Feeling Weird?

"Nighthawks" by Edward Hopper (1942)

There are many words which deal with feelings of strangeness and estrangement. Freud and Heidegger both talked of Unheimlichkeit or the feeling of the uncanny and there are innuendos of esthetic distance that are applicable to these terms. Robert Heinlein’s novel about an earthman raised on Mars is Stranger in a Strange Land, but the artist may purposefully seek out the condition of being a stranger in a familiar land. He or she may intentionally attempt to treat the world of familiar objects from the point of view of a visitor who's seeing them for the first time. Anomie, a term coined by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in Suicide (and a license plate Mike Nichols' used on his Mercedes) and alienation are two other words that are often use to describe the feeling of being apart. Bertolt Brecht employed the estrangement or Verfremdungseffek  in his plays, eschewing the kind of identification that leads to catharsis; he preferred his audience to think rather than emote in response to the historical or existential disquisitions put forth in his works. There are times, of course, when there’s no redeeming purpose to feeling isolated and alone. A recent Times piece describes a calling center in England that deals with older people who suffer from involuntary estrangement and isolation (“Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness,” NYT, 9/5/16). The side effects of senescence  (dementia, and Alzheimer’s) can naturally create the kind of alienation that’s unlikely to be a fuel for creative endeavors. Edward Hopper or Georgio de Chirico may have explored barren and empty landscapes in their paintings, but when they were done with a day’s work they were free to return back to their lives.

Florence Foster Jenkins

Steven Frears' Florence Foster Jenkins is a one line joke: a would be soprano can’t sing. It’s also extremely perverse, as it frames artistic aspiration in the context of a massive delusion. The film’s title character played by Meryl Streep is abated in her grandiose fantasies, not only by the fact that she’s an heiress, but also because she’s suffering from syphilis--which in its later stages can affect the brain. The real character upon which the film was based culminated her career in a performance at Carnegie Hall that made her the laughing stock. In one of the only truly complex dramatic moments of the movie the ridicule of some members of her audience turns into a compassion mixed with grudging admiration for her feat: which is to persevere in spite of everything (something that must have appealed to to the wartime audience for which she performed). Whether this was what exactly transpired is another question. But what’s so endearing about that? Frears' character is a little like the bearded lady in the circus. Nevertheless the film is unsettling. Many creative people suffer the kind of insecurities that make them feel like “as if” personalities and it’s easy to emerge from Florence Foster Jenkins questioning whether years spent in the pursuit of a craft are vainglorious. Does Frears mean Jenkins to be the prototype for the individual of meager talent with a personality disorder or does the impact of the film result from the fact that it ignites one of those dreams of being caught with one's pants down? Frears has hit upon a sore spot, the Achilles heel which can make some talented individuals fear they will be revealed to be imposters? 

En attendant Godot

Waiting is literally a pregnant activity. It is what expectant mothers do of course, but it’s something that bears fruits that are not always the anticipated end of the act itself. Common situations in which people wait are airports (where flights are frequently delayed), auto repair shops (where cars are rarely if ever ready when they’re supposed to be) and most dramatically the waiting rooms of offices where patients are often waiting for results. Those being tried for crimes have to wait for the verdict of the jury and you’ve undoubtedly seen these dramatic moments when the judge reads a guilty or innocent verdict based on a jury’s deliberations on TV. In the most dramatic instances life itself is at stake. But in everyday life, which is filled with moments which have little to do with criminal matters, the end result of waiting can be rather prosaic. Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot and lots of people mistakenly think the play is about God or answers. But Beckett wrote Godot in French and the French title, En attendant Godot, “while waiting for Godot,” throws a light on what the playwright was getting at. The play is not about waiting for anything to happen, as the theater critic Richard Gilman liked to point out. It’s about what one does while one is waiting. So the next time you find yourself waiting for a hamburger, on one of those long lines a Shake Shack, don't even entertain the notion that there is an end in sight. Once you get your food, you're simply going to scarf it down. What’s more important is what happens, the interactions, the perceptions, the conversations you might have, before you satiate your appetite.

The Ultimate Intellectual Shock Jock

Kenneth J. Dover (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen)

You have shock jocks like Dice and Howard Stern. But someone named K.J. Dover an Oxford classicist who wrote Greek Homosexuality may have been the ultimate intellectual shock jock. In a review of a newly released edition of the tome by the deceased academic in the TLS (“Textual Orientation,” 7/27/16) Tim Whitmarsh says, “Philosophically he was what you might call a fundamentalist realist. He believed that most people grope their way through life myopically, shielded from the truth by a fug of ignorance, pusillanimity and squeamishness, and it is the duty of the academic—and specifically the philologist—to confront reality.” Whitmarsh goes on to explain how this epistemology led Dover to undertake his magnum opus and quotes the author thusly, “I am fortunate in not experiencing moral shock or disgust at any genital act whatsoever, provided that it is welcome and agreeable to all the particpants.” One wonders what Dover thought of fist fucking or the use of broomsticks and other objects that may insult the anus. But you have to appreciate his no holds (or holes?) barred scholarship at a time when academic is so oppressed by Orwellian “newspeak.” What would Dover have said to students who found Sophocles Oedipus Rex triggering? What is even more interesting about Dover is that he seemed to subscribe to Flaubert’s dictum, “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Whitmarsh remarks that rather than being some kind of campus hellion or gaining a reputation for upholding the legacy of crossing the aisles (sexually that is) like the Bloomsburyites, “he was married to one woman for sixty-three years” and  “was an establishment man, and a traditional classicist of the most conservative type.” No doubt about it Dover, who died in 2010, was a really cool guy.