On Gérard Depardieu’s change of citizenship…

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

Poor François Hollande. He should only be glad that Depardieu didn't choose to begin a run for President. Our political heroes (and leaders) are largely voted in on the strength of their apparent personalities and popularity (notice I said "apparent"). For all we know, Hollande may be a completely decent, boring fellow, who has a problem with women, but is otherwise harmless and well-intentioned–not correct necessarily; economists who are very much smarter than we are about, well, economics can't agree on what's the right thing to do.

Depardieu has cast himself as a rogue, but a lovable one. A Shrek in the flesh. His life story is far more compelling than Hollande's, especially for the majority of people who live a life closer to the seeming original desultory destiny of the movie star (and let's not forget, he's a movie star, a very rich one) than to Hollande's. Yet Hollande, who has become rich enough, does not hold a candle to the multi-millionaires and billionaires who are threatening to decamp with all their gelt. And yet, even further yet… most people are destined to live their lives of quiet desperation, never to rise even close to the level of a Hollande, never mind a Depardieu. But millions of people live eternally in hope, the only palliative to unrelenting desperation and struggle and a sense of one's own mediocrity measured in material terms. That's how lotteries become popular (and put tons of money–a painless tax, it seems–into public coffers). They'll smoke a cheap narcotic, tobacco, and ruin their health, accepting the confiscatory taxes on it and expecting the state will take care of treating their pulmonary and cardiac disease when they get them, and will do it at no cost.

In short, everyone's values are totally screwed up.

The people will buy trickle-down economics and tax shelters for the rich, as long as they love the guy selling them. Another movie star, Ronald Reagan, was an incredible salesman (in the 50s, 30 years before he became President, he sold cigarettes for Chesterfield, part of the pitch was it's a "healthy" product… Google T-zone if you don't know what I'm talking about). If people love you for whatever reason cooked up up by your publicists and handlers, they'll buy what you're selling.

Hollande is very lucky Depardieu is leaving, and not running for the Assembly… People will still watch his movies. He'll stay superfluously rich (how much do you think his estate will be worth, when he's fought his last Visigoth?), and people will forget he welched on a 75% marginal tax rate for the few years it will be imposed. We all seem already to have forgotten the concept of the 1% and the 99%…

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A new blog

Approximate Reading Time: 2 minutes

As if Per Diem were not sufficient for a world not yet fully prepared for its dubious wisdom and antic ways with the English language, I have decided to launch (or actually re-launch) a blog devoted to the subject of art. It's called Art Long, and it was originally intended, starting some three years ago, and a bit more, to be brought to the world under somewhat other auspices and by a different hand than mine. The explanation is on the blog, if you click the "About" link.

There is also a first entry, mercifully brief, and also written by another, being a short quotation from a book, a psychobiography, about Diane Arbus the troubled brilliant photographer who took her own life in 1972 and entered the canon long since. Arguably even before she died.

I'll repeat that entry here, which I will do for a while, as I begin to populate Art Long with posts. It's a way of priming the pump, to direct some sparse traffic there. I won't wear out my arm, or any other part for sure, as I pump as, at any one time, there are barely more than about 30 reliable regular readers of these posts on Per Diem. But, as the saying goes, it's a start. Not a false one, but given the numbers, a quick one.

I hope you enjoy it. It will not be like the carnival ride here, to use one of my repeated metaphors, but it should be fun nevertheless.

Here's the URL for Art Long: http://artlong.net

And here's that quotation you'll find there:

"Art is not intrinsically therapeutic. It doesn't always allow us to rise above. Instead, it can be an immersion in products of self-expression that mirror our troubles back to us so that we see them metaphorically, but still glaringly. Then it's a matter of what we do with the information, what we make of it. We can turn away again, re-repress what we've inadvertently discovered, or try some means of assimilation."

— William Todd Schultz, An Emergency in Slow Motion: The Inner Life of Diane Arbus, New York, 2011. P.27

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A very brief illustrated explication of and examination into the provenance of and inspiration for my prose style

Approximate Reading Time: 8 minutes

I like to make regular and passing allusion to my tendency to write at great length about just about anything. Friends and loved ones (inevitably one and the same) obligingly and conscientiously acknowledge what is possibly a character flaw, by skirting around what might easily be interpreted by someone as thin-skinned as I can be at times as a personal injury. They point out that not many people can write, never mind spontaneously respond, as volubly, with the added ability of typing incredibly fast, faster than some people allow they are comfortable thinking about something they would then have to commit themselves to putting into words that could be repeated back to them.

Though I am mindful, somewhere in the back corridors of my mind, of the hazards of what is commonly called “popping off” or “venting” I nonetheless invariably proceed, seemingly heedlessly. In actuality I make a splint-second split-second decision, usually electing not to act at all, rather than to speak, invariably at painful length. If I decide to write something, I don’t look back. And invariably I do so, using the same, or seemingly same, convoluted, discursive, complex-structured, Latinate, digressive prose. I use every device I am at all familiar with, rhetorical or grammatical, including all the ways of setting off clauses and phrases, independent and dependent, so that sentences grow and grow, seemingly mindlessly, sometimes in a variety of directions, or with that appearance, to what looks like will be indeterminate length until they loop back and come to a conclusion, logically complete, if having all the air of a chaos demanding to be deconstructed to see if it will surrender any meaning, much like the rag-tag collection of stalwarts holding the Alamo against Santa Ana’s army of 5,000 men under arms, refusing to surrender their small redoubt even as the chapel belied a kind of vulnerability to easy assault.

Now I would never offer as a defense for the way I choose to express myself the style of much greater masters of the language than myself, or, if they prove not greater, because I prove to be none the lesser, in the long run—the run not likely to end until the regrettable day that I am no longer around to be challenged to defend myself—then at least they have proven to be more enduring, and more deserving of tolerance and dedication to the onslaughts of followers seeking to quarry sense from the deep mines of writing they have excavated, though at least, for their good sake, they don’t seem to provoke the anger and frustration that I do (from a very much smaller audience of admirers and devotees). Hence, I am mainly challenged for the length of my little exercises in rhetoric, which I humbly and modestly call essays, for that is what they are, in a great tradition, purely and simply because I do not, as the repugnant common saying goes, “getting down to cases.” I am never asked who my nobler predecessors might be, whom I, presumably, either mimic or to whom I pay homage. Surely there are none so erudite, knowledgeable and at the same time engaged in a serious way, worthy of spending their time, by my prose, to venture theories as to my possible inspirations. It would be too much to ask not only that such readers lend any of their valuable attention to my modest and undeserving efforts, but that they accord it enough seriousness of purpose, such dignity, as to embody a reflection of, dare I use the term? literary forebears.

Other than suggesting, defiantly, with a certain air of pity, that those who complain are free, in all events, not to read it, and having already acquainted themselves with the daunting task of extracting sense, if not pleasure or edification, out of my outpourings, and having persuaded themselves that whatever else they might stumble upon from me will simply be more of the same, they should altogether, henceforth ignore anything with my byline, I say nothing. Just to be safe. I abhor physical abuse.

In the earlier years of my putting my writing out there to be consumed, or having been, to be regurgitated into the metaphorical toilet, half-eaten or, more likely, merely tasted with a bite or two—notice I speak not of “digestion”— I did suggest to those who seemed even moderately literate that, clearly, they were not familiar with the work of Henry James (not that I want to make favorable comparisons between that master and my lowly self; not that my writing is remotely Jamesian, for style, not that anyone, as it turns out, is remotely knowledgeable about style and willing to engage me in conversation about it; I do have to make clear, at this point, that both conditions are absolutely necessary, as I do know people more than adequately knowledgable in the arena of style to go on, more expertly I would guess than I could) and I did that only because he was, at the time, the most recognizable of writers within the canon with a reputation for verbosity (which your garden variety reader could not see justified to any purpose, that is, to say with no appreciation for that elusive and sometimes incomprehensible quality of the written language called “style”). But there are such readers as know style and know James and at least one or two of them have done me the good grace of actually reading through an entire essay of mine. They have simply preferred not to talk about it.

It happens that, in the fullness of time, others have appeared in the literary firmament, far better illuminated, than me for certain, but also, alas for the slightly younger of the two sons of the elder Mr. William James, than Mr. Henry James, and these new constellations, for sure, studied, and usually studied assiduously, seriously, and in dedicated fashion, the subject of scholarly theses and earnest debates. A school of writing in a particular style, such as the one I have fragmentarily defined as typical of my own, has been discerned, the chief practitioner, the ascendant avatar, especially as he did his literary reputation the favor of offing himself as a very young man (48), and quite recently, which has given his canon a lift, and increased it by some multiple as his canonization (he seemed to have to endure the briefest of beatifications, but then we live in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and patience, as a concept, has been delegitimized, as there is nothing worth waiting for that can’t be had right NOW, goddamnit) is a man who, when he walked the earth, was called David Foster Wallace. There is a whole assembly of writers, essentially mainly young (let’s say under 60) males, white, and all of whom seem to go by three names, much like a whole gaggle of a new generation of female movie actresses that, by definition, excludes or stops at Ms. Natalie Portman, who apparently has eschewed her middle name. It is also typical of the current lauded sensibility, which glows around the school of style in question, like an aura, that some of the most approachable—Mr. Wallace and his works were and are not always wholly approachable, as nearly as I can figure because he was a genius, unquestionably, and could speak of philosophy and higher order mathematics with equal facility, if nearly impossible accessibility to the visitor, and it is mainly his writing in these disciplines, which apparently somewhat opaquely actually purports to be about more universal and humanistic matters, more like literature, but merely in the guise of philosophical inquiry and/or mathematical analysis—of the contemporary practitioners might as easily be recognized a nominal very ordinary combination of a singular forename and unhyphenated or compounded surname. So for every Jonathan Safran Fore, there’s a Michael Chabon, indeed, for every Brett Easton Ellis, there may be half a dozen: Jonathan Franzen, Orhan Pamuk, etc., though this begins to trespass beyond the boundaries of consideration I’ve set, which is to say, the practitioners of what has come to be called a form of postmodernism, the greatest living practitioner of which, within the parameters of gender and age I’ve set, is David Eggers. Be that as it may, let me remind the reader that I am, in fact, talking about me. It’s about me, and my style. And the exemplary practitioner of that same opaque, convoluted, discursive, digressive, every technical typographic, rhetorical, scholarly, grammatical trick in the book or whatever you like to call the vehicle as long as it is constituted of typography represented technologically upon a substrate, actual or virtual is the self-same deceased individual formerly known as David Foster Wallace.

However, not really wishing to be disruptive to the reputation of formerly living geniuses, or to cause any ripples in the time-space continuum—which seems a fitting concern for anyone who takes the notion of postmodern writing styles seriously—I nevertheless finally come to the really rather simple point I wanted to make about this still living author, with no claims to any extraordinary powers of intellect or sensibility, but who has done all right, is that there is, indeed (and who else would know, but me?), a conscious predecessor. Way precedent to Mr. Wallace, or any of his tri-named or even nominally nominal confréres, or any American writer (for the idea of America may have existed, but the nation we know as the United States was not to form for 18 years after the death of my literary exemplar and inspiration) was a man named Laurence Sterne, and, more importantly, his sadly singular novel (though he wrote other important prose works), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy. It was published sequentially in slender nine volumes from 1758 to 1765, in which latter year, the Reverend Sterne died. It could have been, was intended to be, and should have been, of much greater length, especially when we consider—for those who have not read the work, as who has save for a relative handful of living souls in any one generation—that the novel opens with an account of the conception of the titular hero and subject (and narrator, off and on) and ends several hundred riotous, raucous and digressive pages later, in an aggregate volume with typographical tricks, printing devices, and tropes that have come, only lately, to be labeled “meta-” without our hero even having been born as yet. And so the story ends, for all eternity, or until the sun we know as Sol goes super nova and evaporates our little planet, whichever comes first.

I won’t belabor all the inspiring aspects of the novel, philosophically and otherwise. Save for this stylistic note, and my one gloss and point of observation is simple and rather brief: two sentences I can honestly say I chose randomly, these from Chapter 37, quite early in the novel as we have it, as it turns out. Don’t ask what these mean. They won’t make whatever sense they may unless you read the entire novel. But then, I write in similar fashion, however feeble and poor are my contrivances by comparison, for what I understand to be the same reasons. To keep the reader paying attention and thinking, and to read the whole bloody thing!

And so, here’s the quotation:

The doctrine, you see, was laid down by Erasmus, as my father wished it, with the utmost plainness ; but my father’s disappointment was, in finding nothing more from so able a pen, but the bare fact itself; without any of that speculative subtilty or ambidexterity of argumentation upon it, which heaven had bestow’d upon man on purpose to investigate truth and fight for her on all sides. —- My father pish’d and pugh’d at first most terribly, — ’tis worth something to have a good name.

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