Characters in Daniel Fuchs's "The Golden West"

 

Tonight the second installment of our discussions of selections from "Counterparts" takes place, and the selections are "Facing West from California's Shores," by Walt Whitman and "The Golden West" by Daniel Fuchs.

 As a reader's aid, here's a list of characters in Fuchs's story:

Curtis Spogel: owns a chain of movie houses in Northern California, host of the party

Julie Vencie: movie producer (he/him), partner in Veeandkay productions

Edith: Curtis's wife and sister to Julie Vencie

David: a guest at the party

Mrs. Vencie: Julie's mother

Boris Kittershoy: Julie's partner in Veeandkay

Daisy: Boris's wife

Imogene: Julie's wife

Lissak brothers:  potential white knights to save a Veeandkay movie in production

Ronnie Fitts: another independent producer

Mrs. Aston: A guest at the party

The setting: Spogel's house on Angelo Drive in Beverly Hills

"The Stages of Life." by Carl Jung

C. G. Jung (1875-1961)

Our selection this coming Monday is "The Stages" of Life," by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung.  Originally published under the title "Die seelischen Probleme der menslichen Alterstufssen," ("Mental Problems of People's Ages") on March 14 and 16, 1930 in the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung, the essay was revised and rewritten for a professional audience, and then republished as "Die Lebenswende" ("Life's Turns") in 1931. The translation we are reading is based on this version.

Veblen's Use of "Invidious"

 A week ago Monday we discussed Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class."  In reading the two chapters from the book, I was struck by his use of the adjective "invidious," in the sense of "causing envy or resentment."  He uses the word ten times in the two chapters alone, and 106 times in the entire book.  I figure the term must have some degree of importance to his argument.  On page 419 of our anthology Great Conversations 1 he says that the distinction between the occupations of men and women in barbarian tribes is of an "invidious" character. 

On pages 424 and 425 he talks about men doing the hunting and fighting ("exploits") and women doing lower-status work such as bringing home the kill. He writes "the distinction between exploit and drudgery is an invidious distinction between employments."  Later on page 425 he writes, "In any community where such an invidious comparison of persons is habitually made, visible success becomes an end sought for its own utility [emphasis added] as a basis of esteem."  Veblen sees the envy of one social group towards another as a key driver of economic life, but I submit that he uses the uncommon word "invidious" in order to avoid plainly expressing what for many might be an unpleasant truth about the social reality in which we live.

Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class"

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929)

On Monday evening we will talk about two selections from "The Theory of the Leisure Class," first published in 1899 by Thorstein Veblen: the first introductory chapter and the chapter on "Conspicuous Consumption."

The eminent 20th-century economist John Kenneth Galbraith once wrote: "The nearest thing in the United States to an academic legend -- the equivalent of an F. Scott Fitzgerald in fiction or of the Barrymores in the theater -- is the legend of Thorstein Veblen."

Great Books in Year 2 of the Pandemic (2021)

In 2021 our group held discussions of these pieces:

January: "Prometheus Bound," by Aeschylus

February: "Of Friendship" and "Of Solitude" by Michel de Montaigne 

March: "Pensées" by Blaise Pascal

April: "Self-Reliance" by Ralph Waldo Emerson 

May: No meeting 

June: "An Enemy of the People," by Henrik Ibsen

July: "The Value of Science," by Henri Poincaré

August: "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" by Walt Whitman 

September: "Democracy in America," by Alexis de Tocqueville 

October: "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," by Sigmund Freud 

November: "The Secret Sharer," by Joseph Conrad

The meetings were held virtually, via Zoom, until September, when we resumed in-person programming at the library but with a virtual option.

Alexis de Tocqueville and "Democracy in America"

 

Portrait of Alexis de Tocqueville
by Théodore Chassériau (1819-1856)

In 1831 and 1832, French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through the United States with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. As employees of the French Interior Ministry, their trip was intended as a "fact-finding" mission on conditions in the American penal system. De Tocqueville and de Beaumont landed in Newport, Rhode Island.  They traveled through the states of New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, made a foray into Québec, then into Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and D.C. before sailing back to France from New York City.

De Tocqueville was a scholar of history and politics with a great interest in the affairs of his own country. France in his time had been embroiled in a series of revolutions and counterrevolutions. His visit to America took place during the second half of the first administration of President Andrew Jackson. When he returned to France, he set to writing De la démocratie en Amérique or Democracy in America, published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840.

Democracy in America is a deep meditation on our political system, and we Americans have ever since been looking into de Tocqueville's mirror to understand ourselves better.

 

Elements of "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," by Walt Whitman

 

A steel engraving of
Walt Whitman (1803-1892)
from the 1855 edition of Leaves
of Grass

Our selection this month is "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," by Walt Whitman, from a section of his Leaves of Grass entitled "Sea Drift."  It has 183 lines, 69 of which are italicized and understood to be the song of a male mocking-bird who loses his mate.

The "characters" of the poem are:

The male bird

His mate

The boy ("when the fifth-month grass was growing")

The man ("out of the Ninth-month midnight")

The lost mate of the male bird

An "old crone"

The sea

The four "light-green" eggs!

One approach to making sense of the poem is to examine the interplay of these elements.