Nostaliga
Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 1:31 am
I am not a particularly nostalgia person, at least not most of the time, except sometimes for spring 1968 and once in awhile for moments having to do with former wife (and my cat Georgia). Marx wrote a splendid essay about nostalgia. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon is an important work, but it is also a brilliant piece of satire.
Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that he reread that essay every time that the began a new work. I like thinking that he did.
About humor from Marx's work, Senator Obama, for example, is touring Europe as if he were John F. Kennedy. That is funny, However, part of what makes it funny is that Senator Obama is already a better president, though we have not yet elected him to the office, than the president we now have is.
I think about those people who (try to) drive Route 66 to relive the thirties. Christopher Hitchens did just that--in a red Corvette. Jean Baudrillard suggests Rouge 66 in America and The Illusion of the End and Wim Wenders suggests it as well in Paris, Texas, a film that my father seemed to admire. Of course, one thinks also of Percy Adlon’s iconic Bagdad Café.
In 1972, my (eventual wife and then) former wife and I once stayed overnight at what was essentially a motel for migrant workers near the Arizona/California (and Mexican) border. We pulled into it after a thunderstorm caused us to abandon the interstate highway. [/size]
The place was surrounded by mud. A family of Anglo children and their father greeted us. The father was an aeronautical engineer from Santa Monica and formerly with Northrop. He had been laid off work. [/size]
His in-laws were a couple who owned and managed the migrant motel. They were from India. The motel was stuck in deep mud. A border of the place was an irrigation canal. Rooms in the motel had bare wooden floors with holes in them. Water apparently came from a canal behind the motel. Perhaps, the place had once been substantial. It was not in 1972.
A cat that later died in Oregon from feline liver disease refused to go into the motel room. A few days earlier, he had enjoyed a luxury room at a Best Western just outside Carlsbad Caverns National Park. In those days, six dollars bought a lot of motel comfort. The AAA Guide even listed six dollar motels. One in El Paso mailed me Christmas cards for several years after we had stayed an extra night.
We enjoyed a long conversation with the son-in-law and the children in the remnants of the rain. The entire mystic of California was there--the memory of how the police took the licenses of people from Oklahoma and told them to go home, immigration, migrant farm workers, defense industries and layoffs, the instability of employment as an aeronautical engineer, golden children from the Golden State, the whole lot, as Balzac or Sir Kenneth Clarke might have written. I think now of Baudrillard’s gentle description of the United States “as the last primitive society.”
By the way, some historian tracked down some of the people whose troubles with California influenced Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. It seems that many of them did well during the Second World War. They became Reagan Democrats and Republicans. The country where Steinbeck lived closed its public (the Steinbeck) library in his hometown. That hometown was also the hometown of the man with whom a long ago lover replaced me. He eventually moved to Kansas. [/size]
Now, my beloved niece lives in California. She helps run a company that places CFOs and other financial officers. She earns a lot of money as an administrative assistant to the founder of that company. This is what nostalgia gets you.
]
Claude Lévi-Strauss claimed that he reread that essay every time that the began a new work. I like thinking that he did.
About humor from Marx's work, Senator Obama, for example, is touring Europe as if he were John F. Kennedy. That is funny, However, part of what makes it funny is that Senator Obama is already a better president, though we have not yet elected him to the office, than the president we now have is.
I think about those people who (try to) drive Route 66 to relive the thirties. Christopher Hitchens did just that--in a red Corvette. Jean Baudrillard suggests Rouge 66 in America and The Illusion of the End and Wim Wenders suggests it as well in Paris, Texas, a film that my father seemed to admire. Of course, one thinks also of Percy Adlon’s iconic Bagdad Café.
In 1972, my (eventual wife and then) former wife and I once stayed overnight at what was essentially a motel for migrant workers near the Arizona/California (and Mexican) border. We pulled into it after a thunderstorm caused us to abandon the interstate highway. [/size]
The place was surrounded by mud. A family of Anglo children and their father greeted us. The father was an aeronautical engineer from Santa Monica and formerly with Northrop. He had been laid off work. [/size]
His in-laws were a couple who owned and managed the migrant motel. They were from India. The motel was stuck in deep mud. A border of the place was an irrigation canal. Rooms in the motel had bare wooden floors with holes in them. Water apparently came from a canal behind the motel. Perhaps, the place had once been substantial. It was not in 1972.
A cat that later died in Oregon from feline liver disease refused to go into the motel room. A few days earlier, he had enjoyed a luxury room at a Best Western just outside Carlsbad Caverns National Park. In those days, six dollars bought a lot of motel comfort. The AAA Guide even listed six dollar motels. One in El Paso mailed me Christmas cards for several years after we had stayed an extra night.
We enjoyed a long conversation with the son-in-law and the children in the remnants of the rain. The entire mystic of California was there--the memory of how the police took the licenses of people from Oklahoma and told them to go home, immigration, migrant farm workers, defense industries and layoffs, the instability of employment as an aeronautical engineer, golden children from the Golden State, the whole lot, as Balzac or Sir Kenneth Clarke might have written. I think now of Baudrillard’s gentle description of the United States “as the last primitive society.”
By the way, some historian tracked down some of the people whose troubles with California influenced Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath. It seems that many of them did well during the Second World War. They became Reagan Democrats and Republicans. The country where Steinbeck lived closed its public (the Steinbeck) library in his hometown. That hometown was also the hometown of the man with whom a long ago lover replaced me. He eventually moved to Kansas. [/size]
Now, my beloved niece lives in California. She helps run a company that places CFOs and other financial officers. She earns a lot of money as an administrative assistant to the founder of that company. This is what nostalgia gets you.
]