Category Archives: Humanities

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Writing

The Titan

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Spring           New Moon (Flower)

Lost sleep night before last, got up early yesterday and had a long day at the museum.  I still feel loggy, not quite focused this morning.   This kind of dulled down makes everything just a bit more difficult like walking and thinking through a bog.

I’m nearing the end of Dreiser’s The Titan, the second book in his trilogy of desire.  I finished the Financier awhile ago.  The book jacket on my copy, a used $.75 paperback from long ago, describes this trilogy as the forerunner of the modern business novel.  That may be so but it’s like saying the Mona Lisa is the forerunner of female portaitature.  Perhaps true, or if not exactly true, then you can see the point, but the point pales in comparison to the work itself, so much more than just a portrait.

These three novels:  The Financier, The Titan and the Stoic give a thick description of life in fin de siecle Philadelphia and Chicago, valuable insights into life itself, not only business, which is merely the fictive vehicle for the life of Frank A. Cowperwood, aka Yerkes.  His life has appetites for money, yes, but more for power, and more than power for beauty and for a particular kind of woman.

Both the Titan and the Financier have eerily familiar scenes developed around financial panics, panics that bear striking resemblance to the one underway right now.  In fact, these books could, at one level, be read as cautionary tales about the dramatic affect personal ambition and animus can have in economic affairs.  In the same vein they give a privileged insight into the mental calculations of a monied set, how it comes to be the case that, “This is only business, nothing personal.”

They show the Faustian bargain successful men (and women) make as they scramble for this rung, Continue reading The Titan →

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Our Land and Home, Politics

With Apologies to Canada and Mexico

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Imbolc            Waning Moon of Winds

I edited and revised American Identity today.  It needed a paragraph indicating what I believe to be similarities between the ante-bellum USA and our current era.  National identity was weak during the ante-bellum period and is weak now.

In ante-bellum America the Unitarians William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson made a strong push for American letters.  On the one hand they wanted a break with the European dominance of American literature, painting and scholarship; but more, they wanted American letters, literature rooted in the American experience, painting using American themes and flowing from the genius of American talent and scholarship trained in the new nation and carried out by American academics.

American identity is weak now for several reasons.  Increasing Mexican immigration has raised a potent challenge to the Anglo-Protestant traditional US culture.  We are now a multiethnic, multiracial society, but our identity has only made tentative steps to say what that means.  We lost a prime enemy in the USSR and now have no one over against whom to identify ourselves.  Since the 1960’s there has been an erosion of trust in the basic institutions of our society:  business, government, the church, education.  Each of these challenges the old ethnic, racial and Anglo-Protestant consensus that underwrote US identity through the 1950’s.

Like the ante-bellum USA this is a time for a new American letters, a new American literature, a new American painting and sculpture and music, a new American poetry and a new American scholarship, one that reflects the multiethnic, multiracial society we have become.