• Tag Archives Dreiser

  • The Titan

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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 → Post ID 2489


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  • Megrims Burn in Sun

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring         Waxing Seed Moon

    “Knowledge can be communicated but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, be fortified by it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.” – Herman Hesse

    Hesse was a key author in my youth.  I’ve revisited him since, as I am Dreiser right now.  They both hold up well, though Hesse can sometimes seem a bit feverish.  Still, his Steppenwolf had an adult anguish that I did not understand when I read it first at 20.  The Theatre for Madmen Only was a place we all could go if we understood the world in which we lived.  6 months ago, when I re-read Steppenwolf, I realized Harry Haller was mad in an existential way, that he had seen too much, walked too close to the flame.  At 20 he was my hero, today he is a cautionary tale.

    The mental megrims of last week have receded, perhaps the sun today burned them out or the root canal gave me some concrete pain.  Whatever the reason, I feel once again whole and engaged.  These ups and downs, a neurotic cycle now much milder than in former years, do get tiresome, as I said a few posts ago, but they no longer paralyze me, stop me in my  tracks.  Thank Jung, John Desteian, age and Zoloft for that.

    Tomorrow morning Kate flies off to Denver.  She will be in Grandma heaven.  I saw a license plate holder that said, Parents say no?   Dial 1-800-Grandma.  She’s a good grandma, more a doting grandma than a Jewish grandma, though she is both.


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