Lemme back up a bit. My blogging (here anyway) has been tapering off pretty steadily since I started. Which is to be expected I suppose. Makes sense. When I started, I had a lot to say. Now I’ve said most of it. The only stuff left is what occurs to me as I go. Which isn’t much, really.

Or rather, it is a lot, but it’s very diffused over many outlets. Maybe that’s the problem. Hm. Just occured to me to wonder what, exactly, the problem is. Hits, I guess. I publish because I want an audience. I’m totally guilty of obssessing over my page hits for about a day after I post anything.

And I want more Twitter followers.

My name is Jason King and I am an attention addict.

Ah! There we are. Some real honesty. None of this is any kind of real problem at all. Not the kind that matters anyway. I do a lot of different things and they all have different audiences. I guess I should be happy that I can connect to so many people in so many ways. But I can’t help wanting more. It’s like this:

My band records and puts music up for download on facebook, which goes largely ignored.

I blog here and post the link through Twitter and facebook. A typical post gets around twenty-ish hits.

I have 72 Twitter followers.

And now I’m trying to maintain a separate blog and Twitter feed for my history classes. That, in itself isn’t really a problem except that I’ll be writing a lot for the history blog, further neglecting this one, and therefore not building a readership. If that’s even how readerships are built.

Every so often I think I just really need to reassess my reasons for doing any of this. I think I’ll be a lot happier about it all if I just recognize that it’s about the creative act itself. I don’t know if everyone gets this, but I was chatting with my tattoo artist (yeah, I got a guy) and we both agreed that there’s a very real sense of pressure that builds up in our skulls if we aren’t making stuff. If I were a different person, I would concentrate all that creative energy on one thing. Maybe music, maybe writing, maybe just my job. But for whatever reason, I can’t do that. I’m scattered. A little bit of everything all the time. Oh well. I is what I is.

So; to my faithful readers, thank you. I’ll be posting when I can. Things’ll probably kick into higher gear around election times. In the meantime, most of what I create can either be found at http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Professor-LeStrange-and-his-Band-of-Degenerates/160384394012253?sk=app_2405167945 for music or at http://garnetandgoldhistory.wordpress.com/ for history blogging stuff.

Thanks for reading and listening. And remember; the “like” button is the new applause.

I was reading a book my wife recommended, The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman and there was this bit where she’s describing a mountain fort/village being occupied by Jewish rebels who are fighting the Romans around 70 C.E. At any rate, reading this description gave me an instant mental cut scene wherein we have a few dusty desert-dwellers standing around at the bottom of this hill going, “Yeah, and we could totally put the goat pens over there and build a tower on that tall bit over there! Hey! Let’s go get our blankets and some sticks and we could totally set things up to sleep here tonight!” Then they all go scampering off to get their canteens and stuff and the rest is history.

All of this, and I do mean all of it, just suddenly snapped into focus. It’s just a bunch of kids figuring out how to settle in, do cool stuff, have good things to eat and generally be comfortable and warm.

I guess is just a matter of scale. I mean, it’s clear to anybody that we’re screwing a lot of stuff up. It doesn’t even matter what “side” you’re on; you’ll find fault. Taxes are too high or too low. The government interferes in your life too much or too little. We’re a bunch of Godless heathens or we’re a bunch of delusional twits.

One of my very favourite shows is Community. I recommend you watch the blanket fort episode. If we could dial things back to that level of simplicity, we might be a lot better off. Especially the no farting rule. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Cho is Sam, the surly one.

Jane is Spencer, the happy-go-lucky one who gets in trouble and whose family was brutally murdered by a serial killer.

Lisbon is Carly. Mainly because their hair is similar.

And Rigsby is Gibby, the goofy dim one who likes to eat and wants to bone Van Pelt, or Freddy as the case may be.

That is all.

You see, it was the dawn of the nineties. A very exciting time for Western culture. Well. I think so anyway. I’m sure anyone would say the same of the time when they were a young person, busy carving out their identity. But I’m just going to double-down on my obvious bias and say that music has never gotten better than it was in Seattle in the early nineties. There. I said it. You can keep your, Katies Gagas Ke$has. Ya damn whippersnappers.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system…

This, of course, is all about Generation X. Thanks to Douglas Coupland and his 1991 novel of that name, we have a nice handy label we can use to identify ourselves whether we like it or not. We are the children of the Baby Boomers. They blazed so many trails for us, we barely had to blaze anything at all. Civil rights? Done. War protests? Taken care of. Sexual revolution? Yeah. They did that too, though I’d really rather not think about it.

Well this is fantastic! The previous generation took care of all that stuff! Now we get to just kick our feet up, listen to Warrant records and chill in our pastel legwarmers. Oh wait. We’re teenagers. We’re not happy unless we’re rebelling against something. Let’s see, let’s see, what have we got around here that’s worth getting mad about? Hm. Got lots of food. Toys? Check. Electronics? Getting better than ever. Clothes? Ugly, but we didn’t really know that then. Hang on! We can get angry about all the stuff we have! And there we have it: the birth of White People Problems.

I was watching the Pearl Jam documentary commemorating their twentieth anniversary about a week ago, and there’s this fantastic bit with Andy Rooney. The footage is from, I dunno, probably about 1992, maybe ’93. He’s commenting on the emergence of grunge and how angry all these guys seem to be. The whole bit he’s delivering could be fairly summarized by saying, “I’ll give ya somethin’ to cry about!”

He sort of had a point. I mean, yeah, if you’re born in North America, you’ve basically won the lottery. But there’s just something about people. If we don’t have something to resist, something to lend meaning and purpose to our lives, we just can’t be happy. So there we were. We had everything, except a cause. Our entire generation was characterized by irony. And irony is the very best tool you can use to strip all the meaning and significance out of damn near anything.

But let’s get back to the literature for a minute. I said I started high school in that small town and was therefore having my sexual orientation questioned on an hourly basis. Lucky for me, I had a drama teacher suggest (demand) that I audition for an arts high school in nearby Ottawa. I did. I got in. Hooray for not being bullied into oblivion.

Aside from an instant jump in social standing, I now had friends who, like me, read books for fun. Up to this point I’d mainly been raiding my dad’s bookshelf for Stephen King novels. Which was pretty good. One of my favourites to this day is The Stand. But when I got to Canterbury High School, all the other guys were reading Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams and Tolkien. They also smoked. I started both. Smoking made me yark. Reading didn’t. Smoking only lasted about a month. Reading stuck.

So that’s what I cut my teeth on literature-wise and I haven’t really looked back. I’ve broadened out of course, but my foundation will always be the irreverence of Vonnegut and Adams and the morality of Tolkien. And that, I think, is the positive side of sarcasm and irony: either or both can be used as tools to have a good, long look at the emperor and decide for yourself if he’s wearing any clothes or not. Satire without irony or sarcasm has no teeth and is therefore useless. I think Swift and Vonnegut would’ve gotten along really well. Or fought like drunken cats. Which would’ve been fun too.

I can’t end the section on Post-modernism without a nod to Fight Club. And it will be only this: you’re not your fucking khakis.

So this pretty much brings things to an end. Kinda. I’d say more about what came after, but I don’t know what the hell is going on any more. I try to keep up. I’m blogging (der), I Tweet, I Facebook, I verb. But man, if we had the Moderns, then the Post-moderns, what the hell are we going to call this?

At least the Boomers and Xer’s had the decency to put up nice, clean lines around their generations so we could label and sort them. This new batch? I don’t think we’ll know what to do with these guys for a good long time, if ever.

I will say this though: the high school kids I’m teaching right now were in grade one on September 11^th, 2001. How much do you remember from when you were six? My own daughter was born in 2003. She’ll be raised in a completely post-9/11 world. In a hundred years, my counterpart will be making this timeline again. I don’t know what he’ll have to say about the current generation, but I know that just as I pointed at the 1440′s and said, “Just look at what printing presses did!” he’ll point at the turn of the 20^th century and say something like, “Just look at what Google and 9/11 did!”

Interesting times, indeed.

Next: I go back to bitching about grades and standardized testing. Or smoothie recipes. Haven’t decided yet, but that’s post-post-modernism for you. Damn hipsters.

“Okay, starting today it’s the Modern Period.”

“But now we’re more modern than we were just then when you said that.”

“Fine. Now we’re modern.”

“Same problem.”

“Gnards!”

While the Russians were off being all bleak with their “realistic” doorstop novels, the rest of the world was feeling pretty sunny. Industrialism was providing a level of wealth we’d never seen before. Nationalism was giving us a fresh new sense of pride and identity. The newly emerging social sciences of anthropology and psychology gave us the sense that we had all the tools necessary to usher humanity into a new, Utopian age. Yaaaaaayyyy!

Instead: World War One.

Crap.

What happened to our new, Utopian Age of Awesomeness? This feels like a repeat the dynamic between the Enlightenment folks and the Romantics. We thought we could use science to engineer a perfect society. Instead we got The Great War and all its associated awfulness. The authors, artists and thinkers who either participated in or witnessed that war had some ideas about the kind of hubris that led to it. For example, Tolkien says of Saruman when he starts going bad and gearing up for war against the forces of good in Middle-Earth that he “has a mind of metal and wheels.” And I’m pretty sure a talking tree delivers that line. Angrily. So that’s fitting.

Also, I was surprised to see that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was published in 1932. That’s way earlier than I would have guessed, given the level of genetic, cultural and social engineering he predicts. Seriously, read that one. It’s bananas.

Collectivism and individualism. Back and forth through the ages. Look where all that nationalistic pride got us. Huxley was mainly warning against not only sameness, but rigid, social classes. No wonder then that the literature of the modern era was characterized by a renewed (once again) emphasis on the value of individuality along with a devaluing of structure and rules.

Again, it was researching this series that I came across something I’d not really been familiar with before. Part of what I really like about my job. “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot was one of those poems that I’d heard of and always thought I ought to look into. Mainly because of the bad-ass title. When it cropped up as an example of modernist literature I had my chance. And, uh, yeah, not as bad-ass as I’d hoped. Pretty difficult to access, mainly because of its distinct lack of structure. The verse is beautiful, but if you’re looking for clear narrative, or even themes, good luck. I’m sure they’re in there somewhere.

Which brings me nicely to my next batch of authors: the Beats. Oh yeah, there was a another world war in there too. I’m told it was quite the ordeal. For our purposes, I’m looking at the first and second world wars as one, long conflict with a twenty year cease-fire in between. It works in terms of our literary continuity too. We had the first war and as a result we got Eliot and his wasteland. We had the second war and we got Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac and all their scribblings. Characterized by what? Yup, lack of structure and a heavy, heavy emphasis on individualism. If Eliot was reacting to the collectivist thinking of nationalism, then it makes perfect sense that the extreme conformity promoted by fascism would be like pouring gasoline on the fires of rebellion amongst the post-WWII authors.

And then the North American population went boom. So here’s the Beats writing away like mad in the fifties. They’re grown up enough to have witnessed the horrors of WWII. Then the vets come back and have their kids. The baby boomers. Too young to be Beats themselves, but by the time they come of age in the 60′s, they’ve been weaned by Ginsberg and his pals. Et voila; hippies.

It’s at this point in my little narrative that I find it hard to decide what to include. It’s tempting to stop here and say something trite like, “And the rest is history.” Which it is of course. Not that it hasn’t been up until now. But I’ve still got the Post-moderns to cover, which I think I’ll do in the next post. But it’s going to be tricky. I, and those who are around my age, don’t have nearly the perspective needed to make a proper study of that age. So it’s just going to have to be much more personal. Which is cool in its own way I suppose. So to end this post I’ll just say that it was either one of two things that ended the “Modern” age as we know it: Woodstock in 1969, or something much more personal; my birth in 1975.

Swift saw the problem with pure reason when he wrote “A Modest Proposal.” For those who don’t know, it was an essay he published in 1729 in which he proposes a solution to overpopulation and its subsequent starvation problem. Eat the babies, of course.

Side note about teenagers: I have proof that at least some of them can’t remember what you’ve said for any longer than a couple of minutes. And here it is; I held up a copy of “A Modest Proposal” and said in a loud clear voice, “Just to be clear, Swift was kidding when he wrote this.” Then I read as far as I needed to for them to get the idea that his “great idea” was to use the unwanted children as a food source. Many of them apparently forgot, or didn’t hear what I had said about the kidding. I’ll be expecting the therapy session bills shortly.

Anyhoo. Swift was making fun of all those folks who really seemed to believe that pure reason was the solution for, well, everything! And if you strip all the morality, all the humanity out of Swift’s solution, it makes perfect, logical sense. Swift predates the Romantic  period proper by a bit, but you get the idea.

The Romantics themselves were really into, among other things, the supernatural. Wuthering Heights and A Christmas Carol feature ghosts. Shelley and Stoker were busy writing monster books. Then there’s Poe and his whole deal None of this seems very “reasonable”in the strictest sense. All pretty gothic in fact. Which is great for people who are into that kind of thing. I’m about one-fifth goth myself. Four-fifths golden retriever, though.

On the less gothy side of things, however, you get some really wonderful poetry by people in search of the sublime. I really like that word. Sublime. I try to use it sparingly. A really good scotch. A song that moves me. Cheesecake, if done right.

Factories and cities were doing a lot to muck up the landscape and in reaction to this, the Romantics felt that the sublime would most likely be found in nature. Thoreau’s Walden is a great example of this. As are Keats’ poems. In researching this stuff I found a line of his I especially like, “Let me write down a glorious tone, / And full of many wonders of the spheres: / For what a height my spirit is contending!” Finding wonder in the natural world that will lift your spirit to…? The next level of…something? See? This is why poetry is important. Even when you start trying to talk about this stuff, words utterly fail. Leave it to the pros, I say.

Pros? But they write in verse. Har!

Now we start to really feel the acceleration of eras. The ancients, classics and dark ages account for several centuries each. Now the periods are ticking by at about a century a piece. Or were. Now we get the Realists overlapping the Romantics, which will lead shortly to the Moderns. What a mess.

But first: the Realists. What a boring bunch of grumps. Look it up and you’ll see that most people point to the Russians when it comes to Realism. Again, in reaction to all the weird, mushy, supernatural stuff of the Romantics, the Realists wanted to tell it like it is. Just the facts. That’ll be enough.

Oddly, I keep seeing Mark Twain put up as a Realist. I get the whole “slavery / racism commentary” angle with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. No ghosts there. Just a nice float down the Mississippi. But A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? Hardly realistic. I guess one guy can be a lot of things.

But back to the Russians. Tolstoy’s War and Peace is kind of the ultimate Realist period novel. In fact, Tolstoy himself looked at it as more of a history text and never acknowledged it as being a novel at all.

A kid asked me while I was lecturing on this if I’d read it. I had to be honest and say no. She asked why. I asked if she had ever seen this thing. Russian literature of that period is like the Russian winter: not to be endured unless necessary.

I think that’s finally it for today. Tomorrow, if I get to it, Modernism and Post-modernism and beyond.

When things really got cooking again during the Renaissance, we had an opportunity to pick up where the Greeks left off before they had to deal with that whole Dark Ages mess. And continue we did. Hence, the Neoclassical period. Get it? Neo=new, classics=well, classic, but specifically, “classic” as in “Classical Greek” period.

Embedded in the cultural revolution of the Renaissance, we were also experiencing the Scientific Revolution. Such a weird time though. Dickens really put it best in his opening for A Tale of Two Cities when he famously wrote, “It was the best of times, it was,” c’mon, say it with me, “it was the worst of times.” But did you know he wrote more words after those ones? Lots of them! The passage continues with, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” Then there’s a bunch more dichotomies like light and darkness, belief and incredulity and so on. Yup. That was the 18^th century.

Here’s my favourite illustration of that very split: in 1687, Newton published his Principia Mathematica. It’s like the Bible of math. A towering tower of reason. I’ve been writing solid for about an hour and a half now. Towering tower is the best I can do. Point is, a scant few years later  in 1692 we get the infamous Salem Witch Trials. Those things were going on at the same time.

I’m sure we could comb back through history and find all kinds of examples of parallel irony (that’s my new kind of irony I just invented) but I think it’s safe to say that Dickens was right in characterizing this particular period in this particular way.

Here’s another event that would suddenly alter the course of history in a fantastically drastic way: the invention of the steam engine. The beginnings of industrialism. And around the same time as that, the American and French revolutions in 1776 and 1789 respectively. The times are a-changin’ to say the least.

Just to bring things back around to the literary for a moment; the novel as a literary medium was starting to make itself known around this time as well. Thanks to the technology of printing presses and the cultural characteristics of a fairly wealthy and literate middle-class, the novel’s time was ripe. The renaissance had made us interested in humanity as a phenomenon and novels were the way to explore the development of character. They were long, thus allowing for a long-term narrative in which the character could experience a lot of things, react to them and develop. And they were written in prose, making them more accessible to the masses.

A good example is Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. Published in 1719, it’s the story of a sailor who gets stranded in and about the Caribbean for something like thirty years. He has lots of adventures amongst savage cannibals and  eventually returns to England to tell the tale. So we’ve got the theme of exploring new lands (still pretty big at the time) coupled with what would be perceived today as horribly Euro-centric style racism in its depiction of the native peoples he encounters.

On the other hand, Gulliver’s Travels is a Venn diagram’s dream come true for comparison with Crusoe. Also about an explorer, but highly speculative. Gulliver finds giants and wee folk on his adventures, but it’s all just Swift’s tool he uses to satirize English society. Between these two examples, we’ve got two versions of what this new long form prose medium was being used for: entertainment or critical, intellectual satire. As you  might imagine, entertainment won. Same phenomenon we’re experiencing today which explains why Community gets benched but we get another season of Celebrity Apprentice. Ugh.

For the next couple hundred years, the novel took off, but as a guilty pleasure. It was a way for folks to pass the time before HBO. Which will bring us to the Romantic period and the Victorians. Next time. ‘Cause I’m sleepy now and I still have a full day of teaching ahead of me.

 Tea time!

Chaucer single-handedly rescued the English language from terminal Frenchification. Tabernac!

I warned you about the over-simplification.

But here we are. Ready to plunge into what was probably the most significant era in our little journey. I’m kind of afraid to touch it. This is the era that if it were in a movie, it would be in a locked briefcase, and then a guy would open the briefcase, except the shot would be such that we couldn’t see what was inside. We’d only see the golden glow in the guy’s face as he stares into the case; his expression a guiless mix of awe, surprise, shock and mystification.

Okay. I’m gonna say it.

Renaissance!

Phew. Glad I got that over with.

Poor Chaucer. He really didn’t get to see any benefit from the printing press. It only went into common use after he died. And not by much in the grand scheme of things.

I mentioned the timeline I drew on the board a couple posts ago. One of the main reasons I made it was to visually demonstrate the explosion of ideas the printing press enabled. I’m sure you get the idea but the timeline is practically empty up to about the 1440′s and then WHA-BAM! Era after era stumbling over themselves for the next 600 years in an ever-accelerating race to get to, I dunno, ultimate understanding of the nature of reality! Optimistic, I know. What can I say. I’m a morning person.

Okay, these blogs are not going to be taken over by William Shakespeare, but I am going to give him a shout-out for a couple reasons. Reason One: he invented modern English. I know you were dragged over what must have felt like the broken glass of his work in high school and you’re wondering wtf I’m talking about with this “modern” business. But seriously. With the exception of a bit of vocabulary and syntax, his English is our English. Despite everything we’ve been through, the language has remained relatively unchanged for the last four hundred years or so. Just look at Old English if you want to get some perspective on this.

And reason two: Shakespeare is a handy example of the kind of thinking people were doing during the Renaissance. Namely: Greek thinking. They had a rebirth of culture and literature and whatnot, but what kind of stuff did they have to base it all on? Why, the last big thing from before the Dark Ages of course: The Classics. I say Shakespeare is a good example of this because his plays are loaded with stuff like the “four humors”, astrology/fate written in the stars stuff and pagan imagery. All Greek.

So when <tee-hee> someone says about Shakespeare that it’s <wait for it> “All Greek to me!” They’re not wrong! Ha! And, I’m pretty sure Shakespeare gave us that idiom too. So there’s that.

And here’s my favourite bit: a return to a focus on humanism and figuring out all this consciousness business. If I may quote pretentiously from Hamlet, “What a piece of work is man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god.”

Before you get on my case about formatting verse quotations, I blame WordPress.

But hey, we’re like gods! Sweet! Beats the living hell out of toiling away in some feudal lord’s fields, never knowing if you’re going to be bludgeoned to death by some bloodthirsty conqueror. I mean, that still might happen, but things are looking up!

Like I’ve been telling my students (and still am if any of them are reading this [hey, guys!]) it’s silly to think that we can draw a nice, neat line between epochs. The Dark Ages didn’t end suddenly with someone turning on a light. Later, we’ll get to things like the Renaissance and Neoclassicism which have very definite characteristics setting them apart from other eras. But he climb out of the Dark Ages was a kind of transition period for our language. Lemme s’plain…

Let’s go with the Norman invasion as our touchstone. In 1066, William the Conqueror, who had a perfectly legitimate hereditary claim to the throne of England, returned from his exile in Normandy (France, in case you didn’t know) and ended centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule. Anglo-Saxon, in case I didn’t mention it, is the Germanic ancestor of our language. In doing so, the fledgling English language got a more than healthy dose of Frenchification.

In fact, because the ruling class was now French, the official languages of power, trade and religious authority became French and Latin. The priests still liked their Latin. And you gotta admit, it sounds pretty bad-ass.

This drove English more or less underground. It was still spoken, but only by the common folk. The peasants, plebs and peons. But of course, you can’t put a fence around language. Some of the English vernacular trickled up to the aristocracy and plenty of French trickled down to the streets.

And things might have stayed that way with English slowly being taken over by a process of linguistic attrition, had it not been for a couple of key, historical events.

English was in serious danger of being completely absorbed by the language of the ruling class. Lucky for English, the ruling class became much less powerful thanks to a plague and the subsequent revolt. After the Black Death and the Peasants’ Revolt of the mid-to-late fourteenth century (1300′s), the peasants found themselves much more in demand and therefore wealthier than they had been for some hundreds of years. Hello, middle-class. Now we’ve got a population who have the means to educate themselves. Which, let’s be honest, is a bit of a luxury. Writing at the time was a fellow who would eventually be recognized as one of England’s first and greatest literary icons, Geoffrey Chaucer.

His most famous work is The Canterbury Tales, which was his way of writing a kind of “day in the life” snapshot of all the different kinds o’ folks who were knocking about. The setting is a bunch of people, representing a fairly random cross-section of the English population who are on a pilgrimage together. They have a long walk ahead of them and to pass the time they decide to tell stories. Best story gets, I don’t really remember, but I think it’s something like a free meal and a foot rub at the inn when they reach their destination.

The point is, it’s a story about regular folk and written in the vernacular English of those same regular folk. And because of Chaucer’s popularity, the English language got the shot in the arm it needed to propel itself forward to, well, now.

Next time on Adventures Through Literature!: the printing press and Shakespeare. Both kinda big deals.