The Swimmer, Burt Lancaster, seems an essay of this sort on the
American nightmare. Was it Updike or Cheever?

I've washed dished and served up ice-cream in my time.

I have fantasies these of someone giving me money and I can do what I
want. I should be saving up for retirement but no, I'm going for broke
to do the art degree. It's the Slade, Goldsmith or the Australia
National University for me. I'll probably end up in Norwich (^_^) I am
an unwise man, but I'll die knowing I did what I really wanted.

R'Owl ... that's just Judy being Judy.

Roger

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 4:46 PM, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Roger Day wrote:
>>
>> I never meant to imply that moneyed == stupid. I just wanted to point
>> out that he could afford the odd piece of paper.
>>
>
> Oh surely.  He seemed a bright enough man.  But speak of great levelers:
> even money and privilege could not stop his mum, after a smallpox run in the
> 1570s, from growing a face like a highway excavation.
>
> I am waiting for a new book: "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia for
> Dummies, a Reference for the Rest of Us."
>
> I had a junior faculty friend at Binghamton who was once chastised by a
> senior professor at Cornell, where they let her in as a graduate student
> before they realized she was an anarchist: "Ms W------, I am a Sidnist!" She
> claims she replied, "Oh, that's all right, I heard Oscar Wilde was too!"
>
> More to the point, class, my favorite subject:
>
>> At the back of my is the topic of heritage; whose heritage is it? I
>> see a lot of those little blue plaques over the place, the official
>> histories, the kings and queens, the moneyed and well-off. Nothing to
>> do with me. Nothing harks back to *my* heritage of miners and sailors.
>> So money is part of it, but it's also land-ownership, education,
>> title, deed, tipping my hat to the squire and his lackeys. Although
>> when I lived in Cambridge, it sometimes felt that Brideshead Revisted
>> was a documentary from the 80s. I jest. Class has some to do with
>> money in this country, but it's not the only marker. Or should I say
>> Money has some to do with class but it's not all of it. And I guess
>> that's one you don't see.
>>
>
> Maybe I missed it, but does America have that sort of stratification
> nonsense?  Nobility and all that.  Unless it indeed is the nobility of money
> and power that makes people treat Donald Trump, for example, like Something
> Special instead of the scumbag he really is.  I do not believe we have any
> impoverished aristos here, unless like Obama and McCain, they they aspire to
> the aristocracy of power but lack for a brain in their heads.  Here, it
> seems, if you fall out of money, you have lost the defining factor of your
> life.  You might as well be kicked out of a plane, sans parachute, from
> 50,000 feet.  The safety net in the USA is not the Unemployment
> check--instead, it is what we *don't* have here, i.e., respect as a human
> being for the person who has fallen.  That lack of respect pervades the
> world of the unemployed, the poorly employed, and other people who have been
> WalMarted below of the American mental radar.  Everyone ought to spend some
> time working at minimum wage behind a service counter, and memorize the
> see-through-you/contemptuous looks they get from customers.
>
> A fantasy: Sir Philip Sidney visits the A&P deli counter for a half-pound of
> liverwurst.
> Money in this country *is* class.  If you have enough money you can buy your
> way into anything in the US even if people think you are a boor like Trump
> or a prick like Jack Welch.  Well, mostly.
>
> I often think it would be lovely to stop scuffling for a week and have the
> money to sit on my ass and write.  Yet how many people in our history could
> do that?  The only one I can think of offhand is James Merrill.  Yes, and I
> worked for his Daddy's so-called brokerage for a year.  No comment on poetic
> quality, thank you.
>
> My particular heritage over here is gamblers, glaziers, furriers, and
> dentists.  I've grown up on class hatred.  Oddly the class for which I had
> hated from time to time was my own.  I outgrew that.  In the end you come
> back to what you are.  For me someone like Philip Levine is far more a model
> than Robert Lowell.
>
> By the way, I must ask, what the hell is a R'Owl?  It sounds like an angry
> cat.
>
> Ken
>
> --
> Ken Wolman      http://bestiaire.typepad.com
>  http://www.petsit.com/content317832.html
> -------------------
> "I have been watching you; you were there, unconcerned perhaps, but with a
> strange distraught air of someone forever expecting a great misfortune, in
> sunlight, in a beautiful garden."--Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas et Melisande
>



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