Sunday Morning! “Butcher’s Crossing” by John Williams

Rufus F.

Rufus is a likeable curmudgeon. He has a PhD in History, sang for a decade in a punk band, and recently moved to NYC after nearly two decades in Canada. He wrote the book "The Paris Bureau" from Dio Press (2021).

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12 Responses

  1. Jaybird says:

    In a weird bit of synchronicity, I just saw a short rant explaining how Marx would never have imagined Tankies in a million years, Bakunin would have. This resulted in me spending 10 minutes on Bakunin’s wikipedia page.

    Wacky.

    This part here is really good:

    It’s one of my little pet theories that post-Christian societies don’t really have the cultural resources to process failure; we’re expected to brush ourselves off and not bother others about it, which creates a cultural void and a crisis. It’s no real surprise to me that the great American art form of the 20th century, noir fiction, comes out of the “victories” of World War II, in which evil was realized on earth and then everyone was required to move on and make a living for themselves. Failure still waits, coiled up in the darkness beside our possibilities.

    I’ve been thinking about one of Richard Selzer’s essays. He’s a doctor who has treated many people including an archaeologist who just got back from Guatemala. Dude came back and had an abscess on his arm. In getting ready to clean out the abscess, he quickly discovers that it’s actually a botfly and goes through the moral horror and revulsion of finding a botfly tunneled into a man and:

    Within the jaws of my hemostat is the whole of the evil of the world, the dark concentrate itself, and I shall kill it. For mankind. And, in so doing, will open the way into a thousand years of perfect peace.
    Here is Surgeon as Savior indeed.
    .. . “You are going to be all right,” I say to my patient. “We are all going to be all right from now on.”

    Of course, it’s quickly hammered out that it’s just a botfly and it was going to come out by itself and it would have died pretty quickly.

    He then writes “I tried to save the world, but it didn’t work out.”

    I think that we live in a world where the breadth of our vision is freakin’ *HUGE* but we really don’t have a whole bunch more power than our ancestors did. So our vision has the scope of the world and so our moral vision is imagined to have the same scope and so our failures are similarly gigantic.

    When if we had the worm’s eye view that would probably be more appropriate to our power levels, we’d probably be the same amount of failures as always, but might actually achieve something that even we would consider a victory every now and again.

    As it is, our vision tells us we have to save the world.
    But that probably won’t work out.

    Anyway, I just saw a trailer for a movie that is, erm, “Die Hard in an Active School Shooter Situation”. Half of me was morally disgusted and the other half was disappointed to find that it came and went already and is not yet being streamed. Bummer. I kinda want to see that.Report

  2. Saul Degraw says:

    I’ve read Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing and adored both. Both are probably woefully out of fashion right now. A lot of would-be academics would lie, steal, cheat, and kill for a career like Stoner’s. In the novel, he is supposed to be something of a failure despite marrying the daughter of the University President. Still, he has a career dedicated to the life of the mind and tenure and a house and things. The whole affair with the grad student episode would be considered in poor form today probably.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      Yeah, there’s an interview with Williams (which you’ve probably seen because I think it’s at the end of the book) where he says he really didn’t consider it a sad story at all because Stoner was able to devote his life to the thing he loved, so his various failures were not so important. I think there was a generation that found it much easier to become academics than it is now, and I’m not sure they realize it.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Rufus F. says:

        Easier but not easy. Plenty of people did ABD 40-50 years ago because they realized academia would mean moving to middle of nowhere schools and decided no than you to that.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Rufus F. says:

        It could also be that the internet makes it easy to find publish more tales of woe for adjuncts but I think the number of adjuncts has increased.Report

  3. Saul Degraw says:

    In terms of reading, I am making my way through Cathedral by Ben Hopkins, it is a massive novel about the a Cathedral town in Alsance and the various tides and fortunes and changes over the centuries it takes to build the Cathedral. It reminds me of Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund in many ways.

    I watched the first episode of Severance last night. I am not sure what to think. The basic concept is that there is a mysterious and ominous corporation called Lumen in an area that looks like Upstate New York. Some of Lumen’s employees undergo a procedure called Severance where there work lives and personal lives are separated. From the hours of 9 to 5, employees lose all knowledge and ability to access any information about their personal lives. Are they married? Do they have kids? Where did they go on Holiday? It is all gone. At the end of the day, they go up an elevator and all the memories return. The main protagonist is a history professor widower who signed up for the job out of the psychological balm of being able to forget he is a widower for 8 hours a day. Of course, complications arise.

    Critics seem to love the show as a critique of life-work balance and the corporate world and late capitalism but I am not sure. The outside world is the present day, iphones and all. The world of the corporation looks like it comes from the 1960s and uses old computer terminals that look very 1970s and 80s. Many critics seem to make statements like such: “Work Mark has no idea what his life is like outside the office; home Mark has not even the faintest inkling of what he does for a living. Dream scenario? Not so fast. Mark’s company, Lumon Industries, has essentially taken over part of his brain. For that part of himself, work is now an experience that he can’t leave.”

    I don’t get this view. The people leave at the end of the day. If they were placed in stasis or something when not working that would be different.Report

    • Rufus F. in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I gotta say Cathedral sounds pretty interesting- I hadn’t even heard of it. I did watch Mr. Klein because you mentioned it and thought it was excellent, but a little bewildering because so much feels unresolved, although I think that was intentional.Report

    • LeeEsq in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      How does Lumon get people into the office if they forget they have a job after they leave? A lot of critiques of modern work life fail because they basically can’t and won’t go full Marxist. This is because they are ultimately written by people who want a world that basically looks like the one we know but kindler and gentler. They really can’t and do not want to imagine anything in life being that radically different. Basically combine the heyday of the post-WWII economic order in the West but with 21st century things and liberal mores. The number of them that want something more radical is really limited. This makes many of the critiques weak because the writers don’t want to imagine a world without corporations.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to LeeEsq says:

        People don’t seem to forget they have a job. They know they are severed. It is discussed on the outside. What severance means is that when you are at work, you forget about your outside life. You can’t remember if you had a family or what you did on the weekend. When you leave work, you can’t remember what you did that day at work. Though the work being done by the protagonists is very enigmatic. They look at old fashioned little computer terminals. The terminals display numbers. They are supposed to find the data/numbers that look/feel scary and move it to a bin. I think this is suppose to be an example of being alienated from your labor.Report

  4. Saul Degraw says:

    Basically, I think the critics love of this kind of reveals how much they do not know about normal office life.Report

  5. LeeEsq says:

    I’m reading the Book of Jacob by Olga Tocarzuck. It is a panoramic novel of early to mid-18th century Poland the Jewish apikoreth Jacob Frank and his followers.Report