Think About It 083: ANNE HELEN PETERSEN

 

To be valuable in American society is to be able to work.  Historically, more work, more toil, more commitment, more loyalty, more grit — all of that could make you more valuable.  That's the very foundation of the American Dream.  But in our current economic moment — often referred to as 'late capitalism,' to evoke how much of the economy is predicated on the buying and selling and leveraging of things that aren't, well, things — hard work only becomes truly valuable when accompanied by existing connections (also known as class status and privilege) or credentials (diplomas, recommendations, resumés).

      Which explains our current 'best practices' for achieving middle-class success:  Build your resumé, get into college, build your resumé, get an internship, build your resumé, make connections on LinkedIn, build your resumé, pay your dues in a soul-sucking low-level position you're told to be grateful for, build your resumé, keep pushing, and eventually you'll end up finding the perfect, stable, fulfilling, well-paying job that'll guarantee a place in the middle class.  Of course, any millennial will tell you that this path is arduous, difficult to find without connections and cultural knowledge, and the stable job at the end isn't guaranteed.

      And yet it's easy to see how parents of all classes would become fanatical about college prep:  If you can just get on the path, that good, stable job is in sight!  To make things better for the next generation, you don't need revolution, or regime change, or raised taxes.  All that's necessary, at least to start, was your kid's college acceptance letter… Instead of raising kids, so many parents, conciously and subconsciously, began raising resumés.

 

Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation (2020)

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a September 2020 article about North American writer and journalist ANNE HELEN PETERSEN and her latest book Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation:

 

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/sep/22/anne-helen-petersen-millennial-burnout-work-life

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 082: BERTOLT BRECHT

 

BERTOLT BRECHT

1898–1956

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SONG ABOUT THE GOOD PEOPLE

 

 

 

 

1

 

One knows the good people by the fact

That they get better

When one knows them.  The good people

Invite one to improve them, for

How does anyone get wiser?  By listening

And by being told something.

 

 

 

2

 

At the same time, however

They improve anybody who looks at them and anybody

They look at.  It is not just because they help one

To get jobs or to see clearly, but because

We know that these people are alive and are

Changing the world, that they are of use to us.

 

 

 

3

 

If one comes to them they are there.

They remember what they

Looked like when one last met them.

However much they've changed––

For it is precisely they who change––

They have at most become more recognisable.

 

 

 

4

 

They are like a house which we helped to build

They do not force us to live there

Sometimes they do not let us.

We may come to them at any time in our smallest dimension,

but

What we bring with us we must select.

 

 

 

5

 

They know how to give reasons for their presents

If they find them thrown away they laugh.

But here too they are reliable, in that

Unless we rely on ourselves

They cannot be relied on.

 

 

 

6

 

When they make mistakes we laugh:

For if they lay a stone in the wrong place

We, by watching them, see

The right place.

Daily they earn our interest, even as they earn

Their daily bread.

They are interested in something

That is outside themselves.

 

 

 

7

 

The good people keep us busy

They don't seem to be able to finish anything by themselves

All their solutions still contain problems.

At dangerous moments on sinking ships

Suddenly we see their eyes full on us.

Though they do not entirely approve of us as we are

They are in agreement with us none the less.

 

 

 

 

 

c 1939

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Translated by

 

FRANK JELLINEK

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poet, actor, playwright and pioneering theater director Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht was born in the southern German city of Augsburg on 10 February 1898.  His early life was heavily influenced by his maternal grandmother and her devotion to the Lutheran church, seeing him become intimately acquainted with the Bible and its teachings by the time he reached adolescence.

 

 

The outbreak of World War One in August 1914 prompted many of Brecht's friends and classmates to enlist in the German army.  Initially a supporter of the war, he quickly became horrified by the carnage it created and an outspoken critic of the Prussian military establishment, almost being expelled from school after composing an essay that satirized the rabid patriotism of his countrymen.  

 

 

Seeking to avoid conscription, Brecht enrolled as a medical student at Munich University in 1917.  It was in Munich, capital of the state of Bavaria, that he first studied drama and became a passionate admirer of playwright and cabaret performer Frank Wedekind.  He had by this time also become a theater critic for an Augsburg newspaper, signing his articles 'Bert Brecht.'  Although he was conscripted in 1918, he was assigned to work as a medical orderly in an army clinic in Augsburg which specialized in the treatment of venereal diseases.  He was still working in this clinic when the Armistice was signed on 11 November.

 

 

1918 also saw Brecht write Baal, his first full length play.  The play would not be staged until 1923, by which time the young dramatist had already established his reputation as a risk taker with a 1922 production of his second full length work for the stage Drums In The Night.  He soon re-located to Berlin where he befriended many of that city's most talented playwrights, poets, musicians and cabaret performers and several members of the emerging Dadaist movement who, disgusted by the needless suffering and destruction caused by the war, viewed it as being their duty to attack and ridicule the bourgeoisie at every opportunity.

  

 

Brecht followed the example of the Dadaists, using biting satire to dramatize his emerging Marxist political views.  In May 1924 he had his first encounter with the Nazis when they staged a protest at the Munich premiere of Im Dickicht der Städte [In The Jungle of Cities], blowing whistles inside the theater and pelting the actors with stinkbombs.  Ironically, Brecht's eldest son Frank (born in 1919 to his first love Paula Banholzer) would die in 1943 fighting for Hitler on the Russian front.

 

 

The nine years between 1924 and 1933 were a period of intensive artistic achievement for Brecht, seeing him create some of his earliest masterpieces including the 'ballad operas' Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera, 1928] and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, 1930] written in collaboration with composer Kurt Weill.  In these and other works he continued to develop his concept of 'epic theater,' a style of production and performance that sought to shake audiences out of their passivity by constantly reminding them they were watching a play, not observing so-called 'real' events as they naturally unfolded.  This technique, which became highly influential in later decades in many parts of the world, saw him adopt a variety of devices — objective narrators who commented on the action without participating in it, actors stepping out of character to directly address the audience, musical and dance numbers that juxtaposed catchy melodies with dark despairing lyrics, minimalist sets that featured few or no props, the use of placards and signs to announce the beginnings and endings of scenes — that were as innovative as they were confronting or, as some critics described them, alienating. 

 

 

The appointment of Adolf Hitler to the post of Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 saw Brecht, his second wife Helene Weigel and many of their colleagues from the worlds of theater and the arts — people the Nazis accused of 'unGerman decadence' and soon began rounding up and sending to concentration camps — become voluntary exiles in other countries.  Following brief stays in Prague, Paris and Zurich Brecht and Weigel eventually settled on the small Danish island of Funen, remaining there until April 1939 when the prospect of war saw them flee again to Stockholm in nearby Sweden.  Following the Nazi invasion of Norway they fled yet again to Finland, remaining there until May 1941 when they were finally granted permission to emigrate to the United States.

 

 

It was while living in exile in the United States that Brecht created what came to be regarded as his most iconic works for the theater, a list which includes Fear and Misery of the Third Reich (first performed 1938), Life of Galileo (first performed 1943), Mother Courage and Her Children (first performed 1941), The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (first performed 1958) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (first performed 1948).  Most if not all of these plays were conceived as direct attacks on Fascism, with The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui cleverly parodying Hitler's rise to power by re-imagining the German dictator as a Prohibition-era gangster taking over the city of Chicago.  Brecht also staged several adaptations of plays written by other playwrights — including a 1946 production of The Duchess of Malfi by Jacobean dramatist John Webster co-adapted with English poet WH Auden — during this period as he'd previously done in Berlin prior to the war.

 

 

Brecht left the United States in 1947 following his decision to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, a Congressional body convened to investigate what the Government defined as the 'alleged disloyalty and subversive activities' of US citizens, civil servants and the nation's public institutions.  Brecht's decision to cooperate with the Committee was viewed by many of his colleagues as a betrayal of his Marxist principles and saw him initially seek refuge in Switzerland before returning permanently to what was now a divided Berlin in 1949.  It was in East Berlin, with the full political and financial backing of the new Communist state, that he and Helene Weigel created the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company specifically formed to stage his own works.  Ironically, he wrote almost no new plays following his return to Europe, instead composing much of his finest poetry while mounting new productions of his old dramas utilizing the techniques he'd developed throughout his impressive thirty year career.

 

 

Bertolt Brecht died in East Berlin of a heart attack on 14 August 1956.  But he remained a controversial figure even in death, revered by some as a great originator and reviled by others as an opportunistic plagiarist who knowingly and ruthlessly exploited his collaborators and many of his friends.  He also attracted fierce criticism from some feminist critics who derided him for the many affairs he pursued both before and after his marriage to Helene Weigel including a longstanding relationship with Danish writer Ruth Berlau which ended acrimoniously in 1944.  

 

 

Weigel, who was the mother of two of Brecht's four children, outlived him by fifteen years, serving as Artistic Director of the Berliner Ensemble until her own death on 6 May 1971.     

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read about the pioneering work of poet, actor, playwright and director BERTOLT BRECHT and his groundbreaking contributions to twentieth century theater: 

 

 

 

https://www.dramaclasses.biz/bertolt-brecht-techniques-and-factsbertolt-brecht-techniques-and-facts

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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© 2010 Deering / creators.com

 

 

 

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Snake (1996) by KATE JENNINGS

 

HarperCollins UK, 2001

 

 

She leaned the bike against the railing and, with the baby on her hip, threaded her way along the bank, stepping carefully between clumps of sticky paspalum, on the lookout for the telltale bright green feathery foliage of the asparagus plants but also for snakes, the brown variety: long, fast, deadly.  All you saw of them was the dull glitter of scales or a tail section soundlessly exiting, unless you were unlucky enough to step on one, in which case the snake formed as S-shape with its forebody and, jaws fixed in a hideous rictus, struck repeatedly.

 

 

 

 

The Novel:  Rex, a returned soldier, and Irene, a former member of the Australian Women's Army Corps, meet at the end of World War Two and marry shortly afterwards.  Rex, a farmer descended from a long line of agricultural workers — none of whom were particularly successful — takes his twenty year old bride to the 'irrigation farm' he has recently been employed to manage on behalf of his patronising father-in-law.  The newlyweds settle down in a comfortable but basic house located several miles from a town called Progress and do precisely what's expected of a young married couple in the conformist atmosphere of post-war rural Australia, quickly producing two children they refer to as 'Girlie' and 'Boy' and becoming, in time, accepted if uninvolved members of their local community.  

 

 

But Irene, a proud and intelligent woman who enjoyed a number of sexual liaisons with visiting GIs and other men during the war, soon finds herself growing disenchanted with her restrictive new life and, as the years pass, becoming increasingly infuriated by its seemingly rigid limitations.  She tries to lose herself in her hobbies — sewing, preserving fruit, planting a lavish native garden she takes tremendous pride in — but her feelings of dissatisfaction persist along with a growing resentment of her timid, overly needy daughter and dull, unambitious husband.  'Irene could go for days,' we're told, 'without speaking, sleeping with her back to him, doing her chores with tears in her eyes… Then, in the bedroom, the children asleep, she unknitted her lips and words poured from her, black as pitch.'  Occasionally Rex objects to these strident tongue lashings, beseeching his angry wife to 'Have a heart' only to find his pleas for mercy falling on deaf ears. 

 

 

One day Rex stumbles upon a letter Irene has written to a former North American GI sweetheart in which she laments that her beautiful son, her Boy-O as she calls him, was born of her union with her uninspiring spouse and not of her infinitely more passionate union with him.  And the situation quickly worsens.  At a Saturday night dance in town, Irene allows herself to be led outside by a flirtatious fertilizer salesman named Hans. They have sex propped up against his car, with the adulterous Irene revelling 'in the act, which she found to be deliciously obliterating… Years later she would remember the feel of the cold metal against her bare backside.'

 

 

 

 

Minerva Publishing first UK edition, 1996

 

 

 

 

The passage of time does nothing to improve Irene's outlook.  She continues to despise Rex, criticise Girlie and indulge Boy (encouraging her son to sit and chat with her while she soaks naked in their claw-footed bathtub as she did when he was small) as the years go by, finding a degree of solace only in the secretarial position she manages to obtain at the local radio station.  Her boss, an ugly would-be politician, introduces her to the delights of classical music and modern literature — discoveries that, instead of sweetening her nature, only make her more conscious of everything she's missed out on in life.  'Fate,' she feels, 'had been cruel to marry her to a farmer.  Such a dull, mean, ordinary existence!  She chewed on the injustice of it like a dog with a piece of hide.'  

 

 

Still, her newfound enthusiasm for music leads her to befriend Hildegarde Hochswender, a motorcyle riding immigrant from Germany who has settled in Progress with her svelte female companion.  It is now 1959 and Hildegarde becomes a frequent Saturday visitor to Irene's home, subsequently taking her, Girlie and Boy on a long anticipated camping trip to the Murrumbidgee River, seventy-five miles from town.  Late that night, after being put to bed by their mother, Girlie and Boy see her and Hildegarde strip off their clothes and plunge naked into the river together, their cries of amusement fading to an unsettling silence until their tryst is abruptly interrupted by a herd of thirsty cows which have blundered into the campsite.

 

As Irene ages she grows ever more bitter and critical, a force of nature her husband and children learn to withstand by deliberately avoiding her.  Even being injured in a serious car accident does nothing to diminish her sense of outrage at the dirty trick she feels that life has played on her.  She remains as resentful as ever of her predicament until, one day, her children do what children inevitably do and grow up.  Girlie is the first to leave the farm, taking with her 'a low-cut, lolly-pink ballgown' and 'a push-up brassière,' and is soon followed by her brother, footloose and fancy free again after getting his girlfriend pregnant and taking her to the bustling metropolis of Sydney to undergo an abortion.  

 

 

The departure of their offspring sees Irene and Rex lead increasingly separate lives, with Rex running the farm as he always has while Irene stays out late at night, returning only as and when she feels like it.  With their primary reasons to remain together now living their own lives far away in the city, Irene enters the kitchen one hot January morning carrying a suitcase and takes it out to her car which she then drives away without uttering so much as a single word to her equally silent if not entirely shocked husband.  

 

 

Rex calmly watches his wife leave, making no effort to stop her.  Yet her absence causes him to go a little mad, seeing him walk obsessively around the farm as if determined to expunge every memory of her from his mind.  He neither sleeps nor eats for five days, then falls into a stupor, eventually emerging to discover that his hair has turned white and he too now is now seething with unreleased anger.  He impulsively burns all Irene's possessions — the many, that is, that she never bothered to take with her when she fled the farm — then buys the pigs he's always wanted to raise and allows them to run wild in her treasured native garden.  A month later he re-sells the animals at a profit and becomes a regular visitor to the town pub, a place he's seldom visited before and from which he often needs to be carried home, dead drunk, by his neighbours.  

 

 

Six months to the day after Irene's wordless departure, Rex gets into his car and drives it into the Murrumbidgee River, seated stiffly in the driver's seat as the water covers 'his chest, his shoulders, his chin.'  He leaves no note for his estranged wife or long absent children to find.  'For years,' we're informed, 'he had felt that they were passengers on a train going God knows where, and he was a solitary figure by the railway line, waving, at first cordially, but then like a man possessed, until he was waving at nothing.'

 

Irene now has what she's always most fervently desired — her freedom.  Having left Progress the same day she abandoned Rex, she takes up with a new man and moves to the sub-tropical state of Queensland with him.  But contentment still eludes her.  As the years pass and her beloved son comes to visit, she persistently makes a point of asking him where those missing years went, how she can reclaim them and somehow unmake the many self-defeating mistakes she made throughout her life.  Her tone is not sad or nostalgic, but querulous and demanding, as if she expects to be compensated for the loss of her youth by whatever unseen power was cruel enough to unite her with a walking disappointment like Rex in the first place.

 

 

 

 

Black Inc Books Australia, 2011

 

 

 

My initial reaction to reading Snakes was one of acute envy.  Few books possess the emotional power of this extraordinary debut novel, a power not diminished but rather made all the more resonant by its brevity.  (The length of the latest edition of the book, published in 2011, is 160 widely spaced pages.)  Jennings pulls off the rare feat of telling the story of Irene and Rex and their disastrous relationship in a series of short, vividly imagined vignettes without the narrative ever feeling in the least way laboured or disjointed.  The reason for this is her astoundingly precise use of language.  The novel could not cover the vast amount of territory it covers — rural Australia from the mid-1940s until roughly 1980 — and do so with such flawless economy had she not paid scrupulous attention to the way each and every word is used.  Each of its 79 chapters is like a masterclass in the art of literary concision, with no chapter exceeding more than 4 pages and many falling well short of that far from elaborate length.  Yet by the end of the book the reader knows its four principal characters as intimately as they might know the members of their own family, so expert is Jennings at capturing their narrow rural existence in all its humour, resentment, isolation and tragedy.

 

 

So why did she choose to title the novel Snake?  I think the answer can be found in the quote used to introduce this post.  Snakes are a frequently mentioned threat in the book, as they are in many parts of rural Australia, but they also serve as an arresting visual metaphor for Irene and her furiously unforgiving nature.  Fail to pay a snake the required amount of attention its presence demands and it will attack and possibly kill you.  Fail to pay Irene the attention and respect she feels entitled to and she may do the same, regardless of whether you happen to be her confused and feckless husband or her bewildered, consistently resented daughter.  (Her son, of course, escapes this treatment because, as a handsome and charming young man, he's incapable of doing any wrong in her eyes.)  While she possesses all the qualities typically associated with a sociopath — selfishness, utter ruthlessness, a heightened and unrealistic sense of self-importance and the inability to forgive anyone she feels has failed, betrayed or otherwise disappointed her — Irene is also an absurd and, at times, richly amusing figure, too full of complaints about what life has denied her to be bothered trying to identify the underlying reasons for her perpetual lack of contentment.  But this doesn't make her someone who can be written off as a fool.  The volcanic rage that underpins her skewed sense of injustice makes her dangerous to everyone who enters her orbit, a force to be feared rather than a human being to be accepted, pitied and loved despite her numerous imperfections.

 

 

What Jennings — who based Irene on her own mother and the novel on her own experiences of growing up in a country town as the daughter of a domineering woman who consistently sought the attention of men other than her husband and generally disliked other women — wants to show us is the messy life of a messed-up wife and parent, a person constitutionally incapable of making the emotional compromises necessary to enjoy a semi-satisfying existence.  Even the funnier moments of Snake, of which there are many, can't fully disguise the grim nature of what Irene's decades of simmering hatred ultimately cost her helpless, love-starved husband.  Nothing is harder to negotiate than relationships and Snake serves as a powerful reminder of how much of human life is governed by luck of both the positive and negative varieties.

 

 

 

 

KATE JENNINGS, c 1985

 

 

 

 

 

The Writer:  'I wrote my novel Snake,' Kate Jennings recalled in a 2011 interview to mark its republication by the Black Inc Press, 'through two long winters at the beginning of the nineties out on Long Island.  No distractions from re-imagining life on an Australian farm in the fifties… As for the style of the book — the shortness of the chapters, the precise language — I trained as a poet.'  

 

It was not as a poet but as an editor of poetry that Kate Jennings — born Catherine Ruth Jennings in Temora, a small town in the Riverina region of New South Wales, on 20 May 1948 — first made her mark on the Australian literary scene.  She edited a 1975 collection of feminist poetry titled Mother I'm Rooted which caused great controversy at the time for its depictions of women struggling against the oppressive power of a male-dominated society, following it that same year with Come To Me My Melancholy Baby, her first solo collection of poetry. 

 

 

Editing what was deemed by the male establishment to be such a strident if not dangerous publication was by no means Jennings's first brush with controversy.  In 1970, while attending a protest march against the Vietnam War at the University of Sydney, she made a now legendary speech attacking those who dismissed the concerns of women as being trivial and irrelevant, famously comparing the number of men who had died in the war with the number of Australian women who had died after receiving illegal abortions.  The speech is often cited as the starting point of the second wave of feminism in Australia, carrying forward the work of Germaine Greer and other feminist writers who rose to prominence in the Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

 

In 1979 Jennings moved to New York City where she continued to write, publishing articles and opinion pieces that shone a sometimes unwanted spotlight on both Australian and North American society, particularly their financial sectors which she gained first-hand knowledge of while employed as a speechwriter to a male Wall Street executive.  This followed her 1987 marriage to graphic artist Bob Cato, a man twenty-five years her senior, and Cato being diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 1991.  'Life never ever turns out like you think it will,' Jennings observed in a 2008 interview.  'But illness costs a lot in the United States, and I was advised that for the first time in my life I had to earn proper money.'  These experiences would later form the basis of her second novel Moral Hazard which appeared in 2002 and went on to win her the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the NSW Premier's Award and the 2003 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.  Like her first novel, Moral Hazard was also listed as a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times.

 

 

 

 

KATE JENNINGS c 2008

 

 

 

Jennings remained in New York following her husband's death in March 1999 and continued to write, publishing a variety of articles and books including Stanley and Sophie (2008), a memoir about her dogs in which she describes her life in the city in the wake of 9/11 and reflects on the role of feminism in the twenty-first century, and the collection Trouble: Evolution of a Radical–Selected Writings 1973-2010 (2010) containing the best of her work about politics, feminism, language, finance and literature.  Despite having published only two relatively short novels, she was still deservedly regarded as one of Australia's greatest writers when she died on 1 May 2021 at the age of seventy-two.

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a 2011 interview with Australian novelist, essayist, activist and memoirist KATE JENNINGS:

 

 

http://theincblot.blogspot.com/2011/04/kate-jennings-on-writing-snake.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 177: WRIGHT MORRIS

 

I am a creature of habit.  As soon as I was able to establish my writing habits — which are to start work in the morning and write until hungry, then again in the afternoon until tired — I stuck to this routine most of the days of the week.  Once I had learned to compose as I wrote — to make corrections as I went along with a crayon or marking pencil — I would average eight to twelve pages a morning.  In time I learned that random breaks — walking around, having a smoke, saving the house from woodpeckers — were creatively helpful.  They jogged the mind from its rut, resolved impasses, opened up unforeseen vistas.  Since all of my books are closely related, thirty or forty pages into a new book, I would begin to have glimpses of where it was going, and what would follow.

 

The Art of Fiction #125  [The Paris Review #120, Fall 1991]

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read an excerpt of the 1991 WRIGHT MORRIS interview posted in the online archive of The Paris Review:

 

 

 

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2164/the-art-of-fiction-no-125-wright-morris

 

 

 

 

 

 

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