One Hundred Years of The Waste Land
Turn it On, Tune it In and Stay Inert
I’m not trying to fool any of you into thinking that I was patiently waiting for T.S. Eliot’s poem to reach the hundred-year mark, as it did this October. I doubt there are many of you who could be talked into believing that I was ever studious enough to be a major T.S. Eliot fan; still, I must tip my hat to the influence he has had on a lot of the cultural production that I have personally enjoyed over the years. (Go down to the final section, Waste Land Notes, for some of those mentions.)
To be honest, I was reminded about the “The Waste Land’s” centenary because of a recent article by Anthony Lane. Some of Lane’s lines are really great: “You may not know “The Waste Land,” and you may not like it if you do. But it knows you.” That’s unsettling, right? Toward the end of his piece, Lane writes that the poem
“can speak to the ecological dread of [our] generation as it spoke to the social and political anxieties of those who had weathered the First World War. . . [It] is fated to tell each of us, from one era to the next, whatever it is that we most fear to hear.”
Just in case you were worried I’d forget my promise to deliver Halloween themed content for most of October, I submit to you: ecological dread, social/political anxieties, poetry that knows you: How is this not creepy? Ah, but you want horrors? What about how Eliot’s inscription for "The Waste Land" was the passage from Heart of Darkness, which ends with Colonel Kurtz's final words?:
Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
"The horror! The horror!"
Horrific enough for you?
To conclude this section: maybe Eliot was always a little too stuffy and evasive for my own tastes and needs. Also, it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that he had a troubling anti-Semitic streak, which is not surprising since he was so close to Ezra Pound, the noted fascist. Still, his work has continued to deliver, plus he imparted the most important bit of wisdom a apprentice writer might ask for: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” Repeating this to myself is one of the ways I summon the courage to hit the “publish” button twice a week.
Flash Delirium
This current generation’s “The Waste Land” might be Flash Delirium from MGMT:
Don’t scoff. Yes, there were several MGMT songs that completely over-saturated the media landscape between 2007 and 2014. Once you get past your initial skepticism and come to terms with the potentially grating vocals (depending on your own tastes), you might come to grudgingly acknowledge this in the same way I am forced to acknowledge Eliot. Don’t just take my word for it:
Pitchfork said the song "features flutes, horns, and about seven different sections that reference doo-wop, old school rock'n'roll, electro balladry, wall-of-Spector pop, and the Beatles at their most high. All in four minutes and sixteen seconds!" — Adapted from Wikipedia
When I first set-out to write about Flash Delirium, I thought I would break up the most notable lyrics and use them as titles for my posts throughout the month of Ocotober. You would get: 1) If you must smash a glass, first fill it to the hilt, 2) My pillar of hope, 3) A growing culture deep inside a corpse, 4) 1 fork in its side, Zero tears in their eyes, etc. You get the idea, but we don’t have time for these word games. We’re not sitting around waiting for the next issue of Criterion (see below).
Maybe it’s sufficient to simply say that this is a really creepy song for a creepy season. The one aspect that I appreciate most about Flash Delirium is that it serves (much like Eliot’s poems) as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the most interesting musical forces of the late aughts and the early teens; then, as an added bonus, it provides a great bridge to the psychedelic high-points of the late sixties. Hopefully, that’s enough justification for you to at least consider it as a potential addition to your Halloween music mixes.
District Courts Go Dark
I am not sure whether something strange is happening in the District Court that is the venue for the Heather Casias trial. The clerk hasn’t answered her phone in at least 2 weeks. Then, the website for the entire district seems to have gone dark. So, I don’t have any case updates. I still have 2 or 3 longer pieces that are being written/edited, but that process is going a lot more slowly than I would prefer. Thank you for your patience on that front!
Waste Land Notes
The first version of “The Waste Land” was pretty-much self-published in October 1922. It first appeared in The Criterion (or the Criterion), which was a quarterly journal that was created by T. S. Eliot who also served as its editor for its entire run. With those sorts of origins, how can I feel any amount of reservation about self-publishing my own stuff in Substack, right?
More from Apocalypse Now: Two books seen opened on Kurtz's bedside desk in the film are From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston and The Golden Bough by Sir James Frazer, the two books that Eliot cited as the chief sources and inspiration for his poem "The Waste Land".
Eliot borrowed from Ophelia at one point - “Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night, good night.” At the end of “Transformer” Lou Reed borrows either from Ophelia or from Eliot in “Goodnight Ladies.” I think Nicole Holofcener had Reed’s song included at the end of Can you ever forgive me?, which is now one of my favorites.