There has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.
Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.
And yet she was a hateful person. She was shockingly, unrepentantly racist and antisemitic, even with respect to the era in which she lived. She believed gay people were essentially unfaithful and promiscuous and incapable of true sexual passion; she had a nasty habit of murdering versions of her ex-lovers in her fiction; she believed menstruating women should not be permitted in libraries. This mix of misogyny and homophobia coming from a gay woman might seem surprising; the truth was, while she didn’t like other people, she didn’t much like herself, either.
The Price of Salt (later reissued as Carol)– the lesbian love story Highsmith published under the pen name Claire Morgan in 1952 — is curiously absent of these pessimisms. There are no violent crimes, no sociopathic protagonists. Even though her reasons for distancing herself via a pseudonym have nothing to do with this fact — she had a career to worry about, and she didn’t want to be “labelled a lesbian-book writer” — it feels correct that she might also not want herself associated with such a fundamentally optimistic book. Because it was the opposite — violence, torment, obsession, all bubbling beneath a cool veneer — that was the signature of her fiction.
Here, now, at the centenary of her birth — her canonisation cemented, her complete collected diaries on the verge of publication — readers grapple with this darkness. What does it mean to love the work of an author Castle describes as the “doyenne of the psychological suspense novel, depressive homosexual, mean drunk, and one of the greatest, darkest American storytellers since Poe?” Perhaps they recognise that you don’t come to Patricia Highsmith for goodness or light or comfort. You come to her for uncanny observations about human depravity; you come to her because you’ve forgotten the sour taste of fear.
Highsmith is probably best known for her novels The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train. And yet short stories, which she was writing at the age of 15, were her foundation as well as her bread and butter. At the time of her death, she had published no fewer than seven collections, and there was ample material for a volume of uncollected stories to be published posthumously. “Short stories are absolutely essential to me, like poetry: I write a lot of both,” she told one interviewer. “Only a fraction of the stories I have written ever appeared in print.” (This prodigious output is at least partially a result of her surfeit of ideas, which occurred to her, she said, “as frequently as rats have orgasms”.)
In his introduction to her collection Eleven, Graham Greene talks about the way in which Highsmith adapts to the short story: “She is after the quick kill rather than the slow encirclement of the reader, and how admirably and with what field-craft she hunts us down.” In her prickly, misanthropic stories, her obsession with obsession is on display, big feelings and bad habits redirected to gruesome ends.
Sometimes it plays out with her telltale violence. In “The Button”, a father’s disappointment in his life boils over into murder; in “The Snail-Watcher”, her beloved pets become an instrument of body horror and monstrosity. And elsewhere — as with the protagonists of “Not This Life, Maybe the Next” and “The Romantic” — her characters are besieged by a quiet misery; they have to learn to accept, if not prefer, their own company. (Even Highsmith’s love of the third person seems tinged by self-loathing. “I have bogged down twice in first-person-singular books, so emphatically that I abandoned any idea of writing the books,” she wrote in Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction. “I don’t know what was the matter, except that I got sick and tired of writing the pronoun ‘I’, and I was plagued with an idiotic feeling that the person telling the story was sitting at a desk writing it. Fatal!”)
Rereading Highsmith’s work, I was struck by how much she reminded me of Shirley Jackson. Both wrote in a clean and economical style that often gave way to breathtaking flourishes; both wrote in genres (suspense, horror) in which their gender was a liability. Both wrote characters liberated by the deaths of their difficult mothers; both had cartoonishly challenging relationships with the same. (Having attempted to abort Patricia by drinking turpentine, Mary Highsmith would joke that her daughter loved the smell. She was “demanding, seductive, [and] catastrophically unloving,” according to Castle.) Loneliness was a shared theme; menace, claustrophobia.
But Jackson’s protagonists were predominantly women; Highsmith, on the other hand, preferred the voices of men. With Jackson, you get the sense that she is twitching the curtain for you, the reader, allowing you to see something she can see. With Highsmith, there is a distinct feeling of being chased toward something near and terrible, and not being able to look anywhere but where she wants you to look.
In the last few years, the unbearable nearness of sex and death has blossomed into its own queer meme: “I would let Rachel Weisz run me over with a car.” “I want Sandra Oh to throw me off a building.” “Please, Cate Blanchett, step on my throat.” Jia Tolentino calls this “desiring a sensation strong enough to silence itself”, and with Highsmith this challenge is more literal than most. To read her is to access her desires, her darkness, her difficulties; her loneliness and self-loathing and terrible mother and love of snails.
It feels good to be hunted. If you read the genres of suspense — crime and mystery and horror in its many iterations — you know the sensation of allowing a master of her craft to pursue you through a maze; the tingly energy of the chase, the eroticism of encountering the end of the line. “Murder,” Highsmith wrote in her diary in 1950, “is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing.”
When you read one of Highsmith’s stories, you’ve given her permission to follow you, catch you, take you apart. Get ready to run.
• Under a Dark Angel’s Eye: The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmithis published by Virago (RRP£20) on *14 January**. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.*
I’ll long remember (I no longer say, “I’ll never forget.”) visiting Peter Reintjes in Apex, NC, with a couple of more advanced CS students from UNC. One of them, Mike Peek (sp?), showed me some tricks with vi (the predecessor of vim). I couldn’t believe my eyes when he showed me what a period could do in vi! I consider that the most useful command of all.
I use vim to write almost everything in markdown. This post, however, is written in nvUltra’s editor.
The attempt to steal the election by Donald Trump and his minions in Congress is not just a threat to our democracy; It’s the end of the Reagan Revolution and the conservative movement as we’ve known it. Pathetically, many of the conservatives who built their careers and made their names defending the ideals of small government and liberty are silent as radicals destroy their movement. As Republican Representative Matt Gaetz says, “This is Donald Trump’s party.”
In large part, the silence of conservatives is what led to Trump and his authoritarian brand of populism in the first place. Throughout the 1970s, ‘80s, and 90s, they became apologists for the racists in their midst, giving them cover with ideological slogans like “states’ rights” and “personal responsibility.” In the early 2000s, they made ideological excuses for the anti-immigrant sentiment that came to dominate the Republican Party electoral message. The populists, animated by racism and xenophobia, grew faster within the GOP than the conservatives who led the Reagan Revolution.
Now, what the president and his enablers are doing is very close to sedition. Trump pressured an elected official, and probably many more, to violate the law of the land to overturn an election. Those former defense secretaries didn’t write that op-ed in a vacuum. They’ve clearly heard that Trump and his minions are talking to the military about keeping him in power. It’s not hyperbole to call what is happening an attempted coup.
My Thoughts
Tom writes:
It’s the end of the Reagan Revolution and the
conservative movement as we’ve known it.
Pathetically, many of the conservatives who built
their careers and made their names defending the
ideals of small government and liberty are silent
as radicals destroy their movement.
I don’t believe that Reagan actually believed in small government, local control, etc.
David Stockman, his budget director, resigned as soon as he realized that Reagan would cut taxes but not spending. A true believer in small government would have cut spending, too.
In 2010 our damn NC Democrats gave us a Republican legislature with the power to gerrymander themselves into even more power. Republicans have since been silent, not uttering a peep about local power. Nor do they “remember the children”, just foetuses.
Ever notice how our “conservatives” never seem to find a police power that they dislike? They keep imagining that they will defend themselves against the police with their guns. But defund the police or try them for murder? Never!
As for racism, I remember listening to Reagan in the late 70s on the radio, while we lived in Georgia. Remember “welfare queens”? Well, Reagan told us about them.
IMNSHO, our fascism started with the civil rights movement, the Southern Strategy, Jesse Helms, Richard Vigarie, televangelists, etc., etc., and it’s been growing ever since.
A Factoid Regarding Virginia Woolf in Popular Culture: Discovering the 1960s Virginia Woolfs Rock Band
Lee Smith, author of multiple works including the novel Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), the memoir Dimestore: A Writer’s Life (2016) and the novella Blue Marlin (2020), earned her bachelor’s degree at Hollins College in Hollins, Virginia. As her official biography states,
After spending her last two years of high school at St. Catherine’s in Richmond, Virginia, Smith enrolled at Hollins College in Roanoke. Perhaps because life in Grundy [the town in Virginia where she grew up] had been so geographically and socially circumscribed, Smith says when she entered Hollins she “had this kind of breakout period–I just went wild.”
She and fellow student Annie Dillard (the well-known essayist and novelist) became go-go dancers for an all-girl rock band, the Virginia Woolfs. It was 1966, during her senior year at Hollins, that Smith’s literary career began to take off.
During Smith’s college years—the 1960s!—Virginia Woolf was already a nascent and intriguing presence in US culture even though, as J. J. Wilson notes in “From Solitude to Society Through Reading Virginia Woolf,” “Woolf’s books were nearly all out of print” in that decade (14)
J. J. Wilson (with Vara Neverow)
Works Cited Smith, Lee. “Official Biography.” LeeSmith.com. www.leesmith.com/ bios/bio.php. 2016. Web. 22 December 2020. Wilson, J. J. “From Solitude to Society Through Reading Virginia Woolf.” Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow. Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf. New York: Pace UP, 1994. 13-18.
The following article from today’s WSJ sounds plausible to me. (Sorry for sending such a long article, but it’s behind a paywall.)
I couldn’t help wondering as I read it if Carnaval had a more violent past? If so, did turning it into “Carnaval” help tame it?
I also wonder if commercialization has or might change Carnaval? Will capitalism figure out how to make more money from it, perhaps by exchanging gifts?
The quote I liked best:
In the 16th through the early 19th centuries,
according to the Oxford English Dictionary,
"merry" was a synonym for "drunk." That
connotation still lingered when, in Charles
Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" (1843), two men
"wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of
grog."
The Capitalists Who Saved Christmas
— How gift-giving rescued the holiday from riots and street gangs
by Jason Zweig. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. 26 Dec 2020: B.4.
Everyone seems to complain about how Christmas has been commercialized. But without the business of gift-giving that sprang up in the 19th century, Christmas might still be what it once was for many people: a riotous bacchanalia in which drunken gangs brawled in the streets and bashed their way into houses demanding money and alcohol.
With the hard work of the harvest behind them, December was downtime for Americans, as it had been for Europeans as far back as the raucous Saturnalias of ancient Rome. The Puritans were so offended by the disorder surrounding Christmas that celebrating the holiday — by feasting, “playing either at cards or at dice,” or even just taking the day off from work — was illegal in Massachusetts from 1659 to 1681. The fine was five shillings, roughly $50 in today’s money.
In England and much of Europe, “Christmas was a season of ‘misrule,’ a time when ordinary behavioral restraints could be violated with impunity,” wrote Stephen Nissenbaum, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts, in his book “The Battle for Christmas.”
Think of paintings by Bruegel and other early Dutch and Flemish artists showing peasants carousing amid the snow and ice, or Shakespeare’s play “Twelfth Night,” in which cross-dressing characters binge on cakes and ale.
In the 16th through the early 19th centuries, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “merry” was a synonym for “drunk.” That connotation still lingered when, in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” (1843), two men “wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog.”
In the 1800s, at Christmastime in cities like Boston, New York and Philadelphia, gangs of drunk young men, dressed in outrageous disguises, marauded through the nighttime streets, often setting off firecrackers, lighting fires or shooting guns in the air.
The mobs sometimes vandalized Black churches and beat Black parishioners with sticks and ropes. Carrying pikes and swords, muskets and spears, sometimes riding donkeys or horses, they swarmed throughout the season, even on Christmas Day itself.
These gangs were called “mummers” and “fantasticals” for their flamboyant costumes or “callithumpians” for the rough music they banged out on pots, pans and other makeshift instruments. Rampaging from house to house, the mobs might smash windows, tear down fences or wrench the handles off doors if homeowners wouldn’t let them in.
Once inside, they helped themselves to food, commandeered alcohol, spit tobacco on the carpets and wiped their greasy hands on the curtains. Not even the watchmen hired by local residents could deter them.
When a bitter cold snap kept the callithumpians off the streets, the Philadelphia Press noted on Dec. 26, 1870, how quiet the city had been on Christmas Eve. So few young men had gotten drunk or been arrested, the newspaper marveled, that “a stranger passing through our city would not for a moment think that Christmas was so near at hand.”
In a different kind of home invasion, down the chimney to the rescue came Saint Nick. Santa Claus was popularized in the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” probably written by the New York patrician Clement Clarke Moore in 1822 and published a year later.
“’Twas the night before Christmas” when Santa Claus arrived with the same terrifying clatter as the callithumpians. He was “all tarnish’d with ashes and soot” and “look’d like a peddler just opening his pack.”
However, Santa Claus burst into the household not to take, but to give — reassuring the poem’s narrator that “I had nothing to dread.” Santa wished the family, “ere he drove out of sight,” not an alcohol-drenched “Merry Christmas” — but a “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
“As soon as Santa Claus entered the picture,” says Prof. Nissenbaum, “people had to go shopping.” Santa Claus was part of a broader movement to domesticate the holiday by creating a warm, comforting family event centered on giving gifts to children. Mayors, merchants and the middle class all wanted to get the violent Christmastime gangs off the streets.
“There’s a general taming of the holiday that goes on throughout the 19th century,” says Penne Restad, author of “Christmas in America” and a retired historian at the University of Texas, Austin. The mass marketing of Christmas gifts, she says, was “a way of creating boundaries.”
As the holiday became about giving gifts to family and friends, rather than about seizing food and drink from strangers, the seasonal street gangs faded away. The rise of department stores in the mid-19th century enabled even the poor to become consumers by giving — and receiving — gifts.
Newspapers, eager to attract advertising, rhapsodized about the virtues of Christmas giving.
“Who is there, who is not ground into the very dust by biting poverty, that would hesitate, at this hallowed season, to bestow a souvenir?” asked the New York Morning Herald in 1839. As department stores began keeping holiday evening hours, the streets had to be kept safe for a new kind of mob: Christmas shoppers.
As memories of Christmastime gang violence faded, many people turned indignant about the commercialization of the holiday.
In 1912, J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne co-founded the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving, whose members were known as Spugs. The group, which at one point included President Theodore Roosevelt, sought to “eliminate…the custom of giving indiscriminately at Christmas” and to foster “unselfish and independent thought, good-will, and sympathetic understanding.”
In 1928, the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay published a sonnet, “To Jesus on His Birthday,” that began:
......
For this your mother sweated
in the cold,
For this you bled upon
the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon
bought and sold;
A paper wreath;
a day at home for me . . .
......
Such complaints continue today. Capitalism can rub people the wrong way by seeming to turn everything — even the most spiritual holidays — into a transaction. But the commercial takeover of Christmas was a large part of what rescued it from anarchy and made the holiday safe to celebrate.
I don’t recall seeing any images here, so I’ll try to describe what I see in Bear’s “hierarchy”:
I have three notes:
Note 1 with #tag2
#tag2
Note 2 with #tag1/tag2
#tag1/tag2
Note 3 with #tag2/tag3
#tag2/tag3
Bear takes these three notes and creates this tag hierarchy in the left column:
# tag1
# tag2
# tag2
# tag2
# tag3
I would expect tag2 to be associated with all three notes since each one contains it. Instead each instance of tag2 in the left column selects a different note.
I realize that hierarchical tagging is a very difficult problem, in particular because it can result in recursion. As my example stands, you should (I think) have a path # tag1 > # tag2 > # tag3
If I simply change the tag in Note 1 to #tag2/tag1,
# tag1
# tag2
# tag2
# tag1
# tag2
# tag3
then I have infinite recursion although Note 3 will end it.
# tag1 > # tag2 > # tag1 > # tag2 ....
If Bear simply checked to see that no tag appears twice in a path, then we have these possibilities, which I think is what I want (do I really know?):
