Good post. I have most of Bellow's books, which I would pick up when I saw dirt cheap copies. But I have only read Ravelstein, which I liked.
I was in HP a few weeks ago and it was sad to see that Valois, though it survived Covid, only serves breakfast and lunch now. The beef short ribs on Saturday were something I pined for all week. I lived two blocks away for one year, including the months of misery when I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange -- The Merc -- from November 1986 to April 1987 -- a Chicago Winter. I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get the 5:18 Illinois Central at 53rd St. to downtown to be on the trading floor at 6:00 a.m. The walk to the train station and the wait on the platform were cold, and I still recall cutting diagonally across a parking lot in full nighttime darkness with no one else afoot. I took a bad spill once, and cut my hand but I got up and kept going to not miss my train, as one does in adulthood. Coming home, despite being desperate for cash, I lacked the willpower to walk past Valois, and I ate there every night. It was the only real meal I ate on any given day. Lunch was out of the question, even leaving the trading floor to urinate was not possible. Breakfast was instant oatmeal, there was no time for anything more complex. When I finally got fired, by a trader who is still a friend, who could no longer afford a clerk who could not do arithmetic quickly and with unerring accuracy, I was feeling very sick. I was going through a full can of extra strength (orange flavor) Sucrets every day, to suppress the incessant sore throat. Upon achieving the blessed state of unemployment, I immediately went to see Dr. Nadler, whom you would have loved. He was from Vienna, and I see he died in 2017 at age 95. He took one look and said I had the worst case of strep throat he'd ever seen. He gave me an antibiotic and said go home and to to bed and don't get up until the throat starts to feel better. The ensuing period of unemployment was as miserable as you describe, anxiety about money making what should have been a gift of hours and days, even in a Chicago Spring, almost unusable.
(I may make a post out of this ...)
UPDATE: Looking at the video, I see he was from Czernowitz. Maybe he studied in Vienna? In any case, I thought there was a Vienna connection.
Thanks for sharing this remembrance! Please expand it into a full post--love to read about bygone Chicagos. I mostly ate breakfasts at Valois in college, after long nights either drinking or studying. You could cure a hangover for under five bucks.
And thanks for linking to Dr. Nadler's testimony. I'm watching now.
Thanks for sharing! Agree with your characterization of Bellow’s conservatism. That’s quite a personal project. I’ve been on a looser version of that journey for a few years now, but I find I need to give each Bellow novel a bit of breathing room in my life before I can move on to the next.
dont worry women can be writers and thinkers, partially because they're not as dumb as you have subconsciously internalized, but also because the male writers you admire are much larger dinguses than you think. it's more a matter of lower bars to clear than anything. the top skill in being an introspective man is learning to disguise your emotions from yourself in 90 layers of rationalization and projections onto society/other people/normies/"Being" if you're a German douchebag Nazi twat/etc
I was doing a booty call to DC this past week and dropped by Gute Leute after seeing you mention it. That place is focking delicious. I wish the DC area wasn't a 1/10 on vibes because there's some awesome shit there that would make it otherwise liveable.
You may've seen me -- I'm dirty troglodyte new york scum, that was stuck in a throng of sparkling clean Korean girls.
Wow, I feel like a real influencer. Gute Leute is incredible. I don't even live very close but I try to take any excuse to make the trek. Someday when I get my caffeine tolerance up I want to try their espresso omakase menu.
You're doing DC wrong if you're rating it 1/10. It's true that like 80% of the landmass of the DMV is soulless suburban sprawl hell, but it's actually super diverse and full of gems if you know where to look and don't limit your social circle to young white transplants who work in government or NGOs. Plus, our museums are free (at least until DOGE gets its claws in the Smithsonian).
true, I fw the Ethiopians there, Family Ethiopian in Logan Circle and Keren near U St were my life force back when I lived in Dupont for a little stint.
The main thing is that I'm deathly allergic to anyone who is a lawyer or has lawyers for friends (which I learned from living there). Not that I have anything in particular against the career, I think they can just smell the gutter class degeneracy on my clothes or something. Like two dogs that start barking at each other within milliseconds of entering one another's perceptive field.
if I were to go back I'd probably find a place in NE DC and try to water down my DC saltiness a bit.
I'm happy that you seem to have found your flow spot, you've got so many images of being there reading a smarty pants book with an aesthetic lil coffee. 🤌🏻 cherish this beauty you've cultivated
Great post, as always. Very engaging. A thought on being "guided" and "formed" by men, in this context. Could be (I'm guessing) that Bellow is sending himself up, as well as his fellow 'mansplainers.' So here's our hero - adrift, still trying to come to terms with "the God that failed" (Communism), annoyed that this woman is resisting being "guided" by him. She's coming into her own and becoming disillusioned with him. Guy can't get and hold a job, so he has plenty of time to share endless opinions about everything. These opinions keep changing (except for his certainty that he's right.) Oliver Hardy (of Laurel &) once described his character as "the dumbest of all dumb guys - the dumb guy who thinks he's smart." (See also Ralph Kramden, Moe Howard, Basil Fawlty and Donald Trump). Part of this syndrome is to deny what's right in front of your face (she's wising up, and you're the fool) and become testy about her sudden contrariness...
This is a marvelous essay! The way you reflect on these books while bringing your own experiences into it really makes it a cut above. A few additional thoughts:
1. I have a pet theory that the form of "Notes from Underground" might have been inspired by Poe's combination short story/essay "The Imp of the Perverse," which is half an essay on a psychological syndrome and half a story about the acting-out of that syndrome. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky had read Poe, so maybe this story was in the back of his mind?
2. The dialogs with the spirit in "Dangling Man" (which I haven't read) sound like a rehearsal for the letter-writing in "Herzog."
3. One of my favorite parts of the Rilke is the meditation on Ibsen, who isn't mentioned by name (the section that starts "There I sat before your books, obstinate man"). It's a great little essay in literary appreciation.
4. Chicago winters are indeed fairly wimpy compared to what they used to be.
Good post. I have most of Bellow's books, which I would pick up when I saw dirt cheap copies. But I have only read Ravelstein, which I liked.
I was in HP a few weeks ago and it was sad to see that Valois, though it survived Covid, only serves breakfast and lunch now. The beef short ribs on Saturday were something I pined for all week. I lived two blocks away for one year, including the months of misery when I worked at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange -- The Merc -- from November 1986 to April 1987 -- a Chicago Winter. I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. to get the 5:18 Illinois Central at 53rd St. to downtown to be on the trading floor at 6:00 a.m. The walk to the train station and the wait on the platform were cold, and I still recall cutting diagonally across a parking lot in full nighttime darkness with no one else afoot. I took a bad spill once, and cut my hand but I got up and kept going to not miss my train, as one does in adulthood. Coming home, despite being desperate for cash, I lacked the willpower to walk past Valois, and I ate there every night. It was the only real meal I ate on any given day. Lunch was out of the question, even leaving the trading floor to urinate was not possible. Breakfast was instant oatmeal, there was no time for anything more complex. When I finally got fired, by a trader who is still a friend, who could no longer afford a clerk who could not do arithmetic quickly and with unerring accuracy, I was feeling very sick. I was going through a full can of extra strength (orange flavor) Sucrets every day, to suppress the incessant sore throat. Upon achieving the blessed state of unemployment, I immediately went to see Dr. Nadler, whom you would have loved. He was from Vienna, and I see he died in 2017 at age 95. He took one look and said I had the worst case of strep throat he'd ever seen. He gave me an antibiotic and said go home and to to bed and don't get up until the throat starts to feel better. The ensuing period of unemployment was as miserable as you describe, anxiety about money making what should have been a gift of hours and days, even in a Chicago Spring, almost unusable.
(I may make a post out of this ...)
UPDATE: Looking at the video, I see he was from Czernowitz. Maybe he studied in Vienna? In any case, I thought there was a Vienna connection.
https://editions.fortunoff.library.yale.edu/essay/hvt-0536#fn-119
Thanks for sharing this remembrance! Please expand it into a full post--love to read about bygone Chicagos. I mostly ate breakfasts at Valois in college, after long nights either drinking or studying. You could cure a hangover for under five bucks.
And thanks for linking to Dr. Nadler's testimony. I'm watching now.
My personal project for the last year and a half was reading all of Bellow's novels. (Which also read me to Allan Bloom, who is the subject of his final novel, albeit in disguise...) My thoughts on Dangling Man here: https://menzgeorge.wordpress.com/2023/11/09/the-saul-bellow-read-along-part-1-dangling-man/
Thanks for sharing! Agree with your characterization of Bellow’s conservatism. That’s quite a personal project. I’ve been on a looser version of that journey for a few years now, but I find I need to give each Bellow novel a bit of breathing room in my life before I can move on to the next.
Great post!
dont worry women can be writers and thinkers, partially because they're not as dumb as you have subconsciously internalized, but also because the male writers you admire are much larger dinguses than you think. it's more a matter of lower bars to clear than anything. the top skill in being an introspective man is learning to disguise your emotions from yourself in 90 layers of rationalization and projections onto society/other people/normies/"Being" if you're a German douchebag Nazi twat/etc
I was doing a booty call to DC this past week and dropped by Gute Leute after seeing you mention it. That place is focking delicious. I wish the DC area wasn't a 1/10 on vibes because there's some awesome shit there that would make it otherwise liveable.
You may've seen me -- I'm dirty troglodyte new york scum, that was stuck in a throng of sparkling clean Korean girls.
Wow, I feel like a real influencer. Gute Leute is incredible. I don't even live very close but I try to take any excuse to make the trek. Someday when I get my caffeine tolerance up I want to try their espresso omakase menu.
You're doing DC wrong if you're rating it 1/10. It's true that like 80% of the landmass of the DMV is soulless suburban sprawl hell, but it's actually super diverse and full of gems if you know where to look and don't limit your social circle to young white transplants who work in government or NGOs. Plus, our museums are free (at least until DOGE gets its claws in the Smithsonian).
true, I fw the Ethiopians there, Family Ethiopian in Logan Circle and Keren near U St were my life force back when I lived in Dupont for a little stint.
The main thing is that I'm deathly allergic to anyone who is a lawyer or has lawyers for friends (which I learned from living there). Not that I have anything in particular against the career, I think they can just smell the gutter class degeneracy on my clothes or something. Like two dogs that start barking at each other within milliseconds of entering one another's perceptive field.
if I were to go back I'd probably find a place in NE DC and try to water down my DC saltiness a bit.
I'm happy that you seem to have found your flow spot, you've got so many images of being there reading a smarty pants book with an aesthetic lil coffee. 🤌🏻 cherish this beauty you've cultivated
I’m just committed to giving Serious Masculine Literature(tm) the ✨bookstagram girly✨ aesthetic treatment
Great post, as always. Very engaging. A thought on being "guided" and "formed" by men, in this context. Could be (I'm guessing) that Bellow is sending himself up, as well as his fellow 'mansplainers.' So here's our hero - adrift, still trying to come to terms with "the God that failed" (Communism), annoyed that this woman is resisting being "guided" by him. She's coming into her own and becoming disillusioned with him. Guy can't get and hold a job, so he has plenty of time to share endless opinions about everything. These opinions keep changing (except for his certainty that he's right.) Oliver Hardy (of Laurel &) once described his character as "the dumbest of all dumb guys - the dumb guy who thinks he's smart." (See also Ralph Kramden, Moe Howard, Basil Fawlty and Donald Trump). Part of this syndrome is to deny what's right in front of your face (she's wising up, and you're the fool) and become testy about her sudden contrariness...
i like how you write criticism.
This is a marvelous essay! The way you reflect on these books while bringing your own experiences into it really makes it a cut above. A few additional thoughts:
1. I have a pet theory that the form of "Notes from Underground" might have been inspired by Poe's combination short story/essay "The Imp of the Perverse," which is half an essay on a psychological syndrome and half a story about the acting-out of that syndrome. I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky had read Poe, so maybe this story was in the back of his mind?
2. The dialogs with the spirit in "Dangling Man" (which I haven't read) sound like a rehearsal for the letter-writing in "Herzog."
3. One of my favorite parts of the Rilke is the meditation on Ibsen, who isn't mentioned by name (the section that starts "There I sat before your books, obstinate man"). It's a great little essay in literary appreciation.
4. Chicago winters are indeed fairly wimpy compared to what they used to be.
Hmm, I haven't read that Poe. Scott, you can't be sending me further down this rabbit hole. I just resurfaced.
Re: #3 -- yes, loved that section! I haven't read Ibsen but this made me want to.
Well, the Poe story is only a few pages long, so it won't add much depth to that rabbit hole!
Oh ok, I’ll take a peek then. I’m definitely craving some lighter fare after this winter of dark reading, though.