 Huggaday Mate 40 here. Welcome to the party. Welcome to the inner party. It's Saturday night live. So have you ever heard of Seymour Krim? Seymour Krim. Great guy. Oh wow. YouTube CEO Susan Wajiki receives free expression award from Pro First Amendment Group that the award ceremony was sponsored by YouTube. We did it for fun. We did it for free. I did it for you. You did it for me. We did it for all the right reasons. Seymour Krim man. I've just gotten into this bloke. Quite an interesting bloke. He lived from 1922 to 1989. He wrote for The Village Voice and Playboy and I love his essay for my brothers and sisters in the failure business. Wow. It's just an amazing work for my brothers and sisters in the failure business. So I am not a Saw Bellow fan but I am a James Atlas fan. And James Atlas, let's pile up the the recolour here. James Atlas wrote biography of Saw Bellow and it's really well written like everything that James Atlas does. It came out about year 2000. A lot of very keen insights. I don't enjoy Saw Bellow's writing but boy does Saw Bellow remind me of myself and his character foibles. The history of modernist literature is a measure, a history of discipleship. James Joyce saluting Henryk Ibsen, Samuel Beckett, apprenticing himself to Samuel Joyce Ezra Pound sitting at the feet of William Yates. But for Saw Bellow, Chicago area literary masters were in short supply in 1938. He was on his own. So when it came to the lonely work of mastering his craft, he turned to the works of the writers he loved best, Dostoevsky, Flowbear, Joyce and Theodore Dreiser. So in 1938 American novels were written by Jews. American novels written by Jews did not exist as opposed to ethnic Jewish American novels such as Ludwig Louison's The Island Within or Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Lewinsky. So Saw Bellow and then Philip Roth they didn't so much write Jewish novels. They wrote American novels by Jews. So Saw Bellow had this literary tech you would constantly try to refer to the great books to the great masters but he was at the same time very suspicious of high culture because he was suspicious of everything that impinged upon his freedom whether in the form of brothers or wives or children or institutions. Saw Bellow did not want anything that impinged on his freedom. Boy, 40 can identify with that. So we can be open here. This is a safe place. You can rate yourself as a lover. You can share what's on your heart and on your mind. This is a safe place for us to share our innermost thoughts. So one of the striking features of Saw Bellow's work is it's refusal to be bound by conventional definitions such as definitions of what constitutes literary seriousness. Saw Bellow was drawn to the gritty side of life. Don't fence me in, bro. Hey, we did it for fun. We did it for free. I did it for you. You did it for me. We did it for all the right reasons. So Saw Bellow had a nose for bad odours to the point where he seldom spells anything else. So he worshipped European literature and he was very eager to show that he knew his way around it. But at the same time he put on a great pretense of levels of levels of knowledge that he didn't really have. So he's less interested in high culture than in exploring the subterranean realm. So Saw Bellow said Mortimer Adler, who is the editor of the University of Chicago great book series Mortimer Adler, has much to tell us about Aristotle's ethics. He has nothing useful to offer us on how to conduct our lives. So Saw Bellow is very influenced by a pioneer of psychoanalytic anthropology, Geyser Rohheim. So he thought he could discover within the rituals and customs of any human group the structure of its collective unconscious. So according to Rohheim, the psyche of the most advanced Europeans was identical to that of the most rudimentary tribesmen. Are you skeptical of that? So Rohheim's work struck Saw Bellow as a revelation. Saw Bellow had studied anthropology because Jews in the 1930s generally speaking were discouraged from pursuing graduate work in English because the English departments were dominated by Anglo-Saxons and the history of English literature is a history of Christianity. But Bellow loved the idea of the existence of the spontaneous and robust human nature. He was a great believer in the quest for the essential self. So in the 1950s Saw Bellow turned to the sexual liberationist teachings of Wilhelm Reich. So Saw Bellow was always going to therapy, but he would stop when the therapy became too confrontive, which is exactly what a psychiatrist said about me. Like Luke's got lots of therapy speak, but he's not going to be very pleased by any therapy that becomes too confrontational. So in the 1970s Saw Bellow was into the mystical teachings of Rudolph Steiner. He loved D.H. Lawrence. Saw Bellow delighted in his physical appeal, so there was a studio executive who invited him to become an actor. Was Wilhelm Reich in the tribe? Is the Pope Catholic? You bet he is, bro. So like the self-regarding heroes of his book, Saw Bellow was proud of his flat stomach, his stamina on the paddle ball courts. He delighted in his physical appeal. Narcissistic traits of the succession of psychiatrists diagnosed him with were fed by this gift from nature, as was his prose, which suffered from an excess of self-delight. Damn, this guy reminds me of the southern side of myself. So Saw Bellow had the air of an Old Testament prophet, but his fly was always down. So he embraced the progressive morals of the New York Bohemian crowd. Everything could fall apart at the sight of a pretty young girl. The Jewish intellectuals of his generation, sex was a revelation as charged as their first encounters with Freud and Marx, that opened up a whole new world. Their parents' marriages constrained by provincialism and the pressures of adopting to the New World seem intolerably suffocating to their newly liberated children. Bro, I paid a set designer a lot of money, and he told me that I needed to get a variety of colors here into my live streams to make them more visually appealing. And my set designer said that nothing adds color like ricola. Also, it's sugar-free and delicious. You can eat these like candy. Sugar-free lemon ricola. So good and very soothing for the live streamer's tonsils and throat. So what was more of a revelation for you? Was it sex, Marx or Freud or some other intellectual? Yeah, the ricola makes the rickey and deep-throating. That's painful. So Bella said he did not feel guilty about his adulteries. He considered them his due. But the satisfaction of conquest outweighed the physical transaction. His sexual appetite was never voracious. Oh, let's all take a simultaneous sip. Simultaneous sip of crystal light. And then in the morning, I've got some core power. Complete protein, bro. Whoa! Josh Randall says, ricola gets me high. $10 super chat from Josh Randall. Cheers, mate. This crystal-like classic orange, looking at you, Josh. That's so good. I can't stop at two swallows. One swallow does not make a summer. So for his infidelities, it was his pride that must be satisfied. His flesh got what was left over. Do I have a drink of water? Yeah, I've got a big bottle of water here. I mainly drink water. I just treat myself with crystal light when I want to celebrate a special occasion, like a super chat. Then I bring out the crystal light. I drink three times as much water as I drink crystal light, guys. Believe me. Don't you know that the live stream is the new novel? I'm vicariously performing my life as a novelistic performance. Oh, you grew up drinking Kool-Aid. So I think I was at a friend's house and he had Kool-Aid and he also had, in the refrigerator, he had orange juice. Yeah, I drink tap water. Usually I can't be bothered filtering it. Oh, but I also drink a lot of Ascension. But, bro, you don't want to drink Ascension after about 2pm or I'll just keep you up at night. It's that energizing. Like, Ascension has a special energizing power, but you only want to use it for good and only drink it before 2pm. You know what I like to drink Ascension water with? Diatomaceous earth. Like pour in some Ascension water, then a big heaping spoonful of Diatomaceous earth. All right, just mix it all around. Diatomaceous earth, it just cleans out your insides. There's nothing like some cleansing soil. Diatomaceous earth. So anyway, my friend was drinking Kool-Aid. He offered me Kool-Aid and I said, now I'll have the orange juice. And he said, no, no, no. Don't drink the orange juice. And I went and poured myself a glass of the orange juice anyway, even though he told me not to. I said, what's the matter with drinking orange juice? He said, it's too expensive. Oh boy. I feel bad about that. Call me tomorrow because I'm going to go to bed after this stream. I'm up late. Is that a real thing? What's a real thing? So Sobello was deeply suspicious of people whose intent upon fending off any entanglement would interfere with his work. I'll let my dad, looking for way protein powder the other day, wound up buying some collagen instead. Yeah, collagen's good, good, right? Like ground up bone powder under running leads to Kool-Aid addiction. Friends noted that Bello was touchy, quick to take a fence, and would nail with quiet ferocity someone who had astonished him by offering the mildest criticism. Damn, this sounds like me. Drinking a spoonful of diatomaceous earth with essential water. Yeah, that, I don't know, I could be wrong, but I find diatomaceous earth energizing. I don't know why it's a, people use it for gardening. My brother's the gardener, gardener, or answer man. So he sells diatomaceous earth and you don't want to snort it. Don't sniff it. Like when you put the, the powder in with the water, hold it like far away from you. So you don't sniff it and then just like hold your breath and then drink it down. I don't know why I just find it energizing. So keeping himself from encumbrance was the strategy that governed Saul Bello's life. It sounds like me, like I'm a 54 year old bachelor. This is, this is embarrassing. Whether his wives, children, publishers, lawyers, friends, or even ideas, he maintained his distance as a way of preserving his fragile sense of self. Yes, Saul Bello was envious of Philip Roth's ascension as the greatest American Jewish novelist. So Saul Bello and John Updike kept their distance from Philip Roth. So by the sound of Blake Bailey's biography of Philip Roth, it sounds like Philip was a better friend to Saul Bello and John Updike than vice versa. Organic concord grape juice is a magical elixir. You got to mix it with the diatomaceous earth guys. Has anyone else enjoyed diatomaceous earth? And Josh Randall, another super chat says, when are we all going to have crystal light shots? Man, good times. Good times. You've got to try the diatomaceous earth. Luke and I are going to hunt a fifth of crystal light and hit Sunset Bowl. I will probably get arrested. Yeah, but I know a lawyer who's great if you ever get arrested for committing a lewd act in public. I just keep his, keep his card in my pocket whenever I go out. Man, is this me? Is this 40? Press one if this is 40. Keeping himself free from encumbrance was a strategy that governed 40s life. Whether it was wise children publishes lawyers, friends or even ideas, he maintained his distance as a way of preserving his fragile sense of self. So I'm something of a, what, intellectual jiggaloo? I fall in love with every pretty idea that comes along, but stay faithful to none of them. I still haven't reached out to Catherine Heard. I don't want to be a creeper, but I'm really inspired by the quality of her journalism and the beautiful fit of her pants. I have so much respect for this woman. Yeah, so, Sorbela got a call from Metro Golden Golden Mayor. Studio executive had seen his photograph in a newspaper offered to make him a star. Sorbela was an Errol Flynn type or George Raft type. He wasn't handsome or tough in the conventional sense, but he could have a great screen career in the sensitive role. The guy who loses the girl to the George Raft type or the Errol Flynn type. So like many powerful figures, Sorbela preferred the company of Lassa Lights who made few demands on him, did not compete for attention and enjoyed reflected glory. Wait, is this me? Like the Talmud Hockham, the wise Talmud scholars of his distant shadow past, wise men revered for their learning. Sorbela spent his days hunched over books. I don't hunch over books because I've learned the Alexander technique, guys. Some maids didn't have to be men for Sorbela, but they did not have to be Jewish. They just had to possess what he considered Jewish qualities. Emotional intensity, a reverence for Russian literature and a love of high-minded gossip. What's high-minded gossip as opposed to middle minded gossip and then low-minded gossip? So his first marriage lasted like 14 years, even though they were both committing adultery very early on. So he found his first wife too practical, too practical. What's my favorite reading position? Here, I'll show you my favorite reading position. So he did it for fun. We did it for free. I did it for you. You did it for me. We did it for all the right reasons. So I just like to kick back here. I think there's my favorite reading position. I put on the old, put on the old c-pow. Oh, yeah. Then just kick back here with my iPad. Oh, so good. Except for having my headphones on, listening to a little music. So I think this is my favorite reading position. So this is what I do. Then sometimes I stand up and sometimes I sit in a chair, but probably this is the position I'm in most when I'm reading. Yeah. It's like, oh, very relaxing. There's the two pillows up here. Then I've got got nice, nice support down here. See, then I've got this. Oh, it's just it's really good, right? It's a beautiful thing, beautiful thing. I got my Ricola right here. Whenever I get bored, sometimes I get sleepy or bored reading or just I need a bump. And so I like a diet Pepsi or some cough drops or this afternoon I was feeling really risque. I had two Greek yogurt ice creams of the chocolate fudge variety, about 330. I needed a bump. Good times. Okay. And then occasionally I just lie on my stomach on my elbows and read that way. But the position I showed you is the main way that let's pile up the Ricola here. Just add that beautiful, that beautiful yellow color. It's my set designer suggested. Okay. So Saul Beller thought that his first wife was too practical. Why would you hate a wife being practical? You want a wife who's practical? Too controlling. She didn't give him room to breathe. Someday he said he would be claimed by a woman who appreciated him and I will go. All right, this damn, this sounds like me. The passive construction was significant. Saul Beller choosing a lover meant allowing himself to be chosen. It's the same way he chose jobs and domiciles and wires. He waited for someone else to make the first move. He replaced that light switch wall plate or freshen up the 40 tabernacle. In his work, Saul Beller asserted himself with courage and tenacity. Yes, on my live streams, I'm a mighty warrior. But the rest of my life are pretty passive. But when it came to domestic arrangements, others dictated terms until he chafed at them. Saul does what he wants. The phrase recurs among his friends and associates. Pretending to be at the mercy of others was a way of disguising his fiercely independent will. By denying responsibility for the choices he made in life, he could circumvent the powerful forces. Father, brothers, society ranged against his ambition. Passivity in Beller's hands was an instrument of freedom. Damn, this sounds just like me. Okay, let's go to the chat. The chat misses Tang. Yes, I mainly drink tap water. Have you guys tried Diatomaceous Earth? You know, just adding some Diatomaceous Earth with your, with your essential water. I find it very energizing. So moral outrage sprinkles Diatomaceous Earth on my sheets for bed bugs. Ford is an elaborate AI. He's just a simulation bros. How do I read on Shabba's Kodesh that same way? I kick back or I stand up. I often read and go for a walk because I live within the air roof. They make mid-afternoon infuse recolour. Mid-afternoon infuse didgeridoo wax. I was forced to read a Sorbello book in college. I don't remember a single thing about it. I do not like Sorbello's work. I did read Ravelstein. That kept me going through the whole thing. I have no idea if Sorbello underwent MK Ultra Experimentation at McGill University. There's nothing about that in this book. Leonard Cohen did. So his first, I think one of his first novels was called The Victim or a Short Story. The first attempt in American literature to consider Jewishness, not in its singularity, not as constitutive of a special word of experience, but as a quality that informs all of modern life. It's the quality of modernity itself. Sounds a little arrogant. It's Jewishness, the quality of modernity itself. But it was through Sorbello's efforts that Jewish literature became American literature. He wasn't much of a teacher because he wasn't much interested in helping other people. So Sorbello as a teacher was a clock watcher. He was not one to nurture talent. He delivered high-minded lectures on the modern world. He dabbled in improbable investments. He borrowed money from his brothers. He made advances to other men's girlfriends and on occasion to their wives. He proposed marriage with unnatural frequency and he craved affection from those he antagonized. I love this book. James Atlas is a great writer. Philosophy was one of the unfortunate legacies of Sorbello's immersion in the University of Chicago great books culture. His heroes shared a penchant for belaboring ideas. They were the products of a provincial Chicago boys' efforts to show that he wasn't provincial. Like the more effort you make to show that you're not something, the more it shines through. Girlfriend said the more you try to be different from your father, the more you'll be like him. The more Sorbello tried to show he was at home with the whole of Western thought. They expressed an impulse to distance him from his true and more painful material. Philosophy was a flight into abstraction. So the gritty streets were Sorbello's real material. So Sorbello thought domestic life stifled the artist. It was bourgeois. To be modern meant to be detached from tradition, traditional sentiments from national politics and the family. Is that what it means to be modern? For Sorbello, the main problem with Paris was the Parisians. They didn't seem to know who Sorbello was. That was the problem with the people in Paris. They didn't know who he was. When he talked about his books and vassalated between grandiosity and self-doubt, he was unaware that in Parisian literary circles to discuss one's own work was considered gauche. So we got it. Quote in the chat. Sorbello had given me a list of a few names of literary people in Montreal who very much wanted to meet Leonard Cohen was at the top of that list. Oh man, the crystal light is so good tonight. Nice and chilled. Yeah, the only Sorbello novel I've read is Ravellstein. I think I dipped into others just couldn't make it through. So Sorbello really got into Wilhelm Reich. Reich wrote a book called The Function of the Orgasm. It was widely read in progressive circles as Trotsky's art and revolution had been a decade before. So Paul Goodman, a reliable indicator of intellectual trends, was a Reichian. So many of Sorbello's Jewish friends were Reichians. So Reich's emphasis on sexual gratification kind of validated their own tendencies. Reich was an intellectual fashion in the 1940s and 50s. So just as in the 30s, Sorbello had been enthusiastic about Trotsky. Now in the 40s and 50s, he got into Reich. So Reich's method represented the psychoanalytic equivalent of what Sorbello aspired to in his own work and life, the freedom of unfettered self-expression. So Reichianism wasn't a philosophy according to Reich, it was a science. So Reich thought he was the heir to Freud. So according to Reich, the cathartic total orgasm was the key to health. Full genitality. But most humans were prevented from achieving these convulsive orgasms by the presence of character armor, rigid defenses that stifled development and block the free flow of sexuality. Damning up the libido caused neuroses and repressed psychic energy. So Reich called this all-going energy and he prescribed building a certain box to build up your all-going energy. Even by the standards of artistic touchiness, Sorbello's fragile grandiosity stood out. He was capable of bearing it grudge for decades. Whoa, Josh Randall Super Chat. Last time I went deep on Crystal Light, I worked up with my ex's ex girlfriend. Yeah, you got to be careful. Only do it in moderation, maybe only on weekends. Sorbello had trouble engaging his students unless he was having sex with them. They weren't real to him. He preferred to read aloud to his students from his own novels. It was obvious that he had work of more importance than preparing for his lectures. He would, he loved to laugh at his own jokes. He would laugh out loud at the funny bits of his own writing. He would have a wonderful time because the student had much better time than the rest of us. So his self-delight was typical. Sorbello always laughed at his own jokes. He derived huge enjoyment from reciting his own work. Never one of criticism, he only one of praise. By setting the tone himself, he had a better chance of getting the response he wanted, at least in the short run. So Sorbello was married five times. How did you know when a marriage was coming to an end? An increase in his frenetic pace of travel was a reliable portent of the dissolution of a marriage. Now, he got married five times. He refused to give up on the idea of marriage, even though it was obvious that he was completely unsuited to the institution. He longed for a home and family, but he longed for them as a child mate. He won a constant attention, constant devotion, but he also had the powerful need to go off and explore the world on his own at well. This contradiction never seemed to occur to him. He would pursue the fantasy of the perfect marriage and the perfect wife again and again. Saul always had trouble with women. He thought he wouldn't have all these troubles with a girl. So one woman said, you want people to pour love on you and you soak it up and you swallow it. You can't get enough. When another woman runs after you, you'll go with her. You're so happy when somebody begs you to oblige. You can't stand up under flattery. Wow, that sounds like 40. I had girlfriends who just leave here so exhausted because I was just so needy. Okay, so Art Bell says, look, two questions. Will you copy German in Venice, run a series covering the beach scene, Jewish in Venice? How about offering up to Jean Francois Guarrappi to be on a show reasonable and responsible? JF doesn't have people on a show anymore. So I don't think JF would have any interest of me coming on his show. The heroes of Saul Bellow's novels aren't rudderings of Saul Bellow the man. They're idealized versions of Saul Bellow the man. They're tall, they're distinguished lineage and they're brilliant. So by altering the details to suit himself, Saul Bellow could become in his novels the person that he always wanted to be. Saul Bellow was ardently loyal to anyone who passed his very rigorous test of friendship for as long as they served his needs. They need to dispose of them. Saul Bellow was not a nurturing person to students, to children, to wives or to parents. He just wanted to soak up the nurturing. Saul Bellow's children represented encroachment on his freedom. Children like wives and friends and lovers were always in danger of making emotional demands requiring attention and expecting to be loved and Saul Bellow had no time for that. So Saul Bellow focused his need for approval on a long line of powerful and disapproving businessmen and the anger that his insatiable need for approval and gendered was enormous. No amount of praise was ever enough for Saul Bellow. The void could never be filled. He was a hungry man. Look, would you talk to a self-described literally autistic Jerusalemite who was working with Dover up until two days ago when they got in an argument? Sure. I mean, I think I'll talk to anyone. Is this behavior related to over my rig? No, I think, well, maybe his mother died when he was about 20. The more I follow Luke in his dreams, the more I realize he is a soft-hearted puppy. JF had Richard Spencer. When did he have Richard Spencer on? Issue an invite, earn his trust. Don't have any news on Richard or Wosie. All I've got are thoughts on when novels still mattered. So Saul Bellow's excitement finding acceptance among the New York Jewish intellectuals quickly gave way to contempt. His sense of inadequacy was vanquished by his grandiosity. Boy, I can identify with that. He no longer needed their praise. So the more his reputation grew in the literary world, the more distastefully found that world. When Saul Bellow was writing a book, in every major book, you'd get to a point where he felt the overwhelming need to destroy his own life. So the opposite of Flo Bear, Saul Bellow deliberately cultivated chaos at home. I have everything I need here, but it's getting to be too safe. He thrived on adversity. So there was a New York Literary Party in New York, one of the guests came up to Jack Ludwick and said, I understand you know Saul Bellow. Know him, Jack Ludwick replied. Hell, I'm fucking his wife. The alt-righted 2016 seems like a distant memory for me now. What will take its place? Late 2020, Richard was on JF. Richard was refused at first, got upset. What about our friendship then and only then JF had him on? Oh, so yeah, JF doesn't really want guests. So I think JF has just found it too exhausting dealing with other people with their insatiable emotional needs. Maybe a little bit like Saul Bellow here. So Theodore Weiss summed up Jack Ludwick's motive. So Jack Ludwick was a friend of Saul Bellow. For Jack, if he couldn't go to bed with Saul, next best thing was to go to bed with his wife. So Saul Bellow's friendship with Jack Ludwick was not the only one with homosexual overtones. So there was an unnatural intensity of Saul Bellow's friendships with men and people noticed. Writers who posed a threat to Saul Bellow's hegemony got the cold shoulder. Writers like Philip Roth and John Updike. Writers who occupied a place safely below his own on the literary ladder was seen as comrades in the travail business toward these needy souls he gladly extended a helping hand. Luke, how big is your library and what sort of books do you have in your collection? So most of my books are e-books. So for physical books, I think I only have like 100 physical books. So probably half of them are on Judaism. And then a few books on Alexander Technique, maybe 15 books on Australia. Do I think Richard Spencer is the secret admirer of Wilhelm Reich? No idea. Oh, this is interesting and it reminds me a bit of myself. There's something indiscriminate about Saul Bellow's ladder writing. It was a literary profligacy. He wrote so openly to so many correspondents, reflected his egalitarian spirit, his willingness to accept the wide range of other people, but it also reflected his loneliness, his eagerness for company, any company. There was a certain impersonality in his boisterous writing style, no matter who he was writing to, the letters have a single tone as if he was writing to just one person himself. So yeah, I'm very happy to read e-books. I don't prefer physical books. Eliot Black keeps his books in his closet along with other things that are vitally important. Eliot finds books unsightly. I find them giving of life. So in the spring of 1960, Saul Bellow began therapy with sexologist Dr. Albert Ellis. Have you heard of Albert Ellis and rational emotive therapy? Rational cognitive behavioral therapy. Can YouTube handle two pirates on one ship? The love boat was sunk. My captain Spencer became the hate wreck. JF would make a better guest than was. So do you guys know who Albert Ellis was? Do the just list of 30 books on eBay. You're not cool unless you have a physical copy of Infinite Jest in view while you're streaming. Yeah, I've never read Infinite Jest. Don't own a copy. So Albert Ellis was a Jewish immigrant. He was a ladies man. He'd been through many wives. He bragged openly about his conquests. Bellow diagnosed him as a phallic narcissist. The same diagnosis Ellis applied to Saul Bellow. Flamboyantly eccentric Albert Ellis, a tall hawk nose figure with a long cello face, munched on sandwiches during the sessions explaining he was a diabetic, required a special diet. Apparently he didn't agree with him. Saul Bellow remembered Albert Ellis's high spelling farts. Albert Ellis's Libertine views found a sympathetic ear in Saul Bellow speaking to packed halls around the country. Albert Ellis anticipated the free love movement of the late 60s. He said the puritanical views about sex create havoc in our love marriage and family relations. The goal of therapy Albert Ellis proclaimed was sexual pleasure. Freud didn't know a thing. Albert Ellis would talk like a drill sergeant. I got a lot of friends who love Albert Ellis. Reich was full of it. Human race was out of its mind. For Ellis therapy was common sense. I talked people out of their BS. His method was to get his patients to act on their wishes and to not feel bad about it. Now one was perfect said Albert Ellis. Even Hitler was just a fallible messed up human being. That's where Saul Bellow drew the line. Ian Ellis had a heated argument over Hitler. So Bellow entered treatment with Albert Ellis to cope with his rage at his second wife. My goal was to get him on angry Ellis record, which wasn't easy with a person like that because he was a novelist. A novelist think that all emotions are good. Saul Bellow minimized the therapy as he always did. He went into therapy when he was desperate and he left as soon as he could tolerate the level of pain in his life. As a lover, Saul Bellow received indifferent marks. He was the put it in and take it out type. He didn't know a clitoris from a kneecap. Now the lover found him passionate and virile but he had a lack of interest in experimentation. Like Herzog, he was a quaker in his love making. He couldn't abandon himself sexually. Press three in the chat if you can abandon yourself sexually. Press two if you are the put it in and take it out type. And press three if you are passionate and virile. The compulsive seducer invariably turns out to be the most insecure man. So there's an actress who had a brief fling with Bellow in the 60s. That sounds like me. The compulsive seducer turns out to be the most insecure man. She remarked on Saul Bellow's sexual do's and don'ts. Yeah, I remember getting a tibidad wanting me to slip a finger into her back hole. I was like, no, I've never done that. I'm not into that kind of experimentation. You guys should see the 99 theses that I present to every potential lover so that we have everything straight and clear and out on the table what 40 does and does not do. Sex was never the driving impulse behind his conquest. It doesn't seem to have chosen women out of lust. I have no reports which described him as a stud. He sought some some kind of uncommitted temporary intimacy even affection rather than sexual possession. He found women overly demanding sexually. Press five if you find women overly demanding sexually. Their sexual aggressiveness was just another effort to impose upon his freedom. Just another demand. Saul Bellow persisted in viewing himself as an old fashioned romantic spurned by unfeeling women. He met these women and then he made them up, a friend said of his wives. So he was unable to handle women in their reality. He'd hang on to a fantasy view of these women and when reality broke through he would cut and run. So many of these ladies who were hungered after Saul wanted to be touched by the magic of his artistry and they would willingly give themselves to Saul to be touched by his magic wand. Art says, Kato Godfrey, those two lads plus JF would be R and R in their comments and language. Always the Apricot Sky Tour. Revisit the sacred sands of the filming locations. Crystal heavy is Luke's heart. Thanks Art. Nothing like cold crystal light. So Saul Bellow found that literary fame still left him an empty bank account. Not only had literary fame not made him rich, it had not even made him solvent. For someone as cynical as he was about the virtues of marriage, Saul Bellow was notably casual about proposing it. So a lot of the women that he proposed to soon realized that only one of them was someone to fornicate with. So Saul Bellow caught himself beneath an hail of sex. He would sacrifice his life to it. The only thing he liked about being married, he said, was dinnertime. He did miss his boys. He had children. 12 years and one marriage, seven and another, two sons whose lives are withdrawn from me. He said, sounding a rare note of regret. But he got the dates wrong. His marriage to Anita lasted 15 years into Sundra 4. Saul Bellow never made a concerted effort to grapple with the issues that underlay his propensity for serial marriage. He preferred to attribute his problems to women's predatory natures. What do women want? Herzog says plaintively. What women want? See, Herzog anticipated my cinematic classic. They eat green salad and drink human blood. So what animates all the Saul Bellow's heroes? Pure rage. Like Philip Roth's protagonist. Now, unlike so many other tragic famous writers for whom success became a hazard, so F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrecked by hack work and drink. William Faulkner squandered his genius in Hollywood. Hemingway was destroyed by his own myth. Bellow adapted easily to fame. He got new clothes, new car, a new co-op, but he overall showed few signs of outward alteration. He noted, most successful writers once transformed into major literary figures for the rest of their lives do little more than give solemn interviews to prestigious journals or serve on White House committees or fly to the mutas to participate in international panel discussions on the crisis in the arts. The writer is usually eclipsed by celebrity, but not Saul Bellow. Saul Bellow was adept at managing both celebrity and writing. Because it fit his self-image, it ratified his conviction that he'd been destined for greatness. Fame was only the world's belated confirmation of Saul Bellow's genius. As far as he was concerned, nothing had changed. The arrival of a child in a marriage meant that Saul Bellow himself was no longer the child. He'd been displaced by his own son. This was always the moment he chose to leave. Saul Bellow's sexual conduct was a paradox he regarded with increasing dismay, the sexual revolution. He invaded against the unregulated sex of the permissive 60s while passing up no opportunity to indulge himself. So he had a biblical old-world morality, but his fly was entirely unzipped at all times. So Bellow's quota of adultery was not satisfied by extramarital affairs. He cheated on his girlfriends too. Once the chase was over and he had the woman, he began to wander. So where do writers come from? Where do journalists come from? So Tom Wolf wrote about them in his great 2012 novel Back to Blood. People have a colorful picture of newspaper reporters, like these daring types who break stories and uncover corruption and put themselves in risky situations to get a scoop, as in Robert Redford and all the president's men and Bert Lancaster and the sweet smell of success. Art Bellow says, Kato and Godfrey are harsh about YouTube. Nothing is left on their channel. They must seek out their podcasts on other platforms. They just ported. New on YouTube is the applaud dollar button. Okay. F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife was schizophrenic. Oswald says Kato and Godfrey would be less cranky if they read some sort of Bellow and Godfrey. So where do journalists come from? Okay. So Tom Wolf says, if you ask me, newspaper reporters are created at age six when they first go to school. In the schoolyard, boys immediately divide into two types immediately. There are those who have the will to be daring to dominate and those who don't have it. Those who don't spend half their early years trying to work out a modus vivendi with those who do. This sounds a bit like me. I was not the dominating schoolboy figure. I was not the big boy in school. Anything short of subservience would be an okay modus vivendi. But there are boys from the weaker side of the divide who grow up with the same dreams as the strong boys. Okay. They too dream of power, money, fame and beautiful lovers. Yep. This is me. Boys like this grew up instinctively realizing that language can be a sword or a gun. So I didn't have people who tell me when my blog was big that the sword, the pen is mightier than the sword. Use skillfully. It has the power not so much to achieve things as to tear things down, including people. One of the pleasures of being a writer and being a journalist is you get to be very cruel. And you get to tear down the boys who come out on the strongest side of the dividing line. So that's what liberals are. Ideology, economics, social justice, they are nothing but their prom outfits. The politics were set for life in the schoolyard at age six. They were the weak and forever after they resented the strong. That's why journalists, liberals, very same schoolyard events that push them toward the written word, push them toward liberalism. If you want power through words and journalism, rhetorical genius is not enough. You need content. You need new material. You need news. You have to find it. You from the weak side can develop such a craving for new information. You end up doing things that would terrify any strong man. You will put yourself in dangerous situations amid dangerous people with relish. You will go alone without any backup. You with your weak manner end up approaching the vilest of the via with a demand. You have some information and I need it and I deserve it and I will have it. Yes, that's what constitutes the writer. I mean, that's, that's certainly my story. I mean, I would, but my blog was, was going strong. I would, I would get up after a few hours blogging and I'd go for a walk. And as I'd walk, I'd get like this with my fingers. And I think there's a new sheriff in town. His name is Luke Ford. I'm just like, that these fingers can move the world. Like anything that's happened to me, that was Tom Wolf in his 2012 novel, Back to Blood. You know, anything that's happened to me since about age 10. I just think, Oh, I'll use this in my writing one day or use this in a novel one day. Like when I was homeless in LA for about six months sleeping in my car, I think, Oh, I'll use this in a novel one day. Every humiliation I just think, Oh, this is going to be great for my writing. It's going to come in just fine for my writing. Okay, let me. Why do I look Asian today? And finally, one of the last great simplicities we use to assemble our impressions, a coherent impression. I think I'm turning Japanese stereotypes. These are generalizations about individuals based on their membership in a group, proximity and resemblance roles we actually talked about earlier. Stereotypes are a shortcut to communication, but really not to understanding. An interesting quick example about this is I call this the door story. Professor Simmons and Levins from Cornell, you had strangers, actually their Confederates on campus asked stop and ask pedestrians for directions. As the two people talk, they are suddenly rudely interrupted by two men who passed between them carrying a door. The interruption lasts. Okay. So Seymour Krim. He died committed suicide at about age nearly 70 in 1989. And he wrote this great essay for Playboy in 1969. The American novel made us. I was made, I was shaped, wetted, given a world with a purpose by the American realistic novel The Mid to Late 1930s. Here he is writing in Playboy in 1969. From the age of 14 to 17, I gorge on the works of Thomas Wolfe, beginning with of Time in the River, catching up with Look Home with Angel and then keeping pace till Big Tom's stunning end. Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James Farrell, John Steinbeck, John O'Hara, James Kane, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Urskine Cordwell, Jerome Weidman and William Sorrian. And I knew in my pumping heart that I wanted to be such a novelist, to me an isolated, super sensitive New York Jewish boy, given the privacy to dream in the locked bathroom of middle class lives. So the author here, Seymour Krim, I think essentially grew up as an orphan. So he was very much kind of that I assume that neglected weak boy on the playground. So he lived a lot of his life in his fantasy world as did I. So I don't think I was ever much above like average in terms of status in school, not until say 11th and 12th grade in high school when I moved above average because I was the editor of my high school newspaper and did other things. So the super sensitive boy given the privacy to dream. These novels taught me about the America out there. I wanted to identify with the big gaudy continent and its variety of human beings who came to me so clearly through the pages of these so-called fictions. I dreamed Southern accents, oakes, bourbon of branch water. This is me like growing up as a seventh day Adventist, preacher's kid. I just I read all these books and there was this amazing word out there that I just wanted to plunge into. Learned about juke joints, Studs Lonegan, speeding trucks, big highways, bigger Thomas, USA, USA. Nothing to me in those crucial irredeemable years was as glamorous as the unofficial seamy side of American life. Yes, that was my life experience. I was reading Harold Robbins novels in my teens. I read probably 12 Harold Robbins novels in my teens. Then I never read them after my teens. The seamy side of American life, the smack brutality and cynical truth of it. All of which I learned from the dynamic novels that appeared in Manhattan between 1936 and 1939. So I didn't do much homework in high school, but I just read tons of books, just read tons of novels. Novels were my high school, my religion, my major fantasy life. Instead of escaping into adventure or detective fiction, I was a kid's knob tucked into my literary American dream scene. I escaped into the vision of reality that these fresh and tough pioneering writers were bringing to print from all corners of the country. Even though these books usually ended bitterly or without faith, they were patriotic in a style that deeply impressed me without being asked to say why. They had integrity to reality. They recreated the very accents of frustration or despair voiced by their characters. They were all truthful in recreating American life. This was a naked, free show about my real nation that I damn well did not receive at home. A home full of euphemisms and concealments for the death of one parent, the breakdown and suicide of the other, hanging over the charade of good manners. So novels would give you the truth as opposed to the charade of what came in the newspapers, the radio and the movies. This is the first writing that ever really possessed me and I would never get over it. How can I communicate the savage greenness of the American novel of 30 years ago, so the late 1930s, as it was felt by a keenly emotional boy? So I spent much of my youth just reading books and a lot of novels. We lived in the perpetual present. We were inspired to become prose writers because of these novels. It wasn't a question of talent. If you responded to the leaping portrait of American life that these realists were showing us with their professionally curved words, you created the talent out of yourself at first in imitation of what you creamed over in their style, point of view and impact, then later in painful effort to do equal justice to your own personal test tube of experience. Wow, I so resonate with this great essay from Playboy magazine, Seymour Crimhend in 1969. The deservedly legendary American novelist of this raw knuckled period before the World War II. They were our celebrities. Remember when novelists were celebrities? They encouraged an untested, unformed young guy to dig into his own worst personal experience and make something exciting of it in the form of a story. So that's kind of how I approached my life. I started writing stories by third grade. I was churning out stories. Everything that was painful and humiliating, I wanted to turn it into exciting work. There we would all look at the unique grain of our life as would be novelists. We were swept up wanting to be novelists to our young, hungering minds hooked by the constantly fresh stream of national lives that made their debut in these novels. It was impossible to quit. Once the real American scene entered your imagination, I started reading books about America by second grade. I was falling in love with America. It just seemed like such an amazing country. And then there was World War II. There was nothing else for the youthful Truth Maniac to go to about the new novels, hurrying each other out of the New York publishing worm. So I got the sense in novels that I was getting the real essence of life compared to novels. Newspaper and radio and TV just seemed inadequate. So new fiction would pour out of the New Yorker, the Saturday review of literature, Esquire. The city buzzed with the magazine unveiling of any new talent. It was news that traveled with enthusiasm. There was Owen Shaw in the New Yorker, Di Donato in Esquire, James Laughlin telling it like it is in Story Magazine. So the 30s drew to a vicious close with the Spanish Civil War and World War II. Politicalization in the US novel became more acute, the bleak international scene began to throw its heavy shadow over our original literary pine thrust. It suddenly became a little bit weary. But if you're coming alive in the late 30s, it just seemed like one nonstop fictional ball. So each of these exciting 1930s novelists seemed to me inside my comet shooting young head. Each of these novelists was a pioneer. They were tackling unrecorded experience in each hidden alley and cove of the country that I wanted to be a part of. Bringing it to ground for the first time, binding it up and sending it east for exhibition before the rest of the country. Their moral flame was ignited, burning steadily. They would not have gone to the huge labor of making the entire country and its people accessible to fiction. So this flame was used to warm their faith in the value of writing. So the American novelist of the 1930s took over what used to be the explorers' role. Okay, after the merely geographical aspects of exploration, it already faded into the bottom drawer of childhood. So when I was seven, eight, nine, I was reading all these books about explorers. But after that, it was the novelist for me. Alex says, Bella saw Bella sees the days, the only novel I read that I remember absolutely nothing about. It convinced me to switch my major, I blame Kevin McDonald. Yeah, I'm no, no sore bellow fan, but I am a big Seymour Krim fan. So the moral integrity of these great realist novels from William Soroyan to John Steinbeck to William Faulkner. So they were bringing us the truth, that which had been seen and smelled and suffered but had never before been written. So these were the outriders, the advanced scouts of the truth, what they brought back from the contemporary American frontier. It was as rare and precious to those of us who wanted the truth as the information brought to earth by an astronaut. So when he was 10 and 11, Seymour Krim wanted to be an explorer. That's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a missionary or an explorer prior to age nine or 10. So my fantasy life, I would follow along and succeed people like various big explorers like Robert Scott, Rold Amundsen. So the American novelist of the 30s took over the explorer's role in my mind. Who else but the self-elected, self-taught, self-studying, gutsy man with a sniff of glory in their nostrils. These were the real explorers of this country's unadvertised life. So if you said to somebody in high school, I wanted to write, it could only mean one thing, the novel. You don't understand what it used to mean to say, I want to write. One had the image of climbing the jaggedus of the Rockies alone, flying solo like Lindbergh, pitting one's ultimate stuff against all the odds of middle-class life and coming out of the toughest kind of spiritual ideal with that book that was more than a book, the book that was a payoff on everything. It was heavenly combat, the self-confrontation of the most hallowed kind. The legendary American novel was the most romantic achievement there was in US life for the dreamer. I love this novel here by, this essay by Seymour Crimm. Lease Denisdale is back in Lukeland, the daredevil Denisdale of Portlandia. So to have wanted to be a writer in this country in the late 1930s had a gorgeous mystique that was inseparable from the American dream. All of our great novelists were suckled by the American dream and then kicked out into the cold to make it come true. It's an American dream, A-D. You want to go all the way that meant that the individual had no option but to fly above the skyscrapers, write the great American novel. Not as an active literature, there's an affirmation of the dream dust of the American dream that all of us are born under that flag. So all the driving personal ambition, the energy, the initiative, the pricing of individual conscience and courage, this is what it took to be a novelist. The act of writing a novel made use of all these qualities, but the reward that one saw was not gold. Their sellers as such was sneered at, unless they occurred by accident. The goal was absolute truth to reality, to make a landmark on the American landscape, to somehow redeem the original intentions of the country, represent the purest kind of success stories. So the novelist, the writer, we tend to live a lot in a world of fantasy. So reality is continually disappointing writers, novelists would be novelists and who almost always tend to be on the left. So America, the reality is always going to fall short of your fantasy. So from a measurement of reality versus a fantasy, America fails. Now, when you compare America to other countries in reality, America does great. But unhappy people living in fantasy who don't do so well navigating reality, these are the type of people who tend to become writers. So being a good realist novelist in the late 1930s was not dependent on having the extraordinary gift of style. It meant only that you had a huge spiritual truth to tell the truth, that you wanted to force the country to see how it wasn't living up to its ideal. So the mystical American novel was bound out with all these big national feelings of the American dream and all these aspirations just right around in the direct center of one's being. This is more than just literature. This is the most thrilling embodiment of one's destiny as a member of making the impossible possible society. So it was the ambition that the gut chosen, generally speaking, by the weaker kids on the playground who lived more in their fantasies than in reality. They wanted to rebuild society according to their fantasies. They wanted to rebuild reality closer to the American soul's desire. They wanted to write in the light of a final faith to transform their portraits of frustration into the opposite. They wanted to believe in the promise of America. They wanted to believe in the fantasy of human potential. They were tied up emotionally, psychologically, every way with the American dream as if it were a person, as if their own fulfillment as human beings depended upon the fulfillment, the American dream, at the poetic height at which they conceived it, which is absolutely impossible, right? No nation is going to live up to poetry. And because they had this dream of an impossible ideal, they felt they could therefore let go in their work to the full extent possible of their negative imagination. Everything bad, stinky, awful, unjust, painful, stupid, outrageous in their own lives, and the lives they saw could now be discharged at full intensity in their fiction. The underlying implication is just and right to give such a ferocious bite to negative expression because it was all just an attempt to redeem the invisible psychic bill of rights. So you can see the left-wing mindset here that so typical of writers and novelists. So you have this towering idealism of a fantasy ideal that then allows one to focus on the dark reality. The more the novelist envisions the way things should be, the more he felt he had a duty to show the ugly side. So what was it that is said about Robert Kennedy? Other men see the world as it is. Robert Kennedy looked at the world and said, why not achieve these fantasies? So to be on the left, it's very much to live in a kind of a fantasy world about the innate goodness of human nature. So the novel, for many people who are frustrated in real life, caught in the emotional hell of a frustrated real life, novel became a wish fulfillment device for would-be lovers banished from the central playground that taunted us via radio, billboards, movies, and our own famished unconscious. So in other words, guys who are not getting laid in real life, who are not making it in real life, who aren't able to navigate reality, they get lost in the novel. So we kids who wanted to write the American novel knew without analysis, we responded totally with sharpened feelers to the unspoken values that lay behind any particular book. We knew by feel that even if a specific book baffled our haughty teenage heads, it contained a purposeful thrust about a part of the country's experience. It was criticizing America under the table to purge and to uplift it. Well, just try doing that in your own life. Try constantly criticizing your spouse or your friends and see how that works out. It was a great American novel was forever encroaching on the most taboo, subtle and previously undefined aspects of our mutual life to show a true picture of the way we lived. Is this true of Hemingway? No, I don't think this is so true of Hemingway. So these are gross generalizations. I don't think this is true of Hemingway. So those of us, you know, sensitive types, underowners, people failing, I think this is generally true of writers in general. It's not true of all. And I don't think it's true of Hemingway. But sensitive types who treasure each hurt, each slight, who are too afraid, too short, too tall, too poor, too afraid of girls, too afraid of boys, too crippled, too neurotic, too psychotic, too vulnerable. Okay. It's we who think that being a novelist will heroically reclaim ourselves, that we can recreate the bit of truth about our own personal lives. So it takes sensitivity of the most piercing kind to provide the openings in the personality where painful experience can lunge and stick. So one day it can all be poured forth and answer against frustration both personal and social. We who wanted to be novelists only thought is the most free and ultimately ethical means of American expression. We needed fiction to confess, absolve and justify our own lives. Now we've got live streams where I can confess, absolve and justify my own life. So I don't have to write fiction anymore. So people who want to write novels, generally speaking, middle class losers, who can't make it inside the accepted framework. We are the thin skin minority set apart in our own psyches, right? Not in the more prestigious rungs of society or in the upper rungs of the school pecking order, right? We're the thin skin minority set apart in our own psyches to observing when we want to act. We're looking on at life when we want to participate. We think we want to participate. We are the kids who are constitutionally unable to live the American way in teens. And now we're going to pour it all out in our words. So writing the novel or writing in general or this kind of first person or rating on a live stream is basically a pimply revenge on life. This is the al-qas tribe of failures getting their own back. This is all the shrimpy, titless, thick lens, crazy head dropouts and sore losers resolving in the utter misery of the dateless Saturday night. That's what we are, right? Okay? You're listening to a live stream from the shrimpy, titless, thick lens, crazy headed dropout sore losers resolving in the utter misery of the dateless Saturday night to shoot down their better favored peers in the pages of a novel or a live stream. That's what's happening here. This gift to recreate lifelike scenes and dialogue to be good at description, to have moral perceptions. It's all spiced and rehearsed by unhappiness. It's all fueled by frustration and failure. So the novel or stand comedy of a live stream is, for those of us caught in emotional hell, it's a wish fulfillment device for would be lovers banished from the central play land that taunts us via radio, billboards, the internet, movie monkeys and our own famished unconscious. There are these big smooth beautiful people, a world of blue eyes and blonde hair and supple tennis racket bodies that feel like you can never belong to and now you want to be on top of them. So the American novel for those of us who feel like precocious outsiders, those who feel like they fail to measure up to the gleaming movie stars and TV stars and live stream stars, it's a magic lifelike double in which we can just work off our private griefs and we can transform them into messages of hope and light. We make our lives by the act of live streaming or writing a novel. That's what we're doing here. This is the art. It's the freest, the most total kind of expression for reality loving idealists. Here's the place where truth can be told as it cannot be in real life or in any place but one's mind. And we can form so close to reality to living itself. So art, writing, live streaming is redemption of the frustrated self. It's a glorification of the losing self. It's a yielding female art that is responsive to our most private subjective needs. This provides the only complete outlet for being that was choked and distorted in our waking relationship to society. It's the golden cup of a modern fable, one that we want to feel to overflowing with all the repressed hunger in ourselves, one that we can announce our fame. I've got 11 live viewers, guys. We can toast us to the sky because of our verbal triumph over the weights that nearly crushed us. We can make true in imagination what could not be realized in the bruising action of daily life. So good. So it's action on a literary level. It's action with words. It's dream action. But it has the wrinkles in the facade of photographic realism. So our prose is going to be streamlined like our country itself. It's going to be stripped down, whipped down. We're just going to bullet across the internet or the page. Behind our lean, aware, dirty knowingness, we are tuned in to the impossible freedom of the novelist or the live streamer. Working out his total hidden life before our eyes. That's what I'm doing here. I'm working out my total hidden life before your eyes. That's what makes live streaming and writing novels the tremendous adventure. No matter how embarrassing and shameful and awkward and subjective and personal, the original motives that might drive us to do this. So can you imagine a human being being mordered by something as abstract as a literary art form? But it's real. Many of us, our values, our colors, our slant on life is people dominated by reality. But we are sustained by a beautiful obsession with fiction. It keeps us secretly, spiritually high like early Christians. It puffs us up with humility. It humbles us with pride. It makes us into every character we ever imagined puts us in every story we could cook up, not as an actor might express it. There are correspondences, but we novelists, we think of actors as childish narcissists. We love ourselves for the infinite range of life that writing the novel gives itself to us. Seymour Crem, awesome here. Forty needs to write the great American Jewish novel. Hey, Affirmative Right is in the house. Blessings to Affirmative Right. So I'm just doing this show on my phone. So I can't bring anyone onto the show right now. Look, what are you reading from? I think it's quite bad, God forbid. I think it's quite awesome. The American novel made us Seymour Crem. Seymour Crem is great. Look, you seem to be high and in a good mood tonight. It's because I had that diatomaceous earth with essential water earlier today and had a wonderful time at synagogue and saw all my friends. What wacky tobacco are you smoking? Could I have some? Not smoking any wacky tobacco, but I've discovered Seymour Crem and he's the best really enjoying this guy. So he knows that when he flunked out of college in 1940 a year after finishing high school, he did not see this as a failure. He saw this as a new and soon-to-be-significant phenomenon that I'll be after right about from first-hand experience. Yeah, that was how I've understood most of my failures. Ah, this is just more material that I'm going to be after turning into a novel. So Norban is live streaming. Ah, shawls have kid-ish. What a wonderful kid-ish. Like, not just a kid-ish, just a full lunch, my friends. Full lunch with my friends, people getting rather happy with lots of alcohol. Ah, beautiful sunny day, 70 degrees outside. Just like I was embraced by the warm bosom of my adopted Jewish family. A lovely time. So the first time I got laid, drunk, smoked tea, shipped out, jumped ship, saw death, spent the night in a hospital, spent the night in jail. The first time I masturbated over the fantasy of going to bed with my sister, put on women's panties and silk stockings for kicks, got into my first adult street fight. All these firsts and 100 others were special, fated, grand experiences for me and for those like me because I was a novelist to be and I was on a special trip and I identify with Seymour Crem here in many of those things, not all. What a dream it was. What a marvellous, hurt-proof fest. Yes, that's when you have the fantasy about yourself as becoming a great novelist one day. Like, I've had much of my life. It's a marvellous, hurt-proof fest. Nothing can hurt you. Yes, marvellous, hurt-proof fest. We all wove in the name of the novel, which is just another name for religion or faith. Now, Seymour Crem notes here in this 1969 Playboy magazine essay. I did not finally write novels. He never did. Committed suicide in 1989. Did not write any novels, but I was made as a person and as a mind as a writer in their image, just as the newer generation is being created by the movies. I may not have had the talent to write novels or the needs of the post-World War II period shifted in my eyes and in those of my friends. We put much more importance on trying to understand a new world zooming up around us rather than on expressing what we already knew. So he was trying to come to terms where he never wrote the novel. He became intellectual instead of open. Much of that same apocalyptic sense of possibility we once felt for the great American novel now went into examination, literary criticism. So the works of fiction became a means for us to examine life. Wasn't that what it was all about anyway? It ran our sincere and troubled rationalizations. So the form of the writing changed in the 40s and 50s, changed from fiction to non-fiction. The goal remained the same to articulate, reflect American reality by individuals who were suffering. Who were unstable, who were constantly self-analyzing and self-doubting. So Seymour Crimm says, I sweated the national anxiety out in myself. What direction was I going to go in? The idea of the novel still hangs over me as a kind of a star but getting farther and farther distant is my ignorance in other areas. Politics, poetry, sociology, history, painting were steadily exposed and I tried powerfully to educate myself. Now that is a non-novelist. I was being challenged socially in imprint. That's so powerful. So the idea of the novel still hung over him like a star but it was getting farther and farther distant. So his dream of being a novelist, it kept him warm for 20 years. He'd put all his golden hope eggs in this mighty basket but now he was stomp torn from this sustaining fantasy by his own failure to act. He was forced to fend for his self-esteem in a hard-boiled New York Jewish intellectual community with the literary political magazines where he published. They had no sympathy for his inspirational couplets of what the American novel means to me. They thought it was a put on because I had written on for a sentimental endorgence. So whether it's because he allied himself with the new criticism in his more cerebral search for reality or because he was simply incapable of thinking novelistically or because the truth no longer seemed to reside in the great American novel. So by the mid-1950s Seymour Krim began to regard the novel as a used-up medium. So he'd been given great hope and direction by this medium. He justified all his pain by his very existence. He thought one day he would redeem his life and redeem the country through writing the great American novel. The beauty of knowing the novel was there. It was like a loving woman for me to go to when beaten down to my knees. It was not easy for him to accept that this doesn't sing for my time the way it once did. So was there a fundamental change of perception about where the significant writing action lay? Fictional realism in which we'd been shaped and reared seemed to lead to further realism that existed in the world of non-fiction, in the world of fact. We'd been so close to the real thing with the style of super realism. It's now impossible to restrain ourselves from wanting to go over the edge into autobiography to the confessional essay to reportage because in these forms we could escape from the growing feeling that fiction was artificial compared with using novelistic sweep on the actual experience we live through each day. He didn't want to write a novelist. He wanted to be seen as a novelist. A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley is a great American novel. He wrote two more before dying of alcoholism. A Fan's Notes is about his preoccupation with New York giants running back Frank Gifford. Yeah, I've heard excellent things about that work. So the realistic 30s novel made us want to take that giant step further into the smellable, libelous, unfaked dimension of sheer torn pocket reality. My actual goodbye world flip out in 1955. So James Adjie was pounding on his small car in Santa Monica a year before he died and he told a friend of mine who had casually quoted a line from Adjie's first and only book of poems. I wasted it. I should have only written poetry sobbing while he banged on the hoods with his fists. And there was Ilya Kazan. Ilya Kazan, the movie director looming over Patty Shaevsky and me at the Russian tea room saying he'd come to see the isolated Clifford O'Detz, the golden boy with cancer, who'd crept back to New York to sniff the ozone of dead triumphs before perishing on the coast. And Ilya Kazan spoke how he'd met O'Detz at 17 at the University of North Carolina, how he'd taken me for a ride in his fast Cadillac, switched me on so that I wrapped pre on the road about speed. All these once-repertorial facts now became the truest story for those of us whose appetite for what is had been built up to a point no longer satisfied by affection. Seymour Krim here in Playboy 1969. Am I planning to come to Sydney Australia soon? I'm planning to come back to Australia as soon as these restrictions end. So I'm just waiting for an end to restrictions and I would very much like to come back to Australia. So during the 1950s and 60s Seymour Krim found the novel increasingly irrelevant. The audience for it in America was no longer loyal and as excited as it had been because we were mentally and emotionally bowled over now by TV, movies, electronic communications of every sort. So if you had a story that you wanted to tell, you could write it for the Saturday Evening Post, you could tell it on TV or movies. There's only a small number of people who seem to haunt out strenuously for the novel. So these electronic whispers of tomorrow could in a momentary flash do what Flo Baird and Conrad spent their lifetimes trying to achieve with words above all to make you see. But there are things that the novel does better than any other medium and that's to allow you to get into the heads of multiple characters, the subjective perspective. So there are things that the novel does better than movies TV. Okay, let me get to the to the very heart of this essay before I wind up. Okay, so in the 50s and 60s Seymour Krem notice there was a deluge of new novel, but he experienced reading new novels as a frantic duty rather than a great thrill and it became impossible to keep up with all the diversity of new novels. So the impact of the novel on its life became less important, less crucial. So he felt the entire role of the American novel had been transformed into something entirely different in the 1960s to what had been to him in the 1930s. So he looked at writing novels as a way to lift the national life into the realm of justice, to use the total freedom of imagination to rearrange the shit-spec facts of our American experience into their ultimate spiritual payoff. We wanted to build Jerusalem out of America's fresh green breast. The novel was our transcendent, our more than could ever be vehicle for this rocketing need toward fulfillment of both ourselves and the nation. So the novel was imaginative action. So if you couldn't make it in real life because of one handicap another, then you could do it through your books. That was even better. Your goal was the same as the man of action. Your books were deeds that came out of your mixture of vision and moral commitment. They stood as the seal of where you were humanly. There could be no faking about taking a stand. You were measured every step of the way by readers who took your fiction as acts that influenced the world to their out-distance by new and more penetrating fictions. It was a sole contest of the keenest kind with America as the beneficiary. But now by the 1960s the effectiveness of this imaginative action seems to have been reduced to mere toenail picking by the tornado voices of the mass media. Novelists have become pawns in the newscast of each day's events. Our novel can no longer affect these events in even an indirect sense unless every ounce of my energy is used in coping with my own life. Things happen too fast for me to be affected by the stance of some protagonist in fiction. I'm spun around by each latest threat to my survival. So what was the charismatic lure of the American novel now becomes an extravagance rather than a necessity. So now he's trying to find in non-fiction and in literary criticism the crucial excitement that the novel used to hold for him. So what happens to that awesome authority of the imagination that the novelists once exhibited that seemed to dictate our lives? What happened to that great ton of submerged American experience? What happens to that special mission to that holy mission of making an imaginary American world that'd be more real than the real world? Where does the legendary US novelist go when he is no longer a cultural hero in a radically new environment? When his medium is passing into the void of time, when he is stuck with a roaring inner need to speak, to confess, to design, to shape, and to record? Well maybe he goes to live streams. So maybe the great wannabe American novelist abandons his imitation or caricature of reality and steps away from the desk of fiction. Maybe we only now have literary individuals themselves and struggling with their own destinies, struggling with emotional, sexual, political, racial, artistic, philosophical, and financial problems. Maybe we should just state these to the reader or to the viewer or the listener as candidly as possible brought into the new mutual non-novel of American life and make possible a truly democratic prose of total communication that can lead to new action in society itself. Maybe we're living in the age of the ex-novelist turned live streamer. So we can see this new communicator, the Norman Mailer, with his non-fiction work like The Armies of the Night, Seed of Chicago, Tom Wolf, the Electric Kool-Aid Asset Test, Norman Pot-Harris' book, Making it Down Wayfields Between the Lines, Frederick Axley's The Fan's Notes. Maybe these works of non-fiction speak intimately to the reader about these fantastic days we are living through. And if we reveal the concrete details and the particular sweat of our own in our life, maybe then we earn the right to speak openly about everything or to be trusted. If we tell the blunt truth about our own life, our own feelings, our own subjective experiences, if we clean house, lay the entire business of being an American right now on the table without shame, maybe this is our new approach. Maybe just put it all directly before the viewer as if YouTube were a telephone. How can we suffer from too much truth? Who isn't glad when someone confesses what's really going on with himself? Like when you hear the truth it feels like the very molecules of the air changes. You had a nice thing going with KMG, what happened? Yeah, we did a show for a year and a half and it just stopped working for me and I thought it'd be better for KMG and better for me for us to go our separate ways. So it's very intense to collaborate and if you're watching the show, if you couldn't see that the show wasn't working, then you are emotionally blind. You are an emotional imbecile and that's not to criticize you. That's just just pointing out that you have an enormous blindness in your life if you can't see that that show was not working. You are just emotionally blocked, blind, deaf, dumb and blind. So that's not to put anyone down for having those disabilities. That's just to let you know that there's a whole range of the human experience that is open to you if you want to explore it. But anyone who couldn't see that that show was not working then you were just emotionally cut off. You have no idea what's going on if you couldn't see that that show was not working anymore. And that's not to condemn, that's to invite someone to get more clued into their own emotional life which will then enable them to better understand what's going on with other people. So who is not heartened when somebody respects us enough to tell us who he really is and then asks us to reciprocate? Who isn't heartened by total leveling, someone who's totally straightforward. So if I talk about my being candidly to you or write about my being candidly to you, it's inevitable that you too will be poured into communication. You are interacting with me, I am interacting with you and others, as long as we have the stomach for the truth then I become part of your experience, you become part of my experience. And what we've all seen and heard and identified with will not be put aside like a piece of fiction. It's just an extension of the same reality that unites us. We have established a sense of community. The destiny of our lives is somewhat intertwined in this uncertain time. Our destiny has become intertwined in a real way if we are honest with each other. So this is not just something that's happening in literature. But if I'm honest, you're honest, we're connecting and forming a community, our lives are touching. For the live streamer, the blogger, the reader, the viewer, we are no longer isolated, we are no longer indifferent. The alienation of our mutual situation has been broken through by my need to make you experience what I have and to share my consciousness. So Seymour Krem says, I want American prose to become a potent force in the life of the individual, so it doesn't have to be prose, it can be live streams. So maybe it's no longer the novelist who shapes El Sol, maybe it can be the live streamer in addition to the preacher and the rabbi. So the imagination that once led the novelist to build a stairway to the stars is now forced into coping with his own imperiled life on the same quaking ground that holds us all. We're all being pushed toward a new art of personal survival. We must move into the senses of action to fight for our own fate. We're not leaving the crucial decisions of our time to others while we concentrate on our work as in the old days. We're now too personally a part of each day's events to pretend that they don't shake us and dominate our existence. Seymour Krem writes, his only choice is to insert himself into these events through his writing or through his live streaming, to become an actor upon them instead of a helpless observer, try to influence the making of history itself with his art so that he can save himself as a man. His driving need for direct participation in our national life now makes the new communicator want to change America in a pact with his readers or his viewers and to begin by changing his own life in the commitment of laying it on the line. So here's the final paragraph in this long 1969 essay for Playboy Magazine by Seymour Krem. Time has shown that the vision I saw in the American novel that made me a character in it, the hero who wants to be a novelist, could be fulfilled only if the novel was real and was acted out. Perhaps in the light of this late recognition of my own need to personify what to many others existed solely in the imagination, I was scheduled all along not to write novels, as I always thought, but to try to put their essence into action. Just as I once believed that art was the highest condition to which a person could attain, I now believe that if this is true, it is the duty of those who conceive such an ideal to use it on society and use it on society and take their literary lives in their hands in the dangerous gamble to make the word deed. That's where the new prose action is 30 years after I got hooked for real, chums for deadly real. That's Seymour Krem there in Playboy Magazine 1969. So I was reading Tom Wolf on the new journalism. It was a piece he published in New York magazine in 1972 and he talks about this Seymour Krem essay in this piece. He says in 1969 Seymour Krem wrote a strange confession for Playboy that I just read you that began. I was literally made, shaped, wetted, and given a world with a purpose by the American realistic novel of the mid to late 1930s. From the age of 14 to 17, I gorge myself with the works of Thomas Wolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and knew in my pumping heart that I wanted to be such a novelist. The piece turned into a confession because first Krem admitted that the idea of being a novelist had been the overwhelming passion of his life, his spiritual calling in fact, the pacemaker that kept his ego ticking through all the miserable humiliations of his young manhood. Then he faced up to the fact that he was now in his 40s and had never written a novel and more than likely never would. I was fascinated by the article but why Playboy was running it I didn't know. Unless it was the magazine's monthly injection of literary penicillin. I couldn't imagine anyone other than writers being interested in Krem's complex. That however was where I was wrong. So this is Tom Wolf writing in 1972. After thinking it over I realized that writers comprised but a fraction of the Americans who have experienced Krem's peculiar obsession. That's how long ago I'm willing to wage a half the people who went to work for publishing houses did so with the belief that their real destiny was to be novelist. So press one in the chat if you have thought at times in your life that your real destiny was to be a novelist. I had a girlfriend at girlfriends who thought their real destiny was to be a novelist but they never wrote one. Among people on the creative side of advertising those who dream up the ads the percentage must have reached 90 percent. 1955 in the Exurbanites late AC Spectorsky depicted the well-paid Madison Avenue advertising genius as being a man who wouldn't read a novel without checking out the dust jacket blurb and the picture of the author on the back. And if that ego flushed little bastard with the unbuttoned shirt and the wind rushing through his locks was younger than he was then he couldn't bear to open the goddamn book. Such was the grip of the damnable novel. Likewise among people in television public relations the movies are the English faculties of colleges and high schools among framing shop clerks, convicts, unmarried sons living with mum. A whole swarm of fantasizers out there steaming and proliferating in the ego mortars of America. Or dreaming they'd write the great American novel one day. The novel writing the great American novel is like finding gold or striking oil through which an American could overnight in a flash utterly transform his destiny. And there are many examples to feed the fantasy. In the 1930s all the novelists seemed to be people who came blazing up into stardom from total obscurity. That seemed to be the nature of the beast. And the biographical notes on the dust jackets of their novels were terrific. The author you would be assured was previously employed as a hard carrier, John Steinbeck, a truck dispatcher, Cain, Bellboy, Richard Wright, Western Union boy William Soroyan, dishwasher, William Faulkner, a truck driver, a lager, a berry picker, a spindle cleaner, a crop duster, a pilot. There was no interest. Some novelists had a whole string of these credentials. That way you knew you were getting the real goods. This is Tom Wolf in the February 14, 1972 issue of New York magazine, the birth of the new journalism eyewitness report by Tom Wolf. Some had participant reveals main factors leading to demise of the novel and the rise of the new journalism. So Tom Wolf begins his essay, I doubt if many of the aces meaning the great writers of new journalism. I will be extolling in this story. It went into journalism of the faintest notion of creating a new journalism, a higher journalism, or even a mildly improved variety. I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world. Have you heard of the new journalism? Kind of exploded in the late 1960s. Causing panic, dethroning the novel is the number one literary genre, starting the first new direction in American literature in half a century. So if you have a choice, two books are equally well written, equally captivating, but one is nonfiction and one is fiction. I think 95% of guys would rather read the nonfiction. And there's a lot of gripping, exciting nonfiction out there. That is what happened. Saul Bellow, John Bart, John Updike, even the best of the lot, Philip Roth. The novelists are all out there ransacking the literary histories and sweating it out, wondering where they now stand. Damn it all Saul, the Huns have arrived. So Tom Wolf notes, God knows I didn't have anything new in mind, much less anything literary when I took my first newspaper job at a fierce and unnatural craving for something else entirely. Chicago 1928, that was the idea. Drunken reporters out on the ledge of the news peeing into the Chicago River at dawn. Nights down at the Sloan, listening to back of the stockyards being sung by a baritone who is only a lonely blind bull dyke with lumps of milk glass for eyes. Nights down at the detective bureau was always nighttime in my daydreams of the newspaper life. Reporters didn't work during the day. I wanted the whole movie, nothing left out. And what reduced him to this student prince model and state of mind? Well, he couldn't help it. He just spent five years in graduate school. Statement that may mean nothing to people who've never served such a stretch because it's hard to convey what graduate school is like. Nobody ever has. Millions of Americans now go to graduate schools but just say the word graduate school and what picture leaps into the brain. Half the people I knew in graduate school were going to write a novel about it. I thought about it myself. No one ever wrote such a book. Everyone used to sniff the air. How morbid. How poisonous. Nothing else like it in the world, but the subject always defeated them. It defied literary exploitation. Such a novel would be a study of frustration, but a form of frustration so exquisite, so ineffable, nobody could describe it. How would, if you'd been to graduate school, how would you describe that experience? This is how Tom Wolf tries to describe it. Try to imagine the worst part of the worst Antonioni, Michael Antonioni movie you've ever saw. Or try to imagine reading Mr. Sammler's Planet. I saw a bellow at one sitting. Or just reading it. Being locked inside a seaboard railroad room at 16 miles from Gainesville, Florida heading north on the Miami to New York run with no water and the radiator turning red in a psychotic overboil and George McGovern sitting beside you telling you his philosophy of government. That will give you the general atmosphere of graduate school. So Tom Wolf says by the time he received his doctorate in American studies in 1957, I was in the grip of a disease of our times, which the suffering experiences an overwhelming urge to join the real world. So when I came out of six years of bedroom chronic fatigue syndrome, did not want to return to university, which I was doing prior to getting sick. I wanted to strike out something completely new. If going to university got me sick, I needed needed something completely different. So Tom Wolf had this overwhelming experience like I did to join the real world. So he started working for newspapers and in 1962 he arrived at the New York Herald Tribune. This is the real world time, Tom. Rackage and exhaustion everywhere. To be continued.