On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice." -William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair) "All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits."  - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind, 1762) I heard the term, "OK boomer" for the first time last year, when reading about an exchange between a young woman and an older male, both of whom were politicians. The latter had begun to interrupt her speech, and she replied with the phrase. I hadn't realized it had been around for a while, though it wasn't a surprise that it was. There's always been "generation gaps," a...

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too..." -George Orwell Each generation produces a coterie of rebels and forward thinkers who may or may not edge our culture forward, but will at least add ideas to the mainstream. Very few age groups develop an ability to look inward and see their own flaws in real time. That tends to be the task of the next generation. There were writers such as Voltaire, H. L. Mencken, Paul Krassner, or Tom Wolfe who could see that human nature was really a constant, that is to say, could see the irony in a generation criticizing another, and who turned their sharp eye on their peers' foibles and failings. But most societal critics and lampooners end up becoming, as George Orwell called it, "licensed jesters" who can coast along as honored sages if they stick to approved targets, but the early feminist writers, the ones who stubbornly kept to the core issue of equality, broke that mold, as as a result faced of...

"I have made a silent compact with myself not to change a line of what I write. I am not interested in perfecting my thoughts, nor my actions." - Henry Miller (Tropic Of Cancer) "But get hold of Tropic of Cancer, get hold of Black Spring and read especially the first hundred pages. They give you an idea of what can still be done, even at this late date, with English prose. In them, English is treated as a spoken language, but spoken without fear..." - George Orwell (Essay: Inside The Whale) I look at Tropic Of Cancer in 2019 and have to think; these days the internet would be eating Henry Miller's flesh, or doing it's best to ban the book without being so uncool as to actually openly proscribe it. Which isn't an indictment of Miller, as the same thing would happen to Jesus or Buddha if they had an online presence. It's a book that's been canonized like an ancient Saint, kept on a virtual shelf and treated as a sacred work that everyone knows is l...