Quote of the Day (Thomas Wolfe, on Oktoberfest, A ‘Paradise of Cram and Gorge’)

“Everyone was eating; everyone was drinking. A ravenous hunger—an insane hunger that knew no appeasement, that wished to glut itself on all the roasted ox flesh, all the sausages, all the salt fish in the world, seized me and held me in its teeth. In all the world there was nothing but Food—glorious Food. And beer—October beer. The world was one enormous Belly—there was no higher heaven than the paradise of Cram and Gorge. All of the agony of the mind was here forgotten. What did these people know about books? What did they know about pictures? What did they know about the million tumults of the soul, the conflict and the agony of the spirit, the hopes, fears, hatreds, failures, and ambitions, the whole fevered complex of modern life? These people lived for nothing but to eat and drink—and they were right.”—American novelist Thomas Wolfe (1900-1937), “Oktoberfest,” originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, June 1937, reprinted in The Complete Short Stories of Thomas Wolfe, edited by Francis E. Skipp (1987)

The first Oktoberfest began in Munich, Germany, on this day in 1810. Since then, according to this brief history from Oktoberfest Tours, the celebration of this bacchanal has been moved to late September and ending in early October to allow for better weather conditions in the changeable local climate. Most similar observances of this festival around the world, including in the U.S., have followed suit.

But there are some American cities—including one I heard about this morning—that are still marking the occasion even as I write this. So, seizing on this slender occasion, I am writing this post.

The “parade of Cram and Gorge” that Thomas Wolfe described in the above passage occurred in 1928—one of a half-dozen visits he made to Germany from 1926 to 1936.  

His participation in that celebration might have been a little too vigorous, according to Ellen Apperson Brown’s April 2020 essay on Wolfe’s short story on the Website of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: The aspiring novelist, after downing eight liters of beer, got into a drunken brawl that left him with “a concussion of the brain, 4 scalp wounds, and a broken nose,” along with trips to a police station and hospital, he confessed to his lover of the time, the American set designer Aline Bernstein.

At one point in the short story, Wolfe’s narrator, amid all the “powerful bodies” packed together in this hall, senses that “nothing on earth could resist them—that they must smash anything they came against”—a disturbing premonition of the violence that Germany would unleash under the Nazi regime in the 1930s. But, caught up in the tumult and friendship of those around him, he eventually relegates his unease to the back of his consciousness.

Wolfe would feel even more enthusiastic about the nation in 1935, when he was feted as a major literary figure—an unambiguous embrace of his work that he was not experiencing in the U.S. at the time.

But to his credit, as journalist Andrew Nagorski chronicled in Hitlerland: American Eyewitnesses to the Nazi Rise to Power, Wolfe came to see the error of his ways in the summer of 1936 during the Munich Olympics, when a German acquaintance laid out for him the mounting economic pressures and violence perpetrated on Jews by the Nazis.

Wolfe’s subsequent dramatic denunciation of the Nazis in the long “I Have a Thing to Tell You” chapter of his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again led to his books being banned by the regime.

Most celebrations of Oktoberfest here in the U.S. will be closer to the feeling of “imminent and impending happiness” that Wolfe felt as he walked the streets back from this night. But here’s hoping that those who don’t know how to control their appetites will refrain from this festival of food and drink.

(The image accompanying this post, of Oktoberfest 2013 held in Munich, was taken Sept. 21, 2013, by Heribert Pohl.)

Quote of the Day (Matthew Engel, on Why ‘A Successful Public Transport System is a National Benefit’)

“A successful public transport system is a national benefit. Japan, China and most of western Europe accept it explicitly. For much of the world, the past 40 years have indeed been the second age of the train. British politicians get the point implicitly but execute policy furtively and cack-handedly; only American Republicans are visceral and obstructive deniers.”— British journalist Matthew Engel, “Slow Train Coming,” The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015

It escaped my attention a few weeks ago until I noticed Leo Lewis’ excellent recent retrospective in The Financial Times: late last month, Japan celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the first bullet train. Since that event, the nation has steadily improved its high-speed railroad system, the shinkansen, with the fastest train, the Hayabusa, now reaching 320 km/h.

In contrast, the fastest train in the US, Amtrak’s Acela—currently running at 150 miles per hour—will, even with a new model announced for 2024 but still with no set date at this point in the year, only reach 160 mph/h, or 258 km/h.

For several reasons, within the lifetimes of older baby boomers, the U.S. railroad system has declined in importance even as the automobile and the airplane become more entrenched. has declined. For the sake of a diversified transportation system and healthy economy, more needs to be done to revive the industry. It should be beyond partisan politics.

Continued decline or even stagnation of the industry is not inevitable. A high-functioning rail system can be not just a signal of industrial innovation but even a point of national pride, as Lewis points out in noticing that the Tokyo-to-Osaka line opened just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, making the two events “symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection.”

But upgrading a rail system will not only require a can-do spirit but eternal vigilance. As Lewis observes:

“Despite the appearance of effortless service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).”

(The image accompanying this post, the Shinkansen N700A Series Set G13 high speed train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station—an image captured with a line-scan camera using strip photography—was taken Aug. 19, 2017, by Dllu.)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Pink Panther Strikes Again,’ As Inspector Clouseau Excuses a Disastrous Mishap)

[Inspector Clouseau has accidentally reduced a piano to a pile of splinters.]

Mrs. Leverlilly [played by Vanda Godsell]: “You've ruined that piano!”

Clouseau [played by Peter Sellers]: “What is the price of one piano compared to the terrible crime that's been committed here?”

Mrs. Leverlilly: “But that's a priceless Steinway!”

Clouseau: “Not anymore!”— The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), screenplay by Frank Waldman and Blake Edwards, directed by Blake Edwards

Quote of the Day (Francis Ford Coppola, on Art and Time)

“Art controls time, it always has. From the moment someone first painted a picture, they were stopping time.”—Oscar-winning American filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, “The Gambler,” WSJ. , October 2024

Quote of the Day (Steve Tesich, on ‘A Time of Post-Truth and Post-Art’)

“This new era is a time of post-truth and post-art. Truth and art don’t exist anymore because man has been diminished. The artist today is a clown, an entertainer. I fight against this image, and I would rather die than become the same. Art is the only religion for me, because at least while I write I can believe in a truth. This is a hard time. It is when neither Tolstoy nor Dostoevsky are read. All the conditions exist, except the most important ones, for man to become a human being.”—Oscar-winning Serbian-born American screenwriter (Breaking Away), playwright, and novelist Steve Tesich (1942-1996), interviewed by Dejan Stojanovic, “A Few Moments with Steve Tesich,” Views, April 1992

The image of Steve Tesich accompanying this post was taken in front of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, 1991, by Marko Rakocevic.

Quote of the Day (Douglas Coupland, on College Teaching as a Nerve-Racking Form of Public Speaking)

“One form of public speaking not usually recognized as such is teaching. I’ve had a few experiences in educational situations and they’ve been worse than flies crawling over my face. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough to do what they do. Having been in their shoes, even briefly, has converted me into an education advocate. Double all teaching salaries now.”— Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist Douglas Coupland, “Observations: Getting Off the Stage,” originally printed in The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015, reprinted in Bit Rot: Bit Rot: Stories + Essays (2017)

The image of Douglas Coupland that accompanies this post was taken Mar. 17, 2022, in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, by the Wylie Agency of New York City.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘My Little Chickadee,’ As Mae West Teaches Math Her Way)

(An out-of-town gold digger in the West vows to tame a class of rowdy adolescent boys who have driven the local schoolmarm into a nervous breakdown.)

Schoolboy [uncredited]: “We was doin' arithmetic on the blackboard when Miss Foster took sick.”

Flower Belle Lee [played by Mae West]: “Oh, arithmetic... I was always pretty good at figures myself.”— My Little Chickadee (1940), screenplay by Mae West and W.C. Fields, directed by Edward F. Cline