DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)
By:
May 28, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… late-breaking obsessions, avoided discoveries, and devotions delayed! Series edited by Adam McGovern.
“…I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea…”
— Eugene O’Neill (Edmund, Long Day’s Journey Into Night)
In working with one Andy Sowers, I’ve recently taken a deep dive back into the worlds of America’s favorite boozy, maritime magician… Eugene O’Neill. Particularly, his very obscure one acts. Seawary dark gems, all. And in doing so back into his masterwork, Long Day’s Journey Into Night (which is the best/saddest play ever written! And an amalgam of all those little one acts obvi.) Into O’Neill himself whom I haven’t thought about in a great many years. Why am I coming back to this? And what stands out in the work to me at present? And amongst all those other little works (besides of course the endless alcohol consumed, the paranoia, suspicion and profound self-loathing/questing) is the Sea. Which is always a character… presence in itself. O’Neill’s love for the sea is profound, so devotional, so spiritual, it transcends for me even the mundane minutia of what his plays are “about.” And then… I think of the sea. Of sea shanties and hard, rough, blue water. Of men on ships and islands slowly going mad together. Of water in general. Its origin. Of times when doctors recommended sea visits to cure melancholy. I think of the Middle Passage. I think of Atlantis. And Mami Wata. Of death. And of dreaming. I have many recurrent dreams of water. Now and then I am before a vast body of water stretching out into forever it seems, very rarely am I in it. Usually just staring out at it, riding over it, living alongside it frozen unfrozen flowing out living vast wide open.
O’Neill saw it as a holy place. Or perhaps like Joyce as a “mighty mother.” A womb of infinite space. Imagine being him. Constantly living between the sea, and dreaming, and death. Perpetually. Edmund, the fragile younger brother from Long Day’s Journey… might as well not only function as an extension of the author, but as a human embodiment of the sea itself. His “illness,” his “frailty” — just the vastness of himself — desperate to escape such a tiny, weak vessel.
DEFER YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Adam McGovern | Mandy Keifetz on FAITH | Heather Quinlan on THE GRATEFUL DEAD | Carlo Rotella on SMOOTHER GROOVES | Art Wallace on MICHIGAN | Kelly Jean Fitzsimmons on TAYLOR SWIFT | Josh Glenn on ART | James Scott Maloy on BE-BOP DELUXE | Jake Zucker on LIGHT SLEEPER | Gabriela Pedranti on THE BIG BANG THEORY | Adam McGovern on DOGS | Tana Sirois on COLLABORATIVE EVOLUTION | Rani Som on LED ZEP | Holly Interlandi on HOT SAUCE | Jeff Lewonczyk on TWIN PEAKS | Nikhil Singh on PRE-TEEN DAVID LYNCH PROBLEMS | Christopher Rashee Stevenson on O’NEILL & THE SEA | Fran Pado on SHARKS | Juan Recondo on BEN GRIMM’S INNER LIFE | Miranda Mellis on KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD | Mimi Lipson on SOBRIETY | William Nericcio on ELYSIUM | Crockett Doob on SLEATER-KINNEY | Marlon Stern Lopez on PAT THE BUNNY | Crystal Durant on SEX AND THE CITY | Wendy Chin-Tanner on MY PARENTS’ ART STORE.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!