New Orleans        On the road, as I’ve sometimes shared, going back and forth between Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas, not even mentioning the long hauls, except for listening to the AM/FM managed noncommercial radio stations, when I’m in range, I’ve gone hard and long on audiobooks.  Part of this is a lifetime war waged against boredom.  A 500 or 1000-page book is a climb too high for me now.  There’s no time to budget or enough hours on a gym’s bicycle or elliptical to make it through such word mountains.  But given radio’s deserts on the road, walking the dog, and more, I can handle forever long audiobooks.

This year, I’ve managed Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Katerina along with Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground for a breather, and now I’m on my way with The Idiot.  I’ve joined Marcel Proust’s and his Remembrance of Things Past long enough to complete two volumes, Swann’s Way and The Guermantes Way, and am a good way long the trail of Sodom and Gomorrah.   I even added Henry James, Washington Square to my travels through long gone society.  I’m not going to say it hasn’t sometimes been a tedious slough, I’m talking about you Marcel, but not without a continuing reward from the snapshots these great authors of fiction give of the society and politics of their countries and their times.  It’s hard to believe, especially for Tolstoy and Proust, that their intended audience was not the same as their subject matter, usually high society, tinged with royal pretensions and entitlements, and upper classes and their privileges.  There’s a common denominator in their countless explications of manners, social rules and expectations, that seems to be speaking to norms accepted widely by the readers, just as it was for their characters.

I could go on, but this isn’t a book report, but an observation of our times compared to their times 100 years ago in France or 150 in Russia.  To the degree in the United States there’s such a thing as “society,” complete with its own slender pages in print newspapers and worshipful pictures at fundraisers, it’s on life support, even in places like New York City and New Orleans.  In the big city, such striving has been discolored by the ease of scammers to infiltrate.  In a place like New Orleans, where once the Mardi Clubs, their noblesse oblige parades, and their seasonal balls, could claim pride of place, all of that has been diminished by other, slightly more democratic and accessible clubs and the changing demographics in the community, leaving their presumptions hollow and easily ridiculed.

The stake in the heart of society that Tolstoy, Proust, and James would easily recognize is that much of the life and vitality of these events have been infected and overtaken by celebrity, and it’s not just of People magazine supermarket rack sort.  The Met Ball, a signature New York City social event, is populated by the new “high” society of film, music, athletics, and social media.  Billionaires, who would have seen noses upturned in these novels, as the nouveau riche have now become the belles of the ball, whether at those soirees, in the special seating at the Wimbledon, or at one of their number’s wedding.  It’s not that there are no debutante balls in cities around the country, it’s just that no one cares anymore, including I suspect the participants.

Money and fame, no matter how ephemeral each may be, have transplanted birthright claims of high society, no matter how thin and senile the line has become over generations.  Old money is mainly old now, and hardly the source of great literature.  In contemporary life, the tackiness of a Bezos wedding or a Trump presidency is just the way of things now, hardly a footnote of any relevance, a caricature of the past, and a circus for the rest of us, laughing at the passing parade.