deleuze on painting: the dream of a segment

 

In the fifth grade,  I began to learn about lines and geometry. Long afterwards, I began to wonder if there were questions I should have asked back then. Wondering if there were questions you should have asked in elementary school is a discipline with a name: philosophy.

My question is: is drawing a line an essential feature of a line, or an accident? To be a little less simple, is it a necessary feature of a line that it can be represented?

On the one hand, the answer would seem to be no. After all, the first thing we learn about lines is that they are infinite. Thus, even given an infinite pencil, and infinite amount of time, and infinite energy, you could never get to the end of drawing even one line. Whereever you stopped, you would have drawn a segment of a line.

Now we all know that the segment of a line mirrors the essential – that is, the angle of the line.  Given this property of the line segment, why waste your infinite energy on drawing the infinite line? But we have still not answered our first question. Rather we have changed it. Does the line segment mirror something essential about the line – by which I mean, given the definition of the line, can we derive a proof that it must essentially be segmentable? Or is the line segment conceptually distinct from the definition of the line – merely a happy accident that allows us to have an image of lines, which are for the most part invisible things.

These questions come to mind when we, and by we I mean me, read Deleuze’s 1981 lectures on painting, which were published in 2023. On Painting, the title of the course, seems an oddly Hegelian title for such a non-Hegelian, indeed anti-Hegelian philosopher.

Deleuze, however, does not begin with history, but with concepts. Or Deleuzian concepts.

He begins not with perspective, or the Egyptians, or with beauty. He begins with the diagram.

Consider the question about the line as a sort of parable or riddle. A koan. By doing so, we can get close to the idiolect of the diagram in Deleuze. He wants to talk about painting given a set in which painting can seem to be highly figurative, or impressionistic, or monochrome, or abstract expressionist. He wants to begin with painting as a manufactured thing.

He takes what he calls the “diagrammatic” approach to distinguish two systems, which accord with two hierarchies. One system accords primacy to the eye over the hand. In this system, painting is a question of color and line.

In another system – one that Deleuze prefers, and one that leads us from the Renaissance to Pollack and beyond – the hand operates outside of, apart from, unchained by the eye. In this system, the fundamental elements are the stroke – the “trait” – and the mark – the “tache”.

Deleuze wants to start, conceptually – outside of the eye’s history, vision’s history – with a germ-chaos. A scribble, a blur, a smudge, a stain. He wants to start from dirt, the expelled thing from the Platonic kingdom of ideas.

This expelled thing helps Deleuze trace a story of painting  that reads like a slave uprising – the hand “slaps” the eye, the stroke-mark communicates with the chaos-germ, the manual follows its own lines of flight, so to speak. And in so doing comes into relation with the “gris” – with grayness. Deleuze, that magpie philosopher, takes the term from Klee. Grayness is the undifferentiated. Out of it we derive our black-white and light-color system.

It is only at this point that we understand – as we do with the question of the representation of the line – that the artist has never been a master of resemblance, but is rather concerned with tearing the appearance from the res, the thing. The painter operates to dis-resemble, so to speak. And here Deleuze goes into a glorious riff about the canvas, the chevalet – easel or stand – and the lure of the window.

Which, to my mind, brings us back to the peculiarities of the segment. Segmentarity, it turns out, is something my fifth grade self should have paid more attention to, since it is the window through which we view so many thousands of things, without ever stopping to consider the metaphysics of the segment.

So today I will spare a moment or two to let myself be wrapped up in a dream of segmentarity.

You do you.

 

This year’s girl: a construction

1. According to Elvis Costello, This Year’s Girl (1977) was an “answer song” to the Rolling Stone’s Stupid Girl.  “ "If you want to hear a song that's actually pretty indefensible, it's The Rolling Stones' 'Stupid Girl’.  Read the lyrics of that one and tell me which one is the misogynist, me or Mick! This year's girl is unashamedly modeled on 'Stupid Girl,' but I wanted to flip it."

Costello was responding to a (male) rock critic chorus that found Costello’s song misogynist – a form of mishearing which has everything to do with that old Nobodaddy, the patriarchal subconscious. Whose mass assembled products we have to deal with every day.

Costello’s song is in the line of a literature stretching back to 1890s and the twin developments of art and fashion – whose outward symbols of grace are the stardom of the art model and the fashion model.  We could etchasketch the line moving through the It girl of 20s Hollywood and the Girl of the year – Edie Sedgwick, Baby Jane Holzer, etc. – a sixties phenomenon. Or so it seemed in the sixties. Tom Wolfe’s article, less glittering now, at this distance, but even so - a distinct capture -  and with all those brand mentions - all the italicized bits of Baby Jane’s monologue - a speed driven thing, electronically enhanced – put it on the stereo.  Rock out.

“Then she hangs up and swings around and says, “That makes me mad. That was ———. He wants to do a story about me and do you know what he told me? ‘We want to do a story about you,’ he told me, ‘because you’re very big this year.’ Do you know what that made me feel like? That made me feel like, All right, Baby Jane, we’ll let you play this year, so get out there and dance, but next year, well, it’s all over for you next year, Baby Jane. I mean,—! You know? I mean, I felt like telling him, ‘Well, pussycat, you’re the Editor of the Minute, and you know what? Your minute’s up.’ ”

There are then, of course, moments in the essay you forget, when it is suddenly presents a sound like chalk screeching across a blackboard: Wolfe putting in the sociological markers, all rather bogus. His thesis about the democratizing of society. His inability to even grok the Civil Rights movement and its weather. Blah blah.  The reader begins to hum:

“Ah, you've been with the professors and they've all liked your looks
With great lawyers you have discussed lepers and crooks
You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books
You're very well-read, it's well-known”

2. In the great decades, there are a host of strange transactions between the demi-monde and the Social Register, between art and fashion, fashion and youth culture, drugs and sex and clothes and clubs. “All those promises of satisfaction” – which are also promises of satisfaction’s melancholy, the aging and overdose to which everything seems to move in lockstep. This year’s girl is the flip side of melancholy baby in the long decade’s semiosphere – in the impress of the twenties or the sixties.

3.  ”I liked them – they were so simple; and I had no objection to them if they would suit. But, somehow, with all their perfections I didn’t easily believe in them. After all they were amateurs, and the ruling passion of my life was the detestation of the amateur. Combined with this was another perversity – an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation. I liked things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was a subordinate and almost always a profitless question.” This is the voice of the unnamed narrator of Henry James’ 1892 story, The Real Thing. “Them” is the Monarchs – a well turned out, upper class couple who have lost all their money – their real thing – and are trying to be taken on as models. The narrator, an artist and illustrator, already has his models. They are real – that is, they have real talents as models. That talent – that photogenicity, or representativeness – has been professionalized in art circles in London and Paris. It is just this odd fraction, this denominator of the represented subject over the real one, which is the very nub and worry of this story. A great title, but not one of the great James stories of the nineties. Yet it shows that James was catching onto … something that was happening out there in urban culture.  

In 1889, Paul Dolfuss, a French journalist, wrote a series of articles about artist’s models, then put them together in a book. Dolfuss was writing in the wake of the Goncourt brother’s novel, a twofer of misogyny and anti-semitism, Manette Salomon; Dolfuss was neither misogynist, as his book on the artist’s model showed, nor anti-semitic – in the 1890s, his paper, Cri de Paris, was both Dreyfusard and anti-colonialist.

Dollfus writes, near the end of the book, that “the prosperity of artist’s models seems to have arrived at its apogee.” By this, he meant, I think, that their names were somewhat more familiar, and that they were not confused with prostitutes, or mostly not. Indeed, I would take a wild guess and say that Dollfus’s articles might have been mulled over by Henry James for his own story. As it turns out, the professionalization of the model was, in fact, just the beginning of a slow but sure inversion of the older bourgeois values. Oh yeah.

One of the signs that the model was accruing a certain amount of fame apart from the artist was the career of Sarah Brown, a model to whom Dollfus devoted a whole chapter. Her real name, in the newspapers and in court, was something like Florentine Royer or Marie-Florentine Rogers.

Perhaps she took her nom de modèle to allude to the Pre-Raphaelites. To Ford Madox Brown’s model, Emma, in particular. We have a few photographs of Sarah Brown, but they don’t do her justice. Justice was done by French painters still working in a tradition close to that of the Pre-Raphaelites and Romantics – a tradition that saw the content and test of painting as the elaboration of a historical, or literary, or mythological scene. Within this tradition, Sarah Brown had a certain value.

“After I had drawn Mrs Monarch a dozen times I perceived more clearly than before that the value of such a model as Miss Churm resided precisely in the fact that she had no positive stamp, combined of course with the other fact that what she did have was a curious and inexplicable talent for imitation. Her usual appearance was like a curtain which she could draw up at request for a capital performance.” In Sarah Brown’s case, the capital performance followed a bit more closely the saintly lines of her face, and her famous skin – never touched with makeup, that skin. This was known to all. Nudity was her forte, down to the lips and the blush.

And so we can still see her, in paintings by Lefebvre, as Lady Godiva, or the legendary Clémence Issaure, the supposed 14^th century founder of a poetry contest in Toulouse.

Dollfus either interviewed her or simply concocted a back story: a country lass, a love of horses, a first approach at age 15 to the big city (Paris), sorrows, a return to the country, another assault on Paris, a half-feral beauty who, in the cast down moments, contemplated suicide and even half-heartedly attempted it. She has her whims – sometimes sitting around in cafes, smoking; sometimes picking out favorites; sometimes posing nude for the students of M. Lefebvre; sometimes coming down from the dias to look at the students work; sometimes throwing paint on the work she didn’t like.

Thus, Dollfus in 1889.

In 1893, something happened. It made Sarah Brown a bit legendary – as much as Clémence Issaure. It marked the decade in which anarchy was the great threat to the social order.

It all came about because of the second Quat’z-Arts ball. The ball was thrown by an organisation of the art students of Paris in their four divisions – hence the Quatre. The organisers had the brilliant idea of renting the Moulin Rouge for the dance. Before the dancing began, there was a pageant, a sort of scene with four models. Four favorites. Later, in Court, there was some disputing over how undressed these models were. Things were a bit confused by the fact that a week later, the same cortege of models attended another Montmartre ball, for the Fin-de-Siecle, a newspaper, and there they seemed to be more undressed. Sarah Brown, of course, was the leader of the cortege, dressed as Cleopatra. How much of her bosoms did she display? Another juridical question – which was posed in a courtroom because the League of Decency, under a certain Senator Berenger, had officially complained, and the organizer and three models, including Brown, were accused of indecency.

A much reported trial. What newspaper was going to miss the chance of a courtroom discussion of bosoms, and their showing, or not?

The judge, President Courot, found the whole matter ridiculous. Nevertheless, due to the Senatorial rank of the head of the League of Decency, he sentenced Sarah and her mates to fines and a couple of days in prison. Same with the organizers.

What happened next was not expected.

The students of the Latin Quarter liked Sarah Brown. And they disliked the League of Decency. So they decided on the time-honored tactic of singing satirical songs in the street in front of Berenger’s hotel in Paris. And then the cops came.

“For eight days,” the Journal reported, “we have been leafing through the classical manuals on insurrection, in vain; we have been abused by an uprising without a program or a leader, without guides or a purpose.”

The cops decided to charge the students. In the melee, a bystander was killed. That signalled the start of rioting that went on from the Seine to the Luxembourg. Windows were smashed, drunken students attacked civilians, and, at the height of battle, while the smoke of police guns floated in the air, Sarah Brown, who had been haranguing the students, was arrested. Somehow, she managed to get astride the policeman who arrested her, and like some odd offspring of Marianne, rode the gendarme to the police station.

Instant Boho legend.

That the It girl declined rapidly afterwards – that in 1896 she was reported dead, either of some disease or by her own hand – that just fed the memories. The model enters history through the front door.  And the “editors of the moment” are subtly demoted.

4. The woman receives letters which contain sentences like: “From the day I met you, my life began. Everything before was as a march through the desert.” She lives with the writer of these lines for a while. As well as another man. She makes love to the other man, but not the man whose life began when he met her.

 

Her lover is an English musician. He played for Isidora Duncan. Their act was so tight that Isadora and he would sometimes experience Hindu Ecstasy. The musician also has a fraught relationship with Alistair Crowley. Then war breaks out. Then the musician dies, in Northern France, in 1916.

She was called the “Queen of Café Central.” She came out of a working class district in Vienna, established herself, firstly, as an artists model. There she is in Klimt, in the Wasserschlangen painting. The glorious red hair. The glorious thin body. She was twenty then. At some point she changes her first name, dropping the two “m”s in the middle of it. “Ea.” Like an Indogermanic divinity. Like a water goddess. A name like no other.

After the musician she moves to the Riviera. Then she moves to Berlin. She falls in with a crowd of people she knew from Vienna. Robert Musil. His girlfriend, Martha Marcovaldi, his best friend, Johannes von A. She studies psychology. She studies graphology. She writes for the papers. She goes back and forth between Berlin and Vienna. Egon Schiele paints her portrait, in 1911. The same year he famously painted the self-portrait in which, while wearing a black cape, he masturbates. An artist must know how the body looks. Everybody knows that, has known it since Leonardo.

Three years later, in the autumn, the soldiers begin to die. They die in Gallipoli. They die in Galicia. In Vienna, she marries Musil’s friend Johanne, at the Stephan cathedral. Robert Musil is the best man. Rainer Maria Rilke is among the wedding party.  Her husband returns to the war. He collapses, on some front, with battle shock. In the apartment they bought on Salesianergasse, she holds court among her admirers, the Vienna wits, who are watching the world fall down just as everybody expected. Why is it such a surprise?

Peter Altenberg, a wit, a naif, and a fetischist collects photos and pictures of her, and covers a wall in his apartment with them. Each is neatly captioned.

The war ends. The empire is dissolved.

Her admirer, the man she lived with along with the musician, is now a fifty-somethin year old famous essayist. He brings a friend with him to her table at the Café Central.  She is now forty, no twenty year old artist’s model. Still: the magnificent hair. The magically commanding presence.  Her admirer’s friend is the son of a wealthy factory owner. His name is Hermann Broch. Broch is in his thirties. He’s lived under his father’s thumb, which is why he manages the family factory. He is married. He becomes her lover. Does his wife know? Or care?

She works at a new journal, Modernen Welt. A journal of fashion and culture. Someone has seen the convergence. It is the twenties. Everyone suddenly sees that culture is fashion, and fashion, culture. The magazine is located on Paracelsusstrasse. Sometimes, Broch visits her, and sometimes, they make love there.

Martha, now Musil’s wife, visits her with a portfolio of drawings. She send Martha away. She has a staff of artists already, she tells Martha.

She moves to Prague, works at the Prag Press, publishes Musil. Publishes her admirers. Perhaps she meets Milena Jesenská there. This was after Milena and Franz Kafka had broken up.

Broch knew Milena too. Had a brief fling with her.

Broch wants to write. She tells him to write a journal for her. She tells him to write about daily things, not vast abstractions. Write about her. Later, she will read it.

In 1927, Broch sells the factory. He goes into psychoanalysis. He finds a new lover. She still allows Broch to come to her place. Canetti, that walking evil eye, is introduced to her by Broch in the 30s. Later, in his memoirs, Canetti writes:  “She was beautiful, and it appalled me to think how beautiful she must have been.” He sees her humiliate Broch, insult his writing. Broch takes it. Canetti, obviously, lives for scenes like this one.

She writes, in 1920, about fashion: “The maxim that ruled over fashion the last few years – the clothes people wear on the street are not modern – has lost its validity.”  She writes in an essay, Fashion and its Models (1923) “Never before were models envied. They were hardly given a glance, as their predecessors, manniquens, were hardly given a glance. Now, however, it has become a well regarded job, and it must be learned, how to parade in a dress with the necessary dancer’s elegance.”  She writes about the New Youth. She writes: “it is no accident that flirting and sports grow out of one root.”

Armand Broch, Hermann’s son, 19 years old, at loose ends – as he will remain - goes to stay with “Tante” Ea. Broch is now living with another lover, Anja Herzog, and has begun the novel trilogy, the Sleepwalker.

She rages. Yet she can’t go back to her invalid husband. She is, as it were, trapped in the apartment Broch has bought for her. Or bought. Where he stores his library of 2000 books. “Just once,” she writes, “I would like to have the feeling of my importance that he has every day of his life.”

She rages, she wants to leave Vienna. She needs money to leave Vienna. She needs money for her health problems. Luckily, she has enough to have an eye operation -  she was going blind. She thinks maybe graphology is the ticket, but she lacks a college degree. Maybe she will establish a client base. She has rich friends, they invite her for summer vacations. She rages in that apartment.

The Anschluss comes. Broch is arrested as a communist. A big misunderstanding. The Nazis don’t have the list of Jews yet, don’t know he is a Jew. She confers with him on the plan. He has long ago decided on his escape route.  His eighty year old mother doesn’t want to escape.  She takes her in,  Johanna. She takes in, as well, the Klimts he bought. The Klimt drawings of her.

 She and  Johanna fight. A true hell, one onlooker calls it. The Nazis begin “fining” Jews – Johanna soon owes more in fines than she possesses. Ration cards are only issued to Aryans – she  divides her rations with Johanna.

What to do about age. What to do about food. What to do when they come for the Jews. Johanna, eventually, is taken in 1941. She can’t do anything to prevent them coming for Johanna, but, as she wrote Broch in 1946, “I asked Prof. Jolles to see to  Johanna and she promised to do so.” It is the kind of thing one can’t imagine. Conditions in the camps. Broch’s mother is murdered at Theresianstadt in 1942. She sells the art, one piece after another. She is going to survive the war. Although why? Sometimes she must wonder why.  You can still go to concerts and cafes in Vienna. You can still go to movies. The Nazi regime does its best to shield the civilian population from the reality of war. This works when the Third Reich is winning. 1939, 1940. In 1941, it all begins to invert. Luise Täubele, her niece, testified that in 1942, when they were close, she saw how she couldn’t repress her contempt for the Nazis. She was “a revelation to me, how a woman could be so intelligent.”

In 1944, an observer of daily life in Vienna wrote:

“"You couldn’t get heating, gas and electricity were rare. The trams were on an irregular schedule. In the city, in one direction, one bumped into groups of refugees from the Hungarian territory freed by the Red Army, and in the other direction, German soldiers marching unhappily to the front. They marched through unlit streets where the rubbish lay meters high, by houses and businesses whose windows were covered with paper and bars, and in which long queues of people stood in front of the few open shops.” (Reinhard Pohanka)

On 10 September, 1944 a 300 plane bomber squad (without doubt, decorated with cover girl pictures – the It girl of 1944 was Rita Hayworth) dropped their bombs and killed around 800 people. That was the annunciation. Bombers then came to wipe out the suburbs (October 17) and to strike the inner city (November 5 and 6, and January 15, 1945).  Her windows were blown out. Her doorframe was destroyed. But her apartment never suffered the annihilating direct hit.

Half of the animals in the zoo perished.

The Red army comes. Vienna and Austria are split into zones. There is a Soviet Zone that is only dissolved in 1954. She learns Russian. She spends a lot of time on her couch, in pain. Accounts of her differ – according to the gender of the reporter. The women who know her are impressed by the culture, by an old woman who still has It, by the time capsule stories. The few men who write about her are impressed that she is old, a hag, an underworld witch.

Broch, however, is not among that male crowd. We are surprised – in the United States, under financial pressure himself, he writes to her, he tries to arrange her affairs, to straighten out the ownership of the apartment. He is going to see her, at last, once again, in 1951. After all the year zeros that have rained on Vienna, he is coming home.  

He doesn’t, though. He dies of a heart attack in 1951. And she – losing her vision, worn by hunger and stress – she perseveres in her apartment, on her sofa, among her things (which were his things, too) until she cannot. Taken to the  Lainzer Versorgungsspital (“this,” she says, “is hell”) she dies, in all her iron, in all her golden fragility,  on July 30, 1953.

 

See re Elvis Costello: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgb298kwof4... and re Stupid Girl by the Rolling Stones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siBkCDbI8OM... and Garbage Stupid Girl: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdw-e9UXW50... On Sarah Brown, see Gallica, Paul Dolfoss: https://gallica.bnf.fr/.../f130.item.r=dollfus%20modeles...; On Ea, see Frauke SeveritEa von Allesch: Wenn aus Frauen Menschen werden. For Broch's journal for Ea, see: https://openlibrary.org/.../Das_Teesdorfer_Tagebuch_f%C3....

On the Hoodoo Man

 Just catchin' up with this London Review Book review of Hoodoo Man. I don't know much about Francis Gooding, but the review is a wonder - and like most reviews in the LRB, has a very intermittent relationship with the book it is reviewing. The object is as much on Dr. John. A NOLA figure, even back when I was there in the eighties. But I had no idea of the backstory, nor of this album, one in the great line of the Creole avant garde - like Aime Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal.

And to think, this was all made possible by Sonny and Cher's I got you babe! Which I am leaving here as a riddle - read the review of the book.

No review of a review should lack a quote. So here's where Gooding finally, for me, takes off from planet earth.

Toop’s narrative is far from straightforward. No opportunity for pareidolic digression, oblique observation or canny aside is wasted: every character’s strange history comes to light, every thread is teased out until it thins to invisibility. Toop’s own past, his own history of ideas and connections and sonic epiphanies, is also always in the mix. Two-Headed Doctor is in some ways an experiment in just how much close examination a single object – in this case, an album – will bear. It takes a similar approach to the idea of history, and the writing of it: any object or fact or event is just one node in a vast web of connections; the historian chooses a route through it, picks up some characters and leaves others behind, and produces a new story. A complex object like Gris-Gris is the precipitate of multiple pasts, all of which hold a space within it. Toop has invited all the ghosts to speak, and at this point in the story, as Rebennack and Battiste decide to make a record together, they all begin to clamour at once.

The downfall of Trump: a trail of murders

 The downfall of Trump is being counted in murder victims. Minneapolis, the 117 and counting fishermen in the Carribbean and Pacific, the measles victims in Texas and Kansas and South Carolina. On the one hand, murder is murder. On the other hand, in a normal state with a normal opposition party, these murders would be hung around the neck of the murderers and their forces would be squeezed shut by militant defunding.

I believe in the Downfall, but I also believe that the hollow, spineless immoral oppostion leaders also have to go. No return to the status ante - no Schumer, no Jeffries, no tricks and pics of the Dems laughing it up with their Republican colleagues.
Between that belief and what is actionable - that's the question. The social media style is to issue little pronunciamentos, as if one were the commandante of a faithful troop. Well, I'm no commandante and my pronunciamento's are worth zip. The main thing is to keep the idea going - we all, and that includes cowards like me, can do this. A country that has taken this dystopian turn can, while resisting it, make giant strides towards a more utopian order. Of course we've been played before - that was the lesson of the 2008 electon. But we aren't condemned to be suckers.

The ghost of William Walker floats through: in the American grain

 

1. William Walker was certainly of the type – the Barbaric yawper, the opportunist, the man who made mistakes out there in the territories – who could have been included in William Carlos William’s Plutarchian attempt to get down the American grammar of character, In the American Grain. It was always a bit too reductive: grain. For such a pesticide treated, multi-wood, laminated,  two by four thing as America.

Williams was aware of the trickiness of going about poetry under the aegis of history.

“But history follows governments, and never men. It portrays us in generic patterns, like effigies, or the carving on sarcophagi, which say nothing save, of such and such a man, that he is dead. That’s history. It is concerned with only one thing: to say everything is dead.”

Walker, the most famous filibuster, didn’t make Williams’ cut. Sam Houston was the closest he got to that. Daniel Boone’s zen, that was something Williams’ saw. And after the Grain book, in his Imaginations, he nailed it for good and all, however problematically:

 

The pure products of America
go crazy—
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth…

The rascality of the American product, its galumphing lack of dignity even as it made orotund and dignified gestures, this was a bit too Mencken-ish for Williams to put in. William Walker was just such a type of young American hoss.

2. I take from Williams words at the end of the Houston chapter a manifesto like notion that we can look at what is happening, on all fronts, in the present American dissolve, from the perspective of the American grain and its secret, libidinous dynamics.

“However hopeless it might seem, we have no other choice: we must go back to the beginning; it must all be done over; everything that is must be destroyed.”

The do-over – we all, good householders, know this urge! Throw out the old wedding presents, repaint the rooms, find the new job, move to another state, stop answering the phone and the emails, seek company among lowlives or revolutionaries, do something to stop the appalling, encroaching staleness!

However, that something at the moment might be much quieter. The woke metaphor that our era of reaction is all coiled about is, partly, waking up the beasts, those seemingly dead things that actually still exist in the very air we breathe. We can see the beast of Calhoun, the “Marx of the Master Class”, as Hofstadter called him, or more simply our proto-Nazi theorist, our Alfred Rosenberg sprung from old planter schemes, as it presides over the  Roberts Court, just itching to reinstate the Dred Scott decision,  to which we still bow (but for how long, Lord?). And we see the filibusters, those arrogant, masculinist, pirate imperialists, weaving into being an ad hoc foreign policy under Trump. Foreign policy’s a piss-elegant name for robbery on a global scale. The robbers this time come unmasked and full of thief’s jargon.

Trump is a great channeler of American history – he knows so little about it that he is a perfect blank through which the malevolent spirits move. Republicans have an addiction to the type. Warren Harding, George W. Rotarians, ignorant shitkickers, reality tv stars. We get what we deserve.

3. Walker -  I can see his type. When I was a kid, it was the leader of the playground. The boy who the other boys somehow always ended up allowing to organize things. Who all the other little boys loved, in their way. Love, fear, wanting to be the best friend.

The playground leader is often the athlete, but not the best athlete. He’s that boy follows out his reflex arc with the  superb confidence of a born imposter, and this is his visible sign of grace. But further than that arc – into techne, a skill to be taught, - or what amounts to being  against his “nature”, his liking – there he cannot go. Or at least he goes reluctantly, against his grain. Into the field of questions. To be taught means to submit, to let that ego, that reflex arc, go. Suspend it. Drop the imposter. And this is a drama.

The playground boy is against teaching and teachers as a policy and instinct. He’s all recoil.

In the American character museum, the playground leader is connected by a thousand threads to the Jack of all Trades. I’m from a Jack of All Trades myself. Pa. Farmer, carpenter, airconditioning man, small business owner, builder of his own house. And the spell got into me. I oriented myself by writing, but have never settled down to the little matter of earning money, and now I’m in the retirement years. It happens.

4.  Once, when America was mostly farm and woods, the Jack of all Trades filled a great space. Now, of course, America is all apps and buzz, and the Jack of all Trades lies bleeding, here an obscure rocker, there the guy who knows how to fix computers in your apartment or neighborhood, who you call on. The proto-professional, the amateur with the Youtube channel, the explainer. Once though the Jack of all Trades did a stage on steamboats, sold lots in Florida, mined in California, shot buffaloes on contract for the U.S. army in Wyoming. The Jack of all Trades was manifest destiny on two scratched up legs.

The types exists way past frontier’s close in our popular culture. For instance, Paul Newman’s Brick. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, paired with sizzling Elizabeth Taylor, both in their physical superbia. Brick, who has numbed his reflex arc and its approaches to reality with drink. Who has met his nature (supplied by Tennessee Williams, of course) in Skipper, his best friend, a suicide for whom Brick has felt the reflex arc in his groin, but never followed through. And now can’t follow through with all Maggie (Elizabeth Taylor’s) superbia to help him find the Dao.  Brick, who never figured his reflex arc was going to steer him into this kind of territory.

A fifties movie, with the American Freudian notion of the libidinal as our crackable code. But we need more than a view of the character as so many detours to a fuck to get us to the Americanness of this. I’d propose here we are encountering, on the verge of the Sixties and its New Frontier rhetoric, the social etiolation of the Jack of all Trades position. The adventurer on his crutches, the playground leader with a repressed longing for his suicided football teammate – this seemed, at one time, the end of the figura.

Ending as tragedy, returning as farce – don’t we know the routine?

5. William Walker was Tennessee-framed, which meant something in the antebellum imagination. It meant a six foot tall talltaler, all forest furs, long rifle, Bowie knife at his belt. Crockett and Bowie, in fact, died as quasi-filibusters in the defence of that useless warehouse, the Alamo. The whole Texas enterprise was Tennessee-framed, a matter of carving out slave territory under the name of freedom.

But in fact, Walker was small, smooth. Robert May observes that he was “five feet six inches tall and weighing about 115 pounds; besides, his smooth, freckled face lacked the whiskers and rough features of so many of the day’s military adventurers.” He was a banker’s son, born in Nashville and educated at private schools, trained to be a physician, even making the traditional tour of Europe under the idea that he was going to come back a doctor. But he didn’t live up to his Dad’s ideas – William Walker had ideas of his own. He went to New Orleans to study law. There, he ended up a journalist, and part owner of a newspaper, the New Orleans Crescent. But it was no go, and in the autumn of 1849 Walker had to find some other way to make his money.

Tennessee-framed. Cormac McCarthy is dead right to start his anabasis, Blood Meridien, with a Tennessee boy. And with a band of freebooters, scalphunters, who are whipped into shape by characters like Walker, drunk on rhetoric and high ideals, under which they idealize themselves, disasterously. An anabasis of atrocity, in which the instruments that move the enterprise undermine the principles under which the enterprise was launched, until it became largely atrocity for atrocities sake, hide and seek among monsters and victims. As it was, and as it will always be. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

The instrument, the drone: such a clean way to shed blood:  Obama’s little helper.

But Trump, a man who is has a love of dirt for its own sake, a copraphile in spirit, has gone back to the bombardment. We know all to well how taking a shit and dumping bombs equate in Trump’s old brain.

And so we come to the awakening of Walker, with the news of gold being discovered in California, and the beginning of his real life. At 30.  It is to California he goes, by boat. But not before one characteristic, Tennessee touch: according to his biographer, William O. Scroggs (whose book, Filibusters and Financiers (1916), bears the mark of that  Americanist style, half Mencken, half muckraker):  ‘Before leaving New Orleans, however, he showed something of the fire that smouldered under the quiet exterior by seeking out one of the editors of La Patria, a tri-weekly Spanish-American paper, and giving him a severe flogging  on account of the publication of an article at which he took personal offence.”

6.  In a memorable essay in Orion Magazine, September, 2006, Rebecca Solnit showed how the San Francisco Bay and the watershed of the Sierra Nevada, including the Sacramento River, are still affected by the Gold Rush. Its geological aspect. 7600 tons of Mercury were dumped in those waters. Mercury was the element used to bind to gold particles in ore, creating an amalgam that is then heated to free the mercury as fumes and leave the gold. “Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out.” A ratio one might metaphysicalize as a standard to measure American rapacity versus the products of Manifest Destiny. The mercury is still in those waters.

“The volume of mercury-tainted soil washed into the Yuba was three times that excavated during construction of the Panama Canal, and the riverbed rose by as much as eighty feet in some places. So much of California was turned into slurry and sent downstream that major waterways filled their own beds and carved new routes in the elevated sludge again and again, rising higher and higher above the surrounding landscape and turning ordinary Central Valley farmlands and towns into something akin to modern-day New Orleans: places below water level extremely vulnerable to flooding. Hydraulic mining washed downstream 1.5 billion cubic yards of rock and earth altogether.”

The past isn’t even past. Gold rush or rush to conquer Mexican, Central American or Caribbean territories, the same Dramatis Personæ populate the scene – the rascal, the commander, the troops, native or American, the villagers (shot or “freed”), the steamboat, the navies of imperial powers. Walker fell in with this or that group of chancers until, in 1852, he and some others struck upon the idea of an American colony in Mexico. They were following in the footsteps of other chancers, such as a Frenchman, Count Gaston Raoul de Raousset-Boulbon, built on the lines of Louis Napoleon (who was behind the expedition of Maximilian to Mexico, which led, at least, to Manet’s very great painting of Maximilian’s execution), who arrived in San Francisco for whatever treasures beckoned and mustered some troops to take Guaymas, Sonora and see what came of it.

7. There’s a detail, here. A historical anomaly. The scalphunters in Blood Meridien bumped into it solid. In 1804, a report was filed by a Habsburg official named Merino who was reporting from the frontlines on the pacification of the nine groups of Apaches. He accords them respect a chronicler owes to a minor kingdom: “This  nation inhabits the vast empty expanse lying between 30 and 3degrees of latitude and 264 and 277 degrees of longitude, measuring from the island of Tenerife, extending from the vicinity of the presidio of Altar in the province of Sonora near the coast of the Red Sea [Rojo] or Sea of Cortes, to that of La Bahia del Espiritu Santo, which is seventeen leagues from the bay of San Bernardo, in Texas.”

A vast territory, and of course absolutely empty to the snake eyes of the white predator. Edward Dorn also stopped in Apacheria, after it was broken, after Geronimo was captured, after Olson, counterculture, and his own conversation with Blake’s America. Dorn discovered how the Apaches were captured and shipped by the Americans, under the command of General Miles in railroad cars, chained up, to Fort Marion, Florida. 1886.

Dorn’s verse:

As the train moves off at the first turn of the wheel
With its cargo of florida bound exiles
Most of whom had been put bodily
Into the coaches, their 3000 dogs,
Who had followed them like a grand party
To the railhead at Holbrook
                                            Began to cry
When they saw the smoking creature resonate
With their masters,
And as the máquina acquired speed they howled and moaned
A frightening noise from their great mass
And some of them followed the cars
For forty miles
Before they fell away in exhaustion.

8. Telling a story like this, we want bold iconographic scenes, neat bits of landscape and event. We want some flat method, something that is not perspective at all, something that is more like putting your nose to a body.

Walker failed in Sonora, after the French nobles had done their worst; but undaunted, that pale man with the hair greased over to the left side in the Brady photograph tried his hand again, in Central America. The famous one, the one success, at least for a time, in Nicaragua. He managed to capture a city, Granada. He founded a newspaper that immediately proceeded to praise the “grey eyed man of destiny” -  for like any wrestler, he knew the value of a cool sobriquet. In 1855, at 35 years of age, he could look around the precincts of the capital (one of two) of a divided Nicaragua and dream of the canal that would connect the Atlantic and the Pacific, from which he’d get a fabulous cut.

“On October 13 Walker’s troops took the enemy capital of Granada; and days later Walker executed the secretary of foreign affairs in the Legitimist régime, who had been taken into custody, after news arrived that Legitimist forces had fired on American civilians crossing  Nicaragua, killing some of them. The seizure of Granada and Walker’s threats of more executions induced the Conservative general Ponciano Corral to agree to a treaty ending the hostilities and creating a fourteen-month provisional, coalition government…”

Walker’s luck lasted for two years. In 1857, other Central American powers, backed by the British navy, put an end to Walker’s venture.

Like the detritus of the gold rush, the detritus of these adventures still comes to us – as “illegal immigrants” that must be stopped or hunted. There is something fun and funny and funky in the higher, prophetic sense (from fonne Middle English fool or stupid) that these prey are bringing down the American house in its current zodiacal configuration.

9. But fast forward is the way this history goes. Walker took up an amazing amount of space, during these years, in public opinion and its correspondent, the newspaper. Walker’s adventures took up almost as much space as the conflict between the slave states and the free. The  Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave laws, the John Brown raid, all in the other columns.   His next venture, in Honduras, gives us this:

He's brought to Truxillo, Hondurus, on September 12, 1860. His troops had done badly, and to save himself he’d surrendered to the British, who were represented by Norvell Salmon, Commander of the H.M.S. Icarus. Walker relied on the British sense of fair play. Bad mistake. Instead, chained in his prison cell, he was informed that his execution was imminent. No sooner said then a squad of soldiers came in to do it, marched him out of town, stood him by a tumbledown wall, and divided into two. The first squad shot him; the second squad shot him again, to make good and sure he was killed.

The business was completed, but in the papers there was other news of succession threats and election business. The Walker chapter was closed.

Entertainment ego sum

This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:

The observations that I will add in the following concern these luminal surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs. And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished by the movies, which did it in three decades.”

As is so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom of nemesis perched on the apocalyptic battlements. His reference is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge, killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained.

Here we are now, entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained – these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end.

The three line novel

 “I did very well for the store for six years, and it’s just time to move on for me,” Mr. Domanico said. He said he wanted to focus on his other businesses, including selling gun-related items.”

I clipped this little slugger of a quote from the article in the NYT about the closing of a Trump store in Philadelphia.
It made me think of you, Félix Fénéon!
Fénéon is most famous as the Uncle Sam looking geek painted by his friend, Seurat. But among a small, hardcore fan group, he is known as the author of the three line novel – forging fictitious fait divers for the newspaper Le Matin, in which three sometimes disjunct sentences throws into relief a whole long narrative – a baggy novel bagged, so to speak, in the narrowest of forms.

Mr. Domanico, who seems like a hybrid figure, part underground cartoon villain, part bitplayer from one of Updike’s Rabbit novels, was, of course, always going to focus on selling gun-related items. He was born (from the union of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a ironing board) to move from selling Maga hats to Smith and Wesson mitten-ware.
Out of the news item, out of the Weegee photo, out of the insatiable quest for jigsaw puzzle fact which makes up the newspaper’s imaginary, we have unleashed so many Mr. Domanicos. Millions of them. What to do with them is our Nobodaddy question of the day.