UGLY STORIES

 

“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot

Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from Under the Floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe one.

The first story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about the nephew of Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In The Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. This is the game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and the nephew of Rameau. There is something about this one of Diderot’s works that gives it a certain clandestine feel. It wasn’t published in his lifetime. In fact, it first appeared in a German translation many years after his death. It was read with interest by Hegel, and referenced in the Phenomenology of Spirit, that great prose poem.

This is the story. It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Classless society my ass. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office, in any tech company. The tv series Silicon Valley dramatized any number of ugly stories, following in the recently popular vein of “cringe comedy” – cringe being the American variant of the ugly story, ameliorating existential shame into entertaining social embarrassment.

I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:

Lui [Rameau’s nephew]: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the latter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”

There are so many beautiful bits here . For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing, of true self-degradation, is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and the nephew at the Palais Royale, where the dialogue is taking place. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense, or any member of Trump’s cabinet – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most deserving, the most masculine grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing, to kill fishermen and schoolage girls by merely flexing! The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancour of overgrown bullies. In another century, Bouret is Dr. Oz, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.

Only, only the ugly story really captures that. The contribution of story to human reality is something we underestimate at our peril.

The "I am" and the 'Happen to be" - a cultural semantics

 

Culture shows its hand molecular bits and bytes, the way the Id shows itself in dreams, a self-directed movie starring IT itself. Look for the conjunctions, look for the negations, the excuses, the condensations.

Look for, for instance at “happens to be”.

“Happens to be” is all around us. I was reading a book about an artist the other day, and I came across the phrase: “A painting by a young artist, who happens to be African American and gay…” Happens, here, sends us back to chance itself. He could “happen to be” unhyphenated American and straight, couldn’t he? In which case he would, presumably, not happen to be at all, but would be. There he’d be, an “I am”, pure as Jehovah in the burning bush. Our pre-birth identities wait, like slips of paper in a box, to be selected blindly. Like, say, the slips of paper in the box in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Somebody has to be stoned. Those are the rules of the routine. But who, that is the variable. That is what is written on the slip. Who will “happen to be”?

Such, as our tongue knows, is the lightly exerted pressure on that “happens to be.” It looks like an ontological statement of fact, and it sounds like an apologetic.

Trust the sound.

“Happens to be” joins together the otherwise sociologically separate strands of neo-liberalism: on the one hand, the lessons of the civil rights era – non-discrimination/diversity; and on the other hand, the master of hap, Fortuna and her wheel, the free market with its invisible hand up your rectum, jumping the puppets, who all say “I am”. Not, mind you, the government – the era of big government is always over, in neo-liberal culture, even if it exerts itself muscularly now and then to save the big banks and the one percent and becomes wildly aggressive and polices the world, all of course in the name of Freedom. In what other name can you reduce schools and hospitals to rubble?

The leftist critique of neo-liberalism can’t be simply, as it was under classical liberalism, that it is all a class act – with Capital v. Labor as the fighters in the ring. Because the spectrum of injustices and differences are not engrossed by Capital v. Labor. That lesson of the civil rights (and de-colonial) era has to ring in our ears, if that is one “happens to be” a leftist.

“Happens to be” is an overdetermined phrase. It is apologetic in that odd way in which one apologizes to a bigot for his or her bigotry. “I happen to be x” – Jewish, black, trans-sexual, whatever – is a way to deflect a certain meanness, a certain threat in the conversation, with one’s counterpart who is, for instance, talking trash about Jews, blacks, gays, or whatever. In this conversation, the “I am” is always on the side of insisting. “The Great I am” – this is what Sam Pollitt’s wife,  Henny, calls her American New Dealer husband, Sam, that bully and humanitarian.  It happens that you, my counterpart – my comrade, my brother or sister – are standing here with an x. A “happen to be” x. An all natural x.

 

“Happens to be” was forced aboard the slave ships, and driven out of the territories. “I am” built the log cabin, the Georgian mansion (now available for weddings) and, if it didn’t build the railroads, profited mightily from railroad stock. The “I am” earns his billions – the “Happens to be” is the parasite on welfare who also happens to have physically built the railroads, clerked at the convenience store, flipped the burgers, nursed the patient, and all that low grade stuff they do.

Truly, from the “I am’s point of view, what is more natural than chance? The happens to be should be happy that they are allowed even to be.  And chance is what provides us with our “diversity” – we can’t all be white straight men, cause somebody has to clean the toilets, am I right? And yet, when we tease out this “happens to be”, we begin to wonder why the heteronormative hick never happens to be – he just is. Does anybody ever say, I happen to be white? Does our egg, our Humpty Dumpty, our man whose words mean what he wants them to mean, ever happen to be?

This is just a little flicker in the national, in the international conversation between the ’I am’ and the ‘happen to be’. Neo-liberal culture is so obviously exhausted, is so obviously tied in knots by its own self-contradictions, that one thinks surely it is at an end. It isn’t, though. Happens to be still creeps through our conversations, our second thoughts, our apologies. The way we confront, and the way, at the last moment, we deflect. Happens to be is the deeper character, the more sophisticated character, the rascal and the sage, but the political advantage seems to be all with the I am.

And yet: who among us, in the end, wants to be the I am? The great loud I am. As the glaciers go down and hedonics turns out to measure unhappiness, after all. 

The great depression, my friends, my dearest friends, has been internalized. We are left to drift. 

A Modest Proposal: Let AI replace CEOs!

 The Dumb New Yorker post - Will AI Replace College or some dumbfuck thing, I'm refusing to check - is another in the media corps cult of AI. Lets face it, AI is a minor tool for lab work and heavy industry, and it isn't going to "replace College."

The bosses are heavy invested in tech, and if the stock crumbles, they crack and crumble next.

So...

Funny how the headline is never: Will AI replace the CEO. Cause there you have a case. What does AI do best? Make up factoids and use them to support other factoids. It "hallucinates." It comes up with the dumbest advice possible. Etc. And what do CEO's do? They rarely known the industry or enterprise they head. Mostly, they make up factoids to support other factoids to massage stock valuations. BINGO! I don't think Grok could replace a single Teaching Assistant, but Tesla would save about 40 billion dollars if it replaced Musk with Grok. Same stupidity - the self-driving yellow cab market is worth a trillion! We are going to mars! Etc. But with less compensation. Grok ought to cost a coupla million to run, maybe in the tens of millions, but it is much cheapter than Musk.

However, not once in the AI goldrush, not once in the infinite amount of AI stories suggesting all middle management and creative jobs are kaput with AI on the watch, has there been any suggestion that top management could be replaced. Gee, I wonder why? I wonder why there is no audience for that in the business pages?

The media can suck my dick.

A translation of Pierre Herbart's story Miraflores

 

“Herbart has made his life into a blank sheet, but it has taken everything he had. He will die seated in front of his blank sheet.” Indeed, according to Jean-Luc Moreau, from which I take this quote about Pierre Herbart, he did die a pauper, and a sick man as well. So poor he was buried in a common grave. Not the ending one would have predicted for a man who was Gide’s secretary in the 1930s, an editor of a famous communist magazine in Moscow for a time, an agitator in the colony of Vietnam, a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, and a resistor in occupied France.

He’s not well known. I came across this story from the late twenties, when Marxism was becoming Sur-marxism, and I thought that it was a rather wonderful enigma. A tale torn from a dream. So I translated it.

 

Miriflores

One evening in a little village in Hungary I witness a strange show put on by a showman with a donkey in the village square. He beat a drum. I easily recognized in this scene one of the images in Madame de Segur’s “Memoires of a donkey”, which showed Miriflore, the intelligent ass, his master and the latter’s family. I couldn’t be mistaken. The son had exactly the stupid air that Madame de Segur lent to our village obscurities. The little slattern girls were clothed in hoop skirts and the boys wore baggy pants and close fitting shirts The papas and mamas were walking up and down, ignoring the donkey man, and Cadichan – Segur’s donkey – absorbed the whole thing through its evil eyes. I wasn’t too surprised, as I expected some show of this kind this evening.. I following the doing with a certain curiosity, then retired back to my room in the inn, although not without a certain trepidation brought on by my reading the news of an innkeeper who had recently been arrested for killing foreign tourists in order to make a paté much appreciated by his customers. Nevertheless, I fell asleep, only to wake myself up in the middle of the night murmuring: “I’m in Hungary.” Upon which I became sad. What to do? I decided that the next day I would find the donkey man and attach myself to his destiny. “He would certainly let me if I gave him a little money”, I thought. “And besides, I can do a few card tricks to follow the end of his routine.” This project returned to my mind when the servant brought me my cup of coffee in the morning. I decided not to argue with it. In the dining room I asked for the innkeeper and then asked him how I could find the place where I could meet up with the donkey man.

- What donkey man? The man asked.

- The one who was there yesterday. In the square.

The innkeeper took a long look at me and , without replying, went across the room to consult with his wife. Sometimes he glanced over at me and I understood that he had decided I was crazy. That could be dangerous. Thus I decided to get out of there with a feigned indifference. I haled a passing carriage.

- I will give you a one hundred franc tip if you get me to Cassal in half an hour.

The horses raced like the wind. We passed the last house in the village when a man came out of the stable and took off in pursuit of us. I recognized the donkey man. He ran as fast as he could, signalling to us. I watched him from a little porthole cut into the roof of the cart. He was manifestly losing ground. At a road crossing he went down the wrong path and continued running in the opposite direction. I was saved.

The coachman turned to me.  “We never show that we see him”, he said.

The door of the past

 In an essay on Henry James’s autobiographies, Richard Poirier claimed that the first volume – A small boy and others – which is ostensibly a memoir of William James, who had recently died – deserves a place among the two other great books about the boyhood of artists that appeared in the 1910s: Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Joyce’s A portrait of an artist as a young man. Perhaps we should include Freud’s Aus Der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose from 1918 in this company.

As it happens: I’ve never read James’s autobiographies. But Poirier’s enthusiasm for A small boy – which was not so much about the picture of William James that it intends, in a cultic gesture, to offer, but about Henry James’s own impression of a bringing up that followed the rather inimitable lines of his father’s whims and his sensibility’s grasp, even then, of the opportunity afforded.

Late James is my favorite James, in spite of the verbosity and the his use of catchphrase and cliché – much as Charlie Chaplin or Gene Kelly would use some ordinary commodity as a partner in some gorgeous cinematic dance sequence. I like that. I live for that.

This is H.J. dancing:

“To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide – to see the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”

The door of memory is thus the door to a wake, and this act of loyalty one long toast; while somehow the copious notes work towards that preservative end. H.J.’s music does not exclude the occasional wheezing, or the tuning of the instrument when it is out of tune, and it is in these moments especially that the fans get their ticket’s worth: the odd combo of raggedness and dignity – O O O that Jamesian rag - elevates the mundane tune.

It is, at least formally, the only James tale of a philosopher – for that is what William James turned out to be. I imagine, though, that to Henry, the mere disciplinary difference was all epiphenomenon, for underneath it all was the solid substratum of the writer.

On Movies

 When Edison, among others, invented the apparatus for making film, everybody – in the West - had a pretty good idea of what an actor did and what theatre was. These ideas were passed onto film, as if film were merely the extension of theatre. It did not occur to Edison, or to others in the first period of moviemaking, to do more than let the camera record a basically theatrical experience. It was as if one were just taking a big extended photograph of a play.

Now, the play is certainly not a spontaneous experience, but it soon became evident that the theatre and the movie operate in different dimensions. The actor in a play may rehearse the part, certainly has to memorize the lines, appears in a stage setting, interacts with others who have also memorized lines, etc. – but all within the defining and unitary experience of the performance. The actor’s experience of the play and the audiences is equivalent, by which I mean that the actor’s part in the play, in real time, concords with the audience’s real-time observation of the play.

This radically changed with film. It was blown to hell. The idea that the film would mimic the play – photograph it - could not long ignore the technical nature of film making, which allows one to create a performance out of an ensemble of many cuts. And that is key – at that moment, the experience of the audience is fatally and finally cut adrift from the experience of the actor. It is, of course, still possible to film a play, but movies generally are built on the ruin of the old regime, in which the actor experiences the unity of his part in something that occurs from beginning to end at one time. This rarely if ever happens in movies.

Of course, this became, very early, a trope in film. Since the silent films, movies have loved to show – to gleefully demystify – their making. They love to focus the camera on the camera focusing on the actor, they love to show the fakery of it all, they love to show the director, sitting in a director’s chair, saying cut. The cliché quickly and thoroughly penetrated the culture.

However, even as the difference made by the movie was exposed again and again, we retained old, theatrical ways of looking at what was happening. We still called the figures mouthing the lines and pretending to be detectives or kings ‘actors’. And though auteur theory wasn’t really codified until the fifties, the characteristics of it in movie appreciation appeared early on – as though the director was an author.

And so, newpaper and magazine movie critics will write about the performance of the ‘actor’ in the film as something that occurs like the performance of an actor in a play – they will ignore what they know, and what every movie abundantly references – that this is very much a synthesis, rather than a spontaneous unity. The movie references this in its camera work, its transitions, its ‘special effects’, etc., and we know after we have finished it that our experience of it as a performance was an illusion. Even the dimmest movie goer sees through the illusion. The ironic entailment of the reality affect offered by movies is that they become less ‘real’ – they reveal themselves as process the realer they are.

So what are these figures? Are they actors?

There’s a story told on the DVD of Ni Toit ni Loi (Vagabond). In one of the last scenes in the film, Sandrine Bonnaire, the actress who plays Mona – the film’s central figure – wanders into a small French village where the grapes have just been harvested. The village celebrates by allowing a sort of carnival – men dressed up like wine demons capture whoever wanders by – civilians – and dunks them in a vat of wine, or throws grapes at them. According to the interview, when Bonnaire played in this scene, she was not expecting these grape demons – and she was really terrified by them as they chased her around, and eventually into a phone booth. It is an excellent scene – but it would never work in theatre. In the unity of the experience of audience and actors that makes up theatrical performance, and actor who doesn’t know what is happening destroys the code of the performance. He or she isn’t better or worse at that point, but becomes a non-actor. However, this rule simply doesn’t apply in film. This is why film actors often speak of acting a role in terms of the way they physically throw themselves into it – rather than, as theatre actors do, the way they throw themselves into it psychologically. Bonnaire lets her hair go, doesn’t wash it, or herself – DeNiro pumps himself up to 250 pounds for Raging Bull – etc. Now, it isn’t the case that the film actor doesn’t try to assume psychological characteristics, or the theatre actor is not concerned with the body as an instrument – it is a matter of what is subordinate to what. In a sense, the actor in movies, cut off from the entirety of the film by the process of making the film, is doing something very different than what we call acting. A movie is a riposte to methodological individualism – the fundamental level at which the movie works is not reduceable to the separate and individual contributions of the people involved in it. We understand it that way for giving prizes, and because the myth of the individual is something that, at least in America, we pay lip service to. In making movies, the West invented an art form that it did not have the conceptual structure to understand.

This is why I am uncomfortable with saying things about movies in the same way I can say things about novels or poems. Of course, the latter two, as well, propose experiences that require a certain cut in the time of their consumption – the praise of a book that “you can’t put down” is foregrounded in the fact that you do, as a reader, put down books, you don’t read continuously from cover to cover. Yet this editorial and utilitarian fact has long been built into our reading experience, whereas the movie experience still carries with it the overtones of the aesthetic experience it overthrew. Perhaps the real end of the 19th century, the century before movies, was signified in Mallarme’s notion of the Book, the one true book, and Wagner’s notion of the Gesammtekunstwerk, impossible products of a saintly devotion to the one good and real thing. Funny how movies, which have gone from products of ultra-modernity to museum goods, have begun to imitate the Wagnerian gesture of being too long, too aggressively long, entirely

The Rise and Fall of Baby in Popular music: some notes

 

1.  “Baby baby where did our love go…?”

“I’ve got you babe…”

“It’s not me babe…|

2. The ductus of baby. Discuss.

3. Someday somebody will write a rich philological-historical study of the rise and fall of babe and baby in popular song in the sixties and seventies. 

Not me, but somebody. Here’s a few notes.

4. It should be said at the outset that I use “honey”  and “darling” a lot, both as endearments and as terms of address – but I have never called anybody babe or baby who was not, in fact, below 16 months of age.

It should also be said that, on another personal note, baby ended for me with Soft Cell, at some point in New Orleans on the dance floor in the Hotel Pontchatrain. It dies while I was dancing with M.P. on the stroke of midnight, although the date and time could be the effect of a blur in my memory.

5. Mostly babe and baby fell into that group of affectionate names for woman (as distinct from the denigrating terms, like bitch or whore – although as we all know, these are mix and match sets and everything depends on the conformation of the tongue and the lips). As well, though, looking over the set of popular songs in my data base (i.e. Youtube and Spotify), baby was also a female term for addressing a male. And applied to the heteronormative male, it has an interestingly dissolving libidinous effect. Who is baby?

7. In 1932, a James Hart wrote an article on Jazz Jargon for American Speech, from which I cull this:

“A new connotation for the once highly respectable nomenclature of the family, ‘mama’, ‘papa’ and ‘baby’ was introduced into the American language by Tin Pan Ally. … Along with the new connotations came along the new signification of the world ‘baby’.” Hunt cites such titles as “I wonder where my baby is tonight” and “yes sir, she’s my baby.”

8. An interesting experiment was conducted on the Ed Sullivan show, once. The Supremes sang a medley of the songs of the Temptations, and the Temptations sang a medley of the songs of the Supremes. Thus we heard David Ruffin sing “Stop In the Name of Love” and could register a certain transformation in the sound of baby: “Baby baby I’m aware of where you go”….

There is, I think, in the very ductus of the words of a song an indication of the fragile autonomy of song against poem. The ductus of the word is why performance is all too quicksilver to be one of those kinds of things that one can hypostatize, rank, and generally treat to the domestic gaze of established literary aesthetics. What we have going on here is a pathic understanding. The seven types of ambiguity are as nothing to the types of ambiguity summoned and released in the word “babe”.

9. Pathic understandings, however, are not a private language. Instead, they emerge in communities and disappear as well. I can’t really say that “baby” disappeared from popular song in the eighties. Anybody can come up with exceptions. Simple minds had a hit, Don’t you (forget about me) where the baby note – the baby as the addressee – was definitely in the mix. However, by then there was something out of date about the word – as out of date as Greenwich Village or the Beats or Motown Detroit.

10. “Baby Baby Baby you’re out of time.”

“Nowhere to run to baby/nowhere to hide.”