Du Bellay meets Hank Williams Sr. in the Coliseum

I like it when a critic pulls some philological razzle dazzle out of his pocket and makes me see a poem I think I know in a whole new light. David Wilbern, in an essay on a poem by Robert Duncan (Murther: the hypocrite and the poet) does this with a famous bit from Baudelaire:

Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat,

— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!

It is of course the ending two lines of Baudelaire’s To the Reader, which begins the Flowers of Evil. Wilbern begins his essay by asking a good question: what is the literary critic for? And he pulls out of this poem the word that catches the eye – hypocrite – to answer, provisionally (and how could it be other than provisionally?) his question.

“Yes, I know this reader (c’est moi meme) and my question is, what sort of literary critic does he make? In answer, I’ve derived what I might call the art of hypocriticism. That is the practice of getting a poem under my skin, like a hypodermic injection which magically transforms me into a likeness of the poet: a monstre délicat, a double who lies somewhere between a perfect clone and Mr. Hyde. I become a temporary semblable, or facsimile: “making like” the poem as I read it, re-presenting its words in my own style, pretending that my voice resembles, reassembles, the voice of the poem. As I read the poets written words in my own speech, and feel the poet’s recorded emotions through my own feelings, I become a reader simulating the other: that is, a hypocrite. Yet not solely a usurper of dissembler. The Greek hypokrites was an actor, but more specifically he was an answerer, that other reciprocal voice which created a dialogue…”

Of course, we find such mimetism suspect. This is a game of pretend, and like pretend, it takes us back to the human basis, which is the play ground. Every child discovers, at some point, that answering and mocking are closely associated. Use, for instance, the words that are said to you: say them back. Do this often enough and you will definitely upset the first speaker. Say them back with a comic intonation, or an insulting one. Or, you can just infinitely respond with a non-response. Why is good. Just repeat why to every sentence. This, too, can create a “magical” irritation in the first speaker.

What I am saying here is that the philological dozens played with hypokrites opens a field; it does not provide one particular routine, so that we can say, this is what the literary critic does.

Myself, I often play the translator. And here the hypodermic injection of the poem does not operate as a magic cause, but a very specific linguistic one. A matching, in as much as one can match, of poem to its (dis)semblable, the poem in another language.

So it is with the poem that begins Du Bellay’s Regrets. It must be said that Du Bellay, being a Renaissance poet, lived a long time before Hank Williams, Sr., who was a country balladeer. However, it is not a stretch to think that the Renaissance had its own honky tonk style. Or – it is a stretch but what the hay. After all, a Renaissance poet like Du Bellay thought nothing of boosting his stylings and themes from Horace or Ovid. One of Du Bellay’s modern commentators, M.A. Screech (a last name like something in a Nabokovian fever dream) notices that, like Horace, Du Bellay dares to introduce a “style raboteaux” in his ars poetica: a prickly style, a hickory bark style. Run your hand over it and you are bound to get scratched.

And one could say the same thing about the cheap scotch thrills of M. Williams ballads. His bucket, as is well known, has a hole in it. And through that hole I’ll drop this translation.

I don’t want to be digging in the bosom of nature

I don’t want to be mulling the spiritus mundi

I don’t want to be measuring the abyss under me

Nor, for pretty buildings, exhale some heavenly rapture.

I don’t want to paint with the finest paint my canveses

Nor from high arguments draw out my verse

But from some poky instance take its accidents diverse,

Good or bad, to be writing of my advances.

I’ll put a tear in my lines if I’ve got reason to cry

I’ll laugh with em too, and whisper my why

As if they were taking dictation from my heart.

So: I don’t want a lota curlers and cosmetics

And be making up heroes and heroics.

This will be more a journal where I’ll spill my part.

Okay. Honky-tonk up to a point. And here’s Du Bellay’s poem, for purists.

Je ne veux point fouiller au sein de la nature,

Je ne veux point cercher l’esprit de l’univers,

Je ne veux point sonder les abysmes couvers,

N’y dessigner du ciel la belle architecture.

Je ne peins mes tableaux de si riche peinture,

Et si hauts argumens ne recerche à mes vers :

Mais suivant de ce lieu les accidens divers,

Soit de bien, soit de mal, j’escris à l’adventure.

Je me plains à mes vers, si j’ay quelque regret,

Je me ris avec eux, je leur di mon secret,

Comme estans de mon cœur les plus seurs secretaires.

Aussi ne veux-je tant les peigner et friser,

Et de plus braves noms ne les veux desguiser,

Que de papiers journaux, ou bien de commentaires.

Notes on haunting and being haunted

 In the world of epiphenomena, the haunt is king.

This sentence, believe it or not, forced itself upon me at 6:45 a.m this morning, as I was arising from bed to go empty my bladder. An old man in a dull month, or a dull man with an old prostate – one of those moments.

Well, yesterday I had to finish up some editing work, and in the evening we were scheduled to go to La Rotunde and chow down, but in between times I was thinking about haunting. In particular, haunted houses. Houses in which what happened in the house forms the nucleus of the story.

Haunted houses have been mocked in the cultures that claim to be children of the Roman Empire since Lucian of Samosata was a pup. In fact, Lucian’s dialogue, Philopseudès, or The lover of lies, is one of the great documents of the Hellenic enlightenment, written maybe a decade before Tertullian, in another part of the Empire, began vigorously damning peeps like Lucian. Renan compared Lucian to Voltaire – and Voltaire also compared Lucian to Voltaire. The lover of lies is a dialogue that contains a dialogue, a conversation between philosophers, so called, at gathered around the sick bed of an evidently wealthy man named Eucratès. They commence to talking about miracle cures, phantoms, and other such business, to the disgust of Tykhiadès, who takes the view, sometimes taken by Voltaire and lesser philosophes as well, that superstition is just stupidity. How can anybody be so dumb as to believe in ghosts haunting houses?

This kind of one dimensional positivism is still around. And it has its fragment of veracity: if we believe in something we call “cause”, much of these superstition visions seem to call for explanations rooted in local causes – like fear of the dark – rather than in cosmological causes – like an afterlife from which these phantoms come.

Our anthropological liberalism, too, searches for causes, but not in the stupidity of the credulous, but in cultural practices that we study while withholding our own cultural biases – an epoche that is either tolerant or patronizing.

Haunting, of course, as hauntology and all the rest of it, became a modish object of reflection after the fall of the wall. Helped along by Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the idea of something haunting something else - the way Communism haunted Europe, or the way Hamlet’s dad haunted Hamlet – became a model for thinking about our own neo-liberal ghostliness.

Myself, as a citizen of Paris, think about haunting as a matter of urban history. And certainly Paris is a haunted and hunted city – we walk past old torture chambers and the ghosts of faits divers, here, as we go to Carrefour and get the meat and veggies and wine.

Paris has always been a central place for occultists, sex magic theorists, Gurdjeffians, far right white magic dudes, clairvoyants, and situationists. Yet, in the Paris media, the ghosts and haunted houses are usually somewhere else. There’s a whole mythology of Britain as a ghost-haunted place, and Brittany too. Whereas if such beliefs creep into Saint-Germain, they are intellectualized – its all surrealists and serious searchers in the Kabbalah.

In Southern France, “folk beliefs” are everywhere. Recently there’s been an excellent scandal in a village near Montpellier. The mayor of Agde, Gille D’ettore, felt that he needed a connection on high. He needed God. Or some spirit. So he searched around to contact the big OTHER, and had the misfortune to contact a corrupt clairevoyant, Sophia Martinez. Here’s the story in brief from the Midi Libre:

“Medium and healer, she is alleged to have used a stratagem with the Mayor of Agde and numerous other interlocutors: in using a masculine and raw voice on the telephone, she made them think she was in contact with a supernatural being from the Beyond. This voice incited them to take good care of the voyante, including materially.

Suddenly, she was able to pay, by means of Gilles D’ettore, for a veranda, a jacuzzi, a sumptuous wedding, airplane tickets for herself and her friends, etc.”

Such little things the beyond wants from us! D’ettore was not the only seeker after advise – some real estate broker is suing Martinez because he gave her ten thousand euros to speak to his late mother, which he did on the telephone – although the voice at the other end might, just might have been Martinez’s own.

If corruption there must be, I’m rather happy that it went into making sure a clairevoyante from Agde could soak in a jacuzzi after expending enormous spiritual energy connecting with the beyond. I get it.

Stupid apocalyspo time: and the winner is the Italian fascist! Applause applause!

 For those who think we are living in normal times, I present, as countering evidence, the Atlantic Council. This money suck (it gets a million from the British government) consists of cast-offs from the great anti-communist crusade. The lounge lizards of the Tory party, and others of that sort. So, it makes sense, as we go through the stupid Apocalypse, that the Atlantic Council would give its Global Citizen award to their fave fascist, Giorgia Meloni, and that she would have Elon Musk as her besty at the ceremony, forking over the trophy. Lina Wertmuller was right in the Seven Beauties: Fascism won't be understood if you don't see it as comedy. A comedy drenched in blood. The blood drenching is, of course, all around us. So, in honor of the Meloni award, this song from the beginning of Seven Beauties. One of the greatest openings of a movie ever. They should def played it before Meloni came on stage. Oh yeah! For those who want to look up the words to Quelli che, here they are.

The ones who say follow me to success/ but kill me if I fail, so to speak/ oh yeah

The ones who say, you know what I mean/oh yeah

one year: October 7, 2024

 The commemoration of the Hamas attack on October 7 has been an exhibition of hollow and disgraceful rhetoric, which probes neither the causes and circumstances of the murder of 1,189 Israelis nor the bloody and criminal consequences. The government of Israel is, astonishingly, unchanged. The murder of more than 40,000 Gazans with weapons supplied by the U.S. is unmentioned. The false image of Jewish unity - when it is Jewish groups like Jewish Voices for Peace who have been most prominent in protesting the massacre - is tossed out there as the prevarication of the day. The expansion of the war, via terror tactics, in Lebanon (it is casually mentioned that 2,000 people in Lebanon have already died, but you can bet their will be no anniversary in the news for their deaths) is treated as an understandable gesture, a little irrational, but nothing to withhold bomb shipments over. Discussion here is a hollow mockery. This October 7, 2024, those murdered Israelis are being used in the most unholy way to justify war crimes committed by the very government that utterly failed them. We've seen this before - of course. On 9/11, the US government showed its complete incompetence by failing to stop a much signalled attack staged by a buncha college dropouts and rednecks from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, then seized on its failure to fail on a much larger scale.

An event that taught the powers that be absolutely nothing.
How should the NYT, Le Monde, etc., have commemorated the murdered souls of the victims of October 7? By shutting up. By publishing column inch by column inch a blacked out text. By an act of shame - for the news medias in the West have systematically overlooked the fascist tendencies, the irredentism, the corruption, of a government who has put a statement of clear apartheid in the Israeli constitution.
Hamas murdered those people. Israel's government was the silent accessory. And the murdered tens of thousands of Gazans will weight like a nightmare on the state of Israel for decades to come. But lets all forget that with fake mourning.
It is a heartbreaking one year. And it is getting worse.

The ethnostate on the downward path: Israel

 The Netanyahu government seems determined to make Israel a major power or destroy it. It is a crazy ambition. And a logical one. Every ethnostate goes irredentist - following an almost Freudian arc - where the Id goes, the ego follows. In this case, the ID is majorly armed, and doesn't hesitate to drop a two thousand pound bomb on the capital of a neighboring state. The ethnostate is best tamed internally, by the development of a theoretically egalitarian, non-ethnic or religious constitution. This has not happened in Israel. Will it? this is where the West's abetting of Israel has damaged not only thousands of murdered Gazans, not only hundred of murdered Lebanese, but, as well, Israel's future chances of survival. Israel had its moment of peace with its neighbors, and could have used that moment to seriously return to the 1967 borders that were internationally recognized - but it has used it, instead, to abet a class of furious nationalists, who think nothing of stealing and killing Palestinians due to a mystical "right". Meanwhile, the Israeli right's alliance with evangelicals is paying off, for the latter. This is the show they've paid for: the Armaggedon of the conversion of the Jews.

Maybe making your allies the people who want to fundamentally eliminate you is not such a great idea.

Is laughter allowed in utopia?

 

I’m a sentimental mook. When a writer dies, I often read something of theirs as a form of commemoration – a remembering together with the dead person, whose memory is, as far as we known, no more. A remembering together with those who have read this person, the invisible community of writer and reader.
So I thought: time to read Archaeologies of the Future. The book that is generally considered a turning point in … in the general consideration, the career, of Fredric Jameson as writer and critic. The turn to science fiction.
Jameson’s approach is through the utopian. My approach to science fiction is through the more marginal science fiction texts, like Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Benjamin Labatut’s When we cease to Understand the World and The Maniac. In Calvino’s case, the Utopian is derived, I think from Nietzsche – specifically, the Nietzsche of The Gay Science, the first book of which opens with the harshest summary of the “truth” of the science of man – that the individual is nothing, the species all – which is a reprise of a certain nineteenth century interpretation of Darwin – and then runs with that dictum like it was a Marx brothers routine. Nietzsche deals with a dialectic that every person must, once in their lives, stumble upon: the amazing difference between one’s non-importance, one’s absolute nullity in the universe, and one’s importance to one thing in that universe: oneself. Dialectic, or comedy routine? This is Nietzsche standup in that first mini-essay, which asks whether there is a future for laughter, a utopian future for laughter, even, against the utopian impulse. Laughter, here, is not an argument – it is a tabooed event, that which, in the absolute, as it is conceived by the moralist, cannot be allowed to have a future, or even a present:
“That drive, which rules in the most superior and most common people alike, the drive of preserving the species, breaks out from time to time as reason and the passion of the mind; it then  goes about in a glorious entourage of reasons  will, with every violence, make us forget that it is fundamentally drive, instinct, foolishness, groundlessness. Life must be loved, then! Man must care for his neightbor, then. And we will call them musts and thens, even in the future! Thereby that which is necessary and forever and happens by itself, from now on will appear as directed towards a goal, and will illuminate men as reason and the last commandment – for this is what the ethical teachers represent, as the teachers of the goal of existence. And thus they invent a second and other existence and elevate by means of their new mechanics this old common existence, unhinge it from its common hinges.  Yes – and the teacher will absolutely not permit us to laugh about existence, or even, and also, about ourselves – nor about him; for him, One is always One, something first and last and enormous, for him there is no type, no sum, no nothings.”
Benjamin Labutet’s When we cease to understand the world was published a decade after Jameson’s book. Some might hesitate to call it science fiction – rather, it is fiction about real scientists. But I think it is in the vein that goes back to Swift’s Island of Laputa, and really to Aristophanes cloud cuckoo land, and is part of the Jameson’s plat, his vision of science fiction. While Calvino’s plunges into the science as a sort of Dada project, with Nietzschian references. For instance, this, from the story, The Meteorites:
“According to the most recent theories, the Earth was originally a tiny, cold body which later increased in size through the incorporation of meteorites and meteor dust.
At first we were under the illusion that we could keep it clean – old Qfwfq said – since it was really small and you could sweep it and dust it every day. Of course a lot of stuff did come down: in fact you would have thought that the Earth had no other purpose in its orbiting but to gather up all the dust and rubbish hovering in space. Now it’s different, there’s the atmosphere; you look at the sky and say: ‘Oh, how clear it is, how pure!’ But you should have seen what landed on us when the planet bumped into one of those meteor storms in the course of its orbit and could not get out. It was a powder white as mothballs, which deposited itself in tiny granules, and sometimes in bigger, crystalline splinters, as though a glass lampshade had crashed down from the sky, and in the middle of it you could also find biggish pebbles, scattered bits from other planetary systems, pear cores, taps, Ionic capitals, back numbers of the Herald Tribune and Paese sera: everyone knows that universes come and go, but it’s always the same stuff that goes round.”
 

flood

 The destruction of the old world, said the preachers after the New World was discovered, was accomplished and marked by the Flood – the universal flood. Jonathan Edwards even hazarded the interpretation that man, before the flood, subsisted only on herbs of the field. Only after the flood did God allow a further ferocity:

“For we have no account of anything else that should be the occasion of man’s slaying beasts, except to offer them in sacrifice, till after the flood. Men were not wont to eat the flesh of beasts as their common food till after the flood. The first food of man before the fall, was the fruit of the trees of paradise; and after the fall, his food was the produce of the field: Gen. iii. 18. “And thou shalt eat the herb of the field.” The first grant that he had to eat flesh, as his common food, was after the flood: Gen. ix. 3. “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.”

Edwards world was one in which the great woods, and their inhabitants, was not so far away, and was as unexplored as, well, a flood.

Wilderness and flood, these are the signs and portents in the New World, or at least for the creoles inhabiting that Atlantic Oceanward huddle of real estate, the thirteen colonies.

Forests burn. Rivers flood. Against these sempiternal truths of natural history the United States, that knitting together of real estate deals, has always pitted itself. Pitting, fighting, constructing, damming, roadraging, planting – every moving thing that liveth and that was in our path had to get out of the way.

In one of those great early essays, Holy Water, Joan Didion wrote: “Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is.”

Didion later revisits and downbeats the American triumphalism of her essays about California in Where I was from. This account includes experiences in Sacramento, a town that was often flooded when Didion was a kid.

This is from the infinitely wiser book, Where I was from:

By 1979 , when the State of California published

William L . Kahrl's The California Water Atlas, there were 980 miles

of levee, 438 miles of canal . There were fifty miles of collecting

canals and seepage ditches. There were three drainage pumping

plants, five low-water check dams, thirty-one bridges , ninetyone

gauging stations, and eight automatic shortwave water-stage

transmitters. There were seven weirs opening onto seven bypasses

covering 101,000 acres. There were not only the big headwater

dams, Shasta on the Sacramento and Folsom on the American

and Oroville on the Feather, but all their predecessors and collateral

dams, their afterbays and fore bays and diversions: Thermalito

and Lake Almanor and Frenchman Lake and Little Grass Valley

on the Feather, New Bullard 's Bar and Engle bright and Jackson

Meadows and Lake Spaulding on the Yuba, Camp Far West and

Rollins and Lower Bear on the Bear, Nimbus and Slab Creek

and L. L. Anderson on the American , Box Canyon and Keswick

on the Sacramento. The cost of controlling or rearranging the

Sacramento, which is to say the "reclamation" of the Sacramento

Valley, was largely borne, like the cost of controlling or rearranging many other inconvenient features of California life, by the federal government."

I never had that opportunity, or terror, of facing a flood. The town I lived in, Clarkston, within the Atlanta metro area, was subject to downpour and thunderstorm, and excitingly enough, sometimes the storm gutter running along our southern boundary line would fill up with churning water, which it would take into the mouth of a great corrugated metal pipe, but that is as far as flooding went.

That was one image of flooding, liliputian flooding. But if I find the image of the flood peculiarly terrifying, I owe this terror of my childhood to a book I read about the Johnstown flood when I was eleven. The description of the sudden destruction of that town, the awful mauling of the casualties of the flood, the way people noticed a rise in the water in the street and thought nothing of it, and the way it was presaging the wall of water to come all fed my nightmares for months. In terms of book-caused terrors, it was right up there with Hersey’s Hiroshima.

I have shed that childhood panic, but I am still vastly interested in water, and too much water. There are two books on water in America that, in my opinion, are indispensable – that is, if you don’t know them, your American history knowledge is deficient. One is Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, which is directly in line with Didion’s Holy Water, although giving the Devil’s version – Ambrose Bierce’s devil, the truthteller. The other is John Barry’s Rising Tide: the great Mississippi flood of 1927 and how it changed America.

Usually a subtitle like that is so much guff. It is pretty easy to find midrange events in the newspapers of the past and show how they changed, in some little way, America. But Barry traces the flood, state power, and race in this book about one of the largest American disasters so that by the end you see why the Republican party lost its hold on Northern black voters, how that party, under its conservative wing represented by Herbert Hoover, became and remained a real federalist force about infrastructure (there’s some justice in naming that huge dam the Hoover Dam), and how the great black migration to the North went the opposite way of the Mississippi flood after 1927.

Barry’s book is, among other things, a corrective to the measures which, in apartheid and even post apartheid America, are used to measure loss. Officially, the 1927 flood took 1,000 lives. This is because black lives were, of course, undercounted. Not counted at all in many cases.

In 1927, the crucial moment in the great flood of the Delta was the collapse of the levee at Mounds Landing. Here’s Barry:

“The crevasse was immense. Giant billows rose to the tops of tall trees, crushing them, while the force of the current gouged out the earth. Quickly the crevasse widened, until a wall of water three-quarters of a mile across and more than 100 feet high—later its depth was estimated at as much as 130 feet—raged onto the Delta. (Weeks later, engineer Frank Hall sounded the still-open break: “We had a lead line one hundred feet long, and we could find no bottom.”) The water’s force gouged a 100-foot-deep channel half a mile wide for a mile inland.

It was an immense amount of water. The crevasse at Mounds Landing poured out 468,000 second-feet onto the Delta, triple the volume of a flooding Colorado, more than double a flooding Niagara Falls, more than the entire upper Mississippi ever carried, including in 1993. The crevasse was pouring out such volume that in 10 days it could cover nearly 1 million acres with water 10 feet deep. And the river would be pumping water through the crevasse for months.”

Looking at the pictures and videos of the floods that followed and succeeded Hurricane Helene, thinking of people I know in Atlanta and Western North Carolina, I am in shock. Shock here in Paris. I am reminded of these flood scenes, the iconography both biblical and geopolitical. I’m reminded that we all think too little of water. We live in a very populated, very administered, very constructed world - and that world is uniquely vulnerable to the leak under the levee, the storm that hits land 300 miles South of us, events high in the stratosphere that only the satelittes and angels spy on.

Forests burn, rivers flood.