anecdote and essay

 Mood tugs at the essay with a stronger hand than it does at other genres. Poetry has all its armored prosody to protect it; fiction has narrative, the monograph has method. But the essay absorbs proof, rhetoric and story into what is eventually, what is inevitably, whim. Which is, itself, not one thing but one thing and another. The wind bloweth where it listeth, said God in an essayistic mood.

The wind, though, is, to our human vision at least, a shapeless thing. For an essay to give shape, to shape its reason to exist, it needs technique. You don’t need a weather man to have weather, but if you are a weatherman, you need some way of depicting and even predicting the weather.

Benjamin, I think, has a certain genius for the essay, and for that moment in which the essay makes its strong play for the readers attention: I am talking about the anchoring anecdote. The essayist is most at home, is a citizen even, of literary culture – a culture of books, pictures, music and gossip. I think Benjamin learned the power of the anchoring anecdote from reading Kafka. That at least is my sense. Kafka’s anecdotes have a certain judicial quality, as though they were really decisions handed down by some supreme, invisible court. And so it is with Benjamin’s best anecdotes.

For instance, this one, from a brief essay on Robert Walser. Benjamin’s take on Walser is that even if Walser’s claim that he never changed a sentence is not, technically, true, it is a key to Walser’s manic stroller style. Manic, but quietly manic – a simple inability to stop, so that it goes past its point and into the fields, so to speak.

This inability to stop is curiously paired with the inability to start. Both moments require a decisiveness that the stroller is afraid of, shy of. Not wanting to make a fuss. And to illustrate this, Benjamin tells an anecdote:

“This story is told about Arnold Bröcklin, his son Carlo, and Gottfried Keller. One day they were sitting at their usual table at the café. Their table was famous for the way, among these comrades, they were unspeaking and closed off. So here, again, the three sat together in silence. After a certain amount of time had crawled by, the young Bröcklin said, “it’s hot.” And, after fifteen more minutes of silence, the older said: “and no wind.” Keller, for his part, sat there for a piece. Then he rose up and said: “I don’t drink with chatterboxes.” This peasant shame of talk, which is underlined by the excentric punchline, is Walser’s thing.”

That anecdote opens up, to me, a whole line of inquiry, stretching from Swiss peasants to Robert Wilson’s legendary play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, a seven act, twelve hour piece in which, or so I’ve read, one of the characters advances by very slow footsteps from the wing to the center of the stage, which takes twenty minutes, stands there as though about to speak, and then, doesn’t, and then makes his way to the other wing of the stage, taking twenty minutes.

Slowness, silence, a certain terrific glue that seals in the human product: these are the anecdotal partners of Blake’s book, Proverbs of Heaven and Hell. Proverbs slowed down to the barest, syllabic beat.

A historiette of the police-lineup

 

“There is no available records of when line-ups were first introduced for police work.” – Historical Dictionary of American Criminal Justice

1. At first, at first the line-up was something different than what you think of, now, when you think of police lineup.

2. The first mention of a police lineup in the New York Times is on February 6, 1914. Headline: Police Line-Up Plan is resumed.” However, the referent here doesn’t look like our police line-up.

“The original line-up was born of the days when the Central Office Squad was a big squad and where the cells at headquarters were always full. Prioners arrested for everything from burglary to assault, who were still behind bars at break of day, were taken to the platform in the big basement room and there to be exhibited to the assembled detectives.”

The line up here is related to “calling the roll”, a procedure I remember from elementary school, and that existed and exists in many forms in many places. One of the memories of concentration camp survivors is the dangerous and eliminationist roll calls in the camps: inventory merged with murder.

As the police in the cities had more and more cases to process, the inventory of the arrested or simply taken in was a way of exerting control. But notice – notice the “exhibition” function. This was the future.

3. The NYT story states that the police line-up was only of those on hand in the Station. It was, then, independent of the fact that a mug was taken in. But it soon became joined with it. In the 20s and 30s, the police line-up was composed not only of perps or suspects at hand, but of those with records, those released from jail, those who were not particularly charged with anything. It was the exhibition that counted.

4. In an early talkie from 1930, For the Defence, starring William Powell, we have a movie capture of what the lineup was like. We know that the movie was realistic in as much as other reports – for instance, a story in Colliers in 1933 – tells essentially the same tale. In the Collliers story, which was about the NYC police department, were are told that the lineups had a master of ceremonies, assistant police inspector John J. Sullivan. Much like the inspector in the Powell flic, Sullivan’s voice was that of an auctioneer. On a stage with a stark white background upon which lines were printed (to represent height), a group of suspects or convicts would be assembled. The one to the right of the inspector would move forward, away from the group, and the inspector would read the name, identifying characteristics, and crime sheet of the given individual. As in the movie, this would provoke banter from the livelier cons. This drama was too good to confine to the detective world – it was a spectacle that many journalists, and those who were connected to the police and could acquire a ticket, also watched. What seems, in the movie, to be the kind of dialogue that was spewed out by screenwriters of the Ben Hecht variety – snappy comebacks, urban snarls, tough guy in jokes – was the word of the street, in all actuality.

5. These lineups lasted a long time. One catches glimpses of them even in the fifties. It was, penologists lamented, a tough thing for a guy trying to go straight to go to a new town and find himself herded down to the station and having his record read out. It made it hard to go straight, to find a sweetheart and a job, to make a stake, to put down roots.

6. This first kind of lineup was paralleled, in the 1930s, by the line-up as we vaguely think of it. In a story in Harper’s monthly in 1935 by Joseph F. Dinneen (Murder in Massachussetts), the lineup is described as a “modern police institution”. “It is considered good evidence to have a victim pick out of a line of average men the person suspected of the crime. The line-up is usually made up of plain clothes men, inspectors, the janitor, salesmen trying to interest the department in traffic devices, telephone repairmen, any person in the corridor who does not mind devoting ten or twenty minutes to an interesting experience in the public interest… As a reporter I have been pressed into service a number of times.”

The persons who are not suspect are called fillers or foils. The hunt for foils becomes itself a matter of urban policing. In 1985, the NYT reported that the police would often pick up “black youth”, scaring them with the idea that they were suspects in some crime, but really only interested in filling out the foils at the station.

7. Foucault, in Surveiller et punir, took the panopticon, described by Bentham, as a sort of Platonic ideal come to earth – an assemblage for creating transparency to allow subordinates to be watched, even as the watchers were in an opaque position – one in which they would not be watched. A new hierarchy: the unwatchables and the watched – was being time released in France, in Great Britain, in the United States, etc. The police lineup participates, in part, in the panopticon. But it participates, as well, in theatre – the very kind of live theatre that was dying out there on the Great White Ways.

8. The line up in this form was, of course, a very attractive proposition for movies and television. In The Lineup, a CBS show that ran from 1954 to 1960, the crime and its investigation all crystalized in the lineup. The people in the lineup were shown walking down from the podium in the opening credits – with the familiar background, white with rays marking heights, creating the background screen. The show ran in France, and introduced the French to the “parade d’identification”.

In Parade Magazine in 1952, a feature ran with twelve photos, six of crooks, six of straights. I challenged the reader to identify the crooks. “There’s always a lingering suspicion – and hope – that you could tell a convict from somebody’s uncle.”

9. From a philosophical perspective, the splendour and misery of the correspondence idea of truth: there is the man who robbed, raped or murdered, and there is the witness who points a finger. Court case after court case muddies and modifies this idea. Eyewitness reports go into the laboratory, and one varies the scene and the time intervals. We check on the circumstances of the initial witnessing – partial as it may be – and the circumstances of the selecting the perp at the police station. As is often the case with police culture, there is the hidden struggle between what police do (find a solution to a case to make it go off the books and through the courts), and what we think they do (find the guilty party). The latter means, to the social whole, that the person who raped or murdered or defrauded will not do so again, at least while being punished. But the former is an actual job, with a job’s pragmatism, where a miss can be as good as a mile if you tart it up a bit, lead the witnesses, supress the contradictory details. And of course in the middle of this is the witness’s impression, an impression like the vast millionfold array of them day in, day out. An impression that, even initially, seems to be wearing away, like a chalk drawing in a downpour.

It must strike the philosophically trained that the gradual development of the line up room, with its screen, its fillers, its sociological diversity or lack thereof, and its witness has a certain resemblance to Plato’s myth of the cave. Are these shadows upon the wall? In particular, ingenuity has been devoted to making the witness see what the people in the lineup can’t see. One reason is evident: crimes are often committed in neighborhoods where the perp will know the witness, and sometimes the witness will believe, often with good reason, that testifying will get the witness in trouble. Put the witness in danger. It is part of policework to try to charm the witness out of this anxiety. The police, here, are often operating not to protect the witness, but the case – and the witness becomes an object of use. The transactionality of witnessing can be used by witnesses, can become a paraprofessional activity – hence the mouchard, the fink, the informer, the snitch. But witnesses who are not aware of the transactional nature of witnessing are dealing with perps, on the one hand, who are well aware of it, and cops, on the other, who are also well aware of it. Nobody is really for the witness, not one hundred percent. Even if the witness is a victim. Even, especially, if the witness is a victim.

10. It is out of such philosophical musings, and court cases that, since Miranda at least (Miranda claimed to be a victim of a skewed lineup), have shaped the space of the lineup. In 1974, after the Warren Court was well history and the Nixon court was busy giving police back their trans-constitutional powers, the NYT reported on a state of the art police lineup room in Queens: it had a video and audio component, to record everything that was said; it was a designated room instead of a room at random in the station, measuring 13 x 11 feet; and it had a one way glass through which the witnesses “may look at suspects” without the suspects looking at the witnesses. A utopia.

Meanwhile, out there in the wilderness, cameras and computers were dispensing with the unreliable eyes of witnesses. In a sense, the lineup was going back to one of its origins, in the array of photographs of perpetrators that the police would let victims and witnesses leaf through.

11. Just as the discipline of prisoners became the discipline of factory workers, I have long thought – from my experience in grocery lines, having to time to gaze at fashion magazine covers and leaf through Vanity Fairs – that the police line has become a secret iconographic norm for fashion models and selfies. The arrangement of people by size, skin color, hair color, the grouping together in an absurdly small space, the smiles, even (expressions on cue), am I not seeing these things through a two way glass?

12. The democratic crisis - the loss of faith in the experience of the people - has many dimensions. One of them is the gradual replacement of the twentieth century police line-up with the photo line-up, or facial recognition machinery - as if we need to cut ourselves out of our experience in order to achieve maximum control over our collectivities. The cases mount up.

Woman wrongly accused of carjacking loses lawsuit against Detroit police who used facial technology - CBS News, September 4, 2025

"Police put a file photo of Woodruff in a photo lineup after a gas station video from the scene was run through facial recognition technology. The carjacking victim picked Woodruff, who was among other women in the lineup."

That last sentence meant - among the women in the photo lineup generated by facial recognition machinery. So much for circumstances and alibis. Detroit - the city to which the movie ROBOCOP refers - has, like many police department, steamlined its grabs. And so they go out, under the mechanical order, and so they bring in, tasers in hand. So much, even, for the old repartee between police and thieves. Who knew that we could start feeling nostalgic for the older versions of the panopticon?

ICE and the cops: how communities should take back power

Cast your mind back to every Western you have ever seen. Most of them, I’d bet, featured or included a sheriff. The sheriff “kept the peace” but, if you think about it, never stopped a single wagon, carriage or horserider for speeding. Consequently, the sheriff never examined a single wagon, carriage or saddle bag for “contrabrand” material.

In Sara Seo’s Policing the Open Road, the burden of the narrative is on the legal construction that allowed police, around the Prohibition era, more power over the car than the Customs officer had over the incoming ship – that is, police were allowed to make reasonable searches of vehicles without a warrant, and with the standard of “reasonableness” amounting to: what the policeman says.

The interesting subtheme, here, is that policing followed technological and legal changes, which intersected with an already existing hierarchy that separated the respectable (white) people and the non-respectable (working class, black, immigrant) people.

“Certainly, traffic laws, like prohibition laws, established mala prohibita—acts that were wrong only by virtue of statute. No inherent sense of morality deemed, for example, driving at the speed of twenty-two miles per hour a per se evil like murder or theft.”

Prohibition and the policing of the automobile came together in court cases that started to allow a growing police force a greatly expanded amount of power not only to regulate the traffic, but to search cars on the instinct of the police.

The addition of police union power beginning with the Civil Rights era added to this police power. Even so, the police would not have become the community’s ruler instead of their servant if the political power of the unions had not been flexed to take the power directly away from local law.

A good example of how the system works is found in Ohio.

On August 12, 2017. 25-year-old Richard Hubbard III was pulled over on E 228th St. just before 10:30 a.m. for "a moving/traffic violation” by Michael Amiott. “Hubbard was ordered to exit the car and face away so he could be taken into custody. Police say Hubbard refused, and a violent struggle ensued. The video that was captured showed Amiott taking Hubbard to the ground, punching him multiple times.”

Thus far, a typical instance of the combo of race – Hubbard is black – the auto – Hubbard had committed a minor traffic infraction and had an expired license – and police authority – the taking into custody of a person without a licence is extraordinary. I speak from authority, having once been stopped by a policeman for a minor traffic infraction and then being told that I would get a major fine if I didn’t renew my license, which was out of date. At no point did the white policeman think that I was going to go down with him to the police station. Cause I’m white.

The video made Amiott’s action undeniable, although the police issued the standard pr piece about how Hubbard had violently resisted. It did not explain why Hubbard was taken into custody – this was, for the police, a simple norm. They get to decide who to take into custody. That power has been given to them when they were given untrammeled power over the streets.

In the next step in this drama, the town of Euclid reluctantly responded by suspending and then firing Michael Amiott. The mayor referenced further instances in Amiott’s record. Amiott’s case was then taken up by the Fraternal Order of Police, even though the Euclid police department is represented, technically, by another union. See this site for an indepth look at Euclid policing and race, including other violent incidences involving Amiott. (see all parts of Series 3)

In 1983, Ohio – like many Midwestern states with a strong union presence – instituted a collective bargaining law that outlawed strikes in favor of arbitration. The driver, at that time, was the fear of teacher strikes. But included in that law were all public employee unions – the police unions foremost.

Ohio was once the heartland of American industry, and consequently, of the factory worker unions that allowed the working class to negotiate with Capital. Some leftist economists have pointed to the benefits accruing to public employees from these laws. At the same time, there is a difference between teachers and cops – the arbitrators and judges have myriad links with the police.

A study by Mark Iris in 1998 of arbitration results in Chicago bears out the bias:

“A total of 328 disciplinary actions were decided by binding arbitration during that period [1990-1993]. In addition, under a new process started in July 1993, 205 disciplinary actions have been reviewed by arbitrators for nonbinding advisory opinions as of July 1995. These two distinct data sets demonstrate remarkably similar patterns of outcomes; collectively, the discipline imposed upon Chicago police officers is routinely cut in half by arbitrators. This pattern recurs despite an elaborate, lengthy review process and close scrutiny before the suspension of an officer is ordered.”

This result should not surprise us, given the larger history outlined by Seo: the abdication of a large degree of sovereignty to the police. In a 2016 article by Tylor Adams, “Factors in Police Misconduct Arbitration Outcomes: What Does It Take to Fire a Bad Cop?”, he summarizes other studies that show the same interventionist tendency. Although police chief, mayors, and the community may want Michael Amiott fired, he does not work at the will of the community: his fate depends on his union and his arbitrator.

Adams remarks that the reason for overturning suspension or firing is most often categorized as a Just cause mistake. “A principal reason why arbitrators overturn police discharges is a department's failure to prove just cause. The meaning of just cause is derived from principles of fundamental fairness that evolved over time through the decisions of arbitrators.” Adams does not question the circularity of this “evolution” through time: a biased system will become more and more biased as precedent is set.

What does this mean? It means that we are depending on the “reasonableness” of cops and the precedents set by police-biased arbitrators. It means that the community needs to take back power. If we dismantle the way the police operate, we have to dismantle and clean up the system of arbitration that is broken. A simple but effective tool is to take away the “just cause” rationality from arbitrators, and have the legislature spell out very what just cause is. I would think that process would weed out bias from racial and gender causes that might make a mayor fire a police officer; but it would not allow police judgment about the appropriate use of force to triumph over the community.

On poems

 

I like a poem that, at some point, I can say to myself. That moment of saying the poem to oneself is not all a poem is about, but without it, the poem has no skin, no place where the nerves end. Anatomical dolls are not our idea of beauty.

J.S. Mill, as we know from his Autobiography, was saved from the horrid erudition shoveled on his head by his pa by poetry – specifically, Wordsworth’s. He tried to define poetry in an interestingly wrong headed essay, making, among other distinctions, this one between poetry and fiction:

“Many of the greatest poems are in the form of fictitious narratives; and, in almost all good serious fictions, there is true poetry. But there is a radical distinction between the interest felt in a story as such, and the - excited by poetry; for the one is derived from incidence, the other from the representation of feeling. In one, the source of the emotion excited is the exhibition of a state or states of human sensibility; in the other of a series of states of mere outward circumstances. Now, all minds are capable of being affected more or less by representations of the latter kind, and or almost all, by those of the former; yet the two sources of interest correspond to two distinct and (as respects their greatest development) mutually exclusive characters of mind.

“At what age is the passion for a story, for almost any kind of story, merely as a story, the most intense? In childhood. But that also is the age at which poetry, even of the simplest description, is least relished and least understood; because the feelings with which it is especially conversant are yet undeveloped, and, not having been even in the slightest degree experienced, cannot be sympathized with. In what stage of the progress of society, again, is story-telling most valued, and the story-teller in greatest request and honor? In a rude state like that of the Tartars and Arabs at this day, and of almost all nations in the earliest ages. But, in this state of society, there is little poetry except ballads, which are mostly narrative, --that is, essentially stories,--and derive their principal interest from the incidents. Considered as poetry, they are of the lowest and most elementary kind: the feelings depicted, or rather indicated, are the simplest our nature has; such joys and griefs as the immediate pressure of some outward event excites in rude minds, which live wholly immersed in outward things, and have never, either from choice or a force they could not resist, turned themselves to the contemplation of the world within. Passing now from childhood, and from the childhood of society, to the grown-up men and women of this most grown-up and unchild-like age, the minds and hearts of greatest depth and elevation are commonly those which take greatest delight in poetry: the shallowest and emptiest, on the contrary, are, at all events, not those least addicted to novel-reading. This accords, too, with all analogous experience of human nature. The sort of persons whom not merely in books, but in their lives, we find perpetually engaged in hunting for excitement from without, are invariably those who do not possess, either in the vigor of their intellectual powers or in the depth of their sensibilities, that which would enable them to find ample excitement nearer home. The most idle and frivolous persons take a natural delight in fictitious narrative: the excitement it affords is of the kind which comes from without. Such persons are rarely lovers of poetry, though they may fancy themselves so because they relish novels in verse. But poetry, which is the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion, is interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.”

This seems to me to get one of the main things right – the last sentence especially – but the main thing wrong, as well as the anthropology. Children love verse that tells no tale, but sounds funny or interesting, for one thing. Of course, Mill’s casual sense that the Europeans are adults and the others are children – though of course living, technically, at the same fucking time – is at the temporal center of the colonialist mindset. Mill, related on all sides to the Indian Office, couldn’t help himself. It is important to remember this way of looking at poetry when thinking about poetry in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as poets sought to navigate the a-chrony of it all.

The main thing, though, is that Mill gets entangled in the distinction between emotion and incident without having a clear sense that these two are very interwoven. The idea that reality doesn’t care about your “feelings” is a shrew denial that, indeed, feelings are as real as rocks. This is a familiar and endlessly tugged against trap. I think it is just the wrong way to talk about poetry. Mill is not alone, of course – Eliot has expressed a similar notion, now and then, and the distinction has had a long and hale life that continues today. With nefarious consequences, insofar as it empties out what we can say when we talk about a poem. It de-motivates the poetic impulse.

Myself, I prefer to think of poems in terms of orientation, or maps. Pound's periplum. What does this mean?

Let me explain by way of an illustration. There is a story in Oliver Sacks The Man who Mistook Himself for a Hat. A music professor was examined by Sacks. The professor was, according to all tests, physically blind. The blindness was caused by the deterioration of the retina. Yet the man claimed to be able to see. In order to understand the case, Sacks went to the man’s home. And, indeed, he seemed to get around the house, and to say things about the house, which only a man with sight could similarly do and say. Or so Sacks thought. Then they had dinner, and Sacks noticed, during dinner, that the professor was “singing” the dinner to himself. He had a song, a sort of hum, that he used to orient himself to all the things on the table.

This is what poetry does, ideally, for me.

Centro-Scriptorium: a poem

 Centro-scriptorium

« … du centro-scriptorium, c'est-à-dire de l'endroit d'où partent les impulsions centro-motrices qui occasionnent l’écriture… »

The doobie is burnt to ash and mood

And within the centro-scriptorium

There’s a ghostly feeling of abandoned lab

A rush after we all looked up

And saw the mushroom cloud framed in the window.

The time that passes.

Subtitle dates mark the hiatus.

Ex-es, ghostly erections, squalor of nights

Strapped down. Unstapled wires sag from the ceiling.

Big themes in the algae frosted Aquarium.

Within the centro-scriptorium

Move, obscurely, the mother current lost

That volted me from girlhood to dame

And kept me going, ghostward

Ever ghostward.

-Karen Chamisso

Reading Andrew O'Hagan's Stay Classy, in the LRB, about Prince Andrew

 Victoria Hervey, Epstein friend, English MAGA supporter, was simply saying what the Epstein crime class believes when she responded to O'Hagan's request for a comment here:

"When I contacted Victoria Hervey to confirm that she had called Virginia Giuffre a ‘whore’, she doubled down on the comment. ‘It’s what anyone with a brain knows,’ she told me by email."

Compare this to Leon Black, the unprosecuted billionaire whose mystery doings, as outlined in Epstein's emails, prodded no investigation by either Trump or Biden's DOJ.

“I took it seriously,” Black said. “But I didn’t take it that seriously. I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year.”

Yeah, didn't take it that seriously. Why should he? Serious would mean Leon Black might be stripped of his billions and treated like a normal perp in a rape case: and in that milieu, Black's, Epstein's, Trump's, Clinton's - these things don't happen. It is more likely that a dog could talk than someone from the dog class, the waitress, the high school gilr (in a public school no less! A real tee hee for these guys), could actually retaliate via the mechanisms that theoretically exist to make everyone obey the law.

The deal is that as our belief in the impartiality of the law evaporates, as the law becomes a joke, so too does the inhibition against electing jokers. Too big to fail is the death knell of any even slightly "progressive" party. Gaza children too small to worry about as you sell their murderers bombs - middle class girls working a part time job in high school - businesses ignoring the law and the SEC never doing squat about it - all these things wrap the social up in a ball.

We can punch holes in that ball, but not by looking for some easy to hate target. No justice, no progress.

All that Fall by Jérémie Foa or: voices from the pit

 

1.  The process by which a historian becomes a superstar is determined by the zeitgeist - that is, by factors that are often outside the scope of the discipline itself. In the seventies, the zeitgeist was with the microhistorians. The old liberal panorama, which was built around European “discoveries”, still had juice – in 1983, Daniel Boostin’s The Discoverers was an enormous best seller – but it was taking hits in the aftermath of the civil rights movement, the rescuing of women’s histories, black histories, the anti-war movement, the inward turn that marked the 70s lifestyles of the bourgeoisie. Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms in 1973 and Ladurie’s Montaillou in 1975 were the markers of a turn towards the histories of the obscure. Back to the people was no longer just a slogan, but a methodological imperative.

2. The obscure are, traditionally, the mass upon whom history is made, not the makers themselves: the screen for the movie. This is a strong remnant of what was once, in Europe, a very stable class structure, with the nobles on top. The noble as the hero of history still trails behind it many many popular histories. Whereas the statistic as the hero of history trails behind it much academic history. The obscure, though, between the statistic and the hero – they are hard to voice.

3. Among the very obscure are the massacred. Our dead rely, for the most part, on the family to keep them dimly alive, ghosts that sometimes populate the stories we tell each other. Without ghosts, is there even such a thing as a family? And though literacy has injured this monopoly the family has on the past, it has not at all destroyed it. For instance: my boy knows about my great grandfather Louis because I have told him stories that were passed down to me from my parents and grandparents. Louis still exists, dimly, in the extended Gathmann family; and not so much elsewhere. Yet if the Gathmanns were wiped out, would Louis walk after death, or would his ghost story be extinguished? Who, after all, would be interested?

4. This is the ethical component of the micro-history.

5. Jérémie Foa is not an internationally known historian – yet. In France, though he is relatively young, he has already been the center of a special issue of the Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine for his book, named after a Beckett play: Tous Ceux qui Tombent: Visages du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. Surely someone somewhere in Anglophonie is translating this book. Which is on the same frequency as Ginzburg’s The Night-Battles, in as much as it is an effort to disinter the voice, the experience of the obscure.

6. Saint Barthelemy’s massacre of French protestants started in August, 1572, in Paris, and spread to the major towns and cities of France in the fall of that year. Formally, it is much like the massacres in Bosnia and Rwanda – it is a genocide of circumstance. It arose from the assassination of the Protestant admiral, Gaspard II de Coligny, who, while tying his shoe in his room,  was shot dead by a Catholic fanatic, one Charles de Louviers, who aimed at him from across the street. This happened on August 22. Almost immediately afterwards, the tocsins sounded in the streets of Paris. Come out, come out, whereever you are.

7. Foa’s approach is not so different from that of the detectives in the TV show, The Wire: it is a matter of casting a broad associative net, finding properties, bystanders, property documents, marriage documents, memoirs of survivors and brags of the murderers. After one has a denser sense of what was happening on the street, and in people’s lives, at the end of August in Paris, or the end of September in Toulouse, or elsewhere, the event with its amorphous edges comes into focus.

8. An example of the method is Foa’s uncovering the itinerary of  one of the great Prot persecutors, a man named Thomas Croizier, who boasted of killing four hundred Protestants that August. Many of the victims were taken out  and, alive or dead, dropped in the Seine. By sheer legerdemain in the archives, Foa found property records for one of the drop off points for the mass murder, a place known as the Vallèe de la Misère, since obliterated by Parisian urbanists, but located in 1572 at the foot of the Pont du Change near Notre Dame – about a half a mile from where I sit, typing this. And by looking at the property records, Foa found that Croizier was a part owner of one of the houses there – more or less confirming a “legend” from the Prot martyrology about a house with a red door where many were taken, their throats slit, their bodies plopped into the river – thus “cleansing” Paris of a heretical stain.

9. Foa is not afraid of allusion, of rhetoric, of a high style that can include bits of René Char and quotations from Derrida’s Archive Fever. But this style works for him in creating a way of historiographic “listening” – taking seriously the work of Arlette Farge, the strong advocate for a history that is aware of voices. In this vein, Foa also pays attention to recent work on genocide. He quotes from Helene Dumas, a sociologist who has written about the Rwandan massacres, finding her comments pertinent:

“At the heart of social intimacy in its affective and topographic aspects, with regards to killers and victims, is the fearsome question of the reversibility of the ties forged in the time before, when neighbors, friendship, religious practice and even family ties are mechanized as so many means favoring their tracking down and execution.”

To know another person on a deep level is to know things about that person, their habits, their residence, their stuff, their other connections.

10. Foa notes that in the accounts of survivors, it wasn’t the tocsins sounding, the civil alarms which rang out, that signified murder. Rather, it was the tapping at the window, the ringing of the door chimes, the voices outside going aunt? Uncle? Or a nickname, which roused the sleepy resident and got them to open the door on the unexpected crowd outside, equipped with knives and axes, who quickly moved in. I was reminded of that terrifically horrifying scene at the beginning of Jenny Erpenbeck’s End of Days when a crowd moves in to lynch some Jews:

“Her husband tried to see who was throwing the stones and recognized Andrei. Andrei, he shouted out the window, Andrei! But Andrei didn’t hear him — or pretended not to, which was more likely, since he knew perfectly well who lived in the house he was throwing stones at. Then one of Andrei’s stones came hurtling through a window pane, passing just a hair’s breadth from her head, and crashed into the glass-fronted bookcase behind her, striking Volume 9 of the leather-bound edition of Goethe’s Collected Works that her husband’s parents had given him as a gift when he finished school. No breath of air disturbs the place, / Deathly silence far and wide. / O’er the ghastly deeps no single / Wavelet ripples on the tide. Hereupon her husband, filled with rage, flung open the front door, apparently intending to seize Andrei by the collar and bring him to his senses, but when he saw Andrei running toward the house with three or four other young men, one of them brandishing an axe, he slammed it shut again at once. Quickly, he turned the key in the lock, and together with his wife tried to take up the boards that always stood ready beside the door, waiting for just such an emergency, taking them and trying to nail them over the door. But it was already too late for this — where were the nails, where the hammer? — for the door was already beginning to splinter beneath the blows of the axe. Andrei, Andrei. Then she and her husband ran up the stairs, banging on the door behind which the wet nurse sat with the baby, but she didn’t open the door: either because she didn’t understand who was asking to be let in, or because she was so frightened she was unwilling to open it. The woman and her husband then fled to the attic, up one last steep flight of stairs, while down below, Andrei and his men were already bursting into the house. On the ground floor, the intruders smashed the remaining window panes, ripped the window frames from the wall, knocked down the bookcase, sliced open the eiderdowns, smashed plates and jars of preserves, threw the contents of the pantry out into the street, but then one of them must have heard her and her husband trying to lock the attic door, for without stopping on the second floor, the men now raced up the stairs…”

11. It should be noted, in this year, 2026, that the genocidal wannabes around Trump know about this reversibility in their guts. They were sure that a little push, the ICE in the street, would activate a popular massacre of immigrants and people of color – this was the whole point. They openly derided empathy, those connections that keep us from using our knowledge of the other to track them, to take their stuff, to drag them out, to put them in the truck and never see them again. So far, though, this has been a massive failure. What works on Twitter doesn’t work in the street.

12. This time.

13. One of the interesting sidelights in Foa’s book is a pre-history of revisionism. Holocaust revisionism, with its weird nitpicking of details, its false frame of references in which a sort of mathematics can be applied (how many people could fit into a crematorium?) was preceded by Saint Barthelemy revisionism. One Abbe Jean Novi de Caveirac, in 1758, published just such an account  of the massacre. Caveirac attacks, for instance, the figure of 1100 murdered by alluding to a document that shows eight gravediggers were employed to bury the bodies, and by seeing how long they took before they were finished with their work, proves to his own satisfaction that the murdered must have amounted to a mere hundred or less. “It is almost impossible for eight gravediggers in eight days to bury 1100 bodies.” Case closed.

We can recognize, here, the ancestor of the denialism that recently, applying bogus stats and gut feelings, has swept the alt right about COVID: turn out nobody died of COVID!

14. Bones, buried in the ground, turn up. For instance: when the Eiffel Tower was constructed in 1887, the evacuation of the foundation revealed a mass grave. It was at a strata that indicated that these were bodies from the massacre. The bones were removed, for the most part, the concrete was poured, and the Tower was erected. What visitor to the Eiffel thinks of the massacred upon which the Tower has, in part, its footing?

Answer: nobody.

Right?

Peter Baker crawls out from under his rock

 Vacay is over. Trieste, I must tell you all about Trieste!

But then there is coming back to this period of absolute shittiness. I'm nominating absolute shittiness as the name for whatever this is. It is not post anything, it is what comes out of your post-erior.

I've been re-reading Robert Coover's The Public Burning, a genius novel from the era of genius American novels, the 1970s. The book is narrated, in part, by Richard Nixon, and tells of his ardor for Ethal Rosenberg as she is about to be electrocuted in Times Square. One of the bits that I really love is that Time Magazine is the national poet laureate of these here states, and so Time articles about the Red Menace and American Democracy and Our Boys In Korea are spaced out as poems on the page.

In the absolutely shit war at present, the NYT has thrown itself into the role of poet laureate. The NYT sees that underneath it all, America is just a democracy supporting country. And shucks, so well intentioned! In a thumbsucker by one of the NYT's heteronyms, Peter Baker (of course! they have developed this persona well, from Bush asskisser to Trump apologist - a fiction worthy of Pessoa!), we read these heartfelt lines in the elegy entitled: Wars Often Lose Public Support/Over Time.

Trump Started This

One

Without Much

we read: "Even some Americans sympathetic to the goal of toppling the repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Tehran find it difficult to embrace Mr. Trump as commander in chief." Really, the "repressive, terrorist-sponsoring government in Teheran" reaches the pathos of TIMES poems in the 1950s about the glorious trial of the Rosenbergs:

it

was a

sickening and

to americans almost

incredible history of men

so fanatical that they would destroy

their own countries & col

leagues to serve a

treacherous

utopi

a.

The Peter Baker heteronym has been in this business for years. Who can forget the odes to George Bush, a man of superhuman strength and vision? Which were wrapped up, in the end, by Baker's great 2013 Epic, "THE FINAL HEARTFELT CONFLICT THAT ENDED THE BUSH-CHENEY PARTNERSHIP, which has been compared to Dumas's classic Three

Muskateers, except there were two of them.

“Not since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger// had two Americans in public office collaborated with such lasting effect as/ George Bush and Dick Cheney.

In the aftermath of the Sept 11 attacks/

they confidenty steered America through its most traumatic years since Vietnam/ erecting a nationa-security apparatus that their successors have largely adopted and prosecuting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that/ members of the administration take pains to emphasize, toppled two brutal regimes.”

The Peter Baker heteronym is obviously representative of NYT's approach to all problems abroad, mainly caused by people abroad being abroad, and thus not being Americans and tending towards brutality and terrorist-support, unless we bomb the shit out of them, kill their kids, and point out such models of amity and freedom-lovin' as our allies, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

And here we are again!

The part where we are fucked

 The beginning of this pirate raid is going to plan, with Democrats assuming the Daschle position – a sort of pro-Israel whiffle bound to please their owners, the donors, while so irritating their voters that they will stay at home – and the media doing its best to present a united front of American patriots who have been itching and moaning to bring their opinions about the proper governance of Shiraz to fruition – and who among us has not noticed that Americans drop everything when they can dream, aloud, about the best qualified undersecretary of culture in an Iranian government of our choice! Why, it makes discussions of the price of gas positively petty!

That 58 percent of said Americans in the latest poll are opposed to the war will make no nevermind to the American press, which from the Free Press to the NYT, including the Elllison networks and beyond, will select only those Americans properly appreciative of Iranians dancing in the street in the joy unleashed in the fact that, at last, a foreign power is willing to drop bombs on their girls schools.

In the circs, it is good to look back at the golden year for freedom lovers everywhere, 2001. We all remember how it rolled out: a president who stripped away the awful Clintonites, forever going on about terrorist attacks, in the period after Bush’s inauguration; the man himself poo-poohing the CIA warning he received in August, knowing many Saudis, all of them rich and generous, himself and willing to trust those guys; the attack; the media and Daschle-ist response, which was not that we had the stupidest puppy ever for Prez, but instead, that we were ruled by a superhero!; the warning to the Taliban (and a policy happily summed up as a very glorious thing indeed, by the poet laureate of American foreign policy, Tom Friedman, as “breaking things” – the tantrum as an endall in itself!) to hand over Osama bin; The Taliban’s response that they’d give him up to a third Islamic power, like Morocco (which was the closest the U.S. ever got under Bush to actually laying hands on Osama bin, not something that the American establishment, with all that Saudi money at stake, wanted to happen); the farcical invasion, employing a comically small U.S. force, allied to a rapehappy congery of warlords, presided over by a General surveying the whole thing from a base in Florida; the happy battle of Tora Bora, in which the U.S. sent a message by bombing the entrance of the cave system not the rear (it would have been unseemly to have just said, escape by the rear you dingbat, we need you around to be a threat on tap!); Osama bins flight on a magic pony, to who know where, just so hard to find that guy!; and finally, the assembly of much of the Taliban high command at Kunduz, with U.S. troops surrounding them, who were evacuated by plane by Pakistan with the tacit consent of the Bushies; all in all a glory that we need to revisit in a speeded up version!

We remember, fondly, that the media during this point in time was careful not to report news that they accidentally found out about, like that Kunduz matter – this would depress your average taxpayer, who would not see the Rumsfeldian cleverness of it all! Far better to report the news on things two to three years after you find them out, so that nothing could be done and we could forget what happened.

We can speed through the rest – the U.S. war against the tally high command that our U.S. ally, Pakistan, to whom we were giving billions a year, had airlifted out, as per above; - the jailing of random Afghanis, and the delicacy with which we let our Afghan warlord allies rape and steal; the famine which we all just forgot; and one of my fave memories, the way the Bush administration promised a Marshall Plan for Afghanistan and then (oopsy!) put $0.00 down on the plan in their 2002 budget. Because words, as we know, are much more important than acts. After all, in the beginning was the word, and the rest you can pocket in bursts of money as a subcontractor, privatizing the whole deal!

Down this road we hop again. That is, our power elite. Out here in the countryside, though, where upper middle class libs and their AI invested friends assure us it is all redneck racism, we are not so sure. In fact, we are sure the war with Iran is the worst kind of shitstorm available, ignorant peasants that we are. But the political people saying this are surely extremist. What we want to do is listen to podcasts from the Third Way, torture transpeople, and guarantee the safety of Israel all the way to Valhalla!

I title this part of American history: how we became so fucked.

Untitled by Karen Chamisso

 

Untitled

 

I, too, stumbled with Raskolnikov

hatted in the dusty street

the sun’s eternity hanging

like an accusation in my pupils

 

and cursed the oppressors of the people,

and cursed the people, oppressed.

Rapist drunks loll

In their vintages in the ditches.

 

The money lend who opened the door

- I was her, too

- as  the ax split open my head.

Last thought: don’t kill, mister

 

My crippled sister hiding in the closet

- my wounded eternity, my bled and fled identity

absorbed entirely in

this impotent flash.

 

- Karen Chamisso

A Cold War Trope

 

Sometimes, a phrase, an image, a reference, a term will catch one’s eye, revealing – not with the flag-like pomp of a theme, but like a firefly in the back yard as evening falls – some moment in history, some corner of the vast dark we call public opinion or the forces of history, which is not so much lit up as flickered up, unshadowed a bit. The master tracker of such firefly ideas is Carlo Ginzburg, who has shown how they can twist and turn – or be twisted and turned – over the longue duree, and how they can be connected, the historian’s construction being the promise that some living thing, some beat, is actually there. Parataxis promises continuity, our ellipsis waits for the pencil that draws the line between dot “a” and dot “b”, we feel the breathing of influence, but not, oh never, the palpable push of cause.

It is one of those ideas that I have been toying with ever since I caught it, again, in Nabokov’s lectures on Russian literature. Specifically, this is what tugged at my eye, or perhaps I should say ear – since I seemed to confront an echo here. An echo of something I had heard before.

“ In the sixties and seventies [1860s and 1870s] famous critics, the idols of public opinion, called Pushkin a dunce, and emphatically proclaimed that a good pair of boots was far more important for the Russian people than all the Pushkins and Shakespeares in the world.”

Nabokov here is repeating in condensed form an argument he had put in the mouth, or rather in the book, written by his character Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift. The book, a mock biography of Chernyshevsky, stamps its way through Chapter 4 of the book. Although mock is the tone intended, the prose often descends into mere dismissal and scurillity – it would really be worth comparing, someday, Nabokov’s pillorying of Chernyshevksy in Berlin, 1937, where much of the book was written, with the Stalinist denunciation of bourgeois writers, since the choice of insults seem to converge, and there is the same microscopic skewing and vengeful hewing of the writer’s corpus – in both senses. At one point, Nabokov makes fun of Chernyshevsky’s physical awkwardness in the Tsarist labor camp he was condemned to – which even his admirers might blanche at, this being written at a time when physically maladroit intellectuals were being processed in labor camps both in Germany and the Soviet Union.

In the Lectures, he informs his poor students that Pushkin was condemned equally by Tsarist dunderheads and radical ones – which is an argument one could make, rather easily, about Nabokov’s own judgments (Thomas Mann was condemned both by the Nazis and by VN).Of course, my argument that there is something of the Stalinist purge in Nabokov's caricature of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s is also making a rather sinister parallelism – borrowing the moral opprobrium we devote to the one and applying it to the other.

However, in making the master Pushkin a scarecrow for radical dunderheads, Nabokov can’t really make the parallel lines meet - one being a matter of secret policemen, the other being a matter of newspaper articles. But such is the wonder of art: due to a trick of the eye, they can be made to seem to.

Here is the author in Nabokov's The Gift: “When Chernyshevski or Pisarev called Pushkin’s poetry “rubbish and luxury””..

Is that a quotation I spy?

It is. But that meticulous man, Nabokov, seems here to have been caught in his own dream, letting the quotation gently drift there, where it seems to be on the verge of emerging from the pen of Chernyshevsky or Pisarev but… ends up emerging from the hybridization of them.

In actual fact, a quotation is like a kite – it can’t get up into the air unless there is a solid figure at one end of it. Usually this figure runs around a bit, works up a sweat, and finally – the kite, or the quote, is aloft. But not here. For all Nabokov’s love for “divine details”, this quote, in quite a philistine way, is simply daubed in, and we will decide later who was on the other end of it. But the Lectures on Russian Literature shows that the plight of our quote has worsened, and now there is a host of shadows on the other end of the diminishing of poor Pushkin, who – we are to suppose – is much better for the Russian people than boots.

This unattached quotation – how it manages to fly through the literature on Russian writers during the Cold War era! What is interesting is not only how it varies in being attributed to this or that figure, but how the quote itself can’t decide between Pushkin and Shakespeare. In Marc Slonim’s An Outline of Russian Literature (which, coming out in 1959, may have been cribbed by some of Nabokov’s students before he quit Cornell), it is Pisarev who, in a parenthesis, writes “A pair of boots is more useful than a Shakespeare play.” Blok, in writing about the critic Gregoriev, states that he never “tended to the idea that “boots are higher than Shakespeare,” which is proclaimed (directly or indirectly) in Russian criticism from Belinkski and Chernyshevskj…” – which proclamation, one wants to ask, must be, if quotation marks count at all, directly – whereas indirectly breaks us out of quotation marks and into suspicion and deduction. Berdyaev’s The Origin of Russian communism (1937), also includes the boots and Shakespeare evaluation. We are told that “Pisarev’s nihilism announced that ‘boots are higher than Shakespeare’ – an oddly phrased quote that attributes a phrase not to an author, but to an author’s ideas, as though the ideas were also writing articles and announcing values and appraising boots – no doubt in the same manner as the nose in Gogol’s story dons a uniform.

Berdyaev is followed by Leszek Kolakowski, who attributes to Pisarev the remark that “a pair of boots is worth more than all the works of Shakespeare” – an expansion of Berdyaev’s sentence, making Marc Slonim’s quote look modest. Ronald Hingley, in the 1969 Nihilists: Russian radicals and revolutionaries in the reign of Alexander II, 1855-81, dispenses with the whole problem of attribution by writing that “a good pair of boots was worth more than the whole works of Pushkin” was a common saying of the 1860s period. Common sayings, they pass from mouth to ear. From ear to mouth. Over the Samovar, in the carriage, or as one trudges with a friend over the summer dusty street in some Moscow city district. Thinking, perhaps, about one's own boots. The hole in the bottom. The nail that has come out and left the heel to flop. And one thinks of the copy of Shakespeare that one has bought at some shop. There it is, in the room, on the shelf, under the portrait. Raskolnikov waits.

I was washing myself in the courtyard that night

the firmament glowing with rough hewn stars.

On the hatchet, star light points like salt,

the water up to the top of the barrel, icy.

What we have here is a phenomenon that also occurs in currency trading in a de-regulated regime: equivalents tend to disequilibrium, as one of the parts inflates in value – which of course brings up the question if the whole works of Shakespeare are worth the whole works of Pushkin. But I will be brave and not pursue every question that jumps up in my head. Instead, I will finish this woefully incomplete collage of quotations with Isaiah Berlin in Russian Thinkers (1979) who grabs the kite by the tale, or the quote by the source, correctly attributing the phrase “a pair of boots is in every sense better than Pushkin” to Dostoevsky, and speculates that Dostoevsky might have been inspired by one of Pushkin’s letters, in which he wrote that he looked at his poems “as a cobbler looks at a pair of boots that he has made.”

What to make of this montage? Looking at this from our sad post-Cold War perspective, we notice, first, that the Soviet aesthetic was not Pushkin averse, but Pushkin idolatrous. Soviet school children had to memorize his verse, he was statueified and feted as a part of world civilization: no member of the Congress of Cultural Freedom could touch the Stalinist praises of that poet.

Pisarev, on the other hand, was not so feted. In fact, he was rather shirked, according to the Slavicists. This is because Pisarev was an ironist and a live wire. In an essay on Heine, Pisarev’s kind of poet, he quotes a passage from the Harzreise in which Heine writes that, on a fresh morning in the mountains, the “fragrance goes to my head and I no longer know where irony ends and heaven begins.” Pisarev recognized Heine in that phrase – perhaps because he recognized himself. He wrote that he heard a “hissing” in Pushkin’s poetry, and in Belinsky’s essays, and he was himself one of the hissers.

Alas, this hissing, this zone where irony and heaven meet each other (something that Nabokov, in his secret self, was well aware of) was stripped from Pisarev, he was compounded and pounded with Chernyshevsky, and we get a caricature of Soviet ideology that might well have been the reason none of the exiled Russians much liked Nabokov’s The Gift.

In any case, a quotation that is not a quotation can fill the space of a quotation: gaslighting is an ancient art, and not just one invented on social media.

What a lordly career the phrase has had! An honored place in the book of misquotations - that book which we can put on the balance against Mallarme's book, just as hell is on the scale against heaven.