popsicle sticks

 

I have been falling asleep, the last week or two, thinking about popsicle sticks. The last week or two is an exaggeration, okay, the last two weeks it pops into my head, one night or another, that I should think about popsicle sticks. About how many popsicle sticks in the course of my life I have discarded, after the popsicle, or the ice cream, has melted in my mouth, been licked off by my tongue. After my hands have been stickied.

Stickied. A complicated thing for me. Is my discomfort with sticky hands somehow related to some old tabu about masturbation? The Freudian in me has always made that association, and, as is the nature of things Freudian, once the association is made, how could it not be true? However, it is also true that stickiness and the vaguely repulsive, the vaguely dirty feeling of stickiness – from the sugar ice dripping down the popsicle stick, or the honey that creeps up the spoon handle, or the glaze that comes off the glazed cinnamon roll – makes me want, neurotically, to go to the bathroom and clean my hands. What Dostoevsky character – was it Raskolnikov? – had the neurotic compulsion to clean his hands. Of course, Raskolnikov was not dealing with a grape ice – more pawnbroker’s blood. Still.

The thing that impresses me, nights, about the ghosts of popsicle sticks past, is the idea of the vast number of them – the forests, literally, cut down to provide those thin sticks, rounded at the ends, which serve such a small purpose that, in light of the sawmilled wilderness, one wants to ask: is this worth it? Was the spotted owl and the Carolina Parakeet driven to extinction so that American children, on hot summer days, clustered around swimming pools, could unwrap flavored ice water molded in the shape of dollhouse tombstones and suck them into their mouths, guiding them with the grip given by the popsicle stick? And of course that moment when you bite the stick itself, when the wooden taste comes through the melting last remnant of the ice. That taste associated with sweets, in my memory, American sweets – the industrial signature. The chemical signature, the signature of the wooden tongue depressor, itself moulded out of sawdust – most probably. I’ve never been in the factory where all the popsicle sticks are manufactured. No doubt there are many such factories. No doubt they were incountry when I was a kid, and are now in Southeast Asia, or Mexico. I can imagine fleets of these sticks meeting up with myriads of ice molds, somewhere, and once the conjunction was made, then came the plasticized paper wrap, printed with the company’s name.

Popsicle Industries of Edgewood NJ was the major producer of popsicles in the sixties, when I was a boy who ate popsicles,  or whatever the verb for devouring of this kind is, hidden in the vast OED no doubt. In 1986, the New York Times noted in a small human interest story that the company was phasing out its double stick popsicle. “The lost cultural icon in this case is the two-stick Popsicle, the sticky confection of syrup and ice that never quite split down the middle but always seemed just right on days when the sidewalks were so hot they could fry a set of toes through a pair of sneakers.”

There was more to the popsicle stick than its tag team toss – first the paper wrapping, than the wood – into the garbage. Popsicle sticks  took their  outlaw affordance and made little popsicle crafts – protolego cabins, for instance.  There were popsicle stick puppets. There were popsicle stick flowers. There were books on popsicle stick crafts. The schoolroom and the rec room were sites of popsicle stick construction.

On the sites where popsicles were constructed in actuality, popsicle sticks were involved in the struggle between labor and capital. In 1940, the Maine unemployment bureau had to consider the case of a middle aged woman, X,  who was employed as a “winder” at a popsicle stick plant. Her job was to pick out defective sticks as they went down the assembly line via a moving belt. She claimed that, after spending approximately 13 hours at her job, she began to suffer severe headaches and vertigo as she watched the endless rows of sticks go past her. She quit and applied for reinstatement of her  unemployment benefits, and the state of Maine had to decide if her excuse was justified. Should she sacrifice her health to the popsicle belt?

The state of Maine gave her a dispensation. A small victory for worker’s rights. Maine, at the time, hosted many “veneer” factories – this is where sugar maple, beech and yellow birch wood went to be made into toothpicks and popsicle sticks. And high quality plywood. All of which connected to the decentralized frozen novelty industry of my boyish days. I missed the big changes that occurred in the 80s – the great age of leveraged buyouts and squeezing profit margins, destroying local providers of popsicles and making them uniform, rewrapping them, adding vitamin C and new flavors, and launching advertising campaigns to compete against General Foods muscular attempt to monopolize the frozen novelty sector.

This all happened behind my back. My consumption of popsicles in the great summer heat of New Orleans and Austin in the 80s contributed less than ten dollars, I’d guess, to the frozen novelty sector revenue stream. Like X, I’d moved on to other ways of cooling my insides under the hot Dixie sun: namely, beer. The popsicle stick was not entirely removed from my material life: one summer I had a job, under my brother, in the maintenance crew of an apartment complex in Atlanta, and among my duties was emptying the garbage cans around the swimming pool. There, the popsicle stick competed with the coke can, the cigarette butt, the beer and liquor bottle, the wadded up newspaper, the discarded tanning oil tube, and other relicts of the animated life of the pool. Including the occasional roach (marijuana, not insect). The smell of old beer and cigarette ash overcame any vestigial nostalgia I might have felt on seeing the popsicle stick. Frankly, I didn’t give a damn.

And yet here I am, in bed in Paris, thinking that these veneer products were a clue to the great conspiracy of material life in twentieth century America. Where have you gone, Mrs. Robinson?

the romance of hatred

 

The romance of hatred is a real thing. But though we all recognize it, few take it to be a “romance” – a narrative of repulsion that is also about the attraction of the repulsed. To draw it out in dance diagram form, there are three positions, here, roughly: hating – being hated – being hated for hating. To be hateful is, in a sense, to be embarked upon a mission of destruction whose ultimate victim is the self. To rescue the self from its own hatred – that is the moral duty of politics, I think.

Hatred is used, fliply, by the journalist and pundit: back in the 00s, Americans were always learning that they were “hated” for their freedoms, and thus could hate back with their weapons. Weapons that by happy chance liberated their enemies – like the wound that heals, enemies would be turned into friends by seeing their loved ones killed by air bombardment.

 Richard Bessel, in his artlcle:  Hatred after War: Emotion and the Postwar history of East Germany, theorized that in the aftermath of shattering events – like World War II -  hatred had  a foundational, legitimating effect.

“This essay is a brief, admittedly speculative, attempt to suggest that examining hatred after war, and viewing public and political behavior as an expression of that hatred, may offer insights into what occurred in both the public and the private spheres in post-1945 East Germany. The suggestion is that hatred, arising from the violence and brutality of war and Nazism, was a major factor motivating both the leaders and the led in East Germany after World War II. Not just their rational calculations of how to deal with the challenges they faced and the political commitment that framed their actions, but also their emotional responses to what had occurred determined how Germans behaved in the physical and psychological rubble left behind by war and Nazism. This essay, therefore, is a tentative attempt to approach the history of Germany after World War II as a history of sentiments and emotions.”

Bessel’s essay was published in 2005, and since then there has been a massive affective turn in the humanities and social sciences. The anthropology of the detestable, the abject, the untouchable: who has not felt touched at least by great waves of hatred that have swept us about in the last twenty years? The apocalypse or the end of things – the great Planetary suicide – is firmly lodged on our entertainment menu. The horror story  is edging towards the aesthetic center, the defining position, rousting the tragedy and the comedy from their traditional places.

We do live in the post Cold War world.

Bessel fastens on the wave of mass suicides in Germany after the Nazi defeat. This was massive.

It is part of the racist code in which our history is given to us that it was not just  Japan – the Oriental enemy – that  was swept by mass suicide. The suicide of the hostile Other is very much a part of our political  dreamlife. The suicide bombers in Iraq, in France, the suicide hijackers of 9/11. We don’t of course think of ourselves as anything but the victims of these crazies. This thought disguises  the fact that the defense posture of the U.S., during the Cold War and after, depends on our own  suicide bombers. . SAC pilots and crews, parodied in Dr. Stangelove,  knew that they had little chance to survive delivering to their targets. In essence, they were asked to be suicide bombers on a much bigger scale than any kamikaze attack we can imagine. . The risk of dropping an bomb on Moscow is undoubtedly close to the risk of being killed delivering a rigged car to be exploded in front of an embassy. But while we can rally warm feelings in the patriotic homeland base by the idea of the suicide mission, the suicide bomber is a sort of ideogram of hatred, hatred taken to its logical conclusion: the annihilation of the self and other.

 

 “One of the most remarkable features of the collapse of Nazi Germany is the huge wave of suicides that accompanied it. This surge of suicides included not only much of the regime’s political leadership—Hitler, Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, Thierack and Ley—but also dozens of Wehrmacht generals and many lesser Nazis and lower-level functionaries, as well as thousands of civilians who killed themselves as Allied forces pushed their way into Germany and occupied the country. Already in early 1945, as the roof was caving in on the Third Reich, many Germans contemplated killing themselves; according to a report of the German security service about popular morale in the dying days of Nazi Germany, “many are getting used to the idea of making an end of it all. Everywhere there is great demand for poison, for a pistol and other means for ending one’s life. Suicides due to genuine depression about the catastrophe which certainly is expected are an everyday occurrence.”10 The gruesome sight that greeted American soldiers when they arrived at the Neues Rathaus in Leipzig—littered with the bodies of Nazi officials who had killed themselves and their families— was but a spectacular example of a widespread phenomenon.”

And:

“After the German military collapse, the atmosphere in entire communities was colored by such events, as suicide became almost a mass phenomenon. A particularly extreme example is that of the Pomeranian district town of Demmin, where roughly five percent of the entire population killed themselves in 1945;13 when the Landrat, who had been installed by the Soviet authorities in May 1945, surveyed conditions in Demmin in a report for the Interior Administration of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in November 1945, he noted: “365 houses, roughly 70 percent of the city, lay in ruins, over 700 inhabitants had ended their lives through suicide.” In Teterow, a town in Mecklenburg numbering fewer than ten thousand inhabitants in 1946, the burial register included a “Continuation of the Appendix for the Suicide Period (Selbstmordperiode) Early May 1945,” containing details of 120 suicide cases, listing how the act had been carried out: people shot themselves, hanged themselves, drowned themselves, poisoned themselves; frequent reports noted how fathers killed their entire families and then themselves. After years when they had been able to aim massive violence against other people, Germans now turned violence on themselves.”

 Bessel’s notion is that we should pay more attention to the literal truth Goebbels enunciated:

“Germany’s war was fought, as Goebbels boasted in a radio speech on 28 February 1945, not long before his own suicide, “with a hatred that knows no bounds.””

Simmel, in his Sociology, modeled sociological processes on what he took to be the fundamental elements of society – on the one hand, the individual, and on the other hand, the universal. In some ways, this is a dubious translation of medieval logic, that eternal game of the particular and the universal. One wants some meso-level between the I and the community. In Simmel’s schema, however, the third entity is conflict. It is neither a quality of the individual or a property of the universal, but a third thing – a socializing process. The thirdness of violence has been taken up by other thinkers – notably, Rene Girard – and given other directions. The important thing is that it lifts hatred out of its supposedly privileged and limited place as a wholly private and interior affair. Unlike Girard, however, I don’t think the endpoint of the logic of hatred is Christ on the Cross, but the Werewolf – the wolf as the hunter of men becoming inhabited by a man.

Bessel talks about the violent intention encoded in suicide, its use as an instrument to hurt “the important other.” This is an old cliché – and it covers up how the other is already eaten by the suicide. The suicide eating his victim, the wolf eating the man, the werewolf living in and on the wolf that lives on people. The soldier of any army, the partisan of any side,  almost instinctively drifts to the imago of the predator.

The romance of hatred dreams of monsters instead of heroes, the undead instead of the resurrection. Perhaps this is why we are so close to Frankenstein and Dracula. Who absorbed the hatred they inspired as a life force, purged of love.

Liminal figures. Against which we have to pit all we know about reality. I’m with Lucretius. You cannot purge life, you cannot purge the universe, of love.  Frankenstein and Dracula included.

 

abolishing jaywalking

 

On December 1, 1915, the New York Sun published a rousing letter from a Mr. Clarence John Davis, which ended like this:

I think it is time for pedestrians to assert themselves and to prevent the issuing of ukases from certain czars who are appointed to represent and protect and not tyrannize over those who by their votes were foolist enough to aid in appointing them to office. I will “jaywalk” the same as before, and I defy the Police Commissioner or any other civil officer to prevent me.”

The quote marks over “jaywalk” were proof of its uncertain distinction as a dictionary recognized word. The sentiment marks the decade in which city streets first became car streets. The mixed use of streets, between pedestrian and horse, was ceding to the automobile. Pedestrian rights were being sacrificed on the altar of civic safety. Although there was a struggle. Even the president of the United States – at least, the President Calvin Coolidge – was a jaywalker, according to journalist Harry B. Hunt’s Washington Letter of April 30, 1924:

“Brakes squealed and horns honked as drivers swerved or slowed up to avoid collision. But Cal flanked right and left by a secret service man held his course. In the middle of the street he had to pause to let a stream of vehicles pass. At the first opening, however, he plunged in again and made the other curb.”

Walking jay became a convenient devil for the newspaper editorialists, all of course on the side of the harried policeman and driver. The word itself was hyphenated in Mencken’s The American Language, but seems, in newspaper usage, to have settled early into a compound. Walking jay, according to some sources, comes from jay meaning a country bumpkin – a clown, a collonus, a plebe from the country. However, the OED also lists jay as meaning a flamboyantly dressed woman “of light character”. The streetwalker, in other words. Words, like roads, are multi-use items, where everything crosses and runs.

Jaywalking, according to legend, became a legal offense first in California. According to my research, it was already an offense in New Jersey. No matter, the abolition  of the jaywalking law, which was signed five days ago by Governor Newsom, is being celebrated as a blow against the car-centric vision that has weighed like a nightmare on the bent shoulders of the pedestrian for nearly a hundred years. Although not just any pedestrian. Jaywalking laws are used by the cops to single out an persecute the usual suspects: blacks, protestors, leftwingers, Hispanics, and whoever is on the chart at the police station.   

“In the state of New York, a 2019 study shows that 90% of jaywalking tickets were issued to Black and Hispanic Americans even though they represent 55% of the population.”

One spirit that is looking down and smiling at the change in the California law is Michael Brown, the most famous victim of jaywalking. In Ferguson Missouri, where he was murdered, a study found that 95 percent of the people cited for jaywalking were black. Jaywalking, which was promoted as an offense by car companies in the 20s, fits in very well with the growth of policing in the 20^th century.

So, a small victory for better streets, California!  We’ll see how long it lasts.

 

 

 

the individual, the solitary, the stone

 

In Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which he published in 1856), there is this paragraph about individualism:

“Our fathers did not have the word individualism, which we have forged for our use, because, in their times, there was not, in fact, an individual who did not belong to a group and who could consider himself absolutely alone; but each of the thousand little groups that composed French society only thought of themselves. Thus it was, if I may so express myself, a sort of collective individualism, which prepared souls for the true individualism which which we are acquainted.

And what is the most strange is that all of these men who hold themselves so apart one from another became so similar to each other that it was enough to make them change places to no longer recognize them.”

Tocqueville is no random witness to individualism, since he was perhaps the first to use the term in a sociologically sophisticated way in Democracy in America. The United States even then had the reputation of being an individualistic country.

Tocqueville’s notion of distance, of being apart,  of being alone seems, then, to be part of what individualism is. The beat, here, falls upon the individual apart from his social ties.

Yet there are a number of paradoxes here.

In the United States, one of the commonest severe punishment that one can inflict on a prisoner is solitary. In solitary, the individual fills his cell in complete solitude. The individual is all- and that all is his punishment. This should help us see that individualism, with its logical stress on the private and the lone person, is, at the same time, not solitudinarianism – the individual is not primarily conceived under invidualism as solitary. This semantic fact is often washed away when we try to grasp invidualism from a quantitative point of view, as though it were about individual atoms. If the individual and the solitary were synonymous, this would be an uncontroversial move. But one has to merely dip into the rich semantic flow of ordinary language to see that the solitary is the negative projection of the individual. “He is a loner” is not a compliment in American speech. “He is a self-made man” is a compliment in American speech.

The path of solitude and the path of the individual are not the same path; yet they can be confused due to the conjoined meanings of alone and lonely – the individual, like Robinson Crusoe, is envisioned as ultimately acting alone, even if we project him into corporate headquarters.  But he is not envisioned as being alone – because then he could never get into corporate headquarters. He wouldn’t want to.

Is individualism a philosophy? Is it a code about the way people think in modernity, or are thought for, thought for that is by institutions and organizations and the people who put up signs and the people who say, fill out this form? Does it describe a society centered around markets? Or is it a theory that helps us understand societies that center around markets, if there are any?

There is a theory, put forward by Jacques Bos, that the character writing of the seventeenth century can be seen as a stage in the making of individualism – the character that the character writers are concerned with is all external show and symptom, “a representation of a certain category of human beings…” Following Bos, we would see the moraliste writers of the seventeenth century as filling a space between literature and sociology – a space later filled by the novel and the lyric poem, on one end, and the newspaper pundit on the other.   

Bos’s notion of the the problem fits in with a broader sense of the way the ‘civilizing process’ in the West has gone. The individual and individualism are contrasted with an earlier communalism, out of which, for good and ill, the Western Paleface has broken.

But I’m a bit of an individualism sceptic. The usual gesture, in neoclassical economics, and in philosophy, etc., is that the individual is the basic level. We reduce collectives and find individuals, just as we reduce metals and gases and liquids to molecules, and then to atoms.

I find this a curious fiction. We evidently start out as embryos, and we are evidently the result of coitus. All of our affordances depend on others. To take chemistry as a model for understanding society is so evidently mad that it registers as an anthropological clue. Something has happened to make modern societies not only accept this model, but try to enforce it. Imagine a society in which the economists all believed in astrology, and developed models of business cycles based on the zodiac. It could, of course, work. Foundations, even fictional foundations, have a certain causal neutrality – the model of the individual as the final unit doesn’t “cause” individualism.

Spinoza’s riff on freedom is well known. It is found in his correspondence. The passage goes:

“For instance, a stone receives from the impulsion of an external cause, a certain quantity of motion, by virtue of which it continues to move after the impulsion given by the external cause has ceased. The permanence of the stone's motion is constrained, not necessary, because it must be defined by the impulsion of an external cause. What is true of the stone is true of any individual, however complicated its nature, or varied its functions, inasmuch as every individual thing is necessarily determined by some external cause to exist and operate in a fixed and determinate manner.

Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess …”

Spinoza’s stone is, to all intents and purposes, homo oeconomicus. The sovereign consumer.

We are not stones, but under the impress of individualism, we think we are. Spinoza’s gloss on the stone is that it is traveling under an illusion. But his gloss undermines, of course, his point. For a stone that could imagine it was free is different from any stone we know of. 

How we came to be the creatures who imagine they are stones imagining they are free is one way to put the anthropological question.

Achilles in Mississippi

I wonder if classical scholars crosspollinate their reading with scholarship about American ballads from Dixie? There’s a wonderful little essay by Eric McHenry on the origins of Mississippi John Hurt’s murder ballad that goes through fragments and traditions to get to the story of Louis Collins, subject of Hurt’s ballad with the refrain: “angels laid him away.” It is a songline where poetry, fact and misprision intermingle, and isn't this how how the Trojan war became a subject of the two enduring Greek epics? And American epics seem drawn to the Mississippi?

I think the Cohn brothers, with their knowledge of folk song, saw this: which is why O Brother where art thou is far more successful than any peplum flick at getting the Homeric impulse down. Same counts of course for James Joyce, who understood something about how to graft the Irish crooner lyric onto the Odyssey.

What is an epic, after all, than a murder ballad writ large?

The McHenry essay, The Bully in the Ballad, is here.

Never too vile

The Andrew Tate – Greta Thurnberg exchange was all the richer for me in that I had never heard of Andrew Tate, and got to read all about his clammy influencer gig. That hundreds of rightwing dickheads came out in support of Tate made me think that the NYT, though I make fun of it, may not be totally incorrect that Trump marked a new moment on the right.

Trump, after all, had cameo roles in a softcore Playboy movie of the type that the conservatives were once all about banning. No longer, of course. The media, sunk in the type of sexism that would require a barrel of dynamite to blast them out of, never headlined or even noticed Trump’s cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, although I’d be my bottom dollar that if Hilary Clinton had a cameo role in Playboy Video Centerfold 2000, we woulda, um, read all about it.

Now, I am all for sex workers. But that is an opinion that used to make the evangelical right and rightthinking righties stand on their hind legs and howl. But that is so yesterday.

In as much as both evangelical and Patriot Boy loved Trump’s shock jock side, the line was crossed. Country Club Republican met Aryan Nation Convict, and since then, the rightwing style is all about: never too vile. The defense of Andrew Tate, who makes his living inducing barely legal girls to do sex cam videos, and who is probably making money on the pimping side, is the latest thing.

Some obscure Brit turd named Julia Hartley-Brewer, who apparently interviews people on tv shown on that sinking island, wrote: I'd choose Andrew Tate's life *every single time* over the life of a half-educated, doom-mongering eco-cultist. And the only car I own is a diesel Tiguan.” As was pointed out on various tweets, this woman is the mother of a sixteen year old girl, so she is presumably down with pimping her out when she is eighteen.

The evangelical right has long perverted the Good News into the Bad News, a cult of rich people where the first are first and get to shit on the last, who are losers anyway. However I never thought they would be down with a sexual revolution led by the Aryan Nation. I’m wrong! Never vile enough is the motto, and choosing the life of a sex trafficker rather than that of an ecologist who “believes” in climate change (and that the world is round and that the planets revolve around the sun) is what they are all about.

Mencius on water

 When I was toiling away, learning philosophy back in Grad school, I pretty much focused on Western philosophy. That’s a vast amount of material there, bucko, and I figured that if – by the time I was doddering on the lip of the grave – I understood some of it, that would be enough of an achievement.

But such projects belong to the long ago of academia. I’ve become more of a pirate intellectual since then – or, less boldly, a dilettante eclecticist. I take my prizes from where I find them.
Which brings me to Mencius’ marvelous question, which is quoted in Yi-Fu Tuan’s Dominance and Affection: the making of pets: “Mencius asked, “Is it right to force water to leap up?” He was taking the position that human nature is inclined to act in certain ways and not others, using the movement of water as an analogy. “Water,” he said, “will flow indifferently to east or west, but it will not flow indifferently up and down.” Now of course, he added, “by striking water you can make it leap up over your forehead and by damming and leading it you may force it up a hill, but do such movements accord with the nature of water?”
It is one index of the fundamental disposition of modernity, over the last three hundred years, that this question simply has no discursive space in which it can be uttered. The discovery of the nature of water is a project we can all recognize, as part of science. But the idea of respecting the nature of water thus discovered forms no part of the world of ideas and actions we inhabit. Mencius’ question is simply weird. We have so little sense that there might be a nature to be respected, there, that we can only view the question as an analogy for the one nature we do respect, human nature. Which, to be fair, is where Mencius goes with it too.
But even if the question exists in a weird and unrecognizable conceptual zone, it does seem more and more relevant to a world in which we have ignored the nature of water, and imposed on it our second nature. We’ve made a lot of water leap over our forehead by damming it. We’ve melted a lot of water by colonizing the atmosphere with our emissions and shit. And we’ve never asked water what it thinks about this. Water doesn’t speak!
But if water doesn’t speak, it has its own nature. Mencius is right about that. We are, I think, gonna have to carve out a conceptual space where water can speak. Or we are going to be in big trouble.

Remembering three foot seven

 

We measure our growth via shoes, clothes, the visits to the doctors office, the photographs (our first grade class, our high school senior class): but though man is the measure of all things, who among these men and women remember growth from the inside? We, after all, were there, in the growing body. I was once a twenty pound thing. I was once a first grader, about a yard and seven inches tall.  That was the summit from which I surveyed the world.  But how I got to that height and beyond it – this is like the mystery of the holy ghost. The track of my track – if I am the measurer, why is it that these inches and feet seem to have come to me from the outside?

Or at least this is my experience. It is a confusing experience. I can describe, for instance, something that happened to me when I was six. I was with other kids, and we were taunting some kid who had moved into the house catty corner from us. This I can remember, but I remember it in an odd space, bi-located – surely I saw it as I was then, at that height, but I remember it vaguely as an onlooker, outside myself. That X, or I, marks the spot. But when memory digs in that X, the I it recovers is handed to the I that recovered it, and neither of them are quite satisfied with this finders keepers arrangement.

spoonwork

 I was talking with a friend about memory work the other day. She said she really didn't remember a lot about the past and I said that when I was in my forties, I did serious memory work. That is, I'd take an object - in my account of this, for this is not the first time I've talked about memory work, the object I select always seems to be a spoon. Thus, a spoon. I'd take that object and I would dream about past iterations of the spoon as it passed through my life. I mean, how many spoons have I held between my thumb and forefinger? But I'd dive down through the river of spoons and try to alight on my first spoons, baby spoons, which in my case meant that the handle of the spoon - when I have a memory-dim lit image of this, it seems the spoon is pewter gray - was shaped like a cartoon figure. Was it Pop-eye? And then I remember the grapefruit spoons, which are associated with living in Atlanta, in the house Dad and Mom bought in Clarkston. The grapefruit spoons seemed to me to be a secret signal of middle-classness. First you afford spoons, tea spoons, soup spoons - blue collar spoons - and then you are a Yankee immigrant in the booming sunbelt and you acquire grapefruit spoons, which are more fragile looking, thinner, than the other spoons, but have a serrated edge. Teeth, in short, on a spoon! Looking in my mind at the grapefruit spoon calls up visions of grapefruit, boxes of it delivered at the door, because my Dad liked grapefruit. And my Dad liked to have boxes of stuff delivered to the door. Two great thins in one!

From grapefruit spoon I can jump to plastic coffee spoons, which I associate with being a college student. I liked to do reading or writing in diners, restaurants, at the counter of Krispy Kreme shops. The white, shiny, mass produced, disposable coffee spoon, and the cardboard cup, which I know are called ripple cups, designed for hot drinks. This image is, to me, as bucolic as any garden Marvell sat in. In the mix of coffee odors and the odors of fried flour and lard, and of course cigarettes - I didn't smoke, but I was a college student in an age in which smoker-non-smoker segregation had not even started. I could probably trip from one plastic white coffee cup to another and retrace the odyssey of my college days - from Tulane to Emory to Centenary College in Shreveport to the University of Texas in Austin. With a stop in France at the Universite Paul Valery in Montpellier. Although in Montpellier, I believe, the white plastic spoon did not have the prominence it now has. More actual metal spoonwork, there. My life among plastic cutlery - a pretty typical late twentieth century American life, in that respect. Instead of a trail of breadcrumbs, we leave behind the plastic fork, knife and spoon, from the great mass of fast food joints, convenience food stores, diners, etc. -all of them hand to mouth to trash, and thence on the great journey to the ocean, joinging the great plastic islands, or to land dumps. Each of us fleas on Gaia's capacious hide.
No man - or plastic spoon - is an island.

Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender

 

Eduard Sievers coulda been a contender.

Sievers was a German philologist of the early twentieth century. In a series of papers he made a plea for what he called a philology of the ear. A beautiful phrase, that floats there in a gray zone, waiting for a meaning. Sievers, though, thought it had a meaning.
Sievers was active at the same time the imagists in American and England, and the symbolists and futurists in Russia were trying to deliver a massive shock to the poetry of their cultures – a poetry that seemed to have been permanently passed by by prose. There were various paths to the new poetry (for, of course, the new person), and one of those was by looking back and trying to grasp that moment in the past where poetry had gone wrong. For Sievers, similarly, philology was born of the era of silent reading, and thus had forgotten the moment when reading was vital – i.e. part of the living stream. That was the long era of reading out loud.

Sievers thought that sound of the written flowed underground, under the strata of silent reading. And, being a Wilhelmine German professor, naturally turned to the newest tools in the lab – the lab in this case being Wilhelm Wundt, with his instruments to observe and measure sensation. “All spoken human talk possessescircumstantially a certain rhythmic melodic character.” 

This was the principle from which he departed in his most famous book of essays, Rhythmic-Melodic studies.

The question that he pursued, given this point of departure, is whether one can find norms. And the way to do that, he decided, was to find a norm. And to find a norm, what better method than to have different people read the same passage in a book, say, and discover if the sound generally tended towards some notable melody?

There’s a wonderful essay about Sievers by Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus: The Promise of a Philology of theEar: Eduard Sievers and Sound Analysis. It is the story of a false promise – Sievers was increasingly driven to bend sound data he developed to his thesis. And at some point he took the esoteric route, like many of his contemporaries – Klages, for instance, with graphology:

“In the end, he even introduced visual signals, inspired by the spiritualists’ pendulums: metal shapes to which the speaker was to react sensorimotorically in order to find the correct voice and melodization while reading aloud.”

Such madness springs from the search for a norm!
Sievers, then, failed to have that much influence on linguistics or sound studies. But his influence was elsewhere: on Russian poetry. In 1918, in the dawn of the revolution – and the dark preface to the years of starvation – the Institute of the Living Word was founded in Leningrad, by Bely, Blok and Boris Eikenbaum, under the inspiration of Sievers philology of the ear. The Institute had a phonograph recorder named Sergei Bernshtein, and though, like all the best things, it was shut down by the Stalinists (in 1930), Bernshtein’s recording of the poets, including Mandelstam, was preserved. So we know some of their voices!
The age of sound recording, which is around 150 years old, is the golden age of voice ghosts. Our videos, our telephones, are voice activated recorders, preserve for us the voices of the dead – something you realize more as you move into the age where people around you die. In my family, we have pictures of my Mom, but no recording of her voice – a huge loss to us, I think.
From Sievers notion that sound runs under our print culture, the Russian formalists, like Eikenbaum, began to attend to the aural engineering of poetry. Interestingly, Sievers thought that this sound engineering was not only there, but provided us with criteria we could disengage: “This subjective interpretation of written signs by the reader can be either “correct” or “false”, according to whether it matches with the melody imagined by the writer or not.” As someone who has written quite a bit – a graphomaniac of the purest type – I can attest that hearing someone read what I have written does have a melodic component. And I can also attest to the fact that the curious academic custom of reading papers is, often, an exercise in tone-deafness, in as much as the melodic substructure of the text is completely neglected. This isn’t to suggest that mandarin prose is tone-deaf – on the contrary, Henry James’ late style, as all Jamesians know, is much more oral than his earlier style, since he dictated it. Rather, it is to point to the way that papers edited for the eye often sound eyeballed rather than tongued when they come out at the podium.
This year, I will work on licking my sentences into place.

Gerard Macé

 

Gerard Macé, as far as I can tell, is an unknown in the Anglophone world. He is, on the other hand, revered in French literary circles. In France, there is a certain line of poetics that goes from the French moraliste tradition through prose poetry into an expanded field of the aphorism – the aphorism as insight and lyric – which doesn’t quite have an equivalent in the Anglosphere. Thus, a poet like Georges Perros, whose  series Papiers collées is one of the important twentieth century texts, was not translated, and then in a selection,  into English until 2021 - https://www.seagullbooks.org/paper-collage/.

I prefer Macé to Perros, but both writers are best understood against the background of the moraliste tradition. It is a tradition which was seized and remade by Nietzsche in the 19^th century, The poetics of Emerson and Thoreau are both recognizably shaped by the moralistes of the 17^th century, plus of course the enormous weight of the sermon.

I came across this bit in Macé’s The map of the empire – simple thoughts 2:

“The liquid element is the closest one to the Dao, which teaches us that we must forget water if we want to swim well. In the same way, we have to forget words to write well, which is not the same as being unconscious of them. But let them come instead of looking for them, and choosing them as thought they were posing before us.”

Now, you either like this kind of thing or you don’t. Myself, I’m a fan. Jules Renard, in his journal – a strong influence on this tradition – records the remark of a friend that he saw, in Renard’s work, a lot of fallen leaves, but no tree. The lack of a masterwork – some central novel or poem – is the starting point for the 20^th and 21^st century moraliste. Proust stands as the counter-example – the one writer who, after the pastiche and the essays, actually created a masterwork about a man who aspires to write a masterwork.

Proust is an example of Macé’s writer: the one who forgets words. It is a highly specific form of forgetting. The critic, you might say, is the bad conscience who only remembers words. But this would make the dialectical game all too simple, don’t you think?

The doormen of genius (aren't we all?)

 

The great wheel of circulation is altogether different from the goods which are circulated by means of it. The revenue of the society consists altogether in those goods, and not in the wheel which circulates them. – Adam Smith

 

Georg  Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money, is very clear about the structure of the modern history of capitalism – it is  about the lengthening of the means – the lengthening of the instrumental interval – to ends. Marx, as well,  pointed out again and again – that capitalism becomes a global second nature that conceals the system of production under the great wheel of circulation. But this lengthening of means leads to a shortening of time – this is the Alice in Wonderland paradox for all of us, living on the other side of the mirror.  For Shylock and Bassanio, a bet on cargo would take months to come to some end – but for Sam Bankman Fried, billions of  dollars attached to pseudo currency  can be bet and lost in the course of a week, dissolving the meteoric rise of a financial adventurer, felled by a cursor and a tweet.

 The sugar I put in my coffee today came Saint Louis, a company that refines and distributes sugar derived from beets cultivated in Europe, while the coffee came from Peru. Both were purchased at the U  down the street. The logistical network by which both products could be refined, packaged, trucked to stores and finally end up consumed on my table is only intermittently visible to anyone – it is visible in the truck that unloads the packages and the store clerks who stock it – it is visible to the rural proles who harvest the beans, picturesquely dressed in colorful and characteristic clothing and smiling (according to the image on the package) (although in reality probably wearing tee shirts that say Harvard or Hard Rock Café or something similar and blue jeans, part of the vast dump of tee shirts throughout the undeveloped economies), and visible as digits displayed on a screen to accountants at the company and stock market traders. All of which means that as Simmel’s teleological series are lengthening, they are also producing the appearance of temporal shortening – they are faster. The faster they are, the more they are lengthened – this is one of the paradoxes of capitalism.

It is a paradox that, as well, impinges on the novelistic representation of what Polanyi called the  Great Transformation, from in-kind to monetized economies, with their proliferation of fictive properties. Lukacs, in the Theory of the Novel, speaks a little mysteriously of the various regimes of “distance” between the hero and the meaning of life in the epic, the tragedy, and the novel. This distance is, I think, an expression of the teleological chains that Simmel saw on the surface of life in a fully monetized society. For the epic and the tragic hero, the quest is to understand the sense of life in the face of fate – the world here consists of large, or one might say, royal contingencies. But for the novelistic hero, fate doesn’t have the same totalizing meaning – it has, instead, a dispersing meaning.

“For life, gravity means: the absence of any present sense, the indissoluble enclosure in senseless causal connections, the withering in fruitless nearness to earth and farness from heaven, the having to endure in not being able to liberate oneself from the irons of simple brutal materiality from that which for the best immanent forces of life is the continual goal of overcoming: expressed with the value concept of form – triviality.”

Baudelaire said that Balzac’s novels are distinguished from the usual novel of moeurs by the fact that Balzac’s delight in the massive triviality of material circumstances transforms them into signs and symbols of genius: “All his personages are endowed with a vital ardor by which he is himself animated. All his fictions are as profoundly colored as dreams. From the summit of the aristocracy to the plebes at the bottom, all the actors of his Comedy are more eager for life, more active and clever in struggle, more angelic in devotion, than the comedy of the real world shows them to us. In brief, each, with Balzac, even the doormen, have genius.”

Baudelaire is a very surefooted critic. Wilde obviously copies Baudelaire here in his famous essay on the Decay of Lying, and Wilde was as cunning as a jewel thief when it came to copping the shiny bits of his predecessors. But though I am sure that Baudelaire is correct about the excess in Balzac, I am not sure that this excess did not flow back into life – or rather, I am not sure that Balzac was not simply being prophetic. Proust thought so – thought that the aristocracy absorbed Balzac’s aristocrats into the norms of their own behavior. The transmission, here, was obviously through a literacy and taste that one might not suppose in the doormen. But could it be… could it be that the burden of trivia itself imposed a struggle upon them such that the result, under the Great Transformation, in the midst of teleological chains that were both lengthening and shortening – in an Alice in Wonderland world – was that genius became a job requirement of the doormen of Paris, London or New York? In comparison to the Sganarelles and Figaros of the old order, at least.

False friends

 

Every student of French or German is familiar with the phrase “false friends.” False friends are those words one comes across that look enough like some English word that the unwise student will assume that they mean the same thing. For instance, the French verb, blesser, which means wound, and the English verb bless, which means to wish something good.

The idea that false friends operate only across language lines, however, strikes me as a limitation on a very useful concept. I think that false friends operate within different subgroups with different jargons within one language. Look at how the word “woke” or the term “cancel culture” has shifted between subgroups.  When you see a “debate” between the right and the left in America, it is often like hearing one group of people using “bless[er]” to mean injure and another group meaning to wish a benediction on. Of course, often – and this is a common rightwing tactic – the use of the term will be intentionally mangled, so that the debate (a puzzlingly idolized idea on the right, ever since the right was all about “debating” the Iraq invasion back in the early 00s, which involved debaters who spoke no Arabic and had the thinnest of notions about what Iraq actually was) is poisoned at the root. This is, of course, one of the diseases to which conversation will always be heir. False friends show up in every sphere. We live in an era that especially relies on false friends to make social media happen, and to create both anger and passivity among the masses. An angry passivity – is this what we want?