manif sauvage

 

I drifted down Rue de Temple around 9:45 last night. My goal was the Place de la Republique. I thought there might be an impromptu demonstration – a manif sauvage – there, if anywhere. When the censure was rejected and the “reform” became law, I felt that I had to see what was happening in the streets. I told A. that if I felt I was in some spot where the cops would target me – or demonstrators in general – that I would ghost. But in my neighborhood everything was just the same. We live, in the Marais, in a sort of cloud cuckoo land, where the garbage is still being picked up.

The first indication that the night was going to be a little less calm came as I passed the park which is in front of the Mairie. On my left, there’s a little alley by a church, where usually there are a lot of homeless people camped. Out of the alley, suddenly, came a stream of running people. As I went farther and saw more clearly, I saw the cops, all geared in their Robo-wear, moving at a trot down the alley. They were yelling stop. Nobody fleeing them was that stupid. The people who emerged from the alley managed to reach the other side of the street and simply dispersed. You couldn’t tell the people at the café from the potential manifesteur. Up ahead, I saw the usual flotilla of cop vans, about ten or fifteen. I decided, after standing there for a moment, to continue.

As I crossed from Temple to the Place, I noticed that some of the people who’d run out of the alley were with me. And as we reached the Place,these people walked ahead. Nothing was happening, and then suddenly a crowd formed. It got larger. The police didn’t respond right away. And then the crowd started singing. To my astonished ears, it sounded like Ca ira. It wasn’t. Later, at home, I looked it up: On est la. The song of the gilet jaunes. The song of the Macron mini-ice age:

On est là !

On est là !

Même si Macron le veut pas,

nous on est là !

The other part, which I didn’t hear sung – because a demonstration is not a chorus – is :

Pour l’honneur des travailleurs et pour un monde meilleur,

même si Macron le veut pas, nous on est lಠ! 

Usually, it is simpler to say Macron, demission, foutre!

I decided to drift up the street in the direction of the Bastille. I called A. I said everything was fine. Then the crowd started to head my way. I walked with them. My companions to the right seemed to know exactly what to do. As we passed by some construction site on the sidewalk, with its barriers, they grabbed the barriers and took them into the street. Other people brought other matter. It amazed me how easy it is to make a barricade. Oncoming traffic came to a stop, and the crowd poured into the street.

At this point I began to chicken out. I saw the empty spot behind the marchers and the cops coming up behind, and I suddenly had visions of the kettle. There’s been a lot of violent face to face at Republique over the last couple years with cops and protestors. So I called A. up, and she advised duck down an alley and come home.

Which I did.

All pumped, I looked at the live stream someone was sending over Twitter. I watched the cops milling around the Bastille. Then the noise of the demonstrators. Then the strategy – a crowd of disparate pedestrians suddenly coalescing into a group. Then the cops massing. Then the fires – in garbage cans, spreading to bikes – and the dissolving of the protestors before the cops and their re-coalescence. It isn’t guerrilla war, and it ain’t beanbag. We will have to see whether a government by the rich, for the rich, and of the rich will rule France – or whether their Plan B., Le Pen, comes in. Or whether by some miracle we can rescue France from this awful, mediocre version of reaction.

the living line, the unbearable genius of the self

 

Marcel Schwob bel

onged to the same fin de siècle generation as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson, his colleagues on the other side of the channel, and Jules Renard and Felix Feneon, the great art critic and anarchist terrorist. He, like RLS, and his friend Renard, was not destined for the long life on the pedestal – which makes it appropriate that one of his best known works, Imaginary Lives, is full of praise of John Aubrey’s Brief Lives.

It is hard for me to read the introduction of Imaginary Lives and not think of Borges, who, like Schwob, separated the paradox from the apology. In the Western tradition, or at least the high church version of it, paradox has an essential and divine place: to believe in an absurdity is a surrender wreathed in cosmic drama. But if the absurdity does not induce belief, what we are left with is paradox itself, as an aesthetic and ethical object and ploy. Schwob’s paradox, in the Imaginary Lives, is that biography stumbles aesthetically when it attaches the figure to the world event – when biography is taken not as art, but as history. To get to this argument, Schwob uses  Aubrey and Diogenes Laertes Lives of the Philosophers,  inserting  an elegant, emblematic reading of a story about the Japanese artist, Hokusaī:  

« The painter Hokusaï hoped to arrive, when he got to his one hundred and tenth year, at the ideal of his art. At this moment, he said, every point, every line traced by his brush would be living. By living, read individual. Nothing is more similar than points and lines: geometry is grounded in this postulate. The perfect art of Hokusaï demanded that nothing be more different. Thus the ideal of the biography would be to infinitely differentiate the aspect of two philosophers who had invented nearly the same metaphysics.”

We have something near this idea in geometry itself – the fractal. That self similarity that creates a difference. This, of course, is not what Schwob was thinking about – rather, Schwob was thinking about the way art ideologies, theories, schools, tend to want the lines to be similar. They want realism, or symbolism, modernism or post-modernism. They want the lines to be lines and the characters to be characters, because life is short. But if life is long, if you achieve the one hundred and ten years, you will perhaps stumble upon a line that is not like any other line, and a point that is not like any other point. At the end of The Man who Was Thursday, Chesterton summons up the same paradox, but as a nightmare. The poet-detective, Syme, pitting himself against an anarchist gang, pauses in his breakneck quest and reflects:

“Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again. Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something--say a tree--that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself--a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.”

Chesterton had an ultimately comfortable idea that the Church was the answer to all that. But if the Church is just an ordinary institution, then the unnatural symbolism becomes a haunt in a world without ghosts. And this, even for spirit seekers – or especially them, with their middle class desire that “science” prove the paranormal – is too much uniqueness. And who can bear too much uniqueness? It is hard to be the geniuses that we all are.

Jupiter stumbles: the curse of Macron

 

Perhaps the most Macronist of all Macron things during the debate about the reforms – the debate in the street, the debate in the supposed Legislature – was Macron deciding that this was just the time to give Jeff Bezos the Legion d’Honneur. I missed it when it happened – I was turned on to it by the excellent, very sad article in Media Part by Nicholas Mathieu: « Savez-vous quelle réserve de rage vous venez de libérer ? »

I read the Mathieu article after reading the “what does Macron’s inner circle think” article by Le Monde, which keeps in intimate and admiring touch with the circle around the great man: “Selon plusieurs de ses proches, le président de la République n’a « aucun scrupule, aucun regret »(According to those close to him, the president of the Republic has “no scruple, no regret”). This is how Le Monde writes – a far cry from the revolutionary stylings in 1792 of Pere Duchesne, the paper whose motto was: Je suis le véritable père Duchesne, foutre!” – I am the fucking real Pere Duchesne. Who would write, for instance, of his great anger against the so called aristocrats, the Duc of this, the Prince of that. Between the fuck it and the “proches de la President de la Republique” there is an abyss set. But all your abysses and all your interior ministers won’t keep that abyss from being crossed at some point – no man or woman can say where.

In the Marianne story about the honouring of the Amazon man, one reads: “C’est une décoration qui fait grincer des dents, surtout à gauche.”  But what gauche? It is the gauche in unions. It is the gauche that realizes that Macron is honouring a union-buster. It is his riposte to the unions he refuses to talk to. The only syndicat that counts for Macron is the syndicat of bosses. The man has an upper class autism of a high order – usually, in the evolution of neolib popularism, the Tory or the Republican has figured out how to hide behind the working man. Macron has never figured out even so simple a ploy. Boris Johnson looks like a political genius next to a piker like our President. The figure he most resembles, in the neolib spectrum, is Bush – Bush the first. George H.W. Bush. A man who could never release his lips, his famous lips, from the silver spoon around which they were wrapped. The man with the same strange personality, the man with the mistress (which, as Hilary Clinton once said, everybody in D.C. knew about)  and the wife-mother.

I despise all Bushes, yet in one way Bush did more than any president since: he took seriously a global climate problem, the depletion  of ozone, and he did something decisive about it. Politicians come in all sorts of flavors. As bad as Macron is, he does have a balanced sense that it is time for negotiation in the  Ukrainian war. And he is not the foreign policy disaster that Hollande was, all the way around. One could imagine him a fairly competent foreign minister. But not Jupiter, never Jupiter.

Dethrone the king. Fuck!

 

serious

 
There is a Jewish myth recounted by the philosopher Shestov that goes like this: when the
angel of death comes down to close the eyes of man, the angel’s body is all covered with
eyes. Sometimes the angel discovers that he has made a mistake. The term of the man’s
life that he has come for still has more time to go. So the angel pulls one of the eyes
off his body and gives it to the man. “ … then the man sees strange and new things, more
than other men see and more than he himself sees with his natural eyes; and he also sees,
not as men see but as the inhabitants of other worlds see: that things do not exist
"necessarily", but "freely", that they are and at the same time are
not, that they appear when they disappear and disappear when they appear. The testimony
of the old, natural eyes, "everybody's" eyes, directly contradicts the
testimony of the eyes left by the angel. But since all our other organs of sense, and
even our reason, agree with our ordinary sight, and since the whole of human
"experience", individual and collective, supports it, the new vision seems to
be outside the law, ridiculous, fantastic, the product of a disordered imagination.”

 

Such men are then considered mad. And not only by others,but by their lawfully seeing selves. , “And then begins a struggle between two kinds of vision, a struggle of which the issue is as mysterious and uncertain as its origin.”

Long ago, I taught an intro philosophy class at Austin Community College – and by the way, let me say I love community colleges! Much more important than Harvard in the total scheme of things. There is a laudatory phrase in French – sérieux – which is inadequately translated by “serious”. It signifies a solid worker, a student who applies herself. It doesn’t mean the highest grades, it means the best intentions. And that is what I found at community college among students who had day jobs.  Anyway, there they were, there I was.  I would begin with this Shestov quote, thus forever corrupting my students vision of what philosophy is – if they took other classes, they’d learn it was all syllogisms and ignoble surrenders to convention. I was a terrible philosophy teacher. Not sérieux. But I did my best for my students.

So:  I am a stout adherent, even in my decline, of outlaw vision, the convergence of poetry and the love of wisdom. It is the romantic agony all over again, granted. Yet, I’d maintain that the eye covered angels are not happy about where humankind has gone. The gift of the third eye has been so collectively refused that we are in the same febrile state of conceptual imprisonment as was felt by people like Hugo Ball, one of the founders of Dada, before the First World War. Every headline is another  iron bar in our collective cage.

They are not what they appear and disappear when they appear. People at dinner parties talk of the climate apocalypse in thirty years and then pass around the delicious fish – or such is my experience. What’s not right is not right. Who doesn’t know this, even with two eyes?

Vienna 1921 - a poem by Karen Chamisso

 Vienna 1921

…. where, cigarladen, the “social vampire” steals

from a drunken greenhorn his daddy’s crowns:

Stören Sie nicht der Spiel!

A great admirer of tits, and morocco bound

Pornography, illustrations by Rops.

In the Cabaret Hölle your table, monsieurs

An occasional word with the cops

To smooth down any controvers.

The song surrenders to the singer

Her shorn eyebrows, her glossed back hair

its lips of glass, its sacre coeur.

Shall we linger

by the fall guy’s latest lair?

… his wife threw vitriol

At one of Europe’s famous flirts?

That face was not, although,

Marked – her hat received the worst

Of it… in the “fameux hôtel Sacher”

Behind the Opera, there they built

A love nest out of Masoch and Schnitzler

Everything in gold late Habsburg gilt.

Later: “Les femmes m’ont trompé, le jeu m’a trahi »

The cat, the fatal cat, is out for a spree.

Yellow gloved player in your mental cabaret

Your belly up deuces are leaden and gray.

- Karen Chamisso

The miniaturist of the apocalypse: Alfred Polgar

 

Alfred Polgar is a name that rings no chimes in the good old Anglosphere. His great fan, Clive James, the Australian essayist, tried to remedy that situation in his mini-encyclopedia, Cultural Amnesia; however, the effect of his article on Polgar is to make him seem untranslateable and forever in the corner pocket of the Habsburg Empire freaks out there. Unfair!

From the classic New Yorker talk of the town piece to Nicholson Baker, miniaturism has had an honourable place in English language lit. Polgar has a distinct family resemblance. His great period was in the interwar era – which, for German writers, ended in Germany in 1933, and in Austria a little later. Polgar was resolutely modern, a cinephile, a presence at the great modernist theatre events, Piscator and such. He was, ultimately, a reviewer – except what he reviewed was often a moment of streetlife, a smell from his childhood.
The quintessence of his art is in a little piece entitled “Orange Peel”. Here he reviews the reaction of a legless beggar to a man throwing away an orange peel. That’s the show, people. He explores the beggar’s motives for yelling at the man for throwing away the orange peel. Then he reviews his own motives for writing about it. Then he puts in doubt his own witnessing, as the evening was approaching, the light wasn’t right, and perhaps the beggar wasn’t legless after all.
“But let’s leave open the question of why the beggar’s soul slipped on the orange peel. Let us leave the small event, around which bloom psychological, social, ethical and cosmic perspectives, uninterpreted. Since, even so, the same circumstances broaden out and occur in heaven and on earth and between the two, we can surely authorize the question why just this story of the orange peel had to be written. Oh, whatever stuff must be written! My literary credo is that one should not write anything which a person cannot read with interest and implication an hour before her death. But that leaves not much other literature than the Bible and the stock market report (Kurszettel).”
Between God and the devil, the bible and the market: now that is an apocalyptic place for a minimalist writer! I love it.

Strike!

 

According to the Littre, the word grève – strike – comes from the Grève – the strip along the Seine behind the Hotel de Ville where, in the 18^th century, people hung out looking for work. There are places like that in all cities – in Austin, Texas, for instance, I remember working for someone who picked up day laborers down near I-35 in the center of the City. I believe that has moved since I left that town. But they will be somewhere – the day-by-days, the desperate, the Barbaric Yawp you can hire for minimum, pick em up at 8, drive em down there at 5.

That, according to Littre, the grève became a linguistic extension of that desperation – the worker becoming, voluntarily, the non-worker – is an etymology to be pondered.

Michelle Perrot, a historian known for her feminism, wrote a book in the wake of 1968: Workers on Strike in France, 1871-1890. Her purpose, besides the strictly historical one, was to understand the strike not as an empty form, but as a social complex. At one point she writes:  “It took May 1968 to remind us for a brief moment that a strike can be something other than a well-run economic scenario, that it can in fact be an expression of latent desires and repressed dreams, a freeing of both word and action, a festival [fete – party] of the assembled populace.”

That the great strikes are great parties is a shock to the Anglophone world. Parties are assigned to the upper class, the style section, the peeps with yachts. A strike – stopping work, by God! – has to be accomplished with solemn faces, with “ideals”, with a certain sense of sacrifice. The strike enters into the sacred realm.

But that realm just is, as well, the realm of the party. The party-sacrifice. Everybody’s pay is docked. Everybody blows trumpets and marches to a reggae beat, or to rap, or to the smokey arty songs of the 50s. To the great disgust of the bourgeoisie. It is by this disgust that you can diagnose them – it is alright to ask the boss for more wages, humbly, and it is all right if the boss, being a self-made man in a dog eat dog world, refuses the request and even institutes a healthful mass layoff – but to bring out the balloons and the saucisse sandwiches! It shows that you are really enjoying the idleness – and centuries and centuries have gone into the message that enjoying the idleness is reserved for the top ranks, only.

Perrot has a nice sense of the counter-seasonal reality of industrial labor, which is always being pushed back by the worker. Thus, the importance of May, of Spring, when working in a dusty building seems to go against human nature. She mentions a strike of the largely female work force at a glove factory:

“The women loved dancing. Their strikes took on the outward appearance of dances. At Ceton (Orne) where the Neyret glove factory employed a large female labor force (100 in the workshop, 600 in their own homes), “the day following the strike declaration, the whole population went to a meadow… and they danced there until dusk. At Ablain-Saint-Nazaire the stikes, female flint gatherers, went through the village streets led by a band, singing and dancing. They waved pocket handkerchiefs and aprons attached to long poles as banners… The day ended in an open-air dance.”

In The Age of Betrayal, Jack Beatty outlines the way labor was crushed in post-bellum America by the combination of media, the courts, Congress and the Executive. The joke of it all was that the highminded motivation here was “freedom” – free markets – and to uphold this freedom, workers were deprived of the freedom of association, speech, and in general of any activity that the establishment did not approve of. The New York Times, in the 1870s, was suspicious that labor strikers were actually not laborers at all, but “tramps” – how the NYT loves the unverified, country club rumor! Beatty digs out the particulars of the Railroad Strike of 1877 in Pittsburg, where the casualties amounted to around 40, the state guard gave the strikers the “rifle diet”, as the president of the railroad called it. Beatty does a good job of connecting the crushing of the strike and the ethnic cleansing going on in the borderlands. In both cases, what was being attacked was an older version of rights and properties.

It was the Homestead strike of 1892 that Beatty singles out as the turning point – a sort of Wounded Knee for the working class: “Homestead was an axial event. It portended the end of the skilled workers’ control over the pace of production, the eclipse of the nineteenth century entrepreneurial economy, and the triumph of corporate capitalism.” Homestead was a steel mill built on the plan of a prison or concentration camp, a place surrounded by barbed wire. Inside, conditions of work were such as to diminish the lifespan of the workers. “Fifteen to twenty men died a year at Homestead.”  But the workers, given the sweat and blood they literally spilled there, considered the plant their territory in some essential sense. As contemporaries wrote, and as Beatty asserts, the spirit of the skilled laborer took the skill as a property, with all its rights, against management. When the workers struck and occupied the plant, Carnegie Steel sent a private militia of Pinkertons against them. The ensuing battle was, really, a battle: the Pinkertons brought a cannon with them and bombarded the factory. The workers, armed, shot back. Since the Pinkertons were on barges on the river where the factory was located, the workers devised the strategy – probably taught to them by fathers who fought in the civil war – of sending rafts on fire against the barges. When the Pinkertons surrendered, the workers revenged the rifleshot and cannons that had cost them seven dead and sixty wounded by making the Pinkertons run the gauntlet in town. Women lined the streets and beat the Pinkertons, something that absolutely shocked the establishment.

The defeat of the Pinkertons was an excuse seized by Capital to get the Governor to call in the troops. And for Frick, who was running the steel company, to recruit strikebreakers. He preferred black strikebreakers – a clever strategy in the race war of the Jim Crow era. They were paid less, but as that pay was more than black workers could get in the South, they accepted it. Northern unions, who refused to accept black workers, paid for their racism with the use of the strikebreakers. Which of course led to the combination of racist and worker discourse, much to the satisfaction of the utterly white upper class. That strategy has been in place for a long, long time. It was in this way that the party of Lincoln reconciled the radical Republican demand for racial equality (in the South) with its middle and upper class demographic.

The strike has become old fashioned – such is the wisdom in the U.S. among the centrists. Indeed, the strike has become overloaded by government supervision, especially guided by a Supreme Court that, besides guarding white supremacy and female subordination, takes it role as crushers of worker associations for capitalist very, very seriously. We have still not seen the combination of strike and civil disobedience that is coming someday. In France, today, the cops are out in full. The reactionary Interior minister has, of course, seen to that. It is a grand tradition: when the right demonstrates, the cops leave them  a respectful space, when the left demonstrates, they are up in your face.

Liberation had an account of the utterly vapid thinking process in Macronie yesterday, which I’d recommend to anybody who can read French.  The Great Man has lept ahead of the “reform” – consider it done! What are people going to do, vote in people to undo the “reform”? Impossible! So now the Macronists are “brainstorming” for other hills to climb. Of course, ultimately they want to rely on the Le Pen card – go down the neolib road and lose your life in futile gestures nudged by thinktankers and business consultants, or you face – the Le Penists! Like Frick with his use of black strikebreakers, it is a strategy based on cynicism, hypocrisy, and the bottom line. Lets hope it blows up in their face before it is too late.

 

 

 

 

 

Longtermism - it's a gas

 

It is weird, to me, that philosophers and pundits think of “human extinction” as some kind of rapture. Would it be bad, would it be good?  There's a typical example in Aeon which is so high minded it leaves the mind completely.,

The go-to people regarding human extinction are not philosophers. The go-to people are engineers especially in petrochemicals. I want to say: read a book! Specifically, Alan  Weisman’s The World Without Us. Weisman, unlike such sage philosophers as William (best friend of Elon Musk) Macaskill and Derek Parfitt, actually noticed a few things. For instance, “one of the most monumental constructs that human beings have imposed on the planet’s surface. The industrial megaplex that begins on the east side of Houstaon and continues uninterrupted to the Gulf of Mexico, 50 miles away, is the largest concentration of petroleum refineries, petrochemical companies, and storage structures on Earth.”

This was written in 2007. There are probably larger concentrations that have been built since then. Anyhooo … what happens if there are no humans? Things go back to groovy nature? Fat chance. “Huge pockets of gas in the Gulf of Mexico or Kuwait would maybe burn forever. A petrochemical plant wouldn’t go that long, because there’s no much to burn. But imagine a runaway reactin with burning pllants throwing up clouds of stuff like hydrogen cyanide. There would be massive poisoning of the air in the Texas-Louisiana chemical alley. Follow the trade winds and see what happens.”

 

The particulates in the atmosphere could “create a mini chemical nuclear winter “They ould also release chlorinated ocmpounds like dioxins and furans from purning plastic. Andyou’d get lead, chromium and mercury attached to the soot. Europe and North America, with the biggest concentrations of refineries and chemical plants, would be the most contaminated. But the clouds would disperse through the world. The next generation of plants and animals, the ones that didn’t die, might need to mutate in ways that could impact evolution.”

All the human extinction movies that treat the industrial structure in which we all live – the gaspipes, the electrical plant, the nuclear plant, etc. – as a mere stage set for zombies and teenagers seem to have been adopted by “serious” philosophers pulling numbers for the possibility of human extinction out of their serious assholes and pondering them. It is as though philosophy has taken the spot that used to be inhabited by “experts” on “security” in the OOs, with their infallible advice about intervening in the Middle East and the life – although of course said experts never learned a word of Arabic. Similarly, the longtermist and existential risk crowd seem to think they move around smoothly in the natural world. They should ponder the more than five hundred salt domes underneath the Gulf of Mexico where we are storing our chemical shit.

This is, incidentally, one of the great effects of neoliberal culture – the distancing and detachment  from production. The overthrow of an ideology that spotlighted labor – Marxism – has drastically removed the spotlight – but not the labor.  The only production allowed in our entertainment is software tech. In reality, though, production has just been repressed in our collective unconscious. Nobody gets dirty daily on any tv sitcom anymore. But in reality, it still happens, and billions depend on those dirty handed wretches.  

As for the clean-hand crowd, palling around with oligarchs – I don’t have a word hard enough, succinct enough in my vocabulary of contempt to throw at them. Although I’ve been through trends in my life, and I know longtermism is short term.

my contempt level is high, lately

 The anti-woke people peaceably lived through the Great Incarceration of african-Americans, the occupation of Iraq and the subsequent massacres, the disaster of Afghanistan, the fall of the cretinous financial system and its propping up, the massive amplification of inequality, the wave of suicides and overdose deaths that have made the US lifespan lower - although sometimes they sternly put themselves into opposition and "resistance" to Trump! - but they draw the line at changing a jot or tittle of Charlie and the Choc. Factory. One thing is turning a blind eye to the disasters that loom over us, and another thing is changing a nostalgia object, available in about 10 million copies.

And why, they ask, are young wokesters so meeeann! Why, they are Stalinists!

Me, I have to check my contempt levels lately. Cause they are bad.

The American Pain

 

I noticed years ago that the American Pain, which used to die in shacks and mansions unheard, has migrated to the Net to be heard – for every pain wants an ear, desperately. Thus, my morbid fascination with the comments on YouTube videos, a vast lamentation. It is here that mothers grieve daughters gone to overdose, daughters grieve mothers gone to Covid, and crooked lives find, at least for a comment, some airing.

This is, I believe, a unique  ethical and aesthetic phenomenon. The blues came out of the American heartland, and scattered singers throughout the land. Seriously. I remember in Shreveport, in the 1970s, when I was working as a janitor at a warehouse, that at break, this one old battered warehouse lift operator would sometimes bring a guitar and sing “a shaky song”. Interrupting the ongoing dominos games.

It makes sense to me, in a painful way, these voices, these anecdotes shared with nobody. The boy who overdoses and dies with the headphones on, the Dad who crashes and burns listening to some R.E.M. song. It is surprising and not surprising at all that so little ruckus is made about the more than million overdose deaths in America in the last decade, or the way suicide has become the number one way out for the under 35 year old cohort. In other times, this amount of pain would have moved mountains, would have somehow rocked the boat.

But it hasn’t, so it ends up in YouTube video comments. This could be one of those YouTube video comments.

Cracking wise

 

When Edith Wharton’s dramatization of her novel, The Age of Innocence, flopped on Broadway, William Howells consoled her by saying that Americans prefer their tragedies to have a happy ending.

I like this because Edith Wharton and William Howells seem class stratospheres above the bootlegger or the private detective, and yet here they are, cracking wise.

The wisecrack has not gotten the philosophical respect it, perhaps, deserves, even as it encodes a very urban American notion of wise. Wise is wisened up. Wise is not a stage in the quest to understand what I know, it is knowledge roughened on the street, knowledge that knows the gangster and the banker, knowledge that drank bathtub gin in the twenties and snorted cocaine in the eighties.

Americans like their wisecracks. I am hopelessly American in that respect.

George Nathan, Mencken’s partner in crime in the twenties, anatomized  the stereotypical comic wisecrack in American theatre in an essay published in his theater column for the American Mercury in 1926. He presents a collection of forms that are still recognizable in tv sitcoms on Netflix - never reaching their sell-by date. There is the What do you think you are? A …. Which is varied by where do you think you are, who do you think you are, etc. There’s the This isn’t a x, it’s a y – that isn’t a stomach, it’s Mount McKinley, ta da, ta da. Variations of if that’s a x, I’m a y – if that’s a diamond, I’m a Rockerfeller – to be said when looking at paste jewels.  There’s the “if I had a x like that, I’d y” – Nathan’s example is, If I had a face like that, I’d sue myself for damages.

Nathan’s conclusion cracks wise on the wisdom of the wisecrack:

“What we obviously have in these forms are a half dozen branches on the family tree of the so-called wise-crack. The wise-crack, as I have noted before, is the species of repartee that from time immemorial has been accompanied on the vaudeville and burlesque stages either by a boot applied to its sponsor’s seat or by a newspaper applied to his nose. It is humor that proceeds in no wise from character but simply from a dummy that serves as the mouthpiece of the state writer. It relies for laughter solely upon itself’; what has gone before it, whether in dialogue or character drawing or dramatic action or what not, is utterly immaterial. It may be isolated from its context and, unlike ture comedic humor, loses nothing in the process. And it is today the worst handicap under which American comedy writing is laboring.”

I am not so down on the wisecrack as Nathan. I object to the idea that the wisecrack is a wholly textual devise – I see in it some oral grace, or at least some oral descent. It is cousin to playing the dozens, and to the barbershop quartet of jokes and remarks which carry the flow between haircuts and shave and gel and the mirror. The waitresses putdown, the bartender’s assessment.  All of which are routines. Routines, behind the back of literary critics still looking for rituals, are the real repetitions in modernity.

And that is the reason that the wisecrack can be isolated from its context. Its context is the drama of the routine, the scheduled action, the expected time. And the great wisecrack writers – Thurber, Lardner, Hammett, Chandler, Parker, Ephron, Perelman, etc. etc – all work with routines, and in some cases – I’m thinking here of Lardner and Parker – of routine as existence itself. Wisecracking leads to a certain savagery: the deadeyed cliches mouthed by Jim Thompson’s deputy sheriff in The Killer Inside me is all about the wisecrack frozen in murder.

And that is American comedy with an unhappy ending. Slip the yoke and reverse the joke.

Little Black Sambo and the sentimental heart of White Supremacy: or, Roald Dahl and bookburners against bookburning

 The pseudo-controversy about editing Roald Dahl's books to suppress bigoted material for the woke crowd - just one incident in the history of the slice n dice of Dahl's books, which nobody seems to have ever objected to before (the Ladybird edition of Charlie and the Chocolate factory book, for instance, trims the 180 pages down to 48 for young readers. The horror!) reminds me of the suburban Atlanta of my youth - back in the wondrous 60s, when the civil rights era was upsetting all the verities! Back then, the suburban white crowd was upset about the censorship of everybody's fave classic, Little Black Sambo. How could one deny white kids and even the colored kids such a wondrous comic classic? That and a couple of lynching postcards, and you would have a fine breath of the American mind.

The banning of Little Black Sambo was probably told to little future Fox News figures as a horror story: surely it was the Jews and the liberals that did it! Looking around for that history, I found out it started - aha! - in Canada.

"Is The Story of Little Black Sambo, the children’s book written and illustrated by Helen Bannerman in 1899, the fantastical tale of a heroic boy who faces danger courageously, outwitting tigers and being rewarded with pancakes? Or is it a prejudiced story whose caricaturized illustrations of blacks had invidious and hurtful effects on generations of black children? That was the question faced by the Toronto Board of Education in 1955 when a concerned parent objected to Sambo‘s presence in his son’s school. The ensuing debate prompted a furor across North America."

The north American nations, founded on a pretty rigid system of racism, but with democratic appurtenances, are prone to these fights. If there is one field that the white supremicist impulse holds dear, it is its popular culture, from Aunt Jemima to Buckwheat.

It rather warms my heart that at the beginning of the fight over Little Black Sambo, the proto-woke opponent was an open communist - a woman named Edna Ryerrson. The Cold War liberal version of Communism was that Communists were just entrapping and using black people - not like the Cold War liberals, who was all about gradual change and equality in, perhaps, 2100.

Edna Ryerson urged that a committee report on the book. A committee did, and saw - of course - that free speech and childhood joy would be impeded by any block to its circulation of being assigned in class:

"The resulting report written by Phimister and Director of Education C.C. Goldring and tabled on January 6, 1956 was dismissive of Braithwaite’s concerns {Braithwaite was the black parent who had complained to Ryerson]. “It is felt that it is unwise to ban from the Public Schools a book which has such a wide appeal for children,” it concluded, “and which cannot be said to be discriminatory in that it is a children’s fantasy which portrays a little negro boy who has a great adventure in the jungle, from which he emerges successfully.” Newspaper coverage of this initial debate likewise denied any legitimacy to Braithwaite’s claims, dismissing the very idea of racial intolerance in Toronto as Communist rabble-rousing."

The woke have, of course, taken the place of the Communists. It is almost as if there were a structural and systematic defense of white supremacy that we can detect here. But shucks, that can't be true!

The debate about the book could be transported to Florida today, and it would seem like just another news item about the important work De Santis is doing in de-trumpizing the GOP and making it a wonderful party once again!

"A fiery, 90-minute debate followed, with Ryerson’s attempts to speak repeatedly cut off by the chairman. “I am somewhat tired of you making political issues out of racial issues,” chairman D.M. Morton loudly declared to the Communist trustee.

“This is book-burning,” superintendent Phimister declared, warning his colleagues that they’d be setting themselves on a dangerous path “along the same lines as book-burning and censoring to which there is no end.” He added: “‘Sensitivity to the word Sambo is in the minds of the minority and not of the majority. The word Sambo doesn’t mean anything bad to me.” Another trustee added that his own children loved the story and they’d “never thought of it as prejudicial to any race.” Another conceded that the book should be removed, but only from specific schools where it was perceived to cause offense."

This is a regular candybox of rightwing and centrist canards. I especially like the mention of book burning by the same people who would turn around and ban any book that criticized in any way the racism of the "majority" - that would be considered, at the time, just communistic, and in our time, as too woke. Can't have that! And so it is that the bookburners decry bookburning and their children see Sambo as an adorable object. The beat goes on and on in the moronic inferno.

Two anecdotes

 Two anecdotes

“Every prominent landholding family in the Rajput caste, I discovered, inherited a family of oral genealogists, musicians, and praise singers, who celebrated the family's lineage and deeds. It was considered a disgrace if these minstrels were forced by neglect to formally "divorce" their patrons. Then they would break the strings of their instruments and bury them in front of their patron's house, cutting the family off from the accumulated centuries of ancestral songs, stories, and traditions. It was the oral equivalent of a library or a family archive being burned to cinders.” This is from William Dalrymple Home in India.

I love those broken strings, that burial! This anecdote is good for thinking - it is of that type, nearing the status of a parable. Isn’t this what happened, on a macro scale, in the 19th century, as art became detached from the old systems of patronage – from the aristocracy, the court and the church? Visual art was and is as inflected by this detachment as by any formal shift in its consciousness – or I should say that the formal shifts, like the cutting of the strings of the instrument, were unconsciously related to the moment of detachment. The melancholy of emancipation, if you will.

Another anecdote, this one from Leonor Fini’s letters. Fini is an amazing person who has rather been forgotten or at least marginalized. She was an artist who was fully equal to the other surrealist painters of her time. And she was a figure in Tout Paris, a fashionista, a wearer of Schiaparelli, a women who liked to refer to her own nervous beauty in her letters to her rather louche writer-lover, Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues. Her acerbic comments on the fashionable and artsy in the interwar period are fascinating – Richard Overstreet, in his introduction to the letters, writers of her “sovereign way of redefining the relation between the sexes”. These sovereigns, these self-appointed kings and queens, these celebrities, these rebel rebels!

So, in 1935, she writes to Pieyre de M. about De Chirico. She knows him both as a painter and another Italian in Paris. There’s a De Chirico shown at the galerie Percier. Kahnweiler finds a Czech client who wants to buy it. The client says he would be “happy to have a dedication from de Chirico behind the canvas.” So De Chirico shows up a few days later and says: “I never made that painting. It is really a pigstye (cochonnerie)! I have never painted that genre of canvas, etc. etc.”

“Can [Fini’s name for Kahnweiler] explains to De Chirico that the painting has been sold and that is the way it is, it is rather tedious. So De Chirico declares, okay, it is really no bother. He writes an affectionate dedication behind the canvas and says: if you need some older paintings, don’t buy them from the dealers, come to me.” Some days later another client shows up, asking for an older De Chirico of the same period. Can goes to De Chirico, who says: I don’t know one, but I can make one in a few hours. (In fact, he painted it, I saw it, it is a disgrace). I find all this strange and hallucinating. There is certainly a side of De Chirico that is practical, a little naïve and piggish, which wants to cheat and make money. One thing is certain: the original painting wasn’t a counterfeit. It is typical of De Chirico to say it is.”

I love this anecdote. Fini’s letters were published long after Derrida wrote “The Truth in Painting”, but this anecdote, with its intricate knitting of the true and the false – much like Poe’s story of the Purloined letter – has that fine castrated parable glide to it, a solution in search of an enigma.