The magicians of the apocalypse: Germany, 1925-1933

 

To read the signs and portents of carnival shows and curiosity cabinets is no mean feat.

There were many such shows, and many readers, in Weimar Germany. As the Nazi event horizon neared, the magicians became more intrusive, and the readers became more puzzled.

Hanussen was the most famous of the magicians, a fortuneteller who, though a Jew, somehow convinced himself that he was a member of the Nazi inner circle. He was disabused of this notion on March 25, 1933, when three S.A. agents dragged him out of his apartment to a Gestapo barrack, where he was beaten and stabbed to death.

Krakauer described Hanussen’s show in a report for the Frankfurter Zeitung: „Der Hellseher im Varieté“ (The cabaret clairvoyant) in June, 1932. Kracauer found his gifts of prophecy less impressive than his “profane talent for creating a mood in the audience.” Hanussen would sit enthroned at center stage with a black band around his eyes and, receiving a card with the name of one of the spectators, tell them of events that had happened in their past. Kracauer found this part of the act rather tedious, since the events were common, and the addition of context by Hanussen was such that the spectator would agree to it without exactly having any proof – the memory of the event would, rather, conform to the words of the magician. It wasn’t in the words, though, that Kracauer saw the eeriness of the act, but in the way the audience was entirely wrapt up in Hanussen’s presence, and would stare at the black band over his eyes as if it were a portal to the future. “A heavy sense of excitement that showed how, in this crisis, there was a mounting expectation of a miracle.”

Another spectator of the stage magician’s art was Joseph Roth. He, too, wrote a feuilleton for the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1925 – a less fevered year – about a magician named Rha-Min-Tho. Where Kracauer’s piece was all about the magician who enchanted an audience, Roth’s piece was about the comedy of the audience member who sought to demystify the magician’s tricks. The throne on which Hanussen was mounted was at the center of his act; for Roth, though, it was the spotlight that took … well, the spotlight.

An audience member – mostly male – would come to Rha-Min-Tho’s show and at a certain point, would be invited to come onto the stage to monitor, i.e. expose, the magician – or, as the magician would put it, to show that his tricks were not explicable by natural laws or devices.

I am not sure if Roth’s reportage has been translated. But it is a shrewd… parable of sorts. Here’s the two paragraphs I like:

In any case, the audience is with Rha-Min-Tho, even when he makes mistakes;  and even evening a man climbs out of the seats and onto the stage to persuade himself that it is impossible to explain the miraculous feats of the magician in a natural way. Most are intelligent gentlemen, well adjusted gentlemen, one can even say: MEN. Men who are confident that they can catch out the magician at his tricks, who are not afraid of the stagelights and the spotlight or of the expectant and slightly mocking glances of the magician. Often it is a man who has come with his wife, and leaves her sitting in the seats, without being afraid of embarrassing himself before her, certain of his effect on the stage as of his inextinguishable power over the heart of his companion.

Unfortunately, this is a mistake. In private life he is, perhaps, a powerful personality, a sergeant, a police officer, a court official – and he wears the clothes made by some reliable tailor, allowing him to sit without wrinkling it, hiding his bodily dieficiencies and emphasizing his good physical attributes. As long as he is sitting there in the seats, he is a respectable gentlemen with gravitas. However, in the moment he ascends the stage, the spotlight falls upon him like a pitiless robber and strips him of all his virtues. In the unflattering white light we see that the good humored man has a belly, a laughable double chin, red, protruding ears. His coat is wrinkled, his pants are too short, his laces in his boots are done up any which a way, his heals are worn and the soles have a light though distinct crumpled curve.”

Ah, these men! In Roth’s view, they come out of the seats of the audience thinking that they will be the audience’s favorite – don’t they represent the intelligent section of the audience, probably dragged there by their women? And yet they find out, on stage, that the audience is with the makeupped magician, the trickster, the effeminate showman! He does, our rational man, search the stage and watch the magician’s gestures closely, but it is all in vain and was from the very beginning.

What use is this all to him? He never had the sympathy of the public, whose ambassador and delegate he actually is. On the contrary: the public is much more sympathetic to the magician. Perhaps the audiences’ pants are also too short, but at least they aren’t being displayed on the stage – and even when they are of the buckled type.“

Cagliostro and the dupes – a motif that keeps turning up, mysteriously, in times of crisis. And especially when the dupes have lost our sympathy.

On not seeing the wood for the trees

 

John Heywood, like many a gentleman in Henry VIII’s England, was not pleased by the Henry’s conversion to the weird Protestantism that has stuck around in the United Kingdom ever since. He was a Catholic, and he wrote as a Catholic, and he was imprisoned as a Catholic in 1544. But being burnt as a Catholic was a big ask: so he was granted a pardon and repented before “the citizens of London at Paul’s Cross.” A good thing too, as he delivered, after that date, his chief claim to fame: A dialogue conteinyng the nomber in effect of all the prouerbes in the englishe tongue …

In Anthony a Woods microbiography of Heywood, he is described as a wit, but not a logician. He was a great favorite with Henry, who found his witty sayings funny; and with Thomas More, who sympathized with his faith.

Here is a passage from Heywood’s dialogue that still lives on the English speaking tongue:

An olde saied sawe, itche and ease, can no man please.
Plentie is no deyntie. ye see not your owne ease.
I see, ye can not see the wood for trees.
Your lyps hang in your light. but this poore mā sees
Bothe howe blyndly ye stande in your owne lyght,
And that you rose on your right syde here ryght.
And might haue gon further, and haue faren wurs.

The variation that I have heard all my life is: not seeing the forest for the trees.

Which is a phrase that contains a deep psychological insight, as the Gestalt school in the twentieth century would show.

In the metro Atlanta countryside, one is astonished by the arboreal mass. Fly into L..A. and you see buildings and lights; fly into Atlanta and you see arboreal cover. I was sitting on my brother’s porch the other day, staring out at the pine tree/deciduous mix that came up to the lawn line like nomads come to decline civilization and all its attributes, and I was thinking about politics. Sadly. America is in the grip of Mr. T mania. I’m among the strong antis. But the question on all of our minds is, are we not seeing the forest for the big fuckin’ orange tree?

I imagine John Heywood, in his house in North Mims, Hertfordshire (near More’s dwelling), might have looked out at woods. According to Anne Rowe’s environmental history of Hertfordshire, it was the site of a familiar double whammy: the common land was being privatized, and the woods were being chopped down in the 16^th century: “Divers parcels of wood’ – said to be at least 80 years old – were felled and sold for 160 pounds from the 200 acre common “woodgrounde’ called Mayne Wood in the parishes of Tring and Wigginton in 1584. The aunathorised felling of substantial amounts of timber and underwood from the 300 acre “great wood”, another common wood, was recorded in the court rolls of the manor of Caddington in the 1680s and 1590s…”

Heywood may well have profited from wood sales, but he was a poet who saw the trees in the forest, and his heart went out to them.

In the Low Countries, the great theorist, so to speak, of collecting proverbs was Erasmus, who wrote: “If Hesiod is right a popular saying is never meaningless.”

Recent historians have put their boot into the idea that Heywood or Erasmus were really listening to the milkmaid and the tavern keeper – the proverbs they collected came from text. Perhaps. Or perhaps text confirmed what they heard, gave them the courage to put it down. At the same time Heywood was presenting us with his Western Zen saying, Brueghel was painting his proverb paintings, which were not given any ancient context. As for Heywood, in his preface he understands the great thing about proverbs: that they are found and heard. Perhaps in Hesiod, a text; and perhaps in the converse of ax men and carters and wetnurses and court hangers-on, where what an ancient Sage said three thousand years ago is all unconsciously echoed.

“That almost in all thinges good lessons they teache.
This write I not to teache, but to touche. for why,
Men knowe this as well or better than I.
But this and this rest, I write for this.
Remembryng and consyderyng what the pith is
That by remembrance of these prouerbes may grow
In this tale, erst talked with a frende, I showe
As many of theim as we coulde fytly fynde,
Fallyng to purpose, that might fall in mynde.
To thentent [intent] the reader redyly may
Fynde theim and mynde theim, when he will alway.”

And so we talk the summer evening away, here in Georgia.

Corporate governance and the Paramount firing of Colbert

 Peeps be getting mad about the cancellation of Colbert, since the trigger seemed to be him mocking Paramount bribing Mr. T. And that is some justified anger!

But shuffle a little of that anger to the deeper cause, which is our old friend, regulations on corporate governance.

The problem is less Paramount (though definitely boo Paramount) than the erosion and annulation of old New Deal to Great Society regulations on corporations and large enterprises.. Shareholders now rule absolutely. Stakeholders - consumers, contractors, and the general public - should have representatives on all interstate businesses, or enterprises above a certain size, measured in employees.

Now am I some goddamn expert on corporate governance? Come on, look at me! I'm a sad and shabby outsider. But our good friends over at the Roosevelt Institute have been at this a long time. Go to this article by Lenore Palladino and Kristina Karlsso. https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/.../towards-accountable.../

They make four comparatively modest suggestions to break the stranglehold of “shareholder primacy” , also, in technical legal jargon, known as "dickheads sitting on your face forever". Here they are:

"-Boards of directors should be accountable to all stakeholders, not just shareholders. Specifically, board “fiduciary duty” should run to all stakeholders;

-Corporate purpose statements should include a requirement that corporations positively benefit society;

-Multiple stakeholders should be represented on corporate boards; and

-Large corporations should be required to charter federally,"

Those with sharp eyes will notice that the last suggestion goes all the way back to Teddy Roosevelt. In fact, Roosevelt's Progressive party pushed for an even more radical suggestion, which would have outlawed P and E splits that we are used to in the stock market today.

To quote myself from something I wrote all by myself back in the day:

There was, back in those days, a burning issue that has flamed out so much since that the very word brings an eery blank to the mind: overcapitalization. The reason this figured so heavily as a scare word among the progressives is that the era from the turn of the century to the establishment of the Interstate Commerce Commission, in 1914 – which is generally taken to bookend the progressive moment – saw the instantiation of what Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, claims is the founding moment of modern American capitalism: the subjugation of industry to finance. This was a moment that expressed itself on several fronts – for instance, the Courts finally cleared up the confusion about how property law applied to corporations – creating a new form of property, defined by John Commons this way: [the old common law definition] … is Property, the other is Business. The one is property in the sense of Things owned, the other is property in the sense of exchange-value of things. One is physical objects, the other is marketable assets.” [quoted by Sklar, page 50]

One of the results of this legal change, or rather, one of the reasons it came about, was that the notion of a corporation as a body issuing stock was changing. And that change brought up the charge of overcapitalization – that a corporation, instead of finding its raison d’etre in using its assets to produce a good or service on which it made a profit, was now an entity wrapped up entirely in the market for its stocks.

In 1911, a bill was voted through the House of Representatives and narrowly turned down in the Senate that would have smashed this legal structure. S. 232 built on legislative ideas already crafted during Roosevelt’s term (remember, Roosevelt was in the wings in 1911, and would run in 1912, thus ruining Taft’s chance at a second term). S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more. S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.”

Take that, Mr. Tariffs!

So the next time you are shocked by your fave media product being canceled and censored, give a thought to corporate governance. There are many avenues to the overthrow of the plutocracy - this is one of them.

The world as will and representation: take one

 

I decided that this summer, I would re-read Ulysses – which I do about every five years – and read a vast text I have never read all of: Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, starting with the numerous forewords which big S. generated for editions of the work. I’m discovering that one of the reasons that Schopenhauer’s place in literature is more prominent than his place in philosophy courses is that he attacked the very idea of academic philosophy with might and main in that preface. Of course, Schopenhauer, with that white springing doo of his, is a sort of iconic philosopher attack dog, so what do you expect? At the same time, he’s a funny writer. And a paradoxical stylist.

That is another thing philosophers have generally been averse to: a literary style. If a theory  aint reducible to various counters, it doesn’t count, is the idea. A strange idea, I think.

Anyway, I’ll probably write more about the big S. (as I will probably irritatingly call him), but here I just want to point out a connection with the big W. – and that is not Wagner, but Wittgenstein.

One of the most famous sentences in modern philosophy comes at the end of the Tractatus. The whole glorious thing, in English translation, reads like this:

“6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

There is something a little strange about the introduction, at the very end of the book, of the “me”: My propositions. Meine Sätze. How are these kinds of things the kind of matter that can be subjected to such a possessive, such an assertion of an “I”? There is something here that chimes in with the large and devouring paradox of Schopenhauer’s prefaces to his Opus, which is that “his idea” – which is how he calls it in the forward to the first edition in 1817 is both so unified and whole as a truth that it seems unnecessary to write a whole book about it – just spit it out, man! – and at the same time can’t be spoken in the preface at all and must be chased by the reader not only throughout the books of the World as Will  and Representation but even in paratexts, such as Schopenhauer’s “Over the four-fold root of the principle of sufficient reason.”

“How to read this book so as to understand it in the greatest possible degree I propose here to set forth. – What might be communicated by this is a single unique thought. Yet I could not, in spite of all efforts, find a shorter way to communicate it than this whole book.“

Another way to the paradox is to ask a version of Leibniz’s question (why is there something rather than nothing): why are there proofs rather than self-evident propositions?

In Wittgenstein’s Vienna, Janik and Toulmin show that Schopenhauer was a key precursor of the Viennese “turn to language” in the 1890-1914 period. The discussion, however, turns on Schopenhauer’s ideas, separated from Schopenhauer’s presentation of his ideas.

Which makes me wonder.

Georgia on my mind

 

Once again to the shores of the New World.

We’ve now flow considerable times back to America from our French hidey holes, and so we have an expectation that the whole routine, the packing, the transport to and fro, the security, the waiting, the queuing, the stowing of carryon, will all unfold a bit like Hobbes’ description of uncivilized life, short and brutal, although hopefully not bloody.

This time, of course, the New World, from the image in the papers, was sunk in a fascist morass, so I was a bit worried. For twenty five years, ever since I skipped from zines to the web page, I have let my opinions roam largely across the big, beautiful Net, like millions of others, and in my experience they have not exactly intruded into the zone of celebrated opinionmakers, but have been far back in the pack, along with the livejournal rants disgruntled adolescents, the geocities musings on family history by last name obsessives, the fanzines and porno stories and paranoia of the hoi polloi. So my reality check superego knew that I had nothing to worry about. But my paranoid Id has never believed my dull and reasonable superego – fuck that! – and, according to my beloved, I have never seen a cop drive by, when I am driving, without saying: oh oh!

In truth, in my twenties and thirties, when I had a Lew Harvey Oswald smirk on my face half the time, the polizei did not like me. In the town of Pecos, New Mexico, where I lived for a while, the police chief (who commanded a force of one) had so little to do that he stopped me quite frequently. I think it was simply that he wanted me and my roommates to find some other town to live in – Pecos not being friendly to strangers back then. We eventually obliged.

In any case, as the trip loomed larger, I decided not  to read the paper’s stories about hostile interactions at airports, since they seemed too bizarre. Why would the border patrol or whatever put two nice German tourists in the pokey and then expel them? Did they really care about some French dud carrying a polemical book about American politics? It was like my motherland, or homeland, or simply the peapot I was born and bred in had gone crazy.

My superego, that unbearably smug bureaucrat, proved correct. It was actually the simplest airport interaction we ever had. We answered the perfunctory questions (are you or have you ever been Canadian? Are you carrying fentanyl or any French cheeses? Like that) and we were delivered into the wonderful colossus of the Atlanta international airport.

 

The Global War on Terror is gone - Al qaeda is still here

 Back in the winter of 2001, who among us would have predicted that the ragtag paramilitaries under a Saudi failson would outlast the "Great War on Terror"? Yet, here we are in 2025, and a branch of Al Qaeda has just overthrown Assad in Syria and is settled down to rule the place, while the allies of Al qaeda, the Taliban, kicked the U.S. out of Afghanistan, and nobody says peep about what just happened over these 24 years.

Because when the American establishment, liberal center and fascist, absolutely fails, that failure goes in the burn pile and no questions are asked.

Looking over the era of the GWOT from the era of the Big Beautiful Bill, I'm thinking: the end of the Cold War system was truly the end of both of the hyperpowers. The U.S. is in the process of plucking its own eyes out, defunding health care, funding cage matches for immigrants, destroying the constitution by way of originalist readings that have turned into mock misreadings, etc. What we all know. The two political parties have become jokes that have no interest in what their voters think, and that is on top of the years of having hardly any interest in what their voters think.

Let the dead bury their own dead is the moral of the tale. Perhaps out of the ruin of the Dem party can arise something that names itself the Dem party but is utterly dedicated to getting rid of the plutocracy and confronting the huge problems that have been thrust, decade by decade, into the background. We can measure the cost of that effort - it is 20 trillion dollars, the amount the U.S. has borrowed in order not to have a Social Democracy.

Its a ruinous little epoch we have on our hands, here.

Drifting. A song for the 4th, sorta

 

1.

Comes a time when you’re drifting, sang Mr. Neil Young in 1977. Or was it 78?

I thought about that line this 4^th.

The news about the slow downfall of secondary education at the state and private levels since January hasn’t really surprised me that much. When the jewel of American culture, the amazing college and university system that arose post-WWII, was at its peak, it seemed pretty obvious to the right that this was a very bad thing. The protests about the Vietnam war, the coddling of leftwingers among the teachers, and the idea that the children of the mob could study Shakespeare and write poetry instead of learning how to optimize their movements on the assembly line  – this simply and absolutely went counter to the tradition-based view of society. The solution, which started in Reagan’s California and became the norm, was to raise the price of education. But as the mob still wanted in, the compromise with the liberal-center was to keep raising the price while at the same time making it easy to get loans for that price. Thus, out of the jewel we extracted a mashup of the system of indentured servitude and the system of liberal education. But mashups are not syntheses. Eventually, they come apart.

Thus slowly, slowly, one of the great features of modernity – a feature that has roots as much in the medieval city and the culture of pilgrimage as in the breakup of the old patriarchal household, in which the extended family all lived together – the period of drift, fell prey to the new norms of debt and continuous labour.

Hard workin’, as Democratic candidates like to say. Hard working families. They work hard. Hard hard hard. It is hammered in with nails. Because the master always wants the serfs to work hard. And in that hard work, you fill in the space of drift. It is an offense and also leads to crime and drugs!

2.

I look at myself as a relic from that older era.

At that time Mr. Young was singing his line about drifting, I was a young sprout and I was drifting. Like many another young sprout, patched and peeled in the suburbs and spit out into the great America that I romanticized through numerous books and popular songs and movies.

I thought of it then, because I did recognize this was drift,  as a necessary phase, especially for a young buck who wanted to become a writer. To me, a writer was attached by every thread to experience, and experience was an adventure. The Wild West was not some historic fiction, it was right outside, you could walk into it any time.  Everything about the America of the sixties and seventies encouraged the thought that drifting and experience were all balled up together. Ishmael’s feeling was mine:

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

The period of drift was made extraordinarily easy for me and my kind by the wondrous archipelago of colleges and universities across the Grand Old Country. You check in, you check out. And even while I was taking classes, I was working in all kinds of jobs.

I worked as a washer in a pizza place, a carpenter’s assistant, a parking lot attendant, a janitor in a Sears Warehouse in Shreveport, Louisiana, a clerk in a hardware store, a furniture maker and deliverer, a landscape crew manager. I worked in a bookstore, I worked in a library, I worked in a diner. And I quit. Oh, quitting was one of the greatest pleasures in the world. To quit – who has ever sung the song of quitting? I remember, for instance, one summer when I was on a crew building a warehouse, and because I was too afraid to work on the roof, which required walking on crossbars yeah wide while carrying tools with the ground 30 foot under,  I was put under the thumb of a young thug, the pup of the owner of said warehouse, who would make me get in the cab of a lift that would take me up  those thirty feet. The thug would juggle me for a joke there, lowering and raising the cab. I took it for a week, being this idiot’s assistant. And then I quit. I think that day, the day I quit with no job in sight and no mowhney to pay the rent on the lousy little attic apartment I had at that time in Atlanta, was one of the happiest days in my life.

This could only have happened in a culture that preserved, reluctantly, a social space for the drift. Almost all my friends drifted, at one point or another. When I worked in the pizza joint – a place called Jaggers cattycornered from the entrance of Emory University, where I’d learned, for instance, all about Dilthey from a professor named Rudolf Makkreel, I fell into a crewe consisting of a lesbian cook who wanted to be a rabbi and goat breeder, a Gay Rights advocate waiter and Don Juan, a long haired, rather short punk who turned me on to Captain Beefheart, and the genial husband of another waitress who took me out to his favorite strip joint. I remember scrubbing the pizza pans, black iron pans, with steel wool, and how I’d get little splinters in my fingers. I remember throwing out the garbage, so much garbage, in the dumpster in the parking lot. I remember feeling this is it: the Wild West!

3.

And such was drift for one middle class white boy. But it would be a huge mistake to think that drift in America, a country founded by drifters, expanded by drifters and killers, and immigrated to, hugely, by drifters – it would be a mistake to think this was some privilege of my race, class, and gender. My aspirant rabbi friend, the Wiccan who I was afraid of who lived across the street from me there in Atlanta and sold drugs, the gay rights activist, the woman who I worked with at the hardware store who alternated between berating her husband, the fireman, and cheating on him with an obvy lowlife, the manager of that store who eventually went to prison for dipping in the till to pay for his gambling losses – this whole glorious collective that I can only call “my” life with a distorting simplification, so much was it ours – this was all within the drift.

And nobody hated the drift so much as those whose distant ancestors were all drifters. The whole of post 70s politics and social science was dedicated to eliminating, once and for all, drifting. And replacing it with debt and a policed underclass. Drifting moved to the Style section of the NYT, and was strictly for Nepo celebs. Who business planned and selfied their whole drift.

4.

When this is over, when the Chinese century has buried the brief time of the American hegemon, I think that drifting will reappear. It is structurally part of the revolution in social time that took place when the patriarchal house disintegrated, and though that house is being put back together, thirty year olds are now living with their parents and the age at which people marry is going up and up, I am certain this will fail. The stocks will fail. The tech companies will fail. The AI will fail. The climate will fail. The attempt to reinstitute racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The attempt to negotiate a centrist racism, homophobia and misogyny will fail. The housing market will fail, the police explosion will fail, the borders will fail.

And drift will remain. Thank God. Happy fourth!

 

Plath

 I was a bit afraid when I read the byline: Patricia Lockwood. Who, perhaps unfairly, I have defined as the London Review of Books putdown artist.

She is reviewing Sylvia Plath’s prose.

Or that is the excuse. As we know from Lockwood’s other reviews, the book at hand is a skelton-key to all the books and the life

And we all know that Plath’s life is a pinata, everybody has a whack at it.

Nobody seems to be at all fascinated by John Berryman’s suicide. Or Randall Jarrell’s, if, as some of his friends assert, the accident (a car, he was walking by the side of the road, apparently) was no accident. But Plath’s suicide, with the gas, the door to the children’s room stopped up with some cloth to make sure they didn’t breath in the gas, the milk and bread for their lunch – this is a scenario that keeps floating out there, as though the poems were simply adjuncts to the story.

I have a lot of sympathy for Plath, and for the poems: basically, I heart those poems, and not just the Ariel poems. Janet Malcolm’s telling of the Plath tale was oddly numb to the poems; although it was really a telling of the Plath story as told by others. Malcolm is upfront: she is with the Hugheses.

I’m not.

So I was a bit afraid that this would be a takedown, a tackle, once again, of the “poet-ess” supposedly loved by Coeds in their Ivies. With such an audience, suspicion falls on the author. Or so goes the usual rant.

However, Lockwood twisted herself from her own grip, her own take down routine. And her essay about Plath is one of her best essays, I think.

She does some likeable things, Lockwood. For instance, she starts writing poetry herself. Yes! The academic grin about Plath, all her nonsense, becomes especially sardonic about people writing like Plath. That form of grin does not, of course, form on the mouth when regarding all the poets who started writing like Eliot. But Plath!

Lockwood writes:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.

Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0

Aseries of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I thought then that she seemed too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal.

The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.

The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.

If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around the shoulder, that need to shelter someone who has proved almost frighteningly enduring. People pass out of the narrative while still she stands. Her death seemed to drive people back on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar:

I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. ‘I have done it again!’ Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying: ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap!’

I’m not sure whether it was fast or gradual. The assignment was The Collected Prose, released by Faber last year and clocking in at around eight hundred pages. I read that first and then her journals; they are especially rich to read in the mornings. Then The Bell Jar, as good as I remember; then a glance at the smoking crater of the Plath-Hughes myth; then The Collected Poems, fresh as fish, and arrayed in shining scales. The rhythm of my notes changed, went in threes, lapped, lengthened.

“One day in metalsmithing class, I picked up a book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern, first published in 1932. It is about everything that can happen in a rectangle. The rectangle was the page. I thought of Plath’s poem ‘Stillborn’. I read ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ in the courtyard of the coffee shop, where two students at the next table were having a loud conversation about whether it was ethical to bring children into the world. I wrote, very quickly, a poem called ‘Dynamarhythmic Design’. For some reason, for the next three weeks, it kept going. Three, four or five poems a day. There were rules, seemingly handed down from her; I followed them. Write the poems straight through from beginning to end, and tell people you’re doing it. It felt strangely joyful, propelled by its own velocity. I was not solving the problem of the death, the life, but I was remembering the real thing, insoluble for anyone who has not done it.

We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the god. She is part of it as a woman in a painting – a blank reclined space, sketching everything around her. Eventually the blank must be filled in totally: it completes the scene, but is fatal. This is why hospitals were fruitful for Plath. It is clear what is happening in them: a visceral tableau, with attending flowers, and a stripped human form at the centre. You could write, perhaps, as if every room were a hospital room, but it would not be very comfortable.”

This gets Plath in a way that escapes Janet Malcolm, who is a often mentioned presence in Lockwood’s essay, making it almost a counter-argument, the kind of exorcism of a strong writer that some – for instance, Harold Bloom – posit as the royal path to becoming a strong writer. Malcolm is who Lockwood – and indeed, me myself – would like to be: the observer who, starting out from some maxim like a slap in the face (instead of building to a moralizing tag line), understands how, in the light of that shock, we are able to trace the shadowplay of dramaturgy of those around her subject and her subject around his or her crew. At the same time, she is aware of, and represents herself as, the woman in the painting, off to the side. Reversing Susanna and the Elders, it is she who spies on their naked old flesh. Lockwood builds up to the confrontation with Malcolm over Plath – which makes this a more interesting essay, but one that reconstructs the usual sidedness of all essays about Plath. Like Plath, who in the anecdotes is often the silent, burning presence (rather like Plath’s poem, The Courage of Shutting Up, which could have been inspired by Ted Hughes sister, Olwyn) observers are not simply and always observers – because the line between observer and subject is dirty, tainted with unconscious desires, thematic dreams, bigotries, the higher morality, and everybody’s striving to be the teacher.

Perhaps there are such sides to the Plath story because she generated sides. It was her poetic. Sidedness.

It shows my age, but I was entirely surprised with Lockwood’s notion that Hughes big poetry book is Birthday Letters. I have bits of Crow memorized, and any poetry loving guy of my generation would probably list this as Hughes contribution to the great Wheel of poetry.

“God tried to teach Crow how to talk

'Love,' said God. 'Say, Love.'

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.”

To those with austere tastes, this might sound like the Doors. But I’ve never had austere tastes.

Plath, too, is stunt royalty, but she doesn't make her play against the old English Anglican Gnostic, to which Hughes, after her death, tried to reduce her. She makes a play against the schoolroom, the style page, the influencer, the types of totalitarian shallow that she had to ram her head against every day.

“Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover ?”

I open to this. It is bad news, the worst news, and I am its admirer beyond the daily tasks that make me not want to deal with it now, or tomorrow, or tomorrow, procrastinating my own deathdrive.

Trump's Gleichschaltung

The NYT gave us a splash of  its usual ideology-washing  prose yesterday regarding the resignation of the UVA president, which came about as one of the Trump administration's demands:

"The extraordinary condition the Justice Department has put on the school demonstrates that President Trump’s bid to shift the ideological tilt of the higher education system, which he views as hostile to conservatives, is more far-reaching than previously understood."

This construction is a sentence of such moderate-centrist bothsiding excess that it could have come from Stephen Miller himself. It invokes the oft expressed idea (in the NYT) that the universities are not "safe" spaces for conservatives, but are packed with lefties. Oddly, that the oil industry from the CEOs to the mid managers are packed with raging rightists has never provoked any demand for an ideological righting of bias by forcing EXXON to hire socialists. Must just be overlooked. Guys, since the oil industry has so lmuch influence in the world, is it right that it is hostile to liberals and leftists?

Ah, a question that the NYT would never ever ask. 

Now, how could they have reported this latest bit of Trump thuggery? There was a nice little German word that cropped up in 1933 and afterwards: Gleichschaltung. The party that came to power in 1933 (the name of which is left up to the reader to find out) used the word to fire Jews and Leftists in academia and bring about a synchronization of the makeup of the Universities with the makeup of the party in power.

Which is what we are seeing the Trumpies do. The Civil rights department is much concerned about the civil rights of whites. You might not know it, but whites, poor rich whites, are descriminated against by DEI. Blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, etc., have long been underrepresented or not represented at all in the U.S. and the name for that is systemic racism. A name that makes the NYT editors and all their country club buddies bristle. 

So remember this term. Gleichschaltung. Because that is what is happening. 

Not that you will ever read about it in the paper of record. 

We live in dumb times. 

Hearing the past: Michelet and the French school of historiography

 In his book on Michelet, Brahami points to a little revolution in method that follows in the wake of Michelet’s metaphors. Michelet, who was as close to skin, bone, blood and sex as any nineteenth century bon vivant, did not like the idea of the historian looking at history through a telescope or a loupe. Brahami goes outside of his strictly historical work, and finds in such texts as “The People” and “The Bird” the key to Michelet’s method – a auscultation of history. Michelet work as a historian was contemporaneous with the instrument invented by his contemporary, Laennec. He uses the image in a rather charming way in The Bird: the woodpecker « ausculates to see how the tree sounds, what it says, what it is in itself. The procedure of auscultation, so recent in medicine, was the principle art of the woodpecker for millenia. It interrogated, sounded, saw by hearing. »

This is a rather fascinating out of the frame metaphor. The British and American historical method was a sort of junction of positivism and epic. But the French school, from Michelet to Foucault, has always been directed by another metaphoric, a combination of folksong and positivism, if such a thing is thinkable.

Brahami quotes the preface from Michelet’s The People:

“Thus, I closed my books and I placed myself in the people as much as I could ; the solitary writer plunges into the crowd, he listens to the noises, notes the voices.” The opposition between the book and the crowd, here, may be a little rough – but even in the book, the books that contain the noted voices, the popular media, there is a sort of historiographic listening that is extraneous to the spirit of the British and American schools, until recently. The failure of historians in the U.S. to use the amazing material of the slave narratives gathered after the Civil War was a failure due to both racism and a predominantly visual sense of history, as if we could “see” the past better than we could hear it.

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A sigh

 

If what the paleontologists say is true, homo sapiens has been walking around on this planet a pitiful 350,000 years. Of that amount, I, at 67, have been here 0.00019142857 of that time. It ain’t much. When I raise my eyes and look at the politics of my time, or the past 200 years or so (0.00057142857), I notice that I have been, except for certain exceptional periods, pretty much on the losing side of all political battles.

At one time, working class leftist politics was animated by the idea that it was inevitable. The working class, being the productive class, would eventually realize its power and overthrow the aristocrats and plutocrats and institute the reign of plebocrats – democrats.

That, I should say, defined politics in the supposedly “short” twentieth century.

The working class decisively lost. The plebocrats, it turned out, were bureaucrats from the Party. And on the other side of the wall, after a number of concessions were made after WWII and up until the sixties, the Free World reverted to the old capitalist order in which those who succeeded in maximizing their wealth a thousand and ten thousand fold more than those who produced the wealth held all the power and made all the decisions, although, as is right and proper, through various representatives who could claim to represent not only the interests of the richest but also, on marginal things, the interests of the rest.

Working class leftist politics, in my time, shifted its focus: it became a matter of those who had the most cultural capital. A wholly untrustworthy group, blind for the most part to their socio-economic function and retreating to a Left of the Mind. Not that I am bitching – I’m a camp follower of that group.

At certain points in my life, I have said, oh fuck it and unplugged from reading about politics – the politics of the 0.00019142857 of the time that homo sapiens have been here – because it was so frustrating. I was at a mook’s distance from any real power. I understood the non-voter better than the voter, really. Alas, I’ve grown old and no wiser, and here I am again, a wee little American pea, raising my voice against war, atrocity, and the bestial stupidity of the ruling class. I know in my bones what happens, having seen it happen over and over – the current crop of idiots will fall, and power will once more return to the technocratic representatives of the plutocrats, who will make little deals for us all, to an extent. The poohbahs of the left, with their cultural capital, will alternatively bitch and tell us all that our very lives are at stake if we don’t elect a buncha oatmeal to “fight” for us. And so on.

Well, what was I, a 0.00019142857-er, expecting?

 

And the prep school boy says: I didn't wanna be mayor anyway! Cuomo' bows out

 Perhaps the oddest thing about the whole Cuomo race is the end of it - or at least this phase. He did not give a concession speech shouting out to his hardworking campaign workers, his voters, etc. He ended it like a prep school boy who did not get accepted at his fourth choice on the list of Ivies. No biggie, he didn't want it anyway!

Throughout the campaign, Cuomo made it crystal clear that his interest in NYC was merely as a stepping stone to the greater things he, as a Cuomo, deserved. Has a man ever run for mayor with greater disdain for the city he supposedly wanted to be mayor of? True, Giuliani, after eating up his 9.11 publicity, decided to jettison the Big Apple for real income opportunities, and eventually for real drinking opportunities, and eventually to star in his candid hair dye apocalypse vids - but he ran to become mayor because, underneath, he actually liked his home town.

A campaign of "vote for me you stupid New Yorker so I can check this box on my resume" turns out, much to the astonishment of the absolutely out of synch Dem party poobahs, not to work! You mean the plebes don't want you to treat them as so many playing cards with your CEO and Republican friends? Well, you don't get any Abundance then!

Perhaps, the Clintonite machine is thinking, they should have called on Dick Cheney for a surprise appearance. That would have wowed em!

What is mad, truly mad, is the political journalism beat at the moment. In spite of polls, in spite of a spate of local elections on everything from the Philadelphia DA's office to the rejection of the Huntington Cali "lets bring anti-woke to the library system" election, the top political "analysts" have their finger on the pulse of Tech bro billionaires and Trump's one hundred closest friends. They still don't have a clue. Which is what happens when you look at everything through the poll, and nothing through the the culture, with its narratives, heartbreaks, ordinary sublimities, loves, hates and all the rest of it.

Surprise is coming. You just won't read about it in the news.