income inequality and the politics of raising taxes

I am ultra sympathetic to the liberal position that we can do something about inequality by raising taxes on the highest tax bracket, but ultimately, I think that it is a huge economic and political mistake to identify the entire inequality issue with the tax issue. I think, in particular, that this obscures and allows many of the structural changes that have accompanied the rise in inequality – and that, if not causing it, have provided the supportive context in which it happened. The 2008-2009 period is frustrating for a number of reasons, one of which was that the solution to the Great Recession in the US and elsewhere was, at best, a mitigated form of Keynesian demand management. It was not the spark to kick off the examination of the fundamental changes that occurred in the 70s and 80s that made the financial sector both immeasurably bigger and immeasurably more important to the “productive” parts of the economy.  That examination would mean redoing or undoing all the "reforms" enacted in the 70s and 80s, which  funneled money into the stock market and set off the explosion in the other financial instrument markets. It is important to see that these reforms weren’t just the result of conservative Reagan. It was ultra liberal Ted Kennedy who, in the 70s, began pushing a very robust de-regulatory program, starting first with the airlines. Yes, airline travel in the US was de-regulated by Ted Kennedy, architected by his aide, Alfred Kahn, as much as by anybody. This was a part of the great avalanche of de-regulatory legislation on finance that, among other things, established the 401(k) – and whichdefinitely had the Carter imprimatur. A recent story about the 401k – a leapforward in regressive taxation – was published in Bloomberg.

The promise of these years, which still crops up as the main rhetorical prop of what happened, was that it was all about “democratizing” finance – allowing you, lucky sovereign consumer, to chose. Now, this rhetoric is about as sensible as saying that everyone should be able to race cars on the Daytona 500. It takes the word choose, weaves around it a groovy ambiance of self-man-manhood, and goes on to promote one of the world historical ripoffs. After 40 years, the reality is that a miniscule proportion of the assets of the income bracket from 0 to 80 percent are in stocks, or bonds, or derivatives. The one thing that did happen, in the best spirit of Keynesian demand management, is that limits on credit and the regulation of credit were lifted or massaged so that these brackets have had greater credit access (for which they have paid) even as their productivity gains were absorbed by the top 1 percent. Although I would never, ever give it a messy, communistic name, this looks exactly like a form of increasing exploitation in the classical manner described by Marx.

It was one of Marx's insights, in fact, that capitalism abolishes private property for the masses, and when one looks at the ratio of debt to assets for the average American, one sees how right he was. This is from the Who Rules America page. The stats are out of date, but I think probably they have worsened:

"Figures oninheritance tell much the same story. According to a study published by theFederal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, only 1.6% of Americans receive $100,000 ormore in inheritance. Another 1.1% receive $50,000 to $100,000. On the other hand,91.9% receive nothing (Kotlikoff & Gokhale, 2000)."

Even liberal economists spend most of their time thinking about redistribution in terms of taxes, rather than what the structure of the economy is doing. It is as if, getting a higher tax rate on the wealthy allows us to keep the system in place. I think the system not only generates the kind of wealth asymmetry that naturally expresses itself in the power system (at an amazingly cheap rate - America's governing institutions are controlled at really bargain basement prices. If a billion dollars is poured into your average presidential election, the ROI is superdelicious) that makes this discussion about tax rates mostly academic. Both branches of Congress are now populated by mostly millionaires, according to recent research. This tells us much more about their politics than party composition.

One of the great things about Piketty's work is that he has pierced the veil of the taxcentric discourse about inequality, raising fundamental questions about the structure of late 20th century and early 21st century capitalism. In the end, it is perhaps illuminating about our present politics that Piketty’s suggestions do not, however, go beyond – changing the tax system.

Which makes me want to end this with the immortal words of Lenny Bruce during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as reported by Don Delillo in Underworld: we are all gonna die!  

the agony of not writing.

There is a plot of a short story by Sigizmund
Krzhizhanovskii that I would love to read, although I don't think it has been translated into English, yet, and I only read a summary of it by a russian scholar: “The Life and Times of a 
Thought”. The thought occurs in Immanuel Kant's brain, where it is happy and everything is glorious. And then it has to be written down, which depresses the thought utterly. Apparently, writing is to a thought what the rack is to a man being questioned by the Inquisition. What an idea!

…

Which brings me to this post. I’ve been pondering the Krzhizhanovskii story. I recognize in it not only a familiar modernist trope (writing as the scene of the agon – Flaubert’s famous throes of dispair on his sofa as he tears apart and rebuilds a single page in Madame Bovary), but also a human predicament. As literacy spread in the early modern era, so did the introduction of a writing system into people’s lives. Literacy did not always mean the ability to write – in France, for instance, many girls were taught to read but not to write. However, that disymmetry soon passed. Reading and writing seem irresistably attracted to each other, unlike, say, music and being able to read and write music. We have a hard time, now, imagining reading without writing.

Yes, then, writing as agon is a very recognizable social fact. As an editor of academic texts, I run into it in the highest reaches of the written. But the other side of the story is writing as an irresistable compulsion. Don’t take my word for it – look at the trillions of words freely poured out on the internet, writing that issues from no professional demand. Myself, I can step out from the billions who do this and offer my own not so unrepresentative experience of graphmania, in which the terms are reversed, and one suffers from the agon of not-writing.

I don’t know how far back my scribbling disease goes. I do know that by the tie the Internet reared up and ko-ed me, I was a definite notebook man, trailing acres of crabbed script around in all these ruled and unruled notebooks which promised, deceitfully, on the blank front page, to be the place, finally, where life and writing would converge.  Most of those notebooks I’ve lost over the years – some I’ve stored here and there, like a squirrel storing nuts. Since moving to LA, I’ve filled three or four notebooks, and of course this doesn’t include the fine flights of typing on the laptop.

I am not a “thought is language” mook – of course thought can exist unthought and unvoiced, just as an unfledged bird can exist in an egg.  However, the more one writes, the more the transition from thought to writing begins to change. Or, rather, scratch that, the more the revolution takes place, the transvaluation of values. Thought, which was once the master of writing, becomes increasingly the excuse for writing – rather than boarding the train of the sentence, the sentence hijacks the train of the thought. It is as if, in the movie in my head, I’ve increasingly become more interested in the subtitles than the images. Give me the subtitles alone!  I shout, sipping my coke and dwning my popcorn there in the dark.

I don’t think I am describing the existential position of an effete literatus here, either. Every self help book, at some point, advises writing things down, under the pretence that this will materialize one’s attention – as if that attention were some pre-existent, ambient thing. There are millions of live diaries, tweets, fb posts, comments in comments sections, etc., indicating to me that there are millions of people who write not only because it is required by whatever they do to bring home the bacon, but because they need to write.

Although email assassinated the US Postal service, I don’t accept the idea that it assassinated the letter. I have received thousands of letter-like emails – a thousand-fold more than the actual letters that I have received in my life. And children, my life has been long – I’m an ancient mariner who remembers the days of stamps and envelops.

Getting back to an earlier point – if in the 17^th century there were thousands of peple who could read and not write, perhaps more than could do both, in the Internet age a weird inversion has occurred. Of course, the people who write, now, can read, but I suspect the decline in reading that thumbsuckers so lachrymosely lament in the papers and the high concept journals is connected to the veritable explosion of writing. I read many e-books and I’ve remarked that in the midst of reading them, even those, like Conrad’s Nostromo, that I am enjoying immensely, there’s a certain current of impatience that disturbs the placid, passive flow of the reading. Partly, of course, this is because my computer connects me up to the aforesaid trillions of words, so I suffer from over-choice. But partly too from the consciousness that I could be reading some irritating thing on the New Yorker blog and writing about it. It is as though I am chafed by the restraint of being a mere reader, a bystander.

This is writing as a pathological condition, and a very good reason to become a Buddhist.

Marx and the machine man

As poor as a machine

“And Jesus said unto him, Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.”.

“ “While the division of labor increases the productive power of labor, and the wealth and refinement of society, it leads to the impoverishment of the laborer until he sinks to the level of the machine. While labor incites the accumulation of capitals and thus the increasing well being of society, it makes the laborer ever more dependent on the capitalist, thrusts him into a greater competition, drives him into a rush of overproduction, from which follows an equivalent slump.”  - Marx

Leszek Kolakowski has written that Marx, unlike the socialists of the 40s, had a firmer grasp of the fact that capitalism was rooted in de-humanization. His economic analysis does not marginalize this insight, but builds upon it – which is why Marx never puts the market at the center of economic analysis, even as he is able to represent the reasons that mainstream economists do so.

In the Economic-Philosophical manuscripts, the figure for that de-humanization is the machine.

Not, I notice, an animal. Traditionally, the poor were compared to animals. Animals themselves occupy an ambiguous status in the popular mindset. Sergio della Bernardina, who did an ethnographic study of various rituals of cruelty to animals, from bear baiting to hunting, found that the concept of the person, outside of philosophy, is a matter of degrees and situations, not an absolute.  How personhood intervenes in social practice can’t necessarily be predicted from our definition of personhood – in the cases Bernardina examines, the tormenting of a bear or a bull before it is killed does not happen because its tormenters lack a sense of the animals personhood, but precisely because they want to provoke aggression on the part of the animal to which they can respond, shifting the blame for the animal’s death to the animal itself as a person responsible for lashing out, for acting badly.

Since the sixties, it has been a popular theme among some  environmental historians have pursued that Christianity, by entrusting nature to man, devalued the environment. I think this is a misinterpretation of the Church’s larger history, which put it in the broad ancient tradition which, while it certainly did not ascribe property to animals, did understand them as dwelling things - they did have holes and nests. They had families. Christian iconography is actually replete with peaceful animals, with the redeemed sheep, with the dove, etc.

The animal might not have a property relationship with the world – they could be hunted, they could be sacrificed, they could be eaten – but they were, of course, God’s creation.

Not the machine. The machine not only has not property claim on the world – it has no home. It has no family. The son of man would not say, the chariots have sheds, the hammers have a box – although he’d know it, being a carpenters son. In the double logic of the dissolution of the human limit, when Descartes and the early modern natural philosophers compare the animal to the machine – and man, too – they both advance a new claim about the human relationship to the world (dissolving any limit to its use) while advancing a new and unrecognizable form of human – the man machine, the Other – as the human subject.

The poverty of the worker, who sinks to the state of a machine, is the flip side of the glory of the proletariat, the Other who is the subject of universal history. What does the poverty consist in? Marx sees it, of course, in terms of wealth – but also refinement – the “Verfeinerung der Gesellschaft.” I would call this poverty an imprisonment in routines. It is hard to resist jumping ahead to Freudian terms, having to do with obsessive behavior and neurosis, which, after all, is the mechanical coming to the surface – the arm or leg that doesn’t work, that has returned to dead matter.


A note more here onthe machine. It is easy to forget that the Descartes or Le Mettrie’s machine was an automaton, an entertainment. Court societies love F/X, whether it is Versailles, Hollywood or D.C. – but in real material terms, the automata did nothing more than demonstrate the uses of a winding mechanism. What Marx is talking about is not that kind of machine.

As Schivelbusch nicely puts it at the beginning of The Railway Journey, the Europe of the eighteenth century, which was still the Europe of wood and woods, of energy supplied by streams and forests, was losing its woods. He quotes Sombart – and I am going to give some elbow room here to exaggeration and the blind eye turned to the forests in America. Still, wood was becoming more expensive, and in this way an opportunity opens up for other means of energy and structure – notably, coal and iron. To which one must add that water, too, but in a new form – as steam – is part of the complex. In one of the historical ironies that the economic historian scrupulously skirts, even the Corn laws, decried for two centuries, actually contributed to the industrial revolution, for, by raising the price of grain and thus of keeping horses, they “helped replace horsepower by mechanical power in much the same way shortage of wood in 18th century Europe had accelerated the development of coal production.”

So, the older elements of life – that obsession of the romantics in perhaps the last final bloom of eotechnical Europe – were being reconfigured before Marx’s eyes. When Marx was expelled from Paris in 1845, he took the messagerie – the stagecoach – to the Belgian border. In 1848, when he was kicked out of Belgium, he took the train back to Paris.

For Marx, the machine like worker is not, here, the automaton, but rather one of the new machines which incorporated an unheard of precision and standardization.

Schivelbusch, interested in how the consciousness caught the phenomenological changes being wrought by the machine, quotes a wonderful passage from an advocate of steam engine powered transport in 1825, who describes the imperfect movement of the horse: ‘the animal advances not with a continual progressive motion, but with a sort of irregular hobbling, which raises and sinks its body at every alternate motion of its limbs.”[12] Similarly, Schivelbusch notes that the steam boat was admired at first because it did not tack – it could move against the current and the wind.

A culture picks up in its proprio-phenomenological net such major changes to its habits, but often doesn’t express their novelty, because the vocabulary to express it is lacking. Marx is a monument of the modern moment because, among other things, he understood that the vastness of the changes taking place around him called for the deployment of an entirely different understanding of the world.

the homeric cliche

In Les Fleurs de Tarbes, Jean Paulhan’s exasperated tract (which holds a position in modern French literature similar to that held by Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise in English lit ), Paulhan puzzles over the growth, in literature, of what he calls a “terrorist” ethic – an ethic that proscribes all cliché, all “literary-ness”, that makes literature only out of renouncing literature, or hunting it down and exploding it. As he points out: “ The classic poets welcomed proverbs cliches and common sentiments from every direction. They welcomed abundance and gave it in back to those around them. But us, we who have little, we risk at every instant to lose that little.”

The “war on cliché” – to use Martin Amis’s hackneyed phrase declaring his allergy to hackneyed phrases, which as is the way of allergies is a disease of the immune system that is constructed to fight disease, a disease that turns on the immune system’s excess - was first declared in France. Independence from the commonplace, and a horrified attention to the way thinking is done through commonplaces was in a way the primary stylistic gesture of Flaubert, Baudelaire,  Bloy and Peguy – to name just four diverse writers of the time. It is as if, in the proverbs that were once considered a sort of common good, the writers discovered with these fantastic, power mad little machines who were actually thinking for us. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that each of those writers was profoundly anti-democratic, for the cliché is like the sum of votes on thought, it is elected by a majority.  And this seems profoundly wrong, for instead of the brain directing the mouth, what came out of the mouth directed the brain.

Henry James, among his other distinctions, is an essentially cosmopolitan writer – he knew Flaubert, he knew George Sand, he knew Turgenev, and he knew them as an artist knows another artist. But in his late style,  one notices that he returns to the classic style as Paulhan describes it. It is, though, a return full of ‘discriminations”, to use the Jamesian word.

I would call the note that runs through the late work the Homeric cliché. Just as the Homeric metaphor unfolds, metynomically, into a narrative, the Homeric cliché, as James uses it, takes the proverbs and cliches of the newspaper and the country club and makes them entrances to the higher impression towards which the authorial presence, and the authorial presence’s characters, strive.

Notice that even the entrance, in James, is labyrinthian – it is full of feints and false doors.  Here’s an example of what I mean. Allusions to apples, orchards, and golden fruit – all circulating around the cliché of fruit falling into one’s hand – are played out in this description, in The American Scene, of James taking a ride on the Staten Island Ferry:

“Nothing could have been more to the spectator's purpose, moreover, than the fact he was ready to hail as the most characteristic in the world, the fact that what surrounded him was a rare collection of young men of business returning, as the phrase is, and in the pride of their youth and their might, to their "homes," and that, if treasures of "type" were not here to be disengaged, the fault would be all his own.(6) It was perhaps this simple sense of treasure to be gathered in, it was doubtless this very confidence in the objective reality of impressions, so that they could deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree--it was all this that gave a charm to one's sitting in the orchard, gave a strange and inordinate charm both to the prospect of the Jersey shore and to every inch of the entertainment, so divinely inexpensive, by the way. The immense liberality of the Bay, the noble amplitude of the boat, the great unlocked and tumbled-out city on one hand, and the low, accessible mystery of the opposite State on the other, watching any approach, to all appearance, with so gentle and patient an eye; the gaiety of the light, the gladness of the air, and, above all (for it most came back to that), the unconscious affluence, the variety in identity, of the young men of business: these things somehow left speculation, left curiosity exciting, yet kept it beguilingly safe. And what shall I say more of all that presently followed than that it sharpened to the last pleasantness--quite draining it of fears of fatuity--that consciousness of strolling in the orchard that was all one's own to pluck, and counting, overhead, the apples of gold? I figure, I repeat, under this name those thick-growing items of the characteristic that were surely going to drop into one's hand, for vivid illustration, as soon as one could begin to hold it out.”  

This multitudinous weave of a trite phrase concerning golden apples into an account of business men, the sea, the cheapness of the ticket,  and the appearance of New York creates a sort of counterpuntal music out of a cliché – and as always, there is the sexual undertone, with the “fruitiness” and the “thick growing items” playing a role that you don’t have to be Freud to find superfluously suggestive.  James has a way of continuing at it – just as you think he’s forgotten that orchard, he returns with it. The cliché is treated  hologrammatically, and instead of the narration that the Homeric metaphor unfolds, in which the comparison becomes the unfolding of an episode in a world of episodes,  we have an impression, a sort of aura around a narration, that  situates, or, because it is a matter of impression rather than precision, concentrates a narratively tending consciousness. The narrative, always, is about not losing the supreme  things – life, intelligence, the chances of attention -  and yet the loss of these things is always the fatality to which, factually, this determination falls victim. There is a certain choral mockery, then, in these cliches. Listened to closely, they reveal not the wisdom of the people, but the implacably boxed in places of their origin – one senses their evolution in the resorts of the upper classes  where they really do operate as a way of thinking or, as is mostly the case, a way of walling off any thought.  In his own way, James, too, becomes one of the writer-terrorists of Paulhan’s essay, while avoiding the logical inconsistency that Paulhan very gleefully points out, where the avoidance of the already said must either lead to the incomprehensibility of the never said or the clichéd antithesis to cliche that founds the campaign against the already thought in an ideology of originality blind to its own contradictions.

James’ Homeric cliché was not passed along to any inheritor, althoug h you do find a figure like Santayana, whose prose is less William Jamesian than Henry Jamesian, occasionaly resorting to one. 

NYT columnists Nocera and Kristof divide up the compassion-labor

At the NYT, the columnists have seemingly decided to divide up the labor of compassion. It has fallen to Nicolas Kristof to worry about the Cambodian orphan and the Thai sex worker, and it has fallen to Joe Nocera to worry about the oppressed billionaire.

Last week, Nocera was very worried about BP, which was on the verge of being plucked by no account peasants. Hasn’t the company suffered enough for killing ten men and destroying the Gulf ecology for a year? It is all on account of trial lawyers, Nocera gravely intoned. You know, if the justice system would simply secede entirely from the jury system and allowing the poor to have lawyers, we could get some things done in this country.

Today, Nocera is shedding copious tears over various Russianbillionaires, represented by Bill Browder, who made a pile in Russia during thetime that Nocera euphemistically calls the Wild West period – Yeltsin’s time, when all corruption was excusable because it was in such a good cause! – and is now trying to get the West to take revenge for the imprisonment and death of one of his partners,   Sergei Magnitsky. I am not going to deny that Magnitsky was barbarously treated by the Putin regime. Perhaps it is right for the US Congress to respond by a special act, named for Magnitsky, aiming at making his tormentors in Russia pay for his death.

But, ever the curious goof, I do wonder how it is that in the nation with the largest imprisoned population in the world, the US Congress doesn’t seem interested in passing acts in favor of US citizens.

Here’s how Magnitsky died:

Browder pleaded with Magnitsky to flee the country, as his other lawyers had done. But Magnitsky insisted on investigating — and speaking out about — the fraud that had taken place. For his troubles, he was imprisoned in 2008. By summer of 2009, he had developed pancreatitis, which went untreated despite his pleas. He died that November. Browder says that when he learned of Magnitsky’s death, it was “the worst news I had ever received in my life.”

And here, for instance, is how an Arizona prostitute died, around the same time as Magnitsky, according to the Phoenix Arizona New Times:

“The Maricopa County Attorney's Office has chosen not to prosecute Arizona Department of Corrections staff in the death of inmate Marcia Powell.

Powell, 48, died May 20, 2009, after being kept in a human cage in Goodyear's Perryville Prison for at least four hours in the blazing Arizona sun. This, despite a prison policy limiting such outside confinement to a maximum of two hours.

The county medical examiner found the cause of death to be due to complications from heat exposure. Her core body temperature upon examination was 108 degrees Fahrenheit. She suffered burns and blisters all over her body.

Witnesses say she was repeatedly denied water by corrections officers, though the c.o.'s deny this. The weather the day she collapsed from the heat (May 19 -- she died in the early morning hours of May 20) arched just above a 107 degree high.

According to a 3,000 page report released by the ADC, she pleaded to be taken back inside, but was ignored. Similarly, she was not allowed to use the restroom. When she was found unconscious, her body was covered with excrement from soiling herself.”

It is perhaps unfair to ask Nocera how the Marcia Powell bill in Congress is faring. Powell was nothing. She wasn’t even Thai or Cambodian, so in the division of compassion neither Nocera or Kristof have any reason to care about her. And yet, somehow, I find it leaves a certain, well, taste in my mouth when I see NYT liberals or neo-liberals go on about the human rights wrongs – especially against billionaires – of the Putins of the world. When Jimmy Carter started the American foreign policy shift towards human rights, there were already 450 000 americans in prison. The rate of growth since then has the look of, maybe, something not so humans rightsish – according to the ACLU:

“From 1980 to 2010, the United States prison population grew over 11 times faster than the

general population. During this time, the general population increased by 36%, while the

state and federal prison population increased by over 400%.”

Bad boys bad boys whatcha gonna do? In any case, as we all pray that the exiled billionaires from Russia get back the possessions they so cleverly stole during the “wild west days” (oh those bad boys) and can investigate the corruption of the Putin clique, we also might spare a little time, o a second, a firefly’s flicker, to such as Marcia Powell. They deserve nothing and should, of course, die on the street – but think how much it cost the taxpaper to build a cage to keep her in while she boiled to death in the Arizona sun! Really, perhaps we should charge her family for those expenses. 

Hideously kinky: the establishment's wars

Interesting duel in the Sunday NYT book section. On the one side is that indefatigable fluffer of all things Petraeus, Dexter Filkins, who gets to tell his favorite surge fairy tale all over again in his review of John A, Nagl's book. I think of Filkins as an exemplary figure, failing ever upwards in an establishment that has been astonishingly unmarked by 13 years of American foreign policy failure, which has mired the US in unwinnable and even incomprehensible wars all over the Middle East and Central Asia. The Filkins style of indirectly acknowledging this - which is the establishment style of tiptoing the graveyards that its criminality has filled - comes in the fourth graf: "The last Americans didn’t leave Iraq until 2011, after about 4,500 of them had been killed and more than 30,000 wounded. At least a hundred thousand Iraqis died, too." Notice the Iraqi casualty addendum, which is as true as saying, about the Holocaust, that "at least a million Jews died too." The establishment, especially the NYT,loves big data and columns that make statistical points using a well established science of sampling. But it appears that in the world of sampling, Iraq forms a strange exception. The lancet's sampling, which long ago showed six hundred thousand deaths, has been supplanted by the latest survey, showing nearly a million. The Filkins half truth maneuver is the answer to this persnickety question of the extent of the establishment's catastrophic policy of "humanitarian intervention." On the other corner, you have the review of Daniel Bolger's Why We Lost, which dares to deride st. Petraeus. This is reviewed by Andrew Bacevich, who is on his best behavior. One feels that he actually agrees with Bolger that Petraeus was a jerk, a showboat, and a man whose surge was designed to disguise the inevitable: the retreat of the US from Iraq. But he doesn't outright say that Bolger has an excellent argument here - he shifts the focus to the politics of the war. Here, of course, Bacevich is right. The Generals didn't lose the war - the war was pre-lost in 2001, when the Americans rallied around the dangerously negligent government that had allowed 9.11 to happen as though the incompetence had never happened, and allowed them to expand the terrain of their incompetence, which of course they happily did. 

Eventually, Bolger concludes that America's enemies in the two wars are "everybody" - of which there is no more absolute condemnation. It is Kurz at the end of his tether.  But the establishment doesn't want to swallow that. Hence, our current swollen Pentagon, our Patriot act, our eliminationist rhetoric against ISIS. It is all a very bloody farce, and will go on until we don't have that extra trillion dollars to pay for all the fun.

Please sir, more Wharton sir, please...

More notes on the House of Mirth

You can’t read the secondary literature on Edith Wharton without bumping into the ghost of Henry James. They both wrote about rich Americans, some of whom spent their time in Europe, so the critics have gathered around this obvious clue and have palpated it to death, rather like the rather dim police inspectors in Sherlock Holmes who fail to make subtle deductions from the more apparently trivial clues with which they are presented, while running off the track when big clues are, by malign design, thrown in their way..
I haven’t waded far enough into the secondary literature to see if anybody has connected Wharton to Oscar Wilde, but as I find traces of Wilde all over The House of Mirth, I think I’m going to  take up the theme and give it a good shaking.
Wharton does a rather neat trick in The House of Mirth – she manages to convincingly create a hybrid of  social comedy and melodrama. The melodrama is the natural aesthetic correlate of the overwhelming emotions, for melodrama is an excessive form,a form for deformation, and in its too muchness it brings a certain paradoxical proportion to the total flavor of those emotions  that swamp the self. These are the blood rushing emotions, the emotions that call metaphorically upon the involuntary surges of the internal organs at work within us, which is why we quickly go to the heart, and secretly go to the genitals, when imagining them. Certainly the melodrama in The House of Mirth is cued to tidal waves, coursing rivers, and all kinds of mounting water action. When Lily Bart, after the humiliation of her scene with Gus Trenor that falls almost in the middle of the book, decides that she will confide in Seldon, the phrase that describes this is perfectly in line with high water :  “the thought of confiding in him became as seductive as the river’s flow to a suicide.”  Flow just is seduction – as the novel makes clear.
But social comedy is a drying thing, and before the rivers flow and the storms crescendo, there are the brilliant setpieces at Bellomont, the most brilliant of which, in its setting, its stage props (ample use being made of cigarettes) and its at times cynical, at times lyrical dialogue, is the conversation between Lawrence Seldon and Lily Bart on the fatal Sunday when she loses her grip on the rich sap she has decided to marry, Percy Gryce. The whole thing is too much like Wilde’s essay dialogues not to be, at some calibrated distance, signifying. For instance, from what text, The House of Mirth or The Decay of Lying,  do these two phrases go? a, If we are all the raw stuff of the cosmic effects, one would rather be the fire that tempers a sword than the fish that dyes a purple cloak; and b, Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection,  which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis.
Notes on Dorian Gray: It is hard to be kind to Dorian Gray. It mixes up the brilliant and the lurid, but the luridness cancels out the brilliance and the brilliance makes the luridness seem ridiculous. Yet, it has survived. It has even become a gothic archetype , partly because it is animated by a very protestant, not to say Puritanical, motif: eternal youth equates to eternal viciousness.  The same thematic adventure is, of course, central to The House of Mirth. It is Lily’s youth that is going. At several points, she looks in the mirror with the same curiosity and fear as Dorian looking at his portrait, and when she sees lines on her face, she worries.
Wilde of course was not even in the same league, as a novelist, with Wharton. Partly that is because he couldn’t foot his novel in the homosexual social circle that the book cries out for – he couldn’t, like Gide, simply seize the permission to do so.The result of  Wharton’s deep sense of the way her own comedy is footed in a social circle she knows down to the design of the wallpaper allows her to move from comedy to melodrama without upsetting the narrative balance of the story. Melodrama, of course, relies, even excessively, upon the conventional – and Lily, for all her flashes of insight, is too conventional for her own good. She is too conventional not to hunt for a rich husband, and too conventional not to reject the offer from Rosedale, the richest man she knows, because he is a Jew. Melodrama also relies on coincidence – but coincidence has an unfairly bad reputation in fiction. In good fiction, coincidence is often a measure of the degrees of the social world in which the characters move – a sort of not always reliable pi.  Without coincidence, there is no measure to that world – and thus, it ceases to act as a world.
The Wildean note in Wharton makes more sense now, when we have opened up all her sealed papers and discovered her erotica, than it might have when Wharton had to come into literature on the arm of her bachelor friend James. It is about time for her to come into literature with a more extended set of references.

The election

In the 18^th century, there was a craze for Constitutions. Rousseau wrote an outline of one for Poland, and Boswell, of all people, had influenced the Corsican constitution. And of course then came the Americans and the French, who linked constitution making to revolution.

The idea of decreeing legislation has become, since, a normal feature of streetcorner and water fountain intellectual life, at least in the States. People, such as myself, who have never successfully organized lunch or an ant farm (when I was a kid, I’d always end up either starving to death the latter or drowing the poor ants in too much sugar water), are undettered by their failures and make and proselytize revolutionary legislative suggestions all the time. Unfortunately, the organizers, if they are good, are usually on the side of the organizations, ie the status quo. There they are rewarded for profiting the heads of those organizations, or the set of them – the establishment.

Now that the dust has settled and we have an American Congress that will make the largest threat to the US – global warming – worse, while claiming the threat posed by ISIS requires major Pentagon trillions – a Congress that will gladly pass Obama’s Pacific Trade treaty, with its many and odious gifts to big business – a Congress that will, in other words, not do much – it is a good time to look back over what I think, for lack of a better name, is the Bush era, a 13 year old phenomenon. In the first phase, when Bush proper was president, it was of course reckless and negligent. However, it was politically astute – it was able to use even the worst evidence of its incompetence, for instance the highly preventable 9/11 attack, to gain more power. Most of the signal events of the Obama end of the era – the withdrawal from Iraq, the continuing and astonishing sums given to the Pentagon, the surveillance, the rescue of Wall street and the hardening of the culture of impunity that spares the rich and the powerful any punishment for whatever they do – were either hatched in the Bush era or bear the stylistic trademarks of that era. The one Obama addition, Romneycare, was hatched by the Heritage Foundation long ago as the alternative to Clinton’s healthcare bill, advocated by Newt Gingrich, and realized in Massachussetts by Romney. This is not exactly a Marxist pedigree.

The ACA, like social security and medicare, are liberal schemes that the Democratic party designed. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way these schemes were put on the shoulders of the 80 percent of the wealth and income bracket who have the fewest assets and the lowest pay. The top 20 percent, meanwhile, which owns something like 90 percent of the financial assets in this country, were massively rescued by the Bush-Obama team. It is an oddity of our politics that the neo-liberals do not at all see this, and are frankly puzzled how people can “vote against their own interests”. Myself, I don’t think they do. Before the Great recession, if a Gop hothead promised to end social security and cut taxes, the voters who elected him could be pretty sure he wasn’t going to end social security but that he would have a chance, in the compromise machine of DC, to cut taxes. Though the taxes he cut would be mainly those of the wealthy, some of the cuts would go to the 80 percent. Meanwhile, the Dems, responsibly talking about securing social security for the future, meant by that either cutting benefits or raising taxes on the 80 percent – since the not so secret secret about social security is that it is paid for by the most regressive federal tax.

The Dem establishment is firmly in the top 20 percent, households that make at least 250 thou a year. And they have designed politicies exquisitely calibrated to not disturb this group. But a liberalism that doesn’t disturb this group is no liberalism at all. Just as camels can’t go though the eye of the needle, in the Kingdom of Heaven you can’t cater to the wealthy while being totally oriented to the welfare of the rest.

Now, it might seem puzzling that the upper 20 percent aren’t more grateful to the neo-liberal Dems. But this isn’t really surprising – the art of the deal, the code by which this group lives and dies, requires an aggressive dealer. The more concessions the other side gives, the more they can give. You don’t do a deal by compromising your side from the outset.

The US is really no different from France, or the UK, or Canada. The non-communist left, born in the Great depression, was led into the golden years by organizers who were richly rewarded for their acts. Those rewards, and the decay of labor power, brought about a brutal disconnect between the political elite and the people they were supposedly leading, the people whose side they were supposedly on. 

In the first eight years of the Bush era, the philosopher kings were the loudmouthed imperialists, the Hitchenses, the Niall Fergusons, the Weekly Standard crewe. In the next six years, under Obama, the philosopher king appears to be Cass Sunstein, whose concept of “nudgery” codifies everything about these years – the sense of noblesse oblige by the political elite, the sense that the 80 percent are too dumb to understand their own interests, and the ridiculous presentation of their case as if it is in response to the “devastating critique” of the Mommy state by libertarians. In fact, of course, nudgery exposes most people to the unchained power of the corporations, while the power that the 80 percent might have to, for instance, send an email without being snooped on by the state is, because because,. Something we really have to abridge for the near future.  Meanwhile, the 20 percent, who apparently know all about their interests, have to be  treated like the too big to fail group they are.

That is pretty much how I see this ultimately not so important election. When Obama was elected in 2008, I thought our long national nightmare was over. Now I think that the nightmare has so saturated everyday life that it isn't a nightmare anymore - it is just how we live.

the wall fell: so what?

So, the end of history, most thumbsuckers think, is itself at an end. What's the damages, bartender? Well, this summing up of what happened to the Communist countries after the fall of the wall is a pretty stunning piece of work. I'm not convinced that all information can be given by GDP growth, but still: only ten percent of the countries in the post-Communist sector have actually converged with the developed world.
Ukraine, according to Milanovic's figures, will take fifty more years to achieve the standard of living of the Communist era. Hmm. I especially like it that Milanovic, perhaps because he's a rusty remnant of the old Soviet system, actually values culture.

"Let me just focus on one often overlooked fact. It is most strikingly illustrated with respect to Russia. Russia, probably for the first time since the early 1800s, has gone through a quarter of a century without leaving any trace on the international world of arts, literature, philosophy or science. One does not need to mention Russia’s “Silver Age” of the early 1900s, nor a number of writers who, often in the opposition to the regime, produced some of the best literature of the 20th century (Akhmatova, Pasternak, Grossman, Sholokhov, Solzhenitsyn, Zinoviev); one does not need even to dwell on scientific progress, indeed limited to the military or military-used production, in the USSR, to realize that nothing similar happened in the past 25 years, which is indeed a sufficiently long period to draw conclusions. Capitalism was not kind to Russia’s arts and sciences."
I was discussing contemporary Russian lit with a Russian professor a couple of weeks ago, and he seconds this conclusion. Myself, I'd put Mikhail Shishkin up among the great writers Milanovic cites. Who else? There has been a Limonovization of Russian literature, that's true. In a round table on Russian literature in the Global context published in the estimable Russian Studies in Literature last year, the contributors were all, unanimously, glum about the fate of Russian writers in the said global context - no Nobel prize for you all! A prof from the University of Colorado I think summed up the scene in the States very well: the last Russian writer to make a stir among the readership was Vassily Grossman.Not exactly current. In one field where the Soviets ruled, linguistics, or the part of linguistics having to do with semiotics, most stuff that I read is very derivative of what went before - the University of Tartu's Sign Systems Studies, for instance, hasn't advanced beyond Lotman as far as I can see, and Russian Studies in Literature is exemplary in digging through Bakhtin, and bringing to light the literature, some of it fallen through the cracks, but new theory, or work?

Late to the party: taking shots at Franzen on Wharton

I’ve been on a bit of an Edith Wharton kick lately, reading her and reading about her. This is how I came late to Jonathan Franzen’s essay about Wharton in the New Yorker which evoked a storm of counterblasts from the likes of Roxana Robinson  (who yields to the intense anger that Franzen’s condescending tone seems to beg for), Victoria Patterson in the LA review of books , and Autumn Whitefield-Madrono in the New Inquiry. All made good solid points, but I have some other points to make about how truly abysmal Franzen’s essay is. Though it is two years old, I figure that there is something to be gotten out of unloading on it some more, since I think the essay signals the sad level of the state of reading in America, at least among a group, like Franzen, who were in college in the theory period in the humanities and now think they are beyond all that.

Franzen begins with a truly barflyish gesture. You know that New Critical idea of the impersonality of the author? All horseshit. In addition to the author being mirrored in the work, the reader, too, wants to crowd into that mirror. What happens when we read is that we root for. We are reader fans, in other words:

“But sympathy in novels need not be simply a matter of the reader’s direct identification with a fictional character. It can also be driven by, say, my admiration of a character who is long on virtues I am short on (the moral courage of Atticus Finch, the limpid goodness of Alyosha Karamazov), or, most interestingly, by my wish to be a character who is unlike me in ways I don’t admire or even like. One of the great perplexities of fiction—and the quality that makes the novel the quintessentially liberal art form—is that we experience sympathy so readily for characters we wouldn’t like in real life. Becky Sharp may be a soulless social climber, Tom Ripley may be a sociopath, the Jackal may want to assassinate the French President, Mickey Sabbath may be a disgustingly self-involved old goat, and Raskolnikov may want to get away with murder, but I find myself rooting for each of them.” 

What it means to “root” for these people is puzzling. Certainly rooting and sympathizing are not synonyms.  How do I root for Raskolnikov, for instance? Do I hope he goes on to bigger and less messier heists?

The “root for” phrase comes from sports – we root for a team. We might even root for a player, in games like tennis. But is a character in a novel really like a tennis player or a team? No. Nor is the author like a team. Its an odd trick to identify  rooting with sympathizing. Sympathizing might seem to, well, feminine for Franzen, but rooting just won’t do. The closest it comes is the situation in which  I watch a game in which two teams that I have no interest in – no sympathy for -  are contending. Then, in my own case, I root for the game to be a good one - an elegant game. I have always been a little shocked, actually, when people who root for a particular team are happy when the opposite team makes an error, fumbles the execution of a play, or in general subverts itself. To my mind, one wants the highest level of play.

I bring some such desire to novels, this is true. And there are novels in which I can say I root for a character – thrillers for instance. But the one-time-onlyness  of such novels – the fact that I don’t re-read them – is precisely connected to the root-for incentive.  I know, even before I start a thriller or watch one, that the hero is going to survive – that is so tied into the conventions of the thriller that we read it into the very physical mass of the thriller – I knew, for instance, in Gone Girl that the wife couldn’t have been killed by the husband by the fact that, at the point at which there was some doubt, the movie still had an hour more to run. Thus, I am rooting for the game to be tough and the agent I am pushed to identify with to win.  But this experience doesn’t strike me as very pertinent to reading Crime and Punishment, or The House of Mirth, where the stakes are not so conventionally laid out, and where the trajectories of the characters may comment about the environment in which they are etched - which is much different from, say, a football game. There is no such thing as a meta football game. Football, however much it has been used as a metaphor to say something about America, is never played in such a way that it intentionally makes a statement about America. The goals, here, are set, the score is summed up in one dimension. 

Raskolnikov, or Lily Bart, are difficult to root for because they pursue their purposes with a divided consciousness.  That is, uh, the point.  Rooting, here, is a rather silly extrapolation of a fan’s – and I am very tempted to say fanboy’s – perspective.

Proceeding from these shaky premises, Franzen considers Wharton. She was rich, which somehow is a strike against her. Her marriage was unsuccessful, which was somehow her fault.  How can we like this author, then, whose mirror image we are seeking in her works.

Well, there is the fact that she was a dog.

This is crucial to Franzen’s argument. The breathless stupidity of this approach was righteously attacked by anyone with any knowledge of Wharton’s biography. And the fact that Franzen was playing “hot or not” with Edith Wharton, as Victoria Patterson points out, was a slap in the face to all female writers. These are all things I think are true.

And yet, here is where I feel something is missing. If we were talking about Toulouse Latrec, the fact that he was so short might have some relevance to his work. And we would look for contemporary accounts and photos to see that he was, indeed, short.

But Edith Wharton? Apparently, she is not Franzen’s type. But there is no, none, zippo evidence that her contemporaries thought she was a dog. To the contrary: when Wharton’s first engagement was broken off, the gossip sheet Town Topics, wrote that, “‘an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride’ caused the engagement to be broken off.”

Bingo. I mean, it isn’t enough that Franzen takes the barfly bullshitter’s approach to literature, but he also seems to have done zero research and have zero instinct for historical contextualization. The mirror here is dominated by Franzen – Edith doesn’t enter into it.

This is of importance, since Franzen’s bizarre thesis is that Wharton’s novels are the revenge of an ugly girl on beautiful girls – for instance, Lily Barton. If Wharton didn’t consider herself ugly, and if nobody else around her considered her ugly, than the thesis is basically, I, Jonathan Franzen, think she is a dog, so everybody else musta. This is like reviewing King Lear by saying I, Jonathan Franzen, am totally opposed to rule by royalty, yucko, so Shakespeare musta been too – which is why Lear’s life is such a bitch!

I think that Town Topics item is important as an indicator of the expectations of the society that is shown in The House of Mirth – it can be contrasted with Lily Bart’s flaw, which is her intelligence. All the irony, all the hinderances to “rooting” for her, come out of that intelligence and its consequences. Intelligence, here, in the sense that she actually conceives, to an extent, the social conditions that make her own striving for a wealthy husband seem both necessary and valuable even as she sees the sterility of the lives of her “set” of wealthy heirs. She’s a divided soul in the classic American sense: she wants to compromise her freedom to attain success, the enjoyment of which rests in the freedom it theoretically offers. But the pattern of sacrifices necessary to attain success offer no compromise, so that when success is attained, it is enjoyed with exactly the sterile triviality that Bart sees around her. Seeing the sterility of her set too clearly stands athwart the simple minded pursuit of her simple minded target, and not seeing that her imagined transformation of the goal, once she attains it, would demand an ability to buck the norm that she has never displayed, is exactly what makes Lily interesting and, in a sense, tortured. In the crucial chapter 6, in which Lily takes a walk with the inappropriate man, Selden. Instead of pursuing the rich heir, Gryce, Wharton makes both the duality and deficit in Bart’s vision of life clear:

“Lily dropped down on the rock, glowing with her long climb. She sat quiet, her lips parted by the stress of the ascent, her eyes wandering peacefully over the broken ranges of the landscape. Selden stretched himself on the grass at her feet, tilting his hat against the level sun-rays, and clasping his hands behind his head, which rested against the side of the rock. He had no wish to make her talk; her quick-breathing silence seemed a part of the general hush and harmony of things. In his own mind there was only a lazy sense of pleasure, veiling the sharp edges of sensation as the September haze veiled the scene at their feet. But Lily, though her attitude was as calm as his, was throbbing inwardly with a rush of thoughts. There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive's gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight.”

As to why Lily Bart, or any protagonist, is handsome or beautiful, well, let me refer you to Hollywood, from 1900-2014, or to the Odyssey or the Iliad. If the writer of the gospel had attributed ugliness to Jesus, given him a hump like Richard III, history would be different today. Franzen’s idea here is not only not rooted in any sense of the author, but any sense of archetypes in literature period. This is dumbness piled on top of dumbassedness, and it makes me cringe and question again whether The Corrections was that good. I'm not, however, inclined to go back and check.   

edith wharton and kill the messenger

Early on in  The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, Edith Wharton's central protagonist, has a stab of insight about Percy Gryce, the heir she is pursuing, and his kind, such as Gwen van Osburgh, the heiress her cousin is pursuing: “ the two had the same prejudices and ideals,and the same quality of making other standards non-existent by ignoring them. This attribute was common to most of Lily’s set: they had a force of negation which eliminated everything beyond their own  range of perception.” Lily has discovered the very principle of the establishment, whereever it forms.  It is not a matter, merely, of mental blinders, since the phrase implies that something exterior has imposed its instrument – no, the force of negation works fiercely outward, and it eliminates that which is unpleasant to perceive, it erases it.

In another sphere, we can see how establishmentarian negation works in the film “Kill the Messenger,” which I saw last weekend. I knew the story, but the movie is good enough to have warmed up my indignation all over again. It is really a simple story: a newspaper writer uncovers disobliging things about the CIA without consulting and ‘understanding’ the CIA, that is, without getting helpful, swatting down hints from clubby high placed unnamed sources. This is what absolutely bothered the newspapers – the NYT, The LA Times, and the Washington Post – who lead an unusually violent lynching party against Gary Webb for his investigative reporting. The echo of that party was heard in an article by the editor of the Washington Post’s “investigative” section, a mooks named Jeff Leen. Leen re-attacked Webb, now deceased, in an article that begins:  “An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. That old dictum ought to hang on the walls of every journalism school in America.” Leen’s article is amusingly filleted by an old AP writer, Robert Parry, who admired Webb’s work:

“Leen insists that there is a journalism dictum that “an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.” But Leen must know that it is not true. Many extraordinary claims, such as assertions in 2002-03 that Iraq was hiding arsenals of WMDs, were published as flat-fact without “extraordinary proof” or any real evidence at all, including by Leen’s colleagues at the Washington Post.

 A different rule actually governs American journalism – that journalists need “extraordinary proof” if a story puts the U.S. government or an “ally” in a negative light but pretty much anything goes when criticizing an “enemy.”

The last galvanic defensive response of Leen – who, with his bellycrawling attitude , will never, I think its safe to say, have any movie made about him – is in full geer in the recent attacks mounted against Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald.  The nadir of course came in Michael Kinsley’s review, which proposed the idea that the government alone should decide which of its secrets it deigns to release. Kinsley’s idea, and the ideas of other poobahs in the press who have taken potshots at Snowden and Greenwald, runs on familiar lines. On the one side we have liberty, and on the other side we have security. The question then is how much liberty we can afford and still be secure.

This way of putting the question is, of course, cluelless, and at no point asks the pertinent question, which is how much security have we been ensured by our ‘security’ agencies. Take a brief glance over the past fifty years: does it seem to anyone that the CIA or the NSA have made Americans more secure?

Rather, it is the opposite. The most flamboyant instance of security failure in our recent past was the 9/11 attack. It isn’t a case here that we were unprepared because security agencies had no instruments to warn them that an attack was being mounted, the presumption that drove the passage of the Patriot Act. We have abundant evidence that this is not at all the case. We know, for instance, that the CIA knew that two of the hijackers were in the US, they knew that they were connected with the attack on the USS Cole, and they failed – they intentionally failed – to inform the FBI. A Snowden, in 2001, leaking to the press what we now know about the behavior of all the agencies that “secure” us would have prevented 9/11. The news reports that have described the failures of the ‘security’ agencies have made it seem that it was a failure of the security agencies, or individuals in them, alone. It wasn’t – the attitude in the major media that preceded the attack, as for instance the dismissal of Gary Webb’s story and the refusal to publish the CIA inspector’s report that, in essence, showed that Webb was right (something that the LA Times didn’t print a story upon until six months after it was out), made clear that the press was in bed with the intelligence establishment.

Liberty, in other words, is not the alternative to security in the US, but its pre-requisite.

Imagine for the moment that my scenario had happened, and some leaker had given both the name of the CIA agent in San Diego keeping tabs on the two members of Al qaeda and the names of those members.  I can easily envision the response of both the agencies and the poobahs in the press: this leak, they would say, endangers many secret operations and countless American lives.  And that is how it would look to them, as 9/11 would not have happened and we would have no tally of casualties to put on the side of liberty rather than bogus security.

The force of negation of the establishment is astoundingly powerful. Those who try to criticize it, to pierce its categories, to show its fundamental ignorance, are fated to be either ignored or attacked.  And since such critics must have something in them, some kink, some deprivation, that allows them to see outside   the range of perception of the establishment, the attacks will mostly succeed, as the vulnerabilities that are seized upon displace the larger and graver crimes of state. 

the state of the unculture in France

Ah, the bottomless pit of the PS! Well on their way to making all France nostalgic for the Sarkozy period. Remember how (justly) Sarkozy was mocked for mocking books like La Princesse de Clèves, which he viewed as unnecessary dejecta in the  curriculum keeping out such new masterpieces as the latest self help book from the ex ceo of General Electric, or something. This was taken to demonstrate his barbarous touch. And who doubts that President Bling was contemptuous of French culture? Yet, one thing you can say for Nicky is he actually knew the name of a book.

Fast forward to Francois Hollande’s Minister of Unculture, Fleur Pellerin, who not only could not name a single Modiano novel when asked on tv, but excused herself by saying that for the past two years, since she’s been minister, she hasn’t had time to read a book. Presumably, in her whole life before those two years, she had other excuses: she had to make a phone call, she was sleepy, books take so long, my eyes hurt, I’ve got a good buzz on from smoking this weed and don’t want to spoil it,  etc.

Well, bad enough. But this is the Hollande mini-siecle, and it isn’t enough that the Culture minister make a fool of herself on tv. Figaro invites an intellectual, one who teaches the big big  boys, supposedly, at Science Po. And he, too, seems to find reading books, heavens, something so incredibly difficult that – well, here’s the comparison he uses:

“Postuler qu'un ministre de la Culture doit être lui-même lecteur assidu de littérature, c'est aussi idiot que de supposer qu'il faudrait pratiquer régulièrement la chirurgie pour être un bon ministre de la Santé.”

Here we get the full shitty flavor of the kind of cretinism that media intellectuals exude. Reading this article, four hundred years of French culture in its various tombs collectively vomited.

One would think that if reading a novel by Modiano (who does not even have an esoteric style, like Toni Morrison – the American comparison would be Paul Auster) is like doing brain surgery, that professors of literature should be paid like brain surgeons. But that is not where the clueless illiterates in the Hollande crewe are heading France: rather the key words are cut and privatize.  The NYT published an article today about where France is heading because, apparently, there’s no money for culture – why, that would take it away from the banks! But not to worry – there are always people around who will tell you that it is positively healthy to bow down to the billionaire. They are such a loveable breed:

Some view the shifting winds as a healthy sign. Frédéric Martel, a writer who hosts a radio show on the arts and wrote a book on the funding of culture in the United States, noted that the conventional view in some quarters used to be that culture financed and organized by the state was good and culture shaped by market forces, whether Hollywood or Disneyland, was bad.

Continue reading the main story

This prejudice is slowly dissipating, he said. Increasingly, France is importing the model of the nonprofit foundation bankrolled by a wealthy benefactor. Such patrons can also afford risk-taking star architects like Frank Gehry, who designed the Louis Vuitton Foundation, or Renzo Piano, who did the new quarters of the Jérôme Seydoux-Pathé Foundation, devoted to the history of cinema, which looks like a giant armadillo.

“There is a new way of thinking that having a billionaire create a nonprofit foundation for the arts is a very good thing and a public good,” Mr. Martel said. The notion that business can pollute the arts is changing, he added.”

A new way of thinking? And here I am, thinking that this new way of thinking was named a millenium ago. It’s called sycophancy.

the nyt kisses its own ass again

I don't think there is any paper out there that kisses its own ass as much as the NYT. In that paper, it is awards day every day - and the awards all go to the NYT. So I find it a bit shocking to read, in a Sunday Book review of James Risen's book about the ludicrous and corrupt war on terror, the following passage" "But he makes no mention of the press. I would argue that many in the news media were at least as guilty as others in his book of stirring up public anxiety for private gain. Risen himself, and the paper for which he works, are notable exceptions."
Notable exceptions? Is this the paper that employed Judy Miller? That filled its magazine section with defenses of a new liberal imperialism? Which withheld stories that would have 'challenged the narrative" for years, and that likes to insult Edward Snowden whenever it has a chance? The paper whose Washington correspondent. Elisabeth Bumiller, said of a press conference before the Iraq invasion - one premised, of course, on a fantasy about WMD - which Bush himself joked was "scripted": BUMILLER: I think we were very deferential because…it’s live, it’s very intense, it’s frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you’re standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country’s about to go to war. There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time."
But all this goes down memory hill, and the NYT has decided that its coverage of the Iraq war was so good that, well, it just has to kiss its own ass. Just one more time! Precious, my precious... 

against the writer's voice 3

I’ve always thought Foucault missed a trick, in Les Mots et les choses, by not devoting attention to the epistemological position of the term “discovery” in the 17^th and 18^th century. I don’t think that neglect was negligible, either – it points to one of the oddities of Foucault’s book, which is that it removed the conceptual history he was telling from the trans-Atlantic  context of colonialism that was one of the great material events of his donnee. Not only trans-Atlantic, but Indian and South Asian as well. Restoring “discovery” to its place would both confirm certain of Foucault’s intuitions and shuffle the order of things in interesting ways – it would give us a handle on deconstructing Foucault’s text.  Discovery is writ large not only in the period’s natural philosophy, but in its law, its ‘anthropology”, such as it was, and in the practice of adventure that traverses the disciplines. Discovery did an enormous amount of work at the time, legitimating a trans-Atlantic order that still exists, and that was built on top of the discovery myth.

“Finding” has no such royal pretentions. If discovery is a kingly word, finding is a jack in the pack. It is still related to the basic nature/culture divide, so a part of the raw essence of the discovery ideology, but there is a modesty in finding. It suits the contemporary sciences, where every researcher comes up with a “finding” – ah, the mock humbleness of it all! Natural philosophers, those baroque sages, came up with “discoveries”, a term that is hard to hide in the bureaucracy.

The above  does not exhaust the semiotic career of finding, of course. One of the great childhood activities is finding. Partly this is because children are built on a scale that allows corners and pockets to assume a greater prominence in their world. Partly this is because finding is basic to a number of childhood games – indeed, Freud’s construction of the fort/da game is built upon a relational element, the finding. In a culture that takes the child as an image of the authentic person – all social vices scraped away – finding will have a certain innocent aura.

All of which gets us to finding a voice. As I’ve pointed out, there is something going on here – something that has to do with the psychoanalytic dynamic of denial and projection – when writing, which is a manual-visual activity, a losing of the voice’s share in one’s word, is revamped as a vocal method – as finding one’s voice.

Mark McGurl, in his exhaustive study of the postwar history of American creative writing progams and their massive effect on American literature, pins the term “finding your voice” to the sixties. Mcgurl claims that there is a kind of motor common to the creative writing scene, which has three legs: “show, don’t tell”, “write what you know”, and “finding your voice”. Interestingly, he claims that the first two are cliches that one is unlikely to run into in a real creative writing course, although they still operate as the principles structuring “craft” and ”experience.” By implication, “finding your voice” – which McGurl links to authenticity – is neither a cliché nor a phrase that has been chased out of the classroom.

The creative writing program is a massive phenomenon:

“The handful of creative writing programs that existed in the 1940s had, by 1975, increased to 52 in

number. By 1984 there were some 150 graduate degree programs (offering the M.A., M.F.A, or Ph.D.), and as of 2004 there were more than 350 creative writing programs in the United States, all of them staffed by practicing writers, most of whom, by now, are themselves holders of an advanced degree in creative writing. (If one includes undergraduate degree programs, that number soars to 720.) “

McGurl claims that he comes not to praise of dispraise the “Program,” but he leans more towards praise.  Elif Batuman attacked McGurl in the London Review of Books for precisely this bias, since, according to Batuman, if creative writing programs are responsible for contemporary American lit and if that lit sucks, then creative writing must suck. Batuman uses the nice, colonialist comparison of literature from pre-literate tribal societies, with no literary tradition, a condition that she claims has been willfully imposed by modern american novelists on their novels, which is why they suck.

Following the implication in Batuman’s logic, though, would give us a different sense if we think American lit since World War II doesn’t suck – and I’m of that school.

However, Batuman does find the right clue for her case in Mcgurl’s promotion of innocence – of authenticity – which apparently cannot fall into the status of cliché, and which distinguishes American literature, or the general quest of the general authors who write it, since the sixties.

Batuman’s intellectual case is strengthened, I think, by the unexamined value given to voice, even though I think McGurl is very much onto something when he connects the discovery of the “finding your voice” trope with the political movements of the sixties. In a clever juxtaposition, McGurl puts together Hirschman’s  Exit Voice and Loyalty, written when Hirschman was at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford in 1964, and Wallace Stegner’s creative writing class at Stanford, which was one of the most influential in the country.  Taking Stegner’s class in the early sixties was Ken Kesey, whose trajectory McGurl follows. Stegner viewed Kesey the way an irritated prof will always view a charismatic students whose very existence offends his sense of propriety – he thought of him as a “smelly beatnik”. In the sixties, odor was definitely a political issue, and smelly here is a place-word indeed. McGurl tries to deduce, from the writings of Kesey and the rise of voice, an ideological correlate of creative writing: the open system. The open system was, inherently, libertarian, and McGurl rightly discerns the conservative dimension in various sixties phenomena – Kesey himself being a Goldwater Republican. In that limited sense, “finding your voice” isn’t necessarily a liberation, except insofar as your idea of liberation is getting Ayn Rand’s message.

However, voice, politically, in the sixties, meant voice from the marginalized – from women, blacks, gays, chicanos, etc.  In that sense, if voice was fatally implicated in the kind of neo-colonialist naivete examined by Derrida in the sixties, it was also a way station to the liberatory activity that brought margins to the center, to quote the old slogan.  Of voice, one can use Goethe’s great phrase about the erroneous and the true:  “Der Irrtum verhält sich gegen das Wahre wie der Schlaf gegen das Wachen. Ich habe bemerkt, daß man aus dem Irren sich wie erquickt wieder zu dem Wahren hinwende.” I’d translate that as: Error is related to truth as sleeping is related to waking. I have observered that one can come out of an error all refreshed to turn again towards the true.”

For Goethe, then, the sleep of reason creates  not monsters, but rationalists who appreciate the benefits of  sleep. Good old Goethe! And so it may be with finding your voice: denial grounds liberty.

Of course, one of the victims of that denial is “style”. While good enough for hairdressers, writers, as professionals in the program era, were certainly  being taught to avoid style – conceived as some exterior trickiness. This is of course one of those lame binaries that is continually shooting itself in the foot – for if style is merely poured over substance, the implication is that substance can appear without style, and yet this unstyled substance is a strangely receding thing – it is neither here nor there but always just beyond the horizon. In  the real world, where even the child’s crayoned caption of a picture has a certain identifiable style, datable, comparable, the idea, the imperative, to write without style looks like the  Zen road to nowhere.

It is at this point that voice, happily, comes in.

  

against the writer's voice 2

In an article entitled “Writing, an essay” in the December 1907 Harper’s Magazine, Edward Martin, who was at that time a periodicals writer, later becoming the first editor of Life Magazine, counseled readers to watch for the conversational tone of the author in writing. “In good writing there is the sound of the writer’s voice,” Martin tells us, and goes on to adduce, of all people, Milton in Paradise Lost (whose voice, if Martin was paying attention, is miles away from the voice he assumed in “Animadversions upon the Remonstrant’s Defense against Smectymnuus” – or if not miles away, at least in a different neighborhood.  Of course, Martin’s sentence has crept forward through the twentieth century and become a hydra headed monster, with a slithering tongue in every book nook, but back in 1907 the ‘writer’s voice” was not a commonplace. A few years after Martin published his essay, Henry James started writing prefaces for the standard edition of his works: the prefaces, collectively, were gathered together under the title ‘The Art of the Novel” because they collectively formed a sort of unique ocassion, an ars poetica by a major American writer. The only other book to which it can be compared for extensive knowledge of the novel and intelligence concerning same is EM Forster’s Aspects of Fiction.  In these prefaces, James never uses the phrase, the writer’s voice – although he often  speaks about voices. Voice is crucial to the novelist, but they are centrally, structurally outside the novelist. In a typical passage, writing about The Reverberator –not one of Jame’s best known novellas – he writes:

“After which perhaps too vertiginous explanatory flight I feel that I drop indeed to the very concrrete and comparatively trival origin of my story – short, that is, of some competent critical attribution of triviality all around. I am afraid, at any rate, that with this reminiscence I  but watch my grease spot (for I cling to the homely metaphor) engagingly extend its bounds. Who shall  say thus – and I have put the vain question but too often before – where the associational nimbus of the all but lost, of the miraculously recovered, chapter of experience shall absolutely fade and stop? That would be possible only were experience a chessboard of sharp black and white squares. Taking one of these for a convenient plot, I have but to see my particle of suggestion lurk in its breast, and then but to repeat in thhis connexion the act of picking it up, for the whole of the rest of the connexion straightway to loom  into life, its parts all clinging together and pleading with a collective friendly voice, that I can’t pretend to resist: “Oh, but we too, you know; what were we but of the experience?” Which comes to scarce more than saying indeed, no doubt, that nothing more complicates and overloads the act of retrospect than to let on’s imagination itself work backward as part of the business.”

James’ image of the anecdote or the threads and themes of the story pleading, having a voice, goes back to the classical source of the voice as an inspiration, an externality, to the entranced poet, the overcome rhetor, or the living argument in the Socratic dialogues. Even when James comes close to Martin’s sense of the “writer’s voice”, the voice still retains that necessary externality – as for instance, when James writes of the “human rumble” of Picadilly that  it and other London neighborhoods “speak to me almost only with the voice, the thousand voices, of Dickens.”

To explain how the writer’s voice supplanted the voice of the written, the voice of the suggestion, the conversation, the place and its genius -  how in fact it became the writer’s ‘self’ that was in question in James’ “grease spot” – is to track the rise of what Cyril Connolly calls, in The Enemies of Promise, the “vernacular style” as opposed to the mandarin one in modern Anglophone lit. Interestingly, Connolly associates the conversational with the mandarin style, full of complex sentences in the folds of which one finds the interjective energy of conversation. Vernacular, with its flatness, takes its cues first from newpaper reporting – with a leveling that is less conversational than photographic.

However, the writer’s voice, in Martin’s sense, was still not quite something one found in oneself. Milton found it in the Bible and in the poets and the modernist poets like William Carlos Williams found it in the mouths of the patients he visited in Rutherford New Jersey (Williams, coming from a bi-lingual  household, Spanish and English, wasn’t tricked by the convention that American English was English). In a sense, what these people were doing was finding a way of tearing down the rhetorical scrim that kept them from hearing these voices.

In 1984, another writer, Eudora Welty, published a book of essays, or lectures, on writing, or perhaps more precisely, on writing and her life: One  Writer’s Beginnings. It was a Harvard University Press book, and it made the NYT bestsellers list, the first Harvard Press book to do so.  Only one of Welty’s previous books had gone that high. Since 1984, it might have sold more than any of her short story collections or novels.

One of the divisions is called “Finding a Voice”, which would seem to make it cousin to the kind of cliché that I am trying to swat, here.  If this is so, I’m in bad straits, opposing the great Eudora Welty. Here I was having a good time battering Edward Martin, who nobody cares about any more, poor soul. But Welty? Surely the sappiness I have been seeing in the conjunctions of “finding” and “writer’s voice” is redeemed if the great Welty puts herself behind it.

So how do I get out of these straits? Eventually I think I need to to backtrack a little to reflect on the geneology of “voice”. There is an ideological line of descent I have so far ignored, and that is the idea of a people or a group having a “voice.” Like all things in modernity, the “voice” begins in politics and ends up in art. It ends up in ways I sympathize with. I think crossed the border in American literature sometimes in the 1920s, with the Southern “renaissance”. So let’s put that in the background and see what “finding a voice” is about.