Bollettino

The NYT has a nice story about the peaceful coexistence between Americans and Iraqis in the city of Diwaniya

"As the area around Baghdad endured a week of repeated violence, a happier scene unfolded in this city, a two-hour drive to the south.

American soldiers, without helmets or flak jackets, attended graduation ceremonies of the Diwaniya University Medical School. At ease with the Iraqi students and their parents, the American marines laughed, joked and posed in photographs. One by one, the students walked up to thank them, for Marine doctors had taught classes in surgery and gynecology and helped draw up the final exams.

"We like the Americans very much here," said Zainab Khaledy, 22, who received her medical degree last Sunday. "We feel better than under the old regime. We have problems, like security, but everything is getting better."

In goes on in this vein for quite a while, making Diwaniya seem like a candidate for Forbes One Hundred Best Cities to Work In. No attacks on friendly American GIs, no anti-American grafitti on the walls, the lion lying down with the lamb, etc.

Yet according to Spanish new agencies, the a military base located in this 'relatively peaceful' city in which Spanish soldiers are being trained was attacked just two days ago. 19 mortar shells were lobbed into the camp. Perhaps the NYT reporter doesn't pay attention to the papers owned by the NYT Company, because the story is up on the International Herald Tribune website. Alas, it is in pdf. Still, it does make you wonder who is in wonderland, here. At the very least, I think that the editors of Forbes would hesitate to recommend a city as Great to Work In that was subject to occasional mortar bombardments.

Bollettino

John Gray wrote an essay on Conrad in New Statesman recently. Gray, who is a conservative who has realized that the logic of his position allies him with the forces of the left's anti-globalist wing, is a philosopher for whose writings on John Stuart Mill I have a lot of respect. However, as a literary critic, there are problems with old Gray. He is properly appreciative of Secret Agent -- with which view I wholeheartedly concur -- but his explanation for why Conrad's approach to power -- a form of therapeutic nihilism -- is suddenly looking more sophisticated than that of 20th century writers doesn't seem quite right. "Conrad is our contemporary because, almost alone among 19th-and 20th-century novelists, he writes of the realities in which we live." Almost alone? I don't think so. In fact, I don't think this could be so -- since the way we live now is built on the way we lived then, just like a coral reef is built on succeeding generations of exoskelotal martyrs. Gray has decided to make a decent point -- that Conrad's novel, Secret Agent, is suddenly, through no intention of Conrad's, relevant to today's politics -- through an exaggerated point.

This is a poor way to go about making a point. Here's a quote that shows how off base he is:

"It is no accident that nothing approaching a great political novel appeared in the last decades of the 20th century. The shallow orthodoxies of the time were not propitious. Not only the right, but also the centre left, had made a sacred fetish of science - not, as in The Secret Agent, the science of astronomy, but the decidedly shakier discipline of economics. Practically every part of the political spectrum accepted the ridiculous notion that the secret of unending prosperity had been found. Free markets, balanced budgets, the correct supply of the correctly measured money, a judicious modicum of state spending - with such modest devices, the riddle of history had at last been solved.

The savants who announced the end of history took for granted that the globalisation of markets would lead to peace. They did not notice that savage wars were being fought in many parts of the world. The economists who bored on about a weightless economy, which had dispensed with the need for natural resources, contrived to pass over the 20th century's last big military conflict, the Gulf war, which was fought to protect oil supplies. None of this mattered much so long as the boom continued, and the illusion of peace was preserved. But the price of living on these fictions was a hollowing-out not only of politics, but also of literature. It is a telling fact about the closing decades of the 20th century that the closest approximation to a notable political novel was probably The Bonfire of the Vanities."

Gray also reveals that the political ideologies of the twentieth century were evolutionist, and disbelievers in a predetermined historical path. He includes Marxism in this statement, which shows that he has (perhaps happily) forgotten most Marxist writings from the 20s to the 50s.

So, is there a great political novel that defies Gray's assertion? Problem: what great political novel has been written in the past ten years.

Answer: I immediately think of Nicholas Shakespeare's The Dancer Upstairs.

There is an essay on Bold Type about the initial seed for Shakespeare's novel. Conrad comes to mind because he possessed a (fairly commonplace) writerly contempt for bourgeois rationality, and a (fairly modern) admiration for the heroic act -- that is, as it emerges from the outlier bourgeois character -- and those moods are certainly involved in the novel that Shakespeare wrote, and the real political events -- namely, the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso -- that underpin it.

Gray, who is a philosopher and was trained, I suppose, in Britain's analystic tradition -- where the sentence I need my umbrella, it is raining, is subject to book length scrutiny -- must feel that, on the literary front, he can break out. But there's no reason to become sloppy.

Here is the beginning of Shakespeare's essay:

About ten years ago a young boy holding a satchel wandered into Lima's Crillon Hotel and after only a few hesitant steps across the opulent lobby exploded into a thousand bloody pieces. This was not an isolated incident. Already dogs had been strung from the city's lampposts; in a crowded Andean market a donkey blew up, causing appalling wounds to the Indian shoppers; and in Chimbote a terrified duck dragged a home-made bomb into the telephone exchange. But I date the moment of my obsession to that schoolboy suicide. Who had sent him?

The question chafed much more than a piece of grit in the shoe. I wanted to understand the character lurking behind these actions. Yet it was hard to discover anything. An utter secrecy pervaded the revolutionaries--for that is who they turned out to be. When they entered a village to cut the throats of government representatives, they wore balaclavas. But underneath their masks they could be anyone. One man, an American married to a beautiful, carefree model from Cuzco, told me how he had looked up from his dinner plate to see his wife's face on television. "She was listed among the most wanted guerrillas."

Peter Avdeev, the peasant soldier in Tolstoy�s novella, Hadji Murad, is shot in a small clash with a bunch of Chechens. He is taken to an infirmary, a doctor probes his wound for the bullet and fails to extract it (although he does, insanely, plaster the wound), and Avdeev lies there with an astonished look on his face, so that he doesn�t recognize his comrades when they come to visit him. Then he does. Then the commander comes in, Avdeev asks for a candle, has trouble gripping it with his stiffening fingers, and dies. As the finishing touch on this little miniature of the casual cruelty of irregular war, Tolstoy writes that the death was announced like this:

"23rd Nov. -- Two companies of the Kurin regiment advanced from the fort on a wood-felling expedition. At mid-day a considerable number of mountaineers suddenly attacked the wood- fellers. The sharpshooters began to retreat, but the 2nd Company charged with the bayonet and overthrew the mountaineers. In this affair two privates were slightly wounded and one killed. The mountaineers lost about a hundred men killed and wounded."

Of course, Avdeev doesn�t even rank the mention of his name, the attack of the mountaineers was, in truth, the firing of one bullet at the wood fellers, the charge never happened, and the mountaineers comprised a force of maybe twenty, of which none were hit � or none that Tolstoy records.

The military hasn�t changed, has it?

We are returning from Portland. We saved our sanity in Portland by ignoring the news, and the Internet, and concentrating on how to describe the characters in the novel we are writing. The news boomed idiotically in the background, with various of the important bigwigs who got us into Iraq warning that we have to stay in there, as though it was self-evidently in our interest to be involved in the same kind of warfare that Israel has been involved in for the last twenty years, or that ripped Lebanon apart. Etc. The amazing blindness to anything remotely resembling American interest is, perhaps, the thing that distinguishes Bush�s Potshot War from wars in the past. It isn�t that America is becoming an imperial power � it is that Bush�s men assumed that becoming an imperial power meant writing an article in Foreign Affairs saying that we are one, god dammit.

Bollettino

LI recently had a discussion with an engineer during the course of which the subjects of God and mathematics were raised. Not for the first time, LI was struck by the difference in what mathematics means for us, and what it means for engineers. Engineers take mathematics to be primarily the efflorescence of that domain of knowledge that deals with discrete units and their relationships. Numeration, in other words, is the primary element of the mathematical. But for LI, mathematics defined by a set of functions (the variable, Successor of, etc.), a set of definitions, and a set of axioms. Our engineering friend was claiming that everything wasn�t mathematically determined. Her point was that LI held to a view similar to Quine�s � a sort of neo-Pythagorianism, in which everything eventually dissolves into number.

Now, we do think there is something to be said for the idea that, theoretically, everything can be translated into mathematics. But we also see logical faults with that view, starting with the term �everything,� which seems semantically dependent on the �All� of set theory. In other words, our proposition is invalid to the extent that it assumes what it wants to claim. Goedel�s work shows that there are limits to the All within mathematics. In the set of All statements generated by mathematics, at least one of them is unproveable � that which asserts the closure of the system. However, there�s nothing in Goedel that addresses the question of the complete translatability of assertions about the world into mathematics. In other words, there�s nothing to guide us in contemplating the possibility of a non-mathematical All. Such an All would, we think, be something like Spinoza�s God. This God, by the way � and any other God � is limited by mathematics, too: even God can�t count the uncountable numbers. Omniscience, in other words, has been quietly proven, in Western culture, over the past two hundred years, to be a characteristic that is not possessed by any intelligence � that, in fact, contradicts intelligence. For almost fourteen hundred years, omniscience was the great constitutive principle of European thought � it is funny how quietly it crumbled. In a sense, Darwin, Newton, and Einstein are reconcilable with the patriarchal God of Jerusalem � but Cantor, Goedel, and Bohr aren�t. Our hypothetical, non-mathematical All can�t know All about itself, and remain an All. It is as if God were some great egg, a Humpty Dumpty, who can only exist when he has his great fall, The Divine moment is just that moment of contact, when the shell is forever broken.

Bollettino

Since I am working on a novel, I am reading novels. Novelist sum, ergo I steal. For some reason, I've decided to give myself a dose of Conrad, since my novel is about politics and murder. But I've also been treating myself to Raymond Queneau's Le Chiendent. This was translated as "The Barking Tree" a long time ago. Recently, NYRB re-issued it as witchgrass -- since that variety of plant is what Chiendent literally means. Barbara Wright's intro to the book is here.

Here, according to Wright, is how the book germinated:
He [Queneau] has described how, on his voyage to Greece: "I had taken Descartes'
Discourse on Method with me, so I decided to translate it into spoken French. With this idea in mind I began to write something which later became a novel called
Le Chiendent. You will find a good deal of popular language in it, but also a
few efforts in the philosophical sense, I seem to remember."

That seem to remember is good. When Sartre, in La Nausee, writes about a tree trunk, he is treading in R.Q.'s footsteps, except that Sartre cannot find his trees and things in general funny. Queneau is one of the great comic writers. Those people, and there are all too many of them, who think that French literature has no sense of humor have never read Le Chiendent. They probably wouldn't make sense of it anyway.

How does Descartes work, as a platform for the novel? The famous idea that existence can be deduced from thought -- since thought presumes thinking, thinking presumes a thinker, a thinker presumes a quelconque -- becomes a sort of science fiction in R.Q. Etienne Marcel is your regular on the subway train -- into work at seven, out of work at six. In R.Q.'s vision, he is merely one of a world of shadows, until one day he stands in front of a shop window.

"Already in this first book there is much that in retrospect can be seen as typical Queneau; the accident which is to transform Etienne's life is not something noble, magnificent, transcendental: it is merely the ridiculous sight of two little rubber ducks swimming in a shop window-in a hat. To prove that the hat is waterproof.
This, and particularly the fact that he discovers that the little ducks have been there for two years without his noticing them, is enough to start Etienne off on a metaphysical journey and a new life-in which outwardly, however, nothing is changed.

The effect of the little ducks is reinforced by something equally banal, but which this time has consequences not so much in the domain of mind as in that of matter. From his commuter's train, Etienne notices in the desolate suburbs north of Paris a hut which has CHIPS (i.e. , French fries) written up on it in large letters. When he decides to visit this forlorn place, for no reason, he there meets several people who are to have a vital importance in his life. The other objects that Queneau chooses to set Etienne off on his meditations on appearance and reality, and on the further train of reflections in which he becomes so passionately involved, are also no more world-shattering than an ordinary potato peeler and a hard-boiled egg cutter."

The "no reason" underlined by Wright is an allusion, probably clearer at the time than now, to Gide. And in fact Gide's best novel, Les Caves du Vatican, has just this kind of plot. A blank in life -- the gratuitous act, the non-reason -- is an invitation to reasons and highly motivated acts. Society abhors a vacuum. More than that -- give society a vacuum, and it will give you back a vacuum cleaner. The sovereignty of non-sense, which Bataille, Queneau's friend, found so glorious, comes down to earth in R.Q. with a crash.

Wright has another essay that profiles Queneau's entire life and work in Context.

Finally, for those who are unafraid to risk the sometimes recondite corners of the French dictionary, there's a remininscence of Queneau during the resistance in Magazine-litteraire.

It's by Jean Lescure, who published a magazine, the Messenger, during the occupation. It's in that Magazine that some of the first Exercises de style appeared. Or is it the Batons chiffres poems? Ourselves, we think the fey, pataphysical side of Queneau has been overdone by his readers. He was far more than an amateur of the kind of things you get sick of reading Carroll's Sylvia and Bruno. But here's an interesting graf:

"Ces mots et ce qu'ils pouvaient faire de la po�sie (tout autant que ce que la po�sie pouvait en faire) occupaient nos conversations - bien plus que les � id�es � que Bataille agitait tous les mardis soirs chez lui, dans le Coll�ge de sociologie qu'il avait plus ou moins r�veill� et qui r�unissait donc Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Fr�naud et moi. C'�tait le temps o� Georges lisait obstin�ment Nietzsche, et nous administrait hebdomadairement les �blouissantes r�flections de ses lectures (� quoi nous cessions de comprendre quoi que ce soit au bout d'une demi-heure, mais qu'il suffisait � Blanchot de reprendre, du fond de son fauteuil, pour qu'en trois minutes tout redevienne lumineux, riche et nous autorise � un d�part repu)."

"These words (of a poem quoted in the above graf-R.) and what they could do to poetry (or what poetry could do to them) occupied our conversations -- much more than the 'ideas" that Bataille agitated every Tuesday at his (RQ'S) office, in the College of Sociology that he had more or less re-animated and which united Queneau, Leiris, Blanchot, Fardoulis-Lagrange, Ubac, Frenaud and myself. At this time Georges was obstinately reading through Nietzsche, and he administered a weekly dose of the spendiferous reflections resulting from his reading (which we ceased to understand period at the end of a half hour, but which were sufficient for Blanchot to reconstitute them, from the bottom of his drawer, in three minutes in order that they become luminous, rich, and left us feeling justly satiated."

Bollettino

Dis.sense is a German site. This month, they are emphasizing doing nothing -- Nicht-tun. And as part of that theme, someone translated Kasimir Malevich's legendary essay on laziness into German. Well, yours truly has translated the first part of it into English. Enjoy.


Laziness as the actual Truth of Mankind
Work as an instrument to reach truth
Philosophy of the socialistic Idea
It has always made a strange impression on me to hear or read some family member or bureaucrat making a contemptuous remark about laziness. �Laziness is the mother of all vices� � which is how the collective wisdom of humanity and all peoples has branded this particular style of human activity. But for myself, I�ve always been of the opinion that this condemnation of laziness is unfair. Why is work so great? Why is it elevated to the throne of praise and fame, while laziness is forced to sit in the pillory and all the lazy are shamed and have to wear the burden of viciousness; meanwhile the laborious are covered with fame, given presents and feasted? To me, it has always seemed like this is the exact opposite of what should happen. Work has to be cursed, as it has come down to us from the legend of Paradise, and laziness should be that towards which all humanity has to strive. Somehow, this has developed quite otherwise in real life. It�s this �otherwise� I want to concentrate on. And since every clarification must employ marks and occasions and every decision and logical conclusion rests on these marks, in this essay I will go over them and illuminate their connection to one another in order to reach the goal that is truly hidden in the word �laziness.�

With many words, the truth is hidden, and can�t be dug up. It seems to me that man rarely handles the truth and that when he does, he�s like a cook, who cooks many different things in many different pots. Now, it is certainly true that every pot has its own proper lid, yet out of pure distraction the cook bangs around pots and covers them with random lids until he finally forgets what is contained in each pot. I think that something like this has happened with laziness � many words and truths are covered with lids until nobody knows what is found under the lids. On one lid it stands written, �laziness is the mother of vice.� Now, they take that lid and they cover up some random pot and think that they�ve captured scandal and vice in it. Of course, it is self-evident that the word �Faulheit (laziness, from Faul, foul � R.),� if it implies some human circumstance, is very dangerous, but what is there that is dangerous for humans throughout the world? One has to think that laziness implies the death of �being� �i.e. of men, whose exclusive salvation resides in production and labor. If man is no longer active, whole countries will die, death will threaten whole peoples. It�s clear that this circumstance, as the circumstance of corruption, will have to be prosecuted. So, in order to escape death, man has brilliantly come up with a lifeform in which all must work and no one is allowed to be a bum. That�s the reason that the socialistic system that leads to communism, struggling against all previous systems, brings all of humanity into the single way of labor, and leaves behind all bums. This is the meaning of the most pitiless of all laws in the most humane of all systems: he who doesn�t work, doesn�t eat. This is also why the communist system prosecutes capitalism, because the capitalist encourages the bum and because the ruble definitely leads to laziness. So in the socialist system God�s curse, i.e. labor, receives the highest blessing. Under the blessing of communism, everyone gets to work, otherwise they starve. But even this point is hidden in the system of laboriousness. The point is that man in all other systems would never feel the nearness of this all-encompassing death, and would never see, that in production lies not only the general, but also the particular good. In the collective labor system, however, death stands before each, and each has only one task; through labor, and the products of labor, to save himself. Otherwise, as said, the threat of hunger. This socialistic system of labor aims, in its natural, unconscious processes at bringing all of mankind to work, in order to improve productivity and preserve security and strengthen humanity and through the increased level of productivity to assure human existence. Naturally this system, that bothers not just about the particular individual, but about all of humanity, is absolutely right. Exactly as the capitalist system guarantees the right and the freedom to work, bringing about the increase of money in the bank, in order to secure laziness in the vague future. That presumes that the ruble is one of those signs that that seduces us because it promises that which everyone dreams of: the happiness of laziness. In fact, that is the meaning of the ruble, the ruble is in itself nothing other than a little piece of laziness. He who collects the most little pieces will luxuriate longer in laziness. The ideologues who worry about all the people imagined this cause and effect in their consciousness and were therefore always unanimous that laziness is the mother of all vices. But in their unconsciousness, the Other exists: the wish to make all equal in labor, or otherwise said, the wish for all to be equally lazy. So what cannot be achieved in the capitalist system can be achieved in the communist system. Yet the capitalist and the communist are both bothered by the same thing: achieving the only truly human state, which is laziness. In the deep unconscious of the system is hidden exactly this truth. But for some reason, this truth has never really been grasped. There has never been a labor system that announces the solution to mankind�s problem thusly: �the truth of your striving is the way to laziness.� Instead, we find everywhere those dreary reminders of the virtue of labor, and the implication that labor is unavoidable, and it is impossible to lay it aside, and in fact this goal is what the socialist system has in mind to reach through labor, taking the burden of vice, hour by laborious hour, off the shoulders of all humanity. The more people who work, however, the less hours of work there will be. And so more time will remain left over for idleness.