Last week, our friend T. – who usually holds down the extensive NYC bureau, with its sweeping views of Central Park, its extensive armentarium of computers put together by God’s little elves, and its News Corp-like budget – supplied the posts while we were gone. We liked the posts; for a long time, we’ve been trying to get T. to put together a web site, or log, or something. Alas, unlike the perpetually underemployed crewe, here, T. actually has a real job, and real prospects.

T. left us with one last post on the Tiger Lillies.

Diana Vreeland in Harper’s Bazaar had a column “Why Don’t You?”

In that spirit: Why don’t you go out and buy some Tiger Lillies CDs. You really ought to.

When R. gave me the keys to LI’s front door, he encouraged me to what I would – profess Paraguayan nationalism, exhort LI’s readers to arms, overturn the laws of every prophet – so I will take this one shot of unmediated endorsement: go, go now and go later to tigerlillies.com and buy something. The Tiger Lillies are perfectly astounding. Songs about pimps, songs about pushers, songs about thieves, an entire album (Farmyard Filth) about sex with animals! If they are known, it might well be due their participation in Shockheaded Peter – the play based on Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter: songs about misbehaving children! Not much chance to see them play live in these States unless you live in or about NYC or San Fran, but if you live in the UK or Russia, there are many opportunities to see them every year (my wife and I will see them in London when we visit that town in May). If you live in such places, go to a goddamned show dammit! While Limited, Inc. may not endorse the band officially and fully, I know that I got its ear when I played many many songs during the drinks and the times we shared together last summer.

"Why don't you . . . Turn your child into an Infanta for a fancy-dress party?" - DV

“Never fear being vulger, just boring.” – Diana Vreeland. If you are not familiar with her, then you are not familiar with one of the great aphorists of the English language. “She is a beauty, no matter her features.” is a favorite; one of the finer statements on ‘beauty’ that these eyes have ever passed over.”

Continuing LI’s Menckenish ecumenicalism (now there’s a phrase, and that’s the only defense I can make of it), on this Good Friday we have searched out some article that can warm our somewhat tepid belief. We found one in the Winter Issue of Common Knowledge: The Presence of Objects by Caroline Walker Bynum – link here to Bynum’s President’s Address to the AHA. The article begins with a small but startling artifact found cemented in the wall of a church in Sternberg, Germany. It is a block of stone with footprints in it. What miracle is attested by those footprints? Well, it seems in 1496, a Jewess stole the eucharist and attempted to drown it. Her attempts were unavailing, and the divinity sunk her feet into stone. It seems, in fact, that the Jews around Sternberg were always bludgeoning eucharists, making them bleed, and in general showing their hard heartedness. A corrupt priest, it was said, delivered a lot of consecrated hosts to the Jews to redeem items pawned by his concubines, and of course they started sticking these things with knives, as was their habit. Hard hearted, these folks. To test just how densely the fibers of their hearts were contracted, the church had sixty five of them tortured, burned twenty seven of them on a hill still known as Judenberg, and expelled the rest.

Such is the history of the Catholic church in a less than life lovin' mode. But these things happened long ago (although certain Catholic bishops, notably the one appointed by the Church to serve the Argentine military, have hopes of reviving Jew-baiting any day now). Bynum’s inventory of objects in the Sternberg church include, quaintly, the heavily scored table at which the Jews assembled to attack the hosts, the iron pot that the concubine got back after the delivery of the hosts, and even a container in which the hosts were stored. The question, of course, is what is one to make of these things now?

In Sternberg, the answer has been, partly, to enroll these objects in the indictment both of the small, distant massacre of the Jews in 1492 and the larger one in the 1933-1945 period. Bynum reports that, in Sternberg’s economic history, the 1492 massacre was no small thing – it made Sternberg the site of a pilgrimage. Sternberg was not alone – it was a common late medieval motif, this of desecrating Jews and miraculously rescued hosts. According to Bynum’s reconstruction, the story of the desecrating Jews as a cause of a pogram is an innovation – in an earlier epoch, the chronicles would recount things like: visitation of grasshoppers, Jews all killed. Afterwards, the desecration story would be woven – not so much to excuse killing Jews, a self explanatory Christian act, but to attract pilgrims, an profitable source of income.

Bynum’s survey leads into Bynum’s argument – that the mass of anti-Jewish objects created in Germany between the 14^th and 16^th centuries should not be destroyed. They should be preserved both to be studied and as probes, as it were, of past cultures. With this argument, LI agrees, even if Bynum’s argument about the aura of objects (Bynum adduces her mother’s old wooden pie rollers) seems, partly, to be the rationalization of an inveterate pack rat impulse.

Now, I could imagine someone pointing out that the Church is no longer a center of anti-Semitism, and has repented quite extensively of its past role. That's true. And, of course, it is also true that the Church is much bigger than its bigotries. To think that it isn't is the mistake, ultimately, of such as Mencken -- it is a foreshortening of the imagination, the critic's vice.

On the other hand, one must remember that the motive for repentence (of certain of those bigotries) came from outside the church – the horror at intolerance, the horror at anti-semitism, were sentiments generated by liberal, secular thinkers, promoted by their controversial disciples, transmitted via outlaw organisations and bohemian enclaves (well, sometimes), and fought against, bitterly, by the Church for two hundred years. Liberal secular thinkers did the Church a favor – in a sense, they brought it much closer to the teachings of Jesus. Moral is: don’t give up now, liberal secularists.

The sedulous flycatcher

There was a faction, after the Bush victory in November, that urged a more compassionate approach to heartland America, outreach on divisive social issues, and even the well tempered expression of faith, on appropriate occasions. LI says to hell with that. Ourselves, we believe that the liberal/left strategy should be one of the fiercest and most unmitigated contempt for the logrollers from the confederacy who are now straddling our necks and digging in their spurs. You will find, here and there, expressions of mild surprise that the rightwing set seems to want to expand the federal government in several ways, and seems headed, as an objective correlative of their real politics, for eight solid years of record deficits. The idea that conservatives once foolishly elevated to power would deny the human impulse to self-aggrandizement to which all conservative theology admiringly refers in the chaste pursuit of small government is, itself, a cause for some amazement: are the depths of human gullibility ever to be plumbed? When a man seeks to reform our vices by throwing himself into the profession of pimp, suspect the purity of grasping heart. And so it is with the chorus of neo-conmen in Congress, who sweat to think that somewhere in America, someone is having some pleasure that they haven't passed a law to suppress -- a fear that ranks with one that sometimes renders them flaccid in the arms of their mistresses, the mighty panic of having, somehow, somewhere, offended a business lobbying group.

LI has little to say about the Schiavo ordeal except that the eructation of Tom Delay on the American scene was diagnosed, in its essence, for all time by H.L. Mencken’s coverage of the Scopes Trial, and his obituary of William Jennings Bryan. From that obituary, we would like to lift a phrase that is even more apposite for a man who sprayed DDT for a living before he decided there had to be an easier way to make a buck and went to that Valhalla of chislers, egomaniacs, and penny ante geniuses, D.C. – the “seduluous flycatcher.” We rip it from perhaps the most marvelous passage ever to open an obituary:

“Has it been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan’s last secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious detail, and not without its sardonic overtones. He was the most sedulous flycatcher in American history, and by long odds the most successful. His quarry, or course, was not Musca domestica but Homo neandertalensis.”

And then there is this description of Bryan at the Scopes trial, which pretty much captures the Delay persona as it trails clouds of talk radio heartburn.

“One day it dawned on me that Bryan, after all, was an evangelical Christian only by sort of afterthought -- that his career in this world, and the glories thereof, had actually come to an end before he ever began whooping for Genesis. So I came to this conclusion: that what really moved him was a lust for revenge. The men of the cities had destroyed him and made a mock of him; now he would lead the yokels against them. Various facts clicked into the theory, and I hold it still. The hatred in the old man's burning eyes was not for the enemies of God; it was for the enemies of Bryan.

Thus he fought his last fight, eager only for blood. It quickly became frenzied and preposterous, and after that pathetic. All sense departed from him. He bit right and left, like a dog with rabies. He descended to demagogy so dreadful that his very associates blushed. His one yearning was to keep his yokels heated up -- to lead his forlorn mob against the foe.”

Maggie Valley is a resort town in the mountains of North Carolina. It is distinguished by one dance hall, seasonally shuttered (the Stompin’ Ground), one main drag, Soco Road, upon which the Stompin Ground is strategically located, numerous rental cabins, four or five hotels including the Four Seasons, also on Soco Road, one now defunct amusement park (Ghost Town), which is for sale, according to the billboard on the property formerly occupied by the enterprise, and a ski resort, the Cataloochee, with a beginners, an intermediate, and a best slope – the best slope being accessed by a ski lift going up (the eye estimates) maybe two thousand and a half feet. It was open Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week. Then it was closing for the season. The employees there say that the busier season, in Maggie Valley, is the summer, anyway.

I headed for Maggie Valley with my brother last Thursday. My other brother had already rented a cabin (with, as he was eager to point out on the phone, a porch jacuzzi), and the aim was to ski Friday and hike Saturday. The resort was on the verge of packing it in, but it looked like there had been snow and sleet in the mountains, so we were figuring that the pack wouldn’t be all artificial.

Since we were going to be staying in a cabin, we packed a few things into my brother’s car, including a bag of kindling and logs – for the fireplace. Then we set out, ate at a steak place, and made the drive from Atlanta in three and a half hours. During two and a half of those hours, I was feeling a bit of pain in my chest. I decided it was heart burn, although to tell you the truth, I have never quite understood the nature of heart burn, that evocative and mysterious term stamped into my brain from an early age by the very successful tv ad campaigns mounted by various patent medicine companies who, from the days of radio to the days of cable, have underwritten so much of the mental referential undergrowth for those raised during that period when tv consisted of the big three and a few public stations. So, we approach Maggie Valley at around ten at night. We are both looking for signs of snow, but it is, of course, dark. We find the cabin, and my other brother in deep repose mode in the Jacuzzi, a snifter of rum in his hand. We unpack, watch a movie (Apollo 13) and I notice that this heart burn is spreading and giving me a frightening empathy with the astronauts encaged in their apparently doomed lunar lander module. I am lying there, understanding the close bond between me and my heart. And, this night, I am not liking it. Still, it is merely severe heart burn. We all agree to go to sleep, what with the big day ahead of us.

At around three, I am filled with intimations of my mortality – intimations in spades that have spread into my shoulder and down my side. A small child’s plastic figurine – an elephant, a giraffe – is being stuffed, by invisible fingers, into one of my aorta. It is not very much fun. So I drag myself up the cabin’s hallway to one of my brother’s door, knock, and when he drags himself out of bed, I explain that I might be dead tomorrow morning. This alarms him. Luckily, my brother has seen enough medical shows on tv to prescribe for these situations: take two aspirins and call him in the morning.

I do. In the morning, I do feel better. However, whenever I laugh, my chest hurts. I discovered a fact about myself: I laugh quite a bit. I resolve to stop laughing so much in the future. I say that I think I can go with them to the Cataloochee, but I am not sure that I can ski. Well, we go on up there, and – whether it is the thinner air or some random anxiety I harbor that, if I do have to go to the hospital, I will never for the rest of my life be able to pay off the resulting medical bill – having no insurance, no assets, and a mere thousand bucks in the bank – my heart starts doing the business with the small plastic animal figurines again. So my brothers pursuade me to go to the medical tech people at the resort. One of them, a trim, handsome man, blue eyes, perfect hair, obviously once a ski jockey and now a med tech jockey who wants to get into medical management, takes my pulse, takes my blood pressure, and advises me to go to the urgent care clinic. He also gives me the helpful information that men in their forties have a greater risk of dying from heart attack then men in their fifties and sixties. He explains this factoid, but I am not, unfortunately, in reportorial mode. Therefore, I can't tell you the cause of the differential. So off I go, leaving one brother behind to ski, and with my unfortunate other brother in tow. We wait for a long time at the clinic, which is like a meeting place for every citizen of Maggie Valley that has a sneeze or cough, reviving, to my mind, that old medical term, miasma. And then I wait in a cubicle and get examined by an echelon of the medically trained, from the woman who takes my pulse up to the chief doctor.

I thought I’d get this down. I’m going to use that pain for some character or another.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/21/arts/music/21cnd-short.html?pagewanted=2&hp

Sadness has descended on this office once again: Bobby Short, saloon singer extraordinaire, singer of saloon songs, saloon singer, the most high, is dead.
There is a peculiar annoyance that those who live in NYC and love NYC and those that love NYC who do not live in NYC can share intimately: the loathing of Woody Allen's particular version of the island of Manhattan. Mr. Short, of course, appears in a few occasions in WA’s version.

Nevertheless, if you ever had the chance to squat in that small room at The Carlyle during one of Mr. Short's performances, you would know that his presence, his manner, and his style were things grander than Woody's simple sentimentality.

I can imagine at least two types of obituaries: the one that reminds one of what has been lost, and the one that informs one of what one never knew. The obitiuaries that I read today reminded me only of what has been lost.

I can just now hear Mr. Short's sad soulful rendition of "Bye Bye Blackbird" - it is beautiful; it is one of the saddest songs that I know. Not quite so much like Nina Simone’s broken version. Nor quite like the Miles/Coltrane version, in its virtuosity. No, his offers a much more soulful sense of loss. His offers a sense of loss that is a sense that no one occasion is for the first nor the last time that one will feel a loss, that the sense of loss is ever present, that loss is ever happening; the sense of the lost ‘thing’ is a self-same sense of wondering what it is that has been lost – what was it and how was it lost at all?

Inconsolably, bye bye blackbird......

It’s a sad day at Limited, Inc. All the staff left early today: boss is out of town. None of them, though, left to get an early start to reveries for St. Patrick; no, theirs are somber drinks tonight: Lil’ Kim was convicted of perjury.

In lieu of an introduction, I will jump to the conclusion:

“For a long time, the chapter I have just written was at the tip of my pen, but I kept rejecting it. I had promised myself that in this book I would display only the cheerful aspect of my soul; but this plan slipped out of my hands, like so many others: I hope that the sensitive reader will forgive me for having asked a few tears of him; and if anyone finds that in all truth I should have cut this chapter, he can tear it out of his copy, or even throw the book on the fire.” Xavier de Maistre – A Journey Around My Room

This is not LI. This is odd.

If R. is to LI what Johnny Carson was to The Tonight Show, then….. I am, as a guest host, seated behind the familiar desk…. who? John Davidson? Joey Bishop? Joan Rivers? Jay Leno? Oh fer fucks' sake! Let us hope, altogether now, that I'm not Jay Leno and that this nightmare analogy might quit my thoughts!

This is odd. The problem of the address. The problem of the typing of a conversation with one’s self.....the bullet in the barrel of the transference gun..…

So, no more about me, let's return to Badiou......today's lesson:
Slavoj Zizek on Badiou, and, later, Derrida. Please open your copy of The Ticklish Subject, and please turn to page 132..... No, I really ought to promise no more Badiou. No, no, and no more Badiou! [but please do go to ‘The Lacanian Subject’, page 158, of this book if you want to get to why LI is not on the side of Badiou; LI, as has been stated previously, remains on the side of Derrida, and Zizek gives one version of an account as to why – or, of course, you can take the path of patience and wait for the return of the founder and proprietor of LI for an account of on which side LI remains, and, perhaps, why it remains so].

No, no more Badiou; this is not to be Art, as Truth or otherwise, any more than it will be an Event, either horizonless or immanent.

Instead, an anecdote: many years ago, when he was a younger man, this correspondent was given this advice by a hard-drinking, long-travelled, scruff-bearded Dutchman at Fanelli’s Bar, on Prince Street: every man should visit a prostitute at least once in his life so that he might know that particular shame that one feels upon leaving her room. Why? Because, in the Dutchman’s jovial opinion, that shame was necessary to any condition that might be called ‘human’.

Whatever one makes of this perhaps not so well-remembered suggestion, whether or not one knows that particular shame, a more general but no less sincere account of where one might find one’s self is offered by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work – the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from the outside – the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within – that you don’t feel until it’s too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be a good man again. The first sort of breakage seems to happen quick – the second kind happens almost without your knowing it but is realized suddenly indeed.” The Crack-up

Shitter. Something has gone wrong. The Event has returned. I suppose that LI has its own gravity.

No time left to sketch an alternate conclusion. This day is nearly done, afternoon is long since past. Raise a glass to Myles na gCopaleen.

Badiou (the end, temporarily)

LI is going to pick up the thread of the Badiou posts next week. Since we are taking a vacation, our friend, T., has agreed to put together a few LI posts. This should shake up this site, which suffers a bit from the arteriosclerosis of our egotism.

Okay, a few more notes.

The sensible is transformed into the Event of the Idea in Art. So it stands written. One wants to know:

1. What is the function of the sensible, here? Here, surely, we have wandered into the very traditional categories of aesthetics, in which one way of working with the sensible – say, measuring the sensation of sound – is taken to be science, while another way of working with it – say, creating an opera with those sounds – is taken to be art. The difference is not, however, in the measuring, surely – in the techniques. Mozart has to measure sound to achieve his goal as surely as an audiologist has to measure his sound to achieve his goal. And then there is the problem of those forms of art – poetry, for instance – in which the model of the sensible doesn’t work too well. A poem could consiste of writing la la la muchly – or a poem can be the Iliad. In order to fit the poem into the sensible model, the sensible is quietly rearranged – where the sensible is the medium for listening to Mozart, the sensible is “appealed to” by the poem – not just by the sound of it, but by the images and the narrative – the mythos – that appeals to the passions. The double place of the sensible in aesthetics, both as what gives us the object and as what the object appeals to, is certainly preserved in Badiou.

2. What does the transforming? The artist? Remember, Badiou’s theses are about contemporary art, in which the artist has a primary function – the death of the artist notwithstanding. Badiou seems uncomfortable with the artist’s survival of that philosophically mandated death – as is LI. But the place where the transformation of the sensible takes place seems to demand some kind of artist. And some kind of audience. The transformation of sandstone into rock formations of astonishing beauty took place millions of years ago in the Southwest U.S., but this was not quite the transformation of the sensible – since the wind, rain, and earth were, presumably, not sensitive, in the philosopher’s sense, to what was happening. However, Badiou makes it clear that the sensitivity of the artist must be just right – the artist must not be a fetishist, must not be too personal, must not be too ethnic, etc. So, there is a gradient here in the artist’s sensibility.

3. finally – Why not just transform the sensible into an Idea? why throw in the event? What does it add, or clarify, to talk about an Idea-event?

LI has to leave it there.