Further adventures at the Mailer conference.

Well, LI’s headache got a better offer from a better head, one with a Pacific coast view, the sauna, the cable tv, a lot more sex to at least vicariously control, and so it moved away.

So now I will say one more thing about the Mailer conference.
I didn’t catch most of the conference, which started last Thursday. This is because I have had work – work! – due to my name being spread by former clients like IT, Lei and Silja. If this keeps up, I might be able to afford to get a new boom box to replace my recently deceased stereo. So the one conference panel I did observe was the last one. Three academics spoke, and the MC was Morris Dickstein, who looked like the Gates of Eden was a long time ago.

So okay. Question time. One question about Mailer’s technophobia. This was mulled around by the panel without any theme emerging. Then the eager guy sitting next to me – Robert Boyer, the editor of Salmagundi – made the comment that though Mailer criticized technology, he benefited from it enormously: tv, the paperback revolution, etc. He sat down with a smile on his face and all the other academics smiled too. Oh, it was lovely, an academic gotcha moment. And on that note the conference dissolved.

And that would have been cool, except: Boyer’s comment was entirely dumb. Mailer’s technophobia was not just a longing for arts and crafts, but wound into the politics of his entire oeuvre. And the point of it was dialectical. The point of it was that WWII had shown the world just how vulnerable all the modern systems were – and the following global Cold War system responded to that by a double movement – on the one hand, the system‘s polar powers tried to trump their vulnerability by threatening ever greater destruction, embodied by ever more missiles, aimed at each other – and on the other hand, within the system, the attempt was made to lessen individual vulnerability – whether due to race, sex or economic status. Technology was the common element shared by both ends of this double movement, which is how entrenched power - the system's beneficiaries - could promise invulnerability while producing, at the extreme of the system, ever greater vulnerability – vulnerability on a planet-wide scale. That was the demonic pact – in Mailer’s terms. Mailer’s conservativism consists in maintaining the badness of the devil and the goodness of God. LI would reverse that – the Cold War system, in which we still live, is one of white magic, with the devil being the joker and the only way out of the contradiction that Nobodaddy generated, and that now threaten to destroy it.

In any case, the point isn’t that technology is bad, but that it exists as part of a system and as a promoter of attitudes. The great hope of liberal society is that individuals, freed from the contingent vulnerabilities of scarcity and history, will use that freedom to risk their existences on a higher level. That, in fact, one can create a society that makes possible human generosity. Gives everyone their own movie music and large gestures. The great social fact of the sixties and seventies, however, is that mass adventurousness scares the shit out of the governing class, which then does everything it can to suppress it: drug laws, massive increases in prison building, the creation of an institutional architecture, an educational system that instills the message that one’s life is about, ultimately, making money. The system, Mailer was correct to feel, was slowly destroying other areas of life beyond the prudential – undermining and demonizing the adventurous moment, the moment of chosen risks, the moment of beauty. And this was at the heart of Mailer’s notion that the tool that created tools – technology – was making life less vulnerable by making life less honorable.

Of course, the backlash that started in 1980 was about making life within the system more risky for some and at the same time embedding in more areas of life the economic connection between the destructive technology at the periphery of the system and life within the system. The present administration, trying to both destroy social security and create a long, expensive, vague war, is following that logic to the letter. At the same time, the environment that has borne the cost of the technological system – absorbed the infinite wastes of it, as though those wastes were not a cost – is finally reaching a point of comparative no return. The gamble of creating nations that are armed to the point that they could, theoretically, eliminate humanity has produced a mindset in which the planet’s life is carelessly pissed away so that we can buy the kids the Hummer for the graduation present. Never has such a large disaster come about through such puissant motives.

But while this happens, we can sit around and find Mailer’s gotcha moment – that paperback revolution! tv! jerking off the Black Hole until it finally responds – and that response won’t be pretty.

yesterday - Mailer day

LI has an enormous headache – one of those headaches with its own address, utilities and telephone number – so my post today, which was going to be all about how I got to see Norman Mailer speak, yesterday (hooray!) and how I finished my damning review of Pynchon’s new novel (sob) is going to have to be truncated. Suffice it to say that, about the latter, I finished that review with the feeling of the crippled lawyer in Lady From Shanghai, who tracks down his wife, Rita Hayworth, in the Mirror Fun House and calls out to her hundred fold reflected image – Lovah, are you aiming that gun at me? Cause I’m sure aiming this gun at you. Of course, to kill you is to kill myself – but I’m getting tired of the both of us. - My codex to the Planet Mars, Gravity’s Rainbow, that great black magic book about white magic, i.e. the Good War, is still high up there as one of the novel’s I most admire. Alas, Against the Day is the dissolution, a barbaric yawp turned into a barbaric yawn. Lovah, are you aiming that gun at me…?

Well, the Mailer symposium at the HRC this week brought together all the once young dudes, who dutifully roll the sixties up the hill until it rolls down again like academic Sisyphi – such as Morris Dickstein – and then for the piece de resistance, the man himself, with – on his left side – his go to guy, Larry Schiller (who is still the guy who sold the pics of Marilyn Monroe dead – he still visibly carries the air of a man who would sell his grandma if it would get him into the news, especially if his grandma had just committed a hatchet murder) and the elegantly suited and perpetually confused Gay Talese on his right. Mailer was totally cool – his belly gone, the arms thin, the eyebrows needing plucking, but still having the devil’s grin in him enough to read an elaborate passage about Hitler’s parents 69ing to the assembled Austin gentry. Speaking of which, the woman in front of me, mistaking me for someone more important (hey, this Joan of Arc haircut is really working out for LI!) told me a story about how she had, indeed, made the mistake of having a fundraiser for Kinky Friedman back in March, but never would have thought he’d become such a jackass, and had sent out a mailing just last week calling on her friends to vote for Bell – but that K.F.’s campaign manager, sitting right before her, had just told her, as though it were the best news, that Governor Perry (the dropped on his head Republican who announced, halfway through his campaign, that non-Christians would go to hell – but graciously declined to make them pay higher taxes if they behaved themselves in his state) had apparently invited K.F. to work with him – on what, God only knows.

Mailer quoted the Trotsky epigram about how to use the press: you can know the truth by comparing the lies, talked about his own way of ‘reporting’, and in general was cushioned by our universal affection. Sincere affection, too. I was happier to actually see Mailer in person than I would be to see… well, almost anyone else.

the suicides' cemetery

Happily she does not seem, in either case, to anticipate the subsequent years when her insight will often be blurred by panic, by the fear of stopping or the fear of going on. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

In the Edwardian age, when the American tourist went to Europe, he or she was sure to take in the suicides’ cemetery in Monte Carlo. The story was that the population of the place was well prepared for suicide. A shot would be heard, certain figures would appear, the body would be disposed of. In John Polson’s decently shocked Monaco and its Gaming Tables, from 1902, cites a typical story is cited from a Menton newspaper:

Another gambling victim

Le Patriote Metonnais, dans son dernier numero, publie le terrible drame suivant qui happened Tuesday evening:

“A man with haggard eyes, and an upset countenance, came out of the gambling hall saying: I am lost, I have nothing more to do than die! I lost two hundred thousand france.”

The Casino guards sought to calm him, but the sad fellow wouldn’t listen to them, and coming upon the great staircase, he took a revolver out of his pocket and blew his brains out.
Some personnel arrived quickly to clean away the blood, and the gambling and ruin continued.”

Matilda Betham-Edwards – the very name comes to us through a heavy chintz cloud of couture, the rustle of all of those chaperones in the Henry James novels – in her France of Today (1894) gives her readers some sage advice:

The traveler … is advised to take the train to Monaco, and, arrived at the little station, whisper his errand in the cab-driver’s ear, “To the suicides’ cemetery.”

Once you get there, you see first the public cemetery – which Betham-Edwards informs us is not really up to American standards … and then – “quite apart from this vast burial ground, on the other side of the main entrance, is a small enclosure, walled in and having a gate of open iron work always locked. Here, in close proximity to heaps of garden rubbish, broken bottles and other refuse, rest the suicides of Monte Carlo, buried by the parish gravedigger, without funeral and without any kind of religious ceremony. Each grave is marked by an upright piece of wood, somewhat larger than that by which gardeners mark their seeds, and on which is painted a number, nothing more. Apart from these, are stakes driven into the ground which mark as yet unappropriated spots.”

But if the Americans, as usual, found that the seductive rumors of wickedness led to a dreary corner of broken bottles and nameless graveplots, the Russians found Monte Carlo much more thought provoking. Chekhov was so impressed with the gambling halls that he wrote home that he would like to spend a year simply gambling there. “This charming Monte Carlo is extremely like a fine… den of thieves. The suicide of losers is quite a regular thing.” Chekhov was as impressed by the expensive restaurants. ‘Every morsel is rigged out with lots of artichokes, truffles, and nightingales’ tongues of all sorts. And, good Lord! how contemptible and loathsome this life is with its artichokes, its palms, and its smell of orange blossoms! I love wealth and luxury, but the luxury here, the luxyry of the gambling saloon, reminds one of a luxurious water-closet.”

Chekhov’s hope that maybe someone could loser would blow his brains out right before Chekhov’s eyes is, of course, typical of the writer’s secret desire of being in the neighborhood when myth condenses into fact. Of course, there was more than just Puritanism plugging the suicides story – there was Nice, competing for tourists with Monaco, that emphasized the suicide angle every chance it got. But the suicide angle was not only a lesson about loss – there was a hidden lesson about capitalism as well. George Hole’s tourist book, Nice and her Neighbors, written two years after Marx visited Monte Carlo in 1882 (not, of course, that Hole had the faintest idea of Marx) recounts a conversation in a train with some young man who won 35 francs – and the remark of another man in the compartment that the winning of thirty pieces of silver has an evil sound: ‘A poor ruined gambler shot himself the other night in the grounds of Monte Carlo. I hope it was not his money you won, for, if so, it was the price of blood.” But one thing about money – the stain of blood wears off remarkably quickly.

Well, of course, for LI the suicides cemetery, with its numbers, stakes, and garbage, and its mythical status, and the cut throat of pure repetition quickly cleaned up by the help, is an allegory for…

Well, I’ll get to that later. One of these days.

elegy for the unibomber

Last night I was tired, so I dropped in at Waterloo’s for a drink and a bite. There was a boy band playing there – all pretty boys of @ 18-20 in age. Blond hair, rosy skin, perfect teeth, oh the excellent line of credit that had gone into their making, playing C & W about a quite other life of drinking and the degrading frisks of Eros in dubious locales. They all played well, and sang enthusiastically. The parents of one of the musicians were sitting there, with the Mom quite happily bobbing her head to it all. As I sat there and watched, the family of another of the singers came in, with two seventeen year old girls at that stalky, shoulders up age, and one of them happily flashed a smile at the group of singers, which the boys then industriously pretended not to see. A minute later through the entrance trooped three other boys, around 20 or so, wearing U.T. shirts and looking vaguely fraternity-ish, and the group immediately came to life, the singer giving them a happy shout out. Their buds were here! Validation!

And I thought, Freud had it so wrong. The interminably unanswered question is: what do males want?

That war is an organizing principle above the structures of the state has everything to do with male desire, the joker in the human pack, begging for it knows not what and quick to anger and long melancholic years when it doesn’t get it.

But… I don’t have time to go into this at the moment. Must get to work!

Oh, and the picture up there at the top of this post is my friend D., who raised me from a pup. D. is presently working on a masterpiece that crosses the boundaries of all medias and in fact pours gasoline on them and tops it off with a lit match entitled, Elegy for the Unibomber.

That was quick! Conventional Wisdom continues walking off the cliff in Iraq

Now that the electorate has clearly spoken, it is time for the second phase to kick in. In this phase, D.C. Court society resolutely misinterprets or lies about what they said, thus allowing themselves to continue to be centrists (which is a compound of being for hollowing out Social Security via a fleabag sleight of hand trick and resolutely supporting the continuing influx of defense spending to swell D.C.’S real estate prices and steak dinner prices). The Washington Post has done a particularly excellent job in this regard, coming out with stories about how all of the Iraqis now fear the withdrawal of American support, which derives from talking to a handful of American paid Iraqi parasites and ignoring what is said in Iraq’s papers, for instance – for a rundown of which, see Juan Cole.

But to really see the genius mind of Conventional Wisdom at work, LI urges readers to go to the Q and A with WP’s politics journalist, Michael Fletcher. It is a piece of art not unlike Keat’s ode to a Grecian Urn, if that Urn were a tin chamber pot in which reposed the collected excreta of WP’s op ed belligeranti:

“New Haven, Conn.: Fletcher:
I still don't see a mandate from these elections, and I still don't see people clamoring for a troop withdrawl. This war is winable, so what if the President got rid of the Secty of Defense? He needed another quarterback, and history is filled with this happening. Why are Demcocrats acting as this is "proof" of something?
Michael Fletcher: I don't know that Democrats are acting as if Rumsfeld's removal is "proof" of anything. And exit polls found something like a third of voters want to withdraw from Iraq now--something that, of course, does not seem to be in the cards. The only proof evident in Rumsfeld's removal, to me, seems to be that the laws of gravity apply to the Bush administration as they do to everything else. The president has long ignored the clamor to remove Rumsfeld. But now he has. And he's replaced him with someone with more of a reputation for consensus building. So that's something.”
…
“New Haven: Over 55% of the electorate, according to exit polls favors withdrawing SOME or ALL troops. Even in Montana, 50% favors withdrawing SOME or ALL.
Michael Fletcher: Fair enough. I should have said about a third of voters favored immediate withdrawal of all troops. But either way, I doubt that either option is in the cards right now.”
Of course not. Once you have fucked up on the higher level, the course is clear. You go back to the teacher again and again. You point out how this is going to hurt your grade average. You show that in other classes, you got such high scores that the school paid your cocaine bill. And then you threaten.
The reality principle is about the fact that American soldiers will remain there and die and do nothing. Or rather, they will contribute to the killing of tens of thousands of more Iraqis, but these deaths will be in vain. Just as the American deaths will be in vain. Even Chalabi and the Meatman himself, Saddam Hussein, have figured out that the only course in Iraq at the moment is negotiations between all parties. You don’t have to read Thomas Hobbes to know that security is the foundation of any state – if you can’t go outside, you have entered a death spiral indifferent to the ideological labels you give it. But the Fletchers of D.C. are going to throw many more bodies – just not their own – into the death spiral:
“Huntington Beach, Calif.: I may be in a minority, but I think this election hurts McCain's chances in 2008. He is calling for MORE troops. Considering the mood of the electorate, I think that attitude is a non-starter. Giuliani is too liberal for the GOP. I think the money on that side is on Mitt Romney. Your thoughts?
Michael Fletcher: I think it's too early to say. What if more troops were sent and they were able to quell the insurgency and other bloodshed, however unlikely that may seem?”

Ah, always bet on the horse with the outside chance – especially if it has three legs and rickets. That’s why the Fletchers of the world are where they are, while the measly 55 percentile is laughable. What do those people know about world affairs?

the superannuated apocalypse now

LI talked with his brother, who is doing a job in a hotel in Florida with his other brother, tonight. I thought I’d lay my latest rap on him, but he found it unlikely. Actually, my bro was oddly out of the loop about this election – he’s feeling rather burned about America in general. But anyway, I told him that the Dems had won, and this and that and the other thing, and then we talked about Rumsfeld resigning and Gates taking his place.

That’s when I proposed that this was obviously a superannuated version of Apocalypse Now. The vanity war has made some folks some money, and they had to give it to Jr – he wanted a war – to get what they wanted. But the tax cuts and the legal restructuring of things like the bankruptcy law and environmental regulation are so yesterday’s news, and the damned vanity war is starting to upset people. Good contractor money there, but now we are coming down to dribs and drabs. And we are definitely going to have to pony up for Schumer to avoid major investigations of where that money went to or what it bought.

So Gates has a mission. He has one more mission. He has to go up the river again and he has to tell Jr. that the vanity war has to wind down. He has to convey that the message isn’t just that his father is concerned. Sure, his father is always fucking concerned. The message is that other people are concerned. Other people are saying that it is time to shut down this particular operation because, frankly, there’s nothing more to wring out of it. It is like, we need a new model war at least. Something quicker, something that won’t take up so much shelf space. Guys are getting restless. Nobody is saying stripping away that dividend tax wasn’t fucking manna from the Gods. Nobody is saying Jr. has let them down. And everybody knows that Jr. wanted his own war and he worked for it, and haven’t they been like supernice to give it to him? And everybody appreciates trying to pull the old pump and dump scheme with Social Security. But for example. Why didn’t the doggies eat the poisoned dog food? Maybe they are getting spooked with this fucking war for no reason. Is what guys are saying. And so Gates has to go up there, he has to reason with Jr. He has to go by the heads on the poles in the yard – there’s Colin Powell, there’s the fucker from Alcoa, Secretary of Treasury, what’shisname, and there’s 650,000 creepy Iraqis. Jr.’s sitting there, at first Gates is thinking shit, he’s going to read to me from Eliot and there’s going to be copyright problems with this movie and I am liable up to my ass, but no, its from the Stranger. It’s, Jr. says, French. The native woman he’s shacked up with, she gives him a French book. Do you read French, Gates, Jr. says and Gates doesn't know if this conversation is really about French. Gates only knows that everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service. It was a real choice mission, and when it was over, I never wanted another.

And of course Jr. says, it’s my war. He says, Dad got his fucking war. He got his fucking missiles. Missiles like with nuclear stuff in them. So uberdangerous we were all supposed to piss our pants. That's the great George Bush for you. He’s never home, then he comes home, oh, let's move to D.C. and play Vice President, and then he’s all president and shit, and then he doesn’t even keep it. He doesn’t even know how to keep it, Gates. I stole it, okay? I did that. Me. Well, the boys helped me do that. But at least then I kept it. They love me. And he’s telling me what to do? Me? And of course Gates is thinking of the last time he talked to Condi, and how she said, What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? That he was a kind man? That he was a wise man? That he had plans? That he had wisdom? Bullshit man! And Gates has to buckled down, he has to breathe out, let’s do it, he remembers Sr saying he's out there operating without any decent restraint, totally beyond the pale of any acceptable human conduct. And he is still in the field commanding troops, and so Gates says to him the guys are serious this time, Jr., and Jr is saying did they say why, Gates, why they want to terminate my command? Gate’s knows he has to go through with this dialogue:
Gates: I was sent on a classified mission, sir.
Jr: It's no longer classified, is it? Did they tell you?
Gates: They told me that you had gone totally insane, and that your methods were unsound.
Jr: Are my methods unsound?
Gates: I don't see any method at all, sir.

At which point we definitely have to cue to:

“The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on

He took a face from the ancient gallery

And he walked on down the hall

He went into the room where his sister lived, and...then he


Paid a visit to his brother, and then he

He walked on down the hall, and

And he came to a door...and he looked inside

Father, yes son, I want to kill you

Mother...I want to...fuck you”

But my brother didn’t buy any of it.

the prophet jonah and his pet raven watch fox news

Readers of the Genealogy of Morals will remember Nietzsche’s quotes from Tertullian to the effect that one of the supreme pleasures of heaven will lie in watching the torments of the damned. In the first essay, Nietzsche introduces the concept of ressentiment as the key to the slave uprising in morals:

"The slave uprising in morals begins with that fact that Ressentiment itself become creative and gives birth to values: Ressentiment is natural to those to whom real reaction, that of the act, is forbidden, and who can only keep themselves guiltless through an imaginary revenge."

Well, darlin’, isn’t that just LI? whose reactions have to be swallowed – along with blood and shit and poverty – in a truly indigestible bolus, caught as we are like one of nature's most unlucky passengers - a passenger pigeon, a bison - in a nation that seems hell bent on mass murder and the mortal fouling of the planet as it careens here and there, throwing unparalleled pelf in the way of unimaginably vulgar plutocrats. Our only the power is that of writing stuff – a power compounded of vocables and saliva, and not much different in kind than a Bronx cheer.

So it was a great pleasure to see the governing class given a great slap last night. I watched the returns at a friend’s house, and got to see names on actual tv, live. Now I know what Katie Couric and Ken Olberman sound like. I finally got to see a Colbert routine. And I got to see Fox election central, with the puzzling succession of news hosts – each looking more Martian than the other. Was it just the reception on that particular tv set, or has Fox discovered a whole new breed of Caucasion male - with a skin color like some outer space alloy and the eyes of a Manga nightmare?

I was pretty bummed about the Texas Governor’s race, which essentially dooms hundreds of thousands of kids to further misery as the testing shibboleth rolls over their organisms, and all for squat. But besides that result, which was pretty much a strangling foretold, the night went well.

When I got back home, I decided to follow Tertullian’s advice and my own deep slavish instincts, last night I made the rounds of the conservative blogs, wanting to hear the shrieks of the justly punished, the gnashing of teeth, the moans. But though I longed to rejoice in the pain of mine enemies – hey, give me his head and I’ll scrape the skin off to make a drinking cup of his fucking skull – I couldn’t, for some reason, warm myself here. LI would have made up exactly the same excuses, and have exactly the same idea that really, really my friends all my ideas are agreed to by a vast majority of Americans.

Well, of course they aren’t. Tough titty for the vast majority of Americans.

I can only hope that the Senate falls, and that finally some real oversight kicks in – although it is about 500 billion dollars late. If, as I suspect, next year will contain the impact from the end of the real estate bubble, the discontent with Iraq and the Bush ideology, with its caste system veneration of the wealthy, might suffer for it. I’m going to entertain a hope (why not?) that a sense of reality will actually dawn among the D.C. dregs, that talks with Iran will lead to recognition of Iran, that the U.S. will encourage all Iraqi factions to negotiate while withdrawing American troops, and that the trillion dollars earmarked for the military this year marks the crescendo of the atrocity orgy.