the portmanteau tombstone

Le voyez-vous, dit-elle, il meurt, ce vieux pervers,
Tous les frimas du monde ont passé par sa bouche – Nerval, “Horus”

Nerval is a poet of strange, strange lines. All the frost of the world passed through his mouth – a truth that could shatter some world, one you possibly live in, if you could find the key to it.

An anecdote: When Nerval went mad in 1841, he naturally tried to suppress the news of this from leaking out. He was the most discrete of men. So imagine his shock when his friend, the critic Jules Janin, wrote a charming mock obituary for Nerval’s reason. So funny! Nerval, in public, even played along with the image Janin had stamped upon him, but in a despairing letter to Janin Nerval denounced the article and Janin for ruining that thing in a life that you can’t get back: the seriousness that surrounds one. He’d been made a buffoon, who feared being made a buffoon.

Here’s how Jonathan Strauss, in Subjects of Terror: Nerval, Hegel and the Modern Self, describes what happened to Nerval that first time, borrowing from Aurelia: “The importance and complexity of Nerval’s role as a mad writer have evolved over the years since the evening of late February 1841 when, following the appeals and declination of a certain star hanging over the horizon, he wandered naked through he streets of Paris, into the arms of the night patrol, and into what was to be the first of a long series of voluntary and involuntary confinements.” The result of Nerval’s stay in Dr. Blanche’s madhouse (a few blocks down from Balzac’s house) was, according to the reliable introduction to the Penguin Nerval, a necronym. Nerval named himself Gerald Nerval after having given himself an immense and mythic geneology. He convinced himself that he was really related to Napoleon, the bastard child, unacknowledged, of Napoleon’s brother. But he was related, as well, to more ancient monarchies. “Gerald Nerval” complicatedly encodes a secret message from the dead – who, in Nerval’s books, are never really dead. They pass into a realm of haunting. Nerva is from the Roman emperor, Averne is the realm of death, vernal of spring, geras is the Greek for glory – and thus a portmanteau tombstone name. He put his suicide into his name – who among us can say as much?

But I have more to say about this Janin.

LI was going to put in this here space one of our ever popular posts about Janin, Nerval and Baudelaire, but unfortunately, where does the fucking time go? LI can't be translating French stuff today, ladies and gents.

We did want to announce that we got a contribution of enormous proportions for this site, yesterday. Thank you, Mr. ....

And, in lieu of something interesting and fun, it is compare and contrast day. Here is an article about the new oil law in Iraq from a warmonger. The gentleman has never been right about Iraq, has found the killing fields in Iraq something of a bracer, supported installing a convicted criminal as the head of the conquered territory, and has never met an opposition argument that he hasn't disposed of by dishonestly manhandling it. We are talking about one suave voiced peckerwood here. And over here is one from a sensible person who knows about the oil business. You decide which one is within the ballpark of reality, and which one is another sad evidence of debility, decay, and decline.

An anecdote for IT

Grimod de Reyniere was a famous gourmand of pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France. We have mentioned him in an earlier post. He is mentioned by Nerval as an esprit faible – Nerval tells the story of the two philosophical feasts that were given by Grimod in the Roman fashion, at which women with long hair were scattered among the guests so that their hair could be used by the guests to wipe their hands – just the kind of touch that drove Carlyle and Dickens crazy about the ancien regime.

Anyway, Grimod de Reyniere was notoriously fond of pigs, and not so fond of women – or at least, of his mother. I have found a quote from him from a history of feasting, Charlemagne’s Tablecloth:

Everything in a pig is good. What ingratitude has permitted its name to become a form of opprobrium?

Is there a woman, no matter how pretty she may be, who can equal … Arles sausage, that delicacy which makes the person of the pig so valuable and precious?

And yet, this pig love is a rather odd thing. Grimod de Reyniere was born with deformed hands – one was a “webbed pincer, the other like a bird’s claw, both required false hands to be fitted”. And to cover up the shame of the deformities, his parents made up a story that he had been mauled by a pig.

Of course, there are those who say the praise of the pig was ironic. And there are those who say Grimod de Reyniere spent too much time with his friend, the Marquis de Sade.

This site gives a different view of Grimod de Reyniere, and has an example of his handwriting – sadly, with his chicken claw hand, Reyniere’s handwriting is better than LI’s.

our standard begging post

Limited Inc has not posted a begging contribution post in a while. So I figure it is time to post one. This is an excellent month to contribute to the maintenance of this enterprise if you are so inclined, since this month is proving to be a cruel one to LI's bones. We had a nice anonymous contribution last week - for which, much thanks! Contributors large and small, check out the little paypal link.

the soundtrack

Q: In everyday life, do you sometimes have the impression of being in a film?
Baudrillard: Yes, particularly in America, to a quite painful degree. If you drive around Los Angeles in a car, or go out into the desert, you are left with an impression that is toally cinematographic, hallucinatory. You are … steeping in a substance which is that of the real, of the hyper-real, of the cinema. This is so even with that foreboding of catastrophe: an enormous truck bowling along a freeway, the frequent allusions to the possibility of catastrophic events, but perhaps that is a scenario I describe to myself.”
-From Baudrillard Live: selected interviews.

LI is of the opinion that post-modernity never happened, that all the features that are supposed to be postmodern – the hyperreal, the self as self-reference, the undermining of epistemic certainties by pure doxic moments (doxa, you Platonists will remember, are the half way real) – that all of this is what happens as we wander about the extended sensorium created by modernism. When Gerald Nerval in Aurelia recounts the l'épanchement du songe dans la vie réelle (the effusion of the dream in real life), the segues and montages and dissolves could be referenced, at best, to paintings and optical instruments like the microscope, telescope, and kaleidoscope, but now the dream is shot through real life in every grocery store and gas station rest room. And as for Nerval’s own version of the occult influence of the ordinary on his life – “I’ve often had this idea that in certain grave moments in life, the exterior world spirit, as such, incarnated itself suddenly in the form of an ordinary person, and acted or attempted to act on us, without the knowledge or memory of that person” – this is what I think I meant in yesterday’s post by saying that everything we touch turns to mythology, and it is that quality, raised to the power of an external system, that is the sensorium of modernity, on all tracks.

Which leads me to movie music, and in particular, the way my sense of myself has been bound up, at least since early adolescence, with the idea that there is a soundtrack to my life. Here we have a question for psychologists: what is the meaning and history of the life soundtrack? I know many people who definitely have this same sense – and in fact, those are the people who have always fascinated me in my life. There are many things that go into elective affinity – one of them for me is the intuition that a certain person has this soundtrack, lives with it, nourishes it, realizes, obscurely, that it is important. These people are poseurs, and I do love poseurs – it requires a lot of push back against the inertia of the everyday, which, after a while, wears on even Popeye’s muscle. I do think the soundtrack dies, for a lot of people – who knows, perhaps most people – in the twenties. It might be a sign of one’s retarded development in late modern capitalism to retain it, as I do, into middle age.

I do know, however, that Baudrillard’s sense of living in a film in America leaves out that very important thing – the radio. The cd deck. Without it – especially in those vast eyeaching spaces that you have to speed through, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Texas – the movie-in-life becomes simply a trance of sleep inducing landscapes. I have left behind a little bit of myself – the little bit that lived at a fictitious address in Georgia - in the computers of the state police of each of those states, just trying to get out of there.

Liars all the way down

LI recommends this article by Gretchen Morgensen today. Although it scares the living bejesus out me – since one of the things about the temporary collapse of capitalism is that poor people tend to get wiped out first, and I tend to be a poor person. Shit. In the dream, I am at the wheel of the car, and the brake stops working, and the accelerator jams, and there is a brick wall looming just ahead.

There is a conservative mindset which pops up among the Clinton liberal set that is all about balanced budgets. I think that is fucking braindead. Debt is not a bad thing – for instance, the European economy, with its paralyzed fear of inflation, did not do the necessary in the past six years, ease up lending requirements and use the European real estate market, in classic Keynesian fashion, to operate as a multiplier at the same time as it transferred savings into investment - but reading this made me sick. This is when the evaporation of savings becomes, uh, real:

In 2000, according to Banc of America Securities, the average loan to a subprime lender was 48 percent of the value of the underlying property. By 2006, that figure reached 82 percent.

Mortgages requiring little or no documentation became known colloquially as “liar loans.” An April 2006 report by the Mortgage Asset Research Institute, a consulting concern in Reston, Va., analyzed 100 loans in which the borrowers merely stated their incomes, and then looked at documents those borrowers had filed with the I.R.S. The resulting differences were significant: in 90 percent of loans, borrowers overstated their incomes 5 percent or more. But in almost 60 percent of cases, borrowers inflated their incomes by more than half.

While the poet in me experiences a certain frisson that the Weltgeist so brilliantly propped up the liar war and the liar government on the back of the liar loan economy - the poor forked creature who is worried about bread and shelter is not happy. I do get antsy when bad things impact the "$6.5 trillion mortgage securities market" - I'm funny that way.

ersatz outrage, real outrage, and the boy that go a-lynchin'

LI will, perhaps, shock all true hearts by admitting that we weren’t at all shocked by Ann Coulter’s use of faggot last week. It wasn’t as good a joke as it could have been, but fuck it – it isn’t that we are especially worried that the Conservative Congress of Dimwits is going to hear something that will corrupt them, or their endorsement of various politicians who will do all within their power to give us a nice, toasty, lifeending atmosphere and lead up to it with one bloody and pointless war after the other.

We thought, at most, that this was a sign of the separation of conservative politics from the conservative constituency. It may surprise liberals, but the conservative constituency is not that interested in politics. Fundamentally, it needs to be prodded into paying concerted attention to who rules the country (although I should say, the attention is directed to a counterfeit network of who runs the country – nobody wants the fundamentalist yahoos looking at the life styles of the rich and the famous, they might begin to get all biblical about that wealth). LI would hazard that the fundamentalists are getting more and more fed up with their so called leaders – for the leaders are political creatures. The reason for going to church, asking forgiveness for sin, being reborn, has everything to do with the emotional and existential satisfactions of accepting Jesus in your heart, and little to do with the epiphenomena of laws, wars, tax cuts, abortion, homosexuality and all the rest of it. And when the people of Muskegee look up and see their so called leaders listening to a blonde pottymouth who seems to have more cultural connection to Lenny Bruce than to Billy Graham, I think they are overcome with a deep and justified apathy. I may be wrong, but the faggot remark is much worse for Red Staters than for liberal sensibilities. It shouldn’t be necessary to say this, but: taboos don’t exist in society in terms of straight binaries. There is a whole middle ground of decorum, and it is on that middle ground of decorum that your good Southern Baptist takes his or her stand.

But LI can be moved to loathing by small, spontaneous outrages. The recent story about AutoAdmit, an online community that seems to exist to combine the sensibility of the titty bar customer with the maddening attitude of spoiled rich male law student, did move me to go here and sign the petition to stop their obnoxious condoning of sexual harassment. For details about this crewe of the misbegotten, go to this Feministe post. There is a distressing thread, to me, equating the sum of the wrong done by the people at AutoAdmit who take women’s pictures from their homepages, submit them for various bogus contests, make a lot of comments re tits, ass, desire to hatefuck, etc. to a bump in the upward trajectory of a career. I understand why this is quantified in money terms, and in fact I think AutoAdmit should be hit in money terms – I think that if liberal and feminist organizations issued advisories against law schools that apparently contain members of AutoAdmit, the company would change its policy in a heartbeat.

However, I do think it is interesting that in the same week that Girls Gone Wild is blamed on feminism, Boys Gone a-Lynching is given a free pass. Mind, I believe the 20 something generation in this country is much less sexist and racist than my generation was – I have a mild faith in the incremental progress of the human spirit in this department. But the lyncher mentality of rich or upper class males is a huge cultural festuche.

There is a sub-outrage to the AutoAdmit stupidity: Ann Althouse's attack on Jill at Feministe for... well, for something. It isn't clear what. Althouse is a conservative, and her kneejerk reaction is determined by three variables, in descending order: class, race, and sex. If you fill those things in wealthy, white and male, you get the Althouse prize of sympathy, if you want it. Temperaments are important in politics: fill those things in poor, black and female, and you'd get LI's kneejerk sympathy. I have no problem with conservative kneejerk reaction per se - I simply am on the other side of that class war. But disguising it in a fake populism does tend to piss me off. When Russell Kirk was replaced by Rush Limbaugh, it was a deal with the devil.