bergman

They all die.

LI has described in an earlier post how watching a series on PBS that showed Ingmar Bergman’s films up until 1965 had an alchemical effect on us, charged us with a sense of how exotic, exciting and essential it is to struggle with life and death, a truth that was buried as deeply as possible beneath the grass and the fill and the junk and the clay atop which our little Atlanta suburb was built. But bury a truth as deep as you want to, it will creep up and get into your living room, your milk, your cubicle, your computer, your war, your taxes, your children and the one thing that can never ever happen in the world, your death.
In 1989, Bergman staged Mishima’s play, Madame de Sade. In one of the scenes, some lines by one of Gunnar Ekelof’s poems, Etudes, was framed on the wall. Here is the 3rd section.

Each person is a world, peopled
by blind creatures in dim revolt
against the I, the king, who rules them.
In each soul thousands of souls are imprisoned,
in each world thousands of worlds are hidden
and these blind and lower worlds
are real and living, though not full-born,
as truly as I am real. And we kings
and barons of the thousand potential creatures within us
are citizens ourselves, imprisoned
in some larger creature, whose ego and nature
we understand a little as our master
his master. From their death and their love
our own feelings have received a coloring.

As when a great liner passes by
far out below the horizon where the sea lies
so still at dusk. And we know nothing of it
until a swell reaches us on the shore,
first one, then one more, and then many
washing and breaking until it all goes back
as before. Yet it is all changed.
So we shadows are seized by a strange unrest
when something tells us that people have left,
that some of the possible creatures have gotten free.

Translation by Robert Bly.

book list

My friend Lorin, who edits over at FSG, pressed an ms into my hot hands a couple of years ago. It was Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land. Unfortunately, the number of ms. that are pressed into my hot little hands, plus the galleys that come in every week, are such that I have fallen into the bad habit of rarely publicizing anything. Also, I don’t really want LimitedInc to be too closely connected to my fading career in cultural journalism, since that would be too… well, boring for LI readers. Recently, Winn found Lipsyte’s novel hilarious and wrote a post on it that made me think. Especially this sentence:

"I know it's just more of that neurotic confessional crap which is all that is left of the American novel, but it's done from a funnier angle than Augusten Burroughs brutalizing the memory of everyone he ever knew for cash.”

Actually, I don’t think that is all that is left of the American novel. From my seat, the nineties were a really good decade for the American novel, while the naughties have been more disappointing. So I thought I’d list novels – not just American ones, and including translations – that you might want to check out since, say, 2003.

As I’ve already promoted, to the best of my ability, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives, let’s take that as a given. But for those with a taste for great nineteenth century novels should check out The Maias by Eça de Quierós (New Directions) which came out this month in a truly wonderful translation by Margareta Jull Costa, who has doggedly been trying to insert Quieros into our consciousness. For some reason, even good novel readers neglect the Iberian novels, even though Quieros, Clarin and Galdos should really be as known as Balzac Flaubert and Zola. Among other things, I love the way Quieros is kinaesthetically alive to the drift, the fatal drift, of the governing class he portrays in The Maias. Life is charming, even though, visibly, life is getting worse. And a certain fatal torpor stays every hand.

I liked Delillo’s Falling Man much more than the reviewers. Delillo has become a cause for certain reviewers, like James Wood in the New Republic, who dislike his influence. They hate his cynicism, as they see it, and they find the famous style – oh, how certain reviewers hate style in a novel – disgusting. There’s a naturalistic default in the review world, which I, actually, find disgusting. However, it is impossible, I think, to read the final chapter, which puts you first on the plane coming into the towers and then throws you into the confusion on the staircases, without being, well, winnowed, worked over. Yeah, the Falling man performance artist motif should have been shot – Delillo is best at spotting how weird normality is, and he goes astray when trying to spot how weird weird is – but it is the best novel on 9/11 so far, by far. Another very good debut novel which is structured around 9/11 is Sons and Other Flammable Objects by Porochista Khakpour , which is coming out in September. It is the story of a California-Iranian family, and Khakpour doesn’t know how to make it move after a certain point, but she’s gotten down certain things about the Persian diaspora, especially in the first half, which are excellent. The best thing in this novel is the portrayal of the mother, Lala. I know that woman – or such was my feeling while reading the novel. It is coming out in September.

Other novelists that have come out in the 00s that LI would recommend:
Adam Langer. Crossing California was, I thought, an amazing debut. Set among various highschoolers in Chicago during the time of the Great Hostage Crisis (a pretty unpromising setting), it had a theatrical, antic cast – the high school novel as masque.

Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. Best novel so far about the software engineering. Hey, there isn’t a lot of competition! Still, there you go.

Most beautifully written English (and American) novel of the decade so far is Line of Beauty by Alan Holinghurst. A novel about gay sex in the Thatcher days. And about class. And about what happened to the U.K. The recent festuche on the intertubes about confidence and experience should have referenced this novel. Holinghurst is the guy who wrote the Swimming Pool Library. Now, it is my experience that straight men are somehow afraid to read gay lit. But don’t be afraid, guys – sure, you’ll get the odd woody at the sex parts, but more from the fucking writing than the fucking. There are a few writers today – Banville, for instance – who could score the death of a fly into an apotheosis of all things mortal and beautiful. Holinghurst is one of them.

They gave a national book award to William Vollman’s Europa Central, and I was glad they did. But the novel before that, Argall (2003), Vollman told me in an interview I did with him, was his worst selling novel. It is, well, difficult. It is another telling of the Jamestown story – much different from Matthew Sharp’s Jamestown (I recommend Sharp’s book to all and sundry). But if you have the patience for the cod Elizabethan, it is a lovely thing, and full of Vollman’s obsessed take on violence and sex and sex and violence. Of course, I even liked his Tenderloin novel, but I have a high tolerance for water sports scenes.

Let’s finish this off with the obligatory reference to the rediscovery of Irene Nemirovsky (Suite Francaise) and the two novels of Gao Xingjian – One Man’s Bible and Soul Mountain. So, though far from exhaustive, there is a lot of fiction, recent fiction, out there And it isn’t all narcissistic journal entries snarkified into a narrative emphasizing, once again, that we lead and must forever lead thin, thin lives. Because I, too, hate that shit.

a little miss and the greatest orator: happiness again

In the Rhetoric, Aristotle takes a stab at illustrating happiness, and then defines it using the method one uses to describe organisms – he sorts through its various constituent parts. This being long before functional accounts of organisms, there isn’t any attempt to show the necessary connection of these parts or how their coordination brings about happiness. On the other hand, though in some ways a rather wild analysis, much of what Aristotle says has been adopted by economists to talk about well being. Happiness, regarded from the outside, then, and reduced to its most typical circumstances, looks something like to Aristotle:

“

It may be said that every individual man and all men in common aim at a certain end which determines what they choose and what they avoid. This end, to sum it up briefly, is happiness and its constituents. Let us, then, by way of illustration only, ascertain what is in general the nature of happiness, and what are the elements of its constituent parts. For all advice to do things or not to do them is concerned with happiness and with the things that make for or against it; whatever creates or increases happiness or some part of happiness, we ought to do; whatever destroys or hampers happiness, or gives rise to its opposite, we ought not to do.

We may define happiness as prosperity combined with virtue; or as independence of life; or as the secure enjoyment of the maximum of pleasure; or as a good condition of property and body, together with the power of guarding one's property and body and making use of them. That happiness is one or more of these things, pretty well everybody agrees.
From this definition of happiness it follows that its constituent parts are: -- good birth, plenty of friends, good friends, wealth, good children, plenty of children, a happy old age, also such bodily excellences as health, beauty, strength, large stature, athletic powers, together with fame, honour, good luck, and virtue. A man cannot fail to be completely independent if he possesses these internal and these external goods; for besides these there are no others to have. (Goods of the soul and of the body are internal. Good birth, friends, money, and honour are external.) Further, we think that he should possess resources and luck, in order to make his life really secure.”

Further in the Rhetoric, Aristotle elaborates – for instance, that wealth would consist of having plenty of coin and slaves. This concantenation has served as a useful guide to the limits of conceptual talk about happiness, but not a very good guide to its cause, or as an explanation, really, of the feeling of happiness and the use of happiness to describe these states. In other words, why should we call any of this happiness?

Hume elaborated a critique of Aristotle’s hierarchical notion of happiness and its attachment to certain conventional circumstances, in his essay, the Skeptic, that may well have been what Tolstoy was thinking of when he famously wrote, in Anna Karenin, that all happy families are alike. Hume’s skeptic claims:

“The inference upon the whole is, that it is not from the value or worth of the object, which any person pursues, that we can determine his enjoyment, but merely from the passion with which he pursues it, and the success which he meets with in his pursuit. Objects have absolutely no worth or value in themselves. They derive their worth merely from the passion. If that be strong, and steady, and successful, the person is happy. It cannot reasonably be doubted, but a little miss, dressed in a new gown for a dancing-school ball, receives as compleat enjoyment as the greatest orator, who triumphs in the spendor of his eloquence, while he governs the passions and resolutions of a numerous assembly.”

Hume’s comparison of the little miss and the orator is alive in the debate today about the relationship between wealth and happiness – which is a debate that is not very loud, and is pursued idly, but that does have to do with the very reason we feel we have to keep the treadmill of production going. Although distantly – long ago the governing class decided that the happiness or unhappiness produced by economic growth would have no relevance to the question of economic growth.

Now that we've all read Nietzsche, we may be disposed to give Aristotle points. We might see this view of happiness, which excludes any interior state and depends wholly on exterior circumstances, as consistent with that great, Homeric culture we all get a little nostalgic for, now and then. Hume's skeptic, in this view, is an example of the leveling that comes with the discovery of interiority. After all, one of the things about Aristotle's list is that it is very frankly about a triumphant aristocracy that could well be overwhelmed by slave revolt or exterior enemy, and would then be unhappy. There's no happiness in defeat. Except it turned out that there was - which may be why the Hellenic period, a period when the Greeks were defeated, was the golden age of the Stoics and Epicureans, both of whom held to notions of happiness that weren't tied so explicitly to the warrior ethos.

However, what interests me is that even with Aristotle, these circumstances are labeled with an affective word: happiness. For the Hebrews, for, say Job, those circumstances would be blessed - not happy. And for those Homeric Greeks - wouldn't they have talked of fortune? Of being fortunate?

Already, here, something is going on.

cet envoûté éternel...

When we quoted Jacques Derrida in our post the other day about the media’s double audience, our far flung correspondent T. in NYC raised an eyebrow. Mr. T. likes the idea of this blog never mentioning Derrida in the same way that Georges Perec never uses the letter ‘e’ in La Disparition. The referential absence eventually calls attention to itself by the force of its tremendous silence. And we understand Mr. T.’s point. Actually, we got the same idea from Derrida himself. Somewhere, perhaps in the lectures on Ponge, perhaps in an interview, Derrida claims that one of his essays on Hegel is really all about Ponge. If memory serves. Now, the cool thing about that claim is that Ponge is not mentioned in the essay. Of course, this is the kind of gesture that drives Derrida’s enemies just up the wall. And there is something obviously facile in saying, oh, I wrote x and I was thinking of y. To make the claim non-facile, you have to work with obsessions and themes that would make it meaningful as a compositional principle. I consider it a form of l'envoûtement – a seduction/abduction, a possession through charms. The devil, of course, used to practice l'envoûtement. Often the magician takes an effigy that is connected in some way with the victim – for instance, a follicle of the victims hair is mixed in with the dough or clay from which one creates the effigy – and by this means gains control over the victim. It is a metaphysical kidnapping. Artaud returns to the term in his last writings, and literally considers those writings a form of contre-l'envoûtement. For Artaud, it was the drugs and electroshock and conceptual schema of the psychiatrists that was winding him in, and against which he had to protect himself:

« Le même personnage revient chaque matin accomplir sa révoltante criminelle et assassine sinistre fonction qui est de maintenir l’envoûtement sur moi, de continuer à faire de moi cet envoûté éternel …”

(the same person returns each morning to perform his revolting criminal and murder- sinister function, which is to maintain the spell they have on me, to continue to make of me that eternal victim of enchantment.)

To perform the contre-l'envoûtement, that piece of magic, one must inverse the spell – one must operate on the hazardous path of the negation of the negation.

Now, to my mind, this conflict between these regimes of spells gives us the musical structure of Derrida’s work. A lot of philosophers ignore, or are ignorant of the fact that a text has a musical structure. Not J.D. This is why Derrida uses blanks and silences in the way he does – there is always some abduction or elopement going on there, out of the seraglio of Western metaphysics and into the streets!

Anyway, in that spirit, I like the idea that I am abducting Derrida from the professional deconstructionists and the spiderweb of a by now canonical language and I do it partly by using his things without referencing the name. It isn’t sorcery anymore – it is called sampling, kids. Standard DJ stuff. But I’m not clever enough to do this with complete consistency. If I was, would I have written this post?

questions about happiness

I thought my friend Alan at Milanda’s questions was going to continue biting holes into my social psychological arguments about happiness, but since he has stopped – he has other fish to fry – and because he raises some interesting questions, I think I’d like to take up a particular theme in his objections, which is that I am using a non-standard, or at least a non-Aristolean, notion of happiness.

As I wrote in the last post about the imago of the dominatrix, switch in hand, who cut such a path through 19th century porn, written so often by men who, as little boys, suffered blissful spankings at public schools and felt bereft thereafter – the certain energy goes out of the theme of volupté as the early modern period comes to an end, and happiness, or the pursuit of happiness, triumphs in the official world – the world to which all justifications must refer. To remind y’all – and hey, I’m sorry about being so repetitive, but I can’t really expect my readers to remember all this shit – I am interesting in the way volupté emerged on the margins, in natural philosophy, under the aegis of Epicurus, in the 17th century, and quickly became a slogan for the libertines and for a certain protest against, on the one hand, Christian doctrine, and on the other, the unofficial religion of the intellectuals, which since the Renaissance had been a sort of stoicism derived from Cicero and Seneca. There are a lot of questions both about the emergence and the way it so quickly made its way into a major vector, that group of “idle’ nobles in England and France whose political energies were, essentially, put into the libertine lifestyle – a lifestyle characterized by its distance both from the bourgeois and the monarch. Of course, I’m giving you a pretty rough map, here, of social tendencies into which are folded philosophical themes – but it is a good enough map to predict the kind of conflicts that will occur in the confrontation of theses and little groups. One can talk about salonwork here.

But let’s not be distracted by the formal characteristics of philosophical history as I am presenting it, like Hegel, Jr. What happened in the Anglosphere was that the dialectic of volupté was aborted – in contrast to what happened in France. In its place, the Scottish Enlightenment expressed the mores of proto-liberal culture in a systematized ethics of sympathy and a theory of the market – the former justifying the raw terror visited upon various global populations by the embodiment of the latter.

So, to return to Alan’s question, or to derive a historical question from one of his questions: how does Aristotle’s idea of happiness, which has become central in contemporary philosophical ethics, fit into this story?

a letter does not always arrive at its destination...

The NYT has a long overdue article about the Saudi support for the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Of course, it softpeddles the extent of Saudi activity, and relies exclusively on U.S. government officials as sources instead of, oh, you know, investigating the pretty easy to investigate money trail. But one expects no less.

The thing that caught LI’s eye was not so much the content of this story as an oddly boastful passage making it clear that the reporters see themselves as a sort of signaling instrument for the Bush administration:

“The accounts of American concerns came from interviews with several senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they believed that openly criticizing Saudi Arabia would further alienate the Saudi royal family at a time when the United States is still trying to enlist Saudi support for Mr. Maliki and the Iraqi government, and for other American foreign policy goals in the Middle East, including an Arab-Israeli peace plan.
In agreeing to interviews in advance of the joint trip to Saudi Arabia, the officials were nevertheless clearly intent on sending a pointed signal to a top American ally. They expressed deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course.”

This is the establishment talking – and it ain’t talking to you, reader. Clearly, the incentive and value of the article isn’t news - isn’t the independent and, as Joe Klein would put it, ‘serious’ investigation of a fact by this time known and well established in the Middle East. No, it is to operate as a middle man between the Bushies and the Saudis.

What an astonishing admission to make. More astonishing is, LI believes that nobody on the NYT sees it as an admission. They have been sunk up to their eyeballs so long in the petrified turds of the governing class, in the morass of talking points and tv talk fests, that they have lost the capacity to understand what “reporting” is. The NYT and the WAPO have taken their self-applied limits – to report or mention a very small bit of reality, and to censure any realities beyond that – and narrowed them in the past twenty years to the point where the caricature they serve up doesn’t even serve the governing class any more.

The double audience of the media – on the one side, the rubes, and on the other side, the ‘serious’ – functions on the level of the selection of what goes into the papers, or goes on tv. This is why the first question one has to ask about any article in a paper is: who is this for? Every letter is addressed in this world - although, as Derrida pointed out in another context:

"The divisibility of the letter... is what chances and sets off course, without guarantee of return, the remaining [restance ] of anything whatsoever: a letter does not always arrive at its destination, and from the moment that this possibility belongs to its structure one can say that it never truly arrives, that when it does arrive its capacity not to arrive torments it with an internal drifting."

In media terms - there are always unserious people out there.

So, when WAPO, week after week, throws one neo-con after another into their editorial mix, the rubes – the usual, slightly liberal audience of the WAPO – are puzzled and even outraged, especially as it just keeps coming in spite of its evidence lack of fit with the audience that the Washington Post has developed over the years. I’ve never read a comments thread on these columns that wasn’t almost completely appalled by the neo-con drivel, and puzzled by the reason it was appearing. So why would a business so callously keep slapping its customers in the face? These pieces appear because these columns have a second audience, that loose association of high government officials, upper management types, think tankers, and lobbyists, the people who count. These people are meme hungry, and the feeding of them is the main concern of the media decision makers. And of course the memes, regurgitated, then get to reappear in the articles - hence the proliferation, over the last year, of straight news reports from the Iraqi front that include, ritualistically, some accusation of Iranian training, weapons, interference, what have you.

Pleased as I am to see even the smallest hole in the dike that the Americans have thrown up against reality in the Middle East, I’m pretty sure that real reporting about the Saudis – and thus a real picture of what is going on in the Middle East – isn’t going to be breaking out in any major American paper any time soon. Such a picture would tell us things like, oh, who financed the Pakistani nuclear program and why – hint, the initials are S.A., as in Societe Anonyme – and how that has operated as a big time incentive to the Iranians. It would erase the favorite picture that the media likes to convey to the rubes – that the Iranian government is a bunch of mad mullahs. It would show that the Iraqi government as it is now constituted and for which the U.S. is fighting is an Iranian ally – which reality is one of the major reasons the U.S. hasn’t attacked Iran, the other being, of course, that the governing class has already decided that spending 12 billion a month to give George Bush a perpetual testosterone party in Mesopotamia is a bit rich, but spending 24 billion per month to pursue two losing wars is more than even the U.S. can afford – I mean, we are all for CEOs having a good time, and who could deny George that prerogative of masculinity which consists in amassing simply oodles of dead brown bodies, hundreds of thousands to mount on the wall, but face it: ROI time is ROI time.

another fine detour on the path to volupté

LI’s search for the embourgeoisification of volupté – its routinization and removal from the line of radical materialist thinking associated with Epicurus in the seventeenth and eighteenth century – has turned into a continual stumbling upon fortuitous themes in the history of pornography. Such is the life of bloggery.

In trying to find some interesting 18th century erotica that we could use here – and also, we always like interesting 18th century erotica – we stumbled on the Eros-Thanatos site,which has a few rare texts, including a whole book by Hughes Rebell, that weirdo among weirdos in the porno universe, as well as the dada writer Renee Dunan, a woman of who operated between naturism and surrealism and apparently produced a ton of pamphlets of the kind just adored by the police – there is nothing like seizing artistic studies of nudes. In fact, police and criminologists get so carried away by the idea that one of them, the eminent early 20th century professor, Ludwig Kemmer, accidentally produced an under the cover seller entitled “Die graphische Reklame der Prostitution” and in the process made himself a type – the pedagogue fascinated by the vices leading his students astray – that went into Professor Unrat, and hence into The Blue Angel of Marlene fame.

In Professor Rath, the Weimar crackup becomes fate. In the world turned upside down, the disciplinarian is disciplined, the first shall be last and the nationalists aren't going to like watching Prussia lie at the feet of that French sounding wench, Lola, and turn a blind eye to her infidelities. A quick perusal of the Eros-Thanatos site shows that such abjection is a very popular subject – in fact, the books and stories collected on the site are weighted towards the flagellation narrative in a rather dreary way. It isn't, I should confess, my particular yen. In the nineteenth century, after the pleasure-pain calculus of the utilitarians became a sort of official ideology of the modern capitalistic nations, flagellation seems to have taken over from the formerly popular anti-clerical topos in porn.

Jeremy Baron’s article, Spare the Rod, in the Spring 06 issue of Sexuality and Culture, traces that phrase, which is not in the bible, back to its real origin, along the way exploring the figure of the female dominatrix. The word dominatrix itself, according to Baron, is first recorded in the 10th century, used by Canoness Hroswitha to show “a fragile woman who is victorious and a strong man who is routed with confusion.” The phrase spare the rod and spoil the child, deriving from a set of admonitions in Proverbs, first occurs in Hudibrus, the 1662 Samuel Butler poem. But as Baron points out, the lines are entirely about sexual courtship, not about educating children:

Love is a boy by poets stil'd;
Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
A Persian emp'ror whipp'd his grannam
The sea, his mother VENUS came on;
And hence some rev'rend men approve
Of rosemary in making love.
As skilful coopers hoop their tubs
With Lydian and with Phrygian dubs,
Why may not whipping have as good
A grace, perform'd in time and mood,
With comely movement, and by art,
Raise passion in a lady's heart?
It is an easier way to make
Love by, than that which many take.

It is odd to think of the millions of pious folk who quote the phrase with an entire innocence of its context.

According to Baron:

“In the seventeenth century physicians became interested in the association between beating and sexual pleasure. Distinguished Renaissance anatomists made the first medical explanations for this phenomenon. In 1629 Johann Heinrich Meibom (1594–1655) [the oil-secreting gland of the eyelid is called Meibomian] suggested that potency was stimulated by pathways from the warmed buttocks that increased blood flow to the organs of generation(Meibomius, 1643; Meibom, 1718). We do not know whether Butler read this 1629 edition or perhaps the fourth edition of 1643. In 1669 Dr Thomas Bartholin (1616–89) [who had described the human lymphatic system: it was his father Caspar after whom was named the small lubricating gland near the vaginal opening
in mammals] wrote to J.H. Meibom’s son Heinrich (1638–1700). This letter established, perhaps for the first time, that women too were sexually excited by buttock-beating, ‘Women too are raised and inflam’d by Strokes to a more easy concepcion’ (Bartholin et
al., 1669).”

As Baron points out, the law in the seventeenth century was clear: men could lawfully beat their wives. There is a long and depressing chapter on the history and prevalence of wifebeating in Edward Shorter’s History of Women’s Bodies, which I’d recommend for the strong stomached. Shorter’s larger case – that men were generally indifferent to their wives in rural European society, even to the point of finding their injuries or deaths less traumatic than the deaths of cows or horses – seems exaggerated, but he does collect a good deal of ethnographic evidence of extraordinary domestic brutality.

What is interesting is that it is within these cultural parameters that two behaviors arose: one was punishing children with spanking or whipping on the buttocks, and the other was the lubricious dominatrix, the whipper of men. Sex is the ultimate bricoleur, of course, the goddess who sees in the human body a thousand and one affordances never before discovered. Martin Amis, who has not always been a rotten egg opining about issues he knows little about, like the Middle East, but was street knowledgeable about the human middle, genitals with all the trimmings, once wrote:

"Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker."

I’ll continue this in another post.