CIORAN

Because I am researching the pessimists at the moment, I’m reading Joseph de Maistre – which is always a pleasure, even if one can’t believe the transformation going on right before your eyes, as Christianity becomes, in de Maistre’s hands, a kind of Satanism presided over by the God of war. Looking around for secondary literature on de Maistre, I was lucky to find a long essay by Cioran that somebody had, no doubt illegally, put up on the web. Cioran rather beautifully understands the programmatic futility of the reactionary temperament, and I am certainly going to use that essay later. But neither de Maistre nor Cioran’s essay is my focus in this post. Rather, it is the variability of critical judgment.

I wanted to see what the reaction to Cioran’s essay was. The essay was translated by Richard Howard in Anathemas and Admirations, so it is available even to your average mono-lingual American academic. I was surprised that so little was said about it. In Edmund White’s review of Anathemas and Admirations, he devoted some precious newspaper space to the essay:

“The other [essay in the book] is a homage to the 19th-century reactionary political philosopher Joseph de Maistre. With hand-rubbing glee Mr. Cioran chortles and quotes Maistre declaring in an insane period: "In all the universe there can be nothing more peaceful, more circumspect, more humane by nature than the tribunal of the Inquisition." Maistre was sent by the King of Sardinia as his Ambassador to St. Petersburg, and Mr. Cioran identifies with his status as emigre: "A thinker is enriched by all that escapes him, all that is taken from him; if he should happen to lose his country, what a windfall! Thus the exile is a thinker in miniature or a circumstantial visionary."

In his reactionary excessiveness Maistre criticized anything new and praised any authority consecrated by time, which he invariably qualified as "divine." Wryly, Mr. Cioran says in an aside, "Applied to war, the adjective seems, at first glance, unfortunate." With characteristic dryness, Mr. Cioran concludes, "Nothing permits us to regard goodness as the major attribute of the divinity."

I fail to see the handrubbing glee in the essay, which, I think, has a definite center – Cioran, like any good aphorist, has an almost supernatural appreciation for the semantic center of a text – in the paragraph that concludes Cioran’s examination of de Maistre’s most operatic pronouncements about the guilt of the philosophes being at the root of the reign of the guillotine:

“To consider the 18th century as the privileged moment, as the incarnation, even, of evil is to toy with aberrations. In what other epoch were injustices denounced with more rigor? A salutary work, of which the Terror was the negation, and not the crowning moment.”

De Maistre coterie of modern sympathizers recognized, more accurately, the weight of the judgment on de Maistre that Cioran unfolds. Cara Camcastle, for instance, in The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre, writes:

Cioran claimed that Maistre became like his ruthless and extreme enemies the Jacobins; his books are not boring to read because they are penetrated by an invigorating rage. he spirit of the Revolution and the Terror that he relentlessly attacked has penetrated, and been assimilated into, his own thought. THis statement is as constructive as saying that a physician who is caring for the sick during an epidemic should be treated as a persona non grata since he may have become as virulent and dangerout to human beings as the illness he is combating because he has come to understand the illness too well.” (53)

The comparison between Maistre and a physician is, to say the least, strange – if one were to really make that comparison, Maistre is more like a physician who insists on bloodletting as the cure for plague, and denounces science as satanic for saying otherwise. But at least it gives one a sense that there is not a lot of handrubbing glee in Cioran’s essay.

Cioran did not, it seems, hide his fascist past - but he wasn't exactly eager to write about it either. The essay on Maistre, written in 1957, has a certain intimate tone, as though Cioran is talking to himself through Maistre - and that may be due to the fact that Maistre's heady embrace of the worst human institutions might have seemed, to Cioran, to mirror his own madness in the thirties and forties – a political trajectory amply documented by Marta Petreu in a recent book. Carlin Romano wrote a story about this for the Chronicle of Higher Education:

“For Petreu, Cioran's life and work look less majestic. To this brilliantly thorough philosophy professor at Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, the slippery "fanatic without convictions" (as Cioran later dubbed himself) is the older, probably repentant successor to the messianic firebrand who applied Spengler's philosophy of cultural development to 1930s Romania with unparalleled brutality and fervor.
In November 1933, Cioran won a Humboldt doctoral grant to Berlin, where he quickly became a fan of Hitler. "I am absolutely enthralled by the political order they've set up here," he wrote to his friend Mircea Eliade, the future historian of religion, whose 1930s fascism and anti-Semitism also emerged most prominently after his death. "Some of our friends," Cioran advised pal Petru Comarnescu, "will believe that I've turned Hitlerist out of sheer opportunism. The truth is that I agree with many of the things I've seen here."

Nazism, Cioran wrote, possessed "greatness." Germans had a "need for a Führer," and Hitlerism constituted "a destiny for Germany." Cioran supported a similar dictatorship for his country and believed that "only terror, brutality, and endless anxiety are likely to bring about a change in Romania. All Romanians should be arrested and beaten to a pulp; this is the only way a shallow nation could make a name for itself." "Hitler's merit," insisted the young voice of vitalist barbarism, "consists in depriving his nation of a critical spirit."

That kind of hyperbole marked Cioran's style throughout his career. In The Transfiguration of Romania and his 1930s journalism, it contributed to bombastic bursts of fascism.”

Romano’s idea that the aphorism is equivalent to the hyperbole is common; however, it isn't right. It certainly doen’t apply to Cioran, who is writing in a world in which the camps and more camps were the reality, while the missiles and more missiles were being constructed by the two great powers left. More interesting, however, from the perspective of Cioran’s own fascism, is the way in which his essay on Maistre digs with doglike persistance at the very foundations of the fascist dream. Joseph Frank, reviewing Petreu’s book and another, by Laignel-Lavastine, in the New Republic, concludes his essay with a long passage about Cioran - and I'll conclude this post with a quote from that long passage

The most complicated case of all was Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions, but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright in his correspondence and in private conversation. In a letter to a friend, Cioran declared in 1971 that "when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don't understand. What madness!" This would certainly seem to indicate their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: "What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind."

There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, self-questioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind's certainties, including his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and controversial in Laignel-Lavastine's book. He is depicted as both evading any overt responsibility for his past and also, "unlike Eliade," weighed down by feelings "inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of diffuse guilt … [an] 'oppressive sensation' with which he admits sometimes awakening in the morning, 'as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.'"

As in the case of Eliade, Cioran's past sometimes came back to haunt him. Paul Celan, the great German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp and who had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and translated one of Cioran's works, Precis de decomposition (A Short History of Decay), into German in 1953. The two saw each other from time to time, and Cioran came to the poet's aid when Celan was fighting off accusations of plagiarism. Yet when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the particulars of Cioran's past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with him. Despite this break, Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the poet's suicide. It is suggested that this relationship with a Jewish writer may also have been meant as the same sort of "cover" that Eliade exploited so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that, when Cioran was once asked whether he knew Celine, he mentioned Celan instead. One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair as possible in stressing Cioran's "ambivalence," Laignel-Lavastine is pushing matters too far.

The same problem arises when she comes to Cioran's attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new edition of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania, was published in Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be eliminated, along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the text: "I completely renounce a very large part [of the book] which stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain remarks about the Jews," he wrote to a friend. Nothing could be more explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on the Jews called "Un peuple de solitaires" ("A Solitary People") that was hailed as philo-Semitic. But Laignel-Lavastine believes this to be an illusion, because on comparing this text with what Cioran had written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their history is much the same as that provided earlier--except that what had been evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive spin. Moreover, Cioran continually identifies his own situation with that of the Jews, writing that "their drama [that of the Jews] is mine." In 1970 he mused that "I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to be Jewish."

This obsessive self-identification with the Jews is interpreted as "the reversed expression of the same psycho-pathological phenomenon" that had earlier led to Cioran's worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them surely indicates some sort of change. Also, the objection is made that while Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so except in general terms, without attempting to explain why they are now rejected. For Laignel-Lavastine, Cioran's tantalizingly ambiguous relation to his past is hardly a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the case with Eliade, he was merely "translating into an acceptable language ideological motifs and attitudes [that are] ideologically disqualified in the West." Petreu is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer's disease: "From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: 'I … am not … an … anti- … Semite.'"

Let me add my personal testimony at this point. During my years in Paris I met Cioran and saw him on a number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate interest). Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly sardonic, self-mocking, and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to deceive."

Deception is the privileged instrument of the exile – as Humbert Humbert knew. The movement from anti-semitism to philo-semitism is a movement within the pure stupidity of projection, as far as I can tell – philosophical anthropology as the production of coloring books for pissants. But enough Rezeption. I’ll write about the Maistre essay soon.

the ontogenesis of the critic

When LI was a child, we were particularly prone to nightmares.

I developed a remedy for the nightmares that would wake me up in a fright. I would compose a happy ending scenario – often involving shooting a bad guy – with which to go back to sleep. I don’t know how common this is – obviously, if you are small, need sleep, and are at the same time afraid to go to sleep, you need to develop some method to negotiate between those two enormous pulls, panic and metabolism. I am not one of nature’s insomniacs, like Nabokov – before the age of thirty, I don’t recall having much of a problem getting to sleep. Now, of course, I sometimes have whole weeks of insomnia, in which I experience vast patches of shallow or no sleep interspersed by blurry days of a tiredness that haunts me like a guilty conscience until I decide to give into it – at which point it disperses, leaving me wide awake and facing the horror of another night. I know intimately the moment of cock crow, when Hamlet’s father flees back to hell, the garbage truck shakes the dumpsters, and the cars bearing people from various night shifts ease back into the parking lot with an oddly muted sound, as though the cars were on tiptoe. The quickly stifled bits of radio or music that come out of the windows. The sound of the door slamming, and the sound of footsteps.

But outside of the shadow of insomnia, I am still bothered, perhaps more than most people, with nightmares. Last night, for instance, the Nosferatu lookalike who carved up a woman in my dreams and stalked me and a friend (who I didn’t really know – the man in my dream was as familiar as a film star, but I didn’t know his name), had a good time spooking me. Eventually, as the Nosferatu looking man came at me with a gun and had me good and cornered, I woke up. Just enough to know that I had to go back to sleep with another dream plan. In that plan, I jumped Nosferatu from behind, or did something – the events get cloudy here. But I cheated the nightmare’s ending.

I sometimes wonder if this habit betrays the salient characteristics of a born critic. Helpless to direct the narrative in which I am caught, I nevertheless have the power, at a certain point, to get out of it and go back into it – there is a little back door in my dreams. I am not even sure that the ending of the dreams that I contrive are really dreams – they may not have the true sleep seal on them, but exist more in the twilight between waking and sleeping thoughts. But they are often followed by another dream – and sometimes, the next dream is also a nightmare, but of a significantly lesser degree of virulence.

army of vestals - taxonomy 2

I am going to have to deal with Fourier in my happiness project. Fourier, more than any other utopian thinker, dealt seriously with the enlightenment vision of happiness as the key criterion for the political order. Rather than the nebulous pursuit of happiness, Fourier felt that one could build an environment that embodied the particular ruling passions of particular subjects. Building on the base of the three basic passional types (the papillone, - or the going from activity to activity; the cabalist, or the creation of intrigues; and the composite, or the enthusiast) which he felt differentiated people, he imagined a dizzying structure, like Leibniz’s pyramid at the end of the Theodicy – Fourier called it a phalanstery - in which each monad is inhabited by different types whose ruling passions finally find corresponding expression in the best of all possible mini-worlds. The primary types – defined by their ruling passions - multiply in the passional series as they are modified by different attributes at different levels.

Fourier has had an odd afterlife. He was cleaned up and classified by Engels as a romantic socialist. He was the inspiring spirit behind America’s utopian experiments in the 1840s, and favored by Horace Greeley, the same newspaper man who practically founded the Republican Party. He was discovered by Breton as a pre-cursor of the surrealists. And he became one of Roland Barthes great references.

Now, those who study him closely usually have to confront the question as to whether he was, uh, a bit touched in the head. For instance, he seemed to believe that his utopia would stimulate human evolution to the extent that we would, in due time, grow a helpful other hand – a sort of tail, or archibras, as he called it. Also, anticipating the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper by one hundred fifty years, he believed that the oceans might well, in the course of the amelioration of all things, turn into lemonade, and that lions and sharks would give way to anti-lions and anti-sharks, just right for snuggling up to people. Today’s NYT magazine article about bears shows that in this, at least, Fourier is proving correct.

After Fourier died, his followers were divided on what to do with his elaborate sexual doctrines. But these same doctrines became the center of the cult of Fourier after he was rediscovered by the surrealists. And, in truth, they are central to Fourier’s immense plan – for the whole point here is to devise an optimal system of attractions. Thus, for instance, Fourier recognizes that there are two divisions of people who can be classified under the term “Vestality” who are attracted to constancy in the love relationship, and seven divisions of people who are attracted to inconstancy. Fourier imagines a vast industrial army composed of Vestal and Vestale – young men and women – who, when they lose their virginity, are cycled into another group. Fourier constrasts his organized sex acts with the terrible custom of marriage.

For assembling an army, it is enough to publish a table of the quadrilles of virginity that each phalange sends; then those who are declared male and female claimants can not avoid following all the claimants into the army, where they must decide the choice, which is done secretly, without the scandalous publicity that is disseminated among us at marriage ceremonies, where one tells a whole village that, on such and such a day, a libertine, an old rogue, is going to deflower a young innocent. One has to be born in Civilization in order to endure the aspect of those indecent customs that one calls wedding nights… after vile intrigues, after being pimped by the notary and various marriage brokers, one is going to enchain for life two individuals who will perhaps not be able to stand each other at the end of two months.

Compare this to the phalange:

In the combined Order, the celebrations relative to first love will only be given after the union is consummated.

But of course things are never that simple. There are virgin men and virgin women who decide to have sex without announcement – or who become attracted to inconstancy. Of course, there are orders for these people to go into – the Bacchants and the Bacchantes. Who have the function to go out each morning to the pavilion where hundreds of virgins are sleeping and ‘relieve the wounded, that is to say the claimant men and women who find themselves so lead in consequence of secret unions during the night.”

As you can tell just by those two brief quotes, Fourier, among other things, made up his own language to talk about his Fourier world. Actually, to use a word that is now common in the art world, it would be best to talk about Fourier as an ‘outsider’ utopian. His elaborate schemes have some resemblance to Henry Darger’s immense fantasy world, In the Realms of the Unreal, in which the Vivian girls have to go from planet to planet leading the Child Slave rebellion – although of course I don’t mean that Darger was at all influenced by Fourier. Rather, the passion for creating immense, sexually resonant worlds is common to both men.

Fourier is an immense subject. This post is just a brief note to follow up on my response to IT’s criticism of pornographic taxonomy – which is to say the use of Fourier’s taxonomy is to make us doubt the claim to cognitive neutrality, to a sort of asexual position, of those who make the taxonomies that mark up our world, way beyond porn.

For taxonomy

(from James Leon's series, Psychopathia Sexualis)



IT has recently been writing about Sade and Pornography and taxonomy – which of course brings out my inner fetishist. I get all drooly about… taxonomy.

“One of the best things about early 20th-century erotic photograph is its lack of taxonomy. Contemporary pornography has more categories than there are dirty thoughts in the world, and yet it fails in one crucial respect - it can no longer surprise. You can be into women who look like cats who specialise in shaving biscuits whilst bouncing up and down on trampolines, and there'd probably be a website that could cater to your needs, but once you've seen a couple of cat-women shaving biscuits whilst bouncing on trampolines surely you've seen them all. The excessive taxonomical drive of contemporary pornography is merely one element of its quest to bore us all to death and remind us that everything is merely a form of work, including, or even most especially, pleasure.”

Myself, I want to disagree with this a bit, because I think IT is underdetermining the taxonomic drive. Although I think she is right that porno embraces specialization, I don’t think you can locate that drive merely in contemporary pornography as a new form of thing. I'd argue that all modern porno, going back to the end of the French revolution, is tied in one way or another to taxonomy. In the case of the early 20-th century, the porno she is referring to comes on the heels of the great explosion in sexual types associated with people like Krafft-Ebbing, and picked up by Freud, and by bohemian culture very quickly. The types included – as Jonathan Katz notes in The Invention of the Heterosexual – heterosexuality itself, which was introduced into the U.S. in the 1890s by a psychologist who referred to the thing as an “abnormal manifestation of the sexual appetite.”

There’s a scene in Wyndham Lewis’ satire of Bloomsbury, the Apes of God, in which a prim little girl of twelve, sitting in her father’s garden, is reading a thick book. An adult approaches her to ask what it is. Is it Charles and Mary Lamb’s Shakespeare for Children? Robinson Crusoe? No, it turns out to be the Psychopathia Sexualis. The joke worked – back then – because the book had gained both a scholarly and popular notoriety, with the popular audience coalescing around a genteel form of sexual enlightenment, a la Freud, Havelock Ellis, and science. Always science. In sexology, as indeed in psychology, the anxiety that the field was a science was assuaged, among practitioners, by the production of taxonomies without end – and, unfortunately, without any central principle. In the world of Darwinian evolution and the periodic table, surely the royal road to science was to produce tables – tables that would characterize mental illnesses, tables that would characterize the different degeneracies of criminals, tables that would bring the human appetite for sexual pleasure into the pleasing order of family, genera, species.

Krafft-Ebbing's style is a sort of cross between court reporting and the Arabian Nights. It has a gloss of dull prurience that is unintentionally and irresistibly... funny. Although one does sympathize with the collection of specimens, each locked into his hidy hole of sexual fevers. Here, for example, is how case 102 starts:

Case 102. Hair-fetichism. Mr. X., between thirty and forty years old; of the higher class of society; single. Came of a healthy family, but from childhood had been nervous, vacillating and peculiar; since his eighth year he had been powerfully attracted by female hair. This was particularly true in the case of young girls. When he was nine years old, a girl of thirteen seduced him. He did not understand it, and was not at all excited. A twelve-year- old sister of this girl also courted, kissed, and hugged him. He allowed this quietly, because this girl's hair pleased him so well. When about ten years old, he began to have erotic feelings at the sight of female hair that pleased him.

Gradually these feelings occurred spontaneously, and memory-pictures of girl's hair were always immediately associated with them. At the age of eleven he was taught to masturbate by school-mates.”

Of course, from such beginnings, Mr. X is only going to go downhill, first into crime: “Not infrequently, in the street and in crowds, he could not keep from imprinting a kiss on ladies' heads, he would then hurry home to masturbate. Sometimes he could resist this impulse; but it was then necessary for him, filled with feelings of fear, to run away as quickly as possible, in order to escape the domination of his fetich, he was only once impelled to cut off a girl's hair in a crowd.” But in this case, there is a happy ending: “He drank large quantities,
had alcoholic delirium, an attack of alcoholic epilepsy, and required hospital treatment. After the intoxication had passed away, under appropriate treatment, the sexual excitement soon disappeared; and when the patient was discharged, he was freed from his fetichistic idea, save for its occasional occurrence in dreams. The physical examination showed normal genitals and no degenerative signs whatever.” Thank god for that! Mr. X wavers, obviously, between the subspecies of hair despoilers and those who, like another X, case 99, loved only men with large bushy moustaches (99’s story is less anxiety producing than 102: One day he met a man who answered his ideal. He invited him to his home, but was unspeakably disappointed when this man removed an artificial mustache. Only when the visitor put the ornament on the upper lip again, he exercised his charm over X. once more and restored him to the full possession of virility.”

“Fetishism” had first been applied by Binet to cases of sexual distraction from the full possession of one’s virility, but Krafft-Ebbing popularized it – and of course he is credited with naming masochism, sadism, hetero and homo sexuality and the like. What interests me, here, is the difference of this taxonomical impulse from the utopian taxonomies of Charles Fourier, who was also a great namer and arranger. I will do a post on these soon.

Meanwhile, there is now a film version of the Psychopathia Sexualis that I think will satisfy even IT’s demand for the reinvigoration of pornography through early twentieth century techniques. If you have never seen a shadow play depicting the rather sad but highly moral story of Sergeant Bertrand, necrophiliac – and I know you want to! you should run, not walk, to Bret Wood and Tracy Martin’s site.

no assets no income no job - Look ma, I'm a ninja!

Kimmy Simon, left, and her friend, Tate Madden, try to keep warm under a blanket early this morning before the opening of a Best Buy store in Cincinnati, Ohio. - NYT


Since this is the first day of real real shopping, LI wants to get inject just the right amount of grinch into the jollity of the day. But how [he said, tapping his long green fingers with the long green nails] can I make those awful Whos suffer?

Business week has a story about the projected shrinkage of consumer spending. It’s an astonishing beast, that American consumer. There has been only one down quarter since 1981:

“It's been a glorious run for the consumer. In the past 25 years, Americans have kept shopping through good times and bad. In every quarter except one since 1981, consumer spending rose over the previous year, adjusted for inflation. The exception was the first quarter of 1991, and even then the decrease was a mild 0.4% dip.”

The projection of a cutback in spending is based on the projection that housing prices will fall, with every dollar less in the price of a house matched by 9 cents less spending – or so the pretend figures go. Thus, we are looking at maybe 200 to 300 billion dollars less spending next year.

Or so saith the cautious spoilsports. Others still see a rainbow, as big and broad as all outdoors:

Will the consumer crunch spread to the rest of the economy? Conventional wisdom is that consumer spending makes up 70% of gross domestic product. While technically true, that figure is deceptive, because so much of what Americans buy these days is made overseas. Compared with the early 1980s, which was the last time consumers cut back, much more of what Americans buy is made abroad. Today, imports of consumer goods and autos run about $740 billion a year. That's fully one-third of consumer spending on goods outside of food and energy. As a result, most of the spending cutbacks won't cost Americans their factory jobs--those factory jobs have mostly fled offshore anyway. Workshop China, in contrast, will get hurt.

What's more, it's still a low-rate world for most nonfinancial corporations, which have access to relatively cheap funds for expansion and capital investment. Asia and Europe are continuing to expand, with German and French growth accelerating in the third quarter. Exports of aircraft and other big items are likely to rise, too, supplying the U.S. economy with an extra lift. In other words, globalization has made consumers less central to the American economy.

Still, the consumer recession will hit some parts of the economy harder than others. Particularly at risk are retailers, who have already seen sharp declines in their stock prices since the extent of the subprime crisis became clear. Nordstrom shares, for example, fell from 52 in September to as low as 32 before rebounding. On Nov. 14, Macy's cut its sales forecast for the fourth quarter, sending its stock down to $28 a share from $43 in July. "Retailers are looking to pare inventories," says Rosenberg.

Not everyone thinks American shoppers are tapped out. Consumers have about $4 trillion in unused borrowing capacity on their credit cards, enough to keep spending afloat, points out Stuart A. Feldstein, president of SMR Research in Hackettstown, N.J., which studies consumer loan markets.”

Four trillion dollars to go – we can’t stop now! We are still swimming in yolk – everything is rich and sweet here in the New World. The Whos need to get their Woofers, their drums and their little Who bugles! Or fuck that – think bigger. Mamma needs a new pair of shoes, preferably an adorable 390 dollar pair of Bettye Muller Coast Pumps. And baby sooo definitely needs a Nintendo Wii that he was torn out of the womb already shrieking and screaming for one.

In the NYT, there is an article by Floyd Norris about what we need much, much more of in our race to accumulate the good things of life. Ostensibly, the article is about Freddie Mac, the giant mortgage lending enterprise, as Norris calls it, which had this wee wee loss of a few billions this quarter.

“Freddie Mac historically did not buy subprime loans. But that did not stop it from buying some truly dubious loans. The borrowers may not have qualified as subprime, but many of the loans should have raised questions before they were made.

''The underwriting standards declined,'' said Anthony S. Piszel, Freddie Mac's chief financial officer. ''That was across the board.''

Those who made loans and expected to sell them quickly did not care much about assuring that the loans would be repaid. It turns out that the financial wizards who made it easy to transfer risk also assured that more risks would be taken. They produced innovations like Nina loans, which, Mr. Piszel said, ''found their way into prime space.''

Nina loans?

The abbreviation stands for ''No income, no assets.'' It does not mean the loans went to people without either assets or income, only that the borrowers were not asked if they had either. I had known about ''stated income'' loans -- also known as ''liars' loans'' -- in which the bank took a borrower's word for how much he earned. But I had not realized you could borrow money without even being asked about your income.
Starting this month, Freddie won't guarantee such loans, which seem to default more often than other loans.”

No income, no assets, eh? That describes my whole life so well that I have to have that inscribed on my tombstone. Except, wait! Having no assets means probably not being able to afford the tombstone. Damn. Finally, a consumer good worth saving up for.

PS - Shamefully, I forgot that the 90th birthday of the Russian Revolution fell this year on November 21st. So a big shout out to the thronging Bolshevik ghosts in the underworld. And since I couldn't find a satisfactory translation of even a bit of the Twelve, here's another Blok poem - which has nothing to do with the Revolution, and everything to do with a certain thirst for revolution:

To the Muse

In your hidden memories
There are fatal tidings of doom...
A curse on sacred traditions,
A desecration of happiness;

And a power so alluring
That I am ready to repeat the rumour
That you have brought angels down from heaven,
Enticing them with your beauty...

And when you mock at faith,
That pale, greyish-purple halo
Which I once saw before
Suddenly begins to shine above you.

Are you evil or good? You are altogether from another world
They say strange things about you
For some you are the Muse and a miracle.
For me you are torment and hell.

I do not know why in the hour of dawn,
When no strength was left to me,
I did not perish, but caught sight of your face
And begged you to comfort me.

I wanted us to be enemies;
Why then did you make me a present
Of a flowery meadow and of the starry firmament --
The whole curse of your beauty?

Your fearful caresses were more treacherous
Than the northern night,
More intoxicating than the golden champagne of Aï,
Briefer than a gypsy woman's love...

And there was a fatal pleasure
In trampling on cherished and holy things;
And this passion, bitter as wormwood,
Was a frenzied delight for the heart!

Happy dargle

I was searching for a thanksgiving music vid and our far flung correspondent in NYC, Mr. T., suggested the Pogues Waxie Dargle. And fuck me if it isn’t the very thing!

Happy thanksgiving readers, patient, patient readers, my web pals! Remember to drink some water before you go to bed, dilute the pints circulating in all your brain wrinkles.

tolstoy again

(Killing of King Umberto, from the Sparticus site)

Both anatomy and belles-lettres are of equally noble descent; they have identical goals and an identical enemy—the devil… - Anton Chekhov

On Sunday, June 29th, 1900, King Umberto of Italy in Monza, a little town near Milan where he had a residence, attended mass, then – in the afternoon – distributed prizes at a local sporting event. He awarded the gold medal, got into his carriage, and was then shot four times by Gaetano Bresci, who had come from America precisely to do that. Umberto died almost immediately . Bresci belonged to a small anarchist grou in Patterson, New Jersey, who had sworn to avenge the Milan massacre of 1898, when one hundred striking workers were killed in the streets by the police.

Tolstoy wrote an article about King “Humbert’s” murder, Thou shalt not kill (which is up in the same form on various web sites, with the same typos. I'm a little irritated that the typos haven't been corrected at, for instance, the anarchist site that has a whole section devoted to Tolstoy. So I'm not linking). The article doesn’t mention Bresci. It does mention killing – state killing. It was the type of article that would certainly have gotten him as roundly denounced today – for his moral relativism and moral equivalences and his objective support for terrorism, the quacking of a thousand ducks – as it got him denounced by the establishment back in 1900. It’s bold premise is that we should not be shocked that we sow what we reap. The connection between our previous acts and our present circumstances – the tie of social karma – is always gripped tightly by Tolstoy. Thou Shalt Not Kill begins like this:

“When Kings are executed after trial, as in the case of Charles L, Louis XVI., and Maximilian of Mexico; or when they are killed in Court conspiracies, like. Peter Ill., Paul, and various Sultans, Shahs, and Khans-little is said about it; but when they are killed without a trial and without a Court conspiracy- as in the case of Henry IV. of France, Alexander ll., the Empress of Austria, the late Shah of Persia, and, recently, Humbert- such murders excite the greatest surprise and indignation among Kings and Emperors and their adherents, just as if they themselves never took part in murders, nor profited by them, nor instigated them. But, in fact, the mildest of the murdered Kings (Alexander 11. or Humbert, for instance), not to speak of executions in their own countries, were instigators of, and accomplices and partakers in, the murder of tens of thousands of men who perished on the field of battle ; while more cruel Kings and Emperors have been guilty of hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of murders.”

Tolstoy pursues his theme without any preliminaries. Shaw once wrote that Tolstoy, seeing that pre-war European society was, as it were, sitting in a room into which poisonous gas was seeping, applied the remedies you’d apply in cases of gas poisoning – seizing the victim by the scruff of the neck and marching him around and around over his vociferous protests. Here’s the way Tolstoy seizes the victim:

“The teaching of Christ repeals the law, 'An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth'; but those who have always clung to that law, and still cling to it, and who apply it to a terrible degree-not only claiming an eye for an eye,' but without provocation decreeing the slaughter of thousands, as they do when they declare war- have no right to be indignant at the application of that same law to themselves in so small and insignificant a degree that hardly one King or Emperor is killed for each hundred thousand, or perhaps even for each million, who are killed by the order and with the consent of Kings and Emperors.”

Tolstoy’s point is that chosing to apply a barbaric law thrusts you into a barbaric world. You have dug your own grave. If a Civilization rests on top of thousands or millions of such graves, what is it worth? And Tolstoy is not one who is going to dicker with the thin membrane, spun of a thousand casuistries, that separates war from murder. His description of the army and of Mission Accomplishing heads of states is still effective:
“The crowd are so hypnotized that they see what is going on before their eyes, but do not understand its meaning. They see what constant care Kings, Emperors, and Presidents devote to their disciplined armies; they see the reviews, parades, and manaeuvres the rulers hold, about which they boast to one another; and the people crowd to see their own brothers, brightly dressed up in fools' clothes, turned into machines to the sound of drum and trumpet, all, at the shout of one man, making one and the same movement at one and the same moment-but they do not understand what it all means. Yet the meaning of this drilling is very clear and simple: it is nothing but a preparation for killing.
It is stupefying men in order to make them fit instruments for murder. And those who do this, who chiefly direct this and are proud of it, are the Kings, Emperors and Presidents. And it is just these men- who are specially occupied in organizing murder and who have made murder their profession, who wear military uniforms and carry murderous weapons (swords) at their sides-that are horrified and indignant when one of themselves is murdered.”
In his polemical work, Tolstoy often uses words depicting some form of altered consciousness – hypnotized, stupefied, drunk. The formalist critic, Victor Skhlovsky, in a famous essay in 1919, Art as Technique, used Tolstoy as an example of an artist who can make an object, act or gesture strange by rearranging the way we see it. The essay begins, beautifully, with some generalizations about automatism that apply not just to Tolstoy’s moral vocabulary, but to the connection between Tolstoy’s art and the sense of shock that runs through his polemical essays – that ties them, in ways that Tolstoy might not have admitted, to his most aesthetic works:

If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic; if one remembers the sensations of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the ten thousandth time, he will agree with us. Such habituation explains the principles by which, in ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed. In this process, ideally realized in algebra, things are replaced by symbols. Complete words are not expressed in rapid speech; their initial sounds are barely perceived. Alexander Pogodin offers the example of a boy considering the sentence "The Swiss mountains are beautiful" in the form of a series of letters: T, S, m, a, b. [1]

This characteristic of thought not only suggests the method of algebra, but even prompts the choice of symbols (letters, especially initial letters). By this "algebraic" method of thought we apprehend objects only as shapes with imprecise extensions; we do not see them in their entirety but rather recognize them by their main characteristics. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack. We know what it is by its configuration, but we see only its silhouette. The object, perceived thus in the manner of prose perception, fades and does not leave even a first impression; ultimately even the essence of what it was is forgotten. Such perception explains why we fail to hear the prose word in its entirety (see Leo Jakubinsky's article[2]) and, hence, why (along with other slips of the tongue) we fail to pronounce it. The process of "algebrization," the over-automatization of an object, permits the greatest economy of perceptive effort. Either objects are assigned only one proper feature - a number, for example - or else they function as though by formula and do not even appear in cognition.”

‘We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.” Surely Skhlovsky must have been thinking of the death of Ivan Ivanovich, who feels a sack closing about himself as he dies. The sack connects automatism to death – and it is a desperate struggle to get out of the sack, to get out of this life of sacks, that I see in Tolstoy – a struggle that constitutes the whole of his moral eminence.