Amazing news! Ingrid Betancourt has been rescued! I happen to know her niece, so I guess I’ve been watching this story more than most Americans.
This is big. Hooray!
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
... the pins that lay in the house that Adam built
We’ve tried to use fairy tales, so far, to make visible a dimension of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations that has ... well, never been made visible, or mentioned at all, even to be dismissed. And the reason for that lack of mention is easy to understand: like any science, economics demands, first of all, to be taken seriously. What is serious and what isn’t remains in the domain of those presuppositions that are both unexamined and as powerful as household gods. The ludicrous and the serious is that domain into which the old taboos migrated in modernity. Wittgenstein, in whom seriousness took the form of a crippling, lifelong neurosis, asked seriously, once, whether it wouldn’t be possible to express philosophy in terms of a series of jokes. I don’t know of an economist who has pondered that possibility for his or her science.
But LI, rank ponderer and an ardent practitioner of the suicidal practical joke (look at my career, ladies and germs!), is more than willing to free our mind to ludicrous possibilities. Here’s one: that Smith’s catalog of the way pins are made, which, according to Jean Louis Peaucelle’s article, “Adam Smith’s use of multiple references
for his pin making example”, owes its content to numerous French sources (Deleyre’s article on l’épingle in the Encyclopedie, Duhamel du Monceau’s L’art de l’épinglier, etc), owes its oneiric fascination to This is the House that Jack Built.
Here, again, is Smith’s description:
“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”
What makes this a peculiar business is that all of this detail goes into all this tininess – and this tininess proves to be a compound, a matter of this AND this AND this, until the pin is done. The difference between the Enlightenment prose of Smith and the 17th century prose of the King James Bible is that Smith omits the ands, using commas instead to speed up the rhythm of the sentence.
The Mother Goose version of the House that Jack built goes like this:
Ruskin, in Fors Clavigera, notes that this nursery rhyme depicts the slaying of the Minotaur in the labyrinth in Minos. In one of the more wonderful passages of English prose, in Letter xxiii, Ruskin attempts to show how we are still under the rule of that “great Athenian squire, Theseus”, although the liberal historians who, like John Stuart Mill, see in the marble statue of Theseus in the British museum only “utility fixed and embodied in a material object” doubt such a squire existed. “Not even a disembodied utility – not even a ghost – if he never lived. An idea only; yet one that has ruled all minds of men to this hour, from the hour of its first being born, a dream, into this practical and solid world.
Ruled, and still rules, in a thousand ways, which you know nomore than the paths by which the winds have come that blow in your face. But you never pass a day without being brought, somehow, under the power of Theseus.”
Which is the power of Athens, as Ruskin goes on to show, although it is a power brought about by Daedelus – the master Jack of the Greeks. And, to tell the truth, we are not so much in the power of Theseus as we are in Jack’s house, which is the house in which Ruskin pounds on the bars and howls at the moon. The house in which Ruskin lost his mind.
Evidence for his connections, here, comes from odd bits of bric a brac in the European attic. For instance, a symbol on the porch of the cathedral at Luca, where Ruskin found a slightly traced piece of sculpture and a six hundred year old inscription which, translated from Latin to English, read:
“This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,
Out of which nobody could get who was inside,
Excep[t Theseus; nor could he have done it, unless he had been helped with a thread by Adriane, all for love.”
Adriane, Ariane. The “maiden all forlorn” – and what happens to maidens all forlorn when they are shut up and shut in is that they deal with thread, with spinning. No, LI has not forgotten Ricdin Ricdon, and our promise to deal with that tale by Perrault’s niece, Mlle L’Heritier – a heritage here indeed. We are not, of course, advocating Ruskin’s peculiar history here – although a history that goes back from the British Museum to Chaucer – who tells a version of the tale of the maiden all forlorn, and the cow with the crumpled horn – to St. George and the Dragon, to Minos, hangs together in a dreamlike way.
Here’s a bit more of Ruskin’s explanation:
“Theseus, being a pious hero, and the first Athenian knigh who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented by the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the ouse fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and the Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece. And by the way, I am more and more struck every day, by the singular Grecism in Shakespeare’s mind, contrary in many respects to the rest of his nature; yet compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens, and ot use the most familiar of all English words, “acre”, in the Greek or Eleusinian sense, not the English one!
“Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country-folks do lie”
Ruskin aptly remarks that the very lines of The house that Jack built go in a labyrinthian way. Myself, I would analyze that labyrinth as the magical product of the “and” – it is the connective that gives us the world, a thing in which all order is simply what the “and” can do. With the “and”, we enter the era of technology.
But LI, rank ponderer and an ardent practitioner of the suicidal practical joke (look at my career, ladies and germs!), is more than willing to free our mind to ludicrous possibilities. Here’s one: that Smith’s catalog of the way pins are made, which, according to Jean Louis Peaucelle’s article, “Adam Smith’s use of multiple references
for his pin making example”, owes its content to numerous French sources (Deleyre’s article on l’épingle in the Encyclopedie, Duhamel du Monceau’s L’art de l’épinglier, etc), owes its oneiric fascination to This is the House that Jack Built.
Here, again, is Smith’s description:
“One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.”
What makes this a peculiar business is that all of this detail goes into all this tininess – and this tininess proves to be a compound, a matter of this AND this AND this, until the pin is done. The difference between the Enlightenment prose of Smith and the 17th century prose of the King James Bible is that Smith omits the ands, using commas instead to speed up the rhythm of the sentence.
The Mother Goose version of the House that Jack built goes like this:
This is the house that Jack built.
This is the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
This is the farmer sowing his corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
Ruskin, in Fors Clavigera, notes that this nursery rhyme depicts the slaying of the Minotaur in the labyrinth in Minos. In one of the more wonderful passages of English prose, in Letter xxiii, Ruskin attempts to show how we are still under the rule of that “great Athenian squire, Theseus”, although the liberal historians who, like John Stuart Mill, see in the marble statue of Theseus in the British museum only “utility fixed and embodied in a material object” doubt such a squire existed. “Not even a disembodied utility – not even a ghost – if he never lived. An idea only; yet one that has ruled all minds of men to this hour, from the hour of its first being born, a dream, into this practical and solid world.
Ruled, and still rules, in a thousand ways, which you know nomore than the paths by which the winds have come that blow in your face. But you never pass a day without being brought, somehow, under the power of Theseus.”
Which is the power of Athens, as Ruskin goes on to show, although it is a power brought about by Daedelus – the master Jack of the Greeks. And, to tell the truth, we are not so much in the power of Theseus as we are in Jack’s house, which is the house in which Ruskin pounds on the bars and howls at the moon. The house in which Ruskin lost his mind.
Evidence for his connections, here, comes from odd bits of bric a brac in the European attic. For instance, a symbol on the porch of the cathedral at Luca, where Ruskin found a slightly traced piece of sculpture and a six hundred year old inscription which, translated from Latin to English, read:
“This is the labyrinth which the Cretan Dedalus built,
Out of which nobody could get who was inside,
Excep[t Theseus; nor could he have done it, unless he had been helped with a thread by Adriane, all for love.”
Adriane, Ariane. The “maiden all forlorn” – and what happens to maidens all forlorn when they are shut up and shut in is that they deal with thread, with spinning. No, LI has not forgotten Ricdin Ricdon, and our promise to deal with that tale by Perrault’s niece, Mlle L’Heritier – a heritage here indeed. We are not, of course, advocating Ruskin’s peculiar history here – although a history that goes back from the British Museum to Chaucer – who tells a version of the tale of the maiden all forlorn, and the cow with the crumpled horn – to St. George and the Dragon, to Minos, hangs together in a dreamlike way.
Here’s a bit more of Ruskin’s explanation:
“Theseus, being a pious hero, and the first Athenian knigh who cut his hair short in front, may not inaptly be represented by the priest all shaven and shorn; the cock that crew in the morn is the proper Athenian symbol of a pugnacious mind; and the malt that lay in the ouse fortunately indicates the connection of Theseus and the Athenian power with the mysteries of Eleusis, where corn first, it is said, grew in Greece. And by the way, I am more and more struck every day, by the singular Grecism in Shakespeare’s mind, contrary in many respects to the rest of his nature; yet compelling him to associate English fairyland with the great Duke of Athens, and ot use the most familiar of all English words, “acre”, in the Greek or Eleusinian sense, not the English one!
“Between the acres of the rye,
These pretty country-folks do lie”
Ruskin aptly remarks that the very lines of The house that Jack built go in a labyrinthian way. Myself, I would analyze that labyrinth as the magical product of the “and” – it is the connective that gives us the world, a thing in which all order is simply what the “and” can do. With the “and”, we enter the era of technology.
the key to the myths has a small spot of blood on it
Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier (1664-1734) was Charles Perrault’s niece. According to the reliable Joan DeJean, she was one of a group of women writers in the late 17th century who were uncommonly common writers of the French fiction of the time – in a list of French novelists of the late 17th century published by Maurice Lever, women constitute about 33 percent of the names. They were, of course, attacked as women by such upholders of the standards as Boileau. The Journal de Scavans published an Eloge de Mademoiselle L'Héritier – a sort of obituary – from which LI culls these facts
- Her father was an “amateur of the sciences” and a ‘historiograph” at the court. Her father’s family was an ancient and noble one, from Normandy, while her mother was a Le Clerc, another connected family. She was educated by her father, developing a precocious interest in history and fable. Her father, meanwhile, was translating Grotius and aligning himself with Cardinal Mazarin, who gave him a pension. Surely he must have known Gabriel Naude, Mazarin’s secretary. When her father died, she started writing poetry – and she must have done some singing, too, as it is noted that her voice was beautiful. She wrote a defense of Madame Houlieres – about whom we wrote a post a while back. Houlieres was an epicurean, and had been attacked as a blue stocking in a satire to which L'Héritier indignantly replied.
- She gained the protection, at the court, of the Duchesse de Nemours. After her death, she edited her memoirs.
- Her lasting work is the Shadowy Tower, which contains the tale of Ricden-Ricdon. This work is supposedly translated from English – the English of King Richard the Lion Hearted.
- She gathered about her a small salon. Never married. A ‘malady’ is mentioned. Never complained.
Interesting, her obituary doesn’t mention Perrault. It does ring the chimes on her distinguished moral qualities, which are the flowers that fade first – no one would say the same thing about Ninon Lenclos. In fact, Perrault was close to the age’s premier transvestite, Francois Timoleon de Choisy, who was close to Louis’ brother, Monsieur, who was a royal sodomite not shy of asserting his royal perogatives, and duly noted in Saint Simon’s memoirs. In such a society, moral qualities have to be, at the very least, accomodating.
Some recent writers on the fairy tale have claimed that Perrault’s tales survived while his female fairy tale competitors, like L'Héritier, fell into oblivion through sheer sexism. LI thinks that this is a great underestimation of Perrault. It is easy to see why Perrault survived – he had a great sense for what can be cut. He explains – in his morals – what has happened, and the explanations are at such a lower level than the tale that they pose the question of whether Perrault understood his own stories – and that, of course, has led to the endless search for their real, oral sources. L'Héritier’s stories obviously influenced Perrault’s, but she liked her explanations – which, of course, are not for children. Children might ask questions about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but they are all questions about how dangerous he is, and whether he might be hiding under the bed, and whether Daddy could kill him. They do not ask about the lamentable events that may have impressed him with the wrong lessons about character and fate. L'Héritier is more interested in the latter.
Here’s a story about Perrault. He was, as my readers might not know, one of the designers of buildings and parks under Louis XIV. He adviced Colbert on public works. It is said that Colbert, at one point, had decided to close Tuileries to the public, after Lenotre had replanted the garden. Perrault proposed that they go for a stroll along the walks. While walking, Perrault observed: You wouldn’t believe, monsieur, the respect everyone has for this garden, down to the tiniest bourgeois – not only women and children never take it upon themselves to pluck any of the flowers, but even to touch them. They all walk about like reasonable people, as the gardeners can testify. It would be a public affliction not to be able to promenade here. – They are all slackers (faineants) who come here, brusquely interrupted the minister. – There comes here, Perrault began again, invalids who need to take a little air; one comes here to talk of business affairs, of marriages, of all kinds of things that are spoken of more agreeably in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary in the future to meet. I am firmly of the belief that royal gardens are so grand and so spacious only in order that all their children can walk there.” Colbert was struck by this last reflection, and went out of the Tuileries without ordering the gates to close, which remained open as before.”
That some things should be spoken of in gardens and others in churches is one of those ideas which, in our day, have been hammered into theoretical dullness via Habermas’ notion of the public conversational space. But Perrault’s consciousness of the coming and going of people and his “town” attitude carries over into his preservation of certain oral nuances in his tales that he wasn’t always fully in control of. In Barbe-bleu, the wife of Barbe-Bleu cannot wipe off the blood on the key that she has used to open the bloody chamber because, Perrault says, the key is fee - it is fairy, it is charmed. A charmed key is the key to the mythologies, no? The messages in Perrault’s tale are in a sense like the people in the garden – they are not, in their individuality, in their entrances, exits, thoughts, words, things planned by the gardener, and yet the plan of the garden accepts them as part of it. They pass through.
... Well, LI is way behind on all projects, and has not even advanced an iota on Adam Smith/Ricdin-Ricdon and the peculiarly nursery rhyme like construction of a pin. What can we say? We suck.
- Her father was an “amateur of the sciences” and a ‘historiograph” at the court. Her father’s family was an ancient and noble one, from Normandy, while her mother was a Le Clerc, another connected family. She was educated by her father, developing a precocious interest in history and fable. Her father, meanwhile, was translating Grotius and aligning himself with Cardinal Mazarin, who gave him a pension. Surely he must have known Gabriel Naude, Mazarin’s secretary. When her father died, she started writing poetry – and she must have done some singing, too, as it is noted that her voice was beautiful. She wrote a defense of Madame Houlieres – about whom we wrote a post a while back. Houlieres was an epicurean, and had been attacked as a blue stocking in a satire to which L'Héritier indignantly replied.
- She gained the protection, at the court, of the Duchesse de Nemours. After her death, she edited her memoirs.
- Her lasting work is the Shadowy Tower, which contains the tale of Ricden-Ricdon. This work is supposedly translated from English – the English of King Richard the Lion Hearted.
- She gathered about her a small salon. Never married. A ‘malady’ is mentioned. Never complained.
Interesting, her obituary doesn’t mention Perrault. It does ring the chimes on her distinguished moral qualities, which are the flowers that fade first – no one would say the same thing about Ninon Lenclos. In fact, Perrault was close to the age’s premier transvestite, Francois Timoleon de Choisy, who was close to Louis’ brother, Monsieur, who was a royal sodomite not shy of asserting his royal perogatives, and duly noted in Saint Simon’s memoirs. In such a society, moral qualities have to be, at the very least, accomodating.
Some recent writers on the fairy tale have claimed that Perrault’s tales survived while his female fairy tale competitors, like L'Héritier, fell into oblivion through sheer sexism. LI thinks that this is a great underestimation of Perrault. It is easy to see why Perrault survived – he had a great sense for what can be cut. He explains – in his morals – what has happened, and the explanations are at such a lower level than the tale that they pose the question of whether Perrault understood his own stories – and that, of course, has led to the endless search for their real, oral sources. L'Héritier’s stories obviously influenced Perrault’s, but she liked her explanations – which, of course, are not for children. Children might ask questions about the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, but they are all questions about how dangerous he is, and whether he might be hiding under the bed, and whether Daddy could kill him. They do not ask about the lamentable events that may have impressed him with the wrong lessons about character and fate. L'Héritier is more interested in the latter.
Here’s a story about Perrault. He was, as my readers might not know, one of the designers of buildings and parks under Louis XIV. He adviced Colbert on public works. It is said that Colbert, at one point, had decided to close Tuileries to the public, after Lenotre had replanted the garden. Perrault proposed that they go for a stroll along the walks. While walking, Perrault observed: You wouldn’t believe, monsieur, the respect everyone has for this garden, down to the tiniest bourgeois – not only women and children never take it upon themselves to pluck any of the flowers, but even to touch them. They all walk about like reasonable people, as the gardeners can testify. It would be a public affliction not to be able to promenade here. – They are all slackers (faineants) who come here, brusquely interrupted the minister. – There comes here, Perrault began again, invalids who need to take a little air; one comes here to talk of business affairs, of marriages, of all kinds of things that are spoken of more agreeably in a garden than in a church, where it will be necessary in the future to meet. I am firmly of the belief that royal gardens are so grand and so spacious only in order that all their children can walk there.” Colbert was struck by this last reflection, and went out of the Tuileries without ordering the gates to close, which remained open as before.”
That some things should be spoken of in gardens and others in churches is one of those ideas which, in our day, have been hammered into theoretical dullness via Habermas’ notion of the public conversational space. But Perrault’s consciousness of the coming and going of people and his “town” attitude carries over into his preservation of certain oral nuances in his tales that he wasn’t always fully in control of. In Barbe-bleu, the wife of Barbe-Bleu cannot wipe off the blood on the key that she has used to open the bloody chamber because, Perrault says, the key is fee - it is fairy, it is charmed. A charmed key is the key to the mythologies, no? The messages in Perrault’s tale are in a sense like the people in the garden – they are not, in their individuality, in their entrances, exits, thoughts, words, things planned by the gardener, and yet the plan of the garden accepts them as part of it. They pass through.
... Well, LI is way behind on all projects, and has not even advanced an iota on Adam Smith/Ricdin-Ricdon and the peculiarly nursery rhyme like construction of a pin. What can we say? We suck.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
science of britney week
On Sundays, Doctor Watson would sit around and read the Times, while Holmes repressed slight shudders of craving for cocaine and prepared to have Watson read him some juicy police report upon which his mind, like a hungry spider, could feast. On Sundays, your faithful LI crewe, on the other hands, surveys the papers cyberspacically, on the q.v. for what happened this week in the exciting field of Britneyology.
This week saw major events. MTV, realizing that, without Britney, four people in a nursing home in Nome who were too disabled to get up and change the channel would be about the sum total watching their pissy awards show, threw out grandiose hints that they would allow... allow – La Brit to perform for them. Beg, MTV, is what we say. I want them down on their knees, weepin’. Meanwhile, the court, in its infinitely patriarchal wisdom, is tormenting Brit by entertaining her ex’s absurd contention that he should be the physical caretaker of the boys – or, in other words, the ex’s desire to be forever on the other end of the Spears’ money pipeline. Brit fired one lawyer and rehired another one, which is probably a good move. In my experience of divorce lawyers, the suck factor is high among even the best of them. In a gesture of magnanimity, the court allowed f... I’m not going to disgrace this blog by spelling out the name of Brit’s least favorite mistake ... to send the kids over via his bodyguards... via his bodyguards... so that they could stay with their much more interesting mother for a day. Via his bodyguards. The man doesn’t even have the guts to deliver the boys himself. Or perhaps he was too busy perfecting his paternal skills with his nose pressed up against a fine white powder line on some ass in the backroom of a Las Vegas club.
Well, this week, too, there was a thread at Crooked Timber about babysitting, playing off a post by Megan McArdle about babysitting, that explains a bit of the court’s attitude. On the one hand, parenting is so valued in this country of ours, where this little light of mine is gonna shine shine shine, that a mother is a radical haircut away from losing her kids forever – in the gated community, every hallmark moment in which an ass is wiped, an angel smiles. On the other hand, childcare itself is shit – it isn’t really work, it requires no skill, and the babysitters or bodyguards you have do it should be royally fucked in the ass as far as like compensation is concerned. In other words, schizophrenia reigns! As it has for the last five thousand years. Notice the high correlation between gender of commentors (male) and parties indignant that housework and childcare could ever, ever be considered work, on par with what these goobers do, day to day, to make the world a little more of a hellish sty to live in.
So, this week, we suggest that Brit’s best plan is to be rescued by Berbers, via this French faux group!
This week saw major events. MTV, realizing that, without Britney, four people in a nursing home in Nome who were too disabled to get up and change the channel would be about the sum total watching their pissy awards show, threw out grandiose hints that they would allow... allow – La Brit to perform for them. Beg, MTV, is what we say. I want them down on their knees, weepin’. Meanwhile, the court, in its infinitely patriarchal wisdom, is tormenting Brit by entertaining her ex’s absurd contention that he should be the physical caretaker of the boys – or, in other words, the ex’s desire to be forever on the other end of the Spears’ money pipeline. Brit fired one lawyer and rehired another one, which is probably a good move. In my experience of divorce lawyers, the suck factor is high among even the best of them. In a gesture of magnanimity, the court allowed f... I’m not going to disgrace this blog by spelling out the name of Brit’s least favorite mistake ... to send the kids over via his bodyguards... via his bodyguards... so that they could stay with their much more interesting mother for a day. Via his bodyguards. The man doesn’t even have the guts to deliver the boys himself. Or perhaps he was too busy perfecting his paternal skills with his nose pressed up against a fine white powder line on some ass in the backroom of a Las Vegas club.
Well, this week, too, there was a thread at Crooked Timber about babysitting, playing off a post by Megan McArdle about babysitting, that explains a bit of the court’s attitude. On the one hand, parenting is so valued in this country of ours, where this little light of mine is gonna shine shine shine, that a mother is a radical haircut away from losing her kids forever – in the gated community, every hallmark moment in which an ass is wiped, an angel smiles. On the other hand, childcare itself is shit – it isn’t really work, it requires no skill, and the babysitters or bodyguards you have do it should be royally fucked in the ass as far as like compensation is concerned. In other words, schizophrenia reigns! As it has for the last five thousand years. Notice the high correlation between gender of commentors (male) and parties indignant that housework and childcare could ever, ever be considered work, on par with what these goobers do, day to day, to make the world a little more of a hellish sty to live in.
So, this week, we suggest that Brit’s best plan is to be rescued by Berbers, via this French faux group!
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Fairy tales in the pin factory
This has been the spring for the Gothic strain of specters that Derrida stirred up in Marx in the bloggysphere; yet, so far, nobody has mentioned the name, Jack Zipes. Zipes is famous in the folklore field, or rather, literary folklore field, for applying a Marxist analysis to his study of the Grimm Brother’s Märchen. Zipes, who has also translated and written about Ernst Bloch, seems to have taken Bloch’s sympathy for grassroots peasant radicalism and applied it in a field where, usually, research tends towards a Freudian or Jungian end. Well, archetypes r us has a large American market – and perhaps I shouldn’t laugh. The softening of the American imago – stoic, a loner, a killer – owes a lot to an earnest search for a spirituality that isn’t so persistently shadowed by the cross – and don’t we all want a less wifebeater friendly, a less “God is a bullet” national culture? Sometimes, crawling in this mire of shit and sperm through the valley of the shadow of death that I laughingly call my life, I sure the fuck do. At the same time, let’s not pretend there aren’t losses, vast losses – of, for instance, that improvisational scrambling with which the escaping prisoner is supernaturally gifted. I take the escaping prisoner traversing the terrified countryside – Huck and Jim, before the hounds - to be as much an emblem of our psyche as the leatherstocking scouts that were the object of D.H. Lawrence’s remark.
Which gets us back to the violence and hope captured in fairy tales, à la Zipes. LI has been insinuating that as we entered a pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house. But pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Zipes makes clear in his analysis of Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.
Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.
Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.
I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.
About which, more later.
Which gets us back to the violence and hope captured in fairy tales, à la Zipes. LI has been insinuating that as we entered a pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations, which inaugurates the science of economics, we are entering a fairy tale haunted place. The path of pins leads to Grandmother’s house. But pins are also an integral part of the economy of spinning, as Zipes makes clear in his analysis of Rumpelstiltskin in Fairy Tale as Myth. As he also makes clear, the patriarchal readings of Rumpelstiltskin – a tale classified under the motif of Helper’s Name in the Aarne-Thompson index – are, to say the least, misleading. Helper is the wrong name for Rumpelstiltskin – “he is obviously a blackmailer and an oppressor,” according to Zipes. Well, “obviously” is a strong word to use about any character in a fairy tale: he could be seen, as obviously, as the accursed share, rejected by the ennobled Miller’s Daughter who is seeking, above all else, to elevate her child above the status she was raised in, all the while keeping that status system intact to gain the benefits of it. Much like the American CEO, usually the product of student loans and state funded colleges, seeking to ensure the radical diminishment of public investment so that others are much more burdened down by student loans in less funded universities competing with the Ivies where the CEOs send their own children.
Still, Zipes is right to draw attention to the woman in the story. The Grimm Brother’s version of the tale is something of a disappointment in comparison to the version published by Madame L’heritier in the Cabinet des fees, Ricdin-Ricdon, since the character of the Miller’s daughter is not very developed in the former, while this character, Rosanie, the daughter of a peasant in L’heritier, is an acute psychological portrait of upward social ambition.
Zipes claims that the spinning motif in the Grimm Brother’s tales is, in a sense, a valedictory to the enormous injury done to women in the 18th and 19th century as their cottage industry of spinning and weaving was wrested from them and centralized in male managed factories.
The very first literary form of Rumpelstiltskin, Mademoiselle L’Heritier’s Ricdin-Ricdon, demonstrates that spinning was cherished by the aristocracy at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century. The queen is most eager to employ Rosanie as a spinner and cherishes all the articles that Rosanie magically produces. We know that numerous French courts had constructed spinning rooms for women to produce much needed cloth, and there was a great demand for gifted spinners at the time that Mademoiselle L’heritier wrote her tale. Interestingly, her model spinner, Rosanie, takes possession of the devil’s magic want (i.e., phallus) to create an image that satisfies if not exceeds society’s expectations. She does not spin straw into gold but rather flax into yarn and thread. ...(67)
I think Zipes is correct to front the spinning in this tale as at least equivalent to the story of the name of the “helper” – but to make this a tale of spinning as an affectionately perceived craft is a bit of a distortion. He writes: “Throughout the entire tale, spinning and female creativity remain the central concern and are upheld as societal values that need support, especially male support.” This is a reading that fails to capture the irony in Rosanie’s story – to say the least. In L’Héritier’s tale, Rosanie has one abiding characteristic: a total abhorrence of spinning. When she is first spotted by Prince Prud’homme (and surely these bourgeois names for the royals – Prud’homme and Queen Laborieuse – are meant to ironically), she is being dragged around the back yard by her evil hag of a mother, who demands that her daughter spin more. In a crafty move that reproduces the comic gesture from Moliere’s Medecin malgre lui, when the hag is interrupted by Prince Prud’homme – who is taken by Rosanie’s looks and wants to know why she is being mistreated by the hag –she tells him a lie, a neat inversion of the truth – that she is punishing her daughter for spinning too much. Thus, under false pretences, Prince P. takes Rosanie back to the court, where his mother is delighted to receive a top flight spinner. Rosanie, horrified by what her mother has done but unable to face being expelled from the court if she confesses the truth, is going through the park to cast herself off a pavilion set on a cliff and end her life – so much does she hate spinning - when she meets the strange man – a big man, in the tale, with a dark face, but oddly amused face – to whom she tells her tale.
About which, more later.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
eating the flesh that she herself has bred...
By the way – re the price of oil – as I wrote a week ago, the main driver of the oil price spike recently has been insecurity. The threats against Iran by Israel, and the futile campaign, led by the U.S., to stop the Iranians from engaging in the uranium enrichment program that they are entitled to at least as much as India (where the U.S. has loaned technically illegal support) and Pakistan, have a cost. The cost can be computed at about 50 cents to a dollar a gallon. Here, for further proof of a series of events that the press, in its neocon wisdom, has simply taken off the table for consideration, is a Financial Times article about the effect of the sanctions in slowing down the development of one of the prime oil fields in the world – in Iran. Of course, if this was Venezuala taking a field out of commission, there’d be the usual dyspeptic drumbeat. But stories like this about Iran aren’t meant for the morons or the children – they might start doubting the wisdom of our establishment! That would be so sad.
“As energy prices surge, the world is wondering where it will all end. Where will supplies come from in the future? Iran, sitting on the world’s second largest reserves of gas – in addition to huge quantities of oil – is tomorrow’s apparent answer.
Iran should in theory be a magnet for international oil companies, which are cash-rich and searching for ways to replenish their diminishing reserves. But the geopolitical environment, in which Iran is being marginalised because of a refusal to suspend work on its nuclear programme, means this is not the case.
South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, is shared between Iran and Qatar but development from the Iranian side has ground almost to a halt, thanks to the US-led crackdown on business links with Iran. This week the European Union ratcheted up the pressure, agreeing tougher financial measures against Tehran.
...
This delicate balancing act is exemplified by the decision of Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol last month to withdraw from the development of what is known as phase 13 of South Pars. The lack of new investment from the oil majors means Iran is left to deal with relatively inexperienced minnows that are desperate for the business – companies from the likes of Austria, Croatia and Poland.”
I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: this will not become an issue in the Presidential or even be mentioned by the NYT and the Washington Post. It would, after all, point to a small paradox: the U.S. is pursuing a foreign policy that has become immediately injurious to the economic power of the average American household. It is pursuing this policy solely from vanity and the interest of the defense industry-petro club to churn up wars and perpetual hostility. Those with memories - that brave band! - might recall that the newspapers touted Bush's European tour, which ended with increasing sanctions on Iran, as a triumph. At the same time, the business pages recorded another spike in the future's market for oil. It was like these stories had nothing to do with each other.
On the other hand - maybe we should laugh at all the morons dying on the gas grapevine. They wanted it. Now let them eat it to the last little morsel.
Poor and rich, laborer and boss - let them all eat their fill of the dainty pie, in which so many sweet and tender Iraqis have been well and truly baked.
Oh corrupt and heartless generation... you will eat your heart, several times over, before this is done.
“As energy prices surge, the world is wondering where it will all end. Where will supplies come from in the future? Iran, sitting on the world’s second largest reserves of gas – in addition to huge quantities of oil – is tomorrow’s apparent answer.
Iran should in theory be a magnet for international oil companies, which are cash-rich and searching for ways to replenish their diminishing reserves. But the geopolitical environment, in which Iran is being marginalised because of a refusal to suspend work on its nuclear programme, means this is not the case.
South Pars, the world’s largest gas field, is shared between Iran and Qatar but development from the Iranian side has ground almost to a halt, thanks to the US-led crackdown on business links with Iran. This week the European Union ratcheted up the pressure, agreeing tougher financial measures against Tehran.
...
This delicate balancing act is exemplified by the decision of Royal Dutch Shell and Repsol last month to withdraw from the development of what is known as phase 13 of South Pars. The lack of new investment from the oil majors means Iran is left to deal with relatively inexperienced minnows that are desperate for the business – companies from the likes of Austria, Croatia and Poland.”
I will go out on a limb and make a prediction: this will not become an issue in the Presidential or even be mentioned by the NYT and the Washington Post. It would, after all, point to a small paradox: the U.S. is pursuing a foreign policy that has become immediately injurious to the economic power of the average American household. It is pursuing this policy solely from vanity and the interest of the defense industry-petro club to churn up wars and perpetual hostility. Those with memories - that brave band! - might recall that the newspapers touted Bush's European tour, which ended with increasing sanctions on Iran, as a triumph. At the same time, the business pages recorded another spike in the future's market for oil. It was like these stories had nothing to do with each other.
On the other hand - maybe we should laugh at all the morons dying on the gas grapevine. They wanted it. Now let them eat it to the last little morsel.
Poor and rich, laborer and boss - let them all eat their fill of the dainty pie, in which so many sweet and tender Iraqis have been well and truly baked.
Oh corrupt and heartless generation... you will eat your heart, several times over, before this is done.
precarious beasts
Well, Mr. Praxis, at least, liked yesterday’s post (sniff, sniff). (I've even lost North, who usually comes in to stronghand me when I emanate self-pity - and by the way, I hope you see that I am emanating self-pity about my self-pity! Trust LI to go Meta!)
To take up yesterday’s thread – we last watched the wolf, or werewolf, merrily hop down the path of pins, and end up, via a Loony Tunes loop traversing space, time and genre, at the pin factory at the beginning of the Wealth of Nations. Of course, the question is – what kind of pin factory is this? It seems to be one that physically exists, one that Smith, our genial author, has seen, according to his own written word. Yet no such factory visit seems to have been recorded elsewhere. Plus, textual cues seem to point to the factory being, in actuality, in France – in the pages of the entry on pin, épingle, in the Encyclopedie. And that pin factory seems to have been in L'aigle, in Normandy. About which we have information that is, oddly enough, never to my knowledge been compared to the account in the Wealth of Nations. Odd, because certainly the model of the pin factory was not just about the efficiency, the marvel, of dividing tasks among laborers, but had an underlying message about labor itself.
Wolves were things of the past in Scotland when Smith made his (non) outing to the pin factory. How far past is another affair wrapped up in some controversy. According to some accounts, the last wolf in Scotland was shot by a hunter named McQueen, who tracked the beast to his lair in Findhorn after the beast had attacked and eaten a woman and a child crossing a nearby moor. Shapeshifting, as would be expected by those who know something of the path of pins, has infected every part of this story. Did the wolf really attack the pair and eat them? The last wolf? What was the sex of it? The size? Or was the last wolf slain by Sir Ewen Cameron in 1680? Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, in 1904, devoted an article to the last wolf in Scotland. According to the writer, many Scottish districts lay claim to the be scene of the shooting of the last wolf. However, Blackwood’s goes with the shooting in the “wild valley of Findhorn” in 1743, since there are detailed accounts. The area was the home of the last wild pack. Here’s the Blackwood’s story:
“The most active carnach in their destruction was MacQueen of Pall a’ chrocain, an immense duine uasail who stood 6 feet 7 inches in his brogues. To this worthy, one winter day in 1743, came word from MacIntosh that a great black beast had come down to the low country and carried off a couple of children near Cawdor, and that a tainchel or hunting-drive was to meet a Figiuthas, where MacQeen was summoned to attend according to an act of Parliament.
Next morning in the cold dawn the hunters were assembled: but where was MacQueen? He was not wont to be ‘langsome’ on such an occasion, and his hounds, nto to mention himself, were almost indispensable to the chase. MacIntosh watied impatiently as the day wore on, and when at last MacQueen was seen coming liesurely along, the chief spoke sharply to him, rebuking him for wasting the best hours for hunting.
“Ciod e a’ chabhag?” (What’s the hurry?”) was the cool reply, which sent an indignant murmur through the shivering sportsmen. MacIntosh uttered an angry threat.
“Sin e dhiabh! (“There you are then!”) said MacQueen, and throwing back his plaid, flung the grey head of the wolf upon the heather. The company had lost thier sport, but they forgave Pall-a’-chrocain, whose renown stood higher than ever as a hunter, and Macintosh “gave him the land called Sean-achan for meat to his dogs.”
Surely LI is showing his own bent for irrelevance and the scaring of all rational like beasties, going so langsome into the thickets of Smith’s prose with a cock n bull hunting tale about a fairy wolf, for Jesus’ sake! Man, where’s your models, your references to the fine theorists, and all that train! But as the disappearance of the wolf seems, to us, magically connected with the appearance of the pin factory, we thought it might be a fine thing, worthy of a carnach from Cawdor (you remember the Thane of Cawdor?), to clear the area so that we could travel across it all safe and sound and snug. And in our search for pin factories, we might just find that, in spite of Smith’s celebration of the division of labor – upon which rock is built so much – that in fact, the celebrated pin factory in L’aigle, Normandy, from which – although it is murky – the encyclopedists might have drawn their information about the pin industry, was still governed by a mass of laws concerning master pinners, and who was allowed to work on pins, and problems with the weight of pins in each envelop of pins, so that the social function of pinmaker, and the needs of the state, and regulation from the state, might have had as much to do with the division of labor as the fabulous productivity of the pin factory, which can only be exampled by ... well, by Rapunzel of course, spinning straw into gold.
MacQueen told more of the story of the hunt than was reprised in Blackwoods. Here’s how he told the tale:
As I came through the slochk (i.e., ravine) I foregathered wi' the beast. My long dog there turned him. I buckled wi' him, and dirkit him, and syne whuttled his craig (i.e., cut his throat), and brought awa' his countenance for fear he might come alive again, for they are very precarious creatures.
Very precarious creatures indeed.
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