from encyclopedia of the second hand

I wrote a series of chapters to a novel in the 90s. It centered around an artist - Longstreet in some versions, Laff in others - and the things he remembers. The chapters, then, are grouped as entries, and not chronologically. I have finally decided that I probably won't finish this. So I think I'll put them up on my blog, occassionally, to please the few punters who come here.
Here's Kickball

‑    Those inflatable rubber balls, the rubber feeling very thin over the hollow, air filled core.  Although when the ball hits you, it stings.  It can sting.  The surface of these balls, the rubber rind, is always dented.  Not smooth, but always a little pitted.  Pebbly.  You never saw this type of ball outside of school unless someone stole one.  And then everybody would know that this person stole this ball, because it was so distinctive, so it wasn't a great thing to steal, in terms of other great things you could steal, like magazines from stores or the little knicknacks, batteries and disposable razors and such, that they always have hanging up at the checkout counter, or (like your friend Eric's sister, Brenda, did) a necklace from someone you were babysitting for.  Of course, Eric's sister wasn't prudent in committing the last mentioned bit of larceny, because it didn't take a genius to connect  Brenda babysitting last night with the necklace no longer glittering whereever it had been glittering this morning. The lack of necklace loomed large enough that the next day it was restored to Mrs. Phillips by Mr. Klimke, and Eric's sister got punished as she was always getting punished, by being grounded, and as always she glided out of her bedroom window like a little sorority cat burglar when her boyfriend Bobby drove up before the house in his big black Oldsmobile. Which Eric saw, of course, but even though he didn't like his sister he still didn't tell about. That is to his folks. To us he told about it. He always did tell us. Eric's sister never cultivated prudence, which was why, on the back of the Thrift Village there on Shallowcross road you could read that Brenda sucks donkey dicks (a dismissable slander) and that Brenda suck Bobby (grammatically doubtful, but accepted as gospel truth by the Gladstone seventh grade).

     Kickball was the eminent ball of the playground. There was the softball, the basketball, the football, the baseball, and the program was that as we got older these would be our balls, and we would be sorted out according to what ball we were around most. (Oh, you forgot the bowling ball. But that was church. The Sunday School class, organised for a rainy Saturday excursion to the bowling alley and you watching the movie must have been made in the fifties, say, that guy looks funny, he looks like my Uncle, yeah my uncle always wears his undershirt and not a shirt over it and the movie voiceover telling Longstreet to take his steps up to the line like in the diagram step a and dot dot dot step b ahead of it and the arm back hey though these finger holes are too small and the after swing ‑ perfecto, man, but the ball I don't think the ball is right see it keeps curving like you know that means they must of unbalanced it by putting more weight on the right, man, and that isn't fair). But up until the sixth grade we were all sort of under the sign of the kickball. Liberte, egalite and fraternite, translated into elementary school terms, meant kickball. If Engels had been around we might have reminded him of that stage of primitive communism when everything is pretty groovy and even the girls get to play on the kickball teams, and then later on he might posit an Asiatic feudal stage in balldom, when the huge project was sorting out the bats and finding the things like petrified pillows for bases and then setting up our configurations and all of this division of labor tending to establish a definite tyranny and caste system, with the outfield getting to play the pariah parts. Any clumsy jerk could be stationed out there, and a lot of times they doubled or tripled up, so there are three right fielders at a time, two left fielders, and so on. 

‑    I should try to be more conscientious of the limits of my world, or at least put in markers here, little surveyor's clues, even if the real limits are by their essence such that the slave to them cannot see them.  The real limits are invisible and function invisibly, the real limits are self‑suppressing, the real limit is not the wall I touch but the interface between touch and wall. I  am talking about the Gladstone Elementary School playground as if it were representative of all elementary school playgrounds, at least of a certain era, but I have to say my sample is limited. The only other playground I had any familiarity with is the Dallastown, Pennsylvania Elementary School playground. The Earlys moved to Gladstone, a suburb of Atlanta, when Street was nine, and Mom was happy about that cause she didn't like living up North so much and so she really got on Dad when he got the opportunity to come down here, Dad was doing a little of this and a little of that and had ended up there in Pennsylvania working on a newspaper for, Street was surprised to learn twenty years later talking to Dad on his porch and Dad reminiscing about that time, Dad making six thousand a year. And it was only four thousand more, the ad agency in Atlanta, but Mom kept pointing out it was a ground floor opportunity, look, honey, this article says  Atlanta is the new New York, it is like the place to be. Honey. Like it was the opportunity of a lifetime.  We could live near Grammy Shillowford. It is important to note that Longstreet had, by that time, incorporated playground in my paradigm of how to be ‑ yes, it was that stark, in those stark terms, that I thought, since I was a melancholic child ‑ and so my memories of kickball, which don't go back to Dallastown, where we played rather chaotic and un‑ball‑organized games, plug into my playground and classroom routine.

‑   In Dallastown you were beaten up on the playground. No, that is an exaggeration ‑ you were never physically beaten up, but you were the object of a certain amount of bullying. The bullying made an impression. For instance, there was this tyke Amazon who would come after you with her coat. She'd swing her coat so that the zipper would hit you. Of course, the zipper didn't hit you very often because you ran away. Now why she came after you with the coat in the first place, that has to do with the reasons children find the targets they do, and that has to do with miseries that are accumulated from elsewhere. From one's relationship to Mom and Dad ‑ standard answer. From the air, from God, the curses of angels or mad toothfairies, who knows, but the important thing is that children, with their back‑to‑the‑primates program of selecting out the weak, are going to find your weak spot.

     Now, here is the thing: by the time you got to Gladstone you were not tormented, or not particularly, and certainly not by children of your own age.  The reason for this is that you were a quick student, you liked to read, you impressed your teachers, and that gave you a certain amount of power, a power base, and it taught you how to use powerful allies to establish yourself.  Not that you told, you didn't have to tell. It was that you could have told and didn't, actually, that made the difference. It is easy to caricature what I am talking about here, we have the vocabularies we inherited from childhood, we  know about sneaks, queers, snitches, bookworms, bullies, but if I turn my back on that sad gallery and really think about it what impresses me is the diplomacy involved in classroom and playground survival, the ability to pick the right moments for remaining loyal and the right and legal moments for jettisoning one's allies, ah, the terrible beauty of Realpolitik in Kinderwelt, ah, the friends who turned out to be mistakes, or somehow became mistakes, not that at first they were mistakes but it was like the effect of some terrible hidden gene, you would be gone a summer from them and you'd come back and there your friend would be, a mistake, a pud, a sucker, coloring the very air around him with unhealthy vulnerability.

‑   So in Atlanta you have a system down, you have a power model that you have discovered, you are very quick to establish yourself.  By the fifth grade you have established yourself on the playground.  All of our models are so crude, it goes along with picking my nose or my butt and not worrying about it, it goes along with poking a straw in my nostril, it goes along with the thing Eric can do with  his eye by putting his finger on the lid right at the corner and pulling it and like pulling his eye right up so that you only see the runny white of the eye, gross, this all goes along with the rawness of the assertions and surrenders on the playground. You have got to where you are in the middle of the kids who are selected for Jackson's team. Jackson Whittemore is the biggest kid in fifth grade and his team usually wins, so you are comfortable, this is the middle management level which a lot of these kids will go into, it starts from here.

‑    The kickballs come out of a closet.  The janitor's closet.  The doors of all the classrooms are wooden doors, easy doors to open, but the special doors in the school, the door to the office, the door to the bathroom, and the doors to the storerooms, they are all heavy metal doors. The janitor unlocks it selecting one key from a great clanking mass of them, which is attached by a chain to his belt.  The janitor, the main janitor of the Gladstone Elementary School is an old black man (which means around fifty, to Street the thick, tufted gray hair signifies extreme age, and he has no eye for the damage and endurence of black skin, his measurements are all in white skin) who at some later date ‑ when Street is already in High School ‑ has to leave the school because he is caught trying to show a little girl pictures of naked women.  God knows what is involved in such a complexly suggestive gesture. A teacher will get Grady to unlock the door and he'll be attended by volunteers.  Maybe the teacher will go with Grady herself, but most of the time the teachers' point of view is that playground time means going to the teacher's lounge and taking a drag on a cigarette. So without Miss Petty or Beston or Muldive we would get nine balls, and sometimes they would be deflated and they are neat when they are like that because you can crevice the surface in this way or that way, and if you knock a dent in the ball and then knock another one in it the dents you form will interfere with each other, and that is endlessly fascinating for about two minutes.  The other interesting thing about hitting the ball to obtain these dents is that it makes an interesting thump, and the other interesting thing about it is that when the ball is pumped up the dents will pop out, and that is good to watch. The ball looks like it is alive when this is happening, a strange seal or something, like it is eating, or at least the way things eat in cartoons where a lot of times what is eaten is swallowed whole, gulp, and it just stays the same inside, in fact if the thing eaten is the smart thing, like the Roadrunner, then it just lights a match and the thing eating it, like the Coyote, has to spit it out.

     Okay, the balls come out of the storage closet and suddenly they are all over the playground.  Little impish red balls, around which coalesce groups of boys and girls and teachers, the ones who aren't smoking in the lounge, which it must be that they switch on and off.  Boys and girls, though: this is a teacher's words.  I write this, I veer, I am in another perspective with the touch of a word.  Kids.  We were kids, I was a kid. We were big kids and little ones, we were girls only in a special tone (geerl. You're a geeerl ‑ a special taunt among the boys) and we were boys only in pathetic moments when we were licking the ass of some especially chosen adult, like going home with some story of malfeasance to a parent (he was a big boy ‑ he was a bigger boy ‑ phrases to evoke sympathy and, one hoped, rage ‑ maybe Daddy will go over there and beat up Mr. Whittemore!).  We could all easily be pretty pathetic lackies, childhood being a wonderful discipline for later acts of supererogatory servility

‑     But normally we werent lackies ‑ we were, as I have tried to point out, diplomats, secretaries of state on delicate missions in perilous international situations.

‑   Shift a little, Street, shift the focus.  Because I want this to be clear ‑ to actually describe the world of kickballs involves a lot of subtle stuff, it involves the whole metaphysics of description and depiction, that stitching between art and life. 

‑    My dream is to describe myself into existence.    

‑   There is always a word, but not simply a word: a charm. An open sesame, a one if by land and two if by sea.  The lock is unlocked, the stone is lifted, the agents meet in the park at twelve and exchange briefcases. Yes, not simply a word, because its synonyms won't do, the place that it holds is uniquely its own, its function is to transform the situation, to make visible the threshhold between absense and appearance.  Like a stage mindreader, your challenge is to pick out a few  experiences from the nattering psychic throng, all those unnamed lifes, all those random vibes. Except here, in the palace of memory, those lifes are one life: your own.  Your own, splintered into a thousand aspect

‑    There is another kickball game which comes later, comes in high school.  It is called smear the queer, although like all these names there are official and unofficial titles and I'm pretty sure Coach Sick, who had a hard enough time saying sperm when the time came for him to say sperm when we got our sex education class from him, I'm pretty sure he didn't go around saying smear the queer, he probably said something more World War II like, like bombardment. Anyway, the game was played inside, in a room that had one wall open so you could lean out and look down on the gym floor and the girls and their little uniforms down there.  I should explain that you are in a school district where they have compressed Junior High and High School, because other people I talk to, they say ninth grade was Junior High.  Well, not for Street.  Now, the girls were inside for the same reason we were:  it was raining.  But you didn't have much of a chance to look down like that, because smear the queer was a hyperbusy game.  It was simple;  two teams, lined up each before a wall, faceing each other.  You could run out a certain distance, to a line running across the floor. You hurl a kickball right before the line.  If it hit some boy, that boy was out.  The tempo of the game was different from the kickball games you played at Gladstone .  Those earlier games were sort of slow fusion jazz, a lot of riffs of inactivity ‑ retrieving the ball, watching the pitcher pitch it, the exchange between catcher and pitcher, neither of whom was better than anybody else at catching the ball, since to catch the ball you had to have a developed sense of speed and the curves that the ball would take and we were all a little primitive about that. Most of the time when the kicker did hit it the ball was foul, and somebody had to go retrieve it, and even when he did kick it and it was legal it usually didn't have to involve you.  Mostly you could confine your involvement to yelling, maybe a little sympathetic movement towards the part of the field where something was going on. But in smear the queer, Coach Sick kept tossing in kickballs, and since there wasn't any set time for anybody to throw a ball balls were constantly in the air, so you could be dodging one and be hit by another.

‑    What do you think is going to happen? Do you think this is going to end with some more profound knowledge about the meaning of kickball?  Do you think, yes you do think, that if you do it right, if you reach the magic moment of greatest specificity, the sound one day of the ball crunching on the sandy mixture they laid on top of the playground that you had to dig down a foot through before you reached clay, the ball bounding towards you segment by segment larger but not so that you had time to mark the stages of its fascinating trajectory, the ball actually heading in your direction and the screams and yells suddenly receding like the soundtrack going out, something screwed up  with the friggin projector as Mr. Dupley in exasperation and shadow said one day, the ball almost in your hands and you squatting down in the catcher's squat for it, if you get this in the crosshairs, see it, know that posture and the waiting and how suddenly you don't want to be here, it will be like a kickball will drop out of the story, memory's relic take physical form, Lazarus as kickball come back from the dead come to tell you all I will tell you all.

ukraine, russia and crimea

I’ve noticed with some amusement that the hawks have come out about Russia and the Ukraine. Timothy Snyder at the NYRB is practically foaming at the mouth, warning that if Crimea is annexed it will mean the end of the “European order”. Similarly, David Remnick and his reporters at the New Yorker are pulling out propaganda tricks that were old in 1991, when they were used to propell the US into the defense of tiny, embattled, and surely democratic (or semi-democratic or completely feudal) Kuwait.

Myself, I think Putin’s annexation ploy is probably a feint that will allow him to get what he wants anyway by “compromising” and making Crimea totally autonomous. But even if Crimea is annexed, there is little Europe or the US can do about it.

However, there is a certain lesson, here – a lesson that we are forced to swallow every four or five years. The lesson is that America’s gung ho gang of interventionists always cause immense and long range trouble. For instance, the Putin who Remnick spits on is, what? The product of Boris Yeltsin. And as those who have memories longer than your average tv anchorman, Boris Yeltsin’s second term was the result of a massive and unprecedented use of private funds and government power, and was influenced by the same American government/NGO nexis that has traditionally gone around making a sham of elections in various “strategic” countries.

Remnick’s comments on the 1996 elections are, in this context, extremely relevant. First he quotes from Adam Michnik: “Today, Russia stands before a dramatic dilemma to which no one yet has given a reasonable answer. What is better: to disrupt the rules of democracy and chase out the totalitarian parties while they are sufficiently weak, or to respect the democratic order and open these parties to the road to power?” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1996/06/17/1996_06_17_005_TNY_CARDS_000373659 This is the kind of orotund stuff that is the cat’s meow to American pundits. Kissinger said it much better about overthrowing Allende:  "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due  to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

In the event, though, Michnick’s dilemma was solved by a judicious use of power that Remnick compared to what John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and Rutherford Hayes did – to which we can add George W. Bush, then not on the horizon. So the state media saturates the zone with pro-Yeltsin news and fake photo ops.

It was a classic operation, and it even involved a photo-op war – the war in Chechnya. The war had a strange effect on Chechens – they seem to multiply right before the election and vote in overwhelming numbers for your friend and mine, Boris Yeltsin, putting him over the top. A winner!

In fact, Time Magazine was so proud that they impertinently put out an issue, Yanks to the Rescue, in 1996, detailing  just how the Americans had rejiggered the Yeltsin campaign. Of course, they avoided talking about the really dirty stuff, but the model was created that would elect Putin in 2000, and thereafter the Russians could take over the reins in running dirty elections.

However, butter does not melt in the mouth of yesteryear’s interveners, always straining at the bit to visit some new disaster upon the world, and spitting on those who oppose them as the friends of totalitarianism and the murderers of Mickey Mouse.

I resent that latter charge. My son loves his Mickey Mouse, and I wouldn’t hurt a hair on that Mouse’s head.

But the official mediasphere, for too too long, has had its run of DC’s toys. One of the effects of the Bush-Obama deal, which solidified the plutocracy on the top of the American economy and has allowed the bottom 80 percent to slip decorously into the shit, is that it is hard to get that 80 percent all excited about our national interests in Crimea.

Just as with Georgia, Putin is playing for low stakes, and the US will lose and give John McCain an ulcer. To say this isn’t to celebrate Putin, a true butcher and an heir to an illegitimate and corrupt system.  It is to look at the real effect of the 90s fun filled shock therapy, mafioso ologarcho takeover of industries, and the skewing of the very beginning of Russian democracy by the farce put on in 1996. The let’s do it again crowd should not be listened to.

betrayal

It is an interesting affair – the affair one has with certain authors, those you read compulsively, and then can’t read. Can’t. Favorite authors. When I was a kid in high school, for instance, I read all the Kurt Vonnegut I could find in great satisfying gulps. God Bless you mr. Rosewater, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, Sirens of Titan, etc., etc. I thought that this was how to write. I imitated him.

And then one day I couldn ‘t read him.

This moment of turning away – what is it but a betrayal? As with a love affair, it is a moment of heavy psychodrama, with  a whole lot of projection going on. That projection is covered, at least in my case, by a critical language, which finds the fault in Vonnegut and the burden of betrayal is unconsciously shifted to him.  It is the author’s betrayal, not my own! He led me on. He took advantage of my teen naivete! And it isn’t even that the critical language is false, the negativity misplaced – but there is a fundamental bad faith behind it all.

Anton Chekhov, in a letter to a friend written in 1891, gave an elegant description of this moment of betrayal. In his case, the writer was  Tolstoy:

“Perhaps because of my no longer smoking, the Tolstoyan morality has stopped stirring me, and in the depths of my soul I feel badly disposed toward it, which is, of course, unjust. Peasant blood flows in my veins, and you cannot astound me with the virtues of the peasantry. From childhood I have believed in progress and cannot help believing, as the differerence between the time when I got whipped and the time when the whippings ceased was terrific. … But the Tolstoyan philosophy had a pwerful effect on me, governed my life for a period of six or seven years; it was not the basic premises, of which I had been previously aware, but the Tolstoyan manner of expression, its good sense and probably a sort of hypnotic quality. Now something within me protests: prudence and justice tell me there is more love in natural phenomena than in chastity and abstinence from meat. War is evil and the court system is evil, but it does not therefore follow that I have to walk around in straw slippers and sleep on a stove besides a workman and his wife, etc. This howevver is not the crux of the matter, not the “pro and contra”; it is that somehow or other Tolstoy has already passed out of my life, is no longer in my heart: he has gone away saying, behold, your house is left unto you desolate. I have freed myself from lodging his ideas in my brain.”

Tolstoy is, of course, a much larger mass than Vonnegut, but Chekhov’s outburst applies to all the betrayals: first comes the rationalization, which indeed contains a spiritual truth, a truth of authenticity; then comes the desacralization, an energy that goes beyond mere argument; and then comes a more accurate description of what it means to be in love with a writer and then fall out of love.

The authenticity of the experience is rooted in Chekhov’s claim to be of peasant blood, and more vividly, to know the experience of the whip growing up – although this is not the serfowner’s knout, but papa’s belt, apparently. Then comes a sort of mockery of the Tolstoyan agenda, which is easy to cook up – the idea of sleeping with the working man and his wife on the stove is a comic image. Then comes the real reason, and here, it isn’t progress or rationality that dominates, but possession and exorcism.

This corresponds to my experience exactly. The hypnotism affected by a writer, a writer one falls in love with, is an act of possession. It could even be an act of angelic possession. But Chekhov, the Chekhov who claims his peasant blood here, wrote in another letter that he had tried to drain the slave from his blood to the last drop, and this purge counts for beloved writers too.

These thoughts were crystallized by a Hudson Review essay onDavid Foster Wallace’s conservatism. The author, James Santel, guides his essayinto port using three facts about Wallace – that he voted for Reagan in 1980,that he voted for Ross Perot in 1992, and that he wrote a shamefullyhagiographic article about John McCain in 2000. Santel ignores DFW’s campaigning for Kerry in 2004 and the interview he gave to the WSJ in 2008, where he says:

“ You write that John McCain, in 2000, had become "the great populist hope of American politics." What parallels do you see between McCain in 2000 and Barack Obama in 2008?

Mr. Wallace: There are some similarities; the ability to attract new voters, Independents; the ability to raise serious money in a grassroots way via the Web. But there are also lots of differences, many too obvious to need pointing out. Obama is an orator, for one thing;a rhetorician of the old school. To me, that seems more classically populist than McCain, who's not a good speechmaker and whose great strengths are Q&As and small-group press confabs. But there's a bigger [reason]. The truth -;as I see it -is that the previous seven years and four months of the Bush Administration have been such an unmitigated horror show of rapacity, hubris, incompetence, mendacity, corruption, cynicism and contempt for the electorate that it's very difficult to imagine how a self-identified Republican could try to position himself as a populist.”

However, I think Santel has a point about Wallace, even if the point keeps shuffling away from him. It isn’t that Wallace is conservative because he thinks “the individual is alone”. What lefty would disagree? And what lefty wouldn’t say that “alone” is an attitude that emerges in the social whole. It is a social construct, which does not mean it is somehow not real, but that it gains its entire value as such a construct. Santel I think confuses methodological individualism with existential individualism. But I think that Wallace did too. From the Ayn Rand fan-dom of his teenage years through the entire body of his non-fiction, and to a certain extent his fiction, he lacked that sense of the contemporary – of the historic moment, and the forces engaged within it – that a novelist like Mann, or Bellow, or Updike – to name some other conservative novelists – had.

It has been a while since I read Wallace like I used to in the nineties and 00s. I’ve never even considered reading Pale King. I do remember thinking Interviews with Hideous Men was a huge comedown from Infinite Jest. But I also remember thinking that  the essays – on the AVA awards, on a LA talk radio jock, on whatever – were genius.

Recently, though, picking up A Supposedly Fun thing I’ll Never do Again (ah, that supposedly!) I found myself reacting allergically to the whole of it. The wisecracks, the footnotes, the mix of hesitation and arrogance, of erudition and self-mockery – it seemed so wrong.

Was it wrong? One of my great reading experiences was lounging in my high bed in New Haven and, as the snow fell endlessly outside the window on Mansfield Street, reading hundreds of pages of Infinite Jest at a stretch. It seemed then that finally the novel had come back, after a long sleep in the eighties – with few exceptions. The novel as I loved it – the paranoid codex. Gravity’s Rainbow, J.R., Lookout Cartridge – these were my household spirits.

Now, of course, I think back to things like the schtick with Joelle Van Dyne, the PGOAT (prettiest girl of all time) and wonder whether this was a tell – a crack in the Golden Bowl, a mark of an essential falseness. Rather like Vonnegut’s catch phrases.

However, I know that this is all about betraying DFW, and the reason that I want to betray him isn’t entirely clear to me. The truths of disaffection obscure the truths of infatuation – that is how betrayal is.

Who knows, though. Maybe I should go back and read The Sirens of Titan.

a slogan for the new revolution

One of the most durable of the Western – or perhaps I should say Axial – metaphors associates waking with enlightenment, with spiritual vision, and sleeping with everydayness, with existential blindness – sleeping through life.

Like  many of these Axial metaphors, in the capitalist world, there is a certain literalism that takes over and, while destroying the material basis for these metaphors, continues to use them as though our value system were unchanged. In this, it is like what has happened to youth. There are complicated demographic reasons that the material basis of youth (what it connoted, socially) started changing in the seventeenth century. Partly this was due to the end of the family house – in much of Western Europe, sons ceased to live in the family house when they got married, but started their own, a business that required capital that was usually unavailable  to an eighteen or twenty year old, thus opening up a period of suspense, of being neither in nor out of the family, and creating the protoform of youth. But this transformation still did not change so much the Axial value set on youth, always in reference to Age. It signified the time of rebirth, of freshness, of adventure. Only in the late nineteenth and twentieth century did youth become a mandate – an actual goal in life. Since life is biologically about aging, the imperative of youth – which has resulted in advice about “staying young” given to codgers who are fingering the shroud, so to speak, or posted up on corkboard in old folks homes – destroyed the culture of age, with its ideal of wisdom. The realisation of that ideal was, of course, rare – you are old, Father William – but it has now been put on the kind of reservation the west always uses to manage  aborigines.

Sleeping, too, has been swept into the anti-biological regime of late capitalism. A metaphor for the enemy of enlightenment, it is now targeted for liquidation by the plutocracy and, in an ironic twist, its absense causes enlightenment to become an impossible dream, a relic. To sleep is to escape from the 24/7 world, to refuse – by the most basic of refusals that the consciousness can make – the function of producer and consumer. Jonathan Crary, in 24/7, recounts a research project being funded by the military that is seeking to unlock the biochemical secrets of the white crowned sparrow, which doesn’t sleep during its fall migration. “The aim is to discover ways to enable people to go without sleep and to function productively and efficiently. The initial objective, quite simply, is the creation of the sleepless soldier, and the white-corwned sparrow study project is only one small part of a braoder military effort to achieve at least limited mastery over human sleep.”

The old revivalist and revolutionary cry – wake up people! – is now in the hands of the worst. Strike a blow against the Empire, and oversleep tomorrow.

what the newsman gives us

“The least sophisticated reader, whenever he takes an old book in his hands, knows in advance that he is entering a world where even the most familiar words will not mean quite what they do today. This is the unsophisticated

reader’s historical intuition.” – Lidiia Ginzburg, On Psychological Prose

The least sophisticated reader has all the advantages against today’s sophisticated news reporter. The news can be described as that discourse that does its best to eliminate the reader’s historical intuition. Some news items really make this clear. Take, for example, this platitudinizing item in the New Yorker today, which begins on a note of unconscious propaganda that it sustains to the last sentence: “On Saturday, Mexican authorities arrested Joaquín (El Chapo)Guzmán Loera, who was the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, acriminal organization responsible for violence and drug trafficking."  This seemingly bland announcement ends by associating El Chapo’s “organization” – of which he is supposedly the leader – with violence and drug trafficking – thus distinguishing him from the unnamed Mexican authorities. This is very sweet. Another way of this release could be written is: Mexican authorities, who have been complicit in the violence and drug trafficking associated with so called cartels, arrested the man who they helped escape from prison the last time they arrested him.” In fact, a glance at Anabel Hernandez’s Narcoland, which has an exhaustive chapter about Guzman, his previous arrest, his first confession (which named the people in power he was paying off), and the threat he received from “Mexican authorities” to change it (which he did), and what it means to be a “leader” of a cartel, would actually help the unsophisticated reader to know what is going on – what these words like “criminal” and “violence” really mean.

But that of course is not the point of this little news item.  Its point is to operate as both an establishment mouthpiece, destroying any alternative reading of this event, and to keep the system of selling drugs, putting dirty money into the system (that money, after all, has been truly vital to parts of the American economy – what would Miami be without it?) and police and military arrests going. It benefits everyone except that majority of people.

“Arresting Guzmán was an inarguably worthwhile goal, but there is concern about how much his absence will affect the organization’s operation. “There are a couple of senior guys in the Sinaloa cartel—one called El Mayo and another one called El Azul—who are still functioning,” Finnegan says.”

Yes, one wouldn’t want to call the goal into question. One wouldn’t even want to think that an argument could be made that the goal, that all the goals in this context, are dirty and worthless, from the, well, human point of view. What we need is the elite point of view here, the only point of view that counts, that has “worth” – and from this point of view, guys “function”. We get a nice, faux insider sense from knowing these guys are called El Mayo and El Azul. And faux insiderdom is what the newsman can give us, in exchange for destroying our historic intuition.

It is, inarguably, a shitty exchange. 

the moraliste and the ethicist

Here’s a couple of sentences from Cioran’s Thinking against Oneself: “Assaulted by the malediction attached to actions, the violent man only forces his nature, only goes beyond himself, in order to return furious, as an aggressor, trailed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for his having instigated  them. No work fails to turn against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.”

This is the voice of a moraliste. A moraliste is an expert in generalizations that are rooted in his exacerbated sense of the world as a place where he tests himself, and fails – taking each failure as a mark left by the world on his hide, and worth studying for that reason. The ethicist, on the other hand, is an expert in generalizations that are, ideally, not suppose to make contact with his personality at all. From the ethicist’s point of view, the moraliste is carelessly and unforgiveably unconcerned with the truth of his generalizations, and is thus an untrustworthy and perverse guide to conduct. For the moraliste, the ethicist derives truths from cases that are so thin and so abstract, so lacking human meat and gusto, as to be caricatures. There is no investigative surprise in such work: it has the quality of fables composed by a bureaucracy.

The moraliste’s problem with the truth is that a too close adherence to it – which presumes success in its pursuit and capture – creates mere sententiousness; while a too intense sensitivity to the failure to discover the truth leads to unending paradox. Both sentiousness and a too facile way with paradox lead to tedium – primarily, in the life of the moraliste himself. Cioran, who began his literary career as a partisan of fascism and an admirer of Hitler and apparently changed his mind in 1940, when he managed to migrate from Romania to France, was the violent man whose work turned against him. And in the work he did after that repentence, the work for which he is known, the work in French, the tension is always between the feeling that fascism gave him – which he identified with youth and energy – and the feeling that the repentence gave him – which he identified with old age and nihilism. Thus, his life and work was an endless political cold turkey. The leveling impulse, as he saw it, of the ethicist who dismisses exhilaration and elevates the rules, enraged him, for that way lead to the crippling of high spirits and the impulses, generous or horrible, of life; and at the same time he had visible proof that the only social order he could really live in either had to cage hatred, violence, bigotry, and hysteria or collapse.    

Barthes and the paragraph

To read Barthes properly, one must be equipped with a pen and a piece of paper, a notebook, have them at hand, cite and dissect. There’s a reason for this besides the difficult theoretical terms and arguments in the text – that reason being that the texts tend to be disconnected in subtle ways, and one needs to have some record to chart the gaps. We know that his method of composition was to write on index cards and arrange them – which he did not only in his study of Michelet, but, according to his colleagues, also in his other work, throughout his life. Thus, Barthes’ text offer not the forward flow of a text that moves over a notebook, or over the loose pages of a typewriter, but instead in short bursts. Barthes once wrote an essay entitle Flaubert and the phrase. It seems natural to associate Flaubert with phrases, since he made so much of them. A similar essay could be written about Barthes and the paragraph.
The paragraph is eminently prosaic. Poetry – save for prose poems – does not settle into a paragraph. The poem must ultimately remain in touch with the vatic, the riddle, the omen – and the paragraph is antithetic to these presumptions and devices.
And yet – it isn’t precisely correct to speak of the product of these cards as paragraphs. Barthes entitle his perhaps most popular work Fragments of a lover’s discourse, and surely there is something to that ‘fragments’. The fragment is closer to the poetic line, it possesses a certain rawness that is groomed out of the properly constructed paragraph. The fragment extrudes its unity, which becomes the number that marks it from the outside – think of Wittgenstein – or the date, or some other indexical sign. It is as if here the paragraph is either too exhausted or too indignant to do its job – to pull itself together and express its topic organically. The topic thus becomes a sort of title or caption outside of it, names the fragment rather than being the interior connector that keeps it together.