the decline of big rock candy mountain

I grew up in a folksinging family. Consequently, my idea of the hobo was very romantic – he was an IWW angel. Big Rock Candy Mountain sounded like a lot more pleasant utopia than the Dictatorship of the Proletariat – and it still does. In folk songs, he was always a canny step ahead of the bulls, all in order to be free.  

However, I’ve noticed something about hobos in the last decade or so: there’s been a political sea change. When you see a bum with a political sign, it is invariably Limbaughdian. I saw, for instance, a man with a white beard a couple of hours ago, with two signs, one the usually begging one (“Help me I’m hungry” or something like that) and the other one, on poster board, a long denunciation of Obama for bringing Naziism to the United States. Santa Monica is, I think, progressive territory, or it once was, which is why the city council is still fairly liberal about letting street people be. I’d be surprised if Obama didn’t rule here during the last elections. Thus, the sign was not a means of sucking up to a potential audience – and besides, the handwriting was too angry for that explanation to float.

He reminded me of a beggar I used to run into in Tarrytown in Austin – another Democratic Party stronghold – whose signs routinely denounced Democrats for being traitors, simps, underminers of our ways, etc.

Now, there is a myth among liberal academics that the uneducated white guy is a strong supporter of the worst Republicans – but in fact, stats show, pretty consistently, that the more educated you are, the more likely you will vote Republican. Here, simple economic interest seems to explain the pattern. College graduates, with their higher salaries, are more inclined to vote for the party that will keep their taxes down. Of course, there are exceptions in this group, and the Third Party Dems have seen in the social liberalism of this group an ace way of stealing a march on the GOP – adopt GOP economic policies and combine them with social liberalism. But that strategy acknowledges the lifestyle interest of the desired constituency.

In the case of the hobo block (and it is probably not a block that goes to the polls), it is hard to see the cultural or economic interest in denouncing the party representing the “handout”. After all, the man with the beard and my friend from Tarrytown are directly demanding a handout! One would think the more handouts the better. This was, in fact, Norman Mailer’s strategy when he ran for Mayor of New York – he actually recruited angry homeless people because these were the people he wanted to appeal to. Norman Mailer was one of a kind.

But that was a long time ago, when the Big Rock Candy Mountain still distantly glimmered. It saddens me that it seems to have gone into permanent decline. The man with the white beard is surely old enough to have been a “child of God/walking along the road” of Joanie’s song – but somewhere along the journey, he absorbed the politics of Ronald Reagan.  It is as though the anti-state views of the old IWW – in which the state and corporation were identified as one monster – have been transformed into simple anti-state views, in which the state is bad cause it keeps down the hardworking billionaire.

This makes me think that American politics are even more hopeless than I already think them. Wow.

a guess at the riddle

I ponder sometimes the fact that Adam, this complex being whose proto-language is so sweet to my ear, whose tricks I laugh at, whose humors I deal with, whose steps I marvel at, will forget all of this. We all emerge from amnesia - it is as if we awaken speaking, walking, eating properly and excreting privately, as though these were things we'd always done. Of course, we have stray memories of what went before, motes of dust in the mind's eye - an image of the shoestring we puzzled over, the feeling of crusty snow on the cheek, a confused vision of trailing down a dark hall. But these memories form no collective whole, no sense of our existence.
There are many theories about the human origin of belief in the gods; I wonder if anyone has traced the line between belief in an agent with supernatural powers and the natural history of our awakening with powers that we cannot account for?An awakening that leaves such a large mark on our subsequent life that it is too large to remember - large enough that we can only venerate it.

the Magic Mountain in Clarkston, Georgia

I’ve been reading the Magic Mountain for much longer than the seven years it took Hans Castorp to climb it and climb down from it. Way back in high school I even finished it – in the now discredited Lowe-Porter translation. I picked it up because I read a high recommendation in a book by the wonderful Will and Ariel Durant, blessed be their names. They were members of the socialist humanism generation of American intellectuals, and their middle brow guides to Western culture were and still are excellent things for high school students, to be supplemented of course by the vast trove of lit and art that we know now was produced by the oppressed – the Atlantic culture of the African diaspora, women, gays, all those edged aside. Although I no longer remember what the couple wrote about Mann, I do remember the experience of reading it. I was sitting in a pew in the Clarkston Baptist church. No doubt it was another Sunday of Reverend Vincent’s endless non-sequitor sermons – the man lacked the charisma of an old piece of gun, so his revivalism had a tendency to fall stillborn on our dead ears. I owe him, though – my first reviews were of his sermons, which I would feistily attack coming home from church in the car with Mom. Ah, the budding critic!

Although at the time I thought I was much more than a budding thumbs up thumbs down man – I felt that I was Clarkston’s sole modernist. In fact, the single person in the damn suburb who knew what the word meant!

Under the Durants tutelage, then, I cracked the book. What I remember is feeling that there was something about the book that made me feel sickly. Then I went on with my reading list, and as the years passed, I learned to look down on T.M. I learned he was hooffooted, pendantic, full of hot air, pseudo-profound. That in fact he was an anti-modernist. I don’t exactly remember how I received this news, but I do know that Nabokov, for instance, always had it in for Mann. And in college I thought Nabokov should know, since he could do anything with prose. Now I have a different view of Nabokov – that his problem with Mann, or Balzac, or Dostoevsky, arose from the fact that Nabokov made up a canon for himself and became its prisoner. In this way, he operated, much like his social realist or psychoanalytic enemies, to squeeze the juice and joy out of literature. In his best works, I think, Nabokov knows this – hence his paragons of good taste, his King of Zembla, his Humbert Humbert, are criminals – in a sense, driven to crime by the same discriminating instinct that they have cultivated in their souls until it hypertrophied and took over the plant.  One knows, for instance, in Lolita, that when H.H. enters the Haze household and spots the “banal darling of the arty middle class, van Gogh’s Arlesienne”, he is not only showing his lethal sophistication but, in general, his lethality – his lack of perspective on his superiorities, such as they are. The radical lack of kindness, without which good taste becomes a very cruel game.

To return to my own banal arty middle classness – for a while I swallowed this idea of Mann. There’s an essay by Michael Wood whichelegantly pinpoints the moment Mann fell from grace to become a modernistembarrassment. To understand this, understand that Harry Levin, in the 40s and50s, was an influential apostle of modernism in academia. He used to teach acourse at Harvard entitled Proust, Joyce and Mann. Then, in 1949, Mann’s DoctorFaustus was published. Levin gave it a very hostile review. I think that wasthe year that Time magazine put Mann on its cover, which is like the apotheosisof middle class artiness. And shortly thereafter, Levin renamed his class:Proust, Joyce, and Kafka.

Well, for myself, I am still a Clarkston modernist. I’ve gone as far away from that little suburban burg (and it has gone away from the burg I knew in highschool, becoming one of the centers of the Bosnian refugee influx in America, and now hosting a good number of Somalis, too).  But I still kick around in the precinct of the ideas I had and the artists I admired then. Age has made me think of myself less as a Joycean exile and more as a sample of a certain history I don’t understand. In short, a relic puzzled by his own relicness. In that respect, I am in a Hans Castorp condition – which, pace Levin, is what modernism was all about.

some liberal reforms on the inequality front

The annual thumbsuckers inequality ball is going on in the press. The right, of course, is all at the battlements, decrying envy.  Greed is one of those virtuous sins for the rich, while envy is one of the damned sins that shouldn’t enter the New Jerusalem. Myself, I’ve always been a big fan of the evil eye. And I don’t even have the liberal disdain for greed.

But I do have the liberal-left desire to finish the incomplete task of the French revolution. Equality is up there with liberty on the roster.

Instead of kicking around abstractions, however, I think we should start kicking around ratios. How much more income and wealth than that earned and accrued by the top 20 percentile of income is allowable under the ideal of egalitarianism?

My sense is that if we take 250,000 dollars as our base (I am of course speaking of the US), something like 10 times that is as far aw we can go with inequality of income. Wealth is a trickier subject, but if we put a cap on 25 million dollars per person,  we have a good inequality space to work with.

Expropriative taxes are a clumsy way to enforce equality. Of course, the wealthy are always threatening to quit if they aren’t permitted to make world class booty – but I take those to be the rational cries of the hopelessly addicted. They should stop working, it would certainly benefit the rest of us.  But besides this, I think heeding those plutocratic bellows has landed us in a truly nutty variant of capitalism, with speculation ruling the roost.  This is why deeper and more radical reforms would aim at making the new york stock exchange, or any exchange, look more like the real economy. For instance, at the end of the year, the commerce department should tally up assets and earnings and make sure that the market capitalization of the firm equals the actual capitalization of the firm.

This would revolutionize Wall Street. Facebook would immediately shrink to a much lesser company than, say, Caterpillar Tractor. And so it should – being little more than an internet billboard company on which companies post ads, it is too ridiculous that Facebook is one of the world’s huge corporations.  The rule of speculation is intrinsic to the rule of the plutocrats. This is where rugs need to be pulled.

From the notebook of baron A.G.

It isn’t right! One expects certain courtesies. It is but a poor manse, but that is no reason to lower our standards. However, one can’t drill this message into the head of the valet. Il ne comprend rien. One really understand the phrase tete de bois in the face of this character.

For instance: one wants either to be in the playpen with the Ipad or one wants to be out of the playpen with the Ipad in easy reach. It is almost tiresomely simple. Yet once again one’s valet mixes it up. Thus, one finds oneself standing helplessly outside of the playpen staring at the Ipad inside the playpen. One has simply to raise one’s voice. It is all so dreadfully theatrical, but the valet sometimes seems to understand no other language.

Well… and then one is literally carried up the stairs. Is one consulted? No. At least, a consoling gesture, one’s Mickey Mouse is carried with one. Lately, in the afternoon, one so adores chats with M.M. A font of jollity! And what adventures that mouse has had. One sometimes says, mon chere, are you not exaggerating a bit? The dog’s name was actually Goofy?

Naturally, however, malentedus persist. The valet insists, for instance, in shutting the doors to the ever so fascinating bathroom. One had so looked forward to grabbing a few things – the contact case, the toothbrushes – and hurling them into the bathtub or toilet. But one’s valet once more gets in the way of these innocent, boyish pranks. One simply must expres one’s discontent the old fashioned way, a la Prusse, by for instance kicking the valet, or, when he picks one up, hurling oneself backwards in his arms. It is all very well that we have emancipated the serfs and have universal education, soi-disant, but it is hard to remember one’s liberalism when an object so undeservering of Enlightenment thwarts one’s every wish.And in regard to the simple pleasures elaborated above, he is hopeless.

However, one is not de la noblesse for nothing. Whim is forever the mark of true good breeding. One suddenly feels very fraternal towards one’s valet. He truly is doing his best as a retainer. So one caresses him, giggles with him, one rolls around with him and hides one’s face under the yell duck blanket – one of the valet’s favorite games. And then it is time for tea.

receptive dozing

I’ve been reading the novel that “suggested” Tarkovsky’s Stalker, Roadside Picnic, by the Strugatsky Bros. It came out a couple of years ago in a new translation, which caught up with the Russian editions that now include things that didn’t pass the Soviet censor. Excellent novel, although of course it is nothing like Tarkovsky’s movie. Imagine a Russian Blade Runner and you would be closer to the feel of the book.

The book is hardly mentioned in Geoff Dyer’s account of Tarkovsky’s movie, Zona. Nor, I think, does Dyer mention a phonetic coincidence that I think would have highly interested Tarkovsky – namely, that Zona, in the language of the Fore people of New Guinea, meant ghost wind. That wind from the north was blamed for the fact that women and children with “kuru” would tremble uncontrollably. In reality, kuru was caused by a novel form of ritual honoring the dead that spread among New Guinea people in the twentieth century, and that involved eating the brains of the corpese. This produced spongiform encephalopathy, which brought about trembling, hallucinations and death. A very Zona like phenomenon.

All of which is simply a hook, on which I want to hang some remarks about Tarkovsky and receptive dozing. Some friends visited us last week and we talked briefly about sleeping while watching a movie or tv – a subject that fascinates me. There are certain rare works that induce receptive dozing – that is, they induce a half-awake state in which the work does its business. Proust and Kafka are always tending towards this point, but I think it is more truly native of another media, film. Tarkovsky in particular is a master of the hypnogogic devise – like dripping water – and the sense of time slowed down (as I’ve been told is the sensation of those involved in car accidents – everything starts happening extremely slowly); for some people, this is the cue for going to sleep entirely, and cutting the thread with the work, but for others, what happens is related to lucid dreaming. The sensory input drifts in, like the wreckage from some downed ship. I’ve seen Stalker three times, but I don’t know if I have “seen” it like I saw “Blade Runner”. Rather, I’ve slept it. 

ethics are for losers: one of the factotums of the behemoth speaks

I love this sentence: "Just one more note of caution before we descend down the rapids of morality and ethics." It was written by a man who went up those rapids, Mr. "brutal questioner" Philip Mudd, to caution us all about getting sniffy about the torture tactics of his agency, the CIA. After all, we were so so scared. So torture was fine. If you are so so scared and you have a naked man in front of you to whom you can attach electrodes, it is all right, cause you are so so scared! Would he do it now? No, cause he isn't so so scared. Well isn't that a relief! It is waht makes America a wonderful country. Actually, it is the same argument that worked in post-Pinochet Chile to keep the fingerpointin' at bay.
Anyway, I'm so happy that we are treating the time when we were so so scared with the proper respect. On to criticizing Putin (or x, y, or z - Israel, Pakistan, Iran, etc._ for his human rights violations. They are nasty and not like our human rights violations, which only occur when we are so so scared. It is like then it is olly olly outsanfree and you can torture your terrorist enemies and hold them without trial in holes for decades.