on a passage in Nabokov 1

I was licked into shape by the Cold War. It was my mother and my father, and I am still a piece of it as I advance towards my death in a world that is no longer moored to it. Vast upheavels have the effecct of making their survivors posthumous people, carrying about obsolete maps and concerned with dead issues – themselves a sort of dead issue. For this reason I follow lines of thought or seize on details that that seem pointless or defunct to those who are under a certain age, and have grown up with a certain set of post Berlin Wall references, and who have never dreamed, as children, of atom bombs dropping from the sky. Similarly, I find it difficult to understand the events and idees recues of the present, I have difficulty being “contemporary” – I have to translate them, clumsily, into their historic “place”, dissolving them so utterly into their causes that I entirely lose their effects – I understand them to death, and don’t understand them at all.

I think of  Nabokov as a supremely cold war writer, or rather, as a writer whose reputation is inseperable from the cold war, just as Orwell’s was. When Bend Sinister was published by Time Life in 1964, with a special forward by Nabokov, the connection was made explicit – here was a more another allegorical attack on totalitarianism, ie the Soviet Union – although, as the “editors of Time Life” note in the preface, there is a lot of word play in the book that even they hadn’t noticed at first.

The cold war atmosphere comes comes across particularly when you read the non-fiction – which is studded with opinions delivered in Nabokov’s best Des Esseintes style, something that at first seems striking – like someone insisting that artificial flowers are better than real ones – and that eventually become an instance of how the manic pursuit of good taste eventually destroys the very foundation of taste, substituting a game of more sophisticated than thou – a game for feebs. This aestheticism was something that seemed very familiar in the fifties, when Nabokov first started becoming known in America. Michael Wood once wrote of how, in Speak Memory, Nabokov’s elegy to “Sirin” – a Russian émigré writer who happened to be Nabokov’s pseudonym – has a certain beauty in its place: “Remember that Nabokov wrote this passage in English, in America, in 1950, having left Europe ten years before. So, it is an elegy for a lost self, a Nabokov who was once called Sirin and who once wrote in Russian, and who did truly vanish "as strangely as he had come." But there is a further delicacy. When Nabokov wrote these words, he was an obscure American writer, still making his way in American letters. “

Nabokov, in 1950, was actually a rather coddled émigré, teaching at Harvard and friends with the American mandarin of mandarins, Edmund Wilson. His opinions were reliably anti-communist, a stance that he wrapped up in aesthetics – he basically considered anything to the left of his father’s classical liberalism to be posh’lust, which he expressed in a Paris Review interview by saying that mentioning Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam in the same breath is “seditious posh’lust” – thus perhaps reinflating the czarist notion of  sedition for the last time. In the introduction to the lectures on Russian writers, he claims that no writers of any note flourished under the Soviets, and quotes Gladkov as a typical Soviet writer – thus throwing Isaac Babel and Yuri Olesha, among others, under the truck. 

TBC

the nose

“But these evils are notorious and confessed; even they also whose felicity men stare at and admire, besides their splendour and the sharpness of their light, will, with their appendant sorrows, wring a tear from the most resolved eye; for not only the winter is full of storms and cold and darkness, but the beauteous spring hath blasts and sharp frosts; the fruitful teeming summer is melted with heat, and burnt with the kisses of the sun, her friend, and choked with dust; and the rich autumn is full of sickness; and we are weary of that which we enjoy, because sorrow is its biggest portion; and when we remember, that upon the fairest face is placed one of the worst sinks of the body, the nose, we may use it not only as a mortification to the pride of beauty, but as an allay to the fairest outside of condition which any of the sons and daughters of Adam do posses.”

Jeremy Taylor’s Rules and Exercizes of Holy Dying was one of the 17^th century’s bestsellers; through the nineteenth century, it was a prime example of raree, cadenced prose that crawled into the sentences of Johnson, Coleridge, Emerson and many others. Oh that seventeenth century rag, faint bits of which we still dance to today.

Taylor’s notion of the nose as a sink of the body and a monument to our mortification is the place where I start with noses, a subject that has been forced upon me over the last two weeks, as I’ve been dripping from it, or suffering from its drying up, or in general living a little too familiarly with, like a prisoner trapped within my sinuses and unable to think of anything else. e.

Of course, poor Jeremy Taylor must have witnessed a good many colds in Golden Grove, the house in South Wales where he wrote the Holy Dying. The book is inspired by the death of his wife, Phoebe, in 1651. Who knows, perhaps she died of a disease that had recently started entering the vocabulary of the English: influenza, named for the influence of the stars that was thought to incubate the disease. In his death sermon on his patroness, Lady Carbery, who died at around the same time, Taylor mentions that many new diseases had appeared lately, and many old ones had changed in circumstances and symptoms, which showed some awareness of the disease landscape around him. So who knows how prominently noses figured in Taylor’s life in 1651, when he wrote his greatest work, or how irritated he was at their running.

On the other side of the channel, we have another religious man, an infinitely greater thinker, Blaise Pascal, who also left a famous remark about noses: Pensee no 29 - “Le nez de Cléopâtre, s'il eût été plus court, toute la face de la terre aurait changé *  Pascal wrote down three versions of this thought, but all of them agree that it was the size of  Cleopatra’s schnozzle, and not its cuteness, its diminuity, its slightness, that made the face a regal beauty. Thus, Pascal enrolls himself among the truly rare connoisseurs of excess in the nose, or at least more splendor than you get down the slope of some nose-changed blonde extra. An essay by Paul Strapper in 1879 pointed out that we really don’t know the dimensions of Cleopatra’s nose anyway. But Strapper, undetered by the fact that we really have no guide to Cleopatra’s body, imagines it anyway, seeing her as an imperfect beauty, and thus a modern one, since we appreciate the disruption of the line, the flaw, as integral to our vision of beauty  – one that supposes a mercurial mind in a feu follet body. This doesn’t seem to be Pascal’s idea, but at the same time, he surely thought about the fact that the nose he was using as a monument for the mortification of human vanity was large, or at least regal, and not short, or demure.

The seventeenth century seemed to have been especially interested in noses and legendary nose figures. Cyrano de Bergerac was a seventeenth century libertine.The legend of his nose became a fixture of 19^th century literature after Cyrano’s work was rediscovered by Nodier – and it might not have been an obsession of his contemporaries. Theophile Gautier, in an essay on Cyrano in his Grotesques, wrote that the Voyage to the Moon and the nose were Cyrano’s great works, one of art and the other of nature . Gautier described it as a mountain comparable to the Himalayas, or as a tapir’s trunk.  This is sheer nose trumpeting, or thumbing one’s nose at fact in favor of funny.

The eighteenth century, as far as noses went, was long on farce. One of the great nose writers is Laurence Sterne, of course, who ransacked the connection between the nose and the penis until he owned it. However, myself, I’m interested in another nose man whose marriage could have formed the basis for another kind of Tristam Shandy. Lord Elgin, who stole much Greek statuary for the British in the early nineteenth century, lost his wife to his nose – or rather, his lack of one. It seems that Elgin contracted some horrible disease in the Middle East that ate his nose. His wife, according to testimony at their divorce trial, then lost all interest  in her husband, and took up with a neighbor who, presumably, had a nose: a Mr. Robert Ferguson.

Byron, of course, made up a gossipy couplet about Elgin:

Noseless himself, he brings home noseless blocks

To show what time has done and what… the pox.

And so we reach what I consider the height of the nose in literature if not life: the nineteenth century, and Gogol’s The Nose. Here, finally, the outer coat of the nose develops an interior interest, a soul – a sinus of a soul. Nabokov, who is often so concerned to be clever, as a critic, that he fails to be interesting, wrote one good critical book – a study of Gogol. Nabokov, among other interesting things, contends that the nose figures majorly in Russian talk – there are hundreds of proverbial sayings that employ the nose. “The point to be noted is that from the very start the nose as such was a funny thing to his mind (as to all Russians).”

The humorousness of the nose leads us away from the mortification it marks, perhaps – or perhaps that mortification finds its true beauty here. But myself, blowing my nose in a wild trumpet solo lasting ten days, have a hard time seeing the comedy here – or rather, I am desensitized to what I know is a ticklish subject. The cold forces us inside the nose, and there – as is similar, in popular sentimentality, with the clown – all is tears. Furthermore, of course, this is my nose, the nose of a man who, having achieved 56 years of nosewearing activity, must acknowledge its rougeur and scaliness, at times – the results of too much sun and too much booze, or at least beer. So even when I am not forced into a stricter intimacy with my nose than I want, I view it with a bit of dismay. There it is, staring back at me in the mirror, and making it very difficult for me to shave over my upper lip,

Yet I have to give the nose some credit. Surely the inner sound of writing – the thing that I go by to get me from a to z – goes much much better when the nose, whatever its outer look, is comfortable inside. That inner noise is something I become partially deaf to when I have a cold, which is why I stop writing.

I write this as, hopefully, the epitaph on the gravestone atop my former cold, and to celebrate the faint re-awakening to my  inner tintinabulation. My nose is almost back! 

ferguson/juvenal

Who will guard us from the guardians? “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” – this is a philosophical question posed by a satirist, Juvenal. It is funny, really: you would imagine that the question would first turn up in Plato or Aristotle, reach its canonical form there – that great rounded form of the thing finally said, as though the whole ocean of discourse had washed over it and worn away every unnecessary edge. But it does not crop up there, nor in Cicero, but in a poem directed against women. “I know the advice my old friends would give/Lock her up and bar the doors. But who is to keep guard over the guards themselves?” (Peter Green’s translation).

Surely there is something of interest here – that an eminently political counsel, something that has been absorbed into the works of the great modern political thinkers, should have first appeared as a question aimed at scoring points against the sucker who thinks he can control his wife’s sexuality, when, as the poem makes clear, she herself can’t. In Juvenal’s poem, a woman’s sex life assumes the dimensions of some vast natural disaster, some erupting volcano, some tsunami. A woman’s sex life buries Pompei all over again.  

In fact, of course, the poem so digs at its own fantastic notion of women as to collapse under its own ridiculousness – which Juvenal recognizes at the end of the poem, when he recognizes that he has turned a satire into something more like a tragedy.

From misogynist satire, then, this question is translated into the just social order, and how to get it. That order suffers under the pressure of two infinities – on the one hand, the infinity of violence, where revenge calls to revenge, and the feud tends to expand in scope until it catches up everyone – and on the other hand, the infinity of order, where those who induce order, by their very position, have access to the abuse of order that calls for them to be subordinated, in turn, to other guardians – and so on in an expanding ring. At the limit, order is always under the spell of a transgressive force that wells up from its own logic and nature, and that forces the order to expand. This is the seed of regulation and bureaucracy that can’t be dreamt away by the libertarian adolescent.  

I started out on this path in order to write about the police lynching in Ferguson; but to bring it to the point, to say something about Ferguson, here my thoughts are blunted by a fact-weighted despair. 

name of officer in ferguson missouri

Interesting how the NYT reports that anonymous has released the name of the officer who shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, but refused to name him.also. The link to his name is here

more bombing iraq talk - isn't this just groovy?

:… the collapse of Iraq had created a refugee crisis, and that crisis was threatening to precipitate the collapse of the region. The numbers dwarfed anything that the Middle East had seen since the dislocations brought on by the establishment of Israel in 1948. In Syria, there were estimated to be 1.2 million Iraqi refugees. There were another 750,000 in Jordan, 100,000 in Egypt, 54,000 in Iran, 40,000 in Lebanon and 10,000 in Turkey. The overall estimate for the number of Iraqis who had fled Iraq was put at two million.”

The NYT today is very worried that if the US doesn’t act, a humanitarian crisis will erupt in Iraq. The cause of the crisis is Isis. And yet, my quote from the Times is not from today – no, it is from May 13, 2007. At that time, Iraq was suffering from a bigger invasion force than any mounted by Isis. The force was called the US Military. They’d been sowing chaos and massacre for four years by this time, and yet there seemed to be no call going out there from any of the major thumbsuckers to bomb Washington D.C. until they withdrew.

Funny that, eh?

I’ve been surprised – which shows how dumb I am – how quickly the hawk narrative has caught on among the punderati, the VSPs. In another recent opinion page piece, the NYT invited  seven figures to debate the question: Is it right that the United States become more involved militarily in Iraq? Of course, this is a question no Iraqi could handle, which is why the seven respondents were all american, with one Iranian american thrown in for good measure.  Two were women who’d been involved in the Bush end of the war on terror, from the perspective of which they could suggest ample measures to make American policy in the Middle East even more of a fucking disaster than it is now.

Because America thirsts for good guys before they pay for bloodshed – as every summer action flick shows – the Kurds have been amped up as the good guys of the moment. I was surprised and pleased to see Steve Coll push back against this meme in a recent New Yorker piece – perhaps stimulated by his colleague Dexter Filkin’s neo-connish rants about Iraq, and Obama’s incredible failure to plunge into the country as into an inviting  swimming pool – one filled with blood! - with soldiers galore – such fun it was the last time!

It has been 11 years since the US, under a criminally negligent president, invaded and occupied Iraq, with results that we can all see. And yet, incredibly, the same old krewe of morons that urged that adventure are now popping up all over the media to urge another. It is a sign of what a sclerotic plutocracy America has become – its elites learn nothing. 

thoughts en route

The last time I walked the streets of the Marais, Adam was ten pounds lighter and I don’t know how many unimaginable inches smaller. Today, we strolled him around the territory that will be his later, after we return from Santa Monica: the Notre Dame, the Hotel de Ville, Rue des Archives, the park on the street off Blancs Manteaux. I could feel him getting an excess of the sense of it all: the buildings, gargoyles, statuary, crowds, small sidewalks, streetlife, bridges, river, high windows, store windows – taking it in. “Taking it in” is a phrase that, perhaps, comes from our stone age psychology. Since the 19^th century, the instruments that measure the senses have become the template for what the senses are – sensitive recorders – but long before that we felt the activity of the senses, not their passivity – we took in the sensate, the eye grasps, the smell and taste extract and send down into the dark tunnels their discoveries, the touch is everywhere, everything material is a monument to the potential sensation of hands, lips, all the working skin. We come from pillagers, all of us, not from lab assistants, and we are out for swag. To take in means that one has a sort of interior “sack” that can get filled, and that is thus limited, can thus fray or burst. For a twenty two month old, there’s a continual shifting between wanting more in the sack and the sack bursting, at which point the toddler sensibly bursts into tears.

Rationalization comes upon us later, and we blame the idiots driving in cars, the street signs, the government, our loved ones, our co-workers – we pretend that the sack is infinitely elastic. You are very rarely asked, at the job interview, how much sensation you are comfortable with. Funny, that, since it determines, as much as skill, what the job is gonna go like.

…

There are some changes in the neighborhood, I was pleased to see in my very brief ambit. Namely, a couple of new restaurants and shops, including a bio take out place which I hope is still here when we return.

Now I sit here in the Café Charlot on Bretagne and revel a bit in the gray, somewhat rainy day. I like rainy gray summer days in Paris. Everything seems to revert to Atget black and whites. Is this merely the retro conservatism of a middling man in the upper fifties, treasuring his failed promise as though it were some perverse triumph? Well, duh. But it is also that a real city displays, under different angles of light and different seasons, the concantanations of its infinite possibilities, such as are not found on the list of addresses that guides the postal service.

I’ll end this with two poems, one a poor translation of a Baudelaire poem by me myself, and one – by the same author – written a couple years ago in the summer rain, Sinatraish mood.

Pluviôse,  the whole city on his nerves,

From his overflowing urn pours a grey cold

On the pale inhabitants of the nearby cemetary

And on the mortality of the foggy neighborhoods.

On the windowsill, my cat is looking for a place to lie down,

Ceaseless stretching his thin and mangy body;

The soul of an old poet wanders in the drainpipe

With the sad voice of a reluctant ghost.

A bee drones a lament, and the smoky log in the fireplace

Accompanies the clock, which has clearly caught a cold,

With its falsetto, while in an odorous  pack of cards-

fatal inheritance of some old case of dropsy-

The cute  jack of hearts and  queen of spades exchange

cynical remarks about their defunct affairs.

Not a very good translation. Oh well. I wrote a poem in 2011 that perhaps expresses my liking for rainy paris days better:

The rain mumbles on the terrace

Its histories of reincarnation

While we sit, eating chicken.

It’s good. Your green blouse

Is good. The wine is good.

Have the seals been opened?

The seals of the angel

Whose flaming sword

Seems like a ridiculous affectation

Held against

The warm gut of the world.

Or has apocalypse been expelled

From our private life

As the rain mumbles on the terrace

And I cut into the white meat.

cockburn versus berman - party like its 1985

Paul Berman has always been a NYT Mag kinda leftist – it is a leftism that is to leftism what cottage cheese is to Stilton – the former is a delight only to the diet-er, without any of the odors, flavor, or texture of real cheese and,in political terms, the former is only a delight to the neo-lib, rid of any suggestion of price controls or, heavens, a stripped down Pentagon and unilateral disarmament (which immediately leads to Munich, don’t you know!) There’s been some buzz among the usual journalists about Berman’s  “takedown” of Alexander Cockburn in The Newrepublic – which is where cottage cheese goes to die, and be transformed into the sort of rancid stuff that eventually stands on its hind legs and demands that we invade Syria and arm the Ukraine and privatize social security at the same time.

Berman’s article was better written long ago, in a letter to the Nation in 1985, when he pretty much said the same thing about Cockburn in a long complaint that Cockburn had distorted his review of a book about the underground press to make him out to be, in Berman’s words, “a hawk, nearly a felon, virtually Republican.” This is the Berman who went on to become one of the grand supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  

Cockburn, a much wittier and deeper writer, replied to Berman’s letter – in which Berman suggested that the Nation fire Cockburn while remarking that Cockburn’s nasty prejudices were fucking up the atmosphere of amity that joined the New Republic, Dissent, and the Nation in the brave new world of anti-communist, neo-liberal, popular frontism that would go from triumph to triumph if only not held back by persnickety stalinists of the Cockburn type, riding on the back of solid democratic socialist politicos like Michael Dukakis (okay, I made up that about Dukakis – it is in the spirit of the letter). Cockburn answered  with brio and quotes. Berman had thought to preemptively defend himself  by claiming that Cockburn was a misquoter, dropping significant quotes that showed that Berman, too, upheld the red flag and all that. This is what Cockburn wrote:

 For a critic who regularly sticks it to playwrights- as part of his professional duties, Paul Berman seems awfully thinskinned.-Since he’s issued a Sneak Alert, fretting that somehow wriggle free with a crafty response, I had better quote once again the lines from his review

that bothered me. There was no distortion or misrepresentation whatsoever.

Berman first described the fine Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett as “a friend of the North Vietnamese government and a Communist of the worst The nuance there was plainly that any friend of the North Vietnamese government should

scarcely be a friend of reasonable people like Berman and the  readers of the New Republic. That nuance became forthright abuse with the gibe about the of Burchett’s Communism. -Having thus primed his readers, Berman wrote:

“Burchett offered the insight (1) that the United States was opposing a popular movement in, Vietnam, and (2)

that to war against the popular will means to war against the populace, i.e., to make massacre a policy. Yes,

without question, the movement paid in the end for the prestige it accorded the Burchett line:”

I quoted that passage exactly, and rereading it several times in the wake of Berman’s charges of distortion, am assured

that it clearly means whatI  thought it meant. The “insight” that the United States was opposing a popular movement and making massacre a policy is described as “the Burchett line.’‘ This same Burchett has just  been described as a Communist of the worst sort. And when the word “line” is juxtaposed with the word “Communist” in such negative

terms, it impossible to conclude that Berman is bearing witness to the value of Burchett’s analysis.

In his letter Berman actually endorses my reading by saying  that he “acknowledged Burchett’s objectionable flaws . . . and the unfortunate consequences came from them.” .~T he only such consequences that Berman mentions in the article are Burchett’s views on the Vietnamese popular struggle and the U.S. policy of massacre. Berman claims that suppressed the fact that he “praised” Burchett when he said of the movement that it “gleaned from him what

could hardly be gleaned in  the early years of  the war, from the mainstream press.” But  this praise -- scarcely overwhelming since in the early days of the war the mainstream  press was offering no insights whatsoever --is

almost imnediately qualified by Berman’s remark that by 1969 the mainstream press “was conducting investigations into Vietnam somewhat more reliable than those of Wilfred Burchett.”

So all I can do is ask my question again: What was the United States doing in Vietnam if not what Burchett said it was doing? In his letter Berman manages to avoid saying anything on this substantive question, which was the point of my item.

Since Berman accuses me of wider distortion, I may as well say openly that I thought his New Republic article was

carefully tailored to the prejudices of that magazine’s editors. His patronizing account of what he called the “hip underground” went in lockstep with his abuse of any radical 1960s politics, particularly antiwar politics, more challenging than tie-dyed T-shirts and bleed-off graphics. And since he is sufficiently shameless to claim that he

praised the worst-sort-Communist Burchett, I quote what Berman said about the leaders

of the antlwar movement in the late 1960s:

They were still the old crowd of acidheads, Buddhist poets, hippie Maoists, beyond-the-pale comedians, electric guitarists, Third World guerilla warriors, future stockbrokers and religious nuts, plus an unscrupulous conniver or two, and they should have known not to take themselves too seriously.

This kind of language has made Martin Peretz happy ever since he stepped out on his own road to ruin in the late sixties, as I

imagine Berman well knew when he wrote  his review. He and Peretz are of course as one on the- Mideast. That aside, Berman’s own politics  have often puzzled me.  I used to think they tended towards a sort of antiquarian anarchism,  but now that innocuous posture has given way to the safari rig of Bananas Republicanism.

Berman sticks it to Navasky too. My beef with Big Vic centers around opportunism, but of rather different sort. Of course he likes these exchanges on the letters page, for which he doesn’t have to pay  even in the high two figures. I expect him to suggest soon that the title of column be changed to “Letters, cont.” so he’ll get all my services,

including answerin silly letters like Berman’s, entirely for free.”

That is what a free spirit writes like. His brief aside, etching Berman’s persona as a Safari Republican was pretty much completely borne out by the subsequent career – although I think Cockburn was a little too generous re Berman’s motives. Berman was one of the innovators in the trick of presenting these views as those flowing from an unimpeachable leftism.  This is the  contrarian trick  that became a regular schtick at Slate. It is necessary to reference one’s leftism in order to keep that contrarianism up one’s sleeve, otherwise you’ll sink into the stream of all the Weekly Standard lookalikes advocating this or that mass slaughter. To get heard, one has to advocate mass slaughter for the highest humanitarian reasons!

Cockburn’s letter shows, I think, why  Berman so wants to strangle Cockburn’s corpse: the man so maddeningly had his number.