file under end of nature

This is a sad fact from an review of a book in the latest LRB: Near the start of the book, "Near the start of the book he gives a list of words that have recently been dropped from the Oxford Junior Dictionary. I’ll reproduce them in full because they represent a fairly hideous symptom of what is going on: ‘acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture, willow’. (The new additions to the dictionary mostly concern electronic media.) " I'm sorry, but what genius decided that kids don't need to know the word mistetoe - not to speak of kingfisher and cowslip! First they come for 'dandelion'... I guess the powers that be have already determined that, as there is nothing to be done about global climate change, they will teach the kids the definition of "youtube" as a compensation.

old halloween

In Adam’s class this week, they are working on nursery rhymes – Adam now knows that Humpty Dumpty fell off a wall, although, like the rest of us, he is rather foggy about who put him, or failed to put him, together again. He much prefers, at that point in the tale to go back to the wall – Humpty dumpty fell off a wall, humpty dumpty had a great fall, humpty fell off a WALL, daddy! I’m glad to see that my son already knows that you don’t bury your lede.

However, they are also learning about ghosts. And every day, when I come to pick him up, I see more orange and black in the room.

Yesterday, A. taught him about Jack o lanterns. It was A.’s first Jack o Lantern too, but she did a bang up job.

All of this has made me think about the Halloween mission creep.

When I was a kid (says Grandfather Simpson)… when I was a kid, Halloween was pretty firmly a children’s holiday. You could tell the kids who couldn’t let go when they’d appear, heads taller than the rest of the crowd, begging for treats. Those were the kids whose parents were always being called into conferences with their teachers; those were the kids with the bully problem, either doing it themselves or receiving it.

Time marches on, in big black leather boots, right over my face, in fact. At some point Halloween became a teen and then a college student party day. Les fetes des masques nous manquent – Martin Luther killed carnival, the rat bastard. So it makes sense that something like Halloween would emerge from a culture still ruled by a Protestant elite but increasingly Catholic. This is a good thing.

It also makes sense that the dead time between the end of summer break and Thanksgiving is a long, long time. The day dwindles, and all we do is work – that can’t be right! Halloween has started to fill that space.

What disturbs me, however, is that as the grocery stores start to stock up on Halloween a month before the day happens, and the decorations turn macabre (in a commercially approved way) on October 1^st, something of the holiday spirit goes out of it. It was, commercially speaking, small change –and now commerce has infected it with the usual malign effects. We speak of the “market” in very abstract terms. In fact, small markets like those that used to supply candy and costumes for Halloween did differ in their culture from the large markets that take over the logistics of holiday enjoyment, sexing up the costumes, making the scares an adjunct to the latest slasher series. I’m just grateful they’ve left us the pumpkins.

When the pumpkins are replaced, I will be very sad. It will be something like Jack o IPAD, and their will be Intellectual Property rights. Oh Oh Oh.

Harlequin's politics

"But if we had been asked, who are you for – Kaedin, Kornilov, or the Bolsheviks, Task and I would have chosen the Bolsheviks.  However, in a certain comedy, the harlequin was asked, Do you prefer to be hanged or quartered? He answered, I prefer soup.”

Viktor Shklovsky is a hard writer to get a grip on. More than most writers, his essence is quicksilver – that wrestler’s metaphor is peculiarly inappropriate for a man who so loved the one or two sentence paragraph. Getting a grip on Shklovsky is like wrestingly a necklace.

But one can say certain things. I’m currently reading The Knight’s Move. Skhlovsky begins the book, a seemingly disparate collection of pieces, with a sort of stunning image – that of the knight’s move in chess. There are many reasons for  the “strangeness” of the knight’s L shaped move in the game, Shklovsky writes. But one of them is this – “the knight is not free- it moves in an L shaped manner because it is forbidden to take the straight road.”

And, a typical Shklovsky device, he drops the matter. But since the move entitles the book, and the book is about literature, there is surely a broader implication. I would take that implication to be that all the notions that traditionally refer to the artist’s freedom, or familiarity with chance, the whole dual notion of inspiration, in which the freedom of creation is granted only at the cost of annuling the creator, in as much as inspiration exists outside of and through the creator, are subsumed in the iron law of the strange move. Strangeness, the disjunction, the lateral movement, are not so much spontaneous but rigged. And yet, what is being rigged but a violation of the conventions of the straight road? And even if the movement is rigged, its effects are not. This is where Shklovsky’s image differs from the inspiration traditon, which situates inspiration not only outside the author but outside the work. The work is the product of inspiration, in this way of thinking. For Shklovsky, it is precisely the inverse. Inspiration is a product of the work – that is, the devises in the work are both inspired and inspiring, creating other devices.

In work, however, in which the devices seem to force us all into straight lines – in work that is, for instance, political – the knight must make a harlequin’s leap – that is, prefer that choice that isn’t given.     

tests for great or not so great literature

One of the common reviewer bromides is the phrase, one test for great literature, or one test of a great book, etc., with some x being the test – that it can be read over and over, that it transcends convention, etc., etc.

I’ve come up with a new test.

Here it is. Take any text – an essay, poem, story, novel – and sit down and read it next to a little boy watching a Youtube video of some of his favorite Oswald the Octopus cartoons.

For those pariahs outside the Oswald orbit, Oswald is a sweet tempered Octopus with a dog and a number of friends – a penguin, Henry, and Daisy, a daisy, among them – and Oswald typically has a problem that involves these friends, as for instance he wants to collect something (Henry collects spoons and Daisy leaves). Out of this problem evolves a series of episodes in which niceness triumphs and some life lessons are snuck in. All of this happens in a world where the most complex words are issued by Daisy, and these consist of Yipporapparoonie, or Fanfuntastic. Otherwise, characters do not speak with Shakespearean eloquence. The closest to that is when the twins, two eggs, get on the swing and one of them says I’m going higher, and the other says now I’m going higher, and then the other says Now I’m going higher – you get the gist. Which, I gotta say, Sam Beckett might like.

Reading next to that, I often experience some kind of linguistic transposition between what I am reading and what is occuring in Oswald’s world. The sentences in the book I am reading suddenly seem light, and not too far removed from the twins – or at least Henry. This is especially so with run of the mill mysteries, where the investigator rarely climbs the heights of I’m going higher/now I’m going higher. Swing swing, swing swing, crime explained, criminal caught.

I’d don’t quite know how to grade my results. Some of the transposition might only pick out the innocent text, that is,  innocent in Blake’s sense. Sometimes, however, it cruelly picks out the level of plausibility that the book rests on – the kind of plausibility that is generated among 13 year olds. And that isn’t good – that is, if you are forty or more years older than 13 year olds.

The roots of philosophy

Philosophers are all rather proud of Aristotle’s notion that philosophy begins in “wonder” – it seems such a superior birth, so disinterested, so aristocratically outside the tangle of pleb emotions.

For these reasons, that origin story has, for the most part, been more interpreted than questioned.

It is, of course, hard to get clear on these things, which depend on self-reporting. Stories that one tells about oneself are, prima facie, self-interested.

Myself, my “philosophical” thinking has its roots more in worry than in wonder. Worry about the dark. Worry about abandonment.

This morning I saw, very plainly, that is, as plainly as I have seen the clouds in the sky gather and obscure the sun and foreshadow ran –worry coming over Adam’s face, as we were headed to school.

Adam, for a long time now, has accepted and, even more, enjoyed going to school. So I was a little nonplussed that, when we got there, he neither accepted nor enjoyed his destination, but instead stood at the entrance and said he wanted to go home now.

He didn’t dash out to the playground, as he usually does when the kids are out there, leaving me to stow away his lunch. He didn’t say hi to his teachers.

I could already see, rolling him to the school in his stroller, that something was going on. His face had a set cast, and he inflected his non-response when I asked him what was up. Adam, nearly three, has long mastered the grammar of silence. In this, he’s already adult.

So I left him there, in the playground, unhappily and tearfully screaming. I went home feeling like a monster. But I am sure when I come back this afternoon, he’ll be fine.

Novalis, somewhere, proposed that philosophy was nothing more than nostalgia, homesickness.

I’m on my man Novalis’s team today. Sigh. 

why the left doesn't care about the poor. Why that's a good thing.

In the TLS, Paul Collier has penned a review of some left leaning economics books that contains an exemplary rightwing view of what left wing economics is all about. The key sentence is here:

“In thinking coherently about capitalism, a helpful starting place is to ask yourself: why are poor people poor?”

Brandishing this question, Collier proceeds to find the left wing answer inadequate, and offers his own critique of financialized capitalism.

However, for a left winger, this is certainly not a helpful starting place to plunge into an analysis of capitalism. It hasn’t been a helpful starting place since Karl Marx, in 1842, starting reading the French radicals and discovered the economic and sociological category of “class”. Such is the amnesia that has befallen contemporary liberal and lefty-leaning groups, who’ve inherited all the shit of the Third way movement of the 80s and 90s, that they have forgotten their own history, and might well fight Collier over the best way to ‘help’ the ‘poor’. For the better two thirds of the twentieth century, however, leftists would have laughed at this starting point. These thinkers, activists and politicians knew full well that Marx was right, at least about this point. In fact, they asked a much different question, at least outside of the Soviet bloc. That question went: can a system based on the exploitation of the worker be so modified that the level of exploitation goes down, even as the system becomes global?

From this vantage point, we can derive another question: why are the middle class people middle class? A question tentatively answered by Karl Polanyi when he pointed out that the classical liberal consensus broke down in the twentieth century as the state became a very large actor in the creation of the economy. In the US, with the New Deal and the Great Society; in France, with the dirigiste regime; in the UK, with the welfare system; in Scandinavia, with a combination of strong unions and the socialist parties. During this time, state intervention, which included massive public employment, enlarged the middle class beyond all recognition. What had once been a class mainly of professionals, administrators and other actors in the sphere of distribution (workers who, as Marx put it, performed non-productive labor) was now flooded with new members, not all of whom shared the same middle class values, but all of whom shared the aspiration for a middle class life style.

Who paid for this? Capital. The state, by its regulations, its taxation, and its support of labor’s bargaining power, hoisted the middle class on the neck of the capitalists.

There are many reasons this period did not last. Suffice it to say that the middle class era is ending, with the middle class life style now an uncertain matter, and the financialization of households a new phenomenon. It is not a phenomenon that Marx foresaw, but it is fascinating. Marx did believe that under pure capitalism, the level of exploitation would go up until the worker owned nothing. This hasn’t exactly happened. Rather, the level of exploitation and the level of financialization have worked in tandem to this goal. In 2004, the OECD published a report on the indebtedness of American households, divided by income. Those households that made below 64,000 dollars – in other words, the middle class – owed, at that point, approximately 238 percent more than they earned. St. Paul is right: in this world, we must see as though in a glass, darkly. Thus, the period of the “ownership” society under Bush was the period of peak non-ownership. As the crash showed in 2008 up until now, these figures aren’t abstract. Many millions of middle class people literally own nothing. If you sell their main asset, the house, they will only get what they paid for it or less.

Are these the “poor”? By no means. But the left is concerned with classes – the poor are not a class, but a description that doesn’t place their members in the real, capitalist economy. As Marx discovered in 1842, the poor is not the correct description of the working class. It turns a sociological category into an object of charity. The disappearance of the working class as a category, and the substitution of the term “poor”, is an example of Third way and right wing trolling.

Don’t fall for it.   

the essential problem with american patisserie - a snobbish pov

In one of his most famous poems, Baudelaire writes of the albatros who is captured by sailors and held by a rope on board ship, unable to fly, and so mocked by the crew, now by a poke, now by some sailor imitating his limping walk. For Baudelaire, this is the very image of the poet:

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées

Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.

For me, this is the very image of a man stuck in Los Angeles, remembering French boulangeries.

It isn’t that America has any reason to have suck pastries. If you read about the donut, the ur-American pastry, it evidently derives from the same family as the beignet, and all kinds of European fried flour goods. So what happened to it? Somehow, there was a split in the development of pastry, with the Europeans intent on inventing ever lighter, ever more complex pastries, and the Americans intent on creating ever denser, ever mono-sweeter pastries. To want something other at some point would expose the poor decadent American who expressed such deviance to a milieu des huées, and from there it is just a hop skip and a jump to homosexuality and drug taking, as any good Republican knows.

This is not to knock all American cuisine. In Paris, one longs, like a poet, for good coffee – although as numerous articles in the NYT over the last five years have pointed out, Paris has become a hot spot of expatriate baristas, who are slowly weening the french from that simplistic concotion they call expresso (not to mention the horror of Nescafe served as coffee – it happens!). However, I’m old enough to remember (a phrase I seem to increasingly use. Funny, that) when American coffee at its finest was a can of Yuban. Perhaps the greatest contribution of hippy culture to the American scene (besides the Monkeys) was an increased awareness of ingrediants and non-industrial cooking. The completely irritatiing foodies are the result, on the one hand, but on the other, the level of American eating has gone up, at least among the aspirers.

This is why I find the donut a puzzle. The donut shop is omnipresent in American life – hence, the network for distributing a better beignet exists. But where is that beignet? Donut shops, when they respond to what they think is public demand, are concerned to advertise less calorific varieties of donut. I, on the other hand, suspect that donuts are one of those serial foods, like popcorn, so that the calory profile of one donut is not exactly helpful. What is needed, of course, is to attack that serial pattern, to make a donut that is completely satisfying in itself. Patisserie, ladies and gentlemen! I humbly ask this on behalf of all albotrosi