Confederate monuments - and phallic ones

Sometimes I think I should find some untranslated minor French classic and translate it. With this in mind, I picked up Jacques Yonnet’s Rue des Malefices, which Raymond Queneau considered to be one of the great books about Paris. It does do that surrealist mixing thing, cutting autobiography and legend, street history and street voices, into a herky jerky narrative about being down and out and under a pseudonym in Nazi occupied Paris.

If I were really to translate the book, obviously I’d need help with those street voices (which were also dear to Queneau’s heart). Here, for instance, is la mere Georgette, naturally a “laveuse”, talking about a neighbor: Formidable qu’il est ce gniar-lá. Je vais sur soixante-dix piges et j’ai l’ai toujours connoblé. Reparouze de pendulettes et fourgueur  d’oignons d’occase. Jamais de bruit.”

Jamais de bruit is the highest compliment one Parisian resident can give another, by the way. As for his repairing clocks and second hand watches – the oignons – I would have to find the street equivalent, and probably end up making Georgette speak in Brooklyn gangster lingo.

So who knows.

But the point, here, is elsewhere. Yonnet, as I said, is immersed in a life of short term flights, among a group of people who are suffering from hunger and foraging the streets in the cold winter of 1941. And he writes this: “They penetrate the hostile night with an enormous fear in their bellies, like we screw by main force a woman who refuses.”

I was brought up short here. It is as if I were walking in a city and suddenly became aware that there was a monument to something nasty – for instance, to a Confederate general.

These monuments are, in fact, scattered all through the literature of the West, and East, and North, and South.  The walker in the city of books will never escape them, never find a route where there isn’t some doomladen shitty sexist thing there in the path.

This doesn’t mean that I give up on Yonnet. To do that would be to give up on Georgette as well, among other things. But it does make me think that there are enormous reckonings that we keep avoiding in this world, with as much energy as we avoid thinking about the future that we are handing to the people of fifty years from now, or twenty-five even. The Tribune in Le Monde that was signed by many other peeps than Catherine Deneuve is a reaction to the fall of these monuments, written in the elegiac tone of a lament for the end of sexual liberation. But of course sexual liberation doesn’t happen in a segregated space – it happens, if it happens, all over. And its shadow side, the exploitation of the rhetoric of sexual liberation to continue gender domination, is a familiar since the dawn of modernity. It was one of the central reactionary moments in surrealism that Bataille, in his over the top essay on Sade and the Surrealists, picked out with cruel accuracy.

It strikes me as no coincidence that the overthrow of confederate monuments and the overthrow of a few phallic monuments – shitty men from the media, firstly – are happening at the same time.

The novel ain't dead

 There seems to be a perpetual market for thumbsucker pieces predicting the end of the novel. The piece is never written from the point of view of good riddance to bad rubbish – the Surrealists stance on the novel – but rather as an exercise in concern trolling. It starts out with how the novel was once important, then moves on to what is important today – which may be video games, or movies, or television.

The NYRB’s published a blogpost by Zia Haider Rahman on January 5th that goes through the classicmotions, ending up with this:

“The question, however, remains: Should the demise of the literary novel trouble us? I think the answer is “yes,” but not nearly as much as some literary novelists would have you think.

Great television is taking over the space occupied by many novels, and taking with them many excellent writers. And by and large, it’s delivering the same rewards to its audience. But what about novels that exploit the opportunities that are available only to the form of the novel, such as novels that explore interiority, or rely on the novel’s versatile treatment of time and causation? Who will speak for such novels?

If I seem reluctant to sound the alarm for the demise of the literary novel, even as a novelist myself, it is because modern fiction, particularly English-language fiction, has moved in the direction of the televisual, anyway. Much so-called literary fiction is evidently written with an eye to an option for film or TV adaptation. The response to the challenges from television and other media has been to become more like the offerings of those media. In some ways, this is understandable behavior on the part of each novelist. For all but a tiny few, it’s nearly impossible to make anything even approaching a living from writing literary fiction.”

There are two arguable premises that underlie all these laments about the death of the novel.

The first one is that there is one space allotted to every media form, with the implication that it’s a jungle out there, and social Darwinism gives us a precise outline of how our larger social forces work. This, it seems to me, has been amply disproven by the real history of technology, which is much more about the intermeshing of media than the competition between same. In other words, if TV competes with the novel, it also borrows from it, uses it, promotes it. And vice versa. They are in other words symbiotic, exist in linked spaces, rather than in a struggle for the crown that leaves one dead on the field. Same thing is actually true for poetry, which is in the same symbiotic relationship with song.

The struggle for the crown has always been an American macho thing. This gets us to our second hidden assumption: that the novel is losing out because it is losing its important MALE audience.

Undoubtedly, white American males at the moment are much more like Donald Trump – a vindicative non-reader – than Barack Obama – an erudite guy who could discuss lit with the likes of Marilynne Robinson. Let’s say that as a class, this group of the population has been suffering a disastrous deficit of narrative intelligence, which is in inverse proportion to their grasp on our lives.

For proof, look at the discourse leading up to the invasion of Iraq. It was conceived and talked about exactly like some primitive video game – in fact, the ones that first came on the market in the eighties, when these guys were kids – in which the important fact about the “enemy” is that they are programmed to sneak attack and you win by wiping out as many of them as possible. The enemy, in these games, has no memory or imagination. They have no content, only form: they form a “side.” They are the “bad guys”. That the good guys with weapons in their hands are invading the space of the bad guys doesn’t even register. After all, who owns the video game?

It is no coincidence that, as the novel lost its male readership, all of these bemoanings of the end of the novel appear in all the midlevel media places. Just as the feminization of certain forms of work – say, the replacement of male secretaries in the late nineteenth century with a female workforce – led to the financial and symbolic downgrading of the role of secretary, so, too, the same sexist shit happens with the novel.

Even here, though, we can see a meshing, rather than a competition for the crown. Tom Clancy, who names not an author but an industry of military wankership, preceded and in some ways projected the form that those early vid games would take – and of course soon he developed a whole line of those games himself.

The reason for this is that the novel form comes from what the Russians call skaz. Skaz are routines – the story-routine in oral form. Go to, say, Reddit, or comparable sites, and you will find guys – very male-y guys – skazzing away. If your sense of the novel is delineated by the commodities  sold on Amazon, you will, of course, lament and lament the decline of the literary novel. So few peeps can make their living on them! But in truth, it was always thus. Samuel Johnson’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, Joyce’s Dublin – always, always, the writer (whether poet or novelist) is a scrounger.

However, the novelist today – Margaret Atwood, or Joan Didion, or Rachel Kushner, etc. – does fairly well for herself. Besides which, there is the teaching. This is, from a financial point of view, really the golden age of the literary novelist, not its flameout. It is just that the patrons of the art have changed.

Big deal. In the end, the responding echo is not monetizable. And guess what? It was always like this. I would like thumbsuckers about the sad plight of the daycare worker and the nursing home caretaker, but as for the novelist, they are doing all right.

January's Paris

In Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe Commenwealthe, written in 1591, there is a marvelously tossed off phrase in high Elizabethan style: after describing the terror of the Russian winter, Fletcher says: “It would breede a frost in a man to look abroad at that time, and see the winter face of that countrie.” The idea of inner temperature mirroring outer, or rather, inner weather being the broadcast of outer vision, is a powerful thought. The icicle is the icicle of the mind, so to speak – to paraphrase the Macbethian theme of daggers. I find it interesting, although impossible, the way the visual takes a different track from the tactile: Though the imagination may well break through time, so that one loses track, such is time’s touchlessness, it never breaks through temperature – however much I dream of Florida in the streets of January’s Paris, it provides no kindling. 

As I was going from Montpellier to Paris: comparison of capitalist cultures

Last night, we took the train from Montpellier to Paris. About 50 kilometers from Lyon, we stopped. Somebody had been on the tracks and was hit. This meant that our train trip was extended about 3 hours, so we got to Paris around 1. Here's what SNCF did. 1. People went through the train while we waited finding people who had connecting tickets from Paris and found them hotels - which were complementary; 2. when we got to Paris, the company had set up a stand to give debarking passengers food and drink; 3. when we got home, they notified us by computer of a refund of our return ticket. Immediately. Now here's what happened when our Spirit airplane was a no show in Kansas City last year. 1. The announcement was made after an hour as the airport vendors closed down; 2. no information was given about what to do next; 3. the number of employees to handle the problems of about 500 people were precisely 2 in number. 3. After a three hour wait in the line, these people were instructed to offer you a big 50 dollar discount on your next Spirit flight.

The difference here is a sort of little sample of the differences in capitalist cultures. The capitalist culture in the U.S. pre-Reagan days was very affected by the countervailing forces of labor and an activist government. These two features have died, leaving corporations in the happy position of "regulating" themselves. Hence, the screw the customer ethos after the transaction has been completed, in contrast with the great customer service before the transaction is completed. In France, customer service before you buy things can be bad; but after you buy things, it is pretty superb. SNCF of course is partly, I believe, owned by the gov.

Travelling in the U.S. is either a cheap nightmare or a crap shoot. It doesn't have to be that way.

Thinking from the sixties: Pasolini

Pasolini’s essays are now viewed, with condescension, as typically over the top products of the sixties, when everybody was on drugs. Or something. We are all so much better now.

I myself indulged in the old punk disdain for hippies in times gone by. But my sixties contempt was negated in recent years by the internet habit of archiving – for instance, archiving newspapers. As I go through what, for instance, the NYT was reporting in the sixties, I am amazed at the street brilliance that seems, now, to have so sadly disappeared. In the sixties, the demand for the absolute had not become the demented fundamentalists hope for Jesus’s return – it was the reasonable counterclaim to a world in which nations – the U.S., the Soviet Union – had so elevated their claim to historical importance that they’d stockpiled weapons to end the world if they were attacked. It was all done, of course, without any discussion – better Dead for ever than Red being about as far as the discussion went.

Russia and the U.S. are still dangerously equipped with those weapons, but we have so routinized the hubris that we don’t even notice it anymore.

So the New Left in the developed world was not, really, the product of wackiness – or rather, it was the counter to the ruling, the inutterable and murderous wackiness of the governing class.

Pasolini’s best essays, it should be said, were written after the sixty’s demand for total change ran into the seventy’s administered world of oil shocks and tax breaks for the wealthy. The crisis of capitalism – which is always underneath a political crisis, a crack in the order that ordains the exploitation of the many for the gain of a few – became much too serious, and the intellectual fashionistas, sensing this, went on to discover, like some acid flashback, that the really bad thing was the Gulag. It was either the Gulag or tax breaks for the wealthy, y’all! And so downhill we went, and peeps stopped voting accept for contestants on TV entertainment shows, where, at least, there were a few real issues.

Anyway, Pasolini kept his eye on the total cultural change he saw going on around him. His crow’s eye, the eye he borrowed from the Raven in Poe’s poem. So here’s something to meditate about, from Pasolini’s Corsair writings.

“At present, when the social model being realized is no longer that of class, but an other imposed by power, many people are not in the position to realize it. And this is terribly humiliating for them. I will take a very humble example: in the past, the baker’s delivery boy, or « cascherino » — as we named him here in rome, was always, eternally joyous, with a true and radiant joy. He went through the streets whistling and throwing out wisecracks. His vitality was irresistable. He was clothed much more poorly than today, with patched up pants and a shirt that was often in rags, However, all this was a part of a model which, in his neighborhood, had a value, a sense – and he was proud of it. To the world of wealth he could oppose one equally as valid, and he entered into the homes of the wealthy with a naturally anarchic smile, which discredited everything, even if he was respectful. But it was the respect of a deeply different person, a stranger.  And finally, what counted was that this person, this boy, was happy. 

Isn’t it the happiness that counts? Don’t we make the revolution in the name of happiness? ? The peasants’ and sub-proletariats’ condition could express, in the persons who lived it, a certain real happiness. Today – with economic development – this happiness has been lost. This means that that economic development is by no means revolutionary, even when it is reformist. It only gives us anguish, anxiety. In our days, there are adults of my age feckless enough to think that it is better to be serious   (quasi tragic) with which the e « cascherino », with his long ha ir and little moustache, carries his package enveloped with plastic, than to have the “infantile” joy of the past. They believe that to prefer the serious to laughter is a virile means of confronting  life.

In reality, these are vampires happy to see that their innocent victims have become vampires too. To be serious, to be dignified, are  horrible tasks that the petit bourgeoisie imposes on itself, and the petit bourgeoisie are thus happy to see to it that the children of the people are also serious and dignified.  It never crosses their minds that this is a true degredation, that the children of the people are sad because they have become conscious of their social inferiority, given that their values and cultural models have been destroyed."

The press wants so much to kiss Trump's ass: why oh why won't he let them?

The strangest thing about Trump’s war on the press is that he is attacking something so systematically sycophantic that it would have embarrassed the courtiers in Louis XIV’s Versailles. The press, of course, would like you to think otherwise, and thus loves to hark back to when it wasn’t sycophantic – almost fifty years ago, during the administration of Richard Nixon. While this is accurate, the corollary that is never explained is that the Democratic party had been in power in the legislative branch almost without interruption since Roosevelt’s time. In other words, the establishment style in DC was set by the aging New Dealers and their kids.

Since 1980, this has not been the case. Although the old idea that the establishment media is “liberal” might even have some merit in a purely sociological way – the chance that a journalist will be more liberal than, say, a middle management person in the petroleum industry is pretty high – that liberalism has been confined, for decades, to a euphemistic approval of diversity, with a blind eye towards the racism inherent in our economy, our system of justice, etc., etc.

There is abundant proof that no matter how abhorrent and mendacious a president’s actions, the white house and D.C. press corps will be there for him. I offer up, as proof, the period between 2000 and 2006. George Bush was so obviously favored by the press corps (which found him the kind of guy that you could have a beer with, against Gore, the kind of guy who claimed to have invented the internet – really, the press loved this false charge) that when he won, there was a sort of holiday of profile pieces. Then 9/11 happened, Bush showed what it was like to panic under pressure, and the press regrouped to laud him as the leader we needed in troubled times. No questions asked for years about how a nation that had spent, conservatively, in the neighborhood of 20 trillion dollars building up a military force that could repel any attack on the “homeland” failed to prevent a handful of Saudi rednecks from hijacking planes and using them as missiles. No question about what the Bush administration knew and did nothing about. Rather, the press spread the idea, which has now become fixed, that there was no way to prevent 9/11. A common sport among liberals is to ask about how Al Gore would have responded to the attack, would he have invaded Iraq, etc. – as if another administration would not have rolled up the hijackers before the ink on their pilot licences was dry.

But the press was just getting started on providing a pretorian guard of publicists for the Bushies. From Soviet style press conferences in which Bush pretended to pick questions from reporters when, in actuality, he and they knew the reporters had been handpicked previously, to the wonderful rapport between the press and the president when he mocked the whole idea of that there were WMDs in Iraq (the video of this is still shocking), the press was “in on the joke”.

The NYT and the Washington Post signal, every day, that they would love to be loved by the President. To take a notorious example, it is pretty unlikely that, under President Hillary Clinton, the NYT would send a reporter out to do a soft soap portrait of a neo-Nazi. That was surely a rose thrown at Trump. It was in a sense a pledge that the press would go as low as he wanted as long as he tweeted something respectful.

Personally, I think Trump is making a huge political mistake. Bush’s people knew very well that the press is oriented towards thinking that the GOP is the natural party of political power. They played the press is liberal card, but professionally, in a way that the press could respect. Trump though seems as convinced as any Fox viewing retiree that the rest of the press is liberal as the Daily Worker. It is hard to kiss the ass of this president. The press will, however, keep trying.

Watch and laugh! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O35NA6TywAg 

the pariah or fascism

We were in Nimes yesterday. A. was reading the papers and she told me that Israel is naming a station in Jerusalem for Trump – the only president we have ever had who finds some silver lining in the Neo-Nazi movement.

This didn’t surprise me.

I have a theory about the “romantic nations”. Those were nations that were first imagined into existence by the poets and philosophers of the 19th century. Italy and Germany are examples, as if Hungary and Poland. The nation-states thatformed in the period between the 16th and 19th century – the United Kingdom, France, Spain, the United States, among others – were formed not on the principle of privileging a certain ethos, but rather on principles in which monarchy, reason and religion were the operative notions. Germany,Italy, and Hungary. on the other hand, were dreamed into existence by philosophers and writers (Fichte for instance; Leopardi; Kossuth), and the long struggle for nationhood was promoted by the idea of a certain people and language having primacy, creating a home. The late romantic nations like Ireland and, finally, Israel, were shaped by the same forces.

In all these cases, you can detect a cycle: the nation exists as a culture before it exists as a nation; as a nation, it increasingly legitimates itself by an appeal to the superiority of its people; and in the final phase, the nation as an entity actually attacks its culture and what it stood for.

Israel was the result of the amazing flowering of Jewish culture in 19th and early 20th century Europe. You cannot think of any aspect of modernity that was not touched by that culture. Zionism was, originally, infused with the idea that this culture – liberal, erudite, tolerant – could found a nation.
But the seeds for the destruction, or at least the wholesale attack, on that culture are laid by the success of the nation project. We know what fascism meant in Italy and Germany. In Israel, that 19th century Jewish culture, and its ideals, are despised by the leaders in power, who find much more kinship with the violently and vilely anti-semitic rulers of Saudi Arabia than with, say, the great Jewish tradition that it otherwise calls on when, for example, the National Library in Israel claims Kafka’s papers as part of the “heritage” of Israel.

Whether Israel’s romantic nationalism in its blind course, allying itself with the worst enemies of the Jews, is going to destroy Israel, who can say? We can say that “forgiving” anti-semitism if it serves the political project of Israel is no different than forgiving anti-semitism if it serves the political project of France or Germany or the U.S. I expect Netanyahu’s government, any day, to set up monuments to the accusers of Dreyfus. He is about as low as you can get. But in these dark circumstances, it is good to remember that Jewish culture far outstrips the mere political maundering of this iteration of Israel.

The dark alliance of Trump's USA, Saudi Arabia and Israel has sent me back to an essay of Hannah Arendt's, The Jew as Pariah: a hidden tradition. Arendt wrote it in 1944, the year in which, for instance, 800,000 Hungarian jews were rounded up and sent to Auschwitz in the most concentrated convulsion of mass murder within the greater system of mass murder set up by the Nazis. Arendt was saved from the fate of other European Nazis by the usual narrow circumstances, getting out in 1941 as one of the Jews aided by Varian Fry in Marseilles. She knew very well who was being murdered - and what. Rare qualities: how many know who is being murdered, and what, in Yemen at the moment?

Her memory of the "contribution" of Jews to the culture of the "West" - in the suspect nomenclature of the time - was a new notion of freedom, from the point of view of the Pariah. In order to sketch this out, she creates four portrait-moments in the essay: the first on Heine, the second Bernard Lazare, the defender of Dreyfus, the third Kafka, and the fourth, Chaplin (who Arendt takes to be Jewish). Through Heine, she clarifies her thesis:

" It is from this shifting of the accent, from this vehement protest on the part of the pariah, from this attitude of denying the reality of the social order and of confronting it, instead, with a higher reality, that Heine's spirit of mockery really stems. It is this too which makes his scorn so pointed. Because he gauges things so consistently by the criterion of what is really and manifestly natural, he is able at once to detect the weak spot in his opponent's armour, the vulnerable point in any particular stupidity which he happens to be exposing. And it is this aloofness of the pariah from all the works of man that Heine regards as the essence of freedom. It is this aloofness that accounts for the divine laughter and the absence of bitterness in his verses. He was the first Jew to whom freedom meant more than mere "liberation from the house of bond age" and in whom it was combined, in equal measure, with the traditional Jewish passion for justice."

The pariah figure has, of course, been wrestled with since the Holocaust and the founding of Israel, and generally found wanting and contemptible. After all, didn't Heine's pariah type take the fight out of people who went like "sheep" to the camps? This is, of course, to substitute a fantasy of muscled resistance in place of reality, which consists of the need for so many calories per day, for air, for time to organize, etc. Modern life would stop if humans were not trained up to be sheeplike in almost all things. If you set your clock so as to get up to get to work on time, you have just contributed, a tiny bit, to your own exterminatability, if authority takes that turn. Resistance, which has become a comedy word in the U.S. meaning twittering for Clinton or something, is one of the hardest things to do in the world, because it takes away all of the struts and props that make life comfortable.

Philip Roth, in Portnoy's Complaint, makes a novel of the struggle between the pariah and the rejection of the pariah. I wonder what Arendt's reaction to Portnoy's Complaint was? For in that book, everything is laid out, and the pariah is definitely put through the paces. The alternative, meanwhile, is strength - strength as a virtue. 

Strength as a virtue - it is a proposition that has left innumerable corpses behind it. Aren't we fed up yet?

Bring back the pariah