what is it like to be a voter?

Neo-liberalism's attempt to shake the existential edge off politics is a futile and ultimately damaging enterprise, although you wouldn’t know it from the thumbsuckers. Every new election, every new populism, proves it. The left, when it is healthy, and the right, when it is not, both know that politics is all about dread and ecstasy.

That politics might be an existentialist errand is very much part of what I take to be the salient characteristic of contemporary election-based democracies. The common lament of editorialist and well heeled country clubber alike is that election based democracy allows those without an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In our opinion, a philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What is the meaning of voting? What is it about? I propose that we look for the answer to that question using Thomas Nagel’s essay, What is it like to be a bat? 

Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cognitive sci school to frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism.”

What it is like questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive activity:

“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states, since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3 I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of physicalist theory.”

The defense of the participation of the people in the government has traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken to be about the people educated, and thus pondering the policy blueprint. Relieved of their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts. However, to me the "adulthood" does not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of deductive or inductive mechanisms. It makes voting a test – but not for the candidate. Rather, for the voter.

The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas, and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.

I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but its survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and are called the hysterical fits of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue, but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't give it much chance of survival.

The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality. Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for very impressive postcards. We think that the success of democracy, given the success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities it possesses.

This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model. I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. The struggle to gain the vote, which is the bloody ghost behind the vote, is surely not summed up by electing some suited lame politico, but is much more like another bit of dialogue in an interminable family argument. Family arguments are as heated as they are because they address precisely the question of what one is like. What am I like, how am I recognized, why am I not, why don’t I feel like myself in the family, why do I feel like myself in the family, etc.

Just as I don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city, or what it is like to be a embittered  writer in Paris, France, or an old black woman beaten up by the police for no reason at a traffic stop in Atlanta, Georgia, and so on.

Of course, this is an approach to voting that takes into account only one side of it. The other side to voting is deductive, by its very nature. Because what is voting? Voting is additive. Voters may vote out of their tacit knowledge about what they are like, but in the end it is the side with more votes that wins. It is out of this tension, endlessly rocking, that democracies exist.

almond milk smoothies and ecological disaster

We talk all too much, in the States, about drugs, and all too little about water. Water is a disregarded topic. There is no water section in the NYT – even the suggestion seems absurd.

But water is everything. I learned this lesson, if not from my own thirsts and growing pains, then from reading Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner’s great book, which gave me an intellectual jolt that I can still, crawling inside the old brainspace, feel. So I’m always on the lookout, which is why I was so pleased to read this horrifying account of our short term fiddling with long term disaster by Mark Arax, A Kingdom of Dust.

For optimal reading, you must have two experiences in mind. One is driving on the highway in California that skirts, at least, the farming district of Kern County, and feeling the eeriness of industrial farming on that scale. The other is Joan Didion’s paen to the California water system, Holy Water. That was written as the final touches were being put in place on the greatest feat of water engineering ever, which was the political legacy of Edmund Brown (Jerry Brown’s father):

“Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also think about exactly where that water is: I particularly like to imagine it as it cascades down the 45-degree stone steps that aerate Owens water after its airless passage through the mountain pipes and siphons.”

Holy Water was written while Joan Didion was still, pretty much, a John Wayne conservative; however, it bears the seed of her later, radically off the story politics.

Compare Didion to Arax:

“I pity the outsider trying to make sense of it. My grandfather, a survivor of the Armenian genocide, traveled 7,000 miles by ship and train in 1920 to find out if his uncle’s exhortation — “The grapes here are the size of jade eggs” — was true. My father, born in a vineyard outside Fresno, was a raisin grower before he became a bar owner. I grew up in the suburbs where our playgrounds were named after the pioneers of fruit and canals of irrigation shot through our neighborhoods to the farms we did not know. For half my life, I never stopped to wonder: How much was magic? How much was plunder?”The analysis of the real political economy should probably start with those two questions: how much was magic? How much was plunder?"

Arax centers his piece on one person, a person I had never heard of, and probably you, too. But an interesting guy. Named Stewart Resnick. How interesting? Well, here’s a fun fact to know and tell. Every year, the whole city of Los Angeles consumes 587,000 acre feet of water per year. And Stewart Resnick consumes 400,000 acre feet of water per year – just in California. That’s right, one farmer consumes water on the scale of a metropolis of 5 million people.

Resnick owns 180,000 acres of California desert – or former desert – much of it in Kern county. You’ve tasted his produce. He’s the pistachio guy. He’s the orange guy. He’s the almond guy. If you haven’t tasted his raisons, or almonds, directly, you’ve tasted them in pastries and sweets. And you’ve especially tasted them if you are into “health” food, if you are into “all natural” things like almond milk shakes and the like. You have bought into the mining of water at a rate unheard of in the Holocene era. One reads occasionally that the drug warriors missed a trick by not emphasizing the unfair labor conditions and ecological disasters spawned by the cocaine trade. But these same writers definitely skip the unfair labor conditions and ecological disasters spawned by, say, the Almond Milk Smoothie.

Obviously, Arax has been waiting all his life to write this piece. It has the magical air of a once in a lifetime reportage. I love this kind of thing, even though it makes me pessimistic that humanity is going to survive.

Happiness and the economics of growth

There’s a post at the blog Stumbling andMumbling with the title, Does Economics matter? 

(Hat tip to Economists View)

Chris Dillow, the writer, is an economist with many media outlets. The post basically puzzles over politics at the present moment, and how it seems less driven by economics (which Dillow seems to imply is a matter for economists) than by animal spirits turned mean. 

“And here’s the thing. There is some justification for this denial of economics. The link between income growth and subjective (pdf) well-being is weak and even many of the worst off feel they are living comfortably. Granted, this might be a sign of adaptive expectations. But it also tells us that things other than economic growth are important: community, autonomy, physical and mental health and so on. From this perspective, perhaps it’s understandable that politicians should want to offer a sense of security – as in various ways austerity, Brexit and immigration controls do – rather than higher incomes.

But, but, but. As Benjamin Friedman has shown, economics does matter. Growth makes people more open-minded and tolerant whilst stagnation makes them meaner: it’s no accident that a decade of stagnation has led to a rise of reactionary populism. John Stuart Mill claimed that a stationary state of incomes provides “as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress”. Subsequent history, however, suggests he was wrong.”

I myself sort of bridle at the fact that Benjamin Friedman is distinguished in the field by "showing" that economics matters. Really, he was preceded here by Marx, Adam Smith, Aristotle, and King Henry II of a “chicken in every pot” fame. Interestingly, the implication here is that if we listen to the economists, we get growth, and all its benefits. And, by the way, John Stuart Mill was speaking through his hat. 

I would show a little more respect for John Stuart Mill, and a little less time praising “growth”, if you want to really talk about the political economy. I’d say Dillow’s puzzlement is a small sign that the field of economics desperately needs to return to its political economics roots. To speak of growth as the post does, and to oppose it blankly to stagnation is the work of mystification rather than analysis. 

You have to couple growth with other aspects of economic living in order to really judge whether economics should "matter." I like to refer to Stefano Bartolini’s essay, Beyond Accumulation, to mix up the notion of growth, for in that essay he proposes something radical yet simple: that negative externalities could operate to aggrandize growth. Instead of being opposed to growth, or the cost of growth, they could operate as a driver of growth.

If you go to Friedman’s book, the Moral Consequences of Growth, there is no separate item in the index for social cost, and externalities are treated to a pretty small spotlight, one in which Friedman imagines externalities only in terms of regulations from “outside” the economy. 

At no point does he imagine that the working class denizens of growth have in any way to pay for growth. 

Growth, of course, is one of those controversial phenomena in economics. There is something not accounted for in it. It has a mysterious relationship to what Robert Solow calls the “residual”. In the 90s, the mystery was solved, or at least some economists thought so, by simply reversing one of the tenents of classical economics, which held that one could expect decreasing returns on endogenous production factors over time. This school, lead by Paul Romer, said aha! we should include knowledge as an endogenous factor, and knowledge shows increasing returns over time. Hence, puzzle solved!

The optimism of the 90s has passed, and many have suspected that the re-accounting for all those productivity gains created by computing might actually be, hmm, not so great. Certainly not as great as those for, say, the invention of artificial fertilizer. Nor is it true that knowledge leads linearly to increasing returns - in fact, these returns seem more like monopoly returns given a certain legal system restricting competition than anything else. 

What Bartoloni suggests, in line, it must be said, with a Marxist school of political economics, is that growth might actually exploit those negative externalities to create more growth – that, in other words, besides the surplus value accumulated by Capital from Labour, there might be another dimension of surplus value in the life styles demanded by the system.This gives us a more complicated relationship between growth and well-being than is dreamt of by Friedman. Growth can very easily look good on paper, but in the everyday, lead to increasing stresses and expenditure - especially when public expenditure lags behind growth, although the latter is no panacea either.

Consider a highway. That sounds good, building a highway. Its a growth-y kind of thing. But if it makes businesses locate along it, and if the real estate landscape is such that it doesn't congregate around the business, then employees might have to commute in. And they might have to schedule chunks of their time to do that which would otherwise be spent on their own lives. 

Which means for one thing they have to figure out what to do with the children. And so on. 

It is easy to see where this structure is going. It is here that the matters that have fallen under the rubric “identity” have their political economic correlates. What does happen to the children? What happens is that women, largely, take care of them. Since women also work, since the households that exist in the growth societies require – in order to maintain the lifestyles that, for instance, result in housing, which results in growth – cannot exist, for the vast majority of people who live under the upper middle class line, without two earners, growth puts a great burden on women. Although self-reported happiness should be viewed with suspicion – it is by no means clear what the respondents mean by happiness, and it is possible that, in a society with a success ethos, to say one is not happy might mean that one is not successful, thus skewing the response – it is true that there’s a gender divide about happiness, with women reporting much higher levels than men. Men, at least in America, who are white and above forty report the highest happiness level, in contrast to the public face of these men, which is one of anger.

Its complex.  

If, however, economists insist that the economy consists of economic ideas instead of practices that must be empirically understood as well as theoretically modeled, they will persist in imposing economic policies on an increasingly unhappy population, and then puzzling over the “politics” of it all.  

Here are some driveby shots at development economics: ass it is set up now, growth economics situates itself in the absurdly short term (with the long term made into a smooth abstraction of the same old thing in the indefinite future), smooths out or does not address feedbacks (hence, the idea that stagnation is the opposite of growth, when of course it could as easily be the result of growth, depending on the composition of the growth), and it also persists in making itself more about equilibria (which goes back to the absurd idea that economics, to be a science, must be centered around the equilibrium, an apriori idea about markets that has done infinite harm) than about real human flourishing.

And as the incredibly inefficient distribution of wealth becomes more egregious, the situation of human flourishing becomes worse and worse. Here economics has mattered greatly - that is, economists bear a lot of blame for our current unhappiness.

All of this is not to say that growth is a bad thing – rather, it is to say that it is different things. And at the root of economics as an ideology is an old myth, that is a subset of the classical economic view that a systematic phenomenon motivated by profit contingently produces such benefits in the mass of people that they become happier. However you formulate this, it is a restatement of the invisible hand metaphor - a coordination between two independent variables that is not explained by either of them. In fact, who knows, empirically growth in the narrow sense might make the mass of peeps happier - or then again, it might not. In any case, to be happier in a changed environment requires a lot of unrecognized expenditure by the individual, with the burdens of that expenditure being unequally distributed.

the firefly party

The Firefly party

« Reality stares at us with a look of intolerable victory: its verdict is that all we have ever loved shall be taken from us forever. »

Pasolini’s most famous essay is entitled: “the power vacuum in Italy”, although it is more often referred to as “The disappearance of the fireflies.”

Pasolini, with his hybrid of Catholicism and Communism, his deep sense of peasant culture and his sexual alienation from same, was one of the great post-war observers. To observe is to synthesize. He noticed the hardest thing to notice – because the hardest thing to notice is the change that happens all around us, and not at geological speed either, but in human time. For instance, he noticed the death of a culture that went back around 4,000 years. Rural idiocy was replaced, rapidly and completely, by techno-idiocy. And its effects were to move mountains, literally. We no longer have to have faith the size of a mustard seed – mustard seeds are definitely obsolete. We just have to have faith in our ones and zeros, our synthetics, our gene splicing, our Glyphosate, Atrazine and Lambda-cyhalothrin, our Parathion, Malathion, our Chlorpyrifos.

The price we pay is to lose any sense of the longterm. The memory palace has been looted. The ancestors have fled, and we all calmly accept that our grandchildren will be living near dead marshes, sunken cities, on a planet that has heated up, in spots, to Martian temperatures; a planet in which the Gulf current is extinct; a planet in which the glaciers no longer store our fresh water, and we have no substitute. The short term is now fully incorporated into the get-it-now economic system, and that is that. We’ve signed in blood.

In his essay, Pasolini used, as a central mark of the changes that had been wrought in Italy during the Demo-Christian era, the disappearance of the fireflies:

“At the beginning of the sixties, the fireflies began to disappear in our nation, due to pollution of the air, and the azure rivers and limpid canals, above all in the countryside. This was a stunning and searing phenomena. There were no fireflies left after a few years. Today this is a somewhat poignant recollection of the past—a man of that time with such a souvenir cannot be young among the young of today and can therefore not have the wonderful regrets of those times.
The event that occurred some ten years ago we shall now call the “disappearance of the fireflies’”.

Since Pasolini’s murder, in 1975, the disappearance of the fireflies has become a recognizable trope. Sciascia’s famous polemic on the Aldo Moro kidnapping begins with a reference to a firefly that Sciascia sees – and his memory of Pasolini as someone who understood the massive corruption of power in Italy. In 2009, Georges Didi-Huberman wrote a book, the Survival of the Fireflies, that took up the political meaning of the exaggerations of Pasolini, and makes the case against the apocalyptic turn.

Well, in 2009, it might have seemed like the Occupation moment would surely lead to something. In 2018, that looks less likely; this is why I found this article on a recent survey of insect life in Germany so interesting not only in terms of our seeming inability to stop ourselves from destruction, but also our inability to even see it. 

“A study published last fall documented a 76 percent decline in the total seasonal biomass of flying insects netted at 63 locations in Germany over the last three decades. Losses in midsummer, when these insects are most numerous, exceeded 80 percent.

This alarming discovery, made by mostly amateur naturalists who make up the volunteer-run Entomological Society Krefeld, raised an obvious question: Was this happening elsewhere? Unfortunately, that question is hard to answer because of another problem: a global decline of field naturalists who study these phenomena.”

For those who have read Pasolini, there is something eery about the way articles such as this one illuminate the double loss that he raged about: the loss of the Holocene and the loss of the sweetness of human life, up to an including the knowledge of nature. Not knowledge simply as an act of monetizable genesplicing - knowledge as love for its object.

Pasolini’s poetic-literary approach brings together natural and human history in one enormous stroke. The disappearance of the fireflies is not simply a fact of concern for naturalists – it is a fact that has a bearing on memory, on the bonds of one generation to the other, and even on the enormous invisible losses that come with ‘creative destruction’ and that refuse to be registered by the political forces that express themselves day after day, and now minute after minute, in the media. By noticing the fireflies, Pasolini breaks out of the parochial discourse of blame and offense in which both the hegemonic party and the oppositional movements in Italy were stuck, like flies to flypaper.

Pasolini’s words became famous, but the signal he sent out died. Nobody ever formed a firefly party. The machine did not stop. The treadmill of production and consumption continued to roll over the planet, producing the routines that make it really impossible to notice that there are no fireflies, that you can’t see the stars at night, that the elms are disappearing, that there are no bluebirds in the garden. Making it impossible to see where you live and what has changed.

Perhaps just as the disappearance of the fireflies marked a cut in the Holocene humanness of Italy, and the disappearance of insect diversity in Germany marks the end of an environment that has existed for the last 14,000 years in that part of Eurasia, we can also mark the appearance and population explosion of other insect, animal and vegetable species, who, like humans, are cleaning up in this short period of time. For instance, the bark beetles in North America.

The bark beetle has a pretty simple lifecycle. The adult beetles dig into the bark of trees, and lay eggs there, as well using the cover of the bark to survive the cold weather. Many of the pupae that hatch from the eggs die off, due to cold temperatures. Some, however, survive, enough that another generation of pine beetles will again lay its eggs.

This simple lifecycle has been sped up by the last Conquista – the conquest of the atmosphere. In terms of the lifecycle of the European movement outward, the first conquest was that of the Americas, the second the partial conquest of Asia, and the third that of Africa. The fourth seizure is of uninhabited atmosphere, which is “free”, and which has been laid claim to by Western industry and now global industry. Just as the conquest of the Americas was accompanied and made possible by a mass dying – the mass dying of the Amerindians, due to the diseases carried by the Europeans – the conquest of the atmosphere is also leading to a mass dying, from which the descendents of the Europeans are averting their eyes.

“From the mountainous Southwest deep into Texas, wildfires raced across parched landscapes this summer [2010], burning millions more acres. In Colorado, at least 15 percent of that state’s spectacular aspen forests have gone into decline because of a lack of water.

The devastation extends worldwide. The great euphorbia trees of southern Africa are succumbing to heat and water stress. So are the Atlas cedars of northern Algeria. Fires fed by hot, dry weather are killing enormous stretches of Siberian forest. Eucalyptus trees are succumbing on a large scale to a heat blast in Australia, and the Amazon recently suffered two “once a century” droughts just five years apart, killing many large trees.”

The natural history of the Americas and the political history of the moment are, it seems, joined in ways that are a mystery – or rather, that are made a mystery. We actually register these things, but out of the corner of our eye.

And this is the political party we need to form: a corner of the eye party. A firefly party. An aspen party. The treadmill of production is deafening, but perhaps we can plug our ears enough to look around. Look around and recognize that the unemployment we face and the massive inequality of wealth that has seized the developed world with the implacable and mechanical force of a bark beetle infestation and that infestation itself are all parts of one thing: the politics of the Holocene. These are the stakes. And if we lose the Holocene to the hedge funders or the coal plants or oil companies or offshore money, we lose everything.

“But for the natives…God’s hand hath so pursued them as, for three hundred mile’s space, the greatest part of them are swept away by smallpox, which still continues amongst them. So as God hath hereby cleared our title to this place…” John Winthrop

The white novelist

In the sixties, the heavy hitter white novelists often included black and ethnic characters of all kinds in their novels. An interesting change in the field occurred with the advent of neo-liberalism and the spread of what I call euphemism culture (a culture in which racial injustices are corrected by finding soothing words to correct them). White novelists, the heavy hitters, seemed, often, to retreat to a segregated world of whiteness. While you could and should criticize a novelist like Tom Wolfe for stereotyping blacks in his novels, you couldn’t do the same for, say, the Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner because there are no blacks in the novel. Astonishingly, in this novel of the 1970s in NYC, the black portion of the population seems to have been whited out.

I think Rachel Kushner is a great novelist, and I’m re-reading the Flamethrowers and loving it, again, but I do think about this. I also think about the fact that few reviewers ever review novels featuring all white casts and bring up race.

I’m writing my second novel. It concerns, in no particular order, Paris, Atlanta, the beginning of the Obama era, pest control, financial skullduggery, genes, termites, poetry and performance art. And as I am developing the first two chapters, in which I am trying to establish the friendship between my two main characters, Leandra Cathcart and Karen Chamisso, I have been struck by how WASPishly I am laying things out. This “oversight” says something about my own bigotries. But I am going to fuck with that WASPy world. Not because I am a “better” person, but because the very Waspyness of this world is part of the story, is aesthetically interesting. 

If a certain kind of novel tries to speak about the “spirit of the age” – which is a very American line of novel – then the whiteout society of the upper middle and upper class has to be a big part of the story, especially for the manufacturers of cultural products. Euphemism culture has taken one very relieving lesson from the story of cultural appropriation, which is that white people can happily pretend black people, or Asian, or Hispanic, don’t exist. Cause if you imagine a Hispanic Texan, say, you imagine from your white root, and can get (oh horrors!) accused of racism. The solution to which is to embrace apartheid.

Forgive me if I find that an utterly bankrupt moral position. And one very telling for a decade in which appropriation – of black income and wealth – has proceeded like a machine, creating disparities in household wealth between races that are comparable to South Africa in 1980.

All of which means: stir it up, little darlings.

strike, NFL players! And let the owners play the game

In my opinion, if the tubby little billionaire owners of football teams in the NFL want to control what the players think, the players should just let the owners play the game. Lets see how many stadiums are filled as Jerry Jones gets tackled by Zygi Wilf. Of course, what I'm expecting is for this to go to court, and for the Trump court to vote down the right to express an opinion as a minor and dispensible thing - in comparison with the enormous right to bear concealed arms at a college campus. 
Strike, players, strike!

by the book

Back before the NYT destroyed, or blandified, its Book section, it used to have a regular feature called By The Book. This consisted of questions like: What books are currently on your night stand? Who is your favorite novelist of all time? And your favorite novelist writing today? Do you have a favorite genre? Any literary guilty pleasures?

Etc. These questions form a sort of program: the writer – the novelist – is part of a profession, and spends his or her time reading and judging texts, which are also part of the profession. Even social time is professionalized: “You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?”

The limits of this set of questions imply an image of what the writer – and here, I am mostly talking about the writer of fiction, or poems, or essays, or memoirs – does as a laborer. The NYT is traditionally for management, so the questions are never about the means of production, as in, what do publishing  houses do correctly or not, what do you think about your book’s publicity, etc. Nor about the interaction between reader and writer.

Nor, going a bit further, is the writer contextualized in a broader culture. For instance, I don’t think I’ve ever read anybody ask about oral storytellers.

I consider this a bit odd. I know that myself, I used to like to go into Panera in Santa Monica, get a coffee, and listen to the old codgers bitch and brag to each other, sounds which fed into certain parts of my novel. But more than that, I am sure the stories I listened to when I was a wee little pea and my parents were giants gave me a total, preliminary sense of narrative possibilities. Not that I am special in this respect – you can hear narrative patterns passed along, generation to generation, from family member to family member. And you can hear characteristics that belong to vocation.

 My pop was an air conditioning man – he did the range of things, from working in a research laboratory (which he hated with all his heart) to repairing or installing hvac systems in businesses and institutions, to selling the machinery. It was the repairing and installing part that formed the heart of stories that usually had the motif: pops vs. idiot. The idiot could be the local repairman, the person running the business or institution, or the backup in the company, but most definitely the adventure of putting in hvac required an idiot to make the story juicy. Not that the stories were always so juicy by Hollywood standards. They often involved descriptions of working in impossible spaces in impossible conditions – small places in steamy hot weather, crawl spaces filled with toads and bugs, etc.

One of the formally interesting things about these stories is that they were sorta diagrammed: that is, repair work requires a pretty clear beginning, middle and ending. You begin with the problem (usually the result of some idiot making unbelievable mistakes installing some unit), you advance towards the solution (usually involving some hazardous or bizarre repair that might require doing certain things no normal man would do, such as dealing with electricity in a flooded, dark basement), and the solution comes about because of your action. Epic, really.

My Dad didn’t do certain things in his stories. For instance, I can’t recall him ever imitating anybody’s voice. I myself love to imitate accents. I like this not so much to mock those accents but to expand my musical range, although of course I know the usual thing about imitating accents is to mock their departure from some pre-supposed norm – everyday racism, innit?

My Mother’s stories were more complicated. This is because she worked as a school secretary, which  involved the more sinuous lines and complexities of human behavior, on various scales. There were many less idiots in her adventures, but many kids acting out, teachers having fits, and parents with many woes, which of course they told Mom. If the structure of my Dad’s stories had a classic cast not so distant from the old Writing Program dictate of showing and not telling, my Mom’s were closer to the underground of gossip and rumor, where telling is all and showing is a matter of glimpses and interpretation.

Of course, these are extreme paraphrases of my parent’s styles – but they certainly connect the act of writing to the natural life of language. I do think, like an old Commie, that you have to baptize the book in the stream of life of the people. That doesn’t mean making the book dumber – oh contrah, as they say around here. Ulysses is my notion of a novel that successfully takes its orientation from oral culture and the oldest of bookish traditions. It is ultimately a DIY novel, the best kind.