nostos

 He came home from the war with a party in his head… 

The ancient Greeks, those great nomenclaturists, had a word for the tale in which the hero came home after many adventures: nostos. There’s a very fine essay by Anna Bonifazi in the American Journal of Philology, Winter, 2009 – your fave journal, reader, and mine too – that explores the way this word played out in Greek literary culture.

“From the literary point of view, a nostos tale basically concerns a sea voyage, including a storm that causes a shipwreck, a landing in an unforeseen place, and the survival of the one who experiences all this. Even before the Odyssey narrative was conceived, nostos tales and Odysseus' nostos tales were presumably widespread.”

Our return to Atlanta did not, thank God, include shipwreck or the culling of our crew by one-eyed giants. But as in any return home, journey’s end puts in question the identity of the endpoint – of “home”. In fact, my relation to Atlanta – or more properly, the Atlanta metropolitan area – is not that of a native. I wasn’t born there. I was raised there. On the other hand, my mother, father, and father’s parents have all died there – it is the country of all my significant ghosts. It is where my brothers and one sister live. It is the place I left, when I was eighteen, and have come back to for variable stays, but always with the plan to depart. And maybe, maybe that really is home – it is where one plots one’s departure from. Odysseus did not want to leave Ithaca – he pretended to be mad, when the proposition was put to him that he should join the insane Greek expedition to return Menelaus’s wife to him by main force, but was found out and forced to go along. Yet when he returns, and rejoins his wife Penelope (“journeys end in lovers’ meetings”), he sets off again on a journey whose purpose is only to fulfill an oracle.

Atlanta, I think, is actually a very fine place to call home. When I was a disconsolate adolescent – moaning for arty circles and bohemian parents, like the worst snobbish teen you can imagine – I thought of Atlanta as a provincial place, where the ethos would always be Lennard Skinner. Now, so many eons later, I see that the provincial was myself. Atlanta is an amazingly diverse place: unlike Los Angeles, it is not a place, for the most part, of ethnic conclaves. The distant metro suburban counties, Cobb, Gwinnett, or even Dekalb, which in my youth were white flight chickenhouses, have long become rainbow: black, Asian, Latinx, white, jumbled together as in some advertisement or sitcom. Our last afternoon in Lawrenceville (the county seat of Gwinnett, most famous for being the place where Larry Flynt was shot by a person unknown, or at least unprosecuted - although Joseph Franklin later confessed to the deed) was spent, given the sogginess of the afternoon, going to Sugarloat Mills Mall – which turned out to be a wonderful place. The Mall’s great anchor store is a huge depot of sporting goods that stocks boats, fishing poles, bows and arrows, a huge aquarium stocked with bass and gar, and guns. Adam, in fact, got to shoot a play gun at targets in one of the store’s dioramas, and so did I. The Wikipedia entry on Sugarloaf Mills describes it, unkindly, as “struggling” and catering to “low income” shoppers. Whatever. To my mind, it was infinitely superior to the shopping mall at the end of Third Street in Santa Monica, where you couldn’t get a shirt under one hundred bucks or a belt under forty. Fuck that, as they say at Sugarloaf Mills (not really – politeness still reigns in the South!). Here, you can get that shirt for ten dollars and they will throw in a belt that is just as good as any you can get at Nordstrom for five. But what you can do, besides, at Sugarloaf mills is sit on a massage chair for five bucks, experience virtual reality at the virtual reality kiosk, play weird childfriendly variants of miniature golf, have a medieval theater dinner, race toy cars in a shop that is laid out in the most economically inefficient way possible (seemingly the shop can only accommodate five racers at a time, which means that even on the best of days, they cannot make more than a few thousand dollars – which made me wonder, as we raced cars there, how they can afford the upkeep), watch a discount movie or shop, miraculously, for books – or even get mild head shop-ish paraphernalia. I know that Walter Benjamin would pick Sugarloaf over Santa Monica’s mall every time. I’m with Walt.

The Christmas week was soggy. About five -ten years ago, Georgia and the whole southeast was suffering such a drought that Alabama, Georgia and Florida nearly came to armed battle over who got dibs on the Chattahoochee water flow. Now – according to the Viconian rule of corsi e recorsi that rules the Gods, the stars, and mankind – Georgia has an overabundance of the stuff that W.C. Fields so despised. We sortied out to several parks during intervals of non-sogginess and saw the landscape, which gave me a deep satisfaction. I’ve always liked the Northern Georgia forests – even when I was a teen, I would apply to them that line from Yeats: “The trees are in their autumn beauty”. Melancholy was my fave teen mood – followed by brooding and above it all. Hey, I was a snot, what can I say? Everyone to their own teenage emotional shell, and devil take the hindmost. I retain, as a merry old man, my liking for oaks that are bluesing their loss of leafage. We went out and saw plenty of that action. We also surveyed the new developments around Emory University, thus upsetting my mental map of the area. In contrast, the area around Stone Mountain and Lithonia seems still to be in the era of Flannery O’Connor. While my hometown, Clarkston, long ago became an emblem of immigration and change. Never in my wildest dreams – when I was a teen – did I imagine that the most vibrant religious denomination in Clarkston in the 21^st century would be centered around a mosque. My sister told me that the Baptist Church in Clarkston, amazingly, has been sold to some other denomination. There goes the very symbol of everything I rejected when I first read Nietzsche. Somehow, I feel it is a case of lese majeste – they can’t do this to Nietzsche!

Adam was a great hit with my family. And they were a great hit with him – at a certain point, he started complaining about how “boring” Paris was compared to Atlanta. It is true – your kids are your parents revenge on you.

And then we came back to Paris. Hope this New Year is better on every dimension than 2018 for all who read this – and for all who don’t!

Palinurus

My Christmas poem. Upbeat - not.

 Palinurus

It was the age of golden coincidences.

That night, when I fell from the deck

It was not, to my surprise, the wine dark sea

Received me, but an undertow of milk

Dragged me through the panics of the birth canal

We woke to screams along the street

Flames taking the palace walls. Our faces flickered

As we streamed out of the South Gate

Hidden in the Goddess’ hand. First things last

Nursery rhymes turned to ash in our mouths

Have you ever seen the farmboy kill

The cubs of the rat, by chance uncovered in the barn.

He raises the shovel and one two three

Swift successive blows batter down

At once the entire dim lineage. Such were our faces.

Down to the water then. Our leader spoke

Only of things of the ship

We crossed the rippling shadow cast

By what seemed impossible to overthrow

Walls built by giants and by gods.

All at once I thought, everything that could be lost

Would be. Which is why I was surprised

How the walk home from school came back

Impregnable, as the milk carried me down,

And I counted every step.

Trump's great idea: the national prison monument!

“We are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it,” the president wrote. “It will be beautiful and, at the same time, give our Country the security that our citizens deserve.” – NYT

And here I was, thinking that we’d elected Boris Badonoff president, when all along Trump was hiding his Christo soul! The border wall as an art project – this has to be Melania’s input. Our jetsetting racists strike again, a blow to remind us that we Americans are good at something - call it slapstick, call it kitsch, call it homebrewed fascism. Whatever!

And since the Trump administration is shitting as hard as it can on our national parks and wilderness areas, isn’t it nice that they want to build a great wall tourist attraction that can compete with China as a sort of compensation? Steel slats, to represent the great and beautiful jail industry, which might be the last one that American elites will keep at home, rather than seeking abroad for cheaper labor costs. It is beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

Apollinaire, the streets, time

I threw into the noble fire

With human hands made of that pyre

That void socketed dead man beneath,  

That past, and worshipped within me the fire.

Flame, I do what you breath.

– Free translation of the first stanza of “Brazier”

I live some three blocks from the Rue Franc-Bourgeois, which is where Apollinaire locates the boutique that is at the center of his story, “The Shadow Departs”. Going by the Google Map, I can reach Rue Saint-Merri – which features in Apollinaire’s Marais heavy poem, The Musician of Saint Merri – in ten minutes. In fact, just this morning, returning with my son from a visit to the doctor, we walked past Eglise Saint Merri – a church I never notice, since its massiveness seems to fade into the neighborhood – and went down Rue de Saint Merri. The route was an accident, just a matter of turning here and there to reach our street, but I was happy when I saw the name on the street plaque, as I was writing about Apollinaire as I was waiting in the doctor’s office for Adam. I’ve been writing a lot about Apollinaire lately, piling up notes, but not really getting anywhere. Saint Merri, however, smiled at me. The city walker lives for signs and dies without them – or stays home, defeated, and calls for the Uber. This was a sign. As Apollinaire said in his poem, On Prophecies, “I don’t believe but I look and when possible listen.”

Yes, I’ve been piling up notes, signs: but as happens sometimes in the essay you want to write, the signs are all wrong. It is as if the vandals came and took down all the streets signs and then put them back up randomly.  So I keep going down the wrong street, a victim of some mysterious disorientation, haunted by Benjamin and his unfinished, unfinishable monster essay of the Arcades Work, which started with a simple, sweeping premise, so sweetly, how that music must have sounded in Benjamin’s ear (even though the man was notoriously unmusical)  and soon swallowed everything in its path. It is natural characteristic of monsters, this threatening, total appetite – it is how you know them.

So at last, instead of pinning my hope on texts and commentaires, it occurred to me that I have walked these streets too, I have entered into the living space, the animal territory, of Guillaume Apollinaire. There’s a wonderful essay by Marc Poupon that ties The Musician of Saint Merri to the streets of Marais on May 21,1913, as represented in the newspapers, and in Apollinaire’s own cultural reportage: a bakers’ strike in which the windows of two new bakeries on Rue de la Verrerrie were shattered, and a lover’s murder on 17, Rue Simon le Franc. These are material circumstances that have gone to newspaper limbo; but a poem that contains a date and so many Marais streets, that recounts a fantastic, erotic mass hypnotism, introduces a blind, impossible pied piper of the Marais whose subjects are neither rats nor children but women – all those women that thronged Apollinaire’s imagination and formed his most vivid correspondents – lives in newspaper time, the time of “actualite,” of the “new”, caged in all its blind simultaneity in the pages of Le Matin, L’Intransigeant, Paris-Midi, etc. It is as if the typography of the newspaper, the columns that we learn to read as paths going separately down the page and sometimes diving underground to crop up on another page, were the real story of the world, here: this is the simultaneity that fascinated Apollinaire, that he experimented with.

A date in a poem is a surprise. We are used to dates in novels, although classically, they are disguised – the year is 18.., in the nineteenth century novel, which treats exact dates with a certain modesty, a certain ethical reticence. Fiction, in this ethic, has to remain in its place, and mark its place. The made up name exists on another plane from the made up date, in this ethos: the one being a private affair of fantasy, the other being a public affair of fact. The dates that Apollinaire puts into his poems and stories create an interesting moment, a newspaper moment, in which the date, as it is shared by poem, story, and newspaper, put them all on the same temporal plane. And this is a clue to what Apollinaire is up to, or so I take it. And yet this question of dates…

Apollinaire, always a reader of the periodicals, might well have read Gabriel Tarde three part series in La Revue des Deux Mondes in 1901, which later became his book, Opinion and the Crowd, which that takes into account the temporal shift that comes epiphenomenally out of the development of public opinion from its primitive state as the crowd, the savage crowd. The haptic space of the crowd, with the physical proximity one to another of the members of the crowds, cedes and becomes subordinate to another kind and degree of proximity, which is mediated by a the simultaneity which is both the ontological and typological principle of the Newspaper. News, as we have pointed out, is actualité in French. Between the English and the French word, an important movement between kin temporalities is captured. News becomes the now. In the old order, the evidence of universal and intemporal processes (which is why history “teaches”, is exemplary) is undermined by the sensational and a present in movement.  Tarde speaks of the newspapers giving their readers a ‘sense of simultaneity.”  He does not, unfortunately, disinter the phenomenon of simultaneity, instead  vaguely pressing on the idea of “at the same time”. But ordinary simultaneousness is transformed in the social mode of simultaneity. We speaking of catching up with, keeping up with, or following the news, or fashions, or tv, or books, or sports. It is in this sense that we are not simply conscious of being simultaneous with, but as well, and more strongly, that the simultaneous is moving ahead of us even as we are part of it, like a front.

The anthropologist Johannes Fabian coined the term allochrony to speak of the peculiar way in which Europeans, starting in the seventeenth century, started to divide up the contemporary world into different cultural time zones. Europe, of course,appropriated the modern to itself. Other contemporary cultures were backward,savage, stone age, traditional – they were literally behind their own time.Modernity exists under that baptism and curse. But Fabian’s concern was so completely focused on cultures exogenous to Europe that he ends up treating Europe,or the West, as a homogenous, total mass. Of course, it isn’t. This is why what happened in the colonial periphery was related to the social forces in motion within the metropoles, the imperial powers. There is, as it were, an allochronic competition, here – here in Paris in 1911, for instance. Simultaneity is the horizon for a temporal competition – one in which the new, the young, the latest compete against the old, the laggard, the out of touch. One of the stories in The Murdered Poet is ariff on these themes. In The Deified Cripple, a chauffeur named Justin Couchot is involved in a vicious car accident that tears off one of his arms and one of his legs and leaves him in a coma fora long time. Once he gets out of the coma, he has to hop around on his one leg,since the stump of the other is so tender that they cannot attach a prosthetic limb to it. This is a very twentieth century wound. 

Read the rest at Willett's!

Is the Opinion Page of the New York Times just for stupid people? a rhetorical question

The NYT opinion page never fails to come up with the stupidest headlines that one can imagine - headlines that put National Enquirer to shame. The headline today is: Is Environmentalism Just for Rich People? A WTF juxtaposition of words if there ever was one.

I propose an elementary exercise in logic, here, substituting for the class "rich people" tokens of rich people (you know, the demographic that voted most strongly for Donald Trump): For instance: Is Environmentalism just for the Koch Brothers. Or: Is Environmentalism just for Exxon executives? Or: Is Environmnetalism just for bitcoin billionaires? Or: Is environmentalism just for bankers who lend to Freeport Macmoran? Is environmentalism just for corporations that demand taking law be inserted into Trade Treaties? Is environmentalism just for Monsanto Investors? Is environmentalism just for Agribusinesses? On and on. the beat don't stop until the break of dawn - and your brains are mush.

This is such obvious nonsense that there must be a powerful override behind it, one that ignores the massive, falsifying counter-evidence. And there is such an override: it is called neo-liberalism. It is a handy portmanteau term, to encompass everything from the Romney wing of the R party to the Clintonite wing of the D party.

Such is the power of illusion in the rentier class, however, to which the NYT directs its rays of enlightenment, that this class thinks of Macron as a radical environmentalist. You know, the president who raised the carbon tax, but not on corporation using a lot of carbon.

The problem here is that the walls are thick and will not hear anything to upset the "narrative".Neo-liberal deafness and Trumpian deafness dominate the "discourse", to the detriment of 99 percent of the world's population. And this is the nuclear weapon that is heading for the planet's climate.

Macron's program, and the ex-Miss France's

In the state of economic emergency, proclaimed last night by our fearless leader, we look for comedy where we can find it. I found it in this declaration signed by, among others, Bernard Henri-Levy and Miss France (of the two, of course, it it Miss France who has all the brains) that the gilets jaunes should immediately stop what they are doing, which has been successful, and begin debating, which would be utterly unsuccessful but would give Bernard Henri-Levy (and Miss France) a chance to appear on TV with a few random Gilets Jaunes and pontificate. 

Miss France might gain an audience with the Gilets Jaunes, but not, I’m betting, the well coiffed, faux philosophe.

More seriously: we watched Macron’s speech last night. Macron started off with a song of love, and he ended like a Chanel commercial. The song of love was directed to the cops. As we know, from the affair Benalla, which involved Macron’s body guard donning police gear and beating the shit out of some passive protesters this spring, there is one exception to Macron’s general contempt for public sector employees: the cop. Macron’s handlers made a mistake in not cuing his words to music: surely this heartfelt paen to order and its masculine forces should have been backgrounded by Gang of Four’s “I love a man in a uniform”.  

I had to regain my confidence/ so I got into camouflage

The girls they love to see you shoot…

The rest of the speech was a curious performance. The raising of the minimum wage by something like 75 centime per hour “without costing the employer anything” seemed like a magic act. In American terms, it is like raising the minimum wage by subtracting the amount from the Earned Income Credit. It was as if Mr. Burns on the Simpsons told his workers that they all get Christmas presents, and then deducted it from their paychecks. But it sounded good – it must have been rehearsed to have the feel good vibe, which is why it was announced as one hundred euros per month rather than 75 centimes per hour.

On the main point, though, Macron held firm. His supply side tax cut to the wealthy still stands. His reasoning still stands too: cutting that tax is supposedly going to bring investment money into France. It is what the late George H.W. Bush, in 1980, called voodoo economics. At least under Reagan the tax cut was made with a fine indifference to the deficit, since investment is not going to happen in an atmosphere of declining demand. The Reaganite solution was, in fact, to inflate two deficits: by easing regulations on credit, the medium household can take on a larger amount of debt in order to sustain a consumer lifestyles that feeds into an economic boom. The second step here, of course, involves mock horror about the government’s debt, which then leads to cuts in the social welfare system, which then leads to either further indebtedness by the household or bankruptcy. In France, the loosening of consumer credit on the American model has not happened, at least on the Reaganite scale. What has happened, especially as Macron is all about being a deficit hawk, is that his policies have essentially been deflating consumer demand. The carbon tax, with its exemptions for big carbon producers – the corporations – was a final straw. In France, one can actually see what taxes are paying for, in terms of healthcare, infrastructure, education and retirement: and what the people see is a decline in the degree and quality of all of these things. You can’t sustain Popular Front programs on a Thatcherite fiscal policy.

 See the rest of the article here at Willett's.

Macron in the chocolate factory

Want to change the world?

There's nothing to it

As was obvious from the beginning, Macron is unsuited, temperamentally and intellectually, to be the president of France. His astonishing reaction to the rejection of the "reforms" - a word that oozes with bad faith, since the reforms are actually the stripping away of the reforms of the past, and should be so characterized - by the French street is to flood said street with armed policemen in tanks if necessary, and to send his friendly unshaven front man, Édouard Philippe, out to talk about how thousands of hoodlums are going to rock and ruin lovely Paris and murder people. Oh, and ps, we'll postpone the gas tax and use this issue to make a plea to lower our funding of France's social insurance system. Nothing says responding to the cry of the lower and middle income level that their lifestyle is seriously deteriorate than feeding them a big dose of neo-liberal whoopass. You want healthcare? well let's lower funding on that! you want a clean ecology? Let's do nothing about rising housing costs that force people to live out where the car is their only means of access to job and life. Oh, and for good measure, let's just manage the railroad system into ruin, then auction it off and let the ticket prices go sky high. You want education? Well, tyr to get it as we freeze funding. The Macronists came from some casting call for the movie, "Atlas shrugged, then pissed, then had champagne and oysters" - a movie only a banker could love.

It appears that France is saddled with this boy-prince for another four years. That is going to be a long fall down the stairs. Macron is another in the long line of French conservatives who refuse to understand that a crisis in capitalism caused by the shortfall of demand cannot be solved by weakening even further the purchasing power of consumers. Rather, the magic formula is "investment", which magically appears when you shuffle money to Capital with no strings attached. You then partition off the part of your brain that just performed this trick from the part that urges the reality of globalisation - which is, precisely, about the liquid flows of capital that seek the highest return on "investment" globally. In other words, the investment you have generated is not going to go to productive activities in France, but to hedge fund bets in New York.

It is all the logic of the spoiled child, which aims at one thing: getting all the candy. We have been trapped with the spoiled kids in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory for some time now, with the plot twist that these kids took over the factory, and made Charlie work for them. In my view, Macron's candystore visions are going to be stuffed down the throat of his party if some grown up doesn't call a halt. Not that I think said grown up is going to appear: when the problem is so simple - the insane divide between the misery of the producers of wealth and the opulence of the profiteers - the solution has to be obfuscated into an incredible complexity, suitable for many a Le Monde editiorial about how complex things are.

Lefty parties were, as usual, late to the gate, but with opportunity throwing a brick at their heads, they finally are waking up. Not totally - connecting the dots between a French foreign policy mainly interested in bombing and droning peeps in the Middle East and North Africa and refugees streaming out of said countries still seems to be a conundrum they don't get. But at least they are getting over the idea that gilet jeunes are just your dumb racist hicks who should pipe down and die behind the screens of the video games they all probably play. Let's hope this goes much further. Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin, or Boil Boil, Toil and Trouble - mottos of the day! And now for a video the French cops proudly released.