all the Karen Chamisso poems so far

I'm thinking that I need to print these out in traditional chapbook form. Anyway, this is a part of The misogynist stripped by the bachelorettes, even, Chamisso's second collection.

They’re going, 3-2-1

The intentions of the Burning Bush

Would make a good study for those who come armed

To wrestle with the Angel

Spread sheets in hand.

Oh, this Eldorado of all the Old Boys!

Already they are on another planet,

Though inconvenient biology

Has Excel-ed them in for death.

Meanwhile the Burning Bush

Bides its time, having wasted

Its word on a desert no account.  Its “I”

Was the breath of life to me, once.

Meditations in the Laundry Room with Leila, 1988

The wrinkles yield with sexual abandon

to the furious onslaught of the iron

bullish, implacable

as though the panics of the tumble dry

the labyrinth of hot water

had never been.

They always say, it never happened.

They say, this won’t hurt. They, they

-- chthonic emissaries of the ironing board.

As if there will never again

be cakefall and sweat

or the ecstatic piddle of the dreadful night.

Still, who am I

fumblefingered at the fringes

to scoff at a sheet so beautifully folded?  

Make mine a double

The elaborately sculpted sigh

Seems to be a British art

Cultivated by recused poets

Continually serving on this or that honors committee

Rewarding other elaborately sculpted sighs.

And yes, they make a certain impression:

The manor house is fallen down

And the family Rubens is in sad shape altogether.

That particular English accent

Is serving out the end of its life sentence

As a spy, ensconced in some dark paneled pub

Doling out the compromising photos it took.

Poem

Beauty is the captive you give

to the messes you have made

- not the tragedy of Hamlet’s father, poisoned

but an anonymous termite in its mud tunnel kingdom

ridden by a nerve agent from the treatment zone

strangling in its unshed skin.

It will turn out, it will always turn out

That pesticide traces will out last

Whatever incipient tumor in my gut

Is planning its knight’s move up the board.

Rape and the season

The girl told the tall old man in the palace later

that they reached the meadow around ten

the one near the sacred spring.

All the girls tumbled down the slight slope

or played tag. Their mistress preferred

to weave garlands out of the flowers

that grew in such abundance there.

It was near noon when suddenly

a fault line branched across the entire meadow

it was black, but not like the rich loam

that the plow will breach back, it was another kind of black

basalt, eclipse, darker.

Out of the lightning  fault rose up

on black horses a party half man half wolf

at their head a man in a lion’s skin.

The ancient man exchanged a look

with his subordinate, who grabbed the girl

in mid sentence, his rough hand, her thin arm squeezed

and dragged her away. Bad luck to be such a witness.

Once upon a time I had a roommate in college. Every Friday, she’d go to the store and bring back a big bag of marshmallows (colored ones – for some reason, I could particularly not abide the pinks) and a stack of magazines. Vogue Elle InStyle Vanity Fair Cosmo. She’d pile them up on the floor and, eating her marshmallows, lie there on her belly and leaf through the pages of each magazine in turn. She’d finish, and then she’d get her scissors and, putting the magazines on her desk, would cut out certain suspect phrases and images. Some of these she would store in a cigar box, some she would glue to a big swathe of butcher paper she’d pinned to her wall. Soon it was crowded with a thick impasto of smiles, bosums, high heels, inspirational phrases, advertisement captions and titles: “The Tears behind the Cheers”;  “a special alchemy with women's naked bodies with a camera”; “fills a lot of fantasies”. She said that she was most interested in one particular class of misogyny, which she called auto-femphobia: women hating women.

She looked up and Dis like the leader of the Wild Bunch

leaned forward on his well oiled saddle

a look she now can’t help but know on his face

interrupted her

in that life that now seems

a perpetual gathering of flowers.

He swept her up. As she let fall

the flowers, he whooped and galloped away.

That very hour by bruise and battery

the audience at home has seen too often

in police photos with voiceover

he ravished her

the daughter of a VIP.  

It became a cold case in spite of her mother

who hired a detective

who interviewed the girls, found the muddied skirt.

I appreciated the project, but I didn’t see any gratifying end point to it. And also, didn’t it become, itself, with its radiating negativity, its femphobic? Auto-Femphobia disguised as the critique of auto-femphobia. What would you call that? Too, all the pink marshmallows were grossing me out.

In the end, on Olympus, her grandfather confessed

“He’s my brother. I owe him.”

Her mother made her own threats.

A deal was reached.

In the silhouette world

she sat on a throne

and forgot flowers altogether.

Why eat? Outlines fed

On bull’s blood, howling for it.

Her skin felt it, she couldn’t wash away tastes

that were in their mouths.

Deal – deal – deal.

In the flicker of her husband’s notice

she took on an icy clarity, pleasing to him.

Reliving her black and blue

through all the intervening layers

that he would drill through, relentless.

Refusing everything with small gestures

after the first day

when she made the mistake of eating the seeds.

Then, one night, she stunned me. She told me that I was auto-femphobic. She said, in fact, that I was the boss mama of auto-femphobia on the campus. Me.

Deal-deal-deal

Her grandfather had foreseen that too

those six seeds were the death of her

the seasons growing out of rape and anorexia

« Et maintenant vous m’avez arraché quelque chose

que je n’ai plus et que vous n’avez même pas. »

The next week I moved out. A friend of mine in the dorm, who lived two stories above us, had a roommate she couldn’t agree with about anything. So we made an exchange, with that roommate moving in with marshmallow girl and me moving in with my friend. A sort of structuralist pleasing exchange, exogamy among roommates.

I never spoke to my ex-roommate after that, although we did share a few classes. I was relieved to see that she didn’t stalk me. I had it in my mind that she was the stalkier type.  She lived her life, I lived mine.

Poem

In the midst of my salt and pepper life

I found myself drown-dead in a mollusque sportif.

I have a gal pal who shops at Big Lots

and buys cereal in the largest boxes

I have a gal pal who likes to wear foxes

but only on bad days, homebound, with a freshened drink.

I found myself ideating like mad

over the throb of the motor running

in the parking lot at Big Lots one Georgia winter day.

Wintry, isn’t that what poets say? The Victorians. Wintry.

Leila run my bath and let my salt n peppa sleep

amidst the bubbles, I pray my Lord my soul to keep.

If not the Lord, then a nice little SSRI

Girlfriend get out the car.

What is it Marlene says? What can you say about people.

Ma’am get out of the vehicle.

I have gal pals and I have lovers

And a year would be nice under the covers.

I got out of the car.

Swedenborg

Fat Swede, family friend, personal haunt

I grew downward in your shadow like an icicle

with no shadow of my own to throw over my shoulder

like a cape.

It was blinding, blinding the visions and the revelations

and never a new next message from all the crowded void

of positive thought and piety. It was as if

all the fireflies were dead in the jar -

we took their light on faith, never thinking

to add our own dim wit.

If we glowed

it was under the covers,

buried away from our own eyes

in descents of the body

bodies in bodies unknowing

descents and ascents, no vocabulary for the bitter or sweet.

The scraping of chair legs on linoleum tile floors

and a leftover biscuit smell in the air -

Reverend Toland’s message tonight concerns the Wise Virgins

like the Girl Scouts, always prepared -

while Sally, Mae and me in the back row giggle

and whisper “touched for the very first time”

in counterpart to the message.

Touch, tag, waystations and squiggle

a Sunday like any other, great Swede,

my medium, my foe.

Message done, prayers,  now everyone fold chairs

and stack them. Out we file

until the last of us is gone, and the monitor

turns out the lights. I alone am left

carrying

‘touched for the very first time’ to this far insomniac station

a world of time and lapses away.

Autobiographical sketch for Pest Control Monthly

Once upon a time, apocalypse was interesting.

We all moved out of the cities

To somewhere beyond the dartboard

SAC hid in its briefcase.

There, of course, roads were cut, sewers laid.

Trees went down, and other trees for shade

Were planted, and insects went to work.

They were in the dart board now.

Rachel Carson was interviewed and died.

Some poet, I’ve read, came up with the perfect line:

Raid kills bugs dead. Wasn’t that the Cold war?

All of the Weltgeist in four words. Bravo!

Finally (I’m buying. Let’s get the Yquem Sauterne, my dear,

You’ll love it!) I came to rest on a trillion soldiers slain

All those red ant, all those termite legions.

We had a lot of money for those reasons.

Apocalypse, after many a rehearsal, flopped.

The bomber’s dartboard was forgotten. All the cute tenements

Were bought, after we purged the tenants.

The tenants were on their own dartboard now. Done!

…

Poem

Xenophanes said that the dogs would claim

that the gods were dogs

if dogs could form propositions

and if any of these propositions

were about gods.

This was Xenophanes argument against the gods

since, for Xenophanes, the gods couldn’t be dogs

as dogs are low and gods are high.

Consequently, we should not think of the gods as humans

which would be a doggish error.

Consequently, we don’t know what gods are.

Consequently, our claims about gods are empty.

I am not at all convinced

Xenophanes

Mosquito gods, bacteria gods, warbler gods

are exactly as improbable

as mosquitos, bacteria and warblers.

Poem

“I always take candy from strangers”

I plucked out of Happy as my dancing maxim

when I was 15, in 1985, in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Could I turn my back on louder this,

never not take for taking’s bliss

any last thrill.

At forty, do I recognize it still?

   (pluck the strings, turn up the amp)

or has caution crept into my taking

Passer les annonces

Betsy Ross said: the candle’s genius is the flame. The flame’s food is the candle. But what is the flame’s genius?

Betsy Ross said: Just as the left hand is not the double of the right hand, so, too, my shadow is not the double of me. Just as the left hand is not the negation of the right hand, so, too, my shadow is not the negation of me. One hand longs for the other. Do I long for my shadow?

One day, the kindly Doctor Bell
told my parents, who were also kind
to hie me to the children’s hospital
and sign there all the forms that bind:

Party A, first names blank and blank
To Party B, for a novel therapy
with regard to C, first name blank
shall impose no liability
(Party C, sign Scorpio
was at this time about eight or so).

How long was I there? A certain hand
pulls down in my memory a blanking veil
I remember dad saying, understand?
and how one night seems to prevail

over all others – when I saw I was bound
to understand one thing about being lost:
torn away forever the sheen of being found
for which, since, I’ve paid a little cost.

Panic Attack No. 5

… what was it I was saying?
I know my bill of rights, thank you very much.
I know the tape is running. I know the camera’s on.
I know the lord of dark corners and the third degree
Knows all my disappointments and my little fun

You say, we’re done here. We’re done.

The prowler is parked a block from the shattered glass
He’s here for the order, girls, forget about the law.
The always wrong the shadowless the sucker and the goof
Can forget about proving jack, he always has the proof
Of their little disappointments and their little fun

You say, we’re done here, we’re done.

No, the sentence before that one, what did I say?
I’ve always had the money not to have to see
I go to the opening nights, always have a place to pee.
In the cold dark corners they are lighting matches what the hell
My little disappointments… my little fun …

You say, we’re done here, we’re done.

Poem

Plenty is a closet full of shoes
Shoes strewn across the landscape
The dead soldiers shod, and shed, and still dead

This is not what I think
When the open-toed sandal, the two inch heel
The snakeskin boots approach and lick me

Yet stricken from all the mirrors
How shall I know if within me
I’m not lying already among the body count?

The Sprinklers

The males just stare at each other

She says, dismayed,

Holding them in her hand

Above the season-dulled yellow

Of a garden hose, by some hand roughly cut.

It is in the jungulated hole

we’ve tried to stuff the coupling

-male – and now stand clueless before the next step.

At our feet, the carboard box holds couplings, all male

And next to it, a male-laden sprinkler.

In an iconic flash I see

Some demonic truth unfold all at once.

Goddess, is this just for me?

This scene, this garden

This scanty grass, this hindmost Eden?

Never will such plumbing be joined.

Oh fuck it. I’ll just water by hand

She says, dropping brass to earth

And kicking the sprinkler aside.

Oh fuck it. And off she strides.

Susanna and the elders

Then Susanna sighed and said, I am straited on euery side: for if I doe this thing, it is death vnto me: and if I doe it not, I cannot escape your hands.

Prodigal daughter of a dynasty down
to its lottery tickets and genetic drift
who gets around, she gets around
they say, eyepinned to her rosy pink shift.

All the peeps in this keyhole diorama
are crazy bout her “going in euery day and walking”
yes, and the bubbles, the whole nudie drama, yes
gets the uncles all stiff and stalking

with their rattrap tight scenario as wanker’s will
comes unzipped as in the dream
threaten the dumb puss she’ll spill
diagrammed out for the whole dumb team.

In my version there’s no dick Daniel
although in the foreground put the angel with the sword.
It all moves so smoothly and it’s the girl
who is lied and died crying out for the Lord.

How many nude girls find in the end that nudity’s become
a stranger to them when they’d only just begun
to get the hang of it?
from the elders’ eyes to the sextext sent
from some ill-lit and ill-gotten incident.

Poem

The poet at the Winn-Dixie

The grocery store clerk has taken

as her subject

the prices themselves, in all their ambiguity.

You may take your mayonnaise

-- bag of chips – sixpack

to her line, but she will dispense

with the x dollars and the y pence

marked, and make of the price

what her impression yields.

At the end of the process

you may stand stripped and bankrupt

but you now really know what mayonnaise costs.

Poem

We felt the weight of the rain waiting
in the un-airconditioned house in N.
for the rain to come down. Anti-climax in the evening
when mere dribble was our lot. We went out, we went in

bitching, spraying anti-moustique freely, scanning our bites
- such were our days, and such were our nights.

I want, like all the new age ladies, to chill the fuck out
- to be filled with some Zen-like, topaz peace
as though I were a bathtub long and large I could fill
and lounge until I found mineral salt release.

But under this mumpy sky, release is not to be or begin.
Pound dogs prowl and howl under my skin.

Poem

The dames came out of the cards
The broads came out of the gangster's lounge act
The ladies came out of the front pew
The sluts were dragged from the pressmetal mouth of the locker

Ribs ribs ribs
The desert is strewn with our ribs.
I asked: can these bones live?
God sez: what kind of odds do you give?

Poem

The Beach Republic

Les Hommes se haïssent entre eux naturellement
Said the Jansenist mook to his flame. I disagree
But I can see
The mood. On the esplanade, above the curving beach
- a plantation of sand and mud and the tide coming in -
August, and the republic is in full swing:
Some build castles with buckets, some play with balls
Some gather shells from the tide’s edge, some head to the stalls
Where they can change or pee or buy a cone.
Self directed play for some, for other’s ocean revery -
And nobody worried about territory.

I count all the bright towels – their expansive flutter
Laid down against the damp sand and low breeze.
Around here the bathers are not in each other’s elbows –
The northern water in this small Breton burg
Holds a clean, bourgeois attraction
Unlike the Mediterranean or the Florida coast
And boasts a lesser crowd.

Families, mostly. Here, the blood beef back of a man
His burdens fallen from him, is turned
Utterly to the rays of the weltering sun.
We hate no one here, sister. The wind tears
The shrieks of kids, throws them out to sea.
The waves come in
With curlers in their hair, leaving
Old lobstermen and pleasure craft to scramble in their wake.

I envy that man. How I would like my days
To be spent on a towel, until the hour comes round
To have a drink and then another.
To eat one lobster and then its brother.
Hate each other? No. But from the esplanade I can see
How we could eat each other up,
lock stock and have another cup.
As the sea roars itself home.

Poem

Here we are, at our ease
In this Breton Mickey Mouse Club
Near a pebbly shore.

What is life for?
We don’t know, today. Up next
Is the swimming lesson.

Our kids, aged three to seven
Paddle in large blue tubs
Of beach blue polyurethane.

I could be bounded
In a Mickey Mouse Club
And think myself king of infinite space

But I’d have to have
An allowance of fifty centime coins
To play baby foot with.

They paddle from one end
To the other, cling to spaghetti floats,
Gape at their teacher, arms flung out, mimicking strokes.

What is life for?
Let’s all put on goggles
And swim under the water til we can’t.

Let’s all eat well tonight
And drown a bit of our life
Under an endless glass of wine.

Fuck Kafka

The ocean’s is the heaviest hand.
In this ferry to Belle Ile,
I can feel through the hull some part of the larger palm.
“From bend of bay to swerve of shore”
We’re grasped. We’re free. We’re grasped.

It’s delusion, but what pull is stronger
Than the siren’s song, to us moderns silent
Just as all those Attic statues, stripped of their paint
Disconnect from every idol ever adored

To become art, and then entertainment, inc.
Still, sometimes I’m a fucking siren
As gaudy, greedy and teethed for prey
As any of my sisters.

the no alternative bullshit

There is something comic about a politician standing up before God and man and free will and mouthing the phrase “no alternative”. Except in the case of Moses and the ten commandments (and even then the first draft was broken on the way down from the peak of Mount Sinai), no politician in history has ever mouthed anything, ever represented anything, except an alternative. No politician has ever produced the inevitable.  And so it was with the Thatcher line, with the wrecking crew of Austerians in Europe, and with the current nosedrip discourse of the moderate Dems. These Dems think that alternatives to the most expensive and aggressively unequal healthcare system in all the “freeworld” are just no-goes. They think the billionaires actually made their billions – instead of having their billions made for them by the workers, in the traditional way. They think actually doing something about climate change disaster – doing something that isn’t a mild carbon tax – is undo-able, cause where are we gonna get the money?

The no alternative line goes back to the end of history line in the nineties. In those days, with the wall down (which made Iggy Pop want to sing Louie Louie), oil prices low,and shock therapy turning a totalitarian communist state into a funloving mafia state, specializing in exporting prostitutes and oil, neoliberalism was celebrating its springtime. Its pamphleteer and poet,  Tom Friedman, came up with one of an image struck out of the poetry of the business inspirational racket (which is the only poetry acceptable under neo-liberalism): the golden straightjacket. Friedman was quite enthused about the triumph of democracy everywhere, as long as democracy didn’t go overboard and put power in the hands of the people. To prevent this, God gave us central bankers and Milton Friedman. Neo-liberalism, back then, advertised itself as so realistic that we all had to eat it every day and every night and never ever dream we had a choice. It dreamed of a world in which there was infinitely increasing returns on investment (oh, what joy to live in the Information age!) and the business cycle was road kill.  But road kill reanimated and pissed all over the New Economy in 2001. Still, for six years the pretense held that a credit system that indebted a population that engrossed none of the increase in productivity that they actually created could replace what used to be called, quaintly, a “raise”. Until the house turned out to be bankrupt, and the elites had to scurry about in 2008-2010, doing what they do: using the power of the government to prop up the power of capital. Or, in populist terms, the state chose to simply give the upper .01 percent throughout the developed world hundreds of billions of dollars. They did not chose to give the 99 percent money – no, the 99 percent were assured that they were making distant money, since their pension funds and other investments (which represented a pathetic substitute for the retirement that social democracy used to hold out)  would eke their way across the bleak landscape, as long as we could foreclose on the losers, lower those labor costs even more, and hike up the price of social goods.

            In Europe at the moment, we are definitely on the edge of a recession. After the mildest lift possible, after the great shortfalls and stumbles of the 2008-2012 period. In fact, if money had flowed like Keynesian wine back then there would actually be more employment, more productivity, and more satisfaction with life than there is now, when there isn’t a satisfied population in sight: pissed off is the new black. The no alternative world is looking shabbier every day. And when the shabbiness is questioned, the same chorus answers: we owe so much money! In fact, tons of fake money are owed all the way around. But in this time of little faith, people are beginning to ask who they owe  the money to, and why. That is, why did the elite which led us into the no alternative cul de sac make the choices it did; and why the choices, when they all went to shit, had no effect on… the elite.

personalism and the left: Morales and the coup

If we look at the Left from the the perspective of a 120 years, one anomaly really stands out: the curious case of personalism.

I’ve been thinking of the “cult of personality”since Evo Morales fled Bolivia. Of course, what the right is doing in Bolivia is a coup. There’s no doubt that the right has long sought to make Morales, a democratically elected president, into a ‘dictator” figure, something that is then pawned off on a compliant press in the U.S. and Europe.

What was “dictatorial” was Morales attempt to more justly distribute economic gains. Bolivia, unlike other primary products countries, has had a remarkable growth trajectory over the past 14 years, since he has been in office. His record is in shining contrast with his privatizing predecessors.

However, the real mark of political success, that is, the emplacement of a party that can robustly represent the interests of the workers, is structural. Here, Morales, like so many leftist leaders (one thinks of Castro and Chavez) has miserably failed. When he went into exile in Mexico, it was a loss for the Left. However, it wasn’t a loss for the programs he had nurtured. That loss, politically, came about because his vice president, Álvaro García Linera,  also resigned. In fact, all those in Morales’ party who were in line to become president resigned, thus leaving the post to a far right Christian,  Jeanine Anez.

A question has been lost in the reports about this coup-ish transition of power: why did the officials from the Movement toward Socialism party – the MAS – resign?

My opinion is: they resigned because Morales fled. They were more loyal to Morales than to Bolivia. This is what personalism is about.

Of course, it is an old story. When Lenin came to power in 1918, there was already abundant evidences of a cult. Lenin himself was an adroit politician, and surely thought of the cult as a tactic for imposing Bolshevik rule on Russia. It is, though, a dangerous tactic, with a tendency to take over the program entirely. When Lenin died, there was, briefly, an interval in which the party seemed to retract from the total monopolization of the political space – but this moment quickly ended. It was a moment attached, in true personalist style, to Trotsky, who lost to Stalin. Stalin’s personality cult was modeled on Lenin’s and Trotsky’s.

The more Bolivia descends, predictably, into a chaos that brings out the army and a decade of rightwing repression, the more one should think about the costs of personalism – and resist it. Because it sacrifices real advances for the working class to romanticism and a rather skewed individualism, with the individual being the leader.

autofiction and the prime of Muriel Spark

Write what you know is the advice of the writing class. Write about who you know is the mantra of the gossip column. Surely these two maxims are meant to meet – and the meet will be cute.

The name for it now is “auto-fiction”. Its great predecessor, always wheeled out to impress the rubes, is Proust. And who can deny that the Marcel of In Search of Past Time bears a striking similarity to that man in the cork lined room at the end of the line, caught in his web of words?

There’s an amusing story in the New York Times about the autofiction feuds of Norway. Norway is the featured country at the Frankfurt Book Fair this year, and this has produced a thin stream of stories surveying the literary scene in that country of 5 and a half million people. Not a lot of people up there, clustered around the fjords, but there are many writers, including international star Knausgaard, the king of auto-fiction if there is one. The story is, thank God, not another warm-over of the Knausgaard story, but instead features a  bookish shootout going on between two sisters, one of whom wrote an auto-fiction about growing up with an abusive father and the other of whom responded with a novel about growing up with an abusive drunk for a sister. In other words, look who’s talking.

One year after the publication of her novel “Will and Testament,” the Norwegian author Vigdis Hjorth was at home with her two daughters when she received a surprising email. Hjorth’s widely read 2016 book, which tells the story of an Oslo woman who accuses her father of sexually assaulting her as a child, and which was seemingly inspired by elements of Hjorth’s own life, had spurred a debate in Norway about the ethics of adapting real events into fiction.

The email informed her that her younger sister, Helga Hjorth, was publishing a novel of her own. The sister’s book focused on a woman whose life was upended by the release of a dishonest sibling’s autobiographical novel, and seemed to be an answer to “Will and Testament.”

“The older sister in that novel is an awful human being, very cruel, narcissistic, alcoholic, psychopathic,” Vigdis Hjorth, 60, said in a recent interview. “And, you know, as bad as she was, I thought, ‘This is good for me.’”

This is good for me – that’s the spirit! All of this is extremely pleasing to my current mood. I’ve just finished Loitering with Intent, a Muriel Spark novel that skates circles around the auto-fiction device before it even wore that name. It is, if you will, a meta-auto-fiction, a tendril from the great root of Don Quixote, in which, as is well known, Don Quixote has to struggle with the fake Don Quixote conjured up by some other author after Cervantes had published the first volume of the work. That characters walk abroad in this world is no news to novelists, but is a perpetual surprise to journalists. While she was writing the novel, Spark said in an interview that it “sort of sums up my life”. She didn’t say it was autobiographical however: the summing up of a life comes in different disguises, as every tax accountant knows.

I’d put Loitering with Intent on the shelf with At Swim-Two-Birds – they form incongruent counterparts, like the left and right hand. 

The rest is at willettsmag. 

cancelling excitement culture

I have lately been feeling pity for the word “excite”. The origin of the word is respectable, and even stuffy – from cite, or move, come forth. Cite appears in English first, as a legal term: a summons. Excite is a summoning too, but one that was connotatively associated with the body. When I learned French in high school, one of the things we were told that made us giggle is not to use “excite” in French, since it was vaguely sexual – a summoning of the libido.

To me, as an American, exciting is associated with more innocent things, or at least libidinously compensatory activities. “Isn’t this exciting” was inevitably ironic, for high schoolers. It was the type of thing the Sunday School teacher said about some dreary game meant to amuse us and edify us biblically.

Exciting still carried that whiff of the bogus, that eyeroll quotation marks, into the eighties. But at some point – perhaps when business schools overtook the humanities as the degree of choice – exciting was revived, a gadget for the new age of Babbitry. It was not only revived, but it started its march towards omnipresence. You could not announce you were taking a dump without saying that you were “very excited by the opportunity to take this dump.” If you were freelancing, and you have, as you must, a twitter account, you must always announce your feeblest initiative by saying how excited you were by it. Trevor Noah, for instance, wants you to know that he is “excited to announce my new 2020 tour dates!” Just to announce the dates! As a tv personality, you would think that he would be a bit blasé, but not Trevor. Bill Gates is “excited” about everything: about Boston Mills new “innovations” in steel production, about technology to “fix” flaws in photosynthesis (a big agro-business moneymaker that is “exciting” because it will, of course, help “poor people”), he’s excited all over the place about innovation. Anybody who has anything to announce nowadays – that they are taking a job or quitting a job, that they are going to school or just that they are one degree above comatose – must be “excited” to announce it. They are never sad, or indifferent; they are never simply announcing, telling, whispering, purring, etc. No, they are always excited. We live in a population that is carbonated on excitement, with bubbles of excitement entering their blood stream every second. You can hardly nail us down – so much are we jumping for joy.

All this excitement leads to a curious letdown feeling, in actuality. It is as if we have exhausted surprise itself, and nothing is exciting, since everything is. I do not deal in predictions, since I am so bad at them, but still, I’m excited to announce that I think excitement is about to take a turn for the less frequent. In the future, people will not be excited to announce anything. They will be, perhaps, ecstatic, orgasmic, or on the edge of their chairs; they will be cool, they will be beady eyed, they will be stoic, they will be anything but excited. This might seem impossible. It might seem like excitement and excited are set in stone, and that the seven habits of highly excitable people will follow us to the flooding of the coastal cities and beyond. But change is possible!

And I’m so excited about it!

Prizes and prophets: against all prizes in the arts and sciences

When I was in the second grade, a now dim tidelet of a memory, a weak link over the cholesterol and the neural network, the teacher gave us all a challenge. We were supposed to write down every book we read. At the end of the school year, the person with the most books on the list would get a prize. I can’t remember what the prize was – a pencil sharpener? A gold star? Whatever.

Well, at the end of the year I had the most books. So I won the prize. And was congratulated by my parents, too. But what I still remember was how sheepish I felt. Because many of the books I wrote on my list were only half read. I was being, in a word that I didn’t know back then, “aspirational”.

Perhaps it was that experience that soured me on the whole prize biz. Although perhaps it is because I am not a prize winner. I haven’t won a prize since second grade – it has been a prizeless life. And I have long been puzzled by the whole prize economy. Like, here’s my questions: what is a prize, how did it come lumbering into this here Western Culture, why do we want to “win” them, and particularly why have the arts and sciences centered prizes so much?

First off, lets start with some wild bourgeois speculation. I can, actually, understand how prize mania starts. Prizes are so part of the warp-n-woofery of childhood that it would be hard for American 21^st century parents to find a substitute if, through some magic wand, we abolished prize giving. Baby is always being given treats for good behavior. And as baby grows into pre-schooler and then schooler, the treats keep coming at a Pavlovian pace. When the child is bad, you can threaten to take away dessert, or something, thus making dessert a prize. And when you want your child to be good, you often promise a prize – go to the dentist with a minimum of screaming and afterwards you get the ice cream. At the same time, school work and prizes go together like that there ice cream goes with some chocolate sauce. Prizes produce the kind of emulation, or are supposed to, that we want to hatch in our hominids: compete, God damn it!

Competition and prizes go way back in this here Western Culture. Among the Greeks, the very gods competed. It was a beauty competition between Hera, Aphrodite and Athena, judged by Paris, that became the root cause of the Trojan war. The Greeks even marked time with Olympic competitions, where prizes were rewarded – and they rewarded prizes to poets, too. Poor Sappho committed suicide, prizeless and in love, according to legend, while Sophocles won the first place prize for his plays 24 times at the Dionysia, a festival that included play competitions. For the athletes, prizes were ritual objects, crowns, corona, of myrtle or olive. The Romans had a custom of awarding soldiers corona obsidionalis, made of wild flowers. These crowns signified a connection between the divine and the profane world, but one should beware of the Victorian view of the Romans and Greeks as gentlemen competing with no commercial reward – as Moehle points out, the Greek cities gave monetary rewards to victors, even if the judges strictly awarded crowns.  Ancient Greek has many words related to “geras” – the common term for honor. Emile Beneviste devotes a whole chapter to the semantic field of geras in Le Vocabulaire Des Institutions Indo-Europennes, showing that it covers the ground between a particular prize that is contended for an the spirit of honor of, say, a household.

I should note here that etymologists group together prize (or prix) with price and praise, deriving them from the Latin pretium, with further connotations of honor. We still retain that tie with honor in honorarium. The Greeks, however, could very well separate price or gain from prize or honor. Aristotle in the Nichomachaen Ethics writes:

“Now the greatest external good we should assume to be the thing which we offer as a tribute to the gods, and which is most coveted by men of high station, and is the prize awarded for the noblest deeds; and such a thing is honour, for honour is clearly the greatest of external goods.”

The strange economy of the prize is expressed in the strange logic of Aristotle’s sentence – that the thing that is offered to the gods is the same as the prize that is awarded for the noblest deeds. It is as if the nobleman diverts from the gods a certain sacrifice – not materially, but abstractly. It is an odd interception of currency, which is validated by being offered to the Gods – thus, a divine currency – and that consists of the greatest of external goods: honour. That it is external – that it requires an other to recognize it – and that it is given to the gods, but is somehow annexed by the men of the highest station, make it a strange kind of tribute, or currency.

Read the rest at Willetts. Here.