writing is not hard. It is the easiest thing in the world.

 

 

 Tennyson, famously, was averse to the word "scissors". Something about the s-es. I don't know if Tennyson had a lisp. When I was a child of six or so, I did. Scissors would be a treachery. My own aversion is for the word "craft". How I hate to hear "craft" applied to writing! The "craft" of the story, poem, whatever. It repulses me, with its overtones of some genteel, antiquated hobby. Engineering, that would be alright, I suppose. Art, design, plumbing, all of that, which puts writing where it should be, in the world where people build, repair, create fixes, mob up, make spaghetti, help their kids with homework, and are alternately illuminated and tired. Craft comes from the early modern guild economy, the fierce nostalgia for which has fed the fascism and reaction of the 20th and 21st century. (Even though I should add that guild organizations, from doctors to profs, have endured to our day with more vigor than unions. Alas.)

 

So where did it come from, this blight of "craft"? I suspect it came by way of the conservative modernists, the agrarians, the Tates and Ransoms, who viewed modern society as a blight in contrast to the organic societies of the pre-bellum South, i.e. societies held together by slavery. As opposed to the Russian formalists, who were seeking a vocabulary of devices and machinery, in line with their sympathy for socialism and the stripping away of superstition, the conservative modernists wanted a vocabulary that would make supplant the radicalism of, say, the futurist with the dark port wine views of a Spengler, moaning for an aristocracy.

In spite of this, "craft" did, to an extent, democratize literary culture. That culture was overwhelmingly masculinist, and I feel that it is turning. Put that in the balance with the trivialization effected by craft, the mini-industry that has sprung up around it, the mystification of the culture producer's position in the system of media and entertainment. Everything that I value in literary culture is anti-craft. Sloppiness, guesses, rants, jibes, reportage, stories told while waiting in line, raps while drinking in the park, emails, tweets, porno fan fic- these are the forms I want to go back to.

The margins to the center – that was briefly a slogan of the Italian extreme left in the 70s. The margins cannot be margins and go to the center, however – structure resists that kind of simple minded restructuration.

The earliest use of the term craft in the current “creative writing” sense that I can find is by Vernon Lee, in the Contemporary Review, 1895. It is, I admit, a pretty good essay on literary construction, and gets the construction part right. Here’s how she begins: “The craft of the writer consists, I am convinced, in manipulating the contents of his reader’s mind, that is to say, taken from the technical side as distinguished from the psychologic, in construction. Construction is not only a matter of single words or sentences, but of whole passages and divisions; and the material which the writer manipulates is not only the single impressions, single ideas and emotions, stored up in the reader’s mind and deposited there by no act of his own, but those very moods and trains of thought into which the writer, by his skilful selection of words and sentences, has grouped these single impressions, those very moods and trains of thought which were determined by the writer himself.”

From thence one can draw a line to Shlovsky’s writing as a devise and Benjamin’s writing as a social function. Vernon Lee was no goof. Violet Paget, to use her real name, had her eye on what Henry James was doing and satirised him in a story that put a finis on their relationship. He wrote to his brother that “she is as dangerous and uncanny as she is intelligent-which is saying a great deal. . . . She's a tiger-cat!"

She wrote in three languages – French, Italian and English – and was nobody’s fool. It is the impress of this multi-lingualism that allowed her to see that the “deposit” of a language’s bits in the writer’s mind is not a willed thing, but a force internalized. And to that extent – to the extent that craft works on a resistant material – she is utterly justified. Unfortunately, the word craft has migrated from witch and iron to arts and … It signals, to me, a certain hobby-lobbyness. As well as a whole ethos about “good” writing being hard, which is just bullshit.

Writing’s a doddle.

at the center of the city, the insane asylum

 The city, like the labyrinth, hides its center through a multitude of false routes to the center. And once in the center, the city hides its exits by imposing its one way streets, while the  art of the labyrinth is all in dead ends. The homology between the city and the labyrinth doesn’t stop there – for at the center of the labyrinth, to get the narrative going, to motivate its structure, there is a monster – and at the center of the city, there is a crime,

At least, this is the city as viewed by German expressionists. I’ve just watched Fritz Lang’s last film from the Weimar German period, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, made after M. The film was made, I’ve read, in Hungary. It was written by Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou. They split up conjugally and artistically after the film came out – or rather, was repressed by the Nazis in 1933. Lang went to Hollywood, Harbou, apparently with a new lover in tow, made a couple of films under the Nazis. The compromises one makes.

To return to my phantom theme, the Testament of Dr. Mabuse is an eerily appropriate close of the period of German filmmaking that begins with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. In both films, the center of the city – or labyrinth – is an asylum for the criminally insane. German Gothic, as we all know, was a much more serious matter than French or English Gothic. English Gothic begins with the building of grottoes on the estate of Horace Walpole, whereas German gothic comes from the dark heart of the people – the Grimm brother’s tales (and never mind that one of their main informants was the daughter of refugee French Huguenots). The German Gothic was always conscious of itself as the shadow of a larger politics. The infinitely mercurial Hoffman was a refugee in 1813, uprooted by both Napoleon’s troops and the Russian troops moving across Germany in pursuit. That period put its own spectres in his work. The expressionists, the Prague group around Meyrink, all of this fed into the two great expressions of gothic angst in Germany – Kafka’s work and the expressionist German cinema. M. and The Trial have ties to each other that have nothing to do with Lang’s knowledge of Kafka’s novel – I imagine he didn’t know it. Although Thea might have.

Of course, it is impossible to view Dr. Mabuse without thinking of the history of Germany that came after it. Or without thinking of the extreme political violence of the Weimar era itself – all the assassinations. The hypnotic master-mind – both an excuse and a nightmare, conjured up from the Juniper Tree, or Hansel and Gretel.

Ein Mann wohnt im Haus der spielt mit den Schlangen der schreibt /der schreibt wenn es dunkelt nach Deutschland dein goldenes Haar Margarete…

Memory's dream

 

In 2003, an editor named David Barker started commissioning a series of short books on albums, which he called  33 ½. It was a genius idea: Mark Polizzati on Highway 61 Revisited, Warren Zevon on Dusty in Memphis, Jonathan Lethem on Fear of Music, etc.  It is a rather brilliant conceit, which takes up the album as a complete unit. It has rather unravelled – the album that is – since 2003. This was something we all knew was coming with the download/upload Web. Even before the Internet – the B.I. years, as they will eventually be known – peeps were making tapes that bound together different songs to create a different unit of experience. I remember many of those tapes fondly, although if I held one in my hands this morning, I would not know what to do with it – I don’t have a tape player, and haven’t had one since I got my first PC, back in the back of….

Albums are excellent memory objects. I would be easy for me to write, say, short stories infused with my memory about Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, or Donna Summer’s Bad Girls. Each track could be correlated to some day, or at least epoch, in my life.

Which brings me to my topic: memory.

In my experience, memory has two directions. That is, when I remember, the direction memory seems to take is either straight, direct, or lateral. In the former case, I am like a fisherman casting a line – I cast my mind back and hook my object, that thing or event in the past. Or I don’t. When I don’t, it means I have either forgotten it or it didn’t exist. Psychologists have shown that it is a rather simple matter to create fake memories, in which case what was never there is remembered anyway. But regardless of whether the object is absent, non-existant, or forged, the direction of memory, here, is direct. It is analogous to double book accounting, where the column with the object and the column with the memory are on one plane, side by side. Lateral memory, however, is a different thing. It is about connotations and associations. Memory here is something that emerges without, at times, my having made any effort to remember. I will, instead, suddenly remember. This suddenness has something of the character of waking up – it speaks of two very different states of consciousness. And yet, just as I can wake up feebly, and fall back to sleep, so too I can suddenly recall a thing and then it will slip away. I will forget what I just remembered, or rather, the memory that was forced upon me. If it was something that I wanted to note down, or something that I remember in the moment of remembering that I was supposed to remember, I’ll mentally rummage around. The direct method here fails me, because though I can directly remember the event of suddenly remembering, the object here, the event, is wrapped around something I’ve forgotten. To find that content, I often resort to association – to trying to construct what I was doing when the sudden memory hit me. Or, having a sense of what the content of this sudden memory was – having it on the tip of my tongue – I’ll try to find associates with it – I’ll play a sort of guessing game.

For instance: let’s say I am trying to recall the sum total of my experiences with Leonard Cohen’s The Stranger song. I’d have to recall putting the album,  Songs of Leonard Cohen,  on the bulky fake wood stereo my parents bought at some fortunate point when I was twelve or thirteen, a purchase that informed my entire musical life. I would have to take a memory glimpse at that stereo, which had drawers underneath the record player – needle combination in which I stored my albums. I would have to think about the storing of albums, how they lean thinly one against the other. I would have to think of album art, which at one time had an importance that is now entirely fabulous, since it has no popular existence. It exists now as a small icon on a screen. I would have to remember the album, where I purchased it – without doubt some pre-Walmart emporium on Memorial Drive – and the way Leonard looked not at all pop on the album, but rather pleasingly  like some poet. And I’d have to remember that I did, over time, get by heart the words of that long long song. Then, the first time I saw McCabe and Mrs. Miller, which begins with the Warren Beatty character, in a bearskin coat, riding on a horse through the wilderness – a vision and a sound that shot through me and gave me, and still gives me, the sense of an expanded existence in the wilds of America, a sense that has always remained with me and makes me, in spite of the old tired racisms and idiocies that issue from that country continually, know the country in terms of a crush I will probably never get over. I would have to think about how I instantly recognize the guitar fingerings that introduce that song, which I believe was the first song on the second side – unless that was the Master Song.  I’d have to remember the distinct small scratch of putting the needle on the groove that starts that song, that static which after a while becomes part of the song itself. This is of course a teen memory, the teen slowly dying over the years until it is a mere whisp, like a dead warrior in the Greek afterlife, a summonable being. And then the memory would have to take on my singing of that song, which I have done frequently, especially when driving a car or riding a bicycle – which to me are occasions for singing to myself. More than a shower, a shower is a more pensive adding up things I have to do experience. And this singing would bring up travels – for instance, driving from Atlanta to Santa Fe. And so on.

This kind of lateral memory, with its suddenness and its frustrations as to the exact details of the remembered and memory signified object, is only one aspect of  lateral memory. The other aspect relates memory to the daydream – it is the memory dream.

In fact, in the 1990s, I tried to write a book using the memory dream as a methodological principle. Take an object or event – a humble spoon, or looking out the window – and specify its real instances.  That is, touch in your present, mentally touch, the spoon or the looking in its stark and naked particularity.  Say the spoon is a measuring spoon, part of a set of measuring spoons made of some cheap pewter like material and bound together with a ring, with measurements imprinted on the handle: 2 oz, 5 0z, etc. Or take the window that you looked out of in your ground apartment in Austin on 45th street, decades ago. That view was really a nonview, comprising a sidewalk, some raggedy bamboo plants grown large enough to form a wall of sorts, and behind that a large dull brown fence that was evidently erected to keep the residents in the cheap apartment house that I was living in – marginals all – from peering at the apartment complex next to us, where it was all swimming pools and nice cars and barbecue on the patio. Here, the logician’s great tool – quantification – breaks down, since it really isn’t clear what divides one looking out from the other. The turn of the head? The mental act of attention? Is looking even defined by consecutive looking, or is the lookings out the window that are divided by other events unified by the intention to look out the window – I say, for instance, I was looking out the window, waiting for the landlord. Quantification is, however, a way to get into the memory game – because the fun in the game is to pose these questions so that gradually you broaden the memory dream, you remember, unexpectedly, the waxed paper into which your mother poured the flour mix for the cupcakes, you remember where it was kept in the cabinet, you remember the other things in the cabinet and the smell of vanilla, etc. In a sense, instead of fishing around in memory, here we are treating it as a jigsaw puzzle. And one that is not, it should be noted, played on one horizontal plane – for the connotation of looking out the window can lead you backwards and forwards in time to other lookings out of other windows. The goal is to cut through the cloud of essences in which the particulars in our life have been wrapped. The routines, which excavate the particularity of an event and substitute a likeness of that event – I remember the window not as it looked, smudged, the yellowing curtain in suspense above it, on some particular moment of some particular day, but I remember the essence of looking out the window, a composite of watchings.

Happy days, wiling away my time in the memory dream!

It is said that the Emperor Rudolph of Bohemia, who had one of the largest collections of curiosities in Europe, possessed a vial in which was held the dust from which the Lord made Adam. This is a curiosity indeed, maybe the Ur-curiosity. There’s a number of paradoxes involved in this object. Was this dust the remnant, the leftovers, of the dust from which Adam was made – or did Adam have two bodies, one of human flesh, the other of dust. Memory seems to give us a parallel paradox. We, too, contain the motes of which we are made, the instances that memory represents. Yet the container, here, is identical to the sum of those motes – just as Adam was both that dust and a divine animal. The artist in me would like to collect every mote, every jot. An impossible grab and snatch expedition, granted, but one I am eternally tempted to launch, to lose myself in, finding that lost, interior Eldorado.

lynyrd skynyrd and Proust

 Unexpectedly, a bit of my teen years in suburban Atlanta visited my son's French elementary school yesterday. As part of a show and tell, one of his roommates brought a guitar and played a riff from Freebird. Freebird! I looked down my seventeen year old nose at Lynyrd Skynnyrd and basically all Southern rock of the seventies. But perhaps that music had its revenge on me, for I can, actually, in a mesmeric trance, lipsync Freebird.

I wonder what Proust would do with this material? The agents of the memory that unleashes In Search of Lost Time are taste and smell - the taste of madeleines, the most common cookie, and the smell of various perfumes and flowers. If, however, the young Marcel had lived in Clarkston, Georgia, I'm pretty sure the agent of memory would be sound - the sound on the radio of pop songs. Some station in Atlanta, in the seventies, got the kids up to go to high school by playing, every day, Dylan's Rainy Day women song (they stone you when you're going to make a buck...). Lynyrd Skynyrd was everywhere in my high school. Or I should say at the white end of my high school - though the school was officially de-segregated, there were few black students in my classes.
If you look at American pop culture and the way it acts as a memory agent, you see some interesting things. Every aging truck driver and secretary is in search of lost time, and they pursue it through the songs of their teen years. Now, we have infinite numbers of concert films from the seventies on YouTube, so you can even wallow in the high with which you went to see the Allman Brothers at Piedmont Park, or whatever. Myself, thinking I was quite the outlaw, never went to any of these concerts, and yet here I am, washed up in France, remembering "and this bird you cannot chaaaange (or is it chain?)" and thinking of comrades, now retiring, who sat next to me in classes that I can barely remember the purpose of. All the ships at sea eventually go down to the bottom.
But this bird you cannot chain.

The expulsion of the giants

 

There is a valiant but small tradition of scholars who see the connection between the so called Western tradition and that of the “East”: among whom the most famous is, perhaps, Martin Buber. Before writing his masterpiece in the twenties, I and Thou, Buber published a “translation” of the Chuang-Tzu that was really a translation of the English translation of the Chuang-Tzu made by James Legge. In a wonderful essay by Jonathan Herman, “The Mysterious Mr. Wang: the search for Martin Buber’s Confucian Ghostwriter” (one of those rare academic titles that evokes the Fu Manchu series by Sax-Rohmer), the background of Buber’s effort is exposed. Sinology was constructed in the German speaking countries in the 19th century on terms that were consistent with a long theme in German culture stemming from Herder, which on one reading promoted a basic equality between cultural productions around the globe. The idea that one should accept the Chinese philosopher as an equal in the dialogue of philosophy is still more valued in theory than in practice. Few really put in that work. But in the German countries, perhaps partly due to German imperial designs on China after the Boxer Rebellion, Chinese studies held a special place. One remembers that Canetti’s Peter Kien, the protagonist of Auto-de-Fe, is a Sinologist. It is through these grids – Sinology and Hassidic Tales – that Buber was enabled to think through the metaphysics of communication that is at the center of the I – thou book. Kafka, too, in The Great Wall of China, sees China through - perhaps - Buber's eyes.

This direct link, in the early twentieth century, and other links going back to Leibniz, should be backgrounded by a certain community of motifs. For instance: the giant. A too often forgotten figure in Western philosophy.

The first chapter of the Chuang-Tzu consists of a comparison between the giant and the small, beginning with the famed fish, K’un:

“IN THE NORTHERN DARKNESS there is a fish and his name is K'un.1 The K'un is so huge I don't know how many thousand li he measures. He changes and becomes a bird whose name is P'eng. The back of the P'eng measures I don't know how many thousand li across and, when he rises up and flies off, his wings are like clouds all over the sky. When the sea begins to move,2 this bird sets off for the southern darkness, which is the Lake of Heaven. (Burton Watson translation)
Against the wonder of the P’eng is set the laughter of the dove and the cicada:
“The cicada and the little dove laugh at this, saying, "When we make an effort and fly up, we can get as far as the elm or the sapanwood tree, but sometimes we don't make it and just fall down on the ground. Now how is anyone going to go ninety thousand li to the south!”
The chapter then proceeds through other giant/small contrasts in the style peculiar to it – each passage being at once unlinked from the proceeding one and yet bearing the distinct resemblance that one hand of cards bears to another. So giant and small face off against each other in wisdom, in status, in miraculous powers. The final contrast is between Hui Tzu and Chuang Tzu. Hui Tzu, given giant gourd seeds, plants and grows them, but the gourds are too big, so he smashes them Chuang Tzu laughs at this, saying that Hui Tzu, seems to be in thrall to the outward show of the gourds only: “Now you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why didn't you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things! Obviously you still have a lot of underbrush in your head!"
So: what is the Daoist attitude towards the giant – are we looking at things from the perspective of the P’eng or the cicada? Surely Chuang Tzu’s tone of mockery is supposed to release us from the first impression of the giant – the impression of sheer wonder. And that is a motif that has references pointing to the early modern era in Europe: this is when, as a sly maneuver, the writers who were inventing the “novel” used it to attack wonder itself , the glue that officially kept the sacred system together. Rabelais’ mock giants, the windmills that Don Quixote attacks, thinking that they are giants – this is about, in one sense, chasing the giants from the culture. Giordano Bruno uses the same mock heroic means in the Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. In the Ash Wednesday colloquy, Nolan (Bruno himself) is extolled in terms that could plug into the Chuang Tzu:
“Now here is he who has pierced the air, penetrated the sky, toured the realm of stars, traversed the boundaries of the world, dissipated the fictitious walls of the first, eighth, ninth, tenth spheres, and whatever else might have been attached to these by the devices of vain mathematicians and by the blind vision of popular philosophers. Thus aided by the fullness of sense and reason, lie opened with the key of most industrious inquiry those enclosures of truth that can be opened to us at all, by presenting naked the shrouded and veiled nature; he gave eyes to moles, illumined the blind who cannot fix their eyes and admire their own images in so many mirrors which surround them from every side. He untied the tongue of the mute who do not know [how to] and did not dare to express their intricate sentiments. He restored strength to the lame who were unable to make that progress in spirit which the ignoble and dissolvable compound [body] cannot make. He provided them with no less a presence [vantage point] than if they were the very inhabitants of the sun, of the moon, and of other nomadic [wandering] stars [planets]. He showed how similar or dissimilar, greater or worse [smaller] are those bodies [stars, planets) which we see afar, compared with that [earth] which is right here and to which we are united. And he opened their eyes to see this deity, this mother of ours, which on her back feeds them and nourishes them after she has produced them from her bosom into which she always gathers them again -- who is not to be considered a body without soul and life, [33. This animistic world view precedes a slightly veiled affirmation of pantheism.] let alone the trash of all bodily substances.”

The moment of mockery, of the exorcism of the giants, gets its juice, its scoffing power, from the practical, from the peasant’s p.o.v. – it is, after all, through Sancho Panza that we know the giants are windmills in Don Quixote. What James Scott calls the Little Tradition – the culture of the peasant and its characteristic skepticism – penetrates the Big Tradition – the tradition of the metropole, with its merchants, scholars, and natural philosophers, all bound together through an intricate system of patronage.
However, it would be a retarded enlightenment indeed that remained frozen in the moment of mockery. The movement, as in the quote from Bruno above, is to another and more abstract view. In the Chuang Tzu, the scale by which the K’un is gigantic and the dove is small is itself neither gigantic nor small. The scale has no size. In Bruno, the attack on the giants is done in the name of a notion of infinity with which Bruno’s name is still associated. When Newton applies the laws of motion on earth to the heavenly bodies, his idea is related to this same notion of a scale of no size – of a force. Newton famously wrote that he saw further because he stood on the shoulders of giants – showing that he had learned something that would make him free from the reproach Chuang Tzu gives to Hui Tzu: "You certainly are dense when it comes to using big things!” In fact, there is a certain slyness to Newton’s phrase – he does not, as is usual with the phrase (tracked through every maze by Robert Merton in his book) call himself a dwarf – his own stature is, as it were, for the observer to determine.
Although there are many Enlightenment tropes that return us again and again to light, to seeing, to emancipation, the deepest trope, I think, is that which uses the chasses aux geants to make us think of the scale that has no scale – a viewpoint outside the divine.

the murder on trolley track b

 

From my piker’s point of view, moral philosophy can be illuminated by imaginary scenarios, but it can’t be based on imaginary scenarios. If we treat these scenarios like "experiments" -and if we grant there can be experiments that are, by design, possible only in the imagination - than we have to have some idea of what narration is about, and what varying a narrative does. I think the recent riot of utilitarians all exercising their effective altruism is a case of thought experiment poisoning. Too much depends on the “trolley problem”, and not enough interest is put into analysing the narrative of the “trolley problem” – including the odd use of the word “save” which pops up in trolley prob discussions.  When people start to talk about “saving” others, I start to ask about the psychopathology of the saviour complex.

I saved no body today by not driving up on sidewalks and ramming into people. That is a bad, but comic, description of driving down the street. 

If a scenario becomes stereotypical, it limits the imagination, which is why philosophers who indulge too much in imaginary scenarios should definitely read  Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style.

When I first heard tell of the trolley problem, I laughed. My aesthetic instinct, as opposed to my moral one, thought that the narrative structure was joke-like. However, the trolley story has had such a large afterlife since it was formulated by Phillipa Foot that I have given this doubtful scenario a little bit more thought. It does seem like an  illuminating scenario about the “vocational instinct” that causes  philosophers to place themselves automatically in the managerial class and to make moral judgments within that position. The standard scenario is of a driver of a brakeless trolly who can go down track a and hit five people or swerve and go down track b and hit one person. This is often contrasted with the scenario of a surgeon who can “save” lives with some transplants. Here is a version taken from Judith Jarvis Thomson’s The Trolley Problem:

“Now consider a second hypothetical case. This time you are to imagine yourself to be a surgeon, a truly great surgeon. Among other things you do, you transplant organs, and you are such a great surgeon that the organs you transplant always take. At the moment you have five patients who need organs. Two need one lung each, two need a kidney each, and the fifth needs a heart. If they do not get those organs today, they will all die; if you find organs for them today, you can transplant the organs and they will all live. But where to find the lungs, the kidneys, and the heart? The time is almost up when a report is brought to you that a young man who has just come into your clinic for his yearly check-up has exactly the right blood-type, and is in excellent health. Lo, you have a possible donor. All you need do is cut him up and distribute his parts among the five who need them. You ask, but he says, "Sorry. I deeply sympathize, but no." Would it be morally permissible for you to operate anyway? Everybody to whom I have put this second hypothetical case says, No, it would not be morally permissible for you to proceed. Here then is Mrs. Foot's problem: Why is it that the trolley driver may turn his trolley, though the surgeon may not remove the young man's lungs, kidneys, and heart?"

The philosophy story, with some exceptions, puts the philosopher (pace Nietzsche) in the role of the operator, not the operated upon. In the trolley story, we have no input from the operated upon – the laborers – they would be laborers – upon the track. The surgeon, it is emphasized, is a great surgeon. Of course! At least here the patient has some say – namely, I would prefer not to.

The lack of curiosity about the narrating business spoils the moral fun, in my opinion. Phillipa Foot definitely needs to meet Raymond Queneau – the Queneau of Exercises in Style. That little book takes a commonplace and rather drab situation that happens, as it happens, on a trolly – or rather, on busline S. He gets jostled  by another passage, almost sobbingly reproaches the latter, jumps for a recently empty seat, gets off, and is seen two hours later at the gare St. Lazaire, talking to a comrade about a lost button on his overcoat.

From that situation, Queneau extracts 98 other ways of telling this story, ranging from shifting to the first person to a generalizing tone – dubbed philosophique – that seeks to find the phenomenology of coincidence adumbrated in this story – to  a medical account, etc. You could stretch out the trolley problem easily -for instance, while the trolley driver runs over the one person on track two, it turns out the six laborers are part-time circus artists and were well prepared to squeeze into the margins of the track if the trolley came by. Or you could place yourself in the head of the one person, looking down from the afterlife, and wondering if his death was preferable to the possible deaths of the others, or if his death had to do with him being the head of the union of railroad workers and his recent conflict with the management. Or perhaps the one man on the b  track, hated by one of the men on the a track, was murdered through the agency of the trolley driver, as the man on the first track sabotaged the brake and knew the instincts of the trolly driver. A true experiment follows just such a course – you vary the variables. The imaginative scenario is meant to provoke an “instinct”, but it is unclear why this is called an instinct rather than a judgment that depends on the circumstances not only of the imaginary scenario but of its telling. And that narrative plasticity is just the way to put in question the managerial suppositions of the imagined scenario. The philosopher not as king, but as a scribe with labor class sentiments.

Phillipa Foot was, in her youth, Iris Murdoch’s roommate. Murdoch knew Queneau, met him in 1946, and wrote letters to him in which she said various lovely things to him. According to Foot, she and Murdoch read Queneau’s Pierrot, Mon Ami in 1944. I wonder if she read the Exercises in Style?

 

A stomach ache in the heart: American frauds

 

We are all, as Americans – I speak as one of the flock – still at the low stage of civilisation of one of the Mississippi towns in Huck Finn.

By a fortunate coincidence, I’ve been reading Huck Finn each night for the last month  to Adam before he goes to sleep. We have an agreement – a page or three of Huck, then A. reads to him from the Vam-wolf-zom book. We are now deep into the Duke and Dauphin’s  greatest fraud, the imitation of an English minister and his deaf and dumb brother to bedazzle a rube Mississippi Valley family and worm out their goods. It is one of the great episodes. I’m revisiting it just as frauds of a larger scale but basically with the same mirthworthy unctuousness  – the FTX fraud, the Elon Musk twitter jamboree – are leading a dance though the papers, and, more importantly, through Twitter. Twitter has taken up the burden of the tabloid, because the newspapers – the WAPO, the NYT – have become so country club that they don’t know what to do with such rich materials, recognizing in the spoiled children who are the begetters of this scheme their own children from their own prep schools, and hesitating between the scolding and the “aren’t they adorable” talk that they give their progeny when they come home stoned with the fender bent Porsche.

Sad, that. At one time, when it had more hustle, the NYT played the role of a sort of choral character in Gesine Cresspahl novels of Uwe Johnson. No more. To find out what happened at the Bermuda HQ of SBF’s lemonade stand, you have to go to places like AutismCapital and tweets like those of Tiffany Fong. O brave new world, which has such trolls and trombones within it! That it is being shaken by the antics of one of the world’s dimmest characters – a damned good salesman cosplaying an engineer, Elon M. – makes it all the more slapstick.

But to return to the Duke and Dauphin. Their apotheosis comes from the most admired American virtue – the ability to keep a face in the light of discrediting circumstance. The poker face, the face of the stone killer cop, the face of the politician “with his pants down/and money sticking in his hole” going on the attack about his enemies – in Trump’s case, the politically correct, in Clinton’s case, the witchhunters who didn’t understand that running the executive office like the Playboy mansion was not sexual harassment, but mock-Kennedyism. It is all there in Chapter 29 of Huckleberry Finn. The Duke and Dauphin, imitating the Wilkins brothers and stealing their relatives blind, are confronted by the real Wilkins brothers, who have finally arrived at the little tree stump settlement. Huck, naively, thinks the jig is up:

“But I didn’t see no joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some to see any. I reckoned they’d turn pale. But no, nary a pale did ¢hey turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was np, but just went a goo-goo- ing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and | gazed down sorrowful on them new- comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done it admirable.”

A stomach ache in his heart. How much this goes right to the heart of the American dream, gone a little crooked! You do have to sit back and admire the audacity of it all.