From the Holodomor to Gaza: NYT softfocuses on famine - the spirit of Walter Duranty lives!

 

When Gareth Jones, a former secretary of David Lloyd George, made a walking tour in Ukrainian agricultural districts in 1933, he wrote a series of articles about the famine and the pitiable state of the villages.

The articles caused a stir. So the New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, decided to put an end to this. Having talked to Jones and found that he did not report seeing dead people, Duranty turned to the sources the New York Times has always held in highest regard: the government. And looking at the Soviet Government’s account of its agricultural policy, Duranty, who in the article acknowledges “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”, wrote that there was a serious food shortage, but no famine. No indeed.

In an article about Jones, Duranty and the Holodomor in Journalism History, Winter 2014, Ray Ganache writes: “Evidence clearly shows that the newspaper was complicit in duping the public. In a memorandum dated June 4, 1931, A. W. Kliefoth, a member of the U.S. Berlin Embassy, summarized a meeting he had with Duranty. The final sentence of the memorandum read: "In conclusion, Duranty pointed out that 'in agreement with NEW YORK TIMES and the Soviet authorities,' his dispatches always reflect the official position of the Soviet regime and not his own."

Well, the NYT seems determined to return to its Duranty-esque reporting  on the terror famine in Gaza. I was unsurprised, though morally shocked, when NYT’s “analysis” of the split between Biden – who continues to supply arms to Israel – and Netanyahu over the United Nations censoring of Israel with comments from sources within the Biden administration expressing surprise – the censoring of Israel was not “serious” after all – and this bit

 "Mr. Biden is facing outrage from his own supporters and global allies about the toll of civilian deaths in the war against Hamas and Israel’s seeming reluctance to allow into Gaza adequate amounts of food and medicine."

The “seeming reluctance” is definitely an improvement, in the propaganda field, over Duranty’s remark about omelettes. That was, in retrospect, so gross! No, the way you handle your favoured governments atrocities is that you soften them down. You make them sound like, oh, innocent mistakes. Mistakes they might not even know they are making! Surely the Israeli government would just be rushing that food to Gaza’s starving population if there wasn’t something blocking them. It must be just like the reporting on the flour massacre on March 1, where the story’s headline explainer was:  "The deaths of scores of Palestinians in a desperate rush for food aid in northern Gaza..." It leaves one pondering. Did God himself strike down those Palestinians. Or was it the seemingly reluctant machineguns in the hands of seemingly reluctant Israeli soldiers that spewed seemingly reluctant bullets into the heads and hearts and stomachs and legs of scores of Palestinians?

 Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
    I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
¹⁴ Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
    I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
    I am weary of bearing them.
¹⁵ When you spread out your hands in prayer,
    I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
    I am not listening.

Your hands are full of blood!

 

- Isaiah 1, 13-15

 

From Will to Control

 

 

 

In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic fashion for the  “will” in the moral, or ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materialism and sensualism of the 18th century philosophes.Conveniently, it also had a hero – Napoleon.

However, a curious thing happened as the century went by.  In the sphere of psychology, the will gradually lost any status it had as a psychological object. In the old rational psychology, it was one of the faculties of the intellect. But as psychologists began to measure things, experiment, and consider psychology as an adjunct of the entire biological system, it became clear that the will was a superfluous entity. I raise my arm, and by no train of introspection, and by no degree on  any measuring device, is there an intermediate moment where I will to raise my arm.

At the end of the century, two philosophers – Nietzsche and William James – both took these findings at face value. Nietzsche took the absence of any psychological entity called the will to mock the notion of both those who argued for the free will and those who argued for determinism, in as much as the latter still used this archaic psychological devise. James, with his own sly Yankee wit, also went through the introspective stages that make us see that the will is a conjuring trick.

Yet these two philosophers are associated with the will – the will to power and the will to belief. How did they reconcile these moral insights with their psychological ones? Well, in Nietzsche’s case, the will moved outside the psyche. The psyche, in fact, becomes a manifestation of a will that is unanchored to a self at all. James, on the other hand, creeps close to the admission that the will, being a good thing to believe in, is acceptable at least in moral terms.  In other words, both take the will as a supreme fiction.

In the twentieth century, in the psychological sphere, the will was replaced by a cybernetic model of the psyche, one that emphasized control and coordination. The old questions surrounding the will were simply no longer relevant. This image not only provides psychology with its paradigm – it penetrated, to an extent, into the public consciousness. Into, that is, our moral speech. It is impossible to imagine Jane Austin characters speaking about being out of control or in control. They wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t understand it if it was said to them. But this has become a reliable part of ordinary speech for those in the twentieth and twenty first century.

However, it is a part of speech that is not entirely coherent with the will ideology, which still exists, and which still influences the way we speak of ourselves and of the polis. It is easy to see why. We all have the experience of doing things we don’t want to do. I have work to do and it is late, but instead of going to bed, I do the work. And the moment of doing something that is not immediately desirable – over something that is immediately desireable – gives me the impression that I will myself to do this over my circumstances. It is easy to think of a computer – say Hal in 2001 – doing what it “wants” to do. But it is much more difficult thinking of it in a will situation – doing what it doesn’t want to do.

This concept in the moral sphere is, I think, slowly changing. It isn’t rare for a driver, or a computer user, to speak of a machine ‘not wanting’ to do something. Being ‘coaxed” into doing something. Of course, at the bottom of this are the lines of routine that one imagines define the machine – are the machine in the machine, so to speak. There’s no ghost in there.  All I’m saying is that the dialectic between the moral image and the cognitive image might well produce an inflection decisively away from the will.

Control without will, control without purpose – artificial unintelligence in a nutshell.

the metaphysics of the address

 

In the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the thieves from the cave that Ali Baba steals from send a spy into the city to discover who the robber was and where he lives. By a clever device, the spy finds Ali Baba’s house and leaves a mark on it. Ali Baba, however, employs a clever maid, Marjaneh, who discovers the mark and, suspecting some skullduggery, takes a piece of chalk and marks other houses, thus bedeviling the band of thieves when they come to town.  This happens a couple of times until the robber captain comes to town and, instead of marking the house, “examined and observed it so carefully” that it was impossible for him to mistake it.
As we know, the clever Marjaneh will thwart the thief captain at every turn. The story has another meaning, however, in Anton Tantner’s Die Hausnummer: Eine Geschichte von Ordnung und Unordnung – The house number: a history of order and disorder: here it throws a light into the premodern era of the city, where direction did not depend on addresses or housenumbers, but on acquaintance, appearance and landmarks, much the same way fishing craft navigated a shore.
Tantner’s book, along with Deidre Mask’s The Address Book, which features a chapter on him, are on the bookshelves of all right thinking address-freaks.   Tantner is faithful to the Foucaultian creed of genealogy – there is no one source for these affordances of contemporary life. The housenumber appears sometimes in early modernity as a sort of score for the height of a house, sometimes an inventory number for the house as property, and only in the 18^th century as a direction mark, a reference.  In  Vienna, where Tratner lives, the address was discussed by the town council in 1754, where it was touted as a guide that would help police find the “disreputable and the dangerous” – but it was voted down. The council feared popular unrest. The populace that was considered disreputable and dangerous by those in power knew exactly what the address was all about.
Ali Baba’s story itself was likely written in the 18^th century by Antoine Galland, the translator of the One Thousand and one nights, who might have heard a core story somewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean. After Galland created the Ali Baba story and his translation became famous, the story was fed back, one might say, to its source, and Ali Baba reappears in collections of these tales in India and Egypt.
Galland died at an auberge, the Cerceau D’or, on the corner of Rue des Sept Voies and Rue des Chiens, on February 17, 1715. The auberge had no address, literally: the Rue des Sept Voies was renamed Rue Valette in the 19^th century, which is when a wing of the Bibliotheque Saint Genevieve was built there, obliterating Rue des Chiens. One biographer, describing the auberge, writes that it was on the left or the even-numbered side of the street – a necessary anachronism for us, who come after the Chief Thief in Ali Baba’s tale.
The address system in the 18^th century was the object of many a speculator’s reflections. Among others, Choderlos De Laclos (the author of Dangerous Liaisons) published a scheme for numbering the houses in Paris. But the turning point was, naturally, the municipal code published under Napoleon. Before, house numbers had been considered as a substitute for house signs. But the 1805 code treated addresses with regard to both to the system of streets and the places on the street – places that could contain a house, or a shop, or various hotels, courtyards, apartments, etc. In this way, it made navigation easier and the place less personal – or less, shall we say, feudal.
By such strokes the old family patterns were broken. By such strokes it was possible to find, tax and raid the inhabitant.  
However, the drama of the address does not end there. Even now, the idea of distributing an address on the internet can cause an upset. Doxxing has become part of our vocabulary. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the great doxx-ers were the newspapers.  The bread and butter policing story – the theft, the murder, the assault, etc. –  included addresses. When a rich man or woman died, where they died and even how much the property was worth was part of the story. The address, to me, has a siren power – I think of them as calling out, in their own sonic language, to their own communities. It strikes me that it is no coincidence that the abolished auberge where Galland died was possibly the same auberge, under a different name, that three hundred years before welcomed Erasmus when he came to Paris. And I think of what Borges might have made of the historical fact that a famous library, much visited by foreign students, is figuratively built on top of the death bed of the translator of the One Thousand and One nights – one of whose nights, at least, was written by him from errant memories of a story muttered by an old Turkish dervish.
 
 
 
 
 

chatter in the moral vacuum - Gaza and us

 The whole discussion of whether Trump or Biden will be "worse for Palestinians", mounted by privileged Americans who have not lost their legs to a U.S. supplied bomb, or all of their children, or all of their children and their sister's children and their brother's children

It shows zero empathy, zero heart, zero hesitation, in the face of moral atrocity, to chatter. Twittering the concentration camp - this is a sort of moral insantity.

As well, it shows an absense of any sense that Middle Eastern things spill into the "West". It will be a miracle if there isn't a "terrorist" attack before Nov. 6. And I am sure the death and destruction will be met with the chatter-point: it would be worse under Trump.

It is worse and worse now. The least we owe to the child with the amputated leg, the homeless family, the starving street, camp, city, is to feel something for them. Once that human bond is erased, chatter fills the void. It is a symptom of the only disconnect of the connected society.

Gaza will matter more and more: remembering against the current of idiocy

 Another day, another headline on Al Jazeera - "Israel’s war on Gaza live: Overnight air attacks kill 11 in the enclave" and another NYT turning a blind eye, no headline whatsoever. Imagine the headlines if Russia attacked a hospital in Kyev.

The media in the US is not only not doing its job by, well, reporting. It is also failing its job of alerting. It is as if everything we have learned about the Middle East over the twenty years has been poured into the memory hole. To think that, by the election in November, with 60 000 Gaza dead to gaze at, there will be no response by paramilitaries and "terrorists" from the Middle East is crazy. We've all seen this before - for instance, Francois Hollande sending French planes to bomb DAECH sites as if we lived in 1900, and DAECH inspired men can't find guns and entry into the Eurosphere.

How did that turn out?

Are we doomed to another round of this idiocy? The end game of neo-colonialism is being staged as a series of bloody massacres modeled on Whak-a-Mole, and the intelligentsia is more involved with figuring out who Prince William is cheating with than a mass murder that has everything to do with the end of the world order as we know it. But those outside of Gaza think that if they are silent enough, everything will turn out to be fine. Ifnoring the consequences of, say, cutting off a food supply to a small area with two million people for two weeks, three weeks, for weeks won't lead to anything... unsightly.

The future is unfolding before us.

The clock is ticking: murder and re-murder in Gaza

 I am generally hoping for a Democratic party victory in the House and Senate, but I am passing on voting for Biden. There are 31,000 corpses and counting that count against him. Whatever happens in November, we are set for that body count to soar to 60, 80 or more, and if, as now seems likely, the U.S. does nothing to stop the attack on Rafah, we might get a Palestine-rein Gaza by Christmas. Meanwhile, on of the Ministers of Fuck-all in Netanyahu's Cabient is distributing 100,000 guns to settlers in the West Bank.

Joseph Roth, in Paris and dying in 1939, corresponded with his friend Stefan Zweig about the leader of the Zionist movement, Chaim Weizmann. Roth saw in Zionism the same blind natinalism and racism as he saw in Germany. Roth, who wrote a great book about Eastern European Jews - and was one himself - defended the view that that the bestiality of Hitlerism was in its attack on humanity itself, under which the attack on Jews should be judged: "If I am, as well, concerned to protect the Jews, it is only in so far as they constitute the the most directly threatened avant-garde of humanity."

Roth was a man who went from the Left to the Right, from sympathy for the Russian revolution to nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian empire. He is no sure guide to politics. But I think he expresses something very true here: we honor in every murdered person the image of humanity murdered. Six million or more Jews worked to death, gassed, tortured and otherwise extinguished by the Nazis were each of them a victim of a crime, and that individuality gets rather blurred by the easy use of the term genocide. Justice, at the extremes, is either a form of mourning or it is nothing. And if we murder in turn to "revenge" that person, we take a heavy risk - the risk of defiling that person's memory with the blood we pile upon it.

Hamas, on October 9, murdered 1200 some people. Netanyahu's government, since October 9, have re-murdered these people by murdering 30000 others, making a blood sacrifice that will forever stain those who did it and those who abetted it. We are at the beginning of the starvation and the murders of thousands in Rafah. Those who pretend the U.S. is helpless here are fooling themselves. Worse - I don't think they have any concern with yesterday's victims if they are brown, or Islamic. Meanwhile, the people under the various U.S. allied Middle Eastern dictatorships stew. The clock is ticking.

The query letter gag: an American tale

 

The “sell your novel tool-kit.” The “How to write Irresistable Query Letters”. The “50 Successful Query Letters”.

The flourishing subgenre of advice books for writers is flourishing. It is flourishing way out of sight of literary scholars, even those, like Mark McGurl, who have noticed that this is the Amazon era in his book, Everything and Less.

I have a difficult relationship, an impassioned relationship, a nightmare relationship with the query letter. I feel about it much as Romeo and Juliet felt about arranged marriages – I want to eliminate the middle man, the annoying and deadly dud and dummy that gets in the way between my hot little texts and the functionaries of magazines, newspapers and publishing houses.

At the moment, I am arranging six of my real unreal stories in a book form, and pondering sending them out to some small press. It is migraine work – and like a migraine, it is an obsessive pain.

As a therapy, I have thought about the query letter as a historic artifact. One that somehow emerged, in early capitalism, from the wreck of the patronage system. At one time, among the Atlantic hopping bourgeoisie, there was such a thing as a letter of introduction. The spritely Yankee, released into the Old World, would be supplied with them. The young English earl’s son would have them in his trunk as he crossed the Channel and hazarded the Continent.

This is the distant genealogy, no doubt, of the query letter. Myself, I would begin such a genealogy in America with the year 1920 and the founding of the magazine, Successful Writing, in the most ur-Midwestern of towns, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1921, it changed to “Writer’s Digest”. The 1920s were in many ways a jump-scare decade – the jump was into a mass consumer society unleashed by the great credit pools that underlay WWI. The radical expansion of media – with movies and radio in the mix – presented a great opportunity for the writer, with whole staffs being stocked with them in Hollywood and Madison Ave.

Zachary Petit, who works at Writer’s Digest, began publishing bits of articles from its archives, beginning here: https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/vintage-quotes-from-f-scott-fitzgerald. Unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the model of “successful writing” in the early twenties. He was a symbol of the mobility and ‘can-do’ that aligned the writer with the inventor and the entrepreneur. Fitzgerald utilized the  binary that was in place from the beginning – advice/rejection. The potential writer was always seeking advice (which is the kind of thing sought by readers of the love lorn columns as well: advice was an ambiguous economic editing, being a thing that was “given” even as its utility was measured by the market, which was dominated by sales), and due to his celebrity – here’s a man whose stories in Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair were going straight into Hollywood production! – he was pursued by queries for advice.

“A letter from Robert L. Terry, of Revere, Massachusetts, was received by F. Scott Fitgerald, author of the Saturday Evening Post story which is to be done in pictures as “The Chorus Girl’s Romance.” Mr. Terry, a story writer, appealed to Mr. Fitgerald for assistance in the construction of a plot. Mr. Fitgerald replied: Dear Mr. Terry. Your letter was very vague as to what you wanted to know. Study Kipling and O’Henry, and work like Hell! I had 122 rejections slips before I sold a story.”

This banality of this exchange does not debar it from a much greater significance – it is like a founding document for a whole industry. For there are many Robert L. Terrys out there. We all have put down our words on paper, or on screen, and we all want advice from those who have sold their Chorus Girl’s Romance to the studio. Or advice from those who have surveyed the successful writer and have called up or emailed the mass of publishers and agents and know just what they want under the mythical transom. Putting advice giving on a paying basis is as natural, in the circumstances, as industrializing agriculture or installing networks of cut and paste machinery and calling it Artificial Intelligence.

We are all herded. And we have to “work like Hell!” for our meager pickings. Such is life among the  flubs and perpetual false starts of us functionaries in the sphere of circulation. No surplus value for you!