The zig zag life of the fabulous Maryse Choisy

 

There are some people who live lives of such zigs and zags that one feels, summing them up, that they could not have been real. These ziggers and zaggers seem to come out in the great decades – for instance, the 20s and the 60s of the twentieth century. I don’t really have to point out, do I, that the twenty first century still hasn’t had a great decade?

There are still many many undiscovered lives, undiscovered zig-zags, that ran through the 1920s. Among them, the fabulous Maryse Choisy.

She is forgotten now, for the most part. In the U.S., as far as I can tell, only her reportage on life in the brothels (she’d taken a job as a manager in a famous maison close, I believe the Sphinx), A month with the girls, has been translated. Translated in 1960. The book came out in 1929 came out. But this is a bullet point of her life up to then:

- become one of the first women at Oxford to take away a degree in Sanskrit

-moved to India and taught Sanskrit

- moved to Vienna to become a psychoanalyst with Freud. Disagreed with Freud

-returned to France and became a lion tamer

- became a reporter – in the great reporter tradition. After reporting on brothels, she went to Mount Athos and reported on monks. Closed societies, if you will.

This is quite the life. She went on to become a novelist, report regularly on politics and finance, get a degree in psychoanalysis in the United States, create the psychoanalytic journal Psyche,  fall under the influence of Teilhard de Chardin, become a guru, wrote about feminism in the 1970s and voyaged to Tibet for Le Monde to write a series of article about the Dalai Llama.

I’m especially impressed with the part where, arguing with Freud, she returned to France and took some circus training to become a lion tamer. Take that, Wilhelm Reich! She wrote an account of lion taming for Gringoire (this was before Gringoire became the infamous anti-semitic porn sheet). 4 September 1931 was a coup issue for the Gringoire. A story by Marcel Ayme. A column by G. de Pawlowski, Gaston Pawlowski, known to scifi buffs for his Voyage to the Land of the Fourth Dimension. And Choisy’s memoire of working in a “foire menagerie” – a traveling circus zoo.

This is how she begins (oh autofictional muses, gather round!):

“I appeared with my legs naked, a bit of cocotterie, an evening dress that was very low cut, in crepe Georgette. The least paw sweep would be noticeable on my skin. My robe was a bit long. Frank Henry claimed that I needed a train, that would go well with the supple grace of the panthers. Me, I am of the short skirt generation. But as long as, in closing the door behind me, I didn’t get it caught in anything. As long as, in dodging a panther’s leap, my feet didn’t get entangled in the train, and my nose in the sand. Panthers are like men: they’ll fall on you when you are down.  As long as… I advanced three steps. Took six steps backwards. Panther on my right. Stool on my left. “

This is the voice of a woman who is only scared of what she chooses to be scared of. That is the thing with zigzagging – you get tired, but you find that fear is not something that need surprise you – you can surprise it. Scare yourself.

The zig zag life is opposed, in its very essence, to the credentialed life. Later, when Choisy chose to become a psychoanalyst, and even found one of the big psychoanalytic journals, she had an advantage: she’d been breathed on by the big cats.

Oh, as a ps - I found a documentary has been made of Un mois avec des filles. HereHere.

 

 

 

The rain in Paris

 

I as a reader in this twenty first century am bonded to the text by the lesser boredom of the text in contrast with the greater boredom outside the text of other things to read or even, horrors, to do. It is in the balance of boredoms that this little superannuated smartass, this me, shares with the Zeitgeist of other readers of newspapers and magazines and social media and even sometimes print in what used to be called, for the yucks, the meat-osphere. Meat, humans that is, on one side, silicon on the other.

Ennui was once the kind of thing we find in the great Mallarme line, “La chair est triste, hélas ! et j'ai lu tous les livres.”  

But some say the age of all the books has passed. I don't believe it. But I do believe that ennui results from something like a reading or looking too long. The optical equipment sifts through the same content, or content that begins to seem the same, from the office job to the commute, from the same old dinner to the same old tv series. Ennui, in Paris this spring, was the weather. I call it spring because that is the official title of this time between March and June, but a winterish must never really left Paris for the first half of the year. The number of days it rained was an amazing 3,000,000, 000 – or maybe that is just what it seemed like. When I finally cast off my winter coat, about three weeks ago, I quickly had to rethink my decision.

A. tells me that they predict a heat wave soon. So from winter mush we will be tipped into New Delhi hell.

The great Paris poem about rain is Baudelaire’s fourth Spleen poem, which begins:

« Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes. »

It occurred to me that this poem must reflect a rainy season in Paris, some time in the 1850s when it was written. I have not found evidence for the date of the composition, so I cannot connect it, exactly, in all of its Poe funk, with something like our non-spring. However, it does seem like 1852 stands out as a rainy year. It was the year that a man named Vener, who wrote little articles for Le Corsair, the paper Baudelaire contributed to when it was called Le Corsair By

-Satan in 1847. It was edited, then, by a man named LePoitevan, who wanted to fill it with 40 to 60 line little essayettes. He called them vade retor.

By 1852, much ink and blood had gone under the bridge, including a revolution and a coup d’etat which gave France another Napoleon for “emperor”. The Corsaire was still published, and they still favored the vade retor, or what would be called the chronicle. Among their house writers was a hardworking man named Vener.  On June 9, 1852, his little piece was entitled: It rains. It is a clever bit of handwork, and it makes me think of Baudelaire – Benjamin was right to see Baudelaire as both a poet and an atmosphere, a general sensibility among writers. He begins by comparing different types of rain to different types of government: “ – when water falss with that monotone regularity that tells us that the whole sky is taken; it is like a bad government; one sadly awaits, with pain, without hope, for a near end; it seems like it will continue forever.”

Vener makes the rain the subject of the article that is not the article he should be writing – he should be writing “reflections on the budget, on Belgium, on the Empire, on the new state of France; impossible! The rain is against it.

It imprisons my will, it paralyzes my spirit, it conquers me by a negative force, it annihilates me; it might be said that its secret power washes away ideas, words, color, images!”

I rather agree. The rain, this non-season, has kept me inside our apartment. I lie on the couch. I sit at the table. I type to no avail, I read to no avail, I age to no avail.

All of this non-availing, though, is broken by one pleasant day, one spring day, one glimpse of sunlight on the plants on the terrace, one breath of fresh breeze running its fingers over the leafery in the pots. And that spring day is today!

I could be king of infinite space, today.

Absolutely: the novel

 

Certain words are novels – and not just novels, but state of the nation novels, U.S.A. novels.

Absolutely, for instance. Exciting or excited.

Actually.

 

Absolutely that became fixed as a certain sound in my ear years ago. I was living in Santa Fe and, for a time, writing lyrics for a band. The singer would say, absolutely, a lot. The singer was a sweet woman, who couldn’t hold a tune – you could glue it to her tongue and she would still mess it up.

So we would go through the song and she would be asked if she heard it, and she would say: “absolutely”.

 

Like so much in the U.S.A, the word came out of some combo of tv, movies, music and coolhunting. And it ended up in business school.

 

One could probably track it through trendy novels. It begins as a sort of Britishy complement – in phrases like, say, absolutely stunning. It occurs in Less than Zero – a marker of the eighties if there ever was one – both as an affirmative and a complement. But only once as the former. Checking into seventies zeitgeist novels – In Alison Lurie, it occurs in the form of “absolutely sure” or “absolutely necessary” – holding on as a modifier, and not pushing aside the “sure” to star by itself.

 

Ann Beattie, whose signature method as a short story writer and novelist in the seventies was to keep as close as possible to the oral tics of the time, used absolutely the way Alice Lurie did. She only introduced absolutely, as a single word, after the eighties.

 

These are not definitive proofs of the origin of the bogus absolutely, but I’d like to coordinate its mission creep with the “morning in America” that was the Reagan era – an era in which the bogus made a comeback, from Wall Street to the shores of Nicaragua.

Of course, this mutation is not unrelated to other mutations abroad in the land – for instance, the systematic skinning of the working class, from their place in the popular arts to the dignity to their paychecks. “Sure”, the older Americanism,  was both the extended hand and a word to be spoken out of the side of the mouth by private dicks and mobsters. Sure was off the farm – as was the population, draining into Detroit and Chicago and Los Angeles and Cleveland, making steel in Youngstown and Pittsburg, waging labor war in Flint. Sure was familiar with numbers runners and the overflowing toilets in neighborhood taverns on Friday night. Sure had all beef hotdogs in its teeth and the ball game on the radio. Sure was Rabbit, especially when yes means no, as in “sure sure.” A doubling that allows Rabbit to hop away from his responsibilities in Rabbit Run.

 

Absolutely is Rabbit in his desuetude, Rabbit in Florida, Rabbit self-pitying in the strip club. Absolutely is the fated, that is, planned erosion of the manufacturing sector. Absolutely is the relentless rise of the service sector. Absolutely is waitresses setting out jauntily to make money while going to college and ending up three jobbing it to make payments on the college loan.  Absolutely is the cool music played at Starbucks. Absolutely is emotional labor, while emotional surplus value is hauled off to be plasticized in the cultural industries. But absolutely never reaches into the now dominent upper reaches, who invaded every crannie of the popular arts in the U.S.A. and made it a mirror of their own vanity. Absolutely is said to them. They never say it back. Instead, they say things like, I’ll have the Chilean sea bass.

 

I sure hate what absolutely did to the States.

 

Genius is primarily egalitarian: Emerson and the newspapers

 

 I read the newspapers like Don Quixote read his romances, fulmination and prophecies race through my brain and come out of my fingertips, perched on the keyboard, and I know that I am behind, utterly behind on everything in my life, that what I do is plunge into what avails not and what I don’t do is what does avail and must avail and this is my mortal sin, and then the night is here, quicker than I expect it to be, always.

With this attitude towards the newspapers, I have long held that not enough is made of the parallel between the literary culture of the moderns, from the 1700s on, and the newspapers, which have been the great angels of Chronos during this same period of time. Even now, as newspapers dwindle down like a pencil too often sharpened, we see the form find its home and bearings on the internet and the internet swell with it.

                                                               1

I like to think of certain coincidences. Emerson, writing about the London Times, in English Traits: “There is no corner and no night.” Emerson happened to visit the Continent, and especially England, in the wonderful and terrible year, 1848. Year of the Communist Manifesto, of the French revolution, which Emerson celebrates in his journal – seeing that this time it is about “socialism”. He notes that Carlyle, at that point still his friend, never read the newspapers until the Revolution broke out.

And after 1848, Marx, in England, becomes the great European correspondent for Emerson’s sometimes friend, Horace Greeley, whose newspaper, The New York Tribune, was the great American answer to the Times. Emerson and Greeley met on the lecture circuit. In 1851, the New York Tribune started publishing articles by the man the paper called “one of the clearest and most vigorous writers that country has produced—no matter what may be the judgment of the critical upon his public opinions in the sphere of political and social philosophy.”

At the time, Greeley was a Fourierist.

Emerson wrote about Fourier in an article in Margaret Fuller’s The Dial:

“We had lately an opportunity of learning something of these Socialists and their theory from the indefatigable apostle of the sect in New York, Albert Brisbane. Mr. Brisbane pushes his doctrine with all the force of memory, talent, honest faith, and importunacy. As we listened to his exposition, it appeared to us the sublime of mechanical philosophy; for the system was the perfection of arrangement and contrivance. The force of arrangement could no farther go. The merit of the plan was that it was a system; that it had not the partiality and hint-and-fragment character of most popular schemes, but was coherent and comprehensive of facts to a wonderful degree. It was not daunted by distance, or magnitude, or remoteness of any sort, but strode about nature with a giant's step, and skipped no fact, but wove its large Ptolemaic web of cycle and epicycle, of phalanx and phalanstery, with laudable assiduity. Mechanics were pushed so far as fairly to meet spiritualism. One could not but be struck with strange coincidences betwixt Fourier and Swedenborg. Genius hitherto has been shamefully misapplied, a mere trifler.”

                                                           2.

I have not found any hint in Emerson that Marx had crossed his intellectual path – although surely he read some of his articles in the Tribune. But the coupling of Fourier and Swedenberg predicts, mystically, the messianic Marxism of Bloch and Benjamin, which crosses Marxism with Klee’s angels.

There is something else in Emerson’s note on Fourier that is consistent with his notion of the democratic theme that runs through the newspaper form: the notion of an egalitarianism founded upon genius.

Our feeling was, that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely, Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid, or fluid, or gas, at the will of the leader; or, perhaps, as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced, but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers, which eludes all conditions, which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New-Harmonies with each pulsation. There is an order in which in a sound mind the faculties always appear, and which, according to the strength of the individual, they seek to realize in the surrounding world. The value of Fourier's system is that it is a statement of such an order externized, or carried outward into its correspondence in facts. The mistake is, that this particular order and series is to be imposed by force of preaching and votes on all men, and carried into rigid execution. But what is true and good must not only be begun by life, but must be conducted to its issues by life. … nay, that it would be better to say, let us be lovers and servants of that which is just; and straightway every man becomes a centre of a holy and beneficent republic, which he sees to include all men in its law, like that of Plato, and of Christ. Before such a man the whole world becomes Fourierized or Christized or humanized…”

                                                                        3.

I love it when Emerson just rides. 

But to break back into thought from such motion and rhetorical glory - the newspaper or its form plays a central role in Emerson's intuition that genius is inherently egalitarian - that is, our private lights are, above all, new lights, new courses in the world marked by our ever anonymous and gigantic particularity. I am the we. And as this we, I must go back to the tabloid as Antaeus had to go back to the earth. It is my strength..

COLLECTING, CULTURAL HISTORY, FETISHISM

 

“In brief, cultural history only represents a surface strike against the insight [of historicism], but not that of dialectics. For it lacks the destructive moment, which certifies dialectical thinking, as well as  the experience of the dialectic thinker. It means to increase the treasures that weigh on the back of mankind. But it doesn’t give humanity the power to shake this off, in order to take them in its hands. This is true as well of the socialist educational work at the turn of the century, which took cultural history as its guiding star.”

This passage from Benjamin’s essay on Eduard Fuchs came to my mind as I was reading Mel Gordon’s Horizontal Collaboration, his book about the erotic culture of Paris, which is meant, I think, to be paired with his earlier (cult) book about the erotic culture of Weimar Germany.

Like Fuchs, Gordon is a collector. Nothing brings together cultural history, fetishism and a certain sense of hidden forces like abundantly illustrated books concerning the vintage wanks of yesteryear. But Gordon utterly lacks a dialectical mindset. For him, pleasure is a unified property – not something divided between consumer and worker. Thus, he plunges into the “happy” world of Parisian brothels and comes up with the anecdotes, which take the place of any ethnology.

This is the blind spot of the fetishism that motivates pilling up the “treasures”, whether of cheesecake photos or art objects of a higher order – objects that are so often rooted, in the avant garde visual and literary culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in the same atmosphere of brothels and dance clubs whose photos, placards and anecdotes spill out over Gordon’s pages – but never gets around to the moral intellectual shudder that will free us from these things, so that we can recognize them.

The erotic life, here, is utterly commercial. From the brothel fuck to the photographer to the spectator – for there was as much a market for spectacle as there was for tactile sex – “life” is restricted to what is outside of “normal life”.

In the end, in the late 1960s, the identification of the erotic with a certain marginal spectacle dissolved before the feminist critique, which correctly identified pleasure as a heterogenous and often exploitative property of “liberation.” The revolutionary moment, in the “sexual revolution”, was all too non-dialectical. It was a revolution in the chains of a very bourgeois positivism.

And don’t we all, generation after generation, bear the marks of that lie? We still have not found the open sesame that will give us, at the heart of normativity itself, our happiness back. Instead, we make our separate treaties. It is this, I think, that has disempowered the avant garde in my lifetime.

Biden's foreign policy: let's bet everything on authoritarianism!

 

And watch it all slip away
(Por fin se va acabar)
Or leave a garden for your kids to play
(Jamás van a alcanzar)

 --- The Black Angels, El JardinThe Black Angels, El Jardin

American foreign policy inhabits the same paradox that American domestic policy lives in: what does it mean to be a democracy?

During the Cold War period, the paradox, at least on the foreign policy side, was simplified by the idea that whatever was anti-communist was democratic. This was, of course, technically not true: from Nazi Germany to the Pinochet’s Chili, from Syngman Rhee’s South Korea to Thieu’s South Vietnam, the United States chose authoritarian states over any possible democratic alternative.

This led to millions of deaths around the world.

At the end of the Cold War, however, there was a sense in the American foreign policy establishment that perhaps the U.S. could be an interventionist liberal power. Weighing in on the side of democracy. The last shreds of this solution were dissolved during the Bush regime. Although we rhetorically wanted “democracy” in the occupied state of Iraq, it turns out that we wanted it on our terms, with no interference from the Iraqi population.

We now seem, under Biden, to be reconstructing a Cold War foreign policy that is even more contradictory than the one forged under anti-communism. Here, democracy is the equivalent of being pro-Israel, no matter what Israel does.

The only way any state in the Middle East, or North Africa, or Central Asia can sustain that as a policy if for that state to be firmly under the thumb of a dictator – be it Sisi in Egypt or the House of Saud or Jordan’s “parliamentary” mock democracy. The U.S. policy is entirely dependent, under Biden, on maintaining and strengthening these authoritarian powers.

This is the kind of paradox that will corrode Biden’s message in the current election: the message that this is an election of “democracy” against Trump’s authoritarianism. It is pretty simple to see that this message relies, in Biden’s politics, on a limit: democracy cannot be entrusted to people like, say, the Jordanians. This tacit principle makes a mockery of Biden’s domestic view, that no persons because of race creed or gender should be denied full civil rights.

Meanwhile authoritarians elsewhere have recognized that whether Biden or Trump is elected, they have a friend in Washington. In Europe, the far right has become absolutely loyal to Israel for two reasons: the historical antisemitic psychopathology, out of which these parties spring, had one great success, from the antisemitic point of view: the murder of six million European Jews. That means practically that in a place like the Netherlands, where the Nazis murdered three quarters of the Jewish community, Jews now form only a tiny percentage of the population – around 50,000 in a total population of 17 million. In comparison, the Muslim population – immigrants mostly from Netherland’s colonies – constitute around a million. The Far Right under Geert Wilders, which is the coalition partner in the Netherlands, has decided to use a new tactic – attacking the Moslem population as antisemitic. That the ideological and real ancestors of Wilders collaborated with the Nazis is now easy to apologize for – with a grin, of course. Dutch Jews do have reasons to fear increasing antisemitism among the Islamic population, as that population absorbs the idea that opposing Israel is antisemitism.

In essence, the far-right part of Europe has been given a gift by the right in Israel and its biapartisan allies in the U.S. Thus, a program that was condemned in the 1990s in the war in Yugoslavia – the mass murder of Bosnian Muslims – has now become less criminal, and more understandable. Those Muslims were antisemitic! Thus, nobody blinks when Netanyahu teams up with Orban to demonize the Hungarian Jew Soros.

Bad times are coming, no matter who is elected president in the U.S.

The new economy is simply a ratio

 

The New Economy that came into being in the nineties names, really, a ratio – that is, the rise in the ratio between price and earnings. Just as the world starts, in the Upanishads, with the first man, Pragapati, floating in a golden egg that he has somehow fertilized himself, so too do we find our plutocrats floating in golden eggs made out of financial instruments which exist solely in order that plutocrats can grow the most enormous golden eggs the world has ever seen.

In an early era – in the Progressive era – the p/e ratio had another name: overcapitalization. And instead of celebrating an economic mechanism whereby speculators are allowed and encouraged to treat themselves to stunning windfalls, the Progessives justly saw overcapitalization as waste and fraud.

Lawrence Mitchell, in The Speculation Economy, has, I think correctly, seen the first two decades of the 20th century in America as the period in which the limits of American progressive politics – and by extension, the limits of anti-corporationism in the West – were drawn and hardened. By 1920, the attempt to reform the stock market from the root had failed.

The high point of the reform effort came in 1911. In that year, the House of Representatives passed a bill a bill that was narrowly turned down in the Senate, S. 232. S. 232 would not only have required federal incorporation of all interstate businesses. Here’s Mitchell’s description of it:

“It would have replaced traditional state corporate finance law by preventing companies from issuing “new stock” for more than the cash value of their assets, addressing both traditional antitrust concerns and newer worries about the stability of the stock market by preventing overcapitalization. But it would have done much more.

S. 232 was designed to restore industry to its primary role in American business, subjugating finance to its service. It would have directed the proceeds of securities issues to industrial progress by preventing corporations from issuing stock except “for the purpose of enlarging or extending the business of such corporation or for improvements or betterments”, and only with the permission of the Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Corporations would only be permitted to issue stock to finance revenue-generating industrial activities rather than finance the ambitions of sellers and promoters. … S. 232 would have restored the industrial business model to American corporate capitalism and prevented the spread of the finance combination from continuing it dominance of American industry.” (137)

Martin Sklar, in The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, summarized the spirit of the drafts prepared during Theodore Roosevelt’s administration that stood in the background of the bill’s eventual configuration in this way: ‘whenever the amount of outstanding stock should exceed the value of assets, the secretary would require the corporation to call in all stock and issue new stock in lieu thereof in an amount not exceeding the value of assets, and each stockholder would be required to surrender the old stock and receive the new issue in an amount proportionate to the old holdings.”

I’ve already manifested my manifesto for a new Soviet version of 21st century capitalism – one that destroys the corporate form and replaces it with hundreds of thousands of small scale enterprises in flexible cooperative structures. It does not overturn capitalism, but it does radically turn capitalism around. The limitation of both the corporation and the state is a kind of capitalism with a human face – which is much more radical than where ‘socialism’ is at the moment. For this kind of harmony of opposites, of cooperation and competition, to really work, the speculative economy would have to be radically subordinated to production. The pleasure palace of the oligarchs, the four hundred trillion dollar derivatives structure that burdens the earth (even as it actually does not exist – truly, an extreme case of economic neuroses), will have to be burnt to the ground. From a historical point of view, instead of a prescriptive one, however: one has to marvel at what the railroad companies wrought.  Most studies of railroads concentrate on their physical structure, and their role in transport. But if you look at financial history in the U.S., you find that railroads basically invented the modern stock market. By overcapitalizing far beyond the needs of stock and expansion, and by being the model that shaped the constitution of interstate businesses, they forged the stock market as an instrument of overcapitalization that it has since become. In the first decade of the twentieth century, state attorney generals, elected by populists, tried to make railroad companies adhere to their contractual obligations under state law. Well, that took state's rights too far, and was overruled by the Federal government. The Scotus, which piously devolved the rights of women over their own bodies to the states, would shriek with horror if the states took up the right to regulate the interstate commerce that comes through it. There is a limit to every reactionary thing, after all! Common sense, among the plutocrats, has agreed to this. And who are we to tell the rich assholes no?