calasso on the singular book

 Roberto Calasso is a writer who has had too much influence on me: I like knowledge, book reading, broken into a wilderness of mirrors and re-assembled. Many of his books have a little too much gaseous material – and politically, as well, I have always considered him one of those “New Philosopher” types who rejected Marx because of Pol Pot or something – which struck me as showing a very thin knowledge of Marx.

Caveats to the side, though, in certain books – Ka, for instance, and the Ruins of Karsch – he creates a unique sound, a beat.

In his book about being an editor and founder of Adelphi, the Art of the Publisher, a more personal Calasso breaks the surface. Someone who has, evidently, a fund of gossip about the entirety of Europe’s intellectual class from the sixties through the 21st century.

The gem of the book is the chapter entitled, The Singular Book. Simon During has been “unpacking his library” on Facebook for years, a sort of installation piece: I find this chapter a sort of coordinate effort, from the side of the production of books. The history of Adelphi is the history of a particular page setup, matched to a certain constellation of authors (the authors of Mitteleuropa, translated into Italian, for instance), and to a very meditated process of finding the right cover illustration. The Adelphi layout for Thomas Bernhardt’s books so impressed Bernhardt that his last book, published after he died by his Austrian publisher, Residenz, looked, Calasso claims, like a Adelphi book, and not the usual Residenz issue.

“The front cover was not on glossy paper—like that of every other Residenz book—but matte, of the kind we used. The page layout was exactly the same as that of Adelphi’s Narrativa Contempora-nea series in which the first volumes of the Bernhard autobiography had appeared. I telephoned Residenz and asked for an explanation of this change, which made it quite unlike all the publisher’s other books. They told me it had been Bernhard’s express wish. Indeed, he had made it a condition that the book should be pre-sented in this way. I took it as a farewell gesture.”

It wouldn’t be a Calasso essay if he didn’t mix into it various interesting marginal observations. Joseph Roth was introduced into Italy by way of Adelphi and an editor, Luciano Foa. Foa made the observation, which I made myself when I bought the Radetzky March for a friend who loved the Charterhouse of Parma, that Roth was the spiritual heir of Stendhal. This is what Calasso sez about the translation of Roth’s Flight without End, which features a man who fought for the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War :

“And to our amazement we realized that, at a time when literature had become a dirty word, the novel was being covertly adopted by youth of the far Left. I remember some members of the Lotta Continua extremist party saying that it was the only story with which they could identify—or at least, with which they would have liked to identify, in that moment of turmoil. It would have been good if they had pursued Roth even further.”

I hear all too often that tone (“when literature had become a dirty word”) as if there were some golden past when everyone read literature, instead of the real past when illiteracy and a stunted educational system kept literature in the hands of a minority. Literature is an institution, true, but it is also a large part of the mental furniture of even those who aren’t continuously reading the “great books”. I connect Calasso’s comment about the political radicals in the years of lead to Ralph Ellison’s essay, The little man at the Chehaw station, which begins:

“IT was at Tuskegee Institute during the mid-1930s that I was made aware of the little man behind the stove. At the time I was a trumpeter majoring in music, and had aspirations of becoming a classical composer. As such, shortly before the little man came to my attention, I had outraged the faculty members who judged my monthly student’s recital by substituting a certain skill of lips and fingers for the intelligent and artistic structuring of emotion that was demanded in performing the music assigned to me. Afterward, still dressed in my hired tuxedo, my ears burning from the harsh negatives of their criticism, I had sought solace in the basement studio of Hazel Harrison, a highly respected concert pianist and teacher. Miss Harrison had been one of Ferruccio Busoni’s prize pupils, had lived (until the rise of Hitler had driven her back to a U.S.A. that was not yet ready to recognize her talents) in Busoni’s home in Berlin, and was a friend of such masters as Egon Petri, Percy Grainger and Sergei Prokofiev…

“Yes,” she said, “but there’s more to it than you’re usually told. Of course you’ve always been taught to do your best, look your best, be your best. You’ve been told such things all your life. But now you’re becoming a musician, an artist, and when it comes to performing the classics in this country, there’s something more involved..”

“All right,” she said, “you must always play your best, even if it’s only in the waiting room at Chehaw Station, because in this country there’ll always be a little man hidden behind the stove.”

“A what?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said. “There’ll always be the little man whom you don’t expect, and he’ll know the music, and the tradition, and the standards of musicianship required for whatever you set out to perform!”

This is to my mind a simple statement of the case. And I suppose my faith in the little man at the Chehaw station is what ultimately separates me from Calasso, who, in spite of the excellent sales of many of the singular books he published, often writes as though all of them went down the drain.

Not to end on a down note: those interested in the how of book publishing should read, if they haven’t read, this book.

Our terrorist/our hero: Luigi Magione

 

1.
On January 5, 1943, the Paris papers all agreed: another act of terrorism
As reported by Le Cri de Peuple, Madame Claire Vioix, a concierge, 7 rue Neuve Popincourt, received a visit from two men. The were let in by her boy. She went with them into the courtyard.
“It was then that her young boy heard a shot…”
According to the Emancipation Nationale, the cowardly murder happened on Sunday, at 7 p.m. The daughter of Madame Vioix, according to the same paper, was a member of the Jeunesse Populaire Francaise. They opened a register, a sign- up sheet where citizens could inscribe their name and their indignant sentiments. Madame Vioix was an activist in the PPF, the Petit Parisien noted, and the mother of four children.
L'oeuvre noted that she had received several threatening letters.
The funeral cortege was graced with officials from her party, the government, and the police.
Reading the account of the terrorist murder in Le Cri de Peuple, one discovers that Madame Claire Vioix was a 'patriot', a true citizen of the occupation:
“A P.P.F. activist, Mme Vioix never hid her opinions. Thus, she never missed an occasion to call to order, in the waiting lines, the Jews, who were not conforming to the regulations.”
Exemplary woman, as we can see.
Reading the officially allowed French newspapers during the occupation is a good exercise. It helps you, in a sense, see how a term like terrorist is picked up and used. It helps you see that “normal” things like the regulations allow one to remind the Jews of them – Jews that one sees, with some satisfaction, rounded up from the streets – although in the eleventh she would not have seen the “rafle” she would have seen in the Marais.
Le Cri de Peuple last mentioned the fallen heroine, Vioix, in June of 1944, when the PPF had a cortege to pay homage to the martyrs of “Jewish capitalism”. No mention is made of reprisal. Apparently, the terrorists – who were also labelled communists – had escaped retribution.
Although surely the price on their head was high enough, nobody snitched on them.
As though moved by the spirit of the assassinated Vioix, the Cris de la Peuple reported in May 20, 1943, the following: “Jews were forbidden to go to the official state pawn shop, the Hotel des Ventes. “Thus there should be an end to the scandalous black market trade of Jewish second hand goods dealers who corrupt the price regulations. However, for some time, we have seen reappear on Rue Douot some disquieting figures, individuals who do not wear the star and use borrowed names for signing the checks that they use to pay for their purchases.
This must be put a stop to.”
Now, neither Vioix nor, say, health insurance executives, nor the newspaper participated in the murder of anyone specifically, although condoning it generally. And the two “communist” terrorists did murder someone specific, who was condoning a general massacre. The latter action is not the kind of action we should need in an order that was fair, solidaire, and just. But, as Dickens or Lloyd Garrison might have put it, there are higher courts than the courts of law, and those two French terrorists – or resistors – were its instruments.
So: of what is, or was, a CEO of a mega Health Insurance Company the instrument?
2.
In the 60s, it was popular to say that "society" was to blame for crime. This has fallen out of fashion. Yet in the case of the assassination of Brian Thompson, this seems close to the truth. It is American society, its politics, economics, and media that allowed a man like Brian Thompson in a company like United Healthcare unparalleled power over the life and death of millions of people. They abused that power as much as they could, and we watched, and knew. We knew about the algorithms, we knew about the medical bankruptcies, we knew about the pain, pointless misery, and the barbarous second guessing of doctors by people with a high school knowledge of biology. We knew about the trail of death that leads directly to the offices of United Healthcare. We knew and did nothing and Luigi M. did something.

To put it another way: if Brian Thompson, in the streets of NYC, had smashed himself down repeatedly onto the body of Luigi Mangioni, damaging his spine for life, he would have been arrested and jailed. But instead, phone callers from Thompson's division of United Healthcare just denied and delayed back pain care, so it is all good. Well, it isn't good. If you like your healthcare insurance, as President Smooth put it, you can keep your healthcare insurance. He didn't add: as they kill and maim other clients. That's the unspoken part.

There are few cases where America, as it is now, is directly on trial. But this is definitely one of them.

"The natural outlawry of women"

 

In a famous passage in Marx’s Grundrisse, Marx wrote about the character form introduced by money: “The exchangeability of all products, services, relationships against a third, material one, which can without exception be exchanged – thus the development of exchange value (and the money relationship) is identical with general venality, corruption. General prostitution appears as a necessary phase of the development of the social character of personal resources, faculties, abilities, activities. More politely expressed: the universal relationships of exploitation and need.”

The Grundrisse was published by the Marx Engels institute, after its discovery among the manuscripts, in the 1930s. Long after the publication of Emmy Hennings Branded (or Stigma – Der Brandmal). This journal of a prostitute is easily assimilated into Emmy Hennings own life, but it is written as and conceived as a novel. The protagonist is, like Hennings, an actress and dancer, who is “guided” to prostitution by a man who provides her with the money to live. When we first meet her, she is on the verge of starvation – and nobody is going to feed her for free. Her use value at this point seems to be nill. The man who buys her food, however, sees a use and exchange value in her. And the narrator – without using the word prostitution – soon “has” money.

In a very brilliant bit (the book, written in the high style of the expressionists, is full of brilliant bits), the narrator has a sort of revery in which she becomes money – the coin or paper bill in her hand or pocket. And the money that she is, is everywhere, throughout the town. She is as available, as widespread, as common, as money.

“I would really like to know if money is the only visible sign of my “fallen state” (Verwarhlosung). Money in my pocket appears, to me at least, questionable. More and more suspicious. Money is disgrace, the most overt sign of scandal. I clean my money with a pocket tissue before I put it in harmless hands; thus, it is at least externally clean. The money is always false, but even so, it works capitally as exchange. There is no real (echtes) money, I tell myself. It would be only by chance that such a thing could be called real. What one exchanges is always something other. I can not, however, so subjectively make these value judgments. I have ordered a roll and a cup of coffee, and for this I put down my insane ten mark piece on the marble table. For this ten mark piece I will lay myself on the table, I will pay with myself Thus I lay a ringing gold coin on the table. And am I just this? Can one compare oneself with a gold piece? Me? Still I have something glimmering in me.”

To be identical to one’s pocket money – and at the same time, not to be identified with it, as it is purely exchangeable. Hennings’ prostitute experiences, due to her position, the impossible identity of the capitalist subject, who is what she earns. Prostitutes exist in the pores of the system – especially back in prewar Europe, half ancien regime, half industrial treadmill of production. In those pores, consumer culture is being transformed, and that transformation is the landscape of bars and restaurants and rent for the hour rooms, the places where eating, drinking and fucking is going on, the place of the transitory, where the narrator (we find that she is named Dagney, or at least uses that name, a third of the way into the book, when she records a conversation) is most at home, and most homeless. “I or the money? What a phantasmagoric, licenced swindle (Schwindel – also, vertigo).” Licenced, pantentierte – as in the licence to be a freelance prostitute.

In a sense, I read this book, or encounter it, with too much knowledge, since I know that this is a chapter not only from Dagny’s life, but Emmy Hennings. Though I might be clever enough to think that no piece of money is really authentic, I can be dull enough, as many a reviewer has been, to think that the woman who writes the journal in the novel is actually Hennings. Memoir, and not fiction. Hennings, however, was a writer with high talents, and if this journal is Dagney’s, I think we can assume that, at least for the author, Dagney’s life is not merely her shadow. Role-playing, who would know better? This is, in a sense, the way expressionist fiction often crossed the boundary between life and art, but not so that we can so directly privilege the former without losing a crucial nuance. The former only gains its value – its desperation is earned – only if it can be poured into the latter. Hamsun, Hennings contemporary, also put his adventures in Copenhagen in Hunger, yet that is read as a novel, and I think it is on that model that Hennings was working. The intensity of a life, the “glimmer” that is not in the gold piece, provides an illumination within the novel, which is a fictive in its gestures, its specifics, its self-reflection. Prison, another of Hennings novels, is bound up with Branded: the former novel also lifts a chapter, or chapters, from her real life. Hennings had short stays in prison, once for “stealing” – apparently, some client didn’t want to pay, so she took her pay and the client went to the police. She wrote Prison in 1918, and her partner, Hugo Ball, read it: “I now live as quietly as though in a cell. Your book, my dear, lies in my arms and legs. It entered my blood like a poison. I am a by no means contemptible public; it will have a wide effect.”

I don’t know if Grisélidis Réal, the Swiss prostitute and poet who militated for sex workers rights in the seventies, read Hennings Branded. And I’m almost sure that Colette, Hennings contemporary, never read her work, and may never have heard of her. All three, however, share an outlook, which is novelistically summoned by Christina Stead in her portrait of Henny Pollit, the wife and sworn enemy of Sam Pollit in The Man who loved Children: “the natural outlawry of womankind.” If law is founded in the will of the people, this outlawry is simply a fact: women have been denied full citizenship for millenia. Under the boot of the law, but never of the law. This chthonic postulate is hard to reconcile with feminism, with a feminism that has been so much about the law, within the law. It does inject a certain scepticism, not so much of nature but of history, into any feminist dogma. It is no accident that Hennings novels (Branded, Prison) are so concerned with the justice and the injustice of the law. And reflect her curious Catholic anarchism.

Hennings reflections on money might well have been influenced by reading Bakunin. Hugo Ball notes he was reading Bakunin’s The Paris Commune and the idea of the state in 1915, when he and Hennings were starting the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich.

From Ball’s letter to a friend: ’Socialism, life with and in the people – at the moment Emmy Hennings and I are playing in a small suburban Variete. We have snake charmers, fire-eaters and ropewalker, everything one could wish for. One looks deeply into life here. One is poor, and yet very enriched.”

 

 

The imaginary Democratic Party

 I love the imaginary Democratic Party! The one against plutocracy, That is for hammering billionaires into millionaires via such things as a progressive capital gains tax. The one that is against corruption on the Supreme Court. The one acutely attuned to the problems of working class families, which begins, indeed,with the price of eggs and ends with the price of medical visits. The party against genocide! We should have a party like that.

But we don't. We have the party of Clinton. We have the party that dropped the A bomb, fought the Korean and Vietnam war, is aiding Israel as it commits genocide in Israel, and recently ran a presidential candidate who was closely advised by Lorene Powell Jobs, a billionaire.

Of course, the imaginary image of a party, a movement, an institution, a state is a sociological inevitability. We are, like all monkeys, creatures of fantasy.

But when imagination so interferes with real life that we develop problems in coping with real life, we have a neurosis.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever found a simple cure for neurosis.

Recognition, though, is a step forward.

2. The question is not what is good for the Democratic Party but what is good? And how do we get there?

I am generally lefitst by disposition. But I can imagine what it is like to be a Trumpist, or a Clinton liberal, etc.

In one party states (Texas, Kansas, Idaho, etc.) we've seen the liberal part of the population waste its time, for decades, hoping to put a Democrat in a Senate seat. We've seen, in Texas, the liberals waste their time trying to put a Democrat in the governorship. And we have seen the Dems nominate candidates that profess to be to the right of Manchin on the issues.

The controversial suggestion I would have is: in one party states, the game is in the party. Trump has done something to the GOP that is so far seemingly unrecognized. Republican women in Kansas, in Ohio, in Florida vote for abortion rights and for Trump, and the liberal commentariat, far from seeing that this opens up a space in the Republican party for the famous "moderate" candidate, come down on these women as racist pigs. Etc.

Now, it might well be that many of them are racist pigs. But they are racist pigs for abortion rights. In Texas, if the Trump standard of 15 weeks I believe it is was represented by some Republican in a Republican primary, it would be both a startling turnabout and a viable political ploy. The ploy would not be to elect a rightwing Democrat, but a 'populist" Republican. And in so doing, do something concrete to bring back abortion rights to Texas women.

Why, then, is the obvious not a political career path? It is because the imaginary and the real Democratic party are confused. There is no liberal Democratic party - save for a few reserved House seats - in Texas. There are Democratic mayors galore., however.

These mayors would do more if they became populist Republican mayors. They would have more power on the statewide playing field. That is a sad fact. But a happy fact is, the GOP can't, or rather won't, gerrymander against its own. If the state GOP did that, then the division between populist and far right GOP would become a politically interesting space for the Texas liberal.

Every once in a while, there is a sport of nature - a Democratic governor of Kansas, for instance. But you will notice these folks usually are center right. In NY, they would be mainstream Republicans.

This has been the state of play now for thirty years, yet the liberal activist in the South simply does not accept the party reality. It is as if the Democratic party - the party of Clinton, the party of Obama (who said, himself, that he was pursuing the politics of a liberal Republican), were a leftist org.

It isn't.

THE "MUSE" OF DADA

“I’m a woman. I’ve let go of the controls. The question about the „why“ and the „whence” .

I’m only confessing the “how”.

How was it?“

 - The brand

She lived, in the last year of her life, in a room above a gas station/grocery store, in Magliaso, Tessin, in Switzerland. It was 1948. Count the dead: Hugo. Eric. Else, Ernst’s wife. Kurt, in England. The gypsies, the bohos and drunks from Munich, the cabaret singers who supplemented their incomes with tricks on the side – like she did. Cities: Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden.

When she died, she was buried in the same cemetery as Hugo. There were some announcements in the Swiss papers. She was not utterly forgotten, ever. One paper commented that the price of her burial service was paid late: a collection was made among friends.

She was hewed out of the same raw sensitivity to the violence in half-capitalist/half ancien regime world that went into the great female characters in Dostoevsky’s novels, which she would have read in German translations in the Piper edition. Novels that were not “reflexions” of society, but much more suggestive, more intrusive than that: guides to excess, to marginality, to the polar opposite of bourgeois decency.  Dostoevsky was an event. Hamsun was an event. In Gide’s essay on Dostoevsky, he presents the credo:

I recently read an interview with M. Henry Bordeaux, who used a phrase that somewhat astonished me: : « First you have to try to know yourself,” he said. The interviewer must have not understood – Certainly a literatus who seeks himself [qui se cherche] runs a great risk: that of finding himself. After this, he will only write cold books, conforming to himself, all resolved. If he knows his lines, his limits, it is in order not to cross over them. He no longer has any fear of being insincere ; he is afraid of being inconsequent. The true artist remains half unconscious of himself, when he produces. He does not really know who he is. »

« He does not really know who he is”. The radical disjunction between who one is, from every social and political perspective, and who one is, from the subjective point of view, creates the space of a certain impossibility to settle on an identity. This space was populated by both artists and con artists, by cabaret singers and prostitutes, by pimps and poets, by agents and counter-agents, by revolutionaries and provacateurs. She was a familiar of this circle, which she found everywhere – even in Switzerland – in the 1910s and 20s. The underground, bohemia, the party, the cult, psychoanalysis or the avant-garde, these are names for overlapping domains.

The domains, of course, had a reach outside the circles in which she travelled. The Dostoevsky who discovered the Underground, for Gide, Hesse, Hugo Ball, etc., was at the same time the Dostoevsky who inspired the proto-Nazi antisemites that would latter fill the role of Nazi ideologues: Brasol, the translator of Dostoevsky’s Notes of a Writer, would also translate and distribute Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the US, finding a patron in Henry Ford, and a receptive audience in Wilson’s State department and the Department of War.  

Alienation, like a hit of acid, is an unpredictable trip.

 In Der Brandmal, she wrote a novel that took its impetus from her own adventures; but her narrator was nevertheless a double, or perhaps the anima, of the narrator of Hamson’s Hunger, with the same mental obstruction lying in the path of any normal course of getting by, a certain refusal to shrink back from the brink of death – death by starvation. Hunger was a keynote. She was not born to bourgeois parents, professionals, she did not go to university, she did not recognize, even, the attraction of the stability of the bourgeois household. Her father, a sailor, was remade into a Sindbad or an Odysseus in her mind – but she was well aware that she was creating a symbol for her own use out of the old man.

Prison [Gefaengnis] and Der Brandmal are a set. The woman who is imprisoned in Prison, who is unjustly imprisoned, who is shaken by the experience so as to see everything in a new light, is connected to the woman who, in Munich, was ripped off by a client – and who consequently took from the client what they had agreed upon. It was for the latter – recompense for her, theft to the court – that she was imprisoned.

Of course, we can trace her in the texts of men, who often reveal their seedy sides in their notebooks, these exploitative fighters against exploitation. Eric Muehsam, for instance, an anarchist, who was later arrested after the Reichstag fire, and murdered “by an SS commando in the night of July 9-10, 1934” in the Oranienburg concentration camp, knew her and claimed she “seduced him” so that they had “coitus” when he was infected with gonnorhea. They were friends, they both worked freelance for Simpliccimus, and she probably charged him for the “coitus”.

Eric Muehsam: The poor girl gets way too little sleep. And since she is very willing, she never gets any rest.“  https://www.xn--mhsam-tagebuch-gsb.de/tb/diaries.php#h5_r190

 By this time she had a daughter. And she was living, as always, hand to mouth, even as she was building up a reputation as a cabaret singer and dancing. She was working at an artist’s bar, Kathi’s, until 3 in the morning, and taking painting classes. To be a cabaret singer you had to put in long hours: it wasn’t a matter of one song, it wasn’t Liza Minelli in Kabaret, it was work.

Later came Hugo, later came her entrance into history, opening the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. The dances, the masks, the free-floating signifiers.

No Muse ever worked so hard.

ars poetica

 

The poem feels its erasures

As the old soldier feels his old wounds

Which make his dreams what they are.

 

And the household what it was

And the child the man

Who puts his raging alky Dad in the nursing home and done.

 

I am the eraser, I am the whiteout

In the nerveways I jump

And jack. Mostly jack.

 

“Similar tactics in other verticals”

A man once said to me

And then said, “all fixed. Should be right as rain.”

- Karen Chamisso

The fascitude ahead of us

We have the useful phrase virtue signaling to describe a certain hollow but scolding tone implying the speaker's woke state. We need a phrase for what Barnier is doing in France. We see it all the time - a politician almost literally begs the financial markets to help him out by raising interest rates or showing "chaos" in the market, etc. We have the phrase capital flight - which is short for taxing rich people and giving workers more benefits - but this an appeal to capital flight if the on display legislation - lowering taxes on the wealthy, tearing up the social insurance program, cutting medical and education expenditure, etc. - isn't voted through tout de suite. I suppose we could call it money signalling. Sometimes it works - in the UK, every step downhill has been accompanied by VSP saying this or that austerity measure must be put through or there won't be pudding. It always turns out that pudding is only for plutocrats. In any case, France still remembers that the social insurance system - retirement, health, education - was only put in place by violent struggle, and that memory remains in the street, though it is trampled under nightly by rightwing tv. Macron, drunk on non-power, laughed about Barnier's threats - France is a rich country, he said, which is so true that it vitiates his entire economic policy thus far.

So, the censure is happening today. Key question is: has Barnier kissed Le Pen's ass enough that the big Fascist will rescue her fine boy? The funny thing is that the RN is running on a leftward economic policy - keeping the social insurance network strong. Which shows that they actually know why they have been winning. The immigrant bigotry is one thing, but if their voters feel that the RN is taking away their healthcare and their retirement, they will go back to the Left.

The neolib consensus is breaking up in the fascitude that was always the next step. God help us.