Joseph Roth On the Newspapers:

 

The Literary World was one of the bright, nervous, easily smashable cultural products of the Weimar period in Germany. Its editorial policy was faddishly pro-bolshevik, but it published all kinds. One of its characteristic gambits was to ask a “rundfrage” – a question about some trending topic – to a number of literary highfliers, as well as journalists, artists, etc. For instance, the magazine would ask, what do you think about the cosmopolitan idea? And get Thomas Mann to answer. Or what is the “german spirit” and get Unamuno and Ilya Ehrenberg to answer. It is a cheap way to get some big names in the mag.

The magazine was always interested in the newspaper business. In one of their round robin questions, they asked reporters about what they hushed up.  They got interesting responses, but the most interesting, retrospectively, was from a reporter for the new, flashy tabloid, the 8 Uhr, which warned that the press of the “old world” was going to go to the dogs if they did not adapt and respond to the challenge of the American news media. Specifically, he warned against the “New York” tendency: that the reporter can say everything and only hush up one thing: his own opinion. “Perhaps the young world on the other side can be lead by the democratic principle of neutrality, but the old world is more advanced. It needs the personality behind the story, it needs to pull conclusions from the material it publishes, it needs [to show] its values.”

In 1929, the magazine asked a number of writers and journalist about their experience of the mass media – the “Tagespresse als Erlebnis”. Joseph Roth was one of the respondents. His answer is a very good, compressed meditation about the press – not in the Karl Kraus manner (Roth was very unimpressed by Kraus’s thunder) but in the manner of someone who is a familiar of the newsroom, knows how the type is set and how the proofreaders do their work. Knows, in essence, that the newspaper is a factory product, which makes a decisive difference in what the “news” is.

Joseph Roth, in the last two decades, has been amply translated. The Hotel Years contains translations of a lot of Roth’s journalism. But it doesn’t contain a translation of his response. I think I’ll translate a bit of it here.

“I read the newsper in order to hear something (or many things) about “current affairs” without forgetting for a moment the distance that divides a fact and a reported story [Nachricht]. In order to know the truth, I try to keep in mind all the approximations under which the story comes to be: for instance, the dumbness or cluelessness of the reporter on the other end of the line from the correspondent [Roth is referring here to the practice of dictating a story on the phone to the ‘reporting secretary’], the natural tendency of the newspaper to highlight “interesting” or “pointed” or “important” stories (which can, of course, be true); the gullibility of an editor who is badly paid and overworked, who is easily driven into heavyhandedness; the rigidities under which the print setter and proofreader have to work and through which simply typos can arise. After I have reflected on all these side issues, there remains little of the newspaper story worthy of notice.

If the newspaper were as immediate, as sober, as rich, as uncontrolled as reality, it could, like this, really communicate experiences. But it only gives us inexact, sieved reality – and when we say it is badly formed, we are really saying: it is falsified. Because there is no other objectivity than an artistic one. Only it can represent a state of affairs as it truly is. Any other kind of presentation is private, which means: incomplete. The correspondent on the one end and the reporter on the other are mostly not artists. Their stories, reports, descriptions are like private communications in a letter, but addressed to the public. It is not an accident that the source of the newspapers are called correspondence and correspondents. Their reports remain private letters: however much lived materials they offer us! But they even their wound the secrecy of the letter by writing for the hundreds of thousands and to to one alone – thus losing the experiential, scattering it to the wind, that finally bears it as “printed matter”.”

I like Roth’s notion that the intermediary is not a clear channel, an independent connector through which fact passes into story and story passes into information. I said that Roth was not Karl Kraus, but there is a glimmer, here, of the Viennese school. Surely we are all to ready to forget that the source of the newspaper is the letter. Although, contra Roth, letters were often, classically, round robins – not for one correspondent alone. I dream, here, of Madame de Sevigne’s letters about the trial of Fouquet, which was perhaps the first instance of an intellectual intervention into a corrupt judicial procedure in France – surely the predecessor of Zola’s J’accuse.

How to preserve the only objectivity that counts – artistic objectivity – in the age of influencers? In the death throes of the newspaper biz? A question I will leave to the Roth-fans among us.

Some objections to Nabokov

 

As is well known, Nabokov had contempt for Dostoevsky. I’ve long regarded that as the bad taste of good taste – of having too strong a taste for a certain kind of novel and poem that cages you into a certain school or style. Nabokov’s father, apparently, had the bad taste to like Balzac, for whose “trashy” books, of course, Nabokov has a low opinion.

This sectarian tendency in Nabokov puts me out of sorts with him. He has, to my mind, a second rate critical intelligence, which makes me weary of his novels and their too easy cruelties.

Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that perhaps Nabokov, living in Germany in the 20s and 30s, thought so badly of Dostoevsky because his vilest idea – his permanent hatred of Jews – was not only appreciated by the ultra-right, but was an inspiration for Nazis like Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg, who was hung at the end of the war, was a Baltic German, one of a core group that migrated to the Nazis in the early twenties. Rosenberg was the official “theorist” of Naziism, and Dostoevsky was a convenient great name to give an honorable lineage to the murderous hatred of Jews.

Nabokov never discusses Dostoevsky in terms of this heritage. It would, of course, violate his notion of the aesthetic to allow something this political to impinge on opinion of a novel. Yet there is something quite comic about the way Nabokov went around dismissing whole swathes of literature, from Balzac to Thomas Mann, something that has a motive above that of his dandyism. Mann, of course, draws a lot from Dostoevsky. All of German literature did.

I wonder about that Nabokovian finickiness.

The pornographic snuffbox maker and Kant

 

In Leslie Stephen’s Studies of a Biographer there is a passage about the transmission of Kant’s philosophy to Britain that rather warms my populist heart. I like an intellectual history to have detours, eccentricities, and coincidences – and certainly the fact that one of the main capillaries of Kantianism in London was a pornographic snuffmaker hits the spot.

The snuffmaker in question is a man named Thomas Wirgman. Wirgman’s father owned a “fashionable” toy shop on St. James Street, which is known in Johnsoniana due to the fact that Samuel Johnson bought his silver buckles there, when he had need of silver buckles. Wirgman himself appears not only in the few books that examine the spread of Kant’s name in England in the 1790s, but also in legal history.  In 1812, he was arrested for offering for sale a toothpick case “containing on the inside lid thereof one obscene, filthy, and indecent picture representing the naked persons of a man and women in an indecent, filthy and obscene situation, attitude and practice.” According to Augustus de Morgan, Lord Brougham was his counsellor and somehow got him off. We go from legal history to philosophy in an anecdote about Wirgman visiting the great Brougham years later. Brougham at first thinks that his former client is in the soup again – but it isn’t that at all. Wirgman is now a Kantian, and he wants to propound the doctrine at the new University of London, with which Brougham is associated.

Wirgman visited Augustus de Morgan too, in 1831, to talk Kant. “I’m an old brute of a jeweler”, he said. “And his eye and manner were of an extreme jocosity…”Now”, he said, “I’ll make it clear to you. Suppose a number of goldfishes in a glass bowl – you understand? Well, I come with my cigar and go puff puff puff puff, over the bowl, until there is a little cloud of smoke. Now, tell me, what would the goldfishes say to that?” “I imagine,” said I, “ that they would not know what to make of it.” ‘By Jove, you’re a Kantian,” said he, and with this and the like he left me…”

Truly, an anecdote that would have made George Bernard Shaw think of the theatrical possibilities.

Wirgman, it seems, was converted to Kant when a German water colorist friend named Richter took him to see a lecture by a man named Nitsch in 1795 in London. The London of 1795 – the London of Blake, of radical mechanics distributing copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. As well of anti-Catholic/anti-Irish bigotry, bucks and whores and small children crippled in the chimney-cleaning trade. Philosophy, outside of Edinburgh, was not in great shape in Britain. But it was sneaking in from Germany in the oddest ways. Wirgman taught himself German to read the great Kant. He became a persistent disciple. He corresponded with Dugald Stewart, but Stewart was too old, too ensconsced in sensualism, to get it. He corresponded with James Mill. He met Madame de Stael when she came to England, and wanted to talk with her about the reference to Kant in De L’allemagne. In his small way, Wirgman got his goldfish to think about things – although Stephen doubts that one can connect Wirgman to Coleridge’s interest in Kant. It was Coleridge who got to the goldfish.

In a fragment written at the end of his life, Coleridge remembered the “rough crowd” of “Crown and Anchor Patriots,” who included Wirgman, Nitsch, and Blake’s acquaintance, Thomas Holcroft. Kant in the London nightlife – I like to think of it.

 

 

Two chamisso poems

 

Postcard to Gerard Nerval

 

Is this “crazed packrat of esoteric lore”

worth the finding after

the bandages are thrown off?

 

Labyrinthian hoarders my brother my sister!

Every wall opening

Egyptian eyes to stare at you.

 

The unmedicated, unmediated soul

Is the pyramid pressing down on

your ache-mixed body.

 

The soul  swallows

shit and ambrosia indifferently

while shakes mug the victim

 

and this ransom demand

in scrawled on a torn off newspaper page

-- ALL OF POSTERITY.

 

Yeah.

Good luck with that.

2.

 

On Rue des archives

 

The infinitely heavy night

far older than this bauble world

falls weighted by moons on street-bound me

and I go under and out with it.

As though some pot bellied Greek god

raping for rape’s sake thrust his snout

into my very roots.

And so I play, bottom-feeder me

 

With the roots of the Indo-European

tongue.

“Tupp (cock) named for its crest, comb”

“skoli young dog, kale bitch”

 

Night, ex-lover, bill collector, bummer

Swims in the muddy puddles

Where my face, the face of summer

dimly huddles.

 

Baudelaire, Rops and the Modern

 

1. Baudelaire.

I was walking home one evening, recently, going down Rue Fauburg St.-Denis, thinking of chores to do and as well, as one does, as absorbing proprioceptively the whole organism of Paris,  I came upon an advertisement video on one of those screens that you find hung up poles on well trafficked streets, flashing pictures of pouty women advertising lipstick or smiley women advertising cleaning products or boys with fey, distant looks in their eyes advertising sports wear. In the repertoire of these advertisements changing one after the other there was one that showed a face that was neither pouty nor smiley nor ephebe, a face I knew., a face I was rather shocked to see. The face, in fact, of Charles Baudelaire, from the famous Nadar portrait. And there were words superimposed on this image. The words did not advertise an exhibit, or a new book, or anything like that. The catch here was a public service announcement warning about STDs. Baudelaire, it informed us, was a victim of syphilis. Don’t you be too!

Baudelaire, in the latter stages of whatever medical condition it was that put him down, was a paranoid sensitive to begin with. He knew, as he walked the street in second hand clotes, that he  was being talked about – but in his wildest dreams I cannot image he ever thought his image would grace a public service announcement about STDs. It is like some awful, posthumous verdict. One that he foresaw. Here was the spirit of his disease revealed, and it was: modernity itself.  Here was the poet as butt. Every jake and jill could feel superior. Could pass by. Laughing.

“There is a softening of the brain, that is evident”, wrote his mother in a letter she sent from Brussels, Hôtel du Grand Miroir, where her son lay speechless after a severe seizure.

The Baudelaire on the screen of the public health advertisement is appropriately spectral. He seems to float there.

‘Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule !

Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid ! »

2. They all went to whorehouses. Those high modernists, those adventurers, those I-otherers.

3. I remember reading Baudelaire in high school and having an immediate case of identification fever.  I didn’t understand the poems in the Penguin paperback translation I read, I was just in high school and had little idea who Andromache was or what she had to do with a construction project but I did understand the spirit, the impossible combination of sleaze, gallantry, and that madly self-subverting oppositional spirit,   because I was an American teen and felt like one, which is to say, I hated teenhood. Seventy years before I picked up that book, in enclaves of literati and artists around the world, there was a Baudelaire cult. In Britain, in Russia, in Japan, as well as in Francophone countries. The extreme, perhaps, was reached in Russia, where a symbolist named “Ellis” (aka L.L. Kobylinsky) suggested, during the Russian revolution, that the solution to Russia’s problems was Baudelaire, writing to a Menshevik senator in the Duma that Baudelaire “was the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison to whom the Marxes, Engelses, Bakhunins and the rest of the brotherhood they created  are nothing.” In Ellis went so far as to dress himself to look like Baudelaire. In Adrian Vanner’s Baudelaire in Russia, he cites the even more extreme case of a poet named Bagritsky who “was so captivated by Baudelaire’s personality that his face and his entire attitude began to recall Baudelaire: the dark eyes, the lips pressed together, bitterly and scornfully,” which were “an exact reproduction of the picture of Baudelaire” he had found in a book.  

Ah, the Imitatio Baudelaire. Even as I was reading my Baudelaire, in the general culture the cult had moved on to Rimbaud. It was Rimbaud’s name that was dropped by Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Baudelaire’s cult status has dropped to an STD warning for the kids.

4. We owe a fine and finely grained account of Baudelaire’s bitter sojourn in Brussels to another Baudelairian, Maurice Kunel, who interviewed various people who met Baudelaire and went through the documents available to produce Baudelaire en Belgique in 1912. Through his books on Baudelaire and, later, Felicien Rops, Kunel achieved that blessed thing, bibliographic immortality. While his book, Baudelaire en Belgique, might have a micro-audience today, one can’t really write a biography of Baudelaire – or Rops – without referencing him. An exoplanet circling around a distant star: which we infer, us terrestrials,  from its infinitesimal gravitational pull on the star as we track it night after night.

It is to Kunel that we owe the scenes in the Hôtel du Grand Miroir,  where Baudelaire holed up during his time in Brussels, alternately dodging the landlady and her demands for rent and sortying out in borrowed shoes that were  too tight. It was to this chamber that was brought from when he had his cataclysmic attack in Naumur, touring the Eglise Saint-Loup in the company of his friends, Felicien Rop, the painter, and his publisher, Malassis, who put him on board a train and tried to understand him when he kept telling them to open the door. The door was opened. It dawned on the two that he meant close the door. He could not remember the word, close. Or rather, the word was occluded, in his brain, by the word open – the latter supervened on “close”.

His friends eventually took Baudelaire to a hospital, where he spent 15 days, his condition worsening. When he left, the doors of the entry suddenly and violently slammed shut. According to Kunel’s source, the sisters, stupefied, fell to their knees on the flagstones of the courtyard and prayed to God. “In order to banish their anxiety, an exorcist was summoned. Dressed in a white robe, waving an aspersorium in his hand, the priest sprinkled holy water and prayed out loud, conjuring away the spirit of evil from the room that had been abandoned by the invalid.”

A scene from a B movie. A giallo.

 

5. Felicien Rops met Baudelaire in Brussels. They were introduced by the publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis,  who had found, in Belgium’s lax enforcement of censorship, an incentive to publishing all the erotic material he wanted,  all the notorious French writers, and even the most cursed of poets. Poulet-Malassis had been arrested during the 1848 revolution – he’d been caught, armed,  on a barricade  – and one of the men he was marched off with “was shot and killed before him’ on Rue Racine before the garde national brought him to prison. A man being shot before you cools a man’s spirits. The publisher admired Louis Blanc - he admired Proudhon – and for their sake, partly, and partly his ideals, and partly his youth, he was in prison for six months until he was released. He hopped it back to his home town, Alencon, in Normandy, where he took up publishing. When he next tested the air in Paris, the 2^nd Republic had dissolved, and the writers he hoped to publish were subject to a regime of censorship that was too cumbering for his ambitions. So he hopped it again, this time to Belgium, and as we said.  Here, the very incompetence of the police was an aid to the promotion of culture, especially if that culture included drawings of naked women and men, and sly or even frank presentations of fucking. As Rops once said, « Les anciens ne reculaient pas devant un bel accouplement et ils « avaient raison. Il y aura de tout. »  Like many a lefty publisher before or since – Girondias, Al Goldstein -  he printed political pamphlets for his conscience and porn to make a living. It is a long tradition, this overlap of wankery and advanced views.

5. Rops was living well from his inheritance. He’d founded a newspaper and found a wife, Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, who came with a castle: the Chateau de Thozée in the small town of Mettet. The newspaper did not take off, given that it made too many demands on Belgian literati, but at least the writing of Rops friends and his first caricature saw the light of day, and those who made it their business to know, knew.  Charlotte had a child, who died, and another, a boy, Paul, who survived. Rops threw himself into caricature, illustration and painting. And, to Charlotte’s dismay, into being a general cocksman. That eventually undid the marriage: they separated their properties in 1875. Charlotte lived long after that, dying after Paul did, in 1929.

Her last letter to Felicien, in part: “You don’t want to see me anymore, Felicien, and so be it. You will never see me again ! ... It is you, yourself, Félicien, who ought to have demanded a separation many years ago. Your life at the moment is certainly far from that which you have been preparing for two years, with so much patience and cruelty, but it seems to me that it must be a comfort for you to be free and not lie to me ceaselessly. This last horrible liaison, the eighth that I ‘ve known of since our marriage, has been a punishment for you for the others, and it has killed me! Since you don’t want to see me anymore and have asked me not to write to you, I want my last words to you to be a pardon. My love for you was too pure and too great for me to ever feel any feeling of hatred, or of  a vengeance unworthy of me. “

The Gavarni of Belgium. The Daumier of Brussels. Plaudits he was accorded.

7. Baudelaire, when Rops met him, was busy and down at heels. The Baudelarian blues. The usual thing.  It had started off, as many of Baudelaire’s fugues did, with feverish plans, worthy of a Balzac character. Of Rastignac.  Putting out the book of translations of Poe, writing a new book of poems, giving a series of lectures. “Je veux travailler à Bruxelles comme un Démon”.  He’d conjured up the demonic, and he knew all too well what that meant.

Baudelaire had come up  on the train to Brussels in 1864 with his friend, Nadar. Nadar was not only a photographer, but also a aeronaut. He was going to Brussels to make an ascent and fly to the coast and maybe over the channel. He invited Baudelaire to come along on Le Geant, his balloon. Baudelaire decided not to, but he did observe the pumping the air into the balloon. Nadar took with him a M. Georges Barrel  instead of the poet.  Baudelaire watched the Le Geant lose its anchor and drift up skyward from the Jardin Botanique. A shape in the sky above Brussels. The  shape that came down at midnight, that same day, near Ypres, never making it across the channel.  

Baudelaire went back to his plans. Always the poems, always the letters to Mama, always the money. The Flowers of Evil had been published, had been fined for lewdness (300 francs), had been censored and re-published and been not reviewed by Sainte-Beuve. A slight that Baudelaire overlooked. His plan for a lecture series on the current state of the arts in France. Like Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin in the wilds of Arkansas, Baudelaire took the view that the yokels of Belgium would enjoy a little splash of up to date culture. Paris culture. Gautier. His maître. In the event, they didn’t show up.

8. Rops had run into Poulet-Malassis on one of his jaunts to Paris. All of his life, Rops was a traveler. He went to Lapland. He went, in the 1880s, to New Orleans, with the two women he lived with. Had children with. Sisters, Leontine and Aurelie Dulac . Eventually, their mother moved into the nest.  

He went to the Côte d’Azure and Tyrol. In Lapland, he caught malaria.

Poulet-Malassis fell in love, in a way, with the “beautiful Fely.” Rops was two years younger than Baudelaire, but already knew of him – as anybody would who was in the business of caricature and engraving. Baudelaire had written of Gavarni and Daumier – perhaps he would write about Rops? Baudelaire made a laborious joke at their meeting, but Rops understood that the joke was more than a joke – it was an initiation. He responded with the kind of gravity, carrying the joke along, that Baudelaire appreciated.

Specifically, when the waiter asked what they would take, Baudelaire had responded: I think a bath. And Rops had said, a bath sounds good. They didn’t laugh. It was funnier not to laugh. They were kin spirits in that non-joke joke.  Even if Baudelaire’s own Rabelaisian side, his fun boy side, had long been sloughed from him by disease and circumstance. The Baudelaire who had walked around the Ile St. Louis in his pyjamas had been forgotten, buried under debts, affairs, and the continual drama with his mother and her uncomprehending husband, and the poems, and the apocalypse, and Swedenborg and Joseph le Maistre.

Rops later wrote: “… we found each other through a strange love, the love of the first crystallographic form: the passion for skeletons.”

In a letter from Brussels, Baudelaire, in his eternal bitch mode, wrote: “As to conversation, that great that unique pleasure of a spiritual being, you can go all around Belgium but you’ll never find a soul who speaks.

Rops spoke. And there was a spark.   Rops and Baudelaire were spiritual descendants of the left hand of John Webster. A Baroque sub-vibe. As Eliot puts it:

“Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.”

 

 

Leaning backwards in the throes of passion or the cataclysm of death – and weren’t these surrenders similar?

 

9. Rops was the child of a prosperous factory owner in Namur Belgium. The product? Printed cloth.  Felicien, the only child. His mother died. His father died. He was left, at twelve, to the care of an un-sympathetic uncle.  A story told of all artists, in all times, all orphans. Even those whose parents died well after the point that the artist had left the broken shell of the egg. He left the moeurs of his forefathers behind as soon as he discovered sex and drawing,  but he did appreciate the textiles his whole life through. He once wrote that his painting “arose out of brocade and the sewing machine”. Like Mallarme, he adored women’s fashions, he adored the peripherals, the fans and shoes. He bordelloed up the female kit, as he saw it, in certain of his drawings and paintings. He was a man with an eye for stockings. And a man with an eye for stockings is never going to live up entirely to Baudelaire’s credo of the shock. The fetishist domesticates the shock, finds scenarios for it.

 A curiously feminine strain in beautiful Fely. We should put in the balance as we ponder the sheer misogyny that you can’t get away from in the high mercury modernist field – that field that held itself to be opposed to the established values of the bourgeois social order, to the virgin and the mother, while continually stumbling over the virgin and the mother, inverting them, running from them. Never getting over the virgin and the mother. While interpreting the emancipation of women solely in terms of the emancipation of hetero desire. While continuing the tradition of a two step objectification: of taking the look of a woman away from the woman, first step – the male gaze is always a colonizer - a step of compliments and striptease; step two, cramming that look down her throat. Aggression, hypocrisy, what hetero man among us would escape whipping?

Among Rops’ Satanic works that attracted the notice of the aesthetes, wankers, bibliophiles and cops was one entitled Pornokrates. It is a famous aquarelle, showing a Rubenesque woman, bare bum and bosom and her naked pubis – no figleaf -  but wearing stockings and a sort of hat. She has a band over her eyes, while she holds a leash attached to a pig.  Rops was pleased with this image: « I took the occasion to see and to kiss the black silk stockings, with red flowers, of a beautiful girl whose lover is in Monaco. I made her nude like a goddess, I put a long pair of black gloves on her beautiful long fingers, which I kissed, and I put on her hair one of those great Gainsboroughs in black velour, with gold trimming, which gives to the girls of our epoch that insolent dignity of the women of the seventeenth century. And there it is ! my Pornocratie.

We get it.

Rops, from years of working on caricatures for magazines and newspapers and illustrating books, was inclined to art that has a “we get it” moment. Usually, what survives is mystery: we don’t get and we will never get Mona Lisa’s smile. But Rops, fortunately, cannot be summed up by the “we get it” moment. This is overlooked by those who snob the curiosa. The monstrous is simply, for him, an aspect of the most attractive.

Another anecdote about Rops, about the desire-become-flesh for the flesh-become-fetish. About experience. It is told by Camille Lemonnier in his memoir of Rops. Lemonnier was fleeing in the face of the armies mobilized in the Franco-Prussian war. Rops, a Belgian national, followed the French armies as an artist-reporter. They met after the battle of Sedan, and shared a meal, and then a blanket, in a poor hut. This is what Lemonnier recalls of Rops’ conversation.

“What a book one could make about this! Yes, that plain littered with human brains, the dead lying in the grass, making dung for the harvests of tomorrow, the almost voluptuous smell of the vast “pourrissoir”[a combination of pissoir and pourri – rot], giving me the impression of the earth in rut… And to illustrate that, like a vast fresco of a cemetery, with the cute mortal rictuses on the faces of all the stiffs… Look, it is one of the affectations of our old sensibilities not to see what is comic about death, what makes it a cold, bracing, terrible comedy. Well – I saw three stiffs in a patch of woods, fallen with their noses in the air, with the black holes of their nostrils in contrast with the greenish pallor of their faces, like clown makeup; with their hands and limbs awkwardly bent under them, just like clowns in a circus farce. Man, even so, I’m getting goosebumps as I talk about this.”

One imagines Rops’ vision in dialogue with the vast fresco that was really made – or in a sense produced, like a movie – by Anton von Weber in Berlin. A panorama of the battle of Sedan that was analyzed by Dolf Sternberger in his book, Panorama, or Aspects of the Nineteenth Century, which came out of Nazi Germany like an odd escapee – published in 1937 in Frankfurt. Sternberger, the student of Adorno’s, who was accused by Walter Benjamin of ripping off his own work in progress, Passages.  Von Weber’s panorama is a proto-cinematic attempt at the immersive experience, minus the scent of the earth in rut, minus the fields strewn with viscera and beshitted uniforms.

10. Baudelaire, in conversation with Courbet, exaggerating his anti-nature polemic:"...speak to me of the always changing Parisian skies, which laugh or cry as the wind wills, without ever allowing their changes of heat or moisture to profit the existence of stupid cereals.”

11. In Calasso’s eccentric book, The Baudelaire Folie, Rops is only mentioned once. Manet is mentioned often, but never centered – instead, Calasso chooses to center Ingres, Baudelaire’s anti-thesis. Calasso mentions the famous phrase in Baudelaire’s letter to Manet – a letter Manet was proud of: “You are but the first in the decrepitude of your art.”

The code word, here, is decrepitude.  From crepitus, to creak, to croak. The sound of a crow – or Raven. Poe’s Raven, like a heraldic symbol, certainly lies underneath this phrase, in a letter written from Brussels and Baudelaire was working on getting out his Poe translations.

12. At the end of his life, Rops, living with blindness and the two Dulac sisters, was working on an autobiography, culled from bits of his correspondence. He proposed calling it: “Memoirs to ruin [nuire] the history of art of my time.” One could line up similar references to the anti-creative impulse running through modernism. A phrase from a letter by Rops’ friend, Stephane Mallarme – and lifted from that letter to entitle a very good recent book about Dada from Jed Rasula:

“My work was created only by elimination, and each newly acquired truth was born only at the expense of an impression which flamed up and then burned itself out, so that its particular darkness could be isolated and I could venture ever more deeply into the sensation of Darkness Absolute. Destruction was my Beatrice.”

STOP THE SHITKING'S WAR

 STOP THE SHITKING'S WAR!

stopping: an aesthetic

 1. Kracauer saw his first film - ›Film als Entdecker der Schönheiten des alltäglichen Lebens‹ - at some period before 1906, according to his biographer. Much, much later, from a point in his war scattered life that he felt the need for some unity, he wrote: “[…] what moved me so deeply was just a normal suburban street, filled with lights and shadows, that the film transfigured. Some trees stood around, and in the foreground was a puddle, in which otherwise invisible house facades and a piece of the sky were mirrored. Than a breeze disturbed these shadows, and the facades as well as the sky began to sway. The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me.“

The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle is not only a look into the mechanical magic of the moving picture – it is an image ripped from a distinct vein of literature. From Blake, from Nerval, from Novalis – the sense that there was more to dreams than something to be forgotten at waking.

Yet Kracauer’s film, and the films that became sound films and color films, seem increasingly to be one phase in a larger cinematic block, one that was not imagined in the twenties, when cinema’s cleverest critics – Bela Balaczs, Jean Epstein, Eisenstein – were thinking through the combinations, gamblers holding their dice, prepped for another throw.

2. 1980 is not a bellweather year. Hostage crisis, inflation, campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, these are the faint associative chimes that ring out for the American goof. But it was quietly decisive in one way for the arts, for that was the year in which the VCR entered the American consciousness as more than just a hobbyists item mentioned in Popular Photography. True, Betamax had come out in 1975, and there were expensive alternatives on the market, but it was roughly around 1980 that a critical mass had been achieved. Meaning that you didn’t have to explain what a VCR was. In 1981, Jack Valenti, stooge of the movie industry, said: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." It is the ritual of technological dissemination that the corporations it seems to threaten throw their lobbyists at it, and then they figure out how to capture it and use it for themselves. Money money money.

What was decisive, it seems to me, was the ability not so much to record film, but to stop it.

This is reflected in the way film was written about. Before the VCR, film exhibition was generally a public thing that the writer on film had to experience like everybody else – that is, as a continuous, forward moving reel. A reel that you could not stop and rewind, unless you were in a very special environment. In this sense, it fulfilled that cliché about the book whose pages “you can’t stop reading” – except that this magic book would, indeed, have become something unheimlich if you really couldn’t stop reading it, if the pages refused to turn back or to stop.

The VCR put an end to that for the masses. Or, rather, it divided up the cinematic universe. All so subtly.

3. Jean Epstein, writing in the 1920s, had a prevision that film had yet to be understood in its true metaphysical and lexical glory – the words had to be invented for it, and so did the concepts:

“The Bell-Howell is a brain in a standardized, factory made, commercially distributed metal box, which transforms world exterior to it into art. The Bell-Howell is an artist and only behind it are there other artists: the director and the operator. Finally, you can buy a sensibility and you can find it in the marketplace and pay a tax on it as you do for coffee or an Oriental rug. The gramophone is, from this point of view, a failure – or simply remains undiscovered. We must find what it deforms or where it choses. Have we registered on a disc the sound of the street, of motors, of railroad stations? Some day perhaps we will see that the gramophone is made for music like the cinema is made for theater – that is, not at all, and that it has its proper way. For we must use this unhoped for discovery of a subject which is an object, without a conscience, that is without hesitation nor scruples, without venality, no smugness, nor possible error, an entirely honest artist, exclusively art, the artist type.”

Epstein was an imaginative film writer and maker, like many in the 20s. What he gives us is a machine that is an artist in as much as it transforms the world exterior to it. But what he doesn’t give us is the crucial moment when that machine stops. It stops, and the subject and object fall apart again. Or… perhaps not. Certainly they don’t fall apart again in the traditional way, where reason is the differand – not stopping. We don't have a metaphysics, or perhaps I should say the aesthetics, of stopping even now.

I have not had the infinite amount of time necessary to research my thesis, but I do think that we have all too lightly jumped over our ability to stop, to rewind, to fastforward film. A breeze has passed through the Overworld. The way Kracauer and Jean Epstein saw movies and the way I do exist in different aesthetic worlds, go on ‘different paths”, to use Epstein’s phrase. I rarely see a movie on TV – or, I should say, on the computer screen, which is where I download them – without at some point stopping it, for this or that reason, or even rewinding a bit (I didn’t get that, I say), which removes from films the magical, irresistible thrust forward which was the experience of Kracauer, of Epstein, of the movie as something one must sit with, endure, in a theatre, which must be run on a reel, to see. Film has become readable for the mass consumer in another way, and perhaps the way it was read in the past, perhaps the former conditions of its production and viewing, hold us in the most tenuous ways when we go to the theatre to see the movie. Something that I can hold onto in Paris, with its hundreds of movie theaters, a bit more forcefully than I can in, say, Atlanta Georgia, with its maxiplexes. The future does have a way of destroying the past that is most marked in our aesthetic lives, the lives of the senses, the real core of our lives.