thoughts en route

The last time I walked the streets of the Marais, Adam was ten pounds lighter and I don’t know how many unimaginable inches smaller. Today, we strolled him around the territory that will be his later, after we return from Santa Monica: the Notre Dame, the Hotel de Ville, Rue des Archives, the park on the street off Blancs Manteaux. I could feel him getting an excess of the sense of it all: the buildings, gargoyles, statuary, crowds, small sidewalks, streetlife, bridges, river, high windows, store windows – taking it in. “Taking it in” is a phrase that, perhaps, comes from our stone age psychology. Since the 19^th century, the instruments that measure the senses have become the template for what the senses are – sensitive recorders – but long before that we felt the activity of the senses, not their passivity – we took in the sensate, the eye grasps, the smell and taste extract and send down into the dark tunnels their discoveries, the touch is everywhere, everything material is a monument to the potential sensation of hands, lips, all the working skin. We come from pillagers, all of us, not from lab assistants, and we are out for swag. To take in means that one has a sort of interior “sack” that can get filled, and that is thus limited, can thus fray or burst. For a twenty two month old, there’s a continual shifting between wanting more in the sack and the sack bursting, at which point the toddler sensibly bursts into tears.

Rationalization comes upon us later, and we blame the idiots driving in cars, the street signs, the government, our loved ones, our co-workers – we pretend that the sack is infinitely elastic. You are very rarely asked, at the job interview, how much sensation you are comfortable with. Funny, that, since it determines, as much as skill, what the job is gonna go like.

…

There are some changes in the neighborhood, I was pleased to see in my very brief ambit. Namely, a couple of new restaurants and shops, including a bio take out place which I hope is still here when we return.

Now I sit here in the Café Charlot on Bretagne and revel a bit in the gray, somewhat rainy day. I like rainy gray summer days in Paris. Everything seems to revert to Atget black and whites. Is this merely the retro conservatism of a middling man in the upper fifties, treasuring his failed promise as though it were some perverse triumph? Well, duh. But it is also that a real city displays, under different angles of light and different seasons, the concantanations of its infinite possibilities, such as are not found on the list of addresses that guides the postal service.

I’ll end this with two poems, one a poor translation of a Baudelaire poem by me myself, and one – by the same author – written a couple years ago in the summer rain, Sinatraish mood.

Pluviôse,  the whole city on his nerves,

From his overflowing urn pours a grey cold

On the pale inhabitants of the nearby cemetary

And on the mortality of the foggy neighborhoods.

On the windowsill, my cat is looking for a place to lie down,

Ceaseless stretching his thin and mangy body;

The soul of an old poet wanders in the drainpipe

With the sad voice of a reluctant ghost.

A bee drones a lament, and the smoky log in the fireplace

Accompanies the clock, which has clearly caught a cold,

With its falsetto, while in an odorous  pack of cards-

fatal inheritance of some old case of dropsy-

The cute  jack of hearts and  queen of spades exchange

cynical remarks about their defunct affairs.

Not a very good translation. Oh well. I wrote a poem in 2011 that perhaps expresses my liking for rainy paris days better:

The rain mumbles on the terrace

Its histories of reincarnation

While we sit, eating chicken.

It’s good. Your green blouse

Is good. The wine is good.

Have the seals been opened?

The seals of the angel

Whose flaming sword

Seems like a ridiculous affectation

Held against

The warm gut of the world.

Or has apocalypse been expelled

From our private life

As the rain mumbles on the terrace

And I cut into the white meat.

cockburn versus berman - party like its 1985

Paul Berman has always been a NYT Mag kinda leftist – it is a leftism that is to leftism what cottage cheese is to Stilton – the former is a delight only to the diet-er, without any of the odors, flavor, or texture of real cheese and,in political terms, the former is only a delight to the neo-lib, rid of any suggestion of price controls or, heavens, a stripped down Pentagon and unilateral disarmament (which immediately leads to Munich, don’t you know!) There’s been some buzz among the usual journalists about Berman’s  “takedown” of Alexander Cockburn in The Newrepublic – which is where cottage cheese goes to die, and be transformed into the sort of rancid stuff that eventually stands on its hind legs and demands that we invade Syria and arm the Ukraine and privatize social security at the same time.

Berman’s article was better written long ago, in a letter to the Nation in 1985, when he pretty much said the same thing about Cockburn in a long complaint that Cockburn had distorted his review of a book about the underground press to make him out to be, in Berman’s words, “a hawk, nearly a felon, virtually Republican.” This is the Berman who went on to become one of the grand supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003.  

Cockburn, a much wittier and deeper writer, replied to Berman’s letter – in which Berman suggested that the Nation fire Cockburn while remarking that Cockburn’s nasty prejudices were fucking up the atmosphere of amity that joined the New Republic, Dissent, and the Nation in the brave new world of anti-communist, neo-liberal, popular frontism that would go from triumph to triumph if only not held back by persnickety stalinists of the Cockburn type, riding on the back of solid democratic socialist politicos like Michael Dukakis (okay, I made up that about Dukakis – it is in the spirit of the letter). Cockburn answered  with brio and quotes. Berman had thought to preemptively defend himself  by claiming that Cockburn was a misquoter, dropping significant quotes that showed that Berman, too, upheld the red flag and all that. This is what Cockburn wrote:

 For a critic who regularly sticks it to playwrights- as part of his professional duties, Paul Berman seems awfully thinskinned.-Since he’s issued a Sneak Alert, fretting that somehow wriggle free with a crafty response, I had better quote once again the lines from his review

that bothered me. There was no distortion or misrepresentation whatsoever.

Berman first described the fine Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett as “a friend of the North Vietnamese government and a Communist of the worst The nuance there was plainly that any friend of the North Vietnamese government should

scarcely be a friend of reasonable people like Berman and the  readers of the New Republic. That nuance became forthright abuse with the gibe about the of Burchett’s Communism. -Having thus primed his readers, Berman wrote:

“Burchett offered the insight (1) that the United States was opposing a popular movement in, Vietnam, and (2)

that to war against the popular will means to war against the populace, i.e., to make massacre a policy. Yes,

without question, the movement paid in the end for the prestige it accorded the Burchett line:”

I quoted that passage exactly, and rereading it several times in the wake of Berman’s charges of distortion, am assured

that it clearly means whatI  thought it meant. The “insight” that the United States was opposing a popular movement and making massacre a policy is described as “the Burchett line.’‘ This same Burchett has just  been described as a Communist of the worst sort. And when the word “line” is juxtaposed with the word “Communist” in such negative

terms, it impossible to conclude that Berman is bearing witness to the value of Burchett’s analysis.

In his letter Berman actually endorses my reading by saying  that he “acknowledged Burchett’s objectionable flaws . . . and the unfortunate consequences came from them.” .~T he only such consequences that Berman mentions in the article are Burchett’s views on the Vietnamese popular struggle and the U.S. policy of massacre. Berman claims that suppressed the fact that he “praised” Burchett when he said of the movement that it “gleaned from him what

could hardly be gleaned in  the early years of  the war, from the mainstream press.” But  this praise -- scarcely overwhelming since in the early days of the war the mainstream  press was offering no insights whatsoever --is

almost imnediately qualified by Berman’s remark that by 1969 the mainstream press “was conducting investigations into Vietnam somewhat more reliable than those of Wilfred Burchett.”

So all I can do is ask my question again: What was the United States doing in Vietnam if not what Burchett said it was doing? In his letter Berman manages to avoid saying anything on this substantive question, which was the point of my item.

Since Berman accuses me of wider distortion, I may as well say openly that I thought his New Republic article was

carefully tailored to the prejudices of that magazine’s editors. His patronizing account of what he called the “hip underground” went in lockstep with his abuse of any radical 1960s politics, particularly antiwar politics, more challenging than tie-dyed T-shirts and bleed-off graphics. And since he is sufficiently shameless to claim that he

praised the worst-sort-Communist Burchett, I quote what Berman said about the leaders

of the antlwar movement in the late 1960s:

They were still the old crowd of acidheads, Buddhist poets, hippie Maoists, beyond-the-pale comedians, electric guitarists, Third World guerilla warriors, future stockbrokers and religious nuts, plus an unscrupulous conniver or two, and they should have known not to take themselves too seriously.

This kind of language has made Martin Peretz happy ever since he stepped out on his own road to ruin in the late sixties, as I

imagine Berman well knew when he wrote  his review. He and Peretz are of course as one on the- Mideast. That aside, Berman’s own politics  have often puzzled me.  I used to think they tended towards a sort of antiquarian anarchism,  but now that innocuous posture has given way to the safari rig of Bananas Republicanism.

Berman sticks it to Navasky too. My beef with Big Vic centers around opportunism, but of rather different sort. Of course he likes these exchanges on the letters page, for which he doesn’t have to pay  even in the high two figures. I expect him to suggest soon that the title of column be changed to “Letters, cont.” so he’ll get all my services,

including answerin silly letters like Berman’s, entirely for free.”

That is what a free spirit writes like. His brief aside, etching Berman’s persona as a Safari Republican was pretty much completely borne out by the subsequent career – although I think Cockburn was a little too generous re Berman’s motives. Berman was one of the innovators in the trick of presenting these views as those flowing from an unimpeachable leftism.  This is the  contrarian trick  that became a regular schtick at Slate. It is necessary to reference one’s leftism in order to keep that contrarianism up one’s sleeve, otherwise you’ll sink into the stream of all the Weekly Standard lookalikes advocating this or that mass slaughter. To get heard, one has to advocate mass slaughter for the highest humanitarian reasons!

Cockburn’s letter shows, I think, why  Berman so wants to strangle Cockburn’s corpse: the man so maddeningly had his number.

at cassis

I woke up about four in the morning. There were still lights glowing in the pines out back. For a while I filled my head with stupid thoughts and worries, and then had the happy idea that this was living besides the point. I found my glasses on the table and being careful not to wake A., I put on my bathrobe and walked out on our terrace and looked beyond the pines to the sea. The lights had finally gone out. I could hear the sea booming. The Mediterranean! Endlessly defaced, defouled, overfished, and still the loveliest thing, its blue the primitive symbol of beauty, before beauty was industrialized, commoditized, reified, and beaten to death in a billion images! And Cassis, too, is in the countryside where they are continually finding grottes where neolithics or perhaps plain lithics painted the walls and did mysterious things, piling up stones in certain ways. I’d read of an underwater cave near here, recently discovered, with wall paintings. One of the first places, then.
Mostly, though, I concentrated on the surge. I listened to it in the silence created by a respite from the cries of the cigales who, during the day, are always buzzing in the trees, and who must be enjoying some form of insect sleep at 4 in the morning. I thought about how it was this surge that went into the first poems, a mantic pursuit of all the sense of the world in the world’s own welling language, which the tongue could feel in its dark, blunt thickness but never speak, freely. It's tied to us, the tongue, and the high goal had to be to untie it a bit, to let it grumble a bit as royally as that persistent water massing against rock. Our nature: a phrase absurd, abused, perverted from the motions that compose it, which meets us, after all the money and the maps, at four in the morning as the air lightens perceptibly moment by moment, dawn just around the corner.
Then I went back and lay close to A.

the biography of a price

We live in an epoch in which objects have taken one of the attributes of kings - that is, they get biographies. The biography of the fork, the pencil, Wall Street – the transfer of the life story from the human to the inhuman has become quite fashionable, as though, since we all know about the pathetic fallacy, we are allowed to systematically commit it. I jest, ho ho – and in fact I have to admit that there is something life-like about these things and their passage through our lives. If they aren’t alive, they still have mana – a lifelike power. They become totems.
However, noone, so far as I know, has done a biography of a price. Ah, there’s a subject! One would first have to wrest it from the enormous mystifications of the economists, who know what a price must be without often looking at what a price is, and one would have to restore it to its true nature, its genesis, its type.
Scratch a price and you find an adventure. We’ve become accustomed to thinking that the adventure it encodes is determined by a thing called a “market” – and so mystery calls to mystery. The mystics of capitalism have shamelessly spoken of the “magic of the marketplace” – which serves as an alibi for our adventurer. In fact, all adventurers deal, at one point or another in their careers, with magic. From Raleigh to Cagliostro, from the average American politician to the Spanish conquistador, all have used magic to fill in the gaps, biographical and strategic. But the biographer’s strong suite is a counter-magic: a grasp of details. While the adventurer sheds one persona for another, one claim to effects at a distance for another, one spectacle for another, the biographer, that dogged leveler, reconnects the membra disjecta with a thousand and one facts, with fine filaments of cause, deliberation, association and purposes (a plural that covers serial disappointments, self-subversions and incompatibilities – for the biographer is not your rational expectations robot, explaining that all can be explained through a system that explains anything. A biographer who seeks to explain a life is a biographer who has gone mad).
The critic Harold Innes claimed that the story of modernization in the west is the story of the penetration of the price system. This is an insight that holds together a truth and a falsehood. Just as there are no solitary human individuals – every mother’s son or daughter of ‘em must be a mother’s son or daughter – so too, there is no single price. Price’s came into the world en masse, rather than as a single prototype – no caveman hammered out a price, held it up, and said, now what will this be goood for? But Innes’s insight is also false, in that it treats price system as something autonomous – it is as if, with the word system, we move from the puppet to the puppetmaster.
TBC

realism again

A wonderful thing about taking care of a 21 month old that might not look, on its face, like a wonderful thing, is the amount of app-less time the child’s care forces upon you.

Adam, at some point a month ago, changed his sleeping pattern. The 9 month old that got to bed at 7 p.m. and slept until 6 or 7 a.m. stopped working like a sleep machine. Now, it is around 8 p.m. that he gets to bed, and we have to stay with him until his breathing takes on a certain open mouthed regularity and the sound of the pacifier being tasted, taken out of the mouth, and reinserted ceases. While this activity, or hopefully, inactivity, is going on, we lay in the bed next to his crib. If we get up too soon, if we misjudge the breathing and the routine with the pacifier, if we try to escape from the nursery and get back to making dinner or watching a video prematurely, Adam turns on the waterworks.

Last Monday, this is just what I was doing. I didn’t have a light on or a tablet near by. I didn’t have a book or a piece of paper. The only app I had was the high window in Adam’s room, which frames a random portion of the sky. Although this portion of the sky does its best, no doubt, to be interesting, it isn’t, very. However, it does have one good trick: it turns, as though bruised, from a lighter blue to a clotted bluish purple in the hour between 8 and 8:30. And I, lying app-less on the bed with my head propped on the pillow, am in a good position to confirm the progress of the evening, the regress of the sunlight.

At this moment that I’ve been laboriously budging us towards in this fudge of words, I was not so much thinking of the physics of light but about realism. Again.  

To return to the thread I was pulling in a previous post about realism: I think that it is a mistake to connect realism to the real, as its distingushing characteristic. Rather, it is the real through the lens of the plausible, the credible. What constitutes the plausible or credible, in a society, is closely connected with the whole question of credit in every sense – economic, sociological, epistemological. To see realism as a narrative form – or rather, to see realism as making up the  kind of world in which narratives of plausibility exist – helps us to disconnect it from a defining opposition with, say, idealism, or romanticism.  

I’m concerned with fiction – so I thought, lying app-less. Adam was still not snoring.

But I am not saying that this is the only characteristic, am I? Connected to it is the fact that in these narratives, the world is “full”. The authorial voice can represent that fullness – as it does in Balzac or in Dickens. Or the authorial voice can be removed, and the world be given as full, as in Flaubert. It is no wonder that, so often, the pursuit that traverses these words is that of the borrower by the creditor. Credit is everywhere – or so it represents itself.

 Against this realism there is another world of narratives that are shot threw with the plausible. One could say that they are parasitic on realism in so far as the implausible effect requires some sense of the codes of realism. In these narratives, the assumption of the fullness of the world and the creditworthyness of the narrator suddenly snaps in the readers head, like a pencil.

For instance, the pencil which, having written the account of the barber who accidentally cut off the nose of one of his customers and found it in a roll baked by his wife, decides to get rid of the culpable probosis by taking it to a bridge and throwing it in the Neva – only to be wrapped in a fog both physical and textual:

“Ivan Yakovlevich turned pale.. But at this point everything became so completely enveloped in mist it is really impossible to say what happened afterwards…”

But at this point Adam’s breathing became unmistakeable, and what happened afterwards to my meditation on realism is really impossible to say, since I can’t remember it. It was time to make dinner.

realism

If things are in the saddle and ride mankind, as Emerson said, then let us imagine that things take a break every now and then and let words ride.  It is a 30 – 70 split, perhaps, is what I am getting at. This being so, it is foolish to argue with a word once it has established a claim on mankind.

In fact, this is just the kind of foolishness that philosophers – who at one time acknowledged themselves to be half-fool, although now they more often consider themselves to be half-scientist, a half and half creature that to me is still fool – like to engage in. Thus, I, in my half a fool robes, have always had a steady dislike for the word “real” and its court favorite, “realism”.

Here’s my reasoning. If real is meant to refer to the constitution of reality, then, in my opinion, it cant go picking out some bits of reality and discarding others. It must be wholly promiscuous, rather than half chaste. It must include magic, dreams, mirages and perceptions as well as carpenters crowns, heaps and pi. In other words, I take real to make the widest of ontological claims. However, in actual use, real has been turned into an ontological grift, setting itself up as something ontologicallly direct as opposed to all those soft ontologically indirect objects.  These, the realist wants to say, are dependent on  a subjective privilege that takes us out of the real and into the ideal, or the fanatastic.

Here we spot everyday dualism, doing its silent work. And everyday dualism has its advantages, or it wouldn’t hang around. But those advantages, which prime it for everyday distinctions, don’t prime it for metaphysical argument. There, it forgets its place. It rubs up against its own original quantitative claim – that reality is all, whereas non-reality is nothing – and  can only help itself out of its dilemma by silently inserting assumption into the discussion that , indeed, must be discussed before we can have the discussion.

In my opinion, realism is only plausibility writ large: it is a view on what is possible and important that gains its justification from a certain class background. Aristotle, in the Topics, speaks of endoxa – credible opinions – that are “accepted by everyone or by the majority or by the wise”. This is the filter through which reality becomes realism. The privileged point of view is given us by the class system in the regime in which that point of view is expressed. The reputable class bears various names, depending on the regime we are talking about, whether it is the middle class in America, or public opinion, or most scientists, or – more commonly – an implied everybody who counts that lurks behind a passive construction (“as is well known,” “as is generally agreed”, etc.). Realism’s affiliation with plausibility, rather than reality, is the secret of why the term seems so indeterminate, when you come to close quarters with it.  

swatting at the structural unemployment solution, again.

The Board of Editors of the Scientific American has annoyed me with their editorial comment in the current issue. It is one of those nattering naif kind of comment about how, gosh, machines are gobbling up jobs, and this explains rising inequality, rising unemployment, stagnatine wages and the rest of it. The quote a study by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osbourne in which the authors predict that, in the coming decades, 47 percent of American jobs will be rendered obsolete by hyper hyper technology, everything from tax preparer to locomotive engineers. Significantly, there’s no mention of CEOs – even though that is a position which, using a few basic data search devices and some algorithms, could easily be folded into a couple of computers. But of course – NO! Not our sacred risktakin’ job creators! Not their jobs, Jesus…

Anyway, what irritates me is the blindness to like data. Because here’s the truth: capitalist private enterprise, as the Great Depression showed and as Marx reiterated back in the nineteenth century, cannot come even near to what the economists call full employment – that is, cannot employ 95 percent of the working population. States increased in size after the 1940s not only because states had more to do – particularly with social insurance and healthcare and education, o my! – but also because without the government hiring, we will be in a perpetual twilight of recession, even in a boom. If Government on the local, state and federal levels had continued to employ, over the recession, as they had before it, we would have long achieved the same level of unemployment as in 2005, Bush’s one boom year.

What I wrote about this in 2009 still stands today. Remember, whenever you hear economists or Janet Yellen or whoever speaking about employment, they are pulling a fast one – in fact, they have pulled it so fast they may believe it themselves. Full employment is not and cannot be achieved under modern capitalism by the capitalists. End of story:

 From 2009 ---

Here’s the truth. Since WWII, the government has gone from employing about 13 percent of the workforce to close to 17 percent. At the moment, according to the Bureau of Labor, there are around 22 million Americans employed by local, state and federal governments.

This means, at first glance, that the private sector employs on average about 82-84 percent of the work force. In actuality, given a very rough average of unemployment of 5 percent, the private sector ends up employing closer to 80 percent of the work force. 

At the moment, what has happened is that the private sector employs about 78 percent of the work force, as unemployment has gone up. Although government has held steady, no doubt in the next year, there will be layoffs from the government, too, This means that neither the private sector nor government will employ the percentage they do on average since WWII.

I put these figures out there so that one isn’t lulled into a discussion of whether the neo-classical models assume full employment or not. This is a nice, liberal discussion, but it overlooks the more fundamental lie, which is the assumption, which is swallowed like the sugar in liquid cough medicine, that the private sector somehow could efficiently employ 100 percent of the work force. It can’t. It has never been able to get past 85 percent in the post war period. There is a limit to the weight it can lift. We know what it is.

So the only argument about the stimulus is this: should the government absorb the extra unemployed or not? That is, should the government grow 3 or 4 percentage points?

The argument against this is not an efficiency argument. That is a stupid argument. The argument is, rather, that somehow, business can absorb the extra unemployed. Which means that the right is saying that, in the next year, the private sector can expand 4 or 5 percentage points to assume its usual standing in the economy.

Do you believe this? Does anybody? No tax break tax cut bullshit should take anybody’s eye off that ball. The question is: how can the private sphere possibly expand to absorb the 4 to 5 percent of the unemployed?

In reality, the right is saying, let the unemployed grow. And underneath that is the notion that if we can actually diminish the salary of the average worker, then businesses will be inclined to hire them. This, without the bullshit, is the right’s position. The recession is an opportunity for business to gain permanent tax cuts and hire people at reduced rates. 

Now, the only way this will actually bring business back up to its traditional 80 percent position is if the pie shrinks. 

I foresee that laying out the numbers in a way that everybody can understand them will not happen. Rather, we will have more endless droning about endlessly bogus functions from conservative economists, who will be countered with ever more esoteric models from liberal ones. The point will be to cover up the real situation, so that we will be fogged in, and deprived of the ability to use our own two eyes to see what the situation is, and decide for ourselves what we want done.”

What I wrote in 2009 has proved to be the case since. The Democrats have silently acceded to the agenda of shrinking the government, which means that the pressure to keep wages down in the private sector becomes much more powerful, and the surplus labor value thus released flows to the wealthy in a sweet, sweet stream of honey.

This will keep going and going and going. Given the Democratic policies that we have now, we are giving America’s children the chance to experience what it would have been like if the government hadn’t stepped in to stop the Great Depression.