me and my goomba

The dermatofibrosarcoma of Darier Ferrand is one of the million and one goombas that seem to lurk about in the world, just waiting to fuck with us. According to one french entry about it, the sarcoma evolves “indolently”. That was certainly true about mine. In return, my response to the thing evolved indolently too, until last year I finally saw a dermatologist in Santa Monica and had him do a biopsy of this welt like thing on my thigh. The biopsy came back with the conclusion that the lab hadn’t had enough material to make a definitive identification. Two weeks ago, I went to a French doctor who, without much ado, took a much bigger chunk of my thigh and sent it to the laboratory, where they ID’ed it. And so it was that I was advised by a surgeon that it was the kind of thing which, though benign, would produce troubles for me later on. His advise was to take it out.

Yesterday morning, A. and I advanced to the Clinique St. Jean, which is just around the corner here in Montpellier. I promised that I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything the previous night or morning. I showered in this chemical substance that I think was designed to kill my lice, if I had them, and that apparently rendered me medically neutral as far as germs go. And then I was off, which meant the dreams of my childhood were fullfilled and I was wheeled on a gurney through the halls of a hospital. And then I went under general anaesthesia.

General anaesthesia my be the most disturbing thing I have ever undergone. There was little ceremony. First, I was hooked up to a drip, and then the triangular shaped plastic bit was fitted over my mouth and nose and I smelled anti-life. Whatever it is that composes that anaesthetic, the smell went through me like death. In fact, it is surely one of the smells of death. I don’t have a group on my tongue that corresponds to its taste. It was the taste of Anti-Roger.

Then it was two hours later and I was waked up. I was in a room with a bunch of other patients and some jolly doctors and nurses. The personnel at Clinique St. Jean are invariably nice and sweet. The hospital services a lot of children, and perhaps that is one of the reasons. In comparison, American hospitals are pits of doom. But at the time I woke up, the jolliness was viscerally revolting. I was asked if ca va, and I answered oui, but all the while I was having the wierdest reaction, a sort of full body panic. I felt somehow that I’d been turned wrong in my skin. In fact, the divot taken out of my thigh and the skin grafts taken out of my lower stomach didn’t even register, at that moment. Now they do, of course, and I’m enjoying the idea that I can now describe, with some authenticity, the feeling of being shot in some future novel – or maybe the novel I am writing now. But the full body panic was very different. I could barely stand the room, and then, fortunately, it was decided to wheel me elsewhere. The childish pleasure of being pushed on the gurney was, to say the least, attenuated. Finally, though, I saw A.

There have been countless times in the past when A. has saved my sanity. This was one of those times, a big one. I felt finally that I was anchored, that the panic would pass, that I’d be out of here, and that I would do this and we’d be all right.

Now I sit here with my two cannes anglaises next to me, wondering how it was I thought this was going to be easy. Of course, that’s my narcissism. Soon enough, the skin grafts will attach themselves and I’ll be a new man, sans goomba. At the moment, though, I am definitely on Jimmy Stewart’s frequency in Rear Window. Save for the fact that I have no neighbors to peer at in this heat wave. 

Idleness

I’ve been extremely and disgustingly idle this vacation. I blame the heat. I blame old age, the slowing down of my cerebral processes, and George W. Bush – because anything bad that happens in the world has to be blamed on George W. Bush. That’s my philosophy and I’m stickin’ with it.

However, my brain ain’t so slow that I’m going to take “idleness” as a self-evident description.

It strikes me, at least, that this idleness is connected with simultaneity, the temporal mode that characterizes modernity. Simultaneity is of industrial manufacture – it was produced as an effect of the steam driven printing press, the railroad, and the system of manufacture that came about in the nineteenth century, which has resulted in the fact that you can get strawberries all the year round in your local grocery store and that you can, if you want, breathlessly follow the crisis in Greece on computer and tv screens in ‘real time”.

Idleness is falling out of the zone of the simultaneousness. Well, up to a point. I don’t breathlessly follow the news – I don’t even summon the usual indignation when reading about the plutocrats and crooks that lead the Western world, among others, and lead it badly while picking its pocket. And I tend to not miss the strawberries, instead indulging in the fruits of summer where I can find them at the corner marche. This, admittedly, is easier to do in Montpellier France, where I am writing this, than in Los Angeles, California.

Outside of the zone of the simultaneous, to which all our tasks and habits seem to attach themselves, I have to move forward in a dreamier space-time, the older, slower modes of past, present and future. Now, this should be ideal for writing a chapter in a novel – the chapter in my novel that I have been working on for the past three weeks – since after all, when we are idle, we reach for novels. Summer reading is, for many people, the only reading they ever do – that is, of the novelistic kind. Magazines of a certain type, too, tend to pile up on the picnic table – Paris Match, Vanity Fair, Elle, Healthy Living – as if now is the time to plunge into them. Of course, this isn’t entirely removed from the simultaneous world, as we often speaking of “catching up” with our reading – and “catching up” is the central imperative of the world of simultaneity, the glue that keeps it together.

The paradox is that I want my novel, I want my chapter, I want my characters to be fully charged with the “catching up” imperative, and even become something to be published and caught up with.  Fond hope!

Which is where my idleness has hit me broadsides. I can’t be bothered to catch up. And he who is  not busy catching up is surely not busy at all, and can only be tolerated in small increments.

In other words: all vacations have to end, my situationist friends. Sorry about that.  

Henry James as supermike

This summer I decided, once again, to go the eight rounds with James’ The Ambassadors, a novel I have never been able to finish. This is weird to me, since I am a great admirer of the late James, and in particular the two novels associated with The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, which preceded it, and The Golden Bowl, which came after it – speaking strictly in terms of order of publication.

Of course, the late style is either damned for its obscurity or praised for its epistemological complexity – but it is always there as a fact, one of the stranger facts in American literature, to put besides Melville’s style, and Faulkner’s.  James managed, in these late novels that were dictated to his secretary, to combine the diffuse and the dense, and by their opposition and entanglement create those great sentence-enigmas.  James, by this point, knew what he stood for ethically, aesthetically, and even, one might say, ontologically – he stood for discrimination. By this, he meant a fidelity to the adventure of perception, to the adventure of not missing things. The problem is that too much perception seems to fatallly thwart the larger narrative movement – or so say the haters. But to me, and to other Jamesians, the effect is really to only that of making it necessary to subdue oneself to the peculiar pulse and pattern of James’ telling. As Aubrey Beardsley supposedly said on his deathbed, beauty is difficult – an ethos which, in Henry James, sometimes seems to have been overused, as though the difficult were always beautiful. Still, once you have the sound down, the novels go at a good clip. In fact, the lentissimo introduced by certain curling and recursive passages becomes something to look forward to, much as a kayaker looks forward to white water downstream. The enigmatic sentences are sport.

Of course, this is not the whole story. The structures wouldn’t work without their vicious little human interest at the base. What is Wings of the Dove, in the end, but the story of a grift – Kate Croy’s beautiful vision for all of Milly Theale’s gorgeous money? And what is The Golden Bowl but a page six gossip item, quasi incest and full on adultery among the wealthy? Intimacy, in James, is the prelude to betrayal. Treason is in the blood – the close connections woven by family, old friendship, sex, and the inescapable proximities of the house hold. For this reason, its turned out that James’s works are really easy to turn into great television – they have a surprising affinity to the soap opera. Although soap operas are teased for their grand production of coincidences, those coincidences, too, are subordinate to the violence visited by nearest and dearest one upon the other.

Unfortunately, this tabloid spirit is absent, or nearly absent, as far as I can tell, from The Ambassadors. James was proud of this novel, his last novel to be serialized in a major magazine – The Atlantic. I can just  imagine the editorial conferences as the novel wended its incomprehensible way through the issues. In this novel, James finally exhausted his Racinian jones, his desire to create a piece of work that left as many things as possible out. Discrimination is, after all, the art of getting as much as possible out of a hint. And I can see the fun in that!

But still – the novel tends to defeat me by page one hundred. It is a curious thing – ordinarily, novels that defeat readers defeat themselves. James is right, though, that this rule is not universal. All of his novels in one way or another press on the initiatory expectation that the reader is never a passive recipient of the novel, never a mere consumer, a like/don’t like automaton. Rather, the reader’s reflexes, his or her skills, must be tested, must be ritually hazed, before he or she can be granted the full force of the whole, impossible vision of life the novel delivers. Impossible, in as much as it is fiction, and a whole vision, in as much as it is art.

Sign me up! I usually think.

Well, this time around, I think I’ve finally figured out the thing about the Ambassadors. Other novels of its cohort were written to maximize the obliqueness of the prospect – but in this novel, James lets himself go to the extent that he dispenses with “good” writing altogether – or if not altogether, at least for large stretches.  I noticed this early on – there’s a scene in which Lambert Strether, our percipient in this book, meets Maria Gostrey, another percipient. Percipients, in James’ novels, tend to associate in order to conspire – and so these two do, almost immediately. Strether is on a mission for the woman to whom, as we are not exactly told, he is betrothed, or at least whom he is confident of marrying if he carries his mission out. This woman, Mrs. Newsome, is a formidable widow, rich and rectitudinous, whose son Chad lives in Paris with his mistress. Chad, so far, has preferred this life to a position in the Newsome business. Strether’s mission is to separate Chad from Paris and his mistress and pack him back to America. He is relying on help from Waymarsh, a New England lawyer of the grand American type, who finds Europe uppity and corrupt.

There’s the making of a good plot here. Patricia Highsmith saw that and, with suitable alterations, made her first Ripley novel out of a similar mission from America to Europe. But James’ adage, always dramatize, seems to fail him here, partly because of what he does leave out.

But I am not going to go in that direction. Rather, this is the passage where I got hooked on a different reading of this novel.   The she here is Maria Gostrey, the he Lambert Strether:

“She was as equipped in this particular as Strether was the reverse, and it made an opposition between them which he might well have shrunk from submitting to if he had fully suspected it. So far as he did suspect it he was on the contrary, after a short shake of his consciousness, as pleasantly passive as might be. He really had a sort of sense of what she knew. He had quite the sense that she knew things he didn't, and though this was a concession that in general he found not easy to make to women, he made it now as good-humouredly as if it lifted a burden. His eyes were so quiet behind his eternal nippers that they might almost have been absent without changing his face…”

Say what? I said to myself here. You could have plucked out his eyes and their absense might almost have gone unnoticed?

Which makes me want to cry out: Everybody go, hotel motel holiday inn/ if your girl starts acting up, then you take her friend. Or something. Because the hip has definitely gotten the hop on me, here. And then it dawned on me that James, sly dog, was laying down a mandarin appearance that really disguises a letting go of all the highly structured shit that went into Victorian and Edwardian prose. As soon as it occurred to me that the Ambassadors might be badly written, I began to see more possibilities in the thing. More humor, more hidden intention, more self mockery.

Now I’m past the dangerous 100 page point, and so far the awfulness of the writing, under the beautiful pretense, has called out to me again and again. I’m not sure what is up, but I am beginning to think that James, for a change, is playing Supermike and committing a long crime against his own style of art for the very hell of it.  

All I'm here to do ladies is hypnotize
Singing on and on and on on and on
The beat don't stop until the break of dawn
Singing on and on and on on and on
Like a hot buttered a pop da pop da pop dibbie dibbie
Pop da pop pop ya don't dare stop

poetic opportunity

I define poetic opportunity as the moment in which the regular course of the world, that mechanism of objects and words, grinds to a sudden halt before an abyss of meaning, which it jumps over so quickly that you might not even think the ground had opened at your feet and you had almost drowned on dry land. This brief, symbolic crack in the order of things is, normally, normalized, shaken off, forgotten or explained. The idea that the world is working behind our back – a figure of speech that doesn’t quite logically work, as the world includes our back, brain and breath, but I will let it go for now – can lead to ecstasy, paranoia or breakdown, but mostly it just leads to irritation and a passing moodiness.

Sometimes it even leads to poetry. But not very often.

For instance – I’ve been mulling over some material presented to me by Adam. We’ve made it a habit, Adam and I, to walk up the street here in Montpellier, past the roadwork and, after a brief stop at the boulanger to buy a croissant, all the way up to the old College of Medicine. The portal to the College of Medicine is guarded on either side by two statues of eminent members of the Montpellier school of physiognomy from the 18^th century. The statues are bronze, and look like they were created in the 19^th century. Certainly they are more than a century old. During the time the two doctors – Lapeyronie and Barthez – have sat there, generations of pigeons have shit on them. In consequence, their faces are marked by traces of oxidation. Adam recognized those traces as tears, and decided that the statues are crying.  When Adam cries, people around him say, calm down. So Adam’s response to these two statues – which he likes, he sometimes asks me when we are going to see the statues – is to tell them to calm down.

I surely should be able to make something out of this scene – this pint sized Californian with the blond hair looking up at the statues, each of which are around ten feet high, and telling them to calm down.

But it is hot. The cicadas in the trees are incessant. The mosquitos are a nuisance. I want a gin and tonic. With a lot of ice. And the occasion escapes me. 

burning Greece

One would need the heart of an economist not to find the ECB’s dealings with Greece cruel and irrational beyond measure. And one would need the eye of an anthropologist to see how this outburst of elite irrationality connects up with other such outbursts that run in a series through Europe’s history. The troika reminds me, in its infinite causuistry, its moral outrage, and the endless punishments that it metes out, of the various commissions to investigate witchcraft that darken the pages of the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth century. One of the most famous was lead by Pierre de Lancre, Montaigne’s relative – he married the granddaughter of Montaigne’s uncle and the president of the parliament of Bordeaux, who in 1608 ventured with other grave worthies into the land of Satan which, according to credible report, had been conquering the women of Labourd in Southern France. The expedition was accompanied, it was once thought, by a holocaust of thousands of burnings. Historians now think that these moderates, these 17^th century centrists, did things the way centrists do: they only burned a few dozen women, and then wrote laborious screeds justifying their actions.  What distinguishes Lancre is that he was justly proud of his relation to Montaigne and was a pure product of the humanist culture of Southwest France. Montaigne’s own opinions on witchcraft are, like all his opinions, an involved and dialogical affair, but he certainly comes out against the persecution of witches on the ground that the witch itself is a figure invented by the theorists of witchcraft: “C’est mettre ces conjectures a bien haut pris que d’en faire cuire un homme tout vif.”

A phrase that should haunt Europe now, while we watch a whole country being put to the stake in support of economic conjectures that were first proposed before there was any grasp of the business cycle, and are now being forced down the throats of entire populations because their elites are either complicit or afraid to act.

Vox EU, which is usually a site devoted to the reactionary maunderings of economists in thrall to neoliberalism, published an unusually blistering analysis of the ECB’s usurpation of state power and its expulsion of Greece from the European Union – which is, beneath the rhetoric, what is happening here.Written by Charles Wyplosz,   the heart of the article is in this to my mind unanswerable graf:

Why did the ECB freeze its Emergency Liquidity Assistance (ELA) to Greece? The ECB will undoubtedly come up with all sorts of legal justifications. Whether true or not, this will not change the outcome.

If the ECB is truly legally bound to stop ELA, this means that the Eurozone architecture is deeply flawed.

·        If not, the ECB will have made a political decision of historical importance.

Either way, this is a disastrous step.

Whether it likes it or not, every central bank is a lender of last resort to commercial banks.

·        By not keeping the Greek banking system afloat, the ECB is failing on a core responsibility.

Surely the EU will never be the same. Either the strong European states – such as France - will reign in the ECB, or the EU will become a shell – and the quicker that happens, given the superstitions of the elites running Europe, the better. 

inverted envy

In 1973, A.O. Hirschman, with his characteristic, concealing modesty (it covered up the fact that he was touching on big themes that economists liked to avoid), wrote an essay about envy and the egalitarian impulse in developing economies. For two decades, Hirschman had been at work as an economist and policy maker dealing with foreign aid and plans to elevate the poorer national economies into the league of the developed nations, as they were called back then. This was the era of multi-year plans and the fad for shrinking agriculture and favoring export industries, which often, paradoxically, called for putting barriers on imports. All of this, by now, has been swept away by the Washington Consensus and the aggressive syndicate of international institutions, multinationals, and neo-liberals.

In Hirschman’s time, third world countries were experiencing unprecedented growth. He observed that the profit from that growth largely accrued to the wealthy. What puzzled him was that this did not stimulate the kind of envy that was feared by the anti-communist establishment everywhere. Instead of revolution, for the most part, third world populations seemed patiently to be waiting. Hirschman devised a model to capture what one might call the dynamics of social envy. In this model, growth and the enrichment of the richest was tolerable as long as the larger population believed that the growth would eventually make themselves and their children richer. In other words, Hirschman believed that there was a larger tolerance for inequality than was reckoned with by the leftist agitator. This was puzzling if one took into account the work of George Foster, whose studies of peasant society in Mexico convinced him that traditional society is penetrated by what he called the “image of the limited good”. This means that the peasant views goods in terms of a zero-sum game, in which x’s possessions are viewed by y from the standpoint of scarcity – what x possesses, y does not possess. Like people in a lifeboat with limited rations, a careful watch is placed on the village populaton to make visible who has what. This is a situation in which savings is hidden, rather than invested.

What Foster calls the limited good, I would call nemesis. In my opinion, the great effect of the enlightenment and of the growing economies of the 19^th century was to suppress nemesis – the social and human limit which demands respect in societies in which growth is sporadic and subject to decay. In such societies, time is cyclical; the myth of progress has no footing here.

I think Hirschman was right to tackle the theme of envy, but his model, it seems to me, lacks an important feature that one finds in success societies – societies, that is, where an ethos of success replaces the ethos of sacrifice. In the former, envy inevitably increases as the success of the wealthiest creates a larger and larger positional gap between the top and the rest. Here, however, an interesting, unconscious mechanism intervenes to protect the wealthiest. This mechanism inverts the direction of envy, the direction of the evil eye. Instead of the wealthiest being subject to the violence of envy, the poorest are subject to it.

This inversion of envy at first seems incredible. How could the poorest be an object of envy? However, anyone with ears to hear in America’s dining and living rooms, or in American work places, will here the tale of the high living poor. The poor don’t work. They luxuriate on welfare payments. The government only works for the poor. The Great slump was caused by the poor cheating the naïve banks who were forced by the government to give them mortgages they couldn’t pay. This story and variations of it are told over and over. We sometimes wonder over some savage custom, thinking, how could it be believed that, say, a woman who has a miscarriage causes drought – one of the thousands of such beliefs recorded in the Golden Bough? But the inversion of envy in success societies, the most pure of which is the US, should teach us that the unlikelihood of a belief, its grossly ridiculous nature when laid out in cold logic, is no bar to its being held true. Although newspaper sociologists like to insist on the hopeful, aspirational beliefs of Americans as the sort of national glue that keeps down radicalism, I would say that, more powerfully, it is the inverted envy, its manipulation and thousand and one uses (inverted envy is deeply associated with racism in America, for instance) that makes it very hard to achieve any kind of lasting social justice in the US 

Adam versus Derrida

In a bout of dubious scientific romanticism, Quine, in Word and Object, conjures up the beginning of language learning by positing an extra-linguistic anchor, a physical stimulus, to get us over the bridge from babble to the noun. Quine’s piece on the baby learning the word Mama takes the then fashionable behavioralism of Skinner and embeds it into theory of the onto-genesis of language:

“The operant act may be the random babbling of some thing like 'Mama' at some moment when, by coincidence, the mother's face is looming. The mother, pleased at being named, rewards this random act, and so in the future the ap­proach of the mother's face suc­ceeds as a stimulus for further utterances of 'Mama'. The child has learned an occasion sen­tence.”

Coincidence plays a hinge role here. The presentation of Mama’s face –its looming – makes this a bit more primitive than Mama pointing at her face, but the logic is the same: there is the extra-linguistic world, the presentation, the coincidence with utterance, and the occasion sentence. The set up here has been remarkably consistent in Western philosophy of language since Augustine’s De Magistro, in which Augustine instructs his illegitimate son on the semiotic constitution of language – words as signs – by reference to charades, the language of gesture of the deaf, mime, and mostly, the pointing finger. Adeodatus accepts the significance of signs, but then gets stuck on what we would call the social construction of reality: how does one ever get out of the world of signs?

Adeodatus: But even a wall, as our reasoning shoedd, cannot be shown without a pointing finger. The holding out of the finger is not the wall but the sign by means of which the wall is pointed out. So far as I can see there is nothing which can be shown without signs/

Augustine: Suppose I were to ask you what walking is, and you were to get up and do it, wouldn’t you be using the thing itself to show me, not words or any other signs?

Adeodatus:  Yes, of course. I am ashamed that I did not notice so obvious a fact.”

Adeodatus concedes, of course, too quickly, since it is not clear why you can’t use the thing in itself as a sign, just as it is unclear why Mama’s face is the thing in itself, and not already the sign, this is Mama.

Signs are a labyrinth. We are continually promised that the labyrinth has an exit, but we are continually deflected from its discovery once we’ve made our fatal entrance.

However, though the metaphysical divide between the word and the object in Quine is definitely arguable, Quine does, properly, take up the issue of divided reference as an issue that cannot be delayed until language is learned.

Another word for divided reference is wise-assery. The smart aleck, the wise ass, the joker – from my earliest memories, I was always like that. And I am amazed and pleased, most of the time, that Adam is also a mocker.

A couple of nights ago, Adam made up his first pun, when we showed him how to roll spagetti on a fork and he pronounced it a pasta-fier.

As well, he has found out how much fun it is to imitate himself. Sometimes, he will pretend cry and pretend tantrum for the fun of it. To, as Quine would put it, stress the context of stimulation in which he has been placed. Or, as I would put it, to both entertain and tease his parental units.

Teasing stretches a long way. It is rooted in the animal world – not only among humans, but among other social animals – and it goes all the way into literature, which is, at base, simply a long form of teasing. There are writers who must have been aggressive teasers when they were young – like Nabokov – and others who were, perhaps, more ambiguous about the phenomenon – like Kafka. Teasing isn’t a necessary derivative of sign using – I’m not sure anyone has ever caught an ant or a bee teasing, although perhaps we have just not looked hard enough – but sign using is certainly a prerequisite of teasing. I’m learning to enjoy this all over again with Adam.

Although … to give Augustine and Quine their due, when it comes to  distinguishing the sign from the thing, Adam seems more in their camp. Thus, when I ask Adam, once he has jumped up and down and laughed while seeing a superhero, if Adam is a superhero, he will invariably reply, no, Adam is Adam. Adam is always Adam. At least for now, he’s having no truck with deconstruction.