A stomach ache in the heart: American frauds

 

We are all, as Americans – I speak as one of the flock – still at the low stage of civilisation of one of the Mississippi towns in Huck Finn.

By a fortunate coincidence, I’ve been reading Huck Finn each night for the last month  to Adam before he goes to sleep. We have an agreement – a page or three of Huck, then A. reads to him from the Vam-wolf-zom book. We are now deep into the Duke and Dauphin’s  greatest fraud, the imitation of an English minister and his deaf and dumb brother to bedazzle a rube Mississippi Valley family and worm out their goods. It is one of the great episodes. I’m revisiting it just as frauds of a larger scale but basically with the same mirthworthy unctuousness  – the FTX fraud, the Elon Musk twitter jamboree – are leading a dance though the papers, and, more importantly, through Twitter. Twitter has taken up the burden of the tabloid, because the newspapers – the WAPO, the NYT – have become so country club that they don’t know what to do with such rich materials, recognizing in the spoiled children who are the begetters of this scheme their own children from their own prep schools, and hesitating between the scolding and the “aren’t they adorable” talk that they give their progeny when they come home stoned with the fender bent Porsche.

Sad, that. At one time, when it had more hustle, the NYT played the role of a sort of choral character in Gesine Cresspahl novels of Uwe Johnson. No more. To find out what happened at the Bermuda HQ of SBF’s lemonade stand, you have to go to places like AutismCapital and tweets like those of Tiffany Fong. O brave new world, which has such trolls and trombones within it! That it is being shaken by the antics of one of the world’s dimmest characters – a damned good salesman cosplaying an engineer, Elon M. – makes it all the more slapstick.

But to return to the Duke and Dauphin. Their apotheosis comes from the most admired American virtue – the ability to keep a face in the light of discrediting circumstance. The poker face, the face of the stone killer cop, the face of the politician “with his pants down/and money sticking in his hole” going on the attack about his enemies – in Trump’s case, the politically correct, in Clinton’s case, the witchhunters who didn’t understand that running the executive office like the Playboy mansion was not sexual harassment, but mock-Kennedyism. It is all there in Chapter 29 of Huckleberry Finn. The Duke and Dauphin, imitating the Wilkins brothers and stealing their relatives blind, are confronted by the real Wilkins brothers, who have finally arrived at the little tree stump settlement. Huck, naively, thinks the jig is up:

“But I didn’t see no joke about it, and I judged it would strain the duke and the king some to see any. I reckoned they’d turn pale. But no, nary a pale did ¢hey turn. The duke he never let on he suspicioned what was np, but just went a goo-goo- ing around, happy and satisfied, like a jug that’s googling out buttermilk; and as for the king, he just gazed and | gazed down sorrowful on them new- comers like it give him the stomach-ache in his very heart to think there could be such frauds and rascals in the world. Oh, he done it admirable.”

A stomach ache in his heart. How much this goes right to the heart of the American dream, gone a little crooked! You do have to sit back and admire the audacity of it all.

JR and SBF - It is Gaddis's world, we just live here

 

In the popular sport of guessing which novel, philosopher, poet etc. will be read a hundred years from now, the answer seems to be mostly – the novelist, philosopher, poet that I like. One likes to think one’s likes will be immortalized by others who are like oneself.

However, I can well imagine a novel and novelist I don’t like at all being read one hundred years from now, and one I adore not being read one hundred years from now. Why not? The community of readers in which I find myself is, I hope, going to socially reproduce. I do my best by writing to help this process along. However, as I am a wee little pea and my writing is certainly not going to be read one hundred years from now, or even one year from now, I am not optimistic about my contribution to the general culture of sweetness and light. It is here that I flash the tears emoticon and move on.

This is why I can’t say if J.R. will be one of those novels, like Moby Dick, that re-emerge after a hundred years as one of the major works, one of the touchstones of literature, American division. I can see similarities: Moby Dick is encyclopedic, and includes everything from a glossary to reflections of a cosmic nature. J.R. is encyclopedic in its way too – it parades such tag ends of culture as Mozart’s letters and the highflying vocabulary of hyper-conglomerates, fall out shelters and the privatization of education, etc. etc. Moby Dick’s characters engage in dramatic dialogues, where’s J.R.’s characters engage in dialogues in which misunderstanding, misspeaking and in general the failure to communicate is the standard of all communication.

But it is not only the unique way Gaddis finds to link together his story, but the story itself, that seems to say something about the America we all know, who have lived in the United States in the last fifty or so years. At the center is a little boy, JR , who – though a mechanism not dissimilar to any of the great swindlers and boy wonders of American capitalism of the past decades – amasses an imaginary fortune on Wall Street. Since J.R.’s voice has not broken, or is breaking – since he’s a boy child – he has to buy and sell using a dirty handkerchief, which he puts over the phone to disguise his voice. And because he needs an adult to help him, he ropes into his scheme a music composer who is a scion of old wealth come down on its downers with the significant name of Bast, which might or might not have anything to do with Forster’s Leonard Bast. But this way of telling the novel, book reporting it, does not convey the experience of the novel. It is huge, and, unfortunately, one reading is not enough. Myself, I started it and stopped it and then, for some reason, picked it up again when I was in the mood, and I was simply astonished by what the novel does. It is never referred to when the tycoons go down, the Milikans or the Lehman Brothers. Shame, that, as Gaddis clearly saw that buying junk – whether junk bonds or junk real estate or whatever – gave you leverage to keep going and blow a financial bubble, and it could be done by a twelve year old boy whose slang and abbreviated speech is taken as the height of financial genius by the press. The special lingo of, say, crypto currency buffs would fit right into JR. And JR has a natural eye for business as an elaborate board game, cause he is a boy who likes to play games and read the back of comic books and junk mail. The junk mail comes in fast as he takes one stock that his class bought and builds an empire of investing on it.

‘See, I read in this thing where you sell everything and lease it right back off the people you sold it to on this like ninety nine  years lease because I mean who cares what’s going to happen in ninety nine years , see so then you stay right in business and get to keep on losing money  just like before only now you have all this here cash.”

I imagine if you took, from this 700 plus page book, all the dialogue of J R, who gets it all from the junk mail he so happily receives – using Bast’s address – you could make an encyclopedia of every get rich quick scheme that has made America the showplace of financialized capitalism. Including such items as integrating old folks homes and medical supply companies to create stores in these homes for the clever prosthetics limb shopper.

The SBF fuckup is special, in one way: apparently all the wisemen of silicon valley and private equity grandly overlooked that the man’s companies didn’t even have real boards. They overlooked the fact that SBF, much like JR, played video games while he was conferencing to get funding from various hotshots. All, of course, via zoom. Gaddis must have looked down from heaven and smiled a big smile. He predicted it all.  

digression

 “Feeds on meat, carcasses, farinaceous grains, but not cabbage; digests bones, vomits up grass; defecates onto stone: Greek white, exceedingly acidic. Drinks licking; urinates to the side, up to one hundred times in good company, sniffs at its neighbor’s anus; moist nose, excellent sense of smell; runs on a diagonal, walks on toes; perspires very little, lets tongue hang out in the heat; circles its sleeping area before retiring; hears rather well while sleeping, dreams. The female is vicious with jealous suitors; fornicates with many partners when in heat; bites them; intimately bound during copulation; gestation is nine weeks, four to eight compose a litter, males resemble the father, females the mother. Loyal above all else; house companion for humans; wags its tail upon master’s approach, defends him; runs ahead on a walk, waits at crossings; teachable, hunts for missing things, makes the rounds at night, warns of those approaching, keeps watch over goods, drives livestock from fields, herds reindeer, guards cattle and sheep from wild animals, holds lions in check, rustles up game, locates ducks, lies in wait before pouncing on the net, retrieves a hunter’s kill without partaking of it, rotates a skewer in France, pulls carts in Siberia. Begs for scraps at the table; after stealing it timidly hides its tail; feeds greedily. Lords it over its home; is the enemy of beggars, attacks strangers without being provoked. Heals wounds, gout and cancers with tongue. Howls to music, bites stones thrown its way; depressed and foul-smelling before a storm. Afflicted by tapeworm. Spreads rabies. Eventually goes blind and gnaws at itself.”

 

This is a quotation from Linneaus, contained in one of Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts, True Stories of Dogs. The broadcast was directed at children – that is, the kind of children that Walter Benjamin might imagine, who seem an even stranger tribe than Linneaus’s dogs.  Benjamin adds:

“After a description like that, most of the stories frequently told about dogs seem rather boring and run-of-the-mill. In any case, they can’t rival this passage in terms of peculiarity or flair, even those told by people out to prove how clever dogs are. Is it not an insult to dogs that the only stories about them are told in order to prove something? As if they’re only interesting as a species? Doesn’t each individual dog have its own special character?

No single dog is physically or temperamentally like another. Each has its own good and bad tendencies, which are often in stark contradiction, giving dog owners precious conversation material. Everyone’s dog is cleverer than his neighbor’s! When an owner recounts his dog’s silly tricks, he is illuminating its character, and when the dog experiences some remarkable fate, it becomes something greater, part of a life story. It is special even in its death.”

It is a bit surprising to hear Benjamin go on like this about dogs – he is associated rather more with the angel of history than the good collie Lassie. But Benjamin, the ultimate freelancer, took all things into his ken. And leaves his mark – here, as elsewhere, it is the description as estrangement that fascinates him. After Linnaeus’s description, Benjamin imagines the dog stories he has read – which most probably tend towards Jack London – with the substitution of the word “dog” by Linnaeus’ description of dog.

It is the fine confusions that result from the substitution of a description for a noun that we begin to wonder about how substitution works at all, and then how noun’s work, and then how we ever convey a meaning in language at all. We are, momentarily, reduced to a muteness.  In Pierre Bayard’s book, Le hors-sujet : Proust et la digression, Bayard begins by asking a simple reader’s question: why is Proust’s In Search of Lost Time so long? He quotes from readers of publishers who rejected the first volume – notably the reader from Fasquelle: “The author concedes that his first volume could have stopped at page 633. But no problem, going forward, for there is almost 80 pages more from that number!

But it could also have been reduced by half, three quarters, nine tenths. On the other hand, there is no reason the author couldn’t have doubled it, or even multiplied it by ten. Given the procedure he employs, writing twenty volumes is as normal as stopping at one or two.”

Here we hear the same exasperation that Johnson felt about Tristan Shandy: “Nothing odd will do long. Tristan Shandy did not last.” This is the eminent classical judgement, which continues in the common sense philosophy to which English philosophers always return. Grice’s rules on implicature, which are beautiful things in their way, tell us that the conditions for perspicacity are the conditions for relaying content – for, in fact, truth itself. Whereas the idea of the digression, the “outside” of the subject – even as the outside moves inside the subject, inside the description – is something too alienating and “odd” to last long.

Proust was one of Benjamin’s sacred authors. It is interesting to think that Proust’s own sacred authors rather skip around the eighteenth century – Saint-Simon’s memoires are rooted in the late seventeeth century of La Bruyere, and Baudelaire is in full revolt against the “stupidity” of Voltaire.

Digression is a great instrument – it puts pressure on the “links” of discourse, as Bayard, who was writing in 1993, saw clearly. And we live and die among the links, us Internet cohorts, now.  

why don't you be stupid instead of smart: on unspelling

 

Does it help that Yeats was dyslexic?

The editors of his letters, where the texts are raw, have decided that Yeats’ spelling was idiosyncratic. That’s a good word. It doesn’t have the same word-injuring psychosis, the same serial killer among the letters, that is baked into dyslexia. Rather, it understands that spelling is a curious procedure, full of mirrors and disorientations.

A spell, as Yeats (who at one point belonged to the same organization as Aleister Crowley, the Golden Dawn) was always aware, was a matter of magical summoning. Spelling, too, is a magical summoning, made domestic by our schoolrooms and four hundred years of rules, so that the words appear under our pens. That the first words we learn to spell are often animal names makes complete sense from this point of view, for animals were, after all, the first things humans drew. But there’s a certain graffiti impulse that lies just outside the spelling book, under which we run away from the rules concerning what to write on and how to write it, and go cave man for real.

I grow old, I grow old. I am too old for emoticons. And graffiti spelling does sometimes assault my sense of the order of things. Yet I am helped by the thought that Yeats was as apt to spell “there” “their” as not. I really am.

A recent article by Rosenblitt and Siegel proposes that E.E. Cummings, too, was dyslexic. Plus, "it is interesting to note", Cummings was lefthanded - although being born in a time where witchburning had ceased but lefthandedness was disciplined against, his schoolteachers and parents tried to cure him of that. Perhaps Cummings work is a revenge on said anti-sinistralists. Perhaps the unlearning that is the mark of certain modernist poets - Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn - is unlearning the spell. Which is a spell in itself. As Michelet pointed out in La Sorciere, the first and primary act of the witch is to discover that backwards - as in saying the Lord's Prayer backwards - is an independent movement, not at all symmetric to forwards. Which is a good way of doing - and reading - poetry.

Or as James Chace put it in some song: "why doncha be stupid instead of smart?" My rallying cry too.

the twitter comedy

 

I like twitter. I get a lot of info from it. For instance, when Libgen fails, I always find somewhere on twitter how to access it again.

However, it has an exaggerated effect as a social media platform, since all the meat press – tv, magazines, papers – have an exaggerated sense of it, which they push on down the line. The racists who get their N word jones on twittering and trolling get a lot more attention than the cops apartheid style management of urban life and the systematic racism of the economic system, from job hiring to mortgage making, that does its best to insert a bit of misery into the day to day of  African-Americans.

So Elon Musk’s buying of Twitter has the downside that pretty surely he is going to run it into the ground. However, I am fascinated by the business aspect. I am fascinated by the way Musk is hopping down a path once hopped down by Forbes’ Magazine’s boy genius of 2004, Eddie Lampert.

For those who don’t remember: Eddie Lampert was one of the evil billionaires hatched by Goldman Sachs. After learning how rent-seeking, a totally useless and harmful enterprise, gets you warm praise in the press and among the country club set at the Hamptons, Lampert struck out on his own and eventually bought Sears Roebuck.

The youth of today probably don’t recognize that name – or the name of K-Mart. One has to reach for the references – Sears was the Amazon of its time, K-Mart the Walmart. Sears, when I was growing up, was the family store. This didn’t mean that we liked Sears: quite the contrary. We bought at Sears and bitched about Sears in equal measure. My Grandfather, in the 1950s, got so made at a Sears employee they had a fistfight – or so my Pop used to say. Sears, however, had sales people whoknew their products, and for my family, which tended to treasure power toolsand such, Sears was an Eldorado. Its Craftsman tool line had everything. And atreasonable prices! So I grew up among Craftsman power drills and Craftsman  Electric Hand Saws. Ah, I can hear, as I write those words, the agonizing whine of a blade going through a 4 x 4, the sawdust in a plume behind it. This , as much as rock n roll, was the music of my youth.

Even in 2006, one might be astonished to learn, the capital value of Sears was greater than that of Amazon. In the 90s, my introduction to the world wide web – and even discussion groups – was made via Prodigy, brought to you by Sears Roebuck. But at this point, even, the upper management had lost the thread. Which is what a predator like Lampert was looking for.

The usual buy with debt, dump, pay yourself cycle followed. Unlike Twitter, however, Lampert’s little accountants had noted that Sears had tremendous real estate holdings in cities. Sell those off! Fire half the staff, hire anybody, train nobody, sell of the product lines, create sightlines in stores that told the customer nothing,  let each expedition to Sears be a buying nightmare, take the pensions and, by legal tricks, sever it from the employees who had made the store prosper, and so on. A good recap of the Lampert story, the story of America in the age of Obama and Trump, appeared inInstitutional Investor here. https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1c33fqdnhf21s/Eddie-Lampert-Shattered-Sears-Sullied-His-Reputation-and-Lost-Billions-of-Dollars-Or-Did-He

 

Musk is no Eddie Lampert. He’s a super salesman, but as a businessman he sucks, and as an investor you could train a duckling to make better decisions. Thus, he has saddled himself with a company that is incapable of giving him a return on his money. He has no big pension fund to drain, he has no real estate to vend. He is paying more in interest on the debt he piled up on Twitter to buy it than twitter will ever pay out. In cases like this, the Sears formula – shit on an American capitalist institution, sit back and watch your fortune grow – will be difficult if not impossible to reproduce. Musk of course has a desire to be up there with the Tech legends (all of them disgusting in their own ways): Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg. I predict that in the future, he will be ranked, instead, with Murdoch, the man who spent 12 billion dollars for Myspace. Myspace, remember myspace?  In 2011, it was sold for 34 million dollars.

Ecce Twitter.

NOTES ON ENGLAND

Because France doesn’t understand the communist candy orgy that is Halloween, and because Adam is a boy who loves a monster mask like French boys love kicking a soccer ball, we resolved to go to England and give Adam a proper trick or treating.  A concocted a costume to Adam’s specifications, which consisted of orange long johns and a burlap bag face, as sported by Sam, the  killer child in Trick r Treat. If you don’t know Trick r Treat, join the majority of the world – normies which the fans of Fangoria heartily despise.

Thus, we awoke early, prepared our bags, and went to the Gare du Nord, there to take the train to London. It is a rather amazing thing, going to London from Paris on a train. There are people for whom the Chunnel is not a novelty. Who were born with the fact that there is a tunnel under the channel as one of the many facts, like Mount Everest being the highest mountain and the like. Me, I’m impressed and will always be.

So light, darkness, light, and we ended up at St. Pancras.

I last saw London nine years ago, when Adam was a crawling beastie with not a whisp of a thought about trick or treat or goth culture in his head. At the time, I have a confused memory that we stopped at another station. In the nine years we’ve been gone, the UK broke itself off from the EU, elected a series of clown P.M.s, imposed austerity as its plutocratic overlords asked, and ended up with a prime minister who threated to make the whole Island Argentina in the 80s. So I expected smoke and burned out buildings, rats in the street chased by wolves. But from St. Pancras to the City, which was roughly our trek, I saw a muscular stretch of contemporary architecture that said to the world: we are the world’s real Dubai. And it is true: milling trillions in securities and instruments that have no use, and that add a considerable portion of rentseeking and misery to the economy, is an excellent way to get rich. And so say all of I.

There’s no comparable stretch of Paris, which saddens Macron’s black heart. But I did rather like it. Plus, the music of English, which makes me want to imitate it. Although A. warns me not to. And means it. We had pizza, made it to the train for Cambridge at Liverpool station, and felt like we were navigating the country. On the train for Cambridge we heard the same recording, which advises people who “see something” to fink something to the cops, where they will “sort it.” This, if it weren’t so normal sinister, could be an outtake from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Brazil seems to be the film about the condition of England that is always relevant.

We got to Cambridge, where we are staying with A.’s sister. Her daughter led us around the dark streets and mews of Cambridge, giving Adam his first trick or treat experience since he was five and we’d go roving Brentwood for the Mansion-fare. The givers were so sweet to Adam, and all complimented the costume, though none had the vaguest idea who he was supposed to be. And Adam, well trained, thanked them every time. We are raising a boy who is much more polite than me!

Home, candy counting, and the parents got part of the loot. Then to an early bed. That ironcast English night.

Notes on Orwell's apocalypso

 

I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen. They forced 1984 down our throats in my Cold War era highschool – it was the golden age of warning the kiddies against Utopia, so Huxley’s … and Golding’s Lord of the Flies were thrown in for good measure – and I, little rebel, did not read these books. In fact, I’ve never read 1984 and Lord of the Flies. Chinks, no doubt, in the  armor of my reading. I read Zamyatin’s We instead.

But I binged on Orwell when I was seventeen, when I systematically checked out of the library the edition of his essays and letters in three volumes, edited by Sonia Orwell. The volumes were entitled – the last one bore the wonderful title In Front of Your Nose, underlining the touch Orwell, the truth teller, the prophet.

Orwell was an almost preternaturally bad prophet. In contrast to his ability to envision the past and the present – he had the gift for reducing the “mental atmosphere” of an era (or at least of his favored chronological unit, the decade) into ten or more rich pages, the great longform writer’s gift – Orwell’s sense of the future consisted of a rather mechanical extrapolation of the horrors of the interwar and World War II period. Orwell’s vision of totalitarianism was applied, like cheap paint, by Cold War intellectuals to Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, etc. – thus missing the huge changes in the Soviet system.

I think I, as a seventeen year old, turned to the essays because of a remark of Kurt Vonnegut’s, who used one of Orwell’s sentences in his series of Letters from England for the Partisan Review as the very model and exemplar of how to begin an essay. As I remember it, the sentence was: As I write, highly trained men in  technologically sophisticated airplanes are trying to kill me with bombs. Something like that. The perspectival shift – which was, as well, Tolstoy’s great trope, per Skhlovsky – is admirable. One can see how Kurt Vonnegut learned from it. It is was absorbed into American literary culture more, perhaps, than British, where comfortably sliding into your subject is still the preferred intro. The violence of ordinary British life goes more into their popular music, in the Cold War period, than into the novel, with its easy relapse into realism.

I periodically re-read Orwell with the same appetite that I periodically re-read Raymond Chandler. It is not that I agree with Orwell about very much, but I think he is one of the true inheritors of the plain speech style. And, as is proven by such essays as Inside the Whale, he has a rare capacity to appreciate other, radically different prose styles – Henry Miller’s, for instance.

Inside the Whale was written in 1939. While Orwell was reading Miller, war broke out, and the sophisticated airmen started their bombing raids. Although not on the scale expected; that is, during the phoney war. And not gas bombs, finally. The great fear at the beginning of the war was of mustard gas. It is odd that Britain prepared for the mustard gas attack by stocking up on masks while leaving the question of Germany’s development and manufacture of gas warfare entirely off the table in the 30s. But of course, Britain was undecided if Germany was really an ally against the great Bolshevik Satan or an enemy itself. Hence, the treaty that Britain struck with Germany, behind France’s back, which allowed Germany vast leaway to rearm. A treaty that has, somehow, gotten much less of the spotlight than the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. And we know why…

Inside the Whale has a very fine analysis of the “mental atmosphere” of the modernist twenties, of which Henry Miller is definitely a product, even if Tropic of Cancer was published in the thirties. Orwell met Miller, and was astonished and fascinated by Miller’s theory, or rather attitude, that he would just accept what comes. Orwell rightly sees that the didactic leftist writers of the thirties failed to understand the ordinary forms of life under capitalism, fascism and Stalinism, which was to hide your head and eat your breakfast, if you had it. Miller, by contrast, with all his rebellion against the ”air conditioned nightmare”, saw his life and others as fluxes in a stream, the general course of which is far outside the powers of the individual to affect.

This attitude, Orwell implies, is necessary for literature as an object in its own right. Comfort, the protection of ordinary life, the essential liberalism – outside of these parameters, Orwell thought, literature as a modern institution couldn’t exist. The ending paragraphs of Inside the Whale are Orwell at his most apocalyptic, and compare with Adorno’s famous phrase that poetry after Auschwitz would be barbaric.

But from now onwards the all-important fact for the creative writer is going to be that this is not a writer’s world. That does not mean that he cannot help to bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism. … It [Miller’s attitude] is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into a new shape.”