On a treadmill

This blog is mired in a serious malaise, one that at times feels terminal. Though I don't have any desire to quit, lately I have been finding it extremely difficult to finish writing posts that I begin. Part of the problem, as ever, is my tendency to link too many ideas together, resulting in so much rambling, bad writing. Just when I think I've gotten the hang of it all, I invariably hit a snag, writing slows down, ideas dry up. Or they come to me, but on the train, in whole paragraphs, good ones I'd like to think, but who can write on the train? (The Marc commuter train is not the smoothest ride in the world, and my handwriting is poor enough as it is.) And if I wrote on the train, anyway, when would I read? (Never, by the way, is the answer to that one. I don't think my reading at home this calendar year has added up to more than a few hundred pages.)

One problem, I realize, is my reluctance to just put it out there. I persist in thinking that I should have read this or that before expressing an idea. When it comes to the actual writing itself, the germ of the idea gets buried, in fact unwritten, as I bog myself down in shaping the introductory remarks or the background. A bog that weighs me down, when what I desire, what I value, is lightness. (God, I looked at my numerous posts in draft status, and there's an earlier unfinished whinge about how I can't write... I'd naturally forgotten all about it.)

All this is to say that I have a lot that I've been wanting, and failing, to say here. Here are just a few topics I hope to get around to finishing posts on in the nearish future, though I make no promises:

J.M. Coetzee (on Diary of a Bad Year, naturally, while everyone else's moving onto Summertime...)

Flannery O'Connor and politics and literature

Evelyn Scott (again)

Art and Ontology

Chomsky, an appreciation, and more

Conservatism and relational political spectrums

Modernism and post-Modernism

a line or two about Gayl Jones' Corredigora (in connection with Modernism)

ideas about primitive accumulation and lost social orders

more on Blanchot, possibly finally getting into his ideas on communism

communism as the original human, cultural state (circling back on Art and Ontology, touching on Chris Knight and Heidegger and more)

the role of play in the former, as well as in art, and what that means for us, moving forward (combining, if possible, Knight and Josipovici, among others; in truth, this feels like my main unwritten book)

We Are the Ones

Big events are unfolding in real life (not bad news), so the blog has necessarily suffered (though in truth, I admit, it was suffering already). I hope to return to more semi-regular posting soon-ish, when I expect to complete some interesting posts in the works. I recall, too, that I'd intended to post a follow-up entry to my recent mid-year music review (I can only assume this is what I meant by including "part one" in the title), but even something as simple as that has eluded my powers of late. Maybe later.

In the meantime, some political song lyrics! (Why not, right?)

I once described music of the Coup (you may remember their 2001 album Party Music, the original cover art of which featured a shot of our rappers blowing up the World Trade Center) as "danceable, left-wing agit-rap". They are unapologetically political and groovy. Well, I've been listening to them a bit lately and thought I'd share the words to "We are the Ones", from Pick a Bigger Weapon:

We - we are the ones
We'll seal your fate, tear down your state, go get yo' guns
We - we came to fight
It's yo' disgrace, smash up your place, that's just polite
(Check it out now)

Once upon a time when crack was gold
And hip-hop was not yet platinum sold
I scoured the streets for stacks to fold
My mood like my hair was relaxed and blowed
I hated police and my teachers were beasts
My heat in the trunk of the classic Caprice
The one university, I knew was Yale
So I cooked it, bagged it, put it on sale
Now philosophically you'd be opposed
to one inhaling coke via mouth or the nose
But economically I would propose
that you go eat a dick as employment had froze

And I felt like an abandoned child
Left to fend for myself in the wild
While every courtroom, judge and gavel
were there to bury me under the gravel
Or at the bottom of the finest malt ale
Observe; you'll find without fail
That in every neighborhood and penitentiary
There exists many others who are similar to me and

We - we are the ones
We'll seal your fate, tear down your state, go get yo' guns
We - we came to fight
It's yo' disgrace, smash up your place, that's just polite
(Check it out now)

In later years I lost some peers
Who mixed burners with Belvedere
And took shots from gung-ho cashiers
The world was cold yet hell was near
So I seek for a kilo
And my stack got a little bit taller like Skee-Lo
A street CEO
There was all of this heroin and not one hero
The intensity was fortified
As I clenched five digits on the forty-five
Barely down at the retail store I would detail more
But I don't wish this action to be glorified
There was a plan I was eager to listen
To not sleep in the park in the fetal position
Having to wipe off canine fecal emission
Otherwise I'd survive without legal permission
It's an equal division and then we go to prison, which is a little decision
All I wanted was a Regal to glisten
And my kids would have meat in the kitchen and complete ammunition
It's a given once the people are driven that

We - we are the ones
We'll seal your fate, tear down your state, go get yo' guns
We - we came to fight
It's yo' disgrace, smash up your place, that's just polite
(Check it out now)

Get your work up! Get your work up!

We are born from the mildew, the rust, the heathenous lust
The dreams in the dust, the evidence flushed
The grieving is just, they're thieving from us
Insulted and cussed, this evening we bust
Appears unstable and under the table
We like free speech but we love free cable
We're taught from the cradle the Bill Gates fable
Which leads to high speeds in Buick LeSables
We have no excuses just great alibis
And poker faces you can't analyze
Our politicians sell our soul and our cries
With blood on their hands they can't sanitize
We're the have-nots, but we're also the gon'-gets
Not just talkin 'bout the Lex with the chrome kits
You can get that by yourself with the four-fifth
Let's all own shit then toast with Patron hits

Update: Since this is the Internet and everything, it occurs to me I should include the actual song. Here goes:

Not so focused thoughts on politics and government. . .

lenin is typically great on health care and the evil totalitarianism of the National Health Service in England. . . speaking of fears of such horrors, Dennis Perrin observes that "Over the last quarter, the number of clueless white Americans rose by thirty-seven percent." White people. What can you do with 'em? (Among the heartening take home messages of the public discourse surrounding the Gates Affair is how eagerly white people embrace the logic of the police state. Remind me again why I read comment threads?) In innocent moments, one is tempted to wonder where such widespread ignorance and stupidity comes from. It's not that there aren't legitimate criticisms of Obama's "plan" (Black Agenda Report offers a few here), but people are just bonkers. Socialism? Really? No, not really. As Tim Wise points out, the cry of "socialism!" is invariably coded racial language and always was. Not that we haven't seen plenty of non-coded racial language.

Racially coded or not, though, there is a weird fear or distrust of government. Many white people have been conditioned to believe that government is this evil thing, as well as necessarily incompetent, bumbling, bureaucratic, and so on. Bitch Phd writes yesterday about the things government provides for us and the ways in which we personally benefit from all the government does. It's a useful reminder, or should be, for all those who so often forget. She includes a photo which identifies and labels various government-provided items or services shown; also, the picture is of an anti-taxes rally, and one woman is holding a sign that reads "Cut Taxes Not Defense". It's not clear where such people think the funds for "defense" comes from if not taxes. But that point leads into a couple of things about Bitch's post that struck me (aside from the very good point she is making with it). First, the list of items gives the impression that "government", in its benevolent wisdom, has simply provided these things, from on high. As if every one of the positive functions of government, outside of basic infrastructure, wasn't the result of pressure from below.

This leads me to the next thing: how deeply militarized even her short list is. The very jumping off point for it is her observation that the Internet is not only a governmental creation, but that it came out of DARPA. She mentions her husband's various DoD-related jobs over the years and their VA-financed mortgages. I don't mean by highlighting these points to sound critical of her at all. My own job depends on there being a continual supply of disabled veterans, and I spent most of the first eight years of my life living on Naval bases. The point is that so many of us, regardless of our political outlook, work in situations that directly depend on massive spending on "defense". Our lives are intertwined with the military-industrial complex to an enormous extent, an extent to which most of us are generally unaware. Much of the technology we drool over came out of military research. Countless regional and local economies would all but collapse without the presence of the military. This is the process that has happened without the public's consent, which has warped the very fabric of society for decades without anyone seeming to notice. The ongoing threat to democracy, and obstacle to necessary change, should be obvious. Instead people are afraid of some mild liberal reforms of health care and, still, always it seems, black people.

Mirah at One Year

I hope to get my act together soon and get some posts up, but in the meantime, we celebrated our daughter's first birthday yesterday. Happy Birthday, Mirah!

Here are two recent pictures, one from last week, one from yesterday's party:

Notes on Evelyn Scott's Migrations

So, you ask, how's that whole Evelyn Scott project coming along? Not quite as smoothly as I'd hoped, but then whoever said literature was supposed to be smooth? I still have another Escapade-related post in the works, but in the meantime I've been looking into a couple of her novels.

In the wake of my happy discovery of Scott and my fruitful reading of Escapade, I checked Migrations and The Wave out of the library with some excitement. Some of this excitement was dissipated upon opening the two volumes, both of which are historical novels of sorts and on first blush appear to be much more conventional than I'd hoped. But then they were both published, still, in the late 1920s, so what seems conventional now may not have been then. Migrations is the shorter of the two, by far, and is the earlier novel, so it was no contest which one I'd attempt to tackle first. In addition, Migrations is subtitled An Arabesque in Histories, which sounds much more interesting than narratives of the Civil War, the subtitle to The Wave. Having now read Migrations, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it, though I certainly enjoyed large portions of it.

"Arabesque" is one of those words I've always avoided looking up, preferring instead to just let it remain suggestive in its strangeness. (I think I first encountered it used by a writer describing the music of the Throwing Muses: "Zep arabesques" he wrote; the phrase seemed to capture something elusive about the band's music, though I really didn't know precisely what he meant. But I digress.) I did finally look it up and, with all apologies to Andrew Seal, it means, when applied to the fine arts, "a sinuous, spiraling, undulating, or serpentine line or linear motif." Here I'd say it means a more or less free indirect prose and stream of consciousness narrative, in the multiple-character Mrs. Dalloway sense (assuming my memory of Mrs. Dalloway is remotely accurate). A species of "pyschological realism". Only occasionally does it appear as if the third-person descriptions of the external world are not also reflected in the direct experience of a character but belong to an outside observer, one who objectively knows, and, indeed, the one occasion when a new character's back story is extensively filled in by a narrator's voice, it feels gratuitous.

The novel takes place in the 1850s and is divided into three chapters, each with several sub-divisions, with interrelated characters but no real plot or narrative arc uniting them other than the theme hinted at by the title. In chapters one and three, we're among slaveholders and slaves in Tennessee. Some of the slaveholders are ambivalent about owning slaves, though not usually for any discernible moral reasons; they all think they treat their slaves well. In both chapters, a slave runs away; in chapter three this leads to a confrontation between mob justice and a suspected abolitionist--who nevertheless owns slaves of his own--and his scandalously mixed-race ("quadroon") wife. Chapter two is considerably longer than the others and traces the journey to San Francisco (in the wake of the gold rush), by way of Jamaica and Panama, of a married couple who've left the town in Tennessee in search of better opportunities.

The book is interesting as a depiction of aspects of life in the antebellum South, but I admit that my attention occasionally flagged the closer it veered to reading like a semi-objective historical narrative, however unresolved. The characters are much concerned with the nature of their own existence, and Scott invests her female characters especially with rich, complicated inner lives, bound up in questions of class, gender, and race. We are also treated to the slaves' thoughts and inner struggles. Beyond The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I have no direct experience with fiction from this time or earlier that deals with slavery and slaves, so I can't say anything about how "progressive" this may or may not have been, but I thought it was worth noting. And it appears that Evelyn Scott aspired to be as "realistic" as possible, so she attempted to render the speech of the slaves in dialect, as well as that of poor whites, or other characters not of the slaveholding class predominant in the book. The language and thoughts of that class is, perhaps inevitably, the more or less standard English of the main, free indirect narration. I get the sense, in some of what I've read about her, that in many ways Scott positioned herself as a writer in opposition to the Southern Agrarian critics of her day (by the way, there is a connection here with the New Critics, such as Cleanth Brooks; more on this in another post, I hope), and thus, I gather, wished to break down the romantic Old South narrative dominant in her youth. I have little doubt, then, that she thought of herself as in sympathy with the former slaves, as well as with Native Americans. Nevertheless, some of this speech is difficult to read, as such rendered speech often is, regardless of the author's best intentions. Also, I probably don't need to tell you that the characters make liberal use of the word "nigger" (or, in the slaves' case, "niggah").

Of course this isn't any kind of review, and obviously there is a lot that could be said about any one of these issues, which I'm not going to delve into here. However, before closing I do want to leave you with some sense of the writing. This is towards the end of chapter one, Captain George is dying, and his wife Miss Sara has rung the bell for help, but everyone is out looking for Silas, the runaway slave (italics in original):

But the lane to the Quarters continued to open an abandoned perspective. Uncle Blossom did not move. Miss Sara was conscious of her ineffectualness, could almost see herself, her thin face under her crushed cap, her diminutive body, her wide sedate lady's petticoats, and her arms upreaching. Why had she not been born a man. Why had the men been sent away on other missions when the Captain was sinking and in a state like this. They should have come to her for their orders. What did anything matter but this--this last struggle against the--but was it inevitable. Her wrists slackened exhaustedly, and she half reclined herself against the long deal table upon which, in the morning, her precious bowls of milk were set out evenly for her to skim the cream from them.

No one had heard her. Staring across the stripped stubble of the brownish tobacco fields, she began to weep silently, her mouth, penciled in its fine lines of age and pain, quivering, her bleared gaze reproaching the distances. Thomas and Edwin do not know. They can not know. A long life--all over--and what for. But there was no need for the 'what-for.' Living-being-alive--was sufficient. We require no explanation of it. In God we trust. A long life. Ah, how she hoped yet to live a long time.

And this is from towards the end of the book. Bosh has also run away, but he hasn't made it very far. He's made it to the Gilbert property, where his mother is a slave and he basically gives up; she has hidden him away, tried and failed to get him to leave in advance of the inevitable mob justice (the mob is after him not only because he's escaped, but because he "attacked" a white women--really, he scared her; he was hungry and trying to get some food):

"Dey's free whut the law sets free," she answered acidly. She was shaking as with palsy, and felt herself in danger of another nervous seizure such as she had experienced in the afternoon. In her flat ponderous countenance, her small eyes sparkled with that constant glitter of anger, aroused from the first instant in which Bosh had thrown insoluble responsibility upon her. She began to set the room to rights, rearranging her small belongings so that they might appear orderly. Some rush baskets and similar odds-and-ends, she stacked in a nook by the chimney, leaving, between the baskets and the wall, a space in which Bosh could, if necessary, secrete himself. The single unbleached sheet on the bed was smoothed out nearly, but she removed her fine quilt of many-colored patchwork and held it in readiness. Surely, as she listened, the tramp of strange men drew nearer.

[...] Ready to expire, she gave up her efforts to shift the bed. It was too late now, truly. Footsteps were indeed audible, and some, as yet, indistinguishable cries. "Snuff dat candle, Bosh," she whispered, but, anticipating his uselessness, did not wait on him. Rushing forward, she laid her broad palm upon the wick. The candle guttered, went out redolently, and, from beneath the door, sagging above an uneven sill, the flat moonlight gushed suddenly, in faint blue traceries. Save for the vivid relief of a spot on the floor just before the door, the room was pitch-black. Mammy Mary, her fists clenched and shaking, sank on her knees, half suppliant, half defiant with a desperation which she recognized as futile. In the night invisible, the sound of shouting voices grew always louder. She could not see Bosh, and only guessed that he was beside her.

"Frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse"

Reading this Bookslut interview with Cynthia Ozick the other day (the interview is from December; I don't remember where I found the link, sorry), I was interested in her remarks about politics and the novel. The interviewer, Paul Morton, is trying to press her about what he perceives as her lack of engagement with the present, a premise to which she objects. He tries to clarify his question:

I may not have been as precise in what I’m criticizing. There’s a scene in Philip Roth’s Exit Ghost that takes place on the 2004 election night. I haven’t seen any writer or journalist depict that night better than Roth does in those 10 pages or so.

I remember it very well. And I remember my reaction to it very well. Notwithstanding my hot admiration for Roth, both in part and as an astonishing whole, this scene struck me as the weakest point in the novel, because -- agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy. Nothing will kill a novel more than when it falls away from serious irony and veers into frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse. Twenty years from now, maybe ten, maybe even five, that scene is going to be as stale and dead and ludicrous on the page as Herbert Hoover’s chicken-in-every-pot oration. It won’t survive even as comedy, though it might as self-indicting cartoon. Still, it goes without saying that Roth’s power and repute will outlast the occasional sermonic glitch.

But think of a book like Fathers and Sons which is filled with conversations that were contemporary to 1861 Russia.

But in Turgenev’s novel, one of my favorites, both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn’t sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus. You can feel the force of history, and of torn human passions, and the troubled bewilderment of parents, and the draw of family love. For me, the greatest political novel of the twentieth century is A Passage to India, a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete. India has been an independent sovereign state for many decades. Its unhappy period as the possession of a foreign power is long over and done with, and today it has a bristling, fruitful international economy. Yet that novel lives beyond the British imperial circumstances of its moment, and why? Because of Aziz, because of Professor Godbole and Mrs. Moore, because of Adela, because of the Marabar Caves, because of a dominating uncanny mystical echo. A beautiful and amazing novel despite its dead political element and yes, the political impulse that may have partly motivated it.

It so happens that I read Exit Ghost just last week. In case you haven't read the book, our man Nathan Zuckerman has returned to New York after several years in self-imposed exile, has entered into an agreement to allow a couple to occupy, for a year, his cabin in the Berkshires in exchange for their apartment in Manhattan. In the scene referred to in the interview, Zuckerman is in the apartment with the couple, who have invited him to celebrate with them what they are sure will be a Democratic victory that night, in the 2004 presidential election, before they officially move out to the cabin. Zuckerman, intentionally, has no knowledge of or interest in what's going on, having stopped following politics years prior, though it seems clear his sympathies are not with the Republicans. His young friends are sure of a Kerry victory, sure of the evil of the Republicans, and just as sure that the latter have destroyed a great thing. They are, of course, disappointed in the event and spend much time denouncing the evil of Bush and Cheney and despairing the direction of this great nation.

A few things interest me about this and Ozick's response to it. First is her assumption that Roth, her hero, in writing this scene, necessarily has failed as a novelist, allowing "frenzied tract or self-indulgent hobbyhorse" to overtake him. Assuming, that is, that inclusion of such a scene can only be Roth taking time to either lecture the reader, or to make his own feelings known, which are otherwise irrelevant. And yet, it is a note-perfect rendition of the kinds of scenes that happened in real life, in true-blue liberal households across the land. Is it relevant to the rest of the book? I think it is, but I'm not going to go to great lengths to argue the point.

Second is her appraisal of the two older novels. She claims that in Fathers and Sons "both sides of the political argument are lived out and imagined from the inside. Turgenev doesn't sneer, he empathizes, he dramatizes. It’s not mere polemical advocacy thrown down out of animus." Note that she refers to both sides of the argument, as if there were only two, as if Turgenev had not selected his two sides to dramatize. In doing so, she fails to notice that two sides are indeed presented in Exit Ghost, that of the politically committed young couple and of the indifferent Zuckerman. And Ozick seems to accept at face value that the only sides involved in the 2004 election, or in any other presidential election, are the Democrats and the Republicans and their respective supporters. But the novel doesn't include any Nader voters, nor any others who might be capable, unlike this couple or Ozick apparently, of recognizing that, awful as they were, the Bush gang did not destroy a "great" thing but were rather implementing an extreme version of basic policies which enjoyed bipartisan support for decades, nor should it necessarily have included such characters. The book is not about the election or about politics. It is, however, largely about the risks of commitment, of life, of involvement, and the attraction of removing oneself from it all, whether for art or security or otherwise. In which case the two "sides" presented are indeed relevant to the novel.

A Passage to India, Ozick claims, is "a wonderful case in point of how a novel can transcend its topical politics when the issues themselves have become obsolete." Apparently, then, it's just fine for a novel to be about politics if those politics don't matter, as long as characters are memorable and place is well enough evoked. How convenient. Is it possible that decades from now Exit Ghost might be able to "transcend its topical politics"? Ozick doesn't say either way, but she implies that the political scenes in the novel are bad by definition. It seems to me that Ozick has allowed her a priori conviction that politics is always detrimental to fiction to determine her take on this particular scene. She claims that it is the weakest part of the book because "agree with Roth’s views or not -- it leaped out of the disbelief-suspending frame of the novel to become topical political rage and topical political advocacy". I'm curious at her assumption that the scene is anything like "political advocacy". What are Roth's views? Are they Zuckerman's or those of the young, politically attuned couple? Both? Neither? It's probably safe to say that Roth strongly identifies with the opinions expressed by the young couple. He is on record as having been appalled by the Bush Administration ("Bush is too horrendous to be forgotten", he says in the linked interview). And yet one can easily see him making common cause with Zuckerman, a sort of "this too shall pass" attitude. So, it could be argued, Roth splits his own attitude on the then-current situation. Possibly, yet it seems to me that this kind of speculation is quite beside the point. I make no great claims for Exit Ghost; it's a perfectly worthy, if sort of slight--in the way that Roth's recent books have managed to somehow be both slight and fascinating--coda to the numerous Zuckerman books. But the question of politics and fiction is important and too often dismissed out of hand by critics like Ozick who find the political novel anathema to aesthetic success, while many who desire the political in their art seem to me to be all too reductive.

I hope to return to these matters in the near future. But before finishing up here, I'd like to hint towards the nature of my problem with the overly reductive approach. I was struck a while back by a comment by jane dark at Ads Without Products, which Ads drew attention to in an excellent post the other day about Lars von Trier's new film, Antichrist:

The most compelling approach to "truth" in the novel is probably Jameson's account of "the real of history" in Political Unconscious and it is exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so, as both Ballard and the bourgeois novelists would have us do.

I'd like to meditate on this, and on that which is "exactly what can't be inserted via choosing to do so". . .

Appropriately Insular

Two weeks ago at The Elegant Variation, Mark Sarvas posted in four installments his interview with Joseph O'Neill, author of Netherland. Much of the interview is of little interest to me, but I admit that I made a point to skim through the whole thing because Sarvas hinted ahead of time that they were going to be getting into the much-blogged-about Zadie Smith essay from last Fall, in which Smith discussed Netherland alongside Tom McCarthy's Remainder (for example, I wrote about it here, and, sort of, here). In the event, that particular part of the interview doesn't really go anywhere terribly fruitful. Nevertheless, there are a few interesting points I'd like to highlight, since they have bearing on questions that some of us have been discussing of late. I'm posting this now as a placeholder, which I hope will lead into future posts on these topics.

First, from the third part of the interview, in reference to Nobel Committee member Horace Engdahl's controversial remarks about the alleged insularity of contemporary American fiction:

TEV: Do you think that this question of the insular nature of contemporary American fiction afflicts the younger generation in a way that it didn't the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows?

Joseph O'Neill: No, I think part of the problem for the young generation may be that they're not insular enough. I mean, Updike and Bellow and Roth achieved their finest, most resonant effects by disregarding conventions of universality. You wrote about what American Jews, or what you have you, were up to in these little towns, and the world followed you.

TEV: Very particular and very personal.

Joseph O'Neill: Yeah. There is no space between these writers and their concerns. You rarely get the sense with them that they are just trying to write a novel. I’m talking about their most successful work. And I think they were appropriately insular with regard to their raw materials.

"Appropriately insular". Whatever one thinks of the particular writers mentioned (I'm much higher on Roth and Bellow than I am on Updike, and I couldn't possibly care less about Mailer than I do), this is an excellent observation. I think it speaks to something important about literature, and has bearing on discussions about writing in general, modernism, post-modernism, and so on.

Then in part four they finally come around to addressing Smith's piece:

TEV: Because I agree with you. It's interesting that you have brought up Zadie Smith because I was going to ask about her next. I think that a lot of people draw the wrong kind of conclusions with a piece like the one that she wrote. I think that it sets up some false oppositions. I feel like this form of the novel is capacious enough to accommodate all different styles

Joseph O'Neill: Yes.

TEV: And the notion that one has to chose [sic] between Netherland or Remainder just seems silly. I liked Remainder a great deal, as well. I don’t feel that they're mutually exclusive, that one must declare an allegiance.

Joseph O'Neill: I'd actually read and liked Remainder before that piece. And I thought it was a perfectly good piece of writing. I'm not sure I would describe it as unconventional, not least because that description, as I've said, would not mean very much.

TEV: Yes. But I think that some of the sentiments that she expresses hold sway among this younger generation of writers, whether it’s people coming out of the McSweeney’s School or the purveyors of the uber-ironic, the tendency toward a hip nihilism or something like that that. That they mistrust, in essence, the idea of a beautiful sentence. Some people find that corny, the notion of a beautiful sentence.

Joseph O'Neill: Well, it depends on how you define them as beautiful. I mean, you know, Foster Wallace wrote many beautiful sentences. I mean, there's nothing but beautiful sentences in his work. Even though he had a particular way of doing it. What makes a sentence beautiful, for me, is its conscientiousness. A hip, ironic sensibility is not necessarily conscientious. Neither is a sensibility that latches on to dusks and dawns and roses.

Obviously O'Neill is put in a weird position, having to comment on such an essay, but TEV sets the terms of the discussion in a not very helpful fashion. Though he's not wrong to observe that Smith set up a false opposition of sorts, I would argue that the much celebrated "capaciousness" of the novel is actually a problem (and by the way think that TEV is one of those who drew "the wrong kind of conclusions" from the essay). But I'll leave further remarks for future posts.

Interview notice

I have a few long-ish posts awaiting my divided attention. In the meantime, over at Conversations in the Book Trade, Finn Harvor has posted an interview with me as part of his ongoing series. It will be seen that I remain, as ever, the eternal optimist. Ha!

Kafka and Brod

What if Brod had destroyed everything? Would Kafka have become Kafka? Would we know his writing? Yes, several stories were published in his lifetime, and would have remained theoretically extant. And this includes, crucially, not just "The Metamorphosis", probably his most famous work, but also "In the Penal Colony", "A Report to an Academy", "First Sorrow", and "A Hunger Artist". Overall, by my edition of the collected stories, approximately 250 pages of fiction, much of it essential reading. Obviously, we would not have The Trial, the second most famous work, or any of the other novels, or certainly the diaries.

Brod emerges as something of a comic figure, pathetic even, the lesser writer in the shadow of his friend, ethically unforgivable to some for the singular crime of not following Kafka's directive to burn. But how much of Kafka's reputation rests on Brod's efforts? That is, without Brod providing a critical framework, in the context of the posthumous novels and saved stories, do these early published stories necessarily survive? Not survive literally, but gain a foothold? I know I'm asking a more or less impossible question, but I like to think about contingency, how easily things could have been different, worse, better.

On Kafka and the pre-modern

Kafka again. The Diaries, the Collected Stories. After dipping into the shorter pieces in the latter over a period of several months alongside other reading, I finally had both the time and the inclination to read the longer stories (though, so far, just the ones published in his lifetime). One doesn't mind disrupting the reading of a novel, but stories need to be read in one sitting. "The Stoker", for the first time (it is also the opening chapter of Amerika, which remains the only unread novel); "The Metamorphosis"--this for the perhaps fourth or fifth time--remarkable how little I remember in it! "In the Penal Colony"--I remember the basic horrible idea, certainly, but the particulars and the conclusion are as if new to me.

From these stories, I've entered into a more systematic reading of the rest of the collection. In doing so, I noticed something odd in my expectations, coming into focus while reading "Eleven Sons". In this story, a father simply describes his eleven sons, one paragraph for each, in pedantic, critical detail, each son in some way somehow failing to measure up. For example, the second son has "a small irregularity of the spirit that somehow corresponds to [a physical blemish], a kind of stray poison in the blood, a kind of inability to develop to the full the potentialities of his nature which I alone can see." That kind of thing. And that's it. Five pages and out. In that same paragraph on the second son, we read this:

He is clever too, but has experience of the world as well; he has seen much, and therefore even our native country seems to yield more secrets to him than to the stay-at-home. Yet I am sure that this advantage is not only and not even essentially due to his travels, it is rather an attribute of his own inimitable nature, which is acknowledged for instance by everyone who has ever tried to copy him in, let us say, the fancy high dive he does into the water, somersaulting several times over, yet with almost violent self-control. To the very end of the springboard the emulator keeps up his courage and his desire to follow; but at that point, instead of leaping into the air, he sits down suddenly and lifts his arms in excuse.

At the word "springboard" I was suddenly made aware that I had been imagining this son's diving taking place at an old watering hole. No big deal possibly, except that I further realized that I tend to take Kafka's stories as somehow pre-modern. In some respects this is plainly ridiculous: isn't the cliché about Kafka that he is the quintessential chronicler of the modern condition? Alienation, bureaucracy, office work, claustrophobia, all of that? I don't subscribe to that short-hand, but even so, the modern world abounds in Kafka's fiction. Isn't Gregor Samsa a traveling salesman for a big, modern firm? Doesn't "The Stoker" take place inside a large, modern ship? The detailed description of the machine in "In the Penal Colony" speaks of a world in which mechanical devices are ordinary, even if this machine in particular is far from it. More than this, though several stories do not, contrary to the cliché, speak of an exclusively modern condition, little details of the modern world continually appear, in Kafka's literal way. Like that springboard. What is my problem?

I'm again talking about the timeless, mythical quality of Kafka's fiction, the tendency, enabled by Kafka's apparently plain prose style, for his stories to read like parables or fables, whatever they may actually be about. And fables and myths are ancient, and so it follows. There is that slippery, if literal, writing. Of course, some of the stories reinforce my pre-conception. "A Country Doctor", for example, could take place almost anytime. There is the recasting of Don Quixote with Sancho Panza as the hero, there is the story about Poseidon stuck doing paperwork, unable to actually enjoy the seas over which he presides (though someday, perhaps, someday), there are stories with emperors and noblemen and peasants and villages, all arguably contributing to this overall sense of pre-modernity. But the other stories, the ones that are unquestionably in a modern setting, are no less fables, to the extent that at times the very modernity on display brings me up short, forcing me to consider it.

Mid-year Music Roundup, part one

Just past the mid-point of 2009, and what music have I been listening to? Well, I'm glad you asked. As advertized, my intake of new music has dwindled considerably, though this year there's a been a slight uptick over last year, still on the trade-in/store-credit regime.

In another entry I may touch on some of my other listening, but for this post, I'll briefly comment just on the four cds released this year that I have acquired:

Neko Case, Middle Cyclone: an excellent album, though I admit I haven't entered into a zone of obsession with it yet, as I did almost immediately with Fox Confessor Brings the Flood; whatever happens, it's always great listening to that wonderful voice. She can sing. Could do without "Marais la Nuit", the album-closing 30+ minute track of crickets chirping. It's fine once but I tend to skip over it. So far I haven't really zeroed in on most of the lyrics, but I do love this from "This Tornado Loves You": "I have waited with a glacier's patience..."

Bill Callahan, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle: this got mostly rave reviews, with listeners seeming to think it's Bill's best record since Smog's Dongs of Sevotion (1999) or, possibly, Knock Knock (1998). For one thing, this view completely overlooks the classics Supper (2003) and A River Ain't Too Much to Love (2005), both of which are far better, in my opinion, than either of the earlier two (both of which, don't misunderstand, I like just fine, though at this late date the latter especially seems a bit over-produced). For another, I think it slightly overrates the new album. It is indeed better than his last album, the disappointing Woke on a Whaleheart, the first under his own name, though that's not saying much by itself (although I admit that I have a soft spot for that one, too, even if I recognize that it's easily his worst record since he started actually writing songs instead of playing with noise). That said, increasingly, I do like the new album. "Jim Cain" is great; "Eid Ma Clack Shaw", "The Wind and the Dove", and "Too Many Birds" are quite good; I'm coming around with repeated listens to "My Friend" and "All Thoughts are Prey to Some Beast"--at first I was thrown by his uncharacteristically emotive vocals in these two, but I believe I've gotten over it. "Rococo Zephyr" is pleasant enough, perhaps overly placid, yet it features this great line, my favorite on the record: "I used to be sorta blind, now I can sorta see." Throughout, the writing is stronger than on Whaleheart, the production is less cluttered and random, and Bill's singing is fascinating as ever, so there is much to recommend it, even if it doesn't reach the consistent heights of his masterpiece Red Apple Falls (1997) or the two mid-decade titles mentioned above. By far the worst track is the finale, "Faith/Void", which I'm afraid is simply an awful song. With the repeated line about it being "time to put God away", it sounds like a song that could have been commissioned by Richard Dawkins. I don't object to the sentiment per se (except that I've always liked how Bill has seemed able to tap into some kind of mystery), except that's all it seems like. The main problem with it is that it's utterly boring, and goes on for nearly ten minutes. I've given it several chances, but ugh.

Sonic Youth, The Eternal: well, yes. After all that, yes. What can I say. It fucking rocks. It's better than "Rather Ripped", about on par with (the excellent) Sonic Nurse or Murrary Street, much better than career nadirs Experimental Jet Set & No Star or Dirty (yes, I said it; Dirty is far and away the most overrated album in Sonic Youth's catalog--Woebot was right [link re-found via Matthew Ingram's own contribution to the SY kerfuffle, in which he backs off of his earlier Woebot-era bash a bit], in retrospect this is where they seemed to lose the thread, and they bottomed out with Experimental Jet Set; in my view they re-found it, beginning, tentatively, with Washing Machine, but it took a while), and naturally not the groundbreaker of EVOL, Sister, or Daydream Nation, or the consolidation of Goo. Full of Sonic Youthiness.

Animal Collective, Meriweather Post Pavilion: It has to be said: this is not Animal Collective's best album, though everyone seems to think it is. It's very good, yes, yes, very good, don't get me wrong. But it disturbs me that this happens with every artist. The best album is always the most accessible. Even fans too often get caught up in the idea that a band's rough edges, disturbing tendencies, whatever might be unassimilable, must be ironed out in order for maturity or growth or whatever to occur. I'm sure Animal Collective are just doing what they want, and what they're doing is still pretty damn good, but those rough edges--the screaming, the meandering, the indulgences--were part of what had made them awesome.

Bloggery and linkage

At A Tiny Revolution, Jonathan Schwarz yesterday took note of "Another Triumph for American Journalism". And last week he noted the similarities between Goldman Sachs's responses to certain interview questions from Matt Taibbi and Saddam Hussein's responses to questions from the FBI, after they forced him to watch a documentary, and quipped, all too accurately: "The funniest part is, you could legitimately argue that Goldman Sachs has killed more people than Saddam."

ladypoverty on jackassery; also on the puzzling perspective on current events offered by Elie Wiesel's account, in Dawn, of the use of terrorism by Jews against the British in Palestine after WWII. I'd like to quote numerous other pithy ladypoverty utterances, but the relevant posts are way too short to justify my quotation of them here. You should check in there regularly yourself.

For those few of you who are not planning on reading David Harvey's The Limits to Capital this summer ("Capital Summer"?), at Lenin's Tomb lenin summarizes a talk given by Harvey, which also happens to serve as an excellent précis of many of the arguments in that book. (See also my own somewhat rambly post from April touching on the same book.)

And, finally, here is a video of an excellent talk given by Chris Knight, discussing Marxism and science, religion and communism, sex strikes and the evolutionary emergence of language and origins of culture, and more. The video is about 75 minutes long, but well worth your time. Unsurprisingly, the link comes to me via Stuart at From Despair to Where?, where in the comments an interesting discussion occurred about the reception of Knight's theory, in particular as outlined in his great book Blood Relations (which, again, I discussed at length here). In the talk, incidentally, Knight refers to an article titled "Painted Ladies" in New Scientist that summarizes some of the argument. That article appeared in October 2001, and a pdf can be viewed here. If you're interested, but wary about jumping right into Blood Relations, the talk plus the "Painted Ladies" article are a good way, I think, to gain some familiarity with these important ideas.

I imagined I would provide more links here today, but then I lost the will, so this will have to do. Enjoy!

Being there only momentarily

Maurice Blanchot, discussing the cave paintings at Lascaux, from his essay "The Birth of Art", found in Friendship:

Art would thus provide us with our only authentic date of birth: a date that is rather recent and necessarily indeterminate, even though the paintings of Lascaux seem to bring it still closer to us by the feeling of proximity with which the seduce us. Yet is it truly a feeling of proximity? Rather of presence or, more precisely, of apparition. Before these works are erased from the history of painting by the ruthless movement that brought them to the light of day, it is perhaps necessary to specify what it is that sets them apart: the impression they give of appearing, of being there only momentarily, drawn by the moment and for the moment, figures not nocturnal but rendered visible by the instantaneous opening of the night.

Does art, then, bring into focus that which recedes from us?--unconcealment?--revealing a shadowy presence, for a moment, of that moment when we first emerged? The sense that the Lascaux paintings give us, of being the birth of art, even they were not the earliest--is the sense that art is always present at the birth of itself? For literature to be art, it should just come into focus, or attempt to articulate something difficult, attempt to express the inexpressible, it should depict something just around the corner, just beyond perception?

Bored by Hemingway

I tried again last night to read The Sun Also Rises. No particular reason: I was in between books, felt like I wanted some fiction, flipped through a few, reading the first page or so of this, the first paragraph of that, before arbitrarily deciding to give the Hemingway another go. It's not going to happen. I get no pleasure from the prose. I find young Mr. Jacob Barnes, the narrator, exceedingly annoying, and the no-pleasure-in-the-prose factor makes that a major problem. I don't care about Robert Cohn or the rest. I'm not interested in characters who are supposed to be metaphors for the Lost Generation. I don't care about any of it. I made it through the first three chapters, approximately 25 pages, about a tenth of the thing, irritated the whole way, telling myself the while that it'd come into focus, I'll get into it. But, no.

I went through an earlier period scorning Hemingway, without really knowing what I was talking about, outside of hated forced readings of short stories (about fishing, I'm almost certain) in high school. Then I took a stab at this same novel, made it 80 pages in, decided it wasn't for me, but without the scorn. I was younger, read too quickly, and his writing didn't fit in with the more expansive, language-drunk novels I was reading at the time. Since then, I always told myself I'd read it; it would be the Hemingway I'd read, since I really don't want to read his war novels. But, again, no, finally, I'm not going to. I'm not going to read any further. I'm giving up on Hemingway.

Gass on Philosophy

Here, by the way, is an extended excerpt from the Believer interview with William H. Gass, on the pleasures of reading philosophy, which I quoted briefly from in my last post (italics in original):

Philosophy has a great sort of appeal in terms of an artistic or aesthetic organization of concepts. It also leads, in some cases, to writing which is exceptionally interesting. I’m thinking, say, of somebody who’s very technical in a way, like [German philosopher Gottlob] Frege. And he’s writing on the foundations of arithmetic. Beautiful, beautiful stuff.

So there’s that part of it. But the world of conceptualized ideas is quite wonderful, even when it’s—-like Aristotle’s Physics—-an outmoded book. The physics is not true. But the reasoning is dazzling. You can learn so much from a book like that about the way a mind might work and should work. I remember reading it for the first time, and it was just extraordinary. When Aristotle is wrong because science has outstripped him, he is so sane given what he has in front of him to work with, that you think, Well. You leave somebody like Plato, whose mind is breathtaking, and you go to Aristotle, who has a very completely different kind of thing, and hasn’t got the style or the panache. And yet, oh, boy, some of the performances are devastatingly wonderful. Same thing with someone like Kant, or Spinoza. And of course one of my favorites, Hobbes. He writes some of the best prose ever. And it isn’t that when one’s appreciating this, you’re just throwing out the aim that they were trying to achieve—to get at the truth. The fact is that even if it isn’t the truth, it’s worth the journey.

One of my favorites is Plotinus, and, you know, I think he’s nuts. [Both laugh] But it’s always gorgeous, and the language is just spectacular. And the same is true of the Tractatus [Logico-Philosophicus, by Ludwig Wittgenstein]. The German is exquisite. So what you’re dealing with is a certain quality of mind. I think it is important to realize when you’re studying philosophy that what you’re getting is not simply that they got it right. What they got right was the going after it and showing you how it works, and imagining this and that. Usually, doing what Emerson suggested: capturing the world as it might seem from one point of view. That tells you a whole lot about that point of view.

Again on Nietzsche and youthful reading

I've been reading Nietzsche's On the Geneology of Morals and thinking more about youthful reading. Previously, I quoted Graham Harman on Nietzsche thus:

Many consider him a sort of juvenile pastime that one has to move beyond, and this attitude is understandable, but just think of how your brain is on fire after reading Nietzsche. There aren’t many philosophers who can do that.

At the time, I was interested chiefly in the "juvenile pastime" part of the remark, now I can see better how one's brain could be "on fire after reading Nietzsche", particularly a young person's brain. I can easily see how a young reader of philosophy could be quite enamored of Nietzsche. So confident! So assured! So provocative! So in love with exclamation points!

Interestingly, at least in the parts of Geneology I've read so far, Nietzsche's account of the origins of certain things is almost certainly wrong, and yet seductive. (Note: I opted to read On the Geneology of Morals after reading Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea--Dennett provides several passages from Nietzsche and suggests that Hobbes and Nietzsche are something like the first "sociobiologists", in that they were trying to explain the beginnings of things in terms of natural history, as opposed to resorting to God as an explanation. Dennett observes that, though Nietzsche may not have read Darwin directly, he was certainly familiar with and interested in the theories of evolution, which interest is reflected in his work. I hope to have something more specific to say about Nietzsche and Dennett and the origins of things, especially in the context of Chris Knight's work, in a later post. Dennett, by the way, is another writer who is overly fond of the exclamation point.) And yet Nietzsche remains a pleasure to read. It is enjoyable following his reasoning, registering objections along the way. I recall William H. Gass' love of reading philosophy--he often echoes a point made several times by Harman at his blog, that the thing about reading philosophy is not necessarily whether the philosopher was right, that they do not become worthless once science has shown them to be wrong on this or that topic; or, as Gass says here in an interview with the Believer, "The fact is that even if it isn’t the truth, it’s worth the journey." (Update: I've provided a substantially longer excerpt on this theme from this interview, here.)

But back to youthful reading. As noted before, Dostoevsky is another writer often said to be for the young. One grows out of Dostoevsky, is the sneer. I don't know about that, but I think I know what is meant by this sort of comment, at least when it's not a form of condescension (as, for example, I don't believe Graham Harman was being in any way condescending in his remarks about Nietzsche). In the final section of his great memoir, Gathering Evidence, Thomas Bernhard recalls his first encounter with Dostoevsky's Demons. He calls it "elemental". Some of us have approached that book and found it decidedly not elemental, for us. But Bernhard was 19 years old, I believe, when he read Demons. For him, at that age, no doubt it indeed was elemental. And what mattered for him later in life, in his own writing, was not what Dostoevksy might have had to say for him or to him in his 30s or 40s or 50s, but what it meant to read Demons when he was 19. Perhaps, if he had not read Demons, or any other Dostoevsky, until his mid-30s--perhaps it would have meant little to him. But that experience, that encounter, that elemental reading at the age of 19--he owed a certain kind of loyalty to that. Indeed, though at the age of 39 I've so far tried and failed to make my way into Demons, I nevertheless remember fondly my experience, at 24, reading The Brothers Karamazov. Yes, I was proud of myself for plowing through such a dense book, but also I was invigorated by the experience, wanted to talk about it, was on fire, in a sense, with the ideas. For some, this very aspect of Dostoevsky is what renders him aesthetically suspect. I used to agree, but now I'm not so sure. (Anyway, resolute atheist that I was and am, I hardly thought it was anything like a conservative religious tract, as others have argued.) After that you'd think I'd have consumed more Dostoevsky at that still relatively young age, but I did not. And by the time I got around to reading Notes from Underground, at 36, even this lean novella felt flabby to me.

The point is that these youthful readings are important, not to be dismissed or sneered at, or disowned. They form part of our worldview and our aesthetic, even if we move beyond or away from them. With some authors, if we miss out on appropriate youthful readings, then perhaps we miss out on them altogether, or maybe they simply cannot mean as much to us as they otherwise might have.

Giovanni Arrighi

Lost in the shuffle of recent events has been the death on June 18th of Giovanni Arrighi, described as "one of the foremost scholars of the history and future of capitalism" at Verso's blog.
I actually haven't yet read anything by Arrighi myself, though his monumental books The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times and the more recent Adam Smith in Beijing are on my ever-lengthening list of books I feel that I need to read in order to understand our time (while I'm here, allow me to again point you to jane dark's excellent recent post on world system hegemons, which draws on Arrighi's arguments in both of these books). In March 2008, not long after Adam Smith in Beijing appeared, I happened to catch a panel discussion with Arrighi, David Harvey, and Joel Andreas at 2640 in Baltimore (Arrighi taught at Johns Hopkins University, Andreas still does, and of course Harvey taught there for the better part of two decades). It was a fascinating and occasionally heated discussion. I took copious notes intended for use on this blog, but I was never able to get my act together to organize them. (However, it turns out you can view a film of the event here; it's worth looking at if you have the time.) I was especially interested in this discussion, precisely because of its focus on China. As I've mentioned here previously, I'm greatly interested in China, but I've been unsure how to proceed. I'd like to read a history of the communist revolution and the cultural revolution that takes it seriously, without being fawningly Maoist or something. Perhaps Arrighi's later book covers some of the history; no doubt the book is equipped with a substantial bibliography (I'm also aware that, as one would expect, Monthly Review Press has some titles that look just right for this investigation, such as perhaps this one or this one or, especially, this one.)

One thing I remember from the panel discussion was Arrighi's contention that China's emergence as an economic power has been in large part dependent on the advances of the revolution, which resulted in a generally healthy and educated populace. Harvey and Andreas didn't dispute this point, but they were far less sanguine about the prospects of China becoming a major power, given its, in their view, particularly virulent form of capitalism. (This contention of Arrighi's reminds me, incidentally, of this talk given by Dmitry Orlov, in which he argues that the USSR, because of its socialism, however deeply flawed, was much better prepared to handle its collapse than the USA will be to handle its inevitable collapse, when it comes.)

Anyway, this great, great interview (link via Verso) of Arrighi by Harvey, which appeared in the New Left Review this Spring, has me dying to dive into his work sooner rather than later. The interview covers a lot of ground, from his work in Africa, where he cut his teeth in the 1960s ("the mathematically modelled neo-classical tradition I’d been trained in had nothing to say about the processes I was observing in Rhodesia, or the realities of African life"), up through to China and the current financial crisis. Here is a short excerpt:

One of Marx’s conclusions in Capital, particularly Volume One, is that adoption of a Smithian free-market system will lead to increases in class inequality. To what degree does the introduction of a Smithian regime in Beijing carry the risk of even greater class inequalities in China?

My argument in the theoretical chapter on Smith, in Adam Smith in Beijing, is that there is no notion in his work of self-regulating markets as in the neoliberal creed. The invisible hand is that of the state, which should rule in a decentralized way, with minimal bureaucratic interference. Substantively, the action of the government in Smith is pro-labour, not pro-capital. He is quite explicit that he is not in favour of making workers compete to reduce wages, but of making capitalists compete, to reduce profits to a minimum acceptable reward for their risks. Current conceptions turn him completely upside-down. But it’s unclear where China is headed today. In the Jiang Zemin era, in the 1990s, it was certainly headed in the direction of making workers compete for the benefit of capital and profit; there is no question about that. Now there is a reversal, one which as I’ve said takes into account not only the tradition of the Revolution and the Mao period, but also of the welfare aspects of late-imperial China under the Qing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I’m not putting bets on any particular outcome in China, but we must have an open mind in terms of seeing where it’s going.

In Adam Smith in Beijing, you also draw on Sugihara Kaoru’s work in contrasting an ‘industrious revolution’, based on intensive labour and husbanding of nature, in early modern East Asia, and an ‘industrial revolution’, based on mechanization and predation of natural resources, and speak of the hope that there could be a convergence of the two for humanity in the future. How would you estimate the balance between them in East Asia today?

Very precarious. I am not as optimistic as Sugihara in thinking that the East Asian tradition of ‘industrious revolution’ is so well entrenched that it may, if not become dominant again, at least play an important role in whatever hybrid formation is going to emerge. These concepts are more important for monitoring what’s happening than saying, East Asia is going this way, or the United States is going the other way. We need to see what they actually do. There is evidence that the Chinese authorities are worried about the environment, as well as about social unrest—but then they do things that are plain stupid. Maybe there is a plan in the works, but I don’t see much awareness of the ecological disasters of car civilizations. The idea of copying the United States from this point of view was already crazy in Europe—it’s even crazier in China. And I’ve always told the Chinese that in the 1990s and 2000s, they went to look at the wrong city. If they want to see how to be wealthy without being ecologically destructive, they should go to Amsterdam rather than Los Angeles. In Amsterdam, everybody goes around on bicycles; there are thousands of bikes parked at the station overnight, because people come in by train, pick up their bicycles in the morning and leave them there again in the evening. Whereas in China, while there were no cars at all the first time I was there in 1970—only a few buses in a sea of bicycles—now, more and more, the bicycles have been crowded out. From that point of view it’s a very mixed picture, very worrying and contradictory. The ideology of modernization is discredited elsewhere but so far is living on, rather naively, in China.

Thoughts and related links on Iran

Of course, the media circus surrounding Michael Jackson's death has had the inevitable effect of distracting attention away from events in Iran. But, as lenin reminds us, there is still much to unpack in that situation. In that post, lenin is discussing the image of Ahmadinejad as some kind of populist leader:

The more that comes out about the elections, the more it is clear that they exposed a raging war in the ruling class over political ascendancy and property, with relatively minor differences on other matters exaggerated. The second point is that the right-wing bloc behind Ahmadinejad has tended to use anti-imperialist rhetoric to justify the most naked transfer of wealth from the public sphere to capital, particularly to more influential players in the bazaari class and state-affiliated capitalists. They shake their fists at Washington just as they're about to go further toward neoliberalism than even the IMF proposed. And they justify it by referring to the need to break the sanctions imposed by Washington. This policy is obviously designed not to enrich the poor or sustain them in the long term, or strengthen their bargaining power as workers, but specifically to reduce their long-term wealth and purchasing power by redirecting a larger portion of socially produced wealth to a specific sector of the capitalist class.

As ever, lenin's been very sensible about the events in Iran, allowing his own analysis to unfold over time (with posts here, here, here, here, here, and here), while also allowing for various conflicting posts from Yoshie (for example, here and here), which has enabled some very interesting discussions to unfold at Lenin's Tomb. I have also appreciated posts from Richard Estes at American Leftist, here and here. In addition, he has again reminded me that I should be reading Angry Arab, As'ad Abukhalil's blog, more regularly.

I highlight these posts in particular because I've been suspicious of the rush to judgment, the rush to interpret these events in terms reduced to our debased sense of political process and our woeful understanding of the history of the region, along with all of our cultural biases about Iran. I am not very knowledgeable about Iran. I do know something about what the British and Americans have done in Iran, from the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 to meddling in the Iranian revolution of the 1970s, from the Iran-Iraq War to Iran-Contra. I know a lot of facts about these things, which I could string along as some sort of semi-coherent narrative about American imperialism and capitalist accumulation in the post-WWII era. Most of what I know about these things is cobbled together from books like Edward Said's Covering Islam, William Blum's Killing Hope and Rogue State, Tariq Ali's The Clash of Fundamentalisms, and Mahmood Mamdami's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, not to mention various Noam Chomsky titles read over the years. But I don't know anything about Iran, about Iranians, the actual people, and I'm not likely to become well-versed enough to write well on the topic.

For this reason, I appreciated another recent lenin post ("The pitfalls of premature eloquence") in which he decried this rush to judgment, the tendency towards "instapunditry":

The dilemma faced by commentators of all kinds, not just bloggers, on the Iranian protests can be summarised by a single, annoying portmanteau word: instapunditry. The pressure to take a view prematurely in such a situation can only produce a series of stock responses, either based on CNN filtered news, or speculation from various samizdat-style websites, or material provided by the Iranian media itself. And after all, while these protests had precedent in previous student and workers rebellions, the sheer scale of upheaval had no precedent in the entire history of Islamic Republic. How to relate to that?

It has been possible to be both eloquent and consistent only [by] relying on an analysis made for a different situation that seems to fit.

My own time constraints aside, this is exactly why I have previously not written about the protests in Iran (and, frankly, why I generally avoid writing about unfolding current events as they happen, except insofar as they seem directly related to something specific I may be reading--for example, the financial meltdown happening as I'm reading Marx or Harvey or whomever).

In any event, lack of sufficient knowledge to form my own coherent analysis does not prevent me from noticing that something has been going on. It may not be quite the clear-cut conflict favored in the liberal press (or, certainly, the conservative press), but still, as lenin puts it:

anyone on the left who doesn't see an emancipatory dimension in the protests is politically defunct. The bloodless lack of enthusiasm for what is manifestly a democratic movement in some of the commentary reflects not anti-imperialist sensibilities so much as political timidity. The key here is universality: these protesters are no different from those who have been beaten or killed in Genoa, in London, in LA, in Athens, and everywhere that the state is challenged by a democratic movement and responds in this way. Their case for solidarity is not diminished by the fact that they live in a society that has been threatened by imperialism.

So it goes without saying, though here I am somewhat belatedly saying it, that I stand in solidarity with the people of Iran. Indeed where previously this blog has taken time to argue against the facile demonization of Ahmadinejad, it has been precisely because this (ongoing) characterization of him in the American press and by American political leaders lays the groundwork for a potential attack on Iran, which of course threatens not Ahmadinejad at all, but the lives of those very people protesting (a point made well two weeks ago by Glenn Greenwald, link via both Andrew Seal and Aaron Bady; the latter, incidentally, also has written a thoughtful post on Iran and non-violent action).

Finally, to close this scattershot entry, this statement of solidarity (link first seen at Lenin's Tomb) from the Venezuelan Revolutionary Marxist Current is well worth reading--it contrasts the current events in Iran with the Bolivarian Revolution, while also offering some useful history about the Iranian Revolution itself and the counter-revolution that has been the Islamic Republic.

Michael Jackson

Much to my surprise, I've been fascinated by Michael Jackson in the wake of his death. When I'd heard he'd died, I didn't think much of anything, other than "oh, wow". I wasn't saddened by his death. I'm still not quite saddened by his death, though I remain saddened by his life.

When Thriller was in its extended hegemonic moment, I liked Michael Jackson as much as the next 12-to-14 year-old kid. I liked the music, wanted to see the videos ("Friday Night Videos", right? we never had cable. . .), enjoyed watching the dancing. I was never into him, but I wasn't into anything at that age other than baseball. And I wasn't yet buying anything of my own. When I was 16 and started buying music and cultivating my own tastes, I'd positioned myself as officially against actually popular music, which obviously meant no Michael Jackson for me--or, for that matter, Prince or Madonna. (And, of course, as noted here on numerous occasions, at the time of this shift I was engaging in necrophiliac music consumption of my own by listening almost exclusively to classic rock.) By the time Bad came out, I couldn't grasp that Jackson was still being taken seriously, even if secretly I liked some of the songs. (Indeed, I remember watching the Grammys, when he performed "Man in the Mirror", and thinking I sensed and saw an audience that wasn't with him at all. Silly me. It wasn't the first or last time I'd be so out of touch.)

In those days I had rather confused ideas about authenticity and selling out. I've blogged about this stuff previously and have no desire to rehearse it here. But that I was able to persuade myself that, for example, the insanely popular Led Zeppelin was somehow not commercial is some kind of neat psychological trick--when it was their very popularity that helped confirm their acceptability to my confused adolescent mind. Of course, they played their own instruments, they rocked, they didn't release singles, didn't license their songs, broke up when Bonham died, and so on--various factors which became for me components of a baseline norm of what music and musicians should be like. Insert here a paragraph or two about the whole indie angst about selling out that I bought into wholesale when that music caught my attention. And another one about self-consciousness about dancing, about cool, about looking foolish. The point is that the kind of spectacle represented by Michael Jackson, especially as he seemed to be continually trying to repeat the unrepeatable success of Thriller, was completely anathema to my tastes, my perspective, my comfort, my sense of propriety, the list goes on.

As a result of all of this, I have never owned a Michael Jackson record. Like many, we rectified this oversight yesterday by downloading all of Off the Wall and about half of Thriller itself. So I find myself listening to songs I've known forever for really the first time, in my own time, paying attention to stuff I've taken for granted. And the main thing I'm struck by is the evident rage and pain in Michael's vocals. I think I'd taken subliminal notice of this before, but it hits me right away every time now, especially in the utterly magnificent "Billie Jean". (About which, perhaps you've already seen k-punk's great post on this song. If not, and you care, go read it.) I think we've long known that this had to be one seriously lonely and tortured person, if we even gave him credit for being a person at all, if we didn't think of him merely as some freak. And again I am saddened by what we do to people, saddened by the life lived by this person in particular. I'd like to step back from the impulse to critique the spectacle and take a moment to celebrate the man's gifts and thank him for sharing them.

That's really all I'm going to say of my own. Of all the stuff written on Jackson elsewhere my favorites, along with k-punk's, have been Marcello Carlin's, in which he talks about the pressures faced by those identified early in life as "special", and Steven Shaviro's. In particular, speaking of selling out, I'd like to highlight this from Shaviro's post before I go:

All this [i.e., discussion of certain racially coded remarks from Greil Marcus, quoted by k-punk here] might seem like raking over old coals; but the intersection between mass popularity and questions of race is still a central one for American culture (note: I am including the reception of British musicians like the Beatles in America as itself very much part of American culture). In the most important respects, the Beatles and Michael Jackson were very much alike, in that they both achieved a mass popularity that exceeded all bounds and crossed over many cultural divides. If we toss out (as we should) Marcus’ white mythology, then we might even say that Michael Jackson was the end of something, as much as he was the beginning of something else. Jackson’s celebrity, like that of the Beatles before him, and of Elvis before them, was only possible in an age of “mass culture” that no longer exists. In the time of Fordist mass production and mass marketing, cultural products were also mass marketed. This reached a new level of intensity when television replaced the movies and radio as the dominant mass medium. Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson are all figures of the period between the introduction of broadcast television and the introduction of multi-channeled cable television, home video players, and the Internet. The latter technologies, together with the general shift from standardized mass production to the regime of just-in-time flexible accumulation, with its endless array of customizable options, mean that no single celebrity figure can ever be as culturally dominant as Elvis, the Beatles, and Michael Jackson were. Recent debates, among music critics and on music blogs, between “rockists” and “popists” are ultimately sterile, because both sides fail to take sufficient account of our curent culture of niche marketing, “long tails,” customization, and “crowdsourcing,” not to mention that the advertising and commercial strategies initially deployed on a massive scale by figures like the Beatles and Jackson are now increasingly prevalent on the micro-level. They are no longer just imposed from above; rather, they saturate all our media and all our interactions, oozing up as they do from below. It used to be that you could accuse somebody (as Marcus liked to accuse black artists) of being a bourgeois sellout; but today, everyone without exception is a “bourgeois sellout,” because (in the age of “human capital” and self-entrepreneurship) being such is a minimum requirement for mere survival. Today, this is a structural condition of social existence, rather than a matter of personal integrity or choice.

Noted: Evelyn Scott

Also from Part VI of Escapade:

Manoel felled a tree in which was an owl nest and when he showed me the small blinded bird I asked him to let me keep it. I cut one of the owl's gray-brown wings and I have allowed him to run loose while we sleep. All night long I hear his hunting moan in the dark. I imagine him free; a gray cloud of feathered quiet drifting, his low cry, and his claws clinging to a young bird--clinging, clinging like an unlifting shadow. From a moral standpoint death, which is most inimical to human relations, should be hideous. But the owl has convinced me of the superficiality of moral judgments. He is the cruelest of creatures and the most innocent. In the morning he sits on my knee and I give him bits of our maggot-laden meat. He is resigned to me utterly. When I call to him in the daylight he always comes feebly toward the sound. And he stares, stares at me with his great helpless eyes, feeling perhaps, because I have given him meat, that I have become a part of his sightless world.

It is different with the hawk. Tilting himself back against the side of his cage, his claws, at the end of his thin stick-like legs, clutch tensely at the air, and when I attempt to feed him his terrible eyes select unerringly my moving finger. More than once he has dragged at it with his beak and torn my flesh. He was wounded when he was captured and it would be useless to free him. Nothing will free him but starvation. He sees us too plainly. His vision has placed us outside him forever. He recognizes our antithesis. He also reminds me of a child. He is another Death.