LI is financially chic!

Reading that Sprint is writing off 23 billion dollars, we here at LI got a little jealous. It seems that every organization worth its salt, nowadays, has to write off a few billion dollars. Even the girls selling girl scout cookies at a foldout table near the Randalls up the street have a sign claiming that for each box sold, they will write off a million dollars.

Where, readers will want to know, does LI stand on all of this?

As the finest and chicest of blogs, we have been a little dumbfounded by the pace of the write offs. Still, I think we can come up with 500 million dollars worth of write offs for starters.

For instance, the 100 million for the coffee machines. The office coffee machine broke a week ago, and the office assistant went to get a new one. The office manager meant to write a check for one hundred dollars, but slipped up and added the million. So of course we now have five warehouses stuffed full of coffee machines, plus tons of non-dairy creamer. We are, of course, writing that off.

Then there was the Nestroy business. We brought in a consultant to help us raise our subscription base from 200 to 200,000. The consultant assured our CEO that the youth of America was totally grooving to the plays of J. Nestroy at the moment. Thus, we went out and bought some very expensive writers to write about the Revolution in Kraehwinkel, and we purchased Nestroy today and Nestroy weekly for a comparative song – a thirty million dollar stock swap. So far, we’ve lost 50 million on the deal. No, it isn’t in the billions, but every bit helps.

Then, of course, comes the revision of our 2006 profits. We had originally figured our 2006 profits at 300 million dollars, which allowed us to pay our CEO a hundred million dollar bonus. Revision, however, has revealed that the 300 million was too high – in actuality, we made 17 cents. Actually, we found the 17 cents in our chair, which the consultant had been sitting in. Being sly business men, we made the lock your lips sign to each otehr until the consultant left the room, then quickly pocketed the princely sum. Of course, this profit was cause to award our CEO another 50 million dollars in bonuses, which included a warehouse full of coffee makers.

So, as you can see, we are doing our best, here, at LI to keep up with the times. At the moment, it may seem like a distant dream that we would lose a billion dollars. But just look at the ratings handed out to subprime mortgage companies by Standard and Poor – yes, dreams can come true!

Now I’m going out to buy some cookies – the LI kitchen is all out! Hmm, how much money does this check give me, anyway?

in the golden egg (2)

All eggs – Prajapati’s, Humpty Dumpty’s – crack. Far from being the kind of thing all the king’s horses and all the king’s men should deplore, cracking is the perfection of the egg, its designed endpoint. The milkfed days of Philip Lord Chandos were, apparently – or so his account would make us believe – appointed to lead him from glorious estate to glorious estate as he became a grandee of great learning. And thus he’d put one foot and then the other out of the egg. But it is a fact that some eggs fail. And it is a fact that promising minds are easily culled and spoiled, that entrance into real life is entrance into a bureaucratic labyrinth in which the many branches are all equally tedious, that energy is delight only as long as the divide between promise and attainment seems eminently surmountable. Hands, necks, cheeks wither. The great work, the grand instauration, the New Atlantis becomes a great mill, to which one finds oneself chained, one day, much like any other slave.

Or… perhaps in a horrible moment, all mental energies collapse, and the egg dies within.

“But, my honorable friend, even earthly concepts escape me in the same manner. How am I supposed to try to describe these rare mental pains to you, this elevation of the fruited branch above my outstretched hand, this retraction of the murmuring water before my thirsty lips?

In brief, my case is like this: the ability to think or speak consecutively over an object, something, has been completely lost to me.”

LI, in middle age, knows a lot about this in particular. The imbecile gaps are longer; living as I do, mostly in solitude, I don’t have to face them as much as, perhaps, other, more normal people do, except when I’m around people and actually have to say something. I used to be a ready speaker, and can still tap mechanically into the old flow, but how easily the references, the memories, the names will suddenly fly out of my head at unbidden moments! I noticed at the Bob-fest, when I was around people who I used to be around in my late twenties, that there was some control over the tearing of the web (which is how I think of this, the homunculus spider in my head weaving, over the seemingly endless time I’ve been alive, its complex, dreadfully dusty webs). It didn’t happen as often. Ah, blind habit friend of human kind! On the other hand, I know that surely the next time I have lunch with, say, my friend S., that the web will be torn. I’ll babble along when suddenly the web will tear off and fall in the dark – inside my head, of course – and I’ll have that magic, frightening aphasic moment, when the name-world become unfamiliar. S.’s name, mine, whatever stupid thing I am talking about, even the whole path that lead me to become a babbler.

Intimations of Alzheimer’s, maybe. But Alzheimer’s simply names a badly understood disease, maybe not even one disease. Rather, in the aphasic moment, what spreads out irresistibly is the embarrassment that takes in my entire life. And the need to keep running it. The need to keep the diligent, unsteady spider weaving. It is as if at the center of the whole project was some covered up glitch. I can taste the poisonous, acrid flavor of this moment on my tongue.

Although I’m not going to exaggerate – this isn’t the kind of thing that makes you slit your wrist with a butter knife in the intervals. It is the kind of thing you don’t talk about with anyone.

in the golden egg (1)

Hugo Hofmannsthal published The Letter (which is almost always translated into English as The Letter from Lord Chandos) in 1903. In turn of the century Vienna, Hofmannsthal, as a young lyric poet, had become the object of a more numerous and public cult than the one (more famous now) surrounding Stefan Georg. And, unlike Georg or Rilke, he was politically and religiously orthodox – a good Catholic, a supporter of the Habsburg order. Herman Broch, in his essay on Hofmannsthal, says that “on the triad of life, dream and death rests the symphonic structure of Hofmannsthal’s complete opus” – which should remind us of Klimt, and the whole Jugendstyl aesthetic of fin de siecle Vienna. It is a mistake to assume that these aesthetes, with their intense interest in hedonism, were somehow opposed to the sexual ‘repression’ of bourgeois Habsburg society, since, in fact, the latter never operated as a machine for repression. And so it was with Hofmannsthal – as his enemy Kraus liked to observe, he was certainly a man of the status quo.

However, he was also certainly a language man. Hofmannsthal seemed preternaturally gifted with phrases in his early poetry.

This is why the Letter created quite a shock.


The Letter is presented as a reply to a letter written by Francis Bacon to Philip Lord Chandos. Bacon is concerned that Philip Lord Chandos, a promising young maker of poems and masques, had fallen silent. Lord Chandos writes that such have been the changes he has undergone that “he hardly knows if I am the same person to whom you have directed your precious letter”. He goes on to ask if he was the same person as the twenty three year old who, in Venice, under the stony boughs of the grand piazza, lived half in a dream of the books to come – for instance, sketches of the realm of Henry the Eighth, or a mythography of the ancient myths, or a collection of apothegmata as Julius Caesar would have written them, a sort of jumble of dialogues, curious knowledge and sayings not unlike Bacon’s own Natural History or New Organon.

“To be brief: all of being appeared as one great unity to me, who existed in a sort of continuous intoxication: the mental and physical world seemed to image no opposites to me, just as little as the world of court and the world of animals, art and un-art, loneliness and society; in all I felt Nature, in the confusions of madness as much as in the extremest refinements of a Spanish ceremonial, in the boorishness of a young peasant not less than in the sweetest allegory; and in all nature I felt myself; when I in my hunting cap absorbed the foaming, warm milk that an unkept person milked out of a beautiful, soft eyed cow’s udder into a wooden bucket, it was the same to me as I was sitting in the built in window cove of my studio, sucking out of folios the sweet and foaming nurture of the mind. The one was as the other; one did not yield to the other, neither in terms of dreamy, super-earthly nature nor in physical force, and so it continued through the whole breadth of life, right hand, left hand. Everywhere I was in the middle, never was I conscious of a mere semblance. Or it seemed to me that everything was an allegory and every creature a key to another, and I felt myself to be the man who was able to seize their heads one after the other and unlock with them as much of the other as could be unlocked.”

Well, now, - if you have been a philosophy student or a lyric poet and not had this feeling, than you are highly in need of an ego. Having a full sense of what you possess when you are young gives you these buttery, milky moments of feeling, as though the crosspatch world has been waiting those dark dark eons just to encounter the revelatory moment of the tearing of the seals which has happened in your head. You are the angel of the Lord. Or you are Krishna, a god man who was pretty conversant, himself, with the ways of milkmaids. At least, so it was with me at twenty one, a fuckin’ mooncalf if there ever was one, but a common enough exhibit of the syndromes of the hyperborean consciousness. Lord Chandos is a recognizable type, the child of the century – his avatars are in Balzac, in Lermontov, in Tolstoy. The modernist moment is marked by the struggle to be impersonal – to deliver oneself from the milky moment – and that struggle requires some terrible sacrifices of ego for an uncertain outcome. One outcome is the Flaubertian artist. Another outcome is… well, as it is described in the Letter.

Perhaps it is a mistake, even, to confine this to the modernist moment, or at least to pretend that the modernist moment isn’t structured according to the precepts of a broader mythology. Wasn’t Prajapati found lying in a golden egg, the first man, Purusa? The egg is both his bearer and his product – for it was born, itself, of Prajapati’s union with Vac, or speech. Laurie Paton, in Authority, Anxiety and Canon, took the story of the Golden Egg and writes this:

“In my reconstruction of the two-phase process of creation, based on several accounts in the Brahmanas, Prajapati and Vac both participate in each stage. The division between the first and second stages of the cosmogonic process is demarcated in certain accounts by the measure of time, generally the period of a year. In the first stage the creator Prajapai has a desire to reproduce and unites with his consort Vac. The Vac with which Prajapati unites at this stage is the unexpressed, transcendent level of speech that is generally identified with the primordial waters. Prajapati implants his seed in the waters of Vac and the seed becomes an egg, which represents the totality of the universe in yet undifferentiated form. In the second stage of creation a child, representing the ‘second self’ of Prajapati, is born and speaks. This speech, which represents the second phase of Vac, is the expressed, covalized speech by means of which the creator introduces distinctions in the originally distinctionless totality of creation represented by the egg, dividing it into the three worlds and manifesting various types of beings.” (43)

What the Letter records is an egg inward collapse. For on the brink of becoming an Elizabethan sage, Chandos found himself becoming something else entirely.

Buckley, r.i.p

The only American conservative I have any regard for just died – William Buckley.

It is a long regard, going back to my teen years. Not that Buckley has been a force on the right since the eighties. He was as alien to the Bush right as he was to the liberalism of the Great Society era. The right's utter intellectual collapse must have pained him - he always believed that the alliance between rich drones and highly stupid people was redeemed by tone. He had wit and literacy. You can search high and low for that in the National Review of the past decade, but you'll search in vain. The last controversial utterance from the old man was that Iraq was a big fuck up, which was greeted with the embarrassed silence the heirs reserve for the batty grandpa, peeing in his recliner.

And so is extinguished the last dying claim of conservatism to truth, beauty or logic. I'm not sure if I should quote Yeats, at this point - or Pope's the Dunciad.

scribble scribble scribble, mr. gathman

It might still not seem clear why LI’s relentless pursuit of the triumph of happiness should have lead us to talk about social animals. As our friend Alan said a couple of weeks ago, our posts about happiness fail to represent any principle of order. We leap around like the jester Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn, stripes painted across our ass, now going here, now there.

Now, primo, partly the problem is due to the flightiness of LI’s mind. Partly it is due to the fact that we are doing this as an historien du Dimanche. No license or position outside the text assuages the readers doubts about the catholicity of our choice of topics. In essence, LI is claiming that there is a topical hole, here, however much the successors of Lucien Febvre have claimed to make the sensibilities the object of historical study. And so we beat about in that hole, looking for themes.

Segundo, topics are generated by actual enchainments within social facts. It is, for instance, a social fact that the early modern era treated the passions as thought they were properties of a certain ‘animality’ in the human makeup. This trope goes back a long way in folk psychology and the writing of the scholars. You find it cropping up among the philosophers of the enlightenment – Kant’s the royal example, with his strong notion that the passions are at once something not quite human and all too human. The sensual interest is an animal interest. The non-sensual interest is – freedom. Fit for men, those creatures who can disburden themselves of the soiled rags of their animal impulses.

Finally, tercero, if we see changes in the way animals are conceptualized in the nineteenth century, our instinct – which is that of a solid ‘birds flock together’ man – is that probably, we’ll see changes in the way emotions and feelings are conceptualized that will mirror their former concept kin. And if the opposite of the sensual interest is freedom and freedom is the political legitimator par excellence – and if, in a pantomime that reverses such talk, freedom in the economic sphere is to let your sensual interest dictate without impediment – well, this too has to have an impact on the way society becomes the object for a host of sciences.

…
These notes I shore against the book to come. Onward, then, to Hofmannsthal’s The Letter.

And this bird you'll never chaaaaiiiinnnnnn!

What can one say about Alabama? LI spent his molting years in an Atlanta suburb, learning to appreciate poetry, masturbation, and a correctly set up tennis serve – the usual adolescence. The old man worked, for a while, as a consultant on big HVAC jobs throughout the Southeast, so he was often posted to Birmingham. I have a vague memory of going with him to the town, which, back then, was a ironman’s heaven, a coaldust place, with a big statue of Vulcan on one of the many city hills. It was Orc city back then.

Georgians consider ourselves at least semi-civilized, and sniff a great deal at the whole idea of Bama. That’s where the wild west really begins – sullen cotton farmers settling sinister black rivers. Of course, that isn’t true – Alabama isn’t the analphabetic, rickets plagued place of my childhood mythology. For instance, there’s Tuskegee University, which was a steady light in the Dixie darkness for decades. Mencken wasn’t kidding when he claimed that the South of his time – 1917 – was the Sahara of the Bozart:

“Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums: one could throw in France, Germany and Italy, and still have room for the British Isles. And yet, for all its size and all its wealth and all the “progress” it babbles of, it is almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara Desert. There are single acres in Europe that house more first-rate men than all the states south of the Potomac.”

Mencken goes on to fling the kitchen sink at Dixie, and then the chairs, the curtains, the lamps, and anything else that he can get his hands on. And he was still short of the astonishing thing about the South, which is not that there are a lot of ignorant people there, but that no place on earth is one’s ignorance more aggressively adored – there is, in Southern tradition, a love for stupidity for its own sake that can only truly be appreciated by those who’ve lived down among the peckerwoods and swapped fleas with em. And if there is one state in which that love is condensed and made into an essence, it is Alabama. There’s a reason George Wallace came from Alabama. There’s a reason Lynyrd Skinner wrote that the “Governor was true.”

Which is why Alabama has turned out to be, much to my surprise, a precursor state in the Bush era. The stupidity-lite of the Bushies, their promotion of ignorance for ignorance sake, has very southern roots. Even Alabama roots. Stealing the election of 2000 in Florida did not begin with Election 2000 in Florida – it began with the Dixie wide attempt, through the nineties, to disenfranchise black males through mass jailing and the use of punitive laws that keep ex felons from voting. It is an old Dixie trick. Alabama, of course, led the way.

However, as we know in these good old states, an astonishing, public crime committed on the black population will rouse not a whimper of protest from the liberal media,. They are, after all, busy encouraging free trade and such. What has happened in Alabama lately even beats the old records – namely, the railroading of the one popular Democratic figure in the state, Don Siegelman, by Karl Rove, a man with deep, greasy roots in Alabama.

Harper’s blogger Scott Horton has tracked this primitive process, which bears comparison with the way Central Asian former Soviet Republics deal with the opposition, with astonishment. And little encouragement from the mainstream media. Finally, though, 60 minutes ran a segment about it. And – it was censored in Alabama! The tv stations in the Peckerwood Kazakhistan are apparently controlled by the usual bevy of corporate criminals, aka friends of the Bushes, and they just suffered an inexplicable outage when the 60 minutes film was a-rollin’. Fancy that!

I’ve wondered when Horton’s reporting was going to get some traction. I’m hoping the time has come. We’ll see.

Ugolino

This is the account in the Florentine Chronicle

“In that time the Count Ugolino being lord of Pisa, for the bad treatment that he used towards them, the people rose up in anger, coming with force and great uproar to the Archbishop Ruggiero Ubaldini, crying out: “Death! Death!” They took him and threw him in prison with two of his sons and two grandchildren, making them die of hunger in prison…Then Guido, Count of Montefeltro, commanded that Count Ugolino and his sons and two grandchildren never more be given food to eat, and thus they died wretchedly of hunger all five. These were the Count Ugolino and Uguccione, Brigata, Anselmuccio and Guelfo, and it was found that the one had eaten the flesh of the other, and finally the last rites were denied to them and all five in one morning were dragged dead from prison. This Count Ugolino was a man of such cruelty that he made the people of Pisa die of famine while at the same time having great abundance of grain, to such an extent that it cost seven pounds to buy a measure of grain in Pisa; then finally he himself died of hunger with all his family.”

Count Ugolino has had a famous afterlife. Dante came across him in the ninth – the lowest – circle of hell. His head was fixed to the top of another head – one that he chewed, as a dog chews a bone.

Dante interrupts him to ask his tale, and the head lifts itself from its bloody gnawwork to give his name and the name of the head he chews upon – Archbishop Ruggieri –

“That I, trusting in him, was put in prison/
through his evil machinations, where I died,/
this much I surely do not have to tell you.

What you could not have known, however, is/
the inhuman circumstances of my death.
Now listen, then decide if he has wronged me!

Ugolino’s story, in Dante’s version, is not as much about Ugolino’s stored up grain as it is about the deeper hunger – a hunger for something bloodier than grain – in the barely sublimated hunt of politics. Shelley translated this part of the story:

Now had the loophole of that dungeon, still
Which bears the name of Famine's Tower from me,
And where 'tis fit that many another will

Be doomed to linger in captivity,
Shown through its narrow opening in my cell _5
'Moon after moon slow waning', when a sleep,

'That of the future burst the veil, in dream
Visited me. It was a slumber deep
And evil; for I saw, or I did seem'

To see, 'that' tyrant Lord his revels keep
The leader of the cruel hunt to them,
Chasing the wolf and wolf-cubs up the steep

Ascent, that from 'the Pisan is the screen'
Of 'Lucca'; with him Gualandi came,
Sismondi, and Lanfranchi, 'bloodhounds lean, _15

Trained to the sport and eager for the game
Wide ranging in his front;' but soon were seen
Though by so short a course, with 'spirits tame,'

The father and 'his whelps' to flag at once,
And then the sharp fangs gored their bosoms deep. _20
Ere morn I roused myself, and heard my sons,

For they were with me, moaning in their sleep,
And begging bread. Ah, for those darling ones!
Right cruel art thou, if thou dost not weep

(Notice that these images of lean dogs were used by Shelley in his political poetry – especially in the Masque of Anarchy, where ‘seven bloodhounds” follow Castlereagh.

“All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.”)

Ugolino’s suffering is, then, first of a public thing, revealed in a dream, and then shrinking in an instant to himself and his children, who die like this:

They wept aloud, and little Anselm mine,
Said--'twas my youngest, dearest little one,--
"What ails thee, father? Why look so at thine?"

In all that day, and all the following night,
I wept not, nor replied; but when to shine
Upon the world, not us, came forth the light

Of the new sun, and thwart my prison thrown
Gleamed through its narrow chink, a doleful sight,
'Three faces, each the reflex of my own,

Were imaged by its faint and ghastly ray;'
Then I, of either hand unto the bone,
Gnawed, in my agony; and thinking they

Twas done from sudden pangs, in their excess,
All of a sudden raise themselves, and say,
"Father! our woes, so great, were yet the less

Would you but eat of us,--twas 'you who clad
Our bodies in these weeds of wretchedness;
Despoil them'."

…

The fourth day dawned, and when the new sun shone,
Outstretched himself before me as it rose
My Gaddo, saying, "Help, father! hast thou none

For thine own child--is there no help from thee?"
He died--there at my feet--and one by one,
I saw them fall, plainly as you see me.

Between the fifth and sixth day, ere twas dawn,
I found 'myself blind-groping o'er the three.'
Three days I called them after they were gone.

Famine of grief can get the mastery.”

It is at this famous and controversial line that Shelley breaks off. Borges, in The False Problem of Ugolino, claims that the earliest commenters took Ugolino to be saying that fasting did more than grief to kill Ugolino, and not confessing to having despoiled the flesh of his dead children. Borges backs up to consider the way Ugolino represents his children as offering their father their flesh:

“I suspect that this utterance must cause a growing discomfort in its admirers. De Sanctis … ponders the unexpected conjunction of heterogeneous images; D’Ovidio concedes that “this gallant and epigrammatic expression of a filial impulse is almost beyond criticism.” For my part, I consider this one of the few false notes in the Commedia. I consider it less worthy of Dante than of Malvezzi’s pen or Gracian’s veneration. Dante, I tell myself, could not have helped but feel its falseness, which is certainly aggravated by the almost choral way in which all four children simultaneously tender the famished feast. Someone might suggest that what we are faced with here is a lie, made up after the fact by Ugolino to justify (or insinuate) his crime.”

But Borges does not make the leap one might expect from his notion that Ugolino is lying – or is being made to lie. The two notions, of course, imply very different forces - on the one hand, the implication is that Ugolino did commit the crime of cannibalism, and on the other, the implication is that he is being falsely implicated as hinting that he committed the crime of cannibalism. Borges believes that Dante’s choice, here, is to arouse our suspicion without sating it with a definite answer. Borges takes this as a lesson in the form of art, as opposed to the substance of life:

“In real time, in history, whenever a man is confronted with several alternatives, he choses one and eliminates and loses the others. Such is not the case in the ambiguous time of art, which is similar to that of hope and oblivion. In that time, Hamlet is sane and is mad. In the darkness of his Tower of Hunger, Ugolino devours and does not devour the beloved corpses, and this undulating imprecision, this uncertainty, is the strange matter of which he is made.”

LI can travel with Borges so far on this argument, but we are much less sure that the strange matter of art is so different from the common matter of life. For it is part of life that we remember, and tell what we remember. And it is part of memory that we edit. We inexorably edit. Our lives aren’t lived in hard focus or in close up – they continually turn out to be softfocused, full of distracted pans, and the alternatives chosen are often, it seems, chosen unconsciously, or made up as the alternatives of the moment afterwards, after sloth, routine, and the contingencies of success or failure impel us to recarve the past. I don’t know if Borges had read about Schroedinger when he wrote this essay – if not, he stumbled on a Schroedinger-like situation without benefit of physics.

Oops. LI really meant to direct this post back to the predator – prey relationship discussed in the Queneau post. And we’ve gone completely astray. Sorry.

I'm alive, he cried

I think it must be: starve a fever. At least, that is the course I’ve taken in the last few days. LI has been down with the flu. We’ve been living in a world of biomorphic distortions and inexplicable lapses of time, much like the narrator of Le Très-Haut. We’ve crammed ourselves with Tylonals, sudafeds, and cough suppressants – the latter of which still does not bar the dog from our door. The dog that is making that godawful din, growling, whining and barking, which shoots out of our mouth and rattle our bones. Possessed by a demon dog and condemned to walk the reaches of the night.

Yesterday we had to finish a review. It couldn’t be put off any longer. Such agony! Usually reviewing a novel combines putting together a flow sheet with a few remarks from our distinguished panel of judges. But instead of bright and spritely flow, every sentence we wrote seemed a peculiar and malicious bog, in which we would sink up to our chin. And then, by mainforce, we’d go forward by another sentence, and so on. The funny thing is that the review, which in the end was pretty bare and barren, is probably just the thing our editor is looking for – we are always being edited back to a paint by numbers, thumb up or thumb down format, there. Sadly, people actually expect reviews to be thumb up or thumb down affairs, when the faithful reviewer could truly care less about whether a review is positive or negative. No, the real reviewer has a wholly surgical objective: to peel back the skin and muscle from the heart cavity and reach in and touch the beating, quivering center of the book. That is reviewer’s coup. Which is why the question I am most often asked about my reviews is – but did you like the book?

…
Well, I have answered a few questions this week. One question is: how much food does a man have to consume in a day? And the answer is: a can of tomato soup every two days is sufficient. However, I have this creeping feeling that my fast is about to break.


And here comes sickness...

the oligarchy

For those among you who love (as much as LI loves!) xrays of the oligarchy, I strongly advise John Cassidy’s article in the March Portfolio.

---Your freedom is garbage!
---It is the freedom of the majority!

the mathematical theory of the struggle for life

"If sharks were people,” the small daughter of his landlady asked Mr. K., would they then be nicer to the small fish?” – Brecht, Wenn die Haifische Menschen wären

Continuing LI’s notes on the predator/prey relationship – we discovered, through one of Machery’s essays, that a famous essay by Volterra had caught Raymond Queneau’s eye, and was mentioned in his 1943 essay, The place of mathematics in the classification of the sciences, which begins like this: “In its relations with mathemtics, every science passes through the following four phases (four as of now, perhaps five tomorrow)” – which elegantly combines the academic and the Groucho Marxian. Queneau briefly surveys the sciences, claims that physics has gone through three of his stages, already, and then writes: “This is the ideal stage for the scientists of the late nineteenth century. The other sciences reamin far behind in this regard. Only very limited subjects are treated by this method: in biology, the theory of the fight for life; in sociology, econometrics. These two examples furthermore show that there is no incompatibility between the analytic method and the life sciences. The delay is in part explained by the fact that such an application apparently offers no problem to be resolved from the mathematical point of view, and so no potential for discovery; mathematicians thus soon lost interest in these theoretical fields, which offered no grist for their mill. if the theory of the fight for life was developed by Volterra, it’s because it ultimately led to integro-differential equations worthy of interest.”

The explanation from mathematical banality might not quite have been the whole story, or at least LI can’t see it. But it is a nice story, nonetheless. The essay arose out of a project Queneau was working on in July 1942 (terrible months to encounter the struggle for life): Brouillon projet d’une atteinte a une science absolue de l’histoire, (sketch for a project for an attempt at an absolute science of history) of which Voltarra’s Lecons sur la theorie methematique de la lutte pour la vie was going to be one of the main sources, and Vico, Bruck, William Flinders Petrie, Spengler, “authors who believed they could discern rhythms or cycles in history” would be the other.” In the Model History in which Queneau jotted down these reminiscences, he also wrote: “if there had never been any wars or revolutions, there would never have been any history; there wouldn’t be any matter for history; history would be without an object… happy people have no history. History is the science of the misery of mankind.”

Most people have heard of the Volterra-Lotka equations, which show how predator-prey relations should oscillate around an ideal equilibrium over time, all other conditions being equal, and how that oscillation takes on four states. Queneau’s idea that, perhaps, these predator-prey states are strung out over human history is startling.

The Plan 9 from outer space Party

Yesterday, I figured it out.

I’ve been wondering if the GOP was serious. They are actually going to nominate this guy?


For a number of years, LI has used the term zombie to denote those who support George Bush. It seemed like a pertinent insult – after all, these were people who have confused a war with a tailgate party. Their sense of unearned entitlement is only equaled by their contempt for liberty. Their lumbering walk through many a comments thread gave meaning to the term, 'self-administered lobotomy'.

But I had thought that the Republican party honchos had a certain amount of control. They would feed the doggies what they damned well pleased.

But – in a final coup de theâtre of massive incompetence – Bush’s toxicity has apparently affected the party itself. John McCain is such a lemon that no amount of media fluffing will get beyond the fact that he seems to be doing standup on the Ed Sullivan show of yore. He is very very of yore.

Which is why I have decided that this the GOP’s version of Plan 9 from outer space. Compare McCain’s fifties-ish patter (and his impulse to surround himself with the doddering and the demented) to this clip of Ed Wood. Surely, McCain is stealing his routine from the amazing Kreskin, seen at the end of this clip. While I believe the zombie’s will swallow nearly everything, I refuse to believe they are going to rally so that we can elect the amazing Kreskin to that tv spectacular, White House idol.

Perhaps, not being a tv watcher, I am presuming too much on my own eye. After all, via you tube clips of the Chelsea Handler show, I've learned that Dancing with the Stars is a hit. That's, well, quite a shock - Americans, I always thought, were way too sophisticated to watch stuff that the yahoo Euro tv networks put on - so maybe this is a bad sign. I just don't see McCain, however, going anywhere but down.

social animal 2

“Submitting to the influence of the considerable scientific progress of the second half of the nineteenth century – Bertillon’s anthropometric measurements, the discovery of fingerprints for the utilization of the police by Galton – the detective novel substituted proof by indexes for proof by witness.”

- Dominique Viart, The imaginary of signs at the dawn of the twentieth century.

Viart’s essay on signs is an attempt, in a brief space, to come to terms with Eco’s claim that the sign existed, basically, as a secondary or minor vehicle for other major conceptual themes (of language, of reason, of logic) up until the beginning of the 20th century. Viart references the success of a new kind of detective novel that traced signs into the past – back to the primary scene of some crime.

There is, of course, no better testimony to the moment in which the eyewitness becomes subordinate to the trace than M, Franz Lang’s film. Of course, the trace and the eyewitness, in correspondence to the law that all opposites shall dance the Moonwalk to a joyous sound played on an ocarina in the black heart of a dead deconstructionist, mutually exclude each other by mutually presupposing each other, and teach the Mosaic law as it came down to Wittgenstein – can your right hand steal from your left hand? (when the Mosaic law was transmitted through Wittgenstein, it came out as a series of questions. Which poses the question, is it possible to create a code of law in which every rule is a question?) But to return to M – you will remember, LI readers, that the eyewitness to Peter Lorre’s child murderer is a blind man. What he witnesses is a conjunction of sounds – the sound of a voice he heard, the sound of a little girl’s voice. The viewer witnesses a ball and a balloon. The blind man tells a fake blind beggar about the man, and the fake blind beggar marks Hans Beckert (Lorre) with the fatal M. Surely more than one Lacanian, orgasming uncontrollably, has had to be ushered sternly out of the movie house whilst watching the famous scene when Lorre turns and sees the M chalked on the back of his coat in the mirror.



Which take us back to Carlo Ginzburg’s essay on Freud, Morelli and Holmes. After cross cutting quotes from Morelli to Sherlock Holmes to Freud, Ginzburg makes his first point like this:

“We have outlined an analogy between the methods of Morelli, of Holmes, and of Freud. We have mentioned the connection between Morelli and Holmes, and that between Morelli and Freud. The peculiar similarities between the activities of Holmes and Freud have been discussed by Steven Marcus (1976:x-xi). 15 Freud himself, by the way, told a patient (the "Wolf-Man") how interested he was in Sherlock Holmes’s stories. When, however, in the spring of 1913, a colleague of his (T. Reik) suggested a parallel between the psychoanalytic method and Holmes's method, Freud replied expressing his admiration of Morelli's technique as a connoisseur. In all three cases tiny details provide the key to a deeper reality, inaccessible by other methods. These details may be symptoms, for Freud, or clues, for Holmes, or features of paintings, for Morelli (Gardiner 1971:146; Reik 1949:24).

How do we explain the triple analogy? There is an obvious answer. Freud was a doctor; Morelli had a degree in medicine; Conan Doyle had been a doctor before settling down to write. In all three cases we can invoke the model of medical semiotics or symptomatology-the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman, or even of Dr. Watson. (Incidentally, the Holmes-Watson pair, the sharp-eyed detective and the obtuse doctor, represents the splitting of a single character, one of the youthful Conan Doyle's professors, famous for his diagnostic ability.) But it is not simply a matter of biographical coincidences. Toward the end of the nineteenth century (more precisely, the decade 1870-1880), this “semiotic” approach, a paradigm or model based on the interpretation of clues, had become increasingly influential in the field of human sciences. Its roots, however, were far more ancient.

Remember we started with footprints. Our signs go back to myths, and our myths go back to footprints – as Ginzburg remarks, there is a Chinese legend that the first letters were copied from the track of a wading bird through the sand.

“Or abandoning the realms of myth and hypothesis for that of documented history, there are undoubtedly striking analogies between the hunters' model we have been developing and the model implicit in the texts of Mesopotamian divination, which date from at least 3,000 years B.C. (Boterro 1974). Both require minute examination of the real, however trivial, to uncover the traces of events which the observer cannot directly experience. Droppings, footprints, hairs, feathers, in the one case; innards, drops of oil in water, stars, involuntary movements in the other. It is true that the second group, unlike the first, could be extended indefinitely, since the Mesopotamian diviners read signs of future in more or less anything. But to our eyes another difference matters more: the fact that divination pointed toward the future, while the hunter’s deciphering pointed towards he actual past—albeit occurring a few instants before. Yet in terms of understanding, the approach in each case was much alike; the intellectual stages—analysis, comparison, classification—identical, at least in theory. But only, of course, in theory: the social contexts were quite different. In particular, It has been observed that the invention of writing must have had a great effect on Mesopotamian divination (Bottero 1974:154ff.). Mesopotamian gods had, besides other kingly prerogatives, the power of communication with their subjects through written messages-on stars, human bodies, everywhere -which the diviners had the task of deciphering. (This was an idea which in turn over thousands of years would flow into the image of "the book of nature") And the identification and divination with the deciphering of characters divinely inscribed was reinforced in real life by the pictographic character of this early writing, "cuneiform"; it too, like divination, conveyed one thing through another.”

I seem to be going off track, here, from our original theme – the groove in this record – of the social animal, but this is because one thinks of the hunter and the prey as being, somehow, alone. And that is because we live far from the real hunts and chases. But the notion of the social animal begins not just with language, but with something to tell and some way to tell it. It begins with organization. This is why Pliny’s story of the elephants passing down the herd line an impress of a human footprint should give us a certain shock – much like the shock Peter Lorre gets from seeing himself in the mirror. It is the shock of being prey, not predator. The shock pulls us back.

I’ll try to get to this again, soon.

The Bob-fest

LI has been so pressed this week that our ambition – to advance a little along the line of the theme of the social animal – has been totally fucked. Fortunately, we’ve spent the last two days attending lectures at the Bob-fest – the conference commemorating Robert Solomon. The academic custom of reading papers at conferences, as anybody knows who has actually gone to a conference and had papers read to him or her, is not exactly the most exciting activity in the world. It ranks somewhere around TV coverage of the Tour de France – long stretches of time go by without anything seeming to happen, and then everybody gets briefly excited, and then ennui stretches out again. This conference was a bit more personal, a bit more eccentric, and instead of the standard way of asking questions, those with questions and comments would go down, at the end of the panel, to the panel table and sit around and speak. I did not hear all sessions, but of the four I heard, the highlight was surely the paper read by my friend, Janet McCracken, entitled " Grief and the Mnemonics of Places: A Thank You Note", which ranged over the funeral games in the Iliad to the place of the dog at Zoroastrian funeral rituals to connect a number of seemingly disparate topics – the dead as companions, the need to mark the earth for the dead, the relation of the human and the animal (and, especially, that subclass of domesticated animal, pets) from the perspective of death. I’m merely flying over the paper giving its grosser features, but McCracken’s paper was just the kind of Shandian essay I wrote about last week, re Ian Hacking’s paper on cyborgs.

Afterwards, I was in a group around McCracken, talking about animals, and of course animal intelligence, and we all sort of marveled that animal intelligence is always measured by seeing how close animals can come to human intelligence. That is surely wrong. An ant or dog or whale born with a human brain would quickly die. Intelligence, if it has any meaning at all, is connected to animal existence, and so one would want to produce a number of intelligence models fitting different animals. As a counterpart on tests of, say, the human intelligence achievable by parrots, it would be interesting to see how close humans can approach to parrot intelligence. Of course, it is pretty difficult to probe into parrot intelligence, but surely we can devise models for parrot seeing, hearing and flight such that they could be fed into a virtual environment, in which we could insert a human subject.

So, LI was not wholly negligent of the social animal theme we so abruptly aborted.

Later, thinking of animals, humans and intelligence, it struck me that one of the reasons I have problems with the machine model of humans and animals is that, in my experience, those who are best with machines – engineers, for instance – are really piss poor at human relationships. My old man, for instance, became pretty well known in the HVAC field. He had a certain diagnostic genius for what was wrong with, say, a 13,500 BTU roof unit that had been underperforming. He could track a ductwork problem down to its malign root. And yet, he couldn’t read the face of a man who was obviously trying to con him out of ten thousand dollars – a situation that my old man faced, alas, all too frequently, as he seemed to be on some list of gulls passed around in the confidence game. As for women, well, forget it. This is, of course, an absurdly limited sample – but I have met a lot of engineers in my life, and a lot of people who make their money repairing machines. It seems to me that generally an inverse relationship held between psychological insightfulness and mechanical ability. Although I wouldn’t say this is a hard and fast rule – my brothers, for instance, are both engineer/repair men, and both of them are fairly interested in what makes human beings tick (which already distinguishes them from most IBM engineers I’ve met). One has adopted an attitude of therapeutic nihilism – since it is impossible to rely on rule based behavior, here, it is foolish to judge – while the other is more inclined to a sympathy theory, and is very good at empathizing and advising – as I well know.

Obviously, this is touch and go evidence, a set of ordinary superstitions. But it does perhaps point to a nuance in the relationship between biology and positivism in the 19th century – given a certain notion of social engineering that went with utilitarianism and was carried into the scientific ideology of the late nineteenth century, biology was often the science from whence sprang the dissenters. Scientific psychology, in order to gain credibility, often veered closer to engineering than to biology. And this made a lot of difference.

The 3 trillion dollar recession and the price of tea

LI finds it clarifying to refer to baseline numbers when thinking about big events, like wars and recessions. For this recession, we hold to the number, 3 trillion dollars – which reflects the growth rate for consumption over the growth of GDP over the last ten years, according to Michael Mandel at Business Week. And that growth, in turn, reflected the magic economy of assets inflation in a world in which inflation was supposedly dead. The magic was in simply not registering the extent of the assets inflation – it was put in a black box, technically diminished so that the information it gave to the Fed could be ignored. When you fix the information that you are supposed to respond to, you destroy the integrity of the machine. It is that simple.

And now, of course, we have asset deflation and inflation on other fronts. This story captured LI’s attention. As, apparently, hardcore members of the bottom 20% on the American wealth scale – oscillating between being in the straight poverty class and just above it – inflation is our biggest worry. At the same time, there has been a sort of cone of silence over the real rate of inflation that has affected our class. It is as if the poor live in some sub-Argentina in this country, where the prices are always going up dramatically, while the rest of the country lived somewhere else.

“Over all, Americans are spending about 13 percent more on food and energy now than a year ago. The figures, as are all the figures shown in the charts accompanying this article, are based on three-month moving averages of seasonally adjusted figures, and compare this year with last year.
The biggest cause of that increase is gasoline, of course. Americans are spending 22 percent more now at gasoline stations than they did a year ago. Food costs are up nearly 6 percent, a smaller amount but still a drain on budgets.”

This is pretty huge. If, as we think, the 3 trillion dollar gap is going to be closed, or at least the start on that closure is what we are going to see, then the recession is going to be deeper than anybody is forecasting. And if inflation on ordinary goods continues at this rate, compounded by the inflation on lifestyle goods like education and healthcare, the American middle class is going to be joining our Argentina soon. It is no fun, alas.

News from our great Democratic Ally

Pleas for condemned Saudi 'witch'
“In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.”

Let the winds strip the calendar back to glorious January, when our beloved leader, President Backbone, made the democracy tour in the Middle East. Among the chroniclers of a moral moment that rivaled Jesus preaching on the mountain and Buddha’s revelation under a sweet gum tree, nobody’s tongue worked as eagerly on the presidential behind as Michael Abramowitz, the Washington Post chronicler of all the fun and goofy things our, well, greatest president ever did on his fabulous trip. The highlight of the tour was, of course, our consultation with our great democratic ally in the fight against the intolerable totalitarianism of Iran (pause for booing…):

“Bush is devoting two days of his Middle East trip to Saudi Arabia, much of it to private meetings with the king, who is hosting the president at his guest palace here and at the farm near Riyadh where Abdullah raises Arabian stallions. That amounts to an unusual commitment of diplomatic time, reflecting both the large role Saudi Arabia plays in U.S. economic and foreign policy and a desire to strengthen a relationship that has frayed badly over the past seven years.

Some diplomats and experts with close ties to the administration say meeting with Abdullah has been the main purpose of the president's trip to the region.

One senior administration official traveling with the president said this week that Bush regards the octogenarian Abdullah as "really a remarkable figure," citing the king's role in starting reforms such as municipal elections and in regional diplomacy, and that the president intends to reaffirm their "close personal relationship."
White House counselor Edward W. Gillespie described the one-on-one time with the king, who is known to dislike diplomacy conducted over the phone, as a "very important" part of the visit to Saudi Arabia.

Despite the outward display of affection on the tarmac, the relationship has also been tense and uneasy for much of Bush's tenure, according to former senior officials and experts on Saudi Arabia.

"The president has a personal bond with the king," said Dan Bartlett, Bush's former counselor. "This visit will go a long way to keeping relations on the right track. The personal diplomacy that the president likes to use will resonate with the way the kingdom does foreign policy, because it is so dominated by the king himself."

The Post is a tout paper for the bizarre Weltanschauung of D.C. elite, a world view and language which makes gangsta rap, by contrast, seem reality based. Unfortunately, these revelers in spilling blood they will never see cause blood en masse to be spilt and bodies to pile up on the invisible margins, where we can dicker about them later (300,000 Iraqis murdered or 600,000? yours to guess). In this imperial farce, there are two pillars – Israel is not to be criticized, and Saudi Arabia is not to be mentioned. Thus, if Iran hangs a man for homosexuality, there will be four WAPO op ed pieces about it and one editorial, notching it up as just one more casus belli. If Saudi Arabia burns a witch, the story won’t happen in the Post. The Saudis are our allies, after all, in the long, long, long, long war to democratize everything and destroy terra-ism.

'Undefined' crime
The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih's conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.
Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.
Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.
The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.
Also Ms Falih and her representatives were not allowed to attend most of the hearings.
When an appeal court decided she should not be executed, the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Jan. 15--One of the more surreal scenes of the eight-day presidential trip to the Middle East may have taken place this evening at the lavish Al Janadriyah Ranch, the so-called "horse farm" where Saudi King Abdullah entertains his most favored guests and raises Arabian stallions.
When the president arrived for dinner, a little before 7 p.m. local time, he was wearing a black full-length robe with bluish-silver trim and seeming eminently pleased, as Steven Lee Myers of the New York Times described it in his pool report last night. Later, when he sat down with the king and took off the robe, it became clear that it was lined with fur.
When his aides showed up, they too were wearing similar robes. The contingent included White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Counselor Ed Gillespie, Press Secretary Dana Perino and--most curiously perhaps--National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams, better known in Washington as possibly Israel's staunchest supporter inside the White House.

When asked by Newsweek reporter Michael Hirsh, Elliott of Arabia said he was allowed to keep the robe, suggesting these were gifts for all.

Perhaps Bush is right that the time is ripe for Middle East peace."

Happy Valentines Day, LI readers

LI is shackled by a tight schedule today. And it is Valentine’s day! During our busy day yesterday (a meeting with a potential editing client, and in the evening, an invite to see a film about an election campaign in Japan, followed by music at… what was the name of that 6th street club?) we heard many disparaging things being said about Valentine’s day. Of course, LI, blistering in our sore and sour solitude, could cast an evil eye on Valentine’s day. But fuck that – those who bitch at the mighty power of Venus notoriously suffer dire fates.

Unfortunately, the American media, or the NYT, has decided on this day to treat us to a love story among the powerful – thus, the report on that über-rebarbative couple, Nicholas Sarkozy and Carla Bruni. At least it is slowly penetrating the Americanosphere that this romance “made in France” is pissing off the French royally. For some reason, the air of the can-can still lingers over “France” in the American media, as though it were a country dedicated to producing naughty postcards of women caught bending over and showing their knickers, a country where the sounds of Maurice Chevalier singing thank heaven for leeeeetle girls can always be heard winding through the streets of Gay Paree. Often though, the very cluelessness of myth rides us to an apposite conjunction of images – and so it is here. The can-can/Chevalier theme point us to the slight, persistent stench of corruption that always surrounds Sarkozy’s behavior – it is very reminiscent of the utterly corrupt behavior of French pols in the 1890s, a bribed lot of wankers who spent their graft on chorus girls (in whose beds they were notoriously prone to be found dead) when not passing laws against anarchist bomb attacks or making anti-semitic speeches. Colette was the poet of this scene, all right.

Ah, Venus, that these products of the new gilded age would be swept away in a paroxysm of your divine disgust!

Happy Valentine’s day, folks.

PS - Maybe I need to perk this post up with some positive Valentine's day vibes. So here they are.

elephant crusoes

Alas, this week is going to be so crowded that LI is going to have a hard time doing what we promised: that is, writing about the social animal.

We wanted to go at this thing in classic philosopher-bot style by goin’ back to the greeks, scanning through Aristotle and Plato for some quote, then scanning up rapidly to Descartes. You know the drill.

Instead, I think we will be entering the subject through a different route. Instead of Aristotle or Plato, Pliny.

And instead of going at this all straightforwardly and with a tie on and chalk dust on the seat of my trousers, I’m gonna go at it crookedly (I saw I am Cuba last night – a film seemingly designed to be shown by IT’s Kino Fist! – and was impressed by the insane camera work, which seemed to be the expression of a camera man who had been taken with, nay, traumatized by Kertesz’s distortion photographs for the first episode involving riotous American sex tourists exploiting virtuous Cubans – and I thought, why not me?) and introduce here the topic we’ve all been waiting for: footprints.

In Umberto Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics, there is a passage on what has proved to be Eco’s favorite logical tool, abduction. Eco took the idea from Pierce. Pierce is a notoriously hard philosopher to pin down to canonical texts, since he wrote on the run, as it were – but this is from a notebook proposal for a book on logic:

“… in my paper in the Johns Hopkins _Studies in Logic_, overemphasizing formalities, I failed to distinguish between abduction and a previously overlooked or little noticed variety of induction which may be called "abductive induction"; in consequence of which, that paper, although correct as far as it goes, and although fully covering the subject of which it professed to treat, entirely overlooked an indispensable mode of inference, abduction, I myself having previously described the inference correctly. Deduction is necessary inference; but if it is applied to probability, then, while remaining in itself necessary, it concludes a probability. That gives the doctrine of chances. Induction is a totally different sort of inquiry, proceeding, by means of experiment, to obtain an answer to a previously propounded question. It has two species: the extensive, where the question is how much, and the comprehensive, or abductive, where the question is to be answered by yes or no (or else is merely susceptible of a vague answer). Abduction is distinguished from abductive induction in not being, properly speaking, experimental, that is, it makes its observations without reference to any previously propounded question, but, on the contrary, itself starts a question, or problematically propounded hypothesis, to explain a surprising observation. Since I barely escaped error on this matter, I will in this present note illustrate the difference between abduction, abductive induction, and probable deduction.

Suppose, then, that, being seated in a street car, I remark a man opposite to me whose appearance and behavior unite characters which I am surprised to find together in the same person. I ask myself, How can this be? Suppose I find this problematic reply: Perhaps he is an ex-priest. He is the very image of such a person; he presents an icon of an ex-priest. Here is an iconic argument, or abduction of it. Secondly, it now occurs to me that if he is an ex-priest, he should be tonsured; and in order to test this, I say something to him calculated to make him take off his hat. He does so, and I find that he is indeed tonsured. Here at last is an indication that my theory is correct. I can now say that he is presumably an ex-priest, although it would be inaccurate to say that there is any definite probability that he is so, since I do not know how often I might find a man tonsured who was not an ex-priest, though evidently far oftener than he would be one. The supposition is, however, now supported by an inductive induction, a weak form of symptomatic or indexical argument. It stands on a widely different basis from that on which it stood before my little experiment. Before, it rested on the flimsy support of similarity, or agreement in "flavor." Now, facts have been constrained to yield confirmation to it by bearing out a prediction based upon it. Belief in the theory rests now on factual reaction to the theory. Thirdly, while the man's hat is off, I read in the crown of it a name that has been pasted into it. I have no doubt whatever that it is the man's name. I do not go into the question of how I come to be so confident of that.”

As you can tell from Peirce’s example, logic, here, runs into detective work. Indeed, logic is, for Peirce, wholly connected to inquiry. Eco, taking Peirce’s hints, writes about clues in his book on semiotics, and takes us to a familiar example – familiar, I suspect, because it was passed around so often in the early sixties by semioticians and critics:

In the recognition of clues, one isolates certain objects (or any other kinds of trace which are not imprints) left by someone on the spot where he did something, so that by their actual presence the past presence of the agent can be inferred. It is evident that, when used for mentioning, clues work in exactly the opposite way from symptoms; by a coded and proven contiguity (of the type ‘owned to owner’) a possible presence of the causing agent is abduced. In order that the abduction be performed, the object must be conventionally recognized as belonging to (or being owned by) a precise class of agents. Thus if at the scene of a murder I find a dental plate I may presume that, if not the murderer, at any rate someone who has no more natural teeth has been there…

As a matter of fact clues are seldom coded, and their interpretation is frequently a matter of complex inference rather than of sign-function recognition, which makes criminal novels more interesting than the detection of pneumonia.
One could say that imprints and clues, even though coded, are ‘proper names’, for they refer back to a given agent. The objection does not affect the fact that they refer, in any case, to a content, for there is nothing to stop the class to which the expression refers from being a one-member class…

But in fact very seldom can imprints and clues be interpreted as the traces of an individual agent (indeed maybe never). When looking at the footprint on the island, Robinson Crusoe was not able to think about an individual. He detected “human being”. When discovering Friday he was undoubtedly able to express the index-sensitive proposition “this is the man who probably left the footprint.” But even if he had previously known that there was one and only one man on the island he would not, when looking at the footprint, have been able to refer it to a preceise individual; the primary denotation of the expression would have been “human being” and the rest would have been a matter of inference.” (224, A Theory of Semiotics)

LI knows that these passages in Eco are fairly famous, at least among the lit crit crowd. We’d like to match them to some corresponding passages in an essay by Carlo Ginzburg which is also famous: Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. But before we do that – before we make a contrast between Crusoe as prey and the detective in Ginzburg as predator – we want to introduce the animal note. This is from Pliny’s Natural History:

“The clemencie of Elephants: their foresight and knowledge of their owne dangers: also the fell fiercenesse of the Tygre.
A WONDER it is in many of these creatures, that they should thus know wherefore they are hunted, and withall take heed and beware of all their dangers. It is said, that if an Elephant chaunce to meet with a man wandering simply out of his way in the wildernesse, hee will mildly and gently set him into the right way againe. But if he perceive a mans fresh footing, before he espie the man, he will quake and tremble for feare of being forelaied and surprised: he will stay from farther following the sent, looke about him every way, snuffe and puffe for very anger. Neither will he tread upon the tract of a mans foot, but dig it out of the earth, and give it to the next Elephant unto him, and he againe to him that followeth, and so from one to another passeth this intelligence and message as it were, to the utmost ranke behind. Then the whole heard makes a stand, and cast round about to returne backward, and withall put themselves in battell array: so long continueth that strong virulent smell of mens feet, and runneth through them all, notwithstanding for the most part they be not bare, but shod.”

Crusoe is a mythical figure in classical economics, and thus in the history of the Great Transformation. He is like the first man in the Vedas - he plays that liminal role. He is the perfect individual: a maroon on an island, a man, and a maximizer of his self interest. His discovery of the footprint leads, in Eco’s account, to some detective work. But we sense a line being crossed here all unconsciously – that is, the passional aspect under which the footprint is discovered. Crusoe, as readers of the book know, goes into a profound panic due to that footprint. The panic has to do with the fact that the abduction, here, is made on the part of a creature who imagines himself to be possibly prey to a predator. Similarly, those elephants, wonderfully passing that image of a man’s footprint among themselves, gather themselves together in battell array to defend themselves. More than that, the footprint, which to Crusoe and to Eco is a visual icon, is, for the elephant, the site of at least two sense experiences – seeing and smelling. That ‘strong virulent smell of mens feet’ is left out of account in the detective novel – after all, men’s feet are usually shod, there. However, since we are plumbing mythology and natural history, here, the the piste – the trace – may well be odorous as well as visual, since we are in the realm of bare feet.

There’s a long and dominant tradition that divides man and animal according to one divine property – language. Usually, language is taken from the noun-side – it is the names of things that animals don’t have. But of course, language would not get off the ground if it were simply a cloud of names. It wouldn’t, to use Peirce’s language, respond to then needs of inquiry, as a footprint passed among elephants does.
LI will try to post about Ginsberg’s essay next.

The murderer and the punctum

The true fan of real crime books must be subject to moments of panic – or so say I, a fan of real crime books subject to moments of panic. Those are irrational, lock the door moments. I am still haunted by a very little moment in Serpentine, Thomas Thompson’s book about Charles Sobhraj, the killer who preyed on tourists on the “hippie road” in Asia during the 70s. The moment occurred, if I remember correctly, when Sobhraj and his pathetic lover were living in Pattaya, a resort town in Thailand. Upstairs from them was a Dutch couple, who’d come down with a mysterious sickness (Sobhraj would befriend people, give them poisoned food or drink, then nurse them through their long sickness until he had seized all of their money, then dispose of them). The lover went up to visit them one day and found them bound and gagged, seated on some chairs. And she decided not to see this, so she simply shut the door. (At the time, she was pretending that her lover’s wealth and the disappearance of various people about them had no connection). Sobhraj by this time apparently had enough of them, and was pondering their murder and disposal, so he'd tied them down so that they couldn't get away. He shortly afterwards killed and burned them – his usual trick. But something about the door opening, the moment of hope that must have flared up their two hearts, and the door closing – well, it strikes me as distinctly panic-making, a moment of such cruelly disappointed rescue that it must have been shattering.

It is tiny scenes like these which, for some reason, are the attraction of real crime books. There is a certain fun in moral vertigo, and it can’t be reasoned out of us.

My favorite of all real crime books – the one that strikes me as the best of the genre – is not In Cold Blood. It is The Reckoning, Charles Nicholl’s expert reconstruction of the murder of Christopher Marlowe. It doesn’t have any lock the door moments – alas, it is difficult even for the high strung to fear Elizabethan assassins in this day and age – but, in compensation, it offers an incredibly intricate puzzle, as Nicholl teases out the workings of Queen Elizabeth’s secret police. Usually I’d rather have the thrill than the detective work – many real crime books, following In Cold Blood, make no bones about who the killer is, and the beauty of the book is in following him or, more rarely, her – but Nicholl combines rare traits for a writer – he is both a kind of scholar of the Renaissance (he’s also written about Raleigh and Thomas Nashe, and has a nice essay on the Cenci) and a hippie travel writer – he was in Thailand for the drugs and such during Sobhraj’s spree years (not that he ‘s ever written about Sobhraj), which gave him the material for Borderlines – the book about the Golden Triangle when it was still golden, when you could still meet people who’d done the opium thing in Thailand right, back in the late 70s - and he traveled in Columbia right before coke became the boring industry it is now, which gave him the material for an even better book, Fruit Palace.

This is by way of urging LI’s readers to check out the review of the latest attempt to finger Jack the Ripper in the LRB.

LI has had occasion to review a Jack the Ripper book – the notoriously stupid book produced by Patricia Cornwell. We reviewed it for the Chicago Sun Times. Contrary to popular belief, book reviewers don’t eagerly look forward to penning negative reviews. Perhaps in the beginning of the sad reviewing career, one salivates to bite the inflated reputation. And, it is true, you get a lot more publicity for snark than for intelligent sympathy. Yet intelligent sympathy is the only real test for the reviewer – I like to think that many of my reviews could not even be labeled positive or negative, as if the only response to a book is to pull out the gradebook. Fuck that.

However, some books call out to the gods above to punish them. And no book called out for thunderbolts more than Cornwall’s galimatias of unsound psychology and unhinged amateur police work. To quote myself:

In 1976, a journalist named Stephen Knight wrote a book claiming that the Jack the Ripper murders, a series of brutal slayings in the Whitechapel area of London in 1888, were the work of a gang set up to protect the reputation of Queen Victorian’s grandson, the Duke of Clarence. The Duke of Clarence, it seems, had contracted marriage with a lowborn Catholic, and the prostitutes who were slain in 1888 were, in one way or another, involved in a vast plan to blackmail the royal family. Knight claimed that the artist, Walter Sickert, later famous as the greatest British impressionist, was the head of the gang that had exterminated Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Liz Stride, Kate Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. Knight’s source for the rumors about Sickert was a man named Joseph Sickert, who claimed to be Walter Sickert’s illegitimate son.

Patricia Cornwall, the creator of fictional forensic detective Kay Scarpetta is also certain -- 100% certain, as she has said in numerous interviews -- that Walter Sickert is responsible for the Whitechapel murders. But you will not read a word about Knight or Joseph Sickert in this book, for Cornwall’s thesis depends, crucially, on her idea that Sickert’s organ of generation was deformed and dysfunctional. In Cornwall’s view, Sickert could not complete sexual congress normally. It is typical of the weirdness of this book that the ferver of Cornwall’s obsession with Sickert’s endownment is matched, in recent history, only by that of the Paula Jones law team’s with President Clinton’s. In the usual real crime book, Cornwall would argue for her hypothesis – which, as she admits, depends on a structure of speculation about some mysterious operations Sickert underwent as a child – by explaining away countering evidence, such as Joseph Sickert claims. There has been enough doubt expressed about Joseph Sickert that this shouldn’t be hard to manage.

But this isn’t your usual real crime book. This is an obsession in search of a justification. In Cornwall’s view, those who doubt Sickert as the murderer are, prima facie, to be doubted themselves. They are either carpers envious of Cornwall’s worldly success, or stooges of the sinister Sickert Trust. When Cornwall’s considerable investment of ego, as well as the six million dollars she spent on her investigation, meets a piece of evidence it doesn’t like, the evidence has as much chance as a Dixie cup has against a battle cruiser. You aren’t going to find it in this book. You aren’t going to find witnesses mentioned in other books, if they clutter Cornwall’s story line. You aren’t going to find suspects mentioned in other books. For Cornwall’s fans, this will surely work. They will end up convinced that Cornwall, like her fictional character, has tracked down her man through observation and the most modern tools of criminology. But for those who are interested in the Jack the Ripper case – Ripperologists, at they call themselves - these omissions have an opposite and highly depressing effect.”

Nicholl’s review is of a new suspect on the scene. Unfortunately, simply going by Nicholl’s representation of the case for Joseph Silver made by Charles van Onselen in The Fox and the Flies: The World of Joseph Silver, Racketeer and Psychopath – the amateur detectives still have not gotten their man. However, van Onselen’s chase after Silver, whose cv is rich and strange (‘arsonist, bank robber, barber, bigamist, brothel-owner, burglar, confidence trickster, detective’s agent, gangster, horse-trader, hotelier, informer, jewel thief, merchant, pickpocket, pimp, policeman, rapist, restaurateur, safe-cracker, smuggler, sodomist, special agent, spy, storekeeper, trader, thief, widower, wigmaker and white slave trafficker’) makes this exercise in Ripperology at least interesting.

The Jack the Ripper murders are inherently panic-making. This is how Nicholl starts his review:

“They found Mary Jane Kelly lying on her bed, in the dingy room she rented in Miller’s Court, off Dorset Street in Spitalfields. She was about 25 years old, a colleen from County Limerick, ‘possessed of considerable attractions’. Widowed young, she had turned, like thousands of others in late Victorian London, to prostitution. One of her clients had taken her for a spree to Paris, and she had started to call herself Marie Jeanette. She was also nicknamed Ginger. She lay with her head ‘turned on the left cheek’. One arm was across her stomach, the other turned outwards ‘& rested on the mattress’. She was naked and ‘the legs were wide apart, the left thigh at right angles to the trunk’. These are the words of the police doctor summoned to the scene, Thomas Bond. It was the morning of Friday, 9 November 1888, and Kelly had just become – at a conservative estimate – the fifth and final victim of the serial killer known as Jack the Ripper.

The positioning of the victim’s body is consistent with the other murders, the splayed legs an immediately readable pornographic cliché: the prostitute in a pose of erotic availability. It is one of the Ripper’s ‘signatures’. It introduces a theme of retribution: this was her crime, and this is her punishment. Dr Bond does not venture these opinions, of course. His job was to observe, and to record as succinctly and scientifically as possible what he saw. His report continues: ‘The whole of the surface of the abdomen & thighs was removed & the abdominal cavity emptied of its viscera. The breasts were cut off, the arms mutilated by several jagged wounds, & the face hacked beyond recognition of the features.’ The eviscerated body parts were scattered – or worse, arranged – about her body, ‘viz. the uterus & kidneys with one breast under the head, the other breast by the right foot, the liver between the feet, the intestines by the right side’, and so on. The heart was missing, however: ‘the pericardium was open below & the heart absent.’ It may have been burned in the fireplace, which bore evidence of a ‘fire so large as to melt the spout off the kettle’. More probably it was taken away by the killer. This is another of Jack’s signatures: what is known in the lexicons of Ripperology as the ‘harvesting’ of body parts.”

Which puts one in mind of the ancestor of all real crime writing, De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts. Perhaps I shouldn't so casually award Nicholls best in this category - but DeQuincey's is an essay, not a book. Ah, a connection is dimly appearing here, between opium and true crime writing – but this is a mere coincidence, a ladder in the stocking of the genre, so to speak. Still, perhaps one needs to understand vertigo as intimately as an opium eater like De Quincey to write a really great real crime piece. His account of the Ratcliffe Highway murders (IT, who has been doing a desultory psychogeography of London places that aren't usually seen (in the spirit of Rachel Whiteread's plaster casts of the insides of objects) lately, should perhaps plan a visit to some of the great murder scenes one of these days – these are, in their way, monuments to modernism too! - although I have no idea if you could even walk around 29 Ratcliffe Highway, now The Highway, Stepney, near King David Lane, viewable by Google Satellite pic here) is still hair raising. John Williams, a sailer, exterminated the inhabitants of two houses – one of them being the Marrs. Timothy Marr was a shopkeeper. He had a “pretty and amiable” wife; he had an eight month old baby; he had a shop boy; and he had a female servant. At around midnight on December 7th, 1811, he called downstairs to the servant to go out and purchase some oysters for the family supper. (I love details like this – what Barthes called the punctum, the unnecessarily specific – for it is in such whirls of details that we explorers in the grotesque get close, oh so close, to the very madly beating heart, the very touch of vertigo, out of which the still voice of capital crime is heard). Lucky woman departs on her errand; unlucky household, no. 29, Ratcliff Highway, is then visited by Mr. Williams. Who, as De Quincey writes, worked as Titian reportedly painted, with his best clothes on.

“Into this perilous region it was that, on a Saturday night in December,
Mr. Williams, whom we suppose to have long since made his coup d'essai,
forced his way through the crowded streets, bound on business. To say, was
to do. And this night he had said to himself secretly, that he would
execute a design which he had already sketched, and which, when finished,
was destined on the following day to strike consternation into 'all that
mighty heart' of London, from centre to circumference. It was afterwards
remembered that he had quitted his lodgings on this dark errand about
eleven o'clock P. M.; not that he meant to begin so soon: but he needed to
reconnoitre. He carried his tools closely buttoned up under his loose
roomy coat. It was in harmony with the general subtlety of his character,
and his polished hatred of brutality, that by universal agreement his
manners were distinguished for exquisite suavity: the tiger's heart was
masked by the most insinuating and snaky refinement. All his acquaintances
afterwards described his dissimulation as so ready and so perfect, that
if, in making his way through the streets, always so crowded on a Saturday
night in neighborhoods so poor, he had accidentally jostled any person, he
would (as they were all satisfied) have stopped to offer the most
gentlemanly apologies: with his devilish heart brooding over the most
hellish of purposes, he would yet have paused to express a benign hope
that the huge mallet, buttoned up under his elegant surtout, with a view
to the little business that awaited him about ninety minutes further on,
had not inflicted any pain on the stranger with whom he had come into
collision. Titian, I believe, but certainly Rubens, and perhaps Vandyke,
made it a rule never to practise his art but in full dress--point ruffles,
bag wig, and diamond-hilted sword; and Mr. Williams, there is reason to
believe, when he went out for a grand compound massacre (in another sense,
one might have applied to it the Oxford phrase of _going out as Grand
Compounder_), always assumed black silk stockings and pumps; nor would he
on any account have degraded his position as an artist by wearing a
morning gown. In his second great performance, it was particularly noticed
and recorded by the one sole trembling man, who under killing agonies of
fear was compelled (as the reader will find) from a secret stand to become
the solitary spectator of his atrocities, that Mr. Williams wore a long
blue frock, of the very finest cloth, and richly lined with silk. Amongst
the anecdotes which circulated about him, it was also said at the time,
that Mr. Williams employed the first of dentists, and also the first of
chiropodists. On no account would he patronize any second-rate skill. And
beyond a doubt, in that perilous little branch of business which was
practised by himself, he might be regarded as the most aristocratic and
fastidious of artists.”

In the event, the night watchman had seen Williams acting suspicious, went in and told Marr, helped him draw down the shutters for the night, and left. After which Willams pounced – the shutters being down meant that he could do his work without being seen from the outside, and the next thing to do was to gain the door before it was locked.
To think was to do:

“… one turn of the key, and the murderer would have been locked out. In,
therefore, he bolted, and by a dexterous movement of his left hand, no doubt, turned the key, without letting Marr perceive this fatal stratagem.
It is really wonderful and most interesting to pursue the successive steps
of this monster, and to notice the absolute certainty with which the
silent hieroglyphics of the case betray to us the whole process and
movements of the bloody drama, not less surely and fully than if we had
been ourselves hidden in Marr's shop, or had looked down from the heavens
of mercy upon this hell-kite, that knew not what mercy meant.”

In this brief passage, De Quincey spills the beans – this is exactly the format and the feeling of real crime stories. We participate as victims without being bloodied, and as gods insofar as not a sparrow falls – or not a fingerprint is left – without us knowing it – the lie at the very center of the genre. We are neither gods nor victims, but some huddled, obsessed thing between, and our interest in these hell-kites, these predators, is not composed entirely of repulsion.

To read about these crimes is one thing – but remember Mary Kelly. Nicholls skips the discovery of her body, but true ripperologists know the story. Discovered the morning of November 9, 1888 at 13 Miller’s Court, by a man named Bowyer who was there to collect rent for a man named McCarthy - tried her door, found it locked - peeped in the curtains and saw her mutilated body – raced to McCarthy, who contacted the police – and then accompanied two inspectors, Beck and Walter Dew, into the small crib that had served as Kelly’s abbatoir. Dew, apparently, was haunted by the scene – McCarthy told newspapers he couldn’t get it out of his mind. The onlookers, the discoverers, the one’s who narrowly escape – those are the ones who slip in and out of real crime books. They interest LI almost as much as the murderers and victims. I have always been fascinated by the accident of being spared.

Activision is Your Vision

People sleeping in the streets
I hear they want to be there
From nearly everyone I meet
at restaurants and parties
cos happiness is relative
that would be my theory
perched up here above the world
so desperate and so greedy

“Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, the high-octane antiterrorism thriller developed by Infinity Ward and published by Activision, took top honors on Thursday night at the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards, the video game industry’s equivalent of the Oscars.”

LI is thrilled for Activision. There are those who say that America has forgotten it is occupying Iraq. Our gamer warriors, though, are semper fi – not our brave, not our proud.

Bobby Kotick is the CEO of Activision. You can’t fault him for ingratitude. He knows the cultcha that fed him...

“In addition, a handful of Bush Pioneers and Rangers who now give heavily to Republicans have a history of giving almost exclusively to Democrats in past elections. Activision CEO Robert Kotick gave $25,500 to Democratic candidates, leadership PACs and party committees and nothing to Republicans in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles. But in the first nine months of 2003, Kotick gave the Republican National Committee $25,000, the maximum amount allowed under the law.”

LI’s idea is that the video game industry just hasn’t gone far enough. Imagine if the box came with bandages, cotton wadding, and some dull bladed knives – so you could quickly get rid of limbs or eyes chewed up by the fragments of flying glass and metal that result from car bombs, or perhaps the cleaner, surgical bombs let loose by American aircraft! Excitement would build as one tried to play with one eye plastered over, or one leg crooked into a painful brace. Awesomeness wouldn’t be the word for it!

Call of Duty 4, released in November for PCs, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, is the first game in this acclaimed series that is not set during World War II. Thought to be risky at first, the game’s modern setting and story line involving deranged ultranationalist Russians, loose nuclear bombs and a Middle Eastern coup have made it a commercial and critical success. Activision has said the game has sold more than seven million copies across its various systems.

Meanwhile, the Dems have a scary opportunity in this year of sinking real estate values. Apparently, many Americans have come to the conclusion that the sticker price for the vanity war has gone too high – imagine that!

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The heck with Congress' big stimulus bill. The way to get the country out of recession — and most people think we're in one — is to get the country out of Iraq, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll.

Pulling out of the war ranked first among proposed remedies in the survey, followed by spending more on domestic programs, cutting taxes and, at the bottom end, giving rebates to poor people in hopes they'll spend the economy into recovery.

The $168 billion economic rescue package Congress rushed to approval this week includes rebates of $600 to $1,200 for most taxpayers, the hope being that they will spend the money and help revive ailing businesses. President Bush is expected to sign the measure next week. Poor wage-earners, as well as seniors and veterans who live almost entirely off Social Security and disability benefits, would get $300 checks.
However, just 19 percent of the people surveyed said they planned to go out and spend the money; 45 percent said they'd use it to pay bills. And nearly half said what the government really should do is get out of Iraq.

Forty-eight percent said a pullout would help fix the country's economic problems "a great deal," and an additional 20 percent said it would help at least somewhat. Some 43 percent said increasing government spending on health care, education and housing programs would help a great deal; 36 percent said cutting taxes.”

There's only one problem with this - it would actually work. And that would bring down upon the Dems the collective wrath of the Petro-Gun club in D.C. Imagine, if you will, a sort of nightmare in which Pinocchio sees all the candy canes at the fair melting before his eyes - that same sinking feeling would inhabit the poor generic Dem Politicians soul as the opportunity for legal graft from the people who have the serious money in the country evaporates. It is one thing to ineffectually oppose Bush’s war plans – throwing sops to suckers is just good business. But to follow the money – why, that’s getting personal.

LI however, is ever the optimist. Maybe somebody will pick up on those poll numbers and actually use them. In the meantime, I'm getting back to picking off that crazy Russian, givin a neutron bomb to the mad mullahs - I think I'm gonna use the saturation bombing option.