On Ludwig Hohl

This is a story from Ludwig Hohl’s Notices – I don’t know if this has been translated. Hohl has his supporters in English – George Steiner calls him the secret master of German 20th century prose.

“Story

Three men had a fearful fight, each struggling against each. The fight raged over the question of what kind of parts a house is divided into.

The first said: “a house falls into: the cellar, the ground floor, the second floor, the third, etc.”
The second cried: “out of wood, stone, mortar, metals – this is what constitutes a house!”
The third, raging against the first true and treating them as liars and scoundrels, as they collaborated between them and against him, observed that a house falls into lines, and referred to an outline and a profile, on which the length and thickness of every wall, the breadth, length and height of the rooms were giving. Everything else was nonsense, only such projections show the exact parts.
Is it necessary to add that the three men fought to the death, because none would concede that the other was right? One died after the other – as an idiot and hero.”

Hohl spent twenty years laboring over his “Notices, or of the reconciliation that takes some time”, in a cellar in a working quarter of Geneva, to which he had returned after living in self imposed exile in Paris and then in Holland. In Paris, according to Peter Hodina, this is what he did:

“In Paris – at that time he was a very young man – nightly he walked around the borderlines between the arrondisements, eventually getting to all twenty. A singular, and eventually provincial method of getting to know a world city”

. Hodina also makes the remark that Hohl was one of those great writers who, like Valery, never wrote a great work. Rather, he sketched out the structure of one. And began to realize that this is what he was doing: "Everything, whether I underline a passage in a writer or copy it out or send a letter, note something, think something, take a position … everything is work.”

He wrote the Notices in the thirties and forties, giving up the idea of a narrative and breaking up his work into fragments, stories, phrases. The Noticess, when first published, fell still born from the press, and the publisher did not want to experience that with any more notices – thus refusing to publish Hohl’s second part. But reputation is a shadow that moves through a crowd and finds the right sensitive – this is the mythic side of Herder’s dispersed public, the literary and the wrongfoooted, who eventually find themselves drawn even to men in cellars – and in the sixties the young Swiss writers and others – Handke, for instance – referenced him. His intransigence, his alcoholism, his cellar.

I think of Pessoa, of Thomas Bernhard, of Robert Walser, of Roberto Bolano. And they die one after the other, idiots and heros.

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE...

Love is the end of ends of world history, the amen of the universe – Novalis

The first time I went to Mexico, it was with my roommate, H. I was 27. H. was a militant in a Trotskyist party in Monterrey, product of a middle class household, ironist, rock climber, and drinker. He was learning English by watching Red Dawn, Rambo II, and, in particular, Blue Velvet, over and over again. There was nothing he enjoyed more than repeating Dennis Hopper’s immortal words, Heinecken! Fuck that shit! Pabst blue ribbon! And of course saluting the tv with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Irony was a lot cheaper back in those distant days.



So we were talking about this and that on the drive down to Mexico. We stopped to take photos of wild blue bonnets. And at one point, he told me, quite seriously, that he thought the most important thing in life was love.

This, for some reason, astonished me – which is why I can even remember it to this day. I think H. might have been the first male ever to express this sentiment to me. Well, except for Jesus, but it was hard to tell what Jesus was talking about when I was a tot and by this time I was past the point of going to churches.

Looking back on H.’s remark today, I can’t say I disagree so much about the love part as about the ‘most important’ part – my perpetual inner émigré has a hard time believing that lives happen in such a way that there is a most important part to them. This might be either the wisdom of the Dhammapada, or cheap nihilism, or a little of both.

Still, H.’s idea has been a pretty powerful one – it has provided the single biggest rival to the modernist cult of happiness. The idea that love is the foundation of the truly human community is perhaps central to the counter-traditions I’ve pointed out before – the three alienations, so to speak: the liberal, reactionary and radical. And the critical viewpoint on happiness is drawn back to love by the force of historical things. Of course, from the liberal point of view, there is a strong critique of the notion that love is the foundation of community. The word for that is totalitarianism. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Hannah Arendt went from doing dissertation work on love to writing her massive opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism. When Calasso speaks of how the ancien regime sweetness of life turned sour – how Wormwood fell to earth and turned the waters bitter – he is touching on the fact that what volupte loaned the incipient happiness culture – a more and more simple tie between pleasure and happiness – produced, as it were, a cultural vacuum which the literature of sentiments, that quasi-institutionalisation of romantic love, filled. A dangerous void.

So, now that we’ve discovered the carte d’amour among the demographic statistics, it is time to talk about Romanticism and we’ll begin with the chapter in Ricarda Huch’s book, the Blooming of Romanticism, on romantic love.

Brit

“You say I’m crazy/
I got your crazy”


So, the Britney issue of Rolling Stone is out, just before her birthday, December 2. Britney is in official return mode. What is she returning from? What everyone agrees is an off the charts craziness. For instance, she got drunk a few times. She might have walked around naked in front of her children, infants at the time. She shaved her hair off. The cops came around, she was making a disturbance.

For this, she received the following punishments: the court took her boys away. The court gave her father control of all her money. The court gave her father control of all her possessions. Apparently even her phone calls are supervised.

I am the Leon Bloy among Britneyologists, I think. In the introduction to the Exegesis of Common Places, Bloy writes (as though presciently seeing, one hundred year ago, the sin the press commits daily in writing of Ms. Spears):

“The true bourgeois, that is to say, in a modern sense and in the most general of possible senses, the man who makes no use of the faculty of thought, and who lives, or appears to live without having ever been solicited, a single day, by the need to understand anything whatsoever, the authentic and indiscussible bourgeois is necessarily limited in his language to a very small number of formulas.

The repertory of patrimonial locutions that suffices for him is extremely cramped and never goes beyond a few hundred. Ah! If only one were holy enough to rob him of this humble treasure, what a paradise of silence would fall immediately upon our consoled globe!

When a manager or a clothing factory owner hazards the observation, for example: that you can’t remake yourself; that one can’t have everything; that business is business; that the doctor is a priest; that Paris wasn’t built in a day; that babies did not ask to come into the world, etc. etc., etc. , what would happen if one proved to him instantly that one or another of these hoary clichés corresponds to some divine reality having to power to make worlds tremble and to unchain catastrophes without mercy?”

And so it is with Spear’s ‘madness’, which is, of course, not madness at all, but the projection of a social madness, the madness of Autrui, so deepseated that Bloy would, of course, suspect a Luciferean origin. So when I read this part of the Spears story, I did feel an empathetic spear going through my side – or perhaps the one that went through her side, as she was nailed to an image that and put through a grinder to make money for someone, day after fucking day, ending up, as the journalist says, with as much control over her life as she had as a seventeen year old Mouseketeer:


"I feel like an old person now," she says one afternoon, as a manicurist applies rhinestones and girly pink lacquer to her chewed-up nails. "I do! I go to bed at, like, 9:30 every night, and I don't go out or anything, you know what I mean? I just feel like an old fart."
And this:

“Of all the things Britney has lost in the past year, it's the custody of her sons, Sean Preston, 3, and Jayden, 2, that has shaken her hardest. "Every time they come to visit me, I think about how they're such special people," says Spears, who currently sees the boys three days a week, with one overnight stay. "Like, they're going to preschool now! I went there to pick them up on Friday, and seeing them in their little classroom and seeing Jayden being bad or not listening? It's like, those are mine, and it's just crazy, you know what I mean? And the things that are coming out of their mouths right now — they're learning so much, and it's new, and you never know what they're going to say, and they're so smart yet so innocent. They're obsessed with monsters, and every night we look outside, and we have to show them that there's no monsters out there. It's dark outside, but there's nothin' out there, you know?"

Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Kentwood, Louisiana, Spears dreamed of having her own children. She considered the experience "the closest thing to God," she said in 2004 in a note on her fan site. "To be a really good mom, I feel your child needs to be your full-time job. I want to raise my kids and share all of those precious moments with them."

But things haven't turned out like she imagined. "I didn't think my husband was gonna leave me," she says, deadpan. She laughs to break the tension. "Otherwise, I'd be with my babies 24/7. But since they're almost like twins, they both take care of each other. I think they look like me," she says, going from affectionate to bitter as she gets distracted by thoughts of Federline, whom she sees only when one of them is picking up the boys. "They don't look like their father at all," she continues. "And it's weird 'cause they're starting to learn words like 'stupid,' and Preston says the f-word now sometimes. He doesn't get it from us. He must get it from his daddy. I say it, but not around my kids."

One has to remember that Spears lives in a city in which the D.A.’s office prides itself on taking frivolous cases against celebrities and running with them, all the way through a cycle of daytime talk shows and nighttime entertainment shows and perhaps into their own consultant spot. The lights is green, time to come out and feed another odorless, colorless victim who develops odor and color – the malignant disease of the non photogenic occasion, the gotcha photo op. But of course, the trolls lie in wait for good time girls all over America: the judge who dismisses a rape here or there in Northern Louisiana, the police chief who spends a perfunctory day tracking down killer unknown after discovering some dissected corpse of a whore in Houston, the whole sad sack of shit you can expect one you bump up against the thing that has been there since long before Judges 19:25.

All I want to know is: when is Britney going to get back her kids?

Jewelry

I’ve been meaning to link to this for some time. Thanksgiving marks the start of the shopping-time, although as we all know, the charge it spirit is a little weak this year. Anyway, my friend Kiyoko, a jeweler in NYC, has started her own biz. I like her jewelry, I like her eye for minutia, I like her energy, I like her sense of what hangs and sparkles and needs to have an eye cocked at it – I like her intuition of the inner human Bird. Check out her site at Bookat NYC if you - oh fashion mavening reader – feel like buying jewelry. I should figure out how to put a picture on my sidebar for her. I should know how to do these things!

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD: THE CONTINUING AND EXCITING SERIES!

"Whence is that knocking?
How is't with me, when every noise appals me?
What hands are here? Ha, they pluck out mine eyes!
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red."

As I said and will continue to say, since there is nothing sweeter than a word grown so bitter in your mouth that it makes your tongue cancerous - that is, to a certain degree of madman, such as LI - the bailout is perhaps the most foolish project ever mounted by a state since Darius decided to whip the sea. The figures are mounting, sweetly sweetly up into complete fantasy. Readers are urged to go see how 7.6 trillion dollars have been pledged by our lovesick Treasury and Fed - come back, SIVs of 2007! We want to light the cigars with the hundred dollar bills again!

PS – LI is thinking that there is some virus that went around the liberal blogs after the Obama victory. Instead of seizing the moment, these bloggers seem intent, suddenly, on defending the indefensible. Kevin Drum, at MOJO, posted today on the bailout, and this is what he had to say:

“Can we please stop this? Calling this a "$326 billion" bailout is crazy. It's a $20 billion capital injection plus a bunch of asset guarantees with a maximum cost of $250 billion and a probable cost in the low billions. (Possibly zero, in fact.) The capital will probably be repaid eventually, but even if it isn't it's highly unlikely that Uncle Sam is on the hook for more than $30-40 billion.

This stuff has gotten completely out of hand, with "estimates" of the bailout these days ranging from $3 trillion to $7 trillion even though the vast bulk of this sum comes in the form of loan guarantees, lending facilities, and capital injections. The government will almost certainly end up spending a lot of money rescuing the financial system (I wouldn't be surprised if the final tab comes to $1 trillion over five years, maybe $2 trillion at the outside), but it's not $7 trillion or anything close to it.”

You will notice that the figures in the second paragraph were ground out not by some devilishly clever calculation, but by the simply bloggy expedient of deciding one needs a figure that sounds reasonable, not too high and not too low. The error rate of the quick calculation is - it could be x or twice x. Wow, there's a calculation for you. And after all, a trillion is now our number of choice.

In fact, Drum’s post does bring up the question of how one figures out the payback. And that brings up the larger question: if, in fact, the financial sector shrinks 15-30 percent or more over the next few years – and that is the conservative estimate of Rogoff, Willem Buiter believes it will be more, how in the world are they going to be viable facing 7 trillion dollars in obligations? The short answer is: they won’t. Either the U.S. eats this debt or the financial sector – whoever is left standing – eats it. But this isn’t, I think, edible. In fact, this is the kind of debt that sticks in the windpipe and causes suffocation, thrashing and death.
We could, of course, have simply capitalized a national bank and used it to keep the usual channels of finance open. Hell, such a bank would be ideal for handling the non-bankruptcy/bankruptcy of GM. But that is not going to happen now. What is happening is this: we are investing 7 trillion dollars in future obligations in the hopes that the financial sector will remain the same size, or grow, in the future. Rather like investing in blacksmithing just around the time Ford came out with the Model T.

Financial Cryptozoology

Because History is a poet, the idea of resurrected the financial sector of 2007 is rubbing elbows, in the press, with the idea that scientists are now able to genetically recreate the Wooly Mammoth. And there is a certain resonance between the big American banks and the Mammoths:

“Preserved frozen remains of woolly mammoths have been found in the northern parts of Siberia. This is a rare occurrence, essentially requiring the animal to have been buried rapidly in liquid or semi-solids such as silt, mud and icy water which then froze.

This may have occurred in a number of ways. Mammoths may have been trapped in bogs or quicksands and either died of starvation or exposure, or drowning if they sank under the surface. They may have fallen through frozen ice into small ponds or potholes, entombing them. Many are certainly known to have been killed in rivers, perhaps through being swept away by river floods; in one location, by the Berelekh River in Yakutia in Siberia, more than 9,000 bones from at least 156 individual mammoths have been found in a single spot, apparently having been swept there by the current.

To date, thirty-nine preserved bodies have been found, but only four of them are complete. In most cases the flesh shows signs of decay before its freezing and later desiccation. Stories abound about frozen mammoth corpses that were still edible once defrosted, but the original sources (e.g. William R. Farrand's article in Science 133 [March 17, 1961]:729-735) indicate that the corpses were in fact terribly decayed, and the stench so unbearable that only the dogs accompanying the finders showed any interest in the flesh.”

Buried rapidly in liquid or semi-solids – a few changes and that would fit for Bear Stearns. You do remember Bear, don’t you? Used to be a bank.

Well, since this weekend the U.S. committed to Citi with a sorta startling generosity – equal to two years of the Iraq war, which is a pretty good party for a weekend even for Uncle Sam, you must admit – it is interesting to read about what the financial sector was up to, so that, when we clone our new species of mammoth bank, we aren’t surprised by its behavior in the wild.

So I went to this site , via Felix Salmon. This is how Alan Kohler describes them:

“Here’s how it works: a bank will set up a shelf company in Cayman Islands or somewhere with $2 of capital and shareholders other than the bank itself. They are usually charities that could use a little cash, and when some nice banker in a suit shows up and offers them money to sign some documents, they do.

That allows the so-called special purpose vehicle (SPV) to have “deniability”, as in “it’s nothing to do with us” – an idea the banks would have picked up from the Godfather movies.

The bank then creates a CDS between itself and the SPV. Usually credit default swaps reference a single third party, but for the purpose of the synthetic CDOs, they reference at least 100 companies.

The CDS contracts between the SPV can be $US500 million to $US1 billion, or sometimes more. They have a variety of twists and turns, but it usually goes something like this: if seven of the 100 reference entities default, the SPV has to pay the bank a third of the money; if eight default, it’s two-thirds; and if nine default, the whole amount is repayable.

For this, the bank agrees to pay the SPV 1 or 2 per cent per annum of the contracted sum.

Finally the SPV is taken along to Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s and Fitch’s and the ratings agencies sprinkle AAA magic dust upon it, and transform it from a pumpkin into a splendid coach.”

Kohler points out that the tipping point is coming, since the reference entities were a list of things like, oh, General Motors, Lehman Bank, etc. Now it might seem that’s no big deal, these 2 dollar SIVs will just collapse – but the genius of the system was to send salesmen around to get investors to put money into those clonish entitites. Oh, the joy! Pension funds. City governments looking for an exciting yield. Mutual funds. The whole wondrous world. And so they grew and grew, like mighty mammoths. Now, if they collapse, the banks will be all saved! By sucking enormous amounts of money from the rest of the system. Or, as Kohler puts it:
“It is a truly great irony that the world’s banks could end up being saved not by governments, but by the synthetic CDO time bomb that they set ticking with their own questionable practices during the credit boom.”

I have to give the establishment a lot of credit. They successfully made the guys on assembly lines making GM cars and trucks villains in the classic mode of that type dear to Reagan, the leaching, fraudulent, probably black welfare mother. One of Reagan’s most popular creations. Meanwhile, admitting the poor leadership of the banks, and the fact that they didn’t understand the risks they were running, they have, shall we say, omitted the sausage making part of the sausage – what were the instruments of that risk all about? You can see that innovations like this are the vehicle that allowed the ownership society to take greater risks – and don’t we all love risks? You might not be able to see that it did any social good at all. But then, if you are looking for social good, you haven’t been reading your Rand. So you definitely don’t understand D.C.

The O. Henry part of this little fairy tale is that, fucking over the auto industry might just be the trigger for the CDS cascade. whosoever diggeth a pit/shall fall in it...

My review of Outliers

I was talking to a friend last night, who told me she read my Malcolm Gladwell review. I didn’t even know it was out yet! So I looked around this morning, googling myself, and I found myself listed on the NY Mag site as a Gladwell hater Now, that isn’t right – Michiko Kakatani, that enigma wrapped in a puzzle (the puzzle being: why is such a poor reader and writer kept on to review books, year after year, for the Times?) is a Gladwell hater, and her review of Outliers is argued with in her usual way – which is this – Kakatani has a prejudice, the writer under review contravenes it, thus the writer under review is wrong. As well as bad. As well as a bad influence. And the worst thing ever. Etc., etc. So Gladwell shows – as any sociology 101 course would show – that the social and the individual so interpenetrate that the notion of the self-reliant individual has to be considered a myth. To which Kakatani replies:

“Such assessments turn individuals into pawns of their cultural heritage, just as Mr. Gladwell’s emphasis on class and accidents of historical timing plays down the role of individual grit and talent to the point where he seems to be sketching a kind of theory of social predestination, determining who gets ahead and who does not — and all based not on persuasive, broadband research, but on a flimsy selection of colorful anecdotes and stories.”

Question begging isn’t the name for this – sophomoric ignorance is.

Myself, I was pretty disappointed in Outliers because – well, you can read my review.

And, hopefully, I am not a reviewer who just says I hate this, I like that. I find reviews that simply do that pointless, and a curse on the review industry, such as it is. I have an image of the perfect review that has nothing to do with the positive or negative. It is like one of those Brazilian faith healers who are reportedly able to place their hands on a patient's body and, through sheer mental concentration, reach through the skin and the muscle, rendered magically porous, to pull out whatever distemper is causing the sickness. Except, in the review, the reviewer reaches into the book, far into it, and pulls out its bleeding, beating, lovely or hideous heart, its center, its vulnerability, its divine, its secret name.

If you can't do that, don't review.

In the cage: Obama's Team of Losers

Like any other liberal, I’m appalled by the rightwing tilt of Obama’s economics team. Any team that is hailed by libertarians and Bushites like Greg Mankiew is obviously not a team I want to play with.

And yet, in some ways, I’m indifferent.

When I use the term rightwing, some explanation needs to be put in place. The terms rightwing and leftwing are often used as markers of rhetoric. It is as if we should bracket the social context of these comments, and discuss them as “ideas”. Myself, I think that the rhetoric only makes sense when embedded in a robust sense of the sociology of a situation. Rhetoric is part of the way a society dreams itself, and like all dreams, should be subject to psychoanalysis – but psychoanalysis is no substitute for history. The history of the last thirty years was about the growing power of the parasitic Dixie model, in which heavy public investment elsewhere – in the Northeast U.S., say, or in Japan – produced an economic activity that could be successfully transported to the South by way of a government intervention – a tax break, say, along with laws preventing labor organization – which would be followed by the continued refusal to make public investments. Thus, in the Sunbelt, you have considerable industrial activity, little of it generated within the Sunbelt, plus an indigenous asset based sector – real estate – and the two together allowed for a regime that took on the accoutrements of the highly developed economy without making the necessary sacrifices to sustain one. This, and this only, is what is meant by small government. This economic form joined with a neo-liberal mindset that had three pillars – as I’ve said over and over. (Pause for breath)

What they are, these pillars, ahem, ahem, I outlined in this huffy reply to a post on Matt Yglesias’ blog. MY is very enthused about the murder of the American auto industry, which he shares with the libertarian young turks he knows, admires, and goes to whenever he has questions about the deeper passages in Atlas Shrugged. In this particular post, MY is psyched that a master such as Bruce Bartlett is giving the thumbs up to Obama’s economics team – Bruce Bartlett! Admittedly, this reply goes over things that I repeat like an organ grinder on this blog. But what can I do? Indignation does have a tendency to degenerate into Tourette’s, and that is what I have, political Tourette’s syndrome.

But here’s the latest version of my rant:

“I’m not sure of the point of this post. The point, I guess, should be that the neo-liberal establishment thinks that basically, nothing is happening here, and we are gonna move back to our open and free markets uber alles position that binds administration policies from Reagan to W in one big happy family. Minus the pesky automakers, which have to be thrown right out of the club, those scum! It is all creative destruction and how we like it.

Meanwhile, this is the week neo-liberalism died. All economies are political economies - they depend on a political pact that underlies any macro policy. The political pact underlying neo-liberalism was pretty simple: a. expanded credit for the masses; b. a robust shadow financial sector; and c., a continuing influx of money from household savings, in the form of 401(k)s, mutual funds, money markets, etc. These all worked together. The middle class did not bond with the investor class because they are “aspirational”, but because they saw their retirement accounts swelling and their assets becoming pricier. While their everyday economic life, which depends on labor income, became in one sense harder, as the rate of earnings increases decreased and then vanished, the increased credit patched over the spots in the lifestyle. And of course, b., allowed the creditor to take increased risks.

Well, a, b, and c are dead. It would not at all be surprising that the equities markets either stabilize at a low level and stay there for a decade, or keep sinking. That means, in essence, that the accumulated savings of those who went through the boom years from the eighties until now are seeing their future systematically destroyed. That was the future they were willing to trade slower income growth for. And meanwhile, good bye to the expanded credit sphere. You might patch your lifestyle gaps with 9 percent, but 19 percent, 29 percent - that is when we are talking about the pre-modern economy. That is interest that, in effect, retracts the elbow room given by credit. In the final month in which Obama pulled ahead, it was clearly the 401(k) effect. It wasn’t youth, it wasn’t change, it wasn’t hope - it was a vast fear. Which will be speaking out a lot more as it turns out that the fear was understated - things are a lot worse than they seem.
So the “brilliant” Larry Summers, missionary of neo-liberalism when the U.S. was the indispensible nation and architect, with Phil Gramm, of the deregulated marketplace that made the perverse Bush boom possible, is going to find that he simply can’t use the old nostrums. Because the old system is gone. Bartlett celebrating this is like one of Louis XVI’s courtiers assuring everybody that the Bishop of Autan, Tallyrand, being so powerful in the Assembly, everybody’s head is safe. It is a joke.

Of course, the last joke of the expiring neo-liberal imperium was the very funny one, which MY laughed at heartily, of course, along with other important young public intellectuals, of shooting GM in the head. Funny funny funny. Those people had the gall to ask for a loan of 25 billion - and sharpeyed Matt saw that could reach to 75 billion! Over the weekend, we decide that Citi needs 300 billion and - well, that’s all right then. It might not be a great deal, but shucks, they needed it and all.

Yes, neoliberalism is a corpse, but it will keep kicking for a while among the pundits.”

My hope, in this election, was that Obama saw the obvious. My disappointment with the appointment of that team of A level neo-libs is that he doesn’t. Yet the difference here is that the neo-libs have lost their tools. They have become State financed humpty dumpties, trying to glue together one cracked egg after another. It is funny, a ha ha joke, that the only industry bailout that ever worked was – surprise! – with the auto industry, namely the Chrysler loan of 1979. My working definition of worked is that Chrysler is still around, paid off the loan with interest, generated tons of profits for investors and paid wages that made life pleasant for thousands of employees, and even led the car design field – admittedly, in the disastrous direction of the SUV – in the early nineties. Manufacturing is one area in which government can actively intervene to good purpose, because the metrics are pretty clear.

Finance, on the other hand, has to be a market driven sector, and the government has to be a guardian of the institutions, even to the extent of coercing those institutions into being. When, in 1927, Coolidge unilaterally seized the radio airwaves for the government and then rented out space on them, he was creating an institution. On this model, the Fed should long ago have seized the peer-to-peer, OTC system by which derivatives are traded and forced it to become an open derivatives market, much like any other equities market, in which all products are transparent and all traders are known. Anything else is bullshit. That they still haven’t done that, and that the crewe brought together by Obama has a historic interest in continuing the sector in its dysfunctional ways is a bad, bad thing. But I think they will be forced to do what they don’t want to do, anyway. The question is, will they be forced to do it before the Treasure blows such a hole in the U.S. Government’s ability to respond that we have a crippled, Brazil like government. We’ll see.

Oh, and Yves Smith, my darling - she is definitely up in the pantheon as far as I am concerned - wrote an excellent little post about our collective cognitive capture by the financial hegemony model:

"There is a remarkable failure to acknowledge a key element of the task before us, that is, that the financial system HAS to shrink. Its current size is based on an unsustainable level of debt, a big chunk of which will go bust or be renegotiated. Yet rather than trying to figure out what a new, slimmed down version of banking ought to look like, to ascertain which pieces should be preserved and which jettisoned, the authorities are instead reacting in a completely ad hoc fashion, rushing to put out the latest fire. And in the process, they keep trying to validate overly inflated asset values (a measure straight out of the failed Japan playbook) rather than try to ascertain what their real value might be so as to determine how much recapitalization might ultimately be needed (if you doubt me, Exhibit One is the pending Citi bailout, in which lousy assets will be guaranteed at phony values). Is this denial? Do the authorities fear that if they work up this analysis, it will leak out and the markets will panic? This seems to be the first, most important order of business, yet here we are more than a year into the crisis, still tip-toeing around one of the very biggest issues.

And why is that? Back to the cult issue. Willem Buiter has chastised the Fed for what he calls "cognitive regulatory capture," that is, that they identify far too strongly with the values and world view of their charges. But it isn't just the Fed. The media. and to a lesser degree, society at large has bought into the construct of the importance, value, and virtue of the financial sector, even as it is coming violently apart before our eyes. Why, for instance, the vituperative reaction against a GM bailout, while we assume Citi has to be rescued? A GM bankruptcy would be at least as catastrophic as a Citi failure. but GM elicits attacks for the incompetence of its management and the supposedly unreasonable posture of the UAW (the same free market advocates recoil at a deal struck by consenting adults). The particular target for ire is the autoworker pensions and health plans, as well as their work rules. But the pension plans being underwater is the fault of GM management for not providing for them in the fat years; I personally have trouble with the idea that health care should vary by class; and for the work rules, German and Swedish automakers have strong unions and yet can compete. I see the UAW as having correctly seen GM management feeding at the trough and doing a good job at extracting their share.

And yet the specter of incompetent, and worse, DISHONEST management elicits far less anger. GM may not make the best cars, but Citi and other banks sold products that were terrible, destructive, that resulted in huge losses and are wrecking economies, damage crappy cars could never inflict (environmentalists might quibble, but never has so much seeming wealth evaporated in so little time, and with the main culprits readily identified). They paid huge bonuses, yet their 2004-mid 2007 earnings have been wiped out by subsequent losses. But while UAW workers will have to give up on deals cut earlier, in terms of health care and pension promises (entered into, by the way, to bridge difference over wage levels), I guarantee no Wall Street denizen of the peak years will have to cough up one penny of his bonus from those days."

The girls are crying the boys are masturbating

I.
We dive down through the ocean of statistics to find, at the bottom, the carte d’amour that has foundered there. Diving into the wreck is a pretty good definition of this history, and LI has been aiming to be one of the deep divers Melville talks about in his famous letter on Emerson:

“Now, there is a something about every man elevated above mediocrity, which is, for the most part, instinctuly perceptible. This I see in Mr Emerson. And, frankly, for the sake of the argument, let us call him a fool; -- then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. -- I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more; & if he don't attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can't fashion the plumet that will. I'm not talking of Mr Emerson now -- but of the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving & coming up again with bloodshot eyes since the world began.”

So, with bloodshot eyes from my practice submersions – take me to the river! let me drown in the Deep End, Lord! - LI wants to allude to the last post in which we mentioned the coincidence between the geography of Hajnal’s thesis about the formation of the – in his final version – Northwest European household - and the geography of the happiness culture that we think, at least, we have a hook into, and are raising up inch by painful inch, a true fish tale of continental, or maybe global capture. And if you hook the world and raise the world, where is the world upon which the fisherman sits, or stands or floats in the tale? Whose blood is, after all, at stake here?

As we said, however, Hajnal’s thesis is, to say the least, arguable – and there are too many exceptions to accept his identification of the simple household with modernization. The leaks can’t be stopped, and aren’t these the old, traditional, the West is the Best kind of leakages? Still, we take it that there is a shift in an area of Europe in the sixteenth century that resulted in higher ages of marriage, a consequent prolongation of youth, and simple households around a single married couple. According to Lawrence Stone and André Burguière, the shift in the formation of the household in the sixteenth century corresponds to a wave of ascetism. If we are meeting whales at this depth, they all seem to resemble Max Weber. One keeps bumping into the ascetic thesis. And well you might ask, gentle reader, if this doesn’t completely fuck up LI’s own thesis. Have we got off on the wrong foot, examining the libertines? Shouldn’t we have started with with levelers?


II

I note these as minnow questions that threaten to turn into sharks. But I won’t be pulled away from love. Love and suicide, those were the themes I want to do for a threadwhile longer.

So, let’s think about women.

III


In particular, three women, spaced out over the 18th century. First, Mary Astell, whose book about marriage can be found here. Then Sophie Huber, a not completely untypical writer and bourgeois adventurer – in her own way – who responded to the French Revolution with one of her own, ditching her husband, Georg Forster, the famed German explorer, to live with a mutual friend with whom she was more sexually compatible. And Mme de Stael, naturally.

Tyler Cowen's country club guide to economics: don't tip the caddies!

Bateman takes out his wallet and pulls out a card.

PRICE
(Suddenly enthused)
What's that, a gram?

BATEMAN
New card. What do you think?

McDermott lifts it up and examines the lettering carefully.

McDERMOTT
Whoa. Very nice. Take a look.

He hands it to Van Patten.

BATEMAN
Picked them up from the printers yesterday

VAN PATTEN
Good coloring.

BATEMAN
That's bone. And the lettering is something called
Silian Rail.

McDERMOTT
(Envious)
Silian Rail?

VAN PATTEN
It is very cool, Bateman. But that's nothing.

He pulls a card out of his wallet and slaps it on the
table.

VAN PATTEN
Look at this.

They all lean forward to inspect it.

PRICE
That's really nice.

Bateman clenches his fists beneath the table, trying to
control his anxiety.

VAN PATTEN
Eggshell with Romalian type.
(Turning to Bateman)
What do you think?

BATEMAN
(Barely able to breath, his voice a croak)
Nice.

PRICE
(Holding the card up to the light)
Jesus. This is really super. How'd a nitwit like you get so
tasteful?

Bateman stares at his own card and then enviously at
McDermott's.

BATEMAN (V.O.)
I can't believe that Price prefers McDermott's card to mine.

PRICE
But wait. You ain't seen nothin' yet.

He holds up his own card.

PRICE
Raised lettering, pale nimbus white...

BATEMAN
(Choking with anxiety)
Impressive. Very nice. Let's see Paul Owen's card.

Price pulls a card from an inside coat pocket and holds it
up for their inspection: "PAUL OWEN, PIERCE & PIERCE,
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS." Bateman swallows, speechless.
The sound in the room dies down and all we hear is a faint
heartbeat as Bateman stares at the magnificent card.

BATEMAN (V.O.)
Look at that subtle off-white coloring. The tasteful thickness
of it. Oh my God, it even has a watermark..." - American Psycho

Tyler Cowen, of whose libertarianism the business page of the NYT is so fond, finds a comfy niche there today to issue some country club warnings to Obama on drawing the wrong lessons from the Great Depression. On the country club circuit, there has been quite a bit of alarm about the whole Roosevelt cult thing, which has definitely disturbed the back to laissez faire thing. We’ve had this temporary bump, don’t you see.

The list of things to do to please rich people is quite amusing. Among them is this sterling piece of malarkey:

“GET THE SMALL THINGS RIGHT It’s not just monetary and fiscal policies that are important. Roosevelt instituted a disastrous legacy of agricultural subsidies and sought to cartelize industry, backed by force of law. Neither policy helped the economy recover.
He also took steps to strengthen unions and to keep real wages high. This helped workers who had jobs, but made it much harder for the unemployed to get back to work. One result was unemployment rates that remained high throughout the New Deal period.
Today, President-elect Barack Obama faces pressures to make unionization easier, but such policies are likely to worsen the recession for many Americans.”
This is, of course, the purest fiction. Price supports for agriculture saved the Middle West – it is only an economist who is lost in the inhumanity of it all that thinks of such things as the “small things”, and in gratitude the farmers there routinely now vote in Republicans who praise small government and vote in vast subsidies for the raising of corn, wheat and cattle. Cowen obviously has no idea how the 2 percent of the population involved in agriculture feed the 98 percent not so involved.
But it is the union smacking that is truly funny.
Conservatives have skipped right over the causes of the Great Depression, because it is so icky looking over the twenties when you can lie about Roosevelt’s unemployment figures – they actually went down considerably until 1937, then rose in the recession of 1938 – which was caused by Roosevelt listening to the orthodox bewailing government expenditure, and cutting back, and then went down again. The structures put in place by Roosevelt – for instance, social security – were the foundation for the relatively high labor flexibility that allowed the American economy in the late 40s up until 1980 to avoid any Depression style drop in unemployment
But more than that – it was, of course, the gross and sustained inequality of income which was a fundamental feature of the 20s economy that magnified the Depression. While productivity rose considerably, salaries and wages didn’t. As Galbraith puts it in his book on the Crash, in relating the causes of the Depression:
1. “The bad distribution of income. In 1929, the rich were indubitably rich. The figures are not entirely satisfactory, but it seems certain that the 5 percent of the population with the highest incomes in that year received approximately one third of all personal income. The proportion of personal income received in the form of interest, dividends and rent – the income, broadly speaking, of the well-to-do – was about twice as great as in the years following the Second World War.
This highly unequal income distribution meant that the economy was dependent ona high level of investment or a high level of luxury consumer spending or both. The rich cannot buy great quantities of bread. If they are to dispose of what they receive it must be on luxuries or by way of investment in new plants and new projects. Both investment and luxury spending are subject, inevitably, to more erratic influences and to wider fluctuations than the bread and rent outlays of the 25 dollar-a-week workman. This highbracket spending and investment was especially susceptible, one may assume, to the crushing news from the stock market in October of 1929.”

Now, of course the libertarian dream is to return to that income structure, and the naughties nearly did it. However, one of the great results of the increase in labor bargaining power is that this structure was broken in the 30s, and didn’t recover as a force of oppression in U.S. society until the 80s – and even then, the open advocacy of impoverishing the blue collar class, which has now become a yahoo standard on the right, was muted. Anybody looking at the Great crash of 2008 would do well to look at the housing bubble that kickstarted it in terms of the fact that, though productivity gains were significant throughout the decade, the profit from those gains was accrued solely by the well-to-do. The middle and working class made up fro the lack of their fair share through the credit that was extended to them in the spirit of amity and greed that made the Bankruptcy act of 2005 such a joy to our hearts. That extension of credit was, of course, fundamentally irrational. Why would one want a system in which, at the same time, the producers gain no more from the increase of their productivity while at the same time they gain a whole new power of credit? One of these things doesn’t go with the other. If you are going to impoverish the mass of the population, you can’t do it by halves. Surely Cowen should recommend that the next time, the population, after getting home from jobs in which union oppression has been lifted and their wages have been joyously cut, should be free to sell their organs at market rates – perhaps they can take out loans on this, too.

LI has a certain faith in reality. Thus, for instance, we are not disturbed that Clinton the hawk is becoming the Secretary of State, since the reality of the U.S. economic condition is the biggest peacemaker there is – in fact, the U.S. can’t support any more enormously popular war-tainment. Iraq was a lot of fun, we all enjoy the victory there, and when you add it up, we can do high fives that 400-600 thou Iraqis died, and our casualties were less than a haircut! But we probably are not going to have so much fun again soon. Reality was what scotched the Bushite desire to bomb bomb bomb Iran. Myself, I don’t think the Obama admin. has the stomach for driving the price of oil up to 165 bucks per barrel again. But given the astonishing, criminal negligence of the Dems in the last days of 2008 – the insane shooting of the auto industry in the head – I am less sanguine about the passage of union friendly legislation than I had been. Obama is listening to the Cowens of the world – the incorrigible and highly disgusting Larry Summers is his economics advisor, and perhaps Obama can get the scoop from him on Robert Scheer’s story in the Nation about how Summers was really the point man who helped free the financial services sector from onerous regulation – and this is going to be bad news for all of us if it continues.

Intimations of Further Fall

Well, now that we have shot a hole in the economy by highhatting the auto companies, a sort of collaboration between the incredible mummies of this ancien regime, the brainless auto barons and the brainless congressional barons (as the zona whips itself into a frenzy outside), and as Paulson’s ass is licked in precise proportion to his ideologically driven incompetence – the Post would have absolutely loved Andrew Mellon! – we hear the creaking of the largest bank collapse in history – oh, just ahead of us. Nothing to worry about. While the terrible, terrible UAW clowns, making their 26 an hour and destroying their economy with their greed, are about to fall into the toilet, our pity goes out, now, to the upper management of Citi, where the per hour is what, 1,000? 2,000? – but only because of the amazing skills they display, on a historic scale. That Ayn Rand could have lived to see her hero caste in all its glory today. Weep a little on her tomb, will ya?

What we are discovering, or rediscovering, is that the private sector is pisspoor at allocating capital and decreasing inequality – the latter is also known as increasing social mobility. The two faults in the private system are interlocked – see the Mangle of Inequality for further details. As is good and fucking obvious, the “investments” of the last eight years, when not going into spec houses, were going into spec houses of cards, otherwise known as securities. It was all insurance. It was all for our good. It was all for the ownership society. It was all about spreading risk. It was all about making us good risktakers. It was all about entrerpreneurship. It was all about aligning the interests of the managers with the companies. It was all about shareholder value. It was all about storing leafs, mud and human feces in huts and performing certain rituals that would turn them into cargo.

Oh, the deadly zona, and it seems, this week, to be blowing on me. My editing business has suddenly gone to shit. And I walk around or ride my bike past restaurants that were filled, three years ago, but are now deadly quiet – past dress shops that seem haunted by the mannequins wearing today’s sale item – and feeling this particular quiet in the streets. It is the quiet after a loud boom. The ear experiences a sort of time hallucination, a confusion between the time of the boom and the time of the silence that rushes in just afterwards. By ear we go down into the depths.


Io sentia gia da la man destra il gorgo
Far sotto noi un orribile scroscio
Per che con li occhi ‘n giu la testa sporgo

Love and territory

In 1965, John Hajnal, published an essay with the very dull title, European Marriage Patterns in Perspective. This essay seems, at first glance, to project a Cold War paradigm back upon the pattern of European demography, as Hajnal proposed that, in essence, starting with the end of the 16th century, you could draw a line from Trieste to St. Petersburgh and allot two different household formations to each side. On the West, you have what Hajnal came to call the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family.

Hajnal made several arguable inferences from this pattern, as, for instance, that modernization followed the simple household formation pattern, and that simple households contained fewer members. He did modify the iron curtain that separated one household type from another, as it became evident that Italy, Southern France, and perhaps Spain did not participate in the simple household pattern, and it may be the case that Austria didn’t participate in the joint household pattern. Instead of Western Europe, then, in Hajnal’s schema you had Northwestern Europe.

LI is thinking of this in relation to an email conversation with an old friend, Professor K. K. is very Catholic, and she found the précis I sent her of the Human Limit very Protestant, in a way. Or at least she pointed out that certain of my themes, for instance, the loss of the sacred middle world, and the war on superstition, lend themselves to a Protestant vs. Catholic binary. This depressed me, since I certainly don’t want to re-invent The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

But I think I am not. Rather, it is within the refined confines of Hajnal’s map that my sense of the happiness culture incarnates itself. Beyond the Cold War traces, what Hajnal’s notion does is give us a certain demographic basis for looking at the kind of changes in emotional customs I am trying to trace - it gives us institutional correlates. And it shows an essential stress between the system of the passions and the system of the social - one that opens up certain fissures. For instance, the advance of the age of marriage is also an increase in the age of youth – youth being defined as the period before marriage. This, in turn, sets up other changes in the way the culture imagined itself, or groups within the culture imagined themselves and by inference, the culture as a whole. For instance, the process of setting marriage back seems to have made it the case that more people didn’t get married at all. It is striking that so many figures I’ve referred to – Theophile de Viau, Chamfort, Goethe, Gozzi, Hazlitt, etc. – either never married or married notoriously late in life.

The demographic story is, of course, about emotion, about the passions, and their institutionalization. It is as fundamental as any story about the system of production. The writ of Venus, here, runs as broad and wide as that of Haephestus. If you took Hajnal’s map and you superimposed upon it the happiness culture as it emerges in the 18th century – that is, the culture in which happiness exists as a threefold social phenomena and a norm against which social, political and economic arrangements are judged – you would find the one is almost equal to the other. Similarly, the resistance to the happiness culture, which was massive, a reaction against the wholesale destruction of long entrenched cultural practices, seems to come most vividly from the periphery of the simple household territory and from the joint household territory – for instance, Russia.

How We'll Miss the Golden Years of the Great Fly

LI was thinking that as the Great Fly leaves us something to remember him by – the destruction of the U.S. economy on a Katrina like scale – that it might be nice to go back and pick up comments about Bush by some of the great minds of the past eight years – you know, people like Fred Barnes, whose inspiring work, Rebel in Chief, will be read until the very heavens break, as it is to ass licking what the kamasutra was to gymnastic sex. Then, perhaps, Elizabeth Bumiller, whose analysis of Bush after the election of 2004 was spot on – the brilliance, the oratory that was so, so moving, the ideas. Perhaps scouring the WSJ in 2005, when Bush’s awesome notion that we should destroy social security was giving the country club crowd an estrus overload – in their frenzies there were understandable cases of them beating their caddies and servants, as the idea was that soon we would be reforming all the way back to Alexander II and re-institute serfdom.

But alas, as I looked back for suitable quotes, I got a little sick of the project. I suppose I have surfeiting on pure American shit over the last eight years. I couldn’t eat another mouthful.

But just when I thought sycophancy was dead – would never achieve the summits of 2003-2005, that golden time in which our leader’s words were balm that made each step lighter, and each death in Iraq more, well, fun – I read Pearlstein’s beautifully crafted D.C.-ish piece about the wonders of Hank Paulson. It has the sweep and depth of Barnes on our Rebel in Chief, and it is as contrarian as, say, Kinsley recommending that poor nations use one of their resources, ie the internal organs of their brats, and start selling them to first world nations to light a fire of free enterprise that will lift them out of poverty.

So I broke through my spell of nostalgia, realizing that yesterday's sycophants are still today's pundits! and tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow - until they've broken the very back of the country that they know, dimly, exists somewhere outside the gated community on a hill. The place the maids disappear to every evening.

the Auto-cracy - who are these suits?

NYT


As pissed as LI is about the refusal of congress to bail out the auto industry from the dragon’s horde of money already committed to the Treasury – a move of unbelievable blindness, which will undoubtedly make this a much, much worse recession – I am as pissed at the Soviet style Auto-cracy, flying on their fucking private planes to make a used car salesman’s pitch. LI supported the 25 billion as a much much better use of money than feeding it to the AIG monster. But ultimately – and the performance of the Auto-cracy shows this – the Government needs to intervene far beyond the usual American capitalist model. The upper management needs to go; the companies need to invest seriously in R and D that would, actually, provide them with a reason for existing – which, at the moment, they don’t have; environment and energy saving concerns can no longer be considered frills to be satisfied at a car show, using the model of a car that no manufacturer has any intention of building.

In fact, the entire fleet of America’s cars could, conceivably, be replaced in the next decade by cars that are much more energy efficient – and that might use different fuels – from diesel to natural gas – and that might require lighter weight chassis. Now, replacing a car that gets 17 miles to the gallon with one that makes 50 makes a lot of sense; it doesn’t make sense to replace it with one that gets 18. But this is the mentality of Detroit, which is where WWII never ended. For the Detroit design and engineering squads are dominated by the military mindset, dominated by a masculine take on driving, dominated by the idea that resources are there for our taking – it’s a gold-rush world, 24/7. What was true in 1957 is not true today.

I’ve read some joking comments on blogs that the government could just buy GM, given its stock price, for 3 billion dollars. That would be a very good idea, actually. As it looks like GM’s healthcare benefit plans are going to revert to the government anyway – one of the results of Chapter 11 – perhaps it is time to take the thing over in order to exert control over an industry that still doesn’t get it. Even if that is an improbable venture – although with the Gov calmly taking 79 percent ownership in a fuckin’ insurance company, I’m not sure why – what needs to be done tout suite is for a policy that includes the whole transportation sphere – the 400 billion in road building and road repairs, the refineries, the gas stations, the cars – and bring much needed, radical reform to it. Unfortunately, the auto industry has a high bar to entry – so if America loses its auto companies, it is not going to get them back. Instead, we are leaning to the Red State model – that is, becoming the parasite on the terminus of the production pipeline. By making huge tax cuts, Red states – who have difficulty generating enterprise because of chronic underinvestment in education, infrastructure, etc., etc. – bring in Japanese and Korean car firms, employ people at below union rates, and usually watch as those companies suck in a management corps from some state that actually gives a shit about education – hence, the phenomena of families originally from the Northeast that sprinkle the suburbs of Sunbelt cities. This isn’t just cause they like the weather – it is because the Sunbelt can’t generate that quality of human capital. If your educational system is pinned to the ever pressing problem of whether the world was created 6,000 years ago and how to coordinate your abstinence classes and your purity balls, you are going to have to find some othe entry point into the first world. When an Alabama senator like Shelby calls American auto companies dinosaurs who couldn’t compete, one has to boggle at the audacity – Alabama, notoriously, pretty much offered to pay Japanese car makers to locate there, providing tax sweeteners of a desperate, third world flavor that put it right next to Mississippi and Kentucky in the socialism for the corporations league. Mississippi, notoriously, passes bonds that it uses to buy buildings for companies it invites to site there. Since, however, all car manufacturers are going to be reeling in the next year, we will definitely see Shelby et al figuring out some way to sweeten the package for their state’s major manufacturer in one way or another.

Getting the poor to bid against each other for the privilege of being prostituted is what, after all, the ownership society is all about.

You can't guillotine the fairies

Vernon Lee was in her early twenties when she wrote her book of essays about 18th century Italy, and among them, a famous – though some say distorting – essay about Carlo Gozzi, the Venetian playwright who took Italian fairy tales and made them into theater. Gozzi did this partly just in order to get up the nose of the enlightened crowd around Goldoni. Gozzi’s plays, notably Love for three Oranges and Turandot, served as the basis for famous operas – and though I looked, I could not find other videos of this seemingly amazing performance of Prokofiev’s L’amour pour trois oranges which, I am betting, the Colonel probably saw
- and are of interest to us here at LI for ending the 18th century on a fairy note – just as it began with Perrault’s fairy tales, those most modern of ancient relics.

Lee tells a story – which is too good to be true – that Gozzi wrote The love for three oranges because he’d been driven crazy by Goldoni’s bragging about his success – and with plays that, in Gozzi’s opinions, were as dull as Diderot’s. Where was the magic? So Gozzi said “I wager that with the masks of the old comedy I will draw a greater audience to hear the story of the Love of the Three Oranges than you can with all your Ircanas and Bettinas and Pamelas!” Which, Lee contextualizes, is like saying you are going to make a theatrical hit out of Jack and the Beanstalk. But Gozzi possessed the key to great comedy- an endless flow of malice. So he wrote the play, which was a great success, drove Goldoni’s realism from the stage – in Lee’s account, at least – and wrote many more Fiabe – fables – for theater.

This is what fascinates me:

“Carlo Gozzi himself was of the opinion that the invisible world obtained some mysterious power over him from the moment of his writing the Love of the Three Oranges, and that the series of persecutions which he relates in his very quaint autobiography were due to the vengeance of the fairy world, which he had dared to bring on to the stage.”

(419)

So – diverting our attention away from the suicide theme I have been pursuing – we know our readers need a break! – let’s look at Gozzi. Whose spirit may well have been astonished by the fact that a Bolshevik artist took over his reactionary play. Although perhaps it isn’t really that surprising, since Schiller had already injected Gozzi into the stream of German romanticism. But LI hopefully has shaken up our reader’s sense that the terms reactionary/progressive, or right/left, are to be taken as rigid designators in the anthropological study of Western politics.

And this is Lee’s excellent description of Gozzi’s struggle with the invisible world:

About 1740 his combat had begun with those invisible enemies who wer to pesecute him throughout his life. Carlo Gozzi manfully determined to break the spell which hung over his family: he went about examining the Gozzi property on terra-firma; he tried to lease part of the premises; he sought for the title-deeds of bonds left by his father; but the goblins met him on all his journeys with flooded roads and broken bridges, with bugs and thieving stewards. They sent to him polyp-like tenants who never paid, scandalized the quarter by their doings, and , when legally ejected, clambered back into their former premises during the night; they inspired the Countess Gasparo Gozzi [wife of his older brother] with the happy thought of selling all the family papers and parchments to a neighboring porkshop. However, Carlo was victorious: he reclaimed the terra-firma property; he finally ejected the non-paying, disreputable tenants; he recovered, among the heaps of cheeses, the rolls of sausages, and the compact rows of ham, the venerable documents of the family; he put his younger brothers into Government offices, his sisters into convents; had the little Gasparo Gozzi swashed and shoed and stockinged; quietly shipped off the resigned philologist Gasparo and his furious poetess wife to Pordenone; and then with a few books and just sequins enough to eat meagerly and dress tidily for the rest of his days, he established himself alone in the haunted palace at S. Canziano, with his Spanish plays and his collections of Arabian and Neapolitan fairy tales. But the goblins did not let him off so easily; they delighted in pulling, pinching, twitching, and tripping him up; they led his silk-stockinged feet into every pool of water; they jolted his coffee-cup out of his hand on to every new pair of satin breeches; they enveloped him in some mysterious cloud which made people mistake him for opera directors, Greek merchants, and astronomers, and give him playful blows intended for other persons; they lost the letters addressed to him and wrote answers of which he knew nothing, so that one evening, returning travel-worn, weary, and ravenous, from Friuli, he found his own house brilliantly lit up and garlanded, filled with cooks and lacqueys, and with a crowd of masked rioters eating, drinking and dancing to celebrate the accession to the patriarchal chair of Monsignor Bragadin, whose flunkeys politely told the astonished owner of the house that he had written to give permission for the momentary annexation of his palace, and that for the three days and nights of Monsignor Bragadin’s festivities he had better retire to the nearest inn.”

Happier News for Northanger!

Since North has been unhappy about my suicide thread, I interrupt it here to link to happier news! The inside out theory of pyramid building! This is happy news to those of us with the Wiccan view that most things are backwards in this world. The old view is that the pyramids were built from the outside in, with frames and an external ramp, which is a complete, as you say, bordel de merde. Main non, say the brave band that has seen in this magnificent structure the obvious signs of an inside out job – a ramp spiraling out from the center, that would make the moving of two million 2.5-ton blocks such a snap of the fingers that voila, and you have time to make the nice biftek for dinner with the little woman. Who is always talking your ear off about this new thing, bronze, that the neighbors in the hut across the street have. Bronze bronze bronze. Good for earrings. Who gives a Hittites pet, as they say? Can’t a man get a little peace after moving two million 2.5 ton blocks?

And, best of all, my friends, my friends, the architect who has figured out the Egyptians little secret is none other than man named Jean-Pierre Houdin. Houdin! The very name is like a bell.

I hope this makes North happy.

My syphilis

The suicide note is an enlightenment genre. Werther, before he died, burnt many of his papers, and sent others to his friend Wilhelm, who – completing the exchange of friendship – then published all the notes and letters as “The Sorrows of Young Werther”. But, of course, as a man of fashion – so fashionable, in fact, that he is concerned with that the clothes he wears into the grave represent his look – Werther was not going to lose the occasion to write a last letter. And so he writes it to his “dearest one” – Charlotte.

As I’ve pointed out, love and suicide in the Sorrows of Young Werther overlap, in a way – they both are imagined in terms of circles, and those circles in turn are the forms in which something is distributed to elements that are substitutable – variable places, in fact. However, Werther’s suicide itself is told in terms not of a circle, but of a line. Werther sends his servant to borrow the pistols from Albert, Lotte’s husband, who is in a foul mood – and we do remember that among the first things Werther says in his early letters was that he could not abide a foul mood. Albert is suffering from problems at work and from Lotte’s relationship with Werther. And of course by this point he knows that Werther is a drinker who talks about suicide a lot. So what does he do? He loans the pistols. And who gives the pistols to the servant? Albert tells Lotte to take the pistols down from where they are hanging, on the wall. So the pistols pass through Lotte’s hands. She even wipes the dust from one of them. She, too, knows that Werther has talked about suicide. And she has reproached him for drinking. But she gives the pistols to the servant without saying anything to Albert. In a sense, the scene in which Lotte gives the pistols to the servant is a scene of judgment: Werther has finally been thrown outside of the circle, into which he entered knowing that Albert existed as Lotte’s fiancé.

The suicide note left by Werther is, then, a letter from a man who has been excluded, and who is about to take that exclusion and embody it in a bullet to the head. In it, he alludes to the first night he met Lotte, and the scene in which, after the counting game broke up, the two of them watched the storm out of a window and communed with each other over some verses from Klopstock. In this, Werther’s suicide note is not of the usual type:

“I step to the window, my dearest one. And look and look through the stormy clouds flying overhead at the individual stars of eternal heaven. No, you will not fall. The eternal holds you in its heart, and me.”

Studies of the suicide note first started appearing in the nineteenth century. But the modern study of the suicide note took a giant leap forward in the twentieth century, when Edwin Schneidman found files of them in the Los Angeles police department archives in 1944. Schneidman and his associate, Farberow, published a paper on the notes in 1957, using a “control” – simulations of a suicide note. The Schneidman Farberow method even has its own acronym in suicidology – the SSN (Simulated Suicide Note).

“A simulated suicide note (SSN) is a communication written by someone who is not suicidal but who has been instructed to write a note as if they were. These notes are matched according to demographic variables and compared with genuine suicide notes. Any differences that emerge are attributed to differences in suicidality and characteristics that discriminate between these two groups are warranted in any explanation of suicide.” [Understanding Suicidal Behaviour, O’Connor, 81]

Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther – LJW – could be considered an SSN. Although as has been noted, literature – that social stain which seeps through everything! – has contaminated the genuine suicide note from the beginning.

Schneidman wrote that his ideas about the suicide note have changed. At first he thought that it would do for him what dreams did for Freud – provide him with the royal road to the heart of the suicide consciousness. But over the course of time, he has moderated this view. What the simulated suicide notes brought out was the length of the genuine note, the fact that the genuine note is more often dated, and that it has more factual statements in it.

Schneidman was interested in what he called “risk writing” – that is, the relationship between writing and suicidal ‘mentation’ – and wrote a study of the "suicidal logic" of the Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide. Schneidman quotes a remark made by Pavese about his early fascination with suicide – which he first attempted at the age of 19 – as his “syphilis.” Interestingly, he had, according to Schneidman, some very highly wrought sexual relationships with women – he often felt inadequate (oh, this language! How dick and pussy are processed through the mill!) because he was impotent, or prematurely ejaculated. Pavese noted in his diary: “A man, unless he is a eunuch, can always achieve ejaculation with any woman… and a man who ejaculates too soon had better never been born. It is a failing that makes suicide worthwhile.” (August 3, 1937) That is not a pleasant thought to carry about in one’s head – besides, of course, being entirely ludicrous. But – as Kafka intuited – the higher judgments, the judgment that condemns you to death, is ludicrous in the extreme.

Schneidman is very good about this. He quotes Von Domarus and Arieti, who wrote that the patients they dealt with – schizophrenics – often mutilated logic by shifting the deductive focus in sentences from the subject to the predicate. The subject of the premises is how we understand the workings of the standard syllogism: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. But in schizo-logic, the focus shifts to the predicate. “An example: Certain Indians are swift; stags are swift; therefore, certain Indians are stags…. Another example. The Virgin Mary was a virgin; I am a virgin; therefore, I am the Virgin Mary.” Schneidman finds this kind of thinking showing up in Pavese’s diary. He uses the word catalogical – “because it destroys the logician” for this kind of thing.

“An example:

You must confess you have thought and written many banalities in your little diary these past months. I agree but is there anything more commonplace than death? A lover’s reasoning: If I were dead, she would go on living, laughing, trying her luck. But she has thrown me over and still does all those things. Therefore, I am as dead. (February 25, 1938)

The argument embedded in this paragraph contains a blatant logical error – and gets Pavese into deep trouble. He reasons himself into hopelessness: Therefore I am as {good as) dead (and might as well be really dead). It makes as much logical sense as his saying that he is Switzerland or the Virgin Mary. One has to watch carefully how one uses the word ‘therefore’..

Pavese’s catalogical reasoning style – I call this pattern of thinking catalogical because it destroys the logician – linked suffering with death, death with suicide, and therefore the presence of suffering the (the necessity of) suicide. … From clinical experience we know that committing suicide is often reduced to the need to do something – anything – to stop the flow of unbearable mental anguish.” [Schneidman, Suicide as Psychache 124-125]

To do something – this is doing without any subject. And – by catalogical inference – suicide operates here as the essence of the dread possibility that lurks at the bottom of this infinite freedom to do something else. It is symbolic of the dark side of the world of abstract labor, a world in which all connections are inessential.

The Bullet we missed

The NYT has a piece on ex Senator Phil “I love a billionaire” Gramm, whose career in the Senate is an epic of corrupt practices and a vile ideology, which all resulted in the economy we know and love today. They even, as a sidenote, print the emails that the ever irrepressible Enron people were sending each other as Gramm was passing the Enron provision in the bill barring the regulators of commodity futures from even thinking about derivatives – a provision that allowed Enron to spiral into a gigantic fraud whose clawmarks can still be spotted in California. How Beautiful! And they print his remarks on the wonders and charms of subprime mortgages, which, in the grand forgettery of the rightwing spin machine, have been tossed aside for insane fantasies about Barney Frank. Gramm is the man who was within a whisker of being the secretary of the treasury.

LI has long considered Gramm among the vilest of the vile. Here’s what we wrote in 2001:

Friday, January 04, 2002
Dope

Some further comments on Senator Torricelli's Houdini like escape from prosecution seem called for.
The question on the mind of the spectator must be: why would the Repugs go along on this deal? After all, damn Senator T with the black spot and Senator Lott will once more be the majority leader, talked to, even, by tv reporters and such.

Well, let's speculate a little bit, children. When one of D.C.'s pirates is caught with his hand in the till, very often a delicate situation arises. Because so many other pirates on the ship have been quietly amassing as much loot as their natural greed allows them. It is a tradition that goes back to the Roman senate. So if Senator T.'s skin is graciously unflayed, one looks around for who else could be outrageously vulnerable to charges of pilfering. And the eye alights on a certain Texas senator, Phil Gramm. Phil and his wonderful and rich wife, Wendy, have made quite a killing in the past decade from their association with Enron corporation, of blessed memory. There's a Public Citizen release that counts the ways Enron loved the Gramms, and the Gramms loved Enron. Consider that Wendy, high spirited free marketer that she is, was appointed by Bushie the elder to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. This is a sad sack commission ostensibly armed to police the derivatives market -- but armed like a boyscout with a peashooter facing down the Nazi Wehrmacht. Even so, you never know when some nasty regulation will actually enforce transparency on futures or options trading, the biz Enron was massively in. So our heroine, Wendy, came to Enron's rescue by exempting trading in futures contracts by Enron, in 1993. It was one of her last acts as a truly altruistic public personality, because she then resigned her chairmanship and, five weeks later, took on an entrepeneurial role on the Enron board of directors. Now, reader, you are thinking that this is merely a coincidence; and besides, boards of directors are notoriously composed of crash test dummies, rubberstamping the decisions of the CEO. But our dear Wendy also served on the Enron Audit committee (this part of her story should be scored to that all time popular hit, "Three blind mice'). So double hitting for that innovator in spot prices in power for you and me, she made off with around a million five. Hey, I'm sure that Phil was uninfluenced by that chunk of change, but you know how a loving, christian couple, in the depth of the night, abed, sometimes talks about the meaning of it all, and our redeemer's beautiful life story, and wouldn't it be nice if some properly motivated senator snuck a provision onto some bill de-regulating the power commodity markets. Probably these sweet whispers were in vain, given Phil adamantine integrity, but maybe something, well, unconscious kicked in, cause golly, Phil did muscle in the bill Enron wanted. For good Laissez Faire reasons, no doubt.

Yes, the money rolls in, but Phil's ambitions no longer play out on the national level, and his mind has turned to contemplating the blank verse of The Prelude or something -- those sweet retirement thoughts. But still, with Enron falling apart this year with a speed and desperation much like that of the East German government in 1989, the Gramms probably also had some heart to hearts about those pesky laws constraining politicians from accepting bribes in too public and outrageous a fashion -- laws which, as we all know, are stronger in the spirit than the letter, but still... Maybe it is time to fold your tent and creep home, with the couple millions of Enron bucks under your belt or in your portfolio to watch over you in the golden years. This will no doubt be used by invidious nabobs of negativism to explain why Phil gave a press conference on September 2 announcing his retirement from the Senate, even though he had amassed a 4 million dollar reelection warchest.

Warms your heart, doesn't it, reader? And so maybe Senator T gets traded for Senator G. in the game. We are not of course suggesting anything so cynical went down in D.C. in reality. In reality, all Senatorial transactions are motivated by the unwavering patriotism of the members of that hallowed chamber. All Limited Inc is doing is, well, muddying the waters. Spewing negativism. Speculating, as is our wont, in an idle and destructive manner.


Here’s what we wrote in 2002:

Monday, October 07, 2002
Remora

Isn't this sweet? Outgoing senator Phil Gramm -- that's what all the news releases say -- is set to join UBS Warburg:



ABC News announces it in the easy tones that embody the flow of senatorial personage to business personage and back:

"Senator Phil Gramm will soon become vice chairman of UBS Warburg, the investment banking arm of Switzerland's biggest bank, UBS Warburg said on Monday.Gramm, who will take up the private sector post when his Senate term ends later this year, follows a well trodden path of key legislators who join top Wall Street firms. Gramm has been in Congress for 24 years, and co-authored far reaching legislation in 1999 that repealed a prohibition on companies offering banking, brokerage and insurance operations under one roof."

Curiously, nobody connects a few dots. So Limited Inc will take up the pencil. How about this?

1. Wendy Gramm serves on the board of Enron. Preceding this nice little sinecure, she sits on the Commodities and Futures Commission and gives Enron a nice little waiver to embark upon its energy trading business without any pesky federal regulation. After eight years and about 600 thousand dollars, Wendy, on the Accounting committee of the Enron board no less, is shocked, shocked to learn that the company has been looted as thoroughly as the Russian looted Berlin, circa 1945.

2. But as that looting is drawing near its close, certain high up personages in Enron have not wholly given up the idea that, in the last moment, they can lick the spoons. Greg Whalley, among this seedy crew, is operating, supposedly, as Enron's President. It is his decision to reach in the piggy bank and award compensatory amounts up to a million dollars a piece for the people who are sitting at Enron's energy trading desk -- which, you'll remember, was made possible by Wendy Gramm's fortuitous waiver. He justifies these awards by going on about necessary personel, and the need to keep them from jumping ship. Of course, he doesn't allude to the vulgar fact that the energy trading desk has been losing money hand over fist. Or that the compensation comes directly out of the hide of the older workers in the gas pipes division -- yokels all.

"A top Enron executive wrongfully allowed employees who stayed with the company to cash deferred-compensation claims worth at least $32 million, while denying similar payments to former employees, legal experts say. And the experts said one-time Enron Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley may well be personally liable for the payments distributed in October and November. A lawyer for Whalley recently told the Chronicle that his client had allowed dozens of company executives to cash out their deferred-compensation plans because they were still "providing value" to Enron. But retirees and other ex-employees who sought to cash out at the same time, or earlier, did not get approval."

3. Well, what is a hardworking president to do? Got to keep the energy section going until you can sell it, and yourself with it, to some lucky company. And guess who that company is, sweethearts? Why it is UBS Warburg: here's the announcement, dated February of this year, in Computerworld.

"A wholly owned subsidiary of London-based UBS Warburg, which is itself the investment banking subsidiary of Swiss bank UBS AG, the re-formed energy exchange has acquired Enron's gas and power trading IT infrastructure, its intellectual property and 625 of its former employees (see story).

"When the sale was finalized [Feb. 8], those people became UBSWenergy employees," said company spokeswoman Jennifer Walker. Most notable in the group is former Enron President and Chief Operating Officer Greg Whalley, who rose to that position in August after former Enron President Jeff Skillings left unexpectedly."

4. And so now Senator Gramm, the honorable Senator Gramm, who seems to have slipped through this awful mess that must have, just must have been caused by government regulation (ask the guys who write the editorials for the Wall Street Journal) with his wonderful wife Wendy by his side, unbowed by her experience and comforted, perhaps, by that half a mil she earned for two weeks work a year, is headed, by coincidence, for the refuge of the high end final Enron looters. Quelle coincidence! Not that we are accusing anybody of striking a deal, especially not good old dirty fingered, corrupt, cheating, lying, stealing, black hearted, selfish, conniving, worthless Phil Gramm -- as we like to call him, jokingly, in Texas. We simply think that it is, indeed, a small world after all, and one in which Phil simply keeps running into people he's helped out, and who want to help him out in turn.

The Modern way to commit Suicide

“In 1718, at Chateau-Gontier, a young pregnant girl having poisoned herself, the cadaver, from the time of the beginning of the trial, was exhumed and imprisoned in a jail”. Then it was dragged, head down, through the streets of the village, hung by its feet, and at last “placed on a bonfire and reduced to ashes.” I don’t know of another case where the penalty of burning was applied. The sentence of Chateau-Gontier specified that the ashes would be thrown to the wind and the child would be, before this, extracted from the cadaver to be buried with the stillborns.

The is even examples of condemnation in cases of suicide attempts. In 1777, the Journal of Paris told the story of a man who, having tried to hang himself, was condemned to the galleys for life and was only acquitted on appeal. Voltaire, in the Philosophical Dictionary, speaks of a man who, having “made several light cuts on himself with a knife, like the charlatans, in order to obtain some recompense”, was condemned to be hung by a decree of Parliament.”

Bayet, Le Suicide et le morale, 632.

LI has been reading Georges Minois’ History of Suicide with mixed feelings. Minois is very good at gathering together sources. But his comments are very flatheaded. I’m using it mostly to poke around in the references. But the information in the Minois book does pose some puzzles if you are interested in suicide as the manifestation of something deeper going on in a culture. For instance, Minois uses the work of Guy Barreau on suicides in Brittany during the 18th century. Barreau maintains that the records show that women account for five times more suicides than men. That is truly unusual – men almost always outnumber women as suicides, usually by a considerable amount. Another striking statistical fact comes via a survey of suicides in England between 1541 and 1799. Children under 14 account for the highest percentage of suicides, an amazing 30 percent. Minois’ notion is that, at least in the eighteenth century, this might reflect the truly horrendous conditions of apprentices and working children. Even in the list of Breton suicides, many of them are young, and are described like this:

29 November 1769. A young girl of fifteen, Francoise Royer, drowned herself at Fougeres. She had for some tie been abused by her mother, who sent her out to beg, gave her hardly enough to eat, threw her out into the street in the middle of the night calling her a whore, and beat her with a stick. The mother showed no sorrow at her daughter’s death: It’s the devil who broke her neck, but she’s over seven, she isn’t under my care anymore… There she is, the great she-devil, she was looking for trouble and she found it… She’s a wretch, she told me so. It’s the evil spirit that whipped her.”

Blake’s Little Black boy among the snow/crying weep weep in notes of woe came from the very heart of the people.
…
It is suicide and love that unweave the net woven by reason and sympathy. The net in which we are caught.

…

Look at how Durkheim sorts his suicides. One sees, in the categories, glimmers of Tocqueville, particularly the analysis of American society. This is the egoist suicide:

“The more the groups to which he belongs are enfeebled, the less he depends on them, the more, in consequence, he stands on his own two feet in order not to recognize other rules of behavior than those which are founded on his own private interest. If, thus, one agrees to call egoism this state where the individual I affirms itself with excess in the face of the social I and at the expense of the latter, we can give the name egoi8st to the particular type of suicide that results from unlimited individuation.” Book ii, 69

Contrasted to Altruistic suicide:

“Thus, in all these cases [of warriors and widows sacrificing themselves], if a man kills himself it is not because he has seized that right for himself, but, which is very different, because he has a duty to do it. If he fails this obligation, he is punished by dishonor, and also, most often, by religious chastisements.” [77]

In Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides (anomy, egoism, altruism, fatalism), it is obvious that the modern suicides fall under the anomy and egoism side, and the pre-moderns under the altruism and fatalism side. Yet, his statistics irritatingly refuse to give us a neat pattern, in which the modern simply succeeds the premodern. Instead, it lurks within the modern structures. Its dread name is woman – for women, in Durkheim’s statistics, stubbornly refuse to commit suicide for reasons of anomy and egotism, and commit suicide, after being all too integrated into the social, for reasons of altruism and fatalism. To explain this, Durkheim even has to allude to biology – not a very Durkheimian gesture. Women must have more primitive brains then men. That must be it.

However, Durkheim did not have good stats on suicide attempts. I wonder what he would have made of them? Esquirol was one of the first to distinguish suicides from suicide attempters, and estimated the suicide attempters as forty percent of the suicide total. In actuality, or at least in contemporary actuality, there are about three times as many attempters as successful suicides, and the majority of attempters are women.

Durkheim’s quadrivium of suicides is suggestive in another way, too – it ties into the imperial perspective. For the altruistic/fatalistic suicides are primitive, and when we find them, we can be sure the society is unhealthily laggard. From the suttee to the kamikaze pilot to the suicide bomber, this perspective still holds. The other/enemy still horrifies by being so imprisoned in the chains of feudalism, from which we have long ago liberated ourselves. Meanwhile, in the shadows cast by this structure, the altruistic/fatalistic type lurks. Every SAC bomber crew in the Cold War was expected, if the call came, to attack even knowing that the chance of survival was minimal – close to what the truck bomber might expect. Yet we never called this our suicide squadron. In fact, during the Cold War, it was often recognized, as a metaphor, that the missile policies of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were thinly disguised suicide threats. It was, in fact, writ large, the cutter’s fantasy, the bulemic’s fantasy.

…
One other note. According to Minois, the suicide letter was a mainly eighteenth century invention. Of course, this is partly due to the spread of literacy. But, Minois thinks, it is also due to the spread of secularization – more and more, the afterlife was not thought of in terms of heaven and hell. It was a vaguely pleasant place where one met one’s loved ones again (the idea that there was no giving or taking of wives and husband in the Kingdom of God – that radically anti-family idea from the radically anti-family Jesus – had long bit the dust), but just in case, one wanted to get in a word or two posthumously.