here we are now - interchange us

This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:

The observations that I will add in the following concern these contact and luminal surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs. And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished by the movies, which did it in three decades.”

As is so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom; of nemesis perched on the apocalyptic battlements. His reference is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge, killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained. Here we are now, entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained – these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end. 

post-dogma

 

Commentaire, the French magazine (a thick journal, to use the Russian phrase), was founded on the idea that communism in France, and more generally Marxism, required gravediggers. The last phrase of the Cold War was, intellectually, a mop up operation, destroying the utopias of the postwar years in the “West” – as the loose coalition of nation states, from Germany to Australia, were called by the Cold Warriors. The name and concept was wrested out of a conservative historiography that had left its sad mark in Germany. The “West” of course called for an “East” – and in due time a South and a North.

I’ve been reading its back pages, and came upon Jacques Revel’s introduction to a rather obscure French philosophe of the early 19^th century, Theodor Jouffroy (1796-1842), whose essay, How Dogmas Finish, had a little cult following of rather disparate figures since it was published in The Globe on May 24, 1825:  Sainte-Breuve, Louis Aragon, and a communist clique that included Andre Thirion.  Jouffroy’s essay is an attempt, after the restauration, to sort out the good and the bad from the French revolution and, in general, the modernisation of the 18^thcentury. It is a project that attracted the great Liberals of the 19^thcentury, with Jouffroy’s essay striking notes that one hears, as well, in John Stuart Mill’s much more famous essay on Coleridge. For Revel, of course, the “dogma” in Jouffroy’s title – an obvious reference to the Church – was applicable to communism in the 20^th century. As Communism, according to the Cold War liberals, was the heir of the negative side of the French revolution, one wanted a history to show how it went so wildly bad – how it became the God that failed. The mopping up operation in the 1980s, when the failure of communism, embodied in the Soviet Union, was pretty much a given on all sides, required some larger historiographic framework. Of course, the framework at hand, totalitarianism versus authoritarianism (the latter justifying putting Pinochet’s Chile, the junta’s Argentina, the death squads of El Salvador and the dictatorship in South Korea and Taiwan in the “Free world” camp), was being given a good workout by the Americans. Yet it did not accord enough energy to classical liberalism.

Theodore Jouffroy is recognizably a contemporary of Stendhal – his French has that malleable structure, like, famously, Napoleon’s letters to the troops. The thesis Jouffroy pursues is about the “post-truth” era of a systematic belief system begins the process of the system’s loss of power – its hold on the masses. This elevates the intellectual to a high place, one in which the discovery of truth, for instance, about the facts of the Christian religion, leads from desire for truth itself to a strategic power position in a society whose rulers want those facts obscured.

“… if the beliefs by which power lives and reigns are destroyed, power will fall with them, and with power those who held it; the power will pass to new doctrines; it will be exercised by their partisans; in a word, the revolution of ideas will bring in its train a complete revolution in interests; everything that is will find itself threatened by everything that will be.”

Jouffroy accords a strong place, in his schema, to ridicule and mockery. Here I think his essay still has a certain pertinence. In the era of media penetration of all spheres of private life, mockery and ridicule have a political potency that has not been properly theorized. John Stuart Mill was too English to go here. In French culture, however, ridicule has a strong place in the mix of reasons to hold a belief. To welcome ridicule is the move of either a saint or a fool. Ridicule arisesas a consequence of the subtle detachment of passion from belief. To belief passionately becomes ridiculous. This is the trap set by the philosophe for the devout. It is a dangerous trap, however, since it can catch the philosophe as well – after all, why be so passionate about the truth as to set about discovering it? “Thus the people despair of the truth. They only see tricksters around them. They become defiant towards all, and think that in this world the unique business is to be as little miserable as possible; and that it is crazy to lend an ear to the beautiful discourse and big words of the truth, of justice, of human dignity; that religion and morality are only means to catch them and to make them serve projects that hardly touch them. They become skeptical about everything, save their own interest; and passing from indifference for every dogma and for every party, that value as best only that which costs them least.”

The social costs of enlightenment – a theme that we are riding down in our own era of dying dogmas.

Jouffroy's essay was translated in the 1840s by George Ripley. His Ethics was translated by Emerson's friend, William Channing. I'm sure that Emerson comments in his Journals about Jouffroy somewhere. 

 

 

The Clock Repairman's gesture

 
In his essay, A kaddish for Austria: On Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald zeroes in on a bit of personal trivia (one of those bits that operate as signatures of some nameless process) that he gets from Roth’s biographer:

“Bronsen reported that Roth collected clocks randomly; and that fooling with clocks in his final years grew into a mania. What fascinated Roth with clocks was condensed into his last piece of published prose in the first weekend of April, 1939  in the Pariser Tageszeitung.”
The essay – one of those feuilleton of which Roth was one of the great masters – was entitled “At the clock repairs shop.” Sebald takes the piece as revelatory of something essential in Roth’s conception of the artist – or storyteller:

„Thus he sat, like the clock repairman, with a magnifying glass stuck in place before his eye, and looed into the broken wonderwork of wheels and gears, “as if he gazed through a blackframed hole into a distant past”. The clock repairman’s hope, like that of the writer, ist that by a small turn of the wrist [durch einen winzigen Eingriff] he can bring everything back to the beginning to restart it all in its correctly intended order.”

That’s a powerfully nostalgic and hopelessly anachronistic image of the power of the writer. Especially given the historical circumstances in Paris at the time, the Paris in which Roth was drinking himself to death, sensing the mass death to come. Our own sense of the mass death to come has now been sucked into the mass media and banalized as a zombie apocalypse, which is also, in its way, something Roth foresaw – or rather saw about his own time. In an essay that Michael Hoffman has not, I believe, englished, “Self-critique”, from 1929, Roth described his realism as the realism of the irrealism of his time – a time in which the self has hollowed itself out. The artistic response to this, Roth wrote, was to bring the reader face to face with that most difficult of all things to represent: boredom. The essay begins on a typically hard to measure sentence: “It is in some ways painful to deal with an extraordinarily good writer, such as myself, without severity and blame.” Roth goes on to say that his book, Right and Left, has hardly any beginning, really no end, has no characters and no psychology. It is not that he feels that there are no books with beginnings, ends, characters and psychology – the 19^th century epic novel up to Proust has them – but Roth believes that this is no longer possible in the world in which he and the reader exist. The substance of the reader’s grandparents is of a different type from the substance-lessness of his contemporaries.

„But I have attempted – on the contrary – to produce in my reader a certain feeling of boredom, which is a necessary consequence of linguistic precision and the effort to portray the hollowness of the present not convexly, not to present the insubstantability of our contemporaries as “tragic” or “daemonic” but instead to precisely mirror the hopelessness of this world.”

One could say that Roth is enjoying a little too much his stay at the Hotel Grand Abyss. He was a man who knew Europe’s hotels, eventually making his circuit of the sleaziest among them. Still, there is something in the connection between boredom and Roth’s sense of the impending pogram. Perhaps the boredom is the necessary preface. It is a boredom that emerges from the planned system of excitement, which had its model, in the twenties, in the hypermodernity of Berlin. And which is now our wonderful world.

Or so says one mood. Another mood is: fuck that. Expropriate that boredom. Use it against the military-industrial perpetual entertainment complex. Stand up.

Deep (trance) state

My latest cold war story. The whole thing is at Medium, here. I fear this story might be too long and too disconnected to all but CIA mooks. But I had to write it as it jazzed outta me. I'm a victim of my muse.

 - You begin by drawing circles around names. You draw lines connecting these circles. You make the lines into arrows. In this way, you build up a profile, a diagram, a secret history. Everyone is interested in a secret history. Secret, put it in the subtitle, market the fuck out of it. That history is like the aether in physics, it fills up the space of history, it mediates between events, mysteries, cases, disappearances, suicides, cries in the asylums, the low watt shadows in solitary. You sit in Langley, to which you have moved from the old hq in D.C., and you are James Angleton, piecing together the great conspiracies over time and place, putting your finger on Nosenko, the false defector, the one you have always expected. Or you are Mark Lane, in a London Hotel, feeling the heat coming in from Swingin’ London, becoming a celebrity yourself just like Paul McCarthy, who had actually called you up on the phone, half satisfied/half afraid that you were finally sticking it to the man on a big scale, leafing through eyewitness testimonies and notes gathered from the Citizens Committee of Inquiry. You are overlaying discrepancy on discrepancy, feeling that the Warren Commission’s tropism towards a predetermined conclusion is itself a clue. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald tells the reporters. A slogan for our time. The conspiracy theorists out in the street, among the hippies, paranoids in the Movement and beyond, were in a parallel universe to those others in offices at 2430 E Street Northwest, the great Manichean fifties, where everything was an association, an informants tip, a hint at the greater picture of Communist conspiracy. The officers looking at the “brainwashing” of American troops in Korea, or Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest. The ones collecting files from Wehrmacht Intelligence, 1941–1945. Hiring experts in interrogation, behavioural control. The ones who did the experiments at Dachau. The ones who developed toxins at Auschwitz. The scientists from Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bring them to America, set up labs, tap their knowledge. It was war.

- Everything after World War II was a war. The war on cancer. The war on poverty. The war on communism. The war of circles and connecting arrows.

- “On the subject of being noticed, there is an inverse point that should be noted. At times tricksters have reason to credit, or accuse, some imaginary person with what has been done. A natural mistake is to describe someone of a form, and of actions, which are unusual and striking. It usually is easy to ascertain that no such person has been in the vicinity. The proper description will be of a person average in size and coloring and normal in features, but — and this is a very essential point-having some minor oddity such as the first joint missing of the little finger of the left hand, or a large mole close behind his right ear.”

Goodbye Mr. Thornhill, whoever you are.” — North by Northwest.

2.

- “It wasn’t felt necessary really to go into a lot of detail as to exactly how they were handling the subjects. In general, patients would be of low interest.”

- The man I am after: M.A. and his “derogatory associations”. The face, the voice, the experience, the traveller and desk hound under so many redacted documents. I go into the documents I can find, the ones online, the ones released. I go into the books, in which the stories grow stale, the referent tugs free from the reference, haunts the dreams of the abused. His hasty entrances and puzzling exits, his presence at the fringe of recovered memory. I go to the State Department directory for 1945 to get my bearings.

- M.A. — “b. Washington, D.C., Mar. 6, 1910; Central High Sch. Grad.: Devitt Prep Sch. Grad.: George Washington U., 1927–1940; with U.S. Govt., 1929–1938; investigator, Civil Ser. Commn., 1938–43; U.S. Navy, 1943–46, lt., overseas service; app. Asst. security officer, CAF-12, in the Dept. of State Mar. 12, 1946; married. — CON.” Slots light up on the board. This guy.

- He emerges into the light in small ways, in out of the way places, but his life, his profile, is sketchy at best. GWU — 1927–1940? Really? How is he with the U.S. Govt. all of this time as well? I have the GWU yearbooks, 1934–1938. I search, I find his picture in the Hatchet. Did he know Bob Bannerman, also at GWU in those years? Bob, his boss at State, his boss at the CIA. Bob, though, wasn’t a presence. He was never chaplain of his frat. He doesn’t seem to have had a frat. Went to night classes there.

- The photographs that exist in the old D.C. papers — they are of the “juvenile dancer”, the prodigy from the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school. Specialty: the cymbal dance. Dressed up as a young Russian — or Cossack.

- D.C. is a small town. Among those donating money to the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school: Mrs. Allen Macy Dulles, mother of Allen Dulles. M.A. enters into the Dulles circle early.

3.

- What did the Agency psychologists make of the childhood? A dancer, this kid. And the sexual connotations thereof. Not your refined Ivy League type, not your beefy FBI type, but of a kind generally unmentioned in the literature — the D.C. type, the GWU type, the type whose father or uncle or mother is in government service. It is as natural to a D.C. kid as coal mining is to a kid in Marshall County West Virginia. But behold, such zigzag routes!

- His dad, Emmet his Mom Una calls him, his dad gets his law degree in Iowa, where he no doubt met Una. He does some post-grad work in Michigan. He gets the call to go to Washington D.C., where he gets a position at Treasury. Or is it Labor? The couple get a house, Emmet calls it their “villa”, out on the Northeast edge of the District. Where the streetcar tracks, newly laid down, promise to solve the problem of getting downtown. Una has her Daughters of the American Revolution projects, her church projects. Emmet makes small investments on the side.

- In 1952, M.A. has moved from the sketchy Project Bluebird (was it all about torturing informers, double agents, communists for what info load they could lay down?) to Project Artichoke. What was Artichoke? Department heads were asking. Some wanted a piece of the pie, some were disturbed by what they heard from their people in the field. A Doctor, no less, was sent in by Technical Services — Ray Treichler’s domain — to assess Artichoke. The assessment that came back was scathing. “[redacted], the present team chief, is an investigator of twenty years experience with Civil Service. He has been thoroughly trained in the use and limitation of the polygraph, received four days of instruction from a professional non-M.D. hypnotist in New York City, and has read extensively in the overt material on hypnosis. He has had no scientific background other than that that dealt directly with his work in criminology. He has had extensive contact with the communists in this country and knows their methods. It is not known whether he has a college degree.

“He is not an unusually intelligent man but has a vivid imagination that would be most valuable in the pursuit of this project. He has on several occasions created antagonism in his co-workers because of tactless management. He tends to be cautious and cons3ervative. His long government service has soundly grounded him in the ramifications of intra-Agency politics.” I read this assessment with a pang for M.A. “It is not known whether he has a college degree.” The old farts, retired, often complained of the kind of Ivy League snobbery they bore the brunt of. An image of the multi-lingual, dashing espionage agent, for public consumption. M.A. is not even dashing — cautious and conservative. A Joe Friday. A Dragnet cop.

“He has apparently become a rather able hypnotist, but is hampered in his efforts by his lack of confidence which it is felt stems from his scientific void.”

“It is suggested that the Medical Office with the support of I&SO recommend [sic] that a high-level control of the project be set-up, to consist of civilians with no service affiliation, who are scientifically well-qualified, and who would be full time, to coordinate, evaluate and direct the ARTICHOKE PROJECT.”

- His star routine as an Indian dancer, performed in the Hoffman-Hoskins Kiddies Revue in Washington D.C. at the age of 13. Performed in New York City, where he won a prize for his age class. At that time, Gertrude Hoffmann herself called him “one of the most clever juvenile dancers in America.” But our childhood is an elaborate cut-out, no? It passes, interest wanes, a few pictures (b & w) are put in the album, which falls from the hands of M.A.’s mother, Una, sitting in her cane chair on 131 R street in 1934, dying. “I don’t feel well, Emmet”, she says. But Emmet is always out. He’s got his fingers, or his clumsy hands, in pies. Developing land in the suburbs. Retired from the stats department under Hoover. Her boy at the time was dating that girl named Dotty, whose family seemed nice — but could they trace their heritage back to one of Iowa’s premier pioneers? Back to the Revolution? A DAR girl. Marry a DAR girl, Emmet would say to their son, at the dinner table, big jovial wink. Una dies, and M.A. marries, a year later, in Baltimore.

• Dot: her childhood house on T. Street. Did she meet M.A. when he was fourteen, struggling with pimples and sexual urges, at the streetcar stop, the Eckington Station. Getting off at 13th street, still a little afraid entering the world of Central High. Or was it later?

The prisoner of cool

 

 

I’ve always believed that you will only see a culture in its totality, see it thoroughly, sees its wonders and damage, when you go through the cracks.

 

I don’t know where this belief comes from. Perhaps it is a vestige of the New Testament I was taught in Sunday School. It severely underestimates the effects of going through the cracks – this I know from experience. Most often, instead of trying to understand the culture you spend that experience counting your pennies and looking for cheap intoxicants, Going through the cracks is terrifying, and terror is not conducive to collecting the forces of your spirit and understanding the mechanics of the great wheel of fortune that is crushing your bones. Splinter and crack, splinter and crack.

 

Nevertheless, the theory is not wholly flawed. A culture’s vision of itself is manufactured by those paid to manufacture such visions – follow the money and you will soon find that the mass of our images and understandings attach to the advertisement for reality these people manufacture, often in all sincerity. This is the vision from the gated community, from the Eloi and their children. It has long been stuffed down my throat good and proper.  I’m no longer the Morlock I once was, but I know I am made, essentially, of mud, and am not going to rise much higher. The Eloi will forever be out of my grasp.

 

Politically, we are supposed to believe that these issues can be understood by a simple dualism between left and right. I lost that illusion in the 00s, at least. To understand the culture when you are going through the cracks, your best guide is to follow your instinct and think of the culture as a many-splendored thing, for which you have to make up categories in your own home or hole.

 

What struck me in the Bush era wass how, instead of a left opposition, in America, you have an opposition that is the prisoner of cool. Cool has taken the place of ‘respectability’ as the ‘moral civilization’ in which all move in lockstep, even those who have some contempt for the images projected by the Eloi.

 

It is a long, strange trip for cool. At one point, in the fifties, cool came in a binary: its opposite was square. Square, now, is one of those words that can only be quoted, never said straight. It is all too reference laden with a certain ersatz Hollywood swinging culture – a culture that seems more improbable than the culture of Edwardian England or the fictional Mad Max cultures of the apocalypse.

 

Square, of course, stood in for the respectable back in the early era of cool – which would make cool its negation. And it is in this vein that the change from respectability was actually interpreted. Robert Erwin, in a 1983 essay, What Happened to Respectability, assessed the changes of the 60s and 70s in terms of a wholesale decline in the forms of the culture that used to add up to respectability, and the triumph of the informal – a dialectic that he captures by contrasting Nixon and Saturday Night Live. Incredibly enough, in 1983 Erwin could plausibly present the rather pallid vaudeville of Saturday Night Live as a sort of revolutionary symbol of a change in mass behavior.

 

|”The degree to which the ideal [of respectability] was internalized also indicates its strength. Richard Nixon seems classic as well as villainous when he wears a suit, pressed and buttoned, to board a private airplane. Elliott Gould seems only show-biz carbonated when, smiling sweetly and wearing a ratty football jersey, he tells a national television audience that he is glad to host “Saturday Night Live” because the progam, in his words, “has balls.” You cannot imagine, Class of 1975, what a fright, embarrassment and hostility Gould’s breaking of a taboo would have triggered in the heyday of respectability. Millions upon millions of ‘dent’ people in 1860 or 1960 went from one year to the next rarely speaking, hearing or reading such words in the open.”

 

Erwin, I think, mistakes a shifting of exterior symbols for a change in substance. What he was watching, I think, was the absorption of cool into a new domain of servitude – the servitude inherent in the service economy – rather than a true Bastille moment. Gould’s audience, perhaps, could not imagine a figure like Father Coughlin, in the 30s, casually talking down Jews on national radio time, or the kind of dialect humor that was omnipresent in the Gilded Age and right up to the 1950s. This is not to say that the shifting of terms was insignificant – it is merely to say that in the shift from formal to informal, from an ideal of respectability to an ideal of cool, the contradiction traversed was shallow.

 

2.

The January 1, 1951 of Commentary carried an article by Anatole Broyard entitled KEEP COOL, MAN: The Negro Rejection of Jazz. In the corner of the article, there was a little bio of Broyard:  “Anatole Broyard, anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world, here lays open the deeper meaning of the injuction to “be cool, man” now current in Harlem music-making.” The ambiguity of being the anatomist of the Negro personality in a white world trailed Broyard around throughout his life.  He was a pale skinned man, apparently, and though he did not call himself white, there was a rumor that he ‘passed’ as white. Race, that chopping block in American culture! Broyard was, it is said, the figure that Phillip Roth referenced with his character Coleman Silk in The Human Stain. Roth himself denied it, in a strange “letter” to Wikipedia, where this rumor was referred to as fact.

 

Whether Broyard presented himself as black – whatever that means – or had some responsibility to do so is wrapped up in the white supremacist subtext of the American dream: one that it is difficult to drain out of that dream without popping it entirely. However it is certain that he wrote a lot about black culture for magazines like Commentary, who accepted him as a “guide” – setting up one of those informant-explorer relationships that always come to a bad end, unless you have the genius to understand how to make the joke and slip the yoke, like Ralph Ellison.

 

Broyard’s essay is notable for appearing about the time that the notion of “cool” was slipping into the vocabulary of a certain white subculture, after circulating in a black sub-culture. For Broyard, the concept marks a certain loss of innocence. Broyard’s essay supposes, again and again, an equation between negro and primitive – meaning, positively, an innocent autonomy, and meaning, negatively, a certain essentialist imprisonment in which “civilization” is seen as the corruption of this innocence. The boundary at which innocence trucks with corruption is music – particularly jazz.

 

“In this period, Negro popular culture began to incorporate into its body proper certain elements of white society, drawn for the most part from the less favored ethnic and economic groups… Their incorporation as spectator, participant and devotee served to further split the consciousness of Negro popular culture. The Negro became increasingly aware of his role as creator and performer. He himself however  was still the subject matter of his performance. His music – in lyrics and feeling – remained autobiographical and continued to express his reactions to his situation.”

 

The fifties was the heyday of the Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship – you can call it the Partisan Review effect, or at least I will call it that, ho ho. It turns up all over as the master trope to understand American society, and particularly, for obvious reasons, America’s system of apartheid. This is the context in which music and civil rights and oppressions background the formation of an existential attitude. That attitude takes the term “cool” as its own master-trope. Jazz, in Broyard’s view, is terminally anchored to “hotness”, which in turn has become, after the moment of spectatorship by a curious white sub-class – one that is marked as deviant by its very interest in black culture – a property lost, an innocence that could no longer be sustained. In the moment of that gaze, hotness turns to jive.

 

There is a lot of futurity in Broyard’s essay, themes that continue – through Mailer’s The White Negro – into the sixties and into the Black Power movement itself. My view is that the imprisoning idea of “cool” comes out of this image of an innocence that is corrupted in the moment of its consumption, which is less history than a nostalgic substitute for history. Here's Broyard pursuing his thesis: “Bebop, which began in the mid-40s, was the expression of the Negro’s search for new material in this period. It was the improvised interpretation of experience of the Negro musician as immigrant in white society. Because he was a foreigner, it was a kind of gibberish.”

 

The idea that he was a “foreigner” is a product less of the real economic and social situation of apartheid – for this foreigner was, actually, a laborer and consumer in the system, and had made the system work from the very beginning not as an immigrant but as a kidnapped hostage – than  of the magic of the image of the master-slave relationship, which seemed to explain so much about racism while relying on highly abstracted essential types that could not explain the reality of a person like, say, Anatole Broyard.

 

3.

So much for cool’s background. The problem with the history of concepts is the same problem that the cowboy faces on the plain – how to move the doggies forward. In other words, how did cool transform from an existential attitude into an imprisoning trivialization of affect? Which is, you might say, sharp eyed reader, a transformation of Broyard’s myth – the fall from innocence leading us to the corruption of the present. The story surely has to do with the attractiveness of “cool” in a postwar consumer society, in which “like” and “dislike”, those responses to the handcrafted, are elevated quantitatively to responses to the mass produced. The time to like, that is, the education of the sensibility that creates a patterned liking and disliking that signifies something about character, becomes something hard to resource. Where is one going to get this time, and how is one going to afford that education? Out of this dilemma, I think, comes the solution imposed by the ”cool”. Imported from the “stranger”, the black entertainer/artist, it goes out there as a short-cut to the sentimental education that is overwhelmed by consumer culture. Which Broyard lays out in racial terms that are pretty marvelously put. I’ll finish with this paragraph about “cool music”, or jazz beyond the swing era, and its tragic flaw:

 

“The circular quality of cool music is unmistakable. The orchestrations and the solos turn back on themselves as a result of the “cool” musician’s lack of interest in the autobiographical continuities which served as program, mood or configurations of jazz, jump or wing. The circle is the most self-contained form in nature, and thus, in cool music, nothing obtrudes, the effect is zero. The supporters of this music might argue that all music- i.e. “classical” “serious, nonfolk music – is tautological or equal only to itself, but their own habit of interpreting cool music and describing the musicians’ attitudes in psychological terms would contradict this. In other words, this zero is attitudinal, not an aesthetic effect. It is the cool man’s answer to the difficult algebraic problems of the marginal man’s place in society.”

 

The algebraic problems! The problem, I guess, of the variable that represents a number which itself varies according to the formula that gives the variable its value. Now that is something for the marginal man to ponder. Un-coolly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a poem by Weldon Kees

 A poem by Weldon Kees, which is pertinent to our present situation, with all the warmalarky being drummed out by the media vis a vis Russia, China, etc. When of course we should be stripping the Pentagon of the vast majority of its funding and using that funding to solve the problem of climate change, no less. The Aztecs used to keep up their social order by staging battles, the Spanish reported. These "flower wars" were arranged so that the proper blood sacrifices would bring fertility to the earth. Georges Bataille was fascinated by this ethnological tidbit.

"The priests killed their victims on top of the pyramids. They would stretch them over a stone altar and strike them in the chest with an obsidian knife. They would tear out the stillbeating heart and raise it thus to the sun. Most of the victims were prisoners of war, which justified the idea of wars as necessary to the life of the sun: Wars meant consumption, not conquest, and the Mexicans thought that if they ceased the sun would cease to give light."

Bataille's account is usefully contrasted with this New York Timesaccount of the drone assassination system. The article focuses on a drone strike in West Mosul, which entailed a meeting of officials to sign off on:

"They had also concluded that there was no civilian presence within the target compound. Though the surveillance video had captured 10 children playing near the target structure, the military officials who reviewed this footage determined the children would not be harmed by a nighttime strike because they did not live there: They were classified as “transient,” merely passing through during daylight hours."

After which, behold, the drone came: 

"Across town, Ali Younes Muhammad Sultan, Sawsan’s father, heard the news from his brother. Everyone at the dinner had been killed: Zeidan and his wife, Nofa; Araj, Ghazala and their four children; Zeidan’s adult son Hussein, Hussein’s wife and their six children; Zeidan’s adult son Hassan, Hassan’s wife and their two children; and Sawsan, their own beloved daughter. Sultan and his wife went to the hospital where Sawsan’s remains were taken.

“If it weren’t for her clothes, I wouldn’t have even known it was her,” he later told me. “She was just pieces of meat. I recognized her only because she was wearing the purple dress that I bought for her a few days before. It’s indescribable. I can’t put it into words. My wife — she didn’t even know whether to go to her daughter, or the rest of the family first. It is just too hard to describe. We’re still in denial and disbelief. To this day, we cannot believe what happened. That day changed everything for us.”

America (United States of) has refined the flower wars for its own purposes, which are well known among the population. The more money pumped into the military, the more profit made by those associated with the military. So now we have, according to the NYT account, drone wars in which we kill 4000 peeps a year, about, mostly darker colored, Islamic people, and we are all happy about it. We should be less happy about it.

YEAR'S END

The state cracked where they left your breath

No longer instrument. Along the shore

The sand ripped up, and the newer blood

Streaked like a vein to every monument.

The empty smoke that drifted near the guns

Where the stiff motor pounded in the mud

Had the smell of a hundred burned-out suns.

The ceiling of your sky went dark.

year ago today they cracked your bones.

So rot in a closet in the ground

For the bad trumpets and the capitol's

Long seasonable grief. Rot for its guests,

Alive, that step away from death. Yet you,

A year cold, come more living to this room

Than these intruders, vertical and warm.

On my conscience: being Yankee Doodle Dandy

 

Auguste Dupin once traced the course of his companion’s thoughts by a series of inductions that attached to the dumbshow of his companion’s expressions - the microworld of steps, frowns, glances, and furrows that, in the nineteenth century, was being explored with absurd confidence by German physiognomists -- until, interrupting that silent monologue, he made some magically relevant comment. The nineteenth century motif: detective as magician, consciousness as a rather easily demystified magic trick - we love it, we love it! The twentieth century, Freud’s, and even ours, with its faith in the murky business of the neural net, has only a broken faith in the coherence and topical unity of the consciousness – after all, if that unity is a fiction, what are we to say of the unity of the consciousness of the scientists themselves? But the unity is, at best, a horizon, a kind of cognitive optimism. 

Dupin’s observant tactic is worth applying even to oneself, occasionally. Although hark at the difference: for instance, I sometimes glare at myself in the mirror, to see how I am bearing up, what I’m looking like, giving myself a wink of complicity, etc., and often find that, puzzlingly, I am frowning. I don’t even know why I am frowning – lately, in this third year of the Pandemic, when systematic racism and its accompaniment, systematic stoopidism, seems rampant in the “free world”, I have been marvelling at the fact that, turn over my life as I may, mostly I do just what I want to do in this mortal sphere. I am not a dandy, yet, due to the material circumstances that surround my particular being – a loving and lovely wife, a boy I am utterly fascinated with, work that I find compelling, the ability, never to be underestimated, to walk out of the apartment, go to a grocery store, and forage to my heart’s content, and the further possibilities inherent in living in the city of Paris, a lifestyle I have craved since I was in the eighth grade in Clarkston, Georgia – I live a dandyish existence indeed. I am the Yankee Doodle dandy or I am nothing. 

So – the frown. Where does it come from? What deeper terrors have so bent my mouth to this characteristic expression? 

To answer this is surely a task for some modern Dupin,  Freudianly informed and hermeneutically suspicious of his own conclusions. Or mine. It is, I fear, this frown, the accompaniment to my thinker – my little neural amusement park. For though I do what I want, I also have a rather dark view of the history of my time, that little piece of the main,  and of my moment. Dark as in Jeremiah’s view of the destiny of Judah, dark as in Ezekial’s view of the priests of Baal. 

Perhaps the frown is… my conscience?

The Denial style in American politics, from Richard Hofstadter to Cass Sunstein

 

Richard Hofstadter published a famous essay, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, in the Harpers Monthlyof November, 1964. A year before, John F. Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. The Republican Party, in 1964, nominated Barry Goldwater for President. For the establishment liberal, the court intellectuals of Kennedy’s Camelot, Goldwater was a Southwestern, ruddy-cheeked repeat of Joe McCarthy (Camelot ignored Bobby Kennedy’s own admiration of Joe McCarthy). Although Goldwater brandished no list of Communists in the State Department at the convention, he did bite out a line that became famous: Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

Karl Hess, Goldwater’s speechwriter, came up with that magnificent sentence. Johnson, of course, won overwhelmingly; his campaigned aired tv ads linking Goldwater to nuclear war, implying Goldwater was for it.

Karl Hess had an interesting career post-Goldwater. In an interview once, he summed it up: “I moved in a direction which the FBI chooses to call leftward. What I actually did was go to work as a commercial welder, get arrested for demonstrating against the Indochina war, work with the Black Panthers and teach a course on anarchism.”

Hess’s career choices mark a good shadow line against which to measure Hofstadter’s essay. That essay, to my mind, codified a certain establishmentarian view of postwar American history that continues even to this day, when the Cold War ostensibly lies in ruins behind us. Substitute “Trump” for “Goldwater” in the first paragraph of Hofstadter’s essay and one could easily imagine it being published yesterday in some newspaper opinion page, or in the New Yorker’s Talk of the Town, or in the Atlantic, et al.

‘Although American political life has rarely been touched by the most acute vagaries of class conflict, it has served again and again as an arena for uncommonly angry minds. Today this fact is most evident in the extreme rightwing, which has shown, particularly in the Goldwater movement, how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the qualities of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.”

This is an almost perfect establishmentarian credo. You could easily draw a line between this and Cass Sunstein, between the politics of Cold war realpolitik and the politics of nudgery. It shifts the notion of class conflict almost completely to the side of one class – the workers – while endowing Capital with a pleasing political colorlessness. It posits a small group as troublemakers, wrapping an old FBI trope in columnar marble, suitable for thinktankery. It makes the small minority of policy-makers into de fact “representatives” of the majority. And it attributes suspiciousness and conspiracy-thinking to an outsider group – while the insider group, implicitly, is dedicated to sweet reason. Of course, by November 1964 Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which wedged the US into Vietnam. And of course that incident was a lie, one motivated by suspiciousness of the “enemy” and one that threw America, once again, into conflict with the “communist conspiracy” – which was combatted, then, for eight years via massive bombing, shifting and building barbed wire around villages, death squads, and casualty count incentivizing the drafted troops. If we are to see the sixties clearly, Hoftstadter is a pisspoor guide, whereas Karl Hess seems much more levelheaded about assessing America’s cold war history.

Hofstadter goes on to justify his use of paranoid by reference to Webster instead of Freud. It consists of “systematized delusion of persecution and one’s own greatness.” I take this shorthand as more descriptive of the D.C. mindset, and the interlocking culture of media, politics and capital, than I do of the Goldwater rightwing. The U.S. had, by the time Hoftstadter wrote his article, spent at least ten trillion dollars to build up the most dangerous military system in the world. During this buildup the U.S. had sustained and supported numerous coups throughout the world, from Guatemala to Iran, bringing about widespread and continuous violence, all in the name of anti-communism. It had instituted a system of atom bomb tests which meant sending military people into the fallout of atom blasts merely hours, or even minutes, after they happened, and letting radioactive fallout drift over large parts of the Pacific and over the continental U.S. I’m not even going to speak of the Jim Crow regime, or its justification through the pseudo-science of race.

What other country has so instituted paranoia that a considerable and influential think tank-academic sector spends mucho time developing suitable images of America’s “enemies” and celebrates the invigorating power of this orientation? In a recent NYT article about Russia and Ukraine, the bright side of the conflict is seen in these terms:

 “Mr. Putin’s insistence that NATO stop enlargement and remove allied forces from member states bordering Russia would draw a new Iron Curtain across Europe, and that threat has concentrated minds. It may be just what a lagging alliance has needed.”

It may be just what a lagging alliance has needed. Repeat that five times. See if it is any less insane the fifth time than the first time. If you find it becoming more and more rational, you might have a job waiting for you at Brookings!

The establishmentarian viewpoint pervades “acceptable” politics from conservative to liberal in the U.S. It is what comes out of the mouths of talk show hosts and serious “experts”. It is the kind of attitude that accepts a figure like John Bolton as a rational ‘dissident’ to that crazy Trump.  I call this the Denial style in American Politics. It is an exhausted style, so often thrown to the mat by reality that it should long ago have given up – but it is always coming out of its corner for the next round. It is, still, nearing its end and dragging us with it. And I say:

Fuck it.

She sings on her own blue guitar - Karen Chamisso

 She sings her own song on the blue guitar

Out of the world of money and pest control

I, the heavenly one, rose up and spoke the truth

Vermin are hidden in Nineveh’s every wall,

And poison works best on the youth

I have learned to bear the mourning of others

And see the termites as unmourning beasts

They have no concept of their mothers

And they make no saddening maddening bleats.

My Daddy told me that my boyfriend Jack

Who technically worked for Dad’s company – and mine –

Was just my way of getting back

At mom and him, and was not at all divine,

just an operator who had the good luck

to stick his hand up the skirt of the boss’s daughter.

I was seventeen - he was my first fuck.

We lay coupled on a bed of insect slaughter

And smoked a spliff, and made our plan

But like any boss’s daughter I soon had my fill.

I’ve since married an acceptable man

And divorced and married another still

And Jack is no doubt with Jill in their house

Somewhere in the metro Hotlanta burbs.

We are all divine – human and louse

But do we ever get what we deserve?

-Karen Chamisso

whose posterity is it?

 An essay from the late and not so great Willett's Magazine.

 

There’s a popular literary game, which consists of predicting which writers will “endure”. Whenever the waters of clickbait grow still and old, some webzine site will stir it up by playing this old game, asking what names among today’s writers will be counted in a hundred years. Heated arguments will break out: the question of whether the works of Stephan King will be recognized one hundred years from now as the greatest American fiction of our time will elicit heated comments, and there will surely be much knocking of the elites.

Nobody seems to predict that a writer that they don’t like will be recognized in one hundred years. Nor does anybody ask about the institutions that preserve for posterity the reputation of a writer. Instead, these predictions rely on a sort of amorphous popular will, with powers beyond any dreamt up by Rousseau. The general will will judge the quick and the dead. That’s the sense.

There are two issues here, actually. One is that the posterity of a work is a form of credentialling – that time awards a good quality seal to the lucky genius. Auden, beautifully, captures this, in my opinion, specious idea:

Time, that is intolerant
of the brave and innocent,
And indifferent in a week,
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.

Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.

Auden, In Memory of W.B.Yeats

Auden wrote that in 1939, and part of him knew that time and the Nazis were definitely not pardoning those who lived by language, but condemning them: hence the aborted careers of scores of poets, novelists, dramatists, essayists and the lot. Time may well condemn to very long, or even perpetual, obscurity those writings that have not stuck, in some way, to the usual institutions, or that emanated from condemned ethnicities or genders.

The other issue is projecting one’s own taste and time on the future. Here, we do have historical evidence, although it is never used by any of those who play the game. It is as if posterity hasn’t been there before us. But it has.

So, how should one go about making predictions about the endurance of written work?

Over the long term, my feeling is that the chance of a prediction being fulfilled, at least for the reasons one says it will be fulfilled, is vanishingly small. Remember, for the medievals, the important Latin poet after Virgil was Statius. Statius. Who even recognizes the name? Ovid, Lucretius, or Catullus just weren’t in the running. Lucretius did not have a very great posterity in the Roman world, and only came into European culture, really, when a manuscript of the Nature of Things was discovered in 1417 in Florence, according to Stephan Greenblatt. So over time, posterity is swallowed up in such unexpected events that we can’t guess. We need a more manageable time sequence to answer the question – we need relatively short term posterity. There needs to be at least certain structures that are generally continuous, as, for instance, an economic structure that is generally the same over time, and a structure of religious belief that is also coherent over time. Even so, there are unpredictable contingencies. The Library of Alexandria burned; Franz Kafka’s manuscripts didn’t, despite his dying request. So it goes. Statius, when all is said and done, had a good run – as good as Shakespeare’s. He’s gone now: even the Loeb Classical library is not all that enthusiastic about The Thebiad.

Given these conditions, we can still see patterns in, say, the last three hundred years. Starting in the 18th century, the literary nexus of publishers, the writers, and the audience started to take a modern shape. Writers could come from anywhere, but readers, and publishers, came mostly from the middle class. There was certainly room for the working class and the upper class, but writers that appealed to a working class audience had to eventually appeal to a middle class audience to endure. Aleida Assmann wrote an essay about this for Representations in 1996: Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory . She points out that the mythology of glory, which Burckhardt traces to Dante, and the city state culture of Italy in the fourteenth century, was, for the writer, shaped by the idea of a group who would preserve it, and upon this group was projected contemporary attitudes: true posterity would consist of people like the friends of the poet, gentle people, highborn, with swift minds. It was an almost tactile sense of posterity, posterity with a face. The posterity of the poem was the posterity of the people who read and understood the poem, the educated audience. But in the eighteenth century, the semantic markers shifted. Assman quotes Swift’s preface to the Tale of the Tub to show that the circle was replaced by the seller — the face by the invisible hand, to be slightly anachronistic about it.

One new factor in the manufacture of posterity, in the twentieth century, has been the rise of educational institutions as transmitters of literature in the vulgar tongue. One has to take that into account, as well as the relatively rapid changes that tend to traverse the academy, which is very much a product of capitalism and has been, for the most part, absorbed in the mechanism of vocationalisation. That mechanism, of course, makes sense once we factor in the costs of higher education. In the Anglophone world, the bright Ph.D in English or Comparative Lit might owe as much as 100,000 dollars in student debt, and faces an absolutely pitiless job market. It is no exaggeration to say that the humanities in the U.S. were assassinated by the regime of tuition hikes and the withdrawal of public financing. Education for its own sake, culture for its own sake, it is fair to say, is no longer the major part of the academic mission, and when it is, its teachers feel a nagging guilt. This is because they are betraying their best students – and they know it.

Another factor, one whose effects are unknown – but that I think we can see in the reputation of male writers from the 60s to the 80s – is the changing composition of who counts in posterity. For the longest time, say, a couple thousand years, women hardly counted at all. This fact has a well known bearing on the rarity of women writers, given the institutions that actively worked to suppress women writers. But it has an as yet unstudied effect, as well, on posterity, which has always been in the hands of a massively male dominated circle. Virginia Woolf asked about Shakespeare’s sister – we can ask about Virginia Woolf. Her reputation was, in the hands of the masculinist opinion-makers,  battered as much as possible after her death. She was snobbish. She wasn’t serious. Or her feminism wasn’t serious. Or her pacifism was disgusting. Or she was a lesbian.  In the sixties, Virginia Woolf’s stock was much, much below D.H. Lawrence’s.  

I think it is a sign of the times that Lawrence’s posterity has taken a huge hit since then. If we were to take a survey now among the literati, it would be a good bet that Woolf would come out before Lawrence. This would have surprised the English critics of the 1950s. F.R. Leavis, the editor of the enormously influential Scrutiny review, campaigned hard against her, excluding her from the Great Tradition. For Leavis, the great English novelist of the 20th century was clearly D.H. Lawrence. The Leavisian antagonism against Woolf is shared by many of the common sense English critics up to this day. As James Wood has observed, what connects Leavis, John Bayley, and John Carey – all influential English literary critics  – was an abhorrence for all things Bloomsbury, and especially Woolf. I’d add Christopher Ricks to that number. Frank Kermode, a literary politician if ever there was one, caught something in the air in 1978 when he wrote that Woolf seemed to be coming into her own again. And, in an unconsciously sexist phrase, he gave away the side that opposed Woolf:

There are even attempts to develop, from some of her remarks, a theory of androgyny, founded in her reading of Coleridge; Roger Poole, sympathetic to feminism, nevertheless makes some sturdy qualifications here, and one is glad of them, for a bass voice strengthens the chorus.

Ah, those bass voices….

Certainly she is taught more than Lawrence in the U.S. In my own opinion, Woolf is a more interesting writer than Lawrence, more of an artist: Lawrence would simply have been incapable of the formal pleasures of To the Lighthouse or Jacob’s Room. Woolf, as The Years shows, was perfectly capable of the multi-generational epic so adored by the bluff and morally hearty school of critics. However, I don’t know how to “rank” them against each other besides making such observations. The need for the ranking exercise stems partly from the classroom, and even in that locus, to my perception, there is a failure to teach canon-making – the critical intelligence that the student can bring to his or her own experience of literature, art, films, etc., with, always, the codicil that other intelligences may come to other conclusions.  The entertainment industry, on the other hand, is fully aware of this fact, which is why it is profligate with ranking exercises, while it prizes only one: earnings.  One of the reasons that ranking has a slightly masculinist air to it is that it invites the same kind of hierarchical projection we see in other places in the patriarchy, and the same kind of boxing matches in which what is at stake is as much the ego of the critic as the worth of the artist. 

However, this observation may be my quirk. Posterity, up to now, has ranked us whether we want it to or not. Since the late nineteenth century, we have developed a certain feeling for the statistical, a sixth sense for frequencies, as we find ourselves in nets of them: polled, counted, interviewed, surveyed, etc. To return to the Woolf vs. Lawrence matchup:  Lawrence scholars have been complaining for decades about the lack of interest in the great D.H., but perhaps this is a reaction to Lawrence being pushed, by English critics, as the greatest, the novelist up there with Joyce, Proust, Mann, etc. The whole crew.  Whereas even with the discouraging word in the years immediately after her death, Woolf always sold. The interest of academics and the larger circle of literati in Woolf has not, really, been a ranking movement – there’s no Leavis out there for Virginia Woolf. It seems somehow tasteless, a misunderstanding of Woolf’s own sensibility, to get all frothy about the greatest.

This, possibly, tells us something deeper about the very idea of posterity, its claim on the living. If there is a future beyond our coming climate change deaths, I think it is fair to say that the next hundred years will see a take off in the posterity of certain writers who were, by gender or race, not considered previously by all the white guys. At the same time, there may be a reconsideration of the whole meaning of lasting a hundred, two hundred, years. 

2.

So here’s a concrete question. Given these circumstances, what chance does, say, Stephen King have to be remembered to future generations? And what chance do the brilliant mandarins, the literary novelists, have? To pose the question wholly in one category of literature – in poetry, I suppose, the same question could counterpoise Marilyn Hacker and, say, Li’l Kim, or John Ashberry and Bob Dylan.

On the evidence of genre alone, gothic and horror writers have a pretty good survival rate. At least three or four writers of gothic novels in the eighteenth century are still in print, and still found on the shelves of medium sized public libraries, as well as being assigned in classes and being made into films (the addition of media technologies has a major impact on posterity, I should note: printing did everything for, say, Lucretius, while it did little for Statius). Books by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and William Beckworth are still in print, as are those by Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and Sheridan La Fanu from the nineteeth century. That is just in English culture – there is also, of course, Theodore Gautier (author of the original Mummy story) and Gaston Leroux; there is ETA Hoffman and Meyrink.

One strong driver of reputation is that a book generates a character. Frankenstein, or Dracula, or, the Mummy, or – going towards another genre – a Sherlock Holmes overshadows the works in which they were represented. King has not, I believe, created that kind of character, unlike, say, Ann Rice. Furthermore, King is proudest of his thousand page works. One thing about gothic and mystery fiction is that it is generally either small or medium sized. As it gets more literary, however, the larger size helps. Hugo’s Notre Dame with the hunchback is a Stephen King sized novel.

Again, though, one can’t just bet on this recipe. Film, which now plays a major role in the posterity management of fiction, is very stagily centered around character; yet that is simply to say that it is stagily centered about the star. Hector Lector is a famous character who, I feel, may be fading into obscurity, but is still remembered as a character, and he is taken from a Thomas Harris novel that nobody predicts a long posterity for (although who knows?). In that sense, Hector Lector might well outlive his bookish source entirely. Who remembers a single book by George Du Maurier? And yet his mesmerist, Svengali, entered popular lore. On the other hand, the process goes into reverse with films, too. Who remembers the name of the character played by Jack Nicholson in The Shining? Rather, one remembers Jack Nicholson. Or at least that’s what I do.

Posterity for a mandarin depends a lot on networking, on circle-making. It isn’t necessary to be part of the establishment, but it is helpful, if one is on the outs with the establishment, to create a counter-establishment. Compare, for instance, the posthumous fates of D.H. Lawrence and John Cowper Powys – both writers of big novels, both of a philosophical bent, both obsessed with sex. Powys has his fans – Steiner called the Glastonbury Romance one of the three great books of the twentieth century. But really, Powys never made a counter-establishment. He became quaint – that is, he was on the outs with the conventions of the modern novel, but he never had a following that theorized that extra-territoriality. Lawrence, however, was the establishment rebel par excellence. There’s nothing like breaking decisively with Bertrand Russell to show that 1, you are a rebel, and 2, you know Bertrand Russell.

Now, my comments so far have not been about the quality of these writers at all. My notes have been about posterity as an effect not of the popular will, nor of quality, but of social forces.

Certain American novelists I like best – Gaddis, for instance, and McCarthy – are, I think, not destined for a long posterity. Gaddis is like George Meredith – he is eccentric enough as a writer that he attracts only a passionate few. But Meredith was able to produce one or two conventional novels, like the Ordeal of Richard Feveral. Gaddis only produced prodigies: The Recognitions, J.R. One hundred years from now, I have my doubts these novels will be much read. But that says nothing, to me, about their intrinsic quality. As for McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy, the case is trickier. I can see his later novels, which to me are much worse than his earlier ones, enduring. But his difficult works, Suttree, Blood Meridian, and some of the shorter early ones, are too negative, and, though movie like in their own ways, not movie like in Hollywood ways.  Of course, this is where the educational institutions come in, creating the substructure of posterity. Joyce seems to be the limit case for these institutions, but it could well be that McCarthy would join Faulkner on the curriculum. I wonder.

3.

There is an enlightenment moment in the posterity imago – it consists in assuming that the world will not end. This was quite a radical thing in the thirteenth century. I wonder if it isn’t still a radical thing. I’ve recently talked to two people, from opposite sides of the political spectrum, both of whom assured me that the world was going to undergo a disaster in the next one hundred years. In fact, the expectation that the world is going to end seems so deeply etched in the Western template that it might be impossible to erase. In this sense, too, the prediction of the posterity of one’s favorite author is generally made without any attention to how posterity works. It is, in other words, a combination of incredible optimism and a severely narrow sociological viewpoint. Like heaven, purgatory and hell, posterity, that secular afterlife, is on the rocks. Time is much more indifferent than even Auden imagined. Yet I still can’t believe that. The incredible indifference to climate change on the part of our governing class shows that we can not trust them, any longer, with posterity. Posterity, in the future, I think, has to be oppositional, or it won’t be at all. We have to take it from them, take it back from them. In the long run, we aren’t all dead.