Well, I am still stuck in this unremunerative task, writing this preface to Silja's book. God is punishing me for all those times I said the Lord's Prayer sideways. Come on, God, don't be like that, dude. Send me that angel of inspiration. I promise I'll, uh, be better. How about: no cocaine for a whole year? How about: I'll get back in contact with the old man?... No, don't think I'll do the latter. Probably I should - oh well.
In the meantime, I'm going to cheat and recycle a post from 2005 on La Salamandre.
Here it is...
My friend D. sent me a little CD the other day. It had the Rage against the Machine song on it, Killing in the Name of. D. is an old Metallica fan, from before they had an on-call psychoanalyst. Myself, I love noise, but I am not a metal person. I particularly hate the voices that a lot of metal music features, in which some singer has to assume the precise sound that would be made by the Cowardly Lion on meth – a fake monster voice, full of empty volume and scatchiness.
All of which gets me, by a detour, to today’s topic: La Salamandre and Nietzsche.
A couple of days ago I saw Alain Tanner’s La Salamandre. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It was made in 1971, and Tanner had obviously seen his Godard, his Antonioni. It has the political language of Godard, and it has the dissipative structure (minus beautiful dresses and garden parties among statuary) of Antonioni. But the political language – exchanged by two down and out writers, one of whom makes his real money as a part time house painter – is all quoting the quotation. In fact, in the 80s, when I was a grad student, this had come to be the default style. Language inspired, distantly, by Marx, or Adorno, bantered about and at the same time made into an elaborate in joke. Being taught how to analyze, with the old male elegance, the oppressive structures that one hadn’t a chance of overturning or gaining the slightest bit of power over. And the dissipative structure wasn’t about the vanishing of purpose so much as the omnipresence of impromptu – each character making things up, including jobs and ends, as he or she went along. There was, of course, a firm sense in La Salamandre that after the trente annees glorieuses a form of capitalist paradise had been established. But all the characters were well aware that this was a predator’s paradise, and they were prey.
The plot of the film is simple. A young woman, maybe twenty, is accused of shooting her uncle in the shoulder with his army rifle. The scene is set in Switzerland. Two writers are paid to write a screenplay for tv about this fait divers. Both writers sleep with Rosamunde, the woman, played by Bulle Ogier. Rosamunde is the name of a sylph, and Ogier’s face alternates between lighting up, beautifully, to show the sylph, and plunging into sallow and slack darkness, the sylph turned tree, or at least like the trees in Dante’s infernos, the bark over the suicide. Rosamunde had a wild hair in high school, then got jobs like the first one we see her doing: working on the assembly line in a sausage factory, holding the skins that are filled with sausage meat shot from a tube.
Rosamunde is prey. While the two writers have a certain intellectual distance from predator’s paradise, or at least pride themselves on it, Rosamunde is pure prey. And… and this is what I like … and she responds to being prey by quitting frequently and listening to the 1971 equivalent of metal. Just noise, although recorded without the modern technology. She bobs her head, turns up the record player of the juke box, becomes vacant.
That’s the prey deal. We can do little to deny the predators. They have the power to occupy our desires, our hours, our minds. Their photos, films, demands, schedules, signatures on our paychecks, politics and wars go on whether we want them to or not. But Rosamunde can choose to be invaded by noise.
Which is where I thought about Nietzsche. Particularly that Nietzschoid saying that lept from the page right onto the walls of innumerable public toilet walls: that which doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. There is a certain fate to grafitti, because that saying is all about shitting in a public toilet. That which doesn’t kill me isn’t what is outside me. It is what invades me. The site for the mythical invasion is just that encounter of the asshole and the public toilet plastic seat. The myth about getting disease here is really about something aberrant in this glitch in the system, since Americans are generally so careful about their hygiene. But let down your pants once and the Alien crawls right into your gut. That is what the predators do. The mimicry of that act, and the momentary release from it, is to fill oneself, to let oneself be invaded by noise. Rosamunde, nodding her head with a totally vacant look to the wordless electric guitar sounds, wrung my heart. This is, in a sense, what we do at LI. Every post is, essentially, noise. Meaningless noise, boom boom boom. But it brings a small relief, it produces a gap between invasions of the predators, who rule and who will always rule, with maximum greed, lust, and callousness the little paradise they’ve trapped us in. Their pictures, their politics, their celebrities, their gossip, their cars, their restaurants, their money, their businesses, their porno, their church, their gods,. their bozo leaders and bozo adulations. It is a joke to think that the prey will have any effect on this, but somehow every invasion – if I can choose it, if I can turn the volume up -- makes me feel stronger.
Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Monday, March 5, 2007
Menger mania
I am going to be trying to write this preface to my translation of Silja Graupe’s Basho of Economics. So I might not be too on the mark this week. However, it is a good time to beg – I’m really looking for some editing jobs this month, which is lookin’ kind of Mother Hubbard bare. The dog wants a bone. LI wants a bone. The Landlady wants a bone. The phone company wants a bone. All God’s children want bones, want bones. So – if you want editing, research, proofreading, the whole deal, know somebody who wants same, know somebody who knows somebody, etc. – send them to me, please.
In the meantime, I’m going off to think about Carl Menger’s curious notions concerning the foundations of economics.
In the meantime, I’m going off to think about Carl Menger’s curious notions concerning the foundations of economics.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Goodbye 20th century, it was good to know you
Prospect Magazine did a survey for this month’s mag. This was the question they asked, and their sense of the response they got:
“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”
Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question. LI, however, thinks the premise is wrong. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.
The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It strikes us as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. But given the need to feed the war culture, terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster. There is nothing like having a vicious, dark skinned enemy to slaughter – Keynes’ “animal spirits” get all stirred up and shit. But LI will never get our brain around the fact that this might be the future. This is because we don’t want to commit suicide right away – we do want a reason to hang around a bit longer. So we will not believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health. Otherwise – somebody get me a rusty razor!
“We asked 100 writers and thinkers to answer the following question: Left and right defined the 20th century. What's next? The pessimism of their responses is striking: almost nobody expects the world to get better in the coming decades, and many think it will get worse.”
Admittedly, the thinkers they asked seemed somewhat random. David Brooks gets his say, and Joe Boyd, a music producer, gets his, and apparently what qualifies one to have a view of the next one hundred years best is to work for a bank or business or write an opinion column. There were no H.G. Wells, that’s for sure, and few seemed to disagree with the premise of the question. LI, however, thinks the premise is wrong. Left and right did not define the twentieth century. The century was defined, in our view, by two things: first, the treadmill of production – that system which is falsely defined as capitalist because one of its surface characteristics is the market system – which emerged in Europe in the 17th and 18th century, followed out its logic in all systems (communist, fascist, liberal capitalist) on a world wide basis, having laid the foundations in the 19th century (the development, for instance, of the terror famine in Ireland and India by the British was surely the model for Stalin's agricultural policy) and collapsed the agriculture-based culture that humans had lived under for the past 12,000 years. That was surely the most significant thing that happened in the 20th century, and no ideology led it, no ideology opposed it, and no ideology even envisioned it. The anxiety naturally attendant on the end of civilization created a macro feature, which I’d call the dialectic of vulnerability – basically, that process by which populations, feeling ever more vulnerable even as they became ever more affluent developed systems meant to render them invulnerable – that is, an ever more threatening war culture, with an ever greater destructive reach – which, of course, rendered them ever more vulnerable, an irony that was not rhetorical, but systematic. 9/11 was, in part, a moment in which the nakedness of the system was revealed – a system that could, theoretically, respond to ICBMs traveling over the poles, couldn’t respond to 19 half educated men with box cutters and homemade bombs. And… of course it couldn’t. Defense is a collective fiction, which is its function – being a fiction, there is never a limit on the amount of money one can spend on it. It is, theoretically, inifinitely expensive, while its payoff, as a defense system against all threats, is nearly zero – it will never defend against all threats. That’s ever, with a big fucking E.
The intersection between the treadmill of production and the war culture shaped the 20th century. The division between the right and the left were epiphenomena of that dynamic. It is, of course, impossible to predict the next five years … but in a sense it is probably easier to predict the next 100, since prediction here isn’t about particulars but long, long trends. H.G. Wells was so great because he had a novelist’s instinct for the life of those trends. LI doesn’t – in 1985, when we entered Grad school, we would never have predicted the cultural triumph of Reaganism, for instance. It would have seemed utterly implausible that the combination of endebtedness, meanness, and libertarian logic that flew in the face of reality would ever survive the end of the Gipper. From our inability to see what was in front of our nose, we took a lesson: never underestimate the Death Wish of a culture. It strikes us as, frankly, insane to frame the next hundred years in terms of terrorism or the “battle of civilizations” between Islam and the west. For one thing, among threatening issues, terrorism ranks way below, I don’t know, highway safety as a real issue. But given the need to feed the war culture, terrorism is an invention that has no enemies – it is a win win for all participants, giving an excuse to the war culture’s governors to continue doing what they want to continue doing anyway, and thus guaranteeing that a little place will always be set aside for terrorists – sort of like in Network, where the tv network discovers the audience pull of terrorism, and puts the unorganized groups of guerillas on a business basis. As for Islam, again, the use value of Islam is not in Islam per se, but the way it operates as a wonderful two-fer – dark skins that aren’t Christian! Is there a more perfect enemy? Really, Milosovic should be hailed as a prophet – his ideology has now become standard on the Right, and will no doubt be more and more embedded in the policy of the American state as we drift from disaster to disaster. There is nothing like having a vicious, dark skinned enemy to slaughter – Keynes’ “animal spirits” get all stirred up and shit. But LI will never get our brain around the fact that this might be the future. This is because we don’t want to commit suicide right away – we do want a reason to hang around a bit longer. So we will not believe what seems to be happening right before our eyes as a matter of spiritual health. Otherwise – somebody get me a rusty razor!
Saturday, March 3, 2007
I love to jerk off, but I don't love all jerk offs
“But if the personalities weren’t ridiculous by themselves, one wouldn’t be able to make up good stories.” – Rameau
Frankly, LI doesn’t like Atrios’ wanker of the day award, because it associates one of God’s greatest gifts – wanking – exclusively with the warmonger and the feeb. I guess it is the last gasp of the great onanism fear that swept over Europe and the States in the 18th century. But it has had one good effect at least – it is obviously driving Time Magazine’s Joe Klein crazy. Today, he published a You can trust a Communist to be Communist post on his blog, and it is a useful map of the parameters of U.S. reporting. Anything that seems to indicate that a reporter will be called a “left wing extremist” is excluded. Since Klein is an insider to these circles, I think we can trust his accuracy. Here are the rules, the things that are tabu for your average thumb up his ass D.C. scribe:
While Joe Klein richly deserves Atrios’ scorn – if he is a wanker, he is the kind of masturbator who gives that glorious supplement a bad name – he’s done a service by spelling out the rules that run through the head of the press corps. One by one, the fear that one will show, for instance, that a corporation is acting evilly, or the fear of showing that fundamental democratic rights are violated by the governing class in the U.S., stifles the baby news story in its cradle. The item that particularly amused me was “believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.” Let’s see. The U.S. financed the Islamic radical fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the U.S. encouraged Saudi Arabia, from 1956 onward, to use its position as a fundamentalist Islamic state to fight Nasser and communism; the U.S. gave a green light, after the Iranian revolution, to the Saudi program of pouring millions into Wahabi controlled mosques, placed from Morocco to Indonesia, from Germany to Turkey; the U.S. went so far, in the 1980s, as to give the man who directed the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a CIA signed visa into the U.S. His air fare and travel arrangements were practically comp’ed by the CIA in the 80s, which he spent flying around on behalf of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This is Robert Friedman’s article for that communist magazine, the New Yorker – which Klein, innocent of those vile red schemes, actually worked for himself! – published in 1995:
Here’s a snippet:
This, of course, is noway near as satisfying as Paul Berman's little book, that blames it all on the Nazis. Those nazis. Intellectual history as wanking - oh, wanking, so many crimes have been committed in your name!
And, according to Sy Hersch, the latest Bush folly is to … start the Saudis up again.
How does this work out as a parameter? when looking at the news, one has to have a sense of what isn’t being reported as opposed to what is. For instance, the reports about Iran’s supposed supplying of weapons to the Shi’a militias have taken up, I’d estimate, oh one hundred times more story space than the story of the Saudi and Gulf Sunni financing of the Sunni insurgents. Now – it isn’t that I don’t expect that the Saudis would operate like that, in their own self defense. That financing just happens to have contributed to a hundred times more deaths of American soldiers than the Iranians have. But… just as a hijacking that was manned mostly by Saudis and financed by a Saudi millionaire in close contact with Pakistan’s secret service operates as an excuse to invade Iraq, so, too, the dance around the obvious is a way of trying to lead us into a war with Iran. The truth, of course, is that the U.S. just isn’t powerful enough to take on the Saudis. Who wants them to? I don’t. I simply want the U.S. to recognize its real strength in the Middle East is weak at best, and operate accordingly. But to get back to the theme – sometimes, newspapers do stumble over reality. They do their best, at these moments, to move on. One of the funnier examples of this, recently, was a NYT story about the evil Iranians, supplying those evil Shi’ite militia those American killin’ weapons. Here’s an excerpt from this James Glanz piece, Feb. 27th:
Right ho. Why is it that the NYT isn’t going to call back? Joe Klein gave us the answer. I think I could pretty much predict the ratio of stories about reality - who supplies the money to buy the goods for the insurgents - as opposed to the Administration's soft soap story about Iran. I would guess one to fifty. I'll check this with Factiva some time. It is nice to have a propaganda criterion.
And people say wanking has never lead to anything good.
Frankly, LI doesn’t like Atrios’ wanker of the day award, because it associates one of God’s greatest gifts – wanking – exclusively with the warmonger and the feeb. I guess it is the last gasp of the great onanism fear that swept over Europe and the States in the 18th century. But it has had one good effect at least – it is obviously driving Time Magazine’s Joe Klein crazy. Today, he published a You can trust a Communist to be Communist post on his blog, and it is a useful map of the parameters of U.S. reporting. Anything that seems to indicate that a reporter will be called a “left wing extremist” is excluded. Since Klein is an insider to these circles, I think we can trust his accuracy. Here are the rules, the things that are tabu for your average thumb up his ass D.C. scribe:
A left-wing extremist exhibits many, but not necessarily all, of the following attributes:
--believes the United States is a fundamentally negative force in the world.
--believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.
--believes that the decision to go to war in Iraq was not an individual case of monumental stupidity, but a consequence of America’s fundamental imperialistic nature.
--tends to blame America for the failures of others—i.e. the failure of our NATO allies to fulfill their responsibilities in Afghanistan.
--doesn’t believe that capitalism, carefully regulated and progressively taxed, is the best liberal idea in human history.
--believes American society is fundamentally unfair (as opposed to having unfair aspects that need improvement).
--believes that eternal problems like crime and poverty are the primarily the fault of society.
--believes that America isn’t really a democracy.
--believes that corporations are fundamentally evil.
--believes in a corporate conspiracy that controls the world.
--is intolerant of good ideas when they come from conservative sources.
--dismissively mocks people of faith, especially those who are opposed to abortion and gay marriage.
--regularly uses harsh, vulgar, intolerant language to attack moderates or conservatives.”
While Joe Klein richly deserves Atrios’ scorn – if he is a wanker, he is the kind of masturbator who gives that glorious supplement a bad name – he’s done a service by spelling out the rules that run through the head of the press corps. One by one, the fear that one will show, for instance, that a corporation is acting evilly, or the fear of showing that fundamental democratic rights are violated by the governing class in the U.S., stifles the baby news story in its cradle. The item that particularly amused me was “believes that American imperialism is the primary cause of Islamic radicalism.” Let’s see. The U.S. financed the Islamic radical fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s; the U.S. encouraged Saudi Arabia, from 1956 onward, to use its position as a fundamentalist Islamic state to fight Nasser and communism; the U.S. gave a green light, after the Iranian revolution, to the Saudi program of pouring millions into Wahabi controlled mosques, placed from Morocco to Indonesia, from Germany to Turkey; the U.S. went so far, in the 1980s, as to give the man who directed the first bombing of the WTC in 1993, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, a CIA signed visa into the U.S. His air fare and travel arrangements were practically comp’ed by the CIA in the 80s, which he spent flying around on behalf of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This is Robert Friedman’s article for that communist magazine, the New Yorker – which Klein, innocent of those vile red schemes, actually worked for himself! – published in 1995:
Here’s a snippet:
The Alkifah Refugee Centre, in addition to providing a hangout for the disaffected, distributed pamphlets and videotapes on the rebel war in Afghanistan. On any given day, a visitor to the centre might take martial-arts classes, or sign up for an automatic-weapons training course taught by instructors from the National Rifle Association. The club even had its own T-shirts: A MUSLIM TO A MUSLIM IS A BRICK WALL. But the highlight for the centre’s regulars were the inspirational jihad lecture series, featuring CIA-sponsored speakers.
”One week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA-trained Afghan rebel travelling on a CIA-issued visa; the next, it might be a clean-cut Arabic-speaking Green Beret, who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujaheddin, or ‘warriors of the Lord.’ The more popular lectures were held upstairs in the roomier Al-Farooq Mosque; such was the case in 1990 when Sheikh Abdel Rahman, travelling on a CIA-supported visa, came to town. The blind Egyptian cleric, with his ferocious rhetoric and impassioned preaching, filled angry, discontented Arab immigrants with a fervour for jihad – holy war. This was exactly what the CIA wanted: to stir up support for the Muslim rebels and topple the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan.
The sheikh, however, had a somewhat broader agenda.
A former investigative counsel for the Senate Foreign Relatiosn Committee, now a private attorney in Washington, Jack Blum speaks bitterly but fatalistically. ‘After every covert war there is an unintended disposal problem,’ he says, as if he were talking about unexpected land mines and not potential Islamic terrorists living in Brooklyn. ‘We steered and encouraged these people. Then we dropped them. Now we’ve got a disposal problem. When you motivate people to fight for a cause – jihad – the problem is, how do you shut them off?’”
This, of course, is noway near as satisfying as Paul Berman's little book, that blames it all on the Nazis. Those nazis. Intellectual history as wanking - oh, wanking, so many crimes have been committed in your name!
And, according to Sy Hersch, the latest Bush folly is to … start the Saudis up again.
How does this work out as a parameter? when looking at the news, one has to have a sense of what isn’t being reported as opposed to what is. For instance, the reports about Iran’s supposed supplying of weapons to the Shi’a militias have taken up, I’d estimate, oh one hundred times more story space than the story of the Saudi and Gulf Sunni financing of the Sunni insurgents. Now – it isn’t that I don’t expect that the Saudis would operate like that, in their own self defense. That financing just happens to have contributed to a hundred times more deaths of American soldiers than the Iranians have. But… just as a hijacking that was manned mostly by Saudis and financed by a Saudi millionaire in close contact with Pakistan’s secret service operates as an excuse to invade Iraq, so, too, the dance around the obvious is a way of trying to lead us into a war with Iran. The truth, of course, is that the U.S. just isn’t powerful enough to take on the Saudis. Who wants them to? I don’t. I simply want the U.S. to recognize its real strength in the Middle East is weak at best, and operate accordingly. But to get back to the theme – sometimes, newspapers do stumble over reality. They do their best, at these moments, to move on. One of the funnier examples of this, recently, was a NYT story about the evil Iranians, supplying those evil Shi’ite militia those American killin’ weapons. Here’s an excerpt from this James Glanz piece, Feb. 27th:
In a dusty field near the Baghdad airport on Monday, the American military laid out a display of hundreds of components for assembling deadly roadside bombs, its latest effort to embarrass the country it contends is supplying the material to armed Shiite groups here: Iran.
Officers of the First Cavalry Division whose unit seized the components said they had been found in a palm grove just north of the Iraqi capital two days earlier, after a tip from a local resident. An explosives expert said the components were made to be assembled into the deadly canisters called explosively formed penetrators, or E.F.P.'s, which explode and hurl out a high-speed blob of copper designed to cut through tough American armor.
''I've lost good friends to these E.F.P.'s,'' said Capt. Clayton Combs, whose unit turned up the cache of weapons. ''And the fact that we found these before they got to the side of the road is just a huge win for us.''
The cache included what Maj. Marty Weber, a master explosives ordnance technician, said was C-4 explosive, a white substance, in clear plastic bags with red labels that he said contained serial numbers and other information that clearly marked it as Iranian.
But while the find gave experts much more information on the makings of the E.F.P.'s, which the American military has repeatedly argued must originate in Iran, the cache also included items that appeared to cloud the issue.
Among the confusing elements were cardboard boxes of the gray plastic PVC tubes used to make the canisters. The boxes appeared to contain shipments of tubes directly from factories in the Middle East, none of them in Iran. One box said in English that the tubes inside had been made in the United Arab Emirates and another said, in Arabic, ''plastic made in Haditha,'' a restive Sunni town on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The box marked U.A.E. provided a phone number for the manufacturer there. A call to that number late Monday encountered only an answering machine that said, ''Leave your number and we will call you back.''
Right ho. Why is it that the NYT isn’t going to call back? Joe Klein gave us the answer. I think I could pretty much predict the ratio of stories about reality - who supplies the money to buy the goods for the insurgents - as opposed to the Administration's soft soap story about Iran. I would guess one to fifty. I'll check this with Factiva some time. It is nice to have a propaganda criterion.
And people say wanking has never lead to anything good.
Friday, March 2, 2007
happy texas independence day, pardners!
Happy Texas Independence day!
"Today is the 171st anniversary of the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836." - Houston Chronicle.
This is a good time to remember one of my favorite American politicians, Sam Houston - friend of the Indian (they didn't call him the fuckin Raven for nothing), agin that bestial slavery system, pro-Union, and especially pro the bottle. Sammy, what happened? LI is going to commune with his ghost today.
Here's a bit of history. On April 19, 1861, Sam went to Galveston, which was like the Charleston of this state, pro-secesh, and from the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel he threw down, which was a dangerous thing to do in Texas. After all, at around the same time, round the Dallas area, Confederate hoodlums were lynching pro-Unionists (always remember, the Confederacy was founded on the blind criminal violence, and was a completely dishonorable enterprise from start to finish - a nation of lynchers, crosseyed nosepickers, and rapists, ruled by bearded retards). When Houston made the speech, someone in the crowd shouted: here's a rope, let's hang the old traitor. Ah, the peabrained descendents of the man who shouted that now run the country!
Being a man of some sense, Houston ended his speech with a prediction: "You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of precious lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you: but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of State rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery impulsive people as you are for they live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, such as the present issues before the country, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche, and what I fear is they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."
So you see, not all Texans are as retarded as the freak show specimen currently parading his baboon like hindquarters around the White House.
So GO OUT AND GET DRUNK TONIGHT! And sing the yellow rose of Texas, or - oh my favorite, I'm gonna cry - Marty Robbins El Paso: "Down in the west texas town of El Paso/ I fell in love with a Mexican guuuuurlll".
If you don't like that song - well, fuck you.
"Today is the 171st anniversary of the signing of the Texas Declaration of Independence at Washington-on-the-Brazos on March 2, 1836." - Houston Chronicle.
This is a good time to remember one of my favorite American politicians, Sam Houston - friend of the Indian (they didn't call him the fuckin Raven for nothing), agin that bestial slavery system, pro-Union, and especially pro the bottle. Sammy, what happened? LI is going to commune with his ghost today.
Here's a bit of history. On April 19, 1861, Sam went to Galveston, which was like the Charleston of this state, pro-secesh, and from the balcony of the Tremont House Hotel he threw down, which was a dangerous thing to do in Texas. After all, at around the same time, round the Dallas area, Confederate hoodlums were lynching pro-Unionists (always remember, the Confederacy was founded on the blind criminal violence, and was a completely dishonorable enterprise from start to finish - a nation of lynchers, crosseyed nosepickers, and rapists, ruled by bearded retards). When Houston made the speech, someone in the crowd shouted: here's a rope, let's hang the old traitor. Ah, the peabrained descendents of the man who shouted that now run the country!
Being a man of some sense, Houston ended his speech with a prediction: "You may, after the sacrifice of countless millions of treasure, and hundreds of thousands of precious lives, as a bare possibility, win Southern independence, if God be not against you: but I doubt it. I tell you that, while I believe with you in the doctrine of State rights, the North is determined to preserve this Union. They are not a fiery impulsive people as you are for they live in cooler climates. But when they begin to move in a given direction, where great interests are involved, such as the present issues before the country, they move with the steady momentum and perseverance of a mighty avalanche, and what I fear is they will overwhelm the South with ignoble defeat."
So you see, not all Texans are as retarded as the freak show specimen currently parading his baboon like hindquarters around the White House.
So GO OUT AND GET DRUNK TONIGHT! And sing the yellow rose of Texas, or - oh my favorite, I'm gonna cry - Marty Robbins El Paso: "Down in the west texas town of El Paso/ I fell in love with a Mexican guuuuurlll".
If you don't like that song - well, fuck you.
Thursday, March 1, 2007
the art of the lickspittle
“A party of us were together one day – we’d been drinking, it’s true – and suddenly some one made the suggestion that each one of us, without leaving the table, should tell something he had done, something that he himself honestly considered the worst of all the evil actions of his life. But it was to be done honestly, that was the point, that it was to be honest, no lying.” – The Idiot
Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe two.
The first story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. As we’ve pointed out before, there is a game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and Rameau. Here, then, is Rameau’s story.
It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office. Variations of this happened at Enron. But let's get on with it, right?
I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:
There are so many beautiful bits here (LI said, tapping you familiarly on the shoulder). For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and Rameau. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most benign grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing. The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancor. In another century, Bouret is Foley, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.
The next story I reserve for the next post.
Dostoevsky is perhaps the greatest artist of the ugly story, the shameless and shameful anecdote. There are so many of them in his novels, and of course, Notes from under the floorboards is one big ugly story. It is obvious that Dostoevsky himself considers that he picked up the genre from the French. One usually thinks of Rousseau’s Confessions. Perhaps that is literally the source of the ‘game”, but, in broader historic terms, Rousseau’s Confessions emerge from a whole sub-genre of ugly stories. I could, perhaps, trace the psychology of these stories to the moralistes. But then I’d be here all fucking day, right? Rameau is, if nothing else, a fount of ugly stories. Of which, let me transcribe two.
The first story is funny, in a way. And the bones of it are definitely La Rochefoucauld. It is not about Rameau himself, but – like many stories – the telling of it sticks in a peculiar way to both the teller and the hearer - it creates a secret bond, the kind of bond that is pointed to, negatively, by the phrase, "I don't want to hear this." To hear is to have, to be entrusted with, to share and have a share in. In the Idiot, when Ferdyshtchenko suggests the game at Nastasya Fillipovna’s birthday party, the intent is a general degradation of all present, and for reasons intrinsic to that moment, it is what Nastasya needs to break out of the situation she finds herself in. But here is the thing - it is a degradation within the bounds of a game. It is the guise of the game that makes it acceptable, or makes it acceptable, at least, to suggest it. As a game, of course, it isn’t serious. But like the best games – like Russian Roulette – its non-seriousness penetrates what is serious, making the serious look shabby and shallow and suspect. As we’ve pointed out before, there is a game like, a ritual aspect to the dialogue between Diderot and Rameau. Here, then, is Rameau’s story.
It is about one Bouret. Fermier général Etienne-Michel Bouret – a tax gatherer. A man whose wealth allowed him to hope for social advancement in the complicated court circles of Louis XV. But there is a price to pay for not being born in the right class, there is always the price of birth. There is now, don’t kid yourself. Bouret, then, determines to win the affection of the keeper of Seals. This is a story that, with variations, could be applied to the Georgetown circles in D.C. at the moment, or – actually, to corporate achievers, going through the ranks, in any Fortune 400 corporate office. Variations of this happened at Enron. But let's get on with it, right?
I’m going to quote from the Penguin translation, as I don’t feel up to translating the whole bit at the moment. But I will make a few modifications:
Lui: “But if this role is amusing at first, and you find a certain amount of pleasure in laughing up your sleeve at the stupidity of the people you are hoodwinking, it ends up by losing its point, and besides, after a certain number of inventions you are forced to repeat yourself. Ingenuity and art have their limits. Only God and one or two rare geniuses can have a career that broadens out as they go along. Bouret is one such, perhaps. Some of his tricks really strike me, yes, even me, as sublime. The little dog, the Book of Happiness, the torches along the Versailles road, these are things which leave me dumbfounded and humiliated. Enough to put you off the profession.21
I: What do you mean about the little dog?
He: [What planet are you from]? What, you don’t really know how that rare man set about [scaring a little dog away from himself and attaching it to the Keeper of the Seals, who had taken a fancy to it?]
I: No, I confess I don’t.
He: All the better. It is one of the finest things ever conceived; the whole of Europe was thrilled by it, and there isn’t a single courtier it hasn’t made envious. You are not without sagacity: let’s see how you would have set about it. Remember that Bouret was loved by his dog. Bear in mind that the strange attire of the Minister terrified the little creature. Think that he only had one week to overcome the difficulties. You must understand all the conditions of the problem so as to appreciate the merits of the solution. Well!
I: Well, I have to admit that in that line the simplest things would catch me out.
He: Listen (he said, giving me a little tap on the shoulder – [he is chummy]), listen and admire! He had a mask made like the face of the Keeper of the Seals, he borrowed the tatter’s ample robe from a footman. He put the mask over his own face. He slipped on the robe. He called the dog, caressed it and gave it a biscuit. Then, suddenly changing his attire, he was no longer the Keeper of the Seals but Bouret, and he called his dog and whipped it. In less than two or three days of this routine, carried on from morning till night, the dog learned to run away from Bouret the Farmer-General and run up to Bouret the Keeper of the Seals. But I am too good natured. You are a layman and don’t deserve to be told about the miracles going on under your very nose.”
There are so many beautiful bits here (LI said, tapping you familiarly on the shoulder). For instance, the way the problem of brownnosing is laid out like a chess problem, just like the chess games going on around Diderot and Rameau. And the admiration demanded for something abject, something inhuman, something truly, in every way, shitty. To be willing to go to such lengths of humiliation in order to curry favor – the history of those humiliations will, of course, rise up again, ghosts that will torment the perpetrator. One can only assuage one’s own wounded pride by such success that one can enjoy the abasement of others – that endless chain. While much is said about masculine aggression contributing to that curious eagerness for war, there is also the revenge for the thousand humiliations that have to be crossed in order to get to be fermier general, or undersecretary of Intelligence in the Department of Defense – and that mass accumulation of humiliations among a group that considers itself the most powerful, the most just, the most benign grouping in history – ah, those are the boys to order the next bombing. The violence in this group is never pure, it is always muddied by obscure memories of toadying, the ingrown rancor. In another century, Bouret is Foley, Bouret is the gay evangelical preacher who gets the 100 percent heterosexual grade at evangelical redemption camp. Giving up the little doggie just for just a little taste of the highest level of cocaine - fame, power, acceptance by the guys who count. Being made. Ah, the bliss of it, the entire bliss.
The next story I reserve for the next post.
Rieff
LI recommends Gerald Howard’s book review of Philip Rieff’s posthumous My Life Among the Deathworks and CHARISMA: THE GIFT OF GRACE, AND HOW IT HAS BEEN TAKEN AWAY FROM US. Rieff’s sociology was entirely in the domain of what Mills called the sociological imagination - rooted in the novelist's sense of the moment, on the one hand, and philosophy, on the other, the latter coming to Rieff via a lifelong engagement with Freud. The review profiles the entire career, and the entire career sounds very much like Herzog’s in Bellow’s novel, down to the young wife – in Herzog’s case, Madeleine - who simultaneously divorces Herzog and starts on the threatening upward academic journey. In Rieff’s case, the young wife was Susan Sontag:
Sontag’s putdown is so very awesome that it almost removes its sting – if one of my lovers could abase me with one punch like that, I’d be awful damn proud.
I want to discuss Rieff’s conservative social vision in another post. From LI’s perspective, the review brought home the troubled trajectory of the American sage – again, reminding me of Herzog. The American sage is well aware of being the peculiar object of an exterior negation at large in the culture. That negation is a characteristic compound of two of the enduring features of American life: anti-intellectualism and worship of success.
That awareness drives the angry movement from sage to buffoon, gets into the sex, the clothes, the dialogue with so called old neighborhood friends, the longing for power, the vendettas which figure in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mosby’s Memoirs – so many of Bellow’s novels.
However … before I get to Rieff and Bellow, perhaps I should finish up the Rameau thread. I will do one more post on that, translating two anecdotes that Rameau tells which contain a certain dreadful touch of the historically premonitory.
It was in a Chicago classroom in 1950 that he met and was instantly smitten with his beautiful student the seventeen-year-old Susan Sontag. Autres temps, autres mœurs, they were married ten days later. In the annals of miserable American literary marriages, only the misalliance of Edmund Wilson and Mary McCarthy can match this one for marriage-of-true-minds interest and, perhaps, reciprocal influence. She followed him as half graduate student, half faculty wife, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and they had one child, the writer David Rieff. But they separated and were divorced in 1959, and the tenor of the marriage may be judged by Sontag's comment, years later, that after reading Middlemarch at age eighteen she "realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon"…
Sontag’s putdown is so very awesome that it almost removes its sting – if one of my lovers could abase me with one punch like that, I’d be awful damn proud.
I want to discuss Rieff’s conservative social vision in another post. From LI’s perspective, the review brought home the troubled trajectory of the American sage – again, reminding me of Herzog. The American sage is well aware of being the peculiar object of an exterior negation at large in the culture. That negation is a characteristic compound of two of the enduring features of American life: anti-intellectualism and worship of success.
That awareness drives the angry movement from sage to buffoon, gets into the sex, the clothes, the dialogue with so called old neighborhood friends, the longing for power, the vendettas which figure in Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Mosby’s Memoirs – so many of Bellow’s novels.
However … before I get to Rieff and Bellow, perhaps I should finish up the Rameau thread. I will do one more post on that, translating two anecdotes that Rameau tells which contain a certain dreadful touch of the historically premonitory.
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