Child of the Century

 I cannot prove this or weave too large a theme out of it, but I think there is a Mediterranean modernism, one that takes up the challenge of Nietzsche’s Gay Science.

“Man has gradually become a phantasmal beast, which has to satisfy a need more than any other beast: man must from time to time believe, know, why he exists, his species cannot thrive without a personal trust in life. Without the belief in reason in life! And time and time again the human race decrees that there “is something about which it is absolutely forbidden to laugh.” And the most foresighted philanthropist would add, not just laughing and the gay science, but even the tragic with all its sublime irrationality belongs to the means the necessities of species preservation! And thus! Thus! Thus!”

Nietzsche’s gay science entitles a minor tradition that I’d call Mediterranean modernism. I’m thinking about figures like Pirandello, Unamuno, even Borges. In the post-war period, I’d include in the cut Sciascia and Pasolini. As the list shows, there is something very masculinist about this modernism, although it is also one in which the macho ethic is definitely mocked. When the late De Chirico forged the paintings of his earlier self, he did it not only for the money but because it was funny. That’s the classic Mediterranean modern gesture.

In the forward to Mist, Unamuno’s novella, the protagonist of the novella, Augusto, comments on his author:

“Don Miguel is fascinated by the buffo-tragic… …a tragic farce or a farcical tragedy, not one in which farcical or grotesque elements are mixed with tragic, but one in which the elements are fused – and confused – into one.”

If we are living in some post-something era – that is, one that has broken with the past and at the same time has the past in its craw, unable to swallow it – then I’d nominate that something as “seriousness”. In other words, we are in the era of the Freak. Of course, one could say we have been here, some of us, for a very long time, and that seriousness and its other, Rameau’s nephew, have been having a ‘discussion’ for 275 years now, long before the defining event of the 20th century, the global collapse of peasant societies. History is the history of false beginnings and bogus endings – it proceeds through the limbo of trends to the next catastrophe with the rictus of laughter painted on its face, our It, our Pennywise. As such it is the very image of the insufficiency of the serious. Myself I have a special affection for the buffo-tragic. I feel it in my bones.

This is what I get for having grown up a sarcastic boy. I’ve internalized that joker, but I still feel the tickle in my ribs in every one of my thoughts. Which makes me a typical specimen, a child of the century.

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For E.D.

 

 

I’d as soon lay hold of Emily’s dash

and trifle

as I would lift my uncle Jeff Cash’s

favorite rifle

 

from out of the case where he keeps it

in his den

- under where the head of an 8 point buck sits

and scares men

 

and little girls who enter – I should know

who used to stare

back at the monster until I’d go

Beyond my fear.

 

From this I culled my fiercest dreams

- the dash from Emily

would be heavier and scarier than it seems

similarly.

Marginalia, a poem by Karen Chamisso

Like everybody else, I live among my marginalia.

The orange peels, the leftover lentil stew, goes in the trash,

I presume. I let the maid take care of it.

There are drawers full of photos, although I

Am a blur in them all, as though some thumb came down

and pressed and turned viciously in the emulsion.

There’s no end of it, until there’s the it, which must be tossed

Into the furnace or the coffin

And the marginalia is cleared away, testimonials all.

I will let the undertakers take care of it.

I presume they know how to do that kind of thing.

-Karen Chamisso

Against Craft

 Tennyson, famously, was averse to the word "scissors". Something about the s-es. I don't know if Tennyson had a lisp. When I was a child of six or so, I did. Scissors would be a treachery. My own aversion is for the word "craft". How I hate to hear "craft" applied to writing! The "craft" of the story, poem, whatever. It repulses me, with its overtones of some genteel, antiquated hobby. Engineering, that would be alright, I suppose. Art, design, plumbing, all of that, which puts writing where it should be, in the world where people build, repair, create fixes, mob up, make spaghetti, help their kids with homework, and are alternately illuminated and tired. Craft comes from the early modern guild economy, the fierce nostalgia for which has fed the fascism and reaction of the 20th and 21st century. (Even though I should add that guild organizations, from doctors to profs, have endured to our day with more vigor than unions. Alas.)

So where did it come from, this blight of "craft"? I suspect it came by way of the conservative modernists, the agrarians, the Tates and Ransoms, who viewed modern society as a blight in contrast to the organic societies of the pre-bellum South, i.e. societies held together by slavery. As opposed to the Russian formalists, who were seeking a vocabulary of devices and machinery, in line with their sympathy for socialism and the stripping away of superstition, the conservative modernists wanted a vocabulary that would make supplant the radicalism of, say, the futurist with the dark port wine views of a Spengler, moaning for an aristocracy.

In spite of this, "craft" did, to an extent, democratize literary culture. That culture was overwhelmingly masculinist, and I feel that it is turning. Put that in the balance with the trivialization effected by craft, the mini-industry that has sprung up around it, the mystification of the culture producer's position in the system of media and entertainment. Everything that I value in literary culture is anti-craft. Sloppiness, guesses, rants, jibes, reportage, stories told while waiting in line, raps while drinking in the park, emails, tweets, porno fan fic- these are the forms I want to go back to.

the stub principle: there has never been a Truth era

We are not living in a post-Truth era, for the simple reason that we have never, ever lived in a Truth era.

We are living in the era of data availability. For instance, I don’t know whether it has quite been realized in the social sciences that when archives and libraries throw unimaginable masses of texts – books, newspapers magazines - on line, and subject them to the search engine, we have a very interesting means of catching the way histories have been written – and have overwritten troubling details. I’ve been working on a non-fiction/fiction story about the assassination of Dmitri Navachine, a minor figure, cut down in 1937 in Paris. And I’m seeing how from the get go the assassination was lied about, Navachine was lied about, specific parts of the whole scene were taled and re-taled like some chromosomal code gone awry, with mutations galore, and how this seeped into almost every historical account of the 30s in France written by historians, many of them Anglophones. Navachine is supposed to be part of a series of the minor lives of the Cold War – I’ve already written about X, a real figure whose murder was solved, but never prosecuted. Navachine is a variation on this theme. The one and only certainty I go by is the stub principle. Stub was the word introduced by William Gibson to designate alternative time tracks – pasts that don’t converge on one canonical past. The reviewers all reference multi-universe theory and what have you, when they could just reference our common past, our twentieth century past, where stubs proliferate. The thirties were an intense time – a low decade, as Auden put it – as compared to, say, the fifties. Or so it might seem looking back. But once you dive into the huge datapile that the internet has made available, you find out that it is stubs all the way down.

I suppose the hope is that at some point, the violence leaks out: that the I – you relationship is re-established. In Lucretian terms, ultimately love rules the universe. I think that is in fact a better account than one that relies on the truth. The truth is a cold thing, as cold as a clue, while love is an organic thing, and warmth is not just its milieu but its essence. We can’t live in a truth era, ever; we can’t suppress the stub principle. The dream should not be everybody agreeing on one canonical version of the world, but rather, a polis in which the citizen is taught to sublimate the violence inherent to their stub – to live in it with the appropriate humor.

IMO, as the kids text.

what is this poem selling

 

What is this poem selling?

For the plausible, the uncle looking man

On the You Tube channel is definitive:

It is by selling that we die and live

 

All things we see above us

And the terror in which we are dressed

Is to sell something to someone

And so on. I was impressed

 

By this cosmic vision. When God made the earth

And it was good – it was to sell

And even the devil is a pr man

Marketing property in hell.

 

Well well well. Everything is sales,

 And always be closing, you hear?

This poem is selling an irony

While I’m shedding a tear in my beer.

 

O O, I can’t argue with the uncle looking man

But suspect selling everything’s a bad bad plan.

- Karen Chamisso

 

 

 

 

 

genteel and mongrel politics: the Democratic Party trap

 The genteel trap

When Santayana used the phrase “genteel tradition” to refer to a certain strain in American thinking - a romantic avoidance of the real, haunted by Calvinistic rules that equated happiness with sin – the phrase escaped his essay and came to stand for an damning avoidance of the vulgar in American art and by extension, America’s middle class self-consciousness. An editor at Scribner’s magazine, which was popular in the 1920s, wrote that he refused stories that contained “slang, profanity, vulgarity, agnosticism or radicalism.” (quote from The Black Genteel Tradition by Gorman Beauchamp). This rule was, as well, once the rule of genteel politics, and most especially of the Republican party, centered in the Northeast among businessmen.

The Democratic party was quite different. From the beginning, it was the libido to the Whig Id. It welcomed both the Southern planter and the ethnic immigrant, mainly Irish. And it was animated with the anti-Black fevers of both groups. However, by the 20th century, due to this tradition of welcoming, it gradually made way for POC – especially after Roosevelt.

For Santayana, I think, the opposite to gentility was a vulgar pragmatism – vulgar in the best sense, akin to vulgate, a literature of the common tongue. To me, the Democratic party in its period of greatest effect, was not vulgar, but mongrel.

I take the word from Ann Douglas’s great Mongel Manhattan, an attempt at a real synthetic American cultural history that doesn’t dicker with the segregation demanded by the academic inventorists, but sees the black strain in every cultural artifact of white modernism and the white strain in the disjunctions of the great products of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a two-headed monster, this America, at least, or two times x heads, with the white head continually trying to destroy the others, though that would mean the death of the entire body.

It is as a mongrel part that the Democratic party stepped into history. It is as a mongrel party that it reconciled the ethnic bosses, the Cold War, civil rights and social democracy.

And it is the mongrel rawness of the party that the generation after the seventies has tried to kill. Though it speaks with a mongrel voice, occasionally – just listen to Bill Clinton go on about trickle down! – it has adopted the forms and norms of gentility. It has trivialized racism, which is a systematic hole in the pocket of every black household in America, as a lingo rule to guide rich privileged people in talking about those they lord it over. The mongrel democrats dreamed big and loved to press publicly on the levers of power – the genteel democrats dream little and far be it from them to use their power in any dishonorable, viz, helpful to the people they represent, way. Like Scribners, they don’t want any “slang, profanity, vulgarity, agnosticism or radicalism”, which is why, when a shortfingered vulgarian claims the election was stolen cause he lost, they don’t holler back that the election was as close as it was because of systematic Republican suppression of the vote, stealing the rights of the people, which are your property. No, it is all – when President Bush lost, he sent such a gracious letter. Gracious , I tell you!

Depending on your enemy to be gracious is a way to lose everything. Which, I could care less except those schmucks represent us. The Republicans are a faux mongrel party – full of white working class resentment, directed towards propping up the worst excesses of the mostly white plutocracy. It is as if the Confederate part of the Democratic party was cut out and implanted in its opponent.

I’m hoping that somebody in the D side in DC is remembering that they represent a vast constituency, and not a small circle of people who send each other gracious notes. Cause those notes are valuable enough to wipe your ass with, and nothing further.

Fight