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29 December
This time a year ago, someone embittered over the Provokies wrote that I was obviously someone who wanted, but failed, to become an academic.
Alas, my ambitions have never been quite so modest.
There are writers one admires, and writers ones love. And then there are a few (really, it can only be a very
few) who reveal to a reader the sense of a vocation, delivering -- in their work in their
example -- the call to what one then tries to do with one's life.
Tries, and too often fails, perhaps. But the moment of the calling is what lingers in memory for
a long time. You feel as if everything, in retrospect, were an answer to the moment of recognition in that call.
I've been frustrated with Susan Sontag's work in recent years -- and said as much in print a few times. ( Here, for example, and here.) My sense was that her work ultimately suffered from the adoration of some, and the stupid malice of others.
While I am going to try to write a couple of essays about her soon (as the demands on my time right
now may permit), for now there is a feeling of grief, of having lost someone who was, almost from
the start, a model -- the incarnation of possibility, the figure who revealed "a world more attractive," the one
who saved me from ever quite believing (as a few simple souls evidently do) that "intellectual" is a subset
of "academic."
23 December
I've just given an interview to the NY Times that will be part of a story on Monday. That sort of
thing happened several times this year. A curious development, and a slightly disconcerting one, after being
so often on the other side of the interview process (listening rather than pontificating). I never sought these
occasions out, being by nature a timid person, fearful of misquotation, and easily unsettled by loud noises or strong gusts
of wind.
All in all, it is probably best to mutter under one's own byline, rather than by proxy -- though perhaps there is
something to be said for the George Bernard Shaw method. GBS once published an article in which he granted himself an interview.
Now that's efficiency.
Meanwhile, in the world of real journalism, Doug Ireland reports on a strike at Editions de Seuil. It sounds as if one of the great French publishing houses is undergoing the sort of "streamlining" that has made American
literary and intellectual life such a bracing challenge to one's will to go on.
Actually it's not all terrible. The other night, Book TV ran a panel discussion of literary blogging. Keep an eye out for reruns. Interesting actually to see the people whose sites I read constantly, and to discover
that, aside from being one of my favorite people, Maud Newton is in fact a smokin' hot babe, bearing no little or
no resemblance to Velma from Scooby Doo, despite her claims to the contrary.
As a tangent, let me gloss something in a recent item by Maud on blogging and book publishing -- in the course of which, she had a little sketch of a character
she knew in college who was prone "to regale us with Bible verses and stories about the girls he'd wanted to fuck at
a frat party the night before."
He is an embodiment of a type delineated by Charles Portis in The Dog of the South, in his portrait of a dubious lawyer named Jack. As the narrator says:
"He struck me as one of those country birds who, one second after meeting you, will starting telling of some bestial escapade
involving violence or sex or both, or who might in the same chatty way want to talk about Christ's Kingdom on Earth. It can
go either way with those fellows and you need to be ready."
22 December
Coming soon....the Memoirs of Chairman Bob.
You can read more about it here, including blurbs from Cornel West and Howard Zinn. It's due out in a couple of months.
But I got my hands on the pre-pre-publication copy, and now have this version, which closely resembles the one to be shipped to a literary commodity distribution center near you.
Good God, y'all -- this is the book. I've now read it a couple of times.
Favorite scene? During early 1970s, while waiting around as meeting plans are being completed for what will be a knock-down,
drag-out fight among three revolutionary organizations, Chairman Bob and posse kill some time at a movie theater,
watching Night of the Lepus.
A memorable film from my own preadolescent viewing of Late Night Monster Horror Chiller Theater, Night of the
Lepus tells the story gigantic mutated rabbits on a rampage. Janet Leigh and DeForest Kelly are in
it -- though what you remember, mainly, are the vicious bunnies.
20 December
Last week, the site got fewer than three hundred visitors per day, for all but two days of the workweek. That
hasn't happened in a while. Not a huge surprise. It's a sign of both the beginning of the holiday season and the end
of the semester. The stats will really start to tank, henceforth.
Speaking of the holidays, the Times article on Festivus appeared on Sunday, mentioning the fact that we did not actually have an aluminum pole at our party.
I'm pretty sure I said things that were more quotable than that. The whole "social history and the invention of tradition" riff, for example. Oh well, go figure.
Does being mentioned in the Style section mean that Rita and I are now East Coast media elite hipster
types? Why, no, it in fact does not. Still, there appears to be a trend to recognize librarians as culture heroes. (See, also, this.)
A friend points out a blog entry drawing/commenting on my small part of the Chronicle's awesome plagiarism package, which has generated a fair bit
of discussion. Word is that it will be picked up by the ABC evening news at some point this week.
Interesting to see this follow-up to the most dramatic of the cases covered in the package.
It may be that the guy would have been better off quoting The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which Guy
Debord wrote, "Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it." Of course, Debord himself lifted that line from Lautreamont's
Maldror, published 99 years earlier.
My piece on Marjorie Garber's book on Shakespeare was in Newsday this weekend. When I filed it, the contributor's
note didn't say anything about winning the Balakian, which in hindsight was the year's personal high point.
They'll give the award to somebody else in about a month.
Oh, fickle and fleeting Glory! thou art less durable than the Festivus pole.
**
Does he have a clearly defined attitude in this matter? Or is it more of a "I can take it or leave it"-type policy?
"My main thrust is that I hate revisionism. I seriously hate revisionism. And I never
compromise with revisionism. I fought and fought again with revisionism. And the party's correct line is based on the process
of fighting revisionism. I hate revisionism. I seriously hate revisionism."
Well okay then! Glad we cleared that up.
Next question?
17 December
As so often happens, you'll be concentrating on some difficult problem and getting nowhere -- and in a moment of
frustration, you go, "Man how I wish Chairman Bob Avakian had provided some guidance in matters of epistemology, that is, the theory of knowledge. I know he's got a lot on his
plate. But that sure would be useful."
Turns out Chairman Bob picked up a little Althusser-ese while in France, maybe, given that he now says his "Conquer
the World: The Revolutionary Proletariat Can and Will" (1981) created an "epistemological rupture" in M-L theory. And I think
we all know just how painful that can be.
As it happens, "Conquer the World" is actually a pretty interesting document (awful title notwithstanding) -- a comprehensive
review of the history of the international communist movement that is more critical than you might think. Not
quite critical enough by half, in my opinion. But then I tend to think that saying that "Stalin committed mistakes"
is inadequate, somehow. "Mistakes" is just not the best word for what Stalin committed.
For a while, other ultra-Maoist types were denouncing "Conquer the World" for being more or less Trotskyist. Which,
to be "a bit provocative" (as Chairman Bob so often says of his own comments), is in fact a reasonably fair
characterization of some aspects of the argument.
Anyway, it's an interesting document, and damned hard to come by. Look on Amazon and you aren't going to find it. Nor
is it in the Library of Congress. Why isn't it available online? I'm just asking.
16 December
The other day, I heard from a reporter doing a story for the New York Times on Festivus parties. The referral
log showed one hit for "Festivus party" the day before. He said he was working on a pretty tight deadline, and I got
the sense that this was maybe his first stop.
I've been in that position, of course -- needing to get something together really fast, hoping for
a halfway decent interview -- so did it, despite the relative lack of Seinfeld-mania around our household.
Rita and I did watch it, at least for a few years. And when the show ended, I knocked off a sort of mock "inspection
of the Zeitgeist" thumbsucker on it, which got reprinted in a lot of newspapers. But it's not like we actually had an aluminum pole up.
A certain number of my colleagues did seem interested in the Airing of the Grievances part, but we ended up going kind
of meta on that, discussing exactly what sort of grievances it would be appropriate to discuss.
Anyway, I yacked away about all of this, and even pontificated a little about how social historians think of "tradition"
as actually a side-effect of modernity. It's always already contaminated by reflexivity. That makes a
"phony tradition" valid, in its way.
I don't know, it might have been better if we'd actually had an aluminum pole, or done the Feats of Strength -- though
I am sufficiently a wuss not to regret this failure to invite other people to beat me up in my own home.
He asked if we'd have a Festivus party next year. I said we probably would. We have a critical mass of people who
have now attended two of them in a row, and momentum counts for something.
The article is supposed to be in Sunday's issue of the Times. We'll see if I came out coherent enough to
merit citation. In hindsight, one thing did seem at least plausibly quotable: "This is nerd culture at its most
quintessential."
Less true of our guests, perhaps, than of their host. Then again, I said it in the context of arguing that the holiday
would only be complete with the establishment of Festivus carols, of which "Now I Wanna Be Your Dog" by Iggy and the Stooges
has always seemed the most appropriate.
14 December
This week's issue of the Chronicle has a cover story that is actually a multi-part series on academic plagiarism.
To make a long story short: If you are a student, by all means, take care not to plagiarize. But if you
are a professor, don't sweat it. The lack of definite protocols for handling charges of plagiarism make it fairly easy
to get away with it, at minimal risk.
I broke a story about an academic plagiarist a few months ago, and contributed one small part of this week's package. My colleagues who wrote the better part (in all senses) of the package did an impressive job.
They tracked down and really nailed various culprits. The print edition has side-by-side texts, some of which are astounding
to behold.
Because of this special issue (the final one of the year), a few professors out there will have a really crappy
holiday.
Boo freakin' hoo.
The package should generate a lot of discussion. At least part of it is online to non-subscribers, here. If you really want to get in, but can't, drop me a line and we'll work something out.
UPDATE: See comments by Henry Farrell on this package, over at Crooked Timber.
Henry may be right that the Chron is not the first paper that comes to mind when you say "investigative reporting." However,
I did a certain amount of it in the course of writing this, not to mention this.
13 December
We had our annual Festivus party on Saturday. Neither of us has watched Seinfeld in a long time, and yet when Festivus rolls around, everybody gets into the seasonal spirit.
(Warning: page may load slowly.)
10 December
his website of short essays and occasional diary-like entries
(or "blog," as the kids now say).
When reached for comment about the decision, Mr. Crain indicated that he needed to get some other writing done -- and
anyway, he was spending way too much time looking at his referral logs.
A source close to Mr. Crain reports that some of the search-terms that led people to the site also bothered
the "blogger."
***
Okay, enough of that slightly disembodied "news reporting" voice that I've learned to do, when necessary, over the
past -- jeez, what is it? almost four years? -- at the Chronicle.
It's now coming up on a year that the present website has been running. Let's just say I've had plenty of opportunities
to experience feelings somewhat like those that led Caleb to shut his site down.
The referral logs can be a disagreeable reminder of what people do with their spare time. "Ayn Rand rape scene," "sneak-a-peek
webcam view," and "virtual dominatrix" can be counted on for a certain steady flow of traffic, it seems.
Beyond that, there is the demand to add something, every so often. A few hundred of you come by more or less regularly.
Lord knows I appreciate the company. There was a period in the late 1990s when I used to read a lot of sociology, in
hopes of maybe acquiring some social skills. That's the neat thing about this site -- it provides a public face, yet
I can continue to be a misanthropic antisocial hermit. Imagine my relief!
Still, it is demanding. I know what Caleb means when he says that it feels like he ought to be working on other projects.
Somebody out there is writing a bad book about C.L.R. James right this minute. Oh, the chagrin.
8 December
Trinity Southern University, which sells degrees based on "life experience," at a reasonable price, is
in trouble with the Attorney General's office in Pennsylvania -- in part because it granted an MBA to one Colby Nolan,
described as a six year-old black cat owned by the deputy attorney general.
I'm not sure what the big deal is. According to the Associated Press, Colby had a GPA of 3.5. You can be president with lower grades than that.
Somewhat more troubling is the discovery that the former head of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health's laboratory
also had a degree from Trinity Southern, according to an article that appeared last year in the Boston Globe.
Actually, with a little effort, you turn up a fair number of people listing TSU degrees on their resumes.
You also find the website of the, uh, institution itself, which has an "org" rather than "edu" domain name.
Unfortunately a lot of links at the site no longer work. So you cannot, for example, read the FAQ. Other sources
quote passages from it, however, and it's a hoot. Favorite bits:
"Q. Will this degree be accepted by everyone?
A. A Trinity Southern degree works for 95% of its graduates, however, it is not appropriate for
people in the public education field, government, or those who wish to use the degree to attend a traditional graduate program.....
"Q. Is this a scam?
A. Absolutely not. We accept credit cards and in fact we have a 'no-questions-asked' guarantee that
if you are not pleased you can return the degree and receive a refund less shipping and printing of $39 for domestic and $59
for international orders."
Although TSU is nominally based in Dallas, Texas, it is clear that students are exempt from any standardized testing
of skills in punctuation and logic.
7 December
If you plug "Charles Portis" into Google, the very first item that comes up is my essay.
Draw from that coincidence what conclusions you may.
Various folks have pointed out the front-page article in the Wall Street Journal about the revelation that the
Marxist-Leninist Party of the Netherlands, founded in 1969, was in fact the product of collusion between intelligence agencies
and a grifter. The latter, it seems, enjoyed the really good Chinese food served whenever foreign delegations gathered
in Peking to study Mao Tse Tung Thought right at the source. (The excellence of the meals has been attested to by others.)
Now, given our quasi-Situationist policy ("humanity will not be free until the last capitalist is strangled with the
guts of the last bureaucrat"), we do not link to the Wall Street Journal. Which is a subscription site,
further sucking the blood of the ink-stained toilers, such as ourselves. Curse them!
However, many of the same details are in this article from the Guardian. Actually the whole thing was in Le Monde a couple of months ago.
There is still a website for the MLPN up at Lycos. At the top of the page, an animated hammer-and-sickle perpetually rotates, like the beacon of
a lighthouse calling to any ancient mariners wandering the earth.
Maybe more worth noting is the image at the bottom of the page. It's an eyeball, peering at you as if through
a keyhole, accompanied by the words "Big Brother is Watching!"
6 December
Sorry for the dead air over much of the past week. That was in part a matter of technical problems with my service provider.
Also, laziness.
Well, not laziness exactly, but distraction.
You know, they start playing Christmas music -- those grim dirges of enforced holiday cheer, of socially sanctioned
family togetherness -- a little bit earlier each year. By the time I draw my last breath, they will start just
after Labor Day. Now when I go out to do some work at a coffee shop, first thing in the morning, there is usually
some holiday tune in the background, sapping my will to go on. As if reading Carl Schmitt did not place demands enough..
1 December
Over the past few years, I've had work translated into German, Spanish, French, and Italian. In one case, something I
wrote was more or less cribbed -- don't recall if Babelfish revealed how much overt credit was given -- into Greek.
A fine thing, this international author-dom.
Nobody ever asks before they make the translation, so it's always a surprise.
According to an informed source, the publisher "is a reputable online web daily published in Berlin" and that
the translator, Ms. Pham Thi Hoai, is "one of Vietnam's best contemporary writers."
My great hope is that the article is better in Vietnamese.
On Monday, I muttered about Doug Ireland's interesting piece about Le Monde, characterizing him, in passing, as
a liberal journalist who didn't know anything about Trotskyism.
I was wrong. In the course of a lively round of e-mail, Ireland has persuaded me that he knows a lot about the
topic. He also objects to being called a liberal, on left-wing grounds that I can respect. So, mea culpa.
My only excuse -- not that it really is much of one -- is to say that finding myself back in
the office (after a week away) induced a certain amount of misanthropy.
29 November
Very interesting stuff about developments at Le Monde here, in a report by Doug Ireland. Certainly had my share of groaning and teeth-grinding while reading it, because like a whole bunch of other American
liberal journalists who will go nameless, he can't resist talking about Trotskyism without actually knowing anything.
So the Lambertists are "the most secretive, paranoid, and Bolshevik of the Trot sects," huh? Well
I dunno ....apart from wondering about the agenda of that particular configuration of adjectives, I do think maybe
Lutte Ouvriere could give them a run for the title.
Ireland also calls Bernard Henri Levy a "neo-con," which is just about as peculiar as the way the American press sometimes calls him "a man of the left."
Or this item, which somehow turns BHL into an "academic." Tres amusant. At Arts and Letters Daily, over the weekend, there was another item for the BHL roundup. I'll put up a full transcript of my interview with him from last year....one of these days.
Here's an enormous review of a book on the history of the Communist Party in Britain. (When I printed it out, the documents was about 25 pages single-spaced.) It's
by a guy who, according to the site, is on its executive committee. Hard to know what that means, at this point,
since CPGB seems to have disintegrated into about fifty pieces. On another commie tangent, an interesting website on Kenneth Burke includes his exchange with CP literary heavyweight Granville Hicks as well as a couple of review-essays that I hadn't
seen -- things which might well have been included in The Philosophy of Literary Form, from 1941, but weren't. Writing about KB a few years back, I had room only to give a very brief nod to his period as fellow-traveller. The 1930s are sometimes called his Marxist
period, but like most American liberals around the CP, Burke wasn't ever really all that up on Marx.
His Attitudes Toward History contains a rationalization of the Moscow trials that is right up there with
Merleau-Ponty's for sophistication. Or rather, sophistry. A good mind turned to a bad end, in any case.......
My short (very short!) review of Magic Seeds by V.S. Naipaul -- his latest, and possibly last, novel -- appeared in Newsday on Sunday.
Seems like a return to Naipaul is in the cards, maybe sometime in 2005, because it'll be very hard to settle down
to work on C.L.R. James again without dealing with Sir Vidia.
James is clearly the model for the character Lebrun in A Way in the World. But Naipaul does so many very
odd things (a few of which amount to acts of aggression) in transforming the original into his own creation. At the same time,
he picks up on some aspects of James's personality that nobody else has ever quite shown -- certainly not in the usual boilerplate biographical introduction.
24 November
One of those phases of maximum concentration....So I'm not going to get sidetracked from the work underway, for too long,
at least. Besides, it's the week of Thanksgiving. Nobody's around anyway, right?
A musical recommendation:
I've just heard about this website devoted to Roky Erickson, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, and Texas psychedelic/punk garage stuff from the 1960s more
generally, including the Red Crayola. (Also, Syd Barrett stuff, since if you like Roky you probably also like Syd.) Lots of
free downloads and whatnot. This is definitely worth a visit.
22 November
The Monday Reading List. Which is just like the Friday Reading List (R.I.P.) except that I'll have the weekend to put
it together.
A little on the short side, this time. I'm working on some essays this week, and just want to
concentrate on that for now.
Everybody has probably heard about Google Scholar by now. Fine in concept, yet a bit of a dud in action, especially if you aren't using it at a major research university or
a library that's part of a consortium. It's bound to get better with time.
A fine essay on "reading moments" by Adam Kotsko, though it could be longer. The same is true of a related essay by the Young Hegelian on the relationship between the accumulating of books and that other form of acquisitiveness known as reading.
Speaking of which: A few weeks ago, I ordered online a second-hand copy of Studies in the Scope and Method of
"The Authoritarian Personality": Continuities in Social Research, published in 1954 and not, to my knowledge, ever
reprinted. The copy was listed as in good condition, at a reasonable price. The first thing I noticed upon opening
it was the name on the inside page. My copy was originally owned by Stanley Milgram, a name that evidently
didn't register with the bookseller. It will certainly have some effect on how I read the book.
It shouldn't be hard to build a transition between The Authoritarian Personality and the topic of Rick Perlstein's
article in the new issue of Columbia Journalism Review. Please consider my failure to do so not so much a dereliction of
duty as a challenge....
Connect away....
As my review of Seth Mnookin's book about The New York Times indicates, it seems to be a lot easier to reconstruct corridor gossip
than it is to deal with the media-wide meltdown now seemingly underway.
Even if Howell Raines is Beelzebub himself, I'm pretty sure he didn't invent Fox News, or force any newspaper to start
shortening articles. Now, if he did, that would be a book.
As everybody knows, David Lodge has a new novel out. He was writing it when I interviewed him for this profile....Not while I was in the room, of course.
It was recently cited here, along with The Satanic Bible.
In the words of the Drive By Truckers: "Sometimes I feel lower than the company I keep...."
19 November
The Friday Reading List will actually appear Monday. I'm tired, and busy, and have a lot on my mind, and just am not
up to it.
Besides, most folks only come here on Friday/weekends for the Cat Blog anyway. I am at peace with that.
18 November
Thanks Maud Newton -- a fellow admirer of Charles Portis -- for the link on Tuesday.
Maud will be part of a panel called "What the Blog? The Terrifying World of Literary Websites" to be hosted by Dennis Loy
("Moby Lives") Johnson, in NYC on Friday, Dec. 3.
Meanwhile, tonight in DC, there'll be a panel on political blogging. Location, etc. available here.
My wont is to avoid all policy-drone gab-fests. In the course of 16 years in DC, it has been amazingly
easy to stick to that. But this one will have both Henry Farrell and Michael Tomasky -- either of them intelligent enough
to be worth a violation of that directive. So an exception can be made. Just this once.
16 November
Charles Portis sighting!
Exclusive to McLemee.com!
(Always wanted to do a headline like that.)
My tribute to the great American comic novelist Charles Portis, first published continues to draw a steady round of visitors (around 700 readers so far this year). The referral
logs show that about 3% of people coming here via search engine do so searching his name. Even more than "sneak a peek webcam
viewer," in fact.
Anyway, it was still a surprise when, last week, a message arrived from Alston Jennings, Jr., former Assistant Attorney General for the State of Arkansas, who tells of meeting Portis.
Mr. Jennings has kindly agreed to let me post his message, which I'm sure will be much appreciated by all other
Portis aficianados.
(By a strange coincidence, yesterday I had to bang out an article after interviewing a professor named Norwood. Ooo-eee-ooo.)
So here's the letter:
Dear Mr. McLemee,
I ran into Charles Portis last night here in Little Rock. That reminded me how much I love his work but how little I
know about him. Google led me to your website and I enjoyed your insightful and respectful Report from the Appreciation
Society. Noting your curiosity about what Mr. Portis might be like in person I offer the following for whatever it might be
worth.
While I have lived within a couple of blocks of Mr. Portis for years I had only met him once, a few years ago, at
a party for our neighbor, Dee Brown. I'd been told that Mr. Portis socialized very little and I was excited about the prospect
of meeting him. He arrived alone in an old, Dodge sedan. He was not unfriendly but neither was he effusive. I don't recall
him smiling. He shares my fondness for beer and cigarettes. He was not much interested in talking about his work. He warmed
up a little when someone happened to mention target shooting competitions (my hobby.) He recalled that he had enjoyed long-range,
highpower rifle matches while he was a Marine. But he was generally very reserved, indeed.
Last night, I was having an after-work beer at a little tavern near my home when I noticed a tallish, fit-looking
gentleman, about 70, old boots and jeans, having a beer and a smoke while standing with his back to the bar,looking out the
window. I thought he looked familiar. I heard him say he was waiting for a wrecker because his car had stalled so I sidled
up to eavesdrop and ask "What kind of car is it?" "'85 Dodge Diplomat." I introduced myself and offered him a ride but he
wasn't interested. "I've got a ride coming. When the wrecker gets here he'll be blocking traffic and people will be blowing
their horns. I'd better stick around." And with that he put down his beer bottle and stepped out into the dusk.
I had to ask the bartender: "Do you know who that was?" "Sure, Buddy Portis. He comes in now and then."
I know this isn't much info but it's first person and it's current. Should you ever find yourself
in Little Rock, I may not be able to get you an audience but I can tell you where to hang out in case "Buddy" gets thirsty.
Very nice website.
All the best, Alston Jennings
15 November
Twelve years ago this weekend, Rita and I (who met during a week-long brainwashing session run by flunkies of management
at the Library of Congress, where we were then both working) had dinner at Zorba's, in Dupont Circle. We went
back Saturday night.
Not sure, but I think maybe they were playing the same Greek folk music loop.
We couldn't remember what we had discussed, back then, other than the movie Sid and Nancy,
which we both liked. Chances are, I probably talked way too much. It's a Y chromosome thing. Still, it was a good date.
Reader, I married her.
12 November
It's good to see that Peter Terzian's profile of Alice Munro has been getting some props in the literary blogoshere. This is, I suspect, the shape of things to come. Canadamania will
soon sweep the blue states. People will start reading Earle Birney and Maissonneuve will sell like hotcakes. Remember,
you read it here first.
Some interesting thoughts by Young Hegelian on blogging, individuality, collectivity, and the socialization of labor -- with Schiller and Durkheim in there,
either dukin' it out or shaking hands, I'm not sure which.
How do you write about blogging and cite Durkheim but never mention anomie? Because a lot of it is anomie. Not
that there's anything wrong with that, given the alternatives. Especially nowadays. I'm guessing the inauguration
will be one big festival of gemeinschaft-y fervor.
People sometimes say "X went so far to the left he came out on the right." I'd like to think that W. Wesley McDonald
-- who is on C-SPAN2 this weekend, talking about Russell Kirk -- is so far to the right that he's kind of a left-winger. (He might not appreciate that sentiment. But there it.) After
doing this article on Kirk last spring, I hosted an online discussion with McDonald. Never did meet him in person, but he came across in the interviews as a nice guy, utterly lacking in pretense. Wish
I could say that about certain soi-disant Marxists....It will be interesting to watch him on the tube.
But thanks to Caleb Crain's musings this week, it will be harder to veg out in front of TiVo without feeling sort of complicit in the decline of reading
in America. (Oh well, you can't consume Durkheim all the time. That'd really be anomic.)
A passage from those Crainian ruminations that bears considering: "Text is no longer the first way that most Americans
learn about their world or imagine their world. Since the advent of television, we have been moving from a textual culture
to a streaming culture, but some dam broke in the last half-decade, and the changes have been accelerating. At some point,
once we have reached a new equilibrium point, the acceleration will stop. We will then be living in a different world."
Okay, social-science-fiction-channel time: What might that equilibrium look like? And will we know when we've reached
it?
11 November
Many thanks to Moby Lives, again, for the link yesterday -- in particular, to my brooding-out-loud notes
from Tuesday, but also to my speech for the Nona Balakian award.
Striking coincidence: that same day, I came across a second-hand copy of Anna Balakian's Surrealism: The Road
to the Absolute (Noonday Press, 1959), which is dedicated to Nona.
It was actually the title -- not the name of the author, much less the dedication -- that caught my eye. One
of the chapters is "The Influences of Freud and Hegel," discussing Breton's interest in Lenin's notes on Hegel. Damn,
what a small world.
9 November
Reaching a broader general audience, beyond the universities, is what it's all about. And Moby was reaching
that public back before every doofus and his dim brother Slim had a blog.
In that spirit, here's a temporary link to my Hot Type column in the new issue of the Chronicle, about the impending shut-down of the Women's
Review of Books.
*
Sorry not to have transcribed the Hardt interview over the weekend, as promised. I didn't really feel up to it.
We ended up spending a good part of one day at a luncheon put on by the Washington Ear, which provides audio services for the blind.
Rita has been doing audio descriptions of plays (giving a quick account of what's happening on stage when the
actors aren't speaking, which the blind folks at the performance can hear through special headsets) for ten
years now. She was recognized for that on Saturday, along with other people who have been volunteers for anywhere up
to thirty years.
It seems like just the other day that we went to the preview of a play for her first audio description. It was A
Christmas Carol, at Ford's Theater. (Yes, the scene of the famous joke: "Other than that, what did you think of the play,
Mrs. Lincoln?") Pretty nearly everything we've ever seen at Ford's was mediocre, at best, and this holiday chestnut was
no exception.
Still, what looms in memory now was my pride in her for doing it, and an earnest wish that some of her
basic generosity of spirit might, with time, rub off.
Whether it has or not, probably ought to be a matter for private rather than blogospheric rumination. But I
can say this much, anyway: The question that has been framing itself, more or less clearly, for some weeks now,
is whether there might be any "use" to what I'm doing as a writer.
*
The word "use" -- as I've just (well) used it-- comes via, of all sources, Emanuel Swedenborg.
For several years I've joked that one day I'll show that Sacvan Bercovitch got it all wrong by writing The Swedenborgian
Origins of the American Self. (In the meantime, this transcript of an essay on ES has an astounding number of wierd typos.)
Without trusting my own capacity to sum up the whole "doctrine of uses" at all adequately, I'd say it's a little bit
like splitting the difference between the Golden Rule and the categorical imperative. There are probably a hundred reasons
why that is wrong. But it's close enough for someone with an endlessly ironic relationship to theological discourse.
So, anyway...yes, the writing does, indeed, pay the bills. But I would be doing more or less the same
thing even if it did not pay the bills. In fact, that was the case for a very long time. Writing is gratifying to the
ego. But it's not that gratifying. My audience is modest, which means there is no particular incentive
to carry on like Norman Mailer on a bender. Very often, the work itself is hard. That's certainly not
a complaint, since the more difficult it is, the more it feels worth doing. But it can be exhausting. It is "the manual
labor of the mind."
The question remains: does it have some use? Some catalytic role? Does it add anything to the
world beyond its immediate occasion?
I don't know. It would be good to think that it does. But it might not make any difference even if it didn't. Money,
glory, or ethical utility ... none really has much claim as primary incentive.
Reading, writing, thinking (at least trying to do so): They are not purely instrumental to realizing some goal
outside themselves, and it is possible that some element of ethical substance is embodied in the very
commitment to them as self-sufficient ends. The "life of the mind" as, implicitly, dialogic.
If only I could trust that it had the proper aspect of a gift -- something given without thought of return -- instead
of a drive that so often seems much stronger than any motivation deduced, after the fact, to explain it.
8 November
A prediction, for the record: In the next videotape released by Osama Bin Laden, he will have a great
big smile on his face.
There may also be scenes filmed at an Al Qaeda recuitment center, with personnel giving
each other "high fives" and engaging in remarkably complicated "soul handshakes."
See, they get bonuses when they exceed the quota. Probably a couple extra virgins in the afterlife or something.
Remember what Gil Scott Herron warned: "Civil rights, women's rights, gay rights…it's all wrong. Call in the cavalry
to disrupt this perception of freedom gone wild. God damn it…first one wants freedom, then the whole damn world wants
freedom."
5 November
The Friday Reading List
(and Occasional Cat Blog)
Bad Subjects has redesigned its website. (Among the past essays I remember best: the memoir of a guy who was in Prairie Fire, the "house band" of the Revolutionary Communist Party during the 1970s. Why their
stuff hasn't been released on CD is a puzzle. I'd also like to hear the album by the Progressive Labor Party choir, also known
as "the PLP-LP.")
The only thing I know about whoever runs Thanksgiving is Ruined is that his name is Jamie and he says nice things about this website. Also, that he is the only other human being I
know who has actually looked through the Albert Weisbord archive and remained awake long enough to tell of it.
Small world department: Weisbord, who the other American Trotskyists of the 1930s considered a pain in the ass, wrote
an enormous work on political history and theory, published in Britain by (amazingly enough) a real press,
rather than by mimeograph machine, his usual medium. He shared the same publisher as C.L.R. James. And there are other grounds for thinking they were in touch with each other. (That is why I make the narcolepsy-defying
effort to read him, every so often.)
His Communist League of Struggle consisted of a dozen comrades who refused to join the Communist League of America
(the official Trotskyists) because (1) they weren't militant enough to have "struggle" in their title, and (2) they
had applied for a bulk-mailing permit, an unacceptable breach of revolutionary secrecy. I am not making that up.
Weisbord seems like the kind of grapho-megalo-maniac who, if he were alive today, would run a listserv devoted primarily
to distributing his otherwise unpublishable writings, denouncing people, and expelling somebody from time
to time, just to keep in practice. Legend has it that the Communist League of Struggle eventually consisted just of Albert
and his wife, Vera. And then they got divorced.
**
Two resources of interest to anyone concerned with James, but also quite valuable by any standard:
There is now an online Toussaint Louverture archive (English-language). I haven't had a chance yet to look through the other stuff in the Haiti archive, but it is great
to have.
As with the lectures on world history, this is "the fun Hegel" -- as opposed to the "headache Hegel" of Science of
Logic, for example.
Reading the introductory part, where he breaks down what's at stake for philosophy in tracing
the history of philosophy, is one of those moments when I feel like I have some hope of understanding what the guy
is all about.
There's a letter by Engels that also suggests that the lectures on aesthetics are smooth tobagganing, relatively speaking
anyway. Pretty sure Engels does not actually use the phrase "smooth tobagganing," however.
**
We now have a digital camera. (Moving into the 21st century, one awkward step at a time.) As it turns out, this can also
record home movies, thereby sending me in a whole new direction, creativity-wise. So far, the audience has
been Rita only, but look out Sundance, here we come.
My somewhat Godardian early period includes the "Smell My Finger" series, which stars our black cat, who always responds to that offer with considerable enthusiasm.
At almost three minutes in length, my most ambitious film to date is "The Cats Go Down the Hall to the Garbage Room," which adheres
pretty strictly to Dogma 95.
Something about it -- the shots of the empty corridors, the excitement of the cats, the loud noises created
by the efforts of the cameraman to get the trash bag into the garbage chute with his one free hand -- captures the
spiritual desolation of the blue-state resident at this moment in history.
4 November
"As the dyslexic Heideggerian said:
Only a dog can save us now."
-- note from a friend, 3 November 2004
My piece on Gertrude Himmelfarb's historical prolegomenon to a neocon "sociology of virtue" appeared last month
in The New York Times Book Review.
Just for the record: the Times doesn't much like the word "prolegomenon."
They also cut out the bit were I complained that Himmelfarb's tendency to write as if the Enlightenment came
into being sometime around 1730, combined with her neglect of the international networks in which its discourse
circulated, made the book a political pamphlet, not a work of scholarship. That trim is understandable, though.
The review ran a bit long.
Anyway, I've just put it up here.
Something about the Hardto-Negrian synthesis makes it seem like this week's election is but a momentary distraction from the growing worldwide democratic revolution.
I grow increasingly allergic to left-flavored happiness pills. Nonetheless, I'll try to get the transcript of my interview
with Hardt up on the website over the weekend.
3 November
I've said it before, and I'll say it again:
Democracy just doesn't work.
-- Kent Brockman, KBBL-TV
"No, folks, I’m not despairing. The country is, and will always be, worth fighting for. I’m not
saying everything sucks, so why bother .... But we here in the reality-based community are constrained by empirical
results, and we know now that we will have to deal with a Senate chock full of lunatics who spend 30 percent of their waking
hours trying to figure out how to bring Christ to earth and the other 70 percent fantasizing about (and then, with a fervor
commensurate with the intensity of the fantasy, decrying) man-on-dog sex."
2 November
Without hesitation, we endorse as candidate for the office of President of the United States the ticket of the Socialist
Party USA from 1904.
With hesitation -- but also a certain grim resolve -- we are willing to take what we can get.
Also, John Kerry is not Eugene Victor Debs. But given the rest of what Adam writes, and given the extremity of the moment,
I am willing to squint until Kerry looks a little bit like Debs, though it won't be possible to hold that squint.
And just for the record, George Bush is not Hitler. (If you say that he is, you make us all look like idiots.) A little
historical analogy is a dangerous thing.
Not to be pollyannish about it....What is profoundly worrisome, given the strands of our culture that warp
toward the authoritarian, is that the electoral process itself seems to be undergoing a crisis of legitimacy in
the middle of what promises to be a protracted war, with no end in sight.
My old friend Rick Perlstein -- who is now into, I guess, his third month without sleep, covering the election --
has a blog on dirty tricks that bears monitoring over the next 24 hours, at least. And who knows, maybe longer than that.
1 November
My article about Hardt and Negri is now out. It's good to have it done, even though so much that seemed important to cover (a) vanished between
the outline and final draft, or (b) never got into that outline to begin with.
Writing for the Chronicle means that I always have to keep in mind an audience consisting mainly of people who share
exactly none of my own interests or background. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but it imposes a fierce discipline.
My imagined reader used to be an assistant professor of botany. Lately, I think of her as a geologist. Not
sure why the disciplines changed.
Either way, it still makes sense not to spend a lot of time on, say, the degree to which the Hardto-Negrian concept
of "immaterial labor" is pretty much Daniel Bell revisited. Not a trivial point, but given the rigors, it
proves best not to be detained by it.
In any case, it is also absolutely necessary to assume that the public the article will reach will have no
particular sense of (say) who Fred Jameson or Francis Fukuyama might be. So I need to spell all it out -- albeit
in a telegraphic manner. Gah!
And as for thinking out loud about whether or not "the multitude" is not simply a variation of "the rhizome".... Forget
it. Just don't even go there. As a very wise person once told me: Writing nonfiction prose is the art of destroying
information. (The word "art" is what makes that formulation work.)
Pretty clear that I need to revisit Empire and Multitude in some other venue, one of these days.
For one thing, while reading H&N, there were numerous occasions when Johnson and Forest came to mind. And that is not
accidental. The first Anglophone grouping to rethink Marxism through the Grundrisse was the Johnson-Forest Tendency.
So much so that, a few years ago, while reading a thin volume of selections from the Grundrisse, I was overwhelmed
by how much it sounded like things by C. L.R. James and company.
The connection is also a lot more direct -- or "direct-actional," as I guess you could say. A translation of my friend
Marty Glaberman's (quintessentially Johnsonite) writings on wildcat strikes circulated in the Italian extraparliamentary left.
And there were lots of other links and mediations. The "workerist" movement in Italy emerged when a huge new cohort of
people who had never been inside a factory ended up on the assembly line, and in defiance of the Communist Party. Similar
conditions prevailed in the wartime auto industry in Detroit, at least as Marty described it.
I had a good interview with Michael Hardt, only a very little of which is reflected in the article. Will make it available
here, once I've had a chance to get the whole transcript into shape.
*
In revising the article for print, I'll try to get in something left out of the online version -- namely that Young-Bruehl
says she did try to contact the journal, as well as Said. (A couple of people have written asking about that.) Regarding
speculation over whether or not Said actually got the letter, I suppose that is a matter for HIS biographer to sort out.
One correspondent suggested that the article was an attempt to smear Edward Said Yeah, that's why I spent
an entire week trying to get somebody who had been close to him to comment in his defense. (See also the
desecration of the man's memory in my obituary for him.)
Naturally there was one demand that the article be retracted -- on the grounds that the JDL was never a terrorist organization.
He also hinted that maybe I have a problem with the Jews.
Actually, my problem is with people who talk about "the Jews" as a monolithic entity (something the Klan-type guys
I knew in high school did) but that's a nuance maybe better not parsed here.
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