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30 December
A review of Margo Jefferson's On Michael Jackson, to run in Newsday on Sunday, will be my first
piece in 2006. It actually went up on their site yesterday, so what the hell.... here it is.
**
To whoever came here yesterday via the search "black nazi skinheads," I am pretty sure you soon figured out that this was
not the site you were looking for.
Then again, it is hard to imagine just what you were looking for.
Good luck with the screenplay, though. At least I would like to think that is what you are doing.
29 December
Via No Great Matter, an instructive addendum to my Sacco and Vanzetti notes from yesterday. Evidently Sinclair's knowledge has itself been known for some time. I'd
heard that Avrich's book indicated acceptance of their guilt, but not that about Sinclair.
And so my education in public continues.
Check out Scott Eric Kaufman's running blog of MLA, over at Acephalous. I had lunch with SEK (among other folks) yesterday, following my panel.
Then went hom and collapsed. Still pretty sick -- fever, spaced-out feeling, etc. Otherwise I'd write more. This, now, is
composed at the outer limit of my available powers....Anway, more later.
28 December
Via both Chris Phelps and the Socialist Party history list, I learn of an article about the unearthing of a letter in which Upton Sinclair says that the lawyer for Sacco and Vanzetti admitted
that they were actually guilty, and that he (the lawyer) helped them cook up a story.
That Sinclair knew this, is news. That Sacco, at least, was guilty, however, isn't, and it's not a good sign
that that the reporter seems unaware of this. (A case were the pertinent Wikipedia article could actually have done some good.)
Then again, the article also refers to "the Socialist Daily Worker." For some reason, I prefer
to think that it was not the reporter's fault, but rather that a copyedidtor thought the word Communist was inflamatory
or libelous.
27 December
We're back from Christmas in Dallas, where, evidently I contracted the plague or something.
Not feeling so hot, anyway -- and now facing three days of the Modern Languages Association. Tomorrow morning, I'm
on a panel about academia and the media. Certainly I've though about the matter enough, over the years, but have
been strict about not writing down anything in advance of this event. It is going to be a talk, not a paper.
Even a coherent one, perhaps, assuming the fever breaks in the meantime.
Between the column, my work for Newsday, and various bits of freelance, I've managed to finish about
a hundred pieces this year. (No column tomorrow, though; it'll resume on regular schedule next week.) So why, looking
back, is it so annoying to think of the stuff merely sketched in notebooks and not executed? I don't know, but it is.
And on that note, I am now going to turn off the computer and go drink some orange juice.
23 December
Various stuff
you could look at.
Frank Wilson, editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer books section, blogs.
The brilliant Mr. Sun presents embedded dispatches from the War on Christmas. May our long nightmare soon end.
Happy holidays. (Is it pathetic that saying "Happy holidays" now seems like an act of defiance?
Yes, yes it is.)
22 December
In yesterday's column, I went along with the now-standard spelling of the author's name as Lu Xun, but actually still think of him as Lu Hsun,
as the old Foreign Language Press editions of his work called him.
Someone should really do a reader in English that would represent the different phases and genres of his work. The translations
I've seen don't seem to do justice to the qualities that you see described in the critical literature.
20 December
My review of Roger Pearson's biography of Voltaire turned out to be a bit more critical than most others that I've seen. ( This one, for example, or this.) As I've said before, there is a tendency to review the person and not the biography as such. And it is easy enough
to admire Voltaire.
I just wanted a better book than this one turned out to be. It seems like there ought to be a really good one
-- something comparable to Arthur McCandless Wilson's fantastic one on Diderot, which is one of my all-time
favorite books.
Update on the topic of embarrassing readings from adolescence:
The memory has now resurfaced of having been quite enthusiastic for Conscience of a Conservative "by" Barry
Goldwater (at least his name was on the cover, one of the National Review guys actually wrote it), a copy of which
showed up at a rummage sale or something like that. I recall also being a fan of William F. Buckley.
This was around age 15. I have no regrets. It did not hurt my vocabulary. And it actually had the effect of
stimulating my interest in the left. Somehow shortly before my 17th birthday I started reading the now-defunct
Guardian newspaper from New York. And also the Socialist Workers Party's The Militant -- which
is still around, and avaiable online.
The Militant is now the single dullest newspaper in the entire history of the American left. If an
SWPer sells five copies at a demonstration, they run a big article about it. I am not joking. Well, maybe just a
little -- but The Militant really is a newspaper about selling a newspaper. ( An example of the genre.)
The Guardian was better, but not a hell of a lot. Around 1980 its pages were filled with an endless (and
to me utterly incomprehensible) series of exchanges among groups with ponderous names like the Philadelphia
Workers Organizing Committee and the National Network of Marxist-Leninist Clubs.
With hindsight, I am not so much embarrassed by the memory as amazed that nobody at my redneck peckerwood high school
beat me to death for reading this stuff.
Even the Buckley was considered suspicious. I recall one guy being surprised to find out that Buckley was a conservative.
He'd seen him on TV and assumed he was a commie, based, no doubt, on his accent.
19 December
Thanks to Henry Farrell, whose recent item at Crooked Timber not only spread the word about my Colin Wilson column earlier this month, but generated a really enjoyable discussion among readers about adolescent literary passions they
now find cringe-making to recall.
Apart from that liking for Wilson's novel The Philosopher's Stone at 15 -- and I'd still say that it is as close
to a good book as the man ever wrote -- my adolescent record is really not that humiliating. By 14 or so, I had
somehow found Kafka, Sartre, and (okay, now admittedly this is pretty strange) Regis Debray. Sometimes I wonder how I
got out of East Texas alive.
But as for pre-adolescent reading enthusiasms....now that gets pretty embarrassing. By
12 or 13, I'd probably read every pamphlet by Garner Ted Armstrong -- not to mention Max Heindel's Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception,
a sort of mishmash of theosophy and anthroposophy from Edwardian-era America. (And if the expression "a mishmash of theosophy
and anthroposophy" doesn't mean anything to you, trust me, you really don't want to know.)
As humiliating as all this is to admit, I will mention in my own defense that the mystical bent of this period also led
me to Pascal. So it wasn't all horse shit. Just mostly.
16 December
A friend points out that I should think less about the quantity of my readership and just appreciate the quality. There
is certainly something to this. And I'm in the fairly unusual position of being able to write about what I want, now, and
to do so full-time. That counts for a lot.
It would be good to reach a larger audience, though. There's just no way around that. I'm pretty much blacklisted
by Arts and Letters Daily now, which is disappointing. The IHE audience is now huge -- the exact numbers are a state secret,
though it's a fair guess that they will soon be higher than those for any print publication to which I've contributed on a
regular basis. But I'd certainly like my column to reach more non-academics than it does.
This kind of brooding is usually a symptom of not having met a challenge in the actual work of writing itself.
Okay, that's it. No more grumbling. In 2006, I'm going to finish a book. I've got about four on the drawing
board. Time to get at least one of them out of the way.
15 December
It mentions an early book on deconstruction of his that I read a long while back -- but didn't quite find a way
to work in anything about his Estranging the Familiar, another volume on the essay-as-form, published a
dozen years ago (more or less) and very interesting. Really should have found a way to recommend it.
Then again, I have no confidence that anybody would pay any attention to such recommendations anyway.
Here's a real confidence booster: The other day, I'm reading the galleys of a forthcoming book and notice a
reference to "Michael Berube's aptly wicked phrase 'publicity intellectuals,' scattershot pundits promiscuous in
their momentary appearances in the electronic media." There is a footnote, citing a piece by Berube in the Washington
Post from 2002.
Now all due credit to MB, who is doing the Lord's work. But I'm going to accept a small cut of the flattery dividends.
Aptly wicked, or maybe wickedly apt, was certainly how that phrase felt when I used it (defining it in precisely
the same way) in an essay for In These Times in 1999. It had occured to me in a moment of anger and disgust
at seeing how the promise of Jacoby's book had been betrayed by hustlers and loudmouths. (A "moment" that is stretching on
a bit.)
Jacoby's book hadn't come as a revelation when it came out in 1987, because I'd already taken the plunge. But it was
encouraging, even so -- the kind of analysis and map of the terrain you really want to know is available,
when the going gets hard.
So now, almost twenty years later, where am I? Lost, that's where. A look at Technorati confirms
it: Hardly anyone ever links to my work. The old familiar sense of writing notes and sticking them in bottles thrown
into the ocean is back, big-time.
Perhaps it is just the seasonal-affective doldrums talking, or the inevitable end-of-the-year effort to draw
a balance sheet. But I can't help wishing for a time machine. There are lessons to be learned from my experience. It would
be good to be able to go back in time and teach them.
"Put down Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading for a minute and listen up. Get a damn clue, boy."
Lessons like: "Don't spend years and years writing for places like In These Times." And: "For heaven's
sake, get out and schmooze as much as possible. Learn to act like a bigshot, because people actually do fall for that."
Those points are basic, and closely related. If you treat work as an end in itself, you won't get anyplace. It has to
be instrumental. My mistake has been a tendency to write 100 article for every 2 parties I attend. If you are going to advance
at all, it really needs to be the other way around. That is how you get a career, as opposed to a big pile of xeroxes and
some old notebooks.
There's no particular honor in being broke and obscure. I'd like to think there is, but that would be sour grapes. The
only thing that really makes sense is to define the situation as acceptable because fundamentally inalterable.
14 December
FBI agents are frustrated that they have been unable to use Section 215 of the Patriot Act to search library records,
according to a report on National Public Radio yesterday.
The NPR story quotes an e-mail message from 2003 that includes the following statement: "The
inability of FBI investigators to use this seemingly effective tool has had a direct and clearly adverse impact on our terrorism
cases. While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from OIPR's failure to let us use the tools
given to us."
Well, there's nothing like having a sensible shoe planted on your behind to get your attention.
McLemee.com exclusive: Reliable sources indicate that T-shirts bearing the words "radical militant
librarian" will soon be circulating in some quarters.
13 December
My favorite passage in the recently issued "Statement by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist
Party, on the Occasion of the Death of Willie 'Mobile' Shaw":
"Willie never turned his back on people who had not yet come to see the world as he had come to
see it--as it really is; he never gave up on winning them to the fight for a radically different and much better world....He
asked me many questions--and he helped me learn many things. Willie said to me: 'You are the only hope we have.' I have kept
those words in my heart, with a deep sense of responsibility to live up to them."
9 December
What with all the hoopla over the Narnia movie now gearing up, it seems like as good a time as any to revive "Holy War in the Shadowlands" -- my 2001 cover-story on a very strange dispute in the world of C. S. Lewis devotees.
At the time, I thought of it as the third part of a trilogy about how communities form around particular
authors. The first two parts were the pieces from Lingua Franca about Thomas Pynchon and Ayn Rand.
7 December
There's a passage in Regis Debray's prison writings where he mentions being in Althusser's seminar in the early 1960s.
At some point he decided he'd rather go link up with Che than do any more "symptomatic" reading of M-L texts.
Anyway, I wanted to include that in my column on Althusser, but couldn't find my copy of the book.
This seems like one of those cases where something was lent out and will never be on my shelf
again....
5 December
My column on Thursday failed to mention the one movie ever made from a book by Colin Wilson: the mind-boggling Lifeforce,
based on his novel The Space Vampires and directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre fame. The film
appeared in 1985, roughly ten years after the novel.
It is not simply a bad movie -- nor even of the "so bad it's good" ilk. No, Lifeforce operates
on whole other level. It is sublime in its badness. It stretches to the limits, and then exceeds, one's capacity to watch
and make sense of a film.
Yet it is not simply incoherent. If anything, Lifeforce probably makes perfect sense -- but
only on its own terms, which defy paraphrase. (I haven't read Wilson's novel. Maybe that would help.)
Lifeforce is also remarkable for the debut of Mathilde May as the Space Girl, who, for
some reason, is naked in all of her scenes.
1 December
Right under that scary theocratic logo at The Weblog, the management has indicated that it's "A Scott McLemee Fansite."
I'm deeply honored, of course. But even more so by Adam Kotsko's commentary on my Tuesday column -- an essayuscule* projecting something that expands on (but also implicitly criticizes, or
at least does a torque upon) my argument.
In short: What if the next stage of the right-wing assault passes from Horowitz-style "Higher Truth" fudging to flat-out
demands for perfect identity between how power is organized within the academy and within the rest of society?
There's something halfway Schmittian about how he frames this. That is, such an arrangement might look as if it were
a matter of running things according to economic calculation, but there'd always be a sovereign in the wings, ready,
in the pinch of crisis, to intervene and patch things over by radical decision, remaking the rules in the moment of exception.
Adam's commentary presents this as something that would happen if someone more extreme than Horowitz (presumably,
also, brighter and less palpably bonkers) were to manifest himself on the scene. I suspect it need not be so apocalyptic,
and that the Terror could be instituted by steady "reform" rather than "revolution." And that we will live to see it.
UPDATE: Plus, there's this item, which in turn links back, via Ralph Luker, to a recent and pertinent article by Russell Jacoby.
* I have no idea if essayuscule is a real word or not. But it should be.
30 November
I've gotten really bad about putting links here when a new column appears. Here's the one from Tuesday. This is my last week of doing it on the Tuesday-Thursday schedule. After that, it will run once a week, on Wednesday.
29 November
The New Yorker just ran a short item on Baudrillard, who, it sounds like, is now doing an feeble imitation of himself circa five years ago, when he was doing a lame imitation
of himself from twenty years before that.
And even then, he was just pilfering from Guy Debord.
I'd feel sorry for the guy, if he'd only just go away.
Yet I'll probably read his two new collections of essays, or as much of them as there's time and patience to get through,
on the odd chance he's actually got more to say now than the New Yorker thing let on. The triumph of hope over experience.
27 November
My essay speculating that Roland Barthes's The Neutral was, in part, his delayed reaction to Maoist China is now
available at Bookforum's website.
How long it will be there, I don't know. Will put it up here as soon as I can get around to it. [UPDATE: it's here.]
Meanwhile, have a look at the new blog of Shawn Gillen, an English prof at Beloit College whose very interesting paper on "the generalist" as academic job
category I heard at MLA a few years ago. It's given me a lot to think about in the meantime, and he also suggested an
idea for an article that I did last year. Anyway, check it out.
22 November
By the way, the title of the piece on Mensonge, "Whereabouts Not Known," is also one that Bradbury mentions in passing
as that of a work by Mensonge.
In the column on Mills today is about an essay that appears at the end of The Sociological Imagination,
which I discovered about twenty years while working as a book-reshelver at the Undergraduate Libray at UT. The
last I heard about the UGL (as it was called, with students often appending a "y" at the end), all the books were going
to be replaced by computer terminals or something like that.
And Les Amis -- the coffee shop where you could get a bowl of beans and rice for about two bucks;
basically, a place that kept me alive during the more impoverished spells, and where I spent many an hour
reading, or arguing with friends about politics -- shut down some years ago and has been replaced by a Starbucks.
On another note: In the column, I mention that The Sociological Imagination is available from Oxford UP. Around
1999, there was some chatter over the news that Oxford had cancelled an intro to that edition commissioned from Amatai
Etzioni. Scandal! Censorship!
Well, I managed to get a copy of the manuscript and concluded that Oxford had been completely in the right
in turning it down, because it was absolutely terrible. Etzioni had almost nothing to say about The Sociological
Imagination and spent all but a few paragraphs discussing the Clinton impeachment. It wasn't like he really
even linked it to anything much in Mills's work. He'd known Mills at Columbia way back when, so evidently that
was connection enough.
20 November
An announcement, of sorts: I'm about to shift from doing two columns a week at Inside Higher Ed to just
one. It will run on Wednesdays, as of the first Wednesday in December. (I'm only doing one this week, given that
Thursday is a holiday.)
To make a long story short, I'm now in the midst of another big shift. Or rather, a series of them -- not just
writing for new places, but venturing into some forms that I haven't tried before. Plus I've got a book project
that has gone nowhere over the past three months.
Anyway, thanks to IHE for agreeing to this. The first ten months of doing the column have marked the biggest single stride in my work so far. A couple of friends have noted that their impression
from the column is that I've had a lot of fun doing it -- that the range of stuff it's treated and the voice that's emerged
there are somehow more expressive than a lot of what I've done over the years.
That part is probably true. And the impression that I've been having a pretty good time certainly is.
Saw a documentary about Parliament Funkadelic not long ago. Towards the end, George Clinton said (and this made
such an impression that I rewound and carefully copied this down): "You're always succeeding so long as you're doing it. The
pursuit of doing what I like doing is the reward."
18 November
From time to time , an academic organization will invite me to sit on a panel at one of its gatherings,
where my role is to serve as a native informant from the tribe of the journalists – one charged with the task of explaining
our bizarre customs, and of demonstrating the primitive means by which we approximate abstract thought. (Sometimes they then
give me food.) It is a curious experience, full of potential for misstatement and hasty generalizations. For one thing, the
tribe is quite heterogeneous. “Media” is a plural, or it should be anyway. And within any given medium, the “journalistic field” (as Pierre Bourdieu called it) is itself fissured and stratified. It is a point I try to communicate to the professors through
a combination of grunts and hand gestures — an awkward exercise, all around.
16 November
Are you one of the new visitors showing up at this website with such inexplicable frequency, lately?
Well, howdy. Make yourself at home. You might have a look at the Recent Work page. And there's one called The Sampler, possibly also of use or interest.
15 November
Q: In running pictures from the Cultural Revolution-era opera Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy, are you
being scornful, jaded, cynical, and whatnot?
A: By no means. I've been fascinated by the occasional clips from these operas that I've seen,
for reasons probably too complicated (or at least idiosyncratic) really to explain very clearly.
Anyway, after exposure to some recent samples of American culture -- like this, for example, or this -- I'm halfway convinced they were right about the whole "decadent running dogs feasting on the spoils of
imperialist decay" thing.
14 November
Given that I am now seriously behind on a lot of work, my plan for this week is to do no blogging. I'll post links to
some new pieces on the Recent Work page, as time permit.
While the traffic here has increased quite a bit over the past two months, my sense is that most of it is from people
looking at Digger the Dermatophyte stuff anyway. (And my article about Ron Radosh, too, for some reason. Which is probably a coincidence. Then again, maybe not.)
The home page this week will be devoted entirely to various inspiring scenes from the Maoist "model opera"
Taking Tiger Mountain By Strategy. And no, it was not based on the Brian Eno album of the same title, though by coincidence I'm listening to it a lot lately.
10 November
Last week, I passed along a link to a review of the album Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Prop from the Hermit Kingdom. Since then, I have listened to it and feel that
the review, despite his best efforts, didn't quite convey what it is like.
Imagine, if you will (and, basically, you can't) the Mormon Tabernacle Choir under the direction of a
particularly strident Lawrence Welk, forcing maximum possible fervor from every note. Now, add some reverb.
We're talking operatic psychedelic polka music here. I am not making this up.
I've been under the weather for more than a week now, and am behind on a lot of work. Fortunately the uplifting beat
has allowed me to get a little done.
Column on
Democracy at Risk
Column on
Column on
That's enough for now. No updates here before Monday. Meantime, I'm Kim Jong Illin'....
9 November
And Moby Lives comes back from a long hiatus....as a radio show? Maybe I can get him to play my solo-album-in-progress, now under the working title Cue the Cheesy Drum Machine.
8 November
According to Yahoo! Asia, this is "the 'Dear Leader's' unique guide on how media hacks can rise to the glories of revolutionary heroism."
That, of course, is all I ever think about.
**
DR,JOHN WILLIAMS (ESQ)
UMEZE CHAMBER
PLAT 8 OWERRI-PH
ROAD,
NIGERIA.
E-MAIL:john_wills@mail.ru
ATTN:
YOU MAY BE SURPRISED TO RECEIVE THIS UNSOLICITED
MAIL FROM ME....
Well actually, John, not nearly so much as you might think. But it certainly is eye-opening to see that a Nigerian lawyer prefers
a Russian ISP. Are the rates really good?
7 November
When I was quite small, there was a Jack Chick tract that scared me half to death. Of course, the artwork later
became pretty basic to Texas punk iconography. We used it in Plan 9, for example, the zine that a friend and
I did in 1982.
Now I'm really scared.
Thanks to Maud Newton for drawing my attention to this. Her item from last month also has some great links that should explain the Chick phenomenon to any heathens out there.
4 November
Okay, some links, as promised....
David Glenn calls my attention to Radio Pyongyang:
Commie Funk and Agit Pop from the Hermit Kingdom -- a new album offering " a peculiar mix of crude militarist bullying and Lawrence Welk without budget constraints," according to the
review at Pitchfork.
Well, that description sounds downright Laibach-ish, doesn't
it? By the way, for anyone who's noticed the periodic references to them here but not known where to start, last
year's album Anthems is a good primer. The second disk of remixes I could live without. But anyway, for
more, read this.
3 November
I'm really behind on some writing, plus need to read about a thousand pages over the next few days (somewhat less daunting
a prospect with my powerful new Coke-bottle-lens'd reading glasses). So not much chance of writing here for a bit. I'll try
to throw up some links though.
Had a really large increase in visitors to this site last month -- part of the upward trend since midsummer. I'm not
sure why, but there was fairly heavy traffic to my piece about Ronald Radosh from a while back.
In writing today's column, I thought of a story from Tales of Beatnik Glory, an episodic novel by Ed Sanders set in the late fifties and early
sixties. There's a character who, from time to time, holes up in his apartment for a few days to crank out a porn novel, which
will earn him enough money not to have to worry for a few months.
Couldn't find a way to work that into the piece, though.
Presumably the expression "porn novel" will mean increased traffic....
1 November
Today is the anniversary of the great Lisbon earthquake, and since it falls on a Tuesday, that's why my column for the day is about.
It was a real pleasure to find that the English translation of Voltaire's poem about Lisbon that I had been looking at
was by Joseph McCabe. By the way, I've now put up my little essay on him from The Philosophers' Magazine on this
site, since it might be taken down again from the free section at TPM Online.
30 October
Oh, right -- before I forget this....It appears that there is now a group of Canadian revolutionaries attempting to apply the lessons of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Chairman Bob Thought to conditions prevailing in the Great
White North. Well, like the song says: "Dare to struggle, dare to win."
My sense is that there was quite a bit of that sort of thing in Quebec during the 1960s and '70s. One of the more prominent
Quebecoise politicians now started out in a Maoist group.
28 October
Yesterday's column was on Gombrich's A Little History of the World, which I also reviewed for Newsday.
I've done something like this a couple of times now -- writing two different pieces on the same book. It's not so much
recycling as trying to use up all the stuff that won't fit into the 800-1000 word range of my Newsday pieces.
My friend John Leonard used to refer to how, after a while, he'd developed an 800 word mind. Of course he went on to
other things. I'm starting to wonder if I ever will. About to start writing a longish essay for the Columbia Journalism
Review, so maybe that's a step in the right direction.
But first I've got to squeeze about 2000 words of musing on a book into a piece for The New York Times...that
can't be more than 900 words. Not to complain too much, but this kind of thing gets difficult sometimes.
27 October
While in Montreal, I spent a certain amount of time in French bookstores, including the Gallimard shop which is on one
of the major streets downtown. The contrast between the density of the material I was buying and my fairly limited capacity
to interact with the clerks was either humorous or pathetic, depending on how generous you are about such things. But hell,
I'm never going to learn to read the language, let alone speak it, without going into bookstores and risking the preposterous.
Anyway, some of the bookbuying was for Adam Kotsko and Anthony Paul Smith, from The Weblog. They came up with a list of titles unavailable in Chicago, and this provided me with an excuse on a couple of occasions
when going into another bookstore was pushing things with my better half.
In particular, they were after titles by Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy. As I noticed in Paris a couple of years ago, the
stores had Deleuze out the wazoo. Books by him, books about him, books about his fingernails probably, just an abundance
of stuff.
It was very striking. But even more so, this time, was what I found upon first stopping at Gallimard.
The window display as you entered the front door consisted entirely of books by Nancy. Later in the week, this was taken
down. But there was still a big table devoted entirely to Nancy. I never would have expected that.
At even the most B. Dalton-ish bookshops, there would be a very solid philosophy section -- an enormous selection,
and nothing like the kind of thing you find here, where it often consists mainly of Chicken Soup for the Soul-type crap.
It is naive of me, but I am still provincial enough to be impressed by that sort of thing.
26 October
For whatevever reason, I thought that settling down to work after a week sans pressure would be easy. So
far, it hasn't been. I can get a certain amount of outlining and rough drafting done in the morning. But evidently it's
going to take a few days to get the full, day-long concentration thing going again.
Plus, there's been the distraction of getting my eyes checked and new prescriptions for my glasses -- including,
now, bifocals.
When the gray hair started coming in, I sort of liked it. This development is less welcome, somehow.
I'm also getting a pair of microscope-power reading glasses -- set in an old pair of heavy black frames, which were
merely nerdy at the time I bought them, long before Franzen made that kind of thing briefly hip. They aren't
that anymore, probably. My timing in such matters is unfailingly off-rhythm.
25 October
Around halfway through our vacation in Montreal, Rita mentioned that she had noticed something that had changed since
our last visit, three years ago.
Each time, people who could tell we weren't natives (for example, clerks listening to the way we pronounced
"Parlez-vous anglais?") would ask where we were from. But this time, the chitchat tended to die pretty quickly once we said
we were from the States -- let alone from DC.
It was as if they didn't know what to say. I'd noticed the same thing, but wondered if it might be my imagination.
A couple of days later, waiting for a screening of a film, I looked through a newspaper and saw the story
about pointing a couple of Taliban guys in the direction of Mecca and setting them on fire.
We met when the first Bush was still in office, and as newlyweds used to listen to Canadian radio every night
before going to sleep. The running jokes about how maybe we should repatriate started a long time time ago.
And I always hate coming back. This is a mean country, down deep and for good. It is also a generous
country, in some circumstances. But the mood swings are brutal.
23 October
We're back from a week in Montreal, Most of it was spent walking; among other things, we went up
the incline that put the "mont" in the city's name. And we spent a few afternoons at the movies.
At a certain point, Rita decided to take a picture of me in front of every bookstore we visited -- a project for
which I am encouraging her to consider seeking NEA funding.
In the course of the week, it also came to pass that (and if you are a friend of mine, you may want to sit
down, for this is going to shock you) I bought some clothes. No, seriously, I really did do that.
It has been known to happen. Usually during a leap year.
So now we're back. The mass of deadlines now swarming just ahead is, if anything, even more demanding
than what loomed in the days right before we left. (Aside from writing two extra columns that week to appear while we were
gone, I finished something for Bookforum about 15 minutes before we ran off to catch the plane last Saturday.)
Did modest but respectable stints on two book projects while in Montreal, thanks in part to the McGill University
library. Just because I go on vacation, the demon does not.
15 October
The first half of this month has been something. I've finished more work in two weeks than I once might have managed
to publish in a year. Maybe in two years.
This is pleasant to realize, and encouraging in ways that make up for many earlier moments of doubt. But
also exhausting to have done. I'm really ready to go see the Wallace and Gromit movie now.
A couple of things are now technically overdue -- a review for The New York Times and the second Omnivore
for The Philosopher's Magazine -- but the editors are being very decent about it.
Anyway, my plan is neglect this website entirely for about a week, in the interest of getting a couple
of book projects somewhere closer to real-world realization. Not a lot closer, of course. But closer. Might as well strike
while the iron is hot.
So anyway, there's not much reason to come back around for a while.... Seriously. Nothing to see here. Move along.
A selection of opening graphs from various pieces can be found in The Sampler.
And there's plenty more in the site Archive.
14 October
Yesterday the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. In previous years, I was there at my keyboard, with the Academy's
homepage loaded, hitting the refresh button as the moment drew near -- and then had to knock off a short item about the
winner based on the official statement, my own knowledge (if any), plus whatever I could learn in half an hour.
Glad not to have had to do this with Harold Pinter, because the effort to be neutral and balanced would have been impossible.
This award makes sense only as a foreign-policy editorial disguised as a literary prize.
Each year, I think they might give it to Adonis. Like the failure to give it to Borges, the fact that they haven't diminishes the significance of the Nobel
for literature. It dilutes the value even of the awards that do seem to be based on merit (Naipaul and Coetzee for example).
The past couple of years make me wonder, not about the internal politics of the decisions, but the committee's sanity.
The one for Jelenik was...well, bizarre. But this year's award is just meaningless, unless strident press releases are literature.
He was a good playwright, a while back, of course. But it was the press releases that clinched it.
13 October
Q. Is it true that Berkeley has recently honored Chairman "Bob" Avakian by naming
one particular day as "Honor Bob Avakian Day"? And if so, what do you think of this development? Does it signal the emergence
of a new conjuncture? Will the future bring People's War?
A. Yes, it appears to be true that October 6 was celebrated in his hometown as a day to honor "A Voice That Should Be Heard."
A somewhat squeaky voice, if truth be told. But one that The Man has never yet silenced. Assuming, of course, that The Man is still
paying any attention.
My feeling is that we should make every day Chairman Bob Avakian day, ever striving
the better to follow his inscrutible reasoning, and to obey his mysterious commands.
"All art is subject to political manipulation, except for that which speaks the language
of this same manipulation." -- Laibach manifesto
12 October
At The Pickle, Adam Robinson (who now lives up the road a bit, in Baltimore)
registers some complaints about my review of Leslie Savan's Slam Dunks and No Brainers.
I don't have much of an argument with him on the merits of the piece. Here follows
the response I sent him directly, with a couple of minor tweaks to the email note:
In short, I'd say, "Yeah, you're right. I said and did what I could, at
the time. But it wasn't enough." But there's more to it than that. He who excuses himself accuses himself, but here
goes anyway....
(1) When you write for a certain target length -- in this case, the editor wanted something around
800 words, which is pretty damned short -- that imposes constraints
on how much depth you can go into on any given point. You get to some things, graze others, and end up leaving quite a few
in the notebook.
It's always hard to know how to make that call. Sometimes I can nail
things on the head and sometimes not.
(2) There are books that I love, and books that I hate, and books that inspire
grand sweeps of my own musing. And there are things are....well, just there.
Not brilliant, not stupid....not a total waste of time...Could be
improved with some trimming maybe, but nobody edits books anymore.
When you are new to reviewing -- and ready to judge each title from
atop the stack of all the great books you yourself haven't quite gotten around to writing yet -- it's easy to rip the
author of a so-so volume a new asshole.
I'm past that point now. But it's hard to know how to review such
a book. My tendency in such cases is usually to err on the side of trying to give an accurate and reasonably lively precis,
and to be judicious (but understated) about indicating whether it struck me as being worth the dead trees or not.
That's what
seems fairest to the author and to the reader. It does not often make for a particularly venturesome piece, however.
(3)
Finally -- and I do see that you picked up on this -- her book left me uneasy. She puts her finger on something real. (This,
in spite of padding.) But the effect is to make you feel sort
of trapped.
The verbal mannerisms and presentations-of-self that she describes
are all around us. And to some degree, perhaps some very large degree, they make their way inside. They cling to life.
I have no idea what to do to change that situation, and if one did
come to mind, an 800 word review wouldn't be the place to state it.
You're the playwright, right? It's up to artists,
not mere book reviewers, to point the way forward. You guys work on language. My role
is just do what I can within it. By deadline, and at assigned length. Or else.
9 October
No column on Tuesday, but this week is going to be some kind of all-time record for time spent writing. Deadlines aplenty.
So I might not be around here much.
This seems like an appropriate moment to point out the Hermitary website -- your one-stop location for all things eremetic.
Also of interest: Ralph Luker's listing of books written and edited by Cliopatria folk. His timing is great. Just the other day, I got a royalty check for a volume I edited
almost ten years ago. It came to not quite $45.
At that rate, my future is secured, provided that I can make time to edit another 999 of them.
7 October
My column yesterday was about a new book called How to Read Hitler. It is a matter of luck, not of timing, that this didn't
actually appear on a Jewish holiday. Actually I hadn't been aware of that in scheduling the piece. It was just the shortest
book at hand that I could finish in time for the deadline.
Was very glad to work in the stuff about Kenneth Burke at the end. I was also going to mention an essay from the 1930s by Max Lerner, but upon going to my shelves found that the
volume in question was one that got sold off not long ago. I am going to regret that book purge hundred of times before it's
all said and done. Those weren't review copies, but stuff I spent years gathering -- a working collection. If I got back even ten
percent of what they cost, that would be a surprise.
5 October
According to one of those silly online tests -- about all my brain was up to, yesterday, just after meeting deadline -- I am a Socialist.
Well now, d'ya think?
The website also scored me as an "economic liberal," which was momentarily confusing because I have gotten used to the
proper sense of that term. (The contradiction between being ID'd as a Socialist and a free marketer both was puzzling.) Of
course they mean "liberal" in the American sense of...well, anti-liberal.
One of the questions did give me pause: "It should be legal for two consenting adults to challenge each other to a duel
and fight a Death Match." You were supposed to vote Agree or Disagree, either Strongly or otherwise.
To be honest, I had overlooked this as the pressing social issue it evidently must be. After long reflection, I
decided that privately contracted Death Matches were probably a bad thing -- being, at heart, sort of committed
to the idea that the state should retain a monopoly on legitimate violence.
I did have to think about it, however.
4 October
As Henry Farrell noted yesterday at Crooked Timber, some of the ideas in his fine and necessary essay for the Chronicle were kicked around during meetings
of the Thursday Interdisciplinary Burrito Symposium -- a weekly gathering that I organized starting last spring,
so as not to become a total hermit.
Actually it has never been referred to, until now, as the Thursday Interdisciplinary Burrito Symposium.
But the name is catchy. (Call me Mister TIBS.)
Anyway, pace some of the comments at CT, it is by no means the case that blog boosterism and Tribble-style chowderheadedness
define the limits of reasonable discussion of the topic. I have been saying for a while now that we would soon hit a moment
when pretty much nobody ever wanted to talk about blogging ever again -- but that (not so paradoxically at all, really) the space
opened over the past couple of years would continue to grow and mutate, simply because it meets a felt need.
(Or rather, a range of needs.)
That is particularly true of academic blogging, for a couple of reasons.....I have thoughts and theories aplenty on this,
but am too busy writing for dead-tree publications at the moment to work them out. Squaring the notion of blog as Bakhtinian
"carnivalized discourse" with that of the blogosphere as Habermasian "public sphere" is not something you do in a day. Or
at least I can't anyway.
Oh Lord, somebody please give me a writer-in-residence gig. Time to read and write without adrenaline. A chance to pontificate
in semi-Socratic manner. That's all I ask....
And if that's not going to happen -- which, basically, it isn't -- then please tell the publishers to FORCE
THEIR EDITORS TO EDIT THE DAMNED BOOKS that I am sent to read. For every book that is enormous of necessity,
there must be a dozen that contain vast puddles of verbal lard.
Speaking of which, Alan Wolfe has a new article. From it, we learn, among other things, that The Authoritarian Personality "never did achieve
its status as a classic" because its analysis was criticized by other social scientists. Yeah, that makes sense. A work's
status is an index of how much consensus emerges around its value. Not!
Also, Wolfe marvels that Adorno and his posse published their study "before anyone was talking about the radical
right in America -- the John Birch Society, the most notorious of the new conservative groups to develop in the postwar
period, wasn't founded until 1958..." Which is pretty darn amazing, isn't it?
Well, of course, there was also the book by posse member Leo Lowenthal about the right-wing radio agitators,
which came out around 1949. It's kind of nit-picky to point out that there was an American radical right before
the Birchers came around. Or to mention that Daniel Bell, Richard Hofstadter, and company published an extremely
influential book called The New American Right in 1955 -- with much of their analysis shaped by Adorno
et al.'s (not-at-all-classical) The Authoritarian Personality.
Of course I'm just jealous of Wolfe. A while back, I read a couple of then-recent books about Carl Schmitt -- a
thinker whose work continues to fascinate and terrify me -- and afterwards saw that Wolfe had an essay about Schmitt.
Which I then read. He even referred to the books in question. It was pretty clear that he hadn't actually opened them, or
he would have had to do more than regurgitate Mark Lilla's article about Schmitt from an old issue of the New York Review
of Books. But clearly, he had taken the time to read the dust jackets -- which left plenty of time for making simplistic
swipes at people on the left who are interested in Schmitt.
My point here (and I do have one) is that the man knows how to prioritize. It is a fair bet that his entire
social life does not consist of eating a burrito once a week with friends.
3 October
Big news: Inside Higher Ed finally has offices -- in fact rather spacious offices, for a startup
anyway -- on K Street in Washington, DC. I went there yesterday for a short in-house celebration.
It's within walking distance, but far enough out of my immediate neighborhood to make going there
a decent change of pace. Chances are, I will still end up working at home and at the Georgetown University library quite
a bit.
But in combination with the news about the number of pageviews the site is getting -- very solidly in the low seven
figures each month, after not even one year of publication and no advertising or other promotions
-- it suggests grounds for optimism.
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