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27 September
Well, another month is winding down without me undertaking the major overhaul of this website that I've had in mind to
do for some time.
The reality is that I'm overextended and have been for some while, so have been falling behind on sundry things, that
among them.
I'm heading off to New York to do some research for a book, and also to see some friends.
That's it until sometime next week. I'd say "watch this space" but really, there's nothing to see here, so move along....
24 September
I've posted a short item on the Spinanes over at Casa de Kotsko.
And in this morning's issue of Newsday, there is my review of Ron Rosenbaum's new book.
21 September
I wrote about The Trouble With Diversity, a new book by Walter Benn Michaels, in the column this week. A big chunk of the piece is just precis, but with some criticism of the argument
along the way.
I think that in a way he is on to something: The argument that multiculturalism -- or rather, certain
articulations of it -- serves to legitimate economic inequality seems credible. But it hardly makes sense to treat
it, as he does, as if that were the only, or even the primary, role that it plays. He sets up some either/or
distinctions along the way that make his job easier by destroying big, tough realities. I nod at some of this in
the piece.
But more incredulity-making, to me anyway, were passages that make it seem as if the decline of the
old-fashioned racism as a normative part of American life (i.e., the kind that really, honest-to-God believed that
phenotypical distinctions corresponded to differences of species) means that racism itself is kaput as a real factor
in American politics and society.
Naturally it came to my attention a day late to use, but this article in The Nation should be consulted as a reminder of how life looks, meanwhile, on this planet.
I have been seeing The Washington Times for almost twenty years now -- a paper often mocked for its
ownership by Rev. Moon, the Christ from Korea, but maybe better described as "the paper which has its
front page laid out each night by the Republican National Committee."
That is not literally true, oh literal-minded Googler, just to be clear. But passing the newspaper boxes each day, I
often wonder if there is a dedicated fax line between the RNC and the newsroom. (In fact, I would be shocked only if
there were not.)
And so the de facto D.C. paper of record of the party controlling all three branches of the U.S. government
has been edited by what political scientists refer to as "a racist kook half-Nazi scumbag."
Yeah, we're just about a colorblind society, already, I reckon.
20 September
There are lots of reasons not to think very much of The Dallas Morning News, but the fact that they would not run this farewell column by Jerome Weeks ranks pretty high.
Parts of it really do, as the saying goes, "speak to my condition":
"A book columnist must read in gross tonnage, read hastily in trains, planes and lunch lines and read
books no one should bother with. One can endure a film or a concert for two hours; reading a pointless book can take days....A
bad book can seem like a prison sentence."
Amen, brother.
Also liked the quotation from David Denby about the glutted media cycling through "information without knowledge,
opinions without principles, instincts without beliefs."
Insofar as I've always been trying to bend things in a more or less essayistic direction, even when doing straight reportage,
it's been an effort at counterstatement -- trying to sneak bits of context into "the context of no context." Not that there's much demand for it, frankly.
Nor does continuing the effort seem very feasible now. The changes taking place in print media (particularly with newspapers)
aren't encouraging, and it's hard to estimate what the long term effect of new media for cultural criticism will be.
This summer, while on the panel at the Association of American University Presses, I told folks that the best comment about
the implications of online publishing for their work would be a reference to an exchange in Peking 35 years ago:
Henry Kissinger: "What do you think of the significance of the French Revolution?"
Chou En Lai: "It's much too soon to say."
19 September
I've had a chance to catch up with some of the response to my column last week, both in the comments section and elsewhere. I'm pretty inconsistent about such things -- at times ignoring feedback entirely. But in
this case it seemed likely that people would have interesting things to say about their own habits or methods
in annotating their books.
And yes, to some degree, that's happened. But quite a few of the comments have been expressions of
horror at the very idea of marking a book. I'm not surprised by that, as such. (The attitude is acknowledged
in the essay itself.) But I certainly didn't expect it to be so frequent a response.
There are reasonable grounds -- aesthetic, for example, or economic -- not to want to annotate books.
I can understand that.
What I don't get is the mentality that rules out marking in a book on principle.
Some of it boils down to considering the habit....well...."ill-bred" or something of the kind.
I don't know. Seems a triffle dainty.
What's that bit in Francis Bacon about the different ways to read? "Some books you taste, some you nibble, a few you
chew, and some you devour with gusto" -- that's the gist, anyway, though presented in rounder Elizabethan sentences.
Ruling out ever marking in a book while reading strikes me as roughly as appealing as ordering
from a menu that consists entirely of pudding.
18 September
Where the Truthiness Lies
A review of Frank Rich's new book
Brainiac
Down the Memory Hole
A news-fueled rant, parts one and two
Black Power, With Shades
of Gray
A review of Peniel Joseph's history of the movement
Commission Impossible
Another damned review, this time of Without Precedent
15 September
I don't think I can defend enjoying the Plasmatics on any grounds likely to seem plausible to anyone who does not
accept the premise that stupid music has its place in the world.
Circa 1980 to '82, the Plasmatics embodied the most cliched and clueless mass-media notions of what
punk rock was about. Guitars were chainsawed, stuff got blown up, there were about fifteen words per song. It was not
pretty and it was not smart. It was, however, kind of enjoyable, if you were in the right frame of mind.
At some point, the band morphed into a comic-book conception of heavy metal, if that's a distinction to make. And,
ditto, per the ratio of dumbness to pleasure.
I find that the speed and bludgeoning beat get me amped up when facing difficult work, as is the case now (difficult
because overdue).
Plasmatics footage is up at YouTube. For the ersatz-punk phase, go here. For some of the silliest Satanic carrying on ever put on video, go here. (The latter with John Candy.)
14 September
My column on marginalia got linked at various places, including among others the National Book Critics Circle blog
Critical Mass and Canadian blogmagazine Bookninja. The latter points to a striking -- I don't know how else to put it than that, understatement though it is -- set
of notes in the margins of a copy of Jane Eyre. The mind does wander while reading, sometimes.
13 September
We've been among the stragglers with regard to The Wire -- having only just finished watching the first season
on DVD last week -- so this is probably preaching to the choir. But damn, what a great show.
I see over at Open University that John McWhorter and spouse are somewhat ahead of us in catching up. He makes some interesting points, though I don't think you get to write off the effects of deindustrialization
quite so easily as that. Anyway, the prize goes to someone in the comments section:
Except for the occasional lapse into didacticism, it sidesteps the debate about "root causes" as much as avoids moral
censure. For example, in Season 3, a character from "the street" says in passing that his was the last generation to be brought
up by adults: now kids raise kids. And that gibes with what we saw in Season 1, where an adolescent runner makes breakfast
for his many little brothers, packs their knapsacks and sees them off to school.
Are kids living like this because of the flight of factory jobs from Baltimore? Who knows? Certainly not the characters.
From their perspective -- which, for the most part, is all we have access to -- the question sounds academic. It's the fearless
exploration of how Baltimore is in fact, not the creator's thoughts about sociology, that makes the show as great as it is.
Quite right. The "runner" mentioned is a kid who works as part of a drug-selling crew in the courtyard of
a housing project. He's maybe 15 years old, and among the most likeable characters on the show. (I said he
was part of a crew, not that he's a gangster. He works for gangster. He isn't one.)
The scene where he sees the younger kids off to school is low-key, very matter-of-fact, and easily one of
the most most memorable things I have seen on television in years.
I'm beginning to think that television is the new home of old-fashioned novelistic social realism.
Good news: it's been renewed for a fifth season (the last).
10 September
I've only been able to find a couple of albums by the Runaways, and am pretty much beyond hoping that there will ever
be a reunion. Here's a short item on them that marks my debut at The Weblog, aka "Kotsko's Place."
A running list of my blogal effusions is available at Cliopatria and (for this I got letters of congratulations last week) Crooked Timber.
Not much action at either of them until a bunch of work is finished for various print-based and/or paying outlets. The
first half of this week looks busy.
8 September
I've been getting notes of congratulations following the announcement, earlier this week, that I'd be joining Crooked
Timber. It's a venerable institution, as these things go: it is more than a decade old, in internet years, and I don't recall
that they have added new full members in all that time.
Meanwhile, this week's column is making the rounds. It has also captured the attention of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. They are offering to send documents. I blame
myself for this.
6 September
Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter
heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.
-- Lee Siegel
Uh, okay. Thanks for sharing. You've given us all so much to think about.
I've been meaning to write about 9/11 conspiracy theory for a little while -- my assumption being that,
while utterly uninteresting in itself, it reflects both a disposition and a set of skills always on call. The timing
made it seem like a "now or never" situation, so that is the topic of this week's column.
I am not looking forward to the comments section and might just skip it. Reading the work of Scholars for 9/11
Truth (notice how I didn't use any scare quotes? that wasn't easy) was actually kind of depressing.
Like I've said before, it will be no surprise at all if it turns out that the next theory is that the World Trade Center
are actually still standing.
5 September
I've now joined the group blog Crooked Timber, which means it will be necessary now to make peace offerings to Samuel Johnson, who is one of my household gods, along with William Hazlitt.
Now I am almost half as famous as Lee Siegel's imaginary cat.
4 September
Since Friday, Rita's been off with her oldest sister, helping one of our nephews get relocated to Toronto just before
the start of his freshman year. I'm at home trying to get some reading done for the new season.
And in the evenings -- as a very minor tangent from more serious research -- I am watching various
movies based on the work of H.P Lovecraft. (He considered himself a socialist, which is perhaps the single strangest
thing about the guy.)
I have reached a conclusion: Making movies based on the work of H.P. Lovecraft is a really bad idea. Even one that
is reasonably faithful to the source material -- for example, Dagon -- will tend to be bad. For one thing, the effort to portray the various uspeakable and
unimaginable terrors evoked by HPL's eldritch prose will not come off, and the potential unleashed via CGI really
does not make any difference.
But there's also the much more serious problem of periodization and local color. Adaptation usually means throwing out
at least one of them, sometimes both. Dagon -- which is primarily based on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," a story
set in New England in the late 1920s -- is moved to Spain in the late 1990s.
That said, I did rather enjoy seeing The Dunwich Horror again, more than 30 years after staying up until two in the morning to see it on the weekends as a pre-teen.
There are problems with the adaptation. The copyright notice on screen says 1969 -- and the flashback
scenes of the ancient cult worshipping the Old Ones makes them look like a psychedelic hippy mime troup who have somehow
managed to tie-dye their own skins.
And yet Dean Stockwell is quite enjoyable, precisely because he looks--as someone commenting at IMDB put it -- kind
of like a sinister disco dude. (You really have to see the suit to get the whole effect, but there's a still from the
movie here.)
In a scene early in the film, Stockwell's character is talking with the one played by Sandra Dee. He indicates
that her dream involving the hippy mimes might be sexual. She responds that she thinks sex is wonderful, although
evidently this is purely a theoretical statement she has not yet had the chance to verify.
About ninety seconds later, she is agreeing to spend the weekend with him. That made a big impression on me, all
those years ago. Adulthood was going to be fun.
31 August
Just came across Radio Schizo, a regular podcast of punk and (non-Nazi) black metal, based in Dallas.
I don't know anything about Oliver, the guy who runs it, except that anybody capable of putting together his tribute to Killing Joke has very creditable taste indeed, in my book anyway.
Nothing new at this site until after the holiday weekend. Some noteworthy developments to announce before long. But
I'd rather get some distance from the August doldrums before doing so.
30 August
I've just read about the "Flat Daddy" phenomenon. Two thoughts.
(1) No aspersions upon the Globe reporter intended....But man, do I hope the whole thing is a hoax.
(2) Either way, the idea is really, really messed up.
27 August
I'm on the verge of returning my main guitar, the Gibson, to normal tuning. A few weeks back, I decided to wind
all the strings down three half steps -- so that, for example, the top- and bottom-most strings (which would normally
be E) are C#.
You can still play the same chords, of course, though at different positions. But the tone is not the same
-- there's a slurrier, darker quality, plus you can bend a string far more than normally. (And it's much easier to play leads
in the keys of E and A.)
But that's enough experimentation for now. Besides, there is always my way-crappy, Sears-bought Synsonics
knockoff of a Fender -- an instrument that I sometimes call my "research guitar." It has a whammy bar. I do terrible,
terrible things to it. There are recordings. Perhaps we should just leave it at that for now.
26 August
At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker has just put up an extensive, but I'm sure not exhaustive, set of links to blogs by female historians -- a useful corrective to the idea that it is, by and large, a boys' club.
And via Margaret Soltan (who I have lunch with once each blue moon) a reflection on having "the courage of your peculiarities" that is good to have. Both the original passage and her commentary "speak to
my condition," as the Quakers say.
24 August
You may recall the historic tour of Riverdale -- homeland of all postwar American youth culture -- that ran
a few months ago.
23 August
The best sentence I've read online in some while: "When she's not replacing the cracked mirrored tiles
on her disco crucifix, Madonna is trying to make a political statement about something, anything, that's more controversial
than she's [already] trying so hard to be." (Even better with a slight edit.)
But if not, consider this blog entry one more point of light, shining against the darkness.
I also like one bit in the comments section: "One can only imagine if Madonna joined forces
with Puff Doodle (or whatever Sean Combs goes by nowadays)."
22 August
"The eponymous 'snakes' here are clearly the wild slithering irruption of the Real, while the 'plane' is the Phallus
that operates in the angular, metallic register of the Symbolic.....The Snakes therefore represent the unthinkable limit in
the neo-colonial discourse of the War on Terror, the exotic, 'illegal' cargo that will, inevitably, bring down the brittle
American frame that is the body politic in this era of the cybernetic gaze. Samuel L. Jackson is portrayed as the heroic African
American man (the phallogocentric 'actor,' whose agency is always-already scripted), who ostensibly represents the forces
of the Airplane against the Snakes, but it’s clear that his true sympathies are in fact with the Snakes.....What is
at stake here is not a battle between 'snakes' and the 'plane,' but rather the contest between transgressive Oedipalized subjectivity
(memorably described by Jackson’s line, 'there’s motherf---- snakes on the motherf---- plane') and the anti-Oedipal,
serpentine, body-machine complex."
It's a good thing that Amardeep labelled this "a parody" -- or else I would have had to point out that, in
a move symptomatic of Zizek's influence, the Imaginary has been occluded. What's up with that?
Okay, kids, here's one more yarn by the old-timer from his rocking chair: When we read Lacan back
in the 1980s, seemed like it was all about the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Hardly anyone ever so
much as mentioned the Real.
I'm not sure why that was, but suspect Anthony Wilden had a lot to do with it.
20 August
One of the very first things I ever published -- this would have been around 1983, when a friend and I were doing a punk
zine, at a time when it seemed like nobody even knew the word "zine" -- was an enthusiastic review of the 12" single
of Throbbing Gristle's song/rant "Discipline." Back then, I was much more keen for extremely noisy No Wave stuff than
I am now, most of the time -- though the memory of Arto Lindsay's never-tuned 12 string guitar does still bring a smile. It
turns out that YouTube has a video of TG performing "Discipline." No date is given, but circa 1981 seems right. It would appear to be the case that I am an old man.
15 August
For dinner on Saturday night, I ate what turned out to be some rogue leftover Chinese food -- with the result that Sunday
was a day of mild food poisoning, with that feeling of being clobbered that goes with a flu. It is not quite rational to say
this, but I may have eaten my last meal of General Tso's Chicken.
In any case, even though this week includes a hiatus from the IHE column, I'm now officially behind on pieces for both
the Post and the Times, and there is a gigantic pile of stuff to look over for to get ready for the fall.
So apart from linking to a recent Newsday piece -- whenever I can get to it -- there probably won't be anything
happening here for about a week. Should the blogging muse come to visit, it will probably be an item for Cliopatria, in
which case you will find it here.
13 August
Very surprised to check in at Crooked Timber over the weekend and find that Harry Brighouse devoted part of an entry to my recent trip down memory lane -- the recollections of my high school days of carrying around both " Andrew Pulley for President" stickers and the paperback How Old Will You Be in 1984? Expressions of Outrage from the High
School Free Press (Avon, 1969).
Elsewhere on the radical history front...Larry Trainor's "oral history" of the American Trotskyist movement is available
in a series of audio clips here. Here's a paradox: It is a kind of history, and the medium is oral -- yet it is not, in the proper sense of
the word, oral history.
It sounds like an SWP "educational,." probably from the late 1960s, since Trainor was part of a tendency that got
the boot by 1972 or so.
UPDATE: Also, thanks to Henry Farrell for this item at Crooked Timber. Man, it's almost like I am halfway to being a member there, now, or something.
11 August
This week's column on George Scialabba got a considerable amount of attention. I should link to all the various blog
entries, but am much too lazy actually to do so. Thanks very much to everyone who did, however.
It looks as if, at long last, there will be a website that will gather George's work. More on that as it develops.
Evidently the column also resulted in a marriage proposal, though I am at present unable to confirm or deny the
seriousness of the report.
10 August
Didn't think of it back in May, during what would have been the actual anniversary itself, but it's been
a quarter century since I graduated from high school.
Wrenching nostalgia for those days is not something I have had to suffer. There are time when the town
of Wills Point, Texas (population 2,500) seems almost like something from a really bad dream. Even then, I joked that
all the school systems in the state took their pick of teachers, leaving WPHS what was left.
In particular, there was no love lost between me and the principal, a crusty old cracker named Theo "Cotton" Miles. I
thought he was an idiot -- an estimate there has been no occasion to revise -- and tended to shake my head every
time I passed his office. To judge by later hostilities, he may have noticed this.
It got really bad sometime during my junior year, around spring 1980, when I was walking around with Socialist Workers
Party literature as well as running for student council president on some approximation of a "student power" platform,
influenced by old radical paperbacks.
During the school assembly where the candidates gave their speeches, my appeal got a very enthusiastic and
rowdy response, particularly from the black kids who gave it a standing ovation. Rumor had it that I actually won, but
Theo wouldn't stand for it.
Okay, now that I'm actually going down memory lane, parts of it don't seem so bad. But man, I hated that place -- counted
the months until it would be over and real life could begin. Again, no surprise to find that the passing of the 25th
anniversary meant not a damned thing to me.
I am fascinated....incredulous....green with disgust...Also, slightly amused to imagine his lips moving
as he struggled with it....
I want to read it, despite (or perhaps, in fact, because of?) a kind of bewilderment at the very
idea it exists.
And no, it is not in the Library of Congress.
Damnit. The thought of paying for a copy is not at all appealing.
9 August
The column this week is about the work of George Scialabba, a critic and essayist whose work I've admired for a long time. There is
a chance it will help sell a few more copies of his book than might happen otherwise.
And in saying "a few," I mean that literally. As in, maybe three or four. Let's not kid ourselves -- collections
of essays usually qualify as commodities only by the strictest application of that term.
You want sales, you gotta write The Serial Killer's Low Carb Celebrity Cookbook. Otherwise it's not a book,
it's an interpretive dance between covers.
8 August
Jason Isbell from the Truckers has a new song called "Dress Blues" -- about someone from his high school class who joined
the Marines and died in Iraq -- that just knocks me out:
The highschool gymnasium is ready
Full of flowers and old legionaires
Nobody
showed up to protest
Just a sniffle and stares
Red white and blue in the rafters
A silent old man from the
'core
What did they say when they shipped you away
To fight somebody's Hollywood war
Mamas and grandmamas
love you
Cause that's all they know how to do
And you never planned on the bombs in the sand
Or sleeping in your
dress blues....
6 August
I've been listed as "contributing editor" at Cliopatria for a little while -- a year or so. But as of this weekend, the
management has upgraded me to full contributor.
The pay increase is just off the chart. And the groupies? Don't get me started.
4 August
Aside from dipping a toe into podcasting, I've done a little honest-to-goodness blogging lately over at Cliopatria.
(This thing really doesn't count.) As ever, I am on the cutting edge of, like, four years ago.
2 August
This week's column is based on my visit to the Future of Minority Studies colloquium at Stanford University last week.
I also recorded a couple of short interviews to accompany it. They will be "podcast" (as you whippersnappers say)
at some point before long, maybe tomorrow.
UPDATE: Okay, they now have put up the podcast. Check the parenthesis at the end of first graf for links. Here's a link to the first part of the first interview.
I definitely felt on a learning curve with both the digital recorder and the whole interview-for-broadcast.
(Note to self: Make fewer phatic noises -- uhm hmm -- in the future.) Serious gratitude to the IHE team that
put this thing together.
31 July
Important things learned, in passing, while at Stanford University, during which trip I stayed on East
Coast time:
(1) At 3 in the morning, there is a cable channel that seems to show nothing but one continuous informercial for
the Girls Gone Wild videos. This program is educational, and inspiring.
(2) People in Palo Alto, California will charge you $3.25 for a small cup of black coffee and not even bat an eye. Maybe they
can sense your desperation?
(3) You should not eat a bagel made on the West Coast. (Note from earlier trip: Also true regarding South Carolina.)
27 July
In any case, the point is moot. I'm off to Stanford University for a bit. The professor (from Cornell) who made the invitation to
the conference said, "We're asking you to come as a colleague, not as a spectator."
Well, I can't very well say no to an offer like that. Probably no blogging while away, though.
In the meantime, in no particularly sensible order, here's...
-- My review of The Black Book by Ohran Pamuk
-- Another, on a popular history of the Persian War.
-- The Globe article about Philip Rieff.
-- A review of Paul Kennedy's book on the United Nations, mentioning H.G. Wells in passing, because I am thinking about H.G. Wells all
the time lately, it seems like.
26 July
No column this week. The first time that's happened this year, I think.
Off to the West Coast for the next few days, so probably not much happening here for a while. I wish it were a vacation,
but no such luck.
So that you may be entertained in the interim, let me point out something that may be of interest to certain among you.
(You know who you are.)
Back about twenty years ago, dear old Chaiman Bob began talking about what he called the Revolutionary Army of the Proletariat. I'm not sure if the acronym RAP was an accident
or part of the "turn to hiphop" that became such a marked influence on the RCP style there for a while.
At the time, the Shining Path was running wild in Peru, so chances are Avakian needed to project some long-term plans
for people's war, American-style. It was all pretty rhetorical though.
The problem being that, if you talk that shit loud enough, somebody is eventually bound to take it as a more
immediate inspiration. And so it would appear from some items appearing recently in the RCP newspaper
in recent weeks.
This article in particular was interesting. The title says it will "clear up some confusion." But in fact it is, in itself, pretty confusing, since most folks not
living on Planet Avakian will be unfamiliar with the hiphop artist Ecclesiastes and his album A Cryptic Gospel, which
is not in any record store I've seen. The article makes vague references to certain problems with the lyrics, but never quotes
any.
Well, with some searching you can find the lyrics of Ecclesiastes, who drops a little young Marx in the very title of his track "Criticism of Weapons" and makes the occasional Maoist
allusion in the course of his flow. Some of his imagery is pretty violent, but not more than a lot of gangster rap is.
Anyway, this did not pass muster with the People's Tribunal or whatever, so no seal of approval from the RCP
-- which probably gets enough attention from the Department of Homeland Security as it is without being
associated with a rapper who pretty much equates Osama Bin Laden with Nat Turner.
You can listen to his stuff here, in any case. He's got some skills. Check out the cut "Waitin' in Line" in particular.
I'll endorse the form if not the content. I'm just a total bourgeois-democratic liberal, like that.
25 July
As mentioned earlier, I am doing some blogging now at Cliopatria.
And like the old radio and TV announcers used to say: "Now this."
23 July
Can you actually read until your eyeballs fall out?
I don't know. But it feels like I'm doing an experiment to learn the answer. Some of it is absorbing, and some of
it requires iron discipline just to keep on going.
Apart from the usual work obligations, there's a new kind: The panel on the anti-Stalinist Left during
the 1930s proposed for next year's meeting of the Organization of American Historians has been accepted, so that
imposes a definite timeline of working up my paper for it. (Will get into the details here at some point.)
I've long since read and reread all of the secondary literature, not that there's an enormous amount of it. The manuscript
sources are another matter. For now, I have plenty of printed materials to work with, but really need to get in more
time in the archives. And, frankly, can't afford it. Reading for a newspaper or magazine piece pays the
bills. Reading for purely scholarly ends doesn't.
I'll figure something out, but am now sure how, just yet.
Don't let anybody tell you that the life of the freelance writer and independent scholar is the least bit romantic.
That's what I believed at one point. The delusion lifts, in due course.
It's a total and constant pain in the ass, is what it is.
21 July
I posted this short item at Cliopatria which, in turn contains links to my two recent essays on Philip Rieff.
In the one appearing in my regular column at IHE, there is a passing reference to the ratio of conservative
shills to conservative thinkers being extremely high. It is hard to believe anyone who has actually read, say, Kirk or Voegelin
or Strauss would think otherwise. To say nothing of Wilmoore Kendall.
To judge from the discussion following the piece, however, the coinage is so debased that George Will actually counts.
And then they accuse me of insulting conservatism?
The best part is where someone accuses IHE of having a bias against conservatives. This is a surprise; after
all, the comments section is always so rich with their fertillizer. And there are left-wing kooks who float the idea that
the site is an instrument of the vast right-wing conspiracy.
In fact, the real hidden agenda involves organ-harvesting farms in a nearby galaxy.....No, wait, I've
said too much already.
19 July
As a strange teenager in a podunk town in East Texas in the early 1980s, I somehow ended up reading a now-defunct leftist
newspaper called The Guardian (dead since around 1990) which led, in turn, to even more esoteric publications
such as the magazine of the Progressive Labor Party. No doubt somebody in an FBI field office in Dallas kept a record of all
the subversive stuff reaching my rural-route mailbox. It would be interesting to see that list now.
In the 1960s, Progressive Labor had been the recognized pro-China party, at least until they decided that Mao,
too, was a running dog. Their magazine was remarkably dull. But in looking it over, I noticed that they were
selling a couple of records of communist songs. One of them was listed as "the PLP-LP." That sounded interesting.
I never ordered it, however, and for many years regretted that oversight. Even better, the PLP-LP could also
be had on 8-track tape. And you can bet that I've looked for that on eBay.
Well, now you can get the entire musical output of PLP on two compact disks, available for the low, low
price of $11. Here's a review, with ordering information. Or you can listen to them online here.
Some of the tunes are downright infectious. The jingle for the PL newspaper Challenge is, as the reviewer puts
it, "sickeningly catchy":
Challenge, the communist paper --
That's right! The communist paper
Fightback, wildcat,
Overthrow the government!
Get your challence he-ere!
With banjos, mind you.
17 July
On Friday, summing up what had been a pretty decent week, I mentioned writing my first piece for the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Here it is.
The first draft had a more detailed account of some aspects of Rieff's cultural -- well, I guess the standard word
would be "theory," though "doctrine" actually seems more on target. And it was hard, even there, not to go off on a tangent
about how much of Lasch's and Sennett's work was anticipated by the discussion of "psychological man" in Freud: The Mind
of the Moralist.
You really have to take a close look at how he understands Freud's place in history to keep from reducing Rieff
to a rather cranky sounding conservative. And in the space and the venue at hand, I just couldn't do that. There certainly
was a degree of cranky conservatism about Rieff, so to that degree the picture of him is certainly recognizable. But I've
been reading the guy for a long time and know that there are other aspects of his thought to explore.
As it was, the second draft (finished late in the morning on Friday) was a major overhaul that
left me with enough scraps to want to try doing another piece at some point. The revision ended
up using a very little bit of the material I've accumulated while trying to work out some things about Sontag. Plenty
more where that came from.
Shortly after filing the piece, I heard from the Washington Post about ....
Well, they'd probably rather it not be mentioned. But something that I'd be glad to do, suffice it to
say -- though it will take a fair bit of work. Likewise for the piece that the Times has commissioned. Plus
I've been invited to Stanford University next week, and in the meantime have what looks like three hundred pages of JSTOR
printouts to digest.
Not to complain....Having this much to do is, in fact, pretty enjoyable, all in all. Except for the
part where I have to sell my own blood to pay the bills, of course, but then again you get used to that over time.
As with reference to not wearing pants,
that last part is somewhat tongue-in-cheek.
Only somewhat, however.
16 July
I first read A Scanner Darkly in the early 1990s, then again sometime within the past few years. It's one of
the two or three best novels by Philip K. Dick, at least among the ones I know, the others being The Man in the High Castle
and VALIS.
In each case, the science-fiction element is by far the least interesting thing about the book. Even
the famous PKD metaphysical paranoia doesn't interest me that much. These are, among other things, formal experiments
with storytelling -- but not in the now too familiar "workshop approved" manner.
Even before the various biographies appeared, it was pretty clear PKD was trying to pack some strange
personal experiences into the genre, and warping it quite a bit in the process. In A Scanner Darkly, one character's sense
of personal identity splinters beyond repair in the course of the novel, and it sure as hell doesn't feel like
a game.
My immediate response to hearing that there would be a movie based on A Scanner Darkly was that it
couldn't possibly work. A pretty common reaction it seems.
In fact Richard Linklater's adaptation is remarkably faithful to the spirit and the letter of the book. I'm very glad
to have been so completely wrong.
Certain aspects of the relationship between "Bob Archer" and "Agent Fred" (the alienation of identity
over time, which PKD presents in a way that would probably take a diagram to explain) are, of necessity, only
sketched. Then again, a second viewing would probably show that there were parts of the sketch that I
missed. And it's the one film in recent memory that certainly deserves a second viewing, at very least.
Update:
Here's a thoughtful and attentive
13 July
This week I wrote a column for Inside Higher Ed, a review for Newsday, and my first piece for the Ideas
section of the Boston Globe (which I'm polishing this morning so it can run on Sunday), and successfully
pitched an essay for The New York Times Book Review.
And I never put on pants.
Well maybe a couple of times...But still -- I didn't actually have to, that much.
12 July
The column from last week based on my talk at the university-presses meeting has continued to get some play in the blogosphere. I've done a kind of sequel to it that includes a manifesto of sorts for the creation of a "hub" to the dispersed (and somewhat chaotic) academic
blog world. One commentator has called the idea "brilliantly obvious." I agree with the obvious part, at least. It seems do-able, so here's hoping that the column will prove useful
in getting things rolling.
11 July
I've been meaning to pay my respects to the memory of Frank Zeidler, for many years the Socialist mayor of Milwaukee,
who died last week. Here's an extensive obituary from the Journal-Sentinal.
"I particularly picked socialism because of several things in its philosophy. One was the brotherhood of people
all over the world. Another was its struggle for peace. Another was the equal distribution of economic goods. Another was
the idea of cooperation. A fifth was the idea of democratic planning in order to achieve your goals. Those were pretty good
ideas."
Frank
P. Zeidler (1912-2006)
Chairperson
Emeritus, Socialist Party USA
Socialist Mayor of Milwaukee, WI (1948-1960)
9 July
Some diverting video clips:
All the obscenities and epithets from one episode of Deadwood, in highly concentrated form. (For anyone who hasn't seen the show, it might be worth explaining that "Celestials" is one derogatory term some whites
use for the Chinese laborers in the mining camp.)
Rare footage of the Young Marble Giants in performance from 1980. One of my very favorite bands for a long time now....Somewhat disconcerting to realize just
how long, actually. A quarter century now? That can't be right.
Another Walken impersonation here, in connection with the summer's most-awaited movie.
7 July
Okay, some inspiring news for a change: The minority faction of the League for the Fifth International -- which
was expelled late last week, because if they hadn't been expelled, they would have split, so that shows
them -- now strides upon the world stage with its very own website.
There you can download the first issue of Permanent Revolution, the group's new journal....sixteen
PDF pages of thick, rich Trotskyistic goodness.
Life is sweet!
For more on this story, see The Weekly Worker,
your one-stop shop for UK far-left inside dope.
6 July
It's been a long time time since I've seen Shakes the Clown, often described as "the Citizen Cane
of alcoholic clown movies." Not the sort of thing that runs on Turner Classic Movies much.
But it has a cult following, and I might try to locate a copy while Rita is out of town this weekend. (Definitely
a "then or never" situation.)
Speaking of underappreciated cinema involving clowns...I've had just about enough of the bad-mouthing of Death to
Smoochy. Yes, the script is, in spots, lacking; but Ed Norton redeems it with his performance as the extremely earnest
Barney-like host of a kids' TV show.
I sometimes find myself repeating Norton's line about his heroes being Jesus and Captain Kangaroo because "with them,
it was all about the work, especially Jesus."
As in the matter of Shakes, that is a personal opinion, and does not reflect the views or policies
of this household as such.
5 July
My column for this week is based on the talk I gave in New Orleans a couple of weeks back. I've reworked it a bit,.
Among other things, that meant cutting out a big chunk of stuff from the start, which was when an outbreak of Male
Pontification Syndrome kicked in.
I hate it when that happens. (There is no cure, only daily maintenance.)
Meanwhile, in case, like me, you've wanted definite evidence that the recent split in the League for the Fifth International
was deeply principled and not -- as a cynic might think -- some tempest in a teacup among people in a toy-sized Bolshevisant
sect (man, those cynics sure are cynical!) then here's documentation proving the case.
2 July
The UK-based organization known as the League for the Fifth International probably seems like one of those internet-based
pranks -- the sort of thing that happens when someone with a bad experience in sectarian-left politics, or
a good sense of humor, or both, learns HTML.
Not so! I can testify to having met members of an earlier incarnation of the Fifth, a group called Workers
Power, when Rita and I were on honeymoon in London. Which was not yesterday.
I've got their manifesto around here someplace, just in case the TiVo ever breaks.
Bet you didn't see that one coming.
I believe that at this point the numbering must become exponential. The new group should be the League for the Twenty-Fifth
International.
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