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27 February
Even though my review of the first volume of Richard Evans's new history of the Third Reich is not technically going
to be published in Newsday until Sunday, it seems that a sneak peak is now possible.
Not so, alas, with my cover story for The New York Times Book Review, scheduled for the first issue of
March.....Actually, we will be in NYC when that appears. On Thursday, I'm supposed to pick up this year's Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing at the annual awards ceremony of the National Book Critics Circle. Some guy named Studs Terkel is also getting a lifetime achievement award that night. No doubt he will be humbled by
my presence.
Meanwhile, an article from last year has evidently been reincarnated as a chapter in the 14th edition of a textbook on race relations. And another piece (published so long ago that even the year escapes my memory) will be reprinted in a series
of volumes on literary criticism found in library reference-sections.
Okay, that is enough tooting of my own horn for one day. Or possibly a lot longer than that.....
All of which is, in fact, a distraction from what is really on my mind at the moment -- a noisome, complicated
essay that really should have been done a long time ago. It has now grown so convoluted and demanding that I need to
draw on every available reminder that I am capable of writing and finishing anything at all. It really
never does get any easier.
Of course, there are people who approach the act of writing with perfect certainty in their own skills
-- and with boundless confidence that the world is waiting for, and will benefit from, their efforts. Such
persons are known as "lunatics."
25 February
Some of you come to this site because of Ayn Rand, and some of you come because of Chairman Mao. (So the referral logs reveal.) Some of you want to know about "Trinidadian people in London." At least one of you came here through the search term "other." Or maybe that was "Other"?
In any case, the records indicate that 11,000 visitors have come to the site so far this year. "Visitors" is,
in this context, a slippery term. Scrutinizng all the numbers, I can tell that most people came here to
look at a page or two, then left. (The single largest draw was this online reprint of an old Lingua Franca article.) But around 1,500 of you stuck around long enough to explore a bit.
Which is, of course, a fraction of what some sites (or for that matter blogs even) get in an hour. The fact that you
will never find interesting gossip here, for example, does not help. This is not a matter of moral principle. I just
don't have any. Sorry! Well, actually, I know a little about what happened to Chairman Bob shortly after the founding of the
Revolutionary Communist Party in 1975. (He refused to come out of his house for a few months.) But that is not the sort
of thing they talk about at the cool kids' table, presumably. So the media bottom-feeders don't crash this particular
nerd hide-out. Things stay kind of quiet. I try to keep the place in motion -- changing and growing. But
realistically speaking it is never going to be buzz central.
Then again, this site was not really running at all until the last fortnight of 2003. So the fact that two
or three hundred of you are coming back on a more or less regular basis is amazing. "Better fewer, but better," as Lenin
once said, in a different context. (He was arguing for a reduction in size of the Soviet bureaucracy. Which,
like a lot of things, didn't quite work out.)
So....I have a favor to ask, and no, it does not involve your credit card. If you are visiting this site
every so often -- if you find it interesting, or useful, or as absorbing as a sore tooth you keep
testing to see if it still proves irritating -- would you please consider letting a friend know about it? Or listing
it on your website? Or maybe...
Well, I'm all out of ideas, actually. But it does seem as if there a few more people might be interested
in some of the topics covered here. If you can help make the site known to a few others, I would appreciate
that very much.
With luck, there should be a fair bit of new material available here within the next month or so. I have a some
pieces scheduled for publication, not counting work now in progress. (Plus there is the continuing process
of excavating old pieces and trying to figure out if they should be added here, or not.) I also want to
update the Commonplace Book with more quotations.
All in good time. But for now, thanks again to anyone who bookmarked the site, or linked to it, or sent
an encouraging word, or otherwise helped out over the past two months. I don't take any of it for granted.
21 February
It is hard to explain my affection for Virginia Beach. The place isn’t charming, nor all that interesting,
really. Nor is there much to do, at least not when you go in October or February, as we have done a few times now.
All I can say is that I love the place. It doesn’t try too hard. It lets me relax, which otherwise tends not
to happen.
A beach resort in the off season is not completely depopulated. Even when it is bitterly cold out, you might find a handful
of people on the boardwalk. But most of the businesses nearby are closed -- including, unfortunately, my favorite waffle house,
as well as the shop with the largest and finest selection of tourist knicknacks, where, five years ago, I purchased my
switchblade comb. (Both stay open into October, but call it quits once winter kicks in.)
Aside from a muliplex theater -- which, often as not, appears mainly to show the kind of film in which Bruce Willis runs
from an exploding fireball -- the main diversions available are walking and feeding the birds. We did a lot of both.
By the time we left on Tuesday, a few of the seagulls appeared to recognize us.
As for walking……The distance between our hotel and the Association for Research and Enlightenment was 57 blocks.
The ARE was built by followers of Edgar Cayce. It has become something like a sacred spot, or at least a commercial hub,
for New Agers. Walking there and back -- as we did one afternoon -- came to about eight miles. A major excursion for a guy
whose picture appears in the dictionary next to the definition of "sedentary."
Why head to the Cayce place? Because it’s there.
Well, actually, it is a little more complicated than that.
Claims that "the sleeping prophet" could stretch out on a couch and establish direct contact with the secrets of the universe
do not constitute, for me, a "live option" for belief (to borrow William James’s terminology). But I’ve read a
lot about him over the years, and became friends with the late Harmon Bro, who did his dissertation on Cayce at the University
of Chicago in the mid-1950s. For my part, I’ve tried to write about Cayce and his following on a couple of occasions.
The last time was in an article that looked at the history of Atlantic University – an institution of higher learning (in all senses) founded by some of his associates.
I’m fascinated by the process through which, as the sociological jargon has it, charisma becomes institutionalized.
See also Kenneth Burke on "the bureaucratization of the imaginative." Not much of that comes through in the piece. (Transforming your ongoing
preoccupations into terms suitable for a journalistic format is, of course, another version of "the bureaucratization of the
imaginative.") One of these days, I’ll come back to the task of dealing with Cayce. As Philip Lopate says, a writer
has to have the courage to mine his obsessions.
So anyway, we walked up to the ARE headquarters, and rested for a little while in its amazing library. Before heading back,
we stopped at the bookshop, which carried Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s Edgar Cayce: An American Prophet -- a biography I reviewed for Newsday some while ago. The paperback turns out to have been available
for a couple of years, though I had never seen it until last weekend.
It was slightly cringe-making to see my name on the back cover. Finding your work used for a blurb is an aspect of reviewing
that loses its novelty value pretty fast, leaving naught else. They usually manage to quote you in a way that leaves you a
little queasy – if not indignant, since even a stray adjective in negative review can be turned into an endorsement.
All the more astonishing, then, that the publisher used a very mixed review in a way that was completely fair. To
whit: "[A] book at once irresistible and (in all senses) incredible...From letters, memoirs and recollections, Kirkpatrick
assembles a chronicle of Cayce’s waking life that is far richer than anything previously available. The somewhat mythologized
account offered by earlier biographies is not so much demolished as filled in with details." So, credit where credit is due.
After showing Rita this anomalous case of truth in advertising, we walked the 57 blocks back towards our hotel. The streets
were nearly as empty as those of Atlantis. Lemuria, and Mu – the lost continents regularly visited by Cayce in his sleep.
Not all of the shops were closed. We stopped to get Virginia Beach t-shirts, plus a really tacky refrigerator magnet.
It is now stuck to a filing cabinet in my study at home.
There is another one on the refrigetor itself that we got on our first visit, several years ago. It is much plainer,
but no less in keeping with the spirit of the place. It reads:
"After breakfast, work a while; after lunch rest a while, after dinner walk a mile. – Edgar Cayce."
14 February
Off to Virginia Beach for a long weekend of relaxation. The stretch of shopfronts near oceanside imply the development
of a form of capitalism based entirely on the vending of t-shirts involving liquor, motorcycles, and women with very large
breasts. We're taking long walks, weather permitting. And I'm busy reading (actually mostly rereading
at this stage) things from the Sartre/Camus break -- supplemented by stuff from the even more interesting Sartre/Merleau-Ponty dispute.
My idea of fun.
Anyway, not easy to add much to the site until we get back on Tuesday. (I am writing this at a public library terminal. A
guy nearby is talking in a loud voice about his opinion of the relative merits of jails in four cities, as seen from the inside.)
Hope you will take a minute to check out old files of Cogito, ergo Zoom (such as these items from last month) and/or the recent additions to the Archive, which are catalogued in The Black Redcoats.
Almost exactly ten years ago today, I sat down to write about the demise of my favorite really obtuse American radical
organization, the Marxist-Leninist Party USA. This required sorting through some really mixed feelings
about the group -- a combination of ironic fascination, horror at most of the MLP's sense
of history, and genuine respect for the way its members tried to rethink their dogma in a serious (if
by no means adequate) way.
Up to that point, I only ever finished a handful of pieces a year. Notes and drafts and outlines would pile up...and
then they would sit there, like a reproach covered in dust.
But in writing my essay on the MLP, something clicked. Not that writing became any easier. (After all this time, it still
isn't easy.) But in the course of writing that piece, something happened -- rather like that moment in learning
to ride a bike when, suddenly, you find your center of gravity.
So that was not quite ten years ago. A personal landmark. As for the essay itself, here it is ....
11 February
The profile of Paula Moya is now online. It appeared alongside my colleague David Glenn’s survey of recent work by social scientists on Latino immigration, some of which challenges standard ideas about assimilation. David synthesized a wide range of material in a long article.
(Well, long by newspaper standards anyway….let’s not even get started on that topic.) By contrast, my
piece struggled to cover the work of a single thinker, using the profile form as a way to introduce readers to a fairly new
school of cultural theory, postpositivist-realism.
Moya’s work has some very direct links to the kinds of work that the social scientists are doing. I didn’t
realize this until after both pieces were in print. There was no room to go into her thinking on the question of assimilation,
which is worked out in the course of a critique of neoconservative writers such as Richard Rodriguez. (This is the third chapter
of her book.) But you can get a better idea of some of the implications of her work for "Latino" identity (identities?) in her essay "Why I Am Not Hispanic."
In writing this sort of profile, you spend a lot of time holding your breath and gritting your teeth, going, "Okay,
now here’s the part where I need to discuss the difference between essentialism and postmodernism. In two sentences.
Which is impossible, but that doesn’t matter. Let’s get this over with." It was especially disagreeable to cover
the work of Satya Mohanty in such quick, broad strokes.
A sharp-eyed reader, David Amor at Knox College, wonders if there might not be some connection between Mohanty’s
work and the "critical realism" of Roy Bhaskar. An excellent question, to which, presumably, no short answer is possible.
There do appear to be areas of overlap. Bhaskar’s early work, at least so far as I understand such things, could certainly
be called "postpositivist." Both CR and PPR have roots in Marxist work on the philosophy of science. To flesh that out would
probably require starting with the way each develops a critique of Althusser.
But Mohanty never refers to Bhaskar in Literary Theory and the Claims of Theory. Nor do the other postpositivist-realists
I’ve read cite him. And the silence was there even before Bhaskar’s work took its turn, a few years ago,
toward what can only be called mysticism.
On a tangential note….In a recent footnote, Bhaskar quotes some online genius who responded to Bhaskar’s shift
by denouncing him like so: "I am disgusted! I haven’t actually read Bhaskar’s latest book, but this has never
stopped me from expressing my opinions before and it won’t stop me now. Yes, this time he’s really done it. He’s
sold out: he’s betrayed us."
Such is the beauty of the internet. Like talk radio, it encourages people not only to be proud of their ignorance, but
to regard it as a moral qualification.
10 February
People are sometimes astonished (when not manifestly horrified) by just how much I know about the history
of the extreme left. Yet in fact they have no idea just how bad the situation really is. They may recall my elegy for the Marxist-Leninist Party USA -- an organization upholding that "bright red bastion of proletarian internationalism," the People's Republic of
Albania, until it reached the sad conclusion that even Enver Hoxha was a revisionist. But who would believe that I now
have before me the full run of American Mass Line, the newspaper of the American Communist Workers Movement
(Marxist-Leninist)? The first issue proclaims it "the bright red newsweekly of the American revolution." They started out
in Cleveland. Maybe Harvey Pekar met them at some point and will write about it one of these days....
But even the most indulgent of friends has probably assumed I was joking about Juan Posadas, the South American Trotskyist
leader who argued that UFOs proved the existence of communism elsewhere in the universe.
His logic was impeccable. Any species able to master interstellar travel has developed extremely advanced technology. But
as anyone with a basic grasp of Marxism-Leninism must know, capitalism places fetters on the development of the productive
forces. So it only stands to reason that the space people abolished capitalism, passed through the dictatorship of the proletariat,
and brought the full glory of communism to their home planet before coming to visit ours in their flying saucers. Q.E.D.
Some years ago, while working at the Library of Congress, I found several volumes of the English-language Posadas-ista
journal. As you might expect, Posadas was a man of many theories. Legend has it that, in his final days, Posadas spent all
his time yelling into a cassette recorder, with his followers dutifully transcribing the tapes for posterity. One article
in the theoretical journal contended that a proper understanding of Greek drama could cure male impotence.
At least that seemed to be the argument. It is possible I missed some steps.
Anyway, there is some information on Posadas in Robert J. Alexander’s doorstop-sized history of Trotskyism. I had high hopes for his recent book on Western Maoism, but it is disappointing. (Actually, the words "incompetent" and "lazy" come to mind.) But for anyone not able to track
down Alexander's Encyclopedia Trotskyana, the place to go for proof that Posadas is not my own
little joke is this recent article, which has just gone online. The author gets a few things wrong, here and there, but the piece is valuable just for
the pictures alone.
It turns out that the Posadas posse is still around. When we were in London last fall, I spent a lot of time (to say
nothing of money) at a radical bookshop called Porcupine Bookcellar, which carried the newspaper of his British followers. A
good bit of it consisted of reprints from his old speeches and writings. Reports that they have maintained contact with
Cde. Posadas via Ouija board appear to be unfounded.
Some people claim that Sam Marcy dictates all policy for International ANSWER during the weekly seance
held by the Central Committee meetings of the Workers World Party. But that may be an urban legend.
6 February
Thanks to Ophelia Benson at Butterflies & Wheels for recommending a couple of items from this site to her readers. We share a distaste for that "hipness unto death" which has become
such a nuisance of urban life. Maybe it always was? I don't know. On reflection, it does seem that Rousseau was
complaining about it, quite a while back.
Of course, the really annoying bit comes when it ripens into faux naivite, the simulacrum of earnestness.
It would be easy to insert some URLs here. A couple of what must be called literary magazines (for want of
a better term) are now serving as nurseries (to use an exact one) for that sort of thing. But screw it. No links from
here to there. They get enough traffic as it is.
Instead, check this out. I have been meaning to write about these guys (Broyard, Brossard, Krim, Klonsky, Landesman, Wolfe) for a long
time. So it's kind of a pain to have Philip Ford sweep in and do it right. If he writes a book on this material,
I will be the first to read it. The relationship between the crew he analyzes and the staggering geniuses
of today is roughly that of tragedy to farce.
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