|
29 April
This news ought to hold until May Day. But damn, I can't wait that long. It is just too exciting.
Let's just forget all this electoral hoopla for a minute and get down to something really historic, okay? Then
after that you can gripe about Nader, or continue with the nasal recitation of Chomsky's analysis of U.S. foreign policy,
or whatever.
Coming this summer -- probably not at a video store near you, but you could ask -- there is the first
combined VHS/DVD release of
REVOLUTION
Why It's Necessary
Why It's Possible
What It's All About
which documents what the producers call "an historic talk in the United States," sometime last year,
by Revolutionary Communist Party Chairman Bob Avakian. Not only does Chairman Bob talk (and talk, and talk....for 5 tapes
or 4 DVDs). He answers questions from the audience.
You can read some of what he has to say here. But words on the cold page cannot, it seems, convey what Freud, in a different context, called "the oceanic
feeling" available from immersion in the Chairman's flow of discourse. Let me quote from an advertisement for the
forthcoming release:
"Bob Avakian is a creative and wide-ranging thinker who, at the same time, maintains a profound sense of the
actual struggles, trends, and sentiments among the masses, the movements of opposition, and society broadly. And, he is the
leader of the RCP, USA, a Party which is seriously setting its sight on the seizure of power right within the U.S. itself...."
I am going to skip some things about his international importance, and get to the part that, as
much as anything, makes clear what'll be spinning in the DVD player at home, come June:
"He is one of those truly rare individuals who emerge only occasionally as an especially concentrated expression
of the very best of what the revolutionary people and their struggles can forge and bring to the forefront at certain junctures
of history." This film "will allow you to spend a day with this unique leader. He will take you on a journey that can change
your life." His speech "is full of heart and soul, humor and seriousness. It will challenge you and set your heart and mind
to flight." (That probably applies to the Q&A as well.)
I have a bunch of the Chairman's books and pamphlets at home, on the shelves alongside titles such as the Proletarian
Unity League's classic Two, Three, Many Parties of the New Type and a report on the happy people of Cambodia under
the wise leadership of Pol Pot, issued by the theoretical journal of the RCP's onetime rival, the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist),
now defunct. As a collector of this sort of thing, I was pretty happy when the RCP issued 4 CDs worth
of interviews with Chairman Bob last year.
It's politically incorrect to say this (and I mean that in the strongest possible sense) but listening to him calls
to mind something once said about a certain Trotskyist orator known for logging in some long hours at the podium: "He denouced
the policy of socialism in one country, but appeared to think he could construct it in one speech."
Anyway, some of you have already had your eyeballs pop out of your head upon reading that the video/DVD records the Chairman's
"historic talk in the United States" in 2003.
For it is now a quarter of a century since the Chairman gave a speech in which, it seems, he became a little to
specific about what would happen to President Carter, come the revolution. A tape reached the Secret Service. In 1980,
the Chairman began leading the American revolution from an undisclosed location in France. It was around that time that his official party portrait was released. No new image of him has appeared since then.
Certain lickspittles of the bourgeoisie have claimed that, while abroad, Chairman Bob developed a passion for French
pastries and stinky cheeses, and so had come to resemble Marlon Brando circa Don Juan DeMarco. Another story had it that, while continuing to apply Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought to the contemporary
world situation, he was also working as a business consultant for some Canadian company. And while there have been rumors
that he came to the U.S. from time to time, as far as anybody knew he still had legal reasons to stay underground, if not
abroad.
So let's just say some folks are going to be watching those DVDs with an interest in the story, as well as the ideology.
27 April
Via Maud Newton's blog comes the word that Thom Gunn died a couple of days ago. An obit appearing in the Guardian doesn't say where he died, which
probably means the Bay Area (since if he'd returned to the UK they would have mentioned it). A good profile of him appeared in LA Weekly four years ago.
He was a poet who somehow got the Apollonian and the Dionysian to balance out, instead of disrupt one another. I'll
probably get pelted with rocks and garbage for saying this, but here goes: Enthusiasm for the ethos of San Francisco
of the 1970s is by no means the most interesting quality of his imagination.
There is also what this essay highlights -- a coldness that is not just formal distance: "In conversation, as in poetry, Gunn seldom allows anything
redundant to survive; the imperatives of clarity and economy mean that, while there is little slack there is also, on occasion,
little comfort: hence, maybe, his supposedly ' cold' writing. [....] it is this very coldness of attitude in
poetry that is the only way in which 'tenderness' can have either a meaning or a use."
The same essay quotes an interesting passage from Gunn himself, worth reproducing here:
"He [Leavis] was not, probably, a very likeable person, but he had a very interesting view
of literature, seeing it as a part of life. That was what was so wonderful. Literature is not like a fine wine that
you taste and judge by comparison with other wines. You compare a book to a person, for example, or to an action. This
was what later attracted me about another slightly difficult critic, Yvor Winters. He too considered a poem as
an action. And it is, of course; it’s not just a decoration."
Courtesy of the literary blog Beatrice.com (which is not maintained by the corporate behemoth named Beatrice....there's gotta be a story there), links to
two poems by Thom Gunn: "The Man With Night Sweats" and "Cat Island." I like the latter poem despite certain lines that are just the purest feline defamation.
26 April
After Invisible Adjunct made her announcement last month, a bunch of people contacted me to suggest doing an article for the Chronicle. A reasonable expectation, but not
my thing really. My involvement with academe is by no means all-inclusive. I'm strictly in it for the ideas. The nuts
and bolts of university life (let alone the sturm und drang of the job situation) are better handled by other
people. Preferably those who have a clue.
Anyway, it was clearly worthwhile for the paper to cover this, given how widely known, indeed beloved,
IA has been in her time. So it's good to see that my colleague Scott Smallwood has a story about Invisible Adjunct in the new issue. This should end up in the "free" section of the online edition. If you don't have a subscription
or password and can't wait that long, drop me a note and I'll forward it.
Meanwhile, since we are on the topic of cannibalism....It seems that the long-awaited DVD of Sweeney Todd is now available, according to The Little Professor. I am not an enthusiast for Sondheim, as such, but have developed an appreciation for him by osmosis; and
Rita has now even persuaded me to attend (and in consequence to enjoy) a couple of performances of Sondheim.
This, despite certain very persistant reservations about the whole concept of the musical.
Speaking of librarians and the pleasures of spectatorship (notice how loosely the chain of association is stretched
today?)......It is interesting to see, via Bookslut, that the TNT cable network has the following movie on its schedule for the fall.
No doubt this messianic figure is a reference librarian. I've said it for years, and it bears repeating: Reference librarians
have amazing powers.
UPDATE: More fun with referral logs. Yesterday, someone came to this site (as it were) via the search term "virtual dominatrix."
Yowsa.
23 April
"An evil genius isn't just some guy who has a tank full of sharks with
lasers on their heads. Oh, no. Those folks might be evil, and they might be geniuses on some level, but in the end they always
get taken out by some bumbling dude in a leisure suit. Nope, the true evil geniuses of the world are a tad more mundane in
their methods and appearance, but have two things in common: a lot of vitriol, and the ability to turn it into cash. Let me
give you a couple of examples--Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. No one political affiliation has the lock on evil genius, and
neither does any one career. If you're a successful evil genius, you will be despised by approximately one half of the population
but you won't care, because the other half will buy all your stuff and love you for 'sticking it to the (pick one: man, liberal
media, hegemony of the day).' I would gladly be hated by half the population if the other half gave me cash, because I'd then
have enough money to make sure that the half that hated me stayed on the appropriate side of the shark-filled (head lasers
optional) moat."
20 April
"Baghdadis have an uneasy sense that they are heading towards civil war," according to an intelligence-agency
memo from early March leaked to The Village Voice. "Sunnis, Shias, and Kurd professionals say that they themselves, friends,
and associates are buying weapons fearing for the future."
"Iraqi police sell their U.S.-supplied weapons on the black market; they are promptly re-supplied. Interior ministry
weapons buy-backs keep the price of arms high."
That's from the first page. For the whole story, check out "Fables of the Reconstruction," a remarkable article by Jason Vest which deserves the widest possible discussion. I mean, if there is something
wrong with this picture, let's hear that too. But damn. This memo is, reportedly, from someone who sees the war
as a good thing.
19 April
My ears are burning. And, perhaps not coincidentally, my ankles itch.
An interesting discussion is underway at Crooked Timber about, appropriately enough, academic blogging. In particular, its uncertain (not to say unstable) place between
journalism and scholarship. It was initiated by John Holbo, who refers along the way to my speech from last month -- which was also, in a way, about what it is like to live and think and have your being in that particular twilight zone.
Holbo refers to my Great Chain of Being model of literary/intellectual discussion, with "bookchat" (as Gore Vidal calls
it) at the bottom and something perfectly (or at least incessantly) self-reflexive at the top, with at least a gradation
or two in between. Just for the record: I did not mean to suggest that the "higher" forms are just variations on
the "lower." Homology ain't equivalence, and in any case, the point made in my speech is that there are indeed big gaps,
corresponding to difficult changes of sensibility and conceptual apparatus as one develops.
But it is always instructive to watch the desperate move to police any gray zones where overlap and mutual
contamination could actually be underway.
On reflection, I'd say that maybe it would be better not to consider the spectrum from "chat" to "criticism" to "critique"
as a hierarchical chain but rather as something like the Four Food Groups, or however they used to chart the categories of
a healthy diet. But there are reasons why such a notion of balance and well-roundedness would never be acceptable, either.
I'm thinking in outmoded humanist categories again, damnit. (Must have been all that Marx that did it.)
The only way to make progress in the simulacrum of intellectual life projected in some fields is by making sure
nobody mentions anything outside the existing regime. Okay, that wasn't the Marx talking. Over the weekend -- heading to and
from Columbia University for what turned out to be an excellent conference -- I read Philip K Dick's novel Time Out of Joint. Somebody should do an equivalent to PKD's novel of suburban manners, only set in a small college town and with an aging
graduate student in cultural studies analyzing Taco Bell advertisements instead.
Meanwhile, in other reading.....last week, I finally got a copy of Harold Garfinkel's classic paper from 1956, "Conditions
of Successful Degradation Ceremonies." Whoah! First of all, when I finally figure out how to convert all my 4-track
Portastudio recordings into digital format, that is going to be the title of my first CD.
Beyond that, Garfinkel helps explain the response to blogging from both academia and journalism. And why intellectuals
who fit into neither professional world -- a category which de facto includes many people working in either -- may walk around feeling
vaguely insulted, much of the time.
Not me, of course. I can't complain. Big old diamond rings on my fingers....fine Italian suits....the courtiers waiting
to offer me copies of their books in special leather-bound editions.
The envy of the little ones? It is to laugh. They can only imagine the power enjoyed by Mac Daddy McLemee. And so
they bite the ankles.
14 April
The demand from McLemee.com readers for new content is incessant. Well, maybe not incessant, exactly. But it exists.
Anyway, a friend just stopped by my cubicle, wondering aloud when I would update the site.
From analysis the referral logs, it would appear that at least a couple hundred people have this site bookmarked -- not
counting visitors searching terms such as "buttons with Chairman Mao on them," "jennifer ringley having sex," "Funyuns," "meta-celebrity,"
and "genetically enhanced house cats."
Some high school student is plagiarizing me right this minute. I can just feel it. (Every time that happens,
another hair turns gray.)
Despite my appreciation for everyone coming here in search of something other than "quotes from Ayn Rand about public
housing," I have resisted any temptation to make this site any slicker in design, or more regular in the updating of
content. If it looks like a Geocities site from 1997 -- well, there is a reason for that. And it sure isn't nostalgia.
Someone recently compared the rituals and protocols of blog commentary to the microwaving of a burrito. Now, I have nothing
against the microwave burrito, and was, in my twenties, perhaps something of a connoisseur (knowing precisely how
long to nuke one for ideal tortilla texture while avoiding the risk of icy bean core). There are limits to the possibility
of developing that particular set of skills, however -- nor infinitely extensible are the horizons of gourmandise.....
The limits of the form are documented in an amazingly thorough and altogether brilliant item called
"Every Damned Weblog Post Ever." As Adam Kotsko writes, the appearance of that text may mark the point at which "the blogosphere is officially over -- we have entered
into the post-blogosphere, during which we can only shallowly mimic other people's past achievements." (Note how "the blogosphere"
here names neither a space nor an era, but something like a chronotope.)
While not averse to self-publishing as such -- and glad to have a regular audience that gathers here just
to watch me pontificate atop the soapbox -- I'm accustomed to writing for places with a rather larger circulation than
McLemee.com. And deeper pockets. (The fee I pay myself here is laughable.) Not to mention, there are no copyeditors,
which is a mixed blessing.
A short essay on James T. Farrell (written in what could jokingly be called my spare time) should
appear in the next issue of The American Prospect, which went to the printers yesterday. Other pieces now underway will
be appearing in the book review sections of The New York Times and The Washington Post, and I'm up to my
ears with things to write for The Chronicle of Higher Education, most of which should appear on the Web, sooner or
later.
So moments of dead silence here don't mean I'm not writing. Or (what can be just as exhausting)
feverishly procrastinating.
A note to those who objected to the fact that "The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis" was an account
of the online publication of The Rising Tide of Insignificancy, rather than an analysis of the materials contained
therein....
Let me explain something about life at a newspaper. I will put this in terms that are very simple,
but that may perhaps convey an important distinction. To whit: "Dead thinker had ideas" is not what we call a "story."
And yet, "Dead thinker's family and followers denounce each other in public, publish materials in
peculiar circumstances, and engage in litigation" is a story. Go figure!
9 April
The Greek newspaper "Eleytherotypia" has just run an article titled "'Piratical' Castoriadis,"
which is available online. Running it through Babelfish, one paragraph at a time, I see that it is pretty much entirely a paraphrase of "The Strange Afterlife of Cornelius Castoriadis" -- or at least the more strictly conflict-related aspects of that piece. In Greece, you don't have to tell the reader
who Castoriadis was or why anybody would care.
I've now had work translated (never with anybody asking permission or even letting me know about it) into French, Spanish,
German, and Italian. This isn't a translation, of course, strictly speaking. But it tracks so closely with the original
article that the distinction hardly counts. To be fair, the Greek reporter does refer to the original piece in The
Chronicle of Higher Education -- with that title, in English, standing out from the Greek text.
I can follow the script well enough to enjoy reading passages out loud, without actually understanding it. The
next phase of savouring this experience comes from the Babelfish translation. Oh man, do I love Babelfish.
In particular, this bit:
"It is a complicated history", writes the American inspection "The Chronicle of Higher Education", "that concerns a interdisciplinary
intellectual, his widower, amfjlego'meno translator and categories lacrohejrj'as, which usually we connect with the space
of pop music and no the philosophy".
There is nothing like having your words come back to you through two rounds of translation. "Usually we connect with the
space of pop music and no the philosophy" is my favorite sentence this week. Except, of course, for "Interventions, and the strategy they employ within their logic of temporality, belong to a peculiarly fungible politics"-- which is just, as the kids say, the shit.
In any case, it is nice that the Greek journalist did give credit for the story to the paper that broke it. About
three years ago, I spent quite a bit of time investigating and writing up a piece about an even more convoluted situation around the estate of C.S. Lewis, which ran as a cover story in the Chronicle. (Unfortunately, the postage-stamp sized reproduction doesn't do justice
to the artwork by Dave Allen.) After that piece appeared, a reporter from the Associated Press contacted me to ask
for the e-mail addresses of various people interviewed in the course of my article. She then interviewed exactly the
same people, and wrote up exactly the same story. (Well, maybe not "exactly." The Cliff's Notes version, at any rate.) And she never gave a word of credit to where she had
gotten the idea for the piece.
When called on this, she responded by saying something like: "We had been planning to cover that book before
your story appeared." Oh, sure. Lots of Associated Press stories are based on titles from extremely obscure university
presses. Happens all the time.
7 April
Hence the other text (below) -- which will not, therefore, have been an/other text, but its mirror. The two
passages really should appear side by side, like the columns in Glas. But once I transfer of all this to the Cogito section, linearity will impose its protocol of sad closure.
Text Number One:
Interventions, and the strategy they employ within their logic of temporality, belong to a peculiarly
fungible politics. To intervene is to at once assuage a present predicament (in the manner of therapeutics), as well as to
incite a redirection from an unwanted situation. One can see immediately both the limitations and the necessity of this form
of critique: in one gesture, the predicament’s object is imagined and given intelligibility (even preserved), even while
it is interrogated in order to be dissolved. This interventionist logic that has widest purchase at the present moment egregiously
attempts to normalize pathologies or resolve social conflicts. From popular expressions in an array of television programming
to a host of techniques in palliative care protocol, to intervene is to bring the once errant back into the arms of the sensible.
But what project can be garnered from perceiving the conditions of intervention itself, and the effects of those conditions,
to be the object of the predicament? It is a credit to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak that in her work “the intervention”
has maintained its exasperating and lacerating aim to walk into the most incisive and unapparent of crises.
-- Tim Kaposy, review of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline (Columbia University Press, 2003)
Text Number Two:
Lowbrow and small time, underachieving and unpopular...Funyuns are greasy, deep-fried rings of corn meal-based material that are coated with pungent, pale yellowish, onion-flavored powder.
They taste like onions in the same easily recognizable yet disconnected from reality way that grape soda tastes like grapes.
Their initial taste is inoffensive, if not particularly good (one shrugging taster described them as "unbad"). Their mouth
feel is akin to unwieldy rings of oversized Styrofoam calamari.
It is crucial, however, to momentarily reserve judgment when evaluating Funyuns; there is more to them than first meets
the tongue. Soon, their special brand of sinister black magic manifests itself in the form of a profoundly unpleasant, multi-tonal
crescendo of bad aftertaste. After swallowing, the oppressive post-Funyun funk rapidly grows in strength, overwhelming the
senses of taste and smell and leaving blistering, breath-mint-resistant halitosis in its wake. Disgusted, you find yourself
blindly reaching for the nearest thing to pop in your mouth, just to make it stop. Unfortunately, the nearest thing is usually
another Funyun, creating a tragic and unintentional parody of Frito-Lay's elsewhere-successful slogan, "You can't eat just
one." [….]
On the back of this unassuming bag, atop a short column of ad copy, bold, red, capitalized letters declare Funyuns "A DELICIOUSLY
DIFFERENT SNACK THAT'S FUN!" Directly below, the first line of regular text says, "For a change of pace that's fun and deliciously
different — FUNYUNS® brand Onion Flavored Rings are the snack." Funyuns "are a fun snack that you and your family can
eat anywhere …" it continues, before insisting, in the same capitalized red letters as the beginning, that "FUNYUNS®
BRAND ONION FLAVORED RINGS ARE FUN!"
The bag, with its weird insistence on the product's putative fun-ness, seems almost defensive, as if its author knew deep
down that the very opposite was true. If Funyuns are really so fun, would the bag have to try so hard to convince us? Wouldn't
we already know?
-- Alissa Rowinsky, review of Funyuns snack-food product, Flak Magazine (2003)
2 April
So on Tuesday I head to attend a seminar on disability studies at Columbia University -- with the guest of honor
being Susan Sontag, there to answer questions from a panel of scholars about themes in her two essays on illness,
as well as her most recent book, Regarding the Pain of Others (which I reviewed about a year ago) Four hours on the reliably unreliable Amtrak and one long cab ride later. I reach the auditorium....and learn
that Susan Sontag is not in the building.
Nor will she be. Her assistant called that morning to cancel. For the past few years, Sontag has had relapses of her cancer.
We were seated across the aisle from her at NBCC a few weeks ago. (Regarding was nominated for the criticism award.) Given the circumstances I was kind
of preoccupied, and never got a good look, to see if she seemed okay. Evidently not.
But the seminar must go on....The organizers had circulated the questions for discussion that the participants prepared. There
were copies available on the table outside -- on handouts, in regular-sized type, as well as extra-gigantic
font for the extremely nearsighted, and also in Braille; and with the text on CD-rom; and another CD containing all
the scholars' questions/statements recorded as an MP3 file. So it was kind of dismaying that the first person to
go the podium then more or less read the same prepared text that had been on the web already for some time.....
Now, my understanding is that at social science conferences, when the texts are circulated ahead of time, people on a panel
will often take it as a given that everyone involved is ready to go the next stage -- and so they will jump into a discussion
of the issues involved, rather than doing the ritual of "now I will give a presentation." I have now attended many, many academic gatherings
in the humanities and never once seen this happen. Critical mass is seldom reached. It's pretty much always "now I will give
a presentation."
In the case of this seminar, of course, they were doing the best they could without the guest of honor present. But
still! It's like that all the time. It is a puzzle. (And by "puzzle," of course, I mean "source of bewilderment and
irritation," because solving it is not really an interesting prospect.)
Now, I may just be a redneck with a big library, but it seems to me that alll the talk about "professionalization"
in some quarters of the humanities really boils down to just this structure of behavior. A kind of routinism, the
simulacrum of public discourse -- polite, and not always devoid of intelligence, but utterly wanting in spontaneity,
which mean that the stakes never seem very high, no matter how much people "deploy" concepts in :"interventions"
that are announced as "urgent." It makes me sad. If you want intellectual excitement, read a blog. (For example, this one, or this one, or this one.)
So anway....the next day, I went to the Strand in hopes of finding some James T. Farrell. The only novel on
hand was Bernard Clare, from 1945 or '46 -- the first volume of a trilogy about a young intellectual,
curiously resembling James T. Farrell, who becomes radicalized in New York. By the most generous
accounts, it is the book that marks the beginning of the end of whatever in his fiction is interesting. (He kept
publishing novels for another three decades, but you get splinters from most of it, it's so wooden.)
My luck was better with his nonfiction -- got three volumes of his essays, including A Note on Literary
Criticism, a polemic from the mid-1930s that challenged the Stalinist orthodoxy of the day. I
read some of it a while back, and it's still pretty impressive. Unlike most of the "Marxist" literati of
his day, Farrell had actually read, you know, Marx. (Not to mention Engels and Lenin.) At the moment, I'm reading a later
volume of essays, Literature and Morality, from 1947.
Two qualities stand out. The first (which the new biography of Farrell never really comes to terms with) is the
intensity and seriousness with which he pursues ideas. Coming from a social world in which education is just not taken
for granted, he is fierce about it. One of the earliest pieces in Literature and Morality is about
George Herbert Mead, written when Farrell was about 28. The series of essays on Tolstoy and Napoleon are from his
early forties. Not much later, something goes awry. His subsequent nonfiction, like his novels, grows self-indulgent
and sentimental and embittered. But at his peak, he's the embodiment of the man getting his education in public, and
almost literally fighting to do so.
The second quality that emerges, you could call polemical. But maybe that is misleading. It's the converse
of what I was complaining about earlier. It's a vital sense that the things he is reading and thinking about
actually do matter -- and that how you talk about them matters, beyond the sphere of one's "profession." If Farrell
had been a good careerist, he never would have denounced the Stalinists in the 1930s, or Senator McCarthy (or the cold-war
liberals of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom) in the 1950s.
He had guts, and nerve. So I'm hoping that the consensus about Bernard Clare is wrong. In any case, it's what
I'll be reading this weekend, along with the books of essays.
|
