cheese it, the cops!

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

oops we kicked your ass

i have been doing research and working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather, herman bernstein (he's my mother's mother's father). what an unbelievable life! i thought i wrote fast. for one thing, the dude was super-jew. for example, henry ford, with whom he locked horns for a decade, called him 'the messenger boy of international jewry.' he was rolling across russia during the revolution, interviewing john reed and leon trotsky.

even a superficial skim of the list of his correspondence (housed at the yivo center for jewish research at the center for jewish history) reveals letters to and from Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem,Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour,Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.

as herman might have put it: jesus a vehicular christ.

herman bernstein as a sensitive young poet

 and as a mature ass-kicker

 

when my mother (joyce abell, b. 1925) was 5, she was sent by her parents, alone, on a ship to albania, where herman was the ambassador. she still remembers the spectacle, the dresses etc., at the court of the magnificently attired zog, king of albania. 

here are a few of the other writers in my lineage, on both or all sides, whether they arrived with the puritans in 1637 or came to ellis island from the russo-german border in 1893. some were protestants, some were catholics, some were jews (100% on my mom's side). most were atheists, though, whatever their heritage. some were communists and some were republicans and some (well...) were anarchists. novelist and short story writer grace sartwell mason (my great great grandfather's sister; one of her books is women are queer); herman's brother hillel bernstein, novelist and new yorker contributor; novelist etc murray gitlin (my grandfather and herman's son-in-law); my grandfather franklin sartwell, columnist for and editor for the washington times-herald and the washington post; my father franklin sartwell, jr., reporter and editor at the washington star, national geographic, science news, and defenders magazine; herman's son david, writer and editor for, and owner of, the binghampton sun. there are others!

spanking thomas hardy

in this week's new york review of books, tim parks compares the works of e.l. james unfavorably to those of nicholson baker and thomas hardy (or, as i prefer to think of him, hummus tardy). apparently she doesn't write as well as they do (sorry about pay wall). next ish: parks will shock the world with his argument that one direction isn't as good as mahler. but, on the other hand, neither e.l. james nor one direction is as pretentious, confused, or boring as tim parks. whatever millions of women have felt reading fifty shades of grey, parks felt reading jude the obscure, the dreariest and most didactic novel ever written.

great scott

i've been reading the works of the yale political scientist/anthropologist james c. scott, for example the art of not being governed; an anarchist history of upland southeast asia and seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. it's work that flips your head over. the experience of reading it reminds me of the first time i read foucault's discipline and punish: you suddenly see what we and our histories lok like from a completely different angle: the truths that you can only see from the outside. also like foucault, scott does theory by producing detailed empirical observations; there is very much hard work i can't help comparing my own work; i am more likely to wield the big theoretical construction; i wish i had more of scott's consciousness, though maybe you need both. 

i'm not sure how i missed this stuff; it's easy to not register 'james scott,' and i kind of thought he was writing about some ragtag bands of anarchist rebels in burma or something. not at all. scott's data ranges around the world, but is also insistently particular and local, which is precisely what the intellectual structure he's constructing demands. so, he's roughly to be ranged in the movement of 'anarchist anthropology' that would include michael taussig and peter clastres and then younger figures such as david graeber. this sounds obnoxious, i admit; why combine the name of a political position with the name of a discipline? what if i said i'm doing capitalist anthropology or something? 

but really here is the idea: such disciplines as environmental studies, anthropology, and political science are infested with statist assumptions that need to be questioned to get at the truth. here's how scott states one of the basic ideas of this trend:

Shatter zones are found wherever the expansion of states, empires, slave-trading, and wars, as well as natural disasters, have driven large numbers of people to seek refuge in out-of-the-way places: in Amazonia. . . in that corridor of highland Africa safe from slave-raiding, in the Balkand and the Caucasus. The diagnostic characteristic of shatter zones are their relative inaccessibility and enormous diversity of tongues and cultures.

Note that this account of the periphery is sharply at odds with the official story most civilizations tell about themselves. According to that tale, the backward, naive, and perhaps barbaric people are gradually incorporated into an advanced, superior, and more prosperous society and culture. If, instead, as a political choice, to take their distance from the state, a new element of political agency enters the picture. Many, perhaps most, of the inhabitants of the ungoverned margins are not remnants of an earlier social formation, left behind, or, as some lowland folk accounts in Southeast Asia have it, 'our living ancestors.' ...Their subsistence routines, their social organization, their physical dispersal, and many elements of their culture, far from being the archaic traits of a people left behind, are purposefully crafted both to thwart incorporation into nearby states and to minimize the likelihood that statelike concentrations of power will arise among them. art of not being governed 8

scott ends up producing incredibly rich evidence for such assertions. the narrative of history or of hunter-gatherer indigenous tribes that reveal our stone-age past and so on, the teleological conception of history, is inherently a state dogma. my favorite little example, which is mentioned by scott, are the seminoles: they are themselves some kind of extruded portion of the cherokee nation intermixed with whatever was in florida. and then they welcomed and interbred with escaped slaves; they were so quaintly primitive; they were so hybrid and schooled in the arts of resistance. that might be quite typical. it's not like different people literally inhabit different temporalities, and i doubt that any human band is evr truly isolated for very long. scott does point out the disadvantages of living in the lowland valley states: corvee labor, conscription, taxation. obviously, some people might rationally opt into the woods. scott is fascinated too by everything that takes place within state formations that delays, irritates, evades, or undermines it.

 

foaming at the...mouth

i think all the ridicule made naomi wolf snap.

giving her a good tongue-lashing

rarely has a book been trashed (by the guardian, new york review of books, new yorker, etc) as thoroughly and repeatedly upon its appearance; everyone is screwing naomi wolf's vagina. personally, i'm working on dick! my huge magical cosmic penis. did you know that there is a connection between the penis and the brain? it's scientific! and yet the schlong is as it were a deeply spiritual organ. plus without it i feel the vagina would have a different shape. god i love myself!

draft of preface to entanglements: a system of philosophy: a philosophical autobiography.

geist und zeit

some jagged news: an extremely smart and accomplished young poet and scholar, kelly grovier - who writes all the time for the times literary supplement - has a book coming out on walking stewart: very much the kind of thing i was contemplating! it's quite typical: two centuries without a book on the guy; suddenly everyone's doing it. i am contemplating whether this pre-empts my project. this is the kind of thing that happens in the sciences all the time, but it can also happen in the humanities, though with very different inflections. one good thing: grovier is an excellent writer and an expert on british romanticism. stewart will very much get treated right. what i could possibly do better - or so i tell myself - is work stewart into the history of philosophy.

you know when i was doing a book on voltairine de cleyre - the great american feminist and anarchist, neglected since her death in 1912 - sharon presley contacted me to say she was doing a book too, so with some discomfort we collapsed our two projects into one. but when we published in 2004, eugenia delamotte's book came out almost simultaneously. and also brigati's reader. really these things make you think twice about zeitgeists. 

unspeakable

i expect there will be no quibbling when i assert that the best book title since gutenberg is i am a genius of unspeakable evil and i want to be your class president. and the book of which that is the title - which i'm reading to jane - actually pays off. matter of fact the volume also has the best first sentence in the history of publishing: "Someday you will beg for the honor of licking my feet."

the persona of the seventh-grade, pudgy genius permits the author - josh lieb - to do many little transgressive things. as an example, he's an extremely sharp critic of the literary material being shoved his way by his pathetic teachers, e.g. fahrenheit 451:

Actually, I read the book when I was two. And even then I knew it was regurgitated bird pap, fit only for morons and seventh graders. In case you're lucky enough to have escaped it, Fahrenheit 451 is one of those books that is about how amazing books are and how wonderful the people who write books are. Writers love writing books like this, and for some reason, we let them get away with it. It's like someone producing a TV show called TV Shows are the Best and the People Who Make Them are Geniuses. [footnote 2: Probably the name of Aaron Sorkin's next project.]

or

The hot sandwich that greets me when I get home is perhaps the highlight of my day. It's "A Small, Good Thing." [footnote 15: To quote the title of an awful short story. Why do people insist on ranking it among Carver's best work? It's a perfect showcase for everything that's wrong with his fiction.]

puritanical

watcha readin, crispy? the 'magisterial' (i.e. long) biography: jonathan edwards: a life, by george marsden. really, edwards conducted quite the amazing life, though i have to say that, even with the vast materials brought to bear by marsden, something mysterious stiill lurks at the center. and though the life is filled with incident, it's certainly in the thought and writing where edwards' heart lay.

rarely has the idea of reactionary progressivism had more purchase. edwards was in many ways a radical figure, but in the guise of a 'revivalist,' constantly engaged in the project of preserving the most hard-assed calvinism: totally opposed to any hint of free will, convinced of total human depravity, an advocate of god's apparently entirely arbitrary grace. these were still the orthodoxies of his chiildhood; the eighteenth century seemed to set itself to explode them all and develop a far more 'optimistic' intellectual structure. from this point of view, edwards attacked not only deists, 'arminians,' etc. but the establishment churches of new england. he was a spearhead of the radical 'new lights' and a friend and fan of the rather democratic and individualist rock star george whitefield, spearhead of the 'great awakening.'

indeed edwards as pastor at northamption, mass., in 1825-26 partly gave rise to the awakening that swept both england a new england. edwards' book a faithful narrative of the surprising work of god told the story of how almost everyone in the town had apparently been 'saved.' what might be hardest for the modern reader to swallow is the extreme darkness of edwards' preaching, even as it brought people to christ. he taught that one should always - literally, always - be aware of one's own soon-to-come death and of the likelihood of eternal punishment (described in excruciating detail), and above all of the fact that we all deserve infinite punishment even if we live the most exemplary lives possible. the event that really ended the northampton revival was a suicide of a particularly earnest believer: one joseph hawley, who was completely convinced of his irremediable depravity. but even immediately afterwards, edwards could blame satan and preach, "There is no expressing the hatefulness and how hateful you are rendered by [sin] in the sight of Gid. The odiousness of this filth is beyond all account because 'tis infinitely odious. You have seen the filthiness of toads and serpents and filthy vermin and creatures that you have loathed and of putrefied flesh. . . . Your  filthiness is not the filthiness of toads and serpents or poisonous vermin, but of devils which is a thousand times worse," etc.

again, though there were many disputes, an exile from northampton to an indian outpost, a rise to the presidency of princeton (which he hardly liived to realize), the real climax of the life are the late works that edwards lived to complete, and marsden presents them as the climax also of the biography. this could be be bathetic, but i think the work amply sustains this treatment. what's most amazing is the comprehensive, and -believe it or not - stunningly optimistic vision articulated in the nature of true virtue (1857.)

[God is] the foundation and fountain of all being and all beauty; from whom all is perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly derived, and on whom all is most absolutely and perfectly dependent; of whom, and through whom, and to whom, is all and all perfection; and whose being and beauty is as it were the sum and comprehension of all existence and excellence: much more than the sun is the fountain summary comprehension of all the light and brightness of the day. . . . True virtue most essentially consists of benevolence to Being in general.

really where edwards arrived by extreme applications of logical acuity applied within a scriptural framework, was an ecstatic religious vision of merger with god and all being. rarely has a more extreme set of contradictions been held so firmly in suspension.

stormy times

watcha readin, crispy?

re-readin before the storm: barry goldwater and the unmaking of the american consensus, by rick perlstein. it's work i deeply admire and that fills me with a sense of my own inadequacy. the research is unbelievable: there are tens of thousands of facts: every page bristles with them. and in the course of setting the context, perlstein gives crisp, smart summaries of all sorts of national and international events of the period, from civil rights to the history of anti-communism, to the cuban missile crisis, to the free speech movement in berkeley, etc. but with all of that, the book also has narrative shape and momentum and a light touch in the writing that keeps you reading. not only that, but though i'd say it's pretty evident that perlstein doesn't share goldwater's politics, he's fair about barry and more or less everyone else even as he can be brutally critical as well. as you may know, i wrote about goldwater as one of my heroes in extreme virtue. that would be a better book if i'd had before the storm when i wrote it.

if you're wondering how i could admire barry goldwater, i might say that the thing i hated most in american politics circa 2000 was its pervasive falsity: the empty focus-grouped catch-phrases, the manufacturing of a perfectly polished jive persona over a massively flawed human being like, let's say, clinton or gore. (let's just say that mitt's reminding me why i was pissed off.) well searching for the opposite of that, one must land on barry, who actually hated the whole process and was always saying precisely the wrong thing. just to take a random example: when reporters showed up at his ranch for his announcement that he was running, he said that he was there to announce that his daughter had been knocked up. during the campaign, he specifically told each audience what they didn't want to hear: you know he'd travel to tennessee and start into selling the tva. he drove his own advisors ape with this sort of stuff. well, one reason for all this was that he didn't actually want to be president, which is a pretty good qualification to be president.

in x-virtue i was clear that goldwater's opposition to the 1964 civil rights bill, which outlawed segregation in public facilities including businesses, helped make him the tool and hero of racists, though actually goldwater expressed anti-racist and anti-segregation convictions throughout his life, and had integrated his own department store.

perlstein documents extremely elaborately two things which i didn't have on board: (1) goldwater's campaign was very possibly the most incompetent ever run by a major candidate in a general election; he ignored every person on his staff or party who had any expertise and surrounded himself with drinking buddies from arizona. from the smallest details to the biggest matters of strategy, the campaign fucked up everything and pretty much alienated everyone who wished it well. (2) lyndon johnson's campaign against goldwater was quite possibly the very dirtiest in the history of american politics, under the auspices of...bill moyers. indeed he had the full nixonian plumbers thing going, including some of the same plumbers, such as howard hunt.

however, hunt in 1964 was the director of domestic covert operations for the cia. that is, moyers brought the total resources of the government - start with the irs - to bear to destroy goldwater. 

Moyers was instrumental in pioneering an innovation in presidential campaigning: the full-time espionage, sabotage, and mudslinging unit. The Johnson "Anti-Campaign" was an all-star Democratic team, including Daniel P. Moynihan of Labor; White House counsel Myer Feldman; the assistant postmaster; the assistant secretary of agriculture; labor lobbyist Hyman Bookbinder; a claque of top D.C. lawyers; the Pentagon's Adam Yarmolinsky (one of the Admistration's strongest liberal voices); even Clifton Cooper, the CIA liaison to the White House. 

goldwater supporters in the business community and elsewhere reported getting personal calls from johnson, saying that he was reading their tax returns right then and they were very interesting. the moyers op got up a very elaborate program to create the narrative that goldwater was literally insane, and had various psychiatrists diagnosing him as paranoid and schizophrenic and psychopathic, and then by hook and crook and blackmail getting this stuff into major newspapers and magazines and the work of the main political columnists for the main newspapers in the country. they orchestrated a campaign to get various professors to call him a fascist. they tried to screw up his events and even his travel in a hundred ways. etc etc.

and even though goldwater did lend fuel to the fire of the daisy commercial and many other spots suggesting that he would lead the world into nuclear holocaust with his belligerent anti-communism, it is worth pointing out that during the campaign johnson manufactured the gulf of tonkin pretext to dramatically escalate the war in vietnam, and that the admistration was engaged in many covert forms of escalation including massive bombing of civilian targets, explicitly intending to keep the reality secret until after the election. johnson is portrayed by perlstein as governing from a place of massive personal insecurity, as a boozer with bipolar disorder. in other words, johnson was what he tried to portray goldwater as being.

 

 

 

 

g.e. moore

also i've been reading g.e. moore, who i'm beginning to think is in his own weird way one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. i started in to reading all his papers again because i was reading my own manuscript and realizing that moore - vaguely remembered from grad school - was actually central over and over. first of all, his "proof of the external world": here is a hand and here is another, which i regard as entirely decisive. and then his view about beauty - that beauty is a feature of a situation embedding both subject and object - was a model for my treatments of value.

he's a hard-ass realist: a complete believer in the everyday world. that's where i'm at. really his papers collected in philosophical studies and philosophical papers were the death of idealism in the british academy: what he does to f.h. bradley is similar to what the state of georgia did to troy davis. but he's just as fatal to the phenomenalism of mill or russell or carnap, for example. these papers were really the lynchpin of the onset of analytic philosophy and philosophy of language. he's not given enough credit for that; the voice of the best analytic philosophy is fully realized in his papers. he's remembered now primarily for principia ethica, pretty much the least interesting of his writings for my money. even there he's a vague figure to the present, and undervalued.

he is an extremely idiosyncratic stylist: disarmingly conversational and always first person, so that he uses itals to emphasize the words that give the sentence its rhythm in spoken english. but also oddly clotted. he's always issuing wild disclaimers: "i have no idea whether this is true or false; for all i know it's true; i could well be entirely mistaken, etc" before the total evisceration. really the stuff is extremely jocular, almost a slapstick routine or a parody - the right term might be 'high burlesque' - where he seems to proceed with punctilious care, piling up fine distinctions until you suddenly realize in the last paragraph that he's just landed you with a thud in the ordinary world.

i think actually ordinary language philosophy was more or less entirely prefigured in his work, which constantly defends ordinary uses of words against introduced funny philosophical senses. so when bradley says that time isn't real, he means that there really is no such thing, which means that one event never occurs before or after or at the same time as any other. indeed, he means that nothing ever happens at all. you know, then 'maybe that's not what bradley means when he says that time isn't real; i really have no idea, but if he means what most people mean when they say that unicorns aren't real, for example...' he even sort of leaves out the last nail: well, i think stuff does happen, don't you? so perhaps something has gone wrong in bradley's argument.

also my all-time hero j.l. austin, i'm realizing, really must have gotten a lot of his schtick from moore: the hilariousness or even vicious wit, the piling up of little distinctions until he completely collapses your house of cards, the implicit affirmation of the everyday world.

 

one big glowing thingummy

watcha readin, crispy? (yo sorry for no watchareadins; i've been too busy reading, writing etc)

i've been sampling parfit's on what matters and dworkin's justice for hedgehogs. i think that the parfit is quite the little slog, and that's only volume one. 'best work in ethics since sidgwick,' said the times literary supplement (i think phillip petit was the reviewer). parfit sent out the manuscript to 250 philosophers (supposedly) and responded with revisions. perhaps that shows: it's bristling with replies to objections from offstage. the dworkin is written more engagingly, but dworkin's always half-lawyer, and this can't have the philosophical dimensions of parfit. on the other hand, dworkin is remarkably sharp: a good thinker.

at any rate, both these books, putting the thing at its most general, bring all human values together in one big glowing thingummy. parfit's argument is that all the major western moral theories (utilitarianism, kantianism, contractualism, and so on) are - despite what their proponents thought - basically compatible. and dworkin seeks to suggest the reconciliation of aesthetic and political values along with those. that's more like neo-platonism than postmodernism! we might not want to go quite so far in the opposite direction, and i'll just signal that the situation is a lot more fragmented and equivocal than they want to make it: we're still just muddling through.

worst blurb ever

blurb from an ad in the new york review of books for beauty pays: why attractive people are more successful by daniel hamermesh (princeton u press). the blurb is by freakonomist stephen dubner. "He writes so lucidly and charmingly about such a compelling subject that you will never again look at a beautiful face (or an ugly one) without thinking of the many economic consequences. Bravo!" bravo? this seems like a terrible interruption of human pleasure.

woof!

i remember when the editors of major newspapers were crusty old bastards, played by jason robards, who were intent on exposing the corruption of the political machine. now, like every middle-aged woman in the country, they write unauthorized yet exhaustively detailed biographies of their golden retrievers. surprisingly, it turns out that there's a lot to be said for patriarchy.

sr

perhaps the most astonishing development in philosophy during the time i've been doing it is that movement has emerged that believes in a reality external to the human mind. now, that might strike you as not all that impressive, considering that everyone - including all the philosophers that denied it - believes in a world external to the human mind, and you might think that reality would have some strange reactionary defenders all the way along. maybe so, but the disease had many forms and has seemed more or less inevitable as death since descartes, who argued that we only have acquaintance with our own ideas. so then...hume, kant, hegel. phenomenology, logical positivism, hermeneutics, narrativism, postmodernism: all asking the bizarre question of how the mind constructs a world, rather than the perfectly sensible question of how the world constructs a mind. to say that, circa 1993 i felt alone is an understatement, though compared with most people i'm comfortable alone.

at any rate 'speculative realism' has emerged incredibly quickly in continental philosophy, in large part due to the prodigiously energetic writer/wheeler-dealer graham harman. the 'movement'  encompasses a number of eccentric figures in continental philosophy, formed up by harman into a group. it recovers bits of deleuze, badiou, zizek, and constructs a new canon out of figures such as latour and quentin meillasoux (whose book after finitude is a key, though strange, moment), on both of whom harman has published books in the last few months. also it's very internetish, and the books appear incredibly quickly, often with open access, from presses such as re, zero, and open humanities. (re's anthology the speculative turn is the place to start). really it has had to forge its whole own world of publishing, blogs, mini-conferences, because it is obvious to everyone who does philosophy of any sort that they themselves are making up their world, or that we're making it up together by telling stories, etc. 

that would really be the dawn of the popomo period, and one has to think that sr is opened up by the death of the pomo generation: baudrillard, rorty, derrida, gadamer etc. it is also, perhaps, a response to the fact that we actually do live more than ever in representations and before screens; that would make you yearn for the real.

there could be a corresponding development in analytic philosophy, and indeed for twenty years and more ontology has re-emerged in analytic philosophy as a legit enterprise.

i have to say that - even though harman publishes a book every month or two (the quadruple object, he says on his blog, took 86 hours) - the whole idea is still nascent. whenever harman builds it up, he does it by clawing his way out of phenomenology: he uses and attacks husserl and heidegger. well, ok, but obviously we're headed someplace else and the origins of this thing in phenomenology are contingent and will, i think, eventually be irrelevant to what develops (i'll give harman one big insight out of heidegger for making objects inward, mysterious etc, but little else, really). also it is developing in many directions at once, and each figure (paul levi bryant, manuel delanda, iain hamilton-grant) has his own eccentric metaphysics. that part is just good, but a little canon will have to settle in.

they're also groping toward new ways of writing, and harman's prose style - kind of rollicking and anti-obscurantist - is as radical within continental philosophy as his positions. reading harman i have the sense that everything is open: you actually can write how you want or how what you're saying demands you write. again, that's why there has to be a new publishing world.

anyway, for the first time in my career, i want in. here is more or less a movement i endorse, something i wouldn't have believed possible. 

 

damning with high praise

i don't know anything about wendy wasserstein. well, i wasn't her intended audience. but i can tell that the biography of wasserstein by judith salamon is a hagiography that would do anything to try to inflate wasserstein's importance. unfortunately, salamon keeps inflating it until it pops. so try this:

Years before Facebook existed, she “posted” updates on her life in essays published in newspapers and magazines. Before the concept of Internet identities existed, she created a public persona that seemed intimate but was carefully controlled.

yes, and two hundred years before that charles lamb did the same, and three hundred years before that, montaigne. between lamb and wasserstein, thousands. one of the most amazing achievements of montaigne was that he anticipated facebook. what appears most remarkable about wasserstein is that she anticipated sex and the city. by almost ten years. oy, the art! what remarkable prescience: like nietzsche, she was a premonition of the future. that the future sucked and was devastatingly conventional and superficial, and has now been canceled, makes no never mind. you might want to think for a second whether anyone had ever dealt with smart successful women in fiction before. judith salamon appears not to think so.

at any rate, in trying to sell her book by puffing up wasserstein, salamon issues a devastating indictment of wasserstein's work, and of salamon's own education and good sense.

book of the forest path

more adventures in e-publishing: book of the forest path. up for kindle and nook, also smashwords. (on the other hand it's already up for free). there seems to be a trickle of interest in my work on the tao te ching, the producet of many a long year of work on the text; i got a note from some high school teacher in cali working up an electronic version for students.

on the other hand, kuo hsiang, of whose chuang tzu chu i translate pieces in the book of the forest path, is little known, but i think gives in some ways the best formaulations of philosophical taoism, a picture of the universe as in a continual process of spontaneous or improvisational self-creation, an atheistical or even materialistic sense of wonder.

sucking issues: catcher in the rye

thank you. it might be some comfort to you that j.d. salinger - a grotesque fuckhead - is not as good a novelist as everyone choruses that he is. you know, taking down someone like salinger is one of life's simple pleasures. first off, no one is as good as people think salinger is. second, saying he sucks hurts no one, since he's already full up with fawning claptrap. at any rate, i know that generations of quasi-literate american adolescents have found their experiences vividly mirrored in the catcher in  the rye. let me just say that i'm not one of them, and i emerged from my 15-year-old reading of the thing wanting to pistol-whip holden caulfield.

you must change

yo my latest book is the color change, out as an e-book and a paperback. now no doubt you if you were tempted to casually check this out - it is a book devoted to a single magical effect with playing cards - you might be put off by the, um, $40 pricetag. however, the photos, by charlie heidlage, are excellent, copious, color. magic books are expensive and not available on amazon, part of the incredible hermetic mystique. it was quite the little research project and has been percolating here and there publisher to publisher revision to revision for some years. 

 

cute, though

a bowie bio frames the thing in the only possible way: he's 'important' even though he sucks.

It argues for Mr. Bowie less as an instinctive rocker than as a shape-shifting cabaret singer and composer writ large, a performer working in the tradition of Harold Arlen, Frank Sinatra, Hoagy Carmichael and Bertolt Brecht as well as the blues.

i think if you really tried to compare him, say, as a lyricist, to those figures, you'd begin to see the problem. it's so amazing that he was all dolled up and androgynous! yeah. astonishing. liberating. marketing. modeling. too bad about the music.

David Bowie had little talent but cool to burn.

He replaced more talented singers in bands because, well, that’s what cool kids do.

Mr. Trynka quotes the music writer Charles Shaar Murray, wonderfully, about Mr. Bowie’s puzzling career choices during the ’80s. “I suddenly thought, He’s turned into a rock-and-roll version of Prince Charles,” Mr. Murray said, noting the “old-fashioned haircut like a lemon meringue on his head.”

The singer Morrissey said about him: “He’s a business, you know. He’s not really a person.”

Mr. Bowie was not a natural singer or songwriter.

Mr. Trynka notes how closely Mr. Bowie’s song “Starman” resembles “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Bowie’s hit “The Jean Genie” pilfered a riff from Muddy Waters’s “I’m a Man.” The song “Life on Mars” borrowed a chord sequence from a French song called “Comme d’Habitude,” later reworked into English by Paul Anka as “My Way.”

About “The Laughing Gnome,” a terrible early song of Mr. Bowie’s, the author says, “As long as one is happy to abandon all notions of taste, the song is brilliantly crafted.” 

ok you throw that all out there, then finish with this: "David Bowie’s greatness, this book suggests, more than caught up with his coolness."

my advice is listen to yourself. you know he always sucked; in fact you said he always sucked. if you're going to do any sort of criticism, you're going to have to learn to believe your own actual assessments.

 

after midnight in paris

there has never been a clearer expression of provincialism than americans' obsession with paris, which just seems to redouble every few years. hasn't this gone on long enough? the food! the wine! the angst! the sex! the pseudo-sophistication and clumsily simulated identities! honestly i'm tired of paris in the 20s: fatigued by hemingway and stein, exhausted by picasso, etc. even if these people weren't excruciatingly overrated, there surely could be no point in writing or thinking about them any more, after infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters have worked them through for decades. i'd be more interested in south-eastern north dakota regionalism of the same period, and its influence in alberta. 

adams's jefferson

in henry adams's history of the united states in the administrations of thomas jefferson, jefferson is portrayed as a charming, good-hearted, and principled man. generous stuff from an adams. now there were many compromises of principle, but these had to do either with the fact that jefferson wanted everyone to like him (and so was always trying to find grounds to cooperate), or (in the humongous case of the louisiana purchase) just faced temptations that were too strong. he himself was trying to persuade his secretary of state madison, or the leaders of his party in congress (randolph, e.g.), that they needed to amend the constitution to make the buy. they were all like "shhhhhh!"

[really his positions were more or less what ron paul was saying today in various news outlets, announcing his candidacy for the presidency: neutrality in foreign conflicts, low taxes, individual liberty, states' rights, small government: we're too broke to go to war. "Peace was his passion," says Adams several times.]

he was always making grand democratic gestures, like riding horseback to his inauguration (rather than in a carriage). one episode. in 1803, he welcomed the brand-new british ambassador anthony merry to the white house, an occasion of solemn protocol and punctilious etiquette, even more because the french charge pichon was there and england and france were at war. yet jefferson's seating pattern was what he himself called "pell-mell; you sat wherever you wanted or wherever there a free seat, first come etc. and jefferson's appearance was described by a recently-elected senator as follows:

"A tall, high-boned man came into the room. He was dressed, or rather undressed, in an old brown coat, red waistcoat, old corduroy small-clothes much soiled, woolen hose, and slippers without heels. I thought him a servant, when General Varnum surprised me by announcing that it was the President."

nor did jeff bother to shave for the occasion. it was extreme anti-pomp, a pointed lesson for the old monarchy and the new empire (under the screeching anti-republican, napoleon) in democracy. jefferson wrote that after everything, merry 'perservered in a pretension to take precedence at dinner, etc. We have told him that the principle of society as well as of government with us is the equality of individuals composing it; that no man here would come to a dinner where he was to be marked by inferiority to any other."

and though the president was notably disarming on this as on so many occasions, merry was offended to the tune of writing an outraged letter to his boss, the foreign minister, regretting that he had ever been appointed: "In short [we] are now placed here in a situation so degrading to the countries [we] represent, and so personally disagreeable,...as to have become almost intolerable." 

re three cups of tea let me make a couple of remarks on memoir.

first off, though we think we can, we can't actually measure the truth of what someone's saying by just listening to what they say. this might make you see that truth has to be a relation to an external reality. that someone really really sounds sincere, or that you immediately connect to the voice or the content, has little tendency to show that what is saying is true. this is even more the case when you are reading than when you are sitting across from someone who is speaking. truth is not internal to discourse or the way you shape a story.

second, the idea that our lives are narratives or, applying the thing more specifically, that a memoir should take basically the form of a novel, is an extreme invitation to actually write fiction. the late manning marable's malcolm x: a life of reinvention apparently suggests that malcolm exaggerated his own criminal past. that would be typical, and one might also think about a million little pieces or even augustine's confessions: these tales of redemption gain shape from the degree of degradation overcome. but that is of course only one of myriad temptations.

i think that for that reason, the publishing industry has to take some responsibility: they want or need the thing to take a coherent, dramatic narrative shape. they actually select what memoirs to publish partly on this basis, and then they push authors into various rigid narrative formats. they view the whole of their fiction and non-fiction catalogues as story-telling. they ought to think about how that distorts not only memoir, but history and biography, for example. what we immediately need is a richer set of models and a little critical scrutiny of this idea that everything always boils down to story. and readers might need to examine their tolerance for actual facts, or polemics, or arguments, etc: none of which can simply be shoved into a narrative form without loss and falsification.

one might speculate that mortenson made up/exaggerated bits in order to illustrate or emphasize his moral stance, which is where the urgency and the sincerity actually originates. it's more in the nature of an allegory than a straight memoir. but perhaps people wouldn't have been so moved and persuaded if he'd actually just straightforwardly presented the moral stance or argument. that's a problem among readers as well as for mortenson's truthfulness.

there can be more-or-less true stories, and allegory is a legit literary form. but you can't insist on allegory, and a story isn't really a very good reason to form an opinion. and if you run the story into an allegory, you'll erase many realities and invent others. it has an element of condescension: you couldn't follow or pay attention if i actually made my point, so let's try pretending.

henry adams is really an astonishing historian. he's way into the mechanics of legislation, the details of economy and demography: the dedication to the real detail is exemplary. and yet the characterizations are incredibly compelling and vivid. jefferson is beautifully delineated: fairly and definitively, with all the problems and all the compelling qualities. but also aaron burr or hamilton or napoleon or charles iv of spain and many fascinating figures now entirely forgotten.

the histories never take on a merely narrative or sing-song story quality in the contemporary fashion, but they nevertheless deploy characters in a compelling way, and track them through events in a manner that connects them and makes them comprehensible. and then there is the writing: full of sharp and felicitous and unique formulations, both clear and highly nuanced. and often very funny: gentle or ironical or even sarcastic; by turns cynical and deployed in the service of a kind of idealism.

one funny thing: he doesn't seem to want to write the name 'john adams'; it's always 'the previous president' and the like.

notre dame went well: threw down some immortal technique and anarchist political aesthetics to the catholics. obviously i am disappointed that there's not a permanent government shutdown. i expected the leaders of the legislative branch to resign in embarrassment after a sudden realization of who they actually are. i'm reading henry adams' beautifully-written and -researched history of the united states of america during the administrations of thomas jefferson. jefferson came in and eliminated all internal taxes (funding the federal government exclusively through excises and tariffs on imported goods), while his treasury secretary albert gallatin (a biography of whom henry adams also wrote) launched a systematic effort to eliminate the national debt. jeff wrote: 'Our general government may be reduced to a very simple organization and a very unexpensive one - a few plain duties to be performed by a few servants." tea par-tay! (on the other hand, he was our least christian president, regarded as one of the most extreme religious skeptics in the world. try that in contemporary american politics.)

 

for a long time i have attacked the literary backwater known as fiction, pointing out that people make that shit up. if there is anything worse than a novel, however, it is a review of a novel. it always dutifully slogs through a plot summary: "it's 1968. in appleton wisconsin, teddy and teresa are raising their kids bobo, hubie, and nitbomb. then they discover a diary in a trunk in the attic and their quiet, happy, average american world is shattered by a devastating family secret: teddy's grandmother was benito mussolini's housekeeper." or whatever it may be. reading the typical review of a novel, i don't believe the first sentence, or i don't know what it would mean to believe it, and if i did know i still wouldn't care at all: you know, "jessica is 17 years old." wow, she is? funny i thought she turned 18 on january 22. there is absolutely no reason why that sentence should exist, nothing it's doing, nothing it's about. even if the novel of jessica's sexual awakening - at once unique to herself and deeply universal - could sweep up a person like you into its ohsovividlyimagined world, the plot summary of the novel in a review is a kind of absolute emptiness, yapyap without reference, point, or art. there is no less worthwhile human activity than reading a reviewer's plodding plot summary of a novel. sweetie, it's not 1968. this is not wisconsin. teddy didn't have a grandmother, because he isn't anything but a string of letters. ok:

It’s October 1940 and Tucker, a writer, and his photographer girlfriend are on an assignment for the W.P.A., chronicling the landmarks and local history of Virginia. Driving along a dusty mountain road, they accidentally knock down a child. Though he seems unhurt, they feel responsible and insist on taking him back to the dismal, isolated shack in the middle of the woods where the boy, Eddie, lives with his mother, Cora.

With night drawing in, the glamorous pair — who have clearly dazzled young Eddie — accept Cora’s offer of a bed for the night. Hoping to cheer the boy up, Tucker fetches an old hand-cranked projector from his car and shows Eddie the first horror movie he’s ever seen, “Frankenstein.” The film will change the course of Eddie’s life, inspiring him to run away and start hanging around a local television station, eventually becoming the well-known host of a comic horror show for children.

even if you take the eccentric position that the novel is a legitimate literary form, what literary form is this? i'm sitting here reading this: am i supposed to get swept up in "young eddie"'s "life"? perhaps people are better at suspending disbelief than i am. for such folks, there could be no uncompelling stories or ways of telling stories, i guess. but if there could be, then every plot summary of every novel in every book review is it. honestly i don't know how people read the paragraphs, much less write them. they're excruciatingly plodding fictions about...fictions. it's 1892, 421 bc, the astounding year 500,000! it's eddie, it's teddy, it's freddie, it's god! something is just about to happen that will change all their lives forever! (or would, if there were any such lives or anything that actually happened or any place or time they happened)! whatever.

 

 

i subscribe to the times literary supplement, and it displays many edifying features. certainly it indicates that the british are still more intellectual and stuff than we are. the quibbling is astonishing, with an extreme emotionalism i can only envy. if only i could be that alive! 'i don't know if it is frederick forper's famous stupidity or his equally notorious moral corruption that causes him to express mild reservations about footnote 6,237 of my book on frederick the great's cousin, but...' as the world washes away, melts down, explodes, here is an actual quotation from march 11: "Who owns Coleridge? Whose Coleridge will prevail? The stakes are high." they don't know it, but these people are happy!

Lobbing a softball into Crispin's wheelhouse

I try not to abuse my guest blogger privileges over here. It's all Crispin's fault anyway...

The idea that punk rock, skepticism as a way of thinking about everything and science have some sort of relationship is pretty intriguing. And, of course, why didn't I think of this before... Although, the YouTube request to disable embedding makes me wonder about how pure the motives can remain. 

i'm teaching a course on 'american political thought' and i've been reading pretty hard in the founders. i've drawn the conclusion (not that many haven't drawn it before me) that john adams was, by a ways, the best, the most formidable, the most knowledgeable, the most scholarly, the sharpest-edged intellect among the founders. one extremely neglected just virtuoso moment is a defence of the constitutions of government of the united states of america (it's a defense of the state constitutions (including his own constitution for massachusetts), written before the national constitution was ratified). it's a three-volume response to a three-page letter from the french thinker/statesman turgot that constitutes an exhaustive history of republican ideas. he's got all the roman historians, machiavelli, harrington, locke, montesquieu, and many others all in their original languages. he's got the swiss cantons, the italian city-states, the dutch republics, an exhaustive sense of english political history, and then there are the incas, zoroaster, india etc etc: an absolutely exhaustive history of republican ideas.

no other founder could have done this; none could even have assayed it. jefferson was a formidable intellect, but by comparison a dilettante. franklin was delightful and sharp as a tack, but not a scholar on this level. it's an intimidating book - though adams can be quite a delightful writer - but still it deserves a lot better than it has gotten; it's out of print, and has rarely even been issued as a book; people who read it usually read it as part of the complete works. well i daresay it needs a revival and a new scholarly edition. but that itself is a vast and intimidating project.

and adams' thought is the most influential on the shape of the american constitution, though all these guys were separation of powers type republicans of one sort of another. and i love his marriage best of all: he loved the fact that abby kicked ass.

update: well i guess it's not out of print if you're ready to drop $250. geez.