CHILDREN AND THE AVANT-GARDE
The surrealists paid almost no attention to children. Breton claimed to not want children and once when he ran into a young mother pushing a carriage down the street he exclaimed, "Just because you can shit out a child doesn't give you the right to hog the whole sidewalk!"
Some of the surrealists thought this was funny.
We here at Lutheran Surrealism believe that children are everything, and that a literary movement has to be about them. We think that anybody who exploits a child, or doesn't care foremost about children, is scum.
We are often asked then why do you consider yourself avant-garde at all? Isn't what you are preaching just the same family values that the right wing keeps preaching?
We do share this in common with the right wing.
We share with the left wing a concern about ecology especially lead levels in older homes, and we would like to think about the levels of fat and sugar that are in our children's diets at school.
Any movement that doesn't put children and their health and welfare first is worthless.
This is one reason why we continue to love Ron Silliman in spite of the fact that he is a socialist. He often writes about his children and he clearly puts a large emphasis on his children's education. He is always watching Shakespeare programs with them, and talking with them. He clearly loves them more than he loves literature. This is the basis of a man. We are fathers first, which is a fact that is denied by almost every aspect of popular and avant-garde culture.
Perhaps the only culture that pays respect to this fact is the church.
The surrealists didn't pay attention to children (Soupault did, in his eighties, write a book of verses for his friends who were the children in his apartment complex, which is one reason why I accept him above all the other surrealists).
The Beats were even worse than the surrealists in regard to children. Burroughs went to Tangiers in order to sexually exploit children. Ginsberg celebrated this in Howl, and later in at least two separate poems published in Death and Fame. (Corso never did anything of this kind insofar as I know, and did write poems for his own children -- which is one reason I respect him above and beyond any of the other Beats.) The sad stories of William Burroughs Jr. born with a heroin addiction and later to die in his thirties after several kidney transplants, and the story of Jan Kerouac, whose strange later life is recalled as she tried to get part of her inheritance from her father's estate, reveal the lack of care this group took with their children.
Jesus held a different sense of things.
Mark 10:13 says, "People were bringing little children to Jesus to have Him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them."
Jesus in turn became upset with his own disciples and their values. Of course the children were important, and He put them first. He took the children in His arms, laid His hands on them, and He blessed them.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Thursday, September 29, 2005
BECAUSE THEY HAVE NO GOD
Because they have no God and thus no theology per se, the Marxists push art into the role traditionally prescribed for religion and thus it becomes too grave. In Lutheranism the role of art is downplayed to adiaphora (not pertaining to salvation) and it is thus on the level of Parcheesi or card-playing or hopscotch. In a sense no one cares.
In the Soviet Union even a slight joke against Stalin could land you in the Gulag Archipelago for eight years as did Ivan Denisovitch. This is unthinkable in the Lutheran tradition. We have freedom.
The Calvinists such as John Milton and the Miltonists seem to place too little emphasis on levity. Some of the humanists such as Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, have a disgusting tone that I liken to the high Romantics. It is possible to take art too seriously.
Lutheran art has a gaiety to it.
In a two-kingdom's system art is meant to break up the monotony rather than transform our world into gold a la the strange Dionysian king Midas.
We reserve endless gold for another kingdom while we see art as slapping cards down on a card table. It wouldn't have occurred to Lutherans to elevate art to the role of theology nor the idea of artists to sanctified icons. This seems laughable. Our artists tend to be humorists (Updike, Keillor, Kierkegaard) and we tend to avoid poetry as it has been pervaded by high seriousness, which we think of as a devilish vice.
Because they have no God and thus no theology per se, the Marxists push art into the role traditionally prescribed for religion and thus it becomes too grave. In Lutheranism the role of art is downplayed to adiaphora (not pertaining to salvation) and it is thus on the level of Parcheesi or card-playing or hopscotch. In a sense no one cares.
In the Soviet Union even a slight joke against Stalin could land you in the Gulag Archipelago for eight years as did Ivan Denisovitch. This is unthinkable in the Lutheran tradition. We have freedom.
The Calvinists such as John Milton and the Miltonists seem to place too little emphasis on levity. Some of the humanists such as Marcel Proust, Jean Genet, have a disgusting tone that I liken to the high Romantics. It is possible to take art too seriously.
Lutheran art has a gaiety to it.
In a two-kingdom's system art is meant to break up the monotony rather than transform our world into gold a la the strange Dionysian king Midas.
We reserve endless gold for another kingdom while we see art as slapping cards down on a card table. It wouldn't have occurred to Lutherans to elevate art to the role of theology nor the idea of artists to sanctified icons. This seems laughable. Our artists tend to be humorists (Updike, Keillor, Kierkegaard) and we tend to avoid poetry as it has been pervaded by high seriousness, which we think of as a devilish vice.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
MADISON AND VOLTAIRE
Madison picked up and liked to quote Voltaire's aphorism, "If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would possibly become arbitary; if there were two, they would be at each other's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."
Quoted in The Business of May Next: James Madison & The Founding, by William Lee Miller
University of Virginia Press, 1992.
Madison picked up and liked to quote Voltaire's aphorism, "If one religion only were allowed in England, the government would possibly become arbitary; if there were two, they would be at each other's throats; but as there are such a multitude, they all live happy and in peace."
Quoted in The Business of May Next: James Madison & The Founding, by William Lee Miller
University of Virginia Press, 1992.
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
THE LOYAL OPPOSITION
I am increasingly concerned about the tone of political rhetoric in this country. From the right I receive cartoons about Hillary Clinton in which the punchline is that she is brutally murdered. From the left I hear comparisons of W. to Hitler. (I even have one friend -- in the prime of his intellectual career at a major American university -- who has said that W. is worse than Hitler.)
Now, I personally would shoot Hitler. Or at least I hope I would. The surrealist Philippe Soupault had the opportunity to shoot Hitler in 1932. Already he knew that Hitler meant war. And he was in an elevator in Paris with Hitler, and had the chance to assassinate him. He was working as a journalist for Paris Soir and was briefly in Hitler's presence. Should he have shot him? He regretted not having bought a gun with which to shoot him.
Even the great Lutheran pietist Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- after years of prayer -- came to the conclusion that Hitler needed to be assassinated. He participated in a plot to destroy Hitler and was hanged for his efforts.
Lutherans generally try to work with leaders. We do not expect perfection from them any more than we expect perfection from ourselves. Leaders have to be respected. They are our representatives in the order of government. Government is a gift from God, along with marriage and the church. It helps to organize society and provide us with a link between human and the divine.
This doesn't mean our leaders are perfect. There was only one man who was perfect. The rest of us are sinners.
I fear that in the current climate some nut -- probably some loner like Czolgosh who shot McKinley -- will take it upon themselves to widow Laura Bush. I hope earnestly that this is not the case. I pray that it is not the case. But as I read the strident rhetoric on two sides of the political aisle (but especially from Democrats since they feel marginalized in the current climate), I wonder if the left would really want our president assassinated. To compare him to Hitler I would say you would want him to be assassinated. This terrifies me.
Do we want to plunge our country into the assassination and counter-assassination of a Central American or South American country?
I tend to see George Bush as a good American. I can't believe that he is in any way remotely like Adolph Hitler and I bitterly resent the comparison.
I also like Hillary Clinton. She is perhaps not my favorite Democrat (I tend to prefer folksy people like former senator Paul Simon, or a practicing Jew like Joseph Lieberman) but I really hope the right wouldn't assassinate such a woman who has given her life to her country.
I am increasingly concerned about the tone of political rhetoric in this country. From the right I receive cartoons about Hillary Clinton in which the punchline is that she is brutally murdered. From the left I hear comparisons of W. to Hitler. (I even have one friend -- in the prime of his intellectual career at a major American university -- who has said that W. is worse than Hitler.)
Now, I personally would shoot Hitler. Or at least I hope I would. The surrealist Philippe Soupault had the opportunity to shoot Hitler in 1932. Already he knew that Hitler meant war. And he was in an elevator in Paris with Hitler, and had the chance to assassinate him. He was working as a journalist for Paris Soir and was briefly in Hitler's presence. Should he have shot him? He regretted not having bought a gun with which to shoot him.
Even the great Lutheran pietist Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- after years of prayer -- came to the conclusion that Hitler needed to be assassinated. He participated in a plot to destroy Hitler and was hanged for his efforts.
Lutherans generally try to work with leaders. We do not expect perfection from them any more than we expect perfection from ourselves. Leaders have to be respected. They are our representatives in the order of government. Government is a gift from God, along with marriage and the church. It helps to organize society and provide us with a link between human and the divine.
This doesn't mean our leaders are perfect. There was only one man who was perfect. The rest of us are sinners.
I fear that in the current climate some nut -- probably some loner like Czolgosh who shot McKinley -- will take it upon themselves to widow Laura Bush. I hope earnestly that this is not the case. I pray that it is not the case. But as I read the strident rhetoric on two sides of the political aisle (but especially from Democrats since they feel marginalized in the current climate), I wonder if the left would really want our president assassinated. To compare him to Hitler I would say you would want him to be assassinated. This terrifies me.
Do we want to plunge our country into the assassination and counter-assassination of a Central American or South American country?
I tend to see George Bush as a good American. I can't believe that he is in any way remotely like Adolph Hitler and I bitterly resent the comparison.
I also like Hillary Clinton. She is perhaps not my favorite Democrat (I tend to prefer folksy people like former senator Paul Simon, or a practicing Jew like Joseph Lieberman) but I really hope the right wouldn't assassinate such a woman who has given her life to her country.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
THE CIRCULATION OF KITSCH IN AN AGE OF PSEUDO-INDIVIDUALISM
I believe in capital punishment for communism.
I believe in the circulation of kitsch, and the commodification of the arts as a form of capitalism.
I believe that kitsch will eventually be rediscovered as fine art, and that fine art will eventually be seen as kitsch. Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell will outlive the surrealists, while Shakespeare will outlive John Lyly, but meanwhile WH Auden and the LANGUAGE poets will be circulated three minutes from now as kitsch.
Kitsch is the zeitgeist.
Bill Collins will outlast Charles Simic. Popeye will outlast Andy Warhol. The Spice Girls will attain an immortality unknown to Bob Dylan. Toni Morrison? Well Toni Morrison is perfectly situated on the cusp between kitsch and fine art.
Black velvet painting and scrimshaw is more expressive of our time than the music of John Cage.
What will live are Che Guevara ashtrays, Mao mugs, and movies such as Bambi.
Artists should try to make stereotypes that capture the schmaltzy aspect of the zeitgeist. It is only in and through schmaltz that immortality is born.
I believe in capital punishment for communism.
I believe in the circulation of kitsch, and the commodification of the arts as a form of capitalism.
I believe that kitsch will eventually be rediscovered as fine art, and that fine art will eventually be seen as kitsch. Walt Disney and Norman Rockwell will outlive the surrealists, while Shakespeare will outlive John Lyly, but meanwhile WH Auden and the LANGUAGE poets will be circulated three minutes from now as kitsch.
Kitsch is the zeitgeist.
Bill Collins will outlast Charles Simic. Popeye will outlast Andy Warhol. The Spice Girls will attain an immortality unknown to Bob Dylan. Toni Morrison? Well Toni Morrison is perfectly situated on the cusp between kitsch and fine art.
Black velvet painting and scrimshaw is more expressive of our time than the music of John Cage.
What will live are Che Guevara ashtrays, Mao mugs, and movies such as Bambi.
Artists should try to make stereotypes that capture the schmaltzy aspect of the zeitgeist. It is only in and through schmaltz that immortality is born.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
LEFT COMMUNISM AND IMPERFECTION
So many of my friends are communists. Always have been. I like to laugh, and communists make me laugh. Not always in a bad way. I like the idealism of communism.
But when I compare North to South Korea, idealism gives way to pragmatism.
When I think of Pol Pot's Cambodia, I wonder about communism.
Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Hoxha's Albania, Ceausescu's Romania.
It seems that communism has the opposite of the Midas touch. It turns whatever it touches to shit.
So many of my friends started out on their left journey due to Vietnam. The enormous opposition to the American war effort in Vietnam succeeded even though we were within a few months of a victory... Tet had caused serious casualties on American forces, but it had devastated the Vietnamese. Today there is very little examination of the results of the North Vietnamese victory, but one result is an annual income of 324 dollars. That's quite poor. In fact, the great majority of the Vietnamese would like an out from their toilet bowl of a country. Communism turns countries into toilet bowls.
I think it's partially because it destroys entreprenurial talent (more rare than poetry! more crucial than farmland!). It also concentrates too much power into the hands of too few (famines are generally the result -- think of the Ukraine in the 1930s or the current famines in North Korea).
Better to go ahead with James Madison -- his vision of the imperfection of humanity and his idea that there are factions and it is better for all factions to compete -- enunciated in letter 10 of the Federalist Papers -- is what has allowed our own country to become the economic envy of the world. Madison was an Augustinian. He saw the fallen nature of humanity. His bill of Rights was a hedge against this fallen nature. He didn't want one church to dominate. He saw that if you ever allow one group to dominate, then it's over.
Communism allows one party to dominate. Communism asks for perfection from people. And so it destroys the population. Jesus said it is not for us to try to separate the wheat and the chaff. Let him do it at the final reckoning. If we try to do it ourselves and insist on perfection from people, we will only kill them. We kill the wheat, we kill the harvest, we kill the economy.
Communism kills.
So many of my friends are communists. Always have been. I like to laugh, and communists make me laugh. Not always in a bad way. I like the idealism of communism.
But when I compare North to South Korea, idealism gives way to pragmatism.
When I think of Pol Pot's Cambodia, I wonder about communism.
Mao's China, Stalin's USSR, Hoxha's Albania, Ceausescu's Romania.
It seems that communism has the opposite of the Midas touch. It turns whatever it touches to shit.
So many of my friends started out on their left journey due to Vietnam. The enormous opposition to the American war effort in Vietnam succeeded even though we were within a few months of a victory... Tet had caused serious casualties on American forces, but it had devastated the Vietnamese. Today there is very little examination of the results of the North Vietnamese victory, but one result is an annual income of 324 dollars. That's quite poor. In fact, the great majority of the Vietnamese would like an out from their toilet bowl of a country. Communism turns countries into toilet bowls.
I think it's partially because it destroys entreprenurial talent (more rare than poetry! more crucial than farmland!). It also concentrates too much power into the hands of too few (famines are generally the result -- think of the Ukraine in the 1930s or the current famines in North Korea).
Better to go ahead with James Madison -- his vision of the imperfection of humanity and his idea that there are factions and it is better for all factions to compete -- enunciated in letter 10 of the Federalist Papers -- is what has allowed our own country to become the economic envy of the world. Madison was an Augustinian. He saw the fallen nature of humanity. His bill of Rights was a hedge against this fallen nature. He didn't want one church to dominate. He saw that if you ever allow one group to dominate, then it's over.
Communism allows one party to dominate. Communism asks for perfection from people. And so it destroys the population. Jesus said it is not for us to try to separate the wheat and the chaff. Let him do it at the final reckoning. If we try to do it ourselves and insist on perfection from people, we will only kill them. We kill the wheat, we kill the harvest, we kill the economy.
Communism kills.
Monday, September 19, 2005
THE STRUGGLE FOR PROOF OF GOD
In Finland I often hung around with a French AI researcher who was working with Finnish mathematicians. We used to play billiards in a massive billiard hall close to the Tampere train station. Often we would get talking in between shots (we usually played with an Australian and two other Frenchmen). He liked to talk about a book called Godel, Escher, Bach. At least two of those figures, I instantly noted, were famous Lutherans. Godel and Bach. I'm not sure about Escher.
And now in the endless struggle with J. I have often wanted to show him how impossible it was to prove the simplest thing. But my mathematics is weak (I refused to go any further in fourth grade when I realized that the world was utter nonsense when we got to negative numbers). I did manage somehow to get through math in high school but I never took it seriously, as it seemed to me to have major gaps.
Recently I've been playing catch-up on Godel. His famous incompleteness theorem has been seen as arising from his Lutheran background in an article here:
http://www.evanwiggs.com/articles/GODEL.html
I have also been reading about and listening to Bach. Bach's emphasis on aesthetics in an era in which only ethics mattered is similar to that of Lutheran surrealism. It is only through the aesthetic that we can intuit the religious.
It can't be proven. Reason is too weak. This is where Bach and Godel perhaps form a framework that they may share with the surrealist Escher.
In Finland I often hung around with a French AI researcher who was working with Finnish mathematicians. We used to play billiards in a massive billiard hall close to the Tampere train station. Often we would get talking in between shots (we usually played with an Australian and two other Frenchmen). He liked to talk about a book called Godel, Escher, Bach. At least two of those figures, I instantly noted, were famous Lutherans. Godel and Bach. I'm not sure about Escher.
And now in the endless struggle with J. I have often wanted to show him how impossible it was to prove the simplest thing. But my mathematics is weak (I refused to go any further in fourth grade when I realized that the world was utter nonsense when we got to negative numbers). I did manage somehow to get through math in high school but I never took it seriously, as it seemed to me to have major gaps.
Recently I've been playing catch-up on Godel. His famous incompleteness theorem has been seen as arising from his Lutheran background in an article here:
http://www.evanwiggs.com/articles/GODEL.html
I have also been reading about and listening to Bach. Bach's emphasis on aesthetics in an era in which only ethics mattered is similar to that of Lutheran surrealism. It is only through the aesthetic that we can intuit the religious.
It can't be proven. Reason is too weak. This is where Bach and Godel perhaps form a framework that they may share with the surrealist Escher.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
HEY, ONE DISASTER AT A TIME PLEASE
It struck me as almost rude when the train derailed in Chicago today. I still haven't quite caught up with the hurricane that struck New Orleans. Now there's another hurricane that waited in the wings off North Carolina and seemingly sensed that no one would care and so it never quite intruded on stage, and went on its way. That's civilized. But now this idiotic train derailment. And the blasts in Baghdad seem almost from some other story -- hey, why are they still doing this? This isn't the drama we are interested in now and isn't this kind of overdoing it on special effects and bloodshed? Let's see more about New Orleans! There's some hope there. I watched a neat documentary about Charity Hospital in the Big Smooth, and enjoyed how the patients and doctors muscled through their various predicaments.
But I'm not ready for the train derailment yet. Couldn't that happen a week from now? Don't we have a slot some time next week for a train disaster?
At least the earthquakes in California have the stage sense to know how to wait for a little while for the cue. The cue is lack of media frenzy I guess. Then, bam.
It struck me as almost rude when the train derailed in Chicago today. I still haven't quite caught up with the hurricane that struck New Orleans. Now there's another hurricane that waited in the wings off North Carolina and seemingly sensed that no one would care and so it never quite intruded on stage, and went on its way. That's civilized. But now this idiotic train derailment. And the blasts in Baghdad seem almost from some other story -- hey, why are they still doing this? This isn't the drama we are interested in now and isn't this kind of overdoing it on special effects and bloodshed? Let's see more about New Orleans! There's some hope there. I watched a neat documentary about Charity Hospital in the Big Smooth, and enjoyed how the patients and doctors muscled through their various predicaments.
But I'm not ready for the train derailment yet. Couldn't that happen a week from now? Don't we have a slot some time next week for a train disaster?
At least the earthquakes in California have the stage sense to know how to wait for a little while for the cue. The cue is lack of media frenzy I guess. Then, bam.
BIRTHDAY
Yesterday was my birthday and I celebrated the best part of it talking with my son Tristan. We went over to the church parking lot on his bicycle and then down to the park to play and finally ended up skipping rocks in the west branch of the Delaware River. He asked me, Dad is this a small town? Why don't we live in a big town? I said because it's safer for children to live in a small town. He said, then let's live in a small town.
Yesterday was my birthday and I celebrated the best part of it talking with my son Tristan. We went over to the church parking lot on his bicycle and then down to the park to play and finally ended up skipping rocks in the west branch of the Delaware River. He asked me, Dad is this a small town? Why don't we live in a big town? I said because it's safer for children to live in a small town. He said, then let's live in a small town.
Friday, September 16, 2005
Reading through Homer's Odyssey I came again across the Laestrygonians. A new book by Michael Goldberg entitled Travels with Odysseus (Circe's Island Press 2005) argues that this scene is much like inadvertantly sailing into the cove of any band of ideologues. At first you think there is peace at last or at least, but then when they realize you are different you are attacked. They have all the answers and you can't reason with them. All you can do is sail out of there as quickly as your rowers will take you, and leave your losses behind.
There is a wall painting from 100 BC here:
http://www.homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Laestrygonians.html
There is a wall painting from 100 BC here:
http://www.homepage.mac.com/cparada/GML/Laestrygonians.html
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
HOME, by Hazard Adams (SUNY Press 2001).
This novel by Hazard Adams contrasts the breakdown of an anarchist colony in south Puget Sound around the turn of the last century (ca. 1901) with the hiring of a feminist professor in an English department that strongly resembles that of the University of Washington around 1991. Adams was a professor in the English department during my passage through that department. He has also been an administrator in various universities including UC-Irvine.
The Puget Sound area with its archipelago of islands was the perfect setting for anarchist colonies as they could be somewhat separate from the surrounding culture. The tiny colony of Home was never more than about 130 people at its greatest point of growth. After William McKinley was shot by anarchist Czolgosch in Buffalo on September 5, 1901 the government moved relentlessly against anarchist communities. The citizens of Home were repeatedly put on trial on charges of breaking the Comstock law. The Comstock law had been put in place to stop the circulation of pornographic images amongst Civil War soldiers. The citizens of Home were largely believers in "free love," which meant that there should be a "ground of happiness" (Lois Waisbrook) between a couple or else the couple should quit. Waisbrook herself was a prolific anarchist author and female supremacist who lived for some time at the Home colony. The colonists of Home had a periodical in which they expressed support for "free love," and this was interpreted by the postal authorities as representative of an ongoing orgiastic climate in the colony.
In the English department a woman named Cynthia Ragland gives a lecture on spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox to mixed reception. Will she be hired for the department's prestigious endowed professorship? Some of the department back her simply because she's a woman writing about a woman. Others nix her for the same reason. Will she be hired? That's only part of what's at stake. Tenure for several others is also in process and who will become the next department chair is an ongoing question. The charge of sexual harassment is falsely thrown against one male contender for the chair.
The book's fascinating levels of discussion mark it as one of the higher level examinations of what's going on in English departments today. Are they like anarchist communes? In that most of them are supported by the state (this one is known simply as State) they are totally unlike anarchist communes. That they are both irreligious and somewhat for free love (against exclusive marriage as a holy sacrament) does draw a parallel between them. The two institutional settings are compared with one another and their utopian leanings are examined from an ironic distance.
I've read this masterful book twice and the questions it opens get richer and deeper. Did the anarchists have a good set of ideas when they opened communes like Home? What was the relationship of an assassin like Czolgosch to the more garden variety anarchist? Was McKinley (a Republican and supporter of big business) also an evil man as Czolgosch thought? What relationship do the anarchists of those times have to feminists in our own time? This short novel (about 200 pages) is one in the current spate of academic satires that is destined to outlive its time. A thoughtful and difficult book it is not one that gives up its treasures easily. Asides on Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault, William Blake, and others, are tossed into the narrative. Familiarity with Adams's more academic writing on the antithetical and familiarity with his two previous novels on academia provide the reader with some of the scope needed to take on this book which caps Adams' career as satirist.
This novel by Hazard Adams contrasts the breakdown of an anarchist colony in south Puget Sound around the turn of the last century (ca. 1901) with the hiring of a feminist professor in an English department that strongly resembles that of the University of Washington around 1991. Adams was a professor in the English department during my passage through that department. He has also been an administrator in various universities including UC-Irvine.
The Puget Sound area with its archipelago of islands was the perfect setting for anarchist colonies as they could be somewhat separate from the surrounding culture. The tiny colony of Home was never more than about 130 people at its greatest point of growth. After William McKinley was shot by anarchist Czolgosch in Buffalo on September 5, 1901 the government moved relentlessly against anarchist communities. The citizens of Home were repeatedly put on trial on charges of breaking the Comstock law. The Comstock law had been put in place to stop the circulation of pornographic images amongst Civil War soldiers. The citizens of Home were largely believers in "free love," which meant that there should be a "ground of happiness" (Lois Waisbrook) between a couple or else the couple should quit. Waisbrook herself was a prolific anarchist author and female supremacist who lived for some time at the Home colony. The colonists of Home had a periodical in which they expressed support for "free love," and this was interpreted by the postal authorities as representative of an ongoing orgiastic climate in the colony.
In the English department a woman named Cynthia Ragland gives a lecture on spiritualist Ella Wheeler Wilcox to mixed reception. Will she be hired for the department's prestigious endowed professorship? Some of the department back her simply because she's a woman writing about a woman. Others nix her for the same reason. Will she be hired? That's only part of what's at stake. Tenure for several others is also in process and who will become the next department chair is an ongoing question. The charge of sexual harassment is falsely thrown against one male contender for the chair.
The book's fascinating levels of discussion mark it as one of the higher level examinations of what's going on in English departments today. Are they like anarchist communes? In that most of them are supported by the state (this one is known simply as State) they are totally unlike anarchist communes. That they are both irreligious and somewhat for free love (against exclusive marriage as a holy sacrament) does draw a parallel between them. The two institutional settings are compared with one another and their utopian leanings are examined from an ironic distance.
I've read this masterful book twice and the questions it opens get richer and deeper. Did the anarchists have a good set of ideas when they opened communes like Home? What was the relationship of an assassin like Czolgosch to the more garden variety anarchist? Was McKinley (a Republican and supporter of big business) also an evil man as Czolgosch thought? What relationship do the anarchists of those times have to feminists in our own time? This short novel (about 200 pages) is one in the current spate of academic satires that is destined to outlive its time. A thoughtful and difficult book it is not one that gives up its treasures easily. Asides on Deleuze and Guattari, Michel Foucault, William Blake, and others, are tossed into the narrative. Familiarity with Adams's more academic writing on the antithetical and familiarity with his two previous novels on academia provide the reader with some of the scope needed to take on this book which caps Adams' career as satirist.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
The Collective Misery of New Orleans
Such an idea makes no sense to me. I can only think of one person at a time, and have sympathy for one person. This is also why Marxism makes no sense to me. It asks me to think of whole races, genders, classes. I think we can only think about one person in all their specificity. I can feel sorry for one person who got a little bit wet in the New Orleans debacle, but not a whole city. This morning at church I prayed that a royal light would descend from the heavens and open my hard heart, but it didn't really happen. I can picture one person at the Superdome, or Astrodome, or wherever these people are, and I can see it subjectively, but I can't see the picture of more than one face, and one person's tears, at any one time. I can imagine one person who has asked himself, "Why am I even alive?" And the floating sensation of having become alien even to oneself, and then that sensation of value coming down from heaven once more, the rich feeling that is expressed in stained glass in our churches.
I can only see one person at a time. Somehow Jesus can see us all, and yet maintain with each one of us an infinite tenderness. I can picture one school kid eating a sandwich to whom God Himself suddenly appears in all His Radiance and reinvests life with a meaning and a purpose. I think that this can happen even to those with the hardest of hearts, and change their life around. If it happened to St. Paul, couldn't it happen to anyone?
Such an idea makes no sense to me. I can only think of one person at a time, and have sympathy for one person. This is also why Marxism makes no sense to me. It asks me to think of whole races, genders, classes. I think we can only think about one person in all their specificity. I can feel sorry for one person who got a little bit wet in the New Orleans debacle, but not a whole city. This morning at church I prayed that a royal light would descend from the heavens and open my hard heart, but it didn't really happen. I can picture one person at the Superdome, or Astrodome, or wherever these people are, and I can see it subjectively, but I can't see the picture of more than one face, and one person's tears, at any one time. I can imagine one person who has asked himself, "Why am I even alive?" And the floating sensation of having become alien even to oneself, and then that sensation of value coming down from heaven once more, the rich feeling that is expressed in stained glass in our churches.
I can only see one person at a time. Somehow Jesus can see us all, and yet maintain with each one of us an infinite tenderness. I can picture one school kid eating a sandwich to whom God Himself suddenly appears in all His Radiance and reinvests life with a meaning and a purpose. I think that this can happen even to those with the hardest of hearts, and change their life around. If it happened to St. Paul, couldn't it happen to anyone?
Saturday, September 10, 2005
TAXONOMY
Linnaeus classified animals without knowing about evolution. We now know that the boundaries of species are less fixed than was once thought. There are conservatives in cladistics as well who delineate species using the most narrow criteria, and liberals who use the most broad criteria.
1.5 million species of beetles.
What kinds of poets are in operation today in America. Silliman -- using a broad criteria of risk -- recognizes only two varieties. Post-avant and school of quietude.
Lutheran surrealism would like to use more narrow criteria and identify new schools within these schools. Within the post-avant group we see the Investigative Poets. Tom Clark, Codrescu, Ed Sanders, Anselm Hollo.
Lutheran Surrealism continues to try to find its own criteria, but we are in constant motion. Perhaps it's easiest to identify poets by taxonomy only after their work is done.
Linnaeus classified animals without knowing about evolution. We now know that the boundaries of species are less fixed than was once thought. There are conservatives in cladistics as well who delineate species using the most narrow criteria, and liberals who use the most broad criteria.
1.5 million species of beetles.
What kinds of poets are in operation today in America. Silliman -- using a broad criteria of risk -- recognizes only two varieties. Post-avant and school of quietude.
Lutheran surrealism would like to use more narrow criteria and identify new schools within these schools. Within the post-avant group we see the Investigative Poets. Tom Clark, Codrescu, Ed Sanders, Anselm Hollo.
Lutheran Surrealism continues to try to find its own criteria, but we are in constant motion. Perhaps it's easiest to identify poets by taxonomy only after their work is done.
Friday, September 09, 2005
MYTHOLOGY
I was asked to teach a mythology class a few years ago by the dean and agreed. It's focused on Greek mythology. It has given me a chance to brush up on the gods and goddesses and to reread the Odyssey.
One of the key finds I've come across in trying to understand "patriarchal" and "matriarchal" societies which almost everybody in the myth business seems to refer to, even though everyone does it differently, is the Swiss jurist and pal of Nietzsche's, JJ Bachofen.
I was coming out of the mail room when I ran into Alex Gedmintas, a Lithuanian anthropologist. I had recently lent him a videotape of Marija Gimbutas -- a very perplexing feminist anthoropologist who believed that there was a matriarchy of absolutely Edenic temperament before the the sky-god folks waltzed in on horseback and commenced with murder and savagery.
So I asked Gedmintas how did we get from Bachofen's ideal of the superiority of patriarchy to Gimbutas' ideal of the superiority of the matriarchy.
And now we're stuck with a total confusion in these terms.
He laughed and said that both theories fell into the error of unilinear evolutionism, which is a term in anthropology to denote universal systems of understanding (or misunderstanding) that look at every culture through a single lens and attempt to make sense of it. Bachofen looks at the evolution of marriage as the key. Some look at the evolution of technology as the key. Gimbutas looks at the frequency of female symbols (or what she interprets as female symbols) as the key. Alex said that her early career was less symbolically oriented than her later movement into the Jungian circles of "matriarchal" new-agers who used anthropology for wish-fulfillment. Well, that's sort of what he said. Or at any rate, that's what I got from it.
I love this new term -- unilinear evolution. Gedmintas said that in the 19th century the thinkers were all wound up by Darwin's idea. Marx's idea that all societies must pass through different stages on their road to scientific socialism is based in Darwinism. Bachofen himself may have used the notion of evolution to develop his notion that evolution of marriage from what he calls haetarism to develop his variety of unilinear evolution.
Funny how a conversation of ten minutes at just the right moment can save one years. Thanks much to Alex! Apparently something called diffusionism, and the notion of the particularity of cultures and how they each develop according to their own unique logic, is somewhat more dominant in anthropological circles at this moment. I need to do more research to get the clarifications I require.
I was asked to teach a mythology class a few years ago by the dean and agreed. It's focused on Greek mythology. It has given me a chance to brush up on the gods and goddesses and to reread the Odyssey.
One of the key finds I've come across in trying to understand "patriarchal" and "matriarchal" societies which almost everybody in the myth business seems to refer to, even though everyone does it differently, is the Swiss jurist and pal of Nietzsche's, JJ Bachofen.
I was coming out of the mail room when I ran into Alex Gedmintas, a Lithuanian anthropologist. I had recently lent him a videotape of Marija Gimbutas -- a very perplexing feminist anthoropologist who believed that there was a matriarchy of absolutely Edenic temperament before the the sky-god folks waltzed in on horseback and commenced with murder and savagery.
So I asked Gedmintas how did we get from Bachofen's ideal of the superiority of patriarchy to Gimbutas' ideal of the superiority of the matriarchy.
And now we're stuck with a total confusion in these terms.
He laughed and said that both theories fell into the error of unilinear evolutionism, which is a term in anthropology to denote universal systems of understanding (or misunderstanding) that look at every culture through a single lens and attempt to make sense of it. Bachofen looks at the evolution of marriage as the key. Some look at the evolution of technology as the key. Gimbutas looks at the frequency of female symbols (or what she interprets as female symbols) as the key. Alex said that her early career was less symbolically oriented than her later movement into the Jungian circles of "matriarchal" new-agers who used anthropology for wish-fulfillment. Well, that's sort of what he said. Or at any rate, that's what I got from it.
I love this new term -- unilinear evolution. Gedmintas said that in the 19th century the thinkers were all wound up by Darwin's idea. Marx's idea that all societies must pass through different stages on their road to scientific socialism is based in Darwinism. Bachofen himself may have used the notion of evolution to develop his notion that evolution of marriage from what he calls haetarism to develop his variety of unilinear evolution.
Funny how a conversation of ten minutes at just the right moment can save one years. Thanks much to Alex! Apparently something called diffusionism, and the notion of the particularity of cultures and how they each develop according to their own unique logic, is somewhat more dominant in anthropological circles at this moment. I need to do more research to get the clarifications I require.
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Uncle Petros & Goldbach's Conjecture, by Apostolos Doxiadis
I'm broke and am going back to books purchased but never read. I got this novel a couple years ago in a bookstore near Columbia University called Labyrinth Books. It was on their sales table for $3.98.
It concerns a Greek mathematician who spends his life on Goldbach's conjecture which states that
EVERY EVEN NUMBER GREATER THAN TWO IS THE SUM OF TWO PRIMES
The mathematician gives up everything in life to try to prove this conjecture and finally more or less collapses after speaking to Kurt Godel whose incompleteness theory argues that there are some things that even if they are true cannot be proven.
Petros Papachristos decides that Goldbach's Conjecture may fall under Godel's rule, and takes up chess and gardening and forgets about math until he is goaded into one last heroic effort by his nephew through whose ideas we are told the story.
Uncle Petros tries to explain some of his intuitions regarding how to solve the conjecture.
"Uncle Petros then pointed at what he'd made while he was talking. 'What is that?' he asked me.
'A rectangle made of beans,' I replied. 'Of 7 rows and 5 columns, their product giving us 35, the total number of beans in the rectangle. All right?'
He proceeded to explain how he was struck by an observation which, although totally elementary, seemed to him to have great intuitive depth. Namely, that if you constructed, in theory, all possible rectangles of dots (or beans) this would give you all the integers -- except the primes. (Since a prime is never a product, it cannot be represented as a rectangle but only as a single row.) He went on to describe a calculus for operations among the rectangles and gave me some examples...
I sat back and watched him: he was walking about the living room, rearranging his rectangles, mumbling to himself, going to the mantelpiece where he'd left paper and pencil, scribbling, looking something up in a tattered notebook, mumbling some more, returning to his beans..."
(184-185)
Papachristos' lifelong work on the conjecture doesn't amount to a hill of beans but this idea of how the rectangles translate the problem from one of number theory to one of geometry using rectangles fascinated me. It was however not clear what the great mathematician was getting at -- like getting a glimpse of an incredible idea whose enormity could only be assailed after years of study. What does it mean that primes can never be represented as rectangles?
Like great poets the great mathematicians give up so much of ordinary life to follow the quest. Godel with his seven sweaters at Princeton. Corso with his nutty outfits in the lower East Side. This mathematician lived alone haunted by a pair of twin sisters who appeared in his dreams to whisper mathematical nothings in his ear and goad him on.
I'm broke and am going back to books purchased but never read. I got this novel a couple years ago in a bookstore near Columbia University called Labyrinth Books. It was on their sales table for $3.98.
It concerns a Greek mathematician who spends his life on Goldbach's conjecture which states that
EVERY EVEN NUMBER GREATER THAN TWO IS THE SUM OF TWO PRIMES
The mathematician gives up everything in life to try to prove this conjecture and finally more or less collapses after speaking to Kurt Godel whose incompleteness theory argues that there are some things that even if they are true cannot be proven.
Petros Papachristos decides that Goldbach's Conjecture may fall under Godel's rule, and takes up chess and gardening and forgets about math until he is goaded into one last heroic effort by his nephew through whose ideas we are told the story.
Uncle Petros tries to explain some of his intuitions regarding how to solve the conjecture.
"Uncle Petros then pointed at what he'd made while he was talking. 'What is that?' he asked me.
'A rectangle made of beans,' I replied. 'Of 7 rows and 5 columns, their product giving us 35, the total number of beans in the rectangle. All right?'
He proceeded to explain how he was struck by an observation which, although totally elementary, seemed to him to have great intuitive depth. Namely, that if you constructed, in theory, all possible rectangles of dots (or beans) this would give you all the integers -- except the primes. (Since a prime is never a product, it cannot be represented as a rectangle but only as a single row.) He went on to describe a calculus for operations among the rectangles and gave me some examples...
I sat back and watched him: he was walking about the living room, rearranging his rectangles, mumbling to himself, going to the mantelpiece where he'd left paper and pencil, scribbling, looking something up in a tattered notebook, mumbling some more, returning to his beans..."
(184-185)
Papachristos' lifelong work on the conjecture doesn't amount to a hill of beans but this idea of how the rectangles translate the problem from one of number theory to one of geometry using rectangles fascinated me. It was however not clear what the great mathematician was getting at -- like getting a glimpse of an incredible idea whose enormity could only be assailed after years of study. What does it mean that primes can never be represented as rectangles?
Like great poets the great mathematicians give up so much of ordinary life to follow the quest. Godel with his seven sweaters at Princeton. Corso with his nutty outfits in the lower East Side. This mathematician lived alone haunted by a pair of twin sisters who appeared in his dreams to whisper mathematical nothings in his ear and goad him on.
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Monday, September 05, 2005
ANTINOMIES CONTINUED
I was thinking about antinomies and how they make up so much of our critical vocabulary. Limited-unlimited, ugly-beautiful, interesting-boring, and how so much of postmodernism has been about ways to undo antinomies or to show how terms feed into one another like a Moebius strip. For instance, John Cage's music is so boring that it's interesting. Charles Reznikoff's poetry is about how the ugly things in the city are actually beautiful. The problem of Georges Bataille's limited and unlimited economies -- they are very hard to separate.
Thinking at the same time about New Orleans, and the antinomies of dry and wet. Certainly there is a middle ground, but in this case it's not a removed aesthetic set of criteria, but literally a matter of life and death for so many.
A infinitely great circle will become a line because the angle of the curve at any given moment is so minute. An infinitely long line will eventually become a circle (I cannot recall precisely why, but it has been more or less proven in that area of mathematics that it will).
Atheist - Christian would seem to be an antinomy and yet I often think that a Christian has dark moments where doubt seeps in, and probably atheists have weird moments where they feel an upsurge of faith. How reliable are these stereotypes?
Men - women. If Stallone is a certain kind of man not to be confused with a certain kind of woman like Goldey Hawn (especially in her youth), then what about men like Andy Warhol, who spent all his free time shopping? And perhaps Stallone has moments where he feels feminine, and Goldey has masculine moments where she can make a decision within a half an hour.
Dark and light are certainly interdependent.
Important - unimportant. Ideas that seem unimportant may suddenly become important. For about a month the country will analyze its cities from within the framework of how safe is their infrastructure. Natalie Holloway was super-important and was on Larry King every night as a topic for several months. But now in terms of the nation's priorities she will swiftly be forgotten.
I'm particularly interested in how characters live inside of characters as demons in the work of Pierre Klossowski. A young woman who works for the Salvation Army during the day, will in her imagination, according to Klossowski -- become a hellcat on wheels riding on motorcyles at night.
Perhaps this is the reason this blog is called Lutheran Surrealism. We always already contain our own antinomies.
I was thinking about antinomies and how they make up so much of our critical vocabulary. Limited-unlimited, ugly-beautiful, interesting-boring, and how so much of postmodernism has been about ways to undo antinomies or to show how terms feed into one another like a Moebius strip. For instance, John Cage's music is so boring that it's interesting. Charles Reznikoff's poetry is about how the ugly things in the city are actually beautiful. The problem of Georges Bataille's limited and unlimited economies -- they are very hard to separate.
Thinking at the same time about New Orleans, and the antinomies of dry and wet. Certainly there is a middle ground, but in this case it's not a removed aesthetic set of criteria, but literally a matter of life and death for so many.
A infinitely great circle will become a line because the angle of the curve at any given moment is so minute. An infinitely long line will eventually become a circle (I cannot recall precisely why, but it has been more or less proven in that area of mathematics that it will).
Atheist - Christian would seem to be an antinomy and yet I often think that a Christian has dark moments where doubt seeps in, and probably atheists have weird moments where they feel an upsurge of faith. How reliable are these stereotypes?
Men - women. If Stallone is a certain kind of man not to be confused with a certain kind of woman like Goldey Hawn (especially in her youth), then what about men like Andy Warhol, who spent all his free time shopping? And perhaps Stallone has moments where he feels feminine, and Goldey has masculine moments where she can make a decision within a half an hour.
Dark and light are certainly interdependent.
Important - unimportant. Ideas that seem unimportant may suddenly become important. For about a month the country will analyze its cities from within the framework of how safe is their infrastructure. Natalie Holloway was super-important and was on Larry King every night as a topic for several months. But now in terms of the nation's priorities she will swiftly be forgotten.
I'm particularly interested in how characters live inside of characters as demons in the work of Pierre Klossowski. A young woman who works for the Salvation Army during the day, will in her imagination, according to Klossowski -- become a hellcat on wheels riding on motorcyles at night.
Perhaps this is the reason this blog is called Lutheran Surrealism. We always already contain our own antinomies.
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In The Religious Situation by Paul Tillich you get several fascinating passages on the lack of Protestant art. I'll cite a few sentences:
"In the theoretic sphere not even an earnest attempt has been made to attain to a Protestant ideal of culture. Protestantism avoids every direct and indirect influence upon art without noticing that art is constantly exercising influences which run counter to the Protestant conception of the transcendance of God and the secular character of nature which are leading the mind away from bourgeois Protestantism. There really is no relationship of Protestantism to painting and sculpture..." (203).
This book was first published in the 1950s in New York at Meridian Books but the situation remains largely the same today, and Tillich was describing a situation that had held in Protestantism for at least a century and a half.
Meanwhile, the figures and figurines on Catholic churches of the Middle Ages seem to no longer speak to the religious situation at present.
Tillich does argue that Dostoievsky, for instance, is a contemporary Christian and does still speak to us as does Edvard Munch, but within the churches these artists are never spoken of, and are more or less disavowed or silenced.
I'm particularly concerned with the lack of a comic expression of religious life in contemporary movies and novels (I can't watch things like Mel Gibson's film -- I just can't handle it)
Recently two of Peter de Vries' Calvinist satires have been republished -- the Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Toward Kalamazoo by U. of Chicago press -- they are almost satanically funny, and tend toward nihilism however.
When I look at much contemporary poetry with it's utter nihilism perhaps graced by just a touch of faith in art itself, I am not moved to go deeper into it. You never see the real lives of real people who are mainstream Protestants on television either. It just isn't presented anywhere even though the lives of some 80% of Americans are in that direction.
Instead we see Will & Grace or something along those lines where a very puerile sexuality is displayed without even anything like the sense of a greater meaning. The ultimate reality in such a program is that ooh somebody is cute. Ooh.
Perhaps Garrison Keillor's very schmaltzy takes on Minnesota Lutherans is all we are going to have in this century. I find Keillor upsetting in that he is so anodyne -- a sort of Norman Rockwell laziness -- but I don't think this viewpoint survived the 1950s even in the micropolises because of TV.
One place where Marxism has been more interesting than the Protestants is in their genuine willingness to try to develop an attitude toward aesthetics. This has been a massive movement from the Frankfurt school up to Ron Silliman himself to elaborate a Socialist aesthetics. Almost all the 8000 university and college and even junior college English departments are engaged in a tremendous dialogue on this topic. A similar movement of any kind just doesn't exist in Protestantism, even in their handfull of Lutheran and Catholic schools. It doesn't exist.
Perhaps Tillich was the last important critic to even attempt to revive this. Luther himself was not terribly interested in this framework. Calvin actually banned the arts from depicting any form of religious life (although Calvinists could continue to make art, it had to be secular art -- stuff like landscapes).
So we have art without any kind of larger message -- the art for art's sake people -- Baudelaire on forwards with their green hair and black lipstick walking lobsters around the black light Gothic neon block, and we have the committed Marxists with their Che Guevara ashtrays and posters and the pious attitude of pseudo-concern for the working class which with they assume an identification of some kind without actually knowing any of these people (most of whom are devoutly Protestant or Catholic according to statistics).