THE LAW
The law was celebrated in its absence by the early surrealists. They honored criminals. Bank robbers such as the Bonnot gang held a high place in the surrealist pantheon, as did poetic murderers such as Lancenaire (spelling?).
After WWI the surrealists had broken with the very idea of government and turned toward anarchism. Surrealist psychiatrists such as Jacques Lacan went further and deified the id, arguing in texts such as Kant Avec Sade that moral principles were just as demonically rigid as the immorality of the id.
One can see a similar movement throughout the avant-gardes. Kafka's denunciation of the law in such texts as The Trial, The Penal Colony, and others demonstrated his growing distrust of the very idea of law in the pre-Nazi Germany in which it was his lot to live. His life became increasingly lawless as he used women and failed in his duty toward them.
One can understand the Jewish disgust toward Law in a country like Nazi Germany where the law actively discriminated against them.
Adorno and co. must have felt a similar disgust toward the Law.
But I am hoping that we do not have to turn against the Law but only against bad law. To turn against the law itself is to turn against the only thing that allows us to live together. If law is bad our job is to rectify it, not to spurn it. Two wrongs can never make a right.
The ten commandments are fundamentally sound. The idea of the Supreme Court is fundamentally sound. Bad decisions can be made, but this doesn't mean we have to turn against reason itself, or against communal decisions.
I remember in high school the encouragement given to us by a soccer coach who suggested that in games we use elbows to the throat of those attempting to defend their goal. The lawlessness of this was tempting. This gentleman, a German national player who had married a local woman, demonstrated how to position oneself between another player and the referee in order to disguise the lawlessness of the behavior he had advised.
And yet to knock out another player's teeth is not the true goal of soccer and to win at such a price would be more of a shame than something to celebrate.
It's very hard to keep the law in mind. There are laws and then there is Law. We believe that Law is eternal and is written on the heart. If it is abrogated the very possibility and condition underwriting communal existence is destroyed.
For too long the surrealist left has dismayed me by turning toward lawlessness. This has now spread into American leftist circles since at least the sixties. It appeared in celebrated texts such as Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman. It appeared throughout Ginsberg's texts. It appeared in the texts of William Burroughs. The central problem of Lutheran Surrealism is how to resuscitate the notion of Law within a left that has largely left the very notion of communal justice -- the phrase "liberty and justice for all" meaning more and more for our faction, or for our immediate friends, and thus a kind of turning away from principle toward egoism along the lines of what the Nazis promoted in the years preceding the holocaust.
Why has this happened? We must analyze and deconstruct as well as resurrect a notion of communal justice and convince the Left that it has much to lose by discarding the Law. Law has always been a weak reminder of a gentle ray from heaven that illuminates our existence and our fragile communities. Prayer and patience, Lutheran Surrealists! The law is every bit as MARVELOUS as is love and humor. Breton placed too much emphasis on love and humor. It is LAW that is God's truest bequest to humanity.
Wednesday, November 30, 2005
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
POETRY AS A LUNATIC REGIMENT
When I think over the last 200 years of poetry in particular I can't think of any poets who would qualify as wise. Perhaps this is the real reason it is so unpopular. Poets have become a lunatic regiment offering unsavory and alarming viewpoints that everybody would be wise to ignore. From the surrealists to the Romantics to the Beats to the New York School to Langpo to SoQ there isn't any wisdom in poetry.
There is wisdom in Homer, in Shakespeare, in the classics. A hard clear sense. Perhaps there is a wisdom of a sort in the Cavalier poems of Sir John Suckling. There may be wisdom in Marianne Moore. Her poetry has a certain hard classicism and she is at the very least not foolish and doesn't recommend foolishness.
Perhaps wisdom is only available in time, and since poetry has decided to specialize in moments outside of time, it is by nature opposed to wisdom and is instead excessive and odd. Wisdom is generally centrist, while poetry tends to go either far right (Pound) or far left (Breton). I doubt if one can write a wisdom poetry. I see no wisdom much in Wallace Stevens, WCW, Shelley, Keats, Ashbery, etc. Pukemeisters one and all.
On the other hand P.G. Wodehouse is almost entirely wise. The Bertie and Jeeves novels actually help one to live better and more sanely as they offer a sense of how to survive obsessions and keep one's eye on survival within ecological borders. What would a sane poetry look like? A poetry that actually helped one to be more sane?
Shakespeare and Wodehouse actually improve one's sanity. Almost all poetry on the other hand wobbles it, and threatens it. What good is Sylvia Plath, or E.A. Poe? Poets of obsession and darkness. Is there a Northwest Passage to a poetry of sanity? All the poets we know who have tried to find it have gotten stuck in ice like the disastrous Laperousse expedition in which the ship froze and the men resorted to cannibalism before expiring.
O!
When I think over the last 200 years of poetry in particular I can't think of any poets who would qualify as wise. Perhaps this is the real reason it is so unpopular. Poets have become a lunatic regiment offering unsavory and alarming viewpoints that everybody would be wise to ignore. From the surrealists to the Romantics to the Beats to the New York School to Langpo to SoQ there isn't any wisdom in poetry.
There is wisdom in Homer, in Shakespeare, in the classics. A hard clear sense. Perhaps there is a wisdom of a sort in the Cavalier poems of Sir John Suckling. There may be wisdom in Marianne Moore. Her poetry has a certain hard classicism and she is at the very least not foolish and doesn't recommend foolishness.
Perhaps wisdom is only available in time, and since poetry has decided to specialize in moments outside of time, it is by nature opposed to wisdom and is instead excessive and odd. Wisdom is generally centrist, while poetry tends to go either far right (Pound) or far left (Breton). I doubt if one can write a wisdom poetry. I see no wisdom much in Wallace Stevens, WCW, Shelley, Keats, Ashbery, etc. Pukemeisters one and all.
On the other hand P.G. Wodehouse is almost entirely wise. The Bertie and Jeeves novels actually help one to live better and more sanely as they offer a sense of how to survive obsessions and keep one's eye on survival within ecological borders. What would a sane poetry look like? A poetry that actually helped one to be more sane?
Shakespeare and Wodehouse actually improve one's sanity. Almost all poetry on the other hand wobbles it, and threatens it. What good is Sylvia Plath, or E.A. Poe? Poets of obsession and darkness. Is there a Northwest Passage to a poetry of sanity? All the poets we know who have tried to find it have gotten stuck in ice like the disastrous Laperousse expedition in which the ship froze and the men resorted to cannibalism before expiring.
O!
Sunday, November 27, 2005
RECEPTION OF MY NOVEL
After years of writing an academic book you wait more years for reviews. Few people can read academic books due to the technical vocabulary and due to the fact that a reader has to be aware of all the different theories of literature and the way in which the writer is jockeying between them.
A novel is different. Many of my relatives and friends have eagerly read Temping. An Australian Finn named Jari has just written to me to express his satisfaction with the novel. He thought it had started slow, but ultimately it picked up plenty of speed and he had liked it. Jari is a fellow I had met in Tampere Finland. He works as an engineer in a Finnish factory that develops new ways to deal with industrial contamination. They market their procedures throughout Europe and Jari is their point man. His excellent English allows him to not only do research but to talk up the company's products. He now lives in a house I had once rented in Tampere. Jari would never read one of my academic books, but the fact that he enjoyed this one gives me great hope.
I also got a note from 78-year-old Hazard Adams who is one of the most famous individuals in the academic literary world. Adams has written books on Yeats and Blake and has also published three of his own novels and a book of poems. He said he read it straight through with only one stop to go to the bathroom and that he thought it was a success with "some fine wit." He saw two parts in it -- the first part was academic satire, but that changes to a love story when the circus opens. At any rate he said "one doesn't forget it."
And now there is news of a positive review in a librarians' journal called Booklist. My publisher Jerry Gold emailed me news of the review a couple of days ago but due to the Thanksgiving hiatus in the U.S. Postal Service delivery schedule I have yet to receive a copy.
After years of writing an academic book you wait more years for reviews. Few people can read academic books due to the technical vocabulary and due to the fact that a reader has to be aware of all the different theories of literature and the way in which the writer is jockeying between them.
A novel is different. Many of my relatives and friends have eagerly read Temping. An Australian Finn named Jari has just written to me to express his satisfaction with the novel. He thought it had started slow, but ultimately it picked up plenty of speed and he had liked it. Jari is a fellow I had met in Tampere Finland. He works as an engineer in a Finnish factory that develops new ways to deal with industrial contamination. They market their procedures throughout Europe and Jari is their point man. His excellent English allows him to not only do research but to talk up the company's products. He now lives in a house I had once rented in Tampere. Jari would never read one of my academic books, but the fact that he enjoyed this one gives me great hope.
I also got a note from 78-year-old Hazard Adams who is one of the most famous individuals in the academic literary world. Adams has written books on Yeats and Blake and has also published three of his own novels and a book of poems. He said he read it straight through with only one stop to go to the bathroom and that he thought it was a success with "some fine wit." He saw two parts in it -- the first part was academic satire, but that changes to a love story when the circus opens. At any rate he said "one doesn't forget it."
And now there is news of a positive review in a librarians' journal called Booklist. My publisher Jerry Gold emailed me news of the review a couple of days ago but due to the Thanksgiving hiatus in the U.S. Postal Service delivery schedule I have yet to receive a copy.
Friday, November 25, 2005
DEALING WITH CYCLOPS
Recently I finished the story of the Odyssey and have thought about the lessons it has left. Looming over the entire story is the figure of Cyclops. Can you befriend Cyclops? Can you in any way sit down to dinner with him without becoming yourself the food? I doubt very much if this is possible.
Odysseus blinded the Cyclops who thought he was invulnerable and left him blind for all eternity.
William Burroughs Jr. (the son of the famous writer and at one point a famous writer in his own write) once had breakfast at my house in Boulder, Colorado. He was hungry and I served him eggs. He was talking about a bully he had had to deal with and he said, "Some people you can deal with. There are others that you have to handle."
I think this is the problem in dealing with the Iraqis. I am not so sure that the entire culture is not a Cyclops culture. This goes double for the Afghanis. The Afghans played soccer with the heads of rival generals. Completely Cyclopsean.
How do you deal with such people, or do you merely handle them?
We currently have some sort of notion that we are going to make this culture over into a democracy along the lines of the one established by our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers came from a genteel class of farmers where theidea of playing soccer with the head of an opposing general would never have been understood.
It seems to me that both left and right are not really dealing with the character of the enemy. What is the character of the people of Iraq? Can character be changed through voting? Can people who are basically very much like Cyclops be turned into citizens of a Republic?
These are some of the questions that Lutheran Surrealism asks. There are, of course, miracles. We keep hoping and praying for such a thing, and that our sense of the reality of this Cyclopsean people is secretly hiding something more along the lines of our Founding Fathers.
Recently I finished the story of the Odyssey and have thought about the lessons it has left. Looming over the entire story is the figure of Cyclops. Can you befriend Cyclops? Can you in any way sit down to dinner with him without becoming yourself the food? I doubt very much if this is possible.
Odysseus blinded the Cyclops who thought he was invulnerable and left him blind for all eternity.
William Burroughs Jr. (the son of the famous writer and at one point a famous writer in his own write) once had breakfast at my house in Boulder, Colorado. He was hungry and I served him eggs. He was talking about a bully he had had to deal with and he said, "Some people you can deal with. There are others that you have to handle."
I think this is the problem in dealing with the Iraqis. I am not so sure that the entire culture is not a Cyclops culture. This goes double for the Afghanis. The Afghans played soccer with the heads of rival generals. Completely Cyclopsean.
How do you deal with such people, or do you merely handle them?
We currently have some sort of notion that we are going to make this culture over into a democracy along the lines of the one established by our Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers came from a genteel class of farmers where theidea of playing soccer with the head of an opposing general would never have been understood.
It seems to me that both left and right are not really dealing with the character of the enemy. What is the character of the people of Iraq? Can character be changed through voting? Can people who are basically very much like Cyclops be turned into citizens of a Republic?
These are some of the questions that Lutheran Surrealism asks. There are, of course, miracles. We keep hoping and praying for such a thing, and that our sense of the reality of this Cyclopsean people is secretly hiding something more along the lines of our Founding Fathers.
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Lutheran Surrealism is a movement of iconoclasts that believes in essence that no two people can ever agree on the simplest thing. Nevertheless we posit that the ten commandments are absolute standards that were objectively created by the Lord of the universe. In addition, we believe that standards of beauty are universal and that even a cat can understand them.
We like to disagree, and in fact will change our opinion to avoid agreement as we find that agreement is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
We also disagree with everything that's just been said, and yet reserve the option to affirm it once more.
At Lutheran Surrealism we believe that disagreement is the only possible mode of discourse and that it is as necessary to understand this as it is necessary for cats to dance with teapots, and lightning storms to flirt with Beetle Bailey, and for golf to resemble curling in all but the most minute particulars.
We like to disagree, and in fact will change our opinion to avoid agreement as we find that agreement is the first refuge of the scoundrel.
We also disagree with everything that's just been said, and yet reserve the option to affirm it once more.
At Lutheran Surrealism we believe that disagreement is the only possible mode of discourse and that it is as necessary to understand this as it is necessary for cats to dance with teapots, and lightning storms to flirt with Beetle Bailey, and for golf to resemble curling in all but the most minute particulars.
Monday, November 21, 2005
A DARKER SHADE OF CRIMSON, by Pamela Thomas-Graham
I've been reading a mystery novel called A Darker Shade of Crimson by a Harvard graduate named Pamela Thomas-Graham. She's a mega-lawyer of some sort -- an African-American originally from Detroit. Her mystery novel is set at Harvard University where an African-American Dean of Students has been killed on the steps of Littauer (a building) due to blunt force trauma to the back of the head. A young assistant professor (also African-American) investigates the murder and puts her tenure in jeopardy due to the higher-ups who are trying to paper over the murder as an accident in which the Dean of Students was made to appear to tumble down the steps in the darkness.
The interesting part for me has been a lecture on Adam Smith. Adam Smith was a Christian capitalist who believed that if everyone contributed what they could to society in exchange for their upkeep that society would best function because God had designed each person with a talent to offer to the community. Bakers, and candlestick-makers, and lawyers. Smith has the additional stipulation that government protects the consumer from shoddy candlestick makers, etc.
It reminded me of the horrible situation in eastern Europe in which the Stalinist mobsters' toilet paper manufacturers made a paper that had the consistency of a paper lunch-bag and the people of eastern Europe dreamed of Charmin' -- fragrant and delicately soft, to soothe their abused rear ends suffering from a state monopoly on manufacture.
In capitalism products compete and the better ones win out soothing our behinds.
The problem of Capitalism is that at this point almost everything is being outsourced to places like China where the moral equivalent of slave labor continues to manufacture our goods in their quasi-communist state where even the most basic freedoms are denied so that we can laugh it up in the aisles over the cheapness of the products manufactured at such a tremendous price in human suffering. And meanwhile all of our local factories close, only to reopen overseas under the aegis of communist and fascist dictators who supply us with our needs and we look the other way as we wipe our rear ends with their products.
I don't yet know how the novel will end or exactly how she will settle the problem of capitalist economics as they have come down to us from Adam Smith. The lawyer did get a book on third world trade out of Widener library but was almost immediately mugged, and the book was taken from her by a suspicious assailant who may or may not be an assistant to Harvard's president.
I've been reading a mystery novel called A Darker Shade of Crimson by a Harvard graduate named Pamela Thomas-Graham. She's a mega-lawyer of some sort -- an African-American originally from Detroit. Her mystery novel is set at Harvard University where an African-American Dean of Students has been killed on the steps of Littauer (a building) due to blunt force trauma to the back of the head. A young assistant professor (also African-American) investigates the murder and puts her tenure in jeopardy due to the higher-ups who are trying to paper over the murder as an accident in which the Dean of Students was made to appear to tumble down the steps in the darkness.
The interesting part for me has been a lecture on Adam Smith. Adam Smith was a Christian capitalist who believed that if everyone contributed what they could to society in exchange for their upkeep that society would best function because God had designed each person with a talent to offer to the community. Bakers, and candlestick-makers, and lawyers. Smith has the additional stipulation that government protects the consumer from shoddy candlestick makers, etc.
It reminded me of the horrible situation in eastern Europe in which the Stalinist mobsters' toilet paper manufacturers made a paper that had the consistency of a paper lunch-bag and the people of eastern Europe dreamed of Charmin' -- fragrant and delicately soft, to soothe their abused rear ends suffering from a state monopoly on manufacture.
In capitalism products compete and the better ones win out soothing our behinds.
The problem of Capitalism is that at this point almost everything is being outsourced to places like China where the moral equivalent of slave labor continues to manufacture our goods in their quasi-communist state where even the most basic freedoms are denied so that we can laugh it up in the aisles over the cheapness of the products manufactured at such a tremendous price in human suffering. And meanwhile all of our local factories close, only to reopen overseas under the aegis of communist and fascist dictators who supply us with our needs and we look the other way as we wipe our rear ends with their products.
I don't yet know how the novel will end or exactly how she will settle the problem of capitalist economics as they have come down to us from Adam Smith. The lawyer did get a book on third world trade out of Widener library but was almost immediately mugged, and the book was taken from her by a suspicious assailant who may or may not be an assistant to Harvard's president.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
Luther and Breton were both fascinated by nature and so are we especially by the charismatic megafauna exemplified by the giant Panda. Few exist. I had thought they lived solely on bamboo by preference but in fact they enjoy meat but are too slow and silly to catch much on the hoof. About 1500 Giant pandas still exist in a narrowing corridor of high mountain range in an area southwest of Peking. Zoos attempt to breed them but with little success. One major problem was that the zoos kept the pandas apart all year and then attempted to throw them together at the 3 hours a year when the female was in heat. The Mexican breakthrough was to let them live together year round.
Pandas naturally delight and are objectively beautiful in that every person on earth must be amazed and charmed by them simply by virtue of being human.
Pandas naturally delight and are objectively beautiful in that every person on earth must be amazed and charmed by them simply by virtue of being human.
Friday, November 18, 2005
When Walter Benjamin asked Pierre Klossowski what his central motivation was as a writer, Klossowski responded that it was to multiply taboos (this is in the French edition of the College of Sociology ed. Denis Hollier which no longer appears among my books -- I have the American edition but from it for some reason this passage was edited out).
Since the 1960s many of our taboos have collapsed.
Our job (as Lutheran Surrealists) is to restore them. Without taboos -- those commandments handed down to Moses -- the culture itself will collapse and the result will be mere barbarism.
Luther's Small Catechism lists the ten commandments which include not only what we must not do but the positive thing that we must do instead. Too long perhaps to list all the positive things here, I will give an inkling instead in a couple of examples--
1. You shall have no other gods.
2. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.
3. Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.
4. Honor your father and mother.
5. You shall not murder.
Luther's comment: We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need. [We not only should not hurt our neighbor but should also help to keep him/her alive.]
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
This one I find to be especially missing in the new left circles in which I often find myself as a writer, and as a member of the academy, where a rather violent sniping goes on and which is often considered politically salutary especially if we don't appreciate the "identity" of the one we are trying to assassinate. At Ron Silliman's blog the central members (Ron and Curtis Faville) honor this commandment implicitly although they are a-Christian. Many of those who comment at that blog however will stop at nothing to dishonor a writer whose thinking may contradict their own. Can such a community of people survive? Luther comments, "We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way" (11).
9. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
God threatens to punish anyone who breaks these commandments.
These commandments are essential to a good society. We would like to bring them back into currency, and to sound the trumpet. It is probably in some sense "natural" to want to override these commandments. When we watch mainstream media almost all the shows are about someone who breaks one or more of these commandments. In the longer shows we see the consequences. In the MTV videos we get instead the jouissance that is possible from their rupture. As a result many younger people don't know why it is wrong to sell drugs, for instance (think about the long-term implications of commandment number 5).
Since the 1960s many of our taboos have collapsed.
Our job (as Lutheran Surrealists) is to restore them. Without taboos -- those commandments handed down to Moses -- the culture itself will collapse and the result will be mere barbarism.
Luther's Small Catechism lists the ten commandments which include not only what we must not do but the positive thing that we must do instead. Too long perhaps to list all the positive things here, I will give an inkling instead in a couple of examples--
1. You shall have no other gods.
2. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.
3. Remember the Sabbath Day by keeping it holy.
4. Honor your father and mother.
5. You shall not murder.
Luther's comment: We should fear and love God so that we do not hurt or harm our neighbor in his body, but help and support him in every physical need. [We not only should not hurt our neighbor but should also help to keep him/her alive.]
6. You shall not commit adultery.
7. You shall not steal.
8. You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.
This one I find to be especially missing in the new left circles in which I often find myself as a writer, and as a member of the academy, where a rather violent sniping goes on and which is often considered politically salutary especially if we don't appreciate the "identity" of the one we are trying to assassinate. At Ron Silliman's blog the central members (Ron and Curtis Faville) honor this commandment implicitly although they are a-Christian. Many of those who comment at that blog however will stop at nothing to dishonor a writer whose thinking may contradict their own. Can such a community of people survive? Luther comments, "We should fear and love God so that we do not tell lies about our neighbor, betray him, slander him, or hurt his reputation, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain everything in the kindest way" (11).
9. You shall not covet your neighbor's house.
10. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
God threatens to punish anyone who breaks these commandments.
These commandments are essential to a good society. We would like to bring them back into currency, and to sound the trumpet. It is probably in some sense "natural" to want to override these commandments. When we watch mainstream media almost all the shows are about someone who breaks one or more of these commandments. In the longer shows we see the consequences. In the MTV videos we get instead the jouissance that is possible from their rupture. As a result many younger people don't know why it is wrong to sell drugs, for instance (think about the long-term implications of commandment number 5).
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
HOOLIGANS
Games or sports are meant to be seen as a play-space. Soccer, for example, is a game. When the spectators forget the difference between fact and fiction and overwhelm the pitch throwing punches and beating up players and the other side there is a tragic reversal of one of the few spaces that are reserved for the ludic element in society.
Literature is a similar space. It is not considered essential to salvation, and so like dancing and card playing and polite conversation, it is meant to be for fun. There are then the boorish hooligans. Perhaps because they see the sports or literature as an idol that they worship it becomes overly serious to them. One thinks of the boorish hooligans of Mao's Cultural Revolution running through the streets and killing teachers and dragging philosophers and comedians to their deaths. Literature is now overly serious and every word of the play-space is carefully monitored for signs that it is not in alignment with the State and the State's party-line. Anyone who steps out of line is silenced. The rules and the play is decided in advance and so there is no room for the individual to play.
The preservation of the play-state of literature and sport is one of the principle notions of Lutheran Surrealism. One can be too serious about the wrong things, and approach those things as false idols that are taken so seriously that they are no longer any fun. Life can be too serious. Those few things that traditionally have been reserved for play can become serious amusements, and help to pass the time. But not when the boorish hooligans arrive.
Imagine trying to get the hordes of boorish hooligans to quell their violence during the Cultural Revolution. How does one stop the violence of soccer hooligans once it has broken out on the pitch? In a proper theology one tries to save some things as being outside of theology. The Marxists tend toward a zealous idolatry in the realm of art but at least they still allow it. Some even more zealous cultures ban it altogether. Without it, and games, and the ludic spaces of public life, life becomes impossibly ugly.
Games or sports are meant to be seen as a play-space. Soccer, for example, is a game. When the spectators forget the difference between fact and fiction and overwhelm the pitch throwing punches and beating up players and the other side there is a tragic reversal of one of the few spaces that are reserved for the ludic element in society.
Literature is a similar space. It is not considered essential to salvation, and so like dancing and card playing and polite conversation, it is meant to be for fun. There are then the boorish hooligans. Perhaps because they see the sports or literature as an idol that they worship it becomes overly serious to them. One thinks of the boorish hooligans of Mao's Cultural Revolution running through the streets and killing teachers and dragging philosophers and comedians to their deaths. Literature is now overly serious and every word of the play-space is carefully monitored for signs that it is not in alignment with the State and the State's party-line. Anyone who steps out of line is silenced. The rules and the play is decided in advance and so there is no room for the individual to play.
The preservation of the play-state of literature and sport is one of the principle notions of Lutheran Surrealism. One can be too serious about the wrong things, and approach those things as false idols that are taken so seriously that they are no longer any fun. Life can be too serious. Those few things that traditionally have been reserved for play can become serious amusements, and help to pass the time. But not when the boorish hooligans arrive.
Imagine trying to get the hordes of boorish hooligans to quell their violence during the Cultural Revolution. How does one stop the violence of soccer hooligans once it has broken out on the pitch? In a proper theology one tries to save some things as being outside of theology. The Marxists tend toward a zealous idolatry in the realm of art but at least they still allow it. Some even more zealous cultures ban it altogether. Without it, and games, and the ludic spaces of public life, life becomes impossibly ugly.
Monday, November 14, 2005
SOLECISMS
Working on my dissertation I came across the following idea in Pierre Klossowski's work. It's called the solecism.
Klossowski posited the instability of identity and how no matter how secure an identity was there were moments when little demons of an almost unrecognizable nature peeked through.
Klossowski was the brother of the important painter Balthus, the student of Andre Gide, the colleague of Georges Bataille, but most importantly he was also in some deep sense a Catholic. I have to admit I loved his work, and found in it a powerful inspiration for my own.
I hate identity politics because it posits the utter stability of a subject. I am so bored by this. I am so interested when someone with a powerful identity of some kind suddenly shows yet another identity behind it -- almost an admission of some sort of demon or set of demons, lurking behind the angelic face we present to others in order to bore them into brainlessness.
I think that when we laugh it is the demons uniting to gang up on the unitary subject.
It takes a train to laugh...
A whole train of demons...
It takes an exploding zeppelin to cry...
Klossowski posited that many Americans do not possess demons because demons refuse to enter into the American mall complex because they would be too bored. They prefer the Arcades.
In a similar way one of the things I always liked about Corso was the sense of people inside of people in his poem about a Month of Reading English Newspapers when he wrote, "The kind man behind the kind man is the kind of man who could and can."
We don't know what identity is, but I doubt if it is ever singular. The moment when the facade crumbles and the liberty-loving PC moron suddenly shows a fascist edge, or the moment when the fascist jerk suddenly has a ray of kindness toward a kitten. These moments are the solecisms where a mistake is made in the unitary resemblance that the individual makes and they suddenly become multiple, doubling over and becoming legion.
Working on my dissertation I came across the following idea in Pierre Klossowski's work. It's called the solecism.
Klossowski posited the instability of identity and how no matter how secure an identity was there were moments when little demons of an almost unrecognizable nature peeked through.
Klossowski was the brother of the important painter Balthus, the student of Andre Gide, the colleague of Georges Bataille, but most importantly he was also in some deep sense a Catholic. I have to admit I loved his work, and found in it a powerful inspiration for my own.
I hate identity politics because it posits the utter stability of a subject. I am so bored by this. I am so interested when someone with a powerful identity of some kind suddenly shows yet another identity behind it -- almost an admission of some sort of demon or set of demons, lurking behind the angelic face we present to others in order to bore them into brainlessness.
I think that when we laugh it is the demons uniting to gang up on the unitary subject.
It takes a train to laugh...
A whole train of demons...
It takes an exploding zeppelin to cry...
Klossowski posited that many Americans do not possess demons because demons refuse to enter into the American mall complex because they would be too bored. They prefer the Arcades.
In a similar way one of the things I always liked about Corso was the sense of people inside of people in his poem about a Month of Reading English Newspapers when he wrote, "The kind man behind the kind man is the kind of man who could and can."
We don't know what identity is, but I doubt if it is ever singular. The moment when the facade crumbles and the liberty-loving PC moron suddenly shows a fascist edge, or the moment when the fascist jerk suddenly has a ray of kindness toward a kitten. These moments are the solecisms where a mistake is made in the unitary resemblance that the individual makes and they suddenly become multiple, doubling over and becoming legion.
Easy Rider
I remember seeing the film Easy Rider. It must have been in the late 60s, or early 70s when I first saw it.
It opens with a couple of hippies getting a drug shipment and then going to New Orleans to a brothel where they take LSD.
In short, the movie celebrates Deleuzian nomadism before the letter. Instead of the settled life, the two hippies decide to make money from selling drugs. Then they go to a brothel.
This was seemingly the life that the hippy left celebrated. Drugs, and prostitution. It had a lawlessness to it. Drugs retard the mental life. Even marijuana works by surrounding brain cells with fatty tissue that make it unable to function properly. Slowly, it kills brain cells. This is why it is illegal, just as putting cyanide in food is illegal. It's bad for you.
As for prostitution, this is also bad. It promotes the dissemination of sexual diseases rather than intimacy.
I admit that I wondered then what would happen to the family if the world of Easy Rider became a generally accepted notion. It reminded me of the Lotus Land section of the Odyssey. Didn't these men want to have families and children? I suppose some of those who had trust funds left from a grandparent with a work ethic that perhaps they could continue this lifestyle -- moving from motorcyles to RVs, from brothels to national parks.... when the two bad men were shot down at the end of the film, I wanted to cheer. Someone is taking care of business! I was elated that these two vermin were erased. I would prefer that the government or the police took care of such people, but sadly there are now so many that vigilantes had to step in. The lawlessness of this thinking on our part makes us feel somewhat guilty, but at the same time, I am glad that someone stopped those darned hippies.
At Lutheran Surrealism we wonder what has happened to the American family since the 1960s. Not just Easy Rider. But think of the sit-coms. Will and Grace, Everybody Loves Raymond. These shows (I have barely watched one episode but hate the world they depict). I used to watch Leave it to Beaver as a kid but felt fairly comfortable watching the shows as I felt that they taught nice values to people.
That was more or less the world I grew up in. My mom was a comforting presence, my dad was a nice guy, my brothers were good sports. We had problems but we generally got through them in about a half hour, same as the shows we watched.
I don't see my world mirrored anywhere in popular culture now, and certainly not in "high" culture. When I went to Naropa and studied with Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso -- I had no idea what was going on. Now it turns out that two of those three were members of NAMBLA. The third, Corso, was an actual drug addict. In some deeply latent way Corso did care about his children but I wonder whether this was ever apparent to them and how they feel about him now. I do feel that Corso was a monstrously gifted poet, but he was essentially without any institution that could contain him.
The only institution that I know of where an ethos of care for children still remains is the church. It was mysteriously missing from most of sixties culture. Easy Rider I suppose was just the tip of that weird decade that continues to haunt us.
Against Hollywood and its seeming hatred of patriarchy, and its celebration of matriarchy, is the Family Values of the right. I wander in the no-man's land between the two as I make my way out of the mess that the left has become or perhaps always was. Life for adults has got to be primarily about the next generation? But there are some who think that desire among adults without any kind of responsibility -- drugs, and brothels -- are the way to go. I keep searching for a notion of decency and law that survived the hurricanes of the 60s that collapsed almost everything I thought I knew and replaced them with values of mindlessness and lawlessness that I still see as best represented by the heroes of Easy Rider.
I remember seeing the film Easy Rider. It must have been in the late 60s, or early 70s when I first saw it.
It opens with a couple of hippies getting a drug shipment and then going to New Orleans to a brothel where they take LSD.
In short, the movie celebrates Deleuzian nomadism before the letter. Instead of the settled life, the two hippies decide to make money from selling drugs. Then they go to a brothel.
This was seemingly the life that the hippy left celebrated. Drugs, and prostitution. It had a lawlessness to it. Drugs retard the mental life. Even marijuana works by surrounding brain cells with fatty tissue that make it unable to function properly. Slowly, it kills brain cells. This is why it is illegal, just as putting cyanide in food is illegal. It's bad for you.
As for prostitution, this is also bad. It promotes the dissemination of sexual diseases rather than intimacy.
I admit that I wondered then what would happen to the family if the world of Easy Rider became a generally accepted notion. It reminded me of the Lotus Land section of the Odyssey. Didn't these men want to have families and children? I suppose some of those who had trust funds left from a grandparent with a work ethic that perhaps they could continue this lifestyle -- moving from motorcyles to RVs, from brothels to national parks.... when the two bad men were shot down at the end of the film, I wanted to cheer. Someone is taking care of business! I was elated that these two vermin were erased. I would prefer that the government or the police took care of such people, but sadly there are now so many that vigilantes had to step in. The lawlessness of this thinking on our part makes us feel somewhat guilty, but at the same time, I am glad that someone stopped those darned hippies.
At Lutheran Surrealism we wonder what has happened to the American family since the 1960s. Not just Easy Rider. But think of the sit-coms. Will and Grace, Everybody Loves Raymond. These shows (I have barely watched one episode but hate the world they depict). I used to watch Leave it to Beaver as a kid but felt fairly comfortable watching the shows as I felt that they taught nice values to people.
That was more or less the world I grew up in. My mom was a comforting presence, my dad was a nice guy, my brothers were good sports. We had problems but we generally got through them in about a half hour, same as the shows we watched.
I don't see my world mirrored anywhere in popular culture now, and certainly not in "high" culture. When I went to Naropa and studied with Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso -- I had no idea what was going on. Now it turns out that two of those three were members of NAMBLA. The third, Corso, was an actual drug addict. In some deeply latent way Corso did care about his children but I wonder whether this was ever apparent to them and how they feel about him now. I do feel that Corso was a monstrously gifted poet, but he was essentially without any institution that could contain him.
The only institution that I know of where an ethos of care for children still remains is the church. It was mysteriously missing from most of sixties culture. Easy Rider I suppose was just the tip of that weird decade that continues to haunt us.
Against Hollywood and its seeming hatred of patriarchy, and its celebration of matriarchy, is the Family Values of the right. I wander in the no-man's land between the two as I make my way out of the mess that the left has become or perhaps always was. Life for adults has got to be primarily about the next generation? But there are some who think that desire among adults without any kind of responsibility -- drugs, and brothels -- are the way to go. I keep searching for a notion of decency and law that survived the hurricanes of the 60s that collapsed almost everything I thought I knew and replaced them with values of mindlessness and lawlessness that I still see as best represented by the heroes of Easy Rider.
Sunday, November 13, 2005
LYME'S: A HIGH PRIORITY FOR LUTHERAN SURREALISTS
Went for a hike today because the Weather Station promised that it would get into the sixties in the western Catskills. Lola and Tristan and I hiked up through the John A. Lennox memorial forest. The sign said, "Tree Farm." Lola read it. Tristan read the map.
Up we went. I was worried about Lyme's Disease but the kids had long pants on, and now that it's late autumn it may not be as much of a problem. Fifty miles to the east along the Hudson Valley insects are a much greater problem generally. Not only deer ticks but also mosquitoes. It's terribly cold here throughout the winter and sometimes doesn't rise above freezing for three or four months at a time. This apparently is not conducive to insect hordes. Even mammals don't like the climate here. It's rare to see a bear or a fox, although they do exist. Until central heating people for the most part wintered elsewhere, and many of our older people still go to Florida for the colder season. Native Americans travelled through this area of the Catskills, but they had no permanent settlements.
Reading a glossy publication called The Catskill Guide -- a monthly -- there was an article with an interview about the poet Janine Pommy Vega and her three-year bout with Lyme's disease. This disease now affects nearly 1% of the population, and often takes away as many as six or seven years of normal life until the body rediscovers its stability. It is often misdiagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndome. How did Vega get the disease? What did she do to cure it? She lives in Phoenicia a small village near Woodstock where the poet Sparrow also lives. Vega is now in her seventies, although she was a mere slip of a youth when she first encountered the Beats fifty years ago and began her affair with Peter Orlovsky.
But this post is about Lyme's. I can't understand how people can't see the tick. It apparently blows up to the size of a mushroom while it's on the leg, and has to remain there for a full 24 hours to allow the disease to coagulate inside the blood stream. Another writer who has had the disease is the novelist Amy Tan.
When we got home today we spent time washing and inspecting all of our limbs for deer ticks and the bulls-eye wound that they leave on the leg.
Although it affects nearly 1% of the population and has such a disastrous cycle often reducing its victims to vegetables for years on end Lutheran Surrealism is the only literary movement that has put the fight against this disease at the top of its priority list. We have sent two letters to our senator, and have blogged on the problem twice. We like to hike, and would like to think it was more or less safe. However, as of yet, we have yet to see any funding increase for Lyme's research at the local or national level and we haven't seen any of the large environmental organizations take it on as a priority. The Centers for Disease Control don't even list it among their funding perhaps because it is rarely fatal. I've known many people who have had it. One friend, who was once an important doctor in Manhattan, has been reduced to bed rest for over a decade due to the disease.
Went for a hike today because the Weather Station promised that it would get into the sixties in the western Catskills. Lola and Tristan and I hiked up through the John A. Lennox memorial forest. The sign said, "Tree Farm." Lola read it. Tristan read the map.
Up we went. I was worried about Lyme's Disease but the kids had long pants on, and now that it's late autumn it may not be as much of a problem. Fifty miles to the east along the Hudson Valley insects are a much greater problem generally. Not only deer ticks but also mosquitoes. It's terribly cold here throughout the winter and sometimes doesn't rise above freezing for three or four months at a time. This apparently is not conducive to insect hordes. Even mammals don't like the climate here. It's rare to see a bear or a fox, although they do exist. Until central heating people for the most part wintered elsewhere, and many of our older people still go to Florida for the colder season. Native Americans travelled through this area of the Catskills, but they had no permanent settlements.
Reading a glossy publication called The Catskill Guide -- a monthly -- there was an article with an interview about the poet Janine Pommy Vega and her three-year bout with Lyme's disease. This disease now affects nearly 1% of the population, and often takes away as many as six or seven years of normal life until the body rediscovers its stability. It is often misdiagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndome. How did Vega get the disease? What did she do to cure it? She lives in Phoenicia a small village near Woodstock where the poet Sparrow also lives. Vega is now in her seventies, although she was a mere slip of a youth when she first encountered the Beats fifty years ago and began her affair with Peter Orlovsky.
But this post is about Lyme's. I can't understand how people can't see the tick. It apparently blows up to the size of a mushroom while it's on the leg, and has to remain there for a full 24 hours to allow the disease to coagulate inside the blood stream. Another writer who has had the disease is the novelist Amy Tan.
When we got home today we spent time washing and inspecting all of our limbs for deer ticks and the bulls-eye wound that they leave on the leg.
Although it affects nearly 1% of the population and has such a disastrous cycle often reducing its victims to vegetables for years on end Lutheran Surrealism is the only literary movement that has put the fight against this disease at the top of its priority list. We have sent two letters to our senator, and have blogged on the problem twice. We like to hike, and would like to think it was more or less safe. However, as of yet, we have yet to see any funding increase for Lyme's research at the local or national level and we haven't seen any of the large environmental organizations take it on as a priority. The Centers for Disease Control don't even list it among their funding perhaps because it is rarely fatal. I've known many people who have had it. One friend, who was once an important doctor in Manhattan, has been reduced to bed rest for over a decade due to the disease.
Saturday, November 12, 2005
TRUTH IS UGLINESS
Coleridge is ok, and Edmund Burke, and the later Wordsworth but for the most part I can't stand the sickly cast of pale thought in the work of Shelley or Keats. Even Byron strikes me as a batty vampyre. Probably the most disgraceful lines of all time belong to Keats --
Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
What a fabulous crock on an urn. Now if you were to substitute the term ugly for beauty you'd be closer to Upton Sinclair and to the documentary ashcan school and the muckrakers. I like them much better. It seems they opened a window away from the sickliness of formal beauty that the Romantics were working with, and which Wallace Stevens continued with his disgusting little bit about the jar on the hill.
I prefer the veritable ugliness of Reznikoff's work:
Asylum Product
Brown and black felt, unevenly stitched with purple thread;
what unhappiness is perpetuated in the brown or black of this pincushion,
lunatic?
This short imagistic poem unlike those of Basho and company from which it partially springs (Reznikoff liked haiku but he was also a muckraker of sorts) is quite disturbingly ugly. But yet it is so precise and individual a picture, and yet so archetypal, too -- that one could easily see Reznikoff as promoting an entirely different aesthetic from Keats in which the Grecian Urn becomes a lunatic's pincushion, and this is what it says:
Ugliness is truth, truth ugliness -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Somehow I find this so much more comforting, because it is so much more truly ugly.
Coleridge is ok, and Edmund Burke, and the later Wordsworth but for the most part I can't stand the sickly cast of pale thought in the work of Shelley or Keats. Even Byron strikes me as a batty vampyre. Probably the most disgraceful lines of all time belong to Keats --
Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
What a fabulous crock on an urn. Now if you were to substitute the term ugly for beauty you'd be closer to Upton Sinclair and to the documentary ashcan school and the muckrakers. I like them much better. It seems they opened a window away from the sickliness of formal beauty that the Romantics were working with, and which Wallace Stevens continued with his disgusting little bit about the jar on the hill.
I prefer the veritable ugliness of Reznikoff's work:
Asylum Product
Brown and black felt, unevenly stitched with purple thread;
what unhappiness is perpetuated in the brown or black of this pincushion,
lunatic?
This short imagistic poem unlike those of Basho and company from which it partially springs (Reznikoff liked haiku but he was also a muckraker of sorts) is quite disturbingly ugly. But yet it is so precise and individual a picture, and yet so archetypal, too -- that one could easily see Reznikoff as promoting an entirely different aesthetic from Keats in which the Grecian Urn becomes a lunatic's pincushion, and this is what it says:
Ugliness is truth, truth ugliness -- that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Somehow I find this so much more comforting, because it is so much more truly ugly.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
Lately I have found myself remembering the Pledge of Allegiance. We used to have to cross our hearts in second grade and repeat after the teacher before the day's schooling these words:
"I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."
Some time around 4th grade the pledge was abandoned in my school district. I was sorry to see it go because I used to like to wonder about the wording, and found the pacing of it quite moving. Back then I didn't really think about the Pledge. It was part of growing up, like McDonald's hamburgers, green jello, and Spiderman.
So I did a little historical research. The pledge was written by a man named Francis Bellamy who penned it in 1892 for a local Columbus Day celebration. Bellamy was the cousin of Edward Bellamy who wrote socialist utopian novels.
The pledge as we said it in grade school was not the way it originally appeared. The words "under God," for instance, did not appear in the original, but were added in 1954 by act of Congress. Bellamy was a Baptist minister but he got angry at his church for its racist attitudes (Florida congregation) and according to his grand-daughter, he wouldn't have approved the amendment.
Bellamy was a Christian socialist. Why wouldn't he have approved the amendment. I rather like it. It makes the whole thing make sense. The notion of God and the notion of Liberty and Justice for all are inextricable, are they not?
Christian socialism used to be a much more common phenomenon. Do Christian socialists still exist? Is Lutheran Surrealism a Christian Socialist construct? We will have to ponder this. We are not sure that it is incendiary enough as a compound noun. When we mix our words we like them to be like nitrogen and glycerine, and yet to claim that we speak in the name of reason, law, order. This doubles the explosion, and the impact on the reader's mind.
We want the reader to see stars, and stripes, when they're done with our posts, and to send them heavenward.
Lately I have found myself remembering the Pledge of Allegiance. We used to have to cross our hearts in second grade and repeat after the teacher before the day's schooling these words:
"I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all."
Some time around 4th grade the pledge was abandoned in my school district. I was sorry to see it go because I used to like to wonder about the wording, and found the pacing of it quite moving. Back then I didn't really think about the Pledge. It was part of growing up, like McDonald's hamburgers, green jello, and Spiderman.
So I did a little historical research. The pledge was written by a man named Francis Bellamy who penned it in 1892 for a local Columbus Day celebration. Bellamy was the cousin of Edward Bellamy who wrote socialist utopian novels.
The pledge as we said it in grade school was not the way it originally appeared. The words "under God," for instance, did not appear in the original, but were added in 1954 by act of Congress. Bellamy was a Baptist minister but he got angry at his church for its racist attitudes (Florida congregation) and according to his grand-daughter, he wouldn't have approved the amendment.
Bellamy was a Christian socialist. Why wouldn't he have approved the amendment. I rather like it. It makes the whole thing make sense. The notion of God and the notion of Liberty and Justice for all are inextricable, are they not?
Christian socialism used to be a much more common phenomenon. Do Christian socialists still exist? Is Lutheran Surrealism a Christian Socialist construct? We will have to ponder this. We are not sure that it is incendiary enough as a compound noun. When we mix our words we like them to be like nitrogen and glycerine, and yet to claim that we speak in the name of reason, law, order. This doubles the explosion, and the impact on the reader's mind.
We want the reader to see stars, and stripes, when they're done with our posts, and to send them heavenward.
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Viereck, Again
Having read Viereck's book Conservative Revisited he argues that the term is one that no one wants to have attached to their name, but he tries to revive the term and to argue that since Edmund Burke, the term has largely meant something quite good. An effort to restrain extremism in the name of anything and to attempt to find an Aristotelean middle-way toward happiness.
In America one has the sense that the red and the blue factions are getting increasingly incensed with one another to the point that a sense of humor between the factions is near to impossible. The sense of harmony and proportion is missing.
I've read articles in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, that revere the Unibomber. On the right side I see emails about killing Hillary Clinton and they are meant to make me laugh.
I'm not happy, because this sense that each side has that the other is lawless ends up making each side want to act lawlessly. Viereck points out that law is all we have that separates us from the might makes right of the jungle. Viereck's father was a Lutheran. Was Viereck Lutheran to some extent? I can't seem to find his biography.
Since I went to college and was interested in the arts I feel I've been surrounded by political extremists. I was always a centrist. I want to see the good in Americans, and still do see the good in Americans. I have Republican and Democratic neighbors. They are all ok with me, and they are all ok with one another. I think out in middle America away from the big media centers that thrive on drama and extremism there is still a middle where Helen Keller, the ten commandments, taking care of one another, saying hello on the street, worrying about family, is still the norm. It's where I want to be.
Having read Viereck's book Conservative Revisited he argues that the term is one that no one wants to have attached to their name, but he tries to revive the term and to argue that since Edmund Burke, the term has largely meant something quite good. An effort to restrain extremism in the name of anything and to attempt to find an Aristotelean middle-way toward happiness.
In America one has the sense that the red and the blue factions are getting increasingly incensed with one another to the point that a sense of humor between the factions is near to impossible. The sense of harmony and proportion is missing.
I've read articles in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, that revere the Unibomber. On the right side I see emails about killing Hillary Clinton and they are meant to make me laugh.
I'm not happy, because this sense that each side has that the other is lawless ends up making each side want to act lawlessly. Viereck points out that law is all we have that separates us from the might makes right of the jungle. Viereck's father was a Lutheran. Was Viereck Lutheran to some extent? I can't seem to find his biography.
Since I went to college and was interested in the arts I feel I've been surrounded by political extremists. I was always a centrist. I want to see the good in Americans, and still do see the good in Americans. I have Republican and Democratic neighbors. They are all ok with me, and they are all ok with one another. I think out in middle America away from the big media centers that thrive on drama and extremism there is still a middle where Helen Keller, the ten commandments, taking care of one another, saying hello on the street, worrying about family, is still the norm. It's where I want to be.
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Some things I wish I knew more about: ancient Greek, Finnish, geometry and calculus, John Adams, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke. I wish I could push a button and have twenty volumes on each instantly delivered into the long-term memory.
Some books I plan to read over the next year -- Edmund Burke on the French and American revolutions, some more books by Peter Viereck, the comic novels of Peter de Vries, much more on Marianne Moore, and I want to read more books on American businesses such as Friday's, and I would like to read more about the Swedish company IKEA.
Alas, there are so many books that I have to read, or that I ought to read, which will prevent me from getting at the books I want to read.
Plus, I have to try and get others to read my book Temping. Somehow I have to get a thousand people to buy it and then get them to read it, too. That's three a day for the next year. I will be the Ancient Mariner of my novel waiting outside of restaurants and weddings to waylay the unsuspecting passersby!
Some books I plan to read over the next year -- Edmund Burke on the French and American revolutions, some more books by Peter Viereck, the comic novels of Peter de Vries, much more on Marianne Moore, and I want to read more books on American businesses such as Friday's, and I would like to read more about the Swedish company IKEA.
Alas, there are so many books that I have to read, or that I ought to read, which will prevent me from getting at the books I want to read.
Plus, I have to try and get others to read my book Temping. Somehow I have to get a thousand people to buy it and then get them to read it, too. That's three a day for the next year. I will be the Ancient Mariner of my novel waiting outside of restaurants and weddings to waylay the unsuspecting passersby!
Monday, November 07, 2005
Sunday, November 06, 2005
FINLAND VS. RUSSIA
One of the oddest things I've ever done in my life is take a train from Finland into St. Petersburg, Russia. Boarding the train in Helsinki we travelled through a comfortable landscape with prosperous homes until we crossed the border into a country that was plunged into an endless nightmare.
The most indelible impression I have of Finland is the lobby of the University where students routinely left their expensive winter coats unattended while they attended classes. There were no reports of theft. The only crime in the entire country that seemed to take place was in Helsinki around the train station where there was a high proportion of foreigners.
In Russia, I stayed in the top of a ruined apartment building whose every lightbulb had been smashed out by hooligans and every inch of space on the walls was covered with graffiti. The apartment door itself had 12 separate locks on three separate doors that needed to be opened before one could open them and enter. Nevertheless, the apartment had been entered repeatedly by the Russian mob. Walking through the streets there was a general air of despair. Prostitutes lounged on corners, and suspicious looking men in heavy coats followed us like wolves. We ate at a restaurant and I was sick to my stomach for three months.
The entire country seemed to be non-functional. Finland, just next door, was completely functional. In fact, in Russian grocery stores, there was almost no food that had been grown in Russia. It was all from Finland. I asked the woman we had been staying with why an enormous country like Russia couldn't grow its own food.
She said, "It can, but nobody would trust it. We trust food that comes from Finland. So everybody buys that."
After nearly a century of sloppy materialism in which no spiritual values were taught the result was a depression so deep and so devastating that the only way out was to drink tremendous amounts of vodka. Had the Russians gotten more money out of their Revolution it still would not have helped them. Because they were a crummy people without decency (of coure there were a few exceptions just as there were a few in Sodom).
Next door the Finns had spent a century or four promoting Lutheran decency. The result was food that you could trust, neighbors that you could trust, railroads that you could trust, education that you could trust, and friends that you could trust. Finland quite simply was decent, and this is what has allowed its material prosperity. We trust its products, because its people are trustworthy, so we buy their products, and we are not fooled. They believe in the golden rule from the top to the bottom of their society with only a few bounders here and there and even they were mostly faux bounders -- dressed up to look evil as in the Goth movement, but fundamentally decent. If Russia is to revive materially it needs to look to Finland for its religious VALUES.
One of the oddest things I've ever done in my life is take a train from Finland into St. Petersburg, Russia. Boarding the train in Helsinki we travelled through a comfortable landscape with prosperous homes until we crossed the border into a country that was plunged into an endless nightmare.
The most indelible impression I have of Finland is the lobby of the University where students routinely left their expensive winter coats unattended while they attended classes. There were no reports of theft. The only crime in the entire country that seemed to take place was in Helsinki around the train station where there was a high proportion of foreigners.
In Russia, I stayed in the top of a ruined apartment building whose every lightbulb had been smashed out by hooligans and every inch of space on the walls was covered with graffiti. The apartment door itself had 12 separate locks on three separate doors that needed to be opened before one could open them and enter. Nevertheless, the apartment had been entered repeatedly by the Russian mob. Walking through the streets there was a general air of despair. Prostitutes lounged on corners, and suspicious looking men in heavy coats followed us like wolves. We ate at a restaurant and I was sick to my stomach for three months.
The entire country seemed to be non-functional. Finland, just next door, was completely functional. In fact, in Russian grocery stores, there was almost no food that had been grown in Russia. It was all from Finland. I asked the woman we had been staying with why an enormous country like Russia couldn't grow its own food.
She said, "It can, but nobody would trust it. We trust food that comes from Finland. So everybody buys that."
After nearly a century of sloppy materialism in which no spiritual values were taught the result was a depression so deep and so devastating that the only way out was to drink tremendous amounts of vodka. Had the Russians gotten more money out of their Revolution it still would not have helped them. Because they were a crummy people without decency (of coure there were a few exceptions just as there were a few in Sodom).
Next door the Finns had spent a century or four promoting Lutheran decency. The result was food that you could trust, neighbors that you could trust, railroads that you could trust, education that you could trust, and friends that you could trust. Finland quite simply was decent, and this is what has allowed its material prosperity. We trust its products, because its people are trustworthy, so we buy their products, and we are not fooled. They believe in the golden rule from the top to the bottom of their society with only a few bounders here and there and even they were mostly faux bounders -- dressed up to look evil as in the Goth movement, but fundamentally decent. If Russia is to revive materially it needs to look to Finland for its religious VALUES.
Saturday, November 05, 2005
ICELANDIC PAINTER DIES IN DELHI, NY
Browsing and googling I suddenly came across a famous Icelandic painter by the name of Louisa Matthiasdottir who died in the year 2000 in the small village of Delhi, NY. This town has only 4000 inhabitants. Mathiasdottir's work is hard to describe -- translucent clarity, fairly realistic. Ashbery praises her for "hard Nordic colors."
There is a book or three on her work, and she is considered an underrated master. Her works are going today for about 5000 dollars a pop. I don't know if she could be considered in any way a surrealist. She seems to be too balanced for all that. She painted Halldor Laxness' portrait when she was only 25. If you wish to look at pictures of her work, put her name in Google and look up images.
This discovery was just made this morning, so I have nothing to add except excitement and astonishment. She apparently lived in Delhi for quite a little long while but no one here has ever mentioned her to me. I did look in the phone book, and her daughter continues to reside here.
Browsing and googling I suddenly came across a famous Icelandic painter by the name of Louisa Matthiasdottir who died in the year 2000 in the small village of Delhi, NY. This town has only 4000 inhabitants. Mathiasdottir's work is hard to describe -- translucent clarity, fairly realistic. Ashbery praises her for "hard Nordic colors."
There is a book or three on her work, and she is considered an underrated master. Her works are going today for about 5000 dollars a pop. I don't know if she could be considered in any way a surrealist. She seems to be too balanced for all that. She painted Halldor Laxness' portrait when she was only 25. If you wish to look at pictures of her work, put her name in Google and look up images.
This discovery was just made this morning, so I have nothing to add except excitement and astonishment. She apparently lived in Delhi for quite a little long while but no one here has ever mentioned her to me. I did look in the phone book, and her daughter continues to reside here.
Friday, November 04, 2005
Thursday, November 03, 2005
Tuesday, November 01, 2005
BACKYARD INCIDENT
Sledding down the backyard hill
We uncovered a squeaky mole
It ran in an approximate circle
Nervous for the sake of my kids
I stomped on it & a bloody halo
Surrounded my boot in the snow
"What you do unto the least of these
You do also unto me," Christ boomed
He appeared with nimbus from a cloud
Sledding down the backyard hill
We uncovered a squeaky mole
It ran in an approximate circle
Nervous for the sake of my kids
I stomped on it & a bloody halo
Surrounded my boot in the snow
"What you do unto the least of these
You do also unto me," Christ boomed
He appeared with nimbus from a cloud
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