Love and Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy of course is the great Victorian novelist, short story writer and lately appreciated poet. Many of his works deal with men and women and their love affairs. If you have never checked him out, I urge you to do so. He is well worth it. He was admired by writers like D. H. Lawrence (who wrote a book about it), the great John Cowper Powys, W.Somerset Maugham, and the great misanthropic poet Philip Larkin. He was a follower of the Naturalist School made famous by Emile Zola. The Naturalists were a follow-on to the Realists such as Gustave Flaubert (proto-realist) and Anthony Trollope (classic realist). It was supposed to be an improvement upon realism, but I am not sure how. Both of these were reactions against the overly florid, unrealistic and overwrought stories of the time. Zola in particular sought to be almost scientific in his descriptions of the people in his books. Both sought to simply portray characters, humans and scenes as they actually are and let readers draw their own didactic or moralistic conclusions if they so wished. As far as Hardy himself in love, he was famously married a couple of times. He was described as an unhappy husband. When his second wife died in 1912 after they were estranged for over 20 years, nevertheless, Hardy become a distraught widower and produced some of his finest poetry in Satires of Circumstance published two years later. These are considered to be some of the saddest, most powerful and finest poems about death ever written in English. And so we have Thomas Hardy:

  • Unhappy husband, and then
  • Distraught widower

He was miserable while he was married to her, but he was even more miserable when she was dead. There is a lesson in here somewhere, maybe:

  • The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, or simply
  • People are never happy

I prefer the latter.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

I participated in a session with this fellow on Academia.edu. I believe the author is a professor at a university somewhere in the UK. I really liked this paper a lot. It’s a bit hard to understand, but if you concentrate, you should be able to understand. If I can understand it, at least some of you guys can too. It is an excellent overview of what exactly neoliberalism is and the effects it has on all of us all the way down to the anthropological, sociological and psychological.

Was Joseph Conrad a Neoliberal? Are We? A Contemporary Reading of Victory

by Simon During

Over the past decade or so “neoliberalism” has become a word to conjure with. It is easy to have reservations about its popularity since it seems to name both a general object — roughly, capitalist governmentality as we know it today — and a particular set of ideas that now have a well-researched intellectual history.

It also implies a judgment: few use the term except pejoratively. I myself do not share these worries however, since I think that using the word performs sterling analytic work on its own account even as it probably accentuates its concept’s rather blob-like qualities. Nonetheless in this talk I want somewhat to accede to those who resist neoliberalism’s analytic appeal by thinking about it quite narrowly — that is to say, in literary and intellectual historical terms. I begin from the position, first, that neoliberalism is an offshoot of liberalism thought more generally; and second, that we in the academic humanities are ourselves inhabited by an occluded or displaced neoliberalism to which we need critically to adjust.1 Thus, writing as a literary critic in particular, I want to follow one of my own discipline’s original protocols, namely to be sensitive to the ways in which the literary “tradition” changes as the present changes, in this case, as it is reshaped under that neoliberalism which abuts and inhabits us.2 To this end I want to present a reading of Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1916). To do this is not just to help preserve the received literary canon, and as such is, I like to think, a tiny act of resistance to neoliberalism on the grounds that neoliberalism is diminishing our capacity to affirm a canon at all. By maintaining a canon in the act of locating neoliberalism where it is not usually found, I’m trying to operate both inside and outside capitalism’s latest form.

***

1 Daniel Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2014, p. 17. 2 This argument is made of course in T.S. Eliot’s seminal essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1921). Let me begin with a brief and sweeping overview of liberalism’s longue durée.3 For our purposes we can fix on liberalism by noting that it has two central struts, one theoretical, the other historical. As generations of theorists have noted, the first strut is methodological individualism: liberal analysis begins with, and is addressed to, the autonomous individual rather than communities or histories.4 Methodological individualism of this kind is, for instance, what allowed Leo Strauss and J.P Macpherson to call even Thomas Hobbes a founder of liberalism.5 Liberalism’s second strut is the emphasis on freedom as the right to express and enact private beliefs with a minimum of state intervention. This view of freedom emerged in the seventeenth century among those who recommended that the sovereign state “tolerate” religious differences. It marked a conceptual break in freedom’s history since freedom was now conceived of as an individual possession and right rather than as a condition proper to “civil associations” and bound to obligations.6 We need to remember, however, that methodological individualism does not imply liberal freedom, or vice versa. Indeed neoliberalism exposes the weakness of that association. Early in the nineteenth century, liberalism became a progressivist political movement linked to enlightened values. But after about 1850, non-progressive or conservative liberalisms also appeared. Thus, as Jeffrey Church has argued, Arthur Schopenhauer, the post-Kantian philosopher who arguably broke most spectacularly with enlightened humanist progressivism, 3 Among the library of works on liberalism’s history I have found two to be particularly useful for my purposes here: Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: a Counter-History, trans. Gregory Elliot. London: Verso 2014, and Amanda Anderson’s forthcoming Bleak Liberalism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press 2016. 4 Milan Zafirovski, Liberal Modernity and Its Adversaries: Freedom, Liberalism and Anti-Liberalism in the 21st Century, Amsterdam: Brill 2007, p. 116. 5 Van Mobley, “Two Liberalisms: the Contrasting Visions of Hobbes and Locke,” Humanitas, IX 1997: 6-34. 6 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, p. 23. can be associated with liberalism.7 Likewise Schopenhauer’s sometime disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche, no progressivist, was, as Hugo Drochon has recently argued, also an antistatist who prophesied that in the future “private companies” will take over state business so as to protect private persons from one another.8 Liberalism’s conservative turn was, however, largely a result of socialism’s emergence as a political force after 1848, which enabled some left liberal fractions to dilute their individualism by accepting that “a thoroughly consistent individualism can work in harmony with socialism,” as Leonard Hobhouse put it.9 Conrad himself belonged to this moment. As a young man, for instance, he was appalled by the results of the 1885 election, the first in which both the British working class and the socialists participated.10 That election was contested not just by the Marxist Socialist Democratic Federation, but by radical Liberals who had allied themselves to the emergent socialist movement (not least Joseph Chamberlain who, as mayor of Birmingham, was developing so-called “municipal socialism” and who haunts Conrad’s work).11 The election went well for the Liberals who prevented the Tories from securing a clear Parliamentary majority. After learning this, Conrad, himself the son of a famous Polish liberal revolutionary, wrote to a friend, “the International Socialist Association are triumphant, and every disreputable ragamuffin in Europe, feels that the day of universal brotherhood, despoliation and disorder is coming apace…Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism.”12 That prophecy will resonate politically for the next century, splitting liberalism in two. As I say: on the one side, a 7 Jeffrey Church, Nietzsche’s Culture of Humanity: Beyond Aristocracy and Democracy in the Early Period, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015, p. 226. 8 Hugo Drochon, Nietzsche’s Great Politics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2016, p. 9. 9 L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism, London: Williams and Norgate, 1911, p. 99. 10 It was at this point that one of neoliberalism’s almost forgotten ur-texts was written,Herbert Spencer’s Man against the State (1884). 11 For instance, he plays an important role in Conrad and Ford Madox Ford’s The Inheritors. 12 Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol 1., ed. Frederick Karl and Laurence Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983, p. 16.   progressivist, collectivist liberalism. On the other, an individualist liberalism of which neoliberalism is a continuation. By around 1900, liberalism’s fusion with socialism was often (although not quite accurately) associated with Bismark’s Germany, which gave anti-socialist liberalism a geographical inflection. Against this, individualistic liberalism was associated with Britain. But this received British liberalism looked back less to Locke’s religiously tolerant Britain than to Richard Cobden’s Britain of maritime/imperial dominance and free trade. Which is to say that liberalism’s fusion with socialism pushed socialism’s liberal enemies increasingly to think of freedom economically rather than politically — as in Ludwig von Mises influential 1922 book on socialism, which can be understood as a neoliberal urtext.13 By that point, too, individuals were already being positioned to become what Foucault calls “consumers of freedom.” 14 They were now less understood less as possessing a fundamental claim to freedom than as creating and participating in those institutions which enabled freedom in practice. Crucially after the first world war, in the work of von Mises and the so-called “Austrian school”, freedom was increasingly assigned to individual relations with an efficient market as equilibrium theory viewed markets. This turn to the market as freedom’s basis marked another significant historical departure: it is the condition of contemporary neoliberalism’s emergence. Neoliberalism organized itself internationally as a movement only after world war two, and did so against both Keynesian economics and the welfare state. 15 It was still mainly ideologically motivated by a refusal to discriminate between welfarism and totalitarianism — a line of thought already apparent in Conrad’s equation of socialism with Caesarism of course. As 13 See Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: an Economic and Sociological Analysis, trans. J. Kahane. New Haven: Yale University Press 1951. 14 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 63. One key sign of this spread of this new freedom is Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous appeal to the “free trade in ideas” in his 1919 dissent in Abrams v. the US, a judgment which joins together the market, intellectual expression and the juridical. 15 See Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2009.   Friedrich Hayek urged: once states begin to intervene on free markets totalitarianism looms because the people’s psychological character changes: they become dependent.16 For thirty years (in part as confined by this argument), neoliberalism remained a minority movement, but in the 1970s it began its quick ascent to ideological and economic dominance. Cutting across a complex and unsettled debate, let me suggest that neoliberalism became powerful then because it provided implementable policy settings for Keynesianism’s (perceived) impasse in view the stagnation and instability of post-war, first-world welfarist, full-employment economies after 1) the Vietnam War, 2) the collapse of the Bretton Woods agreement; 3) OPEC’s cartelization, and 4) the postcolonial or “globalizing” opening up of world markets on the back of new transportation and computing technologies.17 In the global north neoliberalism was first implemented governmentally by parties on the left, led by James Callaghan in the UK, Jimmy Carter in the US, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in Australia, and leading the way, David Lange and Roger Douglas in New Zealand.18 At this time, at the level of policy, it was urged more by economists than by ideologues insofar as these can be separated (and Hayek and Mises were both of course). As we know, neoliberals then introduced policies to implement competition, deregulation, monetarism, privatization, tax reduction, a relative high level of unemployment, the winding back of the state’s participation in the economy and so on. This agenda quickly became captured by private   16 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 48. 17 This history is open to lively differences of opinion. The major books in the literature are: Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France 1978-1979, London: Picador 2010; Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso 2014; Stedman-Jones, Masters of the Universe; Joseph Vogl, The Spectre of Capital, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2014; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. My own understanding of this moment is informed by Stedman-Jones’s account in particular. 18 It is worth noting in this context that the left had itself long been a hatchery of neoliberal economic ideas just because liberalism’s absorption of socialism was matched by socialism’s absorption of liberalism. See Johanna Brockman, Markets in the name of Socialism: the Left-wing Origins of Neoliberalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press 2011 on the intellectual-historical side of this connection. 6 interests, and from the eighties on, it was woven into new, highly surveilled and privatized, computing and media ecologies, indeed into what some optimists today call “cognitive capitalism”.19 In this situation, more or less unintended consequences proliferated, most obviously a rapid increase in economic inequality and the enforced insertion of internal markets and corporate structures in non-commercial institutions from hospitals to universities. Indeed, in winding back the welfare state, renouncing Keynesian and redistributionist economic policies, it lost its classical liberal flavor and was firmly absorbed into conservatism — a transformation which had been prepared for by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.20 But two more concrete conceptual shifts also helped animate this particular fusion of conservatism and liberalism. First, postwar neoliberalism was aimed more at the enterprise than at the individual.21 Largely on the basis of van Mises’s Human Action (1940) as popularized by Gary Becker, the free, independent individual was refigured as “human capital” and thereby exposed instead to management and “leadership.” At the same time, via Peter Drucker’s concept of “knowledge worker,” which emphasized the importance of conceptual and communication skills to economic production, postsecular management theories for which corporations were hierarchical but organic communities also gained entry into many neoliberal mindsets.22 At that   19 Yann Moulier Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism, trans. Ed Emery. Cambridge: Polity Press 2012. 20 Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s influence is no doubt part of why neoliberalism emerged in Austria. Indeed the Austrian context in which contemporary neoliberalism emerged is worth understanding in more detail. In their early work, Hayek and Mises in particular were responding to “red Vienna” not just in relation to Otto Bauer’s Austromarxism but also in relation to its version of guild socialism associated with Hungarians like Karl Polanyi, with whom both Hayek and Mises entered into debate. See Lee Congdon, “The Sovereignty of Society: Karl Polanyi in Vienna,” in The Life and Work of Karl Polanyi, ed. Kari Polanyi-Levitt. Montreal: Black Rose Books 1990, 78-85. 21 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 225. 22 Drucker was another Austrian refugee who turned to capitalism against totalitarianism in the late thirties and his profoundly influential work on corporate management shadows neoliberal theory up until the 1970s.   7 point, neoliberalism also became a quest to reshape as many institutions as possible as corporations. At this point too Foucault’s consumers of freedom were becoming consumers full stop. To state this more carefully: at the level of ideology, to be free was now first and foremost deemed to be capable of enacting one’s preferences in consumer and labour markets. It would seem that preferences of this kind increasingly determined social status too, and, more invasively, they now increasingly shaped personalities just because practices of self were bound less and less to filiations and affiliations than to acts of choice. This helped the market to subsume older gradated social and cultural structures of identity-formation, class difference and cultural capital. At this juncture, we encounter another significant unexpected consequence within liberalism’s longue durée: i.e. the sixties cultural revolution’s reinforcement of neoliberalism. This is a complex and controversial topic so let me just say here that, from the late seventies, neoliberal subjects who were individualized via their entrepreneurial disposition and economic and labour choices, encounters the subject of post-68 identity politics who had been emancipated from received social hierarchies and prejudices, and was now attached to a particular ethnicity, gender or sexuality as chosen or embraced by themselves as individuals. These two subject formations animated each other to the degree that both had, in their different ways, sloughed off older communal forms, hierarchies and values. Governing this ménage of hedonism, productivity, insecurity and corporatization, neoliberalism today seems to have become insurmountable, and is, as I say, blob-like, merging out into institutions and practices generally, including those of our discipline. And it has done this as a turn within liberal modernity’s longer political, intellectual and social genealogies and structures rather than as a break from them. Nonetheless, three core, somewhat technical, propositions distinguish neoliberalism from liberalism more generally:

  1. First the claim, which belongs to the sociology of knowledge, that no individual or group can know the true value of anything at all.23 For neoliberals, that value — true or not — can only be assessed, where it can be assessed at all, under particular conditions: namely when it is available in a competitive and free market open to all individuals in a society based on private property. This is an argument against all elite and expert claims to superior knowledge and judgment: without prices, all assessments of value are mere opinion. In that way, market justice (i.e. the effects of competing in the market) can trump social justice. And in that way, for instance, neoliberalism finds an echo not just in negations of cultural authority and canonicity but in the idea that literary and aesthetic judgments are matters of private choice and opinion. In short, neoliberalism inhabits cultural democracy and vice versa. By the same stroke, it posits an absence — a mere structure of exchange—at society’s normative center.
  2. There is a direct relationship between the competitive market and freedom. Any attempt to limit free markets reduces freedom because it imposes upon all individuals a partial opinion about what is valuable. This particular understanding of freedom rests on the notion of the market as a spontaneous order — its being resistant to control and planning, its being embedded in a society which “no individual can completely survey” as Hayek put it.24 Not that this notion is itself original to neoliberalism: Foucault’s historiography of liberalism shows that, in the mid eighteenth century, this property of markets was thought of as “natural” and therefore needed to be protected from sovereign authority’s interference.25 But as Foucault and others have argued, neoliberalism emerges after World War 2 when the spontaneous market conditions of freedom are no longer viewed as natural (even if they remain immanently lawbound) but as governmentally produced.26
  3. Neoliberalism has specific ethical dimensions too. While it generally insists that individuals should be free to “follow their own values and preferences” (as Hayek put it) at least within the limits set by those rules and institutions which secure market stability, in fact individuals’ independence as well as their relation to market risk, provides the necessary condition for specific virtues and capacities. Most notably, in Hayek’s formulation, a neoliberal regime secures individuals’ self-sufficiency, honor and dignity and does so by the willingness of some to accept “material sacrifice,” or to “live dangerously” as Foucault put it, in a phrase he declared to be liberalism’s “motto”.27 This mix of risk-seeking existentialism and civic republicanism not only rebukes and prevents the kind of de-individualization supposedly associated with socialisms of the left and right, it is where neoliberalism and an older “Nietzschean” liberalism meet—with Michael Oakeshott’s work bearing special weight in this context.28 But as soon as neoliberalism itself becomes hegemonic in part by fusing with the spirit of 1968, this original ascetic, masculinist neoliberal ethic of freedom and risk comes to be supplemented and displaced by one based more on creativity, consumerist hedonism and entrepreneurialism aimed at augmenting choice.29

***

23 See Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis, p. 55. 24 Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents. The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce Caldwell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, p. 212. 25 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 19. 26 This is argued in Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s The New Way of the World: on Neoliberal Society, London: Verso 2014. For the immanent lawboundedness in Hayek, see Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, New York: Fordham University Press 2014: pps. 195-220. Vatter’s chapter “Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault” is excellent on how law is treated in neoliberal thought. 27 Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p. 130. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 66. 28 See Andrew Norris’s forthcoming essay in Political Theory, “Michael Oakeshott’s Postulates of Individuality” for this. We might recall, too, that Foucault argues for similarities between the Frankfurt school and the early neoliberals on the grounds of their resistance to standardization, spectacle and so on. See The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 105.   I have indicated that Conrad belongs to the moment when socialist parties first contested democratic elections and which thus split liberalism, allowing one, then beleaguered, liberal fraction to begin to attach to conservatism. In this way then, he belongs to neoliberalism’s deep past (which is not to say, of course, that he should be understand as a proto-neoliberal himself). Let us now think about his novel Victory in this light. The novel is set in late nineteenth-century Indonesia mainly among European settlers and entrepreneurs. Indonesia was then a Dutch colony itself undergoing a formal economic deregulation program, which would increase not just Dutch imperial profits but, among indigenous peoples, also trigger what was arguably human history’s most explosive population growth to date.30 Victory belongs to this world where imperialism encountered vibrant commercial activity driven by entrepreneurial interests, competition and risk. Thus, for instance, its central character, the nomadic, cosmopolitan, aristocratic Swedish intellectual, Axel Heyst, establishes a business— a coal mine — along with a ship-owning partner, while other characters manage hotels, orchestras and trading vessels. Victory is a novel about enterprises as well as about individuals. But Conrad’s Indonesia is other to Europe as a realm of freedom. Importantly, however, its freedom is not quite liberal or neoliberal: it is also the freedom of a particular space. More precisely, it is the freedom of the sea: here, in effect Indonesia is oceanic. This formulation draws on Carl Schmitt’s post-war work on international law, which was implicitly   29 The history of that displacement is explored in Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott. London: Verso 2005. 30 Bram Peper, “Population Growth in Java in the 19th Century”, Population Studies, 24/1 (1970): 71-84.   11 positioned against liberal and neoliberal theory. In his monograph The Nomos of the Earth (1950), Schmitt drew attention to the sea as a space of freedom just because national sovereignties and laws did not hold there. But Schmitt’s implicit point was that liberal freedom needs to be thought about not just in terms of tolerance, recognition, rights or markets, but geographically and historically inside the long history of violent sovereign appropriation of the globe’s land masses so that elemental freedom was enacted on the oceans where law and sovereignty had no reach. From this perspective, piracy, for instance, plays an important role in freedom’s history. And from this perspective the claim to reconcile radical freedom to the lawbound state is false: such freedom exists only where laws do not. The sea, thought Schmitt’s way, is key to Conrad’s work. But, for him, the sea is also the home of economic liberalism, free-trade and the merchant marines by whom he had, of course, once been employed, and whose values he admired.31 Victory is a maritime tale set on waters which harbor such free trade at the same time as they form a Schmittean realm of freedom — and violence and risk — which effectively remains beyond the reach of sovereign law. Let me step back at this point to sketch the novel’s plot. Victory’s central character Heyst is the son of an intellectual who late in life was converted from progressivism to a mode of weak Schopenhauerianism or what was then call pessimism.32 Heyst lives his father’s pessimism out: he is a disabused conservative liberal: “he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy.”33 Believing this, Heyst leaves Europe to “drift”— circulating through Burma, New Guinea, Timor and the Indonesian archipelagoes, simply gathering facts and observing. But, on an   31 For Conrad and trade in this region, see Andrew Francis, Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015. For Conrad’s affiliations to free trade proper see my unpublished paper, “Democracy, Empire and the Politics of the Future in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”. This is available on this url. 32 Joseph Conrad, Victory, London: Methuen 1916, p. 197. 33 Conrad, Victory, pps. 92-93   12 impulse, while drifting through Timor he rescues a shipowner, Morrison, whose ship has been impounded by unscrupulous Portuguese authorities, and through that act of spontaneous generosity, becomes obligated to Morrison. The two men end up establishing a coalmine in the remote Indonesian island of Samburan, backed by local Chinese as well as by European capital. The company soon collapses. Morison dies. And, living out his Schopenhauerian renunciation of the world, Heyst, the detached man, decides to stay on at the island alone except for one Chinese servant. He does, however, sometimes visit the nearest Indonesian town, Surabaya, and it is while staying there in a hotel owned by Schomberg, a malicious, gossipy German, that he makes another spontaneous rescue. This time he saves a young woman, Lena, a member of a traveling “ladies orchestra,” who is being bullied by her bosses and in danger of abduction by Schomberg himself. Heyst and Lena secretly escape back to his island, causing Schomberg to harbor a venomous resentment against Heyst. At this point Schomberg’s hotel is visited by a trio of sinister criminals: Jones, Ricardo and their servant Pedro. Taking advantage of Schomberg’s rage, they establish an illegal casino in his hotel. To rid himself of this risky enterprise, Schomberg advises them to go after Heyst in his island, falsely telling them that Heyst has hidden a fortune there. Jones and his gang take Schomberg’s advice but disaster awaits them. The novel ends with Jones, Ricardo, Heyst, Lena all dead on Heyst’s island. The novel, which hovers between commercial adventure romance and experimental modernism, is bound to neoliberalism’s trajectory in two main ways. First, it adheres to neoliberalism’s sociology of knowledge: here too there is no knowing center, no hierarchy of expertise, no possibility of detached holistic survey and calculation through which truth might command action. Heyst’s drifting, inconsequential fact-gathering, itself appears to illustrate that absence. As do the gossip and rumors which circulate in the place of informed knowledge, and which lead to disaster. Individuals and enterprises are, as it were, on their 13 own, beyond any centralized and delimited social body that might secure stability and grounded understandings. They are bound, rather, to self-interest and spontaneity. This matters formally not simply because, in an approximately Jamesian mode, the narrative involves a series of points of view in which various characters’ perceptions, moods and interests intersect, but because the narration itself is told in a first person voice without being enunciated by a diegetical character. That first person, then, functions as the shadow representative of a decentered community, largely focused on money, that is barely able to confer identity at all, a community, too, without known geographical or ideological limits just because the narrator, its implicit representative, has no location or substance. This narratorial indeterminacy can be understood as an index of liberalism at this globalizing historical juncture: a liberalism divesting itself of its own progressive histories, emancipatory hopes and institutions. A bare liberalism about to become neoliberalism, as we can proleptically say. More importantly, the novel speaks to contemporary neoliberalism because it is about freedom. As we have begun to see, Heyst is committed to a freedom which is both the freedom of the sea, and a metaphysical condition which has detached itself, as far as is possible, from connections, obligations, determinations. This structures the remarkable formal relationship around which the novel turns — i.e. Heyst’s being positioned as Jones’s double. The generous Schopenhauerian is not just the demonic criminal’s opposite: he is also his twin. Both men are wandering, residual “gentlemen” detached from the European order, and thrown into, or committed to, a radical freedom which, on the one side, is a function of free trade, on the other, a condition of life lived beyond the legal and political institutions that order European societies, but also, importantly, are philosophical and ethical — a renunciation of the established ideological order for independence, courage and nomadism. To put this rather differently: Heyst and Jones’s efforts to live in freedom — to comport themselves as free individuals — combines economic freedom — a freedom of exchange, competition and   14 entrepreneurial possibilities— with a state of nature as a line of flight (or emancipation) from received continental laws, values and social structures. Freedom, that is, which combines that which Carl Schmitt and the early neoliberals imagined, each in their own way. The novel’s main point is that there is, in fact, nothing in this freedom to sustain true ethical substance. It is as if Schmittean freedom has smashed both liberal freedom and pessimistic asceticism, along with their ethical groundings. Or to come at the novel’s basic point from another direction: it is as if the absence at the heart of a free society has transmigrated into these characters’ selves. It is at that level that individual freedom cannot be separated from violence and risk and good from evil. Without an instituted social structure, Heyst cannot stay true to himself: his commitment to freedom and renunciation is compromised because of his spontaneous acts of generosity and sympathy which lead to his and Lena’s death. On the other side, Jones, a homosexual shunned by respectable society, is afflicted by those key nineteenth-century affects, resentment and boredom as well as a quasi-Nietzschean contempt for “tameness”, which drive him towards living outside of society, at contigency’s mercy, and towards reckless, malevolent violence. Heyst and Jones die together almost by accident, in deaths that reveal them not just as entangled with one another at existence’s threshold, but as both attuned to death, even in life. It now look as if while they lived they wanted to die. In that way, the novel makes it clear that the risk, disorder and emptiness which inhabit their striving for a radically liberal practice of life corrode distinctions not just between violence and renunciation, not just between good and evil, but also between life and death. We can put it like this: the freedom that these characters claim and the risks that it entails and which bind them together are inclined more towards death than towards life, just on account of freedom’s own conditions of possibility, namely radical autonomy, absence of sovereign power, and maximum choice.

***

15 As I say, this is a reading of the novel which, at least in principle, helps to canonize Victory just because it claims that its form, plot and characters address versions of our current neoliberal social condition, and does so in metaphysically ambitious terms. Victory is a critique of freedom, I think. Conrad is insisting that even in a liberal society devoted to free trade, enterprises and markets, the law — and the sovereign state — comes first. It is, if one likes, beginning the work of detaching liberalism from freedom. To say this, however, is to ignore the most pressing question that this reading raises: to what degree should we today actually accede to Conrad’s ambivalent, pessimistic and conservative imagination of radical freedom? How to judge that freedom’s renunciation of established hierarchies, collectivities and values whether for adventure, risk and spontaneity or for violence and death? It is a condition of the discipline’s neoliberal state that the only answer we can give to that question is that we can, each of us, answer that question any way that we choose.

Robert Stark, Rabbit, & Alex von Goldstein talk about Radical Centrism, Cultural Elitism, & Gore Vidal

Here. Great new show. It looks like Rabbit of the AltLeft website will be one of Stark’s regular guest-hosts now, so it looks like Stark’s show is becoming at least in part an Alt Left (and Radical Center, see below) site in addition to being the Alt Right site that it has long been known as. I don’t think Stark himself is all that Alt Right. He seemed too sane and liberal, I have known the guy a long time, and and he was never a very racist guy a far as I could tell. Stark is still Alt Right I think, but he leans more towards the Radical Center wing and maybe even towards the Alt Left sometimes. Rabbit sort of has his own wing of the Alt Left as opposed to my wing. Rabbit is more into pro-White stuff and race and he doesn’t really care about the Cultural Left. It’s not that he’s a Cultural Left guy himself, but I think it is more than he just doesn’t care about feminism, gay politics, and whatnot. But Rabbit would surely reject modern anti-racism as should any sane person frankly. Rabbit associates with open White nationalists on radio shows and honestly could even be seen as one himself, although he’s probably the nicest WN I’ve ever met. He seems to be somewhat lined up with Greg Johnson’s West Coast White Nationalism. If you don’t know what it is, go research it as I do not have time to get into it here. Johnson is definitely a hardcore White nationalist. He’s also openly gay. And now there’s Milo. And Jack Donovan’s been here a while. What’s with all these gays being attracted to the Alt Right? Color me somewhat disturbed. There’s been a nasty reaction to the gay bar that’s opened up on the Alt Right. I listened to a very scary Nazi type woman do a podcast on Bathhouse White Nationalism, ranting on and on about faggots and queers and this and that. She was smart as Hell and funny as barrel of ticks, but she left me with a disturbed taste on my lips. I almost wanted some Scope. My wing is more explicitly about economics and maybe even more Left in that sense. Contrary to popular lie, I really don’t care about race stuff or pro-White stuff. Someone needs to explain to me why race of all things is the most important issue facing our society today. I don’t get it. Race is the thing I’m trying to spend most days trying not to think about, you know? It’s like “What the Hell you want to think about that for? At best it’s a sideshow and an ugly and often stupid one at that. Why shell out for the expensive ticket? And then there’s the other people in the audience all around you. I go to the fair to have fun, not to be terrified. I get enough of that in the quotidian grind as it is. I am much more opposed to the Cultural Left. I am quite critical of feminism, gay politics, Baskin Robbins 31 different flavors of gender and the prosaic degeneracy of all the rest of the Cultural Left Freakshow, though I don’t think much of modern antiracism either. But I dislike modern antiracism more because it’s insipid, not because it’s the enemy. Violent opposition to modern antiracism seems cruel. It’s like beating up the retarded. There’s so dumb I almost very sorry for them. About the show, I think Bay Area Guy and maybe also Dota came up with the idea of the Radical Center. Ann Sterzinger has also talked about the Radical Center a lot. Topics include: Rabbit’s Alt Left and how it’s similar to Radical Centrism. How Radical Centrism relates to the Alt Right, which is a big tent movement for people who oppose political correctness and mass immigration but includes people with more Left and Center views. How Radical Centrism can adopt the issues abandoned by the Left in favor of globalism and open borders (ex. civil liberties, the environment, workers rights, and anti-war). How the left opposed the Brexit which stripped the world’s 400 richest people of $127 billion. The Horseshoe Theory, and how the Radical Center is the part of the horseshoe drifting in nothingness. Implementing Radical Centrism politically and which demographic groups it could appeal to. Where Radical Centrism overlaps with the Left, Right, and Libertarianism. What is the role of government vs. individual liberty. Capitalism and how it can produce innovation but is disruptive when unfettered without zoning laws, environmental protection, protectionism, and financial regulation. White liberal utopias such as Portland, Oregon and Boulder, Colorado, how they relate to the Alt Left, and how they contrast with “conservative” run regions such as Texas. Pan-Secessionism and how it can offer every ideology and group self-determination. Gore Vidal as a Radical Center/Alt Left Icon. Gore Vidal’s controversial statements on issues including immigration, race, WWII, Roman Polanski, Ruby Ridge, and how he corresponded with Timothy McVeigh. Gore Vidal’s cultural elitism. Gore Vidal’s novels. Homosexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. The importance of cultural elitism. How our society has a hierarchy based on wealth and celebrity status  rather than cultural elitism.

Robert Stark Interviews Ann Sterzinger about "In the Sky"

Here. Ann Sterzinger is a novelist stranded on the Alt Right for God knows what reason. Sort of a a case of, “What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like that? I think a lot of folks, especially hipster and artistic types, are drifting around the Alt Right because they think it’s like the new hip bar in town where everyone goes to be seen. The Alt Right is hip, groovy and edgy and it’s great for the Permanently lost and those with late onset adolescent rebellion. You look at a lot of these hipster early adopter trendies over there and you think, “You’re a decent person. What the Hell are doing hanging around with all these damn Nazis?” Maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they do. Maybe they’re on glue. Maybe they’re camped at the Lost and Found. Maybe it’s all Performance Art. Maybe who the Hell knows. Sometimes you just have to throw up your hands, shake your head and walk away. Ann is also part of some weird thing called the Anti-Natalism Movement. Anyway, this chick is an excellent writer, already having a few novels under her corset. She is also very, very smart. She used to have this shy nerdy girl look which was a bit attractive except it gets lost in a crowd too easily. One of those sorta cute faces that’s always fading into the wall, you know? Now she’s fixed herself up a lot for the dating market I guess, and she looks a lot better. She seems me one of those super-brainy, (perhaps painfully) shy, introverted young brunettes who is actually kind of hot but usually worries she is ugly and has an inferiority complex about the ditsy blonds. fearfully envies the blonds. In that case, she should have been born Jewish. She’s about 40 years old, except she wishes she was never born. Like most goodlooking youngish intellectual women, I believe she needs to go out with me. You’re welcome, honey. In the Sky (Dans le Ciel) was written by Octave Mirbeau in France in the 1890’s. Ann Sterzinger translated the first English edition published by Hopeless Books. It’s available on Amazon. Topics include: How Ann discovered the book from Pierre Michel, a French literary scholar specializing in the writer Octave Mirbeau. How Mirbeau is best known for his book Diary of a Chambermaid but In the Sky was little known outside of France. How Mirbeau was an anarchist and a Dreyfusard. How Mirbeau was a major influence on In the Sky involves both where X lives on top of a mountain where you can only see sky and a metaphor for being detached from society. Mirbeau’s view on the family and how neurosis is passed down from parents to children. How the book combines tragedy and comedy. Matt Forney’s review Elliot Rodger Goes to Paris. The genre “Loser Lit.” Ann’s article Dead David Bowie, French Nationalists, Antinatalism, and the Meaning of Life. David Bowie’s art & legacy. Her article The Magical Bottomless Labor Pool which connects political themes to her book NVSQVAM. Why I’m Scared of Widows & Orphans. Applied Dysgenics. In Defense of Beta Females. Ann’s upcoming science fiction dystopia novel Lyfe, which needs a publisher that specializes in science fiction.

25 Different Collectors

The Collector is a famous classic novel written in 1963 by the great British author John Fowles. It was immediately greeted with much acclaim, and the success of the book enabled Fowles to quit his day job and work full-time as an author. I found versions of this book that had been translated into 25 different languages. I have grouped the titles according to language family, so many adjacent books are written in languages from the same family. See how many you can get!

  1. Коллекционер
  2. Колекціонер
  3. Колекционер
  4. Колекционерът
  5. Kolekcjoner
  6. Kolekcionar
  7. Zbiratelj
  8. Sběratel
  9. El coleccionista
  10. Colecţionarul, Colectionarul
  11. O Colecionador
  12. Il collezionista
  13. L’obsédé
  14. De verzamelaar
  15. Samleren, Offer for en samler
  16. Der Sammler
  17. Kolekcionierius
  18. Kolekcionārs
  19. Ο συλλέκτης
  20. Neitoperho
  21. Liblikapüüdja
  22. A Lepkegyűjtő
  23. Koleksiyoncu
  24. جامع الفراشات
  25. კოლექციონერი

What Attracts Women

I will go through these one by one here:

  1. Hypergamy
  2. Women’s dishonesty about what they’re attracted to being biologically hardwired because of them wanting one man to beta provide and another man to fuck her.
  3. Looks = Personality. Your personality and behavior are largely dictated by uncontrollable factors (how people reacted to you during upbringing, hormonal profile during puberty, your background, etc.).
  4. Social life and hence status being extremely affected by the way one looks.
  5. Men being more productive and contributing more to society and to general development throughout history, and how marriage and monogamy in the old days was a way to control and make sure that every man got his needs met and hence contributed to society. Basically one can easily conclude that female to male choice-based mating selection is very bad for society overall.

Let’s start with 1 first.

Hypergamy

Yep, females are hypergamous by nature. The Blue Pillers, feminists, male feminists, etc. are absolutely furious about this notion. They say it’s all a great big lie. Are they really that clueless?

Female hypergamy is real. It is also a big problem if unleashed. In order to keep it at least manageable (because you can never get rid of it altogether), institutions such as marriage with enforced monogamy are devised so you can have a halfway civilized society and restrain female hypergamy significantly.

Women’s dishonesty about what they’re attracted to being biologically hardwired because of them wanting one man to beta provide and another man to fuck her.

Yep. Women lie about what they want. They lie about what turns them on. They lie about a thousand things. Why they lie so much, I have no idea, but I suspect that women don’t even know what they want or what turns them on either.

I do not agree with women wanting one man to be a Beta provider and another to provide stud service. Ideally, I think most women would like to marry Chad, tame him so he’s monogamous, and hopefully have Monogamous Chad Dream Man be a great provider for her so she doesn’t need to settle with a Beta as a provider.

You will notice that women’s romance novels are typically about this totally unrealistic dream man who is this hunky male model stud who is a man’s man, masculine as can be but at the same time sensitive, loving, and kind, who has women after him all the time but settles down with the heroine after she tames him.

My mother notes that the male heroes of romance novels are men that more or less do not even exist in real life. So women’s dream men are so fantastical that they probably don’t even exist. They’re pining for nonexistent entities!

The problem that Alphas are often lousy providers. Many Alphas are not employed. A lot of others work in the criminal economy, often selling drugs, etc. A surprising number work at low paying jobs and continue to live in cheap apartments and drive old cars into middle age. A stunning number of Alphas are in jails and prisons. Many Alphas spend most of their life essentially living off women in exchange for providing what boils down to gigolo service.

Even if a woman could pin Chad into a long term relationship or marriage, Chad makes a lousy boyfriend and an even lousier husband. He tends to be an incorrigible cheater, among other things. He is at least a little bit narcissistic/sociopathic, he is typically vain, conceited, and egotistical and is often rather short on empathy. In other words, Chad is an asshole.

So women don’t need a Beta provider. They need a provider, period. Chad would be the #1 pick of course, but he’s not available, so she settles for Mr. Beta with the good job as a provider. But now she still needs Chad for sex. What’s a lady to do?

Looks = Personality, your personality and behavior are largely dictated by uncontrollable factors (how people reacted to you during upbringing, hormonal profile during puberty, your background etc).

This is very sad, but there is probably a lot to it. I do not think we are doomed by what happened to us in junior and senior high school, but those experiences are so important that it is hard to overlook them. While no one has a set in stone lousy personality, we all have a certain personality type, and it is set by the end of adolescence.

There is a healthy and unhealthy side of each personality type. Even the Sociopath has a healthy mirror image called Aggressive Personality. The Borderline has Sensitive Personality. The Dependent has Loyal Personality. The Narcissist has Confident Personality. And so on.

A man with good looks often has so many great experiences during these formative years that he ends up with a nice personality pretty much locked in place by the time adolescence is over. The man who had a rocky road all through middle and late school years has a huge hurdle to overcome in transcending these traumas and becoming healthy.

Social life and hence status being extremely affected by the way one looks.

This is sad as Hell too, but there is probably a lot to it. People need to consider that when they see people with great/poor social skills and high/low status that quite a bit of how high someone scores on those variables may be due to uncontrollable factors like looks.

Men being much more productive and contributing much more to society and to general development throughout history, and how marriage and monogamy in the old days was a way to control and make sure that every man got his needs met and hence contributed to society. Basically one can easily conclude that female to male choice based mating selection is very bad for society overall.

Women are not going to like this one. But I would agree that men create civilization. There have been periods in history when most of the men left, often to wars, and the society was left with mostly women to run the show. Things fell apart pretty quickly.

Women simply can’t create or run civilizations. They need men to do that for them. Women can help the men run things, but they can’t do it alone. This is quite all right. Women can’t do everything. The sexes tend to need each other.

But since civilizations needed men to create them in the first place and then to run them, marriage and monogamy was a way to control society such that most if not all men got their basic needs met. Once their basic needs were met, these men would be able to do a good job contributing to society. Bottom line is a totally free market in marriage where women’s choices set the tone is probably going to cause all sorts of societal problems, like maybe mass shootings for one.

Greatest Comic Series Ever?

This city is afraid of me…I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”… and I’ll look down and whisper “No.” They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father or President Truman. Decent men who believed in a day’s work for a day’s pay. Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn’t realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don’t tell me they didn’t have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody Hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers… and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.Walter Joseph Kovacs/Rorschach

While we are at it with the superlatives, how about greatest graphic novel ever too?

Turgenev!

Turgenev is usually listed as one of the great Russian writers of the 19th Century along with Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov and Nikolai Gogol. He was the favorite Russian novelist of Henry James and Joseph Conrad, who both said he was better than Dostoevsky. Vladimir Nabokov rated him below Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gogol but ahead of Dostoevsky. Although Turgenev quarreled with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky during his lifetime, both eventually came to praise him. After he died, Tolstoy said:

His stories of peasant life will forever remain a valuable contribution to Russian literature. I have always valued them highly. And in this respect none of us can stand comparison with him. Take, for example, Living Relic, Loner, and so on. All these are unique stories. And as for his nature descriptions, these are true pearls, beyond the reach of any other writer!

Turgenev never married but had many lovers and affairs. He had a lifelong affair with a Spanish-born opera singer who was raised in Paris. He spent most of his time in Western Europe, especially Germany and France. He preferred cosmopolitan Western Europe over his native land. He died at age 64. He was particularly noted for his great ear for dialogue, as you can see in the excerpt below. Just to give you a taste of what he is like, here is a passage from the play, A Month in the Country:

You know, Ratikin, I noticed this a long time ago …You are wonderfully sensitive to the so-called beauties of nature, and talk about them exquisitely … very intelligently … so exquisitely, so intelligently, that I feel sure nature should be indescribably grateful to you for your beautifully chosen, happy phrases about her; you court nature, like a perfumed marquis on his little red-heeled shoes, pursuing a pretty peasant girl … the only trouble is, I sometimes think that nature will never be able to understand or appreciate your subtle language – just as the peasant girl wouldn’t understand the courtly compliments of the marquis; nature is simpler, yes, cruder than you suppose – because, thank God, she is healthy …Birches don’t melt, they don’t have fainting fits like ladies with weak nerves.

Nnnice!

The Great White Death!

Moby Dick is Herman Melville’s greatest work and is one of the greatest books ever written in English or really in any other language. Endless ink has been spilled about Ishmael, the sailor on board the whaling ship The Pequod and Ahab, the mad possessed captain of the ship, out to get his revenge against the greatest sperm whale of all, the great white whale, Moby Dick. Revenge against what? Earlier, Moby Dick had waged a war against Ahab’s ship when the whalers tried to kill the whale. In the course of the tumult and the whale’s attacks on the ship, Ahab lost his leg and now walks with an ivory peg-leg.

Moby Dick himself, or as I refer to him, The Great White Death!
Moby Dick himself, or as I refer to him, The Great White Death!
Really the best part of Moby Dick is the prose. I will print a few samples of it here so you can see how great it is. Let us look at Ishmael talking. Here the sea and the land clearly stand in for some deeper issues:

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But in landlessness alone reside the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than to be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety. Consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by the half known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou canst never return!

Two whale heads of killed whales are fastened to the ship as trophies:

Oh, ye foolish! throw these thunderheads overboard, and then you will float light and right…This Right Whale I take to have been a Stoic; the Sperm Whale, a Platonian, who might have taken up Spinoza in his latter years.

He ponders the meaning of “whiteness,” of the obsessive themes of the book.

Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows – a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink?

Ishmael on what’s eating Ahab:

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. …he strove to pierce the profundity.

The surface of the ocean and its deeper waters are obviously stand-in’s for weightier things:

Beneath this wondrous world upon the surface… another and still stranger world…

Ishmael dislikes philosophy:

So soon as I hear that such or such a man gives himself out for a philosopher, I conclude that, like the dyspeptic old woman, he must have ‘broken his digester.’

Yet he spends quite a bit of time philosophizing himself:

What things real are there, but imponderable thoughts?

And has not much use for religion either.

Hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling…. Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian… …Christian kindness has proved but hollow courtesy. …a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world another.

Yet he also wonders about the same obsessions that haunt the religious:

Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance.

But he is brimming with great aphorisms:

…if you can get nothing better out of the world, get a good meal out of it, at least.

Starbuck, a sailor, is a budding capitalist who sees whales as nothing but another commodity:

I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market…

Pip, a castaway is rescued by sailor Stubb, only to jump off his ship. Stubb, another budding capitalist, albeit a vicious one, leaves Pip to flounder in the sea:

Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.

And Ahab has a few thoughts of his own:

All visible objects, man, are but pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing put forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is the wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ’tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him.

Ahab addressing a sperm whale, in a passage in which diving seems imply something deeper than plunging down into the sea:

Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest…

Niice! Great stuff or what?

One Island, Three Books

Ok here we go with the old stranded on a deserted island chestnut. Now suppose you were stranded on a deserted island (not “desert island” as so many improperly say), and you could only bring three books with you, all fiction, all novels. Which do you choose? I choose:

  1. Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
  2. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
  3. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

Now have at it, mavens.

D. H. Lawrence

A lot of people nowadays dislike D. H. Lawrence’s classic books such as Sons and Lovers, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, The Rainbow and Women in Love. I have read all four of them. Indeed the imagery can get rather heavy-handed and downright idiotic at times. His basic point, that humans should get out of their civilized shells enough to get in touch with their primal and of course sexual nature, is good enough for me, but he can be pretty ham-handed with the way he goes about hammering this point into your head. Also his paragraphs can go on and on. And as far as erotic literature goes, it’s isn’t even very dirty by today’s pornographic standards, but I think it’s enough to at least turn’s women Romance-novel aware minds on. I took a class once on D. H. Lawrence. It was all women except for me and one other guy. Well, it was paradise. The women in the class were turned on enough by Lawrence’s prose. I remember one very beautiful young woman, maybe 27 years old, often sat next to me. We were talking about one of the books and she was basically saying how she was getting so turned on reading them that she couldn’t wait for her husband to get home (he was off on some trip). But I would like to point out, just for a moment, one thing often overlooked about Lawrence: what a great stylist he could be. Here is a passage from one of his classic travel books, Sea and Sardinia:

Cold, fresh wind, a black-blue, translucent, rolling sea on which the wake rose in snapping foam, and Sicily was on the left: Monte Pellegrino, a huge, inordinate mass of pinkish rock, hardly crisped with the faintest vegetation, looming up to heaven from the sea. Strangely large in mass and bulk Monte Pellegrino looks and bare, like a Sahara in heaven: and old-looking. These coasts of Sicily are very imposing, terrific, fortifying the interior. And again one gets the feeling that age has worn them bare; as if old, old civilizations had worn away and exhausted the soil, leaving a terrifying blankness of rock, as at Syracuse in plateau, and here in great mass.

Oh! Man that is nice!

Humans Are Perverse

Only part of us is sane; only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. Our bright nature fights in us with this yeasty darkness, and neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves and will not let either part be destroyed. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941)

So we all have a bit of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in us, and to be human is to have a dark side. The universe is bipolar, and both visions are correct, even at the same time as we learn in Zen. The world is either a good place where the possibility of decency and success combined exists, as in soaring goodness of Shakespeare’s best characters, or it is consists of a blackened existence, as in a Ben Jonson play where near every character is a scoundrel with a depraved heart  and the the few good men are ineffectual and impotent and as in Dostoevsky, evil always triumphs and good falls down in the gutters to defeat. Bottom line: the human heart is both divided and perverse. P.S. That Rebecca West book is not only one of the finest novels of the 20th Century, but it is also one of the greatest works in English-language literature. And it’s only 1,181 pages long!

The Last Slice of Pizza, by Joseph Hirsch (A Dystopian Science Fiction Novel)

Brief Synopsis:  Michael Fermi is what many people would uncharitably describe as a “loser.” He is in his mid-twenties, living at home with his mother and delivering pizzas for a living. His life is about to change, however, as he has been selected by an alien race which intends to install its parasitic spearhead in his body in order to use him for their own purposes. This unseen race, known as the Grand Arbiters, will use this method of bilocation to observe humanity through the eyes of the lowly pizza man, in order to determine whether or not Man should be eliminated, and his precious Earth destroyed alongside of him.

The Last Slice of Pizza

By Joseph Hirsch

What the Reader Doesn’t Want to Know

The President of the United States of America walks into the War Room, flanked by two four star generals and the Secretary of State. While there is an impressive, massive table dominating the room, this is not the War Room we have grown accustomed to from countless movies and TV shows. There is a stainless steel carafe of water on the table, centered on a tray with three drinking glass that have been left untouched. The White House Press Secretary and the Vice President of the United States are the only people in the room who are seated. Everyone else stands, either uneasily against the wall or off to the side of the President. The Press Secretary says, “Mr. President, at three-forty five am this transmission was intercepted at Cape Canaveral along with a decryption cipher, which arrived via radio signal at ten second intervals over the course of the following forty-five minutes. At that time, all communications ceased.” The president has his ring finger pressed against the side of his skull, the fingertip flush against his hair which became shot with gray roughly a year into his second term. His golden wedding band is dull from being rapped repeatedly against the surface of his desk in the Oval Office. The message is then played: “Homo sapiens, you are being contacted because we wish to inform you that several tons of radioactive explosives have been placed in the molten core of your Earth. This bomb cannot be defused, and requires no secondary trigger mechanism. It has been activated by the positively charged ions, rotation, and convective motion of your Earth, which are responsible for producing your magnetic field. The bomb will detonate in twelve hours.” A terrified murmur makes its way from one to the other of those assembled in the room. The most powerful man on Earth has been reduced inwardly to a whimpering child, though he is still man and leader enough to conceal his terror from those who look to him for guidance, and who still want to believe that he can get them through this. “In order to dissuade you from your doubts, reticence, or your suspicion that this may be a hoax, we have decided to incinerate a star whose coordinates we have provided to your scientists at NASA. This incineration will take place roughly eleven hours before we destroy your Earth.” The president has clasped his hands together, as if praying, though he is more likely deep in thought, as those close to him know the Ruler of the Free World to be a closet deist, a yuppie agnostic who attended church more to plug himself into the political pipeline when rallying for his senate run, than out of any sort of religious ardor. “Each of you who have been made aware of this message is to meet at coordinates which have been provided in a document accompanying the cipher of this transmission. You three-thousand humans will be spared and taken aboard our ship. Your immediate families will also be spared. If, however, you inform anyone not included on the manifest of either what is to happen to the Earth o he manifest of either what is to happen to the Earth or of the coordinates where the airlift is to take place, you will be incinerated along with all of your unfortunate Homo sapiens friends. End…” Static ripples, and the Vice President turns the volume down. The President looks over at the Press Secretary, who removes his bifocals and wipes the fogged glasses with the triangular end of his paisley tie. “Mr. President, a star was in fact incinerated a little bit more than two hours ago.” “Which star?” The president is grim, but still not panicking. The Press Secretary swivels in his seat, undoes the half-Windsor knot of his tie. “It was a star we hadn’t even located or named until its coordinates were provided in the encrypted signal.” The president is deep in thought, pondering the greatest crisis his nation, his planet, has ever faced. The irrepressible conflict between the North and South which claimed more American lives than any other war, the Cuban Missile Crisis whereby mutual destruction may have just been narrowly averted, the banking meltdown in which economies from Reykjavik, Iceland to Manhattan Island almost collapsed due to bad credit default swaps-all of it pales in comparison to the calamity he now has to face. Every one of the other people in the room is grateful that the decision rests with him. Never has the crown laid heavier upon the head, or the political chalice for which men competed seemed more poisonous a drink. The President of the United States of America thinks about his constituents, about his enemies, about the hardy souls who came out to shake his hand when he did his tours of the heartland damaged by tornadoes and floods. He thinks about his responsibility to them, and he is tempted to ask one of his generals if they might not be able to triangulate the source of that signal and perhaps fire upon the target. He knows that the languishing Star Wars program is a pipe dream, and that some Hail Mary fantasy of sending a nuclear payload aboard a satellite toward the hostile aliens would make a good yarn in a popcorn flick, but this is not a movie. The President stops thinking about his voters, his friends and enemies in Washington, the sycophantic press corps. He shifts in his seat, and the Presidential seal stitched into the leather headrest frames his head for a moment like a halo. He thinks about his wife, his children, his shaggy spotted Cocker Spaniel, and the choice becomes obvious. He glances at everyone in the room, and finally lets his eyes settle on his shiny loafers, because he is too ashamed to meet any gaze right now. “Have Air Force One readied, and give the pilot the coordinates listed in the cipher accompanying the signal from space.” An audible sigh goes up from those assembled in the War Room. There is the sound of papers shuffling, and then they all disperse. No one makes cellphone calls or sends emails, since those can easily be intercepted thanks to programs the president himself has signed off on via executive fiat. His decision has alienated him from his liberal base, and garners him no credit from his enemies who see him as too dovish, but he has done what he thought was right for the American people. It was easy, he muses as he walks through the halls of the White House, past the presidential portraitures, to be a protestor when one didn’t receive the kinds of briefings he got daily. But to stand on that carpet and hear about the terror cells, the loose uranium, the new surface-to-air shoulder fired rockets, day in and day out, and to keep those secrets to oneself, that made the decisions that much harder. It was his second term anyway. Better to alienate the base in order to protect them. All of it had been for nothing, though. He runs out to his helicopter and salutes the marine as he boards, a boards, a final wash of guilt making its way over him before it is drowned out in the roar of propellers as he takes off into the sky. The termites dance away. Another one of the little maggots makes communion with the others, sharing his secret with them, bearing tidings from aboard a vessel where the unseen until now Arbiters are assembled to speak. They wear the same metal shells as Mama, but Wichman, Mars, Kammisch and I can sense alien life pulsing beneath the scaled metal armor. One of them speaks, its voice oscillating through some kind of modulator: “Mercury we need only for the mining of calcium and magnesium.” This motion is seconded, and each of the steel-sheathed Arbiters vibrate as a harmonious accord flows across their ranks. A canister filled with the pseudocoelomate rotifer Nanobots recently jettisoned from Earth appears in their midst. One of the Arbiters cracks the glass case like a giant opening a walnut with his massive hands. A scattering of thermal termites, like floating tinsel, shows the Arbiters a scene of destruction which excites them, makes their slimy, pestiferous bodies writhe inside of the steel shells that make them seem so much stronger and more o much stronger and more formidable than they actually are. The Earth explodes, and something like a gestalt orgasm makes all of the extraterrestrial trolls applaud. The Earth is now a radiant sun, and through the observation window a fleet of ships drifts into view to form a colorless bulwark that blots out the stars. Their force fields deploy, tessellated striations of jagged lightning, a kinematic orchestration which pushes the Earth until it sits where the sun once was, shoving the sun into an adjacent galaxy. The ships groan and turn to face the other direction. Their ballistic waves of purple light press Mars until it moves where the Earth once was. The moon stays in place. From within this vision which has been brought to us thanks to our shattering of the little bank teller’s tube, I can hear Wichman laughing. “Clever, evil bastards.” “That was not Earth we just visited,” Mars says. “Captain Obvious,” Wichman shoots back. Kammisch is silent, as am I. We watch the Arbiters, sated on that main course of destruction, now treated to a desert which consists of a sadistic show well beyond man’s conception. The President has done as the Arbiters have commanded him. He has managed to beat Benjamin Franklin’s sage advice about men and secrets, and he has assembled an intergalactic Noah’s Ark, this collection of senators and their families, generals and aides-de-camp, speechwriters and their spouses. They wait patiently for their starship to come. It arrives, a facsimile of the drop ship where we now sit watching this scene unfold, only of course much larger. They board quietly, frightened, like obedient cattle, forming the shape of a new docile animal which is composed of all of their shuffling bodies, a pachyderm bound for God-knows-where. Once aboard, their vessel launches into space, and as quickly as a rifle tracking skeet, the Arbiters watch them through the display window of their own ship and one of the aliens presses a button which sends a ray out to intercept and obliterate the vessel filled with the only Earthlings besides us four men watching in terror, as a satanic orange and red mushroom cloud consumes itself and then dissolves into shards, fanning out into the vacuum of space. The Arbiters roil and slither inside their steel suits, pleased and hissing, tearing themselves into shapes which resemble uncoiling strands of especially pliant taffy or fiberglass insulation. They are not so much hideous as imbued with a primordial ugliness which should not know sentience. Each of us sees bits of them slithering around in their suits, thanks to the diligence of the thermal termites worming their way into cracks and joints, and though I haven’t spoken to the other men, I can feel their anger rising as just I can feel my own. Things that look like these Arbiters, formless ooze, should not rule over us, should not control who lives or dies or the manner in which we perish. Those politicians who fed off the blood of the people deserved to be booted from office, sure, and one could maybe make a Guy Fawkes argument that they even deserved death for the betrayal of their constituents, but killing their families, their wives, and children is beyond the ken of even Old Testament Yahweh in all but his most vindictive mood. I am, after all, something of an authority on God, as much as any man can be short of knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that He empirically exists. God did not, in that Gutenberg Bible I keep by my nightstand, tell the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah that they would live, only to kill them anyway. If Lot’s wife had not turned around and disobeyed him, if she had kept her eyes forward, then God would not have turned her into a pillar of salt merely to amuse himself. I dig my fingernails into the lifelines of my palms until they begin to bleed, cursing the slime bags for their formlessness, which leaves them no necks to even wring. I want to throttle them, too, to strangle one, but I have to keep my anger in check, because the silkworms are still spinning their web, showing me that I am in fact wrong in my assumption that we four aboard this drop ship are the only human beings left alive. The Arbiters in fact decided to keep a certain number of human beings alive for their own purposes, which were cruel, but not without a cold logic that I find hard to refute. Several hundred sport utility vehicles, like the ones I saw around the neighborhood where I had once lived with my mother by the lake, are arranged in a long line on the rusted tundra of the Martian basalt. “Stau,” Kammisch says. “Ja,” I reply. But how? How or why is there a traffic jam on the surface of Mars? One of the Nanobots, not hindered by atmospheric concerns, weaves its way across the rocks toward the line of SUVs. Each of the drivers, men and women shanghaied from Earth, marooned now on Mars, grip the steering wheel of their car. Each vehicle’s porous doors and sunroofs are sheathed in a cocooning membrane of elastomeric seals reinforced with a space age polymer, like the doors on our mother ship. Nothing can get in and nothing can get out, but these men and women who have been abducted from carpools or crosstown errands do not need more oxygen than they already have, because the thermal termites will provide that, just as they would continually rewire the digestive systems of the drivers so that hunger would never become a problem, either. Gas would certainly not be an issue, as I already know from experience. The termites are rerouting all of the atoms and molecules into a feedback loop, whereby any gas that is burned will in turn create more gas in a cycle of perpetual motion better than any sort of zero point energy theorized by Barry Mars in his most outlandish mood. The people drive in circles for days that turn into months, which become years that in turn morph into generations. They beg for death, but the termites keep their hands sealed to the wheels. The red clay of Mars looks so much like the brimstone of Hell, but nothing from Dante or Sisyphus could rival the punishment these commuters are forced to endure, as the worms in the engine blocks pump more and more fossil fuel into the Martian atmosphere. Co2 gases form a greenhouse shell over Mars, and the Arbiters observe and laugh, this multi-century project a diversion that lasts them in their infinite cruelty the equivalent of only a few hours. Their hideous voices, rasping and scarred, carry across the desolate Martian expanse. Over one-hundred Mbar of surface pressure is realized, the temperature rising degree by degree, until the Nanobots are forced to vacate and the drivers are finally released from their torment, melting to the liquefying hulls of their Denali and Expedition and Yukon utility vehicles. From an astral perch the Nanobots watch, nesting like lapdogs on the contours of the metal suits that the Arbiters wear. After the cars melt, the rocks begin to undergo thermal decomposition, and hissing C02 and H20 make noises eerily similar to the laughter of the monstrous aliens, gases coming in wavering steamy fingers from the ground where it cracks with molten volcanic life. Our hatred for the evil Gods melts in that moment. No matter how wicked we consider them to be, they are giving us something that had been the provenance of no man, no matter how holy and faithful to God he was, or devoted to science he might have been. We are seeing the beginnings of a new world, the new world in fact. A tundra region opens above the regolith, and life as small as the Nanobots appears, little pioneer biota that appeal to the part of each man that he keeps hidden, the part that wants to pet butterflies but fears how that might appear to other men. “Oh, shit,” I think I hear Wichman say, and he starts to cry. It is contagious. We hear each other’s voices, but see only the memories of the termites, each passing on a bit of knowledge to the next in case it prematurely senesces or is consumed in flames. The little butterflies with their purple and blue patterns are resistant to the ultraviolet rays which lash the cragged surface of this new Earth, and they excrete acids that further dissolve the rocks and flatten the mountains into low naked hills, and banded marble cliffs which form a rim around the first ocean. We can taste the nitrogen and oxygen as they are introduced, across the chasm of centuries and despite the limited sensory perception of the little wormy hosts sending back data one broken image at a time. The one ocean of New Earth breaks into two oceans, forming an aqua-frothed Pangaea wreathed in salt in the northern boreal area and a second sea in the southern hemispheric Hellas Planitia zone. Minor tweaking is performed by the bulwarked convoy of drifting sky fortresses, which casts a giant shadow over the Earth which has become the new sun, and Mars, which has become a home for the Arbiters. Giant louvered parasol sunshades emerge from the abysses inside of the great ships, and they adjust the orbital eccentricity of every planet until the Council of Arbiters achieves that revolting harmonious accord again. They writhe in their elemental suits, and rap their chainmail knuckles against the top of their table. The millions of aliens who have moved into the Milky Way are happy with this new living arrangement. We four remaining humans above this drop ship are less so.

Two New Thomas Pynchon Videos

This is one from his new novel Bleeding Edge which is going to come out in only 6 days on September 17, 2013! Very, very weird, and I kind of like it. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNQ8S4EBGA] Above is a video advertising all of Pynchon’s books on one ebook. The video lists the first lines in all of his books. Some go by so fast that you can barely even read them. I have read:

  1. V.
  2. The Crying of Lot 49
  3. Gravity’s Rainbow
  4. Slow Learner
  5. Vineland

I have not yet read:

  1. Mason and Dixon
  2. Against the Day
  3. Inherent Vice

Chapter the Last

What a way to end a book!

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.

Oh yeah! It was 150 years ago, or it was yesterday. When time may as well stand still, who needs clocks? Atomic clocks be damned, the best of the pen will stop them all.

Yes or No?

At the end, what is the answer on the tip of your tongue, yes or no?

“And Yes I said Yes I said yes.”

At the end of a great book, a day, a night or the closing hours of the bar, what could possibly be your answer? At the end of this, that or whatever, it’s always Last Call, and the answer must always be yes. There’s no other way to go out but by shouting the affirmative to all and any who will listen. The human spirit demands this. PS I didn’t write that, but I wish I did.

Any Of You Going on the Road This Summer?

Isn’t it great to be on the road?

…the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

Just wondering. PS I didn’t write that above. Wish I did though.

Sendero Fades and FARC Rises in Peru

Repost from the old site. Web Archive is your friend. What wonderful dead Internet things it has managed to preserve for us, little snapshots long expired, such as Argentine Jewish journalist Uki Goni’s interview with Nicholas Shakespeare, author of the novel The Dancer Upstairs, based on the Shining Path* insurgency. The novel was later made into a Chuschi, Ayacucho, on May 17, 1980, almost exactly 200 years after the last Inca rebel, Tupac Amaru, on May 17, 1781, was drawn and quartered by Spaniards, the four pieces then buried at far corners of Peru. The Chuschi ballots burning was an inauspicious affair. At 2 AM, five masked youths and one adult entered the office of the registrar, tied him up, burned the ballots and registry and retreated into the night. The attack had been led by a schoolteacher. The incident was scarcely even noted in the press. But the single spark to light the prairie fire had been lit. The correlation with the execution of Tupac Amaru was not accidental, yet this little-noted fact has hardly been noticed by anyone who studied the insurgency. But it has profound implications for understanding the movement. Best’s son was the Edith Lagos, a fighter killed in 1982, drew over 30,000 (in a city of 70,000 people) – mostly Indians – to her funeral in Ayacucho, the capital of the province where it all began. The huge crowd had defied a ban on her funeral. Furthermore, Lagos (rare photos of the strikingly beautiful Lagos here and here) had recently graduated from a Catholic high school run by nuns in Ayacucho. She had been a model student at the high school. Earlier, her parents had sent her to Lima to study to be an attorney. She often skipped school to watch movies from India, because, she said, she liked to cry. When she was not doing that, she was meeting with trade union workers in the city and talking revolution. She was rapidly recruited into the Shining Path and her rousing speeches electrified Indians throughout the Southern Sierra. At age 17, she was already a guerrilla commander. Lagos was captured several times by government forces. There is a photo of her in government custody in 1981, face swollen by beatings, 18 year old eyes already hard with determination. By now, Sendero held the northern third of Ayacucho. On May 2, 1982, in one of Sendero’s most impressive actions, 500 Senderistas raided and took over the university city of Huamanga, a city of 80,000 people. They blew up the local jail and raped, tortured and finally bayoneted to death by government forces. She was all of 19 years old. This was pretty typical behavior by government forces. In contrast, Sendero often tended to wounded government soldiers’ wounds, took them prisoner, and asked them to defect from the security forces or join Sendero. Her father was asked to come to Andahualyas to identify the body. He came, picked up the body and took it back to Ayacucho. All along the way, the procession was repeatedly stopped as throngs of peasants poured into the road to mourn their dead heroine. Her funeral and mass were held in the main Catholic (Lagos was a Catholic, as were most of rank and file Senderistas and even some of the leadership – Abimael Guzman himself is said to be Catholic) cathedral in Ayacucho, where her coffin was draped with a hammer and sickle flag inside church, an odd sight. There is a rare videotape of the funeral. The chapel is packed with peasants, storeowners, government workers, all dressed in Indian garb. As her coffin is borne out of the church, a rousing, clapping chant rises from the crowd as it presses forward and drapes a hammer and sickle flag over her coffin: “Commandante Edith presente! The people will never forget your spilled blood!” The crowd circled the square three times, each time swelling the crowd as more and more people poured out of their homes to join the march. Marching into the cemetery was a solid wall of humanity. The Shining Path banner rode on the outstretched arms of the crowd. There are those who swear that Maria Elena Moyano, “Mother Courage”, in 1991, is without merit. Further, Moyano was killed, albeit brutally, for organizing counterinsurgency patrols and turning in supporters and members of Sendero to the police. As such, she was no longer a civilian. The very name of the group was the Peruvian Communist Party en el Sendero Luminoso de (in the shining path of) this fascinating web page. One cannot really understand Sendero without knowing about Mariategui. So from the start, Sendero raised feminism and the liberation of the Indians as two of their banners. Simon Strong’s Shining Path (1992) is the finest book ever written on the movement. He spent a lot of time in Peru and concluded that at the time, the movement had a huge amount of support, even among the military, the Catholic church, teachers, students, workers, peasants, the urban poor and exiles. They also had massive support among the Ashaninka Indians in the Amazon, and also with some other tribes. The notions that Sendero held 1000’s of Indians “prisoner“, or that they massacred scores of unarmed jungle Indians, are total nonsense. At the time Strong wrote his book, the movement was at the peak of their popularity. Later that year, Guzman was captured, and it has been all downhill ever since. But the general assessment of anti-Sendero authors, that Sendero either had no understanding of, or was hostile to, infuriating Peruvians with her Maoist “Serve the People” purse (the rightwing blogosphere has had an idiotic field day with this, but I seriously doubt that Diaz supports or supported Sendero, so the whole affair is just the usual rightwing character assassination), the Peruvians they refer to are elite, the only ones the media ever talks to. No one else in Peru matters or has a voice. At the moment, Sendero is fairly unpopular, even among those who formerly supported them. These same people also despise the government, the system, and the White elite who exploit them. But Sendero was so vicious and crazy, killing so many people, including the masses and other Leftists, that they left a bad taste in the mouths of many. These people have not given up on revolution by any means. After all, the Peruvian system is worthless, insane and evil, and it should be destroyed. It is only reasonable that such an insane and evil system should produce an insane and evil insurgency – Sendero. Now, Guzman and his fellow leaders sue for peace in prison, while a few holdouts under Comrade Artemio wage armed struggle, mostly in Ayacucho, the Huallaga Valley, the Satipo River area and Huanuco. A few years back, they were recruiting in the squalid slums of Lima once again. These days, a more intelligent group of guerrillas is in Peru – the FARC* of Colombia. A massive, wealthy movement with deep roots in the Colombian poor, especially the rural poor, FARC has been spreading out lately down into the Ucayali River area in the jungle. They are primarily in the area of Yurimangas and north. They have been spotted as far south as the Apurimac River near Ayacucho (where Sendero is still active) and even in Lima. They are very well-supplied, upbeat, loaded with cell phones and radios, very well-disciplined and are making deep inroads in Peru. They give medical care, food, cooking utensils and field tools to the people and don’t bother a soul. They are quite popular with the masses they are interacting with, who see them as better than Sendero. Many former supporters and members of Sendero have lined up with the FARC in Peru. Earlier this year, a column of Senderistas went back to Colombia, probably for training. FARC has been urging Sendero to join with FARC and modify their line. Another column of the remaining leadership of the MRTA* (Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement) from around Tarapoto and Moyobamba in San Martin Province (their longtime headquarters – photo here) also left for Colombia around the same time – FARC is trying to join together remnants of both Sendero and MRTA with FARC in Peru – a very interesting and possibly fruitful plan. For a great webpage on Tarapoto, complete with awesome pics, by an American woman who spent some time there, see here. The notion that the MRTA was finished after the hostage raid in 1998 is not true – as the century turned, they continued to build the movement in every province of Peru. One of the problems with the MRTA is that they never had much money. Even around Taratopo, where they had a lot of support, they were a sorry sight, often sickly, pale, thin, and broke, wearing ragged clothes. Compared to that impotent picture, and Sendero’s madness and brutality, many of Peru’s peasants think that the FARC are just dandy. Even in Colombia, the FARC has been much more sane and less brutal towards the masses than Sendero was. As such, you can now go into areas of Colombia where everyone for miles around is in the FARC in one way or another, every villager in every town, every ragged farmer in every field with a gun hidden in his clothes, every woman in apron cooking in her kitchen. And it has been this way for decades in Colombia in these areas. This is the reality of FARC’s roots in rural Colombia. The interview with Shakespeare, who is hostile to revolution, nevertheless makes clear that Peru is one nasty place. It is the most racist country he has ever been to, Shakespeare opines. Sure it is. If someone from a lower class (or caste, really) asks a white elite for the time of day in Lima, the rich man will not even speak to the lower-class person. In fact, he won’t speak to him virtually no matter what he wants. The Indians have been killed, enslaved, raped, abused, ignored and basically slaughtered with hunger, disease and out and out murder since Pizarro stepped ashore in 1521. Shakespeare went to Ayacucho, where a white man had been murdered by Indians a week before. Everywhere he goes, the Indians whisper pistaco – the name for a mysterious white giant that murders Indians for their fat which he uses to run Western industry. Pistaco does not exist, but the Indians think he does. Shakespeare said that Sendero started a myth that Tupac Amaru’s body, quartered and buried over 200 years before, was slowly growing underground and would regenerate as he rose with Sendero’s victory. The materialist Sendero would never make up such a story. The story could only come from the Indians themselves, and I am sure they believed it. And in many ways, Peru today is the same as at any time in the decades and centuries after Pizarro waded ashore 500 years ago. Until that changes, Peru will always be in a revolutionary situation. Peru created Sendero; it could not have grown in any sane or decent society. If Best was evil, so was the land that made him. The crimes of the Sendero Frankenstein rest in large part with its creator, the horror called Peruvian society itself. Sendero carried out 96 actions last year, about 2 a week; clearly, it is still alive, though nowadays they are fighting to get their leaders and cadres released and negotiate and end to the war – reasonable demands that no Peruvian state will cotton to. A few years back, they were recruiting again in Lima’s horrid shantytowns (photo here). Meanwhile, FARC expands with great success across Peru. They combine this success with a group in Venezuela, FARV – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Venezuela – (which has 2,000-3,000 members but has not engaged in many actions yet) and another group in Ecuador called FARE – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Ecuador – mostly in the border area with Putamayo and just building a movement now. FARB – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Brazil – exists in the Dog’s Head region of Brazil where Peru, Brazil and Colombia all come together, building a movement once again. FARC also uses the border areas in Panama as an R and R area. The local Cuna Indians of the Darien are quite cooperative, but the Panamanian state has murdered some of them for allowing FARC to stay with them, though FARC has never done a thing in Panama. Recently, FARC has been spotted all the way over in far northern Guyana, where they are trying to tax the gold mining operations. This sighting implies that FARC also has a presence all across far northern Brazil. US media reports place FARC operatives recently in Bolivia, where they were giving political advice to groups associated with the new president Enrique Morales before his election. Despite recent offensives by the Colombian state, FARC is alive and well and expanding across much of Latin America. This as the radical version of Sendero peters out. Revolution is a bloody thing. If states don’t want 12 year old kids carrying AK-47’s professing revolution while roaming their slums*, they need only create a semblance of a decent society. There is no end of history, and you can only push a man so far before he rises up to strike you back. *A Salvadoran man I met in a San Mateo, California restaurant in 2001 told me he saw a 12 yr old boy in the San Salvador slums carrying an automatic weapon and chanting revolutionary slogans in 1969. He went home and told his family, and his parents resolved to sent him out of the country, saying that revolution was surely on its way. Their omniscience was keen. 11 years later, it exploded in full force via the FMLN*. *This blog strongly supported the FMLN in El Salvador to the point of contributing money to their weapons fund. We also strongly support the FARC in Colombia, all of its regional split-offs and the MRTA in Peru. We do not support the project of Sendero Luminoso as they kill people who are completely innocent. All support for groups is with certain reservations.

Words of the Day

Repost from the old site. Etiolated and Pecksniffian. Both used in the comments section by avant-garde artist whodareswings. Etiolated refers to what happens to a plant when it is deprived of sunlight. The stems grow tall and wiry, and chlorophyll seems to leave the plant, giving it a ghostly, green-white look. Whoredareswings attempted to use it describe people, and said it meant “effete”, but I could not find any good definitions. Pecksniffian is a wonderful word. It refers to a character, or three characters, in the 1844 Charles Dickens novel Martin Chuzzlewit. I’ve never read the book, but the Wikipedia synopsis was pretty delightful. That man could write a story!

The online dictionary defines it as:
Unctuously hypocritical, sanctimonious.
And offers the following example:
His book suffers from excessively long harangues against Pecksniffian prigs and temperance types who, he claims, are still trying to ruin our fun.” (Mark D. Fefer, Seattle Weekly, January 22, 2003).
It describes the main character as:
Seth Pecksniff, a character with a holier-than-thou attitude in Charles Dickens’s 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit, was no angel, though he certainly tried to pass himself off as one. Pecksniff liked to preach morality and brag about his own virtue, but in reality he was a deceptive rascal who would use any means to advance his own selfish interests. It didn’t take long for Pecksniff’s reputation for canting sanctimoniousness to leave its mark on English; “Pecksniffian” has been used as a synonym of “hypocritical” since 1849.

Gerald Kersh, Kickass British Noir Crime Novelist

I never knew there was such a thing as British crime noir fiction! Amazing. Gerald Kersh was said to be one Hell of a writer, but he’s almost completely forgotten.

From an early work, Night and the City, written in 1938 when he was only 27 years old. Centers around seedy London districts, mostly around Piccadilly Square. Characters are criminals, pimps, thieves, blackmailers, con artists, bar owners, gamblers, bookies, etc.

Check out this kickass noir crime novel prose:

“He had highly developed intuitions, proceeding from long and cumulative experience of the customs of the City. I have mentioned how he could appraise a footstep. He could, by a similar method of spontaneous reasoning, read a face, interpret an expression, calculate how much money you were in the habit of spending, or even decide by the look of you which restaurant or café you would probably frequent.

He saw London as a kind of Inferno – a series of concentric areas with Picadilly Circus as the ultimate center.”

“Bagrag’s Cellar is a dragnet through which the undercurrent of night life continually filters. It is choked with low organisms, pallid and distorted, unknown to the light of day, and not to be tolerated in healthy society . . . .

Half-exhausted people throw up spasms of febrile energy: they rise in groups without purpose, move round, then sink back again, like stirred-up filth on the bottom of a pond. . .To take a deep breath in Bagrag’s Cellar, now, is like inhaling the combined vapors of a distillery, a dosshouse, and a burning tobacco factory.”

“This woman had something about her that was indescribably terrifying.

Imagine the death mask of Julius Caesar, plastered with rouge, and stuck with a pair of eyes as small, as flat, and as bright as newly cut cross sections of .38-caliber bullets; marked with eyebrows that ran together in a straight black bar: and surmounted by a million diabolical black hairs that sprang in a nightmarish cascade up out of her skull, like a dark fountain of accumulated wickedness squeezed out by the pressure of her corsets.”

“Now, my precious; people love to see other people behaving like idiots, but not seeing themselves doing the same thing. No mirrors except in the lavatories, and there we’re going to have pink mirrors, see?. . .They mustn’t see ’emselves in their true colors, my love. When they go out to be sick, let ’em look as if they’re having a good time.”

“Vi yawned, and from between her pale, painted lips there proceeded a breath such as might come from a pathological specimen in a jar, when the alcohol is evaporating. . . Her head against the pillow was a study in all the indefinable pale colors of debauch.

The pillow case was gray, but Vi’s face was grayer, tinged with the chlorotic greeny-yellow of anemia. Rubbed smears of yesterday’s rouge gave emphasis to this pallor. Under the laid-on red, her lips were pale pink, and her teeth appeared yellow in the daylight.

The penciled lines of her eyebrows had been rubbed off on to the blanket; the metallic green paint with which she colored her eyelids had become mixed with the blue mascara of her lashes, in an unearthly and poisonous bruise color picked out with flecks of silver. This was trickling down into the hollows of her eyes. One of her false eyelashes had come loose, and swung precariously against her cheek as she blinked. She seemed to be liquefying, falling to pieces.”

“Every film he had ever seen, and every book he had ever read, rushed together in his brain to form one blazing and magnificent composite, in which he, Fabian, fantastically enlarged, fantastically dressed, leaned backwards in a wild photomontage of champagne bubbles, limousines, diamonds, galloping horses, baize tables, and beautiful women; all whirling and weaving in a deluge of white and yellow chips, and large bank notes; an eternal reduplication of breasts and legs of very conceivable shape, size, and color.”

“What was it? Was it that, for the first time in his life, he had become aware of the appalling burden of accumulating lies with which he loaded his soul from hour to hour–the closing coils of deceit which he spun about himself day after day?

There passed through his mind a vision of life free from vanity, fiction, and subterfuge. . .a bygone period in his life when black was black and white was white; when one sinned, and confessed, and breathed again. ‘Why do I always have to start these tales? They aren’t necessary!’ he said to himself.”

Trollope?

The critical view of Trollope is that he has not aged well, and was never much of a novelist to start with, lacking much talent other than logorrhea. His books were huge sellers in the Victorian Era, and some other writers even praised him. But he has not weathered well with time with critics.

Nevertheless, he is still very widely read for a guy who wrote 150 years ago. He’s nearly as widely read as Dickens. And his modern day fans love him to bits.

So what’s the verdict? Does he suck or is he cool?

Who Was the First Novelist in English? What Was the First Novel?

Great question.

My usual answer to the first question is Daniel Defoe, and my typical answer to the second question is Moll Flanders (1722).

Defoe seems to be correct, though a better answer to #2 would be Robinson Crusoe, which predated by Moll Flanders by a whole three years (1719).

Interesting that about a century goes by between the end of Shakespearean drama, which one would have thought would have spurred something as great as the novel, until the first real novel. What happened in between. More plays, I think. Poetry, Milton, etc. Tons of religious nuttiness, lots of kings and queens, the usual early civilizationist grapplings.. The colonization of the Americas. Lots of stuff. But no novels. Funny, that.

Anyone who has an earlier English novelist or novel please speak up.

"Liberation," by Alpha Unit

Henry Miller wrote a novel over seventy years ago in which the narrator spoke fondly and admiringly of prostitutes – and low-rent prostitutes at that. One of them was quite exuberant in her whoredom – “a whore all the way through,” the narrator says proudly, because she acted the part “with feeling,” even though it was a part she acted for anybody. The novel was Tropic of Cancer. The narrator is an expatriate American writer, committed due to circumstance to live in the present, with a focus on the satisfaction of bodily needs, sort of the way animals live (at one point, he declares himself, happily, to be “inhuman”). The descriptions he gives of how these needs were satisfied – especially those satisfied by prostitutes – shocked and mortified several states and the U.S. Post Office, leading to an obscenity trial that eventually produced a ruling in the publisher’s favor in 1964. I’ve read the opinion that this ruling ushered in what some call the Sexual Revolution – a distinction it shares with some other cultural shifts in post-World War II America. At the very least, it was part of a trend toward more and more openness in the discussion of sex in the United States. Those who came along in the generations after Tropic of Cancer was published sometimes applauded it as an example of a modernistic, stream-of-consciousness style of literature that broke through convention in the same way some earlier novels had. But a lot of people were impressed with it in a different way – they were appalled by the graphic descriptions of sex acts, in the context of sordid encounters, and by the way Henry Miller wrote about women. Women were “cunts.” If they weren’t “cunts” they were “sluts” or “bitches.” But they were mainly “cunts,” whether they were whores or respectable. Feminists have long had a problem with Henry Miller, n’est-ce pas? Seen as some kind of maven of sexual liberation (and perhaps excess), Miller was interviewed during the 1960s by Esquire magazine and others. Naturally, he was asked for his assessment of the “new” sexual climate in America. The interviewer David Dury asked Miller if he was bored with sex – referring to the openness with which Americans could speak of it and partake of it. Miller responded:

One can’t get bored with sex. But one is bored with making such a tremendous issue of it. This constant harping on sex all the time is so immature, not just sexually, but socially and politically. It’s as though we’re a race of adolescents.

Dury tells Miller, that it is he, Miller, who harps on it in his books, but Miller’s not having it.

I harped on trying to get at the whole truth of one man: myself. Sex was a big part of that, but no matter how you add it up, in pages or print or words or volumes, it was only a part. It just happened that this was the part that had shock value.

Miller agrees with Dury that all the talk about sex is better than the old ignorance and secrecy that once prevailed. He adds:

But because in the past we have been so Goddamned backward about sex, this revolution is causing sex to become a preoccupation. This I find sad, and even deplorable in many ways.

According to Miller, sex is now a commodity, but what’s worse is that women were becoming commodities. There is a lot of promiscuity, but no passion or vitality. Miller lets Dury in on what things used to be like in the “bad” old days:

During my time, the girls were so shut in, and you were always watched. Now everybody’s free about sex, but they’re shut in in other ways. In the old days the great difference was that when we were committing these – What are they calling them? Adulteries? Fornications? Illicit sex? Ridiculous words! When we did it, we did it! We didn’t sit around and talk about it first, intellectualize it. There was always pleasure involved. I mean, great fun! For everybody! Joy, do you see? That’s the big difference, that element of joy! Joy in sex! You’d have to be a blind man not to see it. In my time, either they weren’t having any sex because of too much guilt, or they were having wonderfully joyous sex. Now everyone’s having sex, the guilty ones probably more than anyone – but it’s so joyless, so much of it.

Dury asks Miller, “Do you consider sex without love to be harmful?” To which Miller replies:

There’s nothing wrong with sex without love. But much more is needed, because just to have a good sex fling isn’t enough, there has to be something more. A man has to fall in love. He has to want something more of the woman and see more in her than an object to be used.

Does this sound like any misogynist you know? The next question is, “What exactly do you think men are missing in the way they relate to women sexually now?” I love Miller’s response, as most women probably would!

They’re missing a lot of things. For one, there’s no adoration for women! Now there’s another word I would like to emphasize – adoration! Where do we have any adoration today in our talk about women and sex? I believe in adoration, not only in relation to women, but in relation to men as well, where the man above you is someone you adore and admire and want to emulate, the adoration for a master. This is completely lost in our society today. Instead of adoration for women, men seem to be just always on the chase.

This was all from a man who was seen as someone who despised women and saw sex as nothing but an outlet for a crude impulse – a conclusion people arrived at on the basis of a work of art. Miller gave this interview back in 1966. I can only imagine what he would think of the way a lot of men see women today. The contempt with which some of these pickup artists speak of women would probably be gravely disturbing to him! But, as always, the problem is not that simple. The feminism that opened so many doors for women and created so many opportunities for them – a development Miller looked upon favorably – has contributed enormously to the disgust so many men exhibit toward women. In another interview with Dury, Henry Miller expressed a fear that the sexual revolution was “masculinizing” women – something that would be to their detriment. With foresight, he told his interviewer:

These aggressive females, particularly the American type, aren’t improving their situation vis-a-vis the male…I am sincerely convinced that a woman’s greatest reward comes from the role of – what shall we call it? – stimulator and comforter. Now if she takes the greater independence and equality necessary for her own development, and becomes masculinized by it, then she is the tragic loser, as much or more than the man. She loses her powers as the seductress, when she becomes masculinized…She’s best when she’s that way. And it’s also best for the man. It brings out all that is masculine about him.

But Dury isn’t giving up entirely on the idea of female independence and equality. Couldn’t these make the woman a better seductress? Miller answers:

Yes, it really should. But if it makes her equally aggressive in the male sense, instead of truly seductive, then it will be like two machines coming together…put a coin in the slot and bang! bang! You see? The poetic prelude and the art of it all will be gone. Just get it over with, bim-bam! I still believe a man really wants to woo a woman. It gives him great satisfaction, don’t you think?

Henry Miller dismissed the idea that he had ever set out to be some kind of expert on sex or love. But for someone who for decades endured a reputation for being some kind of hypermasculine woman-hater, the truth about him is quite refreshing. Could it be that lurking inside your average latter-day misogynist is a romantic who, sadly, has given up?

References

Miller, H., Kersnowski, F. & Hughes, A. 1994. Conversations with Henry Miller. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

“Liberation,” by Alpha Unit

Henry Miller wrote a novel over seventy years ago in which the narrator spoke fondly and admiringly of prostitutes – and low-rent prostitutes at that. One of them was quite exuberant in her whoredom – “a whore all the way through,” the narrator says proudly, because she acted the part “with feeling,” even though it was a part she acted for anybody.

The novel was Tropic of Cancer. The narrator is an expatriate American writer, committed due to circumstance to live in the present, with a focus on the satisfaction of bodily needs, sort of the way animals live (at one point, he declares himself, happily, to be “inhuman”). The descriptions he gives of how these needs were satisfied – especially those satisfied by prostitutes – shocked and mortified several states and the U.S. Post Office, leading to an obscenity trial that eventually produced a ruling in the publisher’s favor in 1964.

I’ve read the opinion that this ruling ushered in what some call the Sexual Revolution – a distinction it shares with some other cultural shifts in post-World War II America. At the very least, it was part of a trend toward more and more openness in the discussion of sex in the United States.

Those who came along in the generations after Tropic of Cancer was published sometimes applauded it as an example of a modernistic, stream-of-consciousness style of literature that broke through convention in the same way some earlier novels had.

But a lot of people were impressed with it in a different way – they were appalled by the graphic descriptions of sex acts, in the context of sordid encounters, and by the way Henry Miller wrote about women. Women were “cunts.” If they weren’t “cunts” they were “sluts” or “bitches.” But they were mainly “cunts,” whether they were whores or respectable.

Feminists have long had a problem with Henry Miller, n’est-ce pas?

Seen as some kind of maven of sexual liberation (and perhaps excess), Miller was interviewed during the 1960s by Esquire magazine and others. Naturally, he was asked for his assessment of the “new” sexual climate in America.

The interviewer David Dury asked Miller if he was bored with sex – referring to the openness with which Americans could speak of it and partake of it. Miller responded:

One can’t get bored with sex. But one is bored with making such a tremendous issue of it. This constant harping on sex all the time is so immature, not just sexually, but socially and politically. It’s as though we’re a race of adolescents.

Dury tells Miller, that it is he, Miller, who harps on it in his books, but Miller’s not having it.

I harped on trying to get at the whole truth of one man: myself. Sex was a big part of that, but no matter how you add it up, in pages or print or words or volumes, it was only a part. It just happened that this was the part that had shock value.

Miller agrees with Dury that all the talk about sex is better than the old ignorance and secrecy that once prevailed. He adds:

But because in the past we have been so Goddamned backward about sex, this revolution is causing sex to become a preoccupation. This I find sad, and even deplorable in many ways.

According to Miller, sex is now a commodity, but what’s worse is that women were becoming commodities. There is a lot of promiscuity, but no passion or vitality.

Miller lets Dury in on what things used to be like in the “bad” old days:

During my time, the girls were so shut in, and you were always watched. Now everybody’s free about sex, but they’re shut in in other ways. In the old days the great difference was that when we were committing these – What are they calling them? Adulteries? Fornications? Illicit sex? Ridiculous words!

When we did it, we did it! We didn’t sit around and talk about it first, intellectualize it. There was always pleasure involved. I mean, great fun! For everybody! Joy, do you see? That’s the big difference, that element of joy! Joy in sex! You’d have to be a blind man not to see it.

In my time, either they weren’t having any sex because of too much guilt, or they were having wonderfully joyous sex. Now everyone’s having sex, the guilty ones probably more than anyone – but it’s so joyless, so much of it.

Dury asks Miller, “Do you consider sex without love to be harmful?” To which Miller replies:

There’s nothing wrong with sex without love. But much more is needed, because just to have a good sex fling isn’t enough, there has to be something more. A man has to fall in love. He has to want something more of the woman and see more in her than an object to be used.

Does this sound like any misogynist you know?

The next question is, “What exactly do you think men are missing in the way they relate to women sexually now?” I love Miller’s response, as most women probably would!

They’re missing a lot of things. For one, there’s no adoration for women! Now there’s another word I would like to emphasize – adoration! Where do we have any adoration today in our talk about women and sex? I believe in adoration, not only in relation to women, but in relation to men as well, where the man above you is someone you adore and admire and want to emulate, the adoration for a master.

This is completely lost in our society today. Instead of adoration for women, men seem to be just always on the chase.

This was all from a man who was seen as someone who despised women and saw sex as nothing but an outlet for a crude impulse – a conclusion people arrived at on the basis of a work of art.

Miller gave this interview back in 1966. I can only imagine what he would think of the way a lot of men see women today. The contempt with which some of these pickup artists speak of women would probably be gravely disturbing to him!

But, as always, the problem is not that simple. The feminism that opened so many doors for women and created so many opportunities for them – a development Miller looked upon favorably – has contributed enormously to the disgust so many men exhibit toward women. In another interview with Dury, Henry Miller expressed a fear that the sexual revolution was “masculinizing” women – something that would be to their detriment.

With foresight, he told his interviewer:

These aggressive females, particularly the American type, aren’t improving their situation vis-a-vis the male…I am sincerely convinced that a woman’s greatest reward comes from the role of – what shall we call it? – stimulator and comforter.

Now if she takes the greater independence and equality necessary for her own development, and becomes masculinized by it, then she is the tragic loser, as much or more than the man. She loses her powers as the seductress, when she becomes masculinized…She’s best when she’s that way. And it’s also best for the man. It brings out all that is masculine about him.

But Dury isn’t giving up entirely on the idea of female independence and equality. Couldn’t these make the woman a better seductress? Miller answers:

Yes, it really should. But if it makes her equally aggressive in the male sense, instead of truly seductive, then it will be like two machines coming together…put a coin in the slot and bang! bang! You see? The poetic prelude and the art of it all will be gone. Just get it over with, bim-bam! I still believe a man really wants to woo a woman. It gives him great satisfaction, don’t you think?

Henry Miller dismissed the idea that he had ever set out to be some kind of expert on sex or love. But for someone who for decades endured a reputation for being some kind of hypermasculine woman-hater, the truth about him is quite refreshing.

Could it be that lurking inside your average latter-day misogynist is a romantic who, sadly, has given up?

References

Miller, H., Kersnowski, F. & Hughes, A. 1994. Conversations with Henry Miller. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

“Before John Travolta, There Was Pulp Fiction,” by Alpha Unit

Upton Sinclair is probably best known as the author of The Jungle, a novel he wrote to draw attention to the living and working conditions of factory workers. Its depictions of what went on inside the meatpacking industry were its legacy (to the annoyance of Sinclair). But before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Upton Sinclair – like many other writers – wrote pulp fiction.

Pulp magazines were fiction magazines created expressly as entertainment for working-class people. (They get their name from the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.) There were many varieties of pulp fiction – science fiction, detective stories, mysteries, westerns, horror stories, superheroes, and so on. But the pulps are most often associated with its more sensationalistic stories, as well as sensationalistic cover art. The “spicy” genre of pulp fiction featured damsels in distress pouring half-naked out of what’s left of their clothes, in the clutches of human or un-human predators!

Pulp publishers thrived by keeping everything cheap. In addition to keeping their printing methods and paper cheap, they paid authors as little as possible. One advantage, though, was that pulps paid upon acceptance instead of on publication. This made them appealing not just to beginning writers but to well-known writers who needed fast money.

Pulp fiction reached the height of its popularity during the twenties and thirties. World War II marked the beginning of its decline. Paper shortages because of the war made it more expensive to make, and after the war, it faced competition from other forms of popular entertainment. One of these was comic books, which some see, perhaps, as the natural heir to pulp.

"Before John Travolta, There Was Pulp Fiction," by Alpha Unit

Upton Sinclair is probably best known as the author of The Jungle, a novel he wrote to draw attention to the living and working conditions of factory workers. Its depictions of what went on inside the meatpacking industry were its legacy (to the annoyance of Sinclair). But before becoming a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Upton Sinclair – like many other writers – wrote pulp fiction. Pulp magazines were fiction magazines created expressly as entertainment for working-class people. (They get their name from the cheap wood pulp paper they were printed on.) There were many varieties of pulp fiction – science fiction, detective stories, mysteries, westerns, horror stories, superheroes, and so on. But the pulps are most often associated with its more sensationalistic stories, as well as sensationalistic cover art. The “spicy” genre of pulp fiction featured damsels in distress pouring half-naked out of what’s left of their clothes, in the clutches of human or un-human predators! Pulp publishers thrived by keeping everything cheap. In addition to keeping their printing methods and paper cheap, they paid authors as little as possible. One advantage, though, was that pulps paid upon acceptance instead of on publication. This made them appealing not just to beginning writers but to well-known writers who needed fast money. Pulp fiction reached the height of its popularity during the twenties and thirties. World War II marked the beginning of its decline. Paper shortages because of the war made it more expensive to make, and after the war, it faced competition from other forms of popular entertainment. One of these was comic books, which some see, perhaps, as the natural heir to pulp.

PC Gone Bonkers Episode #1,509,472

You’ve got to be kidding.

This must be a joke, right? I’m sorry if any Black person thinks this is a good idea. Blacks are turning into a nation of whining crybabies. Considering how tough and aggro Black culture and many Blacks are, this is ridiculous. It’s like you’ve got this tough, hardass guy covered with tattoos, and someone calls him a name and he starts breaking down in tears and crying for Mommy.

This is what I picture Black people doing nowadays.

Black America: “Mommy, mommy, I just heard an n-word! My ears hurt! Waaaaaaaa!!”

Black Mommy: “Oh, I’m sorry baby. Here’s some cotton for your poor hurt ears. It’s sad that these evil words even exist. Why can’t we just give these words a lethal injection so we Blacks can sleep in peace? Do you want to sleep with Mommy for the next few nights?”

Black America: “Yes, yes, Mommy! I’m afraid of the dark! The dark is Black, and Black is the same color as the n-word, so every time I see Black, I think of the n-word!”

Black Mommy: “I’m so sorry, Black America baby.” Rubs its soft, curly head.

“What’s Eating Rufus Griswold?” by Alpha Unit

Rufus Griswold is a fascinating character, but hardly anyone has ever heard of him anymore. Most of the events below were happening in the 1830’s and 1840’s. He was part of the Young America movement along with Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, Lowell, Bryant and some others. This movement sought to create a real American literature rooted in the continent. Logically, it also sought to break away from Britain.

There was also a big debate about Classics in education at this time. Classics had always been a big part of education in Britain, if not in Europe as a whole. The new American literary crowd sought to do away with or reduce the level of Classical study by US students. Studying the Classics was also an Elitist thing, since the son of your average American worker or farmer could hardly understand Homer or Juvenal. So getting rid of Classics was a way to democratize education.

AU touches on Griswold’s lies about Poe’s character. These lies continued in almost every Poe biography for the next 100 hundred years, but finally historians got the truth mostly sorted out from the fantasies. It’s interesting that Poe’s fans loved these scurrilous and character-assassinating lies, since they made him seem “evil,” and they wanted to see Poe as an evil man, the better to go along with terrifying stories.

The part about mourning his dead wife is incredible. I think he must have set a Guinness world record for Greatest Mourner of all Time.

He was a defamer and character assassin, variously described by contemporaries as a liar, “irritable,” “vindictive,” “an ass.” He was a forger and a cheat. A licensed clergyman who was, by all accounts, as thoroughly un-Christian as they come.

He was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, newspaper editor and literary critic. He adored and detested with a passion. And nothing could excite him more than his intended target’s demise.

Griswold is usually given credit for being one of the first influential people to push the teaching of American poetry alongside English poetry in American schools. He is also usually noted for publicly supporting copyright law at a time it was being considered (his reputation being that he shamelessly stole from other writers).

But if not for his association with the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, no one would probably know or care who he was. It was in his dealings with Poe that he achieved lasting notoriety. Poe’s death became Griswold’s shining moment, in a sense.

Both Griswold and Poe were writers with backgrounds in journalism. Poe submitted poems to Griswold for inclusion in an anthology of American poetry; Griswold included several of them. Poe then arranged to write a review of the anthology.

Poe’s review included some mild criticisms of the book; but even these were evidently too much for Griswold. In addition, Poe expressed his true feelings about the book in private letters. In one, he called it “a most outrageous humbug,” and, in another, he divulged his belief that Griswold’s help in getting the review published was intended as a bribe for a favorable review.

These events were the opening salvo in a war of recriminations between Griswold and Poe, a war that outlasted Poe.

Once Poe was departed, Griswold’s hostility toward him took on a new and almost surreal twist. He pseudonymously published an obituary of Poe that amounted to character assassination. But Griswold was just getting warmed up. He subsequently made the claim – a dubious one, it appears – that he was Poe’s literary executor and was therefore authorized to edit a posthumous collection of Poe’s works, for the supposed benefit of Poe’s survivors.

Poe’s survivors didn’t see any of the profits from the collection. If that wasn’t enough, a third volume included more attacks on Poe. According to one account:

[Griswold] even forged letters from Poe to exaggerate his own role as Poe’s benefactor and to alienate Poe’s friends.

Poe’s choice not to return to the University of Virginia became expulsion for wild and reckless behavior. Poe’s honorable discharge from the army became desertion.

Once again, Poe’s friends came to his defense, but Griswold had done his work well. For every magazine that carried a condemnation of Griswold’s infamy, three repeated his titillating slanders.

Talk about an inability to “let it go.”

There was no escape, apparently, from being the focus of Griswold’s passions, not for Poe, but also not for his first wife, Caroline, who might have elicited more devotion from him in death than she ever had while alive.

Upon being informed that both she and their third child had died not long after delivery, he became the soul of despondency.

Deeply shocked, Griswold traveled by train alongside her coffin, refusing to leave her side for 30 hours. When fellow passengers urged him to try to sleep, he answered by kissing her dead lips and embracing her, his two children crying next to him. He refused to leave the cemetery after her funeral, even after he other mourners had left, until forced to do so by a relative.

Griswold had difficulty believing she had died and often dreamed of their reunion. Forty days after her entombment, he entered her vault, cut off a lock of her hair, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and wept for several hours, staying by her side until a friend found him 30 hours later.

A colorful character, and one who apparently attached some significance to doing something for 30 hours.

One scholar who has documented some of Griswold’s behavior suggests that Griswold was mentally ill. He does come across as obsessive. And those he felt strongly about couldn’t even be the focus of attention upon their deaths.

When I review some of the descriptions of narcissism, it’s very tempting to go through a checklist and say,”Yep – that’s Griswold, all right!” But does diagnosing him really make him any more sympathetic? Isn’t anybody just a good old-fashioned son of a bitch anymore?

"What's Eating Rufus Griswold?" by Alpha Unit

Rufus Griswold is a fascinating character, but hardly anyone has ever heard of him anymore. Most of the events below were happening in the 1830’s and 1840’s. He was part of the Young America movement along with Longfellow, Thoreau, Emerson, Lowell, Bryant and some others. This movement sought to create a real American literature rooted in the continent. Logically, it also sought to break away from Britain. There was also a big debate about Classics in education at this time. Classics had always been a big part of education in Britain, if not in Europe as a whole. The new American literary crowd sought to do away with or reduce the level of Classical study by US students. Studying the Classics was also an Elitist thing, since the son of your average American worker or farmer could hardly understand Homer or Juvenal. So getting rid of Classics was a way to democratize education. AU touches on Griswold’s lies about Poe’s character. These lies continued in almost every Poe biography for the next 100 hundred years, but finally historians got the truth mostly sorted out from the fantasies. It’s interesting that Poe’s fans loved these scurrilous and character-assassinating lies, since they made him seem “evil,” and they wanted to see Poe as an evil man, the better to go along with terrifying stories. The part about mourning his dead wife is incredible. I think he must have set a Guinness world record for Greatest Mourner of all Time. He was a defamer and character assassin, variously described by contemporaries as a liar, “irritable,” “vindictive,” “an ass.” He was a forger and a cheat. A licensed clergyman who was, by all accounts, as thoroughly un-Christian as they come. He was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, newspaper editor and literary critic. He adored and detested with a passion. And nothing could excite him more than his intended target’s demise. Griswold is usually given credit for being one of the first influential people to push the teaching of American poetry alongside English poetry in American schools. He is also usually noted for publicly supporting copyright law at a time it was being considered (his reputation being that he shamelessly stole from other writers). But if not for his association with the American poet Edgar Allan Poe, no one would probably know or care who he was. It was in his dealings with Poe that he achieved lasting notoriety. Poe’s death became Griswold’s shining moment, in a sense. Both Griswold and Poe were writers with backgrounds in journalism. Poe submitted poems to Griswold for inclusion in an anthology of American poetry; Griswold included several of them. Poe then arranged to write a review of the anthology. Poe’s review included some mild criticisms of the book; but even these were evidently too much for Griswold. In addition, Poe expressed his true feelings about the book in private letters. In one, he called it “a most outrageous humbug,” and, in another, he divulged his belief that Griswold’s help in getting the review published was intended as a bribe for a favorable review. These events were the opening salvo in a war of recriminations between Griswold and Poe, a war that outlasted Poe. Once Poe was departed, Griswold’s hostility toward him took on a new and almost surreal twist. He pseudonymously published an obituary of Poe that amounted to character assassination. But Griswold was just getting warmed up. He subsequently made the claim – a dubious one, it appears – that he was Poe’s literary executor and was therefore authorized to edit a posthumous collection of Poe’s works, for the supposed benefit of Poe’s survivors. Poe’s survivors didn’t see any of the profits from the collection. If that wasn’t enough, a third volume included more attacks on Poe. According to one account:

[Griswold] even forged letters from Poe to exaggerate his own role as Poe’s benefactor and to alienate Poe’s friends. Poe’s choice not to return to the University of Virginia became expulsion for wild and reckless behavior. Poe’s honorable discharge from the army became desertion. Once again, Poe’s friends came to his defense, but Griswold had done his work well. For every magazine that carried a condemnation of Griswold’s infamy, three repeated his titillating slanders.

Talk about an inability to “let it go.” There was no escape, apparently, from being the focus of Griswold’s passions, not for Poe, but also not for his first wife, Caroline, who might have elicited more devotion from him in death than she ever had while alive. Upon being informed that both she and their third child had died not long after delivery, he became the soul of despondency.

Deeply shocked, Griswold traveled by train alongside her coffin, refusing to leave her side for 30 hours. When fellow passengers urged him to try to sleep, he answered by kissing her dead lips and embracing her, his two children crying next to him. He refused to leave the cemetery after her funeral, even after he other mourners had left, until forced to do so by a relative. Griswold had difficulty believing she had died and often dreamed of their reunion. Forty days after her entombment, he entered her vault, cut off a lock of her hair, kissed her on the forehead and lips, and wept for several hours, staying by her side until a friend found him 30 hours later.

A colorful character, and one who apparently attached some significance to doing something for 30 hours. One scholar who has documented some of Griswold’s behavior suggests that Griswold was mentally ill. He does come across as obsessive. And those he felt strongly about couldn’t even be the focus of attention upon their deaths. When I review some of the descriptions of narcissism, it’s very tempting to go through a checklist and say,”Yep – that’s Griswold, all right!” But does diagnosing him really make him any more sympathetic? Isn’t anybody just a good old-fashioned son of a bitch anymore?

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