Recent reading: Steve Almond

Nobody writes funnier about sex than Steve Almond. In some of his stories -- the earlier ones, I suspect -- that's the whole point, frequently featuring a feckless male unable to rein in his phallus and thus following it into ridiculously bad relationships. But that's not always all: Almond has become such a master of the comedy of sexual desperation that he can use it as a device to tell other, less predictable stories. You'll want to read this collection, not so much for the title story or even the one after that (about another kind of feckless male, a widower who depended on his wife just to function) -- they're OK, and funny in a kind of sick way, but don't get put off by them from reading the others. Especially good: "How to Love a Republican" is full of wet, sloppy sex, but it is really about the utterly shameless lust for power and perversion of the political process in our 2000 presidential election (the narrator is a guy working for Bradley, the girl is an ambitious operative for McCain, scornful of Bush, but easily seduced into the Bush camp once it's clear that that's where the opportunities will be). And be sure to read "The Pass," a semiotic essay worthy of Roland Barthes (who was also a good story-teller). All but one of the stories are told from a guy's point-of-view, usually in first person. The exception is, I think, a successful representation of the same lustful desperation in a woman (maybe some woman who reads it can tell me if it sounds true; it did to me): "Geek Player, Love Slayer." Almond is really good.

Almond, Steve. My Life in Heavy Metal. New York: Grove Press, 2002.

Bio-terror of the state

I've been reading one of Henri Lefebvre's last books, The Production of Space, and so been reminded of the deeper crisis of our society. Now comes this important and distressingly accurate open letter from Giorgio Agamben, recently published in Le Monde:

Le Monde

Saturday 10 January 2004

The newspapers leave no doubt: from now on whoever wants to go to the United States with a visa will be put on file and will have to leave their fingerprints when they enter the country. Personally, I have no intention of submitting myself to such procedures and that's why I didn't wait to cancel the course I was supposed to teach at New York University in March.

I would like to explain the reasons for this refusal here, that is, why, in spite of the sympathy that has connected me to my American colleagues and their students for many years, I consider that this decision is at once necessary and without appeal and would hope that it will be shared by other European intellectuals and teachers.

It's not only the immediate superficial reaction to a procedure that has long been imposed on criminals and political defendants. If it were only that, we would certainly be morally able to share, in solidarity, the humiliating conditions to which so many human beings are subjected.

The essential does not lie there. The problem exceeds the limits of personal sensitivity and simply concerns the juridical-political status (it would be simpler, perhaps, to say bio-political) of citizens of the so-called democratic states where we live.

There has been an attempt the last few years to convince us to accept as the humane and normal dimensions of our existence, practices of control that had always been properly considered inhumane and exceptional.

Thus, no one is unaware that the control exercised by the state through the usage of electronic devices, such as credit cards or cell phones, has reached previously unimaginable levels.

All the same, it wouldn't be possible to cross certain thresholds in the control and manipulation of bodies without entering a new
bio-political era, without going one step further in what Michel
Foucault called the progressive animalization of man which is
established through the most sophisticated techniques.

Electronic filing of finger and retina prints, subcutaneous
tattooing, as well as other practices of the same type, are elements
that contribute towards defining this threshold. The security reasons
that are invoked to justify these measures should not impress us:
they have nothing to do with it. History teaches us how practices
first reserved for foreigners find themselves applied later to the
rest of the citizenry.

What is at stake here is nothing less than the new "normal"
bio-political relationship between citizens and the state. This
relation no longer has anything to do with free and active
participation in the public sphere, but concerns the enrolment and
the filing away of the most private and incommunicable aspect of
subjectivity: I mean the body's biological life.

These technological devices that register and identify naked life correspond to the media devices that control and manipulate public speech: between these two extremes of a body without words and words without a body, the space we once upon a time called politics is ever more scaled-down and tiny.

Thus, by applying these techniques and these devices invented for the dangerous classes to a citizen, or rather to a human being as such, states, which should constitute the precise space of political life, have made the person the ideal suspect, to the point that it's humanity itself that has become the dangerous class.

Some years ago, I had written that the West's political paradigm was no longer the city state, but the concentration camp, and that we had passed from Athens to Auschwitz. It was obviously a philosophical thesis, and not historic recital, because one could not confuse phenomena that it is proper, on the contrary, to distinguish.

I would have liked to suggest that tattooing at Auschwitz undoubtedly seemed the most normal and economic way to regulate the enrolment and registration of deported persons into concentration camps. The bio-political tattooing the United States imposes now to enter its territory could well be the precursor to what we will be asked to accept later as the normal identity registration of a good citizen in the state's gears and mechanisms. That's why we must oppose it.

Translated from Italian to French by Martin Rueff.
Giorgio Agamben is a philosopher and professor at the University of
Venice and New York University.

A still timely oration: MLK, Jr. on the war in Vietnam

Here is a fragment from a powerful denunciation of American aggression that is still apt, unfortunately. It was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, April 1967, at Manhattan's Riverside Church. It is best read after seeing the stunning interview-cum-documentary of Robert MacNamara, "The Fog of War." Or after reeling from the lies and spin still emanating from the White House to justify current aggressions and our government's strenuous efforts to keep democracy (in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Florida) from falling into the hands of the people.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. The need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. With such activity in mind, the words of John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.

Unfortunately, the work still lies before us. For a good start, see the entire speech, published on Thursday, January 15, 2004 by CommonDreams.org: Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam

Recent reading: Peter Marris

Who knew that urban planning could involve sexual intrigue and murder? Back in 1988, sociologist and urban planner Peter Marris wrote a witty, sad allegorical novel about the disasters of urban planning in Africa, The Dreams of General Jerusalem. As a novel (colorful characters, lots of action) it's at least as good as Graham Greene's didactic The Power and the Glory, and the sociological thinking behind it is certainly sounder.

Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, & the resolute doubt

Last night, to find my way to sleep, I opened my bedside poetry anthology at random and found a dozen poems by Marianne Moore. They puzzled me -- they are odd, metrically, and odd in their images, but clearly the work of an intelligence that sees something beyond the words. Then I remembered that Sunday's New York Times Book Review had her picture on the cover, and I fetched and read Brad Leithauser's review of a new edition of her work. He confirmed my impression of the oddness, and got me to re-read those he said were among his favorites, "What Are Years?", "Nevertheless" and "The Mind Is an Enchanting Thing." I too like "What Are Years?", especially "... And whence/ is courage: the unanswered question,/ the resolute doubt..."

It is perhaps the same "overwhelming question" in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.

"Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" J. Allen asks (or is asked; it's never clear who's speaking here). Yes, we dare, if we have resolute doubt.

My bedside anthology, by the way, is the 1955 edition of Modern American & Modern British Poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer (NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company). It was given to me as a prize "as winner of the English Usage Contest" my senior year in high school, 1959. The teachers who gave it to me are now long dead. But the book is still alive, and still surprises me.

Happy Three Kings Day!

Traditionally in Hispano- and Luso-America (that is, before they were totally overwhelmed by U.S. Santa Claus-ism), January 6 has been the day of final celebration of the long Christmas season, the day that children leave out hay for the camels of the Three Wise Men who will leave them gifts. To get the reyes magos in the mood, children dress up to represent them and go house to house serenading in joyous beggary (you're supposed to give them something sweet when they sing at your door). So here's hoping that Melchor, Baltasar and Gaspar have been good to you today! (Did you remember the hay for their camels?)

Recent reading: Rubén Darío

Rubén Darío (Nicaragua, 1867-1916) was a literary movement all by himself, as was his somewhat older contemporary the Cuban poet José Martí (1853-1895). An essential notion of modernismo (as Darío described his style) was that each poet must be himself (if there were any women poets in this literary world, they seem to have gone unnoted). Therefore each was his own movement, or rather, his own unique burst of feeling. Reading Darío is to travel to another time, when the litterati of Spanish-speaking America made peace with the litterati of Spain, seeking a republic of letters that would transcend the petty little terrestrial republics from which they came and find universal harmony above a world that was in turmoil from the introduction of electricity, the gatling gun, the telegraph, the motorcar.
Rubén Darío, Antología poética

Recent reading: Ann Cummins

I've enjoyed the 12 stories in Ann Cummins' collection, and recommend them. Half appeared earlier in either McSweeney's (the weirder stories) or The New Yorker, the others in smaller journals. The p.o.v. character is usually female, often adolescent -- either "white" or Navajo -- and the landscapes of desert and mountains of Arizona are sharply observed. The power dynamics involve older males (sometimes just an older brother, sometimes a more sinister, more powerful figure, in one a goofy, hapless victim) and younger females, "Indians" and "whites," bosses and flunkies. I thought about these stories again this morning when I read the NYT article headlined "Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention" -- about how the ordinary rebellion of ordinary kids gets criminalized because the school systems are so starved for funds they can no longer afford guidance counselors or other services, and because there are no decent jobs for those kids who would rather not be in school anyway. Ann Cummins knows this territory. For my further comments, see the note in my "Fiction Readings" page on Ann Cummins, Red Ant House.

New Year's Resolution 2004: more focus

Resolved: To keep this blog on topic, i.e., "literature & politics." By "politics" I mean the power dynamics in a society, whether the actors are classes, races, genders or clans, even when these forces don't consciously organize themselves as parties. Mainly what interests me is the politics assumed by or implied by poetry and fiction, and the poets and narrators who most interest me are those who are aware of those implications.

So I'm going to try to refrain from sounding off about politics without literature, or literature without mentioning its politics. And that's why for now I'm replacing my old slogan (which was an inversion of a passage from Marx) with these famous verses, from William Carlos Williams:

My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

For a longer excerpt from the poem, see Asphodel, That Greeny Flower

P.S.: For those of you who read Spanish, acabo de reorganizar la Pequeña Biblioteca Comentada, y de agregarle otra narrativa de Mario Vargas Llosa.

The year that was: a blog-by-blog review

Getting this weblog up was one of my New Year's resolutions for 2003.

Venezuela

One of my first blogs, on January 2 was about the turmoil in Venezuela. I still think I was right then, about the general lines of the conflict. One of my resolutions for 2004 is to analyze that situation in greater depth. (You can view the original if you click on "Archive" on the left and go to 2003/01/02. See also Hugo Chávez' triple struggle).

World literature

Another of my 2004 resolutions is to learn more poetry "by heart" (which is much better than learning it "by head") -- if not a poem a day, as close as I can manage. It's a wonderful exercise -- even if I later forget a line or a stanza, the process of repeating it and listening to the poem's music and its several meanings helps me understand it, and in the longer run may build my confidence to commit poetry myself. I started a couple of weeks ago with Robert Frost's "Birches" -- a joyous poem about, I think, mortality and bouncing back. Then I picked up a book I had looked into many times but never before tried to read with care, seeking something that sang to me so that I would want to learn it: Pablo Neruda's Canto general (1949), which is a whole history of Latin America in verse. Then T. S. Eliot (so far, about half of "The Lovesong of J. Allen Prufrock," which is delicious), William Carlos Williams, "The Poor" -- not my favorite of his, but I had only a scanty selection available in an anthology on my shelves. Next I turned to one of the most famous voices of the late 19th century, Nicaragua's (and the world's) Rubén Darío. I'm sure every second adult and school child in Nicaragua has learned by heart much more of Darío than I aspire to, but when next I'm there I'll be able to join in on the choruses of "Juventud, divino tesoro,/ ¡Ya te vas para no volver!/Cuando quiero llorar no lloro,/ y a veces lloro sin querer." (Venezuelan writer Miguel Otero Silva assumed everybody would get the reference when he titled a novel Cuando quiero llorar no lloro -- I didn't get it in 1987, when I read the novel.)

For 2004, I resolve to include more fiction and poetry in Spanish in my reading. In 2003, I commented on Gabriel García Márquez' memoir, Vivir para contarla (in "Archive," 2003/01/04). In English, you can find my blogs on Richard Powers, Three Farmers On Their Way to a Dance (01/13); Stephen Crane, Red Badge of Courage (01/20), and several others -- but just go to my Fiction Readings page for a compendium.

Movies

During the year, I made brief comments on several movies. You can find them all gathered at Film & Theater Notes.

Ecological disaster

Horrible oil spill in Galicia noted 01/07; we were in Spain (though on the opposite coast) when it happened.

Wars on terror (or to promote it?

I first "blogged" against the then-pending war on Iraq on 01/12. I'm still agin it.

Ground Zero, memorial, reconstruction

See Susana Torre's entry in the memorial contest, and my blog of 2003/12/10.

My fiction

I started the year with great expectations for publishing my novel, A Gift for the Sultan; for a description and how I came to write about Constantinople in 1402, check out blog for 01/08. I did give a reading from it in Brooklyn, and published two chapters as stories in Copperfield Review. Several agents asked to see sections, and one requested and eagerly read the whole thing -- but she was disappointed by the ending. I now think she was right, and I'm planning to add a 4th section before sending it out again. (That's another of my 2004 resolutions.) Meanwhile, besides the two publications in Copperfield, I have unrelated stories in Small Spiral Notebook and forthcoming in InkPot, and a couple of others submitted and pending response at other journals. An addendum to my novel-finishing resolution, I also want to revise or write and send out more stories to more journals in 2004.

My journalism and analysis

I don't believe there is any such thing as "nonfiction." All writing is fashioned deliberately by an artist or artisan of words (fiction derives from the past participle of Latin fingere, "to touch, form, mold").The difference is that when I present my work as journalism or analysis, I'm claiming that I didn't make the whole thing up (even though I did make up the form, the emphasis, the structure of the article). But to the matter: I began the year with an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times, blog 01/24. Later in the year, I also landed a contract to write articles for Monster.com; the first one is due Jan. 7, 2004, so I'd better get busy. However by far the biggest "analysis" writing project that I have going is the book on Latin American architecture and urbanism, co-written with architect Susana Torre and to be published by W. W. Norton. It's a very challenging, wide-ranging book touching on many disciplines, many centuries (I start with the Olmecs of A. D. 500 and we go on to the present day and beyond), over an enormous territory with two dozen countries. I made less progress on it than I'd planned; my resolution for 2004 is to finish the drafts of my parts of the book and help Susana edit her parts (as she will help me).