"Covering a strike in the cotton mills, when I was an extreme advocate for the working class, I slept in the house of a Portuguese laborer; above his bed was a tryptich, on one panel was the Virgin Mary, on the other Shirley Temple, and in the middle Karl Marx. Crane had no inclination, as he averred, to 'sum up the universe in one impressive pellet.'"
--Edward Dahlberg on Hart Crane, in Silvers, Robert B., and Barbara Epstein, eds. The Company They Kept. Writers on Unforgettable Friendships. New York: New York Review Books, 2006.
Dahlberg's appreciation of Crane is at once merciless ("heroic bathos...pages of bedlamite shrieks... a syntactical zany") and admiring:
"But then who can be the surd adder after these fleshed locutions: 'Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails...' Or not pity the spirit, thirty years old, only thirty-five months from his Caribbean winding-sheet: '… snow submerges an iron year.'"
And what do you suppose a "surd adder" might be? A voiceless garden snake? Or a computer program that "adds" a "surd" (as I infer from a Google search for the phrase)? The latter seems unlikely, since Dahlberg wrote this piece in 1966. I just don't know what he meant, but that is my problem, not his. Dahlberg sees his job as not to communicate but to express his truth, too sublime for ordinary language. Or ordinary readers. Fleshed locutions indeed.
Upshot: Both are worth reading, Hart Crane for the vivid images calling on all the senses, Edward Dahlberg for his cranky, witty, and deeply cultured -- bottomless, sometimes -- references.
2009/09/14
Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident - CNN.com
Harvard Crimson says Holocaust denial ad published by accident - CNN.com
Let's think about this. I'm not about to condemn something I haven't read, so I found the ad (above).
I didn't know about Smith. I found him in a Wikipedia article on holocaust denial:
In 1987, Bradley R. Smith founded a group called the Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH).[53] He is the former media director of the Institute for Historical Review.[54] In the United States, CODOH has repeatedly tried to place newspaper ads questioning whether the Holocaust happened, especially in college campus newspapers.[55] Some newspapers have accepted the ads, while others have rejected them.[56] Bradley Smith has more recently sought other avenues to promote Holocaust denial - with little success. In June 2007, the film "El Gran Tabu" ("The Great Taboo") by Bradley R. Smith was presented at the festival "Corto Creativo 07" in Mexico.[57] On September 8, 2009, The Harvard Crimson school paper ran a paid ad from Bradley R Smith. It was quickly criticized and an apology was issued from the editor, claiming it was a mistake.[58]I think suppression of holocaust denials is unjustifiable and obviously ineffective. For those who believe such stuff, the censorship is just further confirmation of the great Jewish conspiracy, so they are stimulated to become ever more vociferous. The evidence of mass murder of Jews by the Nazis and their allies seems to me undeniable, but people are perverse and will no doubt keep denying. It seems to me a better idea for the Crimson or any of us to try to give a reasoned response to Smith's questions.
Is it true that in Crusade in Europe DDE failed to mention what later got called "the holocaust"? If so, why might he have left it out? I can think of lots of likely reasons, but there must be biographers of Eisenhower or other historians who have a more precise idea of Eisenhower's motivations for writing his book. He published it in 1948, the year he became president of Columbia University, and was already being promoted as a future presidential candidate. My guess is that he wanted to tell a war story with himself as hero, as a campaign document. His nonmention of the facts (which may not even have been widely known yet) in such a book is therefore no indication of anything regarding the 5.7 million or 6 million or however many Jews were killed. They weren't part of his story.
Smith's other question is whether we can provide "with proof" the name of anyone killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. Surely that information is available (though we don't know what Smith would accept as "proof"). And there is no reason to limit ourselves to Auschwitz.
In short, I think it's much better to answer the questions than to try to deny the deniers. They just keep coming back. We should use the denials as an opportunity to make more people, especially younger people, aware of the overwhelming evidence of the shoah, its dimensions, its consequences and its lessons about what happens if we don't build institutions strong enough to prevent such mass exterminations. Because unfortunately, mass exterminations have continued for religious, ethnic or political differences since then, and will just go on unless we stop them.
2009/09/11
In memoriam
On this eighth anniversary, some of you may want to read my five-day journal, begun shortly after noon of that first day, of what it was like for us, so close to Ground Zero: Attack on New York.
2009/09/08
Fighting for a new America
My Zeitgenosse Charles Degelman has just posted a comment on why Obama is having such a hard time pushing health reform: Footprints. I think his main point is right and important:
I also believe he's right that if the reform fails, the inevitable collapse of our system will likely come sooner than it would otherwise. Though -- after Lehman Bros. and all the rest of it -- essential parts of the structures designed to enrich finance capitalists at the expense of everybody else have already collapsed. In the long run and on the macro scale, what happens to this reform may make little difference -- we are going to have to reconstruct our society on different principles, regardless. On the micro scale and in the shorter run, what happens to millions of American families, it's tremendously important. It's also a tremendously important battleground for deciding the shape of a new system.
But I'm not so sure about some of what Charlie says here. For example, "Capitalism in its imperialist stage (here since WWI), said Marx in 1848, will eventually lead to socialization." I don't find that in the Manifesto. I don't remember Marx talking about "imperialism." I don't think the term was even used as an analytic category in political economics until Hobson (1902), from whom Lenin picked it up 14 years later. Maybe it's in some other text of Marx that I've forgotten?
Also, his description of "blocs" is maybe OK but just as a starting point, rough approximation. The problem I have with that language is that "bloc" implies too much conscious intentionality, even a desire to conspire. It also implies too much internal harmony -- as though the people in each grouping didn't include cutthroat competitors and slavish minions.
As for Lenin's "Imperialism" -- it was useful politically then (1916) and maybe even up to World War II. Thereafter it becomes impossible to explain international conflicts without introducing another, wholly different set of variables, derived mainly from anthropology and psychology (Fanon, for example). Lenin was never particularly sensitive to ethnic issues (Stalin was, of course, perhaps partly because of his own minority origin, and long before either of them, Engels was acutely interested in the subject). Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, southeastern China, Bolivia, Ecuador, Sudan, ex-Yugoslavia and other places have surely been battered by the forces Lenin described, but their responses have been conditioned by ethnic and religious rituals and rage against humiliations that can only be understood within each culture.
Anyway, thanks, Charlie, for provoking these reflections. It's a worthwhile debate. It's about our future. And everybody else: Check out Charles Degelman's story in Above Ground, about how the life of one little boy in a working-class family is touched by the macro politics of the 1950s anti-Communist hysteria and the Rosenbergs' execution.
(On Zeitgenossen
, see my earlier note, or better yet, the stories of Heinrich Böll.)
So I try not to be surprised or disappointed or to blame Obama alone. No! A waste of time. Obama receives no marching orders from The Oligarchy. He is not a pawn in a grand plan or conspiracy. No. He and Congress are – as they have been for a long, long time – part of a desperate attempt by the oligarchies – riddled with greed and stupidity – to save a system that is sliding -- very slowly, inexorably, albeit cruelly -- into oblivion.
I also believe he's right that if the reform fails, the inevitable collapse of our system will likely come sooner than it would otherwise. Though -- after Lehman Bros. and all the rest of it -- essential parts of the structures designed to enrich finance capitalists at the expense of everybody else have already collapsed. In the long run and on the macro scale, what happens to this reform may make little difference -- we are going to have to reconstruct our society on different principles, regardless. On the micro scale and in the shorter run, what happens to millions of American families, it's tremendously important. It's also a tremendously important battleground for deciding the shape of a new system.
But I'm not so sure about some of what Charlie says here. For example, "Capitalism in its imperialist stage (here since WWI), said Marx in 1848, will eventually lead to socialization." I don't find that in the Manifesto. I don't remember Marx talking about "imperialism." I don't think the term was even used as an analytic category in political economics until Hobson (1902), from whom Lenin picked it up 14 years later. Maybe it's in some other text of Marx that I've forgotten?
Also, his description of "blocs" is maybe OK but just as a starting point, rough approximation. The problem I have with that language is that "bloc" implies too much conscious intentionality, even a desire to conspire. It also implies too much internal harmony -- as though the people in each grouping didn't include cutthroat competitors and slavish minions.
As for Lenin's "Imperialism" -- it was useful politically then (1916) and maybe even up to World War II. Thereafter it becomes impossible to explain international conflicts without introducing another, wholly different set of variables, derived mainly from anthropology and psychology (Fanon, for example). Lenin was never particularly sensitive to ethnic issues (Stalin was, of course, perhaps partly because of his own minority origin, and long before either of them, Engels was acutely interested in the subject). Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, southeastern China, Bolivia, Ecuador, Sudan, ex-Yugoslavia and other places have surely been battered by the forces Lenin described, but their responses have been conditioned by ethnic and religious rituals and rage against humiliations that can only be understood within each culture.
Anyway, thanks, Charlie, for provoking these reflections. It's a worthwhile debate. It's about our future. And everybody else: Check out Charles Degelman's story in Above Ground, about how the life of one little boy in a working-class family is touched by the macro politics of the 1950s anti-Communist hysteria and the Rosenbergs' execution.
(On Zeitgenossen
, see my earlier note, or better yet, the stories of Heinrich Böll.)
2009/08/22
Moveable memories
More or less by chance, Susana picked up and now we have both reread this charming, gossipy posthumous book by "Tatie," as his then-wife Hadley calls him in the book.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964. Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books Australia, 1973.
I remembered so little from an earlier reading years ago, just a little of the Fitzgerald stuff, that this felt like a totally fresh experience. Finished it the day before yesterday, and I loved it. Then today I was in the Strand used-books store and saw "the restored edition" introduced and edited by EH's grandson Seán Hemingway. As the Wikipedia article makes clear, there's room for lots of controversy about the editing of EH's manuscripts, which he had never put together in a final form before -- despairing over memory loss, likely due to shock treatment he had received for other ailments -- he shot himself ("July 2, 1961, some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday" says the Wiki bio.
Whether EH would have organized the chapters in the same order as did his widow, Mary, and even if in some places she combined paragraphs from different manuscripts, it is still unmistakably (or "unmistakeably," as he would have written it) his prose. And it all feels true in Hemingway's sense. Not necessarily true factually (Ford Madox Ford may not really have smelled that bad, for example), but true emotionally, to the way Hemingway felt as he began to lose his memory about those events of 35 years earlier. (His memory was helped and stimulated by the rediscovery of a trunk full of manuscripts and letters he had left behind in Paris in 1928, according to the intro to the "restored edition".) So this becomes for me another illustration of the complex processes of memory as we age, on which Elkhonon Goldberg has so much fascinating information. I sympathize with Hemingway's view, that what is "true" is what is honestly felt. What other truth can we know? Because all information is mediated by our senses, which may decive us, and captured and recalled through brain circuitry which evolves as we do.
But mainly, besides these reflections on memory, I admire Hemingways artisanry. The book (in the familiar edition edited by Mary Hemingway) is, as Hemingway invites us to consider it, a novel. The story of how a young man seeking fame achieves it at the cost of his innocence. And in the course of telling the story, he gives some good tips on story-writing. Most important for me, just find one "true" sentence and that's enough to get you started, and always be sure you have some idea of what happens next before you knock off work to think about something else. Good tips.
Wikipedia: A Moveable Feast
Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway)
Ford Madox Ford
See also Elkhonon Goldberg, The wisdom paradox: how your mind can grow stronger as your brain grows older. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. I referred to it briefly in a note on Eros and Thanatos last month.
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. 1964. Victoria, Australia: Penguin Books Australia, 1973.
I remembered so little from an earlier reading years ago, just a little of the Fitzgerald stuff, that this felt like a totally fresh experience. Finished it the day before yesterday, and I loved it. Then today I was in the Strand used-books store and saw "the restored edition" introduced and edited by EH's grandson Seán Hemingway. As the Wikipedia article makes clear, there's room for lots of controversy about the editing of EH's manuscripts, which he had never put together in a final form before -- despairing over memory loss, likely due to shock treatment he had received for other ailments -- he shot himself ("July 2, 1961, some three weeks short of his 62nd birthday" says the Wiki bio.
Whether EH would have organized the chapters in the same order as did his widow, Mary, and even if in some places she combined paragraphs from different manuscripts, it is still unmistakably (or "unmistakeably," as he would have written it) his prose. And it all feels true in Hemingway's sense. Not necessarily true factually (Ford Madox Ford may not really have smelled that bad, for example), but true emotionally, to the way Hemingway felt as he began to lose his memory about those events of 35 years earlier. (His memory was helped and stimulated by the rediscovery of a trunk full of manuscripts and letters he had left behind in Paris in 1928, according to the intro to the "restored edition".) So this becomes for me another illustration of the complex processes of memory as we age, on which Elkhonon Goldberg has so much fascinating information. I sympathize with Hemingway's view, that what is "true" is what is honestly felt. What other truth can we know? Because all information is mediated by our senses, which may decive us, and captured and recalled through brain circuitry which evolves as we do.
But mainly, besides these reflections on memory, I admire Hemingways artisanry. The book (in the familiar edition edited by Mary Hemingway) is, as Hemingway invites us to consider it, a novel. The story of how a young man seeking fame achieves it at the cost of his innocence. And in the course of telling the story, he gives some good tips on story-writing. Most important for me, just find one "true" sentence and that's enough to get you started, and always be sure you have some idea of what happens next before you knock off work to think about something else. Good tips.
Wikipedia: A Moveable Feast
Wikipedia: Ernest Hemingway)
Ford Madox Ford
See also Elkhonon Goldberg, The wisdom paradox: how your mind can grow stronger as your brain grows older. New York: Gotham Books, 2005. I referred to it briefly in a note on Eros and Thanatos last month.
2009/08/18
Siege mentality
This novel by the first Man Booker International prize winner (2005) is also the first fiction I've ever read from Albania. Ismail Kadaré wrote Kështjella, here translated as The Siege, in 1969, when Enver Hoxha -- Mao Tse-Tung's only ally in Europe -- feared Soviet invasion in the wake of the invasion of Czechoslovakia & fomented national anxiety about a possible siege. The idolized 15th-century Albanian resistance leader George Castrioti, known as "Skanderbeg" ("Lord Alexander"), is mentioned frequently but (prudently) Kadaré never describes him directly or lets him appear. Kadaré's strong insistence on the Christian faith of the defenders is probably historically accurate for the period, just prior to the actual Ottoman conquest and conversion to Islam, but was politically uncomfortable in Enver Hoxha's Albania. In 1990 Kadaré, Albania's most celebrated novelist, left for France & began revising this and other works, expanding this novel with pieces that had been cut by censors in 1969; the French translation, on which this English translation is based, is of that expanded version. Here you can find my plot summary and commentary on Kadaré, Ismail. The Siege. (Original: Kështjella. Roman, 1970.) Trans. Jusuf Vrioni (Albanian to French); David Bellos (French to English). New York: Canongate, 2008.
Photo: Skanderbeg statue in Tirana from Trip Advisor
According to this Wikipedia article, the historical Skanderbeg did not abjure Islam and rebel against the Ottoman sultan until 1443, holding out until 1466, so this novel stretches history in several ways. But the details of siege warfare sound authentic, and even though this particular siege is an invention, the Ottomans did suffer some equally disastrous defeats as depicted here before their final, overwhelming triumph.
2009/08/16
Our friends, the Freudian little people
We're in D.C., at the Dumbarton Oaks guest house, where the Dumbarton Oaks Museum has included a piece we own (pyramid in the photo) in their exhibit of Charles Simonds' sculptures, drawings and videos. They've put Charles' fantastical dwellings for tiny people and other sculptures in appropriate spots among the pre-Columbian (Mayan, Inca, etc.) pieces that partly inspired them. It's a lot of fun. His parents were both Freudian psychiatrists, and you'll see a lot of Freudian references -- or jokes -- among the works. We love to visit the Dumbarton Oaks museum on any pretext, anyway. There is a pre-Inca woven tunic of such fine weft that Susana has to keep returning to believe it. And I also get very involved in the other collection, of Byzantine mosaics and artifacts.Susana acquired this marvelous pyramid from Charles more than 30 years ago, when he was just starting out. I should have taken a picture when we were in the gallery yesterday, to show you the setting in the show, but I didn't. This blog El estante del fondo includes excellent photos of this and other Simonds pieces, along with intelligent commentary (in Spanish).
2009/08/13
High school, 50 years on
This past weekend Susana & I traveled to Lake Forest, north of Chicago, for the 50th anniversary reunion of my small (about 135) LFHS graduating class. I'll post pictures (Susana's got them on her computer; we're at a cybercafé in New York City right now). For now, some reflections.
Why do we do this? Re-une, I mean. Nostalgia? Not for me -- I feel no longing to return to that time of adolescent confusion and awkwardness. I do have fond memories of some teachers, who now are all deceased (well, it's been 50 years!). And memories of some funny, pleasant moments with some of the kids. I hadn't been back at all, and I had some curiosity to see how those former kids and the place itself looked now. But more important to me was something I learned at my college reunions, that any gathering of what Heinrich Böll called our Zeitgenossen or "generational comrades" will include people with whom I can compare and check my own understandings of the turbulent times we've lived through.
That is, I looked forward to conversations even with people I didn't know well then. There were some kids I barely remembered who now, as experienced adults, gave me vivid impressions and a desire to learn more about how our times looked from their viewing point. Some were in Vietnam (which I managed to avoid -- I was on the outside, protesting the war). And all were in places and career situations different from mine. I hope that we can now continue those conversations, by email or other ways.
Another general impression: 1959, the year of our graduation, was not only pre-AIDS, it was also before any of us had become aware of feminism. Girls were the weaker sex, expected to attach themselves to some guy to make their, but mostly his, life more meaningful. And that seems to be what most of my girl classmates did. There were a couple of exceptions, including the girl I was most interested in. She was one of the few who had very clear ideas of what she did not want, which included (fortunately for both of us) me. Good for her! And there were others, including one very sweet girl I'd once taken to a dance, who seems to have found the right guy for a mutually supportive relationship that lasted 45 years. She was, alas, recently widowed, but she has the strength of those good memories and the life they built and their children, and seemed like a happy, active person. She had in fact been one of the organizers of this pretty complicated gathering (it had involved researching where everybody was, reserving meeting halls, printing a "yearbook", hiring a photographer -- lots of details to get together).
But they learned, some more quickly than others. Some of the happiest women at the reunion had rid themselves of unsatisfying (or worse) partners and made lives of their own. These included one girl I remembered very well as a conversation partner, for hours. Now she's a very well-established professional, still curious about the world.
Not to neglect the guys. Some of them (or us) caught on to the dignity of women in time not to mess up our marriages, and some of us maybe even started out that way. So, a salute to all my Zeitgenossen! I was very happy to get (re)acquainted.
Why do we do this? Re-une, I mean. Nostalgia? Not for me -- I feel no longing to return to that time of adolescent confusion and awkwardness. I do have fond memories of some teachers, who now are all deceased (well, it's been 50 years!). And memories of some funny, pleasant moments with some of the kids. I hadn't been back at all, and I had some curiosity to see how those former kids and the place itself looked now. But more important to me was something I learned at my college reunions, that any gathering of what Heinrich Böll called our Zeitgenossen or "generational comrades" will include people with whom I can compare and check my own understandings of the turbulent times we've lived through.
That is, I looked forward to conversations even with people I didn't know well then. There were some kids I barely remembered who now, as experienced adults, gave me vivid impressions and a desire to learn more about how our times looked from their viewing point. Some were in Vietnam (which I managed to avoid -- I was on the outside, protesting the war). And all were in places and career situations different from mine. I hope that we can now continue those conversations, by email or other ways.
Another general impression: 1959, the year of our graduation, was not only pre-AIDS, it was also before any of us had become aware of feminism. Girls were the weaker sex, expected to attach themselves to some guy to make their, but mostly his, life more meaningful. And that seems to be what most of my girl classmates did. There were a couple of exceptions, including the girl I was most interested in. She was one of the few who had very clear ideas of what she did not want, which included (fortunately for both of us) me. Good for her! And there were others, including one very sweet girl I'd once taken to a dance, who seems to have found the right guy for a mutually supportive relationship that lasted 45 years. She was, alas, recently widowed, but she has the strength of those good memories and the life they built and their children, and seemed like a happy, active person. She had in fact been one of the organizers of this pretty complicated gathering (it had involved researching where everybody was, reserving meeting halls, printing a "yearbook", hiring a photographer -- lots of details to get together).
But they learned, some more quickly than others. Some of the happiest women at the reunion had rid themselves of unsatisfying (or worse) partners and made lives of their own. These included one girl I remembered very well as a conversation partner, for hours. Now she's a very well-established professional, still curious about the world.
Not to neglect the guys. Some of them (or us) caught on to the dignity of women in time not to mess up our marriages, and some of us maybe even started out that way. So, a salute to all my Zeitgenossen! I was very happy to get (re)acquainted.
Resistance is possible!
But can we stop the wasting of the planet in time? Here's encouraging news about the struggle, another well-documented report by Mark Engler.
Tomgram: Mark Engler, Protesting at Climate Ground Zero
Tomgram: Mark Engler, Protesting at Climate Ground Zero
2009/07/31
How 'how we know' is changing
Good review by Michael Massing of books and blogs dealing with
The News About the Internet - The New York Review of Books
It's worth reading the whole piece, but if you don't want to take the time, the essence is in this quote from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's 2009 "State of the News Media" report:
The News About the Internet - The New York Review of Books
It's worth reading the whole piece, but if you don't want to take the time, the essence is in this quote from the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism's 2009 "State of the News Media" report:
Power is shifting to the individual journalist and away, by degrees, from journalistic institutions.... Through search, e-mail, blogs, social media and more, consumers are gravitating to the work of individual writers and voices, and away somewhat from institutional brand. Journalists who have left legacy news organizations are attracting funding to create their own websites.... Experiments like GlobalPost are testing whether individual journalists can become independent contractors offering reporting to various sites, in much the way photographers have operated for years at magazines.
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