Last Hour of Every Angel

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…If you were a goddess, Xylea said, what goddess would you be? She paused to think for a second. If you were a goddess, you’d be the goddess of beauty and illusion…
…That haunted me, for some reason. The reason was that my life had, without my noticing, been drained of reality, or the pretense to reality. I was a celibate, anhedonic whore (let’s say a depressed whore). Sex itself meant nothing to me, having become mere performance, empty enchantment. I fell in love with ghosts, or people who soon became ghosts, whose names I no longer remembered shortly afterwards.

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Sturdy New Acquisitions

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Forgive me if I’m committing the sin of self-promotion, but I’d like to add an annex to my piece last month about the MET’s class-focused New Acquisitions show. There’s a trio of music videos—with soundscapes evoking hoods all across the world—that could have added a contemporary flash to that MET show.

“Ghetto Phénomène” Houari’s Le Chant des Ra ta ta—with its bass pace, main string riff, and Houari’s amped but unvocodered voice—was a constant on my Marseille rap playlist. Yet I didn’t realize the song was more than just catchy until I watched the video.

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The City and the Commons: A Story for Our Time

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The essay posted below is the one that brought Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! home to your editor (who morphed into a “New York City man” many years ago). Linebaugh’s case for “commonizing” the city seemed fresh and audacious, though he almost lost me when he invoked the panopticon. (Bentham? Again?) But Linebaugh wasn’t content to reheat Foucault’s leftovers.

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A Dylanist’s Diary (“sugar and salt/ if you never listen to the basement tapes/ it’s your own damn fault”)

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Originally posted here in 2016… 

11/7

My monthly income is $500. I just spent $130 of that on the newly released Dylan Basement Tapes. My daddy thinks I’m no good with money.

They haven’t arrived yet so I’ve been listening to the bootleg of those 6 CDs I bought in ‘93 in NYC. One thing now occurs to me—this is boy music. It’s like a frat party of geniuses. It’s a lot of fun to be invited.

My friend in NYC and I were discussing the relative merits of the 2CD release vs. the 6CD box.  How many times do you have to hear 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer” (wherein Homer’s name is Richard)?? I explained my sense that the 2CD set is the trailer, and a damn fine one, and the 6CD set is the documentary. (I didn’t mention I already have 3 copies of 3 takes of “Open the Door Homer.”)

I’m not a fanatic nor a cultist—it just seemed obvious to me get the box. Also I was stoned when I ordered it. My daddy thinks I’m not good with money.

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Invisible Republicanism (Redux): Greil Marcus’s Negro Problem (Circa 1998)

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I published the following piece in a tabloid issue of First in 1998 and then posted it at this website after Bob Dylan released Love and Theft in 2001.  I took it down once Greil Marcus became an occasional contributor to First. In the era of Substack, though, journos’ back pages find new readers and it seems timid rather than tactful to hide “I.R.” in a memory hole.

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U.S. Telos

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The author posted this at the top of 2024, before the Iowa caucuses, the New Hampshire primary, and the E. Jean Carroll judgment, but his forecast for ‘24 is still ripe…

Three years ago today we witnessed the natural end of the Republican Party. I don’t mean a chronological end. As long as there’s FOX News and people eager to tune in, there will be the ignorance and outrage levels necessary to nurture Trumpist conservatism.

I mean end as in the Greek term “telos,” which evokes a phenomenon’s essence — its reason for being. In that sense January 6 three years ago, in its lusty dance with violent ignorance, in its recognition, however dully, that the future of Trumpism did not line up with the future of democracy, indeed demanded its overthrow, all this was the completion of Trumpism, the full Donald.

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Donald Trump and the Machinery of Fame

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Let’s take a trip back to June 16, 2015, the day that Donald Trump announced he was running for president the first time. I’m taking you back that far because I want to see if I can find something…anything…normal about it.  Not normal psychologically – we all know how that search would go – but normal politically.

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Eye of the Hunter

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“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

I don’t want to argue with the American Scholar, but if you’re Hunter Harris — the wittiest millennial? — your obsessions are beyond objections…B.D.

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Like the Night

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He chose friends for wit, his bride for beauty.
She always erred on the side of beauty.

Punk soul in a Father’s body, Hopkins
wrote the motley an anthem –- Pied Beauty.

Mary Oliver’s speaker walks with awe
through the world. Dickinson’s died for beauty.

“From the inside.” “Eye of the beholder.”
Well-meaning parents lied about beauty.

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Liebe Macht Frei

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…I walked by the Sacramento River the day before my thirty-eighth birthday, along the train tracks to an old rusted truss bridge. It was the first time I’d been alone, I mean alone in physical space, in a long time. I’d spent the Christmas holidays with Harvey, who had an excruciating toothache and no health insurance, and with Amber, this trans girl Harvey had just started seeing. Harvey never complained about the toothache, though. They wandered around their bedroom trying on different outfits, showing off their possessions, infinite sentimental relics, displaying their favorite dick pics on their phone (especially the cum vids), making jokes and asking surreal philosophical questions, while Amber fawned over them, which annoyed Harvey, though they kind of liked it, too. Harvey wanted to be seen, to be loved for their capacity to be seen, for their mere appearing in this world, epiphanic ephemera, the brute autistic weirdness of their creature-existence, but they didn’t really like being complimented, compliments made them uneasy, always seemed silly if not outright suspicious, and they liked being romanticized even less, though they knew it was this resistance to romance in themselves that invited it from others.

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X Factor

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The author emailed this response to Leila Zalokar’s December 1 post, “Planet X,” under the heading, “Awesome.”

Starts with a bang! [couldn’t help myself]

And right off the bat, I can’t think of a word, but that melancholy, ironic, hopefulness(?)

…still, the desire to fuck / morning cigarettes…

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Two Histories of Germany: Frank Trentmann’s “Out of the Darkness, the Germans, 1942-2022” and Katja Hoyer’s “Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany”

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Frank Trentmann, a German-born historian, teaches at the University of London and writes books in felicitous English. The special distinction of his latest study is its focus: Out of the Darkness is a history, not of facts alone but of the successive agonies of conscience besetting the Germans from the years 1942 (with the beginning of the rout at Stalingrad) till the present, with Germany’s diffident support of the Ukraine. It is a history of moral mentalities.

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From the Foreword to E.P. Thompson’s “William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary”

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What follows below comes from Peter Linebaugh’s Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (PM Press, 2014). First of the Month will reprint pieces from Linebaugh’s collection of essays, which has been called a “Commonist Manifesto,” throughout 2024. The following text is an excerpt from a piece of Linebaugh’s that served as the foreword to a revised edition of E.P. Thompson’s biography of William Morris. (Thompson’s book was first published in 1955 — the year before his break with the Communist Party.) 

Thompson has been in the cultural conversation lately. (His huffy back-and-forth with Lesezk Kolakowski has been invoked here.)  Thompson may have always have been too full of himself. (Like most would-be vanguardists?) His duller certainties deserve skepticism. (I’m recalling just now Thompson’s dimness about a distinguished thing dear to Stuart Hall: “‘How can you be interested in Henry James?’ Edward Thompson once admonished me, with exasperation.”[1]) Thompson’s blankness about certain aspects of “high” intellection, though, deserve more than forbearance since it seems to have allowed him to focus on The Making of the English Working Class and his other histories from below.

Linebaugh has a near familial feeling for Thompson (who was his mentor), but he doesn’t do hagiography. He interrogates Thompson’s takes on Morris without being prosecutorial. Here he gets to what  Thompson missed in Morris’s essay “Under the Elm Tree” even as Thompson saluted Morris for… 

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High/Low Paris at the Dawn of the 20th C. (“New Acquisitions” at the Met)

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Last season, at the Met, a curator with Dickensian sensitivity to class matters organized a set of eleven Paris prints and watercolors linked to the Manet/Degas show. These pieces—stuck in that odd, tight corridor between the museum’s grand entrance and the European painting wing—were part of New Acquisitions in Context: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints. (The title wsn’t the only yawner, who’d stop for New Acq‘s silverware prototypes or “Design for Transeptal Altars”?) The Paris scenes, though, were a trip. So much for peintres celébrès down the hall, Marie-Louise-Pierre Vidal’s watercolors floated viewers into luxe-life while Edgar Chahine’s prints dragged them down and out.

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On “My Libraries”

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Renato Grigoli’s as usual right-on, witty “My Libraries: Finding a Third Place” (October 2023) sends me back in time to childhood visits at my working-class Peoria Public Library branch—the library card an important visa into feeling curious, smart, and grown up—taking books home to read under the summertime backyard pear tree or in winter bed, and on into high school there guided by our watchful nun librarian with permission also to amble—during free class time—to the nearby main public library, later wandering the stacks as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Hartford, getting into the habit of finding things I wasn’t looking for, like a year after 1974 college graduation while working in the basement Harvard Coop shipping room I wandered into Boston Public Library, discovering by chance Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von Gestern (World of Yesterday), leading to a German course at Harvard Extension School!

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Three Lessons From Mama

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Over the years, I shared various ways in which my parents intentionally worked to develop me into a constructive person. Often, because my mother was the primary disciplinarian, she has gotten the short end of the stick because most of my stories about her involve being the enforcer of the law. Yet, Claudette was the drill sergeant who was determined to prepare her child for a war in which I was armed to wrestle with the ghostly demons who desired to manifest their supremacy in flesh and blood.

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