Headaches, nausea, asthma, crying,
sleep disturbances, reluctance
to go to school—in forty-five states,
the children ready their pencils.
Let’s Solve This, the Exxon announcer
purrs, while bright, hopeful cities
configure themselves in the background.
Using your knowledge
of oil companies, what can you infer
about the speaker’s motives? How is Common Core
like drilling in the sea?
The Revolution Is Dead…Long Live the Revolution
On my last visit to Cairo in March, I was hit by a post-revolutionary reality when I arrived at the airport. The planes coming from Europe are much smaller now, as if proving the country’s stature has somehow diminished. I was through passport control in under five minutes, an unheard phenomenon in the past. I’m usually put off by the swarm of men offering their help with my luggage, for some meandering tips. But this time what struck me, as I looked around the baggage carousel, was the absence of tourists. There were just a couple of courageous ones, who against all odds, decided to take the trip they had been dreaming about for years.
Then I cried for how desolate and pitiful the airport looked.
The Devil’s Party
McKenzie Wark’s latest dip into Debordiana, The Spectacle of Disintegration, focuses on Guy Debord’s comrades as well as on the Situationists’ bibulous prince. He gives Sit’-for-a-season T.J. Clark the most ink, though Clark’s early and late works of Art History are too rich for any bite-sized summary. But other, lesser figures in Debord’s orbit are ripe for Wark’s approach.
Spectacles of Disintegration
We are entering a time when words must be backed up by actions.
1.
In May of 2013, Dominique Venner, the former OAS terrorist turned semi-respectable historian and paladin of the French New Right (although there’s nothing new about it, really, it’s the same old Action française Catholic-monarchist bullshit, the same pompous argot of bourgeois murderers, the same hybrid of decadent rationalism and plagiarized German Romanticism, a style some say was inaugurated by Charles Maurras but may actually extend back to Ernest Renan or even Descartes), walked up to the altar of the Notre-Dame Cathedral and shot himself. He left a suicide note, and, in case the note was lost to the depredations of chance or the iconoclasms of the police, he left a blog post.
Star Time
I. The Game…What Game?
Everyone agrees basketball has changed dramatically over the decades since the NBA began in the 1940’s, but just how do we measure, mark, and comprehend the shock of the new game? Some markers are intrinsic (size, shape of court, basket height, rules to prevent outright domination by the tallest and most athletic), others extrinsic (length of shorts, salary, philosophy, place in American and world culture) to the game itself.
The Gatekeepers
What follows is a compaction of an interview with Dror Moreh, director of the Israeli documentary, The Gatekeepers.
In The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh speaks with former directors of Israel’s secret service, the Shin Bet, about Israel’s war on terror, Rabin’s murder, targeted assassinations, and the Jewish Underground. The film has caused a furor because these men, who have devoted their lives to Israel’s security, all believe Israel should end the occupation. They favor a two-state solution.
The H.D. Book
The H.D. Book by Robert Duncan. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Boughn and Victor Coleman. University of California Press. 678 pp. $49.95. January 2011.
Robert Duncan began writing The H.D. Book in 1959 and finished it except for embellishments in 1961; yet only now, half a century later, has it reached book form. A prose masterwork that begins with the story of Duncan’s initiation as a poet, over the course of its 646 pages it morphs into a visionary meditation in which H.D., the American poet born Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), remains the thematic touchstone. In The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov (2004), Duncan writes to Levertov as he undertakes the book that he needs to guard against letting his distress over dismissive reviews of H.D.’s work by Randall Jarrell and others deflect him from his deeper purpose. Exploring the generative resources and implications of H.D.’s work, he was surely aware too that he was also setting the course and realizing perhaps the fullest expression of his major phase as a poet. The irony is that half a century later one must guard against allowing the analogous treatment of this book to deflect attention from what is here at last.
Within the Context of Obama
On Inauguration Day and on the day before the State of the Union address, I went to Serious Times dialogues – academic seminars (at New York’s School of Visual Arts) where American radicals ponder “Why doesn’t the United States make social progress?” What follows here takes in the distance between doomy discourse there and spectacles of social progress enacted by Obama et al. as he launched his second term. But it’s not locked on that opposition. I try to say true things about where we’re at now by treating old and new acts of mimesis, including classic Russian novels by Vasily Grossman and a soon-to-be classic hip hop CD by Kendric Lamar. My approach to politics and high/low culture is intuitive. This is not a scholarly essay. Call it an experiment in synchronic method.
The Great Divide
The “Cool Britannia” of the noughties has now become Cruel Britannia – a country ruled by a coalition of parties, one as bad as the other for dividing its population into “skivers” and “strivers.”
State of Play
J.M. Shaw has now published a second novel, Ten Weeks in Africa. It feels significantly bleaker and also more intricate than his first, but it is also an often-satirical novel of politics. Ten Weeks In Africa is set in an imagined and renamed version of Kenya with a bit of Uganda added to the mix, and its non-African characters are mostly British or Pakistani, but the kind of pseudo-politics Shaw is satirizing have an unhappy relevance for Americans. Professed and even sincere good intentions mean much less than we hope they do, a point Shaw makes repeatedly in Ten Weeks In Africa: his novel’s most effective hero is a businessman who, among his other enterprises, bribes police officials to allow his employees to steal tourists’ luggage from an international airport. This businessman’s newest employee, a small boy unhappily resolved to help notorious thieves in order to buy medicine for his dying mother, seems on first encounter to have fallen into an African Fagan’s hands, but we slowly realize that the boy is now working for a man who is in effect an unsentimental, wholly modernized and absolutely plausible version of one of the Cheerybles, the benevolent merchants from Nicholas Nickleby…
Takeaway: My Lunch with Osama bin Laden
Watching the movie Zero Dark Thirty, I kept thinking about my own time with bin Laden, in 1994. It involved no torture. No drama. The hunt was not yet on. Instead, like him at the time, I was searching for answers in Khartoum from the preeminent enabler of Radical Islam, Hassan Al-Turabi. Through his writings and sermons, Turabi had transformed fundamentalism into a dramatic theology of liberation that millions bought into—Yes, yes, of course, once purity is reestablished, Mohammed’s voice fresh again, social problems will melt away, pharaohs will die, and Allah’s soldiers will reinstall sharia from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas.
I was working for a Rock-n-Roll magazine; bin Laden was on his own and on the lookout for talent to join his gang, Al-Qaeda.
Gilbert Sorrentino
“Sorrentinian anecdotes: 1. A friend once told me that he got a blowjob while watching Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, which seems like the perfect antidote to Haneke’s gloomy Austrian National Socialist moralism, his sanctimonious pornography of violence. 2. Another friend, or the same friend, I can’t remember, who occasionally suffered from psychogenic impotence, said that a girl once quoted Prufrock to him when he couldn’t get it up, which was such a wickedly tender thing to do (such a relief compared to all the put-on politically correct anti-phallodeterministic caritas he was used to in those situations) that he remembers it as one of the most intimate experiences of his life. 3. I told him, as if to reciprocate his self-mortifying candor, that an ex-girlfriend of mine, who was a crypto-Catholic depressive, used to read Ash Wednesday whenever she wanted to avoid having sex with me. We agreed on the superiority of early Eliot…”
David Golding explains (along the way) how/why he couldn’t resist the “mimetic bug” in this meditation on Gilbert Sorrentino…
Two from the Heart
The day before the election, the author sent First these two pieces, which he rightly believed would be “relevant however the vote turns out.” In the interval since the election, he updated the second piece here to take account of Romney’s defeat.
Harmonica Jean’s Christmas Spirit
The author is a physician and priest who has been working in Haiti for a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. Fr. Frechette was awarded this year’s $1,000,000 Opus Prize.