Baader Meinhof Film Splits Germany

Bader460x276 Kate Connolly in the Guardian:

The bloody legacy of the Baader Meinhof Gang which caused mayhem across West Germany with its politically-motivated assassinations, bombings and kidnappings is to be portrayed on cinema screens this week in a new film which claims to debunk the myth of 1970s terrorist chic.

Just how raw the darkest chapter in Germany’s postwar history remains has been demonstrated by the angry reaction that the Baader Meinhof Komplex has prompted from victims’ families, the children of gang members and historians.

Some have accused the film – which boasts a cast of top German actors – of being too violent, or of reinforcing the image of gang members as Bonnie and Clyde-style heroes.

Bettina Roehl, the journalist daughter of the gang’s co-leader, Ulrike Meinhof, wrote in a blog: “The Baader Meinhof Komplex is the worst-case scenario – it would not be possible to top its hero worship.”

The Berliner Zeitung critic said the film had given Andreas Baader, the other gang leader and son of a history professor, the stuntman status he had always craved. “Finally [he] has got what he always wanted. Posthumously he has become the hero of a real action film,” the critic said.

It was Baader’s escape from prison for the fire bombing of two Frankfurt department stores that marked the birth of the Baader Meinhof Gang, otherwise known as the Red Army Faction (RAF). Its members’ campaigning zeal was triggered by their anger at their parents’ perceived failure to confront Germany’s Nazi past.

The Porsche-driving Baader modelled himself on the Hollywood actor Marlon Brando, and he and Meinhof, a successful journalist, epitomised the glamour that gave the gang its appeal – a status it enjoys in popular culture even today.



Fashion Week, The Cheap Seats

Molly Young reports…for n+1:

I. Round one: Z Zegna

Like ants in a colony, the men and women in town for Fashion Week have thin black exoskeletons, specialized social functions and valuable cargo to transport. A swarm of these people has formed on a September afternoon in front of the West Village showroom where Z Zegna will exhibit its Spring-Summer 2009 collection. I don’t know what Z Zegna is, apart from an Italian menswear line whose website has an alphabet theme. Words that begin with “S” scoot across the introduction page and fade into a photograph of a guy on a motorcycle—Seduction. Sporty. Style. A press release I downloaded opened with a paean to the expected letter Z: “The ultimate letter, the most distinguished of the alphabet.” An invitation to the show is sandwiched between two candy bars in my purse, like a boarding pass. In terms of Fashion Week hierarchies, I get the feeling that Z Zegna is Greyhound to Zac Posen’s Amtrak and Marc Jacobs’s Concorde.

But an invitation is an invitation. From what I can tell by eavesdropping, the people mingling outside the showroom are representatives from department stores, boutiques, online retailers, and press, all smoking and speaking different languages. An abandoned kombucha bottle is wedged in a decorative shrub. Malcolm Gladwell walks past on his way somewhere else and looks inquisitively at the gathering. Ah! My totem! I see Mr. Gladwell frequently in the West Village and consider him, like a shooting star or a rainbow, to be a sign of good luck.

Ten minutes after the show is scheduled to begin people wrap up their conversations and move inside, flashing invites to a team of assistants in black outfits. Stiffly upright men posted by the door hold trays of water bottles that have had the Z Zegna label glued to their midsections. A concrete ramp leads into a bright cavern with seats set up like bleachers alongside a white runway, which is arranged in a complicated Tetris shape. (This is not what I was led to expect by Project Runway.) There is tuneless thumping music beneath the sound of “darling” pronounced in a dozen accents. The smack of kisses landing on cheeks reminds me of asterisks.

Influence and Liberal Internationalism

Michael Walzer in Dissent:

[I]nfluence is a normal feature of political life. We all try to be as influential as possible. So how should influence work? When is it legitimate?  There is a Marxist argument about this in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which starts from everyday social life. Assume, Marx writes, that our relation to the world is a “human” relation: “Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust…If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people, you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others.” I suggest that the case is the same with political parties, social movements, all sorts of NGOs, and with states, too. If they want to influence people in other countries, they must be stimulating and encouraging, which means materially helpful, politically supportive, ideologically persuasive. What is ruled out by the idea of “human” relations is military force, coercion, manipulation, and subversion. Barring those four, influence isn’t limited to a regional sphere—any person, any party or movement, any state can be influential anywhere.

So if democratic states in western Europe, say, provide ideological support, political encouragement, and material assistance first to new democrats and then to new democracies in eastern Europe, this isn’t imperial politics. It is an attempt at influence, indeed, but it isn’t the creation of an old-fashioned sphere of influence. The expansion of NATO is a harder question, and I am not going to address it here. But support and encouragement for the “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine fit Marx’s account of how influence ought to work—while the U.S. instigation of a Guatemalan coup obviously doesn’t.

nascar cancels season for dfw

Nascar_article_largearticle_large

“I’m flooded with feelings of—for lack of a better concept—incongruity,” said Jimmie Johnson, the driver of the #48 Lowe’s Chevrolet who is known throughout racing for his habit of handing out copies of Wallace’s novels to his fans. “David Foster Wallace could comprehend and articulate the sadness in a luxury cruise, a state fair, a presidential campaign, anything. But empathy, humanity, and compassion so strong as to be almost incoherent ran through that same sadness like connective tissue through muscle, affirming the value of the everyday, championing the banal yet true, acknowledging the ironic as it refused to give in to irony.”

“And now he’s gone,” Johnson added. “He’s taken himself away. We can’t possibly race now.”

David Foster Wallace’s work came to stock car racing in the mid-1990s, just as the sport began experiencing almost geometric yearly growth. But the literary atmosphere of the sport was moribund, mired in the once-flamboyant but decidedly aging mid-1960s stylings of Tom Wolfe, whose bombastic essays—notably “The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes!”—served as the romantic, quasi-elegiac be-all and end-all for NASCAR fans and series participants alike. Racing was ready for new ideas, and when a new generation of young drivers like Jeff Gordon arrived on the scene, sporting new sponsorship deals on their fireproof coveralls and dog-eared copies of Broom Of The System under their arms, an intellectual seed crystal was dropped into the supersaturated solution of American motorsports.

more from The Onion here.

roubini getting it right

Even if the Treasury TARP plan is implemented fairly and efficiently the US will not avoid a severe U-shaped18-month recession and a severe financial and banking crisis: the recession train has already left the station in Q1 and the financial/banking crisis will be severe regardless of what the Treasury and the Fed do from now on. What a proper rescue plan can do is to avoid having the US experience a multi-year L-shaped recession and extreme financial crisis like the one that led to a decade long stagnation in Japan in the 1990s after the bursting of their real estate and equity bubbles.

Roubini at the RGE website here.

Roubini video here
Via Andrew Sullivan.

Bernard-Henri Levy’s Left in Dark Times

Scott McLemee in The Nation:

We witness a historical re-enactment of the New Philosophical argument that Pol Pot’s regime was the logical culmination of the Marxist revolutionary vision at its purest. Here, the benighted American leftist reader may want to interrupt–to ask if, say, the destabilization of Cambodia by years of carpet bombing during the Vietnam War might be just as germane to understanding the Khmer Rouge’s rise to power as even the most nuanced appreciation of Louis Althusser’s structuralism. (Ideas have consequences, but so do B-52s.)

Such an objection would not be welcome, for one of the two very worst forces in the world, by Lévy’s account, is anti-Americanism. The other is anti-Semitism, which, it seems to BHL, is well on the way to becoming the ideological core of a new, global totalitarian movement. Sooner or later all those kids with Che T-shirts and Noam Chomsky lectures on their iPods are going to discover the Protocols of Zion–and then what happens? Nothing good.

To swim against this sinister tide, it is necessary to insist upon “the correct notion of Islamofascism, or, better, of Fascislamism” (why the latter should be preferable is not clear) and revitalize old leftist commitments to secular society. The good, true, BHLian left will be generously cosmopolitan. “You won’t find me denying that non-European civilizations have produced wonders, and whole worlds, that it would be disastrous to ignore, and even more disastrous to crush beneath the wheel of a lazy, brutal, eradicating Universal,” proclaims Lévy.

That last part is a relief, to be sure. But it places us right back in front of certain problems that are not so readily solved–not in theory and certainly not in practice. For there is a long history of particular societies coming to regard themselves as “concrete Universals” (to borrow from a certain idiom apropos here)–in short, as the fullest possible manifestation of the proper essence of humanity, given the world’s conditions. People in other societies tend not to take this well, at least not when it becomes a foreign policy enforced by B-52s. It makes them resentful, and worse than resentful, and being patted on the head for their colorful history and folkways may not soothe them.

being trilling

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Lionel Trilling was not completely happy about being Lionel Trilling. “I have one of the great reputations in the academic world,” he wrote in his journal after being promoted to full professor in the Columbia English Department, in 1948. “This thought makes me retch.” Two years later, he published “The Liberal Imagination,” a book that sold more than seventy thousand copies in hardcover and more than a hundred thousand in paperback, and that made Trilling a figure, a model of the intellectual in Cold War America. He represented, for many people, the life of the mind. Trilling was baffled by the attention. “I hear on all sides of the extent of my reputation—which some even call ‘fame,’ ” he wrote in the journal. “It is the thing I have most wanted from childhood—although of course in much greater degree—and now that I seem to have it I have no understanding whatever of its basis—of what it is that makes people respond to what I say, for I think of it as of a simplicity and of a naivety almost extreme.”

He hated being regarded as a paragon of anything.

more from The New Yorker here.

Skin Deep

Sherwin B. Nuland in The New Republic:

Book Lying on a couch in the office of one of the hairdressing salons that she owns in London, Sharyn Hughes perused the advertising brochure she had been sent by Makeover Getaways: “Our Malaysian Makeover Package is a brilliant combination of surgery treatments, sunny beaches and shopping. Offering the latest technological facilities in an exceptionally clean hospital environment, and with guaranteed five star hotel accommodation for postoperative recovery and holiday, you will return home fully revitalized and looking wonderful.”

Within minutes, she decided that this opportunity for what she called a “thorough overhaul” was precisely what she and her partner, Grant, had been seeking. They would join the 100,000 other men and women who became surgical tourists to Malaysia in 2006, up from 40,000 only three years earlier. For Sharyn’s breast enlargement, liposuction, and cosmetic dentistry and Grant’s liposuction and cosmetic dentistry, the total cost would be £9,000 (considerably less than the same surgery in London), with a tour of the country included. She phoned Grant about her discovery, and began making arrangements for both of them to fly off to Asia for their rejuvenation.

In his thought-provoking and disturbing new book, Anthony Elliott describes Asia as having become “the world’s hotspot for surgical tourism, particularly Thailand, Singapore and India.” Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Latin America, the Caribbean states, and parts of the Middle East have witnessed a similar phenomenon, as cosmetic surgery has become as globalized as any other industry — not only for patients, but also for the professional personnel who provide it. The demand for such services and the mobility of the providers has magnified in recent years, and by every indication it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the entire concept of periodically re-imagining oneself – -more, re-designing oneself — has taken its place in the culture of Western societies.

Elliott is a professor of sociology, and he has trained his keen sociologist’s eye on the astonishing phenomenon that cosmetic surgery has become. Using the methods of his field of study, he now presents us with this small and insightful book that is sure to alter the perspective of everyone who reads it. It is Elliott’s contention that there are three cultural forces, acting together and separately, that create the conditions driving the urge for the periodic reinvention of the self. It is an urge that has gripped many members of our society and will affect increasing numbers of those influenced by Elliott’s three forces — numbers that include just about everyone. Those forces are the cult of celebrity, consumerism, and the new economy characterized by globalization.

More here.

Thursday Poem

///

Image_persimmons3Persimmons
Li-Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmons and precision.
How to choose
……………………
persimmons. This is a precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet,
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down.
I teach her Chinese.
Crickets: chiu-chiu. Dew: I’ve forgotten.
Naked: I’ve forgotten.
Ni, wo: you and me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Other words
that got me into trouble were
fight and fright, wren and yarn.
Fight was what I did when I was frightened,
fright was what I felt when I was fighting.
Wrens are small, plain birds,
yarn is what one knits with.
Wrens are soft as yarn.
My mother made birds our of yarn.
I loved to watch her tie the stuff;
a bird, a rabbit, a wee man.

Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class
and cut it up
so everyone could taste
a Chinese apple. Knowing
it wasn’t ripe or sweet, I didn’t eat
but watched the other faces.

My mother said every persimmon has a sun
inside, something golden, glowing,
warm as my face.

Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper,
forgotten and not yet ripe.
I took them and set both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang, The sun, the sun.

Finally understanding
he was going blind,
my father sat up all one night
waiting for a song, a ghost.
I gave him the persimmons,
swelled, heavy as sadness,
and sweet as love.

This year, in the muddy lighting
of my parents’ cellar, I rummage, looking
for something I lost.
My father sits on the tired wooden stairs,
black cane between his knees,
hand over hand, gripping the handle.

He’s so happy that I’ve come home.
I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question.
All gone, he answers.

Under some blankets, I find a box.
Inside the box I find three scrolls.
I sit beside him and untie
three paintings by my father:
Hibiscus leaf and a white flower.
Two cats preening.
Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth.

He raises both hands to touch the cloth,
asks, Which is this?

This is persimmons, Father.

Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk,
the strength, the tense
precision in the wrist.
I painted them hundreds of times
eyes closed. These I painted blind.
Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of the one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight.

From Rose BOA Editions, LTD, 1986

///

The Art of Dying

From Orion Magazine:

Chicago I’M LYING ON MY BACK on the concrete in the heart of Chicago. Chaos whirs around me, so I try to focus, to let the warm light streaming down through the geometry of steel and glass become what it is, a prayer of forgiveness. But this only partly works. We need a lot of forgiveness these days. And I’m distracted—by the abrupt carbonic hiss of a bus pulling out into traffic and the sudden rat-a-tat-tat of a jackhammer breaking up a sidewalk somewhere. It sounds close.

My feet are a few inches away from the feet of the Flamingo, a four-story-high Alexander Calder sculpture in the middle of Federal Plaza. It has always looked like a big chicken to me, as if it should be titled Big Red Chicken Stalks Inner City. Since I have covered myself with a white sheet and am pretending to be dead, I can’t see the red chicken. But I imagine it looming over me, coming to life, pecking at my soft flesh and at the other bodies lying around me. Given the tenor of the moment—pretending to be dead and all—I should be more serious, but the chicken keeps scratching around in my brain.

I dream of the president making an emergency announcement on nationwide television that the Calder chicken and the equally worrisome Picasso sculpture in the Daley Plaza are terrorist robots that are electronically connected to a Henry Moore sculpture in the Art Institute of Chicago. Reportedly planted long ago by a sleeper cell of starving artists, they can be simultaneously activated at any moment. “We are all vulnerable to such attacks,” the president might say. “The enemy is everywhere. Even in modern art.”

But here’s the thing: this daydream is no more absurd than the war itself, or than I am, lying here wrapped in a sheet in the middle of a huge city on a busy workday, just a few feet from the honking congestion of Dearborn and Adams streets.

The die-in is an art installation. The organizers are artists.

More here.

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Urgent Request From Republic Of America For Business Relationship (Confidential!)

Kevin Allman posts over at blogofneworleans.com:

Dear American, My Dear Friend:

I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America.

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a transfer of funds of great magnitude.

My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most profitable to you.

I am working with “Mr. Phil Gram,” lobbyist for UBS, who will be my replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a citizen, you may know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the 1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check.

We need the funds as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.

Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to [email protected] so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction.

After I receive that information, I will respond with detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the funds.

Do not discuss this message with anyone! Time is of the essence!

Yours Faithfully.

Minister of Treasury Hank Paulson

Socializing Debt, Privatizing Profits & Power

If I had pick one defining feature of the politics of the last 8 years it would be the tendency of the current US government to use any real or debatable or fictitious emergency to accrue greater executive power while curtailing transparency and accountability.   Even a financial crisis seems to require Bonapartism. Karyn Strickler in Counterpunch:

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
— Language from Section 8 Treasury Financial Bail-out Proposal

Breathtaking in its scope and staggering dollar amount, the Treasury Financial Bail-out Proposal to Congress is a parting power punch from the Bush Administration.  Even as the American economy melts down, George W. Bush and his cronies are taking advantage of the emergency situation to turn over $700,000,000,000 of American tax payer’s money to bail out the same greedy, corrupt corporations that got us into this mess; transfer most of the scant remaining congressional power into private hands and eviscerate judicial or administrative review of the process.

“The Secretary is authorized to take such actions as the Secretary deems necessary to carry out the authorities in this Act, including, without limitation,” and so begins the Proposal that is perhaps the biggest peacetime (or anytime) transfers of power from Congress through the Administration to private corporations, in history.

Democrats, the American people and patriots of every partisan position, should not drink the $700,000,000,000 Power Punch.  There is no circumstance under which we should tolerate this open theft of public funds, and permanent transfer of Congressional and Judicial power through one man, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, directly to private sector corporations, without oversight, review or accountability. 

The upcoming Congressional elections and the fear inspired in the heart of every incumbent politician are certainly no excuse to capitulate to this brazen, corporate power grab.  Democrats, true-blooded Republicans and the American people should not be intimidated by the rushed, fear-mongering tactics of King Henry Paulson. 

While our economy is in historic trouble, it’s simply impossible that more of the same power without oversight – the same unmitigated, unregulated nonsense that got us into this mess – is the cure to the precipitous plunge the American economy is taking. 

                                  

Wednesday Poem

///

Lay of Rome
Thomas Ybarra

Oh, the Roman was a rogue,

  He erat was, you bettum;

He ran his automobilis

  And smoked his cigarettum;

He wore a diamond studibus

  And elegant cravattum,

A maxima cum laude shirt,

  And a stylish hattum!

…………………………..

He loved the luscious hic-haec-hoc,

  And bet on games and equi;

At times he won, at others, though,

  He got it in the necqui;

He winked (quo usque tandem?)

  At puellas on the Forum,

And sometimes even made

  Those goo-goo oculorum!
…………………………..

He frequently was seen

  At combats gladiatorial,

And ate enough to feed

  Ten boarders at Memorial;

He often went on sprees

  And said, on starting homus,

“Hic labor — opus est,

  Oh, where’s my hic–hic–domus?”
…………………………..

Although he lived in Rome —

  Of all the arts the middle —

He was (excuse the phrase)

  A horrid individ’l;

Ah! what a diff’rent thing

  Was the homo (dative, hominy)

Of far-away B.C.

  From us of Anno Domini.

///

i’m delicious!

3thumbsuppig

JEJU-DO—Meat-eating in Korea is very literal. Humanity’s participation in the food chain is much less disguised than it is in North America, where people are happy to pretend their bacon burgers or pork tenderloin medallions are magically synthesized for the express purpose of being delicious. In Korean, the word for pork is dwaeji gogi — “pig meat.” Most other meats work the same way: insert name of animal, followed by the word for “meat” — not much in the way of linguistic frippery to disguise the fact that meat is basically dead flesh and ripped-apart muscle.

In an unsettling twist, restaurant signage follows suit. Many restaurants advertise specialties with pictures of their dishes, displayed right underneath jovial cartoon versions of whichever animal gave their life for the food. This is especially true of restaurants serving galbi, pork or beef rib meat barbecued over flaming charcoals stuck into the centre of your table.

more from The Walrus here.

rothko matters

Newrothko460

Rothko was interested in the simplified forms that inhabited his paintings, the spread of pigment across the canvas, and how different coloured areas meet; he was also much concerned with the layering of his paintings, from the bare canvas up. He painted from the inside out. Atmospheric photographs of the artist have him seated before an incomplete canvas, smoking and looking into the painted void. Somewhere in the world, an abstract painter is undoubtedly doing the same thing right now. The difference is that it is impossible to do this today without method-acting Rothko. Even he staged these scenes, for the photographer Hans Namuth.

During the 1960s, Rothko’s paintings become poised between the materiality of their surfaces and forms, and the emergence of an image, even if it is an image of nothingness, or an image denied: a blank black screen, or a simple near-horizontal division which we unavoidably see as a horizon, between grey and brown, or black and grey. Rothko cut out the clutter, and in his later work tried to make every single thing count. Someone once said of American abstract painting that Barnett Newman closed the door, Rothko pulled down the blind and Ad Reinhardt turned off the light. Rothko was much vexed by Reinhardt’s black-on-black paintings, with their exquisite impenetrability, their cruciform shapes revealed only as one’s eyes grow attuned to their close tones. Rothko was undoubtedly jealous of them, and even had an affair with Reinhardt’s widow.

more from The Guardian here.

The Pale Cast of Thought

Id_tyree_wallace_ap_0011_2 Josh Tyree on David Foster Wallace, also in The Smart Set:

The toxic yet vacuous phrase “self-indulgent” was often used by the detractors of David Foster Wallace (as if it isn’t self-indulgent to write anything at all). Another accusation, that Wallace was overly cerebral, misses the point completely. As a writer, the guy was as large-hearted as he was big-brained. Don Gately, the recovering narcotics addict in Infinite Jest, is one of the most compassionately drawn and convincingly real characters in contemporary fiction, close in intention, conception, and articulation to a latter-day Leopold Bloom.

I don’t think an essay more hilarious than “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” — Wallace’s account of a botched vacation on a cruise ship — has been written. It ranks with Twain and will endure as long as people want to laugh. His essays often brought forth a sense of exuberant joy, with their meanderings and addictive, often imitated footnotes and mock-scholarly sensibility. Yet Wallace’s fiction also portrays terrible mental darkness, especially what doctors call “major depression.” Wallace’s father told The New York Times that his son suffered from this disease for years, leading to two recent hospitalizations before his apparent suicide. A pair of brilliant and courageous Wallace short stories — “The Depressed Person” in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and “Good Old Neon” in Oblivion — similarly focus on profound psychological agony. With excruciatingly painful detail and a humane laughter that is neither cruel nor belittling, both stories relate the involutions of a consciousness at war with itself, in which the maze-like wandering of thought spirals in futility, deepening the distress without offering any way out. Both stories relate facets of broken-down self-consciousness — severe depression in one case, a terrible feeling of hollowness and fraudulence in the other — that generate a bad feedback loop in which thinking does not help the character to think, or to heal. In Wallace’s fiction, self-reflection is often worse than useless.

An Apology to David Foster Wallace

Id_tyree_wallace_ap_0011 Morgan on David Foster Wallace, in The Smart Set:

Nobody ever really knows why someone else commits suicide — that’s what makes it an ultimate act, an unsettling challenge to those of us who keep on. Anyway, it doesn’t matter why. The death of David Foster Wallace is simply a fact now and we’re the ones who have to deal with it.

I fear that we didn’t do very well by David. We didn’t listen to him closely enough and we kept making him into something that he wasn’t. We called him an ironist. We suggested, often enough, that he was part of The Problem. Or we simply dismissed him as a cute and funny writer with a number of tricks up his sleeve. It was true, of course, that he never came up with a solution — no one has. But he dedicated himself to the problem of America, how to write about it, how to care about it, how to negotiate between loving it and hating it.

Because he was reasonably honest, he ended up taking crap from all sides. To the cultural conservatives he was everything bad about postmodernism. To the postmodernists, he was the wunderkind and court jester who served literary pleasure. But he was neither. He was never willing to fall into either of those camps.

David Foster Wallace has left us with quite a few great essays. Perhaps none is as great as the piece “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. I think of it as an anti-manifesto. It is the painstaking elucidation of a genuine conundrum. I call it a genuine conundrum because there is a difference between simply being confused and having earned your confusion. In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace lets himself think about literature as a task, literature as something each generation has to try and get right. Bravely, he begins the essay talking about television. He likes television. Goddamit we all like television. He will not join the ranks of those who simply dismiss the boob tube as nothing more than that. Or as Wallace puts it, laconically, “American literary fiction tends to be about U.S. culture and the people who inhabit it.” For Wallace, the central problem is not whether television is good or bad. Television, he wants to say, is constitutive of who we are, and that which is constitutive of who we are is beyond simple value judgments — it has become the necessary ground from which we proceed. You can’t be a writer, you can’t write about how the people around you experience the world, without taking into account that simple but massively important fact. You have to deal with television and other aspects of American popular culture, truly deal with it. And yet, Wallace doesn’t want to be reduced to television. He is confused about just how much he should accept it and how much he should reject it. He is trying to find the right balance in the midst of his confusion.

The rest is silence

From Prospect Magazine:

Wallace Like James Joyce, David Foster Wallace will be remembered—and, by some, fiercely loved—for a book which 99.999 per cent of the world’s population will never read to its end. Wallace hung himself in his home in California on 12th September 2008, aged 46. So Infinite Jest (1996), his second novel, turns out to be his final one, and lines and paragraphs throughout its 1,079 pages now flash in neon: “Help me, I’m depressed.” The neon will fade. It will be a magnificently ambitious book again. But right now it reads like a suicide note.

Wallace’s subjects were depression, addiction, language, advertising, philosophy, tennis—tennis was for Wallace what Catholicism was for Joyce—and, ultimately, America. His books (two novels, three short story collections, several collections of idiosyncratic and original journalism) sold well in the US, less so in Britain. Young writers loved him. On the small, strange planet (or, more accurately, asteroid) inhabited by novelists trying to reinvent the novel, this is the death of Kurt Cobain.

Wallace’s comic mode disguised the fact that his view of life was tragic. The last story in his collection Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is, I think, one of the great short stories of the past few decades. In it, he tells a story of a man telling an unnamed listener a story about a woman telling him a story about a man raping her. All those frames within frames should push the pain far away, but they don’t, they pull it closer. The story is postmodern and emotionally direct at the same time. That’s very hard to do. It is magnificent.

More here.

BOOKS MAKETH THE MAN

From The Literary Review:

Maddox_09_08 Attempting to tell an author’s life through the books he read is a risky enterprise. In this remarkable new biography of Oscar Wilde, Thomas Wright makes a convincing start with his claim that books were the greatest single influence on his subject’s life. Wilde’s first reading of some of his favourites was, says Wright, ‘as significant as his first meetings with friends and lovers’. Indeed, he later used gifts of books to seduce young men.

Wilde, born in 1854 and raised in a well-to-do, book-filled house in Dublin’s Merrion Square by a literary mother who called herself Speranza and performed public recitations of poetry, devoured the printed word from an early age. At his Enniskillen boarding school, Portora, he ran up a staggering book-bill of £11 5s 9d. The autograph and date (2 September 1865) on his copy of Voltaire’s L’Histoire de Charles XII make it the one book known to have been in his possession at the age of eleven, and mark his excellence in French. At Portora he also mastered the King James Bible, won a prize for Scripture and became a fine classical scholar, preferring Greek to Latin.

The most unconventional aspect of Wilde’s adolescent taste, in Wright’s view, was his love of French fiction. His passion was Balzac. He later said he wept ‘tears of blood’ when he read of the death in prison of the poet Lucien de Rubempré: ‘I was never so affected by any book.’  After Trinity College, Dublin he went on to Magdalen College, Oxford. There, in 1874, Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance struck him with the force of a revelation and he claimed never to travel without this book ‘which has had such a strange influence over my life’.

When disaster struck in 1895 and he was tried and found guilty of ‘gross indecency’, it struck his books too. Auctioneers descended on the house in Tite Street, Chelsea that Wilde shared with his wife Constance and their two sons. His cherished book collection was sold at auction to pay his creditors. According to Wright, who has consulted the ‘Tite Street Catalogue’, Lot 114 included ‘about’ 100 unidentified French novels.

Among the humiliations Wilde suffered after being sent to prison were not only compulsory silence – prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another – but deprivation of books. All he had in his cell at Pentonville, apart from his bed (a plank laid across two trestles), were a Bible, a prayer book and a hymnal. When at last his sympathetic MP won him permission to have more books, Wilde nominated Pater’s The Renaissance along with the works of Flaubert and some by Cardinal Newman. These were allowed, but only at the rate of one a week. Moved to Reading Gaol, he found himself under a more sympathetic prison governor. His book request lists after July 1896 show him developing an interest in more recently published titles, including novels by George Meredith and Thomas Hardy. Wilde later said that he also read Dante every day in prison and that Dante had saved his reason.

More here.

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Last Ant Standing

From Science:

Ants Every night, the Brazilian ant Forelius pusillus takes self-sacrifice to a whole new level. At sunset, the colony protects its nest by sealing off the entrances with sand, and a few ants remain outside to complete the job. Unable to reenter, they die by the next morning–making them the first known example of a suicidal defense that is preemptive rather than a response to immediate danger. Social insects are well-known for their willingness to die for their colonies; a number of bees, wasps, and ants succumb after their stings lodge in targets and break off. But until now, these insects were thought to engage in such suicide missions only when enemies were present. Behavioral ecologist Adam Tofilski of the Agricultural University of Krakow, Poland, and his colleagues were studying how F. pusillus dispersed sand in a sugar cane field near São Simão in Brazil when they saw that as many as eight ants remained outside the sealed nests. These ants weren’t stragglers: They deliberately helped hide the entrances, spending up to 50 minutes carrying and kicking sand into the hole until it was indistinguishable from its surroundings.

Come morning, when the nest reopened, these ants were nowhere to be seen. The researchers found out why when they plucked ants left behind into a plastic bowl: Only six of 23 survived the night. These findings, which will appear in the November issue of the journal American Naturalist, show that staying outside was suicidal. “In a colony with many thousands of workers, losing a few workers each evening to improve nest defense would be favored by natural selection,” said co-author Francis Ratnieks, an insect biologist at the University of Sussex, U.K.

The ants stuck outside might be old or sick, Tofilski conjectured.

More here.