5 degrees

Faire une recherche, faire des recherches, mots voluptueux; tout pleins,tout gonflés des promesses ultérieures.

(Do research, do some researching, voluptuous words; full, swollen with ulterior promises)

This is from the mouth of Peguy’s Clio, who obviously understand the obscure, persistant, immersive pleasure of a project that consists of tracking down innumerable sources and putting together innumerable facts. Facts, like jigsaw puzzle pieces, are, after all, made to be put together – and like puzzle pieces, the shape of the edges reflects the factory decision as to where, precisely, they fit.

But in contradistinction to the jigsaw puzzle, the historian is always seeking some dreamy fact, some key fact, from which one can go outward, ever outward, to the world. For in history, the box contains too many facts – and, of course, cut the piece differently and you will find a different place for it. Although it will bear, on its surface, one hopes, that glimpse which, collected with all the other glimpses, will give you a picture, a piece of verisimilitude.

It is in the spirit of Clio (version Peguy) that I read, with delight, the Peter Hennesy’s review in the TLS of Brian Harrison’s Seeking a Role: the United Kingdom, 1951-1970. I couldn’t resist the first paragraph:

“Brian Harrison has a special gift which historians prize. He can turn the grains of history into fascinating and convincing patterns. How about this as an example of his grasp of the granular? From a journal to which I was hitherto a stranger, Heating and Ventilating Engineer, he has gleaned that in the UK, the “average living room was over 5° Fahrenheit warmer in 1970 than in 1950”. In terms of what one might call the softening of Britain, this is hugely significant. Those of us on the rim of middle and old age can vividly remember living in homes with but one warm room enlivened by a coal fire and, on winter nights, leaping into bed and hoping to fall asleep before the chill bit, and waking up to patterns of frozen condensation on the window panes in the morning. I have been a weaker man since the winter of 1966–7, when the underfloor heating of St John’s College’s new Cripps Building in Cambridge corrupted me for ever.”

Of course, in that special code of class that the British sneak into all statements, the way Chinese restaurants in the U.S. use MSG, we learn, from this, about Cambridge – it is the neverending echolation of class that will forever keep me from understanding Britain. I admit it. But that 5 degrees – oh, that lovely 5 degrees! Of course, to the inattentive reader, it might seem like only 5 degrees – but to those who love to track a fact, back through its distortions in the literature – and you will find that the simplest facts (to change my metaphor) are as distorted, in their transmission from one text to another, as the faces of the protagonists in the Fun House mirrors at the end of Lady from Shanghai – to some sure source, that 5 degrees is everything. The holy of holies. And whether at Cambridge or in some room in a housing project, that the reviewer recognizes the role played by 5 degrees in his life makes it all the sweeter.

If I were a historian, I cannot imagine a more positive review – at one point, Hennesy actually compares Harrison to Macaulay. For the sake of the 5 degrees alone, I am going to read this book – or maybe review it myself.

And so I’ll hie me hence – and leave this to end my song:

Ham.
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not
imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it
stopping a bung-hole?

Hor.
'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.

Ham.
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with modesty
enough, and likelihood to lead it: as thus: Alexander died,
Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is
earth; of earth we make loam; and why of that loam whereto he
was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that that earth which kept the world in awe
Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!

wastepaper (for amie)

In moments of idleness, I sometimes go through my back pages at LI. I wince at the misspellings, the clang of cracked sentences, the leaps in logic. I am appalled by the boring lengths of certain of my posts. But, overall, I am pleased that I leave this trail behind me. This paperless trail. This waste paper.

But of course it isn’t paper.

Two writers – Lichtenberg and Rozanov – left behind “waste paper” books. Rozanov’s were intentionally named “baskets” Lichtenberg’s Sudelbücher were, I think, named by his son in law, who edited them. But I believe he was naming them in the spirit their author intended.

The pretense that one is publishing a “lost” manuscript has a long and honorable tradition in fiction. Several functions are served by pretending that the text was lost and then found. For one thing, it treats the text as a kind of arcana imperii – secrets of state. Secrets of state are written with one eye on the possibility that they might be “lost” – that is, might fall into the wrong hands. Thus, they are always on the edge of being in secret code. The “lost’ manuscript fell into the wrong hands of the world – the chest, the back of the desk drawer, the space between the bookshelf and the wall.

The book that is lost is the equivalent of the author that is dead. So, to “find” a manuscript gives the author the rare privilege of rediscovering himself – becoming his own posterity.

But a waste paper book is at the opposite pole from a lost manuscript. Far from emanating the secret of imperial power, a text composed of those sheets of paper one has balled up and thrown away is a text composed of defeats. Of course, I admit it is odd to call Lichtenberg a defeated author. And yet, aware as he was of Kant’s critical system, and of other systems, too – like Lavater’s – and dubious as he was of all of them and of all systems in general, he was still driven by a fatal systematic desire – or rather, a desire for a system. Systemlust. That he never produced one could be put down to his hypochondria. The irritated gesture of throwing away his thoughts is certainly in response to his being neither and nor – a stranger to systems, the outsider who longs for insider status, but directs all his energies against insider-dom.

Rozanov, too, was a hypochondriac. He also fashioned himself into being an underground man – and not only by marrying Dostoevsky’s old mistress. Dig through the trash and you will find nasty things on the thrown away papers – sputum, spots of blood, snot, stains of unknown origin. Rozanov turned these things into prose, and presented himself as a nasty creature, always playing tricks, always backstabbing, an antisemite, a sado-masochistic Christian in his fits, more like Pere Karamazov than Ivan or Alyosha.

Myself, I am a neurotic in just this vein. I have, on the one hand, a nasty disposition. I’m always willing to wave my dirty underwear as a flag, and weep over myself while doing it. On the other hand, I have that systemlust, and no system. Like Dylan’s immigrant, “who lies with every breath/who passionately hates his life/and likewise fears his death”, I’ve invested who I am in this life in an ultimately futile project: wastepaper.

my nerves are bad tonight. Speak to me. Speak.

One of my more unpleasant, but seemingly ineradicable habits is that of bursting into nervous tears after a stretch of work that ends with some narrow escape, usually making the money I need to pay the rent. This is always a cliffhanger, the question of whether I will be late, whether I will make it, depending on when the newspaper or the magazine cut my check. And when I am secure, when I am paid, when I’ve written and edited, and even been praised, it is then that I am most easily touched. It is then that I am most easily plunged into a depression. It is then that the tussle of self-pity and self-hatred becomes a demonic, or, if you'd prefer, an angelic wrestling match, like Jacob pitted against the angel in Gauguin's painting. A garish clash.

So, being in this mood, last night I watched Henning Carlsen’s 1966 movie, Hunger. Normally, I have an intense dislike of movies about writers. This isn’t because writers live undramatic lives, which is the usual criticism leveled at this sub-genre of film. It is because the films fail to take the opportunity to strip themselves of drama, to royally purge all action, all theatricality, in favor of film’s own interiority, which is all in the lens, in the very timeframe of the shot, that glassy essence to which action here should be subordinate.

Hunger is Hamsun’s novel, his first real novel, and he produced it with the intent to strip out all clutter and sentiment, all drama, all high teas and ballrooms, as he said. Carlsen not only respected that, but he stripped the novel down further. But it is only because of Per Oscarsson, the actor playing the protagonist, that the film works, and works, and works.

What does the film show? A man in a city, Christiana, in the late nineteenth century, who is a writer. But he is not Victor Hugo or Arnold Bennett; he is, rather, a creature formed in that strange and mysterious interzone between all the classes. The interzone in which there is no division of labor – and thus he bears the doomed, archaic features of such a creature let loose in the world of money. A creature come from the country, the stranger. His instinct – it is an instinct more than a plan – is to approach the limit of what is socially possible, the limit of extreme non-necessity, the limits of the social necessity of the individual in him or herself. Why is this the writer’s task? Because this kind of writer is bold enough to address the whole world. Having no function, having stripped off the ties that would make him necessary in some way, he is at the opposite end of the scale from the great. He is, in this way, the very negative of a politician, He only represents that limit, that up-against-it, where, in the brief flare of his cry, one can see that there is no need for this particular person or any other. And thus he cuts the thin threads that keep us here on earth. Somebody’s love, somebody’s appointment.

Yet, at that boundary, the writer is full of pranks. He can’t help himself, when he talks, he has to lie, and when he lies, he believes himself. How can events have so conspired that there exists, like a crushing weight posed above him, this disproportion between himself, a man who feels sure that he can and must address the world, and the city of Christiana, where his application to be, even, a bookkeeper at a small grocery store is refused? This is how his hunger becomes a metaphysical trait, because, the more he sees food and the people who dine, the more childish it seems, deep down, this need to stuff your mouth. And yet he has to - he finds a bone and chews it, he chews on paper.

There is, as well, a business throughout the movie with his glasses. At one point he tries to pawn them. And he has these episodes in which the city blurs, it gets milky. He can’t accept this – for his spectatorship, his possessed spectatorship, is his one inalienable possession. It is the last thing, too, he can convert into cash. His last chance at elevating himself from the archaic, infantile world before the division of labor, that level in which he is stuck and which condemns him to a shabbiness and a lack of seriousness that he refuses automatically, to the cash nexus.

There is a marvelous scene at the end of the movie. The writer has one article to write. However, the landlady in the travelers hotel he has been staying at kicks him out, since he hasn’t paid. At that moment, he gets a letter containing 10 kroner. The messenger tells him it comes from a woman – the woman we’ve seen earlier in the film, a daughter of the upper bourgeoisie. The writer crumbles up the bill, throws it at his formerly landlady, and stumbles down the street. His eyes have been bothering him, clouding up, and they cloud up now. He tries to correct his article, leaning against a pillar, but he can’t see, he makes a number of marks with his pencil and they are not only no good, they mess up the page. Then suddenly, as though all the exclusions to which he has been subject hit him then and there, he tears up the pages, he throws his hat down, he tears off his glasses, and he begins to screem, Ladies and Gentlemen, all is lost, all is lost! Which is precisely true. Like Lear, he has learned that there is no place in this world where they reason not the need. It is reasoned to the least jot and tittle.

All is lost, Ladies and Gentlemen! All is lost!

sanity and poetry

How much madness we’ve flushed down the drain!

In the London Review of Books, there is a review of the correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Bishop stood for sanity, as much of it as she could stand. She grew up in a house with a mad parent, her mother. Lowell stood for insanity, or sanity shaken to vertigo – and of course suffered from madness himself.

“Some of their exchanges remain fascinating, such as the letter in 1957 in which Bishop responded to a draft poem (which became ‘For Elizabeth Bishop 2: Castine, Maine’) that Lowell had written about her in which he mentioned that her mother had tried to kill her. ‘I don’t remember any direct threats,’ Bishop wrote, ‘except the usual maternal ones. Her danger for me was just implied in the things I overheard the grown-ups say before and after her disappearance. Poor thing, I don’t want to have it any worse than it was.’ The following year, it must have struck Bishop with considerable force to learn that Lowell, who had had a breakdown, was incarcerated in the same mental hospital as her mother had been. ‘My mother stayed there once for a long time,’ she wrote to him. ‘I even have some snapshots of her in very chic clothes of around 1917, taking a walk by a pond there.’”

We have, of course, invited the wires in since 1917 – we calmly speak of hard wiring, as though we were all appliances. A vision that has its roots in the maddest of delusions, truly of Schreber-like proportions. Wires, of course, don’t go mad, they rust, they misfire, they loosen. There are shorts, there are circuits.

It is a funny thing, but for me, it is only together, only in the circuit of their friendship, that I really appreciate Lowell and Bishop. We do like to take our writers one at a time, but often they come in twos – Blok and Bely, for instance; Verlaine and Rimbaud. Perhaps it was the unhappiness of Baudelaire’s life that he really didn’t find a pairing – he was always the albatross. Folie a deux – granted; But sanity is a deux, too. Don’t credit yourself with it if you have it – cause you didn’t make it, baby. You didn’t make it.

Beckett and a stream of pee

There’s a famous story that Beckett was so impressed by Jules Renard’s journals that he read one of the entries out loud to a friend and said that this is how he wanted to write.

It is the final entry in the journal. “Je veux me lever, cette nuit. Lourdeur. Une jambe pend dehors. Puis un filet coule le long de ma jambe. Il faut qu'il arrive au talon pour que je me décide. Ça sèchera dans les draps, comme quand j'étais Poil de carotte.”

“I want to get up. Heaviness. A limb hangs outside. Then a stream flows down my leg. It had to reach my heel before I decided. It will dry in the sheets, as when I was Carrot top.”

The reference to Poil de carotte is to Jules’ childhood name, which he made the title of an authobiographical novel.

What did Beckett love about this passage?

For one thing, there is the fact that this is the last entry. In the Journal, the editor discretely makes an appearance at this point to inform the reader that Jules died, thus taking care of any more entries.

Another thing is, of course, an objectivity that amounts to detachment. It is the author’s limb, the author’s pee, the author’s heel. But the prose seems to take its tone from, to blindly grope forward to, the verb secher – dry. One recognizes, here, the underground influence of the stoics. To detach oneself from one’s life is an exercise in which the mind divides and then puts together, thus showing the artifice beneath the appearance. The more one sees the artifice, the less afraid one becomes of the ultimate detachment, which is from life itself. Unlike the stoics, however, the modern temperament no longer believes in that moment of courage. Turn on the machinery of detachment, by all means, but don’t expect anything to be saved.

Which is, of course, how something, the smallest and tiniest thing, is saved. Peeing. Carrot top. That these things, hollowed out by time, insignificant in themselves and, used as a standard, making insignificant those natures of which they formed a part, can open up, still, to something infinitely kind … this is the astonishment of art towards which thhe artist strive through every negation and pettiness.

Rabbit is no longer rich

“RUNNING out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The fucking world is running out of gas. But they won't catch him, not yet, because there isn't a piece of junk on the road gets better mileage than his Toyotas, with lower service costs. Read Consumer Reports, April issue. That's all he has to tell the people when they come in. And come in they do, the people out there are getting frantic, they know the great American ride is ending.”

Ah, but Updike’s character is not going to hell in a handbasket as the world ends in 1980, not he. Rabbit, pulling himself out of his sexual maelstroms, his jock nostalgia, the investment of his bile and love in Vietnam, ends up selling Japanese because his father in law was ahead of the game, there in the East Pennsylvania town of Mt. Judge where Rabbit’s life keeps threatening to dribble away, a story preserved in newspaper clippings framed and under glass and yellowing in his office. And yet, just as Rabbit had gravely misjudged Vietnam and the Lord’s work there, his bloodyhanded work there, so, too, he misjudged the great American ride – it just seemed like it was ending, then. That was before the Great Moderation, or the great immoderation of responding to two consecutive global oil shocks by doubling down on the tonnage, making the Jeep, the truck or at least its underbody the big cash cow for the big cash cow Americans, debt coming out of their assholes. The river is deep and the lane is wide, and we have to get to the other side – and so we will by main force, herding together to and from work, which gets more tiring and more pointless and makes more money for more ghosts, ghost money for somebody somewhere else, while the restless body, that daytime tomb for the wandering, culturally starved spirit, aspires to 30,000 dollars worth of vehicle, mall weekends and houses that one can ATM the home equity from for another pop at the good life, however ill advised, however little parents, school, tv, and church had prepared you for one, for even knowing what one looked like if it bumped into you, instead selling you a lemon, “happiness”, a “happy life”, a term of imprisonment not to exceed the carcinogen count down ticking away in your liver, thyroid, prostate, brain.

“A hundred twelve units new and used moved in the first five months of 1979, with eight Corollas, five Coronas including a Luxury Edition Wagon, and that Celica that Charlie said looked like a Pimpmobile unloaded in these first three weeks of June already, at an average gross mark-up of eight hundred dollars per sale. Rabbit is rich.”

Rabbit is lucky. And then there are the Arnolds, featured today in the NYT:

“The Arnold Pontiac dealership is not one of those glass-encased bazaars winking from the main drag, with a showroom the size of a parking lot and a name that sounds like a law firm with too many partners: “Acme Chevrolet Buick Jeep Hyundai Volkswagen Kia Saab. How may I direct your call?”
No, Arnold Pontiac pretty much says it all.
The dealership sits exactly where the Arnold family began a car business back in 1916: on the corner of North Main and East Pike in the pit-stop Western Pennsylvania town of Houston, right next to the First Presbyterian Church, where Arnolds are baptized. Small showroom downstairs, service and parts upstairs, free Pontiac calendars everywhere.”

The Arnolds face, of course, the problem that selling Pontiacs will soon be a job like wrangling dodoes – it will lack an objective correlative. The Pontiac has been given a thumbs down by GM. The NYT story is heavy on color. Dan Barry is trying to reflect, in an Updikian way, on what the end of this phase of the American ride means for America. Here’s the obit part:

“His son, who started working at the dealership when he was 6, using a step stool to dust the tops of gleaming Bonnevilles and GTOs, is still trying to process the apparent evaporation of this chunk of his inheritance. “I’m not going to entertain that just yet,” says the younger Mr. Arnold, who sold his first car in 1987. (“Green Sunbird.”)
As Detroit and Washington work to save the car industry from going over a cliff like some roadster in a black-and-white melodrama, entire families have been upended — families that long ago linked their surname to the name of Pontiac in commercial banns of marriage.
For example, the Arnolds are friends with the Mikans, a longtime Pontiac family in Butler, about 60 miles north of here. Robert Mikan, 76, and his son, David, 39, watched last Monday’s devastating news conference on a computer screen in their dealership, in a back room where an old plaque from the Pennsylvania Automotive Association hangs tilted on the gray paneled wall.
After a while the son, whose first sale was a used white 1988 Pontiac Grand Prix, turned to his father, whose first sale was a gray 1946 Pontiac Torpedo, and said, “Dad, I think that’s it.”

I think that’s it. Hit the road, jack. Creative destruction. Behold, thou hast heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all lands by destroying them utterly; and shalt thou be delivered? Oh no, we shall not be delivered, for Assyria has a precontract on the American heart; it has written the word market on that heart, and though the organ throb and moan, it will never bust through that sublime phrase. Dan Barry’s article may sprinkle color over this extinction, but you must read the other half of it, the comments section, to understand the American "love affair" with the car, the American ride - that deeply fucked up knot of contradictory impulses. There is nothing Americans hate like mourning a business gone bad. You can gawk to your heart’s content at the wreck at the side of the road, but let’s not get sentimental about the bloodshed – especially of a car dealer. For this is the thing - in this love affair, there has to be some way of unloading the deep reserves of hatred, the psychotic and jagged shadow that the car leaves behind, its trace in the air.

“I have never bought a new car but that I wasn't lied to, cheated, or ripped off. I have absolutely no sympathy or pity for dealers going under; they richly deserve it. It is particularly irksome to hear those guys whine. Stop whining. Get a job.”

“My first job out of undergrad was in Houston, PA and the car I bought with my first paycheck: a 1995 Pontiac Grand Am, from that very dealership. That car, incidentally, was also the reason why I switched to, and continue to drive Hondas.

My dad recommended the Grand Am to me; he was an Oldsmobile man who worked his whole life at United States Steel Corporation. From my first week of ownership, that Grand Am had serious electrical problems; the engine would stall on I-79 even travelling at full speed. A mechanic at the dealership told me that it was a bad model and that a lot of them were just “thrown together in Detroit with such high speed that many had serious problems.” He then walked me over to a shipment of fresh cars; each had a box of parts in the back that GM hadn’t installed at the factory, which the dealer mechanics would have to do, often without proper training.

The first trip to my Dad’s house in my Honda Civic (after only 3 months of Pontiac ownership) he wouldn’t allow me to park in the driveway. He now owns a Toyota, giving up on GM himself after the end of Oldsmobile forced him into a sub-quality Cadillac: people don’t make expensive mistakes twice.

And so Pontiac dies a shortened, yet somehow also prolonged and painful death, a bit like Elvis. It really won’t be long before Buick, Chevy, and Chrysler follow. For there’s one thing the American auto industry still don’t get… we aren’t impressed by companies that make only one decent car in a sea of otherwise sub-standard products. The fact is, you won’t find a single model from Honda or Toyota that isn’t at the top of its class. But you could find every Pontiac at or near the bottom.”

And what I want to know is: how do you like your blue eyed boy Mr. Death?

on a sentence of bely's

I like this sentence of Bely’s”
“I remained healthy by removing my skin.”

This is the only known cure for the sickness unto death. I suffer from the latter myself, but I admit I’ve never removed enough skin. Never. This is the great failure of my life.