David Harvey Rules

I reread The Crying of Lot 49, which continues to be awesome and terrible. I was especially amazed on this rereading by 1) how moving I found the end and 2) how curious it seems that Pynchon’s cartoonish, ridiculous, wacky, nerdy gamesmanship can turn into affecting, beautiful, and dizzily far-reaching prose. How’s he do that?

I also finished David Harvey’s The Condition of Postmodernity, which was excellent. Basically a Marxist reading of “postmodernism,” this book is clear, lucid, comprehensive, and interesting. Harvey’s main idea is that Postmodernism is best understood as yet another compression of “time-space” brought about by capitalism, trade, and technology, one in a series going back through Modernism (1904-1914), 1848, the Enlightenment, and the Renaissance. Looked at in this way, especially in comparison with Modernism, much of Postmodernism’s peculiar character begins to be explicable—Harvey depends heavily on the transition from Fordist production in the early 20th c., i.e. big factories, nationalism, static accumulation, to what he calls “flexible accumulation,” which we can read as globalization, neoliberalism, etc., indicating smaller factories, transnational economics, the proliferation of finance industries, and other familiar factors. Referencing Hassan, de Certeau, Lefevbre, Foucault, Jameson, and everybody else, he builds a view of Postmodernism (like Jameson's) that connects the cultural to the political and economic without being reductionist, and which offers plausible explanations for many of the salient features of "Postmodernity": put crudely, everything is too fast, the world is too small, capital is too powerful. I wish I had read this book about ten years ago, for it would have answered a lot of questions I had about the world in a compelling and forthright way. My one complaint is that it is too short--just as the book begins to get exciting, after the discussion fo space-time compression and the explication of how it works in postmodernity, we get a brief but interesting comparision between Blade Runner and Der Himmel Uber Berlin (Wings of Desire), then it's over. I would really have liked a more comprehensive development of his reading of postmodern culture. Still, pretty cool. Harvey, a British geographer who teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center, is my new hero. He is a thrillingly pointed Marxist critic of neoliberalism and American imperialism. He has posted videos of his course on Capital here.

Other than that, I’ve been dipping into a bunch of stuff and not finishing much lately. Watched Blue Velvet again for my pomo class. Still creepy. Also, I finished a first draft of my next novel, I Heart Oklahoma, which follows our heroine Suzie Q on her adventures across America in search of truth, freedom, and the meaning of “the road.” I’ll post a PDF of it after I run it by some friends and make sure it’s not total garbage.

Loving the Heidegger, hating the heat.

Mood

"In having a mood, Dasein is always disclosed moodwise as that entity to which it has been delivered over in its Being; and in this way it has been delivered over to the Being which, in existing, it has to be."

I have the attention span of a retarded goldfish right now, brought on by several factors including spending too much time on the internets and general burnout, which might explain why I had trouble making sense of the preceding quotation. Then again, it might not be all me.



This is the winner of the 2008 World's Ugliest Dog Contest, "Gus." Say hello, Gus.

Superstars of Conquest!!!!!!

Tomdispatch.com has posted an article here on Salon.com that talks about the disturbing phenomenon of enormous, long-term US bases being built in Iraq. I saw this when I was there in 2004, especially in Camp Victory and at some of the airbases, and though I'm grim about the prospects that anybody in America will really give a shit, I'm still glad to see it being reported on. See your tax dollars at work, and watch the next President extend American military involvement in the Middle East for another four to eight years, just to start.

This for me addresses one of the three most important unfaced facts about Iraq, which are: 1) We're going to be there for a long time. 2) Because it's all about the oil. 3) But not just our oil: Chinese oil, Indian oil, Russian oil, European oil... world access, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. Oh, and I guess the fourth unfaced fact, which is that nobody in the US govt is gonna do anything about it. Not Obama, not nobody. This is too close to the guts of power and too close to basic civilizational infrastructure. So rock on, superstars, and build your ziggurats of Empire!

The Things the Pterodactyls Carried

It’s been awhile since I’ve put a picture up. So here. Zeppelin versus Pterodactyls.

Have, aside from assorted reading on Heidegger, finished Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, which was unexpectedly good, and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which was a disappointment. I also read most of John Barth’s collection Lost in the Funhouse, which managed to on occasion rise above its irritating pomposity. It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea of the so-called “literature of exhaustion”—I love Beckett. And let’s be clear that Barth is no Beckett. Whereas Beckett mines exhaustion to the bitter end, Barth seems to affect it like a fashion. He manages to be clever without wit, grand without depth, and artful without craft. The title story from that collection was enjoyable and sometimes interesting, and there were brief moments in other works that lifted the tedium, but in general the sense was of writerly workshop exercises stretched beyond their interest. Barth’s jokes are all punchline.

Muriel Spark’s joke on the other hand is ironic and gracefully turned, becoming in the last pages of The Girls of Slender Means a story of surprising emotional power. Spark’s book tells of an assortment of “girls of slender means” living together in a dormitory in London, called the May of Teck Club, in the last year of World War 2. It follows their lives and interests—love, fashion, and ration chits, mostly—from under the shadow of the war to VJ day. I doubt that I can communicate or even suggest the subtle power of this small book in this brief space. What seems at first an almost wistful and silly reminiscence metamorphizes into a glittering modernist jewel of intersubjective narration, a jewel then shattered by events, though the shards keep their lustre. It was great.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried has been recommended to me by loads of people, and sadly they’re all wrong. The book is sentimental, clumsy, and flat, relying a great deal on what have become cliches about Vietnam, cliches both narrative and emotional. Since the book was written in 1990, well after the main war films about Vietnam and some books as well, you’d hope it would offer a unique perspective, but it doesn’t so much. The Things They Carried is about the Vietnam war, but mostly insofar as Tim O’Brien is remembering the war twenty years later and telling stories about it—and, unfortunately, the book itself shows that gap of time. Although clearly “rendered,” it lacks clarity, immediacy, and vividness, and fails to communicate much daily reality or self-aware reflection, giving us instead very conventional circlings around two or three major events with a tired “I was young and now I’m old” look back. There were moments in the book that were quite good, and two stories/chapters for me stood out from the rest, “How to Tell a True War Story” and “The Ghost Soldiers.” Only in these two sections for me did O’Brien really get into some of the complexities of war, the real problems of truth and imagination and the moral transformations war demands. These two were actually worth it. He’s no Ernst Junger, tho, that’s for sure.

Am reading Being and Time and L’Etranger (in French), and some other stuff, which I may post on. Am not loving the heat.

Summer School

As part of my efforts to complete my already much-belated BA (as in, dropping out for ten years didn't help), I'm taking summer courses, French and an independent study on Heidegger and a course on Postmodern Literature and Culture. The Pomo course looks to be at the higher end of what I've come to expect from New School for General Studies undergraduate courses, a somewhat popularized, discussion-heavy presentation of a complex topic, weak on the theory and academic rigor but at least entertaining, and interesting if you come to it knowing nothing or little to start with. So, I am interested in Harvey & Jameson's interpretation of postmodernism as the cultural "logic" or expression of late-capitalist or neo-liberal political-economic structures, but this is not, I think, where the class is going. It's a little more "Isn't it like this when we do this? It's so postmodern!" I'd like to problematize, but folks seem more interested in getting into the groove than examining the production of the social. What can you do? Go to grad school, I guess.

For the independent study, which I pretentiously titled "Heidegger, War, and Poetry," I'm working with a quality professor on looking at Heidegger, and reading Being and Time, from two disjunctive vectors: first, the historical and political context, particularly the two World Wars, and second, the relationship between Heidegger's thought and poetry, insofar as Heidegger's thought is influenced by the idea, and also what it influences, to wit, looking specifically at Holderlin, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Paul Celan. Much ado to do in eight weeks, so I need to beg off and go read some Being and Time, but first I want to mention Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel, which was the first text I read for this independent study. I'd also, very briefly here, like to bemoan the fact that I cannot find an English translation of Junger's Battle as Inner Experience, which would fit oh-so-comfortably into my developing idea of "the phenomenology of war." So I need to do more work. Anyway, Junger.

The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them.

Michael Hofmann, the translator of this version, speaks in his introduction to Storm of Steel of the strangely impersonal quality of the book, and how spare and delimited seems its vision. The book begins in the war and ends in the war, and we're given precious little narrative or information of what lies beyond or behind the front, and nothing of what came before or after. Junger's tone is often detached, generally factual, and even when it waxes lyrical or polemic (the latter far more rarely than the former) it never lets go of its intensely existential immediacy. While being very (and sometimes beautifully) descriptive, the vividness of the action isn't in the clarity of the scene but in the powerful subjectivity that Junger presents. This is a remarkable, unique book, not simply because of its historical content or powerful presentation, but also because of its notable perspective: although toward the end of the book Junger shows his fatigue and his troubling realization that the war, no matter what happens now, will be lost, he is throughout, from start to finish, proud of himself, passionate about his warrior ethos, and unrepentant in his violence. He recognizes the awfulness of war, the pain of loss, the horror of mass violence, the terror, fear, and suffering that characterize the experience of battle, but he also revels in the fierceness of dangerous action, in the charge of violence, in the bloodlust, courage, and brutal competition that give it such a terrible beauty. He doesn't seem interested in moralizing, or covering up his experience, or trying to make the war seem any more or less horrible than it was, and for that reason Storm of Steel seems to me to be one of the clearest, most profound works on war I've ever read.

What the hell?

Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz said today that an Israeli attack on Iran is "unavoidable."

"If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it. The sanctions are ineffective," said Mofaz, according to this article in The Guardian.

I don't mean to be alarmist, but I'm alarmed. As well, I'm disturbed that this rather provocative piece of news wasn't on the NYT or CNN site... so busy they are with the denouement to the Clinton-Obama drama.

Cheers, anyway.