Thursday, February 12, 2015

who killed cock robin

When I grew up in the suburbs, the nights, at least during the school season, were quiet. You’d hear, outside the window, in your bed, maybe the slur of a car leaving or entering a driveway. No voices. In the summer, when the nights were long and people were out in their lawn chairs, then there’d be voices.
In the city, this changed. When I lived in a dubious section of New Haven, there were days when very threatening loud people would be going down the street. In Austin, in the parking lot that was right beneath the window of my cheap efficiency, sometimes there would be fights, or the sound of broken glass. Also, since the highway was near by, the sound of traffic. Not very insistent. In Paris, we can hear the sounds of cafes, sometimes singing. Singing! Cafes! Paris! This is real.
Here in Santa Monica, there is the perpetual late night hobo drama – someone is always pissed off, screaming, exhausted by a life without shelter. There are people parking in the street, the sound of doors closing. On weekends, there’s the sound of groups going to bars, talking, laughing. For the last six months, next door, they have been tearing down the old pet store and erecting a glassy office for Charles Schwab. This has meant a lot of heavy machinery starting up at six in the morning, and weird sounds in the evening, as though some late night crewe was out there. Before they tore down the pet store, its parking lot was another hobo junction. It is right below Adam’s window. Adam got an earful of fuck! Shit! And all the commonplace filler words  that make up the excited conversation of people who are semi-inebriated, whether they are out on the street or twenty something frat boys.
When we go back to Paris, Adam will hear the café songs. And the ocassional drunk.
What I can’t remember hearing, but must have, is bird song. Two nights ago, we heard, marvelously, the chirping of some song birds up to eleven at night. I am hearing a bird singing right now. Now, I know, intellectually, that we are living in the age of who killed cock Robin – the petrochemical insecticide age, the age of vast environmental distruction, the end of the Holocene, that is forcing song birds to the wall. I am not sure that Adam will know those songs when he is my age. When I was a boy, our subdivision was not completely built out. There was still a small pond and a marsh near us. We put up a purple martin house and the martins came. Blue jays were plentiful. Robins, warblers, wrens, chickadees, cardinals, grosbeaks, swallows. I know things are quieter now. The Audubon society published a survey taken from a massive scan of birder notes over forty years – starting in 1967 – and they found this:
“Since 1967 the average population of the common birds in steepest decline has fallen by 68 percent; some individual species nose-dived as much as 80 percent. All 20 birds on the national Common Birds in Decline list lost at least half their populations in just four decades.
As we usher out the Holocene and humanity continues to take its century long spree on the planet, we are probably talking about passenger pigeon time for the bobwhite and the meadowlark and the lark.

So, enjoy the birdsong now.  We killed cock robin…

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

nightwood

When Djuna Barnes read the manuscript of Nightwood to her ex lover, Thelma Wood (who was depicted in it somewhat as the character Robin Vote), Wood expressed her criticism of the book by throwing a cup at Barnes and then landing a right and a left to her face. Apparently, she didn't like it. Since then, a lot of people haven't liked Nightwood for its decadence, obscurity, modernism, or whatever. Lately, I've been reading it and finding the reading slow, which is what Barnes, I think, intends. The danger of slow reading is that the reader will give up. What keeps one going is the truly amazing, even if maddening, prose, the sort of thing Edward Gibbon would have produced if he'd taken acid: it has the glazed, marmoreal finish of some imperial decline and fall while accelerating and decelerating to the barbarian clangor of to a quite non-Gibbonesque fever dream. Plus the famous, skewed aphorisms that stud the thing: "I tell you, Madame, if one gave birth to a heart on a plate, it would say "Love" and twitch like the lopped leg of a frog" - which is surely equal to Lautreamont.

Monday, February 09, 2015

Our gags

Gag is a strangely ugly word. Its repetition of the g seems to enact the throttling that is the meaning accorded to it primitively by the lexicographers. In fact, until the late eighteenth century, the nominal and verbal forms of gag all referred to the notion of some foreign matter either in the mouth and throat (and the physiological reaction thereto) or some matter barring the mouth. When Anthony Wood tells us about the punishment accorded to the Leveler, John Lilburne, for insubordinant speech, he tells us he was whipped while being dragged down a London street at the hind end of a cart, and then put in the pillory in a courtyard, where he continued to rail at the authorities until he was “gagged”. The association of gagging with speaking was clear in law and practice. In Pope’s Dunciad, the triumph of dullness would not be complete without the display of the tortures undergone by her victims:
Beneath her footstool, science groans in chains
And Wit dreads exile, penalties and pains;
There foamed rebellious logic, gagged and bound
There stripped, fair Rhetoric languished on the ground

The question for an ardent believer in speech magic – the invisible leaps and bounds that act out and incorporate the intellectual history of a language – is how we go from this sense of gagging to the idea of the gag as either hoax or joke. A quick look at slang lexicographers gives us, with the telegraphic obscurity that this tribe deals in, some clues – Partridge, for instance, thinks that gagging some victim of a robbery produces first the outraged gurgle of the victim and “hence” the notion of nonsense, which passes itself on to its associate, the hoax. A more solid clue is given by the citation of Lockhart in the English Dialect Dictionary (1900).
Lockhart is known today, if at all, as the biographer of Walter Scott. In his day, though, Lockhart was the boy. According to his biographer, Andrew Lang, he was definitely a rankin’ Scots intellectual, mentioned in the same breath with Carlyle. In 1819, Lockhart, like Carlyle with Sartor Resartus, decided to publish a thing that was not a collection of essays and not a fiction, but a crossover, a halfbreed. I am partial myself to the halfbreeds of literature, but it is true that they are not exactly domesticable in the classroom the way a poem, essay or story is.In one of the letters, Lockhart, an Edinburg man, holds forth on the state of wit in Glasgow. Lockhart claimed – and all these claims are under the cloud of exaggeration, for as his biographer admitted, Lockhart had a waspish tonge and a Tory disposition – thawt in every party in Glasgow, after a certain number of drinks had been downed, the guests would start to pun: “ for punning seems to be the sine qua non of every Glasgow definition of wit.”
It is under this fug of drinks and puns that the primary meaning of gag meets the angel of language, that player of long games, who put his hand on the word and moved it. Lockhart  writes of the “jocular vocabulary of the place”, which is how he places the term “gagging” – which “signifiesm as its name may lead you to suspect, noting more than the thrusting of absurdities, wholesale and retail, down the throat of some too credulous gaper.” A gag could be the kind of doublesided compliment that makes a crowd laugh.  Or it could involve some “wonderful story … evidently involving some sheer impossibility. “ He writes of the “joke” of the matter – thus twinning the hoax and the joke.  Thus it is, in an atmoshere of imbibing liquids (the well known effect of which, if overdone, is spewing them out with interest), that ‘gag’ is turned.
As the psychoanalytically inclined have long observed, the double function of the mouth, which emits sounds and swallows matter, has long been a common object of reflection and unconscious desire and dread. Freud speaks of the transition from the matter of sounds to the abstractions of sense in his essay on Narcisisism, and is followed by Klein and, in his own deviant way, Deleuze in Logic of Sense – who engages with the word/matter distinction throughout his intricate flight.
Freud, however, was preceded in some ways by the Church fathers, whose meditations on the meaning of Jesus’s speech at the last supper – this is my body, take eat; this is my blood, take, drink – understood the dualism as shaped, in its center, by a miraculous divine intervention.
The reason I’ve been pursuing the gag down the rabbit hole is that I feel it is an underused concept. When discussing fiction, reviewers tend to dwell on plot, but in most fiction worth the reading, the plot is the servant of the gags. I’ve been reading a lot of high modernism lately – Djuna Barnes, for instance – and the displacement of plot by gag is a lot of what that modernism was about.

My ambition is to write some perfect gags by the time I lay down my burdens. 

The philosopher as spy: the case of Alexandre Kojeve

In the Spring of 2019, the rightwing French journal, Commentaire, published a story about the philosopher, Alexandre Kojève, by Raymond Nar...