Jeremayakovka

Cortázar: "Walking in Paris Means Moving Forward Toward Myself"

Another Poem Posted

NewsReal Blog picks up my poem, ''Miserere''.

Poem Posted

NewsReal Blog picks up my poem, ''Oedipus Song''.

Waiting For Good Ol' Republican Verse

Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" is a perfect specimen of ... bureaucratic verse, comments Adam Kirsch in The New Republic:

The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

Somewhat like the president's only occasionally exalted, often middling, prose....

Strength Through Superior Critical Firepower

As hinted in a recent post, Mahmoud Darwish's dying affected me more than I'd conceived it would have. For any of us outsiders who have ever insisted that recognition of mutual Israeli-Palestinian interests is our best moral compass, he seemed to be the go-to guy among Palestinian writers. His death may be a good occasion to bury also the idea of Darwish as a great, "universal," national voice, as Joseph Klein suggests:

The great poet Barrett Browning once wrote that “Art's the witness of what is behind this show.”  Mahmoud Darwish betrayed his craft and his own people by turning his poems into weapons of war against Israel instead of reflection on the real cause of the Palestinians’ self-inflicted wounds.  He fed the fictional narrative of the Palestinians’ innocent victim status rather than bear witness to what was “behind this show.”

A Lifetime of "Resistance" Taught Him This

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.
-- Mahmoud Darwish (1941- August 9, 2008)

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Update (08/11) - Afterthoughts:

According to the translator's introduction to Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish was well aware that he had been regarded as a "resistance" poet. Its reductiveness had annoyed him.

Most of his output, which includes editorial work as well as several poetry volumes, is unavailable in English and likely to remain so for a long time. A precise estimation of him by those of us not proficient in Arabic is out of reach. Still, one can try to be fair.

As a young man Darwish studied (briefly) in the Soviet Union where he began an acquaintance with the poetics of their revolution. Sacrificing his Israeli citizenship to do so, he was on the way to becoming a leading Arab (and foremost Palestinian) man of letters among "non-aligned" and "anti-colonial" trends of the Cold War.

Certain lines from Mayakovsky's poem "Back Home!" recall the bit that I know of Darwish's committed but critical work. One portion I can press effortlessly into service as a farewell. Fittingly, Mayakovsky began the poem on board a ship at sea, in no country at all. Also fittingly (and sadly), these particular lines, the intended ending, were cut from the finished version in favor of a more "ideologically correct" stance:

I want to be understood by my country,
but if I fail to be understood--
what then?
I shall pass through my native land
to one side,
like a shower
of slanting rain.

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Update (08/12):

He ended his life as a sad person, because he felt that what the Palestinians had done to themselves was much worse than all the injustices and pain they had suffered at the hands of others.
-- Hanan Ashrawi (via BBC)

Warrior Whitman

In war [the poet] is the most deadly force of the war.
-- Walt Whitman

"Just Ask Henry Roth"

Just Ask Henry Roth

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Humbly prevail
Or proudly fail,
Sly underdogs
Make good old dogs.

The enduring trick
(Healthy or sick)
Is: Do the time,
Not just the crime.
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For Flag Day, "The Defense of Fort McHenry"

Thanks to Laurie for pointing out the complete source of the national anthem. More background from Eugene Volokh.

The Defense of Fort McHenry
by Francis Scott Key

Oh, say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wiped out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Thinking Like A Communist Thinking Like A Nazi To Catch A Thief Called History

I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe.

Some notes here from my recent read of Victor Serge's Unforgiving Years, a pressing meditation about European Communists on the run in WWII even more from Stalin than from Hitler.

True to the concerns of this itinerant Communist's other written works -- humming with a force vitale that ranges from the polemical to the historical to the poetic, taken together they comprise some of the 20th Century's most "committed" literature -- the energies at stake in this novel are political and, above all, psychological. From page one unsettled characters are on the run and remain so for five years (1940-45), in four countries, on two continents, and through 340 pages. They juggle aliases and addresses while beset by trenchant reassessments -- sometimes shared, often private -- of the state of the Class Struggle In A Time Of War.

Come to think of it, a tantalizing twist on Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon would be had Serge managed to compress his tale into one continuous narrative rather than four successive ones. The novel could then be titled (more intensely, likely, and certainly with more economy) Unforgiving Hours. As it stands, the narrative offers two sections whose major machinations unfold amid real warfare, but where battle is but the backdrop -- the mise en abîme of Leningrad under Wehrmact seige, and later the fin de Reich leveling of the city of Altstadt before its American liberation.

Serge's primary purpose is not martial, but civil. For a ruthless agitator, he stares with considerable sympathy into the fragile frontiers of everyday minds overrun by extraordinary, totalitarian ideologies. One passage especially near the end of the Altstadt section struck me. Here an elderly Nazi school instructor speaks his mind to an American journalist:

"A very great people the Americans ... The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war ... On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition..."
"You think so?"
"Beyond a doubt.... You will realize that in fifty years."
"Phew, we got time to turn around then."
(p. 263)

In these lines is the crux of the "culture war" we came to by the 1990s -- stoked by the "adversary culture" (which Norman Podhoretz elaborated in The Bloody Crossroads), then superseded by the "counterculture" -- which rages and festers today. These lines are also, let it be noted, nearly identical to those which "The Philospher of Islamic Terror," Sayyed Qutb, drew in the sand during his nearly identical years in America. Yet note as well the journalist's reflexive, rolling-up-our-sleeves, can-do attitude. Only in America can history be -- or, to a European, seem, at least in part -- neither pathetic nor heroic.

So much of 20th Century European history is unpardonable, yet so much of 21st Century American history remains unfinished.

Now And Zen Cohen

I have abdicated the throne
both the temporal and the spiritual
-- Leonard Cohen, Book of Longing

[Welcome, readers referred by online muses, Fausta's Blog and Atlas Shrugs and Alarming News.]

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Yesterday I read the bestselling collection of latter-day Leonard Cohen poetry and drawings, Book of Longing. Read it start-to-finish and in silence, the way it's intended, I sense. For one thing, the bulk of it was written inside a Zen monastery.... A daintier presenter will give readers leave to "pick and choose" through this 229-page volume, but Jeremayakovka does not advise that.

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Leonard's longing is longer than any of the Book of Longing's 100-something individual compositions and 40-something drawings. The little works smolder in the ear and/or eye, bolder than quips or limericks yet shy of odes or elegies. Taken individually in short-footed, almost sing-song cadence, their form contradicts the pretended gravity of Leonard's notoriously heat- (and wet-) seeking flesh. Some of the Book of Longing's freshest moments are stringent admissions of his own, often priapic, aporias. Out of context they would rate as just an old man's dirty dunceries. Here they ring in deadpan, almost comic relief:

still looking / at the girls / but there are / no girls / none at all / there is only / (this'll kill ya) / inner peace / & harmony (p. 207)

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Leonard is neither gone nor forgotten of course, but either state can turn inert. Neither guarantees a just appreciation. For "appreciation" without estimation is flattery; if not, it might render one vulnerable to flattery. One thing Leonard reminds by the Book of Longing is that he's always longed for order. Not an angelic order (his order being baser), but something closer to that of Rilke who elegized Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me out of the orders of the angels?

Still, the Canadian Jew is not as transcendent as his German predecessor. Leonard's verses (as Rilke's) do not scream so much as murmur, murmuring of the heart while filtering through feminine flesh. This order is, as it must be, of Leonard's own devising. The trick (and this is every artist's acid bath) is that it also be a calling, and that the calling, if it doesn't do the devising, then revises it.

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Whatever may be Crooner Leonard's proven power, Poet Cohen writes at times in the baffled habit of the ex-monk. The habit fits too close for confidence as well as for comfort. Wrestling not with an angel, the ex-monk eats the embarrassment of having stumbled out of that order. His witness  is always to a kind of beauty. It's just that the witness is sometimes lowly and at most just short of holy. Or holy only inadvertently (see p. 207, above):

taxes / children / lost pussy / war / constipation // the living poet / in his harness / of beauty // offers the day / back to g-d (p. 175);

Anyone who says / I'm not a Jew / is not a Jew / I'm very sorry / but this decision / is final "Not a Jew" (p. 158)

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--Hypocrite Leonard,--mon semblable,--mon frère!
--Mon vieux,--mon pauvre,--mon debonaire!
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the road is too long / the sky is too vast / the wandering heart / is homeless at last (p. 215)
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(p. 167)

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For you, Gentle Reader. Verses I jotted, and worked, since opening the Book of Longing:
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Fanfare

My genius is an anchor
Grappling o'er the waves.
Hauled 'weigh by steaming Rancor
The calm seabed it craves.

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This Birthmark On My Skin

Thinking about my father
Gets in the way of thinking
About the men I admire.
Which is how he thinks
About his father.

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California Hotel #1

Having me put out of mind
Once inscribed I on your heart,
     Your inmost rind
     Is where they'll find
Your torrents bloodying my mark.
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California Hotel #2

Come! Nibble at my rotted heart.
Speed your tongue along wormworn trails.
Pay no heed when the thing falls apart.
     Feed then, Liebe. Bitte,
     Feed on the frittered entrails.

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Tenderloin Hotel #1

You know it is no casting chore
     to lick you by the bushel.
Just nod a knee to bid me more
     or sigh my first initial.
How tyrant Time tricks every whore.
     Dare you defy the benevolent official?
Go, then! Anoint your imperious store
     whose lounging supple diadem
     wrings reign o'er brittle thistle.
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Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 9) - "The O-Bomb Threat"

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The O-Bomb Threat

That prickly old pear Uncle Sam
In '45 finally proved, Yes, we can
Crush foe Jap and German.
FDR's war was finished by Truman
Who acknowledged the next one
By dropping A-bombs on Japan.

Times today are as hopeful as grim
When enemies without and within
Swoon for "change" adorned by Guevara.
This makes Uncle Sam wanna holler
O America -- I ain't yo' Mama!
As all 'round Obama fallout descends.
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Previous "Chillin', Not Trillin" here.
What's "Chillin', Not Trillin"? and Why? here.

Be My Valentine, Oriana

The tragedy of a man condemned to be alone because he makes everybody uncomfortable and serves nobody is measured finally by the desert he has to face when he emerges from his natural environment, politics seen as a dream, and enters an environment that is unnatural for him, politics understood as a profession.
-- Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), her novel A Man
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An original sonnet for the occasion (first posted here):
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When Late We Lie
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When late we lie at the other's side
Our murmuring airs palpate the shrouds
Of skirted deaths that still preside
Over loves too meek and loves too proud
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To brace our resurrecting aim
Whose righteous urges urge, and so
Betray no scruple and no shame
Retrieving forms where shadows go.
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Now, lest we lay an early wreath
That misconstrues what's to be tried
When next we lay we down -- to Death --
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When next we lie at the other's side,
May we recount with every breath:
"This death was never ours to die!"

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Multilingualism Yes, Multiculturalism No

It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual; it is a curse for a society to be bilingual.
-- Richard Lamm

Mitt Concedes Race, Asserts Conservatism

Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength.
-- Mitt Romney

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Mitt's concession speech is a bridge-builder, not a barn-burner. From "Stepping Aside for the Good of America":

[C]onservative principles are needed now more than ever. We face a new generation of challenges, challenges which threaten our prosperity, our security and our future. I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century—still a great nation, but no longer the leader of the world, no longer the superpower. And to me, that is unthinkable....

The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960’s welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug—we have got to fight it like the poison it is!....

The attack on faith and religion is no less relentless. And tolerance for pornography—even celebration of it—and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today’s grim realities: 68 percent of African-American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45 percent of Hispanic children, and 25 percent of white children. How much harder it is for these children to succeed in school—and in life. A nation built on the principles of the founding fathers cannot long stand when its children are raised without fathers in the home.

The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it!

Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honored to stand on principle and to stand for principle.

America's Poet Laureate Voted For John Edwards

Beware proponents of "the common good":

Did you vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary last month?
Yes, for John Edwards. I like a lot of things that he said. Greed is going to do us in — stupid, selfish greed. We have essentially squandered the wealth of this country and forgotten the whole idea of the common good. Now, I know he doesn’t have a chance.

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Not surprising when "[no] particular demographic ... glommed onto Edwards' message."

The DoW of Pat Buchanan, The SoW of James Burnham

Fans of Liberal Fascism, unite!

Earlier this month, before dropping over $30 for the debut of Jonah Goldberg's (so far, wildly popular) Liberal Fascism, for $5 at a used bookstore I picked up for the first time ever a Pat Buchanan title, The Death of the West (2000).

I'm glad I did. It's a summary of the cultural, demographic, and economic trends that are the downfall of Western Civilization. It makes no particular case against militant Islam, although it does identify some of the harm it had already caused American interests; hence it cannot be accused of being particularly "Islamophobic" nor "isolationist." It identifies a culture war within American society, unappeasable and unavoidable -- very much as others, post-9/11, have acknowledged the jihad with Islam.

Rarely, however, do I notice Pat mentioned by name by post-9/11 counter-jihad pundit-authors. To pick a few, Mark Steyn in America Alone, Melanie Philips in Londonistan, or Claire Berlinski in Menace in Europe. Yet several of his basic observations and ideas pop up in their work -- declining Western birth rates, for example, or plummeting church attendance in Europe. If a schism exists between Pat and the rest, it seems to me everyone involved would benefit from a spirited debate that identifies just what are their (our) common interests. (In LF Goldberg devotes a few pages to him, btw.)

With an indecisive GOP primary season afoot (uncertain, weary, and chaotic all at once; "the party's falling apart," says Dick Morris) someone's got to ask: Where is American conservatism headed? How well (or poorly) is the Republican Party its "home"? And since the November election will be, in part, a second referendum on "The Bush Doctrine": Of the flagrantly liberal aspects of Bush's record -- nation-building abroad, government expansion at home -- which are worth keeping, amending -- or dismissing?

In The Death of the West Pat is neither grim nor optimistic, just diagnostic. For all the pitched partisanship and great American romance that make up a presidential election, it would be good also to administer a dose of Pat's "DoW-ism" to the Republican and national discussions already underway.

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A pleasant surprise of DoW is its more than occasional literary references. In a way that in no way relies on the academiklatura (something which would surprise and annoy them, would any deign to read it) Pat clearly is well-read in American letters. He quotes from novels and essays only to illustrate his political points, but also -- mirabile lectu -- Pat believes that Western literature should be read (and written) to bolster, not undermine, the West. History -- not "the text" -- is literature's proper reference. In today's culture war that's radical. (That also helps to explain why so much contemporary scribbling may be many things, but certainly not literature.)

One of Pat's sources is James Burnham's The Suicide of the West (1964). It's out of print, but not impossible to track down in used form. So after finishing The Death of the West, I ordered a used copy of The Suicide of the West. It does not disappoint.

A heartening passage about modern literature runs as follows:

It is also ironic that liberalism -- so prevalent among modern intellectuals and so widely regarded as the truly creative outlook in modern society -- has failed to attract any of the major creative writers of our century. Professor Lionel Trilling [described by a former student here] who seldom deviates from the liberal line on specific political or social issues though he is mildly heterodox in theory, discussed this little remarked but surely significant fact in an article published in 1962 by the magazine Commentary. He pointed out that none of the major writers has been a liberal and that most of them have been anti-liberal; and that there is no great twentieth-century literary work infused with the liberal ideology as De Rerum Naturae, the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, Faust, and War and Peace were infused with other ideologies. In the twentieth century, Professor Trilling declares, there has been "no literary figure of the very first rank . . . who, in his work, makes use of or gives credence to liberal or radical ideas." Many secondary writers and a substantial majority of critics have been and are liberals; but Henry James, Marcel Proust, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, T. S. Eliot -- all of whom the liberals so much admire, so frequently imitate and so endlessly comment on -- have all been, often explicitly and scornfully, anti-liberal. (pp.135-136)

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Search inside this book!

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Samuel Coleridge, Romantic Poet Who Recognized Jihad

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Mahomet
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Utter the song, O my soul! the flight and return of Mohammed,
Prophet and priest, who scatter'd abroad both evil and blessing,
Huge wasteful empires founded and hallow'd slow persecution,
Soul-withering, but crush'd the blasphemous rites of the Pagan
and idolatrous Christians.--For veiling the Gospel of Jesus,
They, the best corrupting, had made it worse than the vilest.
Wherefore Heaven decreed th' enthusiast warrior of Mecca,
Choosing good from iniquity rather than evil from goodness.
Loud the tumult in Mecca surrounding the fane of the idol;--
Naked and prostrate the priesthood were laid--the people with mad shouts
Thundering now, and now with saddest ululation
Flow, as over the channel of rock-stone the ruinous river
Shatters its waters abreast, and in mazy uproar bewilder'd,
Rushes dividuous all--all rushing impetuous onward.
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-- Fragment of an intended longer work; composed c. 1799, published 1834.
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Curious to consider: while lamenting corrupted Christianity Coleridge not just marks Islam's fanatic expansion, but possibly also celebrates it....

More on S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) -- poet, critic, translator; with William Wordsworth founder of English Romanticism; enthusiastic, then disillusioned, observer of the French Revolution; opium addict.

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Other links.

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Happy Romantic New Year

I am a bridge from the unidentified past into the future.
--Ayn Rand

A Cassandra in Europe

* Updated (11/26) *

Gay expat critic, poet, and journalist Bruce Bawer appears to have recently launched a blog, Memo From Europe. The initial posts display political and cultural commentary, plus the occasional undying reminiscence. Check it out. If you like it, let him know.

* Update * Bruce emails that Memo From Europe has been up and running for some time. Here are links to MFE's archives from earlier in 2007 and from 2006. We should all feel fortunate that Bruce has a presence on the Internet (where I learned about him). The unique, erudite, and timely perspective of a gay American in Norway would have made Henry James and Orianna Fallaci equally proud.

His most current title is the National Book Award-nominated While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying The West From Within. Other notable works include Beyond Queer: Challenging Gay Left Orthodoxy (editor) and A Place At The Table. He's also written the best demystification of Edward Said I've yet come across.

Romans 12

The whole chapter is so inspirational, I am moved to type it out and post it in its entirety.
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1 I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

3 For by the grace given to me I bid everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith which God has assigned him. 4 For as in one body we have many members and all the members do not have the same function, 5 so we, though  many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 6 Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them: if prophecy, in proportion to our faith; 7 if service, in our serving; he who teaches, in his teaching; 8 he who exhorts, in his exhortation; he who contributes, in liberality; he who gives aid, with zeal; he who does acts of mercy, with cheerfulness.

9 Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good. 10 love one another with brotherly affection; outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Never flag in spirit, be aglow with the Spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in your hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints; practice hospitality.

14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; never be conceited. 17 Repay no one with evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. 19 Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord."* 20 No, "if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals upon his head." 21 Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
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*: a portion of verse 19 appears as the epigraph to Anna Karenina.

"Because The Beautiful Non-Violent Anarchist Revolution Needs A New York Chapter"

Earlier this year the anarcho-pacifist Living Theatre, led by its surviving founder Judith Malina and current co-director Hanon Reznikov, celebrated its 60th anniversary. Here's a public reading of a poem Reznikov wrote for the occasion (hardly a poem, more like some well-spun "free association"...) which he and Malina recited at a dingy basement gathering.

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Almost 20 years ago on 3rd & C in the East Village, in a cabaret-style, black box basement storefront, I caught the Living's exuberant production of Else Lasker-Schüler's anti-Nazi allegorical play I and I. It was a night to remember. A high school friend, back from his first semester at Harvard, sporting first-growth sideburns and smoking Marlboro reds, joined me again in our native Manhattan. I'd bused in from Berkeley (3 days nonstop by Greyhound), having recently bought a $99 black motorcycle jacket and sticking to a still-pending "not guilty" plea for a minor charge incurred some weeks previously for civil disobedience. For two untested liberal New York Jewish teenagers to whom anti-Nazism was still the lone inherited pose of anti-fascism, I and I was, or seemed, just what die Frau des Doktors ordered.

The Living had decided to stage Lasker-Schüler's work -- a refashioning of Goethe's Faust as a condemnation of the acquiescence to Nazism --  as a musical. The musicality (choral more than instrumental) drove the play's points home that much more deeply. One reviewer quipped that Mephistophiles, played by a black actor, looked like Rick James in dreads and drag. Calling to mind Lasker-Schüler's ultimate years as a destitute German-Jewish refugee in Mandate Palestine, Malina (whose parents had fled Germany in the 1930s, little Judith in tow) played the small but by no means minor part of a withered, old, homeless woman. Barrel-chested and tight-fisted, under a single spotlight she belted out a sotto voce exhortation that put the rest of us more supply formed types to shame. (And, this more supply shaped type, to wonder....) Like a beggar's blessing or a mute's moan, it was a fitting theatrical gesture for the reigning grande dame of American anarchism. Since that time no cultural production I've taken in, other than The Living's I and I, has instilled such visceral resistance against the indifference, lassitude, resignation -- and betrayal -- which fascism starkly and in a way seductively imposes. Alas! If only I knew then what I know now about Islamofascism. If only all of us knew then. If only all of us knew now.

The Living Theatre is that most rare of anarchist groupuscules: people who (on their good days) love life more than they hate "the System." While the Left -- both long before and ever since that mesmerizing production of I and I -- has done so much more to discredit than to honor itself, I, me & myself confess an undying, wide-eyed admiration for much of what The Living has undertaken -- that is, envisioned -- during its exceptionally long run. To be sure their "program" (to the extent they have one) is unworkable and in hindsight politically suicidal. They picketed, for example, to spare the lives of condemned, guilty Soviet-American spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and they were for nuclear disarmament from the get-go. Yet it would be disingenuous to act as if I don't know that their je ne sais quoi is a permanent gesture of earthy and even primal exhilaration delivered with bullish derring-do. With that The Living Theatre embraces the world, all of it -- the good & the bad, the beautiful & the ugly -- in an embrace as wide as it is firm. And also loose. To this day The Living Theatre remains, somehow like (and somewhere between) both desire and disease -- infectious.

Long live the spirit -- if not the letter -- of The Living Theatre!

Further reading:
* The Living Theatre's web site.
* Judith Malina's Diaries: 1947-57 and The Enormous Despair.
* About Else Lasker-Schüler.

Related (indirectly): "Arrividerci, Fallaci, Fare Thee Well"

Roger Kimball Comes To Bury Mailer, Not To Praise Him (Really)

Roger Kimball must have been polishing this piece for months, if not years. He seems to have read every book ever written by and about the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and five-time marriage loser (also, one-time marriage winner).

From Kimball's "Norman Mailer, A Dissenting View":

No one combined critical regard, popular celebrity, and radical chic politics with quite the same insouciance as did Mailer. From the late 1940s until the 1980s, he showed himself to be extraordinarily deft at persuading credulous intellectuals to collaborate in his megalomania. Although he modeled his persona on some of the less attractive features of Ernest Hemingway—booze, boxing, bullfighting, and broads—he managed to update that pathetic, shopworn machismo with some significant postwar embellishments: reefer, radicalism, and [Wilhelm] Reich, for starters. The glittering example of Mailer’s commercial success was obviously the cynosure that many aspiring writers set out to follow: his neat trick was to combine cachet with large amounts of cash.

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Wow! I thought I had shrewd opinions about stormin' Norman. E.g., JMK on The Castle in the Forest: Adolf Hitler was more of a genius -- and more evil -- than Norman Mailer ever was or will be. And that may make Norman jealous. Previous JMK blog entries about Mailer here and here.  

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Most telling is to compare Mailer's recent major effort with that of one of his ex-friends and contemporaries, ex-liberal Norman Podhoretz. Norman M's final work is an exploration of the psychological formation of Adolf Hitler whereas Norman P's most recent work is the case for the destruction of Islamofascism. Mailer looks back at the 20th and even the 19th Century whereas Podhoretz focuses on the present and looks ahead to the rest of the 21st Century. It's more evidence that, post-9/11, so-called liberals are rather regressive and so-called neocons are rather progressive....

L'Été Va Bientôt Nous Quitter, Il Faut En Profiter

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"Syrtaki" (or "Zorba's Dance") the theme to the film adaptation of the immortal novel Zorba the Greek, rendered by the mortal Dalida.
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Summer's gonna leave us soon, we better make the most of it.

More Dalida clips: "Never on a Sunday" (English), "Ciao amore" (French), "Gigi l'amoroso" (English), "Born to Sing" (English)
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Or if you prefer, a scene from the original:

(It's a far cry from West Side Story, fortunately.)

How To Talk Back To Liberals And Conservatives (When You Must)

The following is an excerpt from Ann Coulter's new book, which could have been called How To Talk Back To Liberals And Conservatives (When You Must), but which instead is called If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans:

Liberals’ response to unbridled right-wing speech makes the Muslims look laid back. Reacting with stupefied indignation whenever someone disagrees with them—especially in a way that makes people point and laugh at liberals—they seem to be in a constant state of outrage. Liberals, and the conservatives who fear them, have a look of perpetual outrage, kind of the way Nancy Pelosi has a look of perpetual surprise.

About twice a year for nearly a decade, I have upset the little darlings with some public statement, and yet they manage to summon fresh outrage for each new offense. Each time they think I can’t “sink any lower”—I proceed to do so! And by the way, if they’re going to keep using the tired formulation “This time, she’s gone too far!”—can I get an admission that the last sixteen times were, therefore, not “too far”?

I’m almost at the point that I could put together an entire speech containing only lines that make liberals cry. It would be a rather disjointed speech, involving references to Muslims, Katie Couric, Bill Clinton, Max Cleland, Muslims again, Norman Mineta, Justice Stevens, the Jersey Girls, more on the Muslims, Jack Murtha, John Edwards, still more on the Muslims, and Lincoln Chafee—among many others.

To compensate for all the Republicans who go supine at the sound of liberal squalling, I would include a short section in my speech on Strom Thurmond’s contributions to America. I’d fire some of Bush’s U.S. attorneys. I’d have a few jokes about Abu Ghraib—which I think I’m entitled to. I suffered more just listening to the endless repetition of those Abu Ghraib stories than the actual inmates ever did. Then I would wrap it up by laughingly referring to a liberal in the audience as a “macaca.”

Of course, if I start going around making disjointed speeches that make liberals cry, Barack Obama might accuse me of stealing his act.

Liberal hysteria about conservative speech always follows the same pattern; I call it “The Five Stages of Conservative Enlightenment.” There are public denunciations, demands for apologies, letter-writing campaigns, attacks on the sources of your income, and calls for censorship. There will be lots of wailing, but no facts refuting the point behind your hysteria-inducing statement. Liberals prefer denouncing people with idioms—over the top, gone too far, crossed the line, beyond the pale—not substance. Whose line? Whose pale? It almost makes you think they don’t want to talk about the substance.
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Video: This is the funniest book you've ever done. -- Sean Hannity
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Truth and English

Peter Brimelow: You've mentioned what you see as the institutional prerequisites for capitalism. Do you think there might be cultural prerequisites, too?
Milton Friedman: Oh, yes. For example, truthfulness.... It's a curious fact that capitalism developed and has really only come to fruition in the English-speaking world. It hasn't made the same progress even in Europe--certainly not in France, for instance.
-- from "An Interview with Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman," Forbes, December 12, 1988
(quoted in Ann Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors, p. 112).
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George Orwell: [Written English] becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
-- from "Politics and the English Language"
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"June the 30th, 1934"

From a previously obscure short story by Malcolm Lowry, "June the 30th, 1934," just published in the collection, The Voyage That Never Ends (Michael Hofmann, ed.):

"I stopped for a while at Crete on the way home," Goodyear said at length, thoughtfully. "A fascinating island! Many thousands of years ago they had a civilization strikingly like our own. A sporting people, but not religious. At Cnossos, which might be compared to London, they'd reached a position where they thought the human intellect, by itself, could solve all their problems. Perhaps Adam made the same mistake! Anyhow, the barbarians came, who really had a God -- an evil God but still one which was unanimously worshipped, the God of War that is -- who was all their culture rolled into one, and it was all up with the Cretans!..."

In a century whose greatest scientific achievement and marvel was to put a man on the moon, Malcolm Lowry, plumbed, as an artist, some of its most profound depths. He wrote in, of, and for the midcentury exclusively, but that was in so many ways the 20th Christian Century's pivot.... He was the last in a line of desperate, daring boys -- Melville and Conrad, especially; also, Traven -- who run off to sea to find (lose) themselves, in turn finding (losing) everything else, who survive, for a time, to tell the tale, for all time.

History, which often is scarcely more than high-brow hindsight (forgive me, Clio) or (in its postmodern variant) speculation, teaches us that pacifism -- both its pragmatic variant, by which war is believed to be rendered avoidable by negotiation or by appeal, and its cynical variant, by which "peace" is war by other means -- was high on the intellectual agenda during the 1930s. This was especially true in arts and letters.  This book by Virginia Woolf, which in many ways remains the touchstone for today's high-brow "antiwar" feminist pacifism, testifies to the former. The books by this bastard testify to the latter.

What's so good about Lowry is that, unlike so many "engaged" or "committed" writers (for the most part, now long forgotten), although concerned like any normal soul with the possibility of peace, he had no particular party line to parrot and propagate, no agenda to enact. His faithfulness was to observe Europe's frenetically disintegrating civilization. It's a faith that was, is, frightening, hair-raising, pulse-quickening. For the story of a civilization, our civilization, on the verge of having a nervous breakdown, read Malcolm Lowry.

Why Step Out Into The World When So Much Of The World Deserves To Be Stepped On?

From one of the most influential American novels ever written:

-- Darling, you take everything too seriously. One is not supposed to be intellectual at a ball. One is simply supposed to be gay.
-- How? By being stupid?
-- I mean, for instance, didn't you enjoy meeting the young men?
-- What men? There wasn't a man there I couldn't squash ten of.

(Written during a time when "gay" meant happy, light, care-free, etc.)

Trust Freedom - By One Righteous Gentile - Or, The Beginnings of a Rebuttal to Osama Bin Laden's Latest Jihad Video

Every once in a while the unabashedly Christian James Baxter leaves a long comment on the blog. This one is worth reprinting as its own post. I find it a stirring rebuttal to yesterday's OBL "convert, surrender, or die" video. Explicitly, it's about fighting for freedom; implicitly, it's a point in favor of the retaliatory "nuke Mecca" position....:

Every September, I recall that is more than half a century (62 years) since I landed at Nagasaki with the 2nd Marine Division in the original occupation of Japan following World War II. This time every year, I have watched and listened to the light-hearted "peaceniks" and their light-headed symbolism-without-substance of ringing bells, flying pigeons, floating candles, and sonorous chanting and I recall again that "Peace is not a cause - it is an effect."

In July, 1945, my fellow 8th RCT Marines [I was a BARman] and I returned to Saipan following the successful conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. We were issued new equipment and replacements joined each outfit in preparation for our coming amphibious assault on the home islands of Japan.

B-29 bombing had leveled the major cities of Japan, including Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Yokosuka, and Tokyo.

We were informed we would land three Marine divisions and six Army divisions, perhaps abreast, with large reserves following us in. It was estimated that it would cost half a million casualties to subdue the Japanese homeland.

In August, the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima but the Japanese government refused to surrender. Three days later a second A-bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese government finally surrendered.

Following the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese admiral said, "I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant..." Indeed, they had. Not surprisingly, the atomic bomb was produced by a free people functioning in a free environment. Not surprisingly because the creative process is a natural human choice-making process and inventiveness occurs most readily where choice-making opportunities abound. America!

Tamper with a giant, indeed! Tyrants, beware: Free men are nature's pit bulls of Liberty! The Japanese learned the hard way what tyrants of any generation should know: Never start a war with a free people - you never know what they may invent!

As a newly assigned member of a U.S. Marine intelligence section, I had a unique opportunity to visit many major cities of Japan, including Tokyo and Hiroshima, within weeks of their destruction. For a full year I observed the beaches, weapons, and troops we would have assaulted had the A-bombs not been dropped. Yes, it would have been very destructive for all, but especially for the people of Japan.

When we landed in Japan, for what came to be the finest and most humane occupation of a defeated enemy in recorded history, it was with great appreciation, thanksgiving, and praise for the atomic bomb team, including the aircrew of the Enola Gay. A half million American homes had been spared the Gold Star flag, including, I'm sure, my own.

Whenever I hear the apologists expressing guilt and shame for A-bombing and ending the war Japan had started (they ignore the cause-effect relation between Pearl Harbor and Nagasaki), I have noted that neither the effete critics nor the puff-adder politicians are among us in the assault landing-craft or the stinking rice paddies of their suggested alternative, "conventional" warfare. Stammering reluctance is obvious and continuous, but they do love to pontificate about the Rights that others, and the Bomb, have bought and preserved for them.

The vanities of ignorance and camouflaged cowardice abound as license for the assertion of virtuous "rights" purchased by the blood of others - those others who have borne the burden and physical expense of Rights whining apologists so casually and self-righteously claim.

At best, these fakers manifest a profound and cryptic ignorance of causal relations, myopic perception, and dull I.Q. At worst, there is a word and description in The Constitution defining those who love the enemy more than they love their own countrymen and their own posterity. Every Yankee Doodle Dandy knows what that word is.

In 1945, America was the only nation in the world with the Bomb and it behaved responsibly and respectfully. It remained so until two among us betrayed it to the Kremlin. Still, this American weapon system has been the prime deterrent to earth's latest model world- tyranny: Seventy years of Soviet collectivist definition, coercion, and domination of individual human beings.

The message is this: Trust Freedom. Remember, tyrants never learn. The restriction of Freedom is the limitation of human choice, and choice is the fulcrum-point of the creative process in human affairs. As earth's choicemaker, it is our human identity on nature's beautiful blue planet and the natural premise of man's free institutions, environments, and respectful relations with one another. Made in the image of our Creator, free men choose, create, and progress - or die.

Free men should not fear the moon-god-crowd oppressor nor choose any of his ways. Recall with a confident Job and a victorious David, "Know ye not that you are in league with the stones of the field?"

Semper Fidelis
Jim Baxter
Sgt. USMC 
WW II and Korean War

Job 5:23  Proverbs 3:31  I Samuel 17:40
http://www.choicemaker.net/

Time For Some Jewish Resistance - "The Partisan," Performed By Leonard Cohen

To be victorious in the long run you need a tradition of fighting, you need myths and martyrs' haloes -- otherwise national character will fall into decay.
-- Edward Kuznetsov

Leonard Cohen, the most famous renderer of "The Partisan," performs live this originally Russian-French ballad of survival behind Nazi lines. He sings in English and French, with the video offering Spanish subtitles. Many songs of anti-Nazi resistance songs have been sung -- in Yiddish and in Russian, especially. This one's a treat for lovers of Romance languages everywhere.

That might be John Bilezikjian on the oud (I'm pretty sure that's an oud), I'm not sure. (He's one of the outstanding personnel on Field Commander Cohen).

"The Partisan": words by Emmanuel D'Astier de la Vigerie [link in French only], music by Anna Marly. Described in her obituary as "the troubadour of the French Resistance," Marly was the daughter of deposed Russian aristocrats (pictured below).

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For French & Yiddish songs, try Sarah Gorby's The Unforgettable Songs of the Ghetto [Gorby link in Russian only].

English version of the original "Chant des Partisans":

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Oh, friends, do you hear, workers, farmers, in your ears alarm bells ringing?
Tonight all our tears will be turned to tongues of flame in our blood singing!

Climb up the from mine, out from hiding the pines, all you comrades,
Take out from the hay all your guns, your munitions and your grenades;

Hey you, assassins, with your bullets and your knives, kill tonight!
Hey you, saboteurs, be careful with your burden, dynamite!

We are the ones who break the jail bars in two for our brothers,
hunger drives, hate pursues, misery binds us to one another.

There are countries where people sleep without a care and lie dreaming.
But here, do you see, we march on, we kill on, we die screaming.

But here, each one knows what he wants, what he does with his choice;
My friend, if you fall, from the shadows on the wall, another steps into your place.

Tomorrow, black blood shall dry out in the sunlight on the streets.
But sing, companions, freedom hears us in the night still so sweet.

My friend, do you hear the dark flight of the crows over our plains?
My friend, do you hear the dulled cries of our countries in chains?

Love In The Time Of Necrophilia

Even if a husband lives ... two hundred fucking years ... he's never going to be able to discover his wife's real nature.

Welcome to "an Atlas lovers art thread" (Thanks, Pamela):

Better in many ways than his iconic turn in Apocalypse Now, but to many Americans less relevant probably, is Brando's tour de force in The Last Tango in Paris. Here's even more Brando, by quality and quantity, than in The Godfather. "This is one of those performances that goes beyond acting into something more confrontational." It goes without saying that the above scene hits harder if you're watching the whole flick.

The Last Tango in Paris is not about sex per se, no matter how famous (or infamous), no matter how startling, how unprecedented those scenes. It's about the infiltrating onset of decay -- the decay of ideas and possibilities, of desires and affections, all sheltering but festering lustfully still in a mind housed agonizingly in the flesh. It's about the decay of that flesh -- flesh livid and vivid, alluring and onerous, porous and odorous, yielding and unyielding. Whether stumbling, agog with helpless wonder and hesitant trust, upon life's fullest vigor, or contemplating with bracing bewilderment and piercing bitterness its incrementally impending exit, The Last Tango in Paris is decay by degrees. It is decay on the installment plan.... Not coincidentally, the film also sifts the diminishing returns of the barbed shards of shattered historical expectations -- revolutionary, colonial, decolonial. (Note well, apart from this clip, a certain earlier monologue, plus two later dialogues.)

The vigor of The Last Tango in Paris is a vigor mortis, its love a love in the time of necrophilia.

While Greece Burns

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...................................................Ode on a Grecian Urn
...................................................-- by John Keats (more here)
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Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
    Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thou express
    A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunt about thy shape
    Of deities or mortals, or of both,
        In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
    What men or gods are these?  What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit?  What struggle to escape?
        What pipes and timbrels?  What wild ecstasy?


Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
    Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
    Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
    Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
        Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal - yet, do not grieve;
        She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
    For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
    For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
    For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
        For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
    That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
        A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
    To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
    And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
    Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
        Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
    Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
        Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

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O Attic shape!  Fair attitude! with brede
    Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
    Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
    When old age shall this generation waste,
        Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
    Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," - that is all
        Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
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Intellectual Punk Speaks Up For Subject of Hillary Rodham's Thesis

* Update (08/21) * Michelle Malkin plugs Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up

Regarding Hillary's thesis Nick Masesso, who wrote the deservedly obscure Walking the Midway In Purgatory (an incoherent, intellectually violent reminiscence of growing up in the 1960s), emails:

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We all started with Saul Alinsky. He and men like Studs Terkle [sic] taught us how to organize. Without them we'd have had no labor movement, no Teamsters and thus no middle class, ergo no america [sic]. Groking Saul doesent [sic] mean anything. There is only what we do.

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There is only what we do is a line Nick borrows from Aristotle on the formation of character, on excellence as habit. Yes, there is only what we do. Here There is only what we do is the amorality of those who have never given up on letting "the 60s" be their excuse for mediocrity perpetrated in the name of "protest" or "art" or "radicalism." For mediocrity can be a habit, moral equivalency can be a habit, evil can be a habit. In Nick's grubby hands the phrase becomes Nothing works so anything goes. It's what he had in mind last September when he equated me waving an American flag with shouting "Allahu akbar." That's neither a reasoning nor a reckoning with history or one's own life. It's a failure to reason and a failure to reckon (which may be my main complaint with the Clintons.)

Does Nick include Hillary Rodham in his pronoun We? Was she, is she, a "sister in struggle"? A struggle against what? and for what? Hillary Rodham was clearly fascinated American radicalism. The story of the rest of her career is the story of how, exactly, she has reasoned and reckoned with her fascination -- in her case, to what extent her manipulation of American radicalism has been her means to political power.

There is always more than There is only what we do.

Eight Theses On Being Jeremayakovka

for Casey Sheehan and Cindy Sheehan, especially

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Fausta tagged me last week in the "8-ball meme" for eight more previously unknown personal facts. The first eight, it seems, only whetted her appetite. So here are eight, not just facts about, but theses[*] on being Jeremayakovka. [Note: It took a week to tweak #1-#4, and it'll be a piece of work to finish #5-#8. Please bear with me....]:
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1. My parents' ages are 19 years apart, with my mother being the older partner. Their coming together defied custom and practicality, even morality. Not surprisingly, it was also short-lived. Each was also (in effect) an only child, which is what I am, unmistakably. When coming of age as a radical leftwing activist, "family values" were something I rejected categorically and conspiratorially (in pride), and ignorantly and jealously (in shame). Despite reexamining leftwing values for some time now, for me to opine from the vantage point of "family values" would be, still, an imposture. "Family values" remain something to be observed rather than experienced, to be understood (if at all) a posteriori, not a priori.

2. Women usually react with visceral enthusiasm when I inform them that, yes, in fact my mother brought her first, her only healthy child to term at age 45. This is true especially of younger, unmarried, childless women. Standout exclamations include Whoa! and Way go to, mom!. Their enthusiasm smacks of ignorant solidarity, bordering on idolatry, and elicits from me mostly dismay. These daughters (so to speak) of "third wave feminism" -- educated to believe that just about anything subverting "traditional gender roles" (while also trafficking in the mainstream) is curious, virtuous, imperative -- know nothing of the tender travails and miserable dignities that attend a domestic situation such as the one my mother and I knew. These "peers," along with their baby boomer parents (here I include my other, baby boomer parent), often seem to me (as they must have seemed to my mother) to some extent, and in the worst sense, mere children.

3. When very young, about 5 or 6, I inadvertently plunged into the Sailboat Pond in New York's Central Park. I was racing to the opposite side to recover my model boat when the jingle of a far-off ice cream truck distracted me. So much so that, my head craning in one direction and my body running in another, I strode right over the pond's raised cement edge and into its artificial shallows. I forget how I got out -- whether anyone reached for or jumped in after me, or whether if even I pulled myself out. I do remember my father carrying me, soaking and sobbing, not home but to where he lived.

4. When a little less young, about 9 or 10, I nearly got myself swept away into the Gulf of Mexico. A hurricane off the coast of Texas was sending successions of waves -- about twice as tall, fast, and frequent as usual -- into the west Florida beach where my mother and I were vacationing. This monstrous aggregation of briny sights, blustery sounds, salty smells was so enthralling that, with nobody else around, I decided I would test their bounties of touch and taste.... A few minutes later my feet, I suddenly realized, no longer could touch sand. With waves rolling in one upon another, my strokes rectified nothing. The waves lifted me and surged past, leaving me in their hollows where still I could not touch bottom.

In terror, time and language collapse. What remains in the mind (if anything) is the will -- yet even that is often displaced. Bobbing in that excited surf, my body became a constricted concert of heart, lungs, throat, nostrils, a concert bellowing in stark, perfect, physiognomic pitch (which only now I can translate into words): Confront terror with every fiber of your being. If you don't, it will seize you and make off with you. Fight it NOW or succumb forever. My thin, little-boy limbs stroked and kicked in a frantic unison through roller coaster swells. Ignoring whatever lay beneath me, I aimed directly for the line of shore (no longer just a beach). Watching it within reach, and even sensing its approach, brought no consolation until at last all four limbs, surf-slackened, scraped through lapping wavelets the rough but familiar blanket of sand.

Just how long it took to get back I could not measure in time, only distance. Relieved and morose, elated and enervated, I had to concede that I'd washed up hundreds of yards away from the point to which I'd struggled to return. My curiosity had nearly destroyed me. And while my best efforts, I saw, could deliver me, they also could not quite restore me.

On the wobbly walk up the beach, as if obeying an unfamiliar oath in a language yet to be identified (let alone acquired, let alone mastered), I calculated that it would be best never to tell anyone what I'd just come through. Least of all tell either parent. Others would receive my report only as shore-dwellers whereas I would transmit it as both shore-dweller and tempter of the deep. This unsettled purpose made me neither proud nor happy nor secure. It left me only with the sharp sense that, as the poem goes, "East is East, and West is West ..." -- and never the twain shall meet.

All in all it didn't feel like victory against the terror that had gripped me, but merely a draw.
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[*]: Proclaiming "Theses on [a *very important* subject]" is the boldest public undertaking any leftwing intellectual can ever realize (except for the seizure of state power). V.I. Lenin's "April Theses" of 1917 declared openly the Bolsheviks' intention to destabilize Russia's Provisional (reformist) Government. Walter Benjamin followed suit in 1940 with his oft-imitated "Theses on History." It seems to me high time that someone compose Theses for "our brave new, 'neoconservative' 21st Century." --JMK

The 8-Ball Meme: Eight Previously Unknown Facts

Ok, Irina, you asked for it. Eight previously unknown facts about me:

1. While a child, our household had a leatherbound Holy Bible that had been printed in 1876.
2. Also while a child, I was photographed with Mayor Ed Koch in New York.
3. While a young adult I introduced myself to pan-Africanist socialist [euphemism for Black racist, antisemitic] Kwame Toure (Stokely Carmichael) in Berkeley, California to ask him his opinion (his advice, almost) about politics.
4. More than a decade later, returning from my informal political exile, I watched the 2004 Superbowl with Wesley Clark during a break from his presidential campaign in Flagstaff, Arizona.
5. I've spent a day in jail for something I (used to) believe in.
6. I've been to Windows on the World restaurant atop the former World Trade Center (when it was still possible) and have climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty, up to and inside her crown (when it was still permitted).
7. While a teenager, when I went to get Allen Ginsberg's autograph after a public reading, the NAMBLA member lanced a sexually provocative comment at me in front of the tiny crowd that had gathered around him. During my adolescence I had the good fortune to know some consistently (in some ways outstandingly) "appropriate" gay men. (Allen Ginsberg wasn't one of them.)
8. Also while a teenager, I had the good fortune to be introduced to and spend quality time with William Bronk. During our conversations, he offered more than one memorable lesson about poetry, including: ..........................

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Eight other blogs "tagged" to answer this meme: West Bank Mama; Black Belt Mama; Cobb: Strictly Old School; Dancing in Tongues; Gay Patriot West; Right Truth; The Black Kettle; Bookworm Room. In addition to facts about yourself, you may also disclose "habits" (click to Irina's site for clarification).

A Sadistic Thought For This Weekend's Ex-Gay and Ex-Ex-Gay Conferences

As already referenced more than once, diametrically opposed conferences on homosexuality are being held this weekend in Irvine, CA. The larger, longer, and more longstanding one is for those seeking a heterosexual life animated through the Good News of Jesus Christ. The other, lesser one is for those who have tried that route and found it impossible. The one tries to save people from homosexuality; the other tries to save people from being saved from homosexuality.

While more sympathetic to the aims of the former conference, I am also not signing up for it. I can't shake the temperamental, freethinking and freewheeling skepticism which took me, first as a young adult, away from heterosexual norms, and then when more mature directly back to them. This has nothing to do with denigrating the core Christian essence of the evangelical conference, nor with denigrating religion generally. Nor, for that matter, with embracing a supposedly more "tolerant" interpretation of religion that accommodates (or even celebrates) homosexuality.

While coming forward about being, what other people call, "ex-gay" (a ridiculous label, if there ever were one) if I have any message to preach, any principle (let alone, light) to prize, any faith to profess, they're not so much those of Jesus Christ as those of the one French marquis who still boasts marquee-name recognition:

Let no one accuse me of being evil's apologist; let no one say that I seek to inspire wrongdoing or to blunt remorse in the hearts of wrongdoers: my sole purpose throughout these endeavors is to articulate thoughts which have gnawed at my conscience since I was first able to reason; that these thoughts might be in conflict with the thoughts of some other persons, or of most other persons, or of all other persons except me, is not, I believe, sufficient reason to suppress them. As to those susceptible souls who might be "corrupted" by exposure to my writings, I say, so much the worse for them. I address myself only to men who are capable of examining with an objective eye everything before them. Such men are incorruptible.
-- Donatien Francois Alphonse de Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom

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If I were in Irvine today, I'd be shuttling between the two gatherings with a sign reading: XXX-Gay Curious?

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(Is any of this surprising? Seemingly unnecessarily? Even tortuously complicating? Ah, Gentle Reader! Expect nothing less from a blog that takes after Vladimir Mayakovsky and Franz Kafka.)

Rhymes With Conservatism

Gabe on the importance of earnestly studying poetry.

Testimony From A Concentration of Camp Survivor

For Gay Pride Day:

In the French Quarter there are several queer bars so full every night the fags spill out onto the sidewalk. A roomful of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. Fags are ventriloquists' dummies who have moved in and taken over the ventriloquist. The dummy sits in a queer bar nursing his beer, and uncontrollably yapping out of a rigid doll face.

-- William S. Burroughs, Junky

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Check out what Gabe wrote in the Comments section. (Thanks, Gabe!)
MB gets personal. I reply.

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

Israel, The "Peculiar Heart" of Europe

If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe--a peculiar heart located outside the body.
- Milan Kundera, remarks while accepting the 1985 Jerusalem Prize

Chillin', Not Trillin (No. 7) - "San Francisco Is Here, Wish You Were Beautiful"

Dear Lawrence,
San Francisco is here. Wish you were beautiful.
love,
Jeremayakovka
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Like a war criminal "exposing" past infamies in the service of his horrid cause, long after the fact, long after remorse or retribution or even right recall are possible, mumbling bumbling memories to keep from nodding off, let alone for anyone else's enlightenment (or rather, entertainment) or like a soggy, sorry drunk kneeling in his puke on the stoop of a church basement as the town's last AA meeting of the evening is wrapping up, last month the last big Beatnik left standing, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, related:

Before things went bad [in the late 60s], everything was light, in both senses of the word, light physically in the sky, and also in the sense of light versus heavy. After that year, everything got heavy. Things just degenerated more and more. I think it was that summer [of '67, the "Summer of Love"]. It's so long ago. I'm looking through the wrong end of telescope. It's hard to differentiate one year from another.
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Here's the most incriminating gem Ferlinghetti related:
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What if we're all wrong?

- Allen Ginsberg (below, left) to Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
at the Human Be-In, Hippie Hill, Golden Gate Park
San Francisco, California
Summer 1967
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On Obscurity (The Obscurity Of The Once-Bright)

Chuang Tzu and the Butterfly

Chuang Tzu in dream became a butterfly,
And the butterfly became Chuang Tzu at waking.
Which was the real—the butterfly or the man ?
Who can tell the end of the endless changes of things?
The water that flows into the depth of the distant sea
Returns anon to the shallows of a transparent stream.
The man, raising melons outside the green gate of the city,
Was once the Prince of the East Hill.
So must rank and riches vanish.
You know it, still you toil and toil,—what for? 

- Li Po

On Fame

On Fame
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Fame, like a wayward girl, will still be coy
To those who woo her with too slavish knees,
But makes surrender to some thoughtless boy,
And dotes the more upon a heart at ease;
She is a Gipsey,--will not speak to those
Who have not learnt to be content without her;
A Jilt, whose ear was never whisper'd close,
Who thinks they scandal her who talk about her;
A very Gipsey is she, Nilus-born,
Sister-in-law to jealous Potiphar;
Ye love-sick Bards! repay her scorn for scorn;
Ye Artists lovelorn! madmen that ye are!
Make your best bow to her and bid adieu,
Then, if she likes it, she will follow you.

- John Keats

David Horowitz Sees What Jorge Luis Borges Saw

The other day David blogged about recent children's television programming in "Palestine" which uses a Mickey Mouse lookalike to preach armed Islamic conquest of Jerusalem and annihilation of Jews:

Saraa: Sanabel, what will you do for the sake of the Al-Aqsa Mosque? How will you sacrifice your soul for the sake of Al-Aqsa? What will you do?
Sanabel: I will shoot.
Farfour (Mickey Mouse lookalike): Sanabel, what should we do if we want to liberate...
Sanabel: We want to fight.
Farfour: We got that. What else?
Saraa: We want to...
Sanabel: We will annihilate the Jews.
Saraa: We are defending Al-Aqsa with our souls and our blood, aren't we, Sanabel?
Sanabel: I will commit martyrdom.

Here's the video clip, #1442 in MEMRI's long, long series on hateful, inaccurate, and otherwise untrustworthy media coming out of the Middle East.

Pamela has more on terrorist Mickey here.
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When such uncompromising and unapologetic, anti-Zionist and antisemitic media gain currency -- and nearly always without a peep of protest from the professional litterateurs -- this is as good an occasion as any to post on the internet an opinion piece Jorge Luis Borges (left) wrote 70 years ago from the relatively calm cultural outpost of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Borges -- "who valued books and solitude above all things" (as opposed to, say, tenure or fame) -- took the time to put his foot down on a life and death cultural matter.

It would still be a few years before Borges, like the mother continent itself, would go completely blind. Still, David blogging now about "Mauschwitz" is like Borges writing then about "A Pedagogy of Hatred": it's not so much the blind leading the blind as a voice trying to speak to the deaf and dumb....
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"A Pedagogy of Hatred"
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Displays of hatred are even more obscene and denigrating than exhibitionism. I defy pornographers to show me a picture more vile than any of the twenty-two illustrations that comprise the children's book Trau keinem Fuchs auf greuner Hied und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don't Trust Any Fox From a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath] whose fourth edition now infests Bavaria. It was first published a year ago, in 1936, and has already sold 51,000 copies. Its goal is to instill in the children of the Third Reich a distrust and animosity toward Jews. Verse (we know the mnemonic virtues of rhyme) and color engravings (we know how effective images are) collaborate in this veritable textbook of hatred.

Take any page, for example, from page 5. Here I find, not without justifiable bewilderment, this didactic poem -- "The German is a proud man who knows how to work and struggle. Jews detest him because he is so handsome and enterprising" -- followed by an equally informative and explicit quatrain: "Here's the Jew, recognizable to all, the biggest scoundrel in the whole kingdom. He thinks he's wonderful, and he's horrible." The engravings are more astute: the German is a Scandinavian, eighteen-year-old athlete, plainly portrayed as a worker; the Jew is a dark Turk, obese and middle-aged. Another sophistic feature is that the German is clean-shaven and the Jew, while bald, is very hairy. (It is well known that German Jews are Ashkenazim, copper-haired Slavs. In this book they are presented as dark half-breeds so that they'll appear to be the exact opposite of the blond beasts. Their attributes also include the permanent use of a fez, a rolled cigar, and ruby rings.

Another engraving shows a lecherous dwarf trying to seduce a young German lady with a necklace. In another, the father reprimands his daughter for accepting the gifts and promises of Solly Rosenfeld, who certainly will not make her his wife. Another depicts the foul body odor and shoddy negligence of Jewish butchers. (How could this be, with all the precautions they take to make meat kosher?) Another, the disadvantages of being swindled by a lawyer, who solicits from his clients a constant flow of flour, fresh eggs, and veal cutlets. After a year of this, the clients have lost their case but the Jewish lawyer "weighs two hundred and forty pounds." Yet another depicts the opportune expulsion of Jewish professors s a relief for the children. "We want a German teacher," shout the enthusiastic pupils, "a joyful teacher who knows how to play with us and maintain order and discipline. We want a German teacher who will teach us common sense." It is difficult not to share such aspiration.

What can one say about such a book? Personally I am outraged, less for Israel's sake than for Germany's, less for the offended community than for the offensive nation. I don't know if the world can do without German civilization, but I do know that its corruption by the teachings of hatred is a crime.

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["A Pedagogy of Hatred" was copied verbatim from Borges's Selected Non-Fictions (Eliot Weinberger, ed.), a collection which won the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. Suzanne Jill Levine translated this piece. The illustrations are copied from the link to Trau keinem Fuchs.]

How Do You Say "Cojones" In Spanish?

Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look on the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline -- the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us -- by obligations, not by rights.... It is annoying to see the degeneration suffered in ordinary speech by a word so inspiring as "nobility."
-- José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

That's cojones: "Ortega" is the left one and "Gasset" is the right one.

If You Were A Peanut, What Kind Of Peanut Would You Be?

Me? That's easy. Schroeder -- hands down!

Money!? Who cares about money? This is art! This is great music I'm playing, and playing great music is an art. Do you hear me? An art! Art, art, art, art -- ART!

The 1950 Nobel Prize Ceremonies - It Just Doesn't Get Any More Pompous Than These Circumstances

Had Ingmar Bergman never made it as a director, he might have ended up making rent through cheesy side work like what you see in the video (below). Solemn, self-important, and self-satisfied as only the face of Old Europe peeking out from behind its (soon to be post)modernist, excessively secular mask could ever be, here's a Swedish newsreel of the penguin-suited, stuffed-shirted ceremonies that bestowed the Nobel Prizes of 1950. Note the massive formal banquet in the 9th and final minute. I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but given the nearness in time of the Nazi era, I must confess a Riefenstahlesque frisson at the sight of those rows of uniformed diners. A lonely thought, perhaps, but one in which I trust I'm not alone....
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Our boy Bill accepts his prize at 6:45. Rumor has it the down home romancier got deep into his cups before making one of the most exhortatory Nobel acceptance speeches ever. Hell, I would too were I being recognized for a lifetime of tackling the great reducing topics of adultery, incest, and lynching ... of broken promises and prison breaks ... of living with the dead and of surviving living ... all enmeshed in a regional American context, glossed with tsunamic linguistic force gleaned from the Judeo-Christian tradition. O Bill, you were our man at the 1950 awards ceremonies: a Marshall Plan of the mind from Mississippi....
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It's hard to watch this short and not start to grasp what Ingmar Bergman had to get away from in order to get to in, say, his first feature, Ode to Joy (1950, left), about the drama behind a classical musician's struggle to rediscover meaning after enormous personal tragedy -- or somewhat later in Through a Glass Darkly (1961, right), with its play-within-a-play and novelist/father-daughter & novelist/father-son subplots. Like certain European writers of that  burgeoning decade (think Albert Camus and Kateb Yacine) Bergman may well have been shouldering, in cinema, the import of Faulkner on the European mind. Of necessity, this would have entailed sidestepping the phenomenon of Faulkner....
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I don't hate the Nobel Prize! I don't hate it! I don't hate it! I don't....
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What Is To Be Done

Listening to the dead teaches us how to speak for the unborn.
-- Jeremayakovka

"The Battle of Algiers" - A Black & White Blueprint For Full-Color Fauxtography

* Updated * (Naomi Ragen emails that Frida Ghitis confirms this post with "How the Media Partnered With Hezbollah: Harvard's Cautionary Report")
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Last night I screened The Battle of Algiers for the first time since last summer's (unfinished) war between Israel and Hezbollah. Gillo Pontecorvo's Academy Award-winning masterpiece is in some ways a great dramatic record of the tragically implacable, anti-colonial war that ravaged Algeria's people and countryside for nearly a decade while leading directly to the downfall of France's Fourth Republic. The definitive English-language history of this 1954-62 conflict, Alistaire Horne's worthwhile A Savage War of Peace, is so titled for good and terrible reason. (Horne, btw, is on record chiding America's forward strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein.)
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Similar to Picasso's Guernica which had become (after the damage was done) lionized as Europe's definitive objet d'art commemorating all victims of fascist aggression, La Battaglia di Algeri became in the succeeding generation something similar: Europe's definitive objet d'art, extolled in the service of (perceived) anti-colonial, (perceived) aspirations.  With still panel and flickering image attempting to refract war's gory horror through prisms of unblinking moral lucidity, it's no surprise that director Gillo Pontecorvo chose to depict his subjects in black & white. Within that, however, are also many shades of gray. Thus we see in The Battle of Algiers artistic expression of necessary aspirations for independence, self-determination, and peaceful coexistence among all peoples. At the same time, it directly inspires the cult of armed revolution which in turn has spawned endless apologias for the exceedingly and unfailingly cruel list of tin-pot genocidal masters -- from Ernesto Guevara to Idi Amin to Pol Pot to Yasser Arafat to Saddam Hussein to Robert Mugabe -- not to mention independent Algeria's road to its own, homegrown, and precarious socialism. Uncritical screenings of this objet d'art , then, screen damage that continues to be done by dictatorial movements, both the aspiring and the realized.
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In terms of the poster art, note how the above image seems handily handspun from otherwise disparate, but equally strident, visual styles of inter-war Social Democratic pacifist Käthe Kollwitz and post-war Marxist-Leninist Huey Newton. Are the politics of The Battle of Algiers marching forward to socialism? Retreating backward from barbarism? Going round and round in the night consumed by fire? Reflecting neoconservative concerns, are its politics somehow now, nearly two generations later, marching backward to barbarism -- which is to say, retreating forward to socialism? The latter-day result is that -- from street agitators to the academiklatura and minds in between -- the Left adores The Battle of Algiers, to the point where it has elevated (that is, reduced) it to cult status. One thing I'll propose is that the West's inability (or refusal) to arrive at clear determinations about its own history -- and the attendant, staggering spiritual uncertainties -- have created an intellectual vacuum which postmodernism now most ponderously, with a kind of diffuse determination, fills.

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In the meantime, a mental note I took during last night's screening. In one of several fauxtography scandals during last year's Israel-Hezbollah war, the New York Times published advertised a demonstrably staged photo-op of the devastation effected by Israel's aerial bombardment of southern (i.e., Hezbollah-headquartered) Beirut (below). By a kind of visual verbatim, the pose in the news image seems not just staged but copied from images of a sequence halfway through the The Battle of Algiers. It's right after colonial police, acting under an exacerbated but concentrated authority, have blown up a building in the Arab casbah, and its residents (to paraphrase Jim Morrison) bring out their dead (above). Real warfare, real damage, real suffering, and real reportage aside, the latter-day result is neither drama nor journalism, but melodrama -- and melojournalism!

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See Michelle Malkin's substantive post for in-depth treatment of this and other recent fauxtography scandals.

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The dead speak: Poor mountain folk, poor students, poor young people -- your enemies of tomorrow will be worse than those of today.
-- Mouloud Feraoun (1913-1962)

Bonus: Leonard Lopate's sensitive, informative interview of U. of Nebraska prof James Le Sueur re Mouloud Feraoun. (Prof. Le Sueur has written a methodical and highly readable introduction to the French-Algerian War, which appears within his introduction to Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1954-1962.)

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Defining the enemy, at home and abroad, that's our first task.

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Previous: "Hezbollah, Mon Amour" "Lesbollah"

Mister, I've Been To The Zoo!

Sometimes a person has to go a very long distance out of his way to come back a short distance correctly.
-- Jerry, in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story