the politics of time
I didn’t realize that Peter Osborne’s The Politics of Time is available on-line and in full. Shows how the world’s changed in only a few years. I heard about this book just as I was finishing my PhD not too many years ago, and checked it out of my university’s library. It was astoundingly good and helpful… The stuff on Heidegger and Benjamin, in particular, left a real mark on me and has influence my work significantly. But the problem was, back then as I was finishing up, that there was only one copy in our library and as soon as I would get my hands on it, it would get recalled. I hemmed and hawed because it was out of print, and the only copies on Amazon were selling for more than $100. Eventually, that’s just what I paid for it – and probably had it back in my hands too late to use it the way I needed to.
At my previous job, I insisted that my graduate seminar of 20+ students read it… Even if it was unlikely that all or any of them would be able to get their hands on copies. (I reproduced the last chapter for them…) Anyway, all of this would have been moot if it had been on-line as it is now. So, you know, obviously – go read! It’s free!
cunts, twats, pussies, assholes (this’ll bring the punters)
Scrolling through the things I call myself on a nightly basis, it occurred to me: wow are the really bad words ever different over here. I’ve picked up a few that I use at home. (Not in front of the children, for chrissake, at least not on purpose!) At first they drew me steely looks from my wife, and then verbal correction. But somehow I’ve now used them enough that I can get away with it, especially if they seem especially unpremeditated. We are I guess becoming a little bit, you know, British.
The two words that come round most often – and they are bad, misog. words so avert your eyes if you feel the stirrings of offense – are cunt and twat. Remember – I didn’t make these things up, nor did I invent anti-female-genitalic shittalking! So please don’t get mad at me!
The two mean almost the same thing, but not quite. I am not sure I am going to be able to describe it all that well. They’re not that far off from a certain usage of the word asshole at home. Cunt is more angry; twat is more dismissive. (I was about to do a demonstration employing everyone’s favorite popular “philosopher,” but IT is right – it’s time to buy him cake, not call him the platonic ideal of twatitude….)
But here’s the interesting thing. Americans have their own very bad words and they too are derived from the business-end of the female of the species. But if an American in America were to call someone either by the C word or the T word, it would probably sound either affectedly-anglophilic or Chelsea-gay or maybe just maybe greasy New Jersey.
I am not sure they know what either of these words mean out in Wisconsin.
But we have our own nasty word, another one that I’m not supposed to use at home, and it is pussy. And that word, when used properly, that is as a descriptor of a person, means only one thing: coward. Oh, or homosexual I suppose. This is suddenly quite interesting to me. I can’t think of a British vulgarity that is generally applied to cowardice, and the Brits don’t as a rule use the P-word since they have all these others that work just as well…. and, perhaps, cowardice isn’t the issue that it is at home. *
So we hate timidity and effeminacy. And they hate… what? I have the words, but I’m still not in a position to define…. Help me out.
* Asshole, in American parliance (and it’s really ours, as they’re never quite sure whether or not to convert it to arsehole, which we’ll all agree just don’t carry the same punch….) is an interesting one as well, as it generally carries at least a tiny bit of respect along with the disapprobation. They guy who cuts you off in traffic is an asshole. Wall Street types are as a rule assholes. Somebody who knocks you down a bit, especially if unjustly, is a bit of an asshole. Hmmmm…. Do most Americans aspire to be assholes? Does America as a whole?
muldoon and me, me and poetry
(What follows is exactly the sort of confessional post that makes some of my readers, in particular those that I see in person with relative frequency, cringe a bit. So be it. I work things out on here – makes me cringe too, trust me! Especially this one!)
It’s been ten years, just about this month, since I graduated from college. So that’s what all those emails with “reunion” in the subject line were about – I summarily and instantly delete anything from that place. Which I shouldn’t do. I have daughters now, who might one day be what they call legacy applicants. Look at that – all that I believe in, and believe in deeply, disappearing across the haze of parental anxiety!
I know it is a bit embarassing vis a vis the poet types that read this blog, and poet-types do seem to be a major sub-demographic, but I was just thinking about the way my relationship with this guy (watch it, it’s funny – sorry can’t be embedded in wordpress) has sort of indexed or paralleled at least my life since the start of my academic work, since I left home.
The first time I had a sense that I might be good at all of this came during my first year of college. I wrote a paper on The Annals of Chile for a course called Reading Poetry. I really loved the book, and went all out in writing the paper. Spent time with an Irish dictionary in the library and everything, but I am sure – despite the fact I can’t now find the paper, but also knowing what I know about the predilictions of the department I was in – that the paper was hung on good close reading.
I got the paper back in the mail that summer. The professor (who would soon become my advisor) wrote across the bottom, “Ads, this is fucking great! Amazing!” The “fucking” echoed, made me a bit dizzy, and a tiny turn that would in the course of years become highly significant, encompassingly so, shaped itself into the road that I was on.
It bears saying that at the same time I was also taking a course called Writing Poetry I. Now, it was nearly impossible for first-year students to get into this course. It was capped at 15, and generally speaking you had to be in the second or third year to get in. I submitted a sample of my work, and along with one other first-year, was allowed into the class.
The other first-year student was an interesting case. Her work was very good and was often chosen as the material for group discussion in the weekly workshop. She was a slight and attractive girl from Georgia. Unassuming but had a real way with words. After the first year, though, she disappeared. When I finally got around to asking someone what had happened to her, I learned that she had in fact gotten pregnant and had decided to keep the baby. She had moved back to where she grew up – the suburbs of Atlanta. I don’t know the rest of the story, but really wish right now that I did – or that I even remembered her name.
My work, on the other hand, was rarely chosen for class-discussion. Something went a bit wrong. I waited until the last minute to write my stuff; I didn’t follow the rules of the assignments. After this class was over, I never took another creative writing course again. I had come to college thinking that I was a poet, first and foremost. I ended the first year, given the differential between the comments on my critical and creative work, thinking I was a critic. That doesn’t quite tell the whole story, but it’s a start, an approximation. Other things happened – thing I haven’t thought of for years – in that writing class, but nothing for me to share with you now.
Time passed. I kept reading Muldoon. I decided to write my senior thesis on Pound – a senior thesis that somehow got me into a good grad school, though my secondary advisor’s letter to Helen Vendler at Harvard didn’t seem to do the trick. Their bad – I have been a model post-grad student. I have filled the “Our students have taken jobs at….” with good proper nouns, attractive places – places that even Harvard would be proud of.
The guy who picked the poems for the workshops, and who wrote “fucking great” on my paper on Annals, was in his late sixties. He’d never published a monograph, or a serious piece of criticism. After I left, he placed a single poem in the New Yorker, the publishing coup of his entire life. A pseudo-vanity press published a slim volume after that. He was a good teacher, I suppose. Once his wife had caught him cheating, and had tried to run him over with the family car on the little street in front of the English Department. Later, he married someone else and bought a Lexus.
In my final year of college, I would hop in my own car (not a Lexus) and drive down to the city to see Muldoon read at the 92nd Street Y, elsewhere. I never stopped writing poetry.
It’s about to get a bit complicated in light of my pseudonymity. But I ended up, next, living rather proximately to Muldoon. One of his best poems was written about a canal that ran right past my first post-undergrad apartment – a canal that flooded rather badly during my first months of grad school. I assigned the poem to some of my students this year for a writing exercise; I had to provide ample footnotes.
One of things chronically misunderstood about the place where I went to grad school is the fact that the creative writers aren’t a part of the English department – they exist in their own part of the school, with a separate building and everything. This had some hilarious effects. Year after year, we were ranked by US News and World Report as the top department in African American studies in the country, despite the fact that we had neither a single African American working in the department for most of the time I was there, nor a specialist in African American Studies. I won’t explain – you can do the arithmetic if you like.
I did not work on poetry during graduate school. I worked – and I continue to work – on the novel. There are reasons both simple and complex why this happened – a sense that I’d done my work on Pound, and that was enough for awhile, the persistence of theory at that point and the tendency of theoretical work to focus on narrative texts, brutal self-repression and a sense (wrongheaded and not) that prose is actually more difficult to work on than poetry.
Later, toward the end, I went out for dinner with Paul Muldoon and a few other people. It’s not like he was inaccessable – some of my fellow students were working with him in one capacity or another. But as you might imagine, this was a bit momentous for me, given all I’ve said above. Since then, there’s been a men’s room run-in, at a conference somewhere for something where he gave a keynote reading, and during which my look of surprise and recognition (I am guessing, I am safely assuming) provoked him into a polite look of slightly baffled recognition. “Ah hi again!” I am sure he didn’t remember, why would he, but there you go.
I have continued ordering all that he writes, and I have continued writing poetry, on nearly a daily basis, and I have continued not sending any of it out. Perhaps I’ll do something about that in the next week or so, if I get a minute. Recently, Waterstones sent me by mistake two copies of some new and trendy poetry that I’d ordered. I gave one of them to a colleague, my “mentor” or “buddy” or whatever he is semi-officially called. He is a fairly prominent poet. He said to me, when I gave it to him, But Ads, I did not think that you were a reader of slim volumes. Oh, but a secret one, a sureptitious one, I am.
A little while ago, Muldoon made an appearance on the Colbert Report. (Sorry – video only available in the US or if you have a slicko proxy like me….) I watched the segment with great pleasure, you can be sure, as it’s been awhile. And then I showed it to my wife, who said something like, Oh dear. He is looking so much older, isn’t he? I snapped back Of course we all are, aren’t we? We’re all looking a bit older since the 92nd Street Y! And then, that night, I started to write this post…
book now at the grand hotel abyss, brighton
REGISTRATION NOW OPEN FOR ADORNO- 40 YEARS ON
The conference will take place 6th of August in the IDS Building on
the campus of the University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9RE (see map
below).
The conference will be free-of-charge. However, places will be limited
so please register beforehand to avoid disappointment.
Anyone wishing to attend the conference should register via email to
Simon Mussell: s.p.mussell@sussex.ac.uk
Speakers include
Prof. Max Paddison – University of Durham
(Chair: tbc)
“Aesthetics, Politics, and the Ideology of Nature: Adorno Reconsidered”
Prof. Alexander Duettmann – Goldsmiths
(Chair: Keston Sutherland)
“Kafka, Adorno, and the Life of the Letter”
Dr. Drew Milne – University of Cambridge
(Chair: Gordon Finlayson)
“Ideology and Idiolects: Adorno and the Grammar of Argument”
Please see here for further details.
every not so often, helen, trust me
Helen DeWitt seems to have been trying to defend Alain de Botton yesterday in a couple of posts on her blog. I’ll admit that it’s a little hard for me to see what she’s getting at – seems to me a lot of goalpost shifting going on there, whereas Caleb Crain’s initial review seems to me perfectly clear. DeWitt seems to want to fault Crain for not recognising that there are forms of work that aren’t compensated. I’m pretty sure he’d be on board with that, but it’s not what he’s getting at. He’s getting at the fact that AdB can’t stop condescending and generally sneering at the workers that he interviews / features in a book as they don’t live up to some sort of silkgloved idealisation that he arrives at by looking at work from a distance…. I see the problem, sure, with the first sentence, but that’s not really the point that’s up for grabs, is it? And her implicit argument that somehow Crain is more at fault for not naming Bourdieu (why Bourdieu in particular rather than any of the other many, many theorists of work?) than De Botton is baffling. Anyway, a bit hard to make sense of, all this. But on the other hand, this paragraph of DeWitt’s is easy to make sense of, and not only to make sense of, but to call it out as bullshit:
Every so often an academic reads several hundred examination scripts and is appalled by the ignorance, the tendentiousness, the lack of sophistication – and so tackles the problem by taking a paid sabbatical and writing a book showing what proper treatment of the subject looks like. What the academic does not do is show how the subject can properly be treated in a 4 45-minute 1000-word essays. Nor does the academic show how his mastery of the material is to be achieved by candidates who are holding down part-time jobs, who can’t buy books, who are kicked out of their halls of residence three times a year to make way for conferences. If one were to give all several hundred candidates a paid sabbatical, and if one were then to permit them to organize treatment of the subject on their own terms, at book length, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. If one simply locked each candidate up with a computer and gave him/her unlimited time to write to a specific word count, a substantially higher number might be expected to achieve respectable results. We don’t do that, so what we see is, unsurprisingly, that a small number of students can both learn under unfavourable conditions and display knowledge coherently under unfavourable conditions.
I understand that this is deployed as some sort of allegorical device, a parallel instance, but… WTF? Hard not to sense a bit of slippage from the footnoted academics mentioned and “the academic” as a generic breed. * But I know, we academics are sooo spoiled. Let me just assure you of a few things, readers:
a) the implied storyline here, despite the fact that DeWitt seems to know of an actual example of this sort of thing happening, is ridiculous. Just to be empirical about it, I’ll knock on my department head’s door today, tell her that I’m still feeling a bit frustrated about the exam scripts I marked a few weeks ago, and ask her if I can take next term off in order to write something that sets the little buggers right about a few things.
b) there are problems with academia, teaching, but the lack of compassion of instructors for students, lack of understanding for the busy lives they lead, is not one that stands out from the bunch. Believe me, we are in solidarity with the students on all of this – it only makes our lives and work harder when they are overworked, bookless, worried about administrative issues, empoverished, and lacking the appropriate amount of time it takes to finish their assignments properly.
c) “What the academic does not do is show how the subject can properly be treated in a 4 45-minute 1000-word essays.” Yes, I don’t spend tons of time writing about that because, in term, I spend oh about 10-15 hours of contact time actually doing that, face to face. And 10-15 hours contact time, as anyone in the business knows, comes along with 20-40 hours non-contact preparation time.
d) We don’t write our books out of frustration with our students. Sorry. I am not sure what was going on where and when DeWitt went to university, and I’m sure the assholery and general poshness runs a bit thicker at the Oxbridge places than elsewhere, but this is simply not the case anywhere I’ve ever been, and I’ve been a lot of places now, very posh and not so posh.
I’m not sure if DeWitt’s going for some sort of complicated performative endorsement of AdB’s blinders-on condescension here, but whatever it is it makes as little sense as either an element of her argument (if there is one… hard to know…) or as an “every so often” bit of jobsite portraiture.
* Where do we find the slippage in question? Note the present tense of the first sentence… and the fact that the two guys mentioned were teaching at the Oxford of yesteryear when they wrote their books, where sure there were poor kids, but probably not the basketcases in bulk needed to make the posh prof / pathetic student body scenario work in the way DeWitt needs it to….
reclusive blogauthor makes public appearance one night only
Ok. So I’ve said lots about what I did this weekend. What about what I didn’t do? I was supposed to WORK ON BOOK WORK ON BOOK WORK ON BOOK YOU FUCKER! But that’s neither here nor there. And write a letter of reference, will take care of that tomorrow when stationary is at hand. And finish reading Crash, but I’ll do that tonight.
But also, I was supposed to write a talk on a certain very famous Irish author for a lecture I’m giving at a charity bookshop Monday evening. They asked, and what was I supposed to say – world hunger is at stake! I will scrabble something up tomorrow. But if you’re very bored and at the same time utterly fascinated by the author of this blog (and, really, how could you not be! I mean, look at this stuff! and I am cute in person!) I hereby formally invite you to my charity bookshop lecture. Um, you’ll have to write me for the details, for reasons of pseudonymity, but I’d love to a) see some friendly faces and b) not lecture to a single bored person who was otherwise sifting the LPs and c) this won’t happen again, probably, as it’s a unique combination of no-ID required lecturing, not a pay-in-advance conference and stealth enough for me to let you know on here without giving the game away.
It’s out in West London somewhere. No, not the Harrods branch of Oxfam. Further west. The event is free, except you’ll have to buy one of the sixteen copies of Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown that they have in stock if you come. In return, I will supervise your PhD (if applicable – paying punters only, please!)
sunday evening post: columns, bad dads, drink, london, women, men, sex, procreation, cricket, birthday parties
Noticed this attack on female “confessional journalism” by Hadley Freeman in the Guardian the other day:
Here’s how it goes: a female journalist describes her obsession with her weight/breasts/ageing face/food or alcohol problems/inability to have a happy relationship. The article is illustrated by the journalist looking as miserable as possible. There are tales of daily woe. It concludes with the writer still sufficiently unhappy to be commissionable for another very similar piece.
This genre has nothing to do with journalists opening a window into what life is like for women today. It does women no favours at all. It is entirely about perpetuating an editor’s misogynistic image of what women are like (self-hating, self-obsessed) and making a semi-celebrity out of the writer in the belief that readers like to read journalists whose names and faces (and breasts) they recognise.
I have no doubt that the women who write these articles truly feel the emotions they describe. But these women need help; they do not need to be made to feel that their professional USP is to play up their misery.
[snip]
Aside from everything else, this kind of journalism sets feminism back by about 50 years, because not only does it perpetuate offensive stereotypes about women as needy, helpless, childlike narcissists, it suggests that the most interesting thing a woman can offer up to others is her own battered, starved, bloated, enhanced or reduced body. And that seems a lot sadder to me than any shocking revelation I ever read in a single piece of confessional journalism.
Sure, of course, this is all true. But what else is true that the second-smoothest path for women into the papers, after the ritualized self-abuse that she describes here, is to write a piece slagging off other women for doing X, Y, Z. Doesn’t really matter what – writing confessional pieces about being fat is a good if safe choice. I live with a woman who dwells (or dwelt, back before she was working on her book / having kids, but soon will dwell again) in fragrant corridors where la commentaire feminine is manufactured, and it is a testament to her ethics and general above-the-frayness that she resolutely and persistently disregards my suggestions that she write this or that take down of some misdirected female writer or trend.
And so I put these ideas on my blog instead. Refused male musery mine!
But just to keep all these balls in the air, I want to confess that I’ve fallen under the spell of my own confessional columnist – a male one, but one who’s been doing a sort of pitch perfect translation into guy-voice of just the sort of thing that upsets Freeman above. Honestly, it’s not since Hitchens came unwound in the pages of The Nation in the weeks after 9/11 that I’ve actually purchased a magazine on a weekly basis in order to read a columnist. But now, instead of flipping through The New Stateman and making a decision up or down on whether to buy a (reduced-price, via the UCU store) copy, I purchase it without flip-through, as I’ve become a devoted reader, perhaps to my discredit, of Nicholas Lezard’s “Down and Out in London” column.
(Just to be clear, I’ve generally read anything that Owen or Dr. Power have in there before I have an actual copy in my hands… Apparently, I can read Lezard that way too – not sure why this hasn’t occurred to me before…)
Anyway, I’m not going to cut and paste any of the Lezard stuff, and I think the effect 1) works best cumulatively and 2) might only work for those who can understand the situation he is in. And I certainly can… He’s got two kids and apparently was kicked out of his house for good for coming home one too many times plastered, and now lives in a shabby flat with another guy, spends quite a lot of time at his local, is broke, etc. Um, well…. Right. So I’ve seemingly gotten a lot better and have at least one of my nine or so lives left as I’m still here. But there were moments when it definitely looked like a grubby shared flat with nothing but my MacBook Pro and a hasty selection of my clothes had become my immediate and irremediable future.
Having kids is hard on marriages, partnerships. Unspeakably hard, really. The paradigm shift that’s slowquickly been happening over the past few decades, making marriage into a union of buddies and workpartners who (often) spend significant portions of their formative years together and childless only to take the big dip fairly late and find that everything has changed forever. Unexpected though age-old gender roles reassert themselves when you weren’t looking, and you learn how much you depended on that hour-and-a-half walk that you took every evening. Often, one partner works (in the out of the house sense) less than they used to, and different forms of dependency take root. You have no time or venue to talk, or fuck, or be by yourself. When you see friends as a couple, you see them differently. Everything changes, everything is really hard.
But there’s something else, a little less personal and identificatory, that appeals about Lezard’s column in the NS, something I’d like to post more about later. It somehow, his column captures and encapsulates the specific sort of squalor that characterizes London. It’s a very different sort than tinges the atmosphere of, say, New York. There’s a bit of Hollywood to the New York sort, a sort of intersection of money and sex that comes through – just for instance – in the bar girl that I once watched for an entire evening trying to work the fucking Midtown Marriott lobby during the Christmas season. I’ll say more about this later, but London is, in part, about conventional types going softly but insistently wrong.
****
Over the course of the weekend, my wife said two very dirty things that were also very funny. I can only remember one of them now. I threatened to put it up on here, but clearly I am too much of a gentleman for that.
****
There’s an Italian restaurant / cafe at the centre of my neighborhood, literally at the old Roman crossroads or whatever it is, that is known as the sort of characteristic neighborhood establishment. We have started eating there every day that we can, as it is cheap and the food is good and you can eat outside. So…. it’s the characteristic neighborhood establishment of a neighborhood that is in some (class limited, of course, of course) sense the characteristic North London neighborhood. Since I am a real North Londoner now, I further believe that North London is the truest embodiment of London as a whole. So…. this place is really fucking Londony, in some strange but true sense. (Cf the bit in Conrad’s The Secret Agent about London Italian restaurants – that should sort some of the logic that I’m not writing out longhand for you if you need that to happen….)
But.
When I go in there, I absolutely and in a way that happens in none of the many other Italian restaurants I’ve eaten in during my time here, absolutely, positively, feel like I am back in New Jersey. Hmmm. It’s all a bit joisy guido – they show the Godfather on plasma screens over the dining room, the decor screams Rt. 17. Is this hard to understand? Fine, here’s a small but telling materialization of what I’m talking about, from the Men’s Room:
What we have there, folks, is the product of the unholy union of High British Paternalism (”mind the gap, morons!”) and the italomammalovethathurts that embraces my native state and its great recent artistic products in its sagging, well-fed arms…. Uncanny! The way you found them…. Ha!
****
One of the hardest things to decipher: the look that young women give to men pushing strollers filled with children. It seems neither, at least not in any obvious way, to mean mmmm give me some of that wouldja. Nor does it completely not mean that, from what I can tell. It is hard to describe. Perhaps its the look of the generic erotic, the animal gone human and social, of the code playing its games of generality and specificity right there on the high street, shortly after pasta lunch.
****
Later, Saturday afternoon, I walk out and onto my bucolic street of terrace houses to get a bottle of water at the off-license at the corner. Two women, stylishly dressed, attractive, are stumbling a bit as one of them tries to work her phone. They have just come out of a house, three doors down. The phoneless one says to me, as I pass, “Carry me.”
She translates my eyes-on-the-pavement non-response into the question, “Where would you want me to carry you?” for she answers in turn,
“Just to the end of the street, or wherever. Just carry me.”
I walk on, unable to translate the bolt of British vernacular that she drops on me next into Sober and American. They are gone when I return, swallowed whole by the bucolic, the terraced, and the directions someone gave them over the phone.
****
Sunday morning, on the way to Hampstead, my wife said to me, I looked at one sentence of the Ballard that you left on the kitchen table last night and I knew immediately what you mean.
There’s a post coming on what I mean. I flew through the first fifty pages of Crash, a bit excited. Since then, well, slower going. I’ll tell you about it soon.
****
The Jews for Jesus were out in full force today in Hampstead. I can’t even imagine how or why that works here, though then again, maybe I can. But it’s sublimely odd.
****
I visited both Daunt Books in Belsize Park and Waterstones in Hampstead. All I bought, sadly, was Vladmir Sorokin’s The Queue. I’ve never heard of it, but I’m excited to read it. I wanted to buy something else, but it was on 3 for 2, and I couldn’t find another 2, and so I left it for another time. Waterstones needs to think carefully about that promotion – likely I would have just bought the book if it weren’t for the sticker on it.
****
Another Sunday, another kid’s birthday party. Woof. A lot of them now, almost one a week. Luckily this one was better than a lot of the others – and there weren’t any birds. The parents in question went lo-tech with the thing and just scheduled it for the lovely fenced in play area in the Parliament Hill part of Hampstead Heath. Since the weather was pretty much perfect today, it was actually a lovely way to spend a Sunday afternoon, lolling on the grass, watching the kids do their thing.
This is going to start to sound a bit newspaper column-ish, but I’ve started to take more and more note of something kind of interesting. Most people at this party (the adults I mean – the kids were all 3-4) were in their early thirties (like us) to mid-forties – the general and universally prevalent age of childbearing for urban professional / intellectual types in the English speaking world. In fact, this scene, owing to the neighborhood I guess, was a little younger and hipper than the one that we’re a part of by virtue of the school that my daughter attends in our neighborhood. Someone was wearing a Joy Division shirt, and the mom of the birthday boy only wears vintage stuff. You don’t see all that much vintage stuff where we live.
In addition, though, to the parent / child parings, there were four extra adults, childless, in their thirties by the looks of it. It took me awhile to figure out that they were childless; so distracted was I by their supermarket bags full of Stella Artois and white wine that they had brought with them that I simply became reflexively envious and paranoically resentful that I didn’t have my own bag full of fun stuff to drink that until my wife pointed their non +kid status, I simply didn’t notice they were ohne Kindern.
So they were drinking and looked incredibly bored. Of course they were – they were childless adults at a farking four-year-old’s birthday party. But who knows, maybe they were bored in other ways as well. And the parents were certainly bored too – and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one glacing a bit enviously at these people without shit stains on their shirts and who didn’t have to whip out a tit every 45 minutes to sooth the thing hanging from your front in a Baby Bjorn and could instead just crack open another can of Stella and think about what they were going to do for dinner later. Maybe the four of them took off just after we left to sit around doing adult things like getting shitfaced in a pub. Who knows.
But here’s what I’m trying to get to: there’s an interesting sort of tension, a fraught detente, that starts to form between the childless and the childed during this stage in life. Most of the time it’s not right on the surface, perhaps, but when they’re forced into co-presence (whether through a birthday party like this one, or more casually at restaurants, on transit, and the like…) it starts to come through. From what I imagine, further, there’s a bit of tilt on axis that comes a bit later. Right now, the parents of infants can’t help but think, however much they love their children, christ what did I get myself into – I’m only fucking 32! while the still childless can look on with the there but for the grace thing running through their heads. Give it a decade, less, and many of the childless will have punched their own ticket into the exciting world of parenting. But the others who haven’t may have different strings running frontcourt and back through their minds.
Banal, column-fodder, but still true and hugely important. I’d like to do more serious writing about this, actually. Having kids (or not having them) brings to the front some really big questions about society and its perspective on happiness, time, work, life. All the issues that any proper socialist needs to think through first before taking a single step forward toward the development of a theory, let alone a practical path. It’s a shame that more men don’t take up the issue – perhaps I’ll start, perhaps I have started.
****
Ooops. I just posted this and noticed that the title promised cricket. Here:
I watched some cricket on the Heath today. I like watching it; I still don’t understand it at all.
****
Again the kids are asleep by the time we make it back from the Heath, so we take advantage and stop somewhere for a bit. By the time I return to our table with the beverages, a sodden guy is talking to my wife. I overhear, Ah but you must know what part of Ireland your people come from, because god do you ever look it, and you know I would knows as you can tell from the way that I speak I come from there myself and do you ever visit? Would you want to? What the fuck. I sit down and he’s not sure whether to refer to her as my wife or not, and probably for more than one reason. He is fifty years old. He lost his glasses, ha ha, last night. He is a clean man whose clothes are dirty. And his friend has run to Tesco for something. He asks me what part of Ireland I am from, and I respond that I am not Irish. He is getting very confused. But before we leave, break ruined, he tears a menu in half to write down his email address and tells us to be in touch – come and stay! – if we are ever in rural Ireland.
On the way home, my wife responds to my jokes and japes, “Yeah, there’s nothing I’m more attracted to than sodden drunk guys like….”
Significant pause. Cue laughter.
It was a very nice weekend indeed.
brickeee
Oh man, I bricked my fucking eee. I had Mac OS X up and running on the damn thing this morning. The only niggle was that I could get it to wake up from sleeping – which is sort of a big issue, as it takes about eight minutes to boot the machine under Mac OS. So I found a fix online, flashed the BIOS, which didn’t fix the sleep problem but did screw up the screen size such that you could see neither the top nor bottom menus and there weren’t any other options available for screen resolution. Efforts to remedy ensued, efforts that only made things way, way worse.
So now my little constructivist tool-friend is a piece of fried plastic and silicon. It basically can’t load from anything, has nothing but foolishness on its flashdrive. I’ve tried pretty much everything at this point, and basically can recognize that I’m swiftly sinking into a hole of broken BIOS, a hole from which there’s no escape.
My wife thinks this is a ploy to be allowed to buy a MacBook Air. Maybe. But know what? I hate computers. All around. From databases to facebook, from godforsaken twitter to spreadsheets, I hate them and all that they do and honestly believe that the world was a better place when it was all newsprint, cheap pens, and spiral notebooks.
With semi-broken computer an unattractive option to use today, I hauled out a hipdork moleskine notebook and some printouts of what I’ve been working on. I spent a few hours of actual productivity – rare this week – that way. Hmmm….
Pollian? Interested in a little recovery project? After all, erm, you suggested that I… well…. No, that’s not fair, is it?
games for two played by one
I confess that when I was a kid I was into Dungeons and Dragons. * Actually, really, the whole TSR line of games, and even some extra-TSR sets. Twilight 2000 was my last and longest and greatest love in this line.
In fact, I was something of a preternaturally precocious D&D expert, dragging my mother to the local bookshop to buy me a rulebook or module a week when I was, ahem, in the first and second grade. I actually remember one time the bookshop guy telling my mother that there was no way that I could want these things at my age, and half-refusing to sell them to me and her. I can’t remember how she responded, but I’m sure I got my book.
Anyway, problem was there was no one to play these things with. I was a bit early with them, so my friends were out of the question. (Seriously, this is not a story about my titanic genius. I was way smarter as a kid than I am as an adult. That’s what years of sports related concussions and long-term substance abuse – all of the legal varieties! – will do for you! Sad really! So that is absolutely not the point – you’ll see….) Plus, due to a sick mother and the fact that I was an only-child in the deracinated NJ suburbs, I spent lots and lots of time entertaining myself in my bedroom.
And so… I learned to play the games by myself. Which is, of course, if you know anything about RPGs, impossible. The basic setup, for the uninitiated, goes like this. Let’s presume that there are four players. Three of the players will be characters, and the other one will be what is called the dungeon master, or DM for short. The DM controls the scenario, she or he sets the backdrop, the scenarios that are encountered by the characters. You are in a small room with doors on three sides. Through the door on the left, you hear a low cackling. There is a box of tinder on the floor. The players who are characters make decisions about what to do within the scenarios devised by the DM. I choose to take the tinderbox and open the door on the right. There is a third element, that adds contingency to the whole show – the dice. Both the dungeon master and the characters, at different times, roll. The former does it to add an element of chance to the story that he or she is telling (if I roll five or higher, an ogre will bound from the door on the left….), and the latter use the dice to determine the outcome of chancy actions, such as fighting. (I need to roll a four or better to kill the goblin with my mace…)
I hope it’s apparent why it’s impossible to play these things by yourself – the person who is responsible for the suspenseful story is also, at the same time, the characters who are at the whim of suspense. You know what’s behind the door on the left while at the same time, for the game to work, you can’t know what’s behind the door at the left. It’s hard for me to remember how much I actually played these games, rather than simply reading through the modules (premade scenarios) and developing and equipping characters…. Probably not all that much. But the amazing thing is that whole swaths of my young life were given over to such fruitless and seemingly unfun endeavors.
That said…. What a strange but perfectly appropriate preparation for a life of reading, writing about, and writing for myself a bit of fiction. What better materialization of the strange psychological state that one has to enter into in order to write narratives – knowing, but not knowing, what’s behind the door, what awaits the character if she does A, B, or C. I am just now starting to think that everything I am interested in, deeply interested in, about fiction probably had its start with these games for two or more played by only one back in my bedroom. The intense mandate to generate the unexpected, combined with the sheer impossibility of actually making something happen that really is unexpected, as well as the bizarre god-like stature of the author, who, during the modern period, would do anything, would commit to any sophism about impersonality, in order for the game to go on the way it was intended – both of these things are vividly analogous to what I was doing when I was filling out character-sheets and rolling twenty-sided dice on a card table while sitting on my boyhood bed.
One does wonder, however, whether another path toward some other sort of fiction isn’t hidden behind the branches of my childhood loneliness. A collaborative sort of fiction, that puts the emphasis not on the dice, that old standby of the lazy avant-garde, but on the presence at the table of other people, people who are able and permitted to make their own decisions about what happens next. Both of the people that I am reading at the moment – Flaubert and Ballard – in their ways describe the writing of fiction as a sort of experiment, as a process bent on testing hypotheses and presuppositions. Perhaps a new type of fiction, a fiction aggregate not only thematically but also at the site of production, would benefit from the lessons that I learned back there, trying to make myself believe that I didn’t know what I knew right from the start, because I had read the book cover to cover before we even started to write it.
* Since there is a natural line on continuity and causality between D&D play and gothic dress, I just thought I might mention: had a conversation last week in which I asserted, as was confirmed in my assertion, that the most unthinkable thought in the world is the thought that pictures me as a goth. It is not, in fact, that I don’t like goths or ex-goths. It is simply an unthinkable thought. Probably has a lot to do with the fact that I was during my formative years a catholic school jock, though a reflective or even overly-reflective one, hellbent on getting off the field to smoke pot and write poetry (and escape my father’s menacingly disappointed gaze). I will, perhaps, say more about this in a later post.
too much too soon
Too much branding going on lately in our neck of the internet! Just saying! The bubble era, sure, taught all of us lots of tricks about hype without substance, ads perhaps with products but catastropically without a business plan. Or…. it’s like we’re trying to replay English Department 1999, which I can assure you wasn’t all that fun or useful and certainly not sustainable let alone scalable the first time around. Better work before the guerilla-marketting, the spray-painted logos, the placard spots above urinals! Let the world do the naming!
monday is the truth of monday
IT says that the truth of Sundays is Monday… but from the looks of things the truth, in turn, of Monday is getting not much done and in coffeehouses up and down Tottenham Court Road.
I was reading Crash on the way in on the bus and Underground and enjoying it so much, actually, that I gave myself another 20 pp space of time at Starbucks. I was glad to leave, though, as I hit my page allocation just as I
- vaguely started to worry about the plate-glass window right behind me, what it would be like to pick it out of my scalp and cheeks and limbs and (jesus) genitals if something were to knock or blast it in on me. I didn’t find the thought as sexy as the characters in the novel do, weirdos.
- decided that the mother and daughter who had chosen of all the available tables in the nearly empty outlet the one located right next to mine were in fact a team of bag-thieves. They run rampant, the bag thieves, in London Starbucks. Half-tantalized by the idea of looking distracted and trying to get them to make a swipe at it (see my $2000 laptop coquettishly poking its flank out of my bag in the pic?) and then catching them, and half-realizing that if they were thieves worth their salt they could probably still nail me even though I was on to them, I left and went to the office.
Which is a shame, as Starbucks is airconditioned which, amazingly, is actually helpful here in London today. And even more a shame because, as per the general rule of department life in the summer, someone came and knocked on my door and asked me to take care of something that took me the better part of an hour or two. At least it had something to do with Ballard, what I was asked to do.
But it seemed clear that the best course of action was to get out of there before the rota fortunae of departmental work turned my way again. The upstairs of EAT is quite nice, my new favourite. Actually ate lunch complete with an apple for those who are keeping track of my health and well-being. The music is pretty nice too – a heavy-rotation of Macy Gray/Lauren Hill tossed with songs that I remember or want to remember listening to on the radio in the backyard in Hillsdale, NJ when I was 5 or 6 or 7 or 8. Hottown, summahinthecity, back of my neck feelindirty and gritty. Though it does make me feel I should change the station to listen to Rags pitch his no-hitter against the Sox while eating a Ballpark Frank or something. Distracting thought!
Where is summer but New Jersey, a longwalk away from the GWB if you could walk there? What is that boy, whose first novel was a drug-store purchased compy of 1984, doing typing in the shadow of the Ministry of Love? Why doesn’t he get the picture and type a bit faster and not in html? And why did he think buying a 3G stick for his laptop would help matters on Mondays and the rest of the days of the week?
Work on your book, fool! Just because it’s hot and you’re alone doesn’t license reverie and posting!
sunday in “the spiritual home of britain’s left-wing intelligentsia”
I’m not sure exactly why I’m driven to record my familal jaunts, my Sundays, in bland photoessays on here. The one I wrote two weeks ago worked out pretty well, so whatever, I’ll keep doing it and see what happens.
We had no plans when we woke up this morning. Today is my sleep-late day and I actually made it to 9 AM, which is rare. I’m headed into old man territory, very suddenly, with my sleep patterns. For my entire adult life, I’ve gone to bed only begrudgingly before 2 AM, and while work often mandated an early rise, if permitted I’d sleep fairly late. All of a sudden, in the last few months, I’m down before midnight and up before the alarm rings, generally no later than 7 AM.
We had no plans. It suddenly strikes me that Sunday afternoons, and what you do with them, might be read in the same way that one reads a dream. Left to one’s own devices, without the pressures of work (even if the mandate to mind children remains) one’s leisure choices form patterns that sometimes are only discernable after the fact, and sometime not really discernable at all.
I don’t really know why I woke with a strong desire to go to Islington, to Upper Street to be exact. We’d passed through on the bus a few months ago, and it’s not all that far from our house. And we’ve been around Angel for various reasons (me for Kinofist what seems like a long, long time ago and both of us together to buy couches when we moved into our place). But never to Upper Street. It’d take changing buses at Finsbury Park to get there, but buses are easier than the Underground, as we are always a large and heavily encumbered party-of-four at this point.
At the busstop near my house, we couldn’t take the first bus that came by, as there were already two strollers onboard. Another nine minutes. So I walked away to have a cigarette. When I returned my wife was having “the smoking talk” with my oldest. Ah me. Bet you my remaining days of nicotene-tint are few and getting fewer all the time. It’s just what happens, isn’t it… I suppose it’s for the best.
Ah there we are. Upper Street. There’s a farmers market on Sundays behind Islington Town Hall, but we didn’t want to keep the produce all day in the heat, so we bought nothing but pastries. The place was loaded with Americans – another woman with her own set of two kids was dropping her purchases into a Trader Joe’s bag, which made us chuckle – fucking Californians! Our own bag comes from a co-op in the rust-belt city where we lived before all this – and almost certainly marks us as academics in the Expat staring contests that occur constantly in neighborhood like this one.
A few minutes later my wife and the kids ducked into a children’s store and I had a cigarette out on the street, and took the photo that appears above. A second later, I turned to the right, and saw….. this:
Mexican food! In London! I’ve had it exactly once in the more than 1.5 years I’ve been here. It simply doesn’t exist as a food category here – there’s like a total of eight places in the entire city, and generally if you look one up and head there you find that it’s closed for one reason or another. I bounded back to the wife, who was coming out of the shop, wildly pointing toward, yes, that! And yelling, yes, yes I will, yes we will eat there! Yes! But she reminded me, though, that it was only 10:45 AM, so a little early for burritos. And plus, “tex-mex” is an ill-omen, and doubleplus (or doubleminus), good Mexican restaurants don’t ever serve tapas too. (Look closely at the sign). WTF? Yeah, Mexico is not in Spain, hmmm… I conceded she had a point, at least about the tapas part, and so we moved on.
But here’s the kicker. This Desperados, object of my gleeful pleading, is located on the site of the former Granita Restaurant, where the “Granita Pact” between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown was supposedly sealed in 1994. According to wikipedia:
According to several authors, Gordon Brown agreed not to stand in the Labour Party leadership election, effectively giving Blair a clear run, and letting him lead the Labour Party in the 1997 general election. In return, Brown would be allowed wide powers over domestic policy. This was apparently confirmed by a copy of a note published in The Guardian in June 2003. The note mentions Blair’s commitment to a “fairness agenda” consisting of “social justice, employment opportunities and skills” under a Labour government.
Further, according to the Guardian, if we had gone in, we might have gotten to sit at the very table, preserved as it was, where this deal that in the long-run seems to have wrecked the Labour Party, perhaps permanently, was hashed out. I hope, when (if!) my wife reads this post, she realizes that my world-historical radar is very much in operation, even if it is oddly connected with my melted cheese radar system, and that she should always listen and willingly concede to my choices in lunchtime restaurantage!
(Hmmm… now I’m wondering if any world-historical events took place at the site of the Fuddruckers on Rt.1 right by the turnoff for the NJ Turnpike… I used to make my wife take me there for birthday dinners during grad school, because of the melted cheese machine. They should dig for Jimmy Hoffa in the parking lot!)
There is a Waterstones bookshop in Islington. I have to admit, I like going to a decent Waterstones better than the crappy little store in my neighborhood. On the front table, we saw this:
My wife made the same mistake that I did when I first saw this one. We had a long and lovely talk last night about aggregate fiction, and she lifted it from the table thinking…. But nope, no. If it were Twenty People, Two Years we’d be in business. But as it is, no not aggregate – just sentimental romantic trope. Pooh. I bought the first volume of Ballard’s Complete Short Stories and Ian Sinclair’s London Orbital.
I won’t have time to read either anytime soon, but I buy books when I am happy. And I was happy today. We ate lunch at Pizza Express. Soon, I will have eaten at all 400 or so PE outlets. During lunch, I goofed with my older daughter and discussed with my wife the strange fact that in London, people eat at chain restaurants all the time, while in NYC it would be considered quite gauche to eat at chain places. That is to say, there exists here a whole category of middle to upper-middle level restaurants that basically dominate the sub-really-fancy spectrum of eating, while in America it’s hard not to think TGIFridays when you see the same place in more than a single neighborhood. My pet theory about this divergence is that hip American cities have been populated with refugees from the suburbs (comme moi) who grew up eating and lower-middle to upper-middle tier chains on the side of highways. (For the record, Fuddruckers is distinctly sub-lower-middle, just in case you’re tempted to try….) and thus run away from them en-masse when they acquire the West Elm accoutred urban pad of their dreams. I imagine that labour issues are significant too – these fucking chains are rather merciless over here, and there’s not the endless supply of undocumented Latin Americans to shuffle the plates and make the salads.
Weird. There’s a mall in Islington. I like its name: The N1 Mall. Maybe everything should be named after its postcode – far more generic, rational, clean. (Big huge post coming soon, in the hopper, on city names, station names, predicated by an act of barbarity back in Brooklyn.) My youngest decided to poop voluminously, voluminously enough to make it through the clothes. Back with the first one, wouldn’t we have panicked… But we’re veteran parents now and so we just pulled over and took care of business right there in the stroller. Much, much nicer the second time around, I have to say. But malls never look right in the UK – or really anywhere but America. Why is this? Ah, because it’s nicer over here and they simply don’t belong.
How much nicer? This much nicer….
From what I can tell, it’s a co-op-ized former estate built on the site of a V-1 bomb attack during WWII. Islington took quite a lot of bomb damage during the war, and this is the reason why Caledonian Road, for instance, is basically a several mile long block of public or ex-public housing estates. This one (I think it’s now known as the Half Moon Crescent Co-op, though I’m not exactly sure…) is bucolic and lovely, and I sort of wish that I lived there…. But BoBos like us settle where the schools are good, where the Ofsted ratings top 90… And so we are where we are. Which is good, which is fine…
You can see the very top of my wife’s head in the picture, by the way….
We had two sleeping children by the time we boarded the bus on Caledonian Road for the trip back home. We stopped somewhere and looked at a copy of the Times whle they slept, especially the cover article about Michael Jackson’s nanny:
She confided: “When Paris had her birthday this April, I wanted to buy balloons, things, to make a happy birthday. There was no money in the house. I had to put everything on my personal credit card. I brought people to clean the house. The room of the kids needed to be cleaned. But they weren’t paid.”
Revealed within her account of their love-hate relationship was Jackson’s everyday life as a father and drug addict. Grace told me of pumping out his stomach after he took too many drugs and of how dirty and unkempt he became towards the end. Her stories of his attitude to the children shocked me.
Hard to know what to say to all that, and so we went home. It’s taken me over three hours to write this post, as my wife’s been upstairs working on a book proposal and I’ve been downstairs with the kids. One watched Cinderella for a bit, the other would sleep for 15 minute bursts only after 20 minutes of carrying her about.
I’m starting to think that I’d like to write a book someday, perhaps even someday soon, about Sundays. I certainly seem to have a lot to say about them. (Interesting to note that back at the founding of LS I was very against Long Sunday as a title – I favoured Por Ahora – maybe I’m slowing out of radicalism or something as I age, or slowing into another sort of radicalism, who knows…)
In his Politics of Time, Peter Osborne at one point quotes Benjamin’s One-Way Street:
In Nadja, Breton and Nadja are the lovers who convert everything that we have experienced on mournful railway journeys… on Godforsaken Sunday afternoons in the proletarian quarters of the great cities, in the first glance through the rain-blurred windows of a new apartment, into revolutionary experience, if not action. They bring the immense force of ‘atmosphere’ concealed in these things to the point of explosion.
I think it might just be my favorite snippet of critical prose that I’ve ever come across, even if I can’t decide for the life of me whether I agree with Benjamin here, with even the basic principles behind what he is saying. I go back and forth, and in a sense this oscillation, is an index of the rhythm of my entire intellectual life in all of its dimensions. And not just my intellectual life, but the whole burrito really.
barbientworfenheit
Who knows how to handle it…. Christ, she is frightening – she is just what everyone says she is. And she will sneak in, one way or another. An unenlightened relative will send her, or there will be a fit in a toystore – this one came in a most roundabout, but also revelatory way. We let her go to the bakery to pick out her own birthday cake, and she selected the one that formed a giant dress with her in the middle.
You can’t prohibit, it only makes it worse. Those whose television-viewing was rationed or prohibited can’t stop watching shit, whereas I was literally parked in front of the set for hours at a time, it is never turned off in my parents’ house, and now I can barely stand to look at the thing. Other things were prohibited me, directly or indirectly, and if you only knew the problems that I have with them now.
You want to be vulgarly dialectical about it, you want to allow the complex relationship to things like socially-mandated norms of female beauty or (later) drugs or sex or ambition to form naturally. So you neither deny anything nor do you want to become the cool parent, the liberal parent, raising a monstrous child with no edges or real interests or ethics or properly curvaceous drives.
The festina lente temporality of parenting: at every moment, the need to have a firm grasp of a solid answer to the question What is a woman/man? There is an implicit demand, registered everyday, that you solve the unsolveable – how, for instance, the child is the mother of the woman. But at the same time, you know that you can’t rush the solution, as you have to get it right or right enough and besides it seems there’s no good way to learn it but by watching your kids grow up. The child is the mother of the man.
So true to the pattern, Barbie arrived, she is kept permanently nearly naked, and she is thrown violently a couple times a day. Apparently, all girls throw their Barbies.
sequinedglove revolution
CNN International is doing crossover pieces on Iran and Michael Jackson. Why not?
handke: “the impression of fiction”
From Spurious:
Reflecting on his earlier fiction, Handke says:
These narratives and novels have no story. They are only daily occurrences brought into a new order. What is ’story’ or ‘fiction’ is really always only the point of intersection between individual daily events. This is what produces the impression of fiction. And because of this I believe they are not traditional, but that the most unarranged daily occurrences are only brought into a new order, where they suddenly look like fiction. I never want to do anything else.
And he says this:
The more I immerse myself in an object, the more it approaches a written sign.
Handke has published 4 volumes of his journals, which he began to keep in the mid 70s. Was this amidst the general crisis to which he alludes at the beginning of My Year in No-Man’s Bay?
There was one time in my life when I experienced metamorphosis. Up to that point, it had only been a word to me….
Very early on, while at the famous Group 47 meeting, he says:
Above all, it seems to me that the progress of literature consists of the gradual removal of all fictions.
Just ordered a stack of Handke, whom I’ve never read. There’s potentially productive semi-contradiction, I think, between the first quote of the series (in which fictionality seems to have been relocated from the work itself to the eye and mind of the reader – thus the impression of fiction) and the last one. Which fictions, exactly, is he out to remove?
