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Is interesting to note where Marx’s spectre thing turns up. For instance, this from the start of a Businessweek article:

April 30 (Bloomberg) — While the specter of Greek contagion haunts southern Europe, corporate Germany is going from strength to industrial strength.

What is especially interesting is the way that the endless permutations on the original always bear – as if spectrally! – a little bit of the root sense of the original utterance. Crisis of capitalism, even when the recyclers of the trope don’t believe that such a thing is possible.

The playhouse he built for his daughter in the garden. What does he say – to himself, even to it – as he stands before it smoking yet another cigarette? He can remember the day he built it. His wife kept his daughter away from the back windows so that she wouldn’t see. It was the day before her third birthday and they had just moved into the place with the garden at back. One pane of the little plastic window in front cracked as he secured it in the frame, and there’s a little lintel piece that he never got around to installing sitting at its side.

Inside the house, there are mostly unused toys. A kitchen set. Some balls. A little chair.

He says to himself while standing in front of the house, Ah, this that you’re feeling comes one way or another no matter what happens. One way or another way, there will be a last time you look at that house. Such is the nature of things. We know this. We know when we’re hammering the nails and tightening the screws that one day some person, one day, will break the house down with a hammer and crowbar and set it out front on the day that they pick up large objects. So what if it is sooner rather than later? It will happen either way.

He says this to himself, and his heart rises momentarily only to fall again. He is right, he is wrong. It doesn’t work. He says this to himself but refuses to say it, even under his breath, to the playhouse.

From an interview with Nick Clegg in the Guardian magazine today:

Which living person do you most admire, and why? JM Coetzee – he writes with a simplicity which lays bare what really matters.

[...]

What is your favourite book? Life & Times Of Michael K, by JM Coetzee.

Funny to think what an absolutely perfect choice is for a politicians favorite novel, and funnier to think what a catastrophic choice Disgrace would be…

He was a strange and complex man. He had peculiar tastes. He was never at peace with the world.

The only way to know that you were his intimate was if he treated you as roughly as he treated himself. If, at certain pitched moments, he savaged himself and you at the same time and to the same degree, then you knew you were in, for better or worse.

This, you knew, has how love, or whatever it was, worked with him. The fact was that he was at once incredibly tolerant of and incredibly impatient with human nature. His optimism was abyssally pessimistic, and vice versa. At privileged moments, his speech would take on the dark lyricism that comes of such cross-wiring, such implicit contradiction. At other moments, he would remain silent, which amounted almost to the same thing.

You would have stopped, if you knew then what you know now, and said “But when and where did I sign on for that? Can you produce a contract? A duly notarized document?”

“Certain processes and functions,” he would have responded, “are as implicit in human relations as the tree is implicit in this garden, the squirrels in these trees, the train on those tracks.”

“This is a cross to bear,” he would have said. “But haven’t we all got to have one?” he would have asked.

Sinking back into a wine-induced, near-constant stupor, he reads the review and wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it.

His wife, well sort of, tells him to quit, move back to Brooklyn, and scratch the itch that’s been itching, that he’s not been scratching, since at least 1995. All of it comes back to that, all of it, she says when she’s in the mood to say such things.

Once, at a conference, drunk, he expounded upon the literature of the no. But now he has a hard time reading it. He is embarrassed about it, years later. It was in Chicago, or was in Long Beach, that he did that?

His wife says We’ll open a bookstore and then you will have some time. In return, he wonders aloud, pessimistically. Still, the food would be better.

He wonders, not aloud, later, about turning the screws tight, stripping them in fact, and then never being able to unscrew them.

His wife, well sort of, tells him to do an hour a day on it, that that is him at his best. But he simply can’t

He wonders whether the joke was on him or he is the joke on all of it, and then he writes this post.

Dammit. Am writing a lecture and would like to look at what I remember as a Benjamin Kunkel review of a new history of the literature MFA in America, Flannery O’Connor at Iowa and the like. Cannot find it anywhere! Can anyone remember the name of the book? Came out, or at least was reviewed, in the early summer.

Really hate it when all of the many search devices (google, spotlight, etc) at once act like it’s my job or failing that your job to remember stuff. Jesus.

I like Mute - both the magazine and the website. But checked the site today and something’s gone wrong with their quality control. This piece by Daniel Miller is about as close to a pure distillation of subpar gradstudentese as one could imagine in one’s worst teacherly nightmare. It’s a sort of self-sokaling sendup of Benjaminian thetical writing, all breathless paragraphs that make less and less sense the slower you read them. For instance, check out this one:

The city of the future will resemble Lagos more closely than London. In his book Concrete Reveries, Mark Kingwell takes a page from Walter Benjamin, naming New York as capital of the 20th century, overtaking Paris, the capital of the 19th. At the peaks of their prominence, both the City of Light and The Seat of Empire (© George Washington, 1784) incarnated and symbolised planetary dreams. Every epoch dreams its successor. The destruction of the World Trade Center in September 2001 brought the era of New York’s unquestioned urban supremacy to a close. The North East blackout which descended on the city two years later represented the requiem. The economy runs on symbolic authority like a car runs on gas. In a matter of hours, world trade became hollow. Ground zero replaced the twin towers, creating the context for the recent financial crisis.

Now, if DM were my tutorial student, and thank god he’s not, we’d start with the fact that sentence two has absolutely nothing to do with sentence one. Further, does DM mean that New York “dreamed” Lagos? If so, how so? The destruction of the WTC had absolutely nothing to do with the unseating (if that’s in fact what has happened) of New York as center of the universe – if anything, it allowed for a momentary stabilization of the geographical dispersion of playpieces on the world board rather than the opposite. The northeast blackout has nothing to do with anything, other than permitting a recognition that the city’s a lot more civil than it once was. World trade became hollow? Did it? And in the wake of what, the destruction of the WTC or the blackout – as the organization of the paragraph suggests the latter, but that doesn’t make any sense at all. DM, in general, demonstrates zero understanding of the relationship (or lack thereof) of 9/11 to the financial crisis, which both started before the attacks and resumed in full force several years after them… The attacks themselves had absolutely nothing to do with the general trajectory of the American economy….

This is only one, almost randomly selected paragraph, in the course of an persistently incoherent piece. Come on Mute! You’re letting the side down when you publish stuff like this! And the absolutely precious author bio at the bottom of the piece is enough to make a regular reader gag!

Very much regret that I couldn’t come along on Owen’s Piccadilly Line tour today. But then again, I’m pretty sure that none of the Holden designed stations feature one of these, which I saw today doing the same, um, walking tour I do almost every weekend – Highgate to Hampstead, hitting every playground in between.

I took a lot of nice pictures of Hampstead Heath along the way. Really starting to develop extraordinarily warm feelings for the Heath and for this stretch of North London more generally. Starting to wish that I lived even closer to the former than I already do (it’s about a 15 minute bus ride from my house).

The country is so very verdant, that even the dead trees have a bit of life in them.

Here is where you go if you want to have sex in the Heath. Just watch out for the police cameras – this is the UK after all.

There are few directional signs in the Heath, and many forks in the path, some of them leading through fairly dense old growth forest. So the first time I walked from Highgate to Hampstead, I used the GPS system on my iPhone to naivgate my way through. Worked like a charm. But it has a funny effect, this GPS thing – maybe something worth thinking about / writing about a bit more. I had anticipated taking a picture of the following the last time I was there – had the camera with me this time.

But as I took it, I couldn’t help but think – probably given the way I’d navigated last time – of what the tree I was taking a picture of would look like on google maps. In fact, I persistently today thought of myself as walking through a map, a satellite image – couldn’t stop thinking about myself from an imagined god’s eye view. Here’s the tree again, as well as the path from which I took the picture:

Odd to think that men and women walked around for so many centuries thinking, at least in part, from the god’s eye view, only to lose it, to see for themselves and at level angle for a bit, only to resume where they had left off due to gps and google maps. At least google’s satellites don’t care about your sins. Er….

At any rate, we made it to Hampstead, I put the camera away. We delivered our daughter to a birthday party, had a nice dinner (accompanied by a semi-sleeping infant – the other daughter), didn’t buy any books at Waterstones or Daunt, and then came home via one bus and then another. I’m getting my most hits ever today, by the way.

Does fucking suck when someone pinches your shit and publishes well with it. Not a nice feeling. Attribution is all it would take, really. But this does confirm what several friends have told me about the person in question, and what basically I already knew.

Tempting to go line for line, but why bother. Still, makes me question the whole blog endeavor – why one places stuff out there anonymously etc. World of greying idealess shits, that much is long since clear.

It is a little admitted fact, but capitalism is in fact a technology for the storage of pain. Like a freezer in England, it keep the old stuff cold and below.

What does this mean in practice? It means, for the recently ascendant, that every love comes glanced with a desolate fuck behind the only bar in town, just after closing hour and with the last girl in the room. Every job comes quick with the jobs you shouldn’t ever have, being what you are. It leads to arrogance, which is of course only the flipside of fear, rather than confidence, which only those far removed from the trauma of rising are permitted.

You will always recognise yourself in portraits of fear and disease. You will feel penniless despite your full pockets. You will feel inept despite your great successes. You will write and rewrite and develop elaborate techniques to avoid writing – mainly through recession back into what you essentially are. You will learn how to lie, because that is the only thing that this world has permitted you to do well. It has catered to your lies, at least thus far. When you tell one, it buys you another drink.

You only visited, but you will never truly leave XXX, Ontario – the mill town where you were born and weren’t born at the same time.

As with what’s left in the freezer, you will never be able to forget that there’s perfectly good stuff to eat if you’d only unlaze and thaw it out, cook it up for family dinner. You can order out, but eventually everyone’s going to have to pitch in and cook and eat the stuff that’s kept below.

(Sorry – deleted this one this morning, but now I’ve decided to add it back after just a bit of encouragement to do so. I broke some links and prolly lost pollian’s comments…)

Still haven’t broken the news of our imminent breakup to the good doctor, who’s still on holiday,  but yeah I’m leaving psychoanalysis. Not only does it cost too much money (I go the private route here, ugh) but it does have a tendency to weigh my weeks down with non-stop existential crisising, when really I’d be better served, you know, putting my head-down and working and being decent to those that I love. And I’ve already decided something to replace it with. No! Not more booze!

Sex with strangers, of course.

Just kidding. Ahem.

But here’s on thing that psychoanalysis did give me a bit of insight on. I’m a little hard on myself. No! I am! I’ve learned a bit about where this all started, but I’m not fixed yet. Beyond all the other mental murk and mutter, there’s one persistent fantasy that drives me mad, that makes me exceptionally mad at myself. And that is the fantasy of strict efficiency, of optimal organisation, of using my time so very wisely that it hurts.

As they say in the supermarket business, my life feels like it is defined by shrink. I get these blocks of time to work, I’ve always had these blocks of time to work, and I persistently underfulfil! Despite the things I’ve done, the things I’ve earned, I am convinced way down deep that I am an incorrigble slacker, that I’ve not spent a day correctly since I was in college. Back then, wow, did I work. Day after day after day, my now-wife and I sat in the library reading and reading and reading. I have a terrible sense that ever since then, I’ve been coasting on those four years of hard labor, spent without a social life (Friday we’d go to a movie and eat some pizza, and once in awhile we’d drive up to Montreal and drink on a hotel room balcony), without friends, mostly without drink,  but with reams and reams of literary and language study and papers so exquisite that they stopped marking them at a certain point.

Downhill, downhill, since then. Perhaps more rapidly lately. Perhaps more rapidly since the advent of psychoanalysis?

Here’s my dream day, the day that I intend to have but never do.

7:00 – Wake, quickly read the IHT front to back while eating a healthy breakfast and entertaining my older daughter, who gets up at 7 AM every. single. day. It used to be a problem getting up this early, but not since kids. Left alone I still am lucky to make it past 6:30 without waking. But generally I fuck around on the internet after parking my kid in front of Ceebeebies. I drink loads of coffee but eat nothing.

8:50 – Leave for work. I take a bus and then the underground. During this time I should read something pleasureable yet useful. Check on this part of late – I do read during the commute, at least lately.

9:30 – Begin working, preferably writing, and preferably somewhere condusive to this sort of work, such as a library or my office. Generally, this doesn’t happen, at least not smoothly. I check email, I check blogstats and comments, I continue reading that pleasurable but useful commuting book, I do other things. I do these things and then I smoke a cigarette, and another, and further I’ve pre-convinced myself, tacitly, to work somewhere where it’s easy to jump out for a cigarette (i.e. Starbucks). Trashy. Only hours in, or so it feels, do I finally buck up and get to the actual work at hand.

12:30 – Have lunch. As a rule of thumb, though, unless a woman makes me have lunch, I will not have lunch. This goes back to the beginning, to mom of course. Today somehow, someway, and with no woman present, I purchased a double cheezburger with bacon at Burger King and ate it, ate it standing up. American-style fast food is the only thing that can break the needs-a-woman curse. At a boozy end-of-term party, a female colleague actually fixed me a plate of food – I have the look of a man who does not eat unless a female implores him too. This is a blessing and a curse at once.

13:00 – Resume work. If I have written well in the morning, which I never do, this is a good time to read Hard Books. Instead, this is the time that I either continue smoking or actually get to the writing I was supposed to do in the morning but didn’t quite do.

15:00 – Shift gears and write some fiction. This is what I did last summer, and it yielded something at once unpublishable but that I was proud of. This is the first time that I should be allowed to step into Starbucks, but unfortunately I’ve generally already been in three or four of them by this point.

17:30 – Head home. Read morning book or freepapers (I have no problem with the freepapers! Some people don’t get this but they are totally wrong!) during train trip home.

18:00  – Enter home, eat dinner, entertain oldest daughter, bond with infant daughter. This generally happens, there’s no choice in the matter really, though tonight my wife was an absolute saint and allowed me to have nap while she bathed and bedded the children. Absolutely saintly, that sort of gesture….

20:00 – Watch entertaining yet edifying programme with my wife, probably downloaded illegally, as this is Britain and there’s nothing on, ever. As if, though, the kids are all snug in their beds by 8 PM!

22:00  – Head to bed to continue reading my commuting book. Now, herein lies a major problem. The major problem. Generally speaking, this is when the lagering starts and the reading and writing stop. Except, um, blogposts. I should go to bed, I should read in bed and then go to sleep. I should not maintain some sort of fiction, as I head ever more deeply into middle age, that this is When The Writing Happens. Because it doesn’t. Except for blogposts. Like this one.

One of the most fascinating pastimes available in the districts populated by those called, not inappropriately, bourgeois bohemians, is to try to figure out how the other people on your street make ends meet. The stakes are higher now than they used to be, of course. Families who had overspent themselves a few years ago were due nothing more horrible than a visit to the local refinancing outlet to jack their indebtedness from 90 percent of the value of their home to 110 percent and beyond. But with property values doubling over ever two years, what did it matter anyway, right?

Now, of course, things are different. The easy cash for semi-solid collateral is mostly gone, only to return if and when the governments’ (both US and UK) ill-considered efforts to inject liquidity into the markets actually start to work… and in working, likely reinflate the bubble that is at the back of many of the problems that we face today. So when you’re idly speculating about your neighbors’ finances, you’re thinking dispossession and moving in the with parents rather than the semi-comical pyramid schemes of a few years ago. Serious stuff.

But either way you wonder. He’s a freelance cameraman and she, well, she runs some sort of small business out of her house. They joked that they put the extension on their second floor on their credit card. They only moved in a year before we did, so it’s not like they bought the place in the middle of a price trough.  None of their parents looks particularly wealthy but who knows. She takes in kids for child-minding too…

Of course, this is an old story, one of the older stories about this sort of life and this sort of living. One would love to go back and interview Marx’s neighbors at 9 Grafton Terrace in north London to hear what they thought or guess about the whole freelance writing / Engels-funded operation.

Once settled into the suburbs, Marx sometimes gave his address as Haverstock Hill, the main road linking Chalk Farm with Hampstead Village. Today, as then, Grafon Terrace is still on the ‘wrong’ side of that road, being very much part of the working-class district of Kentish Town, rather than the middle class parts of Hampstead on the other side.

She’s a translator or something, but I think it’s mostly piecework that she gets, not a steady job. She says that she wants to go back and get a PhD. They’re moving into a new place, but it’s small and maybe that’s why they don’t want us coming over yet. If only they knew. But yeah, he must be in business or something. She doesn’t really talk about it.

The trick of it is, the serious issue at play, is that vast stretches of places like Brownstone Brooklyn and North London are populated by people who 1) have interesting jobs or non-jobs and 2) couldn’t possibly afford according to their actual salaries to live where and as they do. The bourgeois bohemia that is the proving ground and playing field of intellectual life at present age is funded by parents and debt, hubris and affluent upbringings. That’s the objective half of the problem. The subjective half has to do with stress and bills, aspirational enthusiasm and grief, as well as a general sense of the unrealness of things that comes along with living in a property worth something like a million dollars but worrying about the price of the latte that you just purchased.

Marx’s house in Grafton Terrace, like so many of its kind, was rented. Because of the tendency of the building trade in London to overproduction, there was usually an abundance of new houses at quite low rents for middle-class tenants, and a glut of houses would bring rents well down. Thus, the Marxes paid only £36 a year in rent, in half-yearly installments, for a house with a rateable value of £24. Of the initial rate installment of £4.20, £3.20 was for the Poor Rate, 10p for the sewers, 20 p for the lighting and water, and a general rate for paving and other services. During this period the Marxes always paid their rates on time.

She’s upset. Her book hasn’t sold and the agent’s been stringing her along asking for rewrites for like three years. I don’t know what he does – he’s working on a book about 1968 or something. He always wears that same suit, the Tom Wolfe hipster suit, yeah with the hat. They own their place though. Dartmouth Park, right by Parliament Hill. Three bedrooms or so. But she’s so broke that I paid for pizza last time we were out. But then she laughs when I tell her that we don’t own a car – she says that we should buy a used Volkswagen or something.

On Saturday, after many many visits to the adjacent park which is 15 minute away from my house by bus, my wife and I finally paid for entry into the Highgate Cemetery and visited Marx’s grave. It is starting to seem very significant to me, not in a personal way but in a personally-knowable way, that he did the work that he did where he did it and lived a life in north London that seems remarkably similar to mine, despite the fact that it all happened more than a century ago.

One of the defining rhythms of our time, our time as lived by the notable technodrones who staff the Empire, is a rhythm that I’m very, very familiar with. It is the life-rhythm of having cash in the bank, yet not pulling cash from the machine so as not to walk around with money to spend… which in a city like this generally means spending it. In short, I’ve been able to live the life that I lead through a tenuous intermixture of moderate talent, extreme good fortune, and a certain amount of austerity. I think my experience of these mixture is more representative of a certain banally rarified way of life than, in the best case, it should be. So I’ll blog about that for the next week or so. Please understand that I am not asking for nor suggesting an ounce of sympathy for any of this. Quite the opposite. But it is symptomatic and waiting to be told.

(All quotations are from Asa Briggs & John Callow, Marx in London)

I have imported all my posts from my previous blog, Cultural Revolution, into my archives. (That’s, by the way, why I’m called CR still by some of the oldtimers in case some of you are wondering…) The posts are in rough shape, missing pictures and comments and I’m sure most of the links are broken. But for the, you know, historical record and all…

The added posts run from August 2004 to October 2005, just as I started my assistant professorship at my last place. (Here’s the post where I quit Cultural Revolution…) I took a half a year off at that point, and then started this site.

There was another blog even before that, but at this point I can’t even remember its name, let alone find an archive on my hard drive, though I’m sure it’s there somewhere….

Via the Rumpus, Tim Martin on David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming posthumous novel:

There is also much unpublished work. For at least 10 years before his death, Wallace was working on a long novel that he called The Pale King. Set in a branch of the US Internal Revenue Service, it aimed to articulate the hard-won thesis of mindfulness that Wallace had come to after years of depression and treatment: “Bliss – a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom.”

Wallace threw himself into the research. “He was taking accounting classes from 1998 onwards,” remembers Bonnie Nadell. “We found these syllabuses from accounting classes as well as books you can’t even imagine, books that if you were locked up and forced to read them you would die of boredom. You can’t imagine anyone writing a book about it that would be entertaining, but of course this is David, and it is wonderful.”

Michael Pietsch, who is piecing together the many drafts of The Pale King in collaboration with Nadell and Wallace’s widow, Karen Green, agrees. “The thrust of it,” he says, “is an attempt to look at the dark matter of tedium and boredom and repetition and familiarity that life is made of, and through that to find a path to joy and art and everything that matters. Wallace has set himself the task of making a moving and joyful book out of the matter of life that most writers veer away from as hard as they can. And what he left of it is heartbreakingly full and beautiful and deep. He was looking at how one survives.”

As I was saying before, there is a temporality that’s essential to the novel as a form and against which authors can only ever really tweak and vary. The sunniest it gets is purgatorial dullglow; generally, though, it reverts to the infernal on a low-setting. It is something to mark the historical progression of the form and its affectual expectations: we run from Emma Bovary’s (and her author’s) scandalous discovery that all of these heightened moments and blissful intervals advertised by novels were at the whim of repetitive, reiterative time’s erosive power all the way to this: a sense that after years and years of boredom one might, if one is lucky and DFW was not wrong or lying, find one’s way somehow to a narrow window of pleasure drip, measured in seconds, and grounded in nothing more tumultous than a sense that it is on-balance good to be alive.

Of course, this steady slide into bleakness – the reversal of the axes of happiness and the boredom that it costs – is driven in part by the internal logic of a form running its course, a sort of intrinsic tendency for the rate of profit from generic trope to fall as the genre is refined toward fulfilment. But it’s also hard not to take this intensification of the problem, as it runs from Flaubert to David Foster Wallace’s Flaubertianism, as a particularly bleak if also complex index of something that’s gone a bit wrong with the world and our collective and individual daydreams about it.

Again outside for a cigarette, and this time there is a pigeon in the middle of Capper Street. A car turns off TCR; the pigeon hops to the side, narrowly avoiding a death possibly painful, possibly not depending upon the cleanness of the strike.

Fuck. Missing a foot. It hops around, clearly bewildered. Or is the “bewilderment” something that I project into it, an anthropomorphic idea of what it would be like to lose a limb just a block away from one of the great hospitals of the world and

A van pulls up, again narrowly missing the bird, whose now positioned on sidewalk. So insistently did the driver pull up towards the injured thing that for a second I think that it must be a SPCA vehicle. Amazingly, someone’s called – they’re going to do something about it.

But of course it’s not. The van’s purpose is marked on its side: Human Organ Transport. The driver dashes into my Starbucks and comes to the counter. Yeah, anything but that Fair Trade stuff. That Fair Trade stuff tastes like crap. Seriously can’t drink it. Yeah I’ll wait for a new pot, as lot as it’s not that Fair Trade stuff.

He is angry at the staff. I notice that the pigeon’s not missing a leg – there’s a bit of string, looks like fishing line, visible underneath, bowed around his invisible foot. And then he flies off across Tottenham Court Road to the west and likely to die.