Questions, Questions, This Time abt. Eng. Lit. Dying

"Reading" in this context usually means "the reading of novels by adults," or, in some cases, by students, K-16.

Reading in this sense, particularly in the last 25 years, has been simultaneously dumbed down, hollowed out, fetishized and promoted. What is read has been greatly determined by corporate mergers from the mid-'60s on, which has left us with the Big Five... Four... Three... publishers, tasked with making e-media levels of profit. This has narrowed the range of work widely available.

What's left of the adult reading population has also been fragmented beyond belief by identity politics and age cohort. The drive for inclusion quickly became a means to cultural clout and whatever cash rewards were left in teaching and commentary* – and this has led to ever diminishing circles of content and whatever style was lying around.

(Identity politics/political correctness has more than half killed the endeavour. Saw a rack of featured books at my local library branch & turned to examine them for something interesting to take home. It was XX ethnic group month. My blood turned to a taste of metal and my skin felt burnt from within, exhausted exhaustion.

Why can't anything just be a good book? Why does it have to be a good [ethnicity here] book? Why do I have to read a fucking sermon?

Why does someone's book have to be a sermon, or presented as a sermon?**

This approach is self-destroyingly narrow, even as it claims to be widening the reader's experience. As though anything widely distributed & sold for profit is going to seriously challenge manufactured consent! I turned away in another tired & beaten fury. So much for "always had her nose in a book".)

Teaching literature is in an abysmal state. All sorts of mad non-systems replaced phonic in schools & kids were left permanently unable to decode the words on the page with any certainty and fluency.*** People turn away from that kind of experience, and "don't read."

There are all sorts of specialized sub-bits of reading people do do: nonfiction of general and specialized nature, schematics for car repair, science journals, etc., etc.

But "reading" in the sense it is usually meant is a product of the Prussian-inspired move to mass education and literacy from the C19th onwards: it was necessary for the workforce in a technological age.

The pic of Shakespeare as the personification and symbol of English Literature tells you what is really going on. He wrote plays. People watched them & heard them. They attended or performed "English Literature" such as miracle and morality plays. Now "English Literature" is on the BBC & HBO & Netflicks & Canal+ & ...

Literacy of the sort that is in decline has never been necessary to a population of peasants, serfs, tradies... Universal literacy no longer serves the State, and the State is retreating from its former functions in the mass of ordinary lives.

Which leaves ordinary people where they have always been: creating oral traditions.

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For Extra Credit:

1) Which do you think would be more frightening to the status quo?

a) a book written by a member of an under-represented community set aside and identified as a good [ethnicity here] book
b) a book written by a member of an under-represented community displayed, without ethnic designation, as a good book like any other good book

2) If you watched the video: At the beginning of the 19th century, why would a nation with a nascent empire suddenly start studying the literature of empire?

a) policies, job descriptions and manuals
b) self justification in the face of a near-universal Christianity, which would advocate loving your neighbour / rescuing the man who fell among thieves

Justify your answers on the sheet provided.

==

*Attributed to Mark Twain: "You can make a fortune but you can't make a living." Truer now than it was then. The only reliable money in writing is teaching.

**If you want a sermon, go to church.

*** One of the great grifts perpetrated on the Dept. of Education in the ealier days of public-private business opportunities, begun under Bush the Younger's unfunded mandate, "No Child Left Behind."

A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

I was feeling a bit crook yesterday afternoon – I’d been cutting the weeds at the kerb before the truck could come for the green bin. I’d been out in the sun and humidity for about ten minutes, and clearly that was too long.

I came in. It was early enough in the afternoon to be able to watch Coriolanus. Because it’s about demagoguery I wanted to understand it, but it sends me to sleep at the same moment every time, like Le Samourai with Alain Delon and The Makioka Sisters. I looked at the streaming options.

And there, like an exhaled breath and a great bath of relief, was Top Gun Maverick. Tom Cruise charming, half-smile utterly disarming –

This time he’s a US Navy test-pilot. We don't know where he lives: he first appears alone, in a hangar in a desert. The hangar is a perfection of focus and intention, a cathedral of space and peg-boarded tools and the mechanics of kinetic transcendence – a mid-restoration P49, a heavy motorbike. Per a DOD contract, he’s scheduled to take the latest fighter prototype to Mach 9 today.

He wears a white t-shirt and jeans; he gets his leather jacket from a metal closet; he picks up his keyring, a winged insignia and one key. (Dressing/arming the hero, at least as old as The Iliad.)

He takes the bike and to the bike – the closest thing to flying without leaving the ground – flies helmetless along the road beside the airstrip, unencumbered as a god.

The rest of the movie, the test flight in spite of a rear admiral’s plan to junk manned flight, the triumph of Mach 10 and the disaster of Mach 10.2, the new impossible assignment instead of dishonourable discharge, the personal and mission-specification-driven tensions, the old flame, the new marriage (Hermes-Hestia), the defeats, the victories and reconciliations, are all remarkably slick and well-handled. It’s The Dam Busters and Star Wars and Mission Impossible feats of running, all in IMAX.

TGM is a very late version of the military sub-subgenre of the subgenre America Dea – movies treating the United States of America as a not quite secular religion, Washington and Lincoln its formative angels. The civilian version produced Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

TGM is a lovely and dangerous fantasy, where the machines sing together like Blake’s morning stars, a captain can beat jealous and narrow-minded admirals, the government is great and good, the enemy is defeated despite its technological superiority.

The intermittent musical theme sounds at first as though it could be a handful of muted horns, in a soft, slightly jaunty military register: it is actually very softly and skillfully voiced choral music, a smooth and quiet undertone, a bedrock of quiet reverence.

The enemy has no justification for doing what they’re doing; what they’re doing is wrong: the enemy is a number of undifferentiated silhouettes, bad guys bad because they’re opposing the United States.

There’s racial diversity, often in the background in the bar scenes, more visible in the IMDB credits than in the movie. The people who make the running are the white guys. The conflicts and struggles and victories, the characters who create the framework of the plot, the ones in positions of real emphasis, are the white guys.

It’s a very Trumpian flick: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and vice versa.

American Prometheus

Like her father, Toni Oppenheimer was multilingual. She wanted to be a translator in an official gov’t capacity.

Oppenheimer had been cleared of sending information to the Soviets and of being a security risk. For more than a decade afterwards the FBI kept him under surveillance. Nor would they give Toni a security clearance.

She tried to drown herself. She was rescued.

A few days later she hung herself.

I don’t know how America can walk around with its eyes up and look at the world.

FaceBook

has very kindly objected to my sharing the post about my publications this summer, refuses to let me share, demands I tell them why it does not "violate community standards". And so...

I've come to the conclusion that the block on sharing this post was random. Or the reasoning for it so obscure and/or technical that to all intents and purposes—such as informing the user of the actually evaluable or even fixable problem—the block becomes random the second it is applied.

Facebook constantly allows all sorts of deadly misinformation—from QANON conspiracies to anti-vaccination ranting to the Big Lie about the 2020 election in the U.S.—to spread everywhere. There's nothing surer under a Democratic admninistration than that one or more of Facebook's top level executives will be called to another Congressional or Senate enquiry. Sooner or later.

And what is a poor picked on executive to say?

We have measures in place. In our efforts to stamp out this kind of abuse of our platform we have already blocked X kerjillion posts, but we can only react... It's the nature of the net... Data mining? Senator, Congressman, I'm not sure I follow. Can you explain?

Empire II

Empire I

The Things My Hands Do

sweep and wash the floors
scrub the tracks for the shower doors and the sliding door to the back, scrub the doorframes, scrub the shower doors
scrub the toilets, the bath, the shower stall, scrub the counters, clean the hairbrushes and combs, clean the mirrors
clean the stove, bleach the sinks
put and take dishes into and out of the dishwasher, put them away
put and do and take and fold the washing
clean the doors and doorknobs
clean the window gutters
sweep the stairs
rake the front garden, water and weed the front and back, water the inside plants
take the rubbish down to the bins, take the bins out and bring them in
clean the kitty litter, buy and haul the kitty litter, cleaner, bleach
vacuum inside, vacuum the car, empty the vacuum cleaner, recharge it and put it back together
clean the keyboards and screens and mice
handle the mail and the banking, the endless tracking of small sums of money

they do this as though Trump isn’t raving, as though the ice-shelves aren’t breaking

On the nightstand

dreams of integrity

Strange Attractors

It seems to be out of print, Alan Garner's Red Shift. Which is a shame. Its Roman Britain sections catch the utter weirdness of imperial collapse. Its glimpses into the idolization of any local egregiousness afterwards are creepy and horrifying: Delinquent & murderous nutjobs become the strange attractors of chaos. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, whose internalized imperial order has collapsed, they are creepy, horrifying, and terrifying.

Collapse empowers them, so strange or insane they’d never be heard from otherwise, attractive because they offer certainty in completely uncertain times.

Caveat emptor.

"Publishing from the Provinces”

The most obvious meaning of the title of Ivor Indyk's essay is that Australian publishing is “from the provinces” of the world's geography as well as from the southern extremities of the old British Empire. Though Indyk immediately says this is not what he means, it is still something I’d like to examine for a moment. The provinces of Australian writing lie at the bottom of two stacked English language gravity wells, not just one.

The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)

Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.

Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.

The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.

This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.

The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.

In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)

(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)

But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.

He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.

Of Castro he says:

… [T]his play of mirrors, of repetitions and inversions … is characteristic of the imagination at full stretch, in the province of literature I am describing…. In this far province the imagination rules, in its own unruly fashion.

Of Murnane he says:

It is as if he is out to demonstrate, that the imagination which produced … worlds within worlds is still active, still revelling in its own inventiveness.

Of Wright he says:

Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book begins with just the kind of recursion I have been examining … that movement in which the imagination seeks to expand beyond the condition of neglect or indifference, or in the Indigenous case negation, to declare its power.

Of Gorton and Pi O he says:

Both titles make use of citation and montage, and draw on an encyclopaedic range of sources, and both mobilise expansive perspectives through these means.

And of this type of work in general he says:

The sense of being unregarded, and therefore unconstrained (the element of play), the recursive inventions of an imagination which seeks to move beyond its frontiers, the encyclopaedic aspiration which seeks to discover the whole world in a remote part of it – all these suggest a willingness to experiment with perspectives, in both space and time, both formally and in terms of the responsibilities perspective entails.

From the type of work these writers create Indyk moves on to describe the writer's hope and puzzlement at the general response to it:

To reside in the literary world, in the outer provinces of publishing, is to become used to the discrepancy between expectation and response. Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting, and because of the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination. I suppose no public response could ever do justice to this sense of value… What to make of this craziness, the absence of readers?

I understand Indyk's sympathy for writers whose books are lost in the marketplace because they do not do what more commercially successful books are doing. I admire him for going to bat for the writers he publishes. At the same time I think there are other contours to the situation.

Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”

There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...

The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.

On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.

If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.

If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.

Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.

The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.

In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.

But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.

Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.

In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?

Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.

How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)

This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.

The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.

And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?

And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?

Aah, security

Alarm at 3. Taxi at 4, airport at 4:30 because Alaska strongly suggested we “needed” to be at the airport 2 hours before the flight. There might be long lines at Security.

Ah, Security... Shoes off, the raincoat you’re carrying into the basket, also, if you’re less than 75 years old, your black plastic vest into the basket, also, phone, keys. No, no iPad, tablet, laptop hidden in the bag, only the phone. Step this way into the x-ray chamber. Feet on the yellow footsteps (i.e., legs apart). Hands meeting above your head.

"Step over here. You alarmed the machine in these areas." Yellow circles on the shoulders of the outline I suppose is mine. "So I’m going to have to pat you down."

My shoulders contained, surface to centre: cotton shirt with cotton seam-stitching, no metal studs; camisole shoulder strap, black, indestructible, with perishing spandex, possibly made from recycled milk cartons; skin, sub-surface skin layers, veins, capillaries, layers of tissue, bone, bone marrow.

The girl pulled my shirt sleeves up to my armpit, both arms, and found: nothing up my sleeves, nothing under my arms.

So, firstly: the machines don’t work. Giving false positives isn't "working."

Secondly (looking around): this is an industry.

Thirdly: the industry’s primary purpose is to make money for the manufacturers of the machines. Michael Chertoff – remember him? Heckuva job Brownie’s best friend? Dubya's Administration? – had invested in that company. If the machines don’t work, i.e., if they give false positives all the time, then their primary purpose cannot be to detect explosives. The only thing they do do, unfailingly, all the time, is cost money. So costing money has to be their primary purpose.

Fourthly: the industry’s next purpose is to make you understand that officialdom can do whatever it likes. To you and to anything else.

And tangentially, lastly, but not leastly: Homeland really doesn’t mind if whatever you’ve inserted into your Nike heels blows up in a Social Security Office. SoSec offices have metal detectors, but no transparent, feet-in-the-yellow-circles x-ray chambers.

untitled

on my desktop
sam beckett's
far too observant eyes
tell me
gentleness
does not
survive

Another Shrimp on the Barbie

Colonialism & neocolonialism don't have a hair's breadth between them. They institutionalize and amplify and focus to political ends both casual cruelty and the small, everyday, habitual cruelties - bullying at school, hazing in the army/at military schools/fraternities/in sports clubs, rape culture. Abu Ghraib torture was built on hazing rituals. There are also formal schools of torture such as the School of the Americas, at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Central and South American governments and death-squads learnt their trades there for decades, in the dark heart of democracy. (Which has always been democracy for me and servitude for thee.)

Tools of the state reach down and allow private psychosis to become policy, to give us law and order which is at heart torture, to give us foreign policy which is at heart torture.

Overt and implicit war liberate psychosis. Psychosis makes war granular.

A Royal Commission is a particular kind of stacked committee…

Who’s left, beyond the Finns* & New Zealanders, to liberate the camps?

To take Australia to trial for this history of imprisoning refugees? (Which has been going on for close to 20 years.)

For Aboriginal deaths in custody? (Murder/suicides which publicly protested as long ago as 1987,  committed much longer than that; which had increased to the point of public protest.)

Photograph of poster on display in the South Australian Museum, July, 1988. The artist has dated it '87.

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*In Michael Moore's Where to Invade Next the segment on Finland shows an education system which isn't aimed at producing low-wage labour on the one hand, and corporate apparatchiks on the other. It is aimed at producing adults with autonomy, skilled and self-directed, who expect and are expected to find work that is meaningful to them.

Living in Fifth Century Gaul

And so, finally, to the post imperial, post democratic United States. I have been struck for years by the resemblance of the current United States to the western Roman Empire of the 5th century.

There have been many causes going back many years: the 1973 oil embargo, the Vietnam War and the death of the War on Poverty, the desegregation movement and other rights movements which produced counter-revolutions. By themselves these things may not have created an epochal divide. Reaganism was the quickener. For thirty or forty years after Nixon, in the world at large, the socioeconomic landscape was changed by invasion, the drug trade (greatly expanded during and after the Vietnam War) de-industrialization, Friedmanite economics, judicial and military coups, and disaster capitalism.

Increasingly, since 2000, the general picture resembles Western Europe in the late 4th century:

"Curtains and masses of courtiers separated [Emperors] from the subjects: in public the rulers appeared almost as automata, stiff in robes and protocol... Within their palaces... they gave audience only to foreign ambassadors and important subjects; for advice they relied on a consistorium, consisting not of the freely chosen "friends" of unofficial standing of the Early Empire but mainly of executive officials. These in turn supervised an intricately ordered bureaucracy... which reached into the urban levels. From the praetorian prefects downward all "were inflamed with a boundless eagerness for riches, without consideration for justice of right," or as other writers put it bureaucrats sold "smoke," i.e., promise of assistance with the machinery of government which was not given in reality - heaping up their piles of gold while the Empire in the west went to pieces"- (1)

"[H]eaping up...pieces" is familiar to us as the revolving door - lawmakers passing bills lobbyists/industry groups have written in full expectation of lucrative employment within those industries when their stints in lawmaking/the Administration are over.

"The more the Empire tottered, the more evident became repression and terrorism. The concept of lèse majesté remained a potent tool to strike down opponents" - (2)

Lèse majesté (the surveillance state replacing the emperor) is one of the most savagely punished crimes we have: consider the punishment of whistle-blowers who inform us of the nature of what official secrecy hides (e.g., Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange), or the sheer extent of official snooping (Edward Snowden).

The opponents are not foreign governments with squads of hackers; the opponents are the domestic citizenry, who must be kept in their place, literally by means of militarized police forces equipped with weapons from the never-ending production of weapons for the never-ending wars abroad, or made to accept the new global order by means of increasingly complete economic insecurity.

As well as the "War on Terror" and the enlargement of the surveillance state, other broad societal programs of repression are steady features of everyday life:

The war on drugs and its disproportionate application to people of colour;

The war on public education prosecuted at the elementary and high school level by means of decreased education budgets, unfunded mandates, severe inequality between schools in well-off districts and the rest, and the overall demonization of the system presented as the Charter School movement; prosecuted at the college level over the last 20 years by means of grotesquely increased price of tuition,associated crippling, often lifelong, debt, and now by such budget cuts as will reduce faculty and increase tuition costs even further;

The war on unions conducted since Reagan used the U.S. Army to break the PATCO strike in 1981: the demonization of public servants as members of the only large unions left; the destruction of the Post Office (begun by Nixon) and consequently, of the Letter Carriers Union; resistance to unions by employers large and small, most notoriously by the most profitable or successful entities (e.g. Amazon and Walmart).

Enough repressions to withstand the comparison, then.

There are some further general developments to separate the late fourth century from the earlier fourth, and previous imperial centuries:

"The cities declined or disappeared, the aristocracy became independent of the imperial administration, and the Christian church adopted a very ambivalent attitude towards the state" - (3)

(If the whole Church has not become ambivalent about the State, certainly the Christian right agitates, sets out to obstruct, legislates and murders its least white-patriarchal, authoritarian components.)

The later destructions of the middle class are either further developments, or they are consonant with the textures and shapes of life we already experience.

The broadest political and economic remarks come from Tom Engelhardt's article picked up by Salon:

1 - 1% elections - where candidates belong to dynasties as often as not, and all seek the backing of billionaires months before they got before the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire. Once elected, the candidate will enact programs to favour the same billionaries

2 - The privatization of the State - from Hillary Clinton's Gmail account and the outsourced electronic surveillance of virtually all electronic communication to the use of private corporations to supplement U.S. Armed forces (Blackwater the most well-known), the war on terror has brought unprecedented secrecy to the affairs of state, with all the corruption that guaranteed secrecy so temptingly offers

3 - The de-legitimization of Congress and the Presidency - the hamstringing of government by agreement (e.g.: the repeated debt ceiling crises; the letter from John Boehner and 47 Senators to the government of Iraq, undercutting foreign policy already in progress; the desultory debating of war authorization for military action against ISIS, while the war begins and continues without authorization), combined with the reduction of the Presidency to funding and knuckling under to the state's security apparatus

4 - The rise of the national security state as the fourth branch of government - its staggering growth and its equally staggering non-state agents; the Department of Homeland Security as a de facto second Defense Department; the use of drones, domestically, to monitor internal U.S. communications in conjunction with the CIA, which is now also breaking down the separation of analysts and spies (and so obliterates the long-crumbling border, this side of which the CIA might not actively operate)

5 - De-mobilization of the American people - the huge demonstrations of the civil rights and Vietnam eras have been made invisible even when they occur, as the media under-reports or fails to report them; widespread objection to the deployment of military force has been undercut and by the privatization of the military, on the one hand, and the end of the draft on the other - (4)

The privatizing of state security, the secretizing of ever more realms of illegally gathered data, the governmental obsession with weaponizing itself to the almost total abandonment of programs benefitting ordinary people (the repeated attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, gut Medicare, privatize Social security, the student loan racket, the actual reductions in funding the WIC, SNAP, and Headstart programs among the most notorious) are one aspect of the changing political and social landscape.

Culture Crash (5) describes the destruction of the intellectual middle class as the destruction of post-War cultural consensus. Timberg's arguments / observations / conclusions, chapter by chapter:

Introduction - Down We Go Together – 2008 crash + job losses, LA Times layoffs – changing shape of economy & society – creative class is not big tech

1 – When culture works – the necessary conditions for culture (artists need very little money to produce, except in times of high rents which you have to spend time earning the money for

2 – Disappearing clerks – knowledgeable disseminators of culture, book store, music store clerks – stores close, that cultural filter & educator is lost - Quentin Tarantino, Jonathan Lethem

3 – Permatemps & content serfs – sessions musician have lost work which supported their original work – Kodak & Instagram – crowd funding at a tipping point – faster media making it more difficult for long-term projects (novel, string quartet) to pay for their own creation – the occasional success is publicized & hides the massive failure, artists not being able to continue, not being able to earn a middle class living in creative fields – state budgets for the arts down, corporate also – the point where recession turns into depression – NY's soundtrack & advertising jingle economy has collapsed b/c of sampling & digitizing

4 – Indie rock's endless road – a very few massive bands make most of the money – touring cannot pay; there's no time to write or recover – merchandise (t-shirts, etc.) cannot cover the costs – other job losses mean smaller audiences at live concerts – musicians get 6% of their earnings from records

5 – Architecture meltdown – starchitects and nothing else – middle class houses are no longer architect-designed, as they sometimes were – full time employment with intern wages – commercial building has slowed to almost nothing – young architects leaving the field – construction costs going down, fees are based on costs – rookie design work disappearing (full page illos in magazines, e.g.) – after “recession” magazines spend almost no money on illos or photography – public building also down – e.g. museums – exit recession not into a world of stability & health (architect's family has no medical insurance)

6 – Idle dreamers – demonization of artists, who mostly work hard & want middle class stability in order to go on working – artists have trouble getting paid – Nixon & Spiro Agnew demonizing “long-haired” artists / hippies (Vietnam) – Dan Quayle - "newsroom elites sneering at America" – news outlets devoted to celebrities – celebrity-industrial complex – rabid faux-populism – obsession with economics has destroyed all other considerations

7 – The end of print – plight of newspapers (scandals of inflated circulation figures & advertising charges not mentioned) – new media worst abuses of old economy: production speed-up, sweatshops, piecework, low or no wages, interns, while huge profits for the owners (e.g. Huffington Post) – loss of newspapers = loss of consensus news sources – the revolt against expertise – crooked politicians & fraudulent business executives favoured by collapse of investigative journalism – real magazines operate at a loss, go out of business or are funded by non-profits & foundations – television has erased the pre-television past, no historical perspective

8 – Self-inflicted wounds – semiotics & deconstruction have left academic discourse impenetrable, essentially privatized and increasingly irrelevant to life outside academe: how can value be asserted in such language? – non-championing of “English” has led to lack of a common language – Pauline Kael's influential anti-intellectualism (“the art-house audience,” “the atmosphere of incense burning” that greeted some foreign films) – Cage and Warhol thrilling but destroying consensus – liberal consensus attacked from both sides: collateral damage of New Right's anger & left's postmodern putsch. All trends come together in internet, Kael → flame wars, all opinion equally valid – market worship means no real criticism/critical dialogue – food has replaced art as a field of discussion and knowledge

9 – Lost in the supermarket: winner-take-all – the fabulous(ly wealthy) few, the many struggle or give up – e.g. CEO pay: how can some work be 10K times more efficient or valuable? – societal balances against winner-take-all effects have disappeared (monogamy, progressive taxation, public good, trust-busting, unions, child labour laws) – Star Wars and the blockbusterization of everything - (6)

10 – Epilogue: restoring the middle – how?

Apart from these factors undermining or destroying broad cultural consensus, Timberg also details the aiding and abetting of "the 'skyboxing' of America" by the effects of digital technology. Richard Esgow shows the effects of Silicon Valley's economic biases / assumptions / practices resulting in the further impoverishment of the already poor.

Esgow:

1 - Tech products become the byproducts of a money-making scheme rather than an end unto themselves - resulting in products which aren't so much "better mouse-traps" as hypable into near-monopoly / monopsony, from which position they can manipulate the market further, apply downward pressure to wages and suppliers, and freely engage in other abuses

2 - Even inspired leaders internalize a worldview which places profits over humane behaviour - e.g., the working conditions in Amazon's warehouses

3 - The culture encourages a solipsistic detachment from reality, even as its brute economic strength colonizes everything it touches - e.g., the effect of Silicon Valley's wages structure on San Francisco, as real estate prices rise the the city becomes more inhospitable to the poor

4 - The Valley gets fixated on lame...buzzwords which often come down to using tax loopholes to undercut other vendors/suppress suppliers' prices

5 - Silicon Valley’s culture...increasingly produces monopolies which "suppress wages, overcharge consumers, mistreat suppliers, and drive the economy increasingly off-course"

Buzzwords provide the verbal fog which enables 1 and 5 to sound vaguely compatible with equality of opportunity, democracy, social equity, or whatever other populist concern might raise its head; they function as social / cultural / conceptual anaesthesia; they are inherently deceptive.

Timberg identifies the bulwarks against the winner-take-all society the United States' had produced. Progressive taxation has become tax exemption for the corporations and the rich; trust-busting is a thing of the past; the public good is rarely mentioned (e.g. in the case of publicly-owned airwaves, or the necessary number of Federal meat-inspectors); unions are under attack (see above); child-labour laws are continually weakened by high rates of failure among minority school students...

And so we circle back to "the dissolution of the supports for the imperial order" which Starr examines in the collapse of fifth century western Europe.

" ... [T]hree vital supports for imperial unity - the position of the emperor, the central administration, and the army - had vanished; the cities were much weakened and destroyed; the aristocracy had greatly changed its way of life [retreating to country estates]" - (7)

I think we have crossed a similar epochal divide, that we are now outside the old American hegemony and outside the old America.

(If you find arguments from the ragged remains of ancient evidence - digs and pot-sherds and chance-preserved documents - so much unsubstantiated fluff, too much subject to bias/whimsy/special pleading,  Peter Turchin's work shows population dynamics to be the underlying engine of these changes.)

Timberg mentions divorce many times in connection with the GFC-accelerated destruction of the cultural middle class. Economic stress often results in divorce. But Empires don't go gentle into that good night. Where's the blood in all this?

Here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here .

Minorities, women, children, and the homeless are being raped, injured, jailed, and murdered into sub-serf status by militarized police and for-profit prisons, by voter ID laws and other state legislation intended to nullify Federal law.

Nor was it solely the government which exhibited barbaric brutality. The sophist Libanius, a proud partisan of ancient culture, believed in the crudest of magic and exulted at a famine in the city where his son died; Egyptian papyri attest that in the Nile valley men with official influence could physically assault the weak with impunity - (8)

Engelhardt doesn't know how to name the new reality. I first trained as a mediaevalist. If he doesn't know what to call it, I do.

---
(1) Starr, Chester G., The Roman Empire 27 B.C.-A.D. 476: a Study In Survival, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982, p. 165.
(2) Starr, p. 166.
(3) Starr, p 167.
(4) See also Maddow, Rachel, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power, New York, Crown, 2012.
(5) Culture Crash: the Killing of the Creative Class, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2015
(6) See also Lanier, Jaron, Who Owns the Future? New York, Simon & Schuster, 2013.
(7) Starr, p. 176.
(8) Starr, p. 166

Golems Waiting Redux

To my unutterable delight, I've just found that MOMA, NY, holds Golems Waiting Redux.

Which is about the destruction of Portland artist Daniel Duford's experimental sculpture installation in Portland, in early October, 2002.

The vandals were never found; the motives remain obscure. But Duford's determined documentation of guesses about motives and culprits vividly describes the social forces at work in the U.S. as it was on the point of invading Iraq.

At the end of the week the figures on the wall remained:

as though their nudity were a threat and their helplessness a provocation.

How Memory Works

Because memory is visual verbal and communal and rehearsed, it can disappear under dominant images. I lived in L.A. for about ten years. I've been to Venice Beach a few times (housecleaning, showing a friend from home who wanted a particular book). And so I have visual and muscle memories of the canal, the boardwalk, and the cavernous 2nd-hand bookshop that had been there for years. (That must have been in '91.)

After seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys I now have visual memories of Venice Beach since the 1970s, when I was actually living on the bottom edge of the other side of the world in small patch of rich dairy-farms, and on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, and in Melbourne.

So what happens in a densely populated, media-rich location such as L.A., is that underground movement proliferate, document and ultimately broadcast themselves; the wealth generated by corruption is so fabulous it makes its own myths – Chinatown and the rest of L.A. noir from Chandler on – I will mount that film festival sooner or later – and these images become our not only our images, but also our memories. We remember going to the pictures; we remember what we saw. Seeing them was what we did.

I almost remember World War 2: until Sputnik it was the largest thing in our mental landscape. My parents and brother had lived through it. The first film I have a whole sense of is The Dam Busters. The radio serial we all listened to was Five Fingers. (Adapted and directed by Morris West. Yes, that Morris West).

I remember having anxiety dreams about the Korean War. I remember the Catholics fleeing the Communists, an exodus from North Vietnam – a 16mm film at school shown by a visiting priest.

There was nothing epic, filmic, beautiful, dramatic, noteworthy, about going to work or church or school, cooking, gardening, going to the beach or the hills.

And so to the vexed matter of Australian film.

There had been a silent film industry which never gained a truly sound footing.

Efftee Studios and Cinesound Productions foundered, in 1935 and 1936, repectively, on the Australian Government's failure to introduce a quota for domestic films. (The British did introduce one, giving rise to the "quota quickie" and, via Korda's Private Lives, to Von Sternberg's failed I, Claudius.)

Once Efftee and Cinesound and failed, there were very few Australian films. Some wartime action/morale boosters (40,000 Horsemen, directed by Charles Chauvel, The Kokoda Trail, directed by Ken G. Hall), and then almost nothing.

The only genuinely working production facility in the country was the Commonwealth Film Unit, the documentary arm of the Commonwealth Government. (Tim Burstall, Bruce Beresford, and Mike Thornhill worked there.)

When I was seven or so there was Smiley Gets a Gun at the drive-in; the same night, before it, a trailer for The Sundowners. We never saw that. My family didn't go to the pictures much and this kind of thing rubbed us the wrong way: Peter Ustinov & Robert Mitchum weren't Australians, couldn't get the accent, didn't reflect our lives; the flick was a foreign concoction, an exotification, a falsification, and we weren't going to pay to go to it.

(At the same time, when I saw South Pacific I kept wanting the camera to swing around and see us. I spent decades waiting for them to turn and see us.)

And so, from the mid-'30s until the early '70s, there was a dearth of images of Australia connected to anything the movies and the world thought important: and which we, therefore, might also find  defining and iconic now that cattle-drives and droughts and generally faux-Western tropes had stopped reflecting our lived experience in even the remotest, most analogical way. (1)

In 1971 there was Walkabout, another exotification, a journey with a hilariously mad geography.

Australian Literature was by and large out of print. Henry Lawson and Judith Wright existed in school editions, like Nevil Shute, Colin Thiele, and Kylie Tenant. Frank Hardy wrote on the Gurindji struggle for land rights. Wake in Fright was passed from hand to hand among teachers who'd never intended to be teachers (a terrifying Lord of the Flies at the edge of a country school). White was... too unique, adult, aristocratic, sophisticated, bizarre, to become a generally understood vision. (2)

Lawson's world was 70 years gone. For sense of place attached to the memorable – it all boiled down to the stark landscapes and dispossessions and implied genocides in the Wright.

1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And there, finally, the hills we'd driven through since I'd been a small child; the hill I'd looked at through my schoolroom window as a young teenager: stubble in summer, green in winter, round, low, inevitable, the true last shape of mountain and stone.

But Picnic gave rise to a spate of chocolate-box historicals, and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith was something you could only watch once, like Wake in Fright.

When I go to think of Australia there's only a rectangle of yellow-green, fading into over-exposure.

...

My family's photos have been largely destroyed. I met my father at the back door by chance one morning in 1988, as I came home from an errand; his hands were full of packets and books of old photos I'd never seen. He was on his way to the incinerator. (I'm so like him in so many ways I know what he was thinking. My mother had died; his life was over; there was no point to the images.)

Seeing what he carried I took everything with a cheerful, "I'll take those, Dad" – so smoothly I'm still amazed at myself – and mailed them to our L.A. address. When I sorted, ordered, and annotated them (nothing between 1927 and 1947 had been dated), I realized there were dozens from the 1950s that have utterly disappeared.

Nostalgia for the Light begins as an account of the astronomical telescope in the high desert of Chile and ends with a consideration of the deliberate suppression of evidence of the dispossession of the indigenous population before the suppression of evidence of mass murder by the Pinochet regime. That felt very familiar.

...

My parents were both very good dancers. My father loved musicals; my mother loved dramas.

"Cities are supposed to stimulate you, but Adelaide just puts me to sleep," a cousin of mine said to me a long time ago. Every time the tram crossed Greenhill Road on its way to the Bay I agreed, and thought of my mother wrestling with the washing and the shopping and the garden (that hard Adelaide clay), thinking of Joan Crawford.

...

So, if memory is visual and verbal and communal and rehearsed, then what is memorable is determined by authority. In colonial situations what the colonizing power wants suppressed will be buried. What the colonizing power thinks important will be believed to be important, and what the colonizing power deems unimportant will fade into unimportance.


Because the political has inserted itself into the personal, the personal is political. We must remember and create our own stuff. Our masters won't.

===

1. There was something called Jack and Jill: A Postscript, which arrived (I seem to remember a film can of huge diameter) when I'd asked for something else for my Film Study class in 1971. It came from something called the South Australian Film Corporation, instead of from the Education Department. I showed it, having nothing else: it turned out to be about a bloke with a motorbike and his mate and his girlfriend. It had been shot on weekends over 5 years, as funds and the availability of the actors allowed, by Phillip Adams. (He never did anything as unfunded, difficult, frustrating, unrecognized and unrewarded again. He continued in advertising.)

2. Having Patrick White for your national novelist is like having Pablo Picasso for your portrait photographer.

History

The three most unlikely sentences of my life:

My father in law fought at Guadalcanal.
Fresh out of high school, my husband's uncle worked on the Manhattan Project.
As a child my mother in law used to play with Shirley Temple.

History isn't history - it's close and palpable.

By contrast my own history seems bleached, leached, and empty.

Is it the massive documentation of the Americans in WW2, the doccos, the movies, the books and doccos and movies about the development and invention of the atomic bomb (which is the final image of that war, not the bombing of London or Dresden, nor the piled and walking skeletons of the camps)?

Is this bleach of memory another facet of empire, anything local overwritten by the Cold War and its genesis at Almagordo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the vivid nuclear nightmare of forty years - my own nightmare since the Korean War?

Is it the goddam silver screen, and our theatres bought and closed and replaced by chains and contracts for American films, American tv product dumped overseas, another massive cultural overwriting...

Or is this fading into white created by being far away, on the southern edge of the Pacific, never a major actor in the world's great events (disasters though they be), a colony of another, previous empire of dominant images, with a colonial past we don't dare remember?

Arundhati Roy Speaks of Our Fridge

The fridge died sometime Sunday afternoon. Stuff in the freezer was melting. There was no running sound.

This had happened several times over the life of this particular fridge. It was 8 years old when it died on January 15.

The life-span of a refrigerator used to be between 20 and 30 years. (Remember The Secret Life of Machines?)

Since this was Sunday afternoon and Green Bin Day wasn't till Tuesday, we had to throw out anything that might have been damaged wholly or partially by defrosting or wholly or partially by de-cooling. Between $200 and $400 dollars' worth of groceries. Between one and two thirds of a week's net income for the household. This had happened at least twice a year for 8 years, and after the 3rd year Amana refused to reimburse us for the losses.

We emptied the freezer first.

Frozen tacos, chicken-legs, ice-cream, ice-cream bonbons (for my birthday the night before); buffalo burgers, chicken legs, frozen sections of Italian loaves, & French baguettes (for toasting later), the ice-packs for strains & muscular treatments.

Then the fridge. Half and half, non-dairy hazelnut vanilla, butter, olives, artichoke hearts, salami, brie, cheddar jack, pancetta, bread, English muffins, tortillas, tomato sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chili sauce, vinaigrette, balsamic vinegar, peanut butter, almond butter, cranberry spread, pumpkin butter spread, English muffins, corn tortillas, flour tortillas, As the contents went down the sink or into the Green Bin I almost began to cry.

Greek olives, Italian salami and pancetta — all that work, growing them pickling them pimento-ing them transporting them, unpacking them stocking them storing them — all those ships across all those seas, all those trucks across all those mountains, along all those valleys — all that history and effort. The whole world was going down that drain.

The Amana: $1600. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.
The new Frigidaire: $1500. Around two weeks' gross income for the household.

Between them a month's gross income. This year we will donate a twelfth of our income to large corporations for products which have, in the first case, already proven to be — what, glossy rubbish? A waste of time, energy, steel, and oil, of the ships and the lives of all who made & moved the food, and all who bought it to prepare and cook it to eat.

And in order to enable the continuing production this glossy rubbish, civil wars are being fought in India, warlords are running slave-mines in Africa... And the question — whether corporations will permit any mindset but their own to survive — goes on walking through the Adivati resistance movements of India, and the loss of habitat everywhere.

Walking with the Comrades, Arundhati Roy, Penguin Books, New York, 2012

Strange and Occluded Dreams

Front Wall of the South Australian Museum, North Terrace, Adelaide, July 1988.

If this glass exploded the slivers and shards of Australian pre-history, Aboriginal land rights, the Europeanization of the landscape, global warming (Tim Flannery - The Future Eaters, The Weather Makers - will be  director of this museum 10 years later); the notions of museum (that embodiment of pious theft), university, law, rigidly academic education (examinations held in one of the reflected halls), science as separate from life – the entire British Empire of hierarchies would embed themselves in

whatever they found.

The strange and fearful dreams of childhood, my inability to disentangle this clotted and occluded mass except by leaving, by stepping away, looking back.

(Photos: The Great Family Photo Project)

The Karate Kid remake

11.13.10

The U.S. is now officially a client state. I saw it for a certainty when I watched The Karate Kid remake. Dre's mother had to go to China for a job.

That feeling of no bottom to my stomach was fear.

We've watched and lived through an epochal shift in geo-political power, and that moves the foundation of even an individual's identity.

You absorb the major power relations of the world as a cognitive and emotional foundation, a major indication of your place in it; and you do that when you're very, very young.