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Democracy Now on WhiteFish

Normalizing Trump

From PressThink:

Most every journalist who covers Trump knows of these things:

1. He isn’t good at anything a president has to do. From the simplest, like pretending to help out in flood relief, to the hardest: making the call when all alternatives are bad. (We’re told he can be charming one-on-one. So maybe that’s his one skill.)

2. He doesn’t know anything about the issues with which he must cope. Nor does this seem to bother him.

3. He doesn’t care to learn. It’s not like he’s getting better at the job, or scrambling to fill gaps in his knowledge.

4. He has no views about public policy. Just a few brute prejudices, like if Obama did it, it was dumb. I do not say he lacks beliefs — and white supremacy may be one — but he has no positions. His political sky is blank. No stars to steer by.

5. Nothing he says can be trusted.

6. His “model” of leadership is the humiliation of others— and threat of same. No analyst unfamiliar with narcissistic personality types can hope to make sense of his actions in office.

It’s not like items 1-6 have been kept secret. Journalists tell us about them all the time. Their code requires that. Simultaneously, however, they are called by their code to respect the voters’ choice, as well as the American presidency, of which they see themselves a vital part, as well as the beat, the job of White House reporting. The two parts of the code are in conflict.

If nothing the president says can be trusted, reporting what the president says becomes absurd. You can still do it, but it’s hard to respect what you are doing. If the president doesn’t know anything, the solemnity of the presidency becomes a joke. That’s painful. If they can, people flee that kind of pain. In political journalism there is enough room for interpretive maneuver to do just that.

This is “normalization.” This is what “tonight he became president” is about. This is why he’s called “transactional,” why a turn to bipartisanship is right now being test-marketed by headline writers. This is why “deal-making” is said to be afoot when there is barely any evidence of a deal.

What they have to report brings ruin to what they have to respect. So they occasionally revise it into something they can respect: at least a little.

A Surreal Lolita

From LABR, Delia Ungureanu’s new book finds a possible origin for Nabakov's Lolita:

VLADIMIR NABOKOV’S RUNAWAY best seller Lolita, first published in 1955, established him as a major force in American literature, even as it provoked lasting moral debates over its poetic treatment of a taboo subject — pedophilia. Critics and readers have long wondered what might have inspired Nabokov’s perverse plot, the seduction of a 12-year-old Lolita by the middle-aged Humbert Humbert, who marries the girl’s widowed mother as a means of gaining access to the object of his desire. In 2004, the search for Lolita’s antecedents led the critic Michael Maar to a 1916 tale called “Lolita” by the long-forgotten German writer Heinz von Lichberg. But as Maar himself allowed, Lichberg’s slender, sentimental narrative offered Nabokov little beyond his nymphet’s name.

Could there be a more resonant source? How about the tale of a painter who plots to sodomize a pubescent girl, with the help of her mother, a widow who is madly in love with him? What if I told you the girl’s name was Dulita? First published in 1931, the story was called “Rêverie,” and its author was Salvador Dalí.

Nabokov denied any debt to surrealism, but, as Jorge Luis Borges noted, no author likes to owe anything to his contemporaries. Still, it takes a bit of detective work to uncover Nabokov’s oblique engagement with surrealist ideas. Newly converted to surrealism, Dalí published “Rêverie” in the magazine Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. There he only roughly sketched Dulita, but she returns, in a much more poetic and elaborate form, as a key character in his confessional memoir The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí.

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Genre Distortion

 

From LARB, Cataline Pertine writes:

The Jean Vrin bookshop, Place de la Sorbonne. I’m standing in front of a bookshelf, right at the entrance, where the cash desk is. Suddenly I hear a voice behind me: “Bonjour, do you by any chance have The 7^th Function of Language? Laurent Binet is the author.”

“Monsieur,” replies a voice which can only be that of the lady at the cash desk, “we don’t stock fiction. That is a book of fiction.”

“Yes, I know, it’s a novel, but they all appear in it—Barthes, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Sollers, Althusser. It has won a few prizes, been translated into English, German, Spanish. I thought that…”

“It’s a novel in which Roland Barthes doesn’t die in a stupid road accident, but is run over by a van because he holds a great secret.”

“Actually, the accident happened not far from here. Or the assassination, we don’t know. What we know is that the driver of the van was of Bulgarian origin; and that day, just before he was killed, Barthes had lunch with François Mitterrand, who was preparing his bid for the presidency—I mean, he was in the middle of all the wheeling and dealing. Bizarre, quand même, don’t you think? In the novel, Barthes had come into possession of a document of extraordinary importance, a page describing the seventh function of language, which Roman Jakobson had supposedly discovered; whoever understood that function could convince anyone of anything. In his books, Jakobson only talked about six functions; at any rate, officially he only talked about six. In Binet’s novel, Mitterrand steals that page from Barthes, and…”

“And for 500 pages everyone is hunting for it—Soviet secret services, Bulgarian secret services, Sollers; plus a French police commissioner who suddenly finds himself in this Parisian intellectual milieu where he doesn’t understand a thing, and so he takes a doctoral student in linguistics as his guide and interpreter. I read a review.”

“Unfortunately, it seems that most reviewers have focussed on juicy details, of which, I must admit, there are plenty—Foucault having sexual relations with a young man in a public bath, Althusser, the great guiding light of Western Marxism, admitting that he has only read the first volume of Capital.”

“Écoutez, this is a work of fiction, and we sell only philosophy. For fiction, you should go to FNAC.”

“Umberto Eco also appears in it, and John Searle, plus a number of scholars who attend a conference on the linguistic turn at Cornell University. Cornell is in a town called Ithaca. That’s their Ithaca, language, and that’s where they return to. Anyway, even if all these people, as they appear in the novel, are only characters that do and say what Laurent Binet wants them to, and even if Roman Jakobson (note the forename!) didn’t really discover that seventh function of language, all the same, there is philosophy in this novel, and plenty of it. Didn’t Plato make Socrates say what he wanted?”

I turn round, and see that almost everyone in the bookshop has gathered around a middle-aged gentleman and the lady at the cash desk. The gentleman is plump, looks good-natured, and has a patch of baldness. To my surprise, I speak up: “Excusez-moi, pour intervenir. I haven’t read this novel, but I think the gentleman is right. I mean, you should stock fiction too. A novel is, as Kundera says, an exploration of the possibilities of human existence. Let alone the fact that philosophy itself is to a large extent fiction.”

I stop, startled at the fact that no one has interrupted me. On the contrary, everyone is looking in my direction. I don’t know where I find the courage and I continue, no longer bothering about my accent or about the fact that in French I often get the genders of nouns mixed up

“In the beginning was the myth,” I go on. “Then philosophy and history came along, with a discourse that was opposed to myth. The pre-Socratics called their writings Peri Phuseōs, About Nature. Except that ‘nature’ comes from the Latin translation of phusis, and it’s not quite the same thing. Heraclitus said that phusis likes to hide itself. But, as it turned out, what he and the pre-Socratics understood by it has remained somewhat hidden. Trying to understand them is like trying to remake an old vase when we’re only left with a few shards. We can remake the vase if we imagine how it would have looked in reality; the trouble is, we can imagine it in a number of ways. The pre-Socratics set themselves in opposition to myth, but understanding them calls for a sort of confabulation. As for the historians, well, it was a French historian who said that Thucydides is not their colleague because Thucydides tried to make us forget that his texts are no more than texts, which can be read in various ways, not documents in which the truth is preserved tel quel. Plato, however, tried to recover myth. There are so many myths in his dialogues, and for him they are not completely false.”

I pause and look around me; all the looks are encouraging, and the plump gentleman in search of The 7^th Function of Language is radiant with delight.

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3quarksdaily: Roland Barthes: rock star philosopher

The Wildfires

From Vanity Fair, James Wolcott writes:

The moment Trump leaves the White House for early retirement, jail, a sanitarium, or a Russian refuge, let the reckoning begin. Cue the exodus of his cronies from the Cabinet and commence the shunning. The Trump family itself should be as unwelcome in what passes for society as Bernie Madoff at a Bar Mitzvah. Pay no heed to those pious owls in politics, the op-ed pages and cable-news panels—pastoral Voices of Civility such as Jon Meacham and David Gergen—who will caution that “now is not the time” to be raking over the recent past, casting recriminations, and turning Schadenfreude into tasty casseroles; the nation must move forward and let the healing process begin. To such doily knitters and thumb twiddlers, it’s never the right time to sift through the debris, apportion responsibility, and name the guilty parties; this is why it took more than a year to establish a 9/11 commission, and its final report was analytical, rhetorical mush. The day after Trump is deposed will be the day to get cracking on addressing what got him to where he never should have been.

When Laura Ingraham seemingly snapped a Sieg heil! salute at Trump’s giant-screen image at the Republican convention, it was a signal that a rabid strain of Fascist flirtation had been reborn—and mainstreamed. Post-Trump, the country needs its own, domestic version of the de-Nazification program established in Germany after World War II, an inquiry into how so many alleged neo-Nazi, white-supremacist sympathizers had input into this presidency, and their connection with neo-Nazi and nativist movements overseas. Trump has legitimized the hate militias like no president ever before, one of his many blighting legacies and perhaps his most lasting. The domestic threat posed by white-supremacist militias and other violent extremists armed to the steel teeth has been minimized by Republicans, who, jerked around by their Fox News puppet masters, prefer fulminating against Black Lives Matter and antifa street fighters. But white people’s grievances are always given precedence, reflecting the racial makeup of newsrooms and corporate hierarchies.

This bias infiltrates political feature writing past the point of exasperation. How nice it would be if even before Trump humps out of view and into the elephants’ graveyard we were given a journalistic moratorium on earnest dispatches devoted to the Loyal Trump Voter in the battered industrial ruinscape who still supports the big guy despite the latest storm out of Washington. Nary a month goes by without The New York Times or The Washington Post filing a story about Trump supporters who can’t quit him even though he’s plotting to cut off their health coverage or shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

This sentimentalization of the Loyal Trump Voter, whose rationale for standing by the president is often cradled in incoherence and plain, proud ignorance with a large chunk of stubborn pride, is the latest extension of the press’s centering of the White Working Class in the national narrative, no matter how much the demographics and the complexion of the country change. Every election cycle, eastern reporters ritualistically venture into caucus and primary states such as Iowa and New Hampshire on Norman Rockwell safari to file copy from the diners and truck stops on “real Americans” in plaid jackets and tractor caps with heartland values and comfort-food appetites. It is time this romance with Ma and Pa Kettle was put out to pasture. Let journalists find other ways to pretend to be in touch with those left behind and clinging to their discredited articles of faith. Otherwise, dec­ades from now, if news outlets as we know them survive, reporters may still be tramping through the hinterlands searching for the last remaining Trump holdouts to interview as if they were Japanese soldiers hiding in the jungles long after World War II ended.

Good Morning Spider - a morbid classic

From Sputnik Musik, a review of Sparklehorse's classic second album Good Morning Spider released in 1999:

Good Morning Spider" is an eerie, depressing, and dreary album. Unlike the bands debut you won't find many upbeat noise-pop tunes. The lead songwriter and guitarists Mark Linkous had a near death experience between the bands debut and there sophomore album. Linkous was paralyzed for quite some time and you can really see a change in the music. The way I see it "Good Morning Spider" has two different sides. For the most part these songs are haunting, gloomy, and creepy. They are soft, dreary, and atmospheric. Most of these songs have a ballad type feel, they usually run from three to five minutes long. However Sparklehorse do not stop here. The other side of "Good Morning Spider" is the noise-rock, and lo-fi sound. The opener "Pig" is a perfect example of this. Fuzzy vocals, catchy guitar riffs and the chorus explodes to create a loud distorted feel. These songs are hard to digest at first, but after a few listens you can't stop listening to them. Generally this album is dreary and depressing, soft lo-fi guitar strums, high pitched vocals and a few rockers are thrown in the mix, that is basically what "Good Morning Spider" is. These dreary strums and the atmospheric sound of the album combine to make incredible, beautiful songs. "Good Morning Spider" is a dark album, but some of the noise rockers thrown in make this album interesting and exciting. When I first purchased this album I was very surprised by how much this band has changed. "Good Morning Spider" isn't an exciting load of fun, but it certaintly isn't a bore either.

Musically "Good Morning Spider" is excellent. You will discover something new everytime you listen to this. Guitar riffs, and dreary vocals control most of the drearier and gloomy tunes. Musically the dreary songs are really well done, there isn't a lot going on but the music speaks for itself. On the more rock influenced tunes the guitar riffs are fuzzy and distorted while the rythm section is blazing and catchy. Some electronics and even horns are used in some of these tracks but for the most part a guitar, a bass, and drums control the music. The vocals are another high point for this album. They can be high-pitched and out of control, or on the more melancholy songs they sound more soft and gentle. The vocals mix very well with the songs, Mark has a great amount of range and hardly ever makes a mistake. You can really get into Mark's vocals, it seems like he is sitting right next to you and he's singing to you. The only downside about the vocals is that Mark really needs to speak up. In some of the ballad-esque, dreary songs he whisperes into the microphone and this becomes tedious. Other than that this album succeeds musically and vocally.

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An a more detailed review of this classic at alanbumstead

Robert Desnos

I've Dreamed of You So Much

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your living and breathing body
and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice so dear to me?
I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown accustomed to lying crossed upon my own chest in a desperate attempt to encircle your shadow, might not be able to unfold again to embrace the contours of your body.
And coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years
might very well turn me into a shadow.
Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!
I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love, and yet when it comes to you,
the only being on the planet who matters to me now,
I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random passerby.
I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with your phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now
is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowy
than that shadow which moves and will go on moving,
stepping lightly and joyfully across the sundial of your life

 

 

Feliz 100 Monk

From a NYT review of a biography of Monk:

Thelonious Monk, the great American jazz artist, during the first half of his jun­ior year at Stuyvesant High School in New York, showed up in class only 16 out of 92 days and received zeros in every one of his subjects. His mother, Barbara Monk, would not have been pleased. She had brought her three children to New York from North Carolina, effectively leaving behind her husband, who suffered bad health, and raising the family on her own, in order that they might receive a proper education. But Mrs. Monk, like a succession of canny, tough-minded, loving and very indulgent women in Thelonious Monk’s life, understood that her middle child had a large gift and was put on this earth to play piano. Presently, her son was off on a two-year musical tour of the United States, playing a kind of sanctified R & B piano in the employ, with the rest of his small band, of a traveling woman evangelist.

The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk ­“really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”

It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody. Thelonious Monk’s body of work, as composer and player (the jazz critic Whitney Balliett called Monk’s compositions “frozen . . . improvisations” and his improvisations “molten . . . compositions”), sits as comfortably beside Bartok’s Hungarian folk-influenced compositions for solo piano as it does beside the music of jazz giants like James P. Johnson, Teddy Wilson and Duke Ellington, some of the more obvious influences on Monk. It’s unclear how much of Bartok he listened to. Monk did know well and play Rach­maninoff, Liszt and Chopin (especially Chopin). Stravinsky was also a favorite.

Robin D. G. Kelley, in his extraordinary and heroically detailed new biography, “Thelonious Monk,” makes a large point time and time again that Monk was no primitive, as so many have characterized him. At the age of 11, he was taught by Simon Wolf, an Austrian émigré who had studied under the concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. Wolf told the parent of another student, after not too many sessions with young Thelonious: “I don’t think there will be anything I can teach him. He will go beyond me very soon.” But the direction the boy would go in, after two years of classical lessons, was jazz.

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Brendel plays Haydn

 

From a review of Haydn sonatas played by Marc Andre Hamelin:

Haydn, a keyboard player himself, wrote some fifty piano sonatas over a period from 1760 to 1794. He ceased composing in the genre fifteen years before his death unlike his fellow Vienna-based contemporaries Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert who all continued to write sonatas up to the end of their lives. Arguably the piano sonata was not always as successful a medium for Haydn as the string quartet and the symphony proved to be. Notwithstanding, I believe that Haydn's finest works in the genre contain some remarkable music and rank with the best composed before Beethoven's piano music took centre-stage. Biographer James Cuthbert Hadden has written, 'Haydn, building on Emanuel Bach (Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach), fixed the present form, improving so largely upon the earlier, that we could pass from his sonatas directly to those of Beethoven without the intervention of Mozart's as a connecting link. Beethoven's sonatas were certainly more influenced by Haydn's than by Mozart's.' (Haydn by James Cuthbert Hadden, pub: 1902 Pellegrini and Cudahy, New York).  

Read more: http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2009/Sept09/Haydn_Hamelin_cda67710.htm#ixzz4v3p2TzUK

Inept, Corrupt, and Disruptive Governance

From Norman Ornstein at The Atlantic:

Kakistocracy is a term that was first used in the 17th century; derived from a Greek word, it means, literally, government by the worst and most unscrupulous people among us. More broadly, it can mean the most inept and cringeworthy kind of government. The term fell into disuse over the past century or more, and most highly informed people have never heard it before (but to kids familiar with the word “kaka” it might resonate.)

As I wrote my new book with E.J. Dionne and Tom Mann, One Nation Under Trump, I kept returning to the term. Kakistocracy is back, and we are experiencing it firsthand in America. The unscrupulous element has come into sharp focus in recent weeks as a string of Trump Cabinet members and White House staffers have been caught spending staggering sums of taxpayer dollars to charter jets, at times to go small distances where cheap commercial transportation was readily available, at times to conveniently visit home areas or have lunch with family members. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after his serial abuse, others—including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, remain in place.

With Pruitt and Price, the problems were evident before they were confirmed. Pruitt told the Senate he had done no official business on a personal email account while serving as Oklahoma attorney general. When a judge ordered Pruitt’s emails to be made public, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rushed through his confirmation before they appeared—and, too late, they showed he had misled the Senate. Tom Price had engaged in a string of stock transactions while in Congress that led to accusations of manipulation and insider trading; McConnell and his Republican Senate colleagues brushed the evidence aside. Similarly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s misleading claims in his confirmation hearing about his own relationships with Russians during the campaign met with no pushback or interest from Republicans on the Judiciary Committee.

The Constitution prohibits anything of value other than a salary going to a president from the federal government or the states. (Trump had also been pushing the District of Columbia for more favorable property taxes.) The failure of GSA top officials to act on Trump’s apparent violation is under investigation by the agency’s inspector general. Foreign-government entities falling over themselves to stay in the hotel and schedule meetings and events there at premium prices may have violated the foreign Emoluments Clause, just one of a string of in-your-face elements of a president enriching himself via his office. Doubling the initiation fee at Mar-A-Lago to $250,000, and advertising that those putting on weddings there or at his Bedminster, New Jersey, country club might get a photo-op with the president of the United States, are equally outrageous examples.

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