v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Juan Manuel Castro Prieto-Photographer Whose Book I found in Mexico

The Anarchist Position

From a new biography by robert Barsky of Noam Chomsky and his admiration for Orwell's Homage to Catalonia:

When Chomsky was in his teens he read Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” “which,” he told me in 1995, “struck me as amusing but pretty obvious”; but in his later teens he read “Homage to Catalonia” “and thought it outstanding (though he overdid the POUM role I felt, not surprisingly given where he was); it confirmed beliefs I already had about the Spanish Civil War.” “Homage to Catalonia,” Orwell’s description of the Spanish conflict, which he wrote after completing a stint as an active member of the POUM militia, is still a book to which people (including Chomsky) who are interested in successful socialist or anarchist movements refer, because it gives an accurate and moving description of a working libertarian society. The “beliefs” that it “confirmed” for the teenaged Chomsky were related to his growing conviction that libertarian societies could function and meet the needs of the individual and the collective.

There were three left-wing groups active on the scene in Barcelona during the 1930s: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, or POUM; the socialist PSUC (Partido Socialista Unificado de Catalunya), which was dominated by Stalinists; and the anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores-Federacion Anarquista Iberica), which honored Rudolf Rocker as “their teacher” on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Orwell joined the POUM militia at the end of 1936 as a means of entering Spain to write newspaper articles. His description, in “Homage to Catalonia,” of the POUM line sets up an oversimplified but provocative relationship between bourgeois democracy, fascism, and capitalism:

Bourgeois “democracy” is only another name for capitalism, and so is Fascism; to fight against Fascism on behalf of “democracy” is to fight against one form of capitalism on behalf of a second which is liable to turn into the first at any moment. The only real alternative to Fascism is workers’ control. If you set up any less goal than this, you will either hand the victory to Franco, or, at best, let in Fascism by the back door. The war and the revolution are inseparable.

Orwell maintains that revolution is the only way to remove from power the oppressive business-based ruling class of the type that has dominated the West since World War II. This concept is a difficult one to grasp for those of us who have been programmed, in large measure by the mainstream press, to think that battles must involve two opposing forces — one good and one evil. World War II is often portrayed this way: the Allied side is taken to represent freedom and democracy, while fascism and Nazism are considered synonymous with totalitarian oppression. Chomsky knew early on that there were other ways to conceive of contemporary political structures. He tended to lean towards the left-libertarian interpretation of events, and concluded that neither side deserved the support of those interested in a “good society.” How “good” is the society that drops atomic bombs on Japanese civilians, or reduces German towns to rubble? Isn’t there an alternative?

This subject is still hotly debated, even among members of the libertarian left. Norman Epstein, who has been active in leftist movements for many years and who is otherwise generally sympathetic to Chomsky’s position, here dissents by taking exception to Orwell’s paraphrasing of the POUM line. He emphasizes that “fascism is not simply another name for capitalism. It is a form, and a particularly brutal one, which capitalism takes under certain historical circumstances (including today in many third world countries under the sponsorship of U.S. capital) which is different from bourgeois democracy. Someone like Chomsky is allowed to function under bourgeois democracy but not under fascism.” But we must recognize the similarities between a fascist agenda and that of the so-called democratic West if we are to understand where Chomsky is coming from in his political works, and to do so we have to engage with the anarchist position that he had begun to develop in his youth.

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Reading is a Positive Activity

 

From 3%, an excerpt from Vilas-Matas Montao's Malady:

April 21

“I’m absolutely convinced that publishing being in the hands of businessmen is just a passing episode.”

—-Carlos Barral

Every year’s the same at around this time. The number of illiterates in this country is on the increase, but this seems to be unimportant, there are more and more Book Days and it’s up to me to explain why we have to read. Yesterday, on the radio, I was invited to explain to listeners in two seconds why they should be encouraged to read. For them literally to be encouraged, I replied. I was going to add: and at the same time to achieve the spirit’s salvation, Musil’s ideal. I didn’t say this, it struck me as excessive and also I’d have overstepped the two-second limit.

I am no longer so rigidly literature-sick. Or, rather, I begin not to understand why I must advocate reading. Let every illiterate in this country do what he wants, of course. Besides, I hate virtually the whole of humanity and I spend the day planting mental bombs against all those businessmen who publish books, those departmental managers, market directors on the wire, and economics graduates. I plant mental bombs against them and against their disciplined followers and the rest of the world in general. So I wonder why I should lend them a hand and recommend that they read books if I only wish them ill, if I only want their stupidity to grow and for them to crash, once and for all, as they travel on the train of ignorance that we all pay for, but that one day they will pay a high price for, falling into the bottomless pit of failure, taking themselves elsewhere, into a different industry. What’s more, I loathe them so much that I’d be delighted if they were obliged to read, if a perfidious decree appeared from somewhere, a drastic order to become acquainted with books, and suddenly this country’s cities turned into libraries of forced, chaotic, daft intellectual activity.

In this way the failure of these haughty illiterates’ lives would be twofold. On the one hand there would be the already in itself resounding failure of all life, to which would be added that brought about by contact with literates—nobody doubts by now that to be a writer is to tail—not to mention with books, those astonishing “extensions of memory and imagination” that we take to beaches and cause to fail, not by reading them but by burying them in an unconscious great book of sand, very different from Borges’s.

This would be my revenge for the calls to advocacy that always arrive at around this time and for the constant doubts that plague me and drive me wretchedly to say that no one can be advised to read, but also drive me to think that really, however much I don’t like it, I should advocate reading, albeit only in a stylized way by saying, for example, that there’s nothing to say, except that, without literature, life has no meaning. But, of course, I can only convince those who read of this. And the fact is many of those who read believe it’s an obligation, and they are almost more dangerous than Pico’s moles because they convey an obvious sensation of boredom, they seem not to have read that memorable statement by Montaigne: “I do nothing without joy.”

With this statement, Montaigne wished to indicate that the concept of obligatory reading is a false one. If he came across a difficult passage in a book, Montaigne left it. The point is he saw in reading a form of happiness. Like Borges, who said that a book must not require effort. Borges agreed with Montaigne, though he loved to quote Emerson, who contradicted Montaigne and, in a great essay about books, asserted that a library is a kind of magic box. The best spirits of humanity are imprisoned in this box by an enchanter, and they’re waiting for our word to come out of their silence. We have to open the book, then they awake.

That said—I wish to distance myself from any new temptation to advocacy—the company of literature is dangerous, so much so that I’m really not sure I should applaud people I value for reading a lot and getting so involved in books; you see, I wish them well, and anyone who has read Kafka, for example, is perfectly aware “how much exces­sive anxiety for nothing” (to quote Pessoa) there is in literature.

As Magris says: “Kafka was perfectly aware that literature distanced him from the territory of death and enabled him to understand life, but leaving him outside. Just as it enabled him to understand the greatness of his Jewish father, a model man, but did not exactly enable him to be like him.”

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it leaves us outside it. It’s hard, but sometimes it’s the best thing that can happen to us. Reading and writing search for life, but they can lose it precisely because they’re focused entirely on life and on the search for it.

It may be the melancholy of the evening in which I am writing, but the truth is I’m talking about an inextricable knot of good and evil, of light and shade inherent in reading and literature. All this is hard, why fool ourselves? It’s a difficulty that, according to Gombrowicz, good literature has as the product of an instinct to sharpen spiritual life. There are times when I would recommend reading to my worst enemies.

Precisely because literature enables us to understand life, it tells us what can be, but also what could have been. There is nothing sometimes farther away from reality than literature, which is constantly reminding us that life is like this and the world has been organized like that, but it could be otherwise. There is nothing more subversive than literature, which aims to return us to true life by exposing what real life and History smother. Magris knows this very well, he is deeply interested in what could have been, had History or human life taken another course. Anyone who’s interested in this is interested in reading. This is not advocacy. After all, there are times—like now—when I wouldn’t recommend reading even to Pico’s moles, even to my worst enemies.

The Pencil Method

From The NYRB, J.M. Coetzee writes in 2000 regarding Robert Walser:

In 1913 Walser left Berlin and returned to Switzerland “a ridiculed and unsuccessful author” (his own self-disparaging words). He took a room in a temperance hotel in the industrial town of Biel, near his sister, and for the next seven years earned a precarious living contributing feuilletons—literary sketches—to newspapers. For the rest he went on long country hikes and served out his obligations in the National Guard. In the collections of his poetry and short prose that continued to appear, he turned more and more to the Swiss social and natural landscape. He wrote two more novels. The manuscript of the first, Theodor, was lost by his publishers; the second, Tobold, was destroyed by Walser himself.

After the World War, the taste among the public for the kind of writing Walser had relied on for an income, writing easily dismissed as whimsical and belletristic, began to wane. He had lost touch with currents in wider German society; as for Switzerland, the reading public there was too small to support a corps of writers. Though he prided himself on his frugality, he had to close down what he called his “little prose-piece workshop.” He began to feel more and more oppressed by the censorious gaze of his neighbors, by the demand for respectability. He moved to Bern, to a position in the national archives, but within months had been dismissed for insubordination. He moved from lodgings to lodgings, drank heavily. He suffered from insomnia, heard imaginary voices, had nightmares and anxiety attacks. He attempted suicide, failing because, as he disarmingly admitted, “I couldn’t even make a proper noose.”

It was clear that he could no longer live alone. His family was, in the terminology of the times, tainted: his mother had been a chronic depressive; one brother had committed suicide; another had died in a mental hospital. It was suggested that his sister should take him in, but she was unwilling. So he allowed himself to be committed to the sanatorium in Waldau. “Markedly depressed and severely inhibited,” ran the initial medical report. “Responded evasively to questions about being sick of life.”

In later evaluations Walser’s doctors would disagree about what, if anything, was wrong with him, and would even urge him to try living outside again. However, the bedrock of institutional routine would appear to have become indispensable to him, and he chose to stay. In 1933 his family had him transferred to the asylum in Herisau, where he was entitled to welfare support. There he occupied his time with chores like gluing paper bags and sorting beans. He remained in full possession of his faculties; he continued to read newspapers and popular magazines; but, after 1932, he did not write. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to be mad,” he told a visitor. Besides, he said, the time for litterateurs was over. (Recently one of the Herisau staff claimed to have seen Walser at work writing. Even if this is true, no trace of such post-1932 writing has survived.)

Being a writer was difficult for Walser at the most elementary of levels. He did not use a typewriter, but wrote a clear, well-formed hand, on which he prided himself. The manuscripts that have survived—fair copies—are models of calligraphy. Handwriting was, however, one of the sites where psychic disturbance first manifested itself. At some time in his thirties (Walser is vague about the date) he began to suffer psychosomatic cramps of the right hand that he attributed to unconscious animosity toward the pen as a tool. He was able to overcome them only by abandoning the pen and switching to a pencil.

Use of a pencil was important enough for Walser to call it his “pencil system” or “pencil method.” What he does not mention is that when he moved to pencil-writing he radically changed his script. At his death he left behind some five hundred sheets of paper covered in a microscopic pencil script so difficult to read that his executor at first took them to be a diary in secret code. In fact Walser had kept no diary. Nor is the script a code: it is simply handwriting with so many idiosyncratic abbreviations that, even for editors familiar with it, unambiguous decipherment is not always possible. It is in these pencil drafts alone that Walser’s numerous late works, including his last novel, The Robber (twenty-four sheets of microscript, 141 pages in print), have come down to us.

More interesting than the script itself is the question of what the “pencil method” made possible to Walser as a writer that the pen could no longer provide (he still used a pen for fair copies, as well as for correspondence). The answer seems to be that, like an artist with a stick of charcoal between his fingers, Walser needed to get a steady, rhythmic hand movement going before he could slip into a frame of mind in which reverie, composition, and the flow of the writing tool became much the same thing. In a piece entitled “Pencil Sketch” dating from 1926-1927, he mentions the “unique bliss” that the pencil method allowed him. “It calms me down and cheers me up,” he said elsewhere. Walser’s texts are driven neither by logic nor by narrative but by moods, fancies, and associations: in temperament he is less a thinker or storyteller than an essayist. The pencil and the self-invented stenographic script allowed the purposeful, uninterrupted, yet dreamy hand movement that had become indispensable to his creative mood.

Robert Walser as a Young Man

Interview with Novelist Isabella Hammad

Dennett Gone

 

The  important and impactful thinker Daniel Dennet passed away today on the same day my father did in 1979-April 19. Dennett gave a lot of thought on what consciousness is among the many things that concerned him, but it was through those deliberations that I became aware of his books and thoughts.

Here is what the New York Times had to say:

His first book to attract widespread scholarly notice was “Brainstorms: Philosophical Essays on Mind and Psychology,” published in 1978.

In it, Mr. Dennett asserted that multiple decisions resulted in a moral choice and that these prior, random deliberations contributed more to the way an individual acted than did the ultimate moral decision itself. Or, as he explained:

“I am faced with an important decision to make, and after a certain amount of deliberation, I say to myself: ‘That’s enough. I’ve considered this matter enough and now I’m going to act,’ in the full knowledge that I could have considered further, in the full knowledge that the eventualities may prove that I decided in error, but with the acceptance of responsibility in any case.”

Some leading libertarians criticized Mr. Dennett’s model as undermining the concept of free will: If random decisions determine ultimate choice, they argued, then individuals aren’t liable for their actions.

Mr. Dennett responded that free will — like consciousness — was based on the outdated notion that the mind should be considered separate from the physical brain. Still, he asserted, free will was a necessary illusion to maintain a stable, functioning society.

“We couldn’t live the way we do without it,” he wrote in his 2017 book, “From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.” “If — because free will is an illusion — no one is ever responsible for what they do, should we abolish yellow and red cards in soccer, the penalty box in ice hockey and all the other penalty systems in sports?”

Already with the 1991 publication of his book, “Consciousness Explained,” Mr. Dennett had expounded his belief that consciousness could be explained only by an understanding of the physiology of the brain, which he viewed as a kind of supercomputer.

“All varieties of perception — indeed all varieties of thought or mental activity — are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs,” he wrote. “Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision.’”

By the 1990s, Mr. Dennett had increasingly sought to explain the development of the brain — and illusions of a separate consciousness and free will — in terms of the evolution of human beings from other animal life.

He believed that natural selection was the overwhelming factor in this evolution. And he insisted that physical and behavioral traits of organisms evolved primarily through their beneficial effects on survival or reproduction, thus enhancing an organism’s fitness in its environment.

Critics, like Mr. Gould, cautioned that while natural selection was important, evolution would also have to be explained by random genetic mutations that were neutral or even somewhat damaging to organisms, but that had become fixed in a population. In Mr. Gould’s view, evolution is marked by long periods of little or no change punctuated by short, rapid bursts of significant change, while Mr. Dennett defended a more gradualist view.

Underlying the increasingly acrimonious debate between the scholars was a natural friction in the scientific and philosophical communities over which side merited more credibility on the subject of evolution.

Mr. Dennett also plunged into controversy with his strident views on atheism. He and a colleague, Linda LaScola, researched and published a book in 2013, “Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind,” based on interviews with clerics of various denominations who were secret atheists. They defended their decision to continue preaching because it provided comfort and needed ritual to their congregations.

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The Death of Two Writers

 

From the Cleveland Review of Books, I came to McCarthy in the 90s and Glück much more recently around 2019 and I consider both to be long distance runners who will finish ahead of others:

It’s bizarre to discover that someone you believe you’ve buried, or at least consciously half-written off, can prove to have been one of the vital forces underneath the passion in your life. We may try to quash that once potent growth out, but it remains rooted, never to be questioned. A life is built on the lives before it. Ultimately, at the end of the act, we can’t fool anyone, and the most distant stranger can instantly perceive whom we revere, no matter how hard we try to hide them. If I’ve gone away from Louise Glück in recent years, I have also always carried her writing and her voice within me.

The most renowned US novelist and US poet have died, within four months of each other and in the same year—Cormac McCarthy and Louise Glück. Others will dispute those designations, but I believe their international reputations merit such titles. Both were writers of lament, and both returned to the words “earth,” “planet,” and “abyss” in trying to explicate some foremost feeling inside about living and dying, the cycle of life. I had thought to summon something on McCarthy in the weeks following his death, but as the summer days wore on, the passion proved not to be there. I found I’d somehow already said all I needed to about his work in an essay on Anthony Mann. The question of violence can go only so far, and for that we turn to McCarthy for his early work, primarily up to Blood Meridian, reading for his strange torques of syntax and gothic descriptions; the dialogue makes us laugh, but the over-reliance on it in the last books lends an unliterary twang to his orchestration. We hear a lot as if in a play, but we are in a book—an odd disjunction. If I’d written about the personal effect McCarthy had on me, I would have described how certain artists serve as markers in one’s life: their art measures time and colors our moments, so we live the art as we simultaneously live the life, as per Pater and Proust.

By chance, Glück came into my life at the same moment McCarthy did, around 2002. I didn’t really know what a poem was back then—and now I’m still not sure what poetry is or how to describe it sufficiently for another person to stop their self-chatter and feel the sound of my heart. I treated poems more as bulletins or flyers—as moments of written time bearing the long strain of hours in creation though devoured in a matter of minutes—to impress upon another person my seriousness, or to set a tone, a mood, maybe take us to another realm. All of that would change when I encountered Wallace Stevens, a poet who similarly startled Glück, who wrote, “It never occurred to me that I wasn’t going to write poetry until I read Wallace Stevens.”

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Learning About Jack Youngerman

 

 

Reading The Slip made me hunt down information and art images from some of the artists in the book. Highly recommended.

Writer of The Slip, a book about the artist culture that developed in   in the mid-fifties, Prudence Peiffer writes a reminiscence Jack Youngerman, one of the artists who lived there with his family:

I began talking with Jack Youngerman three years ago, as research for a book on the artist community that emerged at Coenties Slip in downtown Manhattan in the late 1950s and early ’60s. What I imagined might be a few conversations turned into regular sessions: he was a generous philosopher of art. He’d moved out to Bridgehampton, on the East End of Long Island, full time in the ’90s, and it was there, in a kitchen that was always sunny and warm no matter the season, with a cuckoo clock singing the hours and his wife Hilary Helfant’s sculptures gracing the round table, that we talked about his childhood, his art apprenticeship in Paris, and his early days in New York City living in an old sailmaking loft by the East River, next door to Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Indiana, Lenore Tawney, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist.

Youngerman grew up poor in Kentucky and didn’t see any art in person until he was 19. He was immediately smitten. He went to Paris in 1947 on the GI Bill to study art at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he met the fellow American Kelly. The two often played hooky, with the city itself as their school: visiting museums and cathedrals, seeing the paper cutouts of Henri Matisse at the Salon de Mais, and making pilgrimages to the studios of Constantin Brâncuși, Alberto Giacometti, and Jean Arp. Paris was just waking up from its World War II nightmare, and cafés were crowded with arguments about politics, the war, and art. Youngerman absorbed it all. He met Delphine Seyrig, an ambitious French student and actor. They fell in love quickly and were married.

Youngerman and Kelly discovered abstraction in France, in the art and artists that surrounded them and through a series of experiments with how to compose pictures through found images and chance operations. (See Youngerman’s beautiful Untitled drawing from 1953, above, in MoMA’s collection.) Kelly returned to New York first, hopeful that Abstract Expressionism, like a powerful storm front, had cleared the air for other kinds of abstract thinking. Youngerman followed with his wife and six-month-old son Duncan a few years later, with a promise from Betty Parsons that if he moved to New York she would show him at her gallery. On a tip from Kelly, they moved in next to him at Coenties Slip, settling into one of the illegal loft spaces in the oldest neighborhood of Manhattan, a spot so secluded that Youngerman spoke about going “back into the city” when they needed supplies. Well before loft-living became a signature of artists’ life in New York, the Coenties Slip group fixed up the rough warehouse spaces. Youngerman found furniture on the street and splurged on a picnic table from Sears Roebuck at the end of the subway line in Brooklyn. (In one of our conversations, he mentioned offhand that he still had part of that table, and pointed outside to the back porch, where the 60-year-old bench held pots of herbs.)

The friendships at Coenties Slip changed each of the artists there forever, and in turn changed American art history—how we now understand abstraction, Pop art, Minimalism, textile art. But that’s another story. Kelly was a particularly important figure for Youngerman, both from their time together absorbing so much art history in Europe and from the experiments and breakthroughs that each came to individually as artists making their way in New York. Youngerman would go on to work with sculpture and prints, but it was his paintings at the Slip that set the course of his thinking.

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A Poem by Ahlam Bsharat

 

Colonial soldiers,
what have they been doing
to my poetry all these years
when I could have easily killed them
in my poems
as they’ve killed my family
outside poetry?

Poetry was my chance
to settle the score with killers,
but I let them age outdoors,
and I want them to know decay
in their lives, their faces to wrinkle,
their smiles to thin out,
and their weapons to hunch over.

So if you, dear readers, see a soldier
taking a stroll in my poem,
trust that I have left him to his fate
as I leave a criminal
to his many remaining years,
they will execute him.

And his ears will execute him
as he listens to me reciting my poem
to grieving families,
he won’t be able to slink out
of my book or the reading hall
as the seated audience stares at him.

You will not be consoled,
soldier, you will not,
not even as you exit
my poetry event
with slumped shoulders
and pockets full of dead bullets.

Even if your hand,
tremulous as it is
from so much murder,
fidgeted with the bullets,
you will not
produce more
than a dead sound.

                                        —Ramallah

 

From The Baffler 2021

 

Fady Joudah's Poem that The New Yorker refused to Publish in 2021

 

Remove

 

You who remove me from my house
are blind to your past
which never leaves you,
yet you’re no mole
to smell and sense what’s being done
to me now by you.
Now, dilatory, attritional so that the past
is climate change and not a massacre,
so that the present never ends.
But I’m closer to you than you are to yourself
and this, my enemy friend,
is the definition of distance.
Oh don’t be indignant,
watch the video, I’ll send you the link
in which you cleanse me item after limb
thrown into the street to march where
my catastrophe in the present
is still not the size of your past:
is this the wall
you throw your dice against?
I’m speaking etymologically, I’m okay
with the scales tipping your way,
I’m not into that, I have a heart that rots,
resists, and hopes, I have genes,
like yours, that don’t subscribe
to the damage pyramid.
You who remove me from my house
have also evicted my parents
and their parents from theirs.
How is the view from my window?
How does my salt taste?
Shall I condemn myself a little
for you to forgive yourself
in my body? Oh how you love my body,
my body, my house.

 

 

Link to the story at LARB