War Porn

My piece "War Porn 3: i like america and america likes me" is the featured work in this month's canon, which is the interdisciplinary journal of the New School for Social Research. Check it out.

I've been on a jury, which I cannot discuss, fulfilling my civic responsibilities. So I've gotten less reading done than you'd think. Also, in a strange turn of events, I have been enlisted by my wife to run and Dungeon Master an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game, because she wants to do "research" for an art project and I, many many years ago, used to play role-playing games. It's strange to see how easily it all comes back, and also to be reminded how badly-written, disorganized, counter-intuitive, and confusing the 1st edition AD&D rules were.

Reading Raymond Williams Marxism and Literature and nearly done with Starkweather: Inside the Mind of a Killer. More soon.

Je Suis Le Postmodernito

I'm getting stories published in Denver Quarterly, LIT, and canon, which is great. What's also great is that they are all more experimental pieces. More information to follow.

Some Books

The deadlock must be broken. I’ve been busy with schoolwork and cetera, hence not posting. So that also means I read a bunch of books, which I will only list here. Building Red America, by Tom Edsall, which was great. Reread Don DeLillo’s Players, Mao II, and Falling Man and William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, which is superb. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which was childish and cloying. Russell Banks’ The Darling, which was good and interesting, if problematic in certain ways, and about which I would like to talk more, later. The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, by Mario Vargas Llosa, which was unexpectedly excellent. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee, which I hated, but I still haven’t decided why I hate it yet, so maybe it’s totally genius. Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina, which is the best novel I’ve read recently, a Nietzschean feminist stream-of-consciousness poetic masterpiece. Also read Hitchens’ collected jingoism in The Long Short War, which was about as galling as you’d expect. Bits of lots of things, most of Just and Unjust Wars, by Michael Walzer, a good chunk of The Good Life by Jay McInerney, which was total shit, most of George Packer’s The Fight is for Democracy, Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream, Thomas Cushman’s A Matter of Principle. Mostly my brain feels in meltdown now, not quite sure why.

Democracy in Action 2

By Mr. Fish, from Harper's.

Blogs, huh, good God y'all, what are they good for?

So, people keep reading this, and I have to say thanks to both of you. I really feel connected, plugged-in, 2.0 and everything, and it's because of you.

It's good that I feel so connected, because the rest of my time is spent reading, writing, and trying to chill the fuck out. I'm revising the war novel to make it even more cynical and pessimistic, pooping out little bits of a newer, much less coherent novel, and doing work for classes. I'm writing two papers this semester that I hope to be able to turn into articles, one revisiting the "9/11 novel," and another one looking at the arguments of some of the liberal hawks who advocated war with Iraq. Thoughts will get posted as I go, but I've been too busy the last few weeks to write anything down here.

So, books. First, I read Thomas Edsall's The New Politics of Inequality, which is a superbly nitty-gritty account of the late '70s transformation of US government power from representative social-democracy to plutocracy. He looks at Congressional rule changes, ideological and strategic failures by the Democratic Party, the campaign by big business and the wealthy to redistribute income upwards, and the collapse of labor through its own weakness in the face of concerted assault. What is great about Edsall is that he makes such a compelling case based on concrete political and economic evidence and arguments that he makes unnecessary any appeal to fuzzy notions of zeitgeists, cultural shifts, or national psychology. It's an awesome read. Jared, if you're listening, check this shit out. I'm reading his most recent book now, Building Red America, and it's also great.

What else? Ken Kalfus' A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which is hilarious and troubling. It is the best 9/11 book I think I've read so far. More on it later. Other 9/11 novels include Paul West's The Immensity of the Here and Now and Steve Alten's The Shell Game. More on these later. I also read Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, which is an awful, stupid book that purports to offer a theory of how fascism gave birth to Islamic fundamentalism, and how the essential conflict in the modern world is between--you guessed it--Terror and Liberalism. This book should be shat on, burned, salted, then crammed down Paul Berman's idiotic throat. I also read Nadine Gordimer's novel The Pick-up, which was not very good. Simplistic, smug, and ultimately unconvincing, The Pick-up reads like a liberal fairy tale.

Also a bunch of essays and crap. Someday I'll finish rereading Ulysses, really I will. For now, back to work.

Democracy in Action

By Mr. Fish, from Harper's.

10,000 years

The World Outside the Blogow

Been reading for classes, no philosophy this semester—which, frankly, is awesome. I’m happy to get into narrative, historical and novelistic, and only miss the abstractness of philosophy slightly. What’s also nice is feeling like the reading I’m doing has some relevance to the outside world, not just ancient (or nineteenth-century) history. I hope to write two good papers this semester, which I’d ideally turn into articles for submission somewhere, one on 9/11 novels and the other on the history of liberal hawks in the run up to the Iraq War and their use of “just war theory.”

Oh, also, goddamn McCain and Go, Obama! and what's that suspicion that something bad is gonna fuck everything up? Oh yeah, history. Rock the vote, y'all. "If voting was dangerous," said Emma Goldman, "they would have outlawed it years ago."

For now, some books I read.

Redeemer Nation, by Ernest Lee Tuveson, is a masterly scholarly exploration of “The Idea of America’s Millennial Role,” especially enlightening in regards to the idea’s origins and context, and in his view of how the idea played out in the Civil War especially but also World War I. American Exceptionalism is given a compelling religious interpretation by Tuveson, who sees the American ideal to be less an outgrowth of the Enlightenment than of the Reformation. Essentially, he argues, we’re a nation that believes it is the historical agent of the Christian Apocalypse. Three very useful ideas from Tuveson are first, his consideration of the Reformation (insofar as it influenced America’s development through the Puritans, etc.) to be not a break with religion but a fundamentalist revival, second, his distinction between millenarians and millenialists, and third, his analysis of Apocalyptic codes in American culture, especially in “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

On millenarians and millenialists, millenarians are those who believe in the physical return of Christ and the destruction of the corrupt world in the Apocalypse, while millenialists believe rather in that the Apocalypse results in the creation of a Christian utopia on earth. Both theodicies rely on the Book of Revelations to provide the game-plan of history, but they differ on the end result and on the role of believers in history. The millenarians are closer to a traditional Augustinian separation between the City of God and the City of Man, tend to favor withdrawal from the world rather than engagement, and believe that the historical process ends in the devil’s victory over the world, which is then destroyed (after all Jesus’ pals go to heaven, of course). The millenialists believe rather in an almost Hegelian process that ends in a Utopian, Christian earth, and believe that history is God’s process for bringing about this end.

This book is extremely useful for understanding American Exceptionalism and American Apocalypticism. Very awesome. It should be paired with Harold Bloom’s The American Religion.

William Appleman Williams’ The Great Evasion was an interesting and provocative book about the claims of Marxism on American capitalism and the ways that it had by then (1968) managed largely to avoid them (frontier, slavery, and war, mainly). Williams’ book is often overwritten and sometimes pedantic, but a strong critique of American capitalism.

The two novels I read offered an interesting contrast: Michael Ondjaate’s Anil’s Ghost, about a Sri Lankan expat forensic anthropologist who returns to Sri Lanka to investigate human rights abuses, and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the story of an Igbo villager named Okonkwo, who at what should be the height of his life comes face to face with the world-changing upheavals of imperialism. Anil’s Ghost was complex, using a fragmentary, perspectival approach in the attempt to create distance and ambivalence, while Things Fall Apart was simpler in structure, by and large following Okonkwo through his life, yet deeper, stronger, and in the end powerfully tragic. Things Fall Apart was perceptive, profound, clear and beautiful, where Anil’s Ghost seemed scattered and forced.

So, enough blog. Back to life.

Ultimate Philsopher... Or Ultimate Warrior?

Special Thanks to the fine gentlemen at Arabian Facebuster for bringing to our attention this very important quiz. I'm happy to say that I only mistook Heidegger for a professional wrestler twice.

Also, I recently read Marx's The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, A Month in the Country, by J.L. Carr, and Death at La Fenice, by Donna Leon. Death at La Fenice was much smarter than I’d expected—a murder mystery set in Venice, it combines an easy manner with droll wit, and while the prose is workmanlike enough, the book never descends into drudgery. It was fun to read something set in Venice, mostly, and it’s a pleasant page-turner. A Month in the Country was also much better than I expected. It’s a short, finely crafted novel about a WWI vet who goes one summer to the north of England to restore a church painting. It is a gentle and subtle pastoral, and Carr manages to draw his characters quickly and deftly. It’s a very good, short book, and is highly recommended. I also really liked The 18th Brumaire, which was somewhat confusing given my ignorance on the French Revolution of 1848, but a brilliant, pithy, and vividly bitter analysis of the politics of the collapse of the Second Republic and the rise of “the adventurer” Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte. Fun and provocative, Marx opens up thought on the conflict between executive and legislative power, the political weakness and arrogance of the middle class (social democrats), and populist support for authoritarian rule, presaging Frankfurt School analyses of Nazism in works like “Freudian Psychology and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda.” Interesting, smart, and entertaining.

Fuck Shit Stack

This is Reggie Watts. We saw his show Disinformation here a couple weeks ago, and it was awesome. Check him out.

Monkey Controls Robot With Brain

Further news on the future obsolescence of mankind: a robot controlled by a monkey brain. First it was cyborg moths, now its cyborg monkeys. What's next? Cyborg sharks?!?! Do we not realize that we're playing with fire?! Do we not understand the unbelievable dangers with which we are toying? It's only a matter of time now, only a matter of time before an army of cyborg animals enslaves us all.

Also, I finished Great Jones Street, Portrait of a Lady, and The Female Brain. DeLillo's Great Jones Street was flat and boring--of all DeLillo's books that I've read (which is most of them), this book embodies more of his writerly flaws and the fewest of his virtues. There's lots of disattached nattering, lots of plotty plotlessness, lots of flat, affectless characters, and lots of theorizing about mass media culture, but not a lot of zip in the language, little that's fresh, and no interesting characters. Portrait of a Lady, on the other hand, was awesome. This is the first Henry James book I've read and I'm actually glad I've saved them till now, both because I can appreciate the complexity of his psychological insights as I wouldn't have been able to when younger, and because it means I have all his books to look forward to. This book was great. The Female Brain was cheap but somewhat interesting, flawed by the author's chronic tendency to overstate her cases and to fail to address conflicting interpretations. Pop-science that illuminates chemical and hormonal aspects of brain function but in the end relies too much on overstatement and gender stereotypes, and fails to address social aspects of gender.

Venice and Nietzsche

Brief recap of the last few weeks: finals, final papers, lots of reading Nietzsche, going to Ireland, getting married, vacation in Venice, and back to NYC. So the blog understandably fell by the wayside. I’ll post a PDF of the paper I wrote for my Nietzsche class soon. For now, a quick overview of my reading:

Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kauffman—Deeply flawed apology for Nietzsche that attempts to situate him as an heir to Kantian and Hegelian Idealism, but good on Nietzsche and Socrates and Nietzsche’s biography.

Nietzsche and Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze—Interesting and provocative interpretation, although at times it so gnomic and opaque as to beg another volume, perhaps titled Deleuze and Nietzsche and Philosophy.

Reread The Antichrist, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Ecce Homo, read portions of the Will to Power, Nietzsche’s lectures on the Pre-Platonic Philosophers, plus assorted essays and excerpts on Nietzsche by Yirmiyahu Yovel, Paul de Man, Richard Rorty, et al.—Nietzsche, what can I say? I’ll say these three things: First, reading Zarathustra after having read the bulk of the rest of Nietzsche’s corpus is much, much more rewarding than reading it cold. Now the book seems to me to be a beautiful and poetic reformulation of Nietzsche’s thought, whereas before it seemed wild and overgrown. Second, Ecce Homo is brilliant satire. Third, what are we to do with The Will to Power? It is definitely untrustworthy, but full of so much useful scribbling—who knows… Check out my paper.

Nietzsche: Life as Literature, Alexander Nehamas—Good, careful, readable discussion of the literary “turn” of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but weak when it comes to Nietzsche’s ultimate claims. For Nehamas, Nietzsche chooses literature over philosophy, when in fact Nietzsche exposes the literary—or mythological—basis of philosophy. Nietzsche’s stance is much stronger than Nehamas lets on.

Nietzsche and Metaphor, Sarah Kofmann—I found this to be a great book on Nietzsche’s “literary” attack on philosophy. Strongly influenced Nehamas’ book, but with a much more rigorous, post-structuralist interpretation of Nietzsche’s strategy of attacking philosophy through language. Also very interesting on the idea of metaphor itself as a mode of thought.

Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Jacque Derrida—Clever and fun, if stinking slightly of the typical Derridean logorrhea. Interesting thoughts on Nietzsche and the feminine, on Nietzsche’s approach, and on Nietzsche’s intentions (or lack of) toward his readers.

Double Indemnity, James Cain—Surprisingly macabre ending to a slim, punchy novel. It was great fun, and the plot and language were tight and snappy. Great noir.

The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker—Solid, funny, informative, and strongly argued overview of the idea that language-learning is an innate human ability. What I found most troubling was his argument against the congruence of language and thought—while clearly there is something thought before we put it into words, I’m not satisfied with its primacy. Sloppy language does lead to sloppy thinking, and the words we use for things affect the way we “think” about things, even if we’re not entirely thinking in words. I think Pinker too quickly dismisses the idea that our words in some sense shape our world.


Also read some Venice guidebooks. Rick Steve’s comes through again. If you go to Venice, be sure not to miss the Fortuny Museum, which has a marvelous and eclectic collection, and if you go there, make sure to use the bathrooms on the second floor—you get to go out and see the courtyard, which is beautiful. Also, take the traghetti, and skip Harry’s Bar—it’s tiny, stuffy, ridiculously overpriced, and 100% tourist trap.

Not Nietzsche

Although, frankly, this has something to say about perspectivism.

WATCH IT!