Category: Poseur Alert

“‘The truth, whatever it is, is strange.’ I can still hear Saul’s voice, for a few moments absent its gaiety and its wickedness, gently pronouncing those emancipating words. It was a summer afternoon in 1977. We were sunk in Adirondack chairs on the grass behind the shed of a house that he was renting in Vermont, and sunk also in a sympathetic discussion of Owen Barfield’s theories of consciousness. Chopped wood was piled nearby like old folios, dry and combustible. When I met Bellow, he was in his theosophical enthusiasm. The legend of his worldliness went before him, obviously, not least in his all-observing, wised-up books, which proclaimed the profane charisma of common experience. Since I have a happy weakness for metaphysical speculation, a cellular certainty that what we see is not all there is, I thought I detected in some of his writings signs of the old hunt for a knowledge beyond knowingness, for an understanding that is more than merely brilliant. I was not altogether surprised when our first meeting moved swiftly toward an unembarrassed conversation about spirituality. (This was preceded by complaints about Hannah Arendt. We had to get comfortable.)” – Leon Wieseltier, on Saul Bellow, in The New Republic.

“The ball meanders in the air, a halfhearted ennui, the kind of existentialist hit that would keep Camus or Sartre in the money if they had played baseball … The ball is so bored, so tired of itself, it doesn’t even roll once it plops.” – Buzz Bissinger, in his new book, “Three Nights in August,” as noted in Salon.

FRUM AND DWORKIN: They agreed on one important thing: the need to roll back sexual freedom:

And in one respect at least, she shared a deep and true perception with the political and cultural right: She understood that the sexual revolution had inflicted serious harm on the interests of women and children – and (ultimately) of men as well. She understood that all-pervasive pornography was not a harmless amusement, but a powerful teaching device that changed the way men thought about women. She rejected the idea that sex was just another commodity to be exchanged in a marketplace, that strippers and prostitutes should be thought of as just another form of service worker: She recognized and dared to name the reality of brutality and exploitation where many liberals insisted on perceiving personal liberation.

And she shared with Frum a deep suspicion of people who believe they are free and act accordingly.

“I am the only woman in Mommy and Me who seems to be, well, getting any. This could fill me with smug well-being. I could sit in the room and gloat over my wonderful marriage. I could think about how our sex life – always vital, even torrid – is more exciting and imaginative now than it was when we first met. I could check my watch to see if I have time to stop at Good Vibrations to see if they have any exciting new toys. I could even gaze pityingly at the other mothers in the group, wishing that they too could experience a love as deep as my own. But I don’t. I am far too busy worrying about what’s wrong with me. Why, of all the women in the room, am I the only one who has not made the erotic transition a good mother is supposed to make? Why am I the only one incapable of placing her children at the center of her passionate universe?” – Ayelet Waldman, New York Times. (Hat tip: Bidisha Banerjee.

POSEUR ALERT II: For every American feeling compassion for Schiavo, there are at least several more who feel a consolation and satisfaction, maybe even a sense of triumph. Events have complicated, peculiar resonances in the mind. As the instincts seem to be set loose to an unimaginable degree in American society and overseas, Schiavo’s unfathomably suffering face, with its strange beatific-seeming smile, is like a justification for all the carnage. This vale of woe is what life is, it seems to say–at least to those who want to keep her face just as it is, forever. It’s a chilling complement to “The Contender,” whose fixation on pummeling seems to say that this is what society is … So for the Christian right, Schiavo has become something like a human antidepressant… [B]y arguing, no, insisting that her story have a happy ending, they can cheer themselves up about the society they are helping to create every day, a society in which being able to celebrate the spectacle of the weak getting pummeled, and the weak wasting away from within in a vegetative state, is the measure of one’s strength. Nietzsche and Christ, together at last.” – Lee Siegel, The New Republic.

“SUPER-HIV”: The New York Times’ story today about the alleged new strain of HIV tells us a few things. No other person has been found with an identical strain; the patient is responding to anti-retroviral treatment; the bulk of his sexual contacts were already HIV-positive. So we had five days of hysterical coverage from the NYT for … this? The new story – tellingly – does not include the context that was provided in previous stories, i.e. that this new strain comes “as a growing number of gay men become infected despite warnings about unsafe sex.” Maybe that’s because the New York City Health Department has no statistics to support that claim. Is New York City alone in marking a decline in HIV infection rates? Nope. We were told a couple of years ago that Seattle was having a huge new increase. The Seattle Weekly recalls that “[King County’s] top AIDS official, Dr. Bob Wood, called the situation ‘frightening,’ ‘astounding,’ and ‘the most dramatic increase since the beginning of the epidemic.'” Hard data two years later show a stable rate of infections, despite a growing number of people living with HIV. Or a state like Virginia? A state-wide drop of 20 percent between 2003 and 2004. In Charlottesville, they saw a 67 percent drop. San Francisco? The same hype only a few years ago – “sub-Saharan levels” of infection, according to the head of the city’s public health department. The latest data show infection rates completely stable, along with a dramatic rise in the number of people getting tested. I’m waiting for evidence that will show that this new strain is new, that there is a resurgence of HIV infection among gay men in America, and that the New York Times is not a megaphone for whichever AIDS hysteric comes along next. As I said, I’m waiting.

“But how to paint or sketch such a genius at substitution [as Jacques Derrida]? One must, one can only catch him, portray him in flight, live, even as he slips away from us. In these sketches we shall catch glimpses of the book’s young hero rushing past from East to West, — in appearance both familiar and mythical: here he is for a start sporting the cap of Jackie Derrida Koogan, as Kid, I translate: lamb-child, the sacrificed, the Jewish baby destined to the renowned Circumcision scene. They steal his foreskin for the wedding with God, in those days he was too young to sign, he could only bleed. This is the origin of the immense theme that runs through his work, behind the words signature, countersignature, breast [sein], seing (contract signed but not countersigned), saint –cutting, stitching — indecisions — Let us continue.” – from the prefatory author’s note in “Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint,” by Helene Cixous, published by Columbia University Press.

POSEUR ALERT RUNNER-UP: “Admittedly, Midge Decter’s biography of Donald Rumsfeld may stand the test of time as a classic achievement in the literature of coprophagia; the vivid yet bulimically svelte anthology of paranoid slanders Ann Coulter has given us in “Treason” has added something innovative to that small, delectable canon of hallucinatory works that also includes Céline’s Bagatelles Pour un Massacre and the unjustly anonymous Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and the eloquent-as-a-treacle-tart Christopher Hitchens, in a prodigious outpouring of books and articles, has rendered the mental process by which intellectual prostitutes magically change form in alignment with shifting power formations as legibly as few besides Curzio Malaparte have managed since the fall of Mussolini.” – Gary Indiana, Village Voice.

POSEUR ALERT HONORABLE MENTION I: “Yesterday I posted an announcement of my new piece on gay marriage. This piece, I believe, will shift the gay marriage debate from speculation about the future to a discussion of present realities. For that reason, I see it as the most important piece on gay marriage I’ve ever published.” – Stanley Kurtz.

POSEUR ALERT HONORABLE MENTION II: “The value of listening to Brion’s score by itself – with the exception of his thematically tongue-in-cheek “Strings That Tie to You” – is situated in the potency of its corresponding visual nostalgia. This seems to be the logical fate of most film scores, but in the case of Eternal Sunshine, Brion’s insistence on certain themes popping in and out of his textures seems particularly appropriate, as the soundtrack’s fluid matrix performatizes the cinematography’s mind/body collapse: In the film, Brion’s organi-synthgaze postlude “Phone Calls” plays after Joel decides not to try and save his first memory of Clementine, but just to enjoy it. Here, Brion’s score meets Eternal Sunshine’s oculophilia halfway, and fittingly comprises one of the film’s most potent scenes.” – Nick Sylvester, Pitchforkmedia.

“Consider the ferociously subversive iconoclasm that tumbles from the mouths of its juvenile dramatis personae and the exuberant deconstruction of specious bourgeois sitcom homilies.” – David Edelstein, Slate. Or try watching a puppet show, if you want.

“I’m voting for Kerry, because I have a brain and so does he” – Amy Tan, novelist. Barf. Every time I come close to supporting Kerry, I come across comments like this one that make me want to rush out and back Bush. Or I read the latest pearl of wisdom from Teresa. If I were running the Bush campaign I’d send a copy of this nauseating Slate symposium to every swing voter in the country. More effective than the Swiftees for the bobo angst-ridden pro-war blue-stater like, er, me.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “I didn’t know much about him. He was French, which to me says it all. Leave well alone! I did laugh, though, when I saw the news on AOL. It said: ‘Cancer claims snowy-haired philosopher.'” – Julie Burchill, on Jacques Derrida. I tried reading him in grad school. Emphasis on the word: “tried.”

THE LEFT VERSUS TEAM AMERICA: It’s official. The humorless lefties hate the new movie. That includes the rabid apparatchik, Kos:

What do we get? Peacenik liberal Hollywood actors coddling up to terrorist regimes (ha ha). If you hate Susan Sarandon, Alec Baldwin and Janeane Garofalo, then you’ll love seeing them get killed in a bloody battle with Team America. One dead Rush Limbaugh would’ve attoned for using Michael Moore as a suicide bomber. Perhaps massacring Fox’s whole afternoon lineup and Tom DeLay would’ve balanced out the dead actors. But oh well. Me, I didn’t care for it.

Michael Moore as a suicide bomber? Oh heaven.

“We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence. Like all genuinely new work, Spencer Reece’s compels a reevaluation of the possible.” – from the foreword to Spencer Reece’s new book of poetry.

THE NEW JIM CROW: Jonathan Rauch evaluates Virginia’s new law, forbidding same-sex couples from even setting up their own private contracts to protet their relationships:

Before Thomas Jefferson substituted the timeless phrase “pursuit of happiness,” the founding fathers held that mankind’s unalienable entitlements were to life, liberty and property. By “property” they meant not just material possessions but what we call autonomy. “Every man has a property in his own person,” John Locke said.
It is by entering into contracts that we bind ourselves to each other. Without the right of contract, participation in economic and social life is impossible; thus is that right enshrined in Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution. Slaves could not enter into contracts because they were the property of others rather than themselves; nor could children, who were wards of their parents. To be barred from contract, the founders understood, is to lose ownership of oneself.
To abridge the right of contract for same-sex partners, then, is to deny not just gay coupledom, in the law’s eyes, but gay personhood. It disenfranchises gay people as individuals. It makes us nonpersons, subcitizens. By stripping us of our bonds to each other, it strips us even of ownership of ourselves.
Americans have a name for the use of law in this fashion, and that name is Jim Crow.

Yet the social right finds nothing wrong with this. And no anti-gay marriage conservative has condemned it.

THE CHIMERA OF REALISM: A bracing attack on the post-neo-conservative consensus.

“The value of listening to Brion’s score by itself – with the exception of his thematically tongue-in-cheek “Strings That Tie to You” – is situated in the potency of its corresponding visual nostalgia. This seems to be the logical fate of most film scores, but in the case of Eternal Sunshine, Brion’s insistence on certain themes popping in and out of his textures seems particularly appropriate, as the soundtrack’s fluid matrix performatizes the cinematography’s mind/body collapse: In the film, Brion’s organi-synthgaze postlude “Phone Calls” plays after Joel decides not to try and save his first memory of Clementine, but just to enjoy it. Here, Brion’s score meets Eternal Sunshine’s oculophilia halfway, and fittingly comprises one of the film’s most potent scenes.” – Nick Sylvester, Pitchforkmedia.

“But how to paint or sketch such a genius at substitution? One must, one can only catch him, portray him in flight, live, even as he slips away from us. In these sketches we shall catch glimpses of the book’s young hero rushing past from East to West, — in appearance both familiar and mythical: here he is for a start sporting the cap of Jackie Derrida Koogan, as Kid, I translate: lamb-child, the sacrificed, the Jewish baby destined to the renowned Circumcision scene. They steal his foreskin for the wedding with God, in those days he was too young to sign, he could only bleed. This is the origin of the immense theme that runs through his work, behind the words signature, countersignature, breast [sein], seing (contract signed but not countersigned), saint –cutting, stitching — indecisions — Let us continue.” – from the prefatory author’s note in “Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint,” by Helene Cixous, published by Columbia University Press. (Hat tip: American Digest.)