The tail of the humanities is long but it bends toward overloaded circuits

I wish this new crop of dreams better luck than we first-gen bloggers and academic public-access enthusiasts had with ours. But given the proclivity of .com and .edu owners to pull the plug at the drop of a middle manager, I worry about their dependence on a single would-be-monetizing point of failure.

Lyrics server

Playing the remove-one-letter game with Neil Young's "Flying on the Ground" reduces (or restores) a dumb-but-weirdly-evocative non sequitur to a standard "sorry babe, I was born a rambling man" syllogism.

Moral: Always try adding a letter. For example, "Hey Joke" would have made an intriguingly disarming title, and lord knows the rest of that song could use some.

(whisper-sung to my seatmate on a plane returning from France)

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

Book: Le fou de Bergerac by Georges Simenon, 1932. Scene: Inspector Maigret has been immobilized by a bullet wound, but still wants to think and therefore still wants to smoke. He asks Madame Maigret for assistance:

Don't throw those dictionnaires Larousse et Le Robert away just yet, kids.

My mind to me an ant swarm is.

The debt of the author

Stoddard published this little anonymous essay after her third, last, and most challenging novel, Temple House, but before rejection and poverty snuffed higher literary aims. So far as I know it's never been reprinted in full, although biographically inclined scholars frequently quote it.

They might do so in self-defense, since what biographical inclinations unearth isn't flattering. Unruly, ambitious, and thoroughly unsuccessful talents are rarely known for social grace, and Stoddard herself occasionally regretted her compulsive alienation of formerly nearest-and-dearest. She'd be hard to smuggle into any canon of "Art for currently acceptable role-model's sake."

Temple House, a precarious utopia in 300-plus pages of punctuated equilibria, hasn't been reprinted either. While reading it I could only grasp at Pierre as a comparison point. But for some reasons similar personal flaws don't seem to have discanonized Melville.

The rue of law

Among many worthwhile recent essays, my mind keeps returning to Joseph Heath's distinctly not-born-in-the-USA "Observations on the U.S. constitutional crisis," currently simmering alongside Adam Kotsko's "Law and Justice."

For much of my life I've justified American anti-nationalist patriotism by pointing to the first constitution to explicitly defend pluralism, even though American history mostly exhibits long periods of legislature-frozen paralysis briefly disrupted by imperial (or at least imperious) not-strictly-constitutional presidencies.

I was brought up as a beneficiary of one of their legacies, but sometimes thought about how easily Lincoln might've been replaced by a rabidly pro-slavery candidate or FDR by a homegrown white-evangelical-and-greedy fascist, and what the results would've been. Now we find out.

Talking Man

Terry Bisson's voice tended tenorish with a crackled glaze, but sturdy, rooted somewhere around baritone. A Border State blend of drawl and twang, more trawl than Drang, but with firm outlines drawn around each word. A good voice for reading verse, spinning yarns, cutting to the quick, quiet encouragement, or curt exasperation. (I treasure his outburst against Elizabeth Bishop's anti-petroleum bigotry.)

Like Border-Stater Mark Twain, he kept a straight face; I often saw him amused but don't remember his laugh. Other things I don't remember: bullshit, blather, bluster. Terry's provocations were strictly balanced by his silences: he was good at observing and listening and calling a halt.

Anyone so closely allied with Black Panthers and Weathermen and the Grand Old Communist Party would learn early to keep their trap shut. By the time I met Terry his politics were no secret but he still refrained from bullying or preening or point-scoring; he liked to declare a lifetime habit of voting Democrat. Although we never talked about it, I reckon that restraint came natural, or at least came to fit him comfortably. Terry might be certain that feckless softies like me would go up against the Revolutionary walls, but just as certain that a whole lot of fellow freedom fighters would too. As the poet sang, "If there's a hell below, we're all going to go." Nothing to gloat about, just something to come to terms with — something that set the terms.

Whether that's a fair description or not, Terry's company felt genuinely benign. I never met a more reliable medicine for misanthropy.

Learn to croon

I and my brother lean socialist because we were raised Navy. Shelter, health care, and education were government-provided, race-'n'-class distinctions were government-muffled, and it all left us better off than our socioeconomic peers stateside.

Since our childhood, stateside's only gotten harsher; the forces of Counter-Enlightenment raze public schools and public libraries with particular enthusiasm. And so I was happy (relatively speaking) to read that some military budget still diverts toward the old collective dream.

In a world of shortages getting shorter, I thought we at least had an adequate supply of glib bullshit. Where we could use automated assistance is cutting through it.

But that would require more than parroting a text database or comparing citation counts. It would require flexible and yet clearly explicable notions of "trust" and "validity" and "likelihood"; it would require breaking into the fortress-tomb surrounding a century of research and creation; it would require continuous expenditure and acknowledged fallibility. It would not profit our rulers; it would disappoint our consumers.

No, glib bullshit is what rulers understand, what consumers consume, and so it's what our exciting new-and-improved factories produce. Since it's all we've got and all we're getting, can these new sources of deceitful mimicry be put to less redundant use?

Possibly. Context-sensitive translation 1 is difficult, unrewarded, therefore in short supply, and bullshitting at its most benign: false reassurance is the goal.

(Written for Jonathan Gibbs's "A Personal Anthology Collaborative Summer Special 2023".)

‘Blow It’ by Patricia Highsmith

With all due respect to late-February Boston, summer’s the season I dread: in childhood the season of boredom; in early maturity of physical assaults, desertions, and extremely bad decisions. I’m fish-belly pale, with one carcinoma already knifed out, and even ten minutes at 29°C are enough to begin scooping gray matter from my dutch-oven skull and reduce me to a monosyllabic zombie shambling more or less in any direction you lead.

If my most memorable warm-weather traumas had been triggered by mechanical rather than organic failure, Alfred Bester’s ‘Fondly Fahrenheit’ would be the seasonal selection.

Instead I thought of this stripped-down barely-a-story, simple enough for even the sun-addled to follow. In the summer an upwardly mobile Manhattanite’s fancy turns to thoughts of a Westchester County home — ‘white, with a lawn, with grown-up trees’ — which proves one egg too many for his juggling to handle.

Highsmith was a diagnostician of gender roles, generally presenting the threat of physical violence as a comorbidity of maleness. But, as ‘Blow It’ demonstrates, the Highsmith-male trinity of presumed competence, prescribed sense of agency, and near-absolute absence of rational motive doesn’t need bloodshed to generate recognizable nightmares. What say let’s climb out of these sweaty clothes and into a dry martini?

ONLY ONCE MORE THAT BLOOMSDAY

I long ago concluded that earworms are the only disease treatable by homeopathy, but on re-reading that short short-story recommendation, I notice for the first time that the traumatic midsummer triumvirate of "physical assaults, desertions, and extremely bad decisions" has a pinch of something in common with my solstitial reading of choice.

It shouldn't last

"No flesh! No flesh! È la mia casa!" — Priest to tourist, Florentine church, 1989

"Again and again and again and again" — Lou Christie to the world, 1965

Email from the University of Chicago Press promoted the sort of philosophy book I don't normally seek out. But for one reason and another, it caught my attention:

It seems to me that instead, the moments of angelic clarity tend to overrepresent themselves in my mind. It seems to me that a person might be tempted to live by these moments too much; one might hold too hard to them, wanting to have scales forever falling from one’s eyes and lightning forever striking. [...] It can be good to attend to moments of passion, clarity, revelation, ecstasy, discovery. It can be good to listen to warnings. But it is in the nature of these moments to slip away. Lightning flashes are brief. In any attempt to bind these moments, there is a risk. These attempts can leave us living by and bound by something, yes, but not by the surprise that broke over us once; by, instead, an impoverished version of that surprise: less threatening, but also less nourishing. As the psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle writes, “this is perhaps the danger of ‘eventness’; the temptation would perhaps be to outsource the process, to posit the most perfect horizon possible, to recreate the whole protocol, the conditions of the happening of the event, and thereby, in fact, essentially to repress it.”

— On Not Knowing : How to Love and Other Essays by Emily Ogden

(Or, as Stephen Dedalus would punctuate it, On Not Knowing How to Love, and Other Essays.)

An occasional glimpse at the memory of the flash of enlightenment or trauma can serve as touchstone or reminder, but staring at it fixedly makes it the seed of a black spot that obscures the original moment and grows to obscure everything around it. The time leading up to it was a waste of life because the flash hadn't yet happened (or because it wasn't avoided); the time after it is a waste of life because of all that was lost by its not happening sooner (or was lost in its happening); the flash itself is demeaned by the worthlessness of the life it changed.

This might contribute something to the notorious reluctance of wartime survivors to volunteer accounts of their so-fascinating experiences, as well as the near-universal tendency of revelation to shift into proselytizing and ritual, or to screw into increasingly desparate rebirthagains. In a comic register, the Dedalus-patented alternating current of "soaring in an air beyond the world" and "Oh cripes, I'm drownded" is grounded by (grinds into) the daily highs and lows of the working novelist.

That leveling away from (uplifting or negatory, peak or abyss) enlightenment to routine, chores, collaboration can be described either as a retreat and a betrayal or as a fulfillment and a tribute. At any rate, earthbound but no longer buried and not yet buried. If Apollo's missing lips whisper "Change," its torso broadcasts "Persist."

Not that many people are likely to seek advice from a headless limbless torso on a plinth. Or from me, for that matter.