Carceraglio Returns to Seattle

Updates soon. Soon-ish.

A Meatloaf Concert on the TV, A Goldfish on the Floor

When I watched Michael Haneke's The Seventh Continent, I asked myself, why don't more people do that? Why don't more people go out that way, I mean, if they're going out that way anyways.

Well, it turns out they do, sort of.

Invitation to play that game that guy invented on his web site

The Trinketization blog quotes Adorno's Minima Moralia on the capacity for happiness. As Trinketization says Adorno says, "It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces...."

Elliptical as I'm being here (I hope), I spoke in Klartext there. My only profit on it is, I am cursed. Or pitied.

Trinketization's quotation led me back to Adorno, so I'll quote a different part of that same aphorism, "Invitation to the dance."

Psycho-analysis prides itself on restoring the capacity for pleasure, which is impaired by neurotic illness. As if the mere concept of a capacity for happiness did not suffice gravely to devalue such a thing, if it exists. As if a happiness gained through speculation on happiness were not the opposite, a further encroachment of institutionally planned behaviour-patterns on the ever-diminishing sphere of experience. [...] Prescribed happiness looks exactly what it is; to have a part in it, the neurotic thus made happy must forfeit the last vestige of reason left to him by repression and regression...

And, further,

... a cathartic method with a standard other than successful adaptation and economic success would have to aim at bringing people to a consciousness of unhappiness both general and --inseparable from it--personal, and at depriving them of the illusory gratifications by which the abominable order keeps a second hold of the life inside them, as if it did not have them firmly enough in its power from the outside.

Not that we're pessimists, Theodor and I. Adorno writes very movingly about happiness somewhere in Negative Dialectics. Wherever it is that he quotes that same parable about the kingdom of the messiah, which parable turns up in Bloch, in Benjamin, and in Agamben's The Coming Community.

Since this blog has gone all-quotations and no commentary, let me close by saying, you know who else has thought about happiness? Roger at Limited, Inc, and also Claire Colebrook. Colebrook wrote this great essay on happiness-through-the-ages (ages of philosophy), which was published in a slightly obscure journal of contemporary fiction called symploke. I look forward to the book version. I quote it in advance.

Im in ur jobz, making less money

"TutorVista employs 760 people,including 600 tutors in India, a teaching staff it plans to double by year-end.

Minor Notes

1. Blog-roll updated to include the correct address of Ads Without Products, instead of its old ghost address which is filled now with both ads and products. A w/out P noted the same NYT article I'd meant to write about: anthropologists as war consultants (Hearts and Minds).

2. Desertion is much on Carceraglio's mind of late. Carceraglio and friends may once have exaggerated desertion's virtues in certain derivative political pamphlets we wrote or claimed to have written. But we did not exaggerate by much:

Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting. Defection modifies the conditions within which struggle takes place, rather than presupposing those conditions to be an unalterable horizon; it modifies the context within which a problem has arisen, rather than facing this problem by opting for one or the other of the provided alternatives. In short, exit consists of unrestrained invention which alters the rules of the game and throws the adversary off balance. --Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude

Return of the Weird

K-Punk announces the reprise and continuation of the Weird Realists' conference, December 1 in London, with speakers China Miéville, Ray Brassier, Benjamin Noys, and Graham Harman.

The conference announcement asks, "What examples of the Weird can be found in fiction, film and science?"

Carceraglio proposes Melville's "The Encantadas":

Man and wolf alike disown them. Little but reptile life is here found: tortoises, lizards, immense spiders, snakes, and that strangest anomaly of outlandish nature, the aguano. No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

And:

On oppressive, clouded days, such as are peculiar to this part of the watery Equator, the dark, vitrified masses, many of which raise themselves among white whirlpools and breakers in detached and perilous places off the shore, present a most Plutonian sight.

Gone to St Charles Island, The Encantadas

Doubtless for a long time the exiled monarch, pensively ruralizing in Peru, which afforded him safe asylum in his calamity, watched every arrival from the Encantadas, to hear news of the failure of the Republic, the consequent penitence of the rebels, and his own recall to royalty. Doubtless, he deemed the Republic but a miserable experiment which would soon explode. But no, the insurgents had confederated themselves into a democracy neither Grecian, Roman, nor American, but a permanent Riotocracy...

--Melville, "The Encantadas"

The 9/11 Claimant

I am fascinated by the 9/11 "claimant," though, to be fair to her, it is said that she never put in a claim for any survivors' payments; she claimed her due only in the form of presiding over a survivors' organization, giving tours of ground zero, and making speeches. It's as though the authorized version of the 9/11 trauma discourse had invented this woman.

“What I witnessed there I will never forget,” she told a gathering at Baruch College at a memorial event in 2006. “It was a lot of death and destruction, but I also saw hope.”

I think of Borges's The Tichborne Claimant, though they do not seem to share much. The Borges version is about the brash success of an impresario's putting forth the loutish, dim Tom Castro as long-lost baronet Roger Tichborne. It's the disidentity that seals the Tichborne Claimant's success, according to Borges:

If an impostor, in 1914, had undertaken to pass himself off as the German emperor, what he would immediately have faked would have been the turned-up moustache, the withered arm, the authoritarian frown, the grey cape, the illustriously bemedalled chest, and the pointed helmet. Bogle [the Tichborne Claimant's partner and mastermind] was more subtle. He would have put forward a clean-shaven kaiser, lacking in military traits, stripped of glamorous decorations, and whose left arm was in an unquestionable state of health. We can lay aside the comparison. It is on record that Bogle put forward a flabby Tichborne, with an imbecile's amiable smile, brown hair, and an invincible ignorance of French.

This is not at all the 9/11 claimant's strategy. She has the resume of someone who worked in an important building, for an important company, on an important day:

She has told people that she is the daughter of a diplomat, and is described on the Survivors’ Network Web site as “a senior vice president for strategic alliances for an investment think tank.”

Biographical material circulated at a school where she was scheduled to speak listed her as a financial executive who had done work in the United States, the United Kingdom, Argentina, France, Singapore and Holland for leading firms. She said that she had started out as a management consultant for Andersen Consulting.

****

As for her educational background, she has told people that she has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and a graduate business degree from Stanford, though officials at both universities said they could not find records of a student by her name.

****

“We had a long e-mail conversation over a two-month period, before we met, and shared our experiences,” Mr. Bogacz, who escaped from the north tower on 9/11, said in an interview. “The constellation of her experiencing the plane crash personally on the 78th floor and her fiancé’s being in the other tower and getting killed was just amazing.”

Nor did she neglect the detail of the kaiser's withered arm; her colleagues claim to have seen "the scars and marks on her arm that she said she suffered in the terrorist attack."

Collapse Is Back and Bigger Than Ever

Collapse Volume III will be available in a matter of days (mid-October, but order now; they only print 1,000). It will contain a collection of articles under the heading "Unknown Deleuze." Collapse III will not contribute to the literature that gathers Deleuze's scattered remarks on a particular topic (all those unimaginatively titled compendia: Deleuze and... Music, Film, Automobiles....). Nope; it's nothing like those. Collapse III aims to "clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be 'integrated' – what is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts 'signed Deleuze' converge?"

And Collapse III contains two newly translated articles by Deleuze, plus a transcription of the recent Speculative Realism conference. And besides, the Collapse volumes are beautiful objects.

Krapp's Last Semester

Unlike the prisoner, the graduate student cannot say "you only do two days" (the day you matriculate and the day you ex-matriculate).

[I intended here a skein of apercus, citations, the odd link or two, an incautious confession. How much more often I used to post, and with more reading to report on, when I was "on the outside."]

Camps

NPR on a post-Katrina trailer park: "according to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi's parks are 79 times higher than the national average." (from NPR, by way of Husunzi)

New York Times on workers' camps outside Dubai (via Amitava Kumar).


Subtopia on inflatable tent camps and the detention market.




If Carceraglio's books weren't all packed away, maybe there'd be some more thought in this post, or anyway some citations. Not least, from Antoine Volodine's novel Dondog.

To Mars

Carceraglio makes ready to move to Colorado, a place Carceraglio has never seen but imagines thus:

"...[Philip K.] Dick's Mars is the prototype of his characteristic desert of misery, in which the most dismal features of a provincial 1950s Amercia are unremittingly reproduced and perpetuated against a backdrop of ecological sterility and the intensive use of low-yield technology."
--Frederic Jameson, "The Experiments of Time: Providence and Realism," in The Novel, Volume 2, Forms and Themes.

Or thus:

Beyond this flood a frozen continent
Lies dark and wild, beat with perpetual storms
Of whirlwind and dire hail, which on firm land
Thaws not, but gathers heap, and ruin seems
Of ancient pile; all else deep snow and ice,
A gulf profound as that Serbonian bog
Betwixt Damietta and Mount Casius old,
Where whole armies have sunk: the parching air
Burns frore, and cold performs the effect of fire.
--Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II.

Coconut School

From Kenneth Koch's "A la Coconut School"

Oh, to go back to the Schools
With all that we know today!
The teachers we thought were such fools!
The hours and hours of play!
On était un peu ridicule
And went riding about on a mule
With a pleasure undreamed-of today
Bonheur aujourd'hui même pas revé!

[carceraglio thanks Martin Browning for pointing out this poem]

*

From Matthew Stadler's Reading Notes to "Don't Take Any Jobs," describing a writing class he taught in his apartment:

We drank, ate, and played a lot of games. Class made us happy. The other thing we did was read together. But we never read our own work. “Workshop critiques”—submitting your own work for critique by the group—had only ever confused me, disastrously so in graduate school, where the workshop was full of articulate, educated people who knew a thousand ways to describe failure. I think great writing is, de facto, indefensible. It’s great because the writing is its own only argument—nothing further can be said to explain the pleasure it brings. Throw that kind of meat in front of a pack of hungry wolves, and the results will be predictable. Instead, we read great work by other people and marveled at their successes. We read closely, desirously, word by word, trying to understand how the writing we admired did what it did to us.

I marshaled these citations to write something about graduate school, but I'm not sure what that something is.

Here Goes

JM Coetzee's novella The Vietnam Project begins with an epigraph by Herman Kahn:

"Obviously it is difficult not to sympathize with those European and American audiences who, when shown films of fighter-bomber pilots visibly exhilarated by successful napalm bombing runs on Viet-Cong targets, react with horror and disgust. Yet, it is unreasonable to expect the U.S. Government to obtain pilots who are so appalled by the damage they may be doing that they cannot carry out their missions or become excessively depressed or guilt-ridden."

In Zoo, Robinson Devor's & Charles Mudede's new film, the late "Mr. Hands" emerges occasionally as just such a guilt-ridden character.

Mr. Hands was an aircraft engineer at Boeing; the quasi-documentary Zoo suggests he worked on an ultra-secret military project. Mr. Hands (the name was his chat-room pseudonym) was also a "zoophile" who died in consequence of one his sexual encounters with a horse.

In the film, an interview with Chalmers Johnson plays on the radio as Mr. Hands drives to his rural trysting place. The secret that few in the audience are likely to share with Mr Hands--having sex with animals--doubles for the secret nearly everyone in the audience does share with him: complicity with the war in Iraq. (A war that is still a secret, even though everyone knows about it; since the "end" of the war, "the United States has dropped at least 59,787 pounds of cluster bombs in Iraq." The war in Iraq presents the paradox of the public secret.)

This structure of the secret is there, but to read Zoo in this way leaves out some things. Who was it who said that In Cold Blood begins with the murderers' boast that they put the Clutter family's brains on the walls, and that the tension of reading In Cold Blood derives from waiting to see that horrible scene -- from waiting for what you know is coming.

Something similar occurs in Zoo (another work of high-art reportage)--perhaps to its detriment. The film teasingly, gleefully shows and does not show the man-and-horse sex act. Darkness keeps falling, the zoophiles keep swooning into heavy-lidded sleep, barn doors shut and the screen goes black. In one scene, the police screen an impounded DVD for the barn's owners, who never dreamed such goings-on were going on in their barn. As the sex scene unfolds out of our sight, we hear lots of grunting and straining, we see the opera buffa reactions of the nauseated barn-owner and his weeping wife, and then we do see a few seconds of tape. Unless my imagination merely supplied the footage, having repeatedly been promised it in so many fades-to-black.

***

Post-script: One of Hermann Kahn's RAND papers, Ten Common Pitfalls [of Military Planning], gives Kahn's own theory of sexuality. "Modelism," page 12: "In the illustration we see a young man dancing with a dummy. He is either desperate or guilty of Modelism. ... It may or may not be desirable for a young man to construct his love life around fantasies, but the mature heterosexual male wants a girl! There really is 'nothing like a dame.'"

Final post-script: this Coetzee essay, which I think I got from Ads without Products.