“The Internet is a big distraction,” Mr. Bradbury barked from his perch in his house in Los Angeles, which is jammed with enormous stuffed animals, videos, DVDs, wooden toys, photographs and books, with things like the National Medal of Arts sort of tossed on a table.

“Yahoo called me eight weeks ago,” he said, voice rising. “They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? ‘To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet.’

“It’s distracting,” he continued. “It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

More cantankerousness?  Oh yes.

From Wikipedia:

“When asked in multiple interviews Dailor said the record would tell a story dealing variously with the art aesthetics of Tsarist Russia, astral travel, out of body experiences and Stephen Hawking’s theories on wormholes.

“There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin’s body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin’s body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it’s too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down…there are some obstacles along the way.”

Optimistically (or perhaps by some stretched symbolism), Madoff has become Louis XVI, some kind of patsy for that current National Hegemony… His was the pursuit of the American Dream. According to its principles he is entirely without fault. I’m talking about honesty here; honesty as a concept rather than a virtue. Not that kind of honesty which acts as a kind of apology; honesty which, by its expression, forgives any past transgression. Or ‘Painted Honesty’, which wears honesty like a badge - it goes to the regular Honesty meetings, bakes fundraising cakes, attends the annual barbecues and can recite it’s 12 point manifesto - not rhetorical honesty. Its that slimy back-alley honesty. Gumshoe Honesty. Honesty that changes everything once She Walks In… it’s a nation of the night-time, of cash deals, casual what-ifs, of “hey, it’s not like anybodies gonna get hurt…”. I do not have a heart. I have only some painted muscle which exists only because it occurs to me to speak about it when I want to talk about honesty. When I am talking about love, I am talking about This Thing. There is no actual love involved, which we are both aware of in this transaction, but neither are we aware that this is the case. Not conciously; rhetorically. Only in that confused way in which we speak when we speak of honesty - a field of rotted livestock is not a tragedy, it is a tax break; an impetus to go into the fertilizer business. There is a sadness here difficult to express, and one we are lucky if we ever really, really feel… Our abdication into language. I give you “love”. “I love you” - a transaction, cashiered, accounted for… The point is the disconnection between what we say and what actually is (excusing, of course, this shorthand). I’m saying that the American Dream is actually something rotten and corrupt that masquerades as freedom and prosperity - like that dead guy Bernie from those wacky movies, and we’re doing our best to pretend he’s still alive and wonderful so people will want to invest - in this image. It is all we are capable of.

In this way Bernard Madoff is a patsy. His crime? Criminality to maintain a sense of pre-ordained dignity. The poor bastard.

A patsy, by definition, is the victim of the cruelest hypocrisy. See - I like Judas. Judas at least dealt with his shortcomings. They were embraced. JC - swanning about in the guise of the miracle man, with the freakish luck of having Omnipotence controlling your trust fund - didn’t really have anything to prove. He was one of those goodlooking straight A kids always slightly baffled by their luck - and didn’t part of you just want to, at least, stub their toe slightly against the curb of life? Madoff, let us quote your biblical sin: acceptance of 30 pieces of silver for the soul of the American Dream, that imaginative part which does not exist except within our painted, rhetoric hearts! Or more literary - a Faustian bargain! Now the Devil claims his due! Ah, the devil has no claim on Honest Madoff.

The thing is that Madoff deserved his riches. It does not matter if it were a lie. He believed so much in himself that, like Judas, he rose from his undeserved preterition to claim his seat beside the Throne. I bet he was a man who could stand in front of a Friedrich and not ask “What does this mean?”. He’d elevated himself to not completely write off Mondrian or confuse his Kandinsky with his Klee. After all, I ask from my pulpit, is it not a devilish trick to say that there are only 144,000 allowed into Heaven - or so few who are allowed Complaet Freedom, given the amounts of money out there no matter how theoretical - while the rest, no matter our personal worth, are cast out from Salvation? Given that Fox News, that Dark Secret American Heart, hooked up to our subconcious EKG as it were, tells us that not selling our souls to the Devil, or not sucking the massive black penis of the Dark God Mammon is just economically silly, and, in fact, tantamount to a moral sin… then I pity Mr. Madoff. I pity his years of Guilty Pleasures. I bet he bought “conflict-free diamonds”, knowing all the time that it doesn’t matter whether it’s conflict-free, or conflict-full, as the entire industry is a fraud - but he bought it. He paid for Salvation. Look, there’s a lot of the people in the world, capeche? And God - he’s omnipotent, sure - but he’s a busy man, and he loves you, but what’s love, y’know? I have love for my fellow man, but how much do you love me? Enough to dedicate your life to me? Nice - but I got that. Enough to buy me a plasma screen? And some hookers? Well - so long as they’re high class - ain’t a sin if they turn up at my door, is it? Be a sin to turn them away; they’re just enterprising young lassies after all.. (and it’d be cruel to deny them some God before I send them down to the Devil, wink wink…)

As far as I’m concerned? I forgive Bernard Madoff. In his guilty plea, in his knowing acceptance of the necessity of his role as poor old Iscariot, his saint-like humility, his general acceptance of terms, he signed away a debt he knows he owes because, in playing by the rules, he must also die by them - look. Let me put it in Ole Time Preacher Terms: do we hate the tree that bears the rope? Do we hate the rope for the burden it bears? No - we hate the man who burdens the tree, who burdens the rope. Ok, cool - you’ve killed the executioner, but the KKK lingers on, posing new patsies every time, no better than suicide bombers, really; each of them promised Nirvana, just before the axe falls. Lol-capitalism!

Two passages I love. Ever thought I was a bastard? That I had issues? What, only every day? Ah, fuck you. Here’s my excuse:

“Writing that has a voice is writing that has something like a personality. But whose personality is it? As with all art, there is no straight road from the product back to the producer. There are writers loved for their humor who are not funny people, and writers admired for their eloquence who swallow their words, never look you in the eye, and can’t seem to finish a sentence. Wisdom on the page correlates with wisdom in the writer about as frequently as a high batting average correlates with a high I.Q.: they just seem to have very little to do with one another. Witty and charming people can produce prose of sneering sententiousness, and fretful neurotics can, to their readers, seem as though they must be delightful to live with. Personal drabness, through some obscure neural kink, can deliver verbal blooms. Readers who meet a writer whose voice they have fallen in love with usually need to make a small adjustment afterward in order to hang on to the infatuation.”
- Louis Menard, “Bad Comma“, published in the New Yorker, June 28, 2004.

And a deeper, more literary example that I have read about a thousand times this week and absolutely just nails the Man in the Ivory Tower:

“Nothing that this or that casual informant might tell me was of much use in helping me to settle the question of the goodness or wickeness of Bergotte. An intimate friend would furnish proofs of his hardheartedness; then a stranger would cite some instance (touching, since it had evidently been destined to remain hidden) of his real depth of feeling. He had behaved cruelly to his wife. But, in a village inn where he had gone to spend the night, he had sat up with a poor woman who had tried to drown herself, and when he was obliged to go had left a large sum of money with the landlord, so that he should not turn the poor creature out but see that she got proper attention. Perhaps the more great the writer developed in Bergotte at the expense of the little man with the beard, the more his own personal life was drowned in the flood of all the lives that he imagined, until he no longer felt himself obliged to perform certain practical duties, for which he had substituted the duty of imagining those other lives. But at the same time, because he imagined the feelings of others as completely as if they had been his own, whenever the occassion rose for him to have to deal with an unfortunate person, at least in a transitory way, he would do so not from his own personal standpoint but that of the sufferer himself, a standpoint from which he would have been horrified by the language of those who continue to think of their own petty concerns in the presence of another’s grief. With the result that he gave rise everywhere to justifiable rancour and to undying gratitude.”
- Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, Kilmartin version.

I experienced a rare moment of pure joy in watching this:

It’s by a band called “Spastic Ink”, which is virtuoso guitarist Ron Jarzombek and friends who, on one album, wrote awesome prog-rock soundtracks for parts of classic cartoons like Charlotte’s Web and Bambi.

The “Cereal Mouse is fun too

This week, the Nobel Prizes were awarded.  The Literature speech was typically excellent, almost up there with Faulkner or Saramago.  Le Clezio is an interesting dude.  The crux of his speech is pretty much this bit:

“The idea that literature is the luxury of a dominant class, feeding on ideas and images that remain foreign to the vast majority: that is the source of the malaise that each of us is feeling—as I address those who read, who write. Of course one would like to spread the word to all those who have been excluded, to invite them magnanimously to the banquet of culture. Why is this so difficult? Peoples without writing, as the anthropologists like to call them, have succeeded in inventing a form of total communication, through song and myth. Why has this become impossible for our industrialized societies, in the present day? Must we reinvent culture? Must we return to an immediate, direct form of communication? It is tempting to believe that the cinema fulfils just such a role in our time, or popular music with its rhythms and rhymes, its echoes of the dance. Or jazz and, in other climes, calypso, maloya, sega.”

He goes on to beautiful places.  I get the same feeling that I got from Milosz’s speech - a sense of understanding.  It may be a bit tl;dr, but this part just nails it:

“To act: that is what the writer would like to be able to do, above all. To act, rather than to bear witness. To write, imagine, and dream in such a way that his words and inventions and dreams will have an impact upon reality, will change people’s minds and hearts, will prepare the way for a better world. And yet, at that very moment, a voice is whispering to him that it will not be possible, that words are words that are taken away on the winds of society, and dreams are mere illusions. What right has he to wish he were better? Is it really up to the writer to try to find solutions? Is he not in the position of the gamekeeper in the play Knock ou Le Triomphe de la médecine, who would like to prevent an earthquake? How can the writer act, when all he knows is how to remember?

Solitude will be his lot in life. It always has been. As a child, he was a fragile, anxious, excessively receptive boy, or the girl described by Colette, who cannot help but watch as her parents tear each other apart, her big black eyes enlarged with a sort of painful attentiveness. Solitude is affectionate to writers, and it is in the company of solitude that they find the essence of happiness. It is a contradictory happiness, a mixture of pain and delight, an illusory triumph, a muted, omnipresent torment, not unlike a haunting little tune. The writer, better than anyone, knows how to cultivate the vital, poisonous plant, the one that grows only in the soil of his own powerlessness. The writer wanted to speak for everyone, and for every era: there he is, there she is, each alone in a room, facing the too-white mirror of the blank page, beneath the lampshade distilling its secret light. Or sitting at the too-bright screen of the computer, listening to the sound of one’s fingers clicking over the keys. This, then, is the writer’s forest. And each writer knows every path in that forest all too well. If, now and again, something escapes, like a bird flushed by a dog at dawn, then the writer looks on, amazed—this happened merely by chance, in spite of oneself.”

Someone who knows about these things ought to check out the Krugman and Ahtisaari speeches - once they’re online.

Randomly, have stumbled upon long lost friend.  Like Stanley running into Livingstone.  Anyway, his work in the time between has been good.  I like his story “The Dude” - reminds me of Flannery O’Connor, but a Flannery I can relate to.  And now, he paints!  And paints well!  While some of us have been languishing in the dark, others have been evolving.  Hurrah!  (With a little bit of woe )

Anyway - James Apps!

So, a couple of minutes ago, Jean-Marie Gustav Le Clezio won the Literature Prize as an “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”.  I, personally, have not heard of him (which is why I like the prize), but what’s interesting is a Swedish betting agency which listed odds as follows:

Claudio Magris 4,00
Adonis 5,00
Amos Oz 6,00
Joyce Carol Oates 8,00
Philip Roth 8,00
Don DeLillo 11,00
Haruki Marakami 11,00
Les Murray 11,00
Yves Bonnefoy 11,00
Arnost Lustig 15,00
Inger Christensen 15,00
Jean Marie Gustav Le Clezio 15,00
A.B Yehousha 21,00
Mario Vargas Llosa 21,00
Michael Ondaatje 21,00
Thomas Pynchon 21,00
Tomas Tranströmer 21,00
Antoni Tabucchi 26,00
Assia Djebar 26,00
Cees Nooteboom 34,00
Ko Un 34,00
Margaret Atwood 34,00
Alice Munro 41,00
Bei Dao 41,00
Carlos Fuentes 41,00
Gitta Sereny 41,00
Milan Kundera 41,00
Peter Carey 41,00
Chinua Achebe 51,00
Cormac McCarhty 51,00
Harry Mulisch 51,00
Ian McEwan 51,00
James Ngugi 51,00
John Updike 51,00
Mahasweta Devi 51,00
Umberto Ecco 51,00

An interesting, and in my opinion, somewhat dire list.  Most of them are alien to me.  Those I have heard of, seem mediocre.  Oates is a clever lady indeed - but where are her moments of transcendence?  Adonis, I figured, was a sure bet - the Nobels, being famously political despite their contrary protestations, would be all up in some pseudonymous, Arabian poet.  Mulisch, Ondjaate, Llosa - large, flat, contemporary novels, which insist upon themselves. McEwan, Updike, Roth, Murakami - intelligent populists, but I struggle to find their lasting merit.  Kundera, Eco; incredibly overrated.  Transtomer, the new Paul Valery:  no matter how talented, he’s just doomed to second place (and where is Muldoon?).   Peter Carey!  For years I’ve wondered whether he could be a contender!  DeLillo, a talented, brilliant writer - “Cosmopolis” is one of the best books I’ve ever read - but would I give him the Nobel?  Does he have that?  I don’t think he does.  If the Nobels want to really shock next year, if they want to really wake the world up to their relevancy, I would suggest that they, just for once, go for a popular vote:  redeem America and it’s brilliant, popular fiction.  Divide the prize, but not between DeLillo and Roth:  divide between Pynchon and McCarthy.  What a combination!  The head and the heart.  The looney Postmodern world in all it’s deductive brilliance, the shattered mirror composed in all it’s fragmentations, and then there’s the frontier, the freedom, the opposite which inhabits the other.  They’d work perfectly together.  It’s a no-brainer.  Consider also that Pynchon is supposedly released a noirish fiction next year, and next year is the likely release of the film version of McCarthy’s opus “The Road”.  Let them have this last gasp, this symbolic obituary; weigh up their souls, Anubis, and do your fucken job.

But they won’t, and the major reason they won’t is that neither will accept the prize.  Which makes it all the more relevant.

Onto other Nobels:  Medicine has been awarded to French people, one of whom is rewarded for figuring out that the human papilloma virus is a major cause of cervical cancer, and another couple who discovered HIV.  Deserved, but not as awesome as the time it was awarded to advances in olfactory research.

Physics has been awarded to Japanese people who have been thinking about broken symmetries in nature.  This is immeadiatly awesome, but I suspect I understand it in the same way I understand entropy, thermodynamics, and the mathematical constant e, which is to say, not at all, except in shallow, vague, poetic terms.  I require Bob.

Chemistry is easier.  They’ve been able to tag a cell found in a jellyfish, which, through it’s meanderings reveal other, previously invisible proteins.  Like last years award for Surface Chemistry, this is basically a forensic thanks, which seems fair enough.

Tommorrow is Peace.  And then, Economics, which I immediatly distrust, seeing as how it’s basically a dicksuck of the Chicago School of Capitalists - Friedman and all his cronies.  I have nothing but contempt for anything who dares to promote a darwinistic economic system.  We have free will, motherfuckers, we have love for our fellow man;  don’t we?  I’m waiting for a convincing argument for capitalism.  Still waiting.  (Like democracy, it’s hardly the best we’ve come up with or practiced).

On a happier note:  The Ignobels!

“…if Iran acquires nuclear weapons, it is an existential threat to the state of Israel…”
- Sen. John McCain, First Presidential Debate

I’m not sure what one of them is, but it sounds bad. Suddenly, French intellectuals in all their cafes! A coffee drought! Oh noes!

So, the presidential debates are probably important. I’m not sure what to make of them, except that for once McCain sounds good and Obama stutters a lot and sounds out of touch. McCain still refers to Afghanis as “bad guys”, and at one point proposes “league of democracies, a group of people, a group of countries that share common interest, common values, common ideals, and they also control a lot of the world’s economic power..” He goes on to talk about how this group can affect their behaivour and economies. What I’d like to know is how this is different from either the UN or the failed League of Nations? I thought this was pretty much the job of the UN. Is McCain proposing a UN sans “cheeky darkies”? Something like an overt Bilderberger committee?

While Obama sounds flustered, out of touch, and confused, I get the feeling that at least, he gets it. He has a sense of history. McCain believes too much in America - in it’s evil Friedman economics, it’s self-righteousness, sense of entitlement - while Obama sounds like the sort who is more interested in people than myth, sympathetic more to failure than to power. And he likely will fail, because I think what he’s asking Americans to do is to confront themselves a little more than they’re comfortable with.

Simple little haiku, but it sums a lot of this whole ridiculous economic “crisis”:

The world of money
is all imaginary.
Now everyone knows.

- Ran Prieur