Author: Vince Passaro

CRAZY SORROW, a novel, out from Simon and Schuster Sept 2021. Writer of many short stories and personal and critical essays, and a staggering number of book reviews (an assessment I make now that I'm old enough to be staggered by the number), as well as VIOLENCE, NUDITY, ADULT CONTENT: A Novel, published by Simon and Schuster in 2003. Currently at work finishing a collection of short stories and tentatively embarked on a new novel.

In the Rare Case…

In bed, on a Sunday afternoon in late summer, a man and woman, each divorced and twenty years past young, or so one would say if young now didn’t last so long: they were kissing a little, touching a little, the walls around them magic-lanterned with shadows and jumpy dots of sunlight, which passed through the leaves swaying protectively over the woman’s open window. He and she had arrived at the relationship, romantically speaking, empty-handed: harrowed and childless, on guard but well-intentioned.Their expectations had been kept forcibly muted for enough years to make muted their primary setting and, so far, these echoing conditions had worked out for them: the sex was good, compatible, unstrained, often physically intense.As for the rest, it might be too much to say they enjoyed each other’s company (often they did, of course), but more important, at their age, they didn’t at all mind each other’s company.

It’s been two hours and forty minutes, she said. Her fingers were gently touching and letting go of his exceedingly erect penis. Bits of a breeze slipped over them, tinged with the first hints of autumn.

Don’t be a clock-watcher, he said. Or a cock-watcher.

I’m concerned, she said.

Let’s not get neurotic about it. I’m sure it won’t fall off.

They kissed and began to press harder against each other, kissed more, and then he slid an arm under one of her legs and turned her, willing, onto her stomach. Pressed down hard against the bed she made deep noises and she had a way of curving herself back up to take him that inspired him to a certain athleticism and fierceness. It made him wonder at the beauty of the human spine.

It was the usual thing, they had met on the Internet, in chilly March. The first time she’d taken him in her hand, she’d whispered a delightfully filthy exclamation of her desire, which he remembered now every time she touched him and every time he entered her. On other fronts, they had moved slowly—like the infirm. Each had a jagged life history, sharp enough to draw blood; they had not yet attempted to bring these unfinished pieces together—had plainly avoided it, in fact—to see if any of the edges fit.Their relationship, an evening or two during the week, Saturday nights leading to Sunday afternoons such as this one, felt less like integral moments in the histories of their lives than like unique respites from those histories. He had been married for twelve years, and only after it was over was he able to acknowledge that throughout those years, even during the engagement, he had been hoping for (and endlessly planning) his escape. His wife had smelled this on him as if it were another woman, and it had driven her into ever more prolonged periods of estrangement and rage. He spent a year sleeping on the couch before she finally threw him out; he had gotten what he wanted without having to say the words his own father had delivered to his mother: I’m leaving you. It required no genius to see that this victory had not been worth the years required to achieve it.Yet for a time—he was trying to break the pattern—he had continued to relate to women in this way, attracting them and seducing them and then, almost systematically, making them furious.A woman he’d been seeing a few years earlier, a psychologist, had called him one day after they’d been together for a couple of months: Look, she’d said. Let’s end this before it gets toxic.

****

Normal breath was returning; they lay facing each other again, exploratory fingers interlacing and trailing along the other’s palms. Suddenly she pulled her hand away, fell onto her back, and said, Now it’s like three hours.When do we call the EMS people?

I can’t stand it if you’re going to do this, he said.

Why did you take that thing!

I’m fifty-three, he said. Men my age tend to over-insure. Next year I’ll wear white shoes.

But now look, she cried. How much did you take?

Twenty milligrams, he said.

 

That’s the biggest dose!

Self-confidence is everything, he said. And the pill was shaped like a rugby ball, and it was blue, a nice shade of blue, like the pineapple candies my grandmother gave me. Except more opaque.

That’s not all that’s blue, she said.Your grandmother. Jesus . . . She sat up.

I want some tea, she said.You?

Frankly, you know, we need to deal with this, he said. Before we can think tea or a snack or whatever.

She said,We dealt with it already. More than once. I mean it was great, but I’m done.

It never was completely dealt with, he said. He tried to present this in a relaxed and cheerful tone, wanting to find what he knew to be caring and concerned in her, rather than this, which was closer to unnerved and horrified. He said, I mean, it never, you know . . .

Came? she said. Is that the word you’re grasping for? It wasn’t for lack of chances, I just want that on the record.

There is no record, he said.

There is always a record, she said.

We need to deal with it just one more time, he said. It won’t take long. I can tell.

Listen, she said, I just want to hand it over to medical science at this point.

She rose then and, in a short off-white silk robe and bare feet, left the room to make the tea. He was always amazed at how a woman can get up from such fucking and appear so unaltered—undisturbed—by it. This was true all through the animal kingdom, he’d noticed. Chased, captured, held down, ravaged. He’d seen it with cats, ducks, geese. Afterward, they give a shake and walk away. He watched her through the door, watched her ass move in the robe and her foot’s strong tread on the wood floor. She could fuck all day, it wouldn’t faze her. Her floors were very clean. She lived neatly, frugally, and on schedule. It was a little foreign to him, a little frightening. She wrote everything down, kept lists, rose early. But after two glasses of wine she was a different soul, a mischievous flirt. If a bunch of people stripped and jumped in the pool, or the ocean or the lake, she’d invariably be one of them.At such moments she looked a good bit younger than her age. Someday he’d like really to set her loose, he imagined at a fashionable party of some kind, leave her there and wait to see what she would bring home.

Restless, he reached down, grasped the offending member, and found that even he wasn’t interested.And it was sore.What a lifetime of trouble you’ve caused, he muttered. He didn’t mean it. He liked his penis, as most men do, he approved of its doings, when it worked. He got up, put on his underwear and an open shirt, and wandered out of the bedroom.When he found her, she was at her desk opposite the dining table, online and tea-less. She had not made it to the kitchen. One of her cats, still as an Egyptian statue, sat on the desk beside the laptop, its eyes watching her fingers flit on the keypad.

I looked it up, she said. I’m finding a lot of humor and porn of course, and blog commentary, but not much by way of solid medi- cal information. I mean what exactly is the problem if it makes the leap from three-hours-fifty to, like, four hours and ten minutes? I’m assuming the concerns are cardiovascular.

Such ad hoc health research was her forte. She was a fan of all ailments and, figuratively speaking, she kept near to hand an exten- sive set of deadly diseases with which she was conversant. She feared them on an as-needed basis. In the narrative arts, she tended to reject tragedy, which, he wanted to tell her, was something she might work on a little.Tragedy can perform the same psychic cleansing functions as hypochondria but without the nutty doctor bills.

The cat lifted its hindquarters, turned, arched and stretched, and jumped off the desk. With a muffled peh-dump, its soft feet hit the wood floor.

I have years of experience with the penis, he said.The concerns are gonna be with the brain.

She looked up at him, standing there.You should button those boxers, she said.

He said, Let’s go to the kitchen. Tea sounds good. I can fill you in on the medical perils. Basically, it’s insufficient blood flow northward—he pointed from his boxers toward his head—leading to catastrophic cell loss. Memory and judgment are always the first to go, with the ability to tell right from wrong an invariable early victim. Soon the majority of so-called higher functions are gone. By the second day, all that’s left are addresses and phone numbers from one’s youth. Some odd facts, you know, like CarlYastrzemski won the Triple Crown in 1967. Frank Robinson did it a year before, Mantle ten years before that, but, bizarrely, no one did it again for forty-five years. Four-plus decades. That’s what runs through your head. That and the lyrics to “Close to You” by the Carpenters.

She stood, and he hugged her and hummed the tune into her neck. She put a hand on his chest. Not too close, she said.That thing is still loaded.

In the kitchen, he watched her handle her things, always an insight. She worked with delicate efficiency, filled the kettle, placed it on the stove, reached for the teapot, ran it under hot water, brought out the tea. Gentle movements, no banging and clanging; so much of our lives lived in the interstices of these humble rituals, so much of what we know arrived at in this sacramental way. Small scoops of tea—three—into the pot.The fruit of the vine, the work of human hands. All these gestures of daily life like artful sacrifices. He had few greater pleasures in life than watching other people work: twenty minutes and he felt he knew the person he was watching . . .

Okay, she said, so when you fall into the total vegetative state and they give you the earphones—

All Carpenters, he said. I’ve written it into the living will already. Revive?

Nah.

Feeding tube?

Hmm, he said. Not sure.

A tough one, she said. I’ve thought about this a lot. You don’t want to lie there and starve to death. On the other hand, it’s kind of brutal. It looks like someone’s trying to siphon gasoline from your throat.And there’s the funnel.

God, let me go fast, he said.You know what worries me? People feeling compelled to visit the hospital every day.The times in my life when I’ve had to go to the hospital every day were the most awful imaginable. I’d rather be in the hospital than have to visit it every day.

Not me, she said. I’d rather visit. Bring chocolate, argue with your doctors.

He couldn’t have explained why, but he said,You’re planning to be there at that stage?

She paused—she came to a momentary stop against the countertop, stilled as the cat, mint-leaf-adorned tin of tea in her hand. He felt her consciousness fall, falling, an unexpected tumble into a chasm of thought that began with what he’d just said and deepened and widened quickly into her past, her future . . . He felt the room change. They looked at each other. Her eyes—he had never quite really seen her before, now he was seeing her. God she was beautiful there, in nothing but that little silk robe.Words, sentences started to float into his mind, then he thought, no, stop, just look at her. He thought, just look at her. This required a certain courage. Neither spoke.Then she began to move again—how long had it been, three seconds? He felt a softening, an easing of tension in his shorts—as if this intense small moment had begun to draw all his blood back up toward his skull, passing first of course through the heart: his erection was fading, finally, like a ship going down in a silent, glassy sea.

Just in time, he said, pointing.

And she looked—at his boxers, his groin—and smiled a peculiar small quick smile, warm and a little sad. Yet he, suddenly, felt happy. And lightheaded and flushed—he assumed from the pill. He stepped toward her. On the stove the pressure in the kettle was rising, for the metal pinged like a little bell, a child’s thing, a short note that was delicate and slightly distorted, like the notes on a steel drum. The small sound had been sent, it seemed, to mark the time—four hours!—and he wanted to say, no, it’s alright—it’s alright—the danger has passed.

This story first appeared in AGNI 83. Spring 2016. 

Guns, Guns, Guns

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

D. H. Lawrence wrote that in 1919, I think, or the early 1920s, after visiting the US and Mexico, driven from England by the scandal of being married to a German. It’s in reference to Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer — the character and the series of books in which he appears, including, famously, The Last of the Mohicans. Here was the American story and we never stop telling it: the perfect killer, flawless with the knife and gun to which he  is spiritually wed, a man of crystalline morality and with no time to waste on the complexities of civilization, including the law.

How many people, I wonder, does the United States government in its various guises kill every year? A number we’ll never know. Drones, satellite guided missiles programmed from some control center in Virginia, air power, special op assassinations, battles unannounced in countries we citizens don’t know we’re fighting in (see, Yemen) — those advisors, you know, they’re never old and wise in the ways of war, sage teachers; they’re sleek special forces who do not, despite what NPR tells us, sit back at base camp and then ask the indigenous troops how things went in the fighting today. We don’t know the number we kill but we know it’s large. Barack Greatest-President-of-Our-Lifetime Obama* expanded these programs, he didn’t diminish them. We know all this: sophisticated, educated, informed Americans, each one of us knows this is going on and sets the knowledge aside, as Augustine postulated that God must set aside divine foreknowledge so that we may exercise freedom of will. When we first learned, or when it was first acknowledged and not denied, that our government did such things, it was 1975 and 1976, with the work of the Church Commission (Frank Church, Senator-Dem from Idaho, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations) — the population was outraged. The political fallout was that the CIA was essentially stripped of any of its functions that weren’t directly related to gathering foreign intelligence (which is of course the task they’re least good at), oversight committees were established, etc etc, and conservatives and hawks complained bitterly that the US was crippled and unable to do its important work secret-policing the universe. There were whole documentary movies about how special forces went around Vietnam assassinating civilians thought to be part of or sympathizers with the Vietcong. This was shocking. This was horrifying. We must never do this again. We elected a minister. We discovered morality seemed to have a price, though of course the connection was imagined in terms of Carter’s ‘weakness’: the second oil embargo, the long occupation of the American embassy in Tehran.  Our affair with decency lasted four years then we elected a guy whose last name sounded like “ray gun”. We’ve never complained about our nation’s death-dealing again, not in large and politically persuasive numbers.

Because this is who we are. Our prosperity and our identity are built above a cave of fire. We created a nation at the barrel of a gun, taking the land from the people who lived here before us, forcing them back, back, back into the desert. We made this theft into the stuff of legends that still define us.

Meanwhile, George Washington left office in 1801 warning against foreign entanglements yet that same year we began our permanent military travels, first, of course, to the Middle East, where we fought Muslims, specifically The Kingdom of Tripoli, an Ottoman satellite state, which demanded tribute to protect American ships from the Barbary pirates. As with so many of our engagements there and elsewhere the results were ambiguous and the outcome inconclusive. Nonetheless since then we’ve always been going somewhere to fight somebody. Look up the list of US military engagements on Wikipedia. It’s prodigious.

And now, 215 years later, the United States, a nation whose government is “of, by and for the people”, is the world’s largest producer of weapons, we spend more on the military than the next five countries on the list combined (53 percent of all US discretionary spending is on, essentially, guns and people to shoot them, from land, sea, air and outer space.) We have 1.25 million cops, the larger forces now highly militarized, and more people in prison, in sheer numbers and per capita, than any other country in the world.

Yet somehow we believe this armed viciousness that we’ve allowed to become the central activity of our government — these drones and special ops forces and planes and ships and satellites, this multitude of cops in riot gear (some taking time to break down a lefty lemonade stand on the Capitol lawn in Washington — note the number of cops this requires: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04MNf1YdNxI ), this whole fused core of violent values, dating back to our origin as a nation — can be kept from leaching into American civic and social life.

But if we don’t reform the violent center, put out the base fire, we can only do patchwork to fight gun violence on our streets, in our schools and theaters and nightclubs. So many have called again since yesterday’s killings in Orlando for the banning of assault weapons. This would help, of course, it would certainly reduce the number of deaths in mass shootings, but the gesture, doomed to fail in any case, doesn’t address those core values; we’ve permitted at least five generations of our leadership, ten presidential administrations (give or take, I didn’t count Ford), to expand in every way our national capacity for violence. Asking the US to ban assault weapons is like requesting that the Unser family use only public transportation, you know, to set an example. It’s a very nice idea.

There are aspects of our national culture that fill one with pride and affection: we are frequently generous people personally, friendly and open. We’re innovative, clever, we’ve done great things artistically, scientifically, technologically. We have a fundamental though almost always contextually ignorant desire to help suffering people better themselves. We believe still, powerfully, in the unqualified freedom of the individual to think, speak, believe, and express. We are almost delusionally optimistic.

We are also intensely violent. Us. There is a feminist argument to be made here, that “us” means men, not women; the argument has statistical weight yet somehow I only partially accept it. All these men have mothers and most have wives yet somehow they have exerted no notable countering influence on the culture of violence, which suggests something in the formula is amiss — in any case on that question I am out of my depth, except to say that when we talk about a culture, a nation, we are implicitly including the women and the men so how the blame gets apportioned is somewhat academic. The prospect of Hillary Clinton as president offers two scenarios to the imagination, one, that she will be the tough, even ruthless politician we’ve known her to be, able to move a more docile Congress, or two, that as with Obama and race, the macho backlash will be debilitating. In any case, so far, we do nothing. A movement to ban assault rifles may or may not (I’m betting that one) succeed but it doesn’t get to the matter of who we are, acknowledging it, working to change it by changing our vision of ourselves as intergalactic gunslingers riding into the unknown to save the good folks and kill the bad guys. The president said yesterday that to do nothing is also a choice and it’s one we have been making for many decades — since World War II, the fighting that gave us our glory, our honor, our sense of moral certitude. If we’re going to continue now going around the world in profligate sprees of killing, then we’re going to kill at home. There’s more chance we’ll get a single payer national health plan before we’ll ever see a meaningful ban on powerful weapons in the United States. You can blame the NRA folks all you want but they didn’t invent us, we invented them.

 

 

________________________

* Obama is such a curious case. I understand Bush and Cheney better than I understand him: they are clearly misinformed, intellectually deformed, and vicious. And they act that way. Obama is none of those. He loves children, it’s been one of the pleasures of his years in office to see him interacting with children; he chokes up every time he’s speaking about horrors that affect them. He is a man, clearly, not only of intelligence and some scholarship but a deep moral character. His speech at Hiroshima was a beautiful example of what, rhetorically, and compellingly, he’s capable of. Yet little of this moral and intellectual sensibility and force is allowed to interfere with administration policies. As he spoke at Hiroshima, it was important to remember he’d authorized a $3 trillion expansion and modernization of US nuclear weapon capacities over the next 30 years. He’s the drone president, the deportation president, the president whose Justice Department took to charging whistle blowers with treason, and corporate criminals with nothing at all. He allowed to continue practices such as “extraordinary rendition” and other forms of illegal war. He allowed three cuts in the food stamp programs, trading it off for other parts of the budget he felt it important to retain — trading, in other words, poor people’s food. What are we to make of him?

On the power of men

I got the following on Facebook from Michael Thomas Cain:

 

Men WTF

It was originally posted by some humor page. Although the particular contrast is ridiculous, and though god knows women in general are disempowered in many more ways than are men in general, something serious lurks in the question. Part of the humor is that the man on the left appears to us, unquestionably, as an autonomous and empowered individual. Of course he’s Cary Grant and those are expensive clothes but a more modest figure along the same lines would still appear so. The man on the right not so much. And if we’re so moved we can BE him; but no matter how moved, we cannot be Mr Grant or any of his possible substitutes. Part of this sense derives from the authority we ascribe to the past, which is always greater than the authority we grant to the present. Yet, even so, someone came up with this.  We live in a society that detests the autonomous individual and one that exercises its power in invisible and therefore minimally resistible ways, such as through constant titillation of meaningless consumer desire. When I see men now, bankers and lawyers and the like, dressed in contemporary versions of Grant’s get up here, they look to me like fake grown ups in a school play.

 

Nine Wars

OR Books sent out a promo a few days ago for Patrick Cockburn’s War Diaries, which date back to 2001. It features an excerpted Q&A with Cockburn and began with this exchange, Cockburn’s end of which I found deft and provocative.

Q: The diaries go back to 2001. What can this long-ish view tell us that wasn’t apparent in day to day despatches?

Cockburn: It was not apparent until quite recently that the nine wars now going on between north Pakistan and north west Nigeria – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, south west Turkey, Yemen, Libya, South Sudan, north east Nigeria, Somalia – were part of a post-Cold War pattern in which states that had achieved independence and self-determination were destroyed or weakened by foreign intervention fueling and exacerbating internal discontents. There is beneath them a mix of on-and-off imperial intervention, sectarian war between Shia and Sunni, conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, dictatorship and revolution.

Nine wars. I’d never seen nor heard any commentator give the count before. We’re all aware of these conflicts, they’re in the news often enough, but in this obviously very broad statement Cockburn puts them all right in front of us, with geographic coherence. Looking at the map is intriguing: if you draw a line straight west, from the northern Afghanistan/Pakistan border, where we long were led to believe bin Laden was hiding, essentially to Gibraltor; and another down toward the southwest along the border and stretching from there to the equator, within that wedge are all the conflicts he names plus a few others he doesn’t (Mali, Western Sahara, etc). This is gratifying somehow: I doubt I’m alone in wondering from time to time what’s exactly going on with these conflicts, which involve, to greater or lesser degrees, jihadism, sectarianism, oil, power vacuums, total corruption, and large scale enslavement especially of women — yet which seem somehow disconnected, without a coherent narrative relationship that one senses ought to be there. Makes me, at least, want to read Cockburn’s book.

Final thought: Near the center of this triangular area you cannot help but notice pulsing there a large organ of blood and money, Saudi Arabia. North of it, Iran. Slowly, painfully, the Obama administration has kind of, sort of, reoriented the US’s interests and attention, VERY slightly away from the Saudis and really, really slightly toward the Iranians. Similarly, a slight, slight turning of the shoulder to the Israelis.

Of the three the only one that practices a democracy of full-participation is Iran, which remains a state in some respects run by its democratically elected government and in other crucial respects tyrannized by clerics. Saudi is a tyranny outright and en toto; and Israeli is an apartheid state. Throw in our old friends the Egyptians: a military dictatorship.  The healthiest looking of these variously despotic and terroristic regimes — the one that shows any sort of promise of future improvement — to my eye is Iran. Nevertheless, the Obama reorientation will go no further under a Clinton administration and to some degree, likely a considerable degree, it will be reversed. Between the Iranians and the Saudis, I think we’ll be betting on the wrong horse. One of those kick-over-the-lantern and burn the stables down kind of horses, in fact.

 

Alas poor Wallace! Infinite Jest approaches 20th anniversary

Tom Bissell has written for the The New York Times Book Review this weekend [ http://nyti.ms/202l8lj ] an appreciation of David Wallace’s Infinite Jest — he’s written, in fact, an introduction to the 20th anniversary edition of the novel, to be published soon, from which introduction this appreciation is taken. It’s a nice piece, a joyous piece. It’s an intelligent and non-cringe-worthy hug. I wrote about the book at the time of its publication for Vogue, not with great insight; I don’t remember what I said except some version of ‘this guy is the most important American writer of his generation’ which he unquestionably was, and remains. The most intelligent (by far) contemporary review that I saw was Walter Kirn‘s. [Which I guess in those days would have been in New York Magazine(?)]. The book was monumental, and still is, but it thrived despite a condition that Norman Mailer smartly (okay, exaggeratedly) saw in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch — that you could excise a hundred pages and the author would be hard pressed to know what they were or what parts of the text might now be missing them. Bissell says, admitting he can’t describe how, that Wallace was a spiritual writer; I’d say he was first and foremost a moralist and like all great moralists he had a vast horizon of spirituality he was seeing and hiking toward. Once the moralist achieves this place, he won’t need to moralize anymore; or not nearly so much. Wallace saw the moral implications of everything: most devastating for him, he saw the moral impurities that went into his own work, and he could not forgive them. Following his battle against irony is like watching a great pianist one by one lopping off his fingers — which are, after all, the source of all his mistakes. I don’t think a satisfying (comprehensive, penetrating) critical appraisal of Wallace’s work has yet been written and I don’t think it will be any time soon, for we do not live in a critical age. We live in a celebrity age, and it’s way too soon to wash the celebrity off of Wallace’s story, his work, and his reputation.

 

Sept 3, Waiting for Sleep, Thinking of Brodkey, Lish, and Towers

Up tonight, knee shaking, foot shaking. I think Trader Joe spiked my decaf. So it’s 1:00 a.m. when I start thinking about Harold Brodkey — does anyone think about Harold Brodkey anymore? All artistic talent of the first order is incomprehensible but certain talents strike us as more familiar and approachable than others. George Orwell, for instance, whose prose’s muscle and clarity — clarity above all — affected me strongly, does not mystify me. I have a solid sense of where he came from, where his language came from, his general mode of thinking.  Brodkey’s particular genius remains ungraspable. The language is Jewish, it’s American, it’s baroque, it’s beautiful and divine. Divine I mean as in suffused with a spiritual force and a spiritual necessity above that mustered by mere mortals.  It is miraculous and harrowing: to look into his work is like watching a great surgeon, a world class surgeon, magically operate on himself, remove his own organs, examine them in bloodied hands, drop them in a pan.

The reason I’m thinking of Brodkey is first because of Gordon Lish, whom I have wanted to write more about. I said in an earlier post that I think he is the most influential editor of his time and perhaps the most influential literary figure of his time in the United States. He came into my mind because I could suddenly hear him say Brodkey’s name. Never Harold Brodkey, just Brodkey.  As  a teacher Lish held Brodkey up always as the pinnacle of what you as a writer could achieve if you stopped fucking around and fooling yourself that what you’re doing now mattered in the least or displayed a shred of real talent… if you essentially got your ass up off the planet and into the heavens where it belongs.  Lish reacted to words, to writing, and to writers in an unmistakably erotic way: he was then and I imagine still is a literary creature full of worship and desire. He moved hard toward what he liked, or he moved not at all. He was notoriously heterosexual, at least as far as all the rumors went, and there were many. Yet with certain male writers, as he evoked them, you could hear an erotic love, an erotic pleasure: Brodkey, Hannah, DeLillo. There were many other males writers who, as he worked with them, became part of the incantations: Anderson Farrell and Tom Spanbauer come to mind.

What needs to be looked at, carefully, and I don’t have them and I don’t have the time to go find them and read them, are all the issues of The Quarterly that he published from the mid-80s to… when? The early 90s? The work that I will forever most associate with The Quarterly are the drawings of a particular artist featured in every issue, whose name I cannot remember, and the poetry of Jack Gilbert — Lish’s dedication to publishing Gilbert somehow cements the sense that what he treasures most in literature is the language of revealed secrets. Gilbert’s poems always seem to me to have the effect of a door opening and throwing a lovely golden light into a darkened hallway. Illumination and revelation. Art as a moral act and an erotic act: the connection of one being to another.

But — after all this passes through my mind —  I realize why I am actually thinking of Brodkey: because it is PatriciaTowers’s birthday today. She was born on September 3.  What year that was is a deep secret, which only the obituary editor at The New York Times might know, and certain agencies of government; putting my hope in the Times I intend to outlive her just so I can find out. She too, like Lish, has been one of the great and important editors of her time: but utterly different. (They are both retired now.) They both want the writer to seduce, but Pat wants to end up in love. It is a sensuous love, certainly: she worked on ideas and on texts somehow in the manner of a Buddhist forever engaged in the arrangement of stones in a Japanese garden. Everything — what was a good word, a good sentence, a good idea for an article at this time in this place — seemed to be decided by feel: a feel informed by sympathies that radiated outward from the stones, ceaselessly radiated, and took in the world and the air in which the stones must rest, all with the aim of making sure that they were properly — elegantly, correctly, beautifully — situated there. Her work was as close as a busy editor’s work can ever be to flawless, something Gordon Lish would never dare claim for himself.

And her relation to Brodkey? Among other things, my own meager career, such as it’s been. In 1988 she left Vanity Fair, where she’d been one of the founding editors, and done some amazing things unimaginable now, in today’s over-processed publishing landscape (such as, I remember, two simultaneous pieces on Glenn Gould, who had died a year or two prior, one by Tim Page and one by Edward Said, that ran stacked one atop the other splitting the pages they appeared on). She left VF to work on a start up magazine, a New York City magazine, called 7 Days. I had just finished my half-assed MFA thesis in fiction at Columbia, studying under Pat’s husband, the novelist, critic and teacher Robert Towers. He had mentioned me to her as someone who might possibly be able to review a book, and I wrote to her a few months after graduating asking if she had any work. This is the kind of inspired editor Pat always was: she did have a book, she decided, for someone who’d never written for hire or reviewed anything at all: the most long-awaited work of the year, by one of the most controversial writers on the New York scene. She decided I should review Harold Brodkey’s Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, his first book in almost 30 years. My status as neophyte had a certain appeal, she told me: everyone else she could think of already had an opinion about Brodkey. This was, I would come to understand, a loaded remark. His charms, which were considerable, were often overtaken by other more difficult aspects of his personality: he wasn’t merely an acquired taste, he often made himself into a lost taste. As it happened I had met Brodkey, he’d done a four-day Master Class that spring at Columbia, during which he’d looked at me in my plaid shirt and unwashed jeans and ten-year-old hiking boots which — God knows what i was thinking — I had planted up on the conference table, and he said, “You must have a great deal of self-confidence to sit there like that.”  I was so naive Ithought it was a compliment.

So sometime before 2 a.m. I go looking for a copy of this, my first non-fiction publication, my review of Brodkey written for Pat, and find many other interesting things in 30 years worth of files, until finally, around 3, in the bottom drawer rear, in the last file, at the back of the file, I find it.  It’s not a bad piece, though slightly repetitive; like everything else I write, too long; I tried to do justice to how daring the work is, what a psychological high-wire act Brodkey performed. The parts of him that were overbearing were crucial to his art: his art was overbearing as part of its design. More than any other writer I know of, he wrote in order to be loved, and so as painful as writing is for all of us who do it, it was more painful for him.

After the Brodkey piece ran in the fall of 1988 I went on to write many many pieces under Pat’s guiding hands, each, because of her, a stone of unique shape and color. She will be annoyed, superficially only, I hope, to be written about, but it’s just my as-usual-long-winded way of saying: Happy Birthday, Pat. I’m feeling a little sleepy now….

Thinking 1979

DSC_2677

I just had a scientific breakthrough in my head, in which for a moment I understood how size is relative to or perhaps even a function of time. This is patently obvious to people who study physics in any kind of sophisticated college-level way, I assume, but it’s been a stumbling block for my stolid imagination. (Time, that is.) I was staring at the picture of the full moon that I posted on Facebook the other day, looking at all the pock marks where it’s been struck by flying space debris; particularly enjoying the outward bounding marks of scattered force, as if this were a time lapse photo of the event as it happened…. Then I was picturing us living out our human history on earth some thousands of years with asteroids flying past us here and there at various safe distances, working out what we perceive as fate between two accidental moments when the planet is struck by some large flying stone; I could see the whole thing — all of the universe with bullets of hot rock pinging around in it. And if you are much bigger than the universe — say it’s a beachball in relation to you — then the bullets go shooting around in there real fast but if you’re sub-atomic-particle-tiny, as we are, then they move slowly, taking hundreds and thousands of years to go from one place to another.

What’s clear is that I have to get hold of some good weed and revert to a 1979 lifestyle. In Detroit. Or New Orleans. Someplace cheap. Read old New Directions paperbacks. Everybody will have lots of pubic hair — huge mounds of it. Untended genitals. I’ll wonder — in secret terror — about the future.

blue moon 31 July 2015 _1

Hiroshima, Please Remember

hiroshima child

Seventy years ago on this date in 1945, the United States dropped the first of the two atomic bombs that it deployed against Japan; the second fell on Nagasaki three days later, on Aug.9. Immediate deaths from the bombings exceeded 100,000. Over the months that followed this number approximately doubled due to the after effects of radiation sickness, burns, other injuries and illnesses, and malnutrition. The very large majority of these injuries and deaths were suffered by civilians. It is not a date we take much note of in the United States, but it is and will long be a very important ceremonial date in Japan. I am always touched on this date by a sense of sorrow, horror, and guilt.

The suffering endured in that war (as in all wars) takes us to the limits of our understanding. Current estimates (that is, higher than previous) suggest that as many as 80 million people died as a direct result of the war’s conduct. It was the ugly culmination of a complex, brutal and deluded narrative of nationalism, colonialism and industrialism — a narrative that was purposefully suffused with the toxic chemicals of moral necessity and historical inevitability by the relentless propaganda of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Opium Wars, the Crimean War, the Boxer Rebellion, the Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, World War I — all led to this global bloodletting.

Such a convulsion it seems was required to end what might be called Phases I and II of Western colonialism. Phase III began with war’s end and masked itself in bogus terms of national liberation, an idea with significant power for the many human beings who had sacrificed so much to liberate Italy, France, Western Europe, China, the Pacific nations, Southeast Asia, et cetera, from the control of two brutal and deranged tyrannies. The Soviets of course peddled the same story to their own satellites. Rather than concoct a highflown and ludicrous narrative of moral necessity to provide cover for rapacious commercial interests (see Conrad, “Exterminate the brutes!” etc), the West in 1945 and after created a narrative of political necessity to do the same. Nations were granted seeming independence but had to throw in their lot either with the Soviets or the West, who then essentially controlled them politically and economically. (Vietnam is an example of a nation that, able to achieve its independence due to the temporary disempowerment of its traditional overseers, was plucked back into a prolonged anti-colonial war of independence that masqueraded as a Cold War showdown. The Vietnamese had no interest in the West, China, or the Soviets — but in a tri-lateral world, such a position was not permissible. This was true of a number of war-ravaged nations in Africa as well: Angola, Somalia, and others.)

The endurance of this bullshit orthodoxy sees us now in the ludicrous position we occupy in Pakistan, continuing to prop up (and, for our own protection, semi-occupy) a land filled with our obvious enemies, supplying them with weapons and staggering quantities of cash and some kind of meagre and incredible story of alliance, all because once upon a time, when such mattered to us, they happened to oppose, for nakedly ugly reasons, the world’s largest democracy that sits beside them — India — which apparently, given our continuing inability to gain close relations with it, we still fear is going to “go Communist”. The historical rationale for this alliance with Pakistan is on its face insane. yet no reformer in Washington — regardless of his or her seeming mandate or power or righteousness — will ever succeed in rationally changing the policy. It is a genetic fact, a vestigial tail, and it will be removed either by catastrophic injury or the invisible forces of evolution. My money’s on the former.

Just so with the growing hostilities between the US and China and between Western Europe (read: Germany) and Russia. If you fill the world with lies and have to behave as if they were never lies at all, these are the positions you find yourself forced to take. This is what lies do: they have a demonic power subtly to disguise the landscape and make outrageous sins seemingly necessary and inevitable.

Given all that, let’s try this as an exercise: at least on this date, but one hopes for all the days that follow, when you hear this bullshit on the news — our “allies” in Pakistan, the necessity of “countering the influence” of China, big bad Putin and Russia — envision a mushroom cloud, see in your mind ten thousand children burned to hideous deformation, and say these words to yourself: 80 million dead.

The flasher’s raincoat: Germany, Lithuania, Greece, and others

History. I can’t sleep, the Wednesday Guardian arrives in my email. Check it out. The Greeks as usual. Headline: “Greece given days to agree to bailout deal or face banking collapse and euro exit”. They have like 48 hours to show new austerity budget plans to the Europeans or else the troika pulls the plug, no more cash for you (Angela as the Cash Nazi) the banking system collapses and the Greek government will be forced to issue a new currency with which to pay its bills. Of course Angela is not letting two facts stand in her way: first, that austerity hasn’t worked and won’t again; it causes all kinds of suffering, yes, which she likes, yes, yes! — but it shrinks an economy faster than the savings can pay back debts, so that debt in ratio to the GDP keeps growing the more the debtor pays it back, requiring more austerity, etc.; and, second, that the Europeans are again requiring the Greek government to do exactly that which in two elections they’ve been mandated not to do, most recently by 62 percent of their people. So much for European democracy.

OKAY…. so I’m reading this story and I get to this wee tidbit:
“[With] the Greek government it is every time ‘mañana’,” said Lithuania’s president, Dalia Grybauskaitė, one of the Greek government’s harshest critics. “It can always be ‘mañana’ every day.”

Get it? Lazy darkies to the south? Racial enough for you? When I read this, as when I read some days ago that we’re moving major weaponry into these new allies’ (the Baltic three) territories, my stomach turned over.

And history herself can be heard shrieking in the attic.

Let’s dance back in time, to the days when Germany occupied Greece (having saved the hapless Italians from an ass-beating) and were launching an invasion of the good ole’ Soviet Union. The Lithuanians — before the Germans got there but as soon as they knew they were free of Soviet oversight — started murdering Jews in massive riots in the Vilnius ghetto. They started taking Jews out to the woods and slaughtering them and throwing the bodies in open pits. The Germans soon arrived to make everything official — although it’s been written that here, as in Ukraine and Croatia, the Germans were a bit taken aback by the bloodlust of their new subjects. Nevertheless working together with the Germans the Lithuanians made sure that by the time the Soviets liberated the place, of the 220,000 Jews who’d inhabited the country in 1941, only 10,000 were still alive. (Those Jews still alive in the Lithuanian concentration camps, as the Germans retreated, were sent to other camps further west to keep the Soviets from freeing them. Amid that chaos, this they took care of.)

It’s a lot of work, a huge amount of labor and logistics, to murder 200,000 people and dispose of their corpses. Picture it. Go ahead. A simple, muscular job, for simple, muscular people.

Nowadays the Lithuanians are busy repatriating the dusty bones of their beloved leader of the era, a Nazi collaborator (whom the U.S., of course, took in, as we took in so many other war criminals) and having marches in the streets honoring Lithuanian members of the Waffen SS.

So we need to hear ethnic slurs from our new fucking friends the Lithuanians like we need to get shot in the groin. It is sickening.

Angela marches on. Francois scrambles to keep up. (A socialist, he is, you know. Theoretically.) The other history lesson: Greece was run by a vicious clan of oligarchs until the Germans took over. The Greek working classes then produced the largest and most effective resistance movement in Europe. Many of these brave fighters it turned out wanted to be friends with their socialist brothers and Germany’s enemy, the Soviet Union, so the Allies made sure to squash all movement toward real democracy in Greece after the war and brought back the oligarchs and the military to run the country as a right wing dictatorship. Churchill was apparently a key player in forming this policy: Thanks old man. They finally shook this off in 1974 but the oligarchs still frequently ran the country and have never been far off; they are the great friends of the west. And clearly the Germans, the ECB, etc, want them back in power.

And what’s austerity, after all, to an oligarch? A reason to hire more personal security, perhaps.

(The US nightmare is that the Europeans will indeed cut loose these sulky, shiftless darkies and who will come in to lend a helping hand? Hmm? Try Russia. That’s what WE care about.)

Let us keep in mind, too, that in 1992, an exuberantly reunited Germany threw kerosene on a small flame by instantly recognizing their old WWII ally Croatia when it feebly declared independence from the theretofore united Yugoslavia — or, essentially, the Russia-aligned enemy of the WWII years, Serbia. A few weeks later, effectively having started an ethnic war in the Balkans that would last four years and consume tens of thousands of lives, the German foreign minister resigned. His departing words were ‘Oops, my bad’. Now, who has us facing off against WWII enemy Russia because of Ukraine? Germany. Who is driving WWII conquest Greece into a decade of suffering because it wants to punish a recalcitrant old enemy and remove its Socialist government? Germany. Who is the ultimate enemy, the enemy of enemies? Russia. Who will stumble idiotically into the coming conflagration, not knowing our asses from our elbows, historically or strategically? Us.

Germany as the robust new leader of Europe is redrawing all the lines of their Eastern campaign in WWII, this time with France and the US behind them, the French because they’re craven, us because we’re ignorant. Interestingly enough, the British, who actually know history, are hanging fire. In the end chances are few but they still exist, that the British will do that superb British thing and stand up to the whole lot of us. I like to dream.

All the highmindedness of Europe: it’s like a flasher’s raincoat.

Thomas Piketty on Germany’s Misplaced Moralism

From an interview on July 5 in Die Zeit:

Thomas Piketty | © dpa

Thomas Piketty: “Germany has never repaid.”

In a forceful interview with German newspaper Die Zeit, the star economist Thomas Piketty calls for a major conference on debt. Germany, in particular, should not withhold help from Greece.

This interview has been translated from the original German.

Since his successful book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” the Frenchman Thomas Piketty has been considered one of the most influential economists in the world. His argument for the redistribution of income and wealth launched a worldwide discussion. In a interview with Georg Blume of DIE ZEIT, he gives his clear opinions on the European debt debate.

DIE ZEIT: Should we Germans be happy that even the French government is aligned with the German dogma of austerity?

Thomas Piketty: Absolutely not. This is neither a reason for France, nor Germany, and especially not for Europe, to be happy. I am much more afraid that the conservatives, especially in Germany, are about to destroy Europe and the European idea, all because of their shocking ignorance of history.

ZEIT: But we Germans have already reckoned with our own history.

Piketty: But not when it comes to repaying debts! Germany’s past, in this respect, should be of great significance to today’s Germans. Look at the history of national debt: Great Britain, Germany, and France were all once in the situation of today’s Greece, and in fact had been far more indebted. The first lesson that we can take from the history of government debt is that we are not facing a brand new problem. There have been many ways to repay debts, and not just one, which is what Berlin and Paris would have the Greeks believe.

“Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.”

ZEIT: But shouldn’t they repay their debts?

Piketty: My book recounts the history of income and wealth, including that of nations. What struck me while I was writing is that Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them. The French state suffered for decades under this debt. The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.

ZEIT: But surely we can’t draw the conclusion that we can do no better today?

Piketty: When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts. It has no standing to lecture other nations.

ZEIT: Are you trying to depict states that don’t pay back their debts as winners?

Piketty: Germany is just such a state. But wait: history shows us two ways for an indebted state to leave delinquency. One was demonstrated by the British Empire in the 19th century after its expensive wars with Napoleon. It is the slow method that is now being recommended to Greece. The Empire repaid its debts through strict budgetary discipline. This worked, but it took an extremely long time. For over 100 years, the British gave up two to three percent of their economy to repay its debts, which was more than they spent on schools and education. That didn’t have to happen, and it shouldn’t happen today. The second method is much faster. Germany proved it in the 20th century. Essentially, it consists of three components: inflation, a special tax on private wealth, and debt relief.

ZEIT: So you’re telling us that the German Wirtschaftswunder [“economic miracle”] was based on the same kind of debt relief that we deny Greece today?

Piketty: Exactly. After the war ended in 1945, Germany’s debt amounted to over 200% of its GDP. Ten years later, little of that remained: public debt was less than 20% of GDP. Around the same time, France managed a similarly artful turnaround. We never would have managed this unbelievably fast reduction in debt through the fiscal discipline that we today recommend to Greece. Instead, both of our states employed the second method with the three components that I mentioned, including debt relief. Think about the London Debt Agreement of 1953, where 60% of German foreign debt was cancelled and its internal debts were restructured.

“We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable.”

ZEIT: That happened because people recognized that the high reparations demanded of Germany after World War I were one of the causes of the Second World War. People wanted to forgive Germany’s sins this time!

Piketty: Nonsense! This had nothing to do with moral clarity; it was a rational political and economic decision. They correctly recognized that, after large crises that created huge debt loads, at some point people need to look toward the future. We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s. We need to look ahead. Europe was founded on debt forgiveness and investment in the future. Not on the idea of endless penance. We need to remember this.

ZEIT: The end of the Second World War was a breakdown of civilization. Europe was a killing field. Today is different.

Piketty: To deny the historical parallels to the postwar period would be wrong. Let’s think about the financial crisis of 2008/2009. This wasn’t just any crisis. It was the biggest financial crisis since 1929. So the comparison is quite valid. This is equally true for the Greek economy: between 2009 and 2015, its GDP has fallen by 25%. This is comparable to the recessions in Germany and France between 1929 and 1935.

ZEIT: Many Germans believe that the Greeks still have not recognized their mistakes and want to continue their free-spending ways.

Piketty: If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.

ZEIT: The German Minister of Finance, on the other hand, seems to believe that a Greek exit from the Eurozone could foster greater unity within Europe.

Piketty: If we start kicking states out, then the crisis of confidence in which the Eurozone finds itself today will only worsen. Financial markets will immediately turn on the next country. This would be the beginning of a long, drawn-out period of agony, in whose grasp we risk sacrificing Europe’s social model, its democracy, indeed its civilization on the altar of a conservative, irrational austerity policy.

ZEIT: Do you believe that we Germans aren’t generous enough?

Piketty: What are you talking about? Generous? Currently, Germany is profiting from Greece as it extends loans at comparatively high interest rates.

ZEIT: What solution would you suggest for this crisis?

Piketty: We need a conference on all of Europe’s debts, just like after World War II. A restructuring of all debt, not just in Greece but in several European countries, is inevitable. Just now, we’ve lost six months in the completely intransparent negotiations with Athens. The Eurogroup’s notion that Greece will reach a budgetary surplus of 4% of GDP and will pay back its debts within 30 to 40 years is still on the table. Allegedly, they will reach one percent surplus in 2015, then two percent in 2016, and three and a half percent in 2017. Completely ridiculous! This will never happen. Yet we keep postponing the necessary debate until the cows come home.

ZEIT: And what would happen after the major debt cuts?

Piketty: A new European institution would be required to determine the maximum allowable budget deficit in order to prevent the regrowth of debt. For example, this could be a commmittee in the European Parliament consisting of legislators from national parliaments. Budgetary decisions should not be off-limits to legislatures. To undermine European democracy, which is what Germany is doing today by insisting that states remain in penury under mechanisms that Berlin itself is muscling through, is a grievous mistake.

“If we had told you Germans in the 1950s that you have not properly recognized your failures, you would still be repaying your debts. Luckily, we were more intelligent than that.”

ZEIT: Your president, François Hollande, recently failed to criticize the fiscal pact.

Piketty: This does not improve anything. If, in past years, decisions in Europe had been reached in more democratic ways, the current austerity policy in Europe would be less strict.

ZEIT: But no political party in France is participating. National sovereignty is considered holy.

Piketty: Indeed, in Germany many more people are entertaining thoughts of reestablishing European democracy, in contrast to France with its countless believers in sovereignty. What’s more, our president still portrays himself as a prisoner of the failed 2005 referendum on a European Constitution, which failed in France. François Hollande does not understand that a lot has changed because of the financial crisis. We have to overcome our own national egoism.

ZEIT: What sort of national egoism do you see in Germany?

Piketty: I think that Germany was greatly shaped by its reunification. It was long feared that it would lead to economic stagnation. But then reunification turned out to be a great success thanks to a functioning social safety net and an intact industrial sector. Meanwhile, Germany has become so proud of its success that it dispenses lectures to all other countries. This is a little infantile. Of course, I understand how important the successful reunification was to the personal history of Chancellor Angela Merkel. But now Germany has to rethink things. Otherwise, its position on the debt crisis will be a grave danger to Europe.

ZEIT: What advice do you have for the Chancellor?

Piketty: Those who want to chase Greece out of the Eurozone today will end up on the trash heap of history. If the Chancellor wants to secure her place in the history books, as [Helmut] Kohl did during reunification, then she must forge a solution to the Greek question, including a debt conference where we can start with a clean slate. But with renewed, much stronger fiscal discipline.

This interview was translated by Gavin Schalliol.