character limit

A humble request.

Before you invite me to zoom, ask whether it could be a phone call.

Before you call me, ask whether it could be a text.

Before you text me, ask whether a DM would be better.

Before you slide into my DMs, ask whether email might be more considerate, in this case.

Before you send an email, do you really need the post office to survive?

Before you mail me a letter finally, ask yourself,

How treacherous are our words?

Despairing, come to where I am; take my face in your hands.

parental Realpolitik

En route to school today: According to my second grader, the worst thing about the president is that he puts his name prominently on buildings and "wants to name all the streets with his name."

"He doesn't know," she continues, "that everyone dies."
"Or at least," I offer, "he doesn't seem to care about anyone but himself."
A pause, then: "I can't wait until Donald Trump dies," she says, not without animosity.

Friends, I did not try to chasten her sentiment or provide some platitude about ill will. I honored the feeling of an other – her – made space for it in the morning air. Fight me.

empire

Denver. I am reading The Man Without Qualities on an elevated glass walkway between airport concourses. Behind me: terrifyingly flat, endless plains. I am sitting with my back to them so that, when I look up from my book, I see instead the snowy scapes of the Rockies, interrupted periodically by the silhouette of a jet taking off in the direction from which I've just come.

I am really hungry but cannot decide which food to try to eat; I approach the counter and recoil. Or, between chapters, I wander from one identical bookstore to the next – in which the only books on offer are "now a major motion picture," and the magazines are differentiated by the degree of shrillness with which they celebrate capitalism (on a scale of Economist to Inc.), perhaps with some firearms and naked women on the top shelf, for our more direct patrons. The bathrooms at the end of this walkway double as tornado shelters. My friend and former roommate OF lives and practices architecture in this city, but for some reason I have never visited...always coming and going from coast to coast. Someday, maybe.

Today I read and wait for the proverbial connecting flight that will plug me back into some reality – a quality (speaking of Eigenschaften) that this walkway lacks: in the nonplace of the airport, it is even more in-between, more non-. Perfect for disappearing into a long novel about civilization devouring itself.

In a bid to loosen Leo Fischel's daughter Gerda's attachment to Hans Sepp and his German nationalist and anti-semitic circle (at the desperate request of Gerda's mother Klementine), Ulrich visits Gerda and relates a (spurious) history of the earth's moon, which, he finally reveals, has no truth to it; in fact, he says, "the moon isn't really coming any closer to the earth."

Last year at this time I was finishing IQ84 in the Dallas airport, under more or less the same circumstances – a chrono-architectural link forms, not unlike the one between 1984 and IQ84; superimposition superimposes itself as mood. Perhaps, as Philip K. Dick would have it, "the empire never ended."

normalicy and Ausnahmezustand

     VIII

     The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge—unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.

—Benjamin, On the Concept of History (1940)†

On October 16, 1996, Carolyn Forché gave a reading at my alma mater. By then I was two months gone, living in New York, but a certain friend secured a cassette recording for me and an autographed copy of Forché's indispensable The Angel of History. Over time, and repeated listenings, I adopted as my own an interstitial moment in the reading, appropriated even its diction and syntax, and sowed it in my mind like a land mine. And over the years, I would dig it out and gently unwrap it on the bar where I was drinking, say, and discussing the issues of the day with a friend.

Here is Forché's set-up:

Wisława Szymborska just won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She's 73 years old. She's one of the few women to win it. It's very nice that she won it. It would be nice if all of us could learn how to say her name, but it's hard, you know. She's in here; I'm very proud to say that Wisława Szymborska is in Against Forgetting. Because the Communists thought that her writing was too obscure – and morbid, they said – so they banned her. And I will read you a poem of hers so you can judge for yourself if you think that it's too obscure.

Here is her charge –
 which I recall with unreal lucidity bursting in my brain as Amerika responded to 9/11
  and as media endlessly circled the idea of A Return To Normalcy
   (and as I debated whether "normalcy" was even a word),
    and which flashed up again this summer while discussing the US presidential election with friends in Berlin,
     and which flits up in the Now, again, in the wake of 11/9:

We like to think that if we are alive someday in a time of great moral crisis, that we would hide people, that we would be in the resistance, that we would make sure that people weren't killed, that we would be...that we would act morally and in conscience. We also suppose in our imaginations that we would survive. We always think that we would be one of the ones to make it through.

So we like to think, except, if we cannot contemplate the negative, too, then it's not thinking. "Wisława Szymborska has something to say about that," Forché continues, "and about the coincidence and happenstance and real fate of that. And this is her poem called 'Any Case'" (and this is the translation, by Grazyna Drabik and Sharon Olds, that Forché included in Against Forgetting and read that night, in 1996).

I should really get around to digitizing that Forché reading. Before night falls.

outpost

Last year (uh, 2014; read on) this thing in The Atlantic – culled, apparently, from an episode of Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible, which itself leans on this thing in the Smithsonian magazine by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie – happened across my desk on the same day as this thing (h/t Ingrid Burrington), and I thought that, to respond to the coincidence, I should dust off something apropos from a decade ago...

but before I got around to it (half a year flits past) FOLD was rolled out (h/t Ethan Zuckerman)...

and now, months and months and months after that (it's not called belated for nothing, folks!), the dusting-off has happened as a FOLD experiment:

the dusting-off has been completely abandoned, and you will not be invited to read "'Reach out and touch someone,' 1868-69," my 2005 essay on spiritualism, Planchette, the Ouija Board, and the telephone. But here are the epigraphs:

Ghost: Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Hamlet: Speak; I am bound to hear.

On errands of life, these letters speed to death. –Melville, “Bartleby”

Strange, that my first passionate love letter should
have been addressed to a dead girl. Can they feel, I
wonder, those white silent people we call the dead?
Sibyl! Can she feel, or know, or listen? –Dorian Gray

am Tor

Ich sitze.

As I have often done in the morning after dropping das Kind off at camp, I am at a table outside the Spätkauf, sipping espresso and sunning my face before beginning my work for the day. Up rolls an elderly man – sweatpants, old windbreaker, sandals with socks (natürlich). Rolls because he is using a walker with wheels and a handbrake. And because the door into the Späti is a big step up from sidewalk level, he parks there, just at the threshold, and shouts in his morning greeting. The man inside asks him what he would like. It appears they have done this before.

"Fünf Sterni und fünf Kindl!" comes the reply.

The shopkeeper spryly comes out from behind the Kasse, takes the beers from the fridge, and places them into the wire basket fixed to the front of the man's walker. Money is exchanged, farewells also. And then, with a creek and the tinkle of glass bottles – a uniquely Berlin tintinnabulum – the elderly man wheels off over the paving stones in the direction of the Schlesisches Tor. After pausing briefly to chat with another man, he continues his slow progress toward...home?

It is 9:30 in the morning.

"The Dog Barking"

You asked me about what I think of this political season (you did not ask me what I think about this political season). Because you asked me (you did not ask me), I let Thomas Bernhard's Frost speak for me:

einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr

This list of Some Things I Will Miss About Berlin was drawn up hastily on June 26, 2013, and revised, NYE-style, December 31, 2015. Evidently in my barely-employed Hausfrau years I only ate, drank, and bicycled the hugeness of Berlin...

21. Lunches at Primo Maggio

maw

The half-crazy super is sorting the garbage as I'm coming back into the building and waylays me with an obscenity-heavy disquisition on the garbage and recycling iniquities of the other superintendents on the block. The lecture is so intricate that, in the final analysis, I'm unable to figure out whether he supports a regime of recycling, with its rules and sorting requirements, or not. I gather, at least, that "in the 70s" the building's waste bags were impossibly heavy, bulging with every kind of thing. I also gather that the sanitation patrol people exercise their fining powers with vengeful pettiness. The super lauds their efforts for the most part, even as he expresses bitter resignation at the fact of their powers. But in the case of a fellow super – "a fucking idiot" who argued with a sanitation patrolman, who then radioed an NYPD car and lied to the real cops about "the idiot" having put hands on him – my guy's attitude turns to bitter hatred of the authorities.

Later in our "conversation," he describes a woman who liked to dump her household garbage in the public basket on the corner. A sanitation patrolman patiently stakes out the location, then catches her redhanded one morning and writes the ticket. With a shake of his head, the super stabs the air with his voice like a dull knife: "100 bucks!"

"Well," I circumspect, "the city has to make money somehow."

"No. This city is never satisfied. Not in a million years."

little by little and then all at once

The narrator in Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing –

There was a time when everyone wanted to be cool.

     Toward the end of high school, I decided to express only half of what I was really feeling. I can't recall the initial reason, but for the next several years this was how I behaved. At which point I discovered that I had turned into a person incapable of expressing more than half of what he felt.

– reminds me that, to conclude my high school graduation speech, with the unusually tall co-valedictorian, Alethea, towering over and beside me (she is a judge now?), I quoted McClintic Sphere:

Love with your mouth shut, help without breaking your ass or publicizing it: keep cool, but care.

exodus 2, diamond jubilee

And now for my 75th belated post, some more things I posted on Facebook — and later deleted:

exodus 1

Some things I posted on Facebook — and later deleted:

Ein Berliner

We could not have lived in Berlin as well or as cozily without the help of our Tagesmutter / neighbor / fixer / friend who, for no discernible reason except kindness, made our little family part of her world.

Her bio-family might not have been from Berlin originally. They might have been from somewhere boring and not-Berlin. She is the youngest. After some out of control years in the city ("Oh, Seth, if I tell you that some times I did not think I would live to the next day"), she had children of her own and settled with them in Kreuzberg.

Her father was born in 1923 and died in 1989. When he was eighteen he had a "Yiddish girlfriend." His brother made some kind of official report about her, and she was deported to a camp. Father then served as a military courier for three years of the war, at the end of which he returned on foot to the family, from a great distance.

Her father gave her and all of her siblings "Hebräischen Namen." She did the same for her three kids (who are – she struggles to translate – "mixed caste": their papas are west African immigrants)...oh, except for the middle child, named after the title character of a popular U.S. sitcom about a black teenager. "I love that show when I was growing up."

Her father was outlived by his brother, who died in 1995. "We never had contact with him. Nimmer. My father would not have contact with him."

She related these stories to me in parcels, at pick up or drop off, and then our house affairs would draw us hence.

A tangent on agency:

One claim (I’m tempted to say “myth,” and I’m tempted to use the adjective “ontological”) for big data is that, given a behavioral dataset of sufficient size, agency in the classical liberal sense gives way to agency in the sense of emergence, in which the subject is no longer in control of her truth; her truth is produced through a predictive analytics. The data show me better than I know myself. It strikes me that these competing notions of agency (liberal subject versus emergent subject) will themselves be applied in discriminatory ways. Privilege will permit some people to derive power from the revelations of big data, to mix and optimize these two kinds of agency, while disadvantaged people will end up having the emergence model applied to them — and be further disempowered as a result. </tangent>

tweet #∞

algorithmic really has become the new cyber-

— Seth Young (@autresy) June 3, 2015

Look both ways!

You on Amsterdam glide
mid block without the light
then turn, like a leaf out of season
red against my bicycle bell.

Madame Bovary, c'est moi.

"What word would you use," the psychoanalyst asks while my eyes seek the canyon of Manhattan towers visible from her window, "to characterize the feeling in all these things you've been describing?" Me: "Elegiac."

     Since I respect you, let me tell you a secret.
     As a cow devours grass, so literary themes are devoured; devices fray and crumble.
     A writer cannot be a ploughman: he is a nomad, constantly moving with his wife and herd to greener pastures.

After ripping through the first section, Juan García Madero's journal from November 2 to December 31, 1975, it took me months to fall back into the The Savage Detectives. Then, momentum: I take the last third or so of the novel in great gulps, mostly on the 1, nearly missing my stop every time, accompanied by a rising, heaving disillusionment at not having lived like a visceral realist or an infrarealist — hard-boiled. Bolaño didn't believe in exile, "especially when the word exile is set beside the word literature."

The momentum carried me headlong into Cole's Open City, which I had begun in Berlin and abandoned in a kind of panic, like catching a glimpse of yourself reflected at an unexpected angle in the bus window against which you've been resting your head; and for a moment you forget where you were going in the first place. This time I finish. The two, The Savage Detectives and Open City, pass through each other in Liberia, as though a minor character in Arturo Belano's travels there has wound up in a Queens detention center: Saidu telling his story though plexiglass to Julius. Now I fret that there is something equally despicable in my past that I have secreted away, even from myself, and that the therapist will uncover soon.

Directly on the heels of Open City, Zoo, or Letters Not about Love completed what now feels like a coincidental symphony — through Shklovsky's compressed exile in Berlin, a mental or spiritual breakdown between the lines of an epistolary novel that, like The Savage Detectives, ranges freely and idiosyncratically over a literary tradition and its recent politics. For both RBA and VBS, detection and the detective novel were special keys, but for opening what door? while Julius wanders to know himself, like the lunatic quoted by Benjamin: "I travel to know my geography."

...Moving diagonally like a knight, I have intersected your life, Alya, and you know how that was and how it is; but you turn up in my book like Isaac at the fire built by Abraham.

If ever a lady doth-protested too much, it was me writing dustily on the board clack tsssh click that the characters in the novels we will be reading this semester are not people; do not (for you cannot) identify. Drops the chalk into the tray.

Authentica Habita

Photo by Carmen Young.

As I was saying, The Decline of the German Mandarins is a terrific companion for The University in Ruins.

§

Visited PK + RS in PDX over the holidays. PK asked how things are going in NYC. I repeated something that I've been saying to MK for awhile: that I've begun to feel...not uprooted, but un-rooted. I no longer feel at home anywhere. I move from city to city, always just a year or a few years too early or too late. Always -jected in some way, floating. Desychronized from my own prior experiences of a place, a scene. Not there.

another A.

Phenomenology of spirit: Whenever my mind turns absently to Kojève, which is surprisingly often, he is played by Theo Kojak. There stands the prophet, gesturing before Lacan, Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Queneau, Breton, Sartre (?). His head shines. The Battle of Stalingrad was the battle between the Right Hegelians and the Left Hegelians, he intones. Who loves ya, baby?

autumn III: Spouse of Thieves

"In the film [Valis] Brady schemed constantly on Linda, Goose's wife (in the film, for some reason, Goose used his real name, Eric Lampton; so the tale narrated had to do with the marginal Lamptons). Linda Lampton wasn't natural; that came across early on. I got the impression that Brady was a son-of-a-bitch despite his wizardry with audio electronics. He had a laser system set up which ran the information -- which is to say, the various channels of music -- into a mixer unlike anything that actually exists; the damn thing rose up like a fortress -- Brady actually entered it through a door, and, inside it, got bathed with laser beams which converted into sound using his brain as a transducer. / In one scene Linda Lampton took off her clothes. She had no sex organs. / Damdest thing Fat and I ever saw." —PKD, Valis