Featured Post

Brad Pitt and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Aldo Ray

Continuing at Huff Po is another small minded review of Inglourious Basterds http://tinyurl.com/nyeqfc (please bear with me until I learn...

Popular Posts

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

A Reading of Derrick Jensen's ENDGAME Through Dostoevsky, Conrad and Cormac McCarthy

LINK
Derrick Jensen takes on civilization in this Volume 2. Almost 160 years after Dostoevsky first saw it coming. It is very late in the game now.

This edition contains many of his best short novels
This edition is translated with an introduction by David Magarshack and it is wonderful. From NOTES I am quoting:

...that to be too acutely conscious is a disease (p. 111)

...whatever happened, happened in accordance with the normal and fundamental laws of intensified consciousness and by a sort of inertia which is a direct consequence of those laws.....(p. 113)

He is stupid__I am not disputing that. But perhaps the normal man should be stupid. How are you to know? (p. 115)

...And what, pray, does civilization soften in us? All civilization does is to develop in man the many-sidedness of his sensations, and nothing, absolutely nothing more. And through the development of his many-sidedness man, for all we know, may reach the stage when he will find pleasure in bloodshed. This has already happened to him. Have you noticed that the most subtle shedders of blood have almost invariably been most civilized men, compared with whom all the Attilas and Stenka Razins were just innocent babes, and if they are not so outstanding as Attila or Stenka Razin it is because we meet them so often, because they are too ordinary, and because we have got used to them. At any rate, civilization has made man, if not more bloodthirsty, then certainly more hideously and more contemptibly bloodthirsty. In the past he looked on bloodshed as an act of justice and exterminated those he thought necessary to exterminate with a clear conscience; but now we consider bloodshed an abomination and we engage in this abomination more than ever. Which is worse? You'd better decide for yourselves. (p. 128)

He continues to deconstruct science as the cure and details how science will measure desires and limit risk for ready-made solutions. We are experiencing the assembly line manufacturing of desire for us.  All Dostoevsky said has come to pass. 

It is industrial society  that Dostoevsky condemns. And in 1862 abroad for the first time he goes to London and comes face to face for the first time with the industrial society which he regarded as the triumph of Baal. The thing that struck him most was the contrast between the colossal facade of riches, luxury,  and general prosperity of the few and the abject poverty of the many and their coolie-like acquiescence in their fate. In the face of such enormous riches, such immense pride of the spirit of domination, and such triumphant perfection of the creations of the spirit, Dostoevsky wrote in the April, 1863 issue of Vremya, in which he described his impressions of his first visit abroad, the starving soul is humbled and driven to submission, seeking salvation in gin and dissipation and beginning to believe that this is the way things ought to be. Facts oppress the spirit, and if scepticism is born, it is a gloomy, accursed sort of scepticism which seeks salvation in religious fanaticism. (xix)

There follows a description of London to break your heart.


In 1890 Conrad sets sail for The Congo which results in his masterpiece The Heart of Darkness.

1989 St. Martin's Press edition

 And again we have his horrifying novel of Marlowe telling of Kurtz who is a human accumulation of  European civilization. In this edition are five literary reviews of this classic work. Karl - also Conrad's biographer and a psychoanalyst - has written a devastating account of the coming apocalypse which is deconstructed by J. Hillis Miller in a different essay. The accumulation of IVORY to be shipped back to Britain and exported globally for artistic artifacts is chilling to anyone who reads through Foucault on default. We see graphically the intersection of the CUT into capitalism, mercantilism, of DETERRITORIALIZED CAPITALISM that is our state of world economic power today. It is not likely Conrad knew where in the jungle Kurtz was exploring to acquire such massive piles of ivory, more than all the other colonial traders together, operating under the MASK of being there for the purpose of bringing the savages to a civilized social existence. We know though. As Kurtz goes alone in his solitary journeys into the deep darkness of unexplored wild jungle to make contact with other tribes of natives, he is certainly shown the cemeteries of the elephants who make a pilgrimage to their burial grounds as a regular memorial to fondle the bones of their ancestors. How easy to gather up incredible amounts of what Kurtz labels reclaimed ivory in such volume as to amaze those back home in Britain. This is why the journey to him must be made, to import all this loot back home. And it comes at a terrible cost to the natives who have been conquered by the technological demonstration of such weapons as they have never imagined the existence of. Kurtz's dying words are the horror, the horror!  as he at last sees this horror brought into the world. This greed is far beyond the desire for the forbidden fruit in Eden. The destruction of a continent, the enslavement of its people, all for artifacts to be carved from the ivory over the dead bodies of elephants. And now these elephants plundered for the last 160 years are going extinct. 

This is Dostoevsky's vision of the future he sees. We are living it now, the Congo worse than it ever was, the world exploited and depleted.

Dostoevsky saw the unimaginable riches of the earth that could and would be exploited for world industrialization. 

Dostoevsky was a liberal before he stood waiting in front of the firing squad only to be part of a "joke." He was deported to Siberia to labor in a prison. The initial beginning of The Gulags.

When he served his time and returned to Russia he was no longer a liberal thinker. 

As ZIZEK has told us:
Liberal thinking contains the poison pill of its own destruction.

Liberalism teaches us to tolerate the intolerable.

Obama and Clinton were intolerable and INVISIBLE.

TRUMP is INTOLERABLE and VISIBLE.
This is what made Trump more acceptable to ZIZEK and to me.
I do like the MESSAGE of the MEDIUM of the Trump administration. Eyes have been opened and are being opened every day as he is so outrageous that ultimately he offends and enrages everyone last one of us. 

It is a pleasure. 

The Holocaust of North American Natives Beginning in 1849
BLOOD MERIDIAN is Cormac McCarthy's homage to Heart of Darkness. Its theme, its hidden apocalypse, and its characters. Conrad felt maybe he had symbolized Kurtz too much. McCarthy says no no a thousand times no and makes Judge Holden so excessive, so symbolic, so incredible, that Kurtz begins to seem rather normal.
The American has overreached the British monster.
Blood Meridian begins in 1849 when the American Government seeking to extend its reach to California now that gold has been discovered. The Gold Rush is to begin but it must have a clear  journey from east to west without Native Americans to impede it. The US government is paying $100 per single scalp to clean them out. It will be a 30,000,000 Holocaust, far beyond anything Hitler imagined or did to the Jews. It has been enfolded into amnesia in American history. At the end of it there remained 300,000 Native Americans herded onto reservations. Let's think of them as sanctuaries which is where many wild animals are now being transported to before all can go extinct. The ARK has been broken up into fragments scattered all over the world. Gone is the web of elephant ancestor memories, a Native American culture rich and different from the industrialized white man, and is just the stepping stone for a life of circumscribed imprisonment until the land is wanted for the exploitation of its riches. People will be dispossessed as will the wild animals.McCarthy ends his novel in 1862 and we see a depraved barbarian society of the west rivaling that of Dostoevsky's London in the same year. 
More horror. 

Anyone who disputes Jensen's call for the end of civilization needs to rethink their premises about any goodness to be preserved in this ongoing atrocity and horror of apocalypse. 

One is reminded of Isaiah and Jeremiah warning the Israelites to not defy the Assyrians at this time.

And while Rome burns we fiddle around.


Thursday, March 01, 2018

REVIEW: RECKLESS DAUGHTER A PORTRAIT OF JONI MITCHELL BY DAVID YAFFE


David Yaffe has written an exceptional biography of Joni Mitchell. His genius in telling her life and music lies in 


what he doesn't say!

Yaffe resists interpretation. He obviously interviewed with her and recorded what she said. And he did the same with other celebrities who knew her. Yaffe is also right on top of her music, the music of the scene around her and her position in it. He easily acknowledges her genius, her open tuning which she invented accompanied by her memorable voice. And this is where he excels in praise of her.

I spent an afternoon with her and Joy Schrieber - Joy Fibben - the manager of The Second Fret that showcased Joni before she was famous. A little dive on Sansom Street in Philadelphia, kind of dark and funky. This is where I saw her as I knew Joy and her husband. It was October of 1967 when Joni performed there when I first saw and heard her.

That afternoon she came into the area in Joy's apartment where we were talking, sat down and began to continue to write a song. Quietly, not greeting me at all, just Joy. She showed Joy some little beaded purses she had bought and Joy said, "Joni likes little purses."

I left soon after and saw her perform that evening. In performance she was mesmerizing, seductive and wonderful, promising everything. I knew she would be great immediately. A few nights later I took a lawyer friend to hear her. He was critical of her and said he thought she'll never make it. I said, "Oh yes she will." And I couldn't understand why he thought that. Perhaps it was her waif like appearance. Now I know she cultivated that until the trends changed.

Her bout with polio and her long stay in the hospital is described. This I never knew. Her parents visited her only ONCE! She was expected to be paralyzed, in an iron lung for the rest of her life. But she decided she wasn't going to be and struggled to move and then walk again.

Yaffe says only this about that time. He does not interpret it. I will though. I was utterly chilled by the fact her parents simply gave her up at a terrible time in which to withdraw all emotional support. It is no wonder her relation to her parents became indifferent after that. She must have come to terms with this then, the fact that she could never expect anything from them again. Invert this: nor did she owe them anything after this. She was free. Alone but free. With only herself to depend on. 

I am thinking at this time a great deal of Walter Richard Sickert whom I am convinced was Jack the Ripper. But another time for that. 

Joni made a deal with God. If I can walk again I will pay this back to you. She recognizes the gift and the indebtedness the gift imposes. The counter-gift. And she delivers. 

Sickert made no deal. And he was not yet 5 years old. And in agonizing pain and terror.

Yaffe is aware that she was the singer songwriter of loss. She spoke to those in pain. She knew about that. But her music was the only place, it seems, that she owned it, preferring to deny all this in her life and relationships.


… Don't it always seem to go 

That you don't know what you've got 
'Till it's gone 
They paved paradise… More


The Unsung Poet of Loss


Yaffe quotes Elizabeth Bishop on loss

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster

This is a poem in response to the great Catherine Breese Davis's great poem: A villanelle and her best known poem. A reply to Dylan Thomas's Do Not go Gentle and certainly resonates with Bob Dylan's 
"Nothin left to lose"


After a time, all losses are the same,
One more thing lost is one thing less to lose;
And we go stripped at last the way we came.
............................................................................

So we, who would go raging, will go tame
When what we have we can no longer use;
After a time, all losses are the same
And we go stripped at last the way we came.

Davis's life was composed of losses too terrible to list. Her life was simply horrifying and she was still able to leave us some of the greatest poetry of her time. 

Perry Meisel reviews Hejira thus:

 Hejira presents the Queen of El Lay (referring to a Rolling Stone diss) more explicitly in the guise of a poet than ever before, festooned with cape, beret, slanted pinky, and the backdrop of a resolutely abstract landscape. Well, that's the way poets are supposed to look, I guess, and Mitchell's (self-) portrait here seems to be a little too aware of that.  

He continues but let's not here. This is nasty and yet very true when one stands her lyrics beside a master. Meisel does not understand the oncoming of Simulated Reality when stating one is a poet in IMAGE amounts to CREDIBILITY. The image obscures the real.

Here is an image by Mark Tansey that says it 
Mark Tansey the Picasso of the 21st Century
Mitchell just posits herself as an image of poet and voila she is a poet to her masses of fans. As Bolano saying that mediocre is necessary to see the diamond in the pile. (Something like that.)

Meisel hasn't become aware of this yet but Mitchell has.

Yaffe details with interview quotes from the wonderful and generous Judy Collins who used her clout at Newport to feature Mitchell and Dylan and shine the light of excellence on them. For this wonderful act of generosity and good will Collins received only sniping from Mitchell as she didn't like Collins interpretation of Both Sides Now which Collins had made famous by singing it on her recent album. 

Obviously Mitchell never understood that one's reading (interpretation) of a song "is that person's reading," that there is NO ABSOLUTE READING. Of course Collins would read the song differently from Mitchell or anyone else. And Collins was hurt by her lack of appreciation for the great gift she gave Mitchell in headlining her at Newport.

And this brings us to "The Gift." As Ainslee Meares says it:

Meares travels in the far east searching for new ways to cure old illnesses.
We have all read countless accounts of these travels. Meares gives us such a clear perception we can only be grateful to have all the ideology and PR wiped away.

Giving and receiving. What problems arise from this simple process! It may be hard to give, and I am sure it often is. But it is harder to receive, of this I have no doubt at all. I have seen too many patients tense and disturbed because they could not receive without anger. Once might expect people to be pleased and thankful at being given something. But look around, and you will see how often it has the reverse effect.And it is not difficult to see why this should be so. Giving places the receiver in your debt. No wonder he is resentful. But there is more to it than that. As babies our mothers gave us their milk freely, and we were happy to receive it. When we were children, our parents gave and we received. This is a law of nature. It is set in our mind that grown-ups give and children receive. Then as adults we are given something. Unconsciously it makes us feel as children again....

Nietzsche deconstructs the GIFT in his Genealogy of Morals which parallels the far east thinking detailed by Meares.
If you haven't read Nietzsche it is past time.
Mitchell will finally acknowledge her daughter publicly. She has finally received the long awaited call from her daughter. The one she gave up right after birth to a foster mother, then permanently and legally surrendered 6 months later. Here is what Yaffe says:


Joni held the baby... And then Joni signed the surrender papers. There was a form in the baby's adoption files called "Non-Identifying Background Information." Without revealing either parent's name, there were details left for the baby: that her father had been above average height, that her mother had once had polio and grew up in Saskatchewan, and this telling line:"Mother left Canada for U. S. to pursue career as folksinger."

So cold that last line.

After the honeymoon reunion her daughter vented her anger at being given up. This is natural but Mitchell became estranged. That terrible last line. Gave me up to become a folksinger. How wounding.

Fans and others will read this biography and a portrait will emerge of Mitchell with her adoration of fans muted by age and experience. We cannot know how desperately she had to defend herself and her vulnerability in her life that is bare in her music and lyrics. It is not for any of us to judge. But I do cringe at some of this, but that is just my own personal baggage. Not hers.