Can a person get a glass of wine around here?

What's happening to the French cafe?
The historian W. Scott Haine has discussed the French cafe in almost inestimable social terms. As he has argued, the cafe referenced (and lauded) not private accomplishment but public community and sociability, and fostered the creation of “micro-societies” which contemporaries called “café friendships.” Men of differing social and economic stations milled about together, engaged in discussion and serving as (sometimes unsuspecting) pedagogues for one another in interactions that were “an ever shifting and intricate mosaic . . . of social relations . . . that was simultaneously intimate and anonymous.” The cafe was an almost indispensible part of the political and social shifts from an aristocratic society to a broad meritocracy. The cafe is, as de Balzac wrote, the parliament of the people but it is apparently slipping into the past. As a social and cultural institution it survived both the Nazis and Coca-Cola, apparently now a smoking ban is the current wrinkle to be ironed out, but that is hardly it according to the NYTs piece - “The way of life has changed. The French are no longer eating and drinking like the French. They are eating and drinking like the Anglo-Saxons.” (I beg license for the meager changes I made in the quotation before). It comes to it, a question of what the French from the 1930s to the 1980s would call Americanization and afterwards, recognizing that the US was as apt to fall before it as any other nation, simply globalization. Walter Benjamin noted that Paris was the capital of the 19th century but must we leave it all behind. It is not just deals that were made "behind the zinc" as it were, it is life.

Vital to the United States - so they have said

It seems that this past Friday Citigroup had its stock fall beneath $4 a share. Just some weeks ago they were floating plans to buy Wachovia, another embattled financial institution, now they are being lumped into the "too big to fail" group. I will freely admit that I do not understand much of the intricacies of the financial markets, I also admit to being less than heartened by the fact that those who are supposed to understand the whole thing apparently need frequent tutorials. Here is what I do know, in 2002 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found that the United States was the most unequal society of all industrialized nations and there has been plenty of time spent on discussion of a new gilded age where the top 1% control roughly 20% of the wealth (conversely, the bottom 80% manages some slippery control of about 17%!). But hey, as I referenced another time, in another context, as late as this time last year, there were those who were championing the idea that what was of importance was the "narrowing range of experience" - after all, "the distance between driving a used Hyundai Elantra and a new Jaguar XJ is well nigh undetectable compared with the difference between motoring and hiking through the muck."

It seems that much of that has changed with a growing global food crisis and a projected collapse of 1 in 57 banks. We have a massive banking bailout that is significantly higher than the $700 billion figure that is typically thrown about, a sum that left even those who are fans of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson concerned about the "prospect of unelected officials putting massive amounts of taxpayer resources to work without transparency or approval from Congress, and without a clear process at work, is indeed troubling." And it is the complete lack of transparency that troubles me most. Recently the Treasury released its "custodian" contract for implementing the lithely named Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 which expressly states that "the Treasury may designate [private] Financial Institutions as financial agents of the United States . . . " Buried at the end of the document, however, is the troubling bit.

For all the shoddy talk that has been spread about concerning golden parachutes and whatnot, apparently it is unnecessary for the American taxpayer to know what the designated financial agents are to be compensated for their efforts!

Of course, the plan has abruptly and awkwardly changed from the buying of "toxic assets" and it remains to be seen what is going to come of the whole mess - though the initial reaction has not been entirely to the good. But I would be surprised if there was an opening up of the accounting books in any later versions. Let me reiterate, I do not know much about many of the financial tools that are in play here (though I don't believe many other do either) but I see little to suggest in all of this that anything has changed from two years ago (almost to the day) when Warren Buffett went on record saying "There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” The even more recent $25 billion tossed to the Big 3 auto makers doesn't even really try and hide any of this. The money has few strings attached to it and (at least as it regards Chrysler) it is being given to a private company.

Ok, so let's allow for the seasoning that golden parachutes and extravagant AIG retreats have added to this witch's brew, but the discussion for the great bulk of this whole thing has been about sub-prime loans and now (with the automakers) legacy payments. The former is financial speak for "overreaching poor folks" and the latter refers to health care and pension guarantees won by unions. We need not even consider that in the last twenty years the word "liberal" has become something akin to political poison but . . . in an environment when a community action organization has been accused of being at the heart of both the sub-prime crisis and a grave threat to the very fabric of democracy, I don't think the class warfare is over though I do know which side I would put my money (what little of it is left) on.

Not Quite Year Zero - or - Obama's in the buildin'

16 years, 6 months, and what, a week? ago I was on the streets of my small home town with my best friend and wondered, in that untouched - hell, untoughed - way that only a half-educated and half-conditioned and half-cultured boy from the half-sticks can, about the culture and state of his nation as I knew that nearly an entire coast of the coutry was ablaze in riots and across much of the radio dial there were calls that, to put it kindly, emphasized not only a difference of opinion but a difference of being. As I said to that very same friend tonight - it's a machete strike to the breadth of our lives no doubt, but it is a mere wink of things when it comes to the age, the deep knee bend breaths, of the nation. I had actually planned on more vitriol, more Snidely Whiplash, well . . . lashings of things like "Focus on the Family", James Dobson's 16-page nugget of all the fear mongering trip that has come up in the last 20 months of campaigning but I would rather not. I wait for more. This seems too empty, not enough - let us see what comes, we all know my vote.

The chicanery of no expections

Well, what did those of us who expected her to flop out really expect? It's not as if Gov Palin was going to walk out on stage with toilet paper stuck to her heel and tumble down the stairs. She was in fact gracious and in control in the first moments as she strode across the stage and greeted Sen Biden between the podiums. Oddly, her (or both of their) body mike was turned up. Where it was impossible to discern what Barack Obama and John McCain said to each other quickly before their debate last week, her greeting to Biden was fully audible and marked her first success. After introducing herself and saying she was pleased to finally meet him, she asked quickly, "Hey, can I call you Joe?" His response, was inaudible but it surely as an affirmative as she then thanked him. So simple but also perfectly turned - not only did it play to her "folksy" informality but it reminded everyone of what has been passed as a gaffe by Obama from last week's meeting when he repeatedly referred to McCain as "John" while his older opponent stiff-armed him by eschewing similar niceties and called him "Sen Obama" while stating over and over his naivety. Obama ultimately switched to the more formal appelation but it has been characterized as a demonstration of McCain's greater gravitas and authority - or something that offered at least the simple appearance of such. Of course, other than another over-ripe cliched moment where she strung together a mottled twist of words that began with "Say it ain't so Joe" and then largely rambled off into something that reminded me of Bluto's speech from Animal House, she never addressed him in the familiar.

That might have been her high point, though she did demonstrate a dogged ability for staying specifically on point and knew that Israel had at some point negotiated a treaty with Jordan. Nor would she allow anything to stand in her way, early on she simply began disregarding the questions (or not understanding them perhaps), going so far as to note that she "may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear," but that she was "going to talk straight to the American people." Of course, part of that straight talk apparently goes something like "That world view that says that America is a nation of exceptionalism." I only wish that she believed that what the American people craved was intelligible talk, doggone it.
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I want an erection of the heart

I was surprised by how taken aback I was at learning of the death of David Foster Wallace some two weeks ago now. I have not been one of those who tackled his massive Infinite Jest, that 1000+ page tome to postmodern angst and ennui caught in the language of addiction and compulsive action. Rather, I am more familiar with his (more minimalist?) work in such bits as his collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and the nonfiction pieces of "journalism" that appeared in myriad places and publications. In fact, it was just these sorts of essays, ruminations on a (post)modern morality often, that punctuated my months and reminded me of the significance of the man himself - most recently in a near perfect 2004 essay on the Maine Lobster Festival that appeared in Gourmet Magazine; a piece that I took and read (and reread) in the days after learning of his suicide. It was thanks to the thoughtful work of my good friend Jon that I was reminded of an interview that DFW gave to Salon.com after the initial buzz surrounding the publication of IJ. Though it is a decade or so old, it remains a succinct reminder of not only Wallace's concerns, what most motivated his work and life, but also why he was so important an author. Whether it be the valuation and estimation of the work of other authors (and in that a reminder that good writing, though fundamentally a charade, can, as a friend of his had said, give you an erection of the heart), or simply the place of the author and literature in a postmodern world that is seemingly stuck in a cycle of hyper-entertainment and distraction, he spoke out loud the words that many of us who (and lets face up to this) came of age in the late 1980s and the 1990s, who are white and male and found ourselves in a position unfamiliar and unlike that of our fathers. It is too simple to say that our world was decentered and that "power" (in the Foucauldian sense) in the public sphere was slipping (had slipped) out of our grasp, rather the dissolution of the modernist metanarrative that had guided us for fifty or so years - that of the Cold War and righteous warriors - had necessarily faded with the collapse of the Soviet Union and was replaced (whether we realized it or not in the moment) by a narrative of plastic postmodernism. No doubt, the era of image politics had come of age in the US with the ascendency of Ronald Regan to the presidency (as has been noted elsewhere, George Bush actually was all the things that Regan simply pretended to be in the movies and as he aged the boundary between his "actual" memories and his "hollywood" memories became more and more transparent) but it was with the ending of the Cold War that we entered fully into the era that Lyotard had suggested in his short 1979 work, The Postmodern Condition, an era when information and its monopolization in non-governmental organizations pressed the levers of influence and power. Language changed with the ending of the Cold War and other technologies of exchange and transfers of information entered into the (Bourdieu-ian) field muscling onto the ground that had been the privlege of the narrative of the nation previously: "nobody speaks all of those languages, they have no universal meta-language, the project of the system-subject is a failure," wrote Lyotard - the day of a unitary and exclusionary identity has slipped well into the past. This was the tide of things that Wallace did not fight against but wanted to explicate and reveal the source of the alienation that seems to strike so many in today's America.

I can go back and read the work that he left behind at any time, but for now I have another proposition for myself. Recently, a former student in one of DFW's creative writing/literature courses at Pomona College posted a copy of his 2005 syllabus. Sophia, apparently now a graduate student in the hard sciences, nonetheless made reference in comments to her blog that her course with Wallace was her "favorite academic experience" despite the fact that she was a bio major. What I am now proposing for myself is to "take" DFW's course using Sophia's syllabus. I will read the texts listed and write the papers as detailed, and I will attempt to avoid the "rough-draftish" quality of much "semiliterate college writing" that apparently drove him crazy. With pencil, highlighter and a refresher primer on how to do a "close reading" of a text, I'm moving from behind the college lectern and putting myself back in class. I will have to wing some of it, in an attempt to follow as closely as I can his intent for the course, I will have to additionally assign myself at least a dozen smaller readings and produce 11 short writing assignments. Obviously, the elephant in the room here is that DFW is not here to provide his piquant and potentially withering but always spot-on comments on my interpretations and analysis of the assigned works and short assignments so I will be posting them here and leaving them available to anyone who happens across them and wishes to offer their own thoughts or comments. I am going to give myself a year to complete this project and as next week marks Rosh Hashanah, I will mark that as the start date for my class. That said, I will give this one caveat, I have other work, a manuscript, that must - must - be completed and with some luck (lo, how often in the past months have I uttered that simple and ugly phrase?) it will be completed in the next two weeks. It is then that I will actually begin this plan. After all, when another author who was sharing time and space with Wallace at the Lannan Foundation suggested that he was going to blow off the morning's writing to head 50 miles out of town in search of some fresh fish, DFW "looked intrigued, but advised, 'You'd better give that the old sniff test.'" It is time that I start giving much that I decide to do the old sniff test. Thanks Professor Wallace, see you in class - after I finish what I am supposed to finish.
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From Siberian trains to Vermont ski slopes and beyond

I started tonight with eyes on Christopher Hitchens and his insistence that he had no desire to be a "manager" of things before wrapping his weighty jowls in towels to test the limits of similated drowning and, to be sure, at some point I will return to it but in the meantime I noticed with no small weight on my chest that AleksandrSolzhenitsyn has died. Though it does not entirely fit and there are certain disjointers let me simply offer what I wrote in/on another venue:

From the half-blood prince of angry young men who toyed with torturefor all of 9 seconds to the fact-lashed scion of Dostoevsky wholabored under the weight of the Gulag for a decade. AleksandrSolzhenitsyn has died. As should be woefully apparent to most hereI am dabbler, a dilettante, in the best of lights a generalist -leaving the deep geology of a subject, the exhaustion of works toJon. That said, I still have my copy of "One Day in the Life ofIvan Denisovich" assigned so many years ago by the so happily sooften offered up Thackeray - is there anyone that man has nottouched/maimed here? Where are you daddy, throw the chalk, throwthe chalk, will it come down . . . will it?! I return to the textoften and am frequently made to mind of the idea of swapping sausageperhaps a bit of chocolate to make it through to the next day, thenext hour. It is quiet, the influence of this one man whounderwrote the crumbling foundation of the Soviet experiment - sothoroughly did his work undergird the dissolution of the happyproject that it has become easy happenstance to charge the likes ofPaul Robeson (like the man with the voice of God who lead Rutgers tovictory in many a charged game against the likes of Princeton andYale while being denined registry at various hotels and then deniedeats at various restraunts while starring on Broadway never had anyreason to look for venues and whatnot where he was accepted as aman) and myriad others with utter political and cultural blindness.It became easy to describe an evil empire and provided a broadvocabulary (well appropriate in many measures) that also has beenoverlooked. The awkward picture that accompanies the NYTs obit ofhim shaking hands with Putin aside, there are few people who withwords alone proved capable of shaking so much in the 20th century.This does not do it or him justice

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Was it the gravy?

It seems that Wilbur Hardee, founder of the iconic - vaguely southern - fast food chain has died. (I say "southern" because while the shift isn't quite as dramatic as the "because of the odd similarities" White Castle to Krystals - the Castle being a subject for another day, though the largest WC in the world just recently opened in the city across the river from my own hometown - it is akin in the geographic imagination to a partioning out of McDonalds and Hardees, and yes McDonalds is ubiquitous - maybe the distinction is more akin to general economics than a Mason-Dixon divide; you never look twice when you see a McDonalds in an untowards area, but how often is a Hardees restaurant seen in an area that is not bluecollar and or generally downtrodden.) Hardees saw a sister-in-law through college (and she still knows how to make large billowy biscuits) and I often skipped Sunday morning mass to eat $1.99 all you can eat biscuits and gravy of surprisingly good taste and presumed quality. But more than that, more than the many Mushroom and Swiss burgers that I consumed after weight-lifting, more than the Mailman and its juicy chicken, it was at a local Hardees restaurant that I first and most frequently practiced the "intellectual brutality" that marked much of my undergraduate career. My trek through academia to now teaching and working in its lower rungs had its own sinuous if not entirely torturous route, but it is one that would have been made less likely - or at least more wendsome - without the 24Hr Hardees that held down the edge of a local stripmall ring in my hometown that was anchored in its middle by a Big Lots where my best friend worked. It was there, in its slick, slightly greasy but hard curved benches that I plowed through pages of Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre - Foucault would come, not long after picking up a copy of The Portable Nietzsche and chewing through a used copy of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. With Jon I awkwardly clambered over these authors and the general topics of government and ethics and the specifics of the Los Angeles riots and whether Kissinger is a war criminal. I held to Walter Kaufmann as translator and interpreter and sidled up to Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach; the former I moved past, the latter I still have odd dreams about. It was while in its orbit that I first read the one novel I still return to, Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Nietzsche claimed in Twilight of the Gods (trans. Kaufmann) that he would use a hammer on the idols of the age like a tuning fork, sounding out which were hollow; I cannot with surety claim that there were any idols sounded out or even thumped for ripeness, but there were exercises of mental gymnastics and verbal menageries most certainly tumbled through in the hours between the Thickburger and the "made from scratch" overstuffed breakfast biscuits. As a leftbank cafe Hardees might seem lacking, but is it not the situation rather than the context? Do tubetops take away from the general sense of the salon?
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A Seminal Moment?

Well, it seems that not only am I a bad blogger (see previous entry from, what, a month ago?) but now I am days late and out of the country when the first black man all but secures the nomination for the U.S. presidency. Has Obama offered many concrete agenda pieces, pushed anything save for the audacity of hope? Not really, and frankly that is just fine. Is it wrong, or untoward to place political faith in a man who seems principled enough to say something is simply wrong, and reasoned enough to consider opinions not strictly of his own divining - and perhaps just as importantly, not divine. That this man is also black - and yes, I am aware of the fact that he is largely free of the baggage that has plagued the black community/ies of the United States; more Tiger Woods than Rodney King to be sure - makes this a certifiable moment in the political, cultural, social history - hell simply capital "H" History - of the nation. Though I would understand the concession to political expediency if Obama were to take this direction, I hope he, with all due and necessary kind words attached, skips past Clinton as his running-mate. Let us see what now unfolds. Apparently a klatch of astrologers in Denver or some such place, were gathered together to predict who would be the next president, their prediction was Obama would win in November, but that something would prevent him from taking office in January. Talk about audacity, and frankly, I think the likelihood of something ugly happening to him diminishes if Hilary is not #2. I kid, really, lets see what unfolds

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Why I'm a bad blogger

I have openly confessed to many of my friends and colleagues that I am not really well suited to the medium of the blogosphere. The puckish and mercurial pace that should be maintained to be an "effective" blogger simply is a demand, a mill stone really, that I don't wear well. Oh, it's not the instant (often quarrelsome) pith that escapes me, I'm quite capable of that on most days - especially the quarrelsome part. Rather, I am someone who still somehow registers a cleft between the quip and the forged word. No matter how I try and shake it I am stuck with a distinction between the two. I could be coy and say that in this matter I follow the French with whom it is still possible to "pay" for your dinner, or at least justify your presence at the party, with the former while you cut out your place with the latter. But it is more than that, it is the self-conscious wariness of presuming to lay claim to a swatch of electronic earth, of staking ownership to place and expertise - however meager both surveys be. The issue becomes one of what is one's own voice, or simply authorial intent. And yes, I realize that authorial intent - the notion that a swirl of words has a (single) specific meaning positioned (or interred perhaps) by the author presumably intentionally - has, in many quarters of academia and elsewhere, been abandoned as either unknowable and hence largely irrelevant (Deconstruction) or, if not that, circumvented by the will of the critic (e.g., Barthes and The Death of the Author and S/Z) - though it should be noted that the "critic" in this is not simply some fatuous construct of a patrician expert waggling a flaccid digit in a demonstration of favor or contempt - though it is understood that, to paraphrase Barthes, the unity of a text is not in its origin but its destination. There is a sense in which this sort of reading, this sort of launching pad on the part of the reader liberates the author. Meaning is left in the hands of the person who stumbles onto and into the text and the author might be left alone to paddle whatever canoe fits and peddle whatever reptilian balm seems to be of appeal - if that can be determined. Though there is also the Lacanian-influenced idea that would suggest that myriad determining factors crowd about and in the author and serve to shape, if not simply prefashion, the ways in which the text will emerge. Perhaps there remains too much Erasmus and not enough Luther in and for me to have too much truck with this formula, but the notion of the Bourdieu-ian field is persuasive. Here, a glimmer of intent might be afforded the author though meaning is largely interpellated by the surrounding social environment. What is perhaps most relevant here is that Bourdieu's notion of the field does not privilege solely the fiscal flex and instead recognizes that fields are not specifically attributed to economic classes and can be vaguely autonomous spaces of social play. For Bourdieu, this meant that other forms of capital might, and often do, dominate the discursive mileu, and principally this suggested the primacy of what he called both educational and more broadly cultural capital. Most generally, this has been a maneuver associated with the moyen bourgeoisie expressing an ability, by way of education, to talk knowlegeably about high culture, but in today's globalized climate the distinction between high and low (or popular) culture has largely been effaced. While the proclamations of an absolute amalgamation of all specific cultural experiences that were popular in certain circles in the 1990s and the early 2000s have not come to pass - and are not likely to in the most extreme understandings of such, hierarchy being an almost necessary state of human society - there remains a certain sense in which a global eclecticism has forced a leveling of the general cultural enterprise. In fact the democratization of technology the globe 'round has made experts of us all as increasingly all that matters is the immediate - the window for reflection and analysis ever wanes as the the field of experience seems to be forever waxing. And, spectacularly rising income inequality/disparity and potential concomitant poltical inequality be damned, what has become important in recent years, according to some at least, is the fact that the broad chasms in real incomes has been overcome by "a narrowing range of experience" of all people. After all, the proclamation of late has been the wisdom of the crowd, while casting aside the judgment of the individuated expert. Crowdsourcing is the mantra of global business as industry seeks to create demand before a supply even exists and, to cite the author of The Postmodern Condition, "capital accomodates all 'needs', providing that the tendencies and needs have purchasing power. As for taste, there is no need to be delicate when one speculates or entertains oneself." I am left asking what comment is to be made when Chad Vader parodies Chocolate Rain as it falls on a laughing baby in Sweden? Or perhaps we leave it at the fact that the presumed elitism of the first successful black candidate for the American presidency is countered with a shot of Canadian (where's your boilerplate protectionist populism now?!) whiskey by the nation's first legitimate woman candidate - who accepts it only because of the peer-pressure of the crowd. What call is there for the speculative, the ruminative, the candle in the wind? That's why I'm a bad blogger . . . or maybe I'm just lazy.
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Once more, with passion this time

Once upon a time there was a tallish man who trundled about for a while and wondered what it was like on the other side of things. As much as anything, that is likely what this little coy, over-the-shoulder look, chopping block is about. There are mysteries to be solved and those that have been laid to rest, but the "why" of some things may simply never be addressed, for that apparently is the nature of today's world. In 1893, the French sociologist Emile Durkheim published The Division of Labor in Society wherein he introduced the concept of "anomie" - by this he meant to describe a condition of "deregulation" in society. The rules on how people ought to act and react in the social weave of things, he argued, had (or were) broken down and people no longer knew what they might actually rightly expect from others in society. Put simply, the norms of society, the customs and mores that help - along with the opposable thumb of course - separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom (oh sure, there are animals that might be better conservationists and selfless advocates of other species, or possessed of advanced language skills, or those marked by a surprisingly subtle self-recognition, even winged creatures capable of fairly advanced arithmetic but nowhere else in nature does it all come together quite like in the package called homo sapien baby!) had been made unclear, hazed, or perhaps even simply wiped away by the forces of modernity. For Durkheim, anomie occurred when there was great change or abrupt disruption in society - serious economic depression, political upheaval, or the shattering impact of war - I wonder if there be parallels here. Perhaps we'll have to see.