Esther Press

On the cover of The Romance of Happy Workers: Is the snake filled with dark knowledge, of the kind that the Orwellian pigs simply don't want to hear? Or at least not yet? Which is Napoleon? Which is Snowball? Is the author the snake or the pigs? Or the various shades of yellow? Or none of the above? Or all of the above? Or some or the above? The snake is given the prominent position in two ways for a Western reader--it is above the pigs, and it is to the left of them. These are both more powerful positions than the pigs. Or are the socialist pigs the central figures? Revolutionaries on the charge? Is the one pig talking or snarling? Can a socialist pig appear to be simply talking when it appears that it might be snarling? Does a pig tooth mean anything sinister, or is it simply dental realism? What does the loosely cursive H in Happy have to do with the reading of the pigs? Are we being led by font to a meaning, to two meanings, to meanings at odds with one another, within each other? Und so weiter.

We watched John Waters' Female Trouble last night. Very awkward, very funny. Waters is at his very best, and so is Divine. Someone at Youtube has gone to the trouble of posting the entire movie in 10 sections. I'll post the wonderful opening credits song (lyrics by Waters, vocals by Divine) and the first section of the movie.

Received:

Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers, Coffee House Press, 2008.

Marjorie Welish, Isle of the Signatories, Coffee House Press, 2008.

Still from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance.


I finally got around to watching two films that have been sitting here for weeks from Netflix. Both films are from Michael Haneke--The Seventh Continent (1989) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994).

Haneke has always been interested in the creation of violence, usually depicting the banality of life through slow, haunting movements, or slow, alienating movements, or slow, moving movements, or (you get the drift). Almost always, someone in his films will descend into violence, which is not unusual in and of itself. What is unusual is how coldly he goes about showing it, drawing direct links between the numbness of televised violence, the numbness of emotional repression, and the numbness of isolation. What I tend to enjoy--if one can enjoy Haneke's worlds--are the long takes of seemingly harmless activities and what these long takes generate emotionally in a viewer/me. I'm reminded of the scene in 71 Fragments of a man practicing hitting balls on a table tennis board. The man obviously is "playing" with a machine that shoots out the balls to him, and quite rapidly, to the point where the man doesn't have more than a second between ball hits. It's just repetitive motion. The length of the fragment goes on and on, with the camera never moving. We are forced to watch this same activity, which results eventually in a hollowed-out feeling taking place in the viewer, or at least in this viewer. The feeling, like in so much of Haneke's work, is a mixture of a larger, existential sadness (what is this man really hoping to gain for himself by playing table tennis), isolation (he's alone), and undertowing violence (we see that this is a sport, but the incessant hitting of the ball reminds one of different hittings).

Haneke himself, in the special features, can come off pretty consistently as a person who thinks of himself a little too highly. The philosophical framings of the works are really not as novel and ground-breaking as he thinks they are, but this is a pretty common problem among artists. Still, he is adept at revealing versions of the present world and the present ennui very successfully. I have myself resisted watching his films, even while I'm drawn to them, because of how acutely he presents this ennui, this inherently violent, messy world that lies just barely beneath the surface.

Continuing in The Arcades Project. Finished the Fashion section and Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris. The arcades, I'm now realizing, seem to operate as a jumping off point, a locus. Benjamin seems to be offering a dream tale of capitalist production, joining levels of cities (the catacombs being a protected-from-above arcade-like environment, or the anti-arcade, the anti-soul), also showing the desperate desire to continue to live through fabric choices. He sees fashion and its ever-changing styles as an attack against Death. Perhaps. It sounds good. The temporary is killed constantly, so one must change continually, or feel death at one's heels, stasis. Is this why people like to put on low-level music at their parties? Behind the scene, to also stave off Death? He details the failures of crinoline in weather. Commerce pushes the need for new fashion, or does simply living push the need for something new? Do we see in the new something beyond Death?

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A competition for New Yorkers: who can generate the most world-wearied attitude or look? Go!

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Fuck "Hip".

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Writing is a performance of ego, which hardly needs to be said. I'm reminded of some person in text saying that humans have a need to be seen or heard, to stand out in some way, by their crinoline, by their words, their hair, their actions, their car, their girlfriend, their boyfriend, their school, their job, etc. How does /she/he/I want to see himself/herself/myself being viewed by herself/himself/myself (selves) and others? What am I/is he/she comfortable with seeing myself/himself/herself performed as by myself/himself/herself? Does s/he/Do I challenge "myself" "himself" "herself"? My/her/his ism-itis?

I bought Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project two nights ago, handing over a Christmas gift card as exchange value. I have read the preliminary pieces and the first of the Convolutes [Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautes, Sales Clerks]. The book's montage effects were very much in fashion at the time--in the air, so to speak, following Rupert Sheldrake--when he began writing the book (the assortment of notes?) in 1927. Eisenstein's Potemkin arrived two years prior, and back of that there were the Cubists. I can only assume more of the widening bric a brac of culture, commerce, art, architecture, science, fashion, fascism, capitalism, is coming. The text is arranged as examples of "a time," and they are offered as explanation of the rise of commercial arcades in the streets of Paris, with passages leading into other passages, police appearing as guardians of commerce. The assortment of appropriated texts wend around the notions of arcades and what they mean, recalling, somewhat, investigations in non-verbal communication and Barthes' readings of various places, events, etc. At the moment, the feeling is of moving around in space, among components, among textual commodities, if you will, easily digestible, providing something like a sense of continual lacking. As of now, I don't know if the accumulations will "build" or "swell" or continue to adopt the mobile as frame, but I am interested in following whatever arguments emerge, however buried beneath associations and reverberation they may be.

If one thought that the United States wasn't a country filled with puritanical, yet amoral, hypocrites the study in contrast of the possible impeachment of Eliot Spitzer and the larger, indefensible crimes of George Bush really ought to help bridge that gap in understanding. In the Spitzer case, a prosecutor turned governor, the High Sheriff, has been caught in a tawdry prostitution ring, running his name and his family's name into the mud. One can only assume that his political life is over, because this kind of sexual activity is deeply offensive to Americans, and New York State congresspeople--mostly Republicans, at the moment--are already threatening impeachment if Spitzer doesn't step down. You'll remember the same thing happened in the late 90s with Bill Clinton's trysts with Monica Lewinsky. The entire Republican party was up in arms about the indecency, carrying on through a show trial if ever there was one. The media has swarmed in, as they do, going to enormous journalistic factfinding, dredging up every single whisper on the wiretapped phone lines of Spitzer (Client 9) and the call girl club. The media, the government, feel they are moving forward in strict moral outrage. Yet, where is this same media, where is this same government, when it comes to the more highly unspeakable crimes against humanity, as practiced by the United States in Iraq, where it is now known that 80,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed by our hands, never mind the amount of Iraqi soldiers killed, never mind the 3000 plus Americans dead, and the tens of thousands suffering terrible injuries, ranging from loss of hearing to amputations, psychosis, etc? Where are the factfinding journalists? Where is this morally outraged media? Where is this morally outraged group of senators and congresspeople? Why hasn't George Bush been forced out of office years ago? If you want deeply offensive behavior, if you want to see absolutely intolerable hypocrisy, there's no better place to look than these two cases.

The following is a mashup of what happened in my day. I read some of the recently arrived, presidentially-named literary magazine. I watched a couple of Fassbinder's earliest films. And, I had to repair a good portion of our leaking garage roof, which involved tearing off three layers of shingles, repapering and reshingling it. In any case:



ABRAHAM FASSBINDER ROOFING


Going along the logic of square dog equals poor shoe as in the earliest films of Rainer, like The Little Chaos, where a trio must cut the tri-part shingle into separate folds and then peel off the backing for the tar to stick.

Today it was sunny and perhaps the rainy German city afterward meant that one needed to be psychologically upbeat almost to appreciate flarf comedy correctly, though the cynicism of roofers with their two teeth knocked out meant that Rainier’s earliest films were mostly about down and outers/mistaken criminals, one part hammer and two parts human robot. I deferred to the depression medicine.

Indexically, we mated or mattered—I couldn’t hear. Or what was it actually that was said as the woman was hit in the face because if you don’t get the shingle directly under the tar paper most flarf feelings rinse away, leaving a drip edge for tragedians?

What matters in reviews are the immaterial slips one can take and then suddenly the man is bent over in a bar in was it Querelle and maybe he’s not smoking but one gets the sense that it will still probably rain through in another section of the premonition. Tigers necklaced over Germany colored heart.

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Barack Obama's sham grassroots movement.

Barack Obama likes to position himself as the anti-war candidate, but he wasn't in the Senate for the initial Iraq war vote. Since becoming a senator, though, he's voted four straight times for funding the Iraq war.

And he missed the Iran vote, of which he was a co-sponsor of an earlier version, because he was campaigning in New Hampshire. The vote total on that one? 76-22 for. Only two senators didn't vote. One was Obama, right when he was campaigning for president.

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"We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek"

--Barack Obama, not paying attention to what he's actually done as senator.

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The latest Obama issue with Canada and NAFTA is stark mostly because Obama positions himself as being above issues. He has run as a kind of saint, of high moral standards, so when even the smallest smudge of dirt appears, it seems enormous. I think he's painted himself to be too perfect. As Oscar Wilde noted, "A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite."

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I've received the current issues of Fence, Jubilat, and Denver Quarterly.

My review of Allyssa Wolf's Vaudeville will appear in the new issue of Verse magazine, which should be appearing in the next couple of months. Green Integer Review has some work of hers online.

Last night at a dinner party, I was asked if I had ever wept during a film. I couldn't immediately think of one, but then I did recall watching Carl Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. That was, I confessed to the questioner, the only time that I wept during a film. Dreyer digs down to the marrow.

Another of his, Ordet, is right there with Joan.

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One of my favorite songs: Bob Dylan's "Visions of Johanna"

Mid-afternoon. Outside house. Speaking with co-worker. Man in his early twenties with shaved, dyed hair, with red spray in the middle, walking awkwardly down other side of street. My back is to man. Co-worker watches man. Co-worker tells me to watch. I turn around. We witness man having an argument with a cat on the front porch of my neighbor's house. The man continues to argue loudly. Man seems to move on, but then turns back to the cat. Man puts up middle finger and flips the cat off, while also adding it should fuck off in the process. Co-worker and I go back to speaking. Co-worker continues to watch man. Five minutes later man has stopped at the end of the street and begins accosting an orange tree, staring it down. Man begins to get very upset at the orange tree. This time, man flips off the orange tree with both hands. He walks off and looks over his shoulder and comes back over to the tree and seems to be staring it down again. Man then puts hand up high and dismisses tree angrily with it. Man walks out of view.

A child could see the anti-Clinton media bias. It's a 24 hour news cycle. The New York Times' Frank Rich is the absolute worst, of course, barely holding any journalistic integrity anymore, but just shilling openly for Obama. Here are some news service "articles" for today. There are some Rich columns following that. One could breeze by Reuters, Bloomberg, etc., and see more of the same.


NY Times--on why Clinton must leave the race.

AP article or Obama ad (unbelievable)

The message: Clinton "siphons" votes, Obama earns them. Dallas Morning News

Frank Rich in the New York Times, Obama Hope Child writes an Op/Ed, nearly weeping with Obama pride (January 6, 2008)

Frank Rich in the New York Times, angry Obama shill (January 13, 2008)

Frank Rich in the New York Times, angry Obama shill (January 27, 2008)

Frank Rich in the New York Times, where we learn Barack Obama is JUST LIKE John Kennedy, even Obama's weaknesses really aren't weaknesses because they're JUST LIKE Kennedy's weaknesses and we know he became president (hint hint), cue Camelot music (February 3, 2008)

Frank Rich in the New York Times, gleeful "journalist" and Obama hack (February 10, 2008)

Frank Rich in the New York Times, agenda-setting news reporter/Obama autograph seeker (February 24, 2008)