I have been trying to write lately. I am revising a story I should have finished months ago. for coherencies sake I have had to cut paragraphs that I rather liked. I am too lazy to write anything new here. Perhaps you will enjoy them, decontextualized though they are.

Eight months have passed since Byron’s funeral and I am still squinting against the darkness. My pencil is carving its self portrait into my hand. The reader can not yet understand these things. He is put off by stylistic flourishes. He is suspicious of themes of death and obsession. His own presence here is an embarrassment to him. The address seems to him to be an appeal to the gods. It is a romantic convention. It reminds him of the time of poetry – the old dreams of sentiment and communication. He has been suckled on the catalogue. He can lose himself in the file and the index. Narrative is for more decadent natures. It is something for which one should be ashamed. But I am not ashamed. I will write two hundred pages into the past. I did not love Byron but I will sing his elegy until I collapse from exhaustion. I will do it because I have become habituated to such actions. I will turn his life into an epic. I will assemble a chorus and I will thrash it with iambs and heroic couplets until it wails in agony. I will do this because for me writing tragedy is like copying from the dictionary. I do it for the simple pleasure of scratching my pencils down to nubs. I could just as well not write and merely grind them away, but then I would not feel this pain in my fingers and the pain is everything.

I haven't slept in days, nor have I been able to paint. I can feel the blank canvases accumulating in my closet silently conspiring against me. Half formed ideas smash into one another and the walls of my skull, leaving twisted wreckage, the macabre remnants of creativity: William Burroughs nightmares -- endless junk and sodomy and defecation -- and my hobbling seventy year old neighbor wrapped around the machinery of her walker, her face all in those same Lucian Freud hues that invade everything.

expect more of this in the coming days

I found this a few days ago, thought it was funny. enjoy.

The Jean-Paul Sartre Cookbook

by Marty Smith, Portland OR
forwarded by Alastair Sutherland (kaidan@ix.netcom.com)

from Free Agent March 1987 (a Portland Oregon alternative newspaper), Republished in the Utne Reader Nov./Dec. 1993

We have been lucky to discover several previously lost diaries of French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre stuck in between the cushions of our office sofa. These diaries reveal a young Sartre obsessed not with the void, but with food. Apparently Sartre, before discovering philosophy, had hoped to write "a cookbook that will put to rest all notions of flavor forever." The diaries are excerpted here for your perusal.

October 3

Spoke with Camus today about my cookbook. Though he has never actually eaten, he gave me much encouragement. I rushed home immediately to begin work. How excited I am! I have begun my formula for a Denver omelet.

October 4

Still working on the omelet. There have been stumbling blocks. I keep creating omelets one after another, like soldiers marching into the sea, but each one seems empty, hollow, like stone. I want to create an omelet that expresses the meaninglessness of existence, and instead they taste like cheese. I look at them on the plate, but they do not look back. Tried eating them with the lights off. It did not help. Malraux suggested paprika.

October 6

I have realized that the traditional omelet form (eggs and cheese) is bourgeois. Today I tried making one out of cigarette, some coffee, and four tiny stones. I fed it to Malraux, who puked. I am encouraged, but my journey is still long.

October 10

I find myself trying ever more radical interpretations of traditional dishes, in an effort to somehow express the void I feel so acutely. Today I tried this recipe:

Tuna Casserole

Ingredients: 1 large casserole dish

Place the casserole dish in a cold oven. Place a chair facing the oven and sit in it forever. Think about how hungry you are. When night falls, do not turn on the light.

While a void is expressed in this recipe, I am struck by its inapplicability to the bourgeois lifestyle. How can the eater recognize that the food denied him is a tuna casserole and not some other dish? I am becoming more and more frustated.

October 25

I have been forced to abandon the project of producing an entire cookbook. Rather, I now seek a single recipe which will, by itself, embody the plight of man in a world ruled by an unfeeling God, as well as providing the eater with at least one ingredient from each of the four basic food groups. To this end, I purchased six hundred pounds of foodstuffs from the corner grocery and locked myself in the kitchen, refusing to admit anyone. After several weeks of work, I produced a recipe calling for two eggs, half a cup of flour, four tons of beef, and a leek. While this is a start, I am afraid I still have much work ahead.

November 15

Today I made a Black Forest cake out of five pounds of cherries and a live beaver, challenging the very definition of the word cake. I was very pleased. Malraux said he admired it greatly, but could not stay for dessert. Still, I feel that this may be my most profound achievement yet, and have resolved to enter it in the Betty Crocker Bake-Off.

November 30

Today was the day of the Bake-Off. Alas, things did not go as I had hoped. During the judging, the beaver became agitated and bit Betty Crocker on the wrist. The beaver's powerful jaws are capable of felling blue spruce in less than ten minutes and proved, needless to say, more than a match for the tender limbs of America's favorite homemaker. I only got third place. Moreover, I am now the subject of a rather nasty lawsuit.

December 1

I have been gaining twenty-five pounds a week for two months, and I am now experiencing light tides. It is stupid to be so fat. My pain and ultimate solitude are still as authentic as they were when I was thin, but seem to impress girls far less. From now on, I will live on cigarettes and black coffee.

So, Emily's sociology class required her to interview someone outside of the class about 'the american dream' economic-stratification and so forth. To her professor's consternation she chose me for a subject. The result is fairly amusing I think (which isn't to say that it's entirely tongueincheek) . Maybe some of you (does anyone besides Andrew and Emily still read this?) will enjoy it also.

An ind

Sociologist: How do you define the “American Dream”? Do you feel that it is something which you can personally realize?

W: Before I answer these questions I would like to comment on the questions themselves, which are interesting to me for two reasons. First, the questions are interesting to me because they have already created a certain position for the addressee. They are sociological in form, insofar as they demand of the subject that he speak of an ideological unit as such, rather than herself trying to flush out or distill such substances that were held in solution in his discourse.

Sociologist: Held in solution huh?

W: [smiles] If one were trying to uncover the basic ideological units of a given society, presumably she would ask subjects how they measure success, and from the responses she would derive what she believed to be the basic images at play. When she asks about the American Dream instead she is asking the subject to himself play the role of sociologist, to treat an object that is already presumed to be recognized as ideological by himself. This amounts to an assumption that the subject is alienated from the ideology of his society.

One cannot simply ask a person to describe his ideology, because ideology is at bottom, not some idea or other, but a particular way of structuring experience. Now then, if the question is too direct to have sociological aims, as sociological research is necessarily carried out more obliquely, then it must serve other purposes. It would seem likely that the aim of questions such as these is simply to effect the positioning of the addressee I mentioned earlier, to get him to see an ideological unit as such, as a particular probably dubious socially determined mechanism.

But, and this brings me to the second point of interest, questions such as these are common in mainstream political discourse, and this fact suggests that it is highly unlikely that their function is to subvert the conventional ideology. More likely they support it, and in fact we can identify two closely related mechanisms by which they do this. First, by assuming a meta-ideological mode, they give the illusion of being outside of ideology, they create the impression of society as post-ideological – they show that we, as individuals, are to a high degree cynical about our own ideological positions – and this amounts to naturalizing the ruling ideology. Second, by attributing a basically naïve position to the masses they elevate the individual over the collective (this is just another example of the stupidity of the masses myth).

So then, to return to your question, What is the American Dream? Of course the thing everyone thinks of when they hear about the American Dream is a house that has a garage with two cars in it. The American Dream is taken to represent the possibility for anyone to enter the Bourgeois class, but it is well understood that this notion functions as a legitimizing agent for the actual stratification of social classes. That is, it is commonly experienced as a Bourgeois myth, and as such is an ideological unit that is no longer functioning, or it functions only in the ways adumbrated above: to naturalize ideological structures that are still invisible.

Sociologist: Adumbrated?

W: In the sense of sketched, or outlined.

Sociologist: Oh, thanks. Go on.

W: If I am right that the ideological image that once functioned to identify the masses to the bourgeoisie, as that toward which they aspire, is perceived by the people of current American society as merely an ideological construct of the masses, then an interesting question to ask is, what are the images that do legitimize high capitalist society? With what do the politically/economically disenfranchised people of high capitalist societies identify if they do not identify with the Bourgeoisie? The answer, I think, is that they identify with the commodity. They aspire to occupy the space of commodity, as that which is coveted and adored, and the loci of this symbolic identification is the celebrity. The paradigm instance of this symbolic identification with the commodity through the mediation of the celebrity is the television advertisement. What I’m suggesting here is that the conventional understanding of advertisements should be turned on its head.

Usually we think that the product in question is given its semiological importance through its coupling with the celebrity spokesperson. I propose however that the more subtle aim of such a coupling is to put a person in the space of product, thus allowing identification with the commodity itself. As the growth and perpetuation of high capitalist society clearly relies on the continual development of new products, with relatively little regard for the needs and desires of those to whom it will be sold (after all these can be manufactured like anything else), the consumers of society’s fruits – not just its producers – are evermore becoming alienated from those fruits. Thus the ideology appropriate to high capitalism is no doubt one which measures success not by the acquisition of wealth – since, as we have see, wealth is alienated from its possessor – but by marketability.

Sociologist: So, how do you define social class? How do you measure it?

W: This is rather difficult because the ruling ideology in our society to a very great extent is able to suppress class identity, and this is another reason why the old conception of the so called “American Dream” is out of date. One is not supposed to feel that one is part of a social class at all – unless of course it is the middle class, which has become a completely meaningless category.

Furthermore, there has been a great deal of seismic activity in the past one hundred years or so, so that while in some ways the lines of class demarcation have grown more ridged than ever (the proletariat has largely be relegated to other countries), within the first world countries things have gotten rather tricky. Various corporate entities are obviously possessive of a great deal of power and resources, but their internal structures have grown increasingly complex – with technocrats of various levels of power, the highest level of which may hold equal power to the largest shareholders.

Increasingly even companies that are notoriously exploitive of their menial laborers provide stock options for them, thus giving them the illusion of partial ownership. Unionization has often elevated manual labor to economic positions roughly commensurate with many of the petite bourgeoisie. At the same time, what we call the service sector has opened up and is now employing a huge number of the working poor. So, clearly this is a major difficulty facing radical politics, to foster some concrete feelings of class identity.

Sociologist: What do you suppose are the causes of poverty in our society?

W: One could, I think, demonstrate the structural necessity of classes of people who have little access to the products of their labor in capitalist society. Fortunately (or unfortunately) such a demonstration is not really necessary. Simple arithmetic will do just fine. The earth’s resources are simply not great enough for everyone to consume at the levels the top 10 percent do now. It may very well be that the growth of the global market will eventually close the chasm that now divides rich from poor. If it does it will be a matter of running the planet into resource exhaustion, however.

What i

I recently reread Delillo’s Underworld, which is superb. Apropos: I happened across a fight in lit. crit. land, which was, apparently, though I knew nothing of it until this afternoon, quite a thing a few years ago. Some basically unknown professor of North Korean literature wrote an essay, called the reader’s manifesto (the text doesn’t justify capitalizations), in which he declared that contemporary American ‘literary’ fiction (the inverted commas are his) was in a bad way. Evidence: Oprah’s stated puzzlement over some of Toni Morrison’s sentences, some genuinely or apparently puzzling sentences culled from great American novels etc. .

What interested me about all this was not, of course, that someone had made a stir with an insipid article that proclaimed the aesthetic superiority of Stephen King over Don Delillo (it really does). I was not, for example, horribly surprised to find bad taste rampant within ‘the literary establishment’ (again quotation marks are not mine – though this time I quote them not entirely ironically) . Rather, I was interested to see that even those who most assuredly opposed Myers’ views felt compelled to make concessions and, in the end, invariably failed to confront his fundamental contention, that writing should be clear, direct, to the point etc.. That is, I was interested to see that these claims, though conservative through and through are not recognized as such. This is all the more stark in light of the fact that their source, in this case, is himself a good liberal: green party supporter etc..

What then is the power of arguments such as Myers’, and how does the form of such arguments function ironically in relation to their contents? The answer to the first question is two fold. The contention that writing ought to be clear and concise is apparently commonsensical (the purpose of writing is communication), and it is apparently democratic. Of course, this appeal to democracy must be seen within its historical context.

In societies organized according to prior socioeconomic schema, power is legitimized by the supposed properties of its wielder, divine ancestry for instance, or more apropos our current concerns, access to esoteric texts. Naturally the subversive movements appropriate to this circumstance are to open the texts to the people – to give the people immediate access to the power they contain – and, more radically, to reveal the texts themselves to be internally devoid of power – to show that power is conferred on them from the outside, that they merely mark an empty space in the symbolic order. We see this in the protestant reformation, the enlightenment, the bourgeois revolutions, etc.. Thus, arguments of the reader’s manifesto type tend to suggest that there is a privileged class more or less cynically taking advantage of the opacity of certain texts in order to advance its political position.

The irony of this is of course that the writers of difficult text are most decidedly not holders of great political power. On the contrary, they tend to be radical critics of the established order (the Frankfurt School as a paradigm case). And it is in this light that the appeal to common sense suggests the difficulty of the texts to be a tactical blunder, (critiques that are difficult to understand are not likely to sway the masses and so forth).

The irony here is that the appeal to the commonsense goal of writing is often made by intellectuals whose own professional engagements are with highly specialized discourses (physicists are notoriously impatient with the (post)stucturalist movement, for instance).

How does the once subversive demand for clarity in discourse function in modern society to conserve the formations of power?

The point to note here, is that the organization of society has become infinitely more complex as the political discourses have become simpler. The way power functions in modern civilization is not through the charismatic fascination of the ruler, but rather through surveillance – through the collection, systematization and deployment of information within the fields of specialized discourses. That is to say, power functions in the interstices of specialized discourses, in the discontinuities, in the incommensurability of technical discourses. This is way the paradigm of subversive discourse in the current age is the dialectic.

Recent experiences: the philosophical investigations - dispositional reading frustrated by the interventions of Kripke; the accumulation of books - violent, seductive, debasing mounds; the compulsive elaboration of certain common metaphors (mirrors, cancer - no sports yet, thank god); the reduction of philosophy to oedipal neurosis; a developing obsession with the real physical hollowness of the human organism (biological fact as signifier for Lacan’s empty signifiers); the opacity of language; the reprieve of a bed filled with fiancee and new cat (contentment as traumatic event - the obvious biblical, linguistic metaphor: a return to babble); continued insecurity over mathematical incompetence, incapacity to speak french, inability to finish school.

No time for personalized email. Distaste for the mass produced variety – assembly-line nightmares, post-modern paranoia (meaning writhing in agony and dying - the unconstrained mitosis of cancer). Thus, blog: primitive like wall etchings, or propaganda posters (Lenin peering out from over my computer) – dark, proto-linguistic, guttural. Thus also: a peculiar style – terse, impressionistic, gnomic like prophesy (or the rumblings of revolution?(Lenin as psychological disturbance)). Contrast my typical neurotic involutions - the narcism of opposing mirrors, the obsessive persistence of the golden ratio. The hyper-realism of Baudrillard.

And THEN: an edit.