Blog

23 July

My review of Politics by Hendrik Hertzberg will be the lead article in the books section of Newsday on Sunday. But it's already online here. Oh this world of online publishing, with all the crazy acceleration.

On Monday, the Chronicle will run my feature on literary scholarship regarding American literary realism -- or rather, the relative scarcity of same. My fear is that every person who ever published a New Historicist paper on Stephan Crane will send a letter of complaint.....

Well, tough titty. It's true that there is some critical literature. But in proportion to the importance of the work in question, the body of analysis is incredibly small. You could probably read everything of substance on Sinclair Lewis in a couple of days, for example.

The final installment of Zizek Watch appears in the same issue of the Chronicle. Several people who read it in draft or proofs expressed the wish that the column continue. But if (as Woody Allen once put it) half of life is just showing up, then the other half is knowing how to quit when you're ahead.

22 July

Hitting someone for something they’ve written represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the intellectual’s vocation.

-- Leon Wieseltier, in The New York Observer

Very glad we cleared that up. Even so, the cultural memory does begin to turn to thoughts of Hannah Arendt, who was quite taken by the fact that, at literary parties during the 1940s, Clement Greenberg would sometimes beat up other New York intellectuals who challenged his ideas. Arendt liked this, because it suggested he was serious.

You might figure Clem would have eventually tried to clean the clock of Harold Rosenberg, given their competition for the role of authoritative interpreter of the abstract expressionists. But Rosenberg was one big dude -- taller than Leon Wieseltier, even -- so this never happened.

It seems prudent to begin considering whether or not the Crouch-v.-Peck incident has any consequences for my own writing, henceforth.

After all, in matters of critical commentary and public-intellectual discourse, I can rock the mike like a vandal and wax the chumps like a candle. This is fairly well known.

And yet it may become a problem. Certain changes in daily routine may be required, in keeping with that Steve Albini that ends: "I know I'm not too threatening presently....but wait'll I start Nautilus."

21 July

Michael Berube (whose name has accents I do not know how to type) reports that his site has just received its 200,000th visitor this year.

To quote the entry announcing the news: "We have no delusions of grandeur around here--we're no Atrios or Kos or Billmon or Crooked Timber--but we do sometimes speak about ourselves in the first person plural, and that's already pretty grandiose, we think."

We couldn't be happier for MB. But the news is sobering, too, in its way; for a check of the records shows that, within the past few days, McLemee.com hit the 32,000 mark for "total visitors," which comes to not quite 57,000 "total pageviews" and nearly 107,000 "total hits."

(Considering the site barely existed before the first of January, the year-to-date figures are, for all practical purposes, the vital stats thus far.)

Of course, we have no idea what any of this means. How there can be nearly twice as many hits as pageviews, for example, is (like the circumstances surrounding the death of the first Spinal Tap drummer) "one of those mysteries best left unsolved." But even if you add the numbers up, the total of all totals is still well under 200k.

Further examination of the digital entrails reveals that, while 133 people have looked at an old review-essay on C.L.R. James, nearly twice as many (262) have elected to pull my (anti-revisionist) finger.

Hard data keeps us humble.

19 July

News flash! Edward Champion has excerpts from Stanley Crouch's forthcoming memoir, I'll Slap 'Em If They Smoke My Shit .....

A surprising spike of traffic, here, yesterday -- much of it, it seems, from people doing searches after reading Gideon Kraus-Lewis's article "In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower," which was linked at Arts and Letters Daily.

My wife read the piece over the weekend and said that she can see why GKL says I look like a turtle. Evidently it's not just the sweaters.....

I've got two or three dozen old reviews, essays, and whatnot -- mostly from 1998 through 2001, known around McLemee.com as the "where's my damned check?" years -- more or less ready for the site.

Rather than just list all of them at once (which would require yet another marathon session of typing, just to list them), I'll put up a few links at a time. As per the text in the left-hand column.

See also Operation Boneyard. It's been dormant for the last few months -- as has the Recent Work page, come to think of it.

A slow moving turtle at that, it seems. I'll try to pick up the pace.

19 July

Paul Foot has died. The obit at the Guardian calls him a "Trotskyite," which is annoying, on a couple of levels, actually.

Here is Foot's obit for Tony Cliff from a few years ago. "Very few of us who knew him well believed that such an essentially youthful figure could ever pass away," he says.

Well, I didn't know Cliff -- or Foot either, for that matter, except from their writings. But the fact is that by the time he died Cliff was an old man. (One bearing more than a passing resemblance to Yoda, too, I might add.) So his death was not a surprise, where that of Foot is, somehow.

16 July

So far, the response to Gideon Lewis-Kraus's article on the MLA convention has been predictable. Which is to say: for the most part, robust in its petty spite.

Very useful in understanding why people carry on like this is Max Scheler's little book Ressentiment, which is worth reading even if you know Nietzsche. Maybe especially then. A book worth revisiting every so often. The mental or spiritual equivalent of going to the dentist.

Scheler published it in 1912 or so, after attending an early meeting of the MLA.

Okay, I made that part up. But seriously, read it and see if now you don't go, damn.....

The front page of this morning's Wall Street Journal runs an article about Michel Thaler's Le Train de Nulle Part, a novel written without verbs. The article is written without any verbs.

Well, there's an original idea.

It's several times longer than my piece from a month ago. And so the relationship between brevity and wit is demonstrated anew, by negative example.

14 July

Q: So when Dale Peck and Stanley Crouch get into a brawl at a New York restaurant, who wins?

A: You, the reading public.

Meanwhile....being, of late, more or less constantly butt-deep in the quicksand of composition -- scribbling rough draft by hand, much of it, as if to defy the contemporary cult of efficiency -- it seems only natural that my attention should drift to the question everyone ponders from time to time. Or not, as the case may be:

"Which Tarot Card Are You?"

Whatever inspiration, or distraction, it takes, just to get through the day....

13 July

People aren't reading as much any more, according to the NEA. After writing this article on the study, I went back to my hotel room and watched Law & Order reruns on cable. So shoot me.

Actually, while that was literally true, the trip also involved buying (and reading on the train home) a bunch of stuff from Revolution Books. It's damned near impossible to find Lukacs's Ontology anywhere, but Revolution had it -- the first two volumes anyway. What they did not have -- and this is annoying -- was a collection of essays on literature and cultural struggle by Lu Hsun. For a Maoist bookstore (make that the Maoist bookstore), this is completely unacceptable. Somebody call a struggle meeting.

***

"The use of parentheses and slashes to create unpronounceable puns has fallen off considerably since the mid-1990s, when convention bylaws required every panel to include at least one paper referring to 'the (m)other tongue,' 'hetero/textuality,' or 'derr(ier)(i/e)da.'"

At times, it seems like I wrote that sentence a long while ago; in other moods, it feels like only yesterday. It was part of a little piece about the MLA, written with tongue in cheek -- dashed off quickly, and predicated on the idea that folks in academe have a sense of humor.

This was mistaken. I still think "derr(ier)(i/e)da" is pretty funny. But the effect of it was to make grown men and women cry, and have sleepless nights, and mutter obscenities in fits of blind rage. According to a reliable source, one gutless chump/anonymous blogster (to indulge in a redundancy) stalked me around MLA. A thing it is mildly distressing to imagine -- somewhere between the disquieting and the pathetic.

In short, a distasteful affair, all around. A few people declared that the piece was "anti-intellectual," and a couple of really sad cases applied that term to its author. Thus is reassurance gained, by any means necessary.

Anyway, that was more than six months ago. Everybody has probably forgotten about the whole episode, though some people no doubt have traumatic flashbacks. Certainly that is true in my own case. Every now and then, I'll look up from reading (say) an account of how Marx's model of capital is structured by the Doctrine of Essence worked out in the Science of Logic and think to myself: "For an anti-intellectual, you really do have some pretty weird-ass habits."

And now the whole experience comes flooding back with renewed anguish from the pages of the July issue of The Believer. As some of you know, I am not a Friend of Eggers, and have taken some shots at said publication. Its pre-eminence among younger writers is one of those things I have never quite understood. (See also: instant messaging.)

About six weeks ago, I had the perplexing experience of receiving a note from a friend who shared my distaste for, say, the Julevitz screed in the first Believer. He said, a little shamefacedly, that he'd thought there were some excellent things in the June issue. Which I did not go out and buy, let alone read. But I probably would have, in any case, with the July issue, for it contains an excellent interview with Slavoj Zizek.

And, of course, that essay on the MLA, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus -- his first piece, according to the page of contributors' notes. It's quite a debut. Obviously I'm glad to be quoted (and quoted accurately, even) and slightly astonished to find my little satirical Chronicle item from last December reconfigured as a point of departure and return.

Beyond all that, it was interesting to see what the ritual of MLA looks like to someone who approached it with some definite questions (but without, as it seemed when we talked in December, any pre-formed conclusions) in mind. The author watched and listened -- and also paid attention to how nervous his watching-and-listening made some people. The resulting article is about 80,000 words long, or something like that. But maybe that is what it takes to evoke the whole experience and train of thought.

Some personal notes.....I am described in the article as short. I am not, in fact, short. (Except possibly by contrast with, for example, an NBA player.) The author also refers to me as kind and avuncular -- the latter being, perhaps, a euphemism for "old," which is understandable, since Lewis-Kraus is in his early 20s. Then again, at his age, I spent so much time vicariously participating in the struggles of Trotskyist movement from the 1930s and '40s as to have been always-already geriatric. ("Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now.")

Finally, my resemblance to a turtle is mentioned. Whether literally true or no, the tempermental affinity is definite. And on that note, it is time to go back into my shell.

12 July

Spent part of last week in New York, reporting this story on a recent survey of how many American adults read literature, and how much. The results of the survey are -- big surprise -- pretty depressing.

At the panel on Thursday morning, two people attributed the decline to something they called "deconstructionism," which evidently involves reading cereal boxes instead of great literature. I'm not sure what relation, if any, this bears to the "deconstruction" of Jacques Derrida. It's probably a complete coincidence. I mean, after all, Derrida is constantly analyzing really subtle nuances in literary and philosophical texts (works by Plato and Kant, Shakespeare and Joyce, not one Rice Krispies package in the lot). If you fell under the influence of Derrida, you'd probably never stop reading.

Meanwhile, I've heard from someone who says that the whole problem is "postmodernism," which it sounds like is the same thing as "multiculturalism," which is in turn a variation of "deconstructionism."

No matter how you label the phenomenon in question, it seems that the American public is now under the cruel tyranny of English professors who force people to spend all their time reading cereal packages.

And if someone does dare to contemplate any monument of unaging intellect, they are subjected to ... uh ... whatever capacity for violence it is that English professors exercise. (Isn't it just a little suspicious that all of them own copies of a book called Discipline and Punish?)

Of course, I am shocked by all of this, and will be working on a series of muckraking exposes in the months ahead.

6 July

I've got a fairly large set of work at hand, ready to upload to this website -- once I have a few hours to prepare the texts for uploading, reworked various pages indexing old work, and so forth.

All of which would have been done over the weekend, if good intentions amounted to anything. Instead, the three days went to housekeeping, husbandly domesticity, and trying to remove spyware from the computer at home (a labor of Sisyphus, that).

The material to upload includes a bunch of reviews and essays from the late 1990s, including stuff on Baudrillard, Koestler, Orwell, Marx, and many lesser lights. Also, an article on C.L.R. James, written to introduce him to a general readership. Plus some stuff on movies, television, fiction, religion, and who knows what else.

But it's not going up today, or this week for that matter.

For one thing, I'm neck deep in work. That is an understatement. Put it this way.... Maud Newton just posted a humorous piece by Fran Liebowitz about the signs that child will grow up to be a writer, and certain lines in it were funny but (given the present circumstances) a little too close to the mark: "The baby is at least three weeks late because he had a lot of trouble with the ending....When the doctor spanks the baby the baby is not at all surprised."

So there's that. Plus meetings. And travel to cover an event in NYC. And I've got to go buy an expensive and heavy sack of a particular kind of cat food, because certain parties at home require this...It just goes on and on.

In short, little if anything will be happening at this site for the next several days. Next weekend, maybe. Sure, that could happen. Just not this week. But please do check back..