"Talking about the possibility of there being characters"

Here is Gary Lutz, from an entertaining interview conducted by David Winters, published in 2011 at 3:AM Magazine:

Talking about the possibility of there being characters in my fiction puts me a little ill at ease, because I almost never seem to think in those terms. But, having been invited to consider the matter, I can see that in the things I write, something or other achieves, for a short spell, a vocal state, a vocal condition, though the words soon enough drain out completely. I guess that if there are characters at all, they are bodies of language, and their limbs and lineaments are typographical. These verbal presences, call them what we must, have a hard time going into detail about themselves; things tend to come out in summary form, as if everything has already been concluded and can be recounted but not changed. I do not draw or crib from outer life, but sometimes I get the feeling I might be trespassing on some inner one of my own. I’ve never really thought about introducing a wider assortment of human doings into my writing; I wouldn’t want to have to invent or observe. I would rather not describe what’s out there. People, I imagine, can already see it for themselves.

System of Compromise

There's been much ado about the stupid article written by the president of Emery University, James Wagner. Aaron Bady has a characteristically excellent piece on it at The New Inquiry. I don't have much else to add personally, but all the talk about "compromise" (and that, as Aaron writes in his piece, "Politics trumps principle") has reminded me, again, as so much does, of James and Grace Lee Boggs and their remarkable book, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (1974). In particular, their brilliant survey and assessment of the American Revolution and American history in general. I recommend tracking the book down and, if nothing else, reading this section in its entirety. But for the purposes of this post, here is a short excerpt from pages 175 and 175:

A nation which has compromised so often, which has taken the road of opportunism again and again, no longer has the same options as it had two hundred years ago. Its people are no longer the same people as they were at the time of the American Revolution. Too much water has flowed under the bridge. With each compromise they have been more deeply incorporated into the system of compromise. With each evasion of political and social responsibility, their political backwardness and their irresponsibility have been intensified. So that not only their political institutions but they themselves are now embarked on a road accelerating and worsening their political irresponsibility, their powerlessness, their unreadiness to reverse the direction in which they are moving.

[...]

There is no simple solution. It is this naked fact—that no simple solution exists—which torments United States citizens, be they black or white. The people of this country have for so long believed that, if things were just left to the politicians while they pursued their own individual wants and desires, somehow, some day, some leader would come up with the necessary answers. Now that the working out of solutions depends increasingly upon the people themselves, there is widespread confusion and demoralization.

"She wrote it, but..."

Reading Kate Zambreno's Heroines over the last week, I've been inevitably reminded of Joanna Russ and the chapter "Anomalousness" from her book How to Suppress Women's Writing (1983) (which book I have not, unfortunately, read in full; I have read the chapter in, and am transcribing it here from, Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (1991), edited by Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl), which begins with this litany (all italics in the original):

She didn't write it.
She wrote it, but she shouldn't have.
She wrote it, but look what she wrote about.
She wrote it, but "she" isn't really an artist and "it" isn't really serious, of the right genre—i.e., really art.
She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it.
She wrote it, but it's only interesting/included in the canon for one, limited reason.
She wrote it, but there are very few of her.

And ends like this:

Quality can be controlled by denial of agency, pollution of agency, and false categorizing. I believe that the anomalousness of the woman writer—produced by the double standard of content and the writer's isolation from the female tradition—is the final means of ensuring permanent marginality. In order to have her "belong" fully to English literature, the tradition to which she belongs must also be admitted. Other writers must be admitted along with their tradition, written and unwritten. Speech must be admitted. Canons of excellence and conceptions of excellence must change, perhaps beyond recognition. In short, we have a complete collapse of the original solution to the problem of the "wrong" people creating the "right" values. When this happens, the very idea that some people are "wrong" begins to fade. And that makes it necessary to recognize what has been done to the "wrong" people and why. And that means recognizing one's own complicity in an appalling situation. It means anger, horror, helplessness, fear for one's own privilege, a conviction of personal guilt, and what for professional intellectuals may be even worse, a conviction of one's own profound stupidity. It may mean fear of retaliation. It means knowing that they are watching you.

[...]

Of those who are not ignored completely, dismissed as writing about the "wrong" things, condemned for (whatever passes for) impropriety (that year), described as of merely technical interest (on the basis of a carefully selected few worst works), falsely categorized as other than artists, condemned for writing in the wrong genre, or out of genre, or simply joked about, or blamed for what has, in fact, been deleted from or misinterpreted out of their work by others, it is still possible to say, quite sincerely:

She wrote it, but she doesn't fit in.
Or, more generously: She's wonderful, but where on earth did she come from?

Incoming Books

A number of interesting books have made their way into my possession in the recent period overlapping with Christmas, by gift or purchase, used or new:

Fiction, or at least not quite non-Fiction:

The Roving Shadows by Pascal Quignard (translated from the French by Chris Turner; Stephen Mitchelmore's excellent review brought this book to my attention; already read)
Divorcer by Gary Lutz

a clutch of old, cheap, used, mass-market paperbacks, mainly science fiction:

And Chaos Died by Joanna Russ (already read)
The Zanzibar Cat by Joanna Russ (stories, partly read)
Souls by Joanna Russ/Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. (two novellas in one volume)
Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak 
Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban (Riddley Walker wasn't available; this was $2, looked interesting)

a couple of impulse purchases enabled by a discount coupon:

Mathilda by Mary Shelley (Ethan mentioned this in private conversation, and has been a key influence in my ongoing interest in Joanna Russ - and is totally responsible for my knowing anything at all about Clifford Simak. . .)
Eeeee Eee Eeee by Tao Lin (eh, figured I'd give one of his books a whirl; this was the one I remembered Stephen Mitchelmore liking. . .)

and I want to include Heroines by Kate Zambreno in this section, for reasons that remain somewhat obscure to me, yet are nonetheless consistent with my practice of including "sufficiently literary memoir" in the fiction section of my annual year-end accounting - many people have been talking about this excellent book, with good reason, so I don't know who was responsible for bringing it to my attention, but many thanks to whomever that might have been. . .

Non-Fiction:

Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf (used; already read)
Hegel by Frederick Beider (thanks to Mark Thwaite for recommending this one; partly read)
The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks (thanks to Kurt Newman, and others, for making me aware of this)
Pages from a Black Radical's Notebook: A James Boggs Reader
Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State by Chandan Reddy (Kurt Newman mentioned this somewhere, too, I think)
The Portable Malcolm X Reader (another impulse purchase)
Political Writings, 1953-1993 by Maurice Blanchot (translated from the French by Zakir Paul; Stephen Mitchelmore was responsible for this one, too)

"Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make."

This is from a letter Samuel Beckett wrote to Georges Duthuit on August 2, 1948, collected in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956:

Here I have difficulty in believing that it has ever happened to me, that it may happen again, to write. In the old days, I used to make up for that, used to rejoice in it if you like, by talking in abundance, in this city of abundant talkers. Not these days. But you do have to see the two or three who are fond of you, and that you are probably fond of too, faithfully. "Ange plein de beauté connaissez-vous les rides, Et la peur de vieillir et ce hideux tourment, De lire. . .?" [Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal: "Fair as you are, what could you know of fear - /The fear of ageing and the unspeakable pain . . ." in the Richard Howard translation provided by the editors, but see also several others here.] The lines that matter are those one forgets. The others one quotes easily and incorrectly. And so again the other evening great firing-off of knowledge, Neoplatonic academy, Masaccio, Foppa, Michelangelo dead and Galileo born the same year, and that old warhorse the Giorgionism of our times, of their times. And understood, overstood, this Pickwick of a Christ who died for the hard men and the executioners. Do you know the cry common to those in purgatory? Io fui. [Dante: "I was."] I went with my mother to church last Sunday, a distant church, so that she could find the pillar behind which my father would  hide his noddings-off, in the evening, his physical restlessness, his portly man's refusal to kneel. […] The weather is fine, I walk along my old paths, I keep watching my mother's eyes, never so blue, so stupefied, so heartrending, eyes of an endless childhood, that of old age. Let us get there rather earlier, while there are still refusals we can make. I think these are the first eyes I have seen. I have no wish to see any others, I have all I need for loving and weeping, I know now what is going to close, and open inside me, but without seeing anything, there is no more seeing.

Top Economists at Work

This is another one from the draft folder. I'm not sure what else I'd planned to do with it, as it looks more or less finished. No doubt I expected I'd pedantically go on about economists not understanding capitalism or the state, but it probably speaks for itself as is.

The Guardian ran an article the other day last year reporting that "top economists" are urging that the work-week be reduced to 20 hours a week, and the remaining work shared. The article is quite comical. Behold:

A thinktank, the New Economics Foundation (NEF), which has organised the event with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics, argues that if everyone worked fewer hours – say, 20 or so a week – there would be more jobs to go round, employees could spend more time with their families and energy-hungry excess consumption would be curbed. Anna Coote, of NEF, said: "There's a great disequilibrium between people who have got too much paid work, and those who have got too little or none."

No doubt! Oddly, the article says nothing about whether those now working too much will have the same income as they currently do, or, if not, how they'd pay their bills. Weird.

Many economists once believed that as technology improved, boosting workers' productivity, people would choose to bank these benefits by working fewer hours and enjoying more leisure. Instead, working hours have got longer in many countries. The UK has the longest working week of any major European economy. Skidelsky says politicians and economists need to think less about the pursuit of growth. "The real question for welfare today is not the GDP growth rate, but how income is divided."

These two paragraphs say quite a lot about economists' capacity for not knowing what the fuck they're talking about.

"The change in people has to be made by the people themselves."

Among the excellent political books I read last year was Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, by James and Grace Lee Boggs, published in 1974. I had intended to write much more about the book than I did, and may still, but in the interest of clearing out my draft folder, allow me to share with you this passage from the chapter on Mao and the Chinese Revolution:

Many radicals, consciously ignoring the profound questions raised by Lenin after the Russian Revolution*, still believe that all one has to do is eliminate oppressive institutions with one audacious blow and the oppressed masses will automatically change. Many people continue to believe that human behavior is completely determined by objective conditions. [...] Institutions which promote hierarchy and exploitation must be eliminated, but institutions are not rubbed out like marks on a blackboard. The oppressed are an integral part of the system which oppresses them, unless they break loose from that system. Therefore until they begin to change themselves, i.e., to become self-determining rather than determined, they cannot get rid of oppressive institutions. Moreover, eliminating oppressive institutions only provides the external conditions for the transformation of people; it does not guarantee that people will change. The change in people has to be made by the people themselves.

(*The Boggses were neither Leninists nor Maoists, but they took the revolutions seriously, and took seriously the problems they encountered. In one of my three posts on the book last year, I said that "they are primarily interested in discussing the ways in which those movements, and their leaders, posed questions about the specific problems they faced, how they responded to failures, how positions were debated and decided on, how each different revolution went beyond the ones that came before, learning and teaching new lessons, and so on." Indeed, their discussions of four 20th century revolutions make for fascinating and, in my view, invaluable reading. Add in their brilliant discussion of American history, in particular the corrosive effects of the American tradition of compromise, and you have a volume very much worth serious attention.)