Klagenfurt

I am currently in Klagenfurt, Austria, where tomorrow I am giving a plenary speech to Anglistentag 2009, a gathering of German-speaking professors of English. I am writing this as I had to return to my sumptuous hotel, the Lindner Seepark, in order to get a jacket and tie; I usually reserve these accoutrements for the days I am actually giving my talk, but, unlike on my last international conference trip to Brazil, the Teutonic formality of the occasion (even though all the peopel afre friendly, engaging, and unpretentious) clearly dictates a more stringent dress code.

Klagenfurt is, as one of the Forum speakers in the morning said (in German, therefore so far as I understood it) the southernmost city in the German-speaking world, near the Slovenian border (the university makes a deliberate attmept to be trilingual, with signs in Slovenian and Italian as well as German, and therefore a place of liminality that can meaningfully position itself in the context of diaspora and globalization in the Englsish-speaking world. In practice, the only language one hears on the street is German, and this region, as the bastion of the late Jörg Haider, is more 'conservative' than 'multicultural' in inclination, more Tea Party than Spivak or Bhabha in mien, though the people on the street and in the hotel are, again, friendly and charming. The ciy feels like a small city in the hillier regions of the Northeast or mid-Atlantic, sedate yet vigorous, with many new buildings. It is also the beach volleyball capital of Austria. The large lake, the Wörthersee, is now near to all that Austria has for a seacoast, Trieste and Pola of course having been long denied it.

Among the Marchers

While in Washington for totally different reasons, I found myself, unexpectedly on the Mall, in back of the Washington monument, in the middle of the anti-Obama rally on Saturday. I had been with a bunch of Europeans, all of whom were quite surprised that people were rallying against government-sponsored health care that they did not so much celebrate—all said that they had needed to supplement their public insurance with private care when necessary--but assumed as a matter of course, indeed as a social right. The Europeans also were amused that those protesting thought that any reform that would be passed by the US Congress would be "socialist". To go from this point of view to the radically different one of those at the rally was disconcerting, but I was actually impressed by the demeanor, if not the beliefs of the people assembled. They seemed civilized, friendly, well-behaved, and after all they were exercising themselves of the great American right to peaceably gather and represent a point of view. It was also surprisingly diverse crowd, there were certainly people of color as well as people who (from my admittedly snap judgment) did not look as if they could seamlessly afford catastrophic health care costs without some sort of systemic help. One may have said that these people were perversely going against their socioeconomic self-interest, but it could also be said they were standing up for their convictions. There were tons of children there who could not necessarily consciously avow the views on the banners they were holding, but that could be said of left-wing or anti-war rallies as well….
It was when I continued to be surrounded by rally members on the train ride home that I had a few more qualms. First of all, the protestors began, in their conversation, to stray from health care or economic issues into various Obama conspiracy theories, including some with clear racist overtones and I had never heard before and were just incredibly outlandish and full of venom and spite. This was not only reprehensible in itself but detracted from the purity of the convictions I had sensed earlier; they seemed to be looking just for an outlet to attack Obama who they disliked anyway. In addition, a squadron of men wearing identifiable blue-jean jackets with the American flag created a slight impression of uniformity which, with the references to Pat Buchanan and lurid scenarios such as the prospect of the US breaking up into several balkanized regions in the near future, made the group seem more ‘fringe’ than they wanted dot appear (The conversation was full of claims the media had belittled thief renumber, which they said was 1.8 million, the media—CNN, they said scornfully--saying less than 100,000; the media seemed right even if one added ten or twenty thousand to their estimates at the maximum). What also surprised me is that so many of them were going all the way to New York—although hoof course 20 percent of New York City routinely votes for Republicans, and that adds up to a lot of people numerically if not percentage-wise, although of course a lot of the people on the train could have been from the suburbs or other points….a layer of irony was provided by the fact that, of all the ways to get from Washington to NYC, Amtrak is the one run by a quasi-governmental entity it is the public option. Indeed, the Northeast Corridor gets, through Amtrak, the kind of efficient public transportation denied the rest of the country. There seemed to be no protest against that….

Peak

After reading this overoptimistic article on peak oil, i was reminded of this superb poem by John Kinsella occasioned by the phrase 'peak oil'-this poem sums up a certain mood, linguistic and cultural, that prevailed around the middle of this decade:

Graphology 590

Language having reached peak, the slide

into plagiarism, blackmarketeering of syntax,

electrolysis of grammar, inevitable. Became,

lifted like cascade, warbled in magpie tune-ups;

to flex shades, shadows, pleasures, comforts,

shopping reflex; caravaners fringing countries;

sourcing alternative energies, green as ground-down,

pillaging three mine policies and upper antes

dug over, extrapolated, wood-chipped,

wearing overalls and safety goggles: I found

the pair we lost cutting wild oats before summer,

clear as a bell on a rocky outcrop, mini-

breakaway, the maker or publisher

guarding reputation, owning orders,

licenses to drill-core, Google, Wikipedia,

edit as you go purchase-power,

reading habits, ingénues,

loan-sharking.

John Kinsella

The Art of Memory

 

The Art of Memory, explored in a famous book of that name by Frances Yates and later studied more systematically by Mary Carruthers and Anselm Haverkamp, intriguingly binds the verbal and the visual as the mind is able to retain huge troves of archival information by picturing them, associating them with a tangible, visual icon. To extend this parallel into movement and into three dimensions seems both challenging and the next logical step, and this is just what Company SoNoGo's Art of Memory , which I saw last Saturday at 3LD  in Tribeca, accomplished. From the lighting by ‘book-lights’ which filtered light through prisms resembling book covers, to the ‘glass musician’ to the left of the performance space who meticulously and hauntingly sounded out clinks and clanks on an intricately wrought glass instrument, to the set full of old books, this performance called up what it is like to remember the past to have a past, to be burdened by a past. There is a sense of the aura, the aroma; the weight, the gripping presence of memory. In an age so full of transitions and transformations, this was heartening; at a time when so much performance wants to allude to historical or political issues but has trouble meaningfully incarnating that desire on stage, the piece’s genuine achievement of a sense of the archival in a live performance is worth noting. Yet the Art of Memory does not idealize memory; the piece understands Walter Benjamin’s aphorism that every act of civilization is also an act of barbarism, and that memory, with all its nostalgic, redemptive allure, can thus be a double-edged sword. One of the four performers declares in the middle of the 50-minute piece that her shoes were taken by a malevolent princess; this both elicits the trauma of memory—that we can remember bad things, painful things—and also implies that memory, in its privileging of certain objects and associations over others, can be hierarchical, can led to subordination. Neither this nor any other conclusion is so definite; the piece allows room for the viewer to fill in their own dreams or nightmares, making the space around us also include personal and collective pasts. The Art of Memory is running for a few more days—go see it. 

Gates, Obama, Intellectuality

 

I have spent much of the week thinking about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. incident. I have always admired Gates,  used his work in my dissertation (during which I had a polite and helpful exchange of letters with him) and during the writing of my forthcoming book on theory, in which he figures extensively. I viscerally sympathized with him having to deal with the police, at the end of a long trip (having done that distance from Australia, I know how he must have felt) and finding his door jammed. Very few academics, especially one of Gates’s stature, would be above using “Are you aware who I am >” rhetoric in that circumstances, it is a kind of arrogance that just ocmes with the territory of being a professor, and it is, after all, one of the few things we have—even somebody of Gates’s stature is not well-salaried when compared to the Coco Crisps and Jose Guillllens of the world. Sometimes our cultural capital is our only armor, and if gates was showing off that capital to Sargeant Crowley, it was in a way his professional reflex to do so.

My first reaction to the incident was that it was racial profiling; that the person who made the call should have known their neighbors; and that the police should not have arrested gates unless he was violent, not just agitated or petulant. which again I would not put myself past being if I were in the same circumstance. I still basically feel this way.

 

I was surprised at how big a story this became—I was interested in it, but I know Gates’s academic work. I was surprised that people who had no stake in Gates’s work became so interested, but clearly, as President Obama implied, it became a barometer of people’s attitudes towards racial profiling and police brutality. It mushroomed very quickly—it was surprising Lynn Sweet asked the question at the end of a press conference that could be instrumental in a pivotal health-care bill, and it was surprising that Obama addressed it so forthrightly and with such a clear admission of his own stake in the matter. Obviously, he himself now wishes he had not said ‘stupidly,” when something like “precipitously” or “heedlessly” would have been fine, but no one who has a had to answer questions about multiple subjects for an hour could say they would be pitch-perfect in their diction and in their nuances of meaning. Police officers have been ragged by the intellectual left for their level of intelligence, and are understandably miffed by that, and by a general left-elite disregard for the police, audible, sadly, even in New York right after 9/11.  Having made an obvious mistake, the Obama White House handled it well with the rapid-response acumen they showed throughout last year’s campaign. What if Obama had offered to have a latte or a Cosmopolitan with Sargeant  Crowley, not a beer….

 

But what I am interested in is another aspect ot the situation, my Lang colleague Ferentz Lafargue, in a fascinating essay in the Huffington Post, has suggested that town-gown, as much as black-white tensions, may be at the source of the incident—Cambridge, having elected two black mayors in a row, who in addition were successively a gay man and a lesbian, is not necessarily a hidebound racist enclave, but does participate in the historic tension between municipalities and universities that play a huge economic role in them but do not dominate lock, stock and barrel. I would add to this that some of the reactions gates provoked may be reaction provoked in general by intellectuals. I do not mean to invoke the corking ghost of Richard Hofstadter one more time, but we all know the road to popularity in this country is not by appearing overly cerebral, and that for all of Gates’s popularizing and media friendly activities, most people in the US would still perceive him as forbiddingly academic. It is in this regard that I note that, until this incident, Obama has been, strikingly, helped rather than hurt by his evident intellectuality. Unlike past Democratic candidates like Adlai Stevenson, reviled for being an ‘egghead’, Obama’s clear comfort with books and curiosity about what is in them did not hold him back from the top. Part of this is racial—Obama’s intellectuality meant he was not a “black militant,” his conversancy with the mainstream academic tradition meant that he could be counted on to affirm common American values. But some of it may well have been a growing comfort level with people who foreground their intelligence, a concession that expertise and intellectual curiosity are needed in government. The Gates incident  is the first time Obama’s intellectuality—his reposnse to Gates being conditioned not just by his personal friendship with the professor but his knowledge of the value of his work and the regard it has garnered—influenced his reaction to Sweet’s question, and arguably the American people’s reaction to his reaction. This is perhaps a way to explain just how much stemma this story has unexpectedly gotten….

Ensor, Modernity, Nationalism

 

 

 

 

I saw the Ensor exhibit at MOMA  last week—I was deeply impressed by his idiosyncrasy, his combination of rigorous draftsmanship and adventurous uses of color and imagery, and his wining combination of parody and distortion with a generous embrace of the world as it is. It also struck me as interesting that “Les XX,” the avant-garde movement to which Ensor belonged for some years, was the first organized European avant-garde, and these Belgians were the first set of “modern painters.”, or “painter of modern life” to use the phrase Baudelaire so famously employed of Constantin Guys—the first set of them. The painter of modern life is, by definition, not celebratory of modernity, not a ‘Futurist', not a “modern sublime”,  and Ensor’s paintings of modern life indeed express its dinginess and banality. Yet, importantly, they are not, as the works of so many later modernists were , meant as a critique of industrial modernity. Indeed, Belgium, as a nation, as a compound of French and Flemish that was when Ensor began working, behind only Germany and Italy as the most ‘recent' nation of Europe, owed its national identity to early and successful industrialization, and Ensor’s canvassing of industrial dinginess, though again not overtly celebratory of it, was an affirmation of the everyday modernity of ‘his’ Belgium, and maybe even an attempt to position it as ‘cutting-edge”.

 

Flash forward over a hundred years. Ensor was  half-Flemish (his father was English) and worked in an artistic environment as French-speaking as Flemish-speaking. Moreover, the entire industrial identity of Belgium, anchored in the ‘Sillon Industrial’ had a French emphasis; the Flemish were seen as rural, ‘having fallen off the turnip truck’ the French were initiates into la vie modern. Ensor’s Ostend, as a beach resort, was hardly part of this as such, but it was not severed form it either. But, lo and behold, the 2009 Ensor exhibition is funded partially by Flanders House, an organization representing specifically Flemish trade and cultural interests in many world cities now including New York.

 

Without taking sides in Belgium’s internal politics or expressing a preference—which I do not have either way—for Flemish over Walloon nationalism, I must observe that Flemish nationalism is unusual in being so assertive auspicated with postmodernity. It is because Flanders did not industrialize as much as Wallonia did that it was eligible for the information age; it is like the Research Triangle or Silicon Valley as opposed to the Detroit or Cleveland of the Sillon Industrial. Now, nationalism is supposed to be rooted in ancient loyalties, or conversely bound together by modern economic centralization and its communicative appurtenances such as print culture; postmodernism, the information age is supposed to globalize, decenter. Yet Flemish nationalism boasts of how postmodern it is, how globally attuned, how unlike the plodding old Rust Belt of Wallonia. And Ensor’s emphatic embrace of ‘modern life’ in its deromanticized dingy avatar does not fit a nationalism that bundles local self-assertion with a celebratory affirmation of up-to-date business practices and global exchange…on the other hand, perhaps the current economic crisis will make this vision of nationalism itself a back number.

Nonetheless, Flanders House should be thanked for helping mount the show, which I enjoyed and would recommend—free with a New School ID by the way!

Return From Rio

 I am just back from a quick, five-day trip to Brazil. This was a journey of great significance for me. Not only did I get to present my research on the complicated intertextual relationship of Mario Vargas Llosa's The War Of The End of The World (La guerra del fin del mundo). with Euclides da Cunha's Os sertões at the LASA conference, but I got to have a thorough experience of Rio--its beaches, its bookstores, its restaurants, and even got to see a bit more of the city than the tourist guides, panicked about crime that in fact is largely gang warfare, tend to encourage. Even though my Portuguese is analogous to Shakespeare's Greek, as diagnosed by Ben Jonson, I managed to get by, although having a friend in my colleague Juan de Castro who speaks it well was a great help. (My Spanish, I think, is comparable to Shakespeare's Latin; pretty bad, but if I had to only read Ovid in Spanish I could crib it, as Shakespeare presumably did with respect to Latin).  

The LASA conference was held in the Gavéa neighborhood, which I quickly, after a couple of times taking the shuttle bus, found was walkable from my Ipanema hotel; my morning walks allowed me to see a great deal of the city's Zona Sul. One of the aspects one quickly noticed was the massive security. Some guessed that this was because the former President of Brazil, Francisco Henrique Cardoso, was scheduled to speak (I believe he cancelled; if any readers know otherwise, let  me know); others, like  Idelber Avelar in his Portuguese-language blog, attributed it to paranoia about Rio and an exclusionary attitude towards the local populace. There was in any event, far more security than even an MLA, and it was not to check the badges, as the last day I left my badge at the hotel and I was unapprehended. The conference itself, though, was fun: some of my favourite sessions were on the representation of the Chaco War in literature, on the Supreme Courts of Latin American nations as figuring, performing, legitimacy (and thus being in a sense 'imaginative; as well as 'formally legal') and NGOs as enabling 'organic intellectuals' in the Granscian sense. This was the best side of the interdisciplinarity of the group; which inevitably led to fragmentation. I also confess to finding, true intellectuals like Alfred Stepan aside (and Stepan's work was explicitly lauded for itself being interdisciplinary) , the old-school poli-sci analyses to be a bit stultifying. There were also just too many sessions; on the security line at the Rio airport, I heard once of the section chairs say that at the next conference, which will be held in 2011 in Toronto, the acceptance rate will be reduced to 33% for individual papers and 66% for panels. Although our own panel was marred by there being no question period (because some of the speakers including myself, went on too long), it was a very stimulating occasion, and had I been in the audience, it would have been one of the most stimulating. It was conducted in two languages, included discussions of authors in yet a third, represented three continents, and included two people who had connections with Australia, as well as academics with both Roman Catholic and Episcopal/Anglican connections. Besides De Castro and myself, other speakers included Paul Allatson and Rocio Silva Santisteban. We were disparate individuals brought together by a common interest--not even a common enthusiasm, as all of our talks contained some castigation of the author under scrutiny--but a common fascination with Vargas Llosa and how he represents the overdetermined relationship of literature and politics at its richest. 

At the beginning of my Vargas Llosa/da Cunha talk, I made a point (thereby adding sometime to it, alas of mentioning Elizabeth Bishop’s support for the 1964 military coup in Brazil; I felt this was unseemly, especially since those friends of Bishop's who protested so vehemently against the US role in Vietnam seemed not to notice or care that she was supporting a regime much lauded by right-wing elements in the US. As Mario Vargas Llosa himself might say, does not Brazil deserve self-determination as well? I admire Bishop's poetry tremendously, but other writers get called for political missteps, and she tends not to be.  The coup was in my mind because the previous day I had seen Stepan, of Columbia University being honored with LASA's Kalman Silvert award for contributions to the filed, and in his acceptance talk Stepan spoke eloquently of his experience in his youth witnessing the run-up to the coup, which deprived Brazilians of democracy for twenty years. Stepan is an acquaintance of my father's, and I conveyed my father's congratulations to him, as well as noting that I had known Silvert, the namesake of the award, as a child and had visited his New England country home. Even at the young age I was then, I recall him as a formidable intellect and compassionate man. In my comments, I spoke of Latin American Studies somewhat presumptuously and grandiloquently as 'our field'. But, even though this was my first formal paper in the area, Latin Americanists have been so hospitable to me and encouraging on my interest in region and its literature that I felt at home to make this declaration. Indeed, I generally felt at home in Rio, and plan to go back there, visit other parts of Brazil, and indeed other nations in South America in the hopefully very near future.