Rafael Correa at New School

The appearance at my university today of Ecuadrian President Rafael Correa was great theatre...he gave a 40 minute speech on the Yasuní-ITT park, a  product of Ecuador's foregoing oil attracting in order to protect biodiversity....of course Correa said  how noble it was for Ecuador to forego  oil revenues, although he criticized people for criticizing his asking for compensation....Correa was assured, likable, charismatic (in a good sense, not in a bufofonish or malevolent sense). He gave a somewhat Clintonesque series of statistics about the flora and fauna in the park and claimed he was one of the few doing anything about global warming--which in light of the struggles of the current US and Australian admins in this regard was fairly stated. The real fireworks came afterwards when an elderly man stood up, let forth a stream of Spanish I could not get (I had foregone the translation device, but  generally understood Correa, even though he pronounced 'desarrollo" as 'desarrojjo" and Ollanta as "Ojjanta". indeed Correa, who got his PhD at Illinois, clearly had mastered the art of speaking Spanish to Anglophones) but then added a short rider in English that 'this is all choreographed"; he was escorted from the room, Another (i assume) Ecuadorian, either of Asian descent or nearly full blooded indigenous, stood up and asked about the freedom of the press, and Correa said he was for freedom of the press, was only protecting the press from capitalism. (Fox News and Obama is a crude, though not all that accurate comparison). A ruckus ensued and sever la people shouted out questions, Correa said he was sick of the topic and that people did not care about his "lucha contra calentamiento global' a phrase he repeated sever la times..,finally he said that it was the sort of pres she got that led Allende to be overthrow by Pinochet--there Correa got the crowd on his side.

He referred to the indigenous people in the park (Guarani, who he asked his audience to name, and several others)  as 'hermanos'; in English that would sound patronizing. He made no reference to his real brother, Fabricio, who has threatened to challenge him for the Presidency next year.

He struck me, both rhetorically and substantively, as one half Bill Cointon, another half somebody like Keith Olbermann, in that once his assurance broke down he seemed vulnerable and angry, resuming with difficulty the Clintonesque sheen.

As Correa, his entourage-including several members of the Ecuadorian cabinet. the Ecuadorian UN ambassador,  and also representatives from friendly countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina-left, it began to rain fiercely outside and there was a certain amount of panic to get him into the limo--odd I thought for the leader of a tropical country, they kind of acted like Saudi Arabians who had never seen rain.

Fulya Peker's THE PLAGUE

 When I attended the opening performance of Fulya Peker's Plague on September 16, the theater opened slightly late; finally, the announcement was made that we were free to go in. To do so, though, one had to step over a prone figure on the ground, a bald man caked in mud, a kind of combination of hobo and primordial Adam. This not only burst the bounds of the proscenium but also indicated the way this performance would present not just a spectacle but an anthropology. Instead of merely watching humans 'act’, we were to be confronted anew with speculations on the very nature of humanity. The actor eventually entered the stage and assumed a contemplative pose, now seeming more Bodhisattva than bum.

As I ascended the stairs to my chosen, slightly peripherally located seat, I stepped over what I thought was a bulky brown rug spreading out from the stage to the audience stalls. I stepped over it rather authoritatively, in a way that if I had missed a step would have clamped down on the ‘rug’ rather hard. After a point, I realized that in fact the bulkiness of the rug was caused by there being a human being inside it! I had almost crushed one of the actors! Again, more important than the standard Brechtian alienation effect is the total lack of distinction between the substance of the piece and its articulation. This might seem too comfortably organic were it not for the overriding metaphor of the plague. The very phrase “communicable disease” suggests how plagues can carry information that is also destruction, that their ability to penetrate past barriers means that the sort of structural interchangeability betoken here is not just a lark or a passport to beatific infinitude.

The action of the piece took place against the background of a central raised panel covered by a fluted black curtain. In the back of this to the right was a series of small white river rocks strewn on the ground. The elemental colors of black and white provided a stark tableau; they provided, though, less a foundation for the work than a grammar of it, in the same way that the precise and immediate verbal relationships of the vowels and consonants in the words were mirrored by the gestures of the actors. A robed figure in black (assuming a white robe by the end of the play) stood in the middle, speaking most of the language of the play and speaking as its raisonneur. He was flanked most impressively by two black-clothed caryatid-like figures who maintained an architectural poise for nearly an hour. In back, rustling, implication-filled tympani is heard as, from stage center left, a relentless pilot light bores into the audience, signifying, perhaps, the dualities, the ambiguities, of enlightenment.     

One of the astonishing aspects of The Plague was how elastic the four male actors managed to make their bodies, seeming stoic at times, invulnerable at others, sometimes seeming very virile, sometimes more gender-indeterminate, sometimes vigorously tall, sometimes prone on the ground. They could seem Neanderthals at one moment, robots the next, living, breathing contemporaries at another instance. Again the sense of the anthropological seen at the very beginning returned, as body and utterance were both being examined for a kind of bedrock, core humanity, about which yet no cripplingly essentialist assumptions were being made. The sense of body as, again, not just base about mediation fortified the sense of permeation that the piece’s ruling metaphors, plague and the verbal interstices of languages, very much paraded.

Using very simple words—including many monosyllables—constrained by the need to have rhyme and assonance in as much of the enunciated language as possible, The Plaguenonetheless makes a concerted historiographic argument. Most take it is a mere coincidence that the Black Death occurred near the end of the Middle Ages as commonly conceived, that e.g., the quintessentially medieval Dante wrote before it, the quintessentially Renaissance Boccaccio wrote largely after it (and, famously of it). Peker argues here that the plague never totally ended, that its external aspects came to an end but not its internal. (This of course is relevant to the nature of event in general; how can one observe the anniversary of 9/11 if the events of 9/11 have in some way not stopped happening?) Even after the physical disease had vanished, the plague of reason remained, internalized, manifested in Cartesian dualism and in the reign of unthinking rationality. “The most terrible plague is one that does not reveal its symptoms.” Modernity has been trapped by a plague endemic to its very conception. Of course, Peker is saying no more than many modern critics of modernity such as Nietzsche, Foucault, and Adorno; but to dramatize it so intricately, so implicitly, and so considering the nature of her argumentnon-argumentatively is not only a considerable feat but a moving one. Peker's thesis could be potentially stentorian or monolithic, but her dramatic rendition of it forestalls these declensions, having established a past (the literal plague) and a present (a metaphorical plague of reason) Peker then looks to the future. One of the great assets of Peker's work is that it utterly lacks the curdled irony, cloying self-awareness, and naïve cynicism so often found in contemporary New York performance. Jettisoning the post-collegiate smugness of much of the predominant consensus, Peker is after a more serious art and is not afraid to flaunt artistic determination that, in its dignity and fierce ardor, will cause envy and resentment in the cynical. (In this light, the setting in the Theater for the New City reminded me of the work of the late Jeanette Arnone-K, whose paintings and murals, often exhibited there, in their bravest moments challenged an otherwise regnant bourgeois consensus in the urgency with which they registered ecological peril). Peker points out the sterility of reason, how what we think has been deliverance is in fact disease, what we think salvific is in fact morbific. Yet Peker is not writing from a sense of medievalist lament, a Henry Adams-like sense that the Virgin was superior to the Dynamo; she also avoids any kind of hortatory suggestion of a revolution in life, whether through political or sexual revitalization—vulgar-Marxist, vulgar-Freudian, and vulgar-Nietzsche. Her high seriousness and her use of innovative techniques to render issues of artistic gravity hearken back to modernism, but Peker is too postmodern to proffer any kind of positive agenda. Or is she not? It struck me towards the end that The Plague was proposing a solution, and that was through its own medium—of theatricality, and more importantly of language.

Peker has worked a lot with Richard Foreman of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, and the enigmatic lyricism of The Plague was reminiscent of Foreman, as was the rigor and discipline to which the actors had so creatively submitted themselves. Foreman, at least in his work of the past twenty years, seems to want to deliberately foil any pattern in his plays, particularly any overall import to the utterances and ejaculations made by the actors in the course of their performances. Peker, on the other hand, renders a kind of tone poem, playing on inherent resemblances in language like that between “once” and “was”, on the (to use a word sounded in the piece) “tectonic” possibilities of language. Yet the sword is double-edged. The play’s text uses rhyme, yet the introduction of rhyme into European languages was the play hints, part of our falling into verbal imprisonment. The play celebrates the resources of language in its own right, “words alone” as Yeats famously put it. And yet language is “the problem”, verbs wriggling free from their moorings in nouns create sterile puzzlement; the same elemental language whose bare resources are so pleasing in their enunciation here also holds us in thrall. Peker, originally from Turkey, is not a native speaker of English, and this pertains to The Plague both because it makes her experiments with language not just playful but philological, in the manner of an Auerbach or a Spitzer (who famously went the other way with respect to Turkey), or ascetic, in the manner of a Beckett, and because not being a native speaker robs Peker of a base which for a native speaker might make such an elemental iteration a safe harbor, a reassurance. Peker can seek or find no reassurance in the fundamentals; rather, for her, they illuminate the hope and peril of the very condition of our understanding.

In the program notes, Peker adduced high-modernist precursors such as Artaud and Grotowski; and, again, it is refreshing, considering the narcissistic snickering that so often assumes the stage in New York today, that these great artists are being taken seriously, yet, watching The Plague, I thought less of these European precursors than Ralph Waldo Emerson—the Emerson who said, in “Nature,”

Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same. A rule of one art, or a law of one organization, holds true throughout nature. So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit. For, it pervades Thought also. Every universal truth that we express in words implies or supposes every other truth.

Peker, in linking the articulation of language and the movement of performers so intimately, in sounding the innards of a tongue she also thinks holds us in chains, is faithful to the intricacy and brutal duality of Emerson’s conception. As I exited the theater—unobstructed this time by prone bodies or human rugs—I felt a pervasive sense of possibility and excitement. This was not because I had been temporarily infused with sophomoric naïveté. As Peker and Emerson instruct us, all our truths and pains are intimately bound, and we can only hope to think outside of them if we understand how thoroughly and delicately we are sutured. Peker's elegant, forceful, and stunning play offers, in its stark, austere tableau, a glimpse of how this might be attempted.

9/11 ten years later

I have not spoken much about 9/11/01, and in general I feel that decision was right. The mistakes that have been made in speaking of the catastrophe are to braid it into some existing personal or political narrative, to say the terrorist attacks of that day made one feel differently politically or made one take new steps in one's personal life, when most of these things were already somehow on the boards. I do not doubt that some people's lives and views were genuinely changed by 9/11, but I am chary of making much of this sort of change outside of the victims, their immediate families, and those in the serving military and other government officials involved in the response to the calamity. In addition, I think 9/11, as an event, should be isolated from whatever debates about whether what the US government did in response was right or not, or what the causes and preconditions of the attacks were. That's in the realm of ideology and history, a relatively normal continuum; the day itself was catapulted out of that continuum.

The closest I came to these events was..what? I cannot claim any sort of privileged or special relationship. I was almost on the jury for Ramzi Yousef, accused architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombings. (I got out by saying I had to teach Andrew Marvell). I live about thirty-five blocks away, and some dust from the aftermath is no doubt still scattered on some of the books on my bookshelves. I knew, slightly, siblings or spouses of those who died in the World Trade Center and who were on Flight 93. I suspect the emphysema of my late friend, the poet Samuel Menashe, may have been exacerbated by breathing fumes from the disaster--he lived only fifteen or so blocks away.

Menashe wrote a poem that imagined, long before the event, the emotional scale of the calamity:

Must smiles subside in a sigh
   And sobs underlie laughter
   Shall we always leap high
   With flames leaping after?

9/11 reminded us of how much tragedy and suffering lurks beneath our merited--and even at times--valiant attempts to find happiness. We must try to vault further than the flames, exceed their killing grasp, live out what joy we can and should have,  but my reaction to the anniversary is dominated by a sense of gravity and of persistent mourning. 

Saving ESQ and Poe Studies

As I prepare to teach a new course on Emerson and Thoreau (and other figures in their Transcendentalist milieu) the news of  the impending closure of EEmerson Studies Quarterly (ESQ) and Poe Studies, which I already knew about in my capacity with the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, gains new pertinence. In prepping the course, I am turning again and again to articles published over the last few decades in ESQ, and it leaves me wondering if a future teacher, like me someone not an Transcendentalist scholar by training, takes up such a course as part of their university's offerings in twenty years, where will the scholarship be? Blogs, wikis, and open-source archives are not the utopian solution to everything. A scholarly journal, with the continuity provided by an editor and editorial and/or advisory board, by referees, reviewers, and the sense of an ongoing record, is irreplaceable.

Though celebrated and rewarded handsomely for writing and publishing my own books, I have never been given any reward by any university for which I have worked for editing a journal. I used to think this was because of fiscal stresses at my university and the faraway nature of the field in which I edit, but in talking with colleagues at far plushier institutions working in far more accepted and canonical areas, for the most part I get the same impression. Universities rely on learned journals to assess scholarship weighed in tenure and promotion, but the journals themselves, and their personnel, are, paradoxically, not deemed essential. Washington State University, in hiring a full-time editor for both journals and maintaining a well-staffed office to keep them running, was one of the few standouts here. This made, as far as I am concerned, a notable difference at raising the institutions; national profile and defining it as a genuine center of excellence. Whatever the dire budgetary situation--and I am aware it is dire, though even in a dire situation education should be a priority--I am surprised WSU would squander a platform in which it has achieved notable eminence. 

Please sign the petition here and help save Poe Studies and ESQ. 

Bachmann's submission

Ironically, Michele Bachmann, in submitting to her husband, is (since "Islam" means submission) being a 'muslim' with I assume a very small m. 

Vargas Llosa's Victory

Mario Vargas Llosa's biggest win in the past twelve months may not have been garnering the 2010 Nobel prize for literature. It instead may well be his unexpected and, we may conclude, pivotal support for Ollanta Humala in the 2011 Peruvian Presidential election. As of * PM EST SUnday June 5, Humala is widely reported to have eked out a narrow win.

For decades, Vargas Llosa has been the scourge of the Left. If not quite the paladin of the Right--he has never been a supporter of organized religion and is pro-gay rights and pro-choice on abortion--he was a ferocious opponent of governmental intervention in the economy and an acrid critic of Leftist illusions about the "Third World." His endorsement of Humala was a striking swerve from that tendency True, he did not exactly deliver a ringing accolade, having earlier said that choosing between Keiko Fujimori and Humala was like choosing between cancer and AIDS. Nor, as somebody who found even the presidential candidacy of General Wesley Clark faintly praetorian, am I myself inclined towards occasionally demagogic former army officers as political candidates. But I can see, and support, Vargas Llosa's logic, and it has to be understood on a deeper level than commentators so far have,

To see his support for the left-wing, populist Humala as just a visceral grievance against Keiko Fujimori's father, Alberto, to whom Vargas Llosa himself unexpectedly lost in the 1990 election, is to miss the point. Yes, no doubt there is an element of personal vendetta here. But, as a novelist, Vargas Llosa is fully aware that political actors always are tinged with personal emotions, and that this presence of personal affect does not invalidate or delegitimize the grounds of their choice. Humala may, for Vargas Llosa, be wrong and unwise on all manner of issues; Fujimori promised corruption and the rehabilitation of corruption, all the more painful for Vargas Llosa as Fujimori's platform--Keiko Fujimori's, that is--subscribes to the same neoliberal mantras as does Vargas Llosa, and her support came from the beneficiaries of the neoliberal trends of the past generation. Peruvian public figures previously in line with Vargas Llosa's positions, such as the TV personality and novelist Jaime Bayly, have parted company from the Master on this issue. Vargas Llosa is now sundered from many of his former acolytes,

In my article in Vargas Llosa's novel La guerra del fin del mundo in the co-edited collection for Palgrave I coordinated along with Juan E. De Castro, I asked, rhetorically, if Vargas Llosa's critique of utopianism and millennarianism was meant only for the Left, whether or not there were enemies to the Right as well. SO many intellectuals have accused the Left of these 'sins' while not saying a word when the same syndromes manifest themselves on the Right. Even if Vargas Llosa was letting personal spite prevail over ideological conviction in supporting Humala, this can be seen in a way as a salutary brake on the ideological purism of neoliberalism, which--as seen in the US Tea Party movement--has as dangerous a tendency towards unanimity and intellectual conformity as any leftist equivalent. Moreover one can see in Vargas Llosa's latest novel, El Sueñõ del Celta, a critique of colonialism and of unfettered capitalism that shows that the very late Vargas Llosa might be swinging a little bit back to the left after his well-chronicled turn to the Right of the past thirty years.

It will be interesting to see what kind of President Ollanta Humala makes. Peru's national interests--and its curiously right-wing media sphere and intelligentsia-- will not permit him to depart too drastically from many of the policies of his predecessor, Alan Garcia Pérez. Humala has pitched himself as an emulator of Lula in Brazil, and the strong Peruvian economy may permit him to be both redistributionist but also reassure the capitalist powers that be. Of course, Humala may also be a disaster.  History will tell whether Vargas Llosa, and I, were right or wrong in supporting him. But this episode, if nothing else, represents an interesting turn in the fate of the neoliberal consensus which a few years ago thought itself unchallengeable. And it reaffirms Mario Vargas Llosa's stature as a writer of conscience unafraid to challenge--when they are wrong--even those ideological platforms of which he has so visibly been an active supporter...

Derek Jacobi's LEAR

The Jacobi LEAR was great--riveting, grimly funny at times, conveying Shakespeare's most unrelieved tragedy, something so dark MACBETH seems like a dry run by comparison. Jacobi projected anger, sadness, bewilderment in just the right places.  At the end of the production, birds twittered, as if to portend a new day after the worst had happened. I thought I could get my parakeets Actors Equity cards.