Chris Hedges is one of the most thought provoking critics writing today. His weekly column on truthdig is one that I rarely miss.

Here’s some thoughts on the culture of self, from Hedges’ book “The Empire of Illusion”:

“The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is the misguided belief that personal style and personal advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the commodities we buy or consume, has become a compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire. We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and to become famous. Once fame and welth are achieved, they become their own justification, their own morality. How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those questions are no longer asked.”

Comment?

“Words of synthesis summarizing a synthesis of affects: that is the miracle of the ‘psychological label.’ In effect this is the only language in which the objects speak to us, the only one it has invented. Yet, this basic lexicon, which covers walls and haunts consciousnesses, is strictly asyntactic: diverse brands follow one another, are juxtaposed and substituted for one another without an articulation or transition. It is an erratic lexicon where one brand devours the other, each living for its own endless repetition. This is undoubtedly the most impoverished of languages: full of signification and empty of meaning. It is a language of signals. And the ‘loyalty’ to a brand name is nothing more than the conditioned reflex of a controlled affect.”

—Jean Baudrillard (1968)

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“Bauldrillard effectively shows that a semiological analysis reveals that consumer objects constitute a system of signs that differentiate the population. This system of signs cannot become intelligible if each sign is related to each object, but only through the play of difference between the signs…he indicates how consumer objects are like hysterical symptoms; they are best understood not as a response to a specific need or problem but as a network of floating signifiers that are inexhaustible in their ability to incite desire…Bauldrillard goes on to argue that the reproduction of the mode of production has become dependent upon the expansion of consumption, on the reproduction of the act of consumption, thus inaugurating a new epoch in the history of capitalism.”

Comment?

A Mercy by Toni Morrison

Black Zodiac by Charles Wright

Blizzard of One by Mark Strand

The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley

Everyman by Philip Roth

Failure by Philip Schultz

Good News by Edward Abbey

The Heart of a Conflict Chechnya by Andrew Meir

If On A Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

The Last Summer of Reason by Tahar Djaout

Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey

Ulysses by James Joyce

Walking to Martha’s Vineyard by Franz Wright

Without by Donald Hall

The Years by Virginia Woolf

Venerated by early environmentalist while disdained by liberals and conservatives alike, the late Edward Abbey was never a man to go with the flow. In this excerpt from the 1980 novel Good News read how Abbey foresaw many of the environmental problems we are facing today and what, if anything, we can do about them.

“It may have been, as the man on the Tower would say, a failure of courage. Or to use his preferred cliché, a failure of nerve. It may never have happened at all. There was indeed, in those fading years of the doomed century, a sense of overwhelming illusion in the minds of men and women. The cities became unreal. Not so much unbearable as unreal. To the millions crowded within them-for it seemed they could not live elsewhere, in a landscape owned by corporations and dominated by gigantic machines-the ever-growing cities assumed the shape of nightmare. Not a nightmare of horror but a nightmare of dreariness, a routine and customary tedium. Reality became personal, individual, limited to the walls of a room in the center of an enormous hive. The blue eye that glowed from the center of the wall opened only into deeper realms of loneliness. Friends clung together, then were torn apart. Men and women feared one another and searched for safety in isolation. Families withered, scattered across a continent, attached by the thinnest strands of brief, tenuous, one-dimensional, and unreliable communication. To leave the illusory safety of the room was only to find oneself in a corridor without windows leading out into the corridor of the streets, where the walls were of glass and steel, the floor of concrete and asphalt, and the ceiling a dense umber haze through which a pale sun, ever more feeble, shone rays without warmth and little light. At night the layer of smoke and fog and industrial gases cut off all view of the stars, reflecting the vast illuminations of the cities, which extended for hundreds of miles in all directions. The streets were jammed with clamorous machines, crowded with endless hordes of silent humans, most of them wearing air-filtering masks; one saw only the eyes of others, and all eyes were wary, alert with fear, or blank, withdrawn into the inner space of abstraction. A terrible restlessness infected every movement, every gesture.

The disintegration was personal and, at the same time, international. The fear that paralyzed the emotions of men and women in their lonely rooms also poisoned the reaction of nations to one another. As each solitary human sought to preserve his own integrity, so each nation strove to ensure its survival at the expense of all others. The fragile webs of a planetary economy frayed apart in an ever-intensifying struggle for the resources to support a worldwide industrial system. One breakdown in a small Midwestern nation led to massive dislocations, anger and panic in great nations thousands of miles away. War became continuous, limited in scale but never ceasing, breaking out in a new locality as it subsided into chaos and civil war in another. Nuclear weapons were used, as they had been used once before by the first nation to develop them, not on the grand and universal scale envisioned by the most fearful, but in local and regional strife, a practical application of means always available, for ends deemed reasonable by military and diplomatic minds. The unthinkable had always been thinkable. In the effort to compensate for losses abroad, each industrial nation attempted to supply its needs by exploiting to the limit-and then beyond-its own resources of land and forest, water and metals and minerals. The fuel needs of the machine were considered paramount, but the effort to keep the machine operating led to destruction of basic resources needed for the production of food. agriculture itself had long before been mechanized, industrialized, assimilated into the corporate empire, the farmland submerged beneath the growing cities or minded and stripped to produce the power needed to keep the cities functioning, the machines in motions, agribusiness alive. The immediate result, as certain cities vanished, was the economic strangulation of others. Religious fanaticism joined with nationalism and secular ideologies to destroy and sometimes to self-destroy the sources of power on which the overindustrialzed nations depended. Invisible poisons spread through the atmosphere, borne by the winds from the guilty to the innocent. But all were innocent, all were guilty.

The majority of nations had lost the ability to be self-sufficient, even to satisfy the elementary needs of their people for food. Now every nation was losing this ability. The cities could not feed themselves; they were largely abandoned as urban millions spread into the countryside in search of food. Those who suffered least were those accustomed to poverty and hunger; those who suffered most were the inhabitants of the rich nations. And in the richest nation of them all the harshest changes came to the few but precarious, monstrous cities that had once appeared, briefly, in that nation’s arid West; in those desert lands where, as the cautious had foreseen, “cities were not meant to be.” Most of the people had disappeared, fleeing to the greener regions from which, as everyone knew, their packaged food came. But even in the most desolate and devastated of the remote cities a few men and women survived, clinging to the ruins, trying to rebuild the simple farming and pastoral economy that had been destroyed by the triumph of the city, trying to re-create a small society of friends in a community of mutual aid and shared ownership of land. For a few years they were left in peace, forgotten by a world that seemed, for all they could tell, to have forgotten itself-and then the gates of the citadel were opened and certain men came forth with aspirations far more grand than those of farmers and herdsmen and hunters. The oldest civil war of all, that between the city and the country, was resumed.”

NOTES: Cross posted at the mindfulparadigm . Photo courtesy of Combusean

Comment?

“Christ and Machiavelli, while differing in almost every major respect, held in common one precious secret about the nature of reform. Both realized that the individual who is concerned about the vice of a given culture must begin by attacking its apparent virtues.

from Time and the Art of Living

Comment? [1]

Reading any work by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison is a daunting task unfit for the sloven of mind. Ms. Morrison has said in interviews that she has no interest in being the author whose books people read before bedtime. To Morrison, language is a sacred realm and the author must resist the impulse of easy sentiment.

In this age of blogs, digital media, and infotainment, the gravity and precision of her work has become a lost art.

Her status as America’s preeminent living novelist also makes her a target for less prestigious figures, such as John Updike’s luke-warm review of her new book in the New Yorker . Updike begins his review by saying:

“Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.”

It is true that readers often find themselves unmoored in Morrison’s work. As an author she is a benevolent dictator. All will be revealed in time, but only when she chooses and never in the way we have come to expect.

But to read Morrison’s books by plot alone is an egregious error, one that an author of Mr. Updike’s status should be loathe to admit. Morrison’s plots often hinge upon mystery and association, unfolding as a sea of stories inside stories. Some of these stories are myth, others are reportage, none are easily classified.

Still, over the course of her nine novels Morrison has built an alternate history of the black identity in America. It is no coincidence that her first novel, “The Bluest Eye” begins with the deconstruction of a grade-school primer. In some ways Morrison has spent decades deconstructing the American grade-school history book.

What she leaves us with instead of this amalgamous ruling class history is a black experience traced from slave ships, to southern plantations, to Midwest farms, to an all-black town in Oklahoma, to the streets of Harlem. What emerges is not a crystalline chronology of the black experience but an impressionistic painting of myth and memory, story and fable, strength and madness.

In her latest novel, “A Mercy,” Morrison projects farther into this storied past than any of her previous books. The setting, Virginia in the year 1690. The colonies are not a unified nation, rather a smorgasbord of religious settlements, savage camps, struggling farms, and above all indentured servants and slaves who tame the wilderness as the civilization they build savages them.

If you want to understand the madness that would drive Sethe in Beloved to take an axe to her daughter rather than see her sent back into slavery, or the madness that unhinges Pecola Breedlove in The Bluest Eye, it begins here.

“A Mercy” is Morrison’s slimmest volume. Having already written the modern “master novel” many times over, Morrison’s offering this time is her most plain-spoken and bare. The colonial America of which she writes is hardly knowable to us today and Morrison’s novel reflects this truth.

Her colonial America unweaves our aggrandized myths of origin, leaving instead an untamed wilderness where Africans, natives, Europeans, whores, and heretics are mere castaways of an emerging ruling class.

The timing of this book could not be more prescient. Our first minority president will assume the oval office in just under two months, and that event juxtaposed against the nation’s history that Morrison has skillfully constructed over the course of her long career implies a great reckoning.

We are a nation built on the backs of slaves, and no discussion of race in this country will ever be complete without a mindful consideration of the America Morrison has spent a career constructing. “A Mercy” is a welcomed and masterful addition to that cannon.

Comment?

How weary we have grown of storytellers who refuse their gift of narrative. So you call it a book and we linger in its pages, following shifts and tangents until the beginning is so far gone we can not remember how we started on the journey. Like coming home to find an invitation to a high school reunion and suddenly we can’t remember who those people were or who we were then. Our own lives become stories, and the paths between where we started and where we end seem untwined, tangled, impossible to follow. As though the creator of our lives is playing mind games again, sending us red herrings with no hope of resolution. So, at least, dear authors, give us some hope—let us believe that it all can have meaning, do not delude us with the way life is. It will be the most selfless lie to ever stumble from your mouths.

Comment?

Despite holding a Bachelor’s degree and an MFA, as well as teaching in a university setting, I am not, nor do I ever intend to be, an academic within the currently accepted constructs of that career.

I do not wish to speak ill of academics, for they perform a vital function in society and the specialized knowledge they bring to their fields aid in both the preservation of knowledge and the continuation and cross-pollination of new inquiries. However, it is also this specialization with which I wish to argue.

The primary reason that I have never pursued a tenured career in academia is that my interests resist the type of specialization required of a seasoned academic.

Recently, some of the authors I have read include: Milan Kundera, Virginia Woolf, Jose Saramango, Georges Bataille, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Allan Watts, Henry David Thoreau, Phillip Roth, Phillip K. Dick, Audrey Niffenegger, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Wright, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Baker Hall, Donald Hall, Ranier Maria Rilke, Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, Robert Grudin, Andrew Meir, etc. This is not a braggart’s list, rather it is a condensed list meant to illuminate the diversity of my reading.

And why shouldn’t a reader develop tastes as broad and contradictory as life itself? Isn’t Alan Watts an appropriate author to read on the heels of Sam Harris? Doesn’t D.H. Lawrence have some insight into life in rural America, even though on the surface his work never touches this terrain? By designating authors to ghettoized sub-sections and evaluating their work only in the context of these ghettos, we effectuate a serious disservice to education.

To read only within a given specialization is to limit the mind and to deny its natural variances. With the rise of the internet, the academic world has seen a collision of influence unparalleled since the invention of the printing press. Never before has so much information been accessible to so many people with so few barriers between reader and source.

The educated mind needs freedom in which to wonder if it is to continue a fertile path of development. Validated Literary Generalists in a university setting would cultivate a broader field of learning. Rather than pursue a field of research that requires being abundantly versed in a given period, critical school of thought, or identity theory, the Literary Generalist as I envision it would be well versed in a few key pieces from many divergent areas. A Literary Generalist would focus on themes or ideas across culture, producing work such as Milan Kundera’s recent book-length essay on the novel The Curtain. Rather than be “experts” in a narrowly circumscribed field of study, the Generalist would paint broad strokes that span space, culture, and time, making seemingly divergent connections to the grand history of literature in ways that speak to a 21st century audience.

As students, we are taught to distrust the generalist. “Scholars” such as Phillip Lopate, Harold Bloom, Garrison Keeler, and Carl Sagan are scoffed in academia. Their work is viewed as pedestrian and damaging to serious academic inquiry.

But is this really the case? What do the works of these “populizers” sacrifice in speaking to a broader audience? Two neglects come to mind: 1) the popularizer often strips their work of academic jargon, and 2) the popularizer is quick to make broad stroke generalizations that can diminish academic nuance within a field of study. Even if these criticisms are true, one must ask—is this really such a bad thing? Can the consciousness raising of a Carl Sagan or a Joseph Campbell really be held negative simply because they avoid the jargon of their fields, electing instead to speak in broad, readily comprehensible language that fosters a greater interest in a particular field of study.

The typical academic’s trepidation of the generalist smacks of an almost delusional paranoia, but it is a paranoia that is easily understood. In a market-driven world, such as our Universities have become, the need to “carve out a niche” is critical to the apprentice academian. Each young Ph.D. candidate seeks to break new ground with their dissertation, to establish a mode of academic inquiry where none has existed before. But how often, at the end of such work, does a new field of inquiry emerge? Too often the Ph.D. dissertation is read only by the panel whose job it is to “critique” the young student and once this sadomasochistic process is complete the dissertation is relegated to a dusty University bookshelf where few will ever crack its spine again.

I imagine that Milan Kundera’s “The Curtain” would be laughed out of these dissertation panels. What could such wide-stroke statements as “[t]he novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown” possibly mean to a panel consumed by specifics and context. And yet, who has the right to speak for the Novelist?—an academic who merely studies the craft or a writer who devotes his life to creating and understanding that craft.

Inside the capitalist university, surely there must be a place for the Generalist. The educated mind should not be confined to a field of study chosen, often arbitrarily, when the academic is a young Ph.D. candidate. Surely there is place for the generalist, one whom can speak to a “body of knowledge” rather than “a school of thought”, inside the fetid, calcified walls of academia.

Comment? [2]

It seems in the past two years that Philip Roth has achieved what few writer manage in their lifetime: to become a literary darling while maintaining a populist appeal. Roth tows the line between these two poles with extraordinary grace. It is fitting, then, that one of his best received books this decade is the 2006 volume Everyman.

Everyman defies most of the tricks that new writers are taught in introductory creative writing courses. At 182 generously typeset pages, the book’s span is more reminiscent of a novella than a novel. The language of the book is terse and direct, greatly avoiding poetic meditations and flourished language. Most remarkable, however, is that the book’s main character (who is never named) is a selfish, womanizing, misunderstood, bad father who is imminently unlikable.

Even with these elements working against him, Roth manages to weave a deeply moving meditation about death and dying from this character’s life. Everyman is a remarkable account of one man’s struggle to accept his approaching end. He is a flawed man, misunderstood by his family, forgotten by his acquaintances, and struggling to reconnect to an idealized boyhood before he made certain mistakes that set his life’s trajectory. For these flaws, we recognize how quintessentially human Roth’s character is.

Everyman is a book which struggles directly with the most fundamental aspect of the human condition; the simple fact that life is finite and the end is waiting for us, whether we come to terms with it or not.

- – –

“He was not even a caricature but, in his estimation, a portrayal of what he was not, a description with which they persisted in minimizing everything worthwhile that he believed was apparent to most everyone else. Minimized his decency, then magnified his defects, for a reason they surely could not continue to carry such great force at this late date. Into their forties they remained with their father the children that they’d been back when he’d first left their mother, children who by their nature could not understand that there might be more than one explanation to human behavior—children, however, with the appearance and aggression of men, and against whose undermining he could never manage to sustain a solid defense. They elected to make the absent father suffer, and so he did, investing them with that power. Suffering his wrongdoing was all he could ever do to please them, to pay his bill, to indulge like the best of dads their maddening opposition. “

Comment?