Peter Handke, 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature

Today, Peter Handke is being awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke is probably my favorite living writer, and people sometimes ask what I like about his work, and to recommend some of his books. This latter part is always difficult for me, because no single work really represents what I appreciate about him as a writer. I like Handke the writer better than any of his individual works. In fact, Handke seems to me a strange example of a great writer whose greatness lies not in his works, but in his writing practice. Most writers become great by producing monumental works which become pillars of a canon; but most of my favorite of Handke’s books do not have this masterwork character. And this is part of what I appreciate about him. Great works of fiction generally present hermetic worlds with epic scope that hold the imagination in their grasp; Handke’s writing resists this, instead offering a flow of language that constantly compels the reader to look up from the lines on the page, away from the book, and out at the world.

For me, what is most important about Handke’s work is his manner of looking and his method of reflecting that looking in his writing, which always represents a distinct perceptive method, pausing at what more grandiose minds gloss over, showing affection for the idiosyncratic detail, exhibiting a pure talent for identifying fleeting moments of beauty, grace, and justice. This comes from looking, taking the time to look, being open to minor events and their humble yet profound gravity.

There is a transcendent thread through all of his writing that shape-shifts with his polyvalent positioning towards language. Sometime this leads him to poetic abstraction, which in German has an aural elegance that radiates mere suggestions of ideas. This subtlety sometimes grates; it gets boring, or you have no idea what he’s trying to say; but sometimes you get glimpses. Alternately, he has a precise descriptive mode that I count among the most directly evocative in world literature; a photographic clarity with sensual depth, economical without ever veering into the cloying figurative description of other attempts at imagism. Between these two poles, his writing attempts to capture something of individual experience, facing the world with five senses: how it feels to think in a body, how the natural world reflects within the psyche, how the subject discovers and creates truth and meaning in what it sees. Always the specter of language hovers above this, qualifying and enabling any and every attempt at communication.

It is endlessly frustrating and deeply saddening to me that the entire media response to this award has been focused not on his writing, but on a handful of statements made about Yugoslavia. From his earliest days, Handke has resisted direct political declaration, designating a different, less partisan, more observational role for literature; his great failure was not seeing that most people are far too simple to recognize this, and will steamroll literary nuance and replace it with polemic. The imbeciles and the cynical ideologues that try to delegitimize Handke’s win with slanderous and willfully uncomprehending attacks (who understand nothing of Handke or of literature, whose opinions are straight out of the Dictionnaire des idées reçues) may eventually, I can only hope, prove his point (one legible in his entire oeuvre, including his statements on Yugoslavia): that language, the writer’s tool, is conscripted by various social actors—journalists, politicians, generals, salesmen—not to represent or reflect any kind of individual or shared reality, but rather to violently and forcefully contort symbolic elements into a tawdry facsimile used to prop up a certain hegemonic structure, and that literature—at its very best—can save language (if not over a whole work, then at least in a short passage or a few luminous lines) from this ignoble fate.

The Happy Stirrup reissue out now on New Images

The reissue of my 2007 CDR The Happy Stirrup—as a double LP including one side of bonus material—is out now on New Images Limited. Order direct from New Images here.

New (academic) poems

And now, for your reading pleasure, three new poems from some of the most gifted new poetic voices active in our American academies:


"Trace(s), fragment(s), remain(s)"

Ways of knowing, ways of doing
Systems, methods, processes
Paper, palimpsests
Impressions, inscriptions, recordings
Photography, analog and digital
Secrets, enigmas, decoding
Bodies : materiality/ spectrality
Screens, digital traces
Accounts, eyewitness and otherwise
Marks, tracks, signs
Style, stylus, pen
Death, steles, tombs
Hyphens / parentheses / blanks
Past / present
Reality / virtuality
Unity / diversity
Events / accidents / crises
Nature / destiny
Continuity / discontinuity
Memory / forgetting
Transmission, passing, surpassing
Voices, subjects, presence
Sites of passage, sites of passages
Trails, wakes, furrows, lines


"(An)Aesthetic of Absence"

The ethics, politics, morality of absence
Absent signifiers, absent texts
The anti-aesthetics of absence
Authorship in death, in exile, in absentia
Absent God(s), authors, voices
Music/Silence/Mutism
Absent senses and questions of ability/disability
Trace and absence (Derrida)
Absence of consciousness; consciousness of absence
Numbness, lack of feeling (momentary or permanent)
Absence of reality: simulation and simulacra
Performing absence


"Enough is (Not) Enough"

Luxury, indulgence, waste
Hoarding, accumulating, greed
Deviant bodies, gluttony, addiction
Transgressions, sins, breaches of decorum
Obsessions and compulsions
Repetition, boredom, tedium
Exaggerations, verbosity
Fragments, ruins, garbage
Inflation, value, debt
Hate, war, violence


If you haven't already figured it out, these three poems are not actually poems, but are lists of possible topics (or "axes of analysis") for papers to be given at academic conferences at North American universities (Georgia Tech, University of Toronto, and University of Washington respectively), culled from "calls for papers" sent out to my own academic department's email list. As hard as it may be to believe, the titles are not my own satiric creation, but are the actual titles for each conference; it is mere coincidence that all three utilize the Superfluous Academic Parenthesis—a formal innovation developed in the late-twentieth century in order to avoid clear meanings, and to give a title an air of multivalent indeterminacy, handy for cloaking a lack of actual intellectual content. These lists are invariably preceded by the qualification: "possible topics may include, but are in no way limited to...," as if the limitation of a closed set of possible topics were an affront to intellectual freedom.
These lists of possible topics are part of the general organizing principle of academic conferences, the main purpose of which is to avoid clear, specific topics which may bring together scholars working in similar areas. Instead, the idea is to bring together work related by an abstract conceptual rubric—the intellectual creation of the conference's conveners—in relation to which several papers which have nothing to do with each other may be made to appear as if they related to each other. Not only this, but the thesis is then put forward that these forced conceptual interrelations are actually productive, and help everyone present to arrive at a radical new understanding of something-or-other. Papers on the Berlin wall, Lewis and Clark, the sociology of medieval bridge design, and cellular osmosis can be presented in quick succession under the analytical grouping concept of "frontiers". This kind of intellectualized montage technique is presented for an audience of willing listeners in order to enlighten the communal understanding of "frontiers," challenging and perhaps changing perceptions of this difficult and divisive concept. A brief look in the dictionary is, however, often more enlightening.
But at least we get some exciting poetry out of it. For those searching, this is where today's true avant garde is found: absurdists and surrealists disguised as eager young literary pseudo-scientists. Lux et veritas!

List of Foolish Persons: Martin Amis

"I like the idea of coming up with a society that is a little better than this—a gradualist, ameliorist spirit getting something a little fairer and a little more compassionate than most governments we’ve seen. But the idea of a Utopia has always been completely repulsive to me. [...] What would one do in a Utopia? And, certainly, what would one write about? It’s rebarbarative, the idea of everyone being happy and equal. Because it takes no account of human nature. [...] Who would want the socialist Utopia? Especially if you were at all artistic—you want all those inequalities, because that’s what makes life interesting." 1

My art is more important than your equality. Capitalist naturalism and the aestheticization of poverty. A perfect new addition to the culture of Bourgeois Brooklyn!

1 http://www.vulture.com/2012/07/in-conversation-martin-amis.html

Tweety thoughts

1. If it isn't already, ironic mourning should surely be considered a sin.

2. You can fault 20th century misanthropes and pessimists for a number of things—lack of faith, lack of ambition, crankiness, or meanness—but one thing you can't fault them for is being accurate in their predictions.

3. The sadness felt at the death of an artist consists primarily of an emotionally overwhelming sense of admiration and gratitude.

[2012 has been a dangerous year for artists I admire: first Leonhardt, then Kelley, now Spinetta. I can only beg all my admired artists still living (Straub, Handke, Pinhas, Hayward, etc.): please be careful!]

Cosas

First off, a stunning bit of ignorant, self-absorbed buffoonery from the master of such things, Bernard-Henri Lévy. In an aggravatingly uncritical article by Benjamin Wallace-Wells about his role in the Libyan intervention in New York magazine, BHL drops this clanger attempting to explain his aggressive defence of Dominique Strauss-Kahn after his arrest:

One day in Paris, when we are sitting in the lobby bar of the Right Bank five-star Hotel le Bristol, I ask Lévy what had motivated this response. “Principle,” he says, gravely. “Principle.” I ask what the principle was. He sighs. “Class justice,” he says. “Twenty years ago, class justice was to be gentle with the rich and terrible with the poor. This was a problem. When you are a rich man, you can escape justice. When you are a poor man, stealing a fruit—how do you say, a ­pomme?—you went to jail. Today there is a reversal of the process. You have a lot of people who, if you are rich, powerful, and white, do not care if you are guilty or not guilty—you are guilty by principle. It is exactly the same but reversed. And for me, I cannot, I cannot—it is as unbearable as the other one.” 

First off, if BHL really thinks that the situation has been reversed in the last twenty years, that rich people no longer escape justice, and poor people no longer go to jail for stealing apples, he deserves to be deprived of the power of speech. Is this really what European pseudo-leftist neoliberals believe, that twenty years of their own tireless political posturing has successfully solved the problems of "class justice" to such an extent that things have gone too far, necessitating a movement of class justice in defense of the rich? If this really is his view of "class justice," we should consider it terrifying that his dysfunctional moral compass is allowed to exert such an influence on public discourse.
This is also exactly what Brecht was thinking about in his comments on Grosz that I quoted earlier, where he speaks of the common tendency shared by himself and Grosz to more readily forgive injustice perpetuated by the proletariat rather than by the bourgeoisie. BHL shows his roots here: his inability or unwillingness to transcend his own privileged economic position, to see the full social schematic that is class relations. We see here only the myopia of contemporary humanitarian discourse, a misguided faith in the rights of the individual, regardless of class or social situation. This course of thinking serves and has always served to cloak an underlying ideology in defense of capital.
___________

Secondly, some wisdom from Fidel Castro, one of the few to be honest regarding yesterday's national holiday:

"The dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. are thousands of light years further away than the nearest inhabitable planet."

He also bemoans the inability of today's technological advances to solve the most pressing problems:

"Is it not obvious that the worst of all is the absence in the White House of a robot capable of governing the United States and preventing a war that would end the life of our species?"

___________

Finally, let it all float away with the art of Ann Steel:

TB Wave / Kleiner Österreichischer Staatspreis

Es ist nichts zu loben, nichts zu verdammen, nichts anzuklagen, aber es ist vieles lächerlich; es ist alles lächerlich, wenn man an den Tod denkt. [...] Die Zeitalter sind schwachsinnig, das Dämonische in uns ein immerwährender vaterländischer Kerker, in dem die Elemente der Dummheit und der Rücksichtslosigkeit zur tagtäglichen Notdurft geworden sind. Der Staat ist ein Gebilde, das fortwährend zum Scheitern, das Volk ein solches, das ununterbrochen zur Infamie und zur Geistesschwäche verurteilt ist. Das Leben Hoffnungslosigkeit, an die sich die Philosophien anlehnen, in welcher alles letzten Endes verrückt werden muß. Wir sind Österreicher, wir sind apathisch; wir sind das Leben als das gemeine Desinteresse am Leben. [...] Wir haben nichts zu berichten, als daß wir erbärmlich sind, durch Einbildungskraft einer philosophisch-ökonomisch-mechanischen Monotonie verfallen. Mittel zum Zwecke des Niedergangs, Geschöpfe der Agonie, erklärt sich uns alles, verstehen wir nichts. Wir bevölkern ein Trauma, wir fürchten uns, wir haben ein Recht, uns zu fürchten, wir sehen schon, wenn auch undeutlich im Hintergrund: die Riesen der Angst. Was wir denken, ist nachgedacht, was wir empfinden, ist chaotisch, was wir sind, ist unklar. Wir brauchen uns nicht zu schämen, aber wir sind auch nichts und wir verdienen nichts als das Chaos. 

____________ 

There is nothing to praise, nothing to damn, nothing to accuse, but much that is ridiculous; everything is ridiculous, when one thinks about death. [...] Our era is feeble-minded, the demonic within us a perpetual national prison, in which the elements of stupidity and carelessness have become a daily need. The state is a construct which is forever condemned to miscarriage, the people one that is endlessly condemned to infamy and feeblemindedness. Life is a hopelessness, on which the philosophies are dependent, in which all must finally become insane. We are Austrians, we are apathetic; we are life as the general disinterest in life. [...] We have nothing to report, except that we are pitiful, brought down by the imaginative powers of a philosophical-economic-mechanical monotony. Means to a destructive end, creatures of agony, everything is explained to us and we understand nothing.  We populate a trauma, we are frightened, we have a right to be frightened, we see already, if only as dim shapes in the background: the giants of fear. What we think is already thought, what we feel is chaotic, what we are is unclear. We don't need to be ashamed, but we are nothing and we deserve nothing other than chaos.

Excerpted from the acceptance speech for the Österreichischer Staatspreis, 1968.

Translation altered from that of Carol Brown Janeaway in My Prizes.

Berlin nach Bamberg, 14. Juli 2011

[English translation follows below]

Ich fühlte mich schlechter als erwartet nach 5 Biere und 5 Stunden Schlaf. Vielleicht war das kanadische Pizza daran schuld. Das Wasser mit Kohlensäure war mir übel. Die Karbonisation brachte nicht das gewöhnliche Gefühl der Erleichterung. Nur Caspars afrikanische Disko half. Ich könnte gar nicht essen. Der Birnesaft war aber gut.
Ich war sehr überrascht, dass ich pünktlich am Nikolassee angekommen war. Ich kaufte ein Ciabatta-Brötchen, obwohl das Essen noch völlig undenkbar war. Herr Kajawski und die zwei Mitfahrer waren da. Wir stiegen in das alte Mercedes hinein und ging los.
Endlich: Erleichterung, wie es mit jeder Abfahrt gibt. Besonders mit Zug oder Bus, ein unsinniges Glück, nur weil man sich in eine geplante Richtung bewegt. Es ist ja gerade in diesem Augenblick, dass man sich glaubt, ein “Mann der Welt” zu sein. Dieses Behagen mit dem endlichen Abfahrt dauert aber immer nur kurz.
So dachte ich, als wir die A9 entlang, weg von Berlin fuhren. Und natürlich, ging es mir bald wieder übel. Das Gefühl der erleichternden Bewegung war wegen der im Wagen wachsenden Hitze durchaus ausgelöscht. Ich trank kleine Schlückchen Wasser, und schaute auf den unbeweglichen Horizont. Meine Lust auf Bewegung war mit einer Lust auf Unbeweglichkeit ersetzt.
Mein Körper war heiß. Ich saß neben mir. Ich versuchte, nichts zu denken, aber fehlte. Ich schloss die Augen. Eine ganze Reihe von Bilder kam mir vor meinem inneren Auge vor, ohne dass ein einziges Bild mir gefiel. Ich versuchte, etwas Musik anzuhörzen, aber war ebenso enttäuscht. So wie die inneren Bilder, passte eine Reihe von Lieder, ohne dass ein einziges Lied mir gefiel. Das einzige Vergnügen, das ich da im heißen Auto kriegte, war von einem Lied dem nächsten Lied zu springen. Anstatt an etwas Vergnügen zu finden, war es für mich nur möglich, eine Möglichkeit des Vergnügens zu entdecken, und gerade an dieser Entdeckung eine Art Vergnügen zu finden, noch wenn das ursprüngliche Vergnügen nie verwirklicht wurde. Wenn man neben sich steht, wie ich auf diesem Morgen, versteht man nicht das Vergnügen, sondern nur die Möglichkeit des Vergnügens. Plötzlich sagte der Kajawski, dass wir 200 km gefahren seien, welche die Hälfte der Reise sein soll. Ich antwortete rasch, dass ich das Fenster aufmachen wollte.
Der frische Luft tat mir endlich gut. Die Landschaft war bayrisch geworden, und das heisst, dass es hübsche, grüne Hügeln gab, welche sehr erfrischend nach brandenburgischer Flachheit waren. Ich hatte dann ein plötzliches Gefühl der Südlichkeit, das für mich eine Erleichterung war, obwohl es noch heiß im Wagen war. Ich atmete tief, aber sehnte noch nach Stillsein. Ich aß ein Hüstenbonbon, das Caspar mir früher gegeben hat, und schaute wieder auf den wellenförmigen Horizont.
Als die Kräuter des Bonbons zu wirken begann, und als ich danach endlich ein bisschen Hunger kriegte, kamen wir plötzlich zum absoluten Halt. Wegen eines Unfalls gab es unbeweglichen Stau. Die andere machten ihre Fenster auf, und ein kühles Lüftchen strömte durch den Wagen. Ich fühlte mich endlich in Ordnung, und aß mein Ciabatta-Brötchen mit erneute Energie. Mein Verlangen nach Stillsein und Kühlsein, welche mich für 2 Stunden ununterbrochen gequält hat, war endlich befriedigt. Mit den offenen Fenstern fühlt es sich wie ein Picknick.
Um den Stau zu vermeiden, stiegen wir am nächster Ausfahrt aus, und fuhren durch kleine bayrische Landstraßen. Es kamen mir im Kopf wunderschönen Gedanken. […] Alles, was ich dachte, gefiel mir, noch wenn es später als Unsinn vorkamen. Ich wurde glücklich. Glücklich werden heisst Unsinn wieder Bedeutungsvoll zu finden.
Glücklich sein heisst unsinnig sein. Wenn es einem übel geht, kommt einem alles als Unsinn vor. Unglücklich sein heisst nüchtern sein. Wenn man wieder unsinnig wird, kommt einem alles wieder als sinnvoll vor.
Man entkommt diese Nüchternheit nicht nur mit Alkohol, sondern auch mit Kultur, und das heisst auch mit der Vernunft. Die Vernunft setzt man wieder in die Welt des Unsinns ein. Philosophie war nie ein Versuch, nüchtern zu werden, sondern das Versuch, den Unsinn gesetzlich zu ordnen. Die Philosophie hat den Unsinn zum Gesetz erhoben. Sie hat das mit der Sprache gemacht.
Glücklich werden—und das heisst die Nüchternheit zu entkommen—heisst in die Sprache wieder einzutreten. So trat ich auf den bayrischen Landstraßen wieder in die Sprache ein. In der Sprache kommt der Unsinn als sinnvoll vor. Nüchtern werden heisst aus der Sprache hinaus zu treten, und dann wird es einem übel.
Nur in der Sprache geht es einem besser. Wir stürzen in die Sprache hinein, aus der Nüchternheit hinaus, und alles kommt es wieder sinnvoll vor. Nur im Betrug entkommen wir den Unsinn.

__________________


I felt worse than expected after five beers and five hours of sleep. Maybe it was the fault of the Canadian pizza. The mineral water did me no good. The carbonization didn’t bring the normal feeling of relief. Only Caspar’s African disco helped. I couldn’t eat at all. The pear juice, however, was good.
I was extremely surprised that I arrived at Nikolassee on time. I bought a ciabatta roll, even though eating was still out of the question. Herr Kajawski and the other two passengers were there. We stepped into the old Mercedes and took off.
Finally: relief, as accompanies any departure. Especially by bus or train, a nonsensical happiness, just because one is moving in a planned direction. It’s exactly at this moment that one believes oneself to be a real “man of the world.” Yet this satisfaction that one feels when finally departing always lasts only a short time.
These were my thoughts as we headed along the A9, away from Berlin. And of course, I soon started to feel bad again. The feeling of alleviating movement was fully extinguished due to the rising heat in the car. I drank small sips of water, and looked at the unmoving horizon. My joy at movement was replaced by a longing for stillness.
My body was hot. I sat next to myself. I tried to think nothing, but failed. I closed my eyes. A whole series of images flashed before my inner eye, without a single image appealing to me. I tried to listen to some music, but was similarly let down. Like the inner images, a whole series of songs passed by without a single song appealing to me. The only pleasure that I had in the car was skipping from one song to the next. Instead of finding pleasure in something, it was only possible for me to uncover a possibility of pleasure, and thus to find pleasure with this uncovering, even when the originally anticipated pleasure is never realized. When one stands next to oneself, like me on this morning, one doesn’t understand pleasure, rather one understands only the possibility of pleasure. Suddenly, Herr Kajawski tells us that we’ve gone 200 kilometers, which is half of the distance of our journey. I answered abruptly that I wanted to open the window.
The fresh air finally did me good. The landscape had become Bavarian, and that means that there were pretty, green hills, which were very refreshing after the flatness of Brandenburg. I had then a sudden feeling of southernness, which was a relief for me, even though it was still hot inside the car. I breathed deeply, but I yearned for stillness. I ate a cough drop, which Caspar had given me, and looked again at the undulating horizon.
As the herbs of the cough drop began to work, and as I finally got a bit hungry, we came suddenly to a total stop. Due to an accident there was unmoving traffic. The others opened their windows, and a cool breeze streamed through the car. I finally felt alright, and I ate my ciabatta roll with renewed energy. My desires for stillness and coolness, which had tormented me uninterruptedly for two hours, were finally satisfied. With the windows open it felt like a picnic.
In order to avoid the traffic, we took the next exit, and continued along small Bavarian country roads. Wondrous thoughts came to me in my head. […] Everything that I thought appealed to me, even when it later appeared to me as complete nonsense. I became happy. Becoming happy means once again finding nonsense meaningful.
Being happy means being nonsensical. When one feels unwell, nothing seems to make sense. To be unhappy means to be sober. When one becomes nonsensical, everything seems to make sense again.
One escapes this sobriety not only with alcohol, but also with culture, and that means with reason. Reason sets one once again into the world of nonsense. Philosophy was never the attempt to become sober, but rather the attempt to statutorily organize nonsense. Philosophy elevated nonsense to the level of law. It did this using language.
Becoming happy—and that means escaping sobriety—means entering once more into language. In this way I entered once more into language on small Bavarian country roads. In language nonsense appears sensical. Becoming sober means stepping outside of language, and then one feels unwell.
Only in language does one feel better. We plummet into language, out of sobriety, and everything seems to make sense again. Only in delusion do we escape nonsense.

Edvard Munch at the Centre Pompidou (Against Curators, pt. 1)

The Edvard Munch exhibition currently showing at the Centre Pompidou, "Edvard Munch: L'Oeil Moderne", collects paintings, drawings, and photographs from the middle and later stages of the Norwegian painter’s career. In the exhibit program, the curators declare their intent to offer viewers a new view of Munch which highlights his modernity (fair enough, although it seems like a bit of a straw-man argument to say the Munch is generally considered otherwise), by illustrating the ways in which his work concerns itself with the major questions of 20th-century modernity, such as intermediality, self-representation, and the reproducibility of the work of art. As H. and I moved through the exhibit admiring Munch’s works, we constantly came up against a blockade of human bodies, gathered around what one thought would have been a Munch painting, but was actually a large block of text printed in French and poorly-translated English at the entrance to each room of the exhibition. While I was content at first to just ignore the texts, which at first glance seemed to offer nothing of substance or import, and form my own conclusions from the developments of Munch’s style easily observable in the paintings when one is aware of their historical succession, I was eventually forced to take a serious look at the wall texts, as the selection of paintings in the individual rooms ceased to have any recognizable ordered affinities. For example, the room entitled “Rayonnements” informed the viewer that “Munch was part of a generation of artists for whom the imaginary was marked by a culture of radiation.” I forget exactly which paintings were gathered in this room, but I know there was one of his striking paintings of the sun, while other works portrayed geometric circles, and there may have also been some experimental photographs.

Edvard Munch, "The Sun" (1916)

I was certain, however, that none of the works collected in the room had anything to do with radiation, or a "culture of rays," and were more obviously products of Munch’s life-long involvement with questions of light and form, which are indeed the same questions that guide the work of every painter in the early-20th century. Observing the perplexed, searching faces of my fellow exhibition-viewers, I felt with renewed clarity a sentiment that I’ve often had in the past few years, namely that the art world is suffocating under the malignant influence of the curator.
I’ve seen numerous art exhibitions of contemporary as well as older artworks, whose entire conceptual organization rests on a half-baked, hare-brained conceptual framework designed by a curator. Although designed to emphasize certain aesthetic trends in a group of artworks, these curatorial concepts constantly impose their own pop-philosophical concept onto a collection of unwilling participants, uncomfortably forcing a reading which has very little to do with either the artwork or the artist who created it. Not content with traditional curatorial themes such as “good works of art from a certain region/period”, “works of art of a certain kind from a certain artist”, or “works of art from artists who knew each other,” today’s curators attempt to construct impressive-sounding conceptual frameworks on which to hang works of art, as one hangs decorative baubles on a Christmas tree. The result is not only misguided, but misguiding. The basic aesthetic qualities of an artwork, often obvious to even the least informed of art viewers, are misrepresented through the funhouse mirror of the curator’s theoretical approach. Worse still, the pseudo-intellectualism of such theories can convince the viewer that he or she doesn’t actually understand the work of art in question, since they don’t quite see how the work relates to question of the ontological subjectivity of the body in its (post)colonial state of inverted reflexivity. I should really start a scrapbook of some of the explanatory texts written by curators to explain their curatorial intent; among them there are, without a doubt, examples of some of the worst-written and least-helpful writing produced in the past decades.
Such curators are undoubtedly products of academia, and are in the worst-case scenario failed artists themselves. Today's curators are individuals who come of age within the milieu of art and art history, who want to be part of a creative action within the art world, while lacking either the talent or the courage to make art themselves. They content themselves with a destructive act of theoretical framing which is designed, by the way, to promote simplistic art while ignoring works of complexity or mysterious beauty, since works which lend themselves to the most simple, uncomplicated interpretations are precisely those which fit most easily within the curator's theoretical framework. Furthermore, it is not only the representation of existing works of art which suffers from the curatorial menace: young artists are coerced into creating simplistic works of art based on easily-legible, untroubled and untroubling concepts, so that they may be included in exhibitions, the most prestigious of which always seem to be curated by complete fools.
While the Pompidou’s Munch exhibit is not so egregious in its theoretical indulgences, it still produces some clangers. For example, pointing out that, while Munch is considered an introspective painter, “his painting is very taken up with the outside world.” What’s this, an introspective painter that paints pictures of the outside world? Quel paradoxe modern! It’s also stated that Munch’s habit of painting self-portraits is a “perfect response to the Norwegian Bohemian literary agenda that was in place at the end of the 19th century.” True, only such a historical situation could lead a painter to do something as unconventional as paint a picture of himself! I now see that Munch was, indeed, truly modern! Thanks, curators!

Unemployed satirists

"Satire ends at the very point where hatred of the world's abuses becomes irrelevant. This point is reached when absurdity gains control of that plane of experience at which men, throughout the ages, have formed their idea of order and normality [...] When Hitler came to power, Karl Kraus realized that it was the end of his satirical world. In 1919 he said of The Last Days of Mankind that its satirical inventions and exaggerations were mere quotations of what was said and done. Hitler's Germany reversed the situation: her words and deeds merely quoted, and by quoting exaggerated beyond belief, the satirist's inventions."
Eric Heller, from The Dear Purchase (Bowes & Bowes, 1971), p. 259

Below are three examples from contemporary culture that show a similar tendency to that described by Heller: what would have previously been satirical commentary on a particular event or cultural tendency (the mourning of the death of a billionaire technocrat, the insularity of academic political correctness, or the commodification of anti-capitalist discourse) is produced now as sincere expression by the would-be cultural target. Like Kraus during WWII, today's satirists are out of a job.

1. "Steve Nagata, right, holds an Apple iPad displaying an image of a candle as he takes part in a vigil outside the company's store in the Ginza district of Tokyo on Oct. 6, 2011."

2. Fat Studies 2012 PCA Call for Papers (via Good Jobbb Jr.)

3. Tote bag worn by a graduate student at my university.

Grossman on Die Linke

There's a pretty good English-language roundup of recent developments in Die Linke by Victor Grossman at the Monthly Review.

LINK: http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2011/grossman291011.html

Grossman sees reason to be optimistic after 96.9% of party representatives ratified a formal statement of their party program in Erfurt last month. It must also be considered a positive to have Oskar Lafontaine back in action after a period of convalescence following his fight against cancer. Apart from Gregor Gysi, I feel like only Lafontaine has the charisma, rhetorical skill and star-power to return Die Linke to visibility on a national level. (German-speakers: Das Herz schlägt links!)

Protest is not in itself a good thing

Protest is not in itself a good thing. A protest that accomplishes nothing is a failure. Some might say that any protest accomplishes something by drawing attention to certain issues, perhaps even affecting public policy by making demands on politicians. This may be true, but it still stands that the success of a protest needs to be judged by its concrete effects.
This is one problem with the Occupy movement. While I am sincerely excited about the potential of such a widespread outpouring of anger against the power of business and money in government, I have a hard time whole-heartedly taking part in their protest actions. There are two reasons for my ambivalence, both concerned with the democratic ideals upon which the protests operate.
Firstly, the protesters often seem too enthusiastic about the bare act of protesting: they see it as a good thing in itself, separated from its effectiveness or even from the beliefs expressed. Their most popular chant expresses this ideal: "Show me what democracy looks like -- This is what democracy looks like!" For me this is equivalent to chanting "Protest! Protest! Protest!" Protest is not and has never been about fighting for the right to protest. It is about the expression of a specific qualm held by a group of people. I would gladly and wholeheartedly chant along with "Tax the rich!" or "Nationalized health care now!"; these chants express actions rather than ideals, and agitate towards a specific policy change. We don't need to fight for our right to protest: our democratic government guarantees us this right, occasional police brutality notwithstanding. But the right to protest is meaningless without the possibility of producing tangible results.
Secondly, there is not enough of a clear emphasis on issues of class. To say "We are the 99%" is to sketch out a system of two classes: the ultra-rich and everyone else. This is simply insufficient to describe the system that needs to be radically reformed. Declaring the solidarity of the 99% is to declare the solidarity of the working-classes and those living in poverty with the upper echelons of the bourgeoisie. This is obviously not fair to the lower classes. 99% leaves too much leeway for extreme economic equality. When the protesters chant "The people united will never be defeated," who counts among this people? The "American People" is myth, a PR stunt used daily by politicians to gain votes. There is no American People; but there are certainly American classes. As it stands now, the unification of the ultra-rich with the politicians is looking pretty undefeatable. Marx wasn't speaking of "the people" nor of "the 99%." It is the working classes who need to unite in class warfare against their class enemies: the bourgeoisie as well as the ultra-rich.

Unchained - The Happy Stirrup (2007)

Here is the last work of my solo noise band, Unchained (ex-Knifestorm, etc.), entitled The Happy Stirrup, and self-released on CDR in 2007. Of all the solo releases I've done, today I am most satisfied with this one. It was the first time I worked with other musicians for something I considered "solo" work: the songs are constructed from the practice tapes of two bands I was playing in at the time, Gateway Evening Colours (with Alex Farrill on drums and Brian House on bass) and Innnocent Delights (with Miles Huston on drums and vocals and Sam Mehran on keyboard and guitar). In both bands I was playing guitar through a no-input mixer setup (Behringer Eurorack mixer, Boss compression/sustain pedal, Boss digital delay, Rat Distortion pedal, Roland volume pedal, and sometimes a Boss octave pedal). Gateway Evening Colours was working on a kind of deep blues/country-rock noise-wall sound, very minimal and 'jammy'. Innocent Delights was less rock-ish, more free, psychedelic sounding. The majority of the songs consist of loops cut from GEC and ID practice tapes, cut and pasted with a computer wave editor, and also EQ'd and tweaked on a computer. While the source tapes were collective efforts, the editing process was my own solipsistic endeavor. However, I still feel that the collective spirit is audible here, and I think it is for this reason that this recording sounds better to my ears than others which were wholly created in an artistic solitary confinement of sorts.
The first song, "Falsini Fop or Blade" is my fake collaboration with Franco Falsini of Sensations Fix, one of my all-time favorite musicians. This was no real collaboration: instead, I created loops from his Cold Nose solo album, played these through my mixer setup, and played guitar and sang over them. Though Falsini had recorded his part three decades before I added my own part, I still felt that the result was enough of a collaboration to create a fake band, Faux Batard (named after a Sensations Fix song), which supposedly had myself and Falsini as members. This is perhaps the most "noise" song of the album, and also comes the closest out of any recording I've ever done to replicating the sound of my live shows as Unchained.
"Spetters" (named after the Verhoeven film), "The Happy Stirrup" (named after a line from a famous translation) and "Suncanal" are all based on practice tapes of Gateway Evening Colours. With these, as well as the Innocent Delights tracks, I wanted to focus on the golden moments of group improvisation, when things suddenly come together into a song form that seems planned, though it isn't. What I wanted to do was isolate these moments, and cut and paste them into a larger composition: in other words, to force an element of postmortem compositional order onto small moments of improvisational magic. It was this combination of the non-control of group improvisation with the hyper-control of cutting and pasting alone on a wave editor that intrigued me. The GEC tracks are marked by more laid-back grooves, more Grateful Dead where the ID tracks are more free-noise.
Innocent Delights was short-lived. "Crystal Drops of Quilmes" and "Licking Tides" were the only recordings that resulted from our collaboration. We jammed 3 or 4 times, and played once live (the massive show for the opening of The Redemption Center in Brooklyn). Miles used to be in Dreamhouse, with whom I did a US tour in 2004, and now helps run the gallery Know More Games. Sam is now getting some recognition as Outer Limits Recordings. These recordings were also improvised, even Miles's vocals. I'm don't think he's actually singing real words, just like sketches for future words—which makes it even funnier when they are looped by me. Instead of developing compositions through the act of improvising, here the improvisations themselves become the compositions.
I made about 70 or 80 copies of this CDR. If anyone is interested in re-releasing it, please get in touch.

Unchained - The Happy Stirrup (2007, CDR)
1. Falsini Fop or Blade
2. Spetters
3. Crystal Drops of Quilmes
4. The Happy Stirrup
5. Suncanal
6. Licking Tides

********
UPDATE: The Happy Stirrup will be reissued as a double LP (w/ bonus tracks) by New Images Ltd., hopefully by late May. More info here: http://newimagesltd.tumblr.com/

Pro-Blog

Though I ‘look at’ Twitter (one can hardly call it reading) and have even ‘tweeted’ a couple times, and while I often get ‘very important information’ (EPL transfer deadline-day, etc.) faster by Twitter than conventional news sources, I think its an inherently flawed method of communication, one which is leading internet society down a very annoying path. The reason for this is very simple: Twitter is designed to be a mouthpiece for snark (for those of you lucky enough to not be familiar with the concept, it’s a self-explanatory portmanteau of “snide” and “remark”). Being limited to 140 characters, Twitter users can either send a short bit of compacted information (sometimes useful, more often useless), or a poorly thought-out attempt at an aphorism—i.e. a snarky one-liner, something which can only be uttered with an air of smug self-satisfaction. I have to clarify: these are not aphorisms. They are not even aphoristic. I have yet to read a good aphorism on Twitter. Aphorisms are perfect jewels of wit and intellect, labored-over and re-written, not shat out on the train to work.
(Karl Kraus: “One cannot dictate an aphorism to a typist. It would take too long.”)
The gravest dysfunction becomes apparent when one wishes to comment on something someone else has said. My main problem with Twitter is that one cannot reply to messages in any meaningful manner. The only choice is to write a return @ message, which most users have difficulty following. Furthermore, one's commentary is restricted in form: one is compelled to reply in turn with a snarky one-liner, and we should have all learned in third grade that no meaningful conversation can take place when one is limited only to snarky one-liners. The internet is a magnificent medium for interpersonal communication, and I find it really depressing to see its standards of dialogue deteriorate into a mess of fractured, half-baked, smug, thoughtless, and closed-minded snark. Why, why, why? This is not merely the “dumbing-down” of the internet, its the transformation of the internet into a big, spoiled child.
(Twitter users: if you’d like to defend Twitter in the comments below please limit yourselves to 140 characters or less).

Different Prizes pt. 2

Replying to a previous post, Brandon (The Enthusiast) writes:

I've been thinking more and more on those prizes— those "external goods" dangling around here and New York, that seem to keep working their way further and further inward— and it makes me really stick closer to that Internal Good.

I hadn’t considered the issue precisely as Brandon has portrayed it here: for me, I was thinking of Doc in the Boston Aquarium (from Robert Kramer’s Route One USA) musing on the “different prizes” of the culture that strays from the standard ideal of bourgeois America. In Doc’s (and my) original conception, prizes are differentiated between cultural norms, and it is in some sense the burden of those who have devoted their lives to a particular culture that they may only strive towards their culturally-determined prizes. Different pathways lead to different prizes, neither are objectively worth more. Doc’s goal in this little pep-talk is to remind the non-bourgeois individual, whose heart is heavy when he catches a glimpse of the comfortable, domestic life from which he has opted out (I use the masculine, because it seems likely that Doc is directing his talk self-ward, or possibly at director Kramer), that his choice of a different path also brings with it certain opportunities, its own lonely, precarious, yet noble prizes as well.
Brandon’s conception of the “external good” versus the “inner good” considers the situation from within a single cultural milieu, separating the prizes of an endeavor itself (in the university, the love of learning, the φιλοσοφία) from those which stem from the social and economic factors which affect those who partake in said endeavor (the cushy jobs, salaries, stipends, wine and cheese receptions, esteem of peers, cultural capital, etc.).
I’m sure Brandon is thinking also of the art world in NYC, where the actual artworks on the walls are often the least important things at a gallery opening—and are duly ignored by the majority of the socializing crowd. Artworks are sold not for their aesthetic value, but for the current position of the artist/gallery on the market. This position is always determined 90% by pure marketing, 10% by the quality of the artist’s oeuvre as a whole (although there’s no accounting for taste), and 0% by the quality of the work in question. No one would deny this, I think. (And if I sound bitter, it’s because I am: Chelsea is an absolute shit-show these days).
In the academy, the situation is different, and perhaps much more naive (which is not necessarily a bad thing: cynical collaboration is sometimes much worse). It is, in fact, pounded into the heads of incoming students that they are here to learn, to enrich their minds, to become better people. The motto "non scholae sed vitae discimus" (we learn not for school, but for life) provides the cover for what is at heart a training in docility and discipline, picking up enough cultural capital along the way to clear the path towards the highest-paid positions of bourgeois society. The ones who really get fooled return to the fray, and let themselves be trained to do such training, navigating an intricate obstacle course of groveling and pedantic ostentation, ending up with tenure in middle America. The first thing thrown aboard is this ideal of learning for life—the pure encounter between living man and printed word—rather than for school. Unlike the art world insularity, which is openly accepted, the academy never acknowledges the fact that it operates as an enclosed economy, that learning occurs as a stepping stone not towards enlightenment, but towards academic success—the key which (supposedly) unlocks the reservoirs of capital.
All this what I’ve just said is pure Übertreibung (exaggeration), yet to quote Thomas Bernhard, “ohne Übertreibung kann man gar nichts sagen.”
At any rate, I think its important to point out that there are certain ‘prizes’ in the academic world which have naught to do with the “inner good” of the literary experience, and everything to do with the sociological function of the university in present-day capitalistic society. Unlike the art-world, which (for better or for worse) accepts its new role (however ironically), the academy naively presumes idealism where there is only cynicism.

Cosas

>>>Ernst Tugendhat interview (from 4 years ago) @ signandsight

Villa Tugendhat, Brno.

Here [in Germany] there's a lot of bragging in universities. In England and the USA, people have a different way of addressing you, particularly with me, because my style of thinking is rather Anglo-Saxon. Many German colleagues have it easier in America because there people think, oh, that's some German profundity that's so profound that it can't be understood anyway. [...]

As far as the behavioural sciences are concerned, I think that people are too rash in looking for analogies – for example between human morals and animal altruism. That is what Konrad Lorenz, among others, did. As for brain research, I think it's rather crazy what's going on today. [...] They can only find out what types of processes are going on in which parts of the brain. But then those professors of brain physiology appear and present theories about the nonexistence of human freedom. And those theories are only based on the fact that they see themselves as scientists and believe in determinism.

>>>Philippe Meyer on France @ French Politics

Un pays qui prend Bernard Tapie pour un entrepreneur, Bernard-Henri Lévy pour un philosophe, Jacques Attali pour un penseur, Claire Chazal pour une journaliste, Alain Minc pour un économiste, etc. ne peut s'étonner d'avoir Nicolas Sarkozy comme président de la République.

(And in related news, Michel Serres thinks that at this particular junction in history we need to figure out if Astérix was a fascist.)

>>>Autumn's coming @ The Trad

>>>Edwin Fischer 78s @ 78 toeren klassiek

Heidelberg

In Heidelberg on the night of Michael Jackson’s death, heading to Antonio’s place with DB and others after a poetry reading and a tour of the local bars. We pass a bookshop near the Theodor-Heuss-Brücke, where we are presented with an entire window display devoted to the newest offering from Richard David Precht: Liebe – ein unordentliches Gefühl. From our position on the other side of the glass, outside in the dark summer night, we marvel at the brightly lit pile of hardcover books and the large cardboard profile of Precht’s smiling image. Before any of us has a chance to comment, Antonio leans backwards before swinging his torso swiftly forwards, discharging a large glob of mucus which crashes messily against the large window, directly in front of Precht’s visage, beginning to slowly trickle downwards toward the pile of books. DB jokes about the impending start to my graduate school career: “When you get there you should meet with the Brecht specialist and be like, ‘Oh wait, you work on Brecht? I came here to study Precht!’” When we walk past the bookstore the next morning, the dried spittle is caked onto the window, blocking the passerby’s view of Precht’s facial features.

Advanced Humanism

"My point is that to turn a jungle baboon into a seminar baboon is a cruel, irreversible process. I understand why you won't ever be happy around the waterhole again."

Nathan Zuckerman's agent (from Philip Roth's Zuckerman Unbound) is referring to the scarring that results from higher education, how four years of training in "Advanced Humanistic Decisions" can make it difficult for an individual to navigate the less advanced humanism of society outside the university. While I think this is true, I've also noticed (in myself and certain other colleagues) that the reverse is also the case: that too much time spent outside the academy leads to dissatisfaction with the functionings of the academic world. After finishing a somewhat botched undergraduate degree, I spent five years enjoying the freedom of a nu-bohemian creative lifestyle—inclusive of autodidactic efforts to approach literature and philosophy outside of a university perspective—before deciding that the time was right to reenter the academic fold. At first I treasured these five years, believing that they gave me a certain perspective that my fellow students (many of whom entered their doctoral programs directly from college) lacked. I am beginning to see now that this brief taste of freedom had its price: that, opposite to Zuckerman, whose academic experience makes it difficult for him to be content in the "real world," my five years out of the academy also represent an irreversible shift, a break from the academic winding-up process, making it very difficult for me to be happy around the university waterhole.
To go back to the clip I posted of Paul McIsaac in Robert Kramer's Route One USA, it's not always a matter of choice which "prizes" one ends up striving for. With academia, as with bourgeois America, it is a matter of being able to enjoy its system of rewards. With any enclosed cultural ecosystem, a dose of perspective can spell exile for the curious participant.

Literary Reformation

I am somewhat sympathetic to a number of the recent "conservative" critiques of the current state of literary studies in American universities, but I've yet to read one that really expresses my frustrations. There is always something present in such pieces completely foreign to my own concerns, often connected with a certain sentimental view of literature—part old guard liberal humanism, part reactionary hedonism (books are to be enjoyed not analyzed)—which doesn't necessarily need to be the central principle of any proposed reformation of literature departments.

For example, in a recent review of The Cambridge History of the American Novel, Joseph Epstein states that contemporary scholars, though claiming a deeper engagement with the social conditions of the real world, are unknown outside of academic circles due to their inclination to write about abstruse theoretical concerns instead of actual literature, as read by normal people. Epstein claims that this was not the case with the old guard of "Perry Miller, Aileen Ward, Walter Jackson Bate, Marjorie Hope Nicolson, Joseph Wood Krutch, Lionel Trilling," who were more often read by non-academics. Yet Epstein falters when he denounces the confusion that follows from the fall of the barrier between high and low culture. Epstein sets up his argument to defend the reality of literature against that of socio-theoretical analysis: "English departments are less concerned with the consideration of literature per se than with what novels, poems, plays and essays—after being properly X-rayed, frisked, padded down, like so many suspicious-looking air travelers—might yield on the subjects of race, class and gender." He's got a damn good point there, not a very difficult or complex one, but rather a basic one which advocates a very sensible approach to inquiry: we need to start with the text, not with the theory. The theory stems from the reading, not vice versa.

Yet we don't need Epstein to tell us that, and we certainly don't need him to tell us that Allen Ginsberg is a "secondary author" on whom The Cambridge History of the American Novel wastes space simply because he wrote about sex. Epstein's reaction against the "automatic Leftism" of the English Department should be kept separate from his critique of its faulty processes of inquiry. (Furthermore, Leftism has always been a part of the academy—it comes from historical awareness, pseudo-Christian ethics, and a palate for the sublime, I think—and it would be more interesting for Epstein to contrast the pragmatism of the Old Left with the politically-correct intellectualitas of the New Left.)

Epstein ends by quoting William Chace, the former president of Wesleyan and Emory Universities and stalwart of old-school English modernism, who in 2008 identified the problem as "the failure of departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of itself." Now, without being too materialist here, I would first argue that the act of cooking soup for a hungry person is a far greater human good than any course of literary study (no matter how passionately it is undertaken). Secondly, while it is naturally important to differentiate between good and bad literature, it is not sufficient to just present something to a group of young people, with passion, simply because it is good, and you think it is good. (In a recent talk by Johanna Drucker at my university, she advocated a similar approach, that she wanted to present things to her classes just because she thought they were awesome and wanted to share them, whereupon I thought: "Isn't that how one should teach literature to first-graders?") A university course on literature should not only present specimens of good literature, but should supply the students with the critical faculty to understand the literary function active in books that makes them beautiful. To do this, the book doesn't even have to be a masterpiece. (An example: this summer I was present at a seminar where Prof. Horst Thomé of the University of Stuttgart spent two hours discussing the Venice Sonnets of Graf Platen, which upon first read I found utterly ordinary. After Thomé's close-reading and analysis of the intermedial, religious, and ekphrastic functions of the poem, I was fully begeistert.) According to Chace, English departments "have distanced themselves from the young people interested in good books." This may be true, but while I'm not even sure if there are any more young people today who are interested in good books, I think it would be more useful to outfit them with a rigorous critical apparatus to understand and analyze literature "per se," rather than letting someone tell them how good Willa Cather is. American literature departments certainly need an overhaul, as Epstein argues—yet what is needed is not a reactionary return. The passionate, humanistic sentimentalization of literature is not so bad in itself—it has its place, which is no longer in the university (and I'm not sure it ever should have been in the university, but rather in bourgeois living rooms)—but as academic fodder it is certainly not much more interesting than the abstruse theory and "automatic Leftism" of the current day.

A different piece by Scott Herring also bemoans the estrangement of young people from English departments that offer courses such as "Bat[woman] and Cat[man]: Queering the Canonical Comix." Yet Herring advocates for a shift in literary studies, equally as sentimental as Epstein, though less reactionary, towards a recognition of the power of literature to communicate the reality that history cannot communicate: "History gives us the facts, sort of, but from literary works we can learn what the past smelled like, sounded like, and felt like, the forgotten gritty details of a lost era."

Firstly, I would like to defend history very briefly: while it is clear that history sometimes misrepresents historical reality, we must remember that this is not history per se, but bad history. Good history offers us facts about what happened. Historical facts about 1848 are always more important and informative than what it smelled like in 1848. Secondly, it is clear to me from this article that Herring is a listener of This American Life. For the record, I hate This American Life, precisely because it engenders a cultural milieu that produces people like Herring, who instead of reading, re-reading, and analyzing texts, find an old motor in a desert, talk about it with an aged American, and think that from this experience they have learned something very special. This is the new American sentimentality, arising from the pseudo-intellectuals of "Generation X," a bohemian-bourgeoisie pseudo-materialism, the self-satisfied cloaking of poverty in a romantic shawl of pastoral Americana. Like Epstein's stodgy protest against the theory-heads, Herring reacts against dysfunction of this country's English departments in an unhelpful manner, offering a reactionary return to a sentimentalized literature, a literature which describes while at the same time elevates itself above the filth of the real world. What we need are newer critical methods, not a resuscitation of bourgeois literary pastoralism.

"Let the dead French theorists lie," Herring advocates. OK, but it would be helpful if you would be a bit more specific. Dead French theorists like Derrida, Saussure, or Pascal? Me, I'd toss the first, and treasure the other two. (In other words, not all French theory is unhelpful.) He continues: "Instead, literary scholars can become guides to the physical reality of the past." For me, this is another abstraction that the discipline could do without. The illness of American literary studies is not spiritual, and doesn't require a booster shot of passionate humanism, nor of pastoralism; the problem concerns the prevalence of an array of bogus critical/theoretical methods that impede accurate textual analysis.

Kara VanderBijl and the Anthropologie girl

LINK: http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/8/1/in-which-we-finger-plush-towels.html

While this piece may not be brilliantly written—some jokes succeed while others fall very flat—it is a better attempt at satirical cultural critique than most parodies of "hipster" culture that I've seen, for a very simple reason. "The Anthropologie girl" is a new concept to me, and indeed: I may not be the best judge of contemporary culture, having attempted (ever since leaving New York four years ago) to retreat into my private world consisting of idiosyncratic collages of various 20th century aesthetic movements, free from the influence of the 21st century (so I think). Yet still, it seems clear to me that Anthropologie represents the current instantiation of the opportunistic re-packaging and marketing of "alternative" youth culture as bourgeois commodity. This economic entity (the "re-marketer") has been around, of course, since the beginning of youth culture (some time between the World Wars?). It is always parasitic, and always destructive in that commercial appropriation and re-marketing of cultural symbols incites a backlash against and rejection of said symbols in favor of newer things. The neo-Hegelian nihilist (cf. previous posts on Hiller) would recognize here the dialectical form, and thus praise the process as a progression towards the definition of a certain cultural ideal. This view disregards the economic exploitation which flourishes in such a cultural schematic: namely, that the work of cultural innovation (be it musical, visual, technological), produced without pay by young individuals, is inevitably transformed into raw material for a cynical business endeavor (i.e Anthropologie).
This is all to say that VanderBijl's piece on "the Anthropologie girl" succeeds by parodying the imaginary world that is being sold as re-marketed culture, rather than targeting the original cultural from which Anthropologie appropriates. Most parodies of "hipster" culture (or worse still, "the hipster") succeed only in exposing the author's own parochial fantasies about what happens behind the closed doors of a loft in Brooklyn. The illusions and pretensions of young, alternative individuals may not be innocent or attractive—and more often than not they are already deeply influenced by marketing and mainstream media—yet this culture is not really worth being satirized when one considers the fact that its days are already numbered. VanderBijl's piece succeeds by selecting the right target.

[Addendum: I don't know very much about this This Recording website, but I worry about linking to it after looking at their list of "The Hundred Greatest Novels," of which you don't need to read anything more than the following: "6.  I, Claudius by Robert Graves"]

[Addendum 2: This is completely embarrassing and, in a way, a re-marketing of its own: http://shop.nplusonemag.com/products/what-was-the-hipster]