A journal of the urn burial.
The text has been set in Tribute, says the colophon, a typeface designed by Frank Heine from types cut in the 16th century by Françoise Guyot; specifically, a specimen printed around 1565 in the Netherlands.
It does no good whatsoever to call it a coincidence, that in my dilatory reading/re-reading of Nevèrÿon, I’ve ended up in the Tale of Plagues and Carnivals right about, well, now, but I have, and it is, and, well.
7.5 Historically the official reaction to plague in Europe was the one described by Defoe in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722): “The government… appointed public prayers and days of fasting and humiliation, [and encouraged the more serious inhabitants] to make public confession of sin and implore the mercy of God to avert the dreadful judgment which hung over their heads… All the plays and interludes which, after the manner of the French Court, had been set up, and began to increase among us, were forbid to act; the gaming-tables, public dancing-rooms, and music- houses, which multiplied and began to debauch the manners of the people, were shut up and suppressed; and the jack-puddings, merry-andrews, puppet-shows, rope-dancers, and such like-doings, which had bewitched the people, shut up their shops, finding indeed no trade; for the minds of the people were agitated with other things, and a kind of sadness and horror at these things sat upon the countenance even of the common people. Death was before their eyes, and everybody began to think of their Grave, not of mirth and diversion.”
Defoe’s last few lines may betray that this is the official interpretation of the response as well as the official proscription: if there was, indeed, “no trade,” why would these merrymakings need to be “forbid,” “shut-up,” and “suppressed”? At any rate, even in Artaud’s conservative schema, once “official theater” is banished during the plague, the reemergence, here and there, of spontaneous theatrical gestures in the demoralized populace at large throughout the city represents, for him, the birth of true and valid art/theater/spectacle.
And there’s everybody trying to make some sort of point by carrying on as if business were usual, going out to the bars and the Red Robins and St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans because we’re Americans and we do what we want no matter what like the coronavirus is some kind of terrorist we refuse to appease, and there’s all those videos of Italian neighborhood serenades, and there’s this, too, from a prior time of plagues and carnivals, when the ratchet managed for once not to crank to the right—
—but there’s also all the photos of nightmarish airport lines, and now I’m thinking about another book with a plague, and a carnival, that wrote the writing of it into itself—
Last week a nightmare. Landed at Dulles and arrested in Immigration. On a list, accused of violating the Hayes-Green Act. Swiss gov’t must have told them I was coming, flight number and everything. What do you mean? I shouted at officious official. I’m an American citizen! I haven’t broken any laws! Such a release to be able to speak my mind in my native tongue—everything pent up from the past weeks spilled out in a rush, I was really furious and shouting at him, and it felt so good but it was a mistake as he took a dislike to me.
Against the law to advocate overthrowing US gov’t.
What do you mean! I’ve never done anything of the kind!
Membership in California Lawyers for the Environment, right? Worked for American Socialist Legal Action Group, right?
So what? We never advocated anything but change!
Smirk of scorn, hatred. He knew he had me.
Got a lawyer but before he arrived they put me through physical and took blood sample. Told to stay in county. Next day told I tested positive for HIV virus. I’m sure this is a lie, Swiss test Ausländer every four months and no problem there, but told to remain county till follow-up tests analyzed. Possessions being held. Quarantine possible if results stay positive.
My lawyer says law is currently being challenged. Meanwhile I’m in a motel near his place. Called Pam and she suggested sending Liddy on to folks in OC so can deal better with things here. Put Liddy on plane this morning, poor girl crying for Pam, me too. Now two days to wait for test results.
Got to work. Got to. At local library, on an old manual typewriter. The book mocks: how can you, little worm crushed in gears, possibly aspire to me? Got to continue nevertheless. In a way it’s all I have left.
The problem of an adequate history bothers me still. I mean not my personal troubles, but the depression, the wars, the AIDS plague. (Fear.) Every day everything a little worse. Twelve years past the millenium, maybe the apocalyptics were just a bit early in their predictions, too tied to numbers. Maybe it just takes a while for the world to end.
Sometimes I read what I’ve written sick with anger, for them it’s all so easy. Oh to really be that narrator, to sit back and write with cool ironic detachment about individual characters and their little lives because those lives really mattered! Utopia is when our lives matter. I see him writing on a hilltop in an Orange County covered with trees, at a table under an olive tree, looking over a garden plain and the distant Pacific shining with sunlight, or on Mars, why not, chronicling how his new world was born out of the healthy fertility of the old earth mother, while I’m stuck here in 2012 with my wife an ocean to the east and my daughter a continent to the west, “enjoined not to leave the county” (the sheriff) and none of our lives matter a damn.
Also, to design a font based on a Renaissance Antiqua had been a long held desire for Heine, who said “I am particularly attracted to its archaic feel, especially with settings in smaller design sizes. It is rougher with less filigree than the types of the following centuries thus exhibiting much cruder craftsmanship of the early printing processes.” By using a third generation copy as a model, which did not reveal much detail, allowed Heine enough room for individual decisions resulting in a decidedly contemporary interpretation while maintaining a link to the past.
When I haven’t been reading Delany, or Robinson, or Eddison, or McKillip, or Macharia, or Warner, or helping to prep our office for mandated telework, or reflexively reloading the Twitter feeds of friends, I’ve been setting the type for the revised paperbacks. It’s something I can do over there, on the big monitor: since the final (final) edits were done on the ebook files, I have to copy and paste the text a section at a time, tweaking the kerning as I go to fix the capricious judgment of the automated hyphenator, and to make sure the widows and orphans are cared for, and it’s peaceful, soothing work, handling the text in those Renaissance Antiqua shapes, re-reading this bit or that as I lay them out, remembering, re-thrilling, re-embarrassed, and I can look up and find an hour or three has passed, at four in the morning, at ten at night, but it’s, well, it’s, things get done, you know? There is a measurable sense of progress. Still. I look over to the other screen, in another window, where something-or-other has maybe been playing, A Knight’s Tale, say, or Hannibal, I mean, I really like his neckties, you know? But under it, behind it, always all around it, those tweets, that news, these people, driving us over a cliff because they will not let go of the wheel. —I have to go and walk to the office in a bit here (avoiding public transportation), making sure the skeleton crew has what it needs to keep up with the physical labor that still must be done (answering phones, scanning the paper mail, handling secure faxes, keeping the computer network up), but until then, I look away, look back, spread the letters of that line apart just enough so that Ysabel’s name isn’t split between Ys- and abel. Too much of that sort of thing catches the eye. Draws you out of the flow. Breaks the spell.
A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.
Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne’s Urn Burial.
This year, said Thucydides, by confession of all men, was of all other, for other diseases, most free and healthful.
A paradise paved in a parking lot.
Further anent the preceding: here’s a start at listing mutual aid initiatives around the country; here’s a form for Portland-area folks to request support, including food deliveries and prescription pickups; here’s another Portland-area form for folks to offer that support. In conclusion, America is a sham: long live US
Bitter truths are bitter.
“The modern state was one that could no longer be run by a gang of friends.” —Tom Cutterham
Sufficient unto the day.
Closing the libraries is wildly grim. “The library branches’ WiFi signals will remain turned on for anyone who wants to sit outside a building or in the parking lots,” but, and yet, I mean, well. And still. —One might well note that ebooks are still available; one might well note that the 2019 Library Writers Project selections have just been announced; one might well—but still.
To the right, ever to the right!
Never to the left, forever to the right!
I have been thinking about this a lot. One of the things I am really struggling with right now is that we don’t have a progressive or a Left shock doctrine, as Naomi Klein calls it. The Right has a program in place for how to take advantage of moments like this. When you look at what the junta has done and everything else, this is an opportunity for the wealthy 1 percent of the United States and world to make Puerto Rico into a playground the way Cuba was in the 1940s and 1950s for the U.S. rich. I am terrified we will have an island of Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans.
To me, the question is: What do we do in the short and medium term that offers some semblance of a shock doctrine for our side? If we are going to rebuild Puerto Rico, how do we do it in a way that is right for the people of Puerto Rico? I have to weigh that with the very immediate concern of needing to get cargo containers with food and necessities that people have. Unfortunately, I don’t have a very good answer for how we meet the short-term need a way that sets up for the future.
If the Left and the unions don’t show any leadership during the Coronavirus crisis, the most acute social crisis we’ve faced for a long time, then objectively they’re deferring to the government.
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
The President would like to share the attached image with you, and passes along the following message: “From opening of press conference, biggest day in stock market history!”
Who said the working folks were scum?
That we were tramps and on the bum?
And that he had us on the run?
Der Chief!
“Today, we are living in the world Jack Welch made, one in which a racist, proto-fascist, self-proclaimed billionaire whose businesses have worked with organized crime figures is president, governing by the New Gilded Age principles of letting business rule itself and eviscerating labor, consumer, and environmental regulations. In fact, while Welch criticized Donald Trump’s chaotic management skills, he also loved how Trump had governed in favor of business and warned that impeaching the president would ‘blow the markets away.’ Impeachment had no impact on the market, but Jack Welch being wrong about America was the cornerstone of his career. His life immeasurably hurt this nation and should not be mourned. Instead, his methods and beliefs should stand for the decline of America in the twenty-first century.” —Erik Loomis
A mere electric animal, and me earning all that I’ve worked my way up to through the years.
Tom Scocca’s downright poetical on why it is Harrison Ford’s perfect in that Disney confection.
Cancel your subscription.
After 1985, the last Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, sought to reform and liberalize political life and the economy through new policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring). These policies caused political instability arising from nationalist and separatist movements. In 1989, Soviet-allied states in Eastern Europe were overthrown in a wave of revolutions which ended communist rule.
As part of an attempt to prevent the country’s collapse, a referendum was held in March 1991, boycotted by three republics, that resulted in a majority favoring the preservation of the union as a renewed federation. Gorbachev’s power was greatly diminished after Russian President Boris Yeltsin‘s high-profile role in facing down a coup d’état by party hardliners. In late 1991, Gorbachev resigned, and the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union met and formally dissolved the union. The remaining 12 constituent republics emerged as independent post-Soviet states.
The only thing more gobsmacking than the brazenly open who-gives-a-fuck incompetence of it all is how well it’s going to already have been working.
And just to prove I’m not some Russian trollfarm bot, here’s a photo of me doing my bit to thwart the Soviets’ years-long 1988 plan to exploit Sanders’ antiwar agenda by helping to TEAR DOWN THIS WALL in December of 1989:
In conclusion, fuck the Times.
If anyone would know...
“You can’t make the good old days come back just by painting pictures of them.” —Norman Rockwell
Gods are made, not born.
“The Market is at once wide and unthinking; it has a superhuman capacity to order the world, and yet it is essentially human in its behavior; it is a force of nature beyond human power and reckoning, yet it can be appeased, argued with, altered, bribed, influenced, redirected, appealed to, etc.; it is amorphous and yet incarnate—though immaterial, it takes on many forms. Our markets are like a cute classical pantheon, a gaggle of mercurial superhuman principalities of the heavens who sprung out of the self-created ancient orders of the universe and then sorta took shit over, although they seem a bit out of their depth actually running things; in their foibles they are more human than human; their appetites are ours, exaggerated; their greater wisdom smells faintly of folly and stupidity; they are more poetical than actual; they are not, in any case, real. Markets are always doing this because of that, responding to injury with injustice, bickering, dithering, making backroom deals—all in all like a bunch of line-graph Greek Gods. I will spare you the image of Paul Krugman at the Bacchanal. The proper way to read this sort of thing is as an installation in a rather dull epic, full of epithets. Volatility remained high, everyone.” —Jacob Bacharach
The (eventual) persistence of memory.
When I was writing this thing about Moore’s and Gibbons’ (and Higgins’) Watchmen—specifically, the bit about Rorshcach’s origin story in the margins of Kitty Genovese’s story, or at least Harlan Ellison’s hothouse revision of the urban legend of Kitty Genovese—I was trying to remember the piece I’d read some time before that didn’t so much tell me the urban legend was wrong, I mean, that’s what everyone knows at this point, the lesson it’s always already taught, but was the first piece to show me just how wrong it was, how much it bulldozed on its way to making its ugly little point, the glimpses of her life and all those others that couldn’t be reclaimed merely by unlearning it. —I didn’t find this half-remembered piece then, so went with something else, ah well, but I can tell you now it was “Don’t Look Now,” by Angus “studentactivism” Johnson, and I’m glad I can now tuck it into the commonplace book.
Yo dawg I herd you like Snyder cuts so we put a Snyder cut in your Snyder cut so you can sex while you death
“She is, essentially, Joker’s new girlfriend. And she is Harley Quinn’s polar opposite. She is Joker’s #2… A silent, terrifying serial killer, sexy as hell. All of his henchmen are terrified of her and they should be. Imagine Joker being Joker and torturing a hostage, and then he gets tired and sighs, handing the scalpel to Punchline, who slits their throat.” —James Tynion IV
Folie à hirsute.
You have more likely than not seen this—
—which some have likened to this—
—or maybe you’re thinking of this—
—but me, I was suddenly, implacably flung back to this—
—so. Anyway. —I’m not sure where I fall on the charts—Fantasy Garibaldi, I suppose, but more effusive; anyway. I’m not choosing to think about what I’d have to do to properly fit a respirator. Yet.
“If we have lost our faith in them, we have also lost our fear of them.”
The violence that has flared up in the North East district does not appear to be a spontaneous clash between the two communities following the road occupations. It seemed to be a consequence of a slow and deliberate political build-up. On 23 February, Kapil Mishra, a prominent leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party in Delhi, visited Babarpur and threatened the anti-CAA protesters. He was accompanied by people who he claimed were supporters of the CAA. He told the crowd that he would give a three-day ultimatum to the police to clear the Jaffrabad road or else he would handle the matter himself. As Mishra addressed the crowd, Ved Prakash, the deputy commissioner of police of the North East district, stood beside him and made no attempt to stop him or curb his provocative speech. According to the Muslim residents of Jaffrabad and Vijay Park, the mob supporting the CAA started attacking Muslim houses in the localities barely minutes after Mishra left the venue that day.
On the night of 24 February, as I spoke to the mob supporting the CAA at Babarpur, I saw Prakash walk up to the members of the mob amid chants of “Delhi Police zindabad” and shake hands with them. Prakash’s reception by the Hindu mob was not unusual. Every time a police vehicle passed through the armed mob, the mob cheered them—some of them were casually chatting with the police with their sticks and lathis in hand. It seemed as if the armed mob was unafraid of the police.
In contrast, there was a deep distrust among the Muslim population towards the police. At Vijay Park, some of the residents told me that they had seen police assault Muslims along with the Hindu right-wing mob. The residents told me that they did not trust the police anymore and were as scared of them as of the rampaging armed right-wing mobs. The residents said that on 23 February, the police were chanting “Jai Shri Ram” as they charged at Muslim neighbourhoods along with the Hindu mobs. I, too, witnessed a deeply antagonistic attitude by the police which was deployed in the Muslim localities. The personnel stationed in Jaffrabad did not mingle with the anti-CAA protesters or even attempt to talk to them, in sharp relief to their bonhomie with even the armed mob supporting the CAA.
Reëducatable.
Bunch of skeevy assholes who clutched their pearls at the very idea that someone might call the concentration camps on our borders “concentration camps” now joke with each other about being the first against the wall in the Berniebro Gulag, ha ha.
Idaho Purchase.
Speaking of maps (as just we were)—
I guess Oregon conservatives don’t want to drive too far the next time they flee the state to deny the legislature a quorum. —“They’re not leaving very much for us,” said the kid over breakfast. We reassured each other that, despite the website and the petitions for ballot measures, this was entirely a money-grubbing publicity stunt, not unlike Greater West Virginia. “Red states” and extractive industries and internal colonization, go figure.
Of course, conservatives always break number four, and we do live in the Age of Trump. God knows what might happen. Still, you gotta wonder: why do the secessionist earls of Eastern Oregon hate Eastern Washington so much?
