To Texas!

I’m going to be visiting a friend in Texas through next week. Blogging may be sporadic.

In the meantime, here is Barack Obama’s More Perfect Union speech:

Toward a review of The Hours

In a nameless local bar (though of course it has a name) I’d once revealed to a friend that Virginia Woolf is my favorite bourgeois novelist. In particular, I’d been seduced by Mrs. Dalloway. It is a novel that portends to present the joyous measure of abject lucubrations in one sublime day (flashbacks inter alia) of Clarissa Dalloway’s life:

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”–was that it?–”I prefer men to cauliflowers?”–was that it?

The sign of life is a semi-colon; it is the syntactic scaffold upon which the continuous form of a sentence hangs. In its conjunctive suspension the accumulation of words and ideas inhabit a space of their own, the alert expression of a moment’s experience held to the light. Woolf’s waves locate the motion of memory as stream of conscious creativity such that a muse among the vegetables makes for curiously luminous sport: A lark! A plunge! But with the contrast of something solemn and awful ever present. Tragedy triumphs in Woolf, but it is always a partial victory. The rest is what beauty we make of the everyday stuff that binds our moments into hours, the quotidian refuse of another bright possible day.

Masterfully, Michael Cunningham’s love letter to Woolf, The Hours, captures the moment:

The vestibule door opens on to a June morning so fine and scrubbed Clarissa pauses at the threshold as she would at the edge of a pool, watching the turquoise water lapping at the tiles, the liquid nets of sun wavering in the blue depths. As if standing at the edge of a pool she delays for a moment the plunge, the quick membrane of chill, the plain shock of immersion. New York in its racket and stern brown decrepitude, its bottomless decline, always produces a few summer mornings like this; mornings invaded everywhere by an assertion of new life so determined it is almost comic, like a cartoon character that endures endless, hideous punishments and always emerges unburnt, unscarred, ready for more. This June, again, the trees along West Tenth Street have produced perfect little leaves from the squares of dog dirt and discarded wrappers in which they stand. Again the window box of the old woman next door, filled as it always is with faded red plastic geraniums pushed into the dirt, has sprouted a rogue dandelion.

Cunningham’s splendid lyric translation of Woolf is foregrounded by the spare news that it is New York City. It is the end of the twentieth century. From the death of a terrible century, a rogue dandelion. One recalls Wallace Stevens‘ pathos,

What more is there to love than I have loved?
And if there be nothing more, O bright, O bright . . .

Into the bright quiet beauty of morning and mourning, both authors pause for the space of these fraught caesuras to give us ourselves all over again. If life is our dearest possession, to have and to hold for unspecified seasons, then we ought do our best, while we can, to be aware.

I mentioned Stevens, but perhaps it is Whitman’s grass that I want? Is there something about the latter’s ecstatic democracy that seems averse to a discussion of Woolf? The way the death of another is instrumental to one’s consumptive appreciation of life? What is that? Have I been seduced by privilege? Raymond Williams writes that the Bloomsbury fraction, as he calls it, is simply a fraction of the ruling class. What then? What then?

I had set out to write a review of the film version of The Hours. For that I refer you to a capable friend.

McCain Files: straight talk?

Ellen DeGeneres calls Sally Kern

Shame Files: Geraldine Ferraro

And to think that I voted for her and Walter Mondale in 1984 during an elementary school mock election. I’d always thought the vote rather precocious, especially as the majority of my peers went the way of the nation, and elected Reagan/Bush. Well, I take back my symbolic vote.

Obama after Mississippi

Child in Clinton Attack Ad Actually Supports Obama

Shame Files: Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern

Rep. Kern’s hate rant was recorded:

Disagree?
She can be reached at (405) 557-7348, or sallykern@okhouse.gov.

I’m indebted to BlogActive for this info.

Screams Behind the Shadows

I have a soft spot for Schizophrenia (1987), Sepultura’s sophomore effort with Roadrunner Records. DD was kind enough to give me the cassette: my first extended exposure to Brazilian thrash delight.

The album far surpasses Morbid Visions in musical competence, variation, and for this listener, interest. Schizophrenia, despite being largely composed before Andreas Kisser arrived, still wears his mark on lead guitar. Check out the riffing on Screams Behind the Shadows. Igor Cavalera’s drumming is also vastly improved. Thrashtastic fast with breakneck tempo changes. This time the album actually sounds like it was produced, only augmenting the band’s newfound tightness.

Gone is the silly satanism. The obligatory scary keyboard intro remains intact. The album roars into gear with the deliciously fast From the Past Comes the Storms. Who are these guys? No pause for reflection, you’re To the Wall.

The time changes in Escape to the Void are a perfect pit passion frenzy. To be chased with the 7 minute opus, Inquisition Symphony. By this point the listener is about as Septic Schizo as the band. Take a breather with  The Abyss, a short acoustic number, then right back into R.I.P. (Rest in Pain). Then on to glory with the newly produced and now classic Troops of Doom. For those missing the production of Morbid Visions the album closes with rough mixes of From the Past Comes the Storms, Septic Schizo, and To the Wall.

Schizophrenia is the not a masterpiece like next week’s Beneath the Remains. It’s simply Sepultura’s first really great thrash album.

Campaign Update

Obama will win the Wyoming caucus today.

yawn, scratch…

I’ve been revisiting Lukacs:

Quite apart from problems of culture where such fissures and dissonances are crucial, in all practical matters too the fate of a class depends on its ability to elucidate and solve the problems with which history confronts it.

Agreed. That the American proletariat is confronted with the choice between democrats is an ongoing problem. I’ve been watching the nomination process closely since it began in early ‘07. Tired, trite, and tried, are the moderate palliatives on offer from Hillary and Barack.

Yes of course, it’s better than anything coming from McCain, but that’s saying so very, very little…

Lukacs tells us:

For a class to be ripe for hegemony means that its interests and consciousness enable it to organize the whole of society in accordance with those interests. The crucial question in every class struggle is this: which class possesses this capacity and this consciousness at the decisive moment? This does not preclude the use of force. It does not mean that the class-interests destined to prevail and thus to uphold the interests of society as a whole can be guaranteed an automatic victory. On the contrary, such a transfer of power can often only be brought about by the most ruthless use of force (as e.g. the primitive accumulation of capital). But it often turns out that questions of class consciousness prove to be decisive in just those situations where force is unavoidable and where classes are locked in a life-and-death struggle.

Lukacs goes on to argue that class consciousness was absent in the absence of classes in pre-capitalist societies. He diagnoses the confused neo-feudal equivocation of the petty bourgeoisie–whose views and efforts, it turns out…gasp!…are largely irrelevant. The two significant classes are the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.

The voting proletariat seems to like Clinton. It’s true, the use of force is a non-starter against the American government. Superior firepower and all. But absent the will. That’s the disturbing part.

As Thoreau wrote in his Plea for Captain John Brown:

It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was dead, one of my townsmen observed that he died as the fool dieth; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that he threw his life away, because he resisted the government. Which way have they thrown their lives, pray?–such as would praise a man for attacking an ordinary band of thieves and murderers. I hear another ask, Yankee-like, What will he gain by it? as if he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a surprise party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. But he won’t gain anything by it. Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands the chance to save a considerable part of his soul,–and such a soul!–when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.