A quick aside on Modernist poets

There is something annoying about ‘footnote’ poets: Eliot, Pound, Yeats; that is, Modernism packed with obscure references.

I recently read Yeats's 1919. To view the poem in a ‘classical’ way, in which a poem is strong if its vision is concentrated, economical and thematically and visually unified, then it’s a piss-poor poem. 1919 covers the ‘Black and Tan’ years following the end of World War I; Yeats chooses to drop in diffusely references to Herodotus and the Persians’ burning of the Acropolis with fin-de-siècle dancers with Plato and fourteenth-century shape-shifters. The overall first impression I’m left with is exactly the same as that drawn from a conversation with a drunk – senseless lurching.

But 1919 is a powerful poem. Its imagery is rich, even if so diffuse that it stretches our powers of analogy. What we're dealing with is a different type of poetry which requires a different rubric.

A man in his own secret meditation

Is lost amid the labyrinth he has made

In art or politics.

Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924)

Have you ever visited a relative in a convalescent home and ended up falling ill yourself and staying there for years? Nor have I, but that is the backdrop to Thomas Mann’s novel.

Typically for Mann, it is a novel of ideas rather than sensations. Mann writes characters. These characters represent ideas, and between them they battle for the ‘problem child’s’ soul, the young hero Hans Castorp. A matrix to assist you:

	Settembrini	Naphta	Peeperkorn
Speech	Loquacious	Acerbic	Rambling
Taste	Thrifty	Luxurious	Munificent
Political eschatology	World republic	Roman Catholic world-state	Apolitical
Spiritual allegiance	Freemasonry	Society of Jesus	No allegiance
Century	19th century	Medieval	Contemporary (post-WWI)
Political system	Nation state	Spiritual communism	N/A
Nietzschean symbol	Apollo	Dionysus (Chandala)	Dionysus (aristocratic)

Clavdia Chauchat I exclude because she doesn’t represent what is for Castorp an ideal, even though symbolically she represents lust to the reader - lust for the exotic, boorish, energetic East. So too Castorp’s cousin, who represents duty, something which never tempts our protagonist.

Castorp's choice between antagonists? He doesn't really choose. Overall result of the novel: a loose baggy monster.

On the impossibility of correlating an objective criticism of art with a subjective appreciation

Although all great art is truly great in itself, only some of it is, at different times and for different people, like a key which fits a lock on a door we’ve never opened. As we obtain new rooms, so do we close off others behind us. This must be the key to my theory of milieu – the undetectable stream of living which resets our fundamental thought-processes and makes us approach the same task at different times with such subtly different tones.

Writing: show or tell?

Shena Mackay tells us a lot of information in her short stories. I was always of the opinion that ‘show, don’t tell’ means that you reveal information slowly through prompts, and that each prompt (for instance, a necklace or a car) should have only one corresponding reveal. Prompts should be separated from each other by the passage of some action in real time. That gives you a lean, sparse story that’s both economical and concentrated. Example:

A woman is walking to her car, sees a necklace in the road which reminds her of a necklace she lost when a child. Innocently bewildered by her reminiscence, she picks it up and continues to her car. Then the police arrest her for theft.

The ‘tell, don’t show’ version could run like this:

A woman in the back of a police car looks at the path she was walking on which reminds her of the necklace that reminds her of her childhood, which got her there in the first place.

If you can show how the summary looks grammatically tortuous, you can tell that the one is preferable to the other.

Why I hate the Glass Bead Game

Games are designed to stimulate the mind. Chess has proved a long-lasting, peaceful substitute to, and simulation of, the brutal necessities of war. Although a simulation, games possess an inner logic which means that they can also be a substitute for reality. Addiction to computer games is now treated in clinics. Whether virtual reality/ integration is a mere game or an ontology is yet to be posed, but will be once the technology is sophisticated enough.

The glass bead game is a game of extraordinary elegance and freedom. It is an abstract rubric in which players range across human cultural history for material they can use in their 'moves.' The game is a product of a future Europe which has reached the end of its useful productive cultural life. In this way, Das Glasperlenspiel shares the cultural pessimism of Oswald Spengler, but replaces Spengler's vision of a future in which 'Caesarism' triumphs over culture with a future in which monastic-scholastic contemplation triumphs over experience. Although we do not know to what extent this monasticism exists as a general phenomenon or a peculiarity of the province in which glass bead game players study and play, the book gives us this alternative vision as a political solution to Spengler's problem, which was playing itself out in WWII as Hesse wrote the novel.

I get the feeling from Das Glasperlenspiel of a writer who has utterly repudiated his age, but who wishes to situate within it a retreat which is serene and intellectual and Spartan, and as aloof as Lhasa before the coming of the Chinese. It was published in 1943, so the age that is repudiated is the Third Reich. However, Hesse does not rejoice in the freedom that would be gained in the wake of the curtailment of the thousand-year regime, but instead replaces the discipline meted out under the swastika with a different kind of discipline. In the novel, the Castalians are the disciplined acolytes of the Game. They do not get married; they do not experience desire; they are not even creative in the ordinary sense of that word. They are merely conscientious scholars of world culture. The glass bead game itself is played under conditions of total renunciation. The world outside the kingdom of Castalia is only raised as a political threat to their monkish way of life; never as a temptation (as in, for instance, Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation, as well as most other ‘ascetic’-type communities such as the Amish). Hesse would have us believe that no one would want to go out into the world outside once they have been introduced to the purity of the Game.

As a red-blooded young man, I doubt this, but then the crux of my argument is that such renunciation is bad. But what I don't doubt is that Hesse was ill in Nietzsche’s sense. He didn’t take the Judean route - rebellion, rabble-rousing against Rome (cf. Genealogy of Morals) - but the Buddhist one. Hesse wasn't a rebel; he was an ascetic.
Hesse was physically frail - he was rejected for combat duty in the Great War - a fact which must be borne in mind when reading this novel of intellectual dislocation and disembodiment and retreat. His reaction to war was to move away from Germany to Switzerland - after the Fatherland lost the Great War, as if protesting against militarism by protesting against the distinctly non-militarist Weimar Republic was a bold gesture. Twenty years later, his plan for facing off against the Nazi regime was exactly the same as his support for Weimar - to stay exactly where he was. In Switzerland. Hesse's 'politics of detachment' was the politics of extreme individualism: 'Every Buddhist for himself'. Contrasted with that other Nazi-'detachee' Ernst Jünger, it is difficult to respect Hesse. Jünger sought inner emigration in the Wehrmacht. Hesse in cuckoo land.

Jünger's preface to the 1929 English translation of In Stahlgewittern reads:

Time only strengthens my conviction that was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart.

Experience is hot-blooded, in its heights and its depths. Murder - but so too romantic love. War - but also the beauty of self-sacrifice. Hesse's glass bead game players are the apogee of selfish individualists turned away from the world into a private contemplation. What is worse is that the glassbead game players aim low: their contemplation is not of some mystical, difficult apogee of human existence - of God, for instance - but of something much more staid - high cultural history.

The full title of the novel should be: The Glassbead Game - the torpid spiritual life of academic fantasist Joseph Knecht.

Meddling medical men meld made-up memories to mice's minds, may make man-as-memory moot

Link here to a report on scientists introducing false memories in mice.

Of course, erasing memories for sufferers of PTSD is progress, but science is Promethean, and it would be remiss not to note the anxieties set out in Blade Runner/ Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.  If personality is the sum of memories (bodily as well as intellectually, of course) then what could this mean for personality itself?

Fry up on bathetic British banknote bust-up; campaigners kick off, crow about Equality Act infraction

Utterly mental. Link here.Let's just stick abstract shapes on them and have done with it. Let's erase Darwin and Smith and Hublon in the name of equality (nod to Dostoevsky's Devils, there). They've emasculated and denationalised  the Euro, so why wouldn't the BoE do it with the pound? Just stick on some non-local shapes and let the equalisers have what they want.

Recession prompted 'unprecedented' fall in UK wages

At our brother blog, the Lord of Reward. Something for socialists to applaud and libertarians to deplore.

Link here.

The body is gone, but you can still smell her...

Thatcher was a 'conviction' politician, but her conviction was based on the error that everyone else was just like her, but lacked her willpower. She began as a middle-class grocer's daughter in the east Midlands and  worked her way up the social ladder by hard work, perseverance and luck, she became a research chemist who worked on whippy ice cream (a 99 = iced Thatcherism) and then a barrister as she forayed into politics.
'There is no such thing as society,' she later quipped, to the outrage of the communitarian left.

This was a woman of iron will who was well networked. She had middle class upbringing. She married a wealthy businessman. She conveniently forgot these elements as she worked through her philosophy of personal industry and force-fed it to the British public in the 1980s. To Thatcher, it was only a lack of willpower that prevented mining towns from recasting themselves as hubs of entrepreneurship. This is the logic of a well-connected and highly mobile woman.

The Conservatives were voted in in '79 much the same way they were (albeit with the Liberals) in 2010 - on a promise to sort out the economy. And sort it out they did, as the hagiographers keep telling us. Catastrophic unbalancing of the economy would be another way of putting it. Scrapping industry because we can't compete with the Germans is nothing to be lauded. What filled the gap was the beginning of the pain: 1986's Big Bang, which revivified the City of London, helped keep the GDP figures handsome:

Unfortunately, it also provided a crack pipe for Westminster to smoke itself into the belief that there would be 'no return to boom and bust'. A 'shot in the arm', as the Americans would say, which kills the legs is no cure at all.

Thatcher's death gives us a glimpse of what is interesting in people's attitudes towards society. That she 'had to take on the unions', 'sort out the national debt', 'get inflation down' possesses the status of myth for the winners of Thatcher's policies. For the losers - those whom Thatcher believed lacked the willpower to be a part of her Britain - there was increasing meaninglessness, increasing poverty and increasing shame: in the North, Midlands and the West; in Scotland; in Wales; in Northern Ireland.

Thatcherism, for all its divisiveness, gave way to something much worse: Blairism. Blairism shared Thatcherism's credo of greed (they were intensely comfortable with people getting filthy rich), ramped up surveillance, tried to re-engineer the ethnic make-up of the country in a spectacular piece of gerrymandering the demos, but went to war dishonestly with Iraq, and then laughed off what was basically a war crime. Thatcher was an arrogant prig. Blair an insufferable eel.

Thatcher is dead, but her legacy is alive.

BBC: Should Britain let go of London

Link.

Britain - a call centre for London. London - a piece of 'real estate' for the global rich. It isn't healthy and it isn't good. It feasts on the nation. Like a vampire, it sucks the blood; like a zombie, it eats the brains. We at Burning Pyre believe that the provincialisation of the nation outside of the capital is the price to be paid for the destruction of industry, but better that than the collapse of the UK, thought the Tories in the 80s. It has a certain logic to it, but of course it's proved decisive to the growth of nationalism in Scotland and Wales.

The question is, how long before the regions bring a motion to Parliament to rename London Transylvania?

ONS report on regional economics here (March 2013).

Call of Cthulhu and Lovecraft's themes: an essay (part 1)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

It is 1926.

The TV is demonstrated:

Mussolini is in power:

The General Strike takes place in the world's biggest empire:

The First War is a painful and recent memory of machines crushing men like insects and a whole generation of Europeans is raised almost fatherless. Communism has beaten off an international coalition and Stalin reigns supreme now that Lenin is dead. Oswald Spengler has already proclaimed in the wunderbuch of 1917 Decline of the West that the artistic and political culture of the West has petrified into an unalterable form of civilisation, of numbers and law-tables. Max Weber has identified the West’s administrative science of bureaucracy as an iron cage of an unfeeling, impersonal age. Franz Kafka has populated the iron cage with fictive victims. Freud sees cocks and fannies everywhere. Already more than forty years has passed since Nietzsche wrote the immortal warning, ‘God is dead.’ So to 1926: an American writer of pulp fiction named Howard Phillips Lovecraft writes a short story in the Gothic horror genre, called The Call of Cthulu.

Its publication in 1928 is not an historical event, but then works of genre – horror, romance, even science fiction – have never been historical events. Invariably genre works drop out of all but the history books of film, literature and stage as soon as the print is dry on the reviews. Whereas the near-contemporaneous Ulysses is talked about very much in terms of the historical context in which it was published; whereas the admittedly somewhat older Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is pointed at as a fateful ‘kink’ in art history’s path – so genre works are analysed generally without reference to the historical context in which they are created. Ulysses concatenates Freud, the death of god, the plethora of modern man’s leanings and his consequent exhaustion – it is timely; rechtzeitig. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon conjures up feelings of fragmentation and perspective which were thought – perhaps only subconsciously – but not yet expressed so forcefully. Perhaps that is the clue – art begets art. Cubism emerges from painting, bleeds into writing (Apollinaire, Faulkner, Wyndham Lewis); writing captures dream analysis and commits it to the canvas (Dali, Magritte); the news reels find their way into Dos Passos’s USA. Each cross-pollination provides extra momentum when viewed as Art with a capital ‘A,’ creating a sense of its own relevance and historicity.

But horror – a genre – remained mere entertainment, outside of the boundaries of serious art and a mere reflection of the times, not a commentary on them, as if entertainment could only unwittingly catch the diseases of the age and not diagnose them.

Works which have history on their side are specifically and consciously new pieces of work which challenge the canon; this is the way of art since at the latest the Romantic period in the late eighteenth century. A serious work of art separates its cause from its effect. By contrast, Chekhov’s Lady with the Little Dog, which Nabokov called the greatest short work in all Russian literature, is on the face of it a simple tale of forlorn attraction between strangers – a simple set-up which tells us that this story is not about new sensations or contraptions or geographies or creatures. To stretch the use of two of our ordinary terms, Lady with the Little Dog is ‘about’ forlorn attraction; its ‘proper sensation’ concerns something deeper, something which critics find more difficult to agree upon: modern alienation, perhaps; or hopes; or fate. It is this indeterminable quality which separates art from genre. It is quality which then separates accomplished works of art and genre from works which merely aspire to be art or genre, and which is outside of the ambit of this essay.

The horror genre – like all genre – is self-limiting. Its tropes almost anyone can enumerate with the minimum of fuss – and this in all probability is the cause of its being excluded from the serious arts. Horror plays to something primal and pre-existing in the human experience: horror is about what’s lurking in the shadows; it is about our fear of death; it is about our fear of the ugly and deformed. Lovecraft himself said that the ‘criterion of authenticity’ for a work of horror is ‘the creation of a given sensation,’[i] in which ‘proper sensations are excited.’ How? Through the creation of newer, weirder forms of dread. The history of the serious arts tells us that these are themes which need not do anything new in order to function correctly. Horror’s function is to create a sense of fear and foreboding, and sometimes terror. As a genre, it is autotelic. In beginning, middle and end, cause and effect are melded together into an alloy whose sole purpose is to ‘horrify’ the observer. The variety of modes and effects are what provides the genre its depth. The dread of a vampire – a charming parasite capable of reason, but cursed to live forever – and the terror of a zombie – Westernised as a fallen man, devoid of all reason and impelled by the slimmest residue of brute instinct – are qualitatively different modes and effects of horror. Crossover has long been part of the horror genre – theoretical battles set out by enthusiasts in a game which is not different in form from a debate between two philosophers about essence. What better represents the essence of horror – Frankenstein or the Wolf Man? Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man, Dracula versus Frankenstein – these two-for-ones are pitched like The Big Fight, each one a battle between different manifestations of the 'given sensation' of horror, each fight able to be settled only by the director's preference and the sympathies of the audience.

As a piece of Gothic horror fiction, this preamble is designed to show that the historicity of The Call of Cthulu is not in question – so why call it to account? The introduction is necessary because Call of Cthulu is as attuned to the spirit of the age as the invention of TV is the age in which it is created, and it has been ignored as such. Only if we understand the historical context in which it was written will be able to appreciate the subtleties of The Call of Cthulu – subtleties which, as will be shown, are ever more relevant as we moderns in our everyday lives sink ever deeper into fantasy worlds coloured more by rationality and, conversely, simulacra than by danger and risk and the weird.

---

[i] Lovecraft, Supernatural horror in literature.1. Introduction

Works of our age 1: For the Love of God

I worked for one of the most notorious casualties of the financial crisis before, during and after the investment bank BNP Paribas took the decision to stop redeeming on mortgage securities the true risk profile of which it did not understand, an act which sparked demand for liquid funds from buyers of these bonds and which was the speculator’s equivalent of a run on the banks.

I worked for Northern Rock. I worked in junior roles, in HR. I was an outsider, with no access to privileged information – other than biographical anecdotes of the main players, which have in any case been publicised – and I was economically illiterate. I do have a raft of anecdotes, the most moving of which that I considered buying options that same August – I forget whether it was before or after BNP Paribas’ decision on 9 August 2007 – seeing the decline in the share price as temporary market chicanery and a situation in which I could later have profited. Later, I grasped that its precipitous fall from its peak of over twelve pounds to seven pounds was a case of the Telltale Heart: investors and analysts were increasingly aware that the sound beating under the floorboards was the virile heart of over-exposure to risk.

These shares fell off a cliff after 14 September 2007, following Robert Peston’s exposure on the evening of 13 September 2007 that Northern Rock had run out of money and applied for emergency liquidity from the Bank of England – the ‘lender of last resort.’ No one wants to invest in a company which doesn’t have enough money to give to its customers, because there certainly won’t be any crumbs left for investors once the accounts are filed.

Those shares later lost their value completely and were sequestered guiltily by the very government that had fostered the consumer credit boom, in February 2008. An independent valuer later recommended that former shareholders not be compensated for nationalisation of their shares. Northern Rock then downsized, split into a ‘good’ bank and a ‘bad’ bank – as if we suddenly became moral about credit risk – and the ‘bad’ bank merged with that other nationalised bank, Bradford & Bingley and eventually rid itself of its Newcastle workforce. The ‘good’ bank then downsized again. I left before the government’s holding cronies UKFI – with whom I had protracted and tortuous conversations on the topic of bonus payments to staff and executives in 2010 – sold the ‘good’ bank to Virgin Money. By this point, I had distanced myself completely from the squalling maelstrom of UK retail banking and left for a different industry; I’d emotionally sold off my stake in the affair. Nevertheless, it continues to haunt me. As LIBORgate shows, the wounds of financial deregulation are very much still scabrous.

Galbraith blamed the Great Crash of 1929 on irrational exuberance. The Great Crash of 2008 (as it matured and bigger victims like Bear Stearns, AIG and Lehman Brothers began to succumb to the rot) was equally a case of irrational exuberance. What differentiates the cause of the Great Depression and the ‘Credit Crunch’ (a comically understated name if there ever was one) is that our bust was the result of a policy of growth by the expansion of consumer credit, and not wild speculation. According to the FinancialCrisis Inquiry Commission, this policy started in Clinton’s administration. The idea was that the more people that own houses, the more people will lift out of poverty. Greenspan lowered the nets, putting central bank interest rates at one percent. Then financial people in Wall Street began parcelling up debt and selling it in tranches. This fuelled huge profit and huge bonuses. More importantly, it gave consumers more liquidity than they had ever dreamed of.

House prices increased and consumers began to use their houses as cash machines. I temped in Northern Rock’s Mortgage Retention department in 2006, processing ‘Together’ mortgages which offered unsecured top-ups on fully-leveraged secured loans at up to 125% loan-to-value. The House Price Index between January 1995 and October 2012 for Newcastle upon Tyne, where Northern Rock was based, show that trough-to-peak, house prices more than doubled in little over six years.

Source: Land Registry.gov

I remember something was up when I started looking for houses with my girlfriend. Two moderate incomes, and no way in hell could I afford a property anywhere. My friends were in the same boat; they either rented, or lived at home. These were early signs.

For the first time, I noticed the ubiquity of the black Range Rover in the suburbs. Audis and BMWs proliferated. Everyone acquired a flatscreen TV. It was conspicuous consumerism fuelled by a negative balance of trade and a credit boom.

Legislatively, England became a nicer, more civilised place – at face value. Labour introduced the National Minimum Wage in April 1999. It banned fox hunting in 2004. It passed a series of laws strengthening employment rights and the rights of the disabled. On the other hand, we had the bizarre phenomenon of ASBOs – neither tough on crime nor effective – and the proliferation of CCTV and internet monitoring. We also had access to the dark underbelly of globalisation. Society started to look more and more like Blade Runner in the cities, even as the suburbs glutted itself on credit.

Culturally, money dominated. Football removed the last vestiges of its working class origins and spent all of the excess on gate receipts on players’ wage bills. Celebrity was for celebrity’s sake – this was the age of the Big Brother house. Few of its addicted viewers recognised the negative connotation which traces back to George Orwell’s novel.

Every age gets the art it deserves. Recent events demonstrate that between 2001 - when Greenspan started cutting the Federal Reserve interest rate in the wake of 9/11 - and 2008 - the year of the banking bailouts - we lived in the Age of Greed. The first work in this series of works for our age is Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God.

It is a human skull, decorated with human teeth, platinum and diamonds. The rather florid patterning on the forehead could be a logo. It resembles an Affliction t-shirt, a brand whose florid designs first obtained popularity in the latter part of the Age of Greed.

       

    

A reminder of our mortality, this gaudy crystal skull – and there is nothing beautiful about it. It is designed to be a piece of absurd excess; perhaps a reduction of our lives to bling, a sort of Curse of the Sutton Hoo Burial, in that the meretriciousness of our irreligious lives ends in accumulated things which outlast our decaying bodies, and our existences melt away into nothingness.

What is interesting in the context of my own experience is the contrast between the book value of Hirst’s work – the face value of the materials and labour in its construction – and its market value. Traditionally, the art work is produced at minimal cost – canvas, paints and time. At its most extravagant, the saleable artwork is made or marble or gold. But this is where Hirst’s work differs: here, diamonds and platinum are appended to the skull. They are not functional or structurally integral to the work in any way.

The face value at production was £14 million. Its market value was $100 million at sale (roughly £63 million, at current exchange rates). The owner of the skull is therefore – deliciously – accepting market risk into his portfolio in a rather more obvious way than if he purchased a Van Gogh. Artwork-as-market risk is my first choice to include amongst the art works of our age.