There was an old man of L. A.
Whose motto was A = ~A.
When they called him contrary,
He cried: “Corollary!”
That intrinsic old man of L. A.

Jean Métellus has died. Better to put it that way than “is dead,” because he was the sort of person who did things in the active voice. Though I am sure he didn’t want to, he has gone into the great night after a sojourn among us that began in 1937. He was a year younger than my father and three years older than my mother. I felt for him the filial respect of a reader and the conditional identification of a translator (for I did translate him, but one of my reasons for doing so is that I felt a strong difference between his literary personality and my own). I am reminded of how he signed his letters:

“Indéfectiblement
Jean”

Indéfectiblement: what’s that in English? An indéfectible is someone who never gives up, never deserts. And that he was. Convinced that the wretched of the earth were never going to get a fair deal unless they stood up and risked death to demand it, writing his poetry every morning under a big bright picture of Toussaint Louverture, he was indeed indéfectible. A real lefty. Not a deserter. Unshakeable.

Le Monde has a short bio here. “Jean Métellus, 1937-2014, a figure of the Haitian intellectual scene.” I’ll have more to say about it later, but what does it mean to call a man “a figure of the Haitian intellectual scene” when he’s been living in France for more than fifty years? Headlines are rarely written by the journalist who wrote the corresponding article, but I must say that this way of putting things rather confirms than denies the accusation made by the great poet that “French racism is if anything more severe in 2014 than in 1959” (see the article). Métellus? Black man, therefore figure of Haitian intellectual scene, therefore not our problem. Meanwhile, much more importantly, Philippe Sollers has changed his mind about something…

And further Le Monde, God love them, resorts to an esoteric vocabulary when describing Métellus’s book of odes to the heroes of black resistance to racism (e.g.: Rosa Parks, M. L. King Jr., Steve Biko, Nelson Mandela) as being touched occasionally “by angelism or Manicheanism.” That is? Decoded: Métellus occasionally simplified the record, making these resisters unambiguously good and the people against whom they struggled unambiguously bad. A grievous sin against subtlety… But in order to keep it all in the register of polite disagreement, Le Monde uses terms that will be understood by only a few. Is the French paper of record afraid of the Front National, so that they can’t call racism by its name any more? Looking back over Métellus’s broadsides against white privilege, I see the simplification as understandable and not the last word in a competition that has generations yet to run. I had no problem sympathizing with his sympathy. He hated to see good people condemned to live rotten lives because it was more convenient to someone else that it should be so.

Unshakeably. That should sum it up, Monsieur le Docteur Métellus, poète et citoyen éternel de Jacmel. Cher ami, porte-parole extraordinaire des Muses haïtiennes, général de l’armée des mots, may you have readers as long as words are read, and may they recognize your zeal for justice, which spoke through your personas of neurologist and poet. Ainsi soit-il.

(Round table talk at the ACLA/MLA panel of the same name, Chicago, Jan. 11, 2014.)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had a busy ten years. I approach today’s assignment in the spirit of the chastened soothsayer. Since I’m on record as having said a few things, in my section of the ACLA’s 2004 State of the Discipline report, about what Comparative Literature is, has been, and should be, I might now look back at which of those statements held up and which ones were dead in the water.

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(A response to papers by Andrew Piper, on “Wertherity,” and Hoyt Long and Richard So, on literary networks and the English-language haiku, MLA annual meeting, Chicago, Jan. 10, 2014.)

For lack of time, I will jump into the normative right away. Computers should augment human inquiry, not replace it: “augment,” that is, in a specific sense that I will try to elaborate. The point of using computers should not be to do the same sort of thing that scholars have been doing for a long time with file cards and dictionaries, only faster and larger. Let’s not frame the work of the Humanities in such a way that it throws the humans out on the street. My motive is more than protectionism. I hate wasted effort, even computer effort. Let us honor the tools by giving them work that only they—in combination with us—can do.

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So a few months ago I predicted that one day actors would be hired by firms like Coursera to teach MOOCs (because once you don’t have to respond to student questions live, who cares who reads from the script? Might as well be a hottie…).

And now one of the leading MOOC firms, EdX, is considering hiring Matt Damon to teach a course.

Casting Damon in a MOOC is just an idea, for now: In meetings, officials have proposed trying one run of a course with someone like Damon, to see how it goes. But even to consider swapping in a star actor for a professor reveals how much these free online courses are becoming major media productions—ones that may radically change the traditional role of professors.

One for-profit MOOC producer, Udacity, already brings in camera-friendly staff members to appear with professors in lecture videos. One example is an introduction to psychology course developed earlier this year in partnership with San Jose State University. It had three instructors: Gregory J. Feist, an associate professor of psychology at San Jose State University, who has been teaching for more than 25 years and who wrote a popular textbook on the subject; Susan Snycerski, a lecturer at the university who has taught for 15 years; and Lauren Castellano, a Udacity employee who recently finished a master’s in psychology from the university, advised by Feist.

One sometimes hears objections to Halloween from people who are afraid it’s an anti-Christian holiday, demonic, Satanic, hedonistic, or pre-Christian. It might be any of the above (it’s certainly pre-Christian, in its guise as Samhain). But I wonder about the implied notion that a non-Christian holiday might be somehow morally deficient, that it would be virtuous to abstain from costumes, trick-or-treating, or jack o’lanterns.

After all, what passes for a Christian holiday? The Día de los Muertos is an ingenious cultural hybrid (All Saints’ Day plus the lingering memory of the Aztec gods). So is Christmas/Yule. Mardi Gras falls somewhere between Lupercalia and the Greater Dionysia. Isn’t Easter named after Ishtar? If we go on at this rate discovering predecessors, we won’t have any Christian festivals left.

And let’s look at the content of the holiday. On Christmas, there is feasting, singing, and giving of gifts. Some of us make charitable donations (especially Americans, when the first of January looms and the IRS comes to mind). But the greater part of the gifts, and certainly the massive advertising, decorating, carol-singing, red-nosed public side of the thing, has to do with circulating good stuff among friends and family– which is not far from benefiting oneself. If “it is more blessed to give than to receive,” most Christmas gifts qualify only under a technicality.

On Halloween, we throw our doors open to all strangers, the stranger the strangers the better: space aliens, pirates, warrior princesses, dinosaurs, zombies, Elvises, Time Lords, Scotsmen, Yellow Submarines. And into their outstretched baskets we pour candy, not caring when they eat it or whether they got more than they deserved. Sure, there’s the threat of a trick in the absence of a treat, and it may be that atavistically we are bribing the ghosts and spirits to stay away from our homesteads for another year. But it’s still an act of radical hospitality that sweeps the candy away from, not around in, the domestic circle. So I say: Cast thy Twix upon the waters! Go thou and do likewise!

I’ll be using this title to compile some reflections on the NSA spying scandals. Much of what I say will be obvious. If you want to have friends, don’t treat them like enemies. Don’t spy on them and don’t lie to them about what you did if there is the remotest chance of being found out.

I can imagine that there would be a justification for listening in on suspects already identified as “of interest” in a developing case– this is just acting on what is known as “probable cause,” and although not entirely charming, passes the prudence test (does the behavior result in tangibly reduced risk for the people you are responsible for and care about? If yes, check the box and go ahead, though with misgivings). But it’s in the nature of an uncontrolled, secret program to expand as far as the money will take it (and there’s always more money), until the spying apparatus is pretty soon listening in on everybody who is connected to everybody who might be of interest in a potential case that might eventually surface– which means everybody. It’s quite a thing, mathematically speaking, to stay on top of the trillions of relationships that obtain among a billion or so people. But I’m not proud that we’re accomplishing this triumph; it would have been a better cause for pride if we left more people alone.

Expanding the definition of “national security” to the point that it includes eavesdropping on all parties to any negotiation in which we and our allies are involved is simply a sign of pathology. People who are deeply mentally sick alienate their friends pretty quickly. Put otherwise, it is hard to be a friend of a person who is paranoid and prone to violent outbursts and claims to be the world savior– and who taps your phone and email. Such a person, if you have the poor luck to be stuck on an island with him or her, I would style the Lord of the Files.

And that is the person that the US has become. Blame is raining down on Obama, and the question (for those who care) is, as it was for Nixon and Reagan, “what did he know and when did he know it?” According to the White House press secretary, he didn’t know anything. But we knew that was going to be the answer. The fact that repugnant opposition politicians, who would do ten times worse if they had the chance, are jumping in to score points shouldn’t dissuade us from asking the question. But I don’t think it matters so much what Barack H. Obama, Esq., knew. The presidency is a legal person, like a king under the old “two-bodies” theory, and in the transcendent sense of that personality the presidency knows, authorizes, and is responsible for a hell of a lot, and it has been so since the XYZ affair was rattling the ruffled cuffs of the young Republic.

What was Obama’s reaction when he learned about these nifty intercepts that gave him a preview of what our friends were thinking (but not, apparently, what the Russians or the Chinese were thinking)? What kind of courage would it have taken for him to push it all aside and say to the Director of National Intelligence, “Cut those wires and fire those spooks. I don’t need to tap the phones of our most trusted allies. We can compete in the big old world on a fair-and-square basis”? Did he think, “Well, this is not totally kosher, but I didn’t actually order the surveillance, and it might come in handy some day after all.” Did he have an impulse to reject the Faustian package, only to receive this remonstrance from the spook in charge: “Sir, this intelligence could be of national importance. It could save lives. It could make the difference between Boeing winning a contract and Airbus winning it. Your personal moral quibbles must cede to the national interest”? I don’t know. I suspect presidents don’t like to be called choirboys.

But a salient piece of Washington folklore was uttered by a member of the policy circle most likely to have the task of making up justifications for the US President being the Lord of the Files. Mike Rogers, a Republican member of Congress and head of the House Intelligence committee, offered, according to the Guardian, the following interpretation of twentieth-century history:

Going further, Rogers claimed that the emergence of fascism in Europe in the early 20th century could be partly explained by a conscious decision by the US not to monitor its allies.

“We said: ‘We’re not going to do any kinds of those things, that would not be appropriate,” he said. “Look what happened in the 30s: the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism. We didn’t see any of it. And it resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.”

I don’t thing Congressman Rogers would pass a high school history test. What dates are associated with (a) the rise of fascism? (b) the rise of communism? (c) the rise of imperialism? Half-credit for (a), Mr. Rogers (the conspicuous events of the 1930s do include Hitler’s election in 1933, but fascism got its start in Italy in 1922); zero credit for your other two answers.

However, what he is parroting is a familiar line based on at least a fragment of fact. In the first decades of the twentieth century the US had a Black Chamber, or cryptanalysis bureau, based, as much of our present spying activity is, in a commercial telecommunications node (in that instance, the Chamber was hidden in a firm that compiled telegraphic codebooks). After 1919, Henry Stimson, Secretary of State, is said to have declared, “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” and disbanded the Black Chamber. It was pulled back together in a hurry in response to the next war (I am getting this from David Kahn’s 1967 book The Codebreakers, a favorite of my father’s).

Now perhaps Stimson’s code of ethics did not prepare the US for conditions as ungentlemanly as those endured by the combatants of WWII. But Mike Rogers, twisting the anecdote, is demonstrating a degree of paranoia and self-centeredness that is quite magnificent, even for the spoiled children of our elected assemblies. He is saying that the fact that we were (allegedly) not spying on the Germans, the Russians, the British, and the rest accounts for “the rise of fascism, the rise of communism, the rise of imperialism… the deaths of tens of millions of people.” Astonishing! Where is a global policeman when you need one? Why, indeed, did the US not steam forth in 1931 and whack the Japanese who were overrunning China, invade Germany in 1933 and slap them around for their poor judgment in electing Hitler, parachute into Windsor Castle in 1757 and make old George say uncle and give Bengal back to its Nawab? Why can’t we poke our NSA earbuds into every wire and satellite and issue executive orders about every damn thing we please, lest somebody, somewhere, get up to some evil? Foreigners are all right, I guess, if carefully observed and called to order at the slightest sign of going wrong.

“All 25,000 candidates fail Liberia university entrance test” (Vanguard, Lagos)

That ought to boost their ranking.

The art of showing you pictures of babies killed in bombardments, so that the public will support another bombardment that will kill more babies whose pictures you won’t be shown.

I apologize for the cynicism, but I can’t think of an intervention, by the US or anyone else, since 1945 that did what it was supposedly going to do. Nor am I a fan of sitting by and watching when horrors are going on. There isn’t a good way to take the weapons away from the bullies without (a) triggering the deaths of thousands more people on both sides, and (b) rolling out a carpet for the very things the US professes to wish did not exist (civil war, djihadist governments, regional power-projection of Iran, China, you name it).

Want to support something? Support medical assistance to the population (Médecins du Monde is deeply engaged).

Representative discussion among people most of whom I would not dismiss as crazy or ignorant, here. I’d like to know how this is going down across the breakfast tables of America now.

I write a lot of book reviews. (In fact, I’m overdue for one now.) And I just finished copy-editing 23 reviews gathered for the Journal Which Shall Remain Nameless— let me in passing thank the book review editors who recruited the reviewers and kept after them to submit their copy. The two-day bulimic transit through 23 reviews, from 6 to 8 pages in length apiece, has prepared me to discourse to you on the state of the art, which is, on this showing, fairly dismal. What do I like and dislike in a book review? How can I persuade folks to write more intriguing and insightful reviews? It’s not that hard.

Cardinal rule no. 1: Ink is frightfully expensive. Don’t waste it. All right, you know that’s not true; ink is cheap and they’re practically giving away pixels at the moment, but for the person who wants to use either substance well, they’re best treated like gold dust or the finest cocaine. Your reader is probably, like most academics, a slave to duty, but that doesn’t give you a license to waste time. If the book review carries a header saying, for example,

Théodule-Mongin Pfeffernuss, A Comprehensive Catalogue of Gallo-Roman Fibulae Discovered in the Drain of the Caldarium at Aix-la-Chapelle. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Pp. xxi + 430. $1,375.00 (hardback).

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Today is August 24th, St. Bartholomew’s Day. Ernest Renan said it: there are some things that every French person needs to forget, such as the crusade against the Albigensians or the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre. Renan meant that these old grievances, if opened anew, would set French people to fighting amongst themselves rather than building a common Republic or warding off outer enemies.

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Just thought you might like to know.

I’m always interested in the question of whether a social process limits itself or goes on escalating indefinitely. As an example of self-limitation, consider an epidemic that kills so many victims that there are no new bodies left to infect. Or, more optimistically, consider the “asymmetrical” modes of struggle described by Bateson, which he thought ensured greater social stability than symmetrical modes, always apt to escalate into violence without limit. The proposals we’ve been hearing over the last few months for arming more and more people, from kindergarten teachers to garbage collectors, would make the US a society of damagingly “symmetrical” conflicts, in which anyone could shoot anyone for anything. And some people are just fine with that.

I wonder, though, what skills or accomplishments brought a Wayne LaPierre to the head of the National Rifle Association? Was he a recognized Top Gun, a grandmaster of the Bushmaster? I suspect not; he probably got to the top of that particular heap by being good at public relations, communication, rhetoric, and in particular by being more hardline and “on message” than lesser mortals. But even a “hardline” PR man is soft when you compare him to a real gunslinger. I propose that, going forward, the NRA should recruit all its spokesmen and officials from its membership through a system of ranked duels. Any member can challenge another member, just like competitors in tennis or chess, and claim a recognized rank, but only after engaging in a fight to the death.

Setting up this system will be interesting and gratifying for the fans of the gun, and will create jobs in the betting industry as non-gun-owners rush to get in on the excitement by laying odds. There will be symbolic upsets and mythic confrontations. (Can Clint Eastwood really shoot, or is it just for the movies? How about Charlton Heston?) Best of all, the ranks of the NRA will be thinned of the sort of people who just like macho posturing but are not actually good at shooting: these probably pose the greater danger to the public in armed confrontations, so we all benefit. And anyone who demurs from a challenge will be allowed to exit the NRA, taking their year’s membership fee with them.

Let’s see some real bullet democracy at last. (For my part, from behind a thick wall of sandbags.)

We’re at war and don’t know it. Attention, energy, and lives are being wasted on defending against an “enemy” who doesn’t really have the capacity or the will to do us that much harm (if you define harm in terms of citizen lives)– i.e., “terrorists.” But the war we should be attentive to is going on all around us. Prosecuting this war is going to be complicated. It has an infinity of fronts. The enemy is a shadowy, formless, crafty, non-state actor. You probably shook hands with members of this invisible army yesterday, or watched them on the TV. And you weren’t aware that they killed or maimed American citizens in many multiples of the number killed and wounded in military service.

Let us first figure out who they are, and then find a way to stop them. Nothing could be stupider than to be at war and not know it.

The very Republicans who are dug in to a scorched-earth, never-never-never position on any piece of legislation or nominee brought forth by Democrats have found that the reauthorization of massive spying on American citizens is a cause they can put themselves behind, linking arms for once with the White House. Isn’t bipartisan concord beautiful, especially when it occurs at the expense of those civil liberties that, as we used to say, “made America great”?

We’ve been talking a lot about the George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case around the house. I am in no hurry to visit a state with a Stand Your Ground law, simply because I don’t know what would happen if an armed inhabitant decided I posed a threat to his well-being or existence. I’m fairly pale and usually go around in button-down shirts, which would tend to put me in the statistical category of individuals at low risk of being shot by vigilantes, but what if Floridians and Texans woke up one day to the real and present danger posed to their well-being by bankers and arbitrageurs? Whatever I try to do about it, I still look a lot like a banker. So I’m staying in the relatively enlightened state of Illinois, where legislators have been trying to reduce the number of firearms on the street (no thanks to the Supreme Court).

However, other than wave our hands and scream about racism, vigilante anarchy and unequally applied laws, and withhold some tourism dollars, can Printculture contribute to nudging our insane body politic toward sweetness and light? Of course we can– through critique of language. I knew you’d breathe a sigh of relief. Let’s go below the fold.

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There’s a contest on– you can see the results here. I humbly offer for the delectation of posterity my favorite innerlekchul rib-ticklers and side-slappers.

1. Why did the Hegelian chicken cross the road?
To get to the side he was already on.

2. -Knock-knock!
– Who’s there?
– He.
– He who?
– He who say ‘He who’ belong in Confucius joke, not knock-knock joke.

Thanks for listening. If you have a Nobel Prize for me, just slip it under the door.

Larry McMurtry already wrote about “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,” but that was science fiction or cultural collage. Walter Benjamin in Music City, USA? Only a step or two, or a misfiled letter, away from being reality! Let me take you down the relevant arcade, or passage.

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I learned about these from an article by Georges Dumézil on the Druids, Celtic traditions, and writing. Grab a teddy bear and settle in, kids:

[From the Welsh story of Lludd and Llevelys:] The evil sorcerers known as the Corannieit tyrannized over the kingdom of Britain. So artful were they that no conversation could be held anywhere on the island, no matter how softly one tried to speak, that they would be unable to overhear, if only the wind blew past. So no one could rise up and resist them. The king of the island, Lludd, furious at this state of affairs, wanted to get the help of his brother Llevelys, the king of France, to overthrow the sorcerers; so he went to visit him in France and yet even there, there was no privacy. The two kings put their heads together to find another way to communicate in such a way that the wind would not intercept the words traveling from mouth to ear and carry them back to the Corannieit. So Llevelys had his artisans make a long copper horn, through which the two brothers could chat securely. But the copper tube created echoes, noise, and static, so that whatever was said into it was turned to ugly and disagreeable words or a meaning opposite to that intended. Suspecting foul play by the devil, Llevelys washed the copper horn with wine, scaring the devil away, and thereafter it worked reliably. Llevelys gave his brother a magic formula for exterminating the Corannieit, which he did.

[From the Tales of E. T. A. Hoffman:] Albertine had three suitors. They were invited to choose one of three chests, one of which contained her portrait (and thus the promise of her hand) and the other two of which were consolation prizes. Tusmann, the nerdy suitor, opened one chest and found in it only a blank parchment book. At first infuriated, he was invited to put the notebook in his pocket and think of any book he wished he had. “I’m thinking of the Tractatus politicus by Thomasius, which I foolishly threw into a pond when I was contemplating suicide.”
“All right, now pull the notebook out of your pocket and take a look.”
“It’s the Tractatus!”
“Now think of another book you wish you had read.”
“How about The Battle of Composition and Harmony, an allegory about the invention of opera?”
“Now look in your pocket!”
“Hooray! It’s The Battle!”
“So you see now, with this magical book you have inherited the most complete and magnificent library in the world, and you can carry it with you wherever you go. All you have to do is make a wish, and the book you desire will magically appear in your pocket.”
Forgetting instantly about Albertine and his disappointment, Tusmann dropped into an armchair in the corner of the room, buried his face in the little book, and was from then on the happiest man on earth.

(Georges Dumézil, “La tradition druidique et l’écriture: le vivant et le mort,” Cahiers pour un temps, 3 [1981])

The latest in from France (those boats are slow sometimes): Simone de Beauvoir has written a review of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. The result is a charming philosophical duet. Not heretofore translated into English, as far as I know. Gendered pronouns as in original, so if you have problems, tell Simone.

—

One of the essential goals that early education assigns itself is to make the child lose the sense of his presence in the world. Morality teaches him to deny his subjectivity, to renounce the privilege of affirming himself as an “I” against the other; he must consider himself as one human being among others, subjected, like the others, to universal laws inscribed in an anonymous heaven. Science orders him to escape from his own consciousness, to turn away from the living and meaningful world that that consciousness had unveiled for him, which science will now do its best to replace with a universe of frozen objects, independent of anyone’s gaze or thought.