Update: When Mercury is in Retrograde

I've lost touch with my astrologer. Some years ago in fact. So you might say I'm at a loss. At a loss to determine what exactly is bothering me. Though I expect it has something to do with the aging process, which, along with profound new levels of wisdom, creates a great deal of ache, pain, and fatigue. When I say great deal, you should understand that I am being hyperbolic, except when I mean it. I'm getting some tests done to see if I have Psoriatic Arthritis, and I'm also looking into a new hip for my still organic left one. I may have already told you the above, if so, take note of my current age; 78.

I'm in the middle of writing a blog post about Horizon magazine and its creator, Cyril Connolly. It turns out that Cyril's life is resistant to any sort of condensation. I was hoping to just concentrate on his first marriage and that period of time. What I've learned is that the social class that Cyril belonged to was very, well social, in a way different than its American equivalent, which seems to have been more like a teenage gang. 

This blog thing has been a very effective way to avoid my other writing, which after falling by the wayside, has fallen from the fall from the wayside.  

Should I mention my "friend" group?  I'm involved with some friends that I meet regularly, almost daily, through Zoom. You may know about that. I can't say anything negative about it, since it happens to be the best therapy available for people of my kind. That's all your getting out of me on that one.  

I'm having a Dog Jones. Should Jones be capitalized? (I won't be acquiring a dog though, I'm afraid the poor animal might out-live me, which might end him, or her, in some sort of dog orphanage. I can't do that.  If I were to get a dog though, it would have to be a truck-cab dog rather than a back-of-the-pickup dog, (Lab, Rotty, Shepard), because I have a small apartment and smaller fits better with the old man thing. Perhaps a Norfolk or Norwich, or a Miniature Schnauzer. I'd have to think about it. Then again, Martha has shown some interest in an exotic cat called the Miniature Panther. Very cool animal, but would it eat you in the middle of the night?  

This post by the way is in lieu of this year's annual report which has been down-graded due to Covid, for no real, or honest reason, similar to much we have experienced recently.  

 

I've been married now for six months, that is to say, my wife and I together have been so hitched. Nothing feels very different. I would, though, advise anyone who has an ongoing relationship and has reached the age of 76 to consider it. It does give one a bit of a feeling of stability, as false as that sense would have to be at 76.

Did I mention that I'm taking Alopurinol for my gout?  Just another addition to my long list of meds. 

Oh, here's something that bares confessing. As I was closing the blinds the other night, before settling in, in front of the tube, I was saying goodnight to the birds and found myself telling myself I'm blessed. At which time my super-ego held up a big sign which read, "Cornball!"  It was a little unsettling. The fact is, though, that I've long ago, quietly so as not to disturb the ancestors, accepted that there is a God and that I'm not IT.  And with the help of a long list of esoteric teachers including the two most recent, Ingo Swann and Chris Langan, I've come to understand that I have a soul, which I think of as my manifold gasket.    

 

Current Reading: 

Cyril Connolly; Enemies of Promise; Revised Edition, The University of Chicago Press, 2008. 

Secret Teachings of the Western World; Gary Lachman; Tarcher/Penguin; 2015

Jesus and the Lost Goddess; Freke and Gandy; 2001 

Finished Reading: 

Auto-da-Fe;  by Elias Canetti. ..........about which I hope to have something to say after I mull it over for some time. It is unlike anything I've ever read; comes from darkest Europe about which I know little if anything.  

 

 

  

 

 

       

The Hard Problem* and Language

The field of consciousness research seems to be coming into it's own. I've been interested in it for years, even before I took acid. (more than fifty years ago.) As a subject though, it is illusive. It always seems to be on the other side of the coin. Or underneath another layer. (Or under the rug.) But common sense seems to say that if you peel an onion for a hundred years, eventually you'll have to come to a point where you're done peeling, where the substance is no longer a peel but a central core. Use any metaphor you choose, you still aren't there. 

I suppose it started with Freud, who in turn started with dreams. Dreams are little off-Broadway plays that we produce solely for ourselves while we are asleep, supposedly resting. We are conscious of these dreams while we're having them, but often they slip away as we wake. O.K. sometimes I have dreams that are more like movies than plays. Noir, Horror; even, my favorite, Westerns. Some people, from what I understand, never dream; I dream alot, often dreams that are very similar to previous ones. 

 

We construct these scenarios while we are asleep, which seems somewhat paradoxical because the creation of a dream is a creative act, therefore an energetic activity, and yet we are supposed to be unconscious. We aren't conscious of the world around us; the bedroom, the park bench, wherever we happen to be when we fall asleep. But we are engaged in the activity of telling a story, often in color and with sound, and utilizing various techniques; condensation, deletion, displacement, considerations of representability or figurability; revision, (re-writing), recursion, division, copying, modeling, force, (ie; pushing an idea aside), syntax.  We are unconsciously conscious.                                   

Being unconsciously conscious is, I suspect, the door we use when we lift consciousness out of the sticky mass of the brain and externalize it; place it in "inanimate" matter and/or in absolute vacuum space. (In that absolute vacuum by the way, consciousness seems to have something in common with dreaming while you sleep.) This externalizing, it is interesting to know, is something we did long before we discovered quantum mechanics, or at least before we put it in what we refer to as scientific language. That was called Animism.

When quantum mechanics came along in the early 20th century, wise men had the courage to face it, so, before the century was over, its revolution of thought was trickling down to those of us who live comfortably in the middle-brow level of consciousness. I suppose it was about 1975 that I first read what for me was the first of several popularizations of quantum physics, or mechanics, (not sure how it's supposed to be referred to in the nominal sense); The Tao of Physics. Then, maybe a year or so later, I read The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a similar Quantum for Dummies. Around that time I also signed up for Transcendental Meditation, got my mantra, started meditating, and on weekends went to hear taped lectures of its Guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who, it was said, was a yogi and a nuclear physicist. At that point, of course, I was going around with a little knowledge in my head, and we know how that is.    

No little thing. Now it's not just "What is consciousness?", but, "Why are there two realities?" While science has been using the quantum reality to create more and more stuff, and more and more proofs of its existence, the rest of us are still stuck with Science's empirical observations and measurements.     

 In fact in some cases we are not just stuck but imprisoned. To be unscientific is to be almost an outlaw, so we'd better review what science really is, in the vernacular as it were........., 

 

Science is structured in the scientific method, which goes like this;   

Make an observation.
    Ask a question.
    Form a hypothesis, or testable explanation.
    Make a prediction based on the hypothesis.
    Test the prediction.
    Iterate: use the results to make new hypotheses or predictions. 

The problem here is that consciousness is always left outside, waiting to get in. Whether you say; I make an observation; or you make an observation, or one makes an observation; the I, you, or one is still not in the hypotheses or prediction, it's outside, like the horse you left tied up to the hitching post.  

[Science thinks of the observer as an innocent bystander, but that way of thinking is in the process of being eroded by something like metaphysical creep, as in; many aspects of Lacan's thought, etc. etc. ...Wittgenstein, Hofstadter's Godel, Escher and Bach; all of whom imply that the observer can't be trusted!] 

[Here is where I can't leave off mentioning Chris Langan. The problem is, or the problems are, that he speaks the language of higher mathematics and advanced logic, which I have absolutely no competency in. So, any reference I make to his theory has to be based only on that part of his thinking that I can understand, the simpler elucidations; statements that just seem right. [As for instance, what I "grok" concerning his ideas about the Scientific method. All I can do is share my understanding from my own intellectual level, one where I have, at least, more company than Mr. Langan has.]  

I mention Langan because he has in his possession a Theory of the Universe, and it's the only one I know anything about, and that is, again, taking into consideration my limited academic and intellectual resources. I've read as much as I can of The Portable Chris Langan and find his simpler explanation of his theory just amazingly intellectually seductive and will probably spend the rest of my golden years struggling to further my understanding. Since I don't feel qualified to "select out" any quotes of his, I'll leave it to you to listen to one of his many interviews on-line. I'll just say this; that I'm a believer that the universe is an intelligent entity.  

Is that entity the same as God? Well, there are still multitudes of intellectuals that would shoot down that idea quickly, but then, as we head in to this new millennium that group seems more and more vulnerable. My money is on Langan. ...O.K., I'm going to cheat; here's a little quote; 

"By the Principle of Linguistic Reducibility, reality is a language. Because it is self-contained with respect to processing as well as configuration, it is a Self-Configuring Self-Processing Language or SCSPL whose general spatio-temporal structure is hologically replicated everywhere within it as self-transductive syntax."

 

That's from a chapter almost all of which is clearly, distinctly over my head; [though the beauty of his thinking is revealed repeatedly.] So, why do I have so much faith in him? I throw myself on the mercy of the court. All I can say is that I have a long history of working with faith and belief to the occasional benefit of myself and my friends. 

 There are lots, potentially an infinite number of languages. There are sign languages, smoke signals, body languages, pidgens of various ilk, complex broad-based languages like English and German that have lots of words and meanings; languages that have more borrowed words than some, like Serbo-Croatian; and of course there are the language aspects of Math..., and computer languages.  And to some extent, we might say, the languages of animals; like horses and African Grey Parrots.  

There are also, they tell me, meta-languages, as in below, from Wikipedia:    

In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the object language. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quotation marks, or writing on a separate line. The structure of sentences and phrases in a metalanguage can be described by a metasyntax.  Wikipedia

 

A meta-language can refer to the mental version of a sentence you have in your mind when you see a sentence that is grammatically incorrect; as in, "I saw you at the mall last Tuesday." When you are reading,  "I seen youz at the mall las Tuesday."

The following is lifted from Wikipedia with all do credit:

There are a variety of recognized metalanguages, including embedded, ordered, and nested (or hierarchical) metalanguages.

An embedded metalanguage is a language formally, naturally and firmly fixed in an object language. This idea is found in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, in a discussion of the relationship between formal languages and number theory: "... it is in the nature of any formalization of number theory that its metalanguage is embedded within it."^[3]

It occurs in natural, or informal, languages, as well—such as in English, where words such as noun, verb, or even word describe features and concepts pertaining to the English language itself.

Ordered 

An ordered metalanguage is analogous to an ordered logic. An example of an ordered metalanguage is the construction of one metalanguage to discuss an object language, followed by the creation of another metalanguage to discuss the first, etc.

Nested

A nested (or hierarchical) metalanguage is similar to an ordered metalanguage in that each level represents a greater degree of abstraction. However, a nested metalanguage differs from an ordered one in that each level includes the one below.

The paradigmatic example of a nested metalanguage comes from the Linnean taxonomic system in biology. Each level in the system incorporates the one below it. The language used to discuss genus is also used to discuss species; the one used to discuss orders is also used to discuss genera, etc., up to kingdoms. 

Having established that meta-language exists, what about mega? Is the SPSCL The mega language? Maybe it is for Earthlings, but not for other beings who might exist elsewhere? I don't know. I do believe though, that Langan is right that reality is the metalanguage for humans.   

  

*  The Hard Problem is "What is consciousness?".  

---------------------

 

P.S.  Below is what Chris Langan has to say about metalanguage: 

Question: "Syndiffeonesis stratifies language (perception + cognition), but is the relationship between telesis and language syndiffeonic?"

Answer: Language is relational on the syntactic, semantic, and interpretational levels. Syndiffeonesis is the structure of all coherent relations. Hence, languages are syndiffeonic on the syntactic, semantic, and model-theoretic levels.

Telesis is synetic with respect to reality in general. That is, whereas we see reality as profoundly variegated, all of the variety and even the identities thereby distinguished come from telesis. Thus, telesis is synetic in the vast syndiffeonic relationship called "reality".

Because reality is the most general language of all, namely the Metaformal System in which all coherent natural and formal languages and formal systems are necessarily embedded, telesis is synetic with respect to all languages and all of their diffeonic distinctions.

Equivalently, all of the distinctions are "factorizations of telesis".

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on Late Capitalism

Below.  Several months ago, I started this post, but never finished, then looked at it today and decided I'd post it as is, on account of; late capitalism is still in my craw, stuck or not, I'm not sure.  

 

LATE CAPITALISM

Characters we know and love;  Willy Loman and etc.  What do I MEAN when I say that Leftism has permeated the culture?  Let me, if I may, for a moment of your time, visualize this aforesaid permeation from a skeptical point of view, rather than that of, “Oh, goody, here comes the Revolution”.   
There is a monster that has taken over much of the body politic today that is as plain as the nose on your face. That is if television news is  in front of the nose on your face, morning noon and night…….with it’s own starfish-like method of  landing on, suffocating, sucking; now we are switching metaphors and it’s an Octopus but anyway, we call it Leftism but it is also many things including Pathological Altruism. It came out of culture, [German Philosophy], seeping into poetry and prose, painting theater and film. Our parents told us about “The old Left,”; we, as children, saw it happening in television. Paddy Chaevsky comes to mind. And we heard about it in theater;  Brecht comes to mind.  

Television…, the story there is that the New York commies went to Hollywood and couldn’t break in. A Red scare blocked them …and TKTKTK television, well from the beginning, and motion pictures, ...through television?  And anyway; anti-Stalinism gave it a big push, maybe it’s biggest push, but that was after FDR who; well now we see that we are giving a history of Leftism; which I guess is what we really have to do is give the history and the structure and give a consolidated metaphorical symbolic illustrative overall picture if I may be so bold of the monster, its Iconic figures, ie the Fabians, H.G. Wells, and etc. as well as its opponents; see Amity Shlaes..tktktktktktktk

Television “Morphed” into something else; a giant which merged with Hollywood, putting TV commies in the drivers seat of both.  
 

To deconstruct the joy, or the Jouissance, in the contempt for the very idea of late capitalism with the help of Lacan, and Chris Langan....what Late Capitalism refers to is the trickling down of the impulse to profit, as that impulse creeps into every nook and cranny thereby creating economic pressure on consumers, and despair on the part of those concerned with achieving equable wealth re-distribution. Materialist desire is amped up to the maximum.    

Late Capitalism continues to function, belying Marxist predictions. Intellectuals like Zizek scramble to reinvent dialectical materialism. At the same time, right in front of God and everybody, China has created a completely anachronistic Communist-Capitalist state.   

Meme, trope, modern, post modern, (the two used separately) precursors, as in Scout, as in Tonto….
Nonsense as a product,
Surrealism as a product and as a performance…,
Performance, as a product…(everyone is selling something, everyone is a pitchman.)  
Surrealists as “Progressives”, and as people who “Weren’t interested in money!!…, (Except for Gaia). [the wife not the planet..].

 

Autobio -  I woke up in the seventies began to peek at the NYRB.

Post Modernism was beginning to reach a blinking, stoned America.  

Mode of Production; ie Performance; as in motion pictures and the telly, and ie; Psychoanalysis of Textual Form.  
 


Real Estate - Subdivision, Piece of the Action, parcel…Landlocked, right-away, lease on, just renting, mushrooming of prices, cabals, things like snake-oil pitches and testimonials are not necessarily tools of Late Capitalism but they don’t disappear  with time, they trickle down into the Late period; that in which we lie, suffering; or not.   
 

Close your eyes;  

Ghost of Andy Warhol;
Was that Bianca? My God it was. She and a smartly dressed not bad looking but nondescript man driving a Land Rover rolled down the window to ask me directions as they came up alongside me from the opposite direction while I was stopped, in a puddle, it was raining, at a stop sign, in Sag Harbor, aka The Hamptons.  

Wind swirling, Shadbush stiff against the weather. Romance never sated, hunger and deprivation swirling in an indestructible  gut. A ghost of Warhol and the phantom thump of Mick Jaegger’s song. And Mick is right there. .............. ...and then sleep.  Deep deep sleep. Seconal sleep; overpowering the fading acid trip. Daylight. The next day, an empty estate.  Everyone has gone to a bar.  

Meme and trope. Post-modern and then some,
Auto salvage turn to dust. Remoulade and frozen pie crust,
Forced to live in Key West after all the Hemingways are gone,
We won’t know how it turns out until her kids are old.
And they won’t talk.  

Low brow and middle brow;  Willy Nelson; example; Angel flying too close to the ground.  

 

NOTES:  

Pavlov and Rebecca West; a romance.  (Rebecca putting on her makeup. Pavlov shows up in a horse-drawn vehicle, not impossible in 1950, though impossible because he was dead),  I couldn’t see what happened after that but I dreamt about it for four years to the effect of having a complete history of the affair to my complete satisfaction, to wit:  Never was there such an orgasm of understanding. True love is like spaghetti, best served cold and washed down with a good-enough Burgundy, by Gallo. Nothing else will do.

   

 A list of names that I sometimes confuse - Max Beckman, Walter Benjamin; Robert Conquest, John Gunther; Noel Coward, Cole Porter;  Balzac, Zola.   

Music that I sometimes confuse; More, the theme from 'Mondo Cane', and 'A Day in the Life of a Fool', from Black Orpheus.  


 

Late Capitalism Triggers....,

Global Warming
Population Bomb
The Bourgeouise
Snobbery
The Vulgarian
The Middle-Brow
The Nouveau Riche
See;  Robert Osborn and Marya Mannes

But then...........suppose it’s not late-Capitalism but something else?  

 

 

An Egghead Magazine

 

My being old and crotchety you might expect that the way "Young People" deal with the poor old twentieth century kind of pisses me off. It seems as if history to the young talking heads goes only as far back as the sixties. Ben Shapiro for instance. He's "a nice kid". He wrote a well received book,  Primetime Propaganda, which I liked, as far as it went. I kind of wish I could have gotten him to read the chapter in my book that includes an interview with Bob Costello, (an early television producer), in which he talks about the early days of TV. He talks about Playhouse 90, and Omnibus, and Goodson and Todman, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie; television pioneers. It was all out of New York City, and there were only a few dozen people involved; they all came out to my home town, East Hampton, for summer vacation. They were all left-wing, some more than others, and they mixed well with the New York Intellectuals and Abstract Expressionists who were also summering in the same township. My point being, that many of the influencers that Ben Shapiro talks about are the children of, or at least the ideological children of, those people who made up that 1950s social grouping. And they laid the groundwork for those Red Diaper Babies who run television today! The most reaction I seem to get when I talk to anyone in Shapiro's age group when I mention the 1950s, is, "Oh, you mean Happy Days," and with that the eyes glaze over. No sense delving into complex issues.  

The answer to the question, "Why do they avoid the 50s?" is simple. The popular culture was too white. It was even too anti-semitic. Oh, the writers of the narrative that made it to the new medium were Jewish, many of them, but they aimed at the Gentile audience. Right now, though, Winter of 2020, the Twentieth Century long over, with our media-controlled culture at a tipping point, and the country ready to split like post-Tito Yugoslavia,  we need to separate ourselves, those of us who want to stay out of the Orwellian Utopia, from the Marxist movement toward Revisionist History. 

 

In the early days of television the medium abounded with Culturati, or as they were known in those days by the man in the street, "Eggheads". Omnibus, with narrator Alistair Cooke, was the premium product. Leonard Bernstein gave lectures on music and conducted excerpts from Handel's Messiah. There were interviews by writers and public figures, including entertainers Jack Benny and Orson Welles, writer William Saroyan, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. There was live drama, with two early programs, first The Philco Television Playhouse, and later Playhouse 90.  Omnibus, by the way, was created by The Ford Foundation, (No relation to the Ford Motor Company), a CIA front organization. The CIA, since 1945, had been working with singular focus on the creation of something they called The Anti-Stalinist Left.     

Of course, television, like radio, can, and therefore must, unless it is government owned, be aimed at a different audience than print, for the simple reason that with electronic media you buy the machine and turn on the switch. You don't have to go to a news-stand and select what you want to read. And since you only need to look and listen, not read, you don't have to be literate. Television and Radio have a much broader reach.  

But early Television was made up of people who wanted to influence other people. "For their own good."  They weren't interested in the broader reach. In those days, they were living off capital investment, not advertisers profit. And where did that crowd of first generation TV writers, actors and producers get their ideas and opinions?  From the theater, the motion pictures, radio, and magazines. But, the most potent medium, the one with the most clout, many, (including myself), believe, was the little magazine. Said like that, with no caps, it doesn't look like much, but if you look it up in The Encyclopedia Britannica Online, under little magazines, it becomes, well, a thing;  

"Little magazine, any of various small periodicals devoted to serious literary writings, usually avant-garde and noncommercial. They were published from about 1880 through much of the 20th century and flourished in the United States and England, though French writers (especially the Symbolist poets and critics, 1880–c. 1900) often had access to a similar type of publication and German literature of the 1920s was also indebted to them. The name signifies most of all a noncommercial manner of editing, managing, and financing. A little magazine usually begins with the object of publishing literary work of some artistic merit that is unacceptable to commercial magazines for any one or all of three reasons—the writer is unknown and therefore not a good risk; the work itself is unconventional or experimental in form; or it violates one of several popular notions of moral, social, or aesthetic behavior.

Foremost in the ranks of such magazines were two American periodicals, Poetry: a Magazine of Verse (founded 1912), especially in its early years under the vigorous guidance of Harriet Monroe, and the more erratic and often more sensational Little Review (1914–29) of Margaret Anderson; a group of English magazines in the second decade of the 20th century, of which the Egoist (1914–19) and Blast (1914–15) were most conspicuous; and Eugene Jolas’ transition (1927–38). [Small t is correct] In all but the last of these, a major guiding spirit was the U.S. poet and critic Ezra Pound; he served as “foreign correspondent” of both Poetry and the Little Review, maneuvered the Egoist from its earlier beginnings as a feminist magazine (The New Freewoman, 1913) to the status of an avant-garde literary review, and, with Wyndham Lewis, jointly sponsored the two issues of Blast. In this case, the little magazines showed the stamp of a single vigorous personality; similar strong and dedicated figures in little magazine history were the U.S. poet William Carlos Williams (whose name appears in scores of little magazines, in one capacity or another); the British critic and novelist Ford Madox Ford, editor of the Transatlantic Review (1924–25) and contributor to many others; and Gustave Kahn, a minor French poet but a very active editor associated with several French Symbolist periodicals.

There were four principal periods in the general history of little magazines. In the first, from 1890 to about 1915, French magazines served mainly to establish and explain a literary movement; British and U.S. magazines served to disseminate information about and encourage acceptance of continental European literature and culture. In the second stage, 1915–30, when other magazines, especially in the United States, were in the vanguard of almost every variation of modern literature, a conspicuous feature was the expatriate magazine, published usually in France but occasionally elsewhere in Europe by young U.S. and British critics and writers. The major emphasis in this period was upon literary and aesthetic form and theory and the publication of fresh and original work, such as that of Ernest Hemingway (in the Little Review, Poetry, This Quarter, and other publications), T.S. Eliot (in Poetry, the Egoist, Blast) James Joyce (in the Egoist, the Little Review, transition), and many others. The third stage, the 1930s, saw the beginnings of many leftist magazines, started with specific doctrinal commitments that were often subjected to considerable editorial change in the career of the magazine. Partisan Review (1934) was perhaps the best known example of these in the United States, as was the Left Review (1934–38) in England.

The fourth period of little magazine history began about 1940. One of the conspicuous features of this period was the critical review supported and sustained by a group of critics, who were in most cases attached to a university or college. Examples of this kind of periodical were, in the United States, The Kenyon Review, founded by John Crowe Ransom in 1939, and in Great Britain, Scrutiny, edited by F.R. Leavis (1932–53). This and related kinds of support, such as that of publishers maintaining their own reviews or miscellanies, represented a form of institutionalism which was radically different from the more spontaneous and erratic nature of the little magazines of earlier years."

 

 

The Truants is a book about the Partisan Review, a left-wing magazine, a little magazine, published from just before WWll until April of 2003. The author is William Barrett, professor at NYU and one of the magazine's principle editors in the Post-War period. I read The Truants when it first came out in 1982 and just finished re-reading it. I think it's a terrific book.

For many Americans and Europeans before WWll the good guys were; Karl Marx, The Soviet Union, and the Communist Party of the United States. I grew up with parents who were working adults throughout the depression, in an environment where things that were written about in P.R. , (and other little magazines), were also being discussed at home; with my parents to each other, and when they were with friends, certain friends, with them. 

The answer to the question "who invented the Partisan Review?" is; The John Reed Club; under the ideological umbrella of The Communist Party U.S.A.  But don't take my word for that. The following is the first paragraph in a good summation of the P.R., from Wikipedia;   

 

Partisan Review (PR) was a small circulation quarterly, "little magazine" dealing with literature, politics, and cultural commentary published in New York City. The magazine was launched in 1934 by the Communist Party, USA–affiliated John Reed Club of New York and was initially part of the Communist political orbit. Growing disaffection on the part of PR's primary editors began to make itself felt, however, and the magazine abruptly suspended publication in the fall of 1936. When the magazine reemerged late in 1937, it came with additional editors and new writers who advanced a political line deeply critical of Stalin's USSR.

Before re-reading The Truants, I read a review of the book written by the noted art critic Hilton Kramer in 1982. Early in his review Kramer points to an article in P.R. published in the magazine in the summer of 1946, and re-published in the appendix of The Truants. The essay, by William Barrett and titled The Liberal Fifth Column, shows, to quote Mr. Kramer, ...[the article makes us realize] ..."how little has actually changed in the thinking of the American left in the last 36 years."  Then, add another 38 years, if you please.   

 

After saying that this is a great book I won't then go and paraphrase Prof. Barrett, the writing is too good for that. You must read this book, or, failing that, at least read the article in the appendix. The article is shocking, not only because it, that same Fifth Column, is still alive today, but because it is ruling our country.  How that can be, with the Soviet Union gone, and Western Europe having survived, is itself staggering. 

   But now it's Chinese Communists who have the adversarial position, and the Liberal Elites are showering them with soft-ball diplomacy while they go about collapsing our economy. (Mao came to power with the help of Stalin and the American Left*, who convinced Congress to betray Chiang.)  

 

By inserting that article in the appendix, is Barrett implying that the work of P.R. was part of the creation of that Fifth Column? Well, perhaps not in so many words. Perhaps that came to him as he was writing the book?  Or while he was himself working at the magazine. I think that's it. I think his thinking evolved. 

 

 

When Rahv and William Phillips made the retreat from Stalinism to Trotsky they were expelled from Communist Party USA. They folded the John Reed Club version of The Partisan Review.  But they were both still committed to Marxism. The Stalin alternative was Trotsky, who was still alive at that time. (Assassination date, August 2, 1940, Coyoacan, Mexico City, Mexico.)

  The idea of moving from Stalinism to something else, anything else, was dangerous in the extreme though they might not have realized it at that time. For three years, Rahv and Phillips one might say cooled their heels and talked up their ideas, which gravitated toward supporting the ideal of a culture both purer in its Marxism while at the same time being supportive to an inclusive modernist aesthetic incorporating art, literature and the entire cultural world. They needed added brain power for that and they found it in Clem Greenberg, Dwight MacDonald (and his wife Nancy) and Fred Dupee; in today's lingo a trifecta, though they were young and to a large extent, except for MacDonald who had worked at Fortune, un-tried.   

 

The move back and away from Stalin and toward Trotsky and Modernism happened in stages, with the first remove, or perhaps I'd better say stage, being Rahv's and Phillips's move from Stalin to Trotsky. The second stage was, as I go into in some depth in another blog, titled Dancing with Greenberg, the addition of cultural criticism, primarily painting. And then, I may be taking a leap, but I'd like to think of it as a force, or perhaps, the use of force, for which I'll have to offer examples:

1. Piling on...as in adding the MacDonalds and the Trillings!  

2. Using, like any good editor, pressure and manipulation to energize writers; which power takes intellect as well as a check-book.  

3.Putting all the eggs in one basket, or as Stalin might have said, centralizing; contriving to have art and modernism engaged with the Anti-Stalinist Left. Here, there is the question of whether Rahv and and Phillips were on board with the CIA, a probable yes.    

  

Force though, I don't see acknowledged much in the Modernism-joined-to-Marxism world perhaps because it is seen as a fundamental of Capitalism, but of course it is acknowledged in the Freudian world, which world is agreeable and acceptable to most if not all Partisan Review writers, and; to the Left in general...as in Libido, Transference and Counter Transference; as Ego insinuating and Super-ego squelching, but perhaps it, ...[forcefulness] ...is underappreciated in the social organization of Little Magazines and the Art World coterie. For instance, in the cult of personality. You could see it in the Pollock and deKooning worlds but perhaps under-acknowledged in the power extant in influencers*, [Like The New York Times], like Lee Krazner, and Clem Greenberg, Elaine de Kooning, and in other forces pushing these innovators in this or that direction.    

 

Leaving out the lust for power for the moment, let's break that concept of force down into more manageable segments.  Segment; horniness and/or seduction; these too can be broken down.  So many kinds of sexy. Massaging of the painter's or writer's ego; or an editor's ego. The many powers of the muse. The power of money, or as it's known in the painter's world, prices. Prices power myth!  Segment;  political power; the power of the oracle; the power to help selection of candidates and the candidates themselves; the power of spotlighting issues; the power of star-making through prose and poetry. 

 

*The Amerasia Spy Case; Klehr and Radosh, UNC Press, Chapel Hill  

 

**[Below is from an editorial footnote to the Mary McCarthy piece on Rahv in the NYT at the time of his death.]  

"Over the next 30 years Partisan Review became the best literary magazine in America. It would be hard to overestimate the cultural importance of Rahv's and Phillips's decision to break with Stalinism without abandoning the social and political ideals (and analytic techniques) of the Marxist tradition.

But equally important for American culture was their determination to celebrate and define the achievement of the great modernist writers without severing the connections between art and politics, literature and life. Against the art‐for‐art's‐sake “new critics” the editors argued for an understanding of the historical dimension of a literary work; against [sic.] ..the Communists they insisted on the independence of a work of art or literary criticism from any political expedience."

 

 

I am Joe's Liver

 

 

Some of you are old enough to remember that article in The Reader's Digest, I am Joe's liver. It was a good, kind-of-fun layman's description of that important organ; with a personal touch. I suppose my being a magazine buff makes it more likely for me to remember it. I have an informal, (mental), list of "seminal", or "important" articles from various magazines that I've read over the years, and without too much trouble I could increase the list ad infinitum by including those I haven't read but have heard about. I can't say that I've studied journalism so I'm not sure what they teach in college, (I did have one Journalism course in my incomplete college career, and one course that was an Introduction to Television, Motion Pictures, and Radio), but I have heard that Frank Sinatra has a Cold, an Esquire article by  Gay Talese, is "taught" in school, by which I guess they mean used as a model; I can understand that; there is much to admire in it, I've read it several times. My contention here is simply that magazines are important. They represent a very old cultural institution, but today are considered the poor relative of television.    

The Reader Digest's "Liver" piece, (have a piece of liver won't you?) was so well received that they went on and did other organs, though I won't stop here to research which-all ones; could have been Kidney I suppose, but don't let's get carried away, (duodenum, Pineal, Testicle), yada yada.  And the list of great articles from Esquires of the past is almost endless, so I won't go there except to note that someone, back in the 1940s I believe, even wrote a whole article, illustrated, about my father and his painting that referred to his fishing. I remember the first time I read it finding it cringingly fawning, and too gushy. The title was; Ray Prohaska, the poetic seal of Muo.  The writer was Robert Ulrich Godsoe, an art critic and gallery owner. In the 1930s he had a gallery attached to a cultural center, The Continental Club, in a famous building at 249 West End Ave. in Manhattan, a historic landmark noted for it's Romanesque Revival architecture. The article was part of a series that included several of my father's friends and contemporaries, and was published in  Esquire's July, 1947 issue.

Staying with Esquire for a bit longer, if I can here insert columns as being included under the heading of articles, I have to say that I loved and looked forward to Robert Alan Arthur's column "Hangin Out", which I believe appeared mostly in the sixties. And as long as I'm still doing this off the top of my head, (I'll call a time out when I have to stop to look something up), I believe reading Joan Dideon's famous article Slouching Towards Bethlehem in The Saturday Evening Post was important for quite a few people like myself who "discovered" Dideon in that issue.  

 

I sent the archived Esquire article about our father to my sister just to see if she agreed with me and she did. "It's awful", she said, "Was he being paid by the word?"  I dunno. It's one of those twists of fate, when things that could have helped someone's career didn't; could have, for want of a complete and radical re-write. It must be the magazine itself that put together the site, called Esquire Classic. It's very nicely done; attractive, and including so many great writers; Tom Wolfe, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Nora Ephron; Fitzgerald, Didion, Capote, Mailer, and a dozen more.

 

Now, for that time out.   ...To go on with this post I'll have to start looking things up, like for instance the Jack Alexander article about Alcoholic's Anonymous. It made a large swath of the population newly aware of A.A. and many alcoholics benefited. When was that? ....There! That was easy, Goggle, right at the top of the page, March 1, 1941.  And I'll have to go back to one of my previous posts to pin down the date of an article, actually a series of articles, very important to art history; Clem Greenberg's articles starting with Avant-Garde and Kitsch. It's really hard to believe, but worth reviewing, how important Partisan Review was seventy years ago.  

Magazines like Look and Life were everywhere mid-twentieth century and almost as useful, in keeping up with current events, as television is today. There is still something about the photographic image that is very useful and entertaining to humans. And Time-Life is maybe the best example of a magazine company that turned into a corporate giant.

These days it's not at all uncommon to come across a family in who's residence there is not one magazine, unthinkable not too many years ago. Granted I grew up in a household that was dependent on magazines for its bread and butter, but the larger point was that the magazine in all it's variations was ubiquitous. I grew up with Boy's Life, Popular Mechanics, Horse Lovers, Western Horseman, and, because a friend had it, Draft Horse Journal. 

Its not dead. I predict the magazine will live on, probably even thrive. You can see it in the need people have for printing things out.  ...Words on paper are still high tech.  

Here's the last thing I printed out:  'A portrait of Elias Canetti; The Road To The True Book,' By William H. Gass, The New Republic, Nov. 8, 1982.

 

 

 

Semi-Annual Report, 10/17/20

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Presidential campaign is almost over.  I'm sure my lately developed Psoriasis is a result of the political warfare in the fractured public discourse. There is nothing to do but wait it out. It's low-grade PTSD. My bride has it too. (The anxiety, not the skin problem. I've discussed the marriage, somewhere, I think, or will soon write a treatise on it.)

A few months ago I decided it was absolutely necessary that I read Korzybski's book Science and Sanity. I've been reading ten pages a day, early morning before my Zoom meeting. This morning on page 578 I came to a dead halt. Can go no further. Too much math. Calculus!  Didn't I know this would happen? What now? Do I jump into a fit of self anger, or talk myself off the ledge?  .....Off the ledge of course.  

My mother always said about me, that I bite off more than I can chew. That my reach exceeds my grasp. She used to say, "Pity the poor Pelican, his beak can hold more than his belly can!"  Dear old mom.  ...But then again she probably planted the Korzybski seed. She had the book. Don't think she read it, but I think she read some Hayakawa.  You remember him.., the Senator.  Anywayz, as they say in Canada, there is a theme developing here that shouldn't be overlooked. Note to self: Take note!  

 

Having done some Zooming with some nice folks up in Prince Edward Island, I decided to read its most famous novel, Ann of Green Gables.  Having read it, I'm beginning to feel an attachment to the people of PEI as it's called. I noticed there's a Kindle book that has all or almost everything she wrote, Lucy Mongomery, Green Gable's author, so I snatched that up and started reading a second of her books. There are at least 100, so we'll have to see....she's no James Joyce, he said looking down his nose.  

Also, re-reading Ashley Montegue's book, Touching, the Human Significance of the Skin, which I read back in the seventies. Re-reading it to assuage, if possible, my politically encouraged psycho-somatic Psoriasis. Also re-reading a couple of books about consciousness that are laying around, trying to wrap my brain around the idea of a meta-language with which I could converse with the universe. Have I said that the Politics are getting me down? I mean, if someone were to tell me that the Liberal Media is not a propaganda organ for the Hard Left, I might act out. Let's leave it at that.   

     

Politics, 2.O

Whatever my beliefs are, or my system of beliefs, if that applies, or my preferences, likes, dislikes and ad. infinitum, I'm ego involved. I live and die according to my thoughts.  Thoughts are things, as my friends in New Thought would say. Why do I care about the coming Presidential election?  Being that I'm 77 years old and am destined for a future life in the Forth Dimension; some place in the high frequency world of the non-physical?   

I care because of love. Because all those I love seem so much younger than me. In many cases, so naive. So childlike. Expecting a perfect world. Not allowing for evil, sin, stupidity;  including those who think that I.Q. tests are unfair. .....O.K.  Lets have an I.Q. test that's fair. Everyone do the test. We will judge it according to what each participant thinks is fair. Everyone gets an A. Everyone has an I.Q. of 140. There. Now the test is politically correct, and useless.   

Let's give everyone a free home and a paycheck geared to the cost of living. The cost of living will rise. Those more clever will capitalize on their property and on their mental and physical efforts, while the less clever will flounder and the least clever will need special care. 

How is it that someone who voted for Jimmy Carter has gotten so wise in his old age? Not without a struggle, believe me. (I discuss the aforementioned in my book Hold On, sequel to Hold Still, [renamed The White Fence] so I needn't get into it here. It will be available for posterity, all that really counts when you come down to it.)     

 

I feel there is an awful lot of business in running a country; trade is business; negotiation is business, territorial expansion is business.  And, cut to the chase, a Communist isn't likely to be good at business. In fact, being bad at it probably would be good. And, what is progressivism except moving in a particular direction "progressively".  What's left, after the above, is to decide whether one wants Communism. If not, you are stuck with Capitalism.  In fact, even Communism needs capital, but you can only use it once, because it's not being re-produced!  Now, I know there is a school that says all you need to do to get money is to print it, but I think that dead horse has been flayed.  

The election is about seventeen days away and I'm voting for the Capitalist. He's brought jobs back from China.  He's closed the Mexico wall. That's all I need.  My concerns are for the people who live in pre-fabricated homes, own a pick-up truck and a Harley, (or maybe a backyard horse), and somehow get by, while raising two point five kids. There is no reason these people should be sacrificed to some elitist fantasy.    

Elias Canetti

Elias Canetti was a Sephardic Jew, born to German-speaking parents in Bulgaria, and raised in Vienna. He was part of the community of exiles taken in by the British in the 1930s during the build-up to World War ll.  

He is best known for his non-fiction book, Crowds and Power, published in German in 1960 and translated into English in 1962, and Die Blendung, a novel written in 1935 and translated to English in 1946, under the title Auto da Fe, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1981. (Auto da Fe does not mean anything similar to Die Blendung, but I don't suppose that matters.)    

I've just finished reading Party in The Blitz, supposed to be the last part of his memoirs, but published after his death. I've been looking forward to reading it for some time, and had a feeling I was going to like the book, (it seemed to be calling me), and so, wanted to get some other reading out of the way and give it my full attention. Possibly, part of it's attraction came from the fact that Iris Murdoch valued him so highly.  Rumor had it she was in love with him.   

Canetti took a long time in getting his words out there. He was an exile to the depth of his non-religious soul: extremely sensitive about being an outsider. He was an atheist but though the Political Left was his faith, he didn't write much about it or refer to it, at least in this part of his memoirs. He was concerned with the environment in which he had lived, feeling that he was at the center of the intellectual ferment. His memoirs are a personal history of his life from Bulgaria where he was born, to Vienna, where he was raised in a Jewish intellectual environment, to London and finally to Zurich.  

If I say that I find Elias endearing, just on account of this one reading that is; I should add that this is the only book of his I've read to date. Mostly I've known him through his fictionalization at the hands of Iris, who has written more than one book in which some part of Canetti is in an important character. (Perhaps I would have liked some woman to write about me in such a way. That is not a question.) His fictional being comes across as powerful, mesmerizing, and usually right about everything. Who would want anything less?   (ie; What's not to like?)   

 

Party in The Blitz is meant to be part of a series but comes out much later and posthumously...perhaps edited too much or not enough to the writer's specs. Is he sadistic to women? Probably. And do I forgive him too much by giving him credit for being self-abasing in his exhibitionism? Probably.  

Though most of the people he writes about were not familiar to me so that the book is an exposure to a wider milieu, I have long been interested in the topic of artists in their social world. The cocktail party is essential to the book, but the British designation leaves out the word "cocktail", unlike the parties I mentioned in another post referring to those occurring among the Partisan Review crowd during a similar historical time frame in New York City.  

Each character is given a short chapter, finely tuned and "off the nose", as someone said; taking you somewhere you didn't expect. There's Herbert Read, Enoch Powell, Veronica Wedgewood, Franz Steiner, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, people who he often claims not to like but seems quite fascinated with. A street sweeper is one he liked.  

Kathleen Raine was a poet, and not from the aristocracy or even the upper classes. She was raised by a schoolmaster descended from coal miners, in the countryside in Northumberland.  

She had earned her place in the literary world, for which Canetti gave her credit, though he is sure that she didn't like his work, and that he didn't give her's the time of day. He doesn't say if they were lovers but he is fascinated in turn by her fascination with two brothers, themselves aristocrats. He met her at "one of her parties in Chelsea." At the time she was giving lots of parties. He went with one of his mistresses, Friedl.  (His wife was completely tolerant of his mistresses and in fact often befriended them.) But his relationship with Raine failed to deepen until he became friends with the Maxwell brothers, about whom Kathleen seemed to have a serious fixation, at least as Canetti saw it. (He too was, I think, impressed by the history of the two boys, and probably projects some of his thoughts onto the poetess.) 

Blitz; p. 63;

"When they were out walking once, Kathleen's mother pointed out to her a couple of golden, shining-haired boys who were standing together on a small bridge. Their mother was speaking to them in elevated tones, the language was like poetry. This was lady Mary, the daughter of the Duke, with her boys, who if not the sons of a Duke were at least grandsons...   ...The vision of the two golden-haired boys was to accompany Kathleen all her life. Thirty years later, when I knew her, she still spoke about it in visionary terms. ..."

 

Canetti spent years patiently listening to Kathleen pour out her heart concerning her failure to get one of the boys, Aymer, the older one, that had inherited the great estate, to fall in love with her. She seems not to have understood that he, in fact both Aymer and his brother Gavin, were gay. Both were, at least on the surface, manly swashbuckling types. They were also both very bright but unambitious intellectually, and were good listeners, which was Canetti's most important qualification in a companion. In the book, he gives the two boys by far the most generous treatment, which I'm not sure any of the critics has put down to their lack of threat to him in his pursuit of total adoration from women.  Gavin did, eventually, become a writer, though, not a terribly good one we are to understand, but was a monumental success with his book about his pet Otter,  Ring of Bright Water.  

Like the two or three critics I investigated in light of this reading, I was most interested in what he had to say about Iris. I can empathize with Canetti's hatefulness toward her, I've been there, that is to say in terms of women with whom I have been in love. It seems to me like a natural reaction, after the love has gone. (Not going for any high moral ground, of course..) I'd rather see him wallow in meanness, after giving her the props of being a real and true and competent artist, someone of standing that he didn't possess, at that time or probably ever; if that is what being her lover made him feel. He grew up in a glamorous Vienna, with no doubt an adolescence full of idyllic visions of tall thin Klimptian womanhood. 

   

After finishing reading "Blitz", I read a criticism of it by the well- known though recently deceased contemporary English critic Clive James which is a fairly savage review. James didn't find much good to say about Canetti either as a writer or as a man. The review is snide, clever and unsympathetic. Though James is Australian, he's more of an Englishman then I am and I suppose he took offense to the not always positive view that Canetti had of his hosts. James is offended by Canetti's seeming lack of interest in The War. But let me just quote a piece from this James review, which I believe was first published in The Guardian and then in The New York Times;  

"...he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness. The mystery blows apart, and spatters the reader with scraps and tatters of an artificial superiority.  Witnessing, from Hampstead Heath, the Battle of Britain taking place above him -- the completeness with which he fails to evoke the scene is breathtaking -- Canetti, unlike many another German-speaking refugee, managed to take no part whatever in the war against Hitler, then or subsequently. He had his own war to fight, against, among others, T.S.Eliot.  Canetti's loathing of Eliot is practically the book's leitmotif: you have to imagine a version of Die Meistersinger: in which Beckmesser keeps coming back on stage a few minutes after he goes off. "I was living in England as its intellect decayed," Canetti recalls. "I was witness to the fame of a T.S.Eliot... A libertine of the void, a foothill of Hegel, a desecrator of Dante ... thin-lipped, coldhearted, prematurely old ... armed with critical points instead of teeth, tormented by a nymphomaniac of a wife ... tormented to such a degree that my "Auto-da-fe" would have shriveled up if he had gone near it." "  

  

Then there's this quote, from Carol Angier, in a review of "Blitz", in The Independent, July, 2005; 

"It can only be love-hate, because for Canetti and his kind the best things in England are also intolerable. He is hot in everything, especially his opinions, while the English are cool and moderate. He admires their moderation immoderately, and knows it is the reason why Britain alone in Europe is non-Fascist and free. But nothing could be more alien to him. He craves attention and praise, while in England praise is embarrassing, and attention-seeking the ultimate sin. His leitmotif is arrogance, but the English are more arrogant than him. He can enslave some of their women; but Englishmen, and Englishness, mock and defeat him as nothing else will ever do but death itself."

 

In the process of finding the James review I became aware of just what a big-shot Canetti was, or is, judging by the space he takes up on Google. It appears that he has been written about by half the Western World.  So, when I say to myself that he must be a big-shot, let me be seen as gesticulating in the manner of Mel Brooks.  "I mean, whoa, such a big shot!" Of course he made his name pre-Mel Brooks, pre-Borscht Belt, but there must have been a little Jewish humor in his persona available to him, to his fellow refugees, and to the local Britishers. He had friends. You could say he was somewhat popular. There were those that loved him and those that didn't but he seems to have been well respected as an intellectual, and managed to get close to some and close enough to others.  

There is something attractive about the exile narrative or it wouldn't be such a big part of literature. It is almost all of Joyce. Homer. Some of Mark Twain. and etc. and of course some of us'ns.  I'll have more to say about Canetti.  

# A note on the illustration.  It is only vaguely related to Canetti in that he considered himself a Balkan, and that his name is most likely a derivative of Elijah. ( But I think it's nice. )     

 

 

The Czech is in The Montenegren

 

 

I've given myself a time out. I'm being treated for Gout and for Psoriasis. The Gout is now somewhat under control with a standard medication; name of which I'll have to get up from my chair here to get the spelling of....Colchicine, not that you care. The Psoriasis is only the last in a series of diagnoses by a series of doctors for a rash on my back that's about five years old. Haven't you had enough of this? 

Yes. Now for the Czech. When I visited the town in Montenegro where my father was born about twenty years ago, I found a cousin, Ivan, with whom I had trouble conversing because I wasn't able to find an available translator and I don't speak what is now called Montenegrin but was then called Serbo-Croatian. But with a small group of people who each knew a few words of English we struggled along, and my cousin, Ivan, who has since passed away, showed me numerous photos of his family.  

From what I could discern, it seemed, from a picture of his mother and his description of her, that she was my father's aunt and Godmother, Baba Jana. Another picture was of an Austro-Hungarian Army Officer, and I've come to the conclusion that he was my father's father's father. My great grandfather. I've forgotten his name now. (That's part of the problem of waiting until you're old to get interested in you genealogy.)  This officer, everyone agreed, looked just like me. 

I don't know for sure, but I think he was born in Czech Bohemia. I believe the Empire's Army sent him to Montenegro, where he married, I'm assuming a Croat, which would have been considered in the family, of the same tribe and race as it were, (Roman Catholic), which allowed him to settle in and become part of the landscape. His son Sima, though, (Simon in Americanese, and my Gramps, who I never met,) married a Montenegren Serb, and was therefore disowned and so had to flee to the U.S., in much the same manner as my mother's maternal grandmother and grandfather, who were Catholic and Protestant and lived in Northern Ireland and came here for the same reason. (This is a story I've told before, so I must think it's interesting.) My Czech part is in the male. My Irish, Scots-Irish part is in the female, with the Catholic being the Grandmother and the Protestant being the male. 

I suppose there is a good case for mine being a bastardized as well as balkanized genealogy, all of which could make a lesser man slide toward an identity crisis.  I, however, for those of you who are along for the ride, must tell you that I am well beyond that. I've been transformed, (I did EST), I've become transcendant, (I did T.M.), I'm sober, (I did that thing), and I've delved into General Semantics, by which I mean I'm on page 206 reading Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski. And on that page, or near it, I've come across some interesting information about infinity, which, and I'll end with this, is formulated symbolically as an eight, on its side, which I thought to myself, perhaps channeling my late brother-in-law Burt Glinn, famous photographer, and compulsive punster, can be written as ate lying down.  Badump bump.    

 

 

 

Obituary for a Lost Blog Post

 

 

May it rest in peace!  And may I find peace, about IT.  I lost a blog post in the electronic maze and it won't stop annoying me.  I don't feel I can entirely blame myself. It seems to me that some devil had first off messed with the post.  I was looking through the various posts and noticed this one that seemed to have had several, in fact many sentences removed, including some that were cut with seemingly no selectivity.  I tried to find an original copy and then I noticed that the post was in draft form. Anyway, in the process of trying to retrieve the original, I erased the draft form and all was lost. Of course, I could say it's no big deal. I mean it's only me, mine, and who the F. am I?  But I refuse to think that way.  First off, it was important to me; and second of all it's probably of some interest to someone, I have that much faith in myself.  

 

The post, as usual with me, was about a couple of books I'd read recently, one being a biography of Wilhelm Reich, Fury on Earth, by Myron Sharaf, and the other being the well known book about the Merry Pranksters; Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.  The tie-in between the two books, for me was that one of the primary characters in the story of the Merry Pranksters was a woman who's house was the gathering place for the people, the social crowd, which evolved into the Pranksters.  Her name was Chloe Scott, and she had some relationship to Stanford University, which I've forgotten now, and she lived in Palo Alto. She had studied Buddhism and Dance, she was a dance instructor, and she was attractive and kind of a hipster.  She had also, in her earlier days, lived in my hometown, East Hampton, NY, and had been part of the artist's and writer's community there, which included my own parents.  At that time she was married to a guy named Pete Scott, who's best friend was a young writer who would later become famous, by the name of Peter Mathiessen. The two guys had been part of the summer social set as kids, and as adults, after WWll, had come back and gone native.  Mathiessen wrote a great book about that part of his and Pete Scott's life, Men's Lives, a book that describes the world of off-the- beach haulseining fishermen, with whom they worked for some years. I also wrote about the two in relation to another part of their social life at that time which centered around the dynamic, cyclonic life of the artist Jackson Pollock who became world famous almost moments before he killed himself and another person and injured a third in a drunken driving accident.  

The tie-in, if there is one, is based on a rumor that existed at that time, that one of the two couples, Scott and his wife Chloe, or Peter and his wife Patsy, had a Reichian Orgone Box. The rumor was never substantiated though years later Chloe did admit to having "Basted" herself in one such contraption. The reason for the lack of candor no doubt had to do with the fact that all Reichian devices were illegal, owing to the fact that the powers that be had convicted Reich as a fraud, and he had died in prison. Reich, though, had in death retained a loyal following which grew slowly during the fifties, and was greatly helped by his inclusion in The Whole Earth Catalogue, arguably the Holy Bible of the Hippy movement, which was conceived and edited by another of Chloe's friends and part of that same social set, Stewart Brand. There it is, a re-hash, a memory of a lost blog; feel better, me.  

 

 

 

A Theory of Distribution

The relationship of clumps* to the reality of probabilities was the subject on a car trip from Florida to Kentucky. Clumps are a significant part of reality, and a clump is contained in a probability. As in, “Based on a study of 500 college students, it was found that 23.4 percent preferred real cigarettes to Vaping..”  Now that is just a fictitious example, but I’m sure we can all agree that probabilities are everywhere, from dietary recommendations, to politics.  Which candidate is the good guy for those of us who fear Global Warning, or Mercury in our fish? But here’s the clump angle. Suppose your statistical sample just happened to have a clump in it. A clump of smokers or fish eaters or Democrats who hate fat people. You see what I mean. A statistical sample is most likely a limited grouping of a much larger grouping. 
  Suppose for instance that I wanted to find out what percentage of Second Graders, on average, had been victims of child abuse. I could narrow the statistical grouping down to, between 1980 and 1985.  And I could narrow it down to public schools in the state of Wisconsin.  But how do I know that 1980 didn’t produce a clump of kids in Wisconsin who were abused for no other reason then that probabilities are a crap game? What is the law of probabilities after all other than the Universe’s version of a Random Number Generating Machine?

Clump. A clump of dirt. A bunch of stuff all bunched up. Well, a clump is tighter than a bunch. And it would have to be Bunched-up-ness because I’m looking for a thing. A Noun. 
I may have to invent my own new term.  Hmm.  A T.S.G.?  A tightly structured grouping? I’ll think on it. But, in the meantime. Here’s how I got to worrying this labeling to death. 

My wife and I were driving along the highway. We were going from New York to Kentucky, and she was driving because she likes to be in control, and she began musing about how the cars and trucks seem to gather in clumps, which slows down her speed-controlled cruising at 85mph. 
  Which led me to start thinking about clumps. So many things can be clumps. Galactic star forming regions are clumps… An iceberg can be a clump, and so can something that’s less a tightly structured grouping such as vegetable soup. With the soup it’s more contextual. I mean it’s loosely structured so in order to be a clump it would have to have containment. Therefore a soup is a loose clump. 
   Also, people; say, cops on the order of Officer Finnegan; (Catholic, Democrat, beer drinker, type O blood); or, belief systems, (which could break down into a clump of sub-systems), as in Marxist, Unitarian, Vegetarian, Astrologer, together or apart; pick one or reassemble.   
   To keep it simple though; lets assume that a tree is not a clump. It’s a bunch of cells that are interwoven, re-enforced, stuck, contained, could be a clump but that’s stretching it.  A tree is an organism.  Like a cell.  

To jump from vegetable to animal, a flock of ducks, by any other name, could be, I suppose, roughly considered a clump. Maybe more-so if they are not flying, but bobbing up and down in the water in close proximity of each other; but there are other better terms for those, such as brace, flock, raft, or you name it. Or how about lying inert, in a pile, having been shot by a hunter. A pile is a clump.  

Am I thinking more of a clot?  Like a blood clot? A blood clot is a very complicated thing. It involves something called the clotting cascade, which entails a knowledge of Organic Chemistry, a field way above most of our pay grades, I am assuming. 
  There is though, as you might expect, a place you can go to in cyberspace called Clotting For Dummies, which explains it thusly, and I’m not quoting directly;

Blood lives in a circulatory system, and clever stuff that it is, when there is a leak in said system, said system and surrounding systems put into affect a series of events designed for this emergency.  First, there is a conscious freakout, then a constriction of the blood vessels happens, which prompts our little platelets, whatever they are, to stick to the collagen fibers that are part of the walls of the vessels. Eventually they form a platelet plug, similar to what happens when you put oatmeal in the radiator of your old jalopy, assuming you’re old enough to remember what those are. The plug is just the beginning. When it accomplishes its mission, it triggers a chain of events that cause a clot. All these activities are catalyzed by enzymes called clotting factors, of which there are twelve. Twelve is a lot, and that’s why it’s called a cascade, and why there is a mnemonic to help medical students to remember all those chemicals; something similar to Every Good Boy Does Fine, which is for piano lessons, but that’s another story. Basically, as those of us who weren’t pre-med put it, the coagulation phase involves a series of enzyme activations that lead to the conversion of prothrombin to thrombin. Calcium is required for this reaction, which is why you must eat your cheeseburger; or at least some chicken bones. 
  Thrombin then “acts as an enzyme and causes fibrinogen, one of the two major plasma proteins, to form long fibrin threads." Fibrin threads entwine the platelet plug forming a mesh-like framework for a clot. Here I should quote; 
 

“The framework traps red blood cells that flow toward it, forming a clot. Because red blood cells are tangled in the mesh-work, clots appear to be red. As the red blood cells trapped on the outside dry out, the color turns a brownish red, and a scab forms.”*  So there you have it. Scabs. 

Which leads us to heap. “Heap much trouble, Kimo-sabe", as the Lone Ranger's trusty companion Tonto once said. (I bring up heap just to show that there is a reality after clumps.) A heap can be something that can easily be disseminated, or scattered, as in a heap of straw, or a heap of dust, or it can be a heap of mud or even something more noxious, any of various forms of sludge. 

 

An old heap is a car that is stuck together, but is it a clump?  Perhaps it is too complex for a clump, to many organized parts?  I would say that if you add diversified to those parts you could separate it from the complex organic thing called wholism; mud-flaps and fuzzy dice aren't necessarily part of any known whole. 

 
So I’ve established that clumps are accidental, but not accidental, which leads to paradox. They are random in a probability sense, but not without meanings and causes. Causes like stickiness, morphic resonance, environmental pressures such as weather, and a host influences of,  I might suggest, an infinite number. So let me proceed to the important question, which is how do clumps affect the subject at hand? (Our selfish selves.)
 

Here’s how. From the time we are born, [make that conceived], we are subject to clumping. Our parents belong to a social clump.  Sometimes they reproduce enough, six children say, or eight, ten or twelve, more common to be sure in the olden days, but it still happens, and when we go to school, if we are three close-in-age children from one family, we are a family clump in a larger clump known as a grade, which more often than not is the same one that we follow through time for the next eight to twelve years, after which we may go on to another set of clumpings, called College.

 

Which brings us to the late Prof. Williams:

 

“When one accepts the idea of biochemical individuality, he sees how this can be.  [In this case the diversity of clumpiness.] Getting a clear picture of the clotting mechanism in man would be like getting a clear picture of the branching of arteries from the aortic arch in man. It cannot be done. It should be possible to get a clear picture of the mechanism and the various factors that enter into the coagulation of my blood and of yours, but when one tries to include all human bloods, the picture gets confused. The blood chemistries of individuals vary - not just in trifling ways - enough  to make a picture which is accurate for one individual inaccurate for another.   

 

"The clotting of blood is, of course, intimately concerned with coronary heart attacks and also with “'strokes'” because in each case unwanted clotting causes stoppage of blood vessels. What Dr. T.P. Bond of the Medical School at Galveston found and published recently [sic.] is that exercise affects the clotting mechanisms of individuals un-uniformly. In some individuals exercise may cause the release into the blood of factors which make the blood clot less readily, whereas in others, exercise causes the release of clot-promoting factors. If these observations hold up, exercise should be discouraged in those whose blood clots more readily as a result of it, whereas exercise should be encouraged in those whose blood clots less readily as a result of the exertion. So doctors on both sides of the fence may be right - in appropriate cases. 
  "My intuition tells me that the situation will not prove quite this simple, but it also tells me most emphatically that the relationships between exercise and blood clotting will never clear up as long as the scientists who investigate the problem adhere tenaciously to the uniformity idea.” *

*  You Are Extraordinary; by Roger J. Williams, Random House, N.Y., 1967. 

*  Previously published in Dispatches,  

c.  Tonyprohaska@comcast.net