30 October 2006
The hour
Upon reflection, I know precisely what I should have done with my extra hour from Daylight Savings Time; as it happened, I spent the hour thinking about what I was going to do with it.
29 October 2006
Two sisters' eyes
The most earnest love poems in French allowed in a respectable Latin Quarter book store are Louis Aragon’s ‘Elsa’s Eyes.’ Their reputation is a result of the technical brilliance of a genius devoting himself to traditional form and their being at the center of the poetry of the French Resistence. Some of the most earnest love poems in Russian, Mayakovsky’s ‘I Love’ and ‘About This,’ were written to Elsa’s little sister.
Aragon and Mayakovsky also wrote the most prominent propagandist poetry in their respective languages while in love with the two Kagan sisters, both of which are known by their first husbands’ surname. Not only did Aragon’s poetry and prose of the 40s define the Liberation but in 1932 he was originally given a five-year sentence in France for the propagandist poem Red Front. Mayakovsky is known for both Party poems imploring the masses to drink boiled water and some of the most affecting political poetry of the century. Thus these two sisters serve as an empirical thread sewn through these issues of a poets’ love, literary style, and the politics of art in an era when all this came to a head.
Elsa was Elsa Triolet who while a slightly plump, indiscrete woman in her mid-20s had been following Aragon around Paris literary circles and threw herself at him in an attic during a party she was invited to because the Surrealists wanted to meet her brother-in-law Vladimir. Aragon was not for want of young female socialites that wanted to sleep and be seen with him, none of whom figured out or wanted to know that this iconoclast really wanted a mother figure. His was the young mistress of an deadbeat officer, charged with the duties of persecuting the Paris Commune, a woman who told Louis all his life that she was his older sister and his parents were dead.
Aragon’s submissiveness to Elsa began when she had arranged to appear in a club that she heard Aragon, who was actively avoiding her, would visit. Aragon arrived with his girlfriend, and when he saw Elsa he was so rattled that he left alone. Elsa then proceeded to talk his girlfriend into dropping him, which they arrived at his apartment to announce together, to Aragon’s silence.
Elsa preferred Monte Carlo fashion to peasant revolts and turned to Bolshevism only when the party became a world power. This became Aragon’s ideology, causing his split with Surrealism and giving him institutional contacts to become so helpful to the resistence. He renounced his old poetry in favor of the novel and wrote his major realist novels during the early 40s, which were skillful works of Naturalism with a touch of Surrealist techniques that could have been masterpieces if only they could escape the clutches of propagandist illustration.
Mayakovsky was an at times cruel megalomaniac who melodramatically obsessed over the unattainable, a characteristic that Lilya adroitly manipulated. In The Backbone Flute he blamed God for his love for her which only “tortured my soul in delirium.” The poem was published by Osip Brik, her Russian Formalist husband.
Lilya was pictured here on the cover of his 1923 book “About This” which describes his torment over her infidelity. It would be interesting to know if Aragon had seen this cover when he wrote “Elsa’s Eyes.”
The romantic components of his suicidal depression could more convincingly consist of his inability to coax the young Tatiana Yakovlev to move to Russia with him from Paris. His “Letter From Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love,” written a year and a half before his death exalts his love for her as “human and simple” in contrast to the doctrinaire requirements the poetry commission he was supposed to be fulfilling. His suicide note, though, includes “to Lilya – love me.” She maintains that she twice saved him from killing himself before he finally did so in her absence.
Somewhere in the spell of the Kagan sisters is the longing for the poet to be loved, to be understood, to be useful to progress. In the case of Aragon, the spell is only tragic in purely artistic terms – his life with her (pictured together in old age) was happy. In Mayakovsky’s case the tragic obsession made his poetry both at times banal and at other times self-revelatory in a way a more seamless romance wouldn’t. The tragic longing to be understood brought out by the sisters in both men had an intrinsic relation to a devotion to progress which was both elusive and unavoidable in the part the two men played in history and how many there were that looked to them for clarity and guidance.
André Thirion, who was Aragon’s younger confidant and Elsa’s go-between to Aragon, said this of Elsa:
“A woman who would look men straight in the eye but didn’t seem to pay them any particular attention, that was how Elsa Triolet appeared to me in the fall of 1928”....
“I wish that my granddaughter Marianne had as much skill, self-awareness, and sensitivity to others. To get what she was after, Elsa never took anything from anyone or hurt another person... She helped Aragon fulfill his destiny, and if he failed in any way to become the major figure that we could discern on Rue du Château, that was his own fault, not Elsa’s.”
Aragon and Mayakovsky also wrote the most prominent propagandist poetry in their respective languages while in love with the two Kagan sisters, both of which are known by their first husbands’ surname. Not only did Aragon’s poetry and prose of the 40s define the Liberation but in 1932 he was originally given a five-year sentence in France for the propagandist poem Red Front. Mayakovsky is known for both Party poems imploring the masses to drink boiled water and some of the most affecting political poetry of the century. Thus these two sisters serve as an empirical thread sewn through these issues of a poets’ love, literary style, and the politics of art in an era when all this came to a head.
Elsa was Elsa Triolet who while a slightly plump, indiscrete woman in her mid-20s had been following Aragon around Paris literary circles and threw herself at him in an attic during a party she was invited to because the Surrealists wanted to meet her brother-in-law Vladimir. Aragon was not for want of young female socialites that wanted to sleep and be seen with him, none of whom figured out or wanted to know that this iconoclast really wanted a mother figure. His was the young mistress of an deadbeat officer, charged with the duties of persecuting the Paris Commune, a woman who told Louis all his life that she was his older sister and his parents were dead.
Aragon’s submissiveness to Elsa began when she had arranged to appear in a club that she heard Aragon, who was actively avoiding her, would visit. Aragon arrived with his girlfriend, and when he saw Elsa he was so rattled that he left alone. Elsa then proceeded to talk his girlfriend into dropping him, which they arrived at his apartment to announce together, to Aragon’s silence.
Elsa preferred Monte Carlo fashion to peasant revolts and turned to Bolshevism only when the party became a world power. This became Aragon’s ideology, causing his split with Surrealism and giving him institutional contacts to become so helpful to the resistence. He renounced his old poetry in favor of the novel and wrote his major realist novels during the early 40s, which were skillful works of Naturalism with a touch of Surrealist techniques that could have been masterpieces if only they could escape the clutches of propagandist illustration.
Mayakovsky was an at times cruel megalomaniac who melodramatically obsessed over the unattainable, a characteristic that Lilya adroitly manipulated. In The Backbone Flute he blamed God for his love for her which only “tortured my soul in delirium.” The poem was published by Osip Brik, her Russian Formalist husband.
Lilya was pictured here on the cover of his 1923 book “About This” which describes his torment over her infidelity. It would be interesting to know if Aragon had seen this cover when he wrote “Elsa’s Eyes.”
The romantic components of his suicidal depression could more convincingly consist of his inability to coax the young Tatiana Yakovlev to move to Russia with him from Paris. His “Letter From Paris to Comrade Kostrov on the Nature of Love,” written a year and a half before his death exalts his love for her as “human and simple” in contrast to the doctrinaire requirements the poetry commission he was supposed to be fulfilling. His suicide note, though, includes “to Lilya – love me.” She maintains that she twice saved him from killing himself before he finally did so in her absence.
Somewhere in the spell of the Kagan sisters is the longing for the poet to be loved, to be understood, to be useful to progress. In the case of Aragon, the spell is only tragic in purely artistic terms – his life with her (pictured together in old age) was happy. In Mayakovsky’s case the tragic obsession made his poetry both at times banal and at other times self-revelatory in a way a more seamless romance wouldn’t. The tragic longing to be understood brought out by the sisters in both men had an intrinsic relation to a devotion to progress which was both elusive and unavoidable in the part the two men played in history and how many there were that looked to them for clarity and guidance.
André Thirion, who was Aragon’s younger confidant and Elsa’s go-between to Aragon, said this of Elsa:
“A woman who would look men straight in the eye but didn’t seem to pay them any particular attention, that was how Elsa Triolet appeared to me in the fall of 1928”....
“I wish that my granddaughter Marianne had as much skill, self-awareness, and sensitivity to others. To get what she was after, Elsa never took anything from anyone or hurt another person... She helped Aragon fulfill his destiny, and if he failed in any way to become the major figure that we could discern on Rue du Château, that was his own fault, not Elsa’s.”
25 October 2006
Four wheels
Having my tires rotated, I faced the unanticipated outcome of being the only guy in the service office that did not tend to a vegetable garden. I have front wheel drive; I don’t see myself ever opting for four wheel drive. Beyond the threshold of my automotive limits there is the problematic marriage of hubris and consumer rationalization. Mind you, my taste for hubris is boundless, but not accompanied by consumer rationalization, which is why we don’t blog about hubris: it doesn’t mix well with the acquired patterns of justification.
24 October 2006
Continental drift
I commend and thank C.A.Conrad for raising awareness of the truth about the exclusion from the ballot of Green Party candidate Carl Romanelli by the corrupt, partisan antagonists to democracy in Pennsylvania’s court system. Strategic voting can be justified; strategic obfuscation cannot be.
Bob Casey has opened a 13-point lead in the Pennsylvania primary, which means casting a write-in vote for Carl Romanelli is a responsible vote of no confidence in the political elite that brought this decision against the only candidate of the top three that does not support a war overwhelmingly opposed by the public. My previous views on Casey’s brand of populism and my faith in computer balloting can be found here.
On the question of voting for the Democrats nationally this year, I think of how in 1965 Jean-Paul Sartre’s critiques of François Mitterand were at their most acerbic, but on the eve of the election, faced with the De Gaulle’s scaling back of union rights and social spending to pay for nuclear weapons, he issued the statement:
"To give Mitterand your vote is not to vote for him but against personal power and against the drift of socialists to the right."
We can disagree over whether the Democratic Party is devolving or evolving at a snail’s pace, as this legal episode is an apt illustration of the party’s true commitment to electoral representation. However, the Democrats have managed to evolve to the point where they allow their nominees to be decided by public ballot in which each party voter gets to cast one vote as a free and equal citizen. Gone are the days when nominees were decided in smoke filled rooms without the possibility of electoral challenge, and conventions when the delegates intervened on behalf of the people to decide the candidate during multiple ballots.
The Green Party or whatever liberal party is to come to the fore must have as their goal the placement of their primary on the ballot across the nation alongside the primaries of the Democrats and the Republicans. Creating a political debate which deals with the facts rather than the mythologies of the Washington elite and Madison Avenue depends on it. Allowing the people of each region of the nation to have a formative, participatory function in determining what populist ideology best represents them is essential to creating a liberal party with the structure suited to representing the populist majority that always has existed and always will exist in our land.
I am skeptical about whether the Green Party can wrest itself from the ambitions of its own bureaucracy to allow this to happen. The repugnant, self-destructive episode in 2004 when party functionaries who use the party to promote their non-profits and law firms that receive donations and clients from Democratic benefactors smeared Ralph Nader and manipulated a byzantine balloting system to elect a ticket that purposefully inflicted damage to the party is a symptom of that which obstructs it from representing the populist majority that exists in the grass roots.
In addition to public primaries, a liberal party should have a blueprint for making one of the two parties obsolete (the corruption and deficit spending of the Republicans suggest they no longer serve a representative function for the polity) in order to eliminate the problem of splitting the vote amongst the progressive majority. The Green Party grew initially in the parliamentary system in Bremen, Germany and a liberal party in America must, to serve a benign function, transform a two party system that was not intended by the constitutional framers. For this to happen, no compromise or acquiescence to cynical strategic motives is advisable once the blueprint for representing the majority is in place.
23 October 2006
Method
What I liked most about Matthieu Laurette’s Money Back Life!, in which he purchased every item of food (whether he wanted it or not) from the supermarket that offered a money back guarantee and returned each container saying he was not 100% satisfied, is the line spoken in response to the question from a daytime talk show host as to whether the shopping cart full of food was really a sculpture: “I do not offer just a work of art, I offer a method!” A method.
Manifesto
1. Read poetry (other peoples' !) and explain, preferably online, why it does not comply with the rigors of art explained in your manifesto, made up as you go.
2. After a month organize all manifesto items and publish them in limited edition pamphlet. When the pamphlet sells out or stops selling, publish online with the announcement that all manifesto items printed are heretofore obsolete. Repeat process from beginning.
3. Teach a workshop in which you explain to each student why they are unfit for literary endeavor for reasons cited in your manifesto, and then organize the list of manifesto items into a single sequence with all contradictions separated on the page. Publish it in a literary quarterly selected so as to secure more workshop opportunities.
2. After a month organize all manifesto items and publish them in limited edition pamphlet. When the pamphlet sells out or stops selling, publish online with the announcement that all manifesto items printed are heretofore obsolete. Repeat process from beginning.
3. Teach a workshop in which you explain to each student why they are unfit for literary endeavor for reasons cited in your manifesto, and then organize the list of manifesto items into a single sequence with all contradictions separated on the page. Publish it in a literary quarterly selected so as to secure more workshop opportunities.
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