On Two Documentaries

 In the last two decades, documentaries have detoured dramatically away from didactic or public-spirited works that once dominated the form.  In the past, most documentaries celebrated human accomplishment (for instance, The Plow that Broke the Plains) or showed history-in-the-making (war newsreels like The Battle of San Pietro or The Spanish Earth); even the renegade surrealist Luis Bunuel’s documentary Land without Bread had a social conscience.  Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness  portrayed the plight of the blind-deaf; Errol Morris’ documentaries solved crimes and righted injustices.  But many documentaries now popular on Netflix or HBO are, simply put, freak-shows.  These films feature eccentric people involved in grotesque forms of misconduct – the audience marvels at two things: the incredible events shown on screen and the fact that the protagonists of these films were so massively narcissistic as to allow themselves to be filmed committing all manner of crimes and misdemeanors.  It’s hard to ascribe any redeeming social value to The Tiger King (a homosexual exotic animal fetishist) or Wild Wild West (members of a sex cult) or Don’t F**k with Cats (internet-obsessed serial killers).  Documentary as freak-show was probably pioneered by the Maysles’ brothers Grey Gardens, an account of Jacqueline Kennedy’s mentally ill aunt (with daughter) living in awe-inspiring squalor in a crumbling mansion on Long Island.  The bearded lady in her vest of tattoos will always enthrall more people than the the 4H home economics exhibits with their mason-jars of pickles and lingonberry jam.  Two recent exemplars of the freak-show sensibility in modern documentary are The Vow, currently on HBO, and Tread, a documentary on Netflix.

The Vow (2020) traffics in that most problematic of human emotions, Schadenfreude.  There is a distinct, if questionable, pleasure that we feel in observing the self-inflicted travails of those that seem to be better than us.  In The Vow, a cadre of self-absorbed Hollywood types fall under the spell of a tyrannical guru, Keith Raniere.  The guru’s acolytes are a noisome group of minor-league actors and actresses, pretty people with good educations who have suddenly realized what, sooner or later, all of us discover to our dismay – notwithstanding our merit, the world isn’t set up as a playground for our desires nor as a garden delivering perpetual delight.  To be alive is to be disappointed: no doubt Julie Andrews and Raquel Welch (to name two actresses iconic to my generation) suffered dark nights of the soul in which they questioned their beauty and value.  Everyone can name prominent celebrities who upon reaching the very pinnacle of their achievement, then, promptly committed suicide: Anthony Bourdain and Philip Seymour Hoffman come to mind.  The fact is that the world isn’t constituted to reliably deliver happiness although reality can always be counted on to inflict suffering.  When the bright and beautiful discover this, inevitably, a sense of malaise sets in – why am I, despite my intelligence and beauty, not exempt from suffering?  And, this malaise offers an opportunity for a con-man man like Raniere.  KR, as I will call him, devised a set of banal platitudes that he actually patented as an algorithm for artificial intelligence.  These platitudes are simple-minded, the sort of pablum that first-grade teachers administer to their students to enhance their self-esteem.  (The people in The Vow are notably well-endowed with self-esteem.)  Gathering a group of disciples, KR set up a pyramid scheme requiring his followers to enlist more and more adherents to his cult.  On the face of things, there was nothing extreme about KR’s beliefs, which were, as I have noted, a compound of cliches and truisms of the most simple-minded and obvious sort, not dramatically different from the stuff promoted by Norman Vincent Peale.  In fact, the whole enterprise had a noxious aura of self-satisfied well-being and good mental hygiene – ideology promoting a sound mind in a sound body.  (The Pollyanna-ish members of the group played volley-ball as a community exercise.)  In The Vow, our access to this cult is a glib filmmaker of Afrikaaner origin, a tall handsome doofus named Mark – this fellow has produced a well-reviewed film essay with the charming title What the F**k do we know?  Mark is spectacularly narcissistic and a dolt but he’s charming, a bit like a successful used car salesman.  He marries one of the guru’s female associates and rises to a high level in the organization – as you acquire merit you are awarded little scarves to show your rank in the cult.  Mark becomes KR’s best friend and spends innumerable hours walking with the squat, somewhat toad-like cult leader – on the phone, the two chirp to one another using pet names: “Markus” and “Keithus”.  Mark is convinced that he is in the presence of a latter-day Jesus Christ and so tape-records everything that transpires – this proves to be a great benefit to the filmmakers who would later exploit these recordings.  (Needless to say the very pretty people in the cult weren’t camera-shy and there is lots of footage of them cavorting in wholesome ways; on the other hand, the level of treachery implicit in tape-recording every personal conversation is pretty breathtaking.)  Of course, there’s a dark-side that is the subject of a portentous “reveal” – or series of “reveals” since the subject matter of the film is very thin (it would make a good 15 minute Sixty Minutes episode) but has to be stretched to nine hours.  It turns out that the upper echelons of the cult involve some kind of a sex ring in which female subjects willingly submit to be branded in the groin with the initials of the guru KW.  This stuff is undoubtedly amusing and even hilariously funny when the female subject, the doc’s heroine as it were, tries to justify to the camera why exactly it was that she allowed herself (voluntarily) of course to be disfigured by a cauterizing instrument – she’s married and says to one of her female friends: “I don’t know how I’m ever going to be able to get X– (her husband) to go down there, when I’ve got Keith’s initials branded next to my vagina.”  This is possibly something she should have thought through before agreeing to be branded.  The show lags and is repetitive because profound stupidity isn’t interesting in its own right and the documentary’s characters can only prostrate themselves so many times before the loathsome little guru before the film gets tedious.  As is always the case, there’s not enough footage to go around, particularly to underlie the shocking and serious aspects of the documentary (the branding and sex-cult scenes) and so the filmmakers have to just roll the tapes and amuse us with blurred lights rotating on screen like a sort of demented and out-of-focus color wheel – it’s not a good solution, but the admissions on the tape are so jaw-dropping that you’re willing to excuse the rather slovenly film-making.  (Shoah or The Fog of War this is not.)

The appeal of the show is entirely Schadenfreude.  First, the movie gives us license to view beautiful women and handsome men, all of them prosperous and educated at first-rate and expensive schools, making utter fools of themselves.  These are accomplished folks whom we might ordinarily admire but the movie exposes them to ridicule – indeed, ridicule of the most toxic sort: we laugh at these people because they aren’t aware that they are ridiculous.  The more they try to justify branding one another. sex-trafficking and their other lapses into utter folly and crime, the funnier they are.  Second, we enjoy the inevitable demise of the guru – the vicious little con-man is going to end up in prison (we know this from media reports) and so we will delight in seeing his comeuppance.  These aren’t particularly meritorious emotions and The Vow is a sort of guilty pleasure.  The most astonishing aspect of the film is the universally accepted notion that human beings exist to be happy.  Why would we think this to be true?  The evidence is all to the contrary.  And I note that there are no single mothers attending Community College in the cult and, certainly, no minorities –no Black and Brown people as we have been taught to consider them.  I would guess that these groups of people would be under no false illusions about whether life is supposed to deliver happiness.  The only thing that life predictably delivers is suffering and the only practical wisdom in the world is learning to survive with this truth.

The pathetic thing about the dupes in The Vow is that the secret truths revealed to them by KR are completely devoid of any substance.  KR’s theories lack the wild extravagance of Scientology or, even, the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints.  In fact, his teachings seems primarily derived from motivational lectures delivered by Amway salesmen.  Many years ago, I received as a visitor a close friend from college.  This man was exceptionally handsome and accomplished, the son of a prominent Twin Cities orthopedic surgeon.  He had the best car, the best drugs, the finest and most loving family and friends.  Once, he stole my girlfriend: she didn’t think much of me, but fell so deeply in love with this beautiful fellow that her unrequited passion (when he later abandoned her) caused her to join the Peace Corps and depart the country.  (She told me that she waited in suspense at the jet gate at the airport, hoping against hope, that he would come to rescue her at the last moment.)  Not only was this fellow tall and handsome and athletic, he was also a genuinely nice man and talented, he knew hundreds of folk songs and could sing for hours around campfires while he accompanied himself on the guitar.  When the man came to see me, a few years after college, he asked that I draw a circle representing my wishes and dreams – then, he had me draw a circle representing my capacity to achieve those desires.  “The objective is to make the circle of your capabilities equal the circle of your dreams,” he told me.  And, then, he commenced evangelical efforts on behalf of Amway, a pyramid scheme that, in those days, peddled laundry soap.  I must say that for a moment, I almost forgave his erotic interlude with my girlfriend...almost, but not completely.

There are nine episodes of The Vow and this account is based on watching only three of them – all very repetitive and crammed with irritating self-aggrandizing interviews.  I’m not sure that the dubious appeal of the show will warrant another six hours with it – but once I started watching a program, I generally stick it out to the end.  Raniere is awaiting sentencing in October 2020 on five felony convictions.  Wikipedia tells me that, as I surmised above, Raniere derived most of his gimcrack “philosophy” from involvement with Amway prior to founding his own cult.

    

The appeal of Tread (Paul Solnet, 2019) is more straightforward and less queasily problematic.  Tread is the story of a brilliantly articulate malcontent who spends a year manufacturing a metal-clad behemoth of a bulldozer and, then, uses the machine to demolish most of a small town in scenic Colorado.  Like the protagonists in The Vow, the hero (if you can call him that) is fantastically loquacious and has recorded the memoirs of his conflicts with the residents of the town on a casette-tape.  (I’m probably not spoiling the show too much for you to advise that the hero isn’t going to be around to assist the documentary filmmakers in making the picture.)  In this picture, there’s no fancy color-wheel blur – the camera just shows a giant close-up of the casette, gears spinning like the wheels of doom. This guy, a typical small-town know-it-all, is named Marvin Heemeyer.  He’s an accomplished welder and a hard-driving businessman, a self-made man who migrates to Granby, Colorado after achieving success in the muffler business in Denver and Boulder.  Heemeyer is something of a thrill-seeker and spends all of his leisure time, before acquiring the maniacal obsession that destroys him, plowing tracks in the high-country powder snow on his Polaris.  He’s an attractive man and ends up in bed with the town’s most attractive divorcee – she speaks with a slight, and intriguing, Australian accent.  Everything is going great for Marv until he has a run-in with the City Council, a group of well-meaning morons that control Granby.  (Marv construes the City Councilmen as a vicious and sinister cabal of villains plotting against him; he calls one of them a “barbarian” – although these men are a little smug, there’s no objective evidence that they would be smart enough to successfully conspire against a ham sandwich.)  Marv feels that the City has wronged him through its “good ole boy” network and one night, while lounging around in his hot tub and drinking a beer, God comes to Heemyer and tells him to take revenge on the evil Sodom and Gomorrah that is Granby.  (The film has one of the strangest but most apt epitaphs ever stated: “He was a loner who spent too much time alone in his hot tub.”) Biblical correlates accumulate – like Noah, Marv spends an entire season welding together a massive armature on his big Komatsu bulldozer; this will be the vehicle of his salvation.  Working in a shed in the middle of town, Marv equips the bulldozer, now a veritable Killdozer to cite Theodore Sturgeon’s unrelated short story, with high-caliber machine guns and Tv cameras, complete with compressed air jets, to keep the lenses clean as the tank-like vehicle smashes through half the commercial buildings in town.

Heinrich von Kleist’s famous novel, Michael Kohlhass, involves a law-abiding citizen who is driven into homicidal fury when someone cheats him in a horse-trade.  Kohlhass ends up burning Brandenburg, raising an group rebels that defeats several armies, and has to be talked into surrendering by no less than Martin Luther.  Kleist says that Kohlhass “was the most righteous and, therefore, the most terrible man of his time.”  Heemyer replicates Kohlhass on a more modest scale.  He is enraged because a neighbor acquires a tract of land that he desires.  This leads to a series of squabbles with the City Council over zoning and a sewer access line.  When the City Council rejects Heemeyer’s increasingly unreasonable demands, he hires a lawyer and sues.  Inevitably, he loses the lawsuit, blaming his lawyer for treason.  His attractive girlfriend, probably concerned about his obsessions, abandons him.  When his father dies, Heemyer begins interpreting the signs around him and these portents all lead him to one conclusion: he must wreak vengeance on Granby.  The final orgy of destruction, more or less, lives up to its advance build-up – at the outset of the film, a panicked cop calls for the National Guard.  The fortified Komatsu bulldozer smashes down a half-dozen buildings while the local cops and sheriff’s deputies futilely blast away at it with the shotguns, SWAT sniper rifles, and pistols.  There’s plenty of footage of Heemeyer’s spree and it’s impressive.  The bulldozer rolls over parked cars, pushes aside earthmovers and county bulldozers without breaking a sweat, and, then, plows down entire buildings reducing them to rubble.  Needless to say, this doesn’t end well although for a few hours, it seems, that Heemeyer and his revenge reign invincible over Granby.  

The film is effectively designed, a combination of reenactments (shot in semi-darkness to disguise the fact that the reenactors don’t look much like the principals in real life) and actual newsreel footage of the bulldozer destroying the town.  Heemeyer in the cockpit of his tank in the reenactments is filmed from behind, a silhouette brooding over the controls with flickering TV screens guiding him on his rampage.  The City Council is shot as a group of small-town boosters with unctuous and sinister smiles on their face.  Some talking heads, many of them still devoted to Marv, put in their two-cents worth, and there are some nice drone shots of Granby and the very pretty Colorado countryside.  The director has a couple of tricks up his sleeve – because of a paucity of footage, he uses the same shot over and over again, an image of Marv, with an avuncular grin, gazing into the camera.  It’s an image of nice guy, a hail fellow well-met, but when the camera suddenly pans down, late in the film, we see that Marv has a big, bazooka-sized rifle at this feet.  An image of an old Nazi publication, Angaben zum  Fuehrer (“Particulars as to the Fuehrer”) is shown several times, but without any explanation as to what this image is doing in the film.  (The suggestion is that Heemeyer is some kind of neo-Nazi, but this is never shown in the movie.)  History is written by the winners and most of the commentary in the film is provided by Marv’s sworn enemies, indeed the men who had their businesses trashed by his ‘dozer.  The film is refreshing in that its doesn’t draw a moral and makes no effort to explain what motivated Heemeyer to construe a series of minor disputes as a pattern of vicious conspiracy such that it required him to destroy a whole town.  I have often counseled people that men and women can endure the most terrible calamities – the death of children, horrible diseases – with equanimity.  But no one can abide an injustice, real or perceived.  And, so, we are left with the dispiriting observation that Kleist made about Michael Kohlhass, like Heemeyer an actual historical figure: he was “both righteous and terrible.”

(Heemeyer’s rampage inspired an excellent Russian film, Leviathan (2014) directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev  The internet tells me that after Heemeyer lowered the shield over the top of the bulldozer, he was effectively trapped inside.  In other words, the mission was suicidal from the outset.  Heemeyer’s rant recorded on cassette contains some phrasing that has influenced far-Right terrorists.  The so-called Boogaloo boys have adapted as a motto Heemeyer’s statement: “Then, I become unreasonable.”)

 

On the Novel as an Unnecessary Form

 On the Novel as an Unnecessary Form

1.

There is something unnatural about the literary form that we call the “novel.”  Throughout most of history, people got along without the form perfectly well.  This leads me to the conclusion that if novels suddenly ceased to exist, we wouldn’t really notice their absence.  Lyric poetry, by contrast, seems integral to human consciousness.  Narrative and epic poems also pre-date the novel by thousands of years and, although less organic, seem somehow rooted in the way that people experience reality.  The world as re-counted or mirrored in words is an exercise in memory and poetry, even in very long forms, seems mnemonic, a device to channel and regulate what we choose to recall.  It goes without saying that theater is rooted in liturgy and religious observance and, similarly, integral to our consciousness.  Short stories derive from anecdotes; even, longer form tales of this sort such as novellas are intrinsic to the way the people interact – we tell each other stories.  But the novel, conceived as a long prose depiction of people and society, is somehow gratuitous, a profoundly unnecessary form.  Contrary to other forms of literary expression, the novel is dependent on publishing – that is, type technology.  No one can remember a prose novel and, so, the form is rooted in mechanical reproduction and, also, requires something that has never been universal – that is, literacy.  In order to experience a novel, people have to be able to read the book.  Before the 20th century, novels were serialized in print publications, later bound into volumes (often multi-volume texts) and read aloud to friends and family.  The form is therefore highly dependent on social and economic factors: the economy must support periodicals and publishers; people must be able to read; and there must be bourgeois society that provides sufficient leisure for reading.  These prerequisites have not existed for most of human history and will, probably, cease to exist once more in the next one-hundred years.  

Because the novel as a genre is alien to human experience, these books are very hard to successfully write.  And there seems to be little agreement, in fact, as to what constitutes an esthetically valid novel.  Just as the form is contrived and contrary to human nature, many of these books seem to be constructed according to curiously arbitrary principles, whimsical in structure or theme, and strangely capricious.  There are very few novels that are wholly or, even, partly successful – this applies to the greatest of writers no less than the hacks who write most of the books that we encounter.  (Genre novels are, often, much more successful in terms of form than works of so-called literary merit – a mystery writer has a certain form to which he or she must be obedient.  This is true of romance novels and westerns, when such books were written, and many narratives that are, in effect, autobiographical or political accounts of grievance, a sort of novel that comprises a recognized, if ill-defined, genre today.)

The world’s first novel, as it is sometimes called, Cervantes Don Quixote isn’t a novel at all – it’s merely a loosely collated group of anecdotes.  The book’s through line or central narrative, the story of the Knight of La Mancha, comprises about a third of the novel – the rest is loosely appended romance that has nothing to do with the book’s main themes.  Daniel Defoe’s most successful books are, basically, journalism with some of the names changed – that is, essential non-fiction reportage.  Gogol, the Mozart of prose, was unable to complete his only novel Dead Souls and the book just peters out.  Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, despite many brilliant and moving chapters, similarly just collapses in its last hundred pages – the author is exhausted and doesn’t know how to unify the book and, so, he just gives up.  Melville’s Moby Dick, although very great, is packed with tedious stuff – I don’t mean the whaling industry passages that are fascinating, but the laborious imitations of Lawrence Sterne invoking Tristam Shandy, another wonderful piece of prose that just stalls out without reaching anything like a conclusion or denouement.  Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow contains spectacular prose, but, it’s obvious, that he ran out of energy about two-hundred pages before the print stops – I don’t know why critics haven’t observed that the last part of Gravity’s Rainbow is the author’s outline for the book’s end and not the actual ending of the novel (which would have required another thousand pages.)  Musil couldn’t complete The Man without Qualities; Kafka’s two novels are similar unfinished.  Dickens big novels are stuffed with interesting characters but don’t cohere – consider Bleak House, a book that starts with some amazing material, and, then, spirals into demented trivia and vapid sentimentality (the plot turns on “spontaneous human combustion”).  George Eliot’s Middlemarch, although fantastically penetrating, doesn’t succeed in the end – it also just concludes when the author becomes tired of the book and its characters.  In recent times, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest is an unreadable harangue – not a narrative but a protracted scream of pain.  Lincoln in the Bardo is a fifteen page short story inflated to three-hundred pages, although those pages are mostly empty – I like this book a lot and think it is a master-work, but I can’t exactly assimilate the text, largely comprised of quotations, to the concept of the novel.

The problem with the novel seems to be that there are too many ways for a long book to go awry.  This is not to say that there aren’t perfected examples of the form, but they are few and far between.  Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain is estimable, but, for most of its length, the book is just a series of well-tuned and witty philosophical dialogues – the operative plot of the book could be written on the three-by-five card.  (Mann’s later Dr. Faustus is, I think, close to perfect – but, probably, too specialized in its interests in syphilis and atonal music to appeal to most people.)   Mann couldn’t complete his last novel The Confessions of Felix Krull, another promising book that has no ending or, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, not even a fully realized second half.  Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire seem to me to be wholly successful.  Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, one of the greatest works in American literature, is not a novel, but a novella – it doesn’t aspire to the larger ambitions and characteristics of the form and, therefore, can be as polished and lapidary as a gem.  Stendhal’s novels seem successful to me.  Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is probably the greatest and most fully achieved novel of the 19th century and several of Flaubert’s books, most particularly A Sentimental Education, establish paradigms for the form.  And, in my view, the novel’s history ends with a perfected masterpiece, Joyce’s Ulysses, a book that no one can surpass in terms of its breadth of vision and its stylistic energy.  

You might disagree with my assessment of the books listed above.  Your assent to my evaluations is beside the point.  The gist of my argument is that successful novels, because of their ambition and the intrinsically formless prose from which they are fashioned, are almost impossible to achieve.  Most novels fail on various levels.  Almost none of them are persuasive in terms of form – indeed, most literary novels start on a note of flamboyant excellence that gradually degrades as the author discovers that he or she has lost control of the material and is simply floundering in an excess that can not be made to cohere.  In general, we think of art as life designed to cohere in some kind of pattern and with the dull parts, perhaps, referenced, but, more or less, elided.  Simply holding a mirror to life will not satisfy us in the long run – what is required is that a book with all of its episodes and characters be made to cohere in an intelligible pattern that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  Almost all famous novels have a successful beginning, but, then, decay into an interminable middle with either no end or an end that not at all persuasive.

2.

Consider with me Heimito von Doderer’s The Waterfalls of Slunj, the last novel of an Austrian novelist who was once famous and widely celebrated as the most important figure writing fiction in German after the death of Thomas Mann.  Doderer’s Waterfalls was published in 1963, three years before the novelist’s death. 

Heimito von Doderer writes in the shadow of the more ambitious and brilliant Robert Musil, an Austrian acolyte of Marcel Proust who, like his idol, couldn’t exactly complete his magnum opus.  There’s debate as to whether Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is fully realized; Proust was tinkering with the huge book up to his death.  There’s no debate about Musil’s Man without Qualities – he died before it was finished leaving over a thousand pages of prose that seems polished and final, but with hundreds of pages of fragmentary notes and sketches aimed toward a conclusion to the book that Musil never accomplished.  Doderer’s books are all finished, with the exception of something called Roman Number 7 (apparently a second volume to an earlier novel called Der Grenzwald – The Border Forest).  Like Musil, von Doderer wrote at enormous length – his most famous novel The Demons is over 750  pages long, generally published in two volumes; his second most acclaimed novel, Der Strudlhofstiege (The Strudelhof Steps, referring to a landmark in Vienna) is something like 900 pages in length. By contrast, Waterfalls is a mere bagatelle – it runs 393 pages in its German paperback edition. 

Waterfalls is a historical novel.  The book concerns the interactions of about a dozen characters between the years 1880 and 1910.  Primarily set in Vienna, the book takes excursions into the Styrian Alps and wanders as far afield as Istanbul and Beirut.  The titular waterfalls are located in Slunj, a village in Croatia.  Doderer seems to have improvised the novel and it is flagrantly formless.  I have no idea why he wrote the book or what, if anything, he intends by the narrative that is, by turns, tedious, very funny, and smugly faux-romantic.  The book has a sort of climax, but it is so highly contrived as to be ridiculous – an appendix to a novel that shows no signs of ending until Doderer finally tires of one of his main characters, a feckless figure that he has mercilessly mocked throughout the book, and kills him off.  Since a death always gives an impression finality, the assassination of one of his main characters, although wholly arbitrary, provides an illusion of form to the novel as does the scene-setting at the thunderous falls at Slunj.  (The man who dies in the waterfall was presumably conceived there during his parent’s honeymoon visit to this renowned tourist attraction – and, so, book has a kind of mechanical structure: it begins and ends at the cataract.)

It’s not worth describing the book’s plot – the story is too diffuse and ramifies in so many directions in such a seemingly capricious manner that the book’s narrative is hard to characterize.  Furthermore, it’s impossible to define any protagonist in the novel.  People come and go.  Doderer is still adding characters and giving them long introductions, complete with backstory, twenty pages before the end of the book.  Readers are likely to experience irritation when Doderer pauses to insert yet another character in the book at a point in the novel so late that it is apparent that this figure will have little or no significance in what we have left to read.  A strong sense of aimless futility haunts this book and, in the end, the reader is likely to throw up his or her hands and ask “What’s the point?”  This is unfortunate because Doderer himself is an amusing presence in the book – he appears on just about every page as “ye olde storyteller”, disgorging ironic or witty (if often snide) comments about his characters or the situations in which they find themselves.  Doderer is anything but absent from his book – he’s not like the divine all-knowing narrator that Joyce hypothesizes “paring his fingernails” abstractly, withholding all intervention in human affairs, and indifferent to the sufferings of his creatures.  To the contrary, Doderer epitomizes chatty omniscience – he knows everything about everything and the reader needn’t fear that he will keep this knowledge to himself.  Rather, he interlards his seemingly random plot with lengthy asides, bestows snotty nicknames on his characters – one is the Lulusch (“big lummox”), another is called Runzel (“the wrinkle”), another he simply dubs Dickerl (“fatty”) – and, generally, shows overt contempt for everyone in his book.  Doderer indulges in meta-fictional ploys – he reminds readers of what he told them before by citing the page number.  (This is pretty unhelpful because he generally adverts back to a comment that was so astounding that the reader readily recalls it; Doderer would be more helpful if he would remind his readers from time to time about minor characters who keep surfacing later in the book, names with which the reader is familiar although can’t recall accurately who the hell this personage is supposed to be.)  Doderer’s constant interference with his characters and their fictional fates would be amusing if the writer weren’t so smug and despicable.  Doderer was a pervert and, for a time, a Nazi enthusiast and there’s nothing about his biography that is inspiring – in fact, the more you know about the man, the more the reader is likely to regard him as a pathological case.  Some writers are inevitably smug – John Updike is an example in English as is Saul Bellow although to a much lesser extent.  A tone of smug detachment can be effective when it’s not irritating.  But with Doderer, as well as Updike, the author’s blandly smug attitude toward his characters, simply annoys the reader.  Furthermore, Doderer was such a wormy personality that it’s hard to imagine that he had anything to be smug about.  He’s obviously highly intelligent and his prose is fantastically complex with a formidable and brilliantly inpenetrable surface, but the man is a poseur – one has the sense that the huge fictional apparatus of The Waterfalls of Slunj is devised to deliver certain sexually perverse frisson, exciting to the author but of minimal interest to most modern readers.  (Of course, I am commenting on one of von Doderer’s ostensibly minor novels and have no idea whether his huge and much more famous books suffer from the same defects as Waterfalls – it is hard to imagine that they are much different, however, and excerpts that I have read from The Demons and The Strudelhof Stairs seem similar.  Doderer’s failings are baked-into his books – at least, this is how it seems to me, particularly since the writer makes himself the center of attention in these narratives.)

Broadly speaking, Waterfalls follows the fortunes of a large group of characters, more or less, involved with a manufacturing firm called Clayton & Powers.  This enterprise makes machines of some kind that have agricultural applications – probably tractors.  (I’m sure Doderer explains what the company makes somewhere but it didn’t register with me, probably because I didn’t fully understand the German technical vocabulary.)  The firm is owned by Robert Clayton, a vigorous Englishman with an imperialist bent.  The book begins with the 27-year old Clayton meeting a young woman whom he will marry and, then, establish in an opulent villa in Vienna.  Clayton’s business is international and there is a vigorous market for whatever his company makes in the somewhat under-developed eastern part of the Austria-Hungarian empire.  Clayton & Powers evolves to be headquartered in Vienna, where most of the book’s events take place.  On his honeymoon, Robert Clayton and wife, Harriet, tour beautiful Croatia where they are impressed by the waterfalls at Slunj.  These are a series of cascades divided by pinnacles of rock on which there are perched mills, apparently for sawing wood and grinding grain.  The mills form a sort of crenelation along the crest of the roaring precipice and they are linked by wooden catwalks. The book’s only palpable structure is that it begins and ends at the titular waterfalls.

Robert Clayton’s liaison with his markets in the Balkans is a fellow named Chwostic, an engineer but also jack-of-all-trades.  After a dozen pages establishing the mercantile situation and locating the villa where the Clayton’s live in Vienna, the narrative shifts to Chwostic or Pepi as he is sometimes called.  Pepi/Chwostic is poor and an immigrant to Vienna from the eastern provinces.  He has a friend named Milohnic, a Serb, who ends up in the hotel business.  Most significantly, Chwostic’s poverty has forced him to live within Vienna’s red-light district and he shares his flat with two hard-working whores, Finy and Feverl, ruined farm girls from Hungary.  The first hundred pages in the book involve Chwostic’s adventures, most of which concern exchanging his brothel-apartment for a better apartment previously occupied by a dentist and his wife in a more upscale neighborhood.  The dentist’s wife is involved in a longstanding affair with the tax lawyer, Eptinger, counsel on retainer to Clayton & Powers.  The dentist’s wife has a child with Eptinger, a little girl called Monica.  One day, after Chwostic has moved into his new digs, the toddler, Monica, falls into the Danube canal and is saved by Finy and Feverl who are picnicking nearby and both of whom, as a result of their rural upbringing, are vigorous swimmers.  As a reward for their valor, the two whores end up employed as milkmaids on a huge estate in Hungary owned by a fat man named, appropriately enough, Globus.  In this book, everyone is related to everyone else and many plot developments involve someone having an accommodating uncle in some other part of the Empire.  Doderer, in an aside, tells us that he no longer has any narrative need for Finy and Feverl, in some ways the most attractive characters in the novel, and so he is going to literally “boot” them out of the story.  Doderer admits liking the two whores and so says the will “boot” them out of the plot without using heavy shoes (or boots) but, gently, with soft felt slippers on his feet.  As we will see, boots and shoes will play an important part in the book as it progresses.

A number of years pass – in fact, more than 30 years.  Chwostik is still living in the dentist’s old apartment.  Donald Clayton, a strangely feckless and inert young man, has joined his father’s firm.  Doderer describes various parties and business gatherings, dutifully giving us addresses and itemizing menus.  Donald woos Monica, now grown up and working as a technical writer for a science publishing house.  Monica is educated as an engineer and seems to be the prototype for the modern woman.  Robert Clayton’s wife has died and Chwostik, who is now wrinkled but vigorous, remains single.  A cadre of young men, students in the Gymnasium, are introduced.  These boys are over-achievers and participants in something called the Metternich Club or M. C.   Strangely, the club is devoted to the study of the greatness of the diplomat Metternich, but, in fact, the M.C. is really just a sort of highfalutin’ study group.  The M.C. is led Zdenko Chlamtasch, also of Hungarian origin and a brilliant student.  Doderer describes the curiously ineffectual Donald Clayton as a man of the future – the ultimate bystander or “Mann ohne Eigenschaften” (“man without qualities”); he doesn’t act but is acted upon.  

Monica Bachler, the lady engineer, develops an interest in Donald Clayton.  Clayton is too listless to really pursue her and ignores her blandishments – at one point, she takes off her clothes and lounges around in bed, but Donald seems impervious to her charms.  Having failed to seduce Donald, Monica falls into bed with the gallant and accommodating Chwostik – it’s a one-night stand but remains a precious memory to the old fellow (whom Doderer calls “the Wrinkle”.)  A few dozen pages later, Monica becomes the girlfriend of Robert Clayton, who must now be about 60.  This aspect of the novel is reminiscent of Goethe’s themes in his big, last book Wilhelm Meister’s Wanderjahre.  The most famous feature of that novel is a short story, really a sixty-page novella, called “The Man of Fifty”, detailing an erotic competition between a middle-aged man and his son for a teenage girl.  Doderer sets up a similar rivalry between Robert Clayton, father, and Donald Clayton, son, but the book is too hyper-refined to make much of this somewhat tasteless plot.  Although Donald’s repressed love for Monica is central to some aspects of the novel, there’s no Sturm und Drang – Donald isn’t capable of an emotional response of this kind.

An intricate series of somewhat farfetched erotic complications occupy the book’s core.  A physician named Harbach has been “kept” by an Italian countess when he was a young man.  She pays for his medical education.  Harbach later marries and has several daughters.  His wife is handsome and big – Doderer really likes big, plump women – her girls have long-legs and look a bit like horses.  (We will return to this theme a little later.)  Harbach is a complete cipher, an enigma, although he hangs around the margins for much of the book.  The Harbach girls are courted, ineffectively, by the callow and scholarly members of the Metternich Club.  Zdenko, meanwhile, has been lured into a sexual encounter with Henriette Frehlinger, a fat middle-aged woman with no morals to speak of.  Birds of a feather gather together and Frau Frehlinger is best friends with the equally amoral Monica Bachler.  Zdenko seems to be a surrogate for the author and the narrative involving the affair, or really single statutory rape, involving the middle-aged housewife is the subject of much morose rumination in the book.  Although I think Zdenko represents the young and polymorphously perverse Doderer, the author actually gives himself a cameo in the book – he’s mentioned as part of a crew of reprobates at the Gymnasium that despise members of the M. C. and are, in turn, disdained by them.

Doderer complicates the already complex narrative by adding various ancillary characters who don’t really contribute much to the action – except, of course, there is no action, everything slides by in a paralyzed Proustian fog of parties and recondite business transactions.  Robert Clayton’s deceased wife has relatives in Canada – one of them, Augustus Cunius appears as a would-be member of the M.C.  He’s fat and simply called Dickerl or “Fatty” by Doderer.  There’s a mountain climbing expedition involving Chwostik, Robert, and Monica that is picturesque but leads nowhere.  Zdenko, who spends lots of time playing tennis at the Clayton villa, suspects that Robert Clayton is having an affair with Monica (or, at least, there is an attraction) and he lets this slip to Donald whereupon the younger Clayton stumbles, apparently with dismay.  This turns out to be a crucial moment in the narrative.

Robert Clayton has a sexual rendezvous with Monica at a mountain resort.  Meanwhile, Chwostik and Donald are dispatched on a mission to the East, planning a trip by steamer as far as Beirut and, even, Constantinople – this is recompense for a fateful trip into the middle east thirty years earlier in which the Levantine merchants swindled Robert, someone who is vigorous but not too smart.  Relentlessly, von Doderer adds more and more characters.  Chwostic and Donald are accompanied by Dr. Harbach.  During their travels, their liaison in the Balkan countries is a fellow named Laszlo Putnik.  Putnik is related to the managers of a firm called Putnik and Gollwitzer, perhaps, a business that markets the products manufactured by Clayton.  (Confusingly, however, Putnik is not employed by the Putnik and Gollwitzer but works for a competitor.)  Laszlo Putnik is married, but not married, to the beautiful Margot who is, in turn, the sister of a woman married to business contact in Beirut.  Margot is a very strange character – she hates men and suffers from an erotic disfigurement.  She has a scarlet birthmark, the width of a towel, stretched across her haunches and, apparently, when this is seen by men, they are filled with horror and repelled by her.  (It seems that for this reason Laszlo Putnik has not consummated his marriage with her.)  Margot is carrying on a clandestine love affair with a burly museum security guard – this guy, named Illek, works at a Budapest museum of Roman antiquities that has a locked room full of erotic statuary.  (It’s in this room and Illek’s little office that the couple have their sexual encounters.)  The Clayton entourage includes a conniving fellow named Tibor Gergliffi who stirs up further erotic trouble.  Gergliffi has no real part in any of the narrative, but is an important vehicle for Doderer’s sexual obsessions.  (We will consider this below.) 

It’s pretty clear that the mission to Beirut and Constantinople, as well as the extended trip through the Balkans at the height of the sweltering summer, is a scheme contrived by Robert Clayton to get Donald out of the way so that he can finalize his relationship with Monica – ultimately, he sends Donald a letter announcing his betrothal with Monica.  (She also encloses a note telling poor Donald that she “values their friendship” and hopes it will continue.)  Donald, finally, decides that he must act and, so, he sets up a would-be sexual encounter with the terrifying Margot Putnik.  Margot is thrilled to add another victim’s scalp to her trophies.  She gets Donald into her boudoir and strips down to display her scarlet birthmark, expecting him to be stunned.  Donald is horrified and stands in the dim, humid room gaping at her when suddenly Laszlo Putnik, her husband, appears.  Although Laszlo is digusted by Margot, he feels aggrieved, seizes a fowling piece from over the mantle, and aims it at Donald.  Acting decisively for once in his life, Donald pushes the shot gun aside as it discharges.  Laszlo who intended no actual harm, is horrified; he thought he had unloaded the shotgun after its last use hunting ducks.  He and Donald shake hands and bribe the housekeeper to keep silent about the contretemps, although everyone later whispers about the scandal.  Laszlo uses the event as a basis to divorce Margot who lives happily (or unhappily) ever after with her boyfriend, the security guard in the museum crammed with pornographic knick-knacks.

Running parallel to this account of the adventures of Donald Clayton and his associates is the story of Zdenko.  He has been sent to his Aunt’s estate, apparently in Croatia, basically so that the old lady will have a partner for her card games.  But Zdenko’s aunt, Ada Vukovic, is a chronic alcoholic and, at the estate, she spends all her time “indisposed” due to the booze.  Zdenko goes out riding one day to see the celebrated falls at Slunj – they are only twenty minutes away by horseback.  Zdenko has been brooding over his one-night stand with the depraved Henriette Frehlinger and feels that his youth is now over – he has renounced the childish activities of the Metternich Club.  At the falls, he sees a tall, long-limbed man approaching on the gangway.  Suddenly, a railing on the catwalk gives way and the man falls over the edge.  Of course, the unfortunate man is Donald Clayton who has nothing but miserable luck in this novel.  Donald lands on a protruding rock and doesn’t even get washed over the edge, but, nonetheless, dies “of fright” someone claims – it’s summer and too hot for an autopsy so the cause of death is never really determined.  Chwostic comes to help retrieve the corpse and, then, goes into town to send a telegram to Donald’s father who is disporting himself with Monica Bachler back in Vienna.  At the post office, he runs into an old buddy from his days on brothel-street, a man named Muensterer, now a postal official in Croatia and stationed at Slunj.  (It is characteristic of Doderer that he continues to complicate the story even on its last page.)  Muensterer is the son of Frau Wewerka, a loathsome procurer, who served as a concierge or janitor at the apartment in Vienna that Chwostik shared with the streetwalkers Finy and Feverl (who have, notwithstanding Doderer’s peremptory dismissal appeared once more at an idyllic outdoor banquet on the Globus estate, a place where Clayton & Powers hope to sell tractor equipment.)  And, so, the book ends.

This summary omits about a dozen other characters, some of whom are fairly prominent.  Doderer mercilessly adds new characters right up to the end of the book; the flyleaf of my copy of the novel is covered with lists of characters and the page numbers on which they were introduced.  Illek, Margot’s lover at the Roman pornography museum, is described about 25 pages before the end of the book and, even, given an elaborate backstory – he’s an orphan and former military man whose happiest moment was seeing “enemy” cavalry (fictionally) destroyed during maneuvers.  (Doderer goes so far as to provide us with a description of man’s handwriting.)  A groom on the Vanice estate of Zdenko’s drunk aunt, a teenager named Ivo, is introduced about four pages before Donald goes over the brink of the falls and within ten pages of the book’s last sentence.  Doderer tells us the groom’s nickname (with a digression on how nicknames are formed in Hungarian), some facts about his background, and that he keeps a cardboard box full of money that he has saved, including tips from Zdenko, in a hidden place in the barn that is, nonetheless, well-known to all the other servants, some of whom examine this loot from time to time and keep count of Ivo’s assets.  In fairness to Doderer, there is a sense in which the scheme of the narrative is incomplete – some sources suggest that the Waterfalls is really only the first volume of a bigger book, identified (as I mentioned above) as Roman (that is, “novel”) No. 7.  The second volume of the book, called Der Grenzwald (The Border Forest) exists only in fragments, although these were edited and published in 1967.  

As shown by my plot summary, necessarily incomplete and simplified, the book presents an ungainly sprawl.  Furthermore, it resists interpretation.  Since most of the action takes place in 1910, the reader initially suspects that the book will be about the decadence and decay of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, something like Roth’s Radetzky March or Musil’s monstrous Man without Qualities.  (In Musil’s novel, the characters are connected by committees planning festivities for a jubilee celebration of K.u.K (“Koeniglich und Kaiserlich”) empire of Austria-Hungary coinciding with the old emperor’s fiftieth year in power.  The irony of the book is that the regime that everyone is planning to celebrate will be destroyed in the fires of World War One before the celebration can be mounted).  The image of the mills perched on the precipice of the torrent suggests a world poised on the brink of destruction.  But this is not Doderer’s intent and he makes nothing of the oncoming calamity.  This is puzzling because Doderer has the tendency to index locations to present-day Vienna – his sets, as it were, have both an imperial history under the old regime and a modern post-World War Two identity (at one point, he tells us that a street address has changed, at least, three times since his pen-portrait circa 1910).  I assume the waterfalls somehow signify the eccentric relationship between industry (and economy) and sexual passion – mills make power from the water roaring over cliffs only a few feet from their machinery.  This symbolism seems unavoidable, but I’m not sure that it is intended by Doderer, who, after the continental manner, seems a libertine and takes sexual license for granted – people are very nonchalant in this book about love affairs.  Indicative of Doderer’s refusal to make sense of the events that he has so laboriously contrived is Donald’s death.  At first, we suspect that Zdenko’s visit to the falls may be motivated by a desire to kill himself – he’s been mooning about the Vanice estate for several weeks, baking in the heat.  (Apparently, the Balkans are very, very warm during high summer.)  As he gallops toward the brink of the falls, we wonder whether he will not simply dash into the water and drown in the cataract.  But, Zdenko stops on the edge of the river, hikes around among the mills, and, in fact, draws new courage and will from the spectacle of the torrent plunging past the waterwheels and millwork.  So, does Donald seek his death at the waterfalls?  We have seen him upset by the letters received from his father and Monica about their upcoming nuptials.  But Doderer insists that Donald dies because of a carpentry defect – the joints in the balustrade overlooking the waterfall have become rotten from the spray and are warped.  It’s typical of Doderer to stop his narrative to provide a forensic account of this technical failure in the railing.  Zdenko correlates Donald’s flailing plunge over the edge to his “stumble” in the park at the villa in Vienna when Zdenko’s words inadvertently revealed the love affair between Monica and Robert Clayton – thus, Zdenko thinks that Donald’s death is somehow related to the Englishman’s disappointing and abortive relationship with Monica whom he seems to have loved after his own passionless and immobile manner.  But Doderer will not condone this hypothesis suggesting that it is an artifact of Zdenko’s own erotic torment relating to his one sexual encounter with the fat Frau Frehlinger.  Doderer insists, and recall that he is proudly omniscient, that Donald’s death is a pure accident. And this would be characteristic of the novel: people seem to act without knowing their own motives (although they later agonize to unscramble them) and everything occurs as a result of Fortuna – that is, by sheer coincidence and accident.  

It is an open question whether a novel can be designed to demonstrate over the course of 400 pages that there are no plots, that character does not determine action, and that everything occurs by accident.  This question is, perhaps, frivolous.  In the words of the old Lutheran who was asked whether he believed in infant baptism: “Of course, I’ve seen it done.” 

3.

One book leads to another.  

Before the covid-virus put an end to our book club, we were reading Gogol.  While waiting for copies of Dead Souls to arrive, I xeroxed a famous short story by the Italian writer, Tommaso Landolfi, “Gogol’s Wife”.  This was the last text that my group was supposed to read together – I wish it had been something less rebarbative.  Landolfi translated Gogol into Russian and his short story is an odd anecdote, alleging that Gogol (who was, in fact, unmarried and, probably, homosexual) had kept company with an inflatable sex doll that he later murdered. The story was acclaimed by many critics, including Harold Bloom, but the merits of the tale, a grotesque and unpleasant work, are not eminently clear.  Landolfi wrote about thirty short stories and sketches that have been translated into English and, so, when the Great Books club ceased to meet out of fear that we would infect one another (literature is a kind of infection; Burroughs says that words are a virus from outer space), I undertook to read everything that I could find written by Landolfi.  This was not a quixotic or particularly ambitious undertaking – Landolfi’s ouevre in English consists of three short books containing anecdotes and sketches as well as a couple of mid-sized novellas and a short novel called An Autumn Story.

This latter book appears in English in a translation published by an enterprise called Eridanos Press.  I ordered a used copy of the book and read it with pleasure.  (The story involves a gothic encounter between an Italian guerilla fighter and an elderly aristocrat living in a remote and ruinous manor.  The book is similar, in some ways, to Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” and involves madness, hidden crypts, and a deranged young woman.)  Landolfi’s short novel is handsomely printed in a paperback format with a stiff cover with lapels (or a “turn in” cover as it is called in the industry),  that can be used as page markers.  The print is clear, embossed on slightly papyrus-colored leaves and, on the cover of the book, there is a suitably melancholy image by Edvard Munch, I think, showing an unhappy couple.   Within the book, there is a table of other writings published by Eridanos Press, including Pierre Klossowski’s very strange and eerie novella The Baphomet.  (The “Baphomet” is the name for the fiendish demon allegedly conjured by the Knights Templar – it’s described as a disembodied, bearded head.)  I have a copy of The Baphomet somewhere, a book that I’ve skimmed, but not carefully read – Klossowski was a prominent Sadist (here meant as a follower of the Marquis de Sade) and wrote several books of mystical pornography; he’s the brother of the artist Balthus and an authority on the imagery and symbolism of alchemical allegorical prints.  On the evidence of these two books in the Eridanos catalog, it appeared to me that this publishing house specialized in European arcana written by relatively unheralded but accomplished (if eccentric) authors.  This is the sort of the stuff that I enjoy and, so, I endeavored to learn more about the publishing house.  

My copy of An Autumn Story bore an imprint indicating that Eridanos Publishing was located at Hygiene, Colorado.  A little research on the internet showed me that this was an unincorporated post office location somewhere in the high mountains to the west of Boulder.  Eridanos references a river known from Greek mythology.  Hesiod in his Theogony places the river near the Tin and Amber Islands somewhere in Tethys and Oceanus, the torrents that encircle the known world.  Eridanos is associated with dense forests, amber thought to be the embalmed tears of wood dyads, and other semi-precious gems.  Virgil, despairing of locating the actual river, put it in Hades, as one of the streams that bathe that dark and mournful realm.  In the Fifth century after Christ, Nonnus in his Dionysiaca, imagines the celestial serpent Typhon dipping his coils in the Eridanos – Nonnus probably is referring to the constellation as reflected in the gloomy waters of the river.  

Many books published by Eridanos are rare, paperbacks selling for about 150 dollars.  Almost the entire catalog seems to be out of print.  As far as I can determine, Eridanos was an off-shoot of a major New York-based publisher, but seems to have been involved in legal squabbles.  I interpret the company’s business location at Hygiene, Colorado as an effort, perhaps, to defraud creditors – how do you serve process on a company that is nothing more than a post-office box in rural Colorado?

Hygiene is a peculiar place as well.  The village, now non-existent, was founded by the Church of the Brethren, a German Anabaptist sect.  The Brethren established a colony in Boulder County and built a handsome fieldstone church there, adjacent to a tuberculosis sanitarium that they erected on that “magic mountain.”  Because of the TB sanitarium, the community was given the odd, but optimistic name, Hygiene.  The sanitarium, built in the 1880s, is now long gone but its sad cemetery still exists as does the doughty fieldstone chapel, now designated a historic place.  There’s a railroad siding supposedly, a general store in which the post office is located, and, perhaps, six residents as of last census.  

Among books by Pirandello, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, and others, I noticed that Eridanos had published a volume by someone called Heimito von Doderer.  Doderer’s book had the strange title The Waterfalls at Slunj.  “Slunj”?  What does that mean?  I had never heard of von Doderer, notwithstanding some acquaintance with German literature.  When I looked up the book on Amazon, I found that it was apparently rare and that the Eridanos publication, issued in the mid-1990's in a handsome edition, was very expensive –something like $200 for a paperback.  Of course, a book that you can’t obtain always exerts a siren spell.  

I mentioned the novel to a very well-read friend apropos my interest in the Eridanos Press. To my complete surprise, he told me that he owned a copy of the book and that it was in his basement.  Apparently, my friend had purchased a library copy when the book was deaccessioned – probably twenty years ago, had stacked the book among hundreds of others in his storage, and hadn’t read it.  It seems that he paid something like fifty cents for the hardback book bound in library plastic when our local Carnegie library sold the the volume at a fundraising event. (The library edition was published in the United States by Harcourt, Brace & World in a first American imprint dated 1966 – I wonder if Harcourt, Brace & World is the firm that calved to produce Eridanos.)  I ordered a copy of the book in German, something that was easy to accomplish, but had to wait several weeks for the paperback to be shipped over Tethys and Oceanus to me.  In the meantime, my friend read much of the book and provided me with a report by email.  He said that the book was written in an interesting style, contained some remarkable passages, but was too complex and disorganized to be intelligible – he gave up on reading the volume at about page 200.  But my friend, knowing of my interest in the book, brought me his copy so that I could try the novel.  Later, I received the German paperback edition and ceased reading the English version except as a backup to the German, written in a very rococo and intricate style that I understood only imperfectly.

There is another association that I record here: one of my earliest memories is of a dark wood rotunda, filled with people, singing and lights, and my mother beside me with another female relative on what seems, now, to be a pew, also carved from burnished cherry-colored wood.  I believe this memory reflects a visit to Ocean Grove Great Auditorium.  Ocean Grove was revival camp founded in the late 19th century and located beyond some sinister-looking salt-water canals to the south of the Asbury Park boardwalk.  (For several years, until I was about six, my family lived in Wannamassa, a suburb about five miles from the Jersey Shore and adjacent to Asbury Park).  The Ocean Grove Great Auditorium, one of the most remarkable all-wood structures of the Victorian era, was built by the United Church of Brethren during their heyday – a tent city for revivals stood around the great auditorium.  The Brethren, of course, are the religious sect that founded Hygiene, Colorado, the place were the Eridanos Press was said to have its headquarters.  

4.

I’ve accused Heimito von Doderer of being smug and a pervert.  Now, I need to prove those accusations to which I will add another – Hiemito von Doderer’s rococo prose style is fundamentally inhuman.

First, Doderer is insufferably smug: in an aside, the author notes that he has “spread” his net and, more or less, accidently caught Finy and Feverl in his narrative web.  Viewing the two former prostitutes as specimens, Doderer says that before “liberating” them (that is, dismissing them again from the plot), we should have a “bit of a look at them.”  And, so, Doderer tells us that they have actually become more handsome and “prettier” now thirty years after their exploits as street walkers in Vienna.  They look “less vulgar” but still constitute “a tandem”.  (Here Doderer is reverting to earlier imagery in which he described the women as “little Trojan horses” – this is part of the author’s obsession with the equine that I view as a conspicuous part of his perversity.  For instance, when he says the women are “a tandem” he is referring to the way that they would be harnessed to a carriage or wagon.)  And, so, he writes:

They still constituted a tandem.  That is to say, each had remained identical not so much with herself as with the other, which is by no means always the case with doubles, as the lamentable example of Clayton Brothers had recently demonstrated in the most emphatic manner.  The critics will say, quite rightly, that the author has not succeeded in “characterizing each of these figures and distinguishing them from one another.”  It is not that the author has not succeeded: he has not even tried!  What on earth should he “characterize” about these two drabs!  Look, I haven’t been able to tell them apart from the very beginning.  I never knew what either looked like, only what they looked like together.

This rhetorical address to the reader is unusual in the book, but not uncharacteristic.  The form of Doderer’s expostulations owes not a little to the prose of another famous Viennese writer, Sigmund Freud.  One of Freud’s typical persuasive strategies is to identify an objection to his argument likely to be felt by a careful reader; Freud, then, states the objection, usually more forcefully that the reader might, and, then, proceeds to refute that criticism or show that it is insignificant to the general thrust of his argument.  (“Clayton Brothers,” in the excerpt above, refers to the fact that father Robert Clayton looks so similar to his son, Donald, and, indeed, appears so youthful, that the two men are referred to as “brothers” – the nickname “Clayton Brothers” is also redolent of the book’s mercantile aspect: the phrase sounds like the name of business firm.)

I have cited this text, however, to demonstrate Doderer’s Olympian indifference to his characters, a nonchalance about their miseries and joys, that he expresses with a sort of rhetorical smirk.  The text above is quoted in the 1966 translation by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser – a translation into a particularly irritating “tally-ho” sort of affected British upper-crust idiom.  Although Doderer is intolerably smug, his Austrian-German is not as gratuitously nasty as represented by Wilkins and Kaiser.  For instance, Doderer doesn’t call his two former streetwalkers “drabs”, a particularly opprobrious British term for worn-out prostitutes.  The word that Doderer uses is much more neutral: Menschen – that is, just “people”. 

Integral to Doderer’s depiction of Finy and Feverl is his insistence on their “horsiness”.  This equine motif runs as a persistent current through the entire book.  References to horses occur hundreds of times in the novel and, surely, represent some kind of obsession that Doderer displays, more or less, inadvertently – the reader has the sense the author can’t help himself.  

On the first page of the novel, Robert Clayton meets his wife while riding his horse through the country side.  She is also astraddle a horse that is moving with a hopsenden Gallop (rendered as “canter” in the translation.)  Finy and Feverl are “cute little Trojan horses.”  Paul Harbach’s daughters have long legs (like horses) and walk with a “cantering stride.”  Similarly, both Robert and Donald Clayton are characterized by their long horse-like legs.  When Monica Bachler, during her sexual liaison with Robert Clayton, watches the older man as he sleeps, she (or Doderer) notes that he has a sleek “dry head” – a term from horse-trading that means that an animal has no excrescences, tumors, or sores on its head.  “Fatty” (Augustus Cunius) dislikes his riding lessons.  However, when a runaway horse is confronted in the Prater Park in Vienna, he subdues the beast and mounts it, riding the horse back to where it can be surrendered to authorities.  Margot Putnik’s birthmark disfiguring her hips and genital area is described in German as a Brandmal – that is, a brand of the kind that would be used to mark a horse.  Tibor Gergleffi’s business machinations in the implement trade are described as “horse-trader tricks”.  Ada Vukovic, Zdenko’s alcoholic aunt, is said to have a very nice “ass” for riding horseback and, in fact, to the dismay of the local Croatians, she doesn’t ride side-saddle but straddles her steed.  (A big ass is said to be a prerequisite for good horsemanship.  Doderer liked big, heavy-set women.  Two days before his marriage, he placed a personal ad in a Viennese periodical expressing interest in an erotic tryst with an “Israelite lady (Viennese) and about 45 years old of an unusually strong, corpulent, voluptuous, and generally powerful and broad stature” – certainly, someone who might be a fine horsewoman.  Doderer’s working title for the book was “Fat Women”, a name that he fortunately discarded.)  

The most remarkable example of Doderer’s unseemly interest in the equine arises in connection with Illek.  This minor character is the security guard at the museum in Bucharest with the secret gallery full of pornographic figurines.  As he exits an empty tavern (called a Csardas in Hungarian), the former imperial soldier sees something lying in the dust on the street.  Illek, who is carrying on a clandestine affair with the sexually disfigured Margot, first thinks that the object discarded in the roadway is a Hufeisen (a “horse-shoe”).  But, on closer inspection, the thing turns out to be a Stiefelabsatz (that is, a broken-off boot heel).  Illek fantasizes that he is this melancholy object: either a horse shoe or the heel of a boot and, in fact, sheds bitter tears over recognizing himself prostrate in the dust and helpless.  It’s not the fault of women, Illek acknowledges, but rather his own miserable destiny to lay in the street’s filth, broken and discarded.  Whether this bizarre Kafkesque interlude is intended to be funny is unclear to me.  What is evident, however, is that the figure of the horse-shoe/boot-heel fuses two of Doderer’s sexual obsessions – human beings are fantasized as ponies ridden by women with big asses and, presumably, flogged by them; these masochistic impulses are materialized in the desire to be under a woman’s heel, that is, to literally become the heel on her boot.  The artifact of the discarded boot-heel lying in dust trampled by marching columns of soldiers and tourists is melancholy because it is detached from the source of its erotic fascination – if the heel were the shoe of a powerful striding horse or reunited with the woman’s boot from which it has broken, the poor little homunculus would be happy, perhaps, even blissful.  (Illek’s masochistic perception of himself is parallel to Doderer’s depiction of his authorial stance, similarly and bizarrely masochistic as noted below.)

The reader might regard these surmises as fantastic.  But, in fact, this reading can be easily supported by evidence in the novel.  Tibor Gergleffi, the Hungarian attache to a firm selling agricultural implements, is a boot fetishist.  The character is introduced late in the book and seems superfluous – he’s not present at the climax at the falls and doesn’t really interact with any of the other characters except in a mercantile, trading context.  Gergleffi is inserted into the book so that Doderer can enjoy describing the desires of a man sexually obsessed with boots.  In fact, Gergleffi likes a certain kind of boot, “little boots” (an inclination that allows Doderer to invoke Caligula or “little boots”, the Latin nickname for the infamous Roman emperor.)  These”little boots”should be worn by girls in peasant garb.  In fact, Gergleffi sets up a liaison with a bar-maid, Marika, in which he sends to their place of assignation not only a cute, revealing peasant costume, but, also, a pair of specially made boots.  Doderer advises us that Gergleffi, himself, would not wear boot during the encounter but would be “between her boots.”  Later, when the business associates retire to Globus’ country estate (where Finy and Feverl have their hermitage), Gergleffi is quick to devise sexual encounters with the local women, whom, of course, he requires to wear their work boots to bed.  This passage in the novel culminates (I don’t want to say “climaxes”) with a description of the men’s boots worn in this vicinity of Hungary, a plethora of shoe-ware that disappoints Gergleffi who is a sexual specialist in lady’s feet.  (Doderer was bisexual and his orientation to the boots on display worn by the local lads is ambiguous.)  

As the book progresses toward its end, Doderer seems incapable of avoiding sexually suggestive (and perverse) situations.  This aspect of the book, perhaps, is embodied by the business transactions that the author rather laboriously details –we are given details as to tax consequences of acquisitions and rebates offered in Hungary for payment in cash.  As far as I can determine, Clayton and company are selling tractors – that is, traction devices.  The traction applied by these machines has two equivalents in the novel – the influence of sexual inclinations that drive people together and the traction exerted by the falls.  At the end of the book, all events take place under the magnetic influence of the falls – the roar of the cataracts sounds as a basso profundo that can be heard miles away from the actual precipice over which the river pours.  The falls, as it were, exercise traction, pulling the characters to them.  However, the prevalence of perverse sexual imagery accumulating toward the end of the novel casts a lurid shadow over all of its proceedings.  For instance, we expect Zdenko to be seduced by his alcoholic aunt with the big horse-delighting ass.  Furthermore, when Zdenko goes riding with the groom Ivo, the context implies that some kind of sexual encounter will occur between the two of them, an interaction, undoubtedly, involving whips, leather, and boots.  (Neither happens – but, I have the sense that The Waterfalls of Slunj as a part of the larger Roman No. 7 may be setting up these encounters for the book’s continuation in Der Grenzwald, the next installment of the narrative.)  As it stands, Doderer’s coy references to sexual perversion seem to me to be subtly harassing to the reader.  Doderer is drawing us into a web of sexual perversion for his own purposes since many of these aspects of the book seem extraneous (or unnecessary) to its other themes – Gergleffi, as I have noted, exists in the book only to dramatize certain sexual themes that don’t necessarily cohere with other aspects of the novel.

On the hundredth anniversary of Heimito von Doderer’s birth, the German magazine of record, Der Spiegel published an article about the author focusing primarily on his flirtation with the Nazi party during the Anschluss and his sexual perversion.  Doderer maintained a secret diary and this was made public on his centenary.  From the diary, it’s clear that the writer’s sex life was polymorphous, perverse, and intricate.  In his early youth, Doderer was initiated into sado-masochistic sex by one of his tutors.  He also seems to have had liaisons with several older women.  During World War One, Doderer was captured and ended up hewing wood in Siberia at a prison camp.  Somehow, his old instructor and first sexual partner ended-up in the camp with him and the two of them continued their SM relationship in captivity.  Doderer later married.  However, he maintained in his home a “pillar of martyrdom” to which he would fetter his wife for erotic floggings.  (Ever a Viennese gentleman, Doderer owned an elegant collection of whips fashioned from silk and satin so that no one would be injured in these flagellant activities.)  The degree to which Doderer was a practicing boot fetishist is unclear to me.  

Illek’s fantasy about becoming a discarded boot-heel qua horse-shoe is mirrored by a peculiar self-reflexive passage in the middle of the book.  Doderer is brooding about Donald’s failure as a character in the novel.  The author repeats, as he has earlier told us, that he wants to get rid of the big lummox.  A hundred pages earlier Doderer kicked out of his book a repulsive concierge, Frau Wewerka, and the author says that he really should do the same thing to Donald.  Donald is a disappointment to his creators, both Doderer, who invented him, and the indefatigable Robert Clayton, his biological father in the novel.  Donald is inept and impotent. Doderer despises him for his inability to consummate sexually his stalled relationship with the attractive Monica Bachler.  By contrast, Robert Clayton is one of the sons of that “honored and beloved by all” island whose inhabitants have not only conquered the Matterhorn but India and most of Africa as well – in other words, the aggressive industry of the British empire is epitomized by Robert Clayton but has fallen into decadence in his feckless son.  Robert, half unconsciously, contrives to get Donald out of the way by sending him to inspect the firm’s operations in England so that he can seduce Monica, his son’s girlfriend.  Here is how Doderer describes the scene:

Robert told Donald one evening, after dinner, in the hall (to go to the factory in England).  Augustus was also present.  Kindly imagine ourselves seated, microscopically small, with snail’s eyes on the end of long sticks, on the chimney piece (there has been no fire in the hearth for some time.)  We observe nothing at all, so far as Donald is concerned.

Doderer describes himself as tiny creature with eyes mounted on tall stems, crouching in the cold soot of the hearth as he observes the scene.  This is certainly a bizarre description of the author as narrator as strange as Illek’s fantasy that he is a lost boot-heel prostrate in the street’s dust.  In fact, I don’t know any other writer who would describe his involvement with his characters in such an inhuman and degrading way.  Here is the German:

Wir sitzen (ganz klein gedacht) mit Stiel-Augen auf dem Kamin, in welchem nun schon lang kein Feuer mehr brannte.

As is customary, the actual German is less ostentatious than Eithne and Kaiser’s translation into pseudo-Victorian prose.  (This is how Thomas Mann is also customarily translated).  The German says:

We sit (think: very small) with stilt-eyes in the hearth in which, for a long time, no fire has burned.

The German doesn’t have a microscope.  Doderer represents himself as, notionally, “very small” but he’s not microscopic.  He has eyes mounted on stalks, like a snail or crustacean.  (The German focuses on the periscope shape of the eyes and not on the species of the creature.  Of course, the hearth, symbolizing erotic love, at Robert’s mansion has long been extinguished, but the flames are about to be re-ignited.  

What other author would picture himself as a tiny creature with eyes on stilts peering out of the ash of a fireplace?  Doderer shows himself to be, in effect, wholly alien and inhuman.

For hundreds of pages, Doderer broods about how he can move Donald to action.  Of course, his brooding takes the form of the author’s characteristic sexual obsessions.  Doderer contemplates giving the “boot” to Donald.  He should kick him in the ass with his boots.  

This leads me to this surmise: Donald didn’t accidentally fall from the gangway into the waterfall at Slunj.  He was pushed, or more accurately, hurled over the foaming precipice by a boot applied squarely to his behind.  

       

    

       

On the Coronavirus (VI) and Race Relations (with some comments on the DNC)

 

1. 

Covid cases in the United States: 3,165,733; new cases daily: 67,500.

Minnesota’s infection is increasing, but not dramatically in most regions.

In Mower County, where I live, there are about 1000 cases confirmed, a high number due to the meat packing plants.  But the count of new cases is declining sharply and there have been only nine deaths.

  

All borders are porous.  The problem is that travel can carry the virus and so the situation remains fluid.  

2.

Because only a few of the driver’s license exam stations are open, Angelica, my daughter, will have to take the her behind-the-wheel test in Mankato.  That city is noteworthy for a high concentration of traffic circles particularly where Minnesota 14 enters the urban area at its northwest corner.  The DMV (Department of Motor Vehicle registration) is located in that quadrant of the City and, therefore, at the end of several avenues that have curlicue roundabouts in them.  These roundabouts give the impression of being a traffic free-for-all and so they are a little intimidating to navigate.  Angelica is concerned that she will fail the test because of her unfamiliarity with these traffic circles and, so, we drive to Mankato to practice navigating these highway features unique to that place.

The weather has been sweltering with high temperatures aggravated by humidity.  Haze hangs over the silent crops, miles and miles of them stretching in all directions along the road to Mankato.  As we enter town, a dark green cloud towers over the northeastern horizon.  The cloud has its rainy snout dug into the ground and there are little outliers, spirals of wind-sculpted cloud the color of grey stucco.  It seems that a bad storm is approaching.  

In Mankato, by order of the Mayor, you can’t enter any business without wearing a mask.  This notice is pasted to the front of all the stores in town.  (Although cases are rising here, probably due to the many students at Mankato State University, the statistics for Blue Earth County are much better than for the county where I live.   Mankato’s Blue Earth County has, at least, three times the number of people but reporting confirmed cases at about 550 (and five deaths); by contrast, Mower County with its lower population has about the double the number of cases and almost double the deaths.)  As the storm blackens the sky, we finish practice on the roundabouts and stop at Barnes and Noble, the bookstore at the hilltop mall.  While inside the store, storm warnings sound and we are told to go into a designated tornado shelter, a service corridor next to a Skechers store.  The corridor is about 100 feet long and, then, dog-legs around a corner to a couple of double doors opening out onto the parking lots on the back side of the mall.  The corridor is as wide as a lane on the highway, bare concrete underfoot and some kind of plasticized surface on the bare-walls, all things considered not a bad place.  With Angelica, I make my way to the double doors on the parking lot and watch the sky.  It is now complicated with pagoda-shaped towers of pale grey cloud hovering in front of midnight-black wall clouds, big dark seams hanging overhead.  Everything is very still.  

We are all wearing our pale blue or dark red or black masks.  The storm sprays torrents of water down on the parking lot, flooding it, and there is an iron spout about forty-feet away that drains water off the roof – a lateral pillar of water thick as a man’s waist surges out of the spout.  The trees shudder in place along the edges of the parking lot and the smaller evergreen seem to bend in the middle as if paying obeisance to the storm.  Falling water shortens horizons: I can’t see to the edge of the parking lot.  The water pouring down outside spills into the corridor under the door, a sheet of rainwater that darkens the concrete.  

Beyond the dog-leg in the corridor, groups of people, mostly women are sitting together on the concrete, backs leaning against the wall.  It is mostly silent.  Sometimes, someone whispers through their mask.  This tornado shelter is, indeed, protected.  From within the corridor, we can’t hear any sound that the storm makes outside.  A few minutes earlier, when I stepped out of the double doors, I felt the heavy humid air prickling on my arms and face and heard a continuous cannonade of thunder on the horizon.  

The storm alert lasts for about a half-hour.  Then, the danger seems to have passed and, indeed, in the sky-lane through which the black clouds have just rumbled, the air is clear and cool and blue to the zenith behind the storm.

We go to HyVee to buy some groceries.  Returning to Austin, the storm precedes us, a vast black wave that is toppling ruinously over the flat countryside.  Sometimes, wild antlers of lightning sear through the clouds.  The warning is always about 25 miles ahead of us, to the south and east.  In Austin, branches litter the roads but there seems to be no real serious damage.

(A few weeks later, Angelica takes the road-test in Mankato and fails – she doesn’t navigate the traffic circles correctly.)   

3.

The virus is out of control and there is a note of desperation in the television coverage of the crisis. A Harvard doctor has suggested a “human challenge” to the virus – this is a test calling for 100 volunteers to be infected and, then, treated with various antibodies and potential vaccine reagents.   

Two obvious obstacles will arise in connection with this proposal.

First, the virus exhibits malign cunning.  My suspicion is that the pathogen will simply refuse to infect the courageous volunteers so as not expose its secrets to research.  As Heraclitus reminds us: Nature likes to hide.

Second, the call for volunteers to be intentionally infected is ethically questionable.  These people will be volunteering for service in which they are merely instrumental means to an end.  Human beings should not be used in this way.  And the fact that someone volunteers to face this danger is immaterial – every person must be regarded as a end in him- or herself and not a means to an end.  

Here is a thought experiment suggested by Dostoevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor.  Let’s say that we could eliminate the Covid-19 virus by torturing to death a single child.  Would we be morally justified in doing this?

The on-screen talent on TV is uncomfortable with the proposition of intentionally infection 100 volunteers with the virus.  But, being ignorant and uneducated, the TV personalities can’t convert their vague sense of uneasiness into a rational argument.  I suppose that none of them know anything about Kant’s categorical imperative and they, probably, aren’t conversant with Dostoevsky either.

Analogies won’t suffice.  The interviewer mentions soldiers and people who voluntarily scale mountains like Everest, endeavors in which injury and death may be expected.  The mountain-climbing analogy is inapposite – people climb mountains for their own benefit and not for the benefit of others.  It would be morally wrong to make someone climb a mountain for the profit of someone else.  The analogy of the soldier risking his life in combat is more challenging and deserve more close attention.  War is a form of human conduct that is subject to complex analysis – most mainstream religions endorse some notion of the “just war”.  We might argue that our response to the Covid virus is a form of “just war” and, therefore, merits using human beings as an end to the means of defeating this enemy.  But it’s hard to claim that the notion of “just war” applies to responses to an Act of God, as it were, or a force of nature.  And, furthermore, the older that I get, the less I believe that any war is just.  Over my 65 years, I have seen that all wars result in adverse and tragic consequences that last for several generations and inflict suffering on others far beyond the losses on the battlefield.  Once, I subscribed to the notion of the “just war”, but, now, I’m skeptical.  War just leads to more war in an endless cycle of revenge.  The only war that doesn’t induce seemingly interminable cycles of retaliation is one that results in the annihilation of the defeated combatant – and this can’t be accomplished without horrific slaughter.  So I don’t think the idea that defeating the covid-19 virus is the moral equivalent of war will justify the use of people as mere means to an end.  

Most fundamentally the problem with using human volunteers as test subjects against the virus is the “slippery slope”.  Once you embark upon the path of instrumentalizing humans as tools to an end, where does the carnage stop?  If it’s authorized to use ten human volunteers to fight the virus, then, why not a 100,000 or even a million?  And if a million victims of human testing makes us uncomfortably, than why should one victim be okay?

In any event, there are financial stakes here and human affairs are never as simple as some would want.  First, how do we know that the volunteers for the study aren’t suffering forms of subtle or not-so-subtle coercion.  How do we know that they are really. in the truest sense, “volunteers”?  And what about the pharmaceutical companies who will make a fortune on any drug that can successfully haul us out of this mire?  (A course of treatment of remdesivir, a drug proprietary to Gilead and said to be effective in treating cases of Covid, costs $3,120 for a week-long dose – there is, as they say, “gold in them thar hills.”) Certainly, it would be profoundly immoral, not to say criminal, to profit from volunteers exposing themselves to the virus so that big Pharma can make even more indecent profits.  If the scheme of using human test subjects were to be authorized (which I oppose), anyone earning so much as a dollar as a consequence should convicted of some sort of unlawful profiteering and sentenced to life in prison.

4.

The heat hangs over everything like a curse.

In my backyard, innumerable mosquitos helicopter up from the dew-laden grass.   The birds are singing.  The hovering mosquitos are translucent to the bright sunlight.  

5.

The air is charged with water.  The sky is a vast battery poised to discharge its lightning.  In the day, the clouds are melted to towering columns of haze, milk-colored mist without proper edges or boundaries.  At evening, the clouds re-establish their outlines and heap up over the sweltering land.  

At 9:00 pm, it’s still 85 degrees with humidity that makes the air feel as if it were 105.  Sullen energy is banked in the atmosphere, coiled like a snake and ready to strike.  There’s too much of everything – green toppling from the trees and shrubs heavy with flowers and mosquitoes and flies corkscrewing through the air all latent with covid-virus. The extremity of the heat prickles on your skin. You feel invaded by insects and slimy with sweat.  The virus is everywhere, a vast, lethal weight suffocating the land.

6.

You sit inside in a gush of air conditioning.  There’s a name for it: “doom-scrolling”.  This means scrolling down on your cell-phone to find the latest news reports as to violence in the cities, police brutality, Trump’s most recent lies, the advance of the virus and the most recent casualty count.  One aspect of doom-scrolling is using your computer to find cell-phone images of encounters between apparently racist White women and people that were once called “minorities.” 

It’s hard to avoid the proposition that some people of color are out hunting for “Karens”.  A “Karen” is a privileged White lady, sometimes unctuously polite, at other times raging, who has been moved to engage with some non-White person in an egregious and offensive way.  The point of the meme is that liberal White women, all of whom would claim purity with regard to racial issues, can be easily triggered into engaging in vituperative racist harangues when their privileges are threatened.  Therefore, the social media are lit up with pictures of White women staring down the cell-phones of people of color and making all sorts of dire threats.  The most common version of this meme is a claim made by a middle-aged White woman that some person of color doesn’t belong where he or she is standing, usually about a dozen feet from the cell-phone trained on her by the minority victim.  “Dirt”, it is said, is merely matter in the wrong place.  The people of color recording these encounters are, it seems, being treated as “dirt”, as “schmutz”, by spoiled, entitled White women.

But...it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that many of these much-derided “Karens” have been taunted into their bad behavior.  There’s an open season on this kind of woman and, at least, some of the affronted victims seem to have triggered the racist response by some sort of aggressive behavior that is not recorded in that it precedes the offensive tirade.  It’s amusing to watch these encounters but they are train-wrecks, car crashes that we rubber-neck with a sort of self-righteous disdain, a spectacle that is damaging because prurient and because we don’t think it applies to us.  I don’t have any illusions about this – all people are racist to some extent; everyone has some class of people, organized according to our specific prejudices, that we find (to use Hillary Clinton’s word) “deplorable.”  And, so, it is pretty apparent to me that just about anyone, including the righteous folks wielding their cell-phones to expose this sort of behavior, is only a hair-trigger away from acting badly.  This is particularly true in this season in which mean and cruel behavior from all sides of the political spectrum is openly celebrated.

7.

On TV, there’s a commercial touting masks.  You can buy non-medical grade masks light blue-turquoise in color for one dollar per mask.  These are the sort of masks that I have in my car and that are used at my office when clients come to see us.  The mask can be fitted over your nose – there’s a wire in the cloth that molded to fit the shape of your face.  

There is something abject and depressing about the ad.  Masks are uncanny and sinister and it’s absurd to discount people’s aversion to them.  The media all pontificates that wearing masks in public is something that is easily accomplished.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  A year ago, it might have been illegal in many states to wear a mask in public – masked men were guilty of robberies and terrorism.  And masks have specifically tribal meanings that might be atavistic but are not so easily outgrown or ignored.  One dons a mask for all sorts of reasons: to celebrate the divine, to invite gods to appear, to conceal disfigurement or deformity, to engage in sexual license, to terrorize and set fire to White Supremicist crosses and to commit other crimes as well – the least of these reasons is, probably, for health.  (And, we must recall, that experts argued that wearing a mask was not even advisable – the mask just leads you to touch your face more often – as recently as two months ago.)

In the ad, an unmasked man holds his box of masks that is newly arrived in the mail.  He beams with radiant joy.  That’s why he has to be unmasked: to show us the happiness on his face.  A masked woman confidently enters a grocery store.  Some masked children are playing outside.  

A silver-haired grandmother interacts with her little granddaughter, both of them wearing masks. Then, we see a happy and safe family sitting on their sofa: mother and father are masked as are the two tots. One expects the camera to tilt to the side and show the family dog wearing a mask.  Why are these people wearing masks in their own home?  Has it come to this?

When you wear a mask, you assume a different identity.  The Zuni and the Haida, among many other Native American tribes, wear masks to impersonate their deities.  Is this happy family on their couch watching TV from behind their masks impersonating some kind of god?  Is it the god of the Covid-19 virus.  

The resistance to wearing masks in public places is folly.  But this resistance is not without meaning.  In other words, it’s based in something and not nothing as the media would have you believe.

8.

As I drove to the grocery store, I noticed a small black boy lying on his side on the asphalt by a storm sewer.  The boy was observing intently something small on the tar a foot from his face.  Recently, the ants on sidewalks have been hauling around insect carcasses like miniature front-end loaders and, so, I presumed that he was enthralled by a spectacle of this kind.  The 17-year cicadas have also just emerged, only to die immediately, and their thumb-size jade-colored carapaces are all around.

Like all children, the boy is a nascent scientist, making careful and precise observations of the world around him.  I thought that he would, perhaps, do well, particularly if the forces of oppression in the world were all swept away.  For an instant, I recalled that I am part of those forces that obstruct the hopes of little boys like this one.  And, so, I am compelled to think, if only for a moment, that the world might be a better place if I were simply swept away, drowned in the tsunami of history.

9.

The sick have no history, no politics, no art or literature.  In this pandemic, the sick are not really visible.  Confidentiality requires that their features be scrubbed out of images showing chaotic ICUs in big city hospitals.  Doctors and nurses in protective suits with visors and face masks hover over complicated beds with rails and flanked by banks of monitors and machinery.  Somewhere in the tangle of wires and tubes, there is a someone dying of the virus, a wraith with his or her face blurred into a pink smear that contrasts with the crisp protective gear worn by the health care providers.  The virus is about sickness and death and these aspects of the infection are concealed from us.  

Ahistorical, apolitical, resisting aesthetics, the unseen sick and dying are the still, vacant center of a hurricane of rhetoric and invective whirling around them.  

10.

People imagine that when they retire, they will luxuriate in bed, sleeping late in defiance of all alarm clocks and the sun.  Inactivity induced by the virus is a sort of sick simulacrum for retirement and I must report that sleeping late after a lifetime of rising early to go to work is a mirage.  Something tells you that it’s time to arise and, when you resist that imperative, obsessive and comminuted thoughts follow, bizarre hypnagogic states in which you are partially lucid and partially dreaming, nightmares that have paralysis as their subject and that turn sleep into horror.

In a national park, towering monoliths rise like shark’s teeth into the sky. ("Sky" or "vault of heaven" in Latin:  coelum.)  These sheer-sided stone domes are sheathed in scaffolds made from steel girders and plexi-glass panels, transparent walkways and stairways enclosed in cubes of clear plastic that lean against the rock like vast siege-towers.  The objective is to descend from the windswept heights through the hundred levels of the steel and plexi-glass tunnels to the parking lot where you have left your car.  Unfortunately, the way downward is maddeningly complex and the intricacies of the steel and plastic tower sometimes require you to actually climb so as to reach a platform from which descent is possible.  Many passageways in the tower are blocked by chains or metal fences, some of them permanent, others apparently temporary.  It takes much effort to reach the bottom and, then, there is no straightforward exit – rather, the stairs descend underground into dimly lit galleries and shafts.  It’s better to be lost in the bright sunlight and the heat radiating from the vast sheer rock walls than to venture into that underground labyrinth.  And, so, I go upward, following ascending stairs along a precipitous route that leads to a small key-shaped opening onto a ledge encrusted with glittering mica that strikes down the face of the monolith.  By this time, I am leading a not inconsiderable number of people, all of them desiring to climb down off the huge stone and reach their cars below.  The ledge is very steep, angling down the cliff, and, although I don’t fear for myself, I am concerned that some of the more feeble following me will slip and fall to their deaths from this dizzying height.  Nonetheless, I proceed down the sloping ledge, rounding an edge of the monolith where I see that, after this dangerous traverse, the path leads into another tower of steel girders and plexiglass bolted to the side of the precipice, descending into subterranean mazes or rising to the naked, wind-scoured top of the monolith.  (Perhaps, I have rounded the monolith, girdled it on the ledge, and simply come upon the same stairwell structure in which I was earlier entrapped.)  With a cold and growing sense of terror, I realize that there is simply no way out of the stairwell except at its apex atop the inhospitable granite tower.  Furthermore, I recognize that the complex of the stone dome and tower is the coronavirus, a plague from which a multitude of paths seem to lead away but always return to the same place.  

Then, I am at the Sales Lodge, a place where the Company holds promotional events.  The walls of the Sales Lodge are paneled in grained, grey-brown wood veneer.  A friend of mine who recently died is discovered leaning against the wood paneling with his eyes closed and an enigmatic smile on his lips.  All around there is gaiety.  I lean toward my friend and he whispers a secret to me that it would not be seemly to disclose.   He addresses me by my last name.  I am sufficiently lucid to recognize that I am dreaming and the part of me that is awake says: “Go to him again and learn his wisdom.”  There is song and dance and people are smoking cigars and, at first, I can’t find the dead man in the crowd.  But corpses don’t move and he is still in the place where I left him, nonchalantly leaning against the wood paneled wall.  I approach but can’t think of anything to ask him.  

My friend was a chemist and the names of strange compounds now occur to me.  The visual imagery has faded into nothing and I am left with spelling problems, puzzles as to words and their meanings, obsessing over long, complicated names.  The swarm of names, each occurring to me, posing etymological and orthographic problems, then, departing, words like flags or banners, one after another and, all of them, it seems, somehow synonymous with hydroxychloroquine.  

11.

On the news, someone boasts about efforts to unseat statues of Confederate generals in Portland.  Why would there be statues of Confederate generals in Oregon.  It’s a case of mistaken identity, similar to the crowd of activists who ripped down the Norwegian flag at one of that nation’s consulates and burned the thing – the banner bears some slight resemblance to the Confederate battle flag.

12.

Ninety-six days before the election, there has been no campaign to speak of.  Trump’s Oklahoma rally was poorly attended and resulted in a wave of infections, including one that killed Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfathers Pizza and a candidate for presidency in 2016.  The noisome infomercials into which political nominating conventions have devolved seem to be canceled or much curtailed.  Biden releases commercials from a bunker somewhere.  Presumably, the campaigns will develop into barrages of negative ads ascribing all species of criminality to adversaries, a media cannonade that will deafen but persuade no one.  Everyone’s mind is already made-up.  It seems unlikely that there will even be any kind of debate – how to schedule such a thing when all gatherings are presumed deadly.  In any event, a debate between Trump and Biden would be nothing more than a braying contest between two asses.  

In Minnesota, the “great State get-together” (that is, the State Fair) is a religious exercise.  Minnesota prides itself as having the finest State Fair in the country and its enormous fair grounds in Falcon Heights are a fairyland of overhead monorails, minarets, vast concrete livestock barns coupled to small amphitheaters all under the frown of a vast brick stadium over which a Space Needle broods.  Some of the concessions are built in concrete block and there are galleries made from stone in which to exhibit crafts and arts.  The fair is dependent upon County fairs – each county sends its champion pig, goat, and angora rabbit, the handicraft of its champion knitters and weavers and pickle-makers, the best products of its champion Indian corn mosaic-makers and butter and cheese carvers and its politicians and law enforcement officers and its implement dealers and the manufacturers of mobile homes and ingenious plows and its honey-harvesters and woodworkers who contrive marvelous ships in bottles or miniature Taj Mahals or competing model domes of the State Capitol, the full-sized version visible from the Space Needle and the monorail cars overhead, also visible at the apex of the roller coaster or from the Ferris wheels in the Midway.  With the county fairs all canceled, the State Fair has no network of tributaries to channel to it these local champions and best-of-show artisans, and, therefore, this year, there will be no Blue Ribbon pickles or jam, no Blue Ribbon sheep or steers, no Blue Ribbon corn-mosaics of Donald Trump or Governor Waltz, nothing of this sort and the vast fair grounds, acres upon acres of towers and exhibition halls will be deserted, barren until the snow falls and buries the whole place in cold and ice.

In Mower County, the fair grounds are ten blocks from my house and, when the festivities are underway, I can hear from my bedroom window (if it’s not too hot and the airconditioner isn’t running), the sound of music, engines revving in front of the grandstand, the tinkling calliope notes of the carnival, even voices hooting and hollering as the drunk kids come from the beer garden and stagger back over the sidewalks to their cars parked in the residential neighborhood.  Next to the oval of the track where the stock car races take place, there is a huge cow, fifteen feet tall, at twilight an effigy that looks as if it were drawn from the pages of the Bible or some heathen epic – this is Buffy the Cow, a fiber-glass idol that stood once atop a local dairy that has now been bulldozed.  There is a marquee in front of Buffy written with these words: Mower County Fair is CANCELLED due Covid.  Stay Safe.  See you next year at the FAIR!    

13.

The virus doesn’t offer anything new.  It is no longer variable but rather a constant.  The reality of the contagion, which remains unreal in the sense that it is invisible, has seeped down into the core of things – it has become a hypostasis, a metaphysical reality that underlies everything and that can’t be displaced.  It lurks.  Grocery stores, church services, all places of commerce are surreal with people moving about in masks.  What would have once been forbidden is now mandated.

Similarly, the protests about racism and police brutality are also now constant.  The assumption, even among those inclined to be liberal like myself, is that a protest will rage for a day or two, make all its points and, then, politely withdraw into obscurity.  But that’s not how these protests operate: in some places like Portland, they are more or less perpetual and a kind of license exists there to throw rocks and set fires.  In other places, the protests are like a fire that has been only scarcely eradicated – embers exist and the protests flare up and, with them, inevitably, some level of rioting or violence.  Even those who admired or supported the protests from a discrete distance, assumed that once the point was made, the protests would end – but this is different, the point can’t be made because it would require dismantling of police authority and this is an utopian project that will never succeed and, so, the protests just continue and continue like the plague to which they metaphorically refer: covid lurks everywhere, hidden but always potentially emergent – racism lurks everywhere, usually hidden but always potentially emergent.  The world “emergent” is significant – there is an exhausting sense of a permanent state of emergency.  

14.

Heat and humidity: pillars of cloud like the smoke from immense explosions on the horizon.  The roads are all ripped up in Austin, plowed down to raw clay in which fragments of the trees chopped apart on the boulevards are embedded.  If you kick at the wood, you can displace it, creating ghost indentations in the dirt.  Going abroad in this scalding wet heat is like waking in clouds of hot urine.

15.

Here is the context for the latest outrage: government subsidies for those unemployed due to the Covid virus have run their course.  In most States, unemployment benefits are also exhausted.  This means that many people are without income and have no way to pay bills, most particularly rent. Accordingly, the media, always inclined to focus on the most gloomy scenario, predicts a wave of evictions.  Evictions and a collapsing consumer economy also are factors that serve the media agenda supporting Joe Biden for president as against Donald Trump.  Thus, the media emphasizes factors prophetic of economic catastrophe and earnestly urges that someone take action to restore income to the unemployed (they were being paid at a flat rate of $600 a week) and establish a moratorium on evictions, student loan debt repayment and the like.  Predictably, the two parties both over-reach in their negotiations.  Republicans point out that the $600 dollars a week is greater than the sum that many people can earn by the sweat of their brows, that is, by full employment.  If lost wage replacement continues at $600 a week, no incentive exists for these people to return to work.  So the Republicans demand that the wage replacement benefits be radically cut – perhaps to $200 weekly.  The Democrats, for their part, want to continue the $600 a week package and, further, demand that a consumer stimulus check be written on the Federal government paying everyone $1200 as a one time stipend.  The Republican package costs one trillion dollars; the Democratic package has a 3 trillion dollar price tag.  There is an obvious compromise figure, but the partisan negotiators for the two sides can’t reach it.  Both parties dig in, cite principle, and refuse to compromise.  

Trump’s advisors grasp the opportunity posed by this impasse.  They urge Trump to simply cut the Gordian knot by executive order, thereby bypassing the stalemate in Congress.  Of course, this action probably violates separation of powers – it’s an unlawful usurpation of legislative authority.  But Trump has done this sort of thing before – using executive order, for instance, to divert money for his border wall.  He’s too ignorant to even grasp that there are limitations on his power.  But his advisors urge him to issue executive orders restoring the $600 stipend, precluding evictions, and granting other relief.  These measures are undoubtedly illegal but who is going to sue to enjoin them? if Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic-controlled house act to prohibit these orders, then, they will bear the responsibility of taking bread from the mouths of the starving poor.  The Republicans would have no incentive to take any action either.  And so Trump could save the day with a stroke of his pen and be praised as the hero who opened the Federal treasury to the worthy poor.  

Trump schedules a press conference for early evening, after his golf match at the Bedminster (New Jersey) course that he owns.  The prime-time media on CNN and MSNBC are palpably alarmed.  Biden is leading in the polls by a tidy sum of 7 to 10 percentage points in most places.  But Biden is a terrible candidate, dimwitted, loquacious but prone to gaffes, and, generally, feckless.  He’s been waiting out the Covid virus in his basement in Delaware, not even campaigning, and simply winning (up to this point) because he isn’t a dangerous monster like Trump.  But Trump’s executive orders, providing precisely the relief that the mainstream media demands from Congress represent a serious threat to Biden’s almost non-existent campaign.  

In advance of the press conference, Erin Burnett, the perpetually worried anti-Trump anchor at CNN, pitches in for Biden declaring, by way of a non sequitur, that the faithful assembled at Bedminster aren’t wearing masks.  She demands that the camera turn away from the podium where Trump has not yet appeared to show the group of golfers gathered together in the ballroom of the Club House.  But when the camera is pivoted to show those golfers, they are all wearing masks.  “Someone must have handed them masks just now,” Erin Burnett says.  “Just two minutes ago none of them were wearing masks.”  But now every one of them is wearing a pale blue surgical mask.  Gloria Borger, a rabid anti-Trump news reporter, helpfully says in a bitchy tone: “Well, they may be wearing masks but they’re not social distancing.”  

Erin Burnett, then, convenes a panel.  She has Gloria Borger and Owen Goulsbee, an Obama economic advisor on screen, together with some minor Trump campaign official.  Borger and Goulsbee have been adamantly demanding that Congress act to restore the $600 stipend, pay out stimulus checks, and enact a rent moratorium (or, at least, an eviction ban).  Now, they seem stymied.  Goulsbee has a long face and his sour puss looks like he’s about to start crying.  Borger is blinking so fast that you can barely see her eyes behind those shutters of flapping eyelids.  Erin Burnett is also blinking and overtly enraged.  They understand the gravity of the moment – Trump is about to sign an Executive Order literally paying voters from the Federal fisc while at the same time daring Nancy Pelosi to sue to take the money away from their constituents.  The Trump man smiles like a Cheshire cat and gloats: “It’s a bold move, but the President knows that people are hurting and he must take action.”  Both Erin Burnett and Gloria Borger respond with childish pique, essentially repeating the canard that Trump somehow caused the Covid virus and, therefore, is responsible for the misery that he is now about to remedy.  Erin Burnett cites the death figures for the day and the total of dead Americans due to the virus.  Goulsbee’s lips move but he doesn’t seem to be saying anything.  The Trump supporter grins some more and talks about Trump’s heroic boldness.  Of course, the tired Uncle Joe Biden is MIA.

Trump starts his press conference, blows most of his lines, and somehow manages to attenuate what should be a clear victory with a digressive and rambling speech.  He doesn’t directly say that he is going to pay the voters significant amounts of money, although this is implied.  Then, he taunts the media by calling Covid the “Chinese virus.”  A day before there was a enormous explosion in Beirut that has killed about 200 people and maimed 5000.  The pictures of the blast and its aftermath are astounding and apocalyptic.  Of course, this showy spectacle has enthralled Trump who always prefers images over the dull logos and he slips off point announcing a massive aid package to Lebanon.  CNN couldn’t care less about Lebanon and isn’t willing to devote even two minutes to that story if this impairs screen-time that could be used to denounce Trump.  So CNN cuts away from the press conference at the golf course.  Now, the Trump supporter has mysteriously vanished and the panel consists of just Trump-haters, Goulsbee and Gloria Borger.  They sound like third-graders: he can’t do this, he simply can’t do this – they repeat although what he is doing is exactly what they previously demanded on behalf of the suffering citizens of the United States.

If the situation weren’t so grim, and if Trump’s violation of the separation of powers wasn’t so disturbing and dangerous, the media response would be hilarious.  

16.

Racial activists assert that now “the narratives are changing.”  “Changing narratives,” in this context, is supposed to be a good thing. Presumably, the stories of heroic Black people will now be granted priority in the historical narratives promoted by educators and media. As far as I can see, the change in narratives is the replacement of one pack of lies with another.  And, the assertion that our “narratives are changing,” of course, is a narrative itself.

17. 

Along the alley behind my house, there is a white picket fence and a trellis that is built as a bower. The trellis supports green vines adorned with small white trumpet-shaped flowers and wraps around a bench in that arbor.  It’s a pretty place, secret it seems, and, often, when I walk my dog past that bower in warm weather, I can hear voices speaking softly from within that arch of green leaf and white flower.  An old married couple live in the house with their middle-aged mentally retarded daughter.

A week ago, a great horizontal limb on the oak tree in front of the house tore free and fell on the sidewalk.  This was odd, I thought, because there had been no violent thunderstorm, no pelting rain nor wind.  The broad bough, over-freighted with branch and twig and leaf, simply became too heavy to sustain itself and so split away from the broad trunk, leaving a great white rift in the tree, a pale wound that exposed the cream-white wood under the bark, unseamed along the side of the tree.  The big bough had fallen onto the sidewalk and formed a soft, green hedge of leaves and branches the length of a car and broader than the paved way.  As I walked my dog, I skirted the fallen branch, departing from the sidewalk and walking over the lawn near the home’s front door.  The old lady stepped out on her front stoop.  She stared at the huge limb of the tree now partly gouged into her lawn.

“It must have just happened,” the lady said to me.  “It was okay an hour ago.”

“These kinds of happen,” I said.

She said: “I will have to call the lawn service.”

With my dog on her leash, we rounded the big branch and, then, turned up the sidewalk past the little garage built against the old lady’s house and the alley that led past the flowering bower.  

The fallen branch was hauled away before the end of the day, a few ruts left in the grass and a fan-shaped spray of white sawdust where the chain-saws had dismembered the big bough.  I was surprised at how rapidly the tree limb was cleared from where it had fallen.

Two days ago, I walked down the alley, passing the picket fence and the hidden bench in the arbor.  Beyond the white fence and a bank of hydrangeas, I saw some people unfamiliar to me standing in the backyard.  When I turned the corner to walk along the side of the property, I met a long black station-wagon marked with the words Rochester Cremation Service.  A well-dressed woman, slim as a post, was directing the station-wagon as it backed into the little garage.  The woman had a silvery impervious-looking face.  Some other unfamiliar cars were drawn up along curbside.

Across 4th Street, a young woman wearing what seemed to be pajamas was standing on the street corner, smoking a cigarette and watching the hearse back toward the garage.  I suppose that she wanted to see the body taken from the house.  I walked a block and looked back myself, also, for some reason, interested to see the body removed from the place and put into the back of the long black car.  The morning was cool and the dog trotted behind me and I was ashamed of myself for wanting to see some sign of the dead body and, so, I hastened to the next corner and turned it, thus avoiding the temptation of looking over my shoulder.  

I walked the dog ten blocks and, then, returned to the sidewalk where the tree limb had fallen.  The white gash in the bark was as tall as a man, a silhouette ripped into the side of the tree.  

The next day, I took my dog for a walk around 4:00 pm.  Some people that I didn’t know were carrying totes from the house where the tree had broken to their cars parked along the boulevard.  I suppose these were keepsakes associated with the person who died.  Two houses away, a couple of skinhead boys were shooting hoops.  My dog barked at a caramel-colored cat hiding under a lilac bush.

18.

You see them everywhere on front yards, now competing with election signs that have also become ubiquitous.  These are signs with white letters printed on blue and green backgrounds: May you be calm and May you be happy.  These are quarantine signs – admonitions from people sheltering at home to others.  The quarantine signs seem to me vaguely offensive, hectoring and intrusive.  It’s a little like a distant acquaintance saying that he will pray for you.   

19.

The Democratic National Convention is unwatchable.  Various luminaries appear in their basements speaking to the camera.  During the last forty years, political conventions have been infomercials – indeed, they were canned and packaged infomercials even before the name of this sort of production existed.  But they weren’t airless and, since the speeches were shot in real time, they could fail or produce ghastly effects.  And journalists could always roam the crowd and interview various kinds of political grotesques, often tricked-out in red, white, and blue paraphernalia.  Orations were intercut with reaction shots and the whole apparatus of party politics might occasionally yield an inadvertent moment of truth.  

There’s no such possibility with the DNC this year.  Everything is contrived and there’s no hint of spontaneity.  In some sequences, an array of screens faces Joe Biden sitting alone on a stool at a table – he looks like a criminal mastermind interviewing his henchmen in a third-rate James Bond movie.  

During a protest over the killing of George Floyd, demonstrators came close to the White House and, even, set a building on fire a few blocks away.  As everyone knows President Trump was briefly evacuated to the Bunker under the White House residence.  (Trump resented the implication that he had fled into a bunker, a problematic notion that might lead some to question his courage – being historically illiterate, he doesn’t grasp other connotations relating to the great leader holed-up like a rat in a besieged bunker.)  The next day, as everyone also knows, Trump staged an assault on protesters in a nearby park so that he could march to the front of a vandalized church and wave a Bible in the air.  (He didn’t exactly hold the Bible upside down but it was equally obvious that he had no idea how to hold a book in his hands – even though he has ostensibly written several – and he tweaked the volume between his fingers as if it were a particularly noxious piece of garbage.)  Trump’s actions in Lafayette Park were self-evidently a reaction to the President’s perception that the evacuation to the bunker shortly before was a sign of weakness.  

In any event, the speeches delivered during the DNC were all filmed in bunkers or the civilian equivalent, that is, remodeled laundry rooms in the speaker’s basement.  This gave the proceedings a particularly airless, stagnant, and claustrophobic dimension.  Adding stale rhetoric to grim basement or closet environs created a peculiar sense of paralysis; the fury of the speakers was made impotent by the fact that they were all crouching underground, skulking in their cellars.  This was particularly the case with Michelle Obama’s speech – she seemed to be speaking in a large subterranean basement rec room, walls whitewashed and what looked like steel utility shelves in the background on which several forlorn art projects were visible.  It’s hard to mount a crusade from a windowless crypt. 

20.

Predictably enough, the speakers said that Donald Trump was not merely an aider and abettor of the Covid virus, but the virus itself.  Andrew Cuomo said that Trump was the virus of divisiveness that has destroyed American politics, a spectacularly divisive metaphor itself, but, then, what the hell!   

The next morning, the coverage on CNN was predictably fawning: Alison Camerata asked one political hack this question: “Tell us why Michele Obama’s speech was so effective?”

21.

Trump has the endorsement of the New York City police union. He flies to Minnesota during the third week of August, dropping out of the sky at the Minneapolis airport to stand next to Air Force One and denounce the Democratic officials in the State for allowing Minneapolis to burn during the George Floyd riots.  The blue steel and glass skyline of Minneapolis rises over the concrete prairies of the airport and the humble suburbs as an implicit rebuke to his hyperbole.  Then, Trump jets to Mankato.  I had no idea that there was an airport near that City.  He’s late.  A crowd of people stand in the sun looking across the grass to a still and empty runway.  Presumably, he will give the same speech that he presented in Minneapolis.  The people in the crowd look like retired cops, high school wrestling coaches, insurance salesman, and affable cement and dry-walling contractors.  There are probably some farmers mixed in among these people, although Trump’s agricultural policies have been, more or less, disastrous to that sector of the economy.  No one is “social distancing” and no one wears masks.  

22.

August 18, 2020: 170,000 deaths from Covid.  Schools that opened a week before are shutting down again with clusters of infections.  The Democrats and Republicans couldn’t reach a compromise on fiscal relief to people who remain unemployed and are now in default on their rent.  Of course, no one is speaking about this failure to legislate at the DNC.  

23.

It’s the same dream, but with variations: I am strolling along the sidewalk and, then, enter a walkway that descends to a series of meeting halls, cafeterias and rehearsal rooms, and small underground temples and chapels.  Below ground, the place is a subterranean, if well-lit, maze consisting of corridors linking different types of religious facilities.  The first time I entered this maze, the place was between two ostentatious churches on Summit Avenue in St. Paul except that the avenue (running east-west in real life) had been replaced by a north-south street of the same well-groomed and high caste appearance.  My first encounter with this place was primarily architectural – the more deeply I penetrated the space, the more complex and beautifully adorned the chapels through which I passed, small dimly lit niches full of relics and ornate marble carved into forms like soft-serve ice-cream.  By contrast, a later exploration of this place is more about the worshipers.  I am in St. Peter, a small city near Mankato, where I enter a church that is linked to several other sanctuaries by underground corridors.  At first, I am in a kind of gymnasium with galleries overlooking the floor of what appears to be basketball courts.  We are gathered to sing hymns and I am supposed to lead the worship, although I doubt whether I am good enough hymn-singer for this purpose.  I decide to lead the congregation in a rousing rendition of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” except I can’t recall the words to the hymn and the hymnals available to me don’t seem to include that song.  I wonder if I can get a xeroxed copy of the words to “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” – probably not.  I’m afraid that I will disappoint my mother who wants to see me successfully leading the singing in this gymnasium.  Then, I am in the dessert hall, an L-shaped space where people sit in morose, sepulchral silence at tables – it’s like a funeral lunch without the jollity.  I’m looking for my mother.  What kind of grim place is this in which people sit at tables on which there are wonderful-looking pastries and simply stare at them without talking or moving a muscle?  In another subterranean hallway, I come to a big space where there are steps leading up to doors on a higher level.  One of the steps leads to the so-called “Fun Convent,” a notion that puzzles me.  The steps are long and seem to be carpeted.  Then, I leave a below-ground chapel that is somewhat ornate and find that there is a railroad that runs in a circle between religious institutions.  In the railroad car, I meet two young men, both of them Catholics. I’m still looking for my pious mother.  The young men tell me that they are coelibate – a spelling of the word “celibate’ that I imagine to be German. (In fact, the German word for “celibate” is enthaltsam – that is, “abstinent” or “holding back”; coelibate is some combination of “sky” and -bate.) They take tiny pills that dissolve on their tongues to maintain their coelibacy – if that is the word.  I get off at a station next to a church.  I realize that I have taken the wrong train and will have to retrace my path back to find my mother.  Of course, there is a panorama of mountain peaks and cliffs, some of them wrapped in bands of snow, hovering over the city of St.  Peter.  The high, jagged peaks were always there, I just didn’t see them before.  They look like towers and turrets.  I’ll have to take the train back some indeterminate distance to find my mother who has been left behind.  It’s both disappointing and confusing.  

24.

Mike Lindahl, the owner of “My Pillow”, appears on CNN.  Anderson Cooper interviews him.   The interview doesn’t go well.   Lindahl is wearing a cross around his neck, always a bad sign in my experience – men who wear crosses are invariably con-men; this is even more likely if they are bona fide members of the clergy.  Lindahl is an appealing figure; he talks like a professional wrestler, a deep voice that is all bluster and threat, although, in fact, he’s probably harmless.  The intonations in his voice remand me to my childhood – the Crusher and Baron Ratschke and other villainous wrestlers who used to appear at the old Calhoun Beach Club, all of them invariably losing to the noble, “scientific wrestler” Vern Gagne.  Lindahl is an avuncular grifter, a man who claims to have invented a pillow that is specially designed to insure peaceful and salubrious sleep.  An aggressive advertiser, Lindahl marketed his revivifying pillows on cable news particularly CNN, hawking the product himself and assuring purchasers that his wonderful pillows are made in the United States of America – in fact, in Chaska, Minnesota. Lindahl’s factory is somewhere in the vicinity of the late Prince’s studio qua home.  Lindahl made a fortune selling his pillows – everyone has, at least, one and, of course, realizes that the best pillow in the world is still just a pillow and not an anodyne to all that ails us.  (We have several and I can’ distinguish them from our other pillows.)  In accord with his righteous tough-guy stance – he also sounds a bit like Jesse Ventura, who was a professional wrestler as well – Lindholm is a mega-supporter of Donald Trump.  Fortunately, Lindahl’s ambitions don’t run toward public office or the man would be our ambassador to Germany or Kazakhstan or New Guinea.  

Lindahl is fighting with Anderson Cooper.  The interview is off the tracks and the two men are speaking (or rather shouting) simultaneously and, so, it’s impossible to understand what they are arguing about.  In general terms, I understand that Lindahl has concluded that oleander, a herbal supplement is a cure for Covid-19.  Trump has obligingly endorsed oleander as well as a remedy against the virus.  Of course, the entire transaction stinks to high heaven.  Lindahl is apparently somehow involved financially with producing the oleander remedy.  If Donald Trump spoke publicly in favor of penicillin or aspirin, Anderson Cooper would rant that the president knows no science and should keep his mouth shut about these highly suspect therapies and, in this case, there is no FDA approval for oleander as a cure for covid, no known human trials, no scientific studies, nothing other than Lindahl’s anecdotal assertion that he takes the drug and it has cured him.  Therefore, it’s pretty clear that Lindahl is a quack offering a quack remedy and, somehow, stands to profit from this remedy, although this aspect of the interview is confounded by all of the sound and fury.  Lindahl won’t be deterred and he just keeps repeating that there is a secret FDA approval pending, that this will be issued in a few weeks publicly, and that, he knows, Anderson Cooper will call him up after the show and ask for a bottle of the stuff “just in case it works.”  This enrages Cooper and he loses all equanimity calling Lindahl a “snake oil salesman.”  Lindahl is probably too dense to understand what this means and, indeed, like makes a memo to self to find out more about “snake oil.”  Lindahl acts hurt and says he’s not calling Anderson Cooper any names and, then, proceeds to a further encomium to Donald Trump that just increases the interviewer’s indignation.

Anderson Cooper is so dead-set on humiliating Lindahl that he lets the segment run for almost 15 minutes giving the quack advertising that he could never afford otherwise for his herbal supplement.  After failing to force any concessions from Lindahl, and merely enhancing the crook’s credibility, Anderson Cooper, then, asks a doctor named Deutsch to respond to the guest’s assertions.  Deutsch is an Emergency Room physician and, truth to tell, knows nothing about the subject either – he’s just as ignorant as Lindahl; Deutsch’s claim to fame is that he can attest to poor bastards who injected themselves with bleach upon Trump’s musings that chlorox, taken internally, might have some efficacy against the virus.  Deutsch is handsome; he has the rugged good looks of a TV doctor, but he’s an idiot also.  Deutsch says this: “he (Lindahl) is not a scientist and so he can’t state opinions about science.  It’s just like me – I’m not an expert in politics and so I can’t state opinions on political subjects.”  There are so many things wrong with this remark that it would be tedious to unpack them all.  Suffice it to say that if people who aren’t professional politicians aren’t entitled to opinions on politics than I wonder why we are allowed to vote in the first place.

After the shill and doctor are dismissed, Anderson Cooper, who seems to be sweating and dismayed, goes to a commercial.  On the commercial, a used-up actor named Tom Selleck appears.  (Selleck played a private investigator on TV about twenty years ago.)  Selleck looks like the old Marlboro man; he’s also ruggedly handsome although now long in the tooth.  Selleck says: “I think you know this isn’t my first rodeo.”  Then, he proceeds to extol the virtues of “reverse mortgages” for the elderly – “I want you to know that this isn’t some scheme to get your house.”

By saying that a reverse mortgage isn’t a predatory scheme to defraud old people out of their homes, Selleck, of course, has affirmed exactly what a reverse mortgage is, that is, a scheme to cheat the hapless elderly out of their houses.  And what does a millionaire TV star know about reverse mortgages or the plight of the impoverished elderly or anything else other than certain tricks to use before the camera to make yourself look more handsome or more competent than you really are?  In comparison with Tom Selleck and his pitch for reverse mortgages, Mike Lindahl’s advocacy of oleander herbal supplements (oleandrin) as a palliative to the Covid virus seems pretty benign.

Everything on TV is a lie or a damned lie.

25. 

Obama appears at the DNC’s misconceived convention.  He is in an eerie white void with some 18th century handwriting on the wall, apparently somehow entrapped inside the Constitution.  Obama’s speech is inspiring and “presidential”.  I don’t have any desire to watch this stuff, but one minute was enough to hook me – Obama is eloquent and speaks with sincerity avoiding trashy hyperbole, in other words, the polar opposite to Donald Trump’s deranged harangues.

Obama, in his cream-colored constitutional bubble that is nowhere and everywhere, looks haggard.  He’s unnaturally slender and his ears have become even more Kafkaesque with the passing years.  All politicians are monsters of egotism and Obama is no exception.  But one wonders if he doesn’t lose sleep at night over the concept that he is responsible – in some indistinct, and scarcely articulable way -- for, at least, some of what ails us.  

Kamala Harris’ speech is a bridge too far for me.  She has a grating voice and the intonations of a privileged Valley Girl.  And, she’s a cop or something very similar and I have a lifelong suspicion of the police.  She speaks from within a sepulchral tent in which there is one delegate per state sitting under poles naming the places that they represent.  The camera operator thinks its stylish to shoot her sermon from several different angles – this just creates the impression that she is too clueless to know where the camera is located and speaking into an empty void.  

26.

I can’t bring myself to watch more than a couple minutes of the DNC coverage at a time.  The pandering is distasteful and dull as well.  But, on the final night, when the audience has presumably declined to nearly no one at all, the thing seems to go “off the rails” entirely.  Maybe, someone with the fortitude (or masochism) to watch the whole affair gavel-to-gavel might have a different impression.  But such an ideal viewer would have to be a virulent partisan or fool (and, probably, both simultaneously) and the testimony of that viewer would be highly suspect.

Already, there has been an instance of misunderstanding that is amusing since it demonstrates how those designing this convention are misled by past practice – probably, because they have little or no understanding of those past practices or their ceremonial function.  Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, the rising socialist firebrand in the Democratic Party, nominates Bernie Sanders as president.  This is a vestige of an old and honorable practice – a candidate who has lost the nomination for all practical purposes but, fought the good fight, has his name put into contention for the presidency.  The defeated candidate, then, makes a graceful speech throwing his support to his successful adversary.  This display is supposed to demonstrate, and enforce, party unity.  But, here, NBC apparently doesn’t grasp the meaning of the gesture and reports that AOC, an unruly renegade, has inexplicably thrown her support to Bernie Sanders at the very convention in which Joe Biden is to be nominated.  This misconstrues AOC’s nomination and engenders a few moments of actual suspense until the meaning of her nomination can be explicated – and she fires off some fiery tweets, as is her wont, on the subject.  (One hopes that the elderly Joe Biden wasn’t confused; it would have been most unseemly for him to suffer a heart attack or, at the least, atrial fibulation over AOC’s ceremonial gesture.)

But at the big climax of the Democratic Convention, the acceptance speech by candidate Biden, there is a sequence of bizarre faux pas.  First, the comedian Julia Louis-Dreyfus takes the virtual podium – everything, of course, is staged in an empty studio somewhere in cyber-space.  The comely actress is best-known as Elaine on the Seinfeld show, but, more recently celebrated, for her performance as a conniving and vicious politician on the foul-mouthed HBO show Veep.  Louis-Dreyfus is an excellent actor and has won many awards, but she specializes in playing characters who are without moral compass, aimlessly hedonistic, and casually treacherous.  She is an odd choice to introduce the vapid and cluelessly naive Joe Biden – someone whose main claim to virtue is that he is too stupid to be wicked.  Playing the role of Selena Meyer in Veep, Dreyfus’ character had an abortion but, then, imputed the procedure to her long-suffering female aide (later, I recall, that she actually forced the aide to have an abortion); in the TV show, she was casually promiscuous, choosing for her boyfriend, in several episodes, an Arab potentate, a bit like the fellow who had Jamal Kashoggi dismembered.  At the conclusion of the show, she nonchalantly has a political rival assassinated.  Of course, these are the acts of a TV politician and, indeed, one reputedly modeled off Donald Trump (although the show’s first couple seasons were filmed before Trump assumed the presidency).  I suppose there is N alternative universe in which it somehow makes sense to have Julia Louis-Dreyfus introduce uncle Joe, someone too square to have seen any episodes of Veep in any event and, of course, political conventions are the very definition of an alternate universe – but I can’t make head nor tail of the decision to trot out the Tv star to introduce Biden.

But, fairly stated, Julia Louis-Dreyfus doesn’t actually introduce Joe Biden at all.  In the twisted logic of this Convention, she actually introduces the introducers – that is, Joe Biden’s two surviving children.  Both of these folks are a little long in the tooth, pushing fifty I would suppose, and still not fully independent of the Old Man.  Furthermore, Hunter Biden is famously corrupt – somehow, he finagled a position on the Board of Directors of a Ukrainian Power Company and was paid a vast sum for doing... doing something... but what?  The explanation for this curious affiliation, of course, lies in the fact that Hunter Biden’s father was the VP for the United States – no other possible explanation exists.  So Hunter Biden, whose stewardship on the board of the Ukrainian corporation, will undoubtedly lead to Joe Biden’s tit-for-tat impeachment about two years into his presidency (if he is still alive), is summoned out-of-the-proverbial woodwork to introduce his elderly father as “the best Dad a boy could ever have.”  But Hunter Biden is nearly fifty with glittering, deranged eyes and, one would think that prudence would have encouraged the Democrats to keep this grifter out of sight.  But Hunter Biden, a specter haunting his father’s candidacy, has to speak to introduce yet another introducer, this time a ghost – the actual introduction being entrusted to Beau Biden, who is a dead man.  Beau Biden, Joe’s good son (as opposed to rapacious Hunter), would be the ideally charismatic figure to introduce the Old Man except that he is dead.  But Beau introduced his pa earlier at other conventions and, so, by the magic of television, the dear departed can be revived to seem to introduce Joe Biden and his 2020 acceptance speech.  This bizarre sequence of introductions seems to be contrived for one purpose only – to remind the audience that Joe Biden, who has never taken a principled stand on anything, has been running for presidency for, at least, 33 years, that is, for most of the lives of the people expected to vote for him.  And, it goes without saying, that these 33 years of campaigning have all been in service of lost causes – the electorate, if confronted with Joe Biden as a candidate, has uniformly rejected him.  

I don’t know who thought up this series of craven and ill-advised introductions.  Joe Biden is a man who supported segregation until he didn’t, tormented Anita Hill when she accused Clarence Thompson of sexual misconduct, and supported a series of foreign wars until he didn’t as well.  He has no principles to speak of.  And, one wonders if the quality of his advisors is shown by the horrible series of misjudgments on display at the Convention that has nominated him.

(As to Joe’s acceptance speech, I can’t comment – I have almost fifty episodes of Bojack Horseman to watch and so I switched over to that enterprise as soon as he began to speak.)

Of course, Trump vows that his Convention will be more spirited than the ghostly and funereal virtual spectacle presented by the Democrats.  No doubt, this will be true.  We know that he has already enlisted the couple brandishing machine guns at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis to support his cause. The Republican party at this moment in its history is the party of lynching – not the folks who throw the noose around the neck of the Black man about to be murdered, but the cowardly mob cheering on the assassins.  I assume that Trump will recruit Kid Rock and Kanye West and have them compete on stage to see who can produce the largest bowel movement.  Of course, everyone will be watching in hypnotized horror.

27.

So almost 250 years after Revolutionary War, the United States of America, in the midst of a deadly pandemic and daily race riots, has come to this crux: you can vote for a cowardly fool or a dangerous psychopathic criminal.  

I guess I’ll opt for the cowardly fool, but the choice is disheartening.  

August 21, 2020