Globalclashes

Blissful exile to New York

I’m going to New York to spend a few days and to look and find hopefully an apartment (I’m leaving DC this summer for Manhattan). I will be gone for at least 4 days, but for at most 10 days. I don’t know if I will be able to blog, but if I spent more than 4 days away from this blog then I will more than likely find a way to blog. I know that this is my second exodus from this blog so far this year, but the truth is that my life is in flux and I’m trying desperately to get my life together. Anyway, my hope is that I will have a good trip and that I will come back with a new perspective on life or at least on blogging.

Psychoanalyzing Bitchiness

I find the following point by India Knight about bitchiness disturbing:

I always think that nasty adult women were terribly unpopular at school and have yet to meet one who disproves my theory - put it this way, I doubt Celerier found herself overburdened with invitations during her teenage years. However, while I can understand that being shunned as a pariah by your contemporaries would leave its mark and perhaps, rather poignantly, cause you to devote your adult life to getting one over on them, there has got to be more to it than that. Surely not every ambitious young woman in the country was a loathsome teenager? Does The Apprentice have a secret pool of them to pick its candidates from? Or do young women still think that bitching and backstabbing constitute their best chance of achieving success in their chosen field? Because something has gone a bit wrong if they do.

Women have a strange love-hate relationship with bitchiness. We hate being at the receiving end of it but aren’t entirely averse to doling it out: it makes us feel (oh dear) important and capable. We periodically reassure ourselves that bitchiness - being foul to other people and making them feel crap - is a marvellous and uniquely female virtue, one we must embrace and master, one that shows we are brave and fearless and mistresses of our own destinies. We may even hold the vague notion that there’s something rather laudably feminist about it.

However, there is nothing brave about being vile or grinding down your fellow woman just because you can. Au contraire - without wanting to get too Desmond Morris about it, attack is a basic animal response to fear: it’s fight or flight, and therefore says nothing whatsoever about confidence and a great deal about the lack of it.

Perhaps people confuse bitchiness with wit or with verbal dexterity to the point where entire generations of otherwise apparently intelligent women believe, stupidly, that Nasty Girls Finish First, despite the embarrassment of evidence to the contrary, both in the real world, where nasty girls seldom have enviable lives, and in The Apprentice’s version of it, where nasty girls get fired.

The only people who are in any position to do anything about this are the bitchy women themselves: surely it’s time the scales fell from their eyes? Bitchiness gets you nowhere - plus, everyone still hates you. Not big, not clever and not what anyone would call a result, within the boardroom or out of it.

Wow!  I think that by just reading that paragraph it is possible to understand why neither Ségolène Royal nor Hillary Clinton made it. They had too much baggage.  They were bitchy and women are always the first ones to psychoanalyze bitchiness, to make it about them and to make it about a character flaw while having cojones and being macho are considered masculine virtues. To this argument, people always argue what about Margaret Thatcher, what about Golda Meir, or even Angela Merkel, the answer is very simple none of them were president and would have been elected without a group of males around them to drown their perceived bitchiness and make their disturbing feminity less visible.

Musical nostalgia

Soixante-huitards and the search for eternal youth

Christopher Hitchens on May 68 and on why he still considers himself a soixante-huitard:

As someone born in 1949, I prefer to consider myself not a mere sixties person but a soixante-huitard. If there didn’t happen to be French argot for this, I would still want to answer to the name “sixty-eighter.”

For me, this date-stamped association of memories and ideas and bygone struggles has almost nothing to do with the checklist recently evoked onscreen by Tom Brokaw, which ran the gamut from the Tet Offensive and the murder of Martin Luther King to the images of Haight-Ashbury and the mystic lyrics of Buffalo Springfield. That year was for me a rite of passage, a sort of ordeal, as well as a kind of joy and liberation.

[...]  If you were a real political soixante-huitard, which meant that you were in one way or another related to the New Left, what you looked for and hoped for was a resistance to both the Eastern and Western “blocs.” Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were strong options, but they were just that—optional. In my cohort, we kept our hair short and our demeanor non-psychedelic, the better to appeal to the workers at the factory gate, who, we thought, were about to see through the realm of illusion foisted upon them by a combination of consumerism and the Cold War.

[…] At the time, I thought 1968 was the beginning of something. Later, I understood that I had instead been part of the end of something: the last gasp of red-flag socialism (which actually persisted until the murder of Salvador Allende in 1973 and the overthrow of Portuguese fascism in 1974). But the antitotalitarian ethos embraced by the best soixante-huitards remains an option, and I believe that it will have further opportunities to declare itself—in Cuba, to take one vivid and imminent example—long after the pseudo-revolutionary silliness has been forgotten.

The fact that Christopher Hitchens still considers himself a soixante-huitard is very revealing because it explains his evolutions and his contradictions. Hitchens reminds of Bernard Kouchner in his unwillingness to give up the idealism of his past’s struggles and his willingness to reinterpret them and to fight his present struggles by switching camps and putting the emphasis of winning since for him he was never wrong, but simply fought the good fight with the wrong people.  What fascinates me with the soixante-huitards is their refusal to grow up because they can’t give up what they view as the purity of their youthful ideologies, which in fact was its self-righteousness. The saddest things about the soixante-huitards is that because they can’t bring themselves to even consider the fact that they may have been wrong about le droit d’ingérence, interventionism and the belief that injustice, whereever it happened, annihilated everybody's right to freedom, they have today to say the problem isn't that they were wrong, but that they were right, but unwilling to assert their own rightness by kicking the ant-hill by fear of upsetting the balance of the world. This refusal to grow up and the ferocious battle to keep themselves young lead the glorification of action for action’s sake, which in turn accentuate the fact the soixante-huitards no longer believe in anything, but themselves and their duty, in the name of their own greatness, to remake the world in their image. It isn't surprising that Hitchens doesn't believe in God.

A writer's mother

The Guardian has a fascinating interview with Lucie Ceccaldi, the mother of Michel Houellebecq who is certainly France’s most successful writer of the last decade, who has written her memoirs. Ceccaldi has some scandalous (but not always outrageous) things to say not only about her son and his writing but also about motherhood in general. It is a great read. Sugary excerpt:

Then, in 1998, when Houellebecq was at the height of his fame, she says she stumbled upon an article about him winning a literary prize for Atomised. (In the photo he was wearing "the same anorak he had been wearing for years".) She went to a bookshop, picked up Atomised and was furious. "I said, 'Fuck, it's not true.' He described me as a kind of whore, kept by I don't know what American. That's slander. All my life I've toiled to earn money for other people. I want him to apologise. If I was law-suit minded, I would have sued him and won."

She writes in her memoir's postscript that she will only talk to him again "the day he goes to a public square with Atomised in his hand and says: 'I am a liar, I am an imposter, I've done nothing in my life except do bad to the people around me, and I ask for forgiveness.'" Does she think he will apologise? "Of course not, he's too proud. And also, he's famous because he's a terrible victim. If he apologised to me, his sales would disappear."

She doesn't rate her son's literary talents. "What's all this stuff about an old chemist who wonders if his secretary is having a wank?" she asks. "If it hadn't been my son, I wouldn't read that kind of crap, I would put it down straight away, because if there's one thing I detest in the world it's pornography. That book is pure pornography, it's repugnant, it's crap. I don't understand its success at all, that just shows the decadance of France." In her own book, she speculates that he writes about sex because he doesn't get enough. "What's this moronic literature?! Houellebecq is someone who's never done anything, who's never really desired anything, who never wanted to look at others. And that arrogance of taking yourself as superior ... Stupid little bastard. Yes, Houellebecq's a stupid little bastard, whether he's my son or not."

Does she believe in mother love? "Western women get on my nerves with their mother love." She says she can't stand the western mothers who crow about how amazing their kid is, preferring the "mother love of African women who carry a child behind their back" and raise it among the wider tribe.

Do you love your son? "Yes, of course I love my son. If he dropped dead, I'd be profoundly hurt, definitively, but I wouldn't complain in newspapers and write a book about it."

When one reads this interview, one can understand why Michel Houellebecq never seems to be at ease with his own greatness and takes as a curse by then taking upon himself the obligation not just to be controversial, but also to make people uncomfortable. Many articles and books has been written on the influence that having an absent father or rather not having a father at all played in the lives of writer such as Baudelaire, Camus, and Sartre. Paul Vitz wrote a couple of years ago a  book, Faith of the Fatherless, in which he asserts that the atheism of Camus and Sartre, which is essential to their writing and philosophy can be explained by the fact that they both grew up without a father. It is impossible to read Lucie Ceccaldi’s mother and not to be persuaded that she had a great influence in not the personality of her son, but more importantly on who he is as a writer.

Falling out of love with liberalism and becoming an independent

After the end of the Democratic primaries tonight (we all know that the race is over), I've realized that if these primaries have taught me anything is that I don't like the Democratic party and I can no longer call myself a liberal. I think that the whole circus that were the Democratic primaries taught me that I don't want to be a part of party that has to turn everything into a struggle between good. I don't want be to one of those liberals who stop thinking, growing, and rebelling against the unacceptable because they have found hope and the truth. I'm not following Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and David Mamet by crossing the Rubicon to join the Dark Side but I'm definitely leaving the pink island. Anyway, it is sad to say, but liberalism and the Democratic party are about romance and the creepiest form of youth obsession. I was a teenager once and I don't want to go back to that time because I don't believe in the absoluteness of innocence.

It's already so complicated

I find the following sugary excerpt from Jessa Crispin on Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s latest book interesting:

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is worried that this surge in misogyny — the violent porn, Girls Gone Wild, and I’m sure he would include The Average American Male — is one of the signs that something is wrong with our men. He previously blamed women for this trend in Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex. His argument was something along the lines of, “Put some clothes on, tart.” Now he looks into the male half of the species in The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him. He theorizes that the stunted adolescence, the frat-boy mentalities that are never outgrown, the high divorce rate, and the growing number of women who would rather live alone than with men demonstrate that there is something seriously wrong with the state of masculinity. It is our toxic culture that is destroying men.

[…]He does not blame feminism for the state of masculinity, or so he says. But having read his thoughts on femininity before, I read The Broken American Male wondering how long it would take before women became the problem. That would be 47 pages. “[M]en are with women who have in turn been with so many other men that the modern American male feels that his very anatomy is being measured against some standard that he cannot attain.” Sluts! I noticed that in his book about femininity he did not have a corresponding chapter about women’s bodies being compared to men’s former sexual partners, not to mention every woman on television, in movies, on billboards, in pornography; or that chick he saw on the elevator and used as a masturbatory fantasy earlier that day.

If anything, The Broken American Male is a 291-page argument for why women should not get married to men.

America more than any country has gender problem in the sense that it is unable to deal with gender in a nontraditional and unthreatening fashion, which explains why all discussions about gender in America especially tends to be circular and to lead nowhere. Sometime, I feel that America has too much in common with that transsexual woman who becomes a man and yet finds himself pregnant. I don’t think that differences are anomalies or are creepy, or freaky, but I think that when they are sacralized they tend to espouse the qualities that the people who fear them what them to have. I for one, find tiresome the endless conversations about women, men, manliness, femininity, traditional values, nature, and sacredness because it asserts violently the fact that one is her/his gender and that a man is a man is a man and that a women is a women is a women and that she better be a rose. I would like to be able to show my derriere without being an affront to women’s everywhere and to be virile without threatening a man’s ego. It may not be possible in my lifetime, but again the fact that it isn’t doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do it.

Politics and the novel

Orhan Pamuk on novels and politics :

My experience going back to my early 20s when everyone was politicized in Turkey is that serving a cause destroys the beauty of literature. Most of the time I saw that well-meaning authors had destroyed their talent through politics.

If you look at the whole corpus of novels, politics is not the most interesting subject. These subjects are love, happiness, bourgeois life, the meaning of life, goals in life that end in disillusionment.

There is so much cheap morality in writing political fiction. I wrote a political novel, Snow, but I did my best not to pass a moral judgment on any of my characters. The problem with the political novel is that there is a high expectation from the reader that you will pass judgment on a character.

But the very strength of the art of the novel is that the writer identifies with the character he creates with such great intensity that no moral judgment should be passed on a character.

The art of the novel is based on the unique capacity of human beings to identify with the Other with whom we have no common interests. In my mind's eye I try to understand what this person -- who is not like me but is of a different race, gender, culture or class, who may be perverse or strange -- is thinking and feeling. But at the same time he or she is a human being like me. It's called compassion.

Of course, I'm not saying human beings are like this all the time. We are capable of killing 200,000 Iraqis and don't care about it anymore, and just pay attention to what George Bush says. We are capable of doing this as well as being compassionate. But the art of the novel is based on this human capacity for compassion.

A novel works if the writer manages to identify with the characters. That means putting oneself in the shoes of others, not judging them.

The worst thing that a writer can do is not to take politics seriously, but rather to confuse it with literature by placing it above everything including her/his own art. Writers stop to be able to write novels when they to look at the world and their art through the eyes of a politician because doing it implies setting limits that can only cheapen a literary work by making it a cheap piece of political propaganda.