The Republic of Dissent

Proof of life

I'm not dead, just undead for a few more days.

To reassure yourself that I'm not just saying it, you can watch my interview on TV5 by clicking here.

Radio interview

If you are  missing me or just want to hear my voice in French, you can listen to an interview I did with the sublime Yasmine Chouaki here or just click on the embeded links below.

I'll be back soon.

En sol majeur

(19:31)

En sol majeur

(26:31)

Les temps changent et la vie bouscule

Happy new year to all of you! I know I know I have been unfaithful, but sometimes life is too beautiful to do more than just living knowing that you will be ablee to write about all of it soon. Thus, I am enjoying life and I will write about it soon.

Pour saluer Christopher Hitchens

 

I liked Christopher Hitchens even when I disagreed with him. He had the elegance to  resist  conventional wisdom, easy arguments and the temptation to be agreeable and blandly likable.

In short, Hitch was boldly relevant and  I will miss him because he was substantively and abrasively authentic!

The philosopher of small things

Sugary excerpt from BHL (Bernard-Henri Levy) talking with alarming seriousness/narcissism about his habit of leaving his white shirt undone:

No, I just like to be loose. (...)I do. It's a form of my will to freedom. I like to be free in every sense of the word. I have never worn a tie in my life. There was even a diplomatic incident when I met Pope John Paul II. But it's a physical impossibility. I cannot have a shirt buttoned to the neck, I suffocate. I have to be free.

Loose cannons and politics

I want to agree wit Nathalie Rothschild on this, but I cannot mostly because I believe that there is a meaningful and essential difference between being a loose cannon to refuse to pander  and being commercially authentic (which both Gingrich and Obama are) by pretending to be oneself at  the cost of political calculations:

(...) being a loose cannon should not be seen as such a problem in the world of politics. On the contrary, it would be refreshing if more political candidates were less concerned with having carefully crafted images and with watching their words. At least then the public would be in a better position to judge a candidate’s genuine character and opinions.

Dansez doucement...

Well because it's my birthday and having the time of my life in the desert somewhere....

Zoukez, Zoukons!

Birthday !!!!

Taking the rest of the week and Monday to celebrate my birthday.

Where? Agassiland! It's important to enjoy the simple things in life!

Sex writing

My reaction to this sugary excerpt from Natalia Antonova is ah!:

Good fiction features a lot of bad sex writing for the same reason as porn actors (Sasha Grey immediately springs to mind) have a tough time crossing over into mainstream film – society's desperate need to compartmentalise sex.

Literature should be, well, literary, we reason – for stimulation of the brain, not other parts. The ghettoisation of eroticism is the reason why you'd be hard pressed to find a "serious" book review that praises an author's approach to sex scenes, no matter how difficult they may have been to write.(...)Good writers are hyper-aware, neurotic creatures, which is probably another reason why so many tend to fail miserably (or entertainingly) when writing about an activity that puts much of the brain on autopilot. (...)Good sex writers, like bad sex writers, explore the dark side of desire. But bad sex writing is often a tough guy act – an attempt to intimidate the reader with shocking detail – whereas good sex writers invite the reader to explore strange territory.

 

Middle-class self-hatred

Interesting question from Chris Dillow:

[...] could it be that the belief that talking to rioters can explain the riots reflects a form of middle-class self-hatred - that the truth is to be found on the “street”?

My answer is yes, but it doesn't end the debate. It complicates it for as we know there are truths and no truth and although perception may be reality, it is almost always limiting and limited!

Gingrich ...really?

I must confess that I  am puzzled by the state of the Republican primary.

As I said before, there is something about Romney that I like, which doesn't mean that I would vote for right, but solely only that I think that he would be to the tough and frozen right what Obama has been to the intellectual and wishful left: an empty symbol. The fact that the GOP or rather its voters are resisting makes him more and not less attractive.

Having said all that, I'm having a tough time taking Gingrich seriously. I mean are we still in 1994 and doesn't everything known about Gingrich show that he is just a more substantive version of Herman Cain?

I heard the argument about Gingrich so called seriousness and my reaction is that the only thing that Gingrich constantly takes seriously is his belief that America desires and desperately needs him.

Come on, 'Red America' can you look at Huntsman or even Raul Paul before you look to the lover that scrupulously took advantage of you?

The role of the critic

Sugary excerpt for this welcomed first day of November from Nicole Krauss:

It seems to me that we have lost something that used to be considered fundamental in the world of literature, which is the role of the critic. There used to be extraordinary critics. I’m thinking Edmund Wilson, say, or Lionel Trilling. At that time, the role of the critic was to not only know about literature, and to tell us what books were about and why they were interesting or not. Their role—their true role—was to teach us how to read. Ultimately, those critics taught whole generations how to read. The professional literary critic, in that mode, no longer exists in our culture. To begin with, there are no longer places where serious, extensive reviews are published—very, very few are left. So critics can no longer make a living—so unimportant are they to our culture, that we can no longer bother even to pay them.

Sweet and sour

Two words, no one sentence: I'm back!

Slow November

It's going to be a slow November.

Life is catching up with me, which in this case, is a good thing.

So be patient, email me to yell at me (elegantly) or just to vent, but try to be understanding. Oh, by the way, if you read French, you may want to read this, it's an article on slate africa about me (in part) about me, me, me.

You are who you are truly in bed!

Sugary excerpt of the day from Norm Geras:

A psychiatrist once told me that you can get to know people's real natures in bed, and that our sexual personas were the truest manifestations of our actual natures. But we are often ashamed by our true natures, partly because they can conflict so horribly with the characters we present on the pavement or by the fireside. As a result, we do our best to keep our secret lives just that.

I want to agree with Geras. I cannot disagree for I know he is on to something, but I cannot agree either because I know that for too many, sex has become about performance or rather performing.  Ah la jouissance n'est plus ce qu'elle était parce qu'elle a été désinfectée par sa banalisation et une gourmandise niaise (There are advantages to learning/knowing French, one of the non-negligible ones is to fully get me).

French as the language of the infinitesimal

The sentence of the morning is from the greatest writer of the twentieth century, Samuel Beckett writing to Georges Duthiut:

Never understood so clearly as when reading you, not even when reading Proust to what extent French is the language of the infinitesimal.

That explains why French is the best language for poetry!

Herman Cain's African-Americanness

As always great stuff from Glenn Loury and John McWhorter.  Didn't I make the point since the beginning that Herman Cain was a race man?

Political times

Sugary excerpt of the day from Vivian Gornick, whose book on Emma Goldman, which is on my must-read list for the holidays :

We are not living in political times. This is not a time where you can make a speech to 10,000 people out in the street as you could in the Sixties. Everything that’s happening in Washington, the horrors that have occurred, they wouldn’t have happened if they weren’t at one, in some terrible subterranean way, with the times. Obama is always being compared with FDR and the Great Depression, but when Roosevelt opened his mouth and suggested this reform and that reform, the whole country was behind him and people cheered in the streets. Obama—who is indeed a frighteningly disappointing president—nevertheless is made weaker by the fact that he doesn’t have the country behind him.

Doesn't it take a leader to make a country follow her/him? We were told by the Obamaniacs in 2008 that he was the one, the best thing since sliced bread or just John Kennedy (I don't think that JFK was a gread president, he was Chirac befre Chirac) and now, we are told that he is the victim of the times and of the dysfunctions of America when he is contributing to them.

That being said we are living in political times, it is just that the public is not longer up to it because it is fed up with politics and it isn't always equipped to see past the bling bling and the syrupy nail polish.

Race and race card

Ta-nehisi Coates on Conservatives, Herman Cain, and their reaction to his 'small' problem:

(...) conservatives don't really understand racism as a force in history, but as a political attack. Racism isn't something that you, say, discuss the Confederate flag. It's something you use to deflect an attack.

Coates isn't wrong, but he is iased and as always restricting a legitimate point of view to fit his ideology. It isn't just conservatives who use race to deflect a punch or rather to just attack, liberals do it too and very effectively. I cannot forget the fact tat Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro became racists in the primaries of 2008.  In short, race in America is mostly/almost solely about politics and ideology.

Money, Millionaires, Washington and easy scapegoats

Jeffrey Sachs on the influence of money in American politics:

The interesting thing about regulatory failure is that it happened during the Clinton administration. That reflects the complete failure of my party, the Democrats. Bill Clinton basically sold the Democrats to Wall Street.

The crisis on Wall Street is syndromic of something deeper: our political system has been profoundly corrupted by corporate money and campaign financing. Both parties are part of it and both are playing a game of endless flirtation with the rich. (...)Everyone was shocked when, to address the Wall Street crisis, he brought in the Wall Street team! Unfortunately, that's the Washington milieu - it is completely pervaded by money. Half of Congress are millionaires. The White House is filled with millionaires. And that, of course, leads to deep popular dissatisfaction with government institutions.

Isn't it too easy to blame money, Wall Street and millionaires when it is clear th there is something rotten within the American empire that may have to do with anti-intellectualism and the choice of blissful inculture over knowledge.

There is the one thing for sure that Herman Cain has for in common with Barack Obama (it isn't race), it is the conviction that will and practical skills are the most important things. It explains why Cain can dismiss tfacts or seek to bend them to suit what he believes to be his superior reality (after all, Jesus loves him and God speaks to him) and why Obama can pursue some of Bush's policies without shame for he is the one and therefore moral in himself no matter what he does. 

To use my favorite metaphor at the moment, Cain is Roseanne Barr and Obama is Rosie O'Donnell.