Seven Red

Heidi: Du, mit the lavender shirt! I would not let my ‘usband aus of the Haus mit that. You make clothes for a foolish Englische fussballer, not for a real strapping man like m’usband, Seal, oder Tiki Barber.

This has been another edition of Heidi Says: Wisdom from the Runway

I remember when I used to drive up to college through the heart of the orthodox Jewish summer playgrounds: US 17, upstate New York, pretty much from the New York State Thruway to the once great resort areas around Monticello, now empty husks as a result of cheap airfare to Miami and points south, devastation with a brokedown racetrack. You’d get about 20 miles west of the Thruway and you’d start seeing these joyful yellow signs proclaiming the impending arrival of Moshiach. Yes, Moshiach is coming! Tell everybody waiting for Superman, that they should try to hold on the best they can…

This is the theme for Michael Chabon’s alternative history noir, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The alternative history here is not – for Americans, anyway – as disastrous as that of one of Chabon’s likely models, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. In Dick’s story, the Germans and Japanese have won World War II, and San Francisco, like the rest of the West Coast, is under Japanese occupation. In Chabon’s story, things unfolded a little differently. The Germans apparently beat the Soviets, which prolonged the war just long enough to have the US nuke Berlin in 1946. Some devastating war happened with Cuba in the early 1960′s (although one wonders why it would, given the alternative course of Russia).

But, more importantly for the story, there is no Israel. The small group of Zionists who tried to establish the Jewish state in the late 1940′s were ejected (literally pushed into the sea, as the saying goes) by an Arab coalition, while the great powers stood by. The Jews are still, in 2000, in the “big black lake of Diaspora” (202). Specifically, the US government allowed some Jews to temporarily settle in a god-forsaken corner of Alaska, and soon 2 million Jews came to those shores. They live in a very temporary semi-autonomous zone called the District of Sitka, which is soon to revert (the dreaded Reversion) back to US federal control, likely to be handed over to the Tlingit Indians, or the BIA. But in those 50 or so years, the refugees have built up a whole civil structure, cities, towns, governments, restaurants, sects of various orthodoxies, criminal gangs, and street names: a whole culture of Jewish Alaska. Everyone in the Sitka District speaks Yiddish, reserving what the narrator calls “American” for expressions like “Fuck You,” “Fuck your mother,” and “What the fuck?” (Nobody, of course, speaks Hebrew, but perhaps some scheming American Zionists.) There is a history of conflict with the native Tlingit, riots and half-breeds, seething hatred. With Reversion, it’s quite clear that this entire Jewish culture will disappear, as nobody seems assured to get residency permits for the reverted District, and the political environment in the US seems, well, unfavorable. “Strange times,” as the characters in the book continually remind us, “to be a Jew.”

In the midst of this brilliantly imagined world, Detective Meyer Landsman – your typical hard-boiled, sharp-eyed, drunk Jewish Alaskan gumshoe – must solve the murder of a heroin addict who had the bad luck of catching a bullet in the back of his head in Landsman’s very own fleabag (is there any other kind in noir?) hotel. The heroin addict may or may not be the vaunted Tzaddik – the Messiah of this generation come to redeem his people in the Holy Land. It would be difficult to go much more into plot than that without revealing the many twists and turns Chabon had fun performing for the reader (she says too many twists and turns for her liking). To speak in more general terms, I think we see in TYPU an interesting attempt to make sense of terrorism, and experiment which perhaps inverts some positions to determine whether some commonplaces about terrorism hold. And it seems more terrifying not when we’re asked to think differently about terrorism, but when we recognize it in its sparkling, Messianic sameness – emanating from the hills and tunnels of Tora Bora or the strange, cold Untershtaat of Jewish Alaska. These changed positions are easy enough to pull off, I guess, a kind of elementary thought experiment, maybe Ethics 101.

Where Chabon is more ambitious is in building the reminder of homelessness. The clarity with which Chabon sketches the District of Sitka is all the more devastating when we realize that it will really be gone in 15 weeks, this whole culture. And yes, this whole piece of fiction, this elaborate construction no more solid than a Jewish town under the ultimate sway of gentile government. And that so many other towns, whole functioning towns with little histories and places like homes are gone too, for the Jews in Spain, England, Poland, Germany, but also for so many others, gentiles, Africans, corn people, Sioux, Sunni, Shia. Our cities are fictions, and delicate ones. The simple thought experiment so happily deployed these days (what if it was you who…) takes on more heft in this context, for we are asked not merely to identify temporarily with the terrorist, but also to despise them temporarily, but at the same time. Of course, sophisticated people believe that holding contradictory notions is easy enough, and that people who are unable to do it are really the ones with the problem. TYPU suggest that its not that easy, really, and even if you can do it, you really haven’t solved or imagined anything.

They’re still waiting for Moshiach, I’d wager, up on US 17, in their buses out of Brooklyn, the black hats. They should read TYPU; it’ll tell them this: He hasn’t dropped them, forgot them, or anything…It’s just too heavy for Superman to lift.

In any case, I feel like I’ve done a good foray into contemporary (Jewish) lit, having read Lethem and two Chabon’s for the month. Now I’m on to…I’m gonna do it…you can’t stop me…Against the Day. I’m already 200 pages in, again. I’m really getting the feeling of what it must have been like to read Gravity’s Rainbow in 1973; this is also a book that responds to the problem of terrorism (and maybe Pynchon always was that, our Proust for the blasted cityscape). Strangely, like Kavalier and Clay and TYPU, I’m reading about the goddamn Arctic and Antarctica. What’s with the cold these days, fellas?

All 2 1/2 careful readers of this here blog know by now my general distaste for the noun relative to the verb. And yet I have to admire the following two very different songs for their ability to construct a narrative from mainly nouns and noun phrases, with hardly a verb to be found (there are some, of course).

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I’ve been reading a lot about eye-tracking studies in preparation for next quarter’s graduate course.

For a fairly in-depth discussion of the subject, there’s no better site than Eyetrack III.

The studies are both weirdly ahistorical and strangely seductive, although, to be fair, most of the research is well aware of its limitations.  (The fascinating work in psychology on phenomena like the attentional blink universalizes without qualification, by way of contrast.) Ahistorical, then, by design: these studies aren’t really making claims that reading has always worked a certain way, or even that it works a particular way across cultures, which would be absurd even on its face, given different reading directions.

They avoid – as does most of the work on “attention mapping” – the well-researched work on the history of attention, like Jonathan Crary’s very interesting Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, or even Lanham’s The Economics of Attention. It’s certainly fair, at this point, to ask what these histories can teach us, other than the inherent variability of phenomena like attention, and how that can help us design snazzy ad-driven web sites. Like most of the work on document design, these studies tell us how people read, not how they might read, or how that mode of reading produces particular sets of consequences. That’s fine, I guess.

As this site – with its interminable paragraphs – itself amply demonstrates, even getting to the way we read now is a mighty jump for some. But there’s still the faint feeling of self-justification involved: you should organize your site/document this way, because this is the way we read, because sites are organized this way, because this is the way we read. But it’s worse than even that, because the repetition of the design structures actually produces the kind of reading that it is ostensibly responding to; this is truly like Nietzsche’s little story of hiding a ball under a bushel and then being amazed to find it there.

Obviously, there are limitations to attention, and perhaps constants in the way we read (we call these strata); you can’t just do anything. Those studies in Gestalt psychology (however dubious) are likely seeking such stratified formations. The other studies on attentional blink do likewise, and they are useful (see, for example, an interesting collection The Limits of Attention: Temporal Constraints in Human Information Processing). But I’d much rather see people producing new attention structures and their attendant subjectivities than merely replaying, again, the attention structures we currently enact. Of course, that’s an avant-garde desire, and it might be that such experiments should be left to some kind of avant-garde, while the rest of us just get the current design structures right. And maybe it’s even admirable that so few can pay attention to those avant-garde designs.

she and I have zero musical talent. None. We’re horrible. Of course, like all people with no musical talent, we fantasize about having musical talent, and now that we have babygirl, we can invest her with all those fantasies and thereby set ourselves up for bitter disappointment. To this end, we are currently fantasizing about enrolling her in music classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where she will learn to sing and play any number of instruments, preferably guitar. Yes, we’re that kind of silly.

In SC, I used to go to karaoke, but never sang. Not once. And I got drunk. Real drunk. But never drunk enough to sing. she is the same. she wishes she could sing. Me too. I also wish I could play an instrument. In high school, we all had to take a music class which involved playing an instrument. My friends and I all chose the clarinet, because it was well-known to be the biggest bullshit instrument in the class, an easy pass. Needless to say, we all failed the midterm, which involved playing a G. A G on the clarinet means simply blowing a clean note without holding down any of the keys. Couldn’t do it. Hell, I couldn’t keep an unbroken reed for more than a few days. I sucked, totally.

But babygirl won’t, thanks to our oppressive parental desires, already too heavy for babygirl to lift. Babygirl will sing at karaoke and jam on a clarinet like nobody’s business. So I was checking out some stuff on YouTube and I came across this cover of the Flaming Lips song. I’ve been into this song lately, likely because it contains just the right paradoxical amount of outrageous egoism and pathetic self-pity, my two favorite modes for the last few months. So here’s babygirl in 16 years or so, singing about Dad:

When I first got out of college I had the worst temp job in New York. I wasn’t really planning on staying in New York, so I didn’t see the sense in getting a full time job at that time. In any case, this job was at a certain mid-sized investment house – to remain unnamed (let’s just say it was located in the utterly obnoxious “Lipstick” building at 53rd and 3rd, ahem). I graduated in December, so it was prime temp time, as tax season was getting warmed up, and mid-sized investment houses needed to do all kinds of logistics for their clients, mainly related to getting statements out.

And what a way to get them out. The operations department – where I worked – had an old dot-matrix mega printer, a preposterous machine roughly the size of a mature rhinoceros. The full time people would run these reports, then they’d come out of the printer, then we’d have to separate them, collate them, staple them, fold them, put them in envelopes, and finally run them through a Pitney-Bowes, all manually. Oh, I shouldn’t forget: since the printer was, even then, this ancient relic probably bought second-hand from the fucking Phoenix Program, it spit out the paper on turning wheels, with those absurd little punched-out circles on the paper edges supposedly aligning everything, the kind you still see on some government forms. So, before collating, stapling, folding, inserting, and stamping, we also had to rip the alignment edges off the reports. Thousands of them. Of course, since the giant dot-matrix was ancient, and since this technique for printing things was never very smart in the first place, the damn thing kept misfeeding, so somebody had to stand by the printer all day preventing and correcting the misfeeds, which usually occurred when more than, say, six consecutive reports were printed in a row. Thousands of reports. I actually volunteered for this grisly misfeed duty, which everyone else considered about the equivalent of scooping out a barracks latrine, primarily because the rhythm and solitude was strangely comforting, even if the rhino would go haywire now and again. The firm had hired three temps to assist with all these ridiculous procedures, since there were only two full time people doing that sort of work. Lucky me. The cast of characters was something like this:

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I was wracking my brains for a non-cliched response to Thanksgiving – one that wouldn’t require me to give thanks and praise for something to the universe or whatever. I do like the idea that all this stuff around us is a gift, because the gift, unlike the commodity, does not offer up its exchange value, at least not quantitatively. As the many writings on gifts (Mauss, Bataille, et. al.) have amply demonstrated, the gift leaves the receiver in a bit of a quandary, since no matter how small or insignificant its perceived “value,” it cannot be paid for; it’s exchange value is a mystery (all the recent babblings about high tech gift economies have seemingly missed this point, largely because they incessantly repeat capitalist exchange logics). So we give thanks as a pseudo-exchange, just as in the potlatch the “exceeding” of the previous gift – all the way to utter waste and destruction of fortunes – served only as a pseudo-exchange. This is also why the defense of capitalism on the basis of the Great Philanthropists (from Carnegie to Bill and Melinda Gates) is always a little pathetic. If the gift is a true gift, it escapes the logic of exchange, and is therefore utterly non-capitalist (even pre-capitalist and residual, if one believes Bataille); if, on the other hand, the gift assumes some return on investment (however abstract), then it is not really a gift.

So I like the logic of the gift as such, but – of course – I don’t like the way a subject gets tacked on to the verb: the one who gives. In finance, they even invented the verb “to gift,” and this is the time of year that everyone starts using that term – not because of Christmas, but because the chance to “gift” off some taxable revenue for 2007 is fast coming to a close. So everybody’s busy “gifting,” with the obvious return on investment in the form of tax write-offs making the whole operation more comical than this silly word. But there’s your subject of “gifting,” waiting hungrily for the accountant to announce the recompense. In the larger, Thanksgiving sense, the subject of gifting is our fabulous Yahweh & Son Ltd., or maybe Spinoza’s God, that infinite substance with its wondrous modes and attributes. The world worlds, and the universe doth gift for tax credits. In this latter version, not only is the value of the gift infinite, but to whom we offer thanks is likewise mysterious.

So, with these provisos, I’ll gift thanks and praise to the universe or whatever (or rather, gifting happens). Because I wasn’t really wracking my brain, and I’m far less ashamed of cliches than I used to be. Primarily, then, for these two, whose value the insurance industry can calculate precisely, lo and verily unto the eighteenth decimal, but whose gift to me is completely infinite, as is my debt.

Che faccia!

And finally:

Hat OFF!, babygirl says.

One of the big news stories here in Chicago is the tale of Stacey Peterson, the young wife of a former cop named Drew Peterson who has – as the saying goes – come up missing. Needless to say, the weirdly rhyming name reminded everyone of Lacey Peterson, the young wife of Scott Peterson who also came up missing and later turned up dead. In the latest Peterson case, there is also a previous wife who turned up dead in a bathtub, and said wife’s body was recently exhumed to determine whether Drew Peterson had killed her. In a bizarre tipping of hands, some cop honcho noted publicly that his review of the bathtub wife’s crime scene photos suggested murder. Most foul, as it were. So now the talk of the town is “He killed her, right?” Not, “Do you think he killed her?,” but “this guy killed his wife, yeah?”

Well, yeah. That’s the general opinion. When I was younger, I always sided with the defendant. I was like a defense attorney’s dream: a professional and moderately well-educated white guy who would always give the defendant the benefit of the (sometimes even unreasonable) doubt. As she has noted, however, I’ve more recently turned into a prosecutor’s dream. I think it’s because I watch all these damn murder shows on television, in which the suspect is almost always painfully, obviously, guilty. So now, as a joke, whenever somebody is suspected of anything, I turn to she and say

“You know what I think about that.”
“Um, guilty?” she asks.
“Guilty,” I proclaim, like a stern and bewigged English magistrate.

The other day, we were driving in to Lincoln Park, and somebody else’s marital conflict became the subject of discussion. “She better watch out before he pulls a Drew Peterson,” I joked. she corrected me:

“You mean before he pulls a Peterson.”

Huh. Right. I guess with Scott Peterson and Drew Peterson, the act of killing your wife and having her come up missing could be referred to as just a plain old Peterson. Pulling a Peterson. Yup. It’s settled. That will be the term for wife-killing in the Seven Red household. Oh, how we laughed about wife murder.

Then last night I turned on MSNBC, waiting for the second showing of Olbermann. They had a murder show on called “Verdict: You Decide,” or some such name, and it was about the infamous staircase murder in Durham, North Carolina that happened in December 2001. The case is infamous largely because of a 13+ hour documentary that was made about the trial (in coordination with the defense team), and because the defendant was a local journalist, writer, and one-time mayoral candidate. I watched this documentary, called The Staircase, a few years ago, hooked into the DVD’s like I was watching a full season of The Wire in one sitting. It was quite compelling.

The case goes like this. The suspect and his wife are sitting at their lavish Durham home having some drinks on the patio. The wife goes inside, and is found by the husband some time later dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs. Blood everywhere. Did she fall down the stairs, as his defense claims? Or is it as the prosecutors say: she found out about his secret gay affairs and he beat her to death with a blow poke, and set up the bloody stairs scene as a front? (And really, if you were going to kill your wife because she had discovered your secret gay life, could you pick a more aptly named weapon than a blow poke?) So, a fall down the stairs, or a bloody beating? Scientific evidence on both sides, generally relating to “cast off patterns” and other mild names for gruesome blood spatter phenomena. Oh, and there’s one additional piece of interesting information. When he was in the Army in Germany in the mid-1970′s, a woman he knew there turned up dead…at the bottom of a flight of stairs! He was the last one at her house, and he claims it is all accident and coincidence. Talk about a guy who should have bought a ranch house! His name? You know where this is going:

Michael. Friggin. Peterson.

He was convicted of murder in North Carolina and sentenced to life in prison in 2003.

So, let’s review:

• Scott Peterson: convicted of killing wife Lacey and dumping her in the San Francisco Bay.
• Michael Peterson: convicted of killing wife Kathleen (thank goodness her name wasn’t Casey), and suspected of a previous staircase murder.
• Drew Peterson: suspected of killing wife Stacey, and further suspected of killing a previous wife.

It may be premature here to generalize from cases, but I think it may be time to issue the following public safety announcements:

1. If you are a woman married to a guy named Peterson, slowly – and without drawing attention to yourself – get the fuck out of the house.
2. If 1. holds true, and you happen to be named Tracy, Casey, Macy, J.C., or even friggin’ Nancy, RUN, don’t walk!!

Last March, although he couldn’t make it to babygirl’s first birthday party, our friend booga face nevertheless provided a wonderful gift, Taro Gomi’s book Everyone Poops:

Or rather, we thought it was a gift at the time, not knowing that it was a ticking time bomb that would eventually rule our very lives. You see, an elephant makes a BIIIIIIIIG poop. A mouse, on the other hand, makes a tiiiiiiiiiiny poop. I know this because I am forced to read these relatively obvious statements of relative shit sizes sixty times a day on average. babygirl looks around confusedly and then announces “Poo booo’k,” meaning that she demands, then and there, yet another reading of Everyone Poops. No medieval theologian studied the intricacies of the Holy Scriptures with the same care and breathtaking commitment that babygirl devotes to the “Poo booo’k.” Which side is the snake’s behind? What does whale poop look like? These questions are never answered by Gomi, but they serve as spurs to endless speculation. When Gomi advises us that he’s “just kidding” about his assertion that “a one-hump camel makes a one hump poop” while a “two-hump camel makes a two-hump poop,” it’s good for a laugh, but we feel perhaps the joke is on us, after all.

And so I note in this public forum, for whole the world to see, that we hereby pledge vendetta against booga face and his progeny.

Years ago
I was an angry young man
And I’d pretend that I was a billboard
Standing tall
By the side of the road
I fell in love
With the beautiful highway
-Talking Heads, Nothing but Flowers

I got nuttin’. Well, not really. I always have something. This week, however, I’m a bit too busy for all that graffiti writin’-about. So, instead, I threw together a new banner that will grace our excursions into graffiti, on the assumption that people may start huffing and puffing soon about critique rather than production. Needless to say, banging out quick banners in Fireworks does precisely the sort of aestheticizing and reification that I’ve been arguing against here. As booga face‘s favorite poet says, well, then I contradict myself. Nevertheless, I wanted to put something together that would differentiate us for the weekend. So, there it is. You may have to hit refresh a few times to clear your cache.

I spaced out the letters a bit so it would be easier to read. Since I would usually make them a bit more compressed, I’m not extremely happy with it, but I think it came out alright. Thanks, Fireworks, for your vectorializing greatness. If you want to see the complete piece, check here.

I’m really going to try to get more flicks for next week, and pick up on the final installment of that longish analysis I’ve been offering so far, specifically on the problem of exit.