Horner's Corner

This excellent film which, like it’s subject, is genre defying, doesn’t pretend to be the ‘film of the book’. It stands as a kind of sign, or memory, or meditation on the great book The Rings of Saturn and its author, WG ‘Max’ Sebald,. Excellent music by The Caretaker, a ghostly ambience, a variety of ‘hauntology’, mingling electronic sounds  with the hiss and crackle of 78 RPM records of Schubert. This  is utterly right for the project as  book and  film present a series of linked  encounters with revenants. 

There’s been some discussion about whether the book, the walk, could have been based just anywhere. Of course, in a way it could: why not walk and write about Wiltshire, or Greater Manchester, or Saxony? But of then, it was only by being utterly local, with a  walk through a landscape that meant something to a single person at a certain  time that anything  universal and lasting could be achieved.  Reading the book, we don’t need to ‘retrace the writer’s footsteps’ etc.,  because of  this singular encounter  of imagination, place and memory that has become a written artifact, a work of art.  The Rings of Saturn  transcends the particularities of locality and personality through  a total immersion in the local and the contingent, by a great artist. For only the  concrete can  ‘express’ the universal.  Getting stuck with the particularities would result in mere travel writing, a ‘guide to walks in Suffolk’; whereas failure to engage with that part of Suffolk as a real place and time for this writer, Sebald, would generate substanceless, over generalised, ‘fine writing’.  The Rings of Saturn is neither, and so it is a permanently valuable thing. So while it couldn’t have been  ‘set’ in any place but that part of Suffolk, Suffolk is only the foundation for these strange meditations.

Thus the last thing one needs is a pilgrimage to ‘Sebald Country’ in order to find the ‘real places’. If you want those, read the book.

The writer, the book and the film are of lasting interest, and I’ll be returning to them in later posts. Try to see the film, which is on limited release. And do read, or re-read, the book.

Read the book and discover what a quincunx is..

Fast Tube by Casper

WG ‘Max’ Sebald

true-size-of-africa.jpg 2482×1755 pixels.

Click on the link and you’ll get a bigger version.

Public House (Bloomsbury, London.)

This photograph was taken in the 1960s-70s by John Gay (Gay was the English name taken by Hans Gohler,  a German who left his native land when Hitler rose to power  in 1933;  he was not a Jew, but was disgusted at the way the Jews were being treated. He became a naturalised British subject and took wonderful photographs of this country, usually in b&w. He died in 1999.)

In her book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” Naomi Klein explores the myth of free market democracy, explaining how neoliberalism dominates the world with America its main exponent exploiting security threats, terror attacks, economic meltdowns, competing ideologies, tectonic political or economic shifts, and natural disasters to impose its will everywhere.

As a result, wars are waged, social services cut, public ones privatized, and freedom sacrificed when people are too distracted, cowed or in duress to object. Disaster capitalism is triumphant everywhere from post-Soviet Russia to post-apartheid South Africa, occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Honduras before and after the US-instigated coup, post-tsunami Sri Lanka and Aceh, Indonesia, New Orleans post-Katrina, and now heading to Haiti full-throttle after its greatest ever catastrophe. The same scheme always repeats, exploiting people for profits, the prevailing neoliberal idea that “there is no alternative” so grab all you can.

More via Haiti Watch.

I get so tired of hearing that Haiti is un pays maudit, as if God designated particular geographical regions for exceptional hardship, as if having enough money to build to earthquake code were a question of theodicy. I heard this exact phrase, that Haiti is a damned country, from my French neighbor just this morning, who served as a UN peacekeeper for two years in Port-au-Prince. I hear exactly the same thing from the many Haitians I know, or only briefly encounter in the back of their taxis, in Montreal. They are proud of the fact that Haiti was the first Black republic anywhere, and one of the first republics in the western hemisphere, but are resigned to what they take as a simple fact, that the legacy of Toussaint Louverture was doomed to failure from the outset. In fact, Pat Robertson’s senescent account of Haiti’s plight –an account that happened to go viral, but was really only meant for the ears of elderly, bedridden Americans who lack the initiative and the computing skills to check these things out for themselves– is really just a slightly more crude version of what almost everyone says about Haiti. Even Haitians say it.

Most Haitians are probably better able to get their facts straight, though. In his brief summary of the circumstances of the purported deal with the devil, Robertson notes that at the time of the revolution, the Haitians “were under the heel of the French, uh, you know, Napoleon III, or whatever.” In fact, Napoleon III was not born until four years after the Haitian Revolution, in 1808. When Haiti revolted, it was against a France still very much under the reign of Napoleon I (in the course of transitioning from consul to emperor). But maybe this sort of knitpicking is irrelevant, since that ‘or whatever’ is likely meant to signal that facts are not really what is at issue here. Pat Robertson deals with a higher order of truth.

One curious implication of Robertson’s account of things is that he would seem to wish that France had maintained a greater colonial presence in the Western hemisphere: an unusual point of view for so respected a member of the American religious right. Haiti’s independence in 1804 comes less than two decades before the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine, which declared the United States the only global power with any right to interfere in the internal affairs of the many burgeoning republics of the Americas. France kept St. Pierre and Miquelon (2009 population: 7,050) and a few other inconsequential clods of earth, but from then on the US had control over everything that mattered.

While popular wisdom, which Robertson is only echoing, has it that the Haitian Revolution was doomed from the start, in fact it was a glorious revolution, and based on many of the same values that motivated the American revolution 28 years earlier. What then could have made things go so wrong, if not a pact with the devil? The short answer is that even though the American and Haitian (and French) revolutions were motivated by the same values –liberty, equality, and so on– these were values that were never meant to be extended quite so far: they were universal, but only in a local sort of way. The US, still based on a slave economy, was not ready to have a Black republic, sharing in its democratic ideals, so close by. Two centuries of meddling followed, with interventions, puppet governments, anti-communist cronyism, and so on (I’m not going to attempt to summarize the history with names and dates here; for that you have Google), with the result that Haiti is now a fully contained ghetto of the extended United States. Like any ghetto, building codes are different there, and that is why more people died in their earthquake yesterday than would have died in an earthquake of comparable magnitude in Connecticut.

My usual cynicism about the efficacy of charity still prevails, so I would like to make a different sort of plea: do not give money to the William J. Clinton Foundation to distribute as it sees fit for earthquake relief and recovery efforts. US presidents have had Haiti in their budget for quite some time, and have been expert at sustaining the country in near perfect misery since the early 19th century. Instead, text a $5 or $10 donation by cellphone at www.yele.org. Yéle is a respected humanitarian foundation with a long track record of promoting health, education, and well-being in Haiti. What’s more, they have Wyclef Jean as their spokesman, whom I always considered a bit of a buffoon and a showman, and even the Fugees’ weakest third, but whom I trust infinitely more than Bill Clinton to get your generous donations where they need to go. I’ve already texted in $10, which is more than I’ve given to any cause not motivated by rank nepotism, or by my inordinate concern for non-human animals, in quite some time.

via Haitian Earthquake Relief – Justin Erik Halldór Smith.

Ruskin really took against this thing when he saw it; for him it seemed an emblem of everything he disliked about a city he loved. I like it!