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

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Photograph © Jonathan Williams

Nothing

substance utters or time

stills and restrains

joins design and

supple measure deftly

as thought’s intricate polyphonic

score dovetails with the tread

sensuous things

keep in our consciousness.

Celebrate man’s craft

and the word spoken in shapeless night, the

sharp tool paring away

waste and the forms

cut out of mystery!

When taut string’s note

passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet

fade, strong over unseen

forces the word

ranks and enumerates…

mimes clouds condensed

and hewn hills and bristling forests,

steadfast corn in its season

and the seasons

in their due array,

life of man’s own body

and death…

The sound thins into melody,

discourse narrowing, craft

failing, design

petering out.

Ears heavy to breeze of speech and

thud of the ictus.

Basil Bunting, from Odes

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

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The New Gilded Age and Neoliberalism’s Theater of Cruelty

One of the distinctive features of the modern American right has been nostalgia for the late 19th century, with its minimal taxation, absence of regulation and reliance on faith-based charity rather than government social programs. Conservatives from Milton Friedman to Grover Norquist have portrayed the Gilded Age as a golden age, dismissing talk of the era’s injustice and cruelty as a left-wing myth. Well, in at least one respect, everything old is new again. Income inequality — which began rising at the same time that modern conservatism began gaining political power — is now fully back to Gilded Age levels.

– Paul Krugman1

What is often ignored by many theorists who analyze the rise of neoliberalism in the United States is that it is not only a system of economic power relations, but also a political project of governing and persuasion intent on producing new forms of subjectivity and particular modes of conduct.2 In addressing the absence of what can be termed the cultural politics and public pedagogy of neoliberalism, I want to begin with a theoretical insight provided by the British media theorist, Nick Couldry, who insists that “every system of cruelty requires its own theatre,” one that draws upon the rituals of everyday life in order to legitimate its norms, values, institutions, and social practices.3 Neoliberalism represents one such a system of cruelty, one that is reproduced daily through a regime of commonsense and a narrow notion of political rationality that “reaches from the soul of the citizen-subject to educational policy to practices of empire.”4

What is new about neoliberalism in a post-9/11 world is that it has become normalized, serving as a powerful pedagogical force that shapes our lives, memories, and daily experiences, while attempting to erase everything critical and emancipatory about history, justice, solidarity, freedom, and the meaning of democracy.

Wedded to the belief that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public institutions, public goods, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit. Public lands are looted by logging companies and corporate ranchers; politicians willingly hand the public’s airwaves over to broadcasters and large corporate interests without a dime going into the public trust; corporations drive the nation’s energy policies, and the war industries give war profiteering a new meaning as the government hands out contracts without any competitive bidding; the largesse of government is then rewarded when the latter is bilked for millions by the same companies; the environment is polluted and despoiled in the name of profit-making just as the government passes legislation to make it easier for corporations to do so; public services are gutted in order to lower the taxes of major corporations; schools increasingly resemble malls or jails and teachers, forced to raise revenue for classroom materials, increasingly function as circus barkers hawking everything from hamburgers to pizza parties — that is, when they are not reduced to prepping students to get higher test scores. The neoliberal economy with its relentless pursuit of market values now extends to the entirety of human relations. As markets are touted as the driving force of everyday life, big government is disparaged as either incompetent or a threat to individual freedom, suggesting that power should reside in markets and corporations rather than in governments and citizens. Citizenship has increasingly become a function of market values and politics has been restructured as “corporations have been increasingly freed from social control through deregulation, privatization, and other neoliberal measures.”⁵

Fortunately, the corporate capitalist fairytale of neoliberalism has been challenged all over the globe by students, labor organizers, intellectuals, community activists, and a host of individuals and groups unwilling to allow democracy to be bought and sold by a combination of multinational corporations, corporate swindlers, international political institutions, and those government politicians who willingly align themselves with corporate interests and profits. From Seattle to Davos, people engaged in popular resistance are collectively taking up the challenge of neoliberalism and reviving both the meaning of resistance and the places where it comes about. Political culture is now global and resistance is amorphous, connecting students with workers, school teachers with parents, and intellectuals with artists. Groups protesting the attack on farmers in India whose land is being destroyed by the government in order to build dams now find themselves in alliance with young people resisting sweatshop labor in New York City. Environmental activists are joining up with key sections of organized labor as well as with groups protesting Third World debt. The collapse of the neoliberal showcase, Argentina, along with numerous corporate bankruptcies and scandals starting with Enron, reveals the cracks in neoliberal hegemony and domination. In Latin America, a new wave of resistance to negative globalization and neoliberal structural adjustment policies has emerged among countries such as Chile, Peru, Argentina, and Venezuela.⁶

In addition, the multiple forms of resistance against neoliberal capitalism are not limited by an identity politics focused on particularized rights and interests. On the contrary, a politics of identity politics has been expanded to address a broader crisis of political culture and democracy that connects the militarization and corporatization of public life with the collapse of the welfare state and the attack on civil liberties. Central to these new movements is the notion that neoliberalism has to be understood within a larger crisis of vision, meaning, education, and political agency. Democracy in this view is not limited to the struggle over economic resources and power; indeed, it also includes the creation of public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need to perform as autonomous political agents. I want to expand the reaches of this debate by arguing that any form of resistance against neoliberalism must address the discourses of political agency, civic education, and cultural politics as part of a broader struggle over the relationship between democratization (the ongoing struggle for a substantive and inclusive democracy) and the global public sphere.

by Henry Giroux / March 11th, 2008

You can read the rest of this article by following the link:Slouching Towards Bethlehem | Dissident Voice.

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Photograph by John Minihan

Desperately Seeking Sam

Remembering Beckett twenty years after his death

Roger Boylan

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence. –Samuel Beckett

The first and last time I saw Samuel Beckett, he was walking down a Paris street, the Rue Rémy Dumoncel. At least, I think it was Beckett. The height was right; the near-skeletal thinness was right; the location was right—near the nursing home where he died not long after. I think he was wearing a hat and coat, but I can’t be sure. It was twenty years ago.

Seen always from behind whithersoever he went. Same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. –Beckett, Stirrings Still

But I never got close enough to be certain. I was across the street, behind a row of parked cars, admiring, if memory serves, a silver Porsche. Unusually for July in Paris, it was a gray, drizzly day, what Parisians call “la grisaille,” and it was a bit misty, as if in November. Despite all that, I could easily have crossed over and asked my suspect if he was, in fact, the One True Sam. But I didn’t. I funked it. He disappeared. Six months later he was dead. And I had wanted to meet him for years.

More via Boston Review — Roger Boylan: Desperately Seeking Sam.

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The Horner Theory of the Months – Revisited

This is the month that in some ways makes me most uneasy. It’s the ‘bridge’ month between Summer and Autumn – it has a dying fall – the equivalent of the month of March, which takes us out of winter into Spring.

Not Summer anymore, dying into the colder weather and longer nights, without Summer’s luxury or Autumn’s beauty. Ah well – at least we’re not shepherding sheep on a windy hillside. Avoid all work that involves heavy lifting or being outside in all weathers.

Westerne wind bloweth sore,

That nowe is in his chiefe souereigntee,

Beating the withered leafe from the tree.

Sitte we downe here under the hill:

Tho may we talke, and tellen our fill,

And make a mocke at the blustring blast.

Now say on Diggon, what euer thou hast.

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In The Field - Ford Madox Brown

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Fast Tube by Casper">Part 2

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What if I came down now out of these

solid dark clouds that build up against the mountain

day after day with no rain in them

and lived as one blade of grass

in a garden in the south when the clouds part in winter

from the beginning I would be older than all the animals

and to the last I would be simpler

frost would design me and dew would disappear on me

sun would shine through me

I would be green with white roots

feel worms touch my feet as a bounty

have no name and no fear

turn naturally to the light

know how to spend the day and night

climbing out of myself

all my life

WS Merwin

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