...what exactly do you do for an encore?

Pulp, His 'n' Hers
Different Class
This Is Hardcore

In the 90s and beyond, the savvy answer to the eternal Britpop question "Blur or Oasis?" was "Pulp". It was a plausible answer in the mid-90s: in Britain, it signalled a desire to be freed from the endlessly hyped Blur-Oasis rivalry; in the US, it signalled "I have heard of other British bands".

From the perspective of 30+ years, the savvy answer looks more like a kind of derangement, contrarianism for the sake of being different. The most avowed Oasis hater must give them two excellent albums and a handful of singles and B-sides, pessimistically a dozen. Blur has been many things over their decades, but never boring, and occasionally excellent. Oasis hit a peak and declined; Blur kept on going, the highs lower but more plentiful.

Viewed from 1995, Pulp had "Babies", Different Class, Jarvis Cocker's unlikely sex symbol status, and a weird one-sided feud with Michael Jackson. Viewed from 2026, Pulp has "Babies", Different Class, a retrospectively rehabilitated This Is Hardcore, and Jarvis Cocker's increasingly confusing solo career. In 1995, they were a worthy competitor; in retrospect, rather more like the Stone Roses or Suede. 

The fractures were evident at the time, if you cared to look for them: His 'n' Hers is "Babies", "Lipgloss", and a bunch of ballad-type songs about bad sex. Different Class alternates bad songs with classics: one can reasonably still go to the mat for "Common People", "Disco 2000", "Sorted for E's and Wizz" and "Mis-Shapes", but by God: "Pencil Skirt"? "Live Bed Show"? "Something Changed"??? The songs borrow compositional tics and even chord structures, see the spoken-word verses and sung choruses of "I Spy" and "Feeling Called Love". "Bar Italia", a song I've always loved, gives away the game at the end: it's just a little sappy and sentimental from a supposedly cold, black heart: the poor man who wants love but doesn't know how to ask for it, and ends up hating everyone else, instead.

This Is Hardcore is the best, but it beset by two problems of its time. First, it suffers from cd bloat: because the technical limitations of commercial LPs, 8-tracks, and cassettes had been overcome, you could add in twice as much music, and a lot of bands' ability to edit suffered as a result. Second, the cynical neutral politics that still had so much currency in the 90s has aged terribly in retrospect. 

Currently Reading, Again

Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest
I think it was Zola's Nana, or maybe it was The House of Mirth, where I formulated the rule: "If it's the early 19th century and you're a plucky, loveable woman with no money, you'll be fine; if it's the end of the 19th century and you're a plucky, loveable woman with no money, your options will ultimately prostitution, drug addiction, dying in the street from poverty, or some combination thereof". 

And in that spirit I say: Effi, girl, you're in danger.

 

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
I am 500+ pages in, which is to say about halfway through in my edition. One once learned, but one forgets, that it's impossible to take on everything in a book on a first reading. It's pretty easy to read a passage, get the point, and then zone out a bit as Smith demonstrates that it's true in England, and France, and Holland, and Scotland, over and over again. (The digression on silver, whose point I took to be in part that the price of silver fluctuates in addition to the price of the things it buys, is a fine example.)

 

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner
Finally, one of these without a long party sequence, though it does have a short party sequence. The narrator is obsessed with Albertine, whom he keeps as the titular prisoner in his apartment, closely monitoring her actions in the fear that she's leading a secret life, lying to him, a lesbian, or some combination thereof. 

If you've been in your 20s, you've likely been on one side or the other of this kind of relationship: two people who should just break up, but don't for some stupid g-d reason. Narrator, just let Albertine go already! You clearly don't like her that much!

The place where it becomes interesting is somewhere behind all of this: the Narrator is trying to understand what Albertine is thinking and why, and neglects the primary step of "communicating in any way" with her. He makes little tests and finds inconsistencies between days and over years; does it mean anything? Probably not! But it does produce an interesting side effect: the thing he's cataloging so meticulously is not Albertine, since he is selectively introducing and ignoring evidence, and not talking to anyone else about the conclusions he is drawing: no, by accident (and perhaps on purpose for Proust) you end up with a very accurate picture of how his own mind works, the unintentional revelation.

 

Olga Tokarczuk, House of Day, House of Night 
I love Tokarczuk, but some of the themes have started to become obvious across her books: mushrooms, gender and sexual identity beyond male-female dichotomies, mushrooms, real and metaphorical borders, mushrooms, mystical consciousnesses who like to use "we", mushrooms, mushrooms, and, of course: mushrooms.

The Aesthetics of Resistance, in summary

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol. III

So it turns out the question I went to 20th century German literature to answer was the wrong question.

Vol. III differs from the first two in that in does not tell a cohesive narrative. Vol I concerns the narrator in Spain, fighting fascism. Vol II concerns trying to establish himself in Sweden, and dealing with Bertolt Brecht. Vol III is a cascade, shifting from one character to another (many, mostly, women) and recounting how their war ended. For most, this was capture, torture, and death. There is a very real sense in the last volume that time is running out--in the book, in their lives, in the moment during the war--and it becomes stuffed with remembering; names, places, the beliefs and dreams they died for. The futility of trying to save oneself after committing to the resistance, because once you're involved, that's it for you: you might live or die, but that connection is enough, no matter how tenuous or short-lived. 

(And the thing is: these are almost all real people. There really was a Red Orchestra, and they really did sabotage Germany from the inside. But whatever they accomplished is not visible to the people living through it.) 

There's a real anger in the book, too, for the vast majority of Germans who simply exchange one yoke for another: they believe in the Nazis until they lose, and then believe in whoever comes after them, as a matter of blind obedience and not thought or reflection. Anger, too, for the people who went into exile, who think Germany is still the place it was in 1932 or earlier, and one can simply restart and wipe away the last ten years. Anger that the chance to start again was taken away by the US and the USSR who decided that their rivalry was more important, that let the people responsible for the war get away with little or no punishment. 

And I think in some ways this is the thing: the world of ten years ago cannot come back. You might believe that everything that has happened is an aberration, because to you it is an aberration, but the world and the vast majority of people around you live in the reality of right now. You can undermine what is happening, you can try to survive (both valid strategies, though we need a lot of people in the first category, as they did), but the thing you wanted to happen back then will never happen. Nor, and this is the kicker, will anything you have learned in the last ten years help you at all in what comes next: it will simply be new and different.  

A thought

I do not type correctly, that is to say, using the home-row method. I do type a lot, though, so my mostly two-fingered hunt-and-peck system is a lot more like regular typing than it's not. But mostly, crucially, the things that I am typing are things I am writing myself, from my own thoughts, and it so happens that my typing has sped up to be as fast as my thinking. That I cannot do 90 wpm is no matter, because  never need to get up to 90 wpm. I could go faster, but the only thing that guarantees is that my fingers may type a half-formed thought before it's formed, and subsequently derail the rest of what I am planning to write.

Anyway. I was hand-reformatting my resume into a new template for a job opportunity, and in the course of fiddling with spacing and margins and visual elements, I found a number of items in the resume itself I wanted to rework. I certainly could have instructed something to take the content from the one and put it into the other, but I would've missed the other stuff I cared about. One needn't eternally optimize.

Here We Go Again

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

I am of course sympathetic to all mental health issues. I recognize that the treatment of mental health didn't really arrive until the 90s, with cognitive behavioral therapy and the rise of Prozac and its kin--medicines that actually work with minimal side effects--and that treatment before that was scattershot and unhelpful, and sometimes actively harmful. There also remains, to this day, a stigma against admitting to mental health issues of any kind, of receiving treatment or being in therapy, and that colors how people treat others with mental health problems.

Grant also that Sylvia Plath's singular ability as a writer is to remember--to describe something terrible with a precise and accurate metaphor so that whatever she's describing feels uncomfortably close. Towards the end of The Bell Jar, she does recognize this as one of her real failings--that people feel better when they can forget, and she simply can't forget.

But good lord what a piece of work. It's hard to watch someone throw away parts of their life, to know they know they are doing it, and somehow feel no sympathy or identification. Is it the illness or is it her? Either way, what a fascinating trainwreck and a person I would not ever want to have to know. She becomes more sympathetic once she's in the care of so-called professionals, but even this is colored: we hear a lot about ECT, and not a lot about what she was talking to the doctors about the rest of the time, though she occasionally admits there's a lot of that talking happening. Every interaction with another person is seen as through a pinhole, with a narrow focus on what they can do for her and how they think of her. Again, mental health issues and sympathy and all, but no thanks.

(I read some Rilke after finishing Plath's poetry and it felt nauseatingly fake, which I think is part of the spell. The idea is that the most unsparing, harshest version of the truth is the only real one, and anyone who works in a mode of kindness or sympathy or even respect for the beauty of the world is lying, or stupid, or a phony. I eventually snapped out of it--I like being alive, I like the world around me--but the spell is powerful.) 

Currently Reading, Intermezzo Edition

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Devils
(I am intentionally abstaining from Pevear and Volokhonsky translations as I make my way back through Dostoevsky.)
I read this one in grad school and it left no stamp on my memory. It's not hard to see why it didn't: it seems designed to deliver the plot through the most circuitous route possible. Large parts of the novel are just dialogue. The story is told by a narrator who occasionally spoils everything that is about to happen before the action begins. The first 300 or so pages involve a set of characters who then disappear from the narrative. It feels, perhaps, like a Fathers and Sons-style novel that morphed into something quite different, but instead of discarding the unneeded narrative scaffolding, it all remained. The murder is at the beginning of Crime and Punishment and in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov; it may just be a case in which Dostoevsky is a better observer of the consequences of actions than the causes of them; that might be his version of Tolstoy wanting to be a novelist of big ideas but actually being a novelist of small details.
But there was a time when this was the thing I cared about most in a novel: the articulate and detailed exploration of ideas through dialogue. I think back to my own attempts at writing fiction and it occurs to me that I was discouraged many times for two things that resonated with me and were (and are still, kinda) deeply out of step with the reading public: dialogue about ideas and very, very long sentences. Everybody hates a long sentence, unless they win you a Nobel Prize or unending literary fame. 

Sally Rooney, Intermezzo
It's no Beautiful World, Where Are You? but it's pretty good, halfway through. I think I have landed on the thing I like about Rooney that seems to annoy the people who dislike her: there's a baseline conviction in all of her books that there's something beautiful about life and the world that's worth noticing and appreciating. Many things in life can be hard, but the effort is worth it because there is something good that no human action can completely obscure.

Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or I
I mean, the hits are the hits for a reason: "Diapsalmata" still goes, as does "The Rotation of Crops". I could do without 100 pages on a play that doesn't get performed anymore, but the central argument about Don Giovanni is an interesting one. "The Diary of a Seducer" is... I wonder if I would have read it differently had it been assigned as part of my Existentialism course in undergrad. From 2026 he looks very unappealing. But one is somewhat inclined to expect that's the point: Don Giovanni can be somewhat blameless because his seduction is (so A argues) of the moment and just because he's taken away by a whim; the Seducer is plotting and this has to bring an ethical dimension in. But one gets this sense from the other essays, as well: they tend to be arguments that undermine themselves at least a little because no human being can sustain a perfectly aesthetic point of view; we're ethical creatures and we need ethics. 

My Dog Can Do Calculus, a thought related to AI

A few years ago, I read a thread on twitter or bluesky from a PhD mathematician working as a professor. It went something like this: 

"I was playing fetch with my dog the other day, and it occurred to me that the dog knows with a high degree of precision where the ball will end up with no more information that seeing it come out of my hand--sometimes he can grab it mid-air without looking. Of course, the world functions in a regular and observable way, so the description of the ball's trajectory is determined by calculus. My dog must in some way be able to do the calculus necessary to find the ball. Therefore, my dog must be smarter than I'd previously thought."

Flawless logic, and wrong. Calculus describes how the ball moves, but the ball being thrown and the dog running to get it are natural processes that happen regardless of whether anyone knows the math. And a good thing, too: if you count from Euclid to Leibniz or Newton, that would be 2000+ years the world would have had to go not knowing where balls were going to land. Nor does knowing the math really help you, either: if an outfielder needed to do a differential to catch a fly ball, we could just give up on sports altogether; no one can do the math that fast, and it's not clear how it would help even if you could.

(It also says something about something that it took 2000 years to accurately describe what a puppy or a toddler can learn to do in an hour, or less.) 

Reflections on a few years of reading 20th century German-language literature

Günter Grass, The Tin Drum
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
    Doktor Faustus
    Buddenbrooks
Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries
Joseph Roth, Radetzky March
Lutz Seiler, Star 111
Clemens Meyer, While We Were Dreaming
Christa Wolf, City of Angels
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia
Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children
    Life of Galileo
    The Good Person of Szechuan
    The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui 
Alfred Doblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Lion Feuchtwanger, The Oppermanns
Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance vol I and II
Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
    Transit 
Heinrich Böll, The Train Was on Time
    A buncha short stories
Herta Müller, The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
    The Appointment
Elfriede Jelinek, Women As Lovers
Thomas Bernhard, The Old Masters
W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn
    Austerlitz
    Silent Catastophes
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project

...probably some others I'm forgetting over the last few years (I think none of these are more than five years old, and most are from the last year or two when "read modern German-language literature" became a project)

 

I didn't like The Tin Drum. As with many books I don't like while I'm reading, I played some metafictional games: perhaps Oskar is actually normal sized? Perhaps he's such an unreliable narrator that none of it happened? But I settled down into the idea that it's just a novel with a magical realist premise and an insufferable protagonist. I'm legitimately unsure whether this is intentional, and will need to peruse the secondary literature.

The most flattering reading I can give: Oskar is the average German citizen. He's perfectly aware of what the Nazis are for and do, he's heard of the concentration camps but knows not to ask any follow-up questions. He will support the army if it gets him out of Danzig for awhile, he's fine to go lay on the beach each weekend. Leaving Danzig at the end of the war doesn't bother he because he has a place to go, he's glad to accept the German economic miracle in the West despite not doing anything to deserve it. He is passive in the face of history, contains no outrage over anything but his romantic misadventures, and stumbles into a happy ending he does not in any way deserve.

*****

I've been reading in German and Austrian literature for a few years now. It is dispiriting and compelling at the same time. There are so few of these books that I really love--at a pinch, only Anniversaries--the widened circle including The Rings of Saturn, The Aesthetics of Resistance, City of Angels and Mother Courage. But Mann and Musil and Grass all left me cold. I could appreciate but not love Berlin Alexanderplatz, but that's mostly Günter Lamprecht's fault, and that Fassbinder could make his miniseries after the war. But most of it is formal and correct and perhaps a little lifeless, like you're looking for a heart that simply isn't there. 

And yet, I keep on, and will continue. One is inclined to ask: why?

*****

Spanish language literature will explain things to you, if it does nothing else. The most apolitical or right-wing writers must acknowledge colonialism, and capitalism; political instability and the tricky interrelations of Europe and native cultures. (You might have the politics of Octavio Paz, you're still going to hate Europe a little.) Spain gets off no easier than the Americas, wrestling centrally and constantly with what it means to have experienced fascism for such a long time and then tried (and failed) to forget it.

Japan has a central organizing myth in Godzilla and the million things that refract from it: a retelling of the trauma of how WWII ended for Japan, the primal fears that it raised. (I am quite sympathetic to the alternate view that Godzilla is an attempt to overlook Japan's actual role in the much longer war and their various atrocities and focus only on the tiny sliver of that experience that makes them the victims, but this counterreading is very much in the text already--Godzilla attacks Japan for a reason.) The forced modernization and economic miracle that faded; one can pretty simply hop from the Meiji Restoration to the post-1970 economic boom and find all the parallels one might want. And all throughout it people are writing all sides of it.

Germany... does not do any of this. There is the Exilliteratur, but none of those people really know what happened in Germany because they mostly weren't there. The people who were there remain largely silent. Upon the division of the country, the GDR has its own set of problems, and the West now needs to be integrated into western Europe and so the pesky question of what exactly someone did in the war needed to be forgotten. Then there's the economic boom which... how to say this charitably... convinced a number of people in the West that there was some sort of inherent German business genius as opposed to boring structural economic reasons for such advancement so quickly. Moral accounting was then unneeded, God had signalled his approval of the hardworking German people. And when moral accounting is not needed, very few people will be interested in doing it.

There's political violence and an attempt to refocus the issue of Nazism in the 70s, but it mostly fails. The Die Wende, reunification, and yet another economic boom: the people are finally ready to look somewhat honestly at what they did. As with all such historical reminiscences, it helps a lot that many of the most responsible people were already dead in the mid-90s. But Die Wende is also a time of human economic, artistic, and personal flourishing, so attention is at best divided. (I don't mean to downplay it: the circumstances of division were traumatic, and reunification really was a time of new and exciting possibilities for almost everyone.)

The end result is that you can read and read looking for an accounting, a serious moral reckoning, and find nothing. The Exilliteratur will tell you that everyone in Germany knew and understood the bargain, and were more or less happy to go along with it as long as it was providing dividends. The retrospective work will tell you that, too: one assumes this is part of Günter Grass' motive in The Tin Drum. But to write of this at all suggests that you have misgivings, and most people kept their own counsel.

*****

So you go into reading a literature hoping--expecting, more like--to find some revelations and instead find none. A curious silence or an omission. Why did we begin this project in the first place?

Well, you know why you didn't see anything, you've read Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind and know all about Metaphysical Ketman, the idea that you can keep some secret interior personal space your own. When faced with horrors, you can comply or say and do the things you need to do to keep yourself safe and your life normal. But as Milosz will tell you--or Christa Wolf, who was an informer for the Stasi for a couple of years and just forgot about it--maintaining a double life is psychologically stressful and most people just can't do it for any length of time. The division will collapse and the outer person--the one who complies--takes over. How can you write honestly about what you experienced when your entire continued existence requires you to lie to yourself about what you knew, what you did and didn't do? 

And me, looking for clarity where there could never be any.

*****

But those of us in the US live here, now, with the reality of our own horrors. One might have been able to look away in previous decades because the horrors mostly occurred in places far away from us. Now they are home and visible and difficult to ignore. But the example of Germany can and should show us that people will find a way to ignore what is happening so long as it doesn't disturb them and their lives. 

You know very well what will happen if you sit to the side and hope for the best, and don't pretend that you do not. The point is not to interpret what will happen, but to change it.