There, too

Under the sea…deep deep..deep under,
where day comes beryl-dim,
is beauty still. In opalescent wonder
the strange sea-creatures swim.

Under the silence of the crashing sea
life slowly spreads apart
tentacles trembling to life's ecstasy
As tremble you, my heart.

Ellen Margaret Janson

Fug You

Fug You, by Ed Sanders
A counterculture icon's memoir of the 1960s

Fug You, by Ed Sanders - Books - Night & Day - The Prague Post

By Stephan Delbos , The Prague Post, march 2012

L'eloge de l'amour

Alain Badiou a aimé la révolution et est devenu l'un des prophètes de la contestation. Philosophe difficile, pamphlétaire acéré, activiste infatigable, ce communiste canal historique parle aussi d'amour.

Badiou : une certaine Idée de l'amour - Propos recueillis par Elisabeth Lévy

Le Point : On attend Lénine ou Mao, et on découvre Comte-Sponville. Sans amour, dites-vous, point de philosophie. Vous devenez fleur bleue ? Alain Badiou : Vous exagérez ! Quand je dis que le philosophe doit être un amant, ou un aimant, c'est une référence très classique à Platon, qui établit un lien intime entre la philosophie et l'amour. La philosophie est amour de la vérité, mais au sens fort de ce terme. Il faut être dans l'élément de l'amour, savoir ce qu'est l'amour pour éprouver l'amour de la vérité. En déployant cette idée, je postule que quatre expériences fondamentales de la vie humaine sont les conditions de la philosophie : la science, les arts, la politique évidemment, et enfin l'amour, qui n'est donc pas une excursion loin de mes terres.
Ne cédez-vous pas à une vision irénique ? Dans votre idée de l'amour comme « revanche du Deux », il y a peut-être du drame, mais pas beaucoup de tragédie. Il n'est guère question de l'impossibilité de l'amour, de sa fin programmée. Je rappelle au contraire qu'il y a non seulement du drame, mais aussi du meurtre, du sang. Il y a peut-être autant de tragédie en amour qu'en politique. L'amour est une chose difficile et, en fin de compte, rare. L'échec, les malentendus, l'épuisement, le négatif, on en a tant qu'on veut. On peut les ressasser - la plainte est une disposition spontanée. L'art s'alimente de la plainte humaine et la sublime en quelque chose qui, en fin de compte, est du plaisir. Mais être philosophe, c'est ne pas trop faire confiance aux dispositions spontanées ou aux opinions dominantes. La philosophie doit donner à l'humanité le courage de la création et de l'affirmation. Sinon, elle ne sert à rien.
Répondant à Lacan qui affirme qu'« il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel », vous prétendez qu'il y a un rapport amoureux. En dehors de votre expérience, qu'est-ce qui vous prouve que le Deux de l'amour n'est pas une chimère ? Je précise que je ne suis pas totalement lacanien, car je crois qu'il y a un rapport sexuel. Cela étant, je ne pense pas que l'amour soit la connaissance de l'autre. Je crois que, dans la durée amoureuse et pas seulement dans l'illumination initiale, peut se construire une expérience du monde décentrée par rapport à la vision individuelle, au narcissisme. Le monde que j'expérimente, la vie qui est la mienne, le temps que j'y passe sont imprégnés du fait que c'est avec l'autre que ça se passe. C'est cela que je nomme l'amour. Le monde du Deux se superposant au classique monde de l'Un.



Vous avez défendu Mai 68 contre les attaques du candidat Sarkozy. Mais l'amour-Meetic, qui a détrôné l'amour mythique, est aussi un héritage de Mai. Vous ne pouvez ignorer que la libération s'est muée en libéralisation. Dans Mai 68, si vous me permettez de le dire trivialement, j'en prends et j'en jette. Dans « L'hypothèse communiste », je soutiens qu'il y a eu quatre Mai 68 dont les bilans sont contradictoires. Le courant que je qualifie de libertin-libertaire revendiquait en effet la sexualité sans rivage, la jouissance pour tous. J'admets tout à fait qu'il a conduit assez directement à la jouissance marchande. Il y a donc quelque chose de vaguement héroïque à maintenir vivantes une autre idée et une autre expérience de l'amour.
La philosophie fait donc lien entre l'amour et la politique. Mais vous aimez l'amour bien qu'il soit violent et la politique parce qu'elle est violente. Cela est une pure légende. Je ne suis pas du tout un amoureux de la violence en politique. Etre acculé à la violence est bien plus un problème qu'une issue. Les seules violences parfois nécessaires et légitimes en politique sont des violences strictement défensives. Même s'agissant de la politique « révolutionnaire », encore que ce mot soit devenu bien obscur, je pense que tout fétichisme de la violence est périlleux. Par ailleurs, il y a des circonstances où la violence est inévitable. Cette idée n'est pas non plus l'apanage des révolutionnaires, elle anime tout autant les impériaux qui font la guerre en Afghanistan ou en Irak, comme ils l'ont faite en Algérie ou au Vietnam.
Vous semblez penser que cette violence, aujourd'hui, est inévitable parce que la société y serait « acculée » par le pouvoir. Citez-moi un seul texte où j'appellerais à la violence ! Il est évident qu'il y a une injustice du pouvoir et que toute injustice est soutenue par la violence qui permet de la perpétuer. Tout le monde voit bien que la société est entièrement bâtie sur la défense acharnée de privilèges et d'inégalités qui ne se maintiennent qu'à grand renfort de lois répressives. Faut-il pour autant opposer la violence à cette violence-là, je n'en crois rien. Les tâches politiques de l'heure relèvent de l'idéologie et de l'organisation, pas du tout de la lutte armée, surtout pas au sens où l'entendent certains groupes. On est tellement loin d'une situation où la violence pourrait être productive que c'est une absurdité.
Le Deux de l'amour est une extension, un agrandissement par rapport au Un de l'individu. Mais le Deux de la politique - ami/ennemi - n'est-il pas un rétrécissement par rapport à la pluralité du monde ? Je ne suis pas un disciple de Carl Schmitt. Je suis très loin de penser que la politique consiste à désigner l'ennemi. Je dis simplement qu'en politique il y a des ennemis, ce qui est une grande différence avec l'amour.
Mais vous définissez bien le XXe siècle comme « le siècle du Réel » et celui du chiffre Deux, de l'antagonisme, du grand Autre ? C'est exact, mais je pense qu'il faut sortir du XXe siècle. Le réel, tel que l'a pensé le XXe siècle politique et révolutionnaire, a été non seulement celui de l'antagonisme, mais aussi celui de la purification. Au bout du compte, l'idée révolutionnaire a été dévorée par une sorte de suspicion généralisée. Il faut penser autrement. Ce qui compte, c'est de créer une nouvelle unité à partir d'une multiplicité, d'intégrer les différences dans un camp multiforme qui inventera un chemin égalitaire nouveau. Et, pour y parvenir, la question des amis est beaucoup plus importante que celle des ennemis.
« Dans l'amour, écrivez-vous, on fait confiance à la différence au lieu de la soupçonner. La Réaction disqualifie la différence au nom de l'identité. » Vous, vous disqualifiez l'identité au nom de la différence. L'amour et la politique ne seraient-ils que deux moyens de se délivrer de l'identité ? Absolument pas ! Il serait absurde de prétendre que les identités ne doivent pas exister puisqu'elles constituent la trame de tout ce qui existe ! Je dis seulement que tout ce qui est vrai, tout ce qui unit les hommes et leur appartient de façon générique est fait à la fois de matériaux identitaires et de leur dépassement. La philosophie est nécessairement la promotion, non des identités, mais de la part universelle dont les identités sont capables. Surtout quand on remet au goût du jour la notion d'identité nationale, qui sent son pétainisme.
En somme, vous rejetez l'amour-fusion, mais vous croyez à la politique-fusion. D'ailleurs, dans communisme il y a communion. Pour moi, le communisme n'a rien à voir avec la communion ou la totalité. La question est de savoir si la norme égalitaire est à l'oeuvre dans le travail collectif. Mais l'égalité ne consiste nullement à réduire les singularités. Simplement, si une vérité intéresse l'humanité tout entière, c'est qu'elle n'est pas réductible aux singularités qui la composent. Je suis le premier à reconnaître l'existence des identités nationales et des historicités distinctes. Mais, en définitive, le cosmopolitisme et l'internationalisme leur sont supérieurs.
On a l'impression que vous sacrifiez aisément la vie concrète à l'Idée. D'où, d'ailleurs, votre mépris pour le nombre de victimes comme critère du communisme ou du fascisme. Vous êtes injuste ! Tout le monde a du sang jusqu'aux oreilles et je trouve intellectuellement honteux qu'on brandisse les morts contre certaines idées, et pas contre d'autres. En 1914, ce sont les régimes parlementaires qui ont organisé une sensationnelle fête des morts. Tous les régimes ont du sang sur les mains et, dans les dernières décennies, les démocraties continuent à en avoir beaucoup, et d'assez bon coeur.
Peut-être, mais, comme l'observe Sloterdijk, l'érotisme de l'avidité l'a emporté sur l'héroïsme, y compris chez les damnés de la terre : les victimes du capitalisme en redemandent. Cela ne m'impressionne pas le moins du monde. A toutes les époques, de larges pans du monde dominé aspirent à partager les valeurs du monde dominant. Bien des serfs souhaitaient un monde où ils auraient été nobles. Il s'agit de faire en sorte que l'énergie populaire, au lieu d'être fascinée par la richesse et l'opulence, se projette dans un monde dans lequel cette division-là n'existerait plus. Ce passage peut être grevé de passions brutales, et même envieuses. Reste que, dans leur ambivalence, ces mouvements de masse sont nécessaires. Ce n'est pas parce qu'il y a mouvement qu'il y a politique. Mais il n'y a pas de politique sans mouvement.
D'où votre admiration pour la Révolution culturelle chinoise, à laquelle vous trouvez une certaine grandeur. Evidemment ! La Révolution culturelle tente de redonner au socialisme épuisé la signification d'un mouvement. Comme le dit Mao, « sans mouvement communiste, pas de communisme ». Alors que les Etats socialistes sont des monstres bureaucratiques, la régénération, dans les années 60, ne peut plus venir du Parti ni même de la masse des gens intégrés vaille que vaille au nouvel ordre. Comme dans le monde entier, elle ne peut venir que du mouvement de la jeunesse, étudiante et/ou ouvrière. Or celui-ci est capable du meilleur et du pire quand il n'est pas structuré par une véritable discipline politique.
Où était le meilleur ? Le meilleur, c'était, comme partout ailleurs, l'idée qu'on allait changer tout ça, renverser les despotes locaux, faire progresser partout, singulièrement dans les usines et les universités, une sorte d'égalité pratique nouvelle. Entre 1966 et 1968, il y a eu des millions de gens dans les rues, des courants, des contre-courants, des masses de journaux, de caricatures, d'affiches.
Dans cette magnifique effusion, les victimes sont-elles les oeufs nécessaires à la fabrication de l'omelette qu'est l'Histoire ? La question des victimes de la Révolution culturelle est singulièrement compliquée. Qui a tué qui ? La séquence a duré une dizaine d'années et il y a eu des victimes à tous les étages de l'appareil et de la société. La Révolution culturelle est peu à peu devenue une guerre civile incontrôlée, et c'est ce qui en a scellé l'échec.
Sous prétexte que les victimes sont recrutées de façon égalitaire, le crime serait-il moins grave ? La démocratie parlementaire est au moins aussi guerrière et conflictuelle que ceux auxquels elle s'en prend. Je le répète, en politique, on a des ennemis et, quand on n'en a pas, on les invente. C'est aussi vrai des démocraties que des défunts Etats socialistes. La vérité est qu'il faudra en finir avec l'Etat, quelle qu'en soit la forme.
La démocratie est aussi le régime où vous avez pu mener, de la Rue d'Ulm, une attaque au vitriol contre l'un des deux principaux candidats à la présidence de la République... Cet argument n'est pas entièrement convaincant. Que le système des libertés soit plus déployé dans les sociétés protégées est indéniable. Mais c'est parce qu'elles en ont les moyens économiques et ferment leurs frontières aux hommes, et non aux marchandises ou aux capitaux, pour conserver ce privilège. La question qui m'intéresse est tout autre : peut-on soutenir, nommer, faire exister quelque chose qui relève d'une autre hypothèse stratégique que celle de la continuation de l'univers réglé par le profit qui régente les sociétés dominantes ? Bien entendu, il faut intégrer le bilan des tentatives précédentes. On ne va pas rééditer ce qui a été fait au XXe siècle.
Bonne nouvelle... Je n'aboierai cependant pas avec les loups. C'était la première fois dans l'Histoire que les gens d'en bas prenaient le pouvoir. Comment peut-on avoir le front d'exiger qu'ils réussissent du premier coup ? Le pouvoir des riches, lui, est millénaire ! La Révolution, telle qu'elle a existé au XXe siècle, est une figure aujourd'hui morte. Faut-il pour autant devenir un honorable réformiste-libéral ? Je n'ai pas envie de faire entrer la philosophie dans le cadre de ce conservatisme. C'est l'unique raison pour laquelle je ressors du ruisseau où il est tombé le signifiant « communisme ».
Adversaire déterminé du pouvoir, vous exercez un pouvoir considérable, notamment auprès de ce que votre ex-compagnon Jean-Claude Milner appelle la « petite-bourgeoisie intellectuelle ». Normalien, vous enseigniez à Normale, d'où sortent vos disciples. Gauchet remarquait ici-même que vous êtes un produit très français. J'assume ce paradoxe, si c'en est un. Dans l'un de mes premiers livres, j'écrivais : « J'aime mon pays, la France. » Comme je vous l'ai dit, toute universalité se fabrique à partir de singularités. Et les singularités françaises ont leur généalogie propre. Au XVIIIe siècle, les « philosophes » constituaient quasi un parti politique. On peut jouer sur deux tableaux, être à la fois un homme public et un savant. Quant au pouvoir... Franchement, comment un philosophe peut-il servir la part du peuple la plus démunie s'il ne la fait pas bénéficier, directement et indirectement, de son aura, des lambeaux de pouvoir que son oeuvre lui permet d'arracher ? Ce pouvoir n'est au fond que celui de l'Idée. Je combattrai jusqu'au bout la misérable maxime du monde contemporain, cachée sous le manteau de la fameuse mort des idéologies : « Vis sans Idée. » La vraie vie est la vie habitée par l'Idée. En amour comme en politique

Source: Le Point, no. 1938 - Idées, jeudi, 5 novembre 2009.

Failing Better: Ian Hamilton and The New Review

If you could travel back in time to a particular literary era, like Woody Allen’s characters in Midnight in Paris, where would you prefer to drop in? The New York of Mailer and Capote? The Paris of Stein, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald? Not me. I’d defy all the glamour and glitz and go to soggy ’70s London. Specifically, I would waltz into the Pillars of Hercules, an ancient pub on Greek Street in Soho, and report to the poet, critic and editor Ian Hamilton, who would no doubt be holding down the fort at the bar, an emperor-sized scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other (they didn’t call him High-Tar Hamilton for nothing), and ask to review a book for his monthly magazine, The New Review. Its offices were just upstairs from the pub, but all the real business was completed bar-side. There in the Pillars I might encounter Martin Amis or Ian McEwan, Jonathan Raban, or Clive James, possibly even an ageing and manic Robert Lowell, ensconced by wide-eyed admirers. With any luck, I would become audience to one of Hamilton’s celebrated witticisms, like the one about the young poet who came down from Oxford to write for the magazine. According to legend, Hamilton took him downstairs to the pub at 11:30 in the morning and bought them two large scotches. “Oh no, I just can’t keep drinking,” the poet demurred, “I must give it up, it’s doing terrible things to me. I don’t even like it anymore.” To which Hamilton indignantly remarked: “Good god, man! None of us likes it.”



Karl Miller once remarked that you could write an anthology of Hamilton’s pub-sayings. Accordingly, much of the written material concerning him tends toward the personal-anecdotal: everyone seems to have their favorite Hamilton-zinger. Julian Barnes, for instance, whose go-to drink in those days was a gin and bitter lemon (hardly a pub-drink), recalls that “the first time Ian offered me a drink in the Pillars and I told him what I wanted, he didn’t react, no doubt confident that he had misheard me. He was generously willing to stand me the round, but unable to pronounce every word in case the barman got the wrong idea. ‘Large whisky, pint of Old Skullsplitter, a gin and …you say it.’ ‘Bitter lemon,’ I admitted, completing the order and my shame.” Hamilton makes a fictional cameo in Martin Amis’s novel The Pregnant Widow as the “charming, handsome, litigious, drink-drenched, debt-ridden, women-infested Neil Darlington,” and in North Face of Soho, the fourth of his so-called “Unreliable Memoirs,” Clive James devotes a couple of pages to his old friend and editor. One and a half of those pages are devoted to his old friend’s sexual success, which was by all accounts considerable. “At the height of his pulling power,” James writes, “he never had to do anything to get a woman he wanted except fight off the ones he didn’t, so as to give her a free run to the target.” Hamilton’s good looks, in collusion with his poetic air and understated cool, caught the attention of more than just a few women. But there was an attractive darkness, too; an ironic, reserved demeanor that hinted at something broken or damaged. “He had the knack of embodying self-destruction in an alluring form,” James writes. When the two of them did a reading together in Oxford they were approached by a gorgeous young student. Smitten, Clive James invited her to drop by at the Pillars when she was next in London. When she did, James greeted her enthusiastically at the bar. “Is he here?” was all she said to him.



It’s tempting to romanticize this kind of set-up, what with all pub-hub and boozy camaraderie, but it shouldn’t keep us from acknowledging the achievements of the magazine itself. Hamilton, though fearless, was a dream-editor. He launched his first literary journal, Scorpion, when he was in the sixth form at Darlington Grammar School, skipping class to ensure its distribution and getting in trouble for publishing it on the same day as the official school magazine. “It was an anti-school magazine,” Hamilton said. He would have much rather been playing soccer (a life-long passion; he was a self-professed “soccer bore”), but a heart condition prevented him from joining in with his fellow classmates. “I reached for my Keats,” he said. “I developed a kinship with sickly romantic poets who couldn’t play games.” When asked what eventually happened to that heart condition, Hamilton observed wryly that “it went away as soon as I started drinking.”

His editorial breakthrough arrived in the form of The Review, a journal bulging with poetry that followed the failure of Tomorrow, a “rather awful magazine” he’d launched in 1959 while a student at Oxford. The Review appeared in part because of the money Hamilton owed the printer of Tomorrow – a pattern that repeated itself with The New Review. Along with like-minded poets such as John Fuller, Colin Falck, and the American Michael Fried, The Review established a reputation for its acidity and combativeness. “I saw myself protecting poetry against the pretenders, the charlatans, the fakes,” Hamilton explained. It lasted 10 years. During that time, Hamilton moved to London and became the Times Literary Supplement’s poetry editor, not to mention a published poet himself. A pamphlet, Pretending not to sleep, had appeared in 1964 as part of a special edition of The Review, while his debut collection The Visit was published by Faber & Faber in 1970.

When it was revealed that the cultural magazine Encounter, launched in 1953 by the poet Stephen Spender, was being covertly funded by the C.I.A., Spender left in protest, as did other high-ranking officers like the late Frank Kermode, and steps were taken by England’s Arts Council to launch a counter-Encounter. After years of meetings and lunches (presumably to discuss next week’s meetings and lunches) the project ultimately failed to materialize, but a sizable amount of money had been put aside and was, in Hamilton’s words, “just lying there.” Charles Osborne, the Council’s literary director, didn’t object when Hamilton suggested the funds be used to re-launch The Review as a monthly magazine. A year later, in April 1974, the inaugural issue of The New Review appeared, featuring contributions from Robert Lowell, Clive James, Al Alvarez, and Martin Amis, among others.
The magazine, with its glossy pages and design-conscious format, immediately caused a stir. This was the time, as Hamilton explained it, of widespread labor protests and Edward Heath’s three-day work week, and here was a large, baronial litmag priced at 90p an issue. “It did come under a lot of fire on all the waste-of-public money issues — which was bollocks, because public money paid only for about half of any single issue,” Hamilton said. The money was a mixed blessing at best. The Council’s Literature Panel, a committee made up of fellow writers, turned out to be a pharisaical outfit. “The truth is that when you give a bunch of writers any kind of money-muscle, they go slightly mad,” Hamilton wrote in a later essay printed in Granta:
And when you put them on committees that give money to other writers, they go madder still. I can hear their voices now: “Mr Chairman, on a point of order, I feel it my duty to observe…” And this would be some foppish, dreamy-faced poetaster fresh from a three-absinthe lunch. But nearly all of them behaved like this. Wild-eyed anarchic novelists would transmute into prim-lipped accountants. Tremulous lyric poets would rear up like tigers of the bottom line. Book-reviewers who, I knew, lived in daily terror of being rumbled by the Revenue were all at once furrow-browed custodians of public funds.

Of necessity, Hamilton became one of literature’s great hustlers, jingling with money knowhow. “Knowing how many days pass between a final notice and a cut-off, knowing much time you gain with a carefully-phrased ‘WAFDA pdc’… such information is the small change of a life that’s sometimes financed by small change.” When the poet Craig Raine worked as books editor on Fridays, he once met a bailiff on the stairs who asked him if he was Ian Hamilton. Raine took him upstairs to the office and asked Ian Hamilton if he’d seen Ian Hamilton. “No,” Ian Hamilton said, “You just missed him.”

Hounded by debt collectors, pressured by printer’s fees, fearful that the Arts Council would come through on its threats to pull their funding (not to mention more local troubles, such as the mental illness of his first wife and their eventual divorce), Hamilton was ever under intense strain. “He was the only person I knew who was sued by his own solicitor,” Christopher Hitchens recalled. On one occasion his thick, dark hair began to turn white and fall out in clumps. Eventually it grew back again.
In 1999, two years before his untimely death at age 63, the Cargo Press published a festschrift, Another Round at the Pillars: Essays, Poems and Reflections, in which many of Hamilton’s old friends and contributors paid homage to the man who took a chance on their work and half-destroyed himself doing so. In his contribution to the book, Ian McEwan memorably evokes what it was like in the Pillars, amid all the fumes and vapors and drink:
In The Pillars I met “my generation” of writers — male, born in the late forties — and made friendships that will last me a lifetime — among them Amis, Barnes, Raine, Fenton, Reid. Most of us had yet to publish our first books. We read each other with close, gossipy attention. It was a given that there was nowhere as good to place a story or poem as The New Review – at least, until the Amis-Barnes era began at The [New] Statesman. If this was a literary clique, it was remarkably open. I took various friends along who weren’t really writers at all, but Ian treated them as though they were and gave them books to review. Anyone, it seemed, could wander in and get a drink. Junkies came in to shoot up in the lavatories upstairs. If you wandered in too often, you were likely to be given an unpaid job. Mine was at a desk in a corner of the packing room on the second floor. Ian asked me to read the short story slush pile and tell him if there was anything worth his consideration. It took me two weeks to discover that there wasn’t.



McEwan goes on, like practically everyone else who contributed to The New Review, to emphasize the central importance of Hamilton to the magazine. Despite a reputation for being coolly reticent with praise, and devoutly more butch with dispraise (he apparently once told a writer that, if torn into small strips, his piece might serve nicely as cat litter), he was an editor writers were eager to please. He encouraged them to do their best — even if they weren’t getting paid (which they often weren’t). “There was no house style at all, but it had the personality of its editor, who was both hugely enthusiastic and encouraging and capable of scowling sardonically at what he thought was phony,” the writer Jonathan Raban recalls. “Hemingway famously said, ‘The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit-detector,’ and was what Ian provided for us.” Scanning its back catalogues, The New Review’s quality is glaringly obvious: fiction by Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Jim Crace, Jean Rhys, Paul Theroux, and John Cheever; poetry by Tom Paulin, Robert Lowell, Seamus Heaney, and Zbigniew Herbert; essays and reportage by Jonathan Raban, Frank Kermode, John Carey, Mary-Kay Wilmers, Terry Eagleton, A. S. Byatt, and Germaine Greer. There were special features on Scientology, Jaws, and the IRA; entire plays by Harold Pinter and Bertolt Brecht; interviews with Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal. There was a recurring satirical column by Edward Pygge, a fictional name used to poke fun at the Modish London Literary World.

In The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors, a small book published in 1976, Hamilton looked closely at some of the most influential of the 20th century’s little magazines: The Little Review, Poetry, New Verse, The Criterion, Partisan Review, and Horizon. What characterized them were “small resources, small respect for the supposed mysteries of ‘how to run a business’, small appeal outside a very small minority of readers.” It’s hard to shake the sense that Hamilton, whether he is writing about T. S. Eliot and The Criterion or Geoffrey Grigson and New Verse, was also writing about himself and The New Review. He would definitely have sympathized with Eliot’s complaints to John Quinn in a letter of 1923: “I wish to heaven I had never taken up The Criterion… It has been an evergrowing responsibility… a great expense to me and I have not got a penny out of it: there is not enough money to run it and pay me too… I think the work and worry have taken 10 years off my life.” And no doubt he must have been a little inspired by Grigson’s sardonic willingness to make enemies, even of his friends. Just as practically all poet-contributors to New Verse would eventually see their own work savagely debunked in its pages, so Hamilton never shied away from publishing reviews that were critical of the writing of friends or contributors. Before John Carey’s panning of Clive James’ The Metropolitan Critic appeared in The New Review’s pages, Hamilton showed James the typescript over drinks at the Pillars. “In the name of editorial integrity,” James wrote, “he not only didn’t mind making enemies, he didn’t mind hurting his friends either.” James, however, didn’t hold a grudge: his second collection of essays, published five years later, bore the title At the Pillars of Hercules.
“Each magazine needs a new decade,” Hamilton wrote, “and each decade needs a new magazine.” Clearly The New Review was the magazine of the ’70s, and though he believed that the ideal lifespan of a little magazine was 10 years, it only ever made it to five. The Arts Council pulled the plug in 1979 and The New Review collapsed under a ton of debt. Hamilton remained in financial rubble for years to come, though eventually made a living from his journalism and, later, as the author of acclaimed biographies of Robert Lowell (Robert Lowell: A Biography) and J. D. Salinger (Ian Hamilton, being Ian Hamilton, was naturally sued for In Search of J D Salinger — by Salinger himself). He wrote learned and entertaining volumes about the lives of writers and their biographers – Writers in Hollywood 1915-1951 (1990); Keepers of the Flame: Literary Estates and the Rise of Biography (1992); A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (1998); Against Oblivion: Some Lives of the Twentieth-Century Poets (2002) — as well as several volumes of essays and reviews, not to mention two books on Paul Gascoigne, the once-controversial English soccer star. “I think every book I’ve written has some strong autobiographical element in it. That seems to me okay,” he told Dan Jacobson in the London Review of Books shortly before his death.



Nothing was more autobiographical than his poetry, and turning from the wry, self-deprecating voice of his journalism to the spare, somber voice of his verse is something of a shock. His deeply personal subject matter — his father’s illness and early death when Hamilton was just thirteen; his first wife’s mental illness; his divorces and disappointments — are not, like the later poems of Robert Lowell, evoked with all the reticence of a tell-all tabloid spread. Instead, Hamilton’s poems are like eavesdropping on one half of a private conversation. Stripped of personal context, whatever private crisis was there has to be inferred by the reader — Hamilton remains stoically silent. But the emotional intensity, though sparing, is anything but:
I am dumpy, obtruse, old and out of it.
At night, I can feel my hands prowl over me,
Lightly probing at my breasts, my knees,
The folds of my belly,
Now and then pressing and sometimes,
In their hunger, tearing me.
I live alone.
The poetic voice comes as a jolt when compared to the prose, but the two are in no way contradictory. They are contained in each other. In a little analysis of the “none of us likes it” quip that I opened with, the critic James Wood rightly observes that the joke implies a “stoical tragi-comic world…a picture at once funny and sad.” Hamilton was funny in the way of a proverb from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “Excess of sorrow laughs.” His self-deprecating tone is amusing and charming but, like the tip of the iceberg, is sustained by the bulk of private terrors submerged beneath it. In the long interview he gave to Dan Jacobsen in the London Review of Books at the end of his life, the same note is struck again and again. Of The New Review he says: “Looking back, I think I should probably have done it differently, but I didn’t, so there it was. And it still looks pretty okay to me and has some really quite good stuff in it.” When you look at those back issues, pretty okay and quite good are not exactly phrases that leap to mind — nor do they seem to be phrases Hamilton deployed merely out of a sense of false modesty. The New Review, after all, was a result of serial failures, and in the end must have seemed like something of failure to its creator, too. When it folded and he left the magazine racket for good, he went on to occupy an uncertain ground as a sometime-poet and occasional-biographer. There would have been plenty of occasions for the intense self-doubt he admired in Matthew Arnold. In his book on Arnold, published very late in his life, he put a quote of the poet’s at the beginning that he was very fond of:
It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits — and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.



Posterity isn’t usually kind to editors, biographers, critics, or even poets. Hamilton was all four, sometimes by accident, always by virtue of his wit, intelligence and quiet rebelliousness. Still, he very likely saw himself frittered away piecemeal and, if not exactly as a failure, then as less than he imagined himself. It’s fair to say, I think, that he made a career of his many failures: his failure to become a soccer star, his failures in the magazine business, the private failures that fuelled his poetry. He tried, he failed, and then he failed better. At certain moments we may wish to acknowledge the inevitability of this — in writing as in life. Those of us who lack the madcap artistic genius of a Lowell or a Salinger, and whose greatest gift to literature may simply be to serve it, will often feel that we have courted failure. Though he was not a genius or a great artist, Hamilton served literature by setting a great example (The Lowells and the Salingers of this world are hardly exemplary). In a kinder world, his achievements would have yanked him from the penury of posterity. But no matter. I still want to time-warp back to the Pillars, when Hamilton, in the words of his poem “Returning,” was at his best:
Dear friend, I wish you could have seen
This place when it was at its best,
When I was,
But it isn’t far. It isn’t far. Come with me.

By MORTEN HØI JENSEN, June 7, 2012
Source:www.themillions.com

Dimitris Dimitriadis ou Le désir du texte

" Georges Bataille est un écrivain ": ainsi Dimitris Dimitriadis présentait-il G. Bataille au public grec dans son introduction de l'Histoire de l'œil, publié chez Agra en 1980. La formule se suffit à elle même. Comme si l'emploi du moindre qualificatif apporterait une précision inutile, superflue. La sobriété de ce seul mot – " écrivain " – exprime tout à la fois la vocation, la recherche, la raison et la manière d'être. Et Dimitriadis ajoute: " Etre un écrivain détermine tout pour lui et pour nous. Le besoin de la parole est celui qui le guide. Et ce besoin le mène, dès le début, au centre de l'être humain et à la manière de décrypter son secret inaccessible "

Eurozine - Dimitra Kondylaki

Arrowhead

Michael Boyd
WEDGEseries 'Arrowhead' slatted lounge chair, 2011
Unfinished Malaysian Mangaris Mahogany
26 1/2 x 21 x 26 1/2 inches

TV Morrinho - Fico Assim Sem Você

Video clipe da versão remix da música "Fico Assim Sem Você", com interpretação de Adriana Calcanhoto, inspirado em Romeu e Julieta, de Shakespeare.

The Magic Circle

Entering this exhibition is like walking into somebody’s house, a feeling that is expertly cultivated in Loraini Alimantiri and Christoforos Marinos’s curatorial ode to Greek modernism. Made by fifty Greek artists (as well as three philhellenes), 120 works spanning the entire twentieth century and beyond inhabit—along with objects, furniture, books, plants, and posters—a small, modernist house and studio that acts as a historical and conceptual frame. Designed by an associate of Le Corbusier, Aristomenis Provelenghios, this house has served as a home and work space for various trailblazers, beginning in 1957 when it was constructed as a studio for sculptor Jeanne Spiteris-Veropoulou. For those associated with the building whose works are also on view in the exhibition, like ex-tenant Diohandi, “The Magic Circle” is both a homecoming and a time warp. Some of the names of these former residents are documented in a book (on the living room bookshelf) from which this exhibition takes its title. The volume contains reviews by Alekos Drakos of most of the solo and group shows featuring Greek artists that took place in Athens from 1961 to 1964.
Through this community of objects, the historical and the contemporary meet in a celebratory gathering of sorts, evident in the upstairs salon, where ceramicist Ira Triantafyllides’s two malformed animal sculptures from 1960–70 come alive juxtaposed against Tula Plumi’s 2010 ceramic, almost feline form. Nearby, Kostas Roussakis’s 2012 wooden coffee table meets Nikos Tranos’s 1997 cardboard sofa to create a space in which the many stories surrounding this enchanting show might be shared—like when, four days before the opening, octogenarian artist Michalis Katzourakis, so taken by the curatorial concept, hand-delivered a frying pan containing a glass-shard-and-resin omelette for the kitchen, to supplement his works already installed in the office and bathroom. It’s stories like these that make this exhibition feel somehow familiar, like a home worth spending time in.

Text by Stephanie Bailey
Source: Artforum.com
Loraini Alimantiri Gazonrouze, 
Athens

March 10–June 2

Earth Flag

Norman LaLiberte, John McConnell, Earth flag, 1969
R.Buckminster Fuller papers, Stanford University Libraries

woman-woman

Do you have any money?
Can you leave me here?

Car is passing
Dog is laughing
Cat is mumbling cat’s alphabet

She is out of the bed she walks at the kitchen naked.
She puts water in a glass
Her nakedness is thin. Contrast light blocked on white cotton curtains.
She leans on the table to write a note.

“I woke up early
and here is your credit card “

the credit card is on the table

There are oranges in the fridge, half bottle of milk, two slices of bread and a cereal bar. Eat something you look weak and desperate and the color of your lips is grey even when you’re sleeping


I made coffee, have some

Can you hold on?

I am begging for a powerful golden force when you are asking me to still love you. Death is around the corner. Every time I pass this damn bridge I check if there is light in your apartment. I can even see the mirror hanging on the wall at the corridor’s side.

Georgia Sagri, Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Source: http://www.georgiasagri.blogspot.com

The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area

The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and though he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas spawned many local experiments in the realms of technology, engineering, and sustainability—some more successful than others. The Whole Earth Catalog, The North Face, Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne, and Calfiornia Governor Jerry Brown have all cited Fuller as a key influence on several projects.
"Late in his life Fuller selected 13 designs for which he obtained U.S. patents and featured them in a portfolio called Inventions: Twelve Around One, to be marketed to art collectors," notes SFMOMA Acting Department Head/Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, who organized the presentation. "In learning more about Fuller, I've come to realize that the works in the portfolio shouldn't be considered designs. I prefer to view them as opportunities to rethink a more comprehensive and efficient way of living. In hindsight, it's probably fortunate that none of these projects were commercially successful, as it could have distracted from Fuller's idealism. This exhibition attempts to situate him as visionary and to present his revolutionary world view."
The Utopian Impulse opens by introducing Fuller, primarily with prints from the Inventions: Twelve Around One portfolio (1981), as well as several key works on loan from the R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University. The gallery includes projects dating from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s paired with his most well-known ideas from the portfolio, such as the 4D House (1928), a hexagonal autonomous dwelling meant to be optimally resource efficient and mass producible from factory-made kits that could be easily shipped anywhere and quickly assembled on site. Extending this optimization to transportation, Fuller's ultra-light three-wheeled Dymaxion Car (1933) featured unprecedented fuel efficiency and an aerodynamic, teardrop shape, which was determined in collaboration with boat designer Sterling Burgess. While these projects held promise in efficiency, fabrication techniques available at the time could not produce a viable design for mass production.
The exhibition also presents several of Fuller's big-picture ideas, including his World Game project, which he initiated in 1965. Conceived as a data-visualization system meant to facilitate global approaches in solving the world's problems, Fuller intended the piece to "make the world work, for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."
The other half of the presentation looks at Bay Area endeavors inspired by Fuller's thinking, particularly those that employ his approach of commingling technology, ecology, and social responsibility to improve living systems. For instance, in the early 1970s Fuller's conceptions of simple, mobile dwellings emerged in the philosophies of several East Bay companies that were developing outdoor gear to coincide with the back-to-the-earth movement. Many tent designers had learned about Fuller's concept of "tensegrity," a made-up word intended to mean tension plus integrity. The North Face released the first "tensegrity" tent in 1976, called the Oval Intention, which is now credited with changing contemporary tent design.
Nodding to Fuller as a kindred spirit in large-scale change through storytelling and performative marketing, environmental activist David de Rothschild launched the Plastiki sailboat—a catamaran made entirely of recycled materials and kept afloat by some 12,500 plastic water bottles—and sailed it from San Francisco to Australia in 2010 as an awareness campaign for less waste and more recycling. Fuller's notion of social betterment through greater access to information weaves through projects including Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (1968–1972), which attempted to list all things needed for a self-sustainable lifestyle; and architect Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code initiative, which uses geospatial analysis to collect real-time data on health, environmental, and crime activities in San Francisco's publicly owned unused spaces and then proposes temporary solutions for dire conditions.
As a commission for this presentation, San Francisco–based documentary filmmaker Sam Green will create a documentary on several projects related to Fuller and the Bay Area by researching Fuller's self-curated archive known as the Dymaxion Chronofile. The film will be presented in the galleries on a wall sculpture designed by Obscura Digital, a local firm that creates custom installations for media presentations.
While some projects in the exhibition reference Fuller directly, others, like Morphosis's design for San Francisco's Federal Building, have a more distant relationship to Fuller while still maintaining his ethos of "comprehensive design," which advocates for anticipatory design informed by intelligence from several sectors.
 "Fuller's eccentric views were informed by speculating on future technologies, not past history," says Fletcher. "Since he worked outside of business, academic, and scientific norms, he never quite fit in. Perhaps it was frustrating for him or maybe it was a calculated elusiveness. Either way, the view of Fuller as an outsider has emerged as an emblem for 'thinking differently,' which is a starting point for many Bay Area initiatives."

March 31 through July 29, 2012, The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)
Source: http://www.sfmoma.org

Ο μεταμοντερνισμός των αναλφαβήτων

Οταν ο Οργουελ απέδιδε την αντίληψη ότι «αυτός που ελέγχει το παρελθόν ελέγχει το μέλλον και αυτός που ελέγχει το παρόν ελέγχει το παρελθόν» στον «Μεγάλο Αδελφό» και στον ολοκληρωτισμό του, το μυθιστόρημα του Μπόρχες «Πιερ Μενάρ, ο συγγραφέας του Δον Κιχώτη» είχε ήδη αρχίσει να εκκολάπτει μιαν ανάλογη αντίληψη, την οποία ανέπτυξε ο μεταμοντερνισμός. Η κρίσιμη διαφορά, είναι πως για το καθεστώς στο οποίο παρέπεμπε ο Οργουελ «το παρελθόν» ανακαθοριζόταν ώστε να δικαιώνει μια τυραννική εξουσία, ενώ για τους μεταμοντέρνους σε εξουσιαστή αναδεικνύεται ο κάθε αναγνώστης, ο οποίος ξαναγράφει στη συνείδησή του τα όσα παραθέτει το κείμενο, ανάλογα με τις κοσμοαντιλήψεις και τις επιδράσεις που έχει δεχθεί από άλλα διαβάσματά του, και γίνεται έτσι ο νέος συγγραφέας του ίδιου κειμένου.

Μολονότι είναι καταφανές πως άλλο πράγμα ο «Μεγάλος Αδελφός» και η δικαίωση κάθε αιμοσταγούς θηριωδίας λαών, κι εντελώς άλλο ο μεταμοντερνισμός και η δικαίωση κάθε αυθαίρετης ερμηνείας κειμένων, οι τελευταίες εκλογές δείχνουν ότι για σημαντικά ποσοστά Ελλήνων ψηφοφόρων αυτές οι διαφορές χάθηκαν κάπου ανάμεσα στο ανεπαίσθητο και το ανεπαίσχυντο. Κάποιοι μοιάζει να διάβασαν τον Μαρξ σαν τον θεωρητικό των «jacqueries» (των μεγάλων αγροτικών εξεγέρσεων στη Γαλλία του 14ου αιώνα) και ζητούν, συνεπώς, μια αριστερή απολυταρχία στη θέση της Δεξιάς. Χωρίς την παραμικρή έφεση αποδοχής ισορροπιών, που θα επέτρεπαν να συνυπάρχουμε ως κοινωνία. Και κάποιοι άλλοι, πολύ χειρότερα, μοιάζει να ανέμειξαν τον Χίτλερ με τον συμπαθή ηθοποιό Ρόμπερτ Καρλάιλ, ο οποίος ενσάρκωνε τον δικτάτορα στην ταινία «Η ανατολή του Κακού». Λίγο Γερμανία του 1933-45 και λίγο Χόλιγουντ 2003, λίγο στρατιωτική πειθαρχία και λίγο χουλιγκανισμός, λίγο body building και πολλή ξενοφοβία, και ιδού η ψήφος στη Χρυσή Αυγή. Ομοίως: λίγο Ρωσία του 1917-53 και λίγο Κούβα 1963, λίγο αναρχία και λίγο προσκοπισμός, λίγο διαλεκτική και πολλή άγνοια, και ιδού η ψήφος στον ΣΥΡΙΖΑ. Εναν ΣΥΡΙΖΑ που, ενώ βδελύσσεται (δικαίως) τον δικομματισμό, σκοτώνεται να εκλιπαρεί σε συγκυβέρνηση ένα κόμμα που υποστηρίζει τον σταλινικό ολοκληρωτισμό. Για να εφαρμόσουν τι ακριβώς από κοινού; Τη δικτατορία του προλεταριάτου;

Εάν ο Στάλιν είναι «ο ηγέτης που πέτυχε τη μετάβαση από την καπιταλιστική οικονομία στη σοσιαλιστική», όπως κατέληξε το ΚΚΕ σε πρόσφατο συνέδριό του, γιατί ο Χίτλερ να μην είναι ο ηγέτης που έδειξε πώς χαράσσονται ευθείς αυτοκινητόδρομοι; Το ότι στην αφετηρία αυτού που κατέληξε στον σταλινισμό βρίσκονταν τα ιδεώδη του ουμανισμού, ενώ τον ναζισμό τον εμπνέει η αμιγής κτηνωδία, δεν εμπόδισε την πλήρη εξομοίωση σταλινισμού-ναζισμού στα Γκούλαγκ και στα κρεματόρια. Για να συνδράμεις τους αδικημένους ενός συστήματος, πρέπει πρώτα να λογαριάσεις μήπως υπάρχουν ανάμεσά τους και πλήθη απατεώνων, που μέχρι πρόσφατα επωφελούνταν από αυτό το σύστημα. Κι αν οι εξ αστών προερχόμενοι απατεώνες είναι απολύτως καταδικαστέοι, ενώ οι εκ προλεταρίων προερχόμενοι αθωώνονται (επειδή «νόμος είναι το δίκιο του εργάτη»), οι ταξικές διαφορές αποκτούν χροιά φυλετικών διαφορών και η εξομοίωση σταλινισμού-ναζισμού γίνεται ακόμα πιο πλήρης. Εκτός αν το θέμα δεν είναι να περιοριστούν οι μηχανισμοί που γεννούν την αδικία, μα να παρασχεθεί η χαρά της αντεκδίκησης στον λαό κι ευκαιρίες πλουτισμού σε μαυραγορίτες. Μόνο που αυτό δεν λέγεται πρόοδος της κοινωνικής δικαιοσύνης, λέγεται βεντέτα. Να προτιμάς και να εύχεσαι τον Μεγάλο Κατακλυσμό, για να μη συμβιβαστείς με τις αμφισημίες μιας σταδιακής προόδου σε έναν εξαιρετικά πολύπλοκο κόσμο, σε φέρνει πιο κοντά στον μεσσιανισμό, παρά στον μαρξισμό. Κι ακόμη πιο κοντά στις απόψεις του Καρλ Σμιτ, του λεγόμενου «νομικού του Γ΄ Ράιχ», που ως ισχυρότερο δεσμό στη συγκρότηση μιας κοινωνίας θεωρούσε το πώς αυτή ορίζει τους εχθρούς της. Το επικίνδυνο «αμάρτημα της διπλής σκέψης» –το να αποδέχεσαι ότι μπορεί, εν μέρει, να έχει δίκαιο και ο αντίπαλός σου– ήταν κάτι για το οποίο τιμωρούνταν οι αντίπαλοι του «Μεγάλου Αδελφού» στο «1984».

Η Αριστερά ή είναι δημοκρατική ή δεν είναι Αριστερά. Οσο για τα ατελείωτα παιχνίδια ερμηνειών και παρερμηνειών, μπορούν να παίζονται επ’ άπειρον στον κόσμο της τέχνης. Στον κόσμο της πολιτικής, όμως, οι παρερμηνείες κοστίζουν σε πραγματικούς ανθρώπους – όχι σε λογοτεχνικούς ήρωες.

Πέτρος Μαρτινίδης
http://news.kathimerini.gr

Le Plaisir

Magritte, Jeune fille mangeant un oiseau, 1927, Oil on canvas.
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany.