I slept in today. Probably not a good idea now, but at 6 AM I just did not feel like doing anything. Certainly, not anything that took energy.
Now at 10:20, having been doing for about 2 hours, and thinking more rain may be doming, it may be that I was wrong, even if I feel like I accomplished something. The laundry needs to be done, and I will need to walk over to the laundromat. Not likely if it rains.
Last night, we had a very violent thunderstorm pass through Muncie. The lights dimmed here.
I am going to run and gun with this morning's crop. At the moment, it is like twilight here.
More sex please, we’re bookish: the rise of the x-rated novel (The Guardian) has interesting ideas. I am neither a fan of identity politics nor porn (probably the greatest irony of my life since 2009). Long ago I read something about The Kama Sutra and Americans, along the lines that Americans think of sex as mechanics; The Kama Sutra not being an instruction manual causes confusion with Americans; and that sex is mechanics reinforced a prejudice against writing about it that I picked up from Gore Vidal. I have never understood the interest in watching porn flicks, any more than I want to watch a video on rebuilding a car engine. Sex is good for farce (the mechanics fall apart) or tragedy (the after effects, the side effects, forgotten in the midst of performing the mysterious mechanics). Passion is a wholly different thing; therein, I understand to be the root of transcendence sought through the mechanics.
Sex remains at the centre of much of the best fiction, and we need powerful fictions to show us what sex is or can become. This is where realism comes up against something stranger, and body and consciousness undo and affirm each other, because it can be at once so ordinary, and so transcendent.
Read the whole essay, it is a bit long, as Lara Feigel surveys the books that tackle the subject.
Also, I found a way to understand D. H. Lawrence:
To surrender individuality and accept the dissolution of the self, to lose sight of who is in control – these possibilities have preoccupied erotic writers since the early 20th century, when sex first became representable in literary fiction. Back then there was DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, staking the redemption of humanity on sexual transformation. In Lawrence’s wake came Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Georges Bataille – all about abjection and breaking taboos.....
‘Coupledom is very oppressing’: Swedish author Gun-Britt Sundström on the revival of her cult anti-marriage novel (The Guardian) has several interesting points - some I came from reading the first essay alongside of this interview - but also what we can learn from foreign writers. I do not know of any American novel who took this is as its theme:
The novel is often described as a “feminist classic”, which Sundström resists – the implication being that any political objective undermines its integrity as a novel. “Feminist books ordinarily end with a happy divorce. And this doesn’t.” Instead, Engagement is a dense, thoughtful book that takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem and what Sundström calls, “the moral issue; the question of can you treat another person this way, the way Martina [treats Gustav]? At the end, she herself comes to the conclusion that you can’t, it isn’t right. She can’t go on exploiting him, because he’s helplessly in love with her.” The book is less about the experience of loving someone than about being the object of love, and given current discussions around young women “decentring men” and “heteropessimism”, it is a startlingly modern novel.
I admit that kind of relationship is beyond my experience. The interviewee describes the current generation of Swedes as less free than was her generation; I think this is true of Americans, too.
Speaking of keeping up with foreign writers, one of my favorites has a new novel: Death and the Gardener by Georgi Gospodinov review – how it feels to lose a father (The Guardian)
There are some cliches, and the luxurious jetsetting of the narrator grows tiresome, but the occasional slip is easily forgiven in such a warm and melancholic writer – the kind who also remarks, “I wonder whether flowers aren’t covert assistants to the dead who lie beneath them, observing the world through the periscope of their stems”. The book is endlessly quotable, and the narrator’s travel bragging is put into an empathetic context by the lack of travel allowed to Bulgarians under the Soviet regime. He tells us of his father’s one trip abroad to Finland, a reward from his agricultural collective for good work. The amount that Bulgarians are allowed to spend there is limited by the Communist party. Another man on the trip smuggles extra spending money, hiding it in hand-rolled cigarettes. In a fit of excitement over finally getting to travel, he accidentally smokes it.
The other side of the hill (Engelsberg ideas) is about military intelligence, but this seems worth repeating - and for you to think about - as having a more general, existential use.
The other, commonly understood meaning of the word intelligence is that of general, cognitive problem-solving skills. To say that someone is highly intelligent is a mark of approbation and distinction, and is a quality to be found in the best leaders and commanders in all fields of human endeavour. What all leaders are consistently attempting to do is to apply intelligence, as a cognitive skill, to ‘intelligence’ – that timely and accurate, contextualised knowledge which drives informed decision-making. As this process has become more complicated and complex, so the development of military intelligence as both a branch of the armed forces and a sophisticated military process in itself, has grown. It has become a vital, resource-intensive, military discipline that drives information collection, and then delivers considered, informed analysis, in order to provide the guidance and direction that assists commanders in their decision-making. It is intelligence that drives what is often referred to as the ‘decision-action cycle’, whereby information is turned into situational awareness that in turn allows a commander to choose a course of action from several possible options, and to give clear orders for his forces to execute.
Russia's long war with the maritime powers (Engelsberg ideas) also has some points worth considering.
In geographical terms, Russia’s access to the world ocean has always been compromised by maritime chokepoints (and polar ice), which leave the great bulk of its export economy, bulky products relying on shipping, or pipelines exposed to maritime interdiction, economic blockades based on international law, delivered by superior naval forces. Alfred Thayer Mahan explored this strategy through the British experience between 1660 and 1815, and it was adopted as the League of Nations’ preferred instrument to coerce aggressors in 1919. The inability of the League to execute it should not obscure the inherent power of the method.
***
Today, Russian economic activity still relies on access to the world ocean, by ship or pipeline, through two landlocked seas and an icebound northern coast. Selling oil, gas and grain at low rates may support Russian diplomacy, and maintain cash flow, but this is not a viable long-term option. Long wars, like the Anglo-Russian conflict of 1807-11, tend to favour maritime economic actors over those seeking a military solution on land – if they have the political will to persist. Turning the economic screw by legal means offers a non-kinetic means of exerting significant pressure – and detaching some of its more pliable friends.
Andrew Lambert's essay leaves China alone, while I think the same applies to China. It is why we should be so wary of China building up its fleet.
What Trump and MAGA want to tear down has far more value for us, if you think otherwise, then please read Alternative international orders: a modern Holy Alliance for the twenty-first century (Engelsberg ideas). Ask yourself what international order will benefit America and its citizens?
“Politics Is Conflictual”: An Interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (The Drift) raises a whole of points, but until now I had never heard of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. He raised a thought and a fear I have had for many years now: what happens when the rest of the world sees the United States as its enemy?
Coordinating any kind of federal or international response to climate change now feels like a pipe dream. Do you see any reason to hope? Where do you think that we — not only in the United States but around the world — should be directing our energies?
I see one big reason for hope. I’ve started being less shy about using that word these days. I don’t know why people are so bent out of shape about hope. Hope is great. One bright spot is that it seems as though the recession of the U.S. from global centrality has made certain kinds of internationalism more likely to succeed. Maybe most notably from the climate perspective, the International Maritime Organization passed essentially the first global carbon tax just days after the U.S. pulled out of it. I suspect it won’t be the last victory of this sort. The U.S., even by the standards of the right, is particularly intransigent under the present circumstances. It may just leave the rest of the world actually able to coordinate on what space there is for overlapping consensus on climate change. The difficult thing to explain has always been how we weren’t able to move from interest convergence to something at least approaching global cooperation, given that we all do have just the one planet. As much as we might fuss about the details, four degrees Celsius of warming will be bad for everyone. The U.S. has been a uniquely toxic actor in that space, and the isolationist tendencies of the present administration might actually work to the global advantage in the long view — if, and only if, we prevent Trump from pursuing wars and territorial expansion and global interference, like militarily occupying the Panama Canal and claiming Greenland as a colonial prize and disrupting military alliances that help forestall wars. The end result of that kind of destabilization will not be global cooperation. We can only solidify the carbon tax wins in the long term by defeating this administration. But if we do, then we might be able to make those short-term gains in climate politics permanent, and that would be good for the planet and everyone on it.
After World War II, much of the left opposed aspects of the Marshall Plan and American programs for distributing aid abroad. Now, as our foreign aid apparatus is dismantled, is there an opportunity to imagine an alternative to the system that developed? In other words, do you think the decimation of the post-1945 international order creates any productive openings?
The disintegration of the post-1945 order communicates effectively, in terms that state managers understand, the need for the kind of multilateral cooperation that was originally envisioned by Pan-Africanists and Third Worldists, the kind that’s currently being championed by groups like the Progressive International, which is calling for states in the Global South to form blocs around resource management. If, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and similar states decided to organize around the mineral resources they have, could they use that leverage over the global economic system to chart out a fairer, more equitable path of development? Maybe. Just as we were talking about on the domestic front, and just as we were talking about in terms of woke capitalism versus apartheid capitalism, the space opening up for something new is also the space opening up for something worse. The question will be: which version of a new order — or new orders, plural — will win resources and people most quickly and most effectively? And that is a question we have to answer with our organizing.
Trump's America First idea is actually screw everybody else. Unlike his female conquests, other countries will not be quietly screwed.
‘The American Dream is a farce’: US readers on the financial stress delaying milestones (The Guardian) has something in common with “Politics Is Conflictual”. From the latter:
You’ve written about the social consequences of NAFTA. As we weather Trump’s tariffs and other economic disruptions, what social costs do you see coming alongside the financial and economic ones?
Regardless of the specifics — which are increasingly hard to calculate or even make guesses about because of the lack of commitment of the current administration to the things that it says — I can imagine both consumer and investor confidence cratering in the U.S. Downstream of that are a lot of bad things, economically speaking, but I imagine inequality will increase as a result, because there will likely be higher prices for many goods. There will be more uncertainty about the economic future, and that generally tends to tilt things in the direction of the people who are able to save and moderate their decision-making. I think people will feel a lot more vulnerable to the people around them, and a lot more vulnerable in personal relationships. People will leave bad relationships less often. People will leave parts of the country that are bad for them, or people like them, less often. I think you’re going to see a lot of cultural conservatism in the sense of people living less exploratory lives, taking fewer chances, and resigning themselves to levels of abuse and worse working conditions than they might have otherwise. And I think this is the design. Those kinds of interpersonal vulnerabilities, even more than the economic benefits of selling our Social Security numbers to Russia or whatever, is the kind of domination the people in our government crave.
Now, from The Guardian:
High home prices don’t just affect millennial buyers. William Pollard Jr, 71, said he and his wife have been wanting to move out of Florida to live closer to family, but prices have been too high to buy a new home.
“With the stock and bond markets bouncing everywhere, we cannot put together an account to buy a house elsewhere. The markets need to be stable, so we can build more wealth,” Pollard said. “I am very frustrated at having to put a major goal on hold for who knows how long … I am getting no younger. We want to live the rest of our years near family and friends.”
Looks like budgets cuts are disrupting Indiana history, too: Local history may be lost due to state budget cuts (Mirror Indy),
But, due to state and federal budget cuts, including 16 layoffs at the Indiana State Library, some local historians say residents could see fewer of these markers around the city and state. And that means important stories will go untold, Bates said.
“The damage is going to be a lot more costly. What I mean by that is people don’t know these historical narratives,” Bates said. “So without those markers, stories like (John Tucker) would not get told. And maybe that’s their point, is that they don’t want these stories being told.”
History, literature, poetry, the art of novel writing coming together in one interview:
Jung's map of the soul (Engelsberg ideas) is probably too slight for what I wanted - an understanding of Jung - but this contains something that will tickle my imagination:
In his book Man and His Symbols, Jung wrote, ‘as scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized’. He explained: ‘Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.’
Survival food:
Lunch is finished. I should walk down to the convenience store. I will rest instead.
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