“Somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I said, we aren’t going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.”
…try keeping tabs on people who are already living there:
Life among our insistent MAGA fascists is made almost palatable by the caprices of human immanence. Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson, Doctorow—their antennae have long been busy registering what’s coming, even if ours have not, at least not yet. Here’s a revelation from Sterling’s Holy Fire that has lately added to the strain on my already overworked engines of impermeability:
Maya blinked. “Men and women just think differently, that’s all.” “Oh, that’s so stupid! ‘Anatomy is destiny.’ That’s all gone now, you understand? Anatomy is industry now!”
Okay, Zuckermuskians, top that if you can. We see you. Do you see us?
Gertrude Stein was a steward of the English language as well as its first modern sorcerer. To this day, fifty years after I first read her Lectures in America, I’m still amazed by how skillfully she managed to dissolve the accepted frameworks of literacy without simultaneously depriving literacy itself of either its traditional subtlety or its depth. In the twenty-first century, as we’re beginning to believe that the written word lacks the ease of use that terminal stage capitalism and its media torrents demand, we look to computers to do the work of creating, disseminating, sorting and interpreting the flood of content for us. That’s a mistake, possibly a catastrophic one. If you want to know why, read Gertrude Stein, the only effective antidote I know of to the Newspeak now being forced on us by the shiny barbarisms of our new century.
Whatever their other talents, the best of us have always had one thing in common: a fierce, unyielding clarity about what it means to be a human being. Here, in this short clip of James Baldwin speaking informally, is the most succinct expression of that clarity I’ve ever encountered. There’s no cant here, no unspoken agenda, no recrimination. This is as naked, as vulnerable, and yet as implacable an expression of our true responsibilities to one another as it’s possible for a single voice to utter. James Baldwin honors us all, while reminding us all what little comfort we can demand for doing the right thing. There’s far more on display here than a single talented person’s eloquence. We’d do well to heed it.
This is more like it, Governor Newsom. Keep it up. If responsible government officials do their part, we citizens will do ours. Our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor—we all know the drill.
We’re a quarter of a century into our new millennium. The Germans are eating less sausage, the French are drinking less wine, the Russians are trying to reverse-engineer 1991, and in the United States, our self regard has been abruptly terminated by an opera buffa Mussolini with a mouth like a guppy, and a face dipped in what looks like orange finger-paint. (Mussolini was an opera buffa character himself, of course, but the Italians invented opera, and they’ll always be better at it than anyone else.)
Despite what our newly-minted neofascist pundits are screaming at us these days, it isn’t time to re-think our principles, especially not at the behest of people who openly despise both thinking and principles. We already know what we need to know, namely that while we may not outlast them, our principles most definitely will. The rest is just noise.
Post-modern architecture comes to the campus—from a previous incarnation on the Web
Anywhere you look in the Nineties, you’ll find the whimsies of Post-Modernism grinning back at you. Every mall seems to evoke the Forum Romanum, every apartment block the baths of Caracalla.
It’s a clever sort of classicism, but not a rich one. With little money available in modern times for marble, let alone for craftsmen willing to spend their lives chipping away at acanthus leaves, the glory of imperial Rome is only hinted at.
Which, I gather, is exactly the intent. Post-Modern architects claim no allegiance to a particular style; their stated passion is to reintroduce the decorative element into architectural design, to abandon the idea of the city as a “machine for living” in favor of something that won’t give us all nightmares.
Ironic quotations from the past would nevertheless seem to be an essential element of their designs; without them the architect would be vulnerable to the charge of bad decoration, or worse still, of dishonesty. (Stone is stone. Prestressed concrete isn’t. “Form follows function,” etc.) By impudently placing a column where no column could possibly be, Philip Johnson can justifiably claim to be as candid as Van der Rohe about the distinction between the structural and the “merely” decorative.
In any event, the products of more than ten years of Post-Modern construction are now all around us, and the surprising thing is that many of them actually seem to work pretty well.
On the University of California campus where I earn my living, most of the recent buildings are Post-Modern. With their porticos and exterior staircases, their friezes of semi-engaged columns or sunken windows set into beveled architraves, they resemble — at least from a distance — the modest public buildings of a state capital in the Midwest.
On closer inspection, the classical illusion is tempered by the realization that the columns are shells over steel beams, the architraves stucco over styrofoam; that the rooftops above the tiled eaves are burdened with roaring machinery and impossibly large exhaust funnels.
Nevertheless, with their exterior walls painted in shades of pink, sienna, and pale gray-green to match the eucalyptus trees which surround them, their staircases faced in polychrome Mediterranean tile, these pseudo-Roman exercises seem much more restful, more human, than the angular modernist monstrosities from the Sixties which stand beside them.
We’re told that imperial Rome was also painted, that brick and tile were as much a feature of its public facades as marble. Crossing the grass quadrangle between “Physical Sciences North” and “Physical Sciences South,” I’d like to think so. It would help explain why I can imagine men in togas standing under these porticos, or coming down these staircases, something which I could never imagine on the steps of the grand white palaces of Washington.
The illusion of less complicated times lingers for a moment, then I realize that if this were truly Rome, there’d be a long row of monuments to Republican senators along the edge of quadrangle, or perhaps an equally long row of crucified Christians. That, I suspect, would constitute more irony than the architect intended, or the public relations office on our campus would be willing to endure.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
