Bargain-Basement Baudelaire

'Katrina Time' Greg Grandin reviews ' Zeitoun ' by Dave Eggers Penguin, 368 pp, ISBN 0 14 104681 3

2011-01-09T12:37:00.000-08:00

In early September 2005, a week after Hurricane Katrina, the police and National Guard arrested Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who worked in New Orleans as a building contractor and landlord. Zeitoun was seized on his own property; the unidentified officers refused to tell him why he’d been arrested. They took him to Union Terminal, a train and bus station that had been hastily converted into a mini supermax jail, where he was processed in the passenger lobby, below a neglected cubist fresco, a four-wall epic that gives a concentrated version in violent oranges and reds of Louisiana’s history, including the Spanish conquest of the Mississippi Valley, the torture of Native Americans, the chattel slavery that built New Orleans, the nightriders of the Ku Klux Klan, oil rigs, wars and mass graves. The final panel, painted by Conrad Albrizio in 1954, depicts commerce, science and law freeing Louisiana from its past, with reason and order coming to reign. Below the fresco, Zeitoun was strip-searched and accused by heavily armed soldiers of being a member of al-Qaida and the Taliban. He was then put in a cage in the parking lot. Transferred to an isolated prison and placed in a wing filled with those arrested in the aftermath of Katrina, Zeitoun was eventually told that he was being charged with petty larceny. A judge set bail at $75,000, about a hundred times more than the standard for such an infraction, but Zeitoun still wasn’t allowed to make a phone call. ‘Why set bail when I can’t tell anyone I’m in prison?’ he asked. It was nearly a month after Katrina before his wife, Kathy, who had fled the storm with their four children, found out that he was alive. Her husband was finally granted a public hearing, but when she asked where it would be held, a court official told her this was ‘privileged information’. The hearing was then cancelled, Zeitoun was freed on bail and the case eventually dropped.

Prisoners who went through similar ordeals coined the phrase ‘Katrina Time’ to describe the period after the flood when due process went the way of the levees. The brigadier general in charge of Louisiana’s National Guard described his mission in martial, racial terms: New Orleans, he said, was ‘going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control.’ The police and the military, as well as some civilian politicians, began to call the mostly poor and black stay-behinds ‘insurgents’, murderously over-reacting to false or vague reports of officers being ‘under fire’. Among those gunned down was a severely mentally disabled man called Ronald Madison: police shot the unarmed African-American in the back, kicking him as he died. The police also killed 17-year-old James Brissette and wounded four of his companions as they crossed a bridge looking for food. They too were black and were not carrying weapons. As many as 8000 people were arrested, including a Houston sanitation worker who was there to help with the clean-up and a local fireman: both were arrested for looting, the first when walking from his hotel to his truck, in uniform, carrying the keys to the truck and identification; the second in his own yard. Thousands were corralled for days in an open-air football stadium, forced to scramble for sandwiches thrown over the fence and to sleep on the marshy grass. When one man arrived at Union Terminal to protest about a beating he had received from police who had broken into his home, he was arrested. Zeitoun was released after 22 days but others languished for nearly a year.

The Bush administration’s response to Katrina was as brutal and badly botched as its invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet in this spare, harrowing account of one family’s experience of Katrina Time, Dave Eggers does more than just capture the moment when America’s wars came home. Over the last few years, he has shed the notice-me virtuosity of his early writing, and dedicated much of his time to working with the disenfranchised, incarcerated and uprooted: he has established a national literacy and writing programme, published interviews with exonerated death-row inmates and with Sudanese refugees and collaborated with one Sudanese refugee on an embroidered ‘autobiography’, What Is the What. Zeitoun was written with the participation of Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun, along with their friends and family. Katrina Time can seem like a metaphor for Eggers’s method here, with its compression of history and geography – not unlike Albrizio’s mural – into a single moment, stripped of exegesis and moralistic excess, encapsulating the world not just as it is but as it could be at its best.

The eighth of 13 children, Abdulrahman Zeitoun was born on Arwad Island, just off the Syrian coast, and brought up in Jableh. Over the centuries, occupation by successive empires and peripatetic peoples – the Phoenicians and Greeks, the Persians and Turks, the French and British – had created a dense mixture of food, music, art, religion, folklore and language in the area, leavened by a seafaring and mercantile cosmopolitanism; Eggers unobtrusively draws out the similarities between where Zeitoun started and where he wound up. Zeitoun’s father was a sailor, as were many of his brothers. He left home while still a teenager and spent a decade at sea, as a fisherman, crewman and engineer, before landing in 1994 in New Orleans, where he eventually established his own painting and contracting business. New Orleans’s moss-trimmed wooden buildings were different from the dusty mud-brick houses of his youth, yet Zeitoun appreciated the ‘wilful, wildly romantic attention to beauty – crumbling and fading beauty needing constant attention’. His business expanded and he eventually became something approaching a memory-keeper, a newcomer more worshipful of the city’s heritage than many of its natives. As a contractor, he was meticulous, preferring whenever possible to rescue and restore rather than to tear down and build new.

His company was successful largely because of his discipline and focus. He was, according to his wife, ‘one of those inexplicably solid, self-sufficient and never-needy men who got by on air and water, impervious to injury or disease’. But he also had a bit of luck. When he started his business he designed a logo that included a paint roller resting at the bottom of a rainbow, recognisable to many, but not to Kathy or Zeitoun, as the flag of the gay rights movement. He lost a few clients as a result but also attracted gay couples, owners of some of New Orleans’s most gloriously fragile houses. When they first became aware of the connotations of the rainbow, Kathy thought perhaps they should change the logo. Zeitoun laughed. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘We’re a Muslim couple running a painting company in Louisiana. Not such a good idea to turn away clients.’ Besides, ‘anyone who had a problem with rainbows, he said, would surely have trouble with Islam.’ By the time Katrina struck, his business was thriving, he had a wife, four children, clients and friends seemingly on every block, six properties and three times as many tenants.

Zeitoun was from a family that had survived many storms. His father was once thrown from a ship’s mast by a ‘black and tortuous’ gale, floating for days on a barrel in the Mediterranean before being washed ashore. So with Katrina bearing down and his and his clients’ property to watch over, he opted to stay, while Kathy took the children to her sister’s house in Baton Rouge. The hurricane sideswiped the city on 29 August and Zeitoun went to bed thinking the worst was over. That night, though, the Middle East came to him in a dream: the ‘ceaseless shushing of the sea’ lapping at the walls surrounding Arwad Island penetrated his sleep. But the rhythm was not quite right, ‘not an ebb and flow, but instead the constant whisper of a river’. He woke to see lake water coming from the north.

He spent the next week at his house, pulling what he could above the water line, pitching a tent on his roof to escape the heat, and grilling meat from his freezer. He dug out of his garage a canoe he’d bought on a whim and began to make daily rounds. Eggers gracefully paces this section of the book, illustrating it with ethereal details from a suddenly floating world: the sound of car aerials scraping the bottom of Zeitoun’s silently coasting canoe or three perfectly groomed horses grazing on a patch of high ground, ‘luxuriating in their freedom’. Zeitoun’s first rescue was of his fish, which would not survive without filtration. Reaching into their tank, he ‘liberated’ them into the still translucent water that filled his house. Then, hearing cries while out in his canoe, he paddled to a house to find an elderly woman, holding on to a bookshelf, her ‘patterned dress … spread out on the surface of the water like a great floating flower’, her legs dangling below.

Zeitoun rescued about ten people that week, ferrying those who wanted to leave to dry land, feeding dogs trapped on the upper floors of houses, and calling Kathy from a miraculously working land-line in one of his rental properties. Kathy’s refuge at her sister’s house in Baton Rouge was filled with family members critical of her conversion. Kathy had found Islam and begun wearing the hijab before meeting Zeitoun, but her family refused to accept this chronology. Now that her husband wasn’t around, they encouraged her to ‘take that thing’ off her head and ‘go out and have a good time’. Back in the flooded streets of New Orleans, uniformed officers buzzed overhead in helicopters and whirred by in military fan boats, their motors too loud to hear Zeitoun pleading with them to stop to help those in need.

Abdulrahman and Kathy were equals in most things. She helped run their business; their long courtship was on her terms. Led to Islam by a bad marriage and an unhelpful pastor, she ‘could think of nothing she needed from a man’. She fell for Zeitoun not because he showed her the respect mandated by religion but because he treated her as an equal. That equity broke down when it came to their relations to the outside world, for Zeitoun, as a man and an immigrant, enjoyed the privilege of optimism. He had come to embrace the idea that America was a special place, where things ‘worked out’. Kathy felt it necessary occasionally to dampen his enthusiasm, reminding him once that soldiers returning from Iraq were ‘trained to kill people like you’. When news reports of the storm convinced her that she had to get the children out of the city she begged her husband to come, but Zeitoun felt ‘compelled to stay by a power beyond his own reckoning’. Afterwards, Kathy, weighed down by family and worried by stories of mayhem, especially of violence by unaccountable security forces, was still keen for him to get out. ‘So when do you plan to leave?’ she asked in one of their phone calls. ‘I don’t,’ he said.

No explanation was given when a heavily armed joint military and police command, patrolling in one of the fan boats Zeitoun had earlier tried to flag down, arrested him. He was taken to a staging ground, where he was threatened and ill-treated, then to the detention centre at Union Terminal, clearly modelled on Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray, called Camp Greyhound. There Zeitoun was stripped, anally probed and put in a cage. He was prohibited, under the threat of water hose and pepper spray, from leaning on its walls. He was repeatedly fed pork. Camp Greyhound was powered by an excruciatingly loud Amtrak diesel-train engine that spewed fumes day and night. It ‘resembled a great furnace, moaning and ravenous’, Eggers writes, adorned with a ‘small red, white and blue logo’. Over the next three days, Zeitoun saw prisoners being beaten, pepper sprayed, hogtied and shot in their cages by guards with beanbag guns, seemingly for sport. Zeitoun remembers noticing the newness and quality of the razor wire, the toilets and the fencing. It was, he thought, ‘an impressive feat’ to build such a structure so quickly, and must have taken a ‘vast amount of planning and execution’. Later he learned that, only a few blocks away, people in the Superdome and the Convention Center had gone thirsty and hungry while his ad hoc jail had more than enough water and field rations. To fill its cages, the Department of Homeland Security contracted Blackwater USA, the private security firm that became synonymous with murder, corruption and abuse in Iraq, paying it $300 for each person brought in, no questions asked.

Zeitoun was then taken, still without being told why he was being held, to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, a maximum security prison 40 miles outside New Orleans. When he arrived, he was processed by two women whose thoughtfulness and apparent concern gave him hope that he might finally be allowed to call his wife. But random, unprovoked threats by guards and more body searches followed. His requests to see a doctor about a worsening pain in his kidney were ignored. After he had spent three weeks in captivity, two men arrived from the Department of Homeland Security to interview him. They asked him easy, friendly questions and promised to call Kathy. ‘He’s fine ma’am. We have no interest in him,’ one of them told her. Unsure what anything meant at this point, she asked if that was ‘good or bad’. ‘That’s good,’ she was told.

After his release, the Zeitouns rebuilt their life and home and expanded their business. But Kathy had become disoriented and physically ill. Zeitoun lost most of his hair while in prison, along with more than 20 pounds from an already compact frame. Feeling ‘ashamed that he had been handcuffed, stripped, caged, treated like an animal’, he wanted the experience ‘erased from their lives’ but agreed, at the urging of friends and family, to investigate the circumstances of his kidnapping and detention. He discovered no great conspiracy, no targeting of him because he was from the Middle East. What he did find was in a way worse: an initial error – Zeitoun was arrested because he was wrongly identified by a police officer as being part of a group of looters – was compounded by a society that has lost its ability to define itself except through war.

During his confinement, Zeitoun had begun to feel profound guilt for what he understood to be his own hubris. ‘He believed that that damned canoe had given him the right to serve as shepherd and saviour,’ Eggers writes. ‘He had expected too much. He had hoped too much. The country he had left 30 years ago had been a realistic place. There were political realities there’ that ‘precluded blind faith, that discouraged one from thinking that everything, always, would work out fairly and equitably. But he had come to believe such things in the United States.’ He was wrong: ‘This country was not unique.’

Yet Zeitoun does insist on a certain kind of American uniqueness, and in tracking the misfortunes of one family, it illuminates what was at stake in the post-storm siege of New Orleans. Zeitoun’s story is simultaneously exceptional and exemplary in that his sense of mission, his belief in his chosenness, was nurtured by the city he decided to make his home. If Zeitoun was virtuous to a fault – tolerant, open, pluralistic, inquisitive, all the values the ideologues of the war on terror believed could be imposed on the Middle East with tanks and guns – then it was a fault encouraged by the Caribbean worldliness of New Orleans. The port city shares with other coastal regions – like the one where Zeitoun grew up – a vulnerability, which can encourage a liberal sensibility: one that might allow someone like Zeitoun to recognise the kinship between racism and homophobia.

After his ordeal, Zeitoun established, with Eggers, the Zeitoun Foundation, dedicated to promoting human rights and restoring New Orleans. ‘There is no faith like the faith of a builder of homes in coastal Louisiana,’ Eggers writes, and ‘no better way to prove to God and neighbour that you were there, that you are there, that you are human, than to build. Who could ever again deny he belonged here? If he needs to restore every home in this city, he will, to prove he is part of this place.’ As for Kathy, Islam allowed her to escape from inland obscurantism, to be more open to and uncertain about the world. During her conversion, she remembered thinking that the ‘Christian preachers she’d heard had spent a good amount of time talking about who would and wouldn’t go to hell, how hot it burned and for how long, but the imams she began to meet made no such pronouncements.’ If she had a question, they would ‘try to answer, but often they wouldn’t know … The doubt sewn into the faith gave her room to think, to question.’ We still don’t have a full audit of what was lost in the flood, but Zeitoun provides a survey at once intimate and comprehensive of the damage.

Success

2010-05-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

" ... successful people are like castles; fortified towns perhaps. Their impenetrable self-confidence gives less successful folk like us no choice other than to go around them ... (albeit with some sense of sympathy for their apparent isolation) ..."

wary

2010-03-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

"...be wary when pursuing an ideal like justice. It is a mistake, we grow lost when, feeling increasingly righteous, we begin to believe that our enemy is lost or ineffectual. We must necessarily credit our enemies with some power in order to maintain a power of our own; in order to avoid becoming our own enemy ..."

responsibility

2010-03-27T06:52:00.001-07:00

"...the most difficult thing about art is, in the end, taking responsibility for something that has no right to exist..."

What Is Soul?

2010-01-25T00:16:00.000-08:00

" ... soul is a political representation cast in the medium of emotion ... "

The Top?

2010-01-10T15:08:00.000-08:00

" ... artists once strived to get to the bottom of things, uprooting and disturbing things as they progressed. Today they climb as fast as possible to 'get to the top', where (if they get there) they tend to make a spectacle of themselves, look rather vulnerable, and do no good whatsoever..."

2009-12-25T15:25:00.001-08:00

" ... just as it is safe to say that there is a lot more to life than that which advertising would mislead us into believing, so there is a whole lot more to art than merely Saatchi's ... "

the hunch

2009-12-25T15:23:00.000-08:00

" ... for anyone who truly lives the adventure of art, life can be no more and no less than a hunch, seen through, and hopefully proved correct ... "

bowl

2009-12-20T02:30:00.000-08:00

" ... the budgerigar has its cuttle fish, mirror, cage and perch; the goldfish its empty circular bowl, while you- I have recently concluded- surely occupy something like a goldfish bowl comprehensively mirrored on its inner surface ... "

the master

2009-12-15T14:31:00.000-08:00

" ... if there is nothing else in the world over which he has successfully gained mastery, at least he has his dog ... "

hands

2009-12-15T14:30:00.000-08:00

"... there goes a man so neglected by God that he literally has his whole world in his hands ... "

image

2009-12-15T14:29:00.001-08:00

" ... the erasure of the image has left an un-erase-able image ... "

the re-Turner prize

2009-12-15T14:27:00.000-08:00

"... life, they say, begins at 40, but art -I have discovered- can start just after 50. Surely we need a re-Turner prize! ..."

Barclays Logo 2

2009-12-15T14:23:00.002-08:00

" ...the Barclays bank logo has not only morphed from an angry to a far more blobby eagle, it has also now acquired a sinister black background. The National Westminster bank logo, similarly morphed -during the 1990s I believe - from crisp black on white to a kind of bloody red on a devilishly deep blue ground ... "

Do?

2009-12-15T14:23:00.001-08:00

" ... JUST (talk about it endlessly, then) DO IT ... "

now & then

2009-12-15T14:21:00.001-08:00

" ... never, never, has a now been so now. We are primed to give this now back its then! ... "

noble

2009-12-15T14:20:00.001-08:00

" ... his intentions are certainly noble, but nature, unfortunately, does not share them ... "

gates

2009-12-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

" ... a gated community ... of gated minds ... "

coming

2009-12-07T07:51:00.000-08:00

" ... first they came for the unions ... then they came for the art schools ... then ... "

gains

2009-12-07T06:11:00.000-08:00

" ... surely, we can never maintain any degree of respect for anyone who clearly makes their gains by means of any kind of violence or theft ... "

tragic

2009-12-07T06:05:00.001-08:00

" ... a lone teenager walked into a branch of a well-known fast-food chain this afternoon and demolished two cheeseburgers and a large fries before turning his shame on himself. Spokesmen said there was no clear motivation for the tragic episode, but friends of the boy -who has not yet been named- report he had been subject to a large number of advertising hoardings, television commercials and other promotional devices from an early age ..."

avarice

2009-12-06T13:45:00.000-08:00

" ... was it in a Bergman film called 'Winter Light' that I noted the priest character saying: 'must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice? Well, however that ended up in my notebook it seems to sum up something very important about our current environment ... "

'forgiving'

2009-12-06T13:42:00.001-08:00

" ... today it is technology that we thank for being 'forgiving' -not God ... "

cowards

2009-12-06T13:39:00.000-08:00

" ... we learn nothing from cowards ... "

butter

2009-12-06T13:23:00.000-08:00

" ... eventually I clearly realised that he is merely the kind of man who clearly knows his bread is buttered on whichever side to which his coat has most recently been turned. He also clearly knows -incidentally- that this is all he needs to know ... "

wonder

2009-12-06T13:22:00.000-08:00

" ... our duty is to rescue wonder ... "

'Problems'?

2009-11-24T01:12:00.000-08:00

" ... it is precisely the fact that you do not regard yourself as having any 'problems' (while insisting that those around you DO have 'problems') that is the biggest problem ... "

Colourful, Blobby art.

2009-11-17T13:53:00.000-08:00

" .. have you noticed the growing prevalence of a kind of colourful, blobby, and certainly anodyne art? It seems that a certain strain of the bourgeoisie has survived the leveling affects of postmodernism and now wants to assert the freedoms of modernists once again by indulging themselves in the playground of those privileged enough to disdain any political content or consequence of their works and actions. This, I believe, is the underlying force behind the growing array of blandly blobby, colourful and wincingly pseudo-comic 'paintings' and 'sculptures' currently to be found in many galleries and posh foyers. Yet another generation of the spoiled hereby smugly inherit their birthright to a privileged existence, while discarding any social progress carved out by specters, splinters and echoes of Marx under the programme of Left postmodernism. Using these apparently harmless, soft-edged creations they nevertheless violently and greedily re-assert their right to a slice of a modernist pie their grandfathers might well have relished (but sans the salt, sweat and hard-edges of real struggle that won such privileges for original modernists). And by the way, hard luck to all those 'Alter-cultures' hungrily awaiting their modernism, sorry, it is (still) 'not your turn' ... "

Barclays Logo

2009-11-10T01:17:00.000-08:00

" ... have you noticed Barclays Bank's Logo is gradually morphing from a valiant Eagle into an amorphous Blob? Is this a sign of the trajectory of Capitalism itself ... "

What Is MAMMary Art?

2009-11-09T10:53:00.000-08:00

" ... MAMMary art is an approach to art conducted by a millennial generation in awe of the success of a certain group of 90s artist whose own success was achieved without any evidence of talent or commitment but purely by concentrating on 'Me And My Mates' (hence the acronym M.A.M.M on which the term is founded)

Unfortunately, the apparent success of these 90s artists managed to dazzle a broad public and obscure the fact that their art contained no merit or lasting value and was nothing but the inflated outcome of this 'MAMMary' approach.

A subsequent generation, emerging in the late 90s and around the millennium, along with certain academies responsible for teaching principles of art, have sadly grown up to believe not only that MAMMary art is a valid approach to art but have consequently learned and taught nothing else about the subject!

In fact, the MAMMary procedure clearly has nothing to do with art at all other than as a demonstration that nepotism, force, and sleight-of-hand can give charlatans a free-ride to wealth and fame -something already widely known according to other professions- but here applied in the name of art and at art's expense and in such a way as to greatly diminish art's status.

MAMMary art remains a regrettable model today for a generation who, in being distracted by its apparently easy route to success have neglected to learn anything other than its rather vacuous lessons and thus left themselves clueless -albeit with some reasonably secure positions and incomes generated by their MAMMary dealings ... "

frenzied desire

2009-11-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

" ... it is enlightening to pursue the history of a single brand through the development of high-consumerism. In 30 years 'Lucozade' has shifted from being a consoling pick-me-up associated with mild illness, to a sports drink (for a post-Thatcherite age in which illness is seen as 'sad' and uneconomical) and is now transforming itself into a version of 'Poppers' as if the high street life we are leading is itself becoming a 24 hour disco of frenzied desiring activity ... "

Educational limits

2009-11-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

" ... the best teaching and learning experiences occur (and this is well-proven to those talented and brave enough to have experienced it) at the limits of current understanding; not just the current limits of the students understanding -mind you- but also those of the teacher ... "

dis-education

2009-11-04T11:43:00.001-08:00

" ... Having presumptuously elevated itself above barbarism by means of its proud system of education, the rich first world is now busy treating precious thought and priceless young minds in such an overly rational, quantitative and economic manner that they are rapidly bringing about a complete reversal of the pedagogical project ..."

Protection

2009-11-01T14:49:00.000-08:00

" ... It is difficult to disagree with the earnest voice piously proclaiming we must protect the young from harm, but how to protect them from such protection is a more difficult, nay elusive matter ..."

Professional Artists

2009-11-01T14:43:00.000-08:00

" ... Arts schools once aimed to produce more or less good artists, who, if they persevered, might become professionals. Now they aim to produce more or less good professionals, who, if they persevere, might become artists ... "

Contemporary Art

2009-10-19T08:48:00.001-07:00

" ... Art demands of us far more than a single lifetime; 'contemporary art', a little less than a week ... "

Your Job

2009-10-16T00:48:00.001-07:00

" .. I hope you don't mind me telling you this but, you would do your own job a lot better by not telling me how to do my own and instead asking me how I do it occasionally ... in fact, I think that is your job..."

Tory 1.

2009-10-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

" ... the implied perspective of the Tory-type on the bus towards her neighbour amounted to: 'do you mind not making so much noise so as to enable me to make a noise' ..."

Default

2009-10-16T00:42:00.000-07:00

" ... I have noted that there are characters who 'rise to the top' not merely because they cold-heartedly elbow others aside but simply because they are so unpleasant to be near that others prefer to keep a distance from them, thus clearing their path to success by a kind of effortless default ... "

Order?

2009-10-11T23:07:00.001-07:00

" ... not so much a 'pecking order', more an elbowing and gulping order ... "

Contemporary?

2009-10-04T07:29:00.001-07:00

" ... Contemporary! bah! what is 'contemporary, all we deal with is the past and the future, as the learned (past) engages with the as-yet unlearned (future). The 'contemporary' is clearly a nothing, vacuous and drab, insulated against the events occurring between these vivid electric poles ... "

Conscious

2009-10-04T03:45:00.000-07:00

" ... we have made the moon uninteresting, disallowed anger and banned passion; made a mockery of metaphysical justice, turned our back on our dreams and scoffed at the subconscious, bought-out the hippies and refuted society ... look around, what a great world it is when everything becomes so CONSCIOUS ... "

Prejudice

2009-09-29T15:43:00.000-07:00

" ... your prejudice has finally overcome your imagination, what are you now? ... "

Responsibilities

2009-09-28T11:19:00.000-07:00

" ... Those who bully us into 'taking responsibility' are invariably hiding the fact that they are thereby avoiding their own responsibilities. Meanwhile, the passion with which they convince us of their righteousness in this regard only reveals the depth of their self-doubt..."

'Dependency'

2009-09-28T11:16:00.001-07:00

"... Where you hear the words 'dependency culture' (e.g. from top tory Theresa May and various current managers seeking to rid their accounts of hourly-paid workers) you hear the words of a cold-hearted, privileged and very ignorant disdain..."

Mentality

2009-09-24T09:47:00.000-07:00

"... clearly suffering from a VICTOR mentality ..."

Opinions

2009-09-24T09:45:00.000-07:00

" ... I too was young once, like you, and also held such two-dimensional opinions..."

On weathermen shamen

2009-09-06T01:43:00.001-07:00

" ... Imagine, if you will, the world's TV weathermen as the secret shamen of every tribe. After all, weather defines regionality (though not nationality - note) and it is perhaps, deep-down, for heart-stirring reminiscence of certain autumnal skies or particularly long white June nights that men have sacrificed themselves in wars. (Civil war is of course another matter)."

Cake!

2009-09-04T06:21:00.000-07:00

" ... Mon dieu! after queuing at my local M + S to buy a granary bloomer and a blueberry flan the formidable looking check-out lady grasped my attention. As I paid and said 'au-revoir' I noticed her name badge announced 'Marie Antoinett' (sic), needless to say, long-dormant shivers of the old revolutionary spirit tingled about my nape as I left the store and mingled once again with the chaotic crowds."

englishes

2009-09-03T06:47:00.000-07:00

" ... in England it is cultural differences marked by minute inflections of speech and stance that most substantially determine a person's fate."

on staff

2009-09-03T06:44:00.000-07:00

" ... today salaried staff wear highly visible I.D cards around their necks on broad, long, brightly coloured ribbons -not unlike Olympic medals. Perhaps this is because, under higher capitalism is become an extraordinary achievement to obtain and maintain any form of secure employment."

On Lacanians

2009-09-03T01:40:00.000-07:00

" ... the pervasive swarm of euphorically and destructively over-confident, cocaine-addicted Lacanians who have given themselves the narcissistic present of a career (not 'a life' note) without conscience, are fooled by their dealers only as much as thy are by Jacques himself who openly confessed to relishing most of all the lucrative aspect of his practice (thus knowing it for what it 'REALy' was [for him at least]). Taken altogether this tribe amounts to far less than the enamel on the great Freud's teeth."

Jesus

2009-09-02T07:35:00.000-07:00

" ... I sometimes wonder if Christians might feel slightly less guilt-ridden if Jesus had been screwed -rather than nailed- to the cross."

The form of height

2009-08-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

" ... the Eiffel Tower successfully offers us the dream of giving form to height itself, and thus to modern aspiration itself. Brancusi's 'Endless' column however, ridicules the same by remaining loyal to quantity and overlooking the great facility of qualitative description."

On making

2009-08-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

"... just as we can make love with vigorous repetitions or with endlessly melding nuances, so we can make any thing."

On the weight of words

2009-08-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

"...thank you, I did read your writing, but despite its mass the words were light, that is to say, they did not stay with me, I didn't absorb them, or if I did they didn't have any noticeable affect upon my constitution. Worse, they made me fear that all the words in the world, new and old alike, have recently been rendered similarly vacant, vacuous, evacuated, made virtual perhaps so that whatever weight they once carried has shifted onto a back foot and thereby changed into a hesitation, so that today we read, listen, wait for the impact of words to befall us, but no such thing any longer occurs."

The point

2009-08-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

"...at precisely that place on the ground to which a bronze figure on a pedestal was pointing, a teenager threw down his skateboard."

On prejudice

2009-08-30T10:51:00.000-07:00

"... All prejudice is really an expedient fantasy, a form of despicable propaganda dreamed-up to legitimate an expropriation."

Fairy Tales

2009-08-30T10:50:00.000-07:00

"...Modernity invented a fairytale past for us simply by leaving it behind."

On loss

2009-08-28T00:29:00.000-07:00

"... precisely what is it that 'losers' are supposed to have lost?"

On power

2009-08-27T23:53:00.000-07:00

" ... once we have noted, that ALL 'power' and ALL 'achievement' are, in one way or another, gained only at the expense of others (who are correspondingly disempowered and forced to 'fail') we might rapidly lose interest in these ideas or values as the focus of a human life. Having shifted our perspective thus, 'scales fall from our eyes' "

Poor, Poor Peckham

2009-08-27T04:07:00.000-07:00

"... poor, poor, poor Peckham, that you will now be forced to undergo a neo-nineties gentrification, led by auto-legitimating artists, then overrun by estate agents, yuppies and bars, so that all your indigenous personae and character become 'rinsed' (as DJs say of an overplayed record) like the now barren streets of once atmospheric Shoreditch and Hackney. Poor, poor Peckhamites, that your recently built proud pools and libraries will soon fall into the hands of invading hoards, salivating over the chance of a piece of 'cool' territorial pie."

On truth as a language

2009-08-26T10:21:00.000-07:00

"...truth may not be a transcendent and abstract principle, though nor is it an attainable aspect of daily living, however, it may after all be a language, or dialect, something unlike English but nevertheless available to all, albeit occasionally, often unexpectedly, and invariably appearing on the magical wings of a certain special fluency i.e. as if, though rarely spoken, it were the language we have known longest and loved best."

On Saatchi-approved sculpture

2009-08-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

"... or I could just become a contemporary Euro-American sculptor and unveil a Saatchi-satisfying dystopian display of my post-philosophical consumerist entrails."

On Alter Modernism 3

2009-08-26T03:06:00.000-07:00

" ... to get excited about the 'death of post modernism' in 2009 i.e. 20 years after the commonly regarded or actual death of post modernism, is like having leading music critics in 1976, while Hip Hop and Punk were forming, declaring Bill Haley to be the next big thing, when sooooooo much thoughtful water had flown under the bridge since the exhaustion of his cultural currency."

On Alter Modernism 2

2009-08-14T00:31:00.001-07:00

" ...furthermore, the bourgeoisie maintains a romantic notion of the other (alter- alterity) but truly the other is unknowable and, in this, possibly antithetical to all bourgeois values, potentially terrible and terrifying - certainly not a self-gratifying extension of the bourgeois' conceited and patronisng 'virtues'."

On Alter Modernism

2009-08-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

" ... let's not forget that 'Alter' must mean ALL unrepresented creatures oppressed by, and previously not invited to the modern bourgeois paradise of choice and play e.g. those whom sharp-elbowed Thatcherites labelled and marginalised as 'chavs' or 'sad'. They too, like hungry Dickensian children, demand THEIR modernism ..."