Doug had Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story) on this morning. But KPFA didn't run it. I had to listen from LBO's radio web page. What's with KPFA? They had some other economics guy on. He was pretty good. One of his points was how much Wall Street supports privatization of education, because it re-enforces market ideology.
It's funny to think that Jeffrey Brown (pbs newshour) gets thousands and thousands of dollars to interview authors---and he is pretty good. But Doug goes over to Shteyngart's place, sits down and gets almost a full half hour of endlessly interesting things to talk about. Go figure. (The real problem with capital is the mediocrity of the mind set---just plain stupid---so go fuck yourself. These guys are not the Medici and they don't hire Michelangelo or Galileo. They hire Christo and Bill Gates---on a good day---when they even pay attention. Bill Gates, social planner, think on it.)
One subject (among many) Shteyngart mentioned was interesting was the strange correlation between a society that is dying, and various diseases people suffer. I think what he meant by that was mental identification between an individual and society, how they seem to cohabitate each other in health and disease.
One writer who spent a lot to time with this cohabitation was Thomas Mann, but in a much more subtle way. It's easiest to see in something like Doctor Faustus, but its also there in The Magic Mountain, where the haute bourgeois or burger way of life was on the brink in WWI and died out almost in a flash after WWI. Naptha and Settembrini ready to evaporate. Shit, you wanted Fellini for this one. All the elements were there. Do the Magic Mountain, Federico. Just do it. That 19thC world was disappearing and being replaced with something else---for Germany a dystopian nightmare--modernity/
Dostoyevsky is even better at this cohabitation of the individual diseased psyche and its diseased society. And yet, Dostoyevsky is also hilarious, especially the grumbling bitterness of Notes of an Underground Man. I would still like to watch Fellini do the East European, Underground Man, grumbling, scowling in paradise---footnote to Wojtek---its all shit---while he licks his ice cream cone...and reads his stock quotes.
Another really brillant arc from merely a nostalgic old man going mad, to a near vegetable was in the works of Samuel Beckett. It's matched by his stage instructions which reduce a landscape to bare tree and dirt mount (Waiting for Godot), where the `action' is waiting and the dialogue makes no sense toward systematically dis-embodied characters until there are just shadows (Ohio Impromptude) or just a white face or just a voice on an all dark stage which makes even less sense. The coherence of the character's speech becomes more and more degraded, and yet still barely manages to keep a tentative grasp on simple human desparation---the last refuge of hope(?). And they are sometimes hilarious, except you are not supposed to laugh. I had a very hard time not busting a gut, or actually getting choked up at the tremendous sadness (1988, What Where). There was nothing in between.
I once had a very limited gig (Carter killed VISTA) at Vista College, starting a class for disabled theater and performance. The first night, more than seventy-five students showed up for a course I expected to maybe attract fifteen. Thank god I had picked a real drama instructor to co-teach. But my pet project was to put on a production of Endgame (never happened), which is the cul de sac of any one to one human relationship. The way I would present the play was the attendent-disabled relationship, which ends in bickering like husband and wife, where masculine and femmine dissolve and re-constitute with every argument until nobody knows who is actually the man and the woman---the concept that there are no men and women in a marriage. This is near Judith Bulter territory, although she told it badly. It is even more hilarious to watch this in gay relationships...
Shteyngart mentioned something to the effect that the Russia of 1989 was totally corrupt, when he wrote about that era. Now its the US and its corruption and disease. He doesn't have to travel anymore to get the same effects. Satire, and then not satire. How can a society exist when The Possessed is a situation comedy?
How do you stop it? You can't. The individual fate is useless and the collective consciousness is near comatose. The only answer I ever found was to help raise one neat kid. That's my only contribution and I was just attending some genetics I didn't understand. Be good for your kids and pray it turns out... Get one kid through at a time, with his little intellectual hat, his philosophical diaper, his pot belly of wellness, his smile, his deep contentment, his curiousity... his favored people...
CG