Stossel

And after I put down my copy of the Chronicle and looked at myself in the mirror above the TV, I did see the family resemblance.

Thanks, Mr. Ailes! Have a Pooh-Bah song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfIwnehelT8

When push comes to shove, as it has, I read Stein’s war years as a survivor’s tale. Jewish, female, homosexual, elderly (Stein was 66 in 1940), living in occupied France, Stein and Alice Toklas successfully escaped extermination. That is something for which we can be grateful. And I’m also glad that, by hook or by crook, Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis. In the end, Stein was able to go on to write her great feminist opera, The Mother of Us All, a celebration of American democracy.

– Charles Bernstein, “Gertrude Stein’s War Years: Setting the Record Straight.” http://jacket2.org/commentary/gertrude-steins-war-years-setting-record-straight

Text 1: “When push comes to shove, as it has.”  Writing in defense of Gertrude Stein’s politics of survival in Vichy France, Charles Bernstein opens with a cliché (“setting the record straight”), then doubles down. “When push comes to shove” is another cliché, and a bad one: a dead metaphor, one that won’t bear being brought back to life in the same body language as Vichy words like “Drancy” or “Vélodrome d’Hiver.” But Bernstein’s giggly postscript “as it has” deconstructs the corpse. “Of course I know better,” says that little verbal tag. “Notice how wittily detached I am from any simple-minded idea that words can have a non-verbal reference. Of course I know that if the record is a record, it can’t be set straight.”

As a career move, that has been a winner for Bernstein. Romping through fields of crumpled newsprint, Bernstein texts like “Of Time and the Line” or the sublime “this poem intentionally left blank” (which I have now quoted in its entirety) bestow on their readers the great gift of knowing laughter. There’s no guilty “but” to follow that happiness, either. Bernstein’s poems are language in its pure animal function, eating and sleeping and reproducing and then lying down to die in unafraid unconsciousness. Bernstein’s is a poetry with its own “The End” built in.

Text 2: “By hook or by crook.”  Art is inseparable from art collecting, and art collecting is inseparable from crookery. That’s how the Elgin Marbles got to England. At smaller scales, of course, the crookery can get uncomfortable. It may even involve pushing and shoving. Some of Gertrude Stein’s coreligionists discovered that when they returned home after the war and tried to move back into their looted houses.

Kielce, Poland, July 1946

Text 3: “Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis.” Some kinds of looting, some kinds of pushing and shoving, are preferable to others. Lots of women had to suffer for Pablo Picasso’s art. Lots of men had to die for Andrew Carnegie’s libraries. Presumably the suffering and dying wound up with a market value after all. The cliché under the surface of Bernstein’s sentence is something like “On ne fait pas d’omelette sans casser des oeufs.”

Punchline: “How am I? Oi, don’t ask.” Specifically, don’t ask why the collection wasn’t looted, because the answer will only be another cliché. This one will just lie there on the page, too: unmeaning because unconscious. It has been spoken by many thousands of people over the years, sometimes in complete sincerity, and yet not one of those thousands could think through to a definition of any of its terms. In that sense, it is dead language — that is, language which was born unmeaning, language which therefore can never be a poem.

But since you have asked, reader: Stein’s art collection was not looted by the Nazis because it was under the protection of a powerful Nazi crook named Bernard Faÿ. Together, Faÿ and Stein collaborated in their own special translation, from one dead language into another, of the text “Some of my best friends are Jews.”

From Mitt Romney’s commencement address, Liberty University, May 12, 2012:

You enter a world with civilizations and economies that are far from equal.  Harvard historian David Landes devoted his lifelong study to understanding why some civilizations rise, and why others falter.  His conclusion:  Culture makes all the difference.  Not natural resources, not geography, but what people believe and value. Central to America’s rise to global leadership is our Judeo-Christian tradition, with its vision of the goodness and possibilities of every life.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-the-full-text-of-mitt-romneys-liberty-university-commencement-address-2012-5#ixzz1ui5Tj5KJ

2

A Judeo-Christian, type species:

Pose your subject with a tool of his trade, artist, and you’ll have a portrait ready to do its job of educating. As soon as the metonymic apparatus of weaponry and insignia gave this photograph an imputed significance, it developed into Admiral John A. Dahlgren (1809-1870), “the father of American naval ordnance.” Here he is in Charleston harbor on June 17, 1865, with his Dahlgren gun. The small images are a stereo pair; the large image is an anaglyph which requires red-and-blue glasses for viewing. Click to enlarge.

http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/civwar/item/cwp2003000738/PP/

Of course stern-faced Admiral Dahlgren had more important things to do than take his own picture. Seeing the picture, we know that without even asking. Wordlessly, conclusively, the picture tells us so. But one simple, arbitrary change of the subject’s trade and tools could have erased every certainty from that visual knowledge of ours. Make the change for yourself in your mind’s eye; replace the admiral in his gold braid with an artist in a smock, holding a paintbrush. And you see: because a brush serves as an extension of any artist’s hand, we could never be sure whose hand last held the brush that painted the picture. Every portrait of an artist must communicate that uncertainty. It is always on the verge of self-portrait. A brush in a picture, gripped by the hand in the picture, may at any moment assume the power of a scepter. It stands ready to command an image to begin its rule over over its domain.

And if the instrument of image power is not a brush but a camera, an aura of regal volition passes decisively to the camera itself.

Posed with her camera, Margaret Bourke-White is not a single artist but half of a coupled work of art.

Her camera is an accessory across the whole range of significance: not just a decoration for the photographer (in the cosmetic sense of the word) but an enabler (in the legal sense).

Fully accessorized, the proudly exact equal of her camera, Bourke-White strikes the pose of a hero, nom masculin.

2

But from this other heroic photograph the camera’s labor of portrayal has been effaced. Before you realized what you were seeing here, the photographer had ducked out of sight and positioned himself behind you. Aiming his camera over your shoulder, he camouflaged himself as you.

U. S. Army Quartermaster Corps wheelwrights’ shop,
Washington, April 1865
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/cwp2003006221/PP/

Photoshopped:

Confined within their frame by the photographer, the men clamor for your attention. They think they are men being seen by a man. Little do they know that the man who saw them a fraction of a second before you was a cameraman, and the tool of his trade has now reduced them to shiny, dead aggregations of silver halide crystals. The wheelwrights’ tools were extensions of their body for the wheelwrights but are now only obsolete hand tools posed in dead hands: block plane, spoke shave, broad axe. Photographed, the tools and their men have fatally become objets d’art. Within its borders, the photograph of the gesticulating men has superseded the active state of seeing and stilled it to the passive state of being seen. Forevermore now, the men with their blind, lensless tools will exist only in the status of sufferance granted by their image. Because the camera has enchanted them, they and their waving arms and shouting voices have become still. From now on, all these can be sensed only as momentary intervals in the motionlessness.

In the middle of Loren Eiseley’s essay “How Flowers Changed the World,” the freshman comp class snapped awake for a moment when a girl hit a startling assertion and uttered a pretty little scream.

“Flowers are sex organs?” she cried.

“What did you think they are?” I Socratically responded.

Pause.

And then the girl ventured: “For decoration?”

2

The woman’s denim pants from South Korea are purses for an invisible currency. Their decorated pockets hold nothing but an object of imaginative speculation. Playfully, they deploy optical illusion to shape an idea of the body they coyly hide.

Playfully, too, they are labeled with nonsense words and an anachronistic image from a symbol system which still retains prestige in its provincial borderlands.

Click to enlarge.

H. M. Regiment of Royal Korean Cowgirls.

3

The beggar is holding a sign which we can’t read at that angle.

“Beggar’s dog – Hoboken,” ca. 1910-1915
Library of Congress, George Grantham Bain Collection
http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.10090

But we can be sure what it must say. Advancing on our sympathy behind the shield of his sign, the beggar is notionally selling pencils and shoelaces: things everybody needs, things with a value in any economic system. But in the trade zone behind the sign, what is transacted is only an exchange of money from one pocket to another. Except for that transfer, everything in this image is decoration. The beggar’s pencils are no more for writing with than a hedge funder’s bling watch is for telling time.

Making it playful, the beggar has alienated his tin cup from the transaction by hanging it around his dog’s neck. Accustomed to seeing pictures by the rules of narrative convention, we think of the dog as smiling. The dog is also wrapped in something gauzy. It may be something like a woman’s shawl; it may be a completely threadbare blanket. Presumably it is worn against the cold, but we are going to read it too as part of the game. Coming closer and closer to the outline of the dog’s body, it playfully beckons the decorative twists of the iron bars behind it into what might look like the final shape of a life.

That gauze, those iron helices, that dozing bald man, have become part of a pattern they can no longer outlive.

“W. N. McMillan.” G. G. Bain collection, Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/ggbain.18560/  Click to enlarge.

At and around the man’s hands, further decay has accentuated the contrast between the image’s light and dark areas. The decay has done an artist’s job: it has shaped an outline.

—

An outline is usually a line of demarcation which an artist lays down between his creation and the rest of the universe. Here, however, outline is an index of decay. The universe has invaded the physiology of this image like a virus and set it to manufacturing a counterfeit of the artist’s death-defying gesture of separation from time.

—

And the optics of photographic image-making have bloated the man into an incipient sphere: a fruit rounding as it ripens toward decay.

—

The rounding has been preserved in its incipience, however. It comes to us educationally, preserved through natural history as if it and we had been destined from the beginning to face each other from opposite sides of a vitrine.

Surrounded by the Library of Congress’s explanatory words, the image is a fat mute struldbrug surrounded by volubly signifying youthfulness. The words singing in the surround are a choir of still unravished brides.