Income without work

I've been reading Hannah Arendt's introduction to Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, and while some of it is a little dry and academic for my taste, there is no doubt that Benjamin was a fascinating figure. Particularly interesting to me is his attitude towards money, which was one of almost aristocratic self-entitlement. Arendt traces this back to "the ancient Jewish believe that those who 'learn'...were the true elite of the people and should not be bothered with so vulgar an occupation as making money or working for it." Benjamin saw himself as a kind of "man of letters," one who, surrounded by books, was neither "obliged nor willing to write and read professionally, in order to earn a living. Unlike the class of the intellectuals, who offers their services either to the state as experts, specialists, and officials, or to society for diversion and instruction, the hommes de lettres always strove to keep aloof from both state and society. Their material existence was based on income without work, and their intellectual attitude rested upon their resolute refusal to be integrated politically or socially."

How antithetical to our age such an attitude would seem. It might appear conservative, too, the man of letters holding himself aloof from the rest of society. But Benjamin was not a conservative. He was, in fact, a deeply progressive and forward-looking thinker.

The body wants to feel inspired

by Alex Gallo-Brown

Blue lights twirl
through bare window,
flicker like laptop screen
pointed towards our face.
The body springs up. The body
will know what to do.
The body 

bangs head against glass,
craning its neck to see.

Downstairs, the neighbor shakes 

against an open door.

There is a body, dead,

lying in the back lot.
No way he will sleep

until it has been removed.

Nothing to say, 

to see, here

for the body.

It does not know

this man.

Upstairs, in the room, 

body flicks laptop up,

presses a button

until it begins to speak.

There is a convention on,
chirping mouths

in quivering heads
to fill our ears
with air.
There is an election on
and we want to feel 

inspired.

Interview

Gabriel Blackwell interviewed me yesterday for the lit site Big Other about The Language of Grief, Lewis Hyde's The Gift, the gift-giving community some of you were a part of, and more. Have a look.

The Last Book I Loved

Sorry for the long absence -- I've been in the middle of many moves, changes, etc. I do have a new essay up on The Rumpus, however, about "the last book I loved," which was Tom Bissell's Magic Hours. Have a look, if you feel so inclined.

Dad

I've been reading Tom Bissel's brilliant collection of essays, Magic Hours, and came across this nugget on travel writers:

"Travel writers are seldom scholars. They are, by inclination if not definition, transients and dilettantes. All that can save the travel writer and redeem his or her often inexpert perceptions of foreign people and places is curiosity, a willingness to be uncertain, an essential emotional generosity, and an ability to write."

Sighted

I finally have a "real" website, replete with links to my published articles, excerpts from The Language of Grief, a button for ordering the book (which includes a short screed against Amazon), an author's bio, and, perhaps most importantly, a series of photographs courtesy of the noted photographer Jennifer Miran Lobsenz, or, as many of you know her, simply Jenne.

Take a look. I'm quite pleased with the whole thing.

Olives, Vines, and Vices

Before I moved to northeast England, I had no idea about the cultural and geographic divides that abound in the country. I have come to learn, however, that the north, generally, which begins around Manchester, still several more than a hundred miles south of where I live in Durham, identifies more or less in opposition to the south.

The differences are described in the following paragraph from Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell's 1937 account of his trek through English coal-mining country. Orwell himself was a Southerner.

"When you go to the industrial North you are conscious, quite apart from the unfamiliar scenery, of entering a strange country. This is partly because of certain real differences which do exist, but still more because of the North-South antithesis which has been rubbed into us for such a long time past. There exists in England a curious cult of Northerness, sort of [a] Northern snobbishness. A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit,' he is grim, 'dour,' plucky, warm-hearted, and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate, lazy -- that at any rate is the theory."

The theory, according to Orwell, originated thusly:

"[T]he English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy generally started off by explaining in the naivest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada. This nonsense about the superior energy of the English (actually the laziest people in Europe) has been current for at least a hundred years. 'Better is it for us,' writes a Quarterly Reviewer of 1827, 'to be condemned to labour for our country's good than to luxuriate amid olives, vines, and vices.' 'Olives, vines, and vices' sums up the normal English attitude towards the Latin races."