Random
Your Very Non-V-Day V-Day Roundup
This will be as mushy as it gets.
At The Fanzine, Jeff Johnson considers Ben Lerner’s Mean Free Path.
Dennis Cooper hosts the official online launch of Mark Gluth’s The Late Works of Margaret Kroftis. I have yet to hear anything but the best about this book.
Because we love Roger Ebert now, we are interested in his review of Valentine’s Day.
“Valentine’s Day” is being marketed as a Date Movie. I think it’s more of a First-Date Movie. If your date likes it, do not date that person again. And if you like it, there may not be a second date.
Also, did you know that Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks ?
William Deresiewicz on Tolstoy at The Nation. (I’ve become such a committed Deresiewicz reader I can now type his last name without having to check the spelling first–I check after, and I’m usually right. This goes for you, too, Moe Tkacik.)
NYTea Time: Dominique Browning is quite taken with Cathleen Schine’s The Three Weissmanns of Westport. She locates the book in the updated-Austen trend, but hastens to identify a crucial distinguishing feature: “The strange thing about the Jane brigade is that most of its practitioners have raided only her plots, apparently not quite up to the task of honoring the essence of Austen. But Schine’s homage has it all: stinging social satire, mordant wit, delicate charm, lilting language and cosseting materialistic detail.” Hey, there’s a new Peter Handke book! And Adam Haslett wrote a novel! About the financial crisis! Michiko Kakutani did not like Union Atlantic–-but that was on a Monday; Liesl Schillinger likes it quite a lot today. What else? Jon Caramanica looks at a couple of rock & roll books; Catherine Rampell on the interesting-looking academic-ish-seeming, Capitalism and the Jews by Jerry Z. Muller; Dahlia Lithwick on death row lawyer David R. Dow’s memoir, Autobiography of an Execution; and Todd Pruzan makes my weekend.
Happy Sunday!
Tags: mark gluth, Mean Free Path, NYTea Time, William Deresiewicz
…… Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks……..
Am I the only big Ebert fan around here?
Because right now he is living brave.
Props, RE.
…… Ebert wrote a book called Your Movie Sucks……..
Am I the only big Ebert fan around here?
Because right now he is living brave.
Props, RE.
That book on capital and the Jews does look interesting in terms of the data covered. But- and I can’t quite tell if this is the review’s interposition (Marx as Jew-baiting former Jew?! I’m sorry but how anti-Semitic is that!) or if it’s the book’s own angle – but it seems like it may be an apologia for capital using the Jewish as the main prop. I really hate how the entangled history of capitalist conspiracies against the Jewish within capital is often used to absolve capitalism itself by framing hatred of it as merely the height of historical anti-semitism. It doesn’t take into account, for starters, that the designation of Christian moneylenders “temporary” Jews was as much a pre-modern capitalist practice of zoning the consequences of capital on to an agency that it exploited not only as scapegoats for its own dunderheaded suspicion of making money off money (I love how this article just assumes the nobility of nations were idiots) but precisely so it could make money off money while alleviating the consequences. By zeroing in the Jews as the spirit of capitalist pillage, it made the Jews the exploited labourers of its own development. The inversion of conspiratorial thinking that finds a natural history of capitalist genius in the Jewish is to argue that anti-capitalism was always a form of anti-semitism. That supposedly “historical” claim really irks me because it is only ideological and uses the Jews, once again, as capital’s guarantor. The reason Judeo-Bolshevism arose as an anti-communist idea was precisely because anti-semitism sort to triangulate the excesses of capital in a theoretically exterminable entity. Which is to say, if capital exploited the Jewish as labourers as a means for its own development by presenting them as the very face of cutthroat capitalist enclosure, it also, unsurprisingly, cast them as the motor of anti-capital, as the fundamental antagonists to the possibility of a sane capital, which is, of course, inevitably, also imbibed in the Protestant spirit of capital. This is what explains that apparent contradiction: the Jews were always capital’s ideologisation of an identity for its wreckers. Whether a critique of hypercapitalism or Communism, that kind of anti-semitism always came from within capital. Leninist Russia had a complex relation to the Jews, it certainly had plenty of anti-semitic notions, to do with Jews as criminals, prone to usury, and so on, as steeped in false consciousness, but it had no time for the conspiratorial arguments that framed capital as an especially Jewish creation. Its most anti-Semitic idea was really that Jews were privileged tools of capital, not the string-pullers of it. And Trotsky can hardly be dismissed as non-Jewish. Nor Benjamin. Nor Rosa Luxembourg. Nor Marx. I loathe how the defenders of Jewishness are the first to expel their ideological enemies from Jewishness itself: the anti-capitalist Jews become Jew-baiters, self-hating Jews, traitors, etc. Thus, as capitalists or anti-capitalists, the Jewish have always been taken by capital as a foil for – and a locus of – the insanity of capital – indeed, their deployment in a social-symbolic sense helped create the very idea of “hypercapital” as something distinct from “civilized capital”, and continues to give credence again and again to a notion that capital excess has agential not systemic cause, and that a moderate capital can function without exploitation so long as that greedy “interest group” does not secretly reign.
That book on capital and the Jews does look interesting in terms of the data covered. But- and I can’t quite tell if this is the review’s interposition (Marx as Jew-baiting former Jew?! I’m sorry but how anti-Semitic is that!) or if it’s the book’s own angle – but it seems like it may be an apologia for capital using the Jewish as the main prop. I really hate how the entangled history of capitalist conspiracies against the Jewish within capital is often used to absolve capitalism itself by framing hatred of it as merely the height of historical anti-semitism. It doesn’t take into account, for starters, that the designation of Christian moneylenders “temporary” Jews was as much a pre-modern capitalist practice of zoning the consequences of capital on to an agency that it exploited not only as scapegoats for its own dunderheaded suspicion of making money off money (I love how this article just assumes the nobility of nations were idiots) but precisely so it could make money off money while alleviating the consequences. By zeroing in the Jews as the spirit of capitalist pillage, it made the Jews the exploited labourers of its own development. The inversion of conspiratorial thinking that finds a natural history of capitalist genius in the Jewish is to argue that anti-capitalism was always a form of anti-semitism. That supposedly “historical” claim really irks me because it is only ideological and uses the Jews, once again, as capital’s guarantor. The reason Judeo-Bolshevism arose as an anti-communist idea was precisely because anti-semitism sort to triangulate the excesses of capital in a theoretically exterminable entity. Which is to say, if capital exploited the Jewish as labourers as a means for its own development by presenting them as the very face of cutthroat capitalist enclosure, it also, unsurprisingly, cast them as the motor of anti-capital, as the fundamental antagonists to the possibility of a sane capital, which is, of course, inevitably, also imbibed in the Protestant spirit of capital. This is what explains that apparent contradiction: the Jews were always capital’s ideologisation of an identity for its wreckers. Whether a critique of hypercapitalism or Communism, that kind of anti-semitism always came from within capital. Leninist Russia had a complex relation to the Jews, it certainly had plenty of anti-semitic notions, to do with Jews as criminals, prone to usury, and so on, as steeped in false consciousness, but it had no time for the conspiratorial arguments that framed capital as an especially Jewish creation. Its most anti-Semitic idea was really that Jews were privileged tools of capital, not the string-pullers of it. And Trotsky can hardly be dismissed as non-Jewish. Nor Benjamin. Nor Rosa Luxembourg. Nor Marx. I loathe how the defenders of Jewishness are the first to expel their ideological enemies from Jewishness itself: the anti-capitalist Jews become Jew-baiters, self-hating Jews, traitors, etc. Thus, as capitalists or anti-capitalists, the Jewish have always been taken by capital as a foil for – and a locus of – the insanity of capital – indeed, their deployment in a social-symbolic sense helped create the very idea of “hypercapital” as something distinct from “civilized capital”, and continues to give credence again and again to a notion that capital excess has agential not systemic cause, and that a moderate capital can function without exploitation so long as that greedy “interest group” does not secretly reign.