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Toronto May Day Event, 2013 or (The Loblaws Was Our Bastille)

In Contemporary History on 05/01/2013 at 23:07

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Under the shadows of Bay Street’s bank towers, at half past five today about a thousand protestors gathered in Toronto’s Nathan Philips square to observe International Labour Day. There was a carnival atmosphere in the air as a percussion band performed tightly executed rhythms to raise morale for the march. The sense of carnival was further heightened by the menagerie of groups that had arrived for to mark this traditional day of protest. Naturally red flags were brandished as the crowds loitered around the parkette that runs between the Queen St. sideway and Nathan Philips Square. Alongside the red banners were the representations of numerous other groups. Notable was the stylized geometric fist of “No One Is Illegal” the organizers of the event. There were also the purple and yellow flags of the “Idle No More” movement that had marched down from Queens Park to join the event. Other notable devices included the long banners of the fairplay for Tamil League, & the IWW who carried placards with the slogan “Let’s Build A Solidarity City”. There was also the green flags of the radical environmental movement, as well as the national flag of Venezuela that was no unaccompanied by at least one large cardboard photo of the Hugo Chavez. These were the Bolivarians, possibly in league with “No One Is Illegal”.

Lurking somewhere in the shadows were the Black Bloc representatives, with their red and black banner diagonally divided and tended by black veiled toughs. There were various Communist Parties: the bona fide Communist Party of Canada and the Marxist Leninists. There were also people from something called the Bolshevik Tendency with magic markered white signs that displayed ambiguous messages about 30 hours of work for 40 hours of pay. The Iranian Communist Party was out in surprising numbers, given the proximity to Tehran. There were Sparticists, Black Muslims and even a gentleman with a cone on his head & a bull horn. Also present was the purple bus of the CUPE task force, parked in the space normally reserved for tour buses to city hall.

In short it was a good cross section of the Left today, stratified into a multivarious blend of committees, parties, tendencies, sects, tribes, squads, and cabals. It was hard to decide if the diversity displayed weakness or force. The police were well organized, however. Presumably also well organized were the bank employees who might have been looking down on the gathering that late afternoon.

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The speeches started after six o’clock. A representative from a first nations group in a traditional head dress addressed the crowd. He looked forward to a better future when mother nature was respected and when such diverse groups as this, gathered with “a good mind” might come to be typical of Canadian society generally. All this was met with appreciation by those gathered. The only badly received part was the closing comment “Go Leafs Go” to which some anarchist or other radical leftist (who was critical of the patriarchy & evil consumerism in professional sports) let out a boo. (This incidentally is a hint of just the extent of the disconnect between the working class and the leftist intellectuals that actually exists most developed societies.)

Speeches from representatives from “No One Is Illegal” were what followed. There was surprisingly nothing radical, let alone incendiary about anything in what was said. Whether the speakers or crowd realized it or not, the speeches contained nothing that is not to be found in the officially enshrined multi-cultural act. So what effectively was happening was that radicals had gathered that afternoon to reaffirm the ideology of the state: people from different ethnic and social and sexual backgrounds all ought to get along and celebrate each others’ diversity. The slogan to this effect was “not nation but nations”. One could almost hear Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek saying, “My God aren’t you people aware…” If the protestors today had been confronted with this news, they might have replied that they were the ones who really meant multiculturalism. The government just pretends to. Following the first speech a kind of spoken word performance was offered. This speech brought together the all of the mother nature imagery of the first speech and knitted it together with the calls for a more tolerant society.

The march began to push its way to the west, along the now dismally gentrified Queen Street. It was as good as marching through the obscenity of Yorkville. The fashionable set gaped as the men Iranian men with thick accents hollared through bull horns for the end of capitalism, to inception of socialism and the dawn of the brotherhood of man. The percussion band played and to complete the cacophony were songs about Che Guevarra being broadcast from the trailer being hauled like a Bolivarian float by a slow moving pick-up truck.

There were many brief stops along the way to our destination. The first was saliently the place at Queen and Spadina that had been the scene of the brutal police kettling and mass arrest during the G-20 summit. Indeed, it might have been the censorship the police had suffered as an aftermath of that fiasco that accounted for their distance today. They were there, to be sure, a black helicopter even prowled the skies, and a mounted division even could be seen up some on the streets that ran perpendicular to Queen, but the cops remained at a distance.

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Once passed Bathurst, the parade reached a Loblaws which contained a store that distributed clothing made by the factory that had recently collapsed in Bangladesh. 400 workers were killed. If you hadn’t caught anything about this event on the news, it isn’t surprising because any news related to the deaths of 3 people in America get far more media coverage. Here is a terse but effective account of the tragedy:

“In Savar, Bangladesh, the eight-story Rana Plaza building collapsed, killing at least 381 of an estimated 3,000 workers, most of them young women, and leaving hundreds more missing. One day earlier, police had ordered the evacuation of the building, which houses five factories that make clothing for Western markets, because of cracks discovered in its foundation, but at least one manager told his employees they could work nevertheless. “We want to live, brother,” said one trapped survivor to rescue workers. “It’s hard to remain alive here. It would have been better to die than endure such pain.” Two women who gave birth in the rubble were rescued along with their newborns; several thousand protesters vandalized cars and set fire to furniture from a police control room; and the building’s owner, Mohammed Sohel Rana, was apprehended near the Indian border by Bangladesh’s Rapid Action Battalion. “People are asking for his head,” said an adviser to the prime minister, “which is quite natural.” ” – Harper’s Weekly

Here in Toronto representatives of the Bangladeshi community were on hand to bear witness. They had on their heads bands of morning that held single red spots on a background of green. Their contribution was the only heavy and moving part of the march. In a heartfelt speech, a number of demands were made that sounded small compared to the gravity of what the people of Bangladesh suffer at the hands of global capitalism. Finally, a representative Bangladeshi worker when forward to the heavily guarded entry to the grocery store and presented a letter to be taken to the manager of the clothing company lurking within. (See the photo below.)

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There was a tense moment just then when it a black bloc agitator started shouting “fuck the police” but she seemed to get censored pretty quickly by a native protestor. It could very well be that the organizers of this event were ready for this kind of stunt, which effectively amounted to the quelling the actions of an agent provocateur.

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For all that might seem wild or unreal, chaotic, inchoate and ineffectual about the protest, at least the martyrdom at the Chicago Haymarket had been commemorated. And at least in a small way the flame of proletarian resistance was being nourished.

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A Review of John Barth’s “The Floating Opera”

In Literature on 05/01/2013 at 13:07

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John Barth is a credit to accomplished writers with the name Barth. And if one were assigned to read one of the other Barthes, say the theologian Karl or the critic Roland, one wouldn’t be too upset to end up reading the brilliant novels of John. It would be a happy mistake to pick up “Giles Goat-Boy” or “The Sot Weed Factor” and be treated to experimental fiction that imaginatively provocative, as much as it is intellectually as stimulating as protestant theology or continental literary theory. As John Barth says of his own efforts, “…an artist may paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our time into material and means for his work – paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends what appeared to be his refutation…”

In “The Floating Opera”, the narrative imitates the voice of the protagonist of the novel. It does this by making clear to the reader that what he is reading is a memoir. The narrative thus calls attention to itself as a provisional representation, not a naturalistic one. Its method of story-telling goes contrary to the standard novel based on the technique of the realist genre. From the first chapter of the book, “tuning my piano”, it is clear that what we are reading is someone’s version of reality, not just “how it is”. This is, in fact, the truth of the realist genre itself, from Zola to its modern day practitioners in the cultural commodity industry. It is the author’s perspective passing itself off as a neutral witness. What makes Barth’s book significant, and books like it, is that make it clear that what they are presenting is indeed a perspective on reality. Barth himself comments on his own experimental approach to the craft of fiction, “”For apprentices, all work is experimental, as in another sense it is even for seasoned professionals. In my own literary temperament the mix of romantic and  neoclassical is so mutable that I hold no particular brief either for or against programmatic experimentalism.”

The premise of the book is that there is an old man in his fifties writing about what he identifies as the most important day of his life a decade earlier. The events of the novel all take place throughout a day when the author was thirty-seven years old. It was on this day that Todd Andrews had decided to end his own life. So the story is one of a much older man looking back on his younger self. This might be the explanation for the apparent discrepancy pointed out by certain readers. Todd Andrews, the criticism ran, is not a character who displays any signs of being depressed. He is a materially well off professional, engaged intellectually if not committed to his work. He has a mistress and seems to appreciate the company of the other long term residents of the hotel where he lives. He is well liked in his community. This, the critics have it, is the not the ethos of a suicide. This misjudgment of character is attributed to Barth’s own immaturity of the time. (Surprisingly, he was only 24 when he wrote this book. “The Floating Opera” is a massively well informed book and a testament to what a hardworking author can accomplish.) Barth was, however, far ahead of his critics. The tragic optimism of the narrator of the story was not exactly that of the 37 year old Todd Andrews. The critics have forgotten, maybe because they are so accustomed to reading the authoritarian realist perspective, that the teller of the story does not have the identical perspective of the main character. The point of the older Andrews is precisely that he has chosen life over suicide. Naturally, he will present a more rosy picture of life surrounding the 37 year Andrews than the subjectivity of the 37 year old Andrews was himself experiencing.

The novel takes place all in one day. As has been mentioned, this is the day that Todd Andrews has selected to be his last on earth. The reason he has made this decision are unclear, but it gradually unfolds with every succeeding chapter. The odd thing about Andrews is that he opts to live this last day according to his normal schedule. He will not do anything out of the ordinary. In fact, Todd Andrews is revealed to be a normal person except for a few important differences. He seems to be a hypochondriac. A heart condition, he believes, has put him under the sentence of death every day since university when he was first diagnosed with it. Also, Andrews is involved romantically with the wife. What is not ordinary about this is that this arrangement is based on mutual consent – it came about by design of the couple. Finally, Andrews is special because of his outlook on life. He has not committed belief in anything. The world for him is entirely material and therefore has no intrinsic meaning. He charts how this belief evolved from any early acceptance of Marxism, through to his war experiences, and finally to his sinking deeper and deeper into existential nihilism as he lived a quotidian life in a small New England town. Near the end of the novel, a crisis point has him put his belief in nothingness to the test. He comes very close to blowing up the eponymous “Floating Opera” showboat venue along with himself, his friends, and many of the people he knows. Yet he is held back. Quite possibly he is held back by his loving bond with the daughter of his former paramour.

“The Floating Opera” reminds a reader of “Tristram Shandy”. In both novels, the narrative focuses on the existence of a main character, attempting to present his essence by offering as many unorthodox or unexpected perspectives as possible. The narrative of “The Floating Opera” does not over look any detail as too small to incorporate into the composite picture of the main character, down to the double “dd” in his given name “Todd” or the way that name is a pun on the German word for death. This pun will eventually become significant in one of the book’s important episodes. The book includes a number of notable sequences which the narrator jumps over to in order to flesh out his account of this supposedly last fateful day of his life.

One of the subjects of the book’s many seemingly loose threads is the portrayal of the old men of the town where he live, what he calls “a chorus of oysters”. Barth delights in recreating their dialect of English, their manner of story-telling and their nostalgia for the past. The key to understanding their inclusion is to recognize in them what the author wants himself to avoid through suicide. Andrews seems to see only two alternatives in the old men of his town. The first is a kind of cynicism that does an injustice to the life which he does in fact appreciate. A typical sentiment of the old curmudgeons is, ” ‘E’ll get git old soon enough, or a car’ll hit ‘im.” The other alternative is a kind of naive meliorism over the reality of physiological degeneration and gradual isolation from the world of one’s younger life. And, to return the salient, Mersaultian feature Andew Todd’s ideology, since life has no intrinsic value, what is the use in prolonging it further?

Other accomplishments that Barth makes in this book he makes exceedingly well. An excellent ear for dialect is certainly one:

“I b’lieve the Samuel T. Brice burned up one time, tied up to Long Dock in Baltimore. This was Cap’n Will’s new boat – what was ‘er name? LaVerne  Canlon. After ‘is wife. Well, sir, Cap’n Will hadn’t no more’n put ‘er in the water, spankin’ new, ever’ line and whipstitch, ‘for we had the big freeze-up in the Bay, and be durned if ‘e didn’t git froze up in ‘er, and the ice wrecked ‘er. Weren’t no icebreakers them days.” (p.111)

 Another feature is a number of stylistic innovations that might prove annoying or distracting in the hands of a lesser talent. In the chapter “calliope music” Barth presents two lines of the same text in two separate columns. The narrator assures the reader that the best sense of this section can be made not of reading both texts successively, but concurrently. This move anticipates modern developments in scholarly ‘writerly’ texts. Other sections of the book present a hilarious dispute between the wealth Old Man Mack and his children and ex-wives who stand to inherit his fortune if they can meet the bizarre stipulations he sets. The law, furthermore, is another object of Barth’s satirical attack as he writes a chapter in which he shows a stunning linguistic, frankly as great as a tour de force of Beckett, reproduction of the convoluted language of a surreal legal document.

 Also innovative are what is printed in the center of the book. These are actual advertisements for “The Floating Opera” itself. It is a kind of floating carnival that greets the main characters in the final sections of the book. The proprietor of the carnival is not, perhaps, as compelling a figure as Barth might have intended him to be. The “Floating Opera” turns out itself to not be as intriguing as allusions throughout the novel suggested it might be.

 Life itself is a kind of “Floating Opera”. That might be the point of the title and its inclusion at the end of the book. Andrew’s life itself is quite good, and what Barth is saying, and as a result it is a mistake to look for deeper meaning behind the small satisfactions and partial insights life offers. Accept life as an incomplete thing, a sometimes shabby and generally awkward incomplete thing in which the main attraction of the show always seems to get cancelled in favor of a third rate actor who does a poor rendition of Hamlet. Say “yes” in spite of all the cracks.

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A Review of Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night”

In Literature on 04/16/2013 at 14:38

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“…truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future’s counselor” – Cervantes

Fortuitously not entitled, “The Steps of the Pentagon”, which was its working title, “The Armies of the Night” is a novel that challenged the conventional idea of what a novel could be. The book’s subtitle “History as a Novel, the Novel as History” might have seemed like the hype of the publisher, a throw- away line meant to fill space on the front cover of the paperback. And yet, to write a highly stylized version of historical fact is exactly what Mailer set out to, blending “a truly unique sense of perception” with “a traditional journalistic endeavor.”

In October 1967 masses of engaged citizenry marched on the Pentagon, risking “being beaten, arrested, buried in a stampede”, in protest against the war in South East Asia. Mailer, a vocal critic of the war, walked in the vanguard of the movement and war arrested and detained. With this simple scenario as its basis, Mailer crafts a unique style of fiction in “Armies of the Night.” It is this fiction that he described in the book’s chiasmic subtitle “History As A Novel, The Novel as History”. So in the sense of deliberately effecting an alchemical transformation out real events into aesthetically moving work, the novel has something in common with “In Cold Blood” published the year before. And yet the two books could not be more different.

Throughout “In Cold Blood” Capote’s own involvement with the characters of the book, which was considerable, remained invisible to the narrative. In “The Armies of the Night” Mailer places a character named “Mailer” at the center of the action, writing about this fictitious self in the third person. Casting the narrative in this way adds an inescapably comic tone to the book. It isn’t clear if it was Mailer’s intention to write a book that would turn out to be so funny. Looking at yourself in the third person, with any degree of honesty, is liable to produce a good deal that is humorous. The same kind of thing happened in Saul Bellow, otherwise a noted literary grump, when he created a fictional account of himself in “Henderson The Rain King”. (A novel notable for having erected the character of Henderson and then done nothing especially interesting with him.)

The novel begins with Mailer attending a gathering on the evening before the march. The gathering is held in an old hotel, attended by groups that have now became legendary: SDI, SNIC, and other not so famous member of the Rainbow Coalition. Every so often a name will come up, in among others that have been forgotten, which still resonates today. The reader reflects that at the time of the writing Mailer must have had no idea whose fame would win through to the 21st century and whose would not. So in a sense the book gives us a naturalistic glimpse of certain figures.

Notable among the notable who casually make it into Mailer’s history as a novel is Noam Chomsky. A very young Chomsky is met about a third way through the book. He is lying on a bunk where Mailer and many other protestors have been detained. The reader imagines him looking very much like he did when he debated William F. Buckley in the vignettes now available on Youtube. Chomsky was then at the height of his powers, delivering pure brilliance and utter certainty of conviction and knowledge in a Woody Allen type style that must have been maddeningly disarming for his opponents. Mailer indeed sees a sterling quality in Chomsky and devotes almost a page to him and mentions that they chatted a little about linguistics even. Chomsky is worried about getting to class on time the next day.

Robert Lowell is another important figure portrayed in the book. He is mostly shown as a reserved foil to the Dionysian ubermensch of Mailer himself. In fact, he reserve is almost annoying to Mailer, as is the poet’s hesitation to get himself arrested. Neverthless, Lowell is recognized as a man of great nobility for his involvement in the protest. Furthermore, on the great extended flights of imaginative reflection is dedicated to describing the intellectual tradition of humanism and civility that Lowell belongs to.

The first section of the book deals with the march on the Pentagon itself. There is a great deal of lead up to it. Even though this part of the book is one in which there is very little action, Mailer’s narrative voice keeps the interest high. He himself is very high on whiskey drunk from an old mug. He cuts a figure that the contemporary reader is likely to associate with Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist like Mailer but with far less literary acumen. Mailer stays drunk and reflects on his drinking for the first hundred pages of the book. He goes so far as to urinate on the floor of the washrooms of the theater where gathering before the march is being held. If that was not enough, he boasts about what he has done in order to make some point or other about the way that the protestors are provoking middle class platitudes. There is a quality of Don Quixote in this section.

Similar to an episode in Cervantes is the scene that takes place just after Mailer is arrested for crossing the U.S. Marshal’s picket line. Mailer is thrown into the back of a paddy wagon with a member of the American Nazi Party. The two men exchange a threats in a quarrel that quickly becomes a caricature of itself. The Nazi recognizes and hates Mailer, but it still unwilling to attack him and transgress the strictures of civility. Evil is as banal, apparently, as it is hypocritical. Mailer too is unwilling to attack the Nazi, so that stay on opposite sides of the cage until they are led away to the processing center.

“Armies of the Night” succeeds as a survey of the American left at the end of the 1960′s. In the second section of the book, Mailer goes into the exact political meaning of the entire episode. He takes painstaking care to explain how difficult it was to build the coalition and steering committee for the protest. An incredibly delicate political balance had to be struck between the more liberal faction of the protest, who were responsible for bringing out large numbers of people to swell the ranks of the protest, and the radicals, who were responsible for spearheading the movement itself. Mailer also includes an interesting Nietzschean interpretation of what he saw as the reason why so many middleclass students  motivation for being involved in the protest. Mailer reflects in the voice of the average (male) protestor, “I will steal your elan, and your brawn, and the very animal of your charm because I am morally right and you are wrong and the balance of existence of such that the meat of your life is now attached to my spirit, I am stealing your balls.” It takes a very singular mind to have thought of anything like this.

 Mailer’s interpretation of why the middle class student protestors are involved in the march on the pentagon, attended by other notables like Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, probably reveals more about his own personal involvement. From the beginning Mailer was interested in struggle, the type of macho struggle of a man against his own or external nature. There is a lot of Hemingway in Mailer, whose first novel “The Naked and the Dead” couldn’t have had a more tough-guy moniker. Tough guys like Mailer and Hemingway, as Orwell noted of Jack London, their spiritual grandfather, are psychologically more in tune with fascism than socialism. Nevertheless, their moral equivalent of war ends up being in the name of the common man, of the abused and the oppressed and in the name of the promise of a better future, rather than in the name of nationhood, blood and soil. Mailer was getting himself arrested and detained as a kind of self-overcoming. He wanted to prove he had elan, vitality to himself. “The Armies of the Night” is a document of this struggle with himself.

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