Dream Log: Rich & Famous, Yet Again

Last night I dreamed that my blog was blowing up literally overnight, and that when I woke up in the morning I had become rich and famous, literally overnight: millions of pageviews, millions of dollars via GoFundMe, the promise of even greater sums via ads on the blog and book deals, reporters waiting outside my front door to interview me, me acting silly in the interviews, singing in deliberately silly ways into the video cameras, doing the munkee routine and so forth. Standing very stiffly and declaring in a very constricted voice: "I'm a delightful person." Hilarious stuff like that. Becoming an instant media sensation, just like Gore Vidal or Fran Lebowitz.

I have that dream a lot. Surely some of you have noticed. It astounds me that so many artists -- yeah, I called myself an artist again, get over it -- really seem to care so little about being rich & famous. One big exception, I recently learned, one artist who wanted very badly to be rich and famous, was -- Vincent Van Gogh. Yikes!

Maybe all of that bullshit about how the secret to getting it, whatever "it" is, is ceasing to want it, is actually true. ... Nah, it couldn't be! It's malarkey! Also, don't worry, I'm not going to cut off my ear and then shoot myself in the stomach and linger for several excruciating days before dying. Because -- what if I suddenly became rich and famous 3 days after I died of an excruciating self-inflicted wound? No, I'm going to hold on and stubbornly wait for fame and fortune, even if it comes so late that I'm completely senile and can't tell the difference. That'll show 'em!

Once again today, I woke up and it hadn't actually happened: enthusiastic celebrities, authors and other influential people in Australia and India hadn't gotten the ball rolling with rave tweets about my blog as I slept, tweets which spurred many, many similar tweets, and mentions of my blog in blogs and in online and print columns and on radio and TV talk shows and in the speeches of heads of state, so that the tsunami of my success could roll west over Europe and into early-morning Murrka...

But it's also wonderful having the dedicated readers I have in real life, it absolutely is. You guys should be flattered by the dream. What the dream is about, in my analysis, is how wonderful the world would be if everyone was like you guys. I'm not good at expressing appreciation, I know I'm not. The munkee stuff is, in part, about how I wish I could be, and how I wish I were more open emotionally. mee r munkee. mee luv yu. yr verr nice person. yu rillee r.

Real reality definitely has its upsides. I'm attempting to live more in reality and less in the Walter Mitty day-dream-verse.

...Okay, maybe I'm not trying very hard yet. I have to daydream to some extent. Writing is, to one degree or another, daydreaming. Certain passages of certain sorts of fiction are up to 100% daydreaming. And the percentage of daydreaming in the process of writing so-called "non-fiction" is nowhere as close to 0 as certain DULL pretentious creators of non-fiction would have you believe.

Praise From Obama or a Diss From Trump

I'm not good at making money. I would like to have lots and lots of money, but I never have had much. I think my difficulty with making money is one result of my autism. But I'm not sure about that.

For 9 years, the main thing I've been doing to try to earn money is writing this blog. That may be absurd. But I don't know what else to do.

I don't know how to market my blog. Some days I have very high page counts, some days very low. Some individual posts get many more views than others. But whatever happens, it's a surprise.

I daydream a lot about becoming financially successful. (Maybe that's a big part of my problem right there: maybe successful people never daydream about success. That would go directly counter to all of those motivational speakers and authors telling people to visualize success. But I don't think that necessarily means it's incorrect.)

The nearest approaches to success I've had so far with the blog, the biggest amounts of pageviews, have come when someone with a large readership mentions one of my posts: a popular blogger, or a magazine not terribly far from The Main Stream.

And so I daydream about people like Barack Obama doing things like tweeting about my blog. Seems like something like that could be a big boost toward my having something people would call a career. There are many people who could be a big help to me with a single mention, but I've been thinking -- daydreaming -- that perhaps no single person could help me more with a single tweet, than Barack Obama.

Then today I thought: what if Donald Trump tweeted about me? Would that help me even more than a tweet from Trump?

I can't imagine Obama tweeting something negative about me: either he'd have something nice to say, or, surely, he wouldn't go out of his way to diss a nobody like me. I can't imagine Trump tweeting anything but negative things about me. And as we know, he not above going out of his way to diss nobodies.

A tweet from Obama, something along the lines of:

"Here's a blog written by Steven Bollinger, an interesting writer who's not very well known. Essays on all sorts of topics, from wristwatches to renewable energy to politics to ancient Latin, and many other things. Thoughtful, witty, fascinating writing."

-- would almost certainly catapult me into what is known as a career. But what if Trump tweeted something like:

"Small-time creepy loser disabled autistic blogger, sympathetic to loser NYT and loser MSNBC and lib Dems, takes pathetic potshots at me. A complete loser in life, jealous of my huge success. What a pathetic jerk! Sad!"

? Many, many people now say up whenever Trump says down and night whenever he says day, and who can blame them? Almost certainly, many people would praise me and my writing just because Trump dissed me, without ever actually going to the trouble of reading something I'd written. Many others no doubt would actually read my blog because of Trump's tweet, and some of them might like it.

I wonder whether there's some action I could take which would lead directly toward my having financial success, something which has never occurred to me, but would've occurred to almost every non-autistic person in my position?

I wrote above that almost every reaction to a post on this blog is a surprise to me. There is one exception: posts like this one, in which I write about how badly I want fame and fortune, almost always get far fewer pageviews than my average post. That makes me sad for several reasons, one of which is that I think these posts are very interesting and entertaining. It's okay to laugh at these posts, it doesn't necessarily mean you're missing the point.

If Oprah Winfrey,

Larry King, Harold Bloom, Charlie Rose, Stephen King, John Grisham, Barack Obama, Martin Scorsese, Bruce Springsteen, Tom Brokaw, Keith Olbermann, Bob Costas, Barney Frank, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary and Bill and Chelsea Clinton, George Bush Sr and Babs and W, Elon Musk, Taylor Swift, Lady GaGa, Stephen Colbert, Jay Z, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Tina Fey, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Leonardo DiCaprio, Demi Lovata and Raed Selah all praised my blog at once, all on the same day, publicly -- on Twitter or Facebook or their own shows or wherever they go to publicly praise obscure bloggers -- that'd be pretty cool for me.

Commercially. Those wouldn't be the 32 most flattering raves possible for me. In some of those 32 cases I'd be extremely flattered. Some of those people, I admire their work very much and value their opinions very highly. In other cases less so. And in some cases I don't even know who they are, or anything about them except that lots of people hang on their every word and gesture.

I don't suppose it's realistic to hope that all of those people will publicly praise my work today.

Life is hard. I need a break. I need a whole bunch of huge breaks.

Suddenly Becoming Successful

No, I haven't suddenly become successful, but other writers have, and I'd like to, too. I'd like to experience a bit of fame and fortune before I die -- no, I'm not dying. My health is okay for my age. But my age is 55, so that if I do become famous, my obituaries will say that success arrived late in my life. Unless that guy at Cambridge, the one with the huge beard who says we can all live to be 1000 years old, is actually right, and the necessary breakthroughs are actually accomplished before I die, and I actually live to be 1000 years old.

I'd be okay with living to be 1000 years old.

Here's a nice sentence from an essay by Tennesse Williams, "Amor Perdida: Or, How it Feels to Become a Professional Playright," which I read just now:

"That's the nice thing about a language you don't understand -- it is possible to believe the conversation is so much more elevated than it probably is."

As soon as I read that sentence I liked it so much that I had decided to make it the new tagline for this blog -- with attribution, of course. I attribute whenever possible. But by the time I finished the essay, I had more to say about it. To summarize it and do great injustice to it, it's about when Tennessee was in Acapulco, and was about to go broke, something he had done many times and was very familiar with, and asked his friend, the owner of a cantina, for a job waiting tables, and then later that day received a telegram informing him that a play of his was going to be produced in New York. He described it as a moment when his old, poor life had ended, but his new, rich and famous life had not yet begun, and in which his earlier life, filled with many kinds of poverty in many different cities, flashed before his eyes. This happened when Tennessee was in his early 30's, an age which seems young to me now, at 55, but, I know, seems terribly old to a 30-something who has very badly wanted to be a rich and famous writer since before he was full-grown.

I repeat, I've done great injustice to the essay. By all means, read the whole thing. It's just 6 pages long in The Best American Essays 2004, in which it appears because it was first published posthumously in the Michigan Quarterly Review in 2003. And it's magnificent.

Tennessee's friend the cantina owner seemed less certain than Tennessee that Tennessee's life had been changed forever. I suspect this may well have been because he knew much less than Tennessee did about the business of writing.

I wonder whether success in a writing career, if and when it comes, comes with a very unusual suddenness compared to success in other careers. I'm not sure about this, because I don't know very much about other sorts of careers. But I've been studying the nature of the writer's career for well over 40 years. Yes, success can come gradually, rung by tiny rung for decades, but it can also come in an instant, at least as far as what the writer is aware of: wondering where his or her next meal will come from, he or she is informed that his or her play will be produced on Broadway, or that several major publishers have gotten into a bidding war for his or her novel, or that he or she has been awarded a MacArthur genius grant or a Nobel Prize.

I would think that if you, for instance, owned and operated a cantina, although the potential for success might be vast, the ways in which one could go in an instant from rags to riches would be fewer, if not actually non-existent.

As I said, the best thing to do is to read "Amor Perdida," Williams' wonderful short essay, for yourself. But let me interfere just a little bit more and point out, in case you miss it, that "Amor Perdida" is the name of the song which was playing on the jukebox at the beginning of the essay, when Tennessee assumed that he needed a job such as waiting tables, and that he writes, "I believe" it is "the most beautiful of all musical compositions." Not "I believed."

Leftists Give Grateful Dead Props, But Not This Leftist

Jordy Cummings in Red Wedge Magazine:

"What can be said about the Grateful Dead that has not been said before? They are on one hand somewhere below Coldplay and Nickelback on the list of hatred-objects for Leftists of who came of age between the late 80s and late 90s [...] As the Marxist scholar and Deadhead Carol Brightman points out, the intelligentsia never understood the Grateful Dead [...] Actually looking at their concrete musical achievements, they are in more ways a west coast counterpart to their contemporaries in the Velvet Underground, who had the luxury of a relative lack of success keeping their historical reputation unsullied[...]"

1) I like Coldplay. I came of age in the 1970's, and for all I know my opinion of Coldplay might be much different if I had any idea what their lyrics mean or what they do besides the music.

2) Has any member of the Velvet Underground ever said anything about the Dead being their counterparts or comrades or that they liked their music or anything else about them even a tiny bit positive? I think Marxist Deadhead Carol Brightman may be going a teeny ways out on a limb here.

3) As I've said before on this blog, anyone who thinks success is a burden or that failure is a luxury doesn't know a damn thing about failure or about how fortunate they are. I would suggest working with the homeless for several years or more in the hope of developing some depth as a yuman being.

4) I almost forgot: in case it wasn't already obvious: I've never liked the Grateful Dead. Like Timothy Leary, they had the dumb luck in the mid-60's to be in the same place at the same time with some people who were relatively deep, and rode that commercially for decades. The Dead are the quintessence of "grinning-hippie capitalism," whether Hunter S Thompson was thinking of them when he coined that phrase, or not. The Velvet Underground, on the other hand: made of 100% authentic awesome.

I'm Imagining Ken Burns And Artie Shaw,

finishing up an interview for Burn's documentary TV series "Jazz," an interview which has gone on a bit into the evening, so Burns invites Shaw over to the Tavern on the Green for a drink, and although normally it would be just a short walk from Shaw's apartment, it's raining, so they take a limo instead.

There's a line of taxis dropping people off at the entrance to Tavern on the Green, so they get out and walk a few car lengths in the dark, and Artie almost trips and falls over a homeless person who's passed out in the rain from hunger and exhaustion -- who, if this was the mid-90's, could have been me! -- and they mistakenly assume the person is drunk or high and mumble a little bit about Why doesn't someone get a handle on that problem, and the doorman knows them and zips them right in past a line of people standing, and they sit at the bar sipping 30-year-old unblended Scotch and gradually getting very sad as they agree with each other how no-one understands what a horrible burden their success is.

Oh, I hope so much that some day really soon I am allowed to experience for myself the way that tremendous success is so much harder to bear than being homeless and hungry and so tired that you pass out on some pavement and are half-awakened by some rich guy almost stumbling over you in the dark on his way to someplace warm and snug where he will sip 30-year-old unblended Scotch and complain about how no-one understands that success is so much harder to bear than failure!

Artie Shaw Said Success Was Harder Than Failure

What a shame that so much success was wasted on someone so ignorant. Imagine how shockingly little someone would have to know about failure in order to say something that dumb.

Shaw was making a living as a musician at age 16 and sold tens of millions of records before age 30. That's how little he knew about failure.

He made that boneheaded remark on Ken Burns' documentary Jazz, speaking of someone insufficiently acquainted with failure. I've gotta think that many documentarians --- documentarians. Try to imagine, if you can, the gulf between how familiar the average documentarian is with failure, and how much Ken Freakin Burns could possibly know about it -- Ah say Ah say, I have to think that many documentarians would have kindly cut that remark out of the documentary, because they would have had quite a good idea how much it made Shaw sound like a horse's ass.

You don't know what I'm talking about? Good for you! And Shaw, and Burns!

As far as I can tell, Artie Shaw and Arnold Shaw weren't related. Artie was by far the better musician. On the other hand, Arnold said and wrote things which weren't ridiculous.

By The Time Nietzsche Was My Age He Had Been Completely Crazy For 10 Years

And I'm feeling a bit frustrated myself, frustrated by the whole not-being-rich-and-famous thing. But I'm not completely crazed by the frustration, not yet. (Although I realize, of course, that anyone who ever says "I'm not crazy" must add, in order to be logical: " -- at least I don't THINK I'm crazy. But if I WAS crazy, how would I KNOW?")

Before he went completely insane all at once early in 1889, Nietzsche had reconciled himself, or so he claimed, with his lack of popular success. Some writers, he said, were destined to be recognized only posthumously, and he counted himself among those. He was wrong about that. He became very famous before he died -- but, unfortunately, not until he had been completely insane for several years. Which kinda spoils it in a way.

Some of you may be asking, "What th' Heck, Steve -- are you actually comparing yourself to Nietzsche now?!"

Yes, I actually am. I finally got tired of just sitting back and waiting for others to start comparing me to people like Nietzsche -- not because of the tragedy of his biography but for the brilliance of his writing. Yeah, I actually am comparing myself to the greatest writers who ever lived. In part because I want to be rich and famous. But also in part because I actually think I'm one of the greatest writers who ever lived, there, I said it. I DESERVE to be rich and famous, there, I said that too.

I deserve huge success BEFORE I die or go completely insane from waiting. (Assuming that I haven't actually already gone completely insane because if I had how would I know?)

When I read Nietzsche saying that when he reads Spinoza he knows that they are kindred spirits, I know what that's like. I feel exactly the same way about Nietzsche. (Although not in every single detail: I don't share Nietzsche's sexism, and I'm a socialist and he was an ivory-tower guy who claimed to be "above" politics. I got over the ivory-tower kind of silliness many years ago.) I feel less so about Spinoza because I'm not nearly as fluent in Latin as I am in German.

Oh well, here I go, pushing "Publish" again and hoping that this post will be The One --

My Opinion Of Myself And Some Others. An Advertisement For Myself

I feel pretty good about what I write. I think I'm a good writer.

And suddenly today that started to worry me, when I contrasted it with remarks about writing by two of my favorite writers. One is by Kurt Vonnegut,from the preface to one of his books. I don't remember it word-for-word but it went something like this: "How do I feel about this book? I feel lousy about it. I feel lousy about all my books." Seemed he felt somewhat embarrassed that he hadn't be able to do better. The other remark is by Samuel Beckettand is more concise: "To write is to fail."

That's what two writers whom I find to be excellent -- Beckett especially -- have to say for themselves. Pretty close to outright apologizing for doing what they did. What I'm worried about is that perhaps they were so good in significant part because they were profoundly dissatisfied with themselves, and therefore constantly striving mightily to do better, and that, conversely, my satisfaction with my own work keeps it relatively mediocre. But you know what? I still think I'm pretty good. And people whose opinions I value highly also have praised my work.

I wouldn't say that it's a widespread opinion that I'm a good writer, because I don't think enough people know anything at all about me for any opinion about me to legitimately be called widespread. I'm not good at marketing my work. I'm more sure about this negative opinion of my marketing skills than about my positive opinion of my writing, because marketing skills can be measured objectively, in terms of numbers, and the quality of writing cannot. I won't tell you how few clicks this blog gets, because 1) I don't want you to cry or feel sorry for me, and 2) it's basically nunya bidniss nohow. But I need an agent. I had an agent once, a good one, but I lost him again, because I never finished the novel which got him interested in working for me, and by the time I finished another novel he had moved on to another profession. I got that agent by the sheerest and dumbest of sheer dumb luck, and unfortunately for me, finding an agent, a skilled person to market one's work, is itself a kind of marketing. (*sigh*)

And because I am not (yet) so hugely successful that counting my money and turning down business offers occupies all of my free time, and also because I am a bit of a schmuck, let's face it, I spend some time commenting on articles on Huffingtom Post, where they keep us schmucks coming back and clicking on their site and making them money with dumb things including badges, yes badges, and what inspired me to write this post was that today I noticed that ________* had received the Community Pundit badge, which comes with the perk that some of yr comments are conspicuously placed above the others immediately below the text of an article. I'm pretty sure that the Pundits don't actually get PAID or anything, still it irks me mightily than an absolute dolt and moron like ________ has been named a Pundit, whilst I have not.

Then again, do I really want to be in a club which would have ________ as a member? And how are Pundits really chosen? HP says:

"HuffPost Pundits are our most engaged and thought-provoking commenters. Pundit Badges are awarded based on a strong history of insightful comments,"

which sounds as if HP would have us believe that some actual human beings working (as unpaid interns?) for HP found ________ to be insightful and thought-provoking. Can that really be? If that's true it would be quite discouraging, for it would mean that some real bozos are driving the bus over there. Or are Pundit badges actually awarded like the other badges: by a machine which counts clicks, counts things like fans and friends and faves? That too would be discouraging, but in a different way: it would be yet another indication that HP comments section is just another internet flame war trying to pass itself off as a moderated "community."

In any case, sad for me that my life's empty enough that I care. May that change soon, completely and forever. From your lips, gentle readers -- from both of you -- to Andrew Wylie's ears.

*I considered writing ________'s handle in this post, but why do that?

Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway, Myself and Other Superstars

Hemingwaywrote "d--n" instead of "damn." In some of his works, at least. In The Naked and the Dead,Norman Mailer may have spelled out all of the other dirty words, but instead of "fuck" he wrote "fug."

And it was published and it was a huge success, and the reason, Mailer said, that in all of his later works he spelled out all of the naughty words is that when he was first introduced to Dorothy Parker, she said, "Ah, you're the young man who doesn't know how to spell 'fuck.'"

This would have been the late 40's. Hemmingway was still alive then, he lived until after 1960. I don't know whether he and Mailer ever met. It seems strange to me that I don't know that. I also don't know whether by the late 40's Hemmingway had begun to spell out the naughty words.

Clive Owen plays Hemmingway in a new HBO movie. He wears spectacles and a big moustache and a goofy expression, but still it's very flattering physically to Hemmingway.

Okay, okay. I'm not complaining about how much better-looking Cate Blanchett is than Elizabeth I was, or that Owen played Walter Raleigh opposite Blanchett.

And if we get right down to it (Mailer was a shrimp!), it's possible that if I had had more success as a writer, and as a young writer like Hemmingway and Mailer, I might have spent less of my life sneering at Hemmingway and Mailer.

That's either all the way right down to it, or painfully close.

More Awful Truth, or -- Free Your Inner Walter Mitty!

A lot of atheists comment upon the articles in the Religion section of the Huffington Post -- in fact, HP's Religion section has become, among other things, the largest online community of religious skeptics of which I know.

To be sure, HP's authors on religious topics are almost all believers themselves, and it often seems -- especially to us godless types -- that the moderation leans heavily toward the religious side as well, and displays some intolerance toward atheistic readers' comments. (Of course, it's impossible to be sure about this without being able to see all the comments which don't make it past the moderation. Maybe they're much more fair than I imagine. Maybe some of my comments today didn't get posted for a long time today because it's Monday and there's a huge volume of comments on Monday and the mods get swamped.) There's no official atheists-are-not-welcome policy there -- on the contrary: recently some of the article authors have remarked on the large number of atheists commenting on their work, and made some gestures meant to be understood as reaching out toward us -- but not infrequently a religious reader will ask us atheists why we are there, or, even less pleasant, flatly assert that we are not atheists or we would not be there. Occasionally someone goes even further and claims, smugly -- "Smugness is stupidity's surest sign" -- William Gaddis --that no-one is really an atheist. (A fairly popular standpoint among mainstream Christian theologians two to three centuries ago.) [PS, 31. August 2011: It appears I misquoted Gaddis. It would be quite presumptuous to add, "He would've loved that!" but he was very interested in misquotations and made them a significant theme of his fiction, along with forgeries, impersonations and so forth. Sorry, Mr Gaddis. Anyway: the character McCandless in Gaddis' novel Carpenter's Gothic says several intelligent and earnest things about stupidity and smugness. Right now I can't find the authentic quote which morphed in my mind into "smugness is stupidity's surest sign." Much better by far anyway that you simply read the whole novel. Wise men tell us great things.]

It's generally not asked in a nice way, in my humble opinion, but the question of why so many atheists congregate at HP to comment on articles about religion posted by believers is, of course, not entirely unreasonable. I don't think there is any better answer than that we are there because we have happened to find each other there. There are not buildings in every city and town in Christendom expressly built for us to meet and exchange our thoughts about the nature of the universe, as there are for Christians. Even Jews, Muslims and Hindus are much better provided for with meeting places. We gotta go with what we got. The overwhelming majority of HP's readership is on the Left, it shouldn't surprise anyone that many of us are atheists. Indeed, perhaps the surprising thing is how solidly theistic the editors and writers on religion are.

People tend to daydream about what is lacking in their lives. Hungry people, whether dieting or desperately poor, dream of food. Lonely frustrated people dream about romance. I dream about great professional success as a writer, as I confessed in a blog post posted here yesterday. Earlier today I read another one of those "Why are you atheists here?" comments in the Religion section at HP, and I began to daydream about a more atheist-friendly Internet forum -- and then very suddenly that daydream combined itself with the daydream of success from yesterday: I daydreamed of Internet traffic beginning to flow here, to The Wrong Monkey, in proportions rivaling HP's business, many thousands of readers' comments on my blog posts being left here every day, The Wrong Monkey replacing HP as the place on the Internet for atheists to meet and get all atheistic. ("Sorry, Arianna, you HAD your chance to do business with me. I pitched my blog to HP -- and you never got back to me! Oops! MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HAAAAA!")

Yes, you may say that I'm a dreamer. Some people seem to mock all dreamers. I've never imagined for an instant doing what they suggest, and ceasing to daydream. But I do think about them sometimes. I can't imagine that they've thought things through. Surely the briefest realistic contemplation of a world full of people like them, fully devoid of dreamers, must horrify even the most drab mind.

Or maybe they just assume that successful people are substantially different from anyone they would ever happen to know personally. While it may be true that anyone with an ounce of ambition would LIKE to avoid their company completely, as we all know, you can't always get what you want. Again, I think the mockers of dreamers have not thought things through. Very few people were ever born rich and famous: Liza Minnelli, John-John Kennedy, not too many others. Most of the rich and famous were at some point in their lives mere dreamers, being mocked by unpleasant people who never in their wretched lives thought a damn thing through with any consequence.

Albert Einstein is a particularly clear case of the connection between stupendous success and the sort of daydreams routinely mocked by loathesome little human worms. This is not always recognized, because Einstein referred to the daydreams upon which his success was based as thought-experiments. Po-TAY-to, po-TAH-to. Keep dreaming. It's vital that you do, or else we'll all end up like --- brrrrrrrrrr! (Ha! No way we'll ever ALL end up like that!)

The Awful Truth Slips Out

(Just now someone very kindly mentioned that they were going to bookmark my blog, and this is how I responded)

No! Please! Please! Don't bookmark my blog, I beg of you!

Actually, I'm very pleased when anyone reads my blog -- that's right, even him, over there -- and I'm even more pleased when they become official "followers" of it, and when they make comments on the blog. I want more and more people to do these things, and I want them to link my blog on their blogs, and I want Oprah Winfrey and Charlie Rose to praise my blog on their TV shows and put the URL up on the screen, and I want to become rich and famous and have my blog posts collected into bestselling books, and be a frequent guest on Conan O'Brian and Jimmy Kimmel and I want to hang out with Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie and have a stormy celebrity romance with Chelsea Handler with pictures of us constantly in the tabloids over misleading headlines, and --

Nevermind.

(Well, it's out there now, nothing I can do about it. It's out there, and it's the truth. Especially the part about Chelsea Handler. She's so good-looking, sometimes it almost makes me cry.)

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part II

Sloterdijk's footnotes refer to authors from ancient Greece, to medieval, renaissance and modern authors, mostly philosophers, but also psychologists, historians, theologians, natural scientists -- a vast array. Besides Plato and Nietzsche and Heidegger there are frequent references to Nicholas of Cues and to Augustine of Hippo, and to Indian and Chinese philosophers. Sloterdijk's reading list seems infinitely more interesting than Kallscheuer's half-vast repertoire. But then, Sloterdijk is interested in presenting new perspectives on the whole of human history. I can't imagine Kallscheuer ever attempting something like that. I can, however, imagine him proferring reasons why such an attempt is decadant, or passe, or otherwise outside the lines or against the rules of the club.

Of course it is possible that Sloterdijk was not involved at all in the publication of the volume with Kallscheuer's article, and has never been aware of Kallscheuer at all. Certainly, the attacks on Sloterdijk from various German academics and critics have been so numerous that no-one could give serious attention to them all, and clearly, Sloterdijk has had his mind on more interesting things. Regrettably, he has been caught up in a bitter feud with Juergen Habermas. Either Habermas or Sloterdijk is the leading philosopher in Germany today, or perhaps more accurately, Habermas leads one branch of philosophy and Sloterdijk another, and there are probably very few people who admire them both. I have not yet noticed any calls for reconciliation between the two, among the numerous articles praising one at the other's expense. I'm no exception here, I can't think of anything nice to say about Habermas.

The outward, obvious, immediate source of the feud was, depending upon which camp you're in, either Sloterdijk's lecture "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" ("Rules For the Human Park"), first read in 1999; or a gross mis-representation of said lecture, leading to accusations against Sloterdijk of neo-fascist thought. A journalist, an intellectual lightweight, apparently, in any case he hasn't become a household name, heard Sloterdijk give his lecture, and reported that Sloterdijk was propogating right-wing extremism. Within days headlines were flying, and Habermas had weighed in. This is where I came in: I had heard Sloterdijk's name before, but "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" was the first of his works which I read. Sloterdijk made the entire text of the essay available free of charge on the Internet -- which again was interpreted in two very different ways: Sloterdijk's opponents accused him of capitalizing on a scandal in order to further his fame; to others, such as myself, it seemed that Sloterdijk felt, quite rightly, that he was being grossly misunderstood, and slandered, and wanted the public to read the text in question and decide for themselves whether he was a fascist.

In "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark," Sloterdijk mentions that genetic technology is creating new possibilities for human life, which will create new choices, and that philosophy has yet to develop the new parameters which will be necessary to to deal intelligently with these new conditions and new choices. That's it, that's the entire bone of contention right there, the basis for accusations that Sloterdijk was calling for a return to eugenics as practiced under the Third Reich. It is apparently taboo among the philosophical mainstream in Germany, or what used to be the mainstream, embodied by Habermas and the traditional Left, to mention genetic technology without condemning the entire field out of hand. This traditional left goes back to Adorno, who in postwar Germany was the leader of the Institut fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, more commonly known as the Frankfurter Schule, the Frankfurt School. More than just the actual Institute in Frankfurt, the term "Frankfurt School" came to mean the entire dominant school of philosophy in Germany, and kritische Theorie, critical theory, was another name used to describe the whole movement: left-leaning, Marxist or otherwise post-Hegelian, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others, and definitely NOT including such independent thinkers as , Wittgensteinor Canetti. Adorno and Horkheimer were especially close, and collaborated at times as authors. Juergen Habermas definitely belonged to the Frankfurt School: in the literal sense, Adorno having personally appointed Habermas to a post at the Institut fuer Sozialforschung; and in the figurative sense as well, with Habermas, the last living prominent colleague of Adornos's, embodying in the public mind the continuation of Adorno's tradition.

The problem is that Sloterdijk came from the same tradition, and studied for a time at the Institut in Frankfurt, although he has proceeded in a very different direction. Sloterdijk, as well as Habermas, has a very great reverence and admiration for Adorno. However, Sloterdijk also admires Heidegger, and Oswald Spengler, and Michel Foucault, and Nietzsche, and other philosophers, all of whom the Frankfurter Schule tended either to disparage or to ignore. To the Habermas camp, to the traditional Left, to the Frankfurt School or at least to one narrow-minded stream of that movement, Sloterdijk's preoccupation with such thinkers is at best frivolous, at worst reactionary. They seem to forget that long passages of Adorno, for example in the Negative Dialektik, are devoted to Heidegger, certainly not in a positive way, but by no means dismissive either; and that Walter Benjamin, killed by the Gestapo before there was a Frankfurt School, but none the less one of its intellectual fathers, was a very enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche; and in general they seem to be connecting the dots in an ever-narrower philosophical system, ever more self-referential, ever less relevant to anything outside of itself. Sloterdijk may have begun as one of them, but at an early age he found that he could no longer dismiss all those others: Heidegger, Foucault, Nietzsche and the other bogeymen of the Frankfurt School. All the much worse that he praised Adorno along with all those others, lumped Adorno together with the movement's betes noirs. By the time of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft Sloterdijk was coloring way outside the lines. Kallscheuer's attack upon Sloterdijk -- again, allowing for the possibility that I have completely misinterpreted it. Some may find this hard to believe, but I hope I'm wrong about Kallscheuer. I hope that there is a brilliance there which I do not see. There is no surplus of human brilliance in the world, any more than there are philosophers who are too popular -- is the attack of a priest against a heretic, and therefore much more bitter, more PERSONAL than it would have been if the transgressor had never been a member of the flock.

I too have serious reservations about Heidegger and Spengler and Foucault and Nietzsche. I feel the closest personal identification with Walter Benjamin, who was both a Leftist and a Nietzschean, but aside from Benjamin and myself there are very, very few Leftist Nietzscheans. Throw in my great enthusiasm for Sloterdijk, and I may very well be a movement of one. I have some reservations about Sloterdijk, but these are far outweighed by my admiration for the way he broke out of the mold of the Frankfurt School. In the course of his feud with Habermas, Sloterdijk has pronounced that the Frankfurt School is dead -- an exaggeration, perhaps, but even if not dead it surely has become deadly dull. We can no longer ask Adorno to choose between Sloterdijk and Habermas. But it seems to me that a truly profound reading of Adorno must lead to an image of him as a stubbornly INDIVIDUAL thinker, who followed no pre-determined path. In this Sloterdijk resembles him, while Habermas, along with hordes, now receding, of other adepts of the Frankfurt School, betrays the example and lesson of Adorno by trying too much to imitate the inimitable, and by repeating the dictums of one who very seldom repeated himself.

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part I

Peter Sloterdijk, who at least in his native Germany has become a celebrity, hosting, for example, along with fellow-philosopher Ruediger Safranski, the television series "Im Glashaus: das philosophische Quartett," seems often to take a positive pleasure in the opposition he arouses. He is without a doubt the most widely-disliked intellectual in contemporary Germany. It's not entirely unreasonable for a German to be proud of such a distinction: Adornowas probably the most widely-disliked German philosopher of his time, Schopenhauerand Nietzschewere practically unknown in their own lifetimes, Heine and Marx and Wittgenstein and Canetti were exiles, Walter Benjamin emigrated to France in 1933, when the Germans invaded France in 1940 Benjamin tried to flee to Spain, was pursued all the way by the Gestapo, and killed himself in the Pyranees rather than let himself be captured... Well, one could extend the list for quite a while. Germany's intellectual life is different than ours in the US. A very large part of the animosity against Sloterdijk, it seems quite clear to me, has to do with his popularity. A philosopher, many or most German intellectuals seem to believe, cannot be simultaneously profound and popular. Sloterdijk comes along and embodies a glorious refutation of this preconception, is at once brilliant and popular, not as popular as J.K. Rowling or, to name another anomalous conflux of depth and success, Cormac McCarthy, but just popular enough to stand out from the other intellectuals, just enough to make it clear that the readership for contemporary philosophy has widened a bit. The intellectual mainstream in Germany, rather than re-examining their belief in the incompatibility of of intellectual seriousness and publishing success, reject Sloterdijk out of hand. One very striking example is Otto Kallscheuer'sarticle "Spiritus Lector. Die Zerstreuung des Zeitgeists," the first and longest piece in the volume, published in 1987, of reactions to Sloterdijk's book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, which appeared in 1983, sold over 70,000 copies in the first year alone, to give you a more exact idea of the size of the teapot in which this particular tempest has been brewing for over a quarter-century now, and made Sloterdijk famous and extremely controversial. Kallscheuer's essay is extremely difficult. I have nothing against difficult writing. Above, I speculated that Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno, was probably the most widely-disliked German thinker of his time. The scorn which was heaped upon him probably had to do above all, even more than with the fact that he was, from the end of World War II to his death in 1969, by far the most influential philosopher in Germany, and a Jew, with his absolutely unique and extraordinarily difficult prose style. But once I could see past the noise and hysteria surrounding Adorno, I began to appreciate his thinking, and began to eagerly labor through those uniquely difficult sentences of his. Now that he's been dead for four decades, one notices that the negative remarks have largely faded away, and that Adorno has largely been accorded his rightful place in the Pantheon of philosophy, although he's probably actually read as seldom as the other immortals. I love Gaddis' JR and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, too. But difficult is not always the same as good. It is not a praiseworthy end in itself if it does not offer rewards equal to the effort it demands. It can proceed from hopeless confusion as well as from genius. After a long study of the 54 pages of text of Kallsceuer's essay, followed by 85 footnotes over 12 pages, I'm fairly sure that it consists of a deeply confused and neurotic negative reaction to Sloterdijk, based first, last and in between on the sales figures of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. It's just possible that I have it all wrong, and that what Kallscheuer has produced here is a persiflage, a merciless satire of those who would refuse to consider a book to be serious because too many people had bought it -- but I have gone to the trouble of reading other of Kallscheuer's writings, and I'm afraid he's just not that funny. Excuse me, I should say: not intentionally. If I must sum up my reaction to Kallscheuer and to others like him in one line, I cannot think of an improvement on Mark Vonnegut's statement to his father Kurt, quoted in one of the latter's prefaces: "You've disappeared up your own asshole and died." (I gather that the Vonneguts, father and son, eventually reconciled.) There are many others like Kallscheuer, see his footnotes. The main reason I'm singling him out is that I don't want to dig through any more attacks against Sloterdijk, I find them deadly dull and dumb, the dozen or so negative articles I've read by as many different authors in a half-dozen popular, mainstream German publications and smaller, leftist intellectual ones, will last me for a long time to come.

Yes, most of the books on the bestsellers lists are crap. All the more reason to be happy when there's an anomaly, when Cormac McCarthy sticks out like a sore thumb between Kevin Trudeau and Dan Brown. If the stench of the masses horrifies you, just tell yourself that all those other people only bought No Country for Old Men to look smart and won't actually read it -- that is, if you're actually going to read it yourself. If not, telling yourself such things might just upset you further, but then again, pain can lead to greater wisdom.

Most people cannot live freely, cannot think for themselves, it's terrifying. Instead, they conform, to religions, for example, to political parties and movements, to academic trends. They obey, they believe, they connect the dots in the same way as others before them, all to distract themselves from an all-too-clear perception of their own existence. Philosophers are no exception, they slog along their dreary academic paths and repeat their mantras: those other authors are hugely successful, but they write trash. We are the keepers of the flame, we are the enlightened ones. Then someone like Sloterdijk comes along, who is truly free and obviously brilliant, and therefore fits into neither this slot nor that. His very existence calls certain assumptions into question. The honest reaction to him would be gratitude for throwing more light onto life. But such honesty is also brave, much more brave than most people can be. Free and brave thinkers must expect more venom than gratitude.

The book about Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft -- it's entitled quite simply Peter Sloterdijks "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft", and I obtained it quite by accident, wishing to purchase Sloterdijk's famous work itself rather than a book about it, shopping online from across the Atlantic, rather than in a German bookstore -- is published by Suhrkamp, who also publish Sloterdijk himself. Although they have almost a monopoly of the more ambitious German authors, as far as I can determine they have not published any volumes by Kallscheuer alone. I have to wonder, therefore, since it seems not to have been a case of Suhrkamp calling on a writer from its own stable, whether Kallsceuer's vicious, ridiculous attack appeared in the Suhrkamp volume on Sloterdijk's insistence. I would like to think that that is how it happened, that it was Sloterdijk's way of saying, Look, you calf-biters, ("Wadenbeisser" is a beautiful German term of contempt for puny, insignificant critics, who nip at one's ankles and calves like tiny toy poodles.) take a long, 54-page-plus-85-footnotes look at one of your leaders. That it was Sloterdijk's way of saying how little such nonsense bothered him. Or perhaps, as I did, so too Sloterdijk found that Kallscheuer can be very funny, unintentionally. Sloterdijk often seems verschmitzt, an untranslatable German word meaning at once sly, quietly observing, amused, calm.

I've mentioned the 54 pages and 85 footnotes twice now, I should perhaps clarify that there's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with a lot of footnotes in philosophical writing. Almost all philosophers include a lot of footnotes in their works, Sloterdijk is no exception. The only exception I can think of, in the couple of centuries in which footnotes have been commonly written, is Nietzsche, and he may have had no other reason for leaving them out than that he wanted to emphasize how different he was from other philosophers. (As if he needed to.) But Kallscheuer's footnotes are no more inspiring than his main text; they're heavy on obscure contemporary philosophers and critics who toe the same line as Kallscheuer. Obscurantists. Nerdy club members who all know the secret handshake.

PS, 6. June 2015: I've finally figured out that Kallscheuer was mocking Wadenbeisser who have attacked Sloterdijk for ridiculous reasons, not committing such an attack. I'm disappointed. Wadenbeisser don't deserve that much commentary. Like I said in 2009: Kallscheuer isn't very funny. Brevity is the soul of wit. Besides exposing Kallscheuer's lack of it, having someone go on at such length about how ridiculous the Wadenbeisser are mkaes Sloterdijk seem insecure. An actual Wadenbeisser leading off the volume would've been much funnier.