#39: Halldor Laxness, Felix Guattari, & Carolyn Eichner
Hello again, dear friends.
I’m finally catching up on writing about some books that I read on tour. Life post-tour has been crazy. Tour broke up on the monotony of what my daily life has become in such a profound way. I am inspired to pursue some insane whims I’ve been having and to make decisions that don’t at all align with my typical instinct for practicality and longevity. Perhaps it’s time to more intensely be-towards-death.
Salka Valka by Halldor Laxness
I have not yet read a Laxness novel that did not absolutely floor me. Independent People, Wayward Heroes, and now Salka Valka. All are indisputable masterpieces that heroically grapple with the complexity of human drama and the desire for the good life. Salka Valka is the newest of these to me and this edition I read is a brand new translation.
The story follows the eponymous Salka Valka, a 1930s queer icon, from early girlhood to maturity as she lands in a small Icelandic fishing village called Oseyri, some distance from Reykjavik, the intended final destination her mother had in mind before running out of money. Instead, she grows up in Oseyri, works, suffers deaths and losses, educates herself, and unionizes the local fish workers.
It’s a story about the arrival of modernity in a rural land, where the church once ruled before a single merchant became the sole benefactor. It’s the story of the search for autonomy from paternalistic capitalists. A battle between capitalism and socialism is waged and both sides lose. When the revolutionizing ends, power and money coalesce into their standard people and places, structures reestablish themselves, and the working classes keep extracting value from the sea for the rich and powerful.
“Perhaps you young people will eventually become decent human beings, even if we in the older generation haven't managed it. But it's late now. And there's nothing as good as falling asleep, both for those who are blind and those who can see. And we'll look after one another, as best we can, if we should wake up tomorrow. But there's just so little that we can do for each other here in the village. Good night.”
Molecular Revolution in Brazil by Felix Guattari and Suely Rolnik
Felix Guattari really is so amazing. Guattari saw the world in constant flux and sought ways to constantly plug himself into sites where he sensed a potential rupture in the dominant order. He embodied a pure sense of constant and unbridled optimism that daily life can be changed and that small revolutions can emit shockwaves that affect an entire assemblage. I want to see the world like this and do the same.
Guattari traveled to Brazil in 1982 on the dawn of its democracy to meet with the man leading the leftist PT party, Lula de Silva, as well as tour around talking to various minority collectives and psychoanalytic groups and schools. He writes that “the attempt at social control on a world scale through the production of subjectivity clashes with considerable factors of resistance from processes of permanent differentiation that I would call ‘molecular revolution.’” To him, a molecular revolution “consists in producing conditions not only for collective life but also for the embodiment of life for oneself, both materially and subjectively.”
If you are someone who wants to or already does read Deleuze and Guattari and wants to ground their understanding of that project in praxis, this book, which is really made up of a series of lectures and interviews, provides an incredible opportunity to watch Guattari finally map so many of his difficult concepts onto graspable realities. That’s not to say it’s easy, its still Guattari. However, watching the Deleuze and Guattari project be applied to something makes me much more convinced of its potential and its beauty.
Some personal highlights include Guattari on love, anarchism, punk, Braudel, the Tuareg people, John Cage, interpretation, and schizophrenia. Now I really finally wanna read these Braudel books collecting dust on my shelves.
The Paris Commune by Carolyn Eichner
I wanted to read more about the Paris Commune after watching Ghost Dance some time last month and so I read this brief history. The Paris Commune is certainly one of the most inspiring moments in Western history. A bunch of revolutionaries took over Paris and turned the city into something where, for two months and ten days, all had access to what was previously only for the rich — the symphony, the theatre, childcare, palaces, museums, education, and social engagement of all types.
In the words of the popular revolutionary newspaper of the time, Pere Duchene, “Vive le Commune, Fucker!…The commune is simply the city of Paris administering itself, adopting the same measures for all its children, providing the same aid to all, having the same level of care for all … instead of a heap of holy jack-asses from arrondissement town halls, finally a good mother instead of the dirty buggers of the government.”
Was this, at least until Kurdistan, the last great socialist and anarchist feminist attempt at utopia? I know that it was certainly a true embodiment of “the invincible naivete of those who want and hope,” a force I hope to be emitting until I finally drop the body someday.
I saw that movie Dream Scenario. It was pretty funny but overall another completely empty A24 film. Then I saw that new movie The Zone of Interest that won Cannes. It’s a retelling of the life of Rudolf Hoss, a chief architect of Auschwitz. It’s a riff on the banality of evil. The camera glides through the Hoss’s beautiful flower garden, past the pool and the greenhouse, all while Auschwitz looms directly behind his concrete fence. The chimney blazes at night, filling up the bedrooms with bright orange death, and the ambiance of gunshots and desperate screams constantly buzzes in nearly every scene.
Through the use of contemporary film techniques and color editing (the movie REEKS of A24), the Holocaust is ripped from the safety of the past and all its ugliness is forced into the present. The Holocaust is happening right in front of you. This is the incredible success of The Zone of Interest and it will be its lasting contribution.
The Zone of Interest is based on a book of the same name by Martin Amis, a man who deeply hated Muslims and who, if he were alive right now, would likely be saying something awful about Palestinians while praising Netanyahu’s genocidal ambition.
Anyways, at the 2 minute mark here, you can here a new Glue song if that’s of interest to you: