On Anarchism

 

Peter Kropotkin

Emma Goldman

Gleaning a few grains of influence from Hilda Hilst, that great and towering Brazilian madwoman of letters, I would like to begin by asking rhetorically whether a dog—any given dog—is a happy, slobbery, gadabout anarchist. A dog doesn’t have much need for entrenched order because a dog shows up amenable and almost excessively prepared in all earnestness for whatever mess or revelry immediately awaits. A dog doesn’t bother thinking life too far beyond how life innately presents. If anarchism is first of all a methodology or ontology or even a metaphysics, it can only ever be tangled up in ideology secondarily. If it has to have an ideology, anarchism invariably ends up twinning itself with grassroots socialism, this business primarily being one of collectivized labour and equitable distribution of profits. The smaller your population the easier this is going to be to manage and administrate. The Mennonites and the Hutterites have probably done as good a job as any, though I guess some hippies of the drop-out ethos made a go of more or less operational communes here and there, learning to fix tractors and grow whatever they could eat and/or sell. This was back when the Age of Aquarius was coming but didn’t. The chronologically second of the two great Russian forefathers of modern anarchism after Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin is widely quoted as having said something in Russian along the lines of: “Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization.” This is how us anarchist folk believe human society ought to function. However, it really should be clear to everybody that, just like the Age of Aquarius, civilization still hasn’t arrived.

Kropotkin was a descendent of aristocrats and he believed in decentralization, self-governing communities, and worker-run enterprises…just like contemporary Canadian activist author Naomi Klein (she of No Logo renown). The exiled and formerly-imprisoned Kropotkin went back to Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and when he watched Lenin and his Bolshevik cronies build a clumsy top-down version of state-controlled capitalism under the pretence of later inaugurating a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that everybody including Leon Trotsky knew was horseshit, he actually became depressed and hopeless rather than disgusted or incensed. The October Revolution itself had been pure anarchy, but what happened afterward was nothing short of a historic catastrophe from which the world is still reeling. In his wonderful and disorienting book October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, author China Miéville attributes to the emergent technology of trains the collapse of the Czarist regime and the outrageous bedlam that followed. Though some anarchist revolutionaries were briefly held in high regard—like Iosif Bleikhman, “a fiery, unkempt, charismatic figure who spoke his native Russian with what Trotsky described as a ‘Jewish-American accent’ which his audiences enjoyed”—the vast majority of anarchists who participated in the October Revolution ended up dead, imprisoned, or in exile. There would appear to be a very harsh lesson here: only the skeeziest bottom-feeders ever seem to possess that special yen for seizing power.

This infernal revolution of October 1917 did not just pop off like a flashbulb out of nowhere. Radical politics had been building and covertly circulating in Czarist Russia for a good century beforehand, and Russia is indeed a very special case in this respect. Anybody who knows about the life of Fyodor Dostoevsky knows that he came traumatically close to being executed by firing squad for his involvement with subversive organizations. In the 1830s and 1840s, Ivan Turgenev, who shares my birthday, belonged to the same intellectual circles as future radical icons like Mikhail Bakunin and Vissarion Belinsky, and he would later address the drama and danger of the underground revolutionary existence in his elegant but extremely daring 1877 novel Virgin Soil, available to English readers in a wonderful translation from New York Review Books. Even the lion of Russian literature, Leo Tolstoy, practiced a form of Christian Anarchism, refusing to participate in state institutions—courts, the military, even taxation—leaving behind the legacy of a vast agrarian communal system to bind his followers and devotees in Christ.

Adapting and running with an old theme prevalent in the counterculture of the late 1960s, Canadian ‘green architect’ Jason F. McLennan writes that “the way to subvert the dominant paradigm is to have more fun than they do and make sure they know it.” Whether McLennan knows it or not—I’m guessing he does—he is also echoing supreme anarchist exemplar Emma Goldman who purportedly insisted in the early 1930s: “If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.” The subversion of the dominant paradigm has so far in history meant that whatever power apparatus is next on the docket will likewise have to be robustly subverted. If you cannot take pleasure in your work and your sabotage, or in your fellows and your comrades, then the mischief you believe you are up to cannot possibly be worthy of the energy and effort it taxes. “Every society,” writes Goldman, “has the criminals it deserves.”  

The Nabokov Problem

 

Lolita (Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

A Place in the Sun (George Stevens, 1951)

If you were to ask me which of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels is his best, the likelihood is that I would begin by providing myself a bit of a buffer, prefacing my remarks by saying that Ada, or Ardor is the most accomplished from the standpoint of literary prosecraft as well as being the most moving and most personal to this great and super unusual Russian aristocrat author in exile. Dig? I think you can see where this is going. The intractable problem here is that Nabokov’s actual greatest novel is indisputably Lolita. For ever and ever, Lolita has predictably arrived in paperback form with a blurb on the back or front surreptitiously attributed to Vanity Fair: “the only convincing love story of our century.” Since the century in question is the one that brought us the Holocaust and television, we might be prepared to take that dubious line with a grain of salt. As Vanity Fair has no mouth with which to speak or hands with which to write/type, the onus is on us to dig a little deeper and reveal the true author of the blurb, who turns out to be the usually very fine writer Gregor von Rezzori, among the most distinguished offspring of the dead-and-gone Austro-Hungarian Empire (he could probably relate more than a little to Nabokov on a personal level). Alas, unfortunately for all of us, von Rezzori had a little more to say: “a deeply touching story of unfulfillable longing, of suffering through love, love of such ardor that though it concentrated on its subject monomaniacally, it actually aimed beyond it, until it flowed back into the great Eros that had called it into being.” I actually have no idea what the fuck he’s talking about. The only thing this novel flows back into is the bubble of blood in the mouth of a dying fiend. Nabokov himself said that the novel was about the “cheerful barbarism” of America and for me as a reader it is very obviously his only unambiguous crime novel. I mean, Jim Thompson must have been hella jealous. If it is no longer fresh in your mind, let me rehash the story for you: a criminal European pervert with a dodgy superiority complex inveigles himself into the life of a dowdy adult American woman and develops a fixation on her daughter, twelve years of age when introduced, who the European characterizes as a “nymphette” but who is also the most vulgar and ill-mannered character in the whole novel, then he kidnaps her and takes her on the road where before too terribly long another malign pervert takes a shine to her; even though the European man has grown to despise Lolita—who isn’t getting any younger or more cultured—the last thing he is about to do is let some other interloper abscond with her like he weren’t standing right there glaring his most astringent glare. The only character in this captivating and hideous story who I’m able to identify with at all is the dowdy American woman, Charlotte Haze, who makes the fateful mistake of renting the European man a room, thereby unthinkingly introducing him to her lewd little daughter. We are all Charlotte Haze, are we not, when disreputable shit is going on around us and those involved are going to great lengths not to tell us anything? I think some people just call that “family life.” In Stanley Kubrick’s uneven and uncharacteristically slack film version of Lolita (1962), Shelley Winters gives the standout performance of the whole picture, imbuing Charlotte with more pathos and with more ironic humour than she has in the novel. This is a variation on the job Shelley Winters was basically always given. She was widely-reputed to be the smartest woman in Hollywood—somebody once told me she knew at least as much as the C.I.A.—but anybody can see that she isn’t anybody’s idea of a classic screen beauty. (You put her next to Elizabeth Taylor and she doesn’t have to act embarrassed.) In great and immortal films like He Ran All the Way and A Place in the Sun, both from 1951, Shelley Winter is treated with cruelty and unnecessary meanness by men like John Garfield and Montgomery Clift until she girds her loins and finally prepares herself to have them treat her with love…and they treat her even worse.   

Air Quality: Yellow

 

I am nervous and excited because my old psychiatrist, who I was able to walk all over like a Persian rug, ran away with the Moscow State Circus and in an hour-and-a-half I meet my new psychiatrist who has an Italian surname and who I therefore assume can give as good as he gets/takes. We will have to quickly establish that I am the top and he the bottom. That's how it works. They say the air quality today poses only a moderate risk to the health and welfare of Calgary's residents, but I'm having some trouble taking that claim altogether seriously. I'm not saying it's code burgundy out there or anything catastrophic like that, but it's definitely at least as nasty as cottage cheese in your undies. Today we are all chimney sweeps at large!

Derek Bailey and Tristan Honsinger, Duo [Full Album]

The Artists and Bands with Top Representation in My Vinyl Collection

 

Albert Ayler: Five Records and Two Box Sets

Don Cherry: Eight Records

Ornette Coleman: Eleven Records

John Coltrane: Ten Records

The Dead C: Eight Records

Eric Dolphy: Nine Records

John Fahey: Nine Records

The Fall: Eleven Records

Merzbow: Eight Records

Royal Trux: Nine Records

Sun Ra Arkestra: Eleven Records and a Box Set

Neil Young: Nine Records

Simenon and the Trains

The avuncular Georges Simenon was one of the most popular writers of the 20th century, as well as one of the most prolific and wealthy, author of over two hundred novels and sundry shorter pieces of one kind or another. His most popular works were his detective novels dealing with the pipe-smoking Commissaire Maigret—the books the put him and kept him on easy street—but it is his more sophisticated, murky, sordid, and just-plain-existential romans dur, of which 1948’s Dirty Snow is probably the perennial fan favourite, onto which more discerning readers of crime fiction can be expected to habitually glom. It is also widely known that between fans, amenable strangers, and sex workers—he’d spend entire days kicking back in the brothel—Simenon engaged in sex relations with more women than anybody this side of screen legend Charlie Chaplin. (I sometimes joke that the real reason Charlie Chaplin was kicked out of the U.S. in 1952 was because he’d done the deed with the wives of everybody in the U.S. and Soviet upper brass.) Because of its unique historical perspective and wholesale idiosyncrasy, 1961’s The Train, about love during wartime and exigencies of transportation, is for me a definite standout from among Simenon’s more serious outings…and I’ve had a go at a good number of them. It is one of the most informed and unique novels I have ever read about the Second World War. Beginning on the morning of May 10th, 1940, the day the Nazis invaded Holland and Belgium, The Train follows a man named Marcel Féron as he gathers his scant courage and makes the decision the flee his town in Northern France, near the Belgian border, leaving by train with his pregnant wife and young daughter, from both of whom he is to become separated in the chaos of mass exodus and collective panic. Once on his own and uncertain if there is any future at all or of what godforsaken calamity awaits next, Marcel forges a brief but intense romantic connection with a young half-Jewish Czech woman named Anna, who has until recently been imprisoned in Belgium. Marcel is aware of this romance's status as transitory idyll—not a serious relationship with actual legs under it—but he’s nonetheless sort of transformed by the encounter a little. His brief time with Anna is tantamount to a glancing encounter with Fate, perhaps the sole deviation in his life's set course subsequent to a somewhat troubled youth which was impacted both by the First World War and four years spent suffering from tuberculosis in a sanitarium between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. In the case of Marcel, this is an encounter with Fate that is necessarily predicated on a yearning for the collapse of routine. It isn’t like he was out among the blocked and rerouted trains of France scouting for a hookup. He just wanted his life upended. His encounter with Fate also involves an affirmation of his own otherness; an otherness mirrored in Anna. The nature of the sexual relationship between Marcel and Anna is fascinating. It has a desperate and almost quietly gruesome quality to it, hardly the stuff of love story consolation and heavenly bells a-ringing. It may even be partially transactional. This is one factor among many that serves to suggest a scrupulously maintained strategy of demystification. We are left with a very stark measure both of the human cost and the callous banality of the adventurer and of the warmakers. Perhaps the inner life of any given person is inherently criminal and this is at the core of literature's appeal. Our private narratives are secret and cosseted. There are all manner of different kind of cop in our lives. Our daily security—in our work, our families, society at large—requires that we give only so much away of our secret self and that we have thugs to keep people in order. The disclosures of great literature are a benediction about which the cops of the world can for the time being mostly do sweet fuck all, Orwell’s worst visions not having exactly panned out. (Huxley was much closer to the mark.) Simenon spent most of the war years in the Vendée region, the key congruity between The Train and his life. Though his conduct during the war years would become a source of controversy because he continued to hustle, publish, and make money during the occupation, the city of La Rochelle, location of the refugee camp where Marcel and Anna spend much of the novel, named a quay after him in 1989.

Old Time Relijun, "Vampire Sushi"

Generation Nuggets

 

Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966)

Angel, Angel, Down We Go (Robert Thom, 1969) 

The Electric Prunes, "I Had Too Much to Dream (Last Night)"

* Both of my parents turned 18 in 1968, my father a 6'5 party animal with mutton chops and my mother an aspiring nurse and teacher's pet (although she was prepared to do just about whatever it took to get to the big city...which is to say Edmonton or Calgary).

Late 2025 and the First Half of 2026 Have Been Pretty Good for Electronic/Noise/Ambient Music [Four Standouts]

 

Midori Hirano, OTONOMA

Merzbow & Akio Jeimus, Any Other Utterance

Jon Porras, Achlys

Pan American, Fly the Ocean in a Silver Plane

* This has been a good year for music like every year is a good year for music, but it has been the worst year for movies since I've been alive. And that ain't hyperbole.