GIFT-GIVING

By: Harold Jaffe


The holiday season is on us. Xmas muzak everywhere.

Terrorism is in the air, as it has been to one degree or another since the devolution of the Soviet Union to a polluted version of Russia.

Capitalism needed a demon to replace Communism.

Is there something that can be called benign terrorism?

Such as compassion, not just felt, but expressed for oppressed humans, such as the innocent and impoverished Iraqis and Afghans killed or maimed during the US's assault on those sovereign nations.

Compassion, not just felt, but expressed for the Bangladeshis, a made-invisible country of about 150 million souls, its crucial rice paddy industry largely overrun by the ice melt in the Antarctic which has transformed the Bay of Bengal into a maddened ocean.

Compassion, not just expressed, but enacted, on behalf of stock animals like cattle, pigs, chickens, whose lives consist of extreme torment crowned by slaughter.

Schweitzer put it this way: Extend your feelings, try to recognize the suffering of those animals that are slaughtered and eaten.

The suffering is greater than before. Stock animals shot with chemicals and hormones, in many instances spending their entire doomed lives in tight pens where they can scarcely move.

I call compassion benign terrorism because official culture excludes it from its criteria for happiness and unhappiness.

One is not permitted to become unhappy at the suffering of a stock animal, at the suffering of a brown-skinned family whose modest house is bulldozed because the adolescent son is suspected of throwing rocks at an armored vehicle.

What about plain speech, such as attributing oil as the leading if not sole reason for the invasions of Iraq and Libya?

Attributing Congress’s overwhelming majority in support of the homeland security bill and bank bailout to moral cowardice and cynical opportunism.

Global leaders denying climate change while proceeding full throttle with toxic chemical industries along with the reckless overuse of nuclear power plants and fossil fuels.

If referring to these perceptions as benign terrorism seems inapt, call them deviations.

But to deviate in this time of moral fervor, xenophobia, and the exponentially growing, manipulated disparity between rich and poor is about as reprehensible as terrorism.

In the eyes of official culture and most Americans.

Deviation, then, on the occasion of the holiday season.

Gift-giving comes to mind.

Gift-giving is deviant because it tends to be an impulsive action from the heart which has nothing to do with repayment, opportunism, or calculation, and is solely designed to benefit another.

"Tends to be" because there is a species of gift-giving which is calculated and opportunistic, such as political campaign contributions, and even ostensible gifts from the heart like wedding bands or communion dresses or Christmas presents.

That isn't the kind of gift-giving I have in mind.

Why would Georges Bataille say that strong art must always include the immoral subversion of the existing order?

Morality is possessed by the white gloves of the existing order.

Bataille's gift to us were his formulations and his mania.

I will risk sounding sentimental:

Examples of uncalculated gift-giving might include rescuing a stray cat or a wounded bird; giving alms to a homeless person; paying the toll for the car behind you on a toll road.

True, you can perform even these acts of mercy with one eye on divine compensation, but they are not commonly done that way.

Less tangible forms of gift-giving might include paying serious, unpatronizing attention to a child, animal, plant.

Attending to a human not used to be taken seriously, such as a so-called mentally ill or imprisoned human.

Less tangible still would be to spread goodwill like a gentle virus to everyone human, animal, vegetable with whom you come in contact.

But that is generally the province of spiritually elevated souls.

Bodhisattvas.

I recall an instance in NYC. A bus driver in one of the problematic parts of Manhattan sang rather than talked to his passengers, singing out the next stop, singing while he drove.

The Manhattan passengers, habitually stressed and suspicious, especially while en route to work in the AM, praised the driver for being so relaxed, so balanced, so -- as it seemed -- contented, thereby broadcasting this contentment.

Broadcasting contentment is good.

What about broadcasting righteous anger or anguish, as a conscience-bound German might have done during the Nazi period?

Or John Brown enunciating his "No! in Thunder."

"No, I refuse to stand by and watch my black and brown sisters and brothers be enslaved by the same professed moralists who aspire to imitate Christ."

Do those instances of righteous anger qualify as gift-giving?

Yes, they do.

In any case, you can see how a disinterested (not uninterested) gift-giving counters in principle the niggardly dictates of capitalism.

The difference between disinterest and uninterest is that disinterest implies a passionate, caring separation from the object in question, whereas uninterest implies a dispassionate, uncaring separation.

Potlatch, practiced by northwest Indian groups, is a complex prototype of ritualized gift-giving, part disinterested, part competitive.

Let's leave potlatch to the Native Americans; they have suffered more than most of the rest of us.

Their cultures are deep.

Their hearts and minds are integrated.

About Seeing

"We don't see things as they are; we see things as we are."

"You gentlemen and ladies of quality who frequently don't know yourselves what Christian virtue and justice are, look at the sunken, deep-set eyes of the lower classes, where you can see all too clearly the sorrow and misery that weigh on their hearts. Not everyone who sees his grieved and martyred face in the washroom mirror in the morning is a murderer or drug addict." -- Harold Jaffe, excerpt from Death in Texas

Seeing, Noun: Perception by means of the eyes, beholding, visual perception.

"A presiding officer, even of an ordinary polling station like this, should, in all circumstances, be guided by the strictest sense of independence, he should, in short, always observe decorum." -- Jose Saramago, excerpt from Seeing

Seeing, Adj.: Having vision, not blind, being sighted - able to see.

Hurry! Only One More Month to Submit!
For an issue About Seeing: Addressing the Visual Arts (cinema, video, painting, photography, etc) Fiction International is looking for texts, stories, and visuals. Go to Fiction International for submission instructions.

Truth Force

Here's a piece Harold Jaffe posted on the Facebook Occupy San Diego discussion page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/161765230583534/):

--We see a broken human emerge from the canyon and avert our eyes.

--We read of homeless vets and pregnant women breaking into boarded-up buildings to escape the cold; we avert our eyes.

--The buildings have been boarded up for years; squatting in them is against the law.

--Law is not justice.

--We read of a polar bear and her cub trekking 900 miles south from the north Pole to find food, dying on the trek.

--See what's been done to our living world.

--We avert our eyes.

--We see brown-skinned women and children being slaughtered in bloody, fruitless wars across the globe, and we avert our eyes.
--We see people, young people, rebel in cities across the globe. The rebellions are labeled riots; the rebels are labeled criminals.

--We know otherwise.

--Still we avert our eyes.


--We see aircraft funded by caucasian corporate despots relentlessly bomb the country of a brown-skinned desert despot.

--Their mission, they claim, is liberation.

--We know otherwise, even as we avert out eyes.

--We see cynical, opportunistic industrialists and politicians line their pockets while lying to their constituents, and we avert our eyes.

--We see long lines of laid-off working people waiting to claim their unemployment checks which will run out before they find another job.

--We avert our eyes.

--We are not permitted to see the tens of thousand of people imprisoned unjustly in privatized prisons where inmates are denied parole and forced to do surplus labor so that prison owners and investors can extort their surplus profit.


Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.
Avert your eyes.
Don’t avert your eyes.

See.
Share the pain.
Have courage.
Bear witness.

Art as Cultural Activism

On September 5, 1981, the Welsh group that called itself "Women for Life on Earth" arrived on Greenham Common, in Berkshire, England. They had marched from Cardiff, Wales, with the intention of challenging the decision to site 96 US Cruise nuclear missiles on Greenham Common. On arrival they delivered a letter to the Base Commander which said "We fear for the future of all our children and for the future of the living world."

When their request for a debate was ignored they set up a "Peace Camp" just outside the fence surrounding the Royal Air Force Greenham Common Airbase. This surprised the authorities and set the tone for an audacious, lengthy protest that was to last 19 years.

The protesters refused to allow authorities to enter the camp, which became known as the Women's Peace Camp and gained international recognition with imaginative images such as eggs, spiders webs and children’s toys with which they decorated the chain link fences and contested area. In the end the UK and US withdrew their attempt to site the cruise missiles in Greenham Common.

*

During the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, a number of Chilean working-class women created complex tapestries depicting the harsh conditions of life and the pain resulting from the disappeared victims of Pinochet's repression. These tapestries, or arpilleras, get their name from the Spanish word for the burlap backing they used.

Working quietly and using traditional methods, the women's arpilleras came to have a wide influence within Chile and internationally. The tapestries preserved the memory of los desaparecidos and the dictatorship's brutality, as well as the unemployment, food shortages, housing shortages, and other hardships of daily life attributed to Pinochet's rule. Preserving this collective memory was itself an act of art-as-protest, but creating the arpilleras also empowered the women, many of whom experienced a liberation through their work and became involved in further protests against Pinochet's regime.

*

Krzysztof Wodiczko, born in Poland, emigrated to Canada, and currently lives in the US. He is particularly well-known for his guerrilla projections on official buildings purported to embody public values. Guerrilla, because his images were subversive and often projected without official permission. He sought, he explained, to unmask the buildings' existing rhetoric.

One of his first projections was a swastika on the façade of the South African embassy in London during Apartheid to implicate the British government and align them with the white Apartheid regime in South Africa. And to implicate the public building itself, which presented itself as an architectural emblem of moral value.

Later, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, Wodiczko created a two-part projection in San Diego and Tijuana addressing the links between illegal immigration into the US and California’s economy, in which migrant labor plays a crucial role.

One projection is on the façade of a so-called Spanish style building in San Diego's Balboa Park, called the Museum of Man, which professes to be an anthropologically egalitarian repository of art and artisanry, but which Wodiczko sees as a muted celebration of western colonialism.

His projected image aligns a pair of white, male, well-groomed hands impatiently clasped, as if waiting for his meal. Above and to the right are two coarse outstretched hands -- manacled at the wrists -- but holding an ample basket of fruit, and, imprisoned as they are, ready to serve their colonialist master.

*

Rirkrit Tirivanija is a Thai artist. One of his installations consisted of the following: He bicycled around looking for space: empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, deserted K-Mart, abandoned Rite-Aid, haunted Burger King.

He rented the space and furnished it with stoves, cooking gas, freezers, fridges, microwaves, counters, bowls, cups, glasses, plastic cutlery, chopsticks, Tupperware, folding tables, chairs.
He purchased food: noodles, rice, potatoes, bread, soup, salad, tofu, fruit, green tea, bottled water, cocoa, curry spices. Comfort food.

He engaged the homeless as helpers.

Food prepared, he invited the homeless helpers along with the lined-up homeless to eat.
Continued through the day, into the night. Clean up, close for the night. Sleep on the premises.
Do the same thing for 60 days.

After 60 days he closed the space, got on his bicycle and looked for another empty warehouse or aircraft hangar, terrorized Rite-Aid, spooked McDonald's, gutted Gap, bombed-out Home Depot.
Select the space, rent it.

Feed the homeless for 60 days.

Close up, move on, find another space, repeat.

*

The preceding represents four examples of creating art in times of conflict. In every instance the art is problematic; not esthetic, as such; not even palpable in the instance of Tirivanija feeding the homeless.

What is the difference between art as it is usually constructed and what might be called crisis art, or cultural activism: the use of cultural means to effect social change or a wider social awareness?

Art that responds to a crisis is situational, hence created rapidly rather than painstakingly revised and refined.

Crisis art is directed rather than disinterested; more closely related to art as process than product.

Crisis art is keenly aware of text and context.

Crisis art often works best collaboratively.

Collaboration contests the auratic view of the artist? "Auratic," coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to the artificial elevation of the artist to a position above his or her fellows.

Crisis art is "immoral."

Georges Bataille insisted that the strongest art must function as an “immoral subversion of the existing order”; because "morality" is in the possession of the existing order, and as such is never what it professes to be.

Crisis art is (to quote a still fashionable term coined by the Russian critic Bakhtin), "dialogic".

The idea is not that the artist stands above the fray paring his fingernails, bemusedly observing his creations. Dialogic articulates the more humbling notion that the artist interacts, even integrates, with the community, on a largely equal basis, each affecting and affected.

Crisis artists must swallow the poison in order to reconstitute it. Expel it as art.

The poison, currently, includes our crazily spinning, electronic-obsessed, war-making culture and its profit-mad institutions; along with the rapidly worsening environmental crisis. The image of swallowing the poison and expelling it as art is shamanic.

But can art actually have any appreciable impact on the lives of humans who are oppressed, disenfranchised, struggling merely to survive? Can art affect cynical politicians and their corporate brethren?

There are precedents that were successful against great odds: Upton Sinclair's The Jungle; anti-slavery writings during the abolitionist period; French writers and artists helping to end the colonial war in Algeria; Solzhenitsyn's denunciation of Stalinism and the Gulags; Act-Up's culturally activist response to the demonizing of gay men during the AIDS crisis in the 80s and early 90s.

Do the kinds of strategies and calculations necessary for making and employing crisis art stand in opposition to the notion of the artist as dreamer, as creating from the deepest levels of consciousness?

Consider Goya, Blake and the French Revolution, the Mexican muralists, Grosz and Heartfield, Brecht, Picasso’s Guernica, B Traven, John Berger, Elsa Morante, Victor Serge, Clarice Lispector....

Surely these artists continued to imagine complexly, to -- as it were -- dream, even as they fought through their art against injustice?

Might socially activist art also be created for its own sake, its seeming ethical rightness, without calculating its effect?

If art of a certain strain is committed to process rather than product, it is especially difficult to sum up its final success. Was the art in the aftermath of Hiroshima successful? Was the art that characterized the takeover of Greenham Common successful? Were the arpilleras made by disenfranchised Chilean women successful?

Crisis art, dissident art, social activist art (largely synonymous) are perennial; one can't anticipate when an injustice or string of injustices, will invoke an art to register it.

But how will this art be appraised 40 years from now when the crisis that evoked it is no longer a factor?

Paradoxically, art produced rapidly under crisis conditions will sometimes have more lasting power and even esthetic appeal than the painstakingly created seemingly disinterested art that most people identify as quintessential. Crisis art has an energy and focus which more than compensate for its relative lack of refinement.

In the US there have been historical "moments" -- the Quakers, the Abolitionists and Transcendentalists, the Thirties Marxists, the Sixties counter-culture, Act-Up in the late Eighties and early Nineties -- but overall American writers have been contemptuous of socially-activist writing. It doesn't sell, it is more didactic than "esthetic." Moreover, why should artists be in a special position to address political crises?

Writers cultivate consciousness, contemplation, and in many instances learning. They view through a broader lens. If they have a reputation they can find a platform to make themselves heard and express their opinions precisely.

What good will it do? Wars, oppression, colonialism, profit-mania have been with us since human hegemony? And now authoritarian power is decentered, much less visible. Serious art of any kind has been rendered negligible in the market place, which in the US epitomizes the country's ethos.

With effort and intelligence, decentered power modules can be identified, as young dissidents and hackers have located and attempted to disable deliberately elusive nexuses of power and control.

Human history, however bloody and unjust, has not ceased; and, crucially, the planet we inhabit and have debauched is dying. Bangladesh is one of the world’s poorest and most densely populated countries, with its people crammed into a delta of rivers that empties into the Bay of Bengal, which because of the Antarctic ice melt is behaving like an ocean, flooding ice paddies and entire villages. Animals and plants throughout the globe are becoming extinct rapidly. The sun, lacking sufficient protection from its ozone layer, has become toxic. Lethal bacterial agents set loose from leveled rain forests or industrialized seas migrate into the general population.

Possibly the hardest factor for concerned younger artists to accept is that there will always be an incommensurateness between their imaginative efforts and the result. The primary obligation is to not avert your eyes; to bear witness.


Harold Jaffe is the author of 18 books of fiction, "docufiction" and nonfiction, including most recently Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories, Paris 60, and OD. Jaffe is editor of Fiction International.

OD is being published

Harold Jaffe's newest volume of docufictions, OD, will be published in the Fall by Civil Coping Mechanism.

Each of the 13 docufictions features a well-known personage who either died of an overdose or was invested in "drugs" to the extent that they contributed to his/her death. Figures he addresses include: Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe, Jean Seberg, Diane Arbus, Sigmund Freud, Aldous Huxley, Walter Benjamin, Bela Lugosi, Jimi Hendrix, Abbie Hoffman, Mark Rothko, Lead Belly, Jim Jones (Jonestown), and Chet Baker.

If a potential reader wants a signed copy for the regular price, email Hal and he will ship it to you when it's published.

Blackness.

Fiction International is hosting a fiction (prose) writing contest intended to expose new talent to a critical audience of discerning readers. The contest is limited to writers who have no more than two published books.

The theme: BLACKNESS.  Submission period: February 1, 2011 - June 1, 2011.

Grand prize: $1000, plus publication in Fiction International for the prize-winner and two runners-up.

Final judge: Harold Jaffe, editor-in-chief, Fiction International.

Submit at Submishmash

Hal's readings

Hal is giving a reading next week at SDSU and in San Francisco. He will be reading some (not many) 50- or 100-word stories from a very recent volume called Induced Coma, an extension and variation of his volume Anti-Twitter which was published in 2010.

"In Anti-Twitter I adhered strictly to 50-word stories. In Induced Coma it is either 50 or 100 words. Most of the stories are found texts which I’ve altered or turned -- to tease out subtexts and contradictions."

Then he will read a number of short narratives from Paris 60, a sort of journal-slash-travel log he kept when he was in Paris in 2008 to greet the translation into French of one of his earlier books.

Paris 60 is based very loosely on Paris Spleen, a series of prose poems by Baudelaire published posthumously in 1869. The “60” in Paris 60 refers to 60 days, one entry per day.

The Green Arcade
1680 Market Street @ Gough
San Francisco CA 94102

SDSU's Living Writing series
Love Library
San Diego State University

About Fiction International's Writing Contest

For over 40 years, Fiction International has published writers just like you -- intelligent, far-thinking, politically progressive, and stylistically innovative. We continue the tradition by giving away more than $1,000 in cash and publication in Fiction International to one deserving writer and publication (but not cash) to two others!

Deadline: June 1, 2011. Winners will be announced Fall, 2011.
Entry fee: $15.
Theme: BLACKNESS. The meaning of the theme is entirely up to you. Please do not submit any text not related to the theme.
To enter the Writing Contest, submit here.


PRIZES:

Grand Prize: $1,000 cash and publication in Fiction International. Two Honorable Mentions: Publication in Fiction International.


RULES:

You may enter as many manuscripts as you like.

We will only accept entries which are fiction, non-fiction, and indeterminant prose. No poetry will be accepted.

Enter online at Submishmash.

Your entry must be original, in English, and not previously published or accepted by any other publisher or producer at the time of submission.

We have set a wordcount limit of 2000 (approximately). Although we won't adhere to a strict word limit, any manuscript that egregiously exceeds the limit of 2000 will be disqualified.

JUDGING & NOTIFICATION:

Every entry will be read and evaluated by the judges. The top 20 entries (finalists) will be read by FI's Editor-in-Chief Harold Jaffe. The First Prize and Honorable Mentions will be selected from among the 20 finalist entries.

QUESTIONS?

Q: Is it okay to have illustration or pictures accompanying my submission?
A: Yes. Providing the artwork is original to you, submission of artwork as part of an entry will be accepted as long as it is part of a text and is not intended to substitute for text.

Q: If there is a word count, how many words am I allowed?
A: Approximately 2000.

Q: Are pen names allowed?
A: Pen names are fine. Write your pen name on all forms etc. so there is no mistakes on credits. Please be advised that we only need your real name if you are chosen as a winner (in order to issue prizes).

Q: What if I am not a U.S. resident?
A: Since we are named Fiction International, we encourage non-U.S. residents. All entry fees are due in U.S. Dollars.

Q: Is there an age limit for entrants?
A: No.

Q: Are there are any other limitations for entrants?
A: There are two limitations: (1) Because FI's editorial staff is also also judging the contest, staff and family members are not allowed to enter. (2) Because the contest is intended to encourage new writers, the contest is limited to writers who have published two books or fewer.

Q: What if I wanted to submit only part of my novel into the competition (to stay with in the maximum number of words)?
A: If you submit a portion of a novel, please understand that it will be judged as a complete story, not part of another work, so it needs to a complete story in and of itself.

Q: When will winners be notified?
A: Winners will be notified by email in Fall, 2011.

For additional questions, email Editor Harold Jaffe (hjaffe@mail.sdsu.edu).

PRIVACY PROMISE:

In order to protect your privacy, we will not make our customer list available outside San Diego State University.

TO ENTER:

To submit your entry online, visit our secure online entry form.

Blackness. And Publication. What more can you ask for?

Fiction International is hosting a fiction (prose) writing contest in Spring 2011. The contest is intended to expose new talent to a critical audience of discerning, literary readers, and is limited to writers who have no more than two published books.

The theme is BLACKNESS (FI always has a theme), and there's a 2000 word limit for entries. The submission period is: February 1, 2011 - June 1, 2011.

Entries will be read by Fiction International editors and comments will be returned to the entrants. The top 20 entries will be read by FI editor-in-chief Harold Jaffe (who will select the winners). The grand-prize submission will be published in the 2012 volume of Fiction International and the author will be awarded a $1000 cash prize. There will also be two honorable mentions that will be published in the 2012 edition of Fiction International.

Winner will be announced Fall 2011. Go to http://fictioninternational.submishmash.com/Submit to sign up for the contest.

Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 5

In the final excerpt to appear on this blog, our wanderer (Harold Jaffe) spends an evening being civilized by a family of Parisians.

4.15 Deep River

Listening to Vivaldi's Stabat Mater on my iPod as I reprise yesterday evening with new friends.

This version of Stabat Mater features the Japanese contralto Naoko Ihara, which in turn reminds me of the Japanese Christian Shusaku Endo's last novel Deep River, about a group of Japanese pilgrims traveling to the holy Hindu city of Varanasi.

It is the homely, seemingly misbegotten Japanese who makes the final offering, carrying the dead and dying "untouchables" to the River Ganges so their immolated ashes might merge with those who came before and were yet to come.

Ynez and Guillaume Deveraux live in a spacious apartment on the top floor of a Haussmann-era building directly across from the Montparnasse Cemetery.

The apartment was donated rent-free for as long as Ynez continued her employment as manager in the state-run Ministry of Health.

Her husband Guillaume is an artist with a cramped studio in the apartment.

At my request he shows me electronic representations of his work -- impressive abstracts which resemble both Action Painting and the calligraphic paintings of Mark Tobey, who studied Buddhism in Japan.

They have two daughters, Celeste 11, and Marie-Jeanne 3. Celeste has Down syndrome and is a grand mal epileptic, though she hasn't suffered a seizure in nearly a year.

I meet Ynez for the first time downstairs by the elevator, 7:30 PM.

Slender, attractive, somewhat tense, she is only now returning from her job; I am the invited guest.

When we arrive in the apartment, Marie-Jeanne runs to greet her mother then stops as she looks up at the large stranger.

I stoop low to greet her and she kisses me on both cheeks.

Ynez then goes to the sofa in front of the bay window where Celeste is sprawled with her head turned to the side and the foot of a rubber doll in her mouth.

Ynez sits and takes Celeste in her arms, whispering tenderly to her.

I sit on the same sofa.

Guillaume enters, shakes my hand, kisses Ynez, smoothes Celeste's hair, then picks up the three-year-old who is staring at me with a wild surmise.

Guillaume pours the red wine but Ynez is still caressing and whispering to Celeste.

Meanwhile, Marie-Jeanne has carried over her small, red and gold tin box and is making offerings to me.

She places a tiny pink bead in my palm, then an orange ribbon, then a chestnut, a silver bead, a very small bit of jade, another ribbon, a feather.

She delivers them one by one, carefully selecting from her box.

She has created an impressive still-life in my wide palm.

After nearly an hour of quiet talking, Celeste, who had not even turned her head to me, suddenly leans all her weight on me, reaches back and takes my hand which she grasps firmly.

Noting this, Marie-Jeanne settles her tiny self on my knee.

Ynez smiles.

She, the mother, looks lovely and weary.

The late sun slanting through the bay window lights her eyes and forehead.

This is the last of the Paris 60 excerpts - to appear on this blog, that is. If you would like to read more excerpts from this amazing collection, go to his website and click the word "docufiction."

Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 4

One cannot spend any time in Paris - not one day, not one life - without attending the baguette.

4.11 Baguette

Van Gogh, who lived most of his fated life in France, shot himself in the chest, but somehow couldn't kill himself correctly.

He managed to stand and walk to his cot, where he died a few days later, head to the wall.

His whispered last words to Theo, his brother, were reportedly: "La tristesse durera toujours."

Sadness will last forever.

Consider the baguette which, it seems, has been with us forever.

Only in France; imitations can't rival it.

Perhaps the Italians come closest, though their "baguette" is prepared differently.

Unlike, say, Chartreuse, the liqueur composed by monks with its undisclosed ingredients, the ingredients of the baguette de campagne are eminently simple: flour, yeast, water, salt.

The alchemy is in the preparation, and perhaps the physical context.

A baguette purchased in the Montorgeuil quartier of Paris is not likely to taste the same in Glasgow, Prague, or Beverly Hills.

The baguette itself is rarely bagged.

Ordinary paper, even a strip of newspaper, wrapped round its center, or no paper at all.

Hot from the oven is best, but even unheated, the trick is for the purchaser not to devour it before reaching his apartment.

The admonition applies to children, adults, and seniors.

To bankers, gangsters, politicians, the unemployed.

Have your chauffeur lock the baguette in the limo's trunk.

Break it in half and stick it in your bicycle bag; make sure you zip the bag, and whistle all the way back to your flat.

Break it in thirds and fit them into your pockets.

Stretch it around your head like a halo.

(Un ange passe)

Light a cigarette and keep it in your lips until you reach home with baguette intact.

Make a vow to fast for the seven minutes it takes to walk from the boulangerie to your flat.

You're back home at last.

Sit at the plain wood table, such as Vincent would paint, and break bread with your lover or alone.

Have some vin de maison.

Like the young priest in Robert Bresson's 1950 Journal d'un Curé de Campagne, adapted from the Bernanos novel.

The priest, unjustly maligned by his parishioners, takes nothing but bread and red wine.

Imitation of Christ.

Contre la tristesse.

Sadness that will last forever.

Please tell me, pale reader, how Bresson's introverted young priest, with a sensibility much like Vincent's, rejected in his country parish, unexpectedly diagnosed with cancer and soon to die, whispers these last words to a seminary friend: All is grace?

Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 3

After recovering from the Parisian toilet, our intrepid author takes to the streets in search of Baudelaire.

4.6 Solitude

Baudelaire in Paris Spleen goes on about the virtues of solitude.

This was naturally before the advent of technology.

After despising Parisians with whom you're compelled to interact daily, returning to your flat at dusk and securing the locks on the door would seem reassuring.

The chalice of laudanum, half-open bottle of absinthe, and hashish laced with opium are arguably more productive than surfing the Net or texting a chum.

I've been isolated in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Quito, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Paris.

Paris is the most evocative city in which to be alone.

It is only the French who admit (or do not deny) the fou and folle.

The mad and palpably deviant.

I don't mean the functionally mad: bankers, corporate chieftains, uniformed child-murderers.

Those are welcome everywhere in the global village.

I mean the dysfunctional who smell bad, can't decipher the métro, do nothing but dream and rant.

True, Sade was imprisoned and Artaud institutionalized, but there were mitigating circumstances.

Parisians cross the boulevard at the red.

Drive their cars and motorcycles on the sidewalks.

Litter the Bois de Bologne with condoms.

Love their dogs but don't pick up the dog shit.

They welcome, at least in principle, the transgressive tradition in art and letters.

After a bad day with bad people, cross-dressing or undressing, getting high on anything.

Then going out in the Paris dark to a film or gallery opening and groping the human or sub-human to your left.

Stabbing him in the thigh with the poisoned tip of your umbrella.

It's a rush, cathartic, eminently satisfying.

And Paris is the only major city I know that grants you your donnée, won't even turn around to glare.

Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 2

For the second excerpt (from Paris 60) Harold Jaffe describes a bit of culture shock in the men's room.

4.2 Toilet

The French struck gold with the bidet, but now it's time to move on.

Show a hetero American male a bidet and he'll laugh or try to shit in it.

Enter a typical French café and the toilet is likely to be down among the catacombs.

Where it's not the squatting-on-your heels contraption, miserably close to your dung and the dung of those who squatted before you, it is a toilet without a seat and likely without toilet paper.

I am a claustrophobe.

Unlike Sarko, je suis grand.

In one of the old cafes near République, I squeezed my way down into the basement toilet which was about the size of the coffin in the 1988 Dutch-French film The Vanishing.

As I was using the clownishly loud dryer to blow my hands dry, I heard a sptttt, the dryer shorted, suddenly it was black as Hades.

The space was so tight I could scarcely turn around.

Moreover I forgot where on the door the lock was, which I spasmodically felt around for with both hands.

Next I was violently shaking and kicking the door, shouting, swearing, not in English but in "American" -- as the French put it.

Finally I more or less pulled myself together.

Remembered that the lock was a sliding bolt close to the top of the door.

Slid it open, bent my head, left.

Parisians make a point of being too smooth to acknowledge deviation, but the patrons turned to me questioningly as I climbed the stairs.

They had to have heard the racket I was making.

Under my breath I muttered: You're lucky.

I could be one of those American mass murderers -- in which case your Parisian asses would be escargot.

Harold Jaffe's Paris 60, part 1

Harold Jaffe, editor of Fiction International, will have a new book out (pub. Civil Coping Mechanism) in September, 2010. Called Paris 60, it was written in 2008 while he was in Paris to greet the French publication of 15 Serial Killers. It's loosely modeled on Baudelaire's Paris Spleen. This is the first of five excerpts we will publish here.

3.29 Oyster

More than two years since I saw him last, the Moroccan-French waiter in the small oyster bar near the St Paul métro stop in the Marais.

Recognize each other at once, shake hands.

After I speak friendly words he corrects my French.

Even the pissed-on ex-colonized are language pedants in Paris.

Never mind the Starbucks-McDonalds low-grade infection, Parisian cuisine is comme toujours, but expensive, and the dollar, formerly king, is not just shit, but reeks of it.

Maghreb French boys do the hip-hop thing -- rhythmic walk, sideways cap, gang-banger hand-signals.

Hand-signal -- the other hand strokes the mobile.

Myself, aimlessly walking, Baudelaire's flaneur, post-millennium, sans hashish.

Sidestepping shoppers, not catching an eye, nearly everyone tonguing their mobile.

Pause at a café for a Pastis.

No more colorful Gitanes or Gauloises packets laid on the cafe table.

Unexpectedly, the French have followed the US anti-smoking route, even as the streets and highways are congested, polluted.

Ah, but the métro is still a Cartesian marvel of efficiency.

Underpaid transit workers are threatening to strike.

In solidarity with university students who now pay more for less.

The strikers will ritually take over the streets.

In this 40th anniversary, books on the student almost-revolution in May 68 are prominently displayed in the bookstore windows.

No correspondence between Soixante-huit and Sarko's current repression.

Régis Debray, onetime revolutionary who fought with Che in Bolivia, has published his memoirs to critical acclaim.

They too are featured in bookstores.

Debray has rotated 180 degrees and now despises Che, Fidel, Mao.

Scion of a high-toned French family, Debray is proud to have finally acknowledged his birthright.

Revolution, even in this country of Communards, has devolved into a noun like "archeology" or "Social Darwinism."

Anti-Twitter is now on sale

Jaffe's newest book, Anti-Twitter: 150 50-Word Stories is now on sale - just in time for his presentation at the Google Authors Series on Friday, Feb 19, at noon, in San Francisco.

The Authors@Google program "brings authors of all stripes to Google for informal talks centering on their recently published books.... Googlers are treated to readings of everything from serious literature and political analysis to pioneering science fiction and moving personal memoirs; past participants have ranged from novelist Salman Rushdie and economist Jeffrey Sachs to journalist Bob Woodward and U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain."

Authors@Google

Harold Jaffe will present at the Google Authors Series on Friday, Feb 19, at noon, in San Francisco. Rushdie, Chomsky, Zizek, and other heavyweights have presented at Authors@Google.

Anyone who wants to attend should contact Hal so that he can give your name to Google; his guests will then be invited to lunch (on Google's tab).

Death in Texas

A pair of Amsterdam researchers, Andreas R.T. Schuck and Janelle Ward, published a study in Discourse and Society (Vol 19(1): 43–62) concerning the final statements of death row inmates in Texas.

Last statements of death row inmates represent a genre of discourse characterized by an acute situation in which to express final reflections. This article describes how Texas death row inmates give meaning to their situation by examining their last statements. Between December 1982 and November 2006, 379 offenders were executed on the Texas death row. Through the inspection of 283 last statements made available on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice website, we identify strategies of self presentation.

Harold Jaffe's statements of Texas death row inmates, "Death in Texas," examines the variety of such statements, suggesting the differences in facing one's death. Not many people have a chance to sum up their lives, and these men and women are given a rare, privileged gift.

In New York? Come to a reading!

A Reading to Honor the Artist in Wartime issue of Fiction International. At The Lounge, Hudson View Gardens, Pinehurst Avenue and 183rd Street, NYC, Sunday, November 8th at 4:00 p.m.

Featuring contributors to the issue:

Harold Jaffe "one of our finest literary terrorists / freedom fighters" – Paradoxa

Patricia Eakins "intriguing and entertaining" – Greg Boyd, Asylum

A Tribute to Daniel Berrigan, S.J. "[Berrigan] deserves a place of honor on this century's highest shelf." - Boston Post

Reading in tribute to Father Berrigan: Joel Allegretti, Steve Brouwer, Michael Crosby, Gordon Gilbert, Deirdre Mahoney, and Peter Martin.

Harold Jaffe is the author of fifteen books of fiction and creative nonfiction, most recently Jesus Coyote (a docu-novel), and Beyond the Techno-Cave: A Guerrilla Writer's Guide to Post-Millennial Culture, a collection of creative nonfiction. Jaffe's books have been translated into Japanese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Turkish. Jaffe is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.

Patricia Eakins is the author of The Hungry Girls and Other Stories and The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste (a novel), which won both the NYU Press Prize for Fiction and the Capricorn Prize of the Writer’s Voice. She is the recipient of two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Paris Review has awarded her the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction.

Poet, playwright, and biographer Daniel Berrigan, S.J., is an internationally renowned peace activist, a member of the Catonsville Nine and the Plowshares Eight. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He is also a recipient of the Lamont Poetry Prize, the Thomas Merton Award, the Pax Christi USA Pope Paul VI Teacher of Peace Award, and the Pacem in Terris Peace and Freedom Award. He has taught religious studies and theology in various universities and has been a contributing editor to Sojourners, a magazine of faith, politics, and culture.

Suggested donation of $7 includes one free drink and free snacks. Reception after to meet the writers. For more information call 212-923-7800, x1342.

Still more Anti-Twitter

Locus Novus just posted a Flash version of Anti-Twitter. Though it contains only six stories (from the 150 in the book), it's "interesting" watching the bird cough to death.

More Anti-Twitter

Is this the cover of Harold Jaffe's upcoming book?