Julien Devereux – Writer and Editor

Published May 17, 2020

Being realistic

Ken Knabb, editor and translator of The Situationist International Anthology, among other works, has posted an interesting essay about the COVID-19 crisis and its effects on us at his website, Bureau of Public Secrets:

We come to realize how much we miss certain things, but also that there are things we don’t miss. Many people have noted (usually with a half-guilty hesitation, since they are of course quite aware of the devastation that is going on in many other people’s lives) that they personally are appreciating the experience in some regards. It’s much quieter, the skies are clearer, there’s scarcely any traffic, fish are returning to formerly polluted waterways, in some cities wild animals are venturing into the empty streets. There has been much joking about how those who like quiet contemplative living are hardly noticing any difference, in contrast to the frustrations and anxieties of those who are used to more gregarious lifestyles. In any case, whether they like it or not, millions of people are getting a crash course in cloistered living, with repeated daily schedules almost like monks in a monastery. They may continue to distract themselves with entertainments, but the reality keeps bringing them back to the present moment.
I suspect that the frantic urgency of various political leaders to get things “back to normal” as soon as possible is not only for the ostensible economic reasons, but also because they dimly sense that the longer this pause goes on, the more people will become detached from the addictive consumer pursuits of their previous lives and the more they will be open to exploring new possibilities.
“Pregnant Pause — Remarks on the Corona Crisis”

I have no idea what will happen next, and make no predictions, but it is remarkable how much of what was “normal” or “common sense” back in early March seems like ancient history—or insanity—now. Even capitalist newspapers like the Financial Times have been talking about establishing universal basic income, a mostly fringe idea back when Occupy Wall Street was happening, nine years ago.

Earlier today I had the thought that the current crisis was making me realize that the punks of my teens and twenties, who were ignored or disdained by “serious” people, had been basically correct about everything: the state is corrupt, corporations are bad, factory farming kills (animals and us), local mutual aid is preferable to international logistics and supply lines, living cheaply and cooperatively can lead to a richer life, etc. Which I guess means it’s time for me, in my late forties, to become a bicycle-riding vegan anarchist, get a part-time job at a co-op, start a ‘zine or a band, serve free food in public parks, etc.!

Published May 7, 2020

Art after COVID-19

Yesterday I went through some of my old composition books after cleaning up my desk, and stumbled across a quote I wrote down in February 2014 and then forgot:

It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.
Theodor Adorno, “Commitment”

As usual with Adorno, I find it a bit difficult to understand exactly what he means—”resist by its form alone”?—but also intriguing. Art is not just a harmless pastime, a luxury for our “down times”. It’s our ally as we face a world that’s pointing a gun at us.

And although many of us, including me, are so far spending most of our COVID-19 quarantine time in the comfort of our own homes, for “essential” workers—health-care, food service, and grocery store workers—the suddenly unemployed, the people who can’t pay their bills or rent, and more, the world’s gun is at their head.

As a writer (or any other kind of artist), do we have anything to offer them better than a temporary escape? Can we help them resist? Art is not a substitute for providing them material support—honoring strikes, joining in mutual aid efforts, demanding our governments support and protect us—but it’s something worth pondering as we try to make art for others as well as ourselves in a difficult time, under difficult circumstances. Because sooner or later the gun is pointed at all of us.

Published May 6, 2020

Base services

Yesterday was the birthday of Karl Marx, so I decided to dip into a section of Capital, Volume 1, I hadn’t read yet to celebrate. And in footnote 12 of chapter 27, I found Marx suggesting that in 1695 William of Orange (King William III of England) granted a large property in Ireland, confiscated after winning the Williamite War there, to his mistress, Lady Orkney, because of her fellatio skills. He quotes a manuscript as follows:

“On the private moral character of this bourgeois hero, among other things: ‘The large grant of lands in Ireland to Lady Orkney, in 1695, is a public instance of the king’s affection, and the lady’s influence…Lady Orkney’s endearing offices are supposed to have been foeda labiorum ministeria.'”
Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 27, Note 12

In the Penguin Classics edition I have, the Latin is translated in a footnote to the footnote as “base services performed with the lips.”

That’s on page 844, which is admittedly a long way to read to get to a dirty part, but don’t ever let anyone tell you history or economics are dull, and always read the footnotes!

Published May 5, 2020

A machine for living

France is going to subsidize bicycle repairs nationwide to encourage people to drive less. Up to fifty Euros a person, which sounds like a lot of money, but it’s less than Americans spend on gas every half hour.

I’ve been biking a lot during quarantine, and in addition to feeling good about not polluting the air, saving money, and getting exercise—as the graffiti goes, “a car runs on money and makes you fat, a bike runs on fat and saves you money”—it’s given me more appreciation for the city I live in. When I bike, I see areas of Austin I never see when driving (because I stick to the bigger streets) or when walking (because you can go much further, more quickly, on a bike than on foot).

It’s allowed me to get to know the city better, both the human culture and neighborhoods and the topography. In a car you don’t feel the subtle changes in elevation, but on a bike, since you have to make it go uphill and then feel the rush of coasting downhill, you feel it very concretely.

Whereas I used to think of Austin in terms of neighborhoods and landmarks, etc., I now also think of it as a series of creek bottoms and the hills and plateaus out of which they carved themselves. Biking has made me a better urbanist and a better naturalist.

Anyway, this country is unfortunately a long way from doing something like France’s bicycle repair subsidy, but that shouldn’t stop you from biking, and demanding your city build bike infrastructure. (Austin’s is not bad, but could be better, of course.

Published May 4, 2020

What is writer’s block blocking?

Do the metaphors we use to describe problems mislead us about how to solve them? “Writer’s block” suggests that there’s some obstruction or repressed memory that must be cleared out of the way before the words can flow—some mysteriously located golf ball in our mental garden hoses—that the problem is deeply psychological, not one of craft.

But I find that when I know exactly what I want to write about, I don’t have writer’s block. I only have it when I sit down in front of a blank screen or page with no purpose or assignment in mind. So maybe it’s not a block at all but just a lack of clarity or rudimentary planning. Like trying to draw something without anything in front of you to draw. Or building a house without an architectural drawing. (Or wood or nails.)

Maybe instead of thinking of it as writer’s block, think of it as “I haven’t decided what to write about yet,” then go do something else until you decide on something.

Published May 3, 2020

Quarantine Quotes 1

Many who have learned from Hesiod the countless names of gods and monsters never understand that night and day are one.—Heraclitus

I think I’m starting to understand.

(Image source.)

Published May 2, 2020

Life in the Banana Palace

I discovered Dana Levin’s 2014 poem, “Banana Palace,” a few weeks ago, got her collection of the same name from the Austin Public Library, and have read it many times ever since. Prompted by this image (which I had to look up immediately after reading the poem),

Levin writes a by turns moving, frightening, and uncannily funny poem about how she will explain our hermetically sealed Internet browsing and image and identity trading to a future population scraping by, certainly without the Internet and probably without much else, after nuclear war or environmental collapse. Here’s the opening:

It gets even better after that! It’s definitely the best poem about the Internet I’ve ever read, and it was a perfect poem to discover while I was on my social media vacation: “Information about information was the pollen we deposited — while in the real fields bees starved.” (I’m also a sucker for anything about societal breakdown—ask me about the Late Bronze Age Collapse!)

I found the poem through the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day email. Read it and enter the Banana Palace yourself, at your own risk.

Published May 1, 2020

Memory Foam 1

(Memory Foam is a series of short fiction pieces that attempt to capture the ways we travel back and forth in time through our sudden, unexpected memories.)

Raymond Guest, working from home, finished his conference calls and and decided to take a shower at 3:30 in the afternoon. Before the shelter in place order, he had always showered in the morning, when it was dark, and he had worried when cars passed whether they could see his head through the high square bathroom window, and that their drivers would see him, and know he was showering.

But today as he let the warm water run over him, the sun through the window was bright and the streets were empty except for two bicycle riders stopped and straddling their bicycles at the intersection, the woman waving a fingerless gloved hand emphatically while the man stared at his smartphone. As Guest tilted his head back to let the shower rinse the shampoo from his hair, he closed and raised his eyes, which were then hit by direct sunlight through the window, flooding through his eyelids and filling his field of vision with a vast and turbulent orange.

The orange light and warmth were the same he had seen once, age 12, in a eucalyptus grove in the Northern California town he had grown up in. He had ridden his BMX bike up his family’s cul-de-sac to a fire road and then to a deer trail, and only stopped cycling when he found a culvert pipe high up the hill in a little clearing. The culvert was there to divert water down to a creek bed instead of onto the streets and houses where Ray and his family and neighbors lived. His mother had yelled at him because he had forgotten to empty the dishwasher, his father had intervened to tell her not to yell at him, and soon his parents were yelling at each other and ignoring him as he stood there in the yellow kitchen that smelled of linoleum and cleaning fluid. He had left them like that, unnoticed, and headed up the hill.

Other people had been in this grove, he could see. There were bike and motorcycle tracks, old cans of Budweiser—so old that they had been opened with a handheld can opener, what his dad always called a “church key”—and a pornographic magazine lay near the culvert pipe’s opening, bloated from rain and sunned into white and blue. But nobody was there with him now and there was almost no sound. No birds, no wind. He lay his bike down, leaned his back against a eucalyptus tree, and slid down onto his bottom. The dust he sat on was very fine, almost like talcum powder, and red and green eucalyptus leaves lay on top of it, like sickles thrown down by farmers no longer willing to harvest.

He was hot, from anger and heat, but the tree against his back was cool. In an hour or so he would leave and go back home, and find the dishwasher empty, his mother smoking a long thin cigarette while she watched the news in a darkened living room, his father in the bedroom with the door closed, light outlining its shape in the dark hall, and he would go to his room and fall asleep without saying goodnight to anyone. A year later his parents would be divorced and the house sold. But as he closed his eyes and let the sunlight wash over his eyelids in the grove, staring into the orangish warmth, he decided, with great conviction, that he would stay right there, just like that, forever.

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