MJJG 24-33

Sat Nov 21 00:42:53 UTC 2020

I started off 2020 reading Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities... and there is something almost absurdly tragic about the planned campaign to commemorate the Emperor's reign in the year 1918...knowing what happens in 1914... and the great reckoning of European civilization... also in early 2020, pre-COVID, a great reckoning has fallen on the post-War civilization propped up by US/USSR, now just the US, and we'll see how things shake out... but it's pretty clear in a new age... but don't underestimate historical hysteresis... the old putting weights on rubber bands, relaxation/recovery of viscous organic matter when stress induced... I started off 2020 reading Musil, such that now I'm reading my ex-Old's Anatomy & Physiology book, and there is this trippy idea called Homeostasis, and it's an idea that was introduced by this French dude, Claude Bernard, and he says somethin' like this: "It is the constancy of the internal environment that is the condition for a free and independent life." (It sounds better in French, IMHO)

But, the body achieves this constancy through complicated organic negative feedback loops...Cool right? 1st order cybernetics (If you believe in such things), but we live in a 2nd order cybernetic world, and it's hard to say if the response is reinforcing the stimulus or not? Better check in with our Data Lords...

I know what you're going to say, get a hobby...

I think the opening of Chapter 8 is significant: "Picture the 1920s As a drag race whose entries are ages vying for the Champion gros-ben-ange (http://plaza.ufl.edu/kjbowen/project2/rituals.html) of the times, that aura that remains after the flesh of the age has dropped away. The shimmering Etheric Double of the 1920s. The thing that gives it summary. Candidates line up like chimeras."

I think that shinning etheric double is the thesis/antithesis of the Hegelian diaelectic. The 1920s were all about Ethnogenesis... you had all sorts of Nationalism spring up in historical materialist terms... Jewish Nationalism, Arab Nationalism, and Black Nationalism in US vis a vis Marcus Garvey... I suspect that within the competing antithetical strains, personified by WEB DuBois & Booker T Washington, Reed sees a synthesis possible with Black Nationalist leaders (Garvey, Malcolm X...), in essence Carlye's Great Man theory (sorry ladies, not my theory...though I just watched Barbarian on Netflix...Clades Variana...I'd follow that German Warrior Queen into battle any day!)... I also love the line "Candidates line up like chimeras." Needless to say it seems Black Nationalism is sort of dead. It's full steam ahead with Liberal integrationalism, even though if you look at demographic data, especially over the past 50 years, it's appalling, with the exception of the few who've made it to elite status... I found it touching a couple years ago when kids would walk around saying Wakanda Forever... I didn't really like the Black Panther movie, but the aesthetics were incredible... I fully believe Wakanda can be real, and what's to stop a few hundred Special Forces trained guys & gals from overthrowing corrupt Wallflower Order/Big Oil/CCP backed leaders running X country in Africa today and liberating their people, and building their own country from scratch? What if the West recognizes their leader/government as legit... and it's not to say that Black Americans aren't American, of course they are and will always be, I'm Jewish... I have friends who have dual citizenship, and I wouldn't ever question their allegiance, but I also recognize the significance of having a Jewish homeland (though I'm not religious)... and in Africa you probably wouldn't have the tragic situation that Israel has with the Palestinians...

I don't know, there is a reason people don't listen to me, and unfortunately for the P-List the bars are closed on Friday night where I'm at, so I have nobody to ramble to...

Thanks Raphael for pointing out the US occupation of Haiti (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_occupation_of_Haiti)...

On pg. 20, there is this:

"For if the Jazz Age is year for year the Essences and Symptoms of the times, then Jes Grew is the germ making it rise yeast-like across the America plain."

I think Jes Grew is sort of the spirit of awakening of Blacks in the US after slavery... Jazz is a material manifestation of that spirit... as Reed says in the beginning it's metaphysical... and it's infectious... it's exuberant... it's magic...

Later in the novel, Reed pokes fun at Nation of Islam/Marxism/Christianity... to him I think he sees these as external to the Black experience, imposed on them during slavery (not so much Marxism)... Black people have their own gods, their own tradition, and it's about reawakening that which has been suppressed by the trauma of bondage...

One last thing before I go, reading the Harlem sections reminded me of the Luke Cage series on Netflix (sorry to mention them again), I only watched first season, but thought it was incredible... The music was fantastic as well...Another powerful idealization in media, Luke Cage emerges from prison bullet proof... I loved the Powerman/Ironfist comics back in the day...

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to all & to all a GOODNIGHT!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2vCAqdFx1s

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Thursday, November 19, 2020 2:47 AM, Raphael Saltwood <PlainMrBotanyB at outlook.com> wrote:

> Thanks, Bekah and Cagliostro, for background on the gangsters.
>
> numbers racket - later taken over by the state in many jurisdictions - a criminal enterprise that in many people’s thoughts was “victimless” (although hard-core moralists continue to disagree) so is this changeover of power a benevolent manifestation of Jes Grew?
>
> Imho, no - like the Nation of Islam, & African-American communism, a-and maybe even the Mira-filths, black gangsterism is peripheral, not central to Jes Grew
>
> 24 - again the grapevine telegraph, and mention of Booker T Washington at the 1895 Cotton States Exposition. That was the famous “cast down your bucket where you are” speech.
> With which he “bewitched” the first mixed-race audience for a speech given by an African-American in the South. Bewitched?
> Sounds like Reed is linking BTW’s self-help message with the magic of Jes Grew.
>
> 25 does “Picture the 1920s as a drag race” owe something to Donald Barthelme?
> Maybe a bit, but it develops differently, imho. Mixing the metaphor with a dog show.
> Actually pretty cool, I didn’t notice the transition (and back again with “hound mongrel of a struggle-buggy”) till writing about it.
> Author has a way with words, film at 11...yeah, ok, but still, pretty deft imho.
>
> “Gros ben age” is supposed to be a pun on Haitian “gros bon ange” (“big good angel”?) which is like zeitgeist?
>
> 28 & forward - invasion of Haiti
>
> So Harding was only President from 1921 to 1923. Under Wilson’s orders, US factotums invaded and occupied it in 1915; Roosevelt Admin finally ended it in 1934.
>
> James Weldon Johnson, who was, like, a very major poet who also wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” journeyed there & wrote about it for the NAACP and in the Nation - Reed puts him at the rent party that PaPa LaBas attends
>
> 30 “A little boy kicked his Newfoundland HooDoo 3 cents and spent a night squirming and gnashing his teeth.”
>
> Didn’t make sense to me until a later chapter, 3 cents is the name of LaBas’s dog.
>
> 31 & forward - Earline is introduced as his assistant therapist but then many times he calls her daughter.
>
> Who is this Berbelang cat?
>
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