Poets on the Edge

In the work of every great poet there is something the poet glimpses only partly, a shape of which he or she has an only partial awareness, but which in fact is the deepest meaning of the work. I mean here the poet as voyant or vates. In this sense it follows, of course, that a prose writer like Kafka may also be called a great poet. And Heidegger? And Heidegger, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Kafka--each engaged the work I mean.

Heretic Days: First Reactions

My new book Heretic Days is finally in print.

Canadian critic J.S. Porter writes of the book: "Heretic Days is grand theatre--a drama enacted in Eric Mader's subtle and playful mind. Mader queries, dramatizes, teases, mocks, pronounces, parodies, lunges, and finally burrows down into some the of the most intractable conundrums facing Christian seekers today. I know of no other writer who reads theology so deeply and so well. You come away from his work with a new understanding of play as sacrament. Think of this book as a stage onto which skip Tolstoy, St. Paul, the Gnostics, William Blake, Leonard Cohen, and, above all, Jesus, who makes many entrances and commands the most stage-time; think of it as Marionette Theatre where ideas come to play, parry with each other, bow, exit and re-enter with new masks and voices. In this play Mader keeps a directorial eye on his constant theme--Who was Jesus? How do we come to know him? What does he mean for our lives and, especially, what did he intend to mean?"

And I'm pleased to be labeled an "endlessly fascinating eccentric" by Bradley Winterton in his Taipei Times review. Winterton writes: "[U]npredictability is Mader's stock in trade. . . absolutely everything he puts his hand to is consequently very well worth reading, including this bizarre but intensely readable book." NB: Winterton's review is much appreciated, but I should note he wrongly characterizes me as a gnostic. Though I'd been long engaged in study and thinking about the recently uncovered gnostic texts (the Nag Hammadi codices) by the time this book was published I'd converted to Catholicism. And during the years of writing the pieces that make up the book, I considered myself a Christian, but one on the margins of orthodoxy.

The book is available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.

Slavery and Resistance in Madison, Wisconsin

UW Madison's Van Hise Hall, where the jargon grows thick and the intrigues never end.
Barry Powell's A Land of Slaves is an academic murder mystery with a difference. Unlike many academic novels, it makes thoroughly enjoyable reading, suffering none of the stylistic fatigue one comes to expect from novels written by professors. Powell's unique style, a kind of jerky subdued lyricism, hard-boiled in a way that's hard to pin down, keeps one turning the pages. His sleuth Raymond Birch is not so much sleuthing as harried into putting the broken pieces of the story into place, meanwhile exposing the layers upon layers of lies that made for the life of now dead art historian Wally Wills. The portrait of Wills is both sad and hilarious: that such a character could conduct a successful decades-long career in the pinched milieu of a modern art history department is stuff enough to wonder at, though the tale, as narrated, doesn't really seem farfetched.

Aside from being partial murder mystery, Powell's book can also count as academic satire. But again with a welcome difference. Protagonist Raymond Birch has far too much reality about him to be the mere straight man in another exposé of the excesses of theory. There aren't many passages here that directly satirize literary-academic cant. The few Powell offers are just enough to define the milieu.

One of these passages comes near the book's end. Beleaguered by academic infighting, still reeling from the unanswered questions of his best friend's death, Birch enters a darkened auditorium to listen to one of his peers deliver a paper at the international Oral Poetry conference. The speaker is already at the podium, mid-paper, and since Birch enters from the wrong door, a door abutting the stage, he quickly sits down in the front row:

"An impassionate person's passionate need to rebuild the text from within freed from authorial intention and reveling in the oceanic feminine that underlies the stiff (and stiffening) clarity of male cannibalistic gendered greed," the speaker, a elderly male, was saying.

Birch really wasn't feeling very well. He leaned his head forward on his knees and stared at the carpet. . . . [He] straightened up to gaze along the row of gilt chairs. He was startled to see that he was the only one sitting in the first ten rows. Nobody wanted to be too close to a speaker of this magnitude!

"While the modern scholar needs to make concessions," he was saying, "she or he has still to hang onto the hog or the hog is going to get lickety-split away down the path!"

"What is this shit anyway? What a croc of shit," Birch said under his breath but louder than he had intended.

Oh my God, what if somebody heard?

The mendacities of academia are legion, and here both the speaker and Birch are implicated (though the speaker is obviously implicated on many more levels than Birch). Birch is attending the conference to keep up appearances among colleagues set upon ousting him from his department. But he has a tic that comes with his feverish and introspective character: he occasionally thinks out loud. Such a tic can be a real problem for anyone trying to maneuver academic politics.

Luckily, as I say, Powell doesn't use up many pages in A Land of Slaves transcribing the slavish kinds of discourse now common in humanities. This shows a wise restraint on his part. Anyone who's been in these departments, after all, has already seen more than enough such obsequious pandering. Rather, the all-encompassing political correctitude of the academy is taken as background, and Powell's characters come to life in their often hopeless struggles to make careers on such a degraded stage.

As an alum of the university where the action is set (the University of Wisconsin-Madison) I can attest to Powell's skill at evoking environment. He's particularly good at describing the lakeside paths and neighborhoods and student union, as well as the oppressiveness of the building where the university's language departments are housed. There is also the 666 Club, which was in reality the 602 Club (is it still there?). I suspect A Land of Slaves is in large part a roman à clef, but since I'm not familiar with the classics and art departments there in recent years, I'm not sure who most of Powell's characters echo, or who they might be composites of. I'm pretty sure, however, about the models for Wally Wills and Raymond Birch. I believe Powell has taken events of the early 1990s and recast them in the late 2000s. The man Wally Wills is based on--I believe I sat in on some of his lectures on Greek vase painting in the 1980s. I've no idea however if the real scholar's death unwove anything like the tapestry of lies that Raymond Birch unweaves in the novel. And did I possibly, around 1986, take first semester classical Greek with the woman Audrey Winter is based on?

But these identifications are mostly beside the point. Powell's novel is a novel, and I think most readers, familiar or not with Madison, Wisconsin, will find it a fascinating portrait of pathological lying, art collecting, small-time drug dealing, lousy police work, and (of course) academic slavishness--besides finding it a compelling work of narrative, executed in a new narrative voice I'd be happy to hear more of. A Land of Slaves is available in print and Kindle versions at Amazon.

Dangerous

Teaching two 11-year-old girls the word "dangerous," I ask them to name some dangerous animals.

"You're a dangerous animal," says one.

"OK," I say. "Maybe. Can you name any other dangerous animals?"

"Your hair," the other girl says. And she explains that my hair and I are actually different animals, that my hair leaves my head at night and flies around the city following girls and feeding on moths.

"It's true," the first girl says then. "I saw it."

Expatriotically Speaking

Since I'm often challenged to explain myself politically--how can I be "so far left" is usually the gist of the question--I'll actually try to do so here. Or if not explain myself, I'll at least lay my cards on the table. 

Yes, the terms "conservative," "liberal," "right" and "left" aren't very useful, but I'll try to use these terms even so. 

And so. . . .

The problem for most people, especially those who've known me since youth, the thing they can't get their heads around, is that I actually believe in government. I believe it has a role to play in managing and regulating the economy. It's true that Americans with such wacky ideas as this rarely hail from my childhood demographic: suburban Republican Wisconsin.

But folks get even more confused in discussion with me when they learn I'm a Christian. This is because people in my hometown assume Christians are all naturally Tea Party supporters. After all, everyone knows that big government means secularism means communism. And everyone knows Barack Obama wants big government and that he's a socialist or even a Muslim. (An "atheist Muslim"? Sometimes I can't keep track of how these people use the terminology. Perhaps I've lived overseas too long, so my grip on the meaning of English words has begun to slip.)

In fact I don't fit the political categories of the sector of American society I hail from. I'm culturally conservative but politically on the left. This doesn't make any sense to the folks back home. I represent an impossibility. 



But it's not just my small-town Midwest roots I don't jibe with. In America as a whole, I'm something like the polar opposite of normal. The things on which I'm conservative, Americans are generally liberal; and vice versa--where I lean to the left, Americans are on the far right. America's current default settings have been decades in the making; perhaps it's worth outlining how I see them.

In terms of culture, then, I would say that my country is largely what could be called liberal. It brings the world things like MTV, Facebook, "Sex and the City," hip hop. Yes, America is full of outspoken people who call themselves conservative, but this is hardly to the point when one looks at larger trends. America has long been a force of cultural liberalization, both domestically and abroad. 



In terms of politics, on the other hand, America is largely conservative. (I might say this with a caveat: America is "conservative" at least according to the degraded parlance of American Republicans.) My country's economic system is rigged to suit an oligarchy, its foreign policy is nationalistic, self-righteous, trigger-happy. America is far to the right of most of its Western allies and is moving ever further rightward. 



Both trends--America's cultural liberalism and its political "conservatism"--have only gotten more pronounced since I've become an adult. Thus as my country's culture drifts further and further from any respect for traditional Western learning, its economic order becomes more and more a matter of unfettered capitalism. I'd like to see the opposite of this trend; as the trend continues I only feel ever more alienated from the country I grew up in. 

In some respects, then, my politics are "un-American," as are my cultural ideals.

Politics: If we assume that a far right position favors pure free-market capitalism and that a far left position favors a centrally regulated socialism, I'd position myself a few inches to the right of Fidel Castro. This is to exaggerate a bit, no doubt. In fact I do believe free markets have a role to play. Nonetheless I also believe in strong central regulation of all business and finance, a tax policy that takes increasingly large bites as a person's income reaches the top of the scale, strong government protection of the environment, and strong government oversight of education. Government, in my mind, fulfills its role when it ensures against gross income inequalities, when it educates citizens, when it establishes an even playing field, when it protects resources for future generations. These are some things my own leftism would stress.



Culture: If we take education policy as a central arena of cultural debate, I could make my thinking clear by saying that I've always (with some differences) supported the idea of education put forward by Allan Bloom in the 1980s in his book The Closing of the American Mind. I am strongly in favor of a book-centered, classics-centered education, starting in high school and including, certainly, anything that would dare call itself a "university education". I am against the political correctness that seeks to make American schools a culturally neutral space where no tradition of thinking is assumed. In my America, students would start reading the Western canon in elementary school and would continue wrestling with it in high school and during most of their college years. To imagine that someone could graduate from any university without having studied Homer, the Greek philosophers, the Bible, European history, the Enlightenment--this would be out of the question. Only on the grounds of a thoroughly Western learning would students be able to opt for study of other cultural traditions. 



But why, some might wonder, why stick so tenaciously to the study of these old books? Don't we live in the 21st century? Don't we face a different spectrum of issues than our ancestors?

Absolutely not. In fact the Western canon is still the only place where Americans might ground themselves in the crucial questions they need to consider as citizens. These questions include: the relation of the state to citizenry; the meaning of public and republic; the bases and effects of different economic orders; the question of freedoms and responsibilities in the context of a democratic republic. 



Citizens in a democracy must first understand ideas before they can debate them. More to the point: they must understand the grounds of their political system in order to be able to judge where it needs reform and change, or even to judge the possibility of change.

Americans, as far as I can tell, are at present entirely unable to do this. The oligarchy is just fine with that. In fact, looking at what counted as a liberal education in previous decades, and comparing it to the present, I'm more or less convinced the oligarchy orchestrated, or at least expedited, the changes.

 A solid education in the humanities is the last thing the capitalist class wants.

And so it is that my compatriots enter adulthood with scant idea of how their political institutions developed or where their culture came from. They think of their culture as a kind of natural phenomenon to be taken for granted, not the result of historical struggle and the ascendance of a particular set of ideologies. Only a canon-based education can address this blind spot. With a stronger grasp of actual history, citizens would be less susceptible to the politics of warring soundbites and fear-mongering that's currently passed off as political debate. They'd also be more able to recognize a common good and thus more resistant to the absurd demonization of government we hear constantly from the American right. 



Of course most Americans are such hard-wired anti-intellectualists that they'd probably howl in protest at my idea of canon-based education. For them, university is a matter of job training on the one hand, football games on the other. And they're howling already, in any case, about my left-leaning idea of good government.

Go ahead, compatriots and sports fans, go ahead and say it: "If you like Fidel Castro so much, why not move to Cuba!" 



My answer to this is simple: Because I'd rather not live in Cuba, thank you. An experiment in authoritarian socialism, Cuba has serious problems, probably the main one being that it was built on a Leninist model. But Cuba with limited free markets, Cuba with elections and a range of political parties vying for who gets the right to manage a socialist economy--that would be something else. And so, though I'm glad I don't live in Castro's Cuba, I'm glad I didn't have to live in George W. Bush's USA either. 



Yes, I've lived overseas since the mid-1990s. The country I'm living in has its problems too, but I certainly don't feel I've missed out on much in the US. And what can I have missed--the Bush/Cheney years, the rise of the reality TV, Charlie Sheen? Though I had some hope when Obama was inaugurated, I see I was mistaken. In fact America is an echo chamber that gets only more idiotic with each passing year. Obama, if re-elected, does not seem likely to stand up to the oligarchy and push for any of the actual change he once promised. So rather than watch four more years of Compromiser-in-Chief up close, I'm grateful I don't have to live there. 



Maybe you think only lunatics (or perhaps Europeans) could be in favor of the kind of political order I advocate. Fair enough. But I'll ask you a few simple questions: How long do you think humans will be able to survive on this planet if unfettered capitalism is allowed to continue its onslaught on the natural environment? How long do you think the earth will survive the frenetic over-consumption we see in our country and other developed nations? If you recognize, like me, that the earth cannot long survive such pillage, who or what do you think will be able to regulate it? A different political order is needed to moderate excesses: to knock down the monopolies that tend to develop ("too big to fail"), the outrageous wealth that begins to gather, the rampant consumption that ignores what is happening to the environment. These are things only strong central governments can address--governments with a human agenda.

 Governments entirely in the pocket of corporations will never be able to address these issues.

Before closing, I'd like to return to the question of Christianity. As noted above, I'm a Christian, and this seems odd to many who hear me talk about political issues. I really don't know why. In fact both my political leftism and my cultural conservatism are informed by my faith. As for the leftism, this again, I know, is not the norm for American Christians. But so what? I myself find nothing particularly Christian about the things many other American Christians seem to support: free-market capitalism, militarism, greed as good, unbridled consumerism. Some Christians reading this now, maybe they'd like to say, "Hey, I don't support greed as good or militarism or unbridled consumerism!" Well, maybe you don't. But if you support the political status quo, especially if you vote Republican, I don't see how you can imagine you're not supporting these things. Think about it. What is it that the policies of the American right are grounded on if not the belief that 1) greed is good, 2) rapacious consumerism is a God-given right, and 3) American bombs bring peace, not war? Do you really think you don't stand for these things when you vote Republican? Heck, even if you vote Democrat you are supporting these things. If you consider my idea of Christian politics to be "weird" compared to yours, on what grounds are you making this comparison? Have you ever read, say, the Gospels?

* * * P.S.-- But might I, to raise the sense of contrast even higher, add Marx to that list of Western classics that should be required study? Certainly Marx was wrong about many things, but he remains a massively important thinker, maybe even especially now. Terry Eagleton wrote a fine piece on Marx last year:

http://chronicle.com/article/In-Praise-of-Marx/127027

Haakenson Sighting: Check

About 5 p.m. the drizzle coming down and I'm standing under an awning in front of a Taipei supermarket. Across the pavement loping toward me is a slim funny-looking Western guy with his Asian wife. He's wearing a black leather cowboy hat which doesn't really match his red windbreaker. The two are carrying big bags of groceries--snacks it looks like, probably bought to celebrate the Chinese New Year--and I watch them approach as I puff from my one small cigar for the day.

The guy comes closer and I notice he's also sporting white-rimmed glasses under the cowboy hat.

Then the guy comes closer again and I realize it's a high school classmate of mine from my home town, Harland, Wisconsin. It's Paul Haakenson, who I run into once every ten years.

Paul is now teaching Chinese to expat kids in Asia. His work has taken him from Taipei to Jakarta to Hong Kong, and soon, he tells me, he'll be moving again, to Singapore. He's back in Taipei to visit his in-laws for the Lunar New Year.

I last ran into Paul about ten years ago on the north side of Taipei. Starbucks had come to Taiwan and I was sitting in one of their shops when I saw a guy at the register with a teeshirt with the name Haakenson on it--a name familiar from my high school days. I got closer and recognized him. Paul explained that he was living and teaching in Taipei. I hadn't even realized it. I'd also been teaching in Taipei for a handful of years.

I ran into Paul about ten years before that (which would be about 1992) on the outskirts of a Grateful Dead concert in Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. I was taking my Taiwanese wife to see the Dead as part of her American enculturation, and Paul showed up near our car. I think it was then that I learned he'd been studying Chinese in university. Was he married yet then?

But still my clearest memory of Paul comes from around ten year before that (1982 or so) in the basement of Scotty Berendt's house back in Hartland. It was a high school party, and Scotty had been impressing the hell out of us on his drums. Paul was promoting a cassette he'd brought of a band I'd heard of but had never listened to: the B-52s. The song playing--which is forever linked in my mind to the image of Paul Haakenson in a yuppy plaid shirt grooving in a Wisconsin basement--was "Quiche Lorraine." I hated yuppies in those days and hated everything that smelled of the country club (still do: see here), but Paul redeemed both himself and his shirt by being a weird fringe kind of yuppy. And I soon came to love the B-52s, which I continued to listen to up through their Cosmic Thing album. Only a few months ago I called up their brilliant "Private Idaho" on YouTube after hearing the song at a pub.



I've no idea of Paul's impressions of or memories of me. Did he notice that I've finally aged, as I noticed he has? We are both in our mid-40s, and wrinkles are making their tentative early maps round our eyes. He mentioned he'd read some of my online posts (I occasionally email links out to my whole address book, and his email's in there too) but I'm not at all sure these emails aren't just an annoyance to him. His politics or his social or religious ideas--I've no idea of these things. All I know is I'll run into him ten years from now and there will still be that white-bread midwest impression the name Haakenson can't help but bring with it, combined with the odd fringe element Paul always seems to sport: the faint weirdness intended, perhaps, to laugh at the white-bread in himself: the B-52s mystique, the Chinese, the black cowboy hat--and what will it be in 2022?

See you then, old classmate.

Buy Paul's CD here:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/groovipauli

Romney Faces Hard Sell with SC Unibrows

A Disassociated Press Report, January 13, 2012, Columbia, South Carolina

Fresh from victories in the Iowa and New Hampshire Republican primaries, frontrunner Mitt Romney faces a new challenge as the GOP contest moves to unibrow stronghold South Carolina.

In a state where more than 80 percent of Republican voters have the single brow genetic feature, new research shows Romney at a serious disadvantage against rival Newt Gingrich.

"Our study shows a clear pattern nationwide," University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist Doreen Klein says. "Among voters whose eyebrows separate over the bridge of the nose, Romney has a 14 percent lead. But among those voters who have a single eyebrow stretching across the forehead, Romney shows less than 4 percent support. Gingrich meanwhile comes in at 59 percent."

The Gingrich campaign is making the most of South Carolina's strong unibrow presence with a series of aggressive TV attack ads.

"We're going to hit him hard," Gingrich campaign staffer Dave Carney said.

The first of these ads, unveiled Wednesday, shows Gingrich in a loincloth roasting slabs of an unidentified large mammal over a fire. The ad then cuts to footage of Mitt Romney in a Parisian restaurant speaking French to a waiter.

"I'm Newt Gingrich," the ad ends with the candidate standing before a cave painting of running bison. "And I know what's good for South Carolina."

Unibrow and South Carolina resident Tracy Klugian at a Tea Party rally to kick off the Republican primary. "I don't know who I'm supporting yet," says Klugian, "but I'm Republican all the way. We've had enough of these foreign presidents recently."


Unibrows have a long history in the Republican Party. In this undated file photo, ex-president George W. Bush is shown with the trait. Advisers later persuaded Bush to begin shaving above the nose.