Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

[araucaria]

Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

This thread is not an offshoot of Paul’s thread. I started collating material for this thread back in October; but before I come to that, I need to deal with some unfinished business on the other thread from which I withdrew after Paul described my remarks as ‘slanderous’. Rest assured: I am not going to indulge in any sort of polemicking; what I am about to say is theoretical in nature and will segue, slowly but neatly, into the meat of this thread. Since part of the problem seems to have been not disposing of the entirety of my thinking, it may be a good idea to hear me out before commenting further. It will take around a dozen posts for me to cover that ground. Preparing these posts – and finding much more than even I bargained for – is what has made this cooling-off period so long. The entire dozen is now ready for posting, maybe not at four-minute intervals, but fairly rapidly. Others posters will of course do as they please, but I may not respond until the end of what is to me a single mammoth post divided up for convenience.

A major difficulty always is getting the literate turn of mind to converse with the numerate turn of mind, even within a single brain. My constant focus is on achieving this in some small measure while also pointing out how it can sometimes work. We are dealing in this instance with a spectacular failure: no big deal. My thanks to all in the other thread for your support and to anyone patient enough to read this one.

Posted by RunningDeer (here)
Glad you’re hanging around

Paula, I didn’t say I wasn’t withdrawing from the forum: more like hanging by a thread... I am in a kind of NDE state, meaning that I can slip either way and either is good. My membership is precious, but not so precious or addictive I cannot give it up. I have no website: I could easily start one. However, the vast canvas of Avalon provides the area of freedom of expression one needs in order to operate... freely. That does not and should not involve slander, and I think it is worth taking a little time to explain why, for the benefit of others in my position who may be unable or unwilling to defend themselves. It doesn’t matter how carefully one writes, misunderstandings are always possible, and it is worth the time and effort to take a closer look. If you want to understand how I am not just talking about ‘withdrawal symptoms’, then I’m afraid you are going to have to read all the way through to my conclusion

I mentioned Shane because it was Paul who introduced his material here and was big enough to deal with the situation when it was shown his first impression was spectacularly wrong. He has often referred wryly to his past mistakes, e.g. re 911, and is to be highly commended for his honesty and open-mindedness. I would suggest that the initial enthusiasm and the final disappointment go hand in hand. In the end it was I who was pointing out how Shane was not the total fraud he had become for others by that time, and I could do so because from the start I had seen a fictional element in his writings: not truth, not deception, something else. I said I hadn’t changed since then. I feel something similar is going on here. When I see an OP listing scientists studied and somehow found wanting, then going a little over the top about Miles Mathis, I see a search for a ‘theory of everything’ and a cause for further disappointment. No one person can provide more than they have: science, like any human endeavour, is a collective enterprise. Mathis’s cursory dismissal of Rupert Sheldrake as a fraud simply because he appears on TV immediately betrays a similar black-and-white go-it-alone attitude that I personally am not going to call slanderous; but it is certainly accusatory, exclusive and competitive (antagonistic) – one can see straight off that any such overall theory will include everything but Rupert Sheldrake and a few others. The biggest picture will always be a mere part of an even larger puzzle, so if it is closure you want, the only type of closure you are going to get is on... closure itself. You can find the Holy Grail, but until you work out what it is supposed to contain, you are in possession of an empty vessel, of the sort that typically makes the most noise. (I have a good example of that later on in the shape of an empty biscuit tin )

So I was not slandering Mathis by having lower expectations of him: I was upsetting Paul, who takes it almost personally, and I’m sorry for that, because it was not my intention at all to upset Paul. How this happened is likely due to the above-mentioned circumstance. I started collating material for a Miles Mathis thread of my own (this one) back in October. I put it on the back burner when I got involved in a difficult election discussion with Paul. Flash, you are right: early November was a difficult time for Americans in particular, and when you say ‘This propagandist crooked election takes a hold on all of them’, that is something I was trying to point out in a series of posts such as this one. Fortunately, outside circumstances as well as intellectual rigour – and also this odd psychic reticence that occasionally kicks in when tackling sensitive issues – have forced me to take my time over posting this thread.

Then Paul started his Miles Mathis thread and I waded in somewhat on a tangent, which was a mistake on my part – I sincerely apologize – but maybe not entirely a mistake, because the material I have to share below is more disturbing than what I have indicated so far. I made the valid, undisputed point that a 2-million word data dump could not expect same-day appraisal. There is a housekeeping issue here: when one starts a thread on a subject such as numerous Mathis science papers, there is an immediacy trap (which I fell into) in that this is not the most suitable medium for saying, Come back in three years’ time when you are fully up to speed. It is the ultimate conversation stopper when you are trying to have a discussion on a forum. But that is only a trap if one takes the view that a full understanding of anything is required before expressing a provisional impression short of an opinion. Since the world is drowning in information overload, that is clearly not an option, at least most of the time. I would suggest that we receive information through the filter of our personal knowledge base, i.e. matters that we are more or less thoroughly familiar with. The general issue then becomes improving the quality of that filter – through practice.

Applying my filter to Mathis, I may be on a tangent, and I may not be entirely up to speed, but if he has already awakened wariness in this reader, that unfavourable impression is entirely his own doing and worth pointing out to others. Let me restate how I see his art relating to his science. Either they are in some way a match, or they are a mismatch, whether through competence in one area and incompetence in the other, or a lack of integration, as opposed to integrity – not a moral failing, simply a lack of unification, an internal inconsistency if you will: no hanging matter. Are then these two aspects perhaps somehow reconciled in the intermediate conspiracy research Mathis also engages in, and which I came to first?

Here ends my opening statement. My next post will look at Mathis’s work on allegedly fake deaths.

[araucaria]

My first introduction to Miles Mathis was here. The idea for this thread came to me on discovering the entire John Lennon thread after it was revived on 18 October last.
Regarding Mathis’s work on fake deaths, above and beyond the apparently cogent narrative relating to individual events such as the Sharon Tate murders (professional actors maybe doing some professional acting), I was troubled by the basic counterintuitive premise that ‘no one ever gets killed’. Most alternative investigation on the contrary involves adding to the huge body count: the elite supposedly has this agenda of removing all but 500 million of us. No doubt fake deaths do occur from time to time; when they do, at least you will know it was not the Clintons – they like their victims very dead indeed, ‘beastly dead’ (Joyce, Ulysses). The Hillary Clinton election saga actually puts this whole process into reverse: the reality, or unreality, of the situation appears to be that the real Clinton is seriously ill/dying/already dead, with a body double pretending otherwise. So my first impression is that this conspiracy researcher is overplaying his hand, almost turning his material (true or false, I don’t know and can’t tell) into... disinformation. If I were to turn nasty, I might suggest that Mathis sees Intelligence assets everywhere because he is one himself. But I intend to keep this polite, and am content to say that while others may do as they please, I take this material with a generous pinch of salt. That is to say, I don’t need to have an opinion either way. It may be of help to others to explain why I feel comfortable with that neutrality: it serves as catalyst for my own thinking process, and for that I can only be grateful.

That is all I have to say about the fake death analyses with respect to conspiracy research. I turn now to how they may relate to Miles Mathis’s work as an artist – both art and writing. When I saw a thread about John Lennon not being dead after all, I knew it had to be Mathis: that is what he does. Artists have a way of picking up a ball and running with it – if ever you hear that Christo is working on the White House, you know it will be to wrap it up. Or Daniel Buren will put his famous thin stripes on everything. Similarly, if you heard that Miles Mathis was working on Princess Diana, you would know it would be to show she never died. These guys have a hammer and everything they take their hammer to becomes a nail, although it might actually be a screw, a bolt, a peg, a pin or whatever. But there is a positive side to this process: it is not about ‘true’ nails and ‘false’ nails, but about ‘nailness’. To know what a nail is, you need to know what it isn’t. As Picasso said in 1935, ‘the value of a work [of art] resides precisely in what it is not.’

When Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag building, what did they do? They took their hammer – a few acres of tarpaulin and a few miles of rope – and buried their nail – the building. What happened next I can only surmise. For a period of time, people would walk past this building, trying to match their present limited perceptions with their recollections. They might find a resemblance to the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, or if they were feeling ‘slanderous’, to an ordinary office block, or even an iceberg. In other words, the specific nail was turned into a fuzzy set comprising nail/screw/bolt/peg/pin... (akin to a particle behaving like a wave). The interesting part comes when the covers were taken off. No, the building hadn’t morphed into the Louvre (although that was always one possibility!): it had collapsed back into the Reichstag building; but not the old building, surely a new one seen with the sharpened vision that comes from confronting plain sight with error-prone memory feeding on the misperceptions of everyday familiarity.

In other words, we learn what a nail is by comparing it with other similar items. A screw serves basically the same purpose, but you can see from the penetrative spiral that it really requires a rotary force from a screw-driver. A bolt has a concentric spiral with no point that calls for a hole to be drilled. And a nail having just the sharp end can just be hammered in – as can the others, only not so easily. Similarly art is always a part of art history: the collective of other artworks known to the artist at the time. Hence the architecture in a Christo art wrapping is always both what it is (a particular building, independent of people’s recollection of it) and what it isn’t (other buildings, or the same building misremembered). It doesn’t become a fake, it becomes a fiction, while the underlying reality remains unchanged.

[araucaria]

Take another example: The Family Reunion by Frédéric Bazille, a painter I previously mentioned here. This was the first ever group portrait painted entirely outdoors, and why that is important will be apparent in a moment. Bazille portrays his family, including his mother featured prominently in a deep blue dress, and two cousins in whitish dresses. The real dresses were both white (we have their owners’ testimony), but the viewer sees them as different shades of light blue: that is the colour of the paint on the canvas. This difference is not fact vs fiction: it is a record of what the artist actually saw: due to their proximity to the patch of deep blue, the two dresses would take on a bluish hue, paler further away, more pronounced closer in (I owe this insight to a museum guide). Had there been just one cousin, her dress would have just seemed bluish; but the presence of the two hints at this at the time unfamiliar visual effect, derived from two conflicting facts: the objective fact (the white dress), and the optical illusion, itself an objective fact because anyone can and will see it.

The only way for the painter to study and depict this effect was through having all his models together for the duration of the entire process, i.e. a number of days, something they found excruciatingly boring – although in the meantime no doubt plenty of conversation went on. In other words, this is a real family reunion as it actually happened, as opposed to conventional methods, which would involve making sketches (drawings and oils), mostly one person at a time, and assembling the final composition in the studio. Had that been the method, those dresses would have been plain white. Painters like Bazille most of the time could not afford even one model, so they resorted to painting flowers, themselves, each other, their (each other’s) girlfriends, their studios (including painting their paintings), or dead fish and game birds borrowed from the local fishmonger or butcher. This real-life constraint massively overcome by the real-life family willing to endure this chore explains the novelty of the piece. Hence the blue is a measure of the human bond on the female side, and the completed picture is testimony to the family bond holding them all together. No man is an island. One begins to understand the complexity involved in representing reality in a given medium – here what colour to paint the white dress: blue is ‘truer’ than white.

This is an original observation of how we actually see things, and there is really nothing counter-intuitive to it. If you see a crow on pristine snow at dead of night, you will just see uniform black. Does that mean snow is sometimes black? No... Your new dress will appear white in the bright strip lighting of the store, but when you get it home it will look different in different contexts. What colour is the dress? It all depends. Someone will look like their Dad, or like your Dad, or your Dad will suddenly look like he never did before: the information lies in the discrepancy between expectation and actual perception, between similarities and differences. White can be anything from pure white to pitch black, and is usually somewhere in between.

This has everyday applications. Take the difference between a chair and a table. In the dictionary, and not unimportantly, in polite society, one is strictly for sitting on, the other for sitting at. But of course, in normal situations, there is a degree of overlap: with minimum fuss, you can sit on a table, or you can sit at a chair with a plate of food on it; but in polite society this would be met with shock. This is no small deal. Take it all the way up: for a controlling group, humanity belongs strictly to the sitting-on category (not couch potatoes: couches!), and decidedly not the sitting-at category where business is ‘on the table’ for discussion. Adaptability and casual making do with approximations (making the best of a bad job) are very alien human qualities for these people: not qualities at all in fact, just sloppiness or even slovenliness. Qualities and defects, as is well known, are often two sides of the same coin.

This has scientific applications: not only is white a combination of all colours separatable through a prism, the above examples are artistic versions of the Schrodinger’s cat experiment. I speculate here on how we might see a whole array of potential outcomes for that experiment, not just black/white, dead or alive. (As a sidenote, Mathis also has a chapter on this experiment I have only glanced at).

It also has political and moral applications. Just as Manet’s deepest black is never black (I once scanned reproductions of his deep blacks and discovered not a single pixel of black in the jpeg file), Monet’s snow is never pure white. This inevitably drifts into moral and political issues. See here. Seen in the sharp bright spotlight of the mainstream media, Hillary Clinton can appear as the representative of womanhood and all that is feminine, while Trump is cast in the deep shadow of that spotlight to the point that his dark side is all we see. And vice versa. But snow really is white and a crow really is black. You need to increase and equalize the light to tell which is which and distinguish fifty shades of grey in between.

[araucaria]

Lastly, the above has applications for the specific case of Miles Mathis. I have outlined above how certain deceptively simple operations lead to individual complexity within a collective. This would be my personal platform. However, in everyday parlance, the notion of having only a hammer and seeing every issue as a nail is the very reverse of that. It is my contention that – at least in ‘The Stolen Century’, the document I shall be looking at – Mathis falls into this more conventional category. When they come into contact with an Intelligence operative (the hammer), fully rounded characters become flattened into their docile, mercenary puppets, cardboard cutouts with no mind of their own. Cardboard cutouts do not ‘die’: only flesh-and-bloods humans do that. When this one-dimensional treatment is applied to the likes of Ezra Pound or James Joyce, it is patent nonsense. It would seem that Pound and Joyce are stepping-stones from modern art, which Mathis doesn’t like, to Ernest Hemingway, whom he doesn’t like – stepping-stones across a river subject to flash flooding. He is clearly out of his depth.

Exactly how far what I have to say is applicable to Miles Mathis’ other work remains to be seen, but it is consistent with his artistic practice. Looking at his pictures (I haven’t studied his art criticism so far), here’s the deal. He acts as though the twentieth century never happened. Although Mathis is correct in saying that much art (and literature) has lost its way, blanket rejection (blanket anything) is evidently not the answer, since it leads him to some obvious mistakes (see below). Does his rejection of Modernism make him an artist of our time, a 21st century artist? No: in terms of technique, he is a late nineteenth century artist. My grandparents, who have been dead these last sixty years, might have enjoyed his work when they were young, although they might have balked at Cézanne or Van Gogh. A 21st century artist will have digested the twentieth century not as something monolithic to be vomited en bloc, but by assimilating the useful and eliminating the rest. I fear Mathis has thrown the baby out with the bath water. He is an excellent commercial artist; this is not meant pejoratively: he surely gives great pleasure to many; but it is not ground-breaking art. Making an honest living is not a good basis for accusing others of selling out on their art; you would need to be a non-commercial artist to do that.

His art then is consistent with his writing; in ‘The Stolen Century’ – which as the filename papa.pdf indicates, is primarily a piece against Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway – he denounces Modernism as a deliberate sabotage of true art. I am not contesting the basic premise of infiltration of art circles. I might even add to his information by quoting Stealing Van Gogh (2015), in which Robert C. Williams sets out the details of MoMa (the New York Museum of Modern Art) as a CIA/Rockefeller operation. But I have a big objection when Mathis writes,

I have now compiled enough evidence to indicate that these Modernist salons in London and Paris were manufactured or infiltrated by Intelligence, which means that most or all of the artists promoted by them—including my original target Hemingway—were also manufactured.

Setting aside the issue of the weight of his evidence, we see some serious logical slippage here, and not just from artists to writers: from ‘manufactured or infiltrated’, we slip to ‘were also manufactured’; and the grapeshot aimed at the ‘original target Hemingway’ spreads to ‘most or all of the artists’, meaning, one supposes, all rather than most. The alleged method is blatant: infection (infiltration) leading to overall contamination. However, it coincides perfectly with the investigative method itself, involving clicking on successive Wikipedia links to string people together. Mathis is perfectly upfront with his ‘red string’ or ‘skeleton key’ method. Since he also admits to using it for his science, and confesses that it runs away with him – in other words it is out of control, controlling him – this places a huge question mark over everything he writes, including his science, even before examining the details. I am reminded of the climatologist Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph indicating uncontrollable global warming and produced with an algorithm capable of generating nothing but hockey sticks.

Those who have traveled over to my science site will know that my discovery of the charge field has
allowed me to unravel a remarkable number of mysteries in a short time. I have called it the key to
every door. Well, I have recently found a similar sort of skeleton key for the mysteries outside of
physics. Although my discovery in physics contained a bit of method along with my usual serendipity,
I have to admit that here the method was almost entirely lacking. Either I was very lucky or someone
fed me the information: there is no other way to explain it. During a break from my physics papers, I
was just following my nose on some non-scientific topics. Somehow I came up with a paper on
Theosophy and the Beat Generation, and although that was only a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't tell
you how or why I hit on those subjects to write about. It dropped into my lap, so to speak. I think
someone mentioned Theosophy to me, I realized I didn't know much about it, and I began researching
it. In that research, I saw a red string and I began to pull on it. It unraveled and unraveled, and before I
knew it the whole cloak had turned to a pile of yarn. The red string trailed off into another room, I
entered that room, and again all the garments and curtains and rugs unraveled. I have been following
that red string ever since.

‘Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information’. Well, precisely. And he thought he was doing science... This last is more commonly known as channelling, and on this website at least, the practice very properly does not meet with the Avalon administration’s approval. Maybe some of his science does fly; some of it probably does. That is not my point. My point is that it is self-avowedly only a little more methodical than the self-avowed baseline serendipity being exposed in this thread. Let me just state at this point with regard to myself that there is no one feeding information to me: this has been hard graft all the way. Maybe I’m just not very lucky, but I do try to be methodical.

As I stated earlier in this and the other thread, Mathis’s art applies long-established techniques to contemporary situations (his models). This does not make him a fraud by any means; simply, there is this non-creative, mechanical, impersonal element in his art, acting as the basis or skeleton for the personal creative work, an impurity rather like the speck of dirt necessary for a raindrop or snowflake or pearl to form. There is nothing in principle negative about this: however, there comes a stage when ossification becomes fossilization. In art this is the conventionality of academic art reaching breaking point. Manet’s Olympia blew the whistle on the hypocrisy of painting prostitutes disguised as naked goddesses. In other areas, conflict leading to weaponization of an over-dirty snowball can turn an innocent game into violence. Different points on a single scale.

Transpose this to science: there are scientists who believe the twentieth century was mostly a distraction, a wild goose chase, and recommend taking up where Maxwell left off. Unless I’m mistaken, Mathis is not doing that, so there seems to be a disconnect there. I’ll leave it to the scientists to explore the implications of that – in the context of the above-described ‘scientific method’.

Remember, I am talking about tolerance. See these posts: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1015248 https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post748408

With Mathis, as earlier with Shane, tolerance is needed because, while it is easy to enjoy his snowball paintings, there is too much of the dirty snowball in his fake death and other theories. From being a heads-up warning people that things are not all they seem, the more the idea is generalized the more it tends towards saying that nothing is real: there is no snow in this snowball at all. Which amounts to saying there is nothing real about Miles Mathis either, and for that matter there is also nothing real about his reader. At that point, we have to beg to differ and say, yes, Miles Mathis might be a fake, a mere Internet presence concocted by multiple individuals. This was my not entirely idle speculation: the bad news is that I have no way of knowing, but the good news is that I absolutely don’t need to know and am perfectly happy for anyone to prove that speculation wrong. All I need to know is that I AM NOT a total fake, and therefore any hint to the contrary is to be rejected: he can speak for himself. This is where personal integrity and self-knowledge are involved in discernment. The fact that the idea may prove mistaken does not make it wrong to speculate. Discernment means entertaining a broad palette of possibilities, the ability even to see white as black and black as white. In this regard, the denunciation of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, is very possibly baseless (slanderous). It would be grounded only if he is talking in terms of mechanical, Satanical reversibility; it would be baseless if he is actually applying the principle outlined above. Bearing this in mind, we can abandon the gray area of calling-out/debunking, and take a dispassionate look at the way Miles Mathis tries to undermine the reputations of four prominent figures (actually more than four).

To round off this post, let me return to where I started: I have just explained why some of the things I write might be easily misunderstood – totally so – and why my membership on this forum hangs by a thread at all times. A new member truly guilty of slander, one would hope, would be unsubscribed forthwith, and so, one would hope, would a new member guilty of a false accusation of slander. If neither of these happens in a disagreement between established members, that would have to be because owing to its higher-than-average tolerance levels, the strictest legal sense of slander (or libel) is temporarily waived on this site. In the interest of serious discussion, our language needs to reflect this state of affairs.

[RunningDeer]

Posted by RunningDeer (here)
Glad you’re hanging around

Paula, I didn’t say I wasn’t withdrawing from the forum: more like hanging by a thread... I am in a kind of NDE state, meaning that I can slip either way and either is good. My membership is precious, but not so precious or addictive I cannot give it up.

Honestly, araucaria, sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in because it seems like a game of thinkers out-thinking thinkers. This is not intended as a poke-poke. The visual that popped in my mind is peeing on the bush last.

What makes me a simple human by comparison is the details are less important. Now I investigate for entertainment and curiosity. Truth be told, the more I study, the more stupid I feel. Fortunately, the information stays long enough for me to enhance an evolving perspective. The sense is it’s wholesome rather than a defect or old age. One of my objectives is spontaneous answers and solutions.

My interest is cleansing mind, body, spirit of what prevents me from optimum skill levels of what’s currently mislabeled as miraculous. And as Don Juan says, live an impeccable life. Beyond those tall orders, I enjoy the surprises this journey brings. The reactions to and how adaptable towards the changing circumstances? that's the feed back of my progress. If one day, I am called to assist in the world, these are the skills that’ll help the deep thinkers.

Paula ♡

[araucaria]

The analogy of a single-strand cloak may apply to the conventional type of art; it is far too simplistic to account for a century of cutting-edge art on a global scale, which is more like a many-stranded tapestry. I don’t need (or wish) to debunk Mathis to make my point; all I need to do is to point out the existence of a few other strands. His stolen century theory places inordinate emphasis on one of the hats worn by one man – the intelligence activity of the attorney, art patron and collector John Quinn – and on one exhibition mounted by him – The Armory Show in the US in 1913. However, there are all kinds of collectors, there are all kinds of exhibitions, all kinds of artists, and all kinds of relationships between the three. Here in Paris we currently have an exhibition of the Sergei Shchukin collection, western European paintings on show outside Russia for the very first time in a century. The catalogue contains a fascinating essay by Anna Poznanskaya and Alexei Petukhov on the Russian aspect of this very multipolar subject: very briefly, St Petersburg had no idea what was going on in Moscow. We may add that, while some collectors are genuine art lovers, and others (especially Americans) primarily investors; the mafia uses art works as large banknotes, and while it is possible and even likely that an intelligence operative would have infiltrated the scene, it is ludicrous to think that a whole century of art was ‘stolen’, and laughable to think that wherever he turned this guy met with intellectuals as corrupt as himself. And simply not true.

The rhetorical device for taking a part of something as the whole is called synecdoche. Ordinarily it is an innocent figure of speech, but it is not always so innocent, and can even be weaponized when someone presents a piece of the puzzle as the big picture. Between these extremes, you find people getting overenthusiastic about whatever they are looking at: hammers and nails. I am not interested in assigning a precise position to any individual on that scale: I am simply pointing out the scale, and the fact that we can be mistaken about our position on it. I would add however that Mathis seems to be a little further along that scale than we thought when he reduces the likes of Ezra Pound and James Joyce to their relationship with John Quinn. As I said, no debunking is required, just a little additional conflicting input for contrast.

Another analogy comes to mind: a game of skittles, guilt by association. Mathis’s mudslinging (for that is what it can look like) builds up a huge body count of his own. In The Stolen Century, he writes for instance, “Wow. We have, at one swoop, connected Hemingway, Crowley, Stein, Joyce, Ford and Pound to Intelligence, and we have done it without leaving the whitewashed pages of Wikipedia.” WOW indeed: Without Overstepping Wikipedia. Given that just six degrees of separation will connect absolutely anyone to absolutely anyone else, and that we are talking about a literary circle implying just one degree of separation, it becomes very easy to ‘connect’ people; but simply pointing to such connections is worthless smear unless and until we flesh them out into something substantive. As forum members well understand, the Wikipedia formula with input from allcomers and behind-the-scenes editorial oversight is structurally exposed to misuse and the spread of disinfo, and therefore disqualified as a serious research tool. I personally tend to use it only to present the received wisdom on a subject, in order to question or otherwise process that received wisdom. Following hyperlinks is a useful aid to research; it is not research per se. Serious research goes directly to source material – primary sources: the person’s own writings; and secondary sources: other writings about that person. That is what I intend to do for Pound in the next post and for Joyce in a subsequent post.

[araucaria]

We get to Ezra Pound the writer from art as he and Wyndham Lewis were behind the Vorticist movement. Mathis quotes a piece of Pound’s poetry to show how bad a poet he is. The part is not the whole: you need to examine a little more to come up with an opinion. Would any member here like being dismissed on the basis of one or two of their less inspired posts? I don’t think so. Any person is so much more than even those who know them best can imagine, which is good reason for leaving a little leeway, but not of course an excuse for condoning misbehaviour. It takes into account the fact that people can and often do change, for better or for worse, and therefore labels about who people are will always be less accurate than statements about the specific things they do, which exemplify Sartrean mauvaise foi (bad faith).

So, to go beyond the admittedly poor piece of poetry from 1920, you only have to look at the later Cantos to see that Ezra Pound can have a wonderful way with words. To put it another way, he is a real poet; but unfortunately not in the sense of getting ecstatic about daffodils or snowflakes: good grief, he talks about such unsavoury things as war and money! But after all, if poetry is about expressing and sharing feelings, then you can write poetry expressing outrage, disgust and other associated feelings. Here are some excerpts:

On war:

War, one war after another,
Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost.

Or:

And because that son of a bitch,
Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . .
And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche...
They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
dug through corpses
With a lot of kids of sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,
And he sent a chit back to his major:
I can hold out for ten minutes
With my sergeant and a machine gun.
And they rebuked him for levity,
and Henri Gaudier went to it,
and they killed him,
And killed a good deal of sculpture,
And old T.E.H. he went to it,
With a lot of books from the library,
London library, and a shell buried ’em in a dug-out,
And the library expressed its annoyance.
And a bullet hit him on the elbow
... gone through the fellow in front of him,
And he read Kant in hospital, in Wimbledon,
in the original,
And the hospital staff didn’t like it.

And Wyndham Lewis went to it,
With a heavy bit of artillery,
and the airmen came by with a mitrailleuse,
And cleaned out most of his company,
and a shell lit on his tin hut,
While he was out in the privvy,
and he was all that was left of that outfit.

On money and power and conspiracy:

“Thou shalt not” said Martin Van Buren, “jail ’em for debt.”
“that an immigrant shd. set out with good banknotes
and find ’em at the end of his voyage
but waste paper... if a man have in primeval forest
set up his cabin, shall rich patroon take it from him?
High judges? Are, I suppose, subject to passions
as have affected other great and good men, also
subject to esprit de corps.
Or:
Esprit de corps in permanent bodies
“Of the same trade,” Smith, Adam, “men
“never gather together
“without a conspiracy against the general public.”
Independent use of money (our OWN)
toward holding OUR bank, own bank
and in it the deposits, received, where received.
De banchis cambi temendi...
Venice 1361,
’62..shelved for a couple of centuries..
“whether by privates or public...
currency OF (O, F, of) the nation,
Toward producing that wide expanse of clean lawn
Toward that deer park toward
the playing fields, congeries, swimming pools, undsoweiter;

On the suppression of new technology:

Sabotage? Yes, he took it up to Manhattan,
To the big company, and they said: Impossible.
And he said: I gawt ten thousand dollars tew mak ’em,
And I am a going’ tew mak ’em, and you’ll damn well
Have to install ’em, awl over the place,
And they said: Oh we can’t have it.
So he settled for one-half of one million,
And he has a very nice place on the Hudson,
And that invention, patent, is still in their desk
[...]
So we sat there, with the old kindly professor,
And the stubby little man was up-stairs.
And there was the slick guy in the other
corner reading The Tatler,
not upside down but never turning the pages,
And then i went up to the bed-room, and he said,
The stubby fellow: Perfectly true,
“But it’s a question of feeling,
“Can’t move ’em with a cold thing, like economics.”
And so we came down stairs and went out,
And the slick guy looked out of the window,
And in came the street “Lemme-at-’em
Like a bull-dog in a macintosh.
O my Clio!
Then the telephone didn’t work for a week.

On the press:

“Sure they want war,” said Bill Yeats,
“They want all the young gals for themselves.”
That llovely unconscious world
slop over slop, and blue ribbons
“Pig and Piffle” they called it in private
10 pence per copy to make, 6 pence on the stands
and each year 20 thousand in profits
Pays to control the Times, for its effect on the market
“where there is no censorship by the state
there is a great deal of manipulation...”
and news sense?

In addition to his poetry, and his book An ABC of Reading, Pound authored The ABC of Economics. I don’t have access to the full document at scribd [update: full text available here] but here is a sample, on the ideology of scarcity:

Democracy implies that the mass must take the responsibility for choosing his rulers and representatives, and for the maintenance of his own 'rights' against the possible and probable encroachments of the government which he has sanctioned to act for him in public matters. These encroachments in so far as they were political; in so far as they were special privileges handed down from medieval chaos and feudal arrangements have been from time to time more or less put in order. Jefferson and John Adams observed that in their young days very few men had thought about 'government'. There were very few writers on 'government'. The study of economics is a later arrival. An economic library in 1800 could have been packed in a trunk. Some economic problems could perhaps be considered via political analogy, but a greater number cannot. Probably the only economic problem needing emergency solution in our time is the problem of distribution. There are enough goods, there is superabundant capacity to produce goods in superabundance. Why should anyone starve? That is the crude and rhetorical question. It is as much our question as Hamlet's melancholy was the problem of the renaissance dyspeptic. And the answer is that nobody should. The 'science' or study of economics is intended to make sure no one does.

There is Enough

How are you going to get it from where it is, or can be, to where it is not and is needed? I spare the reader the old history of barter, etc. Apples for rabbits; slips of paper from the owner ordering his servants to give to the bearer two barrels of beer; generalized tokens of gold, leather; paper inscribed with a 'value' as of 16 ounces of copper; metal by weight; checks with fantastic figures; all serve or have served to shift wealth, wheat and beef from one place to another or to move wool cloth from Flanders to Italy.

Who is to have these Tokens?

Obviously, certain men deserve well of humanity or of other limited numbers of men.
Those who grow wheat, those who make cloth and harness, those who carry these things from where they are in superfluity to where they are needed, by pushcarts and airplanes, etc.

AND ALSO THOSE who know where things are, or who discover new and easier means of getting them 'out', coal from the earth, energy from an explosion of gasoline. Makers, transporters, facilitators, and those who contribute to their pleasure or comfort or whom it pleases them favour . . usual sequence of children, if they have or want children, aged parents who have earned their affection.

All of which would seem perfectly simple and idyllic, but then we come to the jam.
Some of the people who work or who could and would work are left without paper tokens.

Someone else has all the tokens, or someone else has done all the work 'needed.'
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, despite the long howls of those who used to complain about being oppressed and overworked, the last thing human beings appear to wish to share is WORK.

The last thing the exploiters want is to let their employees divide is labor.

IT IS NEVERTHELESS UNDENIABLE that if no one were allowed to work (this year 1933) more than (5) hours a day, there would be hardly anyone out of a job and no family without paper tokens potent enough to permit them to eat.

Hence it does actually make a great deal of sense to treat Pound as a psychiatric case. In 2010-11 I wrote a short-book-length study on the relationship of finance and mental health, with reference to the art historian and banking rebel Aby Warburg, so this is a subject I know a thing or two about. Warburg was in fact truly insane for a while at the end of the Great War, threatening to kill his wife and children; but he made an unexpected recovery, and was even given one last clean bill of mental health on the very day he died. I will try to post his story asap as it is germane to the picture I am painting here. I will just add one further comment for now: when I talk of rounded personalities, with unexpected features that do not fit the preconceived label, the same goes for families. The Warburg banking family is notorious notably for Paul Warburg’s involvement in creating the Fed, but his eldest brother Aby rejected the entire banking business and became a brilliant art historian instead. His biography is split into three separate sections, namely as brother to the bankers, as iconographer, and as a psychiatric patient. My study weaves those three strands together, to reach an unexpected conclusion. This dark family has its own internal light which it tries unsuccessfully to control, literally driving it mad at times. Catch 22 madness.

Rather than suggesting that Ezra Pound is a lousy poet suitable for dumbing down the masses, the hatchet job on him conveniently overlooks the fact that the poet loudly expresses these inconvenient political convictions, and that would be reason enough to send him to an asylum, however unorthodox the procedure followed. It would definitely NOT be a good reason for putting him out (like Joyce) in plain sight on the education curriculum in order artificially to boost their sales, as Maths claims. I have a quote from the non-mainstream economist Silvio Gesell: “Surely the psychiatrists know the difference between political conviction and a delusion... Ezra Pound has no delusions in any strictly pathological sense.” Clearly we are talking about two different people, or two different facets to the same person, or two different stages of that person’s evolution. You find two stages in the career of any whistle-blower: they had to be an insider first; hence blowing the whistle automatically involves a change of face, turning inside out. It becomes all too simple to debunk such an individual. How can we know which side someone is on, when they have switched sides at least once?

[araucaria]

Here is my suggestion. In the case of Pound, as his name prompts us, follow the money. Mathis here returns to his fakery meme, saying that Pound was probably never confined at all, and we are forgetting that we were not there to check him out. Well, one guy who was there, and did check him out, was a fellow writer by the name of Eustace Mullins, yes that Eustace Mullins: author of The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a book that was burned in Germany in 1961 (shades of Fahrenheit 451; Joyce also had his books burned). Mullins states that on his visits to Pound at St Elizabeth’s mental hospital, as someone working at the Library of Congress he was commissioned by Pound to research the Fed for the sum of ten dollars a week until the funds ran out. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Foreword.

In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St.
Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane),
Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I
replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill
marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research
at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued
this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held
without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After
he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound broadcast from Italy
in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War
II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound's indictment,
spurred by the demands of his three personal assistants, Harry Dexter
White, Lauchlin Currie, and Alger Hiss, all of whom were subsequently
identified as being connected with Communist espionage.
I had no interest in money or banking as a subject, because I was working on
a novel. Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a
few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking
group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and
Congress' enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what
Pound had long suspected. He said, "You must work on it as a detective
story." I was fortunate in having my research at the Library of Congress
directed by a prominent scholar, George Stimpson, founder of the National
Press Club, who was described by The New York Times of September 28,
1952: "Beloved by Washington newspapermen as 'our walking Library of
Congress', Mr. Stimpson was a highly regarded reference source in the
Capitol. Government officials, Congressmen and reporters went to him for
information on any subject."
I did research four hours each day at the Library of Congress, and went to
St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the afternoon. Pound and I went over the previous
day's notes. I then had dinner with George Stimpson at Scholl's Cafeteria
while he went over my material, and I then went back to my room to type up
the corrected notes. Both Stimpson and Pound made many suggestions in
guiding me in a field in which I had no previous experience. When Pound's
resources ran low, I applied to the Guggenheim Foundation, Huntington
Hartford Foundation, and other foundations to complete my research on the
Federal Reserve. Even though my foundation applications were sponsored by
the three leading poets of America, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and
Elizabeth Bishop, all of the foundations refused to sponsor this research.
[...]
After my initial shock at discovering that the most influential literary
personality of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, was imprisoned in "the
Hellhole" in Washington, I immediately wrote for assistance to a Wall Street
financier at whose estate I had frequently been a guest. I reminded him that
as a patron of the arts, he could not afford to allow Pound to remain in such
inhuman captivity. His reply shocked me even more. He wrote back that
"your friend can well stay where he is." It was some years before I was able
to understand that, for this investment banker and his colleagues, Ezra
Pound would always be "the enemy".
(my emphasis) https://archive.org/stream/TheSecret...227P._djvu.txt

This leads to the following interesting situation, where the red string suddenly stops unravelling and is clearly tied in a knot. There you have in plain terms the contradiction whereby Miles Mathis becomes unstuck: not only could ‘a patron of the arts (...) afford to allow Pound to remain in such inhuman captivity’, it was in his interest to do so as ‘the enemy’. Alternatively, if he means to debunk Mullins as well, then Mathis would have to be himself on the side of the intelligence services he claims to be denouncing.

Returning now to another patron of the arts, John Quinn, we encounter the same contradiction; for if Pound was handled, i.e. funded, by Quinn, then secret service cash was being used to fund Mullins’s disclosure of the Federal Reserve system. This makes little sense, and is in fact in total contradiction with subsequent policy, for in 1967 at least, the CIA did “not recommend that discussion of the [conspiracy] question be initiated where it is not already taking place”

However, since Wikipedia has no love for Eustace Mullins, and since he probably cannot be trusted to speak of Paul Warburg even when quoting Paul Warburg’s own words on the need for secrecy, from his autobiography, I shall look elsewhere for information on the Warburg-Fed issue, no further in fact than the almost official family biography by Ron Chernow, a hefty tome that I myself have studied and analyzed. But for the same reason, I shan’t be quoting myself either, preferring to quote a book review for The Institute for Historical Review by John Weir who begins by saying, “So sympathetic is Chernow's portrayal that it can rightly be regarded as an authorized version of events”.

Along with many other bankers, Chernow explains, Paul Warburg was unhappy with the risk inherent in America's decentralized banking system. The central bank he envisioned for the United States would insure against future "panics" and do away with much of the risk of banking. To this end, he played a key but secretive role in this project:
“In November 1910, [Senator] Aldrich [of Rhode Island], Paul [Warburg], and four other experts sneaked off to discuss bank reform at a secret hideaway on Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast. With Democrats now in control of Congress and Progressives railing against Wall Street, the bankers had to travel incognito, lest they be accused of hatching a cabal.”
As part of the elaborate charade, the conference participants pretended to be sportsmen, outfitting themselves as duck hunters.
What Chernow does not adequately explain is why such secrecy was necessary if a central bank was really such a great idea. We are told, in effect, that Warburg and others hatched a cabal to avoid being accused of hatching a cabal.
Because it was the product of a furtive conclave, and secrecy still surrounds many central bank decision-making activities, it is hardly surprising that there are so many dark suspicions and "banking conspiracy" theories involving the Federal Reserve Bank.[my emphasis]

I would simply conclude by suggesting that this fairly mainstream review is more suspicious of what is going on here than the man intent on exposing as many frauds as possible. Just as the Wikipedia article immediately steers the reader away from Mullins by calling him ‘antisemitic’ and a ‘Holocaust denier’, Miles Mathis steers the reader away from even getting as far as Mullins by denouncing Pound who mentored him. For all I know, in some circumstances, Mullins maybe was ‘antisemitic’ and a ‘Holocaust denier’; but that hardly debunks everything he ever wrote or said. Likewise, when Miles Mathis tells us that Pound was at one time an intelligence asset and a lousy poet, that does not invalidate my statement that at another time Pound was a whistle-blower and a very decent poet. Since I for one can live with more than one side to Pound’s career, in terms of character development as opposed to the cardboard cutout model, I might also speculate how his poetry improved dramatically just as soon as he found his soul and started being his own man...

[ThePythonicCow]

.
My accusing you of slander in my earlier thread was using too sharp a stick, and uncalled for. I should have been more accurate, tentative and focused in presenting my differing view.

Posted by araucaria (here)
Similarly, if you heard that Miles Mathis was working on Princess Diana, you would know it would be to show she never died.

Good point. That's exactly what Miles would conclude - she never died. I agree with you that Miles over uses his "no one died" hammer. Some bolts, screws, and latches have gotten seriously smashed in Miles analysis.

Posted by araucaria (here)
Transpose this to science: there are scientists who believe the twentieth century was mostly a distraction, a wild goose chase, and recommend taking up where Maxwell left off. Unless I’m mistaken, Mathis is not doing that, so there seems to be a disconnect there.

I don't think that Miles understands Maxwell's equations much at all. I have not seen evidence that Miles even has the math skills to consider Maxwell's work. I'd rather recommend Robert Distinti, another amateur who endeavors to overhaul our understanding of the physics of matter, energy, electro-magnetism and light, for his insights into Maxwell's work.

The strength of Miles physics that delighted me was his awareness of the physical shapes and geometries and motions that might be involved in the manifestation of light, matter, energy and forces, from the ether.

But Miles Mathis is like a painter with a pallet that has only various shades of blue colors on it. That blue dress is brilliantly shown, but the red rose in the lady's hand is but a fuzzy shadow in the sea of blue.

(... and yes, I'd agree with those who think that relativity and quantum mechanics were a century long distraction ... and perhaps not surprisingly, given my fondness for tin-foil-hat conspiracies, I suspect that the distraction was deliberate. )

[Helene West]

First I apologize for not being able to read all the OP's posts on this thread. I opened the thread with enthusiasm but when I saw right away the OP was referencing an involved older thread that one would have to find and refer back to, in addition to the long posts contained in this thread, I vegged-out. I tend to feel if you're going to start a new thread start it fresh so someone reading for the first time gets the gist without having to sink time into backtracking.

The above being said:
It was a Happy Day for me when I discovered Miles m around six months ago.
I enjoy his essays so much that for fun (my boring idea of fun) i started some casual notes on famous people with their relationships to other famous people and events, how so many are related to military intelligence, how many are really jews or half jews, etc.

I think the latter was the biggest eye-opener for me. It now makes sense that so many famous and/or influential people we thought were/are gentile are really jews in relation to today's Cultural genocide of gentile caucasian people by superrich caucasian policymakers. I think jews throughout the centuries never really identified with western culture anyhow, they adapted and sought to thrive within it but never identified with it hence the zeal with which they are endeavoring to tear it asunder... Just a thought... I'm sure the ruling class has ample depraved gentiles and both groups do some intermarrying but growing up as a typical dumb shiksa I projected gentile onto the outer world screen. Finding out that I was purposely led to see a gentile world and how stealthily jews have disguised their influence has been another piece of the culture puzzle that blows my mind.

I too at some point wondered if Miles is a disinfo guy himself . I tend to think not just because of his constant warnings of our being misdirected. He is too smart to not know that people like us who will read his stuff will also not let him off the hook and wonder about him as an agent as well. I personally think he is a bitter guy who became thus as an artist discovering how controlled the art world was and how dedicated to 'crap for the masses' TPTB were. When he discovered at a younger age that Art was controlled as much as politics and entertainment were controlled he became on the warpath ever since. Hence his embittered attitude that almost every public event and personage is fake.

I take what he writes with grains of salt but at least for me he has made a fascinating contribution to understanding modern culture. I for one would never have thought to look up genealogies of famous people before reading him. As far as disinfo well this very forum, as much as I'm growing to love it, could be a mechanism for controlled opposition as well so I take everything with grains of salt these days but doggone it I'm looking for some enjoyment while I'm possibly being hoodwinked!!

My biggest complaint of Miles m so far is that he doesn't emphasize the Why's. Why the need for some of these false flags and fake events and false biographies. That part is still murky for me.

I would also love for someone who is knowledgeable with his essays, his deconstruction essays - not the art or science ones, to suggest which ones to start with if you were coming across his work for the first time to understand his premises better as I am kind of all over the place with his essays.

Very cynical people have a definite place in my world and, he makes me laugh which scores BIG points!

[ThePythonicCow]

Posted by Helene West (here)
... and, he makes me laugh which scores BIG points!

Yes - he's a delight. He has his (in some cases substantial) limitations, but being afraid to "think outside the box" is certainly not one of them.

[Foxie Loxie]

I had to take a break to "catch my breath"!

[Helene West]

Lazy Helene West wants to cut corners and ask anyone who's read Miles works - What do you feel is the Main Premise of his deconstruction essays, not the art or science essays as I've not read them, but the essays where he is analyzing the genealogy of famous people and/or famous events?

I'm lazy because I'm not taking the time to sit down and seriously go over an entire essay as I read them but I'm like a kid in a candy store picking out all different essays and reading a little of many cause he is still a novelty to me.

I feel I'm missing whatever is his main premises/s. I can come up with reappearing sub-premises but what is the main point of all these many essays if there is one?

Some sub-premises of M Mathis that I've uncovered for myself thus far are:

• Many historical and/or current events which we thought were spontaneous were premeditated, staged.
• Many protagonists in cultural/historical/news events did not die or were killed as we were told but faked their deaths.
• Many famous individuals from entertainment to politics lie about their background and genealogy.
• The ruling class wants to keep beauty and talent for themselves, the masses get the ugly, immoral and dumbed-down, etc.
• For several hundred years, possibly changing only up until very recently, the ruling class has wanted us to feel/believe that gentiles ruled us and gentiles were the ones in positions of fame and power when it appears that a great percentage of them are jewish. Many family names have been altered to appear more gentile than jewish.

These are some of what I think are his main sub-premises. Like I mentioned I feel there is some main premise he is making that is right in front of me but I'm still not getting it yet. Your thoughts? thx

[Ewan]

I tip my hat to you araucaria, I just learnt quite a lot over the last 24 hrs.

[araucaria]

Joyce: introduction

James Joyce is a rather different proposition: Mathis has to admit that he is good. For him, Joyce, Pound and Hemingway are rather like the good, the bad and the ugly, making for a decent film script; but hold on, isn’t Mathis the guy who denounces movie actors for playing dead in real life? For all its quality, he can only make one tiny quote from Joyce’s mammoth masterpiece Ulysses, something about British spies in Dublin. It will be readily understood that this is insufficient to understand what Joyce the writer is all about, a deficiency I shall be remedying later. And since Joyce the person, about whom we are told even less, very much takes a back seat to Joyce the writer, then this ‘portrait of the artist’, as he titles one of his novels, is no more than a sketchy outline. This is very unfortunate as there is so much material out there, not just his own fiction and letters (the reader can start right here), but Joyce studies are a whole branch of academia, starting with Richard Ellmann’s 1000-page biography, James Joyce, which draws from another generous source: the published works of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, including My Brother’s Keeper from which two important quotes alone provide an adequate response to Miles Mathis’s allegations regarding the debasement of art – quotes that are only a couple of clicks away on the Internet, the way he seems to like it.

"It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation. Some inner purpose transfigured him."
"In our world today, serious literature has taken the place of religion. People with liberty of choice go... to literature for enlightened understanding... And it answers in parables." http://classiclit.about.com/cs/produ..._mybrother.htm

As to the baser claim that Joyce was recruited by a spymaster, presumably for financial gain, another preferred source, Wikipedia, demolishes that in a single sentence: ‘The diary indicates that Stanislaus, truly "his brother's keeper", was called upon to rescue his brother from financial difficulties time and time again.’ So, where did the money go? Or are we to conclude that the ‘inner purpose’ that Stanislaus says ‘transfigured him’ was... political collusion?

It is not enough to dismiss this as a ridiculous claim. I intend to labour the point until it becomes perfectly clear that Miles Mathis is mistaken. Why he is mistaken is none of my business; I imagine he is in good faith. He says no one is able to tell him why Hemingway is good: when I have explained exactly why Joyce is good, he may like to reread Hemingway possibly in a different light. I will explain the difference between this self-styled artist and Mathis’s beloved Dickens whom Joyce describes as a ‘story-teller’. Joyce is hardly disparaging Dickens any more than he is disparaging Homer, the father of story-telling, by reworking the Odyssey in Ulysses. So, once again, my aim is not to debunk Mathis; since he is bona fide a priori, then he can either change his mind about Joyce or come up with a more serious argument, with more evidence to bolster his view and pursue this discussion. I have reservations myself about Joyce, but they can only be made clear after reviewing quite a bit of material first. Basically, it is not about rejecting, but about seeing a chronological sequence in writers for their time: just as Dickens is a 19th c. writer, Joyce is an early 20th c. writer, making him actually somewhat... Dickensian when viewed from another hundred years down the line.

The claim that Joyce sought (almost single-handedly it would seem) to kill the novel as a subversive art form is rather preposterous in that it only needs someone to point to evidence of his singular failure in that supposed enterprise: I shall be quoting a few 20th century novels that got past Joyce. But to be fair, in a sense he was actually trying to kill off the opposition, but not at all in the way or for the purpose described by Mathis. As I shall show, it was actually his Dickensian side showing through. However, it is ludicrous to imagine that a personage as insignificant as John Quinn had anything to do with it. In Hélène Cixous’s 850-page thesis on the novels, L’Exil de James Joyce (Paris, Grasset, 1968), a thirty-page section is titled ‘Non serviam’. This Luciferian statement of intent, I will not serve, is not only a rejection of things like religion (Christianity and his Jesuit education), or nationalism (as an Irishman fully embracing the enemy England, at least with respect to the language – as a master of English who did not speak Gaelic) (cf. ‘Joyce would not make obeisance to the passwords of Nationalism any more than to the passwords of the Church. In Mullingar he had offended the citizenry by rebuking them for their antagonism to the English.’ Stanley Gebler Davies, James Joyce: a Portrait of the Artist, London, Granada, 1982, p.70). It is the assertion of artistic freedom, which inevitably involves all kinds of ambivalence that can be seen in terms of either heresy or creativity. We are talking about a much more powerful force than can be simply bribed. An ability to resist bribery in the early 20th century was hardly unlikely, since we have a much more recent example: the French student movement of May 1968.

Why Mathis harks back to Dickens as seemingly the last dangerous threat to the social status quo is precisely because he and Dickens are both ‘story-tellers’. Returning to his own analogy, the story-teller spins a good yarn: events are conjoined (with simple conjunctions) or compiled (into a pile, like the pile of a carpet: single loose strands placed side by side) giving the appearance of a single, easily unravelled strand. Such story-telling is far too simplistic to account for a century of cutting-edge art on a global scale, which is more densely composed and constructed, like a many-stranded tapestry. For example:

the magical, authoritarian properties of ‘And’.
The vogue for this conjunction dates back to the translation of the Bible and the Book of Genesis. Pure story-telling: no whats or whys or hows or whens. And God did this. (dot) And God said that. (dot) And Man thought, Wow! And God said do this and do that. And Man just did what he was told.
Then closer to home: And a plane came along and hit WTC1. (dot) And WTC1 was destroyed. (dot) And before anyone could say ‘This has never happened before’, corroboration came. And another plane came along and hit WTC2. (dot) And WTC2 was destroyed. (dot) And so on and so forth. Until someone said, ‘Let’s join some of those dots.’ https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post563080

[araucaria]

This post addresses James Joyce’s alleged corruptibility. It is based on the flimsiest of evidence: a couple of sentences in his works of fiction:

Although the evidence for the central role of Intelligence has always been there, it of course hasn't been
promoted, and it has retreated into the shadows. The evidence can even be found in the works of the
Moderns themselves, as I showed previously with Burrough's Naked Lunch. The same is easy to show
with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, in which Joyce talks about the British spies in Dublin Castle.
And in Dubliners (p. 96), Mr. Henchy “knows for a fact” that half the Radical Nationalists in Dublin
are “in the pay of the Castle.” Who would have thought that Joyce himself was among them, or soon
would be? I haven't (yet) found any evidence Joyce was subverting the Irish causes, but since he was
certainly promoting the Modernist causes, he was in the service of one of the main Intelligence
programs of his time. Since this program served the rich families at the expense of art history, we see
that Joyce is an anti-hero in a different way that you have thought. Although he showed real early
talent in both poetry and novel writing, he chose instead to sell out his birthright as a real artist for the
money and fame of a bought one. Ulysses is the public record of that sell-out.

When a fictional character “knows for a fact”, the reader only knows for a fiction that may or may not be based in fact. Similarly, when a researcher says ‘I haven’t found..., but’, the reader knows that what comes after the ‘but’ is explicitly baseless speculation, and possibly libellous if someone’s reputation is at stake. In his own words in an earlier paragraph, It is self-confessedly not deep research: ‘All this information is at Wikipedia, so I am not leaking anything here or doing any deep research.’ And remember how he got started on John Quinn in this paper: ‘Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia...’ However, if you do try to dig a little deeper, as I am doing, you get a very different picture.

Mathis suggests that Joyce sacrificed his art to the lure of money from John Quinn, an art collector and lawyer who defended Ulysses at the obscenity trial in the US. I shall now demonstrate this theory to be ludicrous on both counts: he did not sacrifice his art, nor did he give in to the lure of money.

Taking the second point first, Quinn was an art collector: as such, he bought Joyce’s manuscripts, presumably as artworks. He bought the play Exiles in March 1917 (Ellmann, Fr. ed. Vol. 2, p.36). On 20 August, Joyce wrote to Pound asking where the advance money was. He works out that Quinn wrote to Pound on 8 July saying it was on its way. Not very reliable. Regarding this play, Gebler Davies writes, ‘He [Quinn] did not like the play when he got round to reading it but was happy to part with £20 for the corrected proofs of the American edition of A Portrait’ (op. cit. p.249). (The sum I read elsewhere was £200 in £50 instalments.)

So we have two strange things right there. First, if Joyce was an informer, then he would at least expect prompt payment for his services, especially if such payment was disguised as valuable consideration for his most precious productions; for then the payment was the primary concern, and the MS a mere pretext. We have corroboration of Quinn’s financial unreliability. In a letter of December 1918, Joyce reports Pound’s story of Quinn’s purchase of £300 worth of pictures from Wyndham Lewis: ‘unpaid for’. Quinn bought the MS of Ulysses in 1920 in instalments (Ellmann, Vol. 2, p.118). In his letters Joyce indicates that Quinn took a month to offer 700 frs down, and later ‘1500 frs down, without naming the ultimate sum.’ (3 Jan 1920). On 29 August 1920 he wrote his brother ‘Quinn sent 3500 frs’. On 19 November 1923, he wrote, ‘This muddled year is ending badly for me as my treasury is now approaching the condition of a Torricellian vacuum [...] Mr Quinn was to have sent me a cheque in settlement of the Ulysses MS but as you see did not do so.’ This is with reference to Quinn’s selling it on: see below.

Secondly, if Quinn was seeking to guide his (Joyce’s) output in a modernist direction, then his not liking the play is indicative of failure in that enterprise. And selling on the novel is indicative of continued failure over a period of several years and three major works of an author who published only very few. Pound arranged the first meeting between the two men only in October 1923 (Quinn died in August 1924), when they don’t seem to have hit it off very well. According to Ellmann, Joyce was unhappy with the way Quinn had handled the prepublication of Ulysses in Little Review; I would add that he was probably unhappy at his defence of the book at the trial: on the grounds that it was not obscene, only disgusting. Joyce was also unhappy when Quinn said he would be auctioning the MS for around $2000, and offered him a 50% cut (it was sold shortly afterwards for $1975). No doubt he had worked out that since Quinn had only paid him 3500 frs in 1920, which I gather comes to around $250, Quinn was cashing in heavily on his own ’20,000 hours’ of toil for a quick profit of $500 – double the original purchase price.

It seems overall, then, that John Quinn was mostly interested in squeezing out of James Joyce, not so much intelligence as maybe a fast buck. Since we don’t know for sure that he was buying information (where is the evidence?), but we do know he was buying manuscripts, which he didn’t like, and had cash coming in faster than it was going out (Joyce’s own cash flow in reverse), we can conclude that this was likely the only ‘intelligence’ Joyce was leaking, and we can conclude that it wasn’t modernist (i.e. fake) enough either. To confirm this latter point, we need to study the internal evidence: the writings themselves – see my next post. As to the former, we have a wealth of indirect confirmatory evidence above and beyond the direct dealings between the two men, which I propose to examine now, the reason being that in a very real sense the two aspects are closely intertwined: in other words his artistry is what makes him (largely) incorruptible.

Joyce is well known to have been fairly penniless throughout his life. Not only did he rely heavily on Stanislaus Joyce his ‘brother’s keeper’ as mentioned above, he occasionally received financial help – sometimes anonymously, sometimes (very unreliably) from Quinn – which allowed him periods to work on his writing, for which he had given up the chance to become an opera singer, but at other times he would return to teaching English as a foreign language at the Berlitz school. If he had had a steady source of income such as from Quinn, he would not have been teaching, but writing. He also had two major drains on his resources: first his own eyesight, involving multiple operations that left him almost blind in one eye; and second his children: his daughter Lucia was schizophrenic (at one stage in the 1930s costing him three quarters of his income (Ellmann, French edition, Vol 2, p.344), and his son Georgio seems never to have achieved financial independence either. One of the donations from an anonymous admirer involves Pound and Quinn, but only indirectly. The anonymity is important here, because a handler would surely need to make his asset very clear as to where the cash was coming from. About Pound, Joyce writes this in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 1 February 1927:

He makes brilliant discoveries and howling blunders. He misled me hopelessly as to the source of the first benefaction in Zurich and since then I have not relied on his perspicacity. A minute after I had made his acquaintance at Desenzano as we drove across the country by night he asked me ‘Was it John Quinn then?’! My high tenor shout of ‘Who?’ must have been heard in Milan.

A follow-up letter dated 18 February goes further into Pound’s ‘soundness of judgement’, this time on a literary matter: overrating some poor quality poetry. Hence Pound was not entirely reliable in more than one area: no hanging offence. But it does mean that you cannot know what Pound was thinking or doing by extrapolating from other things he thought or did: that would be to apply to his case a form of reliability which he simply did not possess. Joyce could be equally unreliable in financial matters, sometimes detailing his every expenditure in a letter in proof of his impecunious state, at others splashing out on taxis and expensive meals for his friends. Errare humanum est (‘errare’ originally means to wander): unpredictability is an endearing but exasperating human trait, and one that is both inescapable and vitally useful. We deny or renounce it at our peril.

Just how far, then, might Joyce be tempted to sacrifice his art? Judging by a letter of 30 May 1906 to Grant Richard, the would-be publisher of Dubliners, not very far at all. A contract had already been signed, when a couple of changes were requested. One involved dropping or altering the sentence ‘she changed the position of her legs often’; also a couple of expletives (‘bloody’) needed to be removed (while others were overlooked); and that was about all. Not a big deal either way, one would have thought. But whatever we may think is totally irrelevant since the publisher thought it impossible to publish, and the author thought it impossible to give way. The blunt fact of the matter we have to deal with is set out by Joyce himself:

You say it is a small thing I am asked to do, to efface a word here and there. But do you not see clearly that in a short story above all such effacement may be fatal. You cannot say that the phrases objected to are gratuitous and impossible to print and at the same time approve of the tenor of the book. [...] I cannot understand what has been admired in the book at all if these passages have been condemned. [...]
The appeal to my pocket has not much weight with me. Of course, I would gladly see the book in print and of course I would like to make money by it. But, on the other hand, I have very little intention of prostituting whatever talent I may have to the public. (This letter is not for publication.) I am not an emissary from a War Office testing a new explosive or an eminent doctor praising a new medicine or a sporting cyclist riding a new make of bicycle or a renowned tenor singing a song by a new composer; and therefore the appeal to my pocket does not touch me as deeply as it otherwise might. You say you will be sorry if the book must pass from your list. I will be extremely sorry. But what can I do? I have thought the matter over and looked over the book again and I think you are making much ado about nothing.

Joyce himself answers the spying charge a century in advance: ‘I am not an emissary from a War Office’ liable to be corrupted.

[araucaria]

While, as I indicated earlier, Miles Mathis’s ‘The Stolen Century’ is ostensibly about Ernest Hemingway, he reserves his parting shot for James Joyce. His last word on Hemingway comes a little earlier:

You may want to sit down, because here comes the clincher. You will say we have no evidence
Hemingway ever worked for Intelligence, so this whole paper is push to a conclusion. But we do. It is
now known that Hemingway worked for Intelligence in WW2. He not only worked for OSS (the
precursor to the CIA), he worked for Navy Intelligence ONI, the FBI, and even worked with the
Russian Intelligence agency NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). How do I know? The CIA admits it
on their own website. Of course they try to spin it in their own way, but for my thesis here it doesn't
much matter how they spin it. The admission by itself is fatal to Hemingway, since I can now ask you
this $64,000 question: if you can believe Hemingway was with Intelligence in WW2, what is keeping
you from believing he was with Intelligence during and after WW1? The time period in question in
this paper (the peak of the Stein salon) was only about 15 years earlier than 1941. I have just shown
you a lot of evidence that Hemingway was always in Intelligence, and since I have just proved it
beyond any doubt for the period after 1941, you may wish to look again at the evidence before 1941.

This refers to ‘A Spy Who Made His Own Way: Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy’ by Nicholas Reynolds posted as Reynolds-Hemingsway A Dubious Spy.pdf and downloadable at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-f...rtime-spy.html

I had not intended to look into Hemingway, knowing less about this author, but I took a look anyway, as we are beginning to see a pattern here. Mathis has this knack of extrapolating from person X to person Y or from one time period to another. As we saw earlier with Ezra Pound, Pound learnt things, which changed his behaviour, but not necessarily his character; behaviour varies according to circumstance, while character is somewhat stable; it is what determines one’s reaction to circumstance, and is relatively resistant to its own modification by circumstance. So I cannot deduce from Hemingway’s activity in the wartime 1940s what he was up to in the peacetime 1920s. What I can and will do is take this document, for which a link is indeed provided on the CIA website, and see what it says about Hemingway’s character – and indeed also about his activity in the 1940s, which is far from being as damning as Mathis makes out, merely by hinting he was in intelligence (enough said).

Taking the conclusion first, which carries extra weight as the conflation of multiple opinions:

We are left with the irony that four organizations that could not agree on much—the NKVD, OSS, FBI, and Department of State—all arrived separately at the same conclusion: Ernest Hemingway may have wanted to be a spy, but he never lived up to his potential.

My purpose again is not to debunk Mathis: it is to observe how commonalities between person X and person Y (here Hemingway and Joyce, plus person Z, Pound) may be established, not by extrapolation, but by careful comparison of individual behaviours and the stabler character traits that these indicate. This is what we all do all the time: intelligence services vetting potential collaborators do it, as exemplified in this document. And sometimes people are friends simply because they are temperamentally suited to each other; it’s called personal chemistry. What they are precedes what they do.

To begin with, I have to confess a misunderstanding caused by a quick initial perusal highlighting the following passages:

Hemingway had a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances, from literary figures and artists, to barmen and prostitutes, ...
This meant that Hemingway and Joyce could become friends. By the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, Joyce had been invited to many long dinners ...

I was puzzled by all these references to ‘Joyce’, given that James Joyce died on 13 January 1941, a couple of weeks short of his 60th birthday. What I had missed was mention of the ‘American ambassador, and his subordinate, Robert P. Joyce’. So Hemingway had two friends called Joyce, but the writer was already dead by the time the diplomat arrived on the scene. I don’t suppose this mistaken identity troubled Miles Mathis, but it certainly troubled me for a moment, and it might puzzle other readers momentarily too.

The common feature of Hemingway, Joyce and Pound might be labelled ‘what it means to be a writer’. I have yet to post on what it meant for Joyce. We have notably seen independence and ambivalence in Joyce, and it turns out that despite their obvious differences, Hemingway’s character was somewhat similar. Independence: ‘A Spy Who Made His Own Way’; ‘although he undoubtedly has conspicuous ability for this type of work, he would be too much of an individualist to work under military supervision’. Ambivalence: ‘Hemingway’s attitude toward the OSS was typically ambivalent’; ‘”there was some question of the attitude of Mr. Hemingway to the FBI,” to include Hemingway’s signature on a denunciation of the FBI and his remark upon meeting Leddy for the first time that the FBI was “the American Gestapo.”’

One less flattering commonality with Joyce was noted by Hoover himself:

“Hemingway is the last man, in my estimation, to be used in any such capacity. His judgment is not of the best.” Hoover continued with an apparent expression of concern about Hemingway’s evident lack of sobriety in the past.

Hoover was right: we have for once conclusive self-incriminating evidence from the horse’s mouth, for one of Joyce’s less attractive traits was that he drank like a fish. This kills two birds with one stone, since by the same token Joyce was clearly not suitable material either.

He [Joyce] really enjoyed drinking, and those nights when I’d bring him home after a protracted drinking bout, his wife, Nora, would open the door and say, “well, here comes James Joyce the author, drunk again with Ernest Hemingway.” (Gebler Davies, p.297)

Coming to Hemingway’s politics as described in the same document, we find they are rather different – nay, opposed – to the objectionable face of the CIA taken over by a bunch of Nazis imported into the US after the war under Project Paperclip. Miles Mathis’s sole purpose in mentioning these writers’ alleged intelligence activity is to denounce them as pawns of the evil CIA, although the agency was only founded in 1947. Its ancestors may or may not have been evil – it is pure anachronism to presume so until those Nazis were brought in from 1945. And if it is not mere presumption, then what happened earlier? And when? ‘Someone posted a Wiki page’ is another blatant anachronism. I guess I shall have to provide a what and when of my own.

Here is Robert P. Joyce:

I suppose the reason why we got on so well was that we agreed in hating the same things such as Hitlerism, Marxist-Leninist totalitarian communism, … petty bourgeois conformity, and all abuses of state power to police and restrict human freedom.

His ‘habitual stance of dislike and suspicion in all his dealings with civilian government officials and authority in general’ (non serviam?) elicited ‘reservations about Hemingway’s temperament and left-wing politics’, and the fact is that ‘during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway had been a dedicated antifascist’, hence ‘more of a counterintelligence service than an intelligence service: Hemingway was to use his contacts in Havana [he was living in Cuba] to keep an eye out for Axis spies.’

Which bit of that does Miles Mathis object to, I wonder? It seems all very acceptable so far: if you were going to fight in World War II, fighting Nazism was the way to go. Even his mistrust of the FBI was similarly inspired, although also based on presumption and possibly over-generalization:

Hemingway believed that, because many FBI agents happened to be Roman Catholics, they were Franco sympathizers. He liked to refer to the FBI as “Franco’s Bastard Irish” and “Franco’s Iron Cavalry.”

This brings us back to the English-speaking Irishman Joyce, who was a pacifist, or at least a non-combatant in neutral countries; when asked one time what he did during World War I, he answered ‘I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?’ Certainly he was not one of “Franco’s Bastard Irish”; interestingly, this is where the Irish American John Quinn comes in. In 1917 he published ‘An American Opinion’ on the Irish Home-Rule Convention, which makes an interesting read and presents its author in a rather different light than we get from Mathis. More on this in another post. The important point to be made right now is that had Hemingway come in contact with the later criminal CIA, he would surely have denounced it as the ‘Catholic Irish Army’ or the ‘Citizen Irish Army’ and given it a wide berth.

The distance between Hemingway and Joyce (Robert P.) is probably less than this. ‘Like many others, Joyce remembered Hemingway as “apolitical”: The leftist intellectuals…were angry… because he always refused to enter their “camp”…. [Hemingway said,] “I like communists when they’re soldiers but when they’re priests, I hate them.” He was always particularly contemptuous of the “ideology boys.”’ For since 1941, Hemingway had been working for the other side (NKVD) as well. This is not quite so surprising or illogical for an apolitical to be doing: ‘the other side’ is an oversimplification when there are at least three sides. He made a ‘passionate plea for communism because it was still the best hope for beating the Nazis’, fascism being ‘the one form of government that cannot produce good writers’ – this was enough to ensure his recruitment ‘on ideological grounds’ despite his subsequent ‘poor record as a Soviet spy’. In other words, Hemingway seems to have had a very active, political way of producing good writers; Joyce meanwhile simply got on with the job of being one.

A couple of war images will perhaps suffice to illustrate the difference between their two positions. Had he been British, Joyce’s position during World War I might have been somewhat akin to Wyndham Lewis sitting on the toilet while his unit was blown to smithereens: at once in the action and in relative safety; except that his eyesight was so poor he would probably not have been called up. Joyce was temperamentally unsuited to any kind of violence, and would surely have needed some incredible luck to survive. This was Joyce: another writer, Siegfried Sassoon, showed incredible bravery before protesting against the war. Robert Graves was another writer who survived, Wilfrid Owen a poet who was killed: trench warfare was huge lottery whatever your occupation back home. Hence Hemingway’s ‘lost generation’ were not all simply disoriented; many others did vanish.
Hemingway, during World War II, while temperamentally too individualistic for military life, as we saw above, was temperamentally in his element in the hottest situations. While we don’t know what he actually did as a spy, we do know that he came ashore on D-Day on ‘Bloody Omaha’ Beach as a noncombatant (an unarmed reporter). Note how this and any war was/is also an information war. Nonetheless, his reporting can hardly be accused of the faults of embedded journalism: this was the one beach where the landing operation (the French rightly object to the word ‘invasion’) did not go at all to plan, on ‘the brink of disaster’ for most of the day and, as I recall, counting some 10,000 casualties by nightfall. Given these harrowing conditions – they say the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan is an accurate portrayal – it would be churlish to criticize the quality of Hemingway’s writing. As it happens, there is nothing wrong with the quality of his writing. (Note, this might be presented as a defect in the story, but you cannot have it both ways: either he is a decent writer or a lousy writer – or again, maybe like Pound he forges a style in stressful circumstances.)

Those of our troops who were not wax-grey with sea-sickness, fighting it off, trying to hold on to themselves before they had to grab for the steel side of the boat, were watching the Texas with looks of surprise and happiness. Under the steel helmets they looked like pikemen of the Middle Ages to whose aid in battle had come some strange and unbelievable monster. There would be a flash like a blast furnace from the 14-inch guns of the Texas that would lick far out from the ship. Then the yellow brown smoke would cloud out and, with smoke rolling, the concussion and report would hit us, jarring the men's helmets. It struck your ear like the punch of a heavy, dry glove.
Then up on the green rise of a hill that now showed clearly as we moved in would spout two tall black fountains of earth and smoke.
“Look what they’re doing to those Germans,” I leaned forward to hear a G.I. say above the roar of the motor. “I guess there won’t be a man alive there,” he said happily.
That is the only thing I remember hearing a G.I. say all that morning.
(Warren Tute, John Costello, Terry Hughes, D-Day, London & Sydney, Pan Books, 1974, p.193-4)

See here.

Contrast this considerable bravery with Miles Mathis’s pitiful assessment based on guesswork (‘my guess’, ‘we must assume’) and a couple of photographs and his personal dislike for bullfighting (we have already seen how he detests his writing style):

I would go to the corrida only if I were guaranteed to see at least one overconfident famous person of the Hemingway sort come down out of the crowd and be gored to death. I almost got my wish here: [photo] That's him directly in front of the bull, we are told. My guess is Hemingway wasn't even a good boxer. Since all the rest is lies, and since he looks like a slow man with a short reach, we must assume the only men he could beat were other lumbering lummoxes like himself. I also don't believe he was six feet tall.

Mathis likes to belittle people, literally in terms of feet and inches; he does the same for William James and Sigmund Freud. However, his denigration of Hemingway’s physique is also contradicted in the document he himself refers us to, by someone who actually met the man and had no axe to grind:

Another of the OSS officers Hemingway found excellent was David K. E. Bruce, a Virginia aristocrat who headed the organization’s operations in Europe and who after the war became a prominent diplomat [...] Bruce was usually more reserved, but he appears to have idolized Hemingway, describing him as “patriarchal, with his gray beard, imposing physique, much like God, as painted by Michelangelo.”

Sure, Hemingway was ‘overconfident’ – he was an American for God’s sake! As the Brits used to say during the war, the Americans were ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’. But it wasn’t all swagger. He was a complex character, i.e. not unreservedly ‘American’ – notably with respect to his politics – ambivalent in his methods, but single-minded in his anti-fascist goal. ‘American’ itself was an ambiguous notion even back then, depending on whether you were a veteran or part of the establishment. Two last quotes from ‘Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy’:

Hemingway had come to the attention of the NKVD as early as 1935, when he had written an article for the far-left American journal, The New Masses. The article was an angry denunciation of the US for leaving a large group of veterans, who were working in government service, to die in the path of a hurricane. The NKVD was pleasantly surprised by the ideology that seemed to underlie the article. [...]
Perhaps Hemingway eventually concluded that working with the KGB was not patriotic — by all accounts, he always thought of himself as a loyal American.

[araucaria]

Before I come to Joyce the writer, I need to address my suspicion that John Quinn himself may be getting a raw deal as well. Since he published a piece in 1917 – interestingly not about art, but on a political subject – ‘An American Opinion’ ‘on the Irish Home-Rule Convention’, it seems only fair to take a look at what the man has to say for himself, as concrete written testimony. It turns out that John Quinn, who died nine years before Hitler’s rise to power, was already a true anti-Nazi and American patriot.

I have not seen much of that from Mathis, and in ‘The Stolen Century’ he supplies no cross-links, perhaps leaving the reader to wade through his other material in search of something beyond the initial Wikipedia excerpt:

Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia,
“He worked for British Intelligence services before, during and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States.“

(I notice in passing that Quinn’s Armory Show was on the face of it more open-minded in intent than Mathis finds it, since Quinn said (quoting Wikipedia, emphasis mine): “it was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art.” There may have been a subplot, but one thing the exhibition certainly achieved was to give the people that opportunity to make up their own minds without further mediation from Mr Quinn.)

The immediate question this raises is: what was this American doing working for British Intelligence? The answer is right there: the multipolarity of the war. Things are always more complex than they seem. Ireland was still part of the UK, although having sought independence for some time already. Hence the ‘anti-British groups of Irish’ were siding with the Germans, or at least taking advantage of the war between England and Germany to further the separatist cause. The presence of these ‘groups of Irish and Germans in the United States’ would then indeed be a security threat to the US, as an ally of Britain. And being anti-British made potential allies of the Irish and the Germans. (Notice how Hemingway’s mistrust, a quarter of a century later, of the Irish whose Catholic religion put them to his way of thinking, on the side of Franco, and indirectly of the Nazis, was historically well grounded.) (Notice also how Aleister Crowley can be safely left to one side here; as an ‘agent provocateur’, he was playing a role, which says nothing about who he really was, beyond serving the same cause in this instance.) Meanwhile, mere mention of his name serves to demonize the subject in advance and instead of scrutiny: an ‘agent provocateur’ on the very page...

What this means is that the pamphlet on the ‘Irish Question’, as it was called back then, likely opens an interesting window on the undercover work that John Quinn was doing for his country. The first chapter (‘An American’s War Credo’) deals with Germany. Quinn begins with some preliminary statements about belligerency and the reason for fighting this war. For convenience and a visual sample of the original document, I present the first two pages below. I am not going to quote the article at any great length; for the rest just follow the first of the external links at the end of the Wikipedia entry.



He goes on to explain, complete with quotes from the German press, how the entire nation is behind its leaders (e.g. Frankfurter Zeitung: ‘To Wilson the Imperial Government is the merciless dictator of Germany but he himself has to add that our nation is today at one with its government’ [p.11, Quinn’s emphasis]).

This rings true, because it is very much in line with what the depth psychologist C.G. Jung was saying about Germany’s collective psychosis post-World War II. Jung also describes how “… the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.” What we see is that John Quinn in 1917 was describing – and already fighting – an early stage of the German disease. We will see below how he was in fact seeking to immunize his own people against becoming the ‘new victim’: for Jung may not have realized at the time, but he was referring to America See how Paul Levy updates his analysis for the US in the George W Bush era in The Madness of George W Bush. Links here.

This also rings true when we consider not just the pro-German Irish in the US but the Germans as well; we are not talking about down-and-out terrorists, we are talking about affluent German bankers such as the Warburgs, against a backdrop of widespread pro-German sentiment in the US way back in 1915-16. Hence John Quinn is very much in line with that anti-Warburg, Aby Warburg, who before his mental health scare was organizing antiwar demonstrations. (The family biographer Ron Chernow (see above) focuses on his pro-German stance against the uncivilized Anglo-Saxons. This was undoubtedly part of it, but on its own it fails to explain his mental issues, which were surely due to massive cognitive dissonance.) Another of his antiwar activities involved collecting thousands of press cuttings (c. 25k): it occurs to me that Quinn’s source for his quotes from the German press might be... Aby Warburg himself. (While I am at it, these two would be a very good possible source for Ezra Pound’s interest in financial hanky-panky as well). I want to quote a page of my Warburg essay setting this all out, beginning with a lengthy quote from Eustace Mullins.

The Rothschilds were wary of Germany’s ability to continue in the war, despite the financial chaos caused by their agents, the Warburgs, who were financing the Kaiser, and Paul Warburg’s brother, Max, who, as head of the German Secret Service, authorized Lenin’s train to pass through the lines and execute the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. (p. 146) […]
Paul Warburg was in control of the nation’s banking system*.
* NOTE: New York Times, August 10, 1918; ‘Mr. (Paul) Warburg was the author of the plan organizing the War Finance Corporation.’
Knowing that the overwhelming sentiment of the American people during 1915 and 1916 had been anti-British and pro-German, our British allies viewed with some trepidation the prominence of Paul Warburg and Kuhn, Loeb Company in the prosecution of the war. They were uneasy about his high position in the Administration because his brother, Max Warburg, was at that time serving as head of the German Secret Service. On December 12, 1918, the United States Naval Secret Service Report on Mr. Warburg was as follows:
‘WARBURG, PAUL: New York City. German, naturalized citizen, 1911, was decorated by the Kaiser in 1912, was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Handled large sums furnished by Germany for Lenin and Trotsky. Has a brother who is leader of the espionage system of Germany.’
Strangely enough, this report, which must have been compiled much earlier, while we were at war with Germany, is not dated until December 12, 1918. AFTER the Armistice had been signed. Also, it does not contain the information that Paul Warburg resigned from the Federal Reserve Board in May, 1918, which indicates that it was compiled before May, 1918, when Paul Warburg would theoretically have been open to a charge of treason because of his brother’s control of Germany’s Secret Service (p. 150–1).

On page 44, Mullins tells how he personally witnessed (albeit indirectly) the exposing of ‘the Warburg connection with the Communist spy ring in Washington’. It is therefore my contention that the espionage/counter-espionage business, going hand in hand with secrecy, was a homegrown affair of which Aby himself would have been an unwitting agent as an outsider with an insider’s view—or maybe not so unwitting: did this independent observer end up becoming a private investigator? Interestingly, when Aby’s library was transferred out of Nazi Germany to London late in 1933, with a ‘total news blackout’ imposed on the move, two thousand books related to World War I had to be left behind (Chernow, p. 406)—a ‘minor concession’, maybe; more likely, this material was too sensitive for release to a former and possibly future enemy. Such being the case, perhaps the sanatorium was a something of a blessing in disguise, a lesser of two ills, taking him out of harm’s way. The trouble was that the patient did not respond too well to this treatment.

The following from Mullins bears repeating: ‘our British allies viewed with some trepidation the prominence of Paul Warburg and Kuhn, Loeb Company in the prosecution of the war’. It tells us why John Quinn would be working for the British: hardly treasonous, just the opposite in fact – they were America’s allies after all, alerting America to the spread of the contagion to the US. Having cleared up this source of puzzlement to my own satisfaction at least, my next question becomes, What does all this have to do with the Irish? And a subsidiary question: What does all this have to do with James Joyce, who left Ireland for good in voluntary exile in October 1904?

The answer to the former question lies in the broader context of Irish patriots seeking to leverage the war to gain independence from England, a dangerous thing to attempt, but the Irish Question was a intractable issue of long standing. Back in early 1903, Joyce was quoting himself about the ‘true patriots, who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French’ (Joyce Letters, p.13). The French, the Germans: seemingly it did not much matter where help came from. But when it came to the Germans in their present mood, the dangerous tipping point that Quinn and others would be working against was the act of treason if ever the Irish actually sided with the enemy ‘German conspirators’.

Quinn’s second chapter is titled ‘Sinn Fein and the Dublin insurrection’ (better known as the Easter Rising). He speaks of Irish ‘ideality’ (i.e. idealism: dreams of an Irish republic), to be ‘distinguished sharply from the very few pro-German Irish and from the ordinary ruck of politicians, past, present and to come, who think that hatred of England is statesmanship, and who have the one vulgarity in common, a belief in Irish hatred of the English and in English hatred of the Irish’ (p.27). He mentions how the Irish (Sinn Fein) seem to place their interest (independence) ahead of winning the war against Germany, forgetting that a German victory would not be good for Ireland. He quotes a piece of fiction about what Ireland would be like under German rule.

Strikes are punished by deportation to Berlin and it is of course “verboten” to use the Irish language. It is dead. The Sinn Feiners who were caught plotting against Germany were, as a precautionary measure, sent as exiles to the shores of the Baltic.
[...]
General Baron von Kartoffel [=Potato, i.e. German for Murphy] visits the Cork slums and has the inmates of the lunatic asylum “gassed”, the remains cremated, clean sheets put on the beds, and the slum population, escorted by soldiers, moved in. Strangely enough, they showed no gratitude. The picture of Prussianizing Ireland is an amusing one. But I would not have it believed that hotheaded Sinn Feiners or a few irreconcilable Irishmen in America represent the general Irish feeling in this war.

The gassing of mental patients is eerily premonitory, as this was the treatment handed out to inmates at Hartheim Castle near Mauthausen concentration camp in the 1940s. Quinn goes on to explain how, “pragmatically” speaking, pacifists are pro-German. Since he quotes William James (unfortunately another in Mathis’s crosshairs, not just for his diminutive stature), he is here referring to Jamesian pragmatism, something I often do myself: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1027584
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1027519
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1006734
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post668480
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post622591
However the crux of the matter lies in the way the British government reacted to the Easter Rising – much more harshly, one notes in passing, than the fictitious Prussian reaction:

From the Irish point of view, as distinct from what I term the international point of view, the British government in executing these sixteen leaders and putting their names on the roll of martyrdom has not injured the cause of home rule, while the men themselves by their ideality and death have enormously advanced it.

This was not the first big mistake: Quinn also points to Germany’s ‘bloodless victory’ in Ireland whereby it took up to 100,000 British soldiers out of the firing line to police the country, ‘too costly a price for her [England’s] past bungling in Ireland’.

That James quote starts Chapter IV, ‘The American Point of View’, with Quinn highlighting what James describes as one of the nation’s ‘habits’. James: ‘the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this habit that the Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation.’ Quinn: ‘Americans (i.e. ‘all sections and all varieties of people in the United States’) sympathize with Ireland because they feel “she had fairly won her innings” and had been deprived of her innings.’ In other words, Quinn sympathizes with the pro-Irish to the extent that there is nothing un-American about being so, au contraire. He obviously feels comfortable about being an Irish American himself.

He goes on to describe how Ireland became a political football for the English Tory party:

The Tories and the financiers backed and financed Ulster [protestant unionist Northern Ireland] (...) not because they loved Ulster (...) but because they wanted to get the Liberals out and the Tories in.
(...)
Many people forget that the Buckingham Palace conference over the home rule question, which resulted in stalemate, ended July 24-25, 1914, and that England and Germany were at war August 4, 1914. It is believed in the United States that Germany would not have forced the war if she had believed that England would come in; that Germany felt that England would not come in largely because of the Ulster business, and of what was believed in Germany to be general treason and disaffection in the English army; and that therefore the Carsons, the Lansdownes, the Londonderrys, the Selbournes and the others have a heavy responsibility for the war. If that belief is unfounded, still it is a belief.

To summarize: if I understand this correctly, there seems to have been a misunderstanding of the stalemate: for the Germans, it meant that the British were still busy with Ireland and therefore would not fight; for the British, it meant that they could put the Irish question on the back burner and go to war with Germany. Meanwhile for the Irish, home rule was still very much at the top of the agenda, to be taken forward in these vastly more favourable conditions. This is how Ireland may have been not so much a sideshow or byproduct of the war as a trigger, and not just a trigger: it upset the natural balance of power more in Germany’s favour; as such, it would evidently be a major cause for concern for the Allies. And sorting out the mess would be a major contribution to the war effort, equivalent to 100,000 men on the ground, as we saw.

I turn now to where James Joyce fits in this picture. Geographically speaking, nowhere; intellectually speaking, busy writing Ulysses since March 1914. According to Richard Ellmann (Joyce Letters, p.39):

The outbreak of the first World War did not at first affect Joyce or his brother much. Joyce continued to give private lessons and to teach classes at a commercial high school in Trieste. But in January 1915 Stanislaus Joyce was interned, and after the Italian declaration of war in May of that year, Joyce knew he had better leave. With the help of friends he secured permission to go to Switzerland, on condition that he promise to take no part in the war. At the end of June 1915 he and his family were allowed to leave by train for Zurich.

Joyce stayed in Zurich until late 1919. If he was spying for John Quinn, he would have had to have broken his promise and stayed under the radar of the neutral Swiss. What use he would be to Quinn in either Italy or Switzerland is not immediately apparent, as a spy at least: but, as I hinted earlier, perhaps as an unwitting informant, through his writings. I suggested that earlier in an offhand way; now let’s see how this might actually work. Quinn’s Chapter III gives the ‘English View’, notably by quoting at length a not unsympathetic writer, starting with the phrase ‘The murder of Mr Sheehy-Skeffington and his companions was a sheer stroke of ill-fortune for England...’ He is at his most scathing of English hypocrisy in the passage quoted below. Note: English hypocrisy has become a stereotype, which does not make it automatically false (or true): we have to examine each individual case to see where the notion came from in the first place.

It is an awkward moment for a nation which has been publicly thanking God that it is not as other nations are, that it is no tyrant but the protector of the oppressed, no wicked Prussian militarist but the enemy of militarism, when it suddenly becomes suspect of the very crimes which it has set with a flourish of trumpets to punish other races for committing. At the outbreak of the revolt we held all the cards, the sympathy was all with us. But not even the Germans could have played a hand more clumsily. After two years of war, even the man in the street was capable of reflecting that there must be ‘something behind’ the outbreak. And from this it was but a step to speculating what that something could be. In a little while the alarming news came through that the executed rebels were not mere thieves and murderers in the pay of Germany, but schoolmasters and poets of blameless private lives, idealists, abstemious, self-denying men, deeply religious.
[...] The Irish possess essential qualities which the English lack. They are to my mind the salt of the British peoples, the invaluable leaven without which the Anglo-Saxon would grow ever more lumpy.

Quinn himself mentions Padraic (Patrick) Pearse, the leader of the revolt, whose writings were just being published. ‘Not a single thought’, he says, can be found that is unworthy or ignoble’ (p.49). My purpose in mentioning these names is that they were people personally known to Joyce. Skeffington was a fellow student with whom he had collaborated on a literary project; when he invited Joyce to his house the latter refused. Joyce called him ‘Hairy Jaysus’ as he portrayed him in Stephen Hero as ‘a serious young feminist called McCann (...) The students of the college did not understand what manner of ideas he favoured and they considered that they rewarded his originality sufficiently by calling him “Knickerbockers” (footnote in Joyce Letters, p.53). Skeffington was a pacifist who on trying to prevent some poor people looting was killed by a British officer who was later declared insane (Ellmann Vol 2, p.20), although Wikipedia contradicts this with a more complex, more highly motivated account of an execution). Pearse Joyce did not like after dropping out of his Irish language class because Pearse unacceptably glorified Irish by denigrating English.

The bottom line is that Joyce had put some distance between himself and persons of interest to the intelligence service and indeed between himself and his native Ireland – and indeed some time, writing in wartime about a day in 1904. No wonder John Quinn did not like his manuscripts: they would have been singularly unhelpful with respect to the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) responsible for the Easter Rising. There is a character in Ulysses called ‘the citizen’ who is an out-and-out bigot (Joyce’s answer to Homer’s one-eyed giant Cyclops); in another post I shall be analyzing this episode in a demonstration of how Quinn-through-Joyce also fails in the alleged attempt to kill off the novel. No wonder either, then, that a doubtless doubly disappointed John Quinn sold off all his Joyceana before his death in 1924. To be honest, I feel rather the same way about Miles Mathis’s story about the writer-spy and his handler.

There is one loose end in this whole saga that I cannot tie up, namely this reference in the above Wikipedia entry for the Easter Rising: ‘Germany agreed to send an arms shipment to the rebels, but the British had intercepted it just before the Rising began.’ Which is expanded into ‘The Aud and the U-19 reached the coast of Kerry on Good Friday, 21 April. This was earlier than the Volunteers expected and so none were there to meet the vessels. The Royal Navy had known about the arms shipment and intercepted the Aud [a German naval vessel ‘disguised as a Norwegian ship’], prompting the captain to scuttle the ship.’ There are quite a few details supplied about this that need checking. This is important, being the one instance of what I described as the dangerous tipping point of treasonously siding with the enemy (the use of ‘1871 Mausers’ hardly counts any more than the use of an AK-47 is today a sign of alignment with Russia). Not only does it go against Quinn’s whole presentation of the situation (the likely accuracy of which I have explained), it is unfortunately in so many respects a non-event: an arms shipment arriving too soon, intercepted on the basis of a report over which someone at Naval Intelligence ‘was doubtful about its accuracy’, and sent to the bottom of the sea before anyone could show up to collect the weapons; for all we know, it might have been a Norwegian ship disguised as a German naval vessel disguised as a Norwegian ship: the outward appearance would have been the same. It might never have existed at all. In other words, the incident bears all the hallmarks of a ‘false flag’ event whose purpose would be to discredit the rebels as traitors. I am not saying that is what it was; but it certainly gives us pause. Nothing may have happened at all; no doubt the evidence is out there, but at this stage, I simply have no way of knowing.

[araucaria]

Nearly done
I come now to the accusation levelled at Joyce that he was a ‘Modernist’ – i.e. for Mathis a fake: ‘For me, “Modern” is synonymous with “fake.”’ (The Stolen Century) – who sought to kill off the novel in order to cut off the subversion of Dickens. ‘What the dickhuns!’ exclaims someone in Finnegans Wake, a novel full of elaborate punning. If that is what he was trying to do, then he was an abysmal failure, for he has spawned generations of imitators, up to and including only the other day. The idea of writing a single sentence novel is NOT new. Claude Simon’s Histoire (1967) springs immediately to this writer’s mind. The 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Simon "who in his novels combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition". See here.
But the original nonstop stream-of-consciousness prose was the final chapter of Ulysses: Molly Bloom’s fifty-plus-page monologue, just one of many stylistic innovations that later writers have borrowed/imitated while making innovations of their own (or not). (Actually Joyce was not quite the first: he got the idea from a little-known short story by Edouard Dujardin, Les lauriers sont coupés. But he didn’t steal it; he brought Dujardin into the limelight to take the credit he deserved.) Another stylistic offering is the last chapter but one, in a question-and-answer format reminiscent of the Catholic catechism. A long novel by Robert Pinget, L’Inquisitoire (1962), starts with the question ‘oui ou non répondez’ (answer yes or no), combining this format with the inner monologue and starting with the word ‘yes’ that is Joyce’s end point. Both these writers belong to the French nouveau roman (New Novel), which is one major 20th century novel form explicitly acknowledging a debt to Joyce, and which in turn inspired many other innovative writers. You cannot tell me Joyce killed the novel when there is so much post-Joycean fiction to work with! I was going to say don’t get me started; but it is far too late for that See these posts, which are indicative of these writers’ relevance to what we are trying to achieve at Avalon
Alain Robbe-Grillet: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post990542 https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post991210
Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post564868
Georges Perec: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1014637
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post773827
Perec, Butor, Thomas Mann: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post806737
Claude Ollier: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post895061
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post898478
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post921607
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post622591

To return to the vocabulary I used earlier, these authors are Joycean artists, not story-tellers. In contrast, I still need to explain why these 20th century writers are actually not Joycean, but post-Joycean; briefly here, it is because story-telling did not stop with Joyce: he is a story-telling artist, and story-telling and artistry have continued to evolve since. Since I announced a dozen posts: that particular... story will turn them into a baker’s dozen. I first need to establish the artistry in Joyce.

Claude Simon’s Nobel citation correctly refers to the time aspect in his work, which is something we don’t always think about in literature generally, although it is indeed crucial to literature as art. Here is a quote from Stephen Hero, Joyce’s first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

– So you admit you are an Irishman after all and not one of the red garrison.
– Of course I do.
– And don’t you think that every Irishman worthy of the name should be able to speak his native tongue?
– I really don’t know.
– And don’t you think that we as a race have a right to be free?
– O, don’t ask me such questions, Madden. You can use these phrases of the platform but I can’t.
– But surely you have some political opinions, man!
– I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see? Do you believe that I am?
– O, yes, I know you are.
– Very well then, how the devil can you expect me to settle everything all at once? Give me time. (Stephen Hero, Granada, 1982, p.54)

The oral tradition of the bard Homer, the original story-teller (not a writer at all), has two main features: on the one hand, a love of florid epithets (rosy-fingered Dawn, aegis-bearing Zeus....); on the other a love for an action-packed story: the oral ancestor of the ‘page-turner’. Between the two there is nothing: zero description. If Homer wants to tell us about Achilles’ shield, he recounts how his father, the god Hephaistos, made it: first this, then that, then the other. I would go as far as to suggest that the gods are an integral art of this process. Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind presents them as an inner voice inciting men to act. I am thinking that the conceptualization faculty required for embracing simultaneity and hence description only came later.
In other words, for Homer, time keeps flowing: he is incapable of taking in a complex object with simultaneous parts such as a shield. Everything becomes a story. This is not necessarily naive. When Gustave Flaubert, a contemporary of Dickens, lingers over a school cap or a cake in Madame Bovary (1857), he uses time references such as ‘then’ in passing from one detail to another because although the object is outside of time, in the sense of ‘all there simultaneously’, our perception of it takes time: the eyes focus on this and then on that detail; we cannot take it in all at once without folding it back into the blanket concept of naming something, here ‘shield’ (recall how this is where Adam starts the process, simply naming things).

Time is always an element of narrative: there is no fixed correlation between the two. In another novel, Sentimental Education (1869), Flaubert spends hundreds of pages on the day-to-day existence of his hero, then in the space of a sentence he mentions a three-year spell away travelling. The effect produced is striking: somewhat like extreme foreshortening in perspective art. The same effect is at play in a different way in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days: now Jules Verne is a story-teller. The story is about cutting down time, and the author cuts down eighty days of travelling into a few hours’ read, notably by cutting out the endless hours of boredom sitting in a train or on a ship, eating, drinking sleeping, going to the bathroom etc. etc. In this regard, notice Joyce’s slow pace in his final two novels: the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day; Finnegans Wake encapsulates the whole of human history in a single night’s dream.

Stream-of-consciousness/inner monologue – which, remember, is only one of a number of narrative techniques used by Joyce – is an attempt at matching the pace of thought to the pace of reading (although notice how the pace of composition is typically very much slower for a careful writer). It is not unconnected to the automatic writing of surrealism, since, as we all know and understand, what passes through our mind is never elevated thoughts for very long. In this regard, Joyce’s prose is not ‘fake’ ‘modernism’: it is precisely a denunciation of the fakery of the elevated discourse of the traditional novel for example – or more simply, it is a rejection of its artificiality: ‘such is life in the outhouse’. Joyce actually has two types of stream-of-consciousness: in addition to the above feminine version, the masculine type is used for Molly’s husband, Leopold Bloom, in terse sentences of often just a few words, sometimes one word or less. It may be that Hemingway borrowed his clipped style from Joyce, adding the macho component totally, but totally, lacking in Bloom.

When Joyce does this oh so placidly with Leopold Bloom, nothing is wasted and we accompany him to the cemetery and to a maternity ward (death and birth), noble themes with both noble and not so lofty thoughts opn the way, and other less dignified moments all the way to his backyard loo. Applying this principle to the here and now, I am thinking right now that the word ‘loo’ seems to come from ‘Waterloo’ (as the French for loo is ‘les water[-closet]’), but actually this etymology is back to front; in Edinburgh they used to empty their chamberpots out the window (whatever floor they were on) with a shout of ‘gardy loo’ (regardez l’eau) originally meaning Watch out for the water! So we have a nice little knot there, water= loo, except that in Middle Dutch, loo = sacred forest – a blessed tangle: exactly what I am driving at

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six. [...] He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.

Claude Simon once wrote ‘chaque mot est un noeud de significations’ (in Orion Aveugle, Eds Skira, 1970): every word is a knot/node/nexus of meanings. This is where writing as art (Joyce) veers away from story-telling: the one has a self-referential component focussing on the medium (technique); the other regards the medium as being totally transparent: Homer was not a writer at all (an oral poet who never put pen to paper), and Dickens a hundred years after his time might have been a broadcaster. (He actually did a lucrative speaking tour in the US with 76 performances reading from his novels. Mark Twain’s assessment, although harsher than the rest of the press, found some qualities amid defects that sound like a mixture of Englishness and tiredness.) On the other hand, writing as art means that the medium is part of the message. Nowadays we have Internet writers who need to understand that their writing too is an art... That is James Joyce’s and others’ legacy to the 21st century; the survival or otherwise of the novel as a genre per se is immaterial since it is possible to claim that legacy, say as an anonymous poster on a discussion forum – which is precisely what I am doing.

The point is that eliminating bodily waste is a part of life like any other, a vital function in fact, much more important than say watching TV. Joyce was writing in wartime, when he may have heard about its life-saving role for Wyndham Lewis (see Ezra Pound’s poem above), or for one of a thousand others who must have had the same experience. Dropping a titanic turd is no less divinely alive than anything else, of which dropping a bomb is no more than a ghastly caricature. Hence a copy of Titbits is for Bloom’s eyes as well as for his arse. His thought, meanwhile, is: ‘The sh!t people write! And make good money for it!’ This leads us into an example of how Joyce weaves his narrative into a tapestry – what is known in literary theory as text (the word itself being of course a textile analogy, as is Claude Simon’s knot... and Mathis’s ‘pile of yarn’... and, by association only, Bloom’s piles (haemorrhoids). It also offers a micro-instance of his attachment to Vico's principle of cyclical history inasmuch as the recycling of manure is already on his mind on the way to relieve himself:

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall. Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday.

The arsewipe recalls a famous page of Rabelais, whose posterior motive I discuss here. In modern art, you have Piero Manzoni’s Mierda de artista, the artist’s canned excrement. See my post here. Now that might be a useful work to discuss with reference to fakery. For one thing, weight is the only indicator of the actual content of the cans; for another, if you used a can opener to verify the title, you would destroy the work. But the possible fakery is only the symptom of something else: inasmuch as it negates the crucial above-described recycling process, the work marks a constipated end point, whereas non-fakery, i.e. creativity or originality, is all about open-ended process. Contrast Duchamp’s Fountain I discuss here. It describes a particular state of mind vaguely similar to that of standing in a museum in front of a picture, such as a Manet, with its extension of perspective to include the viewer.

This talk of human waste – bodily and written, inextricably combined as used toilet paper – takes us all the way to the human outcast. Later that day, Bloom has a newspaper which someone wants to borrow to see the horse-racing page (it is Gold Cup day). He gives him the paper, saying he was about to throw it away anyway (i.e. like a piece of ‘bumf’). This is taken as a racing tip for a reason that the reader does not understand at this stage. It is only later that we learn that a rank outsider called Throwaway won the race at 20/1. In this subsequent scene, in the pub, Bloom, who is a Jew (Blum), momentarily absents himself. It is suggested that he is off to collect his winnings, leading to an antisemitic episode led by a character called ‘the citizen’, who chases him off the premises hurling an empty biscuit tin at him. As a reworking of the episode in Homer when the Cyclops hurls a rock at the escaping Ulysses, this suggests a whole new reverse angle on the one-eyed monster. First the throwaway wins the race (‘takes the biscuit’ – hence the empty tin), and the outcast, the wandering Jew (here a travelling salesman) is expected to pick up the winnings without buying a round of drinks. In actual fact, the whole financial aspect is totally lost on Bloom (but not on these gentiles), Bloom who preaches love and prompts the citizen to demonstrate how being a Jew makes a ‘Christian’ outcast of Jesus who, as I recall, said to his disciples, ‘Have you never read in the Scriptures: "'The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”’.

I want to quote this passage at some length, partly because it is pretty funny, but mostly because I am wondering what aspect someone like Miles Mathis would object to as the destructive work of an intelligence asset as opposed to the positive work of a subversive writer like Dickens. Has he read it at all? I doubt it. The world is upside down indeed when it becomes subversive for a Jew to practise what Christians only preach, especially when Joyce himself was neither. The salient point however is that John Quinn would be looking disappointedly for political intelligence, and out of the entire 600 pages this was the best that Joyce could come up with. Of course, that was only to be expected, since although writing in wartime, as I indicated, he was harking back to the time in 1904 when he was still a Dubliner, 16th June to be precise (aka Bloomsday). Put yourself in Quinn’s place: looking for info about gentlemen like Pearse and Sheehy-Skeffington, and having to wade through the bigotry of ‘the citizen’, turned inside out like a glove as he blasphemes to denounce a supposed blasphemer.

(Note on old English money and its colloquial names: a ‘tanner’ is sixpence; a ‘bob’ is a shilling, or twice sixpence; half a crown is two shillings and sixpence. A ‘quid’ is a pound, or twenty shillings. Hence Bloom’s alleged five bob bet at 20/1 would have won him five quid. One of the jokes here is Boylan losing badly after betting ‘for himself and a lady friend’, since Bloom knows that at that very moment he is with the lady friend in question... Mrs Bloom!)

—What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.
—Gold cup, says he.
—Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.
—Throwaway, says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest nowhere.
—And Bass's mare? says Terry.
—Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid on my tip Sceptre for himself and a lady friend.
—I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on Zinfandel that Mr Flynn gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.
—Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name is Sceptre.
So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.
—Not there, my child, says he.
—Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the other dog.
And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom sticking in an odd word.
—Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't see the beam in their own.
—Raimeis, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?
[...]
—But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.
Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.
—A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.
—Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.
—That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love, moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
—Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power, citizen.
[...]
I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.
—I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope I'm not...
—No, says Martin, we're ready.
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a ****house rat. Hundred to five.
—Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,
—Beg your pardon, says he.
—Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.
—Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a secret.
And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.
—Bye bye all, says Martin.
And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.
—Off with you, says Martin to the jarvey.
The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the waves.
But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.
—Let me alone, says he.
And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls out of him:
—Three cheers for Israel!
Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ' sake and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would.
And all the ragamuffins and ****s of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew and a **** shouts out of her:
—Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!
And says he:
—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
—He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.
—Whose God? says the citizen.
—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
—By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.
By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.
—Stop! Stop! says Joe.
A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid farewell to Nagyaságos uram Lipóti Virag [Bloom]
[...]
Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's royal theatre:
—Where is he till I murder him?
And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.
—Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.
But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other way and off with him.
—Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!
Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.
The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas.

[araucaria]

What I am trying to say above is that story-telling becomes history-telling. Joyce’s Bloom/Ulysses/wandering Jew is a kind of Everyman since story-telling ‘began’ with Homer, whose Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is Nobody (Outis). There is a pre-Joyce that includes Homer, and Rabelais as we saw, and an after-Joyce, including, but by no means limited to, quite a few authors I have referenced. The only novel Joyce managed to ‘kill’ was his own contribution to that larger picture. But he did not kill it in any destructive way: he took it to its end point, a form of ultimate completion. He only wrote one novel after Ulysses: Finnegans Wake, started in 1923, serialized under the title ‘Work in Progress’ until finally completed and published in 1939, shortly before his death. In this book, everyday characters truly rise to mythical status: the publican ‘Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’, HCE for short, turns into Here Comes Everybody. His wife, ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, becomes a river, every river. And so on. Finnegans Wake takes us all the way back to the Fall of Adam (appropriately in Dublin’s Phoenix Park), and then to the sleeping giant (Finnegan) awakening – complete with a rinse-and-repeat function: the end of the novel’s final unfinished sentence is given by the very first, which begins in mid-sentence with the word ‘riverrun’ – cyclical time applied to the very symbol of linearity, the river of time (and the Liffey of life) elsewhere we read ‘Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be’ . Not only is the book very long, it is an endless loop.

The limits to this world view come precisely at the point where it becomes limitless. We saw in the episode with the citizen a kind of messianism with Bloom becoming a Jesus figure. (And we saw earlier how Hemingway was seen to resemble Michelangelo’s depiction of God ) We also have James Joyce saying this: ‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ Joyce saw this for himself in terms of immortality: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.’ (Gebler Davies, p.290).

The godlike author is precisely what makes Joyce a writer for his time, early 20th century, for this became the mid-20th century issue with the traditional 19th century-style novel and its all-knowing author: his characters are like his creatures, he knows everything there is to know about them. A key element of literary theory therefore is the “death of the author” (Roland Barthes) whereby a piece of writing is to be interpreted independently of any author figure. See my post here. In this regard, Joyce actually took a backward step as an omniscient narrator reporting on the innermost thoughts of his characters on the toilet or in bed at night. He knows even more about his characters than Dickens about his. Any later novel of any real interest will involve a narrative where the narrator is not in full control, maybe a character describing things from their limited perspective. This is a very important issue right here and now, since it marks the more general difference in the 21st century between the status of the written word emanating from any authority such as church, state, mainstream science or mainstream media, and the exposure to non-authoritative sources such as bloggers, whistleblowers or alternative news sites. The problematizing of narration led to new genres such as mystery and detective novels in which the author is deliberately saying less than he knows – or saying one thing and meaning another. The relevance of this with respect to our need to improve our interpretative skills when sociopaths are around can be seen in this post in which I look at a 1988 novel where there is a murderous paedophile on the loose. (This narrative is not entirely original, since Vladimir Nabokov (himself a likely victim rather than a perpetrator) showed in Lolita what a murderous paedophile might get away with through an in-your-face ‘fancy prose style’).

The fact is that Dickens was using the wrong tool to address our problems today. He tried to address the problems of his day, and subversive as he was, any small progress he may have made to solve them must have been in the unquantifiable manner of raising general awareness. To the extent that Dickens’ efforts were ineffectual, it may be that he was using the wrong tool for his own day: just like nowadays we learn not to believe everything we read in the newspapers, people then would mistrust what they read in a novel. The authority of the author was already under threat, and a good thing too. So I am extremely disturbed at the idea that someone like Miles Mathis should look back nostalgically to the age of Dickens and claim that the 20th century novel was dead in the water, move along nothing to see here. It is in total contradiction with my understanding of what a place like Avalon stands for. That was the conclusion I expressed before laying out the full argument, and again I apologize for jumping the gun. The reader now has more evidence than I had when I first reached that conclusion; all reactions are very welcome.

Immortality may be divine: but it is where process stops: canned fecal matter. ‘History’, says the character Stephen Dedalus, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ Joyce’s biggest enigma and puzzle and paradox is that the immortality he speaks of... refines him out of existence. Finnegans Wake is that nightmare world, full of portmanteau neologisms that most people find totally unreadable. In his megalomania he expects his readers to give him their undivided attention. But this message from a god can be met with its own inbuilt Luciferian response: non serviam; this is another god I will not serve. Meaning: I have read your all-inclusive story; in the words of Groucho Marx, include me out!

The wake is ambiguous: Finnegan’s wake is a watch over a dead person prior to burial; Finnegans wake, with that all-important missing apostrophe, is a collective resurrection or awakening. Joyce’s suicidal novel-killing novel was manure for a thriving future, an open system disguised as a closed system. ‘Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.’ (Ulysses) Here are three Joyce obituary notices: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/jan/14/1
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/gene...bday/0202.html
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/cr...A/Times_41.htm

This baker’s dozen of posts is now complete, a kind of closed system (‘see, it all fits’ says Joyce), but a fake one – something doesn’t fit. That’s what the baker does: instead of stopping at 12, he carries on and you get an extra loaf. Hence we have an open system, a notion explored in other posts of mine (see below). So what doesn’t fit in? I don’t fit in.
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1072702
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...=1#post1068934
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post963607
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post944885
https://projectavalon.net/forum4/show...l=1#post678183

We have come a full circle: there is no last word. Only this minute, I discovered a Miles Mathis thread to which I contributed last year.

Closure at the end of Winnegans Fake: fuitfiat (it was, let it be).

Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled, fuitfiat!

I quoted Picasso way back in my second post: ‘the value of a work [of art] resides precisely in what it is not.’ Sure, ‘nought is nulled’ – but something new is added (by nulling nought?). The creative injection of the novel. Ezra Pound: ‘make it new!’