Saying No but Meaning Yes

Philosopher and lifelong fan Simon Critchley remembers Bowie in the aftermath of his sudden passing.

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From Bowie:

ON THE TITLE TRACK OF BLACKSTAR, RELEASED just a couple of days before his death, Bowie sings “I’m not a pop star.” For me, and for his millions of fans, he was much more than that. He was someone who simply made us feel alive. This is what makes his death so hard to take.

As the years passed, Bowie’s survival became more and more important to me. He continued. He endured. He kept going. He kept making his art. Bowie exerted a massive aesthetic discipline, created and survived. Indeed, survival became a theme of his art. Bowie’s death just feels wrong. How can we go on without him?

Bowie incarnated a world of unknown pleasures and sparkling intelligence. He offered an escape route from the suburban hellholes that we inhabited. Bowie spoke most eloquently to the disaffected, to those who didn’t feel right in their skin, the socially awkward, the alienated. He spoke tot he weirdos, the freaks, the outsiders and drew us in to an extraordinary intimacy, reaching each of us individually, although we knew this was a total fantasy. But to make no mistake, this was a love story. A love story that, in my case, has lasted about forty-four years.

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BOWIE Simon Critchley Simon Critchley melds personal narratives of how David Bowie lit up a dull teenage life in England’s suburbs with philosophical forays into the way authenticity and identity are turned inside out in the artist’s work. More

This week, which marks the anniversaries of both David Bowie’s birth and his death, we revisit moments from a life and career unlike any other

In Bowie, philosopher Simon Critchley, whose writings have garnered widespread praise, melds personal narratives of how Bowie lit up his dull life in southern England’s suburbs with philosophical forays into the way concepts of authenticity and identity are turned inside out in Bowie’s work.

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From Bowie:

LET ME BEGIN WITH A RATHER EMBARRASSING confession: no person has given me greater pleasure throughout my life than David Bowie. Of course, maybe this says a lot about the quality of my life. Don’t get me wrong. There have been nice moments, some even involving other people. But in terms of constant, sustained joy over the decades, nothing comes close to the pleasure Bowie has given me.

It all began, as it did for many other ordinary English boys and girls, with Bowie’s performance of “Starman” on BBC’s iconic Top of the Pops on July 6, 1972, which was viewed by more than a quarter of the British population. My jaw dropped as I watched this orange-haired creature in a catsuit limp-wristedly put his arm around Mick Ronson’s shoulder. It wasn’t so much the quality of the song that struck me; it was the shock of Bowie’s look. It was overwhelming. He seemed so sexual, so knowing, so sly and so strange. At once cocky and vulnerable. His face seemed full of sly understanding—a door to a world of unknown pleasures.

BOWIE Simon Critchley Simon Critchley melds personal narratives of how David Bowie lit up a dull teenage life in England’s suburbs with philosophical forays into the way authenticity and identity are turned inside out in the artist’s work. More

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Nat Hentoff died this weekend at the age of 91

Here, we revisit David L. Lewis’ 2013 book The Pleasures of Being Out of Step: Nat Hentoff on Journalism, Jazz and the First Amendment, an oral history to accompany the film of the same name. What follows is a brief excerpt from the end of the book.

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NAT HENTOFF: You never know what impact you have, if any. I fantasized once that years from now, some kid in Des Moines will be going through a library, he’d pick up a book that was miraculously still there, and it meant something to him.

Izzy Stone gave me a lesson when I was a very young reporter. He said, ‘If you want to go into this business to change the world, get another day job.’ Because if you change anything, it’ll only be very cumulatively, in a limited way, and you probably won’t even know about it. So I write to write and hope that some of it has some effect. I’m under no illusion at all—this is not false modesty—that I have much influence, and somewhat more in jazz I think than in trying to keep the Constitution alive.

But the most I feel alive is when I’m writing about what means something to me. My younger son, Tom, the lawyer, who is an expert on intellectual property and libel, he took me to one of these big conferences. And we were sitting there and three lawyers came over. They seemed to be in their thirties, and they said to me, ‘You’re the reason we’re here. We used to read you in the Voice and you made the law seem so exciting.’ So I figured, ‘My goodness.’

I wrote this novel for young readers called Jazz Country. It was the first one I had done for them. And there’s a man who has a jazz band in Hawaii. It’s a very good one—I’ve done the notes for one of his sides. He told me the only reason he came into jazz was reading that book as a kid. And his twelve-year-old at the time had a pocketbook copy of it it his back pocket. Then, just two weeks ago, I hear from a professor in a university in Canada who has a jazz course. And he said, ‘I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Jazz Country.’

So maybe I had some impact on some people.

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THE PLEASURES OF BEING OUT OF STEP Nat Hentoff on Journalism, Jazz and the First Amendment David L. Lewis This is an oral history based on filmmaker David L. Lewis’ full-length documentary profile of the jazz critic and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff. The narrative, from extensive interviews with Hentoff and many of his allies and rivals—who were often one and the same, depending on the issue and the day—traces a unique career in American journalism and activism. More

In an extract from The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power, Alex Nunns tells the inside story of how Jeremy Corbyn scraped onto the Labour leadership ballot in 2015.

Read the full extract here.

“I was ready if necessary to face being called a profiteer from smut.”

Barney Rosset’s fight for the unexpurgated publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover pushed back against 30 years of censorship and set the contemporary standard for free literary expression in the United States.

 

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On this day in 1929, the United States officially declared D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscene and banned its publication and distribution domestically. It would be 30 years before Barney Rosset and the fledgling Grove Press would take on the Post Office and distribute an unexpurgated edition, arguing for Lawrence’s book on the strength of its artistic merit and paving the way for the publication of Henry Miller and scores of other literary voices that would have been otherwise suppressed:

In 1954, when Grove Press was still in its infancy, Mark Schorer, the distinguished literary scholar and professor of English at Berkeley, wrote to me suggesting that we publish an unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. D. H. Lawrence’s last major work had long been banned in England and put on the “proscribed” list by the United States Post Office Department. Now, Professor Schorer, whom I had never met in person, had placed the Lady on our doorstep. Here she was, waiting for her liberator. If we could prove to the satisfaction of the US courts our claims for the artistry of Lawrence as a writer and the specific merits of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as literature, the victory for freedom of speech would be tremendous. It would be a savage kick in the face to Death and a lovely kiss to Life. What was more, it could afford me the opportunity to publish the novel I really had wanted to put out into the public sphere since my college days at Swarthmore: Tropic of Cancer. This was clearly a Trojan horse for Grove. If I could get Lawrence through, then Henry Miller might surely follow.

Lawrence, with Italian publisher Giuseppe Orioli in Florence, had privately issued a 1,000-copy signed limited edition of the third and final manuscript version of Lady Chatterley in 1928, despite the disapproval of his British agent, Curtis Brown, and his publisher in English, Martin Secker. Orioli’s efforts were largely in vain. Though a number of copies of this edition of the book, in mulberry-colored paper boards, got out, others were seized and banned in both England and the United States.

After Lawrence’s death in 1930 at the age of forty-four, the truly obscene result for Lady Chatterley’s Lover came in the form of the 1932 publication of an “expurgated” version by Secker in England and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States.

What was it that these publishers hoped to accomplish with this cleansing process? Were clean living and clean reading synonymous and equally meritorious? And who on earth did Knopf and his British equivalent choose to do the dirty work of purging our Lady of her dirty thoughts? How did these unnamed designated hitters choose which words, phrases, and paragraphs to swat out of the book? Any competent, “decent” publisher would have had a hand in choosing his home-team purifier. After all, it was his (in this case, read Knopf’s) team. And what possibly did “expurgating” mean if not cutting out something already made illegal by our government, something supposedly dangerous, like absinthe. So, the Knopf “expurgated” Chatterley was deconstructed from the original to something along the lines of the de-sexed versions of Ovid given out to prep school Latin students, a kind of methadone before its time. It angers me to this day.

—from Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

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ROSSET My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship Barney Rosset Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset began work on his autobiography a decade before his death in 2012. Now, at last, in his own words, we have a portrait of the man who reshaped how we think about language, literature—and sex. This is Barney Rosset, uncensored. More

ELEUTHÉRIA Samuel Beckett Before the classic Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett wrote Eleuthéria, many elements of which prefigure the themes and characters of Beckett’s most important plays. Beyond the historical interest of this “lost” work, there is also the mesmerizing quality of the master playwright’s language. More

SEVENTEEN & J Two Novels Kenzaburō Ōe In Seventeen, the story of a lonely seventeen year old who turns to a right-wing group for self-esteem, and J, the story of a spoiled, young, drifter son of a Japanese executive, Ōe shows us a world where the values that had regulated life had vanished: what confronts his heroes now is a gaping emptiness. More

In an extract from The Candidate: Jeremy Corbyn’s Improbable Path to Power, Alex Nunns explains how Corbyn was able to survive the attempt of Labour MPs to overthrow him.

Read the full extract here.

1. What first drew you to radical publishing? What keeps you there today?

​ I grew up in Cleveland in the 70s and 80s and discovered punk rock in the early 90s, thereby learning of radical politics. My upbringing was abusive, my education was absent, and my young mentors in the punk scene quickly led to Harvey Pekar, the Dead Boys, The Pagans, Dennis Kucinich, and a long union history of corporate hegemony versus public power. Soon thereafter, I began creating the kind of resources that I needed as a child about gender, mental health, grassroots organizing, history, political power, race and class, and analytical skills. And 21 years later, not much has changed. The issues are shockingly just as relevant as they were in the 90s and my heart gets more invested as my developmental senses improve. I am autistic, which leads me to be plenty stubborn and to really enjoy the challenge of the changing landscape of publishing. I now understand the role of my own meaning and purpose and see suffering as opportunity instead of pain. We made a comic about this tale, with the publishing industry portrayed as dinosaurs and ourselves as rats.

Read the full exchange here.