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The company had another ad in the same series, a similar couple, good-looking young professionals, reading different parts of a newspaper that is spread over the floor in some kind of magnificent domicile, huge and unfurnished. Trying to decode what kind of space it is, I’m reminded of a comment in Amazons, a novel DeLillo wrote under a pseudonym, that “apartments sprawl,” while “houses ramble.” We are in the territory of the sell. The couple lounges around in a sprawling apartment somewhere on the East Coast (he’s wearing sockless loafers). It’s clearly Sunday, given the size of the newspaper dismantled on the floor. He touches her hair with the end of his pencil. It’s the same gesture, if a different pair of actors/models, as the light tug on the shirttail at the beach. It’s, Stop pretending to finish that Times crossword puzzle. What happens next is off-screen, but on the screens of our imagining. Not anything explicit. Just possibility.
i love her
Koons’s linking of refinement with debasement recalls Joan Didion’s closing comment in her essay on the Getty Villa, which, she says, serves as “a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.” Tacky and overt signs of luxury are for the poor. Tasteful, subdued signs of luxury are for the rich. But the very richest do not buy Frangelico. They buy Jeff Koons paintings of liquor advertisements, sure that they are in on the joke, which is how any palpable contract—between peddler and consumer, artist and critic, artist and collector—functions best.
At the height of a roiling controversy, before Kanders ultimately resigned from the Whitney board—and well before Safariland tear gas canisters were fired on crowds of American protestors in cities small and large across this country after the murder of George Floyd—I found myself in a social situation that included a different Whitney trustee, at a dinner party where this trustee felt comfortable and assumed she was with her own kind. (One of the many ironies of the art world is the palpable contract between the wealthy who sustain the art and artists who make it. The lowly writer, outside this contract, is nonetheless occasionally summoned to appear, paid in dinner, and expected to behave.) This trustee, a woman in a silver bubble jacket, assured me that “Tear gas is not only necessary but sometimes it’s really quite desirable!” The civilized way to lay down the law. “I mean, imagine if we didn’t have it!” She invoked Ferguson and other “scary” situations. I transitioned away from her and poured myself a drink.
What the trustee meant to make explicit, without having to spell it out—because why should this woman in a silver bubble jacket, esteemed patron of the arts, have to speak in a language not graced with nuance, given that abstraction, after all, is the language of the rich?—what she really meant to communicate to me was that the alternative to tear gas was shooting people, and with live ammunition, and at least none of the trustees were involved in that!
On the opposite end of the spectrum was a soulless event we worked for a company party at a giant stadium somewhere in the South Bay. It was a private concert given by Rod Stewart for the employees of whatever company it was (I don’t recall). We had to wear ugly polo shirts and khakis, and everyone was making fun of one another in these sad outfits. We served, at that event, four types of drink: Bud Light, Bud Dry, regular Budweiser, and some other Bud derivation. Attendees at this corporate event mulled the options like they were actual choices. “Hmm. So hard to decide. How about… a Bud Light?” Rod Stewart came out and preened and whooped like this wasn’t just some hellish money gig for him. The crowd loved it. Don’t want to give raises and benefits? Hire Rod Stewart once a year, and serve Bud Light.
pano inspo lol
A month after Jerry died, PJ Harvey played two sold-out shows at the Warfield, and after her second show she played a secret impromptu set at the Hotel Utah, a dive bar South of Market. The show began at one a.m., after her show at the Warfield. I don’t know how I got invited but I went. The Hotel Utah was a tiny room—it fit maybe forty people and about half those there that night were band members and other musicians who took turns onstage, sitting in. PJ Harvey played all night. I think I left at about five a.m., and she was still playing. She did not get tired, and she did not look tired. She looked joyous, like a person in a church, filling her soul with Holy Spirit as she sang. She stopped only to change guitars, and the entire time, she had this otherworldly glow. I was witness to an artist who wanted to play all night because she was born to do it. She had passion, talent, and incredible technical skills. She sang and played guitar for hours and hours, in an intimate setting, after she had performed a fully rehearsed stadium act for thousands, that very same night. This impressed me. The message I took from it was: to be truly good at something is the very highest joy. And by inference, I understood this: to merely witness greatness is a distant cousin, or even not related at all.
I wanted to conjure New York as an environment of energies, sounds, sensations. Not as a backdrop, a place that could resolve into history and sociology and urbanism, but rather as an entity that could not be reduced because it had become a character, in the manner that a fully complex character in fiction isn’t reducible to cause, reasons, event. I looked at a lot of photographs and other evidentiary traces of downtown New York and art of the mid-1970s. Maybe a person is a tainted magnet and nothing is by chance, but what I kept finding were nude women and guns. The group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, which figures in the novel, papered the Lower East Side in the late 1960s with posters that said, “We’re looking for people who like to draw,” with an image of a revolver. I had already encountered plenty of guns in researching Italy—the more militant elements of the Autonomist movement had an official weapon, the Walther P38, which could be blithely denoted with the thumb out, pointer finger angled up. I would scan the images of rallies in Rome, a hundred thousand people, among whom a tenth, I was told by people who had been there, were armed. Ten thousand individuals on the streets of Rome with guns in their pockets.
An appeal to images is a demand for love. We want something more than just their mute glory. We want them to give up a clue, a key, a way to cut open a space, cut into a register, locate a tone, without which the novelist is lost.
It was with images that I began The Flamethrowers. By the time I finished, I found myself with a large stash.
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Balestrini had been a founding member, in 1968, of the extra-parliamentary left-wing group Potere Operaio, whose focus was on factories and factory workers, on listening to workers and producing a movement of their voices and direct experience. It’s likely that Balestrini was outside the gates of Fiat in 1969. This method of workers’ inquiry, called “inchiesta” by its practitioners in Italy, has foundations in Marxism. The concept of collecting the stories of workers, the idea that their accounts of work and of their lives would be essential to any revolutionary process, goes all the way back to Marx’s 1880 worker’s questionnaire, which was meant to be disseminated among French factory workers. It is the “workers in town and country,” Marx wrote, who “alone can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes from which they suffer.” Simply put, there is no theory without struggle. Struggle is the condition of possibility for theory. And struggle is produced by workers themselves. But the practice of workers’ inquiry didn’t quite take hold in Europe until after World War II, in the tactics and tenets of the radical-left French group Socialism or Barbarism, which came to influence workerist theory—Operaismo—in Italy.
In its use by Balestrini, who was not just a militant and theorist but a poet and artist, a writer to the core, inchiesta became something more, something else: a singular artistic achievement and a new literary form, the novel-inchiesta. If the novel, traditionally, is a work of introspection, in Balestrini’s hands it is instead a work of refraction: a way to refract that which “is already literature” even before its existence in a book, as Umberto Eco wrote of the voice in We Want Everything. One could argue that the passing thoughts of a worker on the assembly line are also already literature. And Balestrini skiing down the Mont Blanc, his scarf flapping—this is literature, too.
so cool that she's writing about this!!
The narrator gets sick leave but discovers that he has no idea how to deal with free time, how to relax or what to do in Turin. The factory not only degrades work; it degrades life away from work. This is alienation, the lived experience of exploitation, but it is demonstrated here without theoretical abstractions: it’s an oral account of a person’s days—that’s all.
Eventually, the narrator decides to dedicate himself totally to making trouble. It’s a commitment to risk everything. “I’m inside here just to make money and that’s it,” he tells his bosses at Fiat. “But if you piss me off and break my balls I’ll smash your heads in, all of you.” And so the struggle begins. But the narrator’s threat, that scene, is not a moment of singular heroism. As literature and history both, We Want Everything is not a story of one remarkable man (history never is, even if novels so often rely on the myth of an avenging angel). The voice in the book could also be said to represent all the nameless and unknown who went North, like Rocco and his brothers, and like the twenty thousand who were hired alongside the novel’s narrator in 1969. It’s the story of the people who worked these awful jobs, blessed and burdened as they were with a masculine pride, a rage and strength and violence that they decided, all at once, to direct at factory bosses.
Nanni Balestrini’s novels have meant a great deal to me over the years. Formally, stylistically, they are in a category alone. Until I discovered them, I had often wondered if a novelist needed to have contempt for humanity, à la Céline, to have a great style. Style and cynicism—the ability to satirize, and to leave nothing sacred—had always seemed linked. In youth, I’d even regarded a lack of nihilism as an artistic weakness. Balestrini gives the lie to this idea. His novels, which are as funny and bleak as Journey to the End of the Night, are fueled not by contempt but instead by a kind of indestructible belief in revolutionary possibility. This may have something to do with the way the books were made. Balestrini was a subversive, an activist, and an organizer lifelong, in meetings, on barricades, outside factory gates, in the streets, in clandestine spaces. Never a voyeur, and always a participant, which must have been why people trusted him when he turned on his tape recorder. He was introducing art—the novel—to the work of rejecting, possibly overthrowing, bourgeois structures of power.
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