Wednesday 8 November 2017

The Mental Age of Hollywoodland . . . a Beginner’s Guide.

Mr. Sam Silberstein, one of Hollywood’s leading producers, regarded him curiously.
    ‘The title of that movie I had altered. I couldn’t spell it, and anything I can’t spell our public can’t understand.’
    ‘Ah, of course, Mr. Silberstein, I have always understood that Hollywood films aimed at a public of a mental age of fifteen.’
    ‘Quite wrong! Any company which aimed at an age like that . . . it might just as well commit Mata Hari . . .  No, in our show we aim at a public of the mental age of twelve and a half. And if there’s any argument, we think of twelve years and five months rather than twelve and seven.’


(Later, the director of Mr. Silberstein’s film confides his view of the great producer’s imperious demands.)
    ‘The cinema is absurdly restricted by artificial limitations, from the Hays Office to the National League of Decency. The Hays Office issues a list of forbidden subjects, and of sacred and sexual problems that must never be mentioned. It decides how much of a girl’s legs shall be shown, and what proportion of her breasts shall be visible when she bends down. The effect is to limit production to a list of twenty or thirty subjects – Boy meets Girl, Fop hit by Custard Pie, Mother-love, Animals, Babies, Sex, Crime, Danger – obviously faked, yet pretending to be real.
    ‘We are hamstrung. And all the time we are catering for a great range of people.  I have to tell the same story to Americans, Europeans and Asiatics. Their ages range from one extreme to the other, physically and mentally. They are educated and illiterate. Thus, you see, I must stick to simple human emotions, which are understood by everybody.
    ‘Sam Silberstein talks about a mental age of twelve and half! If it was as high as that I would be happy.’*
Bernard Newman
The Spy in the Brown Derby
1946


* In January 1945, in a British court, the American military neuro-psychiatrist, Colonel Leopold Alexander, pronounced on GIs in Britain with this verdict: ‘The average mental age in the US Army today is about fourteen, excluding officers and NCOs. In World War One it was twelve.’

Friday 29 September 2017

Correction Notice : Soviet Weekly January 17 1946 . . . an ‘Exchange of Information’ Restored . . .

Owing to constraints of space, the following second-lead report on the front page of the Soviet Weekly for January 17 1946 was deficient of certain testimonies from demobilised soldiers returning from the Manchzhurskaya Strategicheskaya Nastupatelnaya Operaciya (Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation) of August of the previous year. You’ll note that, in the report, the demobbed soldiers from the front were asked ‘to explain when and how they won their decorations.’ 

Regrettably, though, the report of Comrade Belikov, far from recording the Soviet warriors’ colourful bellicosities, confines his account to valiantly immodest declarations from a number of Stakhanovist Workers — Heroes and Heroines of the Soviet Home Front – while his editor omits the Red Army squaddies’ eyewitness statements altogether.

We are pleased, therefore – albeit some seven decades later – to redress this deficiency and the words of Soviet soldiery, once unaccountably editorially spiked, are now faithfully recorded as an addendum to the original press story. See Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich, below:

ЗА ПОБЕДУ НАД ЯПОНИЕИ
FOR VICTORY OVER JAPAN

WHAT PEOPLE CAN DO

by V. Belikov.   

During my recent stay in the Siberian town of Barnaul, I attended an interesting meeting. A train arrived bringing demobilised soldiers from Manchuria, and the municipal authorities arranged a meeting between the soldiers and the local workers and collective farmers.

The ex-servicemen were showered with questions about their life at the front. They had to explain when and how they won their decorations. The soldiers in turn were interested in the changes that had taken place in the area since they were called up. 

One local worker after another got up and reported to the soldiers on what has been achieved.

Here is a short summary of what I heard. The first speaker was Elena Bogacheva, a weaver of the Barnaul Textile Mills, decorated for war work. She alone had produced 1,500,000 yards of cloth, enough for nearly 500,000 army uniforms. 

Semyon Piatnitsa, a well-known combine operator of the Budyonny Machine and Tractor Station, reported that he had harvested an area of 37,600 acres during the war years. The station agronomist added to this that it would take 4,712 people using 930 horses, 112 simple harvesters, 112 threshers, 112 winnowing machines and 115 sorting machines to do the job accomplished by Piatnitsa with his one combine-harvester. If no machinery were used, 9,424 people would be needed to do this work. The combine operator also saved 15 tons of fuel during the war.  

Felt boots for 1,563,890 soldiers were produced by a team of six women at the Gorky Factory at Barnaul. This information was revealed by Matrena Trimaskina, head of the team.

Ivan Balyuk, shepherd of the Siberian Merino Collective Farm since 1928, who also wore a Government decoration, had this to report : about 9,000 merino sheep raised since 1928, and 2,402 during the war (without a single loss, or case of sickness); the 30,000 lb. of wool shorn from his flock was sufficient for over 20,000 yards of fabrics, and, consequently, for 7,000 suits. This, too, was the result of the labour of one man. 

The ‘Exchange of Information’ continued, and Alexandra Moshchinskaya of the Tomsk  Railway asked for the floor.  She had transported more than 50,000 tons of freight (about 2,510 carloads) during the war, loading or unloading an average of two cars daily. In her one year of work at the Barnaul Sheepskin Coat Factory, Yekaterina Yushchenko, a young worker, dressed 273,000 skins, or 102,000 in excess of her quota, enough to make 19,000 coats. 

I will conclude with citing the facts revealed by Stepan Gostev, leader of a tractor team. His team exceeded the region’s average quota per wheel tractor (which is quite high) by seven times, every tractor employed by the team ploughing 6,280 acres.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

Addendum : the Testimony  of  Sergeant Leonid Volkovich.

[The Report resumes.] Rising to his feet – and to the occasion – Sergeant Leonid Volkovich was cheered to the echo by his comrades-in-arms as he began his own deposition. 

‘Comrade Elena,’ he addressed the weaver Elena Bogacheva in an insultingly mocking pitying tone, ‘my dear feeble-minded mousekin, the real, ferocious and merciless character of war is best hidden from you! Hahaha! But let it be known! Your half million uniforms are now steeped in the blood of the devilish barbarous makaki! [Pejorative: Japanese monkeys.] Not forgetting Matrena’s wonder-working pairs of boots (laughter), trampling on one hundred thousand corpses.’

(Both women shuddered.)

The sergeant then gave vent to a few inarticulate roars and lowered his head like a mad bull ready to attack the weaver, who drew back more in confusion than fear. ‘You have no head to imagine our night attacks – storming ladders and naked weapons, murder and conflagration – scorched earth to Sakhalin. 

‘Who could question our orders?  “Soldiers, the town is yours for three days,” they said. The slaughter begins; torch and bayonet perform their business you may be certain. In the streets streams of blood and wine. A splendid festival of our men fighting like tigers among the bleeding dying, smoking ruins, and beautiful, naked, weeping women dragged by their hair to the feet of their conquerors!’

The demobilised troops war-whooped with merriment at this vivid memory. The sergeant grinned wolfishly, revealing broken front teeth, then raised his hand for silence to continue:

‘Why take prisoners and waste time and strength for them? Madness! Grand and glorious days! What fights! Eye-to-eye with the makaki and hand-to-hand. Slaughter without cease for hours, till our cold-blooded, invincible fury brought victory. 

‘Cold-blooded, I say! Yes. Cold-bloodedness reigned.  An entire village – men, women, children, babes-in-arms – were chased into a river and drowned. Children belonging to a village headman had their brains dashed out before his face; after which we threw the mother into a river, and she was drowned. One raiding party obliged many young men to force their aged parents to that river, where they were drowned. Captured wives even assisted in hanging their husbands; and mothers compelled to cut the throats of their children.’

(Elena Bogacheva, at this point in the sergeant’s recital of events, visibly paled, gave a choked cry and ran from the assembly hall. The welcoming committee had grown restless, faces grim.)

Unperturbed, Volkovich hardly raised his voice as he approached his peroration.  

‘Bullets we rationed, of course, so this is the way of it. We’d compel a captured young man to kill his father, and then we’d immediately hang him. Or, after we’d done with a housewife, we’d force her to kill her husband, then oblige the son to kill her, and afterwards shoot him through the head. One bullet, see? Very often two thousand killed for the price of 500 bullets (Sergeant Volkovich winked) and unequalled in all state records for productivity!’

A crowd of ex-soldiers now flocked around the sergeant, considerably stirred by the gusto of his rhetoric. So aroused were they, it almost seemed they had fallen under the spell of a mass hallucination, as though they were still skirmishing, in the midst of havoc and death, in those remembered streets awash with blood and wine.

Suddenly, a giant Siberiak roared, straining every nerve to make himself heard: ‘More liquor now! Or we won’t trust ourselves! We will have blood!’ Very soon other voices from the demobbed soldiers took up the cry ‘We will have blood! Blood! Blood! We must have blood!’

Above the clamour, the harsher voice of the sergeant could be distinguished addressing the welcoming committee. ‘Give them liquor or this day we won’t answer for our deeds.’

(The meeting for the ‘Exchange of Information’ was swiftly brought to a close by the arrival of the local militia, who escorted the valorous returnees to the Refreshments tent without further incident.)

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.’ 

If this belated addendum should strike the tender-hearted reader as too pitilessly cynical, it should not be forgotten that Olimpiy Kvitkin, the Chief Statistician in charge of the 1937 Census, which was devised to count every citizen in the Soviet Union, was shot on 28 September 1937 on the orders of Stalin, because Kvitkin’s census identified 6 million fewer persons than the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party had projected, an inadmissible shortfall due to the brutal purges and extermination by hunger directed by the Bolsheviks to crush dissent in allegedly rebellious elements of the population.


See also, Red Spies’ Century-Old Creeping Barrage into Woolwich Arsenal.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-8-red-spies.html

See also, Hushed Up Chekhov. In the centennial of Chekhov's death, this essay was published in the Jewish Chronicle (December 24 2004), in which is identified the anti-Semitic aspects of Chekhov's correspondence and writings and drama, airbrushed out of Soviet history books.
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/hushed-up-chekhov.html



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Monday 25 September 2017

A Web Link to Catherine Eisner’s published works . . .

Publishers of Catherine Eisner, Salt is one of UK’s foremost independent publishers, committed to the publication of contemporary British literature. Salt Publishing was founded in 1999. 

    For more information :


Saturday 2 September 2017

Les Activistes de la Cause Anti-Brexit : Banalistes Monumentales revisited . . .

My devoted correspondent, Johanna Behrendt, informs me that my mild rant decrying the trend towards the monumental kitsch of the ‘. . . Banalistes Monumentales, whose facile artefacts are no more than consumer commodities fatuously scaled up with a pantograph . . .’  has demonstrated once again how Life (in this case contemporary political grandstanding) is imitated by ‘Art’.


See: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/banalistes-monumentales-jadedness-of.html
I’m told by Hanni that, according to a recent Parisian news report, the New Banalism of the Supersize School of Art is to profane the Champs-Élysées with a Brobdingnagian monument to Defeated Brexit, gleefully proposed by the assembleur-installationistePatrice Robeaud, to discountenance the emissaries from La Perfide Angleterre with a snarl-up of impenetrable red tape.




Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)

Wednesday 30 August 2017

Schrödinger’s Second Paradox . . . ? Unexpected Deaths

As the great forensic pathologist and criminologist Professor Francis Camps remarked, when investigating Unexpected Deaths
‘A death which may be expected to take place can still be of unexpected causation. It is for this reason that any fallacy in thinking, such as acceptance of the obvious or lack of true critical approach . . . may well become closely allied to self-deception . . .’
The startled cat, a detail from
Olympia by Édouard Manet
first exhibited at the 1865 Paris Salon. 


Simultaneously live and dead. 

Professor Camps then goes on the consider deaths by electrocution . . .
‘The minimum current to kill from electrocution is stated to be about 65 milliamperes. Death from electrocution can occur in two ways, either by a sudden shock causing vagal inhibition or by true electrocution which produces ventricular fibrillation or respiratory failure. Although the importance of the element of surprise should not be over-emphasised, cases have been recorded in which death has occurred from touching a wire which was believed to be live but which was, in fact, dead.’

For more on precocity in forensic pathology (Francis Camps was, according to my mother, a child prodigy in the advancing of the forensic sciences as the keystone of criminal justice) see An Unreined Mind 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-skinner-principle-seminal-sp5-case.html



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)


Tuesday 8 August 2017

Quod dei deo, quod Caesaris Caesari.

                  Since Death these days is on everyone’s lips,
                  we pledge ourselves to His buyers’ market;
                  a mortal spark will trade a loss, perhaps,
                  for the spoils of everlasting darkness.



Wednesday 19 July 2017

A simile is a deceived appearance . . . The House that looks like Hitler.

The putrefaction of the perfect rhyme
That marries Blood and Lime with Mud and Time.

Long, long ago, I read for the first time, Adorno’s minatory dictum: ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (‘To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.’ Culture Criticism and Society, 1949.)
            It struck me then that such an absolutist Death Sentence on Art would have been staunchly repudiated by the persecuted who went to their deaths believing the lyric voice to be unquenchable, and the pen mightier than the sword.
            In my own view, Adorno’s injunction – though noble in intention – is actually a kind of distorted echo of those gloating Nazi voices and their ideological refrain: ‘When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.’
            Certainly, such an injunction would have unfairly denied a voice to a poet as profound as Karen GershonKindertransport refugee.

A simile is a deceived appearance.
For self-evident reasons, Swansea’s 
House that looks like Hitler
does not appear on this page.

All the same, over the years I have remained alert to those writers who despoil race memory by their absurd theatrics of  ‘immersion’, in the manner of method actors. As I have written elsewhere, one should be cautious – not say downright denunciatory – of certain solipsistic postwar poets who exhibit a maudlin notionality of identification with Holocaust victims that devalues the scale of human suffering . . . 
To my mind, the ludicrousness of Dickinson’s Empress of Calvary was exceeded only by the pallid self-pity of Plath’s Lady LazarusAnyhow, I preferred the verses of Karen Gershona poetess who in my own view eclipsed Plath in gravitas, insofar as Gershon was in actuality a Jewess and had no need for maudlin notionality. (From A Room to the End of Fall, 2015, in A Bad Case.)
Yet the ill-advised posturings of Sylvia Plath are defended by Zadie Smith in her 2008 Kafka essay, in which she writes, ‘For there is a sense in which Kafka’s Jewish Question (“What have I in common with Jews?”) has become everybody’s question, Jewish alienation the template for all our doubts. Sylvia Plath hinted at this: “I think I may well be a Jew.” ’  

For further observations on the fatuities in Zadie Smith’s arguments as to the supposed Ghettoization of English identity (she was evidently not raised as a morning-faced New Elizabethan), see: http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/we-are-all-vermin-now.html

Appearances deceive.
So, as you can recognise from my uncompromising critical stance, my grievance with certain poets is their often specious transmutation of familial angst into Judaical diasporic victimhood à la Plath. 
            Accordingly, when I came to write The House that looks like Hitler I was very careful to forewarn the editor of my misgivings. I wrote:
Germanness and cultural dispossession take many forms, and Jewishness is not the only conduit to a continuing sense of betrayal because appearances deceive, which is the poem’s subject, of course. A simile is a deceived appearance.

Welsh Incident.
However, any anxious reservations I had about the subject were, in the event, mitigated by the thought that the poem had practically written itself, arising as it had, from a media frenzy that had seen the wondrous Animation of the Inanimate, an event no less astonishing, were the tabloids to be believed, than the Miracle when the Sun was Seen to Dance, observed by one hundred thousand Portuguese believers in Fátima in 1917.

The elderly owner of an unassuming end-of-terrace house in Swansea has been left bewildered by his home becoming a global media sensation after its resemblance to the Nazi dictator was noted by a passer-by whose photograph gained instant press coverage across the UK and around the world. News item March 2011.

The House that looks like Hitler

                                The corollaries by which we measure 
                                pleasure torment us with War's aftermath;
                                yellow stars by order of the Führer
                                drowned every time we take a bubble bath.

                                How slyly patterns in the carpet hide 
                                swastikas to desecrate our languor.
                                Piano wires to Mendelssohn are tied; 
                                guilt talcums feet with thoughts of falanga.
  
                                The scraps uneaten on your laden plate,
                                the glass abandoned that nobody drank.
                                Each lunch hour summons the hunger-racked fate 
                                of Judentransport, of silent Anne Frank.

                                The mundane taints our haunted lineage.
                                Pyjamas strung up washdays upside down,
                                black bread and soup are slaves to vision's cage:
                                from mirrors stare the eyes of Eva Braun.

                                Today's phenomena are marvellous,
                                yet each lame rhyme or tortured simile
                                is captive to a truth made ruinous
                                by liars out-deceived: Arbeit Macht Frei.                         

                                                                                               Catherine Eisner



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)