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-installationiste, Patrice Robeaud, to discountenance the emissaries from La Perfide Angleterre with a snarl-up of impenetrable red tape.

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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)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html

and A Bad Case (2015)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

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

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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)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

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.

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 Gershon, a Kindertransport 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 Lazarus. Anyhow, I preferred the verses of Karen Gershon, a 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.

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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

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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)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html

A Visit to the Pushkin Club . . . destination 46 Ladbroke Grove W11

Of course, her first emotion, when she learned her husband was living with his Russian interpreter, was utter relief.  No longer was he to be found brooding in his garden room, amber decanter glinting by his side, wearing that wintry smile whenever their eyes met.
          Then new feelings of resentment seized her. Looking from her study window to his room below, she could see, under the lattice of the glass roof, her husband’s whorled crown of dark shaggy hair – thinning in the centre, she noticed – where he had slumped forward, beard on chest, feigning sleep.  Playing possum was invariably his ruse when unwelcome questions remained unanswered.  And those he had answered had been matters-of-fact, cursorily conveyed with his face turned from her.  
          He had said no more than that he was living in his unleased town flat with a young woman named Nadezhda. He called her Nadia, a Russian from Saratov who had never visited the West before. He said she was unworldly, and in the city she was endangered by a childlike inexperience. At heart, he said, she was an unsophisticated, provincial girl who was prey to primitive superstitions. Without too much thought he had bestowed on her his protection. 
          ‘All that you imagine is probably true,’ Leon had said. Beyond that he would say nothing more.
          She slammed the window and saw his eyelids flicker. So be it, she decided, if he chose to retreat behind a carapace of calculated indifference, then she would contrive her manner to be no different from his – yet, she vowed, before the week was ended it would be her intention to unbeard a lifetime of manifold deceptions.

Under the heading of Russian mentalität, Miriam wrote, Izlivat
dushu – ‘pouring out of the soul; the mingling of two lovers’ souls,
for example’;   Stradanyie – ‘mental suffering due to unrequited love
or coarseness of lover or spouse’; Toska – ‘melancholy homesickness’;
Grekh – ‘a sense of sin only removed when sinner reaches a state of
highly emotional repentance’; and, finally,  Tyomniye sili – ‘dark
or sinister, evil forces’; the latter she thrice underlined.

•

The evening was cool so the out-of-season dark wool cape she threw over her shoulders granted her a plausible concealment to melt into the dusk.  Thus seven-o’clock saw Miriam striding after two distant linked shadows as they crossed Leinster Square.  This quarter of London was familiar to Miriam and she found no difficulty in keeping pace with the couple as they turned the corner of the Westbourne terraces and entered Ladbroke Grove.
          She halted and drew back at the gateway of a peeling townhouse set in a neglected garden.  A doorbell sounded and Miriam heard a gutteral murmur in Russian as her husband and his paramour were admitted by a hulking grizzled usher.  
          When the door closed Miriam inspected the illuminated bell escutcheon. ‘The Pushkin Club.’
          Standing in an angle of the garden, in a quadrant of shade, Miriam found she could observe – through a slit in the shutters – the company of discussants within.

          This is what she saw.  A fine, high-ceilinged drawing room with flaking lemon coloured plaster. (She thought: ‘ “Lemon Peel” - wasn’t that the title of an unwritten sketch by Chekhov?’ It was.)  There was a large copper samovar on the sidetable and a framed photograph of Osip Mandelstam.  A frayed electrical flex holding a shaded bulb was suspended from the ceiling’s crumbling plaster rose. 

          Sub rosa, in front of the vast library stacks which formed the far wall, a half circle of ill-assorted chairs had been drawn up to face the window.  A row of émigrés with expectant faces drank tea from unmatched china teacups which appeared to be the only items they’d saved from their country houses before their decadent burzhuaznyi drawing rooms were converted by the Bolsheviks into grain stores. 
          There was much laughter and clapping when an actor wearing side-whiskers and an old, worn frock coat darted between the chairs and stood before the window. 
          ‘A monologue in one act by Anton Pav’lich Chekhov,’ he announced in a heavily accented, corncrake rasp.  There was scattered applause.  The mock lecture commenced.
          Leon’s hand, she saw, was resting on Nadia’s thigh, but when the actor came to the passage where the deranged hen-pecked soi-disant lecturer wrings his hands and rails across the footlights (‘ ... my wife runs a boarding school. Well, not exactly a boarding school, but something in the nature of one. My wife doesn’t give parties and never has anyone to dinner. She’s a very stingy, bad-tempered, shrewish kind of lady, so no-one ever comes to see us. If only I could run away from that stupid, petty, spiteful harridan of a wife who’s made my life a torment ...’) Miriam saw her husband reach out and grip his mistress’s knee. Nadia, however, did not smile. 

•

Crossing the lobby, Miriam’s husband laid his hand on Nadia’s shoulder and gave a coarse laugh. 
          ‘In the right hands it could be hilarious,’ Leon said, and snickered once more.
Nadia disengaged his hand as she opened the door.
          ‘Tell me, Lvyonok,’ said Nadia, inconsequentially, pronouncing the words thickened, as though her teeth were grinding on ice, ‘who is that Amerikanetz whose name sounds like a sneeze?’  They closed the outside door before Miriam heard Leon’s answer.

•

From the garden room below Miriam heard Leon’s discreet, suppressed sneeze.  The sound grated. The truth was that the frequent muffled explosions did, indeed, sound remarkably like Kissinger! and, in time, the apprehension as one waited for the next convulsion began to attack one’s nerves.

•

On the telephone she could hear Laurence riffling the pages, then he quoted, ‘She was carrying some of those repulsive flowers,’ and crowed in recognition. ‘It’s an ugly colour,’ he read, ‘that’s because it’s Russki semiotics for an unfaithful woman, it’s central to the text, don’t you see?’ Then she heard a carillon of mordant laughter. ‘Forgive the emotional histrionicism, but I warned Leon ...’  But Miriam hung up.

•

She had taken her secateurs and gone straightaway into the garden.  First the Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) and plumes of Golden Rod, then the yellowish Lilies (Enchantment), and finally she chose the yellow Aster ; not the species plant but the low-bred cultivars that had strayed to the kitchen door – the Asterasters – for these she considered the most fitting tribute of all from the philosophaster, poetaster and cinéaster she knew herself to be.

Extracts from The Cheated Eye,

Part Six of Sister Morphine by

Catherine Eisner (2008)

See The Girl on the Number 52 Omnibus . . . destination Ladbroke Grove . . .

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/the-girl-on-number-fifty-two-omnibus.html

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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)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

and Listen Close to Me (2011)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html