what song the sirens sang?

...asked Sir Thomas Browne; interesting question! Poe agreed and quoted it at the beginning of the Rue Morgue story. But what sort of answer did Sir Thomas expect? He asks another about the dead in Hades: Agamemnon can predict Ulysses' future but has nothing to say about his own son. It is a mistake to see this as contradictory; Browne's interest is not empirical (eg did Atlantis exist and where?).
Kafka brings up the issue of the sirens and his conclusion gives a clue as to the sort of answer that is required; K's approach is more akin to a parable; while Browne is not writing a parable he is asking questions (occasionally) that fit into a parable. K's answer is that the sirens are silent and Benjamin's explanation of why this is so would have interested Sir Thomas Browne.

pleasure at work

UK Radio 3 ran a show this week about work: there was talk about being 'passionate about work' etc and a literature of work including Melville, Dickens and Grossmith + some research about friends/marriages through work. This literature was narrow and described 'people at work'. The 'Office' has a richer history. Consider Samsa: now an insect his main worry is being late for work; lets stick with the insect theme: Brecht and Benjamin at Svendborg conversed about this and concluded that Kafka saw people at work as antlike separated by their forms of life together. Kundera further develops this idea but adds that Kafka also sees the office as fantastic, a labrynth; writing to Milena he says the office is ' more fantastic than stupid' and that 'he can't drag himself away from it'. K in The Castle will never get a promised job/will wait forever like his cousin in Before the Law and the innumerable other characters whose mission is to 'wait' or like the 10% of staff at Microsoft who are routinely shed each year while the remainder bask in 'pleasure at work'. Any literature of work should start with Kafka and concentrate on his definition of pleasure at work-a place 'he couldn't drag himself away from'

Traces of Poe in the Arcade

There is a literature of 'the trace' beginning with Benjamin (WB) who finds its origins in Poe's Man of the Crowd where all the drapery of the crime vanishes and leaves only a set of traces; thus 'the trace' appears at the time of Second Empire in France. Thereafter, WB notes, traces turn into government's 'multifarious web of registrations' as endlessly discussed by Foucault, Donzelot and Castel. It is a modest step from the man in the crowd to our world of risk management where the individual disappears and is replaced by Castel's ' calculus of probabilities or factors and statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements likely to produce risk (usually a file). Another strand in the history of the trace is the collapsing of heterogeneous laboratory elements (experimental rats) into tractable and portable traces (Latour).

Benjamin, Kipling, Borges and Nabokov

Kipling has some good friends none of whom are 'realists'. Nabokov, writing to Vera commends a poem of Kipling where 'bird winged butterflies flap through'-he especially likes 'flap'. Compared to the complexity of Kipling, Borges says, Maupassant's work is like a 'child's drawing'. More interesting is Walter Benjamin (WB) for whom Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads are one of the last refuges of The Storyteller. At one level it is fashionable to rubbish the realism of Kipling and Stevenson; one way past this is to put aside conventional approaches to these writers and see them through the prism of WB's Arcades; see for example his work on Stevenson and Poe; there is room in the Arcade for Kipling also. Around 1900 Kipling prophesied that a new poet would appear; this person is to be Browning's successor and can distill the best of the past and provide continuity into the future. If the new arrival is late Kipling will leave a posthumous letter of private suggestions. He got it exactly right but did not get what he bargained for: in 1922 The Waste Land was published. But there was continuity: of Kipling's poem The Appeal Eliot wished he'd written it himself

Auden,Benjamin, Kafka & Sullivan

Why did Kafka ask for his work, on his death, to be destroyed? Auden puts this down to Kafka's theory of writing as a private act like praying. Walter Benjamin makes a similar point ie that Kafka is always addressing the same themes: (1) Surprise at the inexplicable. (2) Guilt about the inability to explain the inexplicable. (3) the need to investigate (1), hopelessly. So each piece of Kafka's prose is substitutable by another piece offering an inventory of infinitely varied responses to 1,2 and 3. Benjamin wonders if the items of such an inventory can be inserted into passages of argument at any time. These items could be replicable gestures or actions (scurrying, gazing, gaping, bending and staring, hurrying/staying close to the wall etc). Think of this inventory as being like Catherine Sullivan's video installation Ice Floes of Franz Joseph Land made up of 50 multiply repeated pantomime-like actions. It is clear why Kafka asked for his work to be destroyed. What he left behind was a template that could be written on forever. He foresaw, Auden concludes, the nature of too many of his admirers- like watching Ice Floes for eternity.

The Path to Success; thesis 1.3

This post proposes a link between Walter Benjamin (WB), Auden and Catherine Sullivan. In WB's thesis for success 'presence of mind' (power) in financial wizards etc is revealed via the body or gestures. Auden chooses not to write poetry about these wizards because what they do is less to do with character than with the quantity of 'impersonal force at their disposal'.Catherine Sullivan presents a selection of these gestures in her video