coldhearted scientist وداد

When she was 97, my aunt Helen took me to lunch at the upscale Lark Creek Inn. Normally she took members of our family to the Blue Rock, where we would drink gin fizzes, but we went to the Lark Creek Inn because she had been to the Blue Rock the day before.

“I am a socialist, Z,” she said, “but don’t tell anyone.” She had gone to meet Emma Goldman on the docks in San Francisco in 1917. She complained to Goldman, she said, that some of the birth control methods she recommended, had proved all too fallible. Earlier on, Goldman had made a speech on patriotism in San Francisco. I wish she were alive to give it today.

A book I would like to read is Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution On My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin (Harvard, 2006), in which it is revealed that diaries in this period were used as a means of self-transformation, and as a tool for transcendence from individual to collective consciousness. A book I wish I had enough background to read critically is Bukharin‘s Philosophical Arabesques (Monthly Review Press, 2006). Fortunately, Ronald Grigor Suny has written a fascinating review of this book.

Philosophical Arabesques is about dialectics, and it is sophisticated. I am interested in dialectics as they were discussed during Bukharin’s lifetime because César Vallejo was, and it is written all over his later work; and because I suspect that Bukharin and his contemporaries, whose theoretical concerns were not dissimilar to ours today, were better prepared to consider these matters than are many current literary theorists.

The other person whose work I would like to study in much greater detail than I have is Walter Benjamin, on whom Richard Wolin has written an interesting review essay. I realize that I am pointing to these peoples’ writings without explaining them or even giving an account of my interest in them, but I shall return to these topics.

Axé.