The Construction In Hand is retiring, into a void of peace.

Here, in handy labour-and-eyesight saving summations, are the two better pieces that never got posted:

POST 1.

Title: Constructive art in Europe- still alive and kicking.

Subject matter: Constructive art in Europe- still alive and kicking. Praise some European artists; young constructive artists who have a programme and ideology, working towards changing the entire built environment. Praise three stunning, vital centres of socially-driven constructive art:

HAUS KONSTRUKTIV, Zurich

MUSEUM RITTER, Waldenbuch, Germany

MUSEUM FUR KONKRETE KUNST, Ingolstadt, Germany

Hate figures: Most famous British artists. And Matthew Barney. The makers of surface shocks, shallow banalities dripping in obscene amounts of money; the total lack of personal position or ideology (or even awareness) in Barney, Hirst, etc: it isn’t good enough, for the world’s most famous contemporary artists.

Conclusion: Support socially-driven constructive art. Visit the Haus Konstruktiv, Museum Ritter and Museum fur Konkrete Kunst. Don’t visit contemporary conceptual British art events, especially those involving successful Goldsmith’s College alumni.

POST 2.

Title: Cain, Vian and Djian.

Subject matter: James M. Cain- the greatest ‘anti-novelist’ who ever wrote. Compare and contrast with two French ‘anti-novelists’: Boris Vian and Philippe Djian, both influenced by Cain. Praise Cain’s subtlety, brevity, clarity and skill.

Hate figures: None.

Conclusion: Simple, colloquial writing is extremely powerful, and skilled. Read books by James M. Cain, Boris Vian and Philippe Djian.

Cheerio. Keep your eggs warm.

‘But I wander from my subject. I was going to say that you cannot employ your time worse than in making verses. An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for although all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them. A bad composition carries with it its own punishment- contempt and ridicule. A good one excites envy, and entails upon its author a thousand mortifications; they find their self assailed by partial and ill-humoured criticism: one reader finds fault with the plan, another with the style, a third with the precept which it strives to inculcate; and they who cannot succeed in finding fault with the book, employ themselves in stigmatizing its author. They maliciously rake out from obscurity every little circumstance which may throw ridicule upon the author’s private character or conduct, and aim at wounding the person since they cannot hurt the writer. In short, to enter the lists of literature is wilfully to expose yourself to the arrows of neglect, ridicule, envy and disappointment. Whether you write well or ill, be assured that you will not escape from blame. But I am conscious that all these sage observations are thrown away upon you. Authorship is a mania, to conquer which no reasons are sufficiently strong; and you might as easily persuade me not to love, as I persuade you not to write. However, if you cannot help being occasionally seized with a poetical paroxysm, take at least the precaution of communicating your verses to none but those whose partiality for you secures their approbation.’

(Matthew Lewis, 1795)

To each his lot, and none is light. (Hermann Hesse)

If you’re not going to be there to worry about yourself being dead, why worry at all? (Elmore Leonard)

And besides, when you stop to think about it, at least a hundred people must want you dead in the course of an average day, the ones behind you in the line at the ticket window in the Metro, the ones who look up at your apartment when they haven’t got one themselves, the ones who wish you’d finish pissing and give them a chance, in fact your own children and plenty of others. (Celine)

A belief in immortality arises from the insatiability of appetites. To the wise, the term of our life is quite sufficient to encompass the whole gamut of pleasures to which we may aspire. When death comes, the wise stand back, sated, from the banquet of life, and make room for others. One lifetime is long enough for the philosopher; a fool would not know what to do with eternity. (Epicurus)

Money is the greatest nutrient imaginable for sins of the worst kind. But the real height of monstrosity is attained when money, hiding under the splendour of its name under the dark veil of the word, calls itself capital. At that moment its action is no longer limited to individual incitations to theft and murder, but extends across the entire human race. With a single word capitalism grants monopolies, erects banks, corners markets, changes peoples’ lives, is capable of causing millions to starve to death. (J.K. Huysmans, 1891)

Businessmen have their places where they can go and, by weight of numbers of little worried men, reassure themselves that business is noble and not the curious ritualized thievery they know it is; that businessmen are intelligent in spite of the records of their stupidity; that they are kind and charitable in spite of the principles of sound business; that their lives are rich instead of the thin, tiresome routines they know; and that a time is coming when they will not be afraid any more. (John Steinbeck)

He gave heaping weight to every simulation of affection, grief, pity, good-will and modesty- there was no excess that he did not underscore heavily, and the world’s dull eye read him kindly. (Thomas Wolfe)

I think one of the cardinal fuck ups is how we insist that even vicious whimsical crazy shit needs to make sense, add up, belong to a reason. We lay this pain on ourselves- there must be a reason behind this horror, there must, but I’m not adequate to find it, and that’s my fault, so torture me some more. (Daniel Woodrell)

He found loneliness so intolerable that he could not even allow an idea to mature before hastening to share every half-baked notion with someone else as soon as it crossed his mind. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

“Of all men the drunkard is the foulest. The thief when he is not stealing is like another. The extortioner does not practice in the home. The murderer, when he is at home, can wash his hands. But the drunkard stinks and vomits in his own bed and dissolves his own organs in alcohol.” (Ernest Hemingway)

Sexual jealousy is a result of the imagination at the same time as being a self-judgment. One attributes to the rival the nasty thoughts one had oneself in the same circumstances. (Albert Camus)

“Well, I try to think positive, you know. Cause you act what you think. Like you are what you eat.” (Christopher Cook)

I think you can’t keep a clear head and believe in God both, and I had to keep a clear head. (Boris Vian)

Let no one speak to me of the moral value of work. I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity, and in this regard I strongly favour its better, that is its fairer, division. I admit that life’s grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own work or that of other people. There is no use being alive if one must work. (Andre Breton)

I do not indeed claim that neutrality is the certain mark of a great mind; but I believe that many great minds have been very loath to conclude. (Andre Gide)

The truth about the world is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow… (Cormac McCarthy)

“Patience. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, but misfortune cannot last forever.” (Somerset Maugham)

“You must bear up, if you please- bear up until you see you’re gaining.” (Robert Louis Stevenson)

This is invective after the fact. It’s about the exhibition Rodchenko and Popova: Defining Constructivism. The exhibition ran from February to May 2009 at Tate Modern and is now at Reina Sofia, Madrid. Defining Constructivism is still being presented as an important exhibition in terms of understanding the Russian avant-garde. When I visited Tate Modern the exhibition seemed typically popular, and was packed with people.

The text in this exhibition is iniquitous enough to start a new revolution. The text in every room is both inaccurate and thin on the ground. The text doesn’t once explain what Russian Constructivism was. For an exhibition called Defining Constructivism, that’s not really OK. People visiting the exhibition to find out about Russian Constructivism learn either nothing, or a few misguided things.

Russian Constructivism was a model of communist industrial and cultural production. One essential aspect of Constructivism was its aggressive rejection of the notion of art. For founding Constructivists like Rodchenko, there was no such thing as art, or artists. Work like Circles Within A Circle- which is in the exhibition- wasn’t made as art, and was never intended to be displayed or assessed as art. After Constructivism, Rodchenko never returned to the notion of being an artist. But not one of these essential facts about Russian Constructivism is even mentioned, never mind explained.

Popova has an ambiguous relationship with Constructivism. Some of her work is definitively Constructivist; like mass produced textile designs, made during periods when she programmatically abandoned art and devoted herself to industrial production. But much of Popova’s work is not Constructivist- she trained under the more painterly Malevich- and much of her non-Constructivist work is on display in Defining Constructivism, without explanation. Partly because she died young, it’s unclear whether Popova completely rejected art and painting. Again, none of these simple facts is even mentioned.

Early in the exhibition, there is a room devoted to Wasily Kandinsky. This is a bizarre choice, made presumably because there was lots of available Kandinsky work to display. Kandinsky played a tangential role in the development of Constructivism. He pioneered abstract painting, and Constructivism was sometimes concerned with making abstract objects, usually in three dimensions. More importantly, Kandinsky was involved in the reorganisation of art institutions and teaching in Russia after the Revolution. Constructivism arose in these new institutions. But Kandinsky has no formal connection with Constructivism- he never called himself a Constructivist. To present him as a pivotal figure in Russian Constructivism is ridiculous and very misleading. If there must be a single room devoted to a pivotal figure (apart from Rodchenko), then it must be Vladimir Tatlin. That is the only accurate way of presenting the history of Constructivism: Tatlin is the key and founding figure.

Instead, Defining Constructivism tries to teach the uninitiated that Constructivism was a kind of decorative art style that, almost by chance, ended up being applied to some utilitarian socialist objects, like kitchenware and cigarette packets, in order to prettify them. There is a long history of European exhibitions presenting this shallow and compromised view of Constructivism, but Defining Constructivism is a particularly bad example.

It may sometimes be convoluted, but it’s not that difficult to present the essential facts about Constructivism. Russian Constructivism…

…was a model of communist material production

…was devoted to the factory, mass industry and mass activity

…was rigourously anti-aesthetic

…evolved through theoretical and practical experiment to arrive at industrial production as a creative ideal

…was distinguished by an angry and vocal rejection of art and artistic practice

…was devoted to the construction of communist society

None of these simple and uncontroversial facts about Russian Constructivism are even mentioned in the exhibition text. Seeing so much of Rodchenko and Popova’s work in one place makes criticism irrelevant, but why do we always have to be spoon-fed the inaccurate in art galleries?

Tolstoy- Anna Karenina / War And Peace

Captain Marryat- Midshipman Easy / Frank Mildmay / Peter Simple

Gustave Flaubert- Madame Bovary / A Sentimental Education

Thomas Mann- Buddenbrooks

James Joyce- Dubliners / A Portrait Of The Artist… / Ulysses

Henry Fielding- Tom Jones / Joseph Andrews

Stendhal- Scarlet And Black / The Charterhouse Of Parma

Dostoevsky- The Brothers Karamazov / “and any two others”

Mark Twain- Huckleberry Finn

Stephen Crane- The Open Boat / The Blue Hotel *

George Moore- Hail And Farewell

Maupassant- collected stories

Rudyard Kipling- “all the good ones”

Turgenev- “all of it”

W.H. Hudson- Far Away And Long Ago

Henry James- Portrait Of A Lady / The Turn Of The Screw

* Ernest Hemingway was a big denier of influences. He was aggressive about it. He hated people saying that his writing, and writing style, owed any kind of debt to others’. Desperate to avoid praising his contemporaries, Hemingway usually endorsed the books of safe, dead, so-called classic authors, compared to whom he wrote very differently. In interviews Hemingway boxed clever, maintaining that his formative inspirations were newspaper reports, and listening to vernacular.

But one of the main influences on Hemingway that his contemporaries used to point out was Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge Of Courage, a proto-modernist novel of the American Civil War, published in 1895. This novel is missing from Hemingway’s list.

If you ever find a copy of The Red Badge Of Courage, open it and have a look. You’ll immediately read a sentence along the lines of, ‘He took out the cartridge and threw it in the mud and wiped his face and took out another cartridge and put it in the breech and locked the breech…’ Which is to say, the novel reads precisely like Ernest Hemingway, and it’s no wonder reference to it made him cross.

I decided recently to read a potted history of nasty books. These were novels that have traditionally been considered taboo- that is, extremist novels, considered a bad influence on people. Nowadays, authors like Michel Houellebecq, with his sex, and that German bird who writes about crapping everywhere, are following this seam.

For me this little history (very French, on the whole) started with De Sade, including ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’, and took in things like ‘The Torture Garden’ by Octave Mirbeau, ‘Maldoror’, Georges Batailles’ ‘Story Of The Eye’, ‘The Maimed’ by Hermann Ungar (perhaps worryingly, one of my favourite novels), some J K Huysmans, ‘Irene’s Cunt’ by Louis Aragon, ‘The Naked Lunch’ and so on. ‘The Naked Lunch’ is one of the most recent examples in America of an obscenity trial for a ‘corrupting and harmful’ book.

After consuming all this, what was interesting was that authors, on the whole, came across as a liberal and highly moralistic bunch who use ‘shocking’ books to make liberal and highly moralistic points. Despite its depravity, ‘The 120 Days’ is also/mainly a deeply moralistic attack on the French aristocracy, for example. It was interesting that these ‘bad’ books (with the possible exception of ‘Maldoror’) had such discernibly sensitive and idealistic motives behind them- it was disappointing, in a way.

The disappointment was compounded by the fact that most of the shocking human acts depicted in these books are less shocking than the real acts detailed every day in our news, and media- a ‘power-lessening’ problem that some of these books faced on their original publication (e.g. popular newspapers in France in the early twentieth century were salacious and extremely bloodthirsty).

It struck me that the only ‘taboo’ books I’d read in this time that hadn’t seemed liberally moralistic- books that were nastier and more ambiguous than that – were by Mickey Spillane and Richard Allen; in the latter’s case, ‘Trouble For Skinhead’ in particular. And so for me, the most powerful and disturbing of the supposedly taboo books were pulp novels, and not the classic European novels.

So I became interested in why Mickey Spillane and Richard Allen’s books had this particular disturbing power. It seemed to spring in part from the unconcerned writing style- the fact that both authors, however good some of their lines, were not concerned principally with the writing of good lines. This gives their books the personal, informal air of genuine conversation and confession.

Both also wrote, long-term, from inside the head of a person whose behavior is widely deemed morally unacceptable. This is a very, very difficult thing to achieve if, as a person and a writer, your opinions are not morally unacceptable. For many reasons, most writers seem to want to throw in moments where their morally ugly characters are at least observant, or poetic, or whatever- more sympathetic traits. Most writers can’t help making their nasty people nicer, or potentially excusable (like the admiration Pat Highsmith clearly had for brainy serial murderer Tom Ripley). A random example of an author bottling out of inhabiting a ‘purely evil’ persona is that of Brett Easton Ellis in ‘American Psycho’. In it, there is some writing (apparently from the mind of the protagonist) that is sympathetically sensitive, and that makes both Ellis and his protagonist appear sympathetic and sensitive. And the narrator of ‘The 120 Days’ appears sympathetically sensitive when he, via shocking depictions, criticises the depravity of Catholic bishops and their immoral relationship with the poor.

Richard Allen and Mickey Spillane don’t let the mask slip like that. They write novels that are powerful because the writer’s relationship with both the fiction and the readership is questionable. They have no intention of making their characters excusable. They write novels that make them, as authors and people, look like bad men. For instance, both writers, via their characters, appear to be advocating racist and sexual violence. So what’s at issue- just as in a salacious popular newspaper- is the authors’ relationship with their writing, and the reader.

I like their work, but one of the reasons Spillane’s and Allen’s work was so powerful was probably because they were racists and sexists, in real life, as people. It made their job a lot easier. It’s one of the reasons why as authors their racist and sexist protagonists are so convincing, and powerful.

everything seemed to go right today.

when night fell I noticed the

houses with their lit windows

were darker than the

maroon sky above and

there was an exact

half-moon  over Europe.

Mass state violence begins with racism and nationalism. It builds more subtly and slowly than many people imagine. The twentieth century Holocaust took this form. The Nazis were democratically elected on a programme of nationalism, and racism. But, for example, citizenship for German Jews wasn’t revoked until 1935. The early Nazi government didn’t go as far as many of its voters wanted it to. Following years of open hatred and ill-spirited legal changes (and war in Poland), it was ultimately the early months of the genocidal invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 that created and accelerated the process of mass, systematic killing- of all Jewish people, and of many people the Nazis wrongly (but officially) grouped as ‘Russian’.

Much of this slow-building nuance has been lost from contemporary understanding, for all sorts of reasons. Nowadays we’re forever on the lookout for the obvious, despotic, cartoon-style ‘fascist’ villain. We look less at the wider and equally relevant issues within ourselves, and our societies; economics, racism, and chauvinistic patriotism.

Another subtle background feature of potential mass state violence is the mixing up of political polarities; when traditional notions of ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, etc, become blurred, and evolve into new forms. Politics changed in this way in the decades before the Holocaust; and it is changing in the same way, again, now.

For instance, for ordinary Italians in the early twentieth century, Mussolini’s politics appeared new, different, multi-faceted, and disregarding of convention. The British press was full of excited praise for Mussolini in the early 1920s- not that you’d understand this from today’s history-obliterating media. Mussolini was a member of the Socialist Party until 1914; and by taking some socialist tenets, twisting them, and adding to them nationalism, territorial ambition, rural glorification, agreement with the church, etc, he sparked a powerful and apparently novel hybrid.

This mixing-up of polarities is happening in Europe now; it is discernible in Dutch politics. Some of the more unusual current combinations of sensibility in Dutch political parties include the Christian Union, an anti-abortionist conservative Protestant party with a left-flavoured programme of  tackling poverty and social inequality, and the Party for Animals, which has two members of parliament. But these polarity-shattering changes apply particularly in relation to Islam. The anti-immigration, anti-Muslim position defined by gay ‘liberal conservative’ (and assassinated) Pym Fortuyn is now being taken to a new and charmless low by Geert Wilders, and the PVV- the Party for Freedom. Part of the PVV’s programme includes possible constitutional changes to ‘defend Jewish-Christian, humanist culture’- a notion that, at a glance, hardly looks ‘fascist’.

There are two anti-Muslim critiques going on within this new form of European politics. One critique is, or claims to be, sophisticated- about sexuality, feminism, secularism, democracy, free speech, and the malleability of different religions. A variety of Dutch people, including Socialist Party leader Agnes Kant, support this notion- that something historical and sophisticated is under discussion. Geert Wilders’ claim that the koran is “fascist” is, in his view, part of this sophisticated debate. So are his witterings on homosexuality and feminism. Underlying this, though, is the more impassioned and intuitive critique- the racist one. Muslims tend to be non-white. Holland is not very integrated, racially. I’d say that racial politics in Holland is, conceptually (not behaviorally), roughly thirty years behind the UK- where there is still serious racism, for sure. Many Dutch people- who appear to assume one another to be white- still seem deeply surprised by the fact that there are large non-white communities in their towns and cities. You get the strong sense that, for a significant number of Dutch people, it’s race, and colour, that underlies all other complaints about Islam. Especially in Wilders’ case.

As for the ‘sophisticated’ critique of Islam: in a word, groups that have traditionally been jointly protected by liberalism, and the left- gays/women, national minorities/Muslims- are now at war in Holland. Nobody really knows what the hell to do about this situation. It is Europe’s new and growing problem. The same process is happening in the UK and elsewhere, of course. When I worked in a London social services department, there was no love lost between some of my gay and black Christian colleagues. But Holland is an interesting case, in at least two ways. Firstly, in terms of legal history and practical reality, Holland is especially proud of its notable ‘tolerant’ traditions- despite not yet grasping that in order to ‘tolerate’ something, you have to disapprove of it in the first place. (I believe that there are several other European countries which are at least as ‘tolerant’, historically, as the Netherlands, but make less of a national feature of it). Secondly, Holland has, amongst its citizens, an extremely high take-up of a purported ‘soft nationalism’; a fond, conformist social etiquette and self-image, that’s perpetually reinforced by generations of Dutch people- of every political persuasion (including the anarchists).

Here isn’t the place to tackle Dutch ‘soft nationalism’, and the fact that it’s a lie and has the potential to be, unintentionally or not, as dismissive and aggressive as all other nationalism. I’ll do that another time. Here, I’ll just report two recent conversations about “Islam”.

It looks like Geert Wilders will win the next Dutch general election. He believes that race and nationality are default identities. In terms of mutual animosity between social groups, the situation now is even more loaded than that of the early twentieth century Jews, who were not programmatically antagonistic towards the societies in which they lived, unlike the piddling number of contemporary muslims who are. But in the end, muslims living in the Netherlands are a disempowered minority. Echoing the UK’s one-represents-all Muslim/Pakistani equation, it is around the single, default identity of Moroccan that the conversation always seems to be steered. The Netherlands is a geographical region that, historically speaking, evinces a degree of fair-mindedness amongst its population. Arguably, the larger Moroccan population of France is less well cared for. Is there going to be state violence in western Europe, this century?

Conversation 1. August 2009.

Man at Gay Pride: Great day. But you have to be careful later on tonight. I try to be home, off the streets, before the beatings start.

TCIH: What beatings?

Man: The gay beatings. Moroccan gangs.

TCIH: You expect to get beatings by Moroccan gangs?

Man: Oh yes (surprised). Yes. You get them. Every year. I’ve had friends beaten up every year, for about the last five years. They all come out at the end of the day, the gangs, and get you when you’re going home.

TCIH: Just Moroccans?

Man(surprised): Only Moroccans. Always Moroccans.

TCIH: So you never get homophobic beatings by other youths? White Dutch youths, say?

Man: I’ve never heard of any.

TCIH: There was a report on the iamsterdam website recently, by a gay man saying he was beaten up by white Ajax fans.

Man: (laughs) Oh, every now and then they’ll try to tell you other people do it too. But I’ve never seen it.

TCIH: So it was a lie, that white Ajax fans beat him up?

Man: I don’t know about a lie, but you don’t hear about it. They were probably from some village outside Amsterdam or something. Just drunk.

TCIH: Do you have any Moroccan friends?

Man: No. I don’t know any.

TCIH: Do you think all Moroccans are homophobic?

Man: I think the ones here are.

TCIH: But you hear that there are racial problems in Holland with the Turkish community, also, say?

Man: Turkish, I don’t know.

TCIH: So what are you going to do about it? Vote for Geert Wilders?

Man (horrified): No! He’s just…(we struggle to agree on a word. We settle on ‘thick’).

TCIH: So you’re not racist?

Man: No! No! But no one knows what to do about it. Geert Wilders is horrible, but he’s saying to people that he’s going to do something about it.

Conversation 2. August 2009.

Woman worker in Fred Perry shop (totally unprompted): But I don’t know what it’s like in England, because I heard you had to change the word ‘Christmas’. Or two towns did, or something. So you change the word ‘Christmas’, to…what was it?

TCIH: Winterval?

Woman: Winterval. So that is really putting your country down. But here, it’s…I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s gonna be a civil war or something, because people have had it up to here (puts hand above her head. She is flushed and angry).

TCIH: With Muslims?

Woman: With Moroccans.

TCIH: But it sounds racist and nationalistic.

Woman: I’m not racist! I’ve got friends from the Islands (West Indies) who are gay, they are my best friends, and they get shit all the time. People have had it up to here. It’s gonna be a civil war or something. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of walking down the street and getting “Fucking bitch” and “Fucking whore.”  From Moroccans. This is in fucking Gouda, where I live.

TCIH: My sister-in-law got anti-white verbal abuse living in east London. But why are they calling you a ‘fucking whore’?

Woman: They’re calling me a ‘fucking whore’ because I’m a white Dutch woman, with blonde hair. But we get the worst Moroccans, that’s the thing. The Moroccans in Holland aren’t the normal Moroccans from the cities, they’re like some mountain lot. They’re like some mountain tribe, so we get that kind of Moroccan. We didn’t care before…in the ’60s when they started coming, we didn’t care. Because we thought they’d go home! (laughs).

TCIH: Have you heard of homophobic beatings by white Dutch youths?

Woman: Not for twenty years.

TCIH: Are you sure?

Woman: Not for twenty years. Now they’re all out…if they were out, they’d be beating the Moroccans, you know? And I’m left-wing! I’m not racist. I read De Volkskrant, but they’re wrong to call the people who vote for Wilders ‘animals’, because that’s a bad strategy. ‘Cos whatever else he is, he’s doing something about it. He’s letting people know that he’ll do something about it.