The Stranger

Baby boomers will recall the desert beige colored Leo Lionni cover of the Vintage edition of Camus’ The Stranger which became an iconic representation of a French import called existentialism in the later 50’s and early 60’s--and which Steve Heller recently wrote about on his design blog, The Daily Heller. Other books like Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha and Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet would achieve a similar cultish status--verging on being a mass market phenomenon if such a thing can be said about items whose basic appeal is to intellectuals. But Siddhartha and The Prophet, along with Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate and Sartre’s  Nausea are now literary footnotes, while The Stranger seems to maintain its philosophic and commercial credibility which is to say that people continue to read and admire The Stranger in such a way, as to make one suspect that it might achieve the status of immortal works which remain pertinent while also being read differently by future generations. Hamlet is the major example of such a phenomenon. Only recently Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, a novel based on the brother of one of the main characters of The Stranger (the murdered Arab) garnered France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. But what makes L’Etranger live on? Dusty streets, a random act of violence that recalls in some way another set piece of proto-existentialism, Raskolnikov’s murder of the old woman in Crime and Punishment are the palette from which Camus worked. Existence precedes essence is what you learn about existentialism in philosophy 101. Humans are defined by the actions and choices they make. However, what makes the novel perennially relevant is not a philosophical aphorism but the conjunction of an idea and a world. Camus was born in the North African culture which he describes and it’s as if the philosophical novel he created seamlessly evolved from a milieu, he knew--essentially a colonialist society, in which the punishment for being a lower order of the food chain was objectification. The Stranger is the other. Martin Buber talked of I and Thou (Ich und Du), I and It. The other is the It, the person who has been denied his humanity. Perhaps the novel has maintained its hold on our imaginations because it’s fundamentally about empathy or the loss thereof—a phenomenon that allows for what Clausewitz termed “the continuation of politics by other means,” a state we know only too well, as war.

"Established By the State"

                                                        photo: Pete Souza

"Established by the state,” are the four words that could kill the Affordable Care Act (“Four Words That Imperil Health Law Were All a Mistake, Writers Now Say,” NYT, 5/25/15).  But let’s take a look at some other words that have been of crucial importance to both Americans and mankind in general to see how these four stand up. In his first inaugural address, March 4, 1933, Roosevelt said, "So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance." Kennedy famously supported the West Germans when he said, “Ich bin ein Berliner.” His grammar was wrong (the correct German is “Ich bin Berliner”), but let sleeping dogs die. Critics of the health care plan might call upon Polonius’ famous advice to Laertes, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  After losing the California gubernatorial race in l962 Nixon said,  “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.” “Where’s the Beef?” is what an infamous Wendy’s commercial asked. John Donne said, “No man is an island, entire of itself.” Speaking of fast food the Digital Underground were responsible for these iconic lyrics from “The Humpty Dance.”  “I once got busy in a Burger King bathroom.” Goethe said, “the eternal-feminine lures to perfection," Camus, “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” And then there was Santayana’s famous, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, in his address before the Democratic Convention in l936, Roosevelt also said, “this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny." With all the great locutions made in the service of progress, redress and regress, could the rather lame “established by the state” really usurp America’s destiny? Oh and there’s one last quote which is always applicable in matters of jurisprudence, “while the cat’s away, the mice will play."

The Zeitgeist

The Zeitgeist is like a person who walks into a room and feels totally at home. “Zeit" in German is time and “Geist" is spirit. So the words literally means “spirit of the time." But there are, in fact, certain people and cultural artifacts that reflect the Zeitgeist of a time. Camus’s The Stranger, a book, by an obscure French intellectual, who had edited the resistance newspaper Combat, became a publishing phenomenon in 50’s America. Bob Dylan epitomized the Zeitgeist of the 60’s. He would have several other incarnations which would make him at the very least a fellow traveler in the Zeitgeist of the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. However, that first album, The Free Wheeling Bob Dylan (which included songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Masters of War,”) with the picture of him walking down the street, a guitar strapped over his shoulder and his arm around a pretty girl was like the concept of a first cause in philosophy. Today Lena Dunham's  Girls seems to be a candidate for Zeitgeistmeister, to the extent that it portrays a whole post-modernist generation who have majored in ambivalence and see all of life as a work of meta-fiction in which reality has been mirrored so many times that it’s been reduced to chards of relativity. Opportunistic art entrepreneurs are always on the look out for the next Zeitgeistlich writer, artist or musician, but it’s hard to predict what the Zeitgeist will be since the pupa of its essence is often embodied in a personality like a Dylan whose imagination is like the ignition on an explosive device. Does Karl Ove Knausgaard reflect the Zeitgeist of Norwegians since one out of 8 of his countrymen own Min kamp. The book's incipient provocativeness seems an unlikely candidate for the Zeitgeist of a nation with such a reserved façade? Is the popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey a reflection of the Zeitgeist or is E.L. James’s novel merely a clever manipulation?  Salinger, David Foster Wallace, Annie Lennox and Sting all reflected the Zeitgeist of their respective times, as did Picasso, Jackson Pollock and now yes Damien Hirst? In the political sphere, do the beleaguered Barack Obama, the arrogant Vladimir Putin or even the horrific ISIS reflect the wobbly nature of our globe? And has our age become too complicated to produce philosophers like Plato and Aristotle whose tomes emanated an eternal Zeitgeist, however oxymoronic, that ultimately could tell us how to live?

Paris Journal II: Le Petit Fumeur

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

Only in Paris can you find Le Petit Fumer, a shop which specializes in “la cigarette electronique.” If you fell in love with those classic shots of Camus and Picasso, cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, when you were an impressionable young Francophile, but are now trying to kick the habit, Le Petit Fumeur is for you. The attractions are listed the minute you walk into the store “La Sante” (health), “70% economie," “pas de tabaqisme passif” (no innocent sufferers from your smoking), "le service client" and "le qualite." This new kind of smoking even has an endorsement from The Economist which is quoted as saying: “Le monde devrait accueiller la cigarette electronique” ("the world must welcome electronic cigarettes"). Now smokin’ Thai prostitutes have a more exotic solution which is to light up from another orifice, but if you're less adventurous yet want to live a certain style of life without suffering the consequences, Le Petit Fumeur offers an alternative. Always heeding what we might call "l’appel hedonistique” the French have found their way around the stoic suffering that addictive American smokers have to endure. Afashionably attired woman walking out of the Sevres Bablylon Metro stop, wearing bright red lipstick and a camel hair coat, already had her unlit cigarette in hand as she talked animatedly into her headset. She looked like a computer printout for the kid of customer Le Petit Fumeur is looking for.

Diasporic Dining: Episode IX (Art House)

Photos by Hallie Cohen

Not that all cinema isn’t art, but the true art cinema, redolent with the smell of espresso and Gauloise cigarettes—or Italian Nationali, which are no longer made—is a relic of the past. In those halcyon days, brilliance was purchased at a price. Artists set themselves on fire like Buddhist monks. Pasolini was murdered on a dangerous prowl, and Pollock’s intoxication spread from art to alcohol, leading to his untimely demise in a drunk-driving incident. There was no innocence in the art cinemas, which breathed not only the fumes of strong cigarette smoke, but of the Cedar Bar, Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus and Bazin’s Cinematheque, the archetypal art house.

Across America, there were little covens of European Cinema that also played the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Teshigahara. The Brattle in Boston, The Bleecker Street and New Yorker in Manhattan, and the Uptown, which still proudly reigns over Minneapolis, with its worn neon sign reaching towards the heavens. With the din of the marching band and the cacophony of invading armies in the background, The Battleship Potemkin survived, along with Ikiru and Persona, Ashes and Diamonds and L'eclisse.

Lovers of Antonioni, Bergman and Kurosawa worshipped by themselves in these temples of celluloid.  Women wore black stockings when they went to see Room at the Top. The self enforced solitude was disquieting, but was also, like the smoke, what made the experience.