The Kindly Ones

Well, what a hectic and busy week or two. Guests, prospective students, conferences, shows, work: I've been running around in a happy if tired haze for many days now. In the midst of all of this I once again took on the dreaded machine of US bureaucracy, this time successfully. I went back to the Social Security Administration building and applied for my SSN. Then I went and dropped the form off with Sean Sawyer at the History Department office, only to (of course) subsequently receive an email requiring me to fill in yet more forms. Then, yesterday, having received my SSN with fortuitous haste, I completed my Federal and State taxes. This wasn't quite as nightmarish a task as I'd feared, and the results left me happy indeed: whilst I owe New York State $42 (all those high-class call girls come at a price, after all), the Federal government owe me $842! And quite right too; it's disgraceful that the US government tax academic stipends and fellowships at all, let alone the ridiculous rate I was on. But, whilst I'm bemoaning these issues, why oh why don't the UK and USA have a tax treaty? The US and Germany? Check. US and China? Yep. US and Yemen? No problem. But the UK, the country which loyally follows America on its myriad international adventures? Hell no.

A few days ago I helped my friend Liran to write a lecture on Jonathan Littell's novel Les Bienveillantes. Liran is a friend of Daniel's from Israel, and currently a Visiting Scholar at NYU. He did his MA in Paris under the supervision of Julia Kristeva, which is pretty great in and of itself, but even more interesting (from my perspective) was his PhD dissertation, a critique of Freud's account of death drawing on existential pyschoanalysts like Binswanger, May, Fromm, and my old friend Irvin Yalom. Just to say again, Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy, whilst dauntingly large, is one of the significant and impressive books I've ever read, and has decisively shaped a lot of my thought, both intellectual and personal.

Anyway, Liran's lecture was excellent, and it was really good fun to go through the text with him, debating the meanings and nuances of various words in the English language. Given the very extreme nature of Littell's novel, however (about which I knew nothing before Thursday), this led to some conversations which drew a few quizzical looks: "How I about, 'spattered'?" I would venture. "Spattered? What does it mean?" replied Liran. "Well," I explained, "let's say I shot you in the head. The stain it would make on the wall would be a spattering of blood." "But it would also include pieces of brain and skull and so on, not just blood?" "Yes, it could." "Spattered it is then." And I won't go into our discussion of the syntactical legitimacy of the phrase, "a bout of masturbatory excess." "Bout?" asked Liran...

Well, I guess there's plenty more to say, but I've already wasted enough of your time. Happy birthday to James. Oh, and the paper I'm giving at Harvard in May has a title: 'Between Fidelity and Redlichkeit: Leo Strauss's Zionist Synthesis'.

Songs for the deaf: That's When I Reach for My Revolver - Mission of Burma; Hold On Now, Youngster - Los Campesinos!!! (a great album, even if they sound uncannily similar to Architecture in Helsinki at times); (Hey You) What's That Sound? - Les Rhythm Digitales; The Mending of the Gown - Sunset Rubdown (again).

A final thought: "To pass freely through open doors, it is necessary to respect the fact that they have solid frames." - Robert Musil.