Guy Attends Reception at William Faulkner's Rowan House, University of Mississippi

Oxford, Mississippi: September 28 I most enjoyed a post-debate reception in Rowan Oak, the final home of the great American master William Faulkner, where I mingled with members of the Humanities Departments of the University of Mississippi, who spoke openly and suspiciously, that duality (causal et paranoïde) so uniquely American. I confess, at times during the cocktail chatter, my mind wandered to the words of the great American master whose ghost inhabits this house, and what he said in his Discours de Suède: It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. With that I transcribe, untranslated, some of my evening's transactions.

Professor A.C. (Art History): So Mister Language-Dock, are you a fan of any American authors besides Faulkner? I mean, I know you French are obsessed by late work of Faulkner, Charles Bukowski and by Jackson Pollock but we had some artists too who weren't drunks, surely you must be aware of our expansive pedigree in the South, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Maya Angelou, for instance?

Guy: Of this Flannery person I have heard. But we say in France of this so-called postwar Southern Gothic, that they read Camus and think they know the abyss. As for Maya Angelou, this is she of "I Know Why the Cuckoo Clock Sings"?

Professor G.J. (English Dept): Guy, if I may, let's change the subject. Would you agree that French theory is a negative influence on careful reading in America? Our English majors tend to get their heads filled with half baked notions from feminists and people like Lacan and fail to pay diligent attention to the text. And, not that I can read a word of his nonsense, but did you know Jacques Derrida?

Guy: I do not know the level at which you understand or not to understand what you call "French theory." There is no "French theory," if I may say. Non!! As for feminists, asking a Frenchman if he is feminist is like asking a Marxist if he invests in hedge funds. And this "diligent reading," the matronly fussiness of your word choice, diligent, betrays an anal retentive power fantasy, as you suggest that reading a text is diligent, like cleaning one's kitchen. This I cannot concur. As for Derrida, I took a train ride with him once to Lyon in 1995. He was what you say bloqué in la salle de bain.

Professor G.H.I (French Dept.): Stuck. In the men's room. [embarrassed laughter]

Guy: Ah oui! Yes, stuck. Derrida was stucked and as I was immersed in re-reading my favorite novel, Light in August, by your grand maestro, I did not realize my conféré's fâcheuse. It took several train agents to release him from this toilet room. Jacques and I spoke about this incident many times and on his deathbed gave me a manuscript. It is still not fully translated but it is all about shitting. It is called in English The House Out.

Professor G.H.I. (French Dept): The Outhouse. [more embarrassed laughter ensues] But it is a brilliant book! A study of eschatology, privacy and bathroom door locks.

Professor H.G.J (History Dept): Guy, why is that your French writers, and here I am thinking of Hugo, of Zola, of Sartre, of De Beauvoir and many other greats, were so engaged by history while here in America our writers ignore history?

Guy: First the ones you name are third-rate writers. Or what we call écrivaillons.

Professor G.H.I (French Dept): He means hacks.

Professor K.P (History Dept): My Word! Sartre was a hack? Hugo?

Guy: History, if I may, is an invented construct, an out house, to continue with this trope from Derrida. It is involved with shit yet isn't the material of shit. Et puis, history contains what we refuse and therefore it stinks. A writer is not one to contain but to be of substance. Here I refer you to the scene in "Barn Burning" in which the father wipes the shit off his boots on the rug of Major De Spain. That scene is worth 10,000 Victor Hugos.

Professor F.D.I.C (Philosophy Dept): Guy, are there any logical positivists left in la belle patrie of Descartes? Or have you have you all drank the deconstructive Kool-Aid?

Guy: I do not know what this expression which I have heard drink the cool ade.

Professor G.H.I (French Dept): This is from Jonestown massacre, suicide collectif. The leader urged his followers to drink poisoned "Kool Aid." C'est un boisson poudreux. The expression means to drink Kool Aid is to lose your personal judgment, perdre la tête, marcher à l’aveuglette.

Guy: Ah, oui oui. Well, non. Alors we do not have such disgustive powder drink in France. As for logic. Well of course we have logic. Logic is all, indeed, you and I, we owe our salaries to logic. But we know that the world is a madhouse, yes? And logicians and academics like ourselves are what you say, wardens, and only your maestro Faulkner showed us how mad we are. This is why we have absinthe and why here in American you have what you call "reality TV."

McCain-Dédain

Oxford, Mississippi: September 27: To not look [détourner d'Obama] is to try [faire une expérience] a denial [rejeter] of the presence of truly [empirique] present-other (candidate), suggesting, as the cringing [s'irriter de Obama] body of McCain did here more than once during the non-debate [vide de sens] in Mississippi, that McCain attempts to un-name [effacer] Obama from this page of history against a recognition [une conscience] which his very aversion underscores much like the post-Jim Crow South, no longer able to deny via law denies with eyes cast away. So even the atheist, in his aversion to God's presence in that very denial [renier] voices his latent fantasy that a transcendent God lurks [persister]. Alas, we might conclude from this syllogism (in the land o' grits and Southern secession) that McCain's averted eyes [like the South's denial of the Union] as his body tenses and shudders [Mississippi burning] registers in that disdain [avec dédain] the awe-full [accablant] black transcendent presence he dares not face at the other podium, qua, Barack Hussein Obama.

American Idioms Part One: Election Vocabulary for my French Readers

Chicago: September 25: On the eve of the first presidential debate, en route to Mississippi, I pause here in Chicago, this friendly, teeming American city not quite cosmopolitan, still ruggedly and rOundly "O" and "A"-enunciating Midwestern in spirit ("Sears" conjuring the venerable Great Plain department store; "Tower" conjuring that black glassy imperial majesty), Hancock Tower, Soldier Field, this is a town of "poltical machines" and animals Bears, Bulls, Cubs, as I sit in a Rush Street tavern called Shenanigans, a "sports bar" (yet another American oxymoron, suggesting a voyeuristic relationship to sports is somehow itself sporty: as if beer were athletic), being served by a cornflower blonde femme bartender named Lindsay who hails from Madison, Wisconsin ("I dropped out of University of Michigan Law when I realized being a lawyer in this country is only a little less worse on your self-respect than prostitution, no disrespect meant to good old Eliot Spitzer") and as she serves me another plein verre of awful, watery California Merlot, I tap out here a few translations for my French countrymen, les bons mots of American election jargon:

swing voter= c'est un homme (or une femme) indécis au subjet d'Obama ou McCain: this very popular American, whom I have never met, is said to exist and to decide the fate of American elections in "swing" states. I think "swing voter" means an American white man of about 55 years old who drinks Miller beer, lives in Ohio and likes college football, trudges to Home Depot on Saturday mornings, owns The Complete Sopranos DVD, keeps a .45 revolver in his workroom, hates his daughter's lazy boyfriend, listens to Howard Stern, does not have a U.S. passport, is not sure if he will vote for Obama because Barack is black. Paradoxically, this word "swing" once meant something erotic, in the 1970s, an American bourgeoise excitée...un nouceur.... ou, il couche à droite et à gauche

Main Street=Rue de Moyen: a long street in the center of the business district of small towns, now extinct, which featured a movie theater, a local bank, a pool hall, a hardware store, a grocer, a haberdashery, a beauty parlor, and good old common sense, in which neighbor-pedestrians bid each other "Good morning," and asked after the health of pets, or elderly relations, or brides to be. Main Street has been destroyed by global capitalism, thus, as politicians praise Main Street they conceal the open secret that no such place exists, as now most Americans live in suburban housing developments a few acres behind the miles-long strip malls that line old state highways.


"drill, baby, drill"= McCain-Palin cri du guerre à forer un puits de pétrole, l'industrie pétrolière: this earth-rape mantra was repeated at Republican convention, led by Sarah Palin, "drill" word in English has phallic sexual overtones, not lost on the thousands who repeated Palin's eroto-fascist summoning to strip bare the North American continent to feed "hungry" automobiles. Americans of late like to vote for oil business people: Bush, Cheney, Palin.


"liberal pussy"=Le dénigrement, blesser Obama supporters, une mauviette... l'equivalent en anglais d'argot francais, "chatte"' This is a neo-fascist threat of emasculation and public castration which conservative Americans launch against a man who dislikes torture, supports the Bill of Rights and claims Bush stole the 2000 election. I found out, during my reportage on the Democratic primary, that many Americans think we French are "liberal pussies" because of Hitler's conquest of France: see my Pennsylvanian post from spring

"mainstream Democrat"= un politique tiède, passable, sans émotion violente, comme ci comme ca, un lâche: a title given to Democrats who prefer to to do nothing except get elected. Once elected, they follow Ronald Reagan and Bush I & II policies and in the process create the policies which they run against in order to get re-elected. Bill Clinton was so. And Hillary. Most are pro-Iraq War, pro-Israel, pro-death penalty, pro-corporation.

Dollar-Apocalypse: Ben Franklin, Karl Marx, Nouriel Roubini

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money. -Benjamin Franklin




Wall Street's stockholders and CEOs are rescued by their State. Chairman Mao is reinvented in the Calvinist (and Michel Foucault-look-alike) Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and the "general election" finds its candidates McCain and Obama without speech [rester muet], muted, out-of-language, eclipsed by that entity named on TV "a real issue that Americans care about" (with its implicit acknowledgment that the election revolves around simulacra, viz, the week's 'real issue that Americans care about' the exception to standard faux-issues-that-Americans do-not-care-about, ie, lipstick, pig, moose, kindergarten sex ed, etc).

I observe how the paranoiac American/Puritan mentality about the coming Apocalypse meets its maker in the "shocking" failure of the (post-God-is-dead, post-Berlin-Wall) new God and His Edenic perfection named "free markets around the world."



One must heed [faire attention] my European confrère Dr. Nouriel Roubini whose Jewish-Iranian-Turkish-Italian pedigree singles him out as an eloquent, polyglot Atheist which also earned him (until this week) the derisive nickname [nom de rue] "Doctor Doom" among blind, earnest Anglo-American "Believers" who even this week still seek The Second Coming of Christ (Henry Paulson, Harry Reid, W. Bush, the "dedication of the American worker"). Roubini's prophetic specificity, his naming of the abyss-as-abyss is a marked contrast to the CNBC/Anglo-American/Wall Street Believers' with their religious, mystical rhetoric of entering "uncharted territory" and "a confusing, dangerous time" (ie, Rapture, End Times)

Democracy is a form of government that cannot long survive, for as soon as the people learn that they have a voice in the fiscal policies of the government, they will move to vote for themselves all the money in the treasury, and bankrupt the nation.-Karl Marx

Sarah's Spectacle(s)

In the aftermath of Palin's imperial ascendancy in the American Hyper-Eroticized Moment(um), we shall bypass the Alaskan governor's trumping of Hillary's sensible pantsuits via dominatrix-oriented pencil skirt/stilettos. We shall defer any discussion of her (family's) baby-bursting-Manifest Destiny-as-over-fertility ("go west, (white) man!"). We must (re)focus instead on a portion of Palin's accessorizing which has literally transfixed an American electorate no longer spellbound by Obama's waving arm and declamatory upraised index finger(ing)--- viz, Sarah's Palin's eyeglasses.
Those geometric, sleek, librarian/law-and-order spectacles render (have rendered, shall keep rendering) her as a mediated Medusa to flaccid male media pundits (press corps) and G.O.P-leaning "undecided voters" stirred toward an excitation that is fueled and confirmed by its own compulsive self-questioning (cf Chris Matthews, et al, crying out, "Why are we so obsessed with this Palin phenomenon?"). The Palin esthétique aux yeux is an overdue feminine counterpart to Cindy McCain's eyes with their brightly-light, tiny Barbie Doll inertia and Michelle Obama's alternatively happy/surprised and angry/defensive glances. (To say nothing of Joe Biden's tired, Botox-impaired eyelids, Obama's overwhelmingly self-possessed yet distant wide eyes and McCain's spooky hyper-blinking, hyper-winking and hyper-squinting.) So the world can only watch in horror as the United States of America is helplessly tantalized and subjugated by Palin's metaphysical binoculars: her eye/glasses. These awe-full spectacles conceal and reveal her rifle-toting, moose-slaughtering, Bible-thumping, sideline-shouting, Hummer-driving death-gaze: her specs both absorb (maternal brown pupils) and simultaneously deflect/refract (patriarchal squared-shaped lenses), thus her eyeglasses ontologically position Palin as both dominating subject (Palin-the-seer-who-sees-all) and dominating object (Palin who is seen-by-us-seeing-us) which, in turn, will maintain indecisiveness and thus suspend American democratic reason(ing) over the coming weeks (perhaps), just long enough for the hypnotized voter to enter that private and civic bedroom known as "the voting booth" ("close the curtain!") where, still narcotized by Palin's spectacles, she/he will pull the lever (mindlessly-yet-not-so) on behalf of (Mc)Palin's gaze.

Guy Has Tea with Republican Women

September 2: Chanhassen, Minnesota. Here we are in the upper-middle class suburban milieu where these largely contented 'desperate housewives' are these days simply desperate for a Republican victory. Still these women yielded hints, traces, vestiges of transgressive fantasies, subliminally interjected in what was otherwise un cirque du bourgeois: afternoon tea with female Republican delegates who had traveled to St Paul for John McCain's nomination. What follows below are representative exchanges during the tea (and here below my anglais has not been at all fixed or edited).

Jessica from Illinois: So, Mister Lake-Doc, what do you think of our Republican party? Are American conservatives like French conservatives? Are your conservatives pro-life? Bet you Frenchies would never put a Sarah Palin on your ticket. Or maybe you would, she's a hottie, no?

Guy: Your question presupposes, if I hear you so, that I am of friends with French conservatives. And besides, all politicians are anti-life. They rule life, which is to constrict it so that it is not life but rather, I would say, puppetry. So this is not the case. I do not know friends who are, what you say here, conservative. No. Rather, I am aware that beneath even the most radical, what you say left wing, under the skin of this most left wing French person there is a conservative mentality, esprit perhaps you might say soul, meaning, what you call etiquette is, in fact, for the French the very essence of daily behavior. In the USA etiquette is the exceptional. That said, there are no true outlaws in France.

Megan from California: Gosh, Guy, no outlaws! And everybody is all chivalric and law abiding, hell, I'm moving to France. The road rage in Orange County is off the charts. And people dress these days like teenagers, grown men do! Not you Guy, I mean, look at that designer shirt you have on, it must cost $300. Here it's this Peter Pan syndrome. Oh, the French. Yes. Chanel, Yves St Laurent, ohhh, I so wanted to move to France. My husband had an offer from Apple to relocate and they were ready to set us up in one those pretty ban-loos near Lyon but our youngest boy Isiah, my my, he is so afraid of planes and flying that we just couldn't bear what it would do to him. But oh, France.

Guy: America, to my eyes, is a place that is fascinated with flying, yes? Soaring, you say. So your son would be the exception, to my ears. Superman, for instance, is super because he is the man of steel, yes, but mainly because he is the man who can fly, and you have your astronauts, your jumbo jets, Wright Brothers, Tom Cruise and The Right Stuff and so on, see, Top Gun, space shuttle and so forth. But to the French, we prefer to walk. Alors this American dream of flight is precisely why 9/11 was so shocking for you. Of course it was shock on us too of course but for us this is the price of power.

Hillary from Virginia: Guy, please, don't say 9/11. I mean, you would think from my name I would be all for Hillary who is tough on the Islamo fanatics but I was a delegate for Rudy Giuliani. What do you think of Rudy, Guy? Have you been to New York City?

Guy: This Rudy. Ah oui. He is what they call as nickname Batman of Gotham City. Yes? Well, Superman, as you recall climbed or sortied over tall buildings at the speed of sound. Or some such, yes? But Giuliani, it seems cannot escape the dust cloud of 9/11 which was the collapse of tall buildings. Very unSuperman, that. Plus you Americans do not like crossing dress, as you say and Rudy did he not dress as woman?

Nancy, from New Mexico: Oh God yes, he's scary that Rudy. Liking women's clothes. Eeek! Originally I was going to become a delegate for Fred Thompson but, then my husband, he's a die hard Democrat because of the plumbers' union he's in, but he likes McCain so he talked me into being a McCain delegate, anyway, my husband one night he told me Fred Thompson was really Foghorn Leghorn in disguise, and we went on YouTube and my God ! Sure enough there was Foghorn Leghorn quoting Fred Thompson, or vice versa [loud laughter ensues]

Guy: I like this Anglo-Saxon Fog-horn, Leg-horn sound, very so. Yes. Fred Thompson, we are a fan in France of Law & Order. Special Victims Unit is our best version. For us, it is less British a la Sherlock Holmes than what we call hard-boil American noir, I have an essay on this Law & Order SVU how I would translate the project. Hmm. I say call it "an erotics of the slit and the cadaver."

Helen from Louisiana: Oui oui Guy mais ses paroles sont tres macabre! Il y a des jeunes enfants à la maison! Ni 'le cadaver' ni 'erotique', si vous plait. Translation, ladies, in a nutshell, I told Guy here to hush up with the dirty talk.

Guy: I would like to talk of one more candidate of, you say, G-O-P who, is this Mitt Romney. Yes, he is like a telecaster, you saw, of news? Yet he is also Andrew Carnegie. But, as a Mormon, his knickers are believed to be of magic, no?

Hattie from Texas: Guy it's newscaster not telecaster my Lord! You no parlez English too well! [loud chuckles]. Mitt Romney doesn't believe in magic underwear. But I do not, I tell you I do not, trust the Mormons, Lord forgive me [makes sign of cross]. But you should like Romney, Guy, because Romney speaks French! Him and them Mormons were bopping round France in the 1960s trying to convert you froggies to Brigham Young's crazy cult.

Guy: Well, this is not possible, to only speak of religion and become a French speaker. To speak the language you must live as the people do--we French are atheists first, and believers only for the tax code forms.

Jena from Montana: Speaking of France, help me out here, come follow us out here, our host Betty has a china set she swears is from 18th century France and Lord if she waits for Antique Roadshow to drop by her house, she might never get this treasure assessed.. [all converge on living room]

Nancy from New Mexico: Guy are you married? You're too too handsome and smart not to be.

Guy: In France, this is the last question we ever ask. Here it is the first, only after 'what do you do?" I will defer this question, yes? As for these No. This is not French. I tell you why. There you see, this kind of silly prancing dogs on the dish, is the kind of Victorian kitsch you only get from British aesthetique. In France we eat animals, we do not paint them on our plates. No!