'My Sister and I'/Nietzsche update

I haven't posted my thoughts on my re-read of My Sister and I yet because I've agreed to present a paper on it, thus expanding the scope of my project and focusing my energy regarding the subject elsewhere. I suppose after that ordeal is completed I'll post a more complete capitulation of my thoughts here.

For the time being, suffice it to say that after a more careful read it really, really does not seem to me that Nietzsche wrote the darn thing. A quick cross-referencing of the "Index" thrown together in the back of the text is revelatory (beyond its sloppy and frequently incorrect composition.) Compare the selected anecdotes on (say) Kant within the text to those of Voltaire, or the oft-noted Stendhal references. The former are unconfident, simply biographical and/or poorly constructed rewrites of the thinker in question's most famous doctrines, while the author of My Sister and I is a lot more comfortable digging into literary figures. This to me is in keeping with Walter Kaufmann's claim that a literary author (David George Plotkin - or was it George David?) is responsible for the forged work.

The sum of the Kantian references in My Sister and I are as follows: Eleven references altogether - two simple name-checks, two biographical anecdotes (both surrounding his lack of travel), five vague references to his philosophy (one simply calling Kant "untidy", two mentioning his refutation via Schopenhauer, and two brief mentions of his moral philosophy, the "Kantian ought" and what the author calls his defeat at the bite of the "tarantula of morality" - essentially just glorified name-drops.) Two entire aphoristic "chapters" (i.e., paragraphs) are dedicated to Kant - Chapter 6: Section 56 and Chapter 8: Section 13. The former attacks the Kantian "common good" without seeming to understand Nietzsche's critique of it - i.e., his rejection of Kant's ontological ethics and the categorical imperative. "Kant has in mind what he thinks is the common good of the community?" the text awkwardly asks. "But what is the common good? And was Kant the man best qualified to perceive it for us?" While it is at least arguable that this paragraph was an absent-minded knock-off not intended to dive deep into Kantian critique, it is instead clear to me that the author of the text is working with a limited grasp of Kant and therefore can't quite put his finger on the Nietzschean objection and is therefore skirting the issue with a vague and not quite characteristic response. The second aphoristic "chapter" (again, paragraph) on Kant insists that the philosopher in question should have spent "ten years teaching philology" to better understand morality, but again sounds weakly informed and more impressed by biography (Kant's immobility dislike of travel is again referenced) than philosophy.

Anyway, it goes on and on folks - this is just a taste of my thoughts. We'll talk about this some more shortly down the road, although with my workload back up to full and the gas gauge pushing empty, I apologize for any delays we may incur.

Review of Cracker's "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey"

I have decided that it is high time to gear the content of this burgeoning blog towards readers outside of the 'biographical Nietzsche' niche. As a long-time music lover with what I like to think of as diverse tastes, I imagine it inevitable that this blog will begin to house some music reviews and ruminations, although I don't want it to dissolve into the cesspool of boring rock music blogs that are out there. That being said, here's a review of a record from a group that lies outside of my core interests but that I've nonetheless followed closely throughout their career.

"Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey," the latest record from alt-country-rock outfit Cracker, is an unexpected kick in the pants. After beating a decade-long lull with their bittersweet 2006 "Greenland" album, the band here sounds wide awake, revitalized, and hungry. Apparently the dissolve of the Bush administration has enabled the lads to break out of the rut that was their critique-cum-celebration of backwards Americana and step confidently back into literate, heavy riff rock, amplifying their omnivorous roots music with an unprecedented hard edge. Indeed, the band has never sounded as alive as they do on "Yalla Yalla (Let's Go)", the album's opener, its titular closer, or "I Could Be Wrong, I Could Be Right", in which singer David Lowery's vocals push into the red for a glorious instant. The sardonic country ("Friends") and radio-friendly pop-rock ("Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out With Me") moments are kept to a tasteful minimum, benefiting from lean production and especially effective songwriting, while the Buzzcocks-esque "Hand Me My Inhaler" and "Time Machine" fly in from left field and sail straight out of the ballpark on the strength of their wit and simplistic punch. All and all this is really refreshing stuff from a smart but inconsistent band who in the recent past felt compelled to cheekily document their split from Virgin Records in an eight-verse slogger ("It Ain't Gonna Suck Itself") and pen an awful, self-congratulatory rap ("What You've Been Missing") tacked awkwardly onto the end of their 2002 "Forever" record. With "Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey", Cracker is at the peak of its game, writing sharp and hard-hitting roots rock songs that take their project seriously while leaving plenty of room for a smirk. 9.0/10 (429 Records - www.429records.com)

More on the disputed Nietzsche

I hungrily devoured my Nietzsche - My Sister and I: A Critical Study, the 2007 work by Walter Stewart that makes a case for the apocrypha Nietzsche work My Sister and I, long taken to be a forgery, as a potentially legitimate work. I have to say that I am impressed. Stewart's work is not without a few minor points of contention, but on the whole he makes an excellent case for a re-examination of the work. While I am still apt to lean towards a vote for its illegitimacy, I am in complete agreement with Stewart that a true, thorough examination of the nuts and bolts of the text has never been undertaken, and that such a project should be begun immediately for the sake of the revelations it will inevitably unveil.

Consult my post from a few days ago for the back story if you're presently in need of it; otherwise, we can move on to Stewart's many arguments. I couldn't hope to make the case any better than he - rather I want to summarize what struck me as the argument's strengths and point out a few possible objections.

Stewart begins by making the excellent point that Nietzsche's condition between late January 1889-March 1890, or the time between confinement to the mental facility in Jena following his mental breakdown and eventual release, is criminally misunderstood and misrepresented. Kaufmann, for one, seems stubbornly insistent that Nietzsche remained all but utterly incoherent during this timeframe and while Stewart doesn't deny Nietzsche's clear dementia during much of this time, he wants to emphasize the extended period of lucidity that Nietzsche expressed that most of his biographers, particularly Kaufmann, ignored and/or denied. That Peter Gast believed for a time that Nietzsche was faking his insanity is significant, (and is an under-documented fact that is represented in the text of My Sister and I that adds to the case for the book's validity.) Kaufmann's position as the authoritative and definitive voice in Nietzsche scholarship should here be questioned. Stewart does a decent job of addressing some of Kaufmann's specific claims against My Sister and I's legitimacy, such as the Detroit problem being related to Nietzsche's excitement at his growing audience in America and his documented passing knowledge in unknown cities like Baltimore (thus implying that Nietzsche could have easily had Detroit on the brain - not a case-closer, but not a bad point, and one that I will further expand upon in consideration of the author of the work's overall success at capturing biographical minutia.) Other cursory textual issues are relatively well-addressed by Stewart, from quite convincingly to semi-spuriously. Stewart also points out that while Roth is of quite dubious literary distinction, he was not actually a forger of any literary works, merely a copyright infringer and peddler of pornography. As for Levy's daughter's denial of her father's involvement in the translation, Stewart points out that the text would have been controversial and spelt the possibility of jail time for parties involved and thus did not relate information about the work to his daughter or wife, both of whom were generally involved in his career from office work to more technical academia. Again, not really a conclusive argument, but one solid enough to proceed with our examination.

One promise I'd heard that excited me about Stewart's study prior to reading it was the claim that letters and journals discovered post-1951 had been found that definitively struck a connection between Nietzsche and the authorship of My Sister and I based on themes touched upon only in these two sources and nowhere else in the Nietzsche canon. This promise was not quite delivered - rather, in the material that Stewart presents we have some highly suggestive and strong connections that remain only circumstantial, albeit tantalizingly so. Three examples that I found particularly strong: 1.) A reference to the nobility of Egyptian brother-sister incest as preserving the strong was found in a stricken section of Ecce Homo. References to Nietzsche and Elisabeth's incest, of course, abound in My Sister and I and are frequently coupled with references to the Egyptians. Who do you think struck that section from Ecce Homo? You guessed it, Nietzsche's literary butcher, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche. 2.) My Sister and I's puzzling reference to Bakunin, a figure that appears nowhere in any of Nietzsche's writing that I was aware of (and Stewart confirmed this), was validated by an obscure section of Cosima Wagner's diary, which mentioned Nietzsche's exposure to and opinions on Bakunin. 3.) The consistent misspelling of Julius Langbehn as Julius Langbein. The name of this figure who appeared well into Nietzsche's period of illness to attempt to cure him never appears misspelled in any Nietzsche biography, but the ambiguity of the German pronunciation and spelling would lead someone who had never seen the name in print but heard it spoken - as would be the case with Nietzsche himself but not someone researching his later years - to be as apt to spell it the latter (incorrect) way as the former (correct).

Stewart has half a dozen or so similar points in which Nietzsche's obscure, un-translated or completely unknown tastes, conditions, and thoughts are recreated faithfully in My Sister and I. This, of course, raises the natural question (which was briefly addressed previously in connection to Detroit) - if the author is doing such an impeccable job representing the obscurities of Nietzsche's thoughts, why is he butchering simple details like the year of his sister's return to Germany from Paraguay, Nietzsche's age at the time, and the state of American cities at the time of the book's composition - details that led scholars like Kaufmann to give the book a quick dismissal? Well, maybe the author is a demented, incarcerated intellectual!

Or maybe not. I only have a few lingering concerns that Stewart did not address, but they seem significant. First, why did the publishing company lie about the number of editions the work received? My copy claims to have been published in 1955 (four years after the book's appearance) and to be on the 13th edition. This simply cannot be factual, as the book was invalidated in 1953 by Kaufmann and essentially relegated to the realm of pulp-schlock distribution thereafter. To me, the fact that the publishing company was clearly lying about their success in distributing the book was an instant red flag - that is a sure sign that the publishers were involved in a conscious hoax, giving the book excess printing statistics to manufacture its undeserved legitimacy which once refuted would strike a serious blow against its overall validity. One possible way of addressing this may be in the publishing company itself - it seems that Roth's original company, Seven Sirens, was behind the initial printings of the book, but my copy is alternately ascribed to Boar's Head Books and Bridgehead Books, which means that mine might have come from a second party intent only on deceiving and profiting. Roth clearly had issues with scruples when it came to publishing, so it is natural to assume that he would stoop to such measures simply out of habit. But if he truly believed that he had the unpublished, undocumented final Nietzsche work in his hands to treat as he saw fit, why would he revert to deception here? The fishiness abounds.

My second major objection returns to the text. My initial reading of the book was clouded by my suspicions and biases against it, as I read all but the introduction and first 30 pages with the knowledge that it had been rejected by nearly all Nietzsche scholars, and thus I was apt to find fault with the text. Nonetheless, I cannot shake the nagging feeling that the philosophical elements within the text seem amateurish. Stewart feels that the author of My Sister and I perfectly captured Nietzsche's tastes in philology, music, politics, etc., and while I am not enough of an expert on any of these subjects to have an opinion, my sophomoric understanding of philosophy leads me to be skeptical that this could be true of Nietzsche's philosophical musings. His voice in his canonical works is true dynamite, synthesizing and cross-referencing concepts throughout the history of philosophy, refuting and reworking them prior to even thoroughly signifying them. Many of the points in My Sister and I ("If Plato is right and my mind will live forever...", "We are all crucified on the cross of reason...") simply sound ill-formed, uninformed and uninspired. Stewart would point out that my opinion here is subjective (and he would be right), and that Nietzsche was indeed demented during the period that this would have been written (right again), but I cannot shake the feeling that the supposed Nietzsche's philosophical muscle is so far depleted that, dementia or not, it has arrived at the point of sounding illegitimate.

However, I am by no means claiming to be any kind of Nietzsche expert with any hope to crack this case through my own analytic prowess, merely a humble Nietzsche novice who finds himself quite taken by this mystery and is seeking personal resolution through the means available. As such, I plan on re-reading My Sister and I with much more care than I gave my first read, trying to consider the content from a more open-minded stance (and with a better understanding of his condition and chronology in Jena along with a refreshed sense of his late biographical details) to reach a more informed opinion. The text seemed so overwhelmingly pulp to me in my first read that I simply refused to consider the possibility of its legitimacy. Will a second read change that? Keep your browser tuned to this blog and in coming days to find out!

The ontological properties of freight train hopping

In 2003, Philosophy professor Cliff Williams of Trinity College published an excellent book called One More Train to Ride, which I recently took in and greatly enjoyed. Therein, Williams speaks with numerous 'modern' (i.e., not only post-Depression-era but post-Reagan-era) American freight train hoppers and allows the ideologies of the anti-movement to unfold through the stories, song lyrics and art of the interviewees. Williams' detached journalism paints a full and, in the opinion of one familiar with the lifestyle and subculture, quite accurate picture of the nuanced dialectic of the ultimate freedom and addictive solitude that is train hopping. Nonetheless, after hearing that a Philosophy professor wrote a book on train hopping I am somewhat disappointed that Williams opted against including his own analysis of the lifestyle above and beyond the mostly unstated implications of the stories he collects, strong as they are. Perhaps the modern hobo lifestyle is best depicted on its own terms, and a deeper analysis of the phenomenon would crumple under the weight of the empty and overwrought terms, such as 'nihilism' and 'anarchism', that would be necessary to employ in analyzing it.

With that possibility in mind, I've begun brainstorming my own "philosophy of train hopping." (I read somewhere that Homer Simpson was analogous to Aristotle, so if you think my idea is stretching it, I direct your attention to the schlocky shelves of your local chain bookstore for far worse examples.) This thesis is forthcoming, as it will require a bit of yarn-spinning, but I will keep you posted. Meanwhile,

pay Cliff Williams' page dedicated to his book a visit. The book is a recommended to we vicarious travelers presently imprisoned in our functional and satisfying day-to-day lives while dreaming of another world filled with open skies and train grease.