Let us now give a word of thanks... this is the last time I'll have to get up at 5 on a Sunday to work.  For a while at least - the boss comes back from vacation this week.  I don't know how people do this every day.  At least, people who aren't named Imus or Stern, making millions upon millions of dollars for it.
 
I'm not awake enough to say anything else interesting at the moment.  Let me pass it to my friend Zoran, and a connection he drew in an email last night after I sent him a bunch of links, including this one on Radovan Karadzic - failed artist, wartime Bosnian Serb leader, international fugitive-in-hiding.
 
"I have something that will interest you. Marko Vesovic writes about Radovan Karadzic and his poetic talent. Below you have the link to an article on Edward Limonov, controversial Russian writer who was quite popular before, but he turned into a nationalist and went to see Radovan Karadzic on a couple of occasions.
From the article you will see that Limonov was discredited after he became active in the intellectual guerilla (movement).
 
What Vesovic said about Karadzic is essentially the same thing. It is obvious in the opening sentences when Vesovic states that everything that he will say about Karadzic is now under the shadow of the fact that he should be prosecuted for war crimes. 
  
This is a question of how alternative and radical literary thought grows into intellectual guerilla (movements). Of course, there is always our famous crutch word “unfortunately” but no one seems to be able to explain why Limonov was so attractive not only to lay audience, but to intellectual circles in Germany and France. In the same way, Karadzic had something that attracted people like Limonov, Daniel Schiffer from France or Peter Handke from Germany.
 
Was it the game that Europe played with Serbs, like Baudrillard claims, I don’t know. There are just too many questions open, especially on the background of radical ideas. 
  
Here’s the link:
 
http://slate.msn.com/id/2078955/"  
 
This is so interesting to me, and I'm glad Z. brought it to light.  Beyond the explicit connection between Limonov and Karadzic, beyond the dalliances of the intellectual set with volatile 'revolutionary' figures (to the point where certain artists pose themselves as the revolutionary movement themselves, i.e. Limonov)  there emerges the reliable phenomenon - via both articles, but especially Vesovic's interview - of failed/flawed artist as political leader, as demagogue - a type of political creature we can obviously trace back through Hitler, and no doubt far beyond that as well.   And Z. is of course absolutely correct - the intellectual sets that embrace and at times even nurture such figures at their bosom - even with amused skepticism, as Vesovic portrays he and his fellow writers to have done with the the young artist-poseur Karadzic - well, it cannot be ignored when they say now  "all these thoughts are colored by the fact that he is wanted for war crimes'.  Does that betray an admission that while a Karadzic may be seen as an extreme, volatile and lamentable crystallization of some radical literary thought now, they cannot find it in themselves to say (with any degree of intellectual honesty, at least) that he was a true pariah, or even truly remarkable for his attitudes in those circles (even if they would like to say so now), because he simply was not?  That to some extent they all breathed of the same air?     These are just the first thoughts coming to mind, and not especially well-stated; I'll try to come up with some sort of decent, substantive  comment/response later on.

I also want to note something totally different, something else I brought up to Z. the other night, regarding a review of Dale Beck's Hatchet Jobs.  Now, I keep something of a distance from contemporary literature (too much of a distance, I think, but I'm playing a lot of catch-up) and even more of a distance from any kind of literary scene.  Hell, I felt completely and utterly out of place taking creative writing MA classes in  NYC (just one reason I got the hell out of there) - I don't feel at all at home around the literati, or what I've known of them so far, at any rate.  Thus I don't really keep up with the currents of gossip and trends and who's-hot, who-said-what.  I've never read anything by Dale Beck, not his supposedly infamous review of Rick Moody's book which is included in his new collection (for that matter, I've never read Rick Moody) nor anything else.  I don't find myself caring that much more to upon reading Daniel Mendelsohn's critique of the critic, but I am a bit bemused by something at the end of it.  I mean this paragraph. 
 
"Dynamics of power, punishment, and pain between a younger and an older man have recurred in Peck's work from the beginning: Martin and John contains two arresting descriptions of S&M sex, one of which ends with the younger man begging the older to penetrate him with a shotgun. It is difficult not to see, as the origins of this fascination, the extreme Oedipal tensions at play in the passage from The Law of Enclosures, too: the obsession with power (Peck's as well as his father's), the son's fantasy of being able to punish or save, the constant threat of physical violence both by and against the father ("fists" occurs twice). All this is worth noting only because of its implications for Peck's criticism: it's hard not to feel, in his book reviews, a ferocious kind of acting-out going on. The "hammer and nails" Peck mentions in the passage above seem intended not so much for construction, as one is tempted at first to read the passage, as for a crucifixion; and indeed, you sense that what Peck the critic really wants to do isn't so much to judge a writer as to nail the guy."
 
 
"Dynamics of power, punishment and pain":  So very Foucault, that - and Foucault, like quite a few other artists who emphasized discipline and the meting out of punishment, liked to mix up a little pain with their pleasure.  After you've brought up the whole sexual/power/punishment dimension, how can you, as a critic, note that Beck is a Gay Writer, and yet back away from the blatant sexual connotation of 'nailing the guy', which is evoked both here and in the title of the review?