We see that Quin, in hiatus, is in a slipping one in on us mode for sure. Based on our previous experience with Quin, we are forced to believe that this is, at least in part, an attempt to thwart the speedy and expeditious completion to the writing of the Concordance to THE COMPLEATE WORKES OF QUIN. Nevertheless, and after numerous hasty dark of the night meetings held by the editorial staff, we have concluded that Quin is best served over the long haul, by our carrying on in as thorough and complete a citation of his works as is humanly possible under the extenuated circumstances in which he is placing us. Therefore, we will continue in this writing with citation of the 11/28/2003 entry by Quin, begun on 11/29/03.
Continuing notes to the Concordance to THE COMPLETE WORKES OF QUIN--entry 28 November 2003
(5) from the text--
popular culture fails us continually. (5a) leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke. (5b) meanwhile here as abroad right wing fundamentalism is encouraged in order to prop up corrupt regimes and when it bubbles up out of control the proposed remedy is we blow stuff up. (5c)
(5a) Quin has often been heard to comment on the problem of a failing of popular culture; most often he has been heard to rail against the mediums of television and film, and secondarily, fiction. Regarding television, the existence of 300+ stations where little of interest or entertainment is to be found. Regarding film, he has commented, and indeed written about the lack of anything of much realilty or interest since the production of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Regarding fiction, we believe it is the general unreadability of current popular fiction as opposed to that of former years, basically since the 1930s that most concerns and oppresses him. To further clarify this point, we will excerpt a selection of lines from a few works with which Quin feels a strong affinity. We have selected the genre of mystery writing for this demonstration, as it is one of the most popular of popular genres; the selections will be taken randomly, as are some people's predictions from The Bible, by opening books to pages at random so that the reader may compare styles. Though the authors of these works vary greatly in stylistic characteristics, each, writing in the 1930s has an intrinsically entertaining way of combining words into sentences, paragraphs, and so on, and each has something quite interesting to say. We should add that we are using the original publishers and copyrights here for the readers' reference. Most or all of these books are still available, although the reader may well have to conduct an online search to find either new editions, or those which are out of print.
Example 1, from: Hammett, Dashiell, The Thin Man.Alfred A Knopf; New York, 1933.
Nora sighed. "I wish you were sober enough to talk to." She leaned over to take a sip of my drink. "I'll give you your Christmas present now if you'll give me mine."
"I shook my head. "At breakfast."
"But it's Christmas now."
"Breakfast."
"Whatever you're giving me," she said, "I hope I don't like it."
"You'll have to keep them anyway, because the man at the Aquarium said he positively wouldn't take them back. He said they'd already bitten the tails off the--"
"It wouldn't hurt you any to find out if you can help her, would it? She's got so much confidence in you, Nicky."
"Everybody trusts Greeks."
"Please."
"You just want to poke your nose into things that--"
"I meant to ask you: did his wife know the Wolf girl was his mistress?"
"I don't know. She didn't like her."
"What's the wife like?"
"I don't know--a woman."
"Good-looking?"
"Used to be very."
"She old?"
"Forty, forty-two. cut it out Nora. You don't want any part of it. Let the Charleses stick to the Charleses' troubles and the Wynants stick to the Wynants'."
She pouted. "Maybe that drink would help me."
I got out of bed and mixed her a drink. As I brought it into the bedroom, the telephone began to ring. I looked at my watch on the table. It was nearly five o'clock.
From: Biggers, Earl Derr. The House Without a Key [a Charlie Chan mystery]. Bantam Books, New York: 1925.
Miss Minerva Winterslip was a Bostonian in good standing, and long past the romantic age. Yet beauty thrilled her still, even the semi-barbaric beauty of a Pacific island. As she walked slowly alog the beach, she felt the little catch in her thrat that sometimes she had known in Symphony Hall, Boston, when her favorite orchestra rose to some new and unexpected height of loveliness.
It was the hour at which she liked Waikiki best, the hour just preceding dinner and the quick tropic darkness. The shadows cast by the tall cocoanut palms lengthened and deepened, the light of the falling sun flamed on Diamond Head and tinted with gold the rollers sweeping in from the coral reef. A few late swimmers reluctant to depart, dotted those waters whose touch is like the caress of a l over. On the spring board of the nearest float a slim brown girl poised for one delectable instant. What a figure! Miss Minerva, well over fifty herself, felt a mild twinge of envy--youth, youth like an arrow, straight and sure and flying. like an arrow the slender figure rose, then fell; the perfect dive, silent and clean.
From: Rohmer, Sax. President Fu Manchu. Doubleday and Company, Inc., New York: 1936.
"What is it, mister," the taximan whispered, "some new kind of fever?"
"No," said Nayland Smith. "It's a new kind of murder!"
"Why do you say so?" the hotel doctor asked, glancing in a puzzled way at the ghastly object on the sofa.
But Nayland Smith did not reply. Turning to the night manager:
"I want no one at present in the foyer," he said, "to leave without my orders. You--" he pointed to the night manager:
"I want no one at present in the foyer," he said, " to leave without my orders. You--" he pointed to the house detective--"will mount guard over the taxicab outside the main entrance. No one must touch it or enter it. No one must pass along the sidewalk between the taxi and the hotel doors. it remains where it stands until further notice. Hepburn--" he turned--"get two patrolmen to take over this duty. Hurry. I need you here."
(5b) leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke.
Once again, the editor finds it expedient to interject a bit of economic theory-ese into the discussion in order to clarify Quin's thought for the reader not generally acquainted with such, which means most Americans educated within the lower and higher educational systems of these United States--excepting for those educated in the very very very high. We base this largely on primary research conducted by interviewing recent graduates of American Institutions of higher learning, both those of the State and the Ivy League.
We begin by a paraphrase of Quin's first statement in the above sentence.
leftest thought is perpetually squelched where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy . . .
We think that there will be little disagreement with the conceit that leftest thought is perpetually squelched. One has only to consider recent events. Consider that institution, the third estate--that which the political right in the United States continually refers to as the left wing media. If the American media was or ever has been left wing, this tendency became completely invisible during the most recent Gulf War, popularly referred to as Gulf War II. Most Americans were glued to their television sets during this episode, while embedded reporters thrilled in their discomfort, fear, and peak experiences and related these to us. It is not overstating the fact to suggest that during these operations, the media functioned as no less than a propaganda machine for the war. While the editorial staff tries not to editorialize, we must note that the current media does go where the best story and the most money is, as may be noted now that supposedly, the war is over and the peace has begun. The best story out there now is the failure of the peace. While the media is not reporting this with quite the hydophobic ferver that it did while the tanks were rolling across the desert, it is managing to salivate quite heavily over this change in affairs.
We also mention the recent "Patriot Act" with regard to this concept of squelching citing what is common knowledge at this point, that the FBI now legally has access to such things as library records, all internet records of personal internet browsing, medical records [did our readers wonder why their doctors required them to sign all those photocopied forms about privacy at their last appointments?] and all sorts of information that even the most demur an a-political citizens would no doubt prefer remain truly private.
where it is not necessary to the operations of the financial technocracy, hence the wall street journal is this country's most left wing paper and jameson works out of duke.
As usual, what might appear to be a fairly simple statement of fact by Quin, actually holds many layers of meaning and allusion. The financial technocracy, in general terms are those who run money. These aren't just your boys at Edward Jones. You can think of them, if you like, as Alan Greenspan his X-files minions. These are not just your run of the mill MBA's. They are not your local CPA's. These people have been educated in all of the postmodern theories of economics that most American citizens think of as hocus pocus. They know Marxist theory, the theories of Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard, et. al. The Wall Street Journal disseminated the information which allows them to use these theories to do their work which structures a capitalist government. It is not fiction that the recent tax cuts were more beneficial to those with the highest income per capita. This is a fact. It is not propaganda.
Frederick Jameson is one of the best known and most accessible of the economic theorists. We therefore submit a brief excerpt of his writing and refer our readers to the site: http://www.popcultures.com/theorists/jameson.html where they can find further information by and
about him. 
We also submit this picture, which we believe will quiet any fears readers may have that Marxist scholars may be terrifying, unapproachable, or, as the editor has heard some of extreme religious belief aver, "of the devil."
For the problem of abstraction--of which this one of finance capital is a part--must also be grasped in its cultural expressions. Real abstractions in an older period-the effects of money and number in the big cities of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism the very phenomena analyzed by Hilferding and culturally diagnosed by Georg Simmel in his pathbreaking essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life"--had as one significant offshoot the emergence of what we call modernism in all the arts. In this sense, modernism faithfully--even "realistically"--reproduced and represented the increasing abstraction and deterritorialization of Lenin's "imperialist stage." Today, what is called postmodernity articulates the symptomatology of yet another stage of abstraction, qualitatively and structurally distinct from the previous one, which I have drawn on Arrighi to characterize as our own moment of finance capitalism: the finance capital moment of globalized society the abstractions brought with it by cybernetic technology (which it is a misnomer to call postindustrial except as a way of distinguishing its dynamic from the older, "productive" moment). Thus any comprehensive new theory of finance capitalism will need to reach out into the expanded realm of cultural production to map its effects; indeed mass cultural production and consumption itself--at one with globalization and the new information technology--are as profoundly economic as the other productive areas of late capitalism and as fully a part of the latter's generalized commodity system.
The editor reminds the reader of a broader sense of the history of the above. Historically, religious institutions, [in western history, largely the Catholic Church] granted the right of rule by Divine Right. This continued for centuries through what might be thought of a an unholy union between rulers and church. The most familiar break between a ruler and the Roman Catholic Church is probably that of Henry VIII of England who split from the Roman Catholic Church and declared himself Head of the Church of England so that he might divorce his first wife Katherine of Aragon and marry Anne Bolyn. This took place, however, after England had long been a vassal of Rome and the Catholic Church. During which time, by the authority granted by the church many many corrupt regimes were propped up, and many things blown up.
the film crew who came over last week none of them knew who granpa al lewis is...
( 6a) See Quin entry 11/20/1003 and the accompanying note to the text in entry 11/24/2003 for further on their brief involvment in the making of an independent film
(6b) Al Lewis, perhaps best known for his role as Grampa on the 1960s television program, The Munsters, has been a political activist for left wing causes since the 1930s. One of his most prominent social projects is his pen pal program for inmates of prisons.
While in a improvisatory scene during the shooting of the aforementioned film, in an interview scene disputing whether "anyone actually cared about prisoners," it became apparent that no one among the stars or crew, other than Quin and 'Beth' knew of Lewis' work in prisoners' behalf.
Undoubtedly, this sentiment on Quin's part refers to the a previous comment to this blog made by a group which Quin wishes to have absolutely nothing to do with.
