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Notes from a cliff-edge

One shot

3/17/2025

 
Picture
737 words: 4-minute read

One photograph. Four men.  Hal Chase 
(no, me neither - but I do now), Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs. Apparently the only photograph of the three best-known members of the Beat Generation, all together at the same time.
 
But when was it taken? The last two weeks of January 1945? 20-23 December 1945? 20-24 February 1946? Last week of February 1947?
 
And where was it taken? New York? Manhattan? Morningside Heights? Columbia? Riverside Drive? Morningside Avenue? Morningside Drive? Upper West Side?
 
Oh, and who took the photograph? (All these questions are answered in One Shot, but no spoilers here).
 
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ writes Oliver Harris, ‘What! A whole book about this one snap that everybody already knows? He really has lost his mind, or at least all sense of perspective …’
 
Well yes, a whole book about that one snap, and what a joyous thing to do - and to read. (Full disclosure: Oliver used to be a neighbour of mine and we shared a lawnmower). One Shot: a beat generation mystery ​(Moloko Print, 2024) has been described as a detective story, which it surely is. Every detective story has its detective and every detective has their backstory (is an alcoholic, gay, likes classical music, has a chequered past, feeds stray cats, votes Labour, lost her leg in a powerboat accident) and Oliver has his too. Details are unnecessary; suffice to say that he wrote this book amid a series of personal troubles that would leave most of us unable to function at all, let alone obsess about the crease in the top left-hand corner of a photograph.
 
But maybe the crease in the photograph, the hats and coats the men wore, the direction of their gaze, The Thing that protrudes in front of Borroughs, the snow piled up in the photoshoot pictures, and the rabbit hole investigations prompted by each and every one of these details, is what helped him to get to the end of each day - ‘the only way I knew to keep my heart from breaking so that I could care for you while I endured my own personal trials and the agonies of Mariupol and Gaza’.
 
(Unlikely? By my lights, not at all, as I’ve done something similar myself).
 
So no, Oliver, I don’t at all think you wasted your time writing this book (p.207), and nor do I think I wasted my time reading it. Anything that helps us get to the end of the day in trying circumstances is fine by me, and anyway we all like a page-turner, which this truly is. Then there’s the minor point that you’ll have cemented your spot at the very summit of Beat/Burroughsian scholarship.
 
But there’s another reason why, even if you’re not for some weird reason interested in the provenance and meaning of a roughly 80-year old photograph, One Shot needs to be read: that quaint old thing called The Truth. When you see a photograph caption do you assume it’s telling the truth, especially if it’s in a book published by a reputable press? Yes, me too.
 
Well beware. Oliver’s caption database for the Group Picture contains 30 alternatives: ‘a chaotic confusion of impossible and alternative realities which is the exact antithesis of each individual’s caption’s apparently simple objective authority’ (p.77). If ever there was a metaphor for our post-truth, alternative facts age, it’s surely Oliver’s Group Picture caption database. And if we’re looking for an antidote metaphor it’s the whole of One Shot, dedicated as it is to reducing 30 captions to one - the right one. I imagine someone digging up One Shot centuries into the future, much like the denizens in Will Self’s Book of Dave, shocked at the revelation that amid the mendacious miasma of the early twentieth century there were still people who cared for facticity.
 
(I get this desire. Successive biographers of Mary Wollstonecraft, through force of repetition, have the date wrong for when she lived in the house of the 18th century Platonist Thomas Taylor. This will be put right soon - watch this space).
 
There’s no way the young researcher who stepped into the JFK International Arrivals Hall in October 1984 could have known that forty years later he’d have One Shot at shoring up both his life and a key legacy of the Enlightenment. But that’s what he’s done in this brilliant and brilliantly entertaining book. Read it, and enjoy!
 
PS If you want to read a proper review, there’s one here.


Naomi klein's doppelganger

4/4/2024

 
928 words - 5 minute read

Naomi Klein has the knack of distilling big themes in striking book titles - No Logo, The Shock Doctrine - and for me at least every new Klein book is an 'event'. Her most recent one, Doppelganger, more than lives up to expectations, dealing as it does with the enormous topic of how the themes of left-wing progressive politics have been taken up so successfully by the populist right (at least that's my reading of the book's principal theme). The whole book is prompted by Klein's experience of an increasing confusion between her and what she calls 'Other Naomi', Naomi Wolf, probably best known for her 'Beauty Myth' book.

There was a time when the confusion might have been just a mild irritation, and politically unimportant in that in her Beauty Myth phase Naomi Wolf was widely regarded (rightly or wrongly) as a progressive feminist - like Naomi Klein. But the alarm bells began to ring when, as Klein puts it, 'Covid changed everything'. (And it did, in ways which the left has largely failed to come to terms with). Wolf began to be associated with COVID denialism, and the anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination movements - the last of which she linked (along with plenty of others) with conspiracy theories around elite control of the global population. At this point the two Naomis confusion became very troubling for Klein as people began to wonder what on earth had happened to her.

The question is: what had happened to Naomi Wolf? Her search for an answer led Klein down the rabbit hole in which the internet attention economy was working at full throttle - to Wolf's benefit. And the wilder the conspiracy theory the greater the attention. Thankfully, though, Klein doesn't put all this down to some personality problem in Wolf, or to her putative desire to maximise the monetisation of attention. She - rightly I think - signals the failure of the left to deal with the issues that preoccupy so many today, and that have been picked up by the right in its own grotesque fashion. These are: overweening state power (especially in the guise of surveillance), individual freedom, and security. 

As Klein puts it: 'Issues we had once championed had gone dormant in a great many spaces'. She commends Wolf's sense of strategy and writes, 'it's highly strategic to pick up the resonant issues that your opponents have left carelessly unattended'. Had we been 'too timid and obedient during the COVID era?' she asks, too ready to accept 'pandemic measures that offloaded so much onto individuals'.

Klein sketches the alternative road, conspicuously not followed by the left as it wholeheartedly went along with the measures mandated by governments' emergency measures around the world. What happened to the 'bigger-ticket investments in strengthening public schools, hospitals and transit systems' she asks? Of course these measures couldn't have been put in place overnight, which is why we must lay the blame for the current success of right-wing populism at the feet of the left which has so failed - over the last two decades at least - to put in the place the measures that would have undergirded a less prophylactic approach to the COVID pandemic.
(It's tempting to wonder how different things would have been, in the UK at least, had Brexit not got in the way of Jeremy Corbyn winning the 2019 election).
​
So, having articulated a response that focuses upstream on structure deficits rather than downstream on individual 'responsibility', it's disappointing to see Klein resort to a resetting of individual psychology as the solution to all this. In this vein she appeals to 'unselfing' as the route to a better, kinder world, in which we aim not to 'maximise the advantage in our lives ... but to maximise all of life'. 

The positive aspect of this, for me at least, is the appeal to a universalist vocabulary that the left has largely abandoned in favour of a fissiparous identity politics that favours solipsism over solidarity, leading, as Klein puts it, to a 'splintering into smaller and smaller groups'. 'Splintering', she rightly says, 'is tantamount to surrender'. She acknowledges that, 'race, gender, sexual orientation, class and nationality shape our distinct needs, experiences, and historical debts', but avers that we must 'build on a *shared* interest in challenging concentrated power and wealth' (my emphasis). Amen to that, but I'm not sure that 'unselfing' has sufficient heft to unravel the oligarchic powers with which we're confronted.

In this sense, Doppelganger ends not with a bang but a whimper - a sign, perhaps of the magnitude of the task confronting those on the left seeking to stem the right-wing populist tide. We won't manage this by name-calling, by being patronising, or by underestimating the concerns that propel this tide.

Because governments are indeed increasing surveillance, elites have indeed made obscene amounts of money out of masks and vaccinations, and people really do feel increasingly insecure as the welfare state is hollowed out by swivel-eyed small-state libertarians. Back in the day people would have turned to the left for solutions to these problems, but in the mirror world described by Klein it's those very same small-state libertarians who claim to hold the key to salvation. And people - too many people - believe them. 

These are very real concerns and the left's failure to address them has left the field wide open to the right that presents itself as anti-system. Only in the Doppelganger world described by Klein can elites intent on securing the system and extending its influence present themselves as tearing it down, in favour - they say - of the class with precisely the most to lose from 'Making America (or Argentina, or Hungary, or the UK, or Spain or ...) Great Again'.

    Andrew Dobson

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