https://www.derekwessman.com/
Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Monday, June 29, 2026
Sunday, June 28, 2026
Temp Hides Fun, Fulfilling Life From Rest Of Office
BOSTON—Ty Braxton, 23, continues to hide his fun and fulfilling life from the full-time employees of Hale & Dorr, the Boston law firm for which he has temped since July.
“At a job like this, where you’re surrounded by angry, perpetually stressed-out lawyers who are working 80 hours a week, it’s important to hide the fact that you’re enjoying a normal, balanced, happy life,” Braxton said Monday. “People get really pissed when they hear stuff like that.”
Braxton, who earns roughly one-fourth of what the firm’s lowest-seniority full-time employees make, said he has no desire to make his coworkers feel bad about their “boring, shitty lives.”
“If somebody complains about how bad it sucks to work overtime five days straight, I just nod and agree,” said Braxton, who spends his weeknights at parties, at concerts, and playing basketball in the park. “No point in rubbing in the fact that no matter how busy things are, I leave at exactly 5 p.m. every single day. If anyone asks me to stay later, I just say my agency doesn’t let me do overtime.”
After graduating from Wesleyan University in May 2000 with a degree in Russian literature, Braxton worked a series of part-time jobs in and around Boston. In December 2001, he signed on with QualiTemps, the city’s largest supplier of temporary office labor, which currently pays him $8.44 per hour.
“I have so much going on in my life right now,” Braxton said. “I’m helping a friend start up a little Cajun food stand, I’ve gotten way into this Russian poet Mayakovsky, I’ve been hanging out with this really cool girl I met when my band, Sophie Drillteam, did a show with hers. Honestly, I just don’t have the time or energy to put into some job.”
In spite of his happiness, Braxton said he makes sure always to project an air of dissatisfaction, in both facial expression and posture, while in the office.
“If I had a great time staying out until 4 in the morning the night before, I make sure to wipe away all traces of a smile before I walk in these doors,” Braxton said. “If anyone found out I’m not living a hellish existence like they are, I’d be asking for trouble.”
Braxton is also careful about engaging his coworkers in conversation.
“I stopped talking about movies, because no one here ever goes to them,” Braxton said. “Every time I mention a movie to someone, I have to sit there and listen to them go through the process of figuring out the last movie they saw. The other day, Andrew Walser, this intellectual-property attorney who’s trying to make partner, told me that his last movie was Gladiator. I was like, ’Oh, man, that’s depressing.’”
In his long-term temp assignment as conference coordinator at Hale & Dorr, Braxton schedules employee use of the firm’s five common meeting rooms and is responsible for keeping the rooms stocked with cold refreshments and snacks. His other primary duty is to procure audio-visual equipment for meetings when requested, a situation that arises “only, like, one or two times a month.”
“People e-mail me about needing rooms, and I have to e-mail them back with room assignments,” Braxton said. “I also have to post the schedule on the meeting-room doors and order paper cups and things. All in all, though, it’s pretty easy. Everybody’s usually way too busy to give me any work to do, anyway.”
During his three to four hours of “down time” each work day, Braxton reads, surfs the web, and e-mails friends. He also works on long-term personal projects. Over the past six weeks, Braxton has translated 41 pages of Alexander Pushkin’s unfinished novel Dubrovsky for a new English version he dreams of one day publishing.
Braxton has never mentioned his translation project to coworkers, nor has he mentioned any of his other pursuits.
“I don’t want to rub in how much I get to do the things I want to do,” Braxton said. “I feel sorry for them. They go home after a hard day, and they’re so fried they just spend the night sitting in front of the TV. You know how these people spend their weekends? Resting. They rest.”
Another advantage Braxton enjoys over the full-timers is a significantly more relaxed dress code.
“They’re always on the way to the dry cleaners or the barber or shopping for another expensive suit,” said Braxton, who estimates that his average coworker spends five hours a week maintaining his or her personal appearance. “As long as I wear deodorant, keep my tie reasonably clean, and wash my one pair of Dockers over the weekend, no one really gives a shit what I look like.”
In his efforts to hide his happy, fulfilling life from his coworkers, Braxton has even resorted to lying.
“Just yesterday, somebody asked me about my last temp job,” Braxton said. “It ended in May, but I told them it ended in June. See, after it ended, I took about a month off and just kind of dicked around, traveling around Europe until my money ran out. I knew not to mention that to people who won’t be able to do anything like that until they’re 65.”
Though Braxton said he sympathizes with his coworkers, he added that the decision to pursue a prestigious, high-paying career path was entirely their own.
“They wanted to go for the brass ring and really live the good life,” Braxton said. “What they don’t seem to get is that the key to living the good life is to avoid that brass ring like the fucking plague.”
Saturday, June 27, 2026
Friday, June 26, 2026
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Tuesday, June 23, 2026
Monday, June 22, 2026
Sunday, June 21, 2026
The Iron Fist Behind The Invisible Hand Corporate Capitalism As a State-Guaranteed System of Privilege
INTRODUCTION
Manorialism, commonly, is recognized to have been founded by robbery and usurpation; a ruling class established itself by force, and then compelled the peasantry to work for the profit of their lords. But no system of exploitation, including capitalism, has ever been created by the action of a free market. Capitalism was founded on an act of robbery as massive as feudalism. It has been sustained to the present by continual state intervention to protect its system of privilege, without which its survival is unimaginable.
The current structure of capital ownership and organization of production in our so-called "market" economy, reflects coercive state intervention prior to and extraneous to the market. From the outset of the industrial revolution, what is nostalgically called "laissez-faire" was in fact a system of continuing state intervention to subsidize accumulation, guarantee privilege, and maintain work discipline.
Most such intervention is tacitly assumed by mainstream right-libertarians as part of a "market" system. Although a few intellectually honest ones like Rothbard and Hess were willing to look into the role of coercion in creating capitalism, the Chicago school and Randroids take existing property relations and class power as a given. Their ideal "free market" is merely the current system minus the progressive regulatory and welfare state - i.e., nineteenth century robber baron capitalism.
But genuine markets have a value for the libertarian left, and we shouldn't concede the term to our enemies. In fact, capitalism - a system of power in which ownership and control are divorced from labor--could not survive in a free market. As a mutualist anarchist, I believe that expropriation of surplus value - i.e., capitalism - cannot occur without state coercion to maintain the privilege of usurer, landlord, and capitalist. It was for this reason that the free market anarchist Benjamin Tucker - from whom right-libertarians selectively borrow - regarded himself as a libertarian socialist.
It is beyond my ability or purpose here to describe a world where a true market system could have developed without such state intervention. A world in which peasants had held onto their land and property was widely distributed, capital was freely available to laborers through mutual banks, productive technology was freely available in every country without patents, and every people was free to develop locally without colonial robbery, is beyond our imagination. But it would have been a world of decentralized, small-scale production for local use, owned and controlled by those who did the work - as different from our world as day from night, or freedom from slavery.
THE SUBSIDY OF HISTORY
Accordingly, the single biggest subsidy to modern corporate capitalism is the subsidy of history, by which capital was originally accumulated in a few hands, and labor was deprived of access to the means of production and forced to sell itself on the buyer's terms. The current system of concentrated capital ownership and large-scale corporate organization is the direct beneficiary of that original structure of power and property ownership, which has perpetuated itself over the centuries.
For capitalism as we know it to come about, it was essential first of all for labor to be separated from property. Marxians and other radical economists commonly refer to the process as "primitive accumulation." "What the capitalist system demanded was. . . a degraded and almost servile condition of the mass of the people, the transformation of them into mercenaries, and of their means of labor into capital." That meant expropriating the land, "to which the [peasantry] has the same feudal rights as the lord himself." [Marx, "Chapter 27: The Expropriation," Capital vol. 1]
To grasp the enormity of the process, we must understand that the nobility's rights in land under the manorial economy were entirely a feudal legal fiction deriving from conquest. The peasants who cultivated the land of England in 1650 were descendants of those who had occupied it since time immemorial. By any standard of morality, it was their property in every sense of the word. The armies of William the Conqueror, by no right other than force, had compelled these peasant proprietors to pay rent on their own land.
J. L. and Barbara Hammond treated the sixteenth century village and open field system as a survival of the free peasant society of Anglo-Saxon times, with landlordism superimposed on it. The gentry saw surviving peasant rights as a hindrance to progress and efficient farming; a revolution in their own power was a way of breaking peasant resistance. Hence the agricultural community was "taken to pieces. . . and reconstructed in the manner in which a dictator reconstructs a free government." [The Village Labourer 27-28, 35-36].
When the Tudors gave expropriated monastic lands to the nobility, the latter "drove out, en masse, the hereditary sub tenants and threw their holdings into one." [Marx, "The Expropriation"]. This stolen land, about a fifth of the arable land of England, was the first large-scale expropriation of the peasantry.
Another major theft of peasant land was the "reform" of land law by the seventeenth century Restoration Parliament. The aristocracy abolished feudal tenures and converted their own estate in the land, until then "only a feudal title," into "rights of modern private property." In the process, they abolished the tenure rights of copyholders. Copyholders were de jure tenants under feudal law, but once they paid a negligible quit-rent fixed by custom, the land was theirs to sell or bequeath. In substance copyhold tenure was a manorial equivalent of freehold; but since it derived from custom it was enforceable only in the manor courts. Under the "reform," tenants in copyhold became tenants at-will, who could be evicted or charged whatever rent their lord saw fit [Marx, "The Expropriation..."].
Another form of expropriation, which began in late medieval times and increased drastically in the eighteenth century, was the enclosure of commons--in which, again, the peasants communally had as absolute a right of property as any defended by today's "property rights" advocates. Not counting enclosures before 1700, the Hammonds estimated total enclosures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at a sixth or a fifth of the arable land in England [Village Labourer 42]. E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude estimated enclosures between 1750 and 1850 alone as transforming "something like one quarter of the cultivated acreage from open field, common land, meadow or waste into private fields...." [Captain Swing 27].
The ruling classes saw the peasants' right in commons as a source of economic independence from capitalist and landlord, and thus a threat to be destroyed. Enclosure eliminated "a dangerous centre of indiscipline" and compelled workers to sell their labor on the masters' terms. Arthur Young, a Lincolnshire gentleman, described the commons as "a breeding-ground for 'barbarians,' 'nursing up a mischievous race of people'." "[E]very one but an idiot knows," he wrote, "that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious." The Commercial and Agricultural Magazine warned in 1800 that leaving the laborer "possessed of more land than his family can cultivate in the evenings" meant that "the farmer can no longer depend on him for constant work." [Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 219-220, 358]. Sir Richard Price commented on the conversion of self-sufficient proprietors into "a body of men who earn their subsistence by working for others." There would, "perhaps, be more labour, because there will be more compulsion to it." [Marx, "The Expropriation...."].
Marx cited parliamentary "acts of enclosure" as evidence that the commons, far from being the "private property of the great landlords who have taken the place of the feudal lords," actually required "a parliamentary coup detat... for its transformation into private property." ["The Expropriation...."]. The process of primitive accumulation, in all its brutality, was summed up by the same author:
these new freedmen [i.e. former serfs] became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire ["Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation," Capital Vol. 1].
Even then, the working class was not sufficiently powerless. The state had to regulate the movement of labor, serve as a labor exchange on behalf of capitalists, and maintain order. The system of parish regulation of the movement of people, under the poor laws and vagrancy laws, resembled the internal passport system of South Africa, or the reconstruction era Black Codes. It "had the same effect on the English agricultural labourer," Marx wrote, "as the edict of the Tartar Boris Godunov on the Russian peasantry." ["The Expropriation..."] Adam Smith ventured that there was "scarce a poor man in England of forty years of age... who has not in some part of his life felt himself most cruelly oppressed by this ill-contrived law of settlements." [Wealth of Nations 61].
The state maintained work discipline by keeping laborers from voting with their feet. It was hard to persuade parish authorities to grant a man a certificate entitling him to move to another parish to seek work. Workers were forced to stay put and bargain for work in a buyer's market [Smith 60-61].
At first glance this would seem to be inconvenient for parishes with a labor shortage [Smith 60]. Factories were built at sources of water power, generally removed from centers of population. Thousands of workers were needed to be imported from far away. But the state saved the day by setting itself up as a middleman in providing labor-poor parishes with cheap surplus labor from elsewhere, depriving workers of the ability to bargain for better terms. A considerable trade arose in child laborers who were in no position to bargain in any case [the Hammonds, The Town Labourer 1:146].
Relief "was seldom bestowed without the parish claiming the exclusive right of disposing, at their pleasure, of all the children of the person receiving relief," in the words of the Committee on Parish Apprentices, 1815 [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:44, 147]. Even when Poor Law commissioners encouraged migration to labor-poor parishes, they discouraged adult men and "Preference was given to 'widows with large families of children or handicraftsmen... with large families.'" In addition, the availability of cheap labor from the Poor Law commissioners was deliberately used to drive down wages; farmers would discharge their own day laborers and instead apply to the overseer for help [Thompson 223-224].
Although the Combination Laws theoretically applied to masters as well as workmen, in practice they were not enforced against the latter [Smith 61; the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:74]. "A Journeyman Cotton Spinner" - a pamphleteer quoted by E. P. Thompson [pp. 199-202] - described "an abominable combination existing amongst the masters," in which workers who had left their masters because of disagreement over wages were effectively blacklisted. The Combination Laws required suspects to answer interrogations on oath, empowered magistrates to give summary judgment, and allowed summary forfeiture of funds accumulated to aid the families of strikers [Town Labourer 123-127]. And the laws setting maximum rates of pay amounted to a state enforced system of combination for the masters. As Adam Smith put it, "[w]henever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between the masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters." [p. 61].
The working class lifestyle under the factory system, with its new forms of social control, was a radical break with the past. It involved drastic loss of control over their own work. The seventeenth century work calendar was still heavily influenced by medieval custom. Although there were long days in spurts between planting and harvest, intermittent periods of light work and the proliferation of saints days combined to reduce average work-time well below our own. And the pace of work was generally determined by the sun or the biological rhythms of the laborer, who got up after a decent night's sleep, and sat down to rest when he felt like it. The cottager who had access to common land, even when he wanted extra income from wage labor, could take work on a casual basis and then return to working for himself. This was an unacceptable degree of independence from a capitalist standpoint.
"In the modern world most people have to adapt themselves to some kind of discipline, and to observe other' people's timetables, ...or work under other people's orders, but we have to remember that the population that was flung into the brutal rhythm of the factory had earned its living in relative freedom, and that the discipline of the early factory was particularly savage.... No economist of the day, in estimating the gains or losses of factory employment, ever allowed for the strain and violence that a man suffered in his feelings when he passed from a life in which he could smoke or eat, or dig or sleep as he pleased, to one in which somebody turned the key on him, and for fourteen hours he had not even the right to whistle. It was like entering the airless and laughterless life of a prison" [the Hammonds, Town Labourer 1:33-34].
The factory system could not have been imposed on workers without first depriving them of alternatives, and forcibly denying access to any source of economic independence. No unbroken human being, with a sense of freedom or dignity, would have submitted to factory discipline. Stephen Marglin compared the nineteenth century textile factory, staffed by pauper children bought at the workhouse slave market, to Roman brick and pottery factories which were manned by slaves. In Rome, factory production was exceptional in manufactures dominated by freemen. The factory system, throughout history, has been possible only with a work force deprived of any viable alternative.
The surviving facts... strongly suggest that whether work was organized along factory lines was in Roman times determined, not by technological considerations, but by the relative power of the two producing classes. Freedmen and citizens had sufficient power to maintain a guild organization. Slaves had no power - and ended up in factories ["What Do Bosses Do?"].
The problem with the old "putting out" system, in which cottage workers produced textiles on a contractual basis, was that it only eliminated worker control of the product. The factory system, by eliminating worker control of the production process, had the advantage of discipline and supervision, with workers organized under an overseer.
"the origin and success of the factory lay not in technological superiority, but in the substitution of the capitalist's for the worker's control of the work process and the quantity of output, in the change in the workman's choice from one of how much to work and produce, based on his preferences for leisure and goods, to one of whether or not to work at all, which of course is hardly much of a choice."
Marglin took Adam Smith's classic example of the division of labor in pin-making, and stood it on its head. The increased efficiency resulted, not from the division of labor as such, but from dividing and sequencing the process into separate tasks in order to reduce set-up time. This could have been accomplished by a single cottage workman separating the various tasks and then performing them sequentially (i.e., drawing out the wire for an entire run of production, then straightening it, then cutting it, etc.).
"without specialization, the capitalist had no essential role to play in the production process. If each producer could himself integrate the component tasks of pin manufacture into a marketable product, he would soon discover that he had no need to deal with the market for pins through the intermediation of the putter-outer. He could sell directly and appropriate to himself the profit that the capitalist derived from mediating between the producer and the market."
This principle is at the center of the history of industrial technology for the last two hundred years. Even given the necessity of factories for some forms of large-scale, capital-intensive manufacturing, there is usually a choice between alternate productive technologies within the factory. Industry has consistently chosen technologies which de-skill workers and shift decision-making upward into the managerial hierarchy. As long ago as 1835, Dr. Andrew Ure (the ideological grandfather of Taylorism and Fordism), argued that the more skilled the workman, "the more self-willed and... the less fit a component of a mechanical system" he became. The solution was to eliminate processes which required "peculiar dexterity and steadiness of hand... from the cunning workman" and replace them by a "mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it." [Philosophy of Manufactures, in Thompson 360]. And the principle has been followed throughout the twentieth century. William Lazonick, David Montgomery, David Noble, and Katherine Stone have produced an excellent body of work on this theme. Even though corporate experiments in worker self-management increase morale and productivity, and reduce injuries and absenteeism, beyond the hopes of management, they are usually abandoned out of fear of loss of control.
Christopher Lasch, in his foreword to Noble's America by Design, characterized the process of de-skilling in this way:
"The capitalist, having expropriated the worker's property, gradually expropriated his technical knowledge as well, asserting his own mastery over production....
"The expropriation of the worker's technical knowledge had as a logical consequence the growth of modern management, in which technical knowledge came to be concentrated. As the scientific management movement split up production into its component procedures, reducing the worker to an appendage of the machine, a great expansion of technical and supervisory personnel took place in order to oversee the productive process as a whole" [pp. xi-xii].
The expropriation of the peasantry and imposition of the factory labor system was not accomplished without resistance; the workers knew exactly what was being done to them and what they had lost. During the 1790s, when rhetoric from the Jacobins and Tom Paine were widespread among the radicalized working class, the rulers of "the cradle of liberty" lived in terror that the country would be swept by revolution. The system of police state controls over the population resembled an alien occupation regime. The Hammonds referred to correspondence between north-country magistrates and the Home Office, in which the law was frankly treated "as an instrument not of justice but of repression," and the working classes "appear[ed]... conspicuously as a helot population." [Town Labourer 72]
"... in the light of the Home Office papers, ...none of the personal rights attaching to Englishmen possessed any reality for the working classes. The magistrates and their clerks recognized no limit to their powers over the freedom and the movements of working men. The Vagrancy Laws seemed to supercede the entire charter of an Englishman's liberties. They were used to put into prison any man or woman of the working class who seemed to the magistrate an inconvenient or disturbing character. They offered the easiest and most expeditious way of proceeding against any one who tried to collect money for the families of locked-out workmen, or to disseminate literature that the magistrates thought undesirable"[Ibid. 80].
Peel's "bobbies" - professional law enforcement - replaced the posse comitatus system because the latter was inadequate to control a population of increasingly disaffected workmen. In the time of the Luddite and other disturbances, crown officials warned that "to apply the Watch and Ward Act would be to put arms into the hands of the most powerfully disaffected." At the outset of the wars with France, Pitt ended the practice of quartering the army in alehouses, mixed with the general population. Instead, the manufacturing districts were covered with barracks, as "purely a matter of police." The manufacturing areas "came to resemble a country under military occupation." [Ibid. 91-92].
Pitt's police state was supplemented by quasi-private vigilantism, in the time-honored tradition of blackshirts and death squads ever since. For example the "Association for the Protection of Property against Republicans and Levellers" - an anti-Jacobin association of gentry and mill-owners - conducted house-to-house searches and organized Guy Fawkes-style effigy burnings against Paine; "Church and King" mobs terrorised suspected radicals [Chapter Five, "Planting the Liberty Tree," in Thompson].
Thompson characterized this system of control as "political and social apartheid," and argued that "the revolution which did not happen in England was fully as devastating" as the one that did happen in France [pp. 197-198].
Finally, the state aided the growth of manufactures through mercantilism. Modern exponents of the "free market" generally treat mercantilism as a "misguided" attempt to promote some unified national interest, adopted out of sincere ignorance of economic principles. In fact, the architects of mercantilism knew exactly what they were doing. Mercantilism was extremetly efficient for its real purpose: making wealthy manufacturing interests rich at the expense of everyone else. Adam Smith consistently attacked mercantilism, not as a product of economic error, but as a quite intelligent attempt by powerful interests to enrich themselves through the coercive power of the state.
British manufacturing was created by state intervention to shut out foreign goods, give British shipping a monopoly of foreign commerce, and stamp out foreign competition by force. As an example of the latter, British authorities in India destroyed the Bengalese textile industry, makers of the highest quality fabric in the world. Although they had not adopted steam-driven methods of production, there is a real possibility that they would have done so, had India remained politically and economically independent. The once prosperous territory of Bengal is today occupied by Bangladesh and the Calcutta area [Chomsky, World Orders Old and New].
The American, German and Japanese industrial systems were created by the same mercantilist policies, with massive tariffs on industrial goods. "Free trade" was adopted by safely established industrial powers, who used "laissez-faire" as an ideological weapon to prevent potential rivals from following the same path of industrialization. Capitalism has never been established by means of the free market, or even by the primary action of the bourgeoisie. It has always been established by a revolution from above, imposed by a pre-capitalist ruling class. In England, it was the landed aristocracy; in France, Napoleon II's bureaucracy; in Germany, the Junkers; in Japan, the Meiji. In America, the closest approach to a "natural" bourgeois evolution, industrialization was carried out by a mercantilist aristocracy of Federalist shipping magnates and landlords [Harrington, Twilight of Capitalism].
Romantic medievalists like Chesterton and Belloc described the process in the high middle ages by which serfdom had gradually withered away, and the peasants had transformed themselves into de facto freeholders who paid a nominal quit-rent. The feudal class system was disintegrating and being replaced by a much more libertarian and less exploitative one. Immanuel Wallerstein argued that the likely outcome would have been "a system of relatively equal small-scale producers, further flattening out the aristocracies and decentralizing the political structures." By 1650 the trend had been reversed, and there was "a reasonably high level of continuity between the families that had been high strata" in 1450 and 1650. Capitalism, far from being "the overthrow of a backward aristocracy by a progressive bourgeoisie," "was brought into existence by a landed aristocracy which transformed itself into a bourgeoisie because the old system was disintegrating." [Historical Capitalism 41-42, 105-106]. This is echoed in part by Arno Mayer [The Persistence of the Old Regime], who argued for continuity between the landed aristocracy and the capitalist ruling class.
The process by which the high medieval civilization of peasant proprietors, craft guilds and free cities was overthrown, was vividly described by Kropotkin [Mutual Aid 225]. Before the invention of gunpowder, the free cities repelled royal armies more often than not, and won their independence from feudal dues. And these cities often made common cause with peasants in their struggles to control the land. The absolutist state and the capitalist revolution it imposed became possible only when artillery could reduce fortified cities with a high degree of efficiency, and the king could make war on his own people. And in the aftermath of this conquest, the Europe of William Morris was left devastated, depopulated, and miserable.
Peter Tosh had a song called "Four Hundred Years." Although the white working class has suffered nothing like the brutality of black slavery, there has nevertheless been a "four hundred years" of oppression for all of us under the system of state capitalism established in the seventeenth century. Ever since the birth of the first states six thousand years ago, political coercion has allowed one ruling class or another to live off other people's labor. But since the seventeenth century the system of power has become increasingly conscious, unified, and global in scale. The current system of transnational state capitalism, without rival since the collapse of the soviet bureaucratic class system, is a direct outgrowth of the seizure of power "four hundred years" ago. Orwell had it backwards. The past is a "boot smashing a human face." Whether the future is more of the same depends on what we do now.
IDEOLOGICAL HEGEMONY
Saturday, June 20, 2026
Friday, June 19, 2026
Thursday, June 18, 2026
Wednesday, June 17, 2026
Ulysses in Nighttown
My brief mention of James Joyce’s Ulysses on Monday reminded me that I possessed, hidden somewhere deep in a file or cupboard, a theatre programme dating from 1958. And, with a little digging, I found it.
The theatrical production which the programme describes was entitled Ulysses in Nighttown, and it was, as the name suggests, a stage adaptation of Ulysses – or at any rate parts of it, chiefly the section set in Nighttown.
The particular production of the play which I saw was mounted at the Rooftop Theatre in Greenwich Village, and it opened on 5 June 1958. I must have seen it soon after that.
Ulysses in Nighttown was conceived, the programme tells us, by Burgess Meredith, who was a well known actor from the 1930s on but subsequently became much more famous (e.g. as the trainer in Rocky and as Penguin, the arch enemy of Batman). The play was, however, ‘dramatised and transposed’ by Marjorie Barkentin. ‘Transposed’, I suppose, because the Nighttown sequence of Ulysses is already in dramatic form. And ‘dramatised’ because the play version begins, like the book, in the Martello tower. (I was in the very room only last summer, I’ll have you know, and I have a James Joyce mug for my coffee to prove it.) The play ended (as I recall), with part of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy. But there was also, again if my memory does not deceive me, a final coda, perhaps transported from earlier in the text, in which Leopold Bloom sees his dead son Rudi, and calls out his name, in distress.
Why have I kept this programme? Because I have never seen any theatrical production which matched this one, that’s why. OK, so I was young and relatively easily impressed. But you have to admit that this was one hell of a show. I live in hope of seeing something more impressive before I die, but things are not looking hopeful.
Why was Ulysses in Nighttown so memorable? Well, apart from the obvious fact that it was based on one of the most durable novels of the twentieth century, one key factor was that it starred Zero Mostel as Bloom.
Now Zero Mostel was never a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart type movie star, but he was, I venture to suggest, a connoisseur’s actor. He won three Tonys for three Broadway shows in a row, so he knew how to do the job. And he seemed to me then, as now, a natural for Bloom. Whom he made, of course, funny. (Not that Mostel had to distort anything to do that, because Ulysses is full of humour.) It turns out that Mostel won an Obie for this particular performance, and no one can be surprised at that.
Subsequent performances of this play do not seem to have been plentiful. The original production came to London in about 1959 or 1960, when it did not set the town on fire, and it was revived on Broadway in 1974, again with Mostel in the lead and Burgess Meredith directing. There was also an Irish production at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990. And, er, that seems to be about it.
No doubt one of the reasons why the play is seldom performed is that it calls for a large cast. My programme lists 16 performers, who between them play 62 named characters. Far too many, in other words, for most producers today. A cast list of more than about five scares the poor devils to death.
It was this theatrical experience which encouraged me to spend a bit more time reading Ulysses than I had done up to that point – though I was certainly well aware of Joyce and had been somewhat stunned by picking up a copy of Finnegans Wake. And the main purpose of this post is to encourage you to have a look at the book, if you have not done so already.
Ulysses is quite unlike any other novel of my acquaintance in that it is probably not a good thing (in my opinion) to start at the beginning and read through to the end. A passing acquaintance with the structure of the book will provide a little illumination, and after that the best plan, I believe, is to dip into it at random.
You could do a great deal worse than to start by reading the Nighttown episode. In my Penguin edition, which runs to some 700 pages in total, Nighttown begins on page 425, and you can recognise it because the text is set out as if it was a play script. Which, of course, it is.
Now -- who says I don't appreciate literary fiction? It just has to be good, that's all. And I mean genuinely good, not just good according to the professors of English literature.
Tuesday, June 16, 2026
Monday, June 15, 2026
Sunday, June 14, 2026
No Such Thing as Bad Weather
https://davidrmunson.medium.com/no-such-thing-as-bad-weather-aedb21297de
Saturday, June 13, 2026
Friday, June 12, 2026
Thursday, June 11, 2026
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
Gordon Wood’s Proust by Nic Rowan On reading Remembrance of Things Past at ninety.
https://thelampmagazine.com/blog/gordon-woods-proust
