{"id":1069,"date":"2005-03-07T09:18:54","date_gmt":"2005-03-07T17:18:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2005\/03\/the_evil_eye\/"},"modified":"2005-03-07T09:18:54","modified_gmt":"2005-03-07T17:18:54","slug":"the_evil_eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2005\/03\/the_evil_eye.html","title":{"rendered":"THE EVIL EYE"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had my say<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> about neocon Sufi
\nStephen Schwartz, and several Straight Up readers have had theirs<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>. So here’s his say. It
\narrived in an email message. The header began: “I thought you were dead.” The message itself
\ncontinued downhill from there. <\/P>
\n

On the evidence I’ve seen, Schwartz has a faith-based belief in wishful thinking — primitive
\nthinking, ethnologists might call it, as in magic incantations and sorcery — so I
\ntake his meaning to be: “I wish you were dead.” In other words, he was giving me the Evil
\nEye. <\/P>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Now to the message:<\/P>
\n


\n

You were never very bright, but isn’t it interesting that you’re writing so much
\nabout me, but that nobody ever writes about you?
[His bloviating self-importance
\nremains intact. — JH]<\/I>
\n

I figured you’d somehow get that you were dumb to write off three-piece suits in the hippie
\nera, an interest in surrealism (about which more below), and Sufism as “wrong.” Surrealism was
\nnot a nonexistent movement then. Lamantia showed up a few years later and we had some
\ninteresting, long chats. Your alma mater, City Lights, even installed a surrealism section right by
\nthe door. But I’m glad to be your whipping boy, as I have new books coming out from serious
\npublishers, which it seems you don’t, and can use the extra publicity.
[No one ever
\ndoubted the existence of Surrealism as a European movement in art and literature that grew out of
\nDada in the 1920s and flourished through the 1940s. A San Francisco surrealist movement in the
\n1960s is what I doubted. The reference is to Philip Lamantia<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>. If a chat
\nbetween two people makes a movement … oh, never mind.]<\/I><\/P>
\n

I notice you dis the academy, but brag about placing your archives at Northwestern. Hmmm.
\nI never became an academic. So describing me as an academic proselyte is a little
\nsilly.
[Yet another instance of willful incomprehension. Sometimes the worst pedants
\nnever make it into the academy.]<\/I><\/P>
\n

What’s your beef with Sufism? I’d much rather be a navel-gazer than a necrophile off the
\ncorpse of Herbert Huncke, of all people. I knew him, too, well enough to see through that scam. I
\nthought nobody had heard of Taylor Mead in at least 20 years. He’s still alive, too?
[My
\nbeef isn’t with Sufism, about which I couldn’t care less, but with a particular Sufi. Why am I not
\nsurprised that Schwartz, a former obit writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, thinks in terms of
\ncorpses and necrophilia? And now he’s giving Mead the Evil Eye.]<\/I><\/P>
\n

I remember your ridiculous “Answers to Questions from J.J. Lebel.” He was a latter-day
\nsurrealist, you know — I met him in Paris later, at the same time as I visited Breton’s house and
\nmet his widow. You can read about that on THE WEEKLY STANDARD
\nwebsite.<\/B><\/A>
[More advertisements for his inflated self, but I’ll give him the link<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>.]<\/I><\/P>
\n

<\/A>Keep at it, guy. Playing jazz<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> “in your head” sounds suspiciously like making
\nlove “in your head,” but you’re what, at least 65 now, right? That photo of you [left] makes you
\nlook real old. A little too old for the salsa clubs, but who am I to judge?
[No sense of
\nhumor and an age-ist, too. What difference would it make if I were 65, which I look forward to
\nreaching one day?]<\/I><\/I><\/P>
\n

Don’t bother to answer.
[Aw, shucks.]<\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/I>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Schwartz then followed up with another message:<\/P>
\n


\n

Making fun of my initials<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> is real clever. Did you
\nknow that I became a Sufi in Bosnia where among other things I served as an unpaid investigator
\nof war crimes? I retired from my job at the SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE to work in the
\nBalkans. Not as important or as morally worthy as keeping the reputation of Herbert Huncke
\nalive, but it works for me.
[Unpaid investigator of war crimes? Not to be too cynical,
\nhow about freelance reporter seeking the main chance?]<\/BLOCKQUOTE><\/I>
\n

<\/P>
\n

But don’t take my word for it. Take Clifford Geertz’s. In the New York Review of Books
\nGeertz termed him “a strange and outlandish
\nfigure,”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> which is putting it mildly. He traced Schwartz’s peculiar zig-zags
\nfrom an anarchist-Trotskyist, who started out by calling himself “Comrade Sandalio,” to a
\ncheerleader for Reagan’s war in Grenada, as Amir Butler
\nnotes<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>. Veering from a self-described “internationally recognized
\nsurrealist poet” who believed in “the class struggle” to a New Age rightist, Schwartz was
\nsomeone whose compass never pointed north. “The only consistency in [his] career has
\nbeen the frequent ideological shifts that have characterised it,” Butler writes.<\/P>
\n

Schwartz’s “strange journey,”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> a message by
\nPravda.ru writer Bill White<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> that appeared on a Marxist
\nmailing list, gives these details:<\/P>
\n


\n

[L]ooking into his history -\u2013 from his days as a reviled member of San
\nFrancisco’s far-left anarchist-punk community, to his conversion to Jewish conservatism in the
\nmid-1980s while working on a CIA-funded report on Grenada, to his sudden reappearance on the
\nmodern political scene as a spouter of pro-war anti-Muslim hate -\u2013 one can see that Schwartz has
\nalways been perceived as a blowhard making any ridiculous statements he thinks will impress his
\naudience, without any real convictions or evidence to back them up.<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Let’s admit that White is a weirdo white supremacist anti-Semite<\/FONT><\/B><\/A>, as
\nSchwartz has pointed out, and that the Marxists on the list had a bitter falling out with their
\nformer comrade. So their testimony is highly questionable. But this description by Keith Sorel,
\nfrom the Winter 1994 issue of Anarchy! Magazine, dovetails with my recollection<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> of Schwartz and
\nstrikes me as accurate indeed:<\/P>
\n


\n

In the summer of 1984 [I] made contact with “Comrade Sandalio,” also
\nknown as Steve Schwartz [who] claimed he’d found the philosophers stone of the class struggle …
\nSchwartz claimed that the Russian and German revolutions and all the revolts and uprisings since
\n1917 [have] been minor footnotes to the union-controlled San Francisco General strike of 1934 …
\nI began to detect a pattern of screwy activity. Schwartz had a penchant for making grandiloquent
\nstatements and later retracting them or refusing to back them up. … In Caffe Trieste in North
\nBeach he repeatedly bragged loudly that he was “one of the world’s leading historians of the
\nSpanish Revolution.”<\/BLOCKQUOTE>
\n

<\/P>
\n

Well, have we had enough of Schwartzy boy? I have. Movin’ on.<\/I><\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had my say about neocon Sufi Stephen Schwartz, and several Straight Up readers have had theirs. So here’s his say. It arrived in an email message. The header began: “I thought you were dead.” The message itself continued downhill from there. On the evidence I’ve seen, Schwartz has a faith-based belief in wishful thinking — […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1069","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-hf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1069\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}