I've been plodding for some days now through Out of This World, a piece of secondary scholarship by Peter Hallward on his postmodern eminence, Gilles Deleuze. His exegesis I find frequently illuminating, though it often hews a bit too closely to Deleuze's own argot and peculiar spin on all things metaphysical (a shortcoming I've found in secondary scholarship on Derrida, as well), making for occasional knots of prose as impenetrable as that of his subject.
What I've taken from Hallward's study is the relationship of an individual — a discrete, singular entity — to the conditions of her existence is much like that of a character in a shoot-'em-up video game. I haven't played a video game in many years, but I recall that often the character under my control would have some sort of vitality or "life" meter above his head, which was indicate to me, the force behind his actions, how much more injury he can sustain before dying. This life meter is something that represents the video game character's state of well-being — a measure of what is otherwise dynamic of conditioning, constitutive forces — and is something the character cannot directly perceive about himself. Only I, the game player situated outside the field of the game's immediate action, enjoys this view on the character I control. That which the life-meter indicates, i.e., the imperceptible roil of vital forces that at any moment are dwindling or surging, is, however, no less essential to him that his observable features and condition.
According to Deleuze, we are in a similar state. Everything about us we take to be solid and substantial dissolves into the refulgent flare and shimmer of determinant forces, which, rather than lying beyond us in some realm of the transcendent or Ideal, "hover" above us in a manner roughly analogous to the life-meter above the video-game character of my example. Deleuze therefore declares philosophy's task as widening, if not as opening altogether, channels of intuition that can put us in touch with these hovering forces, immanent to us but no where perceivable by us, which occupy what Deleuze terms "the virtual."
This is all I can confidently speak to at the moment, but I'm reasonably certain I'm beginning to master Deleuze's thought — even to the extent where I'm beginning to dispute some points of his. But more on that later . . .
Please offer comments, especially if you find me incorrect or otherwise deficient in anything.
25 September 2007
18 September 2007
16 September 2007
A Detournement
Vegetarian times great food,good health, smart living =
Simple; suppers
29. Satisfying salads,
Healthy pastas,
Easy stir-fries,
Soups, breads — &, more,
A GUIDE TO COOKING WITH! SQUASH
THE ULTIMATE
CHILI FEAST!
FOUND! THE BEST MEATLESS SAUSAGES,
THE WINNERS! 2007?
READER RECIPE? — CONTÈST!
Simple; suppers
29. Satisfying salads,
Healthy pastas,
Easy stir-fries,
Soups, breads — &, more,
A GUIDE TO COOKING WITH! SQUASH
THE ULTIMATE
CHILI FEAST!
FOUND! THE BEST MEATLESS SAUSAGES,
THE WINNERS! 2007?
READER RECIPE? — CONTÈST!
11 September 2007
Overheard (IV)
Drives and flows, farts, bursts of feeling —
Features of our featured speaker, our paragon.
Believe you me, he'll have them squealing
In no time. . . . I know, I know, "the parergon."
That bit where the Platonic paint is peeling.
"Aporia," "lacuna," some such jargon,
Read, of course, across forces failing
To coalesce presence, dethroning the archon,
And yadda yadda yadda. . . . All due deference,
But the way he belabors Heidegger? Tired stuff,
That schtick, trotted out every conference.
Gallic-phallic gobbledygook. Man, it's rough.
"Difference," "differánce" — what difference
Does it make to one whose meat is meter,
Whose words don't rob Paul just to pay Peter?
Features of our featured speaker, our paragon.
Believe you me, he'll have them squealing
In no time. . . . I know, I know, "the parergon."
That bit where the Platonic paint is peeling.
"Aporia," "lacuna," some such jargon,
Read, of course, across forces failing
To coalesce presence, dethroning the archon,
And yadda yadda yadda. . . . All due deference,
But the way he belabors Heidegger? Tired stuff,
That schtick, trotted out every conference.
Gallic-phallic gobbledygook. Man, it's rough.
"Difference," "differánce" — what difference
Does it make to one whose meat is meter,
Whose words don't rob Paul just to pay Peter?
06 September 2007
Clapboard Pastoral
Boy, he couldn't wait to get that out.
Dinner steams its cooking —
Hot little matter that's already perched a blister
On the end of his tongue for him to worry,
Worry tomorrow as he marks working hours.
"Whad'ya think he's about,
That guy across the alley
Who's always reading at his dinner table?"
"Sad man-tits, defeated virility.
A trove of commonplace tragedies."
This as she rinses dishes,
Rowing her elbows close to those "y'know's,"
Hard baseballs beneath her blouse;
Those always got him going.
And, ah, eftsoons it will be snowing.
Dinner steams its cooking —
Hot little matter that's already perched a blister
On the end of his tongue for him to worry,
Worry tomorrow as he marks working hours.
"Whad'ya think he's about,
That guy across the alley
Who's always reading at his dinner table?"
"Sad man-tits, defeated virility.
A trove of commonplace tragedies."
This as she rinses dishes,
Rowing her elbows close to those "y'know's,"
Hard baseballs beneath her blouse;
Those always got him going.
And, ah, eftsoons it will be snowing.
04 September 2007
The Broken
What is so troubling about the shattered, the torn, the marred, the inoperative — in a word, the broken — is that it jeopardizes the validity of the distinction for which it is a functional term. The Broken calls attention to those considerations papered over if not totally elided by notions of utility. Broken objects do present some real dangers — a chipped glass can cut the drinker’s lip, and a punctured tire can pull a car off the road — but to these practical concerns is added the fact, not acknowledged in utilitarian calculations, that the broken object in its broken state acquires new powers: only broken glass can cut, only a punctured tire can draw the car off the road. The in-tact object meanwhile can only perform its designated function successfully if it performs other functions poorly. The broken object’s mal-function is indeed then a malefic function — fugitive, deviant, dangerous in its disutility.
The Broken enjoys the added ability to bring the Whole into doubt, because it both defies and descries the Whole. Every identifiable absence — the chip missing from the goblet, the frayed end of an electric wire, the flabby amorphousness of a punctured tire — points to a prior wholeness from which the broken thing has deviated. It is the terminus of a line of flight always already a property of the Whole. One can in fact claim that the Whole is in fact nothing more than a massive aggregation of a huge number of these points of departure, of these originary points of possible trajectories of becoming-broken.
This tension characterizing the relationship of the Broken to the Whole finds early expression in the mania for “the picturesque” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A crumbling castle, a dilapidated spire, a tumbled-down tower — such elements of the landscape were precisely those which the typical Regency ambler found so appealing, because every crack, every dislodged stone, every jagged line or interrupted curve univocally bespeaks of the previous wholeness which made it possible. In order for it to crumble a castle must first be built.
* * *
In The System of Objects Jean Baudrillard speaks of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” And this state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., saleable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics)— desire as alienation, a fuel for the juridical mythopoeisis of advertising.
Does Baudrillard’s analysis presume, however, a system of objects eternally whole, eternally unbroken yet of more or less fixed signifiance? If the answer is “yes,” then the relationship of the individual to the system of objects, lamentable as it may be, is largely unvarying. If “no,” then it becomes incumbent upon us to discover some of this system’s unaddressed complexities. For instance, the power of the Broken is one of absolute negation. When something breaks, it becomes de-coded, not in the sense that one deciphers it, but in the sense that it spontaneously resituates itself in the chain of significations that is the series of dislocations that determine that thing’s value. But whereas these relative dislocations — not use or exchange value simpliciter, but some admixture of both along with other social significations — remain necessary to an object’s value, breaking represents near-absolute dislocation vis-à-vis the other signifiers in the chain.
Broken things sever possibilities of synecdochic metonymies; a potshard can never aspire to the arête of the pot. Rather broken things in their brokenness tend paradoxically to be whole and complete unto themselves, and thus resist enlistment into the same proximal representations as their in-tact counterparts.
* * *
When one wants to convey the fact that she is the offspring of parents no longer married to each other she may say she is from “a broken home.” The implication here is that the lines of filiation constituent of one’s identity as a member of a nuclear family are no longer triangular, but radial. Being from “a broken home” brings one into a relation with a non-relation, though no less a relation for it, because it is measurable and therefore finite, but only so because it it has broken with its futurity. Its wholeness instead rests solely in its eternal anteriority, the only futurity allowed it. The offspring of divorced parents actually stands in relation to a severing that continues to sever, but that also continues to signify.
What we should conclude from all of this is that to break is never to destroy, but simply to re-make in some way in which the significant implications have yet to manifest themselves. If, as Carol Burnett once said, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then truly the Broken is but the Whole plus time.
The Broken enjoys the added ability to bring the Whole into doubt, because it both defies and descries the Whole. Every identifiable absence — the chip missing from the goblet, the frayed end of an electric wire, the flabby amorphousness of a punctured tire — points to a prior wholeness from which the broken thing has deviated. It is the terminus of a line of flight always already a property of the Whole. One can in fact claim that the Whole is in fact nothing more than a massive aggregation of a huge number of these points of departure, of these originary points of possible trajectories of becoming-broken.
This tension characterizing the relationship of the Broken to the Whole finds early expression in the mania for “the picturesque” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A crumbling castle, a dilapidated spire, a tumbled-down tower — such elements of the landscape were precisely those which the typical Regency ambler found so appealing, because every crack, every dislodged stone, every jagged line or interrupted curve univocally bespeaks of the previous wholeness which made it possible. In order for it to crumble a castle must first be built.
* * *
In The System of Objects Jean Baudrillard speaks of “the ambiguity of the object,” an infernal consumerist toil “in which individuals never have the opportunity to surpass themselves, but can only re-collect themselves in contradiction, in their desires and in the forces that censor their desires.” And this state of affairs is brought about by the fact that “a censor is personalized in the object,” resulting in “censorship [that] operates through ‘unconstrained’ behaviors (purchasing, choice, consumption), and through spontaneous investment.” The system of objects is thus a system of personalized censors, each one seeing to it that the individual’s desire is aroused in such a manner that it may be channeled into an “impoverished language” of limited signs (i.e., saleable goods) and indexed assumptions about desire (i.e., market research, target demographics)— desire as alienation, a fuel for the juridical mythopoeisis of advertising.
Does Baudrillard’s analysis presume, however, a system of objects eternally whole, eternally unbroken yet of more or less fixed signifiance? If the answer is “yes,” then the relationship of the individual to the system of objects, lamentable as it may be, is largely unvarying. If “no,” then it becomes incumbent upon us to discover some of this system’s unaddressed complexities. For instance, the power of the Broken is one of absolute negation. When something breaks, it becomes de-coded, not in the sense that one deciphers it, but in the sense that it spontaneously resituates itself in the chain of significations that is the series of dislocations that determine that thing’s value. But whereas these relative dislocations — not use or exchange value simpliciter, but some admixture of both along with other social significations — remain necessary to an object’s value, breaking represents near-absolute dislocation vis-à-vis the other signifiers in the chain.
Broken things sever possibilities of synecdochic metonymies; a potshard can never aspire to the arête of the pot. Rather broken things in their brokenness tend paradoxically to be whole and complete unto themselves, and thus resist enlistment into the same proximal representations as their in-tact counterparts.
* * *
When one wants to convey the fact that she is the offspring of parents no longer married to each other she may say she is from “a broken home.” The implication here is that the lines of filiation constituent of one’s identity as a member of a nuclear family are no longer triangular, but radial. Being from “a broken home” brings one into a relation with a non-relation, though no less a relation for it, because it is measurable and therefore finite, but only so because it it has broken with its futurity. Its wholeness instead rests solely in its eternal anteriority, the only futurity allowed it. The offspring of divorced parents actually stands in relation to a severing that continues to sever, but that also continues to signify.
What we should conclude from all of this is that to break is never to destroy, but simply to re-make in some way in which the significant implications have yet to manifest themselves. If, as Carol Burnett once said, “comedy is tragedy plus time,” then truly the Broken is but the Whole plus time.
28 August 2007
Acheron
There's a sort of tired like a secret —
a small bite from the inside, where the worry-marks nag;
a toroid jitter like a zero coming into itself,
its collapse a relief.
Were there one to take my hand,
to peer into my palm,
to count the tears cried it,
I would know this as love.
a small bite from the inside, where the worry-marks nag;
a toroid jitter like a zero coming into itself,
its collapse a relief.
Were there one to take my hand,
to peer into my palm,
to count the tears cried it,
I would know this as love.
26 August 2007
A Consolation Elsewhere
… So much for the hordes mad to redeem legislated dreams, mad to buy, mad to fatten fleeting moments in the caress of the well-turned bauble …
Upon entering the wholesale club today I saw an old man pause before a plasma television. His face slackened before it, becoming smooth again like a child's. His eyes took him to where he was no longer — basting in brute splendor and feats effortlessly fell, off-handedly manly.
On its electric surface doe eyes framed with lashes like lazy punkahs batted at him and implants thrust achingly forward. Clefts beckoned, swells cajoled. Under the spray-on insulation and girders and halogen lights the box wove its spell. A bright bit of moisture on his lip told me all I need to know. I pressed on to lettuce and socks secure in the sexlessness of it, in the stripped down necessity of having to feed and dress day after day after day.
Someday, a coffin makeweight.
Perhaps this old man and I are already dearly departed, trapped in bodies whose failures signify, whose successes are purely nugatory (“Went the whole day without a twinge in my hip ...). We share this life where life — real life in its ruddy, muddy essence — is a mere memory flung in our face by the beautiful big boxed-in world and it shapely, deathless fauna.
Upon entering the wholesale club today I saw an old man pause before a plasma television. His face slackened before it, becoming smooth again like a child's. His eyes took him to where he was no longer — basting in brute splendor and feats effortlessly fell, off-handedly manly.
On its electric surface doe eyes framed with lashes like lazy punkahs batted at him and implants thrust achingly forward. Clefts beckoned, swells cajoled. Under the spray-on insulation and girders and halogen lights the box wove its spell. A bright bit of moisture on his lip told me all I need to know. I pressed on to lettuce and socks secure in the sexlessness of it, in the stripped down necessity of having to feed and dress day after day after day.
Someday, a coffin makeweight.
Perhaps this old man and I are already dearly departed, trapped in bodies whose failures signify, whose successes are purely nugatory (“Went the whole day without a twinge in my hip ...). We share this life where life — real life in its ruddy, muddy essence — is a mere memory flung in our face by the beautiful big boxed-in world and it shapely, deathless fauna.
23 August 2007
"The Time Is out of Joint"
Perhaps the stars grow fainter and the sun dimmer because they recede from us.
What would time be, I wonder, after the earth has uncoupled from its parent? How would the last timekeeper, before joining his fellows in freezing, measure those last extra-solar hours, minutes, seconds?
The earth spins and hurdles, punching itself through space's dark breast, and we can't seem to keep concerned, choosing to chew instead the lotus of a billion pixellated come-ons, ones which tell us our best "us" rest on the other side of its convexity: the lies that lubricate things, the cable wefts that bind us, taut 'til made to shake our blood into a thousand frenzied droplets.
A debt to pleasure, to be sure.
What would time be, I wonder, after the earth has uncoupled from its parent? How would the last timekeeper, before joining his fellows in freezing, measure those last extra-solar hours, minutes, seconds?
The earth spins and hurdles, punching itself through space's dark breast, and we can't seem to keep concerned, choosing to chew instead the lotus of a billion pixellated come-ons, ones which tell us our best "us" rest on the other side of its convexity: the lies that lubricate things, the cable wefts that bind us, taut 'til made to shake our blood into a thousand frenzied droplets.
A debt to pleasure, to be sure.
14 August 2007
Meager Ambits for Those Imagined Mighty
The butcher'll shave it as thin as you like it,
but you must — you must! —
insist that he change the blade,
'cause on the one on there now
deliquescent clots gather unto them legions
so infinitesimally infinite and arriving as if on cue.
Do I sound like Howard Hughes?
Well, a sneeze,
a panspermic peopling, no less;
that wee fleck feeds multitudes,
one of which will find that one corner in the miles of you
unpatrolled by any cells o' the watch —
that batch of sandwich steak looks fresh.
Is his thumb on the scale?
No sale!
but you must — you must! —
insist that he change the blade,
'cause on the one on there now
deliquescent clots gather unto them legions
so infinitesimally infinite and arriving as if on cue.
Do I sound like Howard Hughes?
Well, a sneeze,
a panspermic peopling, no less;
that wee fleck feeds multitudes,
one of which will find that one corner in the miles of you
unpatrolled by any cells o' the watch —
that batch of sandwich steak looks fresh.
Is his thumb on the scale?
No sale!
10 August 2007
The Wedding
The jagged prize that fell to him
Offered him so little that humble he
(One so backward and behindhand he frequently
Can’t see 'round his own head)
Stood there like a mound of goddamn fantastic,
Painfully attuned to the piss, Rabelaisian,
Consecrating the ceremony, only hoping
The whole fucking embarrassment of it
Would dribble away like spit
Around a newly breached tooth in a toddler’s gum;
Only hoping his monster'd be made to scrape and toe
The morning into novel convolutions, though
Only hoping; only he,
Humble he, hoping —
Hoping for only . . .
All of this
As I listen
To talk of Jane Austen.
Offered him so little that humble he
(One so backward and behindhand he frequently
Can’t see 'round his own head)
Stood there like a mound of goddamn fantastic,
Painfully attuned to the piss, Rabelaisian,
Consecrating the ceremony, only hoping
The whole fucking embarrassment of it
Would dribble away like spit
Around a newly breached tooth in a toddler’s gum;
Only hoping his monster'd be made to scrape and toe
The morning into novel convolutions, though
Only hoping; only he,
Humble he, hoping —
Hoping for only . . .
All of this
As I listen
To talk of Jane Austen.
09 August 2007
Multiculturalism in Crisis
On NPR's On Point the host, Tom Ashbrook, is currently interviewing Robert Putnam, the sociologist who wrote Bowling Alone, a work anatomizing the retreat from public life that characterized the late decades of the twentieth century. He's just published an article that finds that the more ethnically diverse a neighborhood is, the less likely its denizens are properly to trust others, to vote, to engage in public discourse, to place faith the government, and the like. In fact, as Prof. Putnam so pithily pointed out a moment ago, the only things that increase are "protest marches and TV watching."
Alarming stuff. And Prof. Putnam, if his voice is any indication, seems exceedingly uncomfortable making his assertions; he keeps protesting his staunch liberalism, but his stammering manner suggests that he's well aware his remarks cast such bona fides in doubt — and having Pat Buchanan, also invited to the table today, in his corner has certainly not put him at ease. After all, the phenomena Prof. Putnam describes certainly lend force to the conspiracy theorists' argument that Leftism in the US and elsewhere, as underwritten and inspired by such things as the Communist International, was really cultural warfare intended to undermine the bastions of Western democracy — and thus Western culture.
23 July 2007
Le jouet des dieux
They called him Fuckface just for the hell of it, tried to get a couple fingers between his ribs or down that little hollow below his throat, above his breastbone.
They punched his guts, each blow driving nubs of spine into the brick wall behind him.
He stood there taking it, incredulous his so-called friends would trick him so.
Did he gain, just then, a glimpse down the hall of his later him – resented flesh stippled with pimples and moles, undulant weird folds encasing drives and their mechanism?
All of this did he come to know at the tender age of ten?
All of this as hard bones hammered harder him?
They punched his guts, each blow driving nubs of spine into the brick wall behind him.
He stood there taking it, incredulous his so-called friends would trick him so.
Did he gain, just then, a glimpse down the hall of his later him – resented flesh stippled with pimples and moles, undulant weird folds encasing drives and their mechanism?
All of this did he come to know at the tender age of ten?
All of this as hard bones hammered harder him?
19 July 2007
Mirabelle, or the False Dream of Injuns
there were sad times —
a no-clown-knock face;
bisbee, my disgrace —
bored, we sucked lattès and watched bikers
rip their petrol screams through mines
that once gave us pennies, not dimes.
a no-clown-knock face;
bisbee, my disgrace —
bored, we sucked lattès and watched bikers
rip their petrol screams through mines
that once gave us pennies, not dimes.
16 July 2007
A Last Look Back
A distance of 3600 miles can drown a lot of shouts. It take planes so long to get there — there where my evening ritual, slid away, will find new life in this salmon gloaming; here where contrails sky-write a language whose figures call to mind time when we first noticed our tongues had a second relation to our minds; here where they wish bridges into bows so a million Kodakchrome memories can say, "I was there."
"I was there," I'll say from there, "stalking behind hot oven walls of anomie, a rip-off victim in the making, nursing my prematurely eldritch bones and wishing small joys before the grave comes to claim me." And with nothing before me but the road and the will to make it I'll depart. The dust'll bear no witness to my steps, or to my tears.
"I was there," I'll say from there, "stalking behind hot oven walls of anomie, a rip-off victim in the making, nursing my prematurely eldritch bones and wishing small joys before the grave comes to claim me." And with nothing before me but the road and the will to make it I'll depart. The dust'll bear no witness to my steps, or to my tears.
Kicking the Bird
Coming down from over two year's dependence on anti-depressants, I feel fine — better than fine, in fact. I was worried that I experience a sort of "dam-burst" after being on anti-depressants for so long, but I actually feel a strange serenity, as well as an improved command of my faculties.
I feel like I'm in the final chapter of a dark volume of my life story. I feared and disapproved of anti-depressants from the get-go; I'd read too many accounts of unshakable mental torpor ever to want to risk my own mind for such a fool's paradise. I thought it wiser to co-exist with my anxieties and cycles of depression, and after this unpleasant detour through the neurochemical slough I've discovered I was right all along.
If the only way I could have saved my marriage was by having chosen to go on anti-depressants years before the fatal crisis of my separation, as my ex-wife claimed, then perhaps my marriage wasn't worth saving.
Maybe now I'll find what Zen masters call my "original face."
I feel like I'm in the final chapter of a dark volume of my life story. I feared and disapproved of anti-depressants from the get-go; I'd read too many accounts of unshakable mental torpor ever to want to risk my own mind for such a fool's paradise. I thought it wiser to co-exist with my anxieties and cycles of depression, and after this unpleasant detour through the neurochemical slough I've discovered I was right all along.
If the only way I could have saved my marriage was by having chosen to go on anti-depressants years before the fatal crisis of my separation, as my ex-wife claimed, then perhaps my marriage wasn't worth saving.
Maybe now I'll find what Zen masters call my "original face."
12 July 2007
All Politics Are Vocal
Arizona – for a state with so much sunshine, there’s precious little light.
Once again, in the name of keeping the public safe from consideration of its own interest, a bill is before the state legislature that would impose a 500-dollar fine on any schoolteacher who airs her political views in the classroom. To the legislature’s credit this bill, sponsored by state congressman Thayer Verschoor of Gilbert, appears dead in the water. The summer heat has apparently not baked the sense out of everyone.
The law is as bizarrely impractical as it is incendiary. Even Fox faux liberal Alan Combs, on whose radio show Rep. Verschoor recently appeared, observed that enforcing this law would prove problematic. He asked if Verschoor proposed planting some sort of marshal in every classroom to audit teachers’ lessons, writing citations whenever anything with a whiff of polemic issues from them. Verschoor agreed that such an enforcement measure is nigh on impossible. Which leaves just one other mode of implementation: encouraging students to denounce teachers to their superiors.
I hope you can appreciate what sort of nightmare would ensue were such a Stalin-era measure actually implemented. Can K-through-12ers really be counted on to sift fairly any passing remark a teacher might make on contemporary politics or the current administration? Doesn’t this create what in economics are known as “perverse incentives” – students discovering that threatening denouncement is an effective way of leveraging grades, or of ridding the classroom of unpopular authority? Most adult Americans don’t know that Dick Cheney is vice president or that 9/11 happened in 2001. How much awareness of political reality can we credit American adolescents with, then? This seems a crucial thing to consider if Verschoor does in fact intend to deputize them as enforcers of his asinine bill. Hell, I can tell you from personal experience that most American eighteen-year-olds can’t keep the facts straight; their minds warp them to suit whatever little officious impulse they feel at the time. My last year as a University of Arizona instructor, a student of mine, whom I one day informed that Hinduism historically antedates Christianity, reported me to her mother, who in turn gave my name to some ultra-right watchdog group. Mother and daughter’s grounds for doing so: that in hatred and defiance of Gospel truth I proclaimed Hinduism superior to Christianity. The student conveniently left out of her account to her mother, who kindly e-mailed me a maundering, ungrammatical j’accuse, my telling her that I myself am Roman Catholic.
But who am I kidding? Slavering Pentecostals like my former student and her mother probably don’t recognize Catholics as fellow Christians.
Besides the fact that you cannot trust non-denominational charismatics – for they speak in tongues, all of which are forked – I learned from the whole affair that you cannot credit Americans with discretion or discernment, especially young ones, for the simple reason that whatever words of yours manage to slip past their iPod earbuds just gets swept up in the cognitive slurry of their labile minds. I make this assessment based on instructor training I received at UA, during which I was told to keep activities short and animated to accommodate the average freshman’s seven-second attention span, and to change the activities every ten minutes so the class might more closely resemble a television show. Ask anyone who taught composition at UA, and they’ll tell you the same. Many students had learning disabilities – euphemistically called “different skill sets” by Writing program mandarins, though how the inability to write a coherent paragraph actually points to an ability in some as yet undiscovered area, I remain unsure – and nearly as many were on some sort of medication, usually Adderall, an SSRI, or some combination of the two. This suggested to me that, wherever their skill sets lie, they’re not in the area of reason or ethics.
To encourage students to police their teachers’ utterances is to let the inmates run the asylum, a state of affairs it seems we’ve been moving toward, anyway. The whole business of “student-center learning,” for instance, is really little more than a programmatic undermining of the educator’s authority in favor of some Deweyesque notion of self-discovery that, while it might defenestrate quality, certainly promotes retention, and therefore increased tuition revenue – Apollo crucified on a cross of gold. These charming Rousseauvean subjects, quivering in anticipation of an opportunity to denounce someone to the State, installed over teachers can only mean bad things in the future. Opponents of Verschoor's bill must recognize this. I believe the initiative a nonstarter, riddled as it is with ambiguity. After all, what are the juridical criteria for finable political speech? If a history teacher teaches her students about Athenian democracy or the Roman republic, is she out of bounds? What about the founding of the United States?
I have to say, I wonder about Verschoor’s constituency broiling under the angry sun in Gilbert. Why is a teacher who, in a moment of indiscretion, expresses sympathy for Chairman Mao so terrifying? Is the fundie-conservative catechism so fragile that it cannot withstand contrary opinion? By voting into office a politician who floats a bill of such unfathomable idiocy as Verschoor’s, conservative Arizonans tacitly admit that the only discourse favoring their cause is the discourse that silences further discourse; but only by parsing the double-speak window dressing – promotion of freedom of thought in the classroom, preservation of the “marketplace of ideas” – can you find this substratum of their political praxis.
Insisting that political speech be barred from the classroom also presupposes that speech, and the ideas it contains, fall easily under distinct categories. My friend Rob mused upon this on his ‘blog, and how (if I read him rightly) a notion of “inorganic democracy” emerges that progressives must constantly combat before even being to table their own proposals. I personally believe those who hoe a narrow row should reap its meager fruit, but the problem is one of collateral damage. Latitudinarians unable to escape to friendlier environs are condemned to suffer the stupidity of the credulous, bovine majority over them. In other words, if I get behind some America-n’-apple-pie demagogue whose blandishments ultimately fuck up my life, they not only fuck up my life, but the life of my liberal neighbor’s as well. Dumbshits should always expect pushback from people smarter than them, and not because these smarter folks are a compulsively overweening lot who relish any opportunity to micromanage other people’s lives, but because they cherish the very liberty that fundie-cons believe themselves the exclusive champions of, and will move to secure those liberties by their own lights.
Unfortunately, too many parties crying, “Don’t tread on me!” brings everyone to a halt. This is why I hold out no real hope for Arizona – or for the United States. Verschoor and his ilk will continue their ill-fated provocations, and thoughtful people will continue to think them asses for doing so. But such partisan inertia plays into the right wing’s strategy of constantly provoking skirmishes to forestall the war (Does anyone remember the swift boats and matrimony-minded gays of 2004?). The Manichaean struggle will thus go on, as will the Iraq War, as will the erosion of educational standards, as will the decline in living standards, as will the ramping-up of a surveillance state . . .
George Bush Sr.’s famous “thousand points of light” meme may just mean a thousand fires lit to rob the inevitable conflagration of fuel.
Once again, in the name of keeping the public safe from consideration of its own interest, a bill is before the state legislature that would impose a 500-dollar fine on any schoolteacher who airs her political views in the classroom. To the legislature’s credit this bill, sponsored by state congressman Thayer Verschoor of Gilbert, appears dead in the water. The summer heat has apparently not baked the sense out of everyone.
The law is as bizarrely impractical as it is incendiary. Even Fox faux liberal Alan Combs, on whose radio show Rep. Verschoor recently appeared, observed that enforcing this law would prove problematic. He asked if Verschoor proposed planting some sort of marshal in every classroom to audit teachers’ lessons, writing citations whenever anything with a whiff of polemic issues from them. Verschoor agreed that such an enforcement measure is nigh on impossible. Which leaves just one other mode of implementation: encouraging students to denounce teachers to their superiors.
I hope you can appreciate what sort of nightmare would ensue were such a Stalin-era measure actually implemented. Can K-through-12ers really be counted on to sift fairly any passing remark a teacher might make on contemporary politics or the current administration? Doesn’t this create what in economics are known as “perverse incentives” – students discovering that threatening denouncement is an effective way of leveraging grades, or of ridding the classroom of unpopular authority? Most adult Americans don’t know that Dick Cheney is vice president or that 9/11 happened in 2001. How much awareness of political reality can we credit American adolescents with, then? This seems a crucial thing to consider if Verschoor does in fact intend to deputize them as enforcers of his asinine bill. Hell, I can tell you from personal experience that most American eighteen-year-olds can’t keep the facts straight; their minds warp them to suit whatever little officious impulse they feel at the time. My last year as a University of Arizona instructor, a student of mine, whom I one day informed that Hinduism historically antedates Christianity, reported me to her mother, who in turn gave my name to some ultra-right watchdog group. Mother and daughter’s grounds for doing so: that in hatred and defiance of Gospel truth I proclaimed Hinduism superior to Christianity. The student conveniently left out of her account to her mother, who kindly e-mailed me a maundering, ungrammatical j’accuse, my telling her that I myself am Roman Catholic.
But who am I kidding? Slavering Pentecostals like my former student and her mother probably don’t recognize Catholics as fellow Christians.
Besides the fact that you cannot trust non-denominational charismatics – for they speak in tongues, all of which are forked – I learned from the whole affair that you cannot credit Americans with discretion or discernment, especially young ones, for the simple reason that whatever words of yours manage to slip past their iPod earbuds just gets swept up in the cognitive slurry of their labile minds. I make this assessment based on instructor training I received at UA, during which I was told to keep activities short and animated to accommodate the average freshman’s seven-second attention span, and to change the activities every ten minutes so the class might more closely resemble a television show. Ask anyone who taught composition at UA, and they’ll tell you the same. Many students had learning disabilities – euphemistically called “different skill sets” by Writing program mandarins, though how the inability to write a coherent paragraph actually points to an ability in some as yet undiscovered area, I remain unsure – and nearly as many were on some sort of medication, usually Adderall, an SSRI, or some combination of the two. This suggested to me that, wherever their skill sets lie, they’re not in the area of reason or ethics.
To encourage students to police their teachers’ utterances is to let the inmates run the asylum, a state of affairs it seems we’ve been moving toward, anyway. The whole business of “student-center learning,” for instance, is really little more than a programmatic undermining of the educator’s authority in favor of some Deweyesque notion of self-discovery that, while it might defenestrate quality, certainly promotes retention, and therefore increased tuition revenue – Apollo crucified on a cross of gold. These charming Rousseauvean subjects, quivering in anticipation of an opportunity to denounce someone to the State, installed over teachers can only mean bad things in the future. Opponents of Verschoor's bill must recognize this. I believe the initiative a nonstarter, riddled as it is with ambiguity. After all, what are the juridical criteria for finable political speech? If a history teacher teaches her students about Athenian democracy or the Roman republic, is she out of bounds? What about the founding of the United States?
I have to say, I wonder about Verschoor’s constituency broiling under the angry sun in Gilbert. Why is a teacher who, in a moment of indiscretion, expresses sympathy for Chairman Mao so terrifying? Is the fundie-conservative catechism so fragile that it cannot withstand contrary opinion? By voting into office a politician who floats a bill of such unfathomable idiocy as Verschoor’s, conservative Arizonans tacitly admit that the only discourse favoring their cause is the discourse that silences further discourse; but only by parsing the double-speak window dressing – promotion of freedom of thought in the classroom, preservation of the “marketplace of ideas” – can you find this substratum of their political praxis.
Insisting that political speech be barred from the classroom also presupposes that speech, and the ideas it contains, fall easily under distinct categories. My friend Rob mused upon this on his ‘blog, and how (if I read him rightly) a notion of “inorganic democracy” emerges that progressives must constantly combat before even being to table their own proposals. I personally believe those who hoe a narrow row should reap its meager fruit, but the problem is one of collateral damage. Latitudinarians unable to escape to friendlier environs are condemned to suffer the stupidity of the credulous, bovine majority over them. In other words, if I get behind some America-n’-apple-pie demagogue whose blandishments ultimately fuck up my life, they not only fuck up my life, but the life of my liberal neighbor’s as well. Dumbshits should always expect pushback from people smarter than them, and not because these smarter folks are a compulsively overweening lot who relish any opportunity to micromanage other people’s lives, but because they cherish the very liberty that fundie-cons believe themselves the exclusive champions of, and will move to secure those liberties by their own lights.
Unfortunately, too many parties crying, “Don’t tread on me!” brings everyone to a halt. This is why I hold out no real hope for Arizona – or for the United States. Verschoor and his ilk will continue their ill-fated provocations, and thoughtful people will continue to think them asses for doing so. But such partisan inertia plays into the right wing’s strategy of constantly provoking skirmishes to forestall the war (Does anyone remember the swift boats and matrimony-minded gays of 2004?). The Manichaean struggle will thus go on, as will the Iraq War, as will the erosion of educational standards, as will the decline in living standards, as will the ramping-up of a surveillance state . . .
George Bush Sr.’s famous “thousand points of light” meme may just mean a thousand fires lit to rob the inevitable conflagration of fuel.
09 July 2007
Letter to a Young Atheist
It appears you're suffering the very thing that atheists believe themselves immune to, but nonetheless experiences sooner or later: a crisis of faith. For atheism is faith, faith in faithlessness as an existential lodestar, and is therefore susceptible to instability, wobbling, and doubt like any other creed.
My intention is not to preach. I'm simply suggesting that an atheistic worldview saddles one with many burdens, if indeed she sees in it more than simply an excuse for egoism or nihilistic hedonism. But I suspect you seek a principled atheism, and, as a former atheist myself ("to everything there is a season"), that is a vexatious proposition, because stalking the minds of every atheist is a capital-w "Why?" — why do a kindness, when their is no balance sheet, no celestial scorecard on which my deeds, good or bad, are recorded? Recovery from doubt and Weltschmerz must proceed from a close consideration of this question, along with an equally close consideration of its answers' practical implications.
The dizzying and often depressing thing about atheism is that it radically alters one's relationship to time. One has no hereafter to appeal to as the arbiter of life's meaning; one must demand that the here-and-now justify itself, and time's celerity complicates the issue. Destinations tend to color the experience of the journey. If annihilation lies on the horizon, how can it not influence every step toward it?
Nietzsche despised Buddhism because it robbed life of tragedy. We know the reasons why he despised Christianity. All that was left was to embrace the tragedy of temporal existence, to aestheticize the grim tones of fell inevitability. Denying God His existence is only the first step. The universal mechanism continues to run, sweeping one's short existence along with it. When I was an atheist, I found I constantly negotiated a treacherous course between the Scylla and Charybdis of horror and banality, the latter in many ways being more fearsome. The one thing I took consolation in during my godless salad days was that whatever was, was fitting — an appropriate just-so-ness that, as I constantly reminded myself, at that moment couldn't have been otherwise, because it wasn't otherwise; a sort of secular dharma, I guess. It was difficult for me to distinguish it from garden-variety fatalism, and of course a host problems concerning freedom, choice and autonomy came in its wake; but it worked for me at the time. I had to affirm the moment and its attendant event in their particularity, had to say "yes" to them if only because it was healthier than saying "no." This attitude of insistent affirmation, this "yes-saying," I learned from Nietzsche, and it suited me for many years, until events in my life unfolded that made principled, Nietzschean atheism no longer a proper fit. If you're interested, I'll share with you some day what it was that turned me from this path.
Your former roommate's death, I guess I'm saying, has confronted you with a true test of your (non)faith's resiliency. Does the situation, precisely as it is right now, present you with satisfactory answers, without recourse to the past, now the fixed record of history, or the future, an indistinct nebula with the void behind it? Simply now, as you think and feel it? If it does, then you can credit your atheism as the right conviction, and find the very explanation you crave in the contemplation of atheism itself.
Those who would challenge your heretical views are champions of dogma, not faith. For if they were true champions of faith, they'd respect, even encourage, your atheism, because you've found it a suitable thematic of your personal narrative. Anyone who aims to save you is doomed to failure, even without your active resistance, because what that individual doesn't understand is one cannot "saved" one already "saved" — by atheism, in your case.
God died for our sins; the God who died for our sins died — a classic instance of Hegelian double-negation, the only truly negating negation. The space is clear to make your own meaning. Perhaps this second sacrifice is God's greatest gift. The only interpretive material you have, however, is what's before you: the event of your friend's death, her once existing, your current existence, your eventual death. Nothing outside, aside, beside, below, above or in addition to. You must make matter and phenomena explain themselves strictly on and in their own terms.
They appear harsh, those words I just wrote. I don't mean the to be. I just wanted to pass along to you the best articles of my former (non)faith in the hope they comfort you, and, more importantly, fortify your heart and mind against future assaults upon them. I also send my condolences.
My intention is not to preach. I'm simply suggesting that an atheistic worldview saddles one with many burdens, if indeed she sees in it more than simply an excuse for egoism or nihilistic hedonism. But I suspect you seek a principled atheism, and, as a former atheist myself ("to everything there is a season"), that is a vexatious proposition, because stalking the minds of every atheist is a capital-w "Why?" — why do a kindness, when their is no balance sheet, no celestial scorecard on which my deeds, good or bad, are recorded? Recovery from doubt and Weltschmerz must proceed from a close consideration of this question, along with an equally close consideration of its answers' practical implications.
The dizzying and often depressing thing about atheism is that it radically alters one's relationship to time. One has no hereafter to appeal to as the arbiter of life's meaning; one must demand that the here-and-now justify itself, and time's celerity complicates the issue. Destinations tend to color the experience of the journey. If annihilation lies on the horizon, how can it not influence every step toward it?
Nietzsche despised Buddhism because it robbed life of tragedy. We know the reasons why he despised Christianity. All that was left was to embrace the tragedy of temporal existence, to aestheticize the grim tones of fell inevitability. Denying God His existence is only the first step. The universal mechanism continues to run, sweeping one's short existence along with it. When I was an atheist, I found I constantly negotiated a treacherous course between the Scylla and Charybdis of horror and banality, the latter in many ways being more fearsome. The one thing I took consolation in during my godless salad days was that whatever was, was fitting — an appropriate just-so-ness that, as I constantly reminded myself, at that moment couldn't have been otherwise, because it wasn't otherwise; a sort of secular dharma, I guess. It was difficult for me to distinguish it from garden-variety fatalism, and of course a host problems concerning freedom, choice and autonomy came in its wake; but it worked for me at the time. I had to affirm the moment and its attendant event in their particularity, had to say "yes" to them if only because it was healthier than saying "no." This attitude of insistent affirmation, this "yes-saying," I learned from Nietzsche, and it suited me for many years, until events in my life unfolded that made principled, Nietzschean atheism no longer a proper fit. If you're interested, I'll share with you some day what it was that turned me from this path.
Your former roommate's death, I guess I'm saying, has confronted you with a true test of your (non)faith's resiliency. Does the situation, precisely as it is right now, present you with satisfactory answers, without recourse to the past, now the fixed record of history, or the future, an indistinct nebula with the void behind it? Simply now, as you think and feel it? If it does, then you can credit your atheism as the right conviction, and find the very explanation you crave in the contemplation of atheism itself.
Those who would challenge your heretical views are champions of dogma, not faith. For if they were true champions of faith, they'd respect, even encourage, your atheism, because you've found it a suitable thematic of your personal narrative. Anyone who aims to save you is doomed to failure, even without your active resistance, because what that individual doesn't understand is one cannot "saved" one already "saved" — by atheism, in your case.
God died for our sins; the God who died for our sins died — a classic instance of Hegelian double-negation, the only truly negating negation. The space is clear to make your own meaning. Perhaps this second sacrifice is God's greatest gift. The only interpretive material you have, however, is what's before you: the event of your friend's death, her once existing, your current existence, your eventual death. Nothing outside, aside, beside, below, above or in addition to. You must make matter and phenomena explain themselves strictly on and in their own terms.
They appear harsh, those words I just wrote. I don't mean the to be. I just wanted to pass along to you the best articles of my former (non)faith in the hope they comfort you, and, more importantly, fortify your heart and mind against future assaults upon them. I also send my condolences.
03 July 2007
Epater l'artiste
My friend Rob's latest 'blog entry on the "Splasher Manifesto," a collective cri de coeur put in print by marauding saboteurs of New York street art, highlights an interesting element in the crisis of artistic authenticity: The mechanisms of co-optation, having accelerated to near instantaneousness, have erected in people's minds fundamental presumptions as to the artist's now automatically suspect integrity.
This recently coined a priori of aesthetic judgment I find dismaying, because it threatens to make art impossible. It took quite a few years for Manet et al. to be absorbed into the canons of bourgeois taste (and Manet's ambitions were arguably bourgeois to begin with). Impressionist painting did enjoy brief middle years as strange, off-putting, unassimilable works. But today, such epater le bourgeois appears impossible, unless artists descend to shock — dung Madonnas, piss Christs, and what-not — and even this is doomed to failure. Perhaps the Splashers are heeding the immortal line from Fellini's 8 1/2, "Sometimes it's better to destroy than to create something unneccessary," a lesson that deviates from Schumpeter's economic doctrine of "creative destruction" in that the former exhorts entrepreneurs to destruction in order to create things that lack as much necessity as the things destroyed to make way for them.
This recently coined a priori of aesthetic judgment I find dismaying, because it threatens to make art impossible. It took quite a few years for Manet et al. to be absorbed into the canons of bourgeois taste (and Manet's ambitions were arguably bourgeois to begin with). Impressionist painting did enjoy brief middle years as strange, off-putting, unassimilable works. But today, such epater le bourgeois appears impossible, unless artists descend to shock — dung Madonnas, piss Christs, and what-not — and even this is doomed to failure. Perhaps the Splashers are heeding the immortal line from Fellini's 8 1/2, "Sometimes it's better to destroy than to create something unneccessary," a lesson that deviates from Schumpeter's economic doctrine of "creative destruction" in that the former exhorts entrepreneurs to destruction in order to create things that lack as much necessity as the things destroyed to make way for them.
02 July 2007
Parable of the Sour (For C.)
He pulls the poor cloth of rectitude around him tighter, every shiver a penance. The mouth of his cave frames the winking lights of the city of the plain below, an antfarm Gomorrah he'd turned his back on some time ago to pace and pray and contemplate his Creator and His imminent Judgment Day. But no Day came, only judgments of lesser consequence from those abandoned — not to sin, but by him. Those who in the warmth of a raw animal touch found no wrong, just the honesty of thus-and-such. Milk, life, the burgeoning form, the flesh that hides the fig leaf from those who stay behind—for him, categories of negation. The stars wink their approval, his company in the expanse of his salvation, in the waste and void of sainthood.
29 June 2007
"He Shur Duz Have a Pritty Mowth"
Deliverance, it seems, has indelibly embedded itself in popular consciousness, despite its being nearly as old as me. The banjo-totin' cretin with fingers of fury, Ned Beatty's harrowing porcine approximations, vengeful crackers stalking the woods above the river—these images, enhanced for home audiences by a first-rate digital transfer and crystal-clear audio remix, have aged well—much better, in fact, than Burt Reynolds, one of the film's actors, whom seeing sans hairpiece and porn mustache was uncanny—and have, I think, taken on an added relevance for these times of dire ecological prospects. The impending demise of the town of Aintry, Georgia and the river running through it at the hands of a hydroelectric utility is a harbinger our fate writ small.
Deliverance is also interesting for being one of a slew of '70s films whose subject matter is those marginal types stalking the hinterlands, and the various perversities around which their aggregate identities are organized. In addition to Deliverance, the ' 70s saw the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and, Friday the 13th. Admittedly, Deliverance distinguishes itself from this company in its thematic content, which aims for psychological and philosophical depth, as opposed to mere exploitation. The existential glosses of Deliverance are nothing short of masterful. The images of dying and death have an agonizing physicality to them, and the dead bodies themselves seem almost to make the screen sag under their insistent corporeality (The actors portraying the two key hicks deserved Oscars for their utterly convincing expirations). Such touches elevate Deliverance above the sensationalism it flirts with.
Intercalated with the theme of masculine self-actualization, are those of man's collisions with both nature and civilization, either having the power to undo an individual. For the hillbillies, Georgia's hill country is a mis-en-scène of very palpable degeneracy, while for the four vacationers, the city is the same. The gap-toothed menace of the lustful rustics finds its complement in Ned Beatty's flabby lubricity. The city takes what the country makes, and vice versa. This is most clearly seen in the neat narrative symmetry at work between Burt Reynolds and John Voigt's respective characters. Oppositions in this movie are never facile, though, and one is left with the sense that the Weltanschauung expressed in it is one eternal Manichean struggle; civilization consumes nature (the hydroelectric dam destroying the river), and is in turn consumed by nature (this is at work at many levels in the film, but the most striking image is the rising waters around Aintry). Viewing Deliverance again has led me to muse upon the historical and culture dimensions of the '70s, and what anxieties the film and those of its ilk capture.
Deliverance is also interesting for being one of a slew of '70s films whose subject matter is those marginal types stalking the hinterlands, and the various perversities around which their aggregate identities are organized. In addition to Deliverance, the ' 70s saw the release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Hills Have Eyes, and, Friday the 13th. Admittedly, Deliverance distinguishes itself from this company in its thematic content, which aims for psychological and philosophical depth, as opposed to mere exploitation. The existential glosses of Deliverance are nothing short of masterful. The images of dying and death have an agonizing physicality to them, and the dead bodies themselves seem almost to make the screen sag under their insistent corporeality (The actors portraying the two key hicks deserved Oscars for their utterly convincing expirations). Such touches elevate Deliverance above the sensationalism it flirts with.
Intercalated with the theme of masculine self-actualization, are those of man's collisions with both nature and civilization, either having the power to undo an individual. For the hillbillies, Georgia's hill country is a mis-en-scène of very palpable degeneracy, while for the four vacationers, the city is the same. The gap-toothed menace of the lustful rustics finds its complement in Ned Beatty's flabby lubricity. The city takes what the country makes, and vice versa. This is most clearly seen in the neat narrative symmetry at work between Burt Reynolds and John Voigt's respective characters. Oppositions in this movie are never facile, though, and one is left with the sense that the Weltanschauung expressed in it is one eternal Manichean struggle; civilization consumes nature (the hydroelectric dam destroying the river), and is in turn consumed by nature (this is at work at many levels in the film, but the most striking image is the rising waters around Aintry). Viewing Deliverance again has led me to muse upon the historical and culture dimensions of the '70s, and what anxieties the film and those of its ilk capture.
28 June 2007
Choses gratis
A few years ago I watched a documentary, entitled The Gleaners, which followed Parisians who do precisely the same as "freegans," self-styled "freecyclers" who here in the U. S. utilize the internet to swap or swipe free stuff.
Anticipating the latter by several years, French gleaners puzzled me, because these “early adopters” live in arguably one of the most socialistic in the developed world. (I heard a story during the lead-up to the recent Sarkozy-Royale election that French celebrity Johnny Halliday actually lives in Switzerland as a tax fugitive to escape a progressive/punitive "wealth tax" that makes his total liability 60 percent. A tax Sarkozy pledged to roll back—to huge public outcry, as it turned out.) It seems odd to me that they intended their lifestyle choice as a reproach to the System, as if redistributionist France were still too bourgeois for their liking. Their critique seemed as dubious as that of their later American counterparts’; one suspects they were motivated solely by the impulse to freeload, and the whole political critique was simply window-dressing for what is really a will to laziness.
Welfare states require huge sums of revenue, after all—as well as an ideologically mobilized populace given incentive to work for something other than the potential to make huge sums of money (the one makes, the more the state takes). Gleaners/freegans seem to me more libertarian than leftist, because, by living off the fat of the urban land, they effectively avoid apportioned taxes, and, if adept enough at freecycling to escape work altogether, income tax as well. Theirs, then, is simply the same somethin’-for-nothin’ dodge that informs most Americans’ actions
27 June 2007
The Confidence-Man
I just chased a door-to-door, magazine-subs-for-charity huckster from my threshold. He somehow circumvented the tenant-controlled front door, knocking instead at my kitchen door, which leads to the fire escape!
I remember my neighborhood in Tucson being lousy with such garrulous, darting fiends. They'd flagrantly ignore "No Solicitors" signs to pay me calls that, no matter the hour, were always awkward. An equally awkward exchange would inevitably follow: I'd pinch my chin and shift from foot to foot (nervous tics), while he (never would a woman appear at my door) would fast-talk me, pleading on behalf of orphans of some undefined disadvantage, or for his own educational and recreational prospects—a curious melange of college matriculation and sunny idylls at some Mexican resort formed the prize after which he was striving—bidding to overtake some "girl who's won the contest year after year," an unvarying element of the schtick supposed, I guess, to play upon some masculine insecurity of mine. My purchase of a wildly overpriced subscription to Maxim would thus consecrate some freemasonry of manliness between us.
All bullshit, of course. I stood and heard the pitch as long as my patience allowed before rehearsing my standard excuse for demurring. I told him that the interest employing him doesn't offer the magazines I like to read. If it offered The Economist or Harpers, for instance, then perhaps I'd be inclined to assist him in his battle of the sexes. This was generally effective in years past, icing further converse.
Today, however, the salesman parried my feint by producing a tattered list of a book I could purchase for a local children's hospital. This unexpected sequel brought me up short; I care about children's well-being very much, and I'm all for kids reading, so in spite of myself I began to warm to his spiel. Enough caution and suspicion remained with me, however,to check me after I asked him if he'd leave me with some literature about his program (I happened to see he had a pocketbook of sorts filled with yellow and blue cards), a request he refused to honor, claiming his overseer "charges him for anything he leaves with customers." I thought, How much could a yellow card possibly cost? If its a draconian sum, then he'd best find another line.
I think he found me a bust, and he left as briskly as he came. I felt angry and depressed—angry and depressed enough to compose this blog entry. The experience returned me to my contempt for contemporary existence. An existence where come-ons, rip-offs, Ponzi schemes, usury and con-games buzz around me like blowflies, mostly because of my modest, slightly downmarket address. Do these salespeople ever infiltrate gated communities? Does one really need to pony up a premium just to be sheltered from such intrusions. I don't hate the salesperson; he's just a stooge whose dimwit cupidity's been harnessed by a cleverer but just as money-loving sociopath. I blame the system that produces such individuals. Just one more symptom of the Republican Revolution, begun in the Eighties, whose "supply-side" deregulation, along with an almost pathological antipathy for entitlement programs, have incubated such grubby little monsters.
I remember my neighborhood in Tucson being lousy with such garrulous, darting fiends. They'd flagrantly ignore "No Solicitors" signs to pay me calls that, no matter the hour, were always awkward. An equally awkward exchange would inevitably follow: I'd pinch my chin and shift from foot to foot (nervous tics), while he (never would a woman appear at my door) would fast-talk me, pleading on behalf of orphans of some undefined disadvantage, or for his own educational and recreational prospects—a curious melange of college matriculation and sunny idylls at some Mexican resort formed the prize after which he was striving—bidding to overtake some "girl who's won the contest year after year," an unvarying element of the schtick supposed, I guess, to play upon some masculine insecurity of mine. My purchase of a wildly overpriced subscription to Maxim would thus consecrate some freemasonry of manliness between us.
All bullshit, of course. I stood and heard the pitch as long as my patience allowed before rehearsing my standard excuse for demurring. I told him that the interest employing him doesn't offer the magazines I like to read. If it offered The Economist or Harpers, for instance, then perhaps I'd be inclined to assist him in his battle of the sexes. This was generally effective in years past, icing further converse.
Today, however, the salesman parried my feint by producing a tattered list of a book I could purchase for a local children's hospital. This unexpected sequel brought me up short; I care about children's well-being very much, and I'm all for kids reading, so in spite of myself I began to warm to his spiel. Enough caution and suspicion remained with me, however,to check me after I asked him if he'd leave me with some literature about his program (I happened to see he had a pocketbook of sorts filled with yellow and blue cards), a request he refused to honor, claiming his overseer "charges him for anything he leaves with customers." I thought, How much could a yellow card possibly cost? If its a draconian sum, then he'd best find another line.
I think he found me a bust, and he left as briskly as he came. I felt angry and depressed—angry and depressed enough to compose this blog entry. The experience returned me to my contempt for contemporary existence. An existence where come-ons, rip-offs, Ponzi schemes, usury and con-games buzz around me like blowflies, mostly because of my modest, slightly downmarket address. Do these salespeople ever infiltrate gated communities? Does one really need to pony up a premium just to be sheltered from such intrusions. I don't hate the salesperson; he's just a stooge whose dimwit cupidity's been harnessed by a cleverer but just as money-loving sociopath. I blame the system that produces such individuals. Just one more symptom of the Republican Revolution, begun in the Eighties, whose "supply-side" deregulation, along with an almost pathological antipathy for entitlement programs, have incubated such grubby little monsters.
21 June 2007
Fables of the Reconstruction
Jack Beatty's Age of Betrayal I have to say, was a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read. Mr. Beatty, who demonstrates his probity, erudition and understanding time and again on NPR's On Point, easily imports these virtues into writing. His is politically inflected historiography in the best sense, comparing favorably to Marxian British historians of previous generations like E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones. For the author, what is past is incontrovertibly prelude, and his treatment of the Gilded Age offers the perceptive reader as many insights into his own historical moment as of historical ones.
To his credit Mr. Beatty wears his learning and convictions lightly; the polemic is always subtle, never heavy-handed, and is seamlessly integrated into the prose; the gusto with which he tackles his subject proves infectious. Some chapters, such as those treating the rise and spectacular collapse of the Populists, and the labor unrest at the Carnegie steelworks, have a tragic sweep to them that will leave only the most jaded eye unmoist. As one who studies late-nineteenth century British literature, I really have to credit the author with deepening my understanding of events on this side of the Atlantic during the same period.
I do, however, have two quibbles with the text. First, the author's prose style, while generally graceful, does show a proclivity toward terseness, as well as Chicago-Manual economy of punctuation, which sometimes make even more formidable the dense thickets of data the author frequently drops his reader into. Second, while in the main Mr. Beatty confines himself to the period stated in the book's subtitle, 1865-1900, he does at times look forward to FDR's New Deal, and offers as a coda some words of Woodrow Wilson's in 1913. What the author fails to discuss in his small leap forward into 1913 is another significant event of that year, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a puzzling omission given that Lincoln's greenback paper currency and the free-silver of the Populists occupy such important places in his narrative.
Puzzling because the Fed did exactly what Lincoln did, and what the Populists proposed: replace metal-backed currency with fiat. The only twist -- and a critical one, keeping with the theme of betrayal -- is that the power of fiat was removed from government and placed in the hands of private bankers through legislation drafted by representatives of the reviled caesariat of robber-barons. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest single greatest betrayal, ensuring as it does that the everyday wage-worker will lose around three percent per annum the value of his labors' fruits -- and it is one the author never mentions. I'd be interested to hear how the author would defend the creation of the Fed as an innovation on what was proposed by the free-silver folk, whom Beatty, following Milton Friedman, claims would have triggered inflation of low-double digits. Thus I'm led to ask: Is the steady, inexorable march of three-percent inflation preferable to that which the free-silverers would have engendered? Is it simply the rate of the progression that makes the former palatable? To me, this is like saying the prisoner condemned death by lin chi died before the thousandth cut, and therefore did not die by lin chi.
These are of course ancillary considerations, and they do not prevent me from recommending Age of Betrayal as an instructive, entertaining read. I also recommend Louis Menand's magnificent The Metaphysical Club for discussion of another dimension of the same era.
To his credit Mr. Beatty wears his learning and convictions lightly; the polemic is always subtle, never heavy-handed, and is seamlessly integrated into the prose; the gusto with which he tackles his subject proves infectious. Some chapters, such as those treating the rise and spectacular collapse of the Populists, and the labor unrest at the Carnegie steelworks, have a tragic sweep to them that will leave only the most jaded eye unmoist. As one who studies late-nineteenth century British literature, I really have to credit the author with deepening my understanding of events on this side of the Atlantic during the same period.
I do, however, have two quibbles with the text. First, the author's prose style, while generally graceful, does show a proclivity toward terseness, as well as Chicago-Manual economy of punctuation, which sometimes make even more formidable the dense thickets of data the author frequently drops his reader into. Second, while in the main Mr. Beatty confines himself to the period stated in the book's subtitle, 1865-1900, he does at times look forward to FDR's New Deal, and offers as a coda some words of Woodrow Wilson's in 1913. What the author fails to discuss in his small leap forward into 1913 is another significant event of that year, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a puzzling omission given that Lincoln's greenback paper currency and the free-silver of the Populists occupy such important places in his narrative.
Puzzling because the Fed did exactly what Lincoln did, and what the Populists proposed: replace metal-backed currency with fiat. The only twist -- and a critical one, keeping with the theme of betrayal -- is that the power of fiat was removed from government and placed in the hands of private bankers through legislation drafted by representatives of the reviled caesariat of robber-barons. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest single greatest betrayal, ensuring as it does that the everyday wage-worker will lose around three percent per annum the value of his labors' fruits -- and it is one the author never mentions. I'd be interested to hear how the author would defend the creation of the Fed as an innovation on what was proposed by the free-silver folk, whom Beatty, following Milton Friedman, claims would have triggered inflation of low-double digits. Thus I'm led to ask: Is the steady, inexorable march of three-percent inflation preferable to that which the free-silverers would have engendered? Is it simply the rate of the progression that makes the former palatable? To me, this is like saying the prisoner condemned death by lin chi died before the thousandth cut, and therefore did not die by lin chi.
These are of course ancillary considerations, and they do not prevent me from recommending Age of Betrayal as an instructive, entertaining read. I also recommend Louis Menand's magnificent The Metaphysical Club for discussion of another dimension of the same era.
18 May 2007
Let Them Eat Lifestyle
I liken Whole Foods to a certain mega-chain bookseller I once worked for. To the higher-ups books were simply salable units; ghost-written WWF-wrestler biographies and Shakespeare’s works enjoyed equal esteem. I see the same basic attitude at work in Whole Foods: the signs taxonomizing the food are in place simply to facilitate its movement from shelf to register to paper or plastic. Whole Foods’s marketing aesthetic is a thoroughly pragmatic one—one that attempts to ensure that not one organic banana goes rotten, nor one fair-trade espresso bean unground.
A priori delimited grocery purchasing options, which come courtesy of the cultural logic of late capitalism, are likely exacerbated by such entities as Whole Foods, but this may just mean that the terms and conditions under which smug, sanctimonious people express their smugness and sanctimony have shifted. The world will always have its assholes; the only relevant question is whether they wear the somber fustian of Puritans or the unbleached hemp of tree-huggers. Hence the pragmatism I sense behind Whole Foods marketing strategies. More than anything, they reflect not the shopper’s native impulse toward epimeleia heautou, but rather her acquired impulse toward self-actualization within the discourse of lifestyle politics. In other words, the experiential gratification of shopping at Whole Foods trumps the actual utility of shopping there. I mean, if Whole Foods were really about bringing healthy food to the people, about offering a viable (Or should I say “sustainable?") alternative to the factory-farmed fare on the shelves of conventional supermarkets, why the hell do they charge six dollars for a bag of granola? Because the foodstuffs therein are actually positional goods, of course! One can feel all earthy and earnest and bourgeois-bohemian while he also, and perhaps unwittingly, circles the wagons of class ever closer at a time when the foundational American principle of upward mobility has never been in greater jeopardy.
If the concern is to find some amenable grocery milieu in which to apotheosize one’s authenticity, then one need look no further than Whole Foods. If, however, the concern is simply to feel the wan thrill of self-congratulatory cosmopolitanism (I can think of no identity more alienated than that which has been fashioned in accordance with the injunctions of political correctness) then, by all means, one should visit the haphazard cornucopias of Chinatown and the farmers’ market. Cosmopolitanism as I use it here involves a dialectical double-movement where the ethno-geographically relative position one understands herself as occupying in the “global village” becomes actually a subtle re-assertion of Western prerogative—something Zizek inveighs against in The Ticklish Subject. This cosmopolitanism, or “one-world Weltanschauung,” is not, despite protests to the contrary, radically pluralistic Progressivism, but is rather old ethnocentric wine in new bottles—with a dash of Orientalism thrown in for good measure.
A priori delimited grocery purchasing options, which come courtesy of the cultural logic of late capitalism, are likely exacerbated by such entities as Whole Foods, but this may just mean that the terms and conditions under which smug, sanctimonious people express their smugness and sanctimony have shifted. The world will always have its assholes; the only relevant question is whether they wear the somber fustian of Puritans or the unbleached hemp of tree-huggers. Hence the pragmatism I sense behind Whole Foods marketing strategies. More than anything, they reflect not the shopper’s native impulse toward epimeleia heautou, but rather her acquired impulse toward self-actualization within the discourse of lifestyle politics. In other words, the experiential gratification of shopping at Whole Foods trumps the actual utility of shopping there. I mean, if Whole Foods were really about bringing healthy food to the people, about offering a viable (Or should I say “sustainable?") alternative to the factory-farmed fare on the shelves of conventional supermarkets, why the hell do they charge six dollars for a bag of granola? Because the foodstuffs therein are actually positional goods, of course! One can feel all earthy and earnest and bourgeois-bohemian while he also, and perhaps unwittingly, circles the wagons of class ever closer at a time when the foundational American principle of upward mobility has never been in greater jeopardy.
If the concern is to find some amenable grocery milieu in which to apotheosize one’s authenticity, then one need look no further than Whole Foods. If, however, the concern is simply to feel the wan thrill of self-congratulatory cosmopolitanism (I can think of no identity more alienated than that which has been fashioned in accordance with the injunctions of political correctness) then, by all means, one should visit the haphazard cornucopias of Chinatown and the farmers’ market. Cosmopolitanism as I use it here involves a dialectical double-movement where the ethno-geographically relative position one understands herself as occupying in the “global village” becomes actually a subtle re-assertion of Western prerogative—something Zizek inveighs against in The Ticklish Subject. This cosmopolitanism, or “one-world Weltanschauung,” is not, despite protests to the contrary, radically pluralistic Progressivism, but is rather old ethnocentric wine in new bottles—with a dash of Orientalism thrown in for good measure.
14 May 2007
Old Wine in New (Left) Skins
Why do the regular contributors to The New Left Review so doggedly insist on a thoroughgoing politicized subjectivity? Is it simply the intransigence of hidebound Marxist-Leninists which is to blame? The absolute centrality of the political in the constitution of subjectivity has been dead in the water for at least a decade and a half now, especially in light of recent innovations in the areas of emergence and self-organization. Recent hypotheses about the genesis and etiology of neural net assign great importance to “mirror” neurons, which allow human to develop theories of other minds. Networks of mirror neurons develop at such an early time in lives of people that researchers believe they develop a sense of others even before they develop a sense of themselves as discrete entities. The brain’s plasticity and acute receptiveness to stimuli may just mean that moral decisions that have organized themselves in response to stimuli of a certain sort. Instead of presuming, then, top-down ideological interpellation from the get-go, one can say with equal plausibility that certain attitudes and conventions of behavior tend to dominate, and in turn tend to give rise to moral agents who tend to make similar moral judgments.
In their prolonged May-’68 hangover, however, which would be quaint if it didn’t tend to produce retrograde currents of thought, The New Left Review crowd seems on the one hand to reject top-down, administrative notions of individuation, à la Althusser, but at the same time, and rather reductively, insists that the subject is always-already political. Their musings never fail to strike me as a variations on a theme established by Pierre Bourdieu: that the actions of an individual both produces and is produced by determinate structures. This idea seems to me to hedge on notions of causality. In the perspectival shift from actor to context, from the individual to the social, something does appear to get lost, to elude expression. A discourse capable of addressing the complex, nonlinear situation of the actor in the social field would be of tremendous value here, and would perhaps lead us away from Bourdieu’s shoulder-shrugging structuralism, which I suspect is the result of a certain intellectual impasse, namely, that the political is the only paradigm on which a responsible materialist theoretician may hang his hat—an assumption that to my mind is beset by uninterrogated aporia of its own. It seems, then, that the folks at the NLR like to take us for a ride on the same carousel, only we don’t recognize it as the same because the carousel’s creatures have been painted different colors since our last ride.
In their prolonged May-’68 hangover, however, which would be quaint if it didn’t tend to produce retrograde currents of thought, The New Left Review crowd seems on the one hand to reject top-down, administrative notions of individuation, à la Althusser, but at the same time, and rather reductively, insists that the subject is always-already political. Their musings never fail to strike me as a variations on a theme established by Pierre Bourdieu: that the actions of an individual both produces and is produced by determinate structures. This idea seems to me to hedge on notions of causality. In the perspectival shift from actor to context, from the individual to the social, something does appear to get lost, to elude expression. A discourse capable of addressing the complex, nonlinear situation of the actor in the social field would be of tremendous value here, and would perhaps lead us away from Bourdieu’s shoulder-shrugging structuralism, which I suspect is the result of a certain intellectual impasse, namely, that the political is the only paradigm on which a responsible materialist theoretician may hang his hat—an assumption that to my mind is beset by uninterrogated aporia of its own. It seems, then, that the folks at the NLR like to take us for a ride on the same carousel, only we don’t recognize it as the same because the carousel’s creatures have been painted different colors since our last ride.
09 May 2007
Preening Monsters of Inconsequence
Today, Tom Ashbrook, host of the NPR call-in show, On Point, invited three recent university graduates to wax prophetic about their professional futures. The show's introduction had already set my expectations quite low, but the blather that followed forced me to switch off my radio in disgust. These three newly minted alums have heads so full of Madison-Avenue platitudes that I really despair for the future. They're not stupid, nor are they dull. Rather, they're cagey and single-minded, albeit provincial and unenlightened, attesting to saccharine dreams of affluence and seamless self-actualization—dreams which at this historical and cultural moment are risibly recherché. And they attest to them with such a tone of unalloyed optimism that a postmodern subject like me cannot help thinking that they're playing to the audience, that they "doth protest to much."
I mean, such "golly-Mister" ambitions do not accord with what market demographers otherwise tell us about the current lot of early twenty-somethings. They're the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If we regard these realities as more indicative than any rah-rah rhetoric they can muster, then here's what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: they're the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo. Abu Ghraib or Grindhouse — it's all the same to them, just as long as the current geopolitical situation doesn't prevent them from plunging headlong into the economy to snatch up dollars that, if you pay close attention to how these twenty-somethings couch their remarks, they believe are theirs by divine right. American prosperity, a pettifogging abstraction which conceals real exploitation and malfeasance, is for them a roasted goose of such abundant flesh as to surfeit generation upon generation forever. They scoff at such secular Armageddons as peak oil and global warming. Sure, they've seen Al Gore's film—but that Hummer H2? Man, it's just to pimp a whip to pass up.
These folks represent, in other words, the undiminished legacy of the Eighties, the decade of their inception: "Show me the money, and Devil take the hindmost!"; "trickle-down" everything. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard, are the people for who life is one elaborate reality-TV show. Children of the simulacrum. More troublingly, they're a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn't get away with. The real is the rational. They'll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they're own, when it's convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them ("I owe other people a friendly smile." "The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen." Political boilerplate at its most nauseating.) leaves you suspecting that they're real desire is to drink and fuck and speed in their cars and screw each other over.
Unlike people their age of decades past, they're not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is PC permissiveness. They're infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence. This is, however, something Tom Ashbrook or anyone else National Public Relations will never tell you; o them, they are the dominant ideology made toned, flawless flesh, shaped in the most flattering light and without shadow or remainder. You can almost see them in the studio sleekly basking in the eminently deserved approbation which the dull pseudo-liberal hordes of NPR listeners so slavishly heap on them.
I mean, such "golly-Mister" ambitions do not accord with what market demographers otherwise tell us about the current lot of early twenty-somethings. They're the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If we regard these realities as more indicative than any rah-rah rhetoric they can muster, then here's what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: they're the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo. Abu Ghraib or Grindhouse — it's all the same to them, just as long as the current geopolitical situation doesn't prevent them from plunging headlong into the economy to snatch up dollars that, if you pay close attention to how these twenty-somethings couch their remarks, they believe are theirs by divine right. American prosperity, a pettifogging abstraction which conceals real exploitation and malfeasance, is for them a roasted goose of such abundant flesh as to surfeit generation upon generation forever. They scoff at such secular Armageddons as peak oil and global warming. Sure, they've seen Al Gore's film—but that Hummer H2? Man, it's just to pimp a whip to pass up.
These folks represent, in other words, the undiminished legacy of the Eighties, the decade of their inception: "Show me the money, and Devil take the hindmost!"; "trickle-down" everything. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard, are the people for who life is one elaborate reality-TV show. Children of the simulacrum. More troublingly, they're a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn't get away with. The real is the rational. They'll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they're own, when it's convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them ("I owe other people a friendly smile." "The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen." Political boilerplate at its most nauseating.) leaves you suspecting that they're real desire is to drink and fuck and speed in their cars and screw each other over.
Unlike people their age of decades past, they're not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is PC permissiveness. They're infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence. This is, however, something Tom Ashbrook or anyone else National Public Relations will never tell you; o them, they are the dominant ideology made toned, flawless flesh, shaped in the most flattering light and without shadow or remainder. You can almost see them in the studio sleekly basking in the eminently deserved approbation which the dull pseudo-liberal hordes of NPR listeners so slavishly heap on them.
07 May 2007
Ars poetica
It seems that, since the advent of mass literacy and increased leisure time, poetry has become a lifestyle accoutrement, because, in its printed, widely distributed, form, it finds itself in a riotous market of many genres that have in common being committed to paper and bound between covers. Its been a long-held belief of mine that poetry, freed from the formal constraints necessary for mnemonic facility (rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc.) once the printed text became its predominant medium, was able to evolve to its present form of "difficulty"; the text has been made static for the reader to regard at length. It’s a two-edged sword, however, because the "thing-ness" of a book helps literature a long way down the path of reification. In his recent Slate article, poet Robert Pinsky seems to insist on some sort of ahistorical aura around poetry that has continued undiminished since Hesiod, or earlier, but this petitio principii obscures the more fundamental consideration of how poetry ever came to achieve that aura in the first place.
I’m basically parroting Benjamin here when I say that I think Pinsky’s twist is that he’s attempting to argue poetry’s characteristic aura as being more a matter of technical than mystical accomplishments, but this seems to play right into the hands of latter-day technocrats for whom the pleasure of the text is always a matter of increased complexity—a measure of technological advance—than perhaps more familiar aesthetic categories. Its simply one aspect of the same mentality in which the fact that a German car with GPS, a Bose sound system and highly precise climate control commands a higher price than it would if its signal engineering feat was that it could go 100K miles without an oil change or a tune-up."
In other words, I imagine poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs., or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone ("It’s a cell phone and mp3 player ... and so much more!). I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalizations and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. I guess one could always take the Bakhtinian line that the lexicon is a priori a neutral site of ideological contest fought by how signs are inflected or voiced that makes the difference. But this also seems a too-facile resolution to a complex problem.
I’m basically parroting Benjamin here when I say that I think Pinsky’s twist is that he’s attempting to argue poetry’s characteristic aura as being more a matter of technical than mystical accomplishments, but this seems to play right into the hands of latter-day technocrats for whom the pleasure of the text is always a matter of increased complexity—a measure of technological advance—than perhaps more familiar aesthetic categories. Its simply one aspect of the same mentality in which the fact that a German car with GPS, a Bose sound system and highly precise climate control commands a higher price than it would if its signal engineering feat was that it could go 100K miles without an oil change or a tune-up."
In other words, I imagine poetry these days represents an item of consumption, a geegaw to marvel at for its technical sophistication. The public, especially when it’s exhorted to celebrate the mandated “Poetry Month” of April, is expected to cast an appreciative if not entirely understanding eye upon poetry as a feat of engineering virtuosity, much the same way magazine ads for a Mercedes Maybach caress us with its list of technical specs., or the way wonks at Wired rhapsodize over an Apple iPhone ("It’s a cell phone and mp3 player ... and so much more!). I guess what I have in mind is poetry as a spectacle that engenders a class of experts to mediate its masterful performance for the rest of us; so much criticism these days seems fit more for technical specialists than true scholars — “author-period-genre” compartmentalizations and highly specific interpretive procedures in the interest of individual advancement. I guess one could always take the Bakhtinian line that the lexicon is a priori a neutral site of ideological contest fought by how signs are inflected or voiced that makes the difference. But this also seems a too-facile resolution to a complex problem.
14 April 2007
Echolalia
Horse's ass, always!
The found nasturtium brings holiness in its wake,
and we, fatigued,
know nothing of guile,
of spit,
of rancor.
Germs, unfrozen,
cast crows before the bloody majesty of a north Texas dawn.
The matter sits thusly —
thus and so,
thus and so;
and I'll be a cusséd clown
who shapes his head around a frown.
Such is the skillful nature of creation:
cervical, metallurgic,
trailing filth and scale behind it.
Whatever that means. I mean,
two kisses double one, and neither are richer for it.
Let's forget living, striving, straining,
and instead fall through the center of existence
as lifeless rays whose resistance
rests in opposing opposition,
drifting instead with the riptide —
Quelle drag!
The found nasturtium brings holiness in its wake,
and we, fatigued,
know nothing of guile,
of spit,
of rancor.
Germs, unfrozen,
cast crows before the bloody majesty of a north Texas dawn.
The matter sits thusly —
thus and so,
thus and so;
and I'll be a cusséd clown
who shapes his head around a frown.
Such is the skillful nature of creation:
cervical, metallurgic,
trailing filth and scale behind it.
Whatever that means. I mean,
two kisses double one, and neither are richer for it.
Let's forget living, striving, straining,
and instead fall through the center of existence
as lifeless rays whose resistance
rests in opposing opposition,
drifting instead with the riptide —
Quelle drag!
05 April 2007
Lust Won't Break the Door
Every night, after I close my eyes,
I fall into situations in which you're there,
You're face a fist, clenched and trembling,
Your eyes seeing only what's behind me. . .
But not entirely;
Every so often they do dance across my face,
And I feel the hot pins of disdain they register.
You'll never know the ice-white light of eyes with devotion
dead behind them.
We'll never never never never never be even . . .
I fall into situations in which you're there,
You're face a fist, clenched and trembling,
Your eyes seeing only what's behind me. . .
But not entirely;
Every so often they do dance across my face,
And I feel the hot pins of disdain they register.
You'll never know the ice-white light of eyes with devotion
dead behind them.
We'll never never never never never be even . . .
02 April 2007
Holy Week
Not once, in the days and months since past—not a call, not a clue that it was anything other than a waste, an experiment, a dress rehearsal for later lives.
You put down the foil, but not before knocking mine from my hands, and I stand dumbly sucking smarts you gave me.
Tears dry before hearts mend—this is eternal law.
You put down the foil, but not before knocking mine from my hands, and I stand dumbly sucking smarts you gave me.
Tears dry before hearts mend—this is eternal law.
24 March 2007
The Whale Grandissimus
Dear Reader,
Pusillanimous man that he is, your Abjectus, having succumbed to personal vanity, has begun a new 'blog on livejournal.com, entitled The Whale Grandissimus:
http://grandissimus.livejournal.com/
Weltverbesserungswahn I intend to remain as it is, but I will only post to it infrequently. If you find yourself simply starving for my scribblings and ravings, please feel free to visit the new 'blog.
For the time being, then —
Auf Wiedersehen,
A.
Pusillanimous man that he is, your Abjectus, having succumbed to personal vanity, has begun a new 'blog on livejournal.com, entitled The Whale Grandissimus:
http://grandissimus.livejournal.com/
Weltverbesserungswahn I intend to remain as it is, but I will only post to it infrequently. If you find yourself simply starving for my scribblings and ravings, please feel free to visit the new 'blog.
For the time being, then —
Auf Wiedersehen,
A.
21 March 2007
Empirics of the Half-Forgotten
Just so much manflesh
Riding the "T" in the five-o'clock crush:
an item on a bill of lading,
a fact for the statistician,
the bulk necessitating the measures taken.
Never had I less a sense
of this integument of fiction, this "me" of me,
than while on the train to Braintree.
Perhaps what I experienced was ego-death,
but it seemed at the time like just plain death.
I imagined a subway mis-en-scene:
a passenger, most prosaically fell,
slips a blade in me, then withdraws expertly,
as I sag wordlessly;
Or: sweaty in the chilly car,
a passenger jerks his breast and
I see myself flying to bits.
In these situations,
no tragedy,
no soil soaked in startled gore,
only me, mute meat merely;
the confusion, police, stampede, relief
simply elements of an event, no more —
pure sequence, empirics of the half-forgotten.
Riding the "T" in the five-o'clock crush:
an item on a bill of lading,
a fact for the statistician,
the bulk necessitating the measures taken.
Never had I less a sense
of this integument of fiction, this "me" of me,
than while on the train to Braintree.
Perhaps what I experienced was ego-death,
but it seemed at the time like just plain death.
I imagined a subway mis-en-scene:
a passenger, most prosaically fell,
slips a blade in me, then withdraws expertly,
as I sag wordlessly;
Or: sweaty in the chilly car,
a passenger jerks his breast and
I see myself flying to bits.
In these situations,
no tragedy,
no soil soaked in startled gore,
only me, mute meat merely;
the confusion, police, stampede, relief
simply elements of an event, no more —
pure sequence, empirics of the half-forgotten.
20 March 2007
Grim Decay of Nows into Tomorrows
"Paralysis of will: Where does one not find this cripple today!"Beyond Good and Evil
How much easier when the cold east winds could be warmed to tolerable by bong smoke...
When the frisson of neurasthenia, proof of a finely-tuned humanity, was ample solace...
When the whore, the hustler and the catchpenny were always others...
When the brave cavalry of sublime thoughts promised ventures to brighter lands...
When faith shone in a beloved's face, not a sheep's eye...
How much easier, those how-much-easier days no longer.
15 March 2007
Cold Missiles the Wind Sends
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief.
"Dejection: An Ode"
A life like manga: read backwards. Like an ice cream cone in the hand of a careless child: running, dribbling, gathering fuzz and trash commonly called "experience." And always so tired, and so tiresome. To whom are we most overfamiliar? Ourselves, of course. I doubt I'd ever speak to that person in the mirror if I'd never seen him. (Narcissus never did anyone any favors.)
Thus and so the prattling transcript of a mind. If only I could speak at the speed of thought, what universes would swallow C.!
Something is strangled in the relay, though; my mouth gets stifled around clots of notions until the cuticle of frustration around every bone and vein contracts, pressing best-forgotten memories into an effigy of me—the me that stands for me.
Let me let you in on a secret: I seek blessedness, though blessedness of a certain sort. I seek one with the integrity to know when she has ceased to be human, and has instead, less than an animal—dumb to itself, yet wiser for it—been fetched from abstractions and become mere orgone and organs, a wet vessel of pulsions, like some snapdragon sagging, heavy with will. Then I will know the pure gospel of bones: they're always ready after one's demise to serve as handles for pairing knives.
Prodigious relief, then sleep.
Finally: finality.
14 March 2007
That Stuff which Falls Between Mother and Matter
"I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles, and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt, maybe."Favors fall liberally or not at all, and so it goes. . .
Heart of Darkness
I ask C., "So have you given up completely?"
She asks me to clarify.
"Have you given up, y'know, on any possibility of hope or of beauty entering your life?"
It's late. I'm waiting for the naturopathic sleep aid to take effect. C. can fall asleep almost instantly; I with my pillow-talk must seem to her a gnat in her ear.
She offers me a muzzy, "No." (A tired C. is a terse C.)
"Well I have. What do you look forward to? Sure, I have some notion of improving my creaturely comfort, to have more than I have now. But is this a worthy ambition?" This question is of course rhetorical.
"Is it even an adequate ambition?" I know I've lost her to sleep by now. "I used to have dreams—visions of the future that in their depth and clarity resembled those old stereoscopic photographs—but that was before. . ." More silence from her here, but not the silence of sleep, I think.
What was jeopardized by the explosion of my former life is inestimable, the ripples carry ever forward. Dreams or no dreams, which to have? In dreams I implore D., weep before her as if in a glass cube, suffocated more by my frustration at her inability or unwillingness to hear me, than by my inability to breathe; and I scream louder and louder until my muffled sounds push damply back against my face. This is the typical dream of REM sleep.
The no-dream dream, on the other hand, is not the flakes of life awake dropping through the slumbering mind, but the projection of my imagination into the future . The bulb is burned out in the projector, however. So instead I throw blackness into black and stumble through days become grindingly the same.
How much longer can I persecute C. with my lack of a being, properly speaking? It is a sin to worry bones of wretchedness, dog in the manger I perhaps am. I almost beg to be cast off. But that C. can sleep and wake and sleep knowing that she has not yet outlived her life perhaps disposes her charitably toward me.
Meanwhile I am buoyed by the cavity anti-depressants have left in me.
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And, after all, maybe our engagements with poetry and ad-copy are fundamentally not so different. Each involves a complex tangle of knowingness, naïveté, envy and attraction, among other things. This sounds like some limpid New-Critical insight, I know, but perhaps its in the unique configuration and intensities of the encounter between a particular poem and a particular reader that constitute authentic experience, which is characterized by multiplicities as opposed to monads, immanence as opposed to transcendence. Authenticity resides in the event of reading the poem, not in how we digest and monologize it into the poem for our own purposes or for the edification of others.