A Hyperanaphylaxis Universal Mean

ending tyrants

2010-05-26T22:28:00.002+01:00

It will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgement, their interests can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidding appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.

-Alexander Hamilton, Federalist papers #1

Rumi

2010-04-22T00:06:00.002+01:00

First comes knowledge,
then the doing of the job. And much later,
perhaps after you're dead, something grows
from what you've done.

This quote makes me smile:

Don't look for it outside yourself.
You are the source of milk. Don't milk others!

There is a milk fountain inside you.
Don't walk around with an empty bucket.

You have a channel into the ocean, and yet
you ask for water from a little pool.

Beg for that love expansion. Meditate only
on THAT.

I love the offbeat way he splits his phrasings at odd angles, jangled with the punctuation. His words remain powerful some 800 years after they were written. That (I'm going to go ahead and assume) is what he means by doing the job. It's not just a work-a-day make your money and get out kind of deal this work, this job worth doing. The job that we all should be doing. Creating something that lasts beyond our own selves and lives. That's what's worth striving for. The transformation of transcendant emanations. Or something. Anyway, I like Rumi. In the right frame of mind, he can really open up corridors of being that are quite lovely and wondrous.

Anyway again, this is a quote from the editors' description from a collection of R's stuff. It explains a kind of part of a sufi spiritual cosmology. It's a cool idea and one that fits well with my own (novel) project.

One sufi image of the lines of transmission (silsila) is a great branching rosebush that grows elegantly on many levels and within several worlds at once. Initiation and guidance come through the saints and keep the present moment dynamic and quivering with new growth. Majesty is that composite attention felt as a presence, dawn, a company of friends, a splendor that is prior to, and the source of, the universe. Rumi says it is a state of awareness best spoken of in terms of what it is not.

The Sands of Iwo Jima

2010-04-03T06:29:00.003+01:00

In any case, we were rip-roaring drunk, on top of which the speedometer was hitting fifty. What better reason for us to plow thorugh a park hedge, bulldoze over a patch of azaleas, and ram head on into a stone post? It was nothing short of sheer good fortune that neither of us was hurt.

When my head cleared from the shock, I kicked open the broken door and got out, only to find that the hood had been knocked clear off and landed thirty feet away in front of a monkey cage. the front of the car was indented neatly in the shape of the stone post, and the monkeys in the cage were most put out at having been so rudely awakened.

The Rat sat crumpled over, both hands on the wheel. Not hurt, just depositing the remains of the pizza he'd had an hour before onto the dashboard. I crawled up on top of the car and peered in through the sun roof over the driver's seat.
"You all right?"
"Uh-huh, a little bit too much to drink, though. Made me vomit."
.............
"Man, Lady Luck's sure with us," said the Rat all of five minutes later. "I mean, look at us. Not a scratch. can you believe it?"
I nodded. "The car's a wreck, though."
"Hey, don't worry about it. you can buy another car, but you can't buy Lady Luck."
This put me off a little, and I gave the Rat a look.
"You that rich?"
"Seems so."
"Good for you."
The Rat didn't answer; he just kept shaking his head, dissatisfied. "Anyway, we're riding with Lady Luck."
"I guess so."
The Rat ground out his cigarette on the sole of his sneaker, then flicked the butt in the direction of the monkey cage.
"Hey, wouldn't we two make a team? Bet we could do great things."
"Like what for starters?"
"How about some beer?"
-Hear the Wind Sing, Haruki Marukami (Kodansha English edition translated by Alfred Birnbaum [my preferred translator of Maru's stuff])
______________________________________

It's been a while since I put on suit of my own clothes.
and even longer since I cast my shadow on a church house door
they say every sin is deadly, but I believe they may be wrong
I'm guilty of all seven and I don't feel too bad at all
I used to have wad of hundred dollar bills in the back pocket of my suit
I had a 45 underneath my coat, and another one in boot
Drove a big old Cadillac bought a new one everytime I please
And I put more lawmen in the ground, then Alabama put cottonseed
-The Drive-By Truckers, Cottonseed

Mike Cooley and Patterson Hood may be the greatest songwriters of our generation, and most certainly they're the most underrated. In my not-as-humble-as-it-probably-should-be opinion.

After taking a nice walk with the moms along a small section of Olmsted's Emerald Necklace and seeing the banks of Jamaica pond way overflowed, I headed home to head for the bed-e-bye, when I got a call from an old friend a mine from the 'phis (mem'phis), my friend Art.

The last time I saw Art he was part of the horn section for JJ Grey, who I happened to go see at the last minute, and there was Art, wailin' on the sax. We caught up after the show, and I told him to hit me up the next time he rolled through town.

Well, he rolled into town this past day as part of Lucero's horn section, and he told me if I was up for it to come down to the House of Blues cause he'd leave me a ticket at willcall. Course, I'm supposed to be at work, now in just about 2 hours, but I can tell you that's not happening.

Cause, course, I told Art, hellz rizza. Art and Lucero were opening for The Drive-By Truckers, and there was no way I was gonna let a little thing like work get in the way of the serious get down.

I can't remember the last time I saw a show. Okay, I do, actually. It was three days after my grandfather passed, and it was intense (w/Thao w/The Get Down Stay Down w/ The Portland Cello Project). But I've been dealing with this messed up shoulder for so long, which ironically was the result of a muscle imbalance in the back body and the side body (as the yogis have told me [or not really told me, but what I've put together from Yoga, physical therapy, and conscious attention to my physical being [Am I the only one who finds the paradox of the idea that the only way to truly transcend the illusion of reality is to become truly inter-physically mindful to be a hilarious tragedy?]).

So, while my shoulder's still tight, with a L of knots that traces the boundaries of left shoulder blade, I couldn't pass up free tickets to Langhorn Slim, Lucero, and The Drive-By Truckers. Or seeing Art, and Brian, and Ben again. I used to get blitzkrieged with Brain Venable on Sunday afternoons regularly when he played in a the uptown Jazz band down at The Map Room, and Art and I spent more than a few moments in the haze of craziness before, after, and during his shows with The Gamble Brothers; one of the first times I really found this thing, this crazed ecstatic flow in which I lost myself in the music and discovered the human bodies inherent ability to instantly translated spontaneously created sound into movement. The first time I realized that dancing was it, was all, was the thing for which I was placed on this earth to do (or the thing that for me is the ultimate in peak experiences [seriously, if I had to choose between dancing and sex, I'd probably choose dancing]).

And I can give you the whole thing. About how there are direct connections between the auditory cortex and the sensori-motor cortex, so, that if you develop and facilitate this (spiritual) practice, you can by-pass the neo-cortical rational processes and tap directly into the pure gleaned flow of life and existence thru that translation of sound into movement.

I could do that, but I, well, I just did, in the abbreviated form. Regardless, I knew, I felt, I sensed in the bark of my bones, that I needed to dance and find my way into the gruff growling purity of the dance. So, I told Art to go ahead and leave me a ticket.

And I went off to the HOB, blowing off work, and knowing that that was the right, nay, the only choice I had. I needed to get back to that place, that wildness of knowing that is the state of true wilderness in dance.

And Lucero were tight, great openers, and I started to really find my form, my lasting and never left connection between the music and my body; started to get myself back for wherever it is/was that I'd been gone to with all this with the intensity of purely non-stop research.

So, I had a drink with Art and Ben, and then the Truckers finally got underway. I wandered up towards the front and found a small place to move that was soon overrun, so I moved off, got a Jack and Ginger and then found a spot towards the back under the spotlight where there was room to move.

And so there I was, a blur of movement, a righteousness of intensity and spirit, a moment of pure transcendence that seemed to last beyond the bounds of infinity well farther beyond into the ranging bliss of sanyama/sunyata. If only for a second, if also within that second, if then actually immanating long drawn breaths of transcendence. If only for a second, or what felt like less than the time it takes for a second to pass. Yoking immanence and tanscendence within the bodily moving dancing melodic rythm of rumpus riffs and pure rock'n'roll (call it indie if you care to). Blurring into a bursting, following the curse of blessed takenness. Lost in guitar riffs, dissonance, and beauty. Lost in the dance. For the first time in much too long.

VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM

2010-03-30T21:58:00.003+01:00

I'd just remembered that there was a link to some of David Foster Wallace's writings for Harper's, and I went over there and was reading Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Holy Krakatau, that second little interview, that is the funniest thing I think I've ever read in my entire life.

VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM.

I'll be shouting that at inappropriate times, probably for the rest of my life now. Speaking of inappropriate, what the what is going on in this country? Yo, it's time to chill back with the rhetoric, Republicans. See, the way this process works is we have elections, and after those elections the elected officials do this thing we call governing. Maybe you remember that your version of that included ramming through two massive tax cuts via the reconciliation process (yes, both of the Bush tax cuts were passed using this process and were substantially more expensive than this bill as well as sold with numbers way flimsier than the CBO's on this) and starting a war with Iraq against the wishes of a whole shitload more in the streets protesters than the tea party movement even has members.

Now, you'll also remember a lot of overheated rhetoric about Bush being Hitler and stuff like that. But, and here's the difference, while there was some vandalism related to the protests, there were no shots fired at the offices of representatives, no death threats, no fake anthrax, no Christian militias planning to kill law enforcement officials. There were mostly orderly protests that numbered in the hundreds of thousands of people in any given place or time. And there were thoughtful articles about how apparently protesting had lost it's efficacy because it was no longer so novel. As it turns out, that's not entirely true. It's just progressive (wait, isn't that a code word for baby killing mother raping nazi zombie warlords from the 5th dimension?!!?) protesting that's no longer novel.

The tea party protests, although numerically not even in the realm of a 1/10th of the sheer numbers that went out to protest the Iraq war, because of the novelty of conservative protesters and the blunt force trauma that is Fox news's effect on television news more widely, were quite effective last year in taking a hugely popular issue such as health care reform and making it only marginally popular. Just so we're clear, the numbers, given the margin of error in national polling, were never any worse than about fifty/fifty.

So, this notion that health care reform was rammed through, all I can say is you get what you give. You want to work in a Bi-partisan manor, well, as the minority party, you need to come to the table first and make a few concessions. Otherwise get the fuck out the way cause we're coming through. The Obama express has left the station.

VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM

Okay, taking it down a notch here. It's been some biblical rain here in the northeast. We're about to set a record today for rainfall both for the day and for the month. Flooding everywhere. It's not good. Usually, I'm kind of a rainy day guy, but apparently even I can have too much rain. Good to know.

So, let's see. We're setting records for rain this spring. Last year we had an ice storm that killed like 200 hundred people (I pulled that number out of my arse, so...) and left about a million without power for up to three or four weeks, and the year before that we set the record for most snow in a single month for the month of december (and can I tell you how shitty it is trying to park in a city that has 8 hundred gazillion pounds of snow piled up everywhere).

Alright, no more harping on my progressive (nazi surf zombie) agenda. I'm working on some interesting things academically. I've developed a theory about dissonance reduction strategies and the efficacy of meditation or spiritual practices more widely and there facilitation of creativity, which is part of a more broad idea about how implicit philosophies (beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, etc.) effect the potentialites of peak spiritual experience, which, of course, fits also in a theory I have about how those philosophies can in fact affect an emotional experience that gets misinterpreted as a spiritual experience. So, I'll be running a pilot study on dissonance reduction strategies. And just assuming I'm right about all the rest.

I've also got this idea in my head which is gonna be kind of a driving force in my mathematical studies (which have been going backward for the most part for the past few months), which is this idea of somehow using statistical tools such as significance and meta- and regression analyses to develop a means to push beyond the simplistic cause/effect that is the heart of psychological study. I have three basic ideas in my head, causal clusters, causal chains, and multi-layered causality. The third is more about explaining causality at multiple levels of abstraction, which at some stage has to become the standard, neuro-psyiologically, psychologically, sociologically, etc. and has been my mantra for some many years now. The first two are about looking at causal activations inter-temporally as well as, potentially, how at any given temporal moment any number of causal factors come together to cause action, reaction, emotion, thought, what have you. It's not clear yet how this all works, but somehow, well, sometimes I have some ideas, other times I think I'm just tilting at windmills again. Always tilting.

Also, my other mantras:
Respect the principle of progressive overload
Soften, straighten, and run through the middle (my running mantra [yo, it works, I ran like seven or eight miles the other day and barely broke a sweat {but as per mantra #1, I was feelin' it the next day}])
The harried man works three times as hard, and remembers only about half of it.

I try and repeat these when I'm pushing to hard, getting impatient, or losing the good running form that takes a whole lot more concentration than you might think (or than you might need if you weren't, like, so slouch-a-daisical).

Okay, then.
Currently reading:
The Second Sex- Simone De Beauvoir
The sociology of Philosophies- Randall Collins
Cognitive Dissonance- Leon Festinger
Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the sinking of the World Economy -Joseph Stiglitz
The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood- Edward Jay Epstein
Mind Wide Open: The Neuroscience of Everyday Life- Steven Johnson
Parzival- Wolfram Von Essenbach
Spiritual Genius- Winifred Gallagher
1776- David McCoullough
Just finished- Merchant of Dreams by Charles Hingham, an autobio of Louis B. Mayer (fascinating character, really horribly written book [I don't know what the deal is, but pretty much all of the autobios on early movie studio execs have been both fascinating and really badly written])

VICTORY FOR THE FORCES OF DEMOCRATIC FREEDOM

Cognitive dissonance, post-modernism and the cultural zeitgeist

2010-03-29T00:18:00.007+01:00

Chuck Closterman has a theory that the reason that he's been successful with women is because of Woody Allen. And it's not that the women he's dated necessarily like Woody Allen movies or find Woody attractive, which, let's face it, today most people think Woody's a little pervy for marrying his formerly adopted daughter. That's pretty effin' weird. For myself, I really like some of his more dramatic movies and think the rest of them are insufferably stupid.

Regardless, the point Chuck makes is that Woody became this kind of archetype of the smart, witty, goofy looking guy who can make you laugh and think (if you so choose), and because that became cool then smart, witty, goofy-looking guys like Chuck Closterman can now get laid.

I would argue the same is true for modern conservatism and post-modernism. Post-modernism came into it's own as a philosophy in the French intellectual movements of the 1950's and 1960's. The trends that we've identified as post-modern started long before that, and certainly questioning reality and the nature of subjectivity is not exactly a new phenomenon. But the French intellectuals of that time really started to question the structuralist project that suggested, a la Saussure, that the structure of the products of human consciousness were essentially related to the structure of the human brain (that's not actually how he conceptualized the process, but I'd say it's the best way of expressing of the structuralist idea).

While they called themselves or were called (I'm not sure if the moniker was self applied) post-structuralists, they were what I think of when I think of the philosophic component of post-modernism. Literary post-modernism was in effect since the turn of the 20th century, and apparently the term was coined in relation to the drabness of what was called modern architecture in around about the 1870's. And sociologists like Max Weber have been questioning what we mean when we talk about the rational since about that same turn as well.

Regardless, these post-structuralists or post-modernists were classic bullshit artists. The truth is there is no truth is only true in the mystical sense. In the sense that everything is illusion and nothingness. It's not true in any pragmatic way. It's not true that there is no underlying objective reality, of which our subjective consciousness only gleans some small part. And I would hasten that that objective reality is itself an illusion that must be transcended. But that does not negate the intermediate stage at which objective reality is indeed, for all intents and purposes, objective reality.

Now the modern conservative movement, call it neoliberalism if you wish (but the appellation is so clearly disingenuous) or neoconservatism (which has essential oxymoronic elements [if you're dedicated to conserving the status quo, how can you're movement be new, and if you're not then what are you conserving?]) or whatever, would almost certainly rather be collectively mauled by bears than admit to having intellectual roots in a French philosophic movement, but the truth is that this idea that there is no truth so whatever truth you can make sound plausible enough is as good as any other is quite clearly possible because of the intellectual post-modern movement. That Fox news, for example, can call themselves fair and balanced in a non-ironic manor is almost surely a result of this same cultural process that gets Klosterman laid.

Course the supreme irony is that post-modernism's progressive element is so jaded about 'truth' and reality that they take nothing seriously, while the result of post-modernism for the conservative movement is that they take a mostly fabricated reality very, very seriously. As a result, conservatives are generally more organized. (Also better funded cause the whole world view is a means toward the concentration and intergenerational maintenance of power and money [I would suggest this is more a kind of processural memeticism {even, somewhat ironically, structuralist in nature} than necessarily the result of some vast conspiracy {although Paully Krug isn't necessarily wrong when he calls out the really well funded right wing think tanks as a kind of vast right wing conspiracy (If I wanted to make a living just thinking [which of course I do], I'd do much better if I'd take on a post-modernist stance and say fuck truth)}]).

I often think the reason prominent proponents of the conservative ideology are so angry is because of how fragile their world is. I mean, Rush Limbuagh is full of shit. He really is. His entire world view is the result of the selective use of information coupled with outright fabrication. He really is a kind of poster boy for post-modernism. Because ultimately, much like Rush himself, the movement is intellectually bankrupt.

Now none of this is to say that I myself have transcended subjectivity. None of us can. That's the point. Anyone who claims to know completely truth is a liar and probably a con artist as well. But post-modernism is incredibly unsettling. Knowing that you can't know, if it doesn't lead you to a spiritual place or result in the kind of ironic or blase attitude, will probably just make you feel afraid of the unknown.

Which explains the rise of evangelical Christianity and the success of Fox news. These movements ultimately have to be anti-intellectual because this is where philosophy has gotten. We haven't transcended post-modernism, nor is it even really possible. That's the cheap gimmick of the movement. It's in the finite structure of the human mind, which is not capable of attaining perfect or true knowledge. Not really.

And, essentially, that's been the thrust of the neoconservative movement from it's earliest days back in the 1960's. If you read Friedman (or a modern variant would be Amity Schleas or the Wall St. Journal op-ed or, again, Fox news), you find a selective process. As if you can just take the successes of your ideas without ever acknowledging any flaws or failures as a way to minimize cognitive dissonance without actually aligning yourself closer to reality. We saw how bankrupt that process was with the initial stages of the Iraq war. (and just as a quick addendum, this idea that Obama is somehow a dictator because he hasn't bent to the will of some small collective of very active protestors who get substantial media coverage when George Bush ignored literally millions who took to the streets in protest of the prospect of an invasion of Iraq is quite frankly a bit offensive and just plainly ignorant. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you want to work by consensus then that principle has to be applied consistently.)

For myself, I could never be sure of any of my knowledge. That's why I always continue to search, and I don't limit myself at all. In fact, I actively seek out information that contradicts what I think I know, and then try to figure out how to work out those contradictions. It's not easy, and it creates a lot of dissonance, which is not fun. Cognitive dissonances sucks, but relieving it by lying to yourself and others is not really a long term solution to the problem.

Okay, so that turned into a complete rant, and there's much more to say. Always more to say, but I'll leave off for the time being. I've got journal articles on cognitive dissonance to read. Let me just say this quick. It's not a mistake that every single mystic movement of every religious tradition, who almost without fail all acknowledge the problem of illusion of reality, all of them have very strong moral per and proscriptions. The only way to transcend the illusion is through goodness and, as the Buddhists say, mindfulness and right action. I guess that leave's me out, but still...the point remains salient.

Obama's first year in office (pt. 1)

2010-03-21T17:45:00.015+01:00

So, we're on the precipice of the vote that will surely come to define the Obama administration one way or the other, the potential enactment of a bill for something that might approach the general vicinity of being close to the edge of the realm where universal healthcare could be the gleam in the eye of some young and newly inspired individual who might then rise to the office of the president and enact such a thing. And, yes, there are a great number of reasons to feel like this bill is dog shit. Dennis Kucinich is not wrong. Nor do I think he is wrong for having changed his vote. To take the metaphor a little too far and too smaltzy, shit, whether dog or otherwise, can be the nutrients for the seeds of a brighter tomorrow. A tomorrow where the young boy suffering from non-hodgkins lymphoma might just get the treatment he needs even if his parents work at Wal-mart. Or a tomorrow where the idea of equality has substantive weight. Or a tomorrow where the tired, poor, and huddled masses can look to this country again and see a vast land of opportunity, a land where rainbows shine across the cloudless blue skies and puppies run free and ice cream is plentiful and flat screen televisions grace the living rooms of every home and, and, and...okay, maybe I'm getting a little carried away here. We'll probably be okay without the rainbows and puppies. I wouldn't suggest getting between an American and their ice cream or their flat screen though. Like getting between a hippopotamus and a river that is.

Anywho, let me just say this, and this is something that's been in my head for a while, this notion of political capital is a load of horse shit (we'll get to the bull excrement eventually). It's a completely fictional idea. The only reason it has any power is because we give it power. Could we have started over on healthcare as the Repubs claim they want to do and get it right? Only if we recognize that the idea that big B shot his wad with this one go round is only true because we have made it so. And the Republicans know this, and so they know that by calling to start over they are in actuality calling for the end of any attempt at health care reform. It's what I call the bullshit highroad (told you we'd get there). This does not have to be the way our political process works. I don't want to get hung up on that problem just now cause it's a doozy and really the center of much of the rest and would take more than a blog post to outline even if I had the answer. I'm gonna hew a little closer to the pragmatic though for just this moment.

Just one more quick point about political capital: much of the reason this idea exists in the first place, beyond the perceptions and internal states of the legislators and their staffs that create the energy necessary to push forward against opposition, is the way politics tends to get covered in the news, especially on television but also in newspapers and on-line. It tends to be the case that the focus centers on the so-called horse race elements of a political debate or election and not so much on the substantive issues. And as a result much of the substance gets lost. (If you want substantive debate on television there's only one place to go-Charlie Rose. I officially retract my negative statements about the irreplaceable Mr. Rose. He is still and forever will remain the greatest roundtable moderator of political issues that the invention of television has ever known. [Although Gwen Ifill {sic?} is no slouch herself] His health care roundtable this week was massively informative both on the questions of process and substance, and Petraeus for the hour was masterful as well.)

The polling bears this out. While the general numbers have been improving as the 'momentum has shifted', even at the nadir during the whole death panel tea party uprising, the polling numbers dealing with the substance of the bill have always been good. People want the underwriting process (the denial of care for pre-existing conditions) ended, among other of the provisions.

The problem with the bill is that it does not 'bend the cost curve'. Single payer was one of the best ways to do that, reducing your administrative overhead potentially 10% and also strengthening yr bargaining position by being a larger entity. Now let me say this as well, the notion that government is inherently inept or ineffective is also substantially nonsense. Government bureacracy is no more inherently inept than business is inherently corrupt. It's all about structure. Properly structured these institutional constructs can and are of great value to our society. Also, the best way to bend the cost curve. Get rid of ice cream and flat screens. (Seriously, poor diet and a lack of excercise are a serious component of the U.S. health care problem [Also stress and income inequality {which is a major stressor the research has shown}].)

Okay, so I've been rambling around here, and I've about reached the limits of what I know about the current bill, as I've only been casually following the details. I still want to know more about the exchanges. Why does Minnesota work? Why did so many others fail? What's the structure of the national exchange? I don't know. And I'm curious about medicare advantage. I've heard from a few places that it's actually works pretty well and costs one third of what it was supposed to cost. How does that work? When I get a few moments, maybe I'll poke around and see what I can find with regards to this.

So, I had wanted to talk about process and big B's first year in office and the general political situation and my general thoughts about how Obama's done. Maybe I'll try again later in the week, as I'm now in possession of computational ability once again and can work form the comforts of my own confines. I do have to give the man his propers. He's committed to the fight and is seeing it through to the end one way or the other, even as they fumbled badly out of the gate by letting congress take the lead. We'll just have to wait and see which way it goes today.

Also, I'm not really sure I can forgive Terry Gross for soft pedaling the Karl Rove interview. I know Fresh Air isn't meant to be a hardball news program, but she practically handed the ball off to him and let him sprint down the sidelines.

Also again, Karl Rove is still a dick.

snippets

2010-02-28T18:00:00.006+01:00

So, they've officially declared my computer a superfund sight (as in we're waiting for government funds to do anything about the problem). So totally fuct. Yeah, well, whatcha gonna do.

The first month of computerlessness was quite nice, but things have devolved. I got the television out of the closet and occasionally will watch. I think Charlie Rose is losing it. Maybe it's just one of those things where you don't see something for a long time (like Voltron or Get Smart or Speed Racer) and you have these memories of how awesome it was and then you see it again now that you're older and more experienced and you do all kinds of mental gymnastics to not say that this thing you loved actually sucks. I was wildly unimpressed by the softball nature of his interview with Peter Orzag (director of the Office of Management and Budget). I remember Charlie being the greatest moderator of a political roundtable ever. I'm afraid to have to discover that that was starry-eyed youthful nonsense, cause I still love Charlie like I still love Speedracer (no amount of reviewing can change the place that Speed has in my heart).

In Boston it's cheaper to get internet with a cheap cable option which consists of the broadcast channels and some home shopping channels and some Spanish language channels and the Catholic network (or something). I'm hooked on the Catholic network (also telanovellas). There's this priest who is like your wierd uncle who tells long, boring, tedious stories with absolutely no point, except your uncle is on TV. And all collared up in his priest gear. I'm oddly fascinated by this man.

I kind of want to read Hank Paulson's new book about the financial meltdown. It should be good for a laugh and some amateur psychological profiling. Also Joe Stigliz's new book Freefall or Downfall. That one'll just be good.

There is nothing worse than when smart people dumb it down for a general audience. I started in on Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works to try and get reacclimated with cognitive sci. and neuroscience, but couldn't make it through the introduction. There is no quicker or more complete way to lose my respect than to write a book in that smarmy tone that smart people seem to be so good at when they try to 'popularize' science. It used to be that the really smart people couldn't contain their insights in the journals and so they needed a longer form or used a longer form to organize their work at a higher level. Now its seems the only reason smart people write books are to cash in with these smarmy works that are 'accessible'.

I'm gonna geek out on comics for a minute in order to unnecessarily complicate what should be a pretty straightforward anecdote. The third X-men movie was loosely based on the Phoenix Saga (I use the word loosely very loosely [as in the name they gave Jean Grey was the same and pretty much that was the end of that]). The flashback to when Professor X goes to meet with her and bring her to the academy was an actual scene from the comic, but in the comic she can't stop herself from hearing other people's thoughts. There all bombarding her mind everywhere she goes, and it's freaking her out. It's been kind of like that recently when it comes to narratives. I see narratives everywhere. Everytime I pass someone on the street, every car, every window of every house. Everywhere there are narratives. What is this person's life, where are they going, what are they doing now, are they happy, are they married, divorced, dying, have cancer, just won the lottery, just got fired? Except that the narrative questions go more specifically with the particularities of the person, car, situation, window. My favorite is to look at a building and try and get some sense of what's happening inside through pure imagination. Mostly I get this sense of the overwhelmingness of the narrative possibilities. Sometimes I just tell myself enough already, shut it.

Ava's Man by Rick Bragg-sad and beautiful, beautiful and sad. It makes me nostalgic for a time and place and way of being that almost certainly never really existed or existed in the briefest of moments amongst the slightest range of people. It's a beautiful sentimentality, if also sentimental nonetheless.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver is kind of affected. Her writing is so elegant that the affectation of the approach gets kind of papered over, but ultimately, so far at the half way point, my opinion is that she should've gone for a straight narrative instead of the mish mashed slightly multi-perspectival approach.

I do want to go through and write up some of my thoughts about big B's first year as El Prez, but I'll save that for another day when I can work in my own home on my own computer.

Also, Karl Rove is a dick.

reading list

2010-02-05T17:51:00.004+01:00

Currently reading:
Saul Bellow- A Theft
Rick Bragg-Ava's Man
Arthur Marx-Goldwyn
The Transformation of Myth through time-Joseph Campbell
History of the kings of Britain- Geoffrey of Monmouth (1139)
The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan- Theodor DeBerry
The Lacuna-Barbara Kingsolver
The Great Unravelling-Paul Krugman
Microenonomics- Somebody other than Mankiw who was cheaper (even the prices of old editions go up when you happen to buy a textbook right when the schoolyear is starting. Duh, Homer.)
Research Methods in Social Psychology-Dana Dunn
On Hold for a month or so-
Political Liberalism by John Rawls( coming back to it in the spring to help gear up for a summer of Rawls [the first summer of non-fiction {and seriously hard core pilosophical non-fiction at that}])
On sort, of hold- The Mists of Avalon-Can't think of it
T book- The laws of the evening-Mary Sukari Waters
Just Finishing- Interaction Ritual Chains randall Collins (with Sociology of PHilosophies next on the agenda)
Just finished-
The Conscience of a liberal-Paul Krugman
Upton Sinclair presents William Fox-Upton Sinclair

Some analysis of the work and politics and a bit about how the creative/conceptual work for the full rewrite of the first book of Mythic Structures; Book One: In the Abstract that represents the form of the hands (and yes I am aware of what you must think of that sub-title, and you can stuff it in a gaint italian sandwich right in between the salami and the red onions). So that's coming soon. Here's a link back to a post I started several months ago that I just posted, for whatever that's worth (not much, but pollution and some climate accord have to be addressed and organized).
So, here's that thing I wrote a month or so ago about The Journal Op-ed page.

patience and presence

2010-01-24T13:00:00.006+01:00

My new year's resolution, from which with luck much else will flow, is the maintenence and furtherance of those two aspects/ perspectives. For the last several months most especially, I've been getting impatient. Like, really, really impatient to be further along than I am. And the result has been mostly to lose the sense of being present as I push for some place in the future where I'd like to be, and the result of that has been the loss of creative inspiration and the lack of retainment or much real coordination of the reams of scholastic research that I've been engaged in.

So, something to work on. I'm getting there. Also, making all this seem radically unimportant, 120,000 dead in Haiti. I first heard that number on NPR on my way home the other day, and I thought, this has to be a mistake. Then I heard it again last night, and everything just started swimming. What an immense tragedy. There are no words to express.

But still, life must continue. Still though also, the helplessness is overwhelming. Donating money is something, but you just want to do more. There's no skills I have that would be in anyway useful.

Anyway, helping some friends move today, and then starting the process myself (luckily I have a three week window, which makes things much easier). Looking forward to some new space within which to work. I feel like this is the year that I write my masterpiece (or the first of many, many, many). So, to breakfast and moving.

Fihi Ma Fihi, or KMRIA

2010-01-10T15:18:00.006+01:00

Fihi Ma Fihi, which is the title of a collection of poems by Rumi, and it translates as 'in it what's in it' or 'it is what it is' (the latter of which has been my go to expression ever since I was told that I had to stop saying 'sucks to be you' everytime someone would commence to griping, way back in like high school). I really love the idea of a sufi mystic poet cracking wise. It makes me ever so happy. Probably because that means there's still hope that I can keep a grain of causticness even as I pursue a path toward mystic illumination. Or some such.

Also KMRIA was one of the headlines in Joyce's Ulysses. And it stands for kiss my royal irish arse. Which was the funniest moment in the book so far. I admit, I get what Joyce is doing conceptually. The whole recreating the true nature of life's narratives and the way we create those narratives and the jarring and uncoordinated and not entirely smooth nature of the reality of those narratives, but A) that's not entirely true because of the nature of memory and identity in which we do smooth out those narratives even as they in reality are jangled and messy and B) holy what? I've gotten so lost in the moment to momentness even as I can keep the overall narrative and conceptual idea kind of clear (which maybe is kinda the point, I guess).

So, I had to take a break and send Joyce back to the library, since I've got about a dozen books going right now, and it was just not possible for me to read it as a just before going to bed trying to relax and zen out kind of book. Which says more about me than the book. My mind would just wander away and not pay any attention to the rythms and stay present with the thing. Which, fihi ma fihi and, if you don't like it, KMRIA.

So again, I saw a question posted on Dooce's community about the best books read last year, and I was trying to go through my brain and catalogue all the books I read last year, and it just wasn't happening. There were just too many to count. So, I thought I'd just catalogue the book reading here every now and again. So, current crop:
Hamilton by Ron Chernow
Macroeconomics by Gregory Mankiw
Native American Religious Traditions: Dancing for Life by Jordan Paper
Tango and the Political Economy of Passion by Marta Lavigliano
History of the Indians of Connecticut by somebody DeForest
Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins
The Shape of Light by Suhrawardi
Structural Yoga Therapy by Mukunda Stiles
a couple of short imagery and relaxation technique books (one with a pelvic focus and other w/ neck and shoulders) by Eric Franklin
A book of algebra and trig to reground my math so I can get back into game theory, which I had to chill out on when they got to calculus, which I'm getting ready to tackle this coming fall perhaps.
Political Liberalism by Jon Rawls
The Mists of Avalon by I forget the author's name and don't have the book handy.

And that's about that. I know boring and ridiculous, but I think you can see the organizational difficulties as it's been like this for the better part of a year and a half since the virtual economic collapse focused my attention on the superstructural project that I've been informally working on for the past ten years. Collins is a significant addition, which I knew from having started his Sociology of Philosophies, but his radical microsociological model is a powerful one, if also incomplete and missing significant neurologic, psychologic, and philosophic pieces. He also overvalues the sociologic, claiming, in a way, that agency is primarily in the social. An understandable statement from a sociologist but just showing once again how difficult true interdiscplinary work is for someone trained specifically in one discipline. The abstract coordination of the varying faceted levels of consciousness can be thought of metaphorically as a series of venn diagrams in which each abstract layer has both it's own area of sole existence and overlapping areas of interrelation that need to be integrated in our understanding.

So, there's that. And the New Year. And possibly moving in a month. And a computer with a video card that's fritzed out, which is why I've been away from blogging for like a month and a half (and also a chance to unplug which is always good). So, lots of fun things. And a month long purificatioin ritual of no alcohol or caffeine or meat or meat products and possibly a fast and maybe I'll do a week of silence (not a vow exactly but just some quietness [I did a week about five years ago of no talking, and it was intense]). It's a fluid thing, no dogmaticism or rigidity, more of a flowing toward the numinousity. Or something.

And if you don't like it. Well, KMRIA. Time for nieces and play and the eight thousandth reading of Where the Wild Things Are (which my niece loves, and I will never tire of reading). Yo, Seacrest out.

The Journal

2009-12-02T22:34:00.003+01:00

One of the guys I work with gets a subscription to the Wall St. Journal and brings it to work and then leaves it around when he's done. (Even as this blog is mostly unread, I'm still not gonna be dumb and talk about my job, except to say that I have a lot of time to read. I've already said too much.)

Anyway, so I think the Journal is a fine newspaper and is the best source of financial news this side of London's Financial Times and all that, but their Op-Ed section just gets me steamed every time. Every freakin' time. And I can't ever leave it alone. I try and just read the world news or the business and investing, but I'm like the moth to the flame. I can't help myself. I always go right for it. And I'm always ranting away in my head as I read.

Like when Karl Rove, who's a semi-regular contributor, talks about how politicized the Obama administration is. That guy has got some titanium cojones, I'll tell you. He takes this tone of impartial concern, like he's just calling it like he sees it. No agenda here. Yeah, thanks for you're pearls of wisdom there, Karl. You're a real pal.

Lately they've been hammering what they're calling climategate. This whole slate of e-mails that got hacked from the university of East Anglia's (which, come on, this isn't exactly the center of the dang climate science universe [edited to say, actually it kinda is]) Climate Research Unit. And the e-mail's appear to be pretty damning in one sense, that scientists were trying to manipulate the data for political reasons.

The journal's boys have been arguing that the sole reason is to increase funding of the researcher's own work, and that this goes beyond just this one instance. Just to be clear here, this means there is a worldwide conspiracy (that goes way beyond the university of west bumblenard) of quite insane proportions. The entire IPCC, some 2500 scientists, made all this stuff up just to get money for research.

What I would suggest is that really these researchers may in fact be concerned about the politicizing of the data the other way. And with valid reason. Concern over climate change started back in the early 1980's, but Republicans and the the Oil boys used and still use the tobacco strategy. The science isn't in. It hasn't been proved. The link isn't there. Blah-de-blah-de-blah. And the fact that there's been some leveling trends recently that most of the models didn't predict would be some serious ammunition for the let's-continue-to-externalize-pollution-costs crowd.

Technically, there still isn't absolute proof that smoking cigarettes causes lung cancer. But here we're talking about the weather. One of the main applications of chaos theory is weather systems. Chaos theory. Need I say more?

And after one of their regular guys goes after this e-mail stuff, a meterologist then says basically that. That the models didn't predict it, that we don't understand the effects of clouds and water vapor, that the weird weather (the once in a hundred year shit that's now happening with regularity) is just our perception and the media's tendency to over blow things.

Here's my point. Okay, say climate change is bullshit. Pollution is still bad. If we fill up our atmosphere with carbon, it'll be like smoking cigarettes when we breathe. So, the planet'll be fine. But we'll all have lung problems and cancer and shit because we don't have clean air. Super. You've really convinced me. I'm gonna write my congressman and tell him not to support the carbon trading scheme.

Which I am, but just to say that carbon trading is nonsense and the Euro market is so full of holes their not really getting anywhere with it. A graduated carbon tax, which, yes, is a tax that consumers will have to pay, is the way to go. We've been externalizing the costs of environmental and social aspects of consumables for a long time. Sometime ya' gotta pay the piper, as my grandma says.

Scientific American recently had an article suggesting that the technology currently exists to legitimately use solar, wind, and wave power to satisfy our energy needs. It's just political will and about 50 trillion dollars (worldwide) that we need. That's a scary number, but just imagine what happens if the reinsurers in London have to stop reinsuring catastrophic insurance. If the governments had to take over reinsuring corporations.

Anway, I'd just ramble right at this moment, so I'll drop the numbers and so pretty hard core scholarship that's getting integrated well. So just now. Just not just right now. Okay then.

In the words of the masters on the day of thanksgiving

2009-11-26T21:32:00.002+01:00

Do not attach yourself to any particular creed exlusively, so that you may disbelieve all the rest; otherwise you will lose much good, nay, you will fail to recognize the real truth of the matter. God, the omnipresent and omnipotenet, is not limited by any one creed, for, he says, "Wheresoever ye turn, there is the face of al-Lah" (koran 2:109). Everyone praises what he believes; his god is his own creature, and in praising it he praises himself. Consequently he blames the beliefs of others, which he would not do if he were just, but his dislike is based on ignorance.
-Ibn Al-Arabi, Futuhat al-Makkiyah (The Meccan Revolutions)

This organic, constitutional, sensory oddity, in which Albert Corde's soul had a lifelong freehold, must be grasped as knowledge. He wondered what reality was if it wasn't this, or what you were "losing" by death, if not this. If it was only the literal world that was taken from you the loss was not great. Literal! What you didn't pass through your soul didn't even exist, that was what made the literal literal. Thus he had taken it upon himself to pass Chicago through his own soul. A mass of data, terrible, murderous. It was no easy matter to put such things through. But there was no other way for realityto happen. Reality didn't exist "out there". It began to be real only when the soul found its underlying truth.
-Saul Bellow, The Dean's December

It seems there's a connection between the true subjectivity of the God concept and this notion that literality is in the surficial interpretations of reality or whatnot that are not taken into and then followed through the soul. That it is this process of soul searching, if you will, that transforms the superficiality of literalism created through some merely rational or maybe emotional process into true understanding. This is the process of subjectivification that might somehow go beyond subjectivity. Maybe. Or something.

Anyway, a day of thanks and praises to be sure, but let us not forget that the history of which this day marks the beginning of, the history of the founding of the American nation, is a history of oppression, forced removal, and the wholesale slaughter of the native peoples of this land. It is a history of slavery, disenfranchisement, and intolerance. If we are to move beyond these disastrous failings of moral being, then we must not ever forget. Forgetting the too painful truths of this history can and has and will only lead us back into the darknesses of immorality and ignorance.

But still, to thanks and happiness and blessings and good feelings and family and friends and good food and stiff drinks and all that good stuff. Go forth and be ye merry, for there is a time for all things under the sun.

Purity and impurity, sloth and diligence in worship,
These mean nothing to Me.
I am apart from all that.
Ways of worshipping are not to be ranked as better
or worse than one another

Hindus do Hindu things.
The Dravidian Muslims in India do what they do.
It's all praise, and it's all right.

It's not I that's glorified in acts of worship.
It's the worshippers! I don't hear the words
they say. I look inside at the humility.
That broken-open lowliness is the Reality,
not the langauge! Forget phraseology,
I want burning, burning
Be Friends
with your burning. Burn up your thinking
and your forms of expression!
-Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Masnawi

The trinity

2009-11-22T21:07:00.004+01:00

The trinity reminded Christians that the reality that we called "God" could not be grasped by the human intellect. The doctrine of the Incarnation, as expressed at Nicaea, was important but could lead to a simplistic idolatry. People might start thinking about God himself in too human away: it might even be possible to imagine "him" thinking, acting, and planning like us. From there, it was only a very short step to attributing all kinds of prejudiced opinions to God and thus making them absolute. The Trinity was an attempt to correct this tendency. Instead of seeing it as a statement of fact about God, it should, perhaps, be seen as a poem or a theological dance between what is believed and accepted by mere mortals about "God" and the tacit realization that any such statement or kerygma could only be provisional.
Karen Armstrong-A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam

The idea of an all powerful, all knowing God becoming mortal, frail, and human is itself an incomprehensibility. It reflects the broader classic theosophical paradox of freewill (how does an all powerful being limit that power?), which has been struggled over without ever being fully answered successfully. And that's essentially why faith is the key to religion. The human mind is incapable of producing a logical or rational answer to the question that would be satisfying to someone whose attitude was not already receptive to the idea.

Which is sort of the point. The experience of religion is meant to go beyond the intellect. This is why Eastern spiritual systems tend to include intellectually incomprehensible concepts such as everything is emptiness. Trying to understand sunyata in an intellectual way only leads so far. In the same way, trying to understand how a god could become a man could only lead so far. The symbolic power of this incomprehensible idea is clear in the enduring nature of Christianity as a religious force.

The word Kerygma is a Greek word that means a kind of public teaching. It was the apparent teachings of the church. Originally, this was contrasted with dogma, which meant the hidden teachings (the mysteries, sort of). The word dogma used to have this mystical connotation. The change really occurred during the late medieval period as Aristotelian ideas were being reintroduced to European Christians through new translations of Plato and Aristotle previous lost to the Latin world as Spain was reconquered from the Moors by European Christians (and subsequently all religious freedom that had existed under Moorish rule vanished in a flash, and death, torture, and forced conversion destroyed or displaced much of the Jewish and Muslim populations of the Iberian peninsula).

The introduction of Aristotle's metaphysics would turn the medieval conception of reality on its head. The reality of that period was what Paul Tillich calls mystical realism. The idea was that the world we experience was not the ultimate reality. The reality of the divinity (which theologically drew much from Plato's phenomenological ideas of form over substance) was the true reality. Aristotle argued that substance has primacy over form, and Thomas Aquinas took that into his own philosophy. William of Ockham would take this to it's logical conclusion, building the basis of later positivism that was then called nominalism. A belief that not only is substance first, but it is all there is. Abstractions and universals were merely mental constructs.

At the time, while nominalism had great value in the realm of science and math, what it meant for religion was the shifting of the locus of attention in church doctrinal dogma from a spiritual plain of what were essentially theological attempts to understand the incomprehensibility of God to the physical plain of the authority of the church. Dogma took on the connotation of edicts of the established Catholic church, which were more or less inviolable. The mystical world in which the reality of God's logos (word or law [the logos was a Greek idea {the actual word can be translated in many different ways} that had been fused with the concept of the holy spirit]) was in all things began to wash away, and, with the reformation and the enlightenment, the mystic nature of life and existence receded into the background.

One of the great dangers of the idea of a personal God is the anthropomorphic tendency to make God in the image of a man. The idea of God as a father, for example, should always be understood to be, at best, a metaphor for some inexpressible thing. Otherwise, as Armstrong points out, we attribute our own ways of thinking to God, which is always a kind of blasphemy.

It's probably kind of obvious where I'm going with this. Intolerance as divinely inspired is quite clearly a case of the loss of a mystical understanding of the incomprehensibility of the concept of God, and that's the prerogative of free peoples to be sure. Where we come into difficulty is when attempts are made and executed to translate personal beliefs that are intolerant into public policy.

In this way, the fundamental principle of liberty (as individual liberty bounded by constraints of sociality [my liberty should not infringe on your liberty and vice versa]) is then subverted.

The American founding, which was done through the displacement of the native populations of the continent through disease, debt, and warfare, is the classic example of this type of thinking. The European settlers believed that this land, already in the possession of various loose confederations of native tribes who had been living here for thousands of years, was their divine right, a kind of new Eden that God had bestowed upon them. One of the ways that God manifested his personal blessing for those settlers was through the deaths of the natives at the hands of diseases carried from fetid European cities. A personal God, when he's your personal God, can act in this way. And you see the things that you do, for example kill and exploit native populations, as the will of God.

But God's will can't be understood by humanity. God doesn't even have a will per se. It's a matter of speaking. One meant to attune the listener to the potentialites of the godhead; not create the sense that my own desires, be they base or even evil, are my destiny because they are the manifestation of the will of God.

You, we, I cannot comprehend what the idea of God even is. We can't comprehend it. God is an incomprehensibility. And not an incomprehensibility in that incomprehensibility. And further not comprehensible in the comprehension of that incomprehensibility. Such that faith becomes an acceptance of the not comprehensible nature of the comprehension of incomprehensibility. And the comprehension of the not comprehensible nature of the comprehension of incomprehensibility, and on ad infinitum (the infinite cycle of incomprehensibility). Faith is the mystical matter of the personal state of being in the attempted comprehension but the known incomprehension of whatever it is that we mean when we use the word God. A word that is empty of all real meaning, as no human signification could in truth represent God.

The Western world seems to have long since forgotten this essential mystic element of religious symbology. God is a real person, a father who loves his children and punishes their enemies. Or he is dead. That literal father is such a ridiculous and so clearly a blasphemous idea that many walk away into cynicism. When in truth the value of the idea of God was in that mystic experience of the incomprehensibility of God.

I know I said I was done with the God talk for awhile, but I just can't leave it alone. The history is too brutal. I've been watching PBS's recreation of the displacement of native Americans by European settlers, We Shall Remain, and it's just such a God damned shame. I can't even begin.

Some Socrates and some thoughts

2009-11-14T23:32:00.008+01:00

This is from Plato's Theaetetus. I've had his complete works sitting on the mantle of the (non-working) fireplace right in front the rest just waiting for a free moment.

SOCRATES: The art of the greatest representatives of wisdom-the men called orators and lawyers [my note (and politicians)]. These men, I take it, use their art to produce conviction not by teaching people, but by making them judge whatever they themselves choose. Or do you think there are any teachers so clever that within the short time allowed by the clock they can teach adequately to people who were not eye-witnesses the truth of what happened to people who have been robbed or assaulted?
THEAETETUS: No, I don't think they possibly could; but they might be able to persuade them.
SOCRATES: And by 'persuading them', you mean 'causing them to judge', don't you?
THEAETETUS: Of course.
SOCRATES: Then suppose a jury has been justly persuaded of some matter which only an eye-witness could know, and which cannot otherwise be known; suppose they come to their decision upon hearsay, forming a true judgment: then they have decided the case without knowledge, but, granted they did their job well, being correctly persuaded?
THEAETETUS: Yes, certainly.
SOCRATES: But, my dear lad, they couldn't have done that if true judgment is the same thing as knowledge; in that case the best juryman in the world couldn't form a correct judgment without knowledge. So it seems they must be different things.

Now assume this jury is the American people. And assume that the current structures are failing or, at the very, very least, not anywhere near approaching optimal, and that that becomes a kind of generational robbery, as those structures not only allow for substantial environmental degradation but also fail to prepare and educate the next generation to continue the systemic optimization project (the infinite chain of being [in which immortality is glimpsed perhaps]). Wouldn't it also be in the best immediate interests of those lawyers (as per the time limits of human life), who in reality do make up the largest percentage of professional politicians and have since the end of feudal times here in the Occident (an idea from Max Weber's Politics as a Vocation), wouldn't it be in their rational interests to try to persuade people and also to persuade people to persuade people to decide based on hearsay to continue to tacitly support a verdict that was incorrect in order to maintain the same Ouroborian cipher of the waxing and waning of the human irrationality of true self interest (an approach that will by it's very definition limit the movement towards true knowledge [objectivity {the true self in it's proper relation to the true other}]). The maintenance of that pendulum of flailing humanity is a great source of personal power and wealth for such demagogues (and one of the points Socrates makes in Gorgias is that even further, if the persuaders themselves are not experts in anything other than persuading, while they may be able to persuade, they are highly unlikely to actually know or have any real valid answers) but is just really the status quo of a world of exploitation, inequality, and ignorance for us all.

And really democracy doesn't work when the American people don't have true knowledge, or at least are moving in the direction of true knowledge. And when the structures of that society are encouraging those people to in fact simply make decisions without thinking, which, this thinking, it takes education (it's one helluva process learning how to think. I don't feel like I'm even halfway there myself) and cultural commitment to the core process of seeking out true knowledge. We need to find the social will to search out the political and economic truths, which we must seek and maybe find in the forests of philosophy.

The map of that forest is hidden in the human mind. And hopefully in that map is the key to unlocking continually deeper objectivity, moving closer to true knowledge and understanding. That's what education is all about. And our education system is failing. And our public education system is rapidly becoming the worst in the western world, even as our private education continues to be the best. And this inequality is a clear indicator of a friction in the fabric of the structure, and relieving that tension in the bio-psycho-social web through the instruments of society ( businesses, governments, schools, etc.) requires conscious attention and coordination. We cannot be stupid about these problems, and we cannot in reality ignore them or pretend they are otherwise. They will not go away just because we wish on a star and believe the con games of the pols or the media persuaders or the corprocrats or their cadres of lawyers.

Regardless of who's lying to whom (and I suspect that anyone lying to the world is then also lying to themselves in probably not totally conscious ways, and also anyone believing the lies then also was firstly lying to themselves about some other maybe seemingly unrelated problem), it's a reinforcing cycle of compulsions, apathy, and helplessnesses that keeps us as a people from our own heroic efforts in service of the goals of knowledge and the understanding of objective reality.

Or something. It might just be me on that one (that sentence originally read: I might just be me on that one. Which I thought was amusing [I might indeed]). I don't entirely know about the heroic part for myself (but, course, my own megalomania keeps hope alive). Just the attributes of numbness. A common response to the insanities of modernity; a thing for which the human animal may have been intended (it was our destiny, right?), but for which it was not entirely designed.

How much do we entrust to human redesign? In moral and political minefields of, really, what should be philosophical leading (as where the hell else do you go for true knowledge? Am I right? Can I get a hell ya' we need to let the philosophers come to the fore? They couldn't be any worse than the lawyers [Oh. Wait. We don't have any damn philosophers anymore, just really semanticists rehashing ancient esoteric arguments in the languages of more modern analytics {Ya get whatcha pay for, America}]), in those fields, if it was really not just formulated by an elite but truly publicly formulated (if the whole population had some basic level philosophic ability), if you did have those democratic formulations in more direct or participatory ways, as really the more people working on these problems the better, the better directed our social resources and the development of those social resources might just be. All the research points in that direction. The average of a larger population's estimate is more likely to be correct than any one single estimate. But without something approximating true knowledge for all, there can be no likely redesign.

Actualizing and transforming the structures, from the businesses, to the partnerships, to the corporations, to the political bodies, with knowledge that hews more towards objective truth (an absolutely illusive and possibly asymptotic ideal for sure), that's really the trick. And it's an outside the box kind of thing, because you really have to be able to see beyond the current structurality. To the potentiality of future structure. (Everybody, say it with me: OR SOMETHING.)

And this is why seeing Ann Coulter talk about Sarah Palin being a true or a real American makes me so upset (not really upset so much as sends me off on a tangent all week about how dangerous this particular dualistic concept is). Because the very principle of the constitutional democratic movement, this whole western thing (which has always been half hearted and imperial), is about more voices, more cultures, not homogenization but the hetrogenization of the democratizing force of expanded consciousness (more knowledge). That's what the great political philosophers have been talking about in essence. And it's what's going to give us our best shot at a bright and sunny future. And the divisive, demagogic language of enthnocentrism and us versus them duality is just gonna slow us down. It is and will always be unproductive. Even as it might be personally lucrative to trade on this reinforcement of small mindedness and narrowly defined interests (a call to put the blinders of bigotry and hatred back on [Give in to the dark side]).

Now, course, translating philosophy into action is surely difficult, but if ever the basic structures of what might be useful in that process were in place it would be in a bureaucratic and technocratic structure of both a public and private sector as currently formulated. The physical structures are quite close, although clearly our energy infrastructures are all ridiculously outmoded. One might say antiquated. But in a realignment of the moral plain on which our political, public, and private structures are enacted maybe, there might be some leverage.

Okay then, I know that's not really a completed thought there about the potential of the current structure to be regenerated and not just chucked and we'll just start over. Still, I've gone about as far as I'm gonna go here on Sunday morn. I might just try for a run. Hadn't been able because of a winged scapula (alignment problem of the shoulder) that still causes some pain and a lot of discomfort even after doing physical therapy and all kinds of stretches for several months now. But I'm thinking it's a good day to give it a whirl. I've been getting down with the power walk, and, besides feeling like a yupmaster dork-a-tron, it's been good for the shoulder and the mental health and all that, but there's still nothing like a flat out run to get the ole' engine started.

Enough then.

music etc.

2009-11-04T07:16:00.013+01:00

I've got about eight different blog posts in various states of disrepair on various topics ranging the whole wide universe of ideas and experiences. Or something. I'll maybe finish the recent spate of unfinished posts though, maybe. It's like that. I roll on posting for a time, and then I want to work in a different format. Usually I want something longer. I'm not naturally anywhere near as brief as I am here. They say that thing about brevity though so, you know. I'll maybe try ta work on that sometime.

I will get back to Khanna's The Second World though because that man has got the geopolitical scholarship tied down tight. He does seem to miss how incredibly dangerous the endgame on the imperial expansions of current energy infrastructures is. Whether it's climate craziness or peak oil, that shit could very well go nuclear on us sometime in the not to distant if we're not careful with our future. And shit.

He is much too blithe about the oil problem for my taste. If we're at 100 million barrels a day, which is about right (his figure was 120 million by 2030, which is a 35% increase from now, so it's close if you average it out over that period), that's 36.5 billion barrels a year. He gives some general reserve estimates, which admittedly have almost without fail had to be revised up multiple times pretty much everywhere, and the largest reserves are in the several hundred billion range. My intuitive calculation on peak oil from these general numbers would be around 80 to 100 years (depending on the expansion of use and the accuracy of current reserve estimates). Honestly, I think it'd probably be better if there was less and we were being forced to be more serious about energy transition, but such is life. Nor does he acknowledge the concern over the improper use of groundwater that's leading to the serious problem of shrinking water tables or other of the serious environmental concerns of globalization. It is a book on politics though, but the proper and sustainable use of resources is a main political question, so in truth my assessment has to be that he ultimately misses the boat.

Anyway, I went to see some live music for like the first time in eons the other night and holy god is there something so, just, therapeutic and awesome about live music. It really does the soul good. One of the opening bands was this group called The Portland Cello Project, which is exactly what it sounds like, a group of cellists (?). I dig the idea of trying to bring different styles of music to different types of venues and all that, and they were pretty cool, turning songs from the video game Halo, Pantera, and Outkast into all cello pieces, but mostly the room just talks drunkenly over music that mellow in the more bar-like music venues, so the music it gets overshadowed by the cacophony of drunken conversations.

Still the main act, Thao w/ the get down stay down, was wond-a-ball, a lot of fun, and great, bubbly danceable music with lyrical darkness there under the surface, which is right up my alley.

So, good and much needed release of steam. I've been sort of trying to organize myself a little better with regards to scholastic and creative work, and it's an on-going process for sure. The true facts of our world though can be disconcerting to say the least. So it's always important to reground the self in the spirit and so forth, and live music and ecstatic dancing is the best way I know of to achieve that goal (though clearly there are many roads to the top of that mountain).

Still, I'll admit the question of subjective and intersubjective existence has been existentially weighing me down a bit lately and has been contributing to various difficulties with the necessaries of health and well being. Things to work on. Always more things to work on. Hmm. Sigh.

Returning from Amsterdam/Dynamic Structures/Life is life is life is life is

2009-11-02T13:27:00.015+01:00

I'd been trying to organize my thoughts on the nature of living and what have you for some few days now since returning from Amsterdam Saturday. One of those thoughts was to play up potential confusions about what that statement might mean. A metaphoric Amsterdam that's more in line with what's in people's heads about Amsterdam. Course, the Amsterdam I'm talking about is an economically depressed former manufacturing town in upstate New York, and I can't really find my way to complex metaphorical intercombinations of conceptuality and actuality or any such things just in this particular moment right now.

It's been probably almost a month since my grandfather was shown across, but the reality of that fact was mostly lost to me until we finally placed his cremated remains in a hole in the ground this Saturday just gone.

The fact in now upon me and has taken hold in a seemingly unrelenting way. Even a whole day of playing with my nieces has only provided a momentary respite from a deep and endearing sadness that fills the very pores of my soul with a melancholic haze that refuses to lift. I spent the night Saturday at home drinking PBR and alternating between a sense of the radical impermanence of all and every thing and the full realization of the very real fact that some fine day that will be me that goes into the ground.

In that alternation of the sudden and on-rushing great anxieties of the imagination of my own last moments on this earth and this sense that nothing not even the deepest of meaning and profundity is anything but the fleetingest of momentary passing, everything seemed worn and shabby. The world was so dull and lusterless I thought it might drain of all color and that that might be an improvement, if not a lasting one, as what can last? What I ask?

And of course the megalomaniacal nature of the feelings released from this truly downcast occasion makes me dislike myself more than is normal, for being so concerned for my own death, for my own end. And that common transfixion (if perhaps heightened, if not so uncommonly so) of self that played or prayed upon my imagination for much of the night Saturday as I put myself in that final place of rest and watched as the horror of the realization of the end seized and made everything else insignificant, that base vanity of self love was just yet another weight in the balancing of the scale. The karmic balance of maybe just the interior of my skull, maybe just the turn of the screw, maybe just the chance of a peaceful final moment in life, maybe really in reality the difference between the gates of heaven and the depths of hell.

This would be the place where I derail into tangents on heaven and hell, James Baldwin's dictum that we pay for our sins by the lives we lead, the Hindu and Buddhist ideas about death, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Not so today. No, just this once I'm staying with the concrete and not tailing off into abstractive digressions, if also maintaining an all too sentimental tone.

My grandfather, my grampy, was, in his person, the kind of person that I would like very much to be. He was self-possessed and measured in everything. There was a level of attention, of concentration paid to the most minute detail of existence. And the thing that I will never forget and that draws from me still heaps upon heaps of tears is the light that was in his eyes, and of his soul.

There was a light that few possess, a light, an intensity, a great force of being that was not lightly earned.

After the funeral, as the family was all gathering ourselves to eat and then go our separate ways, my father passed around photocopies of these lists that my grandfather had made. He and his fellow prisoners of war had written out on tiny scraps of paper these long and intricate lists, and that had been in his bedside drawer until the last. They were lists of food. Different restaurants, recipes, all the different ways to cook potatoes. Lists of food.

In reality though they were lists of hope. And not the callow hope of political sloganeering. The hope that these young men themselves would not die in a German prison camp and would have the chance to see their loved ones and to break bread with those loved ones again in the everyday celebration of living. And he did get that chance. Six months after being captured at a forward position, the Russian army liberated the camp where my grandfather was held, and soon after that he was returned to the US army and on his way back to the bosom of his family.

I imagine he kept those notes to remind himself that every moment, every second of life is precious. Not one should be wasted or taken as a given. And the presence within himself of that constant reminder was what, I imagine, gave him such a light. I will always remember those eyes that shown as steady as a lighthouse, those eyes that revealed untold depths of being. I will remember the last time I looked into the depths of those eyes. The joy of living had not faded one bit at that time, that last time I saw my grandfather, even as his body was then already failing just back in early June.

The strangeness of burying a loved one on Halloween kind of occurred to me in the week leading up to the service. But it never really sunk in until I got home and people were all out dressed in all kinds of costumes and whatnot. In my neighborhood, because it's mostly apartments, people sit out on their front stoops with baskets of candy, and it's this really communal thing. And usually I do think that's top flight, but this night it just made me feel lonely.

It's been some fifteen years since I spent Halloween in a psychiatric facility. For many reasons, it was singly perhaps the most intense and indeed the craziest night of my life. (Actually, now that I think about it, being in a near riot on Halloween in a mental institution at 16 only really ranks as a crazy thing, not the craziest, which says a lot about the amount of crazy shiite I've done or that's happened since that time.) I've been variously diagnosed with major depressive disorder or bipolar disorder at various times by various different doctors, therapists, psychiatrists, what have you. And I've struggled with the dual weights of emotional turmoil and the stigma of mental illness and the imprint of adolescent institutionalization for all of the intervening years, never really able to talk honestly or openly about the neurologic storms that cast my mind high on the crests of hypomanic euphoria or low into the troughs of despondency and despair.

There has always been a concordant shame that comes with the lows, an idea of how idiotic I am for dwelling in the trough, for not fighting harder against the storm. But today I realized in what the idiocy was. It was not in not fighting but in the fighting itself.

Today I went to the grocery store. Even though the weight of unhappiness made my legs feel leaden, my mind numb, and my body electrostatically charged. Even as the verge of tears was like a swell behind my eyes. I went grocery shopping.

I didn't force myself as I've done so often to just do some little symbolic gesture of infulility even in the face of the blinding futileness I've felt. That sense that nothing has any real meaning. I didn't fight against the tide. I just made a list of foods to buy. A list of food. And I went. And I was okay. Everything was okay.

That's not to say that the feelings abated. I still feel charged with sadness, but that's okay too. It shall pass. I don't have to fight against it to get past it. But I do need to be willing to accept it, if you will allow me a moment of cheesy self-helpitude. I need to be present in my self, to remember the value of each moment, even the ones that wrench and seem to cast me out of my humanness. Or to cast me back into my humanness and out of my abstract self. Staying in the presence of a faith in the grace of life. Or something.

It is what is. In many ways it's a blessing not an illness. For me, at least. That's not to say that it doesn't make things difficult at times or that remaining unmedicated is the right or even a very safe answer (and there are all kinds of complications involved in this choice, which is just that, a personal choice, not some universal prescription, and there have been a few close calls for myself on both sides of that fence, so..), but it does make me acutely aware of the need for balance.

Life is a high wire act, even without genetic/neurologic/psychologic/sociologic complications (of which what life might not have at least one or two of those?). But it's too short to fool around with bullshit delusions about who or what we are. Too short to make false pretenses of some bland normalcy. And much too short not to do and be what makes you happy.

Cause when it all comes down to it, that may very well be all we get. We get now. Best enjoy it.

I get the sense from that light that my grandfather had that he did. He honored those lists and the men whose favorite foods were on those lists that never again got to eat them with their friends and families. The men and women who died on the forced marches. In the prison camps. In the gas chambers.

And at his grave side, as the marine in his dress blues played taps, the funeral director placed a small flag with a round plastic plaque that read US veteran into the ground. And I looked around, and I realized the cemetery was full of those same flags. We are burying the American generation that knows for true the horrors of war.

In the same way that my grandfather's death was not real to me until his ashen remains were there before me, these wars we are fighting are not real to us unless we know those who've died and see the grief and devastation for ourselves. 150 dead. 200 dead. (All adding up to thousands and thousands who continue to die in the horrors of war.) It's just numbers. It's not real.

And so we forget. We forget the charred remains of Europe. We forget the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The burning jungles of Vietnam. The scorched deserts and cities of Iraq. The scorched earth of Pakistan and Afghanistan. We forget what most of us never really knew.

We forget how perilous is the balance of this world. For myself and those like me, we will never forget the primacy of balance. How delicate is that scale. It is the very fact of our lives. None of us, sane or otherwise, can ignore the realities of death and destruction, otherwise they have no weight to bear on the face of change.

Regeneration is a kind of watchword of mine. It's just something you have to do after a bout of depression, as the trappings of life, be they material, physical, philosophic, whatever, as they fall away like sand through an hourglass. But regeneration is not merely the domain of the depressive or the bipolar. It is the cycle of life both human and otherwise, and the structures of society must reflect that. Our structures should be dynamic and regenerative. Not static and degenerative. Only really changing after some problem is so bad it can't be ignored any longer. And then mostly in a hyper reactive expression of emotional outrage, not in some considered structural adjustments (in fact the nature of structure tends to be downplayed, especially here in the US but also throughout the west, because of the liberal philosophic tradition of individualist paradigms of personal freedom [as extended to corporate entities as well]).

Those words, dynamic structures, have been kind of stuck in my head all day. The idea of structural dynamism is one that, I feel, has to really seep into the structure of global society for there to be any chance for this project to work. As we begin to build one integrated planet our national structures must grow and, dare I say it, progress beyond there current forms of hopelessly compulsive self-interested action. The global society cannot be a selfish one. Otherwise, well otherwise, (as I've said just maybe once or twice here and there) it's Thunderdome.

The Thunderdome dilemma is real. It's not just me. I may be crazy, but I'm not a fool (in this particular way).

Last thoughts on Friedman for awhile

2009-10-29T20:25:00.009+01:00

I've finally finished Milton Friedman's Freedom and Capitalism, a slender philosophical volume that purports to solve for us the problem of governments, private enterprise, and the social consequences of the poor and inefficient interaction of the two, the social goods or evils. It took a bit of time as I had to read it in small doses to keep my temperature from getting too hot.

He takes for granted that the markets (which while not a code word for corporations per se, their actions are the bulk of what makes up a modern market [as per supply side theory {which itself has social constructivist forces (the will to believe and all that)}]) will suss themselves out. This is really what his argument comes down to, is that it's only through the perverse incentives the government sets up through it's process of trying to redress past wrongs to present populations (a problem for sure [but the solution of which I would say that is the only reason to enter into the tacit consent of the social contract of fair play and what's mine is mine and yours is yours {the only reason not to start a revolution}]) that keeps the private sector from righting those past wrongs of its own accord.

And in a way Friedman is right because of course real freedom (or freedom for the most with hopefully protections for the few) is true if not pure democracy, one hopes. But what he never explains is why large populations should for example do away with protections against discrimination (I'll return to this one a few times), but maintain protections for wealth and business assets. None of his ideas are consistent with what it would be logical for various majority populations, both in localities, nationalities and globalities (?) to take. Some common numbers that get thrown around a lot in progressive circles are the various percentages on the control of wealth and resources. Globally (and here nationally) some small 5-10% of the population controls some 65-85% (I know I should hunt up the real numbers, but these numbers are within an acceptable range of error for a blogpost, so) of the resources. If you consider what democracy is, it becomes clear that it is absolutely clearly in the rational self-interest of that 90-95% of the population to band together and use the mechanisms of government to redistribute the wealth and resources of this top 5-10%. In purely, bald, rationally self interested terms.

Here we see that pure democracy and pure capitalism in actuality do not naturally mix or converge on each other. And the convergence is, of course, an American illusion. Everywhere (literally every single country on this planet) outside of the United States understands how destructive the Washington Consensus was in South America, in South East Asia during the financial crisis of the late 1990's, in Russia and Eastern Europe after the fall of the curtain, etc. The truth of the facts on the ground is that the institution of so called free market reforms exacerbates the inequality of wealth, thereby in reality inhibiting the economic freedom of the many in order to give it over to the few for hyper luxurious consumption and the exploitation of local resources and populations by the corporations. This is and has only been achieved outside the United States through the use of military autocracies, and, for example, the populist swing left of South America (and their current virulent hatred of the US [Who doesn't effin' hate us anymore?]) and the success of demagogic left wing politicians to consolidate their own autocratic powers has as much to do with the impositions of the Washington Consensus by international bodies such as the IMF and World Bank or the direct consultation of the former rightist autocrats on economic 'reforms' as it does with, for example, some perceived naturally autocratic nature of populist or leftist movements.

And Friedman's hand in all this has to be seen as a denial of everything he's written about freedom. A man who advised Augusto Pinochet cannot, with any credibility, say anything about freedom that is meaningful and not worthy of our eternal scorn and ridicule. Clearly, his talk about freedom was only in relation to social policies (returning to the earlier example, discrimination laws are perversions of the natural corrections of the market [thereby keeping the markets from correcting themselves], but patent laws are the proper role of government [meaning government's only place is in protecting businesses, not in protecting people {a la democracy (political freedom)}]).

Economic freedom then, and economic freedom of the few over the many, takes primacy over political freedom. And economic freedom essentially means ceding control of society from a government to a mishmosh of corporations (that binge and merge in all kinds of unhealthy ways), which means the curtailing of all kinds of non-consumerist, non-economic freedoms that don't even show up on any type of balance sheet, as currently calculated.

And in pursuit of essentially a rationalization of this, ultimately autocratic or at least demagogic, structure, it remains impossible to remain philosophically consistent the deeper you go into the abstraction. So, Friedman gets caught, and he throws in Anti-trust laws (essentially so he can point out the union exemption and call for its abolishment [and to be sure, there are significant problems with the current structure of labor unionism in the US]) as the pure backstop against corporatist tendencies to strive for monopoly (and this does also apply to the union that's run like a kind of corporation). He never really does explain how or why it is that Anti-trust laws are the one and only form of government intervention in business (beyond enforcing contracts and the like) that he calls for. How does that take primacy philosophically over discrimination laws (which, in a perverse inversion of logic, he compares to 'the Nazi Nuremberg laws')?

He claims that business, when left to its own devices, becomes a bulwark against the centralization of political power, but that's never really been the case. Corporations constantly and consistently collude with government when given the chance, and laissez faire has always been a smoke screen for the co-option of government by corporate interests. Corporations, as is in there currently structured rational interests, invert democracy and create either an autocratic integration of business and gov't (which we've seen in South America on both the left and the right, and increasingly in South East Asia, Russia, China, etc.) or for example the demagogic work that's being done by the right in the US at the present juncture (yes, I'm talking to you Fox News [in truth it is this limited spectrum of left/right equaling democrat/republican that maintains a kind of centrism that remains unbalanced and uncentered, swinging wildly across the spectrum as both sides overreach and fail to work together {balance is not a single two dimensional spectrum kind of deal and trying to build it in that way can only lead to the charismatic use of power for the furtherance of non-democratic aims}]). Democracy has to be subverted (the self interests of the people have to be either ignored by an autocracy or hidden away by a demagogery). It is never clear how true political freedom and the economic freedom of business and consumers (the only vote he seems to value [and if someone suffers from compulsive hyper-consumption {Yes, I'm talking to you America}, can their dollar voting be said to be really free {a convicted drug addict for example will lose his political right to vote because, I assume, it is said he can't live up to that responsibility (although, I have to admit disempowering felons seems like a good way to guarantee recidivism)]}). So how can we reconcile these two forces, these two very different types of freedom?

The reconciliation never occurs. For whatever Friedman may have been as a mathematician and economist, he's a pretty shitty philosopher and an even worse social scientist. And I'm pretty sure (as economics is all about assumption [theory building {philosophy}]) that without the last two the value of the first two can only be in dilettantish games of diversion and delusion. No real solutions to our problems.

Comparatively speaking

2009-10-28T23:07:00.003+01:00

Of all vulgar modes of escaping from the consideration of the effect of social and moral influences on the human mind, the most vulgar is that of attributing the diversities of conduct and character to inherent natural differences
-John Stuart Mill

Though much of the inequality of income produced by payment in accordance with product reflects "equalizing" differences or the satisfaction of men's tastes for uncertainty, a large part reflects initial differences in endowment
-Milton Friedman

Geopolitical intensity

2009-10-24T18:12:00.012+01:00

I saw this cat on the Daily Show the other day who made all kinds of claims about his ability to use some kind of computer model to predict outcomes of political, business, legal, whatever situations. The idea turns out to be taking certain qualitative ideas about the power and salience of the major players, quantifying them, and running them through some type of game theory computer simulation.

But, course he doesn't explain his models at all in his book which I sent off to Amazon.com for, because it just sounded too tempting that he might (not that I would understand the mathematics). He also turns out to be just completely full of himself and spends more time jerking himself off intellectually than saying much. The brief biblio and end notes point to some hints about this whole predictioneering nonsense or attempts at 'engineering the future', which in concept is not always or necessarily often a 'bad idea'. It's just when you get the 'engineering' wrong. Which, with the current state of our understanding of human consciousness, is going to be a bit murky. But by thinking through the rational and then the deeper spiritual and maybe also the philosophical (which is substantially different than the rational I would say) among all things maybe we can work it all out.

And Bueno De Mesquita is clearly a smart man who has made some serious predictions throughout the years, which have predicted outcomes in geopolitical situations such as the Oslo accords or the Clinton health care flame out or other classified stuff apparently. It is fairly interesting, if also slow and a little patronizingly put, and he still has a few chapters in which to make good on the overall work.

But, course Amazon has that free (supersaver) shipping for orders of just 25 hot dollas or more, so I always try to at least find a cheap second book. Often the book that Amazon pairs it up with. They usually hit the target with their pairings, if you want one, you want the other, if it's just one book that I had in mind to spend a little disposable cash on (on-line and brick and mortar book shopping is one consumer behavior that I fully admit I have a bit of a problem with [I can quit any time, I swear. I just need those two books on behavior economics. Oh, and that other Jared Diamond book, The Third Chimpanzee. And that book I saw in Border's the other day about the thing. I need that book for sure. And also Rawl's work on political liberalism [edited to say: got it]. And surely everything on my wish list is also crucial, but after that. That's it. No more. I'm done.}])

So I got the second book, which was The Second World by Parag Kkanna, and, yo, this guy is no joke. A serious geopolitical antroponaciomorphistological (that word is made up [but still descriptive]) look at the inter-relations between politics, culture at multiple levels, and the old school kind of global history crowd's stuff (Toynbee being the largest example of, but also Oswald Spengler) with that early somewhat immature work in the field of international relations.

Well, Khanna updates that work for like the twenty-third century and shit (I swear this guy is way ahead of his time [and only a year older than me! What the?]) taking geopolitics and the understanding of the globalization process to this whole other level. He uses this process of apparently going to all these places and talking to the people there, and then connecting those on the ground probably informal field interviews with businessmen, gov't officials, taxi drivers, and on with this historico-international perspective of culture. Intensity does not even begin. I haven't been this excited about a book since I discovered Niall Ferguson's The World at War a couple of years ago.

Khanna is especially in favor of the European version of empire over the American or the Chinese (he identifies these as your three poles of power, with second world 'emerging market' nations as the focus of the lens through which to see the tripartite world empire [well, it just sounds conspirial when I write it like that {and it's not (more considered)}]). He does seem to admire the Chinese even over ourselves, the Americans (which points to some concern [edited to say: as I'm now finishing the book, it turns out China is the one of his poles that he goes into with any depth, and it's a nuanced look to be sure). It's really helping me already to see more globally in terms of geosociopolitical stuff. Kind of seeing the world historical dialectic or something. Heavy, man.

Man oh man. It is indeed a heavy problem of international coordination, which has to be the way, whatever you think about all the stuff in the book of revelations and some of the other old testament stuff (without the Jewish, apochrypal, or mystic commentaries [more perspectives are better]). We have to work towards togetherness, and international bodies need to be made fair and decent with proper incentivization of behavior. (Let us not continue to use a structure that incentivizes greed, sloth, avarice, resource hoarding, apathy, over-consumption, hyper-consumption, etc. just because we don't think we can do better. Let us walk out into the light of the Spirit and go beyond such poor organization. Technology is the result of culture, and culture is the sense of the people and who we are and what we can be together as a society.)

On occasion, not any time recently I'll admit because of more basic level learning in new fields, I've tried to work out a language of superstructure theory, which would be a more integrated version of the current social sciences, wherein all where considered in the theoretic position. It has something to do with visualizing the coordinations somehow, but nonetheless...

I did have a moment there just a minute ago where I was visualizing the globe in my head and trying to work out some kind of international cultural intermix in terms of interlocking layers of cities, countries, regions, inter-regions, national tensions. It's a very powerful way of thinking and really requires an elaborative process when you, probably like me and not Khanna (who appears to have been on a trip around the world a la Toynbee's East to West), have never been to the places he's talking about. You've got to use imaginative, creative tools to imagine this world that Khanna describes. No less than some sixty or seventy countries spanning northern Africa (the broader middle East as it were), South America, South Central Asia (the Stans [Khazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc.]), South East Asia, and then he does finally get into a look directly at China, which it turns out he's not so blind to the dangers of.

And but a yet necessary further step for the US to really rejoin the community of nations as a genuine leader is to engage in this type of thinking both within the educational system and in the private sector and in the intersection of these two. Really the public and the private need to get into greater syncopation. The public-private partnership has to be a more healthy, less nutzo freak out version of the current version. Learning real cooperation, not simply self interested cooperation.

Anyway, my interest has been piqued to be sure.

Un Poco Loco

2009-10-21T23:37:00.003+01:00

(Which is the name of a Bud Powell song that is just the greatest song in the universe, but here describing my own state of being a little bit nutzo on the whole wrath of god type deal there, which I swear I'm done with for at least, like, a few months)

I don't know what it is about economics that brings out the revivalist preacher in me, but it does, and especially Milton Friedman. The arrogance just oozes out of the work. It makes me so mad. Which is so totally not the graceful response. Yes, thank you Martin Luther. I am aware. Joyful attitude. Got it.

And really all the talk in the world about spirituality is pretty much worthless. Theosophy and theology, all that stuff, none of it means anything that doesn't inspire the soul. It's supposed to be about spiritual practices or the inspiration of spiritual practices. Not just spouting off at loud mouth jerkheads.

As I was saying. Grace, faith, turning toward god, a joyful heart. All that stuff, it's about the basic fact that the only potentially real freedom we have is in our own attitude. We don't control life, but we can control our own response. Maybe. Or something.

So, anyway. Most of all that stuff in the last post was cribbed off of Paul Tillich's A History of Christian Thought, which is just an outstanding work, and will be the last bit of religion and myth for me for a while even though Durkheim's Elementary Forms of Religious Life is just sitting on my bookshelf taunting me. Right on top of Randall Collin's The Sociology of Philosophies, which I'm planning on trying for again over the Christmas holiday. It is literally the Infinite Jest of the Social Sciences (probably about four hundred pages longer with about 30-40 more pages of end notes [no end notes within end notes, but all kinds of crazy end note charts and graphs, so...{my bookmark is still there where I abandoned ship the first time, probably about page 185}]).

These days it's macro, philosophy of econ, and game theory. With Weber's sociology of bureaucracy and soc. of power just to keep things live. The game theory and macro is kicking my arse what with all the math. My math is so very rusty it's not even funny. It's really isn't. I know I'm not laughing. Anyway,

Hybris Absurdum (2nd 1/2)

2009-10-18T16:00:00.013+01:00

Neoliberalism is a term that comes from Milton Friedman's attempts at reappropriating the mantle of enlightenment era liberal philosophy for the modern conservative movement. Claiming that the liberal philosophical tradition was more initially centered on the ideas of an individual's rationality being the basis for natural rights of personal freedom (for Locke, for example, life, liberty, and property or for Jefferson [by way of George Mason's Virginia Constitution] life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness [being substantially about property anyway one would assume {and also more poetic}]), Friedman then attempts to use this fact as proof that the modern purveyors of liberal philosophy have lost their way.

The problem here is, as Joachim of Floris has long since pointed out, bonum et necessarium in suo tempore, the good and the necessary according to its time. Truth is not static. Every time you try to nail it down, you find, inevitably, that you have nailed your own hand to the picnic table. Inevitably. The picnic table.

The early foundations of the liberal philosophical tradition were fighting against monarchic political systems, a feudal economic system, and autocratic religious institutions. The truth of the primacy of individual freedom was in response to the reality of a collectivism that was a means towards the maintenance and perpetuance of an oppressive and devastatingly wide inequality.

As the Western world moved farther towards democratic structures (albeit imperfect ones that at their best export the exploitation, per internal enthocentric democratic demands), liberal philosophy moved towards equality as an organizing principle. Quite clearly there were many early on who were dazzled by the idea of revolution and believed foolishly in the potentials of a modern Russian autocracy which were never really there. But that idiocy has little to do with the importance of equality. It does remind us though that Friedman is right to say that these freedoms are important. Equality does not negate the importance of freedom nor freedom equality.

For Saint Augustine though, and later Martin Luther, their is only one fundamental freedom. This is the freedom to turn one's life toward God. Or to not to.

For Augustine, the consequences of turning away from God were great. I'll let Paul Tillich explain:

Augustine described it thus: "The soul died when it was left alone by God, as a body will die when it is left by the soul." The soul which is dead, religiously speaking, has lost its control over the body. When this happened, the other side of sin became actual. The beginning is pride, hybris, turning to oneself, becoming separate from God. The consequence is concupiscence, the infinite endless desire. The word concupiscentia, desire or libido (in the ways in which modern pychology uses it) has two meanings in Augustine: the universal meaning, the turning toward the movable goods, those goods which change and disappear, and the narrower meaning of natural sexual desire, which is accompanied by shame.

Now, in Luther, this idea of turning oneself toward God was described as salvation through faith in grace. A closer look at Luther's question of faith and we find that faith was not about a strict and literal faith in the words of the bible per se, although he was a biblicist. Luther was not talking about a faith in the fact that the world is six thousand years old or things of this nature. Luther was talking about an experience. The experience of a living faith in one's own connection to a loving God. And in turning toward God (which can be understood in metaphoric terms as opening one's soul to the potentials of grace for example), the experience becomes one of loving all things, as God exists, God works through all things. Luther said quite plainly that people could know the word of god without having ever been exposed to the bible or Christianity. It was about the reception of grace, the faith that grace would come if thou hadst a joyful and loving heart with which to see and act in the world.

Then came John Calvin. Calvin did not believe in freedom. He believed in predestination. Actually double predestination. He believed that all people had been chosen before birth, before committing any sin, whether they were to go to heaven or spend eternity in damnation. He claimed that evil and hellfire were necessary as some sort of contrast to show just how glorious was god's glory.

While Calvin always held that no one can know beforehand which way you were destined to go at the end, the actual Calvinist and radical evangelical churches had to deal with a populace that undoubtedly wanted some assurances, some way to know for themselves that they were one of the chosen few. Here faith becomes certainty. Doubt becomes the enemy. Only those who believe with absolute certainty can possibly be one of the elect. Also, God's blessing here on Earth was another indication. If you were blessed by material wealth, even as it was a sin to spend that wealth (Calvinists were rigidly ascetic), you might just be one of God's chosen few.

Calvinism was a mixed blessing at best. One of the outcomes of Calvinistic thought was essentially the idea of investment, which is at the heart of capitalistic enterprises. The protestant ethic of hard work and a spendthrift life is really what brought the West beyond the feudal/mercantile system of the middle ages, in concert with liberal philosophy and the industrial revolution, but Calvin also gave to us righteousness. This idea that somehow being absolutely certain brings god's eternal glory. Course, Calvin himself never had any certainty on questions of theology, only about his own status as one of the elect. He famously reversed himself on his deathbed on the question of the ontology of evil, thinking that maybe his idea that god creates evil in order to bring his own glory into high relief might just be totally batshit. Certainty has and will always be dangerous because in certainty there is no room to question. No room to philosophize, to falsify, to reason out the deep questions of human life, and to potentially move in concert with the dynamic truths of a human life, a thing which has no stasis. Certainty is the dead and rotting core of a stale and idolic religion, and Luther knew it. Calvin could not see it.

Returning to Augustine, we find that pride is the observable consequence of the original sin both allegorically in Adam and in reality in each of us, which was this turning away from God. Hybris, pride, or the Greek hubris (that always fatal flaw) and certainty are not so far from each other. Such that the means by which this community of believers meant to guarantee God's special blessing may very well have been the sign by which we might know that they did, in fact, turn themselves away from God.

The ultimate expression of this turning was the 'infinite endless desire', the inability to find any true or lasting satisfaction, the shallow materiality. The modern mentality in which protestantism is a stale and static force for emotional idolatry, and consumption has become the true religion of the people of the West.

The strange irony of the situation is that this shallow materiality is ultimately irrational. And it would not be rational to accept this situation as the given or the necessary. And it is through the non-rational experience of faith in the grace of the truth and the beauty of the life and the world and the word that will allow us to see just how ridiculously childishly irrational we all have been/are being. And but yet this is what we find in the economic assumption of scarcity; that it is assumed not only that desire is unsatisfiable but also implicitly that the attempt should be made, and that this, again implicitly, is the rational way towards happiness and possible satisfaction. Essentially, the satisfaction of a spiritual fulfillment is factored out of economic equations. Augustine's ultimate freedom is canceled out against what? The potentials of materiality to bring us some measure of that spiritual joy? And so what is left is the milquetoast freedoms of car brands and whatnot, Milton Friedman's most treasured thing. The idol that he worshiped.

The problem we find in this disregard for the truely fundamental freedom of the self is that it creates a complication for the economic assumptions of any chance at equilibrium. There can be no assumption of linearity or curvilinearity in the functions of prices, wages, savings, investment, consumption, etc. Inflation for example, the wage-price spiral, is unsolvable for a society as employment approaches zero because of the fundamental irrationality of the rational self-interests of the competing parties for whom cooperating means to lose. The Nash equilibrium will not hold in the reality of these bargaining situations because it requires social concern from all involved, both labor and business. Within our current structure of that bargaining process, this is not really possible.

And this is the purely, grotesquely hilarious theater of absurdity that has long been the reality. The modern individual is Augustine's prideful self, the self devoid of grace, and this is the self that has no doubt. This is the self that knows its own election and cares nothing for the concerns and cares of the rest, cares only for it's own freedoms to choose amongst the gimcracks of shallow materiality, and will never get beyond the infinite endless desire. These selves will forever and perpetually be caught in the types of bipolar economic convulsions the depression side of which we are living through at this moment, and they, we, will never know equilibrium, know balance, know grace of any kind. No peace can come of this way of being. Or so it would seem.

Okay so I'm getting a little preachy now, and the economic element of this argument is underdeveloped here. There's also substantially more to say about the transition into capitalism and the way Protestantism lost the spirit and also secular moralism and it's relation to this turning towards god. The last point is one I'm sticking on a bit I'll admit, but, well, it'll all shake out somehow. For now, that'll have to suffice.

Credo Quia Absurdum Est (1st half)

2009-09-30T15:57:00.007+01:00

The groups in our society that have the most at stake in the preservation and strengthening of competitive capitalism are those minority groups which can most easily become the object of distrust and enmity of the majority-the Negroes, the Jews, the foreign born to mention only the most obvious. Yet, paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market- the Socialists and Communists-have been recruited in disproportionate measure from these groups. Instead of recognizing that the existence of the market has protected them from the attitudes of their fellow countrymen, they mistakenly attribute the residual discrimination to the market
-Milton Friedman, Freedom and Capitalism

What makes this statement seem especially ridiculous is that the book was originally published in 1962, two years before the civil rights act was passed. By this account then, Jim Crow laws only register as residual discrimination.

And that illustrates what appears so far to be a pattern in Friedman's thinking. He doesn't seem to understand or at the very least does not acknowledge that freedom, his central organizing principle, is itself fraught with contradiction and complexity. Perhaps in a world where these perfectly free markets actually existed minority groups would in fact be better off in supporting competitive capitalist ideals, but in that world, assumedly, this 'residual discrimination' would not have come into existence in the first place.

Because the truth of the matter is that freedom is only meaningful as a foundational principle to the full spectrum of society if we were starting from a point of true equality. But the truth of this world is not only current inequality but a historical legacy of vast inequality and oppression. There is a reason that socialism was particularly appealing to minority groups and to those in poverty in the first half of the twentieth century in America. This reason is the oppression they faced at the hands of the dominant system of the time, which was an unregulated and quite cutthroat competitive capitalism. Certainly, early twentieth century America was closer to the capitalist ideal than the socialist one. Now the question of what is a socialist ideal is a question that Friedman rightly poses. And I'll have to leave that aside for the moment.

Returning to the notion of freedom, we find that even in Friedman's own thought there is no clarity on what freedom is or how it's achieved. As he says:

Indeed, a major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it does this task (exchange of goods) so well. It gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.

And then, not five pages later:

Indeed, it is important to preserve freedom only for people who are willing to practice self-denial, for otherwise freedom degenerates into license and irresponsibility.

So, people getting what they want when they want it is the crowning achievement of free markets, but the fact that people in fact do this is degenerative and licentious. This is absurd on its face.

The statement from which this blog is titled, which translates as 'I believe because it is absurd', has been attributed to the early Christian apologist (which in the original sense was someone who responds to [here responding to the rise of gnosticism]), Tertullian. What he actually said was was slightly more nuanced and, it would seem, aimed more at the mystical understanding of god in the intellectual irresolvability of paradox, a way and need to go beyond the rational. An idea that came into the West from the great traditions of Eastern religious philosophy, but that was especially apparent in the ideas and arguments about the meaning of the trinity. But anyway.

It could, in its less nuanced form, also apply to Friedman. And that's my generous reading. The other reading of course is that this whole exercise of his, this applique of philosophic principles to his economics, is at heart duplicitious. I'm trying to be generous today, and so I'll just say that it's painfully simple minded (clearly, my generosity knows no bounds).

And to understand the problem, once again, we must look to the intersection of the economic and the spiritual. To the equilibrium of the two mayhaps?

The inevitable rambling Wallace posting

2009-09-21T02:05:00.028+01:00

I waited a week to write about DFW or Infinite Jest or anything of the Wallacian nature. I thought I might try last Saturday, but when I saw the picture of Wallace over there on the Infinite Summer website, it just made me too sad to even try to be able to actually think about trying to say something meaningful.

For the most part I read Jest in about 10-25 page increments over the past three months; sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but always just like a mule. Plodding along through the hills and the dark down there caverns of this tumultuous, twisting book. Some of those caverns were pretty seriously dark. And the highs (Eschaton, for true) were so funny and hilarious, laughing for pages and pages, and the insights that just kept coming at the speed of light, it all brought me in. It all made for me, myself the reader, a warm place by the fire in this book, this work of the greatest art. And the warmth and comfort provided gave Wallace the freedom to explore the darknessses of the world of reality in a way for which I myself, the reader, would be able to look and see without being turned to stone.

Turned to stone by the hard truths of life. The straight no chaser. Those lows. And but then those lows made me want to crawl out of my own skin, and more than once I was tempted to skip ahead, but I plowed through. Going on like a mule. I stayed with it (the Infinite Summer) the whole way, only finally rushing ahead in the last week, this past week.

I've been done since last Monday, I do believe. And I still held out hope the whole way. I thought right up to really about page 970ish or so that it was going to really, in some indeterminant way, come together somehow in some way other than it did. I should've known better when I saw his article about David Lynch and how Tarantino kind of rips Lynch off and commercializes him. And but yet that is the thing about Lynch that I do so love so very much. You always have to construct the story for yourself at least a little bit. I should've guessed that that was where Wallace was gonna end up. Still, I felt deflated at the end. All the air went right out of the sails in that final last eighth of a page (in the paperback blue sky and whisping cloud edition).

And (but) so if you want answers then you're (I'm) gonna have to go find them for myself (yourself [ourselves all together!]). I guess you go back to the beginning and then you fill it in as much as you can as you go through the second time. And maybe that's why the Wallace fans, the ones who just love Wallace (which is where I would put myself right from really within the very first page of the story there in the Year of Glad, although I did doubt him on more than one occasion but only just so very ever so slightly [obviously, I can also be self indulgent if maybe not to so intense and ululatingly powerful an effect]), they, by most accounts many of them, go right back and start back with the second round right away. Which does make sense what with the end being the beginning and all.

And I don't know if I would start back over right now even if I could and had the time (already this semester I've laid out a course of study that is so heavily research intensive to a degree that's just about going to blot out the sun). Those times when Wallace was maybe trying to shock people a little bit, maybe trying to get us to wake up a little more than we do. That stuff was rough. Those two women's back to back AA stories early on. Randy Lenz's detailed cat and then dog killing. Some of the Fackelmann stuff. Poor Tony's crazy final binge out. Ruthless, unvarnished truth of life. Of the most disturbing type. In some ways the proofs of our humanity.

Kate Gompert's first drink or two with Marathe though in retrospect was pretty durn awesome. I know that it probably means bad stuff for her at least in the short term certainly in getting the boot from Ennett, but I was happy to see it. Gompert a little buzzed and not totally crushingly saddened was a pleasurable moment for me. And drinking with and misunderstanding the mad legless philosopher/agent (and possibly double, triple, quadruple, quintuple [who knows to what levels his deception reaches] agent) of the AFR no less.

And but still I was disappointed when it ended in a way that I felt was a little cheesy. A curtain of Sunshine coming down over everything. Somehow though this whole drawn out final scene with Gately and Count Faxula had me laughing uncontrollably on and off for a good solid twenty pages/40 minutes. I laughed so hard around and about Mt. Dilaudid and Lake Urine that I had to stop reading. I still can't see those two names without cracking up hard. Then though it was bordering on the painful. I couldn't stop laughing at these two helpless junkies just junking their way right into an even more fucked up situation than either of them could possibly know, what with P H-J falling out of a tree, and Bobby C finally showing up to see the Faxter for Sorkin with his retinue of drag queens and the strung out pharmacy tech. And the Fax man just cooking and shooting and cooking and shooting. Running out of diluted water and finally going to the lake (which is solely by itself as it's own brand of shocking humor, all alone as this moment of the perfect and purely mixed emotions of comedy and tragedy, I'd say [a kind of strangely poetic lynch pin for this whole crazy novel, maybe in some sort of way]).

Anyway...For the Count it was all done. But the Bimster was just getting his start in life. And but still yet to do all kinds of heroic and good hearted things, if also some serious violence and drug abuse. Who knows how many heroic deeds Don G has left in him or if he will ever get to see what the P.G.O.A.T. looks like behind the veil or how it'd've gone for Hal'n'm I guess up in the Concavity/Convexity out at JOI's grave site. A lot of questions that require further rereading and a quite large dollop of concentrative creative elaboration no doubt.

And that is hands down the thing that amazes most (or one of those things). That a thousand page novel with another hundred pages of end notes/addendums/errata/way more specific information about pharmaceutical drugs both made up and real than you would ever possibly want to know about could possibly send you scurrying back to the beginning of it to start over to try and see what all you missed out on the first go round, that this could happen is nothing short of an amazing feat of writing. It really is a Herculean effort. Trying to put a world this large and detailed together into any kind of coherent work would be virtually impossible for those of us among the mere mortals of the realm.

Wallace for himself was a titan though. No question of his genius, even if you feel it's self indulgent of him to write as he did in Jest (and go read his reportage and see who you think is the self indulgent one. I dare you if you think that). A man with a vocabulary twice the size of most of us mere humans. And a precision of both observation and interpretation of observation non pareil.

So much of the work was drawn from the real area surrounding Boston that from the perspective of a long time Bostonian it was just a whole helluva lot of fun to go through just for that and that alone, forget about all the rest. Inman Square, Cambridge, Allston, the Storrow 500 (very real and hilariously spot on with that one was DFW), the BPL, the Back Bay, et cetera all real and mostly as described. To a degree of the angle.

It was quite a ride, and I do have to say that the timing was bad on some of the no chaser hard truths towards the end as I myself was just not of a mind for such darkness at those moments of time, and it was contributing just a speck for a moment to my own difficulties. And that's why I wouldn't go back except in a period of stability and for essentially a quick few week reread. That's all the time I can imagine for a second round in the next several years though regardless of anything else. Which is certainly somewhat of a bummer. Plus, no way I show so much restraint in reading a book that I'm as into as I was with this one. It's never happened before. Maybe with another collective read via the continuing infsum (I'm out for Dracula, but we'll see what comes up after that), but otherwise on my own, no way. I'm a sprinter when it comes to literature.

I do still imagine this book will be one that I'll return to at more than one juncture in my life if I live a long one, which is something I'm really kind of hoping for, but one never can bank these things for certain. And I look forward with great relish to the time when I can read more of the man's work. A now finite body now. A too finite body quite many would agree. Still, I'm not angry at the man, as apparently some are. I'm sad for him and how black those final days must've been. The depths to which was the reach of his feel. I would sort of guess from this work.

And I know that because of the freshness of his leaving, the pain that still exists about this loss, that it's still difficult to talk about the man himself and his relation to his work. And that more generally sometimes there's a desire to deal with the work and not the life and its relation back to the work, and that that can be an often times useful approach especially in academia, but that there are just such depths in this work that his own capacity for sorrow must have been something that I just know that I for myself probably could not even begin to imagine trying to stay standing and live through. I would guess.

Right now tonight (this morning now) though I'm not trying to do anything but just slightly recall the emotions of the realization last Saturday that it was the one year anniversary of David Foster Wallace's suicide as I was approaching the end of what must've been his master work and would think about this book that I now love as a desert island top five, this infinite jest, this lopsided Serpinski Gasket, and I would know what it means to miss someone you're not even sure you knew. If only for just a flash when I clicked through from Infsum's twitterlink and saw the picture of Wallace with his head down and that sly smile like he's up to something (which quite clearly he most surely always was) and then had the momentary feeling of having had the true sense of the man himself for a flicker of a second, and that had made me feel heavily the weight of this loss that the man himself is gone even as the work lives on.

That's just it though, the work lives on, and the truth of the fact is that this work, if we get it right and get our shit together, this work will be read for eons to come (If we get it right. If we get it really right). The work lives on. Ultimately and at the end of the day, Infinite Jest lives on more than most or at least has that great potential to do so. Ultimately again it's up to the individual reader (collected). We decide for ourselves as we always do as the literary or whatever consumer. Or we try to. Maybe. Maybe we (you) are one of those who stopped 50/75/100/150/185 pages in. Maybe Wallace isn't you're thing. And that's okay, hey, everybody's gotta do and have their own thing.

The only thing that I would ask though, and I ask this with all restraint, respect, and sincerity. Don't trash him, please. Don't trash the man or his work or how it all ended. Not anonymously on the internet or in any way, shape, or form. And I know I'm nobody to ask that, but it just seems like, what with this country and culture so hell bent on vitriol as the new national past time, that I should just put it out there. Be respectful of this man who so clearly put everything he had on the line every time he picked up the pen. And honor that effort with an equal one of your (our) own self (selves).

Surely that's not really totally possible (like I said, Wallace was a titan), but it's still a good thought to end on nonetheless.

The inevitable, rambling, overlong baseball post

2009-09-18T09:04:00.057+01:00

Certainly most people who know baseball know John Lester's story. How he was a promising young pitcher who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was 22. How he spent a year in chemotherapy and then came back and at 25 is probably the most dominant left handed pitcher in the game of baseball right now. He's just recently broken Bruce Hurst's record for most strikeouts in a single season by a Sox lefty and was totally on point last Sunday evening out at Fenway Park, allowing three hits and no runs over eight innings.

I saw it live and in person from the State Street pavilion half way up the third base line, which it was my first time to sit up there, and I do have to say that it was really just totally pretty awesome. You're looking down on the field from way up high and but you feel so close like being right on top of the field, and you get a really clear view of how well Lester commands both sides of the plate, how much movement his fastball has, how devastating his cut fastball really is. It just bends right at the plate, virtually unhittable when he's got it working. It was a joy to see it.

I went on Tuesday as well and got to see Daisuke take the mound for the first time since June, and he was solid, went right after hitters, and got the K's when he needed them. And at every big strike out the crowd was right behind him. Getting to their feet, yelling, clapping, shouting their support (or disdain for like Figgins or whoever [which really how can you not like Chone Figgins?]). The nation was roaring for the K, for the kill. And while I think it's great that he got such support and a standing O when he left the mound for the dugout with one on and no outs in the seventh with a pat on the back from Tito and a tip of his cap to the hollering crowd, I still think it's just really shitty that Sox fans are so quick to boo their own team's players when those players are struggling.

Matsuzaka was booed off the mound back in June after being 33-15 in his first two years here after making the switch from the Japanese puro yakyuu (only three other pitchers had better records over that span, and one of them got a Cy and an eight year, 230ish million dollar contract with the Yankees for his troubles [And I know Matsuzaka's outings were consistently flukish and mostly short over that period; still they were consistently wins]). They booed Takashi Saito (who has an ERA in the 3.40 range as of this writing and was down in the twos maybe when it happened) as he was about to (I repeat about to) give up the losing run in what had been a tie game since the sixth on one of Penny's better starts just before the break. I don't understand why you would boo your own pitcher right as he's trying to send the game into extra innings, even if he did just walk the bases full. Course they booed Lugo a lot before he was put on waivers. And then there's the fact that Red Sox fans will forever have the distinction of being the only fans in baseball probably ever to have booed John Smoltz. That's really, really classy folks.

In retrospect, the idea that John Smoltz and/or Brad Penny could each/either both come back from serious injuries and make the switch to the American League was some serious wishful thinking. I admit, I thought it could work, but now that I think back, it doesn't seem like it really ever could've. Penny has no reliable secondary pitch. He's a fastball pitcher all the way. Even with perfect location, there's no way you can make that work in the long run against AL lineups. And the Smoltz project was even more pie in the sky, I now also see. Here's a guy that basically had to reinvent himself then now that his fastball is in the high eighties/ low nineties, down from the high nineties even just a few years ago basically because he went to the bullpen for so many years and pitched the middle of his career out of the pen amassing no less than 254 saves. I think. Still, now that he's older, there's just no more blowing guys away with the heat.

Pinpoint accuracy, finesse, a little deception, and at least one out pitch are the barest of necessaries in order to find success in the AL East. Smoltz's slider was real when he could get it to fall, but he was having trouble throwing it for strikes all the way from his starts with the triple-A PawSox onward, and his then now slow fastball (by Major League standards at least) becomes a meatball if it catches any of the middle of the plate and the hitter's looking for it. Trying to figure out how to deal with all of that and a DH and coming off major shoulder surgery was a lot to ask. I mean, coming back and starting at 42 and trying to figure all that out in what is unquestionably the toughest division in all of baseball was never going to be easy. Add to that the pressure of playing for the BoSox. Only a very slight chance that whole project ever had. And I still wonder what would've happened if they'd offered or he'd accepted a set-up role in the Boston pen (Saito was able to make the transition even returning from injury), and for example Buchholz had come on as the fifth. Would we be looking down at the Yankees and not up? Who can say if that wouldn't've been too soon to bring the kid up. If he'd've had his confidence all the way back by then (which he sure does now, and even though Lester was great, I was a little sorry that I didn't get to see Clay as planned before the rain out Friday pushed Sunday's schedule forward).

I did say before the season last year that it would be too much pressure getting regular turns in the rotation for either Lester or Clay. Actually I said it was gonna be too much pressure for both of them, and that it was too soon, but I was only right about Buchholz. Lester was the rock last year. Number two from May on and the number one starter for most of the season and into the post season right up to that top shelf game seven performance when he got only just barely out pitched by Garza in the ALCS, throwing a No against Kansas City at some point along the way to there (a defeat to the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Championship series, sending them onto the World Series and the Sox into the off season).

Still, two rookie starting pitchers on one of the most high pressure teams in all of major league sports, especially with the expectations for Clay after having already thrown a no hitter in the second start of his career back at the end of '07 (a thing that even some of the greatest pitchers retire without having ever done), there was very little chance that that wouldn't be too much. Course Lester probably has a little more perspective on the whole thing than Clay (who just recently got engaged to a suitcase model from that Howie Mandel show with the suitcases for whatever that's worth) what with the hair loss and the facing of death that is the battle with cancer. Even still I say that the 45 million dollar contract coming almost right before the season opened spun Lester's head a bit and had him a little distracted and contributed to his early struggles this year. I would suggest to Theo that it's surely a good idea to get those things done earlier in the off season and certainly before spring training if at all possible.

See, the pressure in Boston baseball is not just the bright media spotlight (and top quality sports writing from both the Globe and the Herald [and also some pretty rudely jerk-off column writing from both as well]), it's not just the park (which can be pretty hitter friendly at times [although can also be a huge home field advantage with its' strange dimensions, passionate fans, and of course the green monster]), it's also the rivalry. Having to try and keep pace with the New York Yankees (especially this particular year's second half, holy mother what?!) and their unmatched revenue streams as their main rival has been difficult for the home team here in Beantown, especially when the division they are already both in boasts a third team that beat out both of these teams and went all the way to the Series before being beaten by Philly last year even if they have now faded back to 500 after being swept by the Sox this past weekend (of which Lester was the final game going against James Shields) and are now fully out of the hunt. As well as Roy Halladay coming around for Toronto (who pulled the reverse of their usual and started strong before fading just before the break) and the still potentially damaging Baltimore line up (even if they are 2-15 against the Sox this year [the most totally lopsided it's been in a while]).

But because there is no profit sharing amongst the teams in baseball each team essentially controls the rights for its own markets and just gets paid per by ESPN or Fox or whatnot for the weekly Saturday and Sunday baseball on what must just be a season to season basis for whichever few good match ups get picked up. Substantial monies go to the players and MLB of the post-season receipts from whoever makes it to where ever, so the real source of money for a team is in stadium receipts and cable television revenues from the regular season. And in this regard New York just cleans everybody's clock. There is no more lucrative sports market in all of the world than NYC.

Which is why New York has two of every major sport. A good one and a shitty one often, although still even more often lately two shitty ones. And less occasionally these days two good ones. They haven't really had the kind of sports luck (or perhaps acumen is the right word here [heh, heh]) that Boston has had this new millenium in general sports success. Still, the Yankees do and always will have more money than every other team in baseball without, dare I say this, regulation. The New York Yankees payroll, relatively speaking, claims the largest differential between its main rival, the Boston Red Sox, of any rivalry payroll differential of any and all professional sports rivalries. In '08 it was 135 to 240 something. A difference of over 100 million dollars. That's still a lot of bread. I don't care how much money the Fed just printed or the banks and the markets've lost.

And for a lot of reasons that team has been less and less successful for the past 10 or so years (to the great enjoyment of Bostonians and Red Sox Nation generally). And even after going out and spending 400 million (over a period of years) for three big time free agent signings over the off season [and overpaid by half for at least two of them, but we'll just have to wait and see about that]), they still struggled early as Alex Rodriguez was swamped with the steroid allegation and then went down with an injury, and Sabathia, Texiera, and Burnett all started slow. Finally though we saw what that team could do as they just destroyed the Sox in the middle serieses (Can you pluralize series? I guess the second plural is just sort of assumed to be understandable from the context) of the season, winning 4 or 5 games straight and starting with the broom in the Bronx over three back in August.

The bombers didn't get here on pace to easily win 100 without the Sox taking several of the early series (es) themselves though. I believe it was three. Three beautiful sweeps that is (even if one was only a two gamer and doesn't really count as a series). Still, this tells you how well the Yanks have been playing since the break that the Sox are five games back even with eight straight early season wins against 'em. Those were good times, I do gotta say. I will always always for the rest of my life always and forever enjoy watching or listening to the Sox beat the Yanks or reading it in the paper the next day or even just going to redsox.com and checking the box scores and quick run down, which is mostly all I get to do these days. Always will get up for that.

Yes, the Sox are trailing right now as we're coming down to the wire but only by five games and only by four losses. Which means the AL East pennant is still on the table, if within a fairly close reach for the bombers. This road trip the Sox are currently on is the key as it ends in NYC for 3. (Just quick, yo, the key is NYC for three. And also just quick, what the...is up with the new Yankee stadium. It's a damn launching pad. I swear they did that on purpose somehow.) The hometown heroes here in Boston've just about clinched a wild card spot at the very least as Texas is on the fade as we head down the stretch, and surprisingly it's not their pitching that's the problem. It's been their hitting here recently, which is pretty odd as the Rangers have been one of the best hitting teams in the game for quite sometime and still sport a dangerous if hard slumping line up. It's really just been this year that their young crop of pitchers had finally been successful. And then they get shut out for like two and a half games, maybe longer. And now they're all but done for the year.

As for Boston's staff, way back in spring training, a lot of people were saying that the BoSox's starting rotation might be the strongest in baseball, and for most of the season those people were mostly wrong. All of a sudden, right when things are getting serious, it just looks like they might end up where we all thought they were gonna be way back when. That rules the schoolyard.

Also, Vlad Guerrero looks like he's getting ready to join Mel Gibson's Braveheart crew and bash some skulls when he's warming up on deck swinging that bat around behind his head all crazy, and Gary Mathews Jr. has about the widest, most bent legged batting stance I've ever seen. Also again, Billy Wagner has a pretty funky delivery his own bad self. The guy looks like he's throwing a knuckleball, but then the ball kinda zooms out of his hand to the plate. It's really weird looking and really effective. He'll get his four hundredth save next year for somebody fer sure. And Shields's set move when he's about to throw is this quick sweeping sideward motion to the set. Also weird, although not ultimately very effective this season.

I have to say, Sox fans are like lost puppy dogs. They seem to wander around aimlessly, making it virtually impossible to move in the walkways underneath the stands. They stand around in the middle of these walkways. Bunching up especially at the various entrances out to the stands; at the very focal point of all traffic is where people always stop. Obnoxious does not even begin. Riding the T with everyone is pretty crappy too because there's never enough cars for at least an hour before and an hour after every game, so it's like sardines that T riding is. And I cannot say enough about how much I dislike Sweet Caroline as Red Sox nation's theme song. I don't mean to be mean, but, seriously, like seriously seriously, we need a new theme already. Not only does the song suck, but it's also all the way tired now after how many years of being played at virtually every home game? They've played it once a game at every one I've been to over the past three years almost without fail. I do love the music Alex Gonzalez and Victor Martinez stand in to though. Some kind of double time Caribbean stuff. Really pretty rad. And lastly I wonder if Pedey picked Dr. Dre for himself or if that's meant as some kind of joke (I would guess not as it's been his music since at least last season [It still does seem funny to me though that Dustin Pedroia stands in to Dre]).

Okay then, I'd say that's enough baseball talk (as if that's even possible, hah!).

Moral perfection or the lack thereof

2009-09-13T17:05:00.005+01:00

I believe that it is not a matter of the church requiring its ministers to accept a series of dogmas. How could they honestly say that they have no doubts about any of these dogmas? If they had no doubts, they would hardly be very good Christians, because the intellectual life is as ambiguous as the moral life. And who would call himself morally perfect? How then could someone call himself intellectually perfect? The element of doubt is an element in faith itself.
-Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (From his lectures at Union Theological Seminary)

There's a complicated history with the problem of doubt in the Christian church. It was under Calvin and therefore of great influence in Protestantism in general that absolute faith became the inward sign of salvation. If you doubted as a Calvinist or a Puritan or an early Congregationalist, then that was it. You were not one of the elect, and you were not saved. And there was nothing you could do about it. You were destined to burn in hellfire for all of eternity. No amount of good works would change that.

This was a abrupt departure from the Catholic church and undoubtedly a reaction to the corruptions of the church in selling indulgences for sin. Under Calvin there could be no such corruption of the church because it was not within its ministers power to offer such things. God had already chosen before creating creation, I suppose.

Predetermination always seemed a little crazy to me. I do remember at one time looking at the arguments reconciling freewill and predetermination, and, while I can't actually remember them now, I remember there were some seriously unnecessary philosophical acrobatics involved. Kind of like digging a tunnel underneath an invisible and not really real wall.

While, I believe, most modern protestant sects don't embrace the concept of predetermination, absolute faith still seems to remain as a cornerstone of the general Christian religion. As Tillich points out, absolutes are pretty much impossible for human beings. Absolute faith is impossible as is absolute understanding, which is the twin here of absolute faith. The point of the book of Job wasn't that god's a sadist, but that humans don't understand really what's the what. The logic of God is not a logic that our finite minds can really fully grasp.

No doubt a great part of this emphasis on faith over thought has a lot to do with the Enlightenment and the clash between science and religion that's been going on since they locked up Galileo for heresy. Also surely an important political aspect of the protestant splintering. Faith may have more to do with maintaining the integrity of the various sects' structures and keeping adherents from contemplating other options than its connection to serving to bring people closer to God. Which strikes me as ultimately counter productive. If a religious institution is engaging in dogmatic requirements for political reasons, the flock is ill served. An ill served flock is a wayward one. I would guess.

Anywho, Tillich makes a similar point but in reference to ideas and earlier times:

Salvation in Stoicism is a salvation through reaching wisdom. In Christianity salvation is brought about by divine grace. These two approaches are in conflict with each other to the present day.

It seems kinda' nutzo to think that wisdom and grace are in conflict. There's no inherent conflict between these two, and that's one of Tillich's main points. There doesn't have to be a conflict between faith and reason, religion and philosophy. The conflict is a conflation of human logic with the more direct logic of infinity. Maybe. Tillich is all about synthesis, and I love that. Let's work it all out. It's not easy, but it sure ain't impossible. Infinite possibility exists in humanity's bold future.

Alright, enough with the religion already. Going to the second half of a double header tonight and then again on Tuesday to see Matzuzaka's hopefully triumphant return to the mound. I sure do hope the Dice man can salvage something from his lost season and help the Sox down the stretch here. I guess it was inevitable that the Yankees would eventually field a team that could dominate. I mean, how many years can you have a player payroll that's at least 100 million dollars more than any other team and as much as two hundred mil more than some and still suck.

A lot of us here in Boston were hoping that the answer to that question was forever, but no luck. Ah, September baseball. You make me forget all my cares, if only for a moment.

democracy of the mind

2009-09-12T20:05:00.004+01:00

About eight or nine years ago I was taking a class on contemporary drama at the U of Memphis, and while I was working on a paper on Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, I came across an article in the journal Modern Language Review that explored the way this play related to consciousness theory. I don't recall the specifics, but the general idea was that the audience represented memory. Roz and Guild were sort of bumbling idiots outside of those few passages from Hamlet because the audience has no memory of these characters outside of their representations within that play.

It was somewhere along those lines, but the brief glimpses of neuroscience that the article provided were the starting point for my own forays into neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and consciousness theory. I spent several years fairly focused (for me [which is still not so much]) on this study, and a few semesters after this first glimpse, while taking a class on political philosophy and reading Locke's 2nd treatise of gov't, I spent one Sunday night pacing around the attic, chain smoking cigarettes, and trying to work out a clearer picture of what is just a small passage from that work on the dangers of material excess, which I felt was a key to unlocking my own interpretations of the work as a whole. At that stage I had a still pretty hazy knowledge of neuroanatomy, but I had a grip on the basics. At some late hour, I came to develop my theory of mental resonance in this mad pacing thought session that is still the foundation of my understanding of the role and value of spirituality.

The basic idea is that there are all these systems of the brain that are interacting all the time, and there's surely as much disagreement within the mind as there is in the world. Most of this occurs below consciousness, but undoubtedly feeling, thought, and action are heavily influenced by this neurological chatter. When there's dissonance between the systems, one system has to dominate and therefore tamp down on disagreement. How this process happens is a complicated mess of complexity and abstractional layering, and I wouldn't pretend to even feel close to having a grip on that. Consciousness is a slippery concept and agency is difficult nay impossible to locate precisely.

So, in my mind, excess is the result of this mental dissonance and a kind of unconscious political fight for control of conscious experience and expression. The type of excess and immoderation that Locke was talking about was the result of this disagreement in (possibly) concert with maybe socially skewed rational processes of the neocortex. The further idea was that mental resonance was what the spiritual experience was. I came to this conclusion based on my own experiences of meditation which can be this kind of hyper-awareness, a feeling that consciousness is expanded and the filter is removed a little bit. A way to get the mind synced up and not talking at cross purposes.

Last year I worked up a presentation for a social psychology class about how this internal process related to the externalities of social interaction. And I really wish it had been a paper and not a presentation because all I have are some vague notes and nothing clearly articulated. Here's just a bit of those notes:
Internal resonance of the mind is an internal democratic process. Must be internally democratic for healthy cognition (read: balanced mind), and therefore able to be democratic in relation to others so as not to dominate.

The idea was that outward autocratic behavior was a projection of this unconscious internal process of dominance. I didn't at the time explore how this dominance came to be or whether this mental resonance would always return similar outcomes across personalities, but I see now these are important questions. And not ones that I have any kind of answers for, for now.

In the previous post, I suggested quickly that this idea of unconditionality (which can be found in one form or another in just about all mystic writings from all different sects and religions) was related to Rousseau's general will, which was itself the ideal political expression and the thing that magistrates (Rousseau's term for gov't officials) should aim for. All these things raise a lot of questions in terms of both ideals and pragmatics, and certainly the fact that Rousseau was the most influential thinker in the French revolution doesn't exactly inspire confidence in his ideas. Course, philosophers have been often misunderstood, which is a problem of the discipline as well as a problem of heuristic human tendencies (and if these are natural tendencies [which cognitive psychology suggests] then what does this mean for democratic consciousness?).

I had a clearer point in my head when I was running this stuff earlier today, but I guess I'm just gonna have to say that I think it's interesting that these ideas appear in such different places as Christian mysticism and 18th century political philosophy. Rousseau never explores any of the spiritual implications of his idea, and settles on The Lawgiver as a way to give expression to this general will. Probably where Lenin got his dictatorship of the proletariat (as if those consolidating power ever really need philosophical backing), but I digress.

Oh, wait. I remember now. So, neuroscientific studies of meditation have sort of verified a portion of my theory in that they found high levels of synchronous electrical activity in the various systems of the brain during meditation. Mental resonance does in fact take place during meditation (and can I just reiterate that I worked that out through introspection, basic neuroanatomy, and logical induction, and, yes, that does make me a badass [in my own admittedly dissonant mind at least]). Returning to the the notion of both unconditionality and the general will being more than just the sum of there parts, I would suggest that this is also true of this gamma wave synchronous mental resonance. The resonant state is the mystical experience that is itself the heavy duty, full-on version of the spiritual experience. And that that experience is itself the absolute intensity of ecstatic human experiential possibility, which is greater than the sum of the dissonantial potentialities all tallied up nice and neat.

Clearly, there's miles left to go with this argument, and certainly my point is not that people who don't engage specifically in transcendental meditation are not all they can be or anything. I'm just not sure as a society we can get anything close to an expression of this ideal, the general will, in a society that on balance lacks spiritual rituals and experience or as a collection of individuals who mostly eschew these potentially mentally resonant states. I also think that in a heterogeneous society those rituals have to be developed personally and no set of 'Here you go, now go to town' paint-by-numbers rituals can be symbolic in the Jungian sense. The hard choices of freedom or some such.

Like I said, miles to go here. Shoulder pain is starting to overwhelm my capacity to sit in a chair, so I'm calling it here.

The General Will

2009-09-09T21:46:00.005+01:00

"the Unconditional is related to all finite things, yet it is not one among them or all of them taken together. Moreover, it 'stands over against' all things of the finite world (including the concept of God) and at the same time is the dynamic ground of existence and meaning."
-James Luther Adams' introduction to Paul Tillich's essay collection, What is Religion

Adams' description of Tillich's idea of infinity, essentially, seems meant as this mysticality that is a direct connection to the natural world and through it to this beyondness that is always present in mystical teachings. The serious mysticism has always been the source of the most profound knowledge and wisest judgment that humanity has ever developed, it strikes me. The lives and teachings of the mystics have always been the source of true moral examplarism. Perhaps more attention should be paid, but I'm already getting away from myself.

There will always be more to say about the place for true saints and mystics in the future of humanity (I predict and hope), but what I wanted to jot down here was what this idea of infinity as a thing lacking all conditions kind of knocked loose in my head about the comparisons here to Rousseau's general will.

This idea that the infinite is not just the collection of all finite things made me think about this idea that is at the heart of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, which is this idea of the general will. The general will is what the sovereign (which in his formulation was the collection of all persons in a commonwealth [1762]) aims to express through its gov't. Or what the gov't is supposed to help create for the people. Or something. But the general will is not simply the collection of all the particular wills of each individual person within this commonwealth; it's more than just what people want and get and have and keep.

It's just about here that I have to strike out on my own from Rousseau as it's been some five years since I read the material, but this connection that Adams makes about Tillich's thought (and I'm very excited to start reading the man himself tomorrow or the next day) of the Unconditional as this rerepresentation of religious experience. An attempt to recapture the individual spiritual experience at the heart of what religion was always supposed to be about. This idea of infinity is a way to try to experience the reality of this that lies behind the symbol. If that symbol actualizes this experience of knowledge and being of the infinite, then perhaps you can access the general will. That's not Roussseau's point. Nor, would I say, is this spiritual route the only access to this kind of unconditional social good. (And really how did this idea of the social [with its ism] become so hated and despised because of autocratic, dogmatic, fairly idiotic 'Communism'? Is that really the smartest move for us as a, ya know, society?)

A point here is, as Pemulis says, the map is not the territory. I think people get confused sometimes. I know I do, and I'm pretty much going to have to stop now cause I'm getting numbness in two of the fingers on my left hand. And that's starting to freak me out. Remind me to tell you about my current attempts to find an orthopedist thru my so amazingly awesome it's universally reviled company-wide private insurance plan. Stopping now, shooting pains in my arm.

center/balance/whisps of ghosts trailing into the background

2009-09-06T20:57:00.003+01:00

A funk. I'm in it. All the way out and back again.

It just creeps up on me every several months or so, and suddenly the existentiality of life just gets to be too much for a while, and the whole thing just seems so pointless. Such an utterly useless waste of precious time to be here thinking and doing and going around and around. And I know in my head that it's just a neurologic event. It's just the waxing and waning of the neurochemical tides, and there's really very little I can do about the feeling. The feeling is the feeling. It's just what happens sometimes and how things are.

It's in the thoughts and the actions that some semblance of control, of choice, exists. I can be philosophical about it.

There's a section of Infinite Jest round about page 800 or so in which Wallace talks about it. First in discussion of Kate Gompert and then about Hal. And while that section about Gompert was just about the most desolate piece of perfect writing and description of depression I've ever come across, he then talks about how Hal uses his intelligence and abstraction as a way to distance himself from his feelings, as a means to stay above the anhedonia. A kind of coping mechanism that only furthers the problem or something. I'm forgetting now exactly how his line of reasoning went, but the idea was that abstraction was essentially an unhealthy means of distancing the self from the feelings of the self.

On one level that makes a lot of sense. The anhedonia, the blah-state that every depressively minded individual knows intimately, the state that is my own personal default and the thing that I fight against a lot of the time, in that state abstraction can be a kind of way to kind of triangulate yr feeling-like state in what that state might be supposed to be. Instead of letting your feelings be your feelings, you try to construct the proper feelings. None of this is Wallace's point, he was more going for the distance problem, and I should go back and reread that section instead of trying to just recreate it from my hazy remembrances [edited to say: that was one of his points. One of his many, many really good points (or amazingly accurate {seeming} interpretations of reality)]. That whole section sort of hit me like a brick. Not since reading An Unquiet Mind was I so caught by a piece of writing as describing something that I knew intimately but never imagined someone else could describe or even understand (as DFW describes it, you just can't imagine that anyone else could know what it's like while yr up in it, even if they suffer from that same underlying neurologic issue. It's a total cipher-like self-referential thing), as I still don't even pretend to understand it for myself much of the time. In my better moments at least.

So, there's some type of abstractional connection to anhedonia, to the blah. Abstraction furthers the blah by distancing the self farther afield from the feelings, maybe. And there is truth to this. It's just that there's also this it. There's these feelings of blackness and nothing and total usurpation of meaning by meaninglessness. These feelings of painful longing for non-existence. This neurologic sadness. And in that state the best and only thing is to distance yourself from the feeling, which isn't really possible, not in the midst of it. All you can do is mediate, maybe just a touch. Crouch down behind yr shield and try to deflect the blow. That's really the best hope. Without some type of medication or like alcoholic type drinking that never ends or fully spiritual existence. That's my personal great hope; that spirituality is the possible out.

But who knows? So far, no good. So far the serotonergic/dopaminergic rollercoaster continues. Still, I don't think I could do it without abstraction. Course part of that is that abstractiveness is a large chunk of my personal life's meaning and wanting to understand is not some type of put on or meant as cocktail hour conversational fodder or anything like that. I feel a need to understand, like if I don't further this need then I'll just turn to dust and whirl away in the wind. Plus, there is no feeling that even comes close to that feeling of discovery, that moment when some little piece of the puzzle fits in place and a whole cascade of logicalities come tumbling out of that moment of unlocking, and suddenly your mind is just on fire. You can feel the electrical currents coursing through the system. You can feel the ideas in your fingertips. Or maybe that's just me (or maybe that's just mania).

And writing helps. It always makes me feel better, even when nothing much results from it. No great mystery solved, no brilliant words strung together into a chain of infinite meaning, nothing really but the equivalent of dribbling spittle out the corners of the mouth. (And really, what is Wallace's obsession with saliva or the lack thereof. I don't entirely get that.) It doesn't have to matter or mean or anything. And that's what I like about blogging. This open-endedness of possibility. Talk about the self, talk about the day, talk about yr ideas, talk about whatever the fuck you want to talk about. It's all good, and I feel better, regardless.

The last lion

2009-08-27T23:37:00.009+01:00

[Warning: I wrote this post yesterday in a bit of a state. Saying that it starts out scattershot would be an understatement. Hopefully as I try to tie it all together now, I can come through with an ending that justifies this type of digressive indulgence, but I wouldn't put money on it without pretty good odds. [Yep, woulda' lost that bet as it turns out]]

I couldn't have done it if I'd planned it to be honest [gone for a run at the exact time that Teddy K's funeral motorpool would be coming down Columbia Road]. It just happened that, as it's starting to feel like a normal, supremely awesome late August New England day, I've been going walking/running earlier. Late August, which when all goes to plan is the beginning of an early and extended fall season that is the envy of fall and just generally seasons everywhere, is so amazingly wonderful at this time of year it's almost painful in it's perfect cocktail of weather and place. It's still warm but a cool warm and by the ocean where I live (yes, I can walk to a beach from my house [and though I haven't swum there yet this year, I bet the water temp is approaching non-polar bear club style swimming {as New England's ocean waters don't warm up too terribly much until August at the earliest}]) there's often either a nice breeze or a blustery wind. Late autumn the winds pick up, but in these still early days of the late New England summer it couldn't have been sweeter.

Course it was a bittersweet wind/ errrt. Nope. I'm not gonna get all sentimental about Teddy's passing. Edward Kennedy had been a senator since before I was born. He fought his last presidential battle with Carter in 1980 over Jimmy's handling of health care when I was a mere two year old. And so Reagan won, possibly because of Teddy's protracted and fractious fight with Carter, and instead of universal health care we got the principle of deregulation and a tax cut (much of which Reagan himself rescinded when he saw how big the deficits were getting) and secret wars in America del Sol.

And now, when the philosophy of deregulation has just about bankrupt the world (and did bankrupt Iceland) and the cost and availability of health care in this country is abysmal, the last lion of the senate passes on to the next after fighting brain cancer for a year and a half, no doubt watching his hope ebb away that meaningful health care reform would ever get done amidst the sophistic dirty tricks of the politics of stonewalling.

Am I saying that Rush Limbaugh killed Ted Kennedy? Not really, but, you know, he wasn't helping the situation. Seriously, though the shrillness of the tone means only one thing, evasive tactics (which big B undoubtedly unintendly encouraged by setting artificial time limits and then letting Congress work it out in a scramble), there is still the chance to have this discussion. And it's a discussion that goes to the question of choice (that lies, really, pretty close to the heart of Jest), and the question is essentially a trick one.

Choice is in some ways many times an illusion. You don't always make your own choices. Life makes many of the important choices for us (or a lot of us) in a lot of different (sometimes bone-crushingly) ruthless ways, and that life is the socio-eco-nationo-global matrix in which we struggle to make these 'free choices'. This web that then goes deep in the other direction, inward, into psychological and neuropsychological and then biochemical layers of mind/brain psyche, and somewhere in the webbed matrix expanding inward and outward from this subjective self-soul is this freedom that we, even in and amongst the physical laws that oversee the chemical reactions in the brain, somehow, in and of all that and the rest, we control the direction of this neurochemical flow and by extension the avenues of consciousness and so can then make these free choices.

And Teddy made some bad ones early in his life. He went racing around, possibly and possibly probably drunk, on little ragged island roads. And it went badly. And, well, those of us over a certain age know what that was all about (and certainly everyone here in Mass). He offered to resign, but the voters of Mass overwhelmingly told him to stay put. He flirted with the idea of the presidency up until that fateful '80 campaign for the dem nom. And then he went to work. Committing himself to a life as an old-school style senator from a hard nosed New England state (and if you don't think per capita Mass ass kicking potential isn't still in full effect then you've never spent much time in the cradle of American democracy that is Boston [Remember, Don Gately was a north shore boy] [We had the real tea party, and we didn't have a damn corporate sponsor either {okay, I'm getting worked up. Let's take it down a notch.}]).

So, I'm getting carried away with myself here. And trying to figure out a way to wrap this whole thing up nice and neat. Well, this'll have to do 'cause I'm done with this nonsense.

It quickly occurred to me as I was walking up to the abandoned and shuttered former concession stand where I like to stretch before running that something was going on, and it then quickly occurred to me also that the reason every single cop in Massachusetts was there and huddled in groups of three or four at every intersection from Dot Ave onward was that Edward Kennedy had finally succumb to brain cancer. Well, that and the lack of overtime in the non-discretionary police budget since the financial meltdown almost set off another depression (I feel like I should repeat this fact as much as possible as it really does feel like we're already all 'Glad that's over, now we don't have to think about the flaws in our way of living anymore and can just go on as before').

The sidewalks were littered with people all waiting for the Kennedy motorcade. I hadn't thought of coming out for that but only just to go for a run, but almost perfectly as I got to my stretching spot the motorcade came roaring through. First, 8,000 (give or take 7, 550 or so) motorcycle cops came screaming down the road, peeling off one at a time and blocking the parking inlets along the beach. Then the hearst. Followed by a line of limousines a mile long. As that black oversized sedan came slowly crawling along past where I was standing, the reality that Ted's body was just a stones throw away and that this man who was mythic here in Mass was now lying rigor mortisly stiff in a flag draped box in the back kind of hit me. And I felt sad.

Which is probably more common to my life than I care to admit, but that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about the last lion of liberalism. Or some such thing. Obviously, I'm can't stay on topic for even a second today, so...

made up future techno-craziness

2009-08-26T01:00:00.004+01:00

Really I just remembered this quote that I had marked out from Infinite Jest to put up that was along the lines of the way that social defaults effect personal defaults. After this long paragraph about all this weird Wallacian made up future techno craziness, he has this to say about where we'd be at if that'd been the way that we'd gone and gotten. Anyway, so-

Saying this (made up future techno-craziness) is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

But so very much private watching of customized screens behind drawn curtains in the dreamy familiarity of home. A floating no-space world of personal spectation. Whole new millennial era, under Gentle and Lace-Forche. Total freedom, privacy, choice.

It's true. Society kind of has these generational defaults that are really what culture is, and those social defaults set up what the general personal default will most likely be. The thing that you would become if you weren't paying attention. Anyway, maybe something in that range. Maybe not. I couldn't rightly say.

Part II (How much farther? Not much farther.)

2009-08-24T00:01:00.008+01:00

Two points quick. One: it has to be a collective individual movement towards the freedom of self sacrifice (of the positive kind [as all things have dualities {and all duality can be balanced through the meditative centering of the self (okay that was a bit far [screw it though, let's go far {you'll go far kid, you're a real winner. I can tell these things. I've got an eye, they tell me. (by all of which I was meaning that the balance of, really the tri-ality [or the infinite variation-ality], of human existence means the subjective self-soul has a constant balancing of the the bio-psycho-social web to effect, for which the gaze of consciousness expanded to and through all the systems and sub-systems of the mind/brain might be of use)}])}]).

Two: What was two?

Okay, two. The value of culture.

I had this thought while I was reading Barbarians at the Gate, a book about what was at the time the largest leveraged buy-out ever (to the tune of 25 billion 1989 dollars [I know, right. Child's play]). It occurs to me that one of the real effects of the sixties counter-culture was the breaking down of even the veneer of Victorian values. Ross Johnson, CEO of RJR/ Nabisco used to live by the line from the Bob Dylan song, "He who isn't busy being born is busy dying." And he was a part of this whole new breed of business men who came of age at that time, and weren't bogged down with these old, staid conceptions of morality and responsibility to the community or employees. There didn't even have to be this thin pretense toward some form of old world values (Moravian in the case of RJR Reynolds). That's not to say that there was some nostalgic time in the just distant past that was all beautiful magical or anything. It's just to say that our modern culture is rootless, rudderless, and morally adrift. Maybe.

Still, Johnson and the Wall Street crew end up making the old school tobacco people look like saints. And really, let's think about that for a minute. The Streeters made the old line tobacco executives look like caring, concerned, moral, upright citizens.

And that's sad. It makes me sad to think about these things sometimes. And I do wonder if that wasn't the ultimate result of Marxism. One last enlightenment era push into secularity. I just don't see how you can think of organizing a society based on altruistic principles without the spiritual experience and rituals as a means towards the maintenance and furtherance of altruism. I mean, I get the whole opium of the masses, corrupted religious institutions thing, but did we really need to through the baby out with the bathwater.

And we saw how far those altruistic principles (to each according to his need, from each according to his ability [or words to that effect]) went in the Russian socialist experiment. Really Russia was never socialist in the utopian sense of the word that pre-dated Marx. Lenin's whole dictatorship of the proletariat was always just another type of fascism.

But I'm getting away from myself. What I'm trying to say is that culture is a great determinant of the default settings of the citizenry.

Matthew Baldwin had a really good post over at infinite summer this week about default settings. And he quoted David Foster Wallace's Kenyon Commencement speech at length. The jist of the quote was that raging egoism is kind of a human default. And it's true. Social Psychology has studied all kinds of variations on self bias. We overestimate how attractive we are to the opposite sex, how often we, for example, do the laundry vs. our significant other, how well we're going to do on an exam, and the list goes on and on and on and on and, well, you get the idea.

What this all adds up to is that freedom from this base self-centered reality isn't the path of least resistance. It takes work. It takes a lot of work to get outside of yr own ego, and it's not necessarily a spiritual path (but that's certainly one avenue availed). So, freedom may be free, but it ain't easy. But a culture that promotes the hard work of this type of freedom from subjectivist, narrow minded egoism makes that work both seem easier and less like work.

Alright, I'm calling it on this particular parry. Time for a run.

Okay though, this one quote from Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. Cause as soon as I read it, I thought of myself being all preachy in my last post. So, a redemption of sorts.

And then people came along. Each as he appeared snatched up one of the truths and some who were quite strong snatched up a dozen of them.

It was the truths that made the people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the matter. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, and tried to live his life by it, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood.

So, you can't be right and righteous all together. Once you get righteous, you lose your rightness. Or so it seems to me sometimes.

Economics and spirituality (pt. 1)

2009-08-23T14:26:00.006+01:00

"'He is infallible, he has an infallible, omniscient mind'. 'It is impossible to deceive Ahura, who sees all', says the Yasna. Like the other sky gods, Ahura Mazda is never sleepy and no narcotic has any effect on him. That is why no secret escapes 'his keen gaze'. Ahura Mazda gaurantees the inviolability of contracts, and the keeping of promises; when he revealed to Zarathustra why he had created Mithra, Ahura Mazda said that anyone who breaks a pact (mithra = 'contract') will bring bad luck to the entire land. It is thus he who ensures good contractual relations among men, and also the steady balance of natural forces and general prosperity."
-Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion

Ahura Mazda was a Babylonian sky god with his origins in Sumerian culture who was worshiped during the period just pre to historical (written) times. According to Eliade, the sky god is a common early hierophany (his word for a thing, symbol, rite, etc. that is embued with sacredity), and this sky god was often all knowing and all powerful and also often had a kind of magical sovereignty. This magical sovereignty manifested itself in that he controlled the scales of justice, actively punishing individuals and society for, for example, breaking a contract between two legal parties.

So, what we have is a god who, at one time, could absolutely, omnisciently tell if someone was engaged in immoral business practices, and it was known that this god would then magically punish this person or his society for the act of lying, cheating, stealing (whether or not these acts might be technically or apparently legal [because an omniscient god knows what's in the heart as well as what's in the contract]).

So, for another example, if a bank were charging usurious fees, that would be punishable by the sky god, Ahura Mazda, through his emissary Mithra. And the whole society might potentially be punished for this behavior. As an interesting side note, for years in Europe the bond market had to be intricately worked to get around the letter and therefore also the spirit of Christianity's usury laws, and in France (i.e.) for a time, they were in the form of either fixed length or life time pensions instead of straight repayments of a loan with interest. Britain, the netherlands, Spain, etc. all had similar financial acrobatics.

Cuneiform, another Sumerian invention, is one of the earliest extant forms of writing and was itself used to create a kind of bond. They were clay tablets with marks made by a reed that represented agreements to repay the immediate receipt of a product (a cow, a goat, some grain, etc.) with an agreed upon larger relative amount, usually, at the end of the growing season.

I think it's quite telling that our first written language here in the West was used for the pursuit of business and trade, and that one of our earliest formulations of the godhead was one that would punish shady business dealings.

I think it's also interesting that although the Christian Evangelical movement continues to believe in magic (the rapture and more generally this idea of a personal god would fall into that category, just in pure anthropological terms), it's no longer focused primarily on people who are expressly immoral but just those who are unbelievers. I've said before, maybe or maybe not here on this blog, that religious institutions that generally seem to promote intolerance almost assuredly are invoking an emotional and not a spiritual response, but that's really beside this particular line of reasoning, somewhat.

The point was that in the earliest stages of Western national organization (civilization, if you must), you find a god who it was believed expressly intervened in the practice of business and trade. In fact, that supreme god created this lesser god, Mithra, solely for this purpose. Within the context of the Ahura Mazda myth.

So, there's all of that. I've got farther to go with this idea, but we'll save that for part dos. Just a quick note about Eliade, who is a brilliant philosophical anthropologist with an incredible knowledge of the enthographic literature as it stood at the time of his writing, believed that one of the differences between 'the civilized' and 'the primitive' mind was that 'the primitive' held a much smaller portion of reality to be profane. Life was sacred in those times. I believe that this is related to the problem of scarcity, and that a certain problem of abundance (poorly distributed) is that sacredity, true religious symbology, and the spiritual experience have to be jettisoned in order to maintain a system whereby inequality is not only allowed but encouraged to go forth and multiply.

And this relates to the question of freedom, as appears to be Milton Friedman's central point. Here's an early formulation of a response that occurred to me this morning as I was running.

I am not free to break Usain Bolt's 200 meter record. The only way I could potentially be free to do this would be if I had been training since I was much younger, essentially narrowing a whole host of other potential free choice desires, such that in order to attain this one freedom I would need to limit my freedom to eat poorly or to not exercise or, more pertinent to my actual younger self, to not drink absurdly large quantities of beer. The analogic connection here is that the freedom to be unequal is and has to be the dissavowing of any real potential freedom of equality. There's no way to maintain absolute freedom in the reality of a world of opposites.

That spirituality can bring us beyond this world shouldn't be too much of a question. Certainly, the mystical tradition of all and every religious institution suggests this to be the case, but even in the mind of the mystic saint that state of beyondness can't be maintained indefinitely (with the exception of, for example, full on nirvana in Buddhism, which means you sort of don't really exist in this world anymore anyway [unless yr a Buddhisattva and come back to this side of the shore to help others across]).

So, we've got to choose. And we've got to figure out what our sacred freedoms are; are they inequality and the ability for the individual to amass untold and untoward amounts of wealth without regard for their fellow human beings? As I've said, I think this is a value that can only live in a thoroughly secular culture where the religious institutions have become idolic and corrupt. But now I'm sliding slightly into propagandistic expressions of the problem. And really losing the point as well.

And none of this is to say that the only way to limit this freedom is in the form of governmental intervention. We are all free to make the choice for ourselves that we will take the harder, less selfish road of devoting ourselves and our lives to the creation of a world and culture that values all and everyone equally and to putting that value of true equality into play in all its potential forms. The culture can change, it is free to, and we are free to try and change it. We are free to find our spirit, to bring our self back into harmonious relation with itself and the world, to stop pretending, heming and hawing about the restriction of personal choice, and to do what is right and necessary for the good of society and the world.

Okay so now I'm preaching a little. It is Sunday morning after all.

Yeah, that's enough for now. I'll come back later and see if I can't go farther into the historico-philosophical direction that I had in my head yesterday morning when I first started stringing some of these ideas together in my head after reading some few pages of Mircea's brilliant book, Patterns in Comparative Religion. That guy was no joke.

And furthermore

2009-08-18T20:07:00.005+01:00

In the previous two posts, I tried to worm my way through a discussion of love in some of its formulations. I just wanted to add a few more thoughts to the pile here.

It occurred to me that I've been speaking somewhat poetically about love and being all hazy and sentimental about the notion itself. What the neurobiology of love is I couldn't exactly say. When I was all up in consciousness theory and practically lived in the U. of Memphis's journal collection, I never came across much in the way of research on this problem. There has been some research that suggests that Eros, those first pangs of physical attraction, is similar neurologically to some certain type of insanity (I think maybe the mania of bipolar 'disorder', but it's been a few years since I was up in the research).

Love is hard to quantify. Is there some special quality that it and it alone has that differentiates it from attachment or attraction or whatnot? My guess is that we'll find that love and the spiritual experience have similar neurological correlates in that there will be a spike in frequency of electrical activity (gamma waves, esp. in the limbic system) and possibly the kind of synchrony that is associated with meditation and the ritualized acts of prayer and worship that are themselves a type of meditation.

And this is a point that Joseph Campbell goes on to make about Gottfried Von Strassburg's Tristan. His idea is that the intensity of intimate love, because it is both wonderful and painful (in that there is this pain of even momentary separation from the [non-objectified] object of love), can bring the experiencer beyond the world of opposites, of pain and pleasure, of being and non-being, of life and death, etc., and into the spiritual realm where, as it was written in the Bhagavad Gita, Tvat Tam Asi; Thou art that. Subject and object dissolve into one.

This, I believe, is the heart of altruism. It is through this experience of the universal connection of the spirit to all of existence that altruism spontaneously arises without the otherwise necessary rigorous moral training (that is as lacking as spiritual training in ModWes society). Love in its specific form maybe helps to bring this about. Certainly, that's Campbell's interpretation.

So, a somewhat long quote from William James's concluding lecture from The Varieties of Religious Experience because it sums up the spiritual experience in a way that I could never hope to match.

Summing up in the broadest possible way the characteristics of the religious life, as we have found them, it includes the following beliefs:-

1. That the visible world is part of a more spiritual universe from which it draws its chief significance;

2. That union or harmonious relation with that higher universe is our true end;

3. That prayer or inner communion with the spirit thereof -be that spirit "God" or "law"- is a process wherein work is really done, and spiritual energy flows in and produces effects, psychological or material, within the phenomenal world.

Religion includes also the following psychological characteristics:-

4. A new zest which adds itself like a gift to life, and takes the form either of lyrical enchantment or of appeal to earnestness and heroism

5. An assurance of safety and a temper of peace, and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affection.

In illustrating these characteristics by document, we have been literally bathed in sentiment.

Leaving aside whether or not the sentiment bath was literal or not, I think that 1 and 2 can be seen as describing an inner universe, a way of seeing and being in the world we do inhabit and our self in that world, which then flows into this spiritual existence described as characteristics 4 and 5 and as process in 3.

And maybe love is a means through which that inner universe of the transcendent spirit is accessible, and through which that world opens up to the self and allows for the radiance of grace to shine through every fiber of our being. Or something.

Again, just quick, on love

2009-08-16T20:35:00.016+01:00

I didn't mean to suggest in the previous post that love is only real and true in its unconditional form. The specific love for a friend, family member, or significant other is just as real and just as true and just as necessary for meaning in life.

I do also think that for our relationships to be really based in love and not mutual self interest or the enjoyment of charisma or any of the many good qualities that stir up various forms of attraction and attachment there has to be an element of this agape style to it. It's the unconditionality that gives love meaning. Man, when you write and think the word love too many times, it really starts to sound like the cheese ball.

So, refocusing here. Naturally there are limits for those of us who are, in fact, not Jesus. Maybe bwana Yesu could love the people who staked him up on the side of the road, but most of us aren't quite as forgiving. And that's okay. If you get nailed to a cross, don't hate yourself for not loving the nailer. God will still love you. (For our non-Swahili speaking friends, Bwana Yesu is Swahili for boss Jesus or big man Jesus or words to that effect [which still seems like an strange expression to me {Yo, it's big man Jesus!}, but who am I to judge? {Not Jesus, that's for sure. Not Jesus by a long shot}])

Yeah, excellent refocus there, kingpin. Really making strides today. Gonna be on the other side of that rainbow any day now. Okay, let's try this again. I'll just go for the quick here. I think that having an element of the agape, both in yr personal relationships and in yr general dealing with the world is important. It is the noble heart, and that heart, I believe, opens up emotional fields unknown to the shallow quid pro quo style of living and relating and so forth. I would guess that Jesus's experience of pure, boundless love even in his gruesome death was on a level of ecstatic emotionality that rave kids and Terence Mckenna and the like only dream about in their wildest drug fantasies. Within the confines of the literary Jesus, of course. I make no judgements about whether or not he really could maintain that or about his status as god's son or any such things. I'm just using this as an example to illustrate the point. To be clear. And for further clarity, I'd just like to say that I know that judgements is spelled judgments here in the U.S. I still prefer the British spelling, thank you very much.

Aaandd, let's try this again. Again. The point in there somewhere was that the subjective experience of life is probably better for those who love more and more deeply. And the unconditionality of the love makes it deeper or something.

Also, the point about the health care debate from the just previous post was not meant to mean that we shouldn't use medical science to help extend life. I was just trying to make the point that suffering is a part of life, and we all have to face that eventually. No matter how well we insulate ourselves from it with the trappings of material distractions. Wait. Hold on. That's not it. No. I got this. I really do. Just give me a minute. I can come up with it. Just keep typing, and it'll come...

Okay, so, yeah, um, it was something about how we all just want to take a pill instead of care of ourselves, and that's why health care costs are out of control. It was in that range, only more so dazzlingly coruscating (Hey, look at me. I know how to use the thesaurus!) and less generally idiotic. I just don't want anyone thinking I'm suggesting killing their grandmother. There seems to be some general confusion about that, in general.

Well, this has all devolved into a nice browny mud color. I guess I'll leave off, seeing as I intended for this to be just quick and on love.

Das Edele Herze (the noble heart)

2009-08-16T16:52:00.012+01:00

The noble heart, "it opens inward toward the mystery of character, destiny, and worth, and at the same time outward, toward the world and the wonder of beauty, where it sets the lover at odds, however, with the moral order. The poet (Gottfried Von Strassburg) in his Prologue had already dedicated himself, his life and work, to those alone who could bear together in one heart 'dear pain' as well as 'bitter sweetness'; and, as Professor (Gottfried) Weber observes, it is just this readiness to embrace love's pain along with its rapture that makes the noble heart exceptional."
-Joseph Campbell, on the themes and importance of G Von S's Tristan, about the myth of Tristan and Iseult, in Campbell's Creative Mythology

First off, that guy, Joey C, is not only so frickin' smart it just about hurts, he's also Marianas Trench deep and deeply spiritual. Reading Campbell is like a process of transmogrification whereby you become a Peregrine Falcon and are then now flying, soaring really, through Denali national park or someplace I'd imagine is similarly lushly, verdantly beautiful and as some type of, at least, equally majestic bird.

Now that we've got the unabashed praise of an amazingly good writer out of the way, I think this notion of the exceptionalness of the noble heart being in its (and by de-anthropomorphized extension his/her) ability to not only not shut out the painful but to also always experience both pain and joy as an integrated whole of experience is a hugely, massively important one. I do think this idea goes to the (or more really a) core of the problem(s) of modernity and ?Western society? (yes, this is a relatively unspecific term, but there is some underlying zeitgeisty truth in this following statement, maybe) in that we, you, they, whoever are trying to separate out the bitter from the sweet and isolate the sweet as a kind of lifestyle of material security and unchallengedly happy being. I get the feeling that this is the notion that Friedman and his pure capitalist models are aiming at (even while probably not consciously), as well as, the reason the new age movement (or, as William James calls its Christian antecedent, the mind-cure movement) feels saccchariny sweet in that it seems to scrub Buddhism of its first noble truth, as well as, the reason this health care debate (and more widely the problem of crazy inflationary tendencies in the field of health in general) is getting so vigorously insane (and we're not talking about the good kind of crazy here). People want pain, unhappiness, and death removed from their own lives, and if not removed from the world then just at least removed from their media for their own personal viewing pleasure. And this won't happen. And it certainly won't happen by ignoring the too painful truths of existence.

Obviously, lumping Western society or Americans or modernity into one big kettle of generalization is a little ridiculous, but it's difficult if not impossible to talk about the cultural landscape without generalizations. And this is why culture tends to be shunted off in an academic corner. Social scientists are already insecure enough about the whole 'softness' insult hurled at them from the spatial, 'hard', scientific world without getting all caught up in etherealities like culture. Another generalization, ah vell.

But furthermore, any type of processes over and against systems argument is and will always be a little disingenuous, as if there's only form and not content. That's not to say that systems, such as consumer capitalism, are actively maintained by some secret cabal of old, white men in some secret fraternal society, but they do exist as aggregations of institutions, governmental policies, social perceptions, culture, decisions made by individuals at varying levels of power and influence, et cetera, whether accurately labelable with one ' too-fine-a-point-on-it' word or not, and we all partake of them one way or another. Still, I digress. Pretty much constantly.

Real and true love is not selective. Agape, the unconditional love of Jesus, the Buddha, and others, doesn't love just because of what someone can do for them or if someone can make them happier. This love finds beauty in the world as a whole and therefore loves the world, worts and all. And that love is a call to arms (of sorts), a call to engage in the messiness of the natural world that has enchantment and ferociousness in equal measures, and a call to engage in a social world that seems to be trying to separate out the painful as something to be fended off and kept 'out there' while keeping the joyous and happy 'in here' for us and us alone.

Or something like that. I realize that it's becoming a bad habit of mine to just kind of end blog posts with: 'Whatever, I'm not going any farther here, now.' But it's sort of how I always feel. I mean, I'm trying to get into some small aspect of basic ideas about what and how the world is and works or should or something, and I always start to feel like I'm getting into some rant that's missing the mark a little bit, and I do feel like part of that is the form (or more accurately the form that blogging on blogger takes, which is like writing e-mails to a nonspecific person, Cc: the internet). Quite frankly, I'm both too lazy and too busy to do anything about that, and I still also enjoy even these digressive mark missing exercises.

So, this'll have to do for now. Alright, a quote from Saul Bellow's Ravelstein because it sums up how I'm feeling better than I could (not the part about the wife who's leaving him that starts the quote but I still like the description so it stays):

Since she didn't love me I had, with innate biological resourcefulness, holed up behind my desk and finished a few long-postponed projects- quoting Robert Frost to myself:

For I have promises to keep
And miles to go before I sleep.

At times changing this to:

For I have recipes to bake
And far to go before I wake.

The joke was on me, not on Frost

I'm still loving SB, and 'the summer of Bellow' continues, but tempered by the need to do and read other things. So, what-the-hell-ever with all of this (not really though).

Just quickly, on moderation

2009-08-15T17:40:00.005+01:00

Moderation is the key to Aristotelian ethical philosophy, Confucian thought, the teachings of Jesus, the teachings of Buddha, and on. It's just a common sense approach to life, and almost all of these just mentioned people have suggested or stated explicitly that immoderation is either inwardly unhealthy or outwardly frowned upon from upstairs. The middle way, the camel's eye, and whatnot.

This notion of scarcity seems to be implying that the reverse is true and that we should strive to fulfill all of our material desires regardless of the implications for the wider world, which was really what point B was about in that last post but was poorly articulated. This all came into my head in relation to an article on Goldman Sachs that really illustrates the ludicrousness of encouraging excess. And I do feel like this philosophical idea of scarcity (separate from actual occurrences of specific scarcities) does seem to encourage the idea that the kind of decadent materiality described in the article is to be lauded, emulated, and envied.

There are relations here to Marxism, religion, social psychology, and whatnot that I'll hope to revisit, but it's just too nice a day to be indoors typing on a computer.

The fundamental assumption of scarcity

2009-08-11T07:28:00.004+01:00

"Scarcity is the most basic concept in all of economics. Scarcity means that we do not ever have enough of everything, including time, to satisfy our every desire. Scarcity exists because human wants always exceed what can be produced with the limited resources and time that nature makes available" -Economics Today; The Macro View. Roger Leroy Miller

There it is. The most basic concept in all of economics. I still can't get over this. I've essentially put aside econ for the summer to focus more on the study of religion and myth, but every once and a while this little kernel comes popping into my head and sets off a whole chain of thoughts, mostly ending with 'These people are staggering in their imbecility'. But I'll to try to be civil today.

Embedded in this concept of scarcity is the idea that A) desires are mostly material, and B) they are satisfied by the acquisition of more material things. The response to A, no doubt, from economists would be that their field is the study of the distributive systems of material goods and services, and therefore any other type of desire is not within their purview. As a staunch interdisciplinarian, I say that's dangerously narrow-minded, but we'll let that one go for the moment.

The second point makes the problem of A more acute because the truth is that the desires of human beings have more to do, once a certain level of basic necessity is reached, with companionship, meaning, and happiness, for example, than with more stuff. And when those non-material needs are not being met, this is when, generally, people try to fill those holes with the compulsive consumption of material goods, if possible (and often in America by accruing debt).

This is really what consumer capitalism is all about. Advertising agencies sell this perfect ideal of what you and your life should be like that's all super-fit, super-good-looking people, usually laughing and always having the 'time of their lives', and by extension so can you, if you buy the product on offer. And when that product fails to magically produce this perfect life, then you're life feels a little shabby, and you feel depressed, and you now need that dopamine uplift that you get when you buy stuff. Okay, so this is a generalized you that doesn't really exist, and the problem isn't anywhere near this neatly expressible, but this is one of the tricks of the advertising/consumption interaction. Around about the early 1900's advertising stopped being about informing the consumer about the product, and more about persuading that consumer that they needed a product that they had formerly got along fine without. And it's been a downhill runaway snowball to today's consumer capitalist craziness.

And that's really the thing. This idea of scarcity is not a fundamental idea to economics. It's fundamental to this one particular economic system, consumer capitalism. This one system that by it's design (although not necessarily intentionally or consciously so on anyone's part [though not necessarily not so either]) maintains the notion of scarcity and deprivation in a world of plenty, if not plenty well distributed. Even when you have plenty you can be made to feel deprived by the level of consumption appearing in magazines, movies, television, etc.

I would also guess that the relation between satisfaction and material consumption is curvilinear if not downright parabolic. The law of diminishing returns definitely applies at a certain stage. The advance in satisfaction from say four to five million dollars worth of consumption is no where near what I bet the jump from 10 to even as little as 30, 000 dollars is. Clearly, the latter person is going to get more bang for their buck.

Unsuprisingly, I'm drifting around here. The point is that at root our desires beyond this basic necessity are really non-material, and trying to fill those non-material desires with material goods is always going to be a hollow process that leaves the individual feeling empty, if that individual stops for a moment to smell the roses. This, I imagine, is what fuels the craziness on wall street. It's hollow men trying to fill the void of meaninglessness in a life devoted to money with the things that money can buy.

So, I really had a better grip on this this morning when I was going through it in my head, but now it's all just coming out in dribs and drabs, and isn't really amounting to much. Mostly I'm just making horrid generalizations that don't give us much in the way of forward progress. Maybe I'll try again tomorrow.

dribble, dribble (fragments)

2009-08-10T20:09:00.003+01:00

Last night, there was an a capella version of A-ha's Take On Me on the local college radio station. It was this whole chorus of singers doing the melodic parts and a guy beat boxing, and it was just about the most awesomest thing I have ever heard in my entire life. It was pretty rad.

I took my car to a guy my friend suggested today, and he's definitely out on the rim. While we waited for his body work guy to come over and check out the damage, we discussed the nature of gates into parallel dimensions. He also laughs volubly and suddenly. It's way cool. I've never met a mechanic before who's shop is half sculpture studio, and he had all these metal work sculptures with different aspects of religious symbolism worked into them. We drank tea, and he told me I need to discover the material, size, and form of the trans-dimensional gate. And to remember that we can be god-like in these other dimensions. He also told me I needed to ask my friend to marry me, and was very serious about this. At the very least, I'm told I need to join e-harmony. I'm sticking to the gates though.

I've been ignoring all of my other books except Pynchon's new Inherent Vice cause it's just that good. It's an amazing confluence of style and substance, and I'm really digging it. It's groovy, man, and also set in the late sixties, and everybody talks in that obnoxious sixties hippie vernacular. Somehow Pynchon manages to balance that obnoxiousness with a really perfect stylistic pitch.

I don't have anything much to say really. It's just that I didn't want that last post to be at the top of the blog for any longer than it already has. So, well...yeah.

The Paradox of Choice, among other things.

2009-08-08T23:13:00.008+01:00

I wanted to organize my thoughts on this problem, as it's really one of the central themes of Infinite Jest, and so it's been kind of popping up now and then throughout, most especially in the so-called Marathe/Steeply sections. Which from Infinite Summer I see are (I really want to write like here but I'm going to just say that I have that urge and this is how I'm exorcising it, as per my promise not to use that word in that way ever again) just about everybody's least favorite. Course I totally love that stuff, as it's all, so far, essentially one long conversation about philosophic ideas.

(Sorry but I'm gonna have to geek out on Jest for a minute here and it may not make total sense if you haven't read the book)

Somebody somewhere mentioned how both the AA and the ETA stuff illustrate some of the problems of choice. In both cases the characters are not really free to make whatever choices they want. While they are technically free (as Schitt says to the A squad who are half-arsing [I'm officially reverting to my policy of toned down swearing just because I'm more generally comfortable with that {I know I said I would cut back on the bracketing, but I really love asides}] their way through morning drills, 'You can leave if you want'. Really words to that effect [I'm not hunting up the actual quote]), this freedom is a for a kind of non-choice. The choice for an addict to go back out and use or for a teenager at Tennis academy to quite are choices with readily obvious consequences for where that person's life will pretty quickly end up.

That's not to say that the choice doesn't exist. It's just probably a really bad one to quit school or AA, if you're at the point where you are in AA. So, Schitt and the crocodiles make it clear that this is a personal choice because the motivation has to be internal for it to be maintained. The more the A squad feels like they want to be great tennis players and are doing these drills for themselves, the better the chance that they will in fact become great tennis players. Because if you feel forced, then you half-arse. Weirdly that kind of works at first in AA. You've got to be desperate for sobriety, but at first you can just go through the motions of prayer and AA attendance.

Marathe/Steeply have been getting into (at around the 480 mark [I'm actually behind the spoiler line for the first time the week I'm on vacation. How about them apples?]) the question of what is a free choice. And this relates nicely to a piece by C. Wright Mills about what the sociological imagination is. In his short essay of the same name, C, as I like to call him, talks about how the biographical intersect with the socio-historical. The idea is that although we have this whole biographical history that feels to us like it's been a series of escalating choices as we've moved from childhood to adulthood (or maybe doesn't feel that way), if you chop up those biographical facts and then look at the members of society that share similar facts, such as financial stability, marriage rates, divorce rates, etc, when you see wide ranging trends among similar socio-economic groups, there will be historical reasons for these trends. That was some pretty awful paraphrasing of a pretty smart and interesting writer (his essay on the military-industrial complex is really spot on).

So, is this a choice? The short answer is no. But the illusion of choice is a central support of The American Dream. Everyone has the potential to be some great, brilliant, successful, phenom. The rags to riches story is useful in maintaining this illusion. And it's just not really true, as the sociological datum shows beyond the pedestaled anecdotes.

This idea is more embedded in the story of Jest than explicit in the discussions of Marathe and Steeply. The Marathe/Steeply stuff, just recently has been on this weird fictional building on the CIA's old MK-Ultra program about a neurosurgical group in Manitoba who figure out a way to implant electrodes into the brain that stimulate some form of pure pleasure. The problem is you just bliss out on this stuff until you die from having stopped eating or drinking or sleeping or anything. I think there's a Phillip K. Dick story that has something similar to this, but I'm forgetting now.

The point is in the range of this problem of the Entertainment in Jest. If people know the Entertainment will veg them out, then what's the problem? Why would you have to make it illegal? Why would you restrict the choice? I think the real question is why would we want this choice in the first place?

And I think (I think) that Wallace is making the point that human's make what appear to be bad choices all the time. And those bad choices exist on a spectrum from, say, eating a bag of candy or watching a crap load of television to shooting heroin to killing someone to genocide. But these choices get made even though they are bad, either for the self or for others. Really, the spectrum of making bad personal choices and making bad choices that effect others are separate spectrums and should be dealt with separately. But if we're making bad choices is that really freedom?

Arrright, I'm just spinning myself in circles here and not really moving forward. I don't know why I've recently thought I should think through these ideas by just sitting down and doing blog writing and seeing where I get to. I do much better with this stuff pacing around my living room muttering to myself and occasionally writing down the really good ideas. A lot of this is just stream of conscious rehash of things I already know for myself.

Since I'm rehashing, I'll just lay down a few quick...now that I look back I see that I've already gone on for some time, so I'll save my theory of what true choice is for another day (it's blindingly brilliant so be forewarned [we're talking staring directly at the sun kind of blinding here]). Really, this was just an excuse to ignore...You know what also, I'm just gonna lay this down here, even though it should really technically go in with the Access the Process stuff, but only sort of, cause it's content and form and not really process.

I'm working on beginning a first draft of the second novel of a trilogy (while simultaneously also working on the second draft of the first novel) about...well, infinite possibility (kind of), which was why I was so keen on reading Infinite Jest this summer. The second novel is structured around the attempts of the protagonist to write a screenplay, and the idea is that each chapter is preceded by a chunk of screenplay of varying size depending on how much Thomas, our protag, has written. The rub is that after he's written it, it actually happens to him, as in he's somehow transported into the movie that he's writing. The problem is that when he started, before he knew he was really writing himself into this role, he wrote the central character as this real anti-hero (read: jerk-off [sort of {maybe morally ambiguous would be better}]) in the tradition of film noir, as in it's set in the 1920's and is all dark and moody.

So, half-way through the second book he decides to start over because his personality outside of the movie is beginning to disintegrate (not to mention that that outside reality is altering every time he goes back into the movie world and then comes back), which just makes things worse. And there's this whole wider story about how the woman who he's written the movie's protag as in love with (and then consequently he's then kind of fallen in love with because he becomes that protag) has dissociations into this other dimension, which is all sci-fi weirdness and shit (I know I said no more swearing, but it makes me really excited to finally write about this shit) because of childhood trauma. The idea being that this woman in the sci-fi universe is a kind of Jesus figure and the fact that our protag has rewritten the film's female lead who dissociates into her, the sci-fi Jesus woman, has split her personality in two (because when the movie's female lead dissociates into her they swap, and there's this whole back story about this swap which involves convoluted time lines, crazy plot points, and weird character personality alterations) thereby making it impossible for her to save not just that universe but the entire infinite dimensionality of universes (because there are infinite universes where infinite possible worlds exist and our own consciousness potentially can dissociate into these other universes through artistic creation [because in the realm of infinite dimensional possibility all worlds that you might make up in your head both exist and don't exist {that's a tricky piece of infinite possibility, in that, the possibility that something doesn't exist has to exist for infinity to be true}] or spiritual transcendence or trauma [Judith Herman's book Trauma and Recovery talks about some interesting parallels between traumatic dissociation and spiritual altered states of consciousness]).

So, I'm trying to plan out these two movies, which are split variations on the same movie, and my idea is to reimagine all the characters and plot lines from the movies that Kar-Wai Wong has both written and directed (if I included the ones he just wrote too, it would be insane [right, that's what would make this project insane. It's not way already there] because he wrote about 8,000 movies before he started auteuring) because he's my idol and shit. Plus, the stuff works, as I've already got some pieces of the puzzle, mostly shaping the movie In The Mood For Love into the backstory for the first film. And but so, his movie 2046 has a character who writes a sci-fi story, so I'm now thinking that in the third novel the protag, Thomas, will be writing at least one screenplay (as he'll have to finish both [and almost as assuredly kill off this woman that he's sort of in love with {both times} so that the sci-fi Jesus woman can then reintegrate her personality and save the multiverse [it sounds awful that he's killing these women {really, just writing that they die}], but it's the only way to save the multiverse dammit! [and also reunite with his true original reality love from the first book]) about a man who starts writing a sci-fi serial, and somehow this is related to this other sci-fi universe that was discovered in the first book and returned to at the end of the second and then resolved in the third, and...well, you can see how complicated this whole thing is to try and work out. Okay, maybe complicated is an understatement. Maybe totally lunaticly insane would be the better description, but you know what, fuck it. So I'm crazy. Is that so damn terrible? Really?

And so I've been procrastinating by blathering on here. But I do. I really do have to get some forward motion on this if I want to have the whole thing wrapped up in say, two or three years given the other demands on my time (like a job, this whole idea about trying to lay the groundwork for a philosophic work outlining a plan for a cooperative economic structure, and really actually finishing one, just one undergraduate degree [which is itself hilarious because I've done the requirements for degrees in every social science as well as quite a bit of the wider humanities as well {thank you, tuition reimbursement, for making all my manic educative dreams come true}]). Yeah, so, there you go. I'm not even gonna bother editing this post. It is what it is, and is probably chock full of unintentional misspellings, grammatical errors, and unparsable bracket asides, but we'll just chalk this whole thing up to the previously mentioned vacation style. As if the fact that I was on vacation somehow excuses me from my sanity. Well, like, whatever and shit (I knew I wouldn't make it through this post without having to use the word like like that).

Structure

2009-08-08T13:51:00.008+01:00

I think I need to back down off the ledge I worked my way out to there in that last post. It's not the crazy that bothers me so much, but the somewhat fascistic undertones of some of the arguments that upsets me a little to see come out of my own head. There is a long tradition among philosophers to think that, essentially, if everyone agrees with me this world would be sooo much better. Plato's Republic goes on a long tangent about how art, then taking the forms of lyric poetry and drama, has to be directed for the proper education of the young. Not to even mention his idea for the philosopher king, which, no surprise here, Hitler just loved. Hegel elaborated on how the heroes of the dramatic and lyric arts, which were the only true ones in his estimation, had to be totally free from convention in the way that only princes and kings were. More generally, you've got Rousseau's lawgiver, Nietzsche's superman, Hobbes' Leviathan, and the list goes on (not that I put myself on that list, just in that general desire of philosophers for universal principles).

Not the proudest moments for the philosophic tradition, I can tell you. Those middle passages of The Republic always make me a little sad because the rest of the work is breathtaking in it's scope and depth. But it's an infinite chain of being. You don't get to John Rawls, for example, without John Locke, whose own work may have been the philosophical basis for the great democratic ideals of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, etc but who also provided cover arguments for the institution of slavery and the wholesale genocide of the native populations of the then new world.

And that sucks. Seriously sucks monkey ass. And this monkey ass suckiness has its roots in the messy realities of democracy. Plato saw the first, sort of, democracy (neither women nor slaves were given the vote), and it probably was what scared him into fascism. In his work Gorgias, he brings the Socratic method to bear on the sophistic notion that the art of persuasion was more important than real, deep knowledge and understanding. Course, the historical Socrates had to drink hemlock or be banished from Athens because of his method, which was supposedly corrupting the youth and denigrating the gods, whereas the historical Gorgias became quite wealthy charging fees for instruction in the rhetorical practices and living a long full life, even commissioning a golden statue of himself in Athens. And that's how things went down in the world's first, sort of, democracy.

So, I guess the question is, is this susceptibility to demagogery inherent in the structure of democracy? I don't have the answer to this question, but certainly most people seem to like to hear people they agree with do so forcefully and righteously, even if the force and righteousness is presented in a disingenuous, one sided, sophistic way (cough, cough, FoxNews, cough, cough, MSNBC, cough some more).

There are whole long lines of argument reaching in just about every direction that I could follow from that last short paragraph, but I think I'll leave off. I was really aiming at a discussion of how structure affects both the content and form of art. And that's a really long and complicated argument involving a whole range of subjects, not the least of which is the history and development of the various forms and the structures of their dissemination, which is really more so what I'm driving at. The problem of the business of art, kind of thing.

Let me get right to the real heart of the matter here because this has already dragged on, and I haven't gotten anywhere. I think the corporate structure, in general but also particularly in relation to artistic dissemination, has got to be reformed. There is nothing inherent in the idea of a global business such as a corporation which requires that it and the enfolded they (i.e. corporate shills) can only, only consider the economic bottom line (a bottom line that leaves off both social and environmental concerns). Muhammad Yunus and his revolutionary work with microfinance (try it!) and the Grameen bank has shown that social business can be both financially sound and socially conscious. And there is no real reason to believe this couldn't somehow also work in the fields of art.

How exactly this transfers more broadly is not entirely clear without (arghh, tautology) a culture that values social goods at least as much as personal pleasures, but I think that it can. Somehow. Okay, so you're now singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow and rolling your eyes. I can feel it. Alright, that's enough of that. I'm trying to be serious. I'll admit (which I seem to be doing all the time), I don't have the whole thing worked out clearly in my head, but I've got some hints and vague impressions. I do think (and this probably has A LOT to do with the fact that I love scholarly shit) that one first step in the direction of a more democratic corporate structure is in the development of a true inter-disciplinary economic theory, an alternative economics, which is a term that I don't entirely like because it might imply that this theory is somehow subordinate to the more pure economic study (which is not the intended implication but could be taken as such). I feel like somebody has got to break the stronghold of Milton Friedman's ideas of pure capitalism in the realm of modern economics because these are the guys, this Chicago School old boy network, who control the US treasury and others around the world, the World Bank, the IMF, and many large and influential national and multinational corporations.

Okay, so this has really gone on long enough now, and I'm just repeating myself and drifting slightly into what could be construed as conspiracy theory. And the argument isn't pure. The internet is a bit of a democratizing force (within a range, as there's a whole personal infrastructure that has to exist for any given person to have the internet [which is part of this material reality that I'm always going on about how horrible is]), and you can self-publish through blogs and whatnot. This is why it's hard to make sweeping universal arguments about Art, even if you have some particular form in your head when you make the argument.

Okay, it's time to do get some fresh air and exercise. Enough of this nonsense.

How bout you legislate me a PB&J

2009-08-07T15:08:00.007+01:00

Two days previous to the now, a friend of mine, who I hadn't seen in what must have been many a year now, happened to show up at my sister's house with his sister, who is also one of my sister's closest friends and through whom I know this friend of mine. Hah. That was a bit of a verbal tornado. I admit, I probably like and pay more attention to the rhythms of speech that the actual content quite more of the time than I should, which may seem weird based on the fact that the content I tend towards tends to be on the heavier side. And I do love to wax philosophic as a way to while away the time, but I do still follow the rhythm as a kind of intuitive path through the logical jungle of thought.

Anyway, as I was on vacation (thank the lord in heaven for that) and he was on vacation, I got to spend the day with him and his sister yesterday, and so we launched almost directly into an all day discussion of both all things serious and also ridiculous. Kind of alternating between the two, sort of. More like starting with the serious over breakfast and a hike through the densely mosquitoed woods of rural Massachusetts and trending toward the ridiculous, lounging in innertubes in a so-called pond that is really a lake (who knows why they would call this lake a pond).

Of course, I can't really recall the content of the ridiculous. There was something about whether or not there was sexual tension between Alvin of Alvin and the Chipmunks fame and Brittney from the, maybe, Chipettes (there wasn't even consensus on the fact that a girl chipmunk group even existed), and a riff on the fact that he used to chase a really dull girl that he was in love with in high school because she was beautiful, who used to bore him to tears talking about watching wrestling, and who has now become very obese as discovered through the magic of Facebook. I believe his words were, "she looked like she ate herself", and he insisted this was an okay thing to say because of the the high school love that he'd formerly felt for her. And it isn't funny to say such things I'm quite sure, and but yet we laughed like hyenas about it for a really long time. Being the hyenas that we are.

So again, anyway, the content of the serious was the content that I was more concerned with trying to scribble out and maybe follow through some of the thoughts I'd had about sort of where we'd gotten to, which was with me sort of saying, "yes, you're right; I'm kind of an idiot who just lets things dribble out of his mouth once his monologue gets really underway and can sometimes not be totally paying much attention to what it is that he is saying", here on this blog. Another twister. (The here on this blog part really makes for difficult parsing, but once I commit to a bit of weirdness, it becomes a little painful to edit it out, so, you know. It stays today, as per the soon to be mentioned vacation style.) Vacations and the concordant sleep often times associated with them do wonderful things for the self. Also sun poisoning and beer do things that are maybe not so wonderful in truth and but probably have more to do with the nature of the runaway blogpost I'm all up in here now. (Why stop? It is a blog after all. I think I'm just gonna let it all hang out here, vacation style.)

Here's an interesting tidbit that I learned from my friend while we were making breakfast yesterday morning. As he's quite caught up in DC politics as like part of his job, he knows all about the insane contortionary nature of the politics of a city that's also kind of a state, but that's also sort of overruled by the federal government's bicameral legislature. Somehow it happens that congress has the power to hold up the city/state of Washington's budget, and they did so because the city/state hadn't changed the municipal signs when congress changed the name of Washington's airport to Ronald Reagan International Airport. This means that, in the city state of DC, no firefighters, teachers, cops, etc. got paid until the municipality changed a bunch of signs because our federal congress is clearly full of mean adolescent children. I would've asked him how and why it is that the congress has this power, but I had to concentrate on English muffins since the toaster didn't actually eject them until they'd become doorstops, and we'd already burnt, like, four or five.

Interesting? Yes, I think this is. In any way related to the point I was working my way up to? Somewhat obliquely I suppose, in that there were a couple of interesting points that came up in the eight or so hours of our relentless jabbering on, and one of them had to do with his choice to get into politics (and he admitted that there were days that he felt he needed a shower when he got home from work because the job had made him feel unclean but not as many as you'd think and most times he felt like he was accomplishing something). So, to the point(s) I'm trying to get at. First was this question about the practical and the ideal. I, myself, tend towards ideals. I like the philosophic, and it's unquestionably and somewhat albatrossly what I do best. Abstract thinking has always been the thing that comes easy, the innate ability if you will, and philosophy, while challenging, rarely seems impenetrable in the way I've been told it is by others. Now, the ability to apply these ideals to the real world in any kind of meaningful way on the other hand is more so difficultly impenetrable for both myself and seemingly also the world at large. If Plato's cave analogy is right (and as a self-professed philosophically minded individual, I have to say it rings pretty true to me), then how do you get those chained to a wall staring at the reflection of a fire to realize that reality is really behind them and outside of this cave they're not even aware exists qua cave?

Just to quote my friend (who will remain nameless since I've already quoted him as saying his high school crush now looks like she ate herself), "the perfect can become the enemy of the good." Clearly, he's putting it in a way that I can understand, but it's an important sentiment I think. The problem being that those of us enamored with ideals and abstractions can, kind of, check out from plain vanilla yogurt reality for this outside the cave reality, and in that way scholastics becomes a kind of monasticism, without the mandated asceticism (which was an unimportant addendum but I'm leaving it nonetheless). He paraphrased his father, who is a man after my own heart and a full bore theoretician, as making the somewhat silly statement that we need a total cultural revolution in response to the question about how some of these ideals might be instituted practically. Which is a kind of cop out, I'll admit, because, as my friend said, "You can't legislate a cultural revolution." Nor can you really do much of much in that direction.

But culture is clearly a key element. As long as our culture remains one of, really, immediate gratification as the national religion, there's no real avenue towards working up serious long term solutions in the political sphere or really any sphere for that matter. And my own abstractionary conclusions about why I write (which I do also admit is tacked on after the fact [as in I just feel like I must write, but if I can make up this reason why it's, capital i, Important that I write, well, then all the better to satisfy my inner philosopher]), is that it's my hope that I can, at the very least, add my little bit to the cultural slipstream, and one day maybe there'll be enough whatever that it will take to actually, kind of, get this revolution or evolution or something or other going, and the the mindlessness I see streaming through the main cultural valves will evaporate, and we can all have a good laugh about: "Remember when we used to pretend that global warming was bullshit and when the average household watched like 6 hours of television a day and when everybody wanted free healthcare and nobody wanted to pay one red cent extra for it and when et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Isn't that just the funniest thing you've ever heard. Can you believe how short sighted we were before this spontaneously magic cultural revolution". Yes, I do realize the implications of both the term and the idea of cultural revolution and those implications have a lot to do with why you can't legislate one and why it has to be essentially a slowly formed but ultimately gotten consensus, maybe, sort of, something along those lines.

(Although, when I talk about writing, I'm not really so very much referring to this blog per se but more to the more structured projects like novels and screenplays and such [that will emphatically change the world {!ironic statement clarification! (as in that was meant to be ironic, please don't think I'm that full of myself [because of course I am, it's just I don't want people thinking that themselves in their heads or hands or feet or wherever it is these alleged people care to do their thinking for themselves])}].)

Cause the otherwise besides the big chuckle after we've gotten it all together and think through our actions collectively and honestly, it's Thunderdome, full on. Gladiators on bungee cords attacking each other in giant fence-like cages covered with garbage can lids surrounded by wild-eyed fanatics screaming at the top of their lungs and rattling these cages furiously, and Tina Turner lording over the whole thing as some weird riff on her role as the Acid Queen or some such. Is that really what we want? I mean, really! I know I always end up in these doomsday scenario apocalyptic scare tactics when it comes to why we should be more serious and maybe consider the soul instead of the mocha chacha frappa-hooffaa or the turbocharged Maserati instamatic penis-mobile or the lobster or, like, Whatever, but it's the callous, cold-blooded truth of the thing: this life, this world, this cavernous reality that we are all together now trapped inside and trapping ourselves within the confines of for no really very clearly good reason does not have to be this plastic and, like (I promise from this blogpost forward not to use this word in this way ever again. I'm just really enjoying myself with it today, so...), shallow.

Okay tiger, let's dial it about 85 notches back from seriously, over the top, effin' crazy. The point I was in the vicinity of making is that we should look around and have a think before we leap. Wait no, that's not the point, although it is a good point. What I was going for was the idea that it's culture and not material that should be the focal point of social striving. Well, maybe not really social striving so much, as egalitarianism is one of my sacred ideals, but that a society that uses its excess productivity above basic necessities not for the cheap material gimcracks of status but for cultural creation is a society that...I don't know, will just be like better or something.

I've kind of lost the plot here. Alright I lost the plot some many years ago, but I think in this instance I've gone long enough on what's derailed more rapidly and deeply than usual into an overheated, somewhat deranged rant. Don't get me wrong. I do clearly love to rant, and I don't really think that people are shallow but more that our culture is. Still, I should really get some more structured writing done before this vacation is over and I wake up Monday morning wondering how it is that I got absolutely nothing accomplished in an entire week of free and unstructured time (as if that would be hard to figure given the available evidence [like I really have any place criticizing anybody for not having gotten it together, what!]). I did want to dig into what would've, no doubt, been a digressionary hole about the way philosophers create representations that don't always fit neatly onto the territory of reality, and that was going to flow totally seamlessly out of the aforediscussed personal artistic pretensions, and it was going to be so completely awesome I can't even begin to describe it in a way that wouldn't be just a cheap imitation of the real thing. But the steam, it has run out. So I got nothin'...in that regard.

(edited to say: I can't believe I just spent the past hour editing this post, and it now makes even less sense than it did when I started [personally, I'm blaming David Foster Wallace for this whole mess]. I promise next time, oh next time, I'll be more considered and less thoroughly, all-hanging-out manic and all 'oh woe is me the world is coming to an end if we don't change our ways' [and I also promise to tone down the bracketing, commaing, and general linguistic absurdity, if you promise not to try and get me committed to, like, an institution or anything {Let's all just pretend this never happened. These are not the droids you're looking for. You can go about you're business. Move along. Move along}].)

Jest and the hall

2009-07-31T20:06:00.018+01:00

I know. I hear what you're saying. I do. And I understand. It's just a game. It is, by many accounts, the dullest sport in the known universe. In the of best games, the pitchers' duals, very little actually happens besides one guy throwing a ball to another guy while this other guy from the other team swings wildly and misses. It is only a game. I do know that, and the people who play this game are just like the rest of us. If there are millions of dollars on the line, people can get caught up in the pursuit and then do anything and everything they can to make sure those dollars are headed into their own bank accounts.

So now that we've established what I know, I'll just come out and admit that the fact that David Ortiz may very well have both taken steroids and also emphatically lied about taking steroids is utterly heartbreaking. From the statement the team released yesterday, it sounds like Papi didn't know that he'd tested positive, and he left the door open for the potential that it's not as bad as it sounds. The fact that I parsed this press release on an even more in depth level than I've just explained shows just how much I want to believe. How desperate I am to believe.

The brutal truth is that I'm a hardened cynic who mostly hides his childish heart from the vicissitudes of a modern world that I'm just about resigned to assuming is hopelessly fuct. I don't take virtually anything or anyone at face value and constantly assess the angles, sifting through the psychological potentialities and the sociological datum. I use my broad knowledge of the social sciences to clearly line up the fact that humanity (as a vast and disparate society) is incapable of maintaining the spiritual levels necessary to commit fully as a society to the obvious laws of morality that are virtually unchanged the world over from religion and culture to religion and culture.

That turned into way more of a sermon than I'd intended. I'm just a little worked up about this whole thing, and it's already clear that there's no way I'll get to the brouhaha over at infinite summer about whether DFW was a genius or just a self-referential navel gazer (that was a ruthless reduction, so well...). I don't actually mean that the last statement from the previous paragraph is totally or even obviously or really true. It just seems that way sometimes, and it's also not true that, on an individual level, ethical action and character require an explicitly spiritual self or the engagement in ritualized spiritual practices. I do suspect that on a national or societal level, a real level of spiritualized (read: fully conscious and psychically synchronous) individual membership is necessary to the individuation process which might then break down the Manichean, good fighting evil in pure black and white, perspective that rises to the top of the media's main stream.

And again, that got out of control and digressive. I believe I was talking about baseball. And big Papi. The history of what David Ortiz has done in Boston is nothing short of amazing. He was one of the crucial ingredients in both World Series victories of the dawning millennium including bringing home Boston's first set of rings since 1918. A drought that is second longest in the history of baseball only to the Chicago Cubs' current run, which has now reached to over 100 years. Ortiz is quite simply the greatest clutch hitter in Red Sox history, and he seems like a really good guy. He does lots of work with kids. He gives a lot back to his country of origin, the Dominican Republic, and he has accomplished these things in a humble and seemingly admirable way.

For those reasons, he had been one of my heroes. Yes, I also know how stupid it is to project my own emotional need for exemplars onto some person I don't know who has some highly valuable skill, and I realize what it says about our society that we value so highly the ability to swat a fastball into the cheap seats. Hero worship is pretty dumb. I don't engage in it often. I had no illusions about how the presidency of Barack Obama was going to go. I am very careful about how I craft my unthinking adulation for writers after the whole Kerouac debacle of my adolescence. I don't give a flying rats arse about any other sport than baseball. I know better than to get sentimentally attached to the lives of people I don't know and can't possibly truly judge the character of thru the previously mentioned ruthless analytics.

Still, I am crushed. I let my guard down with Papi, and I do hold out the glimmer of hope that this is all some big mistake, that David Ortiz would not have lied to us. (because really, I don't care so much about the 'roids. If he had come out and said he'd taken 'em, I would probably be okay with the whole thing. Well, not okay, but I would have understood. What I don't understand is how and why he would come out so emphatically against steroids and steroid users and said so absolutely that he had never used if he was himself a user. That's either monumentally stupid or monumentally arrogant, and I took him for neither.) I want to to believe that Ortiz is clean and he actually tested positive for marijuana or even like coke or something.

In the end, it doesn't matter either what I want or how I feel. It's just a...gulp, dumb game, and my feelings are ultimately irrational and probably a tad unhealthy and certainly of no consequence, but there it is. Ortiz was a hero of mine who I choose to take on faith. I won't be making that mistake again so soon. Sigh. I need a beer. I'm gonna go watch a movie. I don't think I can listen to the game tonight.

Postscript: As if this post wasn't ridiculously long and rambling already (I didn't even get to anything of the subject matter from which the title was drawn [that would be Infinite Jest and the baseball hall of fame {and Yes, I do know I could change the title, but I really liked it and am kind of invested in it now}]), I just wanted to tell the story about how I found out, which might further explain why the whole thing was so emotional and why I can't seem to write reasonably about it now, the next day.

Yesterday, I did what it has been my great thrill to do since I've moved back to Boston. I went to a Red Sox game. There really is something special about Fenway Park. It's just a beautiful, old school ballpark, even if the seats are painfully small and uncomfortable. Watching the game live with about forty thousand others, most of whom are caught up with you in this collective feeling of hope and expectation, can be an emotional thrill ride, and we all ride together, players and managers and fans, on the affective rollercoaster that is a game invested with care, with feeling. Being at the ballpark when the Sox win is like no other feeling I've ever experienced in my life. The elation of having something you have no control over come out the way you hope it will, especially when it seemed like it wasn't going to, is an intense high. Frankly, it's better than whiskey, and I don't say that lightly.

Yesterday's game was one of those come from behind and squeak out a win right when the team needs it badly after being 3 and 10 since the all-star break kind of games. One of those games that is just purely awesome to be there for in person. The hero of the game was none other than big Papi. He jacked a three run blast deep into the bleechers behind the home bullpen, putting the Sox up by one in the 7th. They went on to score two more, and Jonathan Papelbon closed it down in the ninth after blowing just his third save in his last outing. Josh Bard hit 101 mph on the gun during the 8th, and Pap hit 99 closing. The young guns were trailing flames there at the end.

And it was a game that many around where I was sitting thought the Sox couldn't win after going down 4 to 1 in the sixth based on how they'd been playing. Johnny Lester'd struggled through 5 clean innings without being able to throw his cutter or his curve for strikes before finally buckling under with two down in the sixth and giving up a stream of hits that wound up bringing Tito trudging out to the mound to take the ball. The crowd was low, and the obnoxious drunk guy behind me had finally devolved into just cursing at the Sox batters as they went up and then down before coming to life in the seventh.

Yet they did finally come to life, and it was great. Almost magical. I was at the game with my uncle and my cousin, who were in from Missouri and going to there first ever Sox game, and we left feeling on top of the world. Then as we walked down Yawkey Way, behind one of the vendors was a television with the news about Ramirez and Ortiz crawling across the feed at the bottom of the screen. It was like being punched really hard in the stomach. The sails emptied of all wind. I just stood there staring dumbly at the screen in the midst of this huge crowd milling around in general good spirits, many of whom probably were oblivious and also probably in for the same stomach punch I'd just received.

The whole thing turned on a dime, and that's probably why I'm so worked up. The emotional high requires you to care; You have to invest the ritual, the game, with significance in order to get the feeling. It's on a similar plane with the willful suspension of disbelief required of films and novels and such. You have to suspend the rational idea that none of this matters in the least, which is the unvarnished truth of the thing. Chomsky is right. It's a distraction, a modern day version of the Roman gladiators and lion feedings.

And but so (I really love that expression of DFW's and I'm totally using it from now on), I was in that state, and not because I'm trying to ignore the world but because I don't ignore the world and am sensitive to the fact that the world is not in a happy place and maybe never was and maybe never will be. Maybe happy is not the natural thing. I don't know. I just know that there are times when the painful realities of modernity require me personally to blow off a little steam or I will go stark raving into looney tunes. It's the truth.

Wait. Where was I? Oh, right. The state of suspended rationality for the emotional experience of collective ritualized performance (or something). And so I wasn't able to rationally deconstruct the question of Ortiz's positive test before experiencing my emotional response. It was unmediated, and it hurt. So, there you have it. Wow, that was a rabbit hole. Whoops. My bad.

Rediscovering what the world looks like through child-like eyes

2009-07-26T22:44:00.007+01:00

About eight or nine months ago, my sis, brother-in-law, and I took their daughter, who was just about one at the time, for a walk in the woods. At some stage, my niece got set down on this uneven, dirt ground for what must have been just about the first time in her whole life that she'd ever tried to walk other than on the flat, even floor of a house. And she was just totally fascinated and amazed by the small pebbles and the burnt red autumn leaves, and her wonderment made me see those rocks and leaves through a child's eyes. And they were fascinating and amazing to me again for the first time in a while.

This was the experience that first leapt into my mind after this afternoon's performance of Aurelia's Oratorio. It was a kind of mishmash of theater and circus, a surrealistic circus/theater of the absurd with puppets and acrobatics and magic all coming together breathlessly. It was magic. Whatever anyone says, it was magic that Aurelia Thierree and Victoria Thierree Chaplin (yes, that Chaplin [his daughter and granddaughter]) and Jaime Martinez have created.

The performance unfolded in a cascading series of luminously ludicrous vignettes, which pile on top of each other and topple over each other as some kind of racing over-exited child with Aurelia appearing now in a chest of drawers then disappearing into the red plush curtains only to reappear hanging on a drape of curtain hanging from the ceiling. At one point, the curtains themselves were playing footsy with each other and then storming and collapsing, sending Aurelia gliding down her thin piece of curtain back smoothly to the ground of the stage.

And the effect builds slowly as you smile and clap lightly and laugh, and suddenly magic exists again in the world, and you believe as you haven't since you were just a small child that magic is real and exists and is wonderful and alive and here, now. The innocence of childhood comes rushing back into yr bloodstream. I felt like a kid again.

And I could forget for just a quick moment that a garbage truck smacked my car and took off without so much as leaving a note, and the bumper of my car is hanging diagonally attached only on the one side. I'm staring at the grill right now sitting on the floor of the living room, and the truth is I should be pissed. I should be royally pissed and stressed about what a hassle it's gonna be to get Boston Public Works to pay to fix my car, but I'm not. I'm smiling like the cheshire cat at this rediscovery of magic in the world. Tomorrow, there's time to be pissed and stressed and hassle about cars, contact lenses, and groceries, but tonight, right now, I'm going to walk along the edge of the ocean and try to see that great body of water with the eyes of a child. I think I just might be able.

Know Thyself

2009-07-23T21:43:00.004+01:00

To return to this idea a little bit, S.B.'s (Saul Bellow's) characters do indeed minutely and perceptively deconstruct their own lives and the world at large. The problem, of sorts, is that these characters may see how they have been shady or off track or however you want to euphemize what is essentially a bit of immorality or weakness of character (philandering and cheating on wives and girlfriends in SB's and his characters' cases), but even as they see themselves they feel they are helpless to change who they are. James Atlas, in his good but seemingly overly scathing biography of SB, always comes back to this idea of the passivity that Bellow expresses. Always, no matter what the problem (and it's mostly the girl trouble) he can't change anything. He can't help that he's attracted to voluptuous younger (increasingly through his works and life much younger) women, and so because of this helplessness he gives in to the impulses.

I guess the point is that helplessness in terms of self is a put on to both the self and others. We're, none of us, totally helpless. That's not entirely true, although the absoluteness of qualifying helpless with totally makes it probably pretty close but whatever. It just occurred to me as I was reading Altas's Bellow that there is a difference between realization and actualization. Or it occurred to me that this was and is something I've long struggled with personally. I've always been really good at seeing my own faults, and I've always been really terrible at corrective action. Lately, I've been working on that, and it does seem that consciousness does play a huge role in actualizing change. You have to see yrself not just intellectually but in a more holistic way and attend to the vast corners of the conscious and unconscious.

And it's a bit of a biofeedback process as the more you are present and attend to the self the more you are able to notice and bring awareness to the problems and solutions to problems. Okay, so this is turning into self-help-like babble just a little bit so I'm gonna break off, but the essential point is good. Stay aware and in the moment and the ability to change even the most long ingrained of bad habits becomes possible. Yah.

tidbits

2009-07-17T20:06:00.004+01:00

So, one of the things (one of many things) about the writings of Saul Bellow that I really dig on is the fact that all of his characters minutely examine their own lives. They also fly from the particular to the universal quite quickly as well, but they really take to heart Socrates dictum to 'know thyself'. And it's a pretty durn good dictum if I do say so myself.

Apodictical- demonstrably true or logically certain. I've been like a peacock about the fact that DFW has barely stumped me with his big obscure words, and then I started up with Joseph Campbell and was again reminded that I am no wordly peacock.

Rachel Getting Married, written by Jenny Lumet (Sidney's daughter) and directed by the incomparable Jonathan Demme, is rough going for the first long while. Anne Hathaway's Kim is unnerving and obnoxious, and the angle on her and why she is how she is is a little bit much. But this idea of going through a trial. This idea that both in life and in (this, at least) film that if you go through and face bad shit, then the happiness that you might find on the other side is gonna be just that much better. You can't really know happiness unless you've known sadness, kind of thing. The Dostoevskyian saying that happy families are all alike but unhappy ones are unhappy in their own special ways fits here, sort of. This is probably why it was called Rachel Getting Married; so that you would be sort of constantly remembering that there is a pay off on the other side of the bullshit they're all trapped in by Kim's refusal to really confront the situation and her problems.

Obviously, having rich ass Connecticut parents and a way cool sister and soon to be brother-in-law and all their cool ass musician friends around (because let's face it; musicians really are cooler than the rest of us [and not in a hipsterish way but in a laid back way that is just so cool]) makes it that much easier to find happiness on the other side of this trial. So, you go through the uncomfortableness and you come out on the other end at one of the awesomest weddings ever committed to film and the kind of wedding I would go for where you have like 8 different bands play over the course of the night and dancing and a group of latin dancers and drummers and conga lines and all the rest. I admit I got a little misty at Rosemary Dewitt's (Rachel's) wedding vows. So, there is a pay off, and the pay off is way more enjoyable than say the wedding in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which had only silly, light-hearted one dimensional problems.

I haven't really been super engaged in the Infinite Summer other than actually reading along and occasionally checking the main posts there, but I have noticed some slight vitiriol aimed at Foster Wallace about his being showy or excessively verbose or stylistic in Infinite Jest. Mostly this seems to be related to the Wardine/yrstruly stuff, which is a little weirdly written for sure. The other two most common ideas that reoccur from the other side w/r/t Wallace enthusiasts are that you should trust Wallace and that, in the first reading, you should let his words wash over you. These two are kinda' related in that you have to trust an author to let go with them and not maintain an intellectual distance so that you don't get trapped in some whirlpool of bad writing or emotional dishonesty or whatnot. And I think the yrstruly stuff along with all the other weirdness, sci-fi, and smartness of Wallace's writing seem to me to be imminently trustworthy. While there is this recursive, post-modern, meta-ness to the whole thing and ultimately that may mean that the end of the book doesn't give us some neat, clean 'well, that's all cleared up' feeling, there is such warmth and intelligence in the work that if you are present in the moment of reading and not totally warped on 'figuring it all out' and let it wash over you, let the rhythms of his words take you along, when I do all that, I find that it's a pretty good book thru and thru and that there is brilliant insight at every turn. Although admittedly, I actually like verbosity. Henry James is a guy I can get down with. And if there ever was a writer that was a show off about how smart he was, it was James.

The connection of Churchly doctrine to basic economic assumptions

2009-07-12T18:07:00.003+01:00

For, as in all great pagan mythologies, in the Celtic there is throughout an essential reliance on nature; whereas, according to every churchly doctrine, nature had been so corrupted by the Fall of Adam and Eve that there was no virtue in it whatsoever.
-Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

In reading this, I instantly thought of the assumption of scarcity in economics. Did this fundamental economic axiom grow out of the Christian world view of corrupted nature? The idea that nature cannot ultimately provide us with full, absolute satisfaction, while technically sort of true, seems to be related back to the notion that the world is both corrupted and a corrupter in that there is no sense seeking this absolute satisfaction from natural sources, only the supernatural sources available through the sacraments of the church. Scrubbed down to secularity, we come to scarcity, opportunity costs, and necessary trade-offs in economic pursuit of some acceptable level of overall group satisfaction through the 'efficient' use of resources (as seen through the prism of the short-term, as human life is relatively short).

I would say that the church's super-natural is nothing more than the natural abilities of the human brain to find a certain human absolute satisfaction in the mystic experience of spirit, mind, god, what have you. Whether such abilities were crafted by some white bearded man or Vishnu or the creator's computer is beside this particular point. The point is that church dogma may have clamped down on the ability of Europe and beyond to experience the divine through the particularly wrong-headed condemnation of nature, and that this dogmatic view was quite possibly the underpinning of the probably enlightenment era idea of scarcity in political economy. Possibly. Who really knows? I just make things up as I go along.

Johnny Staccato and Herzog quotes

2009-07-12T14:36:00.008+01:00

John Cassavetes is one of my great heroes. Opening Night and A Woman Under the Influence are two of the most destroyingly beautiful films ever made. Plus, he was notoriously difficult (supposedly punching out Stanley Kramer over creative differences on A Child is Waiting) in that he always strove to stay true to his vision of what artistry was all about. And he was a damn fine actor as well, paying for the movies he made by taking whatever gun for hire acting gigs he could get.

Johnny Staccato was one of those jobs, which paid for Shadows and was made around the same time. It only lasted for one season, possibly because it was too violent for 1959, but from the one episode included on the brilliant but canceled crime dramas DVD, it's so frickin' awesome I can't even begin. It's got to be one of the first mixed genre TV shows ever (a proto 'dramedy' if you will allow the use of such an obnoxious word), with a killer jazz soundtrack. In interviews published in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, he claimed to've wrangled with the writers quite a bit, and that it isn't entirely the show he wanted it to be. Still, I've just now gone and scoured the 'net and found a full set of the entire season from one of the auction websites because that one episode was just that good. Cass smirks his way through the whole thing with greatly silly lines, and Waldo the armchair philosopher/jazz club owner is goofily profound and also hilarious.

So, good stuff. Also some quotes from Bellow's Herzog before I return it. Bellow uses an interesting literary device by switching from third person narration to first person as Moses Herzog composes letters in his head to friends, colleagues, and dead philosophers, and the switches occur constantly for varying lengths, sometimes going back and forth in the same paragraph (the shift is acknowledged through the use of italics). It's a very effective move, giving us an apparent objective view of Herzog and then putting us in his cluttered mind. The book explores notions of sanity as we watch Herzog try to work through the tail end of a nervous breakdown over his ex-wife having left him suddenly to live with one of his formerly closest friends. 'Course Herzog is a respected professor whose written about the romantics and was in the process of writing a book about Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind. Great, deep book.

Anyway, some quotes:

So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.

Seeking to sustain their own version of existence under the crushing weight of mass. What Marx described as that "material weight". Turning this thing, "my personal life," into a circus, into gladiatoral combat. Or tamer forms of entertainment.

Herr Nietzsche...You make us want to live with the void. Not lie ourselves into good-naturedness, trust, ordinary middling human considerations, but to question as has never been questioned before, relentlessly, with iron determination, into evil, through evil, past evil, accepting no abject comfort. The most absolute, the most piercing questions. Rejecting mankind as it is, that ordinary, practical, thieving, stinking, unilluminated, sodden rabble

That last quote was part of the last twenty-five pages or so of the book. Most of which is in the the form of these mental letter compositions that go on and on about the state of man and society and really seem to capture to some extent the earnest existentialism particular to the early 1960's, and it's in this as well as the theme of getting out of the city and back to a natural surrounding to air out the mind, which are probably why Herzog got love from a wide audience in 1964 and became his first real commercial success.

And a line of Cassavetes' dialogue from Johnny Staccato (which I think he fought to have called just simply Staccato, which would've been a pretty killer name for a TV show):

"I know I got slugged and I got robbed. Now you're making noises as if I did the slugging and the robbing."

In drerd aufn deck

2009-07-11T20:47:00.004+01:00

Which is Yiddish for the middle of nowhere. Which is how I'm feeling right now. A little shipwrecked. It happens.

Back to books-Saul Bellow round two is underway with a biography, The Victim, and soon to begin Ravelstein. Victim was his second book and it's really got the sensuousness of The Adventures of Auggie March, so I was right originally in thinking that this more Earthy descriptiveness and the wandering philosophy have been two strains of Bellow's style. Dangling Man, his first, was certainly thoughtful but not overtly philosophical. Often, as with Herzog & More Die of Heartbreak, the main character is a professor or in that vein (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's gift, etc.).

Before getting into the value of the biographical, I just wanted to mention that Atlas, the one of Bellow's biographers that I'm reading, mentions that they used to have used books in huge barrels outside of Walgreens back in the 1920's, and it made me really sad to think that the modern equivalent is racks of really crappy movies. A couple of the names he mentions Bellow reading from the "Modern Library editions" (Altas, pg. 25) are Flaubert, Dryden, Maupassant, Romain Rolland. I would be such a much happier person if I lived in a time and place where you could get used books like that cheap from a Walgreens. I'm not saying I want to go back to a time before computers and such. I just wish the two weren't mutually exclusive. Can't we have talking color pictures, the internet, and books on equal footing? Does it have to be 140 characters or Maupassant?

So the issue of biographicality. I agree with Derrida to a degree when he says that the biographical is a smokescreen in trying to understand the work of an author or a philosopher (although he may have been intending to respond to the use of deconstructionism in American literary criticism in saying words to this effect [I'm a little confused by his explanation]), but I generally find it edifying, even if it's only a fictional edification. I think it's especially important when looking at the philosophical systems any individual sets up to know a bit about that individual. It helps to see where and why their system might have holes. That's kind of, sort of part of deconstructionism. I think.

In the literary world though, it's a little more gossipy to go and read biographies of famous authors. These are the kinds of books I imagine People magazine readers would read if they read books. And I'm not ashamed to admit that I love biographies, autobios, memoirs, the whole bit. I'm incredibly nosy about the lives of people who's work I enjoy and admire. That's not to say that it's not useful to a writer to compare the life of a writer with his work. It can be helpful but is also probably not the main reason I go for the bio. I'm not immune to that more salacious curiosity. That's not to say that biographies are all gossipy and so forth. It's a spectrum for sure, but there's always that element.

And with Bellow it's about the girls. I mean, that was the thing that I was most curious about. I wanted another opinion beyond his own on his relations with women. That's the one mainstay of his work is this problem with women. And there's almost always an ex-wife or girlfriend (sometimes more than one) who treats him rottenly. You figure, either he is drawn to this type of woman or he just paints himself in a favorable light. It's probably a mixture, but clearly in Atlas' opinion Bellow always romanticizes his past and sweeps over his own flaws. Wow, that got really gossipy. I think I'm gonna break off and try this again some other time. I had intended to talk more about the intersection of writing and life, but I guess with that intro I couldn't help but go right for the idle talk.

Also, Infinite Jest. I'm at the point where the payoffs start to occur. You start to see the tapestry as opposed to just a bunch of little threads. It gets yr mind working with all kinds of conspiracy-like thoughts about what it all means and how it all really, ultimately fits together.

I do have to say, although Bellow is really a straighforward writer, there is a certain mystery to him as well buried in the philosophical musings which are not always light-bright clear. That stuff can kind of wash over you when you read it in a work of fiction, and I can imagine rereading will be eventually quite rewarding with all sorts of unremembered stuff.

Movies and baseball

2009-07-09T23:29:00.004+01:00

Since the only things I ever post about are what I'm reading, I thought I'd get off that topic for a brief second and talk about my other two favorite things, movies and baseball. I'm watching Rachel Getting Married just now, and I gotta say I'm not totally into the drama of uncomfortableness. I do like the comedy of uncomfortableness, but that stuff's funny. Rachel is just excruciating. When it got to Kim's wedding toast, I just couldn't watch anymore. Plus, Kim's family is flawlessly perfect so far. How does such a self-obsessed, beyond obnoxious person come from such a place? I get the feeling that the perfection isn't real, and things are gonna break down at some stage, but we'll see.

Also, The Thin Red Line is one of the greatest war movies ever. Grittily real. And Nick Nolte as the coronel or general or whatever he is is just a truly transformative performance. There's a scene where he's seriously pissed and screaming into the phone, and the veins on his neck are popping out. It's seriously crazy.

And, of course, Ernst Lubitch is the master of the screwball comedy, but The Shop Around the Corner (on which You've Got Mail was apparently loosely based) is both funny and beautiful and sad all together. Really one of Jimmy Stewart's most subtle performances (Jimmy was not the most subtle of actors). And Margeret Sullivan is really wonderful. I need to rent more Maraget Sullivan movies. Plus, Frank Morgan as Matuscheck has this really pitch perfect child-like quality to him. It all adds up to a damn fine film.

Well, the Sox are in the top slot in the AL East but just barely. The yanks are breathing down their necks. The Jays are saying they'd consider trading Halladay, but I don't think the Yanks have enough to offer or the Sox would give up their young talent. If Hall went to the yanks, that would be it. Hank'd get his pennant for sure.

Now, no one wants John Smoltz to succeed more than me (except maybe Smoltz himself), but with the East such a tight division, how many sub-par outings can you allow the guy to try and turn himself into a finesse pitcher a la Schill? Especially with Buchholz burning up the rubber down in Pawtucket. Still, I have all the confidence in the world in Tito. And this has been his most creative work with the line-up since he's been the skipper of the Sox. And it's paid great dividends. Seems to be taking a page from Joe Maddon's playbook to good effect.

So, that was mostly rambling, little tidbits moreso than anything useful or considered. It's just good for me to write things down. My memory appears to be really useless. I was watching the preview for Elegy, which I saw in the theaters last year, and I was all, 'This looks so familiar. Have I seen a movie with Sir Ben and Penelope Cruz?' I still can't remember what the whole thing was about beyond a may-december romance. Maybe that was all it was about. It's weird watching something you clearly know and have seen, but can't for the life of you remember at all. I don't enjoy that, but then again having a not so good memory has it's advantages too. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind and all that. Okay, enough of this. I'm not getting anywhere.

Infinite Jest and all the rest

2009-07-05T20:06:00.010+01:00

It feels a little weird to have exactly designated page readings for the collective read of Infinite Jest marked out to the day. Though it has got me to read the book in small bites here and there, mostly in the few minutes before I should be asleep. That way I aim for a zen aproach of non-judgement, which never totally works 'cause Wallace is so damn entertaining. Still, I can clear my mind on it at the end of the day, which sounds a little crazy when you think about the material as 'material for a book', as in the kind of material that would in general make a good novel all things being equal. In that sense, the material would not make for a light read before bed book, but he makes it work. Sure, it's huge and complicated, but it's also hugely engaging and full of humour, and he eases you in so smoothly that you barely even notice how weird and complicated things've gotten. I can see just now in the past few days why there has been talk of getting past the first 200 pages. There is a slight lag toward the 120-35 mark, and the Wardine stuff is written in a way that could be obnoxious to some.

'Course after the Sheep Man's dialogue in both Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase and Dance, Dance, Dance, which was all caps without spacing between the words (which was itself the translator's idea to signify some linguistic eccentricity Murakami used in the original Japanese), I can handle just about any level of linguistic weirdness. That stuff was obnoxious. Of course, those two books were so good otherwise that I could tolerate the sheep man stuff. In comparison the Wardine stuff so far is easy, and I feel like Wardine's story is absolutely necessary to balance out the novel and a pretty interesting one ta' boot.

So I read Jest in small bites, and I don't think about it and go to sleep. It's seems like I remember the book really well that way (either that or it's Wallace's shorter sectioning in the early chapters, which fits the modern attention span better) because I do seem to have a pretty good sense of what's going on where. The problem is more what hasn't been discovered in just the first 10% of the entire book when including the end notes, which are seemingly both important for the story and quite funny. The M.I.T. language riots set off by a debate between Steven Pinker and some made up person, I believe. Buried in the infamous endnote 24. That made me happy all day and glad I stuck it out through 24 to the end.

If I read 15 pages today, then I'll be at the 75 per week mark at 150 (second week). (editor's note [as this post was started yesterday] I'm actually ten pages behind in Jest). And this whole setting exact page and chapter designations has crept into the rest of my reading, which has actually been not too frenetic but more disciplined and therefore more successful. I've been, at least, reading, if not fully processing some heavier stuff. 'Course Saul Bellow has got to be one of the more directly philosophical successful novel writers of all time. His fiction has substantial weight, although in the existential direction which is a field both madly important and of so little practical use to the moneygrabbers of this world (in fact, it's a downright hindrance to have to think about the very thing [mortality] that you are grabbing all this money to avoid thinking about [probably]) and probably ultimately a bit on the tautological side. Okay, that was a set of bald speculative generalizations, but, well, if economists are allowed to make wild philosophical assumptions, then why not I.

Just a brief record for myself of my progress up to July 6th: half way thru W. James, One chpter Joe Campbell's Creative Mythology, two chptrs Macroeconomics (the fallacious assumptions in the field are worse than I suspected), finished Dangling Man, 1/3 thru Herzog. Going to the library today for a biography on Bellow and possibly Ravelstein. That one's gotten some interesting praise and was his last book finished at age 85 (the same year his wife gave birth to his last kid!). Anyway, this is how I'm processing the progress thru various reading this summer mainly because of the collective read. This idea of exactly scheduled reads has really got into my head, and frankly it's pretty helpful when trying to juggle multiple books.

A quick word on macroeconomics. My neighbor gave me his textbook after he took the class, and I've been reading it slowly in bits and pieces in the mornings with breakfast. Already, the clear lack of philosophic rigor is soooo apparent it's almost painful in its obviousness. I said this about behavior economics, but it's even more so true of econ proper. There were several small little assumptive choices that I picked up on but didn't register enough to remember exactly other than the writer's poor explanation of the use and value of behavior econ, but the fundamental assumption of scarcity as existing everywhere at all times because human beings can't satisfy every possible desire they might ever possibly have at every moment of their lives...You guys don't see why having that as the fundamental assumption of yr field might result in some freaked out outcomes? If you really can't see the problem here, then I really don't think there's a whole lot anybody can do about it? I mean, that is astoundingly asinine. Just astoundingly.

I can't even be bothered to deconstruct it again. I ran it in my head in a frustrated half-muttered yelling at the book while pounding the text with my finger, but I'm really not going there again. So, this next few years of intensive econ study is gonna be a slog on some levels, but necessary. Alternative economics producing a practical system and the philosophical reformation of the field proper (opening it to the social sciences [and not letting jerk-off intro writers cop to 'that's not part of the field of economics' as an excuse for ignoring the wider ranges and mountaintops of knowledge]) is work that needs to be done, and maybe I can do something useful in that direction.

So, there's all of that. Otherwise, things're good. Beautiful day, don't have to work. Going to spend some time wandering the city today and writing descriptive stuff for the real places for my novel. That'll also be good. Life is good. I feel good. Going running now.

I got a funky shadow with me (miscellaneous)

2009-06-26T23:24:00.006+01:00

So I see that I had the chronology on Bellow a little wrong. And I also see that his first success was Herzog, which I just started, and I have to say that novel's success could only happen in the sixties. I'm also amazed that Dangling Man ever got published. It's a ponderous account of a man waiting for his assignment with the army to go through written in the form of a journal (a kind of proto-blog fiction).

They're both quite brilliant. And quite ponderous. I just can't imagine a man like him being successful today. Ponderous and earnest. Two things not so much in high demand. Two things that are just absolutely so right up my alley though. So, the summer of Bellow will continue, and probably have to be extended into the fall. With a dozen novels and half a dozen short story collections and works of non-fiction, I would have to focus solely on him, which I really can't do this summer. Must make headway with the study of religion and mythology. Work that it is becoming more and more apparent is really necessary for my own novel work (to be cont'd at A the P).

I'll leave the political analysis for another day, but I did want to get into deconstruction on some op-eds from the Wall St. Journal and will. Another day.

I do want to say a few words about Micheal Jackson. I know the interweb is awash in remembrances and discussion of MJ, but I still wanted to add my own two cents because he definitely held a position of prominence in my love of music and dance.

When I was about 13, I took over my neighbor's paper route after he left for college, and after a few months I had collected together the awe-inspiring sum of seventy dollars from this endeavor. I still remember so clearly that trip to the mall. The first time ever that I had any real money of my own to spend. And I remember going into one of those shitty music stores that used to be in every mall (hey, surburbia, watcha gonna do?). And I remember being just totally overwhelmed by the amount of music available.

There were so many choices. Different genres of music and bands, just an amount of music that I could never possibly hope to listen to and absorb myself even if it was all free for the taking (as it now sorta, kinda is). It was one of the first times I realized how big the world was. How much was going on that I'd had no idea about. I admit, I was a little freaked out in that record store that day. So, I picked one artist. Really one group, and I think you can probably guess who that was. Yep, I picked the J5. And I obsessively bought every cassette tape (CD's existed but my sis had this crappy boombox that I could listen to in my room, so cassettes it was) of MJ and the J5 I could over the next year. And knowing all of their and his music top to bottom and stem to stern was a way for me to feel like I wasn't lost in a world that would always be so much bigger than I was.

It was an early coping strategy for the anxiety inducement of feeling lost and small and disconnected, which has always been a kind of mainstay in my life. And I also went out and read biographies about Micheal and read his autobio and watched MTV (this was the one time in my life when I lived in a house with cable) for the Micheal Jackson weekends. I recorded all that stuff on VHS tapes. I had Motown 25, all his music videos, early J5 stuff. So much of his stuff. And knowing his work so thoroughly made me feel comfortable that, if taken one thing at a time, I might not be drowned in information overload.

The thing about MJ that I think impressed me the most was when I found out that he was choreographing the J5 right from the beginning (at age 6 or 7). He was the one that designed their dance moves. I used to wear those VHS tapes of him and them out trying to imitate those moves. That man could dance like nobody's business. My fav is the move he does in the middle of the long form Smooth Criminal video when the song stops and he does this funky sort of moonwalk but just in place in a circle while looking at the ground and holding his white fedora. Loved that move. Practiced it endlessly. Never could nail it.

Anyway, I took a lot of shit for my obsessive love of Micheal Jackson I can tell you. Everyone thought it was off the wall odd-ballness, which it was. By that time MJ was well into his downward slide, of which is being written about plenty so I'm gonna pass by on that. The first child molestation charges came up about 7 or 8 months after I got into his stuff. And I got ragged hard, but I stood my ground and defended him tooth and nail.

I can still sing along with just about every J5 or MJ song there is right up through Dangerous, which I bought the day it was released. That was about the time that I started to move on to other things.

I guess that trip to the music store is really one of the precursors of my fanatic reading, listening, and film watching of particular artists entire body of work. It's not so much about overcoming the overwhelming nature of a global society anymore (for that I have philosophy). Now, it's more about seeing the developmental arc. And enjoying good art. And stuff. For that I am grateful, so thank you for that Micheal. Dance on into the eternal.

Still, with the Bellow

2009-06-25T20:37:00.007+01:00

I have a whole cavalcade of quotes from Humboldt's Gift that I wanted to write down somewhere before I returned the book to the library, so I figured here is as good as anywhere. The whole book is so imminently quotable it's ridiculous. The man was profound and so earnest. Earnestness seems to be a rare commodity sometimes in our oh-so-snark-a-rific modern culture, and there is reason for that. One of earnestness' companions is often naivete. And Bellow on a certain level of practical living exemplifies the problems of earnestness in his characters. I don't want to mix up the man and his characters, but Charlie Citrine (the narrator and hero of H.G.) is a twice won pullitizer prize winning author, so perhaps a certain level of mixedupness is understandable.

The story is happening on two levels really. There's the plotted craziness that is a mainstay of Bellow's. His stories are always wild and crazy, but there's also this journey of the mind. His mind wanders through the hallways of philosophy, art, science, and ends in a mysticality he calls anthroposophy, which is apparently a term for the philosophy of Rudolph Steiner (both this word and this person were entirely new to me). Charlie C rejects rationality to a degree, but then doesn't reject it. Mostly he wants a deeper experience of living, and he goes into strange spiritualist practices to try and find this thing.

Because, of course, like the rest of us and especially like American society in the '70ies when Bellow wrote this book, Charles Citrine is finding himself experiencing a certain blaseness (with an accent on the e). Of course, as a highly emotional character with a deep intellect (I feel safe in saying this is something Bellow shares with his protagonists) this blaseness just peeps out at moments and manifests itself as this push into mysticism.

I've been reading William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience as well, and it has been quite unintentionally and synchronicitiously the ideal companion work of non-fiction for HG. One of the things James talks about is the experience of a presence, of which he chronicles many examples from various anthropological sources. This experience is just what it sounds like; A person feeling like someone else is present in the room when they are, in fact, alone.

Of course, my response to this idea is that it's surely a neurological phenomenon. The experience is in the brain, which does not mean that it's not real or valid or whatnot. It just means that this is some form of mental stimulation (how or where that mental stimulation comes from is another, more complicated question). The point I'm trying and failing to get at is that the spiritual and the religious are the means by which we can break the deadenings of the blase and reconnect with the power of the soul. Bellow's Citrine is all worked up about the fact that the soul is not to be dismissed as some relic of another time but is a real and useful concept. The reality of this soul, for me, is more in the experience of self that comes from the idea of an immortal spirit that both animates us and lives beyond our physical existence.

So, now I've gone all crazy tangential into a slight mysticism myself, but I think Emile Durkheim was right when he writes that religion has an incredible power to drive human existence (obviously, that's for both good and ill), and that the lessening of the spiritual in modernity is a potential loss of animating force within the self.

Oh right, quotes:

Artaud as the artist was a failed priest. Failed priests specialize in blasphemy.

The educated people of modern countries are a thinking rabble at the stage of what Marx called primitive accumulation. Their business is to reduce masterpieces to discourse. Artaud's scream is an intellectual thing. First, an attack on the nineteenth-century 'religion of art', which the religion of discourse wants to replace...

It seemed to me, however, that one might begin with this belief of the modern world-either you burn or you rot. This I connected with the finding of old Binet the psychologist that hysterical people had fifty times the energy, the endurance, the power of performance, the keenness of faculties, the creativity in their hysterical fits as they had in their quiet periods. Or as William James put it, human beings really lived when they lived at the top of their energies.

Someone has even written of an astronomer keeping droves of stars, the cattle of the mind, in the meadows of space. The imaginative soul works in that way, and why should poetry refuse to be knowledge?

He was definitively one of the great contemporary American novelists. Here's to earnest, profound authors who aren't afraid of the non-rational. May your soul live on forever Mr. Bellow.

Can wisdom really be conventional?

2009-06-24T22:17:00.004+01:00

This past weekend I was exposed to a high level of cable news. For myself, I haven't owned a television since my last one exploded (along with a toaster oven, refrigerator, dishwasher, DVD player, etc.) due to faulty wiring several years back, and I haven't lived in a house with cable since before the advent of 24 hour news. And I have to say, cable news is shitty and facile for the most part. Fareed Zakaria's GPS was excellent and thoughtful, but otherwise cable news appears to suck.

The story that was getting a lot of play beyond rebroadcasting Youtube videos from Iranian protests was the whole 'Obama's health care reform is on the rocks' bit because it turns out that anything close to full coverage is gonna be wildly expensive. Who would've guessed? Now, the question I've been asking myself since big B came out with his statement that he wanted a health care bill by the end of the summer was why such a rush? Why on Earth would you want to rush through what is so clearly a monumental undertaking?

And the answer that came back to me was that those moron economists he's got on the payroll have been whispering in his ear about Milton Friedman's theory of crisis as catalyst for undemocratic change. Friedman came to the idea that if you wanted to get real so-called free market reforms you needed to implement them during a crisis while people were too skittish and freaked out to resist. Once they're on the books, it's hard to undo.

The theory here might be (this is all pure, bald speculation I admit) that B's admin can use the economic crisis to push through a barrel of reforms before conservatives can get their barings and regroup. In theory this kind of makes sense, but in truth it's really idiotic. First off, universal health care is not undemocratic. The core problem is not that we're talking about trying to push through reform that only benefits a small group, it's that conservatives seem to embrace demagogic rhetorical practices to an extent that progressives tend to be uncomfortable with on principle. And those practices had been wildly successful right up to the virtual collapse of our economy.

And there's no reason to think those practices will be abandoned anytime soon. Mostly because conservatives embrace those practices on principle. The principle being that people aren't really capable of making wise political choices for themselves, and therefore have to be kind of tricked into making the 'right' choice. This is all wickedly ironic given the foundation of conservative economic theory, but not the kind of irony I would suggest laughing about.

So, really the choice was to try and counter this with a reverse Friedman political move or to somehow figure out a way to break the back of demagogery. Or to dissolve and transform the demagogic. However you want to think about it (I also freely admit that the warrior paradigm has limited use). It appears that B's admin went with the former, and it may have been the exploding cigar that the Repubs needed to lift there collective spirits and get back into the fray.

Obviously, this has all been speculation and generalization. None of which is of much value. I just thought I'd spout off a little bit about this whole thing because after listening to Obama's press conference yesterday I was reminded how smart and thoughtful this president is and how half-assedly pragmatic his admin's approach has been. The disconnect is not just a little frustrating, but I was not unprepared for that possibility (by that crappily calculated book of his The Audacity of Hope).

So there's that. Also just about through with Humboldt's Gift. The casual nature of Bellow's intelligence and the way he brings us into esoterically weird mystic teachings through a dynamic and funny story coupled with a philosophic journey of thought is quite staggering. I see now that I've started Dangling Man that, really, The Adventures of Auggie March was somewhat of an aberration (his Norwegian Wood, if you will) in that the level of philosophizing is still there but kept minimal, and the story and the sensual details of place and character are brought to the fore. Really he's at the philosophy from word one of novel one. And that's just fine.

More Bellow

2009-06-17T20:13:00.004+01:00

Owing to the TB I connected breathing with joy, and owing to the gloom of the ward I connected joy with light, and owing to my irrationality I related light on the walls to light inside me. I appear to have become a hallelujah and Glory type. Furthermore (concluding) America is a didactic country whose people always offer their personal experiences as a helpful lesson to the rest, hoping to hearten them and to do them good- an intensive sort of personal public-relations project. There are times when I see this as idealism. There are other times when it looks to me like pure delirium. With everyone sold on the good how does all the evil get done?
-Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

A flowering of post-modernism is how I always think of Bellow, but with a depth of insight that po-mo stuff can many times lack.

Saul Bellow

2009-06-17T17:58:00.011+01:00

He said this was a good question but it was obvious that he didn't mean it. He turned gloomy and his voice went flat -plink- as though there were one note of tin in his brilliant keyboard. He struck it now. "I may think I'm bringing an offering to the altar, but that's not how they see it." No, it was not a good question, for the fact that I asked it meant that I didn't know Evil, and if I didn't know Evil my admiration was worthless. He forgave me because I was a boy. But when I heard the tinny plink I realized I must learn to defend myself. He had tapped my affection and admiration, and it was flowing at a dangerous rate. This hemorrhage of eagerness would weaken me and when I was weak and defenseless I would get it in the neck. And so I figured, ah ha! he wants me to suit him perfectly, down to the ground. He'll bully me. I'd better look out.
-Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift

It was about two years ago that I bought a copy of The Adventures of Augie March at The New England Mobile Book Fair (an unbelievably cheap warehouse full of books). The way the Book Fair is set up it's virtually impossible to find specific books without in-depth assistance, so I usually just wander around randomly until I hit on something. March was one of those random hits. It was one of several books, but other than Sucker's Progress (a book about gambling on cards), I couldn't tell you what any of those other several books were now. I have them somewhere in closets or on bookshelves, but I couldn't easily identify them as from that last trip to the book fair.

Within twenty, ten, five, maybe even the first page I knew this book was destined to make the all time desert top five. It's just that good. So sensory it's like being in the Chicago streets of the early 1920's and onward, and the story ranges all over the place. It has this magical quality to it that made me think of magical realism even without any type of overtly fantastical reality. The real world is made magical. No small feat.

Now, last summer I dubbed 'The Summer of Murakami' because I went on an obssessive Marukami binge and read everything of his that's been translated except one or two collections of short stories. I went absolutely crazy on the writings of Haruki Murakami, and the plan is to do the same thing with Bellow this summer. So, this is 'The Summer of Bellow'. Which is so much easier, as my local library has just about all of Saul Bellow's work as well as several biographies and about a dozen critical analyses. The only Murakami they had was Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman. A great collection of short stories to be sure, but hardly enough for a Summer Of kind of thing.

With Bellow, I really wanted to start with Humboldt's Gift. I think it's the one that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Not that that really means anything. The Old Man in the Sea won it for Hem, and I think that's the only Hemingway novel that I haven't read. Not that that really means anything either. I'm just saying. Also winning the Nobel probably was the proximate cause for Hem going all paranoid delusional because he couldn't work what with all the hoo-ha over the prize. And he might've been on the verge of breaking through stylistically with the Garden of Eden (on a certain level of meta-ness [not with the whole sexual kinkiness {although that was a new level of sex wierdness for Hem}]). All beside the point anyway. I just had a hunch about this book.

And Humboldt's Gift is clearly a treasure. I'm about sixty pages in, and the book is most firmly in that ecstatic enlightenment of literature category. Just an elegant joy, in words. To me at least. After Augie March, I had picked up some of Bellow's later writing from the 80's (Mr Sammler's Planet [got him the Pullitzer, I think] and More Die of Heartbreak) used for cheap, and it's all dense musings from an old Jewish man in New York and an early Russian lit professor somewhere in the Mid-west respectively, which is probably why they were readily available used for cheap. Books that Dave Eggers calls 'difficult' (lest we forget our labeling theory, Dave). Great books in there own right but no where near the sensual and emotional journey of March. Much more intellectual. It seems that Humboldt may have been the turning point in the development of this later, more intellectual style because it, so far, seems like a wonderful and near perfect mix of the sensual and the intellectual. So good.

And so many more. Herzog next, then Dangling Man (I believe his first novel), and after that, well, we'll just have to see.

Also read Shipping Out or A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace. Harper's magazine has all the DFW stuff they've ever printed available in PDF form over there (thanks to Infinite Summer a bunch of DFW links). It is absolutely, hilariously, deeply, thoughtfully, sincerely amazing. Such mirth and depth so playfully intertwined. Wallace is just brilliant. Just absolutely brilliant. Maybe next summer will be the Summer of Wallace.

Slow down there, Cowboy. Let's not get ahead of yrself.

Gathering together my scattered brain

2009-06-15T00:11:00.004+01:00

Scattered is my go-to euphemism when it comes to over anxious hyper-reflexivity, to be even more euphemistic about the whole thing. I have the tendency to get excited and then start going eight thousand miles per second, and eventually, after four or five months of the everything all at the same time style of life, I crash and burn for a few months of blahh and nothing and try and recharge. Unfortunately, this style of living does not match well with the whole process of aging. As I'm learning.

So, the trick is to catch yrself at the early stages of the cycle and mediate the afterburn. Try and take it slow without sacrificing the creative and/or scholastic energy. For me, this is difficult. It is not easy. I like to sprint. I don't like to jog.

The point of this is that the thing that sets me off is knowledge and ideas. Once I get on the scent of a good story or a good philosophic integrative conduit, I'm off like a bloodhound. And it's a damn the consequences I'm on the hunt kind of a thing, which is in some ways a good response. It's just that all the basics of living tend to get lost in that great cosmic hunt for understanding, at least for me.

So, I guess, what I'm saying is that sometimes it's good to jog. You can't sprint a marathon and all that. And life is a marathon. It's not 200 meters. At least, we hope it's not.

A little bit lately, I'm just running down the rabbit hole. It's a habit of mine when I'm falling into the blah mode to try to keep from going stone cold numb. I'd say it's a bad one, but truthfully I do think it's important that you go down and through and out the other side at least once in our lives. It's important to see what's under the surface. Find out what's down there and what you, yrself, are made of. That doesn't mean we should do it as a defense against apathy. There are surely other, more healthy alternatives in the struggle to remain present and not slip into the back seat of life.

And all that. So, I was informed the other day (not to harp on the Star Trek thing) that it was a black hole and not a wormhole, which is actually worse. I was giving Abrams credit. A black hole is, to my mind, substantially less interesting than a wormhole. Plus, if you went into a black hole, you would be frozen in time, sort of, and would experience that last millisecond of yr life infinitely. So time is a factor but no backwards time travel. Sorry.

Anyway, I've put aside economics for the summer and picked up William James' The Varieties of Religous Experience and Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology. Both are heavy and serious. James is more of a philosophic exercise in the logics of spirituality while Campbell musters the evidence from all corners of the social sciences and brings them together in a kind of mystical way. They fit well together.

Also, of course, Infinite Jest. Of which, I am taking my time and moving slowly and trying not to get too far ahead (Infinite Summer). Tomorrow I'll go to the library and hopefully, fingers crossed, get my hands on three or four of Saul Bellow's novels. I really hope they have Humboldt's Gift. I am optimistic. Also that my fines are not too high.

A Happy thought

2009-06-09T21:40:00.007+01:00

Although I enjoy Hunter S. Thompson's writing immensely and his clear-eyed analysis coupled with absolute post-modern absurdism is both exhilarating and overpowering, I do know better than to read him at breakneck speeds. It's a little mentally dangerous. I picked up Fear and Loathing on the Campaign trail in '72 for whatever unclear reason, and I just tore through it in less than a week. I do. I know better than to do that.

And that's Hunter's most thoughtful work. In my opinion. Not that it's not full of gonzo insanity, and it's not that the context of his ravings doesn't make him seem painfully sane, it's just that his style is wildly manic.

Years ago I had this idea for a remake of an old Japanese film, Rashomon, w/ HST as the bit role of the traveler who's hearing the various stories from different people who happen to be in a diner, which replaces the abandoned temple, as the real story happens in multiple perspective flashback. And the whole thing would be based around Thompson's book Hell's angels. About a crime the Hell's angels may have committed. Rashomon was all about perspective. Cryptic, eh? Read the book and go see the movie and you'll see why the idea is a little controversial and would be a difficult movie to really make.

But anyway, it occurred to me that if I wanted to write as Hunter, I would have to read as much of his writing as I could. I read just about everything. Collections of letters (the man wrote three volumes of letters to friends and family over the years), his early novel The Rum Diary, FNL in LV, The great Shark Hunt, various collections from his later writings, etc. I tried to learn how to think like Hunter S. Thompson.

Let me tell you it's a very disturbing, if also enlightening, place. Not that he's wrong. Especially with Campaign. One of the great takeaways from Thompson's journalism in 1972 was that it's crazy to take politicians at surface value. And even worse, it's not objective. That's really one of the great lessons of postmodernism: rationality is not always rational. But the form of this lesson for Thompson was his life, and it made him a character. A celebrity. He could no longer practice his brand of journalism because he became the story. And he had to play a character that was intensely polarizing. It was probably ultimately a fairly self destructive character too, but only he would've know that for sure. I never did know 'em, so I couldn't rightly say.

The point of all this was that I didn't mean to be such a menace about behavioral economics, leveraged buy-outs, or the new Star Trek. It just happened to be the stuff I was thinking about while I was reading the Campaign Trail. I also shredded on the idea that Inifinite Jest is a difficult book, the difference between the progressive and conservative media approach (informative vs. demagogic?), the potential illusion of free will, and other related nonsense. I was pretty worked up by the time I got through.

I actually think the work of behavioral economics is very important. In the end, we've gotta start somewhere. The economic reform process is going to be long and hopefully fruitful. I just worry that we're picking at the scabs on our elbows while our intestines bleed out or something. Not that behavioral economics is the scab. The metaphor is never perfect. They've taken good basic research from the specialized fields of modern psychology, but the integration has to go further. Sociology, history, anthropology, really the entire field of the humanities, theology. We've gotta get the whole superstructure fit together. It's like a giant puzzle of knowledge.

In order for the social sciences to integrate, economics cannot seperate itself from the research and ideas of the wider field. It cannot be it's own seperate entity, but in order to maintain Friedman, that's what has to be done. And what this basic work that Thaler, Sunstein, Schiller, etc. are doing is showing us the the symptoms of larger philosophical problems that we cannot continue to ignore.

I really don't have any nice things to say about leveraged buy outs. So, I'm gonna move right on to the new Star Trek. It was. It was good. I enjoyed it. To a degree. I really felt like the movie should've started with the young Kirk racing down the road in the stolen car and saved the back story about his dad to be cut in along the way as self-reflective flashbacks to soften the brazenness of Captain Kirk's character. I really felt like Kirk needed a few brief flashes of self reflection. Not just that one slight aside to Uhura.

But it was still pretty smart and funny for the tent pole action/adventure genre. I would prefer if they got some of the physics right. Maybe there was some in there that I didn't notice. Abrams is definitely no slouch. I did like Spock designing the Kobayashi Maru. I felt like the rest of the stuff about the Maru was too easy. It should have been a more difficult question. Not so cut and dried. A little more sophisticated. I know that's a loaded word. It really shouldn't be. Still the new Trek was worthwhile. It was worth my time and money. For the most part.

Anyway, I've already started in on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. Never read any of his work before, and it's clearly monumental. I am looking forward to reading this book this summer. Got to try and make it last all summer, and read other things. Comparative mythology, for example. William James. Mircea Eliade. Joseph Campbell. Some really 'difficult' books.

Anyway, that was really digressive. Sorry. I'm basically just muttering to myself under my breath in print. I probably do that too much.

Don't Believe the Hype, and other etcerated echolalia

2009-06-02T23:31:00.003+01:00

First things first, I've been delving into behavioral economics, and I'm sadly disappointed in the lack of philosophical discipline among the fields' leading thinkers. The work lacks rigor and is for the most part just a mishmash of cognitive, social, and folk psychology applied to economics through an individualist paradigm with no accounting for the field of sociology what-so-ever. This scattershot approach to interdisciplinary work has got to stop, and the honest truth is that if philosophers weren't so Ostrich-like in their pursuit of epistemological and ontological and existential truths, they might be able to help in the superstructural coordinating project that needs to happen to take the social sciences to the quantum and cosmological level.

So there's that. Also read an interesting piece in the Boston Globe today about the huge problem of debt in the newspaper world. We all know that newspapers are struggling, and that they haven't figured out an internet model that works. But the reason that some are so far underwater is that they're drowning in the debt incurred when some larger corporation bought them out after the telecommunications act of '96 basically deregulated formerly mandated diveristy of ownership in local newspapers. That's why the Globe is so close to the edge, because the Times Co. bought them out in a leveraged deal that put over a 100 million dollars worth of debt onto the Globe's books. And it would suck something fierce if the Globe went under.

For everyone who's counting '96 was also the year that Glass-Steagall was repealed and that energy bill with the so-called Enron loophole was passed, which deregulated newly created markets (such as mortgage back securities, energy, auction rate securities, etc.). And who signed all of those things into law. That's right ladies and gents, Bill Clinton. And it looks like, scratch that, it is clear that Obama intends to continue the trend of letting the money changers take over the temple. Who in their right goddam mind hires the guy who fired Cornel West? I ask you.

Anyway, so I saw Star Trek the other day and I gotta say, I wasn't really feelin' it. That's not say there weren't moments. Simon Pegg running around like a madman, givin' it all she's got. Eric Bana as the grieving, vengeful Romulan. There was something else I liked, but I've forgotten now. Oh, yeah. Bones' intro. Classic. Here's my problem. Cap't Kirk was an ass. No holds barred, completely unself-reflective dillhole. I'm generally all about the anti-hero, but I just don't think this is the right time to be celebrating a guy who has one millisecond of self reflection in his whole universe saving adventure. He reminded me a lot of the guy who just left the white house, and frankly I do not want to be reminded of that shit right now. Or a guy who would be right at home blowing huge rails of coke and developing exotic investment instruments a la le credit default swap. These are not the type of people we should be lionizing as the defenders of the universe.

But of course I'm an unrepentant moralist. I freely admit it. I think that anyone who creates a product that is going to be potentially imbibed by millions of people around the world has a responsibility to the creation of mythic structures that help to illuminate the messy, tricky realities we all live through. I feel like that responsibility is shirked time and again. But whatever.

I also did not feel like the chemistry between Quinto's Spock and Pine's Kirk was where it should have been, and I feel like part of that was the writing for Spock. Well, really the writing for everything. The movie was like some giant rolling deus ex machina. And just for the record a wormhole could potentially bring you forward in time, but a regular wormhole could not bring you back in time. You would need some kind of reverse wormhole, like maybe if two wormholes collided. Not that wormholes move, but I just don't understand how a movie that costs millions of dollars can't get a little physics right. Take the physics as it exists and then go beyond it. Don't just grab some concepts out of the zietgiest and throw 'em in. That's a big pet peeve of mine.

Also what is the deal with Spock getting picked on as a kid? If Vulcan's are ruled by logic, then doesn't this mean that it's logical to pick on someone who's different? I don't understand how this works other than that it's necessary for later plot developments.

So, it wasn't awesome. In my humble opinion. I admit. I'm a downer a lotta times when it comes to this stuff. I am incapable of watching a film in a non-hyperly critical way. But when a film is able to make it through that hyper-critical guantlet, the enjoyment is just that much greater. But, I digress.

I see now that my tone here was pretty harsh, but I just started reading Hunter Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. I have a bad habit of slight tonal imitation. These things they happen.

Later than now

2009-05-22T20:19:00.005+01:00

I'm reading a scholarly recreation of the mind of Thomas Jefferson. The author essentially uses historical documentation and a really flimsy, seemingly biased folk psychology to recreate the framework of what and how Jefferson might have thought about the events and actions of his life. He's clearly got the Jefferson scholarship done and done, but the lack of an academic or clinical background in psychology makes his use of them very thin. One of the problems is trying to get in Jefferson's head without taking up his perspective.

There is a psychological explanation for pscyho or sociopathic behavior, whatever you care to call it. Violent behavior has an explanation. It's not always seen as valid from the social perspective, but given enough information, especially if that information is selected to exclude the most contentious time of a person's life, you can get any amount of vicious or vituperative behavior to seem rational. Not that Jefferson was a sociopath, but he sure did, said, and wrote some tough stuff to swallow. Some things that echo through the hallways of time and also the Bush/Cheney presidency, most obviously but among other things as well.
Say that time during the early days of you're national government, when you were on the verge of treason, or that time when you turned on one of your closest friends, and tacitly authorized media tactics that would make Fox News Blush. Being one of the founding fathers, people might immitate you (and recreate those bad habits [if not properly seen and identified]).

So that's the problem with that. But it's still useful and full of interesting information and Herculian psychological hoops to jump through to validate the man's clear disregard for the practical outcomes of his radical ideals (I was gonna use the word fanatic, but I somehow feel radical is a better, more ambivalent word).

Good read. American Sphinx. That's the title. Also almost half-way into Weber's essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Dense, early sociology. Very much a kind of philosophic history about the connection between the Reformation and the rise of Capitalism. Amazingly presentient even now almost a hundred years later. And fascinating for its ideas and sociological proofs about how capitalism came to replace feudalism and the nascent mercantilism. It gained a religious undertone. One that Weber admits has mostly washed away (by 1909ish [when he wrote the book]). Kinda scary, huh?

Anyway...worthwhile.

The cultural landscape

2009-05-10T11:45:00.004+01:00

There have been all kinds of trends in culture over the years. From fashion, to slang, to all the new social media and now dinosaur-seeming traditional media, the desire to do good, or to not care so much about others.
And culture plays such a large part in what kind of political economic structures will be successful or accepted. But the culture is also respondent. It grows and changes in ways we cannot totally understand or control. It's the ultimate memetical social force and one that is used or has been tried to be used in many ways to flat out apply the ideas of behavioral psychology as a means towards expansion, immediate profit, and the normativization of consumerist culture.

Just to take a long view here for a minute. In roughly 5-13 billion years our sun is either going to die or go supernova. Either possibility means that if we want to survive as a species, then we'll have to be out of this solar system, if not this galaxy within that time.

Let's not put that one off till the last minute? eh? Somewhat as we have with, oh, like every other problem facing the human race. I ask myself sometimes if it's not already too late; if my long view is essentially just an intellectual exercise within the egoistic, kin based system of capitalism. If so, then social goods will be out of reach, as from an aggregate of egoists does not an altruism develop. Regardless of the purity of these economic models, the formulas do not add up.

I can't help feeling it's hollow. Almost certainly it is, and any good philosopher of political economy can spot the fallacious assumptions that grow into the cultural zietgiest through the proliferation of ideological 'think tanks' whose only interest is in altering perspectives on culture that favor their brand of...their brand of...frankly ideological economics, or neoclassical econ. as it's more widely called. An economic system with no moral foundation, and one that is quite obviously unsustainable and just plain shiitey. Whatever tactics that are consciously used to alter the state of the current society to orient it towards a greater degree of consumerism and a higher degree of blind acceptivism.

The philosophy of ethics would suggest on several different levels and in several different ways that any distributive system must be grounded in a coherent moral structure. And that moral structure, I believe, is philosophically sufficient in it's pluralist frame, if not entirely satisfying, to develop better social and collective personal outcomes. To take moral pluralism and use it as an analogic starting point towards an economic pluralism, I believe could begin to help reform this system, help to shift culture (although help from Hollywood, TV, magazines, and the internet must serve as stolid engines of this shift by moving away from a quite cracked economic model [which comes from a lack of true economic understanding in the world of the mainstream arts]). I mean honestly, who can't see that making movies like LOTR is a more lucrative enterprise than, say, Max Payne, or even X-Men: Wolverine, and probably Terminator: Salvation. At least during normal economic times. It's just getting from point A to point Q.

In truth nothing short of a world-wide spiritual revolution could bring us beyond simple pluralism and begin the hard road toward a cooperative, sustainable, social economics. I believe there does have to be a personal revolution as someone, anyone, everyone in our society find ways to, through the use of the archetypal symbols that they must individually find for themselves, bring spirituality's ritualistic practices into the transcendance of a elegant, personal grace and love. Only then, with a compassionate heart, a graceful mind, and a loving self can the true experience of the spirit be achieved, and from that the wild-beating heart of culture will emerge, moving along with us towards a just and equitable society. And then, just maybe, your practice will lead you to see beyond the half-stifled glimpses of culture that inundate us with a reduction of the brain activity of consciousness through a hueristic process that tends to gloss over the bittersweet, ambiguous, and even personally shameful aspects of our selves that truly need the experience of god or a blast of the intellect and all of the attendant light that that shines on our own inner truth.

This experience, this trascendant experience of internal, mental synchrony; It's an unmistakable experience of all pervasive happiness and connectivity, real connectivity that binds all humankind into the global milieu past the purience of rushing, hurrying modern living. Until the spell is broken, and the secularity of modernity washes away in its cultural stormclouds can the true human culture of ingenius beauty finally break through.

We must all find the spirit that exists within everyone for ourselves and together at the same time. Find a way to help this spirit, this universal soul that we all share somehow, soar and fly with the falcons, and bring back to us our desperately kidnapped culture. And help to add our little bit into the slipstream, and hope against hope that we're doing the right thing. And know that if we're ever totally sure, then surely we've lost our way. It always seems to circle back around on itself.

In the general categories of reclassification

2009-05-10T07:17:00.001+01:00

Before I get started, I just have two words (actually three letters) about how Alex Rodriquez came back so quick from that surgery: HGH. It can't currently be detected, so the only way to get caught is if you're supplier gives you up. No piss test will pick it up.

Regardless, Manny, oh, Manny, I really hope you're telling the truth. And if you can't prove your innocence than just keep quiet. Don't say peep (while I'm doing business here).

And if this rumor about Ortiz being on the list of 104 is true. I will be truly heartbroken.

Again, regardless. I spent my Thursday this past Thursday meeting with the head of the Economics Dept. at U-Mass, and it was very productive. I'll be sitting in on 6-8 classes over the next two years, hopefully collecting research and data for my tentatively titled book:
Applied Superstructure Theory in Political Economics/ The case for a compherensive philosophy of economic pluralism as a transitionary economic structure hopefully helping to move farther in the direction of a cooperative political economy.

And got tix for the Bo-Sox tomorrow. Hope Beckett can get his groove back.
I'll say the same thing for myself, and all those who lost their grove somewhere along the way.

tantamount to laughter

2009-04-27T11:37:00.000+01:00

If magical thinking existed not as a psychosis but as a real thing, how would that work. I mean, how would you get it? Would it just be something you either had or didn't, or could you develop your magical thought abilities? By fixating on your own megalomania for example. I think that's how I got mine. That's right. Augusten Burroughs isn't the only one who can claim to have magical thought powers just because some ad exec he hated died.
I won't say that the Bush administration was my fault entirely, but I will shoulder a certain amount of responsibility for having been in such a deep denial about the connection between all this outward irresponsible destruction and my own internal irresponsibility and destructiveness, which is how all that nonsense got past the web of my magical thought. I also should accept my culpability in the Red Sox collapse in '03. You guys can stop blaming Pedro and Grady Little. It had more to do with universal forces showing me the deepness of the metaphor of baseball as life, my life specifically.
I'll try to do better for big B now that he's up in the White House. He may not need as much of my magical thinking as Dubya did. Lord knows he needs all the help he can get, and truthfully psychosis isn't really that disfunctional. At least, not anymore. It's practically an adaptive strategy for post-modern living.

Just a slight correction

2009-02-07T23:20:00.000+01:00

I had forgotten that when you save a blog entry and then post it, it gets posted as on the day you initially saved it, so those last two blog entries were from the date that will show up with this blog post. Whatever that is. Maybe February the 5th. No that's not right. Well, whatever. You'll see. And if you're that obsessive about when I post stuff, well, it cool. I promise never to try and get a restraining order against you no matter how many crazy letters you send me. Just don't threaten my characters. Otherwise, y're cool.
Okay, so in a rambling kind of mind, but I did have one more thing to...oh, I forget. Never mind.

The re-return

2008-12-13T23:17:00.000+01:00

So, trying to get back to the blogging thing. And not because I feel some sort of compulsion to exhibit my life, which I do, of course. That complusion is getting deeper and spreading farther afield. I'm facebooking now, and I just started twittering or tweeting or whatever the hell you call it. The point is I'm writing again. Right now, I'm absolutely murdering Mythic Structures, my novel, but I'll get into that over on access the process, one of my other blogs.
Now that I've been at this for awhile (admittedly all of my blogs have been in hibernation for quite some time), it occurs to me that it might've made more sense to make all my blogs one, and just have different sections for each of the overarching topics. One of these days I'll get around to reviving ye' olde' html skills, and doing a total redesign and get rid of the, not awful but just overused and so overseen, templates blogger offers up.
The point I was going for was that I'm back, baby, and better than ever. Well, I will be. I think.
I am going to start posting video and audio. All self-generated stuff though, no links to the outside world. That is one thing this blog will always be is intensely and almost exclusively self-referential cause I'm just that egomaniacal. I really am.
Okay, so, good to be back.

Papa Bear and RockNRolla

2008-11-14T16:35:00.000+01:00

I saw Bill O'Rielly on the Daily Show last night, and Jon Stewart made him look unintelligent. Well, really he made himself sound unintelligent by repeatedly calling Stewart names while Stewart was just laying the tracks right across. Both him and Colbert are really hitting on all cylinders. Colbert's interviews are devastatingly funny, ironic, and pitch perfect, even as both shows interview period is way too short. Stewart, at least, ought to get half hour for interviews. I can understand why they wouldn't want to stretch the main show. Bringing a half hour comedy show to an hour is a lot, but honestly just let stewart interview for another half. Maybe break up the interview with a bit 3/4 of the way through.

Really the best thing to do would be to combine it with The report and make the whole thing half hour longer, so they both get 15 extra minutes to interview. Maybe 10 for Colbert and 20 for Stewart. It must require an incredible amount of concentration for Colbert to due those interviews. The technique is amazingly executed. When that show first came out, I thought it was hilarious, but that it couldn't last. It didn't occur to me that Colbert might perfect his character after several years on the air. I missed the middle years, but I've come back to the shows streaming though comedy central's website. Bitingly funny. Really good stuff.

Anyway, I started this entry about a month ago and never came back and finished, so I don't really have much to say about RockNRolla except it was thin. The story was pretty weak. The characters were flat, and the color tones kinda' clashed at times, and the rest of the time they were just kinda' drab. Still somewhat entertaining though. And now that I think about it, it was one of those movies were you come out feeling like a badass. I remember leaving the film and walking down by the bar where the first scene of The noir movie in Mythic Structures happens, and I had that look in my eye like I had just figured out the secret meaning of life, and maybe, just maybe, I might let you in on it if you ask me reaallly nicely. That was how I was feeling afterwords.
So, I guess as far as a results oriented look at the film, it kicked ass.

critical opinion

2008-09-15T00:43:00.000+01:00

I went to see Burn After Reading the other day. I fully admit I went in wanting to love it and ready to defend it. I get so sick of the how often the Coen Bros. get dissed by the critics. I absolutely don't get it.
Now, I'll admit Burn is a mess. It's all over the place, but I liked that. I like the fact that there's no central protagonist. I also like the fact that you don't really like any of the characters too much. There is no one to root for in this film. When did it become manditory that we have to root for someone? Does film really have to be simply a vicarious experience where we are unchallenged because the protagonist is morally blameless? And does not having this experience mean the movie has to be serious?
These are questions that come out of a lot of Coen films. Now here's the rub. Everyone seems to think that because there's a heavy screwball element to Coen films (with really only two exceptions [blood simple and No Country For Old Men]) this means these films are shallow or lacking in substance. Even Country was often derided as an empty metaphor. I would say that is an amazingly simplistic and shallow interpretation of some very insightful and bitingly critical films.
Coen characters are not real characters. They're archetypes, many times quintessentially American archetypes, and the way these characters interact with each other and the real world holds an incredible amount of insight into the American experience. I won't go too far on this, but Burn has a lot of deep criticism about American's obssession with fitness as a means toward not health but looking good, the erosion of civil liberties and the government's increasing insistence on spying on the American people, and the list goes on. J.K. Simmons asked at the end of the film "What did we learn from all this? Well, not to do it again I guess. Whatever it was." I'm paraphrasing here. The line is right on target as we move closer to the presidential elections, and for many superficial reasons the choice of a pretty, inexperienced woman as a VP candidate who taps into Republican myths of womanhood seems to have pushed McCain into the lead. Really, did we not learn anything from the Bush presidency? Not to do it again, I guess. Whatever that was.

The MPAA and a lack of perspective

2008-08-28T23:12:00.000+01:00

I've been watching some pre-production code films, namely a great Greta Garbo 'biopic' of the Queen of Sweden, Queen Christina, and the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle, Babyface. Babyface was a central movie in the move by Will Hays to try and get more teeth into the production code, and the resulting process really took a lot of the nuance and complication out of a medium that was already running short on subltly. Ironcially, the discussion of Nietzschean philosophy that was forced cut from the film by censorship boards is actually itself a common misreading of Nietzsche's work, The Will to Power, completely missing the nuance of a very complicated philosophical tome.

Anyway, it occurred to me just now that this may be a huge part of the reason that reactionary politics is so fond of a manichean worldview of us vs. them, good vs. evil. It's embedded in the films we watch, especially commercial Westerns, War films, and Action/adventure stuff. Obviously, that's not uniformly true, and the recent Dark Night films at least partially explore a more complex psychology. It is true that mainstream films still greatly reflect the tenets of the code that a film's sympathies must never be with an antihero or a criminal. The resulting films were never allowed to explore the undercurrents of criminality or sexuality with any real depth without running afoul of the Hays Office.

I do believe that American sexuality has long been perverted by the pruriant standards of the code, and that the vastly huge pornography industry is a result of a failure to really have an open and honest dialogue through art about sex. That may be stretching things a little, but I also feel that films' cut and dried approach to morality gives people a skewed conception of the complications naturally inherent in human life. It's certainly a part of the problem. Couple that with a Television and internet based culture where attention spans are brief and context is rarely sought or provided, and you get the insanity of modern American politics.

It's really a shame, and the thing is, I believe the Production Code may be at the root of a lot of our trouble seeing and understanding complexity. I don't know that you have all those John Wayne movies if Wilder, Hawks, Lubitsch and the rest had to contend with such a regressive process of censorship. I guess I'm overreaching a little, but I do feel like the artistic history of film was warped in a very unhealthy way by the overt censorship of the Hays office, the precursor to the modern MPAA rating system.

'apropos of nothing'

2008-08-20T13:13:00.000+01:00

I really hate excessive or unnecessary narration in films. Or the kind of slapdash narration that Allen uses in Vicki Cristina Barcelona. As an easy way to cobble together a movie it works, but in the end it just superficially masks the fact that the movie is skattershot.

I had my car towed yesterday because I parked on the wrong side of the road during street cleaning hours, and I didn't notice until I was trying to leave for work at 4 am. Of course, the tow yard didn't open until seven at which point I would already be three hours late, and I will have to drop a sawbuck to get it out . I'm currently fuming about all of this.

It took me years of journalling before the process became complicated and a responsibility. It took barely six months for the same thing to happen with blogging.

How is it possible that the Rays and the Cubs are tied with the best records in baseball? That is both exciting and frustrating at the same time.

I really like the set design for Gene Kelly's character's apartment in An American in Paris, but I still have trouble with the excessively melodramaticness of the writing and acting in musicals. I wonder what Brecht/Weil stuff is like live? I'd really like to find out someday.

I don't know if I'll start blogging again. If I can get back this kind of feel without this kind of structure, I might just.

Perfect writing & perfect despair

2008-06-04T22:06:00.002+01:00

I've had two unique book reading experiences in the last week or so. Firstly, I've always heard or read about people's experience of reading a book that felt like it was 'written about them' or 'just for them' or whatever, and I've always thought: wow, that sounds cool. I've never had the experience myself until I read Haruki Murakami's first novel, Hear the Wind Sing. Actually, it's more along the lines of a novella, but I did. I felt like it was written just for me, as if he had me in his head when he wrote it. Obviously, I know that isn't the case, but still, it just gives you this mild electric shiver the whole time yr reading. It was a marvelously eerie feeling all in all, which has been a continuing theme of 'The summer of Murakami'.
Concurrently, I was reading his most recent novel, After Dark, and I was thinking the whole time, hey, it only seems mediocre in comparison to his other novels. It still had trademark Murakami wierdness, insight, and when the characters get to talking its way offkey and interesting, but it just wasn't all the way there. Like he was coasting through this one. This was how I felt right up until the 2nd to last paragragh in the book, when the themes from all of his books suddenly clicked in my head, and the book transformed into this exciting distillation of wierdness into a coherent metaphysics of the odd. If I hadn't've read so many of his other novels I don't think it would have happened like that, but I have, so it did. I've never had a book completely transform itself in the waning moments like that. It was highly awesome.
I also finished Norwegian Wood just two days ago, and it hit me hard. Suddenly I felt like I had been disattached from the universe and was just floating in some interliminal state whereby I couldn't actually interact or engage with the world around me for the entire day. I was just watching without being a part of anything. It was not the response I would've expected. It's a sad story for sure, but this was something different. I just felt like I was no longer in the game or even a part of the game. I'm failing miserably in my attempt to explain this feeling because it was a strange one, undoubtedly, but oh, well. I'm now into Kafka on the Shore and Pinball, 1973. Absolutely, utterly obsessed with Marukami.

Oh how I love to dance!

2008-06-01T18:05:00.000+01:00

Firstly, the word of the day over at dictionary.com is harridan, which means a worn out strumpet, a vixenish woman, or a hag. Apparently harridan is a pretty harsh term, and it really doesn't sound like one at all. It sounds more like someone who shops at Nordstorms, although there might be some overlap there. I bet you could totally get away with calling someone that and have it come off like a complement. 'I can't believe you do all yr shopping at Nordstorms. You are such a harridan!'
Okay, enough of that. I went to see Rilo Kiley last night, and it was fan-frickin'-tastic (it's funny that in my real life self I swear like a sailor, but I'm always reticent to do it on the internet), and apparently at Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel, which I have to say is a name that's growing on me, they don't know the meaning of the words measured pour. I ordered a Seven and ginger-ale, and I got this plastic cup full of whiskey with a small splash of ginger-ale on the top. I'm thinking to myself after Thao with The Get Down, Stay Down who had this really excellent kind of indie-rock, hawaiian slack key mix going on that I should get a drink from a different bartender because I really didn't want to get that drunk. So, I go to the bar on the other side of the concert hall, which has been really tastefully redesigned since ten years ago when it was The Strand and was a total pit, to order a drink and it's the same deal. I have no idea how they can stay in business selling drinks like that, but they've won my heart, also the show was phenomenal. Jenny Lewis is just totally bewitching and bitchin' all in the same breath, and the rest of the band's pretty durn good too.
Anyway, at some stage I'll get back into form with The Dancing Fool and talk about the show as a show, but I was just trying to tell the story about how I had this total eureka moment about ten minutes before Rilo Kiley came on about how identity is such a distributed property of the brain that it conflicts within itself and maybe that has a lot to do with the emotional response to things that seem to be outside of the dominant aspects of our identity. I'm pacing around in a corner furiously trying to work this all out to some satisfactory degree, and all I got to was a quickly scribbled note about the overlapping functions of reentrant mapping in the creation of consciousness before Rilo came out, which was actually okay cause I was super-amped up from the adrenaline rush of exciting ideas and got instantly into the music, but I still can't quite get a grasp on what the whole thing means. I don't think I'm smart enough.

Elastic interactive

2008-05-31T20:49:00.000+01:00

I had one of those connective moments this morning, when two disparate ideas coalesce. I'll try to elaborate on it and see if there's anything there. It was really just a flash, and I haven't worked through all the implications. I read a study some few years ago in which these researchers took fMRI's (brainscans) of people who considered themselves Republicans or Democrats while they were reading quotes from the opposing sides major candidate. I believe this was '00, so it would've been Bush and Gore. The scans showed that there was major activation in the limbic system, which is the emotional center of the brain. The basic conclusion was that we respond emotionally to the opposing side before even rationally deconstructing what they've said.
I know I have this experience when I read Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative on the Boston Globe's editorial page. When I see he's written something, I have this moment of slight venomous emotion before I've read the piece. I've emotionally started to salivate at the thought of his bullshit. Sometimes he does make good points, other times I'm all ready to write a letter to the editor myself. Of course, that never actually happens, but you get the idea.
That's not the point. A few months back I read this piece somewhere on the internet about music criticism or somesuch, and this guy was writing about how our personality shapes how we approach music. It's like what we identify with as our thing and what we identify as the other is the starting point for how we appreciate music.
It kind of hit me this morning that this is the same type of phenomenon, so that because we've identified some band as hip or as a sell-out or whatever is going to emotionally influence how we rationally break down the aesthetics of the sound. Obviously, postmodernism has long brought into question what rational really means, and neuroscience is showing us that the postmodern idea is really true. There exists no purely rational thought, and the emotional signals won't even necessarily show up in our consciousness as feelings or anything. They might just be electrical signals in the brain that warp the thinking process and keep us from truly apreciating a band or music or a film or whatever.
Now also there are limits to this. It's not that Bush and Gore are objectively both right, and the opposing sides just don't see what's the what. True also in the realms of art, but it's just good to realize that there is more going on underneath the thoughts of 'this shit sucks' or whatever than just a pure opinion. I guess that was all kind of obvious. Identity shapes our likes and dislikes, but the idea that it might also be behind denying or over enthusing I think is relevant. I was trying to get farther into that, but I'm just not feeling it.

The catch up, catch all post, or I think the feeling is returning to my head

2008-05-26T16:03:00.001+01:00

Sometimes sleepwalking is good. I don't say that lightly, as it seems to be a common afliction of the modern world. That said, the past month was one I just had to get through. I don't want to get into all that involved. Let's just say that it's done. I'm on the other side looking back across, and it's time to get back to work, writing, and resume all requisite mental processes.
First and foremost in my thinking and excitement had been Haruki Murakami. I read his novel Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World a while back, and was just absolutely bowled over. It was brilliance incarnate. I cannot be effusive enough with my praise for the bizarreness and originality of that piece of work, so when I got my casheesh from the gov't I splurged on a whole slew of his books. I even spent sixty bucks for used copies of his first two novels, which weren't published internationally but were published in English for in-house Japanese consumption. I had to scour the internet to find copies for less than four hundred dollars a pop. I'm can not wait to get these, as they aren't in my hot little hands just yet. I have read his third novel, The wild Sheep Chase, and it's sequel Dance, Dance, Dance in the past week, and they are absolutely absurd. His books are so disjointed and angular, his perspective such a hardboiled right angle, his phraseology so killingly odd (who thinks to compare an airplane to a beetle?). He's reminded me that grammar laws were meant to be broken if the effect is legit. He inhabits this strange world that lies just between naturalism and non-naturalism. There's so much in his work that is brutally and emotionally very real, and yet there's just all kinds of wierd things happening. It's just the greatest. I will read everything he's ever written by the end of the summer.

Oh, where did you go, Wong?

2008-05-03T20:18:00.000+01:00

It was my sound and serious intention to take a hiatus from blogging for at least 30 days for several reasons. Maybe I'll elaborate on them over at access the process, since that feels like the better forum, but in my nostalgic rereading of my own earlier posts here, I realized that I'd talked in depth about my love for Wong Kar-Wai and yet had not mentioned his most recent film, My Blueberry Nights. For one thing, it's always unpleasant to watch one of yr idols stumble and get jumbled up. Who wants to reflect on that? Still there were some redeemingly interesting features to Blueberry, so I'll try to focus on them.
It seems there comes a time in all great filmmaker's careers when they've taken their current style to the limit, and need to break free. For examples see the Coen's Ladykillers, Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic of Steve Zissou, maybe Tarantino's Kill Bill stuff, whatever. This generalization has it's limits, but there does always feel like there's a film that hits the wall. Blueberry might have been that film, but there are too many other factors (first english language film, Lawrence Block as a writing partner, an actual pre-established script) to really say that Wong hit his wall and now has to film a new direction.
The main critiques out there of the film are that Norah Jones was tepid and Jude Law is way too handsome to've pined so long over some girl he knew for a few days. I think that's bull. To me the problem was the connection/poetic collision wasn't established well at all in those early scenes between the two of them. The writing seemed lacking, and for this I blame Block just because I refuse to believe that Kar-Wai is in any way fallible. Those early scenes felt like they were much too hum-drum for any kind of long term pining to've been set into effect like that first scene from Days of Being Wild sets up. There's no poetic beauty, just chit-chat, and this really does sink the film as a whole.
That doesn't mean there wasn't some seriously good shiite as well. David Strathairn and Rachel Wiesz: see this movie just for the thirty or so minutes that they inhabit the film. It's intense and powerful and gives the glint of what this movie could have been, and Chan Marshall's momentary passing was just fab. Natalie Portman is also fun and wild, but for a card player like myself that stuff does not play. It just annoyed me and took me out of the proceedings. Again, here I blame Block for trying to inject a commercially exploitable element into Wong's usual dense atmospherics. It was too theatrical.
So, having said all that the use of musical jump-cuts is, as far as I know, totally revolutionary and never before tried. It doesn't quite work for this film, but I think that's more a result of the aforementioned problems than the idea itself. It could be used to sound (no pun intended) and powerful effect, but...it's certainly not clear to me just how. I do hope Wong will try again will try to bring that particular technique to bear in future films, as it's an alluring idea for a new way to use music in film.
I won't say much and certainly nothing specific about the ending, except to say that it felt tacked on and so not in the Kar-Wai vein, mostly because of my first comments moreso than I'm just by nature maudlin. I hope that was elliptical enough not to give anything away.

Neil Diamond blows the save

2008-04-27T14:37:00.001+01:00

Imagine, if you will, this scenario. It's the bottom of sixth inning and somehow the home team has cobbled together a close game with a pitcher on three days rest. Sickness and injury has ravaged the line up, and several triple A call-ups are in the game. The top of the order is coming around, and its time to get the crowd back into the game. Who do you turn to? If this is Red Sox nation, there's no question. It has to be...Neil frickin' Diamond (Warning: baseball rant now in progress).
So what happens? Pedroia pops out. Papi takes a walk, and then arguably the hottest hitter in baseball, the league leader as of that moment in RBI's and homers, stands in. How do we hype him up? Black Betty by Ram Jam. That is just sad, and what is the result? Manny hits into an innning ending double play, and the bats go silent. Timlin gives up another solo homer in the ninth. The Sox hot streak comes to an end, and as I write they've now lost four straight. Great work DJ.
On the serious tip, music is arguably one of the most important tools at the disposal of the home team. It gets the crowd into the game. It can get the players hyped, but here's the thing. Those guys play 162 games a year. Do you really think Manny Ramirez gets ramped up on the 8,236th hearing of Black Betty? I kind of doubt it. If anything, he should stand in to Mind Terrorist by Public Enemy. Admittedly, this isn't really a song. It's just weird scratches and noises with Flavor Flav shouting 'base for your face' for a minute, but I still think it's perfect. How about Kanye's Good Morning? That song's got some umph to it. It really gives you a lift, or if it's got to be classic rock, how about Immigrant Song?
I'm just spitballing here, and probably I've put way too much thought into this. It just frustrated me. I'm sitting there while the whole stadium dances and sings along to 'Sweet Caroline', and I was just embarassed and a little upset. Nobody even noticed Pedrioa pop out. They were just waiting for the song to come back with the chorus so they could sing along, 'So good, so good, so good'. I'm all for dancing and singing like idiots, but we all come to Fenway for a reason. What was it now? Oh right, baseball.
Last word on the subject: The music should complement and bolster the players, mess with the opposing pitcher, and rally the team, not pander to the drunken mob. Let's work on this people.

Comforting?

2008-04-19T23:58:00.001+01:00

I'm gonna expand on a comment I made over at the lovely and talented Golfwidow's blog because I don't think I really got to what I was trying to say in the short space of a comment mostly because I was fumbling around with the point and had to think about it for awhile before it became clear to me where I was going with what I said. She asked if her readers considered curry a comfort food.
To me there's a difference between food I crave and food that give me comfort. I crave lots of food. I crave smoked salmon every time I go to the grocery store, and I crave Inari all the time. I want ice cream every time I go to my parents house, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night craving fried okra. I get a lot of cravings, but there indulgence rarely comforts me. Sometimes I feel worse. Sometimes I just feel full, but for me comfort is a much more elusive proposition.
Today, for example, I lost a good chunk of money playing cards, and as a result I was craving a cigarette something fierce. I was comforted by the fact that I didn't have one. It's rarely such a direct one to one exchange, but I think that kind of illustrates the point I'm trying to make rather aptly.
The comforting aspect of food, for me, is heavily situational depending as much on circumstances and mood as on the content of the food to be consumed. I'm comforted when I cook a nice meal for friends or family, and we communally enjoy that food. I'm comforted when I eat things that I know I should over and against the ones I crave that I know I shouldn't have or have too much of. I'm comforted by a large heaping bowl of pasta on a rainy night with candles and Thelonious Monk and maybe a nice glass of Chianti. The world feels right in those times, and for a brief moment I'll be comforted.

It's not just me

2008-04-19T18:31:00.000+01:00

"This threefold characterization of the nature of the world and all it contains-sorrowful, transient, and soulless- is frequently repeated in Buddhist literature, and without fully grasping its truth no being has any chance of salvation."-Theodore de Bary (Ed.); The Buddhist Tradition in India, China, and Japan

It's always comforting in my times of Existential crisis to know that there's a whole religion based on what I'm feeling. I think that's why I've always felt right at home with Buddhist thought. Not only does the philosophy of the big B teach inclusion, moderation, and meditiation, but also the realization of sorrow. It's the first step towards enlightenment. I love it. I'm like three steps away from enlightenment.

All kidding aside, I think that this is a crucial component of Buddhist thought that seems to be left out in the New age spirituality of our Western world that takes a lot of its cues from Eastern thought and especially Buddhism. Meditation and yoga are all the rage, and there are solid health reasons for that, if also hipness and image reasons that leave a bad taste.

There's just something about the whole New Age thing, to be ridiculously vague and general about it, that gives me shivers. It feels wrong and off and like a false positive, but I love the real deal. Old school Buddhist writings or even just new school non-western stuff feels more honest. I could never put my finger on what was missing until the other day when I read that line. It really seems like a lot of new age stuff dilutes out this important element of the philosophy for a feel-good good time. Once again, I'm working on vibes here, so take that for what it's worth.

The Strangeness we dare not speak of

2008-04-17T02:00:00.001+01:00

It's all well and good to play up yr own eccentricities as delightful, exciting excursions from the world of normal. I am not by any extent of the imagination trying to encourage or even define what the world of normal might be, but that does not negate the fact that there are extremes from which we clearly know we'd like to get a return ticket.
I used to have these two really good quotes from Zappa and HST about what it meant to be a freak tacked up over my desk. Zappa said something to the effect that being a freak meant you were being an individual, and Hunter voiced a variation on the catch-22 theme, in that being a freak in America meant you were not in all actuality a total lunatic.
While that may be an amusing yet profoundly true sentiment from America's favorite speed freak, it does not dilute the fact that crazy is not always fun, which brings me to my current insomniac state where I am forced to get out of bed and come write this nonsense as a way to appease the never ending string of sentences that are in a no holds barred street race through my brain. I don't think this will be successful, but it felt more productive than just tossing and turning.
I'm tired. I want to sleep for just six straight hours without the assistance of alcohol. I would like just a tiny slice of normal pie for breakfast tomorrow and not my normal slice of brain wierdness. I would like to not find that when I wake up tomorrow the very existence of my bed or my glasses or anything makes me frustrated and callow. I would like to feel satisfied that this idea that has been knocking around my head for the past week is not total manic planning, and that I might just be capable of getting it together. I would like all those things, and yet I know I will get none of them.
I don't want to leave off on such a blue note or even so pedantically, but somehow I feel insufferably incompetent at writing just now and the lack of confidence is dulling my mind. Let me just say that I love the Big Apple Circus, you know the one without the animals. It's awesome.

Do people see themselves?

2008-04-12T18:37:00.001+01:00

I was watching the documentary The King of Kong the other day, and it inspired me to do some soul searching. That is probably not the most obvious response to a documentary about video games, but who wants to be obvious anyway?
The irrelevantly obvious question for most of us is, who would possibly put their life basically on hold to play early 80ies video games competitively? There's no money involved; it's just for the thrill of the kill screen: a screen where, once you've gone through all the levels a certain insane number of times, you just inexplicably die. At one point, there's an arcade full of people watching as Steve Weibe makes it to this screen in Donkey Kong, and...wait for it, wait for it...little mario spins around and falls off the screen. That's it.
Okay, so huge swaths of American and world culture love video games and play them obsessively. I think this is nuts, but I'm sure there are those who would consider it nuts to have spent roughly 27% of a life in reading books. I guess that makes us even.
Regardless, I was not inspired to reconsider my obssessive book reading. That was not what I gleaned from this oddly compelling documentary. It was the behavior of Billy Mitchell, the guy who had held the best Donkey Kong score for some twenty years. The whole movie he's kind of lurking around doing shady stuff. He won't ever sit down and play Weibe head to head but just sort of insinuates that he thinks Weibe is somehow a cheat.
Here's my question. Does this guy realize what an jerk-off he's being? I mean, does he know and not care or does he know and still can't stop himself or does he legitimately think he's a good and still cool guy with his awful blow-dried 80ies haircut and cheap theatrics?
I've wondered this often, like whenever I used see Dick Cheney being interviewed. Does he realize he's the manifestation of evil, or does he just think he's doing what's best for the American people? Actually those two things aren't by necessity mutually exclusive without taking a rather more than common long view, so we'll leave off on that.
Billy Mitchell made me wonder about myself. I don't think people dislike me, or that they think I'm a dick. I think they realize I'm moody and introspective and sometimes just want to be left the hell alone, but I wonder now. If this guy, who is so obviously a jerk, could maybe even think he was just too cool for school, what about myself?

Brain wierdness and an NPR factoid

2008-04-10T18:31:00.000+01:00

First, an NPR factoid: The torch relay was first instituted by the Nazi's for the 1936 Olympic games. Take from that what you will.

And now to the brain wierdness: My precious sleep needs have been severely disrupted for the past two days by brain wierdness. Two days ago, as I was in that floating intrastate between sleep and the attempts to quell the thoughts of no great importance that attend (for me) the curled up in bed safely heading towards dreamland, a bit of brain wierdness jarred me out of the floatingness of the in between because it was just so odd it caught my attention and brought me back into all the way conscious state. My brain, as I take no responsibility for those semi-conscious ramblings, was in the midst of a conversation between two sled dogs on the Iditarod who were alternating between cattily gossiping about what a bitch the lead dog was, the necessity of a multicolored scarf in any good dogsled ensemble, and the relative merits of whipping.

That was all kind of wierd and enough to shake me back into awakeness and subsequently cut into the few hours I was hoping to get that night, but last night's brain wierdness far outwierded the sleddog convo. Last night, I was performing and narrating a neurosurgical operation on myself to remove a tumor from my brain. I was jarred into awakeness at the point when I had my skull cracked open and in an imaginative image in my head a blood red pulsating brain with a bright yellow tumor was about to be removed. My brain narration was telling me that, "This tumor is just another example of how Sam the Sham can infect with his infectious wit, so be careful in the future."

Needles to say this shook me back into full wakefulness, and yet another precious hour of sleep was lost to brain wierdness.

You can quote it

2008-04-05T21:26:00.000+01:00

I just thought I'd share a few...because I don't feel like saying anything myself.

"There are two kinds of poets: the good poets, who at a certain point destroy their bad poems and go off to run guns in Africa, and the bad poets, who publish theirs and keep writing more until they die."-Umberto Eco; The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana

I finished this book a few weeks ago, and it goes out with a whimper, which was actually in a nice counterpoint to Ian McEwan's Saturday, which went out with a bang. I'm also glad to find that a Semiotics professor is happy to go wild in the fields of commafication.

a partial quote: "as well as the more sinister organizations like Sakurakai (the Cherry Blossom Society)"-Niall Ferguson; The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the West.

Just a piece that stuck out from an other wise low key chapter on the militarization of Japanese society prior to WWII. I couldn't get over the fact that The Cherry Blossom Society was one of the more sinister organizations.

Politicians, sigh

2008-04-04T18:31:00.000+01:00

If I hear Ted Kennedy say Blood and Treasure one more time, I will seek him out and smack him in the head. How is it helping anything being trite about all the death and billions of dollars this war has cost? Answer: It is not. Please, stop now.

When John Kerry says there's no daylight between John McCain and George Bush, it reminds me both how much I absolutely hate political shorthand and that John Kerry is still not cool.

And the winner of today's most frickin' sleezeballish politico: the bay state's own Gov. Deval Patrick. It turns out that while a signature piece of legislation that Patrick backed was going down in legislative flames, our man Deval was in NYC finalizing a book deal that will not only have him working on this book while still governor (on nights and weekends he claims) but also going on an extensive book tour during his last year in office. His spokepeople have claimed that it won't interfere. All of this is bad enough in and of itself, but they had some excerpts from his proposal for the deal in the B.town Globe today. It was awful; the type of cheap self help gabage that makes you laugh, and I'd be laughing if this man was not actually a Gov'ner. The title: A Reason to Believe: Lessons in Leadership and Life. That's just sad. It really is.

On a personal note, the convergance of sickness and busyness equals busickness. There is nothing like basting yr cold in the juices of sleep deprivation.