Snow and stuff

So i got a little netbook. I am excited. It is a very gracious gift. I must admit though, it is quite difficult to type. You must adjust. 98% the traditional size is a bit smaller than the 2% would imply.

I do not know what to write about. I would say something about Black Swan, a movie that is either brilliant or clumsy and cliché. I have yet to decide. Or I might write about how it seems that there are three things about which the world seems to rotate. At least human life. I might write about how I now have a legitimate reading list that should keep me occupied. I have a schedule at least. I might write how I feel lost.

And then there was blogging

So it's been a while since Glasshouse and I have done one of these things, but better late or repeated than never again. I am much to blame. I am shit on keeping up with stuff and turning on my computer.

So he has sent me Jame Blake's "CMYK." Here, I'll but a link for you to listen to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQoQirZwxE4

Yes, I didn't know it either, but USA Tennis player James Blake was also interested in the London underground dubstep scene. Crazy right? We all have multiple interests though, so I give him kudos for trying to pursue his.

No. I'm kidding, this is some kid from England, as all the good ones should be who once studied at University the kind of disciplines that US doesn't put value in anymore. This guy, then takes his music knowledge and affinity for dubstep and churns out this really pop song with inspiration from dubstep.

These kind of songs are just difficult to write about. Is it dance music. No not really. It is more an exploration of where the sounds will take you. DJing without being a DJ that spins for the kids to dance nor for the art itself. They just spin and mix. And it's always kids in the basement.

So to the song. CMYK. Let's start there. What the fuck is that? Silly initials. It seems to have little to do with the refrain, "Look, I found her, red coat." Right? Well not quite. CMYK is a colour printing scheme that is extremely common. It operates on principles that the human eye cannot perceive the small dots that create a picture and how these dots of the cyan, magenta, yellow and key lay on one another. This produces a solid picture in different colours that the eye can perceive.

Okay, so turn to the song. Just like the title, the refrain, Look I found her red coat. Again and again this refrain. It echos like little dots, punctuating the beat itself. What is dictating the movement of the song, where is the message. It is dubstep electronic music. It doesn't have some kind of cohesive story to tell it is just this refrain this message over and over again being driven and driving again and again and again. Red coat, red coat, look, look, i found her, i found her, red coat, red coat.

This is precisely how the song operates. Just like the subtractive method that constitutes the colour scheme mentioned in the title of the song, the words drive the message. The color, red, look, look, as the listener of the song you must look and see the layers that form the musician complexity that the song creates. It is a layer. Not of just red. Red is just the sound you hear. Notice, red is not even in the CMYK color scheme. But it is red you hear. You hear it because it is part of the entire musical structure. It is being created and perceived by the listener by the dots, the layers and pulse of the music. We hear the sound "red" look. You found the red coat, but you did not see the entire structure which created the song. It is the dots that create the song. It is the sound waves of layers and layers that give content to the music and the message. There is not a message without the beats that are dubstep. The form creates the message.

Even when we move to the beat itself it echos the sounds of a printer. Tick tick tick tick tick tick....just likes the printing press.

So James Blake our brilliant brit is using a visual metaphor to create an aural message that reflects on both the aural and the visual. Wow. This kiddie is a smart one.

Or this is complete bullshit. It is perhaps then that he is not giving us a message at all. That he is merely mashing up some beats and tossing in some vocals. It sounds good. It is a great song.

I have to say though, there is definitely something behind this song. Why the title? Why the color reference? Why the reference to the visual? Is it some reference to Marry Poppins in her red coat and blue scarf? Is that who we are to find? Is this a call to Marry Poppins to give James a little more sugar with his medicine? I don't know and James does not need any more sugar given the history of the English dental profession (kidding, I know it is getting better. Slightly. All the MPs have great teeth. Okay, now I am lying).

Who knows? Who uses art for messages anyway. That would be silly.

Encounter with the Real

Wikileaks.

A point that is often discussed in psychoanalysis coming out of Freud and his notion of consciousness as a protective shell that protects the self from reality and later taken up by Lacan and then his bastard ideological son, Zizek, is that the real, reality is too powerful, too strong to be encountered in it's true form. We must then create fictions around ourselves in order to survive. Zizek then takes this idea a little further from it's Freudian and Lacanian interpreted origins and writies that it is the virtual, the fictions, that have become the read. That we cannot even encounter our own illusions for they have become the real. We continue to wrap ourselves in illusions that we cannot see. Thus, he often says, he looks for the reality in the virtual. That the virtual shows reality.

Herein lies Wikileaks. Wikileaks, that strange and hated website created by the even stranger and even more hated Julian Assange. Wikileaks, legally or not, though probably not, began to leaks documents, private and confidental documents to the press regarding first some atrocities and friendly fire incidents in the middle east and much more recently private cable messages from the US to it's embassies. What these documents released include:
-Sarkozy is a slightly neurotic, image obsessed man with an entourage and tendencies to autocracy
-Saudi Arabia funds terror and it a major destabilizing force in the middle east
-The US and Canada have a strained friendship
-Fears about China.
-Direction to state department official to gather low level information of other diplomats.

Yikes. This news is both revelatory and shocking.

No, no it isn't.

For anyone who has ever read a newspaper and followed the course of events in these countries or read a spy novel, this news is by any means very du jour. Saudi Arabia is a dangerous nation that funds extremist with one hand while shunning it publicly. It is a country that is held together with religious beliefs despite a huge disparity in income. Canada and the US have many dividing points. China holds most of the US debt. Sarkozy, is well, Sarkozy. Diplomats have always spied on each other. That is the name of the game.

Thus what we have is another encounter with the real. The most shocking thing about the releases is that we know the truth. Everyone knew the truth, but no one "knew" the truth. The shallow surface of politics upon which the news channels floated and diplomancy worked has been revealed to the world. There are games which we thought occured that have been confirmed to us all.

At last, we have encountered the real. The under belly has been shown to us.

Or has it?

Funny, that this encounter with the real was brought to us through virtual means. It took virtual reality to leak this message to the public to expose the real. Then the new programs got a hold of it and started to investigate and show us more. But what did they show us? Words and documents that have never appeared in print, only as hacked bits of bytes from sources who we do not know. Where is the virtual now? Baudrillard once wrote about the speed of technology when he said that the virtual would outpace the events themselves, that the news would arrive before the events even occurred. Is that what we have here? We have been shown the truth, but is it really the truth? Have we been shown anything, or is this yet another virtual reality within a fiction within a fiction, a Borgesian maze with many rabbit holes with no exits.

Borges

So initially I had a grand idea about writing about myths. Myths are interesting. Why we return to them? Why do they have meaning in an age when the truth value of the truths of myths has been reassigned to science (for the most part)? Taking some ideological and argument leaps and liberties, we can say that truth is a function of society, of the relationships within it. Pure and unadulterated referentiality is impossible. This is a dull argument and one that we just need to mention if only to say we acknolwedge it.

Why then do we ask questions about myths? What do they mean to us today? Have they be reassigned a new truth (well of course)? Or do we refer to them if only to show how we once were? Is it a means to show progress or regression? Do myths have to be historically progressive or can they simply show the contingency of history? Is myth a myth if only because of its literariness, its disguising the truth while trying to say it (this is a nod to the russian formalists)? I do not know the answer. All I do know is that mythology is popular and I would assume will always remain popular and I wonder why? Why do we need myths? What value do they have? Value perhaps not as truth value but value within the whole. Why do we need them?

All of this was just to say I think Borges is one of the most fascinating characters of all time. When one follows his works, one finds not only breathtaking stories that weave in and out of time and narration--but a richness of stories and cannons that involve Kabbalah, Fascism, Nietzsche, Idealism, the Infinite, and the whole of the western cannon. He offers many paths. I think teasing each one out would be a real exercise and not to mention just plain fun.

Oh well. That's I've got.

How about wikileaks. Wow.

Ou est la Gauche?/ Where is the Left?

In the course of working for a French company, being surrounded by French, and having one of my best friends being French, not to mention a profound interest in politics and recent French philosophy, I have taken an interest in the French political scene. What I have seen of late is disturbing.

Sarkozy, l’americaine, has taken serious strides to turn France into America—if only a romanticized version of it. With reforms to retirement and efforts at autereity in the form of reducing social programs and opening the doors of the inclusive “member’s only” club that are the Grande Ecoles, our French president is knocking at the doors of American equality and individualism. Or is this a fair title for what we are seeing? A quota system for entry into the Ecoles does not change the nature and image of the Ecoles at a grand level. Rather, the institution itself remains unchanged. It is still a private club that not only judges the intelligence of it’s applicants (students, who spend two years cramming all subjects in the classes preparatoires) but also their understanding of the culture (upper echelon of French society from the finest families from the finest lycees). The cloistered structure of French society still remains, even as Sarkozy attempts to erode some of the tenents of modern French society, such as the shortened work week, protection of labour, the fonctionaires, and the welfare state.

So the question is where is the left? These meager gains and the now romanticized French way, is being attacked by the right. A new terror in the guise of a necessary austerity in the face of the collapse of capitalism and it’s revival by the government. Where is the revolutionary fervor that gaves these liberties (positive) to the French people? Was it not in the wake of the revolution in May and June of 1968 that the government granted such concessions? Where is the return of the left to save these institutions?

One might immediately say, “But of course, the students are in the streets, they are protesting. The workers have awakened and they blocked the petrol, crippling France and spitting in the face of Sarkozy.” But yet the “reform” passed. The students did march in the street. The schools shut down. The police were called in to disperse the people. The unions, who threw their imperial might behind the strike (with all 10% of the unionized work force in France) and lost. The students, lost.

But what were they fighting for? Notice how earlier I mentioned that the institutions of France were under attack. Odd how the romantic notion of France as the keepers of a particular way of life, of a welfare state, of limited work hours, of wine and cheese and long dinners, relies on institutions. Instititions keep the identity of the nation safe. A country known to be the most liberal, the bastion of the French Revolution, of Jean Paul Sartre and the rest of the old Marxists, all of them rely on the insititon for protection. Not so very left.

So what does this say? Is there an avenue for the voices to speak. Insititions structure the discourse of that era. What one can say, as the left, is only in light of what the reasonable leftist discourse can be. In France the reasonable (within the reason of the left) reaction is to protest. To strike. The gesture was completed. The reasonable response occurred. Yet, it failed. Or was it always to fail?

Let us turn back to 1968. The grand revolution when poetry ruled the streets was acclaimed as the great failure. The unions showed themselves weak and allied with de Gaulle’s government against the workers and students. The Marxist dream was dead. The people did get concession from the government, but an ideology was dead. In the wake of this you have a birth of great thinkers, Foucault, Derrida, Ranciere, Iraguray to name a few, and a new discourse is born. This new discourse would be one that is always traumatized by the failures of it’s intellectual forbearers. The questions of “who are we now?” “the democracy to come” “the inoperative community” were asked in the wake of the failure of 1968 and forever indebted to it.

Now as we move to the current events, we see that the question of “where is the left” is more complicated. The left as we thought of it is buried in the past. It is structured by the discourse of the right which allows it to protest and march in the streets in an effort to exercise the demons of its past an exercise that shows the futility of such actions. It is institutionalized.

The left is dead.

The question now is what form can the discourse take place? A discourse that is not traumatized by the events of 1968 and poisoned by the stagnate thinking of the intellectual children of that failure. Or, should the discourse arise with the knowledge of it’s own traumatized being? Or should it arise knowing that the entire institution owes itself to a particular understanding of itself? It seems as though politics and the current political discourse is aligning itself into a much more rightist structure (whatever value we can now place in the term “right” is questionable, perhaps the prevalent discourse or order of things). From the recent win of the conservatives and the government of David Cameron (and their strange bedfellow, the liberal democrat Nick Clegg) to the Tea Party movement in the United States, it seems that something is occurring.

It is here that we must begin. Who are we? What is the discipline of the age and the order of discourse? Or is this even the right question? Are these tired realignments of political alliances merely a product of the sedimentation of such a search for origins and the creation of identities? Is there a deeper question that underlies this entire argument especially when questioning the political being of both an individual and the Political itself? Must we fall into an essentialist structure that seeks to universalize? What would it mean to seize being? These are the questions we must ask of ourselves.

updates

keeping a blog is like watering a plant. you don't show it enough love and attention, it will wither and die.

fortunately the internet is closer to bamboo in that it never really dies and when you give it a little bit of water, it will grow anew.

perhaps it is kudzu.

Andre Baurer

Andre, you are an old "leader." You have been in government your entire adult life. You took advantage multiple times of the power. You have shown that you cannot make good decisions.

How then, can you implore the voters to vote for a new leader? All of the candidates are politicians. Old leaders.

Since when did governors fight? I would prefer my governors not to be fighters. Who are we fighting? Government? That sounds a little counter productive. I would imagine that governors have more to worry about than just fighting people and policy.

Whatever.

Bullshit Statistics

If a pole is within the margin of error, then it is inconclusive.

Catholic, French, Mystic, Philosopher

Lemme post this here so I remember it.

"Nothing is so beautiful and wonderful, nothing is so continually fresh
and surprising, so full of sweet and perpetual ecstasy, as the good. No
desert is so dreary, monotonous, and boring as evil. This is the truth about authentic good and evil. With fictional good and evil it is the other way around. Fictional good is boring and flat, while fictional evil is varied and intriguing, attractive, profound, and full of charm" -Simone Weil

Spintastic

I woke up this morning and turned on the news. The top story was about SEC officials getting caught for watching a lot of porn while at the office. I don't know how many people were watching porn and what kind of porn it was or any of those details, but what the newsman said after reporting that story made me uneasy.

"Maybe if these officials weren't watching pornography they would have caught the economic meltdown."

What? Really? Is that how it works. I realise the SEC is a government watchdog, whatever the fuck that really means, and the media is supposed to keep the public informed, but is that the story you want to sell me? Goldman Sachs is being charged with fraud by the United States of America. Goldman Sachs defrauded the American people. They also turned in record profits. Our financial regulations as kaput. The entire system allows for people to skim money off the top without adding any real value to the markets, so much so that we fell into recession and won't recover for a while. Hooray for 1% industrial growth (ie recovery, I know, John, steady state economics...).

I still think it is insane. We report on big bad (lawyers and economists), over paid (doubt it) government officials who watch porn at work (I think that it is inappropriate, I mean they should be working at work) and blame them for the failure of the economy. Silly. Ludicrous. Ah, but perhaps now we have a single point to blame. It was not a stream of fuck ups. No, no, it was not derivatives and deregulation and speculation on the housing market and giving out huge loans for million dollar houses to people who made less than 40K a year and some specious business practices. Nope. It was SEC government workers who could have prevented the collapse, who could have saved us from the housing bubble if they were not watching porn.

I am so glad we solved this one.

BlogMashUpWithGlasshouse

So here we go again . The great blog off creative writing thinking poeticizing mash up that we do now. Great fun I must add. My distinguished colleague from across the way, whatever way that is, and unimpeded by volcanic ash, has sent me “Always Already Gone” by The Magnetic Field. Thank goodness, a band who names themselves something from another artist’s (Andre Breton) creations. How original right? I guess they are a group of individual talents in the Eliot sense. That crock.

Now the hard part—I have to figure out the song. But do I? Does it allow itself to such an easy interpretation? It would seem upon a cursory reading, to be pretty straight forward. It has a very simple structure. Three part structure with a single line chorus, “always already gone.” In the first stanza it is all a series of “I” statements, in the second, “You” statements and in the final stanza, as the relationship was deemed to be doomed at the start and this final realization of this fate, the I’s and You’s are mixed. Oddly too, the vocals are layered…so is there even a unified voice in this song? There seems to be a Hegelian synthesis. I know my amigo baited me with this song. “Always already is one of Kant’s favourite phrases in the whole wide world. Heidegger picked up the use of this phrase and the bastard pupil, Jackie Derrida used it extensively. It would be easy to turn to these kind of theoretical guys, masturbate with their themes and see what kind of progeny I get when I mix them with the sweet female vocals, stringed instruments and the narration of a failed relationship.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell the story I want to tell. It would seem that there is some female narrator telling a former lover who left them, that the lover was always already gone, the relationship was doomed to failure. The lover was not happy, they wanted freedom and entering the relationship resulting in only the taking of freedom from the narrator. The lover, like a bird had to fly away (Yes, Mr Ronnie Van, she remembered you tomorrow).

The fun part is the way this song moves through the realization of this relationship. First denial (crying in the dark) “It seems you were always/ Always Already Gone” to realization , “You're free to be always/ Always Already Gone” to acceptance, “Because you were always/ Always Already Gone.” So the narrator is simply suffering from a trauma. This song then becomes her testimony to the events that unfolded in her life. As such we have to read what was left unspoken. She is always left with a story to tell…but is her story is done, why does she continue to sing the song.

Now Always Already. This is why these ingenious folk use this phrase. Kant, Heidegger and Derrida all use “always already” as a technical term to define those actions that must be ongoing for the system to operate. We are always already in the world. Meaning—we are never born into a world that we are not in. We can’t abstract our self completely from the world. We’re stuck. Okay, if we apply that to this song, what do we get? Something really depressing. Every relationship, every story worth tell, the condition of possibility of every story is the always already that we can never consume subsume the other. The stories we are left to tell are condition by the possibility that at the outset they are set to fail. Yikes, right? Well no, not really. Of course this has to be.
We all lose our freedom when we embark on a path. We have to make a choice. This choice can be entering into a relationship (and people will argue me if that is actually a choice or something much like a revelation which one has no real choice about—but if it were a religious experience how could we put it into words. Revelation doesn’t have a language. When it is put into words it is subjugated to the logos, it is gathered into philosophy. Am I doing my philosopher bullshit again? Okay, I’ll stop. Point stands. I hope the Williams sisters don’t come after me). We have to decide. Can we ever make a decision? More interesting, are all decisions failures. We choose a path but we get stuck on then, we get mired in them, we forget we even chose a path. Perhaps this is what The Magnetic Fields actually see. Always already gone. We enter into something, we make a choice, and it is a failure—we as finite being had to fail. No matter how hard one tries to keep something, to hold onto a decision, someone, something, we are always thrown back to the origin. From whence the authority to make a choice? Every choice throws us back. We have this ultimate freedom. We cede it when we make a decision, but we exercise it when we cede it in the decision making. No matter how hard we try to hold on to something we will fail. The decision has always already been made, it was doomed to failure always already. So why do we fetishize failure as Adorno says? So we can write songs, duh!

The story is what matters. At the beginning the story was already over. It had an end. It had to. But the end is the beginning. Or rather the end was in the beginning. A good ole fashioned and cliché unity of opposites. Heraclitus, warming his ass by the fire would be proud.

Which brings me to a fun point. This is a song is about death. Sorry folks, that’s just the way it is. What ends all relationships? Death of course. This song could be about a lover who died. He was taken by death. That certainly was always already decided. We can’t hold onto a relationship much less life. Ah, but as with every story, death is the ultimate deadline. We have to write in the face of it. Death takes all of our freedom. As we approach our death, as time marches along, we lose our freedom. We are forced into making decisions, we have to make choices on how to live, and in so doing we lose choices, we turn our backs on them, our options become more and more limited, until we have no decisions left—death.

The story is done. But is it? Did we end at the same place we started? Even if the end was foreseen. That shit hits the fan. Things end, we all die—this entire song is a song about conflict. All poetry all worthy music is a combat against this. The song continues even in the failure the destruction that death and failure leave behind. We defeated. We repeat always already gone, but haha, you are not. We have trapped you and held us close to us and in our memory through this song. The song has trapped you in the repetition. You were always already gone, and you are—but within the song. So within this finite song, the freedom you so desired is allowed, but you are trapped within the song. She could have dreamed you, but she didn’t. She has the story to tell.

Of course I might be full of shit (I am).

This is actually a song about our parents.


Here's the song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4HxeiuZsxA

My one funny joke

My friend, German speaker, got a call from a German friend who invited him to eat lunch at a cafeteria. My friend was planning on going to a local restaurant with some other colleagues before he received this call. Here is the story that follows:

Me: "So you traded Harcombe for Ancheaux's"
Ringo: "Yeah, I mean he's a big German guy, so I didn't know what to say."
Me: "Easy--Nein!"

Fundamentals of E

Yes, I should be studying for that exam. I did already. Well kind of. If I don't know it now, it is a futile pursuit to learn it before tomorrow morning. Speaking of futile pursuits--no, we'll see.

Been a lazy week. I don't mind it. Odd day monday. Super tense day tuesday (but it was needed--you have to know how to make an argument in a graduate level seminar on Heidegger...seesh). Overall, very good week. I even found some Rilke (side by side, the only way to read translations).

Okay, I should cut off the Neutral Milk Hotel now. Too much of that, sir. Oh well.

Early morning.

Ghosts of the Past

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hvtXuO5GzU

Only recorded footage of Anne Frank.

Wannsee Conference

Let me just start by saying that the phrase, "Banality of Evil," the Thracian maid's well wrought phrase is over used and devoid of the power it once had. It also seems to be doing a lot of theoretical work for people. For Hannah, the phrase was rooted in a fundamental misalignment of the Kantian moral compass. There was no Kantian in Nazi Germany. Or, and perhaps more frightening, they were all Kantians and what was normal was abnormal everywhere else.

All that is said only to say this--I saw the banality of evil tonight.

I went to a screening of The Wannsee Conference. We all know that they decided on the course of action, or the final solution, to the Jewish Question/ Problem. The film watched was a TV documentary called Wanseekonferenz . It was filmed in the 1980s and is only 85 minutes long--the same about of time it required to seal the fate of millions of Jews.

Well in my university we watched the film. Everyone was pretty attentive it seemed. But afterwards, instead of silence, after watching this banal movie in which the characters damned millions of people, who sought to exterminate a race not only from the face of this earth but from our memory as well--who tortured and gassed and shot women and children along with the men, with smug gloating and murderous calm. With managerial and bureaucratic efficiency, these people dispatched--murdered millions. Millions. I cannot repeat this number enough. I cannot even understand what a million really is. Millions of people. People. With this calm and "another day at the office" air.

Then the entire audience got up and got pizza and coke. After watching a film in which a horror unfolded, like which the world has never seen and hopefully will never see again, they got up and got food and drink. Behind the boring veneer of the movie, bubbled the image of emaciated people in concentration camps, of partially decomposing bodies, of experimentation--yes those were images not shown, but they were underneath the technological dispatch of depicted in the film. And yet they had no problem getting food. Just like the persons at that conference, they were able to deal with the "problem" have a cognac, smoke a cigarette and go about, business as usual.

Then some people go on to ask questions about the bias of the film--what that the nazis were not evil?

I think people missed it. The film was boring. But the climax was a decision on exterminating, annihilating an entire race and how they planned to do it. The next question was who got the Zyklon-B and who got the faulty CO trucks.

And yet we still think that we can just toss around food and drink and critique. I feel like we are so jaded and divorced from the real impact of these kinds of films, of our education and perhaps our humanity.

I'll end with a line from Plato which I have used previously, but I think it is important. Why do we look?

“Well, I said, there is a story, that is Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from Piræus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight” Plato Republic 440a book 4

Stuff

"I wish someone had never given you Derrida because you're so damn smart."

A bit of a backhanded complement, but I'll take it. The funny thing is that this quote calls several issues into question. How did I find Derrida? I fell into him. I received a syllabus, I read it, I bought the book. I read the book, Acts of Literature, and knew exactly what it was I wanted to do. I found all the professors who would teach me Derrida. I write papers, use him as my go-to source and theoretical backing. I know that he can be very formulaic and problematic, that his paradoxes are infuriating, that he has a theory of language that the Anglo tradition sees as bad correspondence theory. I know this. I struggle with it as well. But, he is part of the reason I am doing what it is I am doing today. Reading his work opened up the door to the intersections of philosophy and literature which I had always found interesting.

But the other question is this--how many weird coincidences and people enter our lives and cross paths with us that we do not even realise? This dawned on me recently after meeting someone whose live I have crossed several times without even knowing it. Perhaps Levinas is correct; there really is a comedy to existing. Me meeting someone, a book at a book sale--and in that moment you cross another's path. I know it is not revolutionary--events always seem contingent on some other decision made some time ago (if a decision can ever be made). It is just amazing how interconnected your life might be without even knowing it.

I don't mean to be esoteric, but it is just funny--of course is a deeply ironic way.

PS

Sorge is not a source of ethics in Heidegger. If you read B&T and think that, you fell into a very exoteric reading and have missed the great thinker's true line of thought.

I hate when people tell me that crap.

It does not work.

Going Home

I have grown a little tired of philosophy, at least for the moment. I need a break. I think this is two fold. I have been sick with a sinus infection, nothing serious, but just rather nagging.

The second and most important is reading Ron Rash. I had know about him for a long time and a friend had ben telling me that it is a must read. I had even heard him speak at a literary festival. Well finally my friend handed me a copy of Saints at the River. He told me to read it in a night. It was a skinny paperback, not more than 300 pages of medium sized text. I decided I would give it a go. The first image of the novel was captivated--poetic, and eerie. It was eerie because of the language. It was my language. The language I had heard all of my life. As I read more into the novel, the story became a story that I might have heard, with characters I knew. I could not put it down. I finished it and starting reading it again in the next 4 hours.

Why was I drawn to it?

I am a southerner. I am the son of once proud plantation owners, of grocery store owners who lost it all on a black day in 1929, I am a son of people who once joined a group whose blood boiled with hate, but I am also the soon of Ohio farmers. My family came here with the Mayflower and Jamestown and haven't left. I will say that I have tried to downplay my southern ancestry. I do not know why. There is so much baggage. I read Robert Penn Warren about Jack Burden and I see myself. I read Faulkner about the decaying South and I see my family. I try to avoid it.

That was until I picked up Rash.

I really don't have roots in Appalachia. But I do in the state. I know the language, the peoples, the drives up into the mountains my family would take every year. The canoeing on Jocassee, our hiking trips. I knew the world he was describing and the language he was using to describe it. Veiled and poetic, always revealing more than an outsider will ever know. What is left out, what plot is undeveloped. In the South, there are certain things you let alone, some you hint at, others remain unsaid. That is in the story.

I spent one night at the beach talking in my slow, forgotten, southern accent practising the art of story telling that is so often forgotten, but is part of the life blood of the south. We sit and tell stories. True or false--it does not matter. All that maters is that they could have happened. They drip with history and family, the air so thick you could cut it, always haunted by ghosts of the past that haunt us in the very furniture and furnishings that surround us. Always blurring the lines between story and narrative poetry. The landscapes of every tale breathed the air as we kept spinning tales.

I read another Rash...now I'm on to Cormac McCarthy's early work. Soon I will move to Erskine Caldwell and if I get my courage up, I will read Faulkner. We need more academics reading and writing about Southern Literature. Those of us who know it, who live it, who are haunted by it, who are even part of it. Not an archivist at Dartmouth. Southern Literature doesn't let you study it from afar. It is not some dead work that can be tossed into some neat cannon. It cries out with the agony of a South that has never been consolidated, for there are many Souths, nor a south that has gotten over its history, for we live with our past unlike those other parts of the nation that seek to build over its scars, and of the south that history has forgotten--like the gullah villages on the coast.

Oscar Aftermath

I want to make movies. I want to tell stories. People tell stories, but it seems to be a dying art. People avoid literature. People have become metaphor hunters and cookbook readers always trying to extract some kernel of some tangible "truth."

Side note.

Never attack someone's profession. Even if you think they are just doing tekne and they think they are doing real thinking. Don't let them know that. Maybe from within their discourse by mastering it and leading them into the hole of their own making. Maybe that is the way.

Job interviews and Heidegger

I was going to bitch about how much my weeks have sucked, especially today. But I'm not. No one wants to listen to that. I don't even want to type it. Perhaps the idea of venting online was cathartic enough.

But I do have a story.

I went out to dinner the other night with one of my roommates. We sad next to a couple. Well, there were a couple of people. A man and a woman. The man was in his early 30s perhaps, his haring starting to fall out, his clothes neatly pressed, a bit too much cologne, and generally very fidgety. The woman, early 20s, no older than 23, fashionable dressed in muted colours and uber tall boots. At first I thought that they were boyfriend girlfriend or something along those lines. She came a little late--he had already ordered an appetizer. Well I start to listen to tidbits of their conversation...it sounded like a job interview. She was telling him about her classes and all that she does, what her career plans are, those kind of dry facts. He really did not add anything to conversation except for a few "umm hmm"s and "neat"s. It sounded exactly like a job interview. They were going to leave that restaurant with the job interview picture of each other, him more than her and she knowing little about the other guy. It was amazing. Such a dry and morning way to lead one's life. No probing questions, no laughing, no chatting about music or movies or art or the experiences that make us who we are. It was a listing of disjoint events. The things that make us who we are are not those silly resume facts. If they are, then I don't want a job (aka a girlfriend). People are much richer than that. Perhaps our culture has become so business like that even dinner dates become means to an end. But I don't even think that end was going to be empty sex in the case of what I observed. They were too busy and superficial for even empty sex. Yikes.

IS it fast food culture, is it information age culture, is it internet culture, PayPal culture, monster.com culture? I dunno. Those monikers are too facile too.

I normally don't eavesdrop like this, I swear. I just have really good hearing...

Anyways, on to "Question Concerning Technology." One of my least favourite essays. There are a great number of essays that are much more interesting, but these rhetorics kids want it...

This is real philosophy

“Well, I said, there is a story, that is Leontius, the son of Aglaion, coming up one day from Piræus, under the north wall on the outside, observed some dead bodies lying on the ground at the place of execution. He felt a desire to see them, and also a dread and abhorrence of them; for a time he struggled and covered his eyes, but at length the desire got the better of him; and forcing them open, he ran up to the dead bodies, saying, Look, ye wretches, take your fill of the fair sight” Plato Republic 440a book 4

That's what it is all about. When Heidegger wrote to one of his lady friends that "My philosophy is a philosophy of the night" he mean it. I think that reflects a profound understanding of the questions we should be asking ourselves. Philosophy reveals to us the nature of the world, the groundless of truth and ethics, of even the impossibility of defining our own being. It is dark. It is not nihilism though. Don't fall into that trap. Nihilism is a desire to no longer think, to be told and to accept blindly. That is the ultimate nihilism. It is a desire to no longer be human. Humans are humans in that they question their own existence. Perhaps the question is the ultimate weapon against nihilism, though it does itself have a destructive character.

The look into the abyss of being, of freedom, not in the flimsy french trendy sense, but in the Heideggerian awe and fear of the abyss. That is the philosophy of which I speak. It is the antithesis of nihilism. Perhaps it is the only way to stand up to the abyss. Stare back into it. I shan't quote the oft quoted Fred here, but we have to look. Don't turn away.

To those who forget

Death Fugue

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening
we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night
we drink and we drink
we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Marguerite
he writes it and steps out of doors and the stars are all sparkling
he whistles his hounds to come close
he whistles his Jews into rows has them shovel a grave in the ground
he orders us strike up and play for the dance

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at morning and midday we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
A man lives in the house he plays with his vipers he writes
he writes when it grows dark to Deutschland your golden hair Margeurite
your ashen hair Shulamith we shovel a grave in the air there you won't lie too cramped
He shouts jab this earth deeper you lot there you others sing up and play
he grabs for the rod in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue
jab your spades deeper you lot there you others play on for the dancing

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday and morning we drink you at evening
we drink and we drink
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margeurite
your aschenes Haar Shulamith he plays with his vipers
He shouts play death more sweetly Death is a master from Deutschland
he shouts scrape your strings darker you'll rise then in smoke to the sky
you'll have a grave then in the clouds there you won't lie too cramped

Black milk of daybreak we drink you at night
we drink you at midday Death is a master aus Deutschland
we drink you at evening and morning we drink and we drink
this Death is ein Meister aus Deutschland his eye it is blue
he shoots you with shot made of lead shoots you level and true
a man lives in the house your goldenes Haar Margarete
he looses his hounds on us grants us a grave in the air
he plays with his vipers and daydreams
der Tod is ein Meister aus Deutschland
dein goldenes Haar Margarete
dein aschenes Haar Shulamith
Paul Celan

(Translated by John Felstiner)

the blog race

We’ll all agree that catch 22 seems to hold some water weight. And by water weight we mean the weight of cerebral fluid, so it isn’t really water. It might be slightly more viscous, which of course means it takes more energy to flow. Regardless what does this have to do with anything? We can never know that we are crazy. If we know we are crazy then we are rational enough to talk about being crazy thus we are not crazy.

Fine.

But what about the act of speeding towards insanity. Perhaps not even insanity but the act of feeling your entire world fall apart. Perhaps into some sort of kirkegaardian angst or perhaps heidegger’s nothingness of angst. But are we talking about metaphysics, perhaps not. But perhaps. No. yes. Who knows. What is metaphysics? What is ontology? Let’s just say I am talking about Inderweltsein. Yeah I didn’t split the words up with the neat little hyphens. It shouldn’t be split un anyway. We are all about letting beings be…in the middle…voice. Freedom.

Okay so we can’t talk about being crazy, but even a rational creature knows when we are speeding towards the abyss. Most of us like to look out of the car window as we’re driving. This car just happens to be driving into the abyss, but it is an abyss that we really don’t know. We can’t talk about it. That is the madness. Madness is silent.

Okay, so the arts in their ambiguity allow us to describe what we can’t. they perform where words lack. They silently point to madness. That’s what I would like to talk about. John has supplied me with a great song. Why? God knows. He tries to torture me. Happiness is a warm gun. Well only for one of those bugs. Second hand smoke is a killer. Unless of course you get way too much of the real deal. That will also get you. As will the sun. And the moon. And air.

So here we have the song, “Why won’t you talk about it?” by The Radio Dept. So hopefully I have framed my discussion pretty lucidly. The answer to the title is, hey look you sell out English speaking Swedes, I can’t talk about it. That is the whole idea behind the dialog seemingly presented in the song. There is no dialog perhaps. Perhaps it is an internal dialogue. We all lose our minds, we know it, we see us falling into the abyss that we cannot describe, that we can’t talk about, that I can’t tell you about. It could be so easy to talk about this song as some cheesy break-up song with some nice distortion and that kind of teenage angst, but I think that misses the point completely. And it is boring. Life is worth a little more than that shit…if it is worth anything in the beginning. Well for argument’s sake let’s suppose it is.

So how do we point to ther trauma of the abyss, that whole that can never be filled? We feel ourselves pulled into it, we know that once we get there our memory and understanding of the ride will be erased. We look for words but as soon as we do, we cannot find them, even then we are sinking further and further into irrationality. What do we have left? Only the call, hoping that in said call we are understood. Yet as we get dragged deeper into this whole we forget even the meanings of our pleas, we just allow ourselves to fall in, repeating the same seven lines over and over again so by the time we reach the end of the song, when the music goes away and we are left in silence, the refrain meant nothing. We have the answer to our title with the silence that ends all.

So we can talk about losing our minds.

Is that not the most fascinating part of this song. That we can understand that part of this whole thing. We know when we lose things. The issue then is that we are there when it is gone. What is identity? I don’t want to go into some kind of Lockean critique of memory across time or that shit, but identity is neat. So we can feel our self moving in a particular direction. This of course would then require a specific critique of time, which at this juncture I do not want to provide. But seriously. We can feel ourselves speeding towards something, let’s just say an episode, death, the break-up of a relationship, or more interesting perhaps the foundation of a relationship. Eros is madness isn’t it? Why won’t you tell me? The need to know. The need to be sated of all desire. That is always a kind of madness, a blinding madness that leaves us repeating silly phrases over and over again until they lose all meaning. That happens doesn’t it. No? Just me? Not me at all.

Perhaps that is why the call and response of the song with a singular singer is fascinating. Is it a singular internal monologue. Is it a conversation that is ventriloquized by the same guy. It really doesn’t matter. I tend to enjoy the idea of the internal monologue. We know it is coming, we feel the eros pull us in. then silence

It always ends in silence.

Silence tells us something though does it not. Only that which we cannot know.

If you want to learn how to play the piano...

You take lessons from Beethoven. Well, it turns out he is not available for lessons anymore. Thus, we turn to the next best thing--his students.

So it is with virtually everything. academia is especially prone to this kind of thinking. Who are the heirs of a teacher's thought? Tradition says that it is his best students. even the poor students still take something from the master. Look at Plato. He decided to not follow Socrates orders and write. Of course it was Nietzsche who said, "One repays the techer badly if one remains nothing but a pupil" but that advice is difficult to follow. Even in taking the advice you are taking the advice of the teacher. You will need to pull a Machiavelli and destroy the previous teacher so thoroughly that no one can even remember him (thanks Heidegger).

Regardless. I have been trying to track all the masters through my teachers. I can say that I am two degrees of separation from Derrida (via two people), two away from Levinas, three away from Heidegger, two away from Harold Bloom, two from de Man, three away from Heidegger, Althusser, Foucault, Blanchot and four away from Husserl.

Exciting, right? A little.

Lack of Identity...go to uber Commercialized Pop

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4669ozY4faQ

Thanks for the link...you know who.

Paper Ideas

Wordsworth and Heidegger: Experiencing the Primacy of Experience

Romanticism, The War on Terror and the End of History: How Romanticism has lesson yet

Attuning Authenticity in MGMT's "Time to Pretend"

Identity and Schizophrenia: The song of the denying survivor in T.I.'s "Dead and Gone"

Selling the Spectacle: Lady Gaga's Critical Insight into Contemporary Culture

Primo Levi

Voi che vivete sicuri You who live safe
Nelle vostre tiepide case In your warm houses,
voi che trovate tornando a sera You who find warm food
Il cibo caldo e visi amici And friendly faces when you return home.
Considerate se questo è un uomo Consider if this is a man
Che lavora nel fango Who works in mud,
Che non conosce pace Who knows no peace,
Che lotta per mezzo pane Who fights for a crust of bread,
Che muore per un sì o per un no. Who dies by a yes or a no.
Considerate se questa è una donna Consider if this is a woman
Senza capelli e senza nome Without hair, without name,
Senza più forza di ricordare Without the strength to remember,
Vuoti gli occhi e freddo il grembo Empty are her eyes, cold her womb,
Come una rana d'inverno. Like a frog in winter.
Meditate che questo è stato Never forget that this has happened.
Vi comando queste parole. Remember these words.
Scolpitele nel vostro cuore Engrave them in your hearts,
Stando in casa andando per via When at home or in the street,
Coricandovi alzandovi When lying down, when getting up.
Ripetetele ai vostri figli. Repeat them to your children.
O vi si sfaccia la casa Or may your houses be destroyed,
La malattia vi impedisca May illness strike you down,
I vostri nati torcano il viso da voi May your offspring turn their faces from you.

Bar fights and politics

The post is not as sensationalist as the title would suggest, though such a sms might make certain roommates think you are in a giant fight and need help.

To begin--Who are you Bill King? I went down to the neighbourhood bar, the slightly liberal one that is home to the liberal arts people and most of the professors. Yes, many people there are just "art majors" or "philosophy majors" not students of art or philosophy or literature. There is a difference. Ah, to continue, the group and I were sitting at our little booth, drinking various beers, when some creepy fellow started leaning on the side of the booth. No one really noticed him until one member of our party, realising how much of a creep he was being and the thought of him slipping our wallets from the coats he was leaning on, led him to exclaim, "Who the fuck is that guy." We all looked in his direction. He had hooked us.

With contact made, he then told us that he knew a member of our group...that he had conducted a poll. Jeff, the member of the group, then told the man that he probably didn't know him and that he didn't do "polls." Then man went on to say he was sure he knew him. Jeff went on to say that he had one of those faces. That was not enough for Mr. King; he went on to ask who Jeff voted for. Jeff responds "ObAMa." Mr. King then asks if he was following what he was doing with the country. Jeff says, really I don't know I shouldn't have voted anyway. Mr King then says a few other words...eventually sending me off.

"This isn't a poll, this is an inquisition," I said. I then asked him, "well if I voted for Nader, would that mean that my political participation is over, sense I could not follow what he is doing to the country, would that mean that I am shit out of luck." Mr King responded, "No, that means you're an idiot." I jump back, "So you are telling me that if you are part of a minority vote, you're an idiot? Is that your conception of democracy sir?" He then went on to ask me about my political philosophy. My response was "Thinking." He did not like that too much, but I continued to explain to him, "Any dogma that I present to you would do the opposite of what you hope. My explaining a concrete philosophy would allow you and me both not to think--we would just follow a program of beliefs that lead us to a conclusion. We would not be thinking at all. That is why I implore you, good sir, to think, and let the act of thinking be your first philosophy on all matters." That is not the answer for which he was looking. At some point he called me a coward and an idiot. I mentioned violent revolution to through him off balance. The rest of the conversation just became an exercise in deconstruction his arguments and demonstrating how his own lapses demonstrated the superiority of my point.

Sadly, we had to leave. One of my friends told me it was like the bar scene in Good Will Hunting. I hope so. Drunk people are hard to argue down.

Too much fun though.