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
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
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.
"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.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
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
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
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
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!"
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!"
Friday, April 16, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
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
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
Sunday, April 11, 2010
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
