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Vanity...Perhaps. An exercise in creativity and the immediate (on a good day) found from the internet. Perhaps that too. In any case, its worth a try.
Purity of Heart, or The Contemptible King of Mirrors
I.
"I've been wading through this puddle of human excrement for so long that asphyxiation would be too cheap a mercy for the good fuckin' Lord to bestow upon me"
Were he the progeny of lesser creatures, the excess of hair and prospect of fangs might have justified Evan's foaming mouth. As it was his venomous declaration did little to break the silence of his daily return from school. Always by his side, like a faithful trappist, was Jude. The adolescence of their companionship did not discount Jude's preternatural ability to serve as Evan's pack animal; more a yoke-laden ox than a loyal friend.
"They fuck-ing expect me to pay them to do absolutely nothing while I am forced to suffer for their ineptitude. While Darwin may have correctly speculated on our ascension into creatures with rational faculties and the irreplaceable opposable thumbs those troglodytes seem to have missed the memo."
Venom was Evan's modus operandi and rightfully so. Few sad literary men, boys really, demonstrated such affinity for the most sanctimonious uses of vulgarities. No one in Evan's world could deliver the indignities propelled from his mouth with such poise and creativity. "It is an underappreciated art-form", he is rumored to have once said, "which demands that one be well practiced."
These two journeymen traversed the partially shoveled sidewalks as if set adrift in inescapably separate worlds. Evan plodded along unevenly. His steps matched the divisions within his own thought patterns. At times both crunching the ice beneath him and traipsing atop the compacted plow-drifts, Evan's gait--like most men his age--told far more of him than his own percolating malices set afire by his tongue. He crushed the ice with such enmity that no words, not even his own righteous indignities, could match its undiluted meaning. Yet his oscillation to lightly treading upon the snow-drifts lining either side of the walk led one to believe that he was little more than a child playing a game he did not quite understand. The simple joys of a toddler at their most ornery stage--all innocence and uncompromising evil--leaked out through these light steps and almost made his indignities forgivable.
The steady eye of Jude, a student of Evan's erratic steps, was one of the few who could see all of this in those steps. Jude chose to carefully place his feet in the chasms already well worn by larger boots than his. He pictured himself a pilgrim, retracing what appeared to be ancient steps substantially dirtied by many others who chose the same path as he. Snow does not stay porcelain for long, he thought to himself. "At least the sight of my breath remains unyielding to the particles of dirt which unquestionably surround it. Well, to my own eyes anyway."
"I mean, god-damn. God Damn Jude. These fuckers think they can cover up their own ineptitude with extra paperwork to be processed and then stick me with the fault. I didn't see that the fucking class was not fucking dropped until it was too late. And then, AFTER I explain it to them in the Queen's fucking English--every last fucking detail--they still don't understand why I'm upset that they are sitting there playing fucking minesweeper on those machines of theirs. I bet they're so slowed by porn they can't even update the fucking class list but a week at a time..."
Jude was no longer listening. Evan did not appear to care either way. They walked along one evenly stepping through the cold, the other fighting off the freeze with his own unique expulsion of noxious fumes, not unlike the kind he had yet to receive as the Lord's providence.
Bodie: what about the pawns, how do they get to be the queen
D: it don't work like that
Bodie: but i wanna be the queen
D: bode...the pawns just get pushed around by the bigger pieces. they almost never make it. that's how the game is played.
Bodie: yeah, unless they some smart-ass pawns.
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Love costs a great deal of energy. It demands understanding, patience, the recognition that one gets out of the way and celebrates someone else. I am utterly exhausted after my long vacation. Nothing too spectacular but that's how I like it. Home and then Norway. Illinois. It was so good to see those harvested crop fields spread out as far as the horizon would allow. It was also so good to see people whom I love dearly. Especially those who I see but twice a year now. But I'm exhausted and back in Boston where I get work done.
There is always more work to be done.
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I've been listening to Interpol almost non-stop save for the occasional detour. I can't tell you why Interpol or why now...it just is. I've also been on a HUGE Milch kick. Watched all of his lectures that I had and watched all the behind the scenes stuff for both Deadwood and John From Cincinnati. And I decided to try to adopt his ideas about "resting transparently in the spirit which gave you rise" and "ego suppression at depth" for the actual work of philosophy. Get the self-conscious neuroses about being good enough--will the professor like it--is this even what I should be doing--get all of that out of the way and focus on the task at hand.
So far, so good.
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Pray for my WPS paper...I fear I might have no idea what I'm doing. But I might also be okay with that for now.
rest transparently friends.
Inspiration is a cruel mistress. And an ironic one at that. Derrida is what got me on this philosophy path for real and now that I'm required to write on him...of course I'd be tired of writing. Yet I need to write it. Perhaps more because of the thought that it evokes than for the actual paper itself.
It's a paper about mourning. It came out of the questions I had concerning mourning after Justin died. What exactly is this work of mourning that was so horrible and yet so necessary? I work through the feelings of narcissism, denial, and self-delusion. I am not alone in this. But the paper's generation out of the expiration of that beloved friend only marks it as a betrayal. The confinement of genre betrays the expansiveness of who Justin was, of the plurality of relations he had, of the entire world that he worlded that is no more. So I betray my friend by trying to keep faith with him.
He'd have said my paper wasn't that good anyway. And then beat my ass at halo...with grenades. Always grenades
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The Wire is the second best television show I've ever seen next to Deadwood. Arrested Development comes in third. The pattern that emerges from these three shows is that I enjoy complex plot maneuvers, fully developed characters, and deep content. Exception being AD which doesn't offer up the deep content but rather mocks it and mocks it well. I like my TV to make me think and not just be something passive. That's what videogames are for.
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"Just because you surround yourself with interesting things doesn't make you an interesting person" wrote Ben Gibbard in Paste earlier this year. No, Benji, it doesn't make you interesting but it doesn't hurt you either. I like to surround myself with excellent things. Or at least I want to be associated with excellence. It won't make me a good scholar or a better philosopher. Won't hurt either. And maybe just maybe I'll get to come back at Gibbard with a quote by Ricky Bobby.
"I piss excellence."
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There really are too many arbitrary new web mooblies to make hardly any of them matter to me. Sorry friends, organizing data just aint my thing. Give me a good book, a good cup of coffee, and a few hours to talk about the ideas that make this world such a wonderous place. DB is okay I guess.
So I'm still in love with the music from 2007. It was a cultural onslaught unlike any year of music and film I've experienced. So much good, so much to be excited about. Unfortunately, this year has been a bit more stale. I've only gotten excited about a handful of music and as a result I went back to stuff I had missed. This was the year that I discovered My Morning Jacket and The Hold Steady despite their best albums being made in 2005. They both had records come out this year and I like them both. But nowhere as good as Z and Boys and Girls in America. So here are two lists...first what I actually listened to the most this year courtesy of Last.fm and followed by what i thought were the "best" records of this year.
Last.fm List
1. tie (Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago, Minus the Bear: They Make Beer Commercials Like This in Heaven)
2.The Album Leaf: In a Safe Place
3. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
4. mewithoutYou: Brother, Sister
5. Tie (Sufjan Stevens: Illinois, Pedro the Lion: Control, Headlights: Some Racing, Some Stopping)
6. Owen: At Home With Owen
7. Marvin Gaye: #1's
8. The Swell Season: The Swell Season
9. Explosions in the Sky: The Earth is not a Cold, Dead Place
10. My Morning Jacket: Z
I'm surprised at how many times i listened to minus the bear but that ep really is damn good. Some of these I swear I just left the computer running while I went out for the day...lame I know. Anyway, here's my personal list.
1. Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago
2. Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes
3. M83: Saturday = Youth
4. Broken Social Scene Presents Brendan Canning: Something for all of us
5. Deerhunter: Microcastle
6. Headlights: Some Racing, Some Stopping
7. Paper Route: Are we all Forgotten EP
8. Old Crow Medicine Show: Tennessee Pusher
9. The Notwist: The Devil + You and Me
10. Stars: Sad Robots EP
i think i'm a big believer in the ep as this list attests. honestly, the only music i got really excited about was the first two although m83 has been coming on stronger with each listen.
Honorable Mention: MGMT, Colour Revolt, Sigur Ros
There is only one thing that I will say in regards to the political theater that was the vice-presidential debate. It is nothing concerning the policies of the candidates. Nothing about their demeanor or their body language. Nothing about vacuous answers or repeated talking points. What I have to say stems from something Sara Palin said but never elaborated on. At one point during the rambling-more-than-the allman bros.-never-pronounce-g's-on-the-end-of-words response to the question regarding abortion she said "we need a culture of life." Granted, this term is probably politically loaded, like saying you're "for the little guy" or that "Delaware does not deserve statehood" (it's a PA thing) but I also found it a rather interesting notion.
What would a culture of life look like? What constitutes culture such that it is not immediately associated with life, bios, zoe, etc.? If what is needed is a culture of life, are we presently residing in a culture of death? And what constitutes a culture of death?
To make an ambiguous statement like she did is not, in itself, a bad thing. It might be the only thing that I agree with her saying. But what this means, what this relationship between a culture, that is, something we make with others and life in all its permutations and levels seem much deeper than what is intended by making that statement in a debate in the middle of other commonly understood phrases. The ambiguity of the statement and its intention to sound good conceals the radical nature of a statement such as "we need a culture of life." It's that radicality which I am so interested in.
To say that we need a culture of life presupposes that culture is not immediately linked to life and also assumes that "life" is something that is understood (and that "culture" is understood for that matter). Culture, cultus, cultivate...there is a kind of non-natural creating that goes on in culture. It is not self-generating but communally generating. I cannot create culture. Only when I am in relation to the other is culture possible. That other may be the natural world (say a plant or squirrel that is angry at having his park bench occupied) or another being but they are what is essential to culture.
Life, on the other hand, is a bit harder to interpret. I will focus on meanings of life related to physis, or "nature" as precarious, provisional, and narrow as that description might be. Life, as I describe it, here refers to growing and dying, generation and termination, a process of flourishing and floundering. It is a kind of self-generating. More than just a biological (though not excluding this aspect) account of life, we can look to the imaginative, spiritual, social, and emotional accounts to round out this idea of "life".
If it has not yet become apparent, there is an entangling of culture and life at the very core of their meaning. Life is generating AND dying; we can have a culture of life and a culture of death. This has clarified this concept of a culture of life only provisionally. If anything, thinking about "culture" and "life" along these lines has problematized the idea of a "culture of life." However, if there is to be a culture, a creative and creating set of relationships, that is "of life", related to life, valuing life, emulating life, then would it not be one that embraces more than just an anti-abortion stance? Would it not focus on a culture which sees this process of generation and termination, life and death intertwined? Is the life of which this culture is a part directed towards the horizon of its own impending demise?
I find it difficult to understand how a simple phrase like "we need a culture of life" can clarify the present problems with american, or for that matter global, culture at large. If it is to be a culture of life then it will have a culture of death present within it already. It will be acquainted with the dead, with death, with dying and termination alongside birth, becoming, generation and life. I guess, in a practical sense, it is hard for me to accept the idea that an anti-abortion stance is precisely the very thing that qualifies what one might call a culture of life. What if a culture of life were more exhaustive? What if it included cultivating a concern for the biological world we live in, a concern for the emotional health of its creators and participators, a concern for the loss of arts and imagination as an essential part of education and critical thinking, a concern for the "culture of death" which devalues other human beings to the point where they are still sold into slavery, ravaged by famine, disease, and war? What if it included those things? How would that change your policy stance? How would that shape the way that you mobilize the state?
Yes, I think we need a culture of life. But we need one that focuses on more than just one issue, one policy stance, and pretty sounding platitudes that answer nothing. I long for a culture of life that embraces natality and mortality, birthing and dying, arts and sciences, books and movies, music and silence, solitude and friendship, peace and suffering and all the ways that "life" is intertwined.
The year has begun officially for me. The amount of work I do now trumps any previous year but I, unsurprisingly, love it even more now. Anyway, despite being bogged down with Derrida and Plato's Theaetetus, I have determined that the time has come for me to begin to submit papers to conferences. That is, it is time for me to do scholarly things. So here, below, is my first paper proposal. I find it an interesting dilemma to think about given our current political climate and the identity politics that go along with it.
(On a side note: why are we not encouraged to ask great philosophical questions when the two candidates debate one another? What could be more needed than a mediation on the differences between the importance of judgment (Plato's Republic) and experience (Aristotle's Nicomachian Ethics Book 1)? I tend to side with Plato on the matter...but seriously, where's the questions about the importance of these "virtues")
Paper Proposal for Wesleyan Philosophical Society Conference 2009 Narrating Evil: Emplotment, Truth, and Human Suffering The experience of evil and the human suffering caused in its wake lends itself to narration. The emplotment of these experiences serves as a basic human act which intends moving from a sense discordance to concordance; from disorder to the semblance of order. However, within this act of narration, one finds that the experience of a common life-world and the experience of interacting with the other creates the possibility of a conflict of interpretations regarding experiences of evil. My question, then, is “what are we to do when narratives of evil and suffering come into conflict with one another and yet remain true?” Other, related questions might be “How do we account for the omission of acts of evil in certain narratives or the inclusion of innocent parties in evil actions?” and “What is the responsibility of the narrating subject to account for what would appear to be a conflicting or contradictory interpretation of the truth of events of evil?” My proposal for exploring this issue is to use the hermeneutic work of Paul Ricoeur as a guide for delimiting the act of narration and relation to conflicting notions of the truth of an event, determining the role of responsibility on the part of the narrator and the reader/hearer of such a narrative, and making a gesture towards a hermeneutics of narrativity that can account for both the suspicions and affirmations one might have concerning the truth of any story.It would be nice, and terrifying, to get this accepted. But I hope I do.
I've always been nostalgic for that "old, weird" America that we dream up in our songs. A land where people work harder than they should and stand up for others and do whats right 80% of the time. The rest of the time they are the connoisseurs of vice and perversion. The swindlers with a heart of gold. Hoboes, hippies, beats, punks, and maybe--if they're lucky--hipsters. They're all swindlers, and I'm one of them, sometimes proudly sometimes not. We dream of a world that never really existed and even if it did, it was never ours. I guess it's the romantic in me that longs for a promised land that isn't quite utopia but it's close. Then again, utopia has always been with us, always longed after, popping up in all those weird places that make America what it is.
There are a couple of analyses of utopia (Graham Ward and Paul Ricoeur in particular) that point out this impulse. It is most prevalent today in the dream of the suburbs, our idea of what the 1950's were like, and in political rhetoric. What becomes most disconcerting to me is that, as Ward has pointed out, the utopian dreams of "cities of endless desire" or "cities of eternal ambition" are dystopian from the start. As any urban hipster who digs folk and old-timey music will tell you, city living is no utopia. We city dwellers have become The Hollow Men. Perhaps we're not as desperate as these headpieces filled with straw, at least I don't feel that desperate, but I do find that the utopian dream remains.
Perhaps its not such a bad thing, to dream of the world as it is not. Certainly, the utopian dream can lead to a neglect of the sufferings of the present but it doesn't seem like the wrong dream to have. It is simply a different kind of utopia that I actually desire. It is the promised land of Woody Guthrie songs, John Steinbeck novels, and Wes Anderson movies. It is the "old, weird America" that Greil Marcus documents in his book of the same name that I long for. But it is the New, Weird America that I live in.
The New, Weird America bears a striking resemblence to the old one. Except this one has technology. Less hand cranks, gears and sprockets; more cables and remotes and keyboards. And the utopian dream still lives on in the new, weird america but it takes on new ways of dissemination, that is, new forms of distribution. I'll focus on one aspect of the new, weird america--partisan narratives.
As a philosopher partial to Narrative thought I should be happy about the way that people are throwing around narratives for their parties and how knowledgable about their construction. But my problem is precisely that which, I believe, most important: Content Matters. What the old, weird america did was create a narrative based on issues (at least from my recollection). Problems had solutions and you chose what solution you wanted. I know that I am generalizing and maybe overly so. What I've noticed in our political rhetoric, what angers me the most, is that these narrative swindlers spin their stories not about issues but about ways of life. My people, their people, us v. them, the people v. the elites, etc. On and on they go until they've made us suspicious of our neighbors. Maybe this is what they mean by identity politics. The problem with this, besides its questionable morality, is that it thinks that ways of life are fixed. But any student of history knows that the narrative keeps changing. Aristotle reminds us in his Poetics that action is what makes a drama a drama.
So when there's a farmer buying parts for his tractor on ebay and an urban hipster like myself listening to Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys without the slightest feeling of irony or anachronism, the narrative hucksters are dead in the water. Those narratives about dumb hicks loving their guns and porn and nascar are just as absurd as those narratives about the coastal ivy-leaguers with their indie music, art films, and smarterer-than-thou attitudes. Certainly, there are those people who we all know who make those stereotypes somewhat true. But to craft a whole demographic of people who are ruining it for everybody because they live a certain way, like certain music, movies, restaurants, etc. is completely bogus.
Sometimes these narratives are necessary; in particular I am thinking of energy use narratives. They give us a story by which to judge our actions and in the best cases, give us reasons to change. Here, in the New, Weird America, we can tell the most outlandish stories because they are true, Ivy-Leaguers do actually love appalacian music and farmers do have ipods. And if these narratives are good, they'll be big enough to incorporate both farmers and pharmacologists into their tale and hopefully provide us with new, weird utopian dreams to hope for.
