Spoons and Despair

Timeline

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 24 May 2010 19:00:00 +0000

Boxes and Bands

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 18:45:00 +0000

In an excellent journal recently recommended to me by a faithful interlocutor, Naked Punch, a dialogue with the renowned art critic/theorist Arthur C. Danto is offered, which presents an insightful discussion on a range of topics aesthetical and philosophical. One such topic of conversation comes disappointingly too close to the end of this excellent interchange, but outlines the parallel between the relationship betwixt brillo boxes/Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (some of which are pictured left, click for attribution) and human relationships/ marriage. Danto suggests that while the perceptual or perhaps even phenomenological difference between a couple (of any orientation) in a serious, monogamous, committed relationship and a married couple is minimal, but that the framework, relations to institutions and the hermeneutic circle in which they lie are vastly different, Danto notes:

My idea was that when you do marry, you’re suddenly in all sorts of different relationships with other people, other institutions. All sorts of things come in and you’re obliged to interpret it and so forth, so it’s very much like the Brillo Box-Brillo Box structure.

In fact, as Danto assents “the whole thing’s different.” What is notably ironic about this assertion is that despite the totemic power that Danto assesses to Warhol’s creation: in After the End of Art and elsewhere Danto claims that it is exactly this piece, which marks the death knell of art (as a field of aesthetic creation), this art-object necessarily undermines the institutions which grant it that kind of radical ontology apart from brillo boxes. I wonder if marriage too, in its current (and perhaps always has been) fraught state, also undermines the very institutions which grant it its own status apart and seemingly above mere “couplehood.” A traditional explanation for the status of marriage might derive from the sacralization of the act within a religious frame, if such an explanation holds weight for marriage, this might say something about how we think of art (and artistic institutions like museums and schools). Many museums certainly carry an elegance, perhaps even an austerity that is cognate with what might be called the “church imaginary.” That is, the essentialization of the sum of ideas, representations and descriptions of a place of worship are often matched by what we might see entering a major art museum. The art-object placed within the museum-as-temple gains a sacred status, which is wholly apart from its mundane (profane) origins. Vermeer’s View of Delft isn’t just some boiled linseed oil, mixed with pine resin and pigments placed on top of stretched linen around a wood frame. It isn’t even just the product of an intelligent imagination; it is within the art-world discursive one of the finest examples of Dutch Renaissance veduta. That description only means something if that work is assigned as art. And one can only appreciate this meaning, if one appreciates the institution in which it is created. Brillo Boxes, if I understand it correctly wants to push this kind of appreciation, which borders on or is holy, to its absurd limit. Of course, we know thanks in part to some creative paraphrasing of Tertullian the intimate connection between absurdity and belief. If we think that marriage itself is only the kind of thing that can be marriage within the context of a set of institutions that provide its meaning, then we might understand (though not agree) with individuals who would quibble with those who would seek to participate in this ritual, whose sexual orientations might change the meaning of what it means to be married. That is, it would be anachronistically myopic (anachronistic given the significant work done in the wake of Heidegger and Nietzsche) to presume that meaning and being are somehow isolated, or furthermore, than meaning itself is created in a vacuum. Rather, if we recognize that the world is at all constructed, and if that construction if it is to be viable relies on some sense of intersubjective consensus or verifiability, then the prospect of gay marriage for those who have relied upon and trust a previously intersubjectively agreed upon (though perhaps always a contingent and tacit agreement) meaning, might represent a real (and for them unpalatable) change in the world, a change which not only affects all future marriages but marriage simpliciter. The danger (both rhetorically and politically) in such a philosophical outlook is fairly clear, and perhaps Danto did not intend to suggest that the parallel runs as far or as deep as I am making it out to be, but if Brillo Boxes represented the Death of Art, dare we say that marriage may encounter the same fate. My initial reaction is to cheer its apotheosis, but I understand that for some such a convulsion might be difficult perhaps even painful.

Mobility

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 03:37:00 +0000

Mobility is not to be confused with freedom, but its converse...capture!

I was at : 50th, Tampa, FL 33617

History

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:23:00 +0000

Self-Prescribed Status as Member of Cultural Elite Maintenance Tip #1:

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:35:00 +0000

"You want to be already sick of everything no one else has even heard of..."

From David Brook's Op-Ed Column in the August 7th, 2008 online edition of the New York TImes:

Dear Dr. Kierkegaard,

All my life I’ve been a successful pseudo-intellectual, sprinkling quotations from Kafka, Epictetus and Derrida into my conversations, impressing dates and making my friends feel mentally inferior. But over the last few years, it’s stopped working. People just look at me blankly. My artificially inflated self-esteem is on the wane. What happened?

Existential in Exeter

Ouch! It burns, it burns so deep.[Earnest fist-shaking] Mock me, will you Mr. Brooks! [/fist-shaking] For my part, I have worked exceptionally and obsessively hard to cultivate a face-saving level of ironic detachment (serious hours), and thus my self-esteem has suffered no undue inflation, artificial or otherwise. But where is this mythical dating pool-with their Grande Light Lattes and their copies of Finnegan's Wake and The Anti-Christ in tow? If you perchance occasion upon this and have determined the location of this private Elysian Starbucks(TM) of mine, please inform me of its whereabouts immediately. Epictetus? Really, do people have parts of the Enchiridion committed to memory so that they can bust it out at grad student soirees.

My acquired sense of disdain is reaching new heights, new heights I tell you!

Suppose We are Less...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 07:09:00 +0000

Kafka, I think, in his Zurau Aphorisms, alerts us to the consequences of that afterthought DuBois supposed is lurking behind:

"The animal twists the whip out of his master's grip and whips itself to become its own master-not knowing that this only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master's whiplash."-#29

"The Group and the Indie," Heather Boose Weiss (2004)

It has been many knots, perhaps now it is just knots. Moreover, is the animal exquisitely conscious of the fantasy of which he is the most industrious fabricator? If so, it seems we are always and already happy architects of our own nullification. A high price to pay for our existence. But indeed we can now conceive of Foucault's "law without the king," it is just the ungripped but heavily knotted whiplash. It suggests a canvas wherein a painter, stripped and bloodied, paints himself stripped and bloodied, but what shall he use for the pigment?

Zora for Looking

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:11:00 +0000

When Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960, she had been out of the public eye for some time with little of her work currently in publication. Largely through the efforts of Alice Walker and the influence of Walker's essay, "Looking for Zora," Hurston's oeuvre experienced a renaissance in the late 70's and 80's (Queen 52). Today her work is recognized as a seminal achievement of the Harlem Renaissance with her classic novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, required reading in high schools and in courses across multiple university departments. Her anthropological training and ethnographic work conducted under the advisement of the founder of American anthropology, Franz Boas, gave her the unique ability to identify, elucidate, and contextualize the specific timbre and tone of the African-American voice. However, much of her work encountered criticism, as what endeavored to be ethnographic authenticity was construed as a perpetuation of black stereotypes made pliant for her white audiences. This combined with her controversial political affiliations in the 1940's led to a rejection of her work for some time. One thematic element which operates consistently in her work is the role of women and her sensitivity to feminist concerns and issues of women's rights. Suffice it to say that many women in her novels and short stories play strong, consistent and even heroic roles and are often concern with other things than finding a husband or having children.

The political discourse of the mainstream of the Harlem Renaissance was centered on rebelling against the perceived stereotypes of African-Americans in the era of Jim Crow. "Negro Art," as suggested by W.E.B. DuBois and others, should seek to advance the situation of African-Americans (McKnight 83). Hurston's contrarian stance was not popular with other members of the Renaissance. Richard Wright accused her of nothing less than a kind of literary "Uncle Tomism" when he said that her work, "exploits that phase of Negro life which is 'quaint', the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the 'superior' race'" (McKnight 83) This attack stems at least in part from her literary commitment to a faithful portrayal of rural "black dialect" in her work. This so-called "folk language" is grammatically unorthodox, phonologically and semantically loose, elliptical, highly metaphorical, patriarchal, and utilizes a language which is steeped in mythological allusions and superstitious references. A brief illustration of this can be seen early on in Their Eyes Were Watching God. In one scene, Pheoby Watson is urged to go home before dark by Mrs. Sumpkins who volunteers to walk her home and worries, "It's sort of duskin' down dark. De booger man might ketch yuh." Unconcerned about the "Boogie Man" Phoeby declines and quips that "mah husband tell me say no first class booger would have me" (Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 4). Many members of the Renaissance took exception to this nostalgia for primitivism and complained that while Hurston's effort in Their Eyes was both poetic and humorous, it was tragically and detrimentally un-evolved. Other reviewers were ignorant or blind to this concern of primitivism and instead recognized the universal experiences of Hurston's characters and how she touched on the deeper levels of human existence (Heard 133). In Their Eyes many of the characters are concerned with issues of empowerment and self-fulfillment and their failure to reach it is emblematic of a human endeavor not just an African-American one.

Part of the vehement response from members of the Harlem Renaissance derives from the rightful supposition that Hurston's deployment of "Southern Negro dialect" was explicit, intentional and devastatingly well-researched, i.e. there was not an understandable yet innocent desire for authenticity, but instead an ideological and academic commitment which was present. Hurston's intellectual pedigree did not coexist peaceably with the emotionally charged political convictions of her peers. Her 1934 essay, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," gave a theoretical edge to the deployment of her controversial rhetorical strategies and as such she interposed herself as a cultural intermediary between two "cultures." As an emissary, her role as translator and transmitter of fin de siècle Black Culture was one she adopted with relish and style. Ironically, while many other members of the Harlem Renaissance participated in cultural apologetics, they saw her kerugma of Black Culture as blasphemous. In that essay she lays out in detail the poetics of "Negro Expression" focusing on the role of adornment, metaphor and dramatization in such speech (Hurston, Sweat 55-56).

It is unlikely that any serious discussion of Hurston's work can be conducted without a presentation of how she mediated the issues of race and race relations. This is perhaps an unfortunate commentary on the state of literary criticism, insofar as any analysis of "black" writers must consider how "blackness" plays in their work. Hurston does offer some interesting and rich insights into the nature of being "colored," insights that also run contrary to some of those reached by other members of the Harlem Renaissance. In "How it Feels to be Colored Me" a 1928 essay, first published in the literary magazine The World Tomorrow, Hurston makes a number of striking metaphorical allusions about being colored. One theme that the essay develops is the notion that "race" or being colored is something that is constructed and labeled, rather than being something that is inherently a part of a person. She remarks, "I remember the very day that I became colored" (Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me). By extension, there was a time she remembers when she was not colored, and this time was when she was in Eatonville, FL as a child. Her mythological beginnings in this town[1] are a source of deep remembrance as she references her time in this place often. In Eatonville she could be "Zora," the person she actually was behind her "coloredness." Though admittedly, despite the racism she must have felt, there is a sense of ambivalence even arrogance at the thought of race and racism. She taunts those who "belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all but about it." Furthermore, she claims that racism does not so much as bother her as it does astonish her, and in a clear bit of tongue-and-cheek bravado wonders, "How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me" (Hurston, How it Feels to be Colored Me). Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and other African-American writers impart a sense in their works of a deep and seething existential anger, one that is not easily shaken off or tossed away in the same breezy way that Hurston does in that particular essay.

Zora Neale Hurston did not use her fiction or non-fiction to advert some bluntly political agenda about "black empowerment" much to the dismay of some of her male counterparts in the Harlem Renaissance. Moreover, she regarded antagonistically such attempts to voice these feelings through explicit political sermonizing, as hinted at in her first published novel, Jonah Gourd's Vine. The title is a biblical allusion from the Book of Jonah, in which God prepares a gourd for Jonah only to have it destroyed by a worm, also of God's preparation (Jonah 4:6-8). In one scene, after a sermon on the "race problem" is given a character is asked how she liked it-the character, Sister Boger responds incredulously, "Dat wasn't no sermon, dat was uh lecture" (Hurston, Jonah's Gourd Vine 159). When Hurston preached it was not in the model of religious proselytism or via the staging of excoriating political jeremiads but through a personal quest to seek the connections between identity and language, authentically and on her own terms (Cuiba 119).

All this is not to imply that Hurston was unfamiliar or failed to empathize with people who were disillusioned at the state of race relations at time, or more bluntly, who were angry with white people. It was and continues to be a divisive question that splits this nation, its communities, families and even its citizens' psyches. One of the best examples of this divisiveness is found in her short story, "Sweat." It tells of Delia a washerwoman and her abusive, misogynist husband Sykes. In many of her stories, it is the male characters that tend to give voice to this "black anger," while the female ones tend to take a more pragmatic, quiescent approach. At one point, Sykes chastises Delia for washing white people's clothing in his house, and accuses her of hypocrisy for doing so on Sunday. He yells, "You ain't nothing but a hypocrite. One of them amen-corner Christians--sing, whoop, and shout, then come home and wash white folks clothes on the Sabbath" (Hurston, Sweat 27). It is one thing to work on the Sabbath, a minor oversight as far modern society is concerned, it is an entirely other thing to be doing the "devil's dirty work." For Sykes, Delia's washing responsibilities can be seen as a literal realization of this metaphor. Though ultimately Hurston rejects the paradigm of the white man as devil being the primary structuring element of race relations in America; it is a sentiment that is well-understood by her and to a degree appreciated by her as well.

Zora Neale Hurston was the daughter of a Baptist preacher and was no doubt quite familiar with religious themes and the power that religion had to shape the lives of the people around her. It is clear from her writing that while she may not have adopted the same level of piety as that of her father, she did utilize religious imagery powerfully and effectively. In her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, she devotes an entire chapter to "Religion." She explains that despite the prevalence of religious sentiment in her home, she questioned, from very early on, certain theological inconsistencies that she saw in the faith of her family. Though she claims that the questions "went to sleep" inside her as she grew, religion is a living, breathing character in her work that interacts with her other characters and hums rhapsodically in her narrative tune. Take for example in "Sweat," the initial scene a wedge is already driven between Sykes and Delia, when Sykes tricks Delia into thinking that a rattlesnake, which Delia is deathly afraid of, is beside her. As the story develops and their relationship deteriorates a false rattlesnake is replaced by an actual snake that Sykes managed to catch since it was lethargically full of frogs. As their marriage crumbles and as Bertha, Sykes's fat mistress, makes calls at their home-it is the snake that comes alive having properly digested its food. This is the biblical story of Adam and Eve writ small, though with one noteworthy twist, Adam brings Eve the troubles of the serpent. The image of the serpent and its theological implications are all the more talismanic as its progressive manifestation, from simulacra to total vivification, perversely pantomimes the sundering of her marriage.

What Hurston may have lacked in religious convicted was made up for by an abiding and compulsive desire to preach. The subjects of her homilies were often about the significance of language, not only something she had studied so hard to understand in her ethnographic studies in college, but something that she crafted so patiently and thoroughly in her fiction. In Moses, Man of the Mountain, she portrays Moses as a man who brings liberation through language, language as liberation (Cuiba 120). In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie's grandmother explains that how she wanted to "preach about colored women sittin' on high, but they wasn't no pulpit for me." Without a pulpit that great sermon becomes the narrative of Janie's life, i.e. Hurston's novel, as her grandmother resolves, "Ah'd save de text for you" (Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God 16). Hurston's texts are in many respects are the sum of her sermons which were preached from the pulpit through the characters in her stories.

Zora Neale Hurston was a controversial and divisive figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Her work challenged many of the established desires of that group of intellectuals, and she challenged them with arrogance, stereotypically uncommon among black women of the pre-WWII era. Hurston dealt with a number of themes deftly in her fiction and non-fiction. It is a small stretch of the imagination to suggest that there were at least "three Hurstons" operating in her work. There is Professor Hurston, the anthropologist and ethnographer lecturing us on the importance of connecting with the authentic nature of a group's language and not sacrificing it in the name of political progress. There is "little Zora," the young girl from Eatonville, who did not know what it was like to be colored until she was placed in a world that would not let her forget; however, she is not overly perturbed by it and by making the best of her "colored me" in any way she could and she invites others to do the same. Finally, there is Reverend Hurston who recapitulates the rhapsodic, spiritual tone of her father during his sermons in order to advocate for the liberation of the spirit through a triumphant reconnection with language and its riches. According to biographers she spent the last years of her life working in a number of different positions in various areas of employment, though it is to wonder given her diverse literary occupations whether this situation suited her all the same.

[1] Some research suggests that despite her own claims that she was not born in Eatonville, FL but in Alabama and moved to Eatonville as a young girl.

Cultural Encounters of the Literary Kind

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 07:04:00 +0000

In hindsight, Samuel Huntington's now prophetic invocation of the "Clash of Civilizations," to explain the current global sociopolitical dynamic in contemporary society, can be seen to have a common intellectual experience with the narratives of cultural encounter by such authors as Graham Greene and Paul Bowles. Concomitantly, the current military quagmire in Iraq has reignited allusions to the Vietnam Conflict of four decades prior. The "fiction" of The Quiet American and The Spider's House speaks truth to our current situation more concretely than the grand ideological pronouncements of political scientists or historians. Both Greene and Bowles have a rather dour picture about the possibilities for reconciliation in a global ethical sense, and while we are not required to believe the conclusions they draw; it would behoove us to acknowledge the significant evidence they rally in their favor to support their outlook.

In the opening scene of The Quiet American, Thomas Fowler, the cynical and at times arrogantly self-assured British journalist, is waiting for Alden Pyle to return along with Phuong, a beautiful Vietnamese girl and one-time lover of Fowler. While being followed upstairs by Phuong, Fowler muses about the cleverly irksome things he could say to her but reconsiders and concludes, "Neither her English nor my French, would have been good enough to understand the irony" (11). One of the most if not the most fundamental aspect of cultural encounter is the deep barrier of language. Language in so many ways structures our reality, some philosophers such Martin Heidegger and Hans Gadamer offer that Language is the fundamental structure of reality. The failure to understand one another linguistically, often leads to the genuine failure of understanding one another in any capacity. Greene's novel constantly makes references to the difficulties of communication in foreign cultures. In another scene at the beginning of Chapter 3, Fowler is heading up the stairs to his flat after returning from the hospital and passes by the seemingly always present group of women gossiping about the neighborhood and wonders "what they might have told me if I had known their language” (115). Reaching the door of his flat, he hopes Phuong has received a message, if she was still there. His uncertainty is such because, "she wrote French with difficulty, and I couldn't read Vietnamese" (115) Greene is obviously committed to illustrating Fowler's lack of understanding and the problems, uncertainties and confusions that arise as a result.

Greene's repeated characterization of Fowler's ignorance reveals a second point about the nature of language in cultural encounter. As an experienced journalist in Indochina, Fowler by the start of the novel has been there approximately two years; one would think that he would have tried to learn some Annamese, that is the language of the Mon-Khmer people in Vietnam. It would obviously be an advantage as a reporter to be able to interview people in their native tongue, and of course to converse with the beautiful Phuong. Linguistic imperialism is often seen as a byproduct of the colonial situation. Fowler's ambivalence towards learning the Vietnamese language is a further bloc to cultural understanding and can be a source of cultural and racial tension. However, Fowler is not totally oblivious to the damage that such a willful ignorance creates, after realizing that Phuong would not understand the irony of his jests- he notes, "I had no desire to hurt her or even myself."(11) The romantic nature of those comments aside, there is something pointed about Fowler's aversion that suggests that acting in this way not only hurts another person or another culture, but also hurts oneself in the end.

Another feature of the colonial situation in cultural encounter is the essentializing tendency of foreign or colonized cultures. Cultural essentialism takes many forms, some with ironically good intentions, and others a byproduct of ignorance or self-assigned superiority. In Paul Bowles's The Spider's House, an expatriate American John Stenham living in Fez, Morocco, much like the narrator in Greene's novel, is a somewhat cynical and smug outsider. Unlike Fowler, Stenham is well-versed in the culture and language of Morocco and deeply admires it. While talking in a café to a rather judgmental British tourist, Polly, he tries to exculpate Polly's assessment that Moroccan culture is "primitive." This judgment was reached after he had previously explained the lack of windows in the café was due to the Moroccan conception of buildings as sheltering tents and thus to be really inside and feel safe there are no views to the outside. Stenham in response to Polly summation suggests, "They're not primitive at all. But they've held on to that and made it a part of their philosophy” (187) Essentializing the lack of windows to the philosophical survival of an old lodging system even in the defense against indictments of primitivism is still damaging to cultural and racial harmony. According to Stenham such "survivals" remain because of the "and then" nature of Moroccan society. What he offers is that because of the theological stipulation of Allah's constant intervention in daily affairs, Moroccans do not seek to find explanations or causes of things-as everything is, as it is, because Allah wills it. This is not like western culture according to Stenham, since Stenham is firmly a "because" culture. Polly, not done with her pronouncements, finds it all rather depressing. Stenham is quick to point out that there is nothing depressing about it; it is only depressing because of the Christian influence. He fears that Morocco in a few years will be nothing more than another European slum. Polly takes some offense to this suggesting that it is the French influence, which has brought railroads, streetlights, and much needed modernity. The philosophical and cultural conflict between the "East" and "West" illustrated by this exchange has been exceptionally well documented in recent years. Polly for her part is guilty of a kind of Orientalism, a thesis presented by Edward Said regarding the stereotyping and exoticizing of Eastern and Middle Eastern cultures. By suggesting that the west has made Morocco more modern has imposed a single, stifling view of what counts as modernity. The general rejection of cultures that do not fall in-line with this view is a common element of cultural encounter, one that generally speaking leads to conflict.

Alden Pyle, the committed anti-communist and titular "Quiet American" in Greene's novel is convinced that the Vietnamese do not want communism. Fowler, the cynic, quips "they want rice"(119) He also suggests what they really do not want is their "white skins around telling them what they want"(119). The racial tension between the Vietnamese and the French is palpable in Greene's novel. Just prior to the discussion about the Vietnamese desires, Fowler was taking Pyle's idol, York Harding, to task for devoting so much effort to things that do not exist, namely mental concepts such as God, Liberty, and Democracy. This discussion stands as a foil to the very sensory description of racial tension that Greene provides subsequently. Fowler informs Pyle, "I like the buffaloes, they [referring to Vietnamese] don't like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember from a buffalo's point of view you are a European too” (119). Greene is insistent on pulling out these physical differences graphically, the white skins, the smell; even the buffaloes can tell who is who. It is the prerogative of modern scholarship that the concept of race is a social construction rather than set patterns of physiognomic difference. Nevertheless, tense conditions between various racial groups in this country and in others continue to persist along deeply sensed physical perceptions.

Bowles's work is equally cognizant of racial tension, but instead of defining it along explicitly physiological characteristics there is a typological component as well. In an episode involving Lee, a young woman whose "express desire was that all races and all individuals be equal,"(251) Stenham spots a boy who wades out into the middle of pool apparently to rescue a drowning insect. Stenham admits surprise that such a boy would do that, Lee's natural reaction is that the boy is likely kind-hearted to which Stenham responds, "I know but they're not” (250). Perplexed by such magnanimity, Stenham explores the boy's features for an explanation, "He could be Sicilian or Greek…but if he is [Moroccan] then I give up, Moroccan's just don't do things like that” (250). Idealistic Lee is indignant at this generalization and suggests that even if this act of kind-heartedness was unusual among a group of people generally, it does not mean any one particular individual will conform to this behavior. Bemused, Stenham replies, "But the whole point is they're not individuals in the sense you mean” (250). Bowles incisively and precisely exposes the thinking behind racial profiling. The whole point is that racial and intercultural strife evolves from a type of belief structure that does not recognize the universality of particulars. That is, it is easy to notice individuality and difference among members of the same race or culture; it becomes more difficult to discern the same kind of unique differences among the "Other." The naïve idealism which promotes the sort of belief that we are all the same underneath superficial differences is just as dangerous as the supposition that all others are "Other" in the same strange way. Regardless of the demographic categorization that one seeks to apply to a group of people, whether it is religion, race, ethnicity, or class-no demographic will act totally homogenously or hold the same set of beliefs.

In contemporary discussions, the ethical theories that deal specifically with the treatment of others in a global context fall under the heading of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism recognizes the likely insolvency of certain issues between individuals and groups of different cultural or racial background, while simultaneously holding that those differences are not necessarily insurmountable obstacles to reaching global amicability and respect. In these two novels the respective authors present the narrator as the cosmopolitan cynic, and transmit a deep sense of skepticism about the ability of humanity to accomplish anything resembling a cosmopolitan ideal. Moss, a friend of Stenham, believes that the problem with him is that he has "no faith in the human race"(211) On this count Thomas Fowler's disposition in Greene's novel is even more dolorous:

"Wouldn't we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that's why men have invented God-a being capable of understanding"(72)

We are thrown back onto ourselves when the social and racial tensions of cultural encounters are exposed, since at the beginning of each encounter there is an "I," that is trying to make sense of "them," and realizing that perhaps there is no "us."

Soft Readings of Hard Pulp or Sometimes a Carrot is NOT just a Carrot

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:12:00 +0000

Shoot’em Up is a subtle critique on the preponderant narcissism of violence and sex that is ubiquitous in the movie industry by being painfully over-the-top. It intrepidly parries violence with violence, originating from two different discursive modes, by setting the traditional "shoot em up" tropes over and against the violence done towards good “film sense” utilizing ludicrous, and on one level, mindless camp. Clive Owen's performance is so awkwardly pultaceous that it exposes the internal paradox within the movie, which is further highlighted by his child-like obsession with carrots. The carrot is really a semiotic exchange, the value of which in this symbolic economy represents the trade-off between action movie spectacle and a desire for narrative and aesthetic cohesion. In other words, the heteronormative obsession with violence will only be sated (temporarily) at the cost of a more neutered and dispassionate appreciation of film craft. The deployment of a gendered discourse is made clearer through an analysis of the gun and carrot, which are the phallocentric images that drive and divide the movie towards its climax. The close-up of the no-man Smith biting a carrot has an eerily Freudian implication. Those implications become fully realized psychoanalytic themes as we are introduced to pregnant and lactating prostitutes, a symbolic merging of feminine archetypes irrupting unexpectedly (the sort of unexpectedness a prostitute might experience if she was, in fact, expecting) into the hyper-masculine universe of the film’s gun-toting milieu. Furthermore, these symbols swirl around the simulacra of a public figure, whose images on TV are phantasmagorical projections concealing the decaying body politic as metaphorically exhibited by the suffering/conniving politician. Of course, the revelation of the connection between the dying Senator and the infant offers a further nuance to the previously considered juxtapositions-that of the interplay between Thanatos and Eros. Also, Monica Bellucci is smokin’ hot in this.

From Puppies to Wolves

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:21:00 +0000

“La guerre est la guerre”

Randall Jarrell was an American confessional poet, a member of the so-called Fugitive Poets, during the middle of the 20^th century. He has been described as, “perhaps the most skilled of American poets writing on the Second World War” (Hill 152). Indeed, the theme of the Second World War prefigures dominantly in many of his poems, including the three set for analysis in this paper: “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” “Losses,” and “Eighth Air Force.” As perhaps the most self-consciously psychoanalytical of the confessional poets, War itself offers a rich framework from which to construct a more universal theme, that of the loss of innocence (Willamson 283).

Jarrell in a number of his works adopts various voices, which may be related to his experiences during the war but at the same time distances himself as the particular Randall Jarrell in order to adopt an innocent or at least a voice not informed by the position of the omniscient author. This poetic strategy is described by one commentator as “the sweet uses of personae” (Beck 67). In a letter sent to a friend, we can gain significant insight to the sources of his personae:

"The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," resulted from his relief at not occupying that most vulnerable position in a combat plane. The composite voice in "Losses" intones, "In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school." Jarrell writes in the same letter that "your main feeling about the army, at first, is just that you can't believe it; it couldn't exist, and even if it could, you would have learned what it was like from all the books, and not a one gives you even an idea." The speaker of "Eighth Air Force," who judges himself along with the other "murderers" who sit around him playing pitch or trying to sleep, is but one remove from the flight instructor who describes to Tate how he would "sit up at night in the day room . . . writing poems, surrounded by people playing pool or writing home, or reading comic-strip magazines." (Beck 70)

As it relates to the loss of innocence we can see more specifically how this sweet use of personae is performed in his single most famous poem, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The poem begins mentioning “my mother” and then shortly thereafter using the word “belly,” implying an infantile or womb-like setting indicative of the settings of a child. The poem describes in indirect, uncomplicated detail the events that transpired. The loss of innocence is marked by the juxtaposition of the images “dream of life” and “nightmare fighters,” and the last line in which the author states his demise is both marked with a sense of bitterness at the casualness of his treatment, and resigned acceptance of the Gunner’s fate. The adoption of the innocent persona is also deployed in Jarrell’s poem “Losses.” The speakers attempt to offer an analogy as to how they died mentioning, aunts, pets and foreigners. This list at first is a bit eclectic and strange until the next line explains the selection, “When we left high school nothing else had died/For us to figure we had died like.” The list represents things that children, who are generally unfamiliar with death on a personal level, might have experienced as dying: a distant relative, clearly implying that these boys in their “new planes” were too young to have a parent die, a childhood pet, disappointing but commonplace, or someone they see on TV or hear about on the radio, too far away to really care about. The personal and tragic experience of their own death is an all too vivid and impactful event; such an event jolts them from their relatively quiescent relationship with death into the stark realities of war and suffering.

Another important rhetorical device employed by Jarrell in his work is to exploit the confusing, ambiguous and hectic nature of war as expressed by its inveigling and indirect language. Orwell notes this phenomenon of the fluidity and moral flexibility of war language:

In war and other times of political crisis, direct, forceful language becomes "transformed" and used in defense of the "indefensible." According to Orwell, political forces make use of the ambiguity and flexibility natural to language and metaphorical thought to further their political goals, making them more palatable to ordinary people through sterile terminology and euphemism. (Hill 153)

The use of military jargon is an effective means of obfuscating the blunt trauma of war, shielding innocence from its own crimes, obviously in one particular instance in “Eighth Air Force,” this language is betrayed when the speaker refers to himself and the other members of his troop as “murderers.” However, the presence of such language in his poetry foregrounds the awkwardness of military language, the narrative and rhetorical tension of the military phraseology is made apparent in the first two lines of “Losses”: “It was not dying, everybody died/It was not dying we had died before.” Dying is inherently personal and private, thus militaristically it does not, and cannot apply. Even the poems title, “Losses,” reinforces this sense of euphemism (Hill 154). It is not deaths or even casualties it’s…losses. As the poem progresses, however, the further exploitation of deflected discourse continuously builds the narrative tension in the work the “counting of scores,” as if it were just a game, the “turning into replacements” negating the individuality of one soldier or his death and thus annihilating a distinction between them. This tension maintains the innocent oblivion of the speaker until at the end, an overwhelming bitterness breaks the mood of the poem when the speaker asserts: “It was not dying --no, not ever dying.” Finally, the weight of the deflection becomes too much and the coming of age, the recognition of the reality of the situation becomes apparent as the speaker switches out of military code and style and questions, “Why are you dying…Why did I [my emphasis] die?” In remembering Tennyson’s mantra in “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” we can see why this questioning is a rhetorical break from the previous mode of the poem, to question one’s death, one’s dying, is indeed a violation of duty-“their’s is not to reason why, their’s is but to do and die.” This questioning not only marks a rhetorical break, but the putting aside of childlike concerns about the scores of missions, and girls and coming face-to-face with one’s own mortality. This individualization marks both the maturation of the speaker, as self-awareness is a hallmark of maturity, and the finality of the poem as for the first time the speaker refers to himself as “I,” in a manner highly uncharacteristic of “military speak.”

Another method of elucidating the ambiguity of war as a metaphor for the ambiguities of life is through the use of dream imagery, “the dream is a favorite motif of Jarrell's, both in his war poems and in his other poetry” (Calhoun 2). Dreams by their nature are confusing, and vague, but at the same time can be vividly intense, clarifying and extremely specific. The fog of war can often mimic the fog of adolescence, the whirlwind of emotions and hormones, the transition from childhood to young adulthood can be a confusing, intense and taxing period. Jarrell using dreams as a proxy for the fog is able to extend the metaphor from war to the battles in life. In “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” Jarrell performs an interesting reversal of the dream metaphor. Initially, the innocent womb-like existence of the gunner is the “dream of life” and he wakes up to a nightmare. Life is the tenuous dreamlike reality of the gunner, and reality is the distorted nightmare, the gunner literally wakes into death from his sleep of life (Cyr 94). This confusion is emblematic of the hectic and turbulent nature of war, which again is further emblematic of the confusion of life as one attempt to grapple with the realities therein. The inchoate distinctions between life and death, dream and reality are resolved in stark detail by the materialistic, “hard” description of being washed out of turret by a hose-there is no unclear dialogue, no deflected discourse in the action being described at the end of the poem. The dream trope is also utilized in “Eighth Air Force” in the final stanzas in attempt to display the difficulties in resolving the moral ambiguities that soldiers are faced with during war. In this poem the puppy has become the wolf, though admittedly through no fault of the puppy but through the routine of war as the speaker sighs, “Still this is how it is done.” Yet, the moment of moral clarity is brought through to its apotheosis through a dream. Jarrell in the line preceding the final stanza shows that the speaker has given into his moral responsibility invoking the phrase, “behold the man.” That phrase, Ecce homo, is used by Pontius Pilate when he is presented a scourged and thorn-crowned Jesus shortly before his Crucifixion. That religious imagery is maintained into the final stanza as Jarrell, “Using a complex allusion to the dream of Pontius Pilate's wife just prior to the crucifixion of Christ (Matthew 27:19), Jarrell's speaker obliquely refers to having "suffered, in a dream, because of him / many things" (Hill 159). It is many things suffered in the dream of that man “this last savior,” that transcends or at least clarifies the transition from puppy to wolf, from child to adult, from innocence to deep guilt. Jarrell does not exculpate the speaker, but neither does he condemn him when he comments that though men lie and wash their hands, in blood, he “finds no fault in this just man.” It is not just man that is responsible; it is the system of war, which manipulates individuals to becoming wolves, though these wolves are responsible, ultimate responsibility lies elsewhere.

Jarrell in the post-World War II saw the final primacy of the machine, its subjugation of all human feelings and intimations to the mindless "systems" of technology (Fowler 120-121). It is these “systems” that not only operate in wartime, but at all times, which pulls us along from sweet childhood to a more sour adulthood. It is at the teats of these systems where puppies are suckled into wolves.

Photography Redux or the Randomness of a Monday Morning

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:16:00 +0000

I am always impressed by those who have photographic vision, though I am always at some pains to grasp exactly what it is about that kind of seeing, if it exists at all. Photographic seeing if it exists allows a photographer to capture a moment in history. That captured moment can entertain us, horrify us or educate and enlighten us. The more talented the photographer, the more we are made aware of the world around us. Photographic vision not only allows us to see more of the world, but allows us to see through different eyes. Henri Cartier-Bresson whose work spanned the 20th century, Margaret Bourke-White who worked primarily before 1950 and Cindy Sherman, a currently living and active artist are three photographers, who capture what I appreciate about photographic vision.

Henri Cartier-Bresson was present at many important events of the 20th century, from the Spanish Civil War, to the German occupation of France, the partition of India and the Chinese revolution, Cartier-Bresson was a photojournalist of the highest rank. Throughout most of his photographic career there was one constant, his Leica 35mm. The French novelist and critic Andre Pieyre de Mandiargues once said that Cartier-Bresson used his Leica "rather as the Surrealists tried to use automatic writing: as a window that leaves one permanently open for visitations of the unconscious and the unpredictable" (Ebony 2004, 188). Cartier-Bresson in his most famous collection The Decisive Moment, sought to capture life in its singular essence, the living essence of life. In his own words he offers upon discovering the Leica, "It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it…determined to "trap" life-to preserve life in the act of living" (Sontag 1973, 185). This act of trapping of capturing the decisive moment would become the hallmark of his photography. Cartier-Bresson's vision allowed him to capture those decisive moments where most of us would only see the mundane. Nietzsche suggests that, "To experience a thing as beautiful means to experience it necessarily wrongly" (Sontag 1973, 184). Cartier-Bresson understanding of the world often flew in the face of such a dour supposition.

One photograph that uniquely and elegantly captures that moment in which one's attention is immediately and intensely drawn to the beautiful out of the mundane is Cartier-Bresson's Behind the Gare St. Lazare. On the face of it we see a man running across a large puddle behind what is a train terminal in Paris. However, a formal analysis of the image reveals delightful similarities that would otherwise be missed in the instant (Savedoff 1997, 208-209). Initially, the fortuitous timing of the picture as the man has just stepped off the ladder and has not broken the mirror-like surface of the water. Secondly, the slats of the ladder match the repeated metallic bars of the fence behind him. The poster on the wall features an image of a dancer leaping recapitulating the main action of the photo. Finally, the ripples in the puddle repeat the circular elements peeking out from the surface of the water. The schematization of the moment in time reveals an aesthetic symmetry between the environment and action, between the animate and inanimate, which is awe-inspiring and elegantly beautiful. Some might complain that the fortuitousness of such an image is perhaps too fortuitous, and indeed such a complaint might be legitimate. We are apt, when it comes to photos, to lend our confidence too quickly in its veracity (Savedoff 1997, 207). This easily given confidence evidenced by the mischievous appeal of "photoshopped" pictures, in which images are digitally altered in such a way as to appear legitimate. In a painting, the repetition that is envisioned in Cartier-Bresson's photo would seem contrived and strained. Because the nature of the photograph imputes an "as is" structure as it is an imaging of reality, which appears to us "as is," it is then the case that the repetition is unique, surprising and thus beautiful. It might be argued that the scene presented here is indeed contrived, but the "truth" of the moment is nevertheless maintained through Cartier-Bresson's unique photographic vision. As a world traveler Cartier-Bresson caught many decisive moments around the world, in doing so the viewers of his photographs became more aware of the subtlety and complexity of the world around them.

In another photograph of his travels, not the city streets of Paris but the remote mountain province of Kashmir on the border of India, Pakistan, and China we see four nomads watching out over the land. Kashmir is a heavily disputed territory and the sight of much bloodshed and violence. Though Cartier-Bresson was an insightful photojournalist, his photographic vision saw more than just that violence but the calm and peacefulness that could be found even in this war torn region. By presenting a view of Kashmir that did not consist primarily of violent upheaval, Cartier-Bresson offered a vision of social hope and social connection even in times of turmoil through an appeal to the senses.

The next photographer's sight we will explore is that of Margaret Bourke-White. A photojournalist for the Luce Empire, her photos in Time, Life, and Fortune documented the world with a spectacular realism and emotional appeal. She was one of the first western photographers to witness the industrialization of the Soviet State, and one of the first women photographers to gain international fame and currency. Photojournalism as a medium of expressing information was brought into its golden age through her work. Though according to Barthes there is no code in the message of a photograph, a photograph can open up a moment in a way that a painting, or a story cannot. Sometimes, photographs can express an actuality that is behind the reality of daily life. Because reality has its own codes, that door to actuality can sometimes be closed off to us. The photographer as documenter and expositor can open those doors as Bourke-White explains, "Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open" (Fletcher 2007, 54).

The depression of the pre-WWII era was devastating to many families and individuals, in the South and Midwest. A number of journalists and photographers collaborated to document this plight, to draw attention to those who would not otherwise get attention. Notably James Agee and Walker Evans work, Let us Now Praise Famous Men, and Bourke-White and Erskine Caldwell's, You Have Seen Their Faces highlight in raw actuality the reality of the depression. One photo is particularly revelatory in this regard. "Louisville Flood Victims," juxtaposes to provocative effect a line of poor blacks huddled on a bread line beneath a billboard of a happy white family in their car and the banner: "World's Highest Standard of Living" (Fletcher 2007, 54). The exquisite acuteness of the message is intentional and thought provoking, and intentionally so. Much about photography is subtle and complex, Bourke-White's photo here is most definitely to the contrary. The contradistinction between the bright, shining, and oblivious faces of the family in the car coupled with the stern and dark faces of those waiting in line for bread underneath brings a poignant and legitimate note of irony to the phrase, "There's no way like the American Way." Other photos from You Have Seen Their Faces, such as this one of poor farmers in Yazoo City, Mississippi document the plight of the South during the Great Depression. Here we see their faces and realize that this group, this region of the United States had been forgotten. The text of the book reads, "It is that dogtown on the other side of the railroad tracks that smells so badly every time the wind changes. It is the Southern Extremity of America, the Empire of the Sun, the Cotton States; it is the Deep South, Down South; it is The South" (Caldwell and Bourke-White 1995, 1). By photographing the faces and people of the American South, Margaret Bourke-White made the rest of the country aware of the social circumstances of the hardest hit, forcing the American polity to see what they did want to see.

The final photographer whose vision reveals insight is that of Cindy Sherman. Cindy Sherman is a conceptual artist and photographer whose works often include herself installed in iconic and recognizable scenes. Her work tackles many subjects including ones of gender roles, identity, issues of sexual politics and the "gaze." As such, much of her corpus is described as "feminist" in nature. However, this questionable label aside, the work of Cindy Sherman offers a vision of culture, which is unique insofar that it re-consumes images from other forms of popular media and then represents that re-consumption back onto itself. Thus philosophically, her photographic sight is a mirror of itself. In other words, her work offers a method of understanding how visual media understands itself, or for us how photography might see itself (Mauer 2005). In one of her most recognized set of works Untitled Film Stills, Sherman interposes herself in a number of non-specific yet eminently recognizable scenes. In Untitled Film Still #6, the twisted pin-up girl trope is played upon to slightly diabolical effect. The classic pin-up girl of the 40's and 50's should offer a sense of invitation and not seduction. There are specific bodily dimensions that must be offered, she must look ecstatic to be there. Here Sherman's proportions are intentionally photographed askew, by rotating the trunk of her body and arching her back her breast and hips look narrow and small instead of the canonical strictness associated with pin-ups. The clothes that she is wearing are clashing and mismatched and the facial expression is stultifying, she looks lifeless as a mannequin. The scene in general looks messy and disorganized, the sheets are wrinkled and the flower pattern is confusing. The overall rhetoric from the scene clashes inherently from what such a photograph would send as a message. Hence, the paradox of the photo offers a vision of the pin-up girl that is inherently accusatory, even morally imposing. Yet, despite this moral approbation, there is something undeniably attractive about the scene. Something that exudes a particular residue of sexuality despite the intentional mocking is evident.

Much of the work of Cindy Sherman mocks the kind of role that sex and sexual politics play in our society. At the end of the 1980's during the H.W. Bush administration, funding was cut to artists such as Andre Serrano, and photographer Robert Mapplethorpe who pushed the boundaries of social norms. The National Endowment for the Arts deemed that their work was morally licentious and corrupting and as such could not be publicly supported. In response, Cindy Sherman created a series of photographs in a collection entitled Sex. In this series of works, she photographed assembled parts of medical dummies in blatantly sexual positions and formations. How one chooses to understand these pictures, either as a pornographic depiction of the human body or as a random assemblage of plastic parts, it generates pointed queries about what is going to count as indecent expression and the philosophical underpinnings for those determinations. Though much of Sherman's work is both amusing and somewhat mischievous, it also asks very serious questions about issues of national morals and values and the role of art and photography to be mediums of free expression in a modern and ostensibly open liberal society. Cindy Sherman's photographic vision allows us to examine culture from a slightly askew perspective in order to fundamentally reassess its foundations.

Through the work of Cartier-Bresson, Bourke-White, and Sherman it is possible to understanding the concept of photographic seeing as an educational process by which we can examine who we are as individuals, as a culture, as a nation, and as a world through eyes that are not our own. Such a process can be beautiful as in the work Cartier-Bresson, poignant and informative as in the photos of Bourke-White, or somewhat disturbing as often the work of Cindy Sherman is. Photographic seeing draws our attention in unexpected and unusual ways, and because of this we are all the more richer.

Non-Primary Colors

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 04:42:00 +0000

The CMYK color model is an old standard subtractive coloring model used in color printing. There is of course the Pantone Hexachrome coloring model, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. As a side note, the K in CMYK stands for Key, and the Key color is black. I am sure you also remember from art class of course that the primary colors (Red, Blue, Green) could not be mixed together or subtracted from each other to create black or white.

Keeping this in mind, there has been much talk in the media lately about the preparedness of the United States for the possibility of having a Black man or Woman President. Inevitably, the discussion shifts to the depictions of Black men as President within mainstream media. The idea seems to be that mass media has made the concept of a Black President of the United States more "palatable" to the average American by his mere appearance in the movies and television. At this point the character played by Dennis Haysbert on the popular show 24, President David Palmer is trotted out, or Morgan Freeman who played President Tom Beck in Deep Impact is mentioned in order to illustrate that America is certainly more comfortable with the idea since they have already seen it happen, I guess.

This argument strikes me as a bit naive and somewhat faulty. Of course, it should be mentioned that David Palmer was assassinated and President Beck presided over the destruction of most of the Eastern Seaboard by a comet who classically admits at the end of final pre-apocalypse address to the American populous after all contingencies and back-up plans have failed, "that's it." Well, that is it. The movie is over, the season finale concludes and everyone goes back to the actualities of reality, no harm no foul, regardless of your political leanings. The justification for the palatability of such roles for African-Americans seems to derive from the apparent lack of a public outcry coupled with the observation that advertisers haven't pulled their commercials and that nobody is writing vitriolic screed about the presence of an African-American President in a movie or TV show. But this only reveals the degree to which blatant and public racism is considered inappropriate or at least unfashionable. If someone were to protest the presence of such a character there would be an immediate condemnation from the talking heads declaiming the audacity and the anti-progressive stance of such a protest, not to mention a further reevaluation of the race issue in America, which is the last thing anyone who is actually racist would want...attention. Racists and bigots are not as stupid as their detractors would have us believe or their socially and culturally anachronistic views might indicate. Clearly, the lack of a reaction to such characters is merely indicative of the irrelevancy of such tokenism, which is what this issue is really about.

Tokenism in Hollywood and other mainstream cultural outlets provides an excellent cover for those who would carry the banner of racism and sexism. It is not to suggest that African-Americans should not continue to seek out such positive roles. It is not even to suggest that filmmakers, producers, and directors should not intentionally seek to place African-Americans and other minority groups in non-traditional roles and settings (such as not making all terrorists Arab). But to claim that the presence of such roles legitimizes those who would claim in turn that Americans are in fact comfortable with such possibilities and therefore if Senator Obama or any other minority candidate in the future fails to be elected then it is due to the politics of the candidate and not his skin color is a dangerous and slippery proposition. This palatability proposition allows genuinely racist forces to flourish underneath this level of political discourse. This proposition essentially acts as an automatic disqualification for anyone who would seek to "play the race card," even in situations where race is still an issue, and I claim that race in the US in 2008 is still very much an issue. The truly disconcerting element about this latest form of tokenism is the ease by which it is being propagated and manifested. Amazingly, the token examples are being pulled not out of real life, but out of a movie or television show, scripted ones at that (I know, scripted TV still exists, incredible). At least in sports there were Tennessee State, Texas Western, and Jackie Robinson, and at least in the military there were the Tuskegee Airmen. Here there is only a simulacra of a token, a simulation of a Black President. It is patronizing at its most duplicitous to offer movie characters as examples of a legitimate indicator of public sentiment or as a tangible shift in the racial and political landscape of this country.

At its most benign I see this sort of reference as an attempt to placate the suspicions that we as a country are still torn and afflicted by race related issues. As if the soothing baritone voice of David Palmer will comfort our fears that this country is still racked by racism. It is a bedtime story to lull us into a false consciousness about the existence of the color barrier. The tragedies and travesties of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans not the least of which were man-made exposed this raw, festering wound and made us all aware of another so-called inconvenient truth. This one however can be easily triaged. That triage comes in the form of the now three year Junior Senator from Illinois Barack Obama. Though Obama first gained the spotlight at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, where his keynote speech electrified the audience and pundits suggested that his "audacity of hope" rhetoric might position him well in the future; it is the Katrina Disaster which gave him the political pretext to run in 2008, or more accurately gave him the political credentials to be a viable candidate since actual credentials are somewhat lacking. There is a sort of insidiousness in my implication I realize, somehow Obama is a tool of the political elite which has given him the green light to run in order to conceal the black and white divisions that segregate this country as severely as the red and blue ones. But nothing suggests to me more that Obama's Blackness is the key and the center of our four-color political theory than the fact that his middle name is Hussein, his father was raised as a Muslim in Kenya (though his book suggests that he was a confirmed atheist at the time of meeting Obama's mother, whatever that means), that he grew up in a secular family and the one thing people really talk about is his race. With the rise of Islamophopia in the West and the standing Beltway aversion to public confessions of atheism the thought that Obama's race would be the big issue suggests either that the Obama spin machine has done an excellent job of downplaying these facts or indeed the one thing he cannot hide is the one thing America cannot get over. For the time being as long as there are candidates who happen to be black there will be Black Candidates.

On the day of the Superbowl, it seems appropriate that I mention the infamous question apocryphally asked of Doug Williams, "How long have you been a black quarterback?" As it turns out the winning signal caller of Superbowl XXII in 1988 misheard the question. However, it is this sort of appellation "black quarterback," which continues to haunt our linguistic landscape and such damages constructive and helpful political discussion. Interestingly enough, this Superbowl came on the heels of a media debacle for CBS when 15 days earlier Jimmy the Greek made some controversial statements about how the dominance of black athletes was due to their breeding during the period of slavery. He was quickly fired for those comments, and the first black quarterback to win the Superbowl went on to beat the Broncos 42-10. Currently, the big fight in the NFL and the NCAA is to have more black coaches and assistant coaches, incidentally Doug Williams was the head coach at Grambling State from 1998-2002. He took over after the legendary Eddie Robinson who recently passed in 2007. Today there is less talk about Black quarterbacks, the current quarterbacks who happen to be black have suggested recently that they receive somewhat harsher criticism than their white counterparts. Some of those complaints might be legitimate, some of it might just be a little oversensitive considering the drubbing that Eli Manning had taken in the New York press until his epic run in the postseason. While the Michael Vick situation did re-ignite some of those racial flames as some attempted to exculpate Vick on the grounds that dog-fighting is a Southern thing, or some other code word, many quarterbacks in the NFL and I would say almost all quarterbacks in NCAA enjoy racial anonymity.

Racial anonymity is not color-blindness. People who claim that they do not recognize color or race are really propagating a type of naive cosmopolitanism that ignores difference and is oblivious to the cognitive traits that humans must employ in order to make judgements on a routine basis. We must make handy stereotypes in order to function, it was built-in so that we can avoid dangerous situations. This is discrimination,

but it is not one for which we are morally culpable. Yet racial anonymity is more of a linguistic ambivalence versus a cultural or racial blindness. As an example of this, consider the comic book (using that CYMK color printing model) sponosred by the Catholic Church the Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact, which was in publication from 1946-1972 and distributed to parochial schools all across the United States. In 1964, a series of issues (Vol. 19: 11-20) called "Pettigrew for President." The comic follows a family working for a candidate in the 1976 election. The series which ran from January to June of that year culminated at the National Convention. Throughout the comic we never see the face of Governor Timothy Pettigrew. At the end of the Convention when all the delegates are counted and Gov. Pettigrew is introduced and it is revealed that he is black. The last panel ends with poignant paragraph, suggesting that in 1976, the 200th anniversary of American Independence that it was possible and appropriate that an African-American candidate could gain the nomination of a major political party and have a chance to win. Though they were at least 32 years off, and they did of course call Mr. Pettigrew the first "Negro" candidate, the Catholic Church was certainly progressive for its time. I think the message is not that a "Negro" candidate should in fact win the election or that there should be more Black candidates for President, but that what makes a good candidate is his or her ability to build consensus, establish a solid political platform and speak intelligently about the will of the people. We are not blind to his or her color or race, but it is only after the primary colors of our current political landscape, the red states, the blue ones, and our green attitude (constiuted by both the environment and money) that we should add into the mix black and white.

Common Sense Philosophy now Less Common, or Dancing Around Architecture

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 07:04:00 +0000

The building pictured to the right is the MIT Stata Center, which houses a couple of Computer Science and AI Laboratories, as well as the Linguistics and Philosophy departments. Designed by a Pritzker-Prize winner, the equivalent of a Nobel in the Architecture world, Frank Gehry is being sued for design and structural flaws. The building once described by Gehry as looking like a drunken robot party (I fail to understand why this would be a reasonable design concept, unless they were of course...girl robots), the flaws have caused such problems as mold appearing in the amphitheater due to a poor drainage system and some masonry cracking. The court papers also complain about sliding ice and snow. Sliding ice and snow, really, is this really a surprise to anyone? Look at the building, seriously, what did they expect in Cambridge? Gehry claims that it's a result of "value engineering," code for "the Luddite Philistines don't appreciate my genius," or more xenophobically, "cheap immigrant labor." The construction company responsible for the $300 million abortion claims innocence and no philosophy professors or other faculty who have offices there, including one, Noam Chomsky, have been injured yet. MIT administrators remain on the insurance hunt warpath, common sense warpath long stopped, sometime after the Scottish Enlightenment.

The New York Times Tower designed by the 1998 winner of the Pritzker Prize, Renzo Piano, famous for his Georges Pompidou Center, is also suing the architecture firm responsible for this exposed ceramic roded cruciformed phallus. Apparently, ice forming around the rods heat slightly during the day, I know hard to believe, but this heating causes ice to fall from the sky at intense gravity accelerated, skull-damaging velocities. The structure of the building, with its glass facade has also led to two windows shattering and falling to the earth in the span of a week. This so-called green-building with its reduced environmental footprint and energy-saving features (glass still remains sharp, however) is not without its merit, but they will have to do something about the death icicles.

It is likely true that the amount of planning, testing, and redesigning that must go into these contemporary structures is mind-numbing and tedious at best. It is also that tediousness, no doubt, which generates the massive price tags on those projects. However, it is equally interesting to encounter the cracks in the foundation (pun most definitely intended), as tiny design issues on paper become massive health and safety issues in life, and legal battles in court. Though these issues are nothing new; they are becoming more common as the desire for invention and creativity quickly outstrips the human capacity to foresee, schematize, and account for every contingency. The first such encounter for me and still one of the most head-shakingly amusing ones I have made note of is Uris Hall (pictured right), which is on the lovely campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. Apparently two graduates back in the 70's from my dear Alma Mater far above Cayuga's waters decided, after making a ton of money, that they wanted to name a building after themselves, a natural impulse I guess if you are rich. In Pittsburgh they saw the U.S. Steel building, which was composed of Cor-ten steel. This type of steel was particularly resistant to corrosion due to the fact that as the surface oxidized it would develop a brownish-orange patina that would protect the metal alloy. Both impressed by the material and the color its patina produced, they asked the material to be the principle component in the building of this academic facility. Unfortunately for them but fortunately for the students and inhabitants of Cornell and the surrounding town, the air in upstate New York does not contain the sulfuric pollutants that the residents of Western Pennsylvania inhale. As a result, good air, ugly as sin rust. The building is currently a sort of splotched dark brown and black cage-like monstrosity but is in no danger of corroding. In other news: Men more like rodents than previously suspected in detailed planning tasks says a report out of Scotland. As you may have noticed, Scotland has had a long tradition with both Common Sense and the best laid plans of others, I bet their buildings don't look like drunken robot orgies.

A Good Loss is Hard to Find or Havant & Waterlooville FC Revisited

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 00:03:00 +0000

Liverpool 5 - Havant & Waterlooville FC 2. Despite the loss, those part-timers from Hampshire, a coastal county in the Southeast of England, did not come for a jolly-up they came to play and play they did. Taking the lead not once but twice in the first half to a side in which a deal to refinance the team was recently reached for a staggering £350 million. Playing with resilience through the first half, it was only in the second half did it look like they were actually playing a team of multi-million dollar earning professionals. While a disappointing game to the 6,000 Hawks fans that made it to Anfield, their team gave them much to cheer about and little to complain. After the game the Liverpool fans gave the team a standing ovation, earning perhaps the next best thing to a victorious result, respect. Though things will no doubt settle down in that coastal town, as the global attention fades; I am sure the players and fans will have much to talk about, including how to keep the website from crashing for the next time, and of course there will be a next time.

Heroes for the Night or Why You Must Love the FA Cup

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 22:07:00 +0000

In a great upset last night during a round 3 replay (that is rematch) of FA Cup action, which is a major soccer competition for the British Isles Havant & Waterlooville FC shocked Swansea in 4-2 banger of a game. What makes this upset notable, is that the Hawks are a number of leagues down the huge interconnected pyramid that is the U.K. Football system. There are literally thousands of soccer teams in this system most of which theoretically have a shot at winning the FA cup, though in reality only eight times has a non-premier league team won the whole thing in its 140 year history. To place the difference in supposed quality between the two teams in some perspective, Swansea play in Coca-Cola League One, in fact they sit atop the table, which is one league removed from the Barclay's Premier League, the one that features all your favorites: Manchester United, Chelsea, Liverpool, Arsenal and 16 other major soccer teams. Havant & Waterlooville FC on the other hand play in the Blue Square Conference South division which is a number of leagues down the chain. This equates to about 83 places away. Most soccer systems around the world have a mechanism known as promotion-regulation, whereby a team that finishes at the top of their table, i.e. top of the league have the opportunity to play in the next higher league. By the same token a team near the bottom of their table, may lose their spot and be regulated to a lower league the next season. Havant & Waterlooville would have to be promoted 3 times to compete in the same league as Swansea. Three times! If they happened to be regulated out of their current table they would be in the Isthmian Premier League, the Isthmian Premier League! The game itself was pretty spectacular, 6 goals is a fairly high scoring affair. Moreover, as the announcers pointedly mentioned, that these guys Heroes for the Night, are probably going to have to call in to work in the morning, along with their reveling fan base. In another example to elucidate the uncharted territory that this team now finds itself; the website that belongs to the Havant & Waterlooville team broke last night as so many people suddenly became interested in them. Their fourth round match is against the mighty Liverpool, yes that Premier League mainstay Liverpool, on January 26th. It is likely that this somewhat unlikely run will end at Anfield, but lest you think they aren't relishing the occasion to play, you can already purchase a T-shirt for the game which details their road to Liverpool. Moreover, the game will net a significant cash windfall for the team, somewhere on the order of £500,000. If the greatest upset in FA cup history were to occur and the Hawks manage to beat Liverpool, the closest analogy that is available in the United States is if a World Series of Baseball began with all the teams in the MLS plus the Entire Farm League system and the New York Yankees lost to the Tampa Yankees (a single A team). You really never know...but that's why you play the game! Go on Hawks!

The "New" Mysterians...?

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 09:38:00 +0000

In a recent article from the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries acquaints us with a delightfully rancorous professional squabble between two philosophers of mind, Colin McGinn and Ted Honderich. Though their personal drama is fairly salacious, some nonsense about ex-girlfriends and subsequent ad hominem invective, their philosophical disagreements are no less divisive. Colin McGinn along with public intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky and Thomas Nagel are proponents of a philosophical stance called the "New Mysterian" position. They suggest rather surprisingly that certain philosophical problems, like the one of consciousness are insoluble. There are varying degrees of insolubility, from: just currently not solvable all the way to a kind of a priori insolubility. The name of the position itself derives from a band called Question Mark and the Mysterians [pictured left with self-denigrating possibly ironic road sign], whose most recognizable single is the lyrically uninspired but oddly creepy "96 Tears." Just to follow the ontological suture to its origin, the band name itself is borrowed from a 1959 movie entitled, The Mysterians, which itself was originally a 1957 movie called, Chikyu Boeigun. [Tagline: They come from another World...They want 3 kilometers of land-and...FIVE of your WOMEN!] That's .6 kilometers per woman, frightening.

The central tenet of the new mysterian position holds that the problem of consciousness is either too complex or too "close" to be properly explicated. What is implied by "closeness" is that the degree to which we are imbedded in consciousness either as an individual or as a species restricts our ability to apply the analytical tools required in order to properly parse the phenomenon of consciousness. If this sounds more like an old mysterian position along the lines of a theological doctrine of omniscience and the impenetrability of the mind of God, you are likely not alone. Though it does not explicitly or even implicitly demand a manifested onto-theological structure; such a position is at worst amenable to such a concept. Moreover, those who claim this philosophical stance offer good reasons for believing that this is the case, rather than (as it might be assumed) claiming an epistemic weariness or a psychological unwillingness to go on. The mysterians allow that there is still good work to be done on this most-vexing of phenomena, but the bar of accomplishment must necessarily fall short of a complete solution to the problem of consciousness. The mysterian position as far as can be determined is rather in the minority of the academic world, and immediately a certain sort of repulsion arises at the notion that a lively philosophical position can be promulgated from the stance of necessary failure. One of the most compelling and engaging features of philosophical discourse is that it does not as a matter or course, close itself off to its horizons of possibility. Furthermore, there is a generally accepted and fortifying sense of acknowledgment of the indefatigability of the human intellect, which serves as a basis of scientific endeavor.Scientists and philosophers are notorious for their singular obsession with what might be considered abstracta or minutiae; it is that sort of commitment, which has yielded many discoveries about our world, and our experiences. Prima facie this so-called mysterian position seems to undermine that commitment at its very core.

There are those who would claim that there exists a Church of Science and of Philosophy, insofar that these institutions are dependent on certain axiomatic principles or beliefs which cannot be challenged, much like canonical church doctrine, except through major revolutionary processes or "paradigm shifts." If indeed these cathedrals of the intellect do exist, surely we must count these "mysterians" as their most dangerous heretics. [They have come to invade the earth, abduct its women, and level the basic suppositions of a mechanistic observable universe] They are perhaps even more dangerous than those who would carry the banner of "intelligent design." All they want (though, it is admittedly far too much) is to have their books included in the liturgy and set alongside On the Origin of Species. These mysterians would have us believe that science/philosophy does not and cannot have all the answers, that in fact, (ab)solution does not lie within that Church. Yet, there is a residuum of inquiry that would seem heretofore contradictory to this ostensibly defeatist attitude. The mysterian position does compel its critic to wonder, at least minimally, if in reality there exists a "solution" to the problem of consciousness, how will we know we have found it? More fundamentally, what constitutes a solution to the problem of consciousness? In the typical hypothetico-inductive experimental method, either reproducibility or some other strict method of verification is required in order to establish sufficient confidence about a theory. Is it necessary in order for us to establish the authenticity of a theory of consciousness, must it provide a description sufficiently capable of reproducing the phenomenon? Will a definition of consciousness be able to properly account for every minute and variegated circumstance in which consciousness manifests itself? From this perspective one might consider including the mysterian position in the "big tent" of Philosophy and Science, because like most other authentic or meaningful philosophical inquiries, what it leaves us with is much like what it starts us with, a....

Waiting for an Existential Stuffed Burrito

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 27 Oct 2007 03:55:00 +0000

On the way back from Planet Incubus we frequented one of the fine fast-food drive thru establishments that dot our cityscape and suburbia. While waiting in line, this kitty was waiting placidly in the cement expanse of the florescent brightened parking lot. Though the other passengers in the car were entranced by its ridiculous cuteness and we were all of course touched by the stark vulnerability of such a small kitty (note its size in relation to the thickness of the line) it stands to wonder, What is this kitty waiting for? Those of us in the drive-thru queue were clearly waiting to order 2000% of our daily sodium and an epic numbers of calories and yet this kitty, who can't read the menu and probably has enough sense to avoid the food if given the opportunity watched implacably the line of cars in the lot. Though I was still in medium orbit, it seemed clear to me that this kitten reflects a lot of our present situation (or perhaps my present situation) in the modern condition. I think this small creature is waiting for life, liberty, love and a chance. At least I hope it isn't waiting for an empanada. The most pressing question for me during this encounter is why is this kitty not afraid, bright lights, large loud exhaust producing vehicles any number of anti-kitty tires were just feet away from its position and there it waits. In art, animals, especially cats and dogs are often included to bring home a point, or to ask a question of the viewers, to represent some quality of the scene that might otherwise be overlooked, like the dog in Van Eyck's Arnolfini Wedding or the cat (that's no kitten) in Manet's Olympia. That night in the parking lot this kitten, its relative isolation was explicit and almost painful, was a jarring reminder, though I cannot presume that others could feel this way I by the same token cannot presume that at least some of those others do not feel this way.

The Lions of the Two Rivers

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 05:26:00 +0000

Yesterday, in a brief reprieve from the harsh realities of occupation, the Iraqi people celebrated victory as their national team, who were overwhelming underdogs, managed to beat Saudi Arabia 1-0 in a hotly contested Asia Cup finals, thus securing the first such championship for the "Lions of the Two Rivers." Though the traditional celebratory gunfire did result in a few unfortunate deaths and a handful of injuries, the warnings from government officials as well as the mosques did keep the accidental violence to a minimum. The well placed corner kick in the 71st minute, coupled with a critical error from the goalie, who horribly misjudged the trajectory of the ball, resulted in the only goal of the game. The header was beautifully executed by the captain Younis Mahmoud, a 24 year-old striker, who currently plays for Al-Gharafa, which is a Qatari League Team. The performance of the National Team at the Asia Cup for the past few weeks had been well-monitored by the Iraqi populous eagerly anticipating Iraq's performance, with each successive victory leading to greater and more boisterous celebrations.

A far cry from a few months ago when in April mired in controversy, strife, and general frustration (I think for obvious reasons), the team hired Brazilian coach Jorvan Vieira. Only seven weeks prior to the start of the Asia Cup, Vieira a convert to Islam accepted the job after three previous candidates rejected the position after receiving death threats, his own assistant could not come to Baghdad because he received threats that his son would be kidnapped. However, Vieira, who has a doctorate from France in Sports Sciences and speaks seven languages, galvanized his team and had them prepare for the Asia Cup in Amman, Jordan. The team is made up of all three major religious and ethic groups in Iraq: Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurds, and he managed to unite them under his calm and professional leadership. Vieira is no stranger to coaching in the Middle East, he assisted Jose Faria and led a plucky Morocco to its second World Cup in 1986. While at Mexico '86, they became the first African team to win their group and advance to the second round, a group which included England, Portugal and Poland losing a close second round match to the eventual runner-up West Germany.

The 54 year-old Vieira has coached a number of club and U20 national teams in the Middle East, and despite cobbling barely enough players (six) just six weeks prior to the Asia cup to start a training session, his real work has been in attempting to unify the hearts and minds of his players. Watching the on-the-pitch celebration, the lines between Sunni, Shia, Kurdish were blurred by tears of joy and disbelief. A dream run if there was ever one, undefeated and only conceding 2 goals during play, the Iraqis also handed pre-tournament favorite, the Socceroos of Australia a stunning 3-1 defeat on their way to their first Asia Cup title.

The post-tournament press conferences revealed the good work that Vieira and the rest of the Iraqi National Team staff have done in promoting team unity. Nashat Akram, a midfielder and man-of-the-match winner, proclaimed that this victory sent one message to the rest of the world, "The message is that there is only one Iraq, Iraq belongs to all its sects and all its people." Captain Mahmoud suggested less positively yet with the same nationalistic bravado that he wanted America out, "Today, tomorrow or the day after tomorrow." State television minutes after the victory reported that Nouri Al-Maliki, the recently much maligned and embattled Shi'a Prime Minister of Iraq, would reward each player with $10,000 dollars (Iraqi). Unfortunately, many of the players cannot return to collect that reward since some insurgents apparently do not like soccer and have threatened them or their family if they returned to the country. Also in a wise and prudent move, Vieira has announced that he would step down as head coach in a press conference after the victory, comments amusingly reminiscent speech given by Bush on the USS Abraham Lincoln way back in 2003, "I have worked my best to give happiness to the Iraqi people, to bring a warm smile to their lips and my mission is accomplished."

One victory in Central Jakarta will not lead to lasting unity, but as a general believer in the salvific power of sport; it is nice to know that the Iraqi people for the past month have had something to distract them, and that something, for once, didn't let them down.

Everybody Panic, possibly!

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sat, 28 Jul 2007 00:03:00 +0000

Standing on the dance floor surrounded by the din of the Wednesday night bar crowd and staring blankly into spaces unfamiliar and faces unreachable, I noticed that Late Night with Conan O'Brien was on. His guest that evening was Neil de Grasse Tyson. The latest in a string of physicists to explain all things cosmic, his apparent street credentials garnered him an audience with the august Mr. O'Brien. Mr. Tyson, one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people. He was discussing among other things a relatively significantly sized asteroid that has a pretty good chance (pretty good as far as the mind-boggling expanses of deep space allow) of striking the Earth. Originally calculations had the 1000ft diameter traveler striking in 2029, further refinements now suggest that the close fly-by to Earth (so close that it should make a bit of show as it streaks by), specifically Earth's gravitational pull, will alter the trajectory of Apophis in such a way as to set up a possible collision 7 years later on April 13th, 2036 to be exact. Apophis is a Hellenization of the name of the Egyptian Demon Apep. A water snake (pictured left, taken from a Temple in Luxor) he will be slayed by Ra. This of course nicely predetermines the name of the ship/mission that will be sent up there to destroy the asteroid in case the calculations turn out to not to be in our favor. The movie that results should be great, "Armageddon II: Ra Ascending," Bruce Willis' cryogenically frozen body will be reanimated just in time for the sequel and when he is done he can begin work on "Die Hard 14: Please Just Die." The mythological references aside, Tyson informed Conan that "top people were working on this" (pause for sarcasm). The chances of this rocky formation slamming into our dear planet is somewhere around 1/5000 to 1/45000. These are not necessarily overwhelmingly dire odds, but nevertheless some at NASA are concerned, and have begun to develop response strategies in order to potentially avoid disaster. The other factor in Earth's favor (one of the few things that are her favor these days) is that the size of the asteroid will not cause catastrophic damage to the entire planet; however, scientists predict if it were to strike, significant local or regional damage would occur. With all the asteroids and meteors and other NEOs (Near-Earth Objects) how was this possibly threatening one discovered. The Spaceguard Survey since 1998 has been devoted to discovery, tracking and assessment of these objects. The graph to the right shows the orbits of the terrestrial planets along with the orbits of the 100 nearest-to-Earth objects. The Spaceguard, which took its name from a similarly tasked research body in the Arthur C. Clarke novel, Rendezvous with Rama, has quite a lot to look after with a modest budget of approximately $3.5 million per year. Reading the white-paper on this research body is a bit of a jarring experience, considering the catastrophic consequences that abound in between the lines. For example consider this snappy line from the Spaceguard's documentation:

Indeed, during our lifetime, there is a small but non-zero chance (very roughly 1 in 10,000) that the Earth will be struck by an object large enough to destroy food crops on a global scale and possibly end civilization as we know it (Shoemaker and others 1990).

"Small but non-zero chance." Comforting, eh? If one becomes concerned about everything in the universe of which there is a small but non-zero chance of occurring then perhaps one would soon be committed to a mental institution suffering from an extreme case of depression and/or paranoia. Nevertheless, I am bemused by the fact that we are surrounded at all levels: locally, nationally, globally, and cosmically by threats and perceived threats (both true and false) to our existence, and despite our occasional complaints about an unnecessary cultivation of fear in our society prompted by our media and our administrations, we are often ignorantly quiescent to many of the less publicized but nonetheless possibly cataclysmic imperilments that we face on a daily basis. More entertaining is that there are people whose job, on a daily basis, is to analyze and consider these imperilments (I am sure many of whom are inside the Beltway) with all the perfunctory flourish of a mailroom attendant. I imagine water-cooler conversations must have a hint of an additional gravitas or maybe they still talk about how much the Redskins need help. Though the sky is not falling, and the bad men aren't always knocking at our door I wonder how much we'd care if we knew they were. Generally, I feel that it is dangers such as this, though not particularly asteroids crashing into Earth, that really are worth fretting over, and many of the so-called dangers to society that are hyped up in the media or by government officials are the things that are the least doom-spelling. The incurious attitude adopted by so many finds me standing in a bar disappointingly alone in my thoughts, looking intently at the TV screen, wondering if I looked hard enough or stood still enough someone else would notice.

Hyperbole Shrugged

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:36:00 +0000

On December 6th, 2006 Norman Borlaug won the Congressional Gold Medal. The Congressional Gold Medal is the legislative equivalent to the Presidential Medal of Freedom and not to be confused with the Congressional Medal of Honor which is a military distinction. Most, if they were asked to name the only two living American-born Nobel Peace Prize Winners, the name of Norman Borlaug would be slow to follow the honorable Jimmy Carter (those who might suggest that Kissinger is still alive must remember that he was born in Germany, although with that deep guttural tone which smacks of authoritarianism, how could you forget). Norman Borlaug has been called many things: a father of the Green Revolution, Greatest Living American and perhaps if you are a fan of the television show "Penn & Teller: Bullshit!" you will recognize the title the "Greatest Human Being Ever." It has been estimated that this man has saved close to a billion lives. His primary contribution to the world has focused around developing new techniques to increase the world food supply. His research has led to high-yield, disease-resistant wheat and other essential agricultural crops. Still very active and sharp at the ripe age of 93, giving his well-delivered acceptance speech without notes; it is inspiring to read about his single-minded commitment to augmenting the world's food stores, a commitment that has garnered some negative criticism due to the input-intensive nature of his farming techniques as well as his development of cross-breeding and genetic engineering techniques, which have been claimed to be unnatural or damaging to the environment. Mr. Borlaug despite his numerous appellations continues his important work as an advocate of responsible and effective world food supply management. If you are interested there is an excellent biography, The Man Who Fed the World (Durban, $25) by Leon Hesser, with a foreword by the other currently living American Nobel Peace Prize winner former President Carter.

The competition for the honorific "Greatest Living American" is not a one horse-race, in fact, according to Google, it is none other than Mr. Stephen Colbert. Through a grassroots Google Bombing campaign he has managed to earn this well-deserved title. In a further attempt to alter the public discourse, Colbert has suggested that the phrase "Giant Brass Balls" be the most popular searched phrase. Though Colbert's character in the show is a self-aggrandizing, cartoonishly conservative flagophile; his efforts have been warmly accepted by the young, and by the confused and generally awkward glances from the audience coupled with icy stares from the First Lady he received at White House Correspondence Association Dinner on April 29th, 2006, general derision from the established (read: old) media outlets and the current administration. His latest attempt at shameful self-promotion (let us be clear that it is us who should be ashamed or so I think the unconventional wisdom would suggest) is a book to be released on October 9th, 2007 called humorously enough I Am America (And So Can You!) (Grand Central, $27). Apparently, it has already received the Stephen Colbert Award for Literary Excellence, so it is sure to be a page-turning read or if I were channeling Michio Kakutani, the enigmatic New York Times reviewer who will probably get her hands on an errantly released copy of this work as well, "Colbert's limber voice seamlessly shifts between high satire and low digs at the tabloidized media, the evasive administration and the knee-jerkable public, a riotous romp through America's political and cultural landscape."

That particular dinner speech was hilariously funny and unbelievably audacious, his calm and collected demeanor in an increasingly antagonistic crowd speaks to his talent and composure. Some have impugned exceptional importance to it, Frank Rich specifically suggested that that speech was a "cultural primary" and labeled it the "defining moment" in the 2006 mid-term elections. Despite the minor coverage over the controversy engendered by Colbert's 16 minute vicious invective, its genuine popularity is a direct result of the masterful utilization of the Internet and the much bandied about Web 2.0. Colbert has done a magnificent job, better certainly than any of the candidates in the 2008 Presidential Election, if the feeble YouTube videos contrived by their respective campaigns is any indication, of monopolizing the bandwidth of the denizens of the Internet. Perhaps in the "Colbert Report" introduction he could add "Puppet-Master" to his growing list of self-congratulatory sobriquets.

Perhaps not....

Colbert and other have capitalized on the American penchant for Hyperbole in their media diet. Despite its unhealthy side-effects (it is of course terribly deficient in informative vitamin rich content and it is mostly fluff), the public loves a good outrageous claim (see Mike Gravel/Ron Paul), regardless of its "truthiness." Though I do not claim to have some special epistemological access to the truth and all its treasures, nor do I suggest that I or anyone else can be completely oblivious to the social and cultural conditions which facilitate this sort of obsession for aggrandizement; it must strike some as odd, if not just interesting, the continued misguided prioritization of and focus on the major issues and people that exist in our society and around the world. Perhaps it is the fact that real problems require real solutions, and such solutions are usually long, hard, complicated and boring. Those solutions involve standing a wheat-field in Mexico for hours for months on end taking measurements of soil pH, and seed growth. These solutions require committed focused individuals who can shrug away alarmism, elitism and baseless criticism, public notoriety and must have their feet on and ears to the ground, the right ground (not D.C. but Baghdad). These solutions require serious people. The irreverence displayed by such shows as the "Daily Show" and "Colbert Report" all too easily highlights the lack of seriousness often present in our politics and exhibited by our politicians, by seriousness it is important to recognize the distinction between it and drama. Drama is a cheap simulation for resoluteness and purposefulness. Drama is the all night debate staged by the Democrats on the situation in Iraq which took place last week. Seriousness and earnestness are the illustrated by the real sleepless nights that members of our armed services are faced with on a somewhat regular basis, the two should never be confused. We must shrug off the seductive nature of hyperbole so that we may bear the burden of a sometimes harsh reality.

Borlaug 1 Colbert 0

Steroids Possible Factor in Glasgow Bombings

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:44:00 +0000

Newspapers out of Scotland report that Alex McIlveen (pictured right), a local Glasgow taxi driver became the latest addition to a list of growing local heroes, when he confronted the bombing suspects immediately after they crashed their fuel-filled Jeep Cherokee into the Main Terminal. Upon approaching one of the suspects, who happened to be in flames due to the resulting explosion, the father-of-two did what any self-respecting Scot would do and nailed the burning terrorist right between the legs with a ferocious kick, reminiscent of anything you might see at a Celtic vs. Rangers fixture (in the stands, no doubt). Much to the surprise of the heroic cabbie, the conflagrant would-be bomber seemed to be oblivious to the blow, "he didn't even flinch," McIlveen reported. A doctor later informed Mr. McIlveen that he had managed to tear a tendon in the altercation. Unfortunately for the cab driver, he also had his Nike trainers taken, due to the impeding investigation, and received a parking fine for his troubles as well. The Daily Record reports that the terror suspect on the receiving end of this "kick felt round the world," was the Lebanese doctor, Khalid Ahmed.

Though just speculation at this juncture, one cannot rule out summarily the possibility of steroids being a factor in this incident. Typically involving long well-planned out and pre-mediated affairs which may take hours or even days to transpire; the Chris Benoit murder-suicide case is just the latest in a series of possible "roid-rage" related incidents to have transpired in recent history along with: the judge's decision to re-incarcerate Paris Hilton, the flare-up by Rosie O'Donnell on ABC's The View, many of the actions of Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chavez, the Iraq War and of course global warming. There are, in this episode however, possible signs that point to anabolics potentially playing a significant factor. One, the erratic, impatient driving evident in the alleged terrorists' action is a common symptom of roid-rage. Furthermore, the non-reaction to a massive kick to the jimmy might be indicative of a severely shruken set of testicles, and with the added hormonal output a near obliviousness to all forms of pain as illustrated by the fact that Ahmed was still in flames at the time of the booting. It also cannot go unmentioned, as these foreign doctors worked at a local Glasgow medical facility it is quite plausible to assume that they had relatively easy access to this cholesterol derived rage-juice.

Though toxicology reports will not be published or released for weeks even months, the steroid usage of Islamofascist groups as well as Al-Qaeda should certainly be monitored. It is also clear that Vince McMahon's avoidance of the steroid question in the Benoit case should raise some red-flags and will perhaps lead to an investigation of his overseas and possible terrorist connections. It is a well-known fact that the WWE has long had in its employ, an Iranian by the name of Khosrow Vaziri, who has gone under a number of aliases, no doubt to throw off any possible inquiries by authorities. He is perhaps best known for being The Iron Sheik, one half of the "Foreign Legion," along with Russian-wrestler Nikolai Volkoff. Pictured below demonstrating his famed Camel Clutch on an unsuspecting stockbroker, no doubt trying to procure funds for "charity" organizations, he has long had sympathies for the anti-US stance held by Iran. Though he was recently inducted into the Hall of Fame by longtime rival Sergeant Slaughter, interestingly enough, on a June 18th, 2007 episode of "Monday Night RAW," the Sheik requested of Jonathan Coachmen, a representative of WWE and an associate of Mr. McMahon's as well, that he be offered a segment on the show. Coachmen implied that he thought the idea was interesting and would take it under consideration. Perhaps this segment is payment for services rendered on behalf of Mr. McMahon for certain covert overseas operations. A further inquiry should soon be underway.

The issues here are quite subtle, but the coincidences speak for themselves. A touchy CEO with known terrorist sympathizers on his payroll subverting questions about Chris Benoit's medical history, a tendon-snapping kick administered to the likely miniaturized testes of a potentially nonplussed but generally unresponsive candescent Lebanese doctor, a pro-Iranian wrestler asking for blood money in the form of airtime one week prior to the tragic murder-suicide of the Benoit family and two weeks before this botched bombing attempt; I don't need a needle sticking out of someone, evidence, a medical degree, or even a coherent, plausible explanation to make the connections here. There is a growing menace to the current world order and that menace has a solid polycyclic alcohol with a hydroxyl group at the 17th carbon atom, possibly alkylated, dripping out its syringe and popping out of its blister pack.

Steroids, yesterday it was baseball records, today its Islamofascism, and tomorrow possibly world domination, if we don't stop this menace in its acne-covered tracks.

The Condemnations of the Anointed

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 10:41:00 +0000

730 years ago a French Bishop by the name of Etienne Tempier, conducted what is known as the Condemnation of 1277. Though the specific motivations for this instance of condemnation are unresolved, some suggest that it was papal mandate while evidence suggests that the Pope though not disappointed by his all-to-eager Parisian Bishop's enthusiasm was surprised to learn of this rejection of some 219 various philosophical and theological treatises and propositions. In any event multiple members of the faculty of arts at the University of Paris were condemned and their works and thoughts were placed on the syllabus of errors. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the radical condemnation of the faculty can be seen as either one salvo in the battle between faith and reason, or Tempier's touchy temperament with the increasing rationalist or even populist currents growing in the university. He maintains that the philosophical fetishism which had been growing in academia created an atmosphere which supposed that, "...there were two contrary truths, and as if against the truth of Sacred Scripture, there is truth in the sayings of the condemned pagans." This is a reference to the hermeneutic strategy misunderstood as a metaphysical assumption, which is the doctrine of double-truth. The doctrine of double-truth states in its strong and never defended form that there are two truths, one revealed by Scripture and one revealed by man's reason. The other weaker form of the doctrine offers that an individual proposition can be analyzed from the standpoint of standard theological investigation, or from reasoned philosophical inquiry. I think the genuine fear was that intellectual effort, which was effective, persuasive and interesting was being performed outside the domain of the Church, and that this heretical trend if allowed to fester would infect society with a sickness, a sickness of independent thought.

Cross a few centuries, through the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic reaction, the modern era, and the Postmodern and we arrive here, in the fascinating age of the Internet and the so-called Web 2.0. Where the free exchange of ideas, the rise of the Instapundits and YouTube-celebrities and the cacophonous blare of the blogosphere are delivered via the titter-tatter of keyboards in the wee hours of the morning. The fingers responsible for this titter-tatter, driven by inquisitiveness, caffeine (or perhaps harder fare) and apparently a Cult of Amateurishness. A recently published polemic, The Cult of the Amateur (Doubleday, $22.95) by Andrew Keen, is the latest in a series of relentless attacks on all the amoral evils and stifling discourses Web 2.0 has brought to culture. Of course, I am sure he anticipates the negative reaction he will receive from the citizens of the blogosphere; moreover, for those who are sympathetic to his position will see this as a vindication of his claims...insuring a vortex of non-falsifiability, Fantastic. I will not go into a review or point-by-point analysis of this book; however, if you go to Lessing Blog, you can see such a breakdown. What is interesting about his interpretation is that he claims the book is self-referential satire laced with a great deal of irony and hence should be considered a fantastic boon to the bloggers of the world instead of a call to arms. I will leave this an open question.

Mr. Keen (ironic or not) is not alone in his condemnation. Nicholas Carr over at RoughType, seems to have a special place of hatred for Wikipedia. Yet, it seems his anger, and those who would agree is either misdirected or self-agitated. Look at what he has to say about the conventional wisdom on Wikipedia:

Let me bring the discussion down to a brass tack. If you read anything about Web 2.0, you'll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of "the age of participation." Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute can add an entry or edit an existing one.

Really? Inevitably find praise...Wikipedia is almost universally unacceptable as a valid source for papers written for a high school or college level paper. Wikipedia is often mocked for its gloriously wrong information. Vandalizers and bad jokes put on Wikipedia have their own page on Wikipedia. I don't think there is the universal praise that Mr. Carr seems to be in such a bind about, I think it is a straw-man, a red herring. Moreover Wikipedia is not great as a primary source, but it is great in nailing down information that is supposedly well-known or canonical for a particular subject. Furthermore, many of the better edited pages have links to more authoritative sources, which are generally interesting and helpful.

What seems to be main argument here is that the Web 2.0 is undermining traditional media and traditional media's opportunity for making money, by overloading individuals' bandwidth for information, entertainment, news, arts, and culture.The traditional media outlets necessarily present better, more polished information that is independently researched, peer-reviewed, fact-checked, edited for grammatical and stylistic errors, marketed, etc...While, on the Web 2.0 side every, Tom, Dick, Harry, and Cindy (can't forget about Cindy) can put up whatever he or she feels like on the Internet, and it suddenly gains authoritative valence. However, the argument that seems so interesting for those that would bash the Web 2.0 is that relatively few people actually do those things. Some of the statistics presented in the book and on Mr. Carr's website claim that relatively few users, through Google Bombing and other related strategies have monopolized the blogosphere, and that individuals with no credentials are given extremely wide discretionary powers to decide what goes on major websites like Digg.com or Wikipedia. Isn't this exactly the sort of argument that was initially levied against big media a few years back, wasn't it maintained that relatively few companies had control of an overwhelming majority of the media outlets currently accessible, and that it would be the Internet that would break this hegemony. Second, this rhetoric is not functionally different from Francis Bacon's criticism of the Idol of the Marketplace in his masterwork Novum Organum. That there is the interaction between the free association of men, which leads to a confusing of language is a well-rehearsed argument. Yet, the false learning and sophistry from supposed wise men to which the masses are to accept since they are the ones with the degrees, pedigrees, and copy editors, well Bacon has an Idol for them too.

What I find intriguing about these sorts of attack is that it is directed toward their ostensible target audience. I started hearing these rumblings from the media industry, when the Atlanta-Journal Constitution decided to discontinue their book review section. There is some suggestion that this was due to the influx of amateur book reviewers on the web cutting off advertising dollars from the print media. There was some backlash to this, and I think for the first time, those in the traditional media formats felt genuinely threatened and afraid for their welfares from a bunch of philistine Internet blog-fiends. But those philistines, those amateur book-reviewers are the ones most likely to pick up a copy of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution and read the section. Book-reviews on blogs are not so ubiquitous as to not avoid being seen. One may suggest it is only one click away; nevertheless, it is still one click away. Most people who aren't looking for book reviews don't find them.

Finally, the claim that those on the Internet posting their random musings, have unchecked biases and hidden or not so hidden agendas is in danger of politicizing and relativizing all forms of media is also a common complaint. That genie won't go back into that bottle, if Richard Rorty (may he find his liberal utopia and final vocabulary in the sky) has taught us anything is that this is just a debate between two different sets of vocabularies the one of the amateur and the one of the professional. No one has claim on Truth, everyone has claim to truths. Whining about the absent moral compass and the lack of a desire for objectivity of some bloggers which will lead to a cannibalizing of culture, is clearly a case of the "lady doth protest too much."

Though I don't want to, I can't help but see a residuum of truth to their position, as transparently self-serving and unimaginative as it is. In Herman Hesse's outstanding The Glass-Bead Game, the scholars of Castilia are rather repulsed by a previous Age of culture called the Age of Feuilleton, the word comes from the French diminutive for leaf or book. In this age sensationalist, cute journalism, cultural criticism and the arts replaced serious reading and close reflection. It occurs at the end of the 20th century, to which the predecessors of the monks of the Glass-Bead game flee in order to reestablish order and proper intellectual edification. This age led to decadence and superficiality to such a degree that there was a massive breakdown in culture and chaos ensued. Though the action in the novel takes place sometime after this age; the concern over such an age is well articulated. I can't help but think that there is some resonance with the warning that Hesse is obviously giving us and the sort of pleas that books like the Cult of the Amateur are intimating. I am not sure if such a warning is representative of plain unadulterated cultural elitism, or is their something genuinely more at stake. What is culture other than the sum of its participants? Can we really assess some type of moral imperative to impugn onto Culture in this day of relativism and postmodern antipathy towards Meta-narratives?

Or is this series of condemnations, just like the ones of 1277 but this time it is not a concern of double-truths being promulgated but double-authorities being established? That in fact it is the Church of the Professional which is launching its own inquisition against the heresies and blasphemies of the Cult of the Amateur. Operators are standing by.

Exasperation is a Dish Best Served Reheated...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 17:31:00 +0000

I don't do many things well. In fact I am mediocre at a number of tasks, though I was told once that I drive really well in reverse. What makes this more pathetic than it might initially sound (as if it doesn't sound pathetic as is) is the person was attempting to delineate the things that I did really well, beginning the list with the above gem and unfortunately ending the list quickly thereafter. So, I am great driver in reverse, there are worse things to...be...good...at, I guess. Humility is something I that I think I am good at, you know, that polite sort of humility that really isn't humility at all but just a general self-effacement intimated to engender a sympathetic response. One thing I am genuinely and authentically humble about is writing. There are many, many, outstanding writers in the world-past, present, and no doubt future-some of them wildly successful and some, unpublished.

Most writers, writers in particular, are generally a humble bunch. Tormented by a language that never serves their emotive or literary purposes, they learn to respect the craft of writing and appreciate the difficulty in producing anything of note. Those artists however, they are an arrogant/tortured group of bastards, look what I can do, I can draw a circle freehand, give me the commission to build your Church. Therefore to meet or even hear about a genuinely arrogant writer is usually an interesting story, since 1) it is pretty rare 2) it is usually humorous, since their arrogance more often than not is genuinely unfounded. One such character is Edward Dahlberg. He believed in the humiliation that is writing, but because of his abrasive individualistic attitude, developed a distaste for the professional community of writers. He was in 1968, listed as one of the ten most neglected writers in the United States. Jonathan Lethem, in the title essay to one of his works, The Disappointment Artist, discusses the bitter existence of Mr. Dahlberg and his Aunt Billie's unfortunate run-in with the man. A recently graduated friend of mine introduced me to this writer and his work, and he happened to pick up a copy of his autobiography, Because I Was Flesh.

There is no better way for me to explain his writing style than to just show you and have you judge for yourselves. If you are intrigued by this passage, and become interested in reading the autobiography-let me suggest that you bring a dictionary, a Bible, and a primer on the last 500 years of Western Culture-just a suggestion.

In this brief passage he is describing the book he is currently writing:

This book is a burden of Tyre in my soul. It is a song of the skin; for I was born incontinent. Everything has been created out of lust, and He who made us lusts no less than flesh, for God and Nature are young and seminal, and rage all day long. I shall sing as Tyre, according to the Prophet Isaiah, like a harlot, and for seventy years.

Pretty freaking intense, eh? Gravely moral, he is writing sub specie aeternitatis maniacally driven by the pressing weight of his own disappointment. The novel proceeds through his life much in this fashion, exasperating. Though it was a truly worthwhile read, and I gained much from it, the oppressively recondite passages demanding your submission were just too much at times. Dahlberg was a courageous, emboldened writer unafraid of being not understood, despite his deeply wounded psyche, he was not scared of the reading public and their quotidian demands.

This same friend who introduced me to the oeuvre of Dahlberg, showed me a website in which registered members could upload their poetry and have it searched by others. One word: Exasperating. A few more, simplistic, not just simplistic-they exhibited all the mastery of such emotionally complex issues as love, loss, and death as possessed by an elementary school boy. Moreover, versification, rhyme scheme, or rhythm were not terms familiar to these individuals. Perhaps, many of these individuals were in fact elementary school boys and girls, but having looked up a few of our colleagues who we knew to be on this site...sub-par. Poetry is a notoriously difficult literary form to make sound good, or original, or even authentic. Most of the poetry on that site suffered from stifling Harold-Bloomesque influence and horrible diction.

Though there are a number of great writers, many of whom are unpublished there are some authors who manage to get published that, well, one wonders who they had to drug, or sleep with in order to get this through the publishing house unnoticed. One example of such work is a poem I happened to read by Cin Salach. Yeah, that is her name-not protecting the guilty, that is her name. Sexy, kinda! I am unsure why or how I ran into this "poet," but again, Exasperation. I decided to write my previously mentioned friend an e-mail expressing my indignation at this Ms. Salach. Serving this in reheated form, the subsequent e-mail, in my defense, it was written fairly late at night after a long day of which I am a little proud, (by a little I mean a whole lot but again, that whole polite humility thing) by the way I apologize for the cursing but it is a spice in the dish of exasperation which adds a lovely flavor:

The purpose of my filling your inbox today with a message which barely passes as legitimate and which should not be sent to the Junk E-mail folder is a bit of a reminder of a distant episode (queue iconic harp-music indicative of a flashback) when you had introduced me to that website with a lot of really bad poetry. I was recently online, a scant few minutes before sending you this memorandum, and I had run across an Amazon.com “So you want to be…” whose appositional conclusion was “pretentious.” One of the works listed that trained one for the wide-world of pretentious pseudo-intellectual adult male cow feces, was a book of poetry by a Cin Salach called, Looking for a Soft Place to Land. Bad. Very Bad. I suggest you check it out and be encouraged by the fact that despite the saccharine simplicity of this woman’s poesy that she has somehow managed to get published, my only conjecture as to how this could have possibly occurred is that it might have something to do with her bitchin’ name Cin Salach. Perhaps you should change your name to something equally as retro-futuristic with just that hint of medieval Welch or Celtic. Spicy.
To leave you with an epic line from the oeuvre of Ms. Salach, "It is the language of words, and it is unlike anything I have heard with my fingers" now I will give her the benefit of the doubt on this one and suggest that she is either blind and deaf or referring to someone who is so-but that given that concession, YOU CAN’T FREAKIN’ HEAR WITH YOUR FINGERS (this capitalization in case you are unfamiliar with any of my particular idiosyncrasies, means that I am exasperated and serious, but mostly just exasperated). Also, let me suggest that there is something insipidly moronic about the phrase “language of words,” as opposed to what exactly…a language of éclairs. Moreover this Braille-fetished douchebag has apparently heard other things besides a language of words with her fingers; it is just this singularly unique and perhaps even fucking transcendent language of words which is so uncanny in its ability to carry sound THROUGH HER FINGERS (still exasperated). Perhaps if she used her ears, she would recognize that her poetry of words (because that’s how we use words, language, get into it!) sounds like cat urine smells, which by the way if you haven’t had a recent opportunity to smell cat urine, and consider yourself cosmically luckily in that case, cat urine smells bad, like the sulfurous clogged toilets of hell bad. Yeah, no good, no good at all.
So how are you and the kids? Misses doing well? How’s that new job in Duluth treating you? Banging the secretary yet, huh tiger?
XOXO,
Ahmad
P.S. I am tired, and papers do not write themselves. Stupid fucking papers.

Again, I don't do many things particularly well, and I wish I was better at a few things mainly: dealing with women, thesis writing and Guitar Hero II. But I've got driving in reverse, and indignant exasperation, but probably not humility after all.

Walking Alone (Together) In a World of Wounds

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 03:08:00 +0000

Aldo Leopold, an environmentalist and wildlife management advocate, suggested that the consequence of an "ecological education" is one will live alone in a world of wounds. This, I read in a book about the current environmental "crisis," and America's role in responding to the changing global environment. Let me add that my placement of the word "crisis" in quotation is to suggest that the definition of crisis usually implies, a decisive point of change wherein a specific action must be taken in order to avert disaster. And there is something about the ambivalence expressed by the current and previous administrations, I include the Clinton and Bush the First administrations in that group-that doesn't seem to resonate with the impeding doom that this book, Red Sky at Morning (see right), suggests with alarming rhetoric and bass drum like consistency. Ignorance to a crisis does not invalidate the crisis' reality, I realize, but it all seems a bit surreal to me-headlong into disaster we are in rapt attention as to the incarceration status of Paris Hilton. It betrays a negligence which cannot easily be rectified.

Mr. Leopold was probably exclusively referring to an education about the environment. But by "ecological education" I will take more broadly to mean, the type of education which grows in multiple directions, disciplines, and manners, and where these various trajectories of learning all intertwine and develop an 'ecology of consciousness'. The reason I use this definition because it seems more in-line with the type of education we will need to have in order to recognize and act on the coming "crisis." It isn't enough to be aware of the science, or the politics, or the economics of the situation. In order to feel the genuine impact of such a climatic realignment as predicted by some scientists, requires an 'ecology of consciousness', which recognizes and can evaluate from various points of contact what is at stake. A univocal education breeds a narrowness of vision, insufficient to adequately deal with the problems facing our planet. It is too easy to get caught up the facts and figures, climate data, oil prices, and financial statements which leads us to miss the "bigger" picture. However, it is equally seductive to become a hyper-idealist, head up in the sky, lamenting the loss of this species, the destruction of this lake, engaging in saccharine discourse about a bright summer's day, flagellation about what future generations will think of us and how we will be judged. There are important, difficult decisions that will have to take into account not only the environmental impact, but the current geo-political situation at work today.

Some might protest that the concern with issues akin to inflation, infrastructure, political expediency,the dictates of the free market when our planet is on the brink, is unfounded. Indeed, some demand that our operating principle be that all other concerns are secondary to the impeding environmental crisis. Is your heart so pure, is your will so strong, to believe that such a principle can operate in the harsh realities of nation-state politics. Such a lofty ideal should be counted among such other pipe dreams as: the brotherhood of men and women and the eradication of illness. We are not citizens of the world, because citizenship has its privileges which are applied or at least paid for while we are thrown "free of charge" into worldhood. Countries have competing interests, individuals and the state have competing interests, corporations have competing interests. Good, bad or indifferent, in that competition the environment, social justice, and peace lie in the balance.

Those who have developed an ecology of consciousness can more effectively deal with these problems in a world where moral imperatives unencumbered by pesky realities do not exist. However, it is as Leopold suggests a very lonely road. There are too many that fall by the wayside, too many that do not appreciate one subtlety or another and must be dragged along, those brave few who walk among the ruins are forced to pick up the pieces, because they know no one else will.

Leopold despite being a life-long hunter and fisherman, or perhaps because he was those things, believed strongly that humanity has a deep desire to be with nature, a kinship if you will. Throughout most of human history, nature has been a force outside of human control, an entity, a being whose plans or goals were not amenable to our wishes or desires. James Frazer, Edward Tylor, and other early examiners of 'primitive' cultures offered that the primary motivation for the development of religion was an attempt to mediate, or negotiate with nature. I think one of the most significant obstacles in convincing people that we must be the progenitors of action when it comes to resolving environmental issues is the deeply inculcated, historically reified belief that nature is a force that is to be conceived outside the realm of humanity, lying in opposition to humanity to some degree. The supernatural acts as an intercessor between the natural and the anthropological. Now, if environmentalists are correct-this conception of our relationship to nature has to be fundamentally altered and reconsidered. Now we must conceive of nature as a force that we are capable of manipulating, and more to the point, have already manipulated in potentially disastrous ways. To realign our thoughts in this way in light of such eco-events as Hurricane Katrina, the bird-flu, El Nino, Lovebugs (this is a very annoying and car-besmirching Florida issue) is understandably difficult, nigh impossible perhaps. It is also the case, at least in terms of global warming, that there are arguments, some good, some not so good, that this is not an accurate picture of our relationship with nature. A number of books recently published by some conservative authors, who contend that despite the verifiability of the warming of the globe, that its cause is not anthropologically traceable, and other explanations such as: climatic cycles, stellar influence, God's wrath (seriously), must be taken into account. Of course, it is hard to trust these sources as their funding comes from places that initially sought to mythologize the global warming situation from the beginning, and now in the light of overwhelming data, must now backtrack to this next line of defense against the eco-alarmists. Though, I take those sources that spell out doom and gloom when it comes to the environment with a B-I-G B-U-S-I-N-E-S-S or A-M-E-R-I-C-A with an equally hard to swallow grain of salt; it seems less and less likely that the current ecological situation can be purely chalked up to normal climatic cycles, or stellar gases- as to God's wrath I cannot speak to, but the way we have been acting lately, I wouldn't be surprised if God was a bit miffed. Again, the whole debate is shrouded in so much political and cultural posturing that is so thick, so impenetrable as to render intelligent discussion as little more than emotivist ejaculations for one side or the other, like a Celtic-Ranger football game or the debate regarding a meta-ethical theory based on a Humean non-cognitivist program (those can be bloodily brutal, and the football games can get rough too).

To invoke a Rortian-type query, requiescat in pace: Why is conservation something that must be argued to, why can we not for the sake of solidarity and care take it on principle that the Earth should be taken care of, not in lieu of or the negligent omission of the current economic, socio-political realities that will affect any proposed solution, but that without argument we begin from the premise that there is something good ipso facto about conservation. How we get there is a decidedly different story, I imagine but if the sky is falling then foolhardiness in the face of destruction is equally as dangerous as unreflectively swallowing the hysterical claims of all Chicken Littles that come before us.

On a decidedly separate note, enduring a world full of wounds, and by wounds I mean not only the ones we inflict on the planet, but the ones that individuals inflict on others is a phenomenon which pleads for companionship. One item I have come to realize that the benefit of walking the wounded world with someone you care about, can be its own Salvific Doloris. A precious suffering born out of our conditional existence. As we float on from distraction to distraction painfully aware of our vulgar being, it is comforting to know that born from a biological desire to copulate that the possibility for transcendence is available. Though most of us choose to ignore that deep responsibility and opt for the instant gratification; that for those who feel deeply it is possible occasionally to step fully into that which makes us human versus simply abounding in that which makes us animals.

ManDate...

noreply@blogger.com (Anonymous) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 09:48:00 +0000

The urban dictionary defines a man-date as two men engaging in "normal" male-female dating rituals. The standard dinner and movie scenario. The picture to my left is an oft attached image of man-dating, two ostensibly heterosexual men holding hands and walking through a garden. Interestingly enough both men in their own way are the representatives of two hyper-masculine societies, which makes this little scene all the more jarring. There is a strange set of rituals involved in man-dating, and though a majority of heterosexual men have performed this ritual at least one time in their life, there are some unwritten procedures to the whole sordid process. Lest you think that this particular introspective arc is a bit strange, please consider the New York Times article, which takes up the same issue. What makes a man date, a "man date," depends on such factors as: venue, dress, purpose, seating arrangement and items consumed (for example, going to watch a romantic comedy versus 300, which if you haven't seen yet is the opposite of a romantic comedy). So, if two men are at a bar watching the game-not a man date. This is so for the following reasons:

1) When one is on a romantic date, each person on the date is responsible in large part for the other's amusement
Therefore in situations where the source of amusement is derived from somewhere outside the locus of the two individuals, then it is no longer a "date." This is the sort of adult male equivalent of playing-in-the-sandbox. Yeah, you're both there, and sometimes you share the dump-truck with your pal, but you guys aren't "playing" with each other, but just playing "together." In man-world we are just watching the game, rooting for the local sports team in general proximity to one another.

2) Usually at a bar, you are eating bar food and drinking beer/liquor--man food! Wings, burgers, fries, nachos, etc. If two men are at a sit down restaurant drinking wine, eating salads and other non-steak dishes, "man-date" is in effect.

The essential qualities of a man date require that if one of the individuals were replaced by a woman that the scene would be indistinguishable from a "regular date." Allow me to apologize at this point for the inherently heterosexist speaking position from which I am engaging in this discourse. Our language is fairly cumbersome in attempting to gracefully articulate "non-traditional" relationships, and in order to expedite the analysis I am forced into these horribly exclusive locutions. If indeed the placement of a woman in such a situation makes it indistinguishable from a normal date, then it is possible that any distinction made is a false one, i.e. they're gay. Though women have gone out together in this way for many years with minimal potential misidentification as lesbian, men engaged in such activities where the purpose is not obvious, i.e. sports, business, or getting wasted, then this ambiguity tends to raise suspicions regarding the men's sexual orientation. I believe this is because, men are supposed to be paragons of efficiency and practicality. Men just don't do things for the sake of doing them, e.g. men don't just call to say "hi" (I don't do this, and I don't see why calling to say "hi" to anyone is ever done, some enlightened male or situationally aware female will have to explain this strange and seemingly gratuitously unnecessary phenomenon). If a man is on a date with a woman, or so the stereotype goes, then either he is a)trying to sleep with her, b) already sleeping with her and trying to get her to do more interesting things sexually, c) they are married, and it is their anniversary, or d) he screwed up and is trying desperately to resolve the situation. Therefore, if two men are not clearly on a business, sports, or an alcohol focused engagement then the default switch is set to "trying to get laid."

Male intimacy is a difficult topic for most individuals to articulate fully. For men, the interactions are most robustly experienced when there is some mediating "exchange" that interpolates between the two agents. Whether it is football, or shop-talk, the activity of bonding occurs as an epiphenomenon to the task at hand. "Hanging out," just to hang out, is as the kids say "freaking gay." As the humorously yet disturbingly strange "bro-rape" videos on YouTube illustrate, such a situation tends to raise suspicions. In an article I read for a class on the Philosophy of Love and Sex, the notion that men develop their "fifth set of essential friends," when they, for example, move to a different city, or start a new job, is a common behavioral trope which is destructive to male intimacy. Men use friends as boys use toys in the sandbox, important and fun while they are playing together, but when they come home, they take a shower and clean off all the sand. While women, the article suggests, are more likely to develop fewer yet longer lasting relationships with friends across the various periods in their life. A woman is much more likely to meet an old friend from high school for dinner, even though she has already been to college, and has worked two different jobs. While the article implies that a man will more likely hang out with all of his current work buddies from Tuesday to Saturday nights at the local sports bar with little regard for the sets of relationship he has compiled in the past. One of the many consequences of homosexuality is that it further makes ambiguous the supposedly clear lines of demarcation of male and female behavior, this consequence is one that plagues various spheres of political and cultural landscape-though it should be noted that such lines have, for the most part, always been blurred, i.e. the man date. At the recent Republican Presidential debate, when Wolf Blitzer asked the candidates if any of them thought it would be acceptable for openly gay men and women to serve in the armed forces...crickets.

This last issue is definitely for another time, but just remember if you are on a man-date, keep this simple rule in mind:

Do not, I repeat, do not share the dessert. You are just asking for trouble, or at least questions-which is trouble enough.