When I came to print the negative an odd thing struck my eye. Something, standing in the cross-street and invisible to me, was reflected in a factory window and then reflected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail. Since then, I have enlarged the negative enormously. The grain of the film all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscure. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly ambiguous. Nevertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of film fills me with such fear, such utter dread and loathing that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph. Here it is! Look at it! Do you see what I see?

-Hollis Frampton, (nostalgia)

To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it's 'radiant,' and a spring not quite a spring unless it is 'limpid.' Here to place adjectives would be so rude as leaving price tags on purchases. Japanese poetry never modifies. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum, that includes them all.

Newspapers have been filled recently with the story of a man from Nagoya. The woman he loved died last year and he'd drowned himself in work, Japanese-style, like a madman. It seems he even made an important discovery in electronics. And then, in the month of May, he killed himself. They say he could not stand to hear the word 'spring.'

-Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

"Freud remained deeply suspicious of philosophers and their speculations. Fond of repeating his conviction that psychoanalysis has little to learn from philosophy, he more than once compared philosophical systems to the delusions of paranoiacs and suggested that the primary impact of psychoanalysis on philosophy might consist in affording new insight into the personal quirks that motivate philosophical theory-building. The most common error of philosophers, he thought, is their restriction of the sphere of the mental life to conscious activity. But equally questionable is their tendency to project for themselves a seamless account of reality, their penchant for 'clinging to the illusion of being able to present a picture of the universe that is without gaps and is coherent' (SE, 22:160). Among Freud's favorite quotations was Heine's derisive caricature of the philosopher: 'With his nightcaps and the tatters of his dressing gown he patches up the gaps in the structure of the universe' (SE, 22:161)."

-Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher p. 283

(Illustration: Magritte, Philosopher's Lamp)

David Brooks in The New York Times:

"I’m totally confused about what the political impact of Stewart-stock and Colbert-palooza will be. On the one hand, watching their shows I get the impression they are generally mainstream liberals. On the other hand I do think their shows are unintentionally conservative. Just as the show '60 Minutes' sends the collective message that political institutions are corrupt, so the Comedy Central shows send the message that politicians are buffoons. Both messages undermine faith in political action and public sector endeavor and so cut right against the intentions of their founders."

The only time I've admired either of these guys was during Colbert's speech at the White House correspondent's dinner... but even then, it's hard to accept that some political project exists behind the irony.

This guy is wrong. Drunk driving laws create a climate of fear that prevents people from driving drunk. I'd rather live in a world with clearly defined limits (like .08) than in constant fear that my driving is too "erratic" in the eyes of a random police officer.

I especially liked this line: "Bill Lewis, head of the Texas chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, agreed."

Bill Lewis must appreciate the rhetorical value of "Mothers."

Yesterday I read a couple of chapters from Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice. I’m not sure I agree with Nussbaum’s claim that literature’s ability, through “identification and emotional reaction,” to “cut through [one's] self-protective strategems” ought to be “palatable” or “pleasurable” (6).

For me, a good book or film is a harrowing, painful experience. Indeed, if a “novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning” that generates “potentially universalizable concrete prescriptions,” it cannot function as mere entertainment; it needs to break down its reader and inflict the pain of a new awareness, like an ethical boot camp (8).

A poetic kind of justice must punish readers if it is to have any motivational efficacy; otherwise, isn’t Nussbaum talking about something as brief, flighty, and forgettable as so many bad poems?

This argument reminds me of film historian Scott MacDonald's discussion of a political kind of spectatorship. MacDonald talks about a way of watching challenging, often boring, critical/avant-garde films (Adventures in Perception, 2009). The films he mentions are only political if the audience informally challenges each other to experience something new; sticking it out in the theater, talking about it afterward, but most importantly of all, paying attention. Few watch these kinds of films, especially because the escapism of Netflix is so much easier. Poetic justice in the cinema, therefore, remains a distant hope (especially if you ask Ray Carney about it).

“The invocation of ‘evil’ in the language of the nineteenth century Temperance Movement and the twenty-first century war on drugs is more than a trivial coincidence. To secularists, the word ‘evil’ may be synonymous with ‘very bad.’ But to the religiously inclined, evil can represent the unified and active force of Satan in opposition to all that is good. Defining a problem as an unqualified evil makes it that much easier to draw normative boundaries and crack down on those who fall on the wrong side of the divide—the evildoers. As a moral crusade, prohibition is a fight against evil, a shining path to the pearly gates. The problem with this position, both practically and theologically, is that drugs are chemicals without a moral agenda. Even drugs that are undoubtedly bad are not evil.” Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood p.160

Moskos’ experiences in the Baltimore city police department make for entertaining reading, but his academic approach to the drug war misses the forest for the trees. While drugs are indeed simple chemicals with no intrinsic evil, drug addiction is a spiritual crisis that engenders evil actions. Addiction (from the Latin “religious devotion”) is evil because it opposes life. The drug addict abandons society, rejects his or her obligation to others, and escapes his or her own feelings. If we want to live in a functional society, we can never decriminalize all drugs.

Alcoholism is evil. Alcohol is not. The reason that alcohol is legal is that its addiction is harder to slip into: hangovers, social pressure, and alcohol’s own potency each ensure that an addict must work hard to become enslaved. It takes a lot of despair to drive drunk to work at eight in the morning. Not so with opiates, for instance. That high is easy, and there is no hangover. Physical dependency begins without the desperation that drives a drunk. Opiates satisfy consumer society’s injunction to enjoy better than any product because they are chemicals: they directly increase enjoyment in a reliable way, and often become available in easy installments of $10.00.

So what should we do? Instead of a war on drugs, perhaps we should wage a war on addiction. The “normative boundaries” of a war against evil have their motivational purpose: as Donald Barthelme once wrote, “Fear is the great mover, in the end.” We should fear addiction and condemn drugs. But Moskos is right to insist that a carceral state isn’t the proper vehicle for the war.

Related to drugs in Baltimore, an article in the NYRB: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/oct/14/life-wire/ that discusses the TV show the Wire would have benefited from a more careful viewing.

For example:


[Chris and Snoop] open Season Four using a nail gun—a nod, perhaps, to Cormac McCarthy’s cattle bolt—to kill young black men (number one males, in police terminology).
-they use a silenced gun, this is not a nod toward McCarthy.

For a feminist heroine the show has only the quite imperfect Detective Kima Greggs, and only because in her strength, humor, passion for work, and apparently secure hold on her biracial identity and lesbianism, she is slightly better than almost anyone else.

-so Rhonda and Marla Daniels don't count?

There was once a generation of Americans who fought in a world war. They were called the greatest generation because they were sexist, racist, and weren’t afraid to say that they believed in community norms. These included sneaking a kiss and ‘smear the queer.’ You could find out more if you asked your older brother.

Then their children, the baby-boomers, began to grow up and the older generation became alcoholics.

For the greatest generation, your friends were secretly more important than yourself. This has its pluses and minuses. But their kids never fought in a war together, they just watched it on TV.

The baby-boomers were so resentful for that, they bought whatever they could to express it. Doyle, Dane, and Bernbach.

Then the greatest generation surrendered. The baby-boomers just wanted to enjoy life, was that so wrong?

The thing about it was that no one knows how to enjoy anything unless someone explains it to you. Even sex.

Community norms became the province of big companies, who created far more stringent and exclusionary rules than anything possible just after the world war. I call these the secret rules, because they are properly ideological (as in, ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’).

But the problem was that communities based on buying things only talked to each other about buying things, layout/design, and enjoyment. They didn’t know how to deal with something like domestic abuse unless it could be put into syndication. They liked buying things because it didn’t hurt. You always feel better an hour after watching Schindler's List.

The rules of the greatest generation hurt a lot.

As the century went on, social mores became further and further defined by the new secret rules, until everyone was impossibly free. You can’t deny it. One secret rule is this: you will always feel stupid talking about the things most important to you.

This site is annoying. In the FAQ, it states: "We live in a culture where advertisers directly influence and in some cases control and create the culture at large. Honesty of the writing is affected when corporate interests are paying the bills." Note that the owl has closed its eyes.

Blogging is not the creation of culture. There is no knowledge in shorthand observations and accumulated links. Instead blogs feed consumption by always pointing outward, toward more images, books, feelings, and ideas. Maybe some readers dig deep through these signals and come to appreciate new forms of art - but then, it's not the blog that's doing the work. Indeed, blogs are essentially one-person advertising agencies, who prove the value and intelligence of an author by recommending the right things.

Anyway, most corporations are far too clever to advertise on low-rent blogs. It seems that pyramid schemes and discount clothing retailers buy more Google Ads than anything on the NYSE.

If you don't want your blog to enable consumption, delete it. And if your blog is meant to display family photos or other private content, no one is there to look at the ads in the first place.

XXII. FRUIT BOWL

His mother was sitting at the kitchen table when Geryon opened the screen door.


He had taken the local bus from Hades. Seven-hour trip. He wept most of the way.

Wanted to go straight to his room

and shut the door but when he saw her he sat down. Hands in his jacket.

She smoked in silence a moment

then rested her chin against her hand. Eyes on his chest. Nice T-shirt, she said.

It was a red singlet with white letters

that read TENDER

LOIN. Herakles gave it--and here Geryon had meant

to slide past the name coolly

but such a cloud of agony poured up his soul he couldn't remember

what he was saying.

He sat forward. She exhaled. She was watching his hands so he unclenched them

from the edge

of the table and began spinning the fruit bowl slowly. He spun it clockwise.

Counterclockwise. Clockwise.

Why is this fruit bowl always here? He stopped and held it by the rims.

It's always here and it never

has any fruit in it. Been here all my life and never had fruit in it yet. Doesn't

that bother you? How do we even

know it's a fruit bowl? She regarded him through smoke. How do you think it feels

growing up in a house full

of empty fruit bowls? His voice was high. His eyes met hers and they began

to laugh. They laughed

until tears ran down. Then they sat quiet. Drifted back

to opposite walls.

They spoke of a number of things, laundry, Geryon's brother doing drugs,

the light in the bathroom.

At one point she took out a cigarette, looked at it, put it back. Geryon laid

his head on his arms on the table.

He was very sleepy. finally they rose and went their ways. The fruit bowl

stayed there. Yes empty.

-Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red

1979 / 1974 + 1998 / 1977

Above: Red. A comic-book style triple window is in both lower right corners. In both series, one partner is exploiting the other. Mod Lang: "I can't be satisfied, whatchu want me to do?"

Below: Abstracted brown horizon, cloudless sky. Is it the same flag?

Even though I really hate lists, here are some reasons why "iBooks" sucks:

1. Not typeset. Maddening to read from line to line.
2. Little countdowns at the foot of the page, instead of page numbers, which take all the excitement out of reading and make it a chore with a clearly defined end-point.
3. Size limit chops up paragraphs that are meant to be read as one cohesive unit.
4. Page turning animations just make me nostalgic for real books but aren't as responsive as real paper.
5. Terrible selection of poetry on ibookstore.
6. Users are unable to buy books on their desktop iTunes or read books on the computer screen.
7. No notation method, eliminates marginalia.
8. You can't pass on iBooks to a friend or a child. You can't inscribe an iBook.
9. Featured titles selected by sales and broad appeal rather than quality or importance. "Top Charts" highlight bad books - the top paid book is called "Sh*t My Dad Says."
10. Hurts the business of physical bookstores, which may be massive corporations, but at least offer people a place to read and talk about books with other living, breathing people.

I just responded to this post at The Monkey Cage, about this column by David Brooks. Figured I'd post it here too, as the blog takes a swerve toward poli sci (some of the time)...

I remember reading in one of Brooks' books a line, no doubt frustrating to many social scientists, that suggested: "one needs to tolerate the imprecision of the poetic if one can truly understand the essence of a people, place, or thing." While Brooks might doubt the ability of any science to capture the essential feelings and "ancient insights" of a complex problem like addiction, he is not totally dismissive of "Enlightenment" thinking. Brooks suggests that AA works for people on a very mysterious, unscientific basis (for a vastly more thorough exploration of the topic read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest), and I would be inclined to believe him. Sure, studies of AA's effectiveness ought to guide its public promotion, but those studies miss the personal part of the picture. AA was designed "to arouse people’s spiritual aspirations rather than just appealing to rational cost-benefit analysis;" it addresses a spiritual crisis (addiction) with a spiritual solution. In slightly more scientific terms, it changes fundamental attitudes and dispositions some of the time, for some people. Brooks is not saying that science has no business fighting deep and spiritual problems like addiction - but simply that a rational analysis (within the specific program) fails to capture the intricacies of the problem. No perpetual drunk can be swayed with the promise of a better life and a rewarding job - only through specific social supports and an almost religious devotion to a higher power can he or she freely choose sobriety, much of the time. Thus Brooks concludes that "the business of changing lives" is not a game of costs and benefits, which I think anyone familiar with addiction would agree with.

The tricky question is how and if social sciences can capture and apply those ancient, personal insights when devising public policy. I think they can. While for Brooks, a great work of literature might always hit the ineffable target better than a precision guided case study, I don't doubt that he'd find scientific investigations of unconscious dispositions and deeply felt emotions (and addiction) useful. I read this column as polemic directed against game-theorists and behavioral psychologists who pretend to know all the answers when they clearly do not. Brooks' essential point - that human beings are not rational creatures - is a valid one, and Enlightenment thinking will never completely understand our selves.

Couple Stories

why not feel the magic of good fiction: Amy Hemple

and here's Wells Tower: Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned

DFW, Interviewed by ZDF television

I think one of the ideas of the book is that there’s a particular ethos in U.S. culture, and particularly in entertainment and marketing culture, that appeals to people as individuals; that you don’t have to be devoted or subservient to anything else. There is no larger good than your own good and your own happiness. And that in the book, as best I can recall, characters who become drug addicts there is a form—the root in English, of addict, is the Latin addicere, which means “religious devotion.” It was an attribute of beginning monks, I think. There is an element in the book in which various people are living out something that I think is true, that we all worship, and we all have a religious impulse. We can choose to an extent what we worship, but the myth that we worship nothing and give ourselves away to nothing simply sets us up to give ourselves away to something different, for example pleasure, or drugs, or the idea of having a lot of money and being able to buy nice stuff. Or, in the tennis academy, it’s somewhat different, it’s devotion to an athletic pursuit that requires a certain amount of sacrifice and discipline but is nevertheless an individual sport, and one is trying to get ahead as an individual. I doubt this makes very much sense, but whatever the conditions of hopelessness you’re talking about, at least in Infinite Jest, have to do with an American idea and not a universal one, but one that I think kids get exposed to very early; that you are the most important and what you want is the most important, and that your job in life is to gratify your own desires. That’s a little crude to say it that way, but in fact, it’s something of the ideology here. It’s certainly the ideology that’s perpetrated by television and advertising and entertainment and the economy thrives on it.

Let me insert one thing, which I bet you’ve noticed, from talking to writers, is that most of the stuff that we think we’re writing about in books is very difficult to talk about straight up, question and answer. And in some sense it probably can’t be talked about directly and that’s why people make up stories about it. This is all a big defense because I feel like what I’m saying is so simple and so reductive. To the extent that I understand it, being what you call ‘grown-up’ isn’t a lot of fun, a lot of the time. There are things you have to do, there are things you want to do that you can’t do, for a variety of reasons, and I think that for young people in America, there are very mixed messages from the culture. There’s a streak of moralism in American life that extols the virtues of being grown-up, and having a family, and being a responsible citizen, but there’s also a sense of do what you want, gratify your appetites, because when I’m a corporation, appealing to the parts of you that are selfish and self-centered and want to have fun all the time is the best way to sell you things. And the point that emerges from that is that, I think, one more example of the American economic and cultural systems that work very well in terms of selling people products and keeping the economy thriving do not work as well when it comes to educating children or helping us help each other know how to live and to be happy, if that word means anything. Clearly it means something different from, whatever I want to do, "I want to take this cup and throw it — I have every right to — I should!" You know, we see it with children, that’s not happiness, that feeling of having to obey every impulse and gratify every desire seems to me to be a strange kind of slavery. Nobody talks about it as such though. It’s all “freedom of choice,” and “you have the right to have things” and “spend this much money and you can have this stuff.” Again, saying it this way sounds to me very crude and simple, but that’s sort of the way it is.

I think about general terms like being “grown-up,” a term that’s rarely used here anymore, and now I feel embarrassment because I’m gonna sound like my grandfather or something, but the word “citizen.” But the idea of the word “citizen” would be to understand your country’s history and the things about it that are good and not so good, and how the system works, and taking the trouble to learn about candidates for political office which would mean reading stuff—it isn’t fun, it’s boring. But when people don’t do that, here’s what happens. The candidates win who have the most money to buy television advertisements, because television advertisements are how most voters know about the candidates. Therefore we get candidates who are beholden to large donors, and become, in some ways corrupt, which disgusts the voters, and makes them even less interested in politics, less willing to read and do the work of citizenship. When I was a little boy there was a class called citizenship, and here are a couple things about America and America’s history, here’s why it’s important to vote, here’s why it’s important to vote not just for who the best looking candidate is. Here’s what’s really interesting about this and I don’t know if you can translate this, but I feel ashamed. Saying all this sounds like an older person saying this, which in American culture sets me up to be ridiculed. It would be very easy to make fun of what I’m saying and I can hear a voice in my head making fun of this stuff as I say it, and this is the kind of paradox, I think, of what it is to be a halfway intelligent American right now. There are things we know are right, and good, and would be good to do, but constantly it’s like “yeah, but you know, it’s so much funnier and nicer to do something else,” and “who cares, it’s all bullshit anyway.” One of the things it causes is tension and unhappiness in people. The paradox is that that sort of tension and conflict and complication in people also makes them very easy to market to. Because I can say to you, “feeling uneasy? Life feels empty? Well here’s something you can buy, or do.” The economics term is inelasticity of demand, I demand all the time, no matter what the price of it is, and it works really well in an economic way. Emotionally, spiritually, in terms of citizenship, in terms of feeling like a meaningful part of this country, forget the world, and I’m sure the U.S. government’s arrogance and disdain for the rest of the world is unpleasant, but it’s also a natural extension of certain cultural messages we send ourselves about ourselves, that work very well in some ways, and make us very rich and very powerful.

Transcribed and edited by Adam H. From http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/823228/David-Foster-Wallace-im-Interview-%25282003%2529#/beitrag/video/823228/David-Foster-Wallace-im-Interview-%282003%29

two films by James Benning

I-40 to Memphis, 3-18-2010

By juxtaposing image, text, and sound, James Benning's American Dreams creates a fractured account of two personal relationships: Arthur Bremer and George Wallace, James Benning and Hank Aaron. Bremer wants to kill Wallace, Benning wants to be Aaron. But the careful articulation of their desires is suppressed by the sound of the evening news and the very songs that are meant to articulate desire. As the society of false needs and consumer consciousness matures, it is impossible to focus on any one narrative (baseball cards, diary entries, or sound bytes) for long. The Dreams Benning describes are intensely private, but cannot be fully understood by the audience or, indeed, those who dream them. When they come to fruition, the result is pure spectacle: a gunshot, a crowd cheering wildly.

RR is supposed to be a film about consumption, but I wish Benning tackled the topic in a style more reminiscent of American Dreams. While the sound bytes are back (Eisenhower's speech, the Bible), trains are less effective images than baseball cards and diary text. In RR, there is no human connection between wanting and getting; we see AutoMax cars filled with SUVs, but there is no depiction of the compulsion to own one. While the shots are occasionally beautiful, Benning seems to be reducing the agency of the filmmaker to the bare minimum, and the result is a less compelling kind of dream. If film's frame makes objective truth "pie in the sky," it has an obligation to surpass it.

Documentary: Police Accreditation

What Would Tocqueville Do?

When Hegel wrote: “It is a modern folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation," he announced the necessity of what Mao called the “Cultural Revolution” as the condition of a successful social revolution. Is this not what we have today: (the technological) revolution without a fundamental “revolution of mores [Revolution der Sitten]”? The basic tension is not so much the tension of reason versus feeling, but, rather, the tension of knowledge versus the disavowed belief embodied in external ritual—the situation often described in the terms of cynical reason whose formula,the reverse of Marx’s, was proposed decades ago by Peter Sloterdijk: “I know what I am doing; nonetheless, I am doing it. . . .” This formula, however, is not as unambiguous as it may appear—it should be supplemented with: “. . .because I don’t know what I believe.”

-Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 5