cheese it, the cops!

expression as hate crime

the chief of police in atlanta says he considers placing rebel flags near the ebenezer baptist church a hate crime. people are terribly confused. that is no kind of crime whatever. if you don't believe me go read the first amendment. 'placing flags' is not at all like assaulting someone.

what the control-the-symbols approach to racial healing has accomplished here is more or less what it always accomplishes: it transforms the repressed symbol into a supernatural weapon. people really do think that you could assault people at a distance, perhaps hundreds of people at once, just by waving some rag around. that is, you've given your enemies super-powers.

puzzle theory

i'm still puzzled by cnn's incredibly heavy coverage of malaysia airlines 370, built still on such thin info. but i still like the enrich-and-ditch d.b. cooper scenario, and i still would like to know whether there was anything or anyone extremely valuable on that flight, and whether the pilots knew about it.

'extremist videos'

here's cecile richards' defense: 'only crazed extremists would show you what we actually say. accurately quoting people like me is a kind of terrorism.'

for real

continuing with the thing below, there have been cases in which novels had some sort of practical effect. apparently goethe's sorrows of werther caused a little suicide outbreak among romantic-era boys. it's often said that uncle tom's cabin increased abolitionist sentiment in the northern us. other than that....

as to the world-shaping cultural centrality of poetry: think about that for just a second. maybe you had a case with virgil or dante, not with the 17 people who read poetry right now. 

after a few such cases, the thing consists of vague yet implausible quasi-assertion: novels remake the human personality. novels invented empathy. now, if you think so, i want you to try to square up and notice that the human personality is hard as hell to remake. it cannot be done by laying in bed with a book, even if you seem to yourself to have been profoundly moved and come to some new insights. say you've read a hundred really fine novels in your reading life. i guess your personality's been reforged a hundred times. funny, but you seem more or less just the same as you did last year. i'm telling you that these claims are ridiculous, and a realistic assessment and defense of literature would be much more valuable than a raft of hyperjive, and much less discrediting to its proponents.

the greatest literary novels of the twentieth century had a small, ephemeral effect on a tiny percentage of the population. ulysses remade nothing and no one, except the world of upper-end novel writing and publishing. why you want to pretend otherwise, and why people nod along as you do: really i have no idea. try to say what's true because issuing these giant gaseous clouds of hooey discredits your rationality, self-examination, and claim to be in contact with reality.

i'd say the same about the crazed shit people used to say about painting: oh, "picasso remade the visible world". not. at. all. you might squint funny coming out of the picasso blockbuster; but that's all over by the time you get to the wine bar. maybe these crazed claims are strategies to increase funding. maybe they're intended to get billionaires to make grants, by making what is happening in the arts venue seem superincredibly important, indeed making it seem like god. i love paintings. i go to museums and look at them. and the visible world ticks on just as it did before. that's not under my control, or matisse's, or even all of ours together. the way the world looks is the world's doing.

as to the idea that fiction is the repository of cultural memory, or its essence or something: think about what you just said, ok? because that means our cultural memory is fictional. i'm not saying our 'cultural memory' is not fictional, but of course then its not memory at all, but fantasy. plus the novel is not to a significant extent even the source of our memorious fantasies. but it's still a good thing to write and read good novels, alright? just not the thing you appear to think it is.

writing is a craft. it can produce well-made or interesting objects. it can be an absorbing process, important or central to the life of the writer, pleasurable or challenging to readers. that is enough, right? because that's all you get.

i am the meaning of history!

people really need to think about the globally transformative power of literature and suchlike. it would be nice to have a realistic assessment of such things, rather than a bunch of obviously false hyperbolic catch-phrases. in particular, people are extremely nostalgic now for modernism, which could be anything from yeats and joyce to allen ginsberg and picasso and de kooning and bob dylan. it is a territory infested by superduper stupendous geniuses, and one vaguely misremembers about it that in it half-cracked egomaniacs remade the entire universe. or maybe everyone's just nostalgic for that moment when they were 17 and some poem mattered. 

an excruciating example of all this is an essay by joyce carol oates in the august 13 new york review of books titled "inspiration and obsession in life and literature". it's a very pretentious and yet half-assed journey through plato and wittgenstein, with plenty of yeats and updike and virginia woolf. that the whole thing is pseudo is nailed by the the end bit, which is a compressed little collage of cliches. her readers can be expected to nod along and think that finally someone's saying what they've been thinking; that just shows you the sad decline of the average aging dinner-party where the guests are quasi-intellectuals.

Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, we would have no shared culture - no collective memory. As if [sic?] memory were destroyed in the human brain, our identities corrode, and we "were" no one - we become merely a shifting succession of impressions attached to no fixed source. As it is, in contemporary society, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its fleeting interests, the "stillness and thoughtfulness" of a more permanent art seems threatened. As human beings we crave "meaning" - which only art can provide; but social media provide no meaning, only this succession of fleeting impressions whose underlying principle may simply be to urge us to consume products.

    The motive for metaphor, then, is a motive for survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals.

 

that is, instagram is the apocalypse. lord knows how or why social media is incompatible with art (i'd say it demonstrably is not), making it impossible to write poetry or paint. perhaps it is itself a set of mediums for art. if you think facebook is incompatible with our survival as a species, as a culture, and as individuals, i think you've lost your marbles, if any. also, what a wretched bit of writing that is.

and if you think the modernist novel is a fundamental source of human memory or meaning, you have very little acquaintance with our species. relax and let the girls take their selfies or whatever. there are a number of threats to human survival (oh, the state, nuclear weapons, capitalism, perhaps climate change). that we haven't produced the next updike (if indeed we haven't) is not among them.

i say this to people all the time: your entertainments, and even your most moving experiences, do not have to be the meaning of everyone's life. even if the human species could survive perfectly well without the modernist novel, or indeed the novel, that does not show that a good novel is not a good thing. what you yourself do doesn't actually have to be the most important or the only important thing to be a valid activity, etc. also, read over what you write or think over what you say, and try to be sure it isn't just obviously false, even if your friends nod along.

if i said what she said, but i said it about philosophy, you might get suspicious that my lament had a certain self-serving quality. but what she says about lit is no more plausible - or in some cases it would be considerably less plausible - than saying the same about the discipline of history, or economics, or psychology, or for that matter seamstressing, or farming, or transportation, or trade, or statecraft, or religion, or residential construction, or etc etc etc. none of these are the only important thing, or the singularly most important thing, and though we lived for millennia without the novel, it's been a long time since we've gotten by without farming.

taking the thing where it goes after that: we are no more (and, to be fair, no less) the story-telling animal than we are the animal that calculates or emits polemics or navigates or plays games.

as people age, they often get disaffected by their grandbabies' culture and crank up the jeremiads and prophecies of doom, based perhaps on no real acquaintance with the alleged horrors being lamented. don't let that be you. the culture has never not been in a disastrous decline toward the end. 

another privilege of age (along with gaining the right and responsibility to judge everyone) is that you've seen many moral panics and apocalyptic rants and can do some inductive reasoning: oh, this one's going to be okish too. television was the end of all things good and decent and artistic. so were comic books, for that matter, rock 'n roll, hip hop etc. we came out of them sucking no more or less than always.

 

that took a lot of balls.

bullet-riddled corpse of the tiger mother

not really outlaws

apropos of the best country albums this year: sam outlaw's angeleno is excellent. now, honestly, i'd rather he had stuck with his actual name, 'morgan', which is also a pretty good country thing (oh how about george morgan and his daughter lorrie).  'outlaw' suggests yet another waylon revival act, of which there are so many i couldn't keep up if i wanted to, and which are often kind of...mechanical. plus we still have all of waylon's actual albums. 

anyway, sam's music is not like that: the album is kind of low-key, fairly smooth country. the thing is beautifully produced by ry cooder, with calicountry and tex-mex touches and very fine original songs. sam is, in a laid-back way, a really good country singer. it's a pleasant and improving experience letting the thing play as one putters about the house or drives to target.

 

 

 

i might mention that alan jackson has a new album (angels and alcohol), which is really a fundamental traditional jackson album: not a bluegrass experiment or a set of covers, but a clutch of fine original country songs. it makes a good playlist on shuffle with angeleno.

 

 

 

words are powerful

but talk is cheap. actually, words aren't that powerful.

beetle leeches

right, donald trump has got to go. but not because he sort of made nasty cracks about john mccain. his rivals are saying things like 'that disqualifies him for the presidency'. pretty soon we'll be publicly flogging people for failing to refer to all who who have been in the military - timothy mcveigh, e.g. -  as "america's heroes."  'i will say what i want to say': that should be a slogan for everyone. we have really reached the maximum of pc pall and the correlative cowardice: you wouldn't think we could have a safer, emptier, more dishonest presidential campaign than the last few, but we are going to. the supernatural power of phonemes and abstract designs (rebel flag) is self-evident to everyone, especially young people. both with your mouth and with your ears: show some fucking guts, little bitches. we'll never address race in this country, e.g. we'll just mutter pablum in unison and intern anyone who says...anything.

you're going to need to generate a list of all the things no one is permitted to say. sadly it's going to require infinitely many of you little monkeys and infinitely many typewriters, because there are infinitely many things we are not permitted to say.

Been awhile...

I've been sulking in my cave as I follow the news avoiding anything about Presidential Politics that isn't outright hilarious, so obviously Bobby "Alligator Gar" Jindal and Donald "Singing Bass" Trump and Ted "Hey, I'm an asshole, all right" Cruz are amusing the hell out of me. Unfortunately, the rest of the world sucks.

 

The Mother Emmanuel killings were horrible, and the relocation of the Confederate Battle Flag to the the Statehouse Museum in Columbia was so overdue that the joy seems as sad as the tears and anger. I was slightly enraged about all the nonsense with the faces on the dollar bills, since I am a fan of Andy "By God" Jackson, the first true Democrat and elected man of the people as opposed to aristocrat who would have handled things a bit differently than Lincoln. Since he threatened to hang his Vice President, John C. Calhoun for sedition with his nonsense about "secession" and "nullification" I suspect he would have been very nasty to the south early on in the secession kerfluffle, resulting in a lot less death and destruction. I also think there's no reason to have the permanent fixtures on the bills anyway...rotate them with bona fide distinguished Americans and heroes who were not politicans; have multiple faces on the bills.Let each new Secretary of the Treasury usher in new placeholders on the Bills. 

Then David Brooks wrote some nonsense about removing all the monuments to Confederate heros from the public byways and locations in the South. In a way, Brooks is advocating something a lot more draconian than just moving one flag and possibly changing a couple of others. Of course, his big focus was on Robert E. Lee which was silly. Lee made one ethical error that resulted in the destruction of his beloved Virginia, the loss of his estate, and the death of friends, family members and close associates including more than a few Yankees. It was an ethical judgement that he struggled with; had Joseph Jackson not been seriously wounded and forced to spend a couple of years recovering, Lee had been asked to fill and had agreed to fill a non-combatant job advising Jefferson Davis, whom he disliked, and who was not so fond of him. Lee also refused to be buried in his uniform and famously told his soldiers to go home. He was one of the first of the Southern generals to request that he be granted his citizenship back. 

So, Brooks -- the smug, wealthy elitist who writes the same Capitalism is the answer/Globalism is great drivel as Tom Fiedman although less hysterically -- pissed me off. I mused over that article, but before I could get my teeth into it, the Cosby thing blew up. And continued to blow up. 

 

Now, possibly alone in my generation and subsequent ones, I never liked Bill Cosby. His last original stuff was in the first couple of albums, and the rest of his body of work has been jejune and marginal. I never watched the show, and think anyone who goes out of his way to wear some multicolored vomit looking sweater needs help. I had no problem with his diagnosis of many of the problems in the Black community; I did think he was pretty smug about it and very good at blaming victims. 

 

But, I'd never picked him as a serial rapist. Surprise! At the same time, it appears that Kim Fowley whom I've written of recently with a certain amount of respect, raped at least one and possibly more of the members of the Runaways...when they were minors. He wrote in one of his memoirs that he had never "made love" to any of the Runaways. Well, the HuffPo article bears no resemblance to a description of love making...he drugged her, ripped her clothes off and fucked her in front of a room full of people including some of the other members who were so intimidated that they never spoke of it. 

Ok, the Kim Fowley I got to know a little and whose Underground Garage Show on SiriusXM that I enjoyed was the guy 40 years later. He was a rock and roll auteur; most of the stuff he produced and did himself was pretty awful dreck and he admits it. The Runaways were probably his greatest success after getting people to light their lighters to show John Lennon how much they loved him as he made his first Plastic Ono Band appearance and I shouldn't forget Alley Opp which was actually his first record and probably his biggest hit. 

 

So, Cosby and Fowley were both reprehensible men. The difference between them is that Cosby held himself to be a role model; Kim Fowley never held himself up as anything except a rock and roll animal. One is a hyprocrite; one far less so. I know which I prefer. 

With that, my most recent article over at Veterans Today, on the problem of Sex, Ennui and Hubris. I hope it lets you think. 

are you perfectible?

"I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity."

edgar allan poe

ps. eat me, emerson!

well, i share poe's pessimism on this, but the flat formulation is too strong. human exertion has had and will have many appreciable effects on humanity; think about longevity since poe's time, for example, though of course things can regress too. but what emerson and poe are talking about is human moral perfectibility. here i do not think that we have seen any significant improvement since we clawed like swamp thing up from the primordial ooze; nor do i expect to.

perhaps you are now thinking to yourself: well, perhaps we could work on the genome, or hit singularity, and be much much better than we are right now. what i might note is that the people futzing with the genes or the medications or the information technology will be us. these projects, to whatever extent they are pursued or pursuable, will be pursued by people who themselves are vain and venal, self-deluded, self-seeking, megalomaniacal, obsessive, thick as bricks, and hosts for the imp of the perverse.

say they come to believe that they know what morality consists in and impose it through genomics or software. (1) they'll turn out to have been wrong about the content of morality; (2) the actual implementation of this, as any human system, will benefit some and harm others, and perhaps exponentially increase human hierarchy. i myself regard that hierarchy as central to our evil; (3) implementation will be chaotic, flawed, back-and-forth, cowardly; for god's sake you'll have politicians involved and shit; (4) the unintended consequences will swamp the intended effects, leaving us extinct or at least profoundly puzzled and irritated.

see dick type

rummaging around in boxes of old files, i came across a number of drafts of my dissertation (finished '89), with richard rorty's marginal comments, as well as a number of typewritten memos detailing his responses. if i am recalling correctly i wrote three complete non-overlapping versions before they acquiesced. (he told my friend josh tonkel [a junior professor at uva at the time] "we better let him defend this one or else he'll just write another"). some highlights, for better and worse:

"As I said in my note about the new chapter 4, there seems no overall coherence to that chapter--but simply a series of jottings not synthesized by an overall plan of argumentation. . .  I think you should map out an outline of what the thesis is going to argue, and go over it with me. Try to spell out what your grand plan is, and tell it to me in a perspicuous way."

"When I made a lunch date with you for this Wednesday, I stupidly forgot that I'll be out of town for the last three days of this week. Can we change it to lunch next Wednesday, the 9th? My office at 12:30?"

"You are going to have to write much more patiently and less hectically to get this job done."

"You will need to write up...your own detailed statement about what counts as a language, as representation, as resemblance, and as reference." [yo, no prob!]

"Between now and August ['86], I'd be glad to do some reading in Gombrich, Danto, Wollheim, etc. and discuss their stuff with you, if that would be helpful. I blush to say I still haven't read The transfiguration of the commonplace nor Wollheim's On art and the mind, and it's high time I did."

"This [early version of chap 1] is a convincing and notably well written (despite occasional lapses) presentation of the least common denominator of Dewey, Kallen, Heidegger, Gombrich, Goodman, et al. It's enlightening to have these diverse figures brought together. . . . My feeling is that, assuming you still cling to your project of confuting the pragmatist theory of perception and showing that Gombrich and Goodman are wrong in relativizing everything to contemporary practices, you still have the hard part of the dissertation to write. . . . Come talk to me about how things are going sometime.

"Best, Dick" 

well, there is a shitload of this stuff, most of which requires some context to get ahold of. i remember being maddened by the comment (feb 29, 1988), 'I really don't find much to disagree with'. i was trying to destroy his philosophy! but that there was dick rorty. one thing that all this reminds me of: how generous he was with his time and energy, and this at a period where he was taking up his role as a world-bestriding intellectual colossus, always jetting off to debate habermas or whatever.

of course i cherished 'notably well written' (even with the lapses). 

affirmations

i'm disappointed with the new kacey musgraves album. now, pageant material definitely has its strengths. particularly, in a gentle way, kacey shows the continued development of what could end up being one of the great voices in country music history: distinctive, light as air with a hint of power, effortless in the upper register, wonderfully melodic. there are some good songs, though i will say that none of them are as good as the best on same trailer, different park (such as 'dandelion,' 'it is what it is', 'step off', 'merry go round'). the arrangements are interesting and pretty various: good use of strings, e.g. 

but i suspect that kacey just got too much positive reinforcement for "follow your arrow" (i tried to dish some out myself): a breakthrough moment in country music, even just for about the first charted affirmation of gayness. now no doubt the thing strayed close to cliche: 'you only live once' and you should just do you. but what a charming melody and sentiment, and what a charming person out there at the country music awards singing it. but you only really get one go at a moment like that. here she follows it up a good five times and more: seriously you just do you, over and over and over.

heavens, "(mind your own) biscuits" sounds like a kacey musgraves parody. when we were listening through the album the first time, my 15-year-old jane said, of "die fun", 'the kacey of two years ago would sneer at that lyric'. (anyway, who dies fun?, and i'm worried a little about the pro-substance-abuse theme at times.) but she sings the darn thing ravishingly.

 

maybe she a bit misunderstood the strengths of her own songwriting. listen to a song like "blowin' smoke" from trailer: particular lives, particular stories. here she mostly rests content with the most general banalities; the album is didactic, which is not necessarily the main thing you want from a country song. also her melodic sense, which is extremely distinctive, featuring half-step progressions and melancholy minor keys, is beautifully suited to her melancholic stories. but not to another self-esteem anthem or deck of affirmation cards.

but the title cut, for example, is pretty darn good. i could also recommend "fine," "this town", and "family is family." there's a duet with willie nelson (inhabited by his beautiful guitar) on the old willie song "are you sure" (it has the same tune as "ain't it funny how time slips away" and "don't you ever get tired of hurting me"), which begins to show what she might do in a completely trad vein. but also her contemporaneity is pretty unique.