cheese it, the cops!

things i wrote this year

I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain

For the New York Times' "Stone" series (the thing cannot possibly be described as a 'blog') I wrote on The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I haven't been rolling the opinion section of the Wall Street Journal quite as heavy as I had been the previous couple of years, but I notched a few: Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping? Russian memes didn't steal the election, rural voters' pride and left's prejudice, the opposite flaws of trump and mueller, hatred enhaces your self-esteem

I had a couple of essays in the Los Angeles Review of Books' Philosophical Salon: western philosophy as white supremacism and before and beyond left and right (in early 19th c america)

For Times Higher Education I did an essay on some of the difficulties i'm having in teaching today's undergrads

For Standpoint I recapitulated my ridicule of Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:

I solved Brexit through the miracle of mereology

refuted Fukuyama and identified the actual end of history

narwhal horns and moral scorekeeping

mass shootings and the stories we tell ourselves

the powerlessness of positive thinking

male aging memoir: short version

reviewed or discussed visual art, as Pat Steir at the Barnes Foundation, arte povera at the Philly Museum, art and capitalism in Bentonville (Crystal Bridges), the art of suiseki landscape stones

i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.

i covered country music from time to time (and see above): steel blossoms, the highwomen, self-dramatization in cody jinks and miranda lambert, 2019 top ten

wrote about race, gender, identity politics, pc, free speech: break the glass floor; sexual abuse and political power, apologizing for whiteness; white guys: collectable, electable; his pronouns are 'they' and 'them'; trump, tropes, and the jews, 

masculinity, psychology, and servility

higher ed, which is struggling these days: hunting humans on campus, mandate campus free speech with a new title IX;  the ridiculous state of campus journalism

i covered some of the debates and impeachment developments and, in general, politics: joe biden rattletrap, intel will pick the next pres, the wrong word, whatever you do, don't elect the unelectable, there's no such thing as electability, 2020 will make 2016 look like a more innocent time, how elizabeth warren started her slide, (maybe this wasn't so prescient): biden and sanders are fading, trumpism after trump

media and such: against copyright, the wrong word is the least of our problems, yo, opinion editors, stop this practice immediately, the conspiracy theory is fake news

 

some piecey blog entries: how thoreau became a radical, ragging mr. rogers, 'ok boomer' and the fiction of generations, mao meets macklemore, quotations from chairman joe, masculinity, psychology, and servility, i just can't get no reception, the washington post opinion page and the cia: no distance, nicholas sandmann and nathan phillips (remember them?) both did well, homo economicus replaced by saints

On Sophia/bloggingheads I argued with Dan Kaufman about wittgenstein, the western phil as white supremacism essay, realism anti-realism and g.e. moore, the analytic/continental split, TRUTH

I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.

2018 sartwelliana

What if Donald Trump is really the Joker but with as a result of inbreeding just has a lower IQ?

Just wondering about a few things. 

My latest piece of at Veterans News Today. We're kind of banned by Facebook these days, and I'm ok with that. It seems pretty clear that while we all must be insane to think that writing for an alternative media independent and intentionally unbridled will in any way accomplish or gain anything. Hell, we don't even get T-shirts.

“Logicians have but ill defined /As rational, the human kind; Reason, they say, belongs to man,/But let them prove it, if they can. Wise Aristotle and Smiglesius,/By ratiocinations specious, Have strove to prove with great precision,/With definition and division, Homo est ratione præditum;/But, for my soul, I cannot credit ’em. And must, in spite of them, maintain/That man and all his ways are vain;  And that this boasted lord of nature/ Is both a weak and erring creature. That instinct is a surer guide /Than reason-boasting mortals pride; And, that brute beasts are far before ’em…” Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1697

Enjoy, and Slainte!

a little gallery of suiseki, the japanese art form in which unaltered stones represent or encapsulate mountains or landscapes. these are collected in my immediate area in adams county pa. 

 

 

 

April may be the cruelest month, but October is a bitch...

 

 

Man. Woman. Nature. History. Art. Birth. Death. Infinity. Three chords and Truth.

https://www.veteranstodaynews.com/2017/10/09/dispatches-from-wolf-country-old-age-should-rage/

 

 

fujistone and hokusai 2

 

suiseki 'view of fuji,' collected in latimore township pa. (unaltered natural stone)

hokusai

cream quartz peak

5.5 inches across. collected in adams county, pa. the underside of the same stone:

this one

clouds encroaching on a high plain, perhaps? anyway, a lovely stone.

7 inches across; collected in adams county, pa.

 

suiseki yin yang

stones collected in adams county, pa.

range with crystal cave

 

[collected near gatlinburg, tn. i might do a stone every day for a bit? double-click.]

Merry Pre-Christmas What the Fuck!

 
I don’t know what to say here except there’s something for everyone, I supose. And that includes these hand-crafted Cthulhu sex toys by Necronomicox. How did these things come to be, you might ask? According to Necronomicox: “I saw a niche that needed to be filled, so to speak.”...Because in his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming masturbating, amirite? --- Dangerous Minds, 11-5-2016

As a sort of pseudo-journalist, I am temporarily homeless. Veterans Today and Veterans News Service are reorganizing, and I'm temporarily without a home for my Wolf Country Dispatchs. I hate to take up a lot of Crispin's space, so I'm looking for a temporary home...since I've always wondered if I might be somewhat unloved there because I'm not friendly to various wingnut batshit conspiracy theorists but...hell, it looks like the Batshit Conspiracy Theorists got it half right...

Anyway, one country's useful idiot is another's...President Elect. So, my thought is simple. I think everybody who has a vestigial fondness for the Constitution and American myth, should immediately send one of these sweaters to your favorite Republican weasel. The more Christian they claim to be and the less they indicate it by their beliefs, the better.

Is it the Batshit Old Bag on the committee that overseas the NLRB who hates unions and doesn't understand why workers want them? Great, she wears a large. Is it Paul Ryan, the Eddie Munster Look Alike Ayn Rand worshipper who has no clue about economics, economic theory, Catholic doctrine and teaching, or basic concepts of justice? He's a tall skinny weasel by comparison to the COSTCO bargain sized old broad so I'd say a large also. Is it Mitch McConnell, the useful Idiot who sold out American interests and autonomy to Russia so that Trump would be president? See if they have one with a turtle neck and get an extra large so the Turtle can just turtle his way into your heart.

And, if sweaters aren't your thing, there's always the Cthulhu dildo, which is appropriate for either gender in the GOP anti-American crusade. 

 

 

mountain with cliff dwellings

collected in eastern tennessee. about 10" wide.

been on a collecting jag before winter.

keep on rockin me baby

coupla more. +six names of beauty.

 

white suiseki with natural bridge

 

 

very small mountain

 

 

 

[collected in latimore township, 10/16. about 8 in wide, 3.5 high. double-click.]

terrain stone 2

 

collected at seneca lake, ny. this is some version of suiseki.

terrain stone with terraced hills

 

collected at seneca lake, ny. about 18x13", half an inch deep.

 

rocking nathaniel rogers

vid on my hero (and thoreau's) nathaniel peabody rogers. i love his nature writing, his radical politics, his razor-sharp polemical style.

 

stoned

more adams county suiseki. double click to expand.

[that one's about 5 inches across.]

 

department of defiance

 

american defiance is out in paper, with kindle coming soon. it is a collection of anti-authoritarian texts stretching from anne hutchinson's defense against and attack on the puritan theocracy to voltairine de cleyre's "anarchism and american traditions."

there are some celebrated slices, especially emerson and thoreau, but there is so much that is so little known. i've tried to give whole texts or very substantial parts. john woolman's 'plea for the poor' from the 1760s anticipates the arguments of peter singer. sarah grimke's letters on the equality of the sexes is probably the first feminist book published in the us, and she's better than fuller, i think. william lloyd garrison argues for total anti-statism in 1838. sitting bull lures a reporter into the new york herald's last stand. there is a really stunning and ground-breaking essay on race by frederick douglass that is almost never read (better than dubois 50 years later), along with a big chunk of david walker's unbelievable appeal. angela heywood throws down some surrealist political sex poetry. anti-federalists, abolitionists, anarchists, and antinomians are all represented. 

this is our most radical and most american heritage: a fierce anti-hierarchical tradition, the texts themselves sometimes unimaginable acts of defiance. we need remindin.

in editing this book, i am appointing myself secretary of defiance. these texts constitute our artillery battery, our canon.

committing suiseki

really, adams county, pa should be crawling with japanese suiseki masters. well, maybe there aren't enough of those for a true infestation. here are three of my more charismatic stones.

 

 

 

double click on these.

 

wu wei ching 30

   When you've really got it, the outside and the inside merge.

   The further you wander out there, the deeper within you go.

   The deeper you go within, the freer your wandering.

   So the sage wanders in the world to find herself. She finds the empty place within as she merges with all things.

   She can work hard the livelong day and not harm her spirit. Though she moves through everything, she remains where she is.

   Ferry over to the ordinary and encompass the world.

 

american immanentalism

as i've often said, i think that american transcendentalism is ineptly named; i'd prefer an antonym, actually, such as 'immanentalism.' now i think the canon needs expanding, and i think the narrative according to which transcendentalism was superseded by pragmatism is simplistic. 

so, if i were assembling a set of transcendentalist essays, i might start with rogers. i would certainly include essays by voltairine de cleyre, perhaps 'the dominant idea' and 'crime and punishment.' and i might fetch up with zora neale hurston: i am straight up asserting that zora is an american transcendentalist in the thoreau mould. a volume focusing exclusively on her essays is long overdue.

in the hands of lit and phil profs, the transcendentalists have sunk into quaint american fossils, groovy proto-hippie nature children, with an embarrassing political individualism that no one can believe anymore, or that must be attenuated or vitiated under interpretation. but a good part of the whole thrust is political from the outset in rogers, emerson, thoreau: a radical anti-authoritarianism. and they have a beautiful individualism that is also not at all about economic self-seeking, but derives from protestant notions like the quaker inner light of god in each person. also, this individualism is a radical egalitarianism, as you see in rogers, in voltairine, in hurston. and it is an individualism that connects with the natural world in much the way many had previously connected to god, and then seeks to place us each as an individuals - not as races, not genders, not parties, not classes, not general wills - into the same shared world. 

it is my philosophy.

 

american radical

i've just published a new book to kindle:

Herald of Freedom: Essays of Nathaniel Rogers, American Transcendentalist and Radical Abolitionist

i'm telling you this is a discovery: someone's going to have to convince me that a more important straight-to-e book has been published.

A great and almost unknown American writer from New Hampshire, Nathaniel Peabody Rogers (1794-1846) was the most radical American political voice of the antebellum period. He is also an undiscovered American Transcendentalist, at his best comparable to Emerson and Thoreau. Both men acknowledged Rogers' influence on them, and Thoreau published one of his first essays - collected here - on Rogers' work, recognizing his excellence as both a political and a nature writer. Anti-slavery drove all his thought, and as an abolitionist writer, only Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips are his rivals. Rogers was an anarchist, a pacifist, a feminist, an environmentalist, a religious heretic, an individualist, an anti-capitalist and an advocate of animal rights.

His writings are collected here for the first time since 1849, along with Thoreau's essay "Herald of Freedom" and other materials about Rogers and American radicalism of the early 19th century.

nathaniel rogers was an amazing radical and an amazing writer, and if you want to see someone in 1840 who speaks up for animal rights, against capital punishment, against slavery, against the state, for environmentalism as that came much later to be understood, for indian rights, and so on, and did so with extreme clarity, creativity and vigor, you've got to check this out. he was a decade emerson's senior, and he is a fundamental american transcendentalist.

boy kindle does still mangle a word document. here is a clean, free pdf

 

Contents

Preface, 3

Introduction by John Pierpont, 7

 

Writings

I. Manifestos of Liberty and Infidelity, 20

Speech, 21

Authority, 22

Church and State, 26

Infidelity, 27

Politics, 28

The Great Question of the Age, 29

Rhode Island Meeting, 31

War, 38

Reply to a Correspondent, 41

 

II. Anti-Slavery, 46

Constitutionality of Slavery, 47

The Amistad Case, 52

 

III. Against Hierarchy, 56

Osceola, 57

Color-Phobia, 60

The Rights of Animals, 62

Thoughts on the Death Penalty, 63

Aristocracy, 65

Letter from the Old Man of the Mountain, 67

Address to the Female Anti-Slavery Society, 69

 

IV. Capitalism, 72

Labor, 73

Against Property, 76

Anti-Slavery and Capital, 79

 

V. Nature Writing and Personal Essays, 81

It Rains, 82

Bell-Ringing, 83

The Ground Bird, 85

Cobbett's American Gardener, 87

Tilling the Ground, 89

Trees, 91

"Herald of Freedom," by Henry David Thoreau, 99

Appendix A: William Lloyd Garrison, "Declaration of Sentiments of the Peace Society, 108

Appendix B: American Radical Anti-Authoritarians of the of the Early Nineteenth Century, 113

 

 

my canon

zora neale hurston's essays are still radically undervalued. she is one of the great american essayists. in the canon of great expressions of american individualism i would place seeing the world as it is alongside emerson's self-reliance and thoreau's walking.

as much fun as it is to be floundering around with the alligators in the swamping problem, i think that beauty promises more happiness, whatever that is. what i actually want to blog about is art and books, it may shock you to hear. so i am re-opening a blog i had for a class in 2013: writing the arts. first entry: the hilarious book of the incomparable designer raymond loewy.

 

your husband's heart problem's complicated

 

a proud accession

ladies and gentlemen: marques haynes and the fabulous magicians!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the nut graph:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

skysea

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

anyone who likes these and who wants to understand where they're coming from should read six names of beauty. one thing i'll point out: mountains are actually very large stones, and stones are very small mountains. the relationship is not like a picture to its object or motif.

i realize i have been studying and thinking about and teaching about japanese aesthetics for a quarter century. i've sampled calligraphy and ikebana, been seeing in particular all of very rural life in terms of a wabi sabi aesthetics, and i have been teaching about and in my own way trying to practice zen (or, for me, even more fundamentallly) taoism for a very long time very seriously. all these go together with what i think about myself as a cult of the ordinary, and a continuous cultivation of attention. the tao te ching is how i made my peace with the 'spiritual side' of 12-step programs. i call my higher power the tao! i hear the same thing in zen buddhism. 

so i love about suiseki that it calls attention to things that are already there, rather than creating new ones. if you simply attend to things that are already there, your art can't be an achievement; you're not doing it in order to score; it's just happening through you. i want people to see these rocks as i do, and i could never in the rest of my lifetime design any of them, and they are just ordinary rocks. for me, they open up a peephole on how infinitely beautiful the universe is and how far beyond human capacities to describe or envision or see clearly. but you see more if you really attend. it requires no hand skills. i was always one of those kids who couldn't draw, had abominable penmanship, and so on. well i'm not drawing or painting here, just drawing things together from the world.

the best introduction i know to japanese aesthetics is mokoto ueda's book literary and art theories of japan, long out of print. get it on inter-library loan! he knows a lot more about this than i do, but i find myself intuiting it or using it confidently and spontaneously by my own lights, and my ability to do this is bringing me great peace and joy even in a time of wild emotional and practical swings.

 

sky islands

 

32

"Tao" is the name of the nameless,

of the perfectly simple.

The emptiness at the heart of real power

renders it impossible or pointless to resist.

Reside in this central stillness

and all things begin to shape themselves

and come to exist with ease in your experience.

The sky unites with the earth in a gentle rain.

People find unity without constraint.

Names dissolve and namelessness with them,

until each thing is precisely itself;

each thing stands as itself in your awareness,

names itself, depicts itself, contains itself.

The river contains the sky.

The sea contains the river.

The sky contains the sea.