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

Recent items:

 

wsj: the opposite flaws of trump and mueller

splicetoday: art and capitalism in bentonville

times literary supplement: an authoritative but anti-authoritarian account of 'the dawn of civilization' (review of the great james c. scott's against the grain) [drive]

times higher eduction: teaching beauty and existentialism to the students of now  {drive}

larb philosophical salon: western philosophy as white supremacism

wsj: hatred enhances your self-esteem

Rolling pretty good these days!

I'll figure this thing out eventually

The Oscars and the Illusion of Perfect Representation

I've spent much of my career on this question of the various relations of representations and reality. It was the topic of my dissertation, which was an attack on the claim that reality is a product of or is constructed by means of or just is pictures or words, a position I associated with my supervisor, Rorty, and with his heroes, including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Dewey. The question of realism in representation (and an implicit argument that representations by and large derive from rather than create the antecedent reality) is everywhere in my work, including essays in End Of Story, How to Escape (actually drawn from the work on Entanglements, then in process), and elsewhere. It is central to my work on race in Act Like You Know and I work through the issues explicitly from many angles in Political Aesthetics. I was writing about it in my high school journals. I do not know why these questions so obsess me!

Some other treatments, from splicetoday:

Looks Like Me

King Meets Zuckerberg

PC Entertainment as Medieval Allegory 

The Magical (really, magical) Power of Words

recent items

splicetoday: Fukuyama described the fictional end of a fictional history. This one is real. (also a quick precis of my political orientation)

wsj: Who do you want controlling your internet, Mark Zuckerberg or Xi Jinping?   (or here)

splice: copyright is obviously incompatible with the basic values of scholarship

splice: the scandals at lincoln center and the nature of art

Asking for a Friend...Does Trump's Ass Make Him Look Stupid? Or Fat? Or Both.

 

An odd part of the fallout from the Facebook-Twitter-Instagram Bot investigation is that a lot of internet publications that depend on outside collaborators can't post various places like Facebook because their content won't pass the Decency Test. Veterans Today is one of those places, and they've been struggling to find the right formula to differentiate from old bad actors and new, possibly more bad bad actors who are a bit more politically correct. I guess that did us in at Veterans Today -- I think that our awarding liars "Motherfucking REMFs" for the extent and grossness of the reality may have been the proximate cause. 

Not to worry. Despite losing a lot of retweets and views and various things, we still exist.This is a new piece -- I confess that for someone with a seriously bent sense of humor and a tendency toward satire, the Trump administration is an embarrassment of riches. It's just impossible to write seriously using satire to make points while presenting an argument when you're dealing with this chiseling lowlife. I know that Maddox prefers some varions on Military Monk as a nickname pointing to his dedication, straight shooting integrity, and disdain for comfort and wealth. However, life with Trump for someone in his position probably felt a lot like self-flagellation with barbed wire. Somehow, it just didn't pass the smell test. So, he lasted a helluva lot longer than someone not a Military Saint would have. Trump would have had me at the Bastille Day ceremony. 

Anyway, one thing that has been a problem for me is finding the right epitet for Trump, one that mocks but captures his pieous side. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, belongs to the realm of stories where the hero is destroyed by a fatal flaw in his own makeup. Well, Trump is a nexus in and of himself of lots of fatal flaws. Did he ever give or get a blow job from Roy Cohn? Possibly. Knowing Roy Cohn well enough to have a personal opinion about the guy makes him unqualified to be president -- but that might give his base pause. You need to have a really well developed handle on recent American History to know what a louse Cohn was. He was a genuinely evil man; he died of AIDS denying that he had the disease or was Gay in public up until he died. He probably ran a bit of a gay cabal on Senator McCarthy's staff, which the drunken fool wouldn't have caught on to. He was disbarred for various nasty stunts like suborning perjury, witness tampering, embezzlement, and who knows what else...that's who he's referring to when he'd complain he wanted his own Roy Cohn...

 

I've given it a lot of thought, and had  settled pretty much settled on some variation of President Manatee, but realized that was unfair to sea cows. Then I heard someone say Trump is from Queens and I thought, yeah,,,and then Howard Fineman said something about his administration being the most corrupt government since Caligula. Well, I don't think it's close; I think it's probably worse. Of course, Trump hasn't married his horse yet after appointing it to the Supreme Court -- As Gaius "Caligula" Caesar did -- of course, we know that Trump is scared of animals, and I suspect that horses really scare him. And, Caligula did decide to invade Britannia and then had his Army beat the waves with the flat of their swords and fill their helmets with seashells to represent his booty, planning to display this on his triumph.On the other hand, there was the great parade debacle and the "guard the border against the caravans" nonsense, so...close enough. 

So, does "the Queens' Caligula work for him? Or does it make his ass look fat? 

Politics and Geography

By Crispin Sartwell

There’s recently been a revival of an argument that goes back to the 18th century: that the form of government prescribed by the Constitution gives more representation to rural than to urban people, and to people from relatively sparsely-populated states than to people from populous ones. The clinching demonstrations of this are the composition of the Senate and, less extremely, the electoral college. Now, everyone takes the position on this matter that would help their own side get elected. Nevertheless, the question does show something fundamental about the nature of political representation.

The political reasons for the phenomenon are familiar from your history textbook: the US originates as an alliance among independent states. The less populous states were concerned that their voices and interests would be drowned out or swamped by those of Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York; they had to be cajoled into the nation. Similar assurances about representation were required, for example, by smaller nations in constituting the European Union, and the United Nations pays lip service at least to a principle of equal sovereignty among nation-states, not representation in proportion to population. It had to start there if it expected smaller nations to join.

Most of us do not, any longer, think of the US as an alliance of independent nations; we consider the United States a single political unit in some sense. Under that presumption, and as an abstract matter in democratic political theory (which is liable to start with a principle of equal representation or one person/one vote), it is hard to argue that the 600,000 or so people of Wyoming should have the same representation in the Senate as Florida’s 20,000,000.

But whatever the theoretical and practical drawbacks of the system as it stands, it also shows some of the real complexities and some of the possibilities for beauty or profundity that lurk within the practices of political representation. The neutral, abstract scheme of one person/one vote yields a kind of minimalist or hyper-simplified picture, but the concrete practices of political representation on the ground are variegated, swirling, showing many relations of human beings to one another and to other bits or dimensions of the world.

In almost any real democratic system, the space or geography of the nation is represented to some extent as well as its human population. This is striking, in that it suggests that, in representative politics, the physical configuration of a country as well as its people is the subject represented: what the picture is a picture of, as a portrait represents the person who sat for it or a still-life painting a bowl of fruit. A democracy in some sense represents the place in which it is located as well as people it encompasses as citizens. In addition to being a portrait of the people, that is, a representative system is a sort of landscape painting or topographical map of the terrain it operates within.

The spaces that Florida and Wyoming occupy in the Senate chamber correlates better to their relative physical size than to their relative population, and in general the Senate comes closer than the House, for example, to resembling the sweep of the nation across the vast central plains and mountain west that has been central to the national narrative. Obviously, this doesn’t work so well for Delaware, but the point is that the different principles on which different branches and levels of government are selected ends up yielding a remarkably complex depiction of a nation.

Any representative democracy and indeed almost any political system is obliged to represent geographies as well as populations. Geography, after all, accounts to some extent for the distribution of populations in the first place. But any political situation or system of any size coordinates smaller units: provinces, counties, townships, and so on, and reflects to some extent the physical environment it occupies.

Indeed, when we think about America, we do not think of it only, or even primarily, as a group of people, but as a physical terrain (purple mountains and fruited planes, sea to shining sea, and so on). We might think of it, as well, in terms of located sub-cultures: Latino culture in southern Texas, peoples meeting in New Orleans at the mouth of Mississippi, Appalachia, and a hundred others. The principle of one person/one vote irrigates all the deserts, flattens all the mountains, and bridges all the rivers, but even the attempt to apply the principle with perfect neutrality ends up connecting to the highly differentiated landscape and acknowledging the connections of the people to it.

Every political system represents the space it occupies as well as the people occupying that space, and represents them as inseparable. We may want to ameliorate specific political inequalities that this generates, but I think it is more something we should try to become conscious of and even celebrate than something we should seek to expunge. 

Crispin Sartwell teaches philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. His most recent book is Entanglements: A System of Philosophy (SUNY 2017).

for a week or two there i was a reporter, embedded in the monument wars (piece for citylab). there really is some great public art in philly right now; today might be a good one to check out monument lab before the rain hits.

karen olivier, "the battle is joined," in vernon park

sorry about slow blogging. i'm not missing everything, however, in this wild and woolly period. real-time political commentary has basically moved to my weekly column on the world's liveliest website, splicetoday (today: political idolatry and iconoclasm, on confederate memorials and such) and my twitter feed @crispinsartwell. i'll be back on the blog too, i expect.

paint the white house black

my splice column today is a slam of my hometown: washington, dc. really i'm not so concerned with vindicating the 'worst major city in the country' thing as with describing the particular weirdness of the place. some of this is a bit of a commonplace to people in the area: baltimore is better! etc. or philly. or even richmond.

anyway, like a lot of folks, i am proud of my problematic forebears, and i write in the piece about a peculiar subculture of dc newspaperpeople as it stood in my youth. i've posted these before, but here's my grandfather franklin sartwell, killing some poor schlub's copy at the washington herald. quite elegantly turned out, and with walking-stick in hand he wrote the nightclub column 'man about town.'

and here's his white house pass.

 

apotheosis of washington

 

[contd from below] and, since we saw the dome, i am pondering 'the apotheosis of washington' by constantino brumidi (1865). perhaps some of the people on our tour were a bit surprised to see washington approved of by roman gods rather than jesus, for some believe we live in a christian nation. but you'd have to say, looking around the mall, that the imagery is fundamentally pagan: consider lincoln enthroned in his parthenon like a trans athena. the tour guide did his little rap about roman republicanism, and how appropriate this fresco is to the next great republic after rome, etc.

but, when you get the whole thing straight, it's about elevating washington to the status of a god, and the best roman parallel would be...caligula and all those political leaders who claimed and enforced their godhead or that of their predecessors by decree. this sort of worship of human beings goes well beyond paganism into sheer groveling.

the iconographic program is likely based on vasari/zuccari's ceiling for the duomo in florence, which, like the italian renaissance in general, apparently represents a wildly incoherent new religion in which jesus cavorts with the roman gods.

in particular, 'the apotheosis of washington' subs in gw for christ enthroned at the last judgment, which appears at the analogous place in the (much larger) duomo composition. we've gone very far very fast from 'all men are created equal.'

one thing i believe we can safely say: this cannot be an iconography of republicanism.

so this has just fully struck me, but the italian renaissance really did develop a new syncretic religion. however, the combination of christianity with the classical gods is quite literally absurd, on so many grounds i am not going to enumerate them now. ummmm, what did jesus say in the gospels about your little warrior and sex gods etc? or how about the stuff on humility?

i say, looking at it squarely, that the religious beliefs of a michelangelo, as expressed in his work, are an unbelievable historical, conceptual, and spiritual mess. try his apollo/christ on for size. he's back! a big beefy sexy channing-tatum christ who's all geared up for that assignation with venus or mars, or an earth girl of either gender. 

it's not that this didn't occur to people at the time, one way or another: martin luther was quite clear about it, i think. or savanarola and sandro botticelli: he realized after awhile that his art had been obviously incompatible with his professed christianity and that of his continent. of course, just seeing clearly the actual iconography does not entail that one starts burning its products. but the tensions would have been hard to miss for anyone, and the reconciliations took a lot of work. they'll take a lot more, because these things are irreconcilable.

this is part of what necessitated a counter-reformation, and one might look at caravaggio's work after the initial wave of pagan/homoerotic images. the depictions of christ and all the associated figures are relentlessly human, peasant, humble, and yet exalted. it is a rechristianizing of art and of catholic europe in the face of the new, flatly heretical religion (which was the religion, mind, of an ultra-corrupt papacy). at that moment, and until we get to the neo-classical phase, we seem to be less in need of flitting cherubim and all the accoutrements of the greek pantheon. the story of jesus is the story of god becoming human, not of humans becoming gods.

of course, just because the belief system underlying it is a farrago of irreconcilable confusions and bizarrely conflicted psychological complexes doesn't mean the art doesn't have something going for it. 

 

architecture and truth in dc

spending new year's in my hometown, dc, with the lovely jane irish. we took a tour of the capitol, because irish is working on baroque ceiling-type paintings and she wanted to see the dome. when i was a kid, you could just walk in and wander around (indeed, when i was 15 or so we cased the joint as thoroughly as we could; the plan was a thorough stinkbombing, making the place uninhabitable.) now it's most regimented and security-oriented experience you could imagine. i really am a knee-jerk anti-authoritarian, and walking with me around downtown dc, i'm afraid, is listening to me make nasty cracks, vicious historical observations, and hostile remarks about each organization/building as we pass.

all the classical temples and the pseudo-classical concrete agency monstrosities have an 'ideological' quality, harped on continuously in our capitol tour guide's tribute to the greatness of our republic and its amazing institutions. but, it's quite like imperial rome: republican decoration and the overwhelming reality of worldwide deathdealing empire.

the headquarters of the fbi, however, is a classic piece of brutalism, and not pseudo-classical at all. it is the most repulsive building near the mall. and it is the only honest one.

new dimensions of political theory

i do think that my best book (well, until entanglements) is political aesthetics. here are a couple of reviews:

t.j. diffey in *mind*

paul voice in the *journal of aesthetics*

Inspired by Crispin

 

I continue to blame Crispin for my writing just about anywhere. He invited me to share this space occasionally, and while we disagree about a lot of stuff, we're kind of brothers in some ways. This morning his very brief piece on the probable disintegration of the Republican party and the coming realignment of politics into something a lot more coherent than what we've had since the Southern Strategy took over the Rs and then the Democrats became less elitist and more mainstream while losing a lot of the mainstream Democrats. 

I've been thinking and playing around with writing about class in America as a determining factor for a while. Reagan's big tent has turned into a bunch of conflicting smaller tents all having a revival at the same time. So, over at my new home on Veterans News Now, I wrote this. 

I hope to hear soon that Crispin's exile of conscience has ended and he's back at Dickinson or maybe even someplace a lot better and more welcoming to him. He seems to be dealing with whatever the hell he's doing -- car theft, card sharking, publishing -- quite well. An actual job with a pay check can really fuck up your life. 

 

Related articles

still doing time

yin-yang on splice today

the complement to my piece on hillary and gender: trump the dickhead. 

We haven't seen a man cockstrut like that on the national political stage since women got the vote, or since Teddy Roosevelt hunted big game and waved around his big stick.

how you inhabit your gender

but i will say this: as the first, as the gender-breakthrough, hillary is incredibly problematic, much moreso than obama with regard to race, or like jackie robinson or someone. that it's the wife of a president is problematic; that it's the wife of bill clinton is extremely problematic; that she has been his wife in the way she has is a big old problem from this angle too. it's definitely not maggie thatcher or golda meir.  there are a number of other people already who could be the first female pres, and no doubt there will be many more. i want and expect it to happen. but she is in some ways an unfortunate choice, precisely in the way she's lived gender.

or perhaps she's emblematic of a certain sort of bourgeois white woman in a certain era, sort of just post-friedan, pill etc. she's got the notion that women must be strong and independent and equal, etc., but perhaps she's also got a set of desires that are in conflict with that. she's struggled with the expectation of wifely subordination, both rejecting and enacting it. she's caught between generating an independent power as a person and...manipulating men or the patriarchy to get what she wants or living through, contributing to, and using her husband as he rises, a kind of old-time form of women's power. but then, she still has to legitimize herself as a nurturer; we got a portrait of remarkably traditional mom, with mixed plausibility, and that extends into the presentation of the policy.

chelsea presented her as full-time homemaker, which just can't be right, even if she made efforts. there were attempts, if i remember rightly, to 'humanize' gore, but what it meant for hillary at the convention to 'show the personal side,' the 'human' hillary, was always to feminize her, to show her with the normative female activities, relationships, and values as they stood in 1960. like all the symbology is locked into a transitional and wickedly conflicted moment in gender history. if a younger woman was looking at her self-presentation at the convention, it was extreme 'super-woman': full-time mom and world-bestriding career woman! you can have it all! ! i think a lot of younger woman must have looked at that and rolled their eyes.

i'm imagining that gender in hillary clinton's head is a puzzle, a mess, a difficulty all the time, though who knows? but the public enactment is extremely complex and conflicted. of course, this thing has been pretty much a minefield for everybody, one way or another. i hope bill is deeply confused about it too, but i doubt it. more nostalgic, perhaps, like roger ailes.

it's often been remarked over the decades that the sort of feminism hillary embodies doesn't do very well at representing the experiences of black women, poor women, third world women, and so on. i think it doesn't do that well representing the experiences of younger women right now either, and i actually think that even women a decade or two younger than hillary but otherwise similar had somewhat different internal struggles, or perhaps just somewhat less internal struggle, though there were continuities in the probs too. but it also had a role in moving everybody some way and opening up possibilities.

so there are excruciating tensions. she's not alone; i think it's transitional, characteristic of a certain class-race-gender-age cohort. and i think that even if she were elected, we would await the real breakthrough, something that or someone who shows what women are really becoming outside the gender hierarchy, someone less confused and also less intent on being something general or a symbol; someone who is herself. hillary symbolizes the struggle against that hierarchy, but just as conspicuously she embodies it; she is herself a lot of what she's fighting against.

in every cohort, there have been many sorts of ways of being female, of course. but some in this situation were pretty buttoned-up; like you didn't necessarily see what was really going on with the junior leaguer etc unless there was a crisis. a lot of people were pretty focused on making it seem ok from the outside; sometimes people are more focused on what other people think about them than on what they think about themselves, or those two have merged (with tensions). i feel that hillary clinton has concealed herself, or is extremely focused on not letting her self leak into public space (the disaster of what's in those 30k emails; why she suddenly goes very strange right there); maybe that is characteristic too in a way, a sort of bourgeois respectability of which mom the homemaker is the preserver while dad gets to misbehave a bit unless it slides badly off the rails (note to my 12-steppers; she seems a bit al-anon? kind of 'chapter to the wives'? just sayin). she's the maintainer-in-chief of appearances, but you know boys will be b's etc. so that makes the later career pretty fraught.

london has risen

remember i told you to go out and like listen to and download and pay for immortal tech's revolutionary, vol.2? you didn't, did you? ok. loadin' up the trunk with the mawfuckin arsenal, headin to your place. ok you got it?

i registered republican this year so i could vote for rand in the primary. now i'm stuck with competing fascists in my own fucking party! but...at least i'm not a democrat. if i were i'd dangle myself from my belt in this cell, where the oklahoma state troopers have tossed me after the beat-down.

so, we republicans have all been asking, since it was way too late, how we can stop trump. i am voting for tech, and one vote would be enough. yeah true he and his boys could just jump trump and rodneyking him. but i'd much rather have him in the twitter war or on the debate stage. people keep thinking no one can handle trump verbally; so adept, so funny and fun, so kicking your ass around like jeb bush was his rape victim. just because marco rubio is palpably incapable of besting a turnip in debate doesn't mean a goodly portion of the population couldn't blow up the dump truck.

admittedly, putting anyone on a debate stage with tech, much less a republican, is like vivisecting rabbit eyes. it's like watching mike tyson up against a white boy in those first few fights, or ronda rousey taking on jennifer aniston. still i'd tune in. just like i'm definitely tuning in when terrorists capture the president and torture him on live tv.

 

slower the better. can you imagine the ratings for that shit? let it run over like an american idol finale.

 

  

i guess i never completed the series, or sometimes they take stuff down because you're using copyrighted music. intellectual property must die.

godbob

here's how i think dylan got to be a god. his whole persona, all the scraggly clothes and the roughened-up voice and stuff, was a critique of bourgeois white culture by a bourgeois white person (conveying that is one reason for replacing 'zimmerman' with 'dylan'). it was an attack on the smooth, processed, false suburban white northern 50s or whatever. hence it was extremely compelling to northern white bourgeois kids at that moment: it was an expression of their own discontent with their world. that is sort of important. that's the experience people had when they heard it as so super-authentic, even though it was a self-conscious pose: it was authentic as a critique of the inauthenticity of the lives of the parents of its audience. that's why, despite the fact that dylan never delivered any sort of coherent political message (unlike woody guthrie, pete seeger, or to take actually great artists, john prine or bob marley), he was immediately heard as politically transformative.

but it took the excruciatingly problematic form of romanticizing the primitive, and romanticizing blues and country music as naive folk arts, and hence completely misunderstood and falsified the music it venerated. indeed, i say folk music of this variety is actually racist and classist, like orientalism or...colonialism: it just romanticizes these cultures on the very same grounds that the white power structures condemned them or regarded them as pathological and tried disastrously to remediate them (oh, housing projects, e.g.). it displays a complete incomprehension of its sources, which were actually the work of professional musicians and virtuosi. so, in its incomprehension, it tried to simulate what it took to be their direct, immediate, primitive, authentic expressions: it is simulated primitivism and incompetence as authenticity.

it's not surprising that as those kids grew up and assumed their racial destiny of power, the rhetoric of race and class changed completely, while the realities changed very little. also, it's not surprising in the midst of all that confusion that the music sucks: it's only being used as some sort of badge or device: bob dylan is an actor playing hank williams or blind willie mctell or something. but he sure as hell can't write a song like hank williams or blind willie mctell, can he? or sing one. guess what? you could be listening to the real shit.

the genius of dylan had nothing to do with dylan's abilities, if any. it had to do with this big swirl of cultural critique and abject confusion.

 

 

 

review

i am often frustrated that my books rarely get reviewed; i know a lot of authors who feel that way. but i did find a nice review of political aesthetics from the journal of aesthetics and art criticism, by paul voice from bennington.

i love the praise, of course, and he praises the book for strengths i do think it has. and i also think that his criticisms poke some of the weak spots. it is true that i have a hard time with the concept of 'the aesthetic'. i certainly have been worrying about it for decades, but even when a student asked me today in my beauty class what i meant by 'aesthetic' (properties, aspects, experiences) i fumbled around. and it does have a tendency to get bigger and bigger until it's not surprising that it engulfs everything. i am not satisfied with the general characterizations of the aesthetic i gave in the book, and i have no pop-up definition. but of course i could and do say something and then something else and so on about it; i don't think it's completely nebulous.

king, the afterlife

one more bit on king, and then i'm done. we need to think about how king has functioned as an image, an icon, a symbol, and so on, how 'king' has circulated, what he or his picture or his words mean at any given place and time. it is a well-nigh universal american image, as common an image as we have, less problematic even than the flag. i have written a lot and perhaps intend to write more about 'unconscious racism'. let's say i believe in it in a pretty extreme way. i think it is incredibly obvious on the ground: in the gap between how we white folks think about ourselves/what we say, and the structural racism that persists (income levels, education and educational segregation, incarceration rates, residential segregation, police violence, and so on). it's been decades since i talked to a white person who considered him/herself a racist. it's like reality is a hallucination. black people must find that annoying.

well, the image of king has a role here, a use: really, anti-immigrant activists quote him as a shelter against the charge of bigotry. but just the average white liberal person - who harbors all the attitudes that make the situation, who is still looking for some white experts to tell black people how to remediate their pathologies, still wanting to oppress black people to make them free, still thinking basically racially all the time - takes shelter in king. we march to selma, which is sort of like, is a wan reflection of, marching to selma. of course we already agreed with every sentence, and really felt it when oprah was crucified in the street. we all hated the cracker segregationist police chiefs and governors. and were we to run into cracker segregationists, we'd know what to say. but guess what? today's cracker segregationist only wants to judge people by the cointent of their characters. we have met the cracker segregationist and he is us. king (among others) taught white folks how to talk.

if king's image now is a double-edged sword, that is not king's fault, putting it mildly. he aspired to universal brotherhood, universal values. but any rhetoric, any image, is subject to unpredictable circulation, and those tropes have remarkable possibilities for ... problematic appropriation, because anyone can potentially nod along, and is meant to. king's image can easily be deracinated, im-paled. but then an examination or critique of how a particular image or sentence is being appropriated is always possible too, and people are always re-radicalizing king as well.

the dream of irwin s. huber is a deeply american dream. family man, business man, leader, redeemer.

running out to pick up some body spray

i'm serious when i say this might be the best ad ever for anything.

 

I despise Upworthy, don't you...cue Emily Dickinson

 

I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?

Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...

Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. 
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. -- 

 

 

Anyway, there is also music provided by that twanging philosopher, Mr. Dwight Yoakum. But, watch the Ted Thing and I know you'll like it

And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...

 

kacey the great

i think pop music is very gay. but both hip hop and country have been among the last cultural bastions of homophobia; we live in a rather complex cultural landscape, don't we? the tv series nashville has a sub-plot involving a closeted male performer who is a sex symbol for women. one theorizes that this may have happened to randy travis, for example. back in the 90s, you could still say things like: travis has been accused of being gay. i speculate that that very great country singer may have been having a very difficult life ever since. on the other hand, i don't think you could say that country music is infested with actual anti-gay rants, routine insults and so on like hip hop is. what it's full of is normative heterosexuality. but on either racial end, it is only now even becoming vaguely conceivable for, say, a major artist to come out. (there have been attempts. chely wright came out, but maybe only after her commercial possibilities had petered out. at any rate she was never heard from again.)

i do think the macklemore song 'same love' and his performance at the vma's was a moment. now let's see kanye do something like that. and, in parallel, though without the star-studded mega-spectacle, the first anti-homophobic country song that i've ever heard from a major commercial artist was performed at the cma's: 'follow your arrow' by the really amazing kacey musgraves, who is also, at age 12 or whatever she is, one of the best and most important songwriters in nashville. anyway, i think that the thing below was a bit of a turning point. maybe country music doesn't much matter, but you might contemplate the possible effects of the expression of a completely changed attitude in the places where country is dominant.

the line she's dropping under the usual meaningless censorship constraints is 'roll up a joint...or don't.' really, we don't give a damn how your song sounds. only we can't let you make the noise 'joint'. reallym though, you can't blame anybody, because your little censors, whether at the fcc or wtihin a network, are not in control of the extent of their own intelligence. you know? no one decides to be stupid. it's all inadvertent, really.

 

 

that song is by far the most optimistic thing on kacey's 'same trailer, different park'. as many have remarked, kacey's is essentially a very bleak vision, and, i would add, also a very traditional realist project (courbet's, e.g.), which is also a project of hip hop (or was until there was nothing left except brand-name consumer products): representing the experience of, say, shattered working-class or impoverished families and neighborhoods (try 'merry go round') . 

 a ritual enactment of heterosexuality and a great country song:

 

 

 

one way to think about kacey would be as a melancholic taylor swift, natural because they're both about the same age, they're both astonishingly good writers, they both are kind of modely-looking. but that would unfair to kacey, who is an original figure. also they each have a very distinctive melodic sense, and they are very different. still, it's pretty cool to sort of have the light and the dark side of of girlish genius; they're a nice yinyang.

you know, it is kind of annoying how much easier it seems to be for pretty than for non-pretty people to make it as musicians. it's kind of irrelevant. but on the other hand, one shouldn't infer from the fact that someone is pretty that they're not good. if the looks helped in these particular cases to get the music out there, the looks did us all a favor.

Shameless blog whoring and self-promotion

In which Crusader AXE reflects on the current right wing loons in the Right Wing Loon party and their combination of intemperance, bullying and general dickwadedness...find the hidden music and win a prize...actually, just get to listen to the music. 

 

And to celebrate Crispin's continued success in Academe, here's Ray Wylie Hubbard...

 

stalinist aesthetics

from a review of a book on the albanian writer ismail kadare in the tls: under the leadership of enver hoxha, "the young poets Trifon Xhagjika, Vilson Blloshmi and Genc Leka 'were shot merely for having written poems that were too lyrical".

political aesthetics

right if you found me through the stone, it seems as though political aesthetics is sort of unavailable (six names of beauty, too, dammit). but i have put up a pdf of the proofs.

liberace and liberation

guardian:

Soon after moving into Liberace's gaudy Las Vegas mansion in 1977, Scott Thorson, then a teenage hunk in the foster care system, learned that the jewel-smitten showman could love just as extravagantly as he decorated. Touring the premises before their relationship began, Liberace pointed out some decorative highlights, which included 17 pianos, a casino, a quarry's worth of marble and a canopied bed with an ermine spread. On the ceiling was a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel with Liberace's face painted among the cherubs.

When the pair became a couple, Liberace, who was 40 years older, was just as excessive. He couldn't bear to let Thorson out of his sight.

"We were at a hotel in Florida, and Liberace had the manager give us another suite, with windows that faced the beach," said Thorson, now 54. "He knew I'd be near the water and he wanted to be able to look at me."

i guess liberace is being treated as a profoundly liberatory figure. now, was the admirable part the abuse of foster children? or maybe it was the music? it's as though we were lionizing the lifestyle of roman polanski, and also it's as though roman polanski's movies just sucked all day every day. if you make such people your heroes or aesthetic exemplars, you better face up to the fact that you could have chosen something else instead, and the fact that you didn't really says more than i need to know about your taste or decency or intelligence.

look i understand that you can get into a mode where the worse something sucks the better it is. maybe you get sick of stuff that keeps trying to mean something; maybe good taste gets oppressive. but there are many kinds of cool schlock, mindless yet amusing cant, kitsch that arises from the depths of human depravity or consumer capitalism. the liberace variety of grotesque conspicuous consumption, excruciating mediocrity, and total, fatal corruption is only one of your myriad liberatory possibilities. for god's sake try something else.

i suppose one possibility is that all the aesthetic and ethical problems are redeemed by the homosexuality. really, you might want to think about that again. or: maybe my critique is driven by homophobia. so, really, you're going to put liberace above criticism on the grounds that he had sex with men (while denying it in public)? there's nothing wrong with men having sex with men (though i do hold that there might possibly be smething wrong with men having sex with boys), but on the other hand there isn't anything heroic about it either. also it doesn't per se improve your art, if any. also, if you will excuse my saying so, it's common as dirt and just not that outstanding or interesting.

arts of identity

also i'm working up the sexuality and gender as aesthetic categories thing, which i'll be delivering at slippery rock u late in april. and here's the video playlist. 

 

political aesthetics online

cornell tells me we can't expect a paperback of political aesthetics anytime soon, so i'm putting the pdf of the proofs up onlne. i really think this is my best book.