shipwrecked's lynchian moments

Have you ever noticed that anything you ever overheard is never anything that you would want to hear?

I was in a restaurant waiting for my son to return from Mime class. Across from me were four people. One, obviously, was the friend or relative that was showing the others around New York City. He leans back from his lunch and asks: “ So, do you want to go to Ground Zero or Macy’s?”

Apparently mass slaughter and retail sales have equal tourist appeal.

The rest here.

Bamboozling Ourselves

Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.

Errol Morris, "Bamboozling Ourselves"

All seven parts of Morris's brilliant blog post on Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, fraud, gullibility, and self-deception here (the last part at the top of the page, the first part at the bottom).

maman dearest

from The Guardian:

In the corner of a Sri Lankan canteen in northern Paris, sits a wrinkled, 83-year-old hippy with her hair in scarlet plaits. Lucie Ceccaldi might look like a harmless, peace-loving old dear, but France is wondering if this foul-mouthed, poison-tongued pensioner is the nation's worst ever celebrity mother.

Ceccaldi's son is Michel Houellebecq, France's most successful contemporary writer, an award-winning, ageing enfant terrible whose nihilistic, deliberately shocking novels have seen him hailed as a genius. Philip Larkin spoke for most writers when he said: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." But Houellebecq's disgust for his "old slut of a mother" goes far beyond that. When Ceccaldi abandoned him to his grandparents as a baby so she could go travelling across Africa with her husband, the rejection shaped his whole oeuvre. In his international bestseller Les Particules élémentaires - translated as Atomised - he created one of modern French literature's vilest mothers, a selfish, sex-obsessed hippy called "Ceccaldi" who leaves her young son in an attic in his own excrement then dumps him so she can enjoy free-love life in a bizarre cult. Elsewhere, he described the "fundamental psychic flaw" his mother caused in him. He hasn't spoken to her for 17 years. He once told an interviewer she was dead.

But now Ceccaldi has emerged from her beach-hut on the French Indian ocean island of La Réunion and today publishes her own memoir answering back. She calls her son an "evil, stupid little bastard" adding that "this individual, who alas came from my womb, is a liar, an imposter, a parasite and above all - above all - a petit arriviste ready to do absolutely anything for money and fame."

The rest here.

ok, new rule

Since I started blogging again, my readership has rocketed from an average of 25 readers a day - to 12. Rocketed in half. Can something rocket in half? It can now. Miracles and wonders as always at Night Hauling. Readership held steady at around 20, 25 for 5 months and has now suddenly dropped. Cowinkydink? Methinks not.

So much for the depressing, if predictable, news.

The good news is that some wonderful maniac in New York, probably someone who knows me, found NH through the vicious pack of lies known as DeWitt's paperpools and spent several hours viewing 84 pages.

84.

Now.

The new rule is: If you view 84 pages of someone's blog at one sitting, you HAVE to leave at least one comment. Even if it's hate mail. Which, hey, I wouldn't mind getting.

I feel like someone has just spent a month in my house and didn't leave a note. You at least leave a note. When one's readership shrinks as the direct result (or so the perpetual death-ray of self-hatred would have me believe) of one's having started to write again, it's only right to say something.

willem de kooning and the incomparable capehart

Isn't it about time for an extravagant gesture, a statement of some kind involving a tremendous amount of reckless waste?

I was moved to read about de Kooning's struggles in his 20s and 30s. He worked as a freelance painter, carpenter, and window-display designer, trying all the while--and failing, failing, failing--to be an artist. He didn't have his own show until he was 44.

Two passages from the Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan biography of de Kooning:

For de Kooning, the realism of most Woodstock painters must have looked old-fashioned. But he was not a misfit there, and he was by nature tolerant of different styles. And who was he to venture criticism? He himself had not yet found a satisfactory way of making art, an he destroyed most his work from the early 1930s. To his friends in Woodstock, he was just another talented dauber half-dreaming of becoming an artist and experimenting with various approaches. . . . One experiment in Woodstock represented a significant departure, however, from the still lifes and occasional abstractions that usually absorbed him. He began to try to piece together the figure of a man. De Kooning had some, though not much, anatomical drawing at the academy. Now he seemed to be trying to rebuild the figure from the ground up, as if he had learned nothing without relying upon academic rules or techniques. he labored over how to depict hands, shoulders, and fabric convincingly, in what would prove to be early studies for the 1932 Death of a Man, his first significant picture (later destroyed) to include the male figure. None of the parts seemed to come together. He could not form a complete man. (86-87)

Marchowzky also noted de Kooning's hunger for music. The music that he restlessly sought in jazz clubs and played incessantly at home gave vitality to his days and filled the empty spaces of his art. . . . De Kooning, who could whistle and hum remarkably well, would even whistle Stravinsky to great effect. He probably found the Rite of Spring's fiery celebration of modernity, especially its evocation of the difficulty of escaping the dying world and giving birth to the new, relevant to his own situations. He was having trouble giving birth to an art of his own that he could respect, and he was struggling to resurrect his life in the New World. Although de Kooning still regarded himself as a commercial artist rather than as a painter, Robert Jonas, who saw him every day at A.S. Beck [where de Kooning worked], shrewdly guessed that his friend was constantly, agonizingly, mulling the question of what direction his life should take. He was, speculated Jonas, 'afraid of the vacuum of empty days. He'd have to face the problem, whether to make out in America or to devote himself to painting.' Jonas recalled the almost painful gesture that de Kooning would regularly make about wanting to paint. 'He'd say, he feels it down here, holding his stomach, meaning he had to paint.

In the early thirties, during the time when he was designing shoe displays, de Kooning made one astonishing, and symbolic, purchase. Just when the Depression was destroying the livelihood of millions of people, including many artists, de Kooning bought the best and most expensive record player money could buy--a miraculous machine that could summon 'God and all those angels up there' [a reference to de Kooning's comment on the subject of Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms]. Called a Capehart high-fidelity system, it was one of the first to change records automatically. It cost the then prodigious sum of $700, more than half de Kooning's annual salary at A.S. Beck; he got an advance to pay for it. With this purchase, de Kooning announced that he would not use the money he earned from his job to make himself conventionally respectable, even during the hard, early years of the Depression. He did not buy a house or a car, get married, have a baby, or stash away money against hard times. Instead, he professed himself sublimely irresponsible, a man nourished by music rather than mundane realities. And yet, it was still music rather than art that prompted this expansive gesture, for he could not yet find a comparable fluency, vitality, or extravagance in art. (91-2)

from de Kooning: An American Master

Tired Dad is Back!

With a melancholy edge, it seems. But one of my favorite blogs is up and running again after a year-long hiatus:

Tired Dad

Chris Hedges, Religion, and Inherent Evil

My friend George has introduced me to Chris Hedges, a journalist who writes for Truthdig.com and focuses on war, terrorism, religion, and spectatorship. Hedges is an exciting, independent journalist who always writes with clarity and moral rigor. See all of his truthdig articles here.

I watched a short clip from a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges. Hitchens succeeds so well with American audiences because of his attitude; his Britishness makes us think he's much smarter than he is. He drinks Scotch during interviews and insults his opponents--all good fun. But Hedges is the more serious intellectual. Hedges' response to Hitchens' atheism in another video, here--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HH67M7lUtO4&feature=related

--is interesting. I think he's right to view religious extremism as a symptom of the world's problems rather than a cause. Fascists and Stalinists were atheists. (Or are fascists not necessarily atheists? White Power maniacs tend to have a lot of Jesus tattoos and whatnot.)

But I disagree with Hedges that humans haven't progressed morally (aren't the end of slavery and the spread of suffrage clear markers of enlightened progress?) and that humans are inherently evil. I also think he turns the notion of progress into a straw man by conflating it with perfection. If Hitchens is saying that we'll be perfect without religion, that's absurd; any claim for perfection is absurd. But surely progress isn't the same as perfection. And I have much more faith that science will improve our lives than I do that morality will: my hunch is that the moral argument for stopping global warming, say, hasn't and will continue not to work.

But back to evil. Even if we do have an inherent capacity for evil, I don't think that this is the main problem. Explanation:

I just happened to read Hazlitt's great esssay "On the Pleasure of Hating" this morning. He writes:

"But so it is, that there is a secret affinity, a hankering after evil in the human mind, and that it takes a perverse, but a fortunate delight in mischief, since it is a never-failing source of satisfaction. Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit. Pain is bittersweet which never surfeits. Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: hatred alone is immortal."

Interestingly enough, however, when he turns to examples of the inherent lust for hatred (which takes on widely different guises here, you'll notice: evil, the perverse, mischief, pain--all very different things: Tom Sawyer's into mischief, Hitler's into something quite different), he talks about human beings as collectives, as groups and crowds and villages and countries, as swarms, masses, as a plural:

"...children kill flies for sport: everyone reads the accidents and offences in a newspaper, as the cream of a jest: a whole town runs to be present at a fire, and the spectator by no means exults to see it extinguished.... Men assemble in crowds, with eager enthusiasms, to witness a tragedy: but if there were an execution going forward in the next street, as Mr Burke observes, the theatre would be left empty. A strange cur in a village, an ideot [sic], a crazy woman, are set upon and baited by the whole community. Public nuisances are in the nature of public benefits. How long did the Pope, the Bourbons, and the Inquisition keep the people of England in breath, and supply them with the mick-names to vent their spleen upon!" [emphasis mine]

And so on. The only singluar in the essay is "the spectator" and Hazlitt himself, who talks about his personal love of hatred (only to question it and regret it in the end). Collectives hating individuals or other collectives. Hedges' wikipedia page says that Elias Canetti is one of his influences, so surely he's thought about the role of crowds in catalyzing our capacity for evil, which is surely more interesting and important than the notion of inherency by itself.

I'm thinking, too, of the Milgram experiement (I didn't know Milgram had written a book about this; thought it was just something you found in a psychology textbook; but it's called Obedience to Authority, I just found in the used bookshop). Proximity to the victim, Milgram writes, decreases the likelihood that people will do them harm, and ALSO, shit, what luck, I just found this:

"Placing the victim in another room not only takes him farther from the subject, it also draws the subject and the experimenter relatively closer. There is incipient group formation between the experimenter and the subject, from which the victim is excluded. . . . In the Remote condition, the victim is truly an outsider, who stands alone, physically and psychologically." (Obedience to Authority, p. 39)

An interesting observation about The Group: The experimenter and the subject group is bad, but the subject and the victim group is good. Or rather, the experimenter-subject group is good for the experimenter and the subject (they don't get hurt) and bad for the victim. So the group is generally good for the group members but generally bad for people outside the group.

My sense is that the real problem is the group. The massive group. This is what the worst movements, religious and atheistic, have in common: The worst evils of the last century--Stalinism, Nazism, and Corporatism--are all collectivist nightmares. (Note by the way that all three movements have absolutely no religious core to them. They actively hunt down religious groups or use religion to further their insane goals.) The abstract entity of the State (or its cousin, the Corporation) always and everywhere takes precedence over the individual: this is Hegel 101. People are most dangerous in crowds - when they are part of movements and causes, especially when the movement or cause has as the purpose of its existence the eradication not of some universal problem (poverty, breast cancer) but of another group. Crowds accomplish collectively what individuals could not and probably would not even seriously dream of accomplishing by themselves.

If there is inherent evil in humans, its inherent nature isn't really the problem because the instances of violence and malicious activities of all kinds are exponentially fewer when human beings are not part of collectives - military groups, terrorists groups, corporations, etc - and exponentially greater when they are. If there is an inherent evil in people, the more important question is what exacerbates it to the point of being a pandemic.

So: If a hundred people die from the flu, nobody is going to waste their time thinking about the inherent vulnerability of people to a particular bacteria. If a hundred million people die from it, that's a different story.

Likewise, if twenty or thirty men come home each year and kill themselves and their families, that isn't really enough, I think, for us to worry about the inherent human capacity for doing this sort of thing.

I just looked up US murder statistics. (Interestingly enough, when you do a Google search on murder statistics--as opposed to "homicide rates"--the first sites to come up are white supremacist sites which rant and rave about black-on-white crime. According to them, one percent of the US population commits half the homicides. I guess we know which one percent they're talking about.) According to the Bureau of Justice there were 16,6925 homicides in 2005. The rate for that year was 5.6 people killed out of every 100,000. Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's .0056 percent of the population that gets murdered every year. Not that murder is the only measuring stick for the amount of evil stuff going on in a particular place, but it's a pretty good start.

The vast majority of people don't do anything that really qualifies as evil. But the likelihood that they will commit evil dramatically increases given the right conditions--extreme poverty, group hatred, war, etc. In short, I think we worry too much about our capacity for things and about possibilities, and not enough about probabilities and the way things actually are.

Mill and emotion

John Stuart Mill confuses me today.

Mill famously writes of the crisis in his mental history at the age of twenty in Chapter V of his Autobiography (1873).

The proximate cause of the breakdown: the realization that even if the world were completely reformed, he still wouldn't be happy.

The general cause: the realization that there are no necessary connections between feelings and actions or thoughts or objects. Reformation of the world should make him happy, but it won't.

But the ultimate cause, he says, is the type of education his father gave him. Even though the Benthamites talk a good game about strengthening the associations between good feelings for good things and bad feelings for bad things, that part of his education was virtually neglected. Analysis, he says, is good because it clears away thoughts that are the result of prejudice; it also helps us to discover the laws of nature, the "real connexions between Things, not dependent on our will and feelings." But it's bad because it also tends to have a "dissolving" effect on everything that is "a mere matter of feeling." He thinks that it might have been very good for his father to have indoctrinated him at an early age, to have strengthened his associations of pleasure with what is good and pain with what is bad, so that analysis could never be strong enough to dissolve these feelings.

A few interesting things here for my dissertation (on the feelings in Victorian poetry), especially because Mill is also one of the foremost Victorian theorists of poetry:

1. The sense that, far from being "authentic" and "spontaneous," the emotions are only artificially connected to the things that give rise to them. There's no authentic, natural, spontaneous relation between one's mother and one's feelings of love.

2. Analysis allows Mill to see that there is no real connection between feelings and thoughts/actions/objects. He thinks that if the feelings were somehow "strengthened," they would be able to withstand the assault of analysis. Presumably he doesn't want to weaken his analytical capabilities. This means that, ideally, he would still be able to see that there is no real connection between feelings and things/actions/objects and not feel depressed about this. It seems to me that it is precisely because he does feel strongly that he suffers such a huge mental crisis. He sees the truth and this is truly depressing. If there were no real connection between ideas and feelings, shouldn't he have just said to himself, "This horrible feeling is itself the result of an arbitrary connection? In which case why should I feel so miserable?" Which leads me to think that by "strengthen" Mill doesn't mean "intensify" or "enrich" but rather something like "toughen up." But it seems to me that Mill's education has done just what he wanted it to do: it made him feel intensely depressed by a depressing reality. At no point is the truth of his realization called into question; he just doesn't want it to feel so awful. So by "strengthening the feelings" perhaps he means a strengthening of good feelings, happy feelings. Very pragmatic. In short, Mill wishes he had stronger prejudices. How can he realize the artificiality of his associations and NOT feel depressed? If analysis exposes the artificiality of our associations, then our belief in the reality of associations must be a prejudice.

3. Mill finds his "culture of the feelings" in Wordsworth's poetry. It was therapeutic for him because it expressed "states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling." It taught him that "there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation." "Wordsworth taught me this," he says, "not only without turning away from, but with a greatly increased interest in, the common feelings and common destiny of human beings."

Perhaps it's the weather and my irritable state of mind, but Mill's famous crisis is boiling down for me to two rather hackneyed realizations:

a.) He doesn't want to be so smart that life becomes depressing, i.e., he wants to be dumber,

and b.) he wants to be just like everyone else (the common feelings, common destiny).

And actually a and b are really pretty much the same thing.

But how does Wordsworth provide a cure? OK, there are real, permanent feelings in quiet contemplation. But Mill already had real "permanent" feelings: he was depressed by something depressing and the feeling didn't go away for a long while. Wordsworth's real, permanent feelings are really positive feelings. His poems "draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared by all human beings." Which makes me think of the paradox of the romantic poet: the solitary visionary who is also one of us.

But where does this concern for the common feelings and the common destiny come from? My hunch is that Mill is putting himself in line with thinkers from Wordsworth to Hazlitt to Arnold in tying his understanding of the work that feeling performs to his understanding of the social. Feelings, again and again, appear in Romantic and Victorian accounts as a kind of universal bond--and bond that is vital in a post-revolutionary world.

Wordsworth, Preface to the Lyrical Ballads: defines poetry as emotion recollected in tranquility AND as a man speaking to men.

Hazlitt, "On the Pleasure of Hating": the inherent lust for evil (mischief, the perverse, pain, violence) is manifest - mostly - in collective activities: Guy Faux festivities, tragedies, bloodbaths in the streets, etc.

Arnold, "Preface to Poems (1853)": poetry needs to represent universal human emotions; England also needs a public that can share in the collective activity of experiencing and understanding and being affected by tragedy and poetry.

And Mill's Autobiography (1873) brings us back to Wordsworth.

And a little later Darwin, now that I think of it, tries in his book on the emotions to take us beyond Wordsworth, beyond everybody really, in viewing the emotions as manifestations of the common ancestry of all men, of the sameness of all human beings and of our continuity with the other species. We open our mouths and bare our teeth in a certain way when we laugh just as monkeys do. And so on.

Anyway.

which finds a man and leaves a hideous thing

Paracelsus. [. . .] Festus, were your nature fit
To be defiled, your eyes to ache
At gangrene blotches, eating poison-blains,*
The ulcerous barky scarf of leprosy
Which finds -- a man, and leaves -- a hideous thing
That cannot but be mended by hell-fire
--I would lay bare to you the human heart
Which God cursed long ago, and devils make since
Their pet nest and their never-tiring home.
Oh, sages have discovered we are born
For various ends--to love, to know: has ever
One stumbled, in his search, on any signs
Of a nature in us formed to hate? To hate?
If that be our true object which evokes
Our powers in fullest strength, be sure 'tis to hate!
Yet men have doubted if the best and the bravest
Of spirits can nourish him with hate alone.
I had not the monopoly of fools,
It seems, at Basel.

Robert Browning, Paracelsus, IV (1835)

* Blain, n. [OE. blein, bleyn, AS. bl[=e]gen; akin to Dan. blegn, D. blein; perh. fr. the same root as E. bladder. See Bladder.]

1. An inflammatory swelling or sore; a bulla, pustule, or blister.

Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss. --Milton.

beginning with anything

His canvases are permeated with intellectual character yet never illustrative of a concept. They have the strength, surprise, emotional range, and, on occasion, the arbitrariness of a temperament. In a milieu of nervously interlaced borrowings, the de Kooning signature is unique. While art under the pressure of preconceived formulas has been undergoing steady imaginative shrinkage, de Kooning's creations have gained steadily in formal inventiveness and symbolic reverberation. As against what might be called the self-starving tendency of contemporary art--the effor to produce masterpieces by minimum means, such as color and shape--a de Kooning canvas is an unrestricted as Union Square. His compositions devour everyday sights, odd thoughts, moods, theories old and new, paintings and sculptures of the past. He has the hungry multifariousness of the Renaissance humanists, the 'vulgarity' of Rabelais and Cervantes.

[. . .]

'Style is a fraud,' asserted this veteran of eight years study at the Rotterdam Academy of Fine Arts and Techniques. 'It was a horrible idea of Van Doesberg and Mondrian to try to force a style. The reactionary strength of power is that it keeps style and things going.' Actually, de Kooning asserted, confirming what every thoughtful observer had known for a century, 'there is no style of painting now.' The attempt to generate a style artificially through formal analysis and derivations from the art of the past--e.g., through transforming Cezanne into Cubism--distorts the true situation of art today. 'To desire to make a style,' de Kooning charged, 'is an apology for one's anxiety.' The time ahs come to end the futile game of seeking contemporary equivalents for cultural forms that have long since disintegrated. For his own part, de Kooning was to arrive, after tormenting experimentation, at his concept of 'no style.'

[. . .]

'Painting,' de Kooning wrote, 'any kind of painting . . . is a way of living today, a style of living so to speak. That is where the form of it lies.' Transient and imperfect as an episode of daily life, the act of painting achieves its form outside the patternings of style. It cuts across the history of art modes and appropriates to painting whatever images it attracts into its orbit. 'No style' painting is neither dependent upon forms of the past not indifferent to them. It is transformal.

Beginning with anything--a random daub of color, letters of the alphabet (as, for example, in Orestes), the sketch of a nude--the artist 'lives' on the canvas alert to possibilities for a new coherence. As his action progresses, his originating gesture is blotted out in the accumulation of 'events' that take on body through the starts and stops of the brush.

Harold Rosenberg, "Willem De Kooning"

carpets in the streets and money for everybody

Warhol on Jasper Johns:



Warhol for President:

desperate acts

Boning up for the opening the Modern Wing at the Chicago Art Institute. It's been closed since I moved here. Discovered the art criticism of Harold Rosenberg:

For an interval, painting and the painter are one in action on the canvas. But only for an interval, and in the inevitable dispersion both art and the artist are nothing. Nor will the most tortured effort restore the union. For years it was customary for de Kooning to speak of the artist as 'desperate.'

The De Kooning stuff starts at 3:28. Before that there's Hilton Kramer on Pollock and Barnett Newman on esthetics.

Best exchange:

Interviewer: What does painterly mean?
De Kooning: Well, that, that you can see it's done with a brush . . .

le pouvoir de l'art

"J'ai fait juste un bisou. C'est un geste d'amour, quand je l'ai embrassé, je n'ai pas réfléchi, je pensais que l'artiste, il aurait compris... Ce geste était un acte artistique provoqué par le pouvoir de l'art"

("It was just a kiss, a loving gesture. I kissed it without thinking; I thought the artist would understand.... It was an artistic act provoked by the power of Art").

Artist Rindy Sam defending herself in court for having kissed one of the panels of Cy Twombly's triptych Phaedrus, smudging the all-white canvas with her lipstick.

some old bastard taught me something once, though i'm still glad he's dead now

Four years ago, a little over four years ago, I was given the option of doing long critical paper or a creative project for one of my courses in graduate school. If you wrote a long paper at the midterm, you could do a creative project for the end of the term. This was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard. How's this going to help me get me an academic job?

I should also say that this was the worst class I'd ever taken. The professor thought Amiri Baraka not only worth reading but better than every other contemporary American poet. Had she worn a three-cornered hat and tortured caged weasels with knitting needles instead, I would have thought her less crazy.

She also said silly things about how aesthetics was essentially evil.

We locked horns once. I could just sense the futility even as I went for the breech. I can't disagree with people as forcefully as I would like to in face-to-face interactions because I get an ill-feeling and my face is overrun by invisible red ants. I get flushed. I rarely ever talk in class. I hardly know what to say or how to say it. This is usually out of sheer boredom, but sometimes it's because of this disease I have, which I haven't been able to name and describe just yet.

Anyway, the discussion had to do with testimony. She said that testimonies, true testimonies, made no aesthetic choices. They were raw. They were real.

It should be immediately apparent that this is completely absurd. The minute we start speaking about something we make a whole series of choices. We might not like those choices, we might not be able to make many of the choices we would like to make, but they are choices. I brought this up.

She countered: I meant choices having to do with aesthetic form. The people giving their testimonies are totally immersed in giving us the truth of their experience, not concerned with aesthetics.

I didn't want to go here, but I did.

I said: Well, if we take aesthetics to mean that which pertains to the senses, it seems unavoidable. And testimonies are particularly driven by aesthetic concerns because they are constructed to make us feel something intensely. I mean, are people who've survived terrible events really trying to give us their raw experiences as they experienced them? I mean I think this is literally impossible--but I don't even think people try to approximate the actual experience for us. Because usually there's the part of the experience where you don't know or don't fully know what's happening and then there's the part where you do, maybe that's after you've made it through to the other side of the ordeal, lived through it and reflected on it. But people don't tell stories this way: they infuse the earlier parts of the story with the knowledge and the pathos of the later parts. So that when they tell us they were just enjoying themselves on the beach, their way of telling it doesn't convey how ignorant they were of the tsunami that was coming but rather how sad it was that they didn't know it was coming, how poignant that moment just before the catastrophe was. Like the stories about how sunny it was on 9/11.

She said, Weeeeeelllll.

I said: Take the tsunami in South East Asia. There are a lot of testimonials coming out of this horrible disaster. Now, I think there have got to be some moving testimonials that have been highly sanitized. I haven't heard one story about a child molester who was swept away by the flood. Not one mention of all the Westerners there for the sex trade. Which exists. Which was affected by the flood. You're telling me not one maniac was drowned? Of course not. But all of the stories have been heartrending or heroic. That's fine. I can understand why people would not like to treat this horrible event as an opportunity to talk about the sex trade and how it was probably not such a bad thing that some of these people were killed. But we can't say that choices haven't been made.

She said, The choice is moral not aesthetic.

I said, Well, I don't know how we can know this for sure one way or the other. Maybe people do make conscious moral choices when telling these stories. But already this makes the claim that they're just giving us the raw experience at least a little problematic. They're making some kinds of choices. But putting this aside, can't we say that people often give these testimonials for the same reasons many people tell other kinds of stories: to hold an audience's attention, to cast a spell over them, to impress them, to overwhelm them, to dazzle them, to make them feel something, make themselves feel something? I mean, we can't really say that all these people telling stories about horrible things that happened to them are simply telling them so that these horrible events will never be forgotten. This is to idealize the teller because of the awe and the sadness and the terror we feel about the events they were involved in. The teller as pure moral agent. This is unrealistic to me. There's got to be one Holocaust survivor out there who takes some pleasure in being tremendously interesting to other people, who takes some pleasure in moving people with his horror stories.

I should never use the Holocaust. Dammit. Color drains from the gallery of faces around me. I know I've said something offensive, though I'm not sure why. This is another reason I rarely talk in class. I should have said: There's got to be one soldier who enjoys telling war stories - something like this. I had to go and get all Holocaust on everybody.

The prof: Weeeellll.

Her facial expressions are meant to indicate that my arguments are really too outrageous and silly to be dealt with in detail.

I say: Doesn't Eli Wiesel's Night, horrible [I meant aesthetically] as it is, involve aesthetic choices? Doesn't he try to write well?

She says: That's not the same thing as being conscious of aesthetics when giving a testimonial.

I said: I don't know. I'm confused. But, but, but, OK: people want to preserve a certain sense of the sacred and the terrible around this event. OK. Moral choices. I still don't see why this excludes the possibility of making aesthetic choices. Can't good aesthetic choices help to emphasize the moral? Why is the opposite of moral not immoral but aesthetic?

I read the prof's silence as bafflement, though it's probably boredom or a sense that I have no brains whatsoever.

I say: Well, but maybe we can think of stories where the choice has more to do with taste than morality? For example, let's take 9/11. No one ever talks about the fact that some of the firefighters were looting as the buildings were coming down. They found one of the trucks in the wreckage and while they were lifting it out the roof of the cab popped off and the cab was filled with Gap jeans.

This is a moral choice, again, she says.

(Southern gluey-mouthed cow. She had white shit on the corners of her mouth. It's like: You're a fucking professor. Wipe your fucking mouth like a human being already.)

I don't think so, I said. I think it's more a matter of taste. Because look: I can see why we wouldn't want to tell stories about people who deserved to be drowned in the flood and why we wouldn't want to mention the Jews who actually assisted the Nazis or whatever. But it's OK, in my book anyway, that the fireman were stealing jeans. Everybody knows that cops and firefighters lift things every once in a while from a scene of chaos. But even if it doesn't happen, ever, it's still OK to include this in the testimonials because it in no way comes anywhere near justifying what happened to the firefighters. The firefighters' image has been aestheticized for very sinister political purposes. They've been sanitized and made into heroes. A profession isn't an automatic induction into the pantheon. There are some cowards in the fire department. There are some wife beaters and murderers and nut jobs and assholes and morons and racists in the fire department. They've been sanitized. And it seems immoral to me to create this sanitized "testimonial" image of the firefighter because it can only lead to, well, we're seeing what it's leading to. They're just propaganda tools. And--AND, the image of the sanitized hero firefighter is actually hurting the real firefighters because it doesn't jibe with other images of them, like the image of the firefighter being ravaged by the cancers he got from the toxins in the air at ground zero. We don't see very many of these images not because they're immoral but because they make us feel uncomfortable. They are UGLY - and we don't want to see them.

Prof: Does any body want to comment? Well unfortunately we really do need to get to the Adorno reading, so we can talk about this another time.

I didn't even get to the points I really wanted to make. But, well, I guess I'd have to forget it.

*

I meant to give the above as context, but it's turning out to be the text. I meant to say simply that I was in an awful class with this stupid professor who hasn't tried to publish anything for 25 years and I was given the opportunity to do a creative project so I did it.

I spent a week writing a series of poems on all sorts of things. It was exhilarating. It was really just an unbelievably (the only word for it is) rapturous week. I wrote twenty poems, some highly formal, some not. I was trying out different voices.

I get them back in the mail about two months later. The comments are mostly positive. Only one poem fell completely flat for her. Fine. But the rest of her comments were gushingly positive. I felt bad for hating her so much and thinking she was dumb and lazy. Then I got deeply, deeply depressed and shoved the poems in a drawer and didn't look at them for years. I thought: If this cow likes these poems, they must be awful.

Well, I just found them on a zip drive about two hours ago. And they're completely unsalvageable. Completely. They are really the worst things I've ever written.

And now I'm depressed again. After all these years.

I used to play tennis. I was naturally good at some sports and tennis was one of them. I would play in some city borough tournaments and eventually I played a little in high school. When I played in tournaments at this one place there was this guy in his sixties who always wore white and smoked a pipe and watched all the games. He commented as we played. Once I hit a ball at him. I had some anger issues. Anyway, after winning first set I would inevitably start losing some of my nerve and my focus and would lose the second set and fall behind in the third. Doublefault after doublefault. And I would start getting angry, and I'd yell and hit myself with my racket. And the old guy would say something like, Aw poor baby, awww. That's right, get mad: you got every right to get mad: I mean, you've never done that before. And you practice sooooo much.

Let's put aside just how profoundly weird this old man was and how radically mean all this irony-oozing was. I hardly knew him. And he was 60, watching 12-year-olds playing tennis.

Putting this aside, he of course had a point. I double faulted and got angry as if I'd never double faulted before and couldn't possibly figure out why I wasn't particularly good at serving (I never practiced). But it would still depress me. I would be sad and humiliated for days after a loss, as if I'd been preparing my whole life for a victory.

I suppose I should look at my rapturous foray into poetry the same way. But still.

I don't know. I must have some sort of disease.

blogs

Some blogs:

New Art: Polish artist Vvoitek Ziemilski's blog on performance, painting, installations, sculpture, cinema . . .

Philosophy of Art: A bunch of sluggish aestheticians who post every equinox, it seems

a conspiracy of objects

There is always something going horribly wrong for me in the material world. Objects wait in quiet conspiracy against me. Bookcases tilt ever-so-slightly and drop books on my head. Doorways narrow and knock my shoulder back, bruising it up good. Edges invariably find my funny bones, my eyes occasionally. Windows like to rattle and keep me up all goddamn night. The laundry machine exhaust pipe in my landlord's basement has a good old time putting lumps on my head. Every fucking time. My desk is starting to sway. So is my dining room table. My wife blames the movers; I, of course, know better. It's only a matter of time before my laptop slides off the desk, crashing into my printer and destroying both in its mothlike desire for the dangerous old boy. (The scanner’s gotten a considerable amount of ass. I try to keep the two separate as much as possible.) And it's an absolute certainty that I’ll be picking the shards of my new plates and wineglasses out of the dining room rug. Because objects have hated me since I was little.

When I was eight I was given the perverse gift of an object as a sort of pet: my first pair of eyeglasses. They were rectangular and had brown frames, and not only did they take a wicked pleasure in uglifying me and chafing the bridge of my nose but they also absolutely loved losing a screw, getting lost, and generally doing all sorts of things that incurred my father's wrath. Lenses popped out. Temples got bent and snapped.

When I was nine I was assaulted several times by a closet door during a game of hide-'n-seek. I thought, at first, it was my cousin, who had violent tendencies and who apparently had shut the door on my head when I found him, but I quickly learned--when I tried to demonstrate to my father what my cousin had done and accidentally got my head smashed in the door again, this time apparently because of my own actions, thus causing deliriums of hilarity among my sisters, my cousin, and my father--that it was the door itself that was responsible for humiliating and hurting me.

When I was ten my sister’s blue blanket tripped me and broke my big toe. When I was eleven I passed a basketball to tubby awkward Chrissy Francese and it hit him right in the teeth. This was one of only two times that objects backfired on someone else. I ran into the house, grabbed a box of Oreos, and literally crammed them in his mouth to quiet him down. He had black cookie-mash crammed into his braces and he cried all the way home. The other time an object backfired on someone else was a few years later at a baseball game and also involved a mouth injury. Caught in a rundown between first and third, my helmet too big for my head and flopping down over my eyes, I took it off and flung it behind me without looking where, hitting poor Johnny Cassidey in the face and knocking out his front tooth. Oreos wouldn't fix that one.

The wrong key always offers itself every time I come home. Lightbulbs blow out way before they’re supposed to. Bags, while more considerate than most objects, inevitably rip, spilling whatever I’m lugging in the most embarrassing way possible. Schoolbags especially. Zippers unzip as I run to class (late as usual) and inevitably I have to pick up fifteen or twenty books off the grass and out of puddles. (In this fashion was the Riverside Faerie Queene destroyed.)

Metal bars on buses are sons of bitches. Every third or fourth time I stand up on the bus I feel like I’m getting hit in the head with a cast iron pan. Plastic seats are subtly worse. They saw into my arms and ribs every time the bus breaks. And bus passes are always drained of funds, and there's always one dime too few for the fair.

Forget money. Christ. It's always folding itself into origami shapes, slipping into a mess of receipts, hiding in another season's coats and pants. I worked for a summer and a winter as a teller in the bank my father worked at. He put me in the Journal Square bus terminal branch. There were bomb threats every week and homeless drug addicts relieving themselves on the ATM. That summer the new hundreds came out, the ones with the bigger Ben Franklin on them. New bills like to stick together. I counted out 700 dollars, but evidently four hundreds escaped clinging to the bottoms of the others, like Ulysses and his men hiding under the sheep of Polyphemus.

Does the television volume ever work on the treadmill at your gym?
Are hats always too small?
Condoms, too? (Well, this works out well for me don't it nudge nudge wink wink know what I mean?)

Today I decided to make my own espresso. Last week I received a box in the mail: an espresso maker from Mom. (Doesn't your mom send you espresso makers?) She reminded me that I'd seen it before in her garage, saw that it was unused, admired its beauty, said it was a pity such a beautiful animal should go unused, all of which I totally forgot about, and voila, it ends up on my doorstep. (I should also give excessive compliments to her Viking stove and laundering abilities. Who knows what'll show up on my doorstep.) Objects gravitate toward me so they can torture and kill me. But I decided to take my chances, engage in a little amor fati, and see if the old girl could make some decent espresso. I cleaned her out, sliced me a little lemon rind, rubbed my hands in my insanely excited way (sounds sandpapery and hummingbird-fast), and got out the brown-and-yellow German demitasse I'd also found in my mother's garage (from the 70s, a trip to Germany, never used). It was part of a set that got tragically, tragically decimated in the move out to Chicago. This is proof positive that the object world is prejudiced towards me. These sons of bitches don't get one goddamn chip in the move from Germany to fucking Africa and from Africa all the way to fucking New York, but they get completely destroyed on a few hundred mile jaunt out to Chicago. Unbelievable. Anyway, naturally the wife says:

Maybe you should use a different glass.

I insist on using a demitasse. We go back and forth. Miraculously, I win. And the espresso is absolutely perfect. Game, set, match.

Washing dishes after dinner--don't even get me started on those bastards--a giant salad bowl slips from my hands, falls into the sink, and knocks--you guessed it--the last remaining demitasse after last summer's dishware and crockery genocide. Eyes wide open. Breath held. Waiting for the proverbial collision of turd with fan. I can smell the wifely fury simmering.

But, inexplicably, neither bowl nor cup have a scratch on them. No doubt they're waiting patiently for a more opportune moment to destroy me.

My chair, I'm not kidding, is cracking beneath me right now.

i'm coming home late: this is not a story

just like you, but automated

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ferran adria

'if you want new emotions, and really big emotions, you need new techniques'

I saw Ferran Adria on Charlie Rose and thought I understood something about art and teaching but then it slipped away from me. Anyway I thought it would be nice if there were more writers like mad Spanish chefs, more books that offer 32 courses of things you've never tasted before.

Here's a clip from Anthony Bourdain's trip to elBulli, Adria's restaurant:

informazioni internazionale

full of nimble, fiery & delectable shapes

FALSTAFF: I would you had but the wit. 'Twere better than your dukedom. Good faith, this same young sober-blooded boy doth not love me, nor a man cannot make him laugh. But that's no marvel, he drinks no wine. There's never none of these demure boys come to any proof, for thin drink doth so overcool their blood, and making many fish-meals, that they fall into a kind of malegreen-sickness, and then, when they marry, they get wenches. They are generally fools and cowards, which some of us should be too, but for inflammation. A good sherris-sack hath a twofold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapors which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o'er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherris is the warming of the blood, which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice. But the sherris warms it and makes it course from the inwards to the parts extremes. It illumineth the face, which as a beacon gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm, and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart, who, great and puffed up with this retinue, doth any deed of courage, and this valor comes of sherris. So that skill in the weapon is nothing without sack, for that sets it a-work, and learning a mere hoard of gold kept by a devil, till sack commences it and sets it in act and use. Hereof comes it that Prince Harry is valiant, for the cold blood he did naturally inherit of his father, he hath, like lean, sterile, and bare land, manured, husbanded, and tilled with excellent endeavor of drinking good and good store of fertile sherris, that he is become very hot and valiant. If I had a thousand sons, the first humane principle I would teach them should be to forswear thin potations and to addict themselves to sack.

Henry IV, Part 2, Act 4, Sc. 4, ll. 85-124.

FLOW 2

from the FLOW website:

About Water

• Of the 6 billion people on earth, 1.1 billion do not have access to safe, clean drinking water.
  (www.charitywater.org)
• The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency currently does not regulate 51 known water contaminants. (www.foodandwaterwatch.org)
• While the average American uses 150 gallons of water per day, those in developing countries cannot find five.
  (www.charitywater.org)
• The water and sanitation crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns.
  (www.water.org)
• According to the National Resources Defense Council, in a scientific study in which more than 1,000 bottles of 103 brands of water were tested, about one-third of the bottles contained synthetic organic chemicals, bacteria, and arsenic. (www.nrdc.org)
• Water is a $400 billion dollar global industry; the third largest behind electricity and oil.
  CBS News, FLOW.
• There are estimates that from five hundred thousand to seven million people get sick per year from drinking tap water. Erik Olson, Deputy Staff Director of Barbara Boxerʼs Environmental and Public Works Committee (EPW), FLOW.
• Californiaʼs water supply is running out – it has about 20 years of water left in the state.
  Maude Barlow, author of Blue Covenant and co-author of Blue Gold, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, FLOW.
• There are over 116,000 human-made chemicals that are finding their way into public water supply systems.
  William Marks, author of Water Voices from Around the World, FLOW.
• In Bolivia nearly one out of every ten children will die before the age of five. Most of those deaths are related to illnesses that come from a lack of clean drinking water.
  Jim Schultz, founder of the Democracy Center in Bolivia, FLOW.
• The cost per person per year for having 10 liters of safe drinking water every day is just $2 USD.
  Ashok Gadgil, Senior Staff Scientist in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, FLOW

FLOW

For some reason, my readership has spiked in the last few months. I get about 45 readers every day. For the first year I was getting about 10 to 12 a day.

(Why don't any of you people ever write any comments, by the way? Some of you are here three-four times a day - I see you. What gives?)

Perhaps the increase in readership is not unrelated to the fact that I have very nearly stopped blogging altogether.

So watch, I start blogging again and my readership plummets.

Well. I figure I could put this little blog to some use if I directed all 45 or so of you to this site, dedicated to the establishment of clean accessible water as a universal human right. Click on the link that says "Sign the petition here."

And while you're at it, you might be interested in the documentary FLOW (For Love of Water), which has recently been released in the States on DVD. It documents the attempts of corporations to privatize water around the world. It's quite good and I recommend it highly.

Although, OK: one small problem.

So the film is about the horrors of corporatism, which I'm all for exposing. But it has one of those moments, you know? It's the moment that none of us are supposed to notice because, well, it's self-evidently true, right?

- I took a standardized test in English lit in high school years ago, and one of the passages on the exam was about how if Native Americans had discovered the Americas, and the Europeans had been the native inhabitants, the Native Americans would have embraced the white man as their brother and shared the land with him.

If I gave a shit about anything then, I might have found it offensive rather than just stupid.

(Really quickly: the passage presumes a society with the wherewithal - technological, economic, etc. - and the mania to explore the globe that it apparently did not have. It presumes the reverse about another society. So, in effect, the passage was asking me to imagine different societies than those it thought it was talking about. So it wouldn't make sense to make any statements about how the people in these societies would do anything if they were, um, radically different from what they were.)

Flow had a similar moment, in which a wise old charming shoeless Indian guy talks about how the "red man" does not understand how the sun, the sky, the air, the water, and the earth can be bought and sold, and how the white man's way is not the red man's way.

Right. Such charming folksy wisdom meant to clarify radical cultural differences. Except the film is filled with white people arguing that the white man's way isn't their way either. And the white people didn't need the red man's folksy wisdom to be critical of the activities of the powerful.

Whatever whatever. I'm nitpicking. I'm just sick of this bullshit about "the East" being inherently wise and having this like totally groovy and balanced relationship with nature.

Anyway, good film, check it out.

vn

nabokov in a french documentary. he speaks in english; talks about his portable, personal russia; reads the first lines of lolita in english and russian; talks about his not yet completed 'ada, or ardor: a family chronicle,' which then bore the title, 'the texture of time'; berates mann's 'asinine' 'death in venice', pasternak's vilely written melodramatic 'dr zhivago,' and faulkner's 'corn-cobby' novels; and, my favorite, how could it not be, his notebook of things he detests

death chance art