Archive for 2008

…Google’s Chrome browser being available for the Mac. (~January 2009)
…seeing Obama’s inauguration and hearing his speech (Jan 20 2009)
…seeing the last episodes of Battlestar Galactica. (Jan-March 2009)
…seeing the new Star Trekmovie (May 2009)
…getting an iPhone (Jan-Jun 2009)
…seeing the Caprica series (Jan 2010)

Bob Dylan explains globalization and postmodernism as it was experienced in the mid 1980s:

“Nah, none of that matters. I heard somebody on the radio talkin’ about what’s happenin’ in Haiti, you know? “We must be concerned about what’s happening in Haiti. We’re global people now.” And they’re gettin’ everybody in that frame of mind – like, we’re not just the United States anymore, we’re global. We’re thinkin’ in terms of the whole world because communications come right into your house. […]

Isn’t man supposed to progress, to forge ahead?

Well…but not there. I mean, what’s the purpose of going to the moon? To me, it doesn’t make any sense. Now they’re gonna put a space station up there, and it’s gonna cost, what — $600 billion, $700 billion? And who’s gonna benefit from it? Drug companies who are gonna be able to make better drugs. Does that make sense? Is that supposed to be something that a person is supposed to get excited about? Is that progress? I don’t think they’re gonna get better drugs. I think they’re gonna get more expensive drugs.

Everything is computerized now, it’s all computers. I see that as the beginning of the end. You can see everything going global. There’s no nationality anymore, no I’m this or I’m that: “We’re all the ‘same, all workin’ for one peaceful world, blah, blah, blah.”

Somebody’s gonna have to come along and figure out what’s happening with the United States. Is this just an island that’s going to be blown out of the ocean, or does it really figure into things? I really don’t know. At this point right now, it seems that it figures into things. But later on, it will have to be a country that’s self-sufficient, that can make it by itself without that many imports.

Right now, it seems like in the States, and most other countries, too, there’s a big push on to make a big global country — one big country — where you can get all the materials from one place and assemble them someplace else and sell ’em in another place, and the whole world is just all one, controlled by the same people, you know? And if it’s not there already, that’s the point it’s tryin’ to get to.”

– Bob Dylan, interview with Kurt Loder, 21 June 1984 issue of Rolling Stone

“Paying for things is our way of compensating all the people who have been inconvenienced by our consumption. (Next time you buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks, imagine yourself saying to the barista, ‘I’m sorry that you had to serve me coffee when you could have been doing other things. And please communicate my apologies to the others as well: the owner, the landlord, the shipping company, the Columbian peasants. Here’s $1.75 for all the trouble. Please divide it among yourselves.’)”

– Joseph Heath, ‘Filthy Lucre’ (2009) p. 160

Aaron Straup Cope:

Between plane-living and the Internets we may be midway through the process of distilling every place on Earth down to one of a half-dozen archetypal city-states but until that happens trying to affect a person’s relationship to the history and geography of whatever piece of dirt they call home will continue to be a source of tension.

Eighteen city-states within a global Imperial political model = late 21st Century.

I first began hearing the city-state meme in the mid-1990s. An awarness of it, or a tendency to quote it as Aaron Cope has done, is almost a marker of a generation. John Ralston Saul and his wife are part of the last generation of Canadian nationalists, always ready to write books on Canada and to talk about what it means to be Canadian. Meanwhile, people my own age, in my own city, started Spacing magazine, which is very much of the city-state mentality.

With the exception of the Tragically Hip, I have excluded Canadian musicians simply because they would exaggerate the list and because Canadian music for the most part is no more culturally specific than any other (accounting for its international success). The inclusion of the Hip here reflects their use of Canadian specific content throughout their songs. Leonard Cohen is included for his work as writer more than for his work as a musician.

This list merely tried to illustrate the groupings of artists by generation, to show the progression of cultural achievers over the last century. This illustrates that at the beginning of the 21st Century we have a legacy of artists to understand a heritage around, which wasn’t so much the case even fifty years ago. Also, any name not here is more of an oversight than a judgment (suggestions welcome).

Catharine Parr Traill 1802 – 1899
Susanna Moodie 1803 – 1885

Ozias Leduc 1864-1955

J.E.H. MacDonald 1873 – 1932 (G7)
Tom Thomson 1877-1917 (G7)

Fred Varley 1881-1969 (G7)
A.Y. Jackson 1882-1974 (G7)
Lawren Harris 1885-1970 (G7)
Arthus Lismer 1885-1969 (G7)
Frank Johnston 1888 – 1949 (G7)

Franklin Carmichael 1890 – 1945 (G7)
Harold Innis 1894-1952

Paul-Emile Borduas 1905-1960
Hugh MacLennan 1907-1990

Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980
Northrop Frye 1912-1991
Robertson Davies 1913-1995
George Grant 1918-1988
Pierre Trudeau 1919 – 2000

Jean-Paul Riopelle 1923-2002
Oscar Peterson 1925-2007
Margaret Laurence 1926-1987

Timothy Findley 1930 – 2002
Mordecai Richler 1931-2001
Alice Munro 1931 –
Glenn Gould 1932 – 1982
Robert Fulford 1932-
Leonard Cohen 1934 –
Garry Neil Kennedy 1935 –
Margaret Atwood 1939 –
Adrienne Clarkson 1939 –

Jorge Zontal 1944 – 1994 (General Idea)
Felix Partz 1945-1994
Jeff Wall 1946 –
AA Bronson 1946- (General Idea; Solo)
John Ralston Saul 1947 –
Rodney Graham 1949 –
David Gilmour 1949 –

George Elliott Clarke 1960 –
Douglas Coupland 1961 –
Gordon Downie 1964 – (Tragically Hip)
Paul Langlois (1964 – (Tragically Hip)
Rob Baker 1962 (Tragically Hip)
Gord Sinclair (Tragically Hip)
Johnny Fay 1966 – (Tragically Hip)
Mark Kingwell 1965-
Darren O’Donnell 1965 –

(From)

JA: Do you want to add something about the art scene?

RR: I have this vague sense that the art world has become so isolated from everything else in the universe that you’re either in it or in the rest of the world — nobody has time to be in both.

-Josefina Ayerza interviewed Richard Rorty in the Nov/Dec 1993 issue of Flash Art

Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untraveled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as “empty,” “meaningless,” or “dishonest,” and scorn to use them. No matter how “pure” their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best.

-Robert Heinlein, The Notebooks of Lazarus Long, from Time Enough for Love (1973)

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

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defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE

killall Finder

Warren Wagar, A Short History of the Future, page 244:

…sharp witted, yet outgoing and cooperative, the young members of Homo Sapiens altior fashioned a new model of human behavior ideally suited for life in autonomous communities. They were less inclined than the old human type to take advantage of others and too intelligent to be taken advantage of themselves. Their extraordinary powers of mind and heart were another form of wealth, shielding them, as ample personal incomes and education helped to shield everyone, from the age-old tendency of most of Homo sapiens to fall victim to predators.

As integration deepens, the generation whose identity was created by separation can feel left behind, betrayed, and lash out … at other members of the minority.

– Andrew Sullivan, parsing Wright, Sharpton, and Obama

You’ve suggested that there might be certain functions of the mind, certain aspects of consciousness, that don’t have a material foundation.

Yes.

Advanced contemplatives in the Buddhist tradition have talked about tapping into something called the “substrate consciousness.” What is that?

Just for a clarification of terms, I’ve demarcated three whole dimensions of consciousness. There’s the psyche. It’s the human mind — the functioning of memory, attention, emotions and so forth. The psyche is contingent upon the brain, the nervous system, and our various sensory faculties. It starts sometime at or following conception, certainly during gestation, and it ends at death. So the psyche has pretty clear bookends. This is what cognitive neuroscientists and psychologists study. They don’t study anything more. And they quite reasonably assume that that’s all there is to it. But as long as you study the mind only by way of brain states and behavior, you’re never going to know whether there’s any other dimension because of the limitations of your own methodologies. So here’s a hypothesis: The psyche does not emerge from the brain. Mental phenomena do not actually emerge from neuronal configurations. Nobody’s ever seen that they do.

So your hypothesis is just the reverse from what all the neuroscientists think.

Precisely. The psyche is not emerging from the brain, conditioned by the environment. The human psyche is in fact emerging from an individual continuum of consciousness that is conjoined with the brain during the development of the fetus. It can be very hampered if the brain malfunctions or becomes damaged.

But you’re saying there are also two other aspects of consciousness?

Yeah. All I’m presenting here is the Buddhist hypothesis. There’s another dimension of consciousness, which is called the substrate consciousness. This is not mystical. It’s not transcendent in the sense of being divine. The human psyche is emerging from an ongoing continuum of consciousness — the substrate consciousness — which kind of looks like a soul. But in the Buddhist view, it is more like an ongoing vacuum state of consciousness. Or here’s a good metaphor: Just as we speak of a stem cell, which is not differentiated until it comes into the liver and becomes a liver cell, or into bone marrow and becomes a bone marrow cell, the substrate consciousness is stem consciousness. And at death, the human psyche dissolves back into this continuum.

So this consciousness is not made of any stuff. It’s not matter. Is it just unattached and floating through the universe?

Well, this raises such interesting questions about the nature of matter. In the 19th century, you could think of matter as something good and chunky out there. You could count on it as having location and specific momentum and mass and all of that. Frankly, I think the backdrop of this whole conversation has to be 21st century physics, not 19th century physics. And virtually all of neuroscience and all of psychology is based on 19th century physics, which is about as up-to-date as the horse and buggy.

(source)

John Adams: Spring 1772

Government is nothing more than the combined force of society, or the united power of the multitude, for the peace, order, safety, good, and happiness of the people … There is no king or queen bee distinguished from all others, by size or figure of beauty and variety of colors, in the human hive. No man has yet produced any revelation from heaven in his favour, any divine communication to govern his fellow men. Nature throws us al into the world equal and alike … (source)

In writing this book, I have made a host of spelling “mistakes”, but have paid them no heed. Each has been signaled clearly by a red line that my computer’s U.S. text system inserts beneath the offending word. The mistakes aren’t really mine, though; they are Macdonald’s. He had an order-in-council passed directing that the government’s papers be written in the British style, as with “labour” rather than “labor”.

(p66) In 19C Canada, the observation that all politics is local would have been treated not as insight but as a banality. With occasional exception, such as the campaign to achieve Responsible Government by Population, almost all politics was about local issues. Debates that engaged the general public were almost always those inspired by sectarianism – French vs English, Catholic vs Protestant, and sometime Protestant vs Protestant, as between Anglicans and Methodists. Just about the only non-religious exception to the rule was the issue of Anti-Americanism; it was both widespread and, as was truly rare, a political conviction that promoted national unity because it was held as strongly by the French and by the English.

Almost all politics was local for the simple reason that almost everyone in Canada was a local: at least 80% of Canadians were farmers or independent fishermen. Moreover, they were self-sufficient farmers. They built their own houses. They carved out most of their implements and equipment. They grew almost all their own food (tea and sugar excepted) or raised it on the hoof. They made most of their own clothes. They made their own candles and soap. Among the few products they sold into commercial markets were grain and potash. Few sent their children to school. They were unprotected by policemen (even in the towns in Upper Canada, police forces dates only from the 1840s). For lack of ministers and priests, marriages were often performed by the people themselves. Even the term ‘local’ conveys a false impression of community: roads were so bad and farms spaced so far apart that social contact was limited principally to ‘bees’ – barn and house raising, stump clearing and later, more fancifully, quilting.

Government’s reach in Canada was markedly more stunted than in England. While there had been a Poor Law there from 1597, the first statute of the Legislature of Upper Canada provided specifically that ‘Nothing in this Act … shall introduce any of the laws of England concerning the maintenance of the poor’. (The Maritimes, then quite separate colonies, had both Poor Laws and Poor Houses). The churches were responsible for charity, and in some areas for education (The first legislation in British North America to establish free education was in Prince Edward Island in 1852. Nova Scotia followed in 1864, and Ontario only after Confederation). It was the same for that other form of social activism, the Temperance Societies, commonly brought into being by the Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist churches. The unemployed were ‘the idle poor,’ and no government had any notion that it should be responsible for their succor. Governments collected taxes (almost exclusively customs and excise duties) and were responsible for law and order, maintaing the militia, and running the jails, where the idea of rehabilitation as opposed to punishment was unknown. But without income tax, there was comparatively little the government could do even if it wished. Consequently, the total spending on public charities, social programs and education amounted to just 9% of any government’s revenues. To most Canadians in the middle of the 19C, government was irrelevant to their day to day lives as it is today to the Mennonites, Hutterites and Amish.

[…] In mid to late 19C Canada, conservatism was as widely held a political attitude as liberalism would become a century later. It took a long while for things to change. In one post-Confederation debated, in 1876, held during an economic depression, a Liberal MP argued that the government should assist the poor. Another MP rounded on him to declare “The moment a Government is asked to take charge and feed the poor you strike a blow to their self-respect and independence that is fatal to our existence as a people.’ The shocked intervenor was also a Liberal, as was the government of the day.

Amid this emphasis on the local, there was, nevertheless, one broad national dimension. Governments were remarkably ready to go into debt – proportionally more deeply than today – to build up the nation itself. Here, Conservatives were actually greater risk-takers than the Reformers. Bishop Joseph Strachan, a leading member of the arch-conservative Family Compact, held that ‘the existence of a national debt may be perfectly consistent with the interests and prosperity of the Country’. In the early and middle part of the century, mostly Conservative governments bankrolled major public projects – first canals, such as the Welland, the Lachine and the Rideau – and then a spiderweb of railways, nearly all of them money-losing. The Conservatives were, of course, undertaking projects that benefited their supporters, but they were also building the country. [… p 69]

p. 89 A great many Canadians have come to assume that their country began on July 1 1867, not least because we celebrate each year the anniversary of Confederation. But Confederation wasn’t the starting point of all that we no have and are. It developed from its own past, and that past, even if now far distant from us, still materially affects our present and our future.

The most explicit description of the continuity of Canadian politics across the centuries is made by historian Gordon Stewart in his book The Origins of Canadian Politics. There he writes, “The key to understanding the main features of Canadian national political culture after 1867 lies in the political world of Upper and Lower Canada between 1790s and the 1860s.” His argument, one shared fully by the author, is that all Canadian politics, even those in our postmodern, high-tech, 21st Century present, have been influenced substantively by events and attitudes in the horse-and-buggy Canada of our dim past.

[…]

The catalyst of fundamental change in pre-Confederation politics were the rebellions in 1837-38 by the Patriotes in Lower Canada led by Louis-Joseph Papineau, which was a serious uprising, and by the rebels in Upper Canada led by William Lyon Mackenzie, which was more of a tragicomedy. Both uprisings provided a warning to London that, as had gone the American colonies a half-century earlier, so the colonies of British North America might also go. To deal with the crisis, the Imperial government sent out one of its best and brightest.

John George Lambton, Earl of Durham, arrived accompanied by an orchestra, several race horses, a full complement of silver and a cluster of brainy aides, one of whom had achieved celebrity status by running off with a teenage heiress and serving time briefly in jail. Still in his early forties, ‘Radical Jack’ was cerebral, cold, acerbic and arrogant. After just five months in the colony, he left in a rage after a decision of his – to exile many of the Patriotes to Bermuda without the bother of a trial – was countermanded by the Colonial Office. Back home, he completed, in 1839, a report that was perhaps the single most important public document in all Canadian history. Lord Durham himself died of TB a year later.

Parts of Durham’s report were brilliant; parts were brutal. The effects of each were identical: they both had an extraordinarily creative effect on Canada and Canadians. The brutal parts of Durham’s diagnosis are, as almost always happens, much the better known. He had found here, he declared, “two nations warring in the bosom of a single state … a struggle, not to principles, but of races (Durham’s use of the word ‘race’ will strike contemporary [readers] as odd. It was used then to describe people now usually referred to as ‘ethnic groups’.) The French Canadians, les Canadiens, had to lose – for their own sake. They were ‘a people destitute of all that could constitute a nationality … brood[ing] in sullen silence over the memory of their fallen countrymen, of their burnt villages, of their ruined property, of their extinguished ascendancy.’

In fact, Durham was almost as hard about the English in Canada. They were ‘hardly better off than the French for their means of education for their children.’ They were almost as indolent: ‘On the American side, all is activity and hustle … On the British side of the line, except for a few favoured spots, all seems waste and desolate.’ He dismissed the powerful Family Compact as ‘these wretches’. Still, he took it for granted that Anglo-Saxons would dominate the French majority in their own Lower Canada. ‘The entire wholesale and a large portion of the retail trade of the Province, with the most profitable and flourishing farms, are now in the hands of this dominant minority.’ All French Canadians could do was ‘look upon their rivals with alarm, with jealousy, and finally with hatred.’

The only way to end this perpetual clash between the ‘races’ Durham concluded, was there to be just one race in Canada. The two separate, ethnically defined provinces of Upper Canada and Lower Canada should be combined into the United Province of Canada. As immigrants poured in from the British Isles, the French would inevitably become a minority. To quicken the pace of assimilation, the use of French should cease in the new, single legislature and government. To minimize the political weight of Lower Canada 650,000 people, compared with Upper Canada’s 450,000 each former province, now reduced to a ‘section’ should have an equal number of members in the new legislature. (Officially, Upper Canada now became Canada West, and Lower Canada became Canada East. In fact, almost everyone continued to refer to the new sections by their old titles … In fact, the legislature re-legalized the use of the old Upper and Lower Canada terms in 1849).

Durham’s formula worked – but backwards. Quebec’s commitment to la survivance dates less from Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm [in 17x] (after which the Canadiens’ religions and system of low were protected by British decree) than from 1839, when Durham told French Canadians they were finished. The consequences of this collective death sentence was an incredible flowering of a national will to remain alive. (A parallel exists with the publication in 1965 of George Grant’s Lament for a Nation predicting Canada’s inevitable absorption by America. In response, English-Canadian nationalists suddenly stood on guard for their country).

[…]

Few in Upper Canada noticed [the flowering of French-Canadian self-awareness]. Their attention was focused on the other part of Durham’s report, one calling for a totally different kind of Parliament. It was to be a responsible Parliament, with a cabinet composed of member of the majority party rather than chose at the pleasure of the governor general. In a phrase of almost breathtaking boldness, Durham wrote, ‘The British people of the North American Colonies are a a people on whom we may safely rely, and to whom we must not grudge power.’

– Richard Gwyn, John A. Macdonald Vol I 2007

The prevalence of pedantry at Rome was quickly followed by a decline of true taste, by a contempt of simplicity and nature, and by the substitution of false and affected beauties. Before the close of Augustus’s reign, a certain effeminacy of style insinuated itself at court; and the malignant criticisms of Asinius Pollio, and of his son Asinius Gellius, on the language and compositions of Cicero, greatly conduced to wean the Romans, as Denina expresses it, from that great fountain of Latin oratory. Eloquence was no longer to be seen in an elegant undress, but was always tricked, and flounced, and highly decorated with the studied graces of novelty, or the attractive glitter of points, of witticism, allusions, and conceits. The want of real dignity was supplied by a pompous strut; and artificial flowers were profusely scattered to conceal the decay of Nature’s sweetest blooms.

–The British Cicero: Or, a Selection of the Most Admired Speeches in the English Language; By Thomas Browne, 1808

Despite Canada’s status as one of the larger donors, it has failed to meet a commitment to donate 0.7 per cent of its gross domestic product to the Millennium Project, despite a resource boom over the past few years that generated considerable economic wealth. Mr. Sachs said he was told on one occasion by a cabinet minister that Ottawa couldn’t boost its aid to meet this target because it would threaten the country’s budget surplus.

– Jeffery Sachs in today’s Globe & Mail: Canada deaf to growing hunger crisis, UN aide says by Sinclair Stewart and Paul Waldie

Norman Mailer: ‘One of the reasons Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so beloved one of the reason Jack Kennedy was so mourned is they were two of the rare examples of presidents trying to make the country more intelligent. They didn’t jump the easy conclusions all the time. When Roosevelt said ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself,’ he was introducing a concept into the public mind. He trusted the public to the extent that you could talk to them that way. Jimmy Carter tried but didn’t succeed. Remember he used that word ‘malaise’; ‘the country’s suffering from a malaise’ and of course that bombed. Well, Jimmy Carter had very good instincts up to a point but he didn’t have a sense of how to deal with the public. It’s a peculiar ability to raise the intelligence of the public and still know how to talk to them. [emp mine]

Norman Mailer, speaking in March 2006 (Mp3; 17:39):

NM: A democracy is a most delicate form of government, the most delicate, that’s why it took so long to arrive in history. It depends on the language of the people becoming more artful and richer, and more elevated if you will, over the decades and the centuries. And it depends upon more and more creativity and substantiality and fine institutions and high development. And Bush is a negative force against that because he reduces language. He’s an abominable speaker. He hide behind his … I won’t get into what he hides behind.

Dotson Rader: You’re making what are essentially aesthetic objections to Bush, which to the American people, the great unwashed performing seals out there they see as elitist. You’re not making political objections. You understand what I’m saying? You’re talking about ‘he’s debasing the language’ – well, advertising debases the language. The whole culture of America is one vast debasement of language.

NM: I will insist on one thing. A democracy is dependent on wonderful language, upon the language improving not deteriorating. This country was fabulous in the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt because he spoke so well. The small taste we had of Jack Kennedy gave us the huge sense of will he felt … here was this intelligent man who obviously was indicating in subtle ways that he also wanted to improve the level of intelligence in politics and in America. Democracies are delicate. The opposite end of a democracy is fascism, always. Fascism is much more implanted in our nervous system than democracy. When we’re children, when we’re one, two, three, four years old, willy-nilly with the kindest parents in the world we’re nonetheless living in a fascistic environment if you will, a totalitarian environment, which is ‘do as you’re told’ we say to a child with all the art in the world, the child grows up knowing in some part of themselves that obeying orders is not the worst thing in the world.

DR: Well, I would say it’s a structured environment, I wouldn’t say it’s a fascistic environment.

NM: Well, the word is unpleasant and causes … but I want to underline and exaggerate it for a very direct reason. Which is democracies are always in danger of becoming fascistic, if they they turn corupt, if the people don’t become more and more intelligent and illumined, as they go along, through history, then they tend to deteriorate. I’ve said this over and over: one of the reasons the English did not collapse and go to pieces given all their reversals in the 20C is Shakespeare; just as the Irish, without Joyce, would have been much less. Now I’m not saying this just and only because I’m a semi-talented novelist. I’m saying it because language is immensely important, immensely important and Bush destroys it every time he opens his mouth.

Norman Mailer: A democracy in my mind depends, absolutely depends upon the populace becoming more and more intelligent and sensitive and aware and nuanced over the decades. When a democracy becomes more stupid it’s in danger of becoming fascistic. It’s the duty I would say of a president to make a nation more intelligent. One of the reasons Franklin Delano Roosevelt was so beloved one of the reason Jack Kennedy was so mourned is they were two of the rare examples of presidents trying to make the country more intelligent. They didn’t jump the easy conclusions all the time. When Roosevelt said ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself,’ he was introducing a concept into the public mind. He trusted the public to the extent that you could talk to them that way. Jimmy Carter tried but didn’t succeed. Remember he used that word ‘malaise’; ‘the country’s suffering from a malaise’ and of course that bombed. Well, Jimmy Carter had very good instincts up to a point but he didn’t have a sense of how to deal with the public. It’s a peculiar ability to raise the intelligence of the public and still know how to talk to them.

From Bad Writing’s Back by Mark Bauerlein :

Still, despite the mannered presentation, Just Being Difficult? and previous pro-theory statements do forward responses that deserve a hearing. Theorists devote long paragraphs to them, but they can be distilled into blank assertions and treated as hypotheses. They are:

[…]

Scientists have their jargon—why can’t theorists have theirs?
Again, this is a valid question with a simple pragmatic answer. The public tolerates scientific jargon and not theory jargon because it believes that scientists need jargon to extend their researches and produce practical knowledge that benefits all. Only when scientists appear to abandon the common good does their language come under attack (for example, Swift’s portrait of mathematicians in Book III of Gulliver’s Travels, or contemporary ridicule of sociologese and psychobabble). Come the day when the theorists are able to demonstrate that their jargon enhances human life, and isn’t just pretension and science-envy, public mistrust of them will end. Constantly claiming to foment social justice isn’t sufficient.

[…]

The United States is an anti-intellectual nation, and its national publications follow the trend.
Most theorists take American anti-intellectualism for granted, and Brooks suggests that cultural journals have adopted the Right-wing view, although “there is perhaps no point in lamenting the decadence of the serious cultural journals since journals of any sort mainly go unread at present”. This is silly academic parochialism as its most cocksure. Theorists who lament the absence of serious criticism in the magazines and newspapers should limit their point to the fact that their version of criticism has no public venue. In truth, learned criticism appears in magazines and newspapers all the time. The New Republic (circulation 100,000 a week) publishes lengthy review-essays on scholarly subjects by humanities professors (e.g., David Bromwich, David Freedberg, and Lawrence Lipking), as does the New York Review of Books. The Nation publishes art criticism by Arthur Danto and literary essays by Morris Dickstein; and reviews in Atlantic Monthly by Benjamin Schwarz and others meet high intellectual standards. Wall Street Journal editor Erich Eichman allows academic reviewers 800 words on university press books covering unusual subjects, and the Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe have deliberately raised the content of their weekly reviews. Moreover, although Commentary and The New Criterion haven’t the subscriptions of the others, like the now-closed Partisan Review in earlier times, their influence reaches to politicians and public intellectuals. Dutton’s own webpage, Arts and Letters Daily, receives over two million page views per month. I could go on, but suffice it to say that the notion that public discourse in the U.S. is vulgar and decadent is an absurdity that academics should give up immediately.

[…]

With Hulme, creative artists break down the “standardised perception,” then “induce us to make the same effort ourselves and make us see what they see.” He doesn’t consider the case of the artist who works alone, forever estranged from the crowd. Adorno doesn’t talk about social success in the same way, but we can judge his effect simply by naming the people he influenced. These include not only contemporary theorists but also mid-century mass culture critics Dwight Macdonald, Clement Greenberg, Irving Howe, and others centered around Partisan Review—an audience skeptical and dogged enough to verify his brilliance.

We should apply the pragmatic test to today’s theorists. What if in the end nobody abandons common sense and adopts the theory habit? Butler aims to “provoke new ways of looking” and Culler repeats Emerson’s dictum, “Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul,” but what if nobody is provoked? This is not quite the same verdict that Leftist critics of bad writing such as Katha Pollitt, draw, namely, that the theorists’ recondite language cuts them off from real politics. Rather, it recalls the simple truth that, as a matter of historical record, only certain disruptions thwart common sense and alter the world. In a word, the “anti-styles” only work if they create as well as destroy. If ordinary language is a repository of naturalized values, then the artist/critic’s counter-language must supply other values in infectious, admissible ways: one common sense world collapses only if another takes its place. If you propose to explode certain attitudes and beliefs, and to do so by disrupting their proper idiom, then you must compose a language compelling, powerful, memorable, witty, striking, or poignant enough to supplant it. Your language must be an attractive substitute, or else nobody will echo it.

Needless to say, the theorists haven’t achieved that and never will. A genuine displacement comes about through an original and stunning expression containing arresting thoughts and feelings, not through the collective idiom of an academic clique smoothly imitated by a throng of aspiring theorists. [emph mine] The writings of Pound, Mallarmé, Faulkner, and H.D. each form a unique signature and inspire theorists to daring interrogations, but few idioms are as conventionalized as 1990s critical theory. In her op-ed, Butler mentions slavery as a common-sense notion that had to go (Warner echoes the self-inflating comparison), but none of the abolitionists followed the “difficult writing” strategy. Frederick Douglass was a dazzling rhetorician, and Warner’s example, Thoreau, composed epigrams honored for their pithy brilliance. By comparison, theory prose is a clunker. Its success in the academy lies not in surprising conversions of common-sense minds, but in quick and easy replication by AbDs. If critics assume a duty to undermine common sense, very well, but they need to devise a different counter-speech, not insist on the value of their current one.

This LOL in the webstats; someone searched for:

“fastwurms exhibit another piece of contemporary crap”

All that snow has to go . . . where? | The Star

There’s the “equivalent of a 50 millimetre thunderstorm sitting on the ground right now in the form of snow,” says Toronto and Region Conservation Authority chief flood duty officer Ryan Ness.”But it has to be released and melted to get into rivers and streams and cause flooding.”

There hasn’t been this much snow on the ground, this late in the year, since 1968, says Phillips, who measured 28 centimetres of snow accumulation at Pearson airport yesterday.

From Contingency, irony, and solidarity (1989; pages 37-38) by Richard Rorty:

Another way of making this point is to say that the social process of literalizing a metaphor is duplicated in the fantasy life of an individual. We call something ‘fantasy’ rather than ‘poetry’ or ‘philosophy’ when it revolves around metaphors which do not catch on with other people – that is, around ways of speaking or acting which the rest of us cannot find a use for. But Freud shows us how something which seems pointless or ridiculous or vile to society can become the crucial element in the individual’s sense of who she is, her own way of tracing home the blind impress all her behavings bear. Conversely, when some private obsession produces a metaphor which we can find a use for, we speak of genius rather than eccentricity or perversity. The difference between genius and fantasy is not the difference between impresses which lock on to something universal, some antecedent reality out there in the world or deep within the self, and those which do not. Rather, it is the difference between idiosyncrasies which just happen to catch on with other people – happen because of the contingencies of some historical situation, some particular need which a given community happens to have at a given time.

To sum up, poetic, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or political progress results from the accidental coincidence of a private obsession with a public need. [emph mine] Strong poetry, commonsense morality, revolutionary morality, normal science, revolutionary science, and the sort of fantasy which is intelligible to only one person, are all, from a Freudian point of view, different ways of dealing with blind impresses – or, more precisely, ways of dealing with different blind impresses: impresses which may be unique to an individual or common to the members of some historically conditioned community.

‘Vancouver was a part of the United States where the people were so clever that they never paid taxes to Washington’.

-Robert Heinlein, Time Enough For Love (p.30)

// The same could also be said of Toronto

From the intro to Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies, by Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, Sept 1998:

The sort of intellectual Rorty prefers, then, is one who makes herself familiar with as many vocabularies and language games as possible by acquainting herself with as many novels and ethnographies as she can get her hands on. In doing so, this intellectual becomes an “ironist” about her own vocabulary, recognizing it as a contingent product of the time and place in which she was born. Furthermore, Rorty asserts, in his desired post-metaphysical culture, “novels and ethnographies which sensitize one to the pain of those who do not speak our language must do the job which demonstrations of a common human nature were supposed to do” (94). That is, the job of building human solidarity. Hence, we might be able to characterize Rorty’s pragmatist response to the “Nazi question” as consisting of two answers. First, one doesn’t refute Nazis, or any other world-view; one offers a redescription of the world which makes their description look untenable. Second, and Rorty is clear that this consists more of a hope than a guarantee, the properly ironist intellectual, with her wide range of acquaintance, will have read too many novels and ethnographies to fall for a vocabulary which imagines itself to have some privileged relationship to Truth, and which ignores the pain of others.

Yet Rorty also hesitates to claim too much for the political uses of either redescription or ironist self- consciousness. In fact, he notes that “redescription often humiliates” (90); that is, the act of re-casting the world in the terms of a new language game can often have cruel consequences, as the one redescribing the world overwhelms and makes irrelevant the descriptions and language games upon which others had based their lives (which, as Rorty explains, is what O’Brien does to Winston Smith in 1984, and what Humbert does to Lolita in Lolita). Indeed, Rorty cautions that while the desire to craft a new final vocabulary which redescribes the world apart from the language games one inherited is a central activity of ironist self-creation, it is also one which is largely irrelevant to public life. Thus, he suggests that the ironist intellectual enact a kind of cognitive public/private split: that one’s “radical and continuing doubts about [one’s] final vocabulary” (72), and the ensuing attempt to redescribe the world as an act of self-creation, be kept private, while one’s public life remains dedicated to the liberal hope of diminishing cruelty and expanding human solidarity. In short, Rorty’s model intellectual is what he calls a liberal ironist: one who continues to defend and support principles of liberal hope, despite their lack of metaphysical guarantees, by “distinguish[ing] between redescription for private and for public purposes” (91).

MacBook Air

“I heard through the grape vines that the Macbook Air designers upon the creation of the product called Steve and asked that he returned the time of their lives they wasted creating this laptop for his indulgence.”

A comment to the interview with Steve Jobs which appeared in yesterday’s NYT

Morgan vs. Ridley

A fuller consideration of the relationship between Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture and Richard Morgan’s Black Man: The selection from Nature via Nurture which inspired Richard Morgan to write Black Man (as described in the novel’s acknowledgment), from pages 34-35:

[Describing the domestication of foxes (selected for tameness and essentially turned into dogs) this is mapped onto the domestication of wolves, Matt Ridley continues]:’The surprise was that merely by selecting tameness, Belyaev had accidentally achieved all the same features that the original domesticator of the wolf had gotten – and that was probably some race of the wolf itself, which had bred into itself the ability not to run away too readily from ancient humans’ rubbish dumps when disturbed. The implication is that some promoter change had occurred which affected not one but many genes. Indeed, it is fairly obvious that in both cases the timing of the development had been altered so that the adult animals retained many of the features and habits of pups: the floppy ears, they short snout, the smaller skull, and the playful behaviour.

What seems to happen in these cases is that young animals do not yet show either fear or aggression, traits that develop last during the forward growth of the limbic system at the base of the brain. So the most likely way for evolution to produce a friendly or tame animal is to stop brain development prematurely. The effect is a smaller brain and especially a smaller ‘area 13’, a late-developing part of the limbic system that seems to have the job of disinhibiting adult emotional reactions such as fear and aggression. Intriguingly, such a taming process seems to have happened naturally in bonobos since their separation from the chimpanzee more than 2 million years ago. For its size the bonobo not only has a small head but also is less aggressive and retains several juvenile features into adulthood, including a white anal tail tuft, high-pitched calls, and unusual female genitals. Bonobos have unusually small area 13s. (Footnote here: K Semendefrei, E Armstrong, A Schleicher, K Zilles, & GW Hosen: `Limbic frontal cortex in hominoids: A comparative study of area 13` American Journal of Physical Anthropology 1998 106:129-55)

So do human beings. Surprisingly, the fossil record suggests that there has been a rather steep decline in the size of the human brain during the past 15,000 years, partly but not wholly reflecting a shrinking body that seems to have accompanied the arrival of dense and ‘civilized’ human settlements. This followed several million years of more or less steady increases in brain size. In the Mesolithic (around 50,000 years ago) the human brain averaged 1468cc (in females) and 1567cc (in males). Today the numbers have fallen to 1210 cc/1248cc and even allowing for some reduction in body weight, this seems like a step decline. Perhaps there has been some recent taming of the species. If so, how? Richard Wrangham believes that once human beings became sedentary, living in permanent settlements, they could no longer tolerate antisocial behavior and they began to banish, imprison, or execute especially difficult individuals. In the past in highland New Guinea, more than one in ten of all adult deaths were by the execution of ‘witches’ (mostly men). This might have meant killing the more aggressive and impulsive – and hence more developmentally mature and bigger-brained – people. ( Footnote here: RW Wrangham, D Pilbeam, B Hare: `Convergent paedomorphism in bonobos, domesticated animals, and humans: The role of selection for reduced aggresion` (unpublished); related: page: 87, Turkheimer’s quote: ‘Criminality, for instance, is quite highly heritable: adopted children end up with a criminal record which looks a lot more like that of their biological parents than like that of their foster parents. Why? Not because there are specific genes for criminality, but because their are specific personalities that get into trouble with the law and those personalities are heritable. As Eric Turkheimer … puts it, ‘Does anyone really suppose that unintelligent, unattractive, greedy, impulsive, emotionally unstable, or alcoholic people are no more likely than anyone else to become criminals or that any of these characteristics could be completely independent of genetic endowment?’ [sourced to E Turkheimer, `Heritability and biological explanation` Psychology Review 105:782-91, 1998]).

// Comment: What I find intriguing about this is the suggestion that aggression is mature behavior. Mature biologically anyway; I have for been thinking for a couple of years that rejecting violence was mature, but this then is mature as defined by civilization: that we willingly reject violence in this regard, inasmuch the same way that we also modify our behavior to fit into society (like the use of toilets, the behaviors around sex, the manners of meal time).

But here is also the suggestion that biological expressions are connected to the experience of fear; here, civilization provides less fear, and thus aggression appears less necessary.

Contrast this with Morgan’s version, from the end of Black Man:

‘Look, the fucking cudlips, they talk such a great fight about equality, democratic accountability, freedom of expression. But what does it come down to in the end? Ortiz. Norton. Roth. Plausible, power grubbing-men and women with a smile for the electors, the common fucking touch, and the same old agenda they’ve had since they wiped us out the first time around. And every cudlip fucker just lines right up for that shit.’

[…] Carl nodded and stared at the grey matt surface of the weapon in his hands.
‘But not us, right?’
‘Fucking right, not us. […] You know how you breed contemporary humans from a thirteen? You fucking domesticate them. Same thing they did to wolves to make them into dogs. Same thing they did with fox farming in Siberia back in the 1900s. You select for fucking tameness, Marsalis. For lack of aggression, and for compliance. And you know how to get that?’
[…]
‘Tell you how to get that,’ the dying thirteen rasped. ‘How you get a modern human. You get it by taking immature individuals, individuals showing the characteristics of fucking puppies. Area thirteen, man. It’s one of the last parts of the human brain to develop, the final stages of human maturity. The part they bred out 20,000 years ago because it was too dangerous to their fucking crop-growing plans. We aren’t the variant, Marsalis – we’re the last true humans. It’s the cudlips that are the fucking twists. […] Modern humans are fucking infantilized adolescent cut-offs. Is it any wonder they do what they’re told?’
‘Yeah, so did we,’ Carl said somberly. ‘Remember.’
‘They tried to contain us.’ Onbekend shifted over onto his side […] ‘But we’ll beat that. We will, we’re fucking wired to beat it. We’re their last hope, Marsalis. We’re what’s going to resuce them from the Ortizes and the Nortons and the Roths. We’re the only thing that scares those people, because we won’t comply, we won’t stay infantile and go out and play nice in their plastic fucking world.’
‘If you say so.’
‘Yeah, I do fucking say so. […] We’re the long walk back to hunter-gatherer egalitarianism, Marsalis. We’re going to show those fuckers what freedom really means. (p543-545)

// Comment: I’m currently under the impression that Morgan wrote this first and then constructed the novel to lead up to it. But that’s just an impression. Could be wrong.

Ortiz was a VIP, set to become head of the United Nations. The head of COLIN (the Colony Initiative) he had been shot in an attempted assassination and was in a hospital when confronted by Carl, who killed him in a scene which I keep thinking about as an example of power; that level of self-justification:

‘Tom,’ Ortiz says, ‘I have a secure nomination for Secretary General. There will be no dispute, it’s decided at all the levels that matter. I will hold the post by this time next year, if you let me live.’ The pressed palms raised, almost like prayer.’Don’t you understand, either of you, that this is what I have been trying to safeguard? You think this was about me personally? It was not, please believe me. I have spent the last six years of my life trying to bend the Colony Initiative closer to a rapprochement with the UN. To reach agreements on Martian law and co-operative governance. To leash corporate greed and harness it to a European social model. To break down the barriers between us and the Chinese instead of building walls and fences. I’ve done all that in the hope that we don’t have to take our insular nation state insanities to the first new world we’ve reached and build the same stupid hate-filled structure from the ground up all over again.’Ortiz’s face was flushed and animated, passion briefly imitating health while it filled him. Carl watched the COLIN director as if he were something behind glass in an insect vivarium. See the humans. Watch the patriarchal male justify his acts to his fellows and to himself.

‘One more year,’ said Ortiz urgently. ‘That’s all I need, and I can continue the work form the other side of the fence. I can restructure the idiot posturing in the general assembly, force reforms, make promises, all built on the work I’ve already done here with COLIN. That’s what was under threat from this stupid petty blackmail out of the past – not some quick cash that I could have filtered through a COLIN account for less than the cost of a single nanorack elevator. That’s not why I did this. I did it for the future, a hope for the future. Isn’t that worth the sacrifice? It was a handful of used-up, counterfeit lives, tired, superannuated men and women of violence hiding from their own pasts, set in the balance against the hope of a better future for all of us.’

[…]
‘You’re full of shit, Ortiz. […] You didn’t have a problem with using these men and women of violence when you were running Scorpion Response.’
‘No, that’s true, Tom. But it was a different time. You have to remember that. And back then, those men and women themselves would gladly have given their lives in the causes I’m talking about, because they also believed in a better future.’
Tom Norton: A better fucking future? And what exactly was your bright new future going to be, you motherfucker? Covert ops in other people’s countries. Corrupt corporate practice? A genetic concentration camp in Wyoming?
[…]
Ortiz: I …was… young. Foolish. I have no defense. But I believed what we were doing was right, at the time. You have to understand what it was like. In the West we were losing the edge, terrified of the gene research that was needed to be done, held back by moral panic and ignorance. China was doing work that our universities and technology institutes should have been pursuing. They still are. There is a future on Mars, Mr. Marsalis, but it’s not a human future the way Jacobsen and UNGLA understood it. You’ve been there, you know what it’s like. We will need the variants, we will have to become a variant of some sort if we plan to stay. The Chinese understand this, that’s why they haven’t stopped their programs. I only sought to equalize the pressure, so when they explosion, the realization finally came, it would not rupture society apart from the differential.

[…the conversation continues until Carl Marsalis lifts Ortiz from his wheel-chair to lay him out on the floor, preparing to snap his neck. He says to him …]

Carl Marsalis: I know you Ortiz. I’ve seen your kind making your speeches from every pulpit and podium on two planets, and you never fucking change. You lie to the cudlips and you lie to yourself so they’ll believe you better, and when the dying starts, you claim regret and you offer justification. But in the end, you do it all because you think you’re right, and you do not care. If you really suspected Jeff Norton, if you knew what kind of man he was, you could have squeezed him for the names, dealt with whoever it was – ‘ (pages 501-506)

…More talk, until Carl snaps his neck. The alarms attached to Ortiz’s body go off.

Soft, chiming sirens went off everywhere in the suite, the wail of distressed cudlip society. Man of substance down. Rally, gather, form a mob.The beast is out.