Notes & Quotes

Leonardo da Vinci

John Quincy Adams
Thomas Jefferson
(and others at the Massachusetts Historical Society)

Isaac Newton

Martha Ballard

“Dramatic growth in consumption has happened in the last thirty years: a period when the arts and the humanities have been unambitious in their efforts to guide and educate taste. The accumulated wisdom of humanity, concerning what is beautiful, interesting, fine or serious, was – to a large extent – left to one side at the precise time when the need for guidance was greatest, and when guidance was hardest to give, and so required maximum effort and confidence.

When one looks at celebrated figures of those worlds – such as Andy Warhol or today, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst – and asks what does their art say to people about consuming, the answer is very little. I do not want to attack those particular individuals; they seem, amoung other, to be creations of a profoundly damaged culture that tells itself it is being clever and sophisticated and up to date for the wrong reasons. The cultural laurels – and a species of authority that goes with them – have been awarded in unfortunate directions. Mockery, irony and archness are not what we need.

While the works of these artists have gained amazing commercial success, they suggest a loss of purpose in the arts. Loss, that is, of a really central and powerful claim upon the education of taste: upon the sense of what is beautiful, gracious or attractive.

We have suffered an astonishing corruption of consciousness practised upon us by a decadent cultural elite. Think of the language of contemporary praise: a building is admired because it is ‘interesting’ – like the average newspaper column. The gap between ‘interesting’ and ‘glorious’ or ‘adorable’ is vast. An artist is praised for being ‘provocative’ – like someone bleating into a mobile phone on a crowded train. We are miles from ‘profound’,’tender’, ‘magnificent’.

All of this has come about because of a misreading of history. It has been supposed that the point of high culture – of the greatest imaginative and creative effort – is to unseat some fantasized ruling class who had to be provoked and distressed into change. But that is not the task of art or intelligence. Their real task is to shape and direct our longings, to show us what is noble and important. And this is not a task that requires any kind of cagey, elusive obscurity. The way forward here is to be more demanding, truthful and – at first – courageous. We have to forget the shifting patterns of fashion. Something is good because it is good, not because it was created yesterday or five hundred years ago.”
– John Armstrong

$600.xx Chili Sept 1 1866
Received of James Goldw
Six hundred dollars to
apply one contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble

$450.xx Chili Sept 8 1866
Received of James Goldw
four hundred and fifty dollars to
to apply on contract for the
building of his house in Chili
Henry B Kimble

$200.xx Chili Sept 15 1866
Received of James Goldw
two hundred Dollars
to apply one contract for
the building of his house
in Chili
Henry B Kimble

In order to fund the Civil War, in July 1862 Congress created the United States’ first income tax as well as the Internal Revenue Service. Taxes were also collected on documents through the use of stamps.

“Schedule A described the income tax and other taxes payable directly to the Office of Internal Revenue, including inheritance taxes; duties on carriages, yachts, and other luxury goods; and various duties on business activities. Schedule B described the taxes to be paid on documents, which required the use of adhesive stamps directly on these documents”. Revenue Stamps: Financing the Civil War (PDF)

This document, which I purcharsed for $3 at the Christie Antiques Show appears to show both levels of tax collecting: one on the contracts, and the other in the use of the 2 cent document stamps.

Chili appears to be an area outside of Rochester NY, and a search for Henry B Kimble of Rochester shows he may have been granted a patent in 1854 for a sash fastener.

(Ancestry.com)

From the episode Conundrum

Petty Officer 2nd Class, CFR, Anastasia Dualla:

“My dad went crazy when I enlisted. He though the military was a joke. A refuge for emotional cripples and patriotic fools.”

Q: “But you signed up anyway…”

Dualla: “I guess I just wanted to believe in something”.

Battlestar Gallactica: Season 2: “Final Cut” (2005)

“It’s the seat of government…Imagine a skyscraper being built on Parliament Hill right behind the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa. That would never happen. It would be an embarrassment if this happens.”

Posted via email from Timothy’s posterous

“The historical role of modernism, in the sense of a phenomenon arising with the domain of art, resides in its ability to jolt us out of tradition […] Art today needs to reinvent itself, and on a planetary scale. And this new modernism, for the first time, will have resulted from global dialogue. Postmodernism, thanks to the post-colonial criticism of Western pretensions to determine the world’s direction and the speed of its development, has allowed the historical counters to be reset to zero; today temporalities intersect and weave a complex network stripped of a centre. Numerous contemporary artistic practices indicate, however, that we are on the verge of leap, out of the postmodern period and the (essentialist) multicultural model from which it is indivisible, a leap that would give rise to a synthesis between modernism and post-colonialism. Let us call this synthesis altermodernism'”.-Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism catalogue essay.

Input your birthday into Wolfram Alpha along with search-term ‘life expectancy’ and it will give you an answer rounded to two decimal places. My life expectancy is 81.58 years. You can take that number and add it to your date of birth, and Wolfram Alpha will return the appropriate date. According to the databases, I can expect to live at least until 6:43:12am on Wednesday August 30 2056, which is 47 years, 3 months, 12 days from now.

Forty-seven years left, meaning the days ahead are still greater than those behind.

Interestingly, the results skew with dates going further back in time. My grandmother, for example, is 96. Born in 1913, if I do the search query with her birthdate, I get a life expectancy of 99.31 years. She has an 83.3% chance of living past 97. Adding 99.31 years to her birthdate gives us an exact date of Sunday 29 April 2012 11:02:24am.

However, the life expectancy stats in 1913 did not project at 99.31 year lifespan. I searched for this info on Alpha, and got a ‘no data available’ message. A simple search ‘what was the life expectancy in 1913?’ gave me an answer for Canadian life expectancy in 1921 (presumably this is the earliest year for which the data is available). That result is 57.02 years.

Presuming then you were born on July 1st 1921. What is July 1 1921+57.02 years? Saturday July 8 1978. What does ‘life expectancy July 1 1921’ give us? 93.32 years.

Thus the statistical life expectancy in 1921 of someone born in that year was 57 years. Alpha is clearly interpreting these queries as coming from living persons, and thus is saying, ‘if you birthdate was July 1st 1921’ then you can expect to live to be 93. You have a 76.1% chance of living past 90 and a 69.8% chance of dying before age 95.

Thus the data in 1921 has skewed forward by 36.3 years, representative of the 20th Century’s extension of the lifespan.

Another sample: search-terms: ‘life expectancy july 1 1930’; ‘life expectancy july 1 1940′; life expectancy july 1 1950’ etc.

What this shows us is that those born in the 1930 and the 1940 currently have skewed data: in the case of the 1930s, they’ve already lived thirty years more than expected when they were born, and those of the 1940s by 20 years. My own cohort (1970s) has already increased by 9 years.

If we apply the difference already for those born in the 1930s to those born in the 1970s, (and specifically for myself): 73.49+29:86 = 103.35.

In that case, I can expect to live to exactly 6:00:00pm, Tuesday June 7 2078, which is 69 years from now.

[p.57]

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosophyer of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

The deeper we go into the written, the deeper we go into mistaking the snake for the apple – the messenger for the message. I’ve said before that one of the signs of a healthy civilization is the existence of a relatively clear language in which everyone can participate in their own way. The sign of a sick civilization in the growth of an obscure, closed language that seeks to prevent communication.

[
•blogging vs. academics & mainstream media journalism & the language of a press release;
•participatory vs. dictatorial
]

This was increasingly the case with those medieval scholars know as teh schoolmen. This is the case today with those who wield the thousands of impenetrable specialist dialects. They plead complexity, given this century’s [20th] great advances, particularly our technological breakthroughs. But the problem is not one of complexity. Not many outsiders actually want to know the nuts and bolts of building jumbo jets or writing post-modern novels. It is the intent that is in question – teh intent to use language to communicate, or alternately, through control of it, to use language as a weapon of power.

Unconsciousness – even hysterical unconsciousness – is not a surprising characteristic in a corporatist society where the language attached to power is designed to prevent communication.

“A life without this sort of examination is not worth living,” Socrates said in the most famous sentence of his trial defense. He was referring to the ongoing self-examination that public philosophy involved. And philosophy is a matter of public debate or it is nothing. Philosophy as just another specialist corporation is a flagrant return to medieval scholasticism.

[p.56]

Of course, misinterpretation or inadvertent interpretation is the great fear of writers who have any sense of the real world into which their language flows. Perhaps that is why so many of the key thinkers – let me call them the conscious thinkers – have feared the written word and expressed themselves through the oral. Socrates, Christ, Francis of Assisi are obvious examples. Shakespeare’s plays were almost oral, written down in bits and pieces, changed repeatedly on stage. Even many who wrote – Dante, for example, or the great figures of the Enlightenment – consciously sought to use a language polished into a simple clarity that could both evoke and be used as if it were oral.

Harold Innis, the first and still the most piercing philosopher of communications wrote a great deal about the problem of the written or what George Steiner calls “the decay into writing”.

[…; p. 62]

Socrates, on the other hand, had reached 70, and his trial, full of ironic humour, questions and a terrifying consciousness. He was a force of doubt and thus of disorder from the utopians’ point of view.

PERFORMANCE
FRI 10 APR 2009 7:00PM – 8:00PM @ THEATRE CENTRE

Live 5: Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet)
Hanne Mugaas & Cory Arcangel

How is the internet changing our perception of art? In its indiscriminate cataloguing and non-hegemonic participation, the internet presents an idiosyncratic account of art since 1960. The democratic and self-regulating mechanisms of the internet make artworks and art world information easily accessible for reinterpretation by its users.

Hosted by Pleasure Dome and the Images Festival, Art Since 1960 (According to the Internet) is an informal multimedia lecture presented by Hanne Mugaas and Cory Arcangel that examines the alternate discourse on contemporary art that is unfolding on the world wide web. “The control systems that normally govern the systematization of art are dismantled by the search algorithms and whims of home users,” states Mugaas. The academic discipline of art history is bypassed and the curatorial rigour of the museum is rejected by internet users posting on art. Certainly institutions have their websites, but they are overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of posts by users who ignore their methodologies. What are the results when this level of discourse is lost? Are the long established theories of art merely fusty conceits; irrelevant and elitist notions?

Gathering together art images, video and audio, Mugaas and Arcangel survey the internet’s art collections and how they are contextualized by its users. They offer their view on how this open sourcing of art and ideas has resulted in a variety of contiguities, conflations and collisions.

Cory Arcangel is an internationally renowned digital hacker known for his conceptual art projects. Check out and try out his reprogramming works at www.beigerecords.com/cory/tags/artwork/

Hanne Mugaas is a curator of art ephemera as well as a thought provoking art and culture pundit. View her collection of audiovisual postings at http://hanne-mugaas.com/artblog/

The Articulation:

“Excuse me,” Lisa Durnau said. “Can I say something here? I think you’re wrong.” Then she told them about the idea that made life, mind, and intelligence emerge from the underlying properties of the universe as mechanically as physical forces and matter. That CyberEarth was a model of another universe that could exist in the polyverse, a universe where mind was not an emergent phenomenon but a fundamental like the Fine Structure constant, like Omega, like dimensionality. A universe that thought. Like God, she said and as she said those words she saw the gaps and the flaws and the bits she hadn’t thought through and she knew that every face around the table saw them too. She could hear her own voice, hectoring, so so certain, so sure she had all the answers at twenty-four. She tailed off into an apologetic mumble. (p.108-109, River of the Gods, Ian McDonald)

And it’s been there, encoded in ink formed as symbols, themselves representing sounds, mirrored in soundless electric thought in minds. Been there printed on a page, folded into a book, sitting on a shelf since 2004, before that cast into the light of a screen, tapped out through the buttons at the end of the author’s fingertips, resolved out of the thought-realm of the author’s mind space. From fog to fog, via light and ink, and back again round round round.

“Come on, man.” The Bengali might as well have said Jesus or James Bond of Lal Darfan. Chakraborty turns to Vishram.
“What is it about my answer that you do no believe?”
“Generation Three aeis, that’s science fiction.”
“I assure you my employer is quite actual. Odeco is indeed a venture capital holding company, it just happens that the venture capitalist is an artificial intelligence.”
“The Hamilton Acts, the Krishna Cops…”
“There are spaces where an aeai may live. Especially in something like the international financial markets which demand loose regulation to exploit their so-called market freedoms. These aeais are not like our kind of intelligence at all; they are distributed, in many places at once.”
“You’re telling me that this … Brahma … is the stock market, come to life?”
“The international financial markets have used low-level aeais to buy and sell since the last century. As the complexity of the financial transactions spiraled, so did that of the aeais.”
“But who would design something like that?”
“Brahma is not designed, no more than you, Mr. Ray. It evolved”.
[…]
“Brahma?” he says weakly.
“A name. A title. It means nothing. Identity is a much larger and looser construct in CyberEarth. Brahma is a geographically dispersed entity across many nodes and many subcomponents, lower-level aeais, that may not realize they are part of a larger sentience.”
“And this … Generation Three … is more than happy to give me one hundred million US dollars.”
“Or more. You must understand, Mr. Ray, to an entity such as Brahma, making money is the easiest thing there is. It is no harder than breathing is for you.”

-Ian McDonald River of the Gods p.385. (Set in 2047).

A third idea: An infinite range of behavior can be generated by finite combinatorial programs in the mind. […] The clearest example is the Chomskyan revolution in language. (15) Language is the epitome of creative and variable behavior. Most utterances are brand-new combinations of words, never before uttered in the history of humankind. We are nothing like Tickle Me Elmo dolls who have a fixed list of verbal responses hard-wired in. But, Chomsky pointed out, for all its openendedness language is not a free-for-all; it obeys rules and patterns. An English speaker can utter unprecedented strings of words such as Every day new universes come into existence, or He likes his toast with cream cheese and ketchup, or My car has been eaten by wolverines. But no one would say Car my been eaten has wolverines by or most of the other possible orderings of English words. Something in the head must be capable of generating not just any combination of words but highly systematic ones.

That something is a kind of software, a generative grammar that can crank out new arrangements of words. A battery of rules such as “An English sentence contains a subject and a predicate,” “A predicate contains a verb, an object, and complement,” and “The subject of eat is the eater,” can explain the boundless creativity of a human talker. With a few thousand nouns that can fill the subjective slot and a few thousand verbs that can fill the predicate slot, one already has several million ways to open a sentence. The possible combinations quickly multiply out to unimaginable large numbers. Indeed, the repertoire of sentences is theoretically infinite, because the rules of language use a trick called recursion. A recursive rule allows a phrase to contain an example of itself, as in She thinks that he think that they thinki that he knows and so on, ad infinitum. And if the number of sentences is infinite, the number of possible thoughts and intentions is infinite too, because virtually every sentence expresses a different thought or intention. The combinatorial grammar for language meshes with other combinatorial programs in the head for thoughts and intentions. A fixed collection of machinery in the mind can generate an infinite range of behavior by the muscles.

-Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate pages 36-37

From: Saturday, December 13th, 2008

…Google’s Chrome browser being available for the Mac. (~January 2009) [sometime by June I understand]
…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) [DVD of pilot to be released on April 21st]

(From HBO’s Rome)

Related:
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/348/
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/420/
http://timothycomeau.com/blog/677/

From Wikipedia’s article on Hipsters: (found via a search for how to type the heart symbol; the Wikipedia article noted: “The widespread use of this expression has inspired many parodies. Originally pronounced “I love”, hipsters have taken to facetiously verbalizing it as ‘I heart’, in expressions such as ‘I heart you!’.”)

In the past week I’ve noticed the keffiyeh wearing, and recognized it as both an act of solidarity and bad fashion sense.

Posted here as rare document of Wikipedia getting it totally right:

In the late 1990s, the term became a blanket description for middle class young people associated with alternative culture, particularly alternative music, independent rock, independent film and a lifestyle revolving around thrift store shopping, eating organic, locally grown, vegetarian, and/or vegan food, drinking local beer (or even brewing their own), listening to public radio, riding fixed-gear bicycles, and reading magazines like Vice and Clash and websites like Pitchfork vogue .^[1] Robert Lanham‘s satirical The Hipster Handbook described hipsters as young people with “… mop-top haircuts, swinging retro pocketbooks, talking on cell phones, smoking European cigarettes,… strutting in platform shoes with a biography of Che Guevara sticking out of their bags.”^[5] Hipsters are considered apathetic, pretentious, and self-entitled by other, often marginalized sectors of society they live amongst, including previous generations of bohemian and/or “counter-culture” artists and thinkers as well as poor neighborhoods of color.^[1]

In 2005, Slate writer Brandon Stosuy noted that “Heavy metal has recently conquered a new frontier, making an unexpected crossover into the realm of hipsterdom.” He argues that the “current revival seems to be a natural mutation from the hipster fascination with post-punk, noise, and no wave,” which allowed even the “nerdiest indie kids to dip their toes into jagged, autistic sounds.” He argues that a “byproduct” of this development was an “… investigation of a musical culture that many had previously feared or fetishized from afar.”^[6]

In 2008, Utne Reader magazine writer Jake Mohan described “hipster rap,” “as loosely defined by the Chicago Reader, consists of the most recent crop of MCs and DJs who flout conventional hip-hop fashions, eschewing baggy clothes and gold chains for tight jeans, big sunglasses, the occasional keffiyeh, and other trappings of the hipster lifestyle.” He notes that the “old-school hip-hop website Unkut, and Jersey City rapper Mazzi” have criticized mainstream rappers who they deem to be poseurs or “… fags for copping the metrosexual appearances of hipster fashion.”^[7] Prefix Mag writer Ethan Stanislawski argues that there are racial elements to the rise of hipster rap. He claims that there “…have been a slew of angry retorts to the rise of hipster rap,” which he says can be summed up as “white kids want the funky otherness of hip-hop… without all the scary black people.”^[8]

The hipster aesthetic of irony extends to the appropriation of elements of lowbrow or working class identity in an ironic fashion, such as Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. As well, hipsters wear the multicoloured keffiyeh scarf “initially sported by Jewish students and Western protesters to express solidarity with Palestinians”; however, with hipsters, the “…keffiyeh has become a completely meaningless hipster cliché fashion accessory”.^[1]

Robbery (Swarming) – 14 Division A 38 year old male reports that on January 23, 2009 at approximately 0030 hours, he was in the area of Bloor Street West and Brock Avenue when he was approached by six male suspects. One suspect grabbed the victim in a headlock while the remaining suspects kicked and punched the victim about the body. The suspects made a demand for the victim’s wallet and gloves. The victim complied and the suspects fled  the scene eastbound towards Dufferin subway station. The victim sustained minor injuries and will seek his own medical attention. Police are requesting the assistance of the public in identifying the following described persons in connection with this offence. Description of Suspect #1-#6: Male, 18-20 years, 5’8”-6’.

———————————————

Let’s hope the police catch these six generic men soon.

Because of headlines that read like this:

“iPhone app uses photo recognition to solve Rubik’s Cube” which is a link on Waxy.org to http://i.gizmodo.com/5141731/iphone-rubik-cube-solver-is-pure-genius. One up better than Shazam.

…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

killall Finder

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.

Site 1 (http://www.similarminds.com)

Take Free Enneagram Personality Test

——————-
Site 2 (http://www.personalityonline.com/)

Enneagram – Your Results

Your Enneagram Type(s): Type 8
Eight’s need to be powerful to make their own way in life. They are motivated to maintain territorial control over anything that can influence their lives and by the desire to stay on top in any power struggle Of all the Enneagram types, they are the most openly aggressive. They are dominant figures both at work and at home.

They enjoy being strong and judge others according to whether those others are strong or weak. They also enjoy confronting others, and are even willing to take on the whole power structure if they feel a need for radical change. Eight’s are courageous and will crusade for what they believe in. They bring abundant energy to meeting challenges at work or elsewhere.

They are “natural leaders.” Their overwhelming self-confidence is contagious and can generate in others the energy that is necessary to accomplish monumental tasks.

You can get a full decription of the ‘type eight’ here.

Born in 1906, lived through the USSR.

Photo: Sergei Grits/AP
Alexandra Zhaldybina, 101, signs papers Sunday before voting

Photo: Laszlo Balogh/Reuters
Competitors warm up Sunday during the International Fitness

I upgraded WordPress yesterday and ran into some problems today with the .htaccess rewrite rules, which I’ve just fixed. I’m sharing these rules below. This is for people who are looking to write .htaccess rules for their WordPress setup and need some idea of how to go about doing that.

Note: this is for a custom-structure setting of /%post_id%/. Modify your’s accordingly.

For Months:

RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/199([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=199$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2 [L]

These are doubled to account for an absent trailing slash.

For Months that are broken into pages (again doubled for a missing slash, and here I’m not taking into account any postings from the 1990s):

RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/date/200([0-9]+)/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/page/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?m=200$1$2&paged=$3 [L]

For basic entries:

RewriteRule ^/blog/?p=([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)$ /blog/?p=$1 [L]

The first rule above takes into account anyone’s old links to your pages using the default format. The second rule assumes a trailing slash, and the third rule assumes a forgotten slash.

For pages:

This example uses my About page, which under the default url-setting has an id of 2. Again doubled for slashes:

RewriteRule ^blog/about/$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/about$ /blog/?page_id=2 [L]

Categories are similar:

RewriteRule ^blog/category/uncategorized/$ /blog/?cat=1 [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/category/zeitgeist/$ /blog/?cat=9 [L]

With Categories you need to set up the rules to match the category name with its id number. Although as of the latest iterations of WordPress, categories have been replaced with tags, and I haven’t fully crossed-over to that yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved there.

Andrew Sullivan writes about Barack Obama (via Richard Florida’s blog):

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Chomsky at the Ryerson Q&A (1988)

Take the emphasis on professional sports. It sounds harmless but it really isn’t. Professional sports are a way of building up jingoist fanaticism. You’re supposed to cheer for your home team. Just to mention something from personal experience – I remember, very well, when I was I guess, a high school student – a sudden revelation when I asked myself why am I cheering for my high school football team. I don’t know anybody on it, if I met anybody on it we’d probably hate each other. You know, why do I care if they win or if some guy a couple blocks away wins? And then you can say the same thing about the baseball team or whatever else it is. This idea of cheering for your home team -which you mentioned before – that’s a way of building into people irrational submissiveness to power. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And I think it’s one of the reasons it gets such a huge play. Or . . . let’s move to something else. The indoctrination that’s done by T.V. and so on is not trying to pile up evidence and give arguments and so on. It’s trying to inculcate attitudes. I mentioned a couple of cases but there are a lot more. Let’s take, say, the bombing of Libya. Why did the American public support the bombing of Libya? Well, the reason is that there had been a very effective, and careful, and intense inculcation of racist attitudes about Arabs. Anti-Arab racism is the one form of racism in the United States that’s considered legitimate. I mean, plenty of people are racist, but you don’t like to admit it. On the other hand, with regard to anti-Arab racism you admit it openly. You read a journal like, say, The New Republic, and the kinds of things that they say about Arabs . . . if anyone said them about Jews you’d think you were reading (Der Stern). I’m not joking. And nobody notices it because anti-Arab racism is so profound. There are novels that have a form of anti-Arab racism that’s hair-raising. The same is true of television shows and so on and so forth. An image has been created – the media are part of this, not all – of the Arab terrorist lurking out there ready to kill us. And against that background you could bomb Libya and people would cheer. Recall how effective that was, remember what was happening in 1986, there are a lot of measures of how effective this is. Remember that in 1986 when this happened the tourism industry in Europe was virtually wiped out because Americans were afraid to go to Europe, where incidentally, objectively, they would be about a hundred times as safe as in any American city. That’s no joke. But they were afraid to go to Europe because they got these Arab terrorists out there trying to kill us. Now, that was not from New York Times editorials, that was from a whole array of television and novels and soap operas and a mass of symbolism and so on and so forth and that’s effective. The anticommunist hysteria is developed that way too. The communists are out there ready to kill us – who are the communists? – I don’t know, they’re out there ready to kill us. This is introduced by the kinds of symbolism that T.V. is good at, and cheap novels are good at and so on and that’s important. These are critical means of indoctrination it’s just that I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about the more intellectual side.

(source)

From The End of Virtuous Albion, (on the British National Character), by Theodore Dalrymple (originally published in the New Criterion, 1 September 2005):

On walking through the hospital in which I formerly practiced, I came across the husband of a patient of mine who had always accompanied her to her appointments. He was sitting down and waiting to be called for an examination. He was much thinner than I had seen him before, and he was so jaundiced that he was almost orange in color. At his age, this could mean only one thing: hepatic secondaries in the liver, and fast-approaching death.

I passed the time of day with him, and wished him and his wife well, though I knew that he was dying, he knew that he was dying, and he knew that I knew that he was dying.

“We’ll just have to do the best we can” he said.

Indeed, he died two weeks later. There had been no protest, no self-pity, no demand for special attention. He understood that I commiserated with him, though I said nothing except that I was sorry to see that he was unwell, but he understood also that my commiseration was of a degree commensurate with the degree of our acquaintance, and that demanded no extravagant and therefore dishonest expression. By controlling his emotion, and his grief at his own imminent death, so that he should not embarrass me, he maintained his dignity, and self-respect. He retained a sense of social obligation, a vital component of what used to be called character, until the very end of his life.

I mention these people not because they were in any way extraordinary–a claim they would never have made for themselves–but because they were so ordinary. They were living up to a cultural ideal that, if not universal, was certainly very widespread (as my wife would confirm). It is an ideal that I find admirable, because it entails a quasi-religious awareness of the metaphysical equality of mankind: that I am no more important than you. This was no mere intellectual or theoretical construct; it was an ideal that was lived. Unlike the claim to rights, which is often shrill and is almost so self-regarding that it makes the claimant the center of his own moral universe, the old cultural ideal was other-regarding and social in nature. It imposed demands upon the self, not upon others; it was a discipline rather than a benefit. Oddly enough, it led to a greater and deeper contentment, capacity for genuine personal achievement, and tolerance of eccentricity and nonconformity than our present, more egotistical ideals.

While Kate Blanchette in armour and on horseback, with long red hair flowing from her wigged scalp, looking a good twenty years younger than her supposed age of 55 (which in 16th Century terms is a miracle) is visually resplendent, it captures nothing of the woman who wrote Monsieur’s Departure.

Queen Elizabeth on horseback at the

Queen Elizabeth Playing the Lute, (1576)

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,
I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,
I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,
I seem stark mute but inwardly to prate.
I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned.
Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,
Follows me flying, flies when I pursue it,
Stands and lies by me, doth what I have done.
His too familiar care doth make me rue it.
No means I find to rid him from my breast,
Till by the end of things it be supprest.

Some gentler passion slide into my mind,
For I am soft and made of melting snow;
Or be more cruel, love, and so be kind.
Let me or float or sink, be high or low.
Or let me live with some more sweet content,
Or die and so forget what love ere meant.

– Queen Elizabeth I

_____________
“Monsieur” is identified in two MSS as the duke of Anjou, who withdrew from marriage negotiations in 1582, and in one MS as Robert Devereaux, earl of Essex, whose long-lived affection for Elizabeth ended in a rebellion that resulted in his execution on a warrant signed by Elizabeth. (source)

Goodreads | 2007 week 42 number 6 (Doris Lessing Selection)

From Doris Lessing’s introduction to The Golden Notebook (June 1971):

To get the subject of Women’s Liberation over with – I support it, of course, because women are second-class citizens, as they are saying energetically and competently in many countries. It can be said that they are succeeding, if only to the extent they are being seriously listened to. All kinds of people previously hostile or indifferent say: ‘I support their aims but I don’t like their shrill voices and their nasty ill-mannered ways.’ This is an inevitable and easily recognizable stage in every revolutionary movement: reformers must expect to be disowned by this who are only too happy to enjoy what has been won for them. I don’t think Women’s Liberation will change much though – not because there is anything wrong with its aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women’s Liberation will look very small and quaint.

But this novel [The Golden Notebook] was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation. It described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment. It put them into print. Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing, came as a great surprise. Instantly a lot of very ancient weapons were unleashed, the main ones, as usual, being the theme of ‘She is unfeminine’, ‘She is a man-hater’. This particular reflex seems indestructible. Men – and many women, said that the suffragettes were de-feminized, masculine, brutalized. There is no record I have read of any society anywhere when women demanded more than nature offers them that does not also describe this reaction from men – and some women. A lot of women were angry about The Golden Notebook. What women will say to other women, grumbling in their kitchens and complaining and gossiping or what they make clear in their masochism, is often the last thing they will say aloud – a man may overhear. Women are the cowards they are because they have been semi-slaves for so long. The number of women prepared to stand up for what they really think, feel, experience with a man they are in love with is still small. Most women will still run like little dogs with stones thrown at them when a man says: You are unfeminine, aggressive, you are unmanning me. It is my belief that any woman who marries, or takes seriously in any way at all, a man who uses this threat, deserves everything she gets. For such a man is a bully, does to know anything about the world he lives in, or about its history…

[…]

This business of seeing what I was trying to do – it brings me to the critics, and the danger of evoking a yawn. This sad bickering between writers and critics, playwrights and critics: the public have got so used to it they think, as of quarreling children: ‘Ah yes, dear little things, they are at it again.’ Or: ‘You writers get all the praise, or if not praise, at least all that attention- so why are you so perennially wounded?’ And the public are quite right. For reasons I won’t go into here, early and valuable experiences in my writing life gave me a sense of perspective about critics and reviewers … It is that writers are looking in the critics for an alter ego, that other self more intelligent than oneself who has seen what one is reaching for, and who judges you only by whether you have matched up to your aim or not. I have never yet met a writer who, faced at last with that rare being, a real critic, doesn’t lose all paranoia and become gratefully attentive – he has found what he thinks he needs. But what he, the writer, is asking is impossible. Why should he expect this extraordinary being, the perfect critic (who does occasionally exist), why should there be anyone else who comprehends what he is trying to do? After all, there is only one person spinning that particular cocoon, only one person whose business it is to spin it.

It is not possible for reviewers and critics to provide what they purport to provide – and for which writers so ridiculously and childishly yearn.

This is because the critics are not educated for it; their training is in the opposite direction.

It starts when the child is as young as five or six, when he arrives at school. It starts with marks, rewards, ‘places’, ‘streams’, stars – and still in many places, stripes. This horse-race mentality, the victor and loser way of thinking, leads to ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z had shown himself as better than Writer A.’ From the very beginning the child is trained to think in this way: always in terms of comparison, of success, and of failure. It is a weeding-out system: the weaker get discouraged and fall out; a system designed to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other. It is my belief – though this is not the place to develop this – and the talents every child has, regardless of his official ‘IQ’, could stay with him through life, to enrich him and everybody else, if these talents were not regarded as commodities with a value in the success-stakes.

The other things taught from the start is to distrust one’s own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people’s opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply,

As in the political sphere, the child is taught that he is free, a democrat, with a free will and a free mind, lives in a free country, makes his own decisions. At the same time he is a prisoner of the assumptions and dogmas of his time, which he does not question, because he has never been told they exist. By the time a young person has reached the age when he has to choose (we still take it for granted that a choice is inevitable) between the arts and the sciences, he often chooses the arts because he feels that here is humanity, freedom, choice. He does not know that he is already molded by a system, he does not know that the choice itself is the result of a false dichotomy rooted in the heart of our culture. Those who do sense this, and who don’t wish to subject themselves to further molding, tend to leave, in a half-unconscious, instinctive attempt to find work where they won’t be divided against themselves. With all our institutions, from the police force to academia, from medicine to politics, we give little attention to the people who leave – that process of elimination that goes on all the time and which excludes, very early, those likely to be original and reforming, leaving those attracted to a thing because that is what they are already like. A young policeman leaves the Force saying he doesn’t like what he has to do. A young teacher leaves teaching, her idealism snubbed. This social mechanism goes almost unnoticed – yet it is as powerful as any in keeping our institutions rigid and oppressive.

These children who have spent years inside the training system becomes critics and reviewers, and cannot give what the author, the artist, so foolishly looks for – imaginative and original judgment. What they can do, and what they do very well, is to the writer how the book or play accords with current patterns of feeling and thinking – the climate of opinion. They are like litmus paper. They are wind gauges – invaluable. They are the most sensitive of barometers of public opinion. You can see changes of mood and opinion here sooner than anywhere except in the political field – it is because these are people whose whole education has been just that – to look outside themselves for their opinions, to adapt themselves to authority figures, to ‘received opinion’ – a marvelously revealing phrase.

It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don’t believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself – educating your own judgment. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being molded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.’

Like every other writer I get letters all the time from young people who are about to write theses and essays about my books in various countries – but particularly in the United States. They all say: ‘Please give me a list of the articles about your work, the critics who have written about you, the authorities.’ They also ask for a thousand details of total irrelevance, but which they have been taught to consider important, amounting to a dossier, like an immigration department’s.

These requests I answer as follows: ‘Dear Student. You are mad. Why spend months and years writing thousands of words about one book, or even one writer, when there are hundreds of books waiting to be read. You don’t see that you are the victim of a pernicious system. And if you have yourself chosen my work as your subject, and if you do have to a write a thesis – and believe me I am very grateful that what I’ve written is being found useful by you – then why don’t you read what I have written and make up your own mind about what you think, testing it against your own life, your own experience. Never mind about Professors White and Black.’

‘Dear Writer’ – they reply. ‘But I have to know what the authorities say, because if I don’t them, my professor won’t give me any marks.’

This is an international system, absolutely identical from the Urals to Yugoslavia, from Minnesota to Manchester.

The point is, we are all so used to it, we no longer see how bad it is. I am not used to it, because I left school when I was fourteen. There was a time I was sorry for this, and believed I had missed out on something valuable. Now I am grateful for a lucky escape.

[…]

You might be saying: This is an exaggerated reaction, and you have no right to it, because you say you have never been part of the system. But I think it is not at all exaggerated, and that the reaction of someone from outside is valuable simply because it is fresh and not biased by allegiance to a particular education.

But after this investigation, I had no difficulty in answering my own questions: Why are they so parochial, so personal, so small-minded? Why do they always atomize, and belittle, why are they so fascinated by detail, and uninterested in the whole? Why is their interpretation of the word critic always to find fault? Why are they always seeing writers in conflict with each other, rather than complementing each other … simple, this is how they are trained to think. That valuable person who understands what you are doing, what you are aiming for, and give you advice and real criticism, is nearly always someone right outside the literary machine, even outside the university system; it may be a student just beginning, and still in love with literature, or perhaps it may be a thoughtful person who reads a great deal, following his own instinct.

I say to these students who have to spend a year, two years, writing theses about one book: ‘There is only way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty – and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you. Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down – even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written – and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this – are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the truth in words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book or one author means that you are badly taught – you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow your own intuitive feeling about what you need: that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people’.

Leaks, woes a smudge on Crystal’s sparkle
VAL ROSS

From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail

October 3, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT

Good thing it was a dry summer. The new Michael Lee-Chin Crystal at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto’s most talked-about new edifice, leaks.

At least, it did leak. Water penetrated the north end of the long window of the C5 restaurant, and puddles have appeared near windows on the third and fourth floors.

The ROM’s CEO, William Thorsell, pushed to open the new Daniel Libeskind-designed Crystal and the rest of the renovated ROM on June 1. As construction accelerated, the contractors responsible for installing the Crystal’s cladding system warned that temporary seams around windows might leak. In August, they mopped up and repaired the problems.

As winter approaches, fingers are crossed that there will be no more puddles, and that the Crystal’s cladding, designed to prevent it from turning into an avalanche-maker, will function as well in cold reality as it does in theory. But it’s clear, four months into the Crystal’s life, the new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

An unveiling concert in June shows the Crystal in Toronto. Its new spaces pose huge challenges, and leaks are the least of them.

Far more daunting are the problems of mounting exhibits in the strange new spaces, ensuring public safety and budgeting for the new reality.

There are rumours that the Crystal’s oddly shaped, difficult-to-access windows have increased window-cleaning costs by $200,000, a figure ROM’s executive director of capital development and facilities, Al Shaikoli, disputes.

“But it is considerable,” he admitted. “In the old days, our window-cleaning budget was next to nothing.”

Safety issues are a surprise. “We didn’t predict human behaviour,” Mr Shaikoli said. On the June weekend of its grand, all-night opening, ROM staffers discovered that, particularly after the bars closed, visitors seemed more interested in the Crystal as a playground than as architecture. Staff were alarmed to see people crawling out on windows slanting over Bloor Street, apparently testing their strength.

“Mind you, these galleries were naked spaces,” Mr. Shaikoli said. “Once they’re filled with artifacts, people will be more respectful.” Display cases will soon be installed in the paths of future adventurers.

Another discovery was a trail of footprints most of the way up a fourth-floor wall that rises at a 30-degree angle. “Probably a kid took a run at it,” speculates Dan Rahimi, director of gallery development. Baseboards and stainless steel barriers are being installed to signal that a wall is a wall, even if it’s not on the straight and narrow.

“One of our major bugbears was that William wanted everything open and accessible,” says Janet Waddington, assistant curator of paleontology. “But you can’t do that – the Toronto public is extraordinarily destructive.”

Even in the old dinosaur galleries, says Ms. Waddington, people used to reach across railings to pat the prosaurolophus bones. In the ROM’s Crystal dinosaur gallery, two ancient marine reptile skeletons, a pleiosaur and a mosasaur, have been suspended from an overhanging face of the Crystal (the ceiling is too high), which puts their irreplaceable old bones within arm’s reach. By the time the gallery opens in December, a plinth or base underneath, surrounded with barriers, will keep the public’s hands at bay. “It has been horrendous,” said Ms. Waddington, “but very exciting.”

The problem of installing artifacts in a space with no vertical walls challenged Hiroshi Sugimoto, the first artist to be exhibited in the ROM’s fourth-floor Institute for Contemporary Culture. So, he designed a curving wall 4.3 metres high and 27.5 metres long, fitted with special lighting, to counteract the angular architecture. Total cost to the ROM: about $200,000. The wall was recently removed to make room for a new show of aboriginal contemporary art that opens on Saturday.

Special new display cases have been bought to match the galleries, some with trapezoidal shapes. As well, the renovation has opened the entire building, old and new parts, to more daylight, which risks bleaching museum artifacts. So the museum has acquired special blinds that filter out 96 per cent of ultraviolet light, as well as blackout blinds that block exterior light.

“Daniel didn’t design this building based on the collections,” said Mr. Rahimi. “We had to design the collections to go with the building. We have an aesthetic imperative – partly because the architecture is so strong.”

At this resolution, the Monet damaged over the weekend is almost photographic.

From the Facebook group ‘Everyone’s an Art Critic: Toronto’ discussion topic.

Topic: What themes do you see in contemporary Toronto Art?

01. Gareth Bate wrote on Sep 17, 2007 at 4:56 PM
Do you notice any general themes in Toronto art? Any medium or imagery that is particularly prevelant?

02 .Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 18, 2007 at 8:26 PM
Not relevant, but just annoying and utterly useless trends:

1. Birds: especially orioles and finch-like creatures.

2. Deer: to play on the ‘woodsy’ theme alongside the birds.
[Could this be a flash of modern Canadiana?]

3. Neon colours, such as bright magenta, cyan, and yellow.

4. And the act of drawing on walls. Carrie, this one’s for you!

Maybe they are relevant in one way or another; I’m sure they are somehow. But on the surface, the sheer repetitiveness of it all becomes nerve-wracking and a complete turn-off.

03. Gareth Bate replied to Martin’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 5:51 AM
At the queen west art crawl there was an awful lot of picky little pencil drawings. Really precious stuff.

04. Kurt Rostek replied to Gareth’s post on Sep 19, 2007 at 4:20 PM
I’m seeing a lot of what I would call an almost frivolous if not cartoonish works..with toys, dolls …childlike memorabilia..

05. Stanzie Tooth (OCAD) wrote on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:17 AM
I’ve been seeing alot of micro/ macro stuff- semi-abstract thing based on: diseases, cells- general closeups of bodily fluids, etc.

06. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 10:37 AM
i see that martin has hurt my feelings 🙁

07. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 20, 2007 at 3:27 PM
Hence, art criticism.

😉

08. Alex Mcleod replied to Martin’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 4:41 AM
I’m going to fight you

09. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Alex’s post on Sep 21, 2007 at 6:03 AM
Bring it on, dear.
I’m ready!

10. Robert Farmer wrote on Sep 21, 2007 at 12:15 PM
let’s cover it in resin!

11. Alex Mcleod replied to Robert’s post on Sep 23, 2007 at 10:17 AM
only photo collages though

12. Rachel McRae replied to Martin’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 9:22 PM
As an artist who works with deer imagery a lot I feel I need to respond.

If the use of deer is a “trend” its one with quite a rich history. Beyond mere “Canadiana,” it recalls symbolic use stretching across a vast track of geography (across all continents except Antarctica and Australia) and time (Paleolithic cave paintings in Cave Trois Frères in southern France feature a “shaman” figure crowned with horns.) The deer figures prominently in heraldry internationally, Greek, Slavic, Hindu, Judeo-Christian, Celtic.. A whole mass of religious/cultures groups use the deer as a symbol. Deer appear frequently in classic/neo-classic still lifes and imagery of the hunt…

An animal of such widespread dispersement, a rich food source (and thus economic importance) is bound to become a weighty cultural symbol. Though you yourself may not hunt deer, wear deer skin, engage directly with the animal in any way, you do have a certain connection with it. You’re talking about “art,” practicing I can only assume, and art’s connection with the deer-as-symbol is vast and dense.

Any practice with history must dialogue with its past. (Otherwise, I would argue; it is not art. If I may express a personal opinion, art becomes art when it is engaged with its historical cannon. Otherwise it is something distinct. That being said, engagement is not synonymous with compliance or agreeance.)

(With all due respect, I wouldn’t apply the term “useless” so lightly.)

13. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Rachel’s post on Sep 27, 2007 at 10:34 PM
So, why is deer imagery so ‘important’ (or rampant) in Toronto NOW?

14. Therese Cilia (OCAD) wrote on Sep 28, 2007 at 11:19 AM
I’m getting the impression from this board that themes and trends in art is generally a bad thing, but I’m not so sure. To me, trends are inevitable and unavoidable. We’re all questioning the same universe and have been since we’ve been on this planet. We’re going to be talking about our past and our present, we’re looking at the same things and being influenced by the same things – that’s culture! We’re seeing birds, butterflies, deer, and micro/macroscopic life because they’re HERE, and so are we. If the work is ‘authentic’, not just following a trend but actually being it and questioning it, (and I know we can all realize the difference, it’s what makes a good painting a good painting or not), then birds, cells or deer – it all doesn’t matter.

As an aside, I’d like to say that the Ann Hamilton lecture was EXCITING. It actually made me a little nostalgic to be in school again and be surrounded in that atmosphere. If you’re a graduate, you know what I mean?
I love that when I hear or read Ann Hamilton, I get the feeling that her work and her voice I can never quite grasp, but am so close to getting. She’ll say or do something really profound that leaves you wanting more because you can never quite keep it all in your head. If that makes any sense at all. I love it.

15. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) wrote on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:54 PM
Deer “heads” was reintroduced into the contemporary International art scene when much of the critical discourse centred on the Archive and the museums/institutions role of dominating/destroyer/preserver of nature…and it’s also retro–like Victorian riffed wallpaper…what goes around comes around, and it finally hit Toronto

YOU CANNOT DENY OSMOSIS

popular motifs develop organically not necessarily meaning one is “following” a trend, especially if each artist has a different critical approach and style

deer heads and birds and neon is what will mark this generation of paintings as opposed to cubic abstraction or big eyed paintings, etc. is that a bad thing? no…seriously…everyone in TO working with the same motifs should put out and imprint with essays championing the varying reasons behind the use of neon/birds/dear…with Martin writing the forward 😉

seriously…it will give Martin a topic to lecture future OCAD students about

AND AS FAR AS DRAWING ON WALLS:

for me, Dood was a mere momentary interruption of the usual really bad community arts practice with the synthesis of participatory culture theory made manifest in the physical and digital realms

😉

16. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Robert’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 12:59 PM
covering it in resin was sooo last years TIFF 😉

it made the 3 or so resinless paintings really stand out

i swear thats the only reason I go to TIFF, is to see which trend has exhausted itself into implosion

17. Carrie Cutforth-Young (OCAD) replied to Carrie’s post on Sep 29, 2007 at 1:02 PM
we could call the book “deers, birds, neon OH MY!”

18. Gareth Bate replied to Rachel’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 9:31 PM
Can you post a link to your work?

19. Martin Alonso (York University) replied to Carrie’s post on Oct 2, 2007 at 11:30 PM
“I’ll foreword anytime!” says the next up-and-coming art historian/editor/anthologist. I have big plans ahead, Carrie…

;P

20. Liz Pead wrote on Oct 4, 2007 at 12:19 PM
As a landscape painter, I find this thread really interesting.

Deer and birds are often around me, but like people in city scapes, I omit them in the landscape.
There’s something tacky about portraying deer and other animals in art – I grew up with string-art and velvet paintings in New Brunswick. Jacking deer was a passtimje, but also a necessity for some as a source of a winter’s worth of meat.

Depicting animals, especially by people who grew up in the suburban/ urban experience so often found here in Canada ( not that I’m making any assumtions about any of you and where you grew up!!!) is kind of sweet. I don’t see it any different =than me going up to Algonquin Park every summer and painting my idea of the pretty northern, pristine landscape. It is a potent form of nostalgia that I have for an environment I both remember from my past in New Brunswick surrounded by trees and a form of nostalgia for these natural things which are disappearing very quickly before me.

As for them being trends? Maybe we are reacting more than we know to our envirnomental breaking down…m uch more violently than we can even put into words.

A couple of years ago ( SPring 2006?) Border Crossings mag did a whole issue dealing with Animals, Im going to revisit it and see if it makes any more sense to me now than it did then ( I was finishing my thesis at that point and unless it was hockey or landsacpe it kinda went by me…)

Any thoughts?

From the perspective of space, where there is no gravity, there is also no up or down. The maps of the world that show north as up are not necessarily objective. Scan the map with the south pole on top and you see the world entirely differently. The Mediterranean basin is no longer the focal point, lost, as it is, near the bottom of the globe. North America loses its continental width – and thus its majesty – as it narrows ‘northward’ into the atrophied limb of Central America toward the center of your field of vision. South America and Africa stand out. But South America keeps narrowing toward the Antarctic nothingness to the top, insufficiently connected to the other continental bodies.

Africa, alas, is the inescapable center: Equidistant between the South and North poles, lying flat across the equator, with the earth’s warmest climate, hospitable to the emergence of life in countless forms – three quarters of its surface lies within the tropics. Africa looms large in the middle of the vision field, connected to Eurasia through the Middle East. This map, with south at the top, shows why humankind emerged in Africa, why it was from Africa that our species may have begun the settlement of the planet. Africa is the mother continent to which we all ultimately belong, from where human beings acquired their deepest genetic traits. ‘We are all Africans under the skin,’ says anthropologist Christopher Stringer. Africa is nature write large. As Ben Okri, a Nigerian novelist and poet, writes:

We are the miracles that God made
To taste the bitter fruit of Time.

From Wikipedia: ‘The term Mediterranean derives from the Latin mediterraneus, “inland” (medius, “middle” + terra, “land, earth”). To the ancient Romans, the Mediterranean was the center of the earth as they knew it.’

Scr. Romae m. Quint. a 689 (65).

CICERO ATTICO SAL.

‘Letters were usually headed with the name of the writer in the nominative and that of the recipient in the dative governed by the greeting, ‘S.D’ or ‘SAL.’ = salutem dat. The fullness of the names and the greeting was in inverse proportion to the intimacy of the correspondents. In familiar letters only the cognomen was used (Cicero, Attico, &c.), but such apruptness in a formal letter was boorish’.

Correct: Tim to Ed
Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to Whom it May Concern

Official or other formal communications should give the full style and titles of both the writer and the recipient, and add other greeting, ‘S.V.B.E.E.Q.V’ or the like.

Correct: Timothy Charles Comeau to The Right Honourable Prime Minster Stephen Joseph Harper, SVBEEQV
Incorrect (boorish): Tim to Steve (like, yo!)

Scr. Romae m. Quint. a 689 (65).

CICERO ATTICO SAL.

Petitionis nostrae …

To Atticus
Rome, early July 689 AUC, 65 BC

As to my canvas for the consulship …

(source of Cicero image)

“Listening to the metronome of some 18 year-old getting plowed in the room above me by an old fraternity brother”.

How conflict creates peace:

Pullo: ‘They’ll think we’ve gone soft’
Vorenus: ‘Let them. We need time to regain our strength. While they’re fighting over the spoils of the Argosy, we’ll be recruiting men and restoring order.’

Rome (Season 2, ‘Heroes of the Republic’)

The 19C produced a phenomenon unheard of in the annals of Western Civilization, namely a hundred year’s peace – 1815-1914. Apart from the Crimean War [1853-56] – a more or less colonial event – England, France, Prussia, Austria, Italy, and Russia were engaged in war among each other for altogether only 18 months. A computation of comparable figures for the preceding two centuries [1600, 1700s] gives an average of sixty to seventy years of major wars in each. But even the fiercest of 19C conflagrations, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, ended after less than a year’s duration with the defeated nation being able to pay over an unprecedented sum as an indemnity without any disturbance of the currencies concerned.

This triumph of pragmatic pacifism was certainly not the result of an absence of grave causes for conflict. Almost continuous shifts in the internal and external conditions of powerful nations and great empires accompanied this irenic pageant. During the first part of the century civil wars, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary interventions were the order of the day. In Spain a 100,000 troops under the Duc d’Angoulème stormed Cadiz; in Hungary the Magyar revolutions threatened to defeat the Emperor himself in pitched battle and was ultimately suppressed only by a Russian army fighting on Hungarian soil. Armed interventions in the Germanies, in Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Venice marked the omnipresence of the Holy Alliance. During the second half of the century the dynamics of progress was released; the Ottoman, Egyptian, and Sheriffian empires broke up or were dismembered; China was forced by invading armies to open her door to the foreigner and in one gigantic haul the continent of Africa was partitioned. Simultaneously, two powers rose to world importance: the United States and Russia. National unity was achieved by Germany and Italy; Belgium, Greece, Roumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary assumed, or resumed, their places as sovereign states on the map of Europe. An almost incessant series of open wars accompanied the march of industrial civilization into the domains of outworn cultures or primitive peoples. Russia’s military conquests in Central Asia, England’s numberless Indian and African wars, France’s exploits in Egypt, Algiers, Tunis, Syria, Madagascar, Indo-China, and Siam raised issues between the Powers which, as a rule, only force can arbitrate. Yet every single one of these conflicts was localized, and numberless other occasions for violent change were either met by joint action or smothered into compromise by the Great Powers. Regardless of how the methods changed, the result was the same. While in the first part of the century constitutionalism was banned and the Holy Alliance suppressed freedom in the name of peace, during the other half – and again in the name of peace – constitutions were foisted upon turbulent despots by business-minded bankers. Thus under varying forms of ever-shifting ideologies – sometimes in the name of progress and liberty, sometimes by the authority of the throne and the altar, sometimes by grace of the stock exchange and the checkbook, sometimes by corruption and bribery, sometimes by moral argument and enlightened appeal, sometimes by the broadside and the bayonet – one and the same result was attained: peace was preserved.

This almost miraculous performance was due to the working of the balance of power, which here produced a result which is normally foreign to it. By its nature that balance effects an entirely different result, namely, the survival of the power units involved; in fact, it merely postulates that three or more unites capable of exerting power will always behave in such a way as to combine the power of the weaker units against any increase in power of the strongest. In the realm of universal history balance of power was concerned with states whose independence it served to maintain. But it attained this end only by continous war between changing partners. The practice of the ancient Greek and Northern Italian city-states was such an instance; wars between shifting groups of combatants maintained the independence of those states over long stretches of time. The action of the same principle safeguarded for over two hundred years the sovereignty of the states forming Europe at the time of the Treaty of Munster and Westphalia (1648). When, seventy-five years later, in the Treaty of Utrecht, the signatories declared their formal adherence to this principle, they thereby embodied it in a system, and thus established mutual guarantees of survival for the strong and the weak alike through the medium of war. The fact that in the 19C the same mechanism resulted in peace rather than war is a problem to challenge the historian.

The entirely new factor, we submit, was the emergence of an acute peace interest. Traditionally, such an interest was regarded as outside the scope of the state system. Peace with its corollaries of crafts and arts ranked among the mere adornments of life. The Church might pray for peace as for a bountiful harvest, but in the realm of state action it would nevertheless advocate armed intervention; governments subordinated peace to security and sovereignty, that is, to intents that could not be achieved otherwise than by recourse to the ultimate means. Few things were regarded as more detrimental to a community than the existence of an organized peace interest in its midst. As late as the second half of the 18C, JJ Rousseau arraigned trades people for their lack of patriotism because they were suspected of preferring peace to liberty.

After 1815 the change is sudden and complete. The backwash of the French Revolution reinforced the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution is establishing peaceful business as a universal interest. Metternich proclaimed that what the people of Europe wanted was not liberty but peace. Gentz called patriots the new barbarians. Church and throne started out on the denationalization of Europe. Their arguments found support both in the ferocity of the recent popular forms of warfare and in the tremendously enhanced value of peace under the nascent economies.

The bearers of the ‘peace interest’ were, as usual, those who chiefly benefited by it, namely, the cartel of dynasts and feudalists whose patrimonial positions were threatened by the revolutionary wave of patriotism that was sweeping the Continent. Thus, for approximately a third of a century the Holy Alliance provided the coercive force and the ideological impetus for an active peace policy; its armies were roaming up and down Europe putting down minorities and repressing majorities. From 1846 to about 1871 – ‘one of the most confused and crowded quarter centuries of European history’ – peace was less safely established, the ebbing strength of reaction meeting the growing strength of industrialism. In the quarter century following the Franco-Prussian War we find the revived peace interest represented by that new powerful entity, the Concert of Europe.

I used to say I was born in the wrong century. The way overly dramatic kids claim to be old souls living in the present day, I was convinced I was secretly an impressionist painter, meant more for turn of the century’s demi-monde opulence rather than today’s world of animators, illustrators, and monster movie artists. I didn’t go to art school. I don’t know all the proper techniques. I learned colour theory by doing graffiti, but the story of the graffiti-artist-turned-fine-art-painted has been played out since the mid-’80s. My own life seemed to be working against me. I was convinced I should have been born in 1850.

Then I realized that I was approaching everything wrong. I live in Hollywood, this century’s den of inequity and excess. I have eccentric colourful friends that rival the models of Degas and Renoir, I spend nights at Los Angeles bars that could rival those painted by Monet, and as this is 2007 I have access to neon pink and hot orange that I imagine even Van Gogh wouldn’t know how to utilize. I am a contemporary painter interested in historic themes. There isn’t anything wrong with that. I don’t have any art school loans to pay back. I primarily paint women because I’m tremendously influenced by Klimt – and really focused on beauty.

Joshua Petker
http://www.joshuapetker.com/
(from this month’s Juxtapoz Sept 07 n 80)

This reminds me that the people of the ancient world were physically tinier than we are.

Source

Richard Morgan, from Black Man (UK) /Th1rte3n (US) (Amazon) pages 87-90:

‘So,’ he said..’if the bonobos were patriarchal authority’s wet dream, what does that make variant thirteen?’

‘Variant thirteen?’ Jeff have him the crooked grin again. ‘Variant thirteen gave us back our manhood’.

‘Oh, come on.’

‘Hey, you weren’t there, little brother.’

‘You’re six years older than me, Jeff. You weren’t there either.’

‘So go read the history books, you don’t want to trust what your big brother tells you. I’m talking pre-secession. Pre-atmosphere on Mars. You got a first world where manhood’s going out of style. Advancing wave of the feminized society, the alpha males culling themselves with suicide and super-virility drugs their hearts can’t stand, which is the end is suicide, just slower and bit more fucking fun.’

‘I thought they criminalized that stuff.’

Jeff gave him a crooked grin. ‘Oh, yeah and that worked. I mean, no one takes drugs once they’re illegal, right? Especially not drugs that give you a hard-on like a riot baton and all-night-long instant replay.’

‘I still don’t believe that stuff tipped any kind of balance. That’s talk show genetics, Jeff.’

‘Suit yourself. The academic jury’s still out on the virilicide, you’re right about that much. But I don’t know a singly social biologist who doesn’t count alpha male self-destruct as one of the major influences on the last century’s political landscape. Shrinking manhood’ – the grin again – ‘so to speak. And right along with that, you’ve got a shrinking interest in military prowess as a function of life. Suddenly, no one but dirt-poor idiots from Kansas want to be soldiers, because, hell, that shit can get you killed and there have got to be better, and better-paid ways to live your life. So you got these few dirt-poor idiots fighting tooth and nail for causes’ – and Jeff’s voice morphed momentarily into a gruff Jesusland parody – ‘they don’t understand real good, but generally speaking, the rest are screaming human rights abuse and let me out of here, where’s my ticket through college. And we are losing, little brother, all the way down. Because we’re up against enemies who eat, sleep and breath hatred for everything we represent, who don’t care if they die screaming so long as they take a few of us with the. See, a feminized open-access society can do a lot of things, Tom, but what it can’t do worth a damn is fight wars in other people’s countries.’

‘I didn’t ask for a class on the secession, Jeff. I asked you about variant thirteen’.

‘Yeah, getting there.’ Jeff took another chunk of his arrack. ‘See, once upon a time we all thought we’d send robots to fight those wars. But robots are expensive to build, and down there where it counts no one really trusts them. They break down when it gets too hot, or too cold or too sandy. They fuck up in urban environments, kill the wrong people in large numbers, bring down infrastructure we’d really rather keep intact. They can be subverted, hacked and shut down with a halfway decent black market battlefield deck run by some techsmart datahawk we probably trained ourselves on a big-hearted arms-around-the-fucking-world scholarship programme at MIT. Robots can be stolen, rewired, sent back against us with knowing it. […] You know those fucking machines sat in that storage depot for nine weeks before the Allahu Akbar virus kicked in.’

‘Yeah, I read about it in school. Like I said, Jeff, I’m not here for a history lesson’.

‘They massacred the whole fucking town, Tom. They tore it apart. There’s nothing left there anymore except that fucking rock.’

‘I know.’

‘Hardesty, Fort Stewart, Bloomsdale. The marine base at San Diego. All in less than three years. Are you surprised the military went looking for a better option?’

‘Variant thirteen?’

‘Yeah, variant thirteen. Pre-civilized humans. Everything we used to be, everything we’ve been walking away from since we planted our first crops and made our first laws and built our first cities. I’m telling you, Tom, if I were you I’d just call in UNGLA and stand well back. You do not want to fuck about with thirteens.’

‘Now you you sound like the feeds.’

Jeff leaned forward, face earnest. ‘Tom, thirteen is the only genetic variant Jacobsen thought dangerous enough to abrogate basic human rights on. There’s a reason those guys are locked up or exiled to Mars. There’s a reason they’re not allowed to breed. You’re talking about a type of human this planet hasn’t seen in better than twenty thousand years. They’re paranoid psychotic at base, glued together with from-childhood military conditioning and not much else. Very smart, very tough and not much interested in anything other than taking what they want regardless of damage or cost.’

‘I fail to see,’ said Norton acidly, ‘how that gives us back our manhood.’

‘That’s because you live in New York.’
Norton snorted and drained his arrack. His brother watched with a thin smile until he was done.

‘I’m serious, Tom. You think secession was about Pacific Rim interests and the green agenda? Or maybe a few lynched Asians and a couple of failed adventures in the Middle East?’

‘Among other things, yeah, it was.’

Jeff shook his head. ‘That wasn’t it, Tom. None of it was. America split up over a vision of what strength is. Male power versus female negotiation. Force versus knowledge, dominance versus tolerance, simple versus complex. Faith and Flag and patriotic Song stacked up against the New Math, which, let’s face it, no one outside of quantum specialists really understands, Co-Operation Theory and the New International Order. And until Project Lawman came along, every factor on the table is pointing towards a future so feminized it’s just downright unAmerican.

Digital Bin Laden by Timothy Comeau

The current forms of Islamic fundamentalism should not be understood as a return to past social forms and values, not even from the perspective of the practitioners. According to Fazlur Rahman: ‘Actually it is even something of a misnomer to call such phenomena in Islam “fundamentalist” except insofar as they emphasize the basis of Islam as being the two original sources: the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad. Otherwise they emphasize ijtihad, original thought.’ Contemporary Islamic radicalisms are indeed primarily based on ‘original thought’ and the invention of original values and practices, which perhaps echo those of other periods of revivalism or fundamentalism but are really directed in reaction to the present social order. In both cases, then, the fundamentalist ‘return to tradition’ is really a new invention.

The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be understood, then, not a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony. [Shah’s Iran, Attaturk’s Turkey, Nasser’s Egypt] ‘If modern meant the pursuit of Western education, technology and industrialization in the first flush of the post-colonial period,’ Akbar Ahmed writes, ‘postmodern would mean a reversion to traditional Muslim values and a rejection of modernism.’ Considered simply in cultural terms, Islamic fundamentalism is a paradoxical kind of postmodernist theory – postmodern only because it chronologically follows and opposes Islamic modernism. It is more properly postmodernist, however, when considered in geopolitical terms. Rahman writes ‘The current postmodernist fundamentalism, in an important way, is novel because its basic élan is anti-Western … Hence its condemnation of classical modernism as a purely Westernizing force.’ Certainly, powerful segments of Islam have been in some sense ‘anti-Western’ since the religion’s inception. What is novel in the contemporary resurgence of fundamentalism is really the refusal of the powers that are emerging in the new imperial order. From this perspective, then, insofar as the Iranian revolution was a powerful rejection of the world market, we might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution. (Hardt & Negri, Empire [2000] p. 148-149)

White Jesus amongst the White Aboriginals (from the Book of Mormon)

Christian fundamentalisms in the United States also present themselves as movement against social modernization, re-creating what is imagined to be a past social formation based on sacred texts. These movements should certainly be situated in line with the long US tradition of projects to create in America a new Jerusalem, a Christian community separate from both the corruption of Europe and the savagery of the ‘uncivilized’ world. The most prominent social agenda of the current Christian fundamentalist groups is centered on the (re)creation of the stable and hierarchical nuclear family, which is imagined to have existed in a previous ere, and thus they are driven specifically in their crusades against abortion and homosexuality. Christian fundamentalisms in the United States have also continuously been oriented (in different times and different regions more or less overtly) toward a project of white supremacy and racial purity. The new Jerusalem has almost always been imagined as a white and patriarchal Jerusalem. […]

The ‘traditional family’ that serves as their ideological foundation is merely a pastiche of values and practices that derives more from television programs than from any real historical experiences within the institution of the family. It is a fictional image projected on the past, like Main Street USA at Disneyland, constructed retrospectively through the lens of contemporary anxieties and fears. The ‘return to the traditional family’ of the Christian fundamentalists is not backward-looking at all, but rather a new invention that is part of a political project against the contemporary social order. (Hardt & Negri, Empire pages147-48)

From William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition (2003):

‘How do you think we’ll look,’ Bigend asks, ‘to the future?’
[…]
‘They won’t think of us,’ Cayce says … ‘Any more than we think of the Victorians. I don’t mean the icons, but the ordinary actual living souls.’
‘I think they’ll hate us,’ says Helena.
‘Souls,’ repeats Bignend. […] ‘Souls?’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, on in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.’
‘Do we have a past then?’ Stonestreet asks.
‘History is a best-guess narrative about what happened and when,’ Bigend says, his eyes narrowing. ‘Who did what to whom. With what. Who won. Who lost. Who mutated. Who became extinct.’
‘The future is there,’ Cayce hers herself say, ‘looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.’
‘You sound oracular.’
‘I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future to about the extent we’re interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won’t seem very relevant.’ (pages 57-59)

[…]

‘Have you seen the guerrilla re-edit of the most recent Lucas? [Star Wars Ep I] […] They seem particularly to pick on him. One day we’ll need archaeologists to help us guess the original storylines of even classic films. Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s a though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else. (page 70)

From Lytton Strachey’s Preface to Eminent Victorians (1918):

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art. Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity.

From my Michael Jackson Project image (2003):

I want this painting to be in the AGO in 2116. I want kids on art school trips at the gallery to be bored while the underpaid instructor explains that a hundred years ago there lived this freak who commissioned a painting of himself surrounded by cherubs. She will say, ‘He had delusions of godlihood.’ Maybe she’ll even use big words with the kids, and say, ‘He aspired to an apotheosis in both physical and the musical forms’.Some might be interested, and they will go home and download Billy Jean and Thriller and watch the quaint 20th Century music videos and think, Thank God I didn’t live back then!

As interested as we are in mad Caligula, or the incestuous Lord Byron, most will go to their soy milk and cookies and not give a shit.

One of the things I love about William Gibson is his way with words. Such as below, in which he describes how Google is only really limited by one’s imagination of what to search for.

From an Amazon.com interview:

Amazon.com: How do you research? If you want to write about, say, GPS, like you do in your new book, do you actively research it and seek out experts, or do you just perceive what’s out there and make it your own?

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I’m lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I’m wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text. So people–and this happened to me with Pattern Recognition–would find my footprints so to speak: well, he got this from here, and this information is on this site.

Amazon.com: You’re annotated out there.

Gibson: Yeah it’s sort of like there’s this nebulous extended text. [For one deeply involved annotation, visit Joe Clark’s PR-otaku site–and see if you ever come back.] Everything is hyperlinked now. Some of it you actually have to type it in to get it, but it’s all hyperlinked. It really changes things. I’m sure a lot of writers haven’t yet realized how it changes things, but I find myself googling everything that goes into the text, and sometimes being led off in a completely different direction.

Amazon.com: So are you able to google during your writing day, or do you have to block that off and say, all right–

Gibson: No, I’ve got Word open on top of Firefox.

Amazon.com: That’s very courageous.

Gibson: It’s kind of the only way I can do it. It’s replaced looking out the window, but I have to have–

Amazon.com: You need a certain stimulation to work off of.

Gibson: Yeah, I need a certain stimulation. It kind of feels like when you’re floating underwater and you’re breathing through a straw. The open Firefox is the straw: like, I can get out of this if I have to. I can stay under until I can’t stand it anymore, and then I go to BoingBoing or something.

Amazon.com: I think for some writers, they’d never get back in the pool with Google open to them.

Gibson: It’s not that interesting for me. I’m okay with it because it doesn’t pull me in that much. The thing that limits you with Google is what you can think of to google, really. There’s some kind of personal best limitation on it, unless you get lucky and something you google throws up something you’ve never seen before. You’re still really inside some annotated version of your own head.

~

On the images found at PlanetHiltron, Gibson writes:

Mesmerizing contra-idoru anti-portraits. A reminder of the extent to which posthumanity is already here, but not evenly distributed. Sweat on the underDepp‘s ringer worth price of admission.

From Theodore Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It: Preface pages x-xi:

One might have supposed, in the circumstances, that a principle preoccupation of intellectuals, who after all are supposed to see farther and think more deeply than ordinary men and women, would be the maintenance of the boundaries that separate civilization from barbarism, since those boundaries have so often proved so flimsy in the past hundred years. One would be wrong to suppose any such thing, however. Some have knowingly embraced barbarism; others have remained unaware that boundaries do not maintain themselves and are in need of maintenance and sometimes vigorous defense. To break a taboo or to transgress are terms of the highest praise in the vocabulary of modern critics, irrespective of what has been transgressed or what taboo broken. A review of a recent biography of the logical positivist philosopher A.J. Ayer, in the Times Literary Supplement, enumerated the philosopher’s personal virtues. Among them was the fact the he was unconventional – but the writer did not feel called upon to state in what respect Ayer was unconventional. For the reviewer, Ayer’s alleged disregard of convention was a virtue in itself.

Of course, it might well have been a virtue, or it might equally well have been a vice, depending on the ethical content and the social effect of the convention in question. But there is little doubt that an oppositional attitude toward traditional social rules is what wins the modern intellectual his spurs, in the eyes of other intellectuals. And the prestige that intellectuals confer upon antinomianism soon communicates itself to nonintellectual. What is good for the bohemian sooner or later becomes good for the unskilled worker, the unemployed, the welfare recipient – the very people most in the need of boundaries to make their lives tolerable or allow them hope of improvement. The result is moral, spiritual, and emotional squalor, engendering fleeting pleasures and prolonged suffering.

This is not to say, of course, that all criticism of social conventions and traditions is destructive and unjustified; surely no society in the world can have existed in which there was not much justly to criticize. But critics of social institutions and traditions, including writers of imaginative literature, should always be aware that civilization needs conservation at least as much as it needs change, and that immoderate criticism, or criticism from the standpoint of utopian first principles, is capable of doing much – indeed devastating – harm. No man is so brilliant that he can work out for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to them. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.

Having spent a considerable proportion of my professional career in Third World countries in which the implementation of abstract ideas and ideals had made bad situation incomparably worse, and the rest of my career among the very extensive British underclass, whose disastrous notion about how to live derive ultimately from the unrealistic, self-indulgent, and often fatuous ideas of social critics, I have come to regard intellectual and artistic life as being of incalculable practical importance and effect. John Maynard Keynes wrote, in a famous passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace, that practical men might not have much time for theoretical considerations, but in fact the world is governed by little else than the outdated or defunct ideas of economists and social philosophers. I agree: except that I would now add novelists, playwrights, film directors, journalists, artists, and even pop singers. They are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, and we ought to pay close attention to what they have to say and how they say it.

From Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004:

David Barsamian: As I travel around the country, and I’m sure you do as well, you here this refrain about, well, ‘what’s the tipping point, what is it going to take for people to go out into the streets and protest?’ and the comments that are made are like, ‘well, you know, Americans are too comfortable, they’ve got it too easy’ and then this interesting one, that material things will have to get much worse before there is protest.

Noam Chomsky: I don’t think that’s true. In fact serious protest is often come from … (sometimes it comes from people who really are oppressed) sometimes its come from sectors of privilege. I mean take the case I mentioned about the [anti-vietnam-war] resistance movement; I mean these were privileged kids. You know, they were college students, almost all of them, from the elite schools. That’s privilege, but within those sectors of privilege, a spark was lit, which was recognized both by the oppressors and the oppressed and in ways that were psychologically extremely difficult, sometimes traumatic, as I said, sometimes they even led to suicide, they were not a joke. And the kids were under terrific strain, but very privileged and they played a big role in changing the country, I mean they infuriated their rich and powerful, I mean, take a look at the newspapers then, there’s all sorts of hysterical screeching about bra burning and all these horrible things that are going on undermining the foundations of civilization, yeah, etc. What was really going on was the country was getting civilized. And of course, that infuriated the people of power and wealth. How can you dare get civilized? You’re supposed to get beaten by our club. And yes, you can find at the fringes of any popular movement things that are crazy, and you can condemn and so on and so forth, part of the job of intellectuals is to focus on those, to try and discredit the important things that are happening, which are undermining of privilege and power.

From Dalrymple’s Our Culture, What’s Left of It‘s essay, ‘A Taste for Danger’; consider his thoughts on dress near the end:

The only thing worse than having a family, I discovered, is not having a family. My rejection of bourgeois virtues as mean-spirited and antithetical to real human development could not long survive contact with situations in which those virtues were entirely absent; and a rejection of everything associated with one’s childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it. It was in Africa that I first discovered that the bourgeois virtues are not only desirable but often heroic. […] I was still of the callow – and fundamentally lazy – youthful opinion that nothing in the world could change until everything changed, in which case a social system would arise in which it would be no longer necessary for anyone to be good. The head nurse of the war in which I worked, a black woman, invited me to her home in the township for a meal. […] In this unpromising environment, I discovered, the nurse had created an extremely comfortable and even pretty home for herself and her aging mother. Her tiny patch of land was like a bower; the inside of her house was immaculately clean, tidy, and well – though cheaply – furnished. I would never laugh again at the taste of people of limited means to make a comfortable home for themselves.

Looking around me in the township, I began to see that the spotlessly clean white uniform in which she appeared every day in the hospital represented not an absurd fetish, nor the brutal imposition of alien cultural standards upon African life, but a noble triumph of the human spirit – as, indeed, did her tenderly cared-for home. By comparison with her struggle to maintain herself in decency, my former rejection of bourgeois proprieties and respectability seemed to me ever afterward to be shallow, trivial, and adolescent. Until then I had assumed, along with most of my generation unacquainted with real hardship, that a scruffy appearance was a sign of spiritual election, representing a rejection of the superficiality and materialism of the bourgeois life. Ever since then, however, I have not been able to witness the voluntary adoption of torn, worn-out, and tattered clothes – at least in public – by those in a position to dress otherwise without a feeling of deep disgust. Far from being a sign of solidarity with the poor, it is a perverse mockery of them; it is spitting on the graves of of our ancestors, who struggled so hard, so long, and so bitterly that we might be warm, clean, well fed, and leisured enough to enjoy the better things in life.

From the same Chomsky interview quoted above (Imperial Ambitions, Conversations on the Post 9/11 World interviews with David Barsamian, interview recorded 3 December 2004) with my bolding to highlight another way of considering poverty of dress:

Noam Chomsky: Take where we are [MIT]. You walk down the halls today and you remember what it was like when you walked down the halls forty years ago. It’s radically different. I mean, forty years ago it was white males, well dressed, respectful to the elders and so on and so forth. You walk down the halls today, it’s going to be like any other university: half women, third minorities, casually dressed, informal relations. Those are not insignificant changes, and they’ve gone all through society.

David Barsamian: Are the hierarchies breaking down?

Noam Chomsky: Of course. I mean, if women are not, don’t have to live like my grandmother, or my mother, hierarchies have broken down. Namely the hierarchies that kept them that way. I mean, for example now, in the town where I live (professional, middle class town, lawyers, doctors, so on) I learned recently (I didn’t know this) that there’s a special section of the police which does nothing but answer 911 calls of domestic abuse. That’s what they do, there’s several a week. I mean, if it’s several a week out there, you can imagine what it is in a poor community. Did anything like that exist thirty years ago? Twenty years ago? I mean, I wasn’t even conceivable then, ‘that’s none of anybody’s business if somebody wants to beat up his wife’. I mean, the wife didn’t even complain. They may not like, but that’s life. Is that a change in hierarchy? You bet. And furthermore, it’s one part of a very broad social change.

Brian Lehrer: You raised three kids, didn’t you reward and punish them to promote desired behaviors?

Noam Chomsky: Well, we … see if you believe in [B.F.] Skinner’s doctrines you wouldn’t punish them. So if you’re talking about Skinner no wouldn’t punish them, you would reward them. But no, I wouldn’t say that’s the right way to raise kids. And in fact to the extent that people do it, it has at most a marginal effect on the children, probably mostly harmful. But for their growth and development, it largely takes place on the basis of the outgrowth of their innate capacities. That’s true in every domain that we know. It’s true in language, it’s true in moral development, it’s true in anything that’s been studied carefully – visual development and so on. By now, these are almost truisms in the sciences.

-Noam Chomsky on the Charlie Rose Show, guest hosted by Brian Lehrer, 9 June 2006

It is a pity that the word ‘art’ carries with it, to a person not interested in the subject or not versed in its history, a suggestion of luxury and of superfluity, as contrasted with the utilitarian or the practical. Where this possibly derogatory tinge of meaning is not suggested, there is generally at least a feeling that the matters which the word calls up are those of interest to the specialist in design rather than to the world at large. People who are supposed to be interested in ‘art’ might, according to this view, possibly not be interested in literature and history. Contrary-wise, people interested in history of in literature might not be interested in ‘art’.

It is true that in recent centuries, those namely of recent modern history, the arts of painting and sculpture at least, have become mainly matters of luxury, and that as arts of popular education and instruction they have been displaced by printed books. Hence the difficulty of making immediately apparent, before the subject itself has been opened up, that a history of art is not so much a history of that arts of design as it is a history of civilization. But if this point is not apparent in advance, it is notwithstanding the point in which in recent years has drawn more and more attention to the subject until it is beginning to figure as an indispensable part of the philosophy and knowledge of general history.

– Introduction to Roman and Medieval Art by W.H. Goodyear, 1893

Manuel de Landa: Right now, everybody and their mothers call themselves ‘critical’. You go to New York City bookstores and there are huge sections of bookshelves called Critical Theory. Of course, those theories are the most uncritical in the whole world. They call themselves critical but in the end are so uncritical because they take for granted all kinds of assumptions, they don’t really criticize themselves, and so forth. What I meant when I said ‘criticism as an antidote to propaganda’ would be a new type of criticism that is much more theoretically grounded and goes beyond the fake kind of criticism, or dogmatic criticism, that we have become used to. If we criticize the Internet by simply calling it a ‘capitalist tool’ or a ‘bourgeois tool’. That was a standard way in which Marxists criticized things in the past, attaching ‘bourgeois’ to everything they wanted to criticize and, bingo, you had instant criticism like you had instant coffee. Obviously, that kind of criticism is not going to do anything, and indeed has become a kind of propaganda itself. I mean, you criticize to propagandize your own idea. The question in front of us now as intellectuals is whether we’ve inherited so much bullshit and therefore our criticism is bound, is condemned to be ineffective, or whether we can find ways out or escape routes out of this and create a new brand of criticism that recovers its teeth, its ability to bite, its ability to intervene in reality in a more effective way. Again, it would imply a collective effort of a lot of intellectuals who are fed up with what had been labeled as criticism in the past and is nothing but dogma and repetition, and come up with a new brand of criticism that is capable of fighting propaganda. (source; emph mine)

From the 2007-05-02 show of Democracy Now!:

AMY GOODMAN: Max Blumenthal, I read in the headlines a story that’s gotten very little attention: in Alabama, federal authorities revealing they have broken up a militia plot to attack a group of Mexicans living in a small town north of Birmingham. Last week, six members of the Alabama Free Militia were arrested in a series of raids. The Birmingham News reported police uncovered truckloads of explosives and weapons, including 130 grenades, an improvised rocket launcher, 2,500 rounds of ammunition. The men appeared in court on Tuesday. But despite the violent plot, police did not accuse them of terrorism. Instead, police charged them with conspiracy to make a firearm, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a quarter of a million-dollar fine. The Anti-Defamation League says the weapons seizure was the largest in the South in years. Do you know about this group?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, I’m really glad you brought that up. You know, I don’t know about this group in specific, but I think what we can extrapolate from this story is that the extreme right, militia groups, neo-Nazi groups, groups who should be considered domestic terrorists, see the anti-immigrant movement as their vehicle.

And, you know, there was an interesting, you know, story I noticed in 2000. The Michigan Militia effectively disbanded. This had the largest amount of members during the 1990s, during the heyday of the so-called anti-government militia movement. You know, they organized against Bill Clinton. Waco was their fantasy of black helicopters descending into their communities taking their guns away. And all the sudden they just disappeared. Where did they go?

The head of the Michigan Militia was interviewed, and he said, “Well, a lot of our guys like what’s going on now with the Republicans in power, and, you know, we’re looking to get into government, and we’re looking to support, you know, more mainstream causes, because they’re becoming more influential.” So you see an enormous cross-pollination between the membership rolls of the anti-government, domestic terrorist militias of the ’90s and groups like the Minutemen. So that’s what’s going on here.

And I think what we need to look out for, as the likelihood of a Democratic majority in government is very reasonable, you’re going to see a more extreme posture from these groups. Just imagine the scenario if Hillary Clinton in power, the perfect boogeyman for the anti-government right, a Democratic congress, you’re going to see them growing more and more extreme. And at the same time —

AMY GOODMAN: We’ve just passed the anniversary of the blowing up of the Oklahoma City building.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. And at the same time, you’re going to see, you know, more vigilante action against immigrants. And, you know, it’s unfortunate that the government is not treating this as the threat that it is. They’re not treating it as domestic terrorism. Obviously, if these characters in Alabama were Arab Muslims, they would be on their way to some secret prison in Eastern Europe wearing diapers in a Learjet, ready to get waterboarded. But instead, you know, you’ve got a totally — they’re treated totally differently, and their ideas are advanced on shows like Lou Dobbs, which come on during dinner time. [emp mine]

Noam Chomsky, speaking on April 17th’s Democracy Now! when asked about ‘hope for the future’:

I have a slightly more hopeful sense than Howard [Zinn] at least expressed, I suspect he agrees. It’s true that the country, that in terms of institutional structure – government for the wealthy and so on – there hasn’t been much change in two hundred years but there’s been enormous progress. I mean even in the last 40 years, since the 60s. Many rights have been won – rights for minorities, rights for women, rights of future generations (which is what the environmental movement is about), opposition to aggression is increased. The first solidarity movements in history began in the 1980s after centuries of European imperialism – no one ever thought of going to live in an Algerian village to protect the people from French violence, or in a Vietnamese village. Thousands of Americans were doing that in the 1980s in Reagan’s terrorist wars; it’s now extended over the whole world, there’s an International Solidarity Movement – the Global Justice movement, which meet annually in the World Social Forum are a completely new phenomenon. It’s true globalization among people, maybe the seeds for the first true International. People from all over the world, all walks of life, many ideas which are right on people’s minds and agenda are in fact being implemented about a participatory society – the kind of work that Michael Albert’s been doing … these are all new things. There’s been lots of bits – nothing’s ever totally new – there are bits and pieces of it in the past but the changes are enormous. And the same with opposition to aggression. After all the Iraq War’s the first war in hundreds of years of Western history, it’s the first one I can think of which was massively protested before it was officially launched. It actually was underway we’ve since learned, but it wasn’t officially underway – but it was huge, millions of people protesting it all over the world, so much so that the New York Times lamented that there’s a second superpower – the population. Well you know, that’s significant and I think gives good reason for hope. There are periods of regression, we’re now in a period of regression but if you look at the cycle over time, it’s upwards and there’s no limits it can’t reach.

From Traveling in Mark Twain (Richard Bridgman, 1987):

Having long pondered, without resolution, the meaning of what he had observed in his travels through the world, Twain told his old friend and clergyman Joe Twichell, in a letter of July 28, 1904, that at least “a part of each day—or night” the world vanished absolutely for him, leaving him no more than a thought drifting aimlessly in emptiness. At such moments it seemed to him that everything was “NON-EXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing . That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought . And I am that thought.” (MSM , 30).

William Morris, writing in 1894, and published July 16th of that year in Justice:

To sum up then, the study of history and the love and practice of art forced me into a hatred of the civilization which, if things were to stop as they are, would turn history into inconsequent nonsense, and make art a collection of the curiosities of the past which would have no serious relation to the life of the present. But the consciousness of revolution stirring amidst our hateful modern society prevented me, luckier than many others of artistic perceptions, from crystalizing into a mere railer against ‘progress’ on the one hand, and on the other from wasting time and energy in any of the numerous schemes by which the quasi-artistic of the middle classes hope to make art grow when it has no longer any root, and thus I became a practical Socialist. (p.382; Penguin’s News from Nowhere and Other Writings, ‘How I became a Socialist’)

Henry Chadwick: Envoi: On Taking Leave of Antiquity in The Oxford History of the Roman World (1986)

Yet, even the barbarian invasions of the 5th Century AD fail to mark a decisive ending to the structures and values of classical Greece and Rome. If by ‘the end of the ancient world’ we mean the loss of a uniquely privileged position for Greek and Latin classics in western education and culture, then the shift cannot be described as decisive until the 20th Century, an age in which powerful forces inimical to the very notion of a ‘classic’ of the past providing a model or criterion of judgement over the present. Even as the 20th Century draws to a close, the continued centrality of Rome and of the old Mediterranean world retains at least one living and undiminished symbol in the Papacy, presiding over a community of more than 700 million people, most of whom do not live in Europe. Until very recent times the renewal of high culture in the West has been linked with some direct contact with the prime sources of this culture in antiquity: in Greek philosophy, in Roman law and administration, in the universalism stremming from biblical monotheism.

That is not to say that these three main sources are, or were at the time felt to be, wholly harmonious and co-operative friends. The Romans, from Cicero to Pope Gregory the Great, regarded the Greeks as too clever to be honest. The Greeks, as is clear from Plutarch, admired the Romans, but did not greatly appreciate being conquered by them and would have preferred their own incompetent government to Roman efficiency and justice. Christian monotheism represented a disruptive challenge to immemorial local cults and social customs throughout the Empire, and was met by vigorous resistance in the form of philosophic criticism and state harassment.

John Ralston Saul: The Doubter’s Companion (1994):

From the entry on Taste:

In late Imperial Rome, the great aristocratic pagan families were horrified by the rise to power of the lower-middle-class Christians whose churches were so plain and ugly that they were scarcely more than hovels. These rustic believers knew nothing about architectural principles and, we can surmise, had heavy accents and dressed without style. No doubt they were what those with taste would call common. Gradually, however, the aristocrats themselves followed the odor of shifting power and began to convert. Eventually the law left them no choice. It was probably a few generations before they actually thought of themselves as Christian, but in the meantime they brought taste to the church: architecture, decoration, mosaics, painting, liturgy, music. At last the bishops began to wear chasubles as magnificent as their positions. At last the bishops began to sound elegant and powerful. The beauty that resulted from the participation of the great old imperial families became an integral part of our pleasure in ourselves as civilized people. The new pagan Christian taste was quickly confused with the original Christian message of moral clarity. But those links were and remain purely imaginary.

Civilization

The single and shortest definition of civilization may be the word `language`. This is not to suggest that images or music are of a lesser importance. It is simply that they have more to do with the unconscious. They are somehow part of metaphysics and religion. Civilization, if it means something concrete, is the conscious but unprogrammed mechanism by which humans communicate. And through communication they live with each other, think, create and act.

Western Civilization
This phenomenon is particularly aggressive about its superiority. Even among themselves Westerners are constantly asserting that they have the best religion, language, method of government or production. They can’t wait to tell people everywhere in the world how to dress, pray, raise their children and organize their cities.

Non-Westerners are at first charmed, then paralyzed by our insistent self-assurance. And when, a decade later, our reorganization of cities such as Bangkok has led to disaster or of most African economies to famine and urban poverty, they find themselves pressured to take Western advice on how to get out of their mess.

What makes us such know-it-all busybodies? Christianity? The deformation of Christianity? These are just four among the dozens of standard and contradictory explanations.

It may simply be that we have not got over being the Barbarians. Indeed our problem has never been the fall of the Roman Empire but, with a few Italian exceptions, that we are not the Romans, who felt the same way about not being the Greeks.

Western history harps on about the growing reliance of the degenerate Romans upon the virile Barbarians to man their armies. So virile that we eventually sacked Rome and took it over. This interpretation leaves the impression that Rome was filled with overweight people lying about in a drunken stupor or fornicating. We tend to skip over the high, and from a Christian point of view, positive civilization into which Rome had evolved. Even a glance at the 5th Century mosaics of Ravenna shows a level of artistic skill which we, the Barbarians, saw, admired, but were unable to absorb. And so it was lost for a 1000 years. We may have conquered Rome, but we remained bumpkins. As documents of the time indicate, we were treated as such by the elites of the Empire.

Charlemagne was not simply claiming historic legitimacy when he had himself crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in St. Peter’s on Christmas Day of the year 800. He was giving in to his own colonial emotions by claiming the status of those who had been superior to his people. As with the classic nouveau riche, he had succeeded in his own terms but felt obliged to wrap himself in the trappings of the things he could never be. Charlemagne was the great king of a large but backward tribe called the Franks. He wasn’t a Roman emperor. He was a Barbarian.

The long see-saw battle among the tribes of Europe over the crown of the Holy Roman Emperor continued this seemingly indigestible inferiority complex. In its wake, German and Russian kings declared themselves Caesar (Kaiser, Czar). In our own century [20th] the Roman overlord past has been repeatedly claimed by dictators and democrats.

In any case, for the last half-century this sort of squabbling has been over the illusion of appearances. After all, the reality of power had slipped away from the three European tribes and moved on to North America, yet another step removed from Rome. The inferiority complex followed in a cumulative manner.

No country has more imitated Roman architecture ad mannerisms than the United States. An early identification with the honest but militaristic ideal of Cincinnatus quickly declined into a taste for ‘triumphs’ and ‘bread and circuses’. George Washington would have been horrified, but he was dead when Congress had him sculpted, larger than life, as Zeus dispensing liberty. Why Zeus would dispense liberty isn’t clear, except to provide mythological legitimacy.

As the American dream gradually falters, so the sense of national superiority asserts itself with a growing reliance on Roman-style trappings of power. The most obvious element is a weakened emperor who today surrounds himself with more than 1000 personal advisers. This is what the Romans called a praetorian guard. It follows that as government officials leave for the airport from their Washington houses, which are fully equipped with alarms and window-bars to protect them against their fellow-citizens, it is to tell non-Americans, rich and poor around the world, that they ought to be doing things the American way.

Northrop Frye, from The Educated Imagination (1962):

So you may ask, what is the use of studying a world of imagination where anything is possible and anything can be assumed, where there are no rights or wrongs and all arguments are equally good? One of the most obvious uses, I think, is its encouragement of tolerance. In the imagination our own beliefs are also only possibilities, but we can also see the possibilities in the beliefs of others. Bigots and fanatics seldom have any use for the arts, because they’re so preoccupied with their beliefs and actions that they can’t see them as also possibilities. It’s possible to go the other extreme, to be a dilettante so bemused by possibilities that one has no convictions or power to act at all. But such people are much less common than bigots, and in our world much less dangerous.

What produces the tolerance is the power of detachment in the imagination, where things are removed just out of reach of belief and action. Experience is nearly always commonplace; the present is not romantic in the way that the past is, and ideals and great visions have a way of becoming shoddy and squalid in practical life. Literature reverses this process. When experience is removed from us a bit, as the experience of the Napoleonic was is in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there’s a tremendous increase of dignity and exhilaration. I mention Tolstoy because he’d be the last writer to try and glamorize the war itself, or pretend that its horror wasn’t horrible. There is an element of illusion even in War and Peace, but the illusion gives us a reality that isn’t in the actual experience of the war itself: the reality of proportion and perspective, of seeing what it’s all about, that only detachment can give. Literature helps to give us that detachment, and so do history and philosophy and science and everything else worth studying. But literature has something more to give peculiarly its own: something as absurd and impossible as the primitive magic is so closely resembles.

Robert Fulford, reviewing the then recently published diaries of Northrup Frye, wrote:

He told his diary what he didn’t always express in print or in public. He often disliked the moral tone of the Toronto people he knew. ‘Every once in a while I get shocked by the callousness and brutality of members of my class,’ he wrote; sometimes they revealed that they thought the poor sub-human. He wasn’t impressed when Osbert Sitwell, one of the eminent Sitwells of England, came to Canada to lecture: ‘f I didn’t know him to be brilliant I’d say he was a dope.’He decided that obscenity is an ornament to language except when it becomes routine; then it approaches idiocy. He cited a colleague’s story about a First World War soldier who saw a dead mule at the bottom of a shellhole and remarked, ‘Well, that fuckin’ fucker’s fucked.’ Setting that down, Frye added, ‘What sort of person is it, incidentally, whose feelings would be spared by printing the above as ‘that —-in’ —-er’s —-ed,’ or ‘that obscene obscenity’s obscenitied’?” He had no time for prudes.

(National Post, 30 Oct 2001)

“Perhaps the original flaw of Globalization lies in its overstatement of the success of 19th Century free trade, along with an overstatement of the determinism of technology and the superiority of rational management systems. The certainty of all this inevitable change has distracted us from just how slow civilizations move. The recent genocide in the Congo reminds us that they – and we – are still dealing with King Leopold’s violent, genocidal interference a century ago. Britain is still digesting its loss of world leadership. China still thinks and feels like the Middle Kingdom – the centre of the world. Canada, now the third-oldest continuos democracy in the world and the second-oldest continuos federation, is still emotionally and existentially hampered by its colonial insecurity; just as Australia remains confused by the tension between its European cultural origins, its Aboriginal reality and its Asian geography; just as German youth born forty years after the end of Nazism still struggle with the idea of who they could possibly be. Algerians are still attempting to reconstitute themselves after the loss of their great and appropriate leader, Abd-el-Kader, in 1848; and Americans are still scarred and hampered by the implications of their slave-dependent social and economic origins. The list is endless.”

John Ralston Saul’s, The Collapse of Globalism arrived today. Review to follow, after I’m done reading it.