Thursday Throwback

By in thursday throwback No Comments

[Originally published Feb. 25, 2014.]

I saw my old car off to the scrapyard after it finally died last week. That mileage is all on the original engine. Allow me to get all old-folksy for a moment and aver that they don’t make ’em like that any more, no sir.

There’s a lot of things I won’t miss about it. As you can imagine, a car that’s traveled that much isn’t the most comfortable ride anymore. I hate bucket seats as a rule, especially since it takes more effort to haul my rheumatic joints up and out of them. Stickshifts are just an unnecessary pain in the ass. Cars in general never seem to have enough room to suit me, and I’m a pretty average-sized fellow, not particularly tall or wide. The rear windows wouldn’t go up all the way, leaving about a half-inch open. The automatic window motors would have cost over $200 apiece, though, whereas a strip of black duct tape across the opening only cost a couple dollars — easy choice. The glovebox latch had first broken loose, then mysteriously vanished, so it was held slightly ajar with a velcro strip. The AC stopped working a long time ago and would have needed to be completely replaced to bring it up to current standards anyway, but I never wanted to go to that much expense — getting from point A to B has always been my main concern. Still, the fan only blew hot air no matter how far the dial was turned toward the blue. A dark-colored car with hot air leaking out of the vents on an August day in the South — it was like riding around in a four-wheeled toaster.

Perhaps I’m just inclined to be a little bit mournful today anyway, but despite those gripes, I did feel genuinely sad to see it go. I’ve heard it said in many ways, and I agree, that significant changes in life make us a bit uneasy because they remind us of the inevitability of the most significant change of all. However easy it will be to replace my means of transportation as opposed to a loved one, there’s still a noticeable hole in my routine. Another chapter, however banal, has been brought to a close. Watching it rise onto the back of the tow truck was like plucking a string on a web, sending vibrations through all sorts of dormant memories — the places it had been, the passengers it had carried, and all the myriad associations attached to each. No, I won’t really miss the car, but I will take a moment to rue the separation.

Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (15)

By in montaigne, verily No Comments

Well, this is interesting. This evening, I stumbled across a site I’ve never seen before, which— oh, I’ll just get out of the way and let them explain it:

After Montaigne—a collection of twenty-four new personal essays intended as tribute— aims to correct this collective lapse of memory and introduce modern readers and writers to their stylistic forebear.

Though it’s been over four hundred years since he began writing his essays, Montaigne’s writing is still fresh, and his use of the form as a means of self-exploration in the world around him reads as innovative—even by modern standards. He is, simply put, the writer to whom all essayists are indebted. Each contributor has chosen one of Montaigne’s 107 essays and has written his/her own essay of the same title and on the same theme, using a quote from Montaigne’s essay as an epigraph. The overall effect is akin to a covers album, with each writer offering his or her own interpretation and stylistic verve to Montaigne’s themes in ways that both reinforce and challenge the French writer’s prose, ideas, and forms. Featuring a who’s who of contemporary essayists, After Montaigne offers a startling engagement with Montaigne and the essay form while also pointing the way to the genre’s potential new directions.

…This site contains all 107 of Montaigne’s essays, in Charles Cotton’s 1685 translation (John Florio produced the first English translation, in 1605, and several other twentieth-century translators have made their attempts at rendering Montaigne’s mind in English as well). We hope that you will enjoy spending time with this quirky sixteenth-century Frenchman, that by reading his essays you will find yourself pondering timeless ideas, and that in reading his essays, you will begin to create your own essays.

For It Is Ourselves We Paint

By in antisocial networking, books No Comments

Stranger still, commercials may appear anywhere in a news story—before, after, or in the middle. This reduces all events to trivialities, sources of public entertainment and little more. After all, how serious can a bombing in Lebanon be if it is shown to us prefaced by a happy United Airlines commercial and summarized by a Calvin Klein jeans commercial? Indeed, television newscasters have added to our grammar a new part of speech—what may be called the “Now…this” conjunction, a conjunction that does not connect two things but disconnects them. When newscasters say, “Now…this,” they mean to indicate that what you have just heard or seen has no relevance to what you are about to hear or see. There is no murder so brutal, no political blunder so costly, no bombing so devastating that it cannot be erased from our minds by a newscaster saying, Now…this.” He means that you have thought long enough on the matter (let us say for forty seconds) and you must now give your attention to a commercial. Such a situation is not “the news.” It is merely a daily version of Springtime for Hitler, and in my opinion accounts for the fact that Americans are among the most ill-informed people in the world. To be sure, we know of many things; but we know about very little.

…In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice; we watch him, by ours. When a culture becomes distracted by trivia; when political and social life are redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments; when public conversation becomes a form of baby talk; when a people become, in short, an audience and their public business a vaudeville act; then—Huxley argued—a nation finds itself at risk and culture death is a clear possibility. I agree.

— Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology and Education 

In the online age, it seems almost quaint to be worried about the corrupting influence of commercials, when most people use ad-blockers on their browsers and only watch TV news in an à la carte format of individual clips selected for virality. That strange “flattening” phenomenon still exists, though, where news, entertainment and commentary are all mashed together into digital gruel. It reminds me of English class in high school, where we would read plays out loud in class, with different kids assigned to various characters — there would always be at least one dull kid who read hizzorher parts in a flat, monotone voice, failing to add any dramatic inflection where needed, making even Shakespearean poetry sound insipid and boring. Social media has only intensified this leveling effect, and Twitter, the motherland of journalists, “creatives” and other cultural tastemakers, is the most surreal of all. The lingua franca of the realm consists mostly of memes (formerly known as “inside jokes,” now in picture form), slang catchphrases, and other forms of baby talk. Histrionic emotings about the latest school shooting or political outrage are quickly replaced in the “trending” column by Baby Yoda gifs or jokes about the Peloton commercial, sometimes all in the same individual’s timeline. Adult infants, transfixed by their glowing screens, alternate between squalling in anger and cooing in pleasure. No one needs to interrupt to say, “Now…this,” because it’s intuitively understood that flux is the norm, and there is no significant distinction between one novelty and the next. Deeply serious, utterly frivolous; all are presented in exactly the same deracinated sentence fragments, with the same tiny displays of metrics attached beneath, like tin cans tied to newlyweds’ bumpers, letting us quantify how many people responded with sentence fragments of their own, versus how many responded by pushing a button to signal affirmation. The overall effect is to increase one’s sense of being a spectator, distant and detached, as all this flotsam and jetsam passes by.

And yet, if I’m being fair, how many of us strictly segregate our thoughts through the course of the day? Don’t we mix the frivolous and serious in varying amounts? Don’t we pause to play with the cat while working on something important, or crack jokes in the middle of otherwise serious conversations? Don’t our conversations veer wildly between the silly and profound? I’m pretty sure a detailed log of the contents of my thoughts on any given day would be embarrassingly unimpressive, especially if presented in the form of a list, sans context. Maybe our real gripe with social media is that it makes public that which should be kept private. Maybe, rather than distracting us with with illusions and fantasies, it acts as a pitiless mirror, revealing just how many of our everyday thoughts and actions fail to measure up to our ideals. Maybe we just can’t stand that much honesty, so we console ourselves by witnessing proof that our friends and acquaintances are just as foolish and petty as we are.

Obiter Scripta, no. 76

By in books, obiter scripta No Comments

It is true enough that in Russia writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows where all that is arrested is their development. This is an important difference, but it does nothing to change the fact that grievance is the source of all interesting prose. Without grievance, a writer tends to become a celebrant, which is an agreeable but repetitious state. After you have sung two choruses of “God Bless America,” what else is there to say?

— Neil Postman, Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble about Language, Technology and Education 

If this is so, and I think it often is, why should it be? Are we naturally belligerent and inclined to argument? Or does our lust for novelty prod us to differentiate ourselves from others, thus leading to contrast and conflict? Why is it so difficult to be interesting without being provocative?

Granger Touched Montag’s Arm. “Welcome Back From the Dead.”

By in books, the great awokening No Comments

Winston Smith:

I think I’ve finally learned my lesson: the left never stops. Never, ever, ever, ever stops. That’s the logic of the left: leftward, always leftward. It’s never enough until the dystopian utopia is achieved, and all the counterrevolutionaries are in the Gulags.

I suspect most of us get there eventually in our own way. As Granger said to Montag:

“Right now we have a horrible job; we’re waiting for the war to begin and, as quickly, end. It’s not pleasant, but then we’re not in control, we’re the odd minority crying in the wilderness. When the war’s over, perhaps we can be of some use in the world.”

“Do you really think they’ll listen then?”

“If not, we’ll just have to wait. We’ll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. A lot will be lost that way, of course. But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up under them. It can’t last.”

The Necessary Murder

By in books No Comments

Alison Flood:

Sixty years after the French Nobel laureate Albert Camus died in a car crash at the age of 46, a new book is arguing that he was assassinated by KGB spies in retaliation for his anti-Soviet rhetoric.

Italian author Giovanni Catelli first aired his theory in 2011, writing in the newspaper Corriere della Sera that he had discovered remarks in the diary of the celebrated Czech poet and translator Jan Zábrana that suggested Camus’s death had not been an accident. Now Catelli has expanded on his research in a book titled The Death of Camus.

Camus was one of my earliest intellectual heroes. Orwell, despite his reputation for moral integrity, comes across to me now as a little too much a product of his time and place, too concerned with wanting to rehabilitate a “true” socialism from its real-world manifestation, which makes much of his work seem provincial and outdated. Camus, by contrast, planted his flag on more broadly humanistic terrain, for lack of a better term, and consequently seems more timeless in his outlook. Coincidentally, I was just leafing through The Rebel the other day in search of a particular passage, and I thought I should really get around to re-reading the entire book.

Thursday Throwback

By in thursday throwback No Comments


[On that note, here’s this week’s Thursday Throwback, originally published Jan. 25, 2015.]

Larry Siedentop:

Piety and patriotism were one and the same thing. For the Greeks, to be without patriotism, to be anything less than an active citizen, was to be an ‘idiot’. That, indeed, is what the word originally meant, referring to anyone who retreated from the life of the city.

Having just finished a book in which Steven Pinker cautioned the reader against struggling upstream toward the “original intent” of specific words, against the current of popular usage, it is only after judicious deliberation that I hereby proclaim my intent to reclaim this particular term. Like Randal in Clerks 2, I realize that “idiot” is currently classed along with “moron,” “retard,” “imbecile,” “cretin” and “simpleton” as unacceptably “ableist,” in the parlance of our times, but such fashions will always come and go, and like the idiots of ancient Greece, true individuals will always pay them no heed. Oh, no, no, it’s cool, I’m taking it back.

My own retreat from political dialogue was motivated by sober realism, not by selfishness. Temperamentally averse to any sort of group activity, I’m not the sort to take part in meetings or marches, and I’m incapable of proselytizing for a cause. I make just enough money to get by, not enough to meaningfully contribute to charities and politically-oriented non-profits. I could use my limited spare time in an attempt to thoroughly educate myself about all the issues du jour, but to what end? What would I do with that information? Vote differently? Win arguments on the web? In short, I have no power or influence, and acting or speaking otherwise, even as a quasi-literary character, would be just another attention-seeking, self-flattering conceit.

Life in the modern-day polis has rendered most of our activity as citizens superfluous. Retreating from it isn’t a renunciation of obligations so much as an acknowledgement of limitations. Like another ancient Greek who was faulted for a perceived lack of community spirit, I don’t know much, but I know that much.

Irony Was the Shackles of Youth

By in foolosophy, identity, political philosophy No Comments

Marlowe and Raleigh alike were mockers. Or to put it more kindly: they were gadflies, jesting about matters that were too serious for jest, playing with different and contradictory unorthodoxies without committing themselves to any of them, consistent only in their refusal to bow to authority.

— Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt

Ryrie’s subject is the emotional, as opposed to intellectual, history of how people in the West came to doubt the Christian narrative. I found the book enthralling, and I recommend it to anyone interested. But this passage actually turned my thoughts toward contemporary politics and my own coming-of-age.

Claire Berlinski wrote a bit in a recent installment of her newsletter about Manufacturing Consent, the famous book by Noam Chomsky and Ed Herman. Now, I was born in the early 1970s. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down. My twenties began concurrently with Bill Clinton’s presidency. To the extent that I had a political identity, I largely thought of myself as a non-denominational leftie, especially as defined against the bigoted, religious cultural conservatives of my youth, the kind who wanted to sticker cassettes and CDs with parental warning labels and keep those poor kids in Footloose from dancing at their prom. (The Great Awokening of this decade forced me to reconsider a lot of complacent assumptions.)

What really struck me in reading Claire’s post was how much of my lukewarm-leftism, like that of many of my peers, was basically Chomskian in its framework. Anti-anti-Communist, I suppose you could call it; relentlessly critical of existing realities while being evasive about offering workable alternatives; a comfortable, idealistic posture that reeks of (dare I utter the overused term), privilege. For many of us naïfs, Chomsky seemed to represent an intoxicating intellectual ideal — his moral credibility seemed unimpeachable, his knowledge seemed encyclopedic, and his ability to connect disparate dots seemed unparalleled. (Yes, I know; that’s why I say “seemed.”) He seemed to sit above all partisan bias, observing empirical facts, dispensing moralistic judgments. As adolescent Chomskians, we felt secure that in attacking the compromises and sellouts of political life, we were just being like sculptors, chipping away the unnecessary parts to reveal the idealistic essence within. If we weren’t actually optimistic that the best was ever achievable, we were at least smugly secure that the worst was somehow unlikely. It might not have been the End of History after all, but it was at least a Historical Fermata.

Chomsky, though, seemed a little too serious sometimes. He never seemed to lighten up; he couldn’t watch a basketball game without seeing a modern-day fascist rally lurking underneath. Can’t we enjoy the end of the Cold War and the dawn of the online age? We needed some gadflies with a sense of humor and pop-culture approachability, some mockers to whom we could relate. Luckily, we had comedians like Bill Hicks, George Carlin, and Jon Stewart. Moral superiority with cutting zingers and naughty language? How could we resist? We didn’t have to do much of anything besides taunt the booboisie. We just had to be clever and observant and to crack wise as the parade of fools marched by in public life. It seems only fitting that one of Stewart’s final acts as a jester was to gleefully welcome Trump’s candidacy as a “gift from heaven,” oblivious to what a Trojan Horse it was.

It appears obvious in hindsight that such a respite from responsibility could only be temporary. History’s currents started flowing again. The reality of post-partisan politics and online connectedness has left most observers muttering, “The horror! The horror!” Currently, it’s fashionable for many theoretically-inclined right-wingers (and timid liberals) to lament how capitalism/liberalism was always destined by history’s dialectic to end up producing a society of atomized, isolated individuals wasting away in their loneliness and decadence. Like most fashionable theories, this one is mostly dreck, soon to appear embarrassingly outdated. Millions of years of evolution as a social species is not going to be undone by several decades of affluence and technological trends. We’ve already seen the “atomization” that was going to occur, and it was more cerebral than anything: clever individuals playing with heterodoxies without committing to any of them, consistent only in their refusal to bow to authority. Faced with the competing idiocies of the woke left and the nationalist right, I didn’t have any trouble putting away the childish snark of my gadfly youth. I suspect many more of my peers feel the same.

Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (14)

By in verily No Comments

I have recently learned of two great sites which may also be of interest to you: SENTENTIAE ANTIQUAE (“Are you in search of the ‘wisdom’ of the ancients, but don’t know where to begin? Are you looking for more than the locus classicus–do you long for the odd and the obscure as well? Then you’ve come to the right place!”), and Haggard Hawks (“Strange words, etymology & language facts”), whose Twitter feed is more frequently updated than the blog itself. Give them both a try.

Thursday Throwback

By in thursday throwback No Comments

[Originally published Jul. 24, 2012.]

Nick Hornby:

Wilson asks the question: Why does everyone hate Céline Dion? Except, of course, it’s not everyone, is it? She’s sold more albums than just about anyone alive. Everyone loves Céline Dion, if you think about it. So actually, he asks the question: why do I and my friends and all rock critics and everyone likely to be reading this book and magazines like the Believer hate Céline Dion? And the answers he finds are profound, provocative, and leave you wondering who the hell you actually are—especially if, like many of us around these parts, you set great store by cultural consumption as an indicator of both character and, let’s face it, intelligence. We are cool people! We read Jonathan Franzen and we listen to Pavement, but we also love Mozart and Seinfeld! Hurrah for us! In a few short, devastating chapters, Wilson chops himself and all of us off at the knees. “It’s always other people following crowds, whereas my own taste reflects my specialness,” Wilson observes.

…We forgive people who can’t sing or construct a song or play their instruments, as long as they are cool, or subversive, or deviant; we do not dismiss Dion because she’s incompetent. Indeed, her competence may well be a problem, because it means she excludes nobody, apart from us, and those who invest heavily in cultural capital don’t like art that can’t exclude: it’s confusing, and it doesn’t help us to meet attractive people of the opposite sex who think the same way we do.

Do you think I’m smart? Or a good writer? A stand-up fellow, even? Better than average, at least? Well, I’ll assume so, if for no other reason than the fact that you willingly return here to read. Anyway, the reason I ask is because I’ve dutifully taken in critically acclaimed albums and books that made no difference in my life at all. They didn’t open up new ways of experiencing the world. They didn’t inspire me with new artistic possibilities. The qualities that others praised as innovative and mesmerizing struck me as trivial or overblown. Conversely, I’ve been lifted into a buoyant mood by simple ear candy, making my mind feel alert and engaged, facilitating the energy and awareness that sometimes leads to keen observation and penetrating insight. I’ve been inspired by brilliant metaphors and turns of phrase found in otherwise forgettable fantasy fiction. The Muses seem to delight in popping out of the strangest hiding places.

If you like what you see here, you should know that an awful lot of unimpressive pieces helped construct the mosaic, is what I’m saying.

Aesthetic taste just isn’t a reliable indicator of overall character, the best efforts of so many pop culture cliques to try to reassure themselves otherwise notwithstanding. I find that most of the people I would call truly interesting are the ones whose taste is scattershot and contradictory without betraying any shame over “guilty pleasures.” And I’m bored silly by all those poor little insecure magpies, collecting various pop culture objets d’art, hoping for some vicarious transmission of superiority thereby.

1 2 3 4 5 >»