November 2010

Cast and Crew

By in omnigatherum No Comments

In the seasonal spirit of gratitude, I would like to take a moment to express my appreciation for Brian, Shanna and Noel, the Three Amígos Stooges Wise Persons regular inhabitants of the peanut gallery, as well as the small contingent of lurkers and anonymice. I take pity upon your bewildering lack of discernment and good taste in reading material, but be that as it may, I’m humbled and glad for the fact that you willingly choose to spend so much time reading my fulminations and manifestos instead of being good little worker drones for The Man.

Now, if only you could stop putting your shoes on the furniture and leaving crumbs all over the floor. Friggin’ barbarians…

Peotillomania

By in atheism, augean stables, philosophy, religion No Comments

“Hitchens Beats Blair in Religion Debate.” Well, I guess that settles that! Let’s get God’s tombstone ready! Oh, wait, what? You say Hitchens himself was “sorely defeated” by “the most fearsome and effective” (or is that “interesting but stupid“?) William Lane Craig? And Richard Dawkins is rude? Is that a point for God or for Jesus? Who’s keeping score?

I said before that two years of debate class, along with philosophy, made school worthwhile for me. Arguments can certainly be fun and informative. But I swear by the severed schlong of Osiris, I don’t understand why cheerleaders for either side put so much stock in these debates. We’ve all seen examples of clever sophists getting the rhetorical better of someone who doesn’t excel at having to think on their feet, and while I don’t agree with the old saw about not being able to reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason their way into in the first place, it is true that most believers, even if backed into a logical corner, will toss the old “gut faith” smoke grenade and make their getaway.
I went through a very brief phase of reading these sorts of pro-and-con arguments over God’s existence, but the sudden onset of narcolepsy put an end to that. Not to mention my conviction that in the absence of any sort of immortal soul, the Big Fella’s existence or lack thereof is rendered irrelevant.

Bought, Ensouled

By in extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, moralizing No Comments

“When you leave a product on the shelf, your body and soul start reclaiming itself,” says Talen. “Consumerism is never surprising. It is predicable.” His alternative call to arms? “Be imaginative.”

I’m all in favor of Buy Nothing Day. I celebrate it a couple hundred times a year, in fact. But I couldn’t help but laugh at the ironic, epigrammatic beauty of that statement. You know what’s really predicable (sic)? Romantic philippics about the “soul”-deadening effects of consumerism, as opposed to the lasting happiness of a life grounded in, uh, “natural” desires and artisanal crafts. Look, Rousseau, people were bored, unfulfilled, unimaginative and miserable long before the modern-day Satanic mills of big-box department stores, and conversely, there are people who manage to happily partake of this consumerist cornucopia without suffering an existential crash, because they were never high on utopian fantasies to begin with. All things in moderation, you know?
I note that he, like so many of his comrades, frames it as a choice between the undifferentiated mass-mind (bor-ring!) and the unique snowflake status of the true artiste (oui, oui!) Again, I suggest that people like the Right Reverend Billy might want to consider the thesis of Heath and Potter, that the real engine driving modern consumerism is the urge to distinguish oneself as an individual.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

By in meditation, poetry No Comments

If there’s anything more sublime than autumn in the mountains, I haven’t experienced it yet.
On the road, as usual, when I decided to stop and meditate on the stark beauty of a view from a mountaintop. I sat with my back to a pine tree and thought about Li Po’s poem, “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain”:

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.
We sit together, the mountain and I,
Until only the mountain remains.

No, Atropos, No

By in animals, the big sleep No Comments

Michael Schaub and Matt Zoller Seitz bring up one of the lesser-acknowledged aspects of the holidays, the opportunity to reflect on those who aren’t around to share them with us this time.

It’s something that’s been on my mind constantly anyway. A year ago today, my oldest dog died after several months of suffering with cancer. He had been preceded less than two months earlier by my youngest, also from cancer.
I make no attempt to hide the fact that I’m one of those people who mostly prefer the company of my dogs to that of other people. I’ve been around dogs my entire life. I’ve done volunteer work at veterinary clinics, animal shelters and rescue organizations. My dogs are my family and my best friends. This one in particular went nearly everywhere with me, from the time he was nine weeks old until he died a month shy of his fourteenth birthday. He always amusingly held himself aloof from the others as if he thought of himself as more human than canine, preferring to sit quietly and patiently next to me, whatever I was doing, rather than with the rest of the pack. I doubt I’ll ever meet another one quite like him.
It’s something about the passage of a year that brings home the finality of it to me. You can’t help but think, after the loss of a loved one, about every significant experience and how they’re not there to share it with you, but something about this particular measurement of time brings it around full circle for me. Something about having passed all the milestones of a calendar year without his company makes me feel deep down in my bones that he really is gone and never coming back.
I still think and dream about them constantly, especially as another one enters her final days, struggling with degenerative myelopathy. I wish I had something eloquent to say in honor of them, but I still find it too hard to focus long enough to corral my thoughts. Luckily, Chris Clarke already wrote one of the most beautiful passages I’ve ever read, one that I could never improve on anyway:

There will be years and years, each small forgetting a betrayal, each small betrayal a comfort, each small comfort another death. There is no lesson here, no lesson. Narcissus sought himself reflected in the world and found only death. Plums will bloom until there are no more plums. I will join him diffused into the soil, our component atoms intermingled one day soon, a dog and a man who walked together for a time, a brief spark of sweetness in an aching world.

Where at Least I Know I’m Free

By in jests japes jokes jollies, media/propaganda No Comments

You see this in pretty much every single article about Communist/authoritarian states:

DiCaprio then called himself half-Russian, the state-run RIA Novosti news agency reported.

No matter how servile and superficial our political reporting is, hey, at least we’re not officially state-run! We put our leashes on all by ourselves!
Putin has carefully cultivated a tough-guy image throughout his political career, using strong language in speeches and practicing judo and even co-piloting a fighter jet in front of the television cameras.
His latest stunt came earlier this month, when Putin burned rubber on a racing circuit in a Formula One car.
Seriously! Who could ever be bamboozled by such an obvious act?
I have a nice, shiny quarter here for anyone who can find me one example of the New York Times, Washington Post, or any of the “respectable” news channels using this sort of openly mocking, skeptical tone while George W. was still in office.

Write Away

By in socmed, technology, writing No Comments

Larry Magid:

But my big question is whether Zuckerberg is right when he supposes that young people are likely to permanently adapt to alternatives to traditional email. While it’s true that kids are developing some new habits that will last a lifetime, it has always been the case that some teen habits change as they get older, especially as they enter the work force.
Fact is, many businesses run on email today and though things will change over time, I don’t see instant messaging, text messaging, Facebook messaging or any other technology threatening email anytime soon.
Sigh. Does this count as a Pyrrhic victory? I mean, I shook my head in bemusement when I read the press accompanying Zuckerberg’s announcement and saw him claiming that high-school kids make him feel old when they tell him that they don’t use email anymore because it’s too slow. Well, fuck those little ADHD bastards anyway. I hope it turns out that their goddamned phones are slowly giving them all thumb cancer too! But if the best people can offer up in email’s defense is that it’s more efficient for business, well, talk about damning with faint praise. Doesn’t anyone use it for actual letters anymore? For, dare I say, the art of writing? As a labor of love?
Which brings me to this excellent essay by Bill Morris:
This doesn’t mean Estleman and I are Luddites or cheesy romantics. It’s both simpler and more complicated than that. It means we don’t believe that faster is necessarily better, and we’re distrustful of a bill of goods that our gadget-drunk culture has swallowed whole, the illusion that technology has some magical power to improve our lives. Estleman and I are essentially conservative animals who distrust the notion, so prevalent today, that all things can be improved with the right technology, the right information, the right management, the right laws. While mankind strives to improve itself to death, some of us want no part of it.
…One could argue that writing is writing – it’s all communication – whether it’s scratches on a cave wall, glyphs in stone, ink on papyrus, pencil on paper, typed characters on bond stationery, or digits in the ether. I disagree. In writing and reading, no less than in art, the medium of creation and consumption is critical to a work’s effect. That’s not to say that writing longhand is better than writing on a typewriter, or that writing on a typewriter is better than writing on a laptop; rather, it’s to say that each of these acts is different from the others and will yield different types of prose.
…Similarly, tapping out an e-mail and hitting the Send key (or texting with your opposable thumbs) produces a different effect from composing a letter, revising it, putting it in an envelope and mailing it to someone. And opening that envelope and reading that letter is a different experience from reading an e-mail or a text message. It simply is. It’s more tactile, more suspenseful, more personal – and more likely leave a lasting impression. When writing an e-mail, I find I write much faster and with less thought and feeling than when I write a letter.
Preach it, my brutha. Of course, I disagree that email is an inferior medium for writing letters, as I’ve already said in detail. One point I will keep hammering on until everyone cries, begs and pleads for me to give it a rest already, though, is that the gadgets themselves are not causing us to be more hurried and careless in our correspondence; they’re just symptoms of our work-obsessive culture that recycles every second of free time into an opportunity to get more work done. You can draw the line almost anywhere you choose. He and his friend stick to typewriters and envelopes; I happily use email and hyperlinks but refuse to have anything to do with social networking sites. I’m sure there are some who would argue that even those can be used intelligently, but even so, that’s just a bridge too far for me. Doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that people find a way to set aside the time and energy – assuming they have the desire – to make communication with their friends and loved ones something worth reading. Technology makes it easier for people to be lazy, true, but maybe the fact that we’re so eager to blame gadgetry for cheapening our relationships is indicative of a refusal to consider something more unsettling — maybe a number of our friends just don’t care enough to make us a priority, and vice versa.

Weard Beirds

By in beards No Comments

Paula Marantz Cohen:

I have never known my husband without his beard, a fact that disturbed me in the early years of our relationship. What was he hiding: a weak chin, a saber scar, a slothful nature, a psychological need for a barrier between himself and the world?
…My son, at 25, sports something that alternates between a five o’clock shadow and a two-day stubble. I personally am not crazy about this; it looks as though he has forgotten to shave. But I suppose this is the point — the look is an affectation of forgetting to shave, not a real forgetting. As I think more about it, the shadow/stubble carries interesting resonance. Unlike my husband’s clipped boxed beard with its sense of modesty and stability, my son’s quasi-beardedness is more whimsical, more a self-proclaimed mask. It also announces its transitory state unequivocably: No sooner is it achieved than it is erased in order to be begun again. This seems emblematic of our current Internet culture which is ephemeral and continually in need of updating. My son’s quasi-beardedness may also reflect a slowing of the progress from childhood to maturity, what sociologists, referring to the years between 20 and 30, have dubbed “emerging adulthood.”
Ahem. You know, I’m all for indulging in fanciful, quasi-poetic digressions about ordinary topics, but if I may, a prosaic explanation: perhaps, like myself, some men grow beards (to whatever degree) because they like the way they look with them. Maybe they simply have no fucks to give when it comes to fashion and the chattering imbeciles who pay attention to it. Could be that they spend enough time outdoors in cold weather that every little bit of extra insulation helps.
All valid reasons, and ones I personally endorse. I would add that sporting a beard also associates one with a sort of bohemian-poet-musician archetype, which suits me fine, and when paired with my favorite style of hat, the Fidel cap, it adds a bit of revolutionary panache to my proclamations of being a Grouchomarxist.

Nepenthe

By in foolosophy, psychology, science No Comments

Yeah, I’m going to say that this looks rife with potential for unintended consequences:
Soldiers haunted by scenes of war and victims scarred by violence may wish they could wipe the memories from their minds. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University say that may someday be possible.
A commercial drug remains far off — and its use would be subject to many ethical and practical questions. But scientists have laid a foundation with their discovery that proteins can be removed from the brain’s fear center to erase memories forever.
“When a traumatic event occurs, it creates a fearful memory that can last a lifetime and have a debilitating effect on a person’s life,” says Richard L. Huganir, professor and chair of neuroscience in the Hopkins School of Medicine.
…”Erasing a memory and then everything bad built on that is an amazing idea, and I can see all sorts of potential,” she said. “But completely deleting a memory, assuming it’s one memory, is a little scary. How do you remove a memory without removing a whole part of someone’s life, and is it best to do that, considering that people grow and learn from their experiences.”
…Wolpe could see only limited uses for erasing a memory for now, such as for those suffering after a rape or single terrifying event.
“Certainly, there may be appropriate applications,” he said. “But human identity is tied into memory. It creates our distinctive personalities. It’s a troublesome idea to begin to be able to manipulate that, even if for the best of motives.”
I don’t dismiss this lightly, let me add. My mom thought I had total recall as a toddler (I don’t), and I’ve had others suggest that I have a memory often found among people with some of the mild autism-spectrum characteristics (which seems plausible from what I’ve learned since then). I’ve actually long been in the habit of pretending to forget things occasionally, or downplaying how easily I can remember odd details even after long periods of time, because I’ve found that it tends to freak people out. Probably because they assume that only an obsessed stalker could possibly remember that much.
So I’m very well aware that there are a number of things that would probably increase my overall happiness were they to be surgically removed from my memory, but still, I’d never choose that option, especially in light of the theme we were just discussing.

Pics or It Didn’t Happen!

By in non compos mentis, socmed, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Thanks to Arthur for passing this story along to me:
Popular TV personality Bill Nye collapsed onstage Tuesday night in front of hundreds of audience members during a presentation at USC, campus officials said.
…Tristan Camacho, a USC senior who attended the lecture, said Nye was walking toward the podium when he collapsed mid-sentence. “Then after about 10 seconds, he popped back up with much gusto and asked everybody how long he was out for and went on with a story about how a similar thing happened to him that morning.”
Nye appeared determined to finish his presentation, but began slurring his words and stumbled against his laptop, Camacho said. At first, Nye refused the offer of a chair and continued taking sips from a water bottle. Camacho said Nye was eventually removed from the stage.
“Nobody went to his aid at the very beginning when he first collapsed — that just perplexed me beyond reason,” USC senior Alastair Fairbanks said. “Instead, I saw students texting and updating their Twitter statuses. It was just all a very bizarre evening.”
Oh, well done, Bill! Obviously he has no talent for self-promotion, or he could have been immortalized in the realm of cultural legend. If only he had had the forethought to go ahead and die, he could have been the new Kitty Genovese for a modern generation of solipsist retards.
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