December 2010

Lend Me Your Ears

By in music

What sort of music have I been enjoying the most this year? Which albums spent the most time in my stereo over the past twelve months? Why, I’m glad you asked! Let’s do this thing. Sorry, Brian and Heywood, it’s been a pretty metal-free year.

• Morphine, At Your Service
My joy at discovering a new double-album of unreleased tracks, alternate takes, and live recordings compiled by the surviving members of Morphine is the only thing that prevented me from being mad at the entire world for failing to notify me that the damned thing actually came out more than a year ago. What good are you bastards, huh?
But who can be angry when there’s so much good stuff here to enjoy? Ah, Mark Sandman, you’re still missed more than you could possibly have known.
Favorite songs: Call Back, Women R Dogs, Lilah II, Bye Bye Johnny
• Nobody, One for All Without Hesitation
Nobody, a.k.a. Elvin Estela, is simply sui generis. Is he electronica? Alternative? Does it really matter? On the negative side, he discovered Auto-Tune for this record. On the positive side, he released it as a double album, one disc being instrumental versions, so I guess that balances things out. It’s not my favorite of his work, but it’s still better than so much else.
Favorite songs: Hip$ters, Face to the Sun, Coming Down (but since none of those are on YouTube, let me link to some of his older stuff: After the Summer Hits, Electro-Acoustic, Siesta con Susana, Spin the Bright Sun Rose, Ignite, All the Shallow Deep. After all, I listened to them obsessively too.)

• Against Me!, White Crosses
Angrier and more substantial than most punk/pop bands you’ll hear on the radio (even their name is pissed off and yelling). Tom Gabel writes some of the most unwieldy and overly-wordy lines I’ve ever heard, but when the songs are so infectiously catchy, it’s easy to forgive.
• The Chemical Brothers, Further
The Brothers gonna work it out, indeed. What can I say? I love pretty much everything they do.
Favorite songs: K+D+B, Horse Power, Dissolve
• Scissor Sisters, Night Work
My earliest musical memory is being entranced by Elton John’s falsetto vocals at the end of “Bennie and the Jets.” And I was inundated with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack when I was but a wee tyke. So bite me, I can’t help but love a campy, disco-y sounding band who were obviously influenced by both Elton and the Bee Gees. Again, not my favorite of theirs overall, but still fun to shake your booty to.
• LCD Soundsystem, This Is Happening
Alternative rock with an electronica beat.
• Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, Dark Night of the Soul
Another dead musician named Mark that I miss tremendously, but at least Linkous’ suicide in March was offset a little by the long-delayed release of his collaboration with Danger Mouse. Haunting (and haunted) music.
• Broken Bells, Broken Bells
I never was interested in the Shins, but apparently Danger Mouse makes everything better, as this collaboration with James Mercer demonstrates.
• School of Seven Bells, Disconnect from Desire
My Bloody Valentine-style shoegaze combined with perhaps Ladytron-style electronica. Ethereal.
Favorite songs: I L U, Dial
• Best New (To Me) Band of the Year: Alabama 3
Again, how is it that you all let me go the last decade and a half without hearing the first thing about this band? Yes, if I had watched The Sopranos, I would have heard their song “Woke Up This Morning” being used as the theme, but I didn’t, so the onus was once again on you to keep me informed, and once again, you let me down. I won’t stand for much more of this! What other secrets are you keeping from me, huh?
Anyway, who would have thought that country-blues-gospel-acid house would work well together? It’s as if My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was composed of a bunch of Brits pretending to be from the Deep South. Awesomely bizarre.
• Biggest Disappointment of the Year: Blond Redhead, Penny Sparkle
Damn. After loving 23 with all my heart, this sure did fall flat. Zzzzzzzzzz.
Favorite songs from 23 which will have to sustain me until the next record which will hopefully be up to standards: Publisher, The Dress, Silently, 23

We Believe In Nothing, Lebowski, Nothing

By in history, moralizing, nihilism

Chris Hedges is indeed wankeriffic when he gets on his anti-atheist hobbyhorse, but I do think Ebonmuse is being slightly unfair to him here:

As I’ve written before, Chris Hedges is a nihilist. He flatly denies the possibility of moral progress, and vehemently asserts that any efforts to improve humanity will inevitably end in mass slaughter and destruction. He says so bluntly at the beginning of his book:

Those who insist we are morally advancing as a species are deluding themselves. There is little in science or history to support this idea. Human individuals can make moral advances, as can human societies, but they also make moral reverses… We alternate between periods of light and periods of darkness. We can move forward materially, but we do not move forward morally. The belief in collective moral advancement ignores the inherent flaws in human nature as well as the tragic reality of human history… All utopian schemes of impossible advances and glorious conclusions end in squalor and fanaticism. (p.10-11)

Previously, he countered Hedges by saying:

First, moral progress, though it may be slower than we would like, is real and it is undeniable. A glance over human history would offer as examples the abolition of slavery, the granting of equal rights to women and minorities, the emancipation of state from church, the flowering of democracy worldwide, the increasingly greater efforts at avoiding war through diplomacy, and many more. This is not to say that there aren’t many evils remaining, nor that no new ones have arisen.

A stickler might note that the examples he cites are common in the West, but hardly worldwide. And conceding, even as an afterthought, that this is not to say that no new evils have arisen, well — isn’t that a large part of Hedges’ point? We make progress on this or that specific front, but overall, plus ça change. The larger themes remain, with new variations on them appearing. As John Gray put it:
History is not an ascending spiral of human advance, or even an inch-by-inch crawl to a better world. It is an unending cycle in which changing knowledge interacts with unchanging human needs. Freedom is recurrently won and lost in an alternation that includes long periods of anarchy and tyranny, and there is no reason to suppose that this cycle will ever end. In fact, with human power increasing as a result of growing scientific knowledge, it can only become more violent.
The core of the idea of progress is that human life becomes better with the growth of knowledge. The error is not in thinking that human life can improve. Rather, it is in imagining that improvement can ever be cumulative. Unlike science, ethics and politics are not activities in which what is learnt in one generation can be passed on to an indefinite number of future generations. Like the arts, they are practical skills and can be easily lost.
This is a tragic view, as well as a staunchly conservative one, but it’s hardly nihilism. As Hedges said, we do make moral advances, but we also make moral reverses. Cyclical, not linear. And it’s foolish to put so much stock into state-granted “rights” as an indicator of deep-rooted progress. That which can be granted with the stroke of a pen can be taken away easily, too. Shall we go talk to some Japanese families on the West coast about what good all those Constitutional rights as American citizens were for their grandparents in the 1940s in the face of jingoist hysteria? Do we need to revisit some of the more ominous recent polls showing a worrisome number of Americans willing to trade their own rights for an illusion of security, let alone those of others like Muslims and Latinos? The United States a hundred years from now could just as likely be a Franco-style military dictatorship with severely curtailed civil liberties or a failed state with no worldwide influence, as it could a sorta-democracy with an uneasy tolerance for gays and atheists. As Gray also notes in other places, authoritarian states like Russia and China have proved that popularity, stability and economic power are not necessarily linked to an acceptance of American-style individual rights.

We’ll Take a Cup of Kindness Yet

By in bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, montaigne, socmed, technology

Can any river possibly flow
beyond the love of friends?
– Li Po
I enjoy reading meditations on the nature of online relationships and the ways in which our very ideas of relationships are changing as a result of the Internet, but it is a bit of a predictable trope for writers to contrast online interaction at its shallowest with traditional interaction at its deepest, and Roger Scruton provides yet another example:

Yet already something new is entering the world of human relations with these innocent-seeming sites. There is a novel ease with which people can make contact with each other through the screen. No more need to get up from your desk and make the journey to your friend’s house. No more need for weekly meetings, or the circle of friends in the downtown restaurant or bar. All those effortful ways of making contact can be dispensed with: a touch of the keyboard and you are there, where you wanted to be, on the site that defines your friends. But can this be real friendship, when it is pursued and developed in such facile and costless ways?
Real friendship shows itself in action and affection. The real friend is the one who comes to the rescue in your hour of need; who is there with comfort in adversity and who shares with you his own success. This is hard to do on the screen — the screen, after all, is primarily a locus of information, and is only a place of action insofar as communication is a form of action. Only words, and not hands or the things they carry, can reach from it to comfort the sufferer, to ward off an enemy’s blows, or to provide any of the tangible assets of friendship in a time of need. It is arguable that the more people satisfy their need for companionship through relationships carried out on the screen, the less will they develop friendships of that other kind, the kind that offers help and comfort in the real trials of human life.
Maybe it’s different for British philosophers, but honestly, among ordinary people, aren’t many of those we call our friends simply companions with whom we pass the time? I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with enjoying the company of others for the hell of it, but I don’t imagine I’m alone in thinking that if I were forced to settle for making friends among those in my close proximity, I’d be very lonely indeed. I guess I’m an intellectual, if we define the term as someone who enjoys ideas for their own sake, beyond any practical import; someone who enjoys “thinking about thinking”, as one definition of philosophy has it. (I hasten to add, being intellectual is not at all the same thing as being smart or profound; plenty of intellectuals have subscribed to some of the stupidest ideas ever invented.) And frankly, most people seem to be content to know just enough to get by. To almost everyone I know in real life, evenings and weekends are for leisure and entertainment, not reading and writing. As Dennis Baron said in reference to Nicholas Carr’s own portentous claims of the Internet’s corrosive effects upon our lives, “That position incorrectly assumes that when we’re not online we throw ourselves into high-culture mode, reading Tolstoi spelled with an i and writing sestinas and villanelles instead of shopping lists.” Without the Internet, I’d be stranded in an intellectual wasteland. Hell, communicating with like-minded people online is probably all that preserves what social skills I do have.
Scruton can call personal shyness a “defect” leading to narcissism all he wants, but for people like me, being taciturn and standoffish is neither good nor bad; it’s just the way it is. The things that give me the most enjoyment are largely solitary pursuits. I simply don’t need much companionship. I’m one of those for whom the anonymity and distance of the Internet paradoxically makes me feel freer to express myself openly and honestly, which in turn has led to some of the closest friendships I’ve ever had. His assertion that having a screen between you and your friend, one that you can avoid at will, amounts to “denying the other the power and the freedom to challenge you in your deeper nature”, begs the question of what our “deeper nature” is to begin with. Me, I tend to mostly identify “who I am” with “what I think”, and I’m fortunate enough to have friends who challenge me in that regard all the time. My deeper nature has nothing to do with small talk and sitting around in my underwear scratching myself, and once again, it’s really tiresome that so many people confuse “inchoate” with “authentic”.
Like most things, I suppose, you get out of your online relationships what you put into them. Maybe it is more effort to have to use linear thought and words to fill in the gaps left by an absence of body language and other nonverbal cues, but I don’t see why that can’t be mostly surmounted by honesty and a good faith effort. Li Po and Tu Fu carried on a twenty-year friendship in poetry despite being separated over most of that time by war, drought, and exile. The most significant amount of time they spent together was a three-month span in 744. Was that not a “real” friendship, then? We’re still talking about it almost 1,300 years later, aren’t we? Or what about Montaigne, who only had four years in his late twenties in which to know Etienne de La Boétie, but was haunted by the loss for the rest of his life?
And let’s also consider that for some people, friendship is an opportunity to “share not suffering but joy”, as Nietzsche put it. Cultivating the best of ourselves to share while sweeping away the rest is also a way to provide support in each other’s hour of need. Not everyone needs a shoulder to literally cry on.

How You Say…?

By in language, writing

Roy and Doghouse, two blogospheric wordsmiths who turn me green with envy on a regular basis, do a little riffing on “The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English.” I love these sorts of lists. I just love words, period. I love reading dictionaries. I love sounding a new word out, rolling it around my tongue, thinking of a sentence to use it in. I love having to look up a word when reading someone else’s writing. I love going here to hear how to pronounce a word I’ve never heard spoken before. In fact, one of my pet peeves is how often it’s used as a putdown to accuse someone of using ten-dollar words, or some such thing. Granted, some people use vocabulary like a cuttlefish uses ink, to hide in obscurity, but still, it’s such a cheap shot, to act as if your familiarity with any particular word is the standard to judge by. Well, I’ve never heard of it before, so fuck you, Professor Tweedcoat Elbowpatches! Yew think yer better’n me?

Where exactly is the cutoff date after which we’re no longer allowed to learn anything new, anyway?
But I digress. Here, then, is a brief collection of some of my own favorite words and phrases, chosen more or less at random from memory. (Believe me, I could go on all day like this.) Some are very useful, some are unjustly obscure, and some are just beautifully poetic and fun to say out loud no matter what they mean. Dictionaries used and recommended here include: The Oxford Essential Dictionary of Difficult Words, Depraved and Insulting English, Le Mot Juste, and The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.
Anomie: condition of despair brought on by a breakdown in the rules of conduct and loss of sense of purpose
Argumentum ad individium: argument which appeals to men’s prejudices
Contra mundum: against the world; used primarily of one who takes an unpopular position and opposes majority feeling
Gaudium certaminis: the joy of the struggle
Pons asinorum: the ass’s bridge; problem inaccessible to people of limited wit
Tedium vitae: weariness with life
Au courant: up to date, well-informed
Au fait: well-versed, expert
C’est tout dire: (you have said) all there is to say
Faux dévot: one who feigns piety
Kulturschande: insult to good taste, crime against civilization
Weltschmerz: world-weariness
Penseroso: thinker, usually with a melancholic disposition
Chiromaniac: a compulsive masturbator
Coprophiliac: a sexual deviant with an abnormal interest in feces
Cumberworld: a thoroughly useless person or thing
Driveler: one who talks in an idiotic fashion
Dunderwhelp: a detestable numbskull
Entheomaniac: one who is literally insane about religion
Epicaricacy: schadenfreude
Gongoozler: a dimwit who stares at unusual things
Infandous: too odious to be spoken of
Merdivore: shit-eater
Misologist: one with a hatred of mental activity
Mysophiliac: a person who is sexually excited by filth and excretions
Peotillomania: the abnormal habit of constantly pulling at the penis
Sophomania: the delusion that one is wise
Tartuffe: religious hypocrite
Ventose: verbally flatulent; full of pomp, conceit and bombast
Anodyne: inoffensive
Aperçu: comment or brief reference that makes an illuminating or entertaining point
Ataraxy: a state of serene calmness
Benighted: state of contemptible ignorance
Cogitate: think deeply about something
Dysphoria: state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life
Ersatz: inferior substitute
Fanfaronade: arrogant or boastful talk
Farouche: sullen or shy in company
Farrago: a confused mixture
Ineffable: too great or extreme to be described in words
Insouciance: casual lack of concern; indifference
Ipse dixit: unproven or dogmatic statement
Laodicean: lukewarm or halfhearted especially with respect to religion or politics
Meretricious: apparently attractive, but in reality having no value
Perspicuous: clearly expressed and easily understood; lucid
Sequacious: lacking independence or originality of thought
Supercilious: behaving or thinking as if one is superior to others
Coruscate: 1. To give off or reflect bright beams or flashes of light; to sparkle. 2. To exhibit brilliant, sparkling technique or style.
Nepenthe: 1. A drug or drink, or the plant yielding it, mentioned by ancient writers as having the power to bring forgetfulness of sorrow or trouble. 2. Anything inducing a pleasurable sensation of forgetfulness, esp. of sorrow or trouble.
Lucifugous: Avoiding light
Kenspeckle: Conspicuous; easily seen or recognized.
Anacoluthia: Lack of grammatical sequence or coherence, esp. in a sentence

And, You Know, Through This Situation I Found Jesus and Asked Him for Forgiveness and I Turned My Life Over to God…

By in animals

AP:

Police say a Colorado man is suspected of stomping his girlfriend’s puppy to death because she wouldn’t answer her phone.
Colorado Springs police arrested 25-year-old Christopher Blackstone on suspicion of felony cruelty to animals after his girlfriend discovered her dog wrapped in a garbage bag in a trash bin outside her apartment on Dec. 24.
Just one? Aww, that’s nothing. His lawyer’s probably asking him right now: How’s your forward pass, kid? Your time in the 40-yard dash? What about your jump shot? Hell, we can work with a fastball! Play your cards right, and in a mere couple years, you can have everyone from airhead writers at Salon to the President himself urging everyone to forgive and forget so we can get down to the important business of being entertained.

Écrasez l’Infâme

By in books, history

Voltaire dared to criticize and question the ruthlessness of the Catholic Church’s power and its coordination with the oppressive government of Louis XV. Armed with pen and paper, he faced a government and church that wielded the power of life and death. If Voltaire was not an action-hero, he was a hero all the same, and if had to throw a joke-bomb and run, let him run! Mankind is the better for it. Voltaire promoted tolerance as the most important tenet of civilization and mocked fanatics of all stripes. For this, of course, he was hated and reviled by the powers of his time, and even some of our own.

Despite the indifferent review, I’d be interested to read this book. “The Vile Scribbler” was actually an epithet I could have sworn I heard someone say in reference to him, but when I tried to find the source again later, I couldn’t. Maybe I just hallucinated the whole thing. I do recall Mozart referring to him as a “godless arch-rascal” upon his death, which, come to think of it, would have been a pretty cool pseudonym itself.

I Declare War On Stupidity

By in bread and circuses, fresh hell, moralizing, ohferfucksake

How does that saying go? First time’s an accident, second time’s a coincidence, third time’s an enemy action? Well, then, I feel confident in accusing Mary Elizabeth Williams of waging ignorant aggression, and justified in responding with extreme prejudice.

So let’s get this straight — at an age when plenty of young adults are still living at home, working part time at Chili’s, and making their biggest plans based on the merits of $5 pitchers or Jager on tap, Bristol Palin is a home owner contemplating her educational future. You’d think that maybe the prospect of Palin — a girl who got knocked up at 17, has a high profile and an often justly reviled family, and whose recent claim to fame involved dancing in a gorilla suit — becoming a property owning, possibly matriculating member of society would be enough to make her numerous detractors pause a moment and say, hey, good for her.

She sure does have a soft spot for the helpless and downtrodden, doesn’t she? First she felt obliged to take up for the poor millionaire athlete against the mean old animal welfare workers, then she bravely stuck up for a plucky little Bronze Age mystery cult against the tyranny of a billboard suggesting it’s a crock of shit, and now this. I’m actually intrigued to see what she’s going to come up with next!

You know, I faced a serious dilemma here, one that took an actual coin flip to resolve. No, really. I’ve said before that the amount of scrutiny the Palin family gets is in inverse proportion to their actual significance, that far too many bloggers have been lazily using them as a crutch to avoid writing about anything remotely interesting or important. My first instinct here was to avoid this low-hanging fruit, to refrain from wasting any more pixels on these clowns. But I’ve only become aware of what a fucking moronic hack Williams is in the last couple weeks, so the novelty of mocking her still hasn’t worn off quite yet. What to do, what to do? Well, the coin came up heads, so here I am.

But before I start launching salvos, let me concede a general point she tries to make: it’s a bad thing when urban, educated liberals gratuitously sneer at people simply because they happen to be rural, poor and uneducated. Not everyone who lives in a trailer park or a small town in the middle of nowhere is a bigoted yahoo, it’s true. Nevertheless, we’re talking about the Palins here, and you kind of lose any expectation of sympathy or fairness when your entire public persona, since the very first time we made your accursed acquaintance, has been purely based on condescending, judgmental sneering at anyone who doesn’t fit your bullshit definition of what “real” Myrrhkins are supposed to be like. I suppose it’s possible that Bristol could turn out to be something other than the perpetual resentment machine that her mother is, but based on what we’ve seen so far, it ain’t bloody likely, especially since she’s already been generously rewarded for simply being one of her mother’s appendages.

Being a hack, though, Williams can’t just leave off at suggesting that maybe the kid should be given a chance to become her own person. She has to go for the gobsmacking, counterintuitive comparison between Bristol and her peers as evidence of why she should be respected, if not admired. Oh yes, Mary Beth, let’s get this straight, indeed: Sarah Palin is the telegenic face of a political movement that takes a malicious glee in scolding other people for their supposed moral failings and lack of responsibility while making endless allowances for the inbred children of their aristocracy. If George W.’s last name had been anything but Bush, he would have been living in a cardboard box outside an ABC store in his forties, not being groomed for a career in politics. Most of us don’t have fathers with rich friends who will pour millions of dollars into keeping us out of the gutter. And unlike Bristol Palin, most unwed teen mothers are not going to be given tens of thousands of dollars in speaking fees to go around and tell other teens what a mistake it was to have a kid at such a young age, because, hey, look at how much she’s suffering. They’re not going to be provided with lucrative appearances on imbecilic reality TV shows simply because of name recognition. In a society run by people like Bristol’s mother, they’re going to have extremely limited access to birth control, education and employment opportunities, and almost no margin of error when it comes to making the sort of dumb choices that adolescents are indeed prone to making. I had a few peers who made the mistake of getting married too young before getting stuck raising a child on their own while working two or three jobs and going to school part-time, but all I seem to recall hearing from the conservative aristocracy was that these sluts with their loose morals were destroying the fabric of society, and they needed to get back to church and stop being so quick to leave their husbands over a little infidelity or physical abuse.

I don’t blame Bristol, or anyone else given the opportunity, for grabbing that cash with both hands and making a stash. But there’s something fucking obscene about someone like Williams, who you would think should know better, acting as if she earned a damned thing, rather than being just the latest example of an entitled brat benefiting from incredibly good fortune while telling everyone else that it’s all due to being a “hard ass worker“.

Don’t Break the Law if You Can’t Throw a Ball

By in bread and circuses, ohferfucksake

The White House says President Barack Obama has commended the owner of the Philadelphia Eagles for giving quarterback Michael Vick a second chance after his release from prison.
Obama spokesman Bill Burton says the president told owner Jeffrey Lurie that while he condemns the crimes Vick was convicted of, he believes people who have paid for their crimes should have the opportunity to contribute to society again.
Yeah, we’ve heard this a lot ever since his prison term neared its end, usually from people in the NFL with dollar signs for pupils. Even so, I agreed, despite my utter loathing of this two-legged sack of human waste. He should be able to contribute to society again. Those kennels at the SPCA aren’t going to hose themselves out, after all. But I’m sure there’s nothing disingenuous about this sudden consensus that it’s time to officially forgive Michael Vick that just so happens to accompany Vick’s leading his team into the playoffs, is there? Don’t all illiterate, functionally retarded, violent felons get to waltz right back into their former high-paying jobs once they serve their time? Are you seriously suggesting that Myrrhkins don’t have a single moral conviction they wouldn’t happily sacrifice for the sake of entertainment? Well! I bid you good day, sir!
I SAID GOOD DAY!

It Was Twenty Years Ago Today

By in books

Wittgenstein liked Hollywood westerns and crime fiction. Jiddu Krishnamurti enjoyed detective novels. Me, when I want some light reading, something for sheer fun, I turn to fantasy novels. Dungeons and Dragons sort of stuff, although I never actually played D&D.

But anyway, I remember December 27th, 1990. My brother had gotten a Nintendo game called Wizards and Warriors for Christmas, and playing it made me think, “You know, I like this sort of thing; I should go check out some fantasy novels.” And so I did. The first one I got was R.A. Salvatore’s Streams of Silver, which was actually the second novel in a trilogy, but Waldenbooks didn’t have the first one in stock, and I didn’t feel like walking up to the other end of the mall to B. Dalton’s.
I had one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had after I got home, so I spent the rest of the day comatose in the dark and didn’t get any reading done, but I tore through it over the next two days and loved it so much that I went back out and bought the first in the trilogy, plus whatever other Forgotten Realms novels were on the shelves. I still have a small little stain on page 13 of The Crystal Shard that always reminds me of carelessly touching the page with a finger wet with pizza grease, as I sat in a little family-owned pizza parlor (long since replaced by a chain restaurant) on New Year’s Eve, having lunch while getting started on my newest acquisitions. Good times, good times.
Twenty years later, even though many of the stories are cheesy beyond belief, and the prose and plots are often forgettable, I still enjoy them. I just read Salvatore’s latest last month, and I just got a few more novels as Christmas presents to myself, in fact. I guess it’s safe to say I’ll never outgrow this particular pleasure of youth, thank goodness.

Presence

By in alan watts, foolosophy, meditation

I liked this little Christmas story of Alex Balk’s:

One of the tragedies of our lives is how much we miss out on because we think there’s something more interesting happening wherever were aren’t; it is a lesson always learned too late.

Maybe it’s not the most logical leap, but this reminded me of something John Keats said:

– I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason –

A lot of Buddhist writing talks about how often we fail to be aware, to be present. I’ll spare you that Auden quotation again, in favor of one from Alan Watts:

The peculiarly noticeable thing about the personality of Zen people is the uncluttered mind. When you deal with Zen masters, you have a strange feeling that so long as you are with them and addressing them, they are absolutely with you. They have nothing else to do but talk to you. They are just “right there.”

For me, the common thread here is being able to realize that this, this right here, is as good as it gets. Sure, some details could be better, but some could be worse, and sometimes striving for the former unbalances everything and brings about the latter. The people and places and memories you’re looking at in nostalgic, melancholic hindsight now are the same ones you were looking past at the time, hoping to see something more glitzy, dynamic, captivating, more in line with what you think life ought to be like. And while you’re doing that, you’re dismissing things right now that will seem so much more important later.
I’ve thought about this and tried to consciously embody a more focused presence for years, but I still often find myself unconsciously gravitating toward this outlook. I have to repeatedly bring my focus back and remind myself: I don’t need to know if this or that could be improved slightly. I don’t need to keep trying to have just a little bit more, to make a good thing just a little bit better, to gorge myself on unrealistic desires until I have no appetite or appreciation for what’s available. I have a very good balance right now between the positive and negative in my life. That’s all I need, and I don’t care if I ever have anything more.

The Only Good Thing Ever to Come Out of Religion Was the Music

By in george carlin, music, omnigatherum

I know it’s de rigueur for the blognoscenti to avow their hatred of Christmas music, but I love it. Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, carols like “O Holy Night”, “Angels We Have Heard on High”, “What Child Is This”, “Away In a Manger”, and even “The Little Drummer Boy” are some of my favorite pieces of music, holiday or otherwise. Being in the Appalachian region, it’s easy to find lots of instrumental versions of Christmas music featuring traditional folk instruments, and I especially love the version of “Snowbird on the Ashbank” on this compilation. (Here’s three other favorites that I’ve collected and listen to every year.)

Sound and scent are so especially conducive to a contemplative state of mind. Music like this, specially reserved for one particular time of year, thus heightening its emotional intensity, combined with the smells of cedar and pine, mistletoe and sugarplums, sage and holly, and, of course, freshly baked foods — well. Who needs heaven?

First They Came to Recruit the Gays, and I Said Nothing…

By in atheism, germans supported their troops too, moralizing

Did you know that the United States Army is concerned with the spiritual well-being of their soldiers? Did you know that if you choose not to believe in the supernatural that the United States Army can consider you unfit to serve?

Really? It’s that easy? Well, hot damn, that’s great news! I only wish someone had told me that before I went and got all these gang tattoos on my neck and face, thinking that would keep me out of Afrakistan.

This is not even an insinuation. The US Army has taken the position that a soldier who does not feel connected to a deity is an incomplete person, and that a lack of belief will somehow compromise their principles and values. It’s right there, in black and white. That the US Army would take such a position is deplorable, and the fact that it is mandatory appears to be a direct violation of the First Amendment of the constitution that these very soldiers put themselves in harms way to protect. It is discriminatory in every way and undermines the confidence that every soldier should have that their Government is supportive of them, regardless of their belief or disbelief in a deity.

Okay, look. I promise to not dwell on the bullshit assertion that our freedom of speech and assembly has fuck-all to do with occupying sand-strewn tribal battlefields across the world if you guys promise not to make this a thing. Some of us are just fine with being discriminated against by what we see as an immoral institution. And when did the fucking U.S. military become the vehicle of choice for obtaining equal rights anyway?

Sui Generic (Slight Return)

By in art, foolosophy, mythology

“Most people are other people,” Oscar Wilde wrote. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” You get the feeling, somehow, that he thought this was a bad thing. Seems likelier that it’s just an inevitable fact about a species whose members depend for everything on each other. No single one of us has wings, claws, beaks, or any easy way to make a laptop or a catch a tuna. What we have, instead, is our relationships to other people, through which come laptops, tuna, other necessities—and the sense of connection without which we’re miserable. We create a lot of ourselves by imitating others, then, and that’s not only because we lack enough lifetimes to reinvent all human knowledge. It’s also because imitation makes it easier to communicate information and connect emotionally.

Oh, Oscar. You know, it’s certainly an arresting myth, that of the bold artist storming the heavens, rolling up his sleeves, rudely shouldering aside the gods, and plunging his arms up to the elbows into the raw stuff of creation, fashioning novelties out of sheer willpower and breaking the mold immediately after, but it is still a myth. Ecclesiastes was moaning a long time ago about nothing new under the sun. Old wine is always being passed around in new bottles. Plus ça change. In reality, the context matters as much as the content. The originality and innovation is in the arrangement of the parts in the collage, the particular constellation of elements in a specific time or place. And sometimes, originality is an accidental byproduct of an unskillful attempt to imitate something else. Clever people just draw from a wider range of influences and are better at concealing the obvious roots that betray them.
I recently mentioned a friend of mine who imagines “God” to be something like all the knowledge in the universe, actual and potential. So for her, knowledge is pretty much the equivalent of a person’s soul. “What about all your knowledge?” she asked, after I disavowed any belief in a soul or afterlife. “It was never mine to begin with,” I said. I haven’t ever come up with any breathtakingly original ideas. All I’ve ever done is tinker with ideas that other people passed on to me, applying them to the specific circumstances of my experience, combining them in ways that are only unique to my time and place. Any impression I make on other people will influence them in a way specific to them, and so on it goes. We lay claim to our little treasure-trove of influences for a short while, and then they return to the whole, to be refurbished and brought out again in different guises.

Ex Nihilo

By in atheism, mythology, nihilism, religion, science

Peter Lawler, summarizing David Bentley Hart:

Hart’s “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.
…Christ, the Christians claimed, freed us from the limitations of our merely biological natures through his perfect reconciliation of God’s nature and man’s nature. He was, the Nicene fathers concluded, fully God and fully man, and his redemption was to divinize every man. Christ freed each of us for unlimited love for every other person made in God’s image; Christ was the foundation of a virtuous way of life based on a vision of the good that has no pagan counterpart. Charity to all became the virtue most in accord with the truth about who we are. For Hart, the wonder is that anyone could have imagined the ideals of the Christian faith in the first place, given that those ideals had so little support in any pre-Christian conception of who we are.
It is barely too strong to say that, for Hart, Christ transformed each of us from being nobody to being somebody—indeed, a somebody of infinite value. None of us is destined to be a slave, and death has been overcome. We are no longer defined by our merely biological natures, because our nature is now to be both human and divine. From one view, there is no empirical evidence that death has been overcome for each particular human being. From another, the evidence is the unprecedented virtue flowing from the unconditional love present among the early Christians and that virtue’s indirect, historical transformation of the broader social and political world. The change in who we are is the result of a deepened human inwardness or self-consciousness: Christ made each of us irreducibly deeper by infusing divinity into every nook and cranny of our natures.
John Gray has made much the same point about the roots of rational humanism, but he, at least, went further and noted that the real problem was that both Christians and humanists refuse to accept the fact that homo sapiens are still, at base, another species of animal, probably destined to pass away like so many others did. Hell, Dimetrodon ruled as the Earth’s top predator for fifteen million years, all for naught; we’re barely 50,000 years into our reign and already constantly flirting with planet-wide self-destruction, yet we can’t stop singing our own praises over how essential we are to the universe.
But the logic here just cracks me up. Ignoring the fact that many of our altruistic inclinations are indeed rooted in our biological nature as social animals, conservatives like Hart claim that it’s intellectually dishonest and illogical to arbitrarily decide to value the humane virtues. Grounding them in agreement arrived at through shared experience and dialogue isn’t good enough, evidently. But arbitrarily deciding to believe the myth that an anthropomorphic deity granted us a magical essence that allows us to appreciate and embody those virtues makes for a rock-solid foundation to build a culture upon. Got it.
Again, we see this fear of nihilism that’s so peculiar to Christianity. By staking all value and meaning to a teleological conception of progression toward an unchanging, timeless realm of perfection, we convince ourselves that nothing in the here and now can be worth anything in and of itself. Like poor old Wile E. Coyote, we’re seduced by the illusion that we’re suspended over an abyss, and if we take our eyes off that heavenly future and glance down, if we fail to keep running in place, we’ll plummet to our doom.

The Dust of Exploded Beliefs May Make a Fine Sunset

By in atheism, ohferfucksake, religion, spiritual-not-religious

Proving she’s no one-trick pony, Mary Elizabeth Williams demonstrates that she can be just as stupid about atheism as she can about Michael Vick. Oops, did I just prove her point? I’m so mean.

Unlike those who would rub what they want you to “know” in your face, Gervais has a gentlemanly, eminently British way of conveying his philosophy. He considers the astonishing number of animal species in the world and understatedly muses that perhaps the story of Noah’s Ark “isn’t totally accurate.” He refers to the Bible as “a dusty old book” that sounds “a little bit farfetched.” And in a highly entertaining “holiday message” for the Wall Street Journal this week titled “Why I’m an Atheist,” he wrote, “I’m saying God doesn’t exist. I’m not saying faith doesn’t exist. I know faith exists. I see it all the time. But believing in something doesn’t make it true. Hoping that something is true doesn’t make it true.”

Of course, when other boogeyatheists like Dawkins or Hitchens point out the exact same things in more detail, even while taking pains to stress that they know and respect many intelligent believers, they’re accused of being condescending by reducing everyone’s beliefs to a caricature. Not everyone is a biblical literalist, you know! Some of them – like Williams herself, imagine that! – manage to be believing Christians without being tied down by all those dogmatic rules! May I make a suggestion? Perhaps she should take a moment to be grateful that there’s no church hierarchy with the power to violently punish that sort of heresy anymore, thanks to people who, uh, weren’t afraid to be confrontational and rude.
You know, you just can’t win when you allow yourself to get baited into arguing with someone’s feelings. She thinks a billboard by American Atheists is an example of “shoving your beliefs on other people” (as opposed to writing an essay in a national newspaper, apparently), which seems awfully mild to me. I see more aggressive advertisements for consumer products every day, but I don’t worry that someone’s going to think I’m stupid because I don’t care to own an iPad. But as we already learned, she’s vaguely devoted to some “spiritual” (of course) version of Christianity, so I get the impression that almost any blunt reminder of those who refuse to affirm her choice is going to be too much for her to abide.
Really, this sort of whining is only possible in a society where believers have long had the luxury of never having to be challenged at all. I get told by my friends that calling myself an atheist – in response to their own questions – is arrogant, and my repeated attempts to patiently explain the nuances of my stance don’t prevent me from having to answer the same questions again later on. I don’t complain about it; it’s just the way it is. Having a lot of unusual opinions and tastes in general means I’m more often than not having to listen to some uninformed blustering about a topic of interest or rude dismissal of something I hold dear. Eventually, you just learn to expect it, ignore it, laugh it off, or, if someone’s up for it, argue about it. Sometimes you actually even learn something by being offended, because it takes you out of a comfort zone you’d never get around to leaving on your own. But for fuck’s sake, how insecure do you have to be to be offended by someone who “thinks they’re sooo smart”?
…I left this out of the original draft of this post, figuring it was too obvious to need elucidating, but what the fuck; the holidays are for indulging in sweets, so let’s enjoy the scrumptious irony of a self-professed Christian complaining about pushy, judgmental behavior. After all, exclusivity is the entire point of Christianity — there is one true God and he had one, and only one, son who came to Earth to provide humankind with the one, and only one, path to salvation from sin. Just ask him, he’ll tell ya: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Oh, but that Bill Maher sure does smirk a lot, doesn’t he?
Yes, yes, I’m sure she, like so many other mushy modern Christians, would say that’s the sort of literal dogma that enlightened, spiritual believers like her have outgrown (which would probably sound awfully condescending to at least 40% of the population, but let’s not unduly worry her with that right now). But if you don’t believe in sin, if you don’t believe in hell (or, at the very least, some sort of painful consequences for rejecting God’s gift), if you don’t believe in the exclusivity of Jesus’s claim to divinity, if you feel that other beliefs (or a lack thereof) are just as valid and conducive to living a good, fulfilling life, then what the hell do you call yourself a Christian for? Why be saved if there’s nothing to be saved from? Strip away all the exclusivity, and all you’ve got is some deranged asshole wearing a sandwich board, wandering around making a nuisance of himself, haranguing people to heed his simplistic platitudes or face the brutal consequences when the world ends, which, by the way, will be any day now.
But don’t ever have a strong opinion or act like you know something. Perish the thought. That would be intolerant.
1 2 3