January 2011

Whoever Fights Monsters Should See to It That in the Process He Does Not Become a Monster

By in books, nietzsche, philosophy

Ideas have consequences, contorted ideas all the more so. Unfortunately, Nietzsche’s rhetorical proclivities for metaphorical enigma and hyperbole have been exploited as potential sources of inspiration for egregious acts of terror, most recently in Arizona. Ideas, and Nietzsche’s specifically, must be situated in both their proper intellectual and historical context to be properly understood.
It would be outrageously insensitive to suggest that a more nuanced interpretation of Nietzsche would have prevented Jared Loughner from pulling the trigger on January 8. Clearly, as we have learned from recent revelations of Loughner’s writings and ideas, he was, as Zane Gutierrez attested to, mentally deranged. To incriminate Nietzsche, though, would be anachronistic and based on a specious understanding of his philosophy. In a world of media communications defined by sound bites and a concomitant lack of context, historians have a responsibility to the public to provide the necessary context, the full picture, the long view, whatever one chooses to call it, to promote a more informed and productive public discourse.
Like I said the other day, I’m cheered by the fact that everything I’ve seen written so far has resisted the still-too-common tendency to trot out the same old myths about Nietzsche being some sort of social Darwinist who glorified physical violence over others as a means of proving one’s mastery. But something that still makes me laugh about that is the fact that the first time I ever recall seeing Nietzsche’s name was in a Dean Koontz novel that I read when I was maybe fourteen. I don’t remember the name of it (and I’m too lazy to look it up), but the plot was based on a pair of friends who bond over, among other things, a misinterpretation of Nietzsche and become a sort of serial-killing tag team in order to prove their superhumanity. The detective who cracks the case, speaking for Koontz, laments how often Nietzsche gets misunderstood by such types. If a pulp novelist in the mid-80s knew that much…

Welcome to a New Kind of Tension All Across the Idiot Nation

By in fresh hell, montaigne, non compos mentis, the madness of crowds

This is, of course, only the nerdiest of the many implausibilities depicted in the film. But the movie created enough buzz that NASA started getting mail about it. Yeomans told The Australian: “The agency is getting so many questions from people terrified that the world is going to end in 2012 that we have had to put up a special website to challenge the myths. We have never had to do this before.” NASA has a special section on its website, “2012: A Reality Check”, and has even created its own video about it. In the video, Yeomas laboriously debunks the “2012 myth,” and explains that his only plan for December 12, 2012 is to “lay in an extra supply of egg nog.”
As absurd as the movie is, public fear about the “2012 phenomenon” is even more so. The film’s trailers, which ended by encouraging audiences to search the web (“Find out the truth: Google search 2012”), must bear part of the blame – but so must the hordes of overheated Googlers who hurtled into NASA’s inbox. Perhaps they’re the cataclysm we ought to be worrying about.
I just thought I’d share one example of how there truly is nothing new under the sun, since I was just reading about it last night in Sarah Bakewell’s excellent book about Montaigne:

Signs of the imminence of this apocalypse were plentiful. A series of famines, ruined harvests, and freezing winters in the 1570s and 1580s indicated that God Himself was withdrawing His warmth from the earth. Smallpox, typhus and whooping cough swept through the country, as well as the worst disease of all: the plague. All four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seemed to have been unleashed: pestilence, war, famine and death. A werewolf roamed the country, conjoined twins were born in Paris, and a new star – a nova – exploded in the sky. Even those not given to religious extremism had a feeling that everything was speeding towards some indefinable end.

Freezing winters? Whooping cough? Conjoined twins, hell; how about a two-headed calf? And in place of a new star, would you accept a lunar eclipse on the winter solstice? And doesn’t a werewolf sound kind of tame compared to a Montauk Monster and chupacabras? (Update: never mind, we’ve got a wolfman too!)
If you’re nice to me, I might let you share my heavily fortified bunker.

And He Who Is Not a Bird Should Not Make His Nest Above the Abyss

By in foolosophy, nietzsche, nihilism, philosophy

What is nihilism?
It’s the feeling that nothing in the world matters any more than anything else. Nietzsche’s analysis was that people once found meaning in their belief in the Judeo-Christian God, but that in the post-medieval world belief wasn’t sufficient anymore to give people the sense that things really mattered. The basic philosophical issue underlying the book, then, is: how are you supposed to live your life in order to make it possible that things matter again?
Is nihilism an intellectual problem, or an emotional one?
Some people really suffer from the feeling that nothing seems to matter any more than anything else. David Foster Wallace called it a ‘stomach-level sadness.’ I think that’s a pretty good description of it.
I don’t know; isn’t the inability to find enjoyment in anything better described simply as “depression”? Nihilism does seem to me like a primarily intellectual problem, where people know what they love and enjoy but suffer from not being able to justify it. Our Greek and Christian intellectual heritage teaches us that contingent things are worthless, that only timelessness and permanence are worth grasping for, and since nothing but abstract ideas can ever come close to meeting such criteria, anyone who looks for them in the everyday world is going to have to reckon eventually with how to fully embrace things despite their contingency, or else continue to suffer. If I may quote that passage from Steven Ozment again:

The belief that momentary feelings of unity or visions of perfection can survive permanently into everyday life this side of eternity is the ante-room of nihilism and fascism. Such beliefs give rise to ahistorical fantasies, which can never materialize beyond the notion. To the extent that they are relentlessly pursued, they progressively crush the moments of solace that precious moments of grace can in fact convey. Historically such fantasies have spawned generations of cynics, misanthropes and failed revolutionaries who, having glimpsed resolution, cannot forgive the grinding years of imperfect life that still must be lived.

I know when I was young, dumb, and full of existentialism, grappling with the idea of meaning in a godless universe, the feeling of despair I’d get was similar to the vertigo I’d feel when my fear of heights was triggered — even when I knew perfectly well I was safe from any danger of falling, even when I was only looking up at a tall object rather than being high off the ground myself, I couldn’t reconcile that awareness with the optical illusion that had me so terrified. Nihilism, to me, is a similar sort of illusion. Even when your feet are firmly planted on the ground of everyday experience, secure in the meaning to be found there, you’re tormented by an irrational fear of falling anyway.
…I’m adding this section in several hours after having originally posted this, having just seen this article. It’s depressing to see that people like Jared Loughner still read Nietzsche and take away the lesson that they need to violently impose their will on everyone else, but at least decades of scholarship have made it so that an elegant explanation of why he’s so ridiculously wrong to do so presents itself immediately afterward. Thank you, Matt Feeney, I couldn’t agree more:
Nietzsche, oddly, has suffered a similar fate. Because of his assault on religion and rationalist metaphysics, and because of the hints of anarchy in his assorted visions of the future (e.g., “the transvaluation of all values”), he’s taken as the West’s über-nihilist. But he saw himself as the scourge of European nihilism, and possibly also its remedy. Nietzsche saw nihilism as a disease, which grows from, in Alexander Nehamas’ words, “the assumption that if some single standard is not good for everyone and all time, then no standard is good for anyone at any time.” It presents itself as mindless hedonism and flaccid spirit, but also as fanaticism.
So does that make Nietzsche and Jared Lee Loughner philosophical brethren after all, joined in the same fanatical fight against nihilism? In a word, no, and Loughner’s pathological fixation on the meaning of words is the giveaway. One way of looking at Nietzsche’s project is that he set out to teach himself and his readers to love the world in its imperfection and multiplicity, for itself. This is behind his assaults on religion, liberal idealism, and utilitarian systems of social organization. He saw these as different ways of effacing or annihilating the world as it is. It is behind his infamous doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence—in which he embraces the “most abysmal thought,” that the given world, and not the idealizing stories we tell of it, is all there is, and he will affirm this reality even if it recurs eternally.
Jared Loughner’s despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It’s the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.

Death, the Great Equalizer

By in gender, germans supported their troops too, tribalism, waiting for the barbarians

So I click on the Huffington Post – which probably means I have no right to complain in any event; caveat lector and all that – and I’m greeted with a gigantic headline: Military Panel Backs Women in Combat (on a post tagged “women’s rights”).

“Women in the military are exposed to the same kind of dangers that combat service exposes a soldier to, but the difference is that the women are not getting combat pay, and they’re not getting combat-related opportunities for promotion,” NOW President Terry O’Neill said in an interview with The Huffington Post. “So it’s only fair to recognize that women belong, as much as men do, in combat units.”
In 2005, the Washington Post interviewed dozens of U.S. soldiers serving in Iraq — men and women of various ranks — about the exclusion of women from combat, and they “voiced frustration over restrictions on women mandated in Washington that they say make no sense in the war they are fighting. All said the policy should be changed to allow, at a minimum, mixed-sex support units to be assigned to combat battalions. Many favored a far more radical step: letting qualified women join the infantry.”
I don’t have much to say that I haven’t already said about the same topic as it relates to gays, atheists, the big-boned, the developmentally challenged, the sight-deprived, the assisted-living community, the recently paroled, the Amish, the homeless, the children not tall enough to ride this roller coaster, bestiality enthusiasts and everyone else our equal-rights fetishists would dearly love to dress up in combat gear for the glory of America. Just this: I submit to you that no one belongs in a combat unit. That the Iraq war itself is what made no sense. And that the most radical step of all would be for people to reject the imperial mindset that leads them to look at a world-straddling, resource-devouring, death-dealing colossus and see, first and foremost, a great opportunity for civil rights and career advancement.

Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work

By in omnigatherum

I’m laid low with a bad case of food poisoning (Chinese takeout). My goals for today are modest: spend most of my time dozing in the comforting embrace of painkillers, and maybe have a bowl of soup. Regular programming will resume when I return to the land of the living.

From Tuesday afternoon to Wednesday evening, I lost eight pounds simply by my body violently ejecting everything that wasn’t nailed down inside of me. Maybe if I can catch the flu later this season as well, I’ll have my bikini body all ready to go for warm weather!
What is it with hospital waiting rooms keeping the TV tuned to Fox News? Nothing quite like sitting there shivering, aching and moaning like a junkie going through withdrawal as you watch G. Gordon Liddy tell you to invest all your money in gold and the news anchors debate just how much of a Communist Jared Loughner is.

Disemvoweled

By in language

To revisit an earlier point: Few things provide an undesirable comic effect in an otherwise serious post like the odd practice of refusing to type out FUCK or SHIT in their entirety. Unless you’re concerned that a four year-old might be reading your blog, why bother replacing letters with punctuation marks? We’ve all known these words since we were six years old, haven’t we? (Although, one instance I saw of replacing the U with a V gave FVCK an interesting Roman flavor. Still, when discussing topics like violence and anger, you might want to carefully consider whether you’re trying to make your reader laugh.)

The thoughts and feelings symbolized by the word are what matter, and if those are offensive to you, then I suppose you shouldn’t allow yourself to even think about them. The word itself possesses no inherent magic power. Spelling it out or saying it aloud will not conjure demons, I promise. We know what you mean. You know what you mean. Just fucking spell it out already. Like Louis C.K. said, you’re putting the word in my head, making me say it to myself. You should be the one to say what you mean! Take responsibility for it!

Use Your Fist and Not Your Mouth

By in augean stables, free speech, ohferfucksake

I had already resigned myself to reading plenty of achingly stupid shit about the Giffords shooting, but it’s going to be hard to top this from Jack Shafer:

Any call to cool “inflammatory” speech is a call to police all speech, and I can’t think of anybody in government, politics, business, or the press that I would trust with that power. As Jonathan Rauch wrote brilliantly in Harper’s in 1995, “The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say.” Rauch added, “Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too. Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights.”
Our spirited political discourse, complete with name-calling, vilification—and, yes, violent imagery—is a good thing. Better that angry people unload their fury in public than let it fester and turn septic in private. The wicked direction the American debate often takes is not a sign of danger but of freedom. And I’ll punch out the lights of anybody who tries to take it away from me.
Well, at least he won’t mind too much if I call him a demented, retarded pigfucker, I suppose.
Look. If you find anyone calling for legal restrictions on public speech, then by all means, let’s hear your best Patrick Henry impersonation. But there is nothing threatening to the First Amendment when someone uses their free speech to attempt to persuade other people to voluntarily modify their own, or even shame them for not doing so. Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck or anyone else in that clown car are perfectly free to use guns and revolution as the one-size-fits-all metaphors for talking about political issues, and the rest of us are free to tell them to grow the goddamn fuck up and stop being such hysterical fucking demagogues. The system seems to be working just fine, so what’s the problem? If Palin really has the courage of her convictions, if she really believes her own bullshit, surely she won’t allow one dead nine year-old girl and some public scolding to stop her, right?
Ah, but that’s just the thing, isn’t it? She doesn’t believe it. None of them do. I see it in the teabaggers I know personally, who rant and rave about how mundane policy battles are the razor’s edge between freedom and tyranny, working themselves up into a rabid state over our impending slavery… before going back to watching Monday night football and hanging out at the bar with the rest of the boys. There seems to be a little disconnect here between rhetoric and action, is what I’m saying. I mean, if I honestly believed that a four percent difference in tax rates for people who make five times as much money as me was the difference between the U.S.A. and Nazi Russia, I think I’d be spending my time in clandestine meetings with the rest of the revolutionary cadre, fomenting insurrections, that sort of thing.
No, it all reminds me of nothing so much as a surly teenager who responds to every request to help out with chores by hollering about having never asked to be born. Of course, if you offered to help tie the noose for the little shithead, you’d likely find a sudden change in attitude, but barring that, they have a reasonable expectation that if they just act like the most shrill, obstreperous assholes in response to everything they don’t like, you’ll finally get weary of listening to it and just let them have their way. It’s no different with the teabaggers. Their stunted adolescent response is just to holler “Wolverines!” and go polish their hunting rifles.
We don’t have to waste time in fruitless arguments over the precise nature to which implied violence in rhetoric legitimizes, encourages or causes violent action in response; we can just force them to directly own up to it. Is this what you want, then? Is this what politics needs to become? No? You don’t actually intend to violently overthrow the government every time you lose an election? Then shut the fuck up. You too, Shafer, you fucking moron.

When I Use a Word, It Means Just What I Choose It to Mean, Neither More nor Less

By in jests japes jokes jollies, language, spiritual-not-religious

Hello, what’s this? A link to a post on “techno-spirituality”? Well, that sounds potentially interesting — does it have something to do with online cults? Kurzweil-style babbling about “spiritual machines” and immortality through science? Modern-day whirling dervishes who dance themselves into mystical ecstasy to the accompaniment of programmed beats and synthesizers? Aw, it’s just a guide to taking five minutes out of the day to practice breathing.

Spirituality — that ability to stay calm, focused and compassionate in a constant sea of change — is therefore more important than ever.

I don’t know about you, but I just call that “maturity”. Taking deep, controlled breaths to deal with stress only seems to require common sense. It just struck me funny that the term is so debased that it apparently can refer to everything from vague metaphysical beliefs and the achievement of a mystical union with the Ground of All Being to the simple act of not coming completely unglued under pressure at work.

When in Rome

By in crime and punishment, drugs, waiting for the barbarians

Digby:

Am I the only one who thinks it’s extremely odd that we are sending “Homeland Security” agents to Afghanistan? Don’t we have a military that’s tasked with these sorts of chores? And if it’s just a “loan” of certain specialists, why is Janet Napolitano making the announcement instead of the proper foreign service or military spokesperson? Afghanistan isn’t in her portfolio — at least I didn’t think it was. I thought we were going to keep the new Homeland Security forces here in the … homeland.
That’s all rhetorical, of course, since it’s been obvious for decades that many of our allegedly “domestic” agencies like the DEA and the ATF are really para-military organizations which are deployed all over the world. But it looks as though we aren’t even going to pretend anymore that there’s a separation between the two. And that means that we have created yet another sacred police/military budget item that will be nearly impossible to scale back.
What has changed since the collapse of Jim Crow has less to do with the basic structure of our society than with the language we use to justify severe inequality. In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as justification for discrimination, exclusion, or social contempt. Rather, we use our criminal-justice system to associate criminality with people of color and then engage in the prejudiced practices we supposedly left behind. Today, it is legal to discriminate against ex-offenders in ways it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, depending on the state you’re in, the old forms of discrimination — employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, and exclusion from jury service — are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights and arguably less respect than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.
…What caused the unprecedented explosion in our prison population? It turns out that the activists who posted the sign on the telephone pole were right: The “war on drugs” is the single greatest contributor to mass incarceration in the United States. Drug convictions accounted for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal prison system and more than half of the increase in the state prison system between 1985 and 2000 — the period of the U.S. penal system’s most dramatic expansion.
This kind of stuff is why I largely have no interest in political issues, at least not the sort that occupy most political bloggers. The ever-expanding police/military/surveillance state outweighs almost everything else in importance and in danger to the values we supposedly hold, yet unquestioned support for it is bipartisan, as is the inexorable upward transfer of wealth. Most progressive bloggers feebly note that supposed deficit hawks on the right have no interest in reining in military spending, but none of them are going to waste their time tilting at such windmills either, not when there’s a chance to pose for a picture with the president, or important progress to be made in making sure gays, atheists and fat people all get an equal opportunity to participate in our foreign conquests and occupations. And as Glenn Greenwald observes, even though Democratic politicians just as much as their Republican counterparts are going to keep prolonging the same “wars” on drugs and terror, progressives will meekly drop even the pretense of rebelliousness when election time rolls around.
Feh. If you need me, I’ll be doing some reading.

Who Is It That Can Tell Me Who I Am?

By in foolosophy, identity, technology, the big sleep

Wertheim pointed out that cyberspace had become a new kind of place, where alternate (or at least carefully curated or burnished) identities could be forged, new forms of collectivity and connection explored, all outside the familiar boundaries of the physical world, like the body and geography. It’s not such a long journey to follow those assertions to the “view that man is defined not by the atoms of his body but by an information code,” as Wertheim wrote. “This is the belief that our essence lies not in our matter but in a pattern of data.” She called this idea the “cybersoul,” a “posited immortal self, this thing that can supposedly live on in the digital domain after our bodies die.”
…Wertheim, it should be noted, saw the cybersoul notion as both flawed and troubling, and I would agree. Life’s essence reduced to captured data is an uninspiring, and unconvincing, resolution to the centuries-old question of where, in mind and in body, the self resides. At least other imagined versions of immortality (from the Christian heaven to the Hindu wheel of life) suggested a reconciliation, or at least a connection, with the manner in which a physical life is lived; the cybersoul’s theoretically eternal and perfect persistence ignores this concept. Most of all, though, fantasizing about living forever — in heaven or in a preserved pattern of data — strikes me as just another way of avoiding any honest confrontation with the fact of death.
Well, that depends. I certainly agree that fantasies of eternal life are just that, but at the same time, we can see for ourselves how words spoken and written centuries ago still permeate and deeply affect our lives and thoughts today. Where do some of my favorite authors end and I begin? Not that most of what’s being published on Blogspot or WordPress will still be profoundly moving people decades from now, but still, an author can take a little comfort from imagining their words forging connections that outlast the deaths of any of the particular individuals so affected, and sparking activity after long periods of lying dormant.
The “self”, as many thinkers and neurologists can tell you, is an elaborate, ongoing fiction. It resides in a multiplicity of perspectives and nowhere fixed in particular. Like I said, the thoughts and words in my head are no more “mine” than the atoms in my body or the sustenance I take in, yet they all come together in a unique combination for a brief point in time. And for someone like me who largely identifies “who I am” with “what I think”, I strongly disagree that it’s somehow “uninspiring” to consider such patterns of data as equally integral to one’s sense of identity as the humdrum details of daily life. Why is the self who types these words any less valid than the one who just washed clothes and is getting ready to walk the dogs? The self that we present to others online isn’t a complete picture, but then again, where do we ever find one?

And with Strange Aeons Even Death May Die

By in atheism, extraordinary popular delusions, foolosophy, religion, science, the big sleep

And once again
You’ll pretend to know that
That there’s an end
That there’s an end to this begin
It will help you sleep at night
It will make it seem that right is always right
– Smashing Pumpkins
The idea of dead scientists engaging in an experiment in eugenics is incredible enough. Yet the most striking feature in this episode – only fully revealed more than 100 years after the scripts began to appear – is the power that is ascribed to science itself. While spiritualism evolved into a popular religion, complete with a heavenly “Summerland” where the dead lived free from care and sorrow, the intellectual elite of psychical researchers thought of their quest as a rigorously scientific inquiry. But if these Victorian seekers turned to science, it was to look for an exit from the world that science had revealed. Darwinism had disclosed a purposeless universe without human meaning; but purpose and meaning could be restored, if only science could show that the human mind carried on evolving after the death of the body. All of these seekers had abandoned any belief in traditional religion. Still, the human need for a meaning in life that religion once satisfied could not be denied, and fuelled the faith that scientific investigation would show that the human story continues after death. In effect, science was used against science, and became a channel for belief in magic.
Much of what the psychical researchers viewed as science we would now call pseudo science. But the boundaries of scientific knowledge are smudged and shifting, and seem clear only in hindsight. There is no pristine science untouched by the vagaries of faith. The psychical researchers used science not only to deal with private anguish but also to bolster their weakening belief in progress. Especially after the catastrophe of the first world war, the gradual improvement that most people expected would continue indefinitely appeared to be faltering. What had been achieved in the past seemed to be falling away. If the scripts were to be believed, however, there was no cause for anxiety or despair. The world might be sliding into anarchy, but progress continued on the other side.
Many of the psychical researchers believed they were doing no more than show that evolution continues in a post-mortem world. Like many others, then and now, they confused two wholly different things. Progress assumes some goal or direction. But evolution has neither of these attributes, and if natural selection continued in another world it would feature the same random death and wasted lives we find here below.
…The fantasies that possessed the psychical researchers and the god-builders still have us in their grip today. Freezing our bodies or uploading our minds into a supercomputer will not deliver us from ourselves. Wars and revolutions will disturb our frozen remains, while death will stalk us in cyberspace – also a realm of mortal conflict. Science enlarges what humans can do. It cannot reprieve them from being what they are.
It looks like a fascinating book. Though I’m beginning to fear that I might need an afterlife just to read all the books I’m accumulating. If only science could help me do away with eating and sleeping…
But yes, the belief in some sort of immortal soul and afterlife, and the belief in a teleological essence to life itself both seem to me to be more interesting issues for skeptical attention than that of God’s existence or lack thereof. As Schopenhauer said, given a stark choice between belief in personal immortality and belief in God, most people wouldn’t hesitate to become atheists. And while some branches of Buddhism have managed to reconcile belief in a continuation of personal consciousness beyond death with a denial of any meaningful deity, Buddhists in general may be the only people who wouldn’t suffer a crisis of identity if forced to relinquish an attachment to the idea of progress, the numbing distraction of being in constant motion toward a goal.

Bach Almost Persuades Me to be a Christian

By in music

Speaking of Arthur, it was his birthday the other day, so I sent him a link to this interview with the author of a book on Bach’s cello suites. He’s been a DJ for a classical music program on a local independent radio station before, and he’s forgotten more about classical music than you and I will ever know, so it’s always interesting to hear what he has to say:

Yes, Bach is the only artist who makes a convincing case, to me, for the existence of God, or for the mind of God, which would have to have the qualities of a Bach fugue, infinitely complex and at the same time incredibly clear and perspicuous. Someone in a book on the Well-Tempered Clavier made the point that you never hear the same Bach fugue twice; there are too many paths through the music. On the other hand, any path will do. Unlike the contrapuntal forays of his contemporaries, Buxtehude or Pachelbel, for example, Bach’s fugues never seem merely to noodle. There is always a crystal clear theme or variation (subject or episode, in fugue-speak) guiding the ear through the complexity. And yet the complexity and inventiveness is such that the ear can’t grasp it all at once in any single hearing, and so, far from experiencing satiety, the ear hungers for a re-hearing. Thus the infinite and the finite, the abstract and the concrete, the whole and the detail, exist in harmonious but dynamic simultaneity in his music, as in a perfect aesthetic world, a Heaven of the musical imagination.

I Know No Verse More Gnomic Than Thine

By in socmed, technology, writing

Chris Clarke:

The headline – whether page title or link text – should tell people exactly what’s in the article, they say, so that people will know what’s in your article before they even read it. There’s certainly justification for this approach. In tech writing, for instance, it just makes sense. If your article explains how to repair your mobile phone in the field, it’s clearly better to entitle it something like “Fixing Your Mobile Phone On The Road” rather than “When ET Can’t Phone Home” or “The SIM Sins” or “Lost Verizon.”

Pfft. Me, I would have gone with “No-Bar Blues”. Get it? You get it, right? See, it’s like “12-Bar Blues”, but, you know, when someone doesn’t have any phone service, you’ll sometimes hear them say they don’t have any “bars”, because, uh…ahem. You know, “bars”, the indication of signal, uh, strength. Um. Heh heh.
Anyway, I just had a good laugh imagining someone like Jakob Nielsen palming his face over my post titles, which, in case you’ve ever wondered, are usually snippets of song lyrics or poems, groan-inducing puns, or exotic words with a poetic ring to them that somehow relate to the theme of the post. Clarity doesn’t factor in to my decision-making at all. (The title of this one is a direct quote of something my friend Arthur said to me about a poem I showed him.)

But not everyone who posts writing on the web is doing so for the benefit of web visitors. Some of us are more interested in readers. Eyeballs are one thing. Eyeballs hooked up to a functioning cerebrum is an altogether different, better thing. It’s a simple concept that seems surprisingly hard for some experts to grasp: there is more than one kind of writing on the web. There are news alerts. There are How To shorts. There is poetry. There are aimless diary entries. There are screed. There are plays, short stories, rants, recipes, verbal fusillades meant to inflame, prose meant to enlighten, verse meant to perplex. Try to make rules about structure and tempo and tone for any writing that appears on paper, and you’ll be laughed out of the one remaining independent bookstore in your county. The Web isn’t a genre. It’s a medium. The Web is paper, only faster and with a higher carbon footprint. Tech pundits and journalism pundits seem slowest to grasp this general point, for some reason, but the vast majority of writing on the web is neither tech writing nor journalism. It’s essay, memoir, epistolary writing – literature. Not all of it’s good literature, mind. But literature.

Yes, yes, yes. This is exactly what I love about the Internet, especially the blogosphere, and it’s what underlies my loathing of the increasing tendency of people to coagulate around the lowest common literary denominator of social networking sites. I have friends who know about this blog yet never stop by to read, never answer emails, but repeatedly ask me why I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. Because fuck you if you’re not willing to make any effort, that’s why. I’m only interested in people who love words as much as I do.

We Are Darker Angels, Black Lightning in Our Heads

By in books, foolosophy, psychology

Tell me about The New Black.
Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst who in a great way undermines today’s ideas about depression. He starts with the premise that we live in a society of hyped optimism, where depression appears as a danger that goes against optimism – it’s something for people who gave up the fight for success or whatever. Today we use the terms depression and stress too much – they dominate psychiatric and self-help discourse.
They’re debased terms; you might be ‘depressed’ if you miss the bus.
Absolutely. Or just the common boredom of children can be described as depression. But what Darian does is to return to the difference between melancholy and mourning, and he makes a great distinction between them. It’s very good to return to these different roots of depression, and to stay with them – not as traumatic things, but as something pretty normal which has been forgotten.
So we should re-codify depression?
Not perceive it as a unified term, but to see it as various different things, which is why he is using the old terms of melancholy, mourning and loss.
Darian is also critical of the pharmaceutical industry: depression appears as something universal that can be quickly dealt with using pretty much universal types of drugs. But, as he points out, this denies the fact that the symptom is connected to some cause beyond the depression. He shows that in depression everyone has a different logic and a different individual story, which can be linked to loss – of another human being, of identity, of a job, of health or love. It can also be linked to being stuck in circulating around some lack.
I’d be interested to check this book out. I actually spent a few months over a decade ago talking to a therapist, since a couple others were urging me to do it (and offering to pay for it). An American Indian guy, slightly New Agey, but also with books by Kant on his shelf. He was fun to talk to, but he didn’t really tell me anything profound. I just enjoyed having an hour to bullshit about philosophy with someone with no distractions. It occurred to me that if only we could be guaranteed an hour of someone’s undivided attention once or twice a week, a lot of our psychological problems might disappear on their own. Maybe we need to start waving cash around in front of our friends and family to help them focus.
But anyway, I laughed at the above point about depression as a danger that goes against optimism. That, more than anything, has led people to wonder about my own mental health: “You don’t want a higher-paying job? You don’t have any long-term plans for your life? You don’t mind being single for so long? Are you sure you’re okay?”

They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!

By in jests japes jokes jollies, socmed

Are you allergic to Twitter? Do you befriend people outside your target demographic? Then you may be suffering from an undiagnosed personal branding disorder.

• Schizoid Branding Disorder: You have been overheard proclaiming that Twitter is for blowhards with ADHD. You profess a love of “nature” and “reading books” instead. You refuse to chat with people online, and your cell phone service charges extra for texting. You call Blackberries “Crackberries” and claim that you’re not even a little bit curious about the iPad. When someone asks you a polite question, such as “What’s your current distribution capacity?” you merely roll your eyes and shrug, then wander off without answering.
…The next time you find yourself disparaging iPhone apps or raving about the restorative effects of growing organic milkweed in handmade windowboxes, it’s imperative that you seek professional help immediately. Remember, there’s no shame in admitting that you’re indifferent to your own multi-platform marketing initiatives, as long as you can see clearly that it’s not normal. The sooner you can admit that you’re sick, the sooner you can address your ineffectual sales tactics and build a more resilient, dynamic personal brand that will resonate with a wide range of potential customers, now through the end of the fiscal year.
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