- Cathedral — Autumn Twilight
- Ginger Wildheart — Begin From Within
- Alabama 3 — U Don’t Danz 2 Tekno Anymore
- Extreme — Leave Me Alone
- School of Seven Bells — Love Play
- Modest Mouse — Perfect Disguise
- Gojira — Ocean Planet
- Anthrax — Intro to Reality
- Robbie Robertson — Akua Tuta
- Spoon — Who Makes Your Money
- Micachu and the Shapes — Lips
- King’s X — Hate You
- Helmet — L.A. Water
- Curve — Perish
- VAST — Blue
- Arcade Fire — Headlights Look Like Diamonds
- Mr. Cooper — Five
- Black Sabbath — Thrill Of It All
- Chemlab — Megahurtz (Mindfield Aurora Mix)
- Michael Giacchino — Arnhem Knights
June 2012
Superstition Ain’t the Way
Beckenbauer, 66, lamented the “curse” Italy have over Germany at major tournaments – having remarkably still never beaten them in a competitive match – but believes reaching the semi-final was still a good achievement for a young team.
“I think we have too much respect (for Italy). The talk about the curse of Italy seemed to paralyse the players,” he wrote.
Soccer is a strange game, and how much history plays into contest like this is often overlooked. Germany remain unable to beat Italy in a meaningful game at this level, and it goes beyond the level of luck to a matter of psychology. Italy never appeared really challenged in this game, even when they made some nearly disastrous gaffes early on. But Germany did grow flustered, as if they believed not only that they were destined to win the game – but that there was no way they should be losing it so early on.
Often overlooked. Yes, if only someone besides every lazy staff writer covering the sport, every studio analyst on ESPN and the ghost of Oswald Spengler had dared to broach the possibility that a mystical sense of historical destiny was more relevant than the mundane details of the particular match in question. There’s simply no precedent for a better team being upset by an underdog, and with a statistical sample stretching right to the cusp of high single digits, what other conclusion could any reasonable person draw?
I want you all to bookmark this post, in case I need someone to present it as evidence in my defense after I finish my killing spree and wind up sitting in court, drooling, kicking at imaginary soccer balls and gibbering incoherently about the difference between causation and correlation in response to the judge’s questions.
In Soviet Russia, Book Reads You!
Our reading choices have always been constrained by the natural filter bubble created by our friends, and the pressures of time play as large a role as Google’s search engines. So are there any steps we can take to combat the natural “you loop” in our reading tastes?First, I propose we adopt a thoroughly disruptive stance: “If you enjoyed that, then this is the opposite.” If your sister loves the erotic fantasies of E.L. James, then it’s time for her to take on the metaphysics of “Gods and Monsters”, and give Hari Kunzru a try. I intend to lend my mother Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” and buy my father Marian Keyes’s “The Brightest Star in the Sky”. And when I’ve finished the remaining 700 pages of my Norse epic, I shall ask my Twitter friends: what shouldn’t I read next?And why stop there? How about disloyalty cards, where booksellers give us discounts for clocking up an eclectic range of purchases? Or discomfort zones, with a “books we can’t stand” display, complete with little handwritten condemnations: so much more inviting than yet another card explaining why “Bleak House” is really rather good. Could there be a pop-up sci-fi corner in a romance authors’ convention or critics reviewing novels that are diametrically opposed in subject matter, style and philosophical outlook, and still liking both? As the season for lazy beach-reading approaches, let us make a stand for the joy of being thoroughly surprised.
At first reading, I thought this was protesting too much, but now, I’m thinking it might be like someone walking backwards within their own footprints in order to throw off pursuers.
For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books.
The Confections
Somehow, I’m not surprised that a git like Terry Eagleton is a fan of Rousseau:
Above all, Rousseau is the explorer of that dark continent, the modern self. It is no surprise that he wrote one of the most magnificent autobiographies of all time, his Confessions. Personal experience starts to take on a significance it never had for Plato or Descartes. What matters now is less objective truth than truth-to-self – a passionate conviction that one’s identity is uniquely precious, and that expressing it as freely and richly as possible is a sacred duty. In this belief, Rousseau is a forerunner not only of the Romantics, but of the liberals, existentialists and spiritual individualists of modern times.
I found this especially amusing, having, as it happens, just been reading J.M Cohen’s translation of Montaigne’s Essays last night (a vastly superior example of the genre, if you ask me, and even if you don’t), where he offers a slightly different view of Rousseau’s autobiographical style:
But the internal kind of false portraiture, though rarer, is even more insidious, and its classic exemplar is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “Rousseau”, says Fernandez, “gives an account of his morality in terms of his desires. He makes the person he was coincide with the person he would like to be by explaining his intentions after the event.” The Confessions are full of incidents that show Rousseau pretending to emotions he never had, and that clearly belonged to an imaginary self, whose secret, by Fernandez’ definition, could never be revealed. Rousseau takes it for granted that this romantic ego really was in control of events and aware of situations at the moment when they happened, that it was, in fact, capable of consciously, and sometimes mysteriously, planning his life.Rousseau must therefore explain, though he cannot explain away, any incident in which he fell short of the ideal picture of himself which he cherished in his imagination. Montaigne never explained his actions in this way; he merely noted them down. The word that he uses to describe this recording process is constater: a verb which implies no suggestion of moral or wishful criticism. Had he been guilty of a meanness like some of Rousseau’s, he would no doubt have noted it down. Indeed he notes down many things that would be to the discredit of an ideal Michel de Montaigne, if he had carried one about with him.
And Arthur included a perceptive capsule summary of him in a recent email exchange that’s worth reproducing here:
Rousseau was very big on the way civilization as such, with its complexity and imposition of intricate interdependencies and competitive territorial adjacencies, pressures us to adopt false selves based on what Lacan calls the “imaginary” and what Girard analyzes as the psycho-politics of envy and scapegoating.Rousseau’s problem was that he thought that therefore science and the arts were the source of corruption, and he proposed instead a sublation of the self in the social contract based on an amorphous concept of “the general will,” “forcing us to be free,” opening the door, to detractors like Berlin, to totalitarian encroachments on individuality. But then he was a puritan (that is, a Genevan Calvinist by upbringing and re-conversion), and that says it all, as far as the cultural genotype he represents. He was also highly paranoid and narcissistic. I’m reading his Confessions, and what a train wreck the man’s personality was (and in some sense is, for he is a persistent archetype of the modern personality; who among us can claim not to have at least a little Rousseau in him or her?). He is inevitable. Romanticism is practically unthinkable without him. Tolstoy and Proust are his wiser children. Proust at least realized that art was the solution, not the problem. Rousseau, conflicted, self-hating and self-seeking, contained both the person who made his name writing for the theater and, like a good puritan, attacking the very notion of a theater in Geneva because such frivolous entertainments would distract people from their duties as citizens! The hippie fascist is born.
All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (V)
As usual, these are just the ones that have been added to the mountain since the last picture. I don’t have a problem. I can quit anytime.
The Least of These
I don’t mean to keep picking on PZ lately, but man, he just keeps serving ’em up:
This is why, even when we’re saddled with a moderate conservative jerk for a president, I have to hold my nose in November and pull the lever for the asshole with a (D) after his name. I don’t like him, I think he betrays our values at every turn, but I like the people of the Democratic party far more than I do the people of the Republican party. I’m not going to vote for Obama, ever; I’m going to vote for that guy at the Minnesota caucus who suggested that we cut the defense budget in half and spend the money on universal health care instead, and I’m going to vote against the guy in the Texas caucuses who thinks our most pressing concern is preventing gay couples from having a happy life.
By this impeccable logic, the Pope and the rest of the Vatican leadership are irrelevant, because many lay Catholics are wonderful people, and there are some selfless nuns devoting their lives to progressive principles, so we might as well all convert to Catholicism in solidarity with them because, hey, the Islamists are even worse, and whaddayagonnado, waste your support on some tiny little atheist group that doesn’t have a chance in hell of influencing policy? The line forms behind the professor. No pushing, please.
History’s Truth Is Marching On
I recently came into possession of a hardcover copy of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. Surprisingly, it still had a great sales rank and resale value, and, true to those numbers, it barely had time to get settled in inventory before someone bought it. People still read that book and take it seriously? I thought it had been nothing but a punchline for years now, go figure. Well, at least Marxists and their neoconservative mirror images have been so thoroughly discredited by now that no intelligent person would subscribe to, uh… oh.
And if you’re one of the people who has been whining about dealing with harassment, suck it — you’re on the wrong side of history.
Eh? Since when does history take the form of geometric shapes? For all we know, the final punctuation mark at the conclusion of the human story might be an asteroid. Or a viral mutation. Or maybe the more catastrophic possibilities of climate change will be realized, and the resulting sociopolitical unrest will undo much of the post-Enlightenment social change that the complacent take for granted.
Now, I realize that such statements are mainly just unthinking recitation of the progressivist creed in order to rally the faithful, but, you know, sloppy metaphors often indicate sloppy thinking, and so I have to ask: shouldn’t the imperative for men to not act like obnoxious jerks toward women rest on a firmer bedrock than that of a dubious teleological vision of human existence as a story of linear moral progress? On reason, perhaps, rather than Hegelian faith?
Augury
It seems strange referring to Germany as underdogs, especially in a European competition, yet even with the confidence they have demonstrated so far they are bound to be uncomfortably aware of their record against Italy as they go into the semi.
Yes, I’m sure they are, given that pundits like yourself harp on it incessantly as if it’s actually indicative of anything. We heard it all last week, over and over: Spain has never beaten France in a competitive match! This useless factoid was of the utmost significance, until it wasn’t. Having learned nothing, surprise, the talking heads are now reprising the same focus on the Germany/Italy game, and, oh sweet Jeebus, if Spain and Germany win their respective matches and meet in the final, all we’re going to hear is about how Spain topped Germany in the last two major tournaments, and what does that portend for this game, for expert insight we take you now to our soothsayer standing by live with her runes and tarot cards; Madame LaRue! Madame, as you well know, these two teams blar blar blar please make it stop, please…
Seriously, I thank the gods for the invention of the DVR, which at least allows me to skip past most of the inane chattering, but I still pick up enough of it during the actual games to make me weep and contemplate suicide. I repeat: there is no mystical relationship between different nationalities that affects their performance during a particular match. It is of absolutely no relevance what a completely different group of players representing their respective nations did in a completely different game X number of years ago. If you have nothing else to talk about, no worthwhile analysis to offer, just shut the christing fuck up.
The Popcorn Is Political
In Brave, Merida isn’t interested in the young men trying to win her hand, or in marriage. Which is not to say that she is gay. There’s nothing in the film to suggest that she is; and Markovitz doesn’t assume that because she enjoys outdoorsy activities, she must be gay. But because her character is not defined by her sexuality — unlike, say, Ariel, Jasmine, or Cinderella — she could be a lesbian. The point is: Kids will notice that her happily ever after isn’t dependent on a wedding. And that feels like a step in the right direction.
Okay. Think back with me now to all the fairy tales and Saturday morning cartoons you absorbed as kids, many of them grotesque and reactionary if taken literally. How many of them informed your adult worldview in any meaningful way? What an impoverished mindset it requires to look at a fucking CGI animation and see it as political propaganda for blank slates. However much we have to stretch the definition of art for our purposes here, what a paucity of imagination and integrity it indicates for someone to judge popular art by how faithfully it trumpets the cause du jour.
The point is not that people should or shouldn’t relate characters and themes from books and movies to their own experiences; they always have and will, and skillful creations will resonate with audiences long after current political obsessions have faded. The point is that people who are concerned first and foremost with making Brave into a referendum on feminism, redheadedness or gay rights are myopic prigs, and that it takes incredibly insecure people to demand that their sociopolitical values be validated and affirmed by even popcorn entertainment.
Innerlichkeit
And another one:
These factors combined to produce in German culture a concept that is almost untranslatable into English but is probably the defining factor in understanding much German thought as the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth. The word in German is Innerlichkeit. Insofar as it can be translated, it means a tendency to withdraw from, or be indifferent to, politics, and to look inward, inside the individual. Innerlichkeit meant that artists deliberately avoided power and politics, guided by a belief that to participate, or even to write about it was, again in Gordon Craig’s words, “a derogation of their calling” and that, for the artist, the inner rather than the external world was the real one.
Whimsical Philistines
Leafing through Peter Watson’s The German Genius for particular references, I found some passages I’d bracketed and forgotten about.
From this vantage point (Gottfried) Keller was particularly aware of the growing division between capitalism and artistic individualism, the division that Marx labeled alienation, which Keller found equally abominable. He addressed this in a series of novellas titled Die Leute von Seldwyla (The People of Seldwyla), a distinctly odd but not necessarily disagreeable place. Here the people are no less daring and enterprising than anywhere else but, as they gain experience of the world, they change. They become “whimsical philistines” who withdraw into the security of their own city: they refuse to see work as “a process of upward mobility,” they reject speed, derive pleasure from the trivial side of life, rather than what everyone else regards as “important.” They are, in effect, exploring alternative values to those of the bourgeoisie.
Nothing to Do with What You Think, If You Ever Think at All
My cousin Sherwin’s way into the snob-free zone was simple enough: care only about one’s work, judge people only by their skill at their own work, and permit nothing else outside one’s work to signify in any serious way. View the rest of the world as a more or less amusing carnival at which one happens to have earned—through, of course, one’s work—a good seat. Judge all things by their intrinsic quality, and consider status a waste of time.
…The music was terribly thin, leaving no residue, better listened to, if at all, while driving across town on an errand. But why did I have to establish my superiority to my (mildly) detested fellow listeners, even if only in my own mind? Why not simply note them and think about other things? Because, alas, the snob cannot bear to think himself a nobody, even in his own mind, and he certainly doesn’t want to think himself included in an audience of what he sees as dull people, who have, as W. H. Auden once said to Nicholas Nabokov about a bureaucratic group in the U.S. Army, the “wrong ideas about everything and belong to that group of people neither you nor I can possibly like or condone.” And rather than sit back and enjoy this concert, unmemorable as it was, I had to make plain, if only to myself, that I am a much more serious person than these people sitting around me, and serious in a way that deserves recognition, even if (again) only to myself.
Why do those thoughts play in my head at all? Why did I need to assert my superiority, even to myself, when no one was contesting it? Why cannot I, even so late in the day, grow into one of those admirable fellows–reasonable, tolerant, generous-spirited, honorable–that Jefferson called “natural aristocrats” and that a liberal arts education is supposed to form but almost never does?
I thought about this excerpt recently, seeing a couple stories go viral for seemingly no other purpose than occasioning an orgy of self-congratulation over our refined taste. I don’t begrudge anyone their honest preferences, but I do rankle over the pack mentality toward easy targets, the sad reminder that so much cultural activity is nothing but signaling, posturing, and competition for praise.
More Than Words
The article talks about writers’ block. If you think you’ve got writers’ block after 45 seconds of not writing, you don’t need an app, you need someone gently to tell you that you should consider the possibility that writing is not just about writing, it’s also (and maybe mainly) about the space in between the writing, when nothing seems to be happening, or random stuff is having an incoherent party inside your head. Almost always, you do eventually start to write, and it seems that you’ve been considering after all. It’s not as comfy as writing a thousand words in half an hour, but it seems to work OK, so long as you think of it as part of a process of writing rather than writer’s block.
In between the football matches and the usual work-related timesinks, I’ve actually had enough time for reading and writing this month, and yet I just haven’t been finding post-worthy material. Is the whole Internet on summer vacation or what?
So Damn Long Since We Sung the Song; Let’s Go Back to Church
The world is still turning, and as distant and dreamlike as it seems from our vantage point, I believe that there will be a more peaceful, free and rational future whose people will look back on our era and wonder how anyone ever tolerated the kinds of injustices that afflict us.
We can bring that future into being, if we choose. We have all the tools we need. A rational, humanist understanding of morality is the map. Science and reason are the boots that carry us forward. And righteous, passionate, peaceful anger is both sword and shield, spurring us to take action and giving us passion for the fight. As always, there will be adversaries standing athwart the trail, trying to block our way, but when we recognize them for what they are, we can defeat them.
How much longer this dry spell will last, I don’t know. But all deserts end somewhere if you keep walking, and all dark clouds blow themselves out eventually. Progress comes slowly at first, and sometimes it advances and then recedes, but it leaves a high-water mark for next time.
PZ:
I have never been concerned about all the people moaning about how the fundies and Muslims are outbreeding us — I see them as busily making minds that will be ripe for reason and knowledge.
Humanism can mean many things, but for us it means belief in progress. To believe in progress is to believe that, by using the new powers given us by growing scientific knowledge, humans can free themselves from the limits that frame the lives of other animals. This is the hope of nearly everybody nowadays, but it is groundless. For though human knowledge will very likely continue to grow and with it human power, the human animal will stay the same: a highly inventive species that is also one of the most predatory and destructive. Darwin showed that humans are like other animals, humanists claim they are not. Humanists insist that by using our knowledge we can control our environment and flourish as never before. In affirming this, they renew one of Christianity’s most dubious promises – that salvation is open to all. The humanist belief in progress is only a secular version of this Christian faith.
My Flag Boy Said to Your Flag Boy, I’m Gonna Set Your Flag on Fire
There are recognizable stages in the degradation of anonymous, fragmentary communication. If no pack has emerged, then individuals start to fight. This is what happens all the time in online settings. A later stage appears once a pecking order is established. Then the members of the pack become sweet and supportive of one another, even as they goad one another into ever more intense hatred of nonmembers.
…New patterns of social connection that are unique to online culture have played a role in the spread of modern networked terrorism. If you look at an online chat about anything, from guitars to poodles to aerobics, you’ll see a consistent pattern: jihadi chat looks just like poodle chat. A pack emerges, and you are either with it or against it. If you join the pack, then you join the collective ritual hatred.
…The genetic aspects of behavior that have received the most attention (under rubrics like sociobiology or evolutionary psychology) have tended to focus on things like gender differences and mating behaviors, but my guess is that clan orientation and its relationship to violence will turn out to be the most important area of study.
Mainly, I’m just tacking this on as an addendum to a recent post. But I’ve gotta say, there’s a sad irony to reading comments at Freethought Blogs, of all places, and seeing this dynamic unfold.
Ginger Ails
Merida, the fiery Scottish princess voiced by Kelly Macdonald in Pixar’s new animated adventure “Brave,” belongs to the same category as Dora the Explorer, Nickelodeon’s bicultural cartoon heroine. If that doesn’t quite sound like fulsome praise, you’re on the right track. No, listen — in all seriousness, there are reasons to be grateful for both of them. Both “Brave” and the Dora franchise represent honorable — and desperately needed — attempts to craft alternative role models, and alternative entertainment options, for girls who yearn to break out of the pink-and-peach prison of princess culture.
Of course, Merida is the movie’s heroine, and many redheads embrace the fiery trope as flattering or harmless. It’s not as patently offensive as the dumb blonde trope, nor as harmful as the folk stories about redheaded witches and vampires from which it evolved. But it’s still arbitrary and wrong.
It’s like a Rubin vase! Is she a symbol of feminist empowerment or is she a regressive, offensive stereotype? It depends which pop culture/pop politics website you view it from! Goddamn, I can’t stop laughing.
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