November 2012

Bartlebesians

By in books, solitude, the madness of crowds No Comments

Also from Peter France’s book:

The morality of withdrawal from social and political activism had much concerned Merton, who had made the decision to move from activist to contemplative:

Withdrawal from other men can be a special form of love for them. It should never be a rejection of man or of his society. But it may well be a quiet and humble refusal to accept the myths and fictions with which the social life cannot help but be full—especially today. To despair of the illusions and façades which man builds around himself is certainly not to despair of man. On the contrary, it may be a sign of love and hope. For when we love someone we refuse to tolerate what destroys and maims his personality. If we love mankind, can we blind ourselves to mankind’s predicament? You will say: we must do something about his predicament. But there are some whose vocation it is to realize that they, at least, cannot help in any overt social way. Their contribution is a mute witness, a secret and even invisible expression of love which takes the form of their own option for solitude in preference to the acceptance of social fictions. For is not our involvement in fiction, particularly in political and demagogic fiction, an implicit confession that we despair of man, and even of God?

Sounds like “scratch a pessimist, find a disappointed idealist,” or “withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.” It’s a pretty rationalization, but, nah. I’d go with Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to.”

This Is My Way, Where Is Yours?

By in books, foolosophy, solitude No Comments

I’ve made fun of Thoreau’s popular image a couple times, but Peter France, in his book Hermits, excerpts a passage of his with which I can nod along in agreement:

I would not have anybody adopt my mode of living on any account; for, besides that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way and not his father’s or his mother’s or his neighbor’s instead.

Of course, this could easily read as a generic exhortation to the sort of trivial individuality expressed through, say, different brands of consumer products. I mean, look, people, by definition, you can’t all be regular hikers along Frost’s road-less-travelled-by. But I prefer to interpret such statements as a fundamental challenge to Kant’s categorical imperative, which strikes me as the Golden Rule on steroids; that is, as the deeply ingrained urge to proselytize for one’s own preferences, to see differences of opinion as conflicts in need of resolution, to always seek a common denominator.

I’m not talking about cultivating contrarian rebelliousness or aggressively antisocial behavior, though. My ideal is rather a sort of self-contained, laodicean lack of concern for keeping up with and being accepted by the group. A hermit in my own head.

The Reverse-Anselm

By in atheism, religion No Comments

Adam Roberts:

What should believers do if they discover that their belief is getting in the way of their proper connection to God? Would they be prepared to sacrifice their faith for their faith? For the true believer, God is always a mysterious supplement, present in life but never completely known, always in essence just beyond the ability of the mind to grasp. But for a true atheist, this is even more profoundly true: the atheist embraces the mysterious Otherness of God much more wholeheartedly than the believer does. To the point, indeed, of Othering God from existence itself. For a long, long time Christianity has been about an unironic, literal belief in the Trinity. It has lost touch with its everythingness and its difference and its novelty. Disbelief restores that.

Ahem. I do believe this epistemological phenomenon has already been born and named!

Law of the Letters

By in george carlin, language, writing No Comments

Jessica Love:

One needn’t be a liberal to be a grammar fanatic. Nor need one be a grammar fanatic to be liberal. It is easy to imagine a world in which the two are independent, orthogonal, like rolling a die and then rolling it again. Indeed, this world is probably our own.

And that is what’s so bizarre. Language use varies along the same factors—class, race, ethnicity, region, age, gender—as other cultural practices and markers. Yet, many self-proclaimed liberals disparage others’ language with a fervor they’d never use to criticize the same people’s music, clothing, diet, spending habits, or parenting techniques.

This again? Okay. I can accept that such people exist somewhere, sure. However, anyone who has spent any time at all reading the progressive blogosphere will have seen a plethora of examples of “self-proclaimed liberals” criticizing every one of those things. Hell, I think the only stories I saw last week about the Hostess bankruptcy happened to be written by discerning authors informing us that they would never pollute the sacred temple of their bodies with such cheap artificial corporate garbage junk food blarg blarg blarg. Freddie deBoer has produced thousands of words examining the phenomenon of progressives who construct rigid caste systems of taste and cultural capital. Suffice it to say, if these fascist-in-grammar, relativist-in-everything-else liberals didn’t exist, a lazy writer with several hundred words needed for a deadline would have to invent them.

As to her argument that insisting on rules and consistency in spelling and grammar is just insensitive linguistic imperialism, I can only quote George Carlin:

Yeah, I know you say, “Well many people are using it that way, so the meaning is changing.” And I say, “Well, many people are really fuckin’ stupid, too; shall we just adopt all their standards?”

I’m not an educated fellow. I won’t pretend to be familiar with the standards of composition that English undergrads study, let alone all sorts of arcane grammatical rules. But I honestly would consider it an insult, however unintentional, for someone to present a piece of writing to me, whether in the form of personal correspondence or a public post, that looked like a careless mess of misspellings and nonexistent punctuation. I mean, if I’m talking to a stranger, someone with whom I have no expectation of intuitive understanding, I go out of my way to speak clearly and explain any necessary background for their understanding. Why should it be any different in print? If you don’t take your own thoughts seriously enough to make every effort to be clear about them, don’t expect me to take them seriously enough to do the extra work of decoding it.

I do still cling to a naïve belief that professionals and other people who are responsible for communicating to the public should be nearly flawless in their spelling and grammar. But the shit that gets presented to me for revision in my copywriting gig is slowly eroding that idealism. Good lord, you would not believe how illiterate some of these people can sound.

…adding, someone must have put out a memo.

Listen Hard for the Pound of the Waves

By in music No Comments

A.O. Scott:

Still, “Beware of Mr. Baker” invites you to listen again, and to attend to the rhythmic power and complexity that this drummer brought to the group’s thunderous (and often ponderous) variations on the rhythm and blues playbook.

Mr. Baker was a rocker, in a sense, by accident of birth and association. If you were young, musical and British in the 1960s, rock ’n’ roll was an irresistible career path, and Mr. Baker certainly, at least for a while, lived out the rock star legend to its fullest. But he was by taste and temperament more of a jazzman, captivated at an early age by African polyrhythms and the expansive approach of American drummers like Max Roach and Elvin Jones.

Rather than keeping the beat, Mr. Baker opened it up, adding layers and nuances without sacrificing his innate, unerring sense of time. He was wilder than steady rhythm players like Charlie Watts, and also far more disciplined and subtle than showboating wild men like Moon and Bonham.

My favorite record on which he played is, far and away, Sunrise on the Sufferbus by Masters of Reality. I first heard it on March 22nd, 1994; the date is fixed in my memory by virtue of the immediate impression it made on me as I stood there at the listening center where you could bring any CD in the store to hear before buying. It only took me the first three songs to consider this one a keeper. The jazzy drum fills, which did so much to set the unique mood of that record, reminded me of Bill Ward’s work in Black Sabbath (perhaps unsurprising given the reverential nod toward Sabbath inherent in the band’s name). You kids should check it out on the Spotify or the Eyetoons or whatever it is you do these days in lieu of listening to CDs.

Lying In a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm In Pine Island, Minnesota

By in poetry No Comments

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

— James Wright

Pepperidge Farm

By in poetry No Comments

Arthur sent this to me this morning (I admit, I’m not familiar with the commercial):

Meanwhile, inspired in part by your comments about autumn and the neglected month of November, I came up with something of my own.

You are significantly younger than I am, so significantly that you may never have seen the TV commercial with the slogan “Pepperidge Farm remembers,” said in a suitably old-timey New England voice with a faint gerontological whistle that makes the final consonant a sibilant.

Pepperidge Farm

How many have passed, these crisp and cold Novembers?
When you are young and shiny as any penny
How can you know? You’ve yet to learn how many.
But Pepperidge Farm remembers.

How many times have poets rhymed “Decembers”
With “embers”? Many, far too many times!
Go out into the fields and reap the rhymes
That Pepperidge Farm remembers,
                               
You’ll find slant rhymes among them, umbers, ambers,
Off-colored, dun or dusky, fulvous sheaves,
And more among the leaves, among the graves.
Christ! Pepperidge Farm remembers.

Don’t We Wish That We Could Feel Something More Than Hate and Morbid Panic

By in bread and circuses, identity, writing No Comments

FdB:

I was gonna go off on one of my rants here, about the shriveled little bags of hate and resentment in the comments here showing what unique sophisticates they are by complaining that a website reviewed the finale of a very popular and beloved show, despite the fact that they probably sit at said website hitting refresh over and over so that they can momentarily distract themselves from their drab, empty lives of misdirected self-hatred and congealed defensive apathy as they wait for the inevitable moment when they realize that they’ve gone grey and gotten varicose veins and lost the last shreds of their youth without ever once bothering to feel an unguarded emotion, so consumed were they with the fear that some fuckface will make fun of them for actually trying and in so doing cost them a social currency that was absolutely worthless to them in the first place, and sob quietly in the night for having thrown away the only gift life gives us, the gift of being emotional creatures capable of experiencing feelings so intense that they can ruin or save your life, if you only leave your beating human heart open enough to risk the pain that is the price of everything and anything truly worth experiencing.

Some friends and I once had a fun contest to see who could write the best one-sentence horror story. My blue-ribbon submission, a story about a transvestite prostitute serial killer who favored a pizza cutter as a murder weapon, told from the perspective of the john/victim, seems weak in comparison to this.

November Night

By in poetry No Comments

Listen..
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

— Adelaide Crapsey

Rough Music

By in conspicuous crusading, crime and punishment, revillaging No Comments

“What happens to you here is forever,” O’Brien had said. That was a true word. There were things, your own acts, from which you could never recover. 

Raw Story:

Coen said it didn’t matter that those targeted in the articles were minors.

“So they need to learn, everybody needs to learn here that there’s no divide between real life and online. What you say online is just as important as what you say in real life. So I don’t think it matters what actually happens to the kids at the schools per se. We’re not acting as judges or juries. Our responsibility is just to the story.”

I’m so old, I remember when it was conservatives who were in favor of expanding the scope and severity of punishments for minors. That’s cute, though, the way she invokes journalistic neutrality when convenient. Does working at Gawker Media make you a soulless pageview whore, or does the job itself just naturally select for such people? Kind of a “chicken and the egg” argument.

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