Outis Niemand
About Outis Niemand
Posts by Outis Niemand:
U and I
Some people enjoy spotting rare birds. Well, the birds around here are pretty common. What I get excited about is spotting unusual typographical errors in my reading. I couldn’t believe my luck last night when this incredibly rare example of a double vowelswitch (Vowelswitchus geminus) fluttered into view! Some have argued that such creatures, if they ever existed at all, had long been hunted to extinction by professional editors armed with sophisticated modern software. But here was one in full plumage, effortlessly shifting from one spelling to another as I watched in amazement! I may never be so fortunate again even if I live to be a hundred.
(And no, of course I didn’t highlight in the book. What kind of monster do you think I am? The red and green marks are purely digital additions to the picture I snapped. No rare texts were harmed during the production of this post.)
A Study Has Shown
Research shows that flowing facial hair might have evolved to help fight-hungry humans better absorb blows to the head, according to a new study published in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology.
“Might” seems to be doing an awful lot of work in that sentence. This triggered a memory, and sure enough, I see it was about eight years ago, in response to similar dubious assertions, that I skeptically inquired:
“Has any man outside of a Chuck Norris joke ever grown such a magnificent bramble patch upon his face that it could absorb punches? This is something I would surely like to see.”
So what’s the line of thought here? That men who survived battle without broken jaws had better reproductive success with women? But I thought other studies claimed that beards are widely seen as less attractive to women and a sign of untrustworthiness in general! Wouldn’t that be a net negative as far as evolution is concerned? I suppose I’m asking the wrong questions here. What I meant was, how can I get hold of some of this grant money? I can produce irrelevant information and improbable conclusions as well as any professional!
Sooner or Later You’ll Be a He-Man Woman-Hater
Sometimes, you just have to admire the sheer brass ovaries.
Look, I’ve been alive and paying attention over the last decade or so. If there were any feminists publicly questioning or criticizing the increasingly-fanatical direction their crusade was taking, I somehow missed them. If there were any critics of the simple-minded slogans of intersectionality who were granted a respectful hearing by our media class, I somehow missed them. The only people who dared speak up were publicly canceled, in the parlance of our times, while being slandered as misogynist rape apologists doing the bidding of their right-wing paymasters (man, those guys are behind everything). If there were any clear guidelines about how to distinguish credible accusations from scurrilous ones, they were never publicly articulated. Talk of “due process,” however tentative, was considered a “dog-whistle” of the patriarchy. Way back in 2014, Scott Alexander analyzed what was becoming an already-obvious compulsion among feminists to pick the absolute worst hills to die upon:
The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?
What’s really amusing is that he probably thought “some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists” was such a perfect reductio ad absurdum that it might serve forever as a rhetorical guardrail, preventing anyone from plunging over the edge into lunacy. That guardrail only lasted, what, five and a half years before Ms. Faludi barreled through it in an eighteen-wheeler, all hopped up on the trucker’s speed of ideology and propaganda?
Now, like many aficionados of the human comedy, I have certainly enjoyed the recent spectacle of the scuttling of the good ship #MeToo in the name of political expediency. Your revolution is over, Faludi. Condolences. The broads will always lose. It’s like one of the Three Stooges with a bucket on his head; you can see it coming from far away, but it’s still funny to watch. In fact, I think I enjoy this reboot of the franchise even better than the original version starring Paula Jones, Juanita Broaddrick, and all those other ’90s stars.
But let’s be fair. Contrary to what some have claimed or implied, #MeToo was never a purely cynical exercise in political partisanship. After all, it did bring down a powerful Hollywood Democrat and a sitting Democratic senator. It just turns out that a presidential election is simply a bridge too far. No one is willing to chance losing to Trump again for the sake of principles. Suddenly, idealists see the attraction of lesser-evilism. If we were mature adults, we could talk about this. We could admit that part of the tragic nature of existence is the fact that we’re frequently forced by unchosen circumstances to sacrifice our principles to necessity. But we’re not mature adults, Linda Hirshman’s example to the contrary. We’d rather avoid the up-front pain of facing our compromises squarely and choose the no-money-down, balloon-payment option of investing far, far more time, effort, and pain into denying that there was ever a tragic conflict in the first place, let alone any chastening compromises. We’d rather descend into farce and blame an all-powerful cabal of our enemies for playing some incredibly disciplined long game to manipulate us into this situation so that we can pretend our moral virginity remains intact.
And for what? Who does this benefit? She and her comrades know full well what sort of message they were relentlessly pushing. Those “right-wingers,” real, honorary, and imagined, certainly remember. Absolutely no one is fooled by this, though some will find it useful to pretend to be fooled. And yet, some idealistic part of me is still shocked, no matter how often and predictably this happens, that people would rather go through more trouble to lie than to cut through all those tangled webs and just tell the truth. I can’t help but laugh at the irony that my own feeble idealism would survive after theirs had sold out.
Obiter Scripta, no. 84
Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a “colourless” day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour. There is also an insulting style of speech about “one grey day just like another.” You might as well talk about one green tree just like another. A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.
…Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence, especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.
— G. K. Chesterton, “The Glory of Grey,” Alarms and Discursions
Purple was my first love, as colors go. “I heard that a lot of babies like purple,” my grandmother said when I told her. Within a few years, I had shifted my allegiance to green. My pediatrician gave me a lime-flavored lollipop after I said so. As an adolescent, I was concerned with trying to appear edgy and profound, so I started telling people that red, being the color of blood, was my favorite, even as I increasingly began wearing black clothes. At some point, purple and I got together again. Basically, I’ve slutted my way around the color wheel, but in middle age, I’ve come to truly appreciate the humble, autumnal greys (and browns, to a lesser extent). Still waters run deep; so do restrained colors.
Some Men Just Want to Watch the World Burn
I think a lot of people who lived their lives in a quivering state of imminent ecological collapse-panic have moved those emotions from that box into this one, and feel energized because the dread now seems even more imminent, and they have Science! on their side, and their enemies are all the right enemies, and this time they can make a difference. And it requires nothing.
I’m not much of an aphorist, unfortunately, but I do have one saying that I thought up myself: “Beware the intersection of convenience and virtue.” Righteousness that asks little or nothing of you is cheap and dangerous like bathtub gin. And, as Theodore Dalrymple notes,“There is more pleasure in being right about forthcoming disaster than in being right about incremental improvement.” How quickly we seem to have forgotten all we learned back when “motivated reasoning” and “confirmation bias” were trendy topics.
Clio Shrugged
Literary historian Robert Darnton points out that as private reading bloomed, some feared that the act would have physical consequences. He cites the German writer J.G. Heinzmann, who in a 1795 tract warned that excessive reading would increase “susceptibility to colds, headaches, weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria, and melancholy.”
There’s something so time-specific to this list of maladies, isn’t there? I mean, you read it, smile, and say, “That’s such an eighteenth-century image, like powdered wigs, quills and horse-drawn carriages.” I read this last week, but I thought of it again while reading a review of not one, but two new books about walking. Specifically, “questions of how and why we walk — what walking means.” (Apparently this hasn’t been settled by the previous umpteen books about the meaning of walking. I will never stop being amazed that people can produce so much verbiage from such a humble topic.)
We know that walking is good for us, that “if undertaken in regular doses,” as Shane O’Mara writes in “In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration,” “it provides the small, cumulative and significant positive changes for lung, heart and especially brain health.”
…For O’Mara, the answers are practical. “The emerging science,” he insists, “is giving us a clear picture: Regular walking confers enduring and substantial benefits on individuals, and on society at large.” It improves our “moods, clarity of thought, our creativity,” as well as “our connectedness to our social, urban and natural worlds.”
And yet, when we lived in a world built around the length of the human stride, when architecture was oriented toward pedestrians, and when towns were designed to be walkable, people still found ways to be unhappy and unhealthy. He’s not wrong, but it’s such a shallow, myopic way to look at it. It strikes me that this type of optimal-health-and-efficiency neurobabble will one day be seen as a stereotypical marker of our own time. “Hahaha, isn’t it weird that people back then were so obsessed with brain chemistry and the malign effects of smartphones?”
Another review, this time of a book about the history of Progressivism, suggests that the combination of Darwinian theories, philosophical pragmatism, and the disillusionment following the carnage of the Civil War was what set the stage for Progressive ideas to flourish. Of course, it has long been argued, convincingly in my opinion, that World War One was “the blow that hurled the modern world on its course of self-destruction,” as Jacques Barzun said. How many other wars have likewise served as punctuation marks at the end of an epoch? The cynical thought occurred to me that perhaps “history” is a record of the silly trends that preoccupy us while we wait for the next massive war to come along and wipe the slate clean. Will our contemporary plague serve as a similar cultural palate-cleanser? Or will we pick right up where we left off until the next big war alters our assumptions and priorities again?
The Message Is, “There Is No Message”
It was especially difficult for someone moving from Europe to Southern California to conclude that Americans were materially worse off because of capitalism. Adorno and other members of the Frankfurt School had to find a way of showing that the abundance of commodities capitalism produces is in fact bad for the masses—that, although people seem to be materially enriched by capitalism, they are really being spiritually and culturally impoverished. The work of the Frankfurt School came to focus on culture critique, on analyzing the harmful effects of the commercial culture of capitalism, especially insofar as it takes the form of mass culture.
— Paul Cantor, The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV
And as we know, “consumerism” is always “the stuff other people buy.” I was listening to Steven Wilson’s music recently, and the didactic tone of his song “Personal Shopper” was obvious even when only halfway paying attention. No doubt, Adorno would be appalled to think that anything as degenerate as a rock song could show traces of his intellectual DNA, but there’s no denying the striking family resemblance in lyrics like these:
Buy online and in the shopping mall
Sell it on then buy it back
Buy the shit you never knew you lacked
Buy the update to compete
Buy the things that make your life complete
Buy the box set and the kind of stuff
You’ve bought before a million times
Buy in green, buy in blue
Buy in patterns ’cause I tell you to
Buy the dream, buy the spin
Feel the bite down of the trap you’re in
Buy the lies that I tell
Lap up everything I’m here to sell
Yes, yes, we’re all shallow, brainwashed sheeple who have been indoctrinated by commercials. Dear God, how trite. I used to make fun of a song like Soundgarden’s “Black Hole Sun” for its surreal incoherence, but I realize now that I actually prefer it when I have no idea what someone is singing about, because more often than not, their earnest, undiluted opinions will only make you lose respect for them. I’d rather hear melodious jabberwocky than socially-conscious preaching. Let’s get back to the good old days when musicians just wanted to sing about their drug-addled visions rather than save our empty souls.
He Rapes, But He Saves, And He Saves More Than He Rapes
So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm? Mr. Biden, and the Democrats he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the Republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it. And don’t call me an amoral realist. Utilitarianism is not a moral abdication; it is a moral stance.
— Linda Hirshman, “I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway.”
****
I’ve never met Bill Cosby, so I’m not defending him. Let’s just remember that he has a valuable legacy that I can’t just throw away. I remember that he’s the first black man to ever win an Emmy in television. I also remember that he’s the first guy to make a cartoon with black characters where their lips and noses were drawn proportionately. I remember that he had a television show that got numbers equivalent to the Super Bowl every Thursday night. And I remember that he partnered up with a clinical psychologist to make sure that there was not one negative image of African-Americans on his show. I’m telling you, that’s no small thing. I’ve had a television show. I wouldn’t have done that shit. He gave tens of millions of dollars to African-American institutions of higher learning, and is directly responsible for thousands of black kids going to college. Not just the ones he raped. Here comes the kicker. You ready? Here’s the fact that I heard, but haven’t confirmed. I heard that when Martin Luther King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and said he had a dream, he was speaking into a PA system that Bill Cosby paid for. So, you understand what I’m saying? The point is this: He rapes, but he saves. And he saves more than he rapes. But he probably does rape.
— Dave Chappelle, The Age of Spin
****
“Rebellion? I am sorry you call it that,” said Ivan earnestly. “One can hardly live in rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me yourself, I challenge your answer. Imagine that you are creating a fabric of human destiny with the object of making men happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last, but that it was essential and inevitable to torture to death only one tiny creature—that baby beating its breast with its fist, for instance—and to found that edifice on its unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions? Tell me, and tell the truth.”
“No, I wouldn’t consent,” said Alyosha softly.
— Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Verily, Verily, I Say Unto Thee (17)
Websites and social media accounts are evanescent things, prone to disappearing in an eyeblink, leaving no trace of their existence. Some are so obviously a product of their moment that it’s hard to imagine them having any longevity. Nonetheless, just as we can enjoy the beauty of the wild violets during their brief appearance on spring lawns, we can appreciate a Twitter account devoted to critiquing the credibility of bookcases. (You may be aware that, in this age of enforced video interaction, it has become a “thing” to sit in front of a bookshelf during your calls, to help lend an air of erudition and gravitas.) So allow me to introduce you to Bookcase Credibility. Enjoy it while it lasts.
And I Ain’t Got No Worries, ‘Cuz I Ain’t In No Hurry At All
The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time. It looks simple at first sight: finish something in two hours instead of three, gain an hour. It’s an abstract calculation, though, done as if each hour of the day were like an hour on the clock, absolutely equal.
But haste and speed accelerate time, which passes more quickly, and two hours of hurry shorten a day. Every minute is torn apart by being segmented, stuffed to bursting. You can pile a mountain of things into an hour. Days of slow walking are very long: they make you live longer, because you have allowed every hour, every minute, every second to breathe, to deepen, instead of filling them up by straining the joints. Hurrying means doing several things at once, and quickly: this, then that; and then something else. When you hurry, time is filled to bursting, like a badly-arranged drawer in which you have stuffed different things without any attempt at order.
— Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking
Somewhere along the way, I became a voracious reader. I mean, I’d always been a dedicated reader since childhood. But sometime in the last decade or so, I started devouring books like they were hot dogs on Coney Island on the Fourth of July. Perhaps not coincidentally, that’s about when I started going to library sales many times a year. Many times, I’d walk into a sale with an Augustinian prayer in mind: “Lord, grant me restraint—but oooh, this book looks interesting…”
But I haven’t been to any sales since December, and there likely won’t be any for the foreseeable future, so I’ve rediscovered the joy of re-reading this spring. I actually started doing that before the pandemic made a necessity out of a virtue, but I appreciate the enforced constraints. I look at some of these titles and realize with a start that it’s been years since I first read them and found them engrossing; how absurd is it that I haven’t picked them up again since? How many other forgettable books did I waste my time on between now and then? Gros’s book was one of the best ones I read last year, so it’s a pleasure to have it return to my attention, like the spring perennials. He’s right; the days seem longer, and activities have more room to breathe. I can read a bit during the day, and spend an hour strolling around the yard in the gloaming, casually thinking, silently observing; going nowhere, doing nothing in particular, but somehow never feeling left behind.
Interlude: Shana Falana, “Shine Thru”
Cry for the Indians
Why so serious? Land O Lakes removing the Native American, but keeping the Land and the Lakes is as American as it gets.
— Stephen (@SAS0620) April 26, 2020
Yes, but it makes a certain group of white people feel better about themselves, and as always, that’s all that matters.
…adding, oh, now that’s just funny:
Lol great work everyone pic.twitter.com/CD3kjPgScQ
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) April 30, 2020
Thank goodness there are so many concerned white people around who can explain to these poor savages how they should feel and think!
The Fragile
“Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.”
— Attributed to Paul Harvey, among others
****
“That’s why I carry a gun. The average human is only three missed meals away from becoming a savage.”
— Quoted by Will Bardenwerper, “Army Ranger School Is a Laboratory of Human Endurance”
****
When Norman Lewis arrived in Naples as an officer of the British Intelligence Corps in early October 1943 he found a city on the brink of starvation.
…In the book he wrote about his experiences, Naples ’44, published in 1978, Lewis presents a picture of life as it is lived when civilization has crumbled. Hit by plague — a typhus epidemic visited the city not long after its liberation, while syphilis was rampant — the inhabitants were surrounded by death and disease. Beyond the struggle against sickness, there was another struggle that was all-consuming — the daily effort simply to stay alive.
…As Lewis records, when Naples was liberated by the Allies the entire population was out of work and foraging for food. Liberation was preceded by carpet-bombing in which working-class districts were destroyed and electricity and water supplies cut off. Delayed-action bombs left by the retreating Germans added to the dangers. With no functioning economy, the inhabitants scavenged for whatever was left, including tropical fish in the city aquarium. Thousands of people crammed into a single acre lived on scraps of offal from slaughterhouses, fishes’ heads and cats caught in the street. Families searched for mushrooms and dandelions in the countryside and set up traps to catch birds. Ignored by the Allied administration, there was a thriving black market in medicines.
With everything on sale, anything that could be moved — statues from public squares, telegraph poles, phials of penicillin and medical instruments, small boats, tombstones, petrol, tyres, the contents of museums, the bronze doors of a cathedral — was liable to be stolen. Formerly middle-class people hawked jewellery, books and paintings, a “white-lipped and smiling” priest sold umbrellas, candlesticks and ornaments carved from bones stolen from the catacombs, while around a third of the city’s women were selling sex on an occasional or regular basis.
…Observing the struggle for life in the city, [Curzio] Malaparte watched as civilization gave way. The people the inhabitants had imagined themselves to be — shaped, however imperfectly, by ideas of right and wrong — disappeared. What were left were hungry animals, ready to do anything to go on living; but not animals of the kind that innocently kill and die in forests and jungles. Lacking a self-image of the sort that humans cherish, other animals are content to be what they are. For human beings the struggle for survival is a struggle against themselves.
— John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths
Be Fruitful and Multiply
I do not like a fabric in which the seams and stitches show, just as in a handsome body we must not be able to count the bones and veins: Let the language devoted to truth be plain and simple. Who speaks carefully unless he wants to speak affectedly? [Seneca]. The eloquence that diverts us to itself harms its content. As in dress it is pettiness to seek attention by some peculiar and unusual fashion, so in language the search for novel phrases and little known words comes from a childish and pedantic ambition. Would that I might use only those that are used in the markets of Paris!
— Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children”
****
Nor do I see why I should be deterred by the fact that, when this book was announced, a few newspaper smarties protested that the word would be unfamiliar to many readers, as it was to them. Thousands of excellent nouns, verbs and adjectives that have stood in every decent dictionary for years are still unfamiliar to such ignoramuses, and I do not solicit their patronage. Let them continue to recreate themselves with whodunits, and leave my vocabulary and me to my own customers, who have all been to school.
— H. L. Mencken, preface to A Mencken Chrestomathy
****
I would prefer to always back Montaigne in a scrap, but I grudgingly concede the need to award this round to Henry Louis on points. Hopefully, it goes without saying that there is an appropriate time and place for everything, and there certainly can be times in which an ostentatious vocabulary is evidence of a tedious showoff, but in general, my attitude concerning obscure words is “the more, the merrier.” Too many people act as if any word they haven’t encountered in the past week is archaic and should be shunned. Must all music be three-chord punk rock? Must all religion be dour fundamentalism? Then why should all written and verbal expression be as straightforward as a grade-school primer?
Whenever I visit a library booksale, I like to glance through the language/English/reference section, if there is one, to see if there are any compendiums of weird and forgotten words. I never get tired of collecting them. And I still subscribe to Dictionary.com’s word of the day, where the occasional surprise pops up. Here’s some that I’ve saved over the last couple of years, hoping for a chance to use them. Sometimes I like the particular meaning; sometimes I just like the poetical sound of it.
causerie [koh-zuh-ree]: noun 1. an informal talk or chat. 2. a short, informal essay, article, etc.
notionate [noh-shuh-nit]: adjective 1. Chiefly Midland and Southern U.S. strong-willed or stubborn. 2. Chiefly Midland and Southern U.S. having foolish and fanciful notions.
facetiae [fuh–see-shee-ee]: plural noun 1. amusing or witty remarks or writings.
expatiate [ik-spey-shee-eyt]: verb 1. to move or wander about intellectually, imaginatively, etc., without restraint.
otiose [oh-shee-ohs, oh-tee-]: adjective 1. being at leisure; idle; indolent.
insipience [in-sip-ee-uhns]: noun 1. lack of wisdom; foolishness.
caducity [kuh–doo-si-tee, –dyoo-]: noun 1. frailty; transitoriness: the caducity of life.
operose [op–uh-rohs]: adjective 1. done with or involving much labor.
refugium [ri-fyoo-jee-uhm] noun 1. an area where special environmental circumstances have enabled a species or a community of species to survive after extinction in surrounding areas.
plethoric [ ple-thawr-ik, -thor-, pleth–uh-rik ] adjective overfull; turgid; inflated: a plethoric, pompous speech.
thersitical [ ther-sit-i-kuhl ] adjective scurrilous; foulmouthed; grossly abusive.
Obiter Scripta, no. 83
When I go through a shelf of books on a subject I begin with the thin volumes. Now and then I find a thin and a thick book by an author on the same subject. Usually, the thin book is of an earlier date; and it often turns out that in the thin book the author reveals what he knows and in the thick book he tries to conceal what he does not know.
— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath
“Tell me your thoughts, not the thinking of your thoughts.” Is that an actual quotation? If not, it should be. I have to say, I find it generally disappointing to hear writers or musicians talk about their “creative process.” As Isaac Brock sang, “I guess all us snakes find our tails pretty damn tasty.” I’m fully aware that a finished artwork can, and often does, grow from banal origins. Analyzing those origins in detail, though, often produces a deflation as undignified as a whoopee cushion. Give us the transcendent result of your imagination, but leave the rest shrouded in mysterious silence, please.