Posted Saturday, July 5 Hitler's Shilling Executioners From this week's Economist (July 5-11, p. 51) an article on Germany's tourism woes: On July 2nd, Thomas Matussek, Germany's ambassador to Britain, hosted a conference on "Branding Germany" to work out how to sell Germany to the British. The British used to like to visit, but ... Events intervened; and in the late 1930's and early 1940's, as the conference policy paper delicately explains, Germany suffered from "over-branding". Oh, so that's what happened. Posted Saturday, July 5 Wow The first bit of this essay, and accompanying author picture, don't exactly come out and say it, but it looks like Stephen King may have fallen on financial hard times. I always thought his books were pretty popular (but maybe the ones you see in stores are the ones that don't sell!) Lots of other stuff I didn't know, mostly about Ulysses. All I can say is: Wow! Read the whole thing. And then I read in the NY Post that King bought out all the tickets for a showing of 28 Days and handed them out for free to movie-goers! And him so hard-up! All I can say is: Double-Wow!! That guy's not just a king, he's a prince among men!!! Read the whole thing. Posted Friday, July 4 That's What I Like About the South Atlanta historian Ralph E. Luker has this awesome song on his blog (no permalinks). "Song to Okra" by Roy Blount, Jr. String beans are good, and ripe tomatoes, And collard greens and sweet potatoes, Sweet corn, field peas, and squash and beets – But when a man rears back and eats He wants okra. Good old okra. Oh wow okra, yessiree, Okra is Okay with me. Oh okra's favored far and wide, Oh you can eat it boiled or fried, Oh either slick or crisp inside, Oh I once knew a man who died Without okra Little pepper-sauce on it, Oh! I wan' it: Okra. Old Homer Ogletree's so high On okra he keeps lots laid by. He keeps it in a safe he locks up. He eats so much, can't keep his socks up. (Which goes to show it's no misnomer When people call him Okra Homer.) Okra! Oh you can make some gumbo wit' it, But most of all I like to git it All by itself in its own juice, And lying there all nice and loose – That's okra! It may be poor for eating chips with, It may be hard to come to grips with, But okra's such a wholesome food It straightens out your attitude. "Mm!" is how discerning folk re- Spond when they are served some okra. Okra's green, Goes down with ease. Forget cuisine Say "Okra, please." You can have strip pokra, Give me a nice girl and a dish of okra. I don't know what the tune is like, but in principle this seems worthy to stand beside the B-52's "Butterbeans" and Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys' "That's What I Like About the South" as a paean to tatsy Southern food. I suppose I have to take it on faith that there was a time in American history when all food was either canned or served in a jelled salad. Certainly the Gallery of Regrettable Food seems to substantiate this. Nonetheless, I admit to a certain amount of suspicion. Alice Waters tells her tale of going to France and discovering actual food, but where was she from originally? Like, Minnesota or something? No, I see. She's from New Jersey. Granted, haricots verts are really incredible, and we don't have any fraises de bois in America, but come on. I know people who were alive in the 50's in the South, and they were eating incredibly delicious food all day long. Fresh pigeon peas, corn on the cob, crab boil, beet greens, homemeade rolls, bicuits, ripe tomatoes with basil and homemade mayonnaise, divinity, pralines, Lane cake, shrimp and grits, delicate puddings of corn off the cob mixed with shrimp and shallots and steamed in corn husks, homemade fig preserves with lemon peel, apricot preserves perfumed with cracked apricot kernels, fried chicken, turnip greens with ham hock and little pieces of turnip, peach ice cream, etc.etc.etc. I have to stop because I'm making myself hungry and I just ate a huge slice of homemade cherry pie (my dad's recipe) about an hour ago. That whole eating fresh local produce thing? They were all about that. What the hell else were they going to eat? What do they eat right now? If you could peer into the kitchen of your average trailer in rural South Carolina, yes, you will see some Nehi, some white bread, maybe even some jello. OK, maybe some ambrosia with miniature marshmallows (actually, that shit is really good.) Maybe some "Statesboro Sweet" iced tea, as we call it: supersaturated with white sugar and then a few packets of saccharin thrown in just to set your teeth on edge with sweetness. It's like a brown syrup when it goes over the ice. But, you'll also find incredible fresh vegetables and fruits: watermelons, tomatoes the equal of those in Italy, okra, field peas, strawberries and on and on. Probably a big freezer full of the surplus, too (nestled next to some tasty venison). Homemade jams, jellies and chowchows; pepper sherry and pepper vinegar. I haven't even started talking about BBQ! Pork butt smoking for 15 hours in those special smokers--my stepbrother makes them out of oil drums. Or fish fries! Or oyster roasts! Some of my happiest childhood memories are of long evenings outside in the winter by a fire, oysters steaming wrapped up in a wet towel on a 1/4 inch piece of steel set over it, big table covered with newspaper and beers and saltine crackers and cooked oysters and little bowls of butter with lemon and cocktail sauce. When I was little I couldn't open oysters myself and I would go around to all the guests in turn, getting each person to open me one, and then start again. Yeah, Alice Waters is full of shit. Posted Friday, July 4 The Young Visiters and The Crippled Detectives Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him. He had quite a young girl staying with him of 17 named Ethel Monticue. Mr Salteena had dark short hair and mustache and wiskers which were very black and twisty. He was middle sized and he had very pale blue eyes. He had a pale brown suit but on Sundays he had a black one and he had a topper every day as he thorght it more becoming. Ethel Monticue had fair hair done on the top and blue eyes. She had a blue velvit frock which had grown rarther short in the sleeves. She had a black straw hat and kid gloves. [more] Daisy Ashford's masterpiece, The Young Visiters, was composed when she was but nine. Yet I prefer Lee Tandy Schwartzmann (age seven) for her hardboiled dialogue in The Crippled Detectives: “Oh!” said Sylvia suddenly. “What?” said Lee alarmed. “Oh I have to go out with you to get firewood,” replied Sylvia. “Oh now I remember,” said Lee, and into the house went the two girls to get Lisette and Ben and the things they would need to chop down trees for wood craft and firewood. The sister and brother came out. “Where’s Anne?” said Lee in a worried tone of voice. “I don’t know,” said Sylvia, turning around slowly to see if she could see Anne from the distance. “Where are we going?” asked Ben and Lisette together. “To get kindling wood if we find Anne,” answered Sylvia. “Here I am,” called a happy voice. “Are we going to get wood again?” said Anne. “I found a place where the trees are thick.” “Oh Anne!” said Lee. “Well, are we going?” asked Anne. “Yep,” said Sylvia. [more] Sort of like David Mamet meets Jack London, if all the characters suffered from what-that-guy-in-Memento-had syndrome. Then the rest? Think Donald Barthelme rewrites Midsummer-Night's Dream as a cross between Enid Blyton and ... I dunno. It's a beautiful work of genius, honestly. There is, for example, this extended simile: sweet as everything in the bazaar that was good, charming as new blown silver, pink roses with hearts, sweeter than Venus herself. And this astonishing image: The moon fairy waved her wand and the dictionary opened and read to wisen the evening. I could drag in some stuff about imaginative resistance, but, really - that would only sully Ms. Schwartzmann's perfect art. Posted Friday, July 4 Imaginative Resistance vs. Doctor No I've been troubling my poor head about imaginative resistance (here and here). To make matters worse, last night we watched Dr. No. So the doc is going to divert an American space launch, make the rocket crash in the jungle. Bond foils plot by melting down doc's open-top nuke plant. (It looks like first No was going to builid a conversation pit in the control room, then he retrofitted it as an aquarium, then he added uranium and control-rods as an afterthought.) The plant is on a small island a short motorboat run from Kingston, so the population of Jamaica will die of radiation poisoning presently, and the island will be uninhabitable for approximately 3000 years. And no Bond girls need ever again worry about unwanted pregnancy. This is stipulated to be a good result and a happy ending. A morally deviant fictional world, in other words. I'm not even going to talk about the scene in which Honey Ryder sees tank tracks and says, 'See, there is a dragon!' It was a good Bond flick. Posted Thursday, July 3 Pee-Wee Hermeneutics Zoë does interpretation and appreciation (requires Quicktime). Posted Thursday, July 3 Giant Sea Creature Battles Scientists OK, so I misread the title of the slideshow you can see if you click here. Sue me! But don't say I didn't warn you. (Treat my title as a minatory glimpse into the not-so-distant-future, if you will.) Posted Thursday, July 3 The Narcissism of Small Diffidences A follow-up to Belle’s discussion, below, of Timothy Burke’s post, “The Sounds of Silence”. Burke writes: When we react to every single form of daily practice as if it is as vitally connected to power in the world as every other practice, we lose any ability to set an agenda and react proportionately to the problems we face. To me, this is one of the subterranean ways in which certain flavors of Foucauldian rhetoric end up being reactionary: by placing power everywhere, and refusing to speak of some kinds of power as peculiarly or particularly illiberal, they encourage a kind of simultaneous rhetoric of radical anger fused with a futilitarian inability to actually do anything except complain about relative trivialities, because it is the trivialities which are accessible to critique. This seems to me smart and right. (My Freudian title honors the colleague of Mr. Burke who buttonholed him about his powerpoint presentation.) But I would second Belle’s opinion that Burke is just too easy on these folks (and on Foucault.) If you follow through on Burke’s criticism vigorously – and others he makes, which tend in the same direction - it becomes easier to resolve the dilemma: How can I distinguish between someone calling for an equal place at the table and someone who is simply being an anti-intellectual manipulator, a covert agent of 19th Century romanticism advancing the cause of feeling over thinking, connection over individualism, dialogue over debate. Burke implies it gently; let me say it bluntly: it isn’t the distinguishing part that’s so all-fired hard. The real knot is: lots of academic folks think illiberal, anti-intellectual futilitarianism is a good thing. So this must be yet another one of my ‘the humanities has fallen and can’t get up’-type postings Well, I'd better not get me started. Let me just quote a passage from Nietzsche (Gay Science, Book 1 §56). It's hyperbolically unfair but also unerringly insightful. (But I already said that, didn't I? It's a passage from Nietzsche.) Perhaps you, gentle reader, will see fit to split the difference twixt Burke, who is too generous and accommodating to those he criticizes, and Nietzsche, whose targets cry out (like the coal to the diamond) why so hard? The craving for suffering. – When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young Europeans who cannot endure their boredom and themselves – then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds. Neediness is needed! Hence the politicians' clamor, hence the many false, fictitious, exaggerated "conditions of distress" of all sorts of classes and the blind readiness to believe in them. These young people demand that – not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster. If these people who crave distress felt the strength inside themselves to benefit themselves and to do something for themselves internally, then they would also know how to create for themselves, internally, their very own authentic distress. Then their inventions might be more refined and their satisfactions might sound like good music; whereas at present they fill the world with their clamor about distress and all too often introduce it into the feeling of distress! They do not know what to do with themselves – and therefore paint the distress of others on the wall: they always need others! And continually other others! – Pardon me, my friends, I have ventured to paint my happiness on the wall. I find it impressive that Nietzsche anatomizes – even down to the nerve-endings – the failings of Foucauldianism, a century before Foucault. Well, I won’t interpret it if you aren’t seeing it, or if you disagree. (The bit about the categorical demand that unhappiness approach from outside is italicized - not by me - for a reason: Foucaultian ‘regimes of power’ and so forth.) And I’m not saying this is what Burke is really on about in his post, not even in the bit I quote above. But surely you must agree: predicting the absurd multiplication of journal articles with the words ‘the other’ in their titles was an unusually accomplished piece of prophecy. The Invisible Adjunct was talking about this problem just the other day. And Burke left a thoughtful paragraph in her comments box, so I can't be completely on the wrong track here. Posted Wednesday, July 2 Hooked on Agonics Timothy Burke, over at Easily Distracted, has posted at length about the problem of men dominating conversations in academic settings and what, if anything, can (or should) be done about it. I should say at the outset that he is basically right about everything. Particularly, he notes that much boorish male domination of academic discourse should prompt an irate letter to Miss Manners rather than an acute and carefully nurtured sense of outrage at a grevious wrong. He also makes the point that it is easier to conflate individual situations which irritate you into some vast hegemonic conspiracy than it is to suggest any workable solution to the varying problems, since "the more formalistic we get about the rules of conversation, the less productive conversations are." If I disagree with him about anything it is that I think for professional reasons and due to a certain politeness and reserve he is not as hard on some really dumb arguments as he might be (not as hard on them, I suspect, as he really feels.) But more on Deborah Tannen in a moment. Salient Burke excerpt: How can I distinguish between someone calling for an equal place at the table and someone who is simply being an anti-intellectual manipulator, a covert agent of 19th Century romanticism advancing the cause of feeling over thinking, connection over individualism, dialogue over debate? Or worse yet, manipulating that latent vein of the romantic temperment simply in order to gain exclusive control over the terms of conventionally argumentative institutional and intellectual contestation? He mentions Deborah Tannen as a purveyor of this half-baked Romanticism (well, it's more like warmed up in the E-Z bake oven of the mind). So, I took a gander over Deborah Tannen's way. Oh. My. God. In this Chronicle of Higher Education article she offers the most terrible arguments ever for the proposition that we shouldn't engage in academic "agonism". I am honestly at a total loss to pick out the worst. I'll have to make this a Giant Thought. Posted Wednesday, July 2 The Euthyphro Syndrome Mark Kleiman posts thoughtfully about Plato's Euthyphro, the (quite incidental) occasion for his thoughts being my sententious summary of the dialogue: 'concludes inconclusively'. Mark makes a good point about the thematic link between the Euthyphro and the Crito. (It's sort of obvious, I guess, but never struck me before.) They are both about the ethics of children prosecuting/overthrowing parents. And he makes a good case for casting this thematic net wider, over Apology. But I must stick by my guns. The conclusion is inconclusive. Here it is: S: So we have to begin again at the very beginning, investigating what holiness is. And I won’t willingly give up before I figure it out. Don’t think me unworthy; instead, concentrate your attention to a supreme degree and tell the truth. For you know this thing, if any man does, and so I will clutch you as tightly as if you were Proteus himself, until you tell me. If you had no clear knowledge of holiness and unholiness, you would hardly have been so rash as to prosecute your dear old dad for murder on behalf of a servant. Fear of the gods would have restrained you from taking such a risk of acting wrongly. So I definitely know that you believe you have clear knowledge of holiness and unholiness. So tell me, my good Euthyphro, and don’t keep secret what you think it is. E: Some other time, Socrates. I am in a hurry, and I really have to go now. S: What a thing to do, my friend! By leaving you cast me down from my high hope of learning from you the nature of holiness and unholiness. I might have escaped Meletus' indictment by exhibiting to him my wisdom – courtesy of Euthyphro – concerning divine matters. Ignorance would no longer have made me sloppy and improvisational about such things, and my whole life might have been lived the better for it. I take it that (whatever the subtext says), the text must be granted a modicum of inconclusion. Also, scratching just beneath the skin, I take this conditional seriously: Euthyphro knows, if anyone does. Euthyphro does not know ... (ask not for whom the modus tollens, it tollens for you.) But more than that, I think Euthyphro's hasty, 'so long, I think I hear my mother calling me' exit is itself arguably the main problem the dialogue highlights. The nominal subject is 'holiness' (or 'piety'). And this is, of course, interesting. But it is really just a convenience occasion for highlighting a philosophical pathology. Call it the Euthyphro Syndrome. (It's a Robert Ludlum novel as well, by the sound of it.) Let me explain by means of a Giant Thought. Posted Wednesday, July 2 Suppose Your Philosophy Were On Fire Suppose your whole philosophy were on fire. You rush in and realize you only have time to save two or your premises or one of your conclusions. Which do you save? (HINT: you can also conceive of this as a contribution to trolleycar ethics. Two of your premises are tied to one track, one of your conclusions to the other, etc.) Bonus question: history would have been very different if W.W. II had been fought before W.W. I. Discuss. Posted Tuesday, July 1 The Varieties of Imaginatively Resistant Experience Here's a wonky, analytic philosophy-type thing I've been muddling about, since Brian Weatherson got me interested. (I posted before, but that first post was too long-winded and not of much interest to non-philosophers.) This new one's long-winded and not of much interest to non-philosophers, so I'll just shunt it right aside as a Giant Thought. Any analytic philosophers (or competent amateurs) strolling through are welcome to send me your comments and criticisms. Anyone who needs a quick primer on the subject of imaginative resistance? James Lileks has, with kind consideration, provided. (But the sub-variety he points out is not one of the ones I discuss in my post.) Posted Monday, June 30 I can drink a whole jug and still bust a mean moby. Gawker linked today to this discussion thread (on this New Yorker article about the travails of a Skadden Arps summer law clerk who inadvertently emailed everyone in the underwriting group an account of his lazy, 2-hour-lunch-at-Sushi-Zen-having day.) Substrate: so let me get this straight... you've turned your back on a lucrative career to follow more ethereal pursuit, the lowly underappreciated path of ...an engineer? I can almost hear the violins. Try coming out of school with a philosophy degree, then we'll talk. posted by leotrotsky at 1:08 PM PST on June 27 Try coming out of school with a philosophy degree... What did you think, leotrotsky, you were going to get recruited by a big, white shoe philosophy firm? posted by Faze at 1:27 PM PST on June 27 Ah yes, who doesn't remember those last months of philosophy grad school, when all the recruiters from the big white-shoe philosophy firms are around, and everyone is debating whether they should "sell out" and move to the city, or keep it real. The ones who take the big jobs always tell themselves they'll do lots of pro bono philosophy, but you know how that goes. They end up like everyone else, working 80-hour weeks to make partner, doing metaphysics for the man. They go out to bars that draw the bridge-and-tunnel crowd and try to spice things up by referring to Hilary Putnam a lot and calling things "deck", but... Posted Sunday, June 29 My Weekend Went to a wedding (nice), went to the zoo (fun), read Harry Potter (liked it), watched Teletubby VCD's with Zoë. On the surface Teletubbyland is a happy place, its denizens content. But what will it be like when the kids grow? Tossing in hot, adolescent, plushy discontent on tubby beds. A twenty-something La-La - always the passionate one - making a break for it; young adult face in the sun, glaring sullenly; Yellow Submarine periscopes burbling angry threats. Pinwheel exerting ineluctable psychotropic influence. (One's very biology colonized by foreign media.) The obligatory chorus: 'Again, again.' Like 'I'll be seeing you,' from The Prisoner. Oh, yes. It'll grow into The Prisoner, just you wait. Posted Sunday, June 29 Sigh Some, er, highlights of Dr. Mahathir's speech: Because they [Europeans] like to wage war and seize other people's territories, their main interest is in the development and production of weapons to kill people more efficiently. And: For them, all differences must be settled by tests of strength. Whoever wins is right and is entitled to take all for himself. The loser loses all. That is also the way they settle the differences between the workers and the employers. The winner in the industrial action will get what he wants. And: In the cultural and social fields they want to see unlimited freedom for the individual. For them the freedom of the individual cannot be questioned. They have rejected the institutions of marriage and family. Instead they accept the practice of free sex, including sodomy as a right. Marriage between male and male, between female and female are officially recognised by them. What we call incest is not regarded as serious by them. And: The culture and the values which they will force us to accept will be hedonism, unlimited quest for pleasure, the satisfaction of base desires, particularly sexual desires. Our way of life must be the same as their way of life. Asian values do not exist for them. And here is some praise of Mahathir's 'courageous' speech. (He has also received a scolding from the Asian Wall Street Journal - can't find a link; and a relatively mild one from The Straits Times that drags in (of all people) political theorist John Gray; and Mahathir has made this response to his critics.) UPDATE: I was scratching my head about the sex stuff, which seemed a bit out of place beside all the obvious Iraq coordinates. But today's New Straits Times, perhaps attempting to give a boost to the Mahathir line, links to this Village Voice story as (one infers) a significant item for the day. Perhaps the Voice editors could include a helpful note to their Malaysian readers. Something along the lines of: this sort of thing really doesn't happen very often, in case you were worried. 2nd UPDATE: Yes, I am aware the recent Lawrence decision is a much more likely occasion for Mahathir's sexual talking points. But the speech was delivered on June 19, a week before the decision was handed down (June 26). Which brings me to a point, of sorts. Potential international - er, blowback - from the Lawrence decision. Of course, it is quite absurd even to hint that some Coalition of the Sexually Willing is going to start imposing permissiveness, globally, at the point of a gun. But Americans may not be aware of the ways in which our domestic sexually politic doings tend to end up under a - highly distorting - microscope, world-wide. The world is perpetually focused on this 800-pound gorilla, the USA, in the world's living room. The gorilla can't get any privacy as a result.