Judgements
I evaluate what I'm reading often on the basis of humor.
What is Simone de Beauvoir's best joke?
What is Toni Morrison's best joke?
What is Michel Foucault's best joke?
What is Edward Said's best joke?
What is Raymond Williams' best joke?
I can't seem to find the pulse of much if any humor in the work of such writers. Is writing without humor not dethpicable?
My interests lie often in the realm of surrealist jokers. Richard Brautigan, Andrei Codrescu, Philippe Soupault, Annie Le Brun (Vagit-Prop), Gregory Corso, Edward Lear, Charles Willeford, Elaine Equi, Carmen Firan within literature. Andy Kaufman, Richard Prior, Chris Rock (I love almost any and every comedian).
It often strikes me that the communist left, and the Calvinist right -- are violently against humor more than anything else. The smile on the one hand is right deviationist (Ivan Denisovitch went into the Gulags on the basis of a joke he had told against Stalin), and on the other hand is the sign of the devil (smiling is frowned upon still in some denominations).
Laughter to me is a sign of a critical intelligence and the sign of freedom. I distrust piety when it threatens to take over life. I prefer impiety punctuated by moments of the sublime (moments at such a height -- like the tops of the Alps -- where no human being can be expected to live for long).
Politics of irony -- ESPECIALLY toward oneself -- is where Lutherans and surrealists might converge. I sense that the boundaries are close enough to tickle one another into mutual relief.
Wednesday, January 31, 2007
Sunday, January 28, 2007
I never used to be fat. In ninth grade I weighed 103 lbs. In tenth grade I weighed 112 lbs. When I was 25 I weighed 135 pounds. At forty I weighed 165 pounds. At fifty I weigh about 178 pounds. But there are anomalies. I got a kidney stone when I was 43 and went down to 125 pounds again. It hurt to eat. Once that passed, I saw how many fun new things there were to eat.
Now that the Christmas eating is all over I think it's a gruesome thing to step on the scale.
First, the weather outside is frightening, but the numbers on the scale are terrifying, too. Once in the last year I got on the scale and I swear it touched 190 lbs. I was in full clothes with a coat on, but was mortified.
When this happens I get on the stationary bicycle and turn on the boxing channel. I pretend I'm the blubberbutt in the corner getting his head pounded and wishing I had the legs to move on out, but all I can do is cover up and hope the bell will ring.
Food was uninteresting when I was a kid. We'd go into the IGA in Stroudsburg and it was always hamburger, Velveeta cheese, and iceberg lettuce. That was virtually our entire diet. There was never enough of anything. Perhaps a scoop of rice with gravy would get me through three hours of soccer practise.
Then in the mid 70s they introduced yogurt and tofu. It tasted awful. But soon enough there was sushi. Then Thai food. Then there was an explosion of cooking channels. High end grocery stores made shopping like going into a museum. There were new things like green tea ice cream and persimmons. You can get a box of cookies for a dollar. If I get a box of cookies and open it, I always eat the entire box at one sitting and then pop a Tum's or two. I never intend to do that, but I do it.
I used to play sports all day. Soccer, racketball, badminton, etc. But now that I'm married exercise comes in the hours between when the kids totter off to bed, and I totter off to bed two hours later. Also in those two hours I brush up on Finnish, read the newspaper, do the crossword puzzle, prepare the next day's classes, and for maybe 20 minutes, ride the stationary bicycle.
The kids and I used to dance for a couple of hours a day to an Australian pop band called the Wiggles. But right now one of my kids throws a fit if we put them on, so that's out. Now that all four kids have to agree on something before we do it, the thing that we are most likely to agree on is eating. We all love it, and these days when I ask the kids what was the highlight of your day: they make a list of things they ate. But the kids are still thin. The wife is still thin. It's just me that's bloating up. I need to do something. Everyone else in the house can moderate themselves. I can't. When there's food in front of me, I eat and eat and eat. When I'm playing sports I play and play and play. When I'm writing I write and write and write. Whatever I'm doing I do like a maniac. Right now it's eating.
I should build a vomitorium out back I guess. I'm still fighting the barbarian hordes of enemy food items (sushi, pasta, and thousands of other entities) with the short sword of the stationary bicycle. I'm losing the race, but I'm still in it. I still dream that one day I'll be 164 again, and can put the licorice to one side in exchange for a carrot. Fat chance.
Now that the Christmas eating is all over I think it's a gruesome thing to step on the scale.
First, the weather outside is frightening, but the numbers on the scale are terrifying, too. Once in the last year I got on the scale and I swear it touched 190 lbs. I was in full clothes with a coat on, but was mortified.
When this happens I get on the stationary bicycle and turn on the boxing channel. I pretend I'm the blubberbutt in the corner getting his head pounded and wishing I had the legs to move on out, but all I can do is cover up and hope the bell will ring.
Food was uninteresting when I was a kid. We'd go into the IGA in Stroudsburg and it was always hamburger, Velveeta cheese, and iceberg lettuce. That was virtually our entire diet. There was never enough of anything. Perhaps a scoop of rice with gravy would get me through three hours of soccer practise.
Then in the mid 70s they introduced yogurt and tofu. It tasted awful. But soon enough there was sushi. Then Thai food. Then there was an explosion of cooking channels. High end grocery stores made shopping like going into a museum. There were new things like green tea ice cream and persimmons. You can get a box of cookies for a dollar. If I get a box of cookies and open it, I always eat the entire box at one sitting and then pop a Tum's or two. I never intend to do that, but I do it.
I used to play sports all day. Soccer, racketball, badminton, etc. But now that I'm married exercise comes in the hours between when the kids totter off to bed, and I totter off to bed two hours later. Also in those two hours I brush up on Finnish, read the newspaper, do the crossword puzzle, prepare the next day's classes, and for maybe 20 minutes, ride the stationary bicycle.
The kids and I used to dance for a couple of hours a day to an Australian pop band called the Wiggles. But right now one of my kids throws a fit if we put them on, so that's out. Now that all four kids have to agree on something before we do it, the thing that we are most likely to agree on is eating. We all love it, and these days when I ask the kids what was the highlight of your day: they make a list of things they ate. But the kids are still thin. The wife is still thin. It's just me that's bloating up. I need to do something. Everyone else in the house can moderate themselves. I can't. When there's food in front of me, I eat and eat and eat. When I'm playing sports I play and play and play. When I'm writing I write and write and write. Whatever I'm doing I do like a maniac. Right now it's eating.
I should build a vomitorium out back I guess. I'm still fighting the barbarian hordes of enemy food items (sushi, pasta, and thousands of other entities) with the short sword of the stationary bicycle. I'm losing the race, but I'm still in it. I still dream that one day I'll be 164 again, and can put the licorice to one side in exchange for a carrot. Fat chance.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
About a week ago I was flipping through the channels. There was no boxing match on, which meant that I had to find something else.
I found on International Film Channel the last minutes of a film called Club Dread. I had seen the director's film Super Troopers, and was excited to see Club Dread. But it was just getting over. They were killing a zombie of some sort out in the water, but he kept reforming himself and attacking them again. Then I turned the channel and saw the last few minutes of Terminator Three where the two heroes of the future human race had escaped only to be attacked once more by the she-devil android. Schwarzenegger managed to terminator the female android, and then the Montana Civil Guard sent out a radio call, and hope seemed to remain alive. Then I changed the channel back to the International Film Channel and there was the beginning of a film set in a retirement home. A man had died and his long lost daughter came to get his effects.
I checked the information and it said this was to be a comedy about "mummies who attack retirement home residents." The idea seemed so promising and so improbable that I wanted to turn it off and imagine what would happen instead of watching the actual cineastes ruin the premise.
It's a week later and I wish I had kept the exact title, and the name of the stars. I didn't get very far in terms of imagining the film on its own terms, and would like to go back and see what they did with it after all. But now it's returned into the dreck of the cultural imagination, and I have no idea how to trace it without at least ten minutes worth of research. Is it worthy of that much time spent in terms of recuperation? You never know.
I found on International Film Channel the last minutes of a film called Club Dread. I had seen the director's film Super Troopers, and was excited to see Club Dread. But it was just getting over. They were killing a zombie of some sort out in the water, but he kept reforming himself and attacking them again. Then I turned the channel and saw the last few minutes of Terminator Three where the two heroes of the future human race had escaped only to be attacked once more by the she-devil android. Schwarzenegger managed to terminator the female android, and then the Montana Civil Guard sent out a radio call, and hope seemed to remain alive. Then I changed the channel back to the International Film Channel and there was the beginning of a film set in a retirement home. A man had died and his long lost daughter came to get his effects.
I checked the information and it said this was to be a comedy about "mummies who attack retirement home residents." The idea seemed so promising and so improbable that I wanted to turn it off and imagine what would happen instead of watching the actual cineastes ruin the premise.
It's a week later and I wish I had kept the exact title, and the name of the stars. I didn't get very far in terms of imagining the film on its own terms, and would like to go back and see what they did with it after all. But now it's returned into the dreck of the cultural imagination, and I have no idea how to trace it without at least ten minutes worth of research. Is it worthy of that much time spent in terms of recuperation? You never know.
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
SITUATIONISM NIXED
There was a time when Situationism made sense to me, although I no longer remember why. The Situationists were surrealist leftists who had turned against Stalin and Mao. That's the least someone could do, I must have felt. Simon Leys' books on China (he had once been a Situationist named Rene Vienet*) put paid to Stalinist-Maoism as a left worthy of the name.
Vienet, otherwise known as Leys, argued that to put a house over a man and fill his belly is all that we ask of pig farmers. Human beings deserve more. (In the book Chinese Shadows.) Made sense. It was necessary. But was it sufficient?
Marx and Freud, especially as they've been read by the French left, will give us an empty head and a full gulag. The Situationists were fun to read: but if you follow their ideas carefully they are just as bad if not worse than the Maoists and Stalinists they wished to replace.
First, in the wish to destroy the "spectacle," they argue that artists should be abolished in favor of an artistry of life, which is consummated in the all-night party, or the orgy. Invoking the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier, the Situationists took up the surrealist legacy of transforming everyday life into a carnival of sexuality via these utopian writers.
With Freud, they wished to abolish taboos (a misunderstanding of Freud that is rampant throughout the French surrealist left). With Marx, they wished to set the lower classes into a rampage against the upper classes. Add a dose of Fourier, and you have the orgy. Add a dose of Sade, and you have a sadistic bloodbath.
In a certain sense one can therefore see the Manson family rampage against Sharon Tate and/or the LaBianca families as the apotheosis of Situationist theory. A ragtag bunch of the poor commit an orgiastic murder against the upper classes of Hollywood, leaving blood and death in their wake. The Sex Pistols, a band that took up the Situationist legacy, left a similar trail of murder.
How did this happen? It's quite simple, in spite of their complex prose. The Situationists see the Christian alternative as an attempt by God to placate the poor with the spectacle of the cross and the replacement of life lived at its fullest NOW for a life that would never come, the Situationists advised with Fourier to "Avoid any matrimonial or other association that does not satisfy your passions from the very beginning" (cited in the SI International Anthology, 283).
Class war thus teamed up with the orgy to create the apotheosis of Situationisme, or rather, the ultimate Situation: the orgiastic Manson family murder of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. Realize all your desires, and break the taboos against murder, and against adultery, and find a theory to back you up. Look no further: the Situationist International Anthology will provide you with justification.
Against this ultimate Situation, or ultimate abomination, Lutheran Surrealism argues that a society of art and artfulness is one that is based on taboos (the ten commandments) and is properly afraid of anyone who would break any of the commandments. Those commandments, depicted in their breach with a full telling of the hell to pay, constitute one aspect of our art. The other aspect is the contented life that can be lived by those who live within God's laws and strictures.
The great problem of Situationist theory is that they did not understand where the axioms led. Vaneigem writes as a conclusion to his "Basic Banalities" that "Just as God constituted the reference point of past unitary society, we are preparing to create the central reference point for a unitary society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed" (133).
In fact, it can be fixed. The Situationists were Satanists from the ground up. Their reference point is Cain v. Abel. They want to legitimize murder as orgiastic class murder. They argue that the Watts riots were legitimate. They argue for the "Black Mass" (11), as a perfect example of detournement, which turns the legitimate and orthodox on its head.
The Situationists were right to criticize the orthodox left of their time, but they only criticized it in the way that Sade criticized state executions. Sade argued that all the fun went out of execution when it was left up to the state. We should TAKE IT INTO OUR OWN HANDS, he argued, and put all the fun and blood back into Murder.
Lutheran Surrealism begs to differ. If all the arrows of the Situationist movement lead to the Manson Family debacle, we wish to argue that decency and kindness even toward those whom we loathe is a better way to behave.
We prefer the company of the Lutheran church to that of the Mansons. We think a charitable attitude toward our neighbors, including the extremely rich and extremely poor, is called for, until the day we are called to join our heavenly Father. While Situationism was an attitude of leftism that allowed grown-ups to act like children, we prefer an attitude of restraint and decency in which children are permitted to grow up within norms that allow for their full development as they take our places in society. We are not for the abolition of the superego. Rather, we are for clarifying the rules of patriarchy (ten commandments) and living within the laws of America as responsible and neighborly adults.
* René Viénet, né au Havre, sinologue a vécu 20 ans en Chine et à Taiwan.
There was a time when Situationism made sense to me, although I no longer remember why. The Situationists were surrealist leftists who had turned against Stalin and Mao. That's the least someone could do, I must have felt. Simon Leys' books on China (he had once been a Situationist named Rene Vienet*) put paid to Stalinist-Maoism as a left worthy of the name.
Vienet, otherwise known as Leys, argued that to put a house over a man and fill his belly is all that we ask of pig farmers. Human beings deserve more. (In the book Chinese Shadows.) Made sense. It was necessary. But was it sufficient?
Marx and Freud, especially as they've been read by the French left, will give us an empty head and a full gulag. The Situationists were fun to read: but if you follow their ideas carefully they are just as bad if not worse than the Maoists and Stalinists they wished to replace.
First, in the wish to destroy the "spectacle," they argue that artists should be abolished in favor of an artistry of life, which is consummated in the all-night party, or the orgy. Invoking the Marquis de Sade and Charles Fourier, the Situationists took up the surrealist legacy of transforming everyday life into a carnival of sexuality via these utopian writers.
With Freud, they wished to abolish taboos (a misunderstanding of Freud that is rampant throughout the French surrealist left). With Marx, they wished to set the lower classes into a rampage against the upper classes. Add a dose of Fourier, and you have the orgy. Add a dose of Sade, and you have a sadistic bloodbath.
In a certain sense one can therefore see the Manson family rampage against Sharon Tate and/or the LaBianca families as the apotheosis of Situationist theory. A ragtag bunch of the poor commit an orgiastic murder against the upper classes of Hollywood, leaving blood and death in their wake. The Sex Pistols, a band that took up the Situationist legacy, left a similar trail of murder.
How did this happen? It's quite simple, in spite of their complex prose. The Situationists see the Christian alternative as an attempt by God to placate the poor with the spectacle of the cross and the replacement of life lived at its fullest NOW for a life that would never come, the Situationists advised with Fourier to "Avoid any matrimonial or other association that does not satisfy your passions from the very beginning" (cited in the SI International Anthology, 283).
Class war thus teamed up with the orgy to create the apotheosis of Situationisme, or rather, the ultimate Situation: the orgiastic Manson family murder of Sharon Tate and the LaBiancas. Realize all your desires, and break the taboos against murder, and against adultery, and find a theory to back you up. Look no further: the Situationist International Anthology will provide you with justification.
Against this ultimate Situation, or ultimate abomination, Lutheran Surrealism argues that a society of art and artfulness is one that is based on taboos (the ten commandments) and is properly afraid of anyone who would break any of the commandments. Those commandments, depicted in their breach with a full telling of the hell to pay, constitute one aspect of our art. The other aspect is the contented life that can be lived by those who live within God's laws and strictures.
The great problem of Situationist theory is that they did not understand where the axioms led. Vaneigem writes as a conclusion to his "Basic Banalities" that "Just as God constituted the reference point of past unitary society, we are preparing to create the central reference point for a unitary society now possible. But this point cannot be fixed" (133).
In fact, it can be fixed. The Situationists were Satanists from the ground up. Their reference point is Cain v. Abel. They want to legitimize murder as orgiastic class murder. They argue that the Watts riots were legitimate. They argue for the "Black Mass" (11), as a perfect example of detournement, which turns the legitimate and orthodox on its head.
The Situationists were right to criticize the orthodox left of their time, but they only criticized it in the way that Sade criticized state executions. Sade argued that all the fun went out of execution when it was left up to the state. We should TAKE IT INTO OUR OWN HANDS, he argued, and put all the fun and blood back into Murder.
Lutheran Surrealism begs to differ. If all the arrows of the Situationist movement lead to the Manson Family debacle, we wish to argue that decency and kindness even toward those whom we loathe is a better way to behave.
We prefer the company of the Lutheran church to that of the Mansons. We think a charitable attitude toward our neighbors, including the extremely rich and extremely poor, is called for, until the day we are called to join our heavenly Father. While Situationism was an attitude of leftism that allowed grown-ups to act like children, we prefer an attitude of restraint and decency in which children are permitted to grow up within norms that allow for their full development as they take our places in society. We are not for the abolition of the superego. Rather, we are for clarifying the rules of patriarchy (ten commandments) and living within the laws of America as responsible and neighborly adults.
* René Viénet, né au Havre, sinologue a vécu 20 ans en Chine et à Taiwan.
Auteur de « La Dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? », premier film entièrement détourné de l'histoire du cinéma.
Enseigne le chinois à polytechnique de 1974 à 1978.
A travaillé au CNRS.
Auteur critique du régime chinois.
A été membre de l'Internationale situationniste au cours des années 60 et s'est occupé de la bibliothèque asiatique pour les éditions Champ libre.
A monté une maison d'édition.
Monday, January 22, 2007
Sunday, January 21, 2007
There are many strange things about Finland but for me the strangest is that I didn't see any cultural estrangement. Every Finn likes Finland. Every one seems to feel that they have won the lottery.
There isn't any counterculture in Finland.
Or none that I noticed. And yet I was working in their second largest university.
There isn't any counterculture in Finland.
Or none that I noticed. And yet I was working in their second largest university.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
THE DUKE RAPE CASE & the TRIAL OF JACQUES LACAN
It seems in the Duke rape case we have a microcosm of Lacanian life and thought. White student athletes at one of America's most elite institutions rent an African-American stripper for the night, and proceed to get drunk. It's a field day for Lacanians.
Here we have race, gender and class rolled into a perfect test case for the Lacanian professors of the "group of 88" (too bad there weren't 68) who decided that their students must be guilty. Race, gender, and class showtrials have rarely been given such a perfect case so as to prove the communist professors right.
The only problem is that the lacrosse players, it now turns out, have been exonerated by reason of the DNA evidence (or lack thereof) as it was found on the body of the stripper.
There was plenty of other men's DNA on the stripper, but the three that were arbitrarily seized and put on trial were not guilty of the crime with which they were charged (rape).
And yet the Duke professors (the 88 who thought the case summed up what they were trying to teach in terms of race, gender and class and so were ready to hand down a verdict without the necessity of a formal trial) leaped in and wrote up their verdict.
"Life's but a walking shadow... It is a tale told by an idiot, all sound and fury, signifying nothing" -- as MacBeth puts it in Act V.
How did the "imaginary" of Jacques Lacan -- the infamous surrealist psychiatrist -- end up giving us the ideas that would hoodwink the Lacanian professors of Duke into delivering their verdict without evidence? Epistemology demands we return to the scene of Saussure. First, there is Saussure and then there is Lacan's use of Saussure. Saussure had said that the signifier was arbitrary, and not attached to the signified. Lacan had then added that gender was a signifier that had no biological reality. Race, gender, and class are therefore floating signifiers without a signified. Except, apparently, when it comes to wealthy white men. for some reason there is no slippage in this case. In every case the wealthy white men are going to be considered as a class in this show trial, and as always already guilty of a crime.
Now enter the lacrosse players. White men of wealth. Race, gender, and class. If they were not so innocent, they would know that they had to be guilty. They were always already guilty, just as they were in the Soviet Union, just as they were in Pol Pot's Kampuchea. They were white, they were male, and they were wealthy. Therefore, they had to be guilty. (Plus, they were good at sports, which activated the envy of professors, who are almost always already nerds when it comes to sports, and probably not one of whom could beat any of the lacrosse players at anything except tiddlywinks.) And so the guilty verdict was read out and proudly printed (although the original letter is now difficult to find anywhere on the net).
The courts use the nitty gritty of evidence. The DNA evidence (withheld until recently by the prosecutor apparently so he could get elected) has come to light and exonerated these innocent young lacrosse aficionados. Evidence is something that Lacan had not cared about. You went to him and gave him money, and he said "Au revoir!" There was no need to actually lie down on a couch for an actual hour (time to Lacan was an aspect of the imaginary and so the psychoanalytic hour was excised as being a useless burden to analysis, like reality itself). Money was the signifier that Lacan continued to believe in. You gave that to him, and that was the end of your visit.
The professors at Duke (the group of 88) were much like Lacan. Pay us, and we will tell you how you are sick, and publish our findings as we imagine them.
We will even high-kick together like a Greek chorus if you like at no extra cost. What a deal!
There IS something of a Greek tragedy in all this.
It's not hard to understand how so many American institutions could fail so elaborately. American institutions were designed to work in terms of thinking about individuals. The Lacanian Maoists however think only about race, gender, and class. It's a symptom, but one that Slavoj Zizek will never address (or undress). His phallic signifier would deflate, and all he'd be left with is the works of Jacques Lacan -- hardly worth the paper they're written on. They are a tale told by an idiot, signifying that anything can mean anything you want it to mean, especially if you are the RED Queen, and what you wish to say is, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.
It seems in the Duke rape case we have a microcosm of Lacanian life and thought. White student athletes at one of America's most elite institutions rent an African-American stripper for the night, and proceed to get drunk. It's a field day for Lacanians.
Here we have race, gender and class rolled into a perfect test case for the Lacanian professors of the "group of 88" (too bad there weren't 68) who decided that their students must be guilty. Race, gender, and class showtrials have rarely been given such a perfect case so as to prove the communist professors right.
The only problem is that the lacrosse players, it now turns out, have been exonerated by reason of the DNA evidence (or lack thereof) as it was found on the body of the stripper.
There was plenty of other men's DNA on the stripper, but the three that were arbitrarily seized and put on trial were not guilty of the crime with which they were charged (rape).
And yet the Duke professors (the 88 who thought the case summed up what they were trying to teach in terms of race, gender and class and so were ready to hand down a verdict without the necessity of a formal trial) leaped in and wrote up their verdict.
"Life's but a walking shadow... It is a tale told by an idiot, all sound and fury, signifying nothing" -- as MacBeth puts it in Act V.
How did the "imaginary" of Jacques Lacan -- the infamous surrealist psychiatrist -- end up giving us the ideas that would hoodwink the Lacanian professors of Duke into delivering their verdict without evidence? Epistemology demands we return to the scene of Saussure. First, there is Saussure and then there is Lacan's use of Saussure. Saussure had said that the signifier was arbitrary, and not attached to the signified. Lacan had then added that gender was a signifier that had no biological reality. Race, gender, and class are therefore floating signifiers without a signified. Except, apparently, when it comes to wealthy white men. for some reason there is no slippage in this case. In every case the wealthy white men are going to be considered as a class in this show trial, and as always already guilty of a crime.
Now enter the lacrosse players. White men of wealth. Race, gender, and class. If they were not so innocent, they would know that they had to be guilty. They were always already guilty, just as they were in the Soviet Union, just as they were in Pol Pot's Kampuchea. They were white, they were male, and they were wealthy. Therefore, they had to be guilty. (Plus, they were good at sports, which activated the envy of professors, who are almost always already nerds when it comes to sports, and probably not one of whom could beat any of the lacrosse players at anything except tiddlywinks.) And so the guilty verdict was read out and proudly printed (although the original letter is now difficult to find anywhere on the net).
The courts use the nitty gritty of evidence. The DNA evidence (withheld until recently by the prosecutor apparently so he could get elected) has come to light and exonerated these innocent young lacrosse aficionados. Evidence is something that Lacan had not cared about. You went to him and gave him money, and he said "Au revoir!" There was no need to actually lie down on a couch for an actual hour (time to Lacan was an aspect of the imaginary and so the psychoanalytic hour was excised as being a useless burden to analysis, like reality itself). Money was the signifier that Lacan continued to believe in. You gave that to him, and that was the end of your visit.
The professors at Duke (the group of 88) were much like Lacan. Pay us, and we will tell you how you are sick, and publish our findings as we imagine them.
We will even high-kick together like a Greek chorus if you like at no extra cost. What a deal!
There IS something of a Greek tragedy in all this.
It's not hard to understand how so many American institutions could fail so elaborately. American institutions were designed to work in terms of thinking about individuals. The Lacanian Maoists however think only about race, gender, and class. It's a symptom, but one that Slavoj Zizek will never address (or undress). His phallic signifier would deflate, and all he'd be left with is the works of Jacques Lacan -- hardly worth the paper they're written on. They are a tale told by an idiot, signifying that anything can mean anything you want it to mean, especially if you are the RED Queen, and what you wish to say is, OFF WITH THEIR HEADS.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Thesis
-- God cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs, therefore He doesn't exist.
Antithesis
-- Hope, faith, charity, love, fairness, beauty, time, space and happiness also cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs, and yet even secularists admit that they exist.
Synthesis
-- If the qualities of the antithesis do exist, then so might God exist. What is a love for fairness or beauty if not a love for God?
-- God cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs, therefore He doesn't exist.
Antithesis
-- Hope, faith, charity, love, fairness, beauty, time, space and happiness also cannot be apprehended by any of the sensory organs, and yet even secularists admit that they exist.
Synthesis
-- If the qualities of the antithesis do exist, then so might God exist. What is a love for fairness or beauty if not a love for God?
Saturday, January 13, 2007
The Romans
for MLK
With their aqueducts
their gladiator contests
their bridal chambers
Nero & Caligula
Tiberius and
so on
They hadn't got any morals much
A few rights for the privileged
The slaves were no more than furniture
Could be broken and thrown into the dump
(The Praetorian Guard dumped Caligula...
So even Emperors were garbage)
St. Paul argued that a new God was afoot
Mercy, Love, Charity, Faith
The meek would inherit the earth
For a culture that believed progress consisted of roasted pig
Stuffed with live canaries
Or the invention of the barfatorium...
The coming of St. Paul from the Provinces
Must have seemed a rude joke
To silence it with headchop an instant's wish
Paul's head bounced thrice
Nero's divinity would not suffice
The symbol of the unchanging Three had replaced the dice
The coliseum of lions replaced by kneeling in the hush before Christ.
for MLK
With their aqueducts
their gladiator contests
their bridal chambers
Nero & Caligula
Tiberius and
so on
They hadn't got any morals much
A few rights for the privileged
The slaves were no more than furniture
Could be broken and thrown into the dump
(The Praetorian Guard dumped Caligula...
So even Emperors were garbage)
St. Paul argued that a new God was afoot
Mercy, Love, Charity, Faith
The meek would inherit the earth
For a culture that believed progress consisted of roasted pig
Stuffed with live canaries
Or the invention of the barfatorium...
The coming of St. Paul from the Provinces
Must have seemed a rude joke
To silence it with headchop an instant's wish
Paul's head bounced thrice
Nero's divinity would not suffice
The symbol of the unchanging Three had replaced the dice
The coliseum of lions replaced by kneeling in the hush before Christ.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Polar bears. Two of them are standing at the North Pole. One of them says to the other, "Radio."
That's the first joke I recall ever hearing. My father told it to me when I was about 4.
I didn't get the joke at the time, but now I realize that it's about new technology. My father had heard it himself as a child, when radio was comparatively new. Radio in the 1960s was already old, so the joke didn't quite make sense.
Perhaps we could update the image by having one polar bear say, "iPod."
That's the first joke I recall ever hearing. My father told it to me when I was about 4.
I didn't get the joke at the time, but now I realize that it's about new technology. My father had heard it himself as a child, when radio was comparatively new. Radio in the 1960s was already old, so the joke didn't quite make sense.
Perhaps we could update the image by having one polar bear say, "iPod."
Thursday, January 11, 2007
GET SMART
In that old TV show (the idea was created by Mel Brooks if I recall) there were two opposing forces. The forces of good were called Kontrol. The forces of evil were called Kaos.
This is pretty much right.
But it's possible to have so much Kontrol that it leads to Kaos. Communism would fit under that designation. Too much kontrol of the economy destroys kapital.
By discouraging personal initiative kommunisticifationalalitarianesque kontrol leads to kaos.
On the other hand Adam Smith's notion of the Invisible Hand theory seems to prefer kaos on the surface, but underneath there is a belief that God has so designed the world that if we lean into kaos then the economics would discover a balance: that the talented would rise to the top, that good products would find a market, that bad products would not get bought and would ultimately be driven off the market, etc.
Now in comes Wal-Mart.
And almost all of their products are made in Red China (which is no longer red, but just red enough to make me blush).
Which is more Satanic: a kontrol that leads to Kaos, or a Kaos that leads to Kontrol?
I'm certain this has something to do with the price of those bad eggs in China: not just the gang of 4 and the kapitalist high roaders instanced in Mao's denunciations, but the new kapitalists of the kommunist system and the ways in which they've been turned into parasites of the kapitalist system by Wal-Mart: which is the only place I ever shop as I explore the mysteries of Das Kapital and its infamous antinomies.
Turn over any product at Wal-Mart and no longer are they made in Taiwan as things were in my childhood. Now everything is made by the Red Chinese.
And all my ideas start to spin: give your car to the man who wears the star it was sung in the old Texaco commercials.
As I try to think about kapitalism versus kommunism, I kan only say that neither makes any sense to me on its own. What we need is the two kingdoms theory: the kingdom of the left, and the kingdom of the right. The right and the left do come together in this Lutheran theory, such that kontrol is possible (self-kontrol as we practice our kareer to benefit our society) and a belief in the afterlife: the love that will one day be ours.
Until then, it's Adam Smith as mitigated by Locke's four basic rights, and by natural law (stemming from the ten commandments). Ha ha. I'm seriously confused.
It's confusing to look at things through the secular lens. I can't understand how anybody does it. We need to think about the two kingdoms idea to check the correctness of virtually anything from Wal-Mart to Red China. Red China is bad because it doesn't respect the four freedoms: life, health, liberty, or property.
Wal-Mart is ok, but it does business with a country that isn't ok. Is that ok? I think that it isn't. We should isolate the Red Chinese until they get up to speed on the four liberties of Locke. Otherwise we are creating kaos in that kountry every time we purchase something from Wal-Mart, which, as it turns out, is a front operation for kommunism, NOT the leading kapitalist enterprise that it claims to be.
Klarity is difficult to maintain! Meanwhile, I really shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, but since its products cheaper thanks to the slave labor that went into their making, I do. I must. I make a simple distinction, however. I turn over every product and if it says China on the bottom, I refuse to buy it. Buying communist products contributes to turning everyone into a mindless prole that the authoritarian left can kontrol.
In that old TV show (the idea was created by Mel Brooks if I recall) there were two opposing forces. The forces of good were called Kontrol. The forces of evil were called Kaos.
This is pretty much right.
But it's possible to have so much Kontrol that it leads to Kaos. Communism would fit under that designation. Too much kontrol of the economy destroys kapital.
By discouraging personal initiative kommunisticifationalalitarianesque kontrol leads to kaos.
On the other hand Adam Smith's notion of the Invisible Hand theory seems to prefer kaos on the surface, but underneath there is a belief that God has so designed the world that if we lean into kaos then the economics would discover a balance: that the talented would rise to the top, that good products would find a market, that bad products would not get bought and would ultimately be driven off the market, etc.
Now in comes Wal-Mart.
And almost all of their products are made in Red China (which is no longer red, but just red enough to make me blush).
Which is more Satanic: a kontrol that leads to Kaos, or a Kaos that leads to Kontrol?
I'm certain this has something to do with the price of those bad eggs in China: not just the gang of 4 and the kapitalist high roaders instanced in Mao's denunciations, but the new kapitalists of the kommunist system and the ways in which they've been turned into parasites of the kapitalist system by Wal-Mart: which is the only place I ever shop as I explore the mysteries of Das Kapital and its infamous antinomies.
Turn over any product at Wal-Mart and no longer are they made in Taiwan as things were in my childhood. Now everything is made by the Red Chinese.
And all my ideas start to spin: give your car to the man who wears the star it was sung in the old Texaco commercials.
As I try to think about kapitalism versus kommunism, I kan only say that neither makes any sense to me on its own. What we need is the two kingdoms theory: the kingdom of the left, and the kingdom of the right. The right and the left do come together in this Lutheran theory, such that kontrol is possible (self-kontrol as we practice our kareer to benefit our society) and a belief in the afterlife: the love that will one day be ours.
Until then, it's Adam Smith as mitigated by Locke's four basic rights, and by natural law (stemming from the ten commandments). Ha ha. I'm seriously confused.
It's confusing to look at things through the secular lens. I can't understand how anybody does it. We need to think about the two kingdoms idea to check the correctness of virtually anything from Wal-Mart to Red China. Red China is bad because it doesn't respect the four freedoms: life, health, liberty, or property.
Wal-Mart is ok, but it does business with a country that isn't ok. Is that ok? I think that it isn't. We should isolate the Red Chinese until they get up to speed on the four liberties of Locke. Otherwise we are creating kaos in that kountry every time we purchase something from Wal-Mart, which, as it turns out, is a front operation for kommunism, NOT the leading kapitalist enterprise that it claims to be.
Klarity is difficult to maintain! Meanwhile, I really shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, but since its products cheaper thanks to the slave labor that went into their making, I do. I must. I make a simple distinction, however. I turn over every product and if it says China on the bottom, I refuse to buy it. Buying communist products contributes to turning everyone into a mindless prole that the authoritarian left can kontrol.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
In the most recent issue of the American Scholar there was an article by a New Zealand English literature professor named Brian Boyd. He argued that against the relativists there is the possibility of thinking about universals using Darwin rather than Marx, and biology rather than identity politics. I didn't understand the article completely. He mentioned a lot of new names: Ellen Dissanayake, and a man who had written a book called Darwin's Cathedral. These people are somehow interested in the new field of ecoliterature but not from a Marxist but rather from a Darwinian viewpoint. I don't know what it means yet except that Boyd pointed out that biology has a real and testable quality to it that names and naming don't. The rose is a rose by any other name.
This is a development that I hope to explore further.
If there were three great problematic thinkers that blew up the nineteenth century and ushered in the twentieth they would have been Marx, Freud, and Darwin.
The first two are almost universally considered jokes everywhere but in small pockets of the population such as in English literature departments at large state campuses in Pennsylvania, to choose a random example.
Darwin on the other hand has a future with legs. Although at first his thinking probably seemed the most fishy of the three 19th century giants, I think there is something interesting in asking what he can mean for literary study.
While others piddle about with lunatics like Lacan who are clearly based in Marx and Freud (and who basically don't even admit the real or if they do they do so only reluctantly), I think it is best to leave those lunatics in their asylums to dream of Castro's beard, and to move on to Darwin. I haven't read much of Brian Boyd but what I've read is at the very least clear and elegant. He wrote a pretty good essay on Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, and its relationship to biological truths in a philosophy journal. I thought I understood that essay, but now that I am trying to recall the basic principles that he sought to inculcate, they escape me.
How does a culture SELECT the artifacts it wishes to preserve? Shouldn't these be based on pragmatic qualities such as usefulness in terms of survival? Isn't it true that Shakespeare helps us survive because he shows us what it means to be a stupid pious prick like Henry VIth and end up with a knife in your heart from a ruthless thug like Richard III? Doesn't he show us pretty clearly where being a Hotspur will get you, or a Falstaff?
I think what Boyd is saying is that texts that promote survival will be the most fit, and are therefore the most useful to study. Not affirmative action, in other words, in terms of the texts we employ, but fitness. Of course, segments of the population might differ on the utility of certain texts. Is Shakespeare universally pragmatic in terms of longterm utility? Is Dr. Seuss? Is that why kids love Seuss? Are Zora Neale Hurston, or Marianne Moore? Perhaps only over time as a culture selects can we know what texts have primary utility. Canon choices based on affirmative action are pretty much arbitrary, and we are all looking for a new set of criteria. Can we find a useful universal criterion that is biologically sound and that includes everyone and manages (finally) to exclude Milton from the canon?
I'm not sure that this sort of question is what Brian Boyd is aiming at, but it's more or less what I got from his articles. I'll have to keep reading to see if I can understand this new universal better.
I can't claim to be very definitive about this idea, but in at least two of my books I tried to do something similar. In Comedy after Postmodernism I'm trying to create a Darwinian literary theory, and in my book on Gregory Corso I'm doing the same thing. It helps to have a critical mass of people to work with, but I didn't have it. If i was a graduate student again I'd try to find such a place. One of the hotspots for study of the new literary Darwinism is SUNY-Binghamton which is located about an hour to the south. They have something called the EVOS program which is a linkage of some twenty or thirty disciplines. Here's a brief article about it that appeared in Nature magazine:
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~evos/pdffiles/Lit%20Anim%20Review.pdf
This is a development that I hope to explore further.
If there were three great problematic thinkers that blew up the nineteenth century and ushered in the twentieth they would have been Marx, Freud, and Darwin.
The first two are almost universally considered jokes everywhere but in small pockets of the population such as in English literature departments at large state campuses in Pennsylvania, to choose a random example.
Darwin on the other hand has a future with legs. Although at first his thinking probably seemed the most fishy of the three 19th century giants, I think there is something interesting in asking what he can mean for literary study.
While others piddle about with lunatics like Lacan who are clearly based in Marx and Freud (and who basically don't even admit the real or if they do they do so only reluctantly), I think it is best to leave those lunatics in their asylums to dream of Castro's beard, and to move on to Darwin. I haven't read much of Brian Boyd but what I've read is at the very least clear and elegant. He wrote a pretty good essay on Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who, and its relationship to biological truths in a philosophy journal. I thought I understood that essay, but now that I am trying to recall the basic principles that he sought to inculcate, they escape me.
How does a culture SELECT the artifacts it wishes to preserve? Shouldn't these be based on pragmatic qualities such as usefulness in terms of survival? Isn't it true that Shakespeare helps us survive because he shows us what it means to be a stupid pious prick like Henry VIth and end up with a knife in your heart from a ruthless thug like Richard III? Doesn't he show us pretty clearly where being a Hotspur will get you, or a Falstaff?
I think what Boyd is saying is that texts that promote survival will be the most fit, and are therefore the most useful to study. Not affirmative action, in other words, in terms of the texts we employ, but fitness. Of course, segments of the population might differ on the utility of certain texts. Is Shakespeare universally pragmatic in terms of longterm utility? Is Dr. Seuss? Is that why kids love Seuss? Are Zora Neale Hurston, or Marianne Moore? Perhaps only over time as a culture selects can we know what texts have primary utility. Canon choices based on affirmative action are pretty much arbitrary, and we are all looking for a new set of criteria. Can we find a useful universal criterion that is biologically sound and that includes everyone and manages (finally) to exclude Milton from the canon?
I'm not sure that this sort of question is what Brian Boyd is aiming at, but it's more or less what I got from his articles. I'll have to keep reading to see if I can understand this new universal better.
I can't claim to be very definitive about this idea, but in at least two of my books I tried to do something similar. In Comedy after Postmodernism I'm trying to create a Darwinian literary theory, and in my book on Gregory Corso I'm doing the same thing. It helps to have a critical mass of people to work with, but I didn't have it. If i was a graduate student again I'd try to find such a place. One of the hotspots for study of the new literary Darwinism is SUNY-Binghamton which is located about an hour to the south. They have something called the EVOS program which is a linkage of some twenty or thirty disciplines. Here's a brief article about it that appeared in Nature magazine:
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~evos/pdffiles/Lit%20Anim%20Review.pdf
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
THE MICHAEL BERUBE DEBACLE
Once in a great while one stumbles into a trap that is so vast that one almost loses all one's bearings, one's name is spun out of control, and chaos threatens to extinguish all personal meaning. Such for me is what happened when I innocently entered the Michael Berube Blog about six months ago.
How did it happen? An old friend of mine named Stephen Baraban reported to me that someone named Michael Berube had been mocking Lutherans on his blog. I went to his blog and sure enough -- this individual named Michael Berube had been saying that Lutherans had attempted to make him wear a seat belt. He protested against the compulsory attitude behind this.
I argued in the comment box that Lutherans would be unlikely to do this, since most of us are rather diffident, but that there IS a corollary to Thou Shalt Not Kill, which is that you should help to preserve your neighbor's life whenever you can. We must keep our communities intact, and especially when we see fathers going around without a seat belt, it is possible that we might intervene. I wouldn't, but I am not the best Lutheran around. A really good Lutheran would help Michael to stay alive. Now, I wouldn't cut his brakes (as he might think), but I wouldn't urge him to put his seat belt on either. Why? I don't know. I would be irked that he wasn't wearing one, though. It has been proven in case after case that seat belts do save lives, and Michael has two sons. Thus, it is important for him to stay alive. Sons need a father, and Michael is clearly a good father. He writes lovingly of his children. Irreplaceable. So wear your seat belt, dummy, is what I would think, while going off down the road without wearing mine.
About two months which felt like two months later I was still so irked that he had made fun of Lutherans for their compulsory attitudes, that I felt a compulsion to go to his blog and make fun of Marxists, to see how he liked it. Michael Berube is a very famous Marxist academic, as it turns out, who teaches at State University of Pennsylvania. He has about a half dozen books, and he gives lectures, and he plays ice hockey, and has two sons, one of whom is developmentally disabled. I also felt that I might like Berube. He had written an excellent essay on the need for Amerika to attack Afghanistan after 9/11. I was startled by this. The essay, which has been published in Berube's book Rhetorical Occasions -- reveals a mind that is tight, focused, capable of handling complexity of the highest degree, and organizing a powerful and accurate argument with humor and insight. (NB: not all of his essays are like this -- many of them are mere ice skating, but this is the only one I had read at that time, and I had assumed that he was not a mere conformist. I was wrong.)
So when I went over to his blog and made a few little jests about communists, I was testing the water. The water exploded. There were a hundred biting little comments. Remember the moment in the Odyssey when O. sails into the harbor of the Laestrygonians and the giants come after his ships -- demolishing 10 or so -- and only Odysseus escapes? It was like that. A cannibal horde from the deep, after me. But I didn't flee for my life. I stayed and fought with them for a month.
I fought with a fury.
I was winning.
Readers of Berube's blog were abandoning Marxism and coming over to Lutheran Surrealism. I had turned the tide. They were about to join me and go back and attack Berube who had set them on me with his two top lieutenants in cahoots.
At that point, an incident with a dog in the night was concocted. Perhaps it's true that one of Berube's reader/commenters -- a guy named Chris Clarke -- had been threatened by someone else on the blog who threatened his dog. Why anybody would threaten to injure a dog is beyond me. I didn't think it could be true, and I felt that it was a diversion. I made a hasty reply about the dog (you can see it in the comment box below provided by Chris Clarke, who apparently owns the dog). Like Shakespeare, I do not like dogs. If they are man's best friend I do not want any friends. They will befriend anyone who flips them a liver pie. Disgraceful beasts who were once wolves, but have been subjected to mental pressure by humans until they are now running around unashamed as Dachsunds, miniature French poodles, their tongues hanging out, slaves to humanity, they make me sick.
I am a cat person.
Communists like dogs, I think, because dogs can be trained to do tricks. Cats can't, which is why I prefer them.
Communists are Pols. What they want from people is that they all become the same. They see the state as an iron which will level everyone into an equality that will make it easier for them to work with. I prefer uniqueness in people and in friends. I want friends who surprise me with their humor, with their art, with their open mindedness. I want to be startled.
Communists can't stand that. When they throw the stick they expect you to fetch. That's apparently all they want in a friend.
Solzhenitsyn describes in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch the considerable expense to which the Soviet State went to hammer the humor out of the proles. Ivan was in prison for eight years hard labor for the crime of having made a joke against Stalin. Communists want people to live like dogs. I would prefer to live the life of a cat.
Capitalism thrives on diversity and on the individual's ability to create a sense of humor (humorists as producers of wealth in the name of the jolly).
But the communists want all ideas to derive from the state. To some extent they represent an atavistic impulse within humanity to turn people not just into dogs but into army ants. Perhaps there is something deep inside of humanity that yearns to be an army ant. To take orders, to obey, like ants, or like robots. Perhaps this is why they look forward to the era of the cyborg when people can be programmed to do what the state commands. There is some animal or robot impulse to conform. While some of us are on a higher evolutionary level than that and have souls, the communists would destroy our souls and our churches, and turn us all into the same thing. They will use the Satanic Gulag, or use the university, whatever they can get their hands on, to promote conformity, or slavery. In that infamous Pol's Cambodia, he used the whole resources of the state to destroy literacy itself. Anyone who could read or write had to be destroyed in the name of the slave state he had created.
This is why communists MUST HATE POETS AND HUMORISTS (same thing since Plato) --communists want to determine all life for us through a loudspeaker so that we are slaves of the state.
My life and my beliefs have a continuity. In my youth I was a surrealist. I liked their iconoclastic wit, their ability to stand up to the leveling conformity imposed by the Satanic impulse. For fifty years Breton held the door open for an anarchist left that created the most interesting art of the twentieth century. Germany fell to Hitler and his first action was to abolish the surrealist left. Spain fell to De Gaulle and his first action was to destroy the remnants of the anarchists and especially their artists. Lorca was bayoneted in the ass by a soldier and murdered.
But on the left the leveling was just as extreme. In the Soviet Union the entire artistic avant-garde was endangered, and many were sent to the Gulags, while the rest were driven underground. Even to hand out a blank sheet of paper without state permission could mean years in the Gulag. Poets were especially threatened. Humorists, too. Andrei Zhdanov (who created the doctrine of Social Realism) argued that every artist's work could be defined on a political football field of ideology. Any artist working toward the Soviet's goals could remain. All others had to be destroyed or put into reeducation camps.
Our Cultural Studies field has taken up this model of literary analysis of the individual artwork.
It is the individual that Kierkegaard saw (against the levelers and reductionists) that had to be saved. The poet, the humorist, but also the individual as they stood before God with their own conscience intact. The universities have become giant bulldozers smashing individual rights in the name of political correctness. Michael Berube is part of this, but he was apparently unaware of it.
But he can be saved. He grew up Catholic so he was already used to taking commands in a hierarchical system in which the Pope spoke from his chair as if he were God. The Pope is the anti-Christ, Luther said. Anyone who will arrogate that much power to themselves is the anti-Christ.
Christ saw in each individual (no matter how small) a divine spark. He chose the most unlikely citizens to be his friends and disciples. Obscure fisherman and tax men were chosen. And in this choosing they became aware of their own souls. The intent of Lutheran Surrealism is precisely opposite to the conforming crush of sameness that the communists propose to eradicate the individual soul. We want to support the individual soul as the most tender and beautiful of all of God's creations. We want the uniqueness of each person, each artist, to come to the fore AGAINST communist and fascist materialist hegemony.
The right and the left are like the clashing cliffs in the Jason and the Argonauts myth. Lutheran Surrealism is the dove that sails through those cliffs. The cliffs clash and attempt to smash the dove into dust. But we are more than dust. Like our souls, hope will survive and bring us to the Nude Jerusalem.
Once in a great while one stumbles into a trap that is so vast that one almost loses all one's bearings, one's name is spun out of control, and chaos threatens to extinguish all personal meaning. Such for me is what happened when I innocently entered the Michael Berube Blog about six months ago.
How did it happen? An old friend of mine named Stephen Baraban reported to me that someone named Michael Berube had been mocking Lutherans on his blog. I went to his blog and sure enough -- this individual named Michael Berube had been saying that Lutherans had attempted to make him wear a seat belt. He protested against the compulsory attitude behind this.
I argued in the comment box that Lutherans would be unlikely to do this, since most of us are rather diffident, but that there IS a corollary to Thou Shalt Not Kill, which is that you should help to preserve your neighbor's life whenever you can. We must keep our communities intact, and especially when we see fathers going around without a seat belt, it is possible that we might intervene. I wouldn't, but I am not the best Lutheran around. A really good Lutheran would help Michael to stay alive. Now, I wouldn't cut his brakes (as he might think), but I wouldn't urge him to put his seat belt on either. Why? I don't know. I would be irked that he wasn't wearing one, though. It has been proven in case after case that seat belts do save lives, and Michael has two sons. Thus, it is important for him to stay alive. Sons need a father, and Michael is clearly a good father. He writes lovingly of his children. Irreplaceable. So wear your seat belt, dummy, is what I would think, while going off down the road without wearing mine.
About two months which felt like two months later I was still so irked that he had made fun of Lutherans for their compulsory attitudes, that I felt a compulsion to go to his blog and make fun of Marxists, to see how he liked it. Michael Berube is a very famous Marxist academic, as it turns out, who teaches at State University of Pennsylvania. He has about a half dozen books, and he gives lectures, and he plays ice hockey, and has two sons, one of whom is developmentally disabled. I also felt that I might like Berube. He had written an excellent essay on the need for Amerika to attack Afghanistan after 9/11. I was startled by this. The essay, which has been published in Berube's book Rhetorical Occasions -- reveals a mind that is tight, focused, capable of handling complexity of the highest degree, and organizing a powerful and accurate argument with humor and insight. (NB: not all of his essays are like this -- many of them are mere ice skating, but this is the only one I had read at that time, and I had assumed that he was not a mere conformist. I was wrong.)
So when I went over to his blog and made a few little jests about communists, I was testing the water. The water exploded. There were a hundred biting little comments. Remember the moment in the Odyssey when O. sails into the harbor of the Laestrygonians and the giants come after his ships -- demolishing 10 or so -- and only Odysseus escapes? It was like that. A cannibal horde from the deep, after me. But I didn't flee for my life. I stayed and fought with them for a month.
I fought with a fury.
I was winning.
Readers of Berube's blog were abandoning Marxism and coming over to Lutheran Surrealism. I had turned the tide. They were about to join me and go back and attack Berube who had set them on me with his two top lieutenants in cahoots.
At that point, an incident with a dog in the night was concocted. Perhaps it's true that one of Berube's reader/commenters -- a guy named Chris Clarke -- had been threatened by someone else on the blog who threatened his dog. Why anybody would threaten to injure a dog is beyond me. I didn't think it could be true, and I felt that it was a diversion. I made a hasty reply about the dog (you can see it in the comment box below provided by Chris Clarke, who apparently owns the dog). Like Shakespeare, I do not like dogs. If they are man's best friend I do not want any friends. They will befriend anyone who flips them a liver pie. Disgraceful beasts who were once wolves, but have been subjected to mental pressure by humans until they are now running around unashamed as Dachsunds, miniature French poodles, their tongues hanging out, slaves to humanity, they make me sick.
I am a cat person.
Communists like dogs, I think, because dogs can be trained to do tricks. Cats can't, which is why I prefer them.
Communists are Pols. What they want from people is that they all become the same. They see the state as an iron which will level everyone into an equality that will make it easier for them to work with. I prefer uniqueness in people and in friends. I want friends who surprise me with their humor, with their art, with their open mindedness. I want to be startled.
Communists can't stand that. When they throw the stick they expect you to fetch. That's apparently all they want in a friend.
Solzhenitsyn describes in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch the considerable expense to which the Soviet State went to hammer the humor out of the proles. Ivan was in prison for eight years hard labor for the crime of having made a joke against Stalin. Communists want people to live like dogs. I would prefer to live the life of a cat.
Capitalism thrives on diversity and on the individual's ability to create a sense of humor (humorists as producers of wealth in the name of the jolly).
But the communists want all ideas to derive from the state. To some extent they represent an atavistic impulse within humanity to turn people not just into dogs but into army ants. Perhaps there is something deep inside of humanity that yearns to be an army ant. To take orders, to obey, like ants, or like robots. Perhaps this is why they look forward to the era of the cyborg when people can be programmed to do what the state commands. There is some animal or robot impulse to conform. While some of us are on a higher evolutionary level than that and have souls, the communists would destroy our souls and our churches, and turn us all into the same thing. They will use the Satanic Gulag, or use the university, whatever they can get their hands on, to promote conformity, or slavery. In that infamous Pol's Cambodia, he used the whole resources of the state to destroy literacy itself. Anyone who could read or write had to be destroyed in the name of the slave state he had created.
This is why communists MUST HATE POETS AND HUMORISTS (same thing since Plato) --communists want to determine all life for us through a loudspeaker so that we are slaves of the state.
My life and my beliefs have a continuity. In my youth I was a surrealist. I liked their iconoclastic wit, their ability to stand up to the leveling conformity imposed by the Satanic impulse. For fifty years Breton held the door open for an anarchist left that created the most interesting art of the twentieth century. Germany fell to Hitler and his first action was to abolish the surrealist left. Spain fell to De Gaulle and his first action was to destroy the remnants of the anarchists and especially their artists. Lorca was bayoneted in the ass by a soldier and murdered.
But on the left the leveling was just as extreme. In the Soviet Union the entire artistic avant-garde was endangered, and many were sent to the Gulags, while the rest were driven underground. Even to hand out a blank sheet of paper without state permission could mean years in the Gulag. Poets were especially threatened. Humorists, too. Andrei Zhdanov (who created the doctrine of Social Realism) argued that every artist's work could be defined on a political football field of ideology. Any artist working toward the Soviet's goals could remain. All others had to be destroyed or put into reeducation camps.
Our Cultural Studies field has taken up this model of literary analysis of the individual artwork.
It is the individual that Kierkegaard saw (against the levelers and reductionists) that had to be saved. The poet, the humorist, but also the individual as they stood before God with their own conscience intact. The universities have become giant bulldozers smashing individual rights in the name of political correctness. Michael Berube is part of this, but he was apparently unaware of it.
But he can be saved. He grew up Catholic so he was already used to taking commands in a hierarchical system in which the Pope spoke from his chair as if he were God. The Pope is the anti-Christ, Luther said. Anyone who will arrogate that much power to themselves is the anti-Christ.
Christ saw in each individual (no matter how small) a divine spark. He chose the most unlikely citizens to be his friends and disciples. Obscure fisherman and tax men were chosen. And in this choosing they became aware of their own souls. The intent of Lutheran Surrealism is precisely opposite to the conforming crush of sameness that the communists propose to eradicate the individual soul. We want to support the individual soul as the most tender and beautiful of all of God's creations. We want the uniqueness of each person, each artist, to come to the fore AGAINST communist and fascist materialist hegemony.
The right and the left are like the clashing cliffs in the Jason and the Argonauts myth. Lutheran Surrealism is the dove that sails through those cliffs. The cliffs clash and attempt to smash the dove into dust. But we are more than dust. Like our souls, hope will survive and bring us to the Nude Jerusalem.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
5 Secrets About Me
In the blogworld right now there is a game of tag going around where bloggers are being asked to put down five secret things about themselves. Poet Andy Gricevich tagged me. At the end of this blog comment I will tag five others.
1. In kindergarten I was thought to be mildly retarded and they considered keeping me back a grade. I never spoke to the other children, and never befriended anyone. I remember sitting on the front of the stage (there was no other place for our kindergarten classroom so they put us on the stage), with my legs dangling off, my back to the other kids who were busy with their dumb games of hurting each other, while I sat drinking my milk and thinking that the other kids and the teachers were idiots. They apparently thought that I was an idiot, too.
2. My mother was a reading teacher and I was the first person she taught how to read. I could read Hardy Boys novels by the time first grade started. I spent a lot of time reading and as a result when they gave us IQ tests in first grade I had a giant IQ due to the comparatively big vocabulary I had amassed and I was moved from "special" classes to "gifted" classes -- effectively jumping from "idiot" to "genius." I still remember the day the principal came to get me.
I had gotten used to being hit by teachers (back then this was legal) because of my refusal to pay attention in class. (I was afraid of the teacher and thought that she was actually the Wicked Witch of the West in disguise, but I COULDN'T pay attention because the things she was teaching were things I had known for several years.) Sometimes in class the teacher would look at me and ask me what is the second letter of the alphabet or something and I would scowl at her and then wet my pants in fear because I knew the beating would begin. The beating consisted of my holding out my hand while she smacked it with a ruler. I hate pain and this hurt like hell. I was five years old. When the principal came to get me one day I thought he was going to put me in the incinerator because of my refusal to pay attention since no level of beating could stop me from daydreaming. The principal took me by the hand. I weighed my chances of running out to the street and flagging down a trucker who could take me to freedom, but I knew the authorities would find me. I went toward the incinerator quietly. Just before the incinerator I was taken into the gifted kids' room, and given a desk right in front.
3. As a child I drew something that I called a torture tunnel and I still sometimes imagine this, and at night in my dreams I am still caught in such a contraption that has been created for me by someone else. Every morning I would wake up and draw one, and every night it was the last thing I would draw. During the day I would imagine one or draw one secretly at my desk. Even now when I was getting A's and was no longer being hit, I continued to want revenge for not understanding me. I would draw pictures of my teachers and colleagues undergoing horrific humiliations in one underground room after another. My first grade teacher had to crawl through seas of alligators, and then take electric shock treatments, and walk on the Main Street with a dunce cap over hot coals while I shot spitballs at her. I don't think anyone knew that I felt like this. My parents were busy with their careers or watching TV, so I rarely spoke with them except to assure them that everything was fine. I tried to seem normal to my parents, my friends, even to my closest friends.
4. Once I was put in the accelerated program in 1st grade I no longer felt quite so hateful. Before, I didn't fit, and felt that everyone was a monster. By fourth grade I had been moved to a separate school for super-bright kids, where we jumped a grade every other year. In the accelerated classes I began to feel understood and began to understand the other kids, too. You had to have an IQ of 140 to get in. I started to feel normal. I could sit with other kids and talk about world history, and play chess with them, and we learned about how to multiply negative numbers. Life began to seem ok. I stopped drawing the torture tunnels except on special occasions. I had my first friends. I was actually learning something in classes, and enjoyed playing games with my new (mostly Jewish) friends.
5. We moved again in sixth grade and from then on I hated everybody all over again. I hated my teachers, and hated almost everybody I knew. I felt that I might as well have actual cows for colleagues. By twelfth grade in high school we still hadn't caught up to where I had been in sixth grade in the Philly suburb where I started school. I gave up in 7th grade, and tried to fit in but have remained angry that I had to waste so much time in school with idiots both before and after the two good years in the accelerated program. I'm now fifty and to some extent I still just don't like people.
About five years ago I read a book about serial killers and realized that I fit two out of the three criteria. The book was a crummy sensationalist paperback that I read while waiting in a grocery line in Portland, Oregon but it was written by an actual FBI profiler so it was probably reasonably accurate. He said that there are three signs of serial killers. 1. As a child they wet their bed into their teens. 2. They played excessively with matches. 3. They tortured small animals.
You had to have ALL THREE of these traits, and if you did, you had the makings of a serial killer. I had two of the traits. I wet my bed into my teens. I played excessively with matches and have started at least two major forest fires (I didn't intend to do this, but the fires got out of control) and innumerable smaller fires including burning down a house but haven't done this since I was about fifteen.
I could be a serial killer except for the third criterion and for the fact that I have never injured anyone. I have never wished to injure a small animal. I could never stand to fish because I couldn't bear to put a hook into a worm. I still can't bear to put a hook into a worm's lip and so when my children ask me to take them fishing I say no, and direct them to a game that doesn't hurt others. I can't stand to eat animals, and even feel suspicious about eating animal crackers. It's a slippery slope. I feel sympathetic toward vegetarian goofballs who won't even injure yeast in the pizza they bake and so eat unleavened pizza. A boy in 7th grade once cut the skin off a live frog. I never spoke to him again. I get angry at people a lot of the time when they are mean or self-centered, but I rarely show it. I hate them a lot less if they lessen the suffering of small animals, and if they practice kindness as an avant-garde activity. I think that Jesus practiced kindness as an avant-garde activity. That is why I love Jesus. He was kind to everyone, especially the misunderstood and the outcast. He helped the most unlikely people and chose the weirdest outsiders as his disciples. I think that Jesus (rather than the Marquis de Sade) should be considered the avatar of the avant-garde. Jesus is certainly the avatar of Lutheran Surrealism. I love the kindness of the Lutherans that I know at the church. I love to sing with them. I love that Jesus says to turn the other cheek, and to spread the spirit of peace. I can't always do it, but I love the idea of it. Even as a child, church was the one thing that always made sense to me. I loved the prayers, and the idea that there was someone watching out for me. Even if God is just an invention, He's the most wonderful invention that the world has ever known. Having faith in Him, is like having faith in Life.
I tag Carl Sachs, Helen Losse, Phil Primeau, Steven Shaviro, and WW (sorry, I can only do five -- but if you wish to be tagged put your preference in the comments box and maybe someone will tag you!).
In the blogworld right now there is a game of tag going around where bloggers are being asked to put down five secret things about themselves. Poet Andy Gricevich tagged me. At the end of this blog comment I will tag five others.
1. In kindergarten I was thought to be mildly retarded and they considered keeping me back a grade. I never spoke to the other children, and never befriended anyone. I remember sitting on the front of the stage (there was no other place for our kindergarten classroom so they put us on the stage), with my legs dangling off, my back to the other kids who were busy with their dumb games of hurting each other, while I sat drinking my milk and thinking that the other kids and the teachers were idiots. They apparently thought that I was an idiot, too.
2. My mother was a reading teacher and I was the first person she taught how to read. I could read Hardy Boys novels by the time first grade started. I spent a lot of time reading and as a result when they gave us IQ tests in first grade I had a giant IQ due to the comparatively big vocabulary I had amassed and I was moved from "special" classes to "gifted" classes -- effectively jumping from "idiot" to "genius." I still remember the day the principal came to get me.
I had gotten used to being hit by teachers (back then this was legal) because of my refusal to pay attention in class. (I was afraid of the teacher and thought that she was actually the Wicked Witch of the West in disguise, but I COULDN'T pay attention because the things she was teaching were things I had known for several years.) Sometimes in class the teacher would look at me and ask me what is the second letter of the alphabet or something and I would scowl at her and then wet my pants in fear because I knew the beating would begin. The beating consisted of my holding out my hand while she smacked it with a ruler. I hate pain and this hurt like hell. I was five years old. When the principal came to get me one day I thought he was going to put me in the incinerator because of my refusal to pay attention since no level of beating could stop me from daydreaming. The principal took me by the hand. I weighed my chances of running out to the street and flagging down a trucker who could take me to freedom, but I knew the authorities would find me. I went toward the incinerator quietly. Just before the incinerator I was taken into the gifted kids' room, and given a desk right in front.
3. As a child I drew something that I called a torture tunnel and I still sometimes imagine this, and at night in my dreams I am still caught in such a contraption that has been created for me by someone else. Every morning I would wake up and draw one, and every night it was the last thing I would draw. During the day I would imagine one or draw one secretly at my desk. Even now when I was getting A's and was no longer being hit, I continued to want revenge for not understanding me. I would draw pictures of my teachers and colleagues undergoing horrific humiliations in one underground room after another. My first grade teacher had to crawl through seas of alligators, and then take electric shock treatments, and walk on the Main Street with a dunce cap over hot coals while I shot spitballs at her. I don't think anyone knew that I felt like this. My parents were busy with their careers or watching TV, so I rarely spoke with them except to assure them that everything was fine. I tried to seem normal to my parents, my friends, even to my closest friends.
4. Once I was put in the accelerated program in 1st grade I no longer felt quite so hateful. Before, I didn't fit, and felt that everyone was a monster. By fourth grade I had been moved to a separate school for super-bright kids, where we jumped a grade every other year. In the accelerated classes I began to feel understood and began to understand the other kids, too. You had to have an IQ of 140 to get in. I started to feel normal. I could sit with other kids and talk about world history, and play chess with them, and we learned about how to multiply negative numbers. Life began to seem ok. I stopped drawing the torture tunnels except on special occasions. I had my first friends. I was actually learning something in classes, and enjoyed playing games with my new (mostly Jewish) friends.
5. We moved again in sixth grade and from then on I hated everybody all over again. I hated my teachers, and hated almost everybody I knew. I felt that I might as well have actual cows for colleagues. By twelfth grade in high school we still hadn't caught up to where I had been in sixth grade in the Philly suburb where I started school. I gave up in 7th grade, and tried to fit in but have remained angry that I had to waste so much time in school with idiots both before and after the two good years in the accelerated program. I'm now fifty and to some extent I still just don't like people.
About five years ago I read a book about serial killers and realized that I fit two out of the three criteria. The book was a crummy sensationalist paperback that I read while waiting in a grocery line in Portland, Oregon but it was written by an actual FBI profiler so it was probably reasonably accurate. He said that there are three signs of serial killers. 1. As a child they wet their bed into their teens. 2. They played excessively with matches. 3. They tortured small animals.
You had to have ALL THREE of these traits, and if you did, you had the makings of a serial killer. I had two of the traits. I wet my bed into my teens. I played excessively with matches and have started at least two major forest fires (I didn't intend to do this, but the fires got out of control) and innumerable smaller fires including burning down a house but haven't done this since I was about fifteen.
I could be a serial killer except for the third criterion and for the fact that I have never injured anyone. I have never wished to injure a small animal. I could never stand to fish because I couldn't bear to put a hook into a worm. I still can't bear to put a hook into a worm's lip and so when my children ask me to take them fishing I say no, and direct them to a game that doesn't hurt others. I can't stand to eat animals, and even feel suspicious about eating animal crackers. It's a slippery slope. I feel sympathetic toward vegetarian goofballs who won't even injure yeast in the pizza they bake and so eat unleavened pizza. A boy in 7th grade once cut the skin off a live frog. I never spoke to him again. I get angry at people a lot of the time when they are mean or self-centered, but I rarely show it. I hate them a lot less if they lessen the suffering of small animals, and if they practice kindness as an avant-garde activity. I think that Jesus practiced kindness as an avant-garde activity. That is why I love Jesus. He was kind to everyone, especially the misunderstood and the outcast. He helped the most unlikely people and chose the weirdest outsiders as his disciples. I think that Jesus (rather than the Marquis de Sade) should be considered the avatar of the avant-garde. Jesus is certainly the avatar of Lutheran Surrealism. I love the kindness of the Lutherans that I know at the church. I love to sing with them. I love that Jesus says to turn the other cheek, and to spread the spirit of peace. I can't always do it, but I love the idea of it. Even as a child, church was the one thing that always made sense to me. I loved the prayers, and the idea that there was someone watching out for me. Even if God is just an invention, He's the most wonderful invention that the world has ever known. Having faith in Him, is like having faith in Life.
I tag Carl Sachs, Helen Losse, Phil Primeau, Steven Shaviro, and WW (sorry, I can only do five -- but if you wish to be tagged put your preference in the comments box and maybe someone will tag you!).
Saturday, January 06, 2007
It was 70 degrees today on the town clock. I walked all three children the mile or so down to town where we got sticks of licorice at Good Cheap Food, an organic grocery store on Main St. We got caught in a rainstorm and waited it out in the lobby of the Great American. Our neighbor Dave offered to give us a ride home, but we need the exercise. On the way home my 7-year old daughter told my 5-year old son that there was an invisible fence that kept a dog inside his yard. That's true, but my son couldn't figure out where the fence was, and whether he was going to be shocked by it and started to cry.
I don't know what Lola's motive was in telling Tristan about the invisible fence. Probably she had a mixed motivation. She wanted to comfort him and alarm him simultaneously, I believe. She then asked me, "Dad, how do you buy an invisible fence if it's invisible?"
It was too long an answer to explain. Perhaps you buy it on faith, I said.
"Oh," she said.
So much for the personal anecdote. On another topic: Last night I was over at Ann Althouse's website which is at http://www.althouse.blogspot.com. She's a left lawyer who is nevertheless in support of Bush and voted for him. I find myself comforted by her blog because sometimes I feel crazy that I support Bush when no one else that I know does.
And Althouse produced three political tests that help you to find your bearings. She is still a leftist. So am I. Here are the three tests. Take them and see where you stand in comparison with me.
http://franz.org/quiz.htm
You can score from 0 to 40 on this test. 0 means you are like Jesse Jackson. 40 means you are like Ronald Reagan. I got a 22, which puts me in line with Colin Powell, but not far from Bill Clinton at 18.
Then there's http://politicalcompass.org/questionnaire
On this test I was a libertarian leftist. The two closest to my own viewpoint were the Dalai Lama and Mohatma Gandhi.
Finally there's this test: http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
On this one I was a liberal leftist.
I was almost ashamed to be so far to the left. I had come to have a sense of pride in the fact that I was moving toward the center, but I was only a true centrist in one of the three tests. On the other two I was a gosh darned leftist, leaning toward anarcho-liberalism. Althouse explained in her blog that most people think that just because you support Bush you are thought to be a crazed right-winger. No way. I think that in many respects Bush is not a crazed right-winger. In some ways the left has produced many crazed right-wingers from Pol Pot to Mugabe -- absolute authoritarian monsters. I am always already against such people, and against anyone (like Michael Berube) who believes that the role of the state is to monitor and correct the citizenry. I have always been against communism, but for liberal anarchism. They are completely antithetical.
I think strangely enough that Bush is more anarchist and liberal than John Kerry who was nothing more than a gosh-darned crypto-communist. Same for Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton. John Edwards strikes me as somewhat more liberal than many of the more authoritarian leftists. Guiliani is even more liberal than Edwards. That is, in terms of his social attitudes: he is out and out for gay marriage, for instance, while Edwards is iffy on that topic.
Karl Marx was the worst authoritarian to ever write a political treatise. He makes even fascists such as Mussolini look like liberals.
I'm especially against any kind of control of the arts. It ought to be a place of absolutely free play without any psychopaths like Michael Berube looking over my shoulder and telling me no, you can't do that, go to the reeducation center so you can listen to a little more Raymond Williams over the detention headphone. I can't stand that authoritarian leftism. But I am a true leftist, with centrist aspirations. It's just that my leftism is liberal and anarchistic, while most others is Marxist and authoritarian. They want to use the government to control the citizenry. I want the citizenry to be largely free of the government especially in matters of the absolute freedom of worship, and the absolute freedom to speak their minds.
Both Luther and Breton to some extent were anarchists. They fought hard against the central control of the Catholic church on the one hand, and on the other hand against the control exercised by the communist bastards in Moscow. Against Pope Leo and against Joseph Stalin. "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all."
I don't know what Lola's motive was in telling Tristan about the invisible fence. Probably she had a mixed motivation. She wanted to comfort him and alarm him simultaneously, I believe. She then asked me, "Dad, how do you buy an invisible fence if it's invisible?"
It was too long an answer to explain. Perhaps you buy it on faith, I said.
"Oh," she said.
So much for the personal anecdote. On another topic: Last night I was over at Ann Althouse's website which is at http://www.althouse.blogspot.com. She's a left lawyer who is nevertheless in support of Bush and voted for him. I find myself comforted by her blog because sometimes I feel crazy that I support Bush when no one else that I know does.
And Althouse produced three political tests that help you to find your bearings. She is still a leftist. So am I. Here are the three tests. Take them and see where you stand in comparison with me.
http://franz.org/quiz.htm
You can score from 0 to 40 on this test. 0 means you are like Jesse Jackson. 40 means you are like Ronald Reagan. I got a 22, which puts me in line with Colin Powell, but not far from Bill Clinton at 18.
Then there's http://politicalcompass.org/questionnaire
On this test I was a libertarian leftist. The two closest to my own viewpoint were the Dalai Lama and Mohatma Gandhi.
Finally there's this test: http://www.theadvocates.org/quiz.html
On this one I was a liberal leftist.
I was almost ashamed to be so far to the left. I had come to have a sense of pride in the fact that I was moving toward the center, but I was only a true centrist in one of the three tests. On the other two I was a gosh darned leftist, leaning toward anarcho-liberalism. Althouse explained in her blog that most people think that just because you support Bush you are thought to be a crazed right-winger. No way. I think that in many respects Bush is not a crazed right-winger. In some ways the left has produced many crazed right-wingers from Pol Pot to Mugabe -- absolute authoritarian monsters. I am always already against such people, and against anyone (like Michael Berube) who believes that the role of the state is to monitor and correct the citizenry. I have always been against communism, but for liberal anarchism. They are completely antithetical.
I think strangely enough that Bush is more anarchist and liberal than John Kerry who was nothing more than a gosh-darned crypto-communist. Same for Howard Dean and Hillary Clinton. John Edwards strikes me as somewhat more liberal than many of the more authoritarian leftists. Guiliani is even more liberal than Edwards. That is, in terms of his social attitudes: he is out and out for gay marriage, for instance, while Edwards is iffy on that topic.
Karl Marx was the worst authoritarian to ever write a political treatise. He makes even fascists such as Mussolini look like liberals.
I'm especially against any kind of control of the arts. It ought to be a place of absolutely free play without any psychopaths like Michael Berube looking over my shoulder and telling me no, you can't do that, go to the reeducation center so you can listen to a little more Raymond Williams over the detention headphone. I can't stand that authoritarian leftism. But I am a true leftist, with centrist aspirations. It's just that my leftism is liberal and anarchistic, while most others is Marxist and authoritarian. They want to use the government to control the citizenry. I want the citizenry to be largely free of the government especially in matters of the absolute freedom of worship, and the absolute freedom to speak their minds.
Both Luther and Breton to some extent were anarchists. They fought hard against the central control of the Catholic church on the one hand, and on the other hand against the control exercised by the communist bastards in Moscow. Against Pope Leo and against Joseph Stalin. "Beauty will be CONVULSIVE or not at all."
Friday, January 05, 2007
AM I THE SECOND COMING?
My influence on world-wide weather events has been little noticed. Generally, I keep it a secret, as I find it embarrassing.
Once while feeling dyspeptic I could feel a tsunami beginning somewhere in the Pacific Ocean as a result. I snapped on the TV to watch the disaster in the Pacific as over a half million lives were lost. Ships were upside down and hotels destroyed.
Then there was the more recent instance in which I was gloomily looking out my office window one Saturday afternoon. I was angry about something someone had said. Suddenly there was a straight-line wind that came whipping down the mountain at 175 mph. It wrecked half the village. Telephone poles, cars, and trees were tangled up all over Main St.
Last summer I felt so sad that a huge storm started and floods ruined many of the local villages.
About a month ago, I began to pray for a mild winter...
Recently I read the Anne Rice book about Jesus as a child and how he could start and stop the weather, how he could bring children back to life, and sustain his aging uncle when he started to falter. He could even bring a sparrow back to life.
I haven't tried to resuscitate the dead nor have I tested to see if I can walk on water, multiply loaves, or turn water into wine. Perhaps I should focus harder and give it a go, but if I am the Second Coming, I will say outright that I really don't want the responsibility. I would really rather be an ordinary dude. Ok?
My influence on world-wide weather events has been little noticed. Generally, I keep it a secret, as I find it embarrassing.
Once while feeling dyspeptic I could feel a tsunami beginning somewhere in the Pacific Ocean as a result. I snapped on the TV to watch the disaster in the Pacific as over a half million lives were lost. Ships were upside down and hotels destroyed.
Then there was the more recent instance in which I was gloomily looking out my office window one Saturday afternoon. I was angry about something someone had said. Suddenly there was a straight-line wind that came whipping down the mountain at 175 mph. It wrecked half the village. Telephone poles, cars, and trees were tangled up all over Main St.
Last summer I felt so sad that a huge storm started and floods ruined many of the local villages.
About a month ago, I began to pray for a mild winter...
Recently I read the Anne Rice book about Jesus as a child and how he could start and stop the weather, how he could bring children back to life, and sustain his aging uncle when he started to falter. He could even bring a sparrow back to life.
I haven't tried to resuscitate the dead nor have I tested to see if I can walk on water, multiply loaves, or turn water into wine. Perhaps I should focus harder and give it a go, but if I am the Second Coming, I will say outright that I really don't want the responsibility. I would really rather be an ordinary dude. Ok?
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Today has been a scrambled one. I woke up at 7:53. I had twelve minutes to get showered and in the car to take the kids to school. I grabbed a package of Graham Crackers and ran down the steps to the shower. I emerged from the shower, shaved, and didn't even have to scrape the car. It was sixty degrees outside. In January. In the Catskill Mountains of New York at 8:24 a.m.!
I drove the kids to school, and on the way home stopped to get a gallon of milk for the two still at home.
I got the milk from the Quickway. I had told myself I wouldn't patronize that place since Chavez of Venezuela owned it, but I forgot. It was 3.29 about fifty cents more than at the Price Chopper but the lines at the Price Chopper are long and the cashiers are young and have better things to do than to hurry to help me speed along, and the Quickway can at least be counted to live up to its name.
I then went back to the elementary school to ride the yellow school bus with kindergartner Tristan on his field trip to the Pizza Hut. His whole class went, and I had been volunteered to chaperone. Tristan got to make his own small pizza. The dough was already rising in a pan and Tristan just had to push down a circular plate and then pour in tomato sauce, and choose two toppings. He spread the cheese, and then chose pepperoni and olives.
I sat and watched him eat it, and then he drank two cartons of fat free milk. His friend Roman has been sick for a week, but today they sat across from one another. "Are we still friends?" Roman asked.
"Sure," Tristan said.
It was uneventful but it was a good time.
I then drove a urine sample out to a small rural hospital. My three year old has suffered fatigue from time to time and I've wondered if he has Lyme's disease. The doctor thinks I'm nuts and just want his attention, he actually said. I can never tell who's joking in New York State. They have a more brutal sense of humor than anything I'm used to, and they keep poker faces.
Then I finished reading the marvelous book on Richard Brautigan that just came out from McFarland. It's an expensive academic book, but it's worth every penny. (39.95 in paperback!) In it, is among other jewels an amazing biographical essay by Michael McClure. McClure knew Brautigan and had a love-hate relationship with him for thirty five years. The proximity, and the fact that McClure can REALLY THINK, makes the essay a pure vein of gold. All in all, the book is great for those of you, like me, who grew up on Brautigan. He was the first writer I ever LOVED. I can hardly wait to review the book more extensively for an academic audience. Perhaps I can go over it in detail for five pages! I think I learned more about a single writer from this book than from any other book I've ever read. I'm a Brautigan fanatic but never had the least clue as to his character or his aesthetics. I was unable to even think about him from an objective viewpoint. Now I think I can!
I then checked Ron Silliman's blog. Yesterday he mentioned me twice on his blog, and I always like to check to see how I appear in the comments. But there were few comments today. He monitors his comments, and so perhaps he didn't have time to read the waterfall or tsunami of positive comments concerning me.
I've been a rabid Bush supporter at times in the recent past. Right now I feel more centrist than anything else. McCain seems too far to the right. Hillary seems too far to the left. I want someone right in the middle. Edwards is close to that. Bush strikes me as a nice guy who is out of touch right now. I'm not sure why he's gotten so out of touch. I miss Rumsfeld. I felt at least I knew what was happening with him around. Now I feel like there's some secretive plot hatching and we won't know what it is for another twenty years.
The only candidate I ever really cared about was Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. They won't make another candidate in that mold, however, again. And if they did, he would be squashed like a bug, as he was in 1984. He was too innocent.
What weather we're having. Can you believe it at the beginning of January?
And I feel scrambled, fragmented, like a puzzle I can't quite fit together. The pieces seem to go, but perhaps I lack the patience or the time to find the way this day fit together. 15 minutes more and it's time to put the kids to bed and start on a serious Brautigan review.
I drove the kids to school, and on the way home stopped to get a gallon of milk for the two still at home.
I got the milk from the Quickway. I had told myself I wouldn't patronize that place since Chavez of Venezuela owned it, but I forgot. It was 3.29 about fifty cents more than at the Price Chopper but the lines at the Price Chopper are long and the cashiers are young and have better things to do than to hurry to help me speed along, and the Quickway can at least be counted to live up to its name.
I then went back to the elementary school to ride the yellow school bus with kindergartner Tristan on his field trip to the Pizza Hut. His whole class went, and I had been volunteered to chaperone. Tristan got to make his own small pizza. The dough was already rising in a pan and Tristan just had to push down a circular plate and then pour in tomato sauce, and choose two toppings. He spread the cheese, and then chose pepperoni and olives.
I sat and watched him eat it, and then he drank two cartons of fat free milk. His friend Roman has been sick for a week, but today they sat across from one another. "Are we still friends?" Roman asked.
"Sure," Tristan said.
It was uneventful but it was a good time.
I then drove a urine sample out to a small rural hospital. My three year old has suffered fatigue from time to time and I've wondered if he has Lyme's disease. The doctor thinks I'm nuts and just want his attention, he actually said. I can never tell who's joking in New York State. They have a more brutal sense of humor than anything I'm used to, and they keep poker faces.
Then I finished reading the marvelous book on Richard Brautigan that just came out from McFarland. It's an expensive academic book, but it's worth every penny. (39.95 in paperback!) In it, is among other jewels an amazing biographical essay by Michael McClure. McClure knew Brautigan and had a love-hate relationship with him for thirty five years. The proximity, and the fact that McClure can REALLY THINK, makes the essay a pure vein of gold. All in all, the book is great for those of you, like me, who grew up on Brautigan. He was the first writer I ever LOVED. I can hardly wait to review the book more extensively for an academic audience. Perhaps I can go over it in detail for five pages! I think I learned more about a single writer from this book than from any other book I've ever read. I'm a Brautigan fanatic but never had the least clue as to his character or his aesthetics. I was unable to even think about him from an objective viewpoint. Now I think I can!
I then checked Ron Silliman's blog. Yesterday he mentioned me twice on his blog, and I always like to check to see how I appear in the comments. But there were few comments today. He monitors his comments, and so perhaps he didn't have time to read the waterfall or tsunami of positive comments concerning me.
I've been a rabid Bush supporter at times in the recent past. Right now I feel more centrist than anything else. McCain seems too far to the right. Hillary seems too far to the left. I want someone right in the middle. Edwards is close to that. Bush strikes me as a nice guy who is out of touch right now. I'm not sure why he's gotten so out of touch. I miss Rumsfeld. I felt at least I knew what was happening with him around. Now I feel like there's some secretive plot hatching and we won't know what it is for another twenty years.
The only candidate I ever really cared about was Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. They won't make another candidate in that mold, however, again. And if they did, he would be squashed like a bug, as he was in 1984. He was too innocent.
What weather we're having. Can you believe it at the beginning of January?
And I feel scrambled, fragmented, like a puzzle I can't quite fit together. The pieces seem to go, but perhaps I lack the patience or the time to find the way this day fit together. 15 minutes more and it's time to put the kids to bed and start on a serious Brautigan review.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Monday, January 01, 2007
LUTHERAN HUMOR? – Kirby Olson
[I gave a talk that went something like this at this year’s MLA annual meeting. Our session was the very last one of 800 sessions offered during the four day meeting. We had five audience members at the beginning of the 5-member panel session. At the end only three audience members remained. We had a good discussion between ourselves afterwards I think. I also realize I have to do a lot more work on Baudelaire’s humor theory. The translation I have by Wallace Fowlie is riddled with mistakes, and is also bowdlerized or at least abbreviated.]
There are some sixty million living Lutherans, and another few hundred million that have passed on, so to sum up their sense of humor in a few minutes is pure hubris. But I will do it just the same. A fuller study of the Lutheran humor tradition would have to include Dr. Suess, Dana Carvey, Soren Kierkegaard, Luther himself, just for
starters and have to discuss the notion of two kingdoms. Each one would be different. I might even have to bring in the NPR guy, although I’d rather not as Keillor is neither a Lutheran nor really funny. Laughter must be explosive or not at all.
I’ll skip the examples right now and cut straight to the theory. I don’t care so much about the examples. I want to create the theory. In short, There is the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar. It is often pictured as a figure 8.
When we are at the crucifix between kingdoms, we are in a paroxysm of mirth. If you follow the figure the top half is the kingdom of God (spirit) and the bottom the kingdom of earth. Note that there is continual circulation between the two kingdoms, but it is when we move from one kingdom to the other that the bestial explosion of angels occurs.
Lutheran theologians rarely discuss humor except to note that it has the right to exist so I don’t find them useful. Charles Baudelaire on the other hand who doesn’t seem very likely to be a great Christian theorist nevertheless has the best Christian theory of humor from his essay On The Essence of Laughter where he is quite clear about how Lutheran surrealist humor works, and so we regard him as a plagiarist before the letter and would dig him up and sue him in a court of law and then have him hanged if anybody would hear our case:
"Laughter is satanic, and, therefore, profoundly human. It is born of Man’s conception of his own superiority... It is at once a sign of infinite grandeur and of infinite wretchedness; of infinite wretchedness by comparison with the absolute Being who exists as an Idea in Man’s mind; of an infinite grandeur by comparison with the animals.
(Flowers of Evil, trans. Fowlie, Dover, p. 177)
I’ll give you an example now. John Updike was raised as a Lutheran and has a pretty sharp understanding of Lutheran theology. In Updike’s Rabbit, Run the Episcopalian minister Eccles is interviewing Rabbit’s Lutheran’s mother when he realizes that this denomination produces humorists. They are arguing over whose responsibility it is that Rabbit has left his wife in order to shack up with a prostitute. Rabbit’s mother blames Rabbit’s wife, Janice.
“About as shy as a snake,” she says. “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc” (138).
Rabbit’s mother presents Janice as a snake, or Satan, and then compares her to Joan of Arc. The snake is at the bottom of our circle 8. Joan of Arc is near the top. The incongruity is much like that of Baudelaire’s satanic laughter – infinite wretchedness and infinite grandeur.
Irony involves incongruities, which assume something
people recognize as normative...as well as its opposite. When the
incongruity is pointed out, laughter or comedy result; an example of incongruity would be a fart in church. A loud fart from someone who takes themselves seriously as a parishioner or perhaps from the pastor in the midst of the sermon. In the midst of the saintly, an eruption of the animal. It’s at the cross-section where humor comes. Taking us through the cross-section by introducing Janice first as a snake and then as Joan of Arc creates the moment of humor in Updike's text.
Many Christian denominations regard themselves as saintly. In the Lutheran denomination however there are no saints and to think of oneself as a saint is blasphemy. We are not to even attempt to become saints. We are simply to be good citizens and to believe in God. Luther banned the canonization of saints because since we are all miserable sinners there is no way for us to be saints. We cannot usher in the Second Coming by being a bunch of goody two-shoes. All we would do is become hypocrites and monsters in the process if we were to attempt to become saints and usher in a communist or Calvinist utopia. Lutherans are in the Baudelairean universe between an ideal and the all too real and laughter makes us aware of our horrific and sinful nature. There ARE norms, such as the Ten Commandments, but we cannot reliably comply with these norms. Incongruities are thus essential to our nature, and since humor is based on incongruity, Lutherans are natural humorists. Lutheran Updike understood these incongruities and exploited them in his humor. Father Eccles is a dimwit, for example, even though he is a Father. But is he dimmer than Rabbit himself? Rabbit thinks so. He thinks he’s better than Father Eccles, which makes him a dimwit, too, times two.
What then is the place for humor? In the ambiguous world we inhabit, it must be present in our daily lives as we struggle between good and evil, without ever being sure which side we are on. The Episcopalian father who talks with Rabbit’s mother is himself filled with good intentions but carries them out with complete ineptitude and is probably seen at best as at least as foolish as Rabbit himself, if not more so, but we are comic when seen from the perspective of infinity.
Baudelaire believed that Christianity was FUNNIER than the paganism that it replaced. He felt that Priapus, Hercules, Venus and Pan “were not laughable personages” but that they were adored (made funny by the advent of Christianity). Essentially the laws that the gods propagated were those of barbarians and we now have a better set of laws thanks to Jesus. We are better and higher than the animals, but we are still much like them. When we laugh we suddenly realize we ARE animals, and find this to be grotesque, because we realize at the same time that we have the ability to understand grace. The grotesque is a very sudden realization and is much more profound Baudelaire says than a comedy of morals – we become animals and Godlike simultaneously, and at that precise moment of mad laughter (le fou rire) we realize most clearly ... how horribly funny is our situation.
When we realize that, we are at the crucifixion between two kingdoms, at the interstice (is there a better word?) of the circle 8, pinned to sin.
[I gave a talk that went something like this at this year’s MLA annual meeting. Our session was the very last one of 800 sessions offered during the four day meeting. We had five audience members at the beginning of the 5-member panel session. At the end only three audience members remained. We had a good discussion between ourselves afterwards I think. I also realize I have to do a lot more work on Baudelaire’s humor theory. The translation I have by Wallace Fowlie is riddled with mistakes, and is also bowdlerized or at least abbreviated.]
There are some sixty million living Lutherans, and another few hundred million that have passed on, so to sum up their sense of humor in a few minutes is pure hubris. But I will do it just the same. A fuller study of the Lutheran humor tradition would have to include Dr. Suess, Dana Carvey, Soren Kierkegaard, Luther himself, just for
starters and have to discuss the notion of two kingdoms. Each one would be different. I might even have to bring in the NPR guy, although I’d rather not as Keillor is neither a Lutheran nor really funny. Laughter must be explosive or not at all.
I’ll skip the examples right now and cut straight to the theory. I don’t care so much about the examples. I want to create the theory. In short, There is the kingdom of God and the kingdom of Caesar. It is often pictured as a figure 8.
When we are at the crucifix between kingdoms, we are in a paroxysm of mirth. If you follow the figure the top half is the kingdom of God (spirit) and the bottom the kingdom of earth. Note that there is continual circulation between the two kingdoms, but it is when we move from one kingdom to the other that the bestial explosion of angels occurs.
Lutheran theologians rarely discuss humor except to note that it has the right to exist so I don’t find them useful. Charles Baudelaire on the other hand who doesn’t seem very likely to be a great Christian theorist nevertheless has the best Christian theory of humor from his essay On The Essence of Laughter where he is quite clear about how Lutheran surrealist humor works, and so we regard him as a plagiarist before the letter and would dig him up and sue him in a court of law and then have him hanged if anybody would hear our case:
"Laughter is satanic, and, therefore, profoundly human. It is born of Man’s conception of his own superiority... It is at once a sign of infinite grandeur and of infinite wretchedness; of infinite wretchedness by comparison with the absolute Being who exists as an Idea in Man’s mind; of an infinite grandeur by comparison with the animals.
(Flowers of Evil, trans. Fowlie, Dover, p. 177)
I’ll give you an example now. John Updike was raised as a Lutheran and has a pretty sharp understanding of Lutheran theology. In Updike’s Rabbit, Run the Episcopalian minister Eccles is interviewing Rabbit’s Lutheran’s mother when he realizes that this denomination produces humorists. They are arguing over whose responsibility it is that Rabbit has left his wife in order to shack up with a prostitute. Rabbit’s mother blames Rabbit’s wife, Janice.
“About as shy as a snake,” she says. “that girl. These little women are poison. Mincing around with their sneaky eyes getting everybody’s sympathy. Well she doesn’t get mine; let the men weep. To hear her father-in-law talk she’s the worst martyr since Joan of Arc” (138).
Rabbit’s mother presents Janice as a snake, or Satan, and then compares her to Joan of Arc. The snake is at the bottom of our circle 8. Joan of Arc is near the top. The incongruity is much like that of Baudelaire’s satanic laughter – infinite wretchedness and infinite grandeur.
Irony involves incongruities, which assume something
people recognize as normative...as well as its opposite. When the
incongruity is pointed out, laughter or comedy result; an example of incongruity would be a fart in church. A loud fart from someone who takes themselves seriously as a parishioner or perhaps from the pastor in the midst of the sermon. In the midst of the saintly, an eruption of the animal. It’s at the cross-section where humor comes. Taking us through the cross-section by introducing Janice first as a snake and then as Joan of Arc creates the moment of humor in Updike's text.
Many Christian denominations regard themselves as saintly. In the Lutheran denomination however there are no saints and to think of oneself as a saint is blasphemy. We are not to even attempt to become saints. We are simply to be good citizens and to believe in God. Luther banned the canonization of saints because since we are all miserable sinners there is no way for us to be saints. We cannot usher in the Second Coming by being a bunch of goody two-shoes. All we would do is become hypocrites and monsters in the process if we were to attempt to become saints and usher in a communist or Calvinist utopia. Lutherans are in the Baudelairean universe between an ideal and the all too real and laughter makes us aware of our horrific and sinful nature. There ARE norms, such as the Ten Commandments, but we cannot reliably comply with these norms. Incongruities are thus essential to our nature, and since humor is based on incongruity, Lutherans are natural humorists. Lutheran Updike understood these incongruities and exploited them in his humor. Father Eccles is a dimwit, for example, even though he is a Father. But is he dimmer than Rabbit himself? Rabbit thinks so. He thinks he’s better than Father Eccles, which makes him a dimwit, too, times two.
What then is the place for humor? In the ambiguous world we inhabit, it must be present in our daily lives as we struggle between good and evil, without ever being sure which side we are on. The Episcopalian father who talks with Rabbit’s mother is himself filled with good intentions but carries them out with complete ineptitude and is probably seen at best as at least as foolish as Rabbit himself, if not more so, but we are comic when seen from the perspective of infinity.
Baudelaire believed that Christianity was FUNNIER than the paganism that it replaced. He felt that Priapus, Hercules, Venus and Pan “were not laughable personages” but that they were adored (made funny by the advent of Christianity). Essentially the laws that the gods propagated were those of barbarians and we now have a better set of laws thanks to Jesus. We are better and higher than the animals, but we are still much like them. When we laugh we suddenly realize we ARE animals, and find this to be grotesque, because we realize at the same time that we have the ability to understand grace. The grotesque is a very sudden realization and is much more profound Baudelaire says than a comedy of morals – we become animals and Godlike simultaneously, and at that precise moment of mad laughter (le fou rire) we realize most clearly ... how horribly funny is our situation.
When we realize that, we are at the crucifixion between two kingdoms, at the interstice (is there a better word?) of the circle 8, pinned to sin.
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