Posted on

Pluto-cracy

Is not democracy on the star formerly known as Pluto, no matter what controversy your school district may decide to teach you.

Kevin Drum’s excellent piece on what Wisconsin is all about:

If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they’ve enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. And if you’re not rich yourself, this is a problem. First and foremost, it’s an economic problem because it’s siphoned vast sums of money from the pockets of most Americans into those of the ultrawealthy. At the same time, relentless concentration of wealth and power among the rich is deeply corrosive in a democracy, and this makes it a profoundly political problem as well.

It’s Friday, so read it all.

Posted on

Crushing Necessity

Okay… it’s Friday. Time for your medicine, all you busy people.

This is from that studied misanthrope, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au bout de la nuit, somewhere about page 170. Translation by Ralph Mannheim (New York: New Directions, 1983)

What horrified me most was all of that Elevated Railway. On the other side of the court, which was more like a well shaft, the wall began to light up, first one, then two rooms, then dozens. I could see what was going on in some of them. Couples going to bed. These Americans seemed as worn out as our own people after their vertical hours. The women had very full, very pale thighs, at least the ones I was able to get a good look at. Before going to bed, most of the men shaved without taking the cigars out of their mouths.

In bed they first took off their glasses, then put their false teeth in a glass of water, which they left in evidence. Same as in the street, the sexes didn’t seem to talk to each other. They impressed me as fat, docile animals, used to being bored. In all, I only saw two couples engaging, with the light on, in the kind of thing I’d expected, and not at all violently. The other women ate chocolates in bed, while waiting for their husbands to finish shaving. And then they all put their lights out.

There’s something sad about people going to bed. You can see they don’t give a damn whether they’re getting what they want out of life or not, you can see they don’t even try to understand what we’re here for. They just don’t care. Americans or not, they sleep no matter what, they’re bloated mollusks, no sensibility, no trouble with their conscience.

I’d seen too many puzzling things to be easy in my mind. I knew too much and not enough. I’d better go out, I said to myself, I’d better go out again. Maybe I’ll meet Robinson. Naturally that was an idiotic idea, but I dreamed it up as an excuse for going out again, because no matter how much I tossed and turned on my narrow bed, I couldn’t snatch the tiniest scrap of sleep. Even masturbation, at times like that, provides neither comfort nor entertainment. Then you’re really in despair.

The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows.



Posted on

You Can Go Green Again

Because you can’t stop being what you are. By way – though like any good thing, just barely – of having a favorite bar, and a favorite poet to meet you there, here’s a snip from Lean Down Your Ear Upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism by Robert Taylor Ensign.

As Jonathan Bate pointed out, “Wordsworth wrote poems about how flowers may vitalize the spirit.” Not surprisingly, then, the romantics celebrated life’s inherent and ineluctable movement in all its guises and forms. Wolfe expresses this vitalistic concept in the section of Antaeus, or A Memory of the Earth where the wife of Furman, her home having just been destroyed in a flood, yearns for an existence apart from all rivers, change, and movement: “Oh God! Just let me live where nothin’ moves! Just let me live where things will always be the same!” Nature’s movement and changes, however,  are inescapable and Wolfe underscores this universal and organic reality when Furman’s wife realizes that her consciousness continues to be lapped by the rivers of life:

I know each sound that comin’ from the River! I hear the willows trailin’ int he River! I hear oak-limbs snagged there in the River! Al my thoughts are flowin’ like the River, all my life is movin’ like the River, I think an’ talk an’ dream just like the River, as it flows by me, by me, to the sea.

Based on their notion that nature acts as a vitalizing agent, with the senses serving as the conduit, the romantics valued emotions not only because they are individualistic and subjective responses, but also because they are the signs and expressions of vitality. According to Kroeber, “Wordsworth treats emotions as the psychic manipulation of sensation, the process by which psychic activity, inner impulse, mingles and coordinates with physical sensation, the reception of stimuli from outside.” Wolfe’s writing suggests that he shared this same belief in the external, sensory-drawn origin of human emotions. Based on this belief, the romantics valued pleasurable feelings the most and “joy” in particular. Wolfe himself speaks reverently of joy: “when a person has in him the vitality of joy, it is not a meaningless extravagance to say that ‘nothing else matters.’ He is rich. It is probably the richest resource of the spirit.” The romantics viewed joy as not only being “at its highest… the sign in our consciousness of the free play of all our vital powers”, but also, according to Coleridge, as the pathway to a state of oneness with the physical world.

And so it is.

Posted on

Southern Distinctiveness

There’s actually a magazine called Southern Distinction around here. Anyway, what do you know about Reconstruction? Via TNC, here’s a series of lectures by Yale professor of history David Blight on the subject that is well worth your time. With so many ideas (should say “ideas”) sure to carelessly thrown around in the race to ‘fix the country’ and be the next white guy to lose to Obama president, Dr. Blight’s lectures put that distinctiveness of yestercentury in a solid context. Almost seems as if, far from being dead, the past isn’t even past.

Watch it on Academic Earth

Posted on

Los Teens

Bienvenu, Hwan Yeeng and welcome to the teens.

The faster the tech wheel spins, the more screens you watch, the more rings you hear, the more scores you check… the more you find out what? Quite a bit, though much of it trivial – not as in pursuit, but ft-lbf, the volume of things you allow to get in between you and whatever idylls you once upon a time you associated with, before all these devices intervened. Remember to remember, as the man said:

If the idea that your son must become a killer as well as a provider is abhorrent to you, if you believe that death-dealing weapons should not continue to be manufactured, even if never used, then make a new world in which killing will be unnecessary. Concentrate all your energies upon that, and that alone. If you had a home which you were fond of, and it were suddenly invaded by rats, would you not set everything aside to eliminate the pest? War is the greatest plague that civilized man has to contend with. And what has he done in all these thousands of years to grapple with the problem? Nothing, really. With the passage of time he has devoted increasing effort, ingenuity and money towards aggrandizing the horrors of war, as though pretending to himself that if war became too horrible it might cease of itself.

But the faster the wheel spins, the slower the revelations fly: because illumination is but one-speeded. A perfect vehicle for the flatlands, but nice for coasting in the mountains, too. Cover up with blanket endorsements and pretend you are yourself a signal, giving off indications, accepting messages, reacting to your own commands, creating a personal sense of application. Just yours. And it’s okay if its rhymes. Or is happy. Or new. Or even takes a year. Or five.

All you ever have or can give is a little bit of time, anyway. And now 1-1-11. Cut the feed. Nourish instead.

Posted on

Too Things

1. This stuff is easy to miss: China learns at the knee(s) of the master… or do they?

Thanks to the Dandong plant and hundreds others like it, China is in the midst of unprecedented economic growth—and an unprecedented surge in the use of energy, primarily from burning coal. Coal is the fuel of China and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. As a result, China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, along with all the other noxious by-products of coal burning. At the same time, the Chinese government has committed to reducing its CO2 emissions per economic unit by at least 40 percent by 2020. Tasked with ensuring that the nation delivers on that goal is the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the government agency that essentially sets Chinese energy and industrial policy.

“In Manhattan, lights are lit 24 hours and China will never do that,” says NDRC vice chairman Zhang Guobao via a translator, although the lights of this border town abutting North Korea blaze well into the night, illuminating businesses that tout their names in both Chinese and Korean characters. “China can never learn from the United States in terms of lifestyle. Per capita energy consumption is five times that of China and suppose, one day, that we learn from the U.S.A.: Can you imagine what the world will be?”

And then this talk, by Leslie Hazleton on reading the Qur’an.

Posted on

Oh La Vache! and other Mercurial Inunctions

Dubuffet_The_Cow_with_a_Subtile_Nose

And if you should require more than a thousand, maybe check out The Cosmological Eye by H. Miller.

I should say that ever since the dawn of history–all through
the great civilizations, that is to say–we have been living like lice.
Once every thousand years or so a man arises who is not a louse–
and then there is even more hell to pay. When a MAN appears
he seems to get a stranglehold on the world which it takes cen-
turies to break. The sane people are cunning enough to find these
men “psychopathic.” These sane ones seem to be more interested
in the technique of the stranglehold than in applying it. That’s a
curious phenomenon, one that puzzles me, to be frank. It’s like
learning the art of wrestling in order to have the pleasure of letting
someone pin you to the mat.

What do I mean to infer? Just this–that art, the art of living,
involves the act of creation. The work of art is nothing. It is only
the tangible, visible evidence of a way of life, which, if it is not
crazy is certainly different from the accepted way of life. The dif-
ference lies in the act, in the assertion of a will, and individuality.
For the artist to attach himself to his work, or identify himself
with it, is suicidal. An artist should be able not only to spit on his
predecessor’s art, or on all works of art, but on his own too. He
should be able to be an artist all the time, and finally not be an
artist at all, but a piece of art.

Posted on

For-profit Hate

How does one set of people loathe another whole set? Individuals, sure – it happens all the time, and some many deserve it. But it’s usually sincere, in that it doesn’t pay. You actually loathe them. But entire groups? Is something else at work? Can green mean stirring up resentments?

Steven Emerson has 3,390,000 reasons to fear Muslims.

That’s how many dollars Emerson’s for-profit company — Washington-based SAE Productions — collected in 2008 for researching alleged ties between American Muslims and overseas terrorism. The payment came from the Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, a nonprofit charity Emerson also founded, which solicits money by telling donors they’re in imminent danger from Muslims.

Emerson is a leading member of a multimillion-dollar industry of self-proclaimed experts who spread hate toward Muslims in books and movies, on websites and through speaking appearances.

Leaders of the so-called “anti-jihad” movement portray themselves as patriots, defending America against radical Islam. And they’ve found an eager audience in ultra-conservative Christians and mosque opponents in Middle Tennessee. One national consultant testified in an ongoing lawsuit aimed at stopping a new Murfreesboro mosque.

But beyond the rhetoric, Emerson’s organization’s tax-exempt status is facing questions at the same time he’s accusing Muslim groups of tax improprieties.

“Basically, you have a nonprofit acting as a front organization, and all that money going to a for-profit,” said Ken Berger, president of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group. “It’s wrong. This is off the charts.”

But a spokesman for Emerson’s company said the actions were legal and designed to protect workers there from death threats.

“It’s all done for security reasons,” said Ray Locker, a spokesman for SAE Productions.

Emerson made his name in the mid-1990s with his documentary film Jihad in America, which aired on PBS. Produced after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the film uncovered terrorists raising money in the United States.

Via Juan Cole. Hate to share this on a nice Friday. No groups or individuals, beyond the for-profit co-nationalists mentioned herein, were loathed in the writing of this post. And certainly not you.

Posted on

Early Times Gentrification

All this applesauce about gentrification sent me back to thinking a little about the original movers-in-ers, you know the ones:

While Spanish conquistadors and adventurers were moving the colonial frontier to the mainlands of South and Central America in the early sixteenth century, they also began to explore the southeastern coasts of North America. Slavers preying on the Lucayan Indians in the Bahamas were probably the first to sail the shores of Florida, searching for harbors in which they could anchor to capture Indians who could be taken back to the Caribbean and sold. In 1512 Juan Ponce de Leon contracted with the Spanish crown to explore the region north of the Bahamas and the next year he explored the coasts of the southern portion of the Florida peninsula. In only a few short years other Spanish sailors and slavers would determine what Juan Ponce had thought was an island was a peninsula attached to the mainland of a huge landmass, one connected to New Spain (Mexico) around the Gulf of Mexico.

Over the next forty years the Spanish crown contracted with several conquistadors to conquer and colonize La Florida, establishing a presence on the northern border of Spain’s growing American empire. But all would fail. The expeditions of Juan Ponce de Leon in 1521 (to southwest Florida), Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón (to the Georgia and South Carolina coasts in 1526), Pánfilo de Narváez in 1528 (Tampa Bay to the eastern Florida panhandle), Hernando de Soto (Tampa Bay through, Florida, Georgia, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas in 1539-1543), and Tristán de Luna y Arellano (the Pensacola, Florida region and parts of Alabama in 1559-1561) could not conquer the land and its people.

Spain’s failure to secure La Florida would not escape the attention of France and England. In 1562 France sent an expedition under Jean Ribault that explored the coasts of northeast Florida and Georgia before establishing a short-lived fort on the South Carolina coast. Two years later a second French expedition established the settlement of Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St. Johns River.

Learning the French were usurping lands he claimed, Philip II of Spain sent Pedro Menéndez de Avilés to oust the Fort Caroline settlement. In 1565 Menéndez accomplished his mission and founded his own town, St. Augustine. In short order he established a second Spanish town, Santa Elena, on the South Carolina coast where the Frenchman Ribault had been. La Florida would remain in Spanish hands for two centuries, though the land it controlled would shrink as English interests, following the ill-fated Roanoke colony in 1585, successfully colonized Virginia and then the Carolinas between 1607 and 1670.

Well aware of the slaughter and enslavement of the Indians of the Caribbean, the Catholic monarchy of Spain had begun to require better treatment of indigenous peoples as early as 1516. In reality, however, such legal admonitions were rarely followed; in Florida, Narváez and de Soto, for example, both displayed extreme cruelty toward the native peoples. But by the time of the successful La Florida colony and the founding of St. Augustine, Spanish attitudes had shifted somewhat. Native people were recognized as having souls and capable of becoming loyal, Christian subjects of the crown, members of Spain’s American empire who could work in support of the crown’s colonies. From his headquarters in St. Augustine, Menéndez set about to make Christian allies of the Indians of La Florida. He also wished to establish an overland route from the Atlantic coast at Santa Elena south and west to northern New Spain and to find the fabled northwest passage, the sea route from the Atlantic into the Pacific that would provide a shortcut to the riches of the Orient.

See also Diaz, Bernal.

Posted on

Getting Perspective

Sometimes we might loose sight of the fact that what’s most wrong with what’s been done here is the misappropriation of a color, a thing that has already long been devoted to other purposes. As a reminder, this is part of an essay from the painter-turned-art historian James Elkins, called Why Art and Science Should be Allowed to Go Their Separate Ways:

The Grande Jatte Problem: What Is Science When It Is Immersed in Art?

Masaccio’s Trinità, as every textbook proclaims, is the first surviving painting in linear perspective. Does that mean, to draw the standard im- plication, that mathematics and painting were allied at that moment? Seurat’s La Grande Jatte was made with color theory in mind: But does that mean late nineteenth-century color theory and postimpressionism were linked? These aren’t straightforward questions, because on one level the answer is yes to both, but in another sense some violence is done to both color science and mathematics when they are said to be present in the paintings. It’s a longer argument than can be accommodated here; my example will be La Grande Jatte.

Even after more than one hundred years, La Grande Jatte resists those who claim to see everything in it. The painting puts up formidable obstacles to any interpretation. To begin with, it is not always easy to know what Seurat knew: The most frequently cited sources for Seurat’s scientism are near-contemporaries Félix Fénéon and Paul Signac, and Seurat is not on record unambiguously agreeing with either one.8 In addi- tion, Seurat was an uneven reader of science—some things he studied hard; others, offhandedly, and there are examples of willful misunder- standing and selective reading. It is clear that he misunderstood a great deal, and some of the theorists he misunderstood were themselves mistak- en.9 Assessing that kind of error involves studying twentieth-century color theory, which is itself a difficult subject. And aside from each of these problems, the painting itself seems unreliable, since its colors have faded unmeasurably and unevenly over time.

Even so, these are only preliminary obstacles. They allow us to say—and this is the emerging consensus in recent scholarship—that Seurat was a poor scientist, confused even in comparison to the popular science writers of his day, so that La Grande Jatte is not, in this respect, “a definitive formulation of the technique, method, and theory of Neo- Impressionism.”10 It may be true that Seurat’s “earnest convictions . . . provided both the justification and motivation for artistic projects more ambitious than he might otherwise have undertaken,” but that does not explain what the projects were.11 If pseudoscience was a catalyst to Seurat’s creation, what did it allow him to get on with?

It needs to be said clearly that Seurat had no reason to paint any of the color effects he had been studying, because if they were accurate rec- ords of our subjective experience, they would be produced for us by any painting or natural scene. There is no reason to paint the world in dots in order to simulate the surfaces of the world, and there is no reason to paint simultaneous contrast, halos, iridescence or Mach bands, chiaroscuro, gradation, or any of the other phenomena since they would be reproduced in the act of perception. That is the fundamental stumbling block to call- ing Seurat “scientific,” and it is striking that Seurat himself copied a warn- ing to this effect directly from Michel Eugenè Chevreul.12 Seurat read Chevreul fairly loosely, and it is at least possible that his interest in depict- ing simultaneous contrast was sparked by the fact that Chevreul had a large color illustration of it printed in his book.13 On the other hand Her- mann von Helmholtz’s essay on painting and science, which Seurat appar- ently did not read, would have given him a reason to reproduce certain effects. When pigments cannot match the intensities of outdoor lighting, Helmholtz says, then painters might resort to subjective phenomena in

order to remind viewers of the original conditions. But even if Seurat had seen that essay, it would not have any bearing on his project in La Grande Jatte, because the phenomena he studied are also effects of less intense illumination.14

Seurat’s “science” mixes empiricism and idealism in a manner that is at once specific and opaque to any single explanation: To adapt a phrase of Martin Kemp’s, it is neither science, pseudoscience, nonscience, nor non- sense. It is not entirely “specious in its theoretical formulation . . . applied with an indifference to any critical appraisal,” but neither is it “a definitive formulation of the technique, method, and theory of Neo-Impressionism.”15 The problem is initially a matter of finding out how Seurat conceived sci- ence, empiricism, logic, and self-consistency; but ultimately, the difficulty is finding any way to construct a responsible account of the picture. No matter which scientific theories we may decide to accept and which rules of application or irrelevancy we may adopt, the painting refuses to play along. La Grande Jatte is not an example of any theory, mistaken or otherwise.

As we know from Seurat’s writings and from his friends, theory is what got his pictures started: He imagined theories as their underpin- nings, their raisons d’être, and their necessary and sufficient explanations. But his imagining was flawed. Science and painting do not get along in the La Grande Jatte—they do not speak for one another, and they do not exemplify or signify one another. Their mutual disregard is uneven and sometimes—as in the “dots” that Joris-Karl Huysmans so brilliantly called “running fleas”—destructive.

John Gage concluded that Seurat was indeed “scientific,” because of his “experimentalism,”16 and years before Robert Herbert had said the same thing. To Herbert, Seurat was scientific because he studied ephem- eral phenomena of vision.17 “Science” in Herbert’s and Gage’s texts is an activity involving hypothesis, experiment, and falsification, and those are efficient and common characterizations of the scientific project. But two things stand in the way of enlisting Seurat’s painting as science, as thus defined. First it would have to be shown how La Grande Jatte is an in- stance of any experiment, or a consistent application of some coherent hypothesis. But then, even if La Grande Jatte embodies an experiment, it would have to be shown that the experiment had relevance to contempo- rary color science. To say his work is “experimentalist” is to say it borrows the idea of experiment from science, not that it is an example of a scientific

experiment. It engages popular notions of science and translates them, unscientifically, into paint.