Monday, February 27, 2012

NYRB Winter Sale

The New York Review of Books has produced an extraordinary collection of books since 1999, when it opened for business. For most of the last decade it's been my press of first resort.

So good news: NYRB is presently holding a Winter Sale, making available a wide selection of books at 50% off.

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Love's Work, by Gillian Rose

"Matured by love, practised in the grief of its interminable exercise, I find myself back at the beginning."
Sadly, Gillian Rose was not at the beginning but at the end: she died of brain cancer shortly after writing those words. With or without that knowledge, the reader experiences her voice as nobly heartbroken: life, she tells us, is permeated with sadness; to live is to lose, in the end, everything.

But despair not! Rose was, after all, a working philosopher, and philosophy, she writes, offers real consolation in the face of life's losses, not unlike, in its hopefulness, the lips of one's beloved. Among her ambitions in Love's Work is to offer a scathing defense of philosophy against postmodernism, which, she says, "renounces the modern commitment to reason." The postmodernist impulse to blame reason for the Holocaust, for example, demonstrates an inability "to perceive the difference between thought and being, thought and action." That inability represents a real threat to the future of civilization:
[Postmodernists] proceed as if to terminate philosophy is to dissolve the difficulty of acknowledging conflict and of staking oneself within it. To destroy philosophy, to abolish or to supersede critical, self-conscious reason, would leave us resourceless to know the difference between fantasy and actuality, to discern the distortion between ideas and their realisation. It would prevent the process of learning, the corrigibility of experience. The ill-will towards philosophy misunderstands the authority of reason, which is not the mirror of the dogma of superstition, but risk. 
And it's there, at risk, that Rose's link between philosophy and love becomes clear. Both thinking and loving are risks; we undertake them with no guarantee of success, and often at great personal cost. But in the end they are what is worth doing. They represent the fundamental work of life.

So Love's Work as an elegy to labor. With equal fervor it celebrates the labor of the mind and the labor of the body. In love, these two undertakings coalesce. To love is to think with the body, to caress with the mind. This extraordinary book, which alternates between treatise, polemic, memoir, and eulogy, is an act of love, concerning itself with what most matters in life and nothing else.

Hygiene and the Assassin, by Amélie Nothomb

At some point—Sade?—Western culture turned away from the beautiful, fixed its gaze on the repulsive, and said: I like this.

Contemporary art, which isn't a movement but various pèices de resistance, mostly negotiates this ongoing obsession with the repulsive. More to the point: a contemporary artist compels us to recognize that the repulsive attracts. Ugliness, he says—the grotesque, the brutal, the sick—mesmerizes.

In Hygiene and the Assassin (if not in her later books) Amélie Nothomb is a contemporary artist par excellence. We travel 167 pages in the presence of execrable human beings. The two characters who dominate the book—an obese Nobel Prize-winning murderer named Prétextat Tach and a young female journalist intent upon exposing his criminal past—are top-shelf sociopaths, by turns tedious and fascinating.

Not unlike Sade.

For fun, let's imagine that Nina, the female journalist, stands as Nothomb's surrogate, confronting, at the age of 25, the monstrosity that goes by the name "world literature," and telling it: I will destroy you.

One can't help but admire that kind of foolishness.

Is Nothing Sacred?

Americans understand that to a Muslim the Koran is sacred. What Americans don't understand is that to a Muslim a Koran is sacred.

The West has spent 2500 years desacralizing the world. What matters to the West is not a thing but the idea it represents.

For sentimental reasons a Christian might be upset by someone burning a Bible. But ultimately what matters to a Christian is not a Bible but its ideas. Copies of the Bible come and go. We use them as coasters for a cold can of beer in a Motel 6.

An individual Bible isn't sacred because, to the West, nothing material is sacred. Plato argued that to imagine the material world as sacred is folly—an exercise in futility. Material objects turn to dust. They burn. They cease to be. Better—far wiser—to value ideas, which are not subject to the vagaries of time and circumstance. A soldier with a match cannot destroy the thought in your head.

The history of Western culture can be summarized as the triumph of that idea.

We don't like to see people burn a flag, but we value the idea of freedom of speech more than we value a flag. Anyway, the flag is not America. America is what I think it is. As a material object in the world, there is nothing really, organically sacred about the cloth of a flag.

To a Muslim the physical world continues to be divided between the sacred and the profane. A Koran—every single Koran—is a sacred object. It is a divine manifestation. To burn it and throw it in a pile of trash is to treat God himself as trash. A Koran is important for its ideas, but it's equally important as a sacred object in the world, a persisting physical embodiment of the voice of God.

It's basically impossible for a modern Westerner to think of objects this way. There are no sacred places, no sacred objects. Our churches are tourist destinations. "Antique Roadshow" determines the real value of our family heirlooms. A girl's body sells soda pop.

And an Afghan Muslim can't think as as we do. The world is filled with sacred objects, sacred places. The family Koran, carefully wrapped in the finest silks, is a physical manifestation of God in the home. It is sacred; it pulses with the divine. A mosque isn't a tourist destination but the physical presence of heaven on earth. (A Mormon, with his restricted temples, his blessed undergarments, knows something about this kind of thinking.) A girl's body, like the Greek nymphs that preceded Plato's insurrection, is too sacred for a man to look upon without both the girl and the man being destroyed.

The West won't re-sanctify the world—at least not any time soon. Capitalism surpasses all previous revolutions in its indifference to the sacred. Love alone—including the body of the beloved—retains some hint of holiness. With the death of love we will complete Plato's assault upon the gods. Eros, it appears, will be the last of them to fall. And fall he will.

The Muslim world has taken another path. A Muslim treasures matter. A woman's hair. A book. An old pillar in the heart of dusty Mecca.

Today, contemplating the violence in Afghanistan, it's difficult to imagine our paths converging.

More than that: I'm not sure we want them to. After all, it's nice to know, if only for the purposes of nostalgia, that someone, somewhere, still thinks that something is sacred.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

TsFTD


La originalidad es la hija de la imitación.

Quien dice poesía dice amor.

— Octavio Paz, "El llamado y el aprendizaje"

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Mad Man

The Eye shills for Chipotle.

The Eye celebrates the 21st century mainstreaming of 19th century—18th century—small-farm America.

The Eye delights in plaintive Willie.



Of course this ad—which aired during the Grammys—had nothing to do with McDonald's announcement, less than 24 hours later, that it was going to eliminate the use of gestation crates in its pork supply line.

Gestation crates being a pretty phrase for animal torture, as can be seen here.

Monday, February 13, 2012

TFTD

God created man as the sea created the continents: by withdrawing.

— Friedrich Hölderlin

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Whitney Houston, RIP

Like millions of Americans my age, I have irreplaceable memories that I associate with this song—with this talent. Of how many artists can a generation say that?

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Goodbye to All That

"At the length truth will out." —The Merchant of Venice.

Thanks to the Ninth Court for helping it along. Today, in California, my brother—at least when it comes to marriage—is finally as free as me.

Monday, February 6, 2012

TFTD

The only innocents are those whose crimes have not yet been discovered.

— Salwa Al Neimi, The Proof of the Honey

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

"I'm not concerned about the very poor."



Romney's suggestion that people who are very poor are doing just fine, that it's not the destitute but the the middle class that's struggling, disqualifies him for the presidency. Anyone who can make an argument so disconnected from simple logic and so devoid of empathy represents a danger to the republic.

Frankly, it's going to be a pleasure watching him self-destruct time and again over the coming months. A character flaw so glaring—and so intrinsic to his worldview—can't help but manifest itself more or less daily.

Equally telling is the indignation he exudes when someone challenges his incoherence. A profoundly unpleasant human being—

Obama's good fortune continues. Once again he'll face an opponent who cannot win.

(A personal note: I find it both sad and unsurprising that a Mormon—a man educated by the same faith that defined the first 25 years of my life—can even formulate these thoughts, let alone announce them to the world as his political platform. I couldn't care less if some pastor in Dallas claims that Mormons aren't Christian. But any Mormon who hears what is now the public face of Mormonism in the United States saying what Romney says might ask himself if that pastor in Dallas isn't onto something.)