TFTD

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves were constantly innocent. . . . That's what must be avoided above all. Otherwise, everything would be just a joke.

— Albert Camus, The Fall

Reality as Analogy

Entering Half Moon Bay:

Zach:  "Cool.  Look at the sky."

Me:  "Yeah.  Amazing, isn't it?  It looks like a pearl."

Zach:  "It looks like clouds."

TFTD

I welcome that first mistake.

— Yo-Yo Ma

Is Consuming Sugar More Dangerous Than Smoking? (II)

In my English 101B class at Chabot College this semester, we're studying the American diet, which increasingly appears to be, by just about any measure, a nutritional and cultural catastrophe.

In an earlier post I asked if consuming sugar is more dangerous than smoking cigarettes. "60 Minutes" finally addresses the dangers of sugar, introducing new research that suggests that sugar might be as addictive as cocaine.

American Football, American Culture

Care to see how the sausage gets made?



Yeah, I'm tired of NFL America. "Captain America" America. George Zimmerman America. Rick Santorum America. Secret Drone Program America. High fructose corn syrup America. Paul Ryan America. Ke$ha America. Incarceration America. Goldman Sachs America. Kim Kardashian America. Chicken nugget America. "The Avengers" America. Yes on 8 America.

Yet I'm not tired of America, not quite.

After all, we've still got Bruce.

Notes on Houellebecq

My face is dying. More slowly than the rest of me—but dying, indisputably.

And no matter what strategies I devise to pretend otherwise (and to distract the world from its pitiless collapse), plainly: my face is me. From its angular meatiness I can no longer expunge the traces of grief, failure, fleeting joy, and the wounds of love and solitude.

~

In the bible of contemporary literature, Michel Houellebecq is Ecclesiastes.

He reminds us that all is vanity, that life is fleeting and inconsequential, that pleasure is rare and never surrenders what it promises. In response to art's diligent attention to human striving, Houellebecq writes, for example: "They don't really amount to much, anyway, human relationships."

Absurd claims like this one possess: 1) the legitimacy of grammar, and 2) a perspective from which they're true. Set against the backdrop of the universe—13 billion years and 300 billion galaxies—it's not unreasonable to conclude that life is brief and meaningless, that we're scattered dust; our love affairs, betrayals, and suicides are sighs lost in the wind of time.

But frankly, that perspective doesn't amount to much, itself. It's an inhuman (by which I mean irrelevant) perspective. From the perspective of a human being—Houellebecq knows this—human relationships in fact amount to everything.

By proclaiming life's banality, Houellebecq's art—like Ecclesiastes—has the peculiar capacity to remind us that what we mean to each other is a protean invention, subject to accident, folly, and the evanescence of ideas. Life's inventedness is what makes it unconquerable. We feel the distance between his cynicism and our optimism, his indifference and our devotedness, and that distance is poignant. Really no word better summarizes the effect of Houellebecq's writing: poignancy.

~

The fruit tree outside my window has nearly lost its blossoms. Fallen petals rot on the concrete.

For about two weeks that tree kept me alive, after a fashion. I wouldn't have died—but it required that I lived. In its presence I had no alternative.

Its late-spring greenness has now rendered it more or less invisible.

~

Twice in my life I've seen a dog get hit by a car. The first time, I was six; I was walking to a friend's house in Knoxville, Tennessee, and being followed by our family beagle, Joshua. I kept shouting at Joshua to go home, and he'd lower his head and pretend to go, only to resume following me when I continued walking. After a while I started throwing rocks at him to get him to go home. To escape my rocks he ran into the street, where he was hit—clipped—by an on-rushing car. I took him home—his back leg had been broken—and my dad took him to the vet. I never told my parents that I had caused his injury.

The second time, I was in my late-20s. I was on a bike ride with my brother and his wife's family, and their family dog—I've forgotten its name—was running along with us. We weren't yet far from their home when he dashed in front of a truck. The truck's driver saw him and slammed on his brakes; the dog—a small dog—got caught against one of the truck's front tires, and the tire briefly pushed the dog along the asphalt before mercifully running over it. The dog wasn't immediately killed; but its fur was ripped from its back, exposing most of its ribcage. The dog dragged itself under a car and snarled at anyone that approached. It seemed to be embarrassed by its dying. It declined to look at us. Slowly a pool of blood formed around its paws. After a while it put its head down, and its eyes dimmed and turned off.

~

Embarrassment is the sign of a soul. Anyone incapable of embarrassment is incapable of love.

Michel Houellebecq produces embarrassed art. His novels are embarrassed by their attentiveness, by their stories—by the fact of their existence. Their existence refutes their ostensible nihilism. Houellebecq loves the world, people—the whole mess. If he didn't, he would shut up.

~

Unlike Roberto Bolaño, Houellebecq is romantic about his post-romantic pose. His use of the semi-colon—it's the linchpin of his prose—gives him away. His semi-colon is stylish, and style is always romantic.

~

Houellebecq's male characters, by the end of his novels, always arrive at a cavalier indifference to sex. They're like men for whom peeing has become optional.

~

In Bolaño and Houellebecq, 21st century literature begins where 20th century literature began: with naturalism. Their prose is more clinical, less melodramatic than Norris or Dreiser, but like those writers they are advancing an aesthetic of brutalism; they see anti-heroism as heroism; they see triumph in failure.

~

We are both the map and the territory.

Against Despair

On Monday I read "Africa's Dirty Wars"—an article in the New York Review of Books that managed to convince me that Africa, in the short term, is more or less beyond hope. The article ends with a scream. I set it aside with a sigh.

But then I saw this film today—consider giving it 29 minutes—and it reminded me that it's possible to do something about barbarity; that despair isn't the only response to monumental evil.

(On occasion you might need to remind yourself that ultimately the film isn't about the beauty of its hero.)


KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.

Update: This video has now gone viral, which makes its presence here redundant. I guess I'll leave it up as an historical artifact.

The Sky Actually Is Falling

Find here a succinct summary of why the global warming skeptics are wrong.

Update: Find here a response to the article by some of the scientists it eviscerates, and a response to their response.

Alive

Adele's live cover of Dylan's "Make You Feel My Love" on her Royal Albert Hall album, which she dedicates to Amy Winehouse, reminds me why it's a good time to be alive—to have this art: the art that belongs to our time.

Here she performs the song on Letterman:

In Honor of My Return to Facebook

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.

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.

TsFTD

La originalidad es la hija de la imitación.

Quien dice poesía dice amor.

— Octavio Paz, "El llamado y el aprendizaje"

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.

TFTD

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

— Friedrich Hölderlin

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?

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.

TFTD

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

— Salwa Al Neimi, The Proof of the Honey