One of the most famous of E.J. Bellocq’s photographs of prostitutes in New Orleans’ Storyville district, where sex work was legal from 1897-1917. See below for more.
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My name is Mills Baker; I write about love, culture, art, religion, mental illness, philosophy, memory, politics and the rather random.
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Ernest Belloch Photographing a Prostitute, George Schmidt.
When Abby was last in town, she, Will, and I visited the gallery of George Schmidt, a New Orleans artist, to deliver a canvas stretcher. He treated us to a polymathic and monological tour de force as we wandered around his building, discussing the very high and the very low with equal enthusiasm. He laughed at his own constant and usually ribald jokes while showing us a work in progress I’d give my car for.
The painting above is of a man more commonly known as E. J. Bellocq, well-known for his photographs of prostitutes in Storyville, a district in which New Orleans legalized prostitution from 1897 through 1917 (as is always the case, the goddamn Feds eventually interfered for their own selfish reasons).
His photographs are amazing; this is from 1912:
Bellocq and Schmidt are both part of and concerned with the idiosyncratic and unusual side of New Orleans that is inimitable; Schmidt’s current painting treats in a manner both comic and reverential -the archetypal New Orleans Catholic stance- of the city’s four holy figures in a scene I can scarcely describe. Hopefully I’ll be able to share more on both of them in the future.
“Politics, as a practice, whatever its professions, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.”
“In heaven, I replied, there is laid up a pattern of it, methinks, which he who desires may behold, and beholding, may set his own house in order. But whether such an one exists, or ever will exist in fact, is no matter; for he will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other.”
I have mentioned this paragraph at the conclusion of Book IX of Plato’s Republic (trans. by Jowett) before, but I remain curious: what is the traditional accounting for these sentences, which taken on their face seem to at least hint at an intended metaphorical reading of the entire work?
Note too that such a reading is quite a lot more interesting than the ordinary and unhappy literal examination of his implausible ideas about governance, with their implied historicism and teleology. What would it mean to “live after the manner” of the city Plato describes?
(And how insufferable a first-year class on The Republic can be, with all the students bored with what they consider manifestly indefensible authoritarian ideas! My peers considered Plato a proto-fascist and saw nothing of interest in his arguments. But if we’d not taken it as a revolutionary action-plan, it might have been more compelling).
Allan Bloom’s translation differs a bit:
“But in heaven,” I said, “perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.”
Last, and for nostalgia’s sake, from the first translation I read, by Sterling and Scott, back at Bard in the days when girls made fun of me for having a website and I looked liked Harry Potter:
It makes no difference whether such a city now exists or ever will. But perhaps its prototype can be found somewhere in heaven for him who wants to see. Seeing it, he will declare himself its citizen. The politics of this city will be his politics and none other.
I put the question to the academics and sages and thinkers and those, like me, with no credentials at all. Ideas?
A beautiful color photograph from 1942 by Jack Delano: “Steam locomotives of the Chicago & North Western Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards.” Delano was one of the photographers employed by the FSA, on whose work Errol Morris has posted a typically long and interesting series of articles this week.
“I had a dream that for your birthday present I got you an atom split into 29 pieces. It was white and mounted like a butterfly with silver pins.”
Metaphors and Dreams
Apropos of this fine post by Chris, a comment from Meaghano, the work of Julian Jaynes, and earlier discussions about metaphors:
I’ve briefly referred to the argument that all thought is structurally metaphorical, that the human mind with its linguistic faculties is essentially a machine for making metaphors of the natural world. This argument claims that our method for apprehending reality is to mentally relate novel phenomena, by metaphor, to known phenomena. Chris quite cleverly noted that, in this sense, “poetic psychology,” or the idea of investigating psychology by detailing and deconstructing a person’s metaphors, is a tautology. Quite so!
Psychology does examine metaphors seriously in one sense: dream analysis. Dreams are rather like odd metaphors run amok, representing people, sensations, and problems in our lives in confusing ways. Their code is complex but it has meaning, and what strikes me now is that the language of dreams seems almost as though it is made of poetic metaphors created by someone else to explain the phenomena of our lives. Thus dreams are like the opposite of conscious thought.
That is to say: if an ordinary metaphor is a means of explaining an less familiar metaphrand by a more familiar, descriptive, or explanatory metaphier we can examine the metaphor by who creates it and why it illuminates the subject for them. But a dream metaphor is in some ways opaque even to its ostensible creator, unless he learns an external science for its decoding.
I dream of a house flooding with water, and no matter how I try to secure the doors or bail out the waters their level continues to rise. I don’t know what this means until my psychiatrist tells me, which means I have attempted to illuminate a known metaphrand –the phenomena of my life, observed and felt by me- with an unknown metaphier! It is as though I’ve written a poem I cannot understand but which contains intelligible, intentional, and coherent symbols.
In this sense, dreams are an inversion of the normative process of cognition. They take what we know ordinarily and represent it to us with metaphors that are not nonsensical but are personally mysterious, as though there is a mischievous surrealist defamiliarizing my life every night for reasons I don’t fully understand.
Detail of The Dog, as it’s called, by Francisco Goya.
“…the train pulled into Heidelberg station, where there were so many people crowding the platforms that I feared they were fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste.”
W.G. Sebald, Vertigo. Sebald’s novels, it is said, are thematically haunted by the Holocaust even when they do not overtly treat it as a subject. It is perhaps true as well that the Holocaust haunts his novels because as the destruction of a culture and its memory par excellence it exemplifies his real thematic obsession: memory and its disappearance.
That said, the sentence quoted above is exemplary of his style: an ordinary observation of a European scene imbued metaphorically with sorrow or horror. As I read it, I thought of how uniquely we are marked by our metaphors, or by their absence.
When you see a crowded train platform, what do you see?
- “…people…fleeing from a city doomed or already laid waste”?
- Enthusiastic moshers heaving to some thrumming cacophony?
- A scarcely distinguishable mass of froth and scum?
- The long-sought crowd into which you can disappear?
- Enormous atoms in a kind of Brownian motion?
- The lonely wanderers of urban life as painted by George Tooker?
Probably something else yet: the process of metaphor-making, which can be rather automatic, is a highly individual one, as one learns in childhood when one describes clouds with a friend: dinosaurs, cars, houses, letters. The last point in the list is notable: when one sees Tooker’s work, it affects one’s metaphor-making dramatically, a process described in this lovely quote posted by Meaghano.
How creative one’s metaphors are varies, but so too does one’s instinct towards metaphorical thought. I imagine many think not of imagery but of description: all these people! Or analysis: it must be rush hour, or perhaps a station is closed. Or some combination, etc.
In Immortality, Milan Kundera says he would like
“…an experiment that would examine, by means of electrodes attached to a human head, exactly how much of one’s life a person devotes to the present, how much to memories, and how much to the future. This would let us know who a man really is in relation to his time. What human time really is. And we could surely define three basic types of human being depending on which variety of time was dominant…”
He calls this a form of the aforementioned “existential mathematics.” I would like a poetic psychology which could class humans by their instinct for metaphors, how variegated and constant it is, and whether it delights or upsets them. Surely for every metaphor that amuses or engages there is one, like Sebald’s, that disturbs or discomfits, triggering through the imagination a panic attack or despair.
From the excellent Scott Coleman come these GIFs of Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. So good!
“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting. Consider this utterly commonplace situation: a man is walking down the street. At a certain moment, he tries to recall something, but the recollection escapes him. Automatically he slows down. Meanwhile, a person who wants to forget a disagreeable incident he has just lived through starts unconsciously to speed up his pace, as if he were trying to distance himself from a thing still too close to him in time. In existential mathematics, that experience takes the form of two basic equations: the degree of slowness is directly proportional to the intensity of memory; the degree of speed is directly proportional to the intensity of forgetting.”
Milan Kundera, Slowness.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Louis Armstrong- When the Saints Go Marching In
With apologies to my estranged but fondly-missed sister Katiebakes, I think I’ll begin posting a different version of this song every time the Saints win; I should hope to exhaust my reserve of covers by the end of the season, but one never knows with this team from the City that Care Forgot.
Up next: Sidney Bechet.
Potential captions for this sad photoset of Abby and her pumpkin include, but are not limited to: (1) the memories of a man in his old age are the deeds of a man in his prime; (2) for dust you are and to dust you shall return; (3) “So passes Denethor, son of Ecthelion”; and, (4) live by the kitchen knife, die by the mold.
Attention and Charity: 15,000 x $.10 = $1500
(Note: because I’m an idiot, the original post contained a mathematical error which was, sadly, not a typo! Thank you to those of you who noted this! Let me add an additional question: does the sum donated change the analysis below? If it were $150 for 15,000 reblogs would it be more, less, or as meaningful as if it were $15 million for 15,000 reblogs?)
Is the following proposition ethical: For everyone who deletes their reblog of the previous charity offer and instead reblogs this, I will donate $.20 to the same charity (which -at the present rate- would cost me perhaps $3000 for rather massive exposure).
Objections to this offer:
(1) It is self-aggrandizing and self-promoting. Of course, this is true of the original offer as well, which features a URL in its image for a reason; the poster might just as easily have donated $1500 to the charity in question, but by making an event of it she accumulates attention, which has actual and potential value.
Thus: I am no guiltier of this than she; if self-promotion or self-satisfaction disqualifies charity -and this is a rather old question- we are both guilty for exchanging attention (and esteem) for material wealth. This is common in philanthropy: one gets one’s name on the building, one’s photo in the paper, and so on. If it is not objectionable in ordinary circumstances, what makes it so here?
(It is probable that all she really wanted was to have a bit of fun as she did something good, which I should stress is, to me, commendable).
(2) This erases another’s charity instead of supplementing it. When I saw the original offer, I thought: what would happen if I were right now to pose the same offer for another charity? Wouldn’t I be ignored as an absurd epigone? Yes, and that’s because this community cannot pay its attention (again, attention is a scarce commodity) to dozens of charity offers daily or weekly.
If I want to make a difference, and acquire attention, I cannot merely repeat her gesture; I must displace hers. In allocating attention, we focus on what demands it; this is why our media all attend to the outrageous, the controversial, and the extraordinary. This distorts our sense of reality, of course, but scarce commodities accumulate around what takes them. Hence: shameless celebrity behavior. What is unnoticed is irrelevant to a mediated reality.
Besides: it is ostensibly the case that what matters here is the charity, and my offer means twice as much money for that cause. Aren’t other considerations about attention, credit, Tumblarity, and so on merely vulgar distractions?
(3) This is mean. The person making the original offer is quite clearly a kind, benevolent, good-hearted person whose post will mean money for a cause none can oppose. It is unpleasant to interrogate such gestures -the greening of our avatars in support of Iran, the placing of bumper stickers on our cars to combat racism, the donating of money to one cause when another is more dire by this or that metric, in which most of us -myself included- participate.
But I surely cannot have been the only one to wonder about the exchange rate -$1500 for 15,000 reblogs- or the implicit values traded in such acts of philanthropy, or other associated issues of intent, attention-scarcity, charity prioritization, and more. Indeed, if I was I am sure that only demonstrates my own moral poverty and will be something you can pity, rather than rage at, I hope.
Comments? Thoughts? Is my hypothetical proposition ethical, and if not, why not? Is this the sort of issue one should simply not discuss, instead applauding any and all good deeds without questioning their motives or incidental consequences?
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Dangerdoom featuring Talib Kweli - Old School Rules
