mills

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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(From photophobia):
Photography is useful to me when I am having some trouble participating in the scrum of nightlife due to my damned and blessed sobriety: I can wander around taking pictures while my senses decompress (they are compacted by constant din and visual spectacle), then return to the bar to down another Red Bull.
Chelsea’s has to cover their beautiful sign with a tarp to prevent the float riders of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade from breaking it to pieces with their throws: more evidence of J’s assertion that the floats are just “frat-sleds.” But I like it nevertheless.
It was a wet day and a wet night: blue pools where the wetness gave the light traction.

(From photophobia):

Photography is useful to me when I am having some trouble participating in the scrum of nightlife due to my damned and blessed sobriety: I can wander around taking pictures while my senses decompress (they are compacted by constant din and visual spectacle), then return to the bar to down another Red Bull.

Chelsea’s has to cover their beautiful sign with a tarp to prevent the float riders of the St. Patrick’s Day Parade from breaking it to pieces with their throws: more evidence of J’s assertion that the floats are just “frat-sleds.” But I like it nevertheless.

It was a wet day and a wet night: blue pools where the wetness gave the light traction.

“Were we to describe the so-called “Copernican Revolution” in brief, we might put it this way: predictive power grew ever more irresistible.”

William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.

Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.

Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.

Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.

I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.

“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.

My dog Five is gregarious, obsessed with people, excessively-affectionate, and ridiculous. Jack July once complained that Five was like a frat-boy who hoped to force his tongue on every person at the bar.
Today, at the rainy St. Patrick’s Day parade one block from my house, Five additionally confirmed this description by (1) partying with an enthusiasm I haven’t had in a decade and (2) surreptitiously gunning for every alcoholic beverage left on the ground.
Above, he prepares to take down a Jello-shot. Don’t worry: I worked at a veterinary hospital; I know his limits, and don’t let him drive.

My dog Five is gregarious, obsessed with people, excessively-affectionate, and ridiculous. Jack July once complained that Five was like a frat-boy who hoped to force his tongue on every person at the bar.

Today, at the rainy St. Patrick’s Day parade one block from my house, Five additionally confirmed this description by (1) partying with an enthusiasm I haven’t had in a decade and (2) surreptitiously gunning for every alcoholic beverage left on the ground.

Above, he prepares to take down a Jello-shot. Don’t worry: I worked at a veterinary hospital; I know his limits, and don’t let him drive.

“To reform an evildoer, you must before anything else help him to an awareness that what he did was evil.”

Alfred Polgar. “You must help him to an awareness…” Derision is not help; brutal exposure of perceived logical errors is not help; sarcastic decimation of straw-men is not help. Also: neither agreement nor acquiescence nor victory are synonymous with awareness.

This relates to a previous post on moral vigilantism, and I think well-summarizes why much of what is written against those we oppose is merely intended to pleasure ourselves: rhetoric is often onanistic.

Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings has posted the latest free and wonderful issue of AHHHHH MEGA-ZINE. From his post:
FREE DOWNLOAD HERE
FEATURING WORK BY:kimberly sink (website)reid corzatt (email)javan makhmali (website)
editor’s note:j.makhmali is the creator of rreset, a radical gallery wall for flickr photosets.
READ THE FOURTH ISSUE HERE.”
As usual, it’s great; everything in it is lovely, and the polaroid photographs alone are worth the download. Take a look at the other issues, too!

Joshua Heineman of Cursive Buildings has posted the latest free and wonderful issue of AHHHHH MEGA-ZINE. From his post:

FREE DOWNLOAD HERE

FEATURING WORK BY:
kimberly sink (website)
reid corzatt (email)
javan makhmali (website)

editor’s note:
j.makhmali is the creator of rreset, a radical gallery wall for flickr photosets.

READ THE FOURTH ISSUE HERE.”

As usual, it’s great; everything in it is lovely, and the polaroid photographs alone are worth the download. Take a look at the other issues, too!

What is Wrong with Bad Art?

I’m still not sure why failed or bad attempts at art are “immoral”. -Dad commenting on this.

This is a controversial point, but it wasn’t for Plato. The quality of art he despises in The Republic is that it misleads. It conditions us to expect and hope for what will not come, in his view; it is a saccharine lie or an ideological lie or an incompetent lie. One needs only to think of propaganda to know what he meant, but one can also imagine a middle-American mom disappointed that her camping trip doesn’t look like a Thomas Kincaide painting or shattered that her romance isn’t reminiscent of The Notebook.

Art’s mission has changed since Plato’s time; it now serves less often as a vehicle for explicit messages than as a vehicle for quasi-impartial exploration. That is hugely important, and why art as we understand it emerges from the Western tradition first: it is bound up with notions of liberty and the individual.

But bad art naturally remains. When Plato forbids poets and painters from his ideal city, he does so for the health of the populace: they must not be deceived about the world or their place in it. When I watch television or read pulp novels or see movies who serve mainly to reinforce body dysmorphia and status anxiety, his argument resonates.

That is: bad art obscures reality, lulls us into a stupor in which we are confused about who and what we are and how the world is, manipulates us cheaply and in a way that reinforces our worst habits of feeling, and drives us further from any sort of awareness.

When we read bad books or savor bad movies, we sometimes tell ourselves that they have no effect: they are just for fun. But not only is the human mind too porous for that to be true, even how we have fun is something learned; we condition ourselves through exposure such that choosing the worst over the best is a perverse way to deform ourselves.

When I play violent video games, my dreams get bloody; what will happen if I immerse myself in television, then? We think we are stronger than we are: too many fairy tales heard, too many bronzed and plastic bodies seen, and we cannot accept reality; we want its televisual simulation more. We will close our eyes when having sex to preserve the dream.

The radically inaccurate expectations we have of each other, of the world, of ourselves, the confused sense we grow up with that life is something happening tomorrow and that we will attain happiness if only we find someone attractive enough (or are attractive enough ourselves): these are easily identified as the wounds of bad art. But art that is marginally better is no less harmful; I remember thinking how American Beauty would further embed certain terribly shallow memes into our psyche and incline us to reduce our fellow humans to caricatures.

In sum: good art increases one’s understanding of the self and the world through exploration, simulation, provocation, and so on; bad art decreases it persistently and does so by its sentimentally exploitative nature as much as its incompetence. It violates the purpose of art and does damage to us all: hence its immorality.

Jack July, Christian Bök, & Poetry in Bacteria

Jack July is Will’s brother. Those who know Will are discomfited by his perfection and the modest ease with which he inhabits it, and his brother is more or less the same (but angrier!): a genetically-faultless, brilliant, and thoughtful human being who makes me want to open my wrists and pour my inferior life out all over the concrete before any girls come by and see how much shorter I am than they are.

That is how I’m going to introduce Jack July, who showed us around Oregon and now has a tumblelog. I am also reblogging his incredible note about Christian Bök.

I have written about Bök before; he wrote one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read: Eunoia. Working within ludicrous enabling limits beyond the overall restriction, Bök completed a book in which each chapter can use words with only one vowel: A, E, I, O, and U. The other requirements are as amazing.

Jack July alerts us that Bök is “striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem — a poem that can survive forever.”

[Bök] was inspired by a researcher at the PNWNR Lab in WA who recently enciphered the Disney classic It’s a Small World (After All) into bacteria, allowed them several rounds of division, and then retrieved a regrettably no-less putrescent copy of the song…
Anyway, this poet, who has enlisted the help of a no-doubt Rush-loving libertarian Canadian scientist from Calgary, thinks that perhaps an efficient means of first contact (in case the Vulcans can’t detect our warp trail) is the colonization of other planets with bacteria that encode campy publicity stunts.  In his interview with Nature, he says, “…My project is analogous to building a pyramid and then leaving undecipherable hieroglyphs all over it: later civilizations may not understand the language, but its presence will testify to the enduring legacy of our own civilization.”  Thanks for the explanation.

Bök’s desire to encode poetry into life is itself poetic, but beyond its lyrical or symbolic appeal it reminds me of the suggestion made by David Deutsch from the work of Richard Dawkins and Karl Popper that life is best thought of us encoded knowledge: processual knowledge, adaptive knowledge, even a sort of experiential knowledge (non-individual, of course). This is how the universe expresses knowledge: in life, which responds to and reflects the laws of time and space and matter and energy.

That poetry is the knowledge chosen here is all that’s odd; otherwise we might remark that Bök’s idea is already manifest: every organism is a code of abstracted knowledge, its DNA a high language directing low functions. Life seems to be the best and most durable way we have of coding, demonstrating, preserving, and developing knowledge, which in any event is so synonymous with life that neither exists apart from the other.

In other words: life is self-animating, self-propagating, self-extending knowledge. If anything, Bök’s plan is at most a variation on what already is.

We went to a concert; I screamed and sang so loud that I hurt my throat. A security guard approached me: “Do you have a pass for that camera?” I stammered, exaggerating my nervousness because I think they appreciate submission: “N-no, did I need one? I didn’t know…” Oddly, he replied: “I don’t know, actually. Stay right here. Don’t move.”
He came back: “They’re cool with it.” I thought that was very decent; it was probably a little hard on him.

We went to a concert; I screamed and sang so loud that I hurt my throat. A security guard approached me: “Do you have a pass for that camera?” I stammered, exaggerating my nervousness because I think they appreciate submission: “N-no, did I need one? I didn’t know…” Oddly, he replied: “I don’t know, actually. Stay right here. Don’t move.”

He came back: “They’re cool with it.” I thought that was very decent; it was probably a little hard on him.

“Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of some coldly worked out experimental discovery.”

Eugenio Montale, quoted by James. This is not a condemnation of experimentation, but an observation about the relationship between an experiment’s purpose and its result’s endurance. The purpose must not be the experiment itself.

Milan Kundera said that the “sole raison d’être of the novel is to discover what only the novel can discover. A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”

As a fan of much abstract and experimental art, Kundera echoes Montale: both assert that whatever the formal nature or concerns of a work, its attention and aesthetic must be directed towards apprehending or expressing something like knowledge or truth, and in a new way. The truth pursued is existential, experiential, human, by and large; this is the most important sort. Indeed, Kundera says that the obligation to seek it is moral and that art which fails to meet this standard is not just “pulp” or “ordinary” or “bad” but in fact immoral.

This is radical among men as modern as they because it is so traditional; in my view, it is also true.

GPOYW: I am very much my parents’ child, happily. (Mom and dad, 1975, photographed by my father’s brother).
GPOYW: I am very much my parents’ child, happily. (Mom and dad, 1975, photographed by my father’s brother).
“Humanity will surpass the first dirigibles as it has surpassed the first locomotives. It will surpass M. Santos-Dumont as it has surpassed Stephenson. After telephotography it will continually invent graphies and scopes and phones, all of which will be tele and one will be able to go around the earth in less than no time. But it will always be only the temporal earth. And it will even be possible to burrow inside the earth and pierce it through as I do this ball of clay. But it will always be the carnal earth.”
Almost one year ago, I posted a note about sunburn, which in its annual recurrence demonstrates how resistant I am to learning even the simplest lessons (let alone complexly painful ones having to do with love and selfhood).
This weekend, I spent some time at the beach with Elle Belle. In St. Augustine, FL, a strange city with a stranger transient population of tourists and bikers and hippies and rednecks, I received a pleasant reminder from the universe that I still don’t know anything and that even writing about sunburn will not save me from my stupidity (the same parenthesis applies again: the reflection and analysis of my tendencies in life and love has had little effect on my habits).
My stupidity notwithstanding, it was an excellent time. Above, we are in her friend A’s backyard. Below, additional selected photos from the full set here:

My spartan room at a commune / hostel in Linconville; the absence of sheets made me feel at home.

Henry Flagler, tycoon and developer and city patron.

A week ago, I was wearing my heaviest jacket.

I spent an hour with an old couple who travel the East coast flying their hundreds of kites; the largest here is 100 square feet with two 100 foot tails.

Moss at night.
Little known-facts: Elle is a unicorn, naming a playground space shuttle “Challenger” is considered inspirational, and people make flowers out of other plants and give them to you if you stand around on the beach with a camera long enough.

Almost one year ago, I posted a note about sunburn, which in its annual recurrence demonstrates how resistant I am to learning even the simplest lessons (let alone complexly painful ones having to do with love and selfhood).

This weekend, I spent some time at the beach with Elle Belle. In St. Augustine, FL, a strange city with a stranger transient population of tourists and bikers and hippies and rednecks, I received a pleasant reminder from the universe that I still don’t know anything and that even writing about sunburn will not save me from my stupidity (the same parenthesis applies again: the reflection and analysis of my tendencies in life and love has had little effect on my habits).

My stupidity notwithstanding, it was an excellent time. Above, we are in her friend A’s backyard. Below, additional selected photos from the full set here:

My spartan room at a commune / hostel in Linconville; the absence of sheets made me feel at home.

Henry Flagler, tycoon and developer and city patron.

A week ago, I was wearing my heaviest jacket.

I spent an hour with an old couple who travel the East coast flying their hundreds of kites; the largest here is 100 square feet with two 100 foot tails.

Moss at night.

Little known-facts: Elle is a unicorn, naming a playground space shuttle “Challenger” is considered inspirational, and people make flowers out of other plants and give them to you if you stand around on the beach with a camera long enough.

“With the possible exception of Buddhism, no religion we know about is capable of allying itself to the state without working to the destruction of liberty. Less commonly noted is that it will also work to the destruction of itself, by trivializing its own teachings, or rendering them obnoxious in the attempt to impose them legally, instead of by exhortation, example, and witness.”

Clive James. I tend to think that only a religion which stands apart from society can meaningfully refer to the proposed eternal world which is its proper concern; excessive preoccupation with the minutiae of contemporaneity degrades any faith.

Like most of Cultural Amnesia, the essay offers aphorism after aphorism, the elegance of its insights demanding multiple quotations. I apologize for the length of the following, but given James’ status as an agnostic (if not atheist) cultural critic and historian par excellence, I feel his view is fascinating. Speaking of how translations of the Bible erode credulity, James notes that:

“The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece… The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Version was the work of men who did not realize that they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that… For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy… For me, the scriptures had provided a standard of authenticity against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic politics -all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion… I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me… If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version… But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity congruent with the impact Jesus must once have had on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counseling.”

While I think substantial exceptions can be taken to some of his points, James routinely delights me by his serious and apolitical engagement with the sources of culture; he is never facile because his subject -the world of meaning- never is either.

“One writes of scars healed, a loose parallel to the pathology of the skin, but there is no such thing in the life of an individual. There are open wounds, shrunk sometimes to the size of a pin-prick but wounds still. The marks of suffering are more comparable to the loss of a finger, or of the sight of an eye. We may not miss them, either, for one minute in a year, but if we should there is nothing to be done about it.”
Tender Is The Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald, quoted by Riazm.
Cricket came to Baton Rouge to see the musician Ryan Adams and stayed with me and Will. It was quite a lot of fun: she is as she seems on her site, funny and insightful and reflective and unique, and we greatly enjoyed having her (even if our tour of the city was somewhat lacking).
This was the second time I’ve met an Internet person, the first being my similarly awesome time with Fat Manatee. More photos here!

Cricket came to Baton Rouge to see the musician Ryan Adams and stayed with me and Will. It was quite a lot of fun: she is as she seems on her site, funny and insightful and reflective and unique, and we greatly enjoyed having her (even if our tour of the city was somewhat lacking).

This was the second time I’ve met an Internet person, the first being my similarly awesome time with Fat Manatee. More photos here!