mills

My failed commando attack on Frank B at the office yesterday; he...

Sat, 17 May 2008 09:50:35 -0500

My failed commando attack on Frank B at the office yesterday; he was just too strong to topple. Later, I staged a more successful attack on Will (see below):

Army ants building a living ladder, from this fascinating NYT...

Fri, 16 May 2008 19:18:00 -0500

Army ants building a living ladder, from this fascinating NYT article about swarming and aggregation. The explanatory power of evolutionary theory is spectacular. The article observes how much better at mass behaviors ants are than people, and adds:

The reason may be that the ants have had a lot more time to adapt to living in big groups. “We haven’t evolved in the societies we currently live in,” Dr. Couzin said.

You can see the problems we have with massive social life everywhere, from psychology to culture to politics. It’s just not our most best scale, as the brilliant BoutofContext notes in his comment to this.

"This ego is hell, and hell is a dragon not diminished by oceans of water. It drinks down the seven..."

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:08:13 -0500

“This ego is hell, and hell is a dragon not diminished by oceans of water. It drinks down the seven seas, yet the heat of that manburner does not become less. It makes a morsel out of a world and gulps it down. Its belly keeps shouting: Is there any more?”

- Rumi, via thebronzemedal. Rumi is really wonderful, and I say that as someone almost completely unable to understand most poetry (I would add that ‘Manburner’ might be a good nickname for Syd).

Obama Admires Bush - NYT

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:46:56 -0500

Obama Admires Bush - NYT:

Note: I’m not political and don’t intend this as a celebration or condemnation of anyone.

This, however, is an interesting conversation between David Brooks and Obama about foreign policy, and specifically the use of diplomacy with highly reactionary groups like Hamas or Hezbollah (the latter of which Obama characterizes as “not a legitimate political party”). Obama notes:

“There are rarely purely ideological movements out there. We can encourage actors to think in practical and not ideological terms. We can strengthen those elements that are making practical calculations.”

This is classic realism and is not particularly radical. It’s interesting to note that, as John Brissenden has observed, Obama does not propose a substantive departure from general American foreign policy, but only from GW Bush’s foreign policy. In this interview, he says there is no “argument between Democrats and Republicans. It’s an argument between ideology and foreign policy realism. I have enormous sympathy for the foreign policy of George H. W. Bush. I don’t have a lot of complaints about their handling of Desert Storm.”

Occasionally, I borrow from L. Paul Bremer’s sartorial...

Fri, 16 May 2008 12:09:52 -0500

Occasionally, I borrow from L. Paul Bremer’s sartorial tradition. I feel that militarizing my appearance at the office enhances my authority, which is otherwise undermined by my profound incompetence. Also, everyone thinks I am about to ‘go postal,’ so they’re quite deferential. And who cares about stains on camo? I recommend it!

"It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated,..."

Fri, 16 May 2008 10:11:36 -0500

“It will also be horribly difficult and painful for Americans to absorb the fact that they are hated, and hated intelligibly. How many of them know, for example, that their government has destroyed at least 5 percent of the Iraqi population? How many of them then transfer that figure to America (and come up with fourteen million)? Various national characteristics- self-reliance, a fiercer patriotism than any in western Europe, an assiduous geographical incuriosity- have created a deficit of empathy for the sufferings of people far away. Most crucially, and again most painfully, being right and being good support the American self to an almost tautologous degree: Americans are good and right by virtue of being American. Saul Bellow’s word for this habit is “angelization.” On the U.S.-led side, then, we need not only a revolution in consciousness but an adaptation of national character: the work, perhaps, of a generation.”

- Martin Amis, “The Second Plane.” Written seven days after September 11, this essay is one of the more cogent from that time. I want to quickly note that Amis is no antagonist of America, nor is he an apologist for Islamofascism; he writes that America is hated “intelligibly,” not “intelligently,” and in his prose is nothing like the celebratory tone used by those motivated as much by Nietzschean “ressentiment” as by political reflection.

But Amis is interested in a fundamental question of our time: what accounts for the radical disparity between America’s self-image and its image around the world? Again, I don’t here mean competing views held by the uneducated; we make our task easy if we confine the scope of our enquiry to reactionary rednecks and Afghan villagers without schools.

For the fact is that educated and intelligent Americans are utterly incapable of recognizing or contextualizing the slaughter of Iraqis as morally meaningful (as though our lack of intentionality mitigates the rage and despair of their kin). What Amis calls our “incuriosity” is often blamed on the media, but I doubt the cause is so simple. There is a deep unwillingness to confront America’s historical missteps, the consequences of our errors in judgment (or our malice), the sources of the world’s antipathy towards us.

(I personally think it is largely the same old oppositonal bullshit: privately, you can like get someone to admit that installing the Shah in Iran was not merely unethical and contrary to our principles as a nation but also terribly stupid and still costs us, to this day; but in public, they are so hostile to the opposition, whom they view as pathologically anti-American, that they’ll clam up or talk about the urgent necessity of stemming Communism in the Middle East).

He closes the essay with a warning that was prescient, if not unique in its vision:

…unless Pakistan can actually deliver bin Laden, the American retaliation is almost sure to become elephantine. Then terror from above will replenish the source of all terror from below: unhealed wounds. This is the familiar cycle so well caught by the matter, and the title, of VS Naipul’s story “Tell Me Who to Kill.”

And so it happened. His book contains many rousing and brilliant condemnations of terrorism, the idiocy of theocracy and the banal stupidity of the “philosophies” on which Islamofascism is based, and so on, but we know all that. What remains a mystery is this: what truly accounts for the American disconnect? What will remediate it?

(If you’re waiting for a generational change, here’s a dispatch for you from the South: it isn’t coming).

theoriginaljoefisher:quaking aspens.

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:36:33 -0500

theoriginaljoefisher:quaking aspens.

"We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. We love each other and we love hard, all of..."

Thu, 15 May 2008 21:21:24 -0500

“We say we love each other and we do, I don’t doubt it. We love each other and we love hard, all of us. I love Terri and Terri loves me, and you guys love each other. You know the kind of love I’m talking about now. Sexual love, that attraction to the other person, the partner, as well as just the plain everyday kind of love, love of the other person’s being, the loving to be with the other, the little things that make up everyday love. Carnal love, then and, well, call it sentimental love, the day-to-day caring about the other. But sometimes I have a hard time accounting for the fact that I must have loved my first wife, too. But I did, I know I did… at one time I thought I loved my first wife more than life itself, and we had the kids together. But now I hate her guts. I do. How do you figure that? What happened to that love? Did that love just get erased from the big board, as if it was never up there, as if it never happened? What happened to it is what I’d like to know. I wish someone could tell me.”

- Beginners, by Raymond Carver. Elle Belle posted a note about Raymond Carver, to whom I’d not had much exposure before reading the linked story at the New Yorker.

It might be a matter of very peculiar resonance, a coincidentally strong familiarity the moments and questions of the story have for me, but I found it quite moving (indeed, a bit too much so).

milesbarger: Toxic nudibranchs—soft, seagoing slugs. see more ...

Thu, 15 May 2008 00:23:15 -0500

milesbarger:

Toxic nudibranchs—soft, seagoing slugs. see more
Kitsune Noir

You really need to click those links; I’ve never seen anything like these.

I’ve posted bits of Keith Jarrett before, but as his best...

Wed, 14 May 2008 23:57:00 -0500

I’ve posted bits of Keith Jarrett before, but as his best work is too long to upload (and in any event is something one either finds and loves or doesn’t) I haven’t mentioned him in a while.

But this is one of the rather rare video snippets online of a contemporary solo improvisational piece (2002), and it’s pretty extraordinary. It requires some focus, and at times makes me a bit anxious (that is, its melodic and harmonic language isn’t formulaic and thus isn’t reassuring), but I think it’s wonderful.

I am still simple enough that I sometimes prefer this or this, but the above is amazing, and seeing him play helps make it intelligible and appealing.

Update: Part 2 is really lovely.

"The first time he left I felt scalded, as if drenched by a waterfall of boiling bitter tea. After..."

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:44:00 -0500

“The first time he left I felt scalded, as if drenched by a waterfall of boiling bitter tea. After the fourth time, I came to expect it and no longer felt anything but relief that our unwieldly life together would be, for a time, suspended in his absence. I would always think, “Now I am free to pursue my own interests, my own pleasures; my time is my own, how precious”. But the storms that precipitated his departure exhausted me so, and I would think about freedom and try to consider the myriad options now available to me while laying in my bed, my room darkened with drawn curtains, body prone and limbs laying stiffly in the afternoon heat. I could not move, and I could think only in circles, moving sometimes forwards and sometimes backwards, but always concentrically, around the big hole that was left in me whenever I was alone.”

- Heaven Spent, “Left.”

My mom took this photo in Metairie yesterday; the flag is made...

Wed, 14 May 2008 10:32:15 -0500

My mom took this photo in Metairie yesterday; the flag is made out of Go-Cups in a chain-link fence, and seems sort of remarkable. It’s interesting how some people are drawn to the process of creation in such a direct and unaffected way.

Whoever made this, living in a suburb of New Orleans in some dated, archetypal middle-American dwelling, is probably not an artist and likely doesn’t know many artists. Without much sophistication in the selection of subject*, s/he exemplifies an unmediated folk-art sort of craft that seems very genuine to me.

In such a milieu, s/he would have no peers or context; it’s unlikely others on the block are creating analogous offerings, so there’s a kind of radical individualism in it that’s absent among artists whose art itself may be more unique or sui generis. That is, such folk art occurs in an artless environment where the most creative and original act is merely making something at all.

(*It is perhaps rather elite of me to derogate the subject of the work, but I think defensibly so).

The First Time I've Been Called a "Man"

Tue, 13 May 2008 22:02:00 -0500

fatmanatee:

tumblcrush:

“I have a tumblr crush on Mills The man seems absolutely incapable of saying anything boring. And the eyes and hair! *sigh*”

Mills is so hot right now.

I can only assume this all started when I finally achieved my lifelong ambition to grow a mustache; while that was its own reward (see below), this is actually even better and likely obviates the need for my next shrink session.

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

Tue, 13 May 2008 16:35:36 -0500

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

- Albert Einstein. I’ve been deeply impressed by the willingness of some of my more enthusiastic peers to selectively quote from an article in the Guardian about a private letter Einstein wrote in which, among other things, he noted that the “…word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses…”

Sloganeering, with its vituperative dialectical reductiveness, is less about insight than about self-congratulation, and I suppose that prevented the dozens of rebloggers from noting either the quote above or this paragraph at the end of the article:

“Like other great scientists he does not fit the boxes in which popular polemicists like to pigeonhole him,” said Brooke. “It is clear for example that he had respect for the religious values enshrined within Judaic and Christian traditions … but what he understood by religion was something far more subtle than what is usually meant by the word in popular discussion.”

Despite his categorical rejection of conventional religion, Brooke said that Einstein became angry when his views were appropriated by evangelists for atheism. He was offended by their lack of humility and once wrote, “The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.”*

But why deal with Einstein the complete man, the fully brilliant and subtle thinker, when we can reduce him to a few quotes that substantiate our views confirm our own young wisdom? It is especially dispiriting to note that, as the Guardian article begins with the above quote, the rebloggers must (1) have simply not read it, (2) felt that to deal with Einstein’s complexity on this issue was too laborious, or (3) decided to ignore it and just take from him what they wanted because they don’t actually respect him.

(The comprehensibility of the world, incidentally, is mysterious; it is what Einstein referred to when he wrote, “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.” Emphatically, Einstein did not believe in a personal god, but take him at his word:

“You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth.”)

Jindal, McCain, Katrina

Tue, 13 May 2008 10:34:01 -0500

Jindal, McCain, Katrina:

Mandalay reblogged Pegobry’s link to an Atlantic post about Bobby Jindal, certainly the most impressive phenomenon to emerge from Louisiana in many years (I am here excluding athletes and musicians). Jindal is the only politician I’ve cared about in many years, an ethical and brilliant man whose defeat by Blanco was as great a tragedy for Louisiana (and New Orleans) as any other government blunder after Katrina. Even Blanco knew this, and didn’t run for reelection, all but conceding that Jindal needed to take over if this state is to have any hope at all.

Reading about Jindal is always satisfying to me, but I wanted to note something else in the article:

Bush detractors get mad when I say this, but it really is true that the total ineptitude of the state and local governments was a major reason that things went so tragically wrong during Katrina.

I am a Bush detractor, and I’m particularly disgusted with his callow indifference to poor, black, Catholic New Orleans in the wake of one of America’s worst natural disasters. I don’t want to belabor the point here, but I feel that New Orleans’ cultural contributions to the South and to the United States are subtle, easily overlooked, and critical to our national identity; and that Bush’s manifest and undeniable lack of interest in helping the city constitute a level of cultural violence I thought he reserved for Baghdad’s museums.

However, McArdle is absolutely right: while Bush, FEMA, and the unfortunate Michael Brown were less than respectable, there is no question that the state and local governments of the area were pitiful, disgraceful, contemptible in their incompetence and eventual venality. One need only look to Mississippi (Mississippi!) to see what able local governments were able to accomplish.

I would note only that New Orleans had as daunting a task before its sorry government and impoverished and indolent citizenry as any in American urban history, and in this crisis I had expected that the federal government would do whatever it had to, would take command and lead, rather than shrugging and saying, “Damn, everyone there is corrupt and crazy!”

That may be the case, but that is precisely why we hoped for decisive and meaningful oversight and involvement by a federal government that, in the end, seemed to eventually conclude that nation-building in third-world Louisiana simply wasn’t worth the trouble.

Cycling in St. Francisville, LA, with Will, HM, and WM. I know...

Mon, 12 May 2008 23:23:13 -0500

Cycling in St. Francisville, LA, with Will, HM, and WM. I know the music is perhaps a bit much; but it was a happy ride for me, the first in St. Francisville in a while, and so “Love Goes Home to Paris in the Spring” by the Magnetic Fields seemed fine.

Squashed is grateful for his lovely-looking dog, which -like...

Mon, 12 May 2008 20:52:30 -0500

Squashed is grateful for his lovely-looking dog, which -like most Akitas- photographs beautifully; the above image is from Larkspur, which suggests that Squashed has a really nice life.

My family has had two: Sinjin (whom we called “Biggie”), now passed and seen below in a photo with my mom, and Kuma.

"Get your scary eyes away from my ovaries."

Mon, 12 May 2008 18:55:00 -0500

“Get your scary eyes away from my ovaries.”

- Syd, to me. She swears we’re not reprising this, but I’m not sure.

(Update: Syd demands that I add the context, which does little to clarify this. “You had just threatened to send negative energy to my reproductive system with your mind.” Ah, now it makes sense, doesn’t it?)

Because Everyone Has Klaus Kinski Moments My dogs come sit next...

Mon, 12 May 2008 13:24:00 -0500

Because Everyone Has Klaus Kinski Moments

My dogs come sit next to me
A pack of dogs and of cigarettes
My only friends speak no words to me
But they look at me and they don’t forget
That a boy’s best friend is his mother or whatever has become his pet.

(Dragonfly and wasp nest; music from The White Stripes).

"There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness."

Mon, 12 May 2008 11:45:59 -0500

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche (via dhk). Will’s brother would probably like this a great deal.