mills

"I don’t care whether Picasso put out cigarettes on people’s arms. My attitude is that if..."

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 18:57:08 -0600

“I don’t care whether Picasso put out cigarettes on people’s arms. My attitude is that if Picasso took a machine gun and cut down a line of grandmothers, okay, it would not affect my opinion of his art.”

- Camille Paglia, quoted to me by Abby and posted because Peter and Petitchou mentioned the issue again on Woody Allen’s birthday.

She does not suggest art exculpates guilt; she suggests that guilt is irrelevant to art’s value. She’s probably correct, but I struggle to discard my childish idea that when we love art we love it partly as an expression of a mind or heart we admire, of an imagination we adore. It is hard to adore the imagination or the heart of someone who machine-guns grandmothers; it is hard not to mistrust its output, however beautiful or formally inventive it is.

But this is a silly, sentimental idea of art that reflects poorly on me; I can admit that.

"Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses."

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:31:00 -0600

“Lie detector eyeglasses perfected: Civilization collapses.”

- Richard Powers, from heroine Sarah Belfort’s post of some six word stories; also included were:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.— Margaret Atwood
I’m your future, child. Don’t cry. — Stephen Baxter
LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.— Evelyn Waugh
Thought I was right. I wasn’t. — Graeme Gibson

There is also the well-known Hemingway effort -“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”- and it seems to me that many fragments of James Ellroy’s prose could be excerpted and stand on their own in the same way.

Food stamps are being discussed in the news, which means...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 10:48:53 -0600

Food stamps are being discussed in the news, which means bloggers need related images for their stories; hilariously, they seem often to find my photograph of Jacques-Imo’s door, with its surely tongue-in-cheek announcement that they accept food stamps. I took it while waiting there with Mandalay, Will, and Spencer in May.

Yesterday, Matthew Yglesias used it to illustrate his post on the subject, which I believe means I am officially a world-famous photographer even though Riaz takes vastly better pictures.

When the Saints Go Marching In - The Preservation Hall Jazz...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:21:20 -0600

When the Saints Go Marching In - The Preservation Hall Jazz Band

This mid-1960s recording is a concession to the fact that last night’s victory over the hated Patriots was one I’ll never forget; only the post-Katrina reclamation of the Superdome against the Falcons -also a Monday night game- exceeds it, in my view. If you’re familiar with our team’s history I’m sure you’ll forgive a bit of sentimentality.

I’m trying not to contribute to the hype, but it’s not easy. Previously.

Happy birthday to my the ROLFing, meowing Elle, who I believe...

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 12:21:00 -0600

Happy birthday to my the ROLFing, meowing Elle, who I believe was the first dear friend I made through the Internet. I’ve visited her and she’s visited me, and although both trips had elements of disaster they remain fond memories.

I’ll not be more sentimental than this: it’s been one of the best friendships I’ve had.

Enjoy getting older, L, and next year I’ll let Will “Hunky Brewster” Dalto do this since he remembered your birthday first!

Wizards in the Gaps

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 13:03:00 -0600

Wizards in the Gaps:

I have to disagree with Simen’s critique of David Deutsch, whose theory of knowledge is based largely on the work of Karl Popper. Simen argues that Deutsch is wrong to criticize “explanationless theories” because explanation is itself a weak form of knowledge; in Simen’s argument, wizards underlie all explanations because one can endlessly question explanations: “We end up with an infinite regress: what caused that? What caused what caused that?”

Simen’s answer: at the root of all sciences are irreducible explanations which, because of their irreducibility, constitute “assumptions” which may as well be wizards for their magical role in the construction of our theories.

This is not the case, neither in physics nor in other fields (which do in fact materially reduce to physics: a major cause of tension between biologists and physicists in particular, as Schrödinger discussed in his lectures on the structure of life; we do not “kid ourselves” when we assert that no model of knowledge which cannot in principle scale in accordance with the physical structure of reality and its laws has any legitimacy). It is particularly untrue of the fecund territory at the roots of our sciences, where work to more deeply correlate high-level complexity with the fundamental rules of the universe is most exciting.

What is the case: our explanations are momentarily incomplete (we can assume they will remain so, ever-perfectable, asymptotically approaching completion). Simen’s assertions that where there is no knowledge there are wizards is like an anti-epistemological “God of the Gaps” game: if we posit a working model of the subatomic world and a cosmological timeline that explains how that world came into being over the life of the universe, he says, “Well, what caused that?” If we answer, “The nature of the universe at the Big Bang,” he repeats his question. We might answer this game of endless querying:

The concept of causal relations depends on time, which language construes in a manner not consistent with its actual properties in the universe (and which has itself not always existed, so to speak); you are building sentences to query a universe that may not always follow the rules of sentences. (Indeed, many of Simen’s sentences are metaphysical, not scientific; they would not be sensible to a physicist: “How can we explain which [universe] we ended up with?” begs as many questions as it asks, both from language and physics).
Perhaps something did cause, say, the Big Bang, and we don’t know what yet; that we don’t know yet what caused it does not mean we assume wizards, just as those who developed chemistry without understanding atomic properties weren’t assuming wizards.

Neither gods nor wizards live in the spaces where we don’t yet have explanatory models; nor are these spaces filled by “assumptions.” Instead, they await their explanations, which are not merely descriptive or observational in nature but in fact recreate the functional and formal structures they describe in model form, imaginatively. Once we explain something, we have virtualized it mentally. This is the most important property of knowledge, and one that I believe has special significance for humanity’s future in the cosmos. Popper and Deutsch are, in my view, quite right to argue that explanation is the basis of scientific progress, not the accumulation of predictions drawn from uncomprehended data.

Rapper’s Delight - Sugar Hill Gang I was under the...

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:17:32 -0600

Rapper’s Delight - Sugar Hill Gang

I was under the mistaken impression that this song’s long verse on a disastrous meal was Thanksgiving-themed. My mom is a phenomenal cook, so I suppose I’ll just hope that this doesn’t describe your experience today.

Have you ever went over a friend’s house to eat
and the food just aint no good?
I mean the macaroni’s soggy the peas are mushed
and the chicken tastes like wood.
So you try to play it off like you think you can
by sayin’ that you’re full,
and then your friend says, “Momma, he’s just being polite,
he ain’t finished -uh, uh- that’s bull.”
So your heart starts pumpin’ and you think of a lie,
and you say that you already ate,
and your friend says, “Man, there’s plenty of food,”
so you pile some more on your plate.
While the stinky food’s steamin’ your mind starts to dreamin’
of the moment that it’s time to leave,
and then you look at your plate and your chicken’s slowly rottin’
into something that looks like cheese.
So you say, “That’s it, I got to leave this place,
I dont care what these people think.
I’m just sittin’ here makin myself nauseous
with this ugly food that stinks.”
So you bust out the door while it’s still closed
-still sick from the food you ate-
and then you run to the store for quick relief
from a bottle of Kaopectate…

Happy Thanksgiving!

Simen, of the Daily Meh, is one of my favorites; he posted the...

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:33:05 -0600

Simen, of the Daily Meh, is one of my favorites; he posted the above photograph and detail, and wrote what follows about it (I highly recommend his review of Crewdson).

Speaking of Kafka, he wrote a cryptic little short story called The Cares of a Family Man (Die Sorge des Hausvaters). It’s really short; you can read it here.

The picture above is Odradek, Táboritská 8, Prague, 18 July 1994, by Jeff Wall. Wall is known for his large-scale staged photographs, like Gregory Crewdson, though Wall has been doing it for longer. Some of Wall’s pictures are recreations of works by others. In my review of Crewdson’s Beneath the Roses, I included one of Wall’s pictures called A Sudden Gust of Wind, after a print by Hokusai.

Anyway, the amount of time and resources that goes into creating each of these pictures is stunning. Yet when you look at the picture, you may very well miss the little detail in the middle, shown above. That is the point. Huge resources were spent creating the picture; the point is Odradek, whom you might not notice at a glance.

I was reminded of Odradek recently when I came across an excellent Tumblr-user who bears the creature’s name. As I mentioned to her, Odradek was important to a course I took on Kafka which concerned not only his works but also the often-absurd ideas of “Kafkology,” the scholarship that surrounds them.

Kafkology was memorably defined by Kundera in a tautology: “Kafkology is discourse for Kafkologizing Kafka. For replacing Kafka with the Kafkologized Kafka.” By this he meant that the hysterical, bombastic, indefensible ideas of scholars who misunderstood everything about Kafka -on from his executor Max Brod, who thought that his works depicted the horrible torments of hell which meet those who sin!- were never about Kafka at all. Rather, they were about using his powerful, seemingly encoded stories to support whatever the pet interests of said scholars happened to be.

My professor, Franz Kempf, shared with us the views of one addled academic who claimed that “Odradek,” the word, in some language or another, sounded like “Oh, there is dirt there,” which he further took to be a reference to the anus. Thus, the academic asserted in his delightfully serious essay, “The Cares of Family Man” concerns homosexuality and Kafka’s ambivalence about it, his simultaneous desire and discomfort, bourgeois repression of the body, etc. etc. ad absurdum.

I will concede to Simen that there are problems with assessing the meaning of dreams, and Kafka’s sometimes dream-like stories share that quality: anyone can detect in them indictments of whatever they hate, celebration of what they like, images of whatever they can use to build their thick, dry essays and deep, dull monographs.

"But then? No then."

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:18:28 -0600

“But then? No then.”

- Franz Kafka in “Description of a Struggle,” quoted by Zadie Smith in an essay forwarded to me by Meaghano; more on the essay itself later.

Not Yet

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:27:00 -0600

My friend E., an architect, posted the following extraordinary photo and quote on Corner Lot:

The airplane shows us that the problem well stated finds its solution. To wish to fly like a bird is to state the problem badly, and Ader’s Bat never left the ground… to search for a means of suspension in the air, and a means of propulsion, was to put the problem properly: in less than ten years the whole world could fly.

The problem of the house has not yet been stated.

- Le Corbusier in Vers une Architecture

Village Green Preservation Society - The Kinks Posted by...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0600

Village Green Preservation Society - The Kinks

Posted by Filmosophy-founder, master of the mind, and man-about-the-Internet Sometimes a Great Notion; shared mainly for Abs-the-gym-rat.

Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:04:00 -0600

Arthur Koestler and Mamaine Paget. Koestler’s life was extraordinary; as a journalist, Communist, anti-Communist, Leftist internee under the dying French regime while Hitler invaded, and essayist, he saw as much as anyone the consequences of opinion, of weak morality, of deference to evil.

Koestler was also a wife-abusing rapist whose treatment of women was uniformly brutal: impregnating and abandoning them to dangerous abortions, cowing them and beating them, permitting only sycophancy in them, he repels even if one admires Darkness at Noon.

Julian Barnes, whose own personality emerges from Nothing to be Afraid Of and Flaubert’s Parrot and other works as utterly decent, considered him a friend. In 2000, he and an author of a biography of Koestler fought over the deceased author’s reputation, and in their dispute one encounters again these same questions:

Should deeds (and opinions, which can be a kind of deed) beyond the creative work of an artist or thinker matter in the consideration of that work? Does it matter that Heidegger was a Nazi? Does it matter that Polanski was a rapist? Does it matter that Anderson feels Polanski should not face justice?
If we set an arbitrary point at which we say such things do matter -we forgive Ted Kennedy but not Polanski, or vice versa; we accept Alec Baldwin’s political declarations but not Jon Voight’s; we despise Heidegger for being a Nazi but not Sartre for defending Stalin; there are endless examples- must we accept that all arbitrarily-set limits are equivalently defensible?

These are difficult questions for which I have no answer and in which I lose interest; artists and thinkers are precisely as human as we all are, with the same preponderance of flaws, some unforgivable; what matters to me is the work. Indeed, while most of us do not commit overtly immoral acts it is easy to see how we might be detested. For example: did you vote for Obama? He has increased out use of Predator attack drones vastly; when, years from now, you opine in an interview after your latest book has been released that you loved Obama, the scores of relatives of the innocent collateral damage will loathe you and consider you immoral, and what will you say? Let your handler deal with it! And let’s not think of what our exes and enemies would say of us!

Morality and Aesthetics

But there is something interesting here: I do not think we are merely arguing about whether to, say, boycott Wes Anderson’s movies because we disagree with him. We regularly buy products from companies which do worse than sign petitions! We pay taxes which fund policies with greater negative impact than op-eds or signatures or the odious opinions of some long-dead author!

I think the greater issue is that when a thinker takes a position we consider immoral we begin to doubt the value of their work, a fact I find fascinating. In Heidegger’s case it is perhaps not surprising that we would ponder whether someone who found Hitler reasonable can be trusted to reason -though we might ask Hannah Arendt- but it is notable that we are concerned by Wagner’s anti-Semitism.

What does music have to do with racism? It seems to me that there is a common sense that art or thought of any value must have some moral core, that there is a moral basis to aesthetics without which they lose their value, that creative work implicitly expresses the morality of its creator and loses much of its meaning if said morality is dubious in itself or contradicted by the creator’s behavior.

If painting, photography, philosophy, film, literature, and so on are problematized by their creators’ failed, repudiated, or incoherent moral codes, then we must accept that morality is more integral to art and thought than we ordinarily suppose, particularly in an age of disputed moralities, of negotiable and relative moralities.

Do we restrict the requisite morality of all art to the universal proposals almost all accept: that violence is to be abhorred, that compassion is a virtue? Or do we permit more specific moralities -the morality, say, of feminism, or the “revolutionary morality” of Marxism, or the morality of Christianity- to inform the aesthetic judgement of a work?

That is, are these statements equivalently defensible:

I cannot believe that a man who supports a child-rapist can make movies worth a damn; he lacks compassion, a sense of humanism, and an understanding of justice; everything he makes will be shallow and unfeeling.
I cannot accept that a novel written by a rapist will have any insight into the humanistic concerns of literature; if he cannot feel for his victims, how can he feel for his characters? Everything he writes will be brutally atavistic.
I cannot abide music which promotes extramarital sex sung by someone who has been convicted of un-Christian, immoral acts with children; it is repellant and demonstrates a soulless amorality which places him far from real love.

When do opinions become deeds? When do deeds become universally detestable? When are you comfortable stating that your morality is sufficient to judge another by? When does immorality impugn art’s credibility? Are there aesthetics without morality?

"Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name? … His completely cancerous..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:01:00 -0600

“Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name? … His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, “Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.” The two are just thrown together.”

- Will Oldham’s infamous remarks concerning Wes Anderson, in honor of Wes Anderson Week at Filmosophy.

This flyabostic rake Distorte, whom I worry my girlfriend should like more than she likes me, asked the other day whether he ought to read the Cormac McCarthy interview in the WSJ, noting that “there’s a natural curiosity always about artists we love, but is scratching that itch getting you any closer to the art or is it merely a distraction? Could it damage the relationship?”

It certainly can if one isn’t careful, particularly if one prefers to believe that one’s favorite artists are in possession of a moral intelligence and philosophical worldview whose wisdom is intelligible to oneself. It isn’t always so, and it can be a significant problem. I personally think that not only is Will Oldham’s assessment wrong, it is stupid: to say things are “thrown together” is a speculation he cannot defend; he has no idea what connection Anderson perceives or seeks in his combinations of sights and sounds; he has no idea what the intent behind the selections is, and no standing to declare unacceptable Anderson’s aesthetic approach; and to base on such tenuous speculation such a pejorative claim -that he is “cancerous”- is absurd.

Abby introduced me to Will Oldham, and I love his music; but I also think his lyrics betray a self-centeredness that discomfits me, and this quote didn’t help; I wish I hadn’t come across it, especially because such a narrow arrogance about musical and artistic questions is particularly unseemly for a musician.

It is not atypical, though; many artists, possessing (or faking) the confidence to create and submit to the world the works of their fragile selves, consider their aesthetic views authoritative. How could they not? That’s why they create as they do! But surely Oldham has been misunderstood before, and I am surprised he’s not warier of assuming an absence of meaning wherever he doesn’t immediately detect connections.

Fun assignment: compile a list of all the instances in which the opinions or behaviors of artists of whatever sort problematized our enjoyment of their work.

From my photography blog, yesterday: This is the window behind...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:35:00 -0600

From my photography blog, yesterday:

This is the window behind my computer, fuzzy with dust and its paint chapping like desiccated leather. Today has been very gray; it’s cold, wet, and the plants seem lush.

Gray Saturday, gray Sunday, beautiful Monday. The simple difference between happiness and unhappiness is in whether I am (1) glad that the weather is now beautiful or (2) irritated that it wasn’t when I was free to enjoy it.

"My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward,..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:25:00 -0600

“My formula for human greatness is amor fati: that one wants to have nothing different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely to bear the necessary, still less to conceal it—all idealism is mendaciousness before the necessary—but to love it.”

- A syphilitic Friedrich Nietzsche in the chapter of Ecce Homo titled “Why I am so Clever,” though I should add that this is an example of an idea -amor fati- not without its value despite the increasing dementia of its author. I came across it again while reading Wikipedia’s brief treatment of Nietzsche’s comments concerning eternal return, which related to the previous post.

That idea is probably familiar to most from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which questions at its outset whether the lightness of an existence that vanishes irretrievably into the past is terrible or fortunate; would it better for everything that happens to happen eternally, so to speak?

It’s worth noting that physicists would dispute the assumptions these questions make about time; the great Unburying the Lead quoted Albert Einstein recently:“For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion.”

Update: Nick Barr noted that “the whole syphilis thing is probably untrue,” an assertion which surprised me as the last time I read Nietzsche it seemed fairly widely accepted; much of his lifelong medical trouble is explained by such a diagnosis. But Barr has scholarship on his side, and I thank him for the correction; it appears now to at least be again in dispute, and strong arguments against syphilis have been made.

Apropos of Nothing

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:14:00 -0600

Sometimes when I review what I’ve written here, I am greatly relieved to remember that it will all be lost. It is a common enough trope that we fear death not solely because of oblivion but also because of erasure, not solely for the cessation of consciousness but also because everything we made, said, and did will disappear from the Earth someday. One reads that many “want to leave something behind,” don’t want their lives to dissolve into the froth and scum of generations, cannot bear that their entire worlds will become historical trivia and eventually will be forgotten.

But I am pleased that whatever the advance of the ubiquitous archival process the Internet represents, however sophisticated the indexing or permanent the storage, someday there will be none of this nonsense left, none of these noxious little emissions nor anything of the best ones, none of the preening and straining and posing or the fortunate moments of slight quality; and even were it to remain somehow, no one will care to read it: there will be too much else to sort through. The mathematics of populations ensures that all the photos, all the glib assertions about subjects I barely understand, all that I have made and indeed all that I am will be gone.

This noise! One can see, after years of being shamed by the voracious appetite of one’s self for attention and approval, its contemptible posturing and pageantry, how nice it will be to have no self, to be no self, and to have nothing of the self remain.

Won’t it be nice when this all disappears?

Like a Little Banana: Childhood and Adulthood in Bottle Rocket

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:05:15 -0600

Like a Little Banana: Childhood and Adulthood in Bottle Rocket:

I reviewed Bottle Rocket for Filmosophy, despite not knowing how to review a film; as often happens when I am discussing something I shouldn’t be, I wound up concentrating on all sorts of details that are dull and extraneous, completely omitting the most important attribute of the movie: it’s very funny. Like many, I incorporate film dialogue into my lexicon to a degree that’s appalling, and Bottle Rocket is a major source of my phraseology. It helps that I am personally a lot like Dignan.

I didn’t discuss that, though, and I really got quite lost; I kept thinking of Anderson’s perhaps dubious morality and whether it relates to his creative work, which does have a strange amorality about it. In the films of his I like best, it is questionable why I forgive Zissou and Tenenbaum and Fischer their obscene selfishness, which inclines them to treat as trivial the needs and feelings of others. Fischer is a child, of course, but his precocity problematizes even that excuse; and no less childish are the old men Zissou and Tenenbaum.

It’s appropriate that the graphics with which he infuses and surrounds his films, like the Criterion DVD illustrations and such, have their particular aesthetic: Anderson seems fixated on miniaturization of scale and childishness and immature amorality as a catalyst for adventure, and all these things remind me of children’s stories; the protagonists are often puckish and egomaniacal, but we don’t love them less. It only recently occurred to me, for example, that one might dislike Calvin, although this probably says more about me than about the character. Anderson’s films are sweet as children’s stories; pirates, even when they shoot people, do not terrify; helicopter crashes make us cry, but not sob; everything is without consequence, or with only beautiful consequence. And even tragedy seems somehow to edify or help transform, as in The Darjeeling Limited.

Questions, then: what to make of Anderson’s fascination with adventure-catalyzing, immature, self-centered, protagonists? And if we replace “adventure” with “art” or “creativity” or “success,” aren’t we talking about the problem we have with so many people of genius? To what extent should we overlook Royal’s behavior for its role in producing children of talent? To what extent should we ignore Zissou’s vanity for his fine undersea films? To what extent is a character flaw that aids in creativity or achievement thereby recontextualized? Does it take a Max Fischer to make a play? And should Anderson’s willingness to overlook the selfishness and immorality of older men who create be thought of in these terms?

(Note: I ask these questions for fun; in the end, I like his stories quite a lot without this analytical cruft, but then: I think I am the sort of old child he writes about).

From Photophobia, this is a photo of my ceiling; I took it while...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 13:33:59 -0600

From Photophobia, this is a photo of my ceiling; I took it while on the phone with Abs. I don’t really have a lot to say about it except that it reminds me of a ceiling I once stared at in Mississippi. One feature of childhood I’d like to resurrect is the obsession with spaces, shapes, and colors, the scale-dissolving interest in all physical things; I used to imagine building a house that was upside-down, with fake furniture fixed to the floor/ceilings; I would walk around the ceiling/floor, which would be wide-open but for light fixtures standing up in the middle, each room a sea of spackled stucco with a volcanic island of cheap brass and bulbs in the middle.

No Sleepflower Till Brooklyn

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:37:19 -0600

Marginal Gloss is one of my favorites; his posts and movie reviews are always wonderful. He discusses sleep in an excellent post which happens to reflect the precise opposite of my own attitude towards sleep, which I might best describe as hostile. Included is a quote from Marcus Aurelius which I hope to have written by scribes using my blood as ink, Hussein-style, and framed above my bed:

In he morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?…Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?…[Sleep] is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will.

Marginal Gloss’ comments are, as always, worth reading, but I am unmoved, and he has unwittingly consigned any and all who sleep in the same space as I to a new, shouted morning salutation: Look at the little plants and ants! Thou goest beyond the bounds! Get out of bed already!

"A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:57:42 -0600

“A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall.”

- Walter Benjamin, quoted by Wesley Hill.