It is surprising how much Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's The Trip parallels The Canterbury Tales. A pilgrimage to the north of England, with an ostensible purpose to which its pilgrims become increasingly indifferent as the trip. Their thoughts are occupied with a competitive relationship between each other's identity, which at times is explicitly adversarial but as the trip drags on, becomes a cooperative endeavor through which the pilgrims confront their identities as Englishmen and as humans. Cultural artifacts which by now small stretch could be said to define the English nation, tongue, and artistic oeuvre, are observed reacting in sociological situ. The ultimate effect is somewhere between the demonstration of how cultural dialogue is enacted to make functional (or indeed, dysfunctional) human beings, and a thorough exploration of the means by which that cultural dialogue is constructed.
The truly amazing comparison is, however, how raucously funny the English have found both of these works. While both of them certainly have their moments of deliberate and out of control hilarity, the tear shedding, side splitting humor to which English critics (of both these works) have claimed to find is not readily apparent to me as an American audience. I think it speaks volumes about the English character that these stories, tales of lonely, blanched people lost in a sprawling granite sea of a nation, desperately defending themselves from an alienation from their own identity as artists and a broader social fabric which removes more and more context for self-knowledge with each passing year, are considered humor of the frankest kind. It speaks to some deeper melancholy than American satirists could have ever dreamed, that sad, grey little men lost in a sad, grey little nation, forgetting more and more with each step where they came from and where they are going, causes the English to slap their knees and tap with unselfconscious ease into that cruel and poignant reserve of humor which powers such a tale.
21 November 2011
24 May 2011
Farewell to Arms
This lab was my home for a year. It taught me things I'll never forget, and asked me questions I'll be thinking about for a long time. I hope whoever lives here next knows, somehow, what happened here.
Location:Lincoln Ave,Purchase,United States
25 August 2010
9/11 Mosque
I don't understand why people are being so permissive about opposition to the WTC mosque. It is not a view that should be treated with even the slightest air of legitimacy. It is every bit as idiotic as the people that say gay marriage leads to bestiality or that Obama wasn't born in America.
Opposition to the mosque (as opposed to another holy building) is predicated on several different assumptions, all of which are false. Most of the protest rhetoric falls into one of these modes. The more intelligent opponents will attempt to conceal the blatant falsehood of these assumptions by using disingenuous or counterintuitive logic. However, examining these points intelligently will reveal just how skewed they are.
Anti-mosque rhetoric falls into two categories, each with attendant fallacious assumptions. The first is:
Building the mosque is inappropriate because the site of the WTC attacks is sacred in a way that precludes Islam.
This is the mild version of this rhetoric, and is only rarely phrased so delicately. This is the rhetorical branch which includes slogans like "You can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a synagogue in Mecca." The most exaggerated
one I've heard is "it's like building a neo-nazi cultural center in Auschwitz." Though that's a bit more second branch.
There are two assumptions that could lie behind this branch. The FIRST, and the lest likely, is the idea that a denominational faith based center is an affront to the wide variety of faiths and creeds which lost something in the disaster. Alternatively, that the loss was a political one, and memorial to the fallen should reflect that, as religiously non-denominational war memorials do. However, since a cross made out of girders has been left up at the site for a while, and I sincerely doubt a church would meet with similar opposition, this is not the case.
What I suspect the true assumption is, is that The 9/11 attacks constituted attacks on America, and America is a Christian nation, hence national memorials must by necessity be Christian. I have no desire to argue this right now, but America is not an inherent;y Christian nation. Evidence abounds. Anyone arguing otherwise is a fool, and I will say no more. When this assumption crops up elsewhere, it is recognized for the bullshit it is, but for some reason we're willing to accommodate it here. I suspect, sadly, that this is a product of the second branch of rhetoric, which America has internalized:
The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those responsible for the building of the mosque are the same group of people. This is the much, much more vile way that mosque opponents go about arguing. This is a vile rhetoric because it makes the dark, racist assumption that evil is monolithic. Much as it pains me to play the anti-semitism card, this is the same logic people use to claim that Jews control the media, Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist, and that Sputnik was a spy satellite. A variation of a statement above which compares the mosque at Ground Zero to "a memorial to Hitler in Auschwitz" (from this sign here at a slant) sums up this despicable assumption nicely. A mosque is a house of worship wherein the teachings of Mohammed, one of the prophets worshiped by Islam (alongside Jesus, Abraham, and John the Baptist, which as a side note shows the sheer depth of ignorance of the "synagogue" wisecrack above) and a servant of God (again, the same god worshiped by Judaism, Christianity, and all their 31 flavors) are studied, practiced, and his rituals observed. To compare him to Hitler reveals a twisted universe wherein Mohammed and ALL his "deluded followers" were directly responsible for and participatory in the 9/11 attacks. Anyone believing this, or any variation of this, has no right to have their opinion respected. At all. Period. This has been shown to be a false worldview, like the stars being set in a firmament or all objects being made out of earth, air, fire, or water.
The reality is that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were political and ideological opponents of America as a nation, who made a political attack on us in response to a foreign policy which is no less destructive for the grief that 9/11 caused us. Religion enters into it on only one front: the fact that it's perpetrators used religion as a mechanism to comfort themselves and to justify their actions, which is no more unexpected than American soldiers turning to god to provide them with the same comforts.
The fact that the religion the perpetrators chose to turn to was Islam means that the only religion which is involved by necessity in this incident IS Islam. No one killed in 9/11 claimed to, themselves, represent the will of god, nor of Ahura Mazda, nor any of the things people build faiths around. Only the perpetrators did. What this means is that the religious dimension of 9/11 was an act of war done in the name of a religion which preaches peace. The only faith which was attacked during 9/11 was Islam itself.
Admitting this, the 9/11 mosque is more than the "one more mosque" that the media seems to be characterizing it as (even the liberal pundits who seem to support the mosque all phrase their support along the lines of "well where else are they going to put it?" and Sarah Palin proposed putting it "down the road.") It is an active attempt at conciliation: a move towards healing the wounds dealt to the faith and human brotherhood by the attacks. The fact that we react so bitterly and with such open contempt for an invitation to peace from our fellow man reveals us for the low, brutal savages we are. If this is really the way we want to act, then maybe the assumption, which I have deigned not to touch, that we did not deserve the attacks is misplaced. Maybe we deserved them, and far, far worse.
Opposition to the mosque (as opposed to another holy building) is predicated on several different assumptions, all of which are false. Most of the protest rhetoric falls into one of these modes. The more intelligent opponents will attempt to conceal the blatant falsehood of these assumptions by using disingenuous or counterintuitive logic. However, examining these points intelligently will reveal just how skewed they are.
Anti-mosque rhetoric falls into two categories, each with attendant fallacious assumptions. The first is:
Building the mosque is inappropriate because the site of the WTC attacks is sacred in a way that precludes Islam.
This is the mild version of this rhetoric, and is only rarely phrased so delicately. This is the rhetorical branch which includes slogans like "You can build a mosque at Ground Zero when we can build a synagogue in Mecca." The most exaggerated
one I've heard is "it's like building a neo-nazi cultural center in Auschwitz." Though that's a bit more second branch.
There are two assumptions that could lie behind this branch. The FIRST, and the lest likely, is the idea that a denominational faith based center is an affront to the wide variety of faiths and creeds which lost something in the disaster. Alternatively, that the loss was a political one, and memorial to the fallen should reflect that, as religiously non-denominational war memorials do. However, since a cross made out of girders has been left up at the site for a while, and I sincerely doubt a church would meet with similar opposition, this is not the case.
What I suspect the true assumption is, is that The 9/11 attacks constituted attacks on America, and America is a Christian nation, hence national memorials must by necessity be Christian. I have no desire to argue this right now, but America is not an inherent;y Christian nation. Evidence abounds. Anyone arguing otherwise is a fool, and I will say no more. When this assumption crops up elsewhere, it is recognized for the bullshit it is, but for some reason we're willing to accommodate it here. I suspect, sadly, that this is a product of the second branch of rhetoric, which America has internalized:
The perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and those responsible for the building of the mosque are the same group of people. This is the much, much more vile way that mosque opponents go about arguing. This is a vile rhetoric because it makes the dark, racist assumption that evil is monolithic. Much as it pains me to play the anti-semitism card, this is the same logic people use to claim that Jews control the media, Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist, and that Sputnik was a spy satellite. A variation of a statement above which compares the mosque at Ground Zero to "a memorial to Hitler in Auschwitz" (from this sign here at a slant) sums up this despicable assumption nicely. A mosque is a house of worship wherein the teachings of Mohammed, one of the prophets worshiped by Islam (alongside Jesus, Abraham, and John the Baptist, which as a side note shows the sheer depth of ignorance of the "synagogue" wisecrack above) and a servant of God (again, the same god worshiped by Judaism, Christianity, and all their 31 flavors) are studied, practiced, and his rituals observed. To compare him to Hitler reveals a twisted universe wherein Mohammed and ALL his "deluded followers" were directly responsible for and participatory in the 9/11 attacks. Anyone believing this, or any variation of this, has no right to have their opinion respected. At all. Period. This has been shown to be a false worldview, like the stars being set in a firmament or all objects being made out of earth, air, fire, or water.
The reality is that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks were political and ideological opponents of America as a nation, who made a political attack on us in response to a foreign policy which is no less destructive for the grief that 9/11 caused us. Religion enters into it on only one front: the fact that it's perpetrators used religion as a mechanism to comfort themselves and to justify their actions, which is no more unexpected than American soldiers turning to god to provide them with the same comforts.
The fact that the religion the perpetrators chose to turn to was Islam means that the only religion which is involved by necessity in this incident IS Islam. No one killed in 9/11 claimed to, themselves, represent the will of god, nor of Ahura Mazda, nor any of the things people build faiths around. Only the perpetrators did. What this means is that the religious dimension of 9/11 was an act of war done in the name of a religion which preaches peace. The only faith which was attacked during 9/11 was Islam itself.
Admitting this, the 9/11 mosque is more than the "one more mosque" that the media seems to be characterizing it as (even the liberal pundits who seem to support the mosque all phrase their support along the lines of "well where else are they going to put it?" and Sarah Palin proposed putting it "down the road.") It is an active attempt at conciliation: a move towards healing the wounds dealt to the faith and human brotherhood by the attacks. The fact that we react so bitterly and with such open contempt for an invitation to peace from our fellow man reveals us for the low, brutal savages we are. If this is really the way we want to act, then maybe the assumption, which I have deigned not to touch, that we did not deserve the attacks is misplaced. Maybe we deserved them, and far, far worse.
04 May 2010
Finishing
I find it strange that the first piece of counter-criticism given by the defenders of a work of literature or an author, is that unless the work or author must sampled in their entirety before any criticism may be brought against it (notice a similar argument is not brought against praise). This would be a valid piece of criticism were artistic sins somehow remediable by artistic virtues, bound in a relationship wholly unlike that of crime and charity.
The argument for finishing a work holds somewhat more water. I could see how, having an entirely theoretical experience of literature (or any art that may be experienced only partially), one might genuinely entertain this idea. The conceptualization could be in one of two modes: either the remainder of the work contains material of such startling magnificence that any previous deficiencies will be burned out of the reader's mind, or that seeds, only just planted in the former part, have yet to bloom into the full and glorious potential of the work in the latter.
However, in practice these two things rarely, if ever, happen. In answer to the first characterization, if an objection is to a writer's style, characterization, or setting these things are often fixed throughout the work. Writers do not become different writers in the space of one writing. Yes, they do and can change, but rarely materially enough to banish all the misgivings their initial distaste inspires.
The second conceptualization is popular because it shows implicit praise. It shows this because to actually DO that in a work, to change it so drastically that it goes from good to bad by simply tearing away a facade is an act of literary genius so difficult as to be impossible. I have never been thusly surprised by a book, nor do I ever expect to be.
The more extreme version of this: that to know an author you must have read all, or at least a sizable portion, of their entire oeuvre is the more extreme version of this, and the more untenable. It is untenable for the simple fact that a sin against art is a sin, and cannot be abluted. True, one cannot make statements regarding the circumference of a career regarding one book, but knowing that The Bluest Eye is a terrible book means I can say Toni Morrison is a terrible writer. Maybe her other books are better, I don't know. I do know she writes (and claims) a bad piece of fiction. Maybe she gets a few years off of her sentence in literary jail for good behavior later down the line, but that's still only good for parole.
The argument for finishing a work holds somewhat more water. I could see how, having an entirely theoretical experience of literature (or any art that may be experienced only partially), one might genuinely entertain this idea. The conceptualization could be in one of two modes: either the remainder of the work contains material of such startling magnificence that any previous deficiencies will be burned out of the reader's mind, or that seeds, only just planted in the former part, have yet to bloom into the full and glorious potential of the work in the latter.
However, in practice these two things rarely, if ever, happen. In answer to the first characterization, if an objection is to a writer's style, characterization, or setting these things are often fixed throughout the work. Writers do not become different writers in the space of one writing. Yes, they do and can change, but rarely materially enough to banish all the misgivings their initial distaste inspires.
The second conceptualization is popular because it shows implicit praise. It shows this because to actually DO that in a work, to change it so drastically that it goes from good to bad by simply tearing away a facade is an act of literary genius so difficult as to be impossible. I have never been thusly surprised by a book, nor do I ever expect to be.
The more extreme version of this: that to know an author you must have read all, or at least a sizable portion, of their entire oeuvre is the more extreme version of this, and the more untenable. It is untenable for the simple fact that a sin against art is a sin, and cannot be abluted. True, one cannot make statements regarding the circumference of a career regarding one book, but knowing that The Bluest Eye is a terrible book means I can say Toni Morrison is a terrible writer. Maybe her other books are better, I don't know. I do know she writes (and claims) a bad piece of fiction. Maybe she gets a few years off of her sentence in literary jail for good behavior later down the line, but that's still only good for parole.
06 January 2010
The Crying of Lot 49
I'm reading this nasty little Pynchon book, and can't decide whether I love it or hate it yet.
I hate being jerked around by an author. That is, I hate when the author attempts, transparently, to control my interpretation of and relationship to the text in ways which transgress against the format of a novel. At a basic level I find it presumptuous: the author, it is clear, thinks he is smarter than me and is going to pull some shrewd trick on me by reversing chronologies, changing spellings, etc.
Not to sound too much like an arrogant prick, but I'm too smart for that, and the game quickly becomes tiresome for me. I don't want to keep flipping back and forth to check whether or not a name has been mentioned before, or whether or not a character has been introduced. The disorientation that is supposed to be some kind of literary narcotic euphoria more nearly approximates being forced to take a field sobriety test while sober. It's just tireless jumping through hoops, and no kind of valuable use of anyone's time.
This is the main gripe. The other being that Pynchon creates for us probably the most vapid, irritating protagonist I have had the pleasure of slogging through a story with. His aforementioned attempts to destabilize the narrative, aside from exhausting me as a reader, have the effect of creating an unstable (in many senses of the word) protagonist. As a result, the prose style which is often engaging and dynamic seems affected and shrill.
This segues pretty well into what I actually like about the book. Pynchon has some pretty damn good poetry here, and when he's not trying to weasel some symbolist or aptronymic bullcrap his comparisons all resound clarion. If I didn't get the feeling that he was trying to bewilder/impress rather than entertain I would be entirely satisfied to let the book work entirely on its verbal harmony.
The other part is once the narrative breaks out of its sordid meditation on California (to be honest, a nasty little state which is far less worthy of obsession than Pynchon and the RHCP make it out to be) it becomes quite gripping. Its got a sophisticated bit of surrealist horror and conspiracy thriller: the black-uniformed Tristero assassins become namelessly dreadful in a delicious was. If Pynchon didn't insist on regularly breaking the mood with loud, postmodern farting noises I could even call the whole thing cool.
But we'll see where he goes. I have the suspicion that he'll knock the wind out of the intriguing (speaking literally) aspects of the novel towards the end in order to punish the viscerally driven reader for daring to take pleasure in such things. We'll see, we'll see.
I hate being jerked around by an author. That is, I hate when the author attempts, transparently, to control my interpretation of and relationship to the text in ways which transgress against the format of a novel. At a basic level I find it presumptuous: the author, it is clear, thinks he is smarter than me and is going to pull some shrewd trick on me by reversing chronologies, changing spellings, etc.
Not to sound too much like an arrogant prick, but I'm too smart for that, and the game quickly becomes tiresome for me. I don't want to keep flipping back and forth to check whether or not a name has been mentioned before, or whether or not a character has been introduced. The disorientation that is supposed to be some kind of literary narcotic euphoria more nearly approximates being forced to take a field sobriety test while sober. It's just tireless jumping through hoops, and no kind of valuable use of anyone's time.
This is the main gripe. The other being that Pynchon creates for us probably the most vapid, irritating protagonist I have had the pleasure of slogging through a story with. His aforementioned attempts to destabilize the narrative, aside from exhausting me as a reader, have the effect of creating an unstable (in many senses of the word) protagonist. As a result, the prose style which is often engaging and dynamic seems affected and shrill.
This segues pretty well into what I actually like about the book. Pynchon has some pretty damn good poetry here, and when he's not trying to weasel some symbolist or aptronymic bullcrap his comparisons all resound clarion. If I didn't get the feeling that he was trying to bewilder/impress rather than entertain I would be entirely satisfied to let the book work entirely on its verbal harmony.
The other part is once the narrative breaks out of its sordid meditation on California (to be honest, a nasty little state which is far less worthy of obsession than Pynchon and the RHCP make it out to be) it becomes quite gripping. Its got a sophisticated bit of surrealist horror and conspiracy thriller: the black-uniformed Tristero assassins become namelessly dreadful in a delicious was. If Pynchon didn't insist on regularly breaking the mood with loud, postmodern farting noises I could even call the whole thing cool.
But we'll see where he goes. I have the suspicion that he'll knock the wind out of the intriguing (speaking literally) aspects of the novel towards the end in order to punish the viscerally driven reader for daring to take pleasure in such things. We'll see, we'll see.
01 January 2010
The pornography of art
Every kind of love is pornographic. It's all dirty. Even beautiful people are ugly, because a beautiful body, one that engenders love, is a pornographic body. This abstracts itself to art. There is no such thing as high art. Art is love, and love is dirty, and low.
This is why "erotica" pisses me off, and why the postmodern refutation of "high art" pisses me off. Erotica is supposed to be pornography elevated. Usually this equates to subtlety of presentation, but that's just an affectation. The most demure, arty, "erotica" is exactly equivalent to the dirtiest, comespattered fuckfest Hollywood can offer.
The refutation of high art comes from the other end. Postmodernists abstract and bowlderize the pornography of art as postmodern "uncertainty." They claim that art considered "high" and "low" is characterized thus based on illusory criteria. And what they WANT to be saying is that all "low" art is "high," because the criteria for "high" art is supposedly exclusive. In fact, it's entirely the opposite.
Good art gets you to come hardest, because all art is porn. The more love a work of art can engender, the more a masterful piece of pornography it is. There is no such THING as high art. All art is low, because no matter how "high" or artistic a work of art is, the mechanism is the same. A metacultural tribute to action movies still causes adrenaline to pump. The same penis that is made erect by a black and white spread of supermodels having sex under white sheets as is made erect by some coked up college student from Kansas getting ejaculated on by Italians.
All art speak to our basest desires, because base desires all we have. Some art makes us feel more in control of those desires, but even that sensation of control is a psychological mechanism to allow us to indulge them further. All desires are base. All art is low. All art is love, and all love is pornography
Pereat Ars, Pereat Mundis
This is why "erotica" pisses me off, and why the postmodern refutation of "high art" pisses me off. Erotica is supposed to be pornography elevated. Usually this equates to subtlety of presentation, but that's just an affectation. The most demure, arty, "erotica" is exactly equivalent to the dirtiest, comespattered fuckfest Hollywood can offer.
The refutation of high art comes from the other end. Postmodernists abstract and bowlderize the pornography of art as postmodern "uncertainty." They claim that art considered "high" and "low" is characterized thus based on illusory criteria. And what they WANT to be saying is that all "low" art is "high," because the criteria for "high" art is supposedly exclusive. In fact, it's entirely the opposite.
Good art gets you to come hardest, because all art is porn. The more love a work of art can engender, the more a masterful piece of pornography it is. There is no such THING as high art. All art is low, because no matter how "high" or artistic a work of art is, the mechanism is the same. A metacultural tribute to action movies still causes adrenaline to pump. The same penis that is made erect by a black and white spread of supermodels having sex under white sheets as is made erect by some coked up college student from Kansas getting ejaculated on by Italians.
All art speak to our basest desires, because base desires all we have. Some art makes us feel more in control of those desires, but even that sensation of control is a psychological mechanism to allow us to indulge them further. All desires are base. All art is low. All art is love, and all love is pornography
Pereat Ars, Pereat Mundis
29 December 2009
Maintenance
I suppose that fooling around on the observation deck is a lot more bearable than toiling in the engine room. I do not post here, enough. I post the fuck out of tumblr. I will live here, the place of work, from now on. And that is a firm promise to myself and...whoever else is listening.
"The access code is 'Alone'"
"The access code is 'Alone'"
03 November 2009
If you deconstruct gender, you aren't a lady
I have a hard time respecting feminism. Not because its underpinnings are in any way unsound or fallacious, but because like any idea grounded in the higher realms of sociological or philosophical thought by the time it trickles down to the laiety it is nothing more than a loose conglomeration of slogans having less to do with its ideological corpus and more with the same unsavory forces which have always governed the intellectual drip-pan. In this case it has become little more than a mating evaluation with little other power.
I assume much about feminism's intent and basis, with good reason. If feminism indeed originated in the spirit of the snake-necked diva claiming her right to womynly power because her boyfriend just raised her allowance to stop her withholding sex, then the whole thing is bankrupt, and I renounce all involvement with the word and proudly instantiate myself as a born again chauvinist.
In the first place feminism as it is commonly encountered is nothing more than the last in a long line of arbitrary criteria applied by women to men in order to ascertain how pliable and inoffensive they are. Most of the criteria which are now decried as trappings of the patriarchy originated in just this way: social expectations of gender interactions which place women in a dominant or unassailable position, i.e. the right of a woman to be supported by her husband, "chivalry," the wearing of veils (are we really to believe the gender responsible for designing Bloodrayne's outfit came up with that practice all on their own? Men left to their own devices will NOT restrict their access to female sexuality). What these things have in common is that to contest them constitutes a failure on the part of any man who does so, and thus a legitimate cause to deny him sex. The only function of these institutions is to allow their male participants to demonstrate that they are docile and socially compliant.
Feminism practiced thusly permanently establishes the guilt of all (mostly heterosexual) men, living or dead, for the entirety of woe, oppression, and general disenfranchisement of women throughout all time. According to this capacity of feminism men are saddled with a permanent discursive onus. This then follows the pattern of the dominant, unassailable female against the male who is placed in a morally inferior position, and who is thus eternally "wrong."
Evidence of this abounds. Feminism is no longer an ideological technique or school of thought but an ideal to be striven towards, much as chivalry, modesty, piety, or chastity was. Women do not talk about whether or not they are feminist (rarely will any woman who does not grossly misinterpret the term declare she is "not a feminist") but about whether or not they are a "bad feminist." A woman who is perceived to grant concessions to the patriarchy is a "bad feminist." That is a woman who cooks, cleans, and does anything during sex other than close her eyes and pretend her lover is Janis Joplin. A man who expects a woman to do any of these things can forget about every obtaining a female mate, because to transgress against feminism would be as egregious as men in bygone eras expecting their veiled wives to show their hair, to not pull a woman's chair out, or to expect her to get a job, to pay her share of the bills.
The salient point of this is that feminism is something expected of all educated citizens. But because it is a social expectation, yet another criteria used for the evaluation of a mate, it lacks any power as a social idea. Most men a woman speaks to will declare themselves "feminist" or at least in sympathy with feminist ideals. At the very least they will proffer comments about how much more difficult it is to be a woman.
Let me let you ladies in on a little secret: men never speak about feminism when YOU ARE NOT AROUND. I have never spoken with another man in depth about feminist theory, not have I sincerely evaluated the position in which men and women find themselves from the perspective of gender. As feminism is practiced in the lay discourse, NO MAN is a feminist in private. Men make these pretensions for the same reason they consented to the other, now reviled practices: so you will fuck them. Those guys in "this is what a feminist looks like" shirts know what they are doing. Those shirts might as well say "I'll let you win any argument we have, now suck my cock!"
When a practice becomes an evaluative, it falls into the ideological stagnation I a few paragraphs up. When I made the caveat that I assume much about feminism's basis, I was NOT talking about the alogical guilt machine I described. I mean that I assume feminism aspires to something higher. Rather the exact opposite.
"Pop" feminism, the feminism which asserts woman as "right" and man as "wrong" throughout the entirety of social discourse, is NOT feminism. Rather it is simply a kind of intellectual chivalry. Men are supposed to defer to women: to "empower" them, to continually acknowledge their superiority of perception and judgment as a perceived "payback" for centuries of mistreatment and neglect. When a man agrees with you that Freud was a chauvinist pig, he is mentally holding the door for you.
Coming back to the title of this entry, feminism is NOT about female empowerment. Feminism is about the deconstruction of gender roles into forms which do not deny ANY person the right to whatever identity they choose, regardless of gender. The flip side of this is that if no rights are restricted, no rights are accorded. Which means the position of dominance which a woman is placed by pop feminism and similar "chivalric" practices must be relinquished in order to establish equality.
What this means in the language of the laiety is you cannot be a lady. You cannot expect men to pay for dinner, you cannot expect men to hold the door for you, and you cannot expect men to treat you with any more courtesy, dignity or respect than they would show to each other. You cannot engage in worship of your uterus as "the giver of life," you cannot gender violence (for you to hit a man is every bit as inappropriate as him hitting you: no more 'V-day.' The argument that women are physically less powerful is both fallacious in many cases, and a sexist generalization. The disparity in physical power between two individuals should be based on that power, not on their gender).
This is to say, you CAN do all these things. However when you do these things you are less than a "bad feminist," you are an active counterfeminist. A woman who expects pop-feminist-brand sympathy from men is a proud and enthusiastic subject of the patriarchy, and deserves the corollary subjugation based entirely on the fact that she encourages it vigorously.
I assume much about feminism's intent and basis, with good reason. If feminism indeed originated in the spirit of the snake-necked diva claiming her right to womynly power because her boyfriend just raised her allowance to stop her withholding sex, then the whole thing is bankrupt, and I renounce all involvement with the word and proudly instantiate myself as a born again chauvinist.
In the first place feminism as it is commonly encountered is nothing more than the last in a long line of arbitrary criteria applied by women to men in order to ascertain how pliable and inoffensive they are. Most of the criteria which are now decried as trappings of the patriarchy originated in just this way: social expectations of gender interactions which place women in a dominant or unassailable position, i.e. the right of a woman to be supported by her husband, "chivalry," the wearing of veils (are we really to believe the gender responsible for designing Bloodrayne's outfit came up with that practice all on their own? Men left to their own devices will NOT restrict their access to female sexuality). What these things have in common is that to contest them constitutes a failure on the part of any man who does so, and thus a legitimate cause to deny him sex. The only function of these institutions is to allow their male participants to demonstrate that they are docile and socially compliant.
Feminism practiced thusly permanently establishes the guilt of all (mostly heterosexual) men, living or dead, for the entirety of woe, oppression, and general disenfranchisement of women throughout all time. According to this capacity of feminism men are saddled with a permanent discursive onus. This then follows the pattern of the dominant, unassailable female against the male who is placed in a morally inferior position, and who is thus eternally "wrong."
Evidence of this abounds. Feminism is no longer an ideological technique or school of thought but an ideal to be striven towards, much as chivalry, modesty, piety, or chastity was. Women do not talk about whether or not they are feminist (rarely will any woman who does not grossly misinterpret the term declare she is "not a feminist") but about whether or not they are a "bad feminist." A woman who is perceived to grant concessions to the patriarchy is a "bad feminist." That is a woman who cooks, cleans, and does anything during sex other than close her eyes and pretend her lover is Janis Joplin. A man who expects a woman to do any of these things can forget about every obtaining a female mate, because to transgress against feminism would be as egregious as men in bygone eras expecting their veiled wives to show their hair, to not pull a woman's chair out, or to expect her to get a job, to pay her share of the bills.
The salient point of this is that feminism is something expected of all educated citizens. But because it is a social expectation, yet another criteria used for the evaluation of a mate, it lacks any power as a social idea. Most men a woman speaks to will declare themselves "feminist" or at least in sympathy with feminist ideals. At the very least they will proffer comments about how much more difficult it is to be a woman.
Let me let you ladies in on a little secret: men never speak about feminism when YOU ARE NOT AROUND. I have never spoken with another man in depth about feminist theory, not have I sincerely evaluated the position in which men and women find themselves from the perspective of gender. As feminism is practiced in the lay discourse, NO MAN is a feminist in private. Men make these pretensions for the same reason they consented to the other, now reviled practices: so you will fuck them. Those guys in "this is what a feminist looks like" shirts know what they are doing. Those shirts might as well say "I'll let you win any argument we have, now suck my cock!"
When a practice becomes an evaluative, it falls into the ideological stagnation I a few paragraphs up. When I made the caveat that I assume much about feminism's basis, I was NOT talking about the alogical guilt machine I described. I mean that I assume feminism aspires to something higher. Rather the exact opposite.
"Pop" feminism, the feminism which asserts woman as "right" and man as "wrong" throughout the entirety of social discourse, is NOT feminism. Rather it is simply a kind of intellectual chivalry. Men are supposed to defer to women: to "empower" them, to continually acknowledge their superiority of perception and judgment as a perceived "payback" for centuries of mistreatment and neglect. When a man agrees with you that Freud was a chauvinist pig, he is mentally holding the door for you.
Coming back to the title of this entry, feminism is NOT about female empowerment. Feminism is about the deconstruction of gender roles into forms which do not deny ANY person the right to whatever identity they choose, regardless of gender. The flip side of this is that if no rights are restricted, no rights are accorded. Which means the position of dominance which a woman is placed by pop feminism and similar "chivalric" practices must be relinquished in order to establish equality.
What this means in the language of the laiety is you cannot be a lady. You cannot expect men to pay for dinner, you cannot expect men to hold the door for you, and you cannot expect men to treat you with any more courtesy, dignity or respect than they would show to each other. You cannot engage in worship of your uterus as "the giver of life," you cannot gender violence (for you to hit a man is every bit as inappropriate as him hitting you: no more 'V-day.' The argument that women are physically less powerful is both fallacious in many cases, and a sexist generalization. The disparity in physical power between two individuals should be based on that power, not on their gender).
This is to say, you CAN do all these things. However when you do these things you are less than a "bad feminist," you are an active counterfeminist. A woman who expects pop-feminist-brand sympathy from men is a proud and enthusiastic subject of the patriarchy, and deserves the corollary subjugation based entirely on the fact that she encourages it vigorously.
15 October 2009
05 August 2009
If everyone in the past was so great, why are they all dead now?
Stop complaining that no one uses land phones anymore. Stop complaining that no one writes letters. Stop complaining that people have bad handwriting. Stop complaining that people don’t look at each other on the subway. Stop complaining that it isn’t okay to let strangers give your kids candy. Stop complaining about how it’s the future and you miss the past.
If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.
I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.
If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.
I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.
Home
Lampshades spool out from the house, becoming clotheslines,
the mountains at dusk, the way the light
burrows under the island. You are invoked by it, your separate parts
become harmonics of a single string, your hair
bleeds out from the gash of the first and the second
retreats from your skin in the familiar capillary.
A third and standing wave reverberates.
Your image back and forth between the buildings, back and forth.
There are factories even here, it smells like flowers and
the metal rink of making.
Here are stories you won’t tell me, here are
two of both kinds of heart, and the vascular systems
wound around them. Here every star and its grey orbits hum with blood.
It is a place that you can simply move to, simply
turn to like a radio dial. You are so far away. You
are so much of my home here. I am stuck fast,
take me with you, take me with you.
04 August 2009
Information
is free, always should be free, and always will be free. This is how computers will bring about communism.
From the industrial revolution onward art has enjoyed a kind of capitalist bender. The advent of new methods of distributing artistic works (most notably literature and music) has allowed these industries to transform into obscenely lucrative financial mechanisms in their own right, on par with heavy manufacturing and science in terms of the sheer amount of cash they produce. This is made possible by the transformation of these industries into capitalist machinery: musicians make music as a product, which is sold; novels are a product, movies are a product. Art itself is a product, and the more product you sell, the more money you make.
Todays musicians and actors are far richer than their historical counterparts could ever hope to be. Before the industrial revolution the mechanism whereby an artist supported him or herself was patronage: lovers of art gave money so that artists would be free to produce more art. Shakespeare, though receiving support from the queen and the lord chamberlain, was no Harvey Weinstein. Bach could not afford to eat diamonds or have a roller coaster installed on his property. These people made their way through the economy of reputation: people liked Bach's music, so they kept him around. There was not the formulaic relationship between worker and wage, producer and product that we have been conditioned into accepting as part of capitalist machinery.
When reputation is turned into this worker/wage relationship, it quickly gets out of control. People like art, a LOT of people like art, for a LONG time. If someone like Geoffrey of Monmouth were to turn this "reputation" into hard cash he could buy and sell pretty much every one of us (and if his estate had sued for copyright on King Arthur...well just think about it). Copyright and intellectual property law are NOT how art is supposed to work. Art is not a product, and it is not supposed to generate revenue like one.
The industrial revolution, then, was a transition period between the old reputation model and the new one. For a time, certain capitalist opportunists were able to set up models whereby art is tied in with product. This is akin to putting heroin in candy. People NEED art, and will always pay for it. Art behaves like an idea, which is to say that it lasts a long time, is required and desired by a larger number of people than a specific commodity ever should be, and can be controlled by a conscious effort of the producer. It's a capitalist wet dream.
So muscians, actors, and some writers got obscenely rich. I mean actually obscene, like it's inappropriate. A side effect of this is that art no longer develops under the selecting influence of artistic enrichment, simply rude market forces. Poetry is dying because the masses simply do no clamor for it: the demand is too low. Poetry still has all the staying power of the novel (in fact more so for its brevity) but it is difficult to package and sell, and to find people willing to buy (beyond those who are akin to those artistically minded patrons of historical rep-economy) . Art becomes about what sells, not about what is good or interesting to those who love it.
What we are seeing with the emergence of the information age is the dismantling of these capitalist mechanisms. There is now a way for all information to be transmitted through a single medium, a medium which does not follow the model of a commodity. People pay for ACCESS to information, not for each piece of information which becomes theirs. People are realizing that copyright law and DRM are bullshit, and that they shouldn't have to pay for something that their ancestors never had to. This is the essence of communism: the separation of money from product. It is not about moving property, or transfer of ownership. It is about GIVING people resources. Artists can still make money, simply not the obscene amounts they were capable of under the old system. The musicians who whine fearfully about file sharing "Stealing music" are simply greedy capitalists, nothing more. You're not stealing music from them, because music is information and information cannot be owned or controlled, not in a civilized society leastaways.
Do not buy art! Give artists money, fine, but remember ART IS NOT A PRODUCT AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY IT LIKE ONE.
From the industrial revolution onward art has enjoyed a kind of capitalist bender. The advent of new methods of distributing artistic works (most notably literature and music) has allowed these industries to transform into obscenely lucrative financial mechanisms in their own right, on par with heavy manufacturing and science in terms of the sheer amount of cash they produce. This is made possible by the transformation of these industries into capitalist machinery: musicians make music as a product, which is sold; novels are a product, movies are a product. Art itself is a product, and the more product you sell, the more money you make.
Todays musicians and actors are far richer than their historical counterparts could ever hope to be. Before the industrial revolution the mechanism whereby an artist supported him or herself was patronage: lovers of art gave money so that artists would be free to produce more art. Shakespeare, though receiving support from the queen and the lord chamberlain, was no Harvey Weinstein. Bach could not afford to eat diamonds or have a roller coaster installed on his property. These people made their way through the economy of reputation: people liked Bach's music, so they kept him around. There was not the formulaic relationship between worker and wage, producer and product that we have been conditioned into accepting as part of capitalist machinery.
When reputation is turned into this worker/wage relationship, it quickly gets out of control. People like art, a LOT of people like art, for a LONG time. If someone like Geoffrey of Monmouth were to turn this "reputation" into hard cash he could buy and sell pretty much every one of us (and if his estate had sued for copyright on King Arthur...well just think about it). Copyright and intellectual property law are NOT how art is supposed to work. Art is not a product, and it is not supposed to generate revenue like one.
The industrial revolution, then, was a transition period between the old reputation model and the new one. For a time, certain capitalist opportunists were able to set up models whereby art is tied in with product. This is akin to putting heroin in candy. People NEED art, and will always pay for it. Art behaves like an idea, which is to say that it lasts a long time, is required and desired by a larger number of people than a specific commodity ever should be, and can be controlled by a conscious effort of the producer. It's a capitalist wet dream.
So muscians, actors, and some writers got obscenely rich. I mean actually obscene, like it's inappropriate. A side effect of this is that art no longer develops under the selecting influence of artistic enrichment, simply rude market forces. Poetry is dying because the masses simply do no clamor for it: the demand is too low. Poetry still has all the staying power of the novel (in fact more so for its brevity) but it is difficult to package and sell, and to find people willing to buy (beyond those who are akin to those artistically minded patrons of historical rep-economy) . Art becomes about what sells, not about what is good or interesting to those who love it.
What we are seeing with the emergence of the information age is the dismantling of these capitalist mechanisms. There is now a way for all information to be transmitted through a single medium, a medium which does not follow the model of a commodity. People pay for ACCESS to information, not for each piece of information which becomes theirs. People are realizing that copyright law and DRM are bullshit, and that they shouldn't have to pay for something that their ancestors never had to. This is the essence of communism: the separation of money from product. It is not about moving property, or transfer of ownership. It is about GIVING people resources. Artists can still make money, simply not the obscene amounts they were capable of under the old system. The musicians who whine fearfully about file sharing "Stealing music" are simply greedy capitalists, nothing more. You're not stealing music from them, because music is information and information cannot be owned or controlled, not in a civilized society leastaways.
Do not buy art! Give artists money, fine, but remember ART IS NOT A PRODUCT AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY IT LIKE ONE.
24 April 2009
22 April 2009
15 April 2009
Idioglossia
I am comfortable enough being an outlier I tell you
in my broken english, and I even laugh nervously,
just to reinforce how true it is. but I still can’t resist
placing fragments of pottery in places where you will find them:
underneath your pillow, in geometric patterns
on the back of your hands or neck. you may even wake
to a noise at your door one evening, and find two or three of them
depending from the knob, clinking together softly in the breeze—
even if you manage to ignore these, I will grind
a few pieces into the gravel of my speech, the rusty flecks
tinting it a suggestive shade of red, like a stained shirt.
one day it will be enough, and you will finally come
to my door, face flushed and angry, to ask me to stop;
to tell me it isn’t funny anymore and I will laugh,
too tired by now to hide my unhappiness, and tell you that you
must not have understood, exactly, what I meant by I am comfortable
enough
in my broken english, and I even laugh nervously,
just to reinforce how true it is. but I still can’t resist
placing fragments of pottery in places where you will find them:
underneath your pillow, in geometric patterns
on the back of your hands or neck. you may even wake
to a noise at your door one evening, and find two or three of them
depending from the knob, clinking together softly in the breeze—
even if you manage to ignore these, I will grind
a few pieces into the gravel of my speech, the rusty flecks
tinting it a suggestive shade of red, like a stained shirt.
one day it will be enough, and you will finally come
to my door, face flushed and angry, to ask me to stop;
to tell me it isn’t funny anymore and I will laugh,
too tired by now to hide my unhappiness, and tell you that you
must not have understood, exactly, what I meant by I am comfortable
enough
A caveat
It occurs to me that I am not at all qualified to speak as grandly on poetry as I do. Hm, no matter.
To insert another grandiose statement of contemporary poetic fact, the power of the art lies it the ability of its practitioners to maintain faith in their abilties and truth despite all, even overwhelming evidence to the contrary. With a proper poetic sensibility, this messianic faith cannot fail.
To ber certain, though, it can. But one must still have faith, one must always continue with faith
To insert another grandiose statement of contemporary poetic fact, the power of the art lies it the ability of its practitioners to maintain faith in their abilties and truth despite all, even overwhelming evidence to the contrary. With a proper poetic sensibility, this messianic faith cannot fail.
To ber certain, though, it can. But one must still have faith, one must always continue with faith
14 April 2009
Poetry
is the art, the enterprise.
There is much talk about poetry and its place in culture, and whether or not it is dead. It's tempting to call poetry dead because it is more difficult to see poetry's direct and explosive impact on the cultural landscape the same way one sees movies, television, or music wreaking their specious havoc on the world.
Students of poetry are obsessively taught that their art is esoteric and useless, (the most positive thing you are likely to hear about poetry from the preachers of this doctrine is that THEY "like" poetry, for all it's caveats) even by the most messianic of poets and poetry scholars. At best one can hope to find a professor who teaches a kind of ivory-tower disdain for the realities of art-as-culture: art being pursued for art's sake, almost reveling in the accusations of frivolity or irrelevance leveled at it by the unartistic laity.
That such a pessimistic vision of ultimate futility exists even in academic institutions, the home and nursery of poetry and poets, is troubling. Is poetry indeed dead, then? If its heart is dead, must not the body follow?
Fine, let's all give up and go home.
I kid, of course. The answer is that poetry is not dead, but suffers from an inferiority complex that has been built up through years of elitist thought and isolation. We, as poets, writers, and idea-artists, need to take thorough stock of our art. Not our craft, never our craft. The word craft implies the rude handling and abuse of media. This is one such truth we must acknowledge of our art: it is a pure art, and in certain senses of the word perhaps the purest art.
Poetry must, through the actions and ideological power of its practitioners, realize its true importance. We must not just believe in, or posit the power of poetry, we must know that it is powerful. We must know that it is not a trifle, that we are not wasting our time, that the things we do both in the zone of the poem and out are necessary, in some way, to the human process. We are not isolated intellectuals, and we are not obsessive hobbyists. We are human beings performing a human service.
Poetry, as they say, is due for a comeback.
There is much talk about poetry and its place in culture, and whether or not it is dead. It's tempting to call poetry dead because it is more difficult to see poetry's direct and explosive impact on the cultural landscape the same way one sees movies, television, or music wreaking their specious havoc on the world.
Students of poetry are obsessively taught that their art is esoteric and useless, (the most positive thing you are likely to hear about poetry from the preachers of this doctrine is that THEY "like" poetry, for all it's caveats) even by the most messianic of poets and poetry scholars. At best one can hope to find a professor who teaches a kind of ivory-tower disdain for the realities of art-as-culture: art being pursued for art's sake, almost reveling in the accusations of frivolity or irrelevance leveled at it by the unartistic laity.
That such a pessimistic vision of ultimate futility exists even in academic institutions, the home and nursery of poetry and poets, is troubling. Is poetry indeed dead, then? If its heart is dead, must not the body follow?
Fine, let's all give up and go home.
I kid, of course. The answer is that poetry is not dead, but suffers from an inferiority complex that has been built up through years of elitist thought and isolation. We, as poets, writers, and idea-artists, need to take thorough stock of our art. Not our craft, never our craft. The word craft implies the rude handling and abuse of media. This is one such truth we must acknowledge of our art: it is a pure art, and in certain senses of the word perhaps the purest art.
Poetry must, through the actions and ideological power of its practitioners, realize its true importance. We must not just believe in, or posit the power of poetry, we must know that it is powerful. We must know that it is not a trifle, that we are not wasting our time, that the things we do both in the zone of the poem and out are necessary, in some way, to the human process. We are not isolated intellectuals, and we are not obsessive hobbyists. We are human beings performing a human service.
Poetry, as they say, is due for a comeback.
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