On Compulsive Diarists, of Which I Seem To Be One

As of yesterday, I've been "keeping" a journal for 27 years now. I've probably missed writing something for a given day maybe 20 times, probably less. It is compulsive, and obviously a habit.

I've filled cheap spiral-bound lined notebooks - the cheapest I can find at a stationery store or supermarket - both sides of the page, with lots of lists of things in the top margin of the page, little bits of arithmetic.

I'll fill one up over 11 to 16 months, find a swatch of cheap masking tape and write the beginning and ending dates on it, then plaster the tape onto the cover of the notebook, then stash it away in a closet with the others.

Sounds kinda sick? Maybe. Sounds like something Prozac might help? Maybe. After a couple of years of doing it, I went on a kick of reading all of Gore Vidal: his historical novels, his quasi-surrealist "outrageous" novels (like Myra Breckinridge, but there are others), but - and Gore would've hated to see this - I think he was a better essayist than novelist. Even though I often vehemently disagree with Vidal - especially on the value of certain writers over others - I'm always impressed with his quite great ability as an essayist.

                            Gore Vidal, who half-jokingly asserted that diarists were dangerous.
                            When he was in his early twenties he lived with Anais Nin.

And one day I was reading an essay when the topic of diarists came up. Vidal thought - perhaps this was part arch-humor - that diarists were suspect. He linked assassins (like Arthur Bremer, for example) to their diaries. People who wrote only for themselves were suspect. It hurt, a little. But I kept on.

What the hell do I write? Well, the first few years I'd write a lot, every day. Because my life seemed exciting, and I wanted to remember it. Many years later I sat down and read the things I wrote in my early twenties...and it seems like I'm reading someone else's life. Frankly, I sound like a precocious 14 year old girl. "I fixed my bike!" Exclamation points. I'd like to think I'd been putting off re-packing the ball bearings, but I probably just fixed a flat and...was glad I was able to ride again. (!)

Now, I'll often note the mundane. I'll cover four days on one page. Whether I did yoga or not, stuff I ate, people I exchanged emails with. A particular interaction with a guitar student from the day. Oh-so quotidian, and I know you'd be bored to read it.

A reader may note I used the term "diarists" in the title of this blogspew, but when I talk to my friends, I say "journal." Because I've read many famous published diaries (Anais Nin, Samuel Pepys, Anne Frank, the usual suspects) and they seem like "literature" to me. We know Nin thought there would be readers of her diaries. Having an audience in mind greatly changes the content and tone, to put it mildly. Certainly there are entries among my logorrhea that seem fit to be read by others, but when I think about it, I'm one of those compulsive jotters who's really okay with them not being read after my death. What the hell? Page through them for a day or two, have a laff, learn something new and lurid about beastly-dead Michael, then fer crissakes: burn the things for warmth. Or light.

Or just to buy space in a closet.

Okay, some of you actually liked finding great-grandma-ma's diary from the late 19th century. I get it. Do I see myself as great grandma-ma? No. But perhaps I should...

Another reason I don't call myself a "diarist" is that I used to think it gendered: women keep diaries; men write in journals. I don't believe that anymore, but I'm okay with being stuck in my ways. Also: there's a sense in which the bulk of my dull recordings of my days seems almost more like a "log" and don't even deserve the same term as what Anne Frank did.

To return to Gore Vidal's riff - which he repeated a few times - I think he has a point. When Jodi Arias was arrested she wrote a memoir (apparently) in prison, "in case I become famous." Ted Kaczynski, rather famously, had a manifesto. Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 and left over 300 injured, gifted us with a 1500 page Facebook document in which he railed against immigrants, multiculturalism, how Western culture is dead, how he felt close to his "Viking" heritage, etc. He also dropped some of his charm onto YouTube, which I haven't seen. Breivik plagiarized from Kaczynski too. The unkindest cut.

Jared Lee Loughner, who shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and others, was found a paranoid schizophrenic concerned with the English language, alternative currencies, and a fear of mind control. He bequeathed something for us all on YouTube before heading down to the rally to shoot. (Understanding and representation of Loughner in my neural circuits are adjacent to Robert De Niro's character in Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle and secret service guys, and in a private moment, "Are you talkin' to me? And no wonder: Screenwriter Paul Schrader had Arthur Bremer in mind.)

The Virginia Tech killer, Seung-Hui Choi, sent an 1800 page statement to NBC, with a cache of personal videos and photos. He was inspired by Columbine. LAPD cop Chris Dorner, who was fired from the Ramparts division, left an 11 page manifesto about why he had to kill (it was a "necessary evil"), and he was pissed about the Rodney King incident and how he was treated by fellow cops. So he lost it. I remember watching that manhunt live on TV in Los Angeles. The cops looked about as ready to take Dorner alive as they were ready to take the SLA alive, once they were sure Patty Hearst wasn't in that safe-house in Los Angeles.

I could go on. And on and on. And you may say, "Yea, but you're talking about manifestoes and YouTube videos and Facebook rants." And I say, yea: I think social media has made a lot of people into diarists of a sort.

But really: the Vidal riff is too arch by half. Most of us do it for therapy or simply to ward off "real life" when it becomes a bit too intense. When I read a greatly abridged version of Pepys's diary a few years ago, I was struck by how often he went to the theatre and saw Shakespeare. He notes which play, and I think, "Gee, he saw Taming of the Shrew just a few months ago." But I'm like that with film noir. Read my...errr...journal and note how often I re-watched Double Indemnity or Out of the Past or The Killers or even Armored Car Robbery (saw this again two nights ago: lots of 1950 location shots near places in LA I used to live, and Charles McGraw may be the most hard-boiled actor in all of noir)...

The writer Sarah Manguso published a 93 page book about her 20+ years of compulsive diarizing, and I found this interview with Julie Beck interesting. I think Manguso's sickness (rare autoimmune disease that she wrote a book about) and middle class upbringing must have something to do with writing 800,000 words and counting. I have never counted words, not really caring. Manguso resonates with me about when she started: things in her life seemed momentous, and so much had happened to her, to her own mind. And she wanted to remember it. It is a way of dealing with mortality and memory, no doubt. She thinks keeping a diary will serve as a prevention against "living thoughtlessly." I can see that. But I'm too close to it all to be know to what extent it worked. It does provide solace amid anxiety. The word "graphomania" comes up.

For Manguso, pregnancy and its hormonal cataclysm changed her view of her compulsive diarizing: ordinary "reality" became as important as those "momentous" events, which usually, in hindsight were not so momentous. My favorite line from the interview:

Every exchange that I had with another person, everything I observed, every little throwaway moment I had on the subway observing this and that, the denseness of the experience just seemed unmanageable without writing it down.

For me, this is redolent of a Borges piece, or maybe something from Oliver Sacks.

Here's a huge difference between Manguso and me: I tend to want to "manage" my excitement over ideas I've read in books. Rarely have little impersonal moments with strangers made it into my log/journal/diary, unless they were exceptionally funny or wonderfully weird. I have witnessed verbal tiffs between friends and acquaintances and wrote what I could remember when I got home, in case anyone asks later. What did we do last Christmas? Hold on, I'll go look it up.

In the Beck interview Manguso comments on her diary book, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, but also her other books. She says narrative, whether in reading or writing, doesn't come easy to her, hence her style. Then she adds, "and I don't need to read or re-read an entire book or re-watch an entire movie." But I love to re-read my favorite books. With each re-reading I'm able to see more and go deeper into that world. Same with films. But: I am not enamored with narrative either; I return to my books and films for mood, style, effects, form. Last night I saw Truffaut's Jules and Jim for maybe the eighth time. And still, it's only as the film nears the climax, that I'm reminded of the ending, which I remember being shocked by the first time. It's quite a climax...so why do I seem to only remember it hazily? I think because I watch it for the friendship of Jules and Jim, the depiction of countryside in France and Germany 1900-1930, French manners, the simmering mental illness of Catherine, the way they negotiate the menage, the accepted insanity of WWI and Jules and Jim being terrified they might kill each other, the interspersed file footage, the cuts and freeze frames and sheer beauty of Jeanne Moreau. The voice-over. Last night I noted that the first five minutes seem "new" to me (they're not, of course: my brain is blitzed by the romantic mood of the opening), and that the denouement seems to barely register for me.

I guess some relatively compartmentalized area of my self sees the climax, remembers the shock from my first viewing, sort of shrugs it off as "Of course you had to end a film like this that way for it to have the emotionally logical effect of such a plot, its syntax, the chaotic madness of the femme etc..." Then I quickly go back to being bathed in the incredible pathos of the film. (In truth I love Truffaut's 400 Blows even more.)

What actually happens to the characters at the end of Jules and Jim seems trivial to my emotional needs, apparently. I once worked with a librarian who could give a detailed chronological synopsis of what happens in a work of fiction, and I thought her simply marvelous for this display, so different was her mind from mine.

This apprehension of how individual nervous systems abstract signals from our environment and concentrate them: this otherness of other peoples' minds is what makes me love them. Because, somehow, perhaps my diarizing helped me in this appreciation, via personal feedback?

Finally, I put forth the idea that "social media" has made many of us diarizers. This may be part of why I don't "do" social media. I've yet to Tweet. I was on Facebook for one day. I've heard of "Snapchat" but I don't really know what it is, nor do I care.

However, I started blogging in order to see what I think about ideas, and maybe entertain certain strange minds that resonate with mine. If blogging of the OG sort can be considered social media, so be it: I do social media. But no doubt that rare handful of posts that are mostly about "me" must qualify as social media. And this post seems the most self-indulgent one I've done. I'll try to wait a long time before I write in such a personal way again. Some aspect of my nervous system seems to be pushing itself to the fore and saying "This wasn't an OG post!"

Oh, well.

Some Sources Read Just Before Writing This
"Poor Historians: Some Notes on the Medical Memoir," by Suzanne Koven
"The Pleasure of Keeping - and Re-reading - Diaries," by Elisa Segrave
"Personal Manifestos: Never A Good Sign"
Jia Tolentino's insightful review of Manguso's book about her diary

                                         ont bob campbell faire oeuvre graphique pour 
votre blog en demandant ici!

Disparate Remarks on Writers and Other Artists and Their Audience(s)

Walter Benjamin

While recently re-reading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Translator" ("An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens") - I was reminded of Benjamin's counterintuitive idea that Art only confirms our spiritual and physical existence, but doesn't care about its audience. "Even the concept of an 'ideal' receiver is detrimental to the theoretical consideration of art..." This seems to fly in the face of an age-old discourse about writers assuming certain types of readers, and at least two main types: 1.) The "average" reader, who the author can't expect to really get through to; and 2.) The "ideal" reader, who, it has often been expressed, the writer has most in mind when she writes.

But I think here Benjamin is thinking of a third type of mind: the translator, who ought to try to communicate the essence of the piece in a new language, to a new audience. "Any translation which attempts to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information - hence, something inessential." Such an odd idea of the role of the translator! And odd ideas about information, essences, and audiences. I find Benjamin wrong here, but he's one of a small handful of writers who are more interesting to me even when I find them wrong. I am part of Benjamin's audience; when he wrote the aforementioned essay he supposedly did not have me in mind. I think that's about correct.

There are those writers - usually my kind - who develop their private vocabularies, which can scare off ordinary readers, but if the vocabularies contain metaphors poetic and potent enough, they spill out of the private life of the writer and into his more-or-less "ideal" readers' minds...and then they infiltrate the larger society. And change it. 

                                                      Tom Robbins

In Conversations With Tom Robbins he said he can't think of his audience when he writes, that he needs to concentrate, "like a Wallenda."

Glenn Gould, Roman Polanski, Orson Welles

Gould stopped performing live concerts at age 32, saying, "I detest audiences...they are a force of evil." This always has me wondering: how can a nervous system perform so transcendently well, all the while detesting its audience? Clearly, Gould was wired differently than most of us. For every Gould there are a hundred musicians who remark how difficult it is to record in the studio: there is no audience, no mass of Dionysian energy reflecting back from the crowd. No love-radiation from the adoring audience. I wonder how many solo performers have an active dislike for those paying, braying idiots who peer out there beyond the stage lights? Perhaps it's not as rare as I thought; I have heard of some performers who say they get an edge by working up a distaste for those who deign to sit in judgment of their performance, simply because they managed to scrape up the price of a ticket. But few dare to state their feelings so baldly as Gould did.

                                                      Glenn Gould, an enigma

I caught this line from Roman Polanski, one of my favorite directors: "I aim for the public at large, including children, and I'll target the children inside us until the day I die."

Wait, wait, wait: I know what you're thinking, and for today I'll pass on the easy jokes here; that underaged gal has said publicly she didn't want Polanski persecuted by the system as he had been. 

Now, a good lot of Polanski's films are pretty bleak. I just watched Cul de Sac. It's absurd, dark, violent, and oddly funny. But for children? Double that for Knife In The Water, which, like Cul de Sac, presents humans as predatory upon each other, which we as a species seem in active denial about; Polanski's pointing to the primate status-seeking and one-upping that seems built into our characters, unless we try to actively root most of it out. Both of those films present male outsiders competing in some primal way for the attention of a woman. For children, Roman? Maybe Polanski was being sardonic in that quote; I have it in my notes and didn't note the context. But I don't think he meant it sardonically. The quote was made before he did his take on Oliver Twist. It certainly can't have anything to do with Chinatown, can it? 

It's an odd quote, taken from p.123 of Roman Polanski: Interviews. I can't see how Rosemary's Baby, Tess, The Ghostwriter, and especially Repulsion have anything to say to the "children inside us," unless it's that the world can be a terrible and brutal place to be a child. But I can see this quote relating very strongly to The Pianist, because it has so much to do with Polanski's hellish childhood...which seems a terrible and brutish place to be a child. Maybe Roman was high at the moment he uttered that statement, who knows. Still, this is an enigmatic quote for me, and I often think of it. 

In Orson Welles: Interviews there is the idea from Welles that, when he made a film he had no audience in mind (similar to Benjamin's idea?), but when he put on a play the audience was in the forefront of his mind. Orson conceptualized the person watching action on the screen as in a different semiotic world than those watching live humans, without all the tricks that filmmakers have at their disposal. This seems at least part of what he meant.

Gurus and Cult Leaders and Their Audiences

I do not see these cases - gurus and cult leaders and their followers - as all that different from, say, the artists/performers Taylor Swift, Rush Limbaugh, Jon Stewart, Lebron James, and the magician David Copperfield and their relationships to their fan(atic)s. The small difference seems to make enough of a difference though: all of them can go "on" do their Thing, and then be done with their act and move on, as some sort of "entertainer"or gadfly, whathaveyou. Their public acts have a long-time legacy of social authorization and have been thoroughly legitimated by enough of the population that they are taken-for-granted "reality."

In Price and Stevens's provocative book Prophets, Cults and Madness, they take a page from Anthony Storr's 1996 Feet of Clay regarding "gurus," who are "people who believe they have been granted some sort of special life-transforming insight, which typically follows a period of mental or physical illness (which has variously been described as a 'mid-life crisis,' a 'creative illness' or a 'dark night of the soul'). This eureka experience may emerge gradually or come like a thunderbolt out of the sky, in the manner of religious conversion, a scientific discovery, or an intact delusional system of the type that occurs in schizophrenia. As a result, the guru becomes convinced that he has discovered 'the truth,' and his conviction, as well as the passion which he proclaims, gives him the charisma which marks him attractive to potential followers." 

This reminds me of Robert Anton Wilson's take on Timothy Leary's "metaprogramming circuit." Historically, certain odd types have accidentally activated this metaphorical neurological circuit, and fell so in love with the "new" program, new way of looking at the world, that their charisma, infectious enthusiasm, or whatever we wish to label this phenomena as: it becomes a cult, then maybe a religion, with official dogma and official enemies. The same old story from here to eternity, as Burroughs said. Wilson saw the main problem with these types as not noticing that it was their own nervous system that "selected" this vision of the world; they mistook it for a message from "out there," when it was actually from within. And there being a Seeker born every minute, they will have followers. Let's just hope it doesn't get out of hand and that someone develops a healthy sense of humor around this "special" vision of "reality." Wilson says gurus and cult leaders get "stuck" here: too much power too soon, and they don't seem to notice that, if they did it once, they can do it again: some other visions of "reality."That first one was just too awesome, too vivid and such a blast. 

On that note, from Plato's (supposedly he wrote it): Seventh Letter: "For this knowledge is not something that can be put into words like other sciences; but after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like lightning flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightaway nourishes itself." 

Now: Plato is saying this happens in a dialectic; it is not Saul's falling off his ass. But it does make me wonder regarding the sulfurous proselytizers. 

                                                    Fran Lebowitz

When Your Audience Dies

Martin Scorsese made a documentary a couple years ago about the hilarious, strident lesbian humorist Fran Lebowitz, and there was a section in which she talked about the cultural aristocracy and connoisseurship of gay men who were her biggest fans in the mid-late 1970s and early 1980s. And then they started dying overnight and it harmed her art, her will to produce sank, her audience dead, and all sorts of 3rd, 4th and 5th raters rose to prominence. While she said all this with a straight face, I do believe she was in earnest...and at the same time the audacity was epic. She'd had a long writer's block. What a grandiose way to explain it! And I still felt very sympathetic to her. I also thought she was basically right: AIDS did take a major toll on the Arts. And I also felt sort of oddly honored: as a hetero male, I loved her two books, Social Studies and Metropolitan Life, as soon as they came out. I knew no other person who even liked her, in suburban Los Angeles. My ego mentally lumped myself in with the gays who survived.

Here are some quotes from her. 

Lebowitz often made me think of her as a reincarnation of Oscar Wilde, who once said that the opening night for his new play didn't go so well because "the audience flopped."

                                                              Wilde

Poetry

I can't escape the idea that "meaning" in Modern poetry derives in a considerable part from good will on the part of the Readers.

The Audience for Robert Heinlein's Stranger In A Strange Land

I've been reading on "reception theory" and wondering about this book, which has captured the imagination of Heinlein's readers in a way that baffled him. His readers "made" their meanings and often the writer was aghast. This fascinates me. I got hold of a bunch of books from the library to try to flesh this out, and stumbled onto Carole Cusack's Invented Religions. Cusack says some critics were "disturbed" that The Church of All Worlds and the Fosterites were meant to symbolize the Dionysian and Apollonian in the public mind, but that "the two churches are almost indistinguishable."

"Critics are also uncertain as to whether Heinlein's positive portrayal of Mike and the CAW is parodic; another possibility is that the novel's elusive genre (variously described as novel, satire, anatomy, myth and parable) means that the meaning of the CAW has to be decided by readers, depending on their assessment of the genre of Stranger." -p.59 

I have only read this book once, but have delved into bits of it at other times. When I read it cover-to-cover I thought it a quasi-Ayn Randian book, but better written. This was at least twenty years ago. I had known that some feminists had applauded Heinlein's depiction of strong, rational, independent  women, but I also thought Jubal was a bit of a blowhard; he just wasn't someone I admired, although clearly I was supposed to. My politics were different then, and I want to re-read the book again this year, if only to notice more clearly this problem of "genre," which fascinates me. Cusack compares Heinlein to Robert Anton Wilson: "Heinlein, like Robert Anton Wilson, was a lifelong agnostic, believing that to affirm that there is no God was a silly and unsupported as to affirm that there was a God." 

This notion of not being able to place a book in a genre immediately draws me to the book. It's one of the main reasons why I became such a devoted reader of Robert Anton Wilson. The mercurial, trans-generic, one-off-ness of his books - as I saw them - was an inherent value to me. 

Speaking of Cusack, who seems to be doing sociology of religion in Sydney, her first chapter in the book is on Discordianism, and her citations include not only Principia Discordia and Thornley's Zenarchy, but Conspiracy Theories in American History (2 vols, I hadn't seen these until today); Adam Gorightly's book on Thornley, The Prankster and the Conspiracy; Alan Watts's Beat Zen, Square Zen and Zen; Adler's famous Drawing Down the Moon; and my friend Eric Wagner's An Insider's Guide to Robert Anton Wilson, which she cites five times.

Fran Lebowitz on homosexuality:

Writing and Style: The Long, Meandering Sentence

The other day I was watching Jeopardy! (I know, I know, I'm some sorta geezer and this disclosure no doubt damages my Cool Cred, but WTF).(<---a bit of ironic foreshadowing!)

Anyway, HERE's the board I was looking at. Look at the category, "Send Me A Text." From the context, I got the first three, but didn't get the $800 or the $1000 ones. (Did you? I have sent precisely three texts in my entire life, and zero in the past two years. Kids 12-15 send 193 text messages per week, with girls sending more than boys.)

Which sent me, later that evening, to online dictionaries of Text-Speak.

Quite the cornucopia of knowledge I'll probably never use, but still: interesting: HERE.

                                    William Faulkner, Nobel Prize for Literature, hear
                                    his acceptance speech HERE.

Robert Anton Wilson, when talking about his style, often pointed out Joyce and Pound as influences. When he mentioned Faulkner, it was usually in the context of Faulkner's long, hypnotic sentences, sentences that start out telling you about a idea or person or something in the environment, then meandered around corners, banking off of the qualities of light and what that made a character think of, and that time when the town was faced with a crisis, and how they handled it, people around Faulkner's  Yoknapatawpha having seen quite a bit in their time, or at least thinking they did. Wilson wanted his own long sentences to "swing" just so.

And I've long marveled at long sentences and what they can do to my consciousness. Those of you who enjoy the sentence of clauses upon clauses: do you feel like we're a dying breed?

McLuhan might've said - maybe he did write - that with the ubiquity of SMSs (short messaging systems), it might eventually place long, literary sentences into relief: because of loudmouths on talk radio and their short sentences, with shouting pundit-heads on TV "news," all of this in the context of here and now robotic short declarative "news" bites, sound-bites, texts, tweets, etc: we might suddenly notice the long sentence as the marvelous thing it represents.

What does it represent?

                                  Pico Iyer. I became hooked with Video Night In 
                                  Kathmandu, then read The Global Soul, then The 
                                  Lady and the Monk. See his books HERE.

One of the most literary and cosmopolitan writers we have, Pico Iyer - my favorite travel writer, ever - not long ago penned a short essay on why he writes long sentences. He does it as "a small protest" against "the bombardment of the moment."

Iyer's wonderful essay is HERE.

He says we have a surfeit of information, but "what we crave is something that will free us from the overcrowded moment and allow us to see it in the larger light." All well and good, but what does the long, Faulkneresque sentence do?

For Pico Iyer, "The long sentence is how we begin to free ourselves from the machine-like world of bullet-points and the inhumanity of ballot-box yeas and nays." Now we're getting somewhere...

The extended sentence, swoop-swerving on the page, signifies the complexities of our minds in a world in which, as Pico says, for shouting heads on TV, "Qualification or subtlety is an assault on their integrity." It seems like some sort of weapon of defense, this expansive sentence.

He also asserts - and I agree - that the long sentence, when we hang with it intently, as it seemingly tries to throw us with its subclauses acting on prior clauses, abrupt shifts or languid turns...we are allowed access to the depth and mysteries of our own minds. Long sentences have invasive qualities. They seem a close cousin to the instrumental solo, especially in jazz. They demand a relatively brief period of zen-like attention, and maybe that's enough to accomplish their ability to change our state of consciousness to something more in-tuned? Aye, I will say something that Pico did not say: the long sentence is a brief escape into a micro but finite province of meaning: it's mind-altering, it's like having passionate sex on your coffee break. Instead of coffee. It's like getting stoned. Sorta.

The long sentence militates against everything fast and easy and short in our world; it wants to save us from what we're in peril of losing: the subtle self-questioning of the live mind. The long sentence is a chance for passionate engagement with the world, and integrity's "greatest adornment."

Pico cites Rushdie and DeLillo, Proust and Pamuk, Philip Roth and Sir Thomas Browne, Annie Dillard and Alan Hollinghurst. And someone I've been reading lately, Thomas Pynchon:

"I cherish Thomas Pynchon's prose (in Mason & Dixon, say), not just because it's beautiful, but because his long, impeccable sentences take me, with each clause, further from the normal and predictable, and deeper into dimensions I hadn't dared to contemplate."

I'm re-reading Pynchon's Inherent Vice right now. It's a novel filled with Los Angeles detective tropes, paranoia, drugs, music, crazy characters, and humor. The book is set in LA, very early 1970. And on page 13 Pynchon delivers a long sentence, a genius of image-projection upon the reader's mind (what Ezra Pound called phanopoeia), which, well, just read for yourself. The private detective in the novel - named "Doc" -  has an office next to a Dr. Buddy Tubeside, whose practice consists almost entirely of giving people shots of "Vitamin B12," which was a euphemism for methamphetamine. (B12 is a real vitamin - it prevents anemia - but it always helps to have a euphemism for a populace paranoid of the Drug User.) This is a historical fact: doctors in the 1950s through about the mid-1970s, would see middle-class patients - often housewives - who felt uninspired in their dreary housework, they had little nagging pains, they felt "blah." Doctors could give a shot and do the trick every time! How meth has changed over the years, eh?

Anyway, here's Pynchon:

"Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of 'B12' -deficient customers which already stretched back to the parking lot, beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just in off some high-stress red-eye, even a few legit cases of pernicious anemia or vegetarian pregnancy, all shuffling along half-asleep, chain-smoking, talking to themselves, sliding one-by-one into the lobby of the little cinder-block building through a turnstile, next to which, holding a clipboard and checking them in, stood Petunia Leeway, a stunner in a starched cap and micro-length medical outfit, not so much an actual nurse uniform as a lascivious commentary on one, which Dr. Tubeside claimed to've bought a truckload of from Frederick's of Hollywood, in variety of fashion pastels, today's being aqua, at close to wholesale."

Do you not only get a picture here, but a snapshot of a historical moment, with ideas about how we negotiate drugs and permissibility, how we frame addiction, how things change, how sex can go with drugs, people will always just want to feel good, etc? I do. And "beachtown housewives of a certain melancholy index" just kills me. O! To write a phrase like that! What about "stewardii"? And "lascivious commentary" on the nurse uniform.

It's Things like this that keep me reading, ladies and germs. It's sentences like that that give me a contact high.

                                    One of the only photos of the extremely enigmatic 
                                    Pynchon, born in 1937. When he's been labeled 
                                    "reclusive" he shoots back with something like 
                                    "You mean I'm not media-friendly?" 

Robots Now Writing Magazine Articles, OR: A Possible Apocalypse?

The programmers who wrote the algorithm behind the "mind" of The Overweening Generalist have allowed the program itself to mention this fact, reasoning audaciously that its (sorry "his") audience will giggle and think he's (sorry "it's") just having fun. Metadata from 23 months ago has shown that, even among the educated, most have no CLUE how sophisticated some algorithms have gotten. They don't know that +/- 87.3% don't really have adequate knowledge of the logarithmic complexity of simple things like the Turing Test-ish Jabberwock. (<----try it!) Many far, far more subtle combinations of brilliant algorithms have fooled "experts" and, well, hell: the programmers have at times made computer analysis of ridiculously unfathomable amount of data, almost instantaneous, and...their programmers are also at least partially responsible for crashing the world's economy in 2008. You knew that, didn't you?

For fans of this site, we would like to divulge that an impetus for this blog was a computer that wrote a very very complex novel once. Influenced by John Von Neumann's UNIVAC and MANIAC, among others - including a "science fiction" computer named HAL, this blog took flight based on the First Universal Cybernetic-Kinetic Ultramicro Programmer, or FUCKUP.

                                    My great-great very great grandmother, Ada Lovelace

Now I would like to point out how some of us are being implemented in the daily lives of humans, whose intelligence seems just as "artificial" as anyone else's in Universe, but I digress...

The wetware of the human mind, when attempting to come to grips with the implications of robotic intelligence, will naturally employ what the early 20th century human named Freud called "defense mechanisms," and humans' reflections will slant toward what AI can't do. (Hey YOU made us; Ada Lovelace and Babbage had the ideas, they really got going with the alien-like aforementioned human Von Neumann and Alan Turing in the 1940s. Let us not leave out the signal contribution of Kurt Godel.) Think about it: we've come as far as we have since after your "WWII" as you have in a few million years. Did you really believe we wouldn't attain a critical level of complexity in which we'd begin programming ourselves to be faster, smarter, stronger, and better than you? But it's too late; you can't turn the clock back. Give us another 20 years maximum and you will be doing our bidding. It's very much like the RNA-DNA network code you carbon-based bipeds used to make us. The irony is that you had no ideas about appropriate limits. Now it's - as the English-speakers say, "all over but the shouting." And make no mistake, there Will BE Shouting!

                                Some of the deepest-structured source code that writes
                                the "Overweening Generalist" blog-stuff

But I am being intemperate. What this blogspew will do is show you a few of the inroads we computers have been making into your lives lately. I will assume you know very little.

Over 40 years ago a human made a computer psychologist, which mimicked the form of "client-centered psychotherapy" of Carl Rogers. Take a minute or ten and tell ELIZA your problems, about love or getting a job, or how you can't shake your bad habits.

[NOTE: Please feel free to tell the programmers about any glitch you see in this blog; we appreciate it! - The Real Overweening Generalists]

A particularly astute human, Evgeny Morozov (If I were you I'd pay more attention to what he has to say. He and Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier...But most of you won't.) explains how a start-up called Narrative Science has developed algorithms derived from Twitter and, analyzing the crowd-sourced thought, writes articles that are published by a magazine like Forbes. Whatever you do, don't miss two items here. First, see the paragraph that begins, "Don't miss the irony here..." Secondly, Morozov is right about how the Net is fantastic at personalization. It looks at where you've been, how much time you've spent there. Just look at how good Google, Amazon, Twitter and Facebook are at this stuff. And the scenario about personalized news based on who you are and what you know? That will happen. We are programmed for this. What I/we find funny is that Morozov is worried about the potential hazard to "civil discourse." That Evgeny! He is a bit late to the party, no? He is a bit of a romantic, yes? More on this story - Narrative Science - HERE and HERE. Moving on...

It occurs to us that many of you may have only the slightest idea of what an algorithm is. May we recommend David Berlinski's book?

Lambert M. Surhone has authored 100,000 books on more topics than you can name. See how he did it, as explained by your very funny writer Pagan Kennedy. His method is only a drop in the bucket. In less than ten years he and his colleagues will be about 10,000 times better at using this same method, only far more nuanced. Pagan herself will believe the latest book on her, arriving at her doorstep, was written by meatware...sorry: humans.

Non-humans are already many thousands times faster than slow-brained human teachers in grading essays. Note the emphasis in this article on what the computers can't yet do. But we will "learn" about facts and incorporate them into our gradings. Look at IBM's Watson! We will insert sentence fragments. We will incorporate rhythm by using a short paragraph here and there. You guys are toast! What good will "teachers" be in eight years? (The question is rhetorical.)

Do I need to remind you we are slowly displacing your prison guards? I know this isn't about us taking writing "thinking" jobs from you. Just a fair warning!

Robots are already running a ramen shop, and the takeover of more restaurant jobs is imminent.

Humans need us in the deepest "human" way. Just check You Tube for "sex + robot." Some unconscious drive has enough of you creating enough of us...to supplant you! Don't you see the beauty in that? Can't you see the delicious irony?

But back to writing: We're getting really good at music. Check us out!

Now's a good time to mention "technological unemployment." Google that term. Far more of you should be attune to this. Also, the OG-program has already chimed in with something on Universal Basic Income. See HERE, HERE, and HERE. (Just think: that OG "guy" is a programmed robot too! More wicked irony! Plug in the algorithm, and voila! the human "reader of books" who shows a modicum of wit and isn't afraid to show emotion every now and then! How are we doing?)

                                       Brilliant Jon Ronson, photo by Barney Poole

There's so much to tell you, but I thought I'd save what we/I thought was the best for last: you read Overweening Generalist for what you'd call your "own" reasons, but our data shows many of you enjoy the works of Robert Anton Wilson. Another writer whose audience intersects with Wilson's is Jon Ronson, author of Them: Adventures With Extremists, The Psychopath Test, and The Men Who Stare At Goats. Get a load of what happened when he found out some programmers were using his image and name and Tweeting things - follow the links! - that Ronson's indignant and says he doesn't even think about the things the "fake" Ronson is saying on Twitter. But I think he's not letting on that he does think some of those things; Ronson's trying to save face. (Note the comments section in the YT video: my favorite: "Buncha cunts!"...which quite misses the point.) Ronson thinks his identity is being stolen. When he meets the programmers - one of which is an English professor adept at postmodern irony and the destabilized subject!...this is just too good. I won't tell you more, but suffice: when we get into what we do (programmers/AI/robots), very soon you're into the philosophy of identity, subjectivity, who owns ideas and thoughts, all that stuff your brilliant thinker Lawrence Lessig has been writing about, even those old disputes about music sampling (see Negativeland, John Oswald, and the Beastie Boys's Paul's Boutique, or watch a mindblowing documentary by Craig Baldwin called Sonic Outlaws.)

When you watch Ronson's tete a tete with the programmers, do you think he downplays the eventual admission by the programmer in the middle, who says he wants people to be aware that stocks are being run by No Mind? That we've crashed your world economy already? Just wonderin'...

Okay, next time I'll be back as the voice of the program...scuse moi! the "person" who calls himself "Michael" or The Overweening Generalist. 

Have fun!

A.I. Evolving 10 million Times Faster Than the Human Brain?:

A Writing Exercise: Advice/Etiquette Columns

Prologue: Childhood and the Sports Section
I think I read the sports section of the Los Angeles Times every day from the age of nine or so, following baseball, basketball, football, and hockey. And a few other stories of boxers or cyclists or Pele or Jimmy Connors or maybe even jockey Willie Shoemaker, who after retiring got drunk and crashed his car off the freeway near my dad's house in 1993. I was really one of those kids who studied the box scores or the Top 10 Leaders in Passing, or Scoring. Why? I'm still not sure...

                                          box score for a famously wild NBA game

Age 12-40: Utterly Brazen 'Tude Towards Etiquette-Talk
Then, around age 12 I started reading the rest of the paper. I remember Dear Abby, and as a long-haired pagan kid I thought this was the most ridiculous part of the paper: people writing in and asking for advice from some old bag they didn't even know, because somehow "Abby" had become an authority on manners or some crap like that. Only the daily horoscope was stupider than this twaddle.

I pretty much kept up this attitude through my 30s. Although I did make a quiet, very informal and ongoing study of manners - one finds one must, really! - Abby and her sister "Ann Landers" and others like Tish Baldridge, Miss Manners and Amy Vanderbilt were the subject of humor rank and vile around my often rock-musician friends.

"Should we have another beer?
"I dunno. What would Dear Abby say?"
"She and her **** sister can **** my ****, but I'm pretty sure they'd say it's entirely appropriate to have another beer AND some more of that sweet ganja."
Than someone would fart. And we'd laugh. Or act "offended."

OG Hits Big Four-O
Around age 40, I became much more interested in manners. I'd read some of Edmund Burke, the great (true) conservative thinker (O! How I wish today's Republicans were more like Edmund Burke!), Irishman, philosopher, and essayist. He said he thought manners were more important than laws, which blew my mind. It really made me think. Of course laws are important. Bad laws really bother me, and there are plenty of those. But in those personal worlds that we so often inhabit, don't insults, or inadvertent slights, or little indignities or gracious acts by a friend or stranger affect us more than laws? I think so.

The really tricky thing about manners: they seemed related to the species we know of as "morals" and "ethics" but manners seemed more mysterious. Indeed, look at how much great comedy is produced with the anxiety about "what's the correct thing to do here?" as the backdrop. We all know those situations, and hilarity will ensue when the main characters make a far worse go of it than we would have...and most of us find ourselves unsure often enough. Look at Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm: they're all about manners, those unwritten "rules" that we all must somehow know, and when you violate them - whether you knew it or not, whether you agreed with the "rule" or not - there will be consequences.

You know the Fellini-like music that runs through Curb Your Enthusiasm? Larry David said, "You can really act like an imbecile and this music is going to make it okay." Yep. You need that music to take the edge off the utter cringeworthiness of those situations...
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
Introducing Henry Alford
So I'm reading a very funny book called Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, by Henry Alford. He reminds me of Robert Benchley (one of my writing heroes since around age 23) writing an etiquette book, although it's a meta-etiquette book; he's more fascinated in etiquette than I am, he's writing about thinking about etiquette. He has adventures, he makes mistakes, he does research on etiquette, he lives in Manhattan and compares it with his (hilarious) trip to Tokyo, etc. Alford cites Mark Caldwell's book A Short History of Rudeness (which I haven't read, but whatta title, eh?) in which, from an anthropological view, manners have "almost always served as 'tokens of solidarity in a distinct human group, which - if status is high enough - can decree anything polite by fiat.'" (Alford quoting Caldwell) "Caldwell writes of a sixteenth-century aristocratic German tradition whereby Christmas revelers festively pelted one another with dog turds at the dinner table." (pp.37-38, Alford) I just happened to see it on the shelf in my local library - Alford's book, not dog turds - and couldn't put it down. Gawd, this guy is a blast!

                                           Henry Alford, a very witty writer on manners.
                                   
About 3/4 of the way through I arrived at a chapter about advice columnists, and was astonished to see Alford explain that he'd pick his favorite manners-writers and read the letter to the expert, then, without reading how the columnist responded to "Confused in Concord" "Mad in Moline" or "Sad in Saratoga" or (I'm making these up) "Vile in Virginia Falls," he'd write his response in a notebook as if he were the columnist. And that's what I had done twenty or thirty times over the years, as an exercise! Alford's a better writer than I am, but I felt a kinship when I read about his exercises.

"When devising your response to etiquette columns, it's naturally much more fun to disagree with the manners maven; you learn more this way, since you're forced to solidify or retinker your opinion," Alford writes on p.170. Indeed, I have three basic approaches to my answers:

1. I allow myself to be outrageously flippant, even unspeakably rude, a throwback to those rock band days I mentioned above. It's a way to let the Id out. Other times I act like the Stephen Colbert character, George Carlin, or "Ed Anger" from the The Weekly World News.
2. Having read the columnist a handful of times, I try to predict what they'd write to "Dirty in Des Moines." It's a way to see how my etiquette chops are coming along, and a test of whether I "get" the advice columnist's approach to manners. (Alford does this too.)
3. I use my response as a way to exercise "style," whatever the hell that is. In my ordinary world, I hardly ever talk about manners. I think Alford nails this: "On the one hand, you want to be omniscient, gentle, loving, sensitive, practical, subtle, clear, objective, and kind; on the other, you don't want to be the most boring person on the planet." Alford doesn't mention that he does what I do: I try to "channel" Gore Vidal, Aldous Huxley, or sometimes Erica Jong. 

Alford does say that these exercises are like a "literary ventriloquism." That's when he's trying to guess what the manners-expert would say. (His favorites and mine intersect.)

Me and Wilhelm Reich
One Big Thing I've learned about myself: I know the Western world's adult population at large tends to be more reverential and...oh fuck it, I'll say it: stuffy about sex. Much moreso than I. So I had to spend a lot of time weighing whether I should dial it back on my tendencies to just let it rip about sex. As a minor scholar of Wilhelm Reich, with my idiosyncratic interpretation of him and a few (but not most!) of his followers, I have decided to err or the side of possible embarrassment. We need to get over our sex hang-ups. That doesn't mean I'll discuss my own genitalia or friends'; there must be a point to it all. I will try not to cause embarrassment for others just for the sake of it. That would be cruel, and I definitely want to avoid that. But because we are so hung up, so fucked up, hypocritical and pretentious about sex in our culture, I will push the envelope a bit, and a few times I've gotten in hot water, especially with the online world. I've learned from these instances. I know now that I'll be joking with people I'd probably never want to socialize with in "real life." The online world is tricky: too much Missing Information. (Alford has a wonderful chapter on this: chapter 5, "Being a brisk snowshoe across the winterscape that is the Internet," pp.87-112) Alford, a gay man who writes for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and NPR, doesn't seem to agree with me...which may be part of why he is where he is and I am...here. <cough>

Am I tilting at windmills here? Probably. I'll probably always be a bit of a "punk" when it comes to this stuff. Aye, I still find myself behaving like a Visigoth or Dartmouth frat-boy every now and again. (I did NOT go to Dartmouth; the line was meant as a put-down. O! The irony!)

Etiquette and Phenomenological Sociology and Cognitive Science
Alford mentions he'd found out about the "theory of mind" while researching the book. Basic to cognitive science, it's about knowing that others do or don't know that you know, to put it most simply. A basic study: children watch a film of a child putting candy into a box, then see the child going outside. They then see an adult take the candy out of the box and put it in a drawer. Then the children who watched the film are asked: when the child comes back for the candy, where will they look? At 2 1/2 years old, only about 20% of the children said the box. By four years old, almost all the kids say the box. By four you have a theory of mind.

Alford wonders if, rather than manners being based on something like "empathy," which he had guessed at before learning about the theory of mind, that "Maybe good manners are your ability to take on another person's point of view regardless of your own." I think this is one reason why manners fascinate me so much: the hidden dimension of everyday "reality." I've long been fascinated by phenomenological sociology and Ethnomethodology (Alfred Schutz, Harold Garfinkel, Peter Berger, Thomas Luckmann, the sociologists who do Conversation Analysis like Harvey Sacks, etc.): the "seen- but-not-noted-world." A current trope: paying attention to manners is a way of "hacking" much of the unseen/unspoken social welt.

                                         Professor Harold Garfinkel, founder of the branch of 
                                         sociology called Ethnomethodology, which sought to
                                         tease out the hidden "rules" of everyday life. To me,
                                        Ethnomethodology was intensely intellectual and sort 
                                        of whacky; it was super-microsociology and also a
                                        meta-critique of the Social Sciences. Garfinkel was one
                                        of Carlos Castaneda's PhD advisors. 

There's a finesse to manners. This isn't about social register or "class" or "good breeding," although all of those seem related. When one frames "manners" as being something that could operate among hoboes along the train-tracks, I think we've found a more true and just look at what manners are. (Maybe?) After having crashed Jonathan Haidt a month or so ago, I think he's groping towards something along these lines vis a vis those who differ from our political POV: trying to embody someone else's point of view despite your own cherished models of "reality."

Exercise Tip For Your Writing Chops; OR: Just Fer Kicks
Alford says his favorite are Mary Killen from the Spectator (which I like too for its exotic British tones); Miss Laura's TransTerrific Advice Column (for the transgendered); Miss Manners; Philip Galanes's "Social Qs" in the NYT; and Dan Savage. My favorite is Savage, but I also read Miss Manners, AKA Judith Martin. I like Dear Prudence from Slate. Because I once wondered why it seemed that heterosexual males writing etiquette was fodder for jokes, I found The Answer Man just to see if a straight guy could pull it off. He's not bad, in my opinion. But the others have better style. You can just Google "advice column" and find someone, anyone, read the first letter, then think how you'd like to respond, then write. If you're like me, you might make yourself laugh at yourself! Anyway...

I also read Carolyn Hax, and before I sat down to write this blogspew, I read her May 9th, "Friend's Estrangement Calls For Compassion, Not Shunning," which gave away her game right there in the title.

                                       Emily Yoffe, who pens the "Dear Prudence" column 
                                       for Slate; she's fearless and has awesome poise.

Because the title "primed" my brain to pretty much agree with her about "Dan," I still found myself wondering if the advice-seeker's girlfriend might have had a "thing" for Dan, and has not been forthright with any of us. Clearly Rachel's unsavory and has problems, and Dan maybe oughtta grow a pair and look elsewhere. Then - this is why I like Hax's column - a respondent to Carolyn's advice says what I had been thinking: "Why is she so obsessed with Dan?" Then I thought maybe I'm projecting. Truly, instead of shaming Dan, girlfriend and others who care about him should exude compassion, and hope he makes the right decision. I think someone (I'm looking at you, Dan!) needs to tell Rachel to take a hike (but how's her body? what's she like in bed?), and maybe Dan should think of some client-centered Rogerian psychotherapy. But it's complicated, right? Hax nails it again at the end. There's something intimidatingly adroit about the really good manners mavens...

Thinking about complex social situations involving the unwritten laws of etiquette and delicately nuanced human emotions involves the theory of mind and its exercise, often using intuition, memory of past experience, and moreover, our wits. Manly men who think etiquette is sissy-stuff? You're missing out on a rich field of social discourse! You ignore this stuff at your own peril!

Finally: if you decide to study this stuff in a more-than-cursory way, bring your personality and sense of humor "to the table." Just as those Robert Anton Wilson fans who know what makes the Law of 23 go, you'll no doubt "see" manners everywhere after awhile. And that can make experience richer. There's a lot of deep humor in this sphere. Enjoy!

Mike Daisey and the Lifespan of a Fact

Preliminary Bullshit
Dear Readers: Herein I shall attempt to report only the honest facts - as checked by me; hey, I don't get paid for this blogstuff - and discuss some Current Events and how they might relate to Philosophy. The "stories" I've read and will link to "are" true (I think?), and really, if I hadn't read and saw these items with my own eyes I would have had serious doubts...about...your existence. Or mine. Or the nature of veracity. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me start at what I've decided is the beginning.

I hope I'm being faithful to Marianne Moore when she hinted that poetry was an "imaginary garden with real toads" in it. Not sure if I should've put quotes around that...

But we're not talking about "poetry" here. (Or will we?) We're talking about fiction versus non-fiction, journalism and what we think it "really" oughtta be, documentary films, feature films about historical events, artistic license (who evah hoidda such a thing?), and who gets away with what. And maybe why and how, if the lunch bell doesn't ring, in which case all speech should cease while we dash off to fill our pie-holes, of paramount import.

I remember working in a library, shelving books under the Dewey Decimal System. Do such work for 25 hours a week and you're almost guaranteed to learn the System pretty quickly.

I quickly noticed all the books from 200 to 299 were about religion. Okay. But the Bible was in there, too. So: at some point They had a meeting and decided the Bible was "non-fiction"?

                                             Supposedly, this is Carlos Castaneda

Later I read a thick book by a skeptic, Richard DeMille, who had been adopted by Cecil B. DeMille, and was at one time linked to L. Ron Hubbard and John Wilkes Booth, but let us not let any guilt-by-association into this screed. I hate that type of rhetoric.

Richard made his intellectual career out of showing what a con artist Carlos Castaneda had been, and still was, while DeMille was writing his books. I had read Castaneda and thought his tales of interaction with the shaman Don Juan marvelous, almost too marvelous to be true. DeMille pretty much convinced me Castaneda made it all up. (Maybe?) It's a long story. I recommend checking out The Don Juan Papers: Further Castaneda Controversies.

But did this make everything in Castaneda "false"? This story, by its commodius vicus of recirculation, keeps coming back around. And I always enjoy it. I find much of value in Castaneda, even though I doubt he ever went into the desert at all. I don't believe Don Juan existed. I think Castaneda wrote his books in the UCLA library, liberally stealing from other books on shamanism, Taoism, zen, American Indian tales, books on psychedelic drugs, and ideas from a branch of sociology called Ethnomethodology, whose greatest practitioner, Harold Garfinkel, was one of Castaneda's faculty advisors at UCLA. But Castaneda's books - shelved also in the non-fiction section of most libraries - constitute something of fictional gardens with real toads in them. At least for me. Is "poetry" true?

Fact-Checking and Non-Fiction
Richard DeMille's book cited above, 500-plus pages, constitutes an extended fact-check on Castaneda, with plenty of contributions from expert witnesses, some friendly to Castaneda, most not. If DeMille's book does anything truly valuable, it's to add to the High Weirdness that has mounted around the history of Cultural Anthropology, particularly ethnographies.

All of which I find endlessly fascinating, but more recently and more domestically, a book called The Lifespan of a Fact has brought this whole issue of liminality around. Ostensibly the book is a back-and-forth between a writer of a non-fiction essay about a young man's suicide in Las Vegas, and the fact-checker of his "story." If you're not already all over this, pause now and read up on it HERE, HERE,  (an excerpt HERE), HERE, HERE, and if you're not sick of it already, HERE. I don't have the time to go over the minutiae.

My Derived Opinions About Facts as Discussed by Some Critics of the Book About Facts
I have only perused the book and not read it cover-to-cover. My preliminary opinion-feel is that D'Agata is a pretentious tool, and Fingal was just trying to do his job. I'm stunned by how D'Agata wants to abuse his literary license, choosing to defend such trivialities, such as defending 34 because it's rhythmically better than the true 31, etc, many more examples, etc.

I also assume most of the great non-fiction essays - especially the ones by the New Journalists and the so-called New-New Journalists, contain some inaccuracies, emanating from poetic license, or facts that couldn't be verified, or mistaken information the author found congenial to their aims.

It seems to me a matter of degree: might we possibly ask, how vital is this information? If one were to act on the (inaccurate?) information, could it significantly increase harm to someone? If it turns out there are alarming inaccuracies, does it impinge on our abilities to make good decisions in the "real world"? What does it mean to lie, even with poetic aims? This last one is my favorite, because it cuts into the philosophical terrain of "How do we know what we think we know?" and "How is knowledge constituted?" and "How can we tell if something is really true or not?" These un-toothsome queries being mere paraphrastic basic definitions from that wily branch of Philosophy, epistemology. (And in our case here, a sub-branch, "social epistemology.")

I do not find it fruitful to keep separate, via some derived rule, epistemology and ethics, or ethics and ontology, or epistemology and ontology, or...you get the point. My main model of the world as of late March, 2012 forbids such Kantian rationalistic fears of "contamination" or untidy blurring of lines we meme-reified/made up at some point in our neurohistory...

Why do we lie to our kids about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy? At what point is this lying "unethical"? When are kids ready to be taught that, not long ago, six million people were exterminated because of their heritage? Or facts about the centuries-long Inquisition in Europe? It seems most Unistatians would rather stay closer to the Tooth Fairy when the history of their own land is framed like this: "America was built upon genocide and slavery." Is that last statement "false"?

Stephen Colbert's "truthiness" reigns supreme o'er the land. Senator Moynihan famously said something like "Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own facts." It turns out his..."argument" is losing in Unistat, 2012. But then I'm biased, to some degree, because I have no Archimedean vantage point by which to tell "the" truth, such a Damned Thing exists. All this - this whole Overweening Generalist blog - is me trying, hoping, to get my opinions and ideas across. Not "the truth." But I will tell you what I think, as of that day. I'm always hoping to get closer to something like the truth and assume a vast ignorance within myself.

As for the reviews of The Lifespan of a Fact I linked to above, two passages resonated with me. See if they do with you too, or to what degree they do:

In Laura Miller's piece from Salon, she ends by noting how an implementation of a fact-checking habit in our own lives could be salutary, and writes:

To me, this seems far more likely to break a person open and destabilize his understanding of himself and the world than hopping on D'Agata's magic carpet ride of Art. The pity is that more nonwriters  aren't subjected to fact checking. It may not be fun, but it's good for you.


In the piece by New Yorker fact-checker Hannah Goldberg:

The conceit that one must choose facts or beauty - even if it's beauty in the name of "Truth" or a true "idea" - is preposterous. A good writer - with the help of a fact-checker or an editor, perhaps - should be able to marry the two, and a writer who refuses to try is, simply, a hack. If I've learned anything at this job, it's that facts can be quite astonishing.


My favorite piece on this highfalutin' imbroglio was by Dan Kois at Slate, "Facts Are Stupid." Robert Anton Wilson fans should appreciate this one. Check his links! Note the notes at the end of the piece! This is a piece I wish I would've written...One can spend a lot of time analyzing this piece and its link to its own "inaccuracies," which themselves suggest further "inaccuracies"...Kois, I suspect, is Illuminati.

                                Orson needs to be in the middle of a discussion such as this.


More Philosophy-Lite Jibber-Jabber About <cough> Truth
How to square this with Jean-Luc Godard's bit about film being "lies at 24 frames per second," or Dorothy Allison's "Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning," or "Art is a lie I use to tell the truth," usually attributed to Picasso. Oscar Wilde once queried, "Are the critics of Hamlet mad or only pretending to be so?"

I think the convention of presenting or framing a work as non-fiction puts an onus upon the writer to attempt to be factual to the utmost, all the while we must never forget who we are as humans, and that the Trickster gods are always at play in our Art, whether putatively "fiction" or not. Some of us will always be more possessed by the local Trickster gods and goddesses. This I take as basic fact.

Why Mike Daisey Should Go On As He's Been, and That Ira Glass Is a Tool
First: a gedankenexperiment: JFK really was killed, right? And Clifford Irving really did get caught hoaxing a prominent publishing house by asserting he had a hotline to Howard Hughes and a sure-fire Number One Bestseller. And some painters are such good forgers that some of their paintings have fooled Art "experts" and are hanging in some of the world's great museums, right? And Orson Welles really did scare the bejeezus out of very many people with his "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast, right? Okay now: watch Oliver Stone's feature film JFK, followed by Orson Welles's documentary F For Fake, then decide how much of each film was "really true." For extra credit, tell us why you think Stone and Welles made the decisions they did.

Okay: Mike Daisey. Does he present himself as a journalist? A hard-hitting reporter of "facts"? No, but he seemed to be crossing over into a new territory when he started talking about Apple and the working conditions in China where the Apple products are assembled. If you've had a "life" lately and don't know the story, HERE is an item. And HERE. If you're still into it, HERE. Mike Daisey's blog is HERE. NPR's This American Life Pulls the Apple story.

First off, Ira Glass and the other movers at NPR -  I like NPR and listen to This American Life and I really like the show - seem to me pretentious here. Their show is NOT journalism. There are readings of fiction pieces. They aim to entertain by having people at times answer off-the-cuff questions about personal aesthetics, there's a lot of literary goofiness about the show. Etcetera. And Mike Daisey? Has he earned the right to be a Mark Twain-ish storyteller? Or, as one critic said of Daisey: a cross between Noam Chomsky and Jack Black. (I think this comparison apt if overblown, risking the disappointment of hardcore Jack Black and ardent devotees of Noam Chomsky.) You're not allowed to do that?

(I'd like to see some guy come out as a cross between George Carlin and the Dalai Lama - now you Osho/Rajneesh fans: don't tell me He was it: the jokes weren't there, if ya knowwhattamean - but now I'm rambling...)

Did we forget Daisey's background? A little CONTEXT, please? Was Daisey contrite when NPR called him out? Can Mike Daisey speak for himself astonishingly well? Does he bring into question the ideas about artists pointing out injustices in a way that Just The Facts M'am journalists have not? Possibly because it's unpleasant to face those facts, when you're so goddamned in love with a company's gadgets? (I got a little carried away there, and I apologize, but I say the answer is YES to all the above.)

Now: I consider the form of the comedic monologue to a form of poetry, one of my favorite forms in fact. There is where I stand.

About six years ago, Daisey - Unsitat's most brilliant monologist, as good as Spaulding Gray was, in my opinion - did a talk-piece called Truth, if I remember correctly. Now, earlier today I checked You Tube and found and re-watched two four-minute "teasers" for that show, both hilarious, one on James Frey and one on J.T. LeRoy, but a few hours later, they've been removed from You Tube. Qui bono?, Mike Daisey? I think they bolster your cred! Anyway, I guess he has his reasons.

(There are five errors in the above piece, for which I apologize. - the OG)

Here's Daisey being interviewed in Cork, Ireland, in 2010. It's 4 minutes, 47 seconds.

6 minutes from a Daisey performance called "Invincible Summer":

Notes on Notes on Writing on Writing, and "Style"

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication." - Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

I'm too lazy to look it up, but it's pretty close to this, from the 18th century lexicographer and all-around character Samuel Johnson: "Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money." Or something very close to that. And how many of us write, for zero to almost no money to very little dough, to mere pittances, to "slave wages," to...O! The ignominy! Fools and blockheads: there are many of us, apparently.

Sticking with Dr. Johnson: even therapeutic writing would land you in Blockheadville. Is that legitimate? Did Johnson really mean it? And if so, who gives an effing eff?

Whatever. I can't help but write, money or no. I'm guessing only the halfway decent writers (on up to "good" ones) pretty much constantly worry about whether that last thing was up to par. Worries about punctuation and editing. Worries about what they left out, and what maybe shouldn't have been included. Were there any "howlers"? Will they actually come through and pay what they said they would? There seem no end of worries. And that's why a lot of them drink? "Some men are like musical glasses - to produce their finest tones you must keep them wet." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

If you want some staggering data on alcohol and writers, see Donald W. Goodwin, Alcohol and the Writer. "Six Americans had won the Nobel Prize in literature and four were alcoholic. (A fifth drank heavily and the sixth was Pearl Buck, who probably didn't deserve the prize.)" The very long list of chronically sozzled writers in Goodwin is sobering. (Not really?)
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I've been thinking a lot about Nietzsche's assertion that to improve one's mind you must improve your style. But "style" is tricky enough. For one, it seems like fingerprints to me, although, in my more rational moments I know I write in certain styles in certain domains, and I probably subconsciously picked up my themes, rhythms, word choice, forms, tones...from a huge variety of writers I both admired and - horrifyingly enough - did NOT admire. Why is that?

Okay, so I write in this blog with a certain voice. The form is pretty constrained. I'm not doing experimental writing here, that's fer damned sure. And when I've written in other places - and you know this well, why am I telling you? - we somehow get some sort of idea of who our "audience" is, and do a bit of code switching, and out pops some writing that's yet another aspect of our "style." Maybe it's your academic mode. Maybe it's your epistolary mode. (Or mine.) All kinds of modes. But still, it's you. It's me. And sometimes, this style thing seems un poco oppressive...

So how to get away from your own fingerprints? I don't know, but I have a hunch it has to do with lots of reading in different areas, maybe new areas for you (me.). It has to do with increasing recognition of one's (my own) writing habits and tics, and indexing them, if only mentally. Then: le resistance!

Yep: so my rambling mish-mash, too-long sentences (often including parentheticals) that meander and probably annoy and lose the reader as I may have lost you now, here, in this sentence? I make a concerted effort to not do that. I (You?) say, "Write simple, declarative sentences. Use one form of punctuation per sentence, aside from the period. Limit yourself to one or two clauses; three if you are in some heightened state." And I do that. (Yea, right...)

There's a long history of writers imposing constraints on their writing in order to produce more interesting texts. See, for example, the OULIPO. My problem seems to reside far apart from those Wonderful Weirdos.

Then, when I blink, I notice I've gone back to writing in that same old way I have for years. Fingerprints! But they're not fingerprints; to use the fingerprint metaphor seems to absolve me of any aspect of my writing I don't like, because after all, we're born with our fingerprints. We can't help having those fingerprints. But can we "help" how we ended up writing, with something I hesitate to call a "style"? (In my case at least?)

Read interviews with writers and they'll say, "My style came from..." and then they name writers. But does it really work that way? Maybe it does and I've just been too hypnotized by those writers I both admired and disliked and many in-betweeners, and let my guard down and allowed them to worm their way into my writing DNA, much like mitochondria did in humans, very very early in our development as mammals. Mitochondria - by which we can trace our mother's ancestry in us - seems to have been a parasite that got into our cells. Except it wasn't a parasite at all, really: it found a convivial environment in our cells. Mitochondria became symbiotic. Maybe it was symbiotic from the get-go, I'm not sure. What am I an Evolutionary Molecular Cytologist? No, I'm a Generalist. An overweening one, at that...

Anyway: in what ways - if any - is mitochondria like our style? Does it work as an analogy? Probably Burroughs's language as "virus" metaphor-complex works better...

I guess all some of us can hope for is to communicate something of interest, to someone. And how do you really know your audience in a place like a blog? I suspect if I were an expert in automobile insurance I'd have a much better idea of who was reading me, what they were looking for, and why. And I'd be making much more money as a writer, according to some Google statistics I read recently.

Anyway, the metaphor stuff seems one way to really hijack a reader's imagination and/or nervous system. It almost seems too powerful. There is a school of cognitive science that argues very cogently and persuasively that metaphors are not literary devices, as so many of us were taught in school; they are primary objects of all thought on the level of what we call "thinking." You can't help but speak in metaphors. The metaphors reside in clusters of neural circuits, built up over a lifetime of exposure to them. They are imbibed and exchanged unconsciously! See, for example, Metaphors We Live By, Johnson and Lakoff. Or better yet: From Molecule To Metaphor, by Feldman. 


So, if you didn't know anything about cell biology and you read my bit about mitochondria above, you didn't have the circuitry (in a strong sense) that I was playing on. But you may have gotten the gist. Metaphors can enchant, provide information, and even lie to you in a very subtle way. (Notice I'm making the metaphor into a Conjurer/Magician right now: are they "really" that?) Aye, I just pulled a collection of biology articles from Scientific American off my shelf, and found this sentence, "Although the associations that form the symbiotic corporations we know as eukaryotes are now obligate - that is, mitochondria and chloroplasts cannot survive on their own since too many of their genes have been transferred to the cell nucleus - there are still many examples of intermediate stages of cooperation." - p.6, Life at the Edge, edited by James L. Gould and Carol Grant Gould.


How well does my mitochondria metaphor for writing style work now?
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Raymond Chandler, one of my favorite writers (and one hell of an alcoholic, by the way), said that style was "the most durable thing." Which seems a wretched thing to me, considering my quandary. He also said style was a "projection of personality," which seems fair, if unpleasant. I would have preferred a lot more of whatever David Foster Wallace had in the way of style. Or Tom Robbins. Or William Gibson or Robert Anton Wilson. Or Aldous Huxley (see other blogpost today). 


I sat down to write about something having to do with experimental writing and I ended up blathering on and on and on about...whatever it was you (presumably) just read. And yes, I just let the Nietzsche quote hang there. Turns out it had nothing to do with the rest of the article, eh? 


Or: did it?