tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11782840850805805262024-03-12T23:48:13.479-07:00Overweening GeneralistThe Overweening Generalist is largely about people who like to read fat, weighty "difficult" books - or thin, profound ones - and how I/They/We stand in relation to the hyper-acceleration of digital social-media-tized culture. It is not a neo-Luddite attack on digital media; it is an attempt to negotiate with it, and to subtly make claims for the role of generalist intellectual types in the scheme of things.michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comBlogger388125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-36738185494888041492016-11-08T01:30:00.003-08:002016-11-11T04:25:17.994-08:00Ezra Pound and Douglas Rushkoff on Late Medieval/Early Renaissance EconomicsI've been re-reading the chronological selection of essays on economics in Pound's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Selected Prose, 1909-1965</i>, which I always find thrilling. The book was edited by Pound scholar William Cookson. The section on economics is titled, "Civilisation, Money and History," and Cookson gives us Ez's wonderful pro-cosmopolitan essay "Provincialism the Enemy" from 1917 first. And, as I read each essay in this section, it's like watching one of your favorite horror films once again: you know where it's going, and, if it's really great - and it is - you see new things each time.<br />
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Also, things can get pretty dicey, but you know when you should look away, but don't?<br />
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To those of you who came in late: Pound at age 15 said he wanted to know more about poetry at the age of 30 than any man alive. I think he carried that off. He made a cultural renaissance of literary modernism. When many of his favorite artist friends were killed in World War I, he wondered what caused the war. He decided to teach himself economics. Why were artists starving when there was plenty to go around? And besides, Pound seems to have long believed that innovative artists were the engines of culture. Their work may seem "weird" now, but when you look back 30 years, you see they were in the avant of what's currently the "new" thing. So why are some who seem to produce nothing of value rich, while the creators of culture languish? This was a scandal to Pound.<br />
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<i>Ezra Pound in Venice, 1963</i><br />
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Cut to the chase: eventually the world wide stock market crashes and Pound, possibly driven slightly nuts by his own poverty, possibly because he was manic, or because of some massive character flaw, or combinations of all those things plus other "causes," began to rail against the Jew-bankers. Before he was captured by the Allies in Italy, Pound was making radio broadcasts with Mussolini's imprimatur, telling the US troops that they're fighting for the wrong cause, that FDR - who Pound once called "Stinky Rosenstein" during one broadcast, as if FDR were a "secret Jew" like Obama was a "secret Muslim" - was not the right cause, not the true "Anglo-Saxon" cause. Somehow Pound, between 1917 and 1940, had gone off the mental rails in a major way. Reading his brilliant but "mad" essays you are forced to come to grips with the idea that Pound had somehow - in my main model via maximum naivete - actually believed that Mussolini stood for the same things that Thomas Jefferson did. It's stunning, dramatic, garish, and ultimately tragic.<br />
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So, as I read Ez's essays having to do with money, civilization and economics, arranged chronologically by Cookson, I'm now looking for little signs of "crazy" to pop up. Included in this long section of the book (which extends from p.187 to p.355), Pound's 1935 pamphlet, <i style="font-weight: bold;">ABC of Economics</i>, shows up. This is Ez trying to tell us that C.H. Douglas's "social credit" ideas are probably more sound than John Maynard Keynes's ideas about economics and how to proceed after the 1914-18 war.<br />
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Douglas's ideas about the "increment of association" harmonize well with many of the current worldwide philosophical arguments for Basic Income. But Douglas, a brilliant engineer, had an antisemitic streak, and sadly, so did a lot of those who gathered around the Social Credit movement. In Pound's <i style="font-weight: bold;">ABC of Economics</i> he refuses to Jew-bait, argues for the role of the State in getting production for goods going if needed, and distributing them as needed, but not making munitions for for more wars. Work days being cut in half is a oft-repeated idea: if we all worked four hours instead of eight, everyone would have work, and everyone would have time to have a creative life. These too are ideas I've seen increasingly pop up in today's thinking on alternative economics.<br />
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Almost all of Pound's ideas about economics are presented as "this is what I've learned from studying economics on my own and you should study the subject too." Which I find refreshing. He makes an interesting point by saying that one reason most people don't have any appreciable understanding of their own economic world is that no one had much thought about it until around 1800. But even more persuasive: economists use a haze of abstract language in order to fake what they're doing. The English novelist John Lanchester came out with a book in 2014 addressing - very well - this problem: <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Speak-Money-People-Say/dp/039335170X">How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say and What It Really Means</a>. </i>My current favorite blog on economics is <a href="http://evonomics.com/">Evonomics</a>. Those writers make me think, and for that I'm grateful.<br />
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Many of us, myself included have long suspected that very very few PhDs in Economics have ever spent time in poverty. And that's a problem. Economists have long allied themselves with the owners of capital cee Capital. I don't see it as a conspiracy but simple human nature.<br />
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A weird but wonderful idea Pound got from trying to figure out economics is his "animal/vegetable/mineral" riff: bankers and finance capitalists and stock market players are increasing their money from "mineral," which is the only one of this triumvirate that doesn't increase <i>naturally. </i>Animals reproduce and "grow" hides, milk, etc. The vegetable world is the sexy hyper-increasing world. That's where true wealth should be measured: that which increases in <i>nature. </i>I have always found this idea of Pound's very pagan-sexy and poetic, but too simplistic. The best answer to it I've read is a long essay by the erudite Lewis Hyde, in "Ezra Pound and the Fate of Vegetable Money," found in Hyde's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property</i>. Fantastic essay...<br />
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Because it's quite good form to quote from your subject at least once, here's a few lines from Pound's <i style="font-weight: bold;">ABC</i> that I thought were accurate and funny. Ez is addressing "aristodemocratic" folks and their privilege and the idea of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noblesse_oblige">noblesse oblige</a>:</i><br />
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<i>In practice it is claimed that the best get tired or fail to exert themselves to the necessary degree. </i><br />
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<i>It seems fairly proved that privilege does </i>NOT <i>breed a sense of responsibility. Individuals, let us say exceptional individuals in privileged classes, maintain the sense of responsibility, but the general ruck, namely 95 percent of all privileged classes, seem to believe that the main use of privileges is to be exempt from responsibility, from responsibilities of every possible kind.</i><br />
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<i>This is as true of financial privilege as of political privilege.</i><br />
-p.247, <b><i>Selected Prose, 1909-1965</i></b><br />
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[<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/10/donald-trump-taxes-50-percent-Americans-dont-pay">Donald Trump lecturing all the Americans who don't pay taxes</a>.]<br />
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The very next essay in the book is also from 1935, and is where I'd mark where Ez's mind had jumped the tracks. Ostensibly, it's a very short book review of John Buchan's biography of Oliver Cromwell, which had come out the year before. Pound doesn't like the book, because Thomas Cromwell, born in 1485 or so, who became the great international banker for King Henry VIII, isn't addressed adequately. Or so one assumes. That's what Ez read the book for, one assumes: to learn more about indecent grand larceny and its history. Oliver Cromwell isn't really addressed in the review. I haven't read Buchan's book on Cromwell, so who knows, but Pound begins his review by citing usury and sodomy and the medieval Catholic church, which was against both. Sodomy because...well, the Hive King needs more warriors, is my guess. "Doing it" that way isn't about that oh-so "natural increase." Also: charging interest at an unreasonable rate? Unnatural, aye. The way that money increases is manifestly <i>not </i>the way that wheat increases. (Prof. Carlin would like to argue that cancer, spina bifida and even nachos cheese chips are "natural" too, but we don't have time for him right now.)<br />
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Well, there's Ez spending his book review attacking "the brutal and savage mythology of the Hebrews," (dog-whistle: Jewish bankers), and the Protestant Calvin doesn't get off easily either. <i> </i>Oh, also at the beginning of the "review" Ez lays out ideogrammically how beautiful the 11th century church of St. Hilaire in Poitiers is, and juxtaposes this with the Rothschilds (dog-whistle again!) and their "bomb-proof, gas-proof cellar" where they hide the art. Furthermore, Buchan's book should have been a history book that tells us about our lives <i>now.</i><br />
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But it's a biography, Ez. Calm down.<br />
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And by the way: the biography is about Oliver Cromwell, not Thomas. Oliver was the great-grandson of Richard Cromwell, who was Thomas Cromwell's nephew.<br />
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Nutty!<br />
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<i><a href="http://www.rushkoff.com/">Dr. Douglas Rushkoff</a></i><br />
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A recurring theme in all these essays on civilization, money and economics - and in Pound's poetic life-work <i style="font-weight: bold;">Cantos</i> - is that the medieval church was <i>contra </i>usury. They had <i>values. </i>And, over the years, as I've studied Pound's works, I see him grapple with economics throughout. And, despite what he lamented at the end of his life (he died in 1972): his "stupid suburban antisemitism" which hurt everyone he loved and got him put in an insane asylum for 13 years? Most of his economic ideas are sound. Or rather: they seem sound to me. The Jewish banker riffage is rancid, vile, heinous stuff. ("Deploreable"?) And yet: to quote Pound from a 1960 essay: "Every man has the right to have his ideas examined one at a time." I agree. And with Pound, you get a beautiful idea in one paragraph, an obscure idea in the next, and a terrible idea in the next. Allen Ginsberg visited old Pound in Italy and told Pound his ideas had turned out to be right, just look at the Pentagon budget!, but Pound thought he'd botched his life and wasn't much for speaking any more. However, and ironically, I think the public intellectual Douglas Rushkoff - who happens to "be" Jewish - has done all the research Pound missed, and yet they are on the same page.<br />
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Rushkoff says medieval peer-to-peer selling in the local "market" (an idea that Crusaders got from the Muslims, who called it a "bazaar"), using local currencies, encouraged goods to be well-made ('cuz local and face-to-face), and lots of people got "rich." That is, until the local king outlawed local currencies and invented the chartered monopoly: you can only use money the King has issued (or they kill ya). And: now you can't work for yourself, you had to become a wage-slave for the King, who's the only one who can tell you whether you can make shoes or not. It wasn't "Jews" who created this; it was European Lords of the Land, and they could get away with it because their monopoly on violence was more extensive than anyone else's. (For those who'd like to see a book, with lots of scholarly citations, see Rushkoff's stellar <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.rushkoff.com/books/life-inc/">Life, Inc</a>.</i>)<br />
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Rushkoff says this model is still with us, but now it's on "digital steroids." When Wal-Mart moved into a town it took 20 years for that town to have all its shops close and for half of the town to be making sub-minimum wage working at Wal-Mart. Now a digital company can wipe out all competition in 20 months. And Twitter is an abject failure because it can "only" make $2 billion a year, but its investors want it to make $200 billion...for a platform that delivers 140 characters.<br />
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If you have 50 minutes, <a href="http://www.rushkoff.com/sibos-2016-closing-keynote-platform-cooperativism/">get a load of Rushkoff giving the final talk at the most recent Sibos convention</a>: it's a boffo event for the big players in "the world's financial services" leaders. (Rushkoff's bit starts at about 11 minutes in, but dig the "financial services" gobbledygook uttered by the smug woman at the beginning, then contrast it with Rushkoff's impassioned secular jeremiad against what probably almost <i>everyone in that room deeply believes is true and good. </i>This talk was held in Switzerland very recently, as of this writing. In my opinion, EVERYONE needs to know Rushkoff's narratives about how we got to Trump and Occupy and Brexit and Goldman-Sachs-bought Hillary Clinton, etc.<br />
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O! If only Ezra Pound could've had a friend like Douglas Rushkoff to help him in his study of economics!<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;">έργο τέχνης για το blog σας: δείτε <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-9688929661982683412016-10-31T22:40:00.000-07:002016-11-01T04:22:01.428-07:00Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol. 6 or 7-ish: Alan WattsMy brother has a Theology degree and seems so much more sophisticated about Christiantity than I am that I will always defer to his statements on any subject within that realm.<br />
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There was a time when we disagreed so strikingly about this version of the monotheisms that I'd end up being a wise-ass jerk and he'd get sick of even trying to talk to me. Things have gotten wildly better since then, thank-Goddess.<br />
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His interpretation of Christianity has evolved. I think in the Darwinian sense of "evolve": not toward some Ultimate Form, but simply: cybernetic feedback from society/continuous thinking about his faith/exposure to evermore innovative and nuanced thinkers/and an active neuroplasticity, all of this from within an ecological niche of politics, economics, and other factors. He has an open mind, and it's capacious.<br />
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As I perceive it, his faith (as some of you may know, my only faith is in some sort of <i>change</i>) seems avant-Left, and I never see or even hear Christians in electronic corporate media who sound like him: not on radio, or TV, or even in film. Suffice: even if you're an atheist, you might not be aware of the <i>very many</i> varieties of interpretations of Christianity out there, now. His - if indeed he still even categorizes himself as "Christian" - is marked by compassion for the poor, the sick, and anyone downtrodden. He renders unto Caesar what's Caesar's, and it's a nuisance. He's accepting of gays, muslims...anyone that might get picked on in today's Unistat. He's in <i>this </i>world and is a sensualist, with the most sophisticated beer palate I've ever known, and an inscrutably detailed sense of guitar-sound textures. There's a pained sense of alienation from previous allies and alliances in Christian faith, and, because he doesn't evangelize at all, I must infer many of his intellectual and emotional stances toward aspects of the Transcendent, much like an astrophysicist infers there must be moons around a recently detected exoplanet: secondary effects. People who constantly talk about their religion? We've all known one or a few. Those who we know have very deep, nuanced and extensive knowledge of a certain religion but hardly ever talk about it? These people will interest us, no?<br />
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<i>Alan Watts: artwork by Randal Roberts</i><br />
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So, his birthday comes along and I didn't know what to get him, so I thought of my favorite theology book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Wisdom of Insecurity</i>, by Alan Watts, which came out in 1951. I hope to learn something from my brother's comments, if he offers them. (He emailed me after receiving the book in the mail, "I hardly know anything about Buddhism. Cool!")<br />
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I read Watts's book every few years and it always seems "new" to me, although the part that seems "old" is the basic message: sciences are about knowledge of the past - observations and experiments - and its ability to predict the future; but "now" - this very moment - is religious, and we aren't in the now if we're thinking about being in the now. The core of true religion is experience, not citing chapter and verse. We know we've recently been in the moment, but now that we're thinking about that, we're probably not in It. The key is to just be in the moment. Watts never totally lets on, but this is stealth-zen. I love the idea of always being in the moment, but find it very difficult to accomplish.<br />
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(I find the idea of laughing at the idea that you're not in the moment precisely <i>because </i>you're thinking about "being in the moment" hilarious, and so: being-in-the-moment.)<br />
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And if you "try" that's not going to work. Trying seems one of the most counterproductive things to do if you want to be in my moment: 'tis far better to just go ahead and do or be.<br />
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As readers of the OG know: I have pronounced neurotic tendencies. Which have to do with worry (living in the future) and some regret (living in the past).<br />
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Still: I'm sure this book has somehow allowed me to have a higher quantity of "moments." Or at least it seems so. The book does seem to function reliably - <i>por moi</i> - as a short-term anti-anxiety Pill. The endgame (<---Ha!) does seem to set the bar fairly high, though. Which is cool...<br />
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It occurs to me that in our non-ordinary "realities" we seem to be more conducive to being-in-the-moment, possibly because our primary realities seem a tad too "well-known"?<br />
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It's for me an <i>uncanny</i> book: as I read it, I think, "Alan Watts is right about all this...how did he do it? How does he make it all sound so logically coherent?" (An olde classic: Wordworth's "<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/45564">The World Is Too Much With Us</a>")<br />
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I also find myself thinking "This is one of the best Sophists ever," and I actually enjoy most of the Sophists we encounter in Plato. (Forget Thrasymachus, who seems to me the barking Id of every Pentagon Death Cult thinker we've ever had. Add to this "might makes right" dude: Callicles and Hippias. What a trio of a-holes.)<br />
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I know when we read Plato we're always supposed to be on Socrates's side, and I love the old pederast as much as the next Philosophy student, but some of his interlocutors are even more interesting. Gorgias the rhetorician must have seemed like a whigged-out weirdo thinker in his time, but he probably ends up as an underrated progenitor of trippy Neoplatonism. A case has been made that Gorgias is proto-Derrida.<br />
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Protagoras was the Clarence Darrow of his day: he said there's gotta be at least two versions of everything, and was really good at making the weaker account sound better than the stronger; he also said: you can have the gods, but I say they're unknowable and furthermore: humans are the measure of all things. Antiphon reminds me of a billionaire libertarian who wants unlimited pleasure, life, comfort...and pesky laws and other people's meddling just get in his way. Antiphon thought Protagoras was a dick. I don't like this Antiphon guy very much, but he's not boring and I feel like I know him: Antiphon Lives!<br />
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Socrates quite often pales (according to my own evaluations) when engaged in dialectic with these rock-star talkers and thinkers in Athens. Anyway...<br />
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Back to Alan Watts's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Wisdom of Insecurity</i>: it's also Beatnik philosophy <i>nonpareil. </i>Watts was doing what Aldous Huxley was doing for open-minded Protestant and quasi-lapsed Catholic thinkers in the West at the time: arguing point after metaphysical point and then citing passages from the Bible juxtaposed with quotes from Buddhism, Taoism, and the Vedas and showing how much they had in common. That Old-Time Human Ecumenism. I go for that, as a person who really <i>never</i> went to church. I strongly suspect even the most rabid atheists out there desire transcendent experience. (Hell: I <i>know</i> they do.)<br />
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Watts has also always seemed fantastically entertaining to me: playful Trickster-Guru, erudite, absurd, wonderfully frank, heretical. With marvelous British elocution. This might be <i>the </i>key to a good theologian in the 21st century ("good" according to my own hierarchy of values): be a philosophical entertainer. (Aye: Philosophers could stand to be more "entertaining." Or, failing that, at least drop most of the post-1945 jargon. It's <i>decadent!</i>) Here's a decent line I just found in Watts's essay, "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion":<br />
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<i>Now, I'm a philosopher, and as a philosopher I am grateful to some of the great pioneers in psychotherapy like Freud, Jung and Adler for pointing out to us philosophers the unconscious emotional forces which underlie our opinions. In a way, I'm also a theologian, but not a partisan theologian. I don't belong to any particular religion because I don't consider that to be intellectually respectable.</i><br />
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20 years ago, when I read that, I realized, "Okay, I previously discounted all theologians as pernicious dinosaurs, but I must consider any that say such a thing as this!"<br />
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Later, when I stumbled onto my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, I found that RAW's wife Arlen had turned him onto Watts. In turn, Watts became a sort of mentor to Wilson, telling him there were some very interesting Harvard professors investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of religious experience. (RAW and Leary became friends and intellectual collaborators from the mid-1960s to Leary's death in 1996.) At another meeting, Watts told RAW he'd just read a fantastic book by Israel Regardie, about Aleister Crowley. RAW went on to become one of the world's most erudite explainers of Crowley, and indeed an Adept himself. At another time, Watts said that the biggest error in history books is the idea that the Roman Empire "fell." It never ended. This became a riff repeated in RAW's and Philip K. Dick's books. Watts turned RAW on to zen, and even though Watts quit smoking cannabis by 1959, the notion of zen and being awake in-the-moment has always struck many of us lovers of Mary Jane Warner as an easy way in to a simulation of zen...for reasons I'll go into in some further blogspew...<br />
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Watts was alcoholic and a sensualist. He was an ordained Anglican priest, taught at Harvard, was an editor, broadcaster, a dean, a consultant at psychiatric hospitals, and one of the West's great exponents of Comparative Religion. He wrote one of the first books on psychedelics and religion, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Joyous Cosmology</i>. By late 1959/early 1960s he'd found his calling as self-described "philosopher-entertainer," a religious virtuoso who was "in show biz" and was a "genuine fake." When RAW met him, Watts had left his wife Dorothy and their four kids, with a fifth on the way. He was not perfect.<br />
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I remember a talk Watts gave on Pacifica Radio in which he said the numbers for outcomes in traditional psychotherapy were: 1/3 get get better, 1/3 get worse, and 1/3 stay the same. That floored me. He foresaw a "Zerowork" society as far back as the 1950s. He was very well-read in the sciences, and in one of the few quotations from <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Wisdom of Insecurity</i> we get, in a footnote, a quote from the uber-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, who seemed to be aware that our rationality and machines might kill us...in a book from 1951.<br />
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He was friends with Huxley and an influence on Leary. All three of those men and Wilson influenced me to learn to use my own brain, to think for myself, to acknowledge that I might be one of those weirdo-thinkers who may have to do it outside of The Academy. Against "rugged" American egotist individualism, we as a culture need as complement: transpersonal intersubjectivity and a non-intellectual public meeting of limbic minds.<br />
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Watts's most famous abode was probably his houseboat at Sausalito just north of San Francisco. It was on his boat that a much-written-about meeting (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKi4zoJPfFs">"Houseboat Summit"of 1967</a>) of 1960s guru-minds was held. The problem? Do we forget about politics - because it's hopeless - and "drop out" and continue to "turn on" to our own thing? Or do we engage in politics, trying to bring what we've learned from esoterica and psychedelia to the table? Or something in-between? On the boat that day: Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Leary. In this same year, Watts began championing Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The Summer of Love was happening (or is it capital aitch <i>H</i>appening?) a few minutes down the way, in the Haight-Ashbury district.<br />
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In his Introduction to <i style="font-weight: bold;">Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate</i>, a book of short stories about the "world of darkness" which is an apt title to happen upon as I write this, nearing the Witching Hour on Halloween, RAW, in an eldritch mood, writes:<br />
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<i>Emerson's Brahma, who says"I am the slayer and the slain," presumably enjoys the slaying even if He-She-It also suffers the pain of the victim. This view really implies a cosmos consisting only of a god playing with itself (Transcendental Masturbation) or playing hide-and-seek with itself (the view of Alan Watts and all Gnostic conspiracy buffs in the Phil Dick tradition). </i><br />
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When I first read this passage, I had never thought Watts a gnostic, but then realized: that's probably right. The idea that Rome never fell seems one of the main riffs in modern gnosticism. Further: one easily gets the feeling, reading or listening to Watts, that he had "sight of Proteus rising from the sea." And besides: RAW <i>knew</i> Alan Watts.<br />
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<a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-size: 25px; white-space: pre-wrap;">कलाकार: बॉब कैम्पबेल</span></a>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-16397801540820174032016-10-25T01:16:00.003-07:002016-10-25T04:11:28.650-07:00On a Few of the Many Varieties of Codes and Deceptive Behaviors in History<style type="text/css">
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Buckminster Fuller writes about the earliest Polynesian navigators, who were wizards who learned to sail East to West against the winds, with secret knowledge that was only shared orally with their sons, or coded in their chants: </div>
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"Knowing all about boats/These navigator priests were the only people/Who knew that the Earth was spherical,/That the Earth is a closed system/With its myriad resources chartable./But being water people,/They kept their charts in their heads/And relayed the information/To their navigator progeny/Exclusively in esoterical,/Legendary, symbolical codings/Embroidered into their chants."- <b><i>Synergetics</i></b>, pp.749-751</div>
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I see this as an example of a small group who protect their knowledge because it was powerful and probably because it was thrilling for small-group cohesion.</div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">How do we decode writing such as what you're looking at right now? In 11th century Fatimid Egypt, under science-loving Al-Hakim (who had become ruler at age 11, but then disappeared mysteriously during a solitary walk 25 years later), Cairo was the apex of learning in the world: lots of trade with Mediterranean neighbors, a fearsome army recruited from Sudanese, Turks and Berbers, the Polynesian's sailing code long since cracked. Among the brains that drained toward Cairo at this historical moment was al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Western scholars called him "Alhazen"), from Basra. One project was to explain perception. Al-Haytham had read the recent translations of Aristotle and agreed that things we see enter the eye via the air, but al-Haytham elaborated with more physiological and mathematical suppositions about how perception happens. Furthermore, he said we perceive via a faculty of judgement, after inference. Pure sensation was different from perception, the latter requiring a conscious, voluntary act on our part. Here was a theory of gradations of consciousness, 900 years before Korzybski: there was first pure sensation (whatever we experience before words, analogous to Korzybski's "event level"); then we voluntarily attend to some phenomena (say, paying attention to letters and words and sentences on a page: perception); then we "decipher" the words, and finally: we are reading. Al-Haytham died in 1038. (I mention the 20th century polymath Korzybski; in the first half of the 18th century the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico wrote, "People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner stress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind."- <i style="font-weight: bold;">The New Science</i>, #53</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <i>al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, b.965</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i> wrote possibly the first great work in </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i> optics, influenced Roger Bacon and </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><i> Leonardo da Vinci</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Roughly 200 years later, under Europe's Catholic mullahs (led by Pope Clement IV), Roger Bacon - one of those guys interested in everything - was interested in optics. He'd read Al-Haytham, but was keeping it <a href="http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/on-the-qt.html">on the QT</a> and yet still got persecuted for "unorthodox teaching." There were a lot of Churchmen who insisted rather violently that scientific research was dangerous to Church dogma (They have made <i>some </i>progress since then...). Bacon explained to the Pope how optics/perception/reading probably worked. Bacon and al-Haytham had both realized it's got to be far more complex than they'd suspected. In 11th century Islam, al-Haytham was not persecuted. Roger Bacon, soon after trying to explain to the Pope roughly the same theory, found himself in a cell. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">250 or so years later, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in this same problem of decoding perception and reading. But he was smart enough to know he could get in trouble: he wrote about it in his notebooks in a secret code that could only be read when held up to a mirror. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">It's only in the last 80 years that we've gotten a thick neurobiological account of how reading occurs and there's still interesting problems being worked out at this minute.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">When looking into codes and ciphers, </span>codes are one thing, ciphers another; all translation from one language to another is codework; any language you can't read can function as a code to crack; at one time only priests, kings, and scribes/accountants knew how to write and read: for everyone else in the culture "writing" was a code. </div>
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O! So many codes! And right out in the open. If only we could crack/hack/decipher/decode...</div>
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Not long ago I yet again re-watched one of those films from the Great Age of Hollywood Paranoia (c.1971-1976): <i>Three Days of the Condor</i>, in which Robert Redford plays a CIA agent whose specialty is reading novels, looking for codes embedded in them. These codes would apparently qualify as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography">steganography</a>. Messages hidden within other messages...and how do you know I'm not doing that right now? (If I'm doing it, please take my word for it: it's all in good, clean fun.)</div>
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I remember when I first saw <i>Condor</i>: I thought Redford's job was a fiction-writer's fancy. But apparently it's a real thing, and being taken more and more seriously by...yes, CIA, but all sorts of others working in the (not so) Great Game.</div>
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What if some of our best conspiracy writers and novelists of exquisite paranoia were leaving code in their books that hadn't yet been cracked? I mean...it <i>could </i>happen, right? Maybe not, but we never know. Let's not rule it out completely. Which reminds me of a passage in Don DeLillo's haunting, hilarious, deeply paranoid and postmodern <i style="font-weight: bold;">White Noise</i>. The main character - who is a professor specializing in "Hitler Studies"? - his ex-wife works for the CIA:</div>
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<i>She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail. </i></div>
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<i>It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice. </i>(p.213)</div>
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">Maybe it's just me, but "high-level jungle operative" makes me laff</span><span style="font-weight: bold;">.</span><span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;">White Noise </i>is one of DeLillo's short novels, but there are some really "long serious novels with coded structures." Hmmmm...</div>
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Speaking of postmodernists, Douglas Rushkoff, in his wonderful book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Program or Be Programmed</i>, writes that the postmodernists were right to be suspicious of language and "reality," but they didn't go far enough: they hadn't accounted for the hidden biases of code writers whose codes were embedded deep within our digital gadgets. (see pp.83-84, ibid)</div>
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Well, the pre-postmodernists, often called simply Modernists? A few of them left works so cryptic (and therefore threatening to dull minds, like J. Edgar Hoover's), that they became suspect. </div>
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Even though James Joyce never set foot on Unistat soil, Hoover saw him as a threat. Joyce had an FBI file. Because someone in Joyce's extended circle was a known communist, Joyce was suspected as one, too. (He was more of an individualist-anarchist of some sort.) From Claire Culleton's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Joyce and the G-Men</i>:</div>
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<i>Even as early as 1920, Joyce had been plagued by rumors about him and his work, and he was (laughably) reputed to be a spy for the Austrians, the British, and the Italians. He even complained to his brother Stanislaus that </i><b style="font-style: italic;">Ulysses</b> <i>was believed to be a prearranged German code; Ezra Pound had heard that "British censorship suspected <b>Ulysses </b>of being a code." </i>(p.45, Culleton)</div>
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Anyone who's looked at <i style="font-weight: bold;">Finnegans Wake</i> for 5 minutes might wonder what the eternally paranoid agents of Control thought Joyce must have been up to. If we go back to the early distinction between codes and ciphers, and al-Haytham's and Roger Bacon's and Leonardo's forays into human perception and reading, well, then surely <i style="font-weight: bold;">Ulysses </i>and <i style="font-weight: bold;">Finnegans Wake </i><i>are</i> written in code, only in a different semantic sense than what an asshole like J. Edgar Hoover would sense as "code."</div>
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Similarly, Ezra Pound, after being captured by the Allies in Italy, had to answer to the charge that his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Cantos</i> were some sort of code. (see one of my earlier posts on codes, <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2011/12/on-obscure-coded-and-alchemical-texts_08.html">HERE</a>, skip down to "Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)"</div>
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The great cryptologist David Kahn writes about the enigma of the "emotional bases of cryptology," reminding us that "Freud stated that the motivation for learning, for the acquisition of knowledge, derives ultimately from the child's impulse to see the hidden sexual organs of adults and other children. If curiosity is a sublimation of this, then cryptanalysis may be even more positively a manifestation of voyeurism." (p.755, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Code Breakers</i>) Kahn follows with a long line of later psychoanalysts who basically agreed with Freud, and many who challenged his idea. Nevertheless, I find the idea cosmically funny. I mean: <i>if </i>Freud's right - and I don't think he is, but anyway - then if you've read this far and feel like you acquired some knowledge from the OG, 'tis only 'cuz you're some sort of very well-practiced voyeur! Which reminds me of Pynchon's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Gravity's Rainbow.</i></div>
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Fairly early in the book, you'll recall, Allied spies have noticed that US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has sexual conquests all around London, and they're followed by V-2 rocket hit - in the same place he had sex - a couple/few days later. They don't know why, but there are theories. Rockets and hard-ons...Slothrop's penis must have a "code" to crack...it - his dick - was possibly encoded by...who? Does he know? Slothrop <i>seems</i> to not know. How are they going to crack this code? Talk about an Enigma!</div>
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>psychedelický grafický umělecké dílo <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></i></span></span></div>
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michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-76749183311881490442016-10-16T18:41:00.002-07:002016-10-17T03:07:08.845-07:00Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize For LitWell, that was a surprise. Those Erisian Swedes! In the quantum universe next door, my main pick, Thomas Pynchon, won. Finally! He has not appeared in public to say anything. Of course. There are rumors he'll send <a href="http://thomaspynchon.com/the-daily-show-thomas-pynchons-foreword-for-the-10th-anniversary-concert-program/">Jon Stewart</a> to Stockholm in his stead. (When Pynchon won the National Book Award in 1973, he sent <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-NBPpM--pY">zany Professor Irwin Corey</a> to accept on his behalf.) Pynchon's publisher has given a very short press conference, saying Pynch has already given the award money away, to be divided up among Black Lives Matter, the 9/11 First Responders who still need medical relief, Doctors Without Borders, and <a href="http://boingboing.net/2016/10/11/to-do-in-san-francisco-a-conc.html">John Perry Barlow</a>, who, the press release reads, is a "member of the loyal opposition who needs it."<br />
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Since it was announced, I've caught myself thinking more and more about Dylan and my associated mental relationships to him. My mom had Dylan's LP <i>Nashville Skyline </i>playing when I was a a pre-teen. I remember looking at the cover and reading his name as "Bob dye-LAN." I loved my mom's Beatles records more than the Dylan. Hell, I loved her Carly Simon record, <i>No Secrets,</i> more than the Dylan, but maybe it's because <a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhN3vEwgX0bVtvDdmyjoACtBoIZn2sptTvpL87k2fBoCV7KH3sPu5DXBVk4pfVXZAuotNthICL1FkB7IPP6fJodUL5G4vUKl04D3oWcpLrlpk7LBMwtFsI8p1aiKbseoyr81O-dXcjn76g/s1600/no+secrets.jpg">Carly's braless look</a> was jacking up the baud rate on my boy-organism.<br />
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<i>believe it or not, this is really Dylan and not <a href="https://allaboutoscar.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ce4068e11c604f40_91c432981b0f0fdc_o.jpg">Cate </a></i><i><a href="https://allaboutoscar.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ce4068e11c604f40_91c432981b0f0fdc_o.jpg">Blanchett</a></i><br />
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Speaking of the Beatles, Dylan in 1964 was shocked to meet the lads and find out they hadn't tried weed. He turned them on, and there's a wonderfully drawn-out piece on this historical moment in George Case's book <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Out-Our-Heads-Before-Drugs/dp/0879309679">Out of Our Heads: Rock 'n' Roll Before the Drugs Wore Off</a></i>.<br />
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A passage from Harry Shapiro's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Man-Story-Drugs-Popular/dp/1900924080/ref=sr_1_sc_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1476668238&sr=1-3-spell&keywords=waiting+for+the+man+ahrry+shapiro">Waiting For the Man: The Story of Drugs and Popular Music</a></i>:<br />
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<i>In 1964, Dylan refused a request from Ginsberg to lead a peace rally at Berkeley and earned the unbending enmity of singer Phil Ochs, who called him "LSD on stage." Dylan reported that Ochs was writing bullshit because politics were absurd and the world was unreal. Dylan took his personal drug-inspired research for freedom and escape through "Mr. Tambourine Man" and "Highway 61 Revisited," to the ego-dissolution of "Like A Rolling Stone" and <b>Blonde On Blonde</b>. Nevertheless, claims that all references to "railways" and "tracks" and capitalised H's on lyric sheets demonstrate that Dylan was a heroin addict or that "Blowin In The Wind" was secretly a song about the wonders of cocaine are probably best led in the more extreme realms of Dylanology.</i><br />
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<i>In the early sixties, sharing the experiences of marijuana and LSD between creative spirits had a missionary zeal about it. Rock writer Al Aronowitz turned both Ginsberg and Dylan on to marijuana; Dylan in turn introduced dope-smoking to the Beatles. They met him on their first tour of America. Dylan was "anti-chemical" at the time, probably due to a surfeit of amphetamine, and suggested that the Beatles try something more natural. Dylan rolled the first joint and passed it to Lennon, who, too scared to try, passed it on to Ringo. The episode ended with everyone rolling round the floor in hysterics. </i>(pp.116-117)<br />
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Sociologists who made a study of the "Woodstock Generation" found that, of the 1000 respondents, 43% believed most of the music of the sixties could only be understood by someone who had undergone the marijuana and psychedelic drug experience. This study was done in 1977-78, and the majority said their first pot experience was in a college dorm, with either Dylan or Led Zeppelin playing in the background. (Let us take: people who went to Woodstock who were age 20-25: they were born between 1944 and 1949: the first Boomers.)<br />
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Which brings me to Dylan's 1965 Newport Folk Festival "outrage."<br />
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Dylan appeared there playing an <i>electric guitar</i>, and much of the audience was famously outraged. It's difficult to gauge, in reading multiple sources, the extent of the disapproval, but when I learned about this historical moment, I was deep into playing Black Sabbath, Rush, and Deep Purple guitar solos on my electric guitar. I had always noted any overt response between what a person thought about the acoustic guitar versus the electric. I now think Steve Waksman's book <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=-DWxyYapaBwC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=steve+waksman+bob+dylan+goes+electric&source=bl&ots=hkdoZtnQJP&sig=gruxEVmJnnrcUcHrwUBzBFRQNhw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt87HR0eDPAhUlllQKHfvNBCwQ6AEIOjAF#v=onepage&q=steve%20waksman%20bob%20dylan%20goes%20electric&f=false">Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience</a></i> is the finest explication of the social construction of acoustic vs. electric. I also think the fascinating aspect of <i>timbre</i> and its cultural and existential-phenomenal impact is worth delving into, if it's your kinda thing. Dylan's move to electric illuminated the extent of culture's hidden ideologies surrounding electric vs. acoustic, and maybe he deserves a Nobel for just this....<br />
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Oh, but the Nobel was for Dylan as literature. Right. I got off-topic. Oh, well...<br />
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I consider "Subterranean Homesick Blues" to be proto-Jewish rap from the sixties.<br />
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One of my favorite bloggers, Tom Jackson, wrote a bit on Dylan's Nobel <a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/10/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-for-literature.html">HERE</a>.<br />
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"Acid isn't for the groovy people. Acid is for the president and people like that. The groovy people don't need to take acid." - Dylan in 1967, found on p.24 of R.U. Sirius's <b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Must-Stoned-R-U-Sirius/dp/B00CC7FUY0">Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars on Drugs</a></i></b><br />
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<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/137779/bob-dylan-won-nobel-prize-literature-conversation">A funny conversation</a> about Dylan's win.<br />
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I like this passage from a June 1984 <i>Rolling Stone </i>interview. Kurt Loder had asked Dylan a question about starting out on guitar and Dylan gives the rundown from his first Sears Silvertone guitar to hearing Woody Guthrie. "And when I heard Woody Guthrie, that was it, it was all over."<br />
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Loder: What struck you about him?<br />
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Dylan: Well, I heard them old records, where he sings with Cisco Houston and Sonny [Terry] and Brownie [McGhee] and stuff like that, and then his own songs. And he really struck me as an independent character. But no one ever talked about him. So I went through all his records I could find and picked all that up by any means I could. And when I arrived in New York, I was mostly singin' his songs and folk songs. At that time I was runnin' into people who were playing the same kind of thing, but I was combining elements of Southern mountain music with bluegrass stuff, English ballad-stuff. I could hear a song once and know it. (found pp.424-425 of <i style="font-weight: bold;">20 Years of Rolling Stone: What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been</i>)<br />
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Dylan led me back to Woody Guthrie. Point: Dylan.<br />
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Paul Krassner writes about a moment when Dylan was taking Hebrew lessons:<br />
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"When I asked why he was taking Hebrew lessons he said, 'I can't speak it.' Now I pointed an imaginary microphone at him and asked, 'So how do you feel about the six millions Jews who were killed in Nazi Germany?' His answer: 'I resented it.'" - <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Raving-Unconfined-Misadventures-Counterculture/dp/1593765037">Confessions of a Raving Unconfined Nut</a></i>, first ed, p.182<br />
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Mercurial Dylan Nobel Prize winner. Folk hero, beatnik, hippie, iconoclast, non-joiner, born-again Xtian, Jew, proto-rapper, proto-punk, oracle for a generation, influence on my god Hendrix, altered history by getting the Beatles stoned, enigmatic forever. I love Pynchon, but I'm okay with Dylan winning it.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; line-height: 24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i>s'il vous plaît voir <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">M. Bob Campbell</a> à propos de plus psychédélisme</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: xx-small;"><i><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; line-height: 24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 24px; white-space: pre-wrap;">graphique</span></i></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-27317546808949371202016-10-06T00:35:00.000-07:002016-10-17T03:22:05.673-07:00Our Neurogenetic Archives: A Few NotesI have a guitar student, and she had a high school assignment to write on John Locke and was worried. I piped up, unwisely: "Ask me anything about John Locke! I'm here to help ya!" She had the vaguest notion of what Locke was up to, but she did know he influenced the risk-takers and revolutionaries who established Unistat. I told her Locke has been shown to be pretty far-wrong with his notion of our minds at birth as <i>tabula rasa</i>. Already, I had lost her.<br />
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But aye...I think the jury has come in with a unanimous decision on this: we come equipped, fully loaded. For presumably many but not all imaginable things. This has been established, in historical time, a few seconds ago. Or say 1950-now.<br />
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But to what extent are we loaded? Is it only activated with experience in-the-world, with language, with education? Certainly we inherit a shuffled deck of genes from mom and dad. Is that it?<br />
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(Aside: this genetic inheritance, modified by drugs, learning, changes in environment, bombardment by cosmic rays, alterations in diet, etc: this is my best unpacking of "Plato's Problem" as mentioned briefly in the review of Knight's book on Chomsky, below.)<br />
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In his lecture after winning the <a href="http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1968/nirenberg-lecture.pdf">Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1968, Marshall Nirenberg</a> talked about "genetic memories." Well of course, our genes can be said to have "memories" in a certain metaphorical sense, but details about this metaphorical sense? As I tried to read his lecture (quite technical...but it turns out Nirenberg was wrong about "nonsense codons"!), I can't get a line on it. He's certainly not going off about how the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akashic_records">Akashic Records</a> were "right after all!" or anything like that. Nirenberg gets as close to mentioning the astral plane as Keanu Reeves gets to winning Best Actor.<br />
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But that was <i>way </i>back in 1968.<br />
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Since then, there's been an explosion of knowledge about epigenetics: it turns out experience-in-the-world of our immediate forebears does have influence on our genes/lives. <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/poverty-linked-to-epigenetic-changes-and-mental-illness-1.19972">Poverty</a> has been linked to epigenetic changes and mental illness, for example. Epigenetics is the study of how genes get expressed, and the more I read about it the more my head spins. RNA has much ado about gene expression. It's not merely a "messenger," as many of us were told in skool. Some genes get turned on or off like a binary light switch; others get modulated like a rheostat, gradually becoming more and brighter, or less and dimmer.<br />
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Here's another example from the past year: the <span id="goog_1789049381"></span><a href="http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-oxytocin-social-20160620-snap-story.html">methylation of the genes coding for the hormone oxytocin</a><span id="goog_1789049382"></span> - a hormone linked to nurturing, trust and social skills - can get taxed by intense emotional experiences. What a wonderful example of the new reality of understanding biology: a gene that helps us do very important things such as falling in love with baby as soon as she is born? It's processed in the brain, like a drug. (Hell: I see oxytocin as one of the more interesting endogenous drugs we have, and we can synthesize it too!) This hormone/drug, via social interaction in the world, affects our behavior, and the social world/environmental feedback can <i>alter</i> the expression of the gene. This circular-causal feedback looping of nature/nurture ---> nature/nurture, ad infinitum, till death do us part - seems like a microcosm of how Everything works. (And remember: then the epigenetic effects can get inherited by the next generation, via what happened historically in the environment, and just, wow. So: death is <i>not </i>the end of our story. We're connected in ways we didn't know before.)<br />
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Gosh dad!: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/08/science/parents-may-pass-down-more-than-just-genes-study-suggests.html?ribbon-ad-idx=6&rref=science&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Science&pgtype=article">Father may pass down more than his genes: his life experience too?</a><br />
Oh, my: <a href="https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2016/08/12/epigenetic-zs-could-a-bad-nights-sleep-alter-your-genes/">a bad night's sleep can epigenetically alter your genes</a>.<br />
Our genetic cups runneth over: <a href="http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-biology/2016/09/08/future-epigenetic-drugs/">epigenetic drugs are in the works</a>.<br />
Not fair: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/21/study-of-holocaust-survivors-finds-trauma-passed-on-to-childrens-genes">Study of Holocaust survivors show trauma passed on to children's genes</a>.<br />
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Think of how all this impacts the roiling and boiling issue of income inequality...<br />
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There's plenty more where that came in. A fine readable book for non-specialists that I can point to 'cuz I read it and was enthralled: Nessa Carey's <b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Epigenetics-Revolution-Rewriting-Understanding-Inheritance/dp/0231161174">The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance</a></i></b><br />
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Combine this with a few books on the new synthetic biology, CRISPR techniques, and what the hell: quantum computing and ye head shall be spaghettified.<br />
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But back to the neurogenetic archives. They seem to have some ontological status outside the drawing room where the Theosophical expert waxes on about past lives. But to what degree?<br />
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<a href="http://www.thinkpiecepublishing.com/interviews/the-think-piece-interview-dr-darold-treffert/">Darold Treffert</a> is a psychiatrist who's been studying savants and autistic people with extraordinary abilities in some domain of life. He's been at it for many decades. He became personal friends with Kim Peek, the person "Rain Man" was based on (though that character was a composite of many savants, says Treffert). In the beginning he was a traditional scientist who read Jung and thought it wasn't science: too soft. Now he thinks Jung was on to something; he thinks we may have genetic memories of things experienced in the past by others whom we often cannot identify. See his two books (mentioned in the text linked to) and give us a better explanation.<br />
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How wild this is! We can inherit knowledge? We can get bashed in the head and suddenly write symphonies, when before we couldn't even carry a tune? (Being somewhat conservative in certain areas, I'd rather not get my head bashed in and instead risk continuance of not being a genius.) Treffert says we inhabit a metaphorically left-brain (linear, rational) society; maybe activate latent abilities by spending more time doing what the Kulchur is telling us as "wasting time": doing art. (Here's yet another argument for Basic Income?)<br />
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Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson have a collectively dizzyingly rich series of speculations on neurogenetic memory, based on their reading in genetics, mythology, neuroscience, history, anthropology, and literature; they scattered their ideas throughout their many books, and I'd point to Leary's <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Info-Psychology-Instructions-Manufacturers-Navigational-Individual/dp/1561841056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475736924&sr=1-1&keywords=info-psychology"><i style="font-weight: bold;">Info-Pyschology</i> </a>and Wilson's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Rising-Robert-Anton-Wilson/dp/0692710604/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475736979&sr=1-1&keywords=prometheus+rising">Prometheus Rising</a></i> for starters...<br />
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David Foster Wallace, in an essay on David Lynch collected in <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0316925284">A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again</a></i>, riffs on our topic, saying our internal impressions and moods are, "An <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olla_podrida">olla podrida</a> of neurogenetic predisposition and phylogenetic myth and psychoanalytic schema and pop culture iconography." (p.199 in my copy) I hadda look up "olla podrida."<br />
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Well, now I said to myself, "I think I write too much for this texting world. I'll try to make this OG spew a short one," and so I'll end with a quote from my favorite cognitive neurolinguist, George Lakoff:<br />
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"When we understand all that constitutes the cognitive unconscious, our understanding of the nature of consciousness is vastly enlarged. Consciousness goes way beyond mere awareness of something, beyond the mere experience of qualia, beyond the awareness that you are aware, and beyond the multiple takes on immediate experience provided by various centers of the brain. Consciousness certainly involves all of the above, plus the immeasurably vast constitutive framework provided by the cognitive unconscious, which must be operating for us to be aware of anything at all."<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Flesh-Embodied-Challenge-Western/dp/0465056741">Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought</a></i>, p.11<br />
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Thanks for bringing your immeasurably vast constitutive framework of your cognitive unconscious to the OG: see ya!<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;">художник <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Боббі Кемпбелл</a> зробив цю графіку для мене</span><br />
<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-59414483052223904332016-09-19T23:27:00.000-07:002016-09-20T20:46:34.361-07:00Decoding Chomsky, by Chris KnightNoam Chomsky has often discussed "Plato's Problem," which he obviously finds fascinating. The problem is this: how can people know so much given a relative poverty of stimuli? Just today you found yourself talking to someone and the words just flowed out of you; you didn't have to think about them beforehand. You probably never uttered some of those sentences before, in the exact way. We all take this for granted, easily. Plato wondered about it and surmised that the reason we are able to know so much is because we already knew it in a previous life! You just talk to each other and knowledge sorta miraculously emerges via a quasi midwifery. Or rather: our forebears knew things and passed this ability to know (best example: apprehending our native language so easily) on to us. In a sense, we already "know" everything, but we need it drawn out by some...process. Today, people talk about genes. Chomsky takes Plato's "soul" and changes it to something like "biological language acquisition device," but you already knew that. (<----see what I did there?)<br />
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But this Plato Problem still seems iffy to me.<br />
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Chomsky has often written about "Orwell's Problem" too: how can people <i>not</i> know so many things that truly impact their lives, when the information is basically right in front of them? Noam has offered a solution to why this problem exists in books such as his famous one from 1988 (co-written with Edward Herman), <i style="font-weight: bold;">Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media</i>. Very sophisticated propaganda tools have been developed during the 20th century, suffice to write, for now.</div>
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<i>Chris Knight, radical British anthropologist, studied</i></div>
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<i> Chomsky's works for over two decades</i></div>
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In the 1970s an intellectual proposed there's a "Chomsky Problem," which is this: how can one man write a massive body of work on linguistics, while never mentioning the social world or politics in those books, while at the same time issuing scads of books critical of his own country's foreign and domestic policies? In Chomsky's political books the mention of science, much less linguistics is basically zero. The writer who (as far as I know) coined the "Chomsky Problem" thought Noam's linguistic work was brilliant; his political writings were, IIRC, "naive." </div>
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For at least 20 years I've wondered about the Chomsky Problem, but as I read more and more I came to the opposite conclusion: I thought Chomsky's linguistics were preposterous, while his criticism of the official lies of the State Department (and much much <i>much</i> more) were astonishingly acute.</div>
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I read books from the Right about Chomsky that were mostly <i>ad hominem </i>character assassinations. I've read far too many books by academics on his linguistics that see his grammar models as genius. Of course, the worldwide Left love his political books. There are at least five intellectuals who seem to have made their careers out of explaining, collecting, and championing Chomsky's oeuvre. </div>
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George Lakoff is one cognitive neurolinguist whose work makes a hell of a lot of sense to me, and he seems to despise Chomsky. Chomsky seems to despise Lakoff. (See Randy Allen Harris's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Linguistics Wars</i> on this, and I understand Harris has an update in the works!) Chomsky answers Lakoff's barbs by saying Lakoff doesn't "understand" his work. But Lakoff was one of the early bright followers of Chomsky's linguistics models, only to break with him - radically - when it became apparent Chomsky's linguistics would <i>never </i>be able to account for semantics (by which I mean meaning in language). And Lakoff (who has amassed quite a large body of scholarship himself) has barely had anything to say about Noam's politics. Lakoff is definitely a liberal of some sort...</div>
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So: Social Anthropologist Chris Knight (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Knight_(anthropologist)">Wiki</a>) has, almost miraculously, solved the Chomsky Problem. I've been trying to solve it for 20 years; I now feel the euphoria that one of us has solved it. My many blogspews here as the "Overweening Generalist" on my own attempts to solve the Chomsky Problem now seem horribly unsophisticated. And so it goes...<br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://yalebooks.com/book/9780300221466/decoding-chomsky">Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics</a></i>, recently released, is an astonishingly well-written and researched volume that will probably be the most important work in the history of ideas, post World War II, that you'll read for quite some time, and I say this if only out of Chomsky's massive influence. Knight has made a stellar contribution to the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of intellectuals 1945-now, and has explicated lucidly a new and dynamite version of how the "cognitive revolution" arose. </div>
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Knight has apparently spent the past 20 years researching this book and has managed to boil it all down to 240 pages, plus endnotes, a massive bibliography, and index. In an interview he mentioned that he'd finished a work in his field of Anthropology and hadn't really covered the origin of language in humans, because he felt he didn't know enough about the subject. Knowing Chomsky was Mr. Linguistics (having virtually single-handedly made it into a science and moving Linguistics from the Anthropology Department into the new Cognitive Science labs at your nearby Big University), he read Chomsky's linguistics in order to understand. And he ran into what I ran into: it's a cold, abstract to a painful degree, literally meaningless, an unworkable series of models that, - get this - <i>by definition</i>, has <i>nothing to do with humans communicating with each other</i>. </div>
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Chris Knight says he admires Chomsky's political work, and there's no reason not to believe him; he clearly admires Chomsky's scholarship and courage in this regard. As do I. At times Knight's said there are a lot of conscientious academics and intellectuals who have criticized the US as imperial power, but no one really even comes close to Chomsky. That said...</div>
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<i> Noam Chomsky, whose linguistic models are </i></div>
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<i> (finally!) <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/">seeming to be exposed as going nowhere</a></i></div>
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Anyone who has tried to follow Chomsky's many models of "Cartesian Linguistics" (AKA masochists) and thought to themselves, "Either I'm an idiot or this is a put-on, or possibly massive fraud" - that was me at one point - will know what I'm referring to: "Phrase Structure Rules," "Transformational Rules," "Grammar," "Deep Structure," the nature of the "language organ," "The Minimalist Program," "Universal Grammar," and "Merge"? All scientistic, all going nowhere, basically. (Knight runs all these down, pp. 173-179)</div>
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So, wait a minute: What? How can Noam write about lies and propaganda - which are by definition language and signs and symbols and social work among <i>human beings -</i> while his linguistics work has nothing to do with our social being? Because of an admitted "schizophrenic" life Chomsky admits he must lead, because, since the 1950s, he's worked in the very place that the Pentagon has funneled enormous sums of research money into: MIT. Perhaps because his quasi-kabbalistic linguistics allowed him that Ivory Tower opiate he needed to deal with the cognitive dissonance? If so, if this is anywheres near a <i>close </i>view of Chomsky, then it's dramatic and strange to the <i>nth </i>degree, no?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Chomsky once wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. He greatly admired the anarchists. He had just turned 10 years old. He decided he'd rejected Trotskyism by age 12. This is an interesting fellow, eh? </div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Noam had friends help him land the job at MIT, where he was able to work on the Pentagon's new idea: that computers and cybernetics and information theory would help make the world safe for capitalism after WWII. The idea that there's a language acquisition device - a very sophisticated computer - inside every human being's head? Very appealing to Pentagon folk. This was a computer whose source code must be cracked! And Chomsky's work looked like it was moving in exactly the direction they wanted. Maybe we can develop a computer that can translate any language into English; that should help in the Cold War effort against the Godless Commies. Let's let Chomsky lead a disembodied cognitive revolution. And he did. But: Noam didn't want to do any intellectual work that would help kill people in the name of Omnicorp.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
Here's where adept conspiracy theorists can take this book and run with it: did Chomsky hijack linguistics and purposefully make it useless? Neither Knight nor I believe this to be true: Chomsky seems to genuinely have ideas - which seem bizarre and fruitless to me - about a sort of purity of work in "science." There's one of William James's lectures on pragmatism from the early 20th century, in which James talks about two vastly different temperaments among thinkers: the "tough-minded" and the "tender-minded." Somehow, Chomsky is the apex of "tough-minded" when doing his political work, while his Linguistics is the very apogee of the "tender-minded."<br />
<br />
His persona as a man of conscience and political integrity seems to have been a perfect match for the Pentagon: see? The top man in Cognitive Science is free to write his books, give talks criticizing the Pentagon all over the world. Because we're a free society! </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But how does Chomsky manage this cognitive dissonance? Does he feel it? What have been the unintended consequences of Chomsky's total oeuvre? Knight answers these questions to my satisfaction. To those of you who've heard or read that Chomsky defended a Holocaust Denier named Robert Faurisson, was/is friends with former CIA director John Deutsch, and went against virtually the entire faculty and student body at MIT in defending Walt Rostow in getting his job back at MIT, even though Rostow has been nailed overwhelmingly in Chomsky's books on Vietnam? Knight satisfactorily answers these queries, too. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As an Anthropologist, Knight treats the heavily-funded-by-Pentagon cognitive scientists as a "tribe." Why did this particular form of nonsense catch on so wildly in postwar Unistat? Knight gives a fascinating answer. If the only other superpower seemed to run on ideas based in matter (Dialectical Materialism), then what if we do away with matter? And, to a large extent, they did. Information/data is weightless, travels at the speed of light: matter is secondary. So is the Body...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Along the way, you'll learn about the deep roots of Sociobiology (and a form of scientific feminism that needs to come back from being beaten down by anti-science Leftists in academia), how a Russian Futurist/surrealist from the first two decades of the 20th century influenced Chomsky without Chomsky seeming to know about it, and much more.<br />
<br />
If you had to ask me, what was the overall value of Chomsky's linguistic work at MIT? I'd say it was "Don't study language using this approach! Language is and has no doubt always been a deeply social thing!"</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you're interested in politics, philosophy, and the idea of "science" being an open and public - and possibly ultimately <i>unified </i>thing?: <b><i>Decoding Chomsky </i></b>is for you. If you're already a seasoned reader of Chomsky, I feel safe to say you'll learn a few new things from this book. For me, the book spoke to my interests in the origin of language (of which Chomsky's work is literally laughable) and the fallout from the new and wonderfully interdisciplinary "cognitive sciences." Knight let me on to some reasons I hadn't even considered about why my valuation of being a "generalist" has taken such a beating since the 1950s. Not long ago I wrote <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-korzybski-waned-some-educated.html">a piece about why I thought Alfred Korzybski's work had waned</a>, and Knight fills in a lot of gaps there, too. I'm interested in the history of Structuralism, the academy, "PR", mass stupidity, intellectuals, embodied knowledge, Descartes, Plato, Newton, Galileo and Bertrand Russell, the possible synthesizing of all knowledge, why many people have the idea that "science" isn't for them, the idea of theory and practice going hand in hand, and the timeless notion that ideas have consequences and one clue to this is looking at the time and place and social situation in which ideas blast off and catch on. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So, I loved this book. My intellectual friends have already heard WAY too much about my problems with Chomsky, and I'm only so lathered up over Noam because I love him, although I know it doesn't seem like it. Ya just hafta take my word. - OG</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b><a href="http://scienceandrevolution.org/">Chris Knight's website for further ideas about Chomsky and MIT</a></b><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Knight-on-Chomsky-2010.pdf">Here's an interview with Chris Knight in the journal </a><i><a href="http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Knight-on-Chomsky-2010.pdf">Radical Anthropology</a> </i>from five or so years ago that gives a lot of the gist and pith of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Decoding Chomsky. </i>It was this interview, sent to me by Sue Howard, that felt like a revelation: "Here's a guy who seems to have maybe solved the Chomsky Problem!" </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<b>If you have been taken by Chomsky's ideas about language and want to remediate, some suggestions:</b></div>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">The Major Transitions of Evolution</i>, by John Maynard Smith and Eors Szathmary</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Adam's Tongue</i>, by Derek Bickerton</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Cultural Origins of Human Cognition</i>, by Michael Tomasello</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought</i>, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">From Molecule to Metaphor</i>, by Jerome Feldman</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding</i>, by Sarah Hrdy</div>
<div>
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">The Way We Think</i>, by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier<br />
<br />
Here's something many of us are looking forward to: <a href="http://www.booktrade.info/index.php/showarticle/46443"><i style="font-weight: bold;">7000 Universes: How the Languages We Speak Shape the Way We Think</i>, by the stellar Lera Boroditsky.</a> Gotta wait till 2018, though...</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you're way too busy and don't think you can get to reading <i style="font-weight: bold;">Decoding Chomsky </i>soon, <a href="http://douglaslain.net/zero-books-81-decoding-chomsky/#comment-153839">HERE</a> is a pretty damned good podcast interview of Chris Knight about Chomsky, by the thoughtful and erudite publisher and <a href="http://douglaslain.net/">science fiction writer Douglas Lain</a>.<br />
<br />
<i>Post scriptum:</i> After writing about the Two Chomskys in light of William James's ideas of the "tough-minded" and "tender-minded" I remembered <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2012/10/william-james-and-tough-and-tender.html">I blogged on it four years ago</a>.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>Psychedelische Grafik von <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></i></span></span></div>
michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-59903964107510394072016-09-14T17:17:00.002-07:002016-09-19T21:30:58.319-07:00Surveillance in Unistat Pre-Snowden, File #23a "Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing." (see below)<br />
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"A case can be made...that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of all Cold War regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us."<br />
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1998 book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Secrecy: The American Experience</i>, p.227<br />
<br />
Moynihan the intellectual in the Senate. Published 10 books before going to Congress, vacillated from NeoLiberal to NeoCon. You figure it out.<br />
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Meanwhile, after the Berlin Wall came down, the intellectuals I was reading (kicked out of academia or were never part of it), or Noam Chomsky (as special case), were (mostly) predicting "Islamic Terrorism" as what the Pentagon would need in order to keep their rotten Show on the road. None of these writers I was reading were allowed on TV, so for most Unistatians, this idea didn't exist.<br />
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<i>Kathryn Olmsted, History professor at</i><br />
<i> University of California-Davis, who writes</i><br />
<i> books on spies and national security issues</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Earlier this year I read U.C. Davis History professor Kathryn Olmsted's book <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Right-Out-California-Business-Conservatism/dp/1620970961">Right Out of California</a></i>, which has the thesis that the Unistatian Right as it's now constituted started in the farmland of California in the Depression, because FDR's labor people realized he needed the South, so there were no protections for labor organizers of the farmworkers in California. I found it fairly persuasive, and I'm a fan of Olmsted's books now.<br />
<br />
In this book I happened upon the story of a US General named Ralph Deman, who had accumulated a massive file on anyone he thought might harbor thoughts he might deem "dangerous," that is: anything that didn't toe the corporate state line. And he shared his files with right wing groups and the cops. (See <i style="font-weight: bold;">Right Out of California</i>, pp.151-157)<br />
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And some of us at one time thought J. Edgar Hoover was the only one. I thought so in my 20s.<br />
<br />
*-regarding Ralph Deman, one of Olmsted's grad students responded to an email query about information sources on him. Obviously you can Duck Duck Go Deman, but Scott Pittman cited books titled <i style="font-weight: bold;">Policing America's Empire</i> and <i style="font-weight: bold;">Negative Intelligence</i>.<br />
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<i>Esquire </i>magazine decided to send William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, and Jean Genet to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention in "Czechago." Genet had a line: "The danger for America is not Mao's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Thoughts</i>; it is the proliferation of cameras." (see <i style="font-weight: bold;">Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties</i>, p.98)<br />
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Poet as Distant Early Warning system?<br />
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While Patty Hearst's trial was ongoing, it came out that her mother - Catherine - gave or lent $60,000 to $70,000 to a company called Research West back in 1969. What was "Research West"? It was "a private right-wing spy organization that maintained files supplied by confessed burglar Jerome Ducote." (<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/patty-hearst-the-twinkie-murders">Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders</a></i>, Paul Krassner, p.35) There had been journalistic investigations of this, but Hearst-owned newspaper reporters were told to stop investigating, for obvious reasons. A Santa Cruz paper - the <i>Sundaz</i>, not owned by the Hearsts, did investigate, and found that, before Mrs. Hearst bought it, it was supported by "contributions" averaging $1000 and, well, I'll quote Krassner here on who was "contributing":<br />
<br />
<i>Pacific Telephone, Pacific Gas and Electric, railroads, steamship lines, banks, and </i>[Hearst's own] <i>The Examiner. In return, the files were available to those companies, as well as to local police and sheriff departments, the FBI, the CIA and the IRS. The Examiner paid $1500 a year through 1975 to retain the services of Research West. </i>(p.35, Krassner)<br />
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It gets deeper and more (of course!) nefarious, but I'd like you to read Krassner's book to see how much we've missed from the Official Story.<br />
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<i>Investigative satirist and national treasure</i><br />
<i> </i><i> Paul Krassner</i><br />
<br />
The good folks at Open Culture are currently (as of the date I'm writing this) featuring an <a href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/an-animated-aldous-huxley-identifies-the-dystopian-threats-to-our-freedom-1958.html">animated 1958 Aldous Huxley predicting our world</a>. "Dystopian threats to freedom." How alarmist! And yet...<br />
Aldous immediately presented a threat to assholes like J. Edgar Hoover (who denied the Mafia existed, because they knew he was gay and could crush him, and furthermore, he protected and was friends with a major mobster, Frank Costello, see <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Secret Histories: An Anthology</i>, ed. by John S. Friedman, article "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," by Anthony Summers, 1993, pp. 192-200), and other protectors of the 1%. Huxley arrived in Unistat in 1938, and author Herbert Mitgang obtained Huxley's FBI files. "Of the 130 pages, 111 were released to me, many heavily censored. The net of them: he and his daring and original writings were watched." - <i style="font-weight: bold;">Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors</i>, pp.192-194<br />
<br />
Mitgang surmises the FBI tried to understand Huxley's famous book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Brave New World</i>, but apparently couldn't. Most bright 10th graders I know understand it. <i>This has always been what we're dealing with, folks: losers. Cops who profess to love the Constitution, but in reality hate every bit of it. They (not all of them, of course) seem to be carriers of what Wilhelm Reich called "the <a href="http://anarchy.org.au/anarchist-texts/reich-emotional-plague/">emotional plague</a>." </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Mitgang notes from Aldous's file that Hoover and his loser cop-pals thought Huxley was a threat, largely due to his overt <i>pacifism. </i>Think about that for awhile. Furthermore, the FBI subjected <i style="font-weight: bold;">Brave New World </i>to "cryptographic examination," and Mitgang observes, "but nothing subversive was discovered."<br />
<br />
[NB: A bit of divagation: The British philosopher Peter Strawson would read my judgments on Hoover and his minions (as "assholes," etc) and assert that my judgments, which merely imply that they should be held accountable, reflect attitudes which derive from my own participation in personal relationships: forgiveness, resentment, gratitude, indignation, etc. I find this a very plausible idea.- OG]<br />
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I'm a subscriber to <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/">Muckrock</a>, which specializes in obtaining and making public government information via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Not long ago I wondered about Robert Anton Wilson's file, so I made a request and got nowhere. Then I realized Michael Morisy of Muckrock had already tried to get RAW's FBI file, and <a href="https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/robert-anton-wilson-fbi-documents-2752/#file-6713">posted THIS</a>. Note the FBI were "unable to identify main file records responsive to FOIA." ("Main file records"? What others might there be?)<br />
<br />
Then, as we read "Congress excluded three discrete categories of law enforcement and national security records from the requirements of the FOIA." You and I wonder what this means. We can't know. We're given some bureaucratic numbers and symbols to prove that what Congress did is true. Okay. Obama ran promising the "most transparent" administration ever, and yet 'tis more Orwell: he's probably been the <i>least</i> transparent. What do these assholes think "Freedom of Information" means?<br />
<br />
Stupidly, I then realized my blogging friend <a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2013/03/robert-anton-wilsons-fbi-file.html">Tom Jackson had already covered this in 2013</a>. (Note the one comment was from Bruce Kodish, who has self-published a <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Korzybski-Biography-Bruce-I-Kodish/dp/0970066406">wonderful fat biography on Alfred Korzybski</a>. If you're as interested in Korzybski as I am, you <i>must </i>get hold of this; it's a gem and divulges scads of info on its subject, info that seems to have only been privy to Korzybski's closest colleagues.)<br />
<br />
If you've been involved in trying to get info under FOIA, you may have acquired government files that are so redacted that what's left is meaningless. So, we go from Orwell to Kafka. If you're not convinced, look at what the FBI sent Morisy on RAW: they say records for the request might exist. Or they might not. They won't tell us.<br />
<br />
But we can be practically certain RAW has a fairly substantial file, somewhere in the Belly of the Beast.<br />
<br />
From RAW's introduction to Donald Holmes's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Illuminati Conspiracy: The Sapiens System</i>:<br />
<br />
<i>During my last year of employment as Associate Editor of </i>Playboy, <i>a certain executive came into my office one day and closed the door behind him. He told me that my home phone was tapped and that I was under surveillance by the Red Squad of the Chicago Police Force. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>I was stunned, and asked how he knew this. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>He replied that certain people in the </i>Playboy <i>empire had made an arrangement with a Chicago police official. The official received regular money through some circuitous route that was not explained to me; in return he notified his </i>Playboy <i>contacts whenever an executive of the firm was under police investigation. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>That was when I first realized how often there are spies spying on spies.</i><br />
<i>-</i>p.9<br />
<br />
RAW finds that, because he was involved in the anti-war movement and had talked to some Black Panthers, some spook for some agency dreamed up that RAW was running guns to the Black Panthers. RAW guesses some low-level spy wanted to beef up his reports to justify his work. Later RAW found out that there were "over 5000 government agents assigned to infiltrate peace groups in Chicago alone" (p.8), and that this was all part of COINTELPRO, which was meant to make everyone in a peace group paranoid that one of another of their fellows were spies for the government, and in effect reduce the efficacy of the peace movement...because we're a "free country" and our "way of life" is so superior to the Rooskies.<br />
<br />
RAW says no one at Playboy thought he was dangerous, and offered to support him legally if anything happened.<br />
<br />
Then RAW became an intimate of Dr. Leary, so that file must be very thick. Or one would think. But we don't know how to ask/guess the right questions in order to obtain why they thought Robert Anton Wilson was worth surveilling/wiretapping, etc.<br />
<br />
Through most of his time as counterculture writer and activist, RAW knew he was being spied on, but decided to be amused by it, quoting Helen Keller: "Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing."<br />
<br />
I know all of this seems comparatively ultra-innocent in light of what we know now that we're in the Snowden Era; I just want y'all to be aware of how the Official Story about "who we are, as a nation" clashes so radically with "reality."<br />
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<i style="color: #212121; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">grafikai Bob Campbell</a></i><br />
michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-72325603078003841802016-09-09T02:22:00.000-07:002016-09-11T04:02:48.022-07:00On Compulsive Diarists, of Which I Seem To Be OneAs 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
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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 <i style="font-weight: bold;">Myra Breckinridge</i>, 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.<br />
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<i>Gore Vidal, who half-jokingly asserted that diarists were dangerous.</i><br />
<i> When he was in his early twenties he lived with Anais Nin.</i><br />
<br />
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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Assassin%27s_Diary">Arthur Bremer</a>, for example) to their diaries. People who wrote only for themselves were suspect. It hurt, a little. But I kept on.<br />
<br />
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. (!)<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Or just to buy space in a closet.<br />
<br />
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...<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Taxi Driver</i>, 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.)<br />
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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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUxEyc_cEg8">the SLA alive</a>, once they were sure Patty Hearst wasn't in that safe-house in Los Angeles.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Taming of the Shrew</i> just a few months ago." But I'm like that with film noir. Read my...errr...journal and note how often I re-watched <i>Double Indemnity</i> or <i>Out of the Past</i> or <i>The Killers</i> or even <i>Armored Car Robbery</i> (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)...<br />
<br />
The writer Sarah Manguso published a 93 page book about her 20+ years of compulsive diarizing, and I found <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/02/when-diary-keeping-gets-in-the-way-of-living/386321/">this interview with Julie Beck</a> 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.<br />
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<i>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.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
For me, this is redolent of a Borges piece, or maybe something from Oliver Sacks.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
In the Beck interview Manguso comments on her diary book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Ongoingness: The End of a Diary</i>, 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 <i>love </i>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 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055032/">Truffaut's </a><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0055032/">Jules and Jim</a> </i>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 <i>shocked </i>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 <i>menage,</i> 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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>femme </i>etc..." Then I quickly go back to being bathed in the incredible pathos of the film. (In truth I love Truffaut's <i>400 Blows</i> even more.)<br />
<br />
What actually happens to the characters at the end of <i>Jules and Jim</i> 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.<br />
<br />
This apprehension of how individual nervous systems abstract signals from our environment and concentrate them: this <i>otherness </i>of other peoples' minds is what makes me love them. Because, somehow, perhaps my diarizing helped me in this appreciation, via personal feedback?<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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!"<br />
<br />
Oh, well.<br />
<br />
<b>Some Sources Read Just Before Writing This</b><br />
<a href="http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2016/01/poor-historians">"Poor Historians: Some Notes on the Medical Memoir," by Suzanne Koven</a><br />
<a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/the-pleasure-of-keeping-and-rereading-diaries/">"The Pleasure of Keeping - and Re-reading - Diaries," by Elisa Segrave</a><br />
<a href="http://www.seeker.com/personal-manifestos-never-a-good-sign-1767396450.html">"Personal Manifestos: Never A Good Sign"</a><br />
<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2015/03/ongoingness_by_sarah_manguso_reviewed.html">Jia Tolentino's insightful review of Manguso's book about her diary</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i> votre blog en demandant ici!</i></span><br />
<b><br /></b>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-89238455342354879572016-08-29T02:21:00.001-07:002016-08-30T01:09:52.942-07:00Occultists, Mystics, Artists, and AsthmaRecently, in the group reading of Robert Anton Wilson's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Cosmic Trigger Vol 1</i> over at <a href="http://rawillumination.net/">RAWIllumination.net</a> (<a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/08/cosmic-trigger-online-reading-group_22.html">see this entry</a>), there is a brief discussion about ceremonial magicians and their problems with asthma. MacGregor Mathers, Allan Bennett, Aleister Crowley, and Israel Regardie are mentioned as occultists who had varyingly lengthy bouts with asthma.<br />
<br />
In Regardie's book on Crowley, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Eye In The Triangle: An Interpretation of Aleister Crowley</i>, there is a passage about when Allan Bennett moved in with Crowley and taught him a lot about magick:<br />
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<i>Bennett must have also taught him the art of skrying in the spirit vision, traveling clairvoyance, investigating symbols, their meanings known or not, so that their true significance could be divined. He must have given Crowley a good training in Qabalistic processes too. There is an essay or two of his remaining which indicates profundity and depth of insight. It was an invaluable training for Crowley -- one too that is at the bottom of the very real skill he came to have in practical occultism. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>However, there was something else that must have had a far-reaching effect on him. And that was bronchial asthma. I imagine the damp, wretched English climate did nothing to alleviate this condition.</i><br />
<i>-</i>p.113<br />
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<i>Allan Bennett: taught Crowley a lot, severe </i><br />
<i> asthmatic, Buddhist, died in 1923.</i><br />
<br />
Regardie mentions (this period with Bennett was around 1898-1900) that the drugs prescribed for asthma then were opium, morphine, chloroform and cocaine. These worked for a while, but then "narcosis" brought an end to a drug's efficacy. In Lawrence Sutin's biography of Crowley, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Do What Thou Wilt</i>, Sutin writes that Bennett's asthma was worse than Crowley's and we get this picture of Bennett from Uncle Al:<br />
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<i>Allan Bennett was tall, but his sickness had already produced a stoop. His head, crowned with a shock of wild black hair, was intensely noble; the brows, both wide and lofty, overhung indomitable piercing eyes. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Crowley believed that due to Bennett's asthma, Bennett, "regarded the pleasures of living (and, above all, those of physical love) as diabolical illusions devised by the enemy of mankind in order to trick souls into accepting the curse of existence." -p.66<br />
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Yea, I can see how asthma might contribute to such a worldview. Especially when whatever drugs you were using stopped working. Or made things worse.<br />
<br />
Crowley's asthma got worse and worse through the first 15 years of the 20th century, and by 1919, when he came back to England after spending time in Unistat during World War I, a doctor prescribed heroin. He remained hooked for the rest of his life, one of the horrible ironies of Crowley's life, which was overwhelmingly about using the powers of the human Will to overcome anything.<br />
<br />
In Wilson's book, asthma is discussed as a "chest disease" which some people catch and some are eventually cured. Because of my lifelong "moderate-severe" asthma, which has long been under good control by allopathic medicine, I dispute this picture of asthma, but acknowledge the wheezy sufferings of others quite readily. For example, Crowley smoked, according to Regardie (who for a while was Aleister's personal secretary), "dark perique tobacco by the continuous pipeful, which could only aggravate the already grossly irritated condition of his bronchi." (Regardie, p.114)<br />
<br />
Regardie links asthma to stress, and I think he's probably right, but stress seems to make a flare-up of my own asthma less likely. This is one reason why I subscribe to the psycho-biological idea around asthma as a <i>syndrome. </i>Any asthmatic can tell you of conversations with other asthmatics in which a discussion of what your "triggers" are vary wildly. For instance, Regardie assumes the "wretched English climate" made Bennett's asthma worse, but I do really well during cold, damp rainy weeks. When growing up in the San Gabriel Valley part of Los Angeles, the hot, dry Santa Ana winds were menacing and treacherous to me. (ER at 3AM).<br />
<br />
So certain climates, pollens, foods, exercises, pets, etc: there's quite a variance among asthmatics. It does appear to be an autoimmune disease, but read the best, most up-to-date technical literature on what happens with with the immune system and you'll quickly realize it's a pretty complex cascade of events. For some "reason" your body thinks it's being invaded by something dangerous, and over-reacts.<br />
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I assume this has something to do with epigenetic effects, early exposure to smoke or smog, the individual's microbiome, and the <a href="http://www.livescience.com/54078-hygiene-hypothesis.html">Hygiene Hypothesis</a> probably has something to do with it too.<br />
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Regardie, after getting into a tiff with Crowley and splitting with him in 1932, developed asthma, and relates the time he spent with occultist Dion Fortune and her physician-husband, and Regardie's asthma attack, and how they took care of him. Regardie returned to New York and kept a correspondence with an asthmatic English writer interested in the occult, and this was where Regardie learned of the idea "that somehow asthma is an occupational disease of occultists and mystics!"-p.116<br />
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By the mid-1930s ephedrine and epinephrine inhalers were available, and these work better than anything else for asthma attacks, but they stimulate the heart too much. Regardie thought he had a heart attack at one point, eventually received Reichian therapy, pronounced himself "cured" and had little problem with asthma after that. Makes me wonder...<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_D._Chumbley">Occultist/magician Andrew D. Chumbley </a>died in 2004. Seems like his asthma was as bad as Bennett's.<br />
<br />
Robert Anton Wilson (who got polio at age 4, in 1936, and was "cured" by Sister Kenny's method, pronounced as "quack" medicine by the AMA) gave <a href="http://www.soundstrue.com/store/robert-anton-wilson-explains-everything-3602.html">a long interview with Michael Taft</a> in the final decade of his life. I find this section germane:<br />
<br />
Taft: Do you think the early experience of polio had much effect on you?<br />
<br />
RAW: Yea, I think it underlines the tone of anxiety and paranoia that you find in all of my novels. Basically, all the characters in my novels come to a point where they're convinced the universe has been organized just to destroy them!<br />
<br />
This makes a lungful of sense to me. Not that I think asthma is anywheres near the catastrophe of polio, mind you. I do think being a young person, holed up at home sick, becoming fiendishly bookish and spending a lot of time alone with your own imagination? It can have lifelong effects. And there <i>will be drugs...</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
[Asthma <i>seems </i>to accompany pronounced problems with anxiety, for reasons to be easily guessed at. And we all desire a feeling of agency, but I suspect childhood-into-adulthood debilitations such as autoimmune diseases (and polio) enlarge and distort this desire, possibly leading to a life of mysticism, art, or magick. A third desire that seems to bubble out of this for <a href="http://deoxy.org/wiki/Sombunall">sombunall</a> asthmatics: a yearn to escape. Okay, okay Dear Reader, you say you've always been perfectly healthy - if "anxious" - and yet you desire these same "things"? You're in the club with us! Even when we're not suffering miserably, we love company. Mostbunall?]<br />
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Regardie says Crowley's "association with Allan (Bennett-OG) had another very important sequel. I have already indicated that he used drugs to assuage his sufferings from asthma. In doing so, he must have discovered that some of them had a distinct effect on the mind. They expanded consciousness, and produced a simulacrum of the mystical or religious experience." -p. 117<br />
<br />
In the 1950s-early 1960s, Asthmador could be bought over-the-counter at drug stores. It had <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datura_stramonium">datura</a> in it. It had datura's nightshade cousin, belladonna, in it. These, in sufficient doses, were truly hallucinatory. <a href="https://bathroombio.wordpress.com/2009/04/05/asthma-induced-hallucinations/">HERE</a>'s a trip report. RAW discusses Asthmador, and other nightshade hallucinogenics, in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Sex, Drugs and Magick</i>, pp.84-104.<br />
<br />
RAW - one of the great scholars of the occult/mystical/hermetic tradition, said that modern occultism had three main roots: Madame Blavatsky, Crowley, and Gerald Gardner, who revived pagan Wicca, which thrives today. Gardner too had asthma.<br />
<br />
I've not seen evidence that Blavatsky was asthmatic.<br />
<br />
When I was a kid, I looked for lists of famous athletes who were asthmatic. As I got older, I pay attention when I find out certain people had it: Beethoven (coffee was probably the best remedy he had); Vivaldi, Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Leonard Bernstein; Ambrose Bierce; Orson Welles; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebser">Jean Gebser</a>. Etc. There are a LOT of us. Proust...<br />
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The best writing I've seen on the nightshade/tropane alkaloids is in Dale Pendell's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Pharmako/Gnosis</i>, pp.243-264<br />
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Tomatoes, potatoes, and hot peppers are also part of the nightshade family. Kinda makes me wonder.<br />
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The best history of asthma I've read was <i style="font-weight: bold;">Asthma: The Biography</i>, by Mark Jackson<br />
The best book of a modern personal account of living a life with asthma that I've seen is easily <i style="font-weight: bold;">Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores His Illness</i>, by Tim Brookes<br />
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Cannabis is a well-known bronchodilator. It works in a pinch, and because of Reagan's War on Pot, our best gardeners went underground, fiddled with the genetics of cannabis indicas and sativas, and now it's so good you hardly have to inhale much vegetable matter...which in the long run <i>can't </i>possibly be good for the bronchii, can it? At any rate, less is more with the Green Goddess.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><a href="http://bobbycampbell.tumblr.com/">arte psicodélica por Bob Campbell</a></i></span><br />
<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-2476397546254733432016-08-22T01:14:00.000-07:002016-08-24T00:09:01.015-07:00Food/Sex/Death: Edition Beth<i>Shake and shake</i><br />
<i>The catsup bottle,</i><br />
<i>None will come,</i><br />
<i>And then a lot'll.</i><br />
-Richard Armour<br />
<br />
<b>Food: Tomatoes and other Fruits and Veggies and Tom Robbins</b><br />
As a kid my mom served up a lot of sliced tomatoes on our sandwiches. I remember she diced tomatoes for the bean tacos that were mostly refried beans and Crisco-based tiny corn tortillas that were prone to disintegration upon first touch.<br />
<br />
At least I <i>thought</i> those were tomatoes mom bought from the big corporate grocer. One day, just out of high school, I got a day gig painting a guy's parents' house. As I remember, the guy who hired me seemed to put out an "I'm a low-level mobster" vibe. His parents were <i>very </i>Italian and his father - who I will call "Mario" - didn't speak English, except for the word "fuck." He liked to say "A fuckeen..." a fuckeen <i>something;</i> I could never quite make out the rest. He'd then look at me and laff, like we were two guys sharing a guy moment with him swearing. He could have had no idea about the sort of language my fellow musicians and I were using in the evening.<br />
<br />
Anyway, this guy grew his own tomatoes, and his wife - a little firecracker who was always cooking killer-ass italian food and spoke English fluently and was about 4'6" - gave me a big bag of Mario's tomatoes each day before I went home. That first day was a revelation, and you saw it coming with my foreshadowing: it was the first time I ate REAL tomatoes, and crikey! they were ridiculously tasty-good, and constituted a minor variety of religious experience. I had friends over and held out a tomato:<br />
<br />
"Here, check this out. Eat this thing."<br />
"Uhh...looks like a very red red tomato to me, what's the catch?"<br />
<br />
I said, just walk over to the sink there and eat it plain; if you want to put a little salt on it it's next to the sink. And in moments they knew too: we'd all been had: tomatoes were <i>not </i>the watery vaguely tomato-ish things we'd been led to believe. I now think those fake tomatoes were merely meant for <i>texture. </i><br />
<br />
And now at farmer's markets all over Unistat you can get these goddess-sent delicious things, if you don't already grow them yourself. What a simple, life-giving, unadulterated joy to eat REAL tomatoes! The "little things in life" can loom large at times.<br />
<br />
After that, anytime I went to the corporate grocer and saw the tomatoes all piled up I had to stifle the urge to corner the manager and personally indict him for conspiracy to foist faux tomatoes on the unsuspecting public.<br />
<br />
Now, as I said, you can find flavorful tomatoes all over Unistat. It almost cancels out that whole Iran-Contra Scandal, in my spacial hemisphere's moon-logic...<br />
<br />
One of our greatest poetic prose writers, Tom Robbins, has been riffing on fruits and vegetables in a psychedelic way throughout his career. Here he is in a slightly more sober mood, commenting on our topic:<br />
<br />
"Without apparent guilt or shame, supermarkets from coast to coast regularly post signs reading VINE RIPENED TOMATOES atop produce bins piled high with tomatoes that have never ever experienced the joys of ripening; that, in fact, are hard, usually more pink than red, often streaked with yellow, orange, or even green; and when cut open will reveal pectin deposits of ghostly white. Back when one of those babies last saw a vine, it might have passed for the viridescent apple of Granny Smith's eye. Merchants who through ignorance, indifference, or outright chicanery untruthfully promise 'vine-ripened tomatoes' could and should be prosecuted under truth-in-advertising laws."<br />
-pp.69-70, "Holy Tomato" from <b><i>Tibetan Peach Pie</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
Robbins tried LSD in 1963 and soon after quit his day job by "calling in well." He moved to Manhattan looking for the Others, and attended a talk by Timothy Leary at Cooper Union. Afterward Robbins found himself at the same vegetable stand as Leary. Uncle Tim asked Tom Robbins (then a totally unknown writer) "how to tell which brussels sprouts were good." Robbins told Leary to choose the ones that "were smiling."<br />
p.244, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Aquarius Revisited</i>, Peter O. Whitmer<br />
<br />
Here's Robbins riffing on the ubiquitous blackberry brambles found all over the Pacific Northwest, and even down into my San Francisco Bay Area:<br />
<br />
"And the fruit, mustn't forget the fruit. It would nourish the hungry, stabilize the poor. The more enterprising winos could distill their own spirits. Seattle could become the Blackberry Brandy Capital of the World. Tourists would spend millions annually on Seattle blackberry jam. The chefs at the French restaurants would dish up duck in purplish sauces, fill once rained-on noses with the baking aromas of <i>gateau mure de ronce. </i>The whores might become known, affectionately, as blackberry tarts. The Teamsters could try to organize the berry pickers. And in late summer, when the brambles were proliferating madly, growing faster than the human eye can see, the energy of their furious growth could be hooked up to generators that, spinning with blackberry power, could supply electrical current for the entire metropolis. A vegetative utopia, that's what it would be. Seattle, Berry Town, encapsulated, self-sufficient, thriving under a living ceiling, blossoms in its hair, juice on its chin, more blackberries - and more! - in its future. Consider the protection offered. What enemy paratroopers could get through the briars?"<br />
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Still Life With Woodpecker</i>, p.130<br />
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It would be easy to index a gaggle of vegetative riffs in the Robbins oeuvre, but I'll leave us with this one:<br />
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"Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. Of our trees, the palm is obviously the stand-up comedian. Among fowl, the jester's cap is worn by the duck. Of our fruits and vegetables, the tomato could play Falstaff, the banana a more slapstick role. As Hamlet- or Macbeth - the beet is cast. In largely vegetarian India, the beet is rarely eaten because its color is suggestive of blood. Out, damned <i>mangel-wurzel.</i>"<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">-Jitterbug Perfume</i>, p.76<br />
<br />
Bonus Track: <a href="https://psmag.com/the-tomato-tariff-the-politics-of-fruits-and-vegetables-4501a238784b#.wa5a9eb0f">Here's sociologist Lisa Wade on the history of tomatoes being thought of as "vegetables"</a> and not what they "really are" according to botanists: fruit. I like this short article because we're reminded of the longstanding scientific dipshittery of the Unistat Supreme Court, that fruits are like "ovaries," and that social constructionism may be the most important part of what people now seem to dismiss (stupidly) as "postmodernism." My labeling of dipshittery was hasty: the unanimous SCOTUS in the late 19th c were merely basing their opinion on their preferred social construction; scientific classification seems also largely a social invention.<br />
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<i>an erotic money-shot from the vegetable world</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
"Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest." - Anatole France<br />
<br />
<b>Sex: Gender </b><br />
Speaking of social construction...<br />
<br />
A few months ago I was re-reading an old Robert Benchley book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Early Worm</i>, from 1927. In one comic essay he begins joking off something he'd read by a German biologist named <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Hartmann">Max Hartmann</a> (<----curiously paltry Wiki, eh?). Benchley had read that Hartmann's sexual determination studies revealed that no one was purely 100% male or female. The Wiki here says Hartmann was later critical of the Nazis, but some source I neglected to mention in my notes revealed that Hartmann had continued to do research in Germany under the Nazi regime. Anyway, Benchley had a fine time with this idea - Hartmann (as filtered through Benchley) thought that if 60% of your cells were male, then you were "male." And so on. Benchley wondered how this might pertain to the Broadway stage:<br />
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<i>Roger</i>: Ever since that night I met you at the dance, my male percentage has been increasing. I used to register 65%. Yesterday in Liggetts I took a test and it was eighty-one.<br />
<br />
<i>Mary</i>: You had your heavier overcoat on.<br />
<br />
<i>Roger</i>: Please, dear, this is no time for joking. I never was more serious in all my life. And that means only one thing. Haven't you - aren't you - do you register the same as you did?<br />
<br />
<i>Mary (looking at her finger-nails)</i>: No. I have gone up seven points. But I thought it was because I had cut down on my starches.<br />
<br />
...Benchley goes on for a couple of pages here. What a different time. Now, in 2016, if you're a transgender person you are subject to being followed into public restrooms and outed...but that's North Carolina, and I'm sure their battle with sexual fascism will turn out okay.<br />
<br />
I do think parts of Unistat are horribly behind. Not just North Carolina, either. <a href="http://io9.gizmodo.com/5906663/will-sweden-abolish-the-concept-of-gender?popular=true">The Swedes</a> have been talking about abolishing gender for at least five years now. <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/opinion/neither-female-nor-male.html?_r=0">In Australia</a> you can declare yourself male, female, or "nonspecific," which seems like a start to me. As of early 2013 <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/01/22/nepal_to_issue_third_gender_ids/">in Nepal </a>they added a third gender, if only for "ease of legal documents." <a href="http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/in-indonesia-nonbinary-gender-is-a-centuriesold-idea">Indonesia</a> has had a non-binary conception of gender for hundreds of years. Here's a link to a documentary (<i><a href="http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/two-spirits/">Two Spirits</a></i>) about a Navajo "boy" who was also a "girl" and was murdered. The Native American/First Nations had, for probably a thousand years at least, not constructed a gender binary.<br />
<br />
Here's <a href="http://sexuality.about.com/od/glossary/g/Gender.htm">an article by a person named Cory Silverberg</a> that discusses how the concepts of "sex" and "gender" are different.<br />
<br />
Lately, my own cis-male problem with gender has been with book clubs: for some reason - which, the more I delve into it, seems darker and darker in its implications - men don't "do" book clubs in Unistat. Which I find depressing. I've had my problems in this female-gendered world of book clubs, and it's really touchy; I don't know how to address it. I've been forced out of book clubs in which I was the only male, and I was convinced that nothing I'd done was sexist, obnoxious, or unpleasant in any way. Right now I'm in one, and it's in a very progressive community, and the group is fairly large, and there are often two or three other guys at the monthly meetings, and the women seem accepting of us. So far. I'm sorta paranoid. But what's so overwhelmingly <i>female</i> about reading books and discussing them? <a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/05/that-mens-book-clubs-article-mostly-just-made-me-sad.html">I found a short piece by Jesse Singal</a> - a male - who nailed it pretty well for me, and I sent it to the group email for my current book club, saying "this is sorta 'meta' but Singal speaks for me here," and wrote that I was open to hearing the opinions of anyone who cared to chime in. So far one female answered and was as open-minded and sweet about males expressing themselves emotionally without having to fear being labeled as gay or whatever. I assume other guys in the group identify as gay, but I don't know and I honestly don't care: I'm just glad they're there. I like reading books as a group and discussing them; it's very pleasurable. I ask open questions, I listen, I give opinions, I try to get a laff or two. The Man Book Club referred/linked to in Singal's article is something I do not want to join: too toxic in its Unistat social construction of male-ness, cis-male gendered. I get that already, everywhere.<br />
<br />
This seems like a huge problem to me, but I don't think it will capture much attention space for a long while, as we seem much more taken by our relatively new (and felicitous, to me) acceptance of homosexuality, and we're now grappling with transgendered people.<br />
<br />
What a utopia if people could just openly be as they feel they "are" and not be subject to violence or discrimination! I know I've had my mind expanded by my personal experiences with gay males, lesbians, the professed and apparently bisexual, and a couple of times I have experienced the mild and bracing shock that I'm currently talking to someone who has transitioned from one sex to another...or wanted me to think they had.<br />
<br />
It has always been like this. We're making progress, but it's too slow.<br />
<br />
"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!" - Samuel Goldwyn<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Death</b><br />
I was recently reading in Clifford Pickover's delightful <i style="font-weight: bold;">Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen</i>, about the some of the more bizarre ideas of the great utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Get a load of this:<br />
<br />
"Bentham had a peculiar interest in the rituals of death. For example, to Bentham, cemeteries and burials were a waste of money. Instead, he suggested that embalmed corpses be mounted upright along stately drives and busy thoroughfares. I can just imagine his pleasure at seeing corpses planted like palm trees along Santa Monica Boulevard or affixed to lampposts along New York's Fifth Avenue, for as far as his eye could see."<br />
<br />
Pickover reminds us we can all go visit University College in London and see Bentham's lifelike corpse and mummified head, but warns us that his artificial eyes "stare at you like Linda Blair's in <i>The Exorcist." </i><br />
<i>-</i><b style="font-style: italic;">Strange Brains</b>, Pickover, p.103<br />
<br />
Hey, you out there: don't go gently into that good night. Good night!<br />
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PS: I had forgotten I'd planned to do 22 of these Food/Sex/Death thingies. I hardly ever look at the stats for this blog, but the other day, stoned out of my wig, I checked to see who was reading me at that moment. It appeared someone in Japan (really?) was reading the sole <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2013/12/foodsexdeath-edition-aleph.html">Food/Sex/Death spew I did way back in December 2013</a>. So I tried another. Hey, better late than never to spew again, no? Wot?<br />
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<span style="color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2014/08/new-comic-book-from-bobby-campbell.html">まばゆいばかりのボビー・キャンベルによっ て当</a></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com17tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-69968615518592602092016-08-13T23:44:00.001-07:002016-08-14T16:47:03.259-07:00Intellectuals in the (late?) AnthropoceneWhy "late?": Global warming, antibiotic resistance, global terror, income inequality, acceleration of AI, rapidly ephemeralized synthetic biological techniques, nuke proliferation. I'm not all that worried about an errant asteroid. I'm worried about sociopaths in power, and a species-wide inequality in knowledge and empathy towards The Other...<br />
<br />
Three articles caught my eye in the past week. I'll link to them, give my idio-precis and comments. Why? Because I care about both of us.<br />
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1. ) L.D. Burnett in <i>Chronicle of Higher Education</i>: "<a href="http://chronicle.com/article/Holding-On-to-What-Makes-Us/237381">Holding On To What Makes Us Human</a>," an Adjunct who writes books about academia; Burnett implores us to defend the Humanities in the face of runaway "transferrable skills" and the cost/benefit reality of universities now. Screw "critical thinking" (although that's valuable, of course): we must find a way of articulating why knowledge of literature/history/philosophy etc is inherently valuable, despite all that's transpired in the epoch of NeoLiberalism. She wants arguments that set aside money and jobs issues. And I say: good luck with that, although I'm with you in spirit, Ms. Burnett.<br />
<br />
Her keynote (fair warning: I do not have perfect pitch) seems to be that we must resist perishing, but if we must perish, we should go down resisting. At first I thought she meant "we" adjuncts. Then I realized she seemed a tad more cosmopolitan: we <i>humans.</i> I bet you're on board with her here with me, no?<br />
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If I sound like a dick here, I apologize. I'm just as caught up in the morass of being a Knower and struggling to pay the bills as she is, probably more so. I know Adjunct jobs suck ass as far as pay goes (usually), but I don't even get to do that. I'm a freelancer. There's a really heavy downside to that, apart from making your own hours and staying up all night taking notes in your books. Weed helps. <a href="http://www.medicaldaily.com/pot-smokers-respond-differently-social-exclusion-379971">It certainly helps</a>.<br />
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2.) <a href="http://thesmartset.com/intellectuals-are-freaks/">Michael Lind</a>, a prolific and fairly heavyweight intellectual who notes he's been "accused" of being a "public intellectual," claims that his own in-group of intellectuals are "freaks." Lind is not doing the Chomsky thing of calling out his fellow intellectuals for facilitating and sucking up to State power. He's merely saying he and his kind: academics, think tank experts, opinion journalists, and downwardly-mobile free-spirited bohemians? They really are "freaks" and out of touch with ordinary values. This last sub-class of Bohemians constitute a group who are living off (largely) inherited bourgeois-begotten capital in order to be revolutionaries, avant-garde writers, or artists.<br />
<br />
Lind asserts that "populists" who've always argued intellectuals are out of touch are basically correct. He notes that non-intellectuals are/were wrong about the gold standard, the single tax and "other issues" (I wish he'd have gone into much greater detail here, as I think it's <i>very many</i> other issues, but that's just me), but populists are right: intellectuals are freaks and weirdoes who are out of touch with mainstream values.<br />
<br />
Intellectuals live in large cities and their judgment is distorted by their borderlessness (because scholarship is inherently borderless). Proles finish high school and go into manual labor in what's now the "service sector." They work within 18 miles of where their mothers live and depend on family networks for economic support and child care. Intellectuals often defer marriage and children in order to further their career goals, and they move all over the place, as academia is found throughout the continent. Their notions about a borderless world as a moral and political ideal are, says Lind, "stupid and lazy" because there's no world-wide infrastructure to keep a welfare state equitably distributed throughout the world. (I see this as a worthy utopian goal, but Lind keeps mum about this: "stupid and lazy.") Their childlessness and deferred marriages make them "unusually individualistic"...Lind would like to see that studied more and so would I.<br />
<br />
Talk about unrestricted immigration feeds nationalist and neo-fascist and right-wing populist political movements, and we're seeing that as I type, in many places. Also, it feeds the well-entrenched meme among the unwashed that the UN is taking over their lives, incipient fears of "lost sovereignty" (a classic divide-and-conquer/misdirection move by the Ruling Class), not to mention the Bilderbergers-bugaboo. (Enough food and clean water for Burundi? Tyranny!)<br />
<br />
Here's another major problem with intellectuals: they see the problem of inequality and their solution is...be more like me!: More and better education is the mantra. (As long as Obama has been Prez he's repeated this old workhorse. And I'm embarrassed to admit that on more than one occasion I've yelled at him through the teevee screen, "For what?")<br />
<br />
Lind says this idea of more education is natural, but "stupid and lazy." He's a conscience for his own class of freaks! How come "more education" isn't a good idea? Automation and the service sector job market is really all there is. He doesn't mention Adjuncts, and it's easy to conjure reasons why. Janitors with Master's degrees? Sad. He does say unionization might be a good idea for service-sector workers. A restriction of low-wage immigration (I don't see this happening). A higher minimum-wage is mentioned.<br />
<br />
I read Lind's short piece three times and I still can't discern the level of wryness in it. If you read the piece he exempts those intellectuals in the "hard sciences." Gee, I wonder why?<br />
<br />
A final idea: it's often floated out that one or two years of national service could be a moral and social balancer. Lind says: stupid idea, because the proles already have it hard enough without doing two years of unpaid work. But then he gets off his best riff: But: "it might not hurt" for professional intellectuals to face "a year or two working in a shopping mall, hotel, hospital, or warehouse."<br />
<br />
My Wry-o-Meter was sparking and giving off noxious fumes on that last bit. That Michael Lind!<br />
<br />
As a general comment on Lind, some dialectical sparks from Alvin Gouldner, who is writing about the history and alienation of intellectuals, first from the Old Regime of inherited landed aristocracy, and then the bourgeoisie, this latter group being at first allied with the intellectuals against the Old Regime and helped by their cultural capital...until the bourgeoisie came into ascendancy. Gouldner refers to both the technical intelligentsia and humanistic intellectuals as The New Class:<br />
<br />
<i>The New Class believes its high culture represents the greatest achievement of the human race, the deepest ancient wisdom and the most advanced modern scientific knowledge. It believes that these contribute to the welfare and wealth of the race, and that they should receive correspondingly greater rewards. The New Class believes that the world should be governed by those possessing superior competence, wisdom and science - that is, themselves. The Platonic Complex, the dream of the philosopher king with which Western philosophy begins, is the deepest wish-fulfillment fantasy of the New Class. But they look around and see that the men who employ them do not begin to understand the simplest aspects of their technical specialties, and the politicians who rule them are, in Edmund Wilson's words, "unique in having managed to be corrupt, uncultivated, and incompetent all at once."</i><br />
<i>-</i>p.65, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class </i>(1979), Alvin Gouldner, PhD<br />
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3.) <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/power-powerlessness-thinking-and-future">"Power, Powerlessness, Thinking and Future," by French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, from about 10 months ago.</a> Stiegler notes that intellectuals have been steeped in the analysis of power relations since M. Foucault, but that thinking about this should also highlight power<i>lessness</i> too, and maybe more now than ever, since intellectuals seem to not understand that <i>techne </i>has accelerated faster than they could conceptualize, and they are now proles themselves. He attacks those intellectuals who claim the term "right wing intellectual" is an impossibility or oxymoron, because, well, Freud, Heidegger, Niklas Luhmann, Maurice Blanchot, and many others. And deeper: there was thinking before the French Revolution and "Left" vs. "Right" and we now need to reconceptualize what it means to think, now that almost all of us are proles.<br />
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Stiegler thinks it's unfortunate that the term "intellectual" was ever used as a noun, when it's an adjective. Further, the term activates neurological opposition between "manual workers" and the types Gouldner is talking about, above. And yet throughout the article you notice Stiegler uses "intellectuals" as a term for their class. That's because it's ensconced in culture. And Michael Lind's presuppositions about his own class seem to hold sway, eh?<br />
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Here's where it gets interesting for me: Stiegler claims, based on Marx and Engels, that "proletarianism" now effects not only most of us, but all forms of knowledge. Futhermore, it's a "widespread generalization of entropic behavior" since the Anthropocene commenced and we began to time-bind like mad. Proletarianization destructs knowledge: how to live, do and conceptualize. And intellectuals seem oblivious that this is what has happened to them. They are now much closer to Lind's janitors than any sort of Gouldner's Platonic philosopher kings, no doubt.<br />
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Stiegler wants to clarify: Marx and Engels thought that proletarians denote not a state of poverty so much as a loss of knowledge...knowledge about how to harness negentropy to conceptualize our way out of this mess. Rather than doing this, they "adopt attitudes and poses." A culture of knowledge construction and new ideas has been run out of town by consumer capitalism, based on "behavioral prescriptions produced by marketing." In the weakest part of his fascinating article, Stiegler uses Alan Greenspan's testimony about why he didn't see the 2008 crash coming. It seems there were a few hundred better examples, but perhaps this one suffices...<br />
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So, let's stop with labeling "left"and "right" thinking and replace it with <i>thinking</i>, which he seems to align with negentropy, the notion that, though entropy is The Law, its negative reciprocal is creating novel order and structure amidst chaos. (What Korzybski called "time-binding'.) The acceleration of technology has lapped our social systems of law, education, political organizations and forms of knowledge. We will always be late, it seems. Our only hope is realizing we're all proles now, begin thinking from within casino economies and marketing and short-term R&D "disruptions." We need not become Luddites and reject technology, and Stiegler cites Evgeny Morozov's article (presumably <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/20/rise-of-data-death-of-politics-evgeny-morozov-algorithmic-regulation">HERE</a> although Stiegler merely claims this "evokes") as a way into a new politics, in which it's essential to re-think "value."<br />
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Morozov seems like a start to me, too, but I'd also cite John Dewey's 1920 book <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://archive.org/details/reconstructionin00deweuoft">Reconstruction in Philosophy</a> </i>as a text that argued the Platonic ideal of the "spectatorial view" of knowledge had it backwards: no intellectual need fool herself into believing that just because she doesn't get her hands dirty that she truly <i>knows</i>, and that those who do things with their hands (mechanics, plumbers, craftspeople of every stripe) don't "know" anything. Workers know quite a lot, and so the fuck what if it's not Hegel or organic chemistry: it's knowledge that produces immediate material results in the sensory/sensual world. Dewey's book disabused me of these notions about the primacy of spectatorial/armchair views of knowledge long ago, and this text seems woefully underrated to me.<br />
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Earlier, Marx had expressed a dislike for the opposition of <i>Techne </i>and <i>Logos</i>. Bernard Stiegler reminds us here that, "Knowledge is <i>always </i>constituted by technics, <i>which in so doing always constitutes a social relation." </i>(italics in original)<br />
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Also, and more practically, look at contemporaries like Douglas Rushkoff and his marvelous recent book, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.rushkoff.com/books/throwing-rocks-at-the-google-bus/">Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus</a></i>, and Martin Ford's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Robots-Technology-Threat-Jobless/dp/1480574775">Rise of the Robots</a></i>. Here are thinkers who can get us started thinking ourselves...out of our proletarian situation. There are many, many more...<br />
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki occurred 71 years ago this past week or so. Soon after that Dark Moment, a very smart individual noted that everything had changed...save for our "way of thinking."<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Tueuses graphiques par <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bobby Campbel</a>l</i></span><br />
<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-51446074766876841462016-07-28T01:08:00.000-07:002016-11-01T03:58:11.188-07:00On CrueltyOne of my favorite academic philosophers is Richard Rorty, who died in 2007. As I read him, he's a sort of radical small "d" democrat who seemed a lot like some of my favorite anarchist characters of personal acquaintance, but Rorty called himself a "bourgeois liberal." His essay on Orwell in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Contingency, Irony and Solidarity</i> was marvelous in fleshing out what he thought was the number one value among liberals: cruelty is the worst thing we can do. He was heavily influenced by <a href="https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1389811110d4Shklar.pdf">Judith Shklar</a> in this.<br />
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<i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_N._Shklar">philosopher Judith Shklar</a></i><br />
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I recently re-read a bunch of Rorty (and the Shklar essay I linked to above, which I highly recommend) and, while I think we make up our own hierarchy of values and they are not dictated to us from some transcendent being, I subscribe to Shklar's idea. (I wonder about more esoteric readings of Machiavelli, but that's for some other blogspew.) I've been thinking and worrying this topic of treating others cruelly quite a lot lately, for reasons most of you may guess.<br />
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In delving into the library of the history of cruelty, I can't help but be cheered by some substantial gains over the centuries. Then again, I'm reminded we have a long way to go. Just today I read <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/07/cia-torture-bush-cheney-waterboarding-interrogation/">THIS</a>.<br />
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The human running on the Republican ticket looks at this information and thinks - I'm guessing - "I can be more cruel than that." I have good reason to think the human on the Democratic side knows about this stuff, pretends to not know, and would privately give her assent to its continual practice.<br />
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In reading on the history of cruelty: my gawd! There's just so goddamned much, and I have (presumably) finite minutes left before I shuffle off my mortal coil so why don't I do something - anything - less depressing? I guess I get obsessed by certain ideas, even if some of them activate neural circuitry that seems to take a metaphorical machete to anything close to "euphoria."<br />
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Montaigne's (d.1592) essay, "Of Cruelty" shows him at his most proto-Modern Humanist. Get a load of this passage:<br />
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<i>I do not lament the dead, and should envy them rather; but I very much lament the dying. The savages do not so much offend me, in roasting and eating the bodies of the dead, as they do who torment and persecute the living. Nay, I cannot look so much as upon the ordinary executions of justice, how reasonable soever, with a steady eye. Some one having to give testimony of Julius Caesar's clemency: "he was," says he, "mild in his revenges. Having compelled the pirates to yield by whom he had before been taken prisoner and put to ransom; forasmuch as he had threatened them with the cross, he indeed condemned them to it, but it was after they had first been strangled. He punished his secretary Philemon, who had attempted to poison him, with no greater severity than mere death." Without naming that Latin author, </i>[I tracked it to Suetonius, in my Robert Graves translation of <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Twelve Caesars</i>, chapter on Julius, section 74. - OG] <i>who thus dares to allege as a testimony of mercy the killing only of those by whom we have been offended, it is easy to guess that he was struck with the horrid and inhuman examples of cruelty practices by the Roman tyrants.</i><br />
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I'll say it's "easy to guess," aye. Yea, ya gotta wonder about Suetonius ("mild in his revenges"?), but then I guess he'd seen quite enough. And, you know, something very much on the cruelty level as strangling pirates <i>before </i>nailing 'em to a cross as "merciful" has probably happened somewhere on our planet in the last year, but who knows? CIA torturers? Some Third World dictator (backed by the CIA?); who knows whiskey tango foxtrot goes on in No. Korea...Vladimir Putin, like his presumed ally and/or dupe Trump, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia">merely has journalists killed</a>. It's safe to say Suetonius would consider it almost "right neighborly" to kill a journalist by bashing his head in with a hammer, using contract killers, etc.<br />
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<i>Russia's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Politkovskaya">Anna Politkovskaya</a>, human rights activist</i><br />
<i> likened to Unistat's</i><br />
<i> investigative journalist Seymour Hersh</i><br />
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It may not be about making Russia or Unistat "great again" but you can be damned sure a lot of journalists will not look too closely at what might bring on bodily troubles for themselves, or - as <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/fleischertext_092601.html">Ari Fleischer said</a> after 9/11 in response to a quote from comedian Bill Maher - that it's "a reminder to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do...." (See 98% of the way down on that transcript.)<br />
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As far as I know, Maher has not been strangled or nailed to a cross: Now <i>that's</i> progress!<br />
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(So far...)<br />
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<a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/russian-journalist-murdered-is-russia-s-press-freedom-dead-a-443543.html">Russian Journalist Murdered: Is Russia's Press Freedom Dead?</a><br />
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<a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;">искусство Бобом Кемпбелл</span></a>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-23393627807707232902016-07-15T02:16:00.000-07:002016-09-10T15:36:16.773-07:00Gary Webb, Philip Marlowe, Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous<b>Investigative Journalists</b><br />
I finally caught, on Netflix, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1895587/">Spotlight</a></i>, this generation's <i style="font-weight: bold;">All The President's Men</i>. I had coincidentally been thinking a lot about investigative journalism and journalists and was moved by the story. And how could one not be?<br />
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The "Spotlight" group of investigative reporters at the Boston Globe were in the belly of the beast of Catholicism in Unistat. Their footwork, tenacity and courage has seemed to actuate some real change in what seems like an endless run of pedophile priests, with cover-ups going all the way to the Vatican.<br />
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<b>The Film Noir Detective Hero</b><br />
But they were a team, backed by a major metropolitan daily. Woodward and Bernstein: two guys backed by the Washington Post. Still: when I look at ballsy investigative reporting, I keep thinking of some of my favorite characters in my favorite film style: <i>film noir</i>, which flourished in Unistat from 1941-1959, but has never gone away. Some of those films feature the <i>lone </i>private detective who gets hired to do a seemingly simple seedy gig, like finding out if a spouse is cheating. But one thing leads to another, and the detective (Chandler's Philip Marlowe is the best example) finds himself up to his ears in a bigger mystery. Things are not what he thought they were, and he's in great danger.<br />
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He's not being paid to solve this big conspiracy - much less report on it for a major newspaper - but he can't help himself: he's the Lone Knight in search of the truth. He takes risks, travels in the labyrinth of The City from the poorest neighborhood to the wealthiest enclaves, trying to piece things together. Everyone, it seems, is lying to him. But why? He <i>needs to know</i>. He will eventually get knocked out, shot at, drugged, and punched in the solar plexus by hulking meathead gangsters.<br />
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He will come out alive, but with the gnosis. The myth of the private detective in films noir: he's a free agent, not well-off, lives by his wits and instinct and street-smart intellect and knows how to talk his way out of a jam and into more knowledge of the situation.<br />
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The noir detective drinks, loves beautiful women, and is obviously flawed, and he's no hypocrite. He seems like a profane character, but he's a mostly a man of honor who hates bullshit, who cares about justice in a world that only pays lip service to the idea. In a hopelessly corrupt metropolis, he keeps his integrity. And observes.<br />
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It's been noted many times that the Marlowe-type detective harkens back to the Knights of the Grail legends. Which brings us to Chapel Perilous.<br />
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<b>Chapel Perilous</b><br />
I had come across this term when I first tried reading T.S. Eliot's <i>The Wasteland</i> in my early twenties. I didn't follow up on the footnote in the section "What the Thunder said," which tells us to consult "Miss Weston's book." I have since made a study of Jessie Weston's 1919 work of brilliant scholarship, <i style="font-weight: bold;">From Ritual to Romance</i>, which studies the Grail legends from primary sources. There are very many variations on Chapel Perilous, with interpolations by later writers. Weston's penultimate chapter covers a few of the versions that involve Chapel Perilous, with Sir Lancelot starring, or sometimes Sir Gawain, and even King Arthur appears.<br />
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A generic version of Chapel Perilous: the Knight is riding alone in the forest when a violent storm hits. He finds a chapel in a clearing, often near a cemetery. He'll take refuge from the storm there. He goes in and no one is there, except for a dead knight on the altar, with one long candle lit nearby. There is a window behind and above the altar. Suddenly a Black Hand extinguishes the candle and chapel-shakingly loud haunting voices are heard. The Black Hand looks evil and hideous. Maybe the Knight engages the Black Hand with his sword, and barely makes it out alive.<br />
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My favorite version in Weston: King Arthur has fallen off his game: he's a slob and is at risk of losing all fame and prestige he once had. His wife urges him to trek out to the Chapel of St. Austin, which is a very dangerous journey, but may be just the thing to restore Arthur's reputation. He will take with him a young squire, son of (get this) Yvain the Bastard. The squire's name is Chaus. Chaus is like myself: if I have a very exciting and unusual thing to do the next day, I sleep fitfully in anticipatory anxiety.<br />
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Chaus decides to sleep in his clothes in the hall, to be ready to roll at daybreak with Arthur. He doesn't want to screw this up. He falls asleep, and then it appears King Arthur has already wakened and left on the journey without him. He immediately jumps up and rushes to his horse, trying to follow the tracks of Arthur's horse. Chaus happens upon a chapel in a glade, near a churchyard. He enters the chapel, but there's no one there, only a dead knight on the altar. There are golden candlesticks burning at the dead knight's head and foot. He takes one of the candlesticks and jams it into one pant-leg, mounts his horse, and goes off searching for Arthur.<br />
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Chaus then meets on the road a dark, foul man with a double-edged knife. Chaus asks him, "Have you seen Arthur?" The man says no, but I've met you and you're a thief! You stole that golden candlestick! You're also a traitor. Give me the candlestick! Chaus refuses and the dark man stabs Chaus in the side. Chaus cries out...and then awakens: he'd been asleep in the hall the whole time, yet he has the candlestick and he's been stabbed! Chaus, bleeding out, tells his story, confesses, receives the last rites, and dies.<br />
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Weston, after relating many variations of this story, asks what could it all mean? And she's convinced that it is "<i>The story of an initiation</i> (or perhaps it would be more correct to say the test of fitness for an initiation) <i>carried out on the astral plane, and reacting with fatal results upon the physical." </i>(italics in original, pp. 171-172 of the Dover ed.)<br />
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<b>Robert Anton Wilson and Chapel Perilous</b><br />
Robert Anton Wilson uses "Chapel Perilous" as an unforgettable metaphor in his autobiographical book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Cosmic Trigger vol 1</i> (1977). RAW told Sander Wolff in an interview in 1990 that the "whole book is an account of self-induced brain change." Self-experimentalists and Quantified Self-ies: are you aware that the heritage of your endeavor(s) is brimming with a history of daring, intrepid self-experimentalists like RAW? (I also find Scott Michaelson's take on RAW's self-experimentation compelling: that it was a synthesis of Aleister Crowley and modern neuroscience.) (See <i style="font-weight: bold;">Portable Darkness</i>, jacket sleeve, inside cover.)<br />
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As I write, there is a <a href="http://www.rawillumination.net/2016/04/cosmic-trigger-reading-group-pre.html">group reading</a> of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Cosmic Trigger vol 1</i> going on over at <a href="http://rawillumination.net/">RAWIllumination.net</a>, and if you're reading this at a later date, look for the archives of the reading and the scads of insightful comments and leave your own comments from your reading there, as I sense this is a case in which a "mere blog" will offer up many a nugget for future researchers...<br />
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Back to Wilson's take on Chapel Perilous as metaphor:<br />
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<i>When researching occult conspiracies, one eventually faces a crossroad of mythic proportions (called Chapel Perilous in the trade). You come out the other side either a stone paranoid or an agnostic; there is no third way. </i>(p. 6, <i style="font-weight: bold;">CT1</i>) Wilson describes Chapel Perilous as a mind-state that, while undetectable by any instruments, certainly seems all-too real to the person who finds herself in it. Comparing Chapel Perilous to the human Ego, "once you're inside it, there doesn't seem to be any way to get out again, until you suddenly discover that it has been brought into existence by thought and does not exist outside thought." (p.6)<br />
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In reading of Wilson's determination to push his nervous system as far as it can go before it breaks (delving into ceremonial magick, psychedelic drugs, various forms of yoga, a deep research into conspiracy theories, even some investigative reporting on his own, etc, etc, etc...) he finds himself the psychologically functional equivalent of the Knight, alone in the isolated Chapel, with a dead knight before him on the altar, and then the otherworldly Black Hand appears...<br />
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What does he do? Read the book!<br />
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<i>Gary Webb, investigative reporter</i><br />
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<b>Gary Webb</b><br />
If you don't know who the reporters/investigators I'm talking about here, you really ought to look into their cases for yourself. (See Michael Hastings and Danny Casolaro too?) There are far too many (luminous) details and I suspect at least half of my readers are familiar with these figures anyway. So I'll try to make it brief: Gary Webb got a line on how the CIA was allowing crack cocaine to flood the streets of Los Angeles, in order to fund their covert war against the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Few believed him, but he was smart, with boundless energy, and he produced a series of reports for the small <i>San Jose Mercury-News </i>that made national headlines. Then, the CIA, with a deplorable amount of help from the <i>Washington Post</i>, <i>New York Times</i>, and <i>Los Angeles Times </i>- the reasons seem complicated: they resented being scooped by a relatively small-town paper and some liked the access the CIA allowed them? - Webb quickly went from award-winner to having his own editor and staff gutlessly retract most of Webb's work. There is much to be learned here, my friends, and it's not for the faint of heart.<br />
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Perhaps "mendacious" is too strong a word for these big-time journalists and editors, who, taking the CIA's idea an running with it, decided that Webb's work was shoddy and stoked the fears of an already "conspiracy-theory"- minded African American readership. Webb's own paper took him off the investigation beat and he eventually quit, pursued the story alone, but ended up dead in his hotel room eight years after his breakthrough reporting, with two bullet holes in his head from a .38<br />
<br />
I read a lot of the full-frontal assault on Webb in the Big Newspapers. One thing that really troubles me (to this day) is that, apparently, we're not supposed to know that the CIA has been involved with gangsters and thugs and drug smuggling since...before they were even called the CIA! Don't reporters go to the library and read the astonishingly well-documented <i style="font-weight: bold;">Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia</i>, by Alfred McCoy? How did you miss not reading about the OSS/CIA and their deal with Lucky Luciano and the Mob, the democratic elections in Italy, and the French Connection that flooded the streets of major Unistat cities with heroin?<br />
<br />
Another galling thing: many of the "reporters" on the big-city dailies who attacked Webb for stoking conspiracy theories in black communities? Many of them were black themselves. I tracked down a handful and emailed them, politely asking if they've changed their mind about Gary Webb (who turns out to have been right about almost everything, of course). Only one wrote back: Donna Britt, who wrote in the WA Post that the whole CIA/crack cocaine-contra connection "just may not have happened." But still, paranoid cases will go on thinking their conspiracy thoughts. "They know the truth, or one truth anyway: It doesn't matter whether [Webb's "Dark Alliance" series - OG] claims are 'proved' true. To some folks - graduates of Watergate, Iran-Contra, and FBI harassment of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr - they feel so true that even if they're refuted, they'll still be fact to them." (<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/local/1996/10/04/finding-the-truest-truth/d62ccf2a-51a8-4a47-89fc-94b44dd7ad2f/">Donna Britt, <i>Washington Post </i>"Finding the Truest Truth," Oct 4, 1996</a>)<br />
<br />
Here's what she said in her email to me:<br />
<br />
<div class="p1">
<i>Thanks for your note. The fact is that I honestly don't recall what I wrote about him. That was a long time ago! Sorry to disappoint.....</i></div>
<div class="p2">
<i><br /></i></div>
<br />
<div class="p1">
<i>The boundaries are imaginary. The rules are made up. The limits don't exist....</i></div>
<div class="p1">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="p1">
<br />
Apparently she's a book-author now. <a href="http://www.donnabritt.org/index.cgi">HERE</a> is her website.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
When I think of Gary Webb, I think of his own Chapel Perilous. But: was it brought into existence by thought alone? I think there was more to his. I think Webb's Chapel Perilous somehow has something to do with <i>us.</i></div>
<br />
<b>Other Sources Consulted:</b><br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Messenger-Crack-Cocaine-Controversy-Journalist/dp/1560259302">Kill The Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Gary Webb</a>, </i>Nick Schou.<br />
<br />
<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW4XO-52ubE">Kill The Messenger (2014 film starring Jeremy Renner as Webb: trailer)</a></i><br />
<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Alliance-Contras-Cocaine-Explosion/dp/1888363932/ref=pd_sim_14_2?ie=UTF8&dpID=51urmrnxkXL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL320_SR202%2C320_&psc=1&refRID=217DW8B3PS364Z68A299">Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack-Cocaine Explosion</a></i>, by Gary Webb<br />
<b><br /></b>
"<a href="https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-media-destruction-gary-webb/">Managing a Nightmare: How the CIA Watched Over the Destruction of Gary Webb</a>," by Ryan Devereaux, <i>The Intercept</i><br />
<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">Censored 2016</i>: chapter 7, "Dark Alliance: The Controversy and the Legacy, Twenty Years On," by Brian Covert, pp.227-253<br />
<br />
<i>Murder, My Sweet (1944 Edward Dmytryk) w</i>ith Dick Powell as Marlowe<br />
<i>The Big Sleep (1946 Howard Hawks) </i>with Humphrey Bogart as Marlowe<br />
<i>Lady in the Lake (1947 Robert Montgomery) </i>with Montgomery as Marlowe<br />
<i>Long Goodbye (1973 Robert Altman)</i> with Elliot Gould as Marlowe<br />
<i>Farewell, My Lovely (1975 Dick Richards)</i> with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe<br />
<i>Chinatown (1974 Roman Polanski)</i> with Jack Nicholson as Jake Gittes<br />
<i><br /></i>
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<i> I personally posed for this photo. The book was</i><br />
<i> <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">artist Bob Campbell's idea</a>. In reality, the number</i><br />
<i> of arms is slightly exaggerated.</i><br />
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<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-60984423045171188892016-07-07T01:52:00.005-07:002016-07-16T03:24:38.574-07:00An Idioglossary For Our Reading in the Info-Glut (Partial)Last I wrote to you few weirdos, I groped toward a small section that I and possibly you encounter in your reading: your readings and their apparent effects on your sensoria.<br />
<br />
Another approach would be a gathering of terms. If you're able to make use of even one term, I'll be happy. Feel free to add your own in the comments.<br />
<br />
I aim my personal lexicon-blunderbuss, exhale, and fire:<br />
<br />
<b>exformation</b>: In my previous blogspew I quoted David Foster Wallace on this term. Here are three other interpretations I've seen: 1.) Everything we don't actually say but which we have in our minds when - or before - we say anything at all. Whereas information is the demonstrable and measurable (in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mathematical_Theory_of_Communication">Shannon</a> sense of the math of information) utterance we actually come out with. 2.) "Useful and relevant information" 3.) A specific sort of information explosion.<br />
<br />
I don't have in my notes who I am quoting in #2. I know it seems trivial, and perhaps it is...<i>to you</i>. And that's the very point. #3 seems a lot like DFW's gloss ("a certain quality of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient") to me. #1 reminds me of all those riffs you and your friends have about not coming up with the perfect comeback in time. It's only later when you think, "Oh! That would have been the perfect riposte!" I think the Italian term <i>fare secco qualcuno </i>means this, but I don't quite trust my memory on this...which is an example of <i>exformation</i>?<br />
<br />
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exformation">HERE is the current Wiki on Exformation</a>. That which was not said and that which was <i>explicitly </i>discarded? Tor Norretranders - the neologizer for exformation - wrote a book on consciousness that came out in Unistat around 1999. He said that which our consciousness rejects is the most valuable part of ourselves. Our brains are fantastic processing systems meant for survival. Apparently we make an image of the world in our heads, which is a fantastic strategy for biosurvival, and this nervous system processing information from within and from the environment...including an image of the imager itself, that very helpful phantasm: our "selves." It seems this idea about consciousness keeps being rediscovered and reframed. Just three days ago, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/what-is-consciousness.html">George Johnson of the </a><i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/05/science/what-is-consciousness.html">New York Times</a> </i>reported on consciousness in this way. It violates almost all of our notions about our "self" but there we go: my digression is already out of the way for this particular blog article.<br />
<br />
Exformation seems to bear some sort of anti-matter family resemblance to Ezra Pound's idea of <b>excernment</b>, which was "The general ordering and weeding out of what has actually been performed. The elimination of repetitions...The ordering of knowledge so that the next man (or generation) can most readily find the live part of it, and waste the least possible time among obsolete issues." - Pound, as quoted in Christine Brooke-Rose's <i style="font-weight: bold;">A ZBC of Ezra Pound</i>, p.18. It's one of the functions of the critic, according to Pound.<br />
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<i>a random beautiful fractal image, because why the hell not?</i><br />
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<b>Noocene Epoch</b>: I forgot how to place the <i>umlaut </i>over that second o. O well. I found this term in another 1999 book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader</i>: "How we manage and adapt to the immense amount of knowledge we've created." The Noocene seems like a subset time-frame of the newly minted <b>Anthropocene</b>: the period since humans created massive Industrialization.<br />
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"Knowledge," not information. We all have our favorite ways to define the difference between these two phantoms. I see knowledge as of drinking age, and it's been around the block. Knowledge tends to grate on our nerves by being a know-it-all, but then it can be contrite and quite charming. Info tries to get away with whatever it can. It's underage, hangs around the pool hall and smokes cubebs stolen from its grandpa and who the hell knows where info will end up? Let's hope it makes good use of itself and doesn't kill somebody.<br />
<br />
Wisdom watches both of them and shakes Its head.<br />
<br />
<b>componentiality: </b>An aspect of modern consciousness. "Technology induces a cognitive style we call 'componentiality' - breaking up reality into separate components that can be analyzed and manipulated." - found on p.121 of Peter Berger's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist</i>, when writing about his 1973 book <b><i>The Homeless Mind</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
At first glance: what a stupid term. But we swim in a componential world; obviously there were many millennia when human consciousness did not know of such a Damned Thing. It therefore seems manifestly <i>not </i>a stupid term. In fact: Sing to me! O Goddess! Of words that describe something right in front of my face, that I never noticed! I owe you one...<br />
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<b>apophenia: </b>German psychologist Klaus Conrad (d: 1961) coined this term, but I picked it up while reading William Gibson's novel <i style="font-weight: bold;">Pattern Recognition</i>, and he gave at least two glosses in different spots in the book: 1.) "The spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things;" 2.) "Each thing conceived as part of an overarching pattern of conspiracy." (pp.115 and 294)<br />
<br />
Possibly related ideas: metanoia, paranoia, abduction in logic, reading Chinese, gestalting, pronoia - all or some of these terms as cited by the OG in the current context as being (possibly?) an example of apophenia. If I have been apophenic here, I blame it all on my reading. Don't look at me. I didn't do it.<br />
<br />
Another text I read says people with mental disorders are prone to apophenia. Okay, so maybe I am a little "off." So what? Anyway...here's an interesting Q, and it gets to near the heart of problems of Info-Glut 2016: are experiences of apophenia the symptom of mental illness, or the cause?<br />
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<b>enmindment: </b>I'm pretty sure the poet/classics scholar/writer on the "Deep State" Peter Dale Scott minted this term. He contrasts it with "the Enlightenment":<br />
<br />
<i>I believe in enmindment</i><br />
<i>the translation of light</i><br />
<i>into awareness of the dark</i><br />
<i>and understanding of that fear</i><br />
<i>we return to</i><br />
<i>whenever we forget</i><br />
<i>-</i>from <i style="font-weight: bold;">Minding the Darkness</i>, p11<br />
<br />
At first glance, lapping into second, this seems part of the overtone series for exformation, but it addresses an emotional component of it. It certainly seems to address all that reading we do that is not "fiction" that nonetheless makes us <i>feel</i> like we've been reading a horror story, eh?<br />
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<b>Kampung culture</b>: Another term copped from Peter Dale Scott. It means "narrow world-view" in Javanese culture. PDS was trying to find out more about Unistat's involvement in the slaughters of East Timor. Suharto, Sukarno, CIA and Dutch imperialism all appear. See p.213 of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Minding the Darkness</i>, but I hafta warn ya: it's not pretty. This unpacking of "narrow world-view" can take on some nasty hues. Even after the Dutch left, the Javanese still bathed in the blood of their brothers. Why? Kampung culture:<br />
<br />
PDS quoting Pramoedya:<br />
<br />
<i>Even in the belly of Dutch power</i><br />
<i>Java still glorified</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>its Kampung culture</i><br />
<i>they bathed in the blood of their brothers</i><br />
<i>right up through 1966</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>And because Java was no longer</i><br />
<i>in the belly of European power</i><br />
<i>the slaughter reached an unlimited scale</i><br />
Etc.<br />
<br />
Suffice to say: It Can't Happen Here!<br />
<br />
Giambattista Vico used the term <b>sapienza volgare</b>, or "popular wisdom," which to Vico were ideas expressed through myth, rituals, traditions. I do not see this term as the "same" as Kampung culture, but it seems related. (via my own apophenia?)<br />
<br />
<b>anamnesis: </b>An SAT-like word I shouldda known, but didn't: To remember. A recalling to mind. Plato's use: all souls need to be stimulated in order to remember an eternal Truth, or to accept axioms as self-evident. Chomsky seems to like this idea. I get it.<br />
<br />
<b>jouissance: </b>Obviously French (cough): Enjoyment, or our French brothers and sisters seem to mean "Whatever gets you off." It seems aimed at our transcending of our ordinary/primary "reality." It's probably a good description for why I read. Leo Bersini considers jouissance intrinsically self-shattering and disruptive of the "coherent self." (possibly see McKenna, Terence?) In my delvings into glosses of jouissance a competing term, <b>plaisir</b>, often shows up, trying to get in on the conversation. Plaisir sounds like "pleasure," but it seems to strengthen dogma and individual me-ness. Roland Barthes eloquently defines plaisir as a "homogenizing movement of the ego." Plaisir might be defined as going for what you already know - more of the same stuff - while jouissance seems like an attempt to fracture the structure of the ego, whatever the ego "is," after reading about exformation...<br />
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<b>Einfuhlen: </b>Gore Vidal says he got this term from Johann Gottfried Herder, German polymath who died in 1803. Vidal unpacked it thus: "The ability to get into the past, while realizing that it's not just another aspect of the present, with people you know dressed up in funny clothes." I tend to link this term in my own thinking with Vico's <b>entrare</b>, which Vichian Isaiah Berlin described as the force of imaginative insight used to understand remote cultures.<br />
<br />
I had always wondered vaguely about this when reading history, and fearing my imagination was falling short. This term helped remind me of how much is missing in history, which I guess we'll just have to learn to live with. The "missing" part, that it. Let us continue to develop our historical imaginations till death parts us! Why? Oh, all the usual reasons, but also: it might help stave off Kampung culture where you live.<br />
<br />
<b>unthinking: </b>As opposed to re-thinking: I first noted this term in Immanuel Wallerstein's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Uncertainties of Knowledge</i>, p.104: He wanted to emphasize very deep-seated notions that, even though physical sciences have shown to be inadequate, nevertheless stay with us and lead us epistemologically astray. The great anthropologist Weston Labarre gave me a term similar: <b>group archosis</b>: "Nonsense and misinformation so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable from our thinking." Thomas Vander Wal coined the study of <b>folksonomics/folksonomy </b>as the ordered set of categories - or "taxonomy" - that emerges from how people tag items, which works in cognitive anthropology. Oh hell: let me drop in another fave here: <b>logophallocentrism</b>, which Robert Anton Wilson interpreted as "We have a social system based on belief in the special magic power of words and penises."<br />
<br />
Let's hope all that categorizing leads to something we can cash out and invest in the Sanity Sweepstakes...RAW reminded us we seem to have inherited a lot of our ideas from the apes. No wonder this crap is so hard to root out and overcome! This all seems something akin to...<br />
<br />
<b>unspeak: </b>I found this term used by Steven Poole. It's language that "says one thing while really meaning that thing, in a more intensely, loaded and revealing way than a casual glance might acknowledge." I <i>think </i>I know what Poole was getting at here, but I may need to make more multiple glances. Is this like "enhanced interrogation"? I suspect so. Orwell's <b>doublespeak</b>, let's remind ourselves, was a form of language that says one thing while really meaning the opposite. So far, of the thousands of real-life examples, I like Bush43's "Blue Skies Initiative" which would have gutted the Clean Air Act and allowed corporations to dump their toxic garbage - or "negative externalities," in economist's-speak - anywhere they wanted. I may as well tack on <b>cognitive policy</b>, which, according to George Lakoff, is the policy of getting an idea into normal public discourse, which requires creating a change in the brains of millions of people. (see <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Political Mind</i>, p.169)<br />
<br />
<b>campus imperialism: </b>Coined by Jaron Lanier, as far as I know. He touches on it <a href="https://www.edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-one-half-a-manifesto">HERE</a>. Representatives of each academic discipline assume something like a Philosopher-King's eye view of all other disciplines, which are subsumed under their own. It gives rise to thinking such as the very common idea now - I touched on it earlier - that we humans are merely sophisticated computing machines. It's all data-processing, all the way down. While I side with Lanier and other <b>qualophiles</b> (a term I got, ironically, from Daniel Dennett, who seems a <b>qualophobe</b> of some sort): our own experiences seem not covered by any academic domain, while each area of the campus has its own particular ways to model what <i>it thinks </i>is my experience. Okay, this is at least my second digression, but while I'm on it I may as well: currently I see the admittedly brilliant Nick Bostrom's notions about the "Simulation Hypothesis" as taking up a lot of cultural space, perhaps deservedly so. However, a small gaggle of minions will make of this idea - an astounding one for sure! - more than perhaps it deserves: campus imperialism? I will admit the Simulation Hypothesis leaves me pretty damned <b>spaghettified</b>, which is a more extreme step - or colorful phrase! - than having one's mind "blown" or "stretched" by a novel set of facts or ideas.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to another German term:<br />
<br />
<b>Unbehagen: </b>something like "uneasiness." Einstein felt this in the face of the quantum theory, and he tried to get rid of it the rest of his life, to no avail. Because I'm a Soft Whorfian, I think Germans who use this word mean something a little more than uneasiness, but I don't have the German chops to say so or not. Bostrom's "Simulation Hypothesis" - that there's a better than 50% chance we are all simulations made by other Beings - makes me feel Unbehagen, but even if it's true I don't know why it should matter. I mean, we were all getting along fairly well before the Sim Hyp, weren't we? Please say we were. Oh hell, it's all just campus imperialism anyway, right? Right?<br />
<br />
Much of my reading, on the other hand and ironically and paradoxical to boot, seems to chase after this feeling of Unbehagen. Some H.P. Lovecraft can do it. Much of actual history does it. Certain conspiracy theories can do it. Borges does it, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qf_QorYgDE">even Argentines without means do it</a>.<br />
<br />
<b>depressogenic: </b>One of my favorite scientist-writers, Robert Sapolsky, used this term in an essay about what might be in all our futures. "Why do I assume we'll all be getting sadder? Mainly because it strikes me that there is so much in our present civilization that is depressogenic." - found in <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Next 50 Years</i>.<br />
<br />
No comment...<br />
<br />
<b>ideology: </b>"Ideas serving as weapons for social interest." - one of my favorite definitions, from Berger and Luckmann's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Social Construction of Reality</i>, in a discussion of Marx.<br />
<br />
How much of what we read fits into this definition of ideology? Keep your powder dry. (Or is it "powders"? Let us keep our various powders and powderings dry...)<br />
<br />
Alright, I've done enough harm for today. My intent was to maybe give you one term that you might make good use of, not to make you feel even more <b>annoyed </b>(you know the definition) than you already were, which would defeat the purpose of this post.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>conception graphique par</i> <a href="http://conception%20graphique%20par%20bobby%20campbell/">Bobby Campbell</a></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-46250360274150976062016-06-27T03:19:00.001-07:002016-07-07T02:26:37.952-07:00Phenomenology and Info-GlutAt some point in the past 12 years I began to develop a Shadow that watched me consume information. Metaphorically, the Shadow set up lines of communication with "me" and took measures to insert redundancy and insulated wires, etc: the clarity of signal between Shadow and "me" became less and less noisy. I am not describing a clinical picture here; I'm not mentally ill.<br />
<br />
Not yet, anyway.<br />
<br />
The Shadow seemed only concerned with how I <i>felt</i> when reading books or on Internet, or any other media in which we decode alphabetical "words." (<i>i.e., </i>It's a lot like what you're doing right where you are sitting now.) I noticed It didn't care very much about my listening to music or watching TV. There had been a similar sort of Entity many years ago that watched my TV watching, but it was blunt and always correct. A typical message: "You're not really enjoying this program. Not anymore. Turn it off and do what really makes you happy."<br />
<br />
A lot of the time that happy-making thing was reading. It still is.<br />
<br />
I know now this Shadow and the earlier Entity were parts of myself I'd constructed from reading and thinking about how media affects me. And I know my reading can make me unhappy, but sometimes I ward that off by saying to myself, "This is very unpleasant information, and it seems mostly true, or true enough. But I'd rather be one who knows how the world 'really' works than an oblivious bore. It's what Jefferson said was essential for democracy to work." Something like that.<br />
<br />
Mostly my reading brings me great joy and wonder. That's why I'm addicted to it. I'm okay with the addiction. Resonant energy-language from books interacting with my nervous system has become some sort of activity that acts symbiotically: I derive a sort of secular religiosity of wonder from it; it derives my attention and money, but I think the thing it really likes is how I propagate its seed. It wants pullulation; I deliver. We're both happy.<br />
<br />
And, like playing a musical instrument, reading on and on for years and really challenging yourself makes you a more formidable reader. I can pick up <i style="font-weight: bold;">Finnegans Wake</i> at any point, read a page and yack about my interpretations there for 20 minutes. I'm currently reading my first Murakami book (and it's <i>great!</i>: <i style="font-weight: bold;">Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World</i>, not that you'd asked) and I get the palpable feeling that my intense readings of Borges make this book "easier" because of the earlier heavy lifting of the Argentine and Chandler, maybe William Gibson and a handful of like-marvelous writers...<br />
<br />
I've at times (twice at minimum) read myself into Chapel Perilous, and reading was <i>part </i>of finding my way out. Nowadays the only worry I have in these regards is Info-Glut. I first became aware that I was not the only one who experienced the vertigo of info when a book called <i style="font-weight: bold;">Information Anxiety</i> appeared on the New Books shelf at my local library in 1990. It was by some guy named Richard Saul Wurman, who later invented the TED Talks. He gave some historical perspective. Misery loved company yet again. I forget whether Lassie ever really did come home...<br />
<br />
Since then: a flood/deluge/onslaught/barrage/din of books and articles on the effects of too much information interacting with the nervous system. Ironic? Hell yes. Those terms (flood/deluge, etc) are some of the same ones people use when they talk about their own "info overload."<br />
<br />
So: I guess I model internally my reading on some sort of Bell Curve, and most of the time I'm right near the top, on the lefthand slope, enjoying myself. And if I get to the top and tip over and start sliding down the righthand side, I know some good breathing exercises. I know to go be with friends. I know when to take a walk or play guitar, lose myself in <i>that.</i><br />
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<br />
<br />
<b>Some Notes From Outside Me and My Shadow</b><br />
<br />
-David Foster Wallace, in an essay collected in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Both Flesh and Not</i>, addressed the combination of boredom - which his friend and fellow writer Jonathan Franzen said DFW died from (boredom) - and information anxiety: Total Noise. He not only addressed the personal responsibility to be informed as a citizen in a "democracy" but he felt like he was drowning, losing his autonomy, in "the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective." In order to stay afloat, we need allies, proxies, and subcontracting friends who will maybe read that long article for you, and tell you what's the gist and pith. A bulwark against info-glut were those invaluable writers of concision who knew how to marshall the flood of facts and convey them meaningfully. They seem to be essayists.<br />
<br />
While I doubt I'll ever totally understand DFW's boredom problem - some things seem simply beyond me, temperamentally - the irony for us here is that he was one of those writers who provided that bulwark for us.<br />
<br />
What further complicates DFW for me: in his brilliant discussion of Kafka and short stories and jokes in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Consider the Lobster</i>, he addresses Danish science writer Tor Norretranders's idea of <i>exformation</i>, "which is a certain quality of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient." - that's how DFW unpacks Norretranders here.<br />
<br />
DFW's suicide is too sad -not to mention too arch and far too simplifying - to posit that his boredom-unto-out-of-control-depression-and-suicide was due to going over the Bell Curve, down the right-hand slope, careening into oblivion. His writing gives me nothing but pleasure; he makes me feel smarter. He helps me deal with the Glut.<br />
<br />
-In David Ulin's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Lost Art of Reading</i> he tells us about the Global Information Industry Center's 2009 study about information consumption by Unistatians in 2008: <i>tons</i> of shallow crap. Okay, but why? This led me to Elizabeth Eisenstein.<br />
<br />
-Around 1962, the honcho primo of the American Historical Association, Carl Bridenbaugh, gave a talk about how the new media of TV, telephones, polaroid cameras, transistor radios, data processing machines and "that Bitch Goddess, Quantification."<br />
<br />
Bridenbaugh: "Notwithstanding the incessant chatter about communication that we hear daily, it has not improved; actually it has become more difficult."<br />
<br />
Eisenstein's massive, 2-vol <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Printing Press as an Agent of Change</i> argued the opposite of Bridenbaugh, who thought we were losing our history, our memory, who we are, due to the new media. Eisenstein showed how utterly profound the Gutenberg explosion was responsible for the rise of science, the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance. She cited Marshall McLuhan's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Gutenberg Galaxy </i>for pointing to scholars that they can be blind to the very medium in which they swim: books. The past was becoming not less accessible, but <i>more </i>accessible. Scholars translate books, crack codes like Linear B, uncover the <i style="font-weight: bold;">Dead Sea Scrolls</i>, etc.<br />
<br />
Still: how to make sense of that part of the glut you're mired in at present? Does info glut make us culturally crazy? Is this ultimately behind the phenomena of "FOMO" and other mediated maladies since 2000CE?<br />
<br />
-T.S. Eliot, by 1934 quite the reactionary, but still:<br />
<br />
<i>Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;</i><br />
<i>Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.</i><br />
<i>All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,</i><br />
<i>All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,</i><br />
<i>But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.</i><br />
-"The Rock"<br />
<br />
While I don't share Eliot's Anglican bend by any stretch, why not constantly wonder about the principles and workings in us of data/information/knowledge/wisdom? And, perhaps especially: silence? It seems to me worthsomewhiles.<br />
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<br />
-Aldous Huxley and the stoned intelligentsia that followed in the wake of his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Doors and Perception </i>and <i style="font-weight: bold;">Heaven and Hell</i> often picked up Aldous's metaphorical riff: that tripping on LSD and psilocybin was flooding the nervous system with information. Huxley compared the experience of rapid info-flow on psychedelics as if ordinary life was spent while your mind was a garden hose with a crink in it, so we experience those dribbles and drabs as "reality. With psychedelic drugs, the garden hose is straightened out, and it feels like a goddamned fire hose of info-deluge. With the <i>slightest</i> tweak of a serotonin molecule, "reality" is seen in a profoundly new light. Lots of us have at times freaked out on that...glut.<br />
<br />
It doesn't seem too much to see why robotic cults follow in the wake of this: the replacement by a very low-info environment. The grasping at quotidian Our Leader Will Tell Us crap. Jesus Told Me To Tell You crap. In order to feel better. I get it.<br />
<br />
<b>Back To My Shadow and Me</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
One thing that helps me in staving off the fear from Info-Glut: I find it feels good to imagine being part of a conspiracy of readers/knowers who are privy to certain things. (If I recall correctly, the Shadow turned me on to this cabal.) This seems to me at once both a product of my arrested adolescent Walter Mitty-mindedness, and a hedge against, for lack of a better word, insanity. I mean, Ted Kaczynski read the Great Books. Cosmic humor and frequent erotic flings with the Infinite Goof seem quite on the jocoserious order in face of the Glut. Or: do you have a better way?<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: xx-small;"><a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/"><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;">l'image de bobby campbell</span> <span style="font-size: x-small;"> </span></a></span> <span style="font-size: large;"> </span></i> <br />
<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-72870527094573176832016-06-17T23:58:00.001-07:002016-06-28T04:29:15.099-07:00Obscurity, Codes and Puzzles in Books: Ponderings"Censorship is the mother of metaphor." - Borges<br />
<br />
While I'm on record as being with the cognitive neurolinguistics of Lakoff, et.al., as my main model for the mother of metaphor, Borges here gets at something I find exceedingly interesting: the now-marginalized idea that writers have used coded language for various reasons, and one of them would be to escape persecution by the State. I give Borges his point here.<br />
-------------------------------------------<br />
<b>Joyce's Friend Byrne's Crypto</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
With the debates about mass surveillance and encryption continuing on to what I assume is a slow boil, and with <a href="https://theintercept.com/2016/05/20/high-school-debaters-bring-surveillance-encryption-arguments-to-capitol-hill/">brilliant high school students bringing the debate (literally) to Capitol Hill</a>, many of us of a certain caste of mind eventually wonder where and when this began. One day we find ourselves in the archives and indexes of old books. We learn some of what we set out for. In my case - and probably (?) yours - you get the serendipitous hit, too. A recent example from my own forays:<br />
<br />
John Francis Byrne, who was James Joyce's best friend at university in Dublin, later invented a cryptographic device that he thought might make him rich, because it was an uncrackable "Chaocipher," which used what's called an "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autokey_cipher">autokey</a>" in the trade. It was a cigar box with some bits of strings and a few odds and ends. When Byrne showed it to his cousin she said it would win him a Nobel Prize, "not for science, apparently, but for ushering in an age of universal peace by conferring the gift of perfect security upon the communications of all nations and all men." - <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Codebreakers</i>, Kahn, p.767<br />
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<i>J.F. Byrne, Joyce's friend</i><br />
<br />
Byrne thought his device would be used by businessmen, brotherhoods, religious groups and social institutions, and by "husband, wife, or lover." (Kahn, quoting Byrne, p.768) Anyone could use his device anywhere and it would provide perfect encryption. Byrne met with and tried to sell his device to the US Army, State Department, AT&T, and the Navy, and was turned down. The State Dept sent him a form letter, telling him their own "ciphers are adequate to (our) needs."<br />
<br />
Byrne, who published a book in 1951 called <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Silent Years</i>, mostly about remembering Joyce, devoted the final third of his book to telling the world about his amazing encryption machine, and actually challenged the public to crack his code, offering "$5000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book..." (Kahn, 768) Byrne challenged the American Cryptogram Association, the New York Cipher Society and Norbert Wiener to crack his code.<br />
<br />
Kahn:<br />
"Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had its merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use. Byrne, like many inventors, both won and lost. His cipher was never broken. But his dream never came true." (768)<br />
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<i>David Kahn, 2013. His book <b>The Codebreakers</b></i><br />
<i><b> </b>is a tour-de-force.</i><br />
<br />
When Joyce came back to Dublin in 1909, another of his old friends from university, Vincent Cosgrave, told Joyce that Nora had "walked out" with him - Cosgrave - around the time Nora fell for the dreamy writer, which devastated him. He wrote accusatory letters to Nora, who was living at their home in Trieste. He wondered if Giorgio, his first child and only son, born in 1905, was really his. Byrne tried to convince Joyce that Cosgrave and Oliver St. John Gogarty (the model for <b><i>Ulysses</i></b>'s "Buck Mulligan") were trying to ruin Joyce. It was a plot. Joyce's brother Stan told James that Nora had <i>rebuffed</i> Cosgrave, and this calmed the Irish/cosmopolitan bard.<br />
<br />
In real life, Byrne lived with cousins at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, which is the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Byrne is "Cranly" in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i>, the character who lends a sympathetic ear to Stephen's aesthetic ideas, amongst other things. The section late at night in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Ulysses</i>, where Bloom has forgotten the key to his house, so he jumps the fence and gets in through the backdoor and lets Stephen in? That actually happened with Byrne. Joyce makes me think of it as a mythic thing, which is marvelous on his part...<br />
<br />
By 1910 Byrne had emigrated to New York, where he worked as a journalist under the name J.F. Renby, an anagram of his last name. He died in 1960.<br />
----------------------------------------------------------------<br />
<b>Arthur Melzer Makes Me Think</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
"Against history, we developed community through the use of a subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another way by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song and magic."<br />
-Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian essayist, broadcaster and poet, in his 1990 <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape</i>, pp.38-39<br />
<br />
In a dizzyingly wonderful book that leaves me wondering what I'm missing, Michigan State professor of political science, <a href="http://polisci.msu.edu/index.php/people/faculty/item/faculty/arthur-melzer">Arthur Melzer</a>, published <i style="font-weight: bold;">Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing</i> (2014).<br />
<br />
[<a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/sites/melzer/melzer_appendix.pdf">Get a load of his out-of-book appendix</a>, a real data-dump of historical textual examples that bolster his claims that esoteric writing (writing in a tricky way in order to not be persecuted or not damage the body politic, but it's more complicated than that) has basically gone on since writing and the State emerged.]<br />
<br />
The book was reviewed widely and positively...by NeoCons. The bad reviews seem to be from anti-NeoCons. Melzer says the book needed to be written, and the subject - which was one of Leo Strauss's main riffs - wasn't really Melzer's thing. He doesn't like esoteric writing. He wants to read writers who say exactly what they mean.<br />
<br />
I've read the book and find it magisterial. Then I made the mistake of re-reading a book of essays, mostly by Umberto Eco, with contributions by Christine Brooke-Rose, Richard Rorty, and Jonathan Culler: <i style="font-weight: bold;">Interpretation and Overinterpretation</i>. I find it heady stuff. But it worsened my probably paranoid overinterpretation of Melzer's avowed reluctance to address the topic, and his NeoCon ties.<br />
<br />
Melzer:<br />
"My friends and colleagues all regard it as curious that I should be the one to write this book. There are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it. I am not one of them."<br />
-p.xvii<br />
<br />
And yet there's 450 pages (plus that online appendix!), scholarly throughout. And then I'm into Eco, illustrating how paranoid overinterpretations occur. And there's NeoCon Mark Lilla, in his book on Vico (who to me is the most interesting example of what Melzer calls "defensive esoteric" writing), saying he disagrees with Leo Strauss on an esotericist reading of Vico. (See <i style="font-weight: bold;">G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern</i>, pp.243-245)<br />
<br />
Before Melzer's book appeared, for years I'd accumulated notes on the topic on my own, but I hadn't read NeoCon godfather Strauss's 1952 <i style="font-weight: bold;">Persecution and the Art of Writing</i>. I accumulated notes based on my readings of Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown, Frances Yates, Nietzsche, etc.<br />
<br />
The British empiricist Isaiah Berlin knew Strauss and liked him, admired his mind, but thought a lot of his ideas were wrong, including the esoteric idea:<br />
<br />
Berlin:<br />
"Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This had been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd."<br />
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Conversations with Isaiah Berlin</i>, with Ramin Jahanbegloo, pp. 31-32<br />
<br />
And yet Berlin seems to me one of the most astute readers of Vico. And yet: I agree with Berlin about Strauss's rejection of Modernity. And yet: Melzer's book seems overwhelmingly persuasive.<br />
<br />
I have not read my way into yet another Chapel Perilous. But I have once again become, lately, ever-more hyper-aware of my own interpretive schemes in reading.<br />
<br />
The headspace? Cosmic hilarity!<br />
-------------------------------------------------------<br />
<b>Ending in a Southernly Direction</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Lee Server interviewed the late great Terry Southern, and here's a passage apropos:<br />
<br />
Server: Reading <i style="font-weight: bold;">Candy </i>as a kid, I'll confess to you, played a definite part in my growing into manhood - I don't intend to go into details. What would you read for "erotic purposes" as a youngster?<br />
<br />
Terry Southern: When I was young, they had what were called "little fuck-books" - which featured characters taken from the comics. Most of them were absurd and grotesque, but there were one or two of genuine erotic interest; "Blondie" comes to mind, as do "Dale" and "Flash Gordon" and darling "Ella Cinders." For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to "read between the lines" in the famous <i>Nancy Drew </i>books, searching for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage ("J.O." wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless, series.<br />
-<i style="font-weight: bold;">Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995</i>, ed. Mike Southern and Josh Alan Friedman, p.2<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>grafica di <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></i></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-46385155518920893202016-06-11T00:22:00.002-07:002016-06-11T15:06:08.920-07:00On "Maps" as Maybe the Best Metaphor For Our Knowledge?I was talking with a friend of a friend about GPS devices and I said I didn't have one. He didn't either. I said I like the challenge of getting lost (my sense of direction in non-familiar environments seems sub-optimal) and trying to "figure it out." We both still carry road-maps in our cars. About GPS systems: Apparently they're getting smaller, cheaper, more portable, and are causing trouble with not only the cops "illegally" tracking someone, but citizens are using them to spy on each other. (But <i>of course...</i>)<br />
<br />
(I've already digressed?)<br />
<br />
I still use road maps in my car. I <i>love</i> maps of all kinds. They fire my imagination.<br />
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"The map is not the territory." - Korzybski, who apparently annoyed certain segments of the <i>cognoscenti</i> by repeating something so obvious. (But is the phrase so obvious when looked at from from the angle of personal knowledge? Human behavior? Our own neuroses?)<br />
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Robert Anton Wilson, elaborating on Korzybski's famous riff, reminded us that for a map to actually "be" the territory it would:<br />
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<br />
<ul>
<li>Have to be as big as the territory</li>
<li>Have to show every inhabitant, including animals, plants, and microbes</li>
<li>Give an account of every change, which it cannot do: maps are inherently frozen in time</li>
</ul>
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In a fragment by Borges, "<a href="https://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/08/bblonder/phys120/docs/borges.pdf">On Exactitude In Science</a>," the cartographers of the Empire zealously mapped the entire Empire, point-by-point. The map of the Empire was as big as the Empire: what a pain in the ass. Eventually, they realized the uselessness and "pitilessness" of such a venture.<br />
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In reading a collection of articles on the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (AKA: the DSM-V), I became ever more aware that Big Pharma had succeeded in making more behaviors "diseases" that could be treated by drugs, while things like "homosexuality" had been taken out of earlier versions of the book. Psychiatrists apparently listen to their patients, and if they don't "know" enough about what drug to prescribe - what they decode as a specific set of mental symptoms - they consult the DSM-V. But it's only a "map" of human complaints and hypotheses and theories and ideologies about what might help "remedy" the patient's unhappiness.<br />
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Here's where I think Korzybski's "map" metaphor is still underrated. Practically all of our knowledge "is" "maps". Certainly all of our books are maps. Even "fiction" books. (I welcome a spirited disagreement in the comments!)<br />
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metaphor<br />
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Veteran Korzybski scholar Robert Pula:<br />
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<i>By "maps" [in the korzybskian sense] we should understand everything and anything that humans formulate...including (to take a few in alphabetical order), biology, Buddhism, Catholicism, chemistry, Evangelism, Freudianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Lutheranism, physics, Taoism, etc, etc,...!"</i><br />
-Preface to the 5th ed. of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Science and Sanity</i>, 1994, p. xvii<br />
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This entire blog - any blog you read - mostly consists of maps, or maps of maps, or maps of maps of maps, etc. And what of it? Are we still sub- and/or un-consciously looking for Someone with The Truth? (What we want is "more of the truth," no?)<br />
<br />
What truths do we want most for ourselves? How to go about it? When do we know we're on the "best" or one of the better trails?<br />
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Computer scientist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Kay">Alan Kay</a>, on "science":<br />
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<i>Science is a relationship between what we can represent and think about and what's actually "out there"; it's an extension of good map making..."</i><br />
-p.118 <i style="font-weight: bold;">What We Believe But Can't Prove </i>(ed. John Brockman)<br />
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Kay appreciates Korzybski. Here's Blake Victor Seidenshaw on Alan Kay on Alfred Korzybski (or a map of a map of a map?):<br />
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<i>I enjoyed Alan Kay's perceptive comments about the irony of the Korzybskian "null-A," since the "null" is itself an Aristotelian operator! Alan mentioned that he thought Korzybski himself probably would have found this hilarious, since he had obviously never intended to do away with Aristotelian logic entirely. This is an important, if obvious point: if you think about it, as Korzybski certainly did, we cannot logically - intellectually - do away with classical logic; the very attempt to do so would precisely reproduce it. This amounts to an excellent paradox; it is literally unthinkable.</i><br />
<i>-ETC: A Review of General Semantics</i>; vol.67; no.1, January 2010, p.3<br />
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With Robert Anton Wilson, "The word is not the thing" being called Korzybksi's First Law, the 2nd Law is "The map is not the territory." Aside from the philosophical zombies and the possibility I'm a brain in a vat imagining/hallucinating my "reality" (or the recent lysergic philosophical idea that we're probably Sims created by more advanced beings from Elsewhere, although, with this last, on some level, so effing what?), there seems to be a booming, buzzing confusion of a pre-verbal world "out there." Once we note it and begin to make sense of it we're abstracting/making a "map" of "reality" in our nervous system. (I think that guy is going to make a left-hand turn...why can't he use his turn indicator?: This forms part of your own mental map of "driving" or "other drivers", etc)<br />
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It seems there might exist some exceptions to this? Maybe. How about when maps are part of the territory? When I'm teaching a class and I talk about how "maps" work, am I not using maps as part of the territory about representation from within a teaching framework?<br />
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[...Or does this constitute a Strange Loop? Can I JOOTS (jump outside of the system- Douglas Hofstadter) and aver the teacher is using his knowledge (map) to talk about how maps work, putting teacher in a larger set/system of "reality" of map-users and map-makers? Just asking for a friend...]<br />
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Well, as we saw in my prior OG-spew, many Serious Thinkers thought Korzybski "nutty" and gave plenty of snarl words and "reasons" why. I'm not buying. Korzybski was weird, but also: pretty damned genius, in my opinion. Here's a passage from deep in modern cognitive neurolinguistics:<br />
<br />
(The author has spent 190+ pages addressing neurons, how they fire, how the nervous system of humans make neural circuits based on embodied being-in-the-world, and how conceptual schemes arise, allowing us to categorize our experiences and understand the world. - OG):<br />
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<i>How do people learn the concepts and language covering rich array of cultural frames such as baseball, marriage, and politics? In particular, what does the embodied NTL </i>[Neural Theory of Language - OG]<i> have to say about learning and using the language of cultural discourse? </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>The answer is </i>metaphor.<i> Metaphor in general refers to understanding one domain in terms of another...The NTL approach suggests that all of our cultural frames derive their meanings from metaphorical mappings to the embodied experience represented in primary conceptual schemas. </i><br />
<i>-</i>p.194, <b style="font-style: italic;">From Molecule To Metaphor: A Neural Theory of Language</b>, Jerome A. Feldman (2006)<br />
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Now: you're an embodied human reading and abstracting from what I've written here. You're making sense of it in the best way you can for right now. (<i>I am trying to do this, as you read and breathe.) </i>Feldman is reporting on not only his own work, but the work of hundreds of other cognitive scientists and others. He's trying his best - presumably - to get us to understand this exciting set of ideas. And, as I abstract from this, it's all about "metaphorical mappings."<br />
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We are attracted to people who make really interesting maps. A lot of the time we call these people "artists" or "inventors." We love them because they help us make our own maps richer in detail.<br />
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If you accept the idea in the title for this blog-spew, what other sorts of metaphors exist but maps? Metaphors here "are" maps. Maps are metaphors, by a process of algebraic thinking.<br />
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Where might I have gone wrong here?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>artaĵo por <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bobby Campbell</a></i></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-81029570329932746092016-06-03T20:22:00.002-07:002016-06-04T04:53:09.745-07:00Why Korzybski Waned: Some Educated GuessesAs I meditate - even ruminate, at times - on the quandary of climate change, income inequality, the Supreme Court's tragically stupid ruling that money "is" speech, that Trump or Hillary will probably be the next POTUS, etc, lately I've been thinking that, were Korzybski's "General Semantics" (from now on: "GS") taught in schools, or talked about on teevee or lauded in pop kulch, we couldn't possibly "be" in the mess we seem to be in now. I recently re-read Ezra Pound's 1937 essay "On the Immediate Need of Confucius" and thought, "We need Korzybski immediately."<br />
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And GS had its moment in Unistat education (c.1938-55 or so); now it's apparently thought of as something from the "fringe." While I constantly re-read the Ur-Text of GS, Korzybski's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Science and Sanity</i>, and can always "see" something sort of "wild" in the text, I think it's one of the great underrated books of all time.<br />
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I will try to provide a brief, necessarily idiosyncratic and truncated sketch of GS's marginalization. The following ideas, while numbered, represent no particular hierarchy:<br />
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<b>1.</b> The late media theorist Neil Postman (d:2003), who was a great student of Korzybski's writings, gave two reasons why Korzybski had fallen out of favor:<br />
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"Many academicians do not care for Korzybski - in part because he was not careful, and in part, because they have no patience for genius." - originally in Postman's "autobibliography" in his own book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk</i>, but my immediate source is "Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk - Redux," by Martin Levinson, PhD, in <i>Etc: A Review of General Semantics</i>, vol.63, number1, January 2006, pp.67-76<br />
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Brief comment by OG: Yes, Korzybski seems at times not-careful (ask me about the jazz irony sometime, for example); also: he clearly seems like an overpowering generalist-genius to me. If academicians have no patience for such a cat, my current main interpretation is that specialization has so manically taken over academe, and someone who writes about - on many pages all-at-once - neurobiology/philosophy/mathematics/biology/anthropology/physics/psychology and chemistry: can't possibly be taken seriously. I see AK's synthesis of what was known by 1933 as astounding.<br />
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<b>2. </b>Korzybski was a Polish count, polyglot, and not a bona fide academic, under Western standards. Hence, he was often seen as a cranky weirdo by academics. Not one of "us." Tries to cover too much. Too esoteric and generalistic. Now: many writers in different fields loved Korzybski and wrote interpretations (abstractions?) of his work. One of the earliest popularizers of AK's work was by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Chase">Stuart Chase</a>, whose <i style="font-weight: bold;">Tyranny of Words</i> (1938) was a best-seller. Chase was an MIT social theorist and advisor to FDR.<br />
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Brief comment: While Woody Allen's joke about the intellectual class being like the Mafia - "they only kill their own" - is one of my favorites, this seems like an exception.<br />
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<b>3. </b>By the late 1950s/early 1960s, AK and his GS was seen by the "responsible" intellectuals as allied with the outre and growing culture later known as "the counterculture." William S. Burroughs studied under AK briefly, and used ideas about GS in a science fiction-y way. (By extension, Allen Ginsberg was influenced by WSB's interest in Korzybski, and so Ginsberg was obviously influenced by GS too. When mentioning Ginsberg in this context, it seems <a href="http://korzybskifiles.blogspot.com/2014/07/alan-watts-on-general-semantics.html">Alan Watts's AK influence need be added</a>.) Indeed, for a while, GS was seen as synonymous with science fiction-thought, with Heinlein being an exponent of AK. A.E. Van Vogt wrote SF novels trying to popularize his interpretations of GS. (Sorry about the initial-stew here!)<br />
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<b>4. </b>AK and his GS have gradually become "infected" (my word) by its association with Scientology. Perhaps the richest irony here: an adequate understanding of GS would reveal that a mere association of one group with another does not mean that one groups's idea "infected" the following group. The notion that previously-created knowledge is utilized by many subsequent groups, for their own ends, still seems a pillar of sophisticated thought.<br />
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In Lawrence Wright's riveting book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief</i> (2013), while science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard was formulating his new religion, Jack Parsons's ex-mistress, Sara Elizabeth "Betty" Northrup, read to Hubbard from Korzybski; and Hubbard, "immediately grasped the ideas as the basis for a system of psychology, if not for a whole religion." (p.60) A further taste:<br />
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"Korzybski pointed out that words are not the things they describe, in the same way that a map is not the territory is represents. Language shapes thinking, creating mental habits, which can stand in the way of sanity by preserving delusions. Korzybski argued that emotional disturbances, learning disorders, and many psychosomatic illnesses - including heart problems, skin diseases, sexual disorders, migraines, alcoholism, arthritis, even dental cavities - could be remedied by semantic training, much as Hubbard would claim for his own work. He cited Korzybski frequently, although he admitted that he could never get through the texts themselves. 'Bob Heinlein sat down one time and talked for ten whole minutes on the subject of Korzybski to me and it was very clever,' he later related. 'I know quite a bit about Korzybski's works.'" (p.60)<br />
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Comment: There's no doubt <i style="font-weight: bold;">Science and Sanity</i> influenced <i style="font-weight: bold;">Dianetics</i>. I feel quite confident that Korzybski (who died in 1950) would disavow such a thing. Is it the fault of a writer if a later writer takes their work and uses it toward entirely different ends? Nietzsche's sister played her brother's work into the proto-Nazi's thought. I also have no doubt Nietzsche would have been appalled by Alfred Rosenberg's use of his thought, not to mention Hitler's bad reading in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Mein Kampf</i>. I will not comment on the parade of Christian fascists we've seen in the grand historical sweep.<br />
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<b>5. </b>As Unistat gradually took on the character of the National Security State after 1947, there slowly grew an apparatus of apologists for the State (of which I prefer Chomsky's term "commissar class"), and some of these intellectuals appointed themselves as "debunkers" of challenges to scientific orthodoxy. Darkly ironic, and seemingly at odds with the spirit of scientific investigation itself, probably the most famous and enduring Official Debunker was Martin Gardner, a brilliant writer who seemed polymathic in a way that mirrored Korzybski. However, in his enormously influential book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Fads and Fallacies In the Name of Science </i>(1952), Gardner lumped Korzybski in with flying saucer fanatics, psionics, the Bates theory of eyesight, Atlantis, Bridey Murphy...and L. Ron Hubbard. The zeitgeist and Gardner's formidable writing chops cannot be overestimated here. The chapter, "General Semantics, Etc," gives (to my eyes) a bad-faith ad hominem reading of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Science and Sanity. </i>While prefacing that he thinks Korzybski's bad book is not as bad as previously-discussed pillories of Wilhelm Reich and Hubbard (separate chapters are devoted to taking down those guys too), Gardner writes of Korzybski's magnum opus:<br />
<br />
"It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive, repetitious mish-mash of sound ideas borrowed from abler scientists and philosophers, mixed with neologisms, confused ideas, unconscious metaphysics, and highly dubious speculations about neurology and psychiatric therapy." (p.281)<br />
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At the same time, Gardner - who for some reason links Korzybski with Jacob L. Moreno, the Rumanian who invented psychodrama - says Korzybski "may or may not have considerable scientific merit." Then he gets down to debunking. If Korzybski ever had a good idea, it was not a new idea. <i>usw.</i><br />
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Comment: At the risk of taking 10,000 words to debunk this debunker, I would merely aver that Korzybski's psychology of perception and individual/societal "making sense" of phenomena is still on very strong ground, and that Gardner should have at least acknowledged this and written, "It seems to me that..." (It is a poorly organized, verbose, philosophically naive...etc). I charge Gardner with ad hominem, but he's canny about it. It seems mean-spirited and underhanded to me, with lots of appeals to authority and almost zero charity. See for yourself: Chapter 23, pp.281-291.<br />
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<b>6. </b>Many years ago I was sitting in a very large room on the 5th floor of the hall of justice in Long Beach, California, waiting to see if I would be impanelled on an actual jury. I was reading Korzybski or another book on GS. An older lady stopped and took note: "You're reading General Semantics! I used to teach that." I asked what ever happened to it? How come I wasn't taught it? She said "The business community hated it." She also said she thought the local churches and politicians didn't like it, either. I remember saying this reminded me of Socrates getting busted for "corrupting the youth" of Athens. I recall the older lady saying it was sort of like that, yea.<br />
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Comment: I mean this as an endorsement of Korzybski.<br />
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<i>A Chomsky diagram: how will this tell you how</i><br />
<i> "the death tax" really works?</i><br />
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<b>7. </b>In 1957, Noam Chomsky broke radically with a long historic tradition in linguistics, publishing a thin book titled <i style="font-weight: bold;">Syntactic Structures</i>. It was so obscure at the time the only place he could publish it was at The Hague. In what myself and many others take to be a prime example of "physics envy" in areas of the academy that were not physics, this book gradually achieved academic cult-status, filled with abstruse diagrams of transformations of sentence structures, as an attempt to get to the "deep structure" (still a potent metaphor, with legs!) of English. The goal was audacious: scrap the entire history of empirical linguistics and, using the latest mathematics and following a Cartesian philosophical rationalism, to eventually show that human language contains Universal Grammar that only humans are endowed with, by...well, not the Creator-creator. Not evolution, either. Oh, he'd deal with that some other day.<br />
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Comment: This may be the most underrated reason why Korzybski is now seen as a fringe figure: Chomsky's linguistic work, which now looked as important and impressive as physics diagrams on a blackboard as scribbled by Einstein, Bohr, Schrodinger, or Feynman, was too seductive to not jump on board if you were an academic who wanted in on the Newest Abstruse Theory. Or: a new, possibly more-encompassing language paradigm, which, if legit, was a real winner. Couple this with Chomsky's tireless humanistic ethics against the State, war, inequality, official lies, Behaviorism, and most of his fellow intellectuals' overweening ambition to serve the State: you have the conscience of the entire Intellectual Class residing in one man's thought. I think Chomsky's odd non-charismatic charisma helped his linguistic program, which was doomed, probably from its inception, to never be able to account for the most important aspect of language: semantics. Intellectual attention space is limited. Chomsky's language ideas and his background as a properly trained academic <i>seemed </i>more impressive. Hence, GS waned. Unistat culture suffered. I now see Chomsky's linguistic gains, over 60 years, to be quite modest considering the declared ambitious grasp in scope. It was a bifuration point, culturally, and to our detriment and for complex reasons, it went the other way...<br />
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<b>8. </b>"Popularizations" are not serious reading. This, in the age of Specialization, seems gospel in Academe. Now not only AK but his popularizers are seen as not only "wrong" because non-Chomskyan, but debased, because for the masses. I have on my shelves GS-popularizations such as <i style="font-weight: bold;">People In Quandaries</i> by Wendell Johnson; <i style="font-weight: bold;">Levels of Knowing and Existence</i> by Harry L. Weinberg; <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Language of Wisdom and Folly</i>, by Irving J. Lee; <i style="font-weight: bold;">Mathsemantics: Making Numbers Talk Sense</i>, by Edward MacNeal. Oh, and Samuel Hayakawa's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Language In Thought and Action</i>, which has proven to be the most famous of GS popularizers. (More about this last book and author below.)<br />
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Comment: All of these books consist for me as guides to what might have been. Korzybski's work was so fecund that none of these books are alike. Just one irony among many I could point out here: In Chomsky's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Understanding Power</i>, he extolls 1930s leftist intellectuals for popularizing difficult subjects! (see pp.331-333) For more irony, see pp.37-44, where Noam - not doing linguistics but championing human freedom against the State and its violence, gives one example after another of how the State uses Orwellian language against the masses, who are defenseless unless they somehow learn one or another form of "intellectual self-defense," none of which could possibly include GS because that approach is "all wrong."(<----I read an email from Noam forwarded to me by a friend who asked what Chomsky thought of GS)<br />
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Popularizations are not to be taken seriously, but we want the public to understand the increasingly opaque world. So: popularizations are no good unless they're good. Since 1930: it looks to me like the Commissar Class doesn't really care if a small minority of the population reads something very truthful about power. As long as more than a "few" don't catch on?<br />
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<b>9. </b>In what functions as an update on Gardner, Steven Pinker's popular book <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Language Instinct</i> (1994) has an entire chapter showing why Korzybski/GS/Sapir-Whorf "are" all wrong. Pinker has picked up the Chomsky linguistic model and assumed the role of Public Intellectual. When I read his chapter, "Mentalese" from <b><i>TLI</i></b>, I get the feeling Pinker has never actually read Korzybski. I emailed him; Pinker never wrote back. In my opinion Pinker contributes to the enormous disservice to the public by making fun of the previous model of how language works. (See <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Language Instinct</i>, pp. 55-82 and see what you think?)<br />
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<b>10.</b> Regarding S. I. Hayakawa, the most popular popularizer of Korzybski: it's pretty complicated. Because Hayakawa was teaching mostly writers and humanities types, his biographer, Gerald Haslam, has called Hayakawa's GS "General Semantics Lite." <i style="font-weight: bold;">Language In Thought and Action</i> is a delightful read, and will make you "smarter" right away. However, if you decide then to look at his source - <i style="font-weight: bold;">Science and Sanity</i> - you will probably be STUNNED by all the math and science.<br />
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In Robert Anton Wilson's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Illuminati Papers</i>, there's a page of Erisiana that may seen obscure now. <a href="http://www.principiadiscordia.com/downloads/The_Illuminati_Papers_-_Robert.pdf">On p.92 (I have the olde And/Or Press issue), there's a jokey-ornate form letter </a>from, among other "groups," the American Anarchist Association. The letter is addressed to someone named S.I. Hayakawa, and cautions the recipient to read another person with the same name, because the other Hayakawa was evidently a sane reader of GS who knew and wrote about Korzybski well. The recipient of the letter would benefit, because "He might also teach you something about neurosemantic relaxation. In the last photograph We saw of you confronting the dissidents, your entire face, shoulders, and body showed rigidity, neurosemantic 'closedness,' and the general nonverbal message, 'Don't talk to me; my mind is made up.' General Semantics might teach you how to grow out of this infantile and primitive attitudinal set and function as a time-binding and open personality. Please get in touch with the other Dr. Hayakawa an give this a try." - signed by "Theophobia the Elder," a Robert Anton Wilson pseudonym within the Discordian religion.<br />
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Some background <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeCIaVGM9E">HERE</a>.<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLDT67P2RKk">Here's his biographer, Haslam, giving a talk to General Semantics Symposium</a>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.oac.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb5q2nb40v;NAAN=13030&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00005&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=oac4">A defense of Hayakawa by his son:</a> Let's remember that S.I. Hayakawa<span style="font-size: x-small;">1</span> is not the same as S.I. Hayakawa<span style="font-size: x-small;">2</span>, who isn't the same as S.I. Hayakawa<span style="font-size: x-small;">3</span>, etc.<br />
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Comment: Hayakawa famously slept in the California Senate. As Haslam notes, it's ironic that this is all people remember about Hayakawa (who was Marshall McLuhan's paperboy in Canada when he was very young!); it seems very unfortunate that his semantic reactions at SF State during the anarchic late 1960s has been used to denigrate GS.<br />
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<b>11. </b>Robert Anton Wilson - who turned me on to Korzybski - told interviewer Charles Platt in the early 1980s that there were "defects" in his [Korzybski's- OG] system, but his body of work is something "everybody should grapple with." RAW told me he thought Korzybski could be personally abrasive, and that may be why he fell out of favor. (I forget where I read that some of Korzybski's students said he could be "blasphemously cheerful.") There's an idea that runs through a lot of RAW's heavily-influenced-by-Korzybski <i>oeuvre</i>: that there is a semantic unconscious - which Pound called paideuma - in which it is taboo to know how power, sex and knowledge "really work." In my opinion, this may be the deepest "reason" why Korzybski waned.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-size: 25px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">बॉबी कैम्पबेल द्वारा कलाकृति</a></span><br />
<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-10030534340367012412016-05-27T04:16:00.002-07:002016-06-03T04:45:07.098-07:00On Hillary Clinton's UFOlogySince last December I've noted that Hillary Rodham Clinton (henceforth: HRC) has been openly talking about how she'd like to "get to the bottom" of what the Unistat gummint knows about UFOs/aliens.<br />
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Call me cynical (What? In <i>this</i> election cycle? Golly!), but I immediately thought of the neo-Machiavellian political theories of guys like Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and their <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/19/dictators-handbook-de-mesquita-review">Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics</a> </i>from 2012: even in a democracy you need enough coalitions of support from the "selectorate" in order to win; you may be yanking other coalition's chains, but you need as many voting blocs of special interests as possible. The ones with money who helped you get elected matter most to you, and if you yank their chains the wrong way, you're cooked.<br />
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I thought, "Well, she's going for the X-Files-obsessed vote here." Cynical! (Of me and/or HRC.)<br />
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Then I continued to follow HRC and her UFO talk, and I went back and researched a bit to see how phony HRC might be on this subject. It gets complicated. Which is how I like it.<br />
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While Donald Trump trots out around one conspiracy theory per day lately: Vincent Foster was killed by the Clintons; Obama may still be a secret Muslim; Scalia was murdered and it was covered up; vaccines cause autism; many thousands of muslims were seen celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11/01; Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the JFK hit; Bill Clinton has sexually "assaulted" several women, etc...he's clearly going for the Nutjob vote, which I think he already had sewn up a long time ago.<br />
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I'd say, "Maybe time to dial it back a bit, Donny," but he'd probably have his goons haul me out of the room, telling said goons to <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/03/11/from_knock_the_crap_out_of_him_to_i_certainly_dont_condone_that_at_all_watch_trump_directly_contradict_himself_on_violence_against_protestors_at_his_rallies/">"Knock the crap out of him. I'll pay your legal fees."</a> (Ladies and germs: the future <i>President of Unistat!</i>)<br />
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I figured HRC needed to tap into the quasi-religious and conspiracist idea that the Unistat gov still has classified files about aliens. That's probably a sizable voting bloc, eh? (The voters, not the aliens.)<br />
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It turns out she seems to have been genuinely interested in UFOs (she corrected Jimmy Kimmel on his show earlier this year: the scientific, evidence-based community prefer UAPs [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena]), which greatly - apparently? - impressed the ardent UFO-philes out there. HRC met with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurance_Rockefeller">Laurence Rockefeller </a> in 1995, at his Wyoming ranch. She was photographed with serious physicist Paul Davies's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Are We Alone?</i><br />
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(Coincidentally, <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/maybe-life-in-the-cosmos-is-rare-after-all/">Davies very recently wrote an article for <i>Scientific American</i></a> that posits maybe life in the universe is exceedingly rare, afterall...assumptions that there must be life seeded all over this universe - the one you're probably in right now - seem unwarranted...is Davies trying to distance himself from HRC? Wheels within wheels...)<br />
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Longtime Clinton operative John Podesta is an <i>X-Files </i>aficionado and has talked about getting the files declassified, asserting recently that "There are still classified files that could be declassified." (Maybe it depends on what the term "are" means?)<br />
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Kimmel told HRC that he'd asked her husband and Obama about the UFOs and they didn't find anything. Hillary: "Well I'm going to do it again." Great, because it's not like the economy needs fixing or anything. Go for it, Hills-y baby! (Obama has treated questions about UFOs as a joke.)<br />
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So, while Bill was Prez 1993-2000, they weren't able to "get to the bottom of it"? Why? Maybe lots of stuff has happened since then? Who knows...Let's try to keep an open mind here. Let's keep digging...<br />
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I stumbled on to an <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/13897-50-years-ago-michigan-congressman-gerald-ford-made-ufos-a-political-issue">article about former Prez Gerald Ford</a>, who, as a Michigan Congressman in 1966, responded to UFO sightings over Michigan by calling for a Congressional Hearing. He didn't get the hearing, and seems to have taken his constituents' fears seriously (this was only five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War in full swing, UFOs not the humorous Thing they are now), but Ford did get a long report on UFO sightings from the U. of Colorado and <a href="http://bluebookarchive.org/">Project Blue Book</a>, which ran from 1947-1969. This report considered 12,618 UFO sightings, all explained as weather balloons, atmospheric phenomena, or classified test flights, and a few other things. 701 sightings were still inconclusive.<br />
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The conspiracy-minded will want me to mention that Ford was on the Warren Commission. Done. Anyway...<br />
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Oh yea: Project Blue Book? <a href="http://www.space.com/28256-ufo-sightings-cia-u2-aircraft.html">Recently, the CIA tweeted</a> that all those UFO sightings in the 1950s and '60s? It was <i>them</i>! I mean...not THEM-them, but the CIA. Which is "them" enough for me. Yea, verily the CIA asserts they were covering up their very high-flying U-2 Program, 1954-74. So, a branch of the Unistat government withheld evidence from a future US President and anyone else who might be interested in what the hell was going on with odd things in the sky. The cads! Those...<i>bounders</i> have done it again!<br />
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'Cuz, "national security," of course. If you read the article, professional "skeptic" and debunker Robert Sheaffer is calling bullshit on the CIA here. O! sooo rich! So meaty! Sheaffer once accused Robert Anton Wilson of "malicious, misguided fanaticism." (Personally, I prefer the properly "guided" fanaticism, but that's just me.) Sheaffer is long-suffering. <a href="http://www.rawilson.com/csicon.html">In 1990, he charged the novelist Wilson</a> as one who "attacks language and thought" the way a "terrorist attacks"...and to add insult, Wilson seems to have enjoyed a hearty belly-laugh over what he did as a writer of satire. Horrible!<br />
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To be honest, why are you even reading what some dipshit blogger like the OG thinks about these ideas? Clearly: Robert Sheaffer is <i>the </i>go-to Grand Poo-Bah of all things honest and capital tee Truth. What does Sheaffer think of HRC wanting to get to the bottom of the UFO/aliens thing?<br />
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HRC and her UFOlogy Sancho Panza, Podesta, just want transparency, evidence-based science, and the destigmatization of those who are interested in whether or not We Are Not Alone. The UFO/alien cohort (Sorry! Very snarky of me: the <i>UAP/alien </i>cohort) is an estimable one too: Stephen Bassett, who spends his time lobbying Congress on extraterrestrial/UFO issues? His organization has 2.5 million Twitter followers. That could put you over the top. (In November.)<br />
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December, 2015: HRC tells a New Hampshire reporter, "We may have been visited already." (Yes, and you may have already won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes of <i>one million dollars cash!</i>)<br />
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I like this line from HRC: "There's enough stories out there that I don't think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up." Point well taken. They could be in the bathroom, or out by the swing-set near the wading pool. The possibilities seem well-nigh endless.<br />
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In 1996, Bob Woodward's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Choice</i> made fun of HRC (what a meanie!), seeming to ridicule her for having conversations with dead heroes of hers, like Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt.<br />
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In delving in some archives (Okay: I read about six short articles published in the last year) and re-visiting the Wm Jefferson Clinton years in Office, I was reminded that, indeed, the <i>X-Files </i>seemed to run alongside his term. And <i>Independence Day</i> did boffo box office. And HRC openly complained about a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get her and Bill. (I think she had something tangible with that last bit of conspiracy thinking, but this was all pre 9/11/01; it was practically <i>Leave It To Beaver </i>time compared to what we're looking at now.)<br />
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And you know what? Even though I confess I'm not a HRC fan - not by a longshot - I do think she has some good points about her UFOlogizing. But it sounds better coming from the mouth of a higher-up who may as well be anonymous to me: a <i>luminary</i> named Christopher Mellon, a former Senate Intelligence Committee guy, former intel at the Dept of Defense: "It shouldn't be a source of embarrassment to discuss it. [UFOs/UAPs/aliens- OG] We should be humble in terms of recognizing the extreme limits of our own understanding of physics and the universe."<br />
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Amen to that, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellon_family">Mellon</a>. (Can I borrow a $50-spot?)<br />
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So: I've rambled fairly incoherently through this blogspew, and I have no excuse save for I'm stoned on some uber-dank OG Fire and trying to laff my way into November. I've considered my alternatives, and laffing seems the best.<br />
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Two more tangential points to make, and then I promise I'll be more sober for the next installment of the OG:<br />
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1. Blogger <a href="http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2015/07/12/donald-trump-a-false-flag-candidate/">Justin Raimondo thinks Trump is a "false flag" candidate</a>. Or at least as of last July Raimondo thought this. He says that just before Trump got into the Republican race he was trying to help his friend, <i>Hillary Rodham Clinton</i>. How else do you describe the sheer INSANITY of Trump's gambits so far? (Note the date Raimondo wrote this. What does he think now? No seriously: what <i>does</i> he think? Anyone know? I'm too stoned to Bing it.) And what do YOU think of this idea? I mean: consider the implications. Have you read Baudrillard on the Simulacrum? Is it time to resume your studies of the deep structure in <i>The Matrix </i>films?<br />
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Which leads me to Noam Chomsky, who recently said a Trump Prez is basically a "death warrant" for humanity and the planet. Noam the Subtle. (I confess I'd rather he was wrong on this one, if for no other reason than my overweening bias towards humanity <i>not</i> dying on a burned-up, uninhabitable planet.) So yea...<br />
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2. In Chomsky's 2007 book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World: Interviews With David Barsamian</i>, Noam says this:<br />
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<i>A couple of years ago I came across a Pentagon document that was about declassification procedures. Among other things, it proposed that the government should periodically declassify information about the Kennedy assassination. Let people trace whether Kennedy was killed by the mafia, so activists will go off on a wild goose chase instead of pursuing real problems or getting organized. It wouldn't shock me if thirty years from now we discover in a declassified record that the 9/11 industry was also being fed by the administration. -</i>pp.39-40<br />
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So, I end with epistemology down the rabbit hole: Chomsky bristles when you say he's a "conspiracy theorist." He does "institutional analysis." (He does it really well, methinks.) BUT: If the JFK hit is the great conspiracy - or at least in your Top Five - Chomsky seems to be saying here that the government has been engaged in a conspiracy to mislead people into thinking that the government conspires to mislead people.<br />
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Let this sink in.<br />
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Or not.<br />
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Does Chomsky make a valid point here? A sound one?<br />
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See you on the Other Side of the Looking Glass.<br />
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<b>Some Other Reading I Did Before I Bloviated; Lots of the Quoted Material Is Found Here:</b><br />
<a href="http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/03/hillary-clinton-and-ufo-thing-just-wont-go-away">"Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs," </a>by AJ Vicens, <i>Mother Jones</i>, 25 March, 2016<br />
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<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/11/us/politics/hillary-clinton-aliens.html?_r=1">"Hillary Clinton Gives UFO Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files,"</a> by Amy Chozick, <i>New York Times</i>, 10 May 2016<br />
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<a href="http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2016/05/11/what-hillary-clinton-says-about-aliens-is-totally-misguided/">"What Hillary Clinton Says About Aliens Is Totally Misguided,"</a> by Natalie Drake, <i>National Geographic</i>, 11 May 2016<br />
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<a href="http://www.npr.org/2016/05/24/479331275/a-guide-to-the-many-conspiracy-theories-donald-trump-has-embraced">"A Guide to the Many Conspiracy Theories Donald Trump Has Embraced,"</a> by Brett Neely, <i>NPR</i>, 24 May 2016<br />
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<a href="http://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2015/07/welsh-government-uses-klingon-to-respond-to-serious-ufo-questions/">"Welsh Government Uses Klingon to Respond to Serious UFO Questions,"</a> by Sebastian Anthony, <i>Ars Technica</i>, 12 July 2015<br />
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<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2013/07/11/flying_saucer_the_full_report_on_a_government_commissioned_prototype.html?wpisrc=flyouts">"The Government Tested a Flying Saucer in 1956. Here's the Full Report,"</a> by Rebecca Onion, <i>Slate</i>, 11 July 2013<br />
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June 1962 issue of Paul Krassner's <i>The Realist</i>: Krassner reported that UFOs were really diaphragms dropped by nuns on their ascent to heaven.<br />
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<a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/nasa-preps-flying-saucer-for-take-off/">"NASA Preps Real Flying Saucer For Takeoff,"</a> by Amanda Kooser, <i>CNET</i>, 19 May 2014<br />
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<a href="http://hoaxes.org/weblog/comments/us_nazi_space_aliens">"US Secretly Run by Nazi Space Aliens, Says Iranian News Agency"</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/05/americans-alien-abduction-science">"Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted By Extraterrestials?,"</a> by Ralph Blumenthal, <i>Vanity Fair</i>, 10 May 2013 (Robert Redford planned a film about heretic Harvard psychologist John Mack)<br />
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OG here: Just a thought: why worry about possible Extraterrestrial Intelligence "visiting" us, when we already have <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2013/09/cosmic-indifference-and-high-weirdness.html">yellow slime-mold intelligence, a jellyfish takeover in the making, and thousands of asteroids that can wipe us out? </a> And <i>nota </i>quite <i>bene</i> I'm not even mentioning the antibiotic apocalypse, runaway global warming, AI singularity Worst Case scenarios, or the Trump Presidency.<br />
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Have a fine day!<br />
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<b> </b><span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-size: 29px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; text-align: right; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">אמנות על ידי בוב קמפבל</a></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-16436653366324257132016-05-20T02:28:00.001-07:002016-05-20T15:14:09.884-07:00Synthetic Biology and Giambattista Vico<b>Prelude</b><br />
Less than two months ago as I write this, <a href="http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6280/aad6253">J. Craig Venter and his team published in <i>Science</i></a> the deets on how they built a synthetic organism, called "Syn3.0," and it's got only 473 genes. This is the lowest number of genes that we know of for a self-replicating living thing that doesn't require a host.<br />
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It's a sober-seeming Frankenstein scene, is it not?<br />
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<a href="http://www.nature.com/news/minimal-cell-raises-stakes-in-race-to-harness-synthetic-life-1.19633">HERE</a> is a nice write-up in <i>Nature </i>on this<i>. </i><br />
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They did this via trial and error; they didn't build Syn3.0 from scratch. They took a bacterium, <i>Mycoplasma mycoides</i>, which lives in cattle, and painstakingly and systematically knocked out genes to see if they were truly essential. If a gene seemed to be essential for life, or a gene played a critical role in the regulation of other genes, they left it in. They whittled away a lot.<br />
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A complex bacterium like <i>E. coli </i>has around 6000 genes; humans have around 19,500.<br />
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What appears most fascinating to Venter and his crew (and me too) is this: once they finished and confirmed they had synthesized/whittled away a new organism, they still couldn't figure out exactly what 149 of the 473 genes did that were so essential to life. So: we don't know 1/3 of what is essential to life. We have our work cut out for us...or these synthetic biologists/fancy bio-hackers do.<br />
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The rest of us, like the girl who just ate a slice of pizza with anchovies, wait with baited breath.<br />
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This highlights how much we don't know, and makes ever-clearer the reason why, after Venter and scientists working for the Unistat government "mapped" the human genome 13-16 years ago, miracle breakthroughs in health and medicine did not pour forth immediately after.<br />
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<i> a human-made bacterium, believe it or not</i><br />
<b>A Variation on a Theme</b><br />
My favorite analogous explanation for this went something like: for hundreds of years we heard wonderful music but weren't sure where it was coming from. Through a Herculean effort by legions of biologists, eventually we learned that this music had the structure of something we discovered was a "piano." Tremendous efforts by public sector genius and private wizards finally produced a map of the music: a Steinway piano! What a fantastic discovery of human ingenuity!<br />
<br />
But then: you need to learn how to play Beethoven. Just having the piano and knowing that you press certain keys little hammers inside struck strings and made "notes"? Not good enough. We had to <i>actually understand the thing.</i> We had to learn how to play something like the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C3TIr2bBo0">Appassionata</a>. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Tall order? Of course! Would we shrink from it and ditch our lessons and not practice our Hanon exercises? No. We're all in. Here's where Vico makes his entrance...<br />
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<b>Expository Material</b><br />
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), an early admirer of Descartes, later did a 180 from "Renato" (as Vico refers to him in his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Autobiography</i>) and said no: it's not correct that we humans can only truly have knowledge of the physical world because we can apply our rationality and math to understand it; Renato said we can't know the human past, so forget about it. Vico said, <i>anzi,</i> we can only truly know what we have ourselves made: the social world. Law, politics, art, history, etc. Even mathematics is a human construction. We did not make Nature, so we can't truly know it. Scholars of Vico (who call themselves Vichians and not Viconians) refer to this idea as Vico's principle of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giambattista_Vico#The_verum_factum_principle">verum factum</a>. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Because of <i>verum factum</i>, various scholars have called Vico the first Anthropologist, the inventor of the sociology of knowledge, the first great modern sociologist, etc. It's interesting. I don't know what to think, because Vico's writing - especially in his magnum opus <i style="font-weight: bold;">The New Science</i> - seems to alternate between staggeringly prescient ideas and really crazy and "wrong" ones. Here is one of his most famous passages, and the one cited most often with regard to <i>verum factum</i>:<br />
<br />
<i>Still, in the dense and dark night which envelopes remotest antiquity, there shines an eternal and inextinguishable light. It is a truth which cannot be doubted: </i>The civil world is certainly the creation of humankind. <i>And consequently, the principles of the civil world can and must be discovered </i>within the modifications of the human mind. <i>If we reflect on this, we can only wonder why all the philosophers have so earnestly pursued a knowledge of the world of nature, which only God can know as its creator, while they neglected to study the world of nations, or civil world, which people can in fact know because they created it. The cause of this paradox is that infirmity of the human mind noted in Axiom 63. Because it is buried deep within the body, the human mind naturally tends to notice what is corporeal, and must make a great and laborious effort to understand itself, just as the eye sees all external objects, but needs a mirror to see itself. </i>- section 331, translation by Dave Marsh<br />
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A couple of notes:<br />
- The Inquisition was very strong in Naples, when Vico was doing his thing. The reference to "God" in his text is problematic, to my eyes. Perhaps he truly believed all the things he says about "God," but I see plenty of room for doubt. In his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Autobiography</i> he certainly seems to have been heavily influenced by Lucretius, who popularized Epicurus. Vico also has plenty of oblique things to say about the deep and enduring history of class warfare and he doesn't seem all that admiring of history's aristocracy. Vico was one of those thinkers who seemed to have read everything available; he had personally known thinkers around Naples who had paid for speaking out for thought free of Church restrictions. He certainly had read about others who'd suffered at the hands of the Inquisition.<br />
<br />
-Hobbes and many other thinkers of antiquity and the Renaissance had ideas like <i>verum factum</i>, but they only mentioned this notion in passing; with Vico this idea is central to his thought.<br />
<br />
-Axiom 63 reads thus:<br />
<i>Because of the senses, the human mind naturally tends to view itself externally in the body, and it is only with great difficulty that it can understand itself by means of reflection. This axiom offers us this universal principle of etymology in all languages: words are transferred from physical objects and their properties to signify what is conceptual and spiritual. </i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<b>Finally: OG's Point, If Indeed He Has One?</b><br />
When I first delved into Vico I thought <i>verum factum </i>was wrong: the revolution in modern science since the Renaissance was based on a special way of looking into nature: some phenomenon needed to be explained, hypotheses competed until a line of very fecund thought - a theory - led to a cascade of knowledge about the physical world. Ideas were freely exchanged and published and the idea that my experiment, while exciting, needed to be replicated by many others working independently for it to be considered "true"...this seemed to me like a vast leap in human knowledge. At the same time, the idea of "knowledge" in the Humanities (which to this day I love with a very deep passion) was not making gigantic strides. When scientific knowledge cashed out into Technology, which accelerated the human world, I just thought Vico, while exceedingly erudite and weird and entertaining, was a bit daft here.<br />
<br />
Later, when reading people like Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, Foucault and Latour, I realized the physical sciences didn't actually work as neatly as I'd been led to believe. Further, the most successful physical theory ever - the quantum theory - led to philosophical quagmires dizzying and surreal. Did we <i>really </i>understand the physical world, or did we pragmatically go with what worked, while retroactively explaining what was "really" going on?<br />
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<i>Richard Feynman's blackboard at CalTech</i> <br />
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<b>Apocalypse and/or Utopia</b><br />
Now, we are making living things. I'm quite sure Syn3.0 is merely the first of thousands of human-made living things. And Venter and his colleagues are playing Creator in order to understand, at a fine-grain level, the physical, chemical and biological <i>way </i>something does its thing.<br />
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Is <i>verum factum </i>then a "dead" idea? I don't know, but when Venter and his guys came up with an artificial living thing a few years ago, it prompted Obama to issue a bioethics review and the Vatican challenged Venter on his claim of creating life. And so has it ever been...<br />
<br />
Finally: if you read the link to the article in <i>Nature</i>, you may have noted that Venter and his crew inserted their own names - literally - into the deep structure of Syn3.0. Why? As watermarks, a way of marking this territory of Life as human-made. They also inserted some quotes and one was from Richard Feynman's blackboard, as seen in the photo above: "What I cannot create I do not understand."<br />
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Sounds a lot like Vico to me.<br />
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<b>Reading:</b><br />
<a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/20160324-in-newly-created-life-form-a-major-mystery/">"In Newly-Created Life Form, a Major Mystery,"</a> by Emily Singer<br />
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<a href="http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-minimal-synthetic-genome-bacteria-20160324-story.html?track=lat-email-healthreport">"Scientists Synthesize the Shortest Known Genome Necessary For Life,"</a> by Amina Khan<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.newscientist.com/article/2088703-why-would-scientists-want-to-build-human-genomes-from-scratch/">"Why Would Scientists Want to Build a Human Genome From Scratch?"</a>, by Sally Adee<br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Science-Penguin-Classics-Giambattista-Vico/dp/0140435697">The New Science</a></i>, by Giambattista Vico, translated by Dave Marsh<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-size: 25px; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">藝術鮑勃·坎貝爾</a></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-15823346495959613862016-05-14T17:05:00.000-07:002016-06-04T03:42:07.576-07:00Updates and Re-Takes On Some Old Posts: Toxo, Hot Peppers and Boredom<b>A. Toxoplasmosis </b><br />
I had written a bit on <i>Toxoplasmosis gondii </i> <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2015/03/free-will-law-philosophy-and-microbes.html#uds-search-results">HERE</a>. This is a weird microbe that infects around 11% of Unistatians and other countries have a much higher infection rate. If infected by this parasite, most people's immune systems keep it in check; for others it appears to get into the brain, cause cysts there (Ew!), and very weird stuff: it makes women more aggressive; men become more impulsive and less fearful when they probably should be cautious. One way we get it is via contact with domesticated cat feces. It rarely kills anyone; it simply makes them act strangely.<br />
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Right after I wrote about it, <a href="http://www.schres-journal.com/article/S0920-9964(15)00176-0/abstract">another study</a> came out. (Secondhand <a href="http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2015/06/08/new-study-links-childhood-cat-ownership-to-schizophrenia-later-in-life/">HERE</a>.) Its lead author, E.Fuller Torrey, thinks cats should be seen as more dangerous than most of us think they are. Having a cat around in your childhood might lead to schizophrenia or other mental illness in adulthood, their study suggests.<br />
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Sidelight: Interestingly to <a href="http://deoxy.org/wiki/Sombunall">sombunall</a> readers of this blog, <a href="https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-roots-of-treason-ezra-pound-and-the-secret-of-st-elizabeths-by-e-fuller-torrey/">Dr. Torrey published a book on Ezra Pound </a>in 1984; I've read it: Torrey thinks Pound and his pals in high places got away with pulling a fast one on the Unistat gummint: Pound was found, basically, insane for broadcasting his at-times vile antisemitic thoughts over the radio with Mussolini's imprimatur, and therefore Pound avoided a death sentence for treason.<br />
<br />
Adding to this bizarre infection, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/16/science/a-parasite-leopards-and-a-primates-fear-and-survival.html?rref=collection/sectioncollection/science&action=click&contentCollection=science&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront&_r=1">a study in France</a> sought to understand the possible evolutionary aspect of <i>Toxo</i>. Some chimps were infected with it, and urine from a leopard didn't scare them away like it should have. Today, mice and rats infected with <i>Toxo </i>aren't afraid of domesticated cats like they ought to be, for their own survival. I also learned that lions and tigers are not predators of chimps, but leopards are. I will never become a zoologist at this point...<br />
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Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky is fascinated by the <i>Toxo</i> research, while his equally brilliant colleague at Stanford's rival, U. of California at Berkeley, Michael B. Eisen, said this study is interesting, but the chimps' sense of smell could be set off by factors other than their <i>Toxo</i> infection.<br />
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So: <i>Toxo </i>may have jumped from being incubated in the guts of a Big Cat, to domesticated cats circa 15,000 years ago. But I don't see the evolutionary Big Picture of <i>Toxo</i>, other than it's doing what it's got to do to keep going generation after generation, like viruses. It makes some of us act really weird, and humans in our pre-history who ended up being eaten by big cats? They're not any of <i>our </i>ancestors. I'd like to hear an Intelligent Design person explain this one.<br />
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<b>B. On Hot Peppers</b><br />
Three and a half years ago I blogged about, among other things, <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2012/11/drug-report-for-november-2012-hendrix.html">my love for very hot peppers</a>, and how I <i>might have</i> hallucinated in a Thai restaurant near Berkeley due to an extreme hot pepper event. I still chase after the buzz, and the quest to develop the hottest peppers in the world continues unabated.<br />
<br />
Recently I ran across a fascinating article by a Berkeley writer (who I only know by name), Andrew Leonard. "<a href="http://nautil.us/issue/35/boundaries/why-revolutionaries-love-spicy-food">Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food: How the Chili Pepper Got To China</a>."<br />
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Now, I consider <i>Nautilus </i>one of the best online magazines, but the comments for this article were, I thought, really horrid. So many fine points made by Leonard missed! (Also: Leonard invites semantic reaction by asserting that "revolutionaries" like really hot peppers, when he really only makes a strong case for those Chinese coming out of Sichuan Province.) Was George Washington a lover of hot peppers? Doing the research: no. Karl Marx? Probably not. Che? He appears to have liked spicy food, but he didn't make a huge deal out of it. One of the highlights of Leonard's piece is the story of how former German schoolteacher Otto Braun, turned Soviet counter-espionage agent, was sent to advise Mao, and couldn't get used to the very spicy food, and Mao is quoted, "The food of the true revolutionary is red pepper."<br />
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U. of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin had long been interested in why some people really love hot, spicy foods and peppers. Why do peppers seem "hot" when they aren't? Because capsaicin activates pain receptors (called TRPV1) for actual hot things. It's a delightful glitch, methinks. Rozin thought people attracted to hot peppers and who enjoy the taste and the pain must be the same sorts of people who are thrill-seekers, chance-takers...maybe even revolutionaries? Mao thought the pepper-lover is ready to fight and win; Rozin later coined the term "benign masochism" for pepper-lovers.<br />
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(So who are the malignant masochists? Poor Trump supporters?)<br />
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Decades after Rozin's guesses about hot pepper-lovers, research has validated his ideas. A Penn.State study showed a <i>significant correlation</i> between "sensation seeking" and love for hot peppers. (Italics mine to remind you it's tentative.)<br />
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Leonard goes into the history of Sichuan Province: where, about 250 years after Columbus, hot peppers made their way and grew easily and cheaply and preserved themselves for long periods and added flavor to dishes, vitamins B and C, and were antibacterial to boot.<br />
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The history of Sichuan and its de-population in the 16th century due to banditry, famine and rebellions, followed by an influx of 1.7 million the next century (fall of the Ming, rise of the Qing) is one Leonard tries to tie with the hot and humid province, the ying/yang medicinal philosophy, the cheapness of raising hot peppers there, and risk-taking personalities on the move due to internal strife. Because these hardy souls lived through tough times and migrated to Sichuan from other parts of China, the idea is that revolutionary personalities are prevalent there. And hey, I dig a spicy-food-loving lady too. But the neurobiological research so far shows that these pepper-lovers may just be more thrill-seeking; I think political revolutionary is a mere sub-type. Still, read the article, 'cuz it's pretty good if you're into that sorta thing.<br />
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It seems people are probably not born with a penchant for spicy hot peppers, and need to become habituated. I think I habituated myself, and it could be because I'm what <a href="http://www.livescience.com/17190-supertaster-nontaster-tongue-evolution.html">Linda Bartoshuk calls a "nontaster"</a>: the number of fungiform papillae on my tongue make me like my coffee black and strong, my beer very hoppy and bitter, my peppers really hot, etc. However, I have never considered myself a thrill-seeker in the ordinary sense of the term. I <i>do</i> seek novelty...<br />
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<b>C. On Boredom</b><br />
I assayed some aspects - mostly my subjectivity - toward boredom <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2014/04/if-youre-bored-dont-read-this.html">HERE</a>. With the availability heuristic - or is it more like "priming"? - once I've written on some topic, that topic suddenly appears everywhere.<br />
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<a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/07/28/unbored-a-zillion-ways-fo.html">A book called </a><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://boingboing.net/2014/07/28/unbored-a-zillion-ways-fo.html">Unbored</a> </i>came to my attention. Although it's for younger people, I saw a lot of my own thinking on the topic reflected there. In delving into Robert Anton Wilson's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Sex, Drugs and Magick</i>, looking for a reference about something else, I happened to re-read a part of RAW's discussion of Aleister Crowley's book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Diary of a Drug Fiend</i>:<br />
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<i>In the third, and most controversial part of the book, "Purgatorio", Peter and Lou attempt a cure under the auspices of a mysterious magician named King Lamus - a thinly disguised portrait of Crowley himself. At the Abbey of Thelema (based on an actual religious retreat once run by Crowley in Sicily), Peter and Lou are put in a situation where all the cocaine and heroin they could possibly want is immediately and easily available to them. King Lamus tells them, using Crowley's favorite slogan, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>There is a gimmick, of course. In fact, there are several gimmicks. The abbey, although hardly as austere as a Christian monastery, is quite isolated from civilization; Peter and Lou are soon confronted with the most underrated but powerful force in the world - boredom. There are no movies, nightclubs, or other distractions. When they complain, King Lamus tells them again, "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." They soon discover that, in spite of their hedonistic existence, they have never actually done their "will" in a profound sense, but have only followed momentary whims. Isolated at the abbey, they are forced to ask themselves, again and again, what they truly do "will" for their subsequent lives.</i><br />
-p.186<br />
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Take a few moments to ponder this?<br />
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Boredom is being tackled by neuroscientists: if you've ever been tackled by a neuroscientist, you know what I mean. But I jest. Scientist Bill Greisar says of boredom that it's so pervasive it "suggests it serves some critical role in behavior." Which I think Crowley - a more interesting psychologist to my eyes - saw in the early part of the century. In <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2015/06/familiarity-breeds-contempt-why-do-we-get-bored-and-what-point-boredom">one of many articles on boredom studies</a>, Ingmar Bergman's <i>Scenes From A Marriage</i> comes up, as does Dickens, and the idea of one thinker that boredom is a milder form of disgust, which took me some time to "see." (Right now, I've gone back to not "seeing" much of a relationship between Boredom and Disgust, and I'm afraid it simply was never meant to be. I'd like to fix up Boredom with Anger...)<br />
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Many studies have shown that boring activities lead to more creativity, even boring <i>reading </i>activities. ("In some circumstances" was the caveat from one researcher.)<br />
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In a creative activity bored subjects performed better than distressed, elated and relaxed subjects. (I wonder how they provoked elation?) The physiology of boredom is interesting: you're more stressed (cortisol in bloodstream), with an increased heart rate, unmotivated by your surroundings, and have a difficult time sustaining attention.<br />
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What could be the purpose of boredom? A Texas A&M study suggests boredom is something like hunger or thirst: it motivates you to change your immediate circumstances. You seek novelty, new goals and situations. "By motivating desire for change from the current state, boredom increases opportunities to attain social, cognitive, emotional and experiential stimulation that could have been missed." Anticipation of a change in mental state is associated with our old pal Dopamine.<br />
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<a href="https://aeon.co/essays/life-without-boredom-would-be-a-nightmare">Philosopher Andreas Elpidorou says boredom is essential for a decent life and life without it would be a nightmare.</a><br />
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Around the same time, I stumbled upon the idea that, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/apr/24/why-are-we-so-bored">how can we still be bored in the 21st century? </a>The idea is that too much stimulation is boring.<br />
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Since my initial blog on boredom, I've become convinced that I <i>do</i> get bored. It's probably <i>not </i>true of my assertion that I'm never bored. It's a matter of degree, which reduces to the felt amount of time bored, which for me isn't much. <i>Id est</i>: my moments of boredom are so brief, I don't frame them as "me being bored." I simply move on to the next thing. And there are endlessly interesting things of easy avail to me. Perhaps I'm some sort of intelligent simpleton?<br />
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I consider my lifetime love of reading here paramount. How many departures from my paramount "reality" are available to me in books? It's endless. It's good for a reliable squirt of dopamine into my brain-pan.<br />
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Not long ago I read a wonderful novella by Anton Chekhov, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Story of a Nobody</i>, from around 1893. The description of the main male antagonist's friend, a logical man named Pekarasky, who can multiply two three-digit numbers in his head immediately, has railway and finance tables memorized, can convert currencies mentally and accurately:<br />
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<i>But for this extraordinary intelligence many things that even a stupid man knows were quite incomprehensible. Thus he could not understand at all why it is that people get bored, cry, shoot themselves and even kill others, why they worry about things and events that do not affect them personally, and why they laugh when they read Gogol or Saltykov-Schedrin. </i><br />
-p.11<br />
<br />
Is this not a creepy guy, this Pekarsky? Doesn't something about him seem vaguely monstrous to you?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/books/review/walker-percys-theory-of-hurricanes.html?ref=books&_r=2http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/books/review/walker-percys-theory-of-hurricanes.html?ref=books&_r=2">Walker Pearcy's theory of hurricanes </a>seems to fit in here nicely. Malaise and despair and world-weariness can be fixed by a you-must-act-now situation, which is the hurricane. My view is that we need to pay attention and develop a mental "patch" so that it doesn't require a hurricane or car accident in order to make our interiorities vital again.<br />
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<i>kunst: <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Mr. Bob Campbell</a></i>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-83132492373293835112016-05-04T02:14:00.000-07:002016-05-17T23:44:44.911-07:00Solo Flight: On Masturbation<a href="https://www.theblot.com/fap-fap-fap-how-may-became-national-masturbation-month-7743381">May is International Masturbation Month</a>, because hey, why not? You've probably already celebrated it without even knowing it. I say glibly "hey why not?," but its genesis had to do with Unistat Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/10/us/surgeon-general-forced-to-resign-by-white-house.html">Joycelyn Elders</a>, saying publicly that masturbation is a safe way to explore sexuality and (gasp!) maybe we should tell kids that in school. She also had enlightened ideas about drug use, so she had to go. Unistat was and still is chock-full of anti-sex hypocrites and sexual fascists and "morally correct" authoritarians with major sticks up their asses.<br />
<br />
So, in comparatively enlightened San Francisco, the response by sex-positive activists was to make May the month to celebrate masturbation, about which James Joyce once praised its "wonderful availability," and try to turn the cultural tide against the hypocrisy and lies and fear-mongering of anti-masturbationists. It's been almost 22 years since the Erisian Ms. Elders was forced out, and it could be that she will be talked about as a cultural hero, a sexual freedom fighter, in a decade or so. It's in our hands, ladies and germs, so get to it!<br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;">Singular Pleasures</i> <b>by Harry Mathews</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Q: What is the question to which the answer is: 9 W?<br />
<br />
A: Mr. Wagner, do you spell your name with a V?<br />
<br />
I remember this from an interview with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo">OULIPO</a> member Harry Mathews (b.1930), often cited as the sole American member of that group. Mathews has talked about how Stravinsky and Bartok opened up his mind to breaking the rules in writing poetry, when he was 13. So far my favorite book by Mathews is his <i style="font-weight: bold;">Singular Pleasures</i>, which is nothing but 61 very short literary snapshots of people masturbating, all over the world. Compared to most of his work, it's extremely accessible, but I find it sweet and daring and frank and funny and therefore liberating.<br />
<br />
<i>A native woman has disappeared into the jungle upstream from Manaus. She is alone. She wants to do what she had so often done until the day of her fifteenth birthday, ten years before, when she became a woman: straddle once again the resilient trunk of a young rubber-band tree.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>A man of sixty-three belonging to the Toronto chapter of MAID successfully masturbates in a slaughterhouse while steers are being killed and disembowelled. His achievement is not recognized after it is discovered that people of both sexes bribe their way into the slaughterhouse every day in order to perform this very act.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>A twenty-four-year-old cellist is sitting naked on a stool in her bedroom in Manilla. Her legs are spread; her left hand pulls back the folds of her vulva; her right hand is drawing the tip of the 'cello bow over her clitoris in fluttering tremolo.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Somewhere north of the Bering Straits, sitting on the edge of an ice floe, his face impassive, all movement concealed beneath thicknesses of pelt and fur, an Eskimo male of thirty-one is bringing himself to an orgasm of devastating intensity in the slickness of dissolving blubber.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Mathews's OULIPO colleague Georges Perec - perhaps best known for <i style="font-weight: bold;">A Void</i>, a novel accomplished without use of the letter <i>e</i>, which he tied down in his typewriter - called <i style="font-weight: bold;">Singular Pleasures </i>"a great ecumenical work."<br />
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<i>Joycelyn Elders, heretic</i> <br />
=============================================<br />
<br />
<b>You Too Can Become a "Solosexual"</b><br />
<br />
That's how <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/02/20/a_solosexuals_guide_to_me_time_a_masturbation_session_should_ideally_last_a_minimum_of_3_hours_or_i_wont_even_bother/">a gay man with the pseudonym "Jason Armstrong"</a> is describing himself. A "bate sesh" should take three hours, or why bother? He lights candles, looks at himself in a mirror, jerks off alone with other guys online (a very special way of being alone?), just really takes his solo pleasure seriously.<br />
<br />
His spirit is with the sex-positive female activists who started Masturbation Month is the wake of the Elders travesty, saying he talks publicly about masturbation (asserting it was more difficult coming out gay than as a confirmed masturbator) because a "discourse about sexuality that affirms us" is like a utopia. I was moved by his drive to alter his consciousness via jerking off; getting into the "batehole," which is "That place where you completely lose yourself to the experience and broach another consciousness." In another place he says it's like "flying," which suggests I should take my own masturbations more seriously.<br />
<br />
Some reading this may think about Armstrong and say, "Come off it," but I think he's describing an essential move away from ordinary reality. We all do this. The sociologist Peter Berger called these altered states "finite provinces of meaning.":<br />
<br />
"Now, there is one reality that has a privileged character in consciousness, and it is precisely the reality of being wide awake in ordinary, everyday life. That is, this reality is experienced as being <i>more real</i>, and as more real <i>most of the time</i>, as compared with other experienced realities (such as those of dreams or of losing oneself in music)."<br />
<br />
Berger says his mentor in phenomenological sociology, Alfred Schutz, called the primary reality the "paramount reality" and departures from the paramount reality were "enclaves," but Schutz also used William James's term "subuniverses."<br />
<br />
I know for some readers this discussion has taken a rather odd turn, but it's my own weirdo turn of mind, so, here's more of Berger writing about subuniverses/finite provinces of meaning/enclaves, and Armstrong's "batehole":<br />
<br />
"These are not abstruse theoretical considerations but rather are explications of very common experiences. Suppose one falls asleep - perhaps while working at one's desk - and has a vivid dream. The reality of the dream begins to pale as soon as one returns to a wakeful state, and one is then conscious of having temporarily left the mundane reality of everyday life. That mundane reality remains the point of departure and orientation, and when one comes back to it, this return is commonly described as 'coming back to reality' - that is, precisely, coming back to the paramount reality."<br />
-all Berger quotes from <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Heretical Imperative</i>, p.35<br />
<br />
To get into Armstrong's "batehole" is to depart from your paramount reality and enter a finite province of meaning, or subuniverse. And you thought you were merely "rubbing one out"!<br />
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<i>Prof. Ingvild Gilhus</i> <br />
<br />
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<br />
<b>Amazon Is There For You</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
There's a LOT of nasty things I could say about this company, but now is not the time. Rather I will link to two items and see what you make of them.<br />
<br />
1. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005MR3IVO/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=boingboing06-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B005MR3IVO">A 55-gallon drum of Passion Lubes, Natural Water-Based Lubricant</a>. No comment, save for the wonder of who buys this and how it's used. And the possible scenarios, one of which I just noticed flitted through my mind: a scene that makes anything from <i>Caligula</i> look like a child's birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese.<br />
<br />
2.) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/RFWM0CFO0UMWY/?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&linkCode=ur2&tag=downandoutint-20#RFWM0CFO0UMWY">Kleenex Everyday Facial Tissues, Pack of 36</a>. Since 2013, consumer James O. Thach has received over 10,000 "review helpful" votes, and if you read his review you can see why. The warm reception for his review probably fits best into the third of <a href="http://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/persons/ingvild-gilhus/">Ingvild Gilhus</a>'s three theories of laughter: the "relief theory," which says we laugh and feel relief for being able to express something over that which is forbidden. Or: be an audience to someone who says forbidden things. Robert Anton Wilson told me he thought this was one of his favorite theories of laughter, and why humor must be used if you're going to discuss taboo issues. To me, George Carlin was <i>the </i>master of this stuff.<br />
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<br />
<b>Fapping in the Great Books</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_masturbation#cite_note-11">Wikipedia does a good job</a> on meat-beating, flogging the bishop, wanking, self-polluting, jerkin' the gherkin, beating around the bush, polishing the pearl, muffin buffin', roughing up the suspect, engaging in a <i>menage a moi</i>, and juicing. (These are just some of hundred-plus euphemisms I picked up from Spears's dictionary of <i style="font-weight: bold;">Slang and Euphemism</i>, and <a href="http://eduncovered.com/50-great-names-for-female-masturbation-2015-03-31">this Internet article</a>. If you have a favorite that's not mentioned here, lay it on me in the comments.)<br />
<br />
Kant and Voltaire seemed to buy Tissot's idiot ideas about self-pleasure. If you didn't read the Wiki (I don't blame ya), you're probably still not surprised that, soon after the Romans (who thought you ought to <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fap">fap or schlick</a> with your left hand, something sinister about that), masturbation suddenly caused idiocy, cancer, weakened spines, moral degeneracy, blindness...really: just about any disease you can think of. Mark Twain had a negative attitude, probably 'cuz he got more pussy than he knew what to do with. William James, it is theorized by scholars, may have associated it with epilepsy due to a haunting experience he had after visiting a sanitarium.<br />
<br />
Freud thought masturbation was like addictive drugs, and represented an inability to face reality, according to his fantastically wrong and yet interesting and brilliant and influential <b><i><a href="http://www.sigmundfreud.net/three-essays-on-the-theory-of-sexuality-pdf-ebook.jsp">Three Essays On The Theory of Sexuality</a></i></b>. I bet he jerked it a hour before writing that, but who knows?<br />
<br />
Not until around 1897 do we get Havelock Ellis, one of the great early sexologists, who called BS on all the fear and danger about masturbation. By the time of Kinsey in the 1940s? Everyone does it! By 1972 the AMA calls masturbation "normal." The great renegade psychiatrist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz">Thomas Szasz</a> said that masturbation was the "disease of the 19th century" and the "cure" of the 20th. But if it's 1994 and you've been appointed by the POTUS, you can't say what Ellis, Kinsey, the AMA, and Szasz say: you get canned. (Tonight, or this morning, or during lunch break, do it for Joycelyn!)<br />
<br />
Sin, vice, self-pollution, etc: <i>how</i> in the hell did this idiocy stick with us for so long? How much suffering it caused! It's wonderful and normal and safe and free, and yet Authority had almost everyone <i>believing </i>it's HEINOUS! (This symptom of the emotional plague is still with us, but I do see an...<ahem> abatement.)<br />
<br />
Friends, let's not let Joycelyn Elders's termination be in vain! To paraphrase Ben Franklin, "Fap proudly."<br />
<br />
Interestingly, David Foster Wallace thought a lot like Freud. (In other places DFW called himself a "puritan.") In the book <i style="font-weight: bold;">Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself</i>, about writer David Lipsky's time with DFW just after <i style="font-weight: bold;">Infinite Jest </i>came out, Lipsky's book being made into the very moving little film <i>The End of the Tour</i>, DFW says masturbation is part of the addictive "pleasure continuum" along with drugs and TV. -pp.84-85 I read this and realized, "Oh my god I'm addicted!" On p.128 DFW tells Lipsky that people have wet dreams even if they've been masturbating, which I think may only apply to males, aged 14-19? I do not consider DFW a sexologist, but I do consider him part of the continuum of the Great Books.<br />
<br />
Speaking of the canon, Rabelais joked about masturbation (which I will call right now, "Being one's own best friend"), and my friend Mark Williams, who, in writing a paper for his degree in English from UCLA, on <i style="font-weight: bold;">Tristram Shandy</i>, told me he had to jump through some hoops in order to get his hands on 1716's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution And All Its Frightful Consequences In Both Sexes, Considered: With Spiritual and Physical Advice To Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves By This Abominable Practice</i>, by the - I'm not making any of this up - Dr. Balthazar Bekker.<br />
<br />
'Cuz in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Tristram Shandy </i>there are jerk-off jokes galore.<br />
<br />
And hey check out <i style="font-weight: bold;">Gulliver's Travels. </i>Swift gets into it on the first page, repeating Gulliver's benefactor's name "Master Bates," <i>three times</i>. Because it was hilarious back then.<br />
<br />
But things evolve.<br />
<br />
When in the late 1990s, after Madonna and Britney Spears tongue-kissed on the MTV Music Awards, conservatives got all lathered up in their moralic acid, and the comedian Jon Lovitz was on <i>Late Night With Conan O'Brien</i>, when Conan asked Lovitz what he thought about the kiss. Lovitz complained that the kiss wasn't long enough, because by the time he'd pulled his pants down to his ankles, it was over...And I (the OG) call this <i>progress!</i><br />
<br />
No, but seriously: I knew I was addicted around age 15, and I hope they never find a cure.<br />
<br />
<b>Men? You Wanna Stay Healthy? Jerk It Every Day</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
If you read about the Xtian Era of masturbation terrors, you'll see we've done a 180:<br />
"<a href="http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-12-masturbation-healthbenefits.html#ajTabs">Masturbation Actually Has Health Benefits"</a><br />
"<a href="http://www.realclearscience.com/video/2015/09/12/is_masturbation_good_for_you.html">Is Masturbation Good For You?</a>"<br />
"<a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/06/07/good-news-for-high-frequency-m.html">Good News For High Frequency Masturbators</a>"<br />
"<a href="http://www.ibtimes.com.au/new-study-confirms-link-frequent-orgasms-lower-prostate-cancer-risk-1511533">New Study Confirms Link of Frequent Orgasms To Lower Prostate Cancer Risk</a>"<br />
<br />
So, you may be a confirmed Ladie's Man, but on your off days, even though you may not approve of it "morally," just do it. (<i>Progress!</i>)<br />
<br />
<b>Sir Francis Crick Anecdote</b><br />
<br />
"Finally, a decade ago, I was at the home of a friend when someone visited him in order to borrow some pornography - it was the late Francis Crick, who in 1962 won the Nobel Prize in medicine for his seminal (yes I said <i>seminal</i>) discovery with James Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA. In a best-selling 1968 book, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Double Helix</i>." - <i style="font-weight: bold;">One Hand Jerking</i>, Paul Krassner, p.95 Krassner thought it ironic that "DNA" is now so publicly equated with semen.<br />
<br />
<b>Other Sources I Dipped Into</b><br />
<a href="http://www.alternet.org/sex-amp-relationships/welcome-masturbate-thon?paging=off">"Welcome To The Masturbate-a-thon,"</a> by Paul Krassner<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Master-of-his-domain-UC-Berkeley-professor-2616144.php">Interview with Prof. Thomas Laqueur of UC Berkeley</a>, who wrote <i>the </i>end-all scholarly book on the history of masturbation.<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyM7QJREkM0">3 min video with popular science writer Mary Roach, about female masturbation</a><br />
<br />
"<a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/91845/female-masturbation-petite-mort-book">Is Female Masturbation Really The Last Sexual Taboo?</a>": a review of a Taschen book titled <b><i>La Petite Mort</i></b><br />
<b><i><br /></i></b>
<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/06/24/happyplaytime_app_hopes_to_help_women_masturbate_but_overlooks_the_real.html?wpisrc=flyouts">Feminist writer Amanda Hess says women don't masturbate as often as men for logistical reasons</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/dont-laugh-bulgers-masturbation-punishment.html">Whitey Bulger Gets Solitary For Masturbation </a>(Sure, Bulger is a vicious murderer/gangster, but I thought this was monstrous; every prison official should have to do a week of solitary before they sentence someone else to solitary confinement. It's fucking medieval, and just plain evil: Let's stop it! - OG)<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Kunst von <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></i></span>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-71795981168195471212016-04-29T02:55:00.000-07:002016-05-02T02:46:05.787-07:00World Book Day/Night 2016[Apparently World Book Night came again this year, and I was busy doing other things, totally oblivious. Yesterday I logged on to "surf the Net" - which fogies like me still say, by the way - and kept noticing all these new articles about Shakespeare and wondered, "wha?" Then it hit me: World <a href="http://www.dw.com/en/sixth-annual-world-book-night-underway-on-shakespeares-400th-anniversary/a-19209385">Book Day/Night was April 23rd</a>, so here I am, a mere six days late. - OG]<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Fore-Words: Set the Tone</b><br />
Here's part of a dialogue between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell:<br />
<br />
Moyers: Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?<br />
<br />
Campbell: It is the function of the artist to do this. The artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn't simply a sociologist with a program for you.<br />
<br />
Moyers: What about those others who are ordinary, those who are not poets or artists, or who have not had a transcendent ecstasy? How do we know of these things?<br />
<br />
Campbell: I'll tell you a way, a very nice way. Sit in a room and read - and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. This realization of life can be a constant realization in your living. When you find an author who really grabs you, read everything he has done. Don't say, "Oh, I want to know what So-and-so did" - and don't bother at all with the best-seller list. Just read what this one author has to give you. And then you can go read what he had read. And the world opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain point of view. - <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Power of Myth</i>, p.99<br />
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<b>Short Note on Books and Revolutions</b><br />
My writing on the visceral thrill I get from reading "forbidden" or "dangerous" books, books with some purported "demonic" power, books linked to infamous crimes, <i>etcetera</i>, has appeared at this blog and in other places. Currently I've been reading in books about other books on the topic of what books can/might/did "do" to certain readers, and, oh, all kinds of fallout in human history. For those who want to look at some <i>choice </i>academic research quite readable about books and revolutions, two that I've recently found of surpassing interest are Robert Darnton's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France</i>, and John V. Fleming's <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped the Cold War</i>.<br />
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Darnton - one of <i>the </i>great scholars of books in our time - breaks down the forbidden best-sellers during the 20 year period before the <i>ancien regime </i>turned to guillotine-time (a much different time than the time Joseph Campbell warned us about; I tend to agree with Campbell about best-sellers under the current dispensation); Darnton's sleuthing is marvelous, teasing out the many "underground" forbidden books from roughly 1769 or so to 1789. These books get classified into three categories: 1.) "Philosophical Pornography"; 2.) Utopian Fantasy; and 3.) Political Slander. Darnton writes a chapter on each. Later, Section 3 of Darnton is titled, "Do Books Cause Revolutions?" and this section constitutes a marvelous contribution to the sociology of knowledge.<br />
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Fleming writes at length about four books that influenced the Cold War: Koestler's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Darkness At Noon </i>(1940), which was the only one of the four I'd been familiar with. The others are <i style="font-weight: bold;">Out of the Night</i> (1941, but really only a few weeks after Koestler's book came out), by "Jan Valtin" AKA Richard Krebs, a supposed autobiography and the best-seller in Unistat by the end of the year; <i style="font-weight: bold;">I Chose Freedom</i>, by Victor Kravchenko (1944). The last anti-commie book for Fleming was one I'd known <i>of</i>, but that was the extent: Whittaker Chambers's <i style="font-weight: bold;">Witness</i> (1952), which Fleming calls "perhaps the greatest American masterpiece of literary anti-Communism," and a book which greatly benefited by the Cold War being then in full swing, and even more so by Chambers's nailing of Alger Hiss. At the end of last year I read a cracking good just-off-the-presses book about the history of today's Unistat right wing, <i style="font-weight: bold;">Right Out of California</i>, by UC Davis History professor Kathryn Olmstead. That book - which argues persuasively that the origin of the Unistat Right began in Depression Era California, where the migrant farmworkers were <i>not </i>considered under The New Deal, because FDR needed the South - foreshadowed a lot of the information in Fleming's book, and extended the boundaries of my own historical imagination vis a vis the refinement of propaganda techniques by Unistat spy agencies and the military/industrial/entertainment complex. Juxtaposing Fleming's book on mid-20th century political books that the State "likes" vs. the underground sales of books forbidden by the State in Darnton made me feel like 1789 was more like 500 years ago.<br />
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Darnton and Fleming and Olmstead (oh my!) also reminded me of Frances Stonor Saunders's must-read, <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Cultural Cold War</i>. Get a load of this:<br />
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"'Books differ from all other propaganda media,' wrote a chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff, 'primarily because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium [such as to] make books the most important weapon of strategic (long-range) propaganda.' The CIA's clandestine books programme was run, according to the same source, with the following aims in mind: 'Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any US influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publications or booksellers. Get books published which should not be 'contaminated' by any overt tie-in with the US government, especially if the position of the author is 'delicate.' Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability. Initiate and subsidize indigenous national or international organizations for book publishing or distributing purposes. Stimulate the writing of politically significant books by unknown foreign authors - either by directly subsidizing the author, if covert contact is feasible, or indirectly, through literary agents or publishers." -p.245, Saunders, who is quoting from the <i style="font-weight: bold;">Final Report of the Church Committee</i>, 1976. Saunders quotes a NYT article published on Christmas Day, 1977, about the investigations into the CIA's history: "The <i>New York Times </i>alleged in 1977 that the CIA had been involved in the publication of at least a thousand books."<br />
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When I first read Saunders, I noted a CIA-backed book I had read that no one I personally knew had read. And I'd liked the book: <i style="font-weight: bold;">The New Class</i>, by Milovan Djilas. E. Howard Hunt, working for the CIA admitted he helped get that book published. Was I a dupe? I guess any one of us who reads books at this level will be reading "propaganda" at some point, unwittingly, or possibly quasi-wittingly. Chomsky has written many times that the intellectual class is most subject to this sort of thing, simply because they read so damned much...So there's another reason to embrace those rebel writers you love, the <i>outre </i>and <i>declasse</i> ones that never get reviewed by the New York intellectuals?<br />
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To return to our Big Q: do books cause revolutions? I'd like to think so. My oblivious reading of Djilas's CIA-backed book led me to read a wonderful book by the renegade "outlaw Marxist" Alvin Gouldner, and his <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class</i>. Gouldner turned Socrates and interrogated Marxism from within, walking the perimeter of "the dark side of the Dialectic," which I still find thrilling. I find the intellectual stimulation so bracing I return to this slim volume every few years. In it, Gouldner says that Marxism is a product of bookstores and libraries.<br />
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Thirdly, and really a bald non-sequitur, I will state a personal strong esthetic preference for reading "dead tree" books over reading them on <i>any digital </i>gadget, and that replacing paper books with e-books is - and I'm not the first to float this analogy - like replacing real cut flowers with plastic ones.<br />
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<b>Dead Tree Books, Despite the Peril of Paper</b><br />
Oh, okay yes: the "real" cut flowers will wither in a week or so, while your plastic flowers look the same year after year, so there's gotta be something wrong with this analogy. But I will throw in a monkeywrench and say that with cannabis and hemp legalization more publishers will probably want to use hemp for paper because it last many, many, <i>many</i> times longer than pulped paper.<br />
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And our diminishing world forests get a break. Lousy quality paper: have you ever picked up an old paperback novel produced in the 1950s at a yard or library sale? I've bought ones where the paper is increasingly sort of brownish-rusty near the edges, the paper itself has a rough fuzzy feel to it, and the pages are likely to <i>break </i>if you bend them. Lamentable books like this - even if you read 'em and they're great - are not the ones you'd give to someone else, "You've got to read this! It's fantastic!" Then you hand them the book and a couple of pages fall out, having detached from the spine during the apparently rough drive over, when you hit that pothole. Sad. What an overall lugubrious-evoking state of affairs, indeed.<br />
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40 years after a book rolls off the presses ready for the bookstore, it's literally disintegrating in your hands! (I first noted these books in the 1990s.)<br />
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In the bargain basement pulp paper era (BBPPE), which lasted into the 1980s, according to one source I probably just made up, publishers of paperbacks sought to save money by buying the cheapest pulp paper they could find, then "extend" this pulp by throwing in some acid.<br />
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No, that's cutting corners. It's more like this: when you use wood to make paper there's this stuff called <i>lignin</i>, which went into making the cell walls of wood and bark and helped make up the vascular structures of a plant. This is odorless, mostly colorless, and I imagine fairly tasteless. (Ever get one of those old crappy paperbacks that actually have a big fleck of wood embedded in a page? This I count as one of those Things That Ought Not Be in my world.)<br />
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You get rid of the lignin when you're making the paper by adding acid, particularly something called peroxycetic acid. It's more complex than this (of course!), but adding the acid is part of the <i>delignification </i>process. We worry about old Ray Bradbury paperbacks - or at least I <i>think we should</i> - but documents and artworks, if not delignified, will break down and deteriorate, and even faster if exposed to light and heat. And don't we do some of our best reading under light, with adequate heat? To get the pH level of your pulp back to something closer to the 7 of alkaline/acid balance, you need to go through another process or two, but that costs money. Just take the acid-riddled pulp and print that dimestore novel on that. Take the money and run...<br />
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To cut to a less technical aspect of this spiel, hemp has lower lignin content. If treated just right, it's fairly inexpensive to produce paper for books from hemp that will last 500 to 1000 years before it noticeably starts to deteriorate. Robert Anton Wilson cited an article in a February, 1938 issue of <i>Popular Mechanics </i>about a hemp harvesting machine that would make farmers rich and allow us all to have the most fantastic paper in our books, no cutting down forests either. The male (you don't get high off it) cannabis plant: hemp. Easy to grow. Here's RAW's bit:<br />
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"Well, kiddies, the wonderful invention was a device that made it possible to harvest hemp more cheaply than ever before. Hemp was the chief ingredient in paper throughout most of history (our Declaration of Independence was written on it, for instance) and paper made of hemp lasted a good long time compared to paper made of wood pulp. Ever notice how 19th or 18th century books, or even 17th century books like the original folio of Shakespeare's plays, printed on hemp, are still around, while modern books printed on wood pulp fall apart in only decades?"<br />
-p.178, "Deforestation," <b><i>Email To The Universe</i></b><br />
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Wilson then goes on to link this to the War on Drugs, including pot. The Unistat gummint found out people were getting high, so sorry: millions of lives must be ruined, forests chopped down, and books must fall apart. I wish I believed in "hell" so I could imagine someone like Harry Anslinger paying for his part in all this, but he's probably just food for worms.<br />
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The Good News: we have good reason to believe we'll get lots of hemp in our paper in our books, soon, the cultural winds finally having shifted. And I'm sorry, but we cannot extend the life of our cut flowers indefinitely, and I'm sure someone's working on it. (Then where will the florists be? Uber drivers? Oy!)<br />
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I love the story about Ts'ai Lun, who made paper out of hemp and mulberry bark and tried to convince the Chinese bureaucracy to adopt his invention, <i>paper</i>, in 105 CE. The stuffed shirts wouldn't give Ts'ai a decent hearing, so he pulled the old shamanic stunt of burying himself alive and then returning to the living. He used a hollow reed to breathe, and his friends burned a bunch of his hemp-paper over his grave, which caused Ts'ai Lun to miraculously come back to life. Quite a trick! The bureaucrats were impressed (jeez, the shit The Suits put you through before they'll listen to a new idea!), and his paper was adopted, and Ts'ai became a palace favorite. But political winds shifted after a spell, and Ts'ai faced a trial, which he wasn't up for. So, as Dale Pendell writes, Ts'ai Lun "dressed in his best robes and drank poison." - <i style="font-weight: bold;">PharmakoPoeia</i>, p.183<br />
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<b>Coda: A Future?</b><br />
So, we're all used to the print/dead tree/dead hemp plant "codex" book vs. the book read on some electronic gadget argument. Well, Google is working on a combination of the two, but as I read about it, I had mind's eye trouble: an "augmented reality" pop-up book that adds sound, lighting elements, and video projection? And it interacts with other personal information you had stored on your other e-gizmos? You can add content? I'm not sure if I understand what these visionaries want to do, but I guess there are some areas in all our lives and - I'll speak for myself here - I think I <i>already</i> add that stuff to my reading of the plain old paper-bound book. I do it in exercising my <i>imagination.</i> For what the wizards at Google and Apple want to do, I'll just watch a fucking movie, your mileage may vary. See the article I'm getting all reactionary over <a href="http://techxplore.com/news/2016-03-google-envisions-delivery-ar-elements.html">HERE</a>. What am I missing?<br />
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On second thought: this could become the next great art medium, and you know what? I hope it does...<br />
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<b>Adieu</b><br />
I wish you all a Joseph Campbell-ian "nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time" in your reading, chums.<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #212121; font-family: inherit; font-weight: lighter; line-height: 36px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>fantasztikus grafikus <a href="http://bobbycampbell.net/">Bob Campbell</a></i></span><br />
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<br />michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-41413386472060214472016-04-22T14:45:00.000-07:002016-05-15T04:18:41.858-07:00Critical Mass (2012 Mike Freedman): Interview with the FilmmakerIn mid-July 2012 I blogged on <a href="http://overweeninggeneralist.blogspot.com/2012/07/john-b-calhoun-digital-media-and.html">John B. Calhoun and his experiments with rats and overpopulation</a>. A documentary filmmaker read the post and contacted me, because he liked that I was addressing Calhoun and he'd just made a film about him, but the main topic was world human population. He sent me a password so I could watch his as-yet unreleased film. And I was impressed.<br />
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This interview was conducted at the end of 2012; I was waiting for an alert from Freedman about the official release date, and I must have missed it. I've been meaning to get this out, and Earth Day seems like as good a day as any. The film has done very well so far. (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lABDEMJXATo">HERE's the trailer.</a>)<br />
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OG: Where were you born and raised, what are/were your parent's occupations, and were intellectual ideas discussed around the dinner table?</div>
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Mike Freedman: I was born in New York City and raised in London. My father is a playwright and director of theatre and my mother was in banking. Family dinners were a fixture, and ideas were very much discussed - questions were answered, words were defined and looked up in the dictionary. More broadly, although my parents weren't lavish spenders on "things", they were always of the belief that money spent on books was never wasted, so visits to book stores always yielded prizes. We were also a family that attended theatre, concerts and films and then discussed them afterwards, and as children we were allowed to have an opinion and encouraged to frame it and defend it intelligently. Disagreement was not discouraged, so I grew up in quite an aggressive environment intellectually speaking - if you had an idea, you had to be prepared to defend it and clarify it, and taking offence at being called out on something was looked down upon.</div>
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OG: When did you first get interested in sustainability, and human survival on the planet? I saw EF Schumacher's name near the end credits of special thanks, which listed your family first, if I remember correctly. Schumacher's books on "buddhist economics" were a big deal for me along these lines, way back when I was 18 or so.</div>
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Freedman: In terms of how I viewed the genesis of environmental crises or human conflicts, I recall always seeing them as byproducts of humans competing with one another or being crowded together. I never thought of myself as an activist, but I suppose my intellectual curiosity about the complexity of these issues simply led me to the rational view of our planet as a holistic system of which we are a part, albeit a part currently engaged in some rather systemically disruptive behaviour. There were three books in particular that gave me the vocabulary and intellectual framework with which to navigate and share this view: <b><i>The Human Zoo</i></b> by Desmond Morris, <b><i>The Soul of the Ape</i></b> by Eugene Marais and <b><i>Small is Beautiful</i></b> by EF Schumacher. Honourable mention must also go to <b><i>Our Inner Ape</i></b> by Frans de Waal, a fantastic book. As an aside, I should say that my interest in human survival on this planet is the same as everyone else's really - I suppose I was just raised and educated in a way that helps me to filter out the cultural programming and status-seeking noise of our social and economic structures sufficiently that I can see where this road leads if we continue down it.</div>
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OG: The footage of Calhoun was mindblowing, and you and your editor inserted the clips in very effective points in the narrative. I was reminded of something William Gibson said about narrative, that it was about the "controlled release of information." Your film does this masterfully. Say a little something about how you found the Calhoun footage and the process in which you chose to use it: simple story-boarding? </div>
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Freedman: Calhoun's work was done using public funding, and as such the law places the films of his experiments in the public domain. This was a very big help for us. John Rees, the head archivist at the National Library of Medicine, was an absolute angel in terms of tracking down his boxes and tapes, and then of course finding a way to get me copies of the footage. Without that man's help, this film would still be in my head for sure. In terms of how we use the footage, it was always intended that we tell Calhoun's story as the main arc of the film, but with almost 200 hours of interviews, cut-aways and archive I got bogged down pretty badly. I ended up at one point with a pretty lumpen chapter structure which the editor discarded and then strung the information out along the length of the film in a much more dramatically effective manner. No story-boarding - after I'd logged the footage and snipped out all the tidbits I knew I wanted (which resulted in a ridiculously self-indulgent 3 hour cut), the editor and I sat down and spent our first day together discussing the structure of the film. After that, we just worked to the plan and kept grinding it out until we had it done. The key was to allow visual breaks that still delivered information even if the audience felt that they were getting a rest.</div>
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OG: The main reason I think you have a winner here - beside the fact it's so well-put-together - is that Al Gore's power point <i>An Inconvenient Truth</i> film was so well-received. Now, that may have something to do with the power of Al Gore, but your issues encompass his. We shouldn't denigrate global warming, obviously, but the issues your film discusses a much larger set of pressing concerns. Gore covered global warming, and it seems you've covered everything else! The problem with films like yours, for some viewers, may be that the information is so scary and overwhelming (and this issue is addressed in your film, I know), that viewers may react with a sort of paralyzed anxious passivity, which Calhoun himself foresaw. But the film isn't all doom and gloom. There are rays of hope, a way out. What are some of the things that you have done to personally now that you have such a high level of awareness? What do you think the viewers can start doing the moment they walk out of the theater? What are some of the best organizations they may want to pay attention to? I LOVED the link to the books on the website; I've read about 60% of those and want to read the rest now.<br />
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<i>documentarian Mike Freedman</i></div>
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Freedman: Well, when we were making the film we knew that there was a very fine line between scaring people enough that they feel they must do something and scaring them so much that they feel there's nothing they can do. In terms of what can be done, I would suggest three main levels of action: the individual, the community and the political. As an individual, you have a certain range of choices that you can make, and by making certain changes you not only show others by your actions what it is that you would like them also to be doing, you show yourself that you are capable of change and capable of exerting will over your own life and actions. The latter cannot be overstated - so many of us feel either powerless, or entrenched, calcified, not only knowing what we can do but not even feeling that we can do it. Doing something, no matter how minor, is a step, and as the saying goes, a single step is where the journey begins. The more you work on yourself, the more you prove to yourself that you are capable of will, of change, the more will power you gain and the more changes you can make. The individual level of action is not only the primary but ultimately, in this wild and mysterious world, the only level of true action. At the community level, you can work to know your neighbours, to source your food and energy not only sustainably but locally, to build genuine resilience and democracy. I'm fond of saying that democracy functions best at the local level, municipal and at most state. Much further than state democracy and the people who are governed are too far removed from their leaders and vice versa. How many people from Nebraska can or will go all the way to DC to protest or deliver a petition? So how can a Nebraska representative at the federal level truly represent his people if he never sees the majority of them, or speaks with them or lives among them. That's why federal officials serve the interests they serve - they work with the people who are there. In a sense, everyone else simply isn't real to them in any meaningful way. Which brings me to the political level - certain changes can only be made structurally to our system as a whole. Personally, I believe that we have certain flaws in the system itself that absolutely must be addressed if we are going to collectively do anything about these issues. The money creation mechanism, the economic imperative of growth because of the debt-based nature of our financial system, the gutting of education to extract creativity and critical thinking (and also to focus purely on the intellect at the expense of the emotions and intuition of the child), the crushing ubiquity of consumer marketing and PR pablum which makes genuine civic discourse nearly impossible, the corrosive effect of money on politics, the rise of multi-nationals operating beyond the realm of national law, the Bretton Woods institutions, the homogenisation and monopoly of media production through mergers and acquisitions...the list goes on and on. Second verse, same as the first. These issues can't be addressed only with community gardens and blue-sky thinking - it's wrong to suggest otherwise. But it is also true that the political level is the furthest removed from the individual's sphere of influence, and yet exerts an undue impact on the range of decisions that individual is able to make. So if I were to recommend organisations to your readers, I would suggest looking into Positive Money in the UK (<a href="http://www.positivemoney.org.uk/"><span class="s1">www.positivemoney.org.uk</span></a>) and the American Monetary Institute in the US (<a href="http://www.monetary.org/"><span class="s1">www.monetary.org</span></a>). Ultimately, without a complete redesign of our monetary system and economic priorities, no other structural factors will really change. So as I said earlier, the best and most immediate thing you can do is change yourself.</div>
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OG: One things that's very impressive is the sheer number of knowers you have in the film, and how articulate and animated, interesting and passionate they are. For some people - like Desmond Morris, Jon Adams, and John Michael Greer - I imagine they were ready to give you good stuff from the start, for their varying reasons. But is there anything you do to work up an interview subject so that they become as animated as they were? What I mean is: there are a lot of "talking heads" here, but they're never boring. </div>
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Freedman: First of all, thank you. That was always a concern and luckily, the passion and charisma of the people we interviewed shines through. Those people are just like that - I can't take any credit for their engagement and their excitement about their subject matter. If I did anything, it was only preparing for the interview by familiarising myself with their work so that they could speak freely without feeling that they were dealing with someone who didn't know who they were or what they really did.</div>
<div class="p1">
<br /></div>
<div class="p2">
OG: Tell us about your previous work, and how long it took from gestation to finish this film. Were there any particular films that influenced you to make <i>Critical Mass</i>?</div>
<div class="p1">
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Freedman: <i>Critical Mass</i> is my first feature documentary, and also my first feature-length project. Previously, I'd made some short films, music videos, the usual. Although I obviously was interested in the subject for a long time, we shot the first interviews for this film in June 2010, so it's been almost exactly two years in the making. As far as influence goes...when I was about 13, we watched excerpts from <i>Koyaanisqatsi</i> in a poetry class and I later tracked the full film down and it is still one of my absolute favourites. I watch it about once a year, and it's the gold standard of pure cinema - music, montage, technique, framing, social observation, political statement, environmentalism, poetry, history...like <i>Network</i>, it's even more powerful now than it was then because all of those things are still happening. <i>The Corporation</i> is another documentary I have a lot of respect for, and the work of Adam Curtis at the BBC is also a pretty big deal for me. And of course Peter Watkins - I actually tracked down the editor of <i>The War Game</i>, Michael Bradsell, and he came and sat with me a few times to discuss cutting and structure for the trailer and for the film.</div>
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OG: When I finished watching, I thought, "Finally! The Exponential Function has its film!" I just want to thank you for this. But why isn't this stuff better-known? Why can't we think from a systems view better than we do? How come my educated friends have never heard of John B. Calhoun? </div>
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Freedman: Okay, so one question at a time. First, the exponential function isn't better known because it's actually very difficult to internalise. Even making an animation of it was nearly impossible, because the numbers of little people got so big so quickly that the animator was freaking out trying to make it look good instead of just confusing. There's a theory about human evolution that because we developed in small hunter-gatherer bands with small family units, we actually can't really picture numbers much higher than three. There's one - me, two - me and my mate, and three - me, my mate and our baby. Much above that is just fog to the mind since there's no corollary to latch onto. So up front it's important to say that the exponential function is very hard to get your head around. </div>
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<br /></div>
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As to our lack of a holistic system-view, I suppose there are many reasons for that. The impact of economists in lending academic legitimacy to the destructive growth narrative we are programmed to believe in cannot be overstated. Counteracting a dominant establishment belief will always take a lot of time and effort, and come at a great cost - if you want to know how receptive the academic establishment can be to new information about the world, look up a man called Ignaz Semmelweiss. He tried to tell doctors that they should wash their hands before delivering babies in the late 19th century and their response was to tell him he was crazy. He died in an asylum and a few decades later, Pasteur and Lister proved him right. Nowadays I can't eat an apple without my wife yelling at me to wash it first. Economics is only really now, and barely at that, starting to acknowledge the existence of the natural world as an important limiting factor on growth. Our planet doesn't come with a manual telling us what the thresholds and limits are, so as long as the prevailing mindset is one of 'progress', i.e. growth of human numbers and material throughput, the lack of a line in the sand allows for the excuse that since we don't know what the limits are we can get away without worrying about them. That argument obviously is as attractive to politicians as it is to economists, and that helps dictate the narrative structure of our society and therefore what we grow up knowing about the world around us and our role in it. The overtly non-holistic nature of Western thinking also has a lot to do with it. Our educational and financial systems, our industrial capitalist ideology, our advertising and creative landscapes are worlds of components, of isolates. Factor in the denigration of emotion and instinct in favour of the intellect and you have a recipe for a society that does not see a world of intimately connected life-spirit-matter-energy engaged in a constant feedback from all parts to all parts.</div>
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Why haven't your friends heard of Calhoun? Calhoun retired from NIMH in the early 1980s; a new director was appointed who changed the focus of their work from understanding behaviour to medicating behaviour. Calhoun saw the writing on the wall - it was clear that NIMH was focused on targeting behaviour with drugs rather than understanding and working with behaviour in a more organic way. His work, which is all about complexity and nuance, didn't fit with the new idea that there should be a pill that solved the symptoms and therefore there would no longer be a problem. That might explain why his behavioural studies were de-emphasised in academia from that time on. There's also the over-simplified interpretation of his work, i.e. crowding causes violence, which when put in those bald terms is not a defensible assertion; that reduction of his work was used to 'debunk' him in the minds of some sociologists, such as Claude Strauss-Fischer, with whom I exchanged a spirited series of emails during my research on the film. His experiments and his broader viewpoint on where humanity might be headed and what we could do about it kind of fell in the memory hole. This was a man who predicted the internet as we know it today, including tablet and handheld devices (which he called 'new information prostheses'), in 1970. His ideas on evolution and the future of our species were and remain to this day not only remarkable but unique. I suppose it's inevitable that he's largely unknown. He didn't invent anything of immediate potential for commercial exploitation by the establishment and as such he remains less famous than the guy that came up with the Pet Rock. Go figure.</div>
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OG: What do you anticipate will be the main lines of negative criticism from Big Biz reviewers who would feel threatened by the ideas in <i>Critical Mass</i>? I think you have massive Truth on your side, but I'm scared/disappointed by how Monsanto et.al. were able to sway Californians from saying yes to the labeling of modified foods...as merely a minor example.</div>
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Freedman: Criticisms:</div>
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<div class="p3">
1.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Environmentalists in general and population concern in particular is really just misanthropy - they don't like people, they don't want them to have nice things and they're wrong.</div>
<div class="p3">
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Any talk about the subject of population is really just an undercover attempt to encourage eugenics, sterilisation, genocide and coercive population control.</div>
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3.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>People aren't just a mouth to feed, they have two hands to work, innovate and create, so net production is higher than consumption.</div>
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4.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Everyone on the planet could fit into [insert name of small country] shoulder to shoulder, so there's plenty of space.</div>
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5.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Tertullian thought the planet was overpopulated almost two thousand years ago and he was wrong, so any assumptions about carrying capacity are pointless.</div>
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6.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Everything is fine now and therefore always will be, and Chicken Littles always make plenty of noise about whatever.</div>
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7.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>We've always managed to produce more food than we need.</div>
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8.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I'm an agent of the Illuminati hellbent on the eradication of 80% of the world's population in line with the suggestions made on the Georgia Guidestones by our lizard overlords.</div>
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Responses:</div>
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1.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>It isn't and we're not. I like people and I want them to have nice things like clean air, drinkable water, healthy food, personal space and mental/emotional wellbeing.</div>
<div class="p3">
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Population concern did originate in its modern form out of some rather unsavoury eugenics movements during the early 20th, and terrible things have been done in the name of eugenics and coercive population control. I am not in favour of coercive population control, I think that the manner in which current coercive policies are enforced is barbaric and as an asthmatic bespectacled Jew with allergies whose wife has scoliosis and had a full blood transfusion at birth, I can assure you that I am not remotely advancing a eugenic argument in any shape or form.</div>
<div class="p3">
3.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Physically true, arguably specious but largely irrelevant since the theme of the film is crowding and its impact on us in a qualitative sense.</div>
<div class="p3">
4.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I've heard this many times and all I can ask is: if we're standing shoulder to shoulder, what do we do if we want to sleep or poop? Another semantic point which ignores the truth of our situation.</div>
<div class="p3">
5.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Tertullian did think that, and for the record the empire he was living in collapsed, but let's leave that aside for now. I don't use the word "overpopulation" if I can help it, and I personally don't argue about 'too many people' - what matters to me is the quality of the individual human life experience and a kinship to other living things. We are not talking about carrying capacity per se, but what limits (crowding included) can or will do to us and our life on this planet. I don't think that's a pointless conversation.</div>
<div class="p3">
6.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Someone will always be convinced that the world is about to end. However, it's equally true that someone will always be convinced that it won't. Watch the sinking of Hy-Brazil from Erik the Viking and you'll see what I mean - <a href="http://youtu.be/d8IBnfkcrsM"><span class="s1">http://youtu.be/d8IBnfkcrsM</span></a>.</div>
<div class="p3">
7.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>So far that's been true, and don't get me started on the inequity of food distribution in the world, which is a serious problem of economic and political power rather than genuine supply. However, the uptick in food production in the 20th century was largely due to the work of Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work - he's credited with being instrumental in feeding over a billion people. In his Nobel acceptance speech, Borlaug said (and you can check Nobel's website if you want) that no advances in food production would make a difference in the long run if we didn't also look at population. In fact, if you took that excerpt from his speech and sent it to your average 'concern debunker', they'd probably write him off as a hardcore Malthusian rather than the guy that saved a billion people from starvation.</div>
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8.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>I'm nobody's agent and I'm not hellbent on anything, least of all eradication of anyone. I can't even stand up without grunting these days. Georgia is a lovely state (and also a very cool country), but I've never been to nor read firsthand the inscription on the Guidestones. I receive no endorsement, funding or creative input from reptilian extraterrestrial or extradimensional beings. Fact.</div>
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OG: When is the film due for release?</div>
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Freedman: Good question! I'm talking with distributors now, and our best case scenario is looking like six to nine months for securing broadcast/theatrical/DVD. No date fixed as yet.</div>
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OG: Are you showing it at any festivals or special showings in large cities?</div>
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<div class="p3">
Freedman: We've been invited to a festival in Canada in May which I can't disclose yet as we're still talking with them, and we've submitted to several festivals throughout the world that, if we were accepted, would be happening over the next four to six months.</div>
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OG: What's the distribution looking like right now?</div>
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Freedman: At the moment our strategy is looking like educational only for six months, then commercial release once we've placed it with a theatre chain or broadcaster, followed by DVD and online. Nothing fixed yet.</div>
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The earlier the better, or just before it comes out and generates a buzz? What are your ideas?</div>
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<div class="p3">
I think that at present, anything we put out there would be buried in the Yuletide snowdrift. Best to wait until there is some sort of event or announcement, either a distribution date or festival appearance. If that's alright with you.</div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p1">
OG: "New Documentary Film <i>Critical Mass</i> Will Do For Human Population What Al Gore Did For Global Warming"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Freedman: I like the ring of it and the sentiment, but two concerns occur to me, both of which might very well be me being over-cautious.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
1.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Al Gore is a dreadful hypocrite.</div>
<div class="p3">
2.<span class="Apple-tab-span"> </span>Al Gore showed that global warming was bad, so would that mean we're saying people are bad? Or can we be confident people will understand that you mean raising awareness?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
OG: When you approach financial backers, what's the short explanation when they ask, "What's it about?"</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Freedman: "<i>Critical Mass</i> is a feature documentary about the impact of human population growth and consumption on our planet and on our psychology." </div>
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<div class="p3">
That's the elevator pitch. I've got it down to the point where I can reel it off in one breath.</div>
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OG: How do you feel about being compared to Al Gore?</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Freedman: Well, on the one hand it's encouraging that people feel the film does for population what he did for climate change, but on the other, as I said above, he's a dreadful hypocrite, so hopefully they mean the comparison in relation to his film and not to his behaviour.</div>
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<div class="p1">
OG: I loved the stuff about the empowerment of women, near the end of the film; it reminded me of Bucky Fuller. </div>
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<div class="p3">
Freedman: Thank you. Interestingly, when we showed the film in the US there were cheers at that part. In the UK and Europe, not so much. So perhaps Americans need to hear it said out loud, or perhaps Europeans are more numb. Who knows?</div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p3">
I'm a fan of Bucky Fuller - I actually was reading <b><i>Critical Path</i></b> in the run-up to making the film. And I tried to have a prototype of his fog gun shower built as part of the 'solutions' section at the end, but there weren't any available working blueprints for it.</div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p1">
OG: I saw that you interviewed Derrick Jensen and and Aubrey de Grey, but they apparently got cut. With Aubrey, I imagined it was because the problem of living to 200 and the environment was too much for a film already brimming with ideas and possible future scenarios? How was Jensen? What do you think of the life extension people like Aubrey?</div>
<div class="p2">
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<div class="p3">
Freedman: Derrick and Aubrey didn't make the film for two different reasons. Derrick was actually interviewed over the phone for what was meant to be a podcast, but the line was bad and the sound was unusable. However, the conversation gave me so much food for thought that I felt he deserved a credit. Aubrey was interviewed on camera, but our conversation was much more future-oriented and the film deals mainly with how we got to this point and what the present situation is, meaning there wasn't room for adding in his particular brand of futurism. Both Aubrey's and Derrick's conversations with me are now chapters in a book that I'm putting together which (fingers crossed) may be available soon. I just need to transcribe two more conversations, write the conclusion and do the endnotes.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Derrick was inspirational to put it mildly. He's not a man everyone will agree with, but he speaks with straightforward honesty and passion (and compassion) and that is truly inspiring.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Aubrey would say that he's a rejuvenation biotechnologist, not a life extension guy. I'd say that consequence and mechanism are not that easily separable in his field. I think that if he (or one of the other labs working on it) is successful, the timeline of how things unfold will be much less egalitarian than the way he perceives it. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
OG: Do you have an opinion on Jared Diamond's book <b><i>Collapse</i></b>? </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Freedman: Jared Diamond is the only person I contacted who declined to be interviewed for the film. Two others, Mike Ruppert and Robin Dunbar, simply never got back to me, but Diamond said no all three times that I asked him. That moved his book off my immediate list of reading because I had to read the work of the people I was meeting, and because of that I haven't read it. What I do know is that I interviewed Joe Tainter who wrote <b><i>The Collapse Of Complex Societies</i></b> and he is quite unequivocal about the fact that he finds Diamond's scholarship in Collapse to be dubious. The way he put it is that Diamond's thesis is the basis of the book rather than the evidence of how collapses actually unfolded. I couldn't possibly comment as I haven't read it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p1">
OG: Are there any others that have come along recently that you'd like to share with my readers?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Freedman: After a hardcore two years on a non-fiction diet, locking the picture on the film drove me to seek refuge in fiction, ironically dystopian sci-fi to be precise. In the past year I read (among others) <b><i>The Space Merchants</i></b> by Pohl and Kornbluth and <b><i>The Death of Grass</i></b> by John Christopher, a book that I now desperately want to make into a film (although it was adapted - in a typically 70s hack manner - by Cornel Wilde). I've also been reading material for research on two other docs I'm developing, as well as quite a bit of Ferlinghetti's poetry recently. I also read <b><i>Black Elk Speaks</i></b> (the annotated anniversary edition) last year - there's a passage in there where Black Elk describes his people as an ever-eroding island in a sea of white men which I found quite affecting. Next on my list of dystopian fiction is Paolo Bacigalupi - several of my friends have gotten religion about his work, so I'm going to check it out. </div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
As an aside, you reminded me that I only put non-fiction on the reading list on our website, and there are two fiction books (not admitted by the authors to have been influenced by Calhoun, but nonetheless thematically consistent and from the same time period) called <b><i>Make Room! Make Room! </i></b>by Harry Harrison and <b><i>Stand On Zanzibar</i></b> by John Brunner that I need to add. I got in touch with Harry (who lives here in the UK) about interviewing him for the film - he's still very much of an opinion on population, but we never found a place to put it in the structure so we never shot it.</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Regarding <b><i>The Great Bay</i></b>, I'll look it up - it reminds me of the Bill Hicks routine about Arizona Bay, the coastline formed when California falls into the sea. If I'm not mistaken, that was also an Edgar Cayce prediction?</div>
<div class="p2">
<br /></div>
<div class="p3">
Again, thank you so much for your passion for the film. It's very encouraging and I'm proud to have you as an ally.</div>
michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-31834836836302374722016-04-20T03:43:00.003-07:002016-04-28T23:08:52.081-07:00420: A Few Anecdotes About My Favorite Artists and CannabisI'll try to make this short, 'cuz I've been taking up too much of your time lately and I don't want ya to feel I ripped you off. Besides, I reward myself for doing a blog post by getting a tad baked. But then again I reward myself with weed after peeing, too...<br />
<br />
<b>George Carlin</b><br />
"Carlin had been smoking 'shit' habitually since he was thirteen years old. 'I'd wake up in the morning and if I couldn't decide whether I wanted to smoke a joint or not, I'd smoke a joint to figure it out,' he once admitted. 'And I stayed high all day long. When people asked me, 'Do you get high to go onstage?' I could never understand the question. I mean, I'd been high since eight that morning. Going onstage had nothing to do with it'"<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin</i>, James Sullivan, p.107<br />
<br />
<b>David Bowie</b><br />
"According to an interview David Bowie gave to <i>Playboy </i>in the mid-seventies, he only got stoned on pot once, when he was turned on by Ronnie Wood and he spent hours staring at the sidewalk having visions. A couple of years later, Bowie was busted, along with Iggy Pop, in Rochester, New York, for possessing several ounces of marijuana...blame it on Iggy."<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">Everybody Must Get Stoned: Rock Stars On Drugs</i>, R.U. Sirius, p.91<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_50EUdghy7NTFh-0RU9faxjw5GWp9Ve_-KseJmZV-0RQ_AxPWG_fHK0wxa7__Eqzhe8WSAoTaFjql-l8XXIjlI06X-l2_ubObAlQOJWe_NdYzruj4rxa7EogbastTe_XIBoUmiUL5NyYw/s1600/utopia_cannabis.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_50EUdghy7NTFh-0RU9faxjw5GWp9Ve_-KseJmZV-0RQ_AxPWG_fHK0wxa7__Eqzhe8WSAoTaFjql-l8XXIjlI06X-l2_ubObAlQOJWe_NdYzruj4rxa7EogbastTe_XIBoUmiUL5NyYw/s400/utopia_cannabis.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
<b>Steve Almond</b><br />
"I was pushing forty and had smoked the equivalent of a large marijuana tree the previous decade."<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">Not That You Asked</i>, Almond, p.252<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNBpbNKRZYkVIiD9nktADpFItMe0WvuovJYySGwkZmR-RVxLYFJgcoezgO0MZ-zY6OH1M8iyeoSZ2ex2NIBKBkLkgZXasG1XX66T__ASS5_Zf-B8h3GuISTJZrj_5_2hLOQyMpI-khf5hq/s1600/FERNANDEZ_1960s_Allen_Ginsberg_Pot_Is_Fun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiNBpbNKRZYkVIiD9nktADpFItMe0WvuovJYySGwkZmR-RVxLYFJgcoezgO0MZ-zY6OH1M8iyeoSZ2ex2NIBKBkLkgZXasG1XX66T__ASS5_Zf-B8h3GuISTJZrj_5_2hLOQyMpI-khf5hq/s640/FERNANDEZ_1960s_Allen_Ginsberg_Pot_Is_Fun.jpg" width="468" /></a></div>
<i>Allen Ginsberg, 1963, 64, or 65. Photo by Benedict </i><br />
<i> J. Fernandez</i><br />
<br />
<b>Ezra Pound and Allen Ginsberg</b><br />
Ginsberg visited Pound in Rapallo, Italy, in the late 1960s. Pound had been profoundly depressed, realizing he'd been an idiot with his antisemitism, and that he'd hurt everyone he loved. Ginsberg told Pound, basically, So you fucked up...you influenced everyone with your aesthetic ideas. At one point Ginsberg talked to Pound about "modern use of drugs as distinct from Twenties opium romanticism." Pound replied, "You know a great deal about the subject."<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">What Thou Lovest Well Remains: 100 Years of Ezra Pound</i>, ed. Richard Ardinger, p.37<br />
<br />
<b>Robert Anton Wilson</b><br />
"The 'funniest' experiences I've ever had with drugs all involved pot, and none of them seem comic when I try to write them down. Apparently words, which cannot convey 'mystical' experiences, also fail to communicate hilarious drug experiences.<br />
<br />
"For instance, a friend and I took a little too much hash one night and both got lost in stoned space. We knew who we were and where we were, but we couldn't remember the last 30 seconds. We spent what seemed like an hour saying things like:<br />
<br />
"Jesus, I can't remember what we were talking about."<br />
"What did you just say?"<br />
(Interlude of spasmodic laughter by both of us.)<br />
"I think I'm having a...what? What did you say?"<br />
"I can't remember...What were we trying to remember?"<br />
(More spasms of laughter)<br />
"We're trying to...What are we trying to do?"<br />
As the effect modified with time, we understood what was happening, and one of us described it as "a visit to the islands of micro-amnesia."<br />
<i style="font-weight: bold;">Pot Stories For The Soul</i>, edited by Paul Krassner, p.68<br />
<br />
<b>Aleister Crowley</b><br />
"The action of Hashish is as varied as life itself, and seems to be determined almost entirely by the will or the mood of the 'assassin' and that within the hedges of his mental and moral form."<br />
-originally in <i style="font-weight: bold;">The Equinox</i>, 1909, found in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Orgies of the Hemp Eaters</i>, Hakim Bey and Abel Zug, editors, p.444<br />
<br />
<b>William S. Burroughs</b><br />
"Hashish affects the sense of time so that events, instead of appearing in an orderly structure of past, present and future, take on a simultaneous quality, the past and future contained in the present the moment."<br />
-found in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Writing on Drugs</i>, by Sadie Plant, p.152<br />
<br />
<b>"Mezz" Mezzrow</b><br />
"It's a funny thing about marihuana - when you first begin smoking it you see things in a wonderful soothing, easygoing new light. All of a sudden the world is stripped bare of its dirty gray shrouds and becomes one big bellyful of giggles, a spherical laugh, bathed in brilliant, sparkling colours that hit you like a heatwave. Nothing leaves you cold any more; there's a humorous tickle and great meaning in the least little thing, the twitch of somebody's little finger or the click of a beer glass. All your pores open like funnels, your nerve ends stretch their mouths wide, hungry and thirsty for new sights and sounds and sensations; and every sensation, when it comes, is the most exciting one you've ever had. You can't get enough of anything - you want to gobble up the whole goddamned universe just for an appetizer. Them first kicks are a killer, Jim."<br />
-from <i style="font-weight: bold;">Really The Blues</i>, 1946, found in <i style="font-weight: bold;">Artificial Paradises</i>, ed. by Mike Jay, p.152<br />
<br />
<b>Bonus Tracks</b><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1jk4F1757A">1 Minute excerpt from <i>Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story</i></a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.cc.com/video-clips/pbfcaq/the-colbert-report-cheating-death---sun-exposure---marijuana">Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA, "Cheating Death": sun overexposure and pot</a><br />
<br />
<a href="http://dangerousminds.net/comments/weed_snobs_pretty_much_nails_weed_snobs">"Weed Snobs"</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXcPEKaxJzg">Nancy Grace saying the most idiotic Reefer Madness-level crap about pot</a><br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=cannabis+images&espv=2&biw=1262&bih=621&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuz6ivg53MAhVD92MKHYXPDKkQsAQIGw">weed porn</a><br />
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<i>from Sean Tejaratchi's <b><a href="http://liartownusa.tumblr.com/">LiarTown USA</a> </b>site, which always makes me laff </i><br />
<i> until I have a side-ache</i>michaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.com3