On Compulsive Diarists, of Which I Seem To Be One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or just to buy space in a closet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, well.

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

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

Rushkoff's Presentism and Further Musings on Time

Prof. George Carlin was performing on The Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour - a TV show - in 1976. He told the audience about Time as a concept. He said that there is no "present" that we can say to be truly living in because just as we identify it...ZOINK!...it's gone. We've moved on to the next moment. "There's no present. Everything is in the near future, or the recent past." - copped from Sullivan's delightful biography of Carlin, 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. The gnomish intellectuality of Carlin's POV on "presentism" notwithstanding, I do enjoy the para-Zen-like musing as a potent little philosophical riff, akin to Led Zeppelin's very simple but powerful, "Whole Lotta Love."

Both Carlin and Zep are "basic" but they rock-steady...On to my bit.

Douglas Rushkoff has produced yet another marvelous book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Because most of the libraries in my area don't yet have it, or if they do the waiting list is too long, and also because I don't have any money, I once again stood (sometimes sat) in a bookstore and did a very fast read of the whole thing, over about two hours. I will re-read it when it's less the molten hot commodity and I have more time to devote to it. Speaking of time/Time...

                                           Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff says that, within our collective historical consciousness, our technologies have landed us in "the future." Now, and for the foreseeable future, which is now. So let's start to feel freed up from thinking of book-like narratives of seeing a beginning, rising action, falling action, climax, denouement (or variations of that), because terrorism, child starvation and global warming don't have these narrative structures to them. They're not like: dictators in Europe out of hand, killing people, Hitler invades Poland, death, more stuff pushes the action, death, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, death, death, death, Victory in Europe day, death, slaughter, carpet bombing, lives stunted forever, Hitler and Eva off themselves in a bunker, death and then another dollop of mass death, "discovery" of the Death Camps, Hiroshima, death, ticker-tape parade. That sorta stuff. (In my reading outside idiot-making "school" I developed a  habit of imposing complex, intertwingling narratives-without-end...both because I find these conceptions of "history" more true-to-phenomenological "facts" although not "identical" to them, and because I simply find it far more instructive and interesting to conceive of historical narrative this way. Ya got a bettuh whaddyacall..."method"? Do me a solid and let's hear it.)

There's so much going on with our gadgets now that we're not managing time in the way that will make us more happy; we're too caught up in the modes of Industrial (and corporation's) Time and this really ought to stop. It starts with you: maintain eye contact when you're with someone you really want or need to be communicating with. Ignore the cell phone when it vibrates. The email, your text messages, scrolling for Facebook "friends" can wait. Rushkoff's one of My Guys, obviously.

Franz Boas, trained as a physicist but he then invented Modern Cultural Anthropology, traveled to live among the Inuit. Extensive immersion-within-the-field studies were essential in this new discipline, which sought to distance itself from the old anthropology: reading the latest dispatches from missionaries, spies, or pirates and making armchair proclamations about..."the" Pygmies/French/Laplanders/Maori/Turks/Yanomano, etc. Boas wrote later about "culture shock." It's something that must have been experienced countless times before by missionaries and pirates; but Boas was a true intellectual and very reflective. The utter newness of the ways "eskimos" lived, what they thought and took-for-granted as "reality" disoriented Boas; it was all too much.  His mind was blown by the experience. Culture shock became a to-be-expected in the training of cultural anthropologists.

I had the Experience when I spent three weeks in Tokyo/Kyoto/Osaka/Kathmandu. But Boas stuck it out. His students - people like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir and Zora Neal Hurston and many others developed an empirical view of "culture," and altered the idea of the Platonic One True Reality. A major aspect of cultural relativity is the observation that different peoples seem to experience Time very differently than Western Industrialized Humans, or anyone else under 24/7 electric lights/effective "grid", clocks everywhere, mass transit, schedule, schedule, schedule, metropolises, and mass communications.

Sociologist Alvin Toffler was a huge deal with he came out with his book Future Shock in 1970. This sort of shock was defined as "too much change happening in too short of a period of time," or something like that. It led to disorientation (and there was no Internet! no Twitter or Facebook or...blogs) and anxiety. It reminded me of Aldous Huxley's idea of the consciousness or nervous system on psychedelic drugs: it's as if "normal consciousness" was a garden hose with a kink in it, so the water only flows out in dribs and drabs, but on a psychedelic, the hose is unkinked and the amount of...information, perception, ideas, emotions...is overwhelming. It feels like a firehose in your brain, when what you're used to is...a dribble here and there. It can be - it will be - overwhelming. Your comfy old-sneakers whelm will be overtaken. But you knew that.

Another Net guru, Clay Shirky, coined the term "filter failure" as a sort of update on "future shock." This implies that we were all trained to acknowledge that some sort of mental "filter" or way of practicing a....mental hygiene? was part of our educations. (Was it yours?) Rushkoff, one of those that Richard Rorty would have labeled a Strong Poet, has minted some of his own terms here, the two that stick out most clearly being "digiphrenia" and "fractalnoia." On Rushkoff's blog he posted some of his favorite early reviews and media interviews, which probably flesh a lot of this out better than I've done here...

                                        George W.S. Trow

It's firehoses for everyone now, seemingly, and you don't even need LSD. Everyone is On, all the time, now, 24/7. Twittering, blogging, texting, chatting, On Demand. So where in the narrative arc of life or some current news story are we? We don't know. (I think George W. S. Trow had some amazing things to say about our lack of context - he loathed what TV had done to our sense of history, and see his short - so it won't eat up your TV-time - book Within The Context Of No Context.) And yet gadzillions of bits of information about what's "going on" is readily available. The Boston Marathon was bombed. There's a story! Now: to find out. Notice how the story plays out into the "future" (what will Unistat do with Tsarnaev?) and the "past" (was Tamerlane under the guidance of plotting, malevolent terrorist elders?). When will we "know" that this story has a climax and denouement? Answer: we will impose some sort of "ending" ourselves.

What, then, about our very real problems, like starvation and global warming? Here the story has even less of a discernible narrative arc. It looks like we can ameliorate, manage, divert, defer...the idea of the 19th century novel and our sense of historical events has broken down, aided by our extremely sophisticated communication gadgets. In his previous book, Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments For The Digital Age (which is short and doesn't demand too much of your...time), Rushkoff urged us to be in our own real time, to not always be plugged in and "on," to live our lives without the imperatives of our digital gadgets, which are programmed by others, the code hidden from you. Are your gadgets using you to do what some corporations want? Or are you using your gadgets in accordance with your consciously-negotiated and present and personal values? His recent book seems to take on a far grander theme: how our sense of Time is and has been affected by technology.

The section on chronobiology was particularly interesting, and when I have more time alone, at home, to delve in it, I think I'll skip back to those bits first.

Another area of his thought I wish to study further: I confess I don't feel I've grokked in its fulness the riffs on money and capitalism and the dated Industrial Age and how we can get out of this mess. Rushkoff says we live in a "steady state real time economy" now. Maybe I'm brainwashed by the Corporations or Control, but I need tutoring on that one. He certainly seems to think he's on to something. Must...obtain...book...

One thing: why do we plan for the "future" when the banks will just steal all out retirement money anyway and any corporation we work for could not possibly care less about us? (This reminds me of the fiery, sharp, acid, and hilarious Lee Camp, reacting to the possible positive aspects of the recent news story that CEO pay has increased  1000 times since 1950 over what the worker makes. See HERE.)

At any "rate" (HA!), Time marches on and we're all wired with lots of information, to put it mildly. Do we know how to make sense of it all? We certainly have ample opportunities to panic, react with fear, paranoia, and to propagate more erroneous and just plain pernicious info outselves. Also: notice how we must always be "catching up" on the latest whatever. We've fallen behind. (Really? What are our lives about? Completing multiple "jobs" that we uncomfortably saddle ourselves with, seemingly of our own "free will"?)

Is this the "new normal"? I don't know, but I do know that the next person who says, "Well what I heard was that..." about a very recent news story will make me want to slug them in the mouth...but I won't. The OG don't swing that way. He all about Peace 'n shit. But do try to cite a source?

Rushkoff says we can make meanings of our lives filled with information by using a very powerful human tool: pattern recognition. And yet: he seems to buy the idea that we're in a post-narrative age; I tend to go along with this golden postmodern trope, but note there are enough Nuts who are angry that the rest of us won't swallow what they and only they possess: the Ultimate One True Truth. Rather, I see a radical breakdown of thousands-year-old hardcore narrative tropes. Most people are not hardcore ideologues who have one consistent POV. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in his Bed Of Procrustes that people who think that intelligence is about noticing patterns that are relevant are wrong; in a complex world "intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

Finally, I got the idea that We have some semantic issues. I already thought that - hell I ALWAYS think that - but Rushkoff hammered more of it home. I was reminded of the great old anthropologist Weston LaBarre's term "group archosis," which he defined as "Nonsense and misinformation so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable from our thinking." (found on p.53 of Robert Edgerton's book Sick Societies) 

Similarly, the world systems-theorist Immanuel Wallerstein dropped the term "unthinking" on me while I was reading his Uncertainties of Knowledge, p.104. Opposed to rethinking, unthinking as a word emphasizes that there are very deep-seated notions that, even though physical sciences have shown them to be inadequate, these notions nevertheless stay with us and lead us epistemologically astray.

Some Previous Blogspews on "Time"
History and Perception of Time: Labeling and Control
Historical Consciousness and Deep Time: A Ramble
Still Caught In Time
Five Brief Riffs On The Oddity of Time
Keeping Up To Date On Time Travel

I Get (Imaginary) Letters...

So hey yea! kiddies! Its time to open up the Ol' Mail Bag. Let's see what my phantom friends/fiends/detractors/slavish admirers have for the OG...(NB: a few of my correspondents seem to have zero clues about properly formatting their email Qs for me; the problem lies with them, not your humble OG.)

1.)
 Dear Overweening Generalist dude,

    A friend turned me on to your blog, saying you were all into Robert Anton Wilson and conspiracy 

    theories and the Deep State and stuff like 'at. But you hardly write about that stuff at all. Oh, there are 

    a few pieces here and there. Are you holding out on us? What gives?

    (Signed) Disgruntled

Dear Dis: first of all, get your gruntle back; you'll never know when that shit will come in handy, and besides, I'm not worth the loss of it. (BTW: what's with your fucked-up formatting?) While I'm truly fascinated in all that stuff you're fascinated in, and I have a lot to say, I'm not sure this blog is the place for all that, and besides, when I last looked, there were precisely 789 million other sources online for conspiracy theories and paranoia, really meaty stuff about the Deep State. The more I've delved into that whole schmeer the more model-agnostic I've become about most conspiracy theories. And then again the NSA came to my door and used vaguely threatening language about me even "thinking about" (one of the three guys's exact words) writing about what I know. But thanks for reading!

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2.)
Hey man: What's it like where you are? Here it's cold and sorta clammy, which is a drag because         I'm allergic to shellfish. (LOL!)

(no signature given)

Dear No Sig-

Hey man back atcha: I love jokes like that, and I thank you for sharing with me and not being...wait for it...shellfish! (HAHAHAHAHA! ROTFLMFingAO! Don't you love this Intrawebs thingy?) 

Stay cool, man. (Or, you could be a woman, in which case: you lucked out, eh?)

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3.) Hi. I really liked your piece on bumperstickers and how people feel the need to express themselves 

     "safely," as you wrote. I agree that the sorts of sentiments found regionally can tell us something 

      about the local semantic unconsciousness. - Publius

OG: Uhhh...I haven't written that piece yet. How did you read it? This email baffles me. I have 

        sketched notes for that piece, but it's nowhere in my computer yet. This really freaks me out,

        because I would have written about what you say you've already read from me. Are you

        mistaking me for someone else? 

Publius: No, I read the piece in Overweening Generalist from, gosh, I don't have my computer nearby...sometime in mid-December of 2012?

OG: Wha?...How are you writing to me if you don't have your computer nearby?

Publius: Brain implants, muthafuckuh! They rock! I think a thought and my iNeuron writes it as sentences? Duh! Of course, it still requires effort on my part to think, "Message to Overweening Generalist blog." So they have a lot of kinks to work out.

OG: What? Are you putting me on? 

Publius: Oh, no: I'm sorry! I forgot: you are writing before the time machines came in. I'm from 2027. I should've said that earlier. Sorry!

OG: Okay, I'll bite: if you're from 2027 and you've read a piece I haven't written yet, then how are we exchanging email right now, in my blog?

Publius: I'm not sure if I follow?

OG: You're not sure...? This makes no sense! You're freaking me out, "Publius."

Publius: Oh wow. Sorry dude. I was only trying to express how I like some of your pieces. Some of your other ones? Not so much...But hey: I'm no great shakespeare as a writer myself! 

OG: Ummm...okay, I'll grant you're from the future. Ray Kurzweil's most fervent admirers were right. But I still don't understand how we're conducting an email correspondence in "my time," right now, right where I'm sitting. Just answer that and I think I'll be okay.

Publius: They said we're not allowed to divulge that info, dude. But I swear, man: it's not a big dealio. Things will be okay, and btw: don't worry when they find something bad after your physical.

OG: All right: that's it! I'm tired of you fucking with me! I would like to politely request that you do not write me anything from 2027, as I'd rather just pretend the future can't be known. Humor me. Unknowableness gives me comfort.

Publius: Jeez-a-Louise! I'm sorry, asswipe! I contact you to say I like your piece and you jump all over my shit with a 15 year separation. Fuck you!

OG: Allright: I got carried away. I apologize. But can't you see that using a time machine can really freak out people from the past? By the way: how did they do it? I was sure Einstein's theory of relativity and all the other quantum gravity stuff and wormholes just were hopelessly unworkable.

Publius: Einstein's for schmucks! Do you know about n-dimensional tensile matrices and Gilhooley's theory of antimatter aggregates?

OG: Nevermind. Have a great day, whenever you are.

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4.) Dear OG,

     I noticed that, unlike bloggers who actually make money from their blog (and I'm aware of your

     rather unfortunate history with some clueless Puritan assclown d-bag from Google who scuttled

     your affiliate-derived income), you not only write far too much to hold the Average Reader, but you

     eschew the time-honored "5 Reasons Why You Should Do This and That To Make Your Life   

     Better" list-formula. Why? No offense intended. 

     (Signed) - SEO in Oshkosh

Good question. I don't do the listing thing for a number of reasons:

1. I just think it's trite, and I'm a contrarian, maybe congenitally. Others would say I'm an a-hole, or worse: a hypocrite. One thing I'm not is a cheap Ironist, I'll tell you that!
2. The List Approach seems so horribly formulaic I simply can't bring myself to stoop that low, and besides: it seems to appeal to that aspect of the quick I want it now I have the attention span of a poodle on meth thing in our culture. I detest what's happened to us. Did you read my post on long sentences? It's HERE.
3. Furthermore, the List device violates my personal aesthetics derived from Nietzsche, Rorty, and (Groucho) Marx.
4. THIS SPACE LEFT INTENTIONALLY BLANK AND REDACTED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY PURPOSES
5. I'm frankly afraid - and I hate to admit this - that the listing technique, approach, gadget, whatever: it might become addicting. And I'm okay with all sorts of addictions, but this is one I will not do. Sorry to disappoint you!

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5.) Dear blogger,

In order to leverage user-friendly interest graphs to maximize social media feeds, I can show you how to synergize cutting-edge podcasting techniques in order to harvest the inverted output of crowdsourced, integrated models and reinvent a bottom up mashup to generate buzz and attract the most talent to your blog endeavor. (not signed)

Dear Robot,

Please watch the below video. It sums up my stance on your schtick really well:

On Lit Crit

One of my favorite academic literary critics, Stanley Edgar Hyman (who was married to Shirley Jackson, an underrated writer who wrote the famously chilling short story "The Lottery") seemed to have read everything and wrote about his reading in a provoking and engaging way. I love his book The Armed Vision. Hyman quotes an earlier critic/academic, I.A. Richards: "To set up as a critic is to set as a judge of values." (I wrote about Richards long ago HERE.)

I find Richards fascinating for many reasons, one of which was that he was influenced by both Coleridge and the early anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. Besides Richards's scientific foray into how literature is received by bright college students (as described in Practical Criticism), he thought critical evaluation functioned largely as "social communion." He explicitly saw his work as "phatic," and I tend to wish more critics had these values in mind. (Certainly someone like Dale Peck doesn't see the role of critic like this!)

Hyman seemed to not like teaching all that much, and "Professor X," who wrote In The Basement of the Ivory Tower quotes Hyman: "I've been doing it for years, and before every class, I take a piss, I check my fly, I wish I were dead - and I go into the room and begin."

Jacob Silverman
Two months ago in Slate Silverman made a complaint about too much "niceness" in literary criticism lately, and he thought it had to do with authors using Twitter, blogs, Facebook, Yelp, and Tumblr. They create a "fan base," tweet nice things about other authors, every other author is awesome, we're all friends here, authors create an aura of good feelings around themselves, and literary criticism suffers, due to the "mutual admiration society that is today's literary culture, particularly online." The level of criticism an author receives amounts to a literary culture in which "cloying niceness and blind enthusiasm are the dominant sentiments." Silverman would rather we cultivate an environment where we care less about an author's biography and who follows them, and more on the work itself. When no voices of dissent are heard about a work, it tends to chill a "vibrant, useful literary culture." He quotes Lev Grossman of Time, who admitted he won't review a book he doesn't like. Silverman would like us to act more like adults and not mix criticism for an author's work with criticism of the person who wrote the work. The last paragraph of Silverman's article sums his stance well: we ought to think more and "enthuse less."

Chris Collin
Around a year before Silverman's article, Chris Collin wrote a piece for Wired titled, "Rate This Article: What's Wrong With the Culture of Critique." I found and read this after I read Silverman's argument. Collin objects to online lit-crit's star-rating system, its thumb's up, its plus one, the number for how many times the article had been Tweeted (or re-Tweeted?), the number of "likes," etc. I couldn't agree more: go ahead and give some article four stars out of five, but don't pretend you're adding anything to the conversation. You're certainly not thinking. Well...probably not. Maybe a little, if the piece was good. Voting/giving symbolic feedback seems - to me - more a gesture along the lines of the consumer.

Hey, I dig good feedback and kind vibes - we all do - but in our writings as in life, we want to feel like we've been heard.

Collin quotes one of my favorite culture critics, Erik Davis: "Our culture is afflicted with knowingness. We exalt in being able to know as much as possible. And that's great on many levels. But we forget the pleasure of not knowing. I'm no Luddite, but we've started replacing actual experience with someone else's already digested knowledge."

(I wrote about "knowingness" not long ago, HERE.)

Collin says that "There's an essential freedom in being alone with one's thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else's. Diminish our aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective."

This reminds me of one of my favorite lines from Buckminster Fuller: "Dare to be naive." In a culture of knowingness, where everyone is always online, I can't help but think that our interiorities are suffering. It's getting to the point where the act of not looking to see what everyone else is looking at, what's viral, what's hot, what's cool...and instead just following your own path and evaluating on your own...seems a bona fide radical act. 

Roxane Gay's Answer To Silverman
Not long after Silverman's piece appeared, Roxane Gay parried in Salon. And while I think she played a tad unfair by tsk-tsking Silverman over not actually reading Emma Straub's book - that really wasn't his point - I think her rebuttal quite fine, and I present these three points of view about literary kulch in our online-world as a possible opening to a conversation itself. About the role of criticism.

I thought Gay's best point was the analogy that literary culture is like school, and serious criticism is the classroom; social networks and all the mundane trivia and phatic (How would I.A. Richards see "evaluations" of literature on Twitter?) aspects of five stars and "liking" is the cafeteria. Gay pulled up an apt quote from 1846, by Edgar Allan Poe, on writing too sweetly about someone else's book. There's nothing new under the sun, truly, Ms Gay! She also takes issue with Silverman over too much niceness regarding women, people of color and writers who'd fall under the LGBT rubric: when they are reviewed, often their personal lives are considered fair game. Gay shows that she's able to give a good review to a book while noting some perceived problems with it, and at times she might even know the author personally. She urges that we stop thinking of reviews as "positive" or "negative" as this is the "wrong conversation."

Points all well-taken...until someone's feelings get hurt. Vicious, savage reviews by the aforementioned Dale Peck and his ilk: do these people thrive on shame? Are they thinly-veiled sadists?

And I bet that it's true that males - especially white males - get reviewed more often. But I also bet they are "savaged" more often by critics, too. And sometimes it might seem the reason they're getting savaged is precisely because they're male. I cop to being a lot like Lev Grossman, but my reasons for not writing negative reviews are due to the unpleasant mental states I'm required to be in to write that stuff. It's not worth it to me. NB Roxane Gay seems to evade the question somewhat by saying that everyone who read the book would see its flaws jump out at them, so why bother writing the bad review?(However, if someone wants to pay me to review Dick Cheney's or Paul Wolfowitz's or Rupert Murdoch's memoirs...I'd take that advantage. Some things need to be said, sometimes, no matter how unpleasant.)

Intellectuals and Critics: The Mafia?
Woody Allen once said that intellectuals are like the Mafia: they only kill their own. As much as this culture of criticism chugs along, let's not pretend that a large portion of the critical class - the fine writers, the intellectuals, the "chattering classes," congenitally bookish bloggers - let's not pretend that they don't consider evaluations of a rival or a political foe's work as something akin to a blood sport.

I have never published a book to scathing criticism, but can easily imagine what it feels like, especially if one feels they've produced a fine work, filled with long hours of sweat, tears, inspiration, elation, actually getting themselves to believe that they were contributing something of value to society, that they might even inspire a handful of people not blood-related in a very deep way.

The cultivation of a Nietzschean sensibility seems in order, although 'tis probably easier said than done.

Finally, I can't help but think that most of us are taking ourselves and our evaluations far too seriously, and while I surmise that many of us give critics far too much power over our choices, this seems as virtually nothing compared to forming your opinion based on relatively faceless/nameless others' likes and thumb's ups and plus-ones and re-Tweets. Fer crissakes! Let us dare to be naive! I have tried it and found it quite invigorating. Am I preaching to the choir here? I suspect so...

Tomorrow I'll note an example of polarized approaches to the role of critics and criticism by two novelists, and I hope you'll get a nice laff then.

My Top 10 Rick Perry Ad Responses on You Tube

As of very early December 10, here are my Top 10. It appears a new response to Rick Perry's acutely stupid, homophobic and moronic christian fundamentalist idiotic TV ad - titled "Strong" and linked to below if you haven't seen it - (a new YT response) comes up every 15 minutes or so, most of them young people talking in their own homes (or bedrooms) about the ad.

Perry's ad was posted on You Tube sometime on December 6th. My colleague Annabel Lee had Perry nailed pretty well on her blog, Double Dip Politics, in a matter of hours, on December 7th.

But another form of rhetoric is the personal video response; it's difficult for me not to ponder the enormous implications of McLuhan's "the medium is the message" here, although I think Robert Anton Wilson hit on something when he wrote that McLuhan would've been more accurate to say "the medium shapes the message." At any rate, I think it completely marvelous that, via accelerated omniephemeralization of digital gadgets, anyone can make a "television" piece and, in effect, "converse" with TV and other media, both corporate and non. The potential in this, and the degree to which it might truly shape the electoral process, seems unknown. We will learn more as time goes on. Much has been written about social media and the Arab uprisings and the Occupy movement, but it still seems too early to see how powerful decentered, user-generated content can affect political change...

I'm a shade embarrassed I've spent so much time tonight watching this stuff, but I couldn't stop, it's so fascinating to see how democratic this sort of thing can be. And some of the responses are totally brilliant (also see below). I think this is the some of the best use of You Tube: talking back to power. I don't think I could do it - appear on camera and be witty or interesting - but I might be able to write some of the lines that had me laffing so much. (Watch as the list gets closer to my Numero Uno.)

There are all kinds of "remixes" and "mashups" but none of them seemed as acerbic or absurd or satirical or intelligent or godlessly irreverent as the ones I chose, which will necessarily reflect my esthetics. I heartily invite anyone to put a link in the comments to one or many Perry responses they think deserve to be seen.

My list favors the parodic over some really well-done and heartfelt and witty-intelligent personal reflections by hip young people. There's only one quasi-celebrity in my Top 10: a radio guy named Sam Seder. I just liked his style.

The Perry ad (which I link to first, so that we're all on the same page) has broken some sort of all-time You Tube record for the most "dislikes" ever, which I find comforting. (Hey, you have to enjoy the little things in dire days like these, eh?)

The original ad (31 secs)

Now (drumroll please), my Top 10:

#10: The ending made it for me (35 secs)

#9: Sam Seder (5 mins)

#8: a fulminating Aussie atheist, really letting loose in a profanity-laced tirade over religion and "strength" (8:52)

#7: Gay kid, I think named Jakey. Wonderful style, sweet and funny. The comment about Perry's outfit is gold to me (2:04)

#6: dinosaurs (22 secs)

#5: a series of three short vids, each one shimmering with not-so-repressed bile for Perry. So, numbers 5, 4, and 3 are all the same actor and writers (first one 43 secs) (there's a bunch of outtakes of this guy riffing that are pretty funny too.)

#4 (36 secs)

#3 (35 secs)

#2: I literally laffed out loud (2:08)

#1: I want this one to go viral (1:03) (I catch myself hoping something like this could, on its own, make Perry go back to Texas forever.)

He's Rick Perry, and I don't give a crap if he would disapprove of ANY of this:

Do You Like This Blog?

I recently read this article in Wired, about how we're inundated with Diggs, Likes, Thumb's Ups, etc, etc, etc. Yea, why think about why you're even reading/watching/doing/whatever...let's see what others have already said about what I'm doing! Then I might know where I stand!

I'm sure you don't operate like that, but others surely do. Or that stuff wouldn't be there, would it?

In the Wired article, the quote from Erik Davis about "knowingness"? Big "like" from me. It reminded me of a moment in an old Simpsons episode that really blew me away; I saw the joke as not only funny but profound: Homer goes on tour with a rock 'n roll circus, a take-off on the Jim Rose stuff that was (is still?) big around 1996 or so. Homer's so fat he can take having a cannonball shot at his stomach every night. As they are introducing his act, there's a cut to the audience of hipster twentysomethings. One guy comments to his friend about Homer's act by putting up air quote marks and saying, "Oh yea: Groovy," in a bored way. His friend says, "Hey man. I never know if you're serious or being ironic. Which is it?" And his friend breaks down and starts crying, "I don't even know anymore."

Knowingness. We may have a crapload of technology but I don't care if you're 40: you have NOT seen everything. Our media saturation has created the illusion that you've seen everything. When twenty year olds act as if they've seen it all, it's just embarrassing, speaking for myself. They seem to not even know they're horrified because they have no idea who they are. So: on with the relentless knowingness.

Not every person under 40 has fallen prey to knowingness. I still witness some genuine openness to naivete and enthusiasm or relatively unmediated experience. But Erik Davis makes a point. A good one, I think. Of course I'd think it: I've just told you this knowingness stuff has had me concerned for at least 15 years.

Are we becoming more and more afraid of thinking and evaluating for ourselves? It seems so, what with the plethora of crowd-response data we can easily fall back on. However, I'm not sure what all that really means, in any substantive sense. It's easy to guess, but I really don't know. That it looks like consumerism masquerading as a faux democracy is just too easy.

I can tell you that I've pushed the Google +1 on my own blogposts, here. I read that it helps your blog's standing, and that it doesn't matter if you +1 your own articles. So I did it about five times. Then I quit, because it felt silly. No one else is plus-one-ing me; what does it all really mean? I don't know.

I also must confess: I still don't really "get" social media. Oh, I listen to intelligent friends who use it like mad, and they tell me in very articulate ways why they use it, what they get out of it, the benefits they've gotten from it. And it all makes sense. I believe social media is enhancing their lives. It just doesn't make sense that I would get all that much out of Facebooking, Tweeting, Digging, Liking, etc. Except to steer more people to the site of my writing/opinions/inane "observations" and readings that I admire? I understand why that should actuate me into doing the social media stuff, but it feels like I'm pitching a product. And I probably am. I probably should. But I don't like the idea of pitching myself. I'm not kidding when I say I find myself completely out of step with All This, and I think the most appropriate response you ought to have towards me is pity.

So yea, if you like this blogpost, don't say anything. No Google +1. No comment. No Tweeting. No response of any kind, ok?

Another Ramble on Digital Media and Mental Hygiene

[I'd previously assayed something here. - OG]

There's been some interesting research and discussion lately on the topic of solitude, and "alone time," and not "loneliness as a social problem." One thing that strikes me when I read this stuff: Yep, I am one of those who loves to/can "tolerate" much more time alone than most people. And yet I'm a social animal too; furthermore, I am not usually one to cite Aristotle, but I think he was probably fairly close to being "right" in his Nicomachean Ethics when he asserted that we are inherently social beings, and we need friends, but that true friends are rare indeed and we probably can't have that many. If you have three you're doing well; if you're doing inordinately well at having true friends, you might have seven, but that's rare.

Rather than give Aristotle's or my own definition of a "true friend" I will leave it to The Reader to ponder; no doubt you have 4000 "friends" at Facebook...so Aristotle is a complete moron! (And the OG too!) 

Or: could it be that maybe we need to think about what "friend" means? 

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So, I go back to the recent research on being alone. Do you do it well? Being alone, I mean. Do you flip out after two minutes and grab for the connection to the outside "social" world? A lot of the research shows that learning to enjoy your alone time enhances the time when you are with others, including acquaintances and your 3, 7, or 4000 friends. Your ability to be alone has much to do with your feeling of personal integration, which semantically harmonizes with one sense of the term "integrity."

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The great schoolteacher and critic of schooling John Taylor Gatto writes about the manufacture of a restless anti-solitude in the late 19th century and throughout the 20th. In Dumbing Us Down Gatto saw the schoolchild's "mastery" of individual solitude as an essential goal. Morris Berman writes in his Twilight of American Culture of rampant cultural consumerism and quotes the literary critic George Steiner on a "systematic suppression of silence." In Dark Ages America Berman says "We ache for silence [Well, some of us do] because our environment is saturated with fatuous commercial noise." William S. Burroughs thought silence was only terrifying "to compulsive verbalizers." 

Are some of us literally scared to be alone with our own thoughts? 

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I confess I've had it up to here with all of the books that evangelize how the Internet is going to change everything for the better, especially now with Net 3.0 (or whatever the PR people have us saying/believing about it), the "crowd-sourcing" and "social networking" that, really, seems to only have upsides. But I see lots of downsides. Yes, ironically, I'm saying this on "my" own blog.

So yes: Egypt and how Facebook and Twitter supposedly enabled the downfall of tyrannical Mubarak. But totalitarian governments gravitate to this stuff too. Dig this, from a book review by Chris Lehmann, in the March 21st edition of The Nation:

Tomaar, a Saudi website promoting philosophical inquiry outside the confines of Muslim orthodoxy, attracted a mass following soon after it was launched, especially as its discussion boards expanded to include the question of politics and culture in the Arab world. In short order, though, the Saudi government denied access to the site on all servers used by its citizens. When Tomaar’s webmasters devised a straightforward workaround via a third-party Internet connection, that stopped working as well—and the US-based service provider abruptly canceled the site’s contract, condemning it to a series of improvised connectivity patches. Even so, it still suffers regular denial-of-service attacks—the same tools that have been used to disable the site for Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks operation. Nothing in the battery of attacks on Tomaar points directly back to the Saudi government—another sign, in all likelihood, that authoritarian webmasters have grown as adept in covering their tracks as they are in disrupting web service. As Morozov notes, “cases like Tomaar’s are increasingly common, especially among activist and human rights organizations. Burma’s exiled media—Irrawaddy, Mizzima, and the Democratic Voice of Burma—all experienced major cyber-attacks…; ditto the Belarussian oppositional site Charter97, the Russian independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta (the one that employed the slain Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya), the Kazakh oppositional newspaper Respublika, and even various local branches of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.”

* * *

It has never been the case that authoritarians are allergic to information technologies. Quite the contrary: as pioneers in the production of mass propaganda, they love mass media, and maintain an intense interest in later-generation digital technologies such as GPS and Twitter location that permit them to plot the real-time whereabouts of online dissidents. Yet one never encounters these uses of digital technologies in Shirky-style broadsides on cyber-liberation; in them, digital technology by definition unleashes and pools human creativity and generosity, because that’s what we Western progenitors of these technologies like to imagine them doing.

As the Tomaar episode also shows, American Net companies—hailed in State Department speeches as the vanguard of the freedom revolution—are often fleet of foot when political controversy threatens to roil their plans for overseas market expansion. It’s not hard to see why that should be the case: their shareholders expect them to be profitable, and in many stops along the global marketplace, freedom and democratization stand directly athwart that prime directive. To take just one example, last year Facebook pulled the plug on a group maintained by an activist in Morocco named Kacem El Ghazzali, which promoted discussion about secular education in the theocratic country. When El Ghazzali e-mailed Facebook engineers in Palo Alto requesting an explanation, they deleted his profile on the site for good measure. Eventually, Facebook relented and restored the education site, once the episode got press attention in the West, but El Ghazzali was left to rebuild his Facebook profile on his own. In Egypt, as the New York Times recently reported, Facebook shut down Wael Ghonim’s page because he had violated the company’s terms of service by using a pseudonym to create a profile as one of the page’s administrators. Hence, as Morozov observes, “contrary to the expectations of many Western policymakers, Facebook is hardly ideal for promoting democracy; its own logic, driven by profits or ignorance of the increasingly global context in which it operates, is, at times, extremely antidemocratic.”

The trenchant review of books by Net-evangel Clay Shirky and the more sober-minded Evgeny Morozov is here.

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I'm not trying to argue that social networking is all bovine excreta, clearly it is not; what I am merely suggesting is that there ought to be some sort of meta-level of discussion between you and - let's face it - your three to seven (or I'll be charitable) twenty friends about how this technology can better be used to express your own values. I think we desperately need discussions - not led by a celebrity on TV - about our values and all this incredible potential communication power at our disposal. I see - literally - far, far too many variations of this on the Internet: "I'm bored. Someone text me?" Now, if this isn't pathetic in at least nine ways I don't know what is...I thought that part of becoming an adult was learning how to manage your own nervous system so that boredom would be a rare occurrence?

It also seems obvious to me there are times when the palpable anxiety of silence probably ought to send us fleeing for the social connection, someone. But that moment? I hope the reflection upon it can become instructive. There's a line in the poet Mari L'Esperance's book The Darkened Temple that I found striking: "silence ticking like something alive." The kind of silence amidst a period of personal anxiety that gives one night sweats. Reach for a loved one! Anyone!

If you've fallen into something like what Catherine Deneuve's character faces in Polanski's Repulsion then I'm afraid you've gone too far. Ditto John Turturro's writer in Barton Fink. Move along! The jury's still out - way out - on Teshigahara's Woman In The Dunes.

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But overall, I can't think of a better place to start with this Project of thinking about our new magickal tools and our values than when you're by yourself, alone, solitary, in (relative) silence, tranquility, stillness, quietude, whatever you wanna call it. I'm not talking about imitating a Tibetan monk and going silent in meditation for three months - that's clearly off the charts - but how about 15 minutes? 

If I've sounded some notes of the Scold in this post it's because I'm clearly troubled by this mad world and have merely proffered my thoughts on steps towards a meliorism; if I took you away from some valuable Dancing With The Stars or Twitter or Facebook or World or Warcraft time I truly apologize: this was three minutes you'll never get back!

Recent Article on Virtuoso Geeks and Something of Alvin Gouldner; On a "Moral Stance" Towards Media

I've mentioned I admire the Geeks but feel quite alienated from their visions, and a lot of that - cut to the chase - has to do with my frankly fuddy-duddy bookish slant. Books of all sorts, on a gleaming vast welter of topics, are my main squeeze. And I'm paranoid about Kindle and associated gadgets. (Come to think of it, my asthma has been acting up again, too. And we're out of fabric softener? Will it ever end?) I feel my Book Culture sliding away in the ever-acceleration of info and technology. Please tell me I'm merely being paranoid, and this time they are decidedly not out to get me? Anyway: The Geeks fascinate me, especially virtuoso ones like the M.I.T. people as featured in this recent article...

As lost in my own Cloud-Cuckooland with my books as I am, I have to admire these types. And my envy of their success is quite great...

In general, I think the renegade Socratic Marxist sociologist Alvin Gouldner was right about the "New Class": it's made up of two parts, and this is from my memory of reading Gouldner:

• The old "humanist" intellectuals, and they probably go back to the literate priests who kept literacy for themselves. Today they include historians, theologians, poets, literary critics, most social "scientists," musicologists, philosophers...you get the drift. They tend to be politically liberal or "radical"and try to make cultural change through their use of various rhetorics, usually conducted through writing and verbal/oral skills. Their impact has become less and less politically powerful, especially during the Roaring 20th c.
• The more recent technical intelligentsia, who rose mightily since around 1600. These are the Geeks who use the language of mathematics. They're physical scientists (physicists, chemists, biologists) and technological innovators and maintainers of the technical infrastucture. Throw in doctors, lawyers, and engineers here. Certain types of high-level bureaucrats and C.E.Os who don't own stock in their own company too...They tend to be more conservative, but their impact on society has been radical. The Third Culture types have made a somewhat convivial bridge between the Two Cultures, but to my eyes they are still rooted in the technical intelligentsia.

Both groups compete for funding, the older class making a spectacular loss to the newer tech-intelligentsia, especially since 1945.

Both groups have an overweening sense of entitlement, are jealous of their prerogatives, and, basically, the Platonic Philosopher King Complex holds in both courts. Both groups have together been wrestling with the Old Money class for cultural power. Think of the characters and values of, say, the National Association of Manufacturers, longtime backers of the Republican Party in the U.S.

The major difference, for Gouldner, between the two intellectual groups versus the Old Monied class is the former's insistence on CCD: the Culture of Critical Discourse, which means, among other aspects, that it doesn't matter if you're wearing jeans with holes in them, or you have tattoos, and and Rastafarian hair and it's well-known your father is a drug dealer: if you have a good idea and you're articulate, they will listen. Rational, critical, careful discourse knows nothing of Inherited Privilege. To dismiss any idea because it's not from a wealthy upper classman is the height of idiocy for the New Class. Good ideas can come from anywhere. (All of this a thumbnail sketch from Alvin Gouldner's fascinating and slim 1979 volume, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class. )

One more thing that sticks out in my memory of this amazing book (time to read it again!) is this: despite the aforesaid overweening sense of its own entitlements, this New Class (both the old humanist and the new technical intellectuals together) is the best card History has dealt yet.

[Note: I'd give an Amazon link to the Gouldner book, but the prices were ridiculous! Get thee to your local library for it! For people interested in ideas about how intellectuals see themselves, this book is an absolute must-read.]
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Regarding a moral stance toward dazzling electronic gadgetry and its social networking possibilities and what it all "does to" our nervous systems: I am like Marshall McLuhan, who personally preferred books and conversation to radio, TV, films, and...everything since. But unlike the Bard of Media Ecology, I love some of the stuff: some TV, a great many movies. I use a cell phone as a portable telephone booth and would rather not talk on it. I love compact discs, but they're on their way out, and I've never downloaded music from Internet, nor do I know how to do MP3s or podcasts.

The Internet would've blown McLuhan's mind, and in many ways MM is one of its Patron Saints. Internet has blown my mind, most assuredly. I don't Tweet or Facebook, although friends and family have urged me to do so. I love email. I could go on and on, but suffice: McLuhan is wildly and erroneously thought of as LIKING all the electronic media he famously wrote about, and nothing could be further from the truth. As Douglas Coupland writes in his recent book on MM, "He hated, loathed, abhorred it." The point is, McLuhan had a professionally amoral stance towards all of it. He thought a moral stance got in the way of understanding it, because in "probing" the new media, there were ideas to mine that, artfully, gave a sort of anthropological perspective on humans. And what did Marshall like more than ideas? (A: probably nothing.)

I'm more or less a piece with him on this. And I often wonder just how weird this "makes" me, because McLuhan was a very wonderfully weird guy. We have different politics, and I actually like-unto-love some of the 20th century media that (supposedly) is re-tribalizing us in the Global Village, whilst always beating a hasty retreat back to my books.

Back to the marvelous Geeks:

Here's the Wiki about the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Something recent (as of the above date) from the Media Lab that seems to argue for a Jonah Lehrer (-ish?) Fourth Culture going on there (10 mins):

Here's a video about the M.I.T. Media Lab (note the 8 other equally freaky science-fiction-y vids available after this one):

Specialization Is For Insects

Yea, verily it seems unto me that specialization is still for insects, long after Robert A. Heinlein made that claim. This creates certain very real problems for overweening generalists like you and me. Why? Well, you probably have some good answers for this, but one of my best answers is that specialization has increased with the hyper-technological boom, especially in the post-WWII era. The Geeks have elbowed their way to the top of the intellectual and financial world, their niches a product of ever-increasing acceleration of omni-ephemeralization microchip-ruled world.

Don't get me wrong: I love what the Geeks have accomplished. I'm impressed as all get-out. And I like a lot of Geeks personally. And I am jealous of their specialized skills. Some of them frighten me with their powers to alter the social structure. But in the haze of wowee-gee digital gadgets and virtual thises and thats, "killer apps" and the Gamer Welt, etc, etc, etc...I wonder about the value of knowledge. Or rather: certain kinds of knowledge, certain modes of knowing and thinking, particular ways of approaching Being that may be getting drowned out in the Tweeting.

Also: I am not claiming the Digirati and Associated Geekdom (a name for your next band? it's yours!) are "insects." Heinlein's line about specialization was a rhetorical flourish; most geeks I know are intellectually fluent in a few areas. And they're fun! (generally speaking)

Now look: I'm on a blog. I can't believe how cool and easy some Geeks made it for some damned Generalist and dead-tree book reader like myself to start ranting on a blog. I'm not fundamentally against any digital media; I love that you/we/I can use it, and the social media world has clearly enveloped us.

I just want to muse here about what it might mean for us. And by "us" I mean the human race, my favorite of all the species alive now. I read recently that, of all species that have ever inhabited the planet Earth, 0.01 of them are still alive, now. And we're part of that small number. The 99.99% have gone...well, let's leave that for another day.

I want us to be a success in the multiverse. I'm one of those Socrates-like people who asks annoying questions. That's mostly what this blog will be about. I think we Generalists need to speak up. I think the Kulch needs us. Maybe I'm wrong, but I will go on, in the spirit of pragmatism and assume the Kulch needs those of us who are passionately interested in perhaps "too many things."