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Writing about writing

Here again just to update you all on the existence of a newish blog, on my main website mike-duffy.com: a little blog called "Writing about writing," where I'm posting something about once a week on writing and criticism and whatever I'm critiquing at the moment.  Next up from me expect a couple reviews on some Latin American literature, particularly Horacio Castellanos Moya and Alan Pauls.  Also coming soon: I'm tentatively starting work on a little lit magazine here in Portland, I'll open it up to Kickstarter once I have a couple issues going.

Nomadology and sports

I promised some Barthes on sports.  Also, get ready for some Deleuze.  Just letting you know, it's in the works.

It's time...

It's time to wrap up this blog, everyone. I'll be maybe sticking a couple nice quotes up here over the next few months, but there won't be much more new content. Mostly, this is because there are more important things to do, but also because I think I've learned what I can from this experience--that is, just jotting down things in a more public form, with an eye trained towards an audience of thoughtful readers.

I know blogs can be a lot more than this, of course, so it's not like the medium is failing me in any major way. It's just that I went in with the aim to write a bit better and think a bit more clearly, and, well, I think I've seen it through. Insofar as the blog remains something you can keep continuing even without such a goal, indeed, there it might have failed me: its informality, or unformedness, too easily moving in the space between a diary and an essay or project (the horrible vagueness of "log" hits at this), like everything electronic now can quickly become a crutch, a way of keeping you from beginning something definite and finishing it definitively.

I know that this is also part of the new (or is it old? 17th century cavalier poets did something similar too) practice of creating a public image, or a virtual identity, which you can manipulate and alter as you see fit--probably some way of giving ourselves some sort of narrative for ourselves in such a fragmented society. I think too often this ends in us merely giving ourselves excuses or justifications rather than narratives or passing off the former for the latter: I believe this or this, I take this position and so that was the reason I acted that way, I was consistent, never a hypocrite (one of the topics I gave my students for their essays this semester was the following: "Characters in fictions can be ambiguous where someone, realistically, might be called a hypocrite. Show how a narrative we have read tells a hypocrite’s story as a tale of two desires (without necessarily justifying them), rather than of self-contradicting (or even conflicting) beliefs or biases."). However, the project, insofar as it tends towards making sense of things, is a good one. It's just that I've never really been interested in that, or if I have been, I'm not quite interested any more. And in the end, all of this doesn't quite matter much anyway. Media are not responsible for what is said through them, and first and foremost blame for whatever is at fault here lies certainly with my various incapacities: inexperience; lack of skill; an over-systemic way of thinking; a tendency, drastically lessening as soon as I got into grad school, to read for critique rather than with sympathy and with the aim of understanding; a lack of inventiveness, drollery, incoherence--to name a few things that my readers have had to slog through on occasion.

The human factor broached, I feel on this level there is also an even more basic reason for bringing things to a close: I feel the blog is a good place for people who don't have anything more concrete to do on the intellectual level to just do something, put things to work. That's pretty basic, but I think it's true, and, far from being a testament to the laziness, etc. of such people--I don't mean to say this at all--it testifies to the the absolutely incredible inability of our current society to make something of people's intelligence, skill, time, and desire to be useful: we have to ask ourselves what is going on when our society has to create a massive virtual repository for less professionally oriented intellectual work, give it none of the material benefits of the actual world of letters or make it subject to the same restraints or regulations, and then even have the gall to call it "self-publishing." Of course it's not all bad: people should be able to just have an area to talk to others casually in a weird world where it is hard to do this sometimes, and people do things with blogs that are of course much more than a waste. Again, I don't mean to indict the medium or anything: I just mean to recognize the fact that I don't know if I'd find myself fulfilled writing these things if they weren't notes merely to other work (most of which, in fact the majority of which, has nothing to do with what I write here: I write on 18th century literature), and that has to be weighed into the whole scheme of things when you are at the point of deciding whether you should quit the thing or not. I also just want to recognize, on more of a human level, how lucky I feel that I'm one of the really, really fortunate ones out there now who has more concrete things to do intellectually.

To do this another way, I might again turn the lens not on the notes here but on myself, and just say that as you get older, the desire to engage in such open-ended things as this just fades. You've been around enough to see what results from actions; you have a good measure of your force in the world, and what type of force it is. The blog at its best extends all this and deepens it, and at its worst makes you think you can extend it much farther and go much deeper than you can: in that respect, it seems more appropriate for the young, or the young at heart, who are also more willing to get into fiery all-night-long debates about and critiques of things. I'm past that moment, I think, perhaps earlier than some of my friends (though later than a few I can think of, certainly). That doesn't at all imply I'm more mature, too cool for school--far from it. It's just that, at a certain point, you crave doing something much more actual--by which I mean, more appropriate to your measure. Some people precisely have made blogging their thing: that's great. But for me, it's in scholarly work and teaching, and the fun I have with this just can't compare to the fun and fulfillment I have with that.

Obviously, there's a nice middle way in here somewhere, and I probably will try and gesture towards it in quoting some nice bit every now and then. Of course I won't delete the blog, a few of you good souls out there have pleaded with me not to do that. But as for new things, new thoughts, you won't really be getting many from me. My point here is just to say that maybe this is for the best for you too, reader, in some small way: it encourages you not to read these little notes looking for thoughts, but to go out and think and jot down some yourself.

Saying things clearly

I thought I'd just stop a moment and recommend the great "Philosophy Bites" podcast of David Edmonds and Nigel Warburton, in case any of you haven't heard it. They do a wonderful job, and have some of the best guests: there's a great, great piece with Princeton's amazing Philip Pettit they did recently, which I finally got around to hearing, which I particularly recommend (anything by Pettit is just fascinating).

And they are also extremely, extremely clear, though not much depth is actually sacrificed in the service of this. This is on the one hand not suprising, given the immense experience and knowledge of their guests, but also extremely suprising, given the nature of the medium and indeed the problems involved. But if there is anything I miss about philosophy sometimes, it is what they keep at work in the interviews: the imperative to clearly state something, to clearly formulate it, and clearly argue about it. It's that certain plain style aspect of philosophizing which I miss, that commitment to clear reasoning which makes Warburton quip that prose of Stanley Cavell, who is an extremely lucid writer in the scheme of things, is a bit "purple." Of course, it's more than a style (though a style too is usually more than just a style): it's an ethic, which makes me particularly fond of people like G.E. Moore--and Moore perhaps a little too fond of Wittgenstein.

I know people feel hemmed in by the sort of "common language" philosophy of the followers of the latter, and people outside philosophy often cite it disapprovingly as an example of the sort of weirdness of the imperative. But the truth is (and this is why those who diss the clarity-requirement I'm thinking of nevertheless usually love Wittgenstein) Wittgenstein doesn't really submit himself to the requirement of thinking clearly so much as identify clarification with a procedure for philosophizing. And while these two things overlap often, they aren't the same.

In short, Searle's "if you can't say it clearly, you don't understand it yourself" (which Warburton has at the top of his website) doesn't mean you need to work like Wittgenstein, even if you sometimes fall back on it and use it as a sort of guide to your thinking--i.e. using it even as a procedure isn't the same thing as identifying it with a procedure. Indeed, it means something quite broad: clear speaking and clear thinking usually go hand in hand, so if you're not speaking clearly about something, there's a good chance you don't understand it, and you need to think through it more. Hemingway spoke once somewhere of a bullshit detector, and it's basically that: a way of not confusing philosophy with poetry, even if you think the former is something of an art. But it is also a spur to thinking--that's the part people usually leave out--which encourages understanding: not unlike how Hegel thinks something is only known when you've seen both sides of it (which is all that much-maligned "synthesis" is, in the end: not grasping things one-sidedly).

And indeed, if it doesn't lead to bullshit, feeling this way about thinking through problems often leads you down certain more unsavory paths. One is the use of jargon as an excuse for technical language. Now, I am all for the use of technical language, and indeed the argument for saying things clearly could actually support this. Paul Ennis puts it best, probably, in these terms: sometimes you just need a word for something, and so the word chosen is one is weird. And that doesn't mean you don't speak clearly with it: all it means is that the word requires a special use. At the same time, and while it has been used against the cultivation of a clearer technical language (maybe I should speak intead of lingo, then), it's probably best to acknowledge a difference betwen jargon and technical language, because there is a use of specific terms that don't improve clarity (or even clearly demarcate the specifics of its use). An example of this would be theoretical discourse, of course, which is often just a way to allow thought to proceed precisely on the opposite principle of the one I'm talking about: the more you are led by unclarity, and into unclarity, the more you have thought something through. This trades on an insidious sophism--one which Searle precisely objected to, though perhaps a bit too harshly--which claims that what is thought is always going to be beyond my ability to refer to it, which isn't inherently wrong so much as wrong-headed: it smuggles in a notion that clear speaking involves direct reference to the object of thought, which as you can see from Searle's little formula is never mentioned, though it might be implied. One can't generalize from this that all clear thinking is referential, and therefore the only way to get beyond what we refer to is to use a weird term: indeed, it is often the case that when we use jargon, we precisely know what we're referring to, and just want to sound like an asshole.

The other way you go down if you don't make clarity a big part of your thought and speech, is something philosophers do all the time, actually, and isn't as insidious, though I find it unfortunate: it is gathering up what could be expressed clearly into a special "Problem," or "Argument" instead of giving it the form of exposition or even a technical term. The "mind-body problem" is one of these, though since that's more of a commonplace, I'm actually thinking more of something like what you encounter in ethics and aesthetics a lot, which usually describes a situation or a sort of crux which either amounts to an objection or something that needs to be thought around, or a position of some sort (in philosophy of mind, technical terms often do the same work: behaviorism means a position or proposition). It's a weird sort of work that is based on the same sorts of assumptions as formal logic, and while this isn't wrong, doing it in other areas than formal logic often leads to a lot of systematizing rather than sticking close to the subject matter. Sometimes, since the subject matter can be dizzying, and systematizing is precisely what you need (I don't mean to knock systems), but sometimes you'll be thinking through a problem and won't pursue a certain angle because you are too afraid it will ultimately end back in x position, in y problem, or, what's perhaps worse, that making an advancement in thinking amounts to merely getting past, resolving the contradictions in x position or y problem. And sticking close to the notion that saying things clearly often means thinking them through clearly can actually be quite liberating when this is the case. Most good philosophy I've read--especially in aesthetics, which is absolutely bogged down with -isms and formal problems of this sort--just returns to basics and tries to speak about what's going on clearly, just as most good academic work in general is, I find, remarkable for its ability to address something clearly but in a new way rather than obscurely.

This is symbolic...

A golden MST3K moment I'm always going to remember whenever I get the temptation to interpret something as a symbol:

In The Castle of Fu-Manchu, three characters get a notice they have to return to London. Cut to: the train scene above. Crow (on the right, if you're not familiar with the best show ever) says: "This is symbolic of their return to London."

(Another gem from the always way-too-smart MST3K fans, that I stumbled upon recently: summarizing the plot of the horrible Time of the Apes, one writes, "a plot device transports a woman and two kids to a time when apes rule.")

This is scary

The comments of the CEO of a company taking over public libraries on the West Coast are genuinely scary:

“A lot of libraries are atrocious,” Mr. Pezzanite said. “Their policies are all about job security. That’s why the profession is nervous about us. You can go to a library for 35 years and never have to do anything and then have your retirement. We’re not running our company that way. You come to us, you’re going to have to work.”

[...]

“Pensions crushed General Motors, and it is crushing the governments in California,” he said. While the company says it rehires many of the municipal librarians, they must be content with a 401(k) retirement fund and no pension.

These are arguments that haven't changed since the days of union busting--though people still seem to fall for them!--but their application to the running of libraries, as if they were anything like GM, really does just sound ridiculous. The CEO even has something to say about that though:

“There’s this American flag, apple pie thing about libraries,” said Frank A. Pezzanite, the outsourcing company’s chief executive. He has pledged to save $1 million a year in Santa Clarita, mainly by cutting overhead and replacing unionized employees. “Somehow they have been put in the category of a sacred organization."

Nothing sacred. It sounds like the politicians in charge of the local government have decided against providing public services in general for their community, no doubt because they probably had similar things to say: the government wastes money, it's ineffective compared to the private sector (which I, the candidate, have worked in), and the first thing that has to go is government workers and their unions, who are the laziest of all the lazy American employees (for a good rejoinder to this attitude, look at Paul Krugman's excellent recent bashing of the idea of structural unemployment). We can't have the government run by the government.

But the real perversity is just simply that it is an argument for job cuts, masked as an argument for efficiency and fiscal responsibility, when it is precisely the function of the government to provide and stimulate job growth by itself offering jobs like this--especially right now. That's what's weird: they're after the heart of things, attacking the idea that government has nothing to do with anything business-related, eliminating the idea of partnerships and going all-out for privatizing the whole damn thing, as if that really would be more efficient. If they're going to compare the library to GM, why not compare this company to Goldman Sachs?

Sweetening

I tended to conceive of English and Irish as adversarial tongues, as either/or conditions rather than both/ands, and this was an attitude which for a long time hampered the development of a more confident and creative way of dealing with the whole vexed question--the question, that is, of the relationship between nationality, language, history, and literary tradition in Ireland.


Luckily, I glimpsed the possibility of release from this kind of cultural determinism early on, in my first arts year at Queen's University, Belfast, when we were lectured on the history of the English language by Professor John Braidwood. Braidwood could not help informing us, for example, that the word "whiskey" is the same word as the Irish and Scots Gaelic word uisce, meaning water, and that the River Usk in Britain is therefore to some extent the River Uisce (or Whiskey); and so in my mind the stream was suddenly turned into a kind of linguist river of rivers issuing from a pristine Celto-British Land of Cockaigne, a riverrun of Finnegans Wakespeak pouring out of the cleft rock of some pre-political, prelapsarian, ur-philological Big Rock Candy Mountain--and all of this had a wonderfully sweetening effect upon me.
-Seamus Heaney (in the introduction to his Beowulf)

Fiscal responsibility

Every time you hear the phrase "fiscal responsibility," think "job cuts," and "no services," because that's what it means, and what it has meant for 30 years now. "We have to be fiscally responsible," in the mouth of some conservative or libretarian or pro-business leftist blowhard, however "multicultural" or "green" or "patriotic" or whatever they are, means "I think we have to cut jobs and refuse to provide services to the public; I think we have to take away the few stable jobs that there are right now--government jobs, at the federal and local level--which provide vital public services and a national infrastructure; I think we need to 'privatize' it all, make the narrowest of private interests dictate what's in the public's interest--and in fact, wholly dictate whether ten percent (or more) of all of them can be employed or not, can make a living or not."

Over-extended metaphor

I said a while ago that reviews in literary studies tend to be excellent compared to those in other disciplines. But there are always exceptions:

Dr. Rostvig is again excellent on the intellectual background, particularly in bringing familiar material into new focus. She gives a fresh turn to the topic of Augustan poetry and landscape-gardening. Her essay on the still underrated James Thomson, who played a large part in destroying the classical ideal of the beatus vir, is excellent criticism. She resolutely traces the course of the river to its end; but as it widens to the sea, the water grows shallow and the fish more commonplace. When a Watts, a Collins, or an Akenside swims by, Dr. Rostvig marks him appreciatively. But the tiddlers come in shoals here, and we are forced to look at them too with almost comic concentration. There was too much in Dr. Rostvig's first book; she still lacks the discrimination of the compleat angler.
-James Kinsley, Review of English Studies, Feb. 1960 (in a review of volume 2 of Maren-Sofie Rostvig's classic The Happy Man)

Yikes.

Johnson, rambler

We see the essay as a vehicle for an opinion. But for Johnson, as he says in his Life of Addison, the essay aims to

teach the minuter decencies and inferior duties, to regulate the practice of daily conversation, to correct those depravities which are rather ridiculous than criminal, and to remove those grievances which, if they produce no lasting calamities, impress hourly vexation.

It is an explicitly didactic enterprise, perhaps because didacticism does not seem so loathsome to him as it does to us in the US, who associate all regulation and correction only with outrages of authority upon the individual, and never with the removal of annoyances through a little rambling.

I say this because it might ease one into Johnson's Rambler, which I want to reproduce here every so often, unlocking some of their lessons as I go. Yesterday was the 21st of July, so I thought I'd start with Johnson's Rambler 36, which came out on that day (it was a Saturday) in 1750.

This number is indeed concerned precisely with the removal of annoyance and whether "knowledge of the busy and tumultuary part of the world" (as Johnson will call it below) is better imparted or avoided. And it shows well how Johnson dissolves these extremes by teaching us about them, letting literary critical judgment encounter them in literature: Rambler 36 was a reflection on pastoral poetry, which involves precisely the retreat from such tumult.

Fittingly, it takes it's epigram from two lines of the tumultuary Iliad, giving Pope's translation:

Ham’ éponto nomêes
Terpómenoi súrinxi; dólon d’ oúti pronóêsan.

-- Piping on their reeds the shepherds go,
Nor fear an ambush, nor suspect a foe.

These lines appear in the great description of the shield of Achilles. But the context is not just the tumult of war in general. What makes it all the more poignant is that in the description itself armies siege a city, and just after these lines they fall upon the herdsmen, slaughtering them along with two of the city's scouts they happen to be piping near:

In arms the glittering squadron rising round
Rush sudden; hills of slaughter heap the ground;
Whole flocks and herds lie bleeding on the plains,
And, all amidst them, dead, the shepherd swains!

The retreat cannot be total: the tumult will seek you out.

•••

RAMBLER 36
Saturday, 21 July 1750

There is scarcely any species of poetry, that has allured more readers, or excited more writers, than the pastoral. It is generally pleasing, because it entertains the mind with representations of scenes familiar to almost every imagination, and of which all can equally judge whether they are well described. It exhibits a life, to which we have been always accustomed to associate peace, and leisure, and innocence: and therefore we readily set open the heart, for the admission of its images, which contribute to drive away cares and perturbations, and suffer ourselves, without resistance, to be transported to elysian regions, where we are to meet with nothing but joy, and plenty, and contentment; where every gale whispers pleasure, and every shade promises repose.

It has been maintained by some, who love to talk of what they do not know, that pastoral is the most antient poetry; and, indeed, since it is probable, that poetry is nearly of the same antiquity with rational nature, and since the life of the first men was certainly rural, we may reasonably conjecture, that, as their ideas would necessarily be borrowed from those objects with which they were acquainted, their composures, being filled chiefly with such thoughts on the visible creation as must occur to the first observers, were pastoral hymns like those which Milton introduces the original pair singing, in the day of innocence, to the praise of their Maker.

For the same reason that pastoral poetry was the first employment of the human imagination, it is generally the first literary amusement of our minds. We have seen fields, and meadows, and groves from the time that our eyes opened upon life; and are pleased with birds, and brooks, and breezes, much earlier than we engage among the actions and passions of mankind. We are therefore delighted with rural pictures, because we know the original at an age when our curiosity can be very little awakened, by descriptions of courts which we never beheld, or representations of passion which we never felt.

The satisfaction received from this kind of writing not only begins early, but lasts long; we do not, as we advance into the intellectual world, throw it away among other childish amusements and pastimes, but willingly return to it in any hour of indolence and relaxation. The images of true pastoral have always the power of exciting delight, because the works of nature, from which they are drawn, have always the same order and beauty, and continue to force themselves upon our thoughts, being at once obvious to the most careless regard, and more than adequate to the strongest reason, and severest contemplation. Our inclination to stillness and tranquillity is seldom much lessened by long knowledge of the busy and tumultuary part of the world. In childhood we turn our thoughts to the country, as to the region of pleasure, we recur to it in old age as a port of rest, and perhaps with that secondary and adventitious gladness, which every man feels on reviewing those places, or recollecting those occurrences, that contributed to his youthful enjoyments, and bring him back to the prime of life, when the world was gay with the bloom of novelty, when mirth wantoned at his side, and hope sparkled before him.

The sense of this universal pleasure has invited "numbers without number" to try their skill in pastoral performances, in which they have generally succeeded after the manner of other imitators, transmitting the same images in the same combination from one to another, till he that reads the title of a poem, may guess at the whole series of the composition; nor will a man, after the perusal of thousands of these performances, find his knowledge enlarged with a single view of nature not produced before, or his imagination amused with any new application of those views to moral purposes.

The range of pastoral is indeed narrow, for though nature itself, philosophically considered, be inexhaustible, yet its general effects on the eye and on the ear are uniform, and incapable of much variety of description. Poetry cannot dwell upon the minuter distinctions, by which one species differs from another, without departing from that simplicity of grandeur which fills the imagination; nor dissect the latent qualities of things, without losing its general power of gratifying every mind by recalling its conceptions. However, as each age makes some discoveries, and those discoveries are by degrees generally known, as new plants or modes of culture are introduced, and by little and little become common, pastoral might receive, from time to time, small augmentations, and exhibit once in a century a scene somewhat varied.

But pastoral subjects have been often, like others, taken into the hands of those that were not qualified to adorn them, men to whom the face of nature was so little known, that they have drawn it only after their own imagination, and changed or distorted her features, that their portraits might appear something more than servile copies from their predecessors.

Not only the images of rural life, but the occasions on which they can be properly produced, are few and general. The state of a man confined to the employments and pleasures of the country, is so little diversified, and exposed to so few of those accidents which produce perplexities, terrors and surprises, in more complicated transactions, that he can be shewn but seldom in such circumstances as attract curiosity. His ambition is without policy, and his love without intrigue. He has no complaints to make of his rival, but that he is richer than himself; nor any disasters to lament, but a cruel mistress, or a bad harvest.

The conviction of the necessity of some new source of pleasure induced Sannazarius to remove the scene from the fields to the sea, to substitute fishermen for shepherds, and derive his sentiments from the piscatory life; for which he has been censured by succeeding criticks, because the sea is an object of terrour, and by no means proper to amuse the mind, and lay the passions asleep. Against this objection he might be defended by the established maxim, that the poet has a right to select his images, and is no more obliged to shew the sea in a storm, than the land under an inundation; but may display all the pleasures, and conceal the dangers of the water, as he may lay his shepherd under a shady beech, without giving him an ague, or letting a wild beast loose upon him.

There are however two defects in the piscatory eclogue, which perhaps cannot be supplied. The sea, though in hot countries it is considered by those who live, like Sannazarius, upon the coast, as a place of pleasure and diversion, has notwithstanding much less variety than the land, and therefore will be sooner exhausted by a descriptive writer. When he has once shewn the sun rising or setting upon it, curled its waters with the vernal breeze, rolled the waves in gentle succession to the shore, and enumerated the fish sporting in the shallows, he has nothing remaining but what is common to all other poetry, the complaint of a nymph for a drowned lover, or the indignation of a fisher that his oysters are refused, and Mycon's accepted.

Another obstacle to the general reception of this kind of poetry, is the ignorance of maritime pleasures, in which the greater part of mankind must always live. To all the inland inhabitants of every region, the sea is only known as an immense diffusion of waters, over which men pass from one country to another, and in which life is frequently lost. They have, therefore, no opportunity of tracing, in their own thoughts, the descriptions of winding shores, and calm bays, nor can look on the poem in which they are mentioned, with other sensations, than on a sea-chart, or the metrical geography of Dionysius.

This defect Sannazarius was hindered from perceiving, by writing in a learned language to readers generally acquainted with the works of nature; but if he had made his attempt in any vulgar tongue, he would soon have discovered how vainly he had endeavoured to make that loved, which was not understood.

I am afraid it will not be found easy to improve the pastorals of antiquity, by any great additions or diversifications. Our descriptions may indeed differ from those of Virgil, as an English from an Italian summer, and, in some respects, as modern from ancient life; but as nature is in both countries nearly the same, and as poetry has to do rather with the passions of men, which are uniform, than their customs, which are changeable, the varieties, which time or place can furnish, will be inconsiderable: and I shall endeavour to shew, in the next paper, how little the latter ages have contributed to the improvement of the rustick muse.

Bike lane prospects

So while I was out in California for a couple weeks, the NYC DOT finally put in the bike lane along Prospect Park West. There was uproar all through the Slope about the lane, put in the master plan over a decade ago in 1997. Things got really intense earlier this year, when the borough president (Marty Markowitz) asked the transportation commissioner (Janette Sadik-Khan) to kill the project in an open letter. In the last few months flyers were being passed around and posters were being taped up claiming, like Markowitz, that it would eliminate parking spaces, make walking across the street a nightmare, and increase congestion on the street generally.

The first claim hits at the most wide-ranging problem in the Slope, as parking is extremely hard to find and is only becoming more scarce as more and more families come into the area with more and more cars, and more and more parking garages are sold and turned into more and more apartments. The next claim about pedestrian traffic is the most narrow in focus, as it affects mostly the population in the streets closest to the park (some of the choicest properties in all of New York City). And the last claim about congestion is groundless, like the first two--the only difference being that it if you have ever lived in or near Park Slope, you would never make it in the first place.

This is because (to take the last claim first), as only a little experience with the road will tell you, the problem on Park Slope West is not traffic congestion at all but speed, as the planners of the project understood when they made this the foremost goal of the plan. They claimed, rightly, that the actual traffic along the park simply didn't require three lanes of one-way street, and that having three lanes there could only encourage people to rocket along and weave through lanes unpredictably. And this is what people did--wouldn't you? A particularly bad twist to this was that the cab companies which thoroughly infest Park Slope and make it a dangerous place to walk with your children realized it could work as their own personal freeway: thus, just a couple weeks ago, cabbies were shooting along, weaving around on either side anyone going slower than 50, or floating from the left lane all the way over the middle to the right and back again, looking for the street they had to turn down to find the executive they would race that day down into Manhattan or up to JFK. Moreover, it became a thoroughfare for people in other neighborhoods to make their way towards the BQE. Why people didn't get pissed about this, and did get pissed about the commission's decision to reduce the road to two-lanes and force people to drive slower, I guess I'll just never understand. But even in my ignorance I can positively say that the threat of congestion couldn't be the real reason, since the only possibility of it existing on that road was when the commission was trying the stop-gap solution of fiddling with the timing of lights and increasing the length of reds--pending the more thorough solution the plan would provide. This, to the eye of someone who believes that traffic problems are only solved by expanding roads and adding lanes, rather than by incentivizing the use of real thoroughfares (Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Avenue, 4th Avenue) or (gasp!) public transportation, I guess might look like congestion. But the view isn't then much different than the person's that would use anything to convince us that any project without immediate benefit to the most immediate parties involved--which tends to be most projects in the interests of the local population--can't be managed, and that we should concludes, like Markowitz, that the only thing worth approving are lucrative projects like the kick-backing corporate orgy that is Atlantic Yards (which at least looked a bit like that before costs, and Frank Gehry, were cut--all without "managing," however). Meanwhile, even though it is too early to tell how the reduction of lanes has affected things in any significant sense, I can say there are many hints of slower speeds already.

In short, even if Janette Sadik-Khan had to basically ram the project past all of the objections, this was thoroughly justified, as the objections were not only groundless but also were made by people with only private interests in mind. This goes especially for local residents who somehow thought (to take up the next claim) the walking situation would be complicated by bikes. While crossing a bike lane is indeed a bit annoying, anyone who enters the park from the west does it already without complaining just to get to the Long Meadow--and on the bike lane inside the park's West Drive which they cross, they have no problem avoiding marathons, races, and all sorts of bike-related tomfoolery. What's a bike lane--which is better than undirected bikes flying everywhere, mind you--to that? Nevertheless, the concern is more global than this annoyance, since the goal of the bike lane involves directing more new bike traffic to this area. But one has to realize that this is done to alleviate the car traffic on Prospect Park West in an even more substantial way than the ways already mentioned: by encouraging biking rather than driving by the park. And one can't complain about too much congestion, as we saw above, at the same time as one complains about every remedy for it--unless of course, what one is really complaining about is any and all traffic along the park except their own. And while the park should be for local use, "local" should not be defined so exclusively as to require no traffic at all coming from elsewhere, and especially from areas so close by that people are using bikes to get where they are going, since they will probably also live around the park (something else is going on when you effectively claim the other sides of Prospect Park are not "local" enough).

But the most astounding thing about the whole bike lane project is the way it put the fears about parking to rest. The planners simply moved the bike lane to run right along the curb, protected by the cars which now park right along the street (and given lots of room on the other side from the extra-wide sidewalk). Everything regarding the cars is exactly the same as it was before with three lanes, only we now have two lanes: the bike lane does not interfere at all with the process of parking or finding or getting a space, as the cars and the bikes don't have to cross each other at all. While no spaces were added (that I can see), none at all were taken away or made tough to access, and it is probable that with more bike traffic into the area, the demand for parking spaces will actually go down.

New problems are sure to emerge, of course. But if the commissioner and everyone involved in the project handles those with a similar combination of creativity and levelheadedness, I'm also sure they will be manageable.

Social

A good article from a couple days ago that tries to reclaim the word social from Facebook. It reads, however, like someone asking us to go back to Web 2.0 (and thus the Google websearch is idealized as open, when it arguably isn't). While I myself miss Web 1.0 (that wonderful, stupid, experimental time where we had so many web pages like Homer Simpson's), this means we've probably actually really entered the age of Web 3.0, and are now realizing what it is: when all information on the web has effectively and perversely become socialized by corporations, so that it becomes something other than information--a product recommendation. Promising, though, is that we are now wondering whether the word social is being used any substantive sense by these corporations. It certianly jars with experience: if Facebook is the attempt to resolve the public/private paradox in the use of the increasingly corporatized web, it certainly doesn't seem intuitive, since its vision of what counts as interaction is so unbelievably narrow (narrower, it seems, even than networking).

Literature aloud

For some reason I've been absolutely addicted to audiobooks lately. It started with Tristram Shandy, which I was rereading but realized I didn't quite have the time to go all the way through again. Then I stumbled upon Peter Barker's unbeleviably excellent recording. It is ridiculously inexpensive ($7!!!), since it is in the (still excellent) "Great Literary Classics" series made by the Royal National Institute for the Blind, but that's not only why you should check it out. I generally am suspicious of the full-on dramatization in the reading of literary texts, or the playing up of characters at the expense of something like a narrative voice (I don't speak here of actual dramatizations, which are quite amazing alternatives to TV or Film adaptations--I'll recommend a couple below). Except in some very special cases--namely, the indescribably wonderful readings of Harry Potter by the inimitable Stephen Fry, and what is (to me) simply the most hilariously absurd satire ever written, Wigfield, by Stephen Colbert, Amy Sedaris, and Paul Dinello--because I am a literary critic, I want the tonelessness of the page (or, rather, its multiple tonalities) somewhat available to me at all times, and that is the first thing to go when this sort of thing happens. But if there is any one text that repays this sort of work, it is Tristram, since the text itself is already cut up so much into so many voices that it becomes almost impossible to read silently straight through. In short, much is actually lost in the silence, and Barker brings it all (and more) back. It feels like a different book, in all the best ways--and is all the more hilarious. All the other recordings of Shandy, as well, don't even compare with this one (though looking at them all, you can see Sterne has had a better audio fate than other authors).

I have been looking for the best Austen recording lately, but I'm still not satisfied with what is out there. I will venture to say the "Great Literary Classics" Emma by Richard Baker isn't bad, Anne Flosnik's is somewhat better, while the Juliet Stevenson's Emma is the best. Fascinatingly, Jeremy Northam who played Knightly in the popular Paltrow movie adaptation, reads a version which is actually really, really good--though abridged (blech!). I will say Flo Gibson's Pride and Prejudice is a little too quick for me--you don't get the unbelievable balance (or telling imbalance) of Austen's prose when you go that quick.

But all that is prose. It's quite a different thing to listen to poetry--and not just in a live reading, but in a recorded version. For, strangely, the temptation is even greater here to work up these wonderful lines into something like drama, which makes them fall so very flat for me: take, for example, Ian McKellen's Ancient Mariner, which--sad to say, since he has of course one of the most amazing voices around--is so overdone (unlike, however, McKellen's wonderfully quick, sprightly rendition of Robert Fagle's quirky Odyssey). The BBC's recent adaptation of Wordsworth's "Two-Part" Prelude which--with its interesting sound effects and music--is a bit more effective, but again dulls the poetry. Anton Lesser's Milton (the most recent BBC recording of Paradise Lost, as well as Regained and many of the other poems for Naxos) so ov-er-em-pha-sizes-every syl-able that all rhythm is murdered--though he occasionally produces some unbelievably sublime moments. But, just to be clear, it isn't dramatization as such that is really the problem: the dramatizations of Austen by the BBC are really wonderful, and so is the recent Maltese Falcon with Tom Wilkinson--which is really, really, really good. And of course Shakespeare is meant to be heard on a stage--not on the page. But with certain bits of poetry, or perhaps certain forms of poetry, a certain space opens up in between drama and silent reading which is problematic--and in which, at least for me, it is better to err by moving away from drama.

This all said, it will be no suprise that I was again suprised to find myself getting quite addicted to Ralph Cosham's absolutely excellent recording of Paradise Lost. It is of course just another aspect of my Milton-mania over the last few weeks (not just because of--again I'll mention them, they are that good--John Rogers' lectures which I have been enjoying, but also because some bits in my research have taken me back to Milton [Paradise Regained might have some part in my diss], whom I haven't read in a few years). But the recordings are so good because they hit exactly the sort of open tone or antitone I think is excellent. His reserved, controlled approach--perhaps too reserved for prose--is actually extremely well suited to capturing Milton's prosodic pyrotechnics, and I really recommend this version over every other one: what's so essential--though there is a lot of literature on this (Robert Pinsky, to take the most recognized example, writes well on the demands of reading aloud and promotes it tirelessly)--is that the rhythms of verse produce the drama first and foremost, and Cosham nails this. Also exellent are any of Derek Jacobi's recordings.

I should add as a footnote to all this that it is an extremely tough thing to read any book aloud with any amount of talent--as anyone who has been in a literature class, and listened to our plain, shy, amateur attempts to just sound out the thing to get a grip on it knows. This is especially the case with poetry, which sounds so flat so easily... Nearly every reading from the Naxos Great Poets series is excellent.

What I've been listening to

John Rogers has his really great lectures on Milton up for viewing or listening.

John Joseph Campbell has a nice nature of mind course.

I have also been listening to the end of Cathryn Carson's superb course on the history of science, which I have recommended before.

Also really good is Stephen Stearns' course on evolution, ecology, and behavior.

All good things...

I think I'm probably going to end this blog pretty soon. Not now, but soon.

Update

It has been a little busy here lately with writing and teaching--but just wanted to say two things quick:

1) We're slowly starting up again at the Latour blog, moving now into the work of Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux, John Law, Alain Badiou, and others.

2) Check out this CFP from the Cornell Theory Reading Group--certainly I've always thought a lot about form... maybe I'll write something.

Also, just want to apologize--it's been hard for me to link back to all the sites that link to this one... I'm trying to add as many as I can (and employing all sorts of tools to find this stuff out) but it's been going slow. So if you don't find yourself here, it's not out of spite or anything!

How to get off Facebook

So, I just got off Facebook. Why? Basically privacy concerns, but also because I fundamentally felt that the technology was much more promising when it first came out. There were limitations: Facebook couldn't do everything and anything. It felt like an extension of text-messaging. Twitter now is more like what Facebook was then, although that could change too. But now the clunky thing just feels like a database, a slightly more entertaining version of email--which, by the way, also just acts as a huge data mining operation:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos [...], you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook [...]. This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. [And] When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).

That's the "privacy" statement you agreed to a little while ago. It was worse a couple months ago, when they made a huge grab just to own everything outright and in perpetuity. They were a little bit more explicit then about what this all involved:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

Justifiable outrage by users has kept this all in the air as of today, but the arguments are mounting by the people who wrote that last statement that ownership of your information is completely natural--it's what people should expect. This, of course, is only one instance where intellectual property "rights" have been extended to basically steal any private information of yours and use it to make money. Meanwhile, whatever isn't just outright obscene about the whole operation is covered up by styling it as you helping the company "create" by "generating" "content." Moreover, if you demand that you own anything you write there, any of your photos--that's actually getting in the way of their ability to further "innovate." It's an immense ratcheting-up of the consumerist arguments of old: your individual, private preferences, "expressed" clearly and in the open enough (that is, if you think using money is the same thing as genuine personal expression, like our Supreme Court), can magically bring you better products and services (especially services). But it's also a coordination and hyperextension (if I can say that) of a lot of other rhetoric about "innovation" and "creativity" in business that have an really long history and basically pops up whenever business practices as a whole are looking as shady as they do now. Meanwhile, we can't even find information about who precisely caused the financial disaster--not to mention how exactly they used our bailout money--and every attempt at introducing transparency is met by the argument that it will somehow cause even more market "instability."

But I'll return from all these indicators that a discursive struggle over the meanings of all these words in quotes is occurring and has real consequences (and that it works the other way around too) to my point that Facebook has also become, generally, an unwieldy behemoth. This is what people, who I've talked to about this, don't quite seem to understand--or indeed admit but don't do anything about: all this data you're giving them hasn't produced a better service at all! There are many, many more creative ways to communicate with people--especially now with Twitter, Skype, and all sorts of other microblogging and friend-finding technologies which can only further proliferate with time! In using something other than Facebook (not to mention email), you're not giving up much that is substantive about your connection with people--you're giving up the chance to occasionally get drunk and creepily poke one you forgot existed.

Now, I realize that for a lot of people Facebook too is more than this (even though the almost enforced-fun had in the recent "doppleganger week" suggests otherwise), and I don't want to knock anything that is indeed rewarding and meaningful. After a couple years, when the technology spread to older people (but also to other younger people), these people used it as a way to find old friends who might have had email--and this also prompted Facebook to fundamentally change it's texting-like structure (not to mention the structure of the friend-networks themselves, which were primarily college-based) to something broader. The whole thing itself became an alternative to email in some way (and set the stage for Google Wave, which, I think, fundamentally seeks to do away with that altogether and pave the way for users to slip in and out of constant streams of updates, never exiting the network) and offered something like what it was to talk to them back in school or whenever they were in close proximity (whereas for the college kids at the beginning, it was merely an alternative to day to day interaction, providing a forum where all sorts of additional creepy/cute awkwardnesses could be created). This is substantial--and it is combined with the comfort of only having to talk to someone in little bursts, when most internet-based technology provides, fundamentally, too-instantaneous of a connection. It's as if these people are trying to work out a new form of technologized familiarity, one that works on the level of weeks rather than seconds, and lets you live side-by-side across huge distances--like future astronauts on the way to a distant planet calling home, only not minding at all that delay in transmission of a few minutes... since the delay in connection has become not a feature of the technology but of our lives themselves, which are pauses in the flow.

So I'm wary of condemning this sort of effort, which provides new possibilities the more and more people consciously take hold of and further refine its specificity (that is, it is a site of struggle to define the shape of our everyday practices). But there is still the danger that someday, you're still just good old friends with certain people when it is convenient to be. And Facebook itself, since it always needs more data, seems to encourage this by constantly pushing you to extend your connections to less and less relevant people in your life (like famous people). This, of course, is countered by the creation of fan pages (strenuously encouraged by Facebook instead of and making false or fictional identities--as you can wonderfully do in Twitter and as I have done with I.A. Richards), which then provide another basis for everyone to reconnect substantially within the system (that is, Facebook can never become a fantasy space). But the tendency--despite this uneven and counter-balancing virtual topography--is to disperse by connection. And given that, why not take all these new forms of interaction that we are building, and make something even better than Facebook that caters to them (and meanwhile allows its content to be governed by a Creative Commons license, for example, like Flickr).

This, however, is just my way of responding to the biggest argument against getting off Facebook which was proffered to me ceaselessly during this whole process: that I'll lose all my friends. Not only did many people say this to me--but only mildly, as if people who said it also knew it was bullshit--but also Facebook itself shows you pictures of your friends (not just of the friends, but of the significant photos in which you and your friends are there, having a good time--they actually have algorithms that use your their data to tell them this) while you try and wrest yourself from the whole network and "deactivate" (you can't delete--all your information still stays there with them) your account! My response is simply that it would be extremely depressing if friendship was the same thing as being networked together with someone on Facebook! We have to draw this fundamental distinction between the social activity in "social" media or "social" networking and actual, genuine social life if we want to have any rich conception of the latter--or, more importantly (since it shouldn't ever remain a merely moral issue), if we ever want to push our technologies further towards actually integrating that social life. On that last point, you can see from this and all the above that I'm no Luddite--which was another, more popular way I was characterized throughout this process. With the proliferation of those alternative ways to communicate that I mentioned above, I don't see any reason why the connectivity with anyone has to drop off. So it's really a matter of asking whether we really want to accept the form of friendship being "given" to us (with the caveat that it takes everything private about you and puts a price tag on it).

So, now that it's clear why I indeed got off of Facebook, I'll finally just take you through how you can do it:

1) Go through and find all the emails and other contact information (AIM, twitter, blog) of your friends, and create a little database for them. You'll be surprised at how many people's emails you don't know how reliant you are on Facebook to connect you to them when you can just take some initiative and talking to them yourself. This isn't hard--it takes about 20 minutes max.

2) Go through and copy all the pictures you want to keep--if you don't have copies of them on your computer already (and you might not). This'll take 5 minutes max.

3) Delete your information. I'd say delete as much as you feel comfortable deleting--though I'd stress getting rid of a lot of your profile info. I think it's okay to leave some pictures up there and some of your other stuff... they're Facebook's anyway now. Moreover, your friends will be taking pictures of you and putting you up there, so it's not like you have to cover up all of your tracks. It'll take 5 minutes.

4) Take your contact info and send out a notification to your friends about the change. I'd try and do this in email, because then it makes people more comfortable replying to you and getting the ball rolling back in that form of connectivity. You can do it through Facebook, though--but remember that this doesn't encourage any alternative effort to contact you on their part. Moreover, Facebook doesn't let you actually send an email to all of your friends at once without creating a group (and you have to be suspicious about this, which, while trying to keep out spam, still says something about the indirect sort of communication that Facebook in reality is). This will probably take 10 minutes.

5) Do a final check and go to Accounts. At the bottom of the page will be an option to deactivate your account. Click it, ignore the bullshit about how your friends will miss you, and get the hell out of there and into newer, more truly creative forms of communicating with all those people. Also, remember that Facebook will save all your password information so that if you ever revisit the site, they'll be there waiting for you to come back--don't rejoin by mistake. But if you forgot to get rid of anything, indeed rejoin and you'll be able to get rid of it and deactivate--as they repeatedly assure you, all your stuff will be there just as it was before (since they own it). This'll take 5 seconds.

You can also commit seppukoo, if you want to do all this in a more flashy way. And if you decide to reform the thing from within (which I hope you do--I'm not out to convince anyone why they should do this, just to relate why I myself did it and how you can if you want), make sure check your privacy settings.

World's Roundest Head

It's surprising to me that Ricky Gervais' American promos for the new HBO animated adaptation of the Ricky Gervais Show usually only feature him and Steve Merchant, when Karl Pilkington is so integral to things. I simply can't believe he's still so unfamiliar to the American audience. Surely his boswelox should be world renowned by now. Do yourself a favor and meet Karl (above) ...and while you're at it, listen to the show, which is perhaps the funniest thing you'll ever hear.

Twenty-ten

One great thing about 2010 is we finally get to refer to each of our years from now on as "twenty-" something. For me, that always seemed the real concrete thing that would bring home just how much we live in the future imagined so vividly by people in the middle of the twentieth century. Referring to "twenty-nineteen" or "twenty-twenty-seven," regardless of the actual historical time involved, sounded futuristic in a particular way that "two-thousand-sixty-one" or "two-thousand-and-ten" just didn't. Now that we're there, and the next real comprehensive future (the future we imagine for the next full generation after us) that we begin to envision (on the scale of some larger cultural narrative) shoots forward to 2060 or so, we can begin to register the discrepancies between what the last wildest age of speculative thought about the future (the "golden age") and what took place. This doesn't have to be done cynically: it's rather a matter of registering the change in the "structures of feeling" that are constituted on a larger time-scale than the individual (though perhaps on a less extensive time-scale than that of a society as a whole), and actually the fact that we can reach back to these alternate futures without positing any really tight continuity... In other words, we can have a concrete encounter with the the fact that we're really living the future of the last generation--always an uncanny thought, but now made even more exciting by our taking up the old dates themselves and seeing how they can be put to so many more and different uses...