Desires

"Then they talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They talked all at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words" (W. Faulkner The Sound and the Fury 117).

Formalisms

Wondering whether the rebellion of Russian formalism (and of all other formalisms to follow in its footsteps) is not indirectly a rebellion against the bitter pill of the ancient Platonic sentence against art as twice removed from reality, which even Aristotle's somewhat less damning view of art as cathartic mimesis did little to sweeten? To all those who thought form was just decoration, formalists of all denominations respond: wait a minute, content is nothing, what matters is form. But at the same time they indirectly respond to those (much older statements) that deprecate art's content merely because it isn't 'true'. In a world where art's main attributes are formal, the truthiness™* of art's content would cease to be reason for philosophical contempt.

*Truthiness is a Stephen Colbert trademark.

Lars and the Real Girl

So there's this Lars guy, who buys a "love-doll" online and when it arrives he starts pretending she is his girlfriend. Dresses her up, takes her out to meet friends, to dinner, to church to the lake. Fights with her. Sleeps with her literally, not sexually, or at least we're not told that: most we see, there is a passionate kiss, late in the relationship. (By the time this happens, everyone except the viewer seems to have accepted his premise, that Bianca is real, so no need for quote signs around 'relationship', above.)

Though it's hard not to find the whole premise inciting I felt it was undermined by the whole far-fetchedness of the thing, sort of like one of those less successful, more recent, Simpsons episodes where the whole Springfield embarks on some sort of farce only to fool Homer or Bart or Marge. At least, in the end, the Simpsons writers have the sense of humor to laugh at their own expense pointing out the absurd. If nothing else, they can always use the "it's a cartoon for God's sake" defense. Not much humor in Lars and the real girl, though the absurd of the situations does invite smiles and even a laughter or two. Stranger yet, this far-fetchyness undermines the premise both from outside and from within: from outside, because, when even the 911 and the ambulance people seem to agree to play their part in the delusion of Lars, well, it's like I am asked to find and suspend even the very last shred of disbelief, and I don't know about you, but those last shreds are Peskiness Incarnate, harder to find and get hold of than the watermelon seeds. The only help the movie provides with this is to suggest this all takes place in a small town, where everyone knows everyone… Ok, I might buy that, in the spirit of the holidays, I suppose.

But the real problem with the
whole damn town bending backwards to "play" with Lars is that it challenges the core idea of the movie; see, as I see it, this is that our going through life is a series of stories, of rituals, is the way Lars puts it, whose truth depends in a large measure of our say so. Yes, there are things no matter how many people believe, will not become true. But other things are less finicky. Gather enough believers, and you have yourself a bona fide "truth". Things having to do with feelings, are particularly prone to this, and relationships are merely a public (so even less "true", because "performed") version of those truths we can just conjure up by believing in them. So, if that's the premise, and if Lars's story is meant to show how someone's being in love/a relationship is ultimately a function of that someone's (and of many non-innocent bystanders') belief to the effect, then what is lacking from the whole ritual Lars is building up for himself and for his friends is the friction resulting when people do not approve of that relationship. There's little of that in the beginning, but not nearly enough. Someone should fall out with Lars for his chosen love, someone should tell him she's not good enough for him (the opposite might not work too well I suppose). Someone should not "play" with Lars for this ritual to be truly accurate. As it is, all we have is a relationship similar to what we have at the end of fairy tales, or Hollywood tales, when evil and obstacles have been conveniently disposed with. I don't like that as an ending, you can imagine how I feel about it as a premise.

Men must be crazy....

Reading The World without Us by Alan Weisman, an imaginary account of what would happen to the world if mankind would suddenly (saddenly) disappear, but not in a cosmic cataclysm or in an alien invasion, not even in an self-made enviro-catastrophe. Rather, just vanished, just disappeared one of these days. Starting rather dramatically, with how fast the matchbox houses we live in would disintegrate and vanish beneath the ever-advancing vegetation and unforgiving elements. (Experienced something of sorts myself, as he describes it all starting at the humble chimney, where the roof starts to leak, but anyway...)


Then it meanders all over the place, New York City, and Africa, and Turkey, and Cyprus and London, and North Pacific, nice meanderings, interesting meanderings, though I'm growing tired of the Wall Street Journal style - I think it's called - that introduces many chapters, even some sections: "So-and-so remembers the summer day he got that call" or "So-and-so has known the so and so desert for three decades..." wherefrom he proceeds with a story of who So-and-so is, even what he looks like whether he is bald or stalky or tall or what not... and only then goes into what so-and-so did and what his claim to fame is, which is really what the book is about.

But most of all his meanderings tell a grim story of a parasitic homo sapiens at strange odds with nature, and not since the beginning of the industrial revolution either, but since almost day one, or at least since day one anywhere else out of Africa, particularly here, in America, where, the story is beginning to go, the first people to arrive (what were in due time to be called "Amerindians") apparently put an end to all big fauna, either by hunt or by virus-induced disease (oh, the irony...!) Naturally, a controversial theory with the Indians. Jared Diamond spins the same yarn (sorry, Mr. Pynchon, that's just too good to pass) somewhere, and it kinda makes sense. So much sense that, when you add to it the crazy ivory-induced butchering of elephants in Africa in the late 20th century, the North Pacific Garbage Patch (the Gyre, look it up), the image of "plastic is for ever", and, on top of it all, the image of a universal nature calmly reclaiming every nook and cranny that we ever turned into a hellhole and then left alone, sprouting its flowery and grassy fingers everywhere to upturn pavement and buildings, you end up with the strange feeling of rooting for nature in this bizarre contest with homo sapiens. You end up wondering whether this guy who keeps starting many of his sentences with "if we were to disappear" knows something you don't know, or is just yanking your chain.


So much sadness overcame me (the word I'm looking for is m'envahit, but English doesn't have it or if it does I have not found it) at our stupidity that I even passed on watching the PBS special on democracy in Athens, that normally would have kept me glued to the TV, like anything else vaguely Greek. Instead I switched to Foucault, which I distinctly remember having started to read (in French) a while back, though for the life of me I don't know where I would have found the French edition (GSU, perhaps? gotta check). And after going again through three thirds of the interminable first chapter on Velazquez's painting I skipped ahead to chapter two, which I also know I had read...because I remember all his comments on "convenience" and "aemulatio"...

I also remember once I did a similar "telling" of a picture, though not with the kind of philsosophical perversity he seems to put into his, for look, just look what he says:

"It is not that words are imperfect, or that, when confronted by the visible, they prove insuperably inadequate. Neither can be reduced to the other's terms: it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say" (Order of Things 9).

Seeing the difference

οὐ γὰρ μόνον ἵνα πράττωμεν ἀλλὰ καὶ μηθὲν μέλλοντες πράττειν τὸ ὁρα̂ν αἱρούμεθα ἀντὶ πάντων ὡς εἰπει̂ν τω̂ν ἄλλων.αἴτιον δ' ὅτι μάλιστα ποιει̂ γνωρίζειν ἡμα̂ς αὕτη τω̂ν αἰσθήσεων καὶ πολλὰς δηλοι̂ διαφοράς .

(Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.980a)

The notion being that always, whether we plan on doing something or not, of all the senses we prefer seeing because "it helps make clear (evident) most differences."
I won't dispute whether indeed sight is our most discerning sense. Intuition would seem to agree with this. The thing that fascinates me, though is Aristotle using "seeing the difference" as grounds for superiority or at least for preference. Seeing the difference means breaking the world objects in pieces in order to understand it/them. Keeping lists of the pieces we broke the world objects into, readily available for comparison and for observing the things things have in common just as we note what keeps them apart. I can see how seeing differences might be an evolutionary advantage (is this red berry just like that other red berry Bob ate the other day and died?) or an evolutionary handicap: "to be or not to be" mused the young, wise prince who was going to die young, wise, childless.

Roland Barthes: “The Photographic Message”

His definition of the (newspaper) picture as "message without a code" rubs me the right way. Pinpoints something that I knew was wrong with our insistence that websites be graphically rich and textually poor. And then here it comes to me, from an article written sometime in the sixties, way before there was any www. Our desire to take cognitive shortcuts, to achieve the ultimate in communication, an almost telepathic togetherness with (someone else's) reality. The idealism of laziness.

Testing blogging from Word 2007

Pretty much as the title says.

Pretty nice feature of Word actually.

So I discover that Word 07 has, in addition to its horrendous interface (getting used to that) a nice blogging feature and my first thought is... nice, from now I can type my blog in Word and, in addition to all its features (I am actually a pretty good speller so no, it's not the spell check I have in mind, but rather, if you must know, niceties such as automatically CAPitalizing the first letter after period and such) in addition to these things, I realize, a prime result will be for people, bloggers, let's call them, to write their message then perhaps, at the end, to decide it's not quite for everyone and instead of clicking 'publish' to merely click 'save'.... which in turn would make the actual blogs even more artificial, even less spontaneous...

...

like there was this guy, they talked about on NPR, who kept a journal since 1972, chronicling almost every minute of his life since then. Died the other day, leaving behind 94 or so boxes of journals. Donated to some university, that sealed them for fifty years. Fifty years from now some researcher will revel in the quaintness-quotient of a guy's meteorological notations and methodical notes on how much orange juice he had drunk while reading the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and perhaps write a paper, thesis or book on it all.

...

Oh, cut the guy some slack, he was an English teacher after all.

Circles of Human Nature

"Samuel E B. Morse, who patented the telegraph and invented its code, saw no use for Alexander Graham Bell's even newer device, the telephone. Morse refused Bell's offer to sell him the rights to the telephone patent. He was convinced that no one would want the telephone because it was unable to provide any permanent record of a conversation.

As people discovered that telephones could further romantic liaisons, guardians of the public morality voiced concern or disgust that sweethearts were actually making kissing noises over the phone. Appropriate language during conversation was also an issue, and phone companies would cut off customers for swearing (like today's computer Systems Operators, or Sysops, the telephone operators, or ''hello girls" as they were called in the early days, frequently listened in on conversations and had the authority to interrupt or disconnect calls).

Phone companies also tried to limit telephone access solely to the subscriber, threatening hotels and other businesses with loss of phone service if they allowed guests or customers to make calls. Telephone companies backed down from their demand that phones only be used by their registered owners once another technological development, the pay telephone, was introduced, and their continued profits were assured (this situation is analogous to the discussions of copy protection and site licensing for computer software today)." (Hawisher, G. E., C. L. Selfe, et al. (1999). Passions, pedagogies, and 21st century technologies. Logan Urbana, Ill., Utah State University Press ; National Council of Teachers of English.)

These are excerpts from the first article in this anthology, by Dennis Baron. Funny how greed and self-importance and blindness survive over centuries. Though I'm not sure the analogy with software today is the best. More fitting analogy would be with music DRM. Bold is mine.