The Personal is Political. The Political is Personal.

 
the "inverse Sprezzatura" strategy

Ms. Dowd counsels that pseudonymous bloggers check themselves before giving offense, and mentions almost off-handedly:

The great poet Fernando Pessoa used heteronyms to write in different styles and even to review the work composed under his other names.

However she then fails to pursue the thought to its logical

[or "logical," as in TiR "logic"]

      conclusion, one that the technology itself almost seems to invite.

Bloggers should set up parallel, heteronymous blog sites to critique, review, heckle, ridicule and heap abuse on

[or engage in dialogue, tri-alogue, "try"-alogue, multilogue, or revise & extend . . . ]

            their own posts.

Pessoa, for example, could have had one blog under his own name, and others for Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, Ricardo Reis, etc.

A less cumbersome stragegy would be to bracket or parenthesize then insert the critique directly into the texts of the original posts.

[No it wouldn't.]

[Yes it would.]

[No it wouldn't!]

[And so on.]

[update 9/1/09:

Meanwhile, last month's Boston Review drew a momentary but fecund connection between use of pseudonyms and boredom, specifically via dull clerical work:

There are certain similarities here [i.e., with "Flann O'Brien," a/k/a Brian    O'Nolan, a civil servant] to another genius stuck in a boring office job: Fernando Pessoa, the alcoholic Portuguese poet and novelist (1888-1935), who in his writing invented an immense number of noms de plume, which he called heteronyms, not primarily as a means of concealing his identity but mostly to give a different name to each aspect of his literary personality -- the poet, the diarist, the novelist, etc.

The review is "We Laughed, We Cried: Flann O'Brien's Triumph" by Roger Boylan, here.]

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

 
if it ain't braked, can't fixe it



Speaking of burgeoning fields of research & inquiry (esp. fields that do not yet realize that they're fields), TiR appreciates new contributions to the field of Fail Studies, like this one. Nevertheless, we are not entirely sure we'd like to work under this fellow, who may represent another case worthy of study:

In Florida, Fugate was notorious for what he called "Thunderbolt" drills. Once a month, he’d walk into the office with a large Starbucks coffee and tell everyone to stop what they were doing and respond to a catastrophe baked in his imagination. Sometimes it was a blackout; other times it was a small nuclear bomb.

"People are afraid to fail. I’m seeking failure," he told me. "I want to break things. I want to see what's going on so we can fix it."

(as per the current Atlantic)



Hence TiR's practice of steering its car into a ditch with each post -- unto "the 12,000th" fail -- tho we're not really sure that a "fix" is the ultimate project -- and moreover the practice is usually not evident to us (but then it becomes stupidly so) until each time TiR find itself crawling from the

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

 
gaze upon my b'dum b'dum, ye





(pointless) update to this:


            tho note, if everybody always is creeping everybody else out,

then everybody always is paranoid vis-a-vis everybody else, and

everybody is always looking at everybody else -- & must look, & be looked at.



Hence one of the most haunting sentences that TiR stumbled onto in the past month:

If Lionel Trilling was right, if the property that grounded the self, in Romanticism, was sincerity, and in modernism it was authenticity, then in postmodernism it is visibility.

from William Deresiewicz's "The End of Solitude," here, as excerpted in the current Wilson Quarterly.



Deresiewicz then launches into a fine contribution to TiR's ever beloved field of Boredom Studies, e.g., that

SOLITUDE    :    LONELINESS    :  :    idleness    :    boredom,


etc.



Can one shudder, flee, pursue, look over one's shoulder, spy out of one eye, and yawn, all at once?

[update 8/27/09:

the Context of the Creepy: Henry Giroux draws upon Habermas on public space, & others, here:

[F]ear and violence become the only modalities through which to grasp the meaning of the self and larger social relations. . . .

As the public collapses into highly charged narratives of personal anger . . . irrational mob rule becomes "the only politics there is, the only politics with a tangible referent or emotional valence."

(quoting Jean & John Comaroff, here)

The title of the piece is "Town Hall Democracy or Mob Hysteria? Rethinking the Importance of the Public Sphere."]

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

 
dust 5

Everything looked clumsy and improvised in the days after the vote: the top-down way the outrageous results were announced; Khamenei's appeal to Ahmadinejad to be the president of all Iranians, followed immediately by a radically polarizing speech from his disciple dismissing all those who didn't vote for him as hooligans worthless as "dust" . . .

Slowly they marched, students and shopkeepers, old and young, with arms raised to signal a "V" for victory sign. "Sokoot " -- "Silence" -- they said if even a murmuring arose. "Raise your hands," they whispered to the police. "Where is the 63 percent?" asked one banner. A young woman, Negar, told me, "We were hoping that after thirty years we might have a little choice."

From beside me, an insistent male voice: "We are dust, but we will blind him."

from Roger Cohen's "Iran: The Tragedy & the Future," here (NYRB, 8/13/09)

(sequel             to             this             series)

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

 
What's so funny about Wille, Macht und Übermenschen?



Simon Critchley has a newly republished essay about humor.

His funniest line in it, TiR thinks, is this one:

[O]ne must obviously acknowledge the extraordinary difficulty of writing anything interesting, let alone funny, about comedy.

The essay appears in one of these new Radical Thinkers volumes. The title is (no joke): "Comedy and Finitude: Displacing the Tragic-Heroic Paradigm in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis." The book was published originally in 1999.

Perhaps the most important historical development between then and now, for purposes of appreciation of Critchley's essay, is the invention of YouTube (b. 2005). Its invention enables today's reader to use it to look up examples of what Critchley tells us he finds funny. This includes comedy by Frankie Howerd, Tommy Cooper, Tony Hancock and the National Theatre of Brent.

Along the way, Critchley throws in his second funniest knee-slapper (though he notes the line to be Hegel's), about man as an "amphibious" creature. The essay also includes the inevitable product placement coincidential reference to another work that just happens to be for sale in the new series of Radical Thinkers philosophical crack rocks volumes.

He sets up an opposition between two types of humor. One type, for which Critchley is not so hot, "is a manic laughter: solitary, hysterical, verging on sobbing. This is the ego bloated and triumphant in empty solitude." TiR won't name names, but is on record from last summer suggesting that it finds the master of this type of humor to be, in his own way, pretty funny.

Then there is humor type # 2, "which is more sardonic and which arises out of a palpable sense of inability, inauthenticity, impotence and impossibility." It "introduces some humility into the subject. . . . a radical abasement of the subject that requires a new form of acknowledgment, but whose effect is not depressive, but liberating, elevating" and even a "site of resistance," critique and the "solidaristic."

So the reader is told:

[T]o live between two deaths is not to live tragically, but is perhaps the life of comedy, where finitude is not something to be affirmed by the tragic hero, but comically acknowledged.

[The preceding sentence reminds TiR of the funniest proto-joke it found when it braved the entirety of an old collection of Yeats plays, this past spring:

[Y]ou stand there, so to speak, between two washings; for you were doubtless washed when you were born, and, it may be, shall be washed again after you are dead.

from "The Player Queen" (1922) (full text herein)

cf.: "Astride of a grave and a difficult birth."]

Ultimately, however, we think that Critchley, amidst a few digressions, really means to pose the following mysterious but burning question:


                                    Who is funnier, Zarathustra or Harpo Marx?


                                                      

(We would like to read him also to offer an intermediate choice: Johannes Climacus.)

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM

 
dead words

A column in last week's Yated Ne'eman newspaper

                [generally & among other things an illuminating source for certain scandal coverage & opinion]

              mentions an amazing story:

The Gemara describes that after R'Eliezer Ben R'Shimon died, his body lay in the attic of his home. Two people who had a financial dispute would bring their case before him, and a voice would emanate from the room and declare a halachic decision.

The column, by one R. Hool, sources the story to the recently studied Daf 84b in the Bava Metzia, and is entitled "Supernatural Solutions."

Supernatural indeed. Some additional details on R. Eliezer are here:

Before he died he told his wife: . . . "You shall leave me in the attic and do not be afraid of me." She followed his wishes and kept him in the attic for 18 to 20 years after his death. . . .

She once found a worm in his ear and was upset, until he appeared to her that night in a dream and told her, "It is nothing to be upset about for this is a punishment for my having allowed a young scholar to be insulted in my presence..."

After his death, whenever two people came to his house for a lawsuit, they would stand at the door and state their cases. A voice would then issue from the attic: "You, ploni, are just/unjust with your claims."

Of the many potentially reflection-worthy aspects here, R. Hoon reflects on only a couple. These aspects revolve around the propriety of relying on otherworldly sources of juridical guidance, with particular regard to the scope of parties bound by the decision, and rulings on fact vs. law.

[update 8/26/09:

It's perhaps a(n ever) timely topic.

e.g., "Amulets and Predictions, for $180 A Pop," here.]

TiR imagines that at least someone might reflect instead on the question of whether the story of R. Eliezer is deeply creepy.

However, maybe that question cannot be answered, or even posed, without giving offense somehow someday to someone, who might read this, who probably doesn't deserve offense.

So instead let's step back, look at the question again, and ask, "What does 'creepy' mean, anyway?"

Here's an oblique way to answer that question: "What does 'everyone' not consider creepy, these days?"

The topic of the current state of the idea of "creepiness" -- its subtle migration, subterranean expansion, the "concept creep" of The Creepy?

[TheoryWatch blog thought about the same notion last autumn, we now see]

              
-- deserves a blog post here of its own, someday.

For the time being, though, we will note a classic statement by the guy from The Shins, in an early 2007 interview about a 2001 song:

[I]n my circle of friends -- this was my circle of friends, especially in Albuquerque -- you drink and you hang out and you talk and you make jokes and you do all that stuff, but as soon as you start talking about anything real, something that actually moves you or anything like that, it's just f--king awkward.

You know, there's a lot of ways to kill a party -- talking about politics and that sh-t -- but I'm talking about anything that's heartfelt. . . . [S]o "Caring Is Creepy" is where that came from.

Given our zeitgeist's apparent ongoing interest in colonizing new territory for the Creepy, then TiR might perversely ask why the words of a dead person, spoken from his attic, which issue a ruling (if that's technically how we are to understand the voice in the story of R. Eleazar), should be considered to be any creepier than the rule-issuing words of a person, often no less dead, that are codified in a constitution, a bill of rights or even a didactic work of literature. Why are we not skeeved out, in the latter cases, given who's doing the talking?

Why do we not automatically consign the writings of everyone to the flames upon the writer's death, as requested by Kafka and Dickinson? Why does it not seem unnatural to have the deceased "speak" to us in written form, when to hear their voice "in person" would freak most of us (with some exceptions) right out? To think this way about writing becomes easy, if you try it for a few minutes as a thought experiment.

TiR thus wonders about the motivations behind prohibitions (superstitions?) against writing, in certain past civilizational situations.

One imagines how an insistence on an "Oral Law," or on the spoken, could be important in any number of circumstances: if your group placed priority on keepings its rules fresh, flexible, tightly coherent and "living"; if it mistrusted literacy as a kind of elitism or sorcery; or rather if it valued the power of the sophistical and golden tongued.

Caesar observed that the Druids were one society with a prohibition against writing:

They are said there to learn by heart a great number of verses; accordingly some remain in the course of training twenty years. Nor do they regard it lawful to commit these to writing . . .

That practice they seem to me to have adopted for two reasons; because they neither desire their doctrines to be divulged among the mass of the people, nor those who learn, to devote themselves the less to the efforts of memory, relying on writing; since it generally occurs to most men, that, in their dependence on writing, they relax their diligence in learning thoroughly, and their employment of the memory.

They wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another, and they think that men by this tenet are in a great degree excited to valor, the fear of death being disregarded.

(Gallic Wars, Book 6, Chap. 14)

[but see the words of this deceased fellow:

To be a poet is to know how to leave speech. To let it speak alone, which it can do only in its written form.

and

Arche-speech is writing because it is a law. A natural law. The beginning word is understood, in the intimacy of self-presence, as the voice of the other and as commandment.

. . . whatever these mean.]

TiR appreciates the Druidical implication that, each time one writes, a little bit of one's soul leaks out, leaving less for survival into any possible afterlife.

(The belief that to leave a written record is the very opposite of immortality seems itself to be the very opposite of modernity's belief.)

The same probably goes for blogging. Which is probably why the Druids so rarely blogged.

posted by TiR at 7:01 AM