quotes of the month - november 2010

Nihil tam absurde dici potest, quod non dicatur ab aliquo pilosophorum. (Nothing so absurd can be said, that some philosopher has not said it.) -Cicero

"It's very hard to keep your spirits up. You've got to keep selling yourself a bill of goods, and some people are better at lying to themselves than others. If you face reality too much, it kills you." -Woody Allen


Oh, jeez. That does sound rather bleak.

I could scrounge around real quick for a funny quote to round it off and reassure you that I've not spent this month peeing myself while trembling in the corner with all the curtains drawn, vaguely plotting--between lines of coke--the means with which to bring about my early demise.

But, honestly, I can't be arsed right now.

Here is a baby lemur or something.



Note 7/2011 - I can't believe how many people get brought to my blog through this photo. Hi, all you lemur lovers.

predecessors of the modern hipster: a photographic journey - part 1

Fig. 1: Note the artfully disheveled hair; the meticulously arranged scarf and (optional) floppy hat, both donned in spite of temperate weather; the teeming basket of community laundry, indicating the repudiation of restrictive gender roles.

Fig. 2: 'nuff said.

quotes of the month - october 2010

"It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil." -Judith Herman

"You can never get enough of what you don't want." -Wayne Dyer

"People still believe a lot of stupid crap. There's still a ghost hunters show on Discovery! Wouldn’t you love it if you turned on the History Channel and they said, 'Sorry about all those Nostradamus shows?' I would love that world." -Adam Savage

on the intake - vol. 3

Month of October, 2010

1) Paris, Texas



In this month, in 2003, Elliott Smith died. I accidentally commemorated the occasion this year by watching his favorite movie. It's now easily in my top five as well.

Speaking of which, here is a link to what is, in my opinion, the most thoughtful and nuanced article in existence about the months leading up to Smith's suicide. Scroll down to read reply #3. SPIN magazine has not made this article available online, so the link is to a message board where a user reprinted it without permission.

I think it is irrelevant whether or not Smith's memories of molestation were accurate. Nobody disputes that he was beaten, abandoned, and verbally/emotionally abused. Any one of those things could be sufficient to leave a person scrambling forevermore to pick up the shambles of his life. This is especially true during times when the individual is attempting to face reality without taking refuge under the wings of dissociation* or delusional comforts. It's not strange that Smith died sober.

2) Trauma and Recovery by Judith Herman

In the words of an acquaintance who read half the book: "Not good nighttime reading."

It is a tough read, if you have so much as half a heart (even a Grinch-sized one). But it is also an excellent book, on the whole. Indispensable for anybody interested in PTSD and trauma recovery. Bessel van der Kolk is another author/researcher whose work I would recommend looking up. Onno van der Hart and his colleagues are also at the forefront of PTSD research and clinical practice (at least in my unprofessional estimation). And all of these folks tip their hats repeatedly to Pierre Janet.

3) The History of Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause

That was actually a reread for me. But this time around I also read more or less everything available on his personal site.

If Herman is bad bedtime reading, deMause is worse. I don't mean that the quality is poor, but that you'll probably NEED that book about PTSD recovery after reading this one. ;-)

I am a little skeptical of deMause's work. The Institute for Psychohistory is small and The Journal of Psychohistory is at least somewhat controversial. The relevant wikipedia articles are, in their present state, not terribly illuminating. Is he exaggerating or cherry-picking his findings? I don't know yet. I don't know enough to say. I do know that what he is saying is unappetizing and I can see why some others in the field would prefer to plug their ears.

My hunch at the moment is that deMause is mostly correct, especially regarding his main ideas (that the history of childhood is depressingly violent and exploitative, but improving; that a given culture's childrearing practices have an enormous impact on military and political happenings). The criticisms I've read so far have been ... uh, pretty cursory, with an emphasis on scandalized pearl-clutching ("What? No! My noble savages/grandparents would never do that!") rather than specific, evidence-backed objections.

4) Rene Magritte

I don't know much about art or art history, which means I not-so-infrequently get the pleasure of stumbling on a great artist I knew absolutely nothing about before. (Or, rather, nothing beyond a childhood glimpse of his iconic painting "Time Transfixed".)

Check this out:

Pretty awesome. I don't know about you, but that reminds me of the year 12,000 BC.



Happy Halloween!

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*Spirituality and substance abuse are the most obvious examples of ways in which people dissociate from reality but sober, secular people also have systems in place that serve the same reality-dampening purpose. And, of course, most people--especially "well-adjusted" people--have layer upon layer of these protective illusions and mechanisms. Don't worry; I know I have them, too. Blue pill FTW, I guess.

quotes of the month - september 2010

“Many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” - Thomas Edison 

"The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it." - Lawrence Krauss 

---

That first quote brings to mind another quote I saw stenciled on someone's wall recently: 

"There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting." - The Buddha

on the intake - vol. 2

Month of September, 2010

This month went by in a flash for me. I've mostly been doing research on topics I'd rather keep to myself (things such as panda bondage and water snarfing syndrome--very embarrassing).

Nevertheless, here is a selection of what I'm reading, watching, and listening to.

Mumford & Sons - This is folk rock, according to wikipedia. I don't particularly care what it's called though. Sigh No More is a great album and I'm enjoying delving into it bit by bit.

Here's "The Cave".

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen - I heard perhaps the latter 3/4 of this interview on NPR on Sept. 11. Then I promptly ordered the book. Before I knew it was Franzen speaking, what struck me about the first bit was that the pattern of thought reminded me very strongly of David Foster Wallace. Even though I had heard Franzen talk before (on a weird sort of joint thing along with Wallace on Charlie Rose with poor Mark Somebody playing the third wheel), for a few moments I thought maybe they were playing an old interview with DFW. It's easy to see why they were close friends.

Not long ago I looked back back at some of the first few communications between my partner and I. The messages were saved without our names attached and, reading through them, I found it was often difficult or even impossible for me to determine which one of us has written which messages. That's kind of an amazingly pleasant feeling.

Wallace is quoted as having said that good writing should make us "become less alone inside."* A friendship of compatible minds accomplishes the same, I think. By "compatible", I mean really, really, super similar in your thought patterns and conclusions. Not just being the only two people in town who like pork rinds with rooster sauce. (I don't like pork rinds at all. Just to be clear, in case you were thinking of buying me a present or something. =p)

Civilization Revolution - I've liked every installment of Civilization, but this (on the 360) is the one I'm currently obsessed with playing. Been fiddling around with the Game of the Week feature, which is a great motivation to master the game.

I also have the app of the same name for my iPod, which is good for practicing different strategies. In a way I like the app better because the simple graphics make it easier (for me) to focus on the symbolic/quantitative significance of each square and unit. As far as I know, there is no way to disband/sell units on the app version, which is a teensy bit limiting. The rules for the settler unit's movements also differ between the two versions. That's not a bad thing; it just means they're different games. Those differences aren't terribly relevant until you start really trying to shave your times down.

Gran Turismo - This is a pretty old album by The Cardigans (1998), but I'm digging into it again lately. You've probably at the very least heard "My Favorite Game" on the radio and I do like that track, but the other songs are worth checking out as well. Robert Christgau writes of the album, "With a hit on their resume, they're free to be the depressed Swedes they always were." I like them that way. :-)

That Mitchell & Webb Look - The first season is on Netflix now. My favorite sketch might be "The Surprising Adventures of Sir Digby Chicken Caesar", which is neatly summed up on wikipedia as "A drunken, drug-addled tramp... seems to be under the impression that he is a brilliant and intrepid Victorian detective..."

Also good.


_________________________

*To be honest (by which I mean presumptuous), I suspect that most people actually don't have any sense of existential aloneness at all--neither the experience nor the idea of it.

It's like sometimes there's this strange, vague cry coming from the back of their linen closets but if they pile the shelves high with assorted fluffy stuff, one can really barely hear it anymore. That's almost as if there weren't any problem to begin with.

And some people (perhaps those same people?) are grievously irked by very notion of someone writing books about the sort of thing that Wallace and Franzen wrote/write books about.

For further reading, check out the comment section following any article on Franzen (such as at the NYT or NPR), where invariably there is at least one gem along the lines of: "I'm way TOO HAPPY for this author and I'm too happy for this book, too happy for this book, so happy AND THIS LOSER SURE HAS SOME FUCKING NERVE INSINUATING... "

This probably isn't a simple case of "the lady doth protest too much". I would guess that those commenters are very happy. It's just that the structural integrity of their brand of happiness depends upon their not knowing that the foundation is comprised of delusional beliefs. Like Santa Claus, if you stop believing, it stops working. They sense, quite rightly, that if this original house (shaky as it is) were to tumble down, building a new and better one would be--at best!--a painful, laborious process. Perhaps it would prove impossible and they would have to face the world in all its violence, without shelter.

And so--because they know they are too weak at present to bear the full weight of reality--they assault the inspectors.

quotes of the month - august 2010

"...quite ordinary people can be good at science. To say that is not to depreciate science but to appreciate ordinary people. But to be good at science one must want to be-- and must feel a first stirring of that sense of disquiet at lack of comprehension that is one of a scientist's few secure distinguishing marks. I think it is the lack of this exploratory, hunting trait that makes it unthinkable to many people who could be scientists that they should be so."
-PB Medawar (quoted at the blog "49 percent")

"Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in the case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing."
-William James

"He used to think things like, 'This organic soymilk will make me healthy and that'll make my brain work better and that'll improve my writing.' Also things like, 'The less I eat the less money I spend on publicly owned companies the less pain and suffering will exist in the world.' Now he thinks things like, 'It is impossible to be happy.' Why would anyone think that?"
-Tao Lin, Eeeee Eee Eeee

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another you have only an extemporaneous half-possession."
-R.W. Emerson, "Self-Reliance"

"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."
-Voltaire

---

The third quote is one of my favorites of all time. ^_^

self-identifying as "mother" or "father"

"Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself."
--David Foster Wallace

I was watching Charlie Rose today. It was a memorial show for Tony Judt, who died earlier this month, presumably from complications of ALS. You can watch it online here. There are a lot of interesting ideas touched on in the interviews shown in this episode--not least of all Judt's use of the memory palace technique, which helped him compose and remember new bits of writing during the nighttime when there was no one available to take dictation.

At one point in the show Rose questioned Judt about his identity as a "controversialist". Judt expressed amusement and said he did not identify as this at all. He then rattled off a few labels he found more applicable.

Most conspicuously (to me, anyhow), "father" was not among those labels--and this was in spite of the fact that Judt had spoken with pride about his children earlier in the same interview. My mind kept returning to that conspicuous absence all afternoon.

I don't really like to identify myself as "mother", either, frankly.

I don't mean that I disown my lovely children or pretend not to know them when we're out together. That's far from the case. Rather, I don't particularly like revealing my parental status in out-of-context situations (I strongly considered never mentioning it on this blog, for instance). I don't like how many people tend to take a person less seriously once the "mother" label has been applied to her. All of a sudden you're treated like your IQ just dropped 40 points, for one.

Generally the penalty for revealing parental status is higher for women than for men. Yet it's a tad more controversial when a woman refuses to label herself based on her family relationships, isn't it? Why is that? (I guess it's because controversiality is a culturally imposed penalty in and of itself...) And why is my own distaste for the label so strong, even though I love my kids as much as Judt loved his?

I was thinking about all of that (as I washed the dishes, lollololllolol...), and I brainstormed a few reasons why I (or someone else) might be disinclined to identify strongly with the terms "parent", "mother", or "father":

1) Low social value placed on parenthood.

By identifying yourself with a low status job, you are announcing, "Hello, I am a low status human being. Please piss all over me." Do you really want to do that? Maybe not all the time...

I'm not saying this is how the world should be. But this is how it is.

2) Parenthood is common and unremarkable.

Almost everybody eventually does it. It's not something unique or distinguishing.

We certainly would never introduce ourselves as "Peter's Uncle", or "Tamika's second cousin" out of context!

3) It's not a very specific label.

There's no honor in being just a generic parent. What sort of parent are you? Some parents (perhaps even most parents) are really pretty awful at nurturing their children. Being a shitty parent is worlds worse than being a shitty janitor or a shitty human resources director--it's about on par with being a shitty brain surgeon.

4) The parental role is not necessarily chosen freely.

This is true of paying jobs as well. The less freely a job is chosen, the less a point of pride it tends to be for the person performing it. A janitor who wanted to be a lawyer and lost the opportunity still might be a very excellent janitor, but it's unlikely she'll want to talk about her job at every turn. The cultural pressure to become a parent is still very high among many groups of people, especially for those who grew up in a strongly religious and/or conservative community.

5) It simply doesn't speak to some of us. We don't find the label and/or the job itself to be moving or exciting.

I can hear the witch burners coming for me now... but, let's face it. Only a total flarfflebrain could find it intellectually stimulating to wipe up some puke, snuggle up for one more episode of WordWorld, or make a peanut butter sandwich for the 325th time. Parenting is 95% mundane acts of daily living.

While it may be an internal act of extreme heroism to make that 325th sandwich without crying into the jelly out of despair, or to coo gently and rock-a-bye a fretful baby while ignoring your chronic backache and aching feet, it's not exactly the sort of riveting theme you want to revisit on your off hours.

Yes, yes, you get the good parts, too. Who doesn't love a hug from a sweet-smelling toddler or an adorable impromptu magic show put on by a preschooler? (Well, probably profoundly autistic people or those with leprosy... but I digress.) Nevertheless, spinning parenthood as being constantly full of reward and excitement is about as honest as saying that a tour abroad with the US Army is an awesomely fun learning experience where you get free food, new friends, and lots of exercise.

This is a bit of a lazy list; I could go a lot further in breaking down the pressures and motivations behind these reasons... but ... I am kind of tiring of the subject.

Watch the Judt special if you get the chance. He was an interesting guy.

Gonna go hug my kids. :-)

moo haiku

I believe this is the Little People Farm #2501, circa 1986, from Fisher-Price.

And now a frightening haiku, composed in the tradition of the USian elementary school.

Quiet plastic cow

is lured by wallpaper hay.

closing, the door moos.