SYMBOLPOND -- http://www.symbolpond.com

Taps for The Catcher in the Rye and His Moral World

2010-02-03T12:48:00.003-05:00

J.D. Salinger used skaz to give readers of Catcher in the Rye the illusion of the spontaneous speech of a Pency preppy sickened by his transition to adulthood in the post-war years that gave birth to the phoney 50's. Salinger's oft-celebrated "narrative voice" helped popularize his novel among a generation of would-be hip schooteachers who assigned it to their crummy students. In today's postindustrial American culture, many of the products that carry the Williams-Sonoma moniker rely on applied graphics that are pulled from the look and feel of another era to impute "character" to the brand. But just as Holden Caufield failed in his heroic quest to use the familiar spaces of his New York City as imaginiary places of healing, so too does Catcher in the Rye now fail the postmodern test of performativity vis-a-vis the hegemonic symbolic-moral regime of the therapeutic worldview. What works with buyers of consumables doesn't work with readers raised in the therapeutic ethos. The Catcher in the Rye is a vanishing icon.

Robert McCrum in the secret history of JD Salinger gets it right. J.D. Salinger's hero doesn't need prozac; he needs to be heard as an avatar of the experience and the inner lives of those World War II combat infrantyman who found themselves demobilized among civilians who did not ask and soldiers who did not write: one of death's men.

Tacent satis laudant.

Inner Directeds Are Like Pagans Today

2010-01-31T02:15:00.003-05:00

Blogging creates the itch to scratch the lacunae of self realization

My post of Friday, January 29, 2010 , "A Counteractant to the Anodyne of my My Middle-Range Concepts" wherin I listed my "big four" taken-for-granted operational concepts, has left me itching for a gestalt.

Ever since I posted it, I've realized something is missing. Finding myself in a beleaguered position in my evaluation of the tenor of the ascendant socio-political ideology in power in Washington DC today, I now comprehend that my "big four" should mirror the "big five" trophy animals celebrated in Safari lore. Hence, let me herein augment my list to include the concepts of inner directed vs. outer directed cultural types. Obviously, I now realize, my itch has been occasioned by my affiliation with the first type, an existential existence seemingly similar to the last pagan in the classical world who heard the words, "Tell them the Great Pan is Dead."
\
"... Great God, I'd rather be

A Pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea,

And hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

A Counteractant to the Anodyne of My Middle-Range Concepts

2010-01-29T14:41:00.004-05:00

What socio - cultural theories of the middle range constitute your taken-for-granted analytic "iron-cage" of at- hand conceptual tools? For me the big four are (1) Robert Merton's manifest and latent functions and dysfunction, (2) ethnoscience's emic and etic levels of analysis, (3) the paradigmatic analysis of binary oppositions, and (4) Max Weber's methodology of “ideal type” (Idealtypus) and “rationalization thesis.”

Thanks to the blog Paralipomena (2), whose posting " Has the theory of the Protestant work ethic just collapsed?" reproduces Damian Thompson's article of the same name in the Telegraph, I now have a hot-off-the grill empirical study to serve as a temporary counteractant to the anodyne of idealism as manifest in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Now let me see if I can appreciate the latent function of Mr. Thompson's squibb.

Two Takes on Andrew Lange's Suicide

2010-01-27T23:09:00.005-05:00

Dontcha just love the Higher Ed worldview that translates the suicide of Andrew Lange into news of increased "counseling " jobs at CalTech. Equally affecting is Higher Ed's subtext that juxtaposes self-murder with the supposed raison de vivre of one million dollars in prize money.

... lost in time like tears in the rain

Andrew Lange let us see that the universe is flat. In his end, he showed how despite a self that comprehends time behind and time before a man can self-determine his place in the cosmos by choosing his time to die. In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius has words fit for this great cosmologist.

You have the power to strip away many superfluous troubles located wholly in your judgement, and to possess a large room for yourself embracing in thought the whole cosmos, to consider everlasting time, to think of the rapid change in the parts of each thing, of how short it is from birth until dissolution, and how the void before birth and that after dissolution are equally infinite.

Altogether the interval is small between birth and death; and consider how much trouble, and in company with sort of people and in what feeble body this interval is laboriously passed. Do not then consider life is a thing of any value. For look to the immensity of time behind thee, and to the time which is before thee, another boundless space. In this infinity then what is the difference between him who lives three days and him who lives three generations?

Self-Awareness and the Logic of the Supermundane

2010-01-14T12:52:00.125-05:00

The New York Times of January 13, 2010, p. A29, reports the death of Ray Solomonoff. His wife, Grace, said the cause of his death was a ruptured brain aneurism. Shubhendu Trivedi's blog, Onionesque Reality,   provides a cogent and appreciative perspective on the works and days of "one of the founding fathers of Artificial Intelligence as a field and Machine Learning as a discipline within it." Trivedi's essay and the Times' obituary set me thinking about founding fathers who were forerunners of Solomonoff.

Although born too early to be a member of the Foresight Institute, Rabbi Akiva, nevertheless introduced nano-hermeneutics and nano-diacritical heuristics into rabbinical legal exegesis. His interpretive bent found its complement in his philosophy.   In chapter 3, verse 19 of Mishnah Pirkei Avot , popularly called Ethics Of The Fathers in English, he articulates the perspectival strain of finite individual human self-awareness situated in a universe of supermundane action and infinite duration.

        Rabbi Akiva said: All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given.
        The world is judged in goodness, yet all is proportioned to one's work.

Click on the title of this posting to see how Vernor Vinge's 1993 paper on "the singularity" validates Akiva's teaching. Although it has nothing to do with contemplation of the irony of the father of machine learning dying by brain aneurism (but everything to do with what Rabbi Akiva said) , Vinge's essay is worth reading all the way to the end, if for nothing else than for his statement that he thinks Freeman Dyson has it right when he says: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension."

Mary Heaton Vorse in The Maytrees

2009-09-04T10:03:00.003-04:00

In my posting of Thursday, August 27th, I mentioned Annie Dillard's mention of Mary Heaton Vorse as one of the reasons I appreciated The Maytrees. Yes, I singled out the mention of Vorse to acknowledge Annie Dillard's tribute to a literary predecessor. Mary Heaton Vorse is mentioned on page 112 and her son, Heaton Vorse is mentioned on page 112. She is the only historical figure emblematic of American radicalism in the first half of the twentieth to have a presence in Dillard's novel.

A good deal of the social atmosphere of Provincetown, as depicted by Dillard in The Maytrees, can be found in Time and the Town: a Provincetown Chronicle, published in 1942, by Mary Heaton Vorse. Her contribution to the background of Dillard's novel helps account for Dillard's tribute to her in her fictional story. Additionally, Vorse's chapter on the Coast Guard - the dangers of the sea at, for example, the Peaked Hill Bars, or the qualities of coast guard men that make them good husbands, are reflected in Dillard's story. And of course, Vorse, like Dillard, was a writing woman, albeit more political than Dillard and more attached to P-town as a place of her own, but a writing woman and a mother no less.

If you walk down the East End of Provincetown along Commercial Street, you'll find Mary Heaton Vorse's house. There ensconced in the quilts of her bed, the woman who said "the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair” is framed by her bedroom window doing her writing. Click on the title of this post to see how Life Magazine found her in 1940.

Yes to The Maytrees by Annie Dillard

2009-08-27T14:21:00.008-04:00

For all readers interested in death-bed learning, as well as those who respond to love stories in which the married couple represent the contrast between Aristotelian and Platonic thought, I highly recommend The Maytrees ( NY: Harper Collins, 2007). It's Annie Dillard's latest novel and supposedly her last. Word has it that Dillard's original draft realistically detailed the marriage and love of Lou Bigelow and Toby Maytree in over a thousand pages. Coming in at 216 pages, the book we have before us has been pared down to a focus on what would have been the symbolic overlay of its longer version. Fictional mundane reality takes a backseat. The Maytrees foregrounds the author's perception of the supernal qualities of "being" to give us an allegory on how best to live so that one can experience the holy and the "real."

So at the end of her writing career, Dillard returns us to the central question posed in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: "What was it, exactly, - or even roughly - that we people are meant to be doing here?" If she can't exactly answer the question with respect to all of our lives, in The Maytrees she can help us at our end of life by lyrically modeling two death scenes in which the surface of time cracks open. Lou Bigelow Maytree dies unmonumentally on pages 80-82. Toby Maytree dies on pages 209-216 with Yankee the box turtle unconcernedly sunning himself during his enlightened passing.

Yankee, denizen of the reality of inhuman life, is totemically present at a third death scene in which the author occludes her character's apprehension of the "holy" and the real. Deary Hightoe's death scene on pages 173-182 gets a realistic description with focus on her external actions and her physical condition. There's no cosmic mysticism here. Readers familiar with the folklore associated with the hawthorn tree won't be surprised that this is so. Time is experienced differently in faery land. No May Queen she.

To move us fast, Dillard's verbal style express itself in a sentence style based on active verbs. To slow us down she uses indecipherable phrases, a suggestion that reality is not always interpretable by language. Dillard tutors the Casper Hawsers of her readership with references to Orion, the Milky Way, Venus, Alterf, Diphda, Nekkar in Bootes, Vega, Scopio, Hercules, Cassiopeia, the Pleides. At Race Point Beach the grass covered dunes yield to the white sand and tides of the ocean's edge. In summer, it's my favorite spot. The Maytrees reminds me that as I am looking out onto the Atlantic from there, I am overlooking the Peaked Hill Bars.

Annie Dillard and I belong to the same generational cohort. Her religious apologetics, spiritual questing, sense of America, schooling with the works of Thoreau, irony, and her reaction to her middle class upbringing that makes her loath to scumble strike a familiar chord in me. It's as if we were once buddies in the same advanced placement classes in high school. Her alinear narrative structure works for me. I appreciate her reference to Mary Heaton Vorse. I hope Dillard writes another novel.

Personal Aging as Really {Super} Old School

2009-07-21T14:19:00.001-04:00

A gerontologist discovers the classics of Western Humanities as most fit to bring to the desert island of old age. The graphics are fittingly pre-Raphaelite too.

Click on the title of this post to read the essay from the blog Rogue Scholarship on Aging.

In the Retro-Humanistic Spirit of William Hone

2009-06-29T17:54:00.005-04:00

Vince Hancock of Bear Lake Michigan is master of the blog "The Chronicles of William Hone" at
http://chronicleshone.blogspot.com/. Contemporary, but faithful to a daybookish trope of mind congenial to the original William Hone in his maturity, Vince captures the retro-humanistic side of folkloristic antiquarianism. I've added this site to the blogs I follow.

Zugehörigkeit -- Shared Horizons of Assumptions

2009-06-05T14:40:00.013-04:00

The experience of Zugehörigkeit ("belonging") comes into existence when an author's and a reader's unstated assumptions overlap. The experience embodies a sense in the reader that he or she shares life -- a lived being-- with the author regardless of how remote the author may be from the reader in some ways. The reader feels the being of the author merge with his own being. At the same time, the reader plummets deep into his or her own indistinct assumptions, feelings, and self-meaning. " It is the experience of Zugehörigkeit in which we recognize our subordination and obligation to shared truths (embodied by language) larger than ourselves. I think it might be likened to Wu Wei or the experience of synchronicity. According to Barrett Mandel, " At such a moment the author's language feels like it is speaking not only to us but in us as as well, merging the particulars of the author's past with the particulars of ours and creating a moment of transcendence." What the reader never knew to be included within the horizon of his or her assumptions, what was beyond the limits of the reader's own experience, now shockingly is recognized as belonging to the reader's assumptions about life.

I discovered the explication of the concept of Zugehörigkeit in Barrett J. Mandel's essay "Full of Life Now," in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, edited by James Olney ( Princeton University Press, 1980), 49-72. Last night I experienced the meaning of the concept reading Arthur Cooper's translations of selected poems of Li Po.

"In the Valley of the Shadow," an essay by Elizabeth D. Samet, who teaches English at the United States Military Academy, points to the power of Zugehörigkeit without naming it. Seemingly unintendedly, Samet extends my horizons of assumptions back to accounts of the Oxbridge education of those young English officers who arrived at the front lines in France in 1914 with copies of the Iliad in their tunic pockets. Her entire essay can be found at: https://navyseals.com/valley-shadow. Here's the pertinent section:

A senior named Brittany, who is now a lieutenant preparing to deploy to Iraq, was surprised by her own response to “War South of the Great Wall,” by the great Tang Dynasty poet Li Po, which presents the battlefield as a dreamscape overhung by a blood red sun. Living soldiers have turned to “ghosts,” while the birds that feed on the dead can no longer fly — in David Hinton’s translation, they are “grief glutted, earthbound.” Brittany confessed that she didn’t think she could be moved by poems about war anymore, but this one struck her in the gut. Li Po, by omitting what Brittany had come to regard as essential to the representation of war, seemed to communicate some important knowledge to her. “The poet,” Stevens proposed, “is the priest of the invisible.”

Merkin's Hairy Kabalistic and Swank Nomenclature

2009-04-06T18:14:00.024-04:00

Ascot, Ariel, Gabriel -- J. Ezra Merkin knew what he was doing when he gave these names to his "feeder funds" for Bernie Madof'f's ponzi scheme. To establish an organizational identity for his funds, Merkin borrowed from the status -anxious storehouse of his intended clients' treasury of cultural aspirations. Hence:

Ascot
It's gorgeous; it's English royalty; it's horse racing for high stakes and prestige; it's Beau Brummel in a "je ne sais quois " flippancy of taste over sense. High flying aristocratic status! A bit roguish, but moneyed nonetheless....

Ariel
An archangel name from the Hebrew meaning lion of God. Who can go wrong with that? Ariel is known as the Angel of Healing and New Beginnings. Who doesn't need such potency ?

Gabriel
Due diligence? Gabriel is in the Book of Daniel. He's the chief of the four favored angels. Gabriel. My word; he's the spirit of truth. To many folks with lots of money and short attention spans, he's synonymous with the spirit of truth. By Jesus, even Muslims believe in him.

And pious Jews who believe in Yeshiva University say in their nightly prayers: "In the name of the Lord the God of Israel, may Michael be at my right hand; Gabriel at my left; before me, Uriel; behind me Raphael; and above my head the divine presence of God." No one can fault J. Ezra Merkin for not soothing his investors' midnight qualms.

Why were Merkin's clients deaf to the shmooze-tones of these pseudo- pietistic and narcissistic- swank sounding funds promising easy money and self-affirming insider status? Maybe Rabbi Jochanan ben Dahabai ( b. Nedarim 20b) had a valid point after all.

NY Attorney General Not Impressed By Swank or Kabbalistic Nomenclature
Click on the title of this post to read the New York Times back storey of April 6th about the civil complaint filed by the New York attorney general accusing Mr. Merkin of lying to clients about Bernie Madoff's dominant role in his three hedge funds and improperly collecting more than $470 million in fees for simply handing his clients' money to Madoff. As the Times explains, "Mr. Merkin's three investment funds -- Ascot Partners, Ariel and Gabriel -- had been either fully or partly invested with Mr. Madoff since 1990, according to the complaint. It claimed the Ascot fund was formed in 1992 'for the sole, but undisclosed purpose of serving as a feeder to Madoff.' "

Iceland and the Separation of Thought from Memory

2009-03-16T11:21:00.024-04:00

Landscape with Ravens
Last Thursday I wrote about Iceland and Nostalgia for the Undetermined Future. This weekend while clearing a winter's dead fall of oak branches from the hillside, I listened to ravens cawing in bare branches overhanging the shoreline of a small Hudson Highland lake covered slick by melting ice. A bandage of white mist covered the sun. Sounds of artillery fired by the National Guard at Fort Smith thumped ten miles across Crystalline Appalachian corduroys to syncopate with the birds. Hugin and Mugin -- Thought and Memory. When did they cease to fly as a pair? In the Prologue to his Edda Snorri Sturluson tells us that "the population of the world" originally "understood everything in a material sense...since they had not been given spiritual understanding, and so they thought that everything had been made from some substance." [1] Although it took from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, I realized that Snorri's words had finally come true in terms of the progress Icelandic people have made in moving beyond the old faith.

Beyond Sæhrímnir
Up until now I assumed Iceland to be a "nowhere place" whose overpowering wilderness tied its inhabitants to a materiality as perdurable as the tides and as practical as their geothermal network of heating conduits. Free of despotic control, well educated, living in a public weal in which the country's population of 320,000 ( with one third of the total living in Reykjavik) had at least a quasi-familiarity with each other, I believed Icelanders to be an integrated society content in warm hand knit sweaters made from the lanolin rich wool of Nordic sheep and, hence, safe from any snow job. Surely, the nation that " preserved the classical language of the thirteenth century as the living Icelandic of today" [2] would continue to prefer reality over reason's natural preference for abstraction. Nevertheless, my Rousseauian picture of Iceland was not proof against the spiritual understanding of our dark time that has formalized speculation into a seemingly rational system in which money is believed to be quite simply made out of money.

Wall Street on the Tundra
On Thursday I was thinking about Iceland and nostalgia for the undefined future. Despite their being the kenning people who know the story that explains why gold is called Otter's ransom, Sif's hair, Fafnir's abode, or the metal of Gnita Heath, or Grani's burden, Icelanders failed to oblige themselves to go slowly. So in the end, their "nowhere" became like everywhere that failed to consider that, perhaps, everything was, in fact, made from some substance, that only actual production creates new capital, and that inflation and depression are the fate of an economy which delivers itself to speculation on debt.[3]

In the subway today, I saw a sticker slapped onto a billboard advertising the new TV series "The Real Housewives of New York." It said, "God Bless Our Brave Stockbrokers."

References:
1. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Tales from Norse Mythology, Introduction by Sigurd Nordal, Selected and Translated by Jean I. Young (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1954), 24-25.
2. Above, 15.
3. John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), Chapter 17, "The Miracle of the Loaves."

Iceland and Nostalgia for the Undetermined Future

2009-03-12T08:44:00.008-04:00

I don't exactly know why, but today I'm thinking about Iceland. I've read the cogent summary provided to us in CIA - The World Factbook -- Iceland . And I have reread Fríða Björk Ingvarsdóttir's online essay on the work of Roni Horn, PLACE POSSESSES YOU IN ITS ABSENCE. Hers is the best example of the concept of Nostalgia for the Undetermined Future that I can think of at the moment.

A humanist would say that the emotion of Nostalgia for the Undetermined Future is useful because it makes us think about the cunning of history. A religious woman or man would say that Nostalgia for the Undetermined Future brings sapience. It forces us to experience the psychological reality of the force that here and now binds us -- the absolute Power of time. In the past, this Power was termed "Fate," phenomenologically an empty sound for the god who has no name or, rather, has every name. Of course, sophisticated religious folk unwilling to be mocked as 21st century érudits are certain to be careful to explain that for them Fate refers to the explanation of the destiny of man by his own nature.

Echoes of Spengler in Voltaire's Bastards

2009-03-09T00:53:00.005-04:00

The lyric trope of the devolution of Western Civilization, a neglected feature of John Ralston Saul's philosophical essay Voltaire's Bastards, deserves greater attention. It rumbles ominously beneath his more sparkling aphoristic utterances, such as can be found at John Ralston Saul - Wikiquote . Here are six examples that hint at his penchant for the prophetic persona.

Language Devoted to Obscurity
"The wordsmiths who serve established power...are always devoted to obscurity. They castrate the public imagination by subjecting language to a complexity which renders it private. Elitism is always their aim. The undoubted sign of a society well under control or in decline is that language has ceased to be a means of communication and has become instead a shield for those who master it... When language begins to prevent communication, that civilization has entered into serious degeneracy." --pp. 9 and 476

Fall into Illiteracy
"Voltaire used to ridicule the elite of his day by pointing out that, apart from their titles and their money, they were pitifully ignorant...The elite's ignorance was so profound that it made them incapable of leading...The technocrats of our day make the old aristocratic leaders seem profound and civilized by comparison. The technocrat has been actively--indeed, intensely--trained. But by any standard comprehensible within the tradition of Western Civilization, he is virtually illiterate...Literacy refers to civilization as a shared experience. One of the signs of a dying civilization is that its language breaks down into exclusive dialects which prevent communication.. A growing, healthy civilization uses language as a daily tool to keep the machinery of society moving. The role of responsible literate elites is to aid and abet that communication." --p. 110

From Capital Goods to Unnecessary Services
"...consider the characteristics of societies in decay. At the meeting point between their rise and their decline, societies -- or rather the elite of societies -- always discover that it is beneath their dignity to continue to do the concrete things which caused their rise...the contemporary American decision to manufacture as much as possible abroad with cheap labor, while concentrating on services at home, is undermining their own civilization." -- pp. 381 and 261

Reassuring Reflections of Ancient Paganism
"A civilization of structure flees doubt. And so, quite naturally, rational man has debased modern imagery into the lower ritual forms of pagan religion...When societies are at the end of a line of evolution, there is often confusion as to which is reality and which ritual. The result can be disastrous."-- pp. 428 and 455

Prime Candidates for Replacement
"Societies on the rise are simple, unadorned and relatively uncompromising. Those on the decline are given to open-mindedness, self-indulgence and the baroque." --p. 467

From Simple Ideas to Byzantine Systems
"The end of something often resembles the beginning. More often than not our nose-to-the-glass view makes us believe that the end we are living is in fact a new beginning. This confusion is typical of an old civilization's self-confidence -- limited by circumstances and by an absence of memory -- and in many ways resembling the sort often produced by senility. Our rational need to control understanding and therefore memory has simply accentuated the confusion....Nothing seems more permanent than a long-established government about to lose power, nothing more invincible than a grand army on the morning of its annihilation." --pp. 30 and 31

All quotations from John Ralston Saul, Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West (New York: Vintage,1992)

Dogs Playing Poker or A Game of Federal Bailout

2009-03-02T00:51:00.026-05:00

The Netherlands treats Jan Steen's mid- 17th century genre painting ''Soo voer gesongen, soo na gepepen" as a cultural treasure. Here in the New World, the fellow who comes closest to replicating the artistry and wit of the Old Dutch Masters is Cassius Marcellus Coolidge. Unfortunately, the provenance of his work of belongs to cigar box lids of the 1920's, beer mugs, ash trays, and poor quality chromolithographs sold today at flea markets or on websites run by eccentric prophets crying the genius of Dogs Playing Poker into the ether of cyberspace for a few bucks profit.

If you wish to enlighten yourself about the social significance of the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Holman Hunt or Ford Madox Brown, as well as examine the cultural implications of those animal paintings of Sir Edwin Landseer which endowed dogs with human emotion to "make them icons of domestic virtue and sympathies," Professor Martin A. Danahey's essay Domestic Animals and Violence will start the ball rolling. Innumerable scholarly biographies and studies of the aforementioned artists exist to help you along. Not so for the American paragon of canine anthropomorphism, the Jan Steen of the beleaguered unprofessionalized middle-class world of the American male of the early years of the 20th century. An earnest but amateur Biography is the best source we have. This is unfortunate for, like all great artists, the sometime banker "Cash," as his friends called him, has left us timeless works. For example, I find that his most popular painting -- A Friend in Need -- provides us with a timeless visual typology of the meaning of the term " federal bailout" as it applies to today's great game of finance and poker faced speculation.

Manifestos: Alive, Dead, Homo and Earth Centric

2009-02-25T17:07:00.042-05:00

A few days ago, the always interesting website Neojaponisme featured an essay on 100 Years of Futurism by W. David Marx (February 20, 2009) in celebration of the centennial of the appearance of a piece entitled "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" on the front page of Le Figaro. It was written by F.T. Marinetti, a relatively-obscure 32 year-old Italian poet whose call to action reflected his peer group's fear that without a redefinition of greatness they would be unable to create great art. Both for its own sake and as context for his essay, David Marx highly recommends taking a few minutes to read the full text of Marinetti's Manifesto. His reasons for his recommendation highlight the appeal that some manifestos may still carry for contemporary readers despite the fact that the subject of the documents may be a historical dead letter or irrelevant to their present concerns.

Thus, Marx tells us that "the Manifesto can still be a useful corrective for any contemporary artist and writer and thinker, with applicable lessons for this deeply Futurist-inspired future. Despite the familiarity of the Manifesto’s convictions, I still swoon in its romantic energy. Even in translation, Marinetti’s prose jabs against familiar rivals with the speed of a master pugilist, almost proto-gonzo. Thank god for the historical detail of good newspaper placement, or otherwise he could be easily charged with unbearable pretension and self-indulgence. But it is exactly Marinetti’s choice of romantic idealism over cynicism that allows the text to still feel alive today."

No such feeling transpires during a reading of Futurism e-visited -- the postmodern follow-up to Marinetti's romantic idealistic and breathless rhetoric of innocent pugilism. Here is chastened youth, war weary, heavy with portfolio gained at art school, in possession of I.T certification. Futurism e-visited even comes with the following abstract, a fitting formal device to herald a hundred years' senectitude.

ABSTRACT: The paper [i.e., Futurism e-visited] argues the centrality of Futurist aesthetics and philosophies to current performance work utilising computer technologies, and suggests that Futurism’s legacy to ‘digital performance’ has been greatly underestimated. A close analysis of Futurist theatre manifestos reveals clear relationships between theatrical plans and practices separated by almost a century. These include fundamental principles of Futurist performance art such as alogicality, parallel action, photodynamism, luminous scenography, virtual actors, ‘synthetic theatre’ and the cult of the machine.

Readers with an appetite for manifestos (or is it manifestoes), gourmands of this self-referential call to action, can find a compendium of examples at Manifestos.net ,a web site devoted to manifestos in politics, philosophy, and the arts. The best general essay I have found on the subject of the manifesto as genre of rhetoric is the introductory essay by Mary Ann Caws, "The Poetics of the Manifesto: Nowness and Newness" in Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws (U of Nebraska Press, 2001). However, unless I am mistaken, here are four manifestos not included in either of these sources that too may well be worth taking a few minutes to read their full texts.

Dead Media Manifesto. The concept for the Dead Media Project was first conceived by science writer Bruce Sterling in Boing Boing magazine. Sterling posted the Dead Media Manifesto. and asked for help in creating a virtual library dedicated to past forms of media. This request was also made public in a speech on dead media at the International Symposium on Electronic Arts in Montreal, Canada in September, 1995

With a hat tip to Leonardo Boiko, who commented on the "100 Years of Futurism" at Neojaponisme, here's a not to be forgotten manifesto which I am not sure how to title at : http://imomus.com/wordsandpictures.html. As the site Words And Pictures Texts explains, "in 1994 Iain Forsythe and Jane Pollard, two art students from London's Goldsmith's College of Art, had the idea to distribute limited edition art by young artists in boxes.They asked Momus to write a short text for the first box. His parody of a classic art movement manifesto gave the series its title: 'Ultra-Paranoid (Extra-Spatial) Portable Art'. The manifesto attained respectability when it was shown in a glass case in the Musee D'Art Moderne in Paris as part of their 'Live / Life' British Art Show in 1996."

And of course, there's the equally never to be forgotten, constant guide for the daily development of all earth's citizens -- Morning of the Magicians. As R.T Gault tells us, The Quixotic Dialectical Metaphysical Manifesto - Morning of the Magicians "contains almost all of the themes that typify the fantastic and visionary ideals now associated with the 60's and 70's."

And speaking of quixotic dialectal metaphysical manifestos, any complete list must reference A Manifesto for Earth . Its rhetoric transforms Marinetti's pugilistic heat into an o' so glacial postmodern call for the rejection of chauvinistic homocentrism. Clearly its authors never practiced magic at dawn, of if they did, they didn't do it with heart. I am charitable, so I choose to think of them as the true inheritors of Marinetti's Futuristic spirit. Hence it is that this earth-centered crew of A Manifesto for Earth just can't grog the reality of the folks who participate in the Citizen's Manifesto 2067 . I highly recommend taking a few minutes to read the full text of what is formally entitled a "Citizens' Manifesto for a people defined roadmap of India till 2067. " Listen to its calming, unpugilistic patriotism. Note how it subtly promises to season its poetics with theatre. And then know that it does so, or by "virtual actors" gives us a simulacrum of its so doing. Click on the title of this post to see how the progenitors of Citizens' Manifesto 2067 spread the word via the cult of youtube.

Experimental Philosophy - Shadows in Plato's Cave

2009-02-22T00:45:00.010-05:00

Please click on the title of this posting to enter Plato's cave where you will be self-induced to ask yourself the question : "Who the hell are these folk who hold to these tautological folk concepts?"

Quod erat demonstrandum: Under the hegemony of performativity the struggle for tenure gets harder each day; don't it? Especially when narrative no longer cuts it. See this review of Lyotard to learn why the young professors of philosophy are rushing to practice docimasy on the tropes of philosophy.http://www.arasite.org/lyotard1.htm ; and see this review to further appreciate the salvage work afoot in university circles to make Minerva's owl hoo-hoo to a performative tune: http://www.philosophersnet.com/magazine/article.php?id=1078

Hubble as Terror Management Machine

2009-02-20T01:25:00.029-05:00

Astronomy used to bore me. In its own way it was as boring as the taxonomy of insects. It was all star maps, planetary trajectories and abstruse incomprehensible classifications. But the HubbleSite is different. It's a primary aesthetic generator. It's a real Memento mori engine. It's an orbiting existential dreadnought.

Mars Rovers excite warm homey feelings of estrangement. Their images are familiar. They are like clicking on the title of this posting to walk into an Edward Hopper painting of light and solitude. But Hubble cuts the ground right out from under my feet. The Hubble Deep Field is troubling strange like a Sivalinga. It's an epoche generator to bracket out thought of what came before and what will come after.

The Hubble Telescope is my friend. It reminds me that the splendor of the Creator of the Universe is in the skies. It's a Terror management theory machine. It proves the validity of the mortality salience hypothesis. It leads me to invest in cultural belief systems that imbue life with meaning. OM NAMA SIVAYA

Vietnam's Cheap Socks and Other Icons of Loss

2009-02-16T23:26:00.027-05:00

-- We call it the Vietnam War. They call it the American War. --

This afternoon I bought three pairs of dress socks for $3.75 in Wal-Mart. They were made in Vietnam. Take a look at this website and tell me if you think I should have paid more for my socks -- http://www.travelersdigest.com/us_vietnam_war_atrocities.htm ?

This evening I read Moira Roth's Obdurate History: Dinh Q. Le, the Vietnam War, Photography, and Memory in Art Journal (Summer 2001). If you read this essay, be sure to note the "sponsored links" at the end. They help to define what is meant by the phrase "the tragedy of history."

And speaking of socks, here's a letter that exemplifies the slow, but steady, consequences of losing a war. It's an iconic statement in a minor key of what it sounds like to be a "sore loser": http://www.usvtc.org/trade/wto/textile/LetterDMC27Dec06.pdf

Coughing Up Blood: Cutting Words in Haiku

2009-02-13T07:44:00.018-05:00

Let me paraphrase what Emerson asked Thoreau on 22 October 1837: What are you doing now? Have you read the Manifesto of the blog Neojaponisme ?

Celebrating mukokuseki (無国籍) — a “no nationality” framework of the modern world -- the Manifesto welcomes the digital resources of a modern technology that "allows greater freedom from the chains of the fourth dimension" but realizes such "freedom creates severe competition from ghosts. " In contrast to my favorite negative example -- the arts and crafts pastbound Pre-Rapaelite brotherhood -- the Manifesto calls for temporal multivalence:

Our generation has no choice but to indulge in a revised futurism beyond the historically-anchored concept of Futurism. Uninhibited time-shifting and multi-directional time-travel are more advanced than constantly pushing the seams of forward progress. With no new territory, we cannot simply be the New Adventures of Lewis and Clark to etch our names in heavy tomes. We must move back and forth, side to side in our honest attempt to break new ground.

In its nine point concluding statement -- "We Want! We Don’t Want!" -- the Manifesto asks:

Who will sit down and read an essay when the Internet Gods provide hundreds of fragments and gimmicks in its place? We denounce this addiction to sweets and promise to provide protein to the hungry masses. Do children dream of being linkers or linkees?

Please click on the title of this post to read "Transliterating Shiki." It is a parade example of the kind of essay found at Neojaponisme, where careful attention is paid to the needs of readers who do not have Japanese. Its subject is Kireji ("cutting word"), a special Japanese linguistic category for which there is no obvious equivalent in English. For me, its analysis of how the right transliteration of Kireji can help express the inexpressible experience framed by haiku writer and poet Masaoka Shiki, as well as the experience of those readers who share the haiku aesthetic, validates the premises and the promise of the site's Manifesto.

If Ruskin Were Alive Today He'd Author the Barrista Code of Conduct

2009-02-12T16:34:00.015-05:00

I'm thinking about my post for Tuesday, January 20, 2009: "If William Morris Were Alive Today He Would Have Invented Starbucks."

Does anyone agree that if John Ruskin were alive today, he would have written "The Barrista Code of Conduct"? You can find this oh-so Pre-Raphaelite code at:http://www.coffeegeek.com/opinions/bgafiles/06-02-2005.

Click on the title of this posting to make a virtual visit to Brantwood, the former home of John Ruskin. Here we are told: Displays and activities in the house, gardens and estate reflect the wealth of cultural associations associated with Ruskin’s legacy – from the Pre Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts Movement to the founding of the National Trust and the Welfare State. .

Salvage Gastronomy Defines a Church Fair

2009-02-11T17:50:00.006-05:00

Episcopal churches in the better parts of New York City hold great annual winter and spring "fairs" where slightly outmoded squash rackets, cross country skis, hand knit Norwegian sweaters too warm for today's weather, solid ceramic ashtrays with the J. P. Morgan logo from before the acquisition by Chase, still serviceable sweater sets, and suchlike stuff, distinguish these "fairs" from the church bazaars or rummage sales of other denominations. Although Unitarian Universalists do not share a creed among themselves, they do share with Episcopals a natural attitude toward the world anchored in rummage sales and the social gospel. Hence they too hold seasonal "fairs" with jumble somewhat less heavy on the Orvis and L.L. Bean brands but nevertheless still recognizably isomorphic with the aforementioned Anglican stuff except for a wantage which, though singular, is sufficiently critical to raise doubt about the authenticity of any Unitarian Universalist claim to "fairness."

Only twice in the last seven years have I failed to find the article that functions as a material shibboleth to distinguish a fair from a rummage sale. It's found in the used book section, usually located next to the ranks of foxed copies of Gentlemen Sail to Weather and gardening and bonsai manuals. Placed by unenlightened volunteers, it rests amidst its putative peers: the hardcover, paperbacked, and spiral bound cookbooks whose well worn pages testify to the use made of their recipes. It's the hard cover, usually exquisitely or at least amply illustrated cookbook that belongs to the genre of "salvage gastronomy." That is to say, the class of cookbooks produced under the spell of the "salvage paradigm" that was the ruling motivation of ethnologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who desired to rescue "authenticity" out of destructive change. As the anthropologist James Clifford reminds us, the salvage paradigm did not die with Franz Boas and his disciples. It is alive and well in ethnographic writing, in the coffee table books of Edward S. Curtis's photographs of The North American Indian, in connoisseurships and collections of the art world, in illustrated narratives of native spirituality and exhibits produced by royal museums, and in a range of familiar nostalgia.

In our instance, the salvage paradigm takes a gastronomic turn in donations of cookery books published at least twenty years ago now offered for sale as rummage. Their mint or near mint condition evidences that they were not meant to be propped open on the kitchen table or granite counter to be ruffled by hands sticky with oyster supreme sauce, or repeatedly thumbed by amateur chefs anxious to confirm how often the saddle of Magdalen venison is turned each day during its week long marinade bath. Like my favorite, Shizuo Tsuji's Japanese Cooking A Simple Art, they are best savored as a reading experience anchored in the dyadic relation between aesthetic contemplation and the consciousness of a stock of knowledge never to be unselfconsciously practiced again.

Tipping as an Emotional Toll

2009-02-06T18:07:00.021-05:00

Tipping a Feudal Survival

Tipping, as the The Telegraph's polemical commentator Gerald Warner reminds us, is a feudal survival. "It was the coin thrown by a nobleman to the ostler who fetched his horse, or some similar lackey. Its purpose was to enable the recipient to drink his benefactor's health, hence the terms pourboire in France and trinkgeld in Germany. Its survival is a gratifying echo of hierarchy which is why it is disliked by grey egalitarians." Only an avatar from the Spinsters' Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore on 9 February 1963 would argue, as Warner puts it, " that, since it is no longer the social custom to thrash with a cane or riding-crop those whose service has been unsatisfactory, it is inequitable to reward those who have given satisfaction." [1]

The Progressive Argument

In the early twentieth century progressives argued that tipping reinforced that era's undemocratic social ethos and threatened its democratic polity. Although it lacks access to the sociological construct of social constructionism, or, perhaps, because this deficiency allows its author to write with the lapidary clarity of the muckraker, William R. Scott's 1916 work, The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America, is still pertinent. For example, here's Scott on "the ethics of tipping":

Where all men are equal, some cannot become superior unless the others grovel in the dust. Tipping comes into a democracy to produce that relation.

Tipping is the price of pride. It is what one American is willing to pay to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority. It represents the root of aristocracy budding anew in the hearts of those who publicly renounced the system and all its works.

Tipping is the training school of graft...The tipping practice has created an atmosphere of petty graft, the constant breathing of which breeds all other forms of dishonesty. It is small wonder that with so much avarice in low places that we have been shocked by graft in high places. The tipping custom is educating the grafting spirit much faster than the prosecuting arm of the government can destroy it. [2]

The Itching Palm is salutary reading. Its strictures strike me as especially applicable to today's class of civil servants who use their subordinates as their personal servants. This is a group just as greedy and corrupt as the "honest grafters," who as a criminal type have survived from the progressive era till today. The lessons of The Itching Palm apply as well to "public servants" who believe their retirement from office entitles them to sluice themselves with either new wealth gained from the pourboires they can earn as lobbyists or, if one is a sometime President like Bill Clinton, buckets of trinkgeld from foreign potentates. But my view may well be a minority view held only by those who believe that a ritual, such as tipping, can function to both create and to reinforce a world-view.

From Degradation to Worth

The progressives of the last century were well aware of the exculpatory argument that tipping signals not the degradation of the server but rather the server's worth. [3] However, as the tone and reasoning of their writings indicate, they believed it insufficiently dominant to prevail against the view that held tipping to be an undemocratic moral and political hazard. Although shaky, I think that the progressive view still prevails in the civic realm. For example, although it was nip and tuck right down to the wire, in the end Tom Daschle's type of "Honest Graft" in Our Time was still too much of an obstacle for him to overcome in order to secure appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services. However, when applied to the private sphere, the view that sees tipping to be a moral hazard is no longer dominant. One reason for this is that most contemporary consumers are unaware that the notion that tipping signals the server's worth screens a repertoire of manipulative practices intended for the positive emotional management of the tipper. In this posting let me offer examples from the world of waiters and waitresses.

Tipping as an Emotional Toll

On the institutional level very few would-be tippers know, and very few waitpersons wish them to know, that in what is known as "pooled houses" a tip does not go directly to the waiter. Rather, both cash and credit card gratuities are added up at the end of a shift and apportioned to waitresses and waiters, busboys and the like according to a point system. "Pooled houses" are generally upscale restaurants.

By contrast, Professor Michael Lynn's booklet "Mega Tips: Scientifically Tested Techniques to Increase Your Tips" (2004) is geared to low to mid-priced, casual dining restaurants. Its techniques of emotional manipulation are intended for the nearly two million people who work as waiters or waitresses in the United States who depend on what he terms "voluntary gifts of money " from their customers for the vast majority of their income. "Mega Tips" provides instruction in the psychology of the emotional management of tippers along with the following thirteen specific techniques designed to yield bigger voluntary gifts of money. In excerpt format, here's what Dr. Lynn professes:

Although you must usually wear a server’s uniform at work, add a distinctive element of clothing, jewelry or other adornment to your uniforms so that you stand out. This will help customers perceive you as an individual person rather than a faceless member of the staff.

Introduce yourself by name when greeting their customers. If done properly, these introductions make you seem friendly and polite and make the customer feel more empathy for you.

Most servers stand throughout the service encounter. Instead, you should experiment with squatting down next to the table when interacting with your customers. [Click on the title of this post to see the authentic way to squat]

Repeat customers' orders...researchers have found that briefly and subtly imitating or mimicking others increases those others’ liking for, and interpersonal closeness to, the imitator.

Research has confirmed the cultural wisdom on smiling and has found that smiling people are perceived as more attractive, sincere, sociable and competent than are unsmiling people. These interpersonal effects of smiling suggest that you may be able to increase your tip earnings by smiling at your customers.

Sell, Sell, Sell!!!...During a slow shift, sales can be increased through suggestive selling. Thus, you should recommend appetizers, liquor, wine, expensive entrée selections, and desserts during slow shifts.

In commercial settings, casually touching customers has been shown to increase the time they spend shopping in a store, the amounts that they purchase, and the favorability of their store evaluations. These positive effects suggest that being touched may also increase the tips that customers leave their servers...relax and touch your customers briefly on the shoulder when delivering the check. Doing so will not upset them. On the contrary, it will make them think you are friendlier and that the service is better.

Entertain customers...research indicates that servers who recognize and satisfy their customers’ needs for entertainment are tipped more than those who do not.

Forecast good weather...servers who live where the weather is highly variable can increase tips by telling their customers that sunny weather is on the way.

Try writing "Thank you" and signing your name on the backs of checks before you deliver the checks to your customers...Expressions of gratitude may also make customers feel obligated to earn that gratitude by leaving larger tips.

Drawing a"smiley face" on the backs of checks will increase tips...This manipulation significantly affected the waitress’ tips, but not those of the waiter.

Restaurants often post signs informing customers that credit cards are accepted. These signs, and other displays of credit card insignia, can be seen on restaurant doors, windows, counters, menus, table tents, tip trays and cash registers. Although it is not clear why, research has found that simply seeing these insignia increases consumers’ willingness to spend money. So, whenever possible, you should use those tip trays and folio booklets with credit card logos.

People generally feel obligated to reciprocate when they receive gifts from others. You can benefit from this by giving your customers after-dinner mints or candies.

Calling people by their names tells them that they are considered important. most people find such recognition flattering and enjoyable. Thus, you should get larger tips when you call your customers by name.

Such Condescension

The more I learn about the emotional management techniques of the server (and the emotional labor involved in such management) the more I agree with William R. Scott. "Tipping is the modern form of Flunkyism. Flunkyism may be defined as a willingness to be servile for a consideration. It is democracy's deadly foe...The tendency always is for one to sap the vitality of the other." [5] After going to school with Professor Lynn or noodling through the good parts of Waiter Rant (the book and the blog), I grow nostalgic for the old self-service cafeteria. With democratic zeal, I resolve to decrease my gratuity footprint. It's not because I have a great taste for lumpy oatmeal or soggy cafeteria corn beef hash. It's because I have no taste for such condescension as is signaled by tipping.

References:
[1] Gerald Warner, "Tipping Staff Is at Our Discretion - Not the Government's" (Posted November 19, 2008, in Society) at: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner .

[2] William R. Scott, The Itching Palm: A Study of the Habit of Tipping in America (1916),pp. 37, 42-43: http://www.archive.org/details/itchingpalmstudy00scotrich .

[3] See footnote 31 in Ian Ayres, Fredrick Vars, and Nasser Zakariya, "To Insure Prejudice: Racial Disparities in Taxicab Tipping," Yale Law Journal, vol. 114, issue 7 (May 2005)pp. 1613- 1674 at: http://yalelawjournal.org/114/7/1613_ian_ayres_fredrick_e_vars_nasser_zakariya.html

[4] Michael Lynn is Associate Professor, School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University. "Mega Tips" is available at: http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/wml3/pdf/megatips.pdf .

[5] Scott, p. 7.

Second Thoughts About Zuihitsu

2009-02-05T00:53:00.005-05:00

With nothing better to do, I pass the day meditating on the pure forms of Internet Wonder Rooms - Plots Without Stories. I realize I ought to have compared this virtual genre to zuihitsu and jotted down something about Wabi-sabi . I should have traced the link between commonplace books, pillow books, and impermanence

A single word can stimulate the urge to annotate until a world-view is revealed. For example, imagine how much of a gloss one can give to "upsell" or consider "wanker." As the following definition 15 in the urbandictionary entry for wanker proves, the very word can become a brush with which to paint a cultural topography of an urban zipcode.

Wanker:
A transient (usually male) to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC, zipcode 11211. These men usually do nothing for a living yet have more money than they know what to do with. Oddly they are not wealthy people and display themselves as poor. They are older versions of Emos. Their emotional issues have now been dealt with and their time is to be spent sipping coffee and toting the latest Apple computers from Cybercafe to other Cybercafes. Mode of transportation is usually skateboards with the minor exception of "vintage" bicycles. They can be found up and down Bedford Street but with it becoming more and more popular, Wankers are likely to relocate. And of course they have the means to do it. The question is always "how do they have that money?"
Anybody in the zipcode 11211 with a home-based job in the arts, music, photography, or blogging. One exception stands out - realty...

Give Us the Tools to Close the Chav Gap

2009-02-02T01:21:00.027-05:00

Lexicographically speaking, wangster and wigga are nothing like chav . Does the United States have a blason populaire so rich in its denotative and connotative vitriol ? Alas, I think not.

Of the more than 3,678,164 definitions written since 1999, urbandictionary.com contains no better word than "chav" (which many believe to be an acronym for Council Housed and Violent) to illustrate the truth that England and America are, as George Bernard Shaw is supposed to have once said, two nations divided by a common language. And this is despite the fact that from baseball hats to McDonalds, the accouterments of the chav are our gifts to our English cousins.

If the USA is serious about closing the chav gap, if Americans are really down with the notion of developing a social subject whose blason populaire has a potency we all can believe in, then the time has come for words not deeds. Let us echo the exhortation that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick in his 2009 State of the State message plagiarized from Winston Churchill: "Give us the tools and we will finish the job."

References:
Deval Patrick:
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/01/gov_deval_patricks_2009_state.html

Winston Churchill:
http://www.winstonchurchill.org/i4a/pages/index.cfm?pageid=1188

Linguistic analysis of "chav" in the blog Separated By a Common Language:
http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/search?q=chav

See also:
townie

asbo