Sleuthing

Several months ago I was on a northbound bus when a man and his son boarded. One stop later, the son disembarked and began walking south.

I've thought about this off and on, and here's the best conclusion I've reached: the son was there to buy a cheap ticket that he could pass off to a third party that was waiting for him.

method

Walter Benjamin:

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

I've experienced this many times. An idea comes to mind, but I don't write it down for quite some time, maybe for months. I rarely trust notes. Generally if I make a note of something, I'm never going to expand on that note. Outlines and notes are for after a piece of writing is already half-formed, for when something has already been tested.

Impressions

The disappointing thing about Nietzsche is that he admired Emerson.

The strangeness in reading Foucault is that he cites basically no other scholarship on what he's writing about.

What do you do with the body?

For ten years I concentrated on how to become more and more ethereal, how to lose my substance. For the last four, I've learned how to become more and more material.

How does the body lose its materiality? How does the immaterial gain substance? Those are the questions that have bothered me for a long time.

econ 101

The question I find myself asking in regards to politics, laws, policies, and regulations these days, especially in terms of economics, isn't who will benefit but who will benefit the most. What does it matter if a change in laws will help small businesses when it will help the large corporations even more? Likewise, the question isn't who will lose out but who will lose the most.

This is also the question I have in regards to, say, gay marriage. Who will benefit the most from institutionalizing gay marriage? Probably the divorce attorneys and conservative politicians who can split the gay vote. As I've heard, it was a debate in the gay community, whether or not legalized marriage was even a good goal to strive for, even if there seems to be little debate now.

The kicker is that what's good for the party isn't good for the politician. Legalizing gay marriage probably won't lose the party many voters (where would they turn? to the liberals?), but it could definitely lose a politician some votes.

conservative evolutionists

I'm convinced that in a few years, if it hasn't happened, conservative Christians will realize that there's nothing in evolution counter to their theology. Evolution still provides as much of a mechanism for hereditary sin as creation does (I mean, it makes as much or as little sense with evolution as it does with creation, it just doesn't necessarily start with Adam and Eve). The only thing that might have to change is their understanding of the Bible, but they will probably adjust to literalism being the 'intentions' of the writers, so that the literal truth of Genesis is that it is mythology. That's just my prediction.

15th Ave 7-11

The neighborhood paperboy was burning out his lungs and blowing smoke rings in the parking lot when I rolled up. He looked at me then looked away as I walked to the door. I couldn’t blame him.

I’d seen the type of place before: flashy neon lights and bright paint on the outside, a wall of windows and, on the inside, shelves of packaged food. But this joint was different, somehow.

It didn’t take long for me to find what I was looking for: a packaged burrito and a can of soda. These burritos taste like cardboard but the price is right.

Behind the register, the cashier was filing her nails and watching some old soap on the television.

“You want a bag with that, mister?” I could tell she was a classy broad because she had a full set of teeth. Around here, that still counts for something.

I ignored her question, leaned over the counter and said, “What kind of square feet you think this place has? Five hundred?”

“Whatever you say, mister.”

“You been working this gig for very long?”

“Well, that depends. Is six years a long time?”

Something seemed fishy but I couldn’t put my finger on it so I said, “Lot of lights in this place. You must run up a hundred bucks a month in electric bills alone.”

“This ain’t my place,” she said. “So do you want a bag with that?”

They went in the bag even though I didn’t say anything. I slapped some bills on the counter--enough for the tab and six dollars for a tip, one dollar for every year she’d worked there--grabbed the bag and walked outside, back into the night. The paperboy had cleared out, and I figured I’d better do the same.

repetition

From Repetition by Soren Kierkegaard.

If, on the other hand, there is nothing in particular one has to accomplish on one's trip, one can just wait for something to happen. One will sometimes see things in this way that others miss, look past the important sights, catch an accidental impression that has meaning only for oneself. Such a careless vagabond does not usually have much to communicate to others, and if he does try to communicate something, he easily runs the risk of undermining the positive opinion good people might have concerning his moral character and manners

Isn't this what is at work every time I go walking, or engage in conversation, or perform music, or even every time I read? There's a certain amount of gambling to each of these things, but a part of every gamble is being aware of the very real possibility that it will end in catastrophic loss or humiliation or, maybe worse, boredom.

My priorities in reading have very little to do with comprehensive knowledge of a work, or the ability to detail main arguments and trajectories and define terms. And I rarely feel embarrassment about failing to remember, or the way that my memory of a text works (I can never remember cold, I almost always need triggers). Perhaps because, in my opinion, forgetting is the only way to make sense of something or, perhaps, because my interest in smaller matters has usually looped me back around to the heart of the matter anyway.

sewer baptisms

While reading an article about the Paris sewer system, I came across this pasage.

The sensuous flow of water (and even the advocacy of cleanliness in readiness for sexual pleasure) struck at the heart of conflicting concerns with moral purity, hygiene and social order. Washing had long been associated with pagan sensuality in early Christian belief, and, for most of the nineteenth century, the bathroom was restricted to the homes of the rich, tourist hotels and luxury brothels.

Which of course makes me think of baptism, or further connections between morality and cleanliness. This passage makes me notice how infrequent the connections are in the new testament between baptism and moral purity. More frequently, baptism is coupled with death. For instance, in Romans, "By no means! We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer? Or don’t you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." Dead to sin, not cleansed from it. Sin as neither crisis nor structure?

A cursory investigation indicates that in the gospels, cleaning and washing are almost always in reference to the body, physical cleanliness and especially disease. The epistles are where cleanliness shows up in reference to morality.

Orientation

Orientation of the windows in rooms I've had for the past 13 years.

Happy Home - South and East Windows
Mosers - East
House in Nang Lae - South and West Windows
House in Bandu - South
Isaksons - West
Dorm Room 1 - North
Dorm Room 2 - Northeast
Basement at Zach's - North
Wallingford - West
Queen Anne 1 - South
Oxford - South
Queen Anne 2 - West
Capitol Hill - East

East: 3.5
West: 4
North: 2.5
South: 5

East is the ideal direction, for sunrise. But I would take any orientation of window, or any size of room, for a room that wasn't ground level or basement.

My window at the Bandu house caught a lot of the afternoon sun, and a lot of my books were subsequently damaged.

fashion

 

'Last Stand' Canvas Mocassins - $70
'White Flight' Single-Source Cotton Socks - $25
'Emergency' Topless Jumpsuit - $180 (belt loops available by special order)
Pinstripe Rayon/Polyester Shirt with Pre-Popped Collar - $120
'Blu-nibrow' Indoor Shades - $65

21st Century Scientists Have it So Easy

After several years of collecting specimens and keeping journals in the Amazon, AR Wallace was on his way back to England when his ship caught fire and sank. He ended up spending 10 days on an open boat before being picked up by another ship. He notes in the November, 1852 issue of Zoologist that "The only things which I saved were my watch, my drawings of fishes, and a portion of my notes and journals. Most of my journals, notes on the habits of animals, and drawings of the transformations of insects, were lost."

A few pages down, I started reading about another naturalist named Julian Deby. The account is that "suddenly he was himself seized with the malignant fever of the country, and had his whole body covered with tumours. He was for six weeks completely laid up, and nearly all the time unconscious; when he came to himself, his first thought was for his collections: alas! his Indian servant had forgotten to fill up with tar the plates laid under the bench which supported his boxes, and the ants (a small red species) had devoured every specimen in his collection."

I love that whoever wrote up that second report paused to specify what type of servant failed to protect the research, and what type of ant ate Deby's collection. A true scientist.

markets

In the Malay Archipelago, written in the 1860s, AR Wallace comments on the state of Timor. He notes that it is more trouble than profit to the Dutch and Portuguese rulers, proposes a few changes, then finishes with this:

Under such a system the natives would soon perceive that European government was advantageous to them. They would begin to save money, and property being rendered secure they would rapidly acquire new wants and new tastes, and become large consumers of European goods. This would be a far surer source of profit to their rulers than imposts and extortion...

While Wallace didn't anticipate the end of colonial rule, isn't this more or less what has happened? The formation of new desires and new markets?

The Kind of Barber I Want

The last time I went to a barbershop for a hair cut, I was 15. In the 8 years since then, I've cut my hair myself with a little help from my friends and mom (to trim up the back) and have even handed over the scissors to my girlfriend to do the whole thing. Reading Arabian Nights, I came across a barber who makes his customer miserable with endless talk. He says this about himself:

God in His bounty has provided you with a barber who is also an astrologer, a chemist, an expert in natural magic, grammar, morphology, philology, rhetoric, eloquence, logic, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, religious law, the traditions of the Prophet and the interpretation of the Quran. I have read the relevant books and studied them; I have a practical knowledge of affairs; I have commited to heart a perfect knowledge of the sciences; I am a theoretical and practical master of technical skill. There is nothing that I have not organized and undertaken.

Now that's the kind of barber I'm looking for. I've considered a few barbers at various times, but at the moment of decision I've never gone through with it. If I found a barber shop that was open at 3 in the morning, an all-night barber shop, I would have gone a long time ago.

Night Walks

Since I was a teenager I've enjoyed walking around at night. Most nights while vacationing on the Gulf of Thailand, I'd walk up and down the beach and, while visiting other cities, I loved walking around the night bazaars and streets to see what was happening. I kept this up when I moved to the States for college, but I was disappointed to find that not much happens in Seattle outside, after dark.

Charles Dickens was a big walker, and a big night walker, and started out a piece on the subject this way:

Some years ago, a temporary inability to sleep, referable to a distressing impression caused me to walk about the streets all night, for a series of several nights The disorder might have taken a long time to conquer, if it had been faintly experimented on in bed, but, it was soon defeated by the brisk treatment of getting up directly after lying down, and going out, and coming home tired at sunrise.

I think he was on to something. All of last year, when I was working on my project on Dickens, Darwin, and Nietzsche, I suspected that I would have breezed through it if I'd written all through the night, rather than trying to write during the day. I never had the guts to do it.

architecture

…but another aspect (or spectre) of architecture is how sedimentary it is, either the different buildings in a neighborhood or city, or the difference in the building (renovations, I guess). And what is sedimentary? Differences of materials used for construction, the money and means available to whoever was bankrolling the project, restrictions that speak to different building codes at different times, the technologies first included or added on afterwards (some more successfully than others). And then there’s the history that gets wrapped up in a building through fire, earthquakes, vehicular accidents, etc.

Returning to Thailand after the economic crash in 1997, one of the first things I noticed was how many buildings were left half-built after the funding disappeared. Most of them are still unfinished.

And, of course, while we often know who rents or even owns a building, the designers and, especially, the builders disappear.

Many other professions depend on form, materials, and aesthetics working together, but a lot more depends on the structural integrity of, say, a 6-story apartment complex, or a half-mile suspension bridge than on the structural integrity of a 12-string guitar.

a little vision of hell

The man's girlfriend pretends to be pregnant so that he'll marry her. They come to hate each other. They raise a pig and when the butcher is late, slaughter it themselves. After that she starts throwing his books around the house

'Leave my books alone!' he said. 'You might have thrown them aside if you had liked, but as to soiling them like that, it is disgusting!' In the operation of making lard Arabella's hands had become smeared with the hot grease, and her fingers consequently left very perceptible imprints on the book-covers. She continued deliberately to toss the books severally upon the floor, till Jude, incensed beyond bearing, caught her by the arms to make her leave off.

Jude the Obscure is off to a great start.

a partial list of books I own but haven't read

Pickwick Papers - Dickens
Pictures from Italy - Dickens
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Jude the Obscure - Hardy
Lord Jim - Joseph Conrad
The Persian Expedition - Xenophon
The Ticklish Subject - Zizek
The Plague of Fantasies - Zizek
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Hardy
The Long Valley - Steinbeck
The Storm - Daniel Defoe
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
Lost Illusions - Balzac
The Wings of the Dove - Henry James
Mardi - Herman Melville
The Confidence Man - Herman Melville
Letters from My Windmill - Daudet
The Three Musketeers - Dumas
The Bostonians - Henry James
The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
Spring Currents - Turgenev
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
McTeague - Frank Norris
The Secret Agent - Conrad
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Annals of Imperial Rome - Tacitus
Barchester Towers - Trollope
Moll Flanders - Defoe
A Pair of Blue Eyes - Hardy
The Nature of the Universe - Lucretius
Felix Holt - George Eliot
Jonathan Wild - Henry Fielding
Vanity Fair - Thackeray

And the list goes on.

One of my teachers in high school told me that he really didn't start reading until after college. While I'm still reading a lot, I don't think many of my friends do. Some of them have embraced the book totally as an aesthetic object, used mostly for design purposes in a room. A full shelf looks good. A full shelf of good books in good condition, even if you've never read the books to know they're good, looks great.

The real question is how the hell I got so many Thomas Hardy books when I didn't even really like the one book of his I did read, the Mayor of Casterbridge. Jude the Obscure I picked up in Vancouver, CA while on a trip with friends. Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess I bought because I thought I'd have to read them in Oxford. a Pair of Blue Eyes I grabbed off a free table in a hospital...

dusty

Many things can, and often do, disturb my reading: bad lighting, an uncomfortable seat, too much talking or not enough, the wrong type of music. Then there are problems having to do with the book itself. The story's boring or the style is bloated, the book's spine doesn't bend right, the font is hard to read or the pages are too thin and I can pick up the writing on the other side of the page (Norton anthologies.) I become confused and agitated, have trouble concentrating. But the most crippling obstruction for me is dust.

At first everything seems normal and then my nose begins to run. I wipe my nose on my hand (which is now dusty from holding the book), my nose runs even more, and my face starts to itch. Most of the time the books I read are clean enough that this is not much of a problem--I'm careful now about smelling the used books that I buy to check how dusty they are even if they otherwise are undamaged.

I can remember a few books that were dusty enough to make me miserable while reading, most recently Stendhal's Scarlet and Black, which always left me itchy and snotty. It happened most distinctly while reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. Even now, when I ask myself whether I liked the novel or not, I think, "Well, it was so dusty." I have almost no recollection of what happened in Portrait of a Lady, and had almost no recollection immediately after finishing it, and I blame this in large part on the dust.

Several years ago I lived for a summer behind a used bookstore and, several times, went through their dumpsters at night. After sitting in the sun for a summer day, the dumpsters were quite warm, and warmer still since I would close the lid back down once I was inside. One of the books I found in the dumpster was Saturday by Ian McEwan and, sure enough, when I read it my nose always ran.

France

I would never have made it in a 19th century French novel. From Stendhal's Scarlet and Black.

He flew up the ladder, he tapped at the shutter; a second or two later Mathilde heard him; she tried to open the shutter, but the ladder was in the way. Julien clung to the iron hook placed there to keep the window open, and, at the risk of coming hurtling down time and time again, gave the ladder a violent shake and shifted it a little. Mathilde was able to open the shutter.

He flung himself into the room more dead than alive.

'So its you, my dear!' she said, rushing into his arms.

Painting, I was never comfortable enough on the ladders to perform this maneuver. I would have either had to climb down and reposition the ladder from the ground (not romantic), or I would have tried to move the ladder while on it and fallen to my death (also not romantic). Luckily, my friend who is moving to France has more talent up on the ladder.

sinners

Slavoj Zizek writes this in the Sublime Object of Ideology"Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it 'projects' this internal negativity into the figure of the 'Jew.'" He was writing about anti-Semitism, but the same logic applies to the figure of the radical Muslim, the illegal immigrant, etc...

And in the church? Perhaps what happens there isn't so much a negative type in response to an internal problem or blockage, but the creation of a positive type whose non-existence or absence can always be posited as an explanation for why things are falling apart. Zizek talks about how, in anti-Semitism, perceived counter-evidence is absorbed as evidence for anti-Semitism: "The fact that this Jew doesn't seem xyz just demonstrates how dangerous they actually are." And sin works similarly in the church: "...this shows just how deceptive sin is..."

fitzroya cupressoides

While walking through Edinburgh's botanical gardens with my friends, I happened across this plant, the fitzroya cupressoides. Considering that I had just read Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, I had the captain of the Beagle, Robert Fitzroy, on my brain. The right name from the right place. And I felt like I saw it at the right place (the city where Darwin went to school) at the right time ("the Darwin Year," and when I was in the middle of reading, thinking, and writing Darwin). So I took this picture to remind myself to look it up later.

Well it turns out I was right, that the fitzroya cupressoides was named after Robert Fitzroy. It ends up being an interesting plant, a giant tree that is the only species in its genus. In the late '90s, one tree was found that was over 3000 years old...

mechanics

What I've come to be wary of is any idea that can move from from place to place with losing or gaining anything. This is the trouble I have with activisms and fundamentalisms of all kinds, with protests and campaigns.

Karl Popper makes a similar point when he tries to demarcate between science and non-science, where he says that what is perceived as the strengths of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis is actually their weakness, namely their ability to absorb and explain all new data. Zizek, I think, makes a better point (though still one about weaknesses perceived as strengths) when he writes in the Parallax View, "In other words, the fact that sexuality can spill over and function as a metaphorical content of every (other) human activity is not a sign of its power but, on the contrary, a sign of its impotence, failure, inherent blockage." But, here Zizek is talking about content moving from form to form, molded into different shapes, and what I'm interested in here is the same form moving from content to content without ever bending or changing shape.

In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes about idealism in this way: “All idealists imagine that the causes they serve are significantly better than the other causes in the world; they do not want to believe that if their cause is to flourish at all, it needs exactly the same foul-smelling manure that all other human undertakings require." And, actually, I would think this goes both ways: not only making use of the foul-smelling manure but at the same time creating it, constant reworking.

flak

A few days ago, a bus in New York crashed bad. So far 15 of the 31 passengers are dead, and there are some accusations that the bus driver fell asleep at the wheel. Apparently the company he worked for has been flagged for problems with fatigued drivers, which reminded me of a section from Marx's Das Kapital.

Marx writes about a railway accident that occurred when some railway workers fell asleep on the job, resulting in the deaths of hundreds. But, “Everyone knows the consequences that may occur if the driver and foreman of a locomotive engine are not continually on the lookout. How can that be expected from a man who has been at work for 29 or 30 hours, exposed to the weather, and without rest?”

The workers were charged with manslaughter but, of course, there were no consequences for their employers.

finishing up

I've been finishing a lot of books lately, including a few that I've been reading since summer. Today I finished reading The Challenge of Jesus by NT Wright. Here are the 4 main things I thought were interesting:

1. Wright insists that the parables are to be read, and were delivered, as stories about the nation of Israel, rather than about individuals.

2. Truth, not as "a set of doctrines or theories but as a person and as persons indwelt by that person."

3. One of the huge dividing lines in the church, one of the real ones, is in the distribution of weight between the crucifixion and the resurrection. Most Christians I know put all the weight on the crucifixion, and read the scriptures that way. Wright argues that every early Christian theology was focused around the resurrection, and that a bodily resurrection.

4. Did Jesus know himself to be God? "It was in short the knowledge that characterizes vocation. As I have put it elsewhere: 'As part of his human vocation, grasped in faith, sustained in prayer, tested in confrontation, agonized over in further prayer and doubt and implemented in action, he believed he had to do and be, for Israel and the world, that which according to scripture only YHWH himself could do and be."

retrograde

After talking about rejecting metaphysical ideas, especially theological ones like original sin and salvation, Nietzsche puts this forward: "Then, however, a retrograde movement is necessary: he must understand both the historical and psychological justification in metaphysical ideas. He must recognize how mankind's greatest advancement came from them and how, if one did not take this retrograde step, one would rob himself of mankind's finest accomplishments to date."

I'm not against metaphysics to the extent that Nietzsche is, but I do think there is something very important here in terms of ideas and how they are approached. What I find boring about much of philosophy, theology, and even history, is that first movement that Nietzsche talks about, where energy goes towards assent or rejection, proof or disproof. What I find more interesting is asking the question of why an idea is valuable and powerful, how it functions, and what it has done. I may not believe in substitutionary atonement, but I still find it to be fascinating for just these reasons. Not to mention, arguments centering around assent and rejection are unlikely to change anyone's minds, but arguments focused around function can be much more revealing.

Where I also get bored of philosophy and theology is the treatment of ideas as fixed forms, as stable entities, and as essences. I'm not sure that ideas ever reach a fixed state, in spite of various attempts to construct or identify stable systems of thought and how each part of the system works together. The history of an idea isn't just about how an idea passed through time, or even how it changed through time, but also how the manipulation and multiplicity of a single idea is necessary for it to function.