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.