Police Report, circa 1891

In 1891 Bolton Rogers was appointed as chief of police in Seattle. In his report for the year, he includes this peculiar note to explain why he hadn't collected nearly as many fines as his predecessor: it was "the custom prior to my advent to collect fines once a month from all gambling houses and houses of prostitution, and in that way make the Police Department what was called "self-supporting," in other words turning the department into legal blackmailers, fining law breakers for breaking the law, and at the same time taking the fine as a license to allow them to continue to break the law."

Isn't this exactly what Michel Foucault was talking about in Discipline and Punish when he wrote that "the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delinquency" (280)?

Rogers story is an interesting one. The mayor removed him from office just a few months after he wrote that report, because they didnt get along. Rogers bounced around for a while, started a private detective agency, was reappointed as chief of police, ran some gambling dens, then died of brain fever.

Public Health, circa 1899

Today I went down to the library and read the Seattle health officer's "Annual Report of the Health Officer for the Year Ending December 31, 1899." Here are a few gems:

Unsanitary Localities: One cesspool of vast magnitude and long standing, covering the greater part of two squares on Jackson Street between Second Avenue South and Fourth Avenue South, has engaged our attention at different times, but without any improvement whatever. The region is a disgrace to the city, and time only adds to the magnitude of a nuisance which, in summer especially, is a serious menace to the health of the community."

Among the health officer's other concerns and suggestions were installing public urinals downtown to provide a "great convenience and remove a disgusting and oft-complained-of nuisance in the shape of filthy alleys"; forbidding peddlers to yell because their yelling tormented the sick; requiring scavengers to register for licenses and finding "some rational means of disposing of garbage" so that no one should have to deal with massive mounds of rubbish.

Another serious concern of his was the fact that even though there were public sewers being dug around town, no one was connecting their house to the sewers.

Which all reminds me of what I recently read in Slavoj Zizek's Parallax View: “one definition of being-human is that disposing of shit is a problem” (194). Of course it's not just about shit, although it is partly that, but aren't we learning more and more all the time about how much trouble our garbage is?

Baudelaire

I don't know anything about Baudelaire, except that he was a French poet, but I do know enough to say that his Flowers of Evil shouldn't be shelved in the gardening section at a book sale.

I know quite a bit more about Murakami, and enough to know that Sputnik Sweetheart shouldn't be shelved in the romance section at the same book sale. But hey, it worked out well for me.

Short story abut my life: Last night as my roommate and I were brushing our teeth, getting ready to go to sleep, etc, we hear some fellows outside yelling about the "fucking raccoons." We hurried to the window of our apartment and looked across the street, where three or four raccoons were crawling over the chain link fence. Appropriate response to the situation? Grabbing the raccoon pelt from my room and throwing it out the window at the yelling spectators.

crimes

Here's a list of crimes perpetrated on my friends, my acquaintances and I in Seattle over the last 4 years.

4 stolen bikes (including my own)
1 stolen car (later recovered)
1 stolen i-pod
my professor's house was burglarized/trashed
1 case of breaking and entry
1 case of identity theft
1 stolen car radio

That's all I can come up with right now, although there's more that I'm forgetting. As far as shady activity on the part of my friends, the list I can come up with is shoplifting, growing/selling/buying pot and underage drinking. Not enough material to start writing a crime novel.

From Haruki Murakami's Underground

"Haven't you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a 'narrative' in return? Haven't we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of 'insanity'? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else's visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?"

This idea has been on my mind for sometime, although my interest isn't that the dream turns into a nightmare, but that the content of the dream and the nightmare is exactly the same. Or perhaps it is that the fantasy and the nightmare are exactly the same. But I'm also intrigued that in Murakami this shows up in such close proximity to insanity, or to a madness built upon the excesses of any system or narrative.

How to Write Your Essay

1. Begin by describing the novelty of your essay, and how it disrupts the conventional view of a text, history, identity, etc.

2. Draw out the essential core of the text, or history, or culture.

3. Do this by first introducing disparate phenomena and demonstrating how what appear to be disparate are actually part of the same pattern. Or...

4. Introduce a pattern and demonstrate that what appears to be homogenous is in fact marked by rupture.

5. Anything you treat seriously, treat as a tool to be used. Do not contextualize it.

6. Contextualize anything you do not treat seriously. Philosophers you disagree with are artifacts of naivete.

7. Make sweeping generalizations about how history led, necessarily, to the pattern or disruption that you've described.

8. Dismiss disciplines you know nothing about.

9. Use penetrating metaphors to maximize your audience's pleasure.

10. Finish like you begin, with your own novelty. You are the hero, and you're saving everyone else.

That's what I learned in college.

environmentalism, capitalism, pacifism

I've been thinking lately about the relationship between capitalism and environmentalism. In part my thinking on this started from a paper I wrote years ago on tourism in Thailand, and how a lot of the money and impetus for preserving various ecologies comes from tourist revenue. Then a few months ago I came across a historical work called Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism by Richard Grove. He talks about this issue in a variety of ways, finally saying that "modern environmentalism...emerged as a direct response to the destructive social and ecological conditions of colonial rule" (486). I suppose what's interesting to me isn't particularly the historical component, demonstrating that environmentalism emerged out of colonialism, but the ways in which environmentalism acts as an appendage or apparatus of capitalism, no matter what its history is. Whatever you say about capitalism, it's difficult to ignore that the preservation of environments (even beyond what is natural) leads to never-ending profits. Likewise, there's nothing anti-capitalist about sustainability.

I've also been curious about the connections between pacifism and capitalism, or the extent to which pacifism functions as an appendage of capitalism. Once again, it doesn't matter, in a lot of ways, what the origins of pacifism are, just how it functions and to what ends. Then again, war itself is a huge money-making machine (e.g, all those billions spent for waging war don't just disappear), so who knows?