There are only a few things that are interesting to me. I will continue to comment on them over and over and over...
"So there is not just one thing that literature offers. It portrays and dissects a wide range of human experiences, all of which we have in life, but which literature offers in a concentrated and heightened form...
"At the heart of Zamir's book are three chapters on erotic love in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. He prefaces his readings by pointing to the great difficulties that philosophy has had investigating love, especially erotic love; and he suggests that only works that convey to their reader the texture of complex human experiences, with all their internal tensions and contradictions, will put us in a position to make any philosophical claims at all.
"Romeo and Juliet conveys the hyperbolic, extravagant, and rather abstract character of young love, with its focus on a generalized and aestheticized image of the body ("I ne'er saw true beauty till this night"), and its humorless mutual absorption, its search for a transcendence of mere earthly humanity. Juliet is the sun, her eyes "two of the fairest stars in all the heaven." She is a "bright angel," soaring above the heads of mere mortals. This sort of love, Zamir shows, works by distancing, and even bracketing, reality; it is actively hostile to fact and evidence. Since it is determined to rise above the earth, it is also lacking in particularity: Juliet is an abstract image, an angel, and neither Romeo nor the audience knows a great deal about the earthly attributes that distinguish her from others.
"One sign of these qualities in their love is the play's constant fascination with images of sleep and dreaming. Like many critics before him, Zamir notices that the play itself draws readers into a lulled and dreamy state. Such a state might be seen as mere forgetfulness; it might also be seen as infantile narcissism. Zamir rejects both these interpretations in favor of one that focuses on the transfiguring experience of the perception of beauty: "Love in the play is not only an abandonment of the world, a dim or foggy experience, but also a penetration of it through heightened perception." By allowing ourselves to be drawn into this complex state, we instantiate, and learn more fully to understand, our own relationship to aesthetic beauty, and to the blindness to daily life that its perception frequently involves.
"By contrast--in what for me is Zamir's most fascinating chapter--Antony and Cleopatra depicts "mature love," love between people who enjoy being grown-ups together, and who have no project of transcending human life, because they are taking too much pleasure in life as it is. Romeo and Juliet do not eat; Antony and Cleopatra eat all the time. Romeo and Juliet have no occupation; Antony and Cleopatra are friends and supportive colleagues with a great deal of work to do running their respective and interlocking empires. Romeo and Juliet have no sense of humor; Antony and Cleopatra live by elaborate jokes and highly personal forms of teasing--what Zamir calls "idiosyncratic practices." ("That time,--Oh times!--I laugh'd him out of patience") Romeo and Juliet, utterly absorbed, pay no attention to anybody around them; Antony and Cleopatra love to gossip about the odd people in their world, and spend evenings wandering through the streets watching the funny things people do. Romeo and Juliet speak to each other only in terms of worshipful hyperbole; Antony knows how to make contact with Cleopatra through insults, even about her age (he calls her his "serpent of old Nile"), and she knows how to turn a story about a fishhook into a running joke that renews laughter each time it is mentioned. All this suggests a romance that, unlike that of the younger couple, "does not work through transcending life, through perpetually setting its intensities at odds with what life is, but rather structures itself through life and the daily pleasures it affords."
"It's not that they do not pay attention to each other's bodies, says Zamir-- but in contrast to the teenage lovers, the body in Antony and Cleopatra is always seen as animated by a searching and idiosyncratic mind that makes contact with another particular mind through intimate conversation. Cleopatra is clearly supposed to be attractive, but, as Zamir notes, the play, by contrast to Shakespeare's sources, downplays this aspect of her attraction. It is her complicated personality, full of surprises, to which Shakespeare most draws our attention. ("Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety.") Her mode of seduction, in Zamir's persuasive reading, is above all mental. "Cunning past man's thought," as Antony describes her, she ingeniously elaborates a battery of stratagems to keep herself in the forefront of his attention: flirtation, capricious annoyance, the constant private teasing, frustrating allusions to significant undelivered information--but also shared ambition, trusting collaboration, sincere and deeply felt admiration for his achievements, and insistence on her own equality. (When Charmian advises deference and flattery, Cleopatra is appropriately contemptuous: "Thou teachest like a fool; the way to lose him.") Zamir is particularly insightful, and adds something that I believe to be new in the literature on the play, when, examining the scene after the battle of Actium, he shows the love expressed in Cleopatra's delicate attunement to the phases of Antony's career, her subtle sense of when to approach him and of what should and should not be said. I do not know another critic who gives Cleopatra the credit for empathy that she plainly deserves.
"But does she really love Antony? The question is Zamir's. In part because many critics do not like Cleopatra, feeling that any such complicated, capricious, and powerful woman must be incapable of love, Zamir feels compelled to press this question repeatedly. He seems to have a hard time trusting the reality of this middle-aged love, so lacking in outsize rapture, so immersed in the daily movement of work and conversation. Zamir eventually finds an affirmative answer to his question in the scene in which news of Antony's marriage to Octavia is delivered to Cleopatra by a messenger--whom she first upbraids and then, in a bizarre tantrum, drags physically around the room by his hair. (Stage direction: "She hales him up and down.") Her angry reaction, says Zamir, must convince "even the most suspicious of audiences that this woman's love ... is genuine." And here, I think, Zamir missteps: he reads Cleopatra's reaction as a pure case of erotic jealousy. But of course it cannot be that, since Cleopatra knows that the marriage is politically motivated, and not at all based on overwhelming passion. And she intuits quickly that Octavia is no rival in brains or fascination.
"Zamir himself makes much of the fact that Octavia is later described as "of a holy, cold, and still conversation." With her "modest eyes/And still conclusion," she "shows a body rather than a life." (In fairness to Octavia, we should observe that, though the first of these judgments comes from the relatively impartial Enobarbus, the second remarkable insult is uttered by Cleopatra herself, and the third by that same messenger, no doubt averse to a second "haling," and happy to echo exactly what Cleopatra wishes to think about Antony's marital relationship.) So jealousy, focused on the sexuality and spirit of the rival, is not what her emotion is about. She does eventually get around to asking what Octavia looks like, at the end of this scene and in a later one, but it is an afterthought, well after the unfortunate messenger has been dragged about, and after she has asked him, three times, "He is married?"
"So it is clearly the fact of marriage, and not the particularity of the wife, that is the target of her fury. This formidable woman, powerful, unique, who has wit, achievement, success, and glamour, who rules a kingdom, who seems an utter stranger to banality--this woman suddenly sees that she is circumscribed by the world's most banal form of power. This fact seems to her so completely outrageous and absurd that she can react only by behaving in an absurd, even infantile, way. Zamir is correct, then, that she does love him--but it is not jealousy that is the proof, it is her regal intolerance of mere social impediments, and, far more, her utterly submissive tolerance of them, as she accepts and lives with the limitations entailed by the news, whatever they may ultimately turn out to be. (But does she really accept limitation, or is all that dragging by the hair, that funny threat to put the messenger in brine and turn him into a pickle, itself one more outsize joke, a theatrical display of determination and indomitability? Cleopatra is certainly capable of games more elaborate by far. An actress might play the scene in many ways.)
"Romeo and Juliet's love transfigured the world by raising love into the heavens: Juliet is the sun, and, as with the sun, we have no idea what, if anything, makes her laugh. Antony and Cleopatra transfigure the world from within, making each daily experience more vivid, funny, and surprising. Without each other, the world is sadly boring. "Shall I abide/In this dull world," she asks him as he dies, "which in thy absence is/No better than a sty?" What is piggish, in her view, is not the body, it is the absence of interesting conversation. So the world needs to be transfigured here, too, but the transfiguration is human and particular, rather than celestial and abstract.
"What does all this have to do with philosophy? Well, in the first place, no philosopher has ever given a decent account of the complexities of "mature love. " (John Stuart Mill's letters and autobiography come close, but they are not philosophical works, and Mill, despite his many virtues, is not exactly the man to describe the role of jokes and erotic teasing in love.) Nor is this failure just an accident, or a social fact about cultural reticence. Zamir plausibly argues that philosophical prose all by itself could not convey the quirky and uneven nature, the incommensurable particularity, of this type of love, the way genuine feeling is embodied in a fish story. And so he contends that the experience of the spectator or reader, as she goes through the variegated moods of this relationship, is epistemically significant, putting her in a position to make claims about love, and to assess claims about love, as no abstract account could do.
III.
"If Antony and Cleopatra's love faced fatal political and military obstacles and was for that reason tragic, wrecked on "the varying shore o' the world," still there is nothing fundamentally tragic in the texture of the love itself, which is at its heart more akin to comedy. In Othello, by contrast, Zamir finds a love that is tragic at its core, fated for violent death--because of one party's determination to see and to deeply love, and the other party's horror of being seen and being deeply loved.
"Any successful interpretation of Othello must explain Othello's readiness to be deceived. Iago is certainly skillful, but he has an all-too-willing victim. At every point, Othello picks up Iago's suggestions and runs with them. No other character, despite receiving the same information, shows the slightest inclination to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful. Here McGinn writes his best chapter, showing how the play takes the classical philosophical problem of the knowledge of other minds and displays its agonizing human reality--but, focusing on enumerating passages that highlight epistemological themes, he does not finally show us why Othello is driven mad by this problem in a way that other characters are not. Some interpreters impute the Moor's collaboration with his tormentor Iago to his racial insecurity in a society that stigmatizes him. Yet this suggestion by itself does not tell us why the insecurity should take the form of sexual jealousy and ultimately violence--especially violence directed against the one person who appears to have no awareness of his racial difference. ("I saw Othello's visage in his mind.")
"Stanley Cavell's famous interpretation goes further. Othello, he believes, has become heavily invested in the idea of his own purity, a project no doubt supported by his awareness of being black, and a Moor, in a white Christian world. So, says Cavell, when Othello makes love to Desdemona and sees the passion he arouses in her, he cannot bear it, because this passionate response proves to him that he is a sexual being, not a pure heavenly will. Cavell's sentences express, in their haunted and hesitant structure, the torment of that discovery:
"In speaking of the point and meaning of Othello's impotence, I do not think of Othello as having been in an everyday sense impotent with Desdemona. I think of him, rather, as having been surprised by her, at what he has elicited from her; at, so to speak, a success, rather than a failure.... Rather than imagine himself to have elicited that, or solicited it, Othello would imagine it elicited by anyone and everyone else. --Surprised, let me say, to find that she is flesh and blood. It was the one thing he could not imagine for himself. For if she is flesh and blood then, since they are one, so is he.
"Cavell then generalizes, in a memorable observation: "If such a man as Othello is rendered impotent and murderous by aroused, or by having aroused, female sexuality; or let us say: if this man is horrified by human sexuality, in himself and in others; then no human being is free of this possibility." Sexuality, Cavell continues, is the field in which the idea of human finitude, "of its acceptance and its repetitious overcoming," is worked out. In other words, we are all to some degree ashamed and horrified at our own sexuality, of which another person's sexual response to us is the proof. We are horrified because we wish not to accept our finitude. We wish to be pure souls without limit or imperfection.
"Cavell's essay is one of the best things written about the play, and one of his own best essays, haunting and devastating to experience. I recall the sense of sudden revelation that swept over all of us when Cavell first presented it in a class I taught with him at Harvard in 1980. But now, with the distance of time, I must say that what Cavell is describing looks to me not like a universal human reality, but like a common style of misogyny, in which people-- usually males--have a stake in being above the merely bodily, and find themselves reminded by women's sexuality that they are not in that way lofty. But this sort of shame and revulsion at sexuality is hardly inevitable. Why on earth should one think that "no human being is free of this possibility"? (Antony and Cleopatra are utterly free of this type of disgust-misogyny. What disgusts her, and turns the world into a "sty," is the absence of humor, not the presence of the body.) As a reading of the play, Cavell's assimilation of Othello to The Kreutzer Sonata is much too quick, neglecting the fact that Desdemona's primary mode of interaction with Othello is not sexual rapture but compassionate understanding, directed at the suffering that he has experienced during his exploits.
"Here is where Zamir gets going, in another wonderful chapter. Othello, he argues, has become deeply invested in seeing himself as identical with his heroic role. He is that outsize hero, and the vulnerable shapeless person within has been concealed by that grandiose construction, to such an extent that Othello himself does not even remember that he really is that vulnerable inchoate self. Desdemona sees past the persona to the self within: she recognizes, and pities, his vulnerability. Othello is erotically drawn to her by her compassionate response: "Othello falls in love when he encounters pity directed at him, when, for a change, he is not being used but is understood." But committed as he is to invulnerability, to being nothing more nor less than the grand heroic construct, he simply cannot stand the loving knowing gaze that reaches past his achievements to "some deeper foundation of his being," "an unbearable penetrating love that sees through to his source." He has to extinguish the eyes that see him, and love him, too deeply. "In his growing abuse of her, Othello wants this kind of love to stop somehow."
"In other words, the general human problem raised by the play is the problem of the "false self" (Winnicott's term) with which we so often mask our real, childlike selves. All human beings have this problem to some degree, wanting to hide from the gaze of those who see our vulnerability too clearly (although it is also seductive to be so seen). For some people, however, the problem is more agonizing than for others, because some people have become so invested in being competent and in control that they have not attended to their inner selves or cultivated the emotional and receptive parts of their personalities. The result is that the true self, the one within, remains in an infantile condition, and the controlling adult has little conscious access to it. When it is seen and addressed, it can be a terrifying experience.
"Zamir does not make use of Winnicott's concepts, but that is how I would make sense of his shrewd suggestions. Still, his reading has a harder time than Cavell's in making sense of the sexual form that Othello's fantasies take. For Cavell, "rather than imagine himself to have elicited that, or solicited it, Othello would imagine it elicited by anyone and everyone else." Moreover, the very fact that Desdemona is aroused means, for him, that she is a whore, to be distanced from the self who is striving for purity. (Misogyny often works this way, by projecting the feared and loathed aspects of the self onto others: she, not I, is the body; she, not I, is an animal being.)
"How would Zamir, by contrast, make sense of Othello's sexual focus? He would say, I suppose, that by portraying his wife to himself as a whore, attending to many men, Othello can deny that she is focused all too intently on loving him. "Iago," says Zamir, is Othello's "mode of resistance and something in him is using Iago so that it can bloom to full expression." What he cannot stand is the real love that she offers, and so he would prefer to believe anything else. I am not entirely satisfied with such an account of Othello's obsessively sexual fantasies, and I wish that Zamir had said more about this issue.
"Yet Zamir's reading is very strong in explaining Othello's odd and disjointed language in the murder scene, in which a carefully constructed persona has unraveled and he no longer knows where or what his selfhood is. He speaks in strange third-person abstractions. He seems to have lost hold of his "I." ("It is the cause, my soul.") Above all, Zamir makes better sense than Cavell of Othello's obsession with extinguishing Desdemona's vision: "Put out the light, and then put out the light." And later, "This look of thine will hurl my soul from heaven." On Cavell's reading, he should be obsessed with her bodily movements, her sexual organs. Zamir convincingly shows us why he is so afraid of her eyes.
"Zamir simply offers, side by side, his readings of Antony and Cleopatra and Othello. He draws no explicit conclusion from the juxtaposition, but these readings, juxtaposed, make us wonder why Antony and Cleopatra do not fall prey to the same romantic agony. It's not that they do not feel jealousy--but the jealousy that they know is of a limited and daily sort, not monstrous or murderous. The answer, it would appear, is given by Zamir's fine passages on their "idiosyncratic practices": they are willing to acknowledge what is uneven, silly, and odd about the self--to let it be seen, to let it be. In their way highly regal and heroic, they have no stake in being only that. The most intelligent and commanding woman in all of Shakespeare, Cleopatra is also one of the silliest and most childlike--and it is this capacity for allowing silliness to be seen that is their personal salvation and, by its absence, Othello's doom.
"Zamir's book has its defects. Like many first books, it opens up more questions than it pursues. It lacks, to some extent, what Cavell always gives us: the sense of a coherent and distinctive philosophical sensibility with its own well-thought-out views on the significant questions. Yet those faults can also be seen as virtues: openness rather than dogmatism; a willingness to be puzzled rather than to assert; an acknowledgment that the world, and Shakespeare, does not fit into a single tidy philosophical picture. Nuttall and McGinn fail because they make Shakespeare look simple, reducing him to a primer. Cavell brilliantly succeeds at being Cavell, which is to say that his readings always illuminate issues of human significance; but one often has the sense that the plays are being used as occasions for the pursuit of Cavell's own preoccupations. In Zamir, however, the plays challenge the philosopher to new thought. Zamir's approach is respectful of mystery and complexity, and always suggests that the plays contain more than his interpretations have elicited.
"To write philosophically about Shakespeare, or any other great author or artist, one needs not so much philosophical learning, or even philosophical argument, but a genuinely philosophical temperament, puzzled and even humble before life's complexities, and willing to put one's sense of life on the line in the process of reading a text. As Plato rightly said, it is no chance matter that we are discussing, but how one should live. The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character."
from Martha Nussbaum, Stages of Thought, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
A New Life
This is paradise: unstructured time. a cup of coffee. A little sun and the city of San Francisco.
A cigarette would make it more picturesque, but smoking is bad for you.
Its summer time. I'm embracing my Identity as Creator and Disgruntled Scholar. Weeks and weeks of reading and writing. Policy briefs. Human Rights treaties. The rise of global networks. Political theory. Immigration law. Economic models.
Henry miller. Isaiah Berlin. Aldous Huxley. Italo Calvino.
Microbiology, pharamacology and neurobiology just to keep sharp.
But so far...wearing the New York Times like a fashion accessory. Systematically working through the scotch collection at The Bar Down the Street. Online shopping. Jazz radio on a loop. Chewing on cherry pits and wandering aimlessly through Mission vegetable vendors. I'm getting there.
Life is so. so. so. good.
A cigarette would make it more picturesque, but smoking is bad for you.
Its summer time. I'm embracing my Identity as Creator and Disgruntled Scholar. Weeks and weeks of reading and writing. Policy briefs. Human Rights treaties. The rise of global networks. Political theory. Immigration law. Economic models.
Henry miller. Isaiah Berlin. Aldous Huxley. Italo Calvino.
Microbiology, pharamacology and neurobiology just to keep sharp.
But so far...wearing the New York Times like a fashion accessory. Systematically working through the scotch collection at The Bar Down the Street. Online shopping. Jazz radio on a loop. Chewing on cherry pits and wandering aimlessly through Mission vegetable vendors. I'm getting there.
Life is so. so. so. good.
Monday, May 26, 2008
Another one!
Two revelations in one frenzied night of blogging!
I really owe it to the re-discovery of the Night Cap. God bless the Bar Up The Street.
#2: over-exposure is annoying because its self absorbed! That's why most sensible people don't like blogs, not because its too full of sex or cursing. Its because its pointless, badly written and egotistical.
OH!
"mily's generation has some bizarre lack of filter and needs to be looked at. In another generation, she might have labored in obscurity, but that's impossible now. We've always celebrated young, attractive, self-obsessed writers. ALWAYS. But also, it's going to be like this, forever, because these are the people who are writing now." gawker people.
I really owe it to the re-discovery of the Night Cap. God bless the Bar Up The Street.
#2: over-exposure is annoying because its self absorbed! That's why most sensible people don't like blogs, not because its too full of sex or cursing. Its because its pointless, badly written and egotistical.
OH!
"mily's generation has some bizarre lack of filter and needs to be looked at. In another generation, she might have labored in obscurity, but that's impossible now. We've always celebrated young, attractive, self-obsessed writers. ALWAYS. But also, it's going to be like this, forever, because these are the people who are writing now." gawker people.
Exposed--and its Backlash
Emily Gould Will Not Let Us Ignore Her Upcoming ‘Times Magazine’ Cover Story
5/12 New York Magazine
"We generally try to avoid writing about people like Emily Gould and Julia Allison, because to document their burps and blow jobs is to participate in the wacky media experiment which they control."
The real key to credibility of course, is to have a publication with "New York" somewhere in the title.
Really though. Between NYT and Vice, The Daily Show and The New Yorker, my entire liberal elitist lifestyle rests on things made in some place thousands of miles away.
oh shit! omg. Doood. Middle-of-blog-writing-revelation.
I will have to digest that some more.
5/12 New York Magazine
"We generally try to avoid writing about people like Emily Gould and Julia Allison, because to document their burps and blow jobs is to participate in the wacky media experiment which they control."
The real key to credibility of course, is to have a publication with "New York" somewhere in the title.
Really though. Between NYT and Vice, The Daily Show and The New Yorker, my entire liberal elitist lifestyle rests on things made in some place thousands of miles away.
oh shit! omg. Doood. Middle-of-blog-writing-revelation.
I will have to digest that some more.
I can has Professionalism?
I have been brooding, imagining a blog devoted to my pursuits in research, medicine, philosophy and perhaps even literature. In this site, I would post my name, email, picture, papers, institutional affiliation, the whole lot. It be a shout into the void, but it would be a more focused void, and in my wild fantasies, nobel laureates would send me emails that start with "Why, that is fascinating ---, i have been thinking that all along, and my what a delightful precocious young scholar you are! Why don't you come by my office and lets write a book together on the matter..." However, this would mean dropping the various references to drugs, sex, and the unrelenting detractions from human dignity known as my daily life.
Wouldn't it?
What does it amount to, having one's perpetual rough draft, the chaotic inner studio of the mind in such a pseduo-public sphere?
The NYTimes, zion of the print media, although certainly a beat or two behind, and a lumbering giant still, is no less nimble enough in translating the trends. And with its weight of printed stacks, it lends an authority to the ether of the brave new world of shouting in the cosmic internet void.
Some points of consideration
(1) For certain personality types, the particular technology of the internet invites, tempts and deliciously seduces one into ejecting heartfelt personal thoughts into this public space
(2) There is a danger in ejecting your authentic, heartfelt personal thoughts into the public spehre
There are obvious discomforts. Your workplace superiors or distant relatives googling photos of your Friday night indiscretions. Or the threat to one's professional reputation--there's shit sometimes you just don't want to know about your doctor or your lawyer or school teachers, no matter how articulate they may be about their passion for [insert unusual, unseemly hobby here]. And perhaps you just don't want everybody up in your bizzz-nas.
Exposed
By EMILY GOULD
Published: May 25, 2008
"What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online."
The woman who wrote this is exactly my age. At first I was deeply excited, and admired her and was excited for someone who was able to capture the experience for the masses. By the end of the article, something...repulsed me. Perhaps it was the facts of her life style, the snarky commentary for which she earned her fame and paychecks. But then maybe it is something more profound...the essence of the struggle was how willing she was able to shove her vulnerability in the faces of others--and how the internet made it easy. And indeed, her article shamelessly diced her dark moments, not tastelessly, but certainly viscerally, even for a newspaper column. Perhaps there is something intrinsically off putting about this. Perhaps especially nauseating when it is a shame to which one relates--like she is the Britney Spears of the blogosphere, the sacrifice from which we project our comparatively minor, but equally gross over-exposures.
(3) There is great benefit to be harnessed from the dynamic networking that this particular technology also invites.
The Obama Connection
By ROGER COHEN
Published: May 26, 2008
Barack Obama’s grasp of Internet-driven networking comes from his conviction that in a globalized world sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I mean, its fucking big.
(4) And what of the authentic self?
Our brains are crazy complex, our ability to socialize--to judge friend, foe, relate, express, love, retaliate--ours are the most outrageously complex of the living world. So even as the species itself drastically change the name of the game within generations, we furiously adapt to keep pace and play with a new zealous mastery. But there seems to be needs, desires, inclinations that stay the same, that drive on robustly
The Library in the New Age
By Robert Darnton
The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Among them--the desire to be authentic. As a matter of fact--sex, drugs, cursing, daily humiliation, pouty railings against the system--these too are so integral to my intellectual life, to becoming a good physician, to becoming a good citizen, a poet, a philosopher, friend and family member. And there is that difficult to resist self righteousness--surely, if I am a woman of integrity (and I am), then I have nothing to hide, nothing for which I am afraid to account.
But I think in the end, there are more important things than the fierce egoism of self aggrandized nobility in character. For one: relationships--both intimate and professional. For another: the work, which is worth being cleared of all the distracting garbage (however fascinating) from which it rises.
So yes, it is not only good manners, but considerate, good reasoning, and virtuous to clear away the rambling of the authentic self when presenting papers at the conference; or when in the clinic; or even when at the dinner table with beloveds. The clarity allows one to open up to ideas and others. But to nurture the underlying authenticity, the right thing to do is to have the safe places one does let down the guard and pour the rawness of emotion, the sloppiness of rough drafts, the intuitions that drive the argument, and the desires that fuel it all. The work bench, good teachers, and the pub table of trusted comrades.
And when one's life is so fractured, that such space becomes endangered? When it is 3 am and one has inappropriately converted one's eblogger into the madwoman's soapbox on the sneaking suspiciou that the best place to hide is in the crowds, where people pay the least attention of all?
(5) Maybe i'll just start a facebook group.
Wouldn't it?
What does it amount to, having one's perpetual rough draft, the chaotic inner studio of the mind in such a pseduo-public sphere?
The NYTimes, zion of the print media, although certainly a beat or two behind, and a lumbering giant still, is no less nimble enough in translating the trends. And with its weight of printed stacks, it lends an authority to the ether of the brave new world of shouting in the cosmic internet void.
Some points of consideration
(1) For certain personality types, the particular technology of the internet invites, tempts and deliciously seduces one into ejecting heartfelt personal thoughts into this public space
(2) There is a danger in ejecting your authentic, heartfelt personal thoughts into the public spehre
There are obvious discomforts. Your workplace superiors or distant relatives googling photos of your Friday night indiscretions. Or the threat to one's professional reputation--there's shit sometimes you just don't want to know about your doctor or your lawyer or school teachers, no matter how articulate they may be about their passion for [insert unusual, unseemly hobby here]. And perhaps you just don't want everybody up in your bizzz-nas.
Exposed
By EMILY GOULD
Published: May 25, 2008
"What I gained — and lost — by writing about my intimate life online."
The woman who wrote this is exactly my age. At first I was deeply excited, and admired her and was excited for someone who was able to capture the experience for the masses. By the end of the article, something...repulsed me. Perhaps it was the facts of her life style, the snarky commentary for which she earned her fame and paychecks. But then maybe it is something more profound...the essence of the struggle was how willing she was able to shove her vulnerability in the faces of others--and how the internet made it easy. And indeed, her article shamelessly diced her dark moments, not tastelessly, but certainly viscerally, even for a newspaper column. Perhaps there is something intrinsically off putting about this. Perhaps especially nauseating when it is a shame to which one relates--like she is the Britney Spears of the blogosphere, the sacrifice from which we project our comparatively minor, but equally gross over-exposures.
(3) There is great benefit to be harnessed from the dynamic networking that this particular technology also invites.
The Obama Connection
By ROGER COHEN
Published: May 26, 2008
Barack Obama’s grasp of Internet-driven networking comes from his conviction that in a globalized world sociability is a force as strong as sovereignty.
I mean, its fucking big.
(4) And what of the authentic self?
Our brains are crazy complex, our ability to socialize--to judge friend, foe, relate, express, love, retaliate--ours are the most outrageously complex of the living world. So even as the species itself drastically change the name of the game within generations, we furiously adapt to keep pace and play with a new zealous mastery. But there seems to be needs, desires, inclinations that stay the same, that drive on robustly
The Library in the New Age
By Robert Darnton
The New York Review of Books
Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Among them--the desire to be authentic. As a matter of fact--sex, drugs, cursing, daily humiliation, pouty railings against the system--these too are so integral to my intellectual life, to becoming a good physician, to becoming a good citizen, a poet, a philosopher, friend and family member. And there is that difficult to resist self righteousness--surely, if I am a woman of integrity (and I am), then I have nothing to hide, nothing for which I am afraid to account.
But I think in the end, there are more important things than the fierce egoism of self aggrandized nobility in character. For one: relationships--both intimate and professional. For another: the work, which is worth being cleared of all the distracting garbage (however fascinating) from which it rises.
So yes, it is not only good manners, but considerate, good reasoning, and virtuous to clear away the rambling of the authentic self when presenting papers at the conference; or when in the clinic; or even when at the dinner table with beloveds. The clarity allows one to open up to ideas and others. But to nurture the underlying authenticity, the right thing to do is to have the safe places one does let down the guard and pour the rawness of emotion, the sloppiness of rough drafts, the intuitions that drive the argument, and the desires that fuel it all. The work bench, good teachers, and the pub table of trusted comrades.
And when one's life is so fractured, that such space becomes endangered? When it is 3 am and one has inappropriately converted one's eblogger into the madwoman's soapbox on the sneaking suspiciou that the best place to hide is in the crowds, where people pay the least attention of all?
(5) Maybe i'll just start a facebook group.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Science, Art. Sex and Drugs.
I am sitting amid the wreckage and detritus of my second year of medical school. It isn't quite* over, and the accountability to my summer research funding shall begin soon, but a smug satisfaction and a ravenous appetite for leisure has already begin. (I awoke at 11 am today...about 4.5 hours later than i normally do. I was hung over. And i felt strange guilty already because i couldn't remember my to do list. I had forgotten my thur to do list was: Fuck around. So far, i have enthusiastically gotten in the groove of it).
My general dicking around had already begun though. On Tue, I fwd out from H (my brilliant stoner biophysicist hot sassy psychedelic lady friend) an invitation
A special event, a frank conversation about drugs...everything from caffeine & pot to ecstasy & prozac is fair game. This discussion will be driven by YOU. No presentations. No fancy powerpoints. Just your questions, your experience, and your curiosity.
What: This is Your Brain on Drugs: Psychoactives & Your Brain
Who: Professor David Presti, Prof of Neurobiology at UC Berkeley, Fire & Earth Founders of Erowid.org
The Deets:
Psychoactives...the name itself conjures up hundreds of images: hippies at Woodstock, those "well acted" anti-drug PSAs, even Colombian drug cartels. One thing is for sure, human history and psychoactive use are intertwined.
The term psychoactive covers a wide range of compounds...ranging from caffeine & alcohol to heroin & meth. Within that range, there again exists a wide range of use...historical use, cultural use, recreational use, and abuse.
But what do psychoactives reveal about our brain and its neural mechanisms? the connection between our mind & body? our spirituality? For once, we're going to have an honest discussion of psychoactives. Starting with the science, moving into historical/cultural use, and finally discussing the social impact today.
Friends E and J, also hyper intellectual, sassy good looking stoner lady friends (I am a lucky woman), come by. The event at the local cafe up the street was too crowded (the good professor, alas, was preaching to the choir), so we wandered off to get pizza and spent the evening digesting in the piles of pillows laundry and homework papers in my room.
While I hacked away at clinical write up on a woman with an atrial fibrillation and carotid endarterectomy, I proudly declared to my lady friends, feeling quite empowered, that i had bought my first collection of erotica. They ooh-ed and hooted and wanted to see. So I proudly handed them:
"The naughty bits: The steamiest and most scandalous sex scenes from the world's great books."
They then proceeded to groan and mercilessly mock me with accusations of the lowest pits of Nerddom. No less, the evening proceeded with raucous cackling over the seduction of Socrates, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's melancholy whores, and the bawdy rhymes of the not-so-Dark Ages of Italy.
I excerpt now from the Introduction, written by a drop out from a Medieval Literature PhD, from this charming little book:
"So, although it might have been nice to call this book The Best Sex Scenes from the History of Literature, that not what it is. Such a thing cannot really exist. Sex is too varied, personal, and intricate to qualify for Bests; what works at one point for one person doesn't necessarily work for someone else, or even for that same person at a different time. I also realized that the column would be a lot more interesting if I included scenes that reflected truth and diversity of sex, not just idealized fantasies. Cormac McCarthy's writing about necrophilia, a medieval poem equating homosexuality to bad grammar: these are not what you'd expect to find in your basic erotica anthology, and I'm happy about that. The Naughty Bits is ultimately less a book of* sex in literature as much as a book about* sex in literature. If you come looking for brief and steamy diversions, you'll find them, but if you are looking for the ecstasy, agony, absurdity and poignancy of sex, you'll find that too...
"Sex is everywhere in writing, but it's not always there in the form we think it's going to take. And not all authors are up to the challenge. I often joke about half the sex scenes in the history of literature consist of only one word: Afterwards. And it's almost true. You get all the buildup, perhaps even some heavy breathing and the taking off of shoes, and then 'Afterwards, Gary and Bunny picked up their fallen clothes and..." Yeah, yeah. Cop-outs we have known.
The Naughty Bits is a celebration of all writers who decided that a single word wasn't enough, that something in the knocking together of bodies, the mixing of memory and desire, the slip of skin and sweat on skin and sweat was an integral part of the human experience--something vital to their characters and thus their stories, not to be missed.
"Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people believe that sex is better left behind closed doors and that to bring it out for public scrutiny somehow demystifies it, strips it of its magic. To me, all human experience shimmers with the luster of miracles, if we can bring ourselves to see it. Poets and fiction writers do their best to point it out; in those rare moments that they succeed, they are really creating art. Yes, sex is full of mystery, but it would take a lot of monkeys sitting at a lot of typewriters for a lot of eternities to begin to capture any of that magic on paper. When we are examining what's worthy of spilled ink, we should be less concerned with robbing something of its mystery as catching some measure of it. It's doubtful that any art, even photographs, steals the soul of the subject; the bigger question is whether, when the negatives are tweezed out of the fixer, any soul is visible on the film. We have to hope there is. And if sex is so likeley to be divested of its gravity by writing about it, then what of love? And what of death?"
Drugs and Sex. The Analysis of Science, and the Recreation of Art. This is all very Serious Business.
My general dicking around had already begun though. On Tue, I fwd out from H (my brilliant stoner biophysicist hot sassy psychedelic lady friend) an invitation
A special event, a frank conversation about drugs...everything from caffeine & pot to ecstasy & prozac is fair game. This discussion will be driven by YOU. No presentations. No fancy powerpoints. Just your questions, your experience, and your curiosity.
What: This is Your Brain on Drugs: Psychoactives & Your Brain
Who: Professor David Presti, Prof of Neurobiology at UC Berkeley, Fire & Earth Founders of Erowid.org
The Deets:
Psychoactives...the name itself conjures up hundreds of images: hippies at Woodstock, those "well acted" anti-drug PSAs, even Colombian drug cartels. One thing is for sure, human history and psychoactive use are intertwined.
The term psychoactive covers a wide range of compounds...ranging from caffeine & alcohol to heroin & meth. Within that range, there again exists a wide range of use...historical use, cultural use, recreational use, and abuse.
But what do psychoactives reveal about our brain and its neural mechanisms? the connection between our mind & body? our spirituality? For once, we're going to have an honest discussion of psychoactives. Starting with the science, moving into historical/cultural use, and finally discussing the social impact today.
Friends E and J, also hyper intellectual, sassy good looking stoner lady friends (I am a lucky woman), come by. The event at the local cafe up the street was too crowded (the good professor, alas, was preaching to the choir), so we wandered off to get pizza and spent the evening digesting in the piles of pillows laundry and homework papers in my room.
While I hacked away at clinical write up on a woman with an atrial fibrillation and carotid endarterectomy, I proudly declared to my lady friends, feeling quite empowered, that i had bought my first collection of erotica. They ooh-ed and hooted and wanted to see. So I proudly handed them:
"The naughty bits: The steamiest and most scandalous sex scenes from the world's great books."
They then proceeded to groan and mercilessly mock me with accusations of the lowest pits of Nerddom. No less, the evening proceeded with raucous cackling over the seduction of Socrates, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's melancholy whores, and the bawdy rhymes of the not-so-Dark Ages of Italy.
I excerpt now from the Introduction, written by a drop out from a Medieval Literature PhD, from this charming little book:
"So, although it might have been nice to call this book The Best Sex Scenes from the History of Literature, that not what it is. Such a thing cannot really exist. Sex is too varied, personal, and intricate to qualify for Bests; what works at one point for one person doesn't necessarily work for someone else, or even for that same person at a different time. I also realized that the column would be a lot more interesting if I included scenes that reflected truth and diversity of sex, not just idealized fantasies. Cormac McCarthy's writing about necrophilia, a medieval poem equating homosexuality to bad grammar: these are not what you'd expect to find in your basic erotica anthology, and I'm happy about that. The Naughty Bits is ultimately less a book of* sex in literature as much as a book about* sex in literature. If you come looking for brief and steamy diversions, you'll find them, but if you are looking for the ecstasy, agony, absurdity and poignancy of sex, you'll find that too...
"Sex is everywhere in writing, but it's not always there in the form we think it's going to take. And not all authors are up to the challenge. I often joke about half the sex scenes in the history of literature consist of only one word: Afterwards. And it's almost true. You get all the buildup, perhaps even some heavy breathing and the taking off of shoes, and then 'Afterwards, Gary and Bunny picked up their fallen clothes and..." Yeah, yeah. Cop-outs we have known.
The Naughty Bits is a celebration of all writers who decided that a single word wasn't enough, that something in the knocking together of bodies, the mixing of memory and desire, the slip of skin and sweat on skin and sweat was an integral part of the human experience--something vital to their characters and thus their stories, not to be missed.
"Of course, not everyone agrees. Some people believe that sex is better left behind closed doors and that to bring it out for public scrutiny somehow demystifies it, strips it of its magic. To me, all human experience shimmers with the luster of miracles, if we can bring ourselves to see it. Poets and fiction writers do their best to point it out; in those rare moments that they succeed, they are really creating art. Yes, sex is full of mystery, but it would take a lot of monkeys sitting at a lot of typewriters for a lot of eternities to begin to capture any of that magic on paper. When we are examining what's worthy of spilled ink, we should be less concerned with robbing something of its mystery as catching some measure of it. It's doubtful that any art, even photographs, steals the soul of the subject; the bigger question is whether, when the negatives are tweezed out of the fixer, any soul is visible on the film. We have to hope there is. And if sex is so likeley to be divested of its gravity by writing about it, then what of love? And what of death?"
Drugs and Sex. The Analysis of Science, and the Recreation of Art. This is all very Serious Business.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
The sound of the market self regulating
Sprint is a stupid, terrible horrible company. I hate them I hate them I hate them. Please tell your friends.
Friday, May 16, 2008
Philosophers
I am STILL writing this motherfucking paper due last winter, for a graduate course that nearly gave me an ulcer.
[Do you understand i used to be a Type B personality? My parents come from an equatorial, tropical island goddamnit. Now look at me. PHILOSOPHY GIVES ME ULCERS. This is the second consecutive week in which my DREAMS HAVE BEEN ABOUT KIDNEY FUNCTION. I have nervous twitches and environmentally induced OCD--I count how many strokes my toothbrush makes. Dozens of generations of rice farmers and school teachers and now this--a neurotic, latte sucking, obsessive american mess]
The professor of political philosophy for whom the paper is due is Very Good. I mean, other professional scholars and most grown intellectuals fall in rapture at his name. It is not clear why...he is an incredibly mild mannered man. But then you hear him speak a bit and you are like...goddamn, he is so brilliantly REASONABLE. If you listen more, there is incredibly undertow of devastating and dry-like-bone wit. He is not one of the charismatic geniuses--the ones i dreamed of coming to berkeley, wildly throwing chalk at the board. He is neatly dressed, polite, quite calm. And yet, as suspect as all the build up is, you are softly lulled into a mad revelation: this man is incredibly brilliant. His mind with great ease takes the complexities of the most complex philosophical tomes--or even the complete mess of your own thoughts--and in one brush returns it with elegant lucidity. His mind is the equivalent of a ballerina--feats of ridiculous bodily contortions with the ease of floating feathers, and the rigid aesthetic of euclidian geometry.
And THAT is why i can't finish this fucking paper. Just to talk to him i have a bodily sympathetic nervous system reaction. My heart beats faster, i sweat and i stutter. I am a grown ass woman, you know, I've been in school for decades, I shouldn't be afraid of professors anymore. But this one...its like having some sort of massive intellectual crush. I am the 12 year old nerdy girl again, and I've just met the Dreamy Rock Star.
[No, no, its not like that*; the record stands, the man appears to be stably married and has a son approximately my age. but in that uneasy way that sexual desire and intellectual rapture cross wires, they set off the eerily similar downstream devastation]
He is incredibly nice. But...nice like a philosophy professor. The Philosophers are among the most polite, measured, and civilized of all the scholars--a reputation they've cultivated since Seneca and the best of the Stoics. No impassioned screaming; why bother when you can simply lay it out in set theory? And yet...underneath it all, you know quite well there is the mildest, gentlest condescension. They think you are rather dumb, but that's alright, they are used to it.
And so here i am, sucking lattes and agonizing.
[Do you understand i used to be a Type B personality? My parents come from an equatorial, tropical island goddamnit. Now look at me. PHILOSOPHY GIVES ME ULCERS. This is the second consecutive week in which my DREAMS HAVE BEEN ABOUT KIDNEY FUNCTION. I have nervous twitches and environmentally induced OCD--I count how many strokes my toothbrush makes. Dozens of generations of rice farmers and school teachers and now this--a neurotic, latte sucking, obsessive american mess]
The professor of political philosophy for whom the paper is due is Very Good. I mean, other professional scholars and most grown intellectuals fall in rapture at his name. It is not clear why...he is an incredibly mild mannered man. But then you hear him speak a bit and you are like...goddamn, he is so brilliantly REASONABLE. If you listen more, there is incredibly undertow of devastating and dry-like-bone wit. He is not one of the charismatic geniuses--the ones i dreamed of coming to berkeley, wildly throwing chalk at the board. He is neatly dressed, polite, quite calm. And yet, as suspect as all the build up is, you are softly lulled into a mad revelation: this man is incredibly brilliant. His mind with great ease takes the complexities of the most complex philosophical tomes--or even the complete mess of your own thoughts--and in one brush returns it with elegant lucidity. His mind is the equivalent of a ballerina--feats of ridiculous bodily contortions with the ease of floating feathers, and the rigid aesthetic of euclidian geometry.
And THAT is why i can't finish this fucking paper. Just to talk to him i have a bodily sympathetic nervous system reaction. My heart beats faster, i sweat and i stutter. I am a grown ass woman, you know, I've been in school for decades, I shouldn't be afraid of professors anymore. But this one...its like having some sort of massive intellectual crush. I am the 12 year old nerdy girl again, and I've just met the Dreamy Rock Star.
[No, no, its not like that*; the record stands, the man appears to be stably married and has a son approximately my age. but in that uneasy way that sexual desire and intellectual rapture cross wires, they set off the eerily similar downstream devastation]
He is incredibly nice. But...nice like a philosophy professor. The Philosophers are among the most polite, measured, and civilized of all the scholars--a reputation they've cultivated since Seneca and the best of the Stoics. No impassioned screaming; why bother when you can simply lay it out in set theory? And yet...underneath it all, you know quite well there is the mildest, gentlest condescension. They think you are rather dumb, but that's alright, they are used to it.
And so here i am, sucking lattes and agonizing.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
When its this warm in San Francisco
They've painted over my graffiti in the bathroom at the coffee shop. That's too bad.
The third floor of the rotting victorian is simmering, sticky still at 1130 pm, clinging to the afternoon's long gone heat.
If i open the window, it smells like evaporating stale piss.
I can't finish my work. I want only to listen to songs:
I want to be a tattooed lady
dedicated, as I am, to art
Characters bold, complex and shady
will write my memoirs
across my heart
Two roosters I slew
and with all of my might
I prayed, hard, for you
in Haiti at night
Your skin has turned blue
and your hair has turned white
Must be the voodoo
of this Haitian moonlight
The third floor of the rotting victorian is simmering, sticky still at 1130 pm, clinging to the afternoon's long gone heat.
If i open the window, it smells like evaporating stale piss.
I can't finish my work. I want only to listen to songs:
I want to be a tattooed lady
dedicated, as I am, to art
Characters bold, complex and shady
will write my memoirs
across my heart
Two roosters I slew
and with all of my might
I prayed, hard, for you
in Haiti at night
Your skin has turned blue
and your hair has turned white
Must be the voodoo
of this Haitian moonlight
Its been said
"The bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep." OMG its so true. However, the bridge between the bright-eyed hope of that first whiff of perfectly coifed cappuccino, and the despair of realizing the endless crushing daily decimation of your youth, is also in a good day's futile, endless work.
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Neuropsychological and Cognitive Effects of elevated serum cortisol levels
(1) emotional lability
(2) agitated depression
(3) irritability
(4) anxiety
(5) panic attacks
(6) mild paranoia
(7) impairment of learning and memory (especially short term)
(8) insomnia
(9) frequently, increased appetite and weight gain
Sources of Elevated serum cortisol
(1) an assortment of diseases
(2) chronic stress
Sample clinical scenario
25 yo female medical student inclined to rapture at mere site of histopathological images of glomerular damage, reports having to switch coffee shops every three days because every time the cashier calls her "sweetie" she reflexively proposes marriage, adamantly believes the dudes next door are part of a south american drug ring, has lost keys/wallet/cellphone/pants multiple times in a course of a few hours, hates "everybody", has bad dreams about dominated mostly by the natural flora of the intestines, eats two vegan donuts a day, swears that all pants in her wardrobe have mysteriously and suddenly shrunk. she blames global warming.
(2) agitated depression
(3) irritability
(4) anxiety
(5) panic attacks
(6) mild paranoia
(7) impairment of learning and memory (especially short term)
(8) insomnia
(9) frequently, increased appetite and weight gain
Sources of Elevated serum cortisol
(1) an assortment of diseases
(2) chronic stress
Sample clinical scenario
25 yo female medical student inclined to rapture at mere site of histopathological images of glomerular damage, reports having to switch coffee shops every three days because every time the cashier calls her "sweetie" she reflexively proposes marriage, adamantly believes the dudes next door are part of a south american drug ring, has lost keys/wallet/cellphone/pants multiple times in a course of a few hours, hates "everybody", has bad dreams about dominated mostly by the natural flora of the intestines, eats two vegan donuts a day, swears that all pants in her wardrobe have mysteriously and suddenly shrunk. she blames global warming.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Contemplating Beauty
"Style is about class and class is about confidence and confidence is about believing in yourself which is, ultimately, about booze."
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Hrmph
Barack Obama, visionary and leader, candidate for the American presidency on the eve of yet another pivotal election day, angry black man egg head elitist, orders PBR. PBR?! nasty ass shit.
Sunday, May 4, 2008
Re-assessment
Ok, I take it back. The Catholics may have South American Liberation Theology, the Jesuit priests who stood by the masses, willing to be tortured to death by tyrants.
But Protestants came to flower in the Uuuuuunited States.
The Black Church.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04powell.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
I spent most of my childhood being incredibly bitter and torn by the fire and brimstone of being the Hindu child at my Baptist school. But being infused in the King James Version probably forged if nothing else, my take on the English language.
Rumi did have the language of lovers, wine and ecstasy. And Hindu texts the honor of war, patriotism and chivalry. But Judaism and the Black Church have the Old Testament and the fires of Exodus.
In other news, i have decided on a Blackberry.
But Protestants came to flower in the Uuuuuunited States.
The Black Church.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/weekinreview/04powell.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
I spent most of my childhood being incredibly bitter and torn by the fire and brimstone of being the Hindu child at my Baptist school. But being infused in the King James Version probably forged if nothing else, my take on the English language.
Rumi did have the language of lovers, wine and ecstasy. And Hindu texts the honor of war, patriotism and chivalry. But Judaism and the Black Church have the Old Testament and the fires of Exodus.
In other news, i have decided on a Blackberry.
Analysis
The hardest things to write about are the things you most care about. The ones you want to think through clearly, have a logical progression of thought, carefully crafted words. The things you care most about, you want to communicate the most clearly--un-fettered by sloppiness, gimmicks, sentimentality, distractions. Clean, a truth that stands by its own merits. Because its that important.
The things you care most about are also the ones that are hardest to be clear about. Like the evidence that shows that systematically, the longer a doctor knows a patient, the more likely they are to err on the side of excessive optimism in a bad prognosis. Or anecdotally, the way lovers will long delude themselves in the face of a dissolving or bad relationship, systematically dismissing evidence and intuition otherwise. Or in philosophy, the more an ideal matters--love, justice, truth--the more it is so much a part of who we are as humans, as teachers, are lovers, as mothers, explorers, brothers--the harder to be logical, consistent, far sighted and unequivocal.
So we are left with these paradoxical actions. I care so much about x, i must learn to approach x without that care, so i can serve it with the most powerful tools that rigor and objectivity can lend it. But i must not lose that care in the process, because that care itself is a powerful tool, and the entire motivating process. It is the point.
And so you end up with these funny products. Like John Rawls': A Theory of Justice. A massive 500 page tome completely inaccessible to the average citizen in its lacework of intricate arguments and abstraction. And yet to dive into it, it is astounding, the meticulous care with which these arguments are crafted. This like Kant's metaphysics, Aristotle's logics, these difficult works, rich with the brilliance of their crafters, and so difficult to maneuver. That is what philosophy degrees are for. But then there is a subtext--Rawls, so unfashionable these days--he really fucking cares! Its incredibly moving. This man believes in justice, in the role of the society to make life better. He believes in liberty. He believes that great evils that he saw in his life--World War II, tyranny, famine, cruelty, oppression--these can be systematically addressed, with the right structure of society, one that has mechanisms to ensure rights and liberties and equity. And he undertook the work of illuminating those girders--building the framework of reason and truth under it. If we have a system, a criteria, a way to wisely assess the conflicts that inevitably arise, we can sustain a healthy functioning collective of flourishing human beings.
And yet, it is a book on many shelves. And yet we still have: tyrany, famine, cruelty, oppression.
Alternatively, the project of medicine. It attracts people for all sorts of complex reasons. But at least one substantive drive, all cynicism be damned, is a genuine idealism, a desperation of young students to do* something in the face of suffering. Not just platitudes and wistfulness, a hard action with palpable impact. A care for the relief of suffering, and often enough, at least around here, plots for subversion--if i am a physician, i will have a different voice. People will pay attention. That fact is powerful, and may be harnessed for a variety of ends, but not least of which is advocacy for systematic change for the better.
In the meantime, however, the training to see suffering objectively and act level-headedly is one that may cancerously overwhelm other ways of seeing, so that one has forgotten, that even though caring was why one wanted to do the right thing, the right thing has obliterated the caring, and one is left cold and eviscerated.
Analysis is the dissection of things. Breaking apart complex messes of things into workable parts, to understand its fit, to project the next sensible step. It is necessary for deep understanding, and yet dissection most likely kills its specimen.
It is difficult to write about what you care about. To write is also to slice in, open, see what squirms below--then to name those things, identify them, with loving care pull them out, carving away the fats and grease and fluids, to pin and label them, build a taxonomy, annotate the patterns, and show them to another--see here it is. What they see then is not necessarily the thing you care about, but the way you have understood that thing--they see the mount, the categories, the pins and labels. What then?
The things you care most about are also the ones that are hardest to be clear about. Like the evidence that shows that systematically, the longer a doctor knows a patient, the more likely they are to err on the side of excessive optimism in a bad prognosis. Or anecdotally, the way lovers will long delude themselves in the face of a dissolving or bad relationship, systematically dismissing evidence and intuition otherwise. Or in philosophy, the more an ideal matters--love, justice, truth--the more it is so much a part of who we are as humans, as teachers, are lovers, as mothers, explorers, brothers--the harder to be logical, consistent, far sighted and unequivocal.
So we are left with these paradoxical actions. I care so much about x, i must learn to approach x without that care, so i can serve it with the most powerful tools that rigor and objectivity can lend it. But i must not lose that care in the process, because that care itself is a powerful tool, and the entire motivating process. It is the point.
And so you end up with these funny products. Like John Rawls': A Theory of Justice. A massive 500 page tome completely inaccessible to the average citizen in its lacework of intricate arguments and abstraction. And yet to dive into it, it is astounding, the meticulous care with which these arguments are crafted. This like Kant's metaphysics, Aristotle's logics, these difficult works, rich with the brilliance of their crafters, and so difficult to maneuver. That is what philosophy degrees are for. But then there is a subtext--Rawls, so unfashionable these days--he really fucking cares! Its incredibly moving. This man believes in justice, in the role of the society to make life better. He believes in liberty. He believes that great evils that he saw in his life--World War II, tyranny, famine, cruelty, oppression--these can be systematically addressed, with the right structure of society, one that has mechanisms to ensure rights and liberties and equity. And he undertook the work of illuminating those girders--building the framework of reason and truth under it. If we have a system, a criteria, a way to wisely assess the conflicts that inevitably arise, we can sustain a healthy functioning collective of flourishing human beings.
And yet, it is a book on many shelves. And yet we still have: tyrany, famine, cruelty, oppression.
Alternatively, the project of medicine. It attracts people for all sorts of complex reasons. But at least one substantive drive, all cynicism be damned, is a genuine idealism, a desperation of young students to do* something in the face of suffering. Not just platitudes and wistfulness, a hard action with palpable impact. A care for the relief of suffering, and often enough, at least around here, plots for subversion--if i am a physician, i will have a different voice. People will pay attention. That fact is powerful, and may be harnessed for a variety of ends, but not least of which is advocacy for systematic change for the better.
In the meantime, however, the training to see suffering objectively and act level-headedly is one that may cancerously overwhelm other ways of seeing, so that one has forgotten, that even though caring was why one wanted to do the right thing, the right thing has obliterated the caring, and one is left cold and eviscerated.
Analysis is the dissection of things. Breaking apart complex messes of things into workable parts, to understand its fit, to project the next sensible step. It is necessary for deep understanding, and yet dissection most likely kills its specimen.
It is difficult to write about what you care about. To write is also to slice in, open, see what squirms below--then to name those things, identify them, with loving care pull them out, carving away the fats and grease and fluids, to pin and label them, build a taxonomy, annotate the patterns, and show them to another--see here it is. What they see then is not necessarily the thing you care about, but the way you have understood that thing--they see the mount, the categories, the pins and labels. What then?
Saturday, May 3, 2008
In the Strip Mall of Souls
If I was to purchase a religious identity--research and compare specs as i would, say, with my electronics--i would not have chosen Hinduism.
Hinduism is both incredibly sloppy (it isn't even really one religion; people proclaimed some central texts, but only after colonizers came along and lumped together a myriad theologies and tribal cults, under a mispronunciation of the Indus river), and yet also one of the most OCD religions in the world. For this latter title it is closely rivaled by Judaism and Catholocism in its fixation with the mysticism of numbers, repetition, and ornate rituals.
Books and books and books of instructions, from how many times to circle the fire in the morning, how to progress in life cycles from cockroach to enlightenment, the precise way to bathe, even the way to fuck (See: kama sutra). It has an incredibly detailed opinion on everything.
The intellectual strand of hinduism has been long dominated by Brahmins--the people who took insular snobbery to its unrivaled heights, the name by which insular elitism is defined. A lot of pish posh dogmatism, self protection, and terrible metaphysics. Not to mention an adamantly Victorian code of morality more furious than when introduced by the British, with throttled genitals, soppy sentimentality for the poor and stern classism.
The mystic strand of Hinduism...a lot of self righteous gurus self-flagellating and ruling it over the heads of others. India is a religious country. There is a lot of status in being holier-than-thou. Self deprivation in an orange robe is a lot easier than trying to make it big in Bollywood. It is also likely that you will have a lot of middle class middle aged fanatics who will follow you around swooning. If i you do it really* well, you can have a lot of middle class middle aged fanatics in europe and Los Angeles too, and then you're fuckin set.
The festival strand of Hinduism--that is harder to argue. Festivals involve throwing colored dirt in the air, decorating confused white cows with flowers, wearing endless yards of bright silk and pounds of gold, setting lit candles down rivers, dancing, clapping, singing, gonging bells, making noise, crowding thickly and patiently in tropical humdity, praying into frenzy until dawn. I like that part--the excess, the fat bellies of priests, over their silken loin cloths, pouring gallons of milk and honey over granite and marble statues while masses starve outside.
I would not choose Protestantism either. Yes, the Great American Way for which I am grateful: rationality, pragmatism, the perfecters of logic, manufacturing, and log cabin construction. But clearly the sex life can't be all that great. All that individualism. There is less room for absurdity. Although to its credit, only with such stifling, bare and elegant theology can flourish the most subtle and richest ironies.
Atheism? Boring.
Agnosticism? Cowards.
Buddhism? over done. anyhow, i disagree with fundamental tenets i shall complain about some other time (e.g. clinging to suffering--not all that bad, is it now?)
Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam. Judaism like Buddhism--too done. Not to mention all the Jew-Boos out there. Too trendy. Islam is up and coming though. Nice intellectual history. Questionable political history. Although when next to the Catholics--Scylla and Charybdis. Can't read Arabic though. I like the intellectual spirit and collectivity of Catholicism coupled with its equally excessively elaborate rituals. I like its centralized state structure. However its strand of mysticism (Theresa of Avila, say) pays for all that sexual repression. Or not pays, i should say...it gets diverted excessively compared to the balance of other faculties. Islamic mysticism in Rumi and his dervishes...Poetry, Wine, and melancholy young men spinning in circles. Very nice.
Jesuits or the Dervishes, iPhone or a Blackberry. Well designed, hip, functional. I'll sleep on it.
Alternative exposures
Hinduism is both incredibly sloppy (it isn't even really one religion; people proclaimed some central texts, but only after colonizers came along and lumped together a myriad theologies and tribal cults, under a mispronunciation of the Indus river), and yet also one of the most OCD religions in the world. For this latter title it is closely rivaled by Judaism and Catholocism in its fixation with the mysticism of numbers, repetition, and ornate rituals.
Books and books and books of instructions, from how many times to circle the fire in the morning, how to progress in life cycles from cockroach to enlightenment, the precise way to bathe, even the way to fuck (See: kama sutra). It has an incredibly detailed opinion on everything.
The intellectual strand of hinduism has been long dominated by Brahmins--the people who took insular snobbery to its unrivaled heights, the name by which insular elitism is defined. A lot of pish posh dogmatism, self protection, and terrible metaphysics. Not to mention an adamantly Victorian code of morality more furious than when introduced by the British, with throttled genitals, soppy sentimentality for the poor and stern classism.
The mystic strand of Hinduism...a lot of self righteous gurus self-flagellating and ruling it over the heads of others. India is a religious country. There is a lot of status in being holier-than-thou. Self deprivation in an orange robe is a lot easier than trying to make it big in Bollywood. It is also likely that you will have a lot of middle class middle aged fanatics who will follow you around swooning. If i you do it really* well, you can have a lot of middle class middle aged fanatics in europe and Los Angeles too, and then you're fuckin set.
The festival strand of Hinduism--that is harder to argue. Festivals involve throwing colored dirt in the air, decorating confused white cows with flowers, wearing endless yards of bright silk and pounds of gold, setting lit candles down rivers, dancing, clapping, singing, gonging bells, making noise, crowding thickly and patiently in tropical humdity, praying into frenzy until dawn. I like that part--the excess, the fat bellies of priests, over their silken loin cloths, pouring gallons of milk and honey over granite and marble statues while masses starve outside.
I would not choose Protestantism either. Yes, the Great American Way for which I am grateful: rationality, pragmatism, the perfecters of logic, manufacturing, and log cabin construction. But clearly the sex life can't be all that great. All that individualism. There is less room for absurdity. Although to its credit, only with such stifling, bare and elegant theology can flourish the most subtle and richest ironies.
Atheism? Boring.
Agnosticism? Cowards.
Buddhism? over done. anyhow, i disagree with fundamental tenets i shall complain about some other time (e.g. clinging to suffering--not all that bad, is it now?)
Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam. Judaism like Buddhism--too done. Not to mention all the Jew-Boos out there. Too trendy. Islam is up and coming though. Nice intellectual history. Questionable political history. Although when next to the Catholics--Scylla and Charybdis. Can't read Arabic though. I like the intellectual spirit and collectivity of Catholicism coupled with its equally excessively elaborate rituals. I like its centralized state structure. However its strand of mysticism (Theresa of Avila, say) pays for all that sexual repression. Or not pays, i should say...it gets diverted excessively compared to the balance of other faculties. Islamic mysticism in Rumi and his dervishes...Poetry, Wine, and melancholy young men spinning in circles. Very nice.
Jesuits or the Dervishes, iPhone or a Blackberry. Well designed, hip, functional. I'll sleep on it.
Alternative exposures
Genesis
'Genesis'
Documentary makers tread through the mud to explore the origins of life with a storyteller.
By Kevin Crust, LA Times Staff Writer
In the beginning, there was muck.
But first, there was darkness, followed by fire, then lots and lots of rain, which caused the muck. And from the muck oozed life, which is when Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou's evocative, meta-nature film, "Genesis," begins to take off.
The film is a follow-up to their successful 1996 documentary, "Microcosmos," in which they focused on an insect-laden patch of grass to render a virtual Jurassic Park of bugs. Minuscule life-and-death struggles played out against blades of grass the size of palm trees when blown up for the big screen.
With "Genesis," the scope is grander with the emphasis definitely on life, or more precisely, its origins.
An African griot (Sotigui Kouyaté) acts as our guide, essentially telling the story of the beginning of everything. Within that muck, which cools from a bubbly, cheese pizza molten state, forms the essential breeding ground for creatures great and small.
Ugly, primeval critters venture to crawl and slither from their watery homes onto what passes for dry land. Gills and fins transform into lungs and feet as evolution occurs before our eyes in the mudskipper, a walking fish, which still strangely roams the Earth.
Exotic animals of unimaginable beauty and grotesqueness, such as frilled lizards, panther chameleons, violin crabs, sea horses and various frogs and toads, make their entry into the world, scrambling for dominance and survival. Very closely, we witness the sex lives of the wet and slimy, as they perform mating rituals that would test the mettle of contestants on both "The Bachelor" and "Fear Factor."
"Genesis" does get around to dealing with death, most impressively in the time-lapse demise of a jellyfish washed up on a beach that makes the sands of time much more than a metaphor.
As extraordinary as all of this imagery is, it is the film's sound design that takes it to another level. A quirky, electric mix of ambient sound, effects and music by composer Bruno Coulais and sound designer Laurent Quaglio gives the film its heart and its sense of humor. The scratching of a crab's claws against rock is amplified to amusing effect. Surprising blurps and bleats turn into symphonic compositions only to revert back to dissonance as the action reaches a crescendo.
"Genesis" is a creationist's nightmare — a feature-length endorsement of evolution. But it does so in an inherently spiritual manner. At times, the life through a microscope plainly blurs the line between man and animal.
The human birth enterprise is woven seamlessly into the film via clips, including a frenzy of spermatozoids and a fetus in a bubble. The underlying effect of this otherworldly parade of biology is the undeniable interconnectedness of it all.
The griot blends myth and fable to stress the bond among all the elements of the universe while simultaneously unraveling a very simple physics mystery. Not strictly speaking a documentary — as many images stand in for unfilmable events such as the dawn of time — "Genesis" takes on profound questions with a clear point of view without being overly didactic.
Documentary makers tread through the mud to explore the origins of life with a storyteller.
By Kevin Crust, LA Times Staff Writer
In the beginning, there was muck.
But first, there was darkness, followed by fire, then lots and lots of rain, which caused the muck. And from the muck oozed life, which is when Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou's evocative, meta-nature film, "Genesis," begins to take off.
The film is a follow-up to their successful 1996 documentary, "Microcosmos," in which they focused on an insect-laden patch of grass to render a virtual Jurassic Park of bugs. Minuscule life-and-death struggles played out against blades of grass the size of palm trees when blown up for the big screen.
With "Genesis," the scope is grander with the emphasis definitely on life, or more precisely, its origins.
An African griot (Sotigui Kouyaté) acts as our guide, essentially telling the story of the beginning of everything. Within that muck, which cools from a bubbly, cheese pizza molten state, forms the essential breeding ground for creatures great and small.
Ugly, primeval critters venture to crawl and slither from their watery homes onto what passes for dry land. Gills and fins transform into lungs and feet as evolution occurs before our eyes in the mudskipper, a walking fish, which still strangely roams the Earth.
Exotic animals of unimaginable beauty and grotesqueness, such as frilled lizards, panther chameleons, violin crabs, sea horses and various frogs and toads, make their entry into the world, scrambling for dominance and survival. Very closely, we witness the sex lives of the wet and slimy, as they perform mating rituals that would test the mettle of contestants on both "The Bachelor" and "Fear Factor."
"Genesis" does get around to dealing with death, most impressively in the time-lapse demise of a jellyfish washed up on a beach that makes the sands of time much more than a metaphor.
As extraordinary as all of this imagery is, it is the film's sound design that takes it to another level. A quirky, electric mix of ambient sound, effects and music by composer Bruno Coulais and sound designer Laurent Quaglio gives the film its heart and its sense of humor. The scratching of a crab's claws against rock is amplified to amusing effect. Surprising blurps and bleats turn into symphonic compositions only to revert back to dissonance as the action reaches a crescendo.
"Genesis" is a creationist's nightmare — a feature-length endorsement of evolution. But it does so in an inherently spiritual manner. At times, the life through a microscope plainly blurs the line between man and animal.
The human birth enterprise is woven seamlessly into the film via clips, including a frenzy of spermatozoids and a fetus in a bubble. The underlying effect of this otherworldly parade of biology is the undeniable interconnectedness of it all.
The griot blends myth and fable to stress the bond among all the elements of the universe while simultaneously unraveling a very simple physics mystery. Not strictly speaking a documentary — as many images stand in for unfilmable events such as the dawn of time — "Genesis" takes on profound questions with a clear point of view without being overly didactic.
Special Final Exams Diet
Black Coffee (x 12), ibuprofen, antacids, water, half priced day old cafe pastries. shots of whiskey as needed, before sleep.
When i am done with this, i will have the authority to advise people on how to take care of their bodies.
When i am done with this, i will have the authority to advise people on how to take care of their bodies.
Joining the Circus
The Too Cool For You Coffee Shop is inexplicably compelling. The coffee is* really good. And I am* a creature of habit (for about 4 month intervals anyway). And I do* need another decent substitute for Coffee Shop Where Barista-Not-Actually-Flirting-With-You works.
[“The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney…we have raccoons sometimes in our chimney…and once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames, and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that. They are all like that.” ]
However the TCFYCS is, a bit embarrasingly, a place to see-and-be-seen. The most unusual people show up there. Yes its bougie as fuck, and sits on Valencia Street, that precipice between Dolores Heights and Mission Street, shiny BMWs and secret grandmother tamale vendors. But it is a gathering of bohemians none the less, just richer ones, entire herds of students, graphic designers, aaarteests, party crawlers getting their pre-disco latte on. Dreadlocks and designer shoes, aging hipsters with their fllock of children and pale literature graduate students.
The workers are all in their mid to late twenties and unequivocally, Beautiful, Hip and Strange. Their dirty ripped clothing, their bored air of contempt, the precisely mussed hair, the perfection with which they sculpt miniature van gohs out of the swirls of steamed milk and espresso--exude a definitive ratio of their coolnes to your coolness at a bout 3000 on any given day.
I show up, annoyed by these feelings. And yet hungry for it. Since they are busy crafting impressionist art out of every drink, the wait is inordinate, plenty of time to stare blankly at all the people lounging around the bar
Today was "Matty's last day" the signs all said. "Which one is Matty?" I ask. The bulky man covered in tattoos and plaid at the register points to the fellow in a handsome bowler hat. I was quite sad. I loved that guy. He had an exquisite handle bar mustache, wore dirty overalls with a very nice tie and shirt and was also scribbled with tattoos. He was dark and handsome and had large brown eyes. You must imagine a very good looking Super Mario say, except dressed with the elegance of a Parisian Surrealist sketch. i over heard him banter with some woman about the circus shows he would do all summer--the bed of nails, the bugs he ate, the imitations of his audience at Very Famous Museums and grand theatres.
I wanted to tell him something. But their conversation continued. i didn't know what to tell him. Only that i was terribly fond of him, his presence, his whimsy, his existence. Bowler hats and handlebar mustaches will no doubt be at the Gap this time next year, but still, a man who wears it with such talent is a force of nature. So on my out, i tell him as earnestly as i can without being too creepy, "You will be missed!" He is cheerful and tells me to stop by for beer every sunday, where he hangs out. This sense of warmth, ease and inviting made me incredibly happy.
I left with all sorts of plots in my mind. Perhaps this fellow could be my link to the circus. I had been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, have been practicing my handstands for 3 years now (with little to show except tendonitis). What would it take to be in a circus? Would i have to look as exquisite in a bowler hat? That could be difficult.
Summer is so close, it teases me, i must work so hard -- write and write and write. Go to clinic. Memorize drugs and bugs and poisons. But oh...the circus.
I will go to this bar and find out more. slowly but surely. For surely, there must be a talent i posess that people find strange and upsetting and willing to fling quarters for.
[“The thing to remember about love affairs,” says Simone, “is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney…we have raccoons sometimes in our chimney…and once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped that the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames, and running madly around until they dropped dead.” Simone swallows some wine. “Love affairs are like that. They are all like that.” ]
However the TCFYCS is, a bit embarrasingly, a place to see-and-be-seen. The most unusual people show up there. Yes its bougie as fuck, and sits on Valencia Street, that precipice between Dolores Heights and Mission Street, shiny BMWs and secret grandmother tamale vendors. But it is a gathering of bohemians none the less, just richer ones, entire herds of students, graphic designers, aaarteests, party crawlers getting their pre-disco latte on. Dreadlocks and designer shoes, aging hipsters with their fllock of children and pale literature graduate students.
The workers are all in their mid to late twenties and unequivocally, Beautiful, Hip and Strange. Their dirty ripped clothing, their bored air of contempt, the precisely mussed hair, the perfection with which they sculpt miniature van gohs out of the swirls of steamed milk and espresso--exude a definitive ratio of their coolnes to your coolness at a bout 3000 on any given day.
I show up, annoyed by these feelings. And yet hungry for it. Since they are busy crafting impressionist art out of every drink, the wait is inordinate, plenty of time to stare blankly at all the people lounging around the bar
Today was "Matty's last day" the signs all said. "Which one is Matty?" I ask. The bulky man covered in tattoos and plaid at the register points to the fellow in a handsome bowler hat. I was quite sad. I loved that guy. He had an exquisite handle bar mustache, wore dirty overalls with a very nice tie and shirt and was also scribbled with tattoos. He was dark and handsome and had large brown eyes. You must imagine a very good looking Super Mario say, except dressed with the elegance of a Parisian Surrealist sketch. i over heard him banter with some woman about the circus shows he would do all summer--the bed of nails, the bugs he ate, the imitations of his audience at Very Famous Museums and grand theatres.
I wanted to tell him something. But their conversation continued. i didn't know what to tell him. Only that i was terribly fond of him, his presence, his whimsy, his existence. Bowler hats and handlebar mustaches will no doubt be at the Gap this time next year, but still, a man who wears it with such talent is a force of nature. So on my out, i tell him as earnestly as i can without being too creepy, "You will be missed!" He is cheerful and tells me to stop by for beer every sunday, where he hangs out. This sense of warmth, ease and inviting made me incredibly happy.
I left with all sorts of plots in my mind. Perhaps this fellow could be my link to the circus. I had been thinking about this for some time now. In fact, have been practicing my handstands for 3 years now (with little to show except tendonitis). What would it take to be in a circus? Would i have to look as exquisite in a bowler hat? That could be difficult.
Summer is so close, it teases me, i must work so hard -- write and write and write. Go to clinic. Memorize drugs and bugs and poisons. But oh...the circus.
I will go to this bar and find out more. slowly but surely. For surely, there must be a talent i posess that people find strange and upsetting and willing to fling quarters for.
Friday, May 2, 2008
The Last Box
I finally unpacked it.
9 months after moving here.
Unfortunately the contents of the last box and the several previous are now all over my floor. and bed. and desk. and basically ever plane surface and some vertical ones.
9 months after moving here.
Unfortunately the contents of the last box and the several previous are now all over my floor. and bed. and desk. and basically ever plane surface and some vertical ones.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
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