A strange brew is this, and not all of it is pretty. Partially a record of a crackup and partially a tale of rising from that crackup back into a useful life; and part of that is how I decided writing was necessary to my life and recovery; and another part is just keeping a record of where I have been and what I have learned. You can see the topics I cover the sidebar. The hope is to help others; the purpose is figuring out where I am going. Thank you for dropping by. Feel free to comment.
I have a beein in my bonnet about Hollywood remaking movies - instead of recycling well-done material into second-rate reboots, why not plunder older IP?
Other than Warren Williams, Barbara Stanwyck & Joan Blondell being dead?
Bruce Dern ruined Robert Redford's The Great Gatsby for when I read someone saying Bern should have played Gatsby. Yes, that would've been so much more interesting.
When I Give You My Silence was published in Spanish in 2023 its author, the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa, rightly predicted that it would be his final novel. He died last year at the age of 89. I Give You My Silence may have been completed with the spectre of death approaching, but there is nothing morbid about this book, which is an eccentric love letter to Vargas Llosa’s native country and, in particular, its music.
Irvine Welsh’s 16th novel Can Nothing Save Us? comes as something of a
surprise. An epic American family saga, it explores a collective
emotional malaise at the heart of a great power in decline. This is a
bold and ambitious work, in which Welsh deftly shifts point of view with
confidence and conviction: his ability to jump generations and to
capture the voices and feelings of his disparate cast of characters is
at times quite astonishing.
In his opening paragraph, Philip Hensher declares that a novel not only “tells a good story” but is a good story in itself. We could extend that neat formula to include this book, which is not only a masterful account of fiction since 1719, when Daniel Defoe set Robinson Crusoe down on his desert island, but is itself a wonderful read. There is nothing dreary here; no sense of being back in the seminar room taking notes. Instead it is 600 pages of deep pleasure, an excuse to revisit old literary loves and be reminded of ones that have slipped from view.
***
Hensher never falls into crankiness, but he is unafraid to point out
home truths. Such as the fact that so much of the pleased-with-itself
“experimentalism” of the 1960 to 1980 period was merely a retread of
things that had been done better before. Tickled by the clever wheeze of
having central characters with no name? Fanny Burney was already doing
that in 1814. Keen on using fragmentary collage to signal modernity?
That blustery old fogey Evelyn Waugh got there first with Vile Bodies
(1930). As for self-reflexivity, that device by which the novelist
comments on the process of writing a novel, you should go back to
Fielding.
From Marquis de Sade to Grand Theft Auto, a Brief History of Depravity (Literary Hub). I have understood the French fascination with Sade. It seems to fall in line with their admiration of Jerry Lewis. The essay is in good company, Camus started with Sade in The Rebel. I think he was faker, living in his head, but that might be the point of the essay. He let out all the demons.
Interview with Stephen Greenblatt on the Death of Christopher Marlowe in 1593:
None of this excludes the possibility that the later legend might have
been based on a fictional character – that remains a strong argument –
but the evidence demonstrates that there are several possibilities for a
historical Arthur which can withstand the rigours of contemporary
source-criticism. Asserting that Arthur was certainly a myth is,
therefore, no longer credible.
It is not true that I bend my ear every time Joyce Carol Oates speaks, but maybe it comes close?
In general, Oates said she liked Nolan’s film:
“[I] highly recommend both Nolan’s film and the 1997 miniseries
co-produced by Francis Coppola. The adaptations are notably different:
one American, with the brooding middle-aged-boy-hero Matt Damon; the
other very Mediterranean, with charismatic Armand Assante who more
naturally inhabits the role … no reason why Nolan, or anyone else,
should not re-imagine/re-envision a classical hero through the prism of
his own invention.”
I have eaten dinner, a big bowl of soup, have finished watching Tulsa King and Strange New Worlds. The former works, if you forget the sociopathy of mobsters exposed by The Sopranos. The Trek show has grown on me, as has Anson Mount. The real Trekkers I guess are not happy with its experimentation. That I find its most interesting aspect.
The key, Camus believed, was to differentiate between
rebellion and revolution. As he saw it, revolutions sought to protect
freedom and humanity against injustice by creating a perfect social
order – in other words, by putting an end to history. The problem is
that in trying (and failing) to create an ideal society, revolutions end
up crushing the freedom and humanity they purport to be defending. This
was especially true of the French Revolution, but no ‘revolutionary’
regime was any better – or worse – than any other. In this respect,
Camus believed, the Soviet Union was indistinguishable from Nazi
Germany.
Rebellion, by contrast, should respond to injustice by
emphasising a shared humanity and by clinging doggedly to the value of
human life. It required not just individual commitment, but solidarity
with others. As Camus pointed out in Neither Victims, nor Executioners
(1946), it should not aim to end history, but to ‘fight within History,
to preserve from History that part of man which is not its proper
province’.
Camus gave vivid expression to this in The Plague
(1947). Set in Oran, in Algeria, during an outbreak of the plague in
the 1940s, the novel has been widely recognised as an allegory of the
German occupation of France and is, in many ways, a blueprint for his
concept of rebellion. As Ronald Aronson has argued, it ‘conveys the
unheroic determination to do what must be done in the face of a total
threat’. Although the journalist Rambert, for example, initially tries
to flee, he eventually resolves to stay and – realising that the plague
can only be combatted through solidarity – accepts the risks that
entails.
I mean to do some writing today. And I need to go to the grocery again. Which proves me a bit of a shit since I passed on the writer's group. I got into watching Orphan Black, but truly, I did not feel like having that much human interaction today.
Thinking and reading while watching.
I read Ray Davies' X-Ray while in prison; of the rock star memoirs, I think it is the best I have read. Definitely a Ray Davies production, far stranger and probably deeper than even Dylan's memoir. But I must not have caught the reference to The Beatles mentioned in Dave Davies on the Kinks’ Beatles rivalry (GuitarPlayer)
I made it to group on Friday. My legs got wobbly. I took the bus there and back, as little walking as possible. I stayed put for the rest of the day. Did some reading, watched shows on Netflix. Right now I cannot recall what it was! Thusday Murder Club.
Got a rejection.
Thank you for sharing "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory, 1976 - 1984" with A Public Space. We regret that we are unable to use this piece for the magazine, but appreciate the opportunity to consider it.
I keep having these intense moments of insomnia. Those I have used to work on my research project.
CC called again on Friday. I spoke with KH, too. Joel C called with compliments for “Ahab in the Moonlight”. That is now published. I need to get a link here to it.
Saturday, I went to Payless and the convenience store twice. A little more walking, a little more of my research project.
I started watching Orphan Black on Netflix. I like it.Oh, I started Bugonia and just could not take its deepness or weirdness. Looks good, though.
I decided against church. Not enough energy, pain is more a low-level discomfort.
One thing decided: a different working schedule. I need to get some books read.
Things read over the past few days that I want to share:
No Longer Human comprises a series of notebooks
by a formerly “handsome young man”, who declares his incompatibility
with the human race. For him, the world is “a place of bottomless
horror”; he concludes that “living itself is the source of sin”. The
narrator of the title story of Schoolgirl takes a similar view: “the
problem is that I’m corrupt. I’m a bad girl.”
The
relentless pessimism in Dazai’s work risks seeming overwhelming or
indulgent but, as Barton puts it, Dazai “leans into [the self-loathing]
with a kind of exuberance”. Indeed, his appeal in part lies in this
“unashamed emotional quality, but also tempered with enormous
intelligence”.
Whitehead initially envisioned the Harlem Trilogy as a jaunty
entertainment, a break from the serious Pulitzer-winning business of The
Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. Cool Machine specifically
covers the New York of his youth, a scene he experienced first-hand,
which only adds to the air of vivid, freewheeling fun. Whitehead maps
the streets, labels the landmarks and dips in at intervals with handy
background information. He takes a dark and dangerous corner of history
and makes it feel illuminated, magnified, even borderline
family-friendly.
Revisionist? Well, it certainly takes us to wintry and sombre ponderings
on the movies’ (perennial) tendency to coarsen and to cheapen, to
enforce cultural mob-rule. He cites King Vidor’s 1928 film The Crowd,
starring James Murray, a former extra plucked from the ranks and groomed
for glory but whose awful destiny was to descend into alcoholism and
homelessness – back into the crowd. He emphasises movies’ amazing
populist-democratic power and reach, their power embodied by the fact
that, unlike in the theatre or concert hall, a film’s action could not
be stopped or affected by the crowd in front of it. Like a theologian
dragged by doubts to the foot of the cross, Thomson wonders if the
movies will always lack literature’s way of allowing us to enlarge our
imaginations, as opposed to forcing a submission to the screen.
As the report notes, immigrants from countries like Haiti, Mexico,
the Dominican Republic, Uganda, Jamaica, the Philippines, and dozens of
others make up the majority of people who serve the aging, frail, sick,
disabled and dying. These immigrants “bathe their clients, change adult
diapers, supervise medications, and provide companionship in
relationships that are intimate as well as professional.” And they are
the targets of Donald Trump’s hatred.
Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain
is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what
they are worth.
This vivid lyricism calls to mind other Irish writers such as Paul Lynch or Sara Baume (Patch and his dog, in particular, echo Baume’s gorgeous debut Spill Simmer Falter Wither). Looking farther afield, the reading experience resembles that of Samantha Harvey’s Booker-winning Orbital, where another handful of individual lives and private concerns are set against a vast and sublime beauty – only this time we are not up in the heavens, but down in the dirt. Just as with Harvey’s novel, some readers of The Red Mouth might bemoan the lack of dialogue or explicit plot. There are no big epiphanies: time unfolds in quiet increments; new losses are accrued; mysteries are set up only to remain unanswered. However, as Brigit, one of Fleming’s daughters, comes to realise, such is life: “things happen, one after the other, and there is no smooth parabolic curve that can connect all the checkpoints … uncertainty is the only certainty”. In Armstrong’s meditative and profound novel, such uncertainty, so exquisitely rendered, is more than enough to sustain us to the end.
In the tradition of Angela Carter, Marina Warner, Emma Donoghue and Helen Oyeyemi, Blackie wants to reclaim these stories from the Disneyfication of the past century. Many of the heroines in her books would rather throw a frog at a wall than kiss one, and are “very much more likely to rescue than be rescued”. The heroine’s journey is one of young women discovering their agency through courage, grit and wit.
Blackie is determined to push back against the wicked stepmother and evil-witch tropes, to restore the “wise old woman” to her rightful place at the heart of society. Frustrated that all the well-known mythical women belong to Greek and Roman legends – “raped left, right and centre, and always secondary to men” – she set out to explore the Celtic folklore of her half-Irish, half-Scottish ancestry. “I discovered all these different ways of being a really interesting and useful old woman,” she says. “Why does nobody know about them?”
Her favourite mythical being is the Cailleach (“old woman” or hag in Scottish and Irish Gaelic), associated with winter and wilderness and as old as the land itself. “A very powerful role model for the challenges we face today,” she says. But the Selkie, a seal woman who is stranded out of water and has her skin stolen, or the miller’s daughter, whose father cut off her hands and must regrow them, are rich metaphors for her own story and for female narratives in general. Rebirth, transformation and renewal – the message of Blackie’s books is clear: be ready for “the Call”, which is most likely to come when you fear your story might be over.
But "dude," "man," and "bro" are a specific type of vocative known as "familiarizers."
Familiarizers mark a relationship as casual and provide social nuance
beyond their attention-getting function. Their true power lies in how
they help perform interactional work
like signaling closeness or commiseration, expressing or softening
disagreement, and managing conversational turns. Consider the different
relational messages being delivered by the "bro" used in "Bro, you ate
my pizza!" versus the one in "I love you too, bro."
Recuperating from surgery on Tuesday, so still a little rocky. My brain is not in the mood for extended exgesis. Take the following for what they are worth. I am just glad that the dimbulbs who were so certain that Mr. Musk has oracular abilities have had their moronic minds smashed.
The Odyssey does not come from the same world as the other
pinnacles of Greek culture we all know and love and tweet about. For one
thing, it is much older: the events it recounts take place during the
late Bronze Age, around 1200 years before the golden age of Attic
culture that spawned Socrates and Plato. The poem itself was set down in
writing only after centuries of oral transmission — but even the written
document is older than not just Plato and Sophocles, but the Persian
War, the Olympic Games, and even the Archaic poets like Sappho and
Alcaeus. In fact, Homer barely ever uses words that mean “Greek” or
“Hellenic” at all: TheIliad and Odyssey are really
about a mess of tiny, disunited Mycenaean kingdoms whose subjects wear
boar’s tusk helmets and fight with bronze weapons and write, on the rare
occasions that they write at all, in a complicated ideographical script
called Linear B that was only deciphered in the Fifties.
No heroic figure better illustrates just how different these two
worlds — the Homeric and the Attic — were than Odysseus. It is true that
he was often admired by the Greeks of the Athenian Golden Age: the
intelligence evinced by his ruses was impossible to ignore for such a
self-consciously brainy civilization. But just as frequently, Odysseus
was deplored for his lack of scruple, his amorality, his low cunning.
Pindar suspected that “the fame of Odysseus is become greater than his
toils, through the sweet lays that Homer sang”. Sophocles had his main
character, Philoctetes, berate Odysseus for being a “shameless wretch!
from whom nor truth nor justice, / Naught that becomes the generous
mind, can flow”. Even Socrates, who was generally rather keen on
intelligence as a virtue, stopped short of straightforwardly defending
the man from Ithaca in the Lesser Hippias, preferring instead to
show how his interlocutor is just as bad as Odysseus, because he is a
deceiver, not of others, but of himself.
Up early and questioning what I am about to do now that I've gone through the morning's readings.
Last night, very early this morning, I found accidentally a site having Indiana case law dating back to the 1800s. What I have been trying to get at with my trips to Indianapolis was right there. I got the cases I needed to be downloaded, so not going out of town on Monday. But I am still sleepy.
Of course, Nolan isn’t just trying to replicate the Odyssey, and I’m not
expecting him to. This is not – OK, not entirely – the chagrin of a
Homerist missing her favourite scenes (no matter how I felt when I found
out that Homer’s delightfully brash princess, Nausicaa, Odysseus’s key
in getting back to Ithaca, had been chopped). What I’m pointing out is
what is lost, or changed, in a Nolan–Hollywood–Homer crossover, and why
that matters. As Nolan himself has said: “I was intrigued by the idea of
a Hollywood studio taking on the biggest of stories.” So this is about
uncovering what, in Nolan’s movie, looks like the Odyssey, and what is a
product of his own choices. I’m here to think through what an epic hero
and his world looks like to Nolan, and to Hollywood. And that is a
really telling ride.
***
In the gap between the sung verses of Homer and
Matt Damon declaiming to an Imax camera, what this Odyssey offers us, by
way of a hero and the grandiloquent experience of epic cinema, is a man
who seeks redemption and solidarity among men, recognition from women,
and absolution for a civilisation’s fall. Make of that, in the current
climate, what you will.
Keith Richards on New Music, Old Friendships & the Future of the Rolling Stones | Billboard Cover
Another Homeric use of automatos is even more striking. In Iliad
18 we are told that Hephaestus, the god of sweat and technic, made 20
devices which can glide through the halls of Olympus ‘all on their own’.
This is the passage that Aristotle cites in his Politics. ‘The
tripods of Hephaestus’, he says, ‘see what to do in advance’ and then
‘perform their own work.’ What Aristotle means by this – and Homer, too –
is that Hephaestus’ tripods can navigate the whole of Zeus’ palace,
bearing to the gods whatever they may happen to desire, wherever they
happen to be.
It is not just the gates of heaven, then, which are
both sensitive and active. The Olympians’ tripods can drive through the
corridors of heaven: Homer tells us that they ‘roll to the halls where
the gods convene’ and then return, ‘all on their own’, to Hephaestus’
splendid forge. They certainly would be, as Homer calls them, ‘a marvel
to behold’.
In light of all this it is not meaningless to ask: was
Homer’s heaven the birthplace of AI? Machines that can drive through a
vast mountaintop complex would now be called, if only conversationally,
intelligent.
***
Since Descartes, to simplify a long and subtle history, ‘machine’ and
‘intelligence’ have functioned as counter-concepts. In antiquity, on
the contrary, the predecessors of our word ‘machine’ and the concept of
‘intelligence’ were very closely linked. There is no machine after all that is not a materialisation of mēchanē, or cunning. The function of any machine is to realise some desire of its originating intelligence.
An unintelligent machine may well function as a mere tool of that intelligence or cunning – roughly, what Hesiod seems to call mēchanē.
But if all natural powers are originally purposive, as the ancients
felt and believed – then intelligence, too, is purposive. To construct
an intelligent machine is therefore to construct a radically purposive machine.
This means that a truly intelligent machine cannot and will not be exhaustively instrumentalised by its creators. If an unintelligent machine can function as a pure tool of its designer, an intelligent machine is, by definition, no longer just a tool. A smart device has device – like the Cyclops. And, for that matter, like Pandora.
An intelligent machine is one that has its own mēchanē,
its own cunning. As such, it has its own imperatives and objectives,
its own drives. Intelligence possesses some inner purposiveness, some
tendency that humans do not fully comprehend in themselves. Did Homer
really know why he dreamt of androids in the eighth century BC? And do
we really know now?
Trehan describes the ordeal of trying to get
Satluj released as “dystopian” and decries “undemocratic censorship” and
alleged political interference under the Narendra Modi government
re-shaping India’s film industries. He claims Indian cinema has been widely co-opted as a propaganda
arm for the government’s rightwing, religious nationalist agenda, where
there is “only room for one kind of story to be told”, particularly in
mainstream Hindi films.
“It is clear to me
that there is no creative freedom in India today,” says Trehan. “When
you see the level of censorship happening, films getting blocked by the
film board and banned from release, it makes you question: does
democracy exist in this country any more?”
Even
today, discussions of Punjab’s separatist movement – which raged in the
1980s and 1990s, fighting for an independent Sikh homeland called
Khalistan, before it was crushed by the state – remain highly sensitive
for the Modi government.
The history of the Anglo-American Common Law is a history of renewal,
restoration and reinvigoration that is grounded in practicalities and
tangibility. It does not try to answer ‘what is Justice?’ deductively.
It searches for justice inductively, case by case, precedent by
precedent, and roots itself constitutionally in the community’s capacity
for self-government. Not without an endearing sense of grandiosity,
Winston Churchill was still right when he said in his sweeping history
of the English-speaking world that the claims and disputes across its
vast stretches obtain according to the Common Law, at least in theory,
and not uniformly. Lincoln the lawyer was dealing in the same terms and,
naturally, he had a ‘Common-Law mind’. His life on the judicial circuit
showed he understood that the real gem of the Common Law was redress
and remedy, not revolution. In its deepest working sense, even the most
ordinary, granular case could distil the most fundamental political
question there is: what sort of government do we want? Better yet, what
sort of government does our history of cases and precedents point us
toward?
***
It is by asking and answering such questions that America rediscovers
and regenerates itself. Lincoln saw and understood this, which lent him
both wisdom and his remarkable belief in the American constitution.
America at 250 should remind us of its capacity for self-rediscovery and
its durability because of the instincts of the Common Law deeply woven
into its DNA. It should remind us, as Lincoln the Common Law lawyer
understood, that American democracy is a renewable charter.
I did group, almost falling asleep at the end. I came home and did a nap. Something like 4 hours. When I woke, I was a little disoriented about time and date. The sky outside was as dull and gray as it had been this morning.
What I thought would be a small diversion became this post. It has been at least 4 hours since I started. Now, I have run through my emails and have nothing more to say about the outside world. Or life. Or whatever you find here.
I regret to notify you that it has been decided that "Agnes" will not be published in Flying Island Journal at this time. On behalf of the journal's editorial team, I wish you the best of luck with your writing endeavors.
Thank you
for allowing us to consider "Pieces About A Small Indiana Factory Town,
1976 -1984" for Midwest Review. We are sorry to report it was not
selected for publication.
We are honored you thought of us as a home for your work.
The Odyssey is more fractious, more fissured. It is,
first, two hours of abuse and defeats and arguments and disappointments
and the occasional bit of grubby cleverness, followed by an hour of
glorious vengeance. (So glorious, in fact, that people in my audience
were clapping at the mere plucking of a bow and the beautiful twang of
its reverberations.) Odysseus, like Oppenheimer, is a man who changed
the world, albeit one who had some regrets after the fact: Change is
momentous, change is dangerous. When you shatter norms and fail to
respect what has come before, you risk calamitous darkness.
Nukes, Data Centers, A VAT in our future: Race and Gender-Based Contract Practice Ends | Indiana Week in Review | July 17, 2026.
Neither Confirm Nor Deny is a book written by a journalist who,
with his colleague Geoff Seed, took personal risks and now presents a
rigorously researched and balanced account of what happened in Northern
Ireland.It is not a book that makes you want to go
into the garden and hoist a Union Jack — nor, come to that, an Irish
Tricolour. Ware explains – in almost too much detail — how undercover
security work during serious conflict can, unimpeded by the law, take an
ethical nose-dive. It is to be hoped that this book will make such events, and the moral judgements behind them, much less likely in the future.
The result is a gigantic, shimmering mirage, a mysterious three-hour
vision of crazy episodes that does not yield up wisdom or contentment,
but only a grim resolution to continue with the fight, to make sense of
ruined lives, to re-enter the scorched battlefield of loss.
Nor should the comedy in either film disguise their underlying
seriousness. Hairspray may treat the Civil Rights era with a deft touch
but its indignation is palpable. Both movies celebrate resistance in the
face of racism, fascism and tyranny. What do these movies have to say
about the US in 2026?“I think they say that anger can
be good, but the way you change things is through humour.” Is there
anything he wouldn’t joke about? “I’m certainly not going to go into
Israel and that whole situation. It’d be a lose-lose for me to even try.
But I’ve always walked the edge of what you can’t make fun of. In all
my movies, I make fun of things I like, not things I hate. That’s why
I’ve been getting away with this for 60 years.”
Deathdealer_16 turns out to be Solomon (Asa Butterfield), a Texan living
in a trailer with his grandma, none too pleased to see Balthazar. But
the two strike up a friendship, with Balthazar besotted by the shooting
range, and Solomon eager to prove to the New Yorker there’s more to him
than incel futility. Hitting a homoerotic pitch (“You wait to see the
rest of what I’m packing,” says Solomon after revealing his glove box
pistol), the film is at its strongest outlining this queasy
interdependence. It’s a buddy-movie travesty of the mutual
incomprehension and fascination between liberal and red-state America,
suggesting that resignation to and glorification of gun violence aren’t
so far apart.
It seems to me we are now a nation of the infantilized. I thought that was the goal of prison. Have the powers that be learned their lessons from the pirson-industrial complex and applied them to the nation at large?
For more than two decades, Han has shaped a form of writing equal to his
concerns: brief, concentrated books that think in movements rather than
arguments. Their brevity feels deliberate, as if composed for the
attention economy yet guided by another sense of time. Winding through
subjects as varied as Zen, smartphones, and gardening, they often return
to the same question: What has become of freedom in the digital age?
***
Burnout, depression, anxiety: these are the maladies of our time. No one
denies their spread, but their wider significance is a matter of
debate. For Han, they are not signs that the new order is breaking down.
They are signs of its success. We are free — and the result is not
liberation but exhaustion.
***
What Han would later diagnose as burnout is not just a condition of
exhaustion; it is a condition of perception. Moods are how we feel the
world, even before we think about it. They are less like emotions than
the background conditions of our experience, like slow-moving weather
patterns that give times and places their character. They cannot be
examined like objects from the outside — we are always already within
them — but they can be named and described. In Heidegger, Han found a
way to notice them. And it made him weather-wise, alert to the world at a
time when the weather was changing.
The Berlin Wall came down during Han’s years as a student, marking
the end of the Cold War. For most in the West, the mood was jubilant.
Liberal democracy and the free market had triumphed, and the specter of
totalitarianism seemed to recede into history. The future, many assumed,
belonged to societies that were more market-driven — and therefore more
free. Han, however, had seen enough to question that story of progress.
Growing up under the extreme pressures of Korean capitalism, he knew
that domination could take many forms. South Korea had not followed the
Big Brother model of the North, yet its people labored with an intensity
that suggested another kind of domination — one rooted not in
surveillance or prohibition but in competition, achievement, and the
inner compulsion to perform.
If the twentieth century had feared domination by the state, the
twenty-first would reveal another possibility: domination by freedom.
***
By now, we understand the basic mechanics of the profit model. While
complex in one sense, its logic is painfully simple: keep users using;
sell their attention to advertisers. In the early 2010s, news about
predictive algorithms came as a shock. It seemed uncanny that an
advertising algorithm could detect a woman’s
pregnancy before anyone else knew about it. But the headlines have long
since moved on. What once seemed unsettling has faded into the din of
daily life, normalized under the regime Shoshana Zuboff calls
“surveillance capitalism.”
When Zuboff began writing about it
in 2015, the public imagination often returned to a familiar nightmare:
Orwell’s Big Brother, the all-seeing avatar of the surveillance state.
Zuboff argued that the comparison was misleading. Today’s most powerful
surveillance systems are not instruments of the state, nor do they rule
by repression. They are transnational, driven by a market logic that
shapes behavior without appearing to command it — what she called “Big
Other,” a diffuse computational order that monitors and modifies human
action at scale.
***
Han’s new book, The Tonality of Thought, approaches freedom in a
different mood. Consisting of three public lectures, the book returns
to themes that have run through his work for more than two decades. Han
is not searching for a stronger self, but for a way beyond the
self — another way of inhabiting the world, combining German Romantic
ideals with Eastern thought. “If I may compare my thinking with a
fruit,” he writes, “then its skin and flesh are deeply romantic. The
seed, in contrast, is Far Eastern.”
***
In this clearing, Han’s thinking lets Western concepts take root differently. Among them is eros
— a term that, in Greek thought, signifies much more than desire in the
everyday sense. It is the soul’s movement beyond itself, toward a
beauty that transcends possession. Eros reorients the reflex of
self-enclosure, the habit of drawing the world inward and rendering it
usable. The soul, instead of grasping, is laid hold of.
Against a Zen backdrop, this can seem difficult to place: the Western
longing for beauty seems to unsettle the stillness of Buddhist
detachment. Han’s books, inhabiting that tension, do not systematically
resolve it. Instead, they bear its fruit in a mood that attunes us to
the world. What matters for Han is that both movements, in their
different ways, loosen the grip of a possessive inwardness. The question
is no longer how to possess the self, but how to move beyond it.
***
Han begins from a different premise. Freedom in the digital age is
found not in resisting the Other, but where the Other resists us. It is a
question of ends: does freedom secure the ego or free us from its grip?
One posture is habitually on guard, the other habitually open. For
Zuboff, who draws again from Sartre, the danger is plain: “Hell is other
people.” For Han, the more radical danger is an “inferno of the same”
in which the Other disappears.
A life organized entirely around the self — its projects, its
performance, its wants — leaves no room for the kind of relations in
which freedom can actually take shape. The word freedom, Han likes to note, shares a root with friend.
One is not free alone. Freedom arises from vulnerability. It begins not
in mastery but in exposure, where one is no longer fully one’s own.
Which, since John Locke is integral to my research project, makes me think of Locke's idea that true freedom reaches its height in civil society - with other people, ordered liberty.
Let’s step back and ask one of the central questions of ethics: “What
kind of people should we want to be?” Ethics, in the classical sense,
is about how to live well. And that involves more than producing the
right outward acts. It involves becoming the sort of person who can
recognize what is right, choose it for the right reasons and respond to
the world with the appropriate thoughts and feelings.
How, then, could an automated oracle help? It cannot tell you what to
feel, because feeling is not something you can summon by obedience. But
neither can it settle the matter by telling you what to do. Reasons
matter, and to be a morally responsible agent you must reason for
yourself. That thought is central to the ethical tradition that reaches
back through the European Enlightenment and to Immanuel Kant. Central to
Kant’s thought was the ideal of people fully in charge of their own
lives, reasoning toward the right decisions through a kind of
self-government he called autonomy. People who simply do what they are
told, even when what they are told to do is right, are not living
autonomous lives. Nor is this a uniquely European idea. Confucius taught
the virtue of yi, which involves recognizing what is right and acting
in harmony with moral principle. Buddhism offers similar lessons. What
matters is not just what you do but the intention with which you do it.
Accordingly, philosophers have rightly been suspicious of “moral
deference”, in which someone decides what to do based on what another
person or institution declares to be right. Moral guides, your priest,
your rabbi, your imam, your guru, even a humble philosopher, can help
you think things through. They can draw your attention to features of a
situation you may have overlooked. But if they are doing their job, they
will not simply listen to your quandary and pronounce a course of
action without giving reasons. They will want you to do what is right
because you understand why it is right, because only acts that arise
from your own deliberation are fully yours. If they espouse values you
do not recognize, your compliance does not turn their judgment into your
own.
I should add that I am not assuming values are matters of mere belief
rather than knowledge, or endorsing relativism, the notion that
different normative traditions are entitled to their different answers.
You can reject moral deference and affirm autonomy while still believing
that there is such a thing as moral truth, and even moral expertise.
Perhaps many moral questions, perhaps even all of them, have a
universally correct answer. It remains the case that, even if LLMs give
excellent answers to moral questions, you still should not defer to
their conclusions. You should try to understand the reasons they offer,
because it remains important that people act on the basis of their own,
admittedly imperfect, understanding. That, in my view, is itself one of
the universal moral truths.
***
Once we recognize that people, media outlets or spiritual guides may
try to shape us in these ways, we can take that into account. We can ask
what interests they have in influencing us. We can consult a range of
sources with different interests. I know the pastor has an interest in
getting me to make a larger offering. I know that Fox News tilts right
and The Guardian inclines left. So, I can weigh what they say
accordingly.
But the most effective forms of manipulation are invisible. And one
problem with applying this strategy to AI is that we often lack any
clear picture of the interests, if any, that guide it. That is one place
where public education would help. One strength of LLMs, however, is
that, unlike the pastor, they are often willing to tell you what they
“know” about the forces that shaped them. And researchers have explored
the political bent of the major models. There is a lot of evidence that
existing LLMs tend to lean somewhat left of political center. It would
be unfounded conspiracy-mongering to suggest that some secret
center-left cabal is controlling things behind the scenes. Once you
consider the shape of politics in the North Atlantic world, where the
main LLMs are based, more ordinary explanations present themselves.
***
Political outlooks also differ in ways that reflect evaluative
disposition rather than straightforward factual belief. Moral
psychologists Graham and Haidt, for example, argue that concern about
fairness tends to diminish, and concern about group loyalty to increase,
as one moves rightward.[8]
If so, users should know that fine-tuning may favor equality over
national loyalty, reflecting the outlook of the cosmopolitan, highly
educated people who help shape these systems. Autonomy is strengthened
when people can judge advice in light of the perspective that informs
it.
***
But notice that an AI guide that did agree to simply choose options
would not be much use if you could neither identify the relevant
features of your situation nor see what your options were. An LLM cannot
tell you anything useful unless you can inform it about your situation.
And grasping what matters in your situation is a capacity you can
acquire only through practice. There is always something else you might
consider. You have to learn what is relevant and how to respond to it.
I would add it is not enough to learn, but to remember and to have faith in what you know in the face of a world that does not care. I knew much. Depression became nihilism as my faith in ethics, in people, in what I was doing with my life dissipated.
Oops, I stopped reading too soon.
Aristotle thought that we develop this capacity through habituation,
by practice. For him, the virtues were not rules or isolated good acts
but settled dispositions of character, ways of seeing, feeling and
responding that are formed over time until they become, in a good sense,
second nature. Confucius, in a different key, stressed the role of
ritual and custom in shaping good habits of response. Our sensibilities,
our capacities for detecting what matters in the human world, do not
come ready-made. That thought, largely sidelined for a time in modern
moral philosophy, was revived in the twentieth century by thinkers such
as Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa Foot, who urged that ethics return
its attention to character, judgment and human flourishing.
One role of fiction, in fables and parables—in novels and short
stories, in film, video and even painting—is to let us imagine complex
moral situations and so develop habits of judgment and feeling.
Conversational exchanges with an LLM, in which scenarios are built out
collaboratively, could certainly engage the imagination in ways that
help shape character and sensibility. Still, it is likely to remain true
that we develop these capacities mostly by using them in the situations
we face, alone and with others. Time online draws us away from those
encounters.
I once told a friend of mine that the hardest ethical questions were between two equally bad choices. It seems now that may not have been taken as much comfort. I think that was the last time I saw Paula.
I am not a Saul Bellow fan. He put me off my writing for decades. I felt it was a milieu that had no reality - factual or emotional - for me. Yet, I keep coming back to him. Wondering was I wrong about him. Did I close my mind? I wish I had read Philip Roth first rather. Bellow was older - closer to Mailer, whose fictions leave me cold. But I admire Nelson Algren - also of Chicago and close to Bellow's age. And Vonnegut, Heller, Gore Vidal were of the same generation. There is someone else from the Fifties dancing in the shadows of my mind who leaves me as disinterested in his topics as does Bellow. I cannot get a name to form. Cheever's people have all the sexual tics and social anxieties. Yet, I understand their problems better. Augie March I found a novel worth reading, but Humboldt's Gift preceded it by decades.
And today I received a link to ‘Ravelstein’ Revisited - by Jonathan Marks (The Bulwark). This fit into the previous entries in this post. It might have also sparked a bit of reflection on my Bellow bias. A recession of sorts. It is a consideration of a Bellow novel for which I have only read disdain, to be polite.
I DON’T THINK THAT CHICK’S EXPOSURE, sometimes intentional,
sometimes unintentional, of his own defects justify his shameless
exposure of a friend. To be sure, Ravelstein and Chick both merit praise
from Bellow’s perspective. Bellow, throughout his career, took a
special interest in ineffectual intellectuals, most notably Moses Herzog
in Bellow’s novel Herzog, whose book-learning and
talent for observation does little to make him wise. Herzog is,
however, raised above his fellow moderns, who are less foolish than he
is in some ways, by his high ambition, rare in a world ruled by
economics, natural science, and the quest for the comforts those
pursuits provide. Herzog wants to “live out marvelous qualities vaguely
comprehended.” That desire, pursued even to the brink of madness,
matters more than the failure of Herzog to gain more than the mystical
conclusion that “only the incomprehensible gives any light.”
Chick
and Ravelstein, who attempt but fail to understand a world Chick deems
“mysterious,” are honorable in the same way Herzog is, a way that is
compatible with great foolishness. Perhaps Ravelstein, who understood
the quest for human completeness to be nearly always futile, wouldn’t
mind being understood as a noble failure. But I doubt that even Chick’s
Ravelstein would consider the abandonment of his lifelong convictions
and preferences in the face of death to be the kind of failure that is
noble.
Yeah, pretty sure I will only read Ravelstein if I am stuck with nothing else to do.
I got word from the doctor that they moved my surgery and I need to be there at 5:30 Am. Not a problem if I had my own transportation. My sister was to take me, so I called her. The number I have is an old one and the right one was lost when my last phone died. Emails were sent without a reply. Grasping at straws right now.
I spent most of yesterday working on submissions, and not in the way I intended.
“The First Day of Feeling Free” - Strange Pilgrims - is actually a chapter from “Chasing Ashes”. I spent several working it around into more of a standalone piece. LibreOffice has taken to shutting down and I do not know why.
“The Unintended Consequences of Art” - The Submission Pit- was meant to go elsewhere only it had been previously submitted and the site would not let me use the same title. Witless, I decided to send it to this site with a change of the name of the aliens instead of changing the title.
A little less mopey. A nap in the evening. Email worked on. Some side reading, even if not of what I should be reading. I started a new short story just to get a paragraph out of my head. Not much of a day.
I read Lolita in prison. Nabokov's writing was the best thing. Gabriela de Mendonça Gomes's The Spurious Perversity of Lolita(Book XI) does put some of the novel's problems in perspective.
In his essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” Nabokov argues that, “if one begins with a ready made generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.” By the way, however, this doesn’t mean that anyone, including Nabokov, believes that the reader should be giving H.H. the benefit of the doubt or a charitable reading; the foreword to the novel is framed as an editorial note by a fictional psychologist, Dr. John Ray, Jr. who calls H.H. “horrible,” “abject,” and a “shining example of moral leprosy.” So, no one goes into Lolita thinking he’s the good guy––or at least they shouldn’t.
Professor Dwyer reconstructs her students’ claim that “by assigning Lolita I am perpetuating trauma and may even be perpetuating rape culture.” And retorts “this last suggestion runs so counter to my own beliefs about what literature does.” Because there’s an important distinction to be made, which nowadays seems to have become forgotten when it comes to works of literature: representation does not equal romanticization.
Nabokov goes on to say: “Nothing is more boring or more unfair to the author than starting to read, say, Madame Bovary, with the preconceived notion that it is a denunciation of the bourgeoisie.” The tedious and benighted nature of this procession strikes a clear resonance with his own text. I had a wonderful literature professor who told us never to read the back of the novels we were reading in her class....
***
And another thing, Lolita is more about America, postwar America—it’s temporal setting—and present-day America than anything else. Hand-in-hand with H.H. being the quintessentially unreliable narrator is the novel’s quintessentially Americanness presented in its tropes: the road trip he takes with Dolores, the life in suburbia in which he first encounters her, the U.S. popular culture allusions strewn throughout the novel, the fact that it begins with an extensive allusion to Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Just as we ought to be suspicious of H.H.’s nomial transfiguration of Dolores into Lolita, erasing the pain and replacing it with imposed seductive obsessions, so should we throw a scrutinizing eye on the narratives the U.S. was/is weaving about itself.
And this warning is more relevant than ever. As Professor Breen points out, we are living in a world where young girls are, and have been since before Nabokov’s novel, serially commodified. The darkest side of this perverse cultural valuation has been presented to us in its most bare-face cruelty in the release of the Epstein files. How Nabokov’s gripping, seductive prose hides within it profound violence teaches us to be disgusted with that behavior and that deliberate erasure, which stands in stark contrast to the way that the glorification of the modeling and beauty industries that incessantly and insidiously hide, suppress, and normalize the abuse and exploitation of the young and vulnerable. In the past five years, there has been a meteoric rise of young women commodifying their own bodies on platforms like OnlyFans. While it is not a larger institution, like in modeling, these platforms operate on a false sense of empowerment. While they purport to empower women by allowing them to take agency over their sexuality and monetize it on their own terms, the nature of this digital sexwork platform differs little from ages-long the capitalistic and patriarchal exploitation of young women. The narrative of self-empowerment that OnlyFans promotes can be much likened to the narrative that Humbert Humbert weaves of Dolores’ seduction of him: false, and created by the person in power who benefits from the vulnerable’s participation—which is never the vulnerable party herself.
The online morons hating The Odyssey movie have also attacked the translator Emily Wilson. From Emily Wilson on Porous Boundaries and the World of Homer (Los Angeles Review of Books), I think she sounds charming, well-intentioned, and competent.
CC and I were supposed to see a movie. Shew was too tired, it was too hot. Not that I really expected her to go along. Since I was waiting for a call from my sister, I stayed home wating for her call.
Reading around this morning, awakening before the alarm:
Despite its historical focus, The China Question is not written
for historians. It is very much a ‘Grand Theory’, supported by rich
case studies drawn from a wide-ranging secondary literature. While its
ambitiousness is laudable, it also opens up some pitfalls. An attempt to
recount 800 years in 260 pages necessarily results in a loss of nuance.
One of the more problematic aspects of Hung’s argument is its own
replication of a binary view, much like the orientalism he critiques.
His suggestion that for eight centuries almost all Western writings on
China swung between two equally orientalist poles ends up overlooking
the enormous ‘third space’ that has long existed in between. Martino
Martini, for instance, wrote two extraordinarily erudite accounts of
China’s chronology and geography in addition to his punchier account of
the fall of the Ming, painting the empire and its history as connected
to, but different from, Europe’s. Where Matteo Ricci and Nicolas
Trigault – earlier Jesuit missionaries in China – argued that the
Chinese were peace-loving and thus ‘differ greatly from the nations of
Europe’, Martini offered more nuance. In his lengthy Chinese history, Sinicae historiae decas prima
(1659), he explained that, rather than being timeless and unchanging,
Chinese wartime strategies depended on their particular contexts and
often involved learning from their enemies. Many of Hung’s case studies
contain complex perspectives which he overlooks. Indeed, his decision to
see things as either Sinophilic or Sinophobic risks simplifying rather
than critically probing the historical record. This is perhaps best
captured by a table produced at the end of the book: ‘Eight hundred
years of fantasy-fear cycles’, covering different ‘fields’ – from
‘Catholic scholarship’ in the 1240s to ‘Political discourses disguised
as scholarship’ from the 1990s to the present – gives a binary overview
of the evolution of attitudes towards China, tracking the pendulum swing
from Sinophilia to Sinophobia.
After I came home from church, I kept having problems with engery. The air conditioner had my legs cramping. I napped. That did no good. There was still a problem of concentrrating. i got a little bit of work done with Montana, only stopping when I could not keep the fuzziness in my head.
Some other things I got into and want to share:
The restless eye of James McNeill Whistler(Engelsberg ideas ). Whistler fascinates me as an American. That I cannot rightly draw a stick figure makes artists fascinating to me.
A Eulogy (Sheila Kennedy) the distance travelled from decency to MAGA.
Even in an angry and at times despairing speech like “Sources of Danger
to the Republic,” Douglass retained hope for the future, calling on
Americans to secure the democratic promise of the nation. “Strike down
the one-man power everywhere,” he says at the speech’s conclusion; “make
your Government lean to the people, and away from the individual or the
one-man power.” If Americans are willing to do that, through
constitutional reform or other means, “you make sure the permanence,
prosperity, and glory of this great republic.” This is Douglass’ wish
and request to us from 1867. As in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of
July?,” he reminds Americans of the still unfulfilled egalitarian
promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there is no better time
for such a reminder than July Fourth.
Some times behind paywalls, the sort of thing I try not to usullay post about.
Journalists still do, every day, hold
power to account. Think of Partygate, Plebgate and Barnard Castlegate.
Think of Jeffrey Epstein. So-called mainstream outlets may have become
smaller players in today’s vast information ecosystem, but, thanks to
journalism’s endless ability to reinvent itself, they have new allies.
Civic-minded, crowd-funded bloggers sit in local council meetings on the
press bench vacated by struggling or defunct local newspapers; digital
activists live-stream protests straight to YouTube; third-sector
organizations such as Greenpeace and Liberty employ journalists to
investigate their own specific areas of public life; for the first time,
a subscriber newsletter, Democracy for Sale, has won the Paul
Foot award for investigative journalism. Some of the best watchdog
reporting today is collaborative, community-funded or conducted by data
miners sitting in their bedrooms (see the work of Bellingcat), or by
digital teams supported by philanthropic donors. If investigations that
stir public opinion to outrage and demands for action are one measure of
success, then the recent television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office (2024) probably had more impact than any news article about the Horizon IT scandal.
Yet the Watergate myth, of which Woodward
and Bernstein are an integral part, has persisted and even grown. This
is both because we need it to be true and because, in certain ways, it
was. Pakula’s film shows that, through a combination of legislators who
remembered their oath to uphold the Constitution, an independent
Department of Justice and FBI, and a courageous newspaper editor and his
reporters, the system worked.
As the name of Barney’s ship suggests, the struggles in Mysore stirred
the American imagination. Hyder Ali’s decisive victory at the Battle of
Pollilur, in September, 1780, in which he routed a column of British
troops, was documented and discussed by the Founding Fathers. Edmund
Jennings Randolph, a Virginia delegate at the Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams,
then posted in Europe, in April, 1781, of how Hyder Ali’s “Army of
80000 Horse” had “totally defeated” its British quarry. John Quincy
Adams, a teen-age student in the Netherlands at the time, wrote
excitedly to his mother, Abigail, about “the check the English have had
in the East Indies,” where they had “lost a great number of men.” In a
letter written in the summer of 1782, James Madison praised Hyder Ali’s
“superiority” over his most implacable foe, Sir Eyre Coote, the British
general tasked with pushing back Mysore’s forces from the East India
Company’s southern Indian stronghold in what is now the major coastal
city of Chennai. Nine days after the British surrendered at Yorktown, in
October, 1781, a group of notables in Trenton, New Jersey, made a
series of triumphant toasts that were accompanied by artillery fire; one
of those toasts hailed the “great and heroic Hyder Ali, raised up by
Providence to avenge the numberless cruelties perpetrated by the English
on his unoffending countrymen, and to check the insolence and reduce
the power of Britain in the East Indies.” (Hyder Ali died, of an
apparent tumor, at the end of 1782, and his son, Tipu Sultan, followed
as his successor.)
John Adams and his colleagues helped broker a
preliminary peace deal with the British in the autumn of 1782, in
Paris—a few months later, Britain would forge a separate set of deals
with Spain and France. But combatants in the subcontinent were unaware
of the initial truce that had been made in the West, and dozens more
battles took place around the world. The last clash of the American
Revolutionary War, some historians suggest, occurred along India’s
Coromandel Coast, in June, 1783; as the British laid siege to a fort in
Cuddalore, then occupied by a joint Franco-Mysorean force, a smaller
French fleet scored a naval victory nearby. The siege was finally lifted
after news of the earlier peace arrived.
What
solidarity Americans had with Mysore proved fleeting after
independence. France withdrew direct aid to Mysore following the 1783
Treaty of Paris, at a moment when Mysore’s forces could have pressed
their advantage. In the years thereafter, Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, would
likely rue having allied with the wrong European power; the French,
struggling financially and on the verge of their own revolution, could
do little to support his kingdom against the emboldened British. In
1788, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to France,
wrote of the arrival of a number of diplomats from Tipu’s court, and noted
that he would attend their reception in Versailles, but was unsure what
any of it would achieve. “If their mission has any other object than
that of pomp and ceremony, it is not yet made known,” he wrote in a letter.
As early as 1792, the U.S. sent an American consul to Calcutta, the
East India Company’s main port in Asia—an implicit recognition of the
growing power of the British in India, and a sign of how the U.S. saw
its early trade interests in Asia best served.
This morning when I was first up, I finished up on Montana for my research project and did a little bit more.
Some neo-garage rock from a now-defunct Canadian band:
Got on a Cramps kick. Still The Queen: The Cramps' Poison Ivy Turns 70 ( Rock and Roll Globe); terrible photo of Poison Ivy, good overview of her career, and it is difficult to think she is now mid-seventies.
Second round this morning:
Up around 9:15 pm, wondering where is my new phone, and went down to the convenience store for smokes and Coke.
Back here, I started on my email.
A detective series I never heard of Nobody’s Perfect (1969) by Douglas Clark ( In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel) - a series I do not recall and not sure if I missed anything.
Listened to Jo Jo Gunne's So...Where's The Show - an album I picked up more than 40 years ago, lost, and now I am wondering what was the fuss? The band was an offshoot of Spirit, it's good, but nothing really stands out. Not a lyric to make me pause or playing to make me take notice. Why are the vocals not clearer? It is very much an early Seventies sound. It is competent background music.
The All-Music Guide says:
After the erratic and self-consciously weird Jumpin' the Gunne, this
album is a return to form. More than that, actually -- the replacement
of founding guitarist Matt Andes with John Stahely resulted in a
tighter, more focused, and generally more interesting band than ever
before. Jo Jo Gunne was originally formed to be, in Jay Ferguson's
phrase, "a hard-ass rock band," and on So...Where's the Show they
finally were one. Ferguson responded to the harder edge by abandoning
the synthesizer in favor of a jazzy piano sound, an inspired move under
the circumstances. The combination enlivens even the dud songs; "I'm
Your Shoe" starts as a pedestrian slow-grind, but has an incredible
instrumental break in which the whole band rocks hard and fast, then
drops out suddenly to let Ferguson take a wonderful and delicate piano
solo. The element of surprise gets you the first time, the brilliant
playing every time afterward. When the band actually takes on a song
with a half-decent hook all the way through, the results are splendid.
The title cut, "She Said Allright," and "Falling Angel" are all winners,
and there isn't a single track that is actually a dud. If it was
inevitable that Jo Jo Gunne was going to break up, at least they left
one consistently good album behind.
I am looking forward to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Last night, I tried listening to a video on what it gets wrong, and could not finish the video.
Seems to me an intelligent woman gave a smart answer to a dumb question.
Between the content and the comments, I was left thinking what a bunch of wankers. This is no way we are going to understand the mentality, the ethos, of Bronze Age Greeks. Enjoy the spectacle, if it works as a film. And if you think you can do better, then get to work at doing a better version. Lastly, probably every commentator thinks they would be fighting along with Odysseus rather than being a slave; reality would have tipped them towards beign slaves.
In her timely and punchy new book, the philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever produced. She’s interested in how an artist’s character can influence their creations, and the harmful effects those creations can have on the world.
She’s not the first. Plato panicked over art’s power to corrupt citizens, while Oscar Wilde celebrated its provocative potential. More recently, Claire Dederer puzzled through the problem of what we ought to do with great art by bad men in her 2023 book Monsters.
Come to Depraved expecting a conventional view of art history and you’ll be disappointed, though. Alongside traditional media from prehistory to the present, including paintings, novels and plays, are more contemporary “art forms” such as video games; there’s also a lengthy tangent on pornography. Some of the stuff is so repulsive it’s hard to read about. There’s talk of live goldfish being pulverised in blenders in the name of performance art, and a film featuring shocking scenes of paedophilia. A video game named Rape Day needs no explanation, but Dixon won’t let you look away
***
What should our response be? Dixon isn’t shy about supplying an answer.
In the past, pieces considered too corrupting for the public gaze were
placed in secret collections. She believes depraved art isn’t something
to be squirrelled away, but confronted “loudly, angrily, beautifully”:
emotions that capture the spirit of this passionate book, which, like
those rewritten labels in museums, is going to delight some, and prompt
eyerolls in others. “The remedy,” writes Dixon, “is better speech. Better art. Better curation.” She makes it sound so simple.
One thing I have learned from my on-going progression through the bowels of the federal government, from the ICE agent who arrested me to my sentencing to my polygraph sessions to my supervised release - is the perversity of the custodians of public safety who are far more sex-obssessed than I have been since I was a teenager. Some times I feel like others are projecting their obsessions onto me and other times I am the focus of their prurient interests. So, no, better curation may not be the solution. I would add better education, less supersititious fear.
I started JoJo Gunne's 99 Days (Live, 1971) - which I do like, they sound like they might have been a damn good live band, a raucous party band. Why they remind me of Mott the Hoople with harmonies is something I need to think about.
The phone has not arrived and I just noticed it was promised by 9 pm!
That changes my plans for the rest of the day. Do I stay here or go to the grocery? I fixed black beans last night and they need chorizo and cilantro. Definitely cilantro.
There were more things read yesterday, but I am putting them into a post that is more literary.
I have also reached a bit of a crisis point as whether to post submissions or work wholly on the project, then go back to submitting on my fiction. I could do both, if I were nto having these problems where I jsut lose energy and coherent thought.
Maybe I was just not in the mood for the stuido album
