November 2011

Soon after reading this (via Chris’ post) I read this (bia BoingBoing). I would pay good money – albeit probably only a small amount – for a videogame designed by Horkheimer and Adorno.

“”We realized that if we incentivized things that were inherently boring,” Butterfield told me, “people would do them again and again—it showed up in the logs—but that they would secretly hate us.”

“This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.”

Just wanted to give our Ohio readers a chance to tell us how inordinately pleased they are with themselves. And to tell anyone who doesn’t yet know that, in an exceptionally high turnout, Ohio voters defeated their state government’s union busting legislation by a large majority. Well done everybody. And, from your friends in Wisconsin, thanks. Fantastic.

Chris’s “post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/08/a-new-communist-manifesto/ reminds me that I’ve been meaning to disagree with this “claim”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/10/utopia_is_creep.php by Nick Carr.

bq. Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It’s easy to understand why: There’s a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it’s pretty dull.

bq. But there’s another reason why portrayals of utopia don’t work. We’ve all experienced the “uncanny valley” that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy – or at least it looks creepy. That’s probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world.

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At The Utopian there are details of a project by Adorno and Horkheimer for a new Communist Manifesto:

bq. Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

bq. Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

bq. Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.

We went to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem on Saturday, with Mark Rylance playing the role of “Rooster” Byron. It was one of the most overwhelming experiences I’ve had at the theatre. The production was superb, and Rylance extraordinary, inhabiting the character of drunk, drug-dealing outsider Byron with love and energy throughout. Englishness is the theme, but hardly the house-trained Englishness of which the Daily Mail would approve, since the action is set on Byron’s last day before eviction from his illegal encampment by Kennet and Avon council, and Byron is a “gippo” and a “pikey” (Americans might call him “trailer trash”). The inhabitants of the little box houses on the “new estate”, many of whom have hung around Rooster’s caravan as adolescents themselves, want him out. If I were being pretentious I might use terms like Dionysian (ok I just did). The play problematizes peace, “progress”, order and prosperity and projects a view of what matters that won’t appeal to Steven Pinker or the average economist. Well too bad for them. I hear the play was well-received on Broadway. I wonder how well the Wiltshire underlass travelled to New York? No spoilers here, but I have listened to Sandy Denny singing “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” about 100 times in the past couple of days, often with tears running down my face.

Singapore is evidently a great place for shopping, as this photo from a friend shows:

But it is surely a sign of deep recession that gives us bargains like this in Dublin:

On the one hand, I’m glad DC is bringing out volume 1 of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane [amazon]. I’m glad, too, that they aren’t bringing it out until after X-Mas. That way, I can’t give it to Belle as a present, which would be unwise. On the other hand, I can’t help thinking that an even better book might collect just the covers of all 137 issues, cataloguing all the ways in which – due to being too fat, or a ghost, or due to Pat Boone, or a lead cube on her head, or being a giant, or very small, or too highly evolved, or having over-educated green ape feet – Superman’s girlfriend [UPDATE: girl friend!] serially failed ever to become his wife, or even his girlfriend, I think. Fortunately, the internet provides. I don’t think I’ve ever actually read an issue of Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, but I can’t believe it could be as much fun as the covers promise. [click to continue…]

<a href=”http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/130821/”>From Open Pajamas Media</a>:

<blockquote>A JOURNOLIST REMINDER: There was this email group, called <a href=”http://dailycaller.com/2010/07/20/documents-show-media-plotting-to-kill-stories-about-rev-jeremiah-wright/”>Journolist</a>, where journalists got together and talked about how to bury stories that hurt Democrats and push stories that hurt Republicans. <a href=”http://thevailspot.blogspot.com/2011/01/journolist-membership.html”>Here’s a list of the members.</a></blockquote>

No, that was not the purpose of Journolist.  It was an ordinary liberal listserv that included pundits and professors.  Once in 2008, one of its members, angered by the American media’s harping on the Jeremiah Wright nonsense, suggested an aggressive pushback against conservative pundits.  No one took him up on the suggestion.  People complained for a while (on list and off, in public even) that Sean Hannity had fed a stupid debate question to George Stephanopoulos, and then they went back to arguing about social policy and the Red Sox.  The end.

Reynolds’ second update to his disingenuous/delusional post acknowledges that there might in fact be something to the Herman Cain sexual harassment story after all.  Do tell!  Now all Professor Reynolds needs to do is to take down and apologize for his little piece of slander about a liberal listserv that (a) did not actually do anything wrong in the first place and (b) clearly had nothing to do with the Cain story, having disbanded in 2010 when the right-wing press proved by geometric logic that it was unseemly for liberals to use the Internet to converse with each other.

Full disclosure: yes, I myself was a member of Journolist for about two years.  I was invited to join because I signed <a href=”http://gawker.com/5591801/scandal-liberal-journalists-colluded-to-write-open-letter”>the open letter about that ABC News debate of April 2008</a> — indeed, the very letter that is repeatedly cited in the wingnutosphere as proof that Journolist was colluding on an open letter!!  How did the writers of the open letter get in touch with me if I was not already a member of Journolist, you ask?  The amazing but true answer is below the fold:
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It seems that there has been a bit of a kerfuffle at Harvard over Greg Mankiw’s introductory economics course, culminating in a walkout by a number of the students. The “Harvard Crimson”:http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/11/3/ec-walkout-occupy/ gravely pronounces that “Protesting a class’s ideology damages free academic discourse.”

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Anyone who blogs regularly gets annoyed by commenters. We do our best to screen out the worst here at Crooked Timber, but inevitably some get through, and, just as inevitably, they can sometimes upset us. But though I’ve had my intelligence, good judgement and moral character questioned many times, I’ve never had to cope with the kind of abuse female bloggers sometimes get. And the women at CT have had that too, from behind the protective shield of anonymity (though I did work out who on one occasion and warned a fairly prominent academic about what would happen if he came back). Now Helen Lewis Hasteley at the New Statesman has an article on this, complete with reports from some of the women who have been on the receiving end. Read the whole thing.

The Irish government must be disappointed that the Presidential election, held on 27 October, is now over, with the election of the Labour Party’s candidate Michael D Higgins as the country’s ninth President. We will now start to notice once again that unemployment is over 14%, we are still in the grip of austerity, and a new and even nastier budget is on the way. But for weeks on end, news coverage was dominated by the race for this almost entirely ceremonial office, while the government’s standing in the polls stayed quite high.

Long ago we could depend on having a pretty boring Presidential election contest involving a largely tribal, party-political choice between two elderly men. But the last two Presidents, both women, both lawyers, both academics from Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and both strangely enough called Mary, transformed the office. Mary Robinson and Mary MacAleese adopted big, symbolic, non-party-political themes for their campaigns –women’s empowerment (‘Mná na hÉireann’), outreach to the diaspora, overcoming communal divisions, encouraging civil society organizations.

This year, the election attracted an unprecedented seven candidates. This colourful group included a prominent gay rights activist, a former Eurovision song contest winner, an ex-IRA leader, a poet-politician given to wearing floral ties, and a businessman best known for his role in the Irish version of the reality-TV programme Dragons’ Den (or Shark Tank in the USA).

What’s been especially striking is that several of the leading candidates embodied some issue that has been difficult or traumatic in recent Irish public life. And one after the other, what they had hoped to use as their main selling-point turned out to be their downfall. What follows is probably mostly for Irish political junkies, so I will put the rest below the fold…

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Scott’s new “article”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/11/02/essay-librarians-occupy-movement at _IHE_ provides some interesting follow up information on the role of librarians in _OWS_ (and their historical antecedents).

bq. Steven Syrek, a graduate student in English at Rutgers University, has been working at the OWS library since about the third week of the demonstration. “People talk about this movement like it’s a ragtag bunch of hippies,” he told me when we spoke by phone, “but the work we do is extremely well-organized.” The central commitment, Syrek says, is to create “a genuine clearinghouse for books and information.” Volunteers have adopted a slogan summing up what the library brings to the movement: “Literacy, Legitimacy, and Moral Authority.”

bq. … But the libraries at the anti-Wall Street protests are not quite as novel as they first appear. They have a tradition going back the better part of two centuries. In a recent article, Matthew Battles, the author of Libraries: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2004), noted the similarity to the reading rooms that served the egalitarian Chartist movement in Britain. … points out that libraries emerged as part of the sit-down strikes that unionized the American auto industry in the 1930s. …

bq. So the OWS library and its spin-offs have a venerable ancestry. But what distinguishes them is that the collections are drawing in people with a deep background in library work – who, aside from their feelings about the economic situation itself, are sometimes frustrated by the state of their profession. … The issue here isn’t just the impact on the librarians’ own standard of living. Their professional ethos is defined by a commitment to making information available to the public. They are very serious about that obligation, or at least the good ones are, and they are having a hard time meeting it. If knowledge is power, then expensive databases, fewer books, and shorter library hours add up to growing intellectual disenfranchisement. … joining the occupation movement is a way for librarians “to begin taking power back,” Henk says, “the power to create collections and to define what a library is for.” It is, in effect, a battle for the soul of the library as an institution.