I’m doing some intellectual scratching about re: the nature of pictures and pictoriality. I think one of the best philosophy books on the subject is Flint Schier, <em>Deeper into Pictures</em>
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John Holbo
Like everyone else, I’m glad Ta-Nehisi Coates got a NYT op-ed. Unlike everyone else, I haven’t seen X-Men: First Class yet. (Hey, I like comic books.) But I get the general idea, so I’d like to weigh in on the whole Magneto Was Right issue (part ii).
Thing is: it’s not just Magneto, it’s the government, going back to the first film. Everyone is right except Professor X. [click to continue…]
First, let me jot some thoughts about Ingrid’s peer-review post that also relate to Henry’s. Then, mongooses. [click to continue…]
The National Library of Ireland is on Flickr, contributing public domain photos to the Commons. If anyone is looking for an image for the cover of their new book on trolley problems – and is too shy to ask to use mine – this might be the ticket.
My daughters got interested in the Ramayana because we’ve been to Bali and seen some shadow puppets and golden deer dancing. (For the foreseeable future, the golden deer crown I helped Zoe make, for this thing she did at school, is going to be my signal achievement in the ‘damned fiddly art projects you help the kids with for school’ category.) We also watched Sita Sings The Blues, which they thought was great. They insisted on fast-forwarding through the ‘boring’ bits about Nina and her long-distance relationship, but they loved the bits in which the unreliable shadow puppet narrators offer inarticulate commentary and mis-assembled chat about Hindu religion, Indian literary history, so forth. The girls asked me to fill in the blanks.
I know my Greek mythology. (Norse? Of course!) Hindu religion and Sanskrit literature? Fortunately, I found a couple beautiful books suitable for kids of all ages, by animator/artist Sanjay Patel. The Little Book of Hindu Deities: From the Goddess of Wealth to the Sacred Cow
You can see numerous page scans from the books here and here. Lovely pictures. [click to continue…]
Via the Corner, a spot of TV talking head with Eric Cantor.
“Everything is on the table,” he said. “As Republicans, we’re not going to go for tax increases. I think the administration gets that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as cuts.”
Imagine what the response would be if this were flipped around. Imagine a Democrat emitting the following, as a bold deficit reduction plan: “Everything is on the table … we’re not going to go for spending cuts. I think the Republicans get that. But we’ve also put everything on the table as far as tax hikes.” No one would say such a Bizarro Norquist thing, of course, because no one on the Democratic side is as bizarre as Norquist. But if someone did, it would be perfectly obvious the person saying this thing wasn’t concerned with deficit reduction. The idea that someone unwilling to contemplate spending cuts – anywhere – was a deficit hawk would not pass the laugh test. As Cantor’s statement does not. [click to continue…]
Ta-Nehisi Coates really likes Moby Dick, apparently the first paragraph in particular.
But not everyone feels the same. Reminds me of that great scene in Bone, vol. 5
I had a simply heart-breaking experience, reading Sunnyside. (Strictly, I listened to it on Audiobook. So the following page numbers, courtesy of Amazon search-inside, do not correspond to my original ‘reading’ experience.)
Leland “Lee Duncan” Wheeler is about to audition.
The house lights went up momentarily, for the judges to introduce themselves. Each in turn stood up, announced his or her associations, then sat. Mrs. Franklin Geary, head of the Liberty Loan Committee, Christopher Sims of the Institute for Speech Benevolence … (246)
Then, on p. 256.
“We didn’t understand half of what he was doing. Mr. Sims, did you understand what he was doing?”
“I liked the kick to the face.”
Mrs. Geary frowned. “I thought he was swimming.”
You get it? Sims? Of the ISB? And the kick to the face seals the deal. I was so proud I spotted it. I emailed Sims to report my discovery of this wonderful Easter Egg and … he’d … already noticed it … himself. Way to let the air out of my little Easter Egg.
But now you know. That’s something they can put on my tombstone, I guess. [click to continue…]
Yep. Green Lantern and Philosophy: No Evil Shall Escape this Book
Let’s be serious. Example: the entry on ‘serious’ from the Super Dictionary
I think Green Lantern has just proposed Jonah Goldberg’s book for the JLA Watchtower reading group. Hence the wooden floor. [click to continue…]
I remember back when it seemed like, maybe, in the future everyone would get paid in whuffie. If we all worked together. Now I think I know better. In the future, everyone will get paid in ukelele covers of pop songs from the 80’s. If we all work together.
I just pledged $40 to kickstart LINDA, ‘a hollow earth retirement adventure in 23 singing, illustrated installments’. I am very far from saying you should do the same. Daniel Davies, just for instance, is sure to find the artist’s vocal and instrumental stylings intolerably twee. He will prefer to spend his money on Budweiser. But if none of you do as I do, I am perhaps going to keep my money and not get any adventure or singing. But it’s up to you. (The story is going to run on hilobrow.com, whose editors are my friends. They aren’t your friends, I assume, so that may weigh in your calculations.)
In related news, I see on boingboing that someone else is trying to Kickstart “a huge 20-foot-tall kinetic sculpture with a 25-foot long spinning painting in the center, which include a zoetropic animation.” I think I might chip in $11 so I can get the coloring book.
But this is unrealistic, you say. In the sense that it is not a model for a barter economy based on ukelele covers and giant zoetropes (which would, after all, make using giant stone discs with holes in them as your currency seem comparatively sensible.) No no no. This is just the first stage. Next, we build a kind of cross-kickstarting platform on which the people trying to kickstart their crazy art follies do so via complicated latticeworks of artistic cross-commitments. ‘I’ll cover a song of your choice on the ukelele, and knit you a badge, if you build a 20 foot tall zoetrope in Michigan, and send me a coloring book.’
Next, we get Wall Street hipsters to pool all the Kickstart projects, slice them into tranches, resell these collateralized aesthetic obligations to … oh wait.
One thing we’re getting a lot in the Strauss-Kahn case, which we always get in the early days of any high-profile case, is a lot of conditional expression of emotion. ‘Our sentiments are firmly with the alleged victim, if indeed she proves to be one.’ ‘I am profoundly outraged by DSK’s behavior, should he prove to have behaved in this manner.’ This is appropriate, even obligatory, but also somewhat absurd. There is no such thing as conditional anger. There’s just anger. Either you are angry or not. It’s not as though you will find out how you are actually feeling now only at some distant point in the future when the facts are in.
OK, you get the point. So what is the appropriate emotional state to be in now, when you are in a state of uncertainty? Should everyone be emotionally neutral but laying down markers promising high emotionality after the trial? ‘I’m cool as a cucumber, but, should the victim prove to be one, I will feel a sudden upsurge of sentiment on her behalf.’ Or, alternatively, if you are 80% confident that DSK is guilty, at this point, should you feel the level of outrage that would accrue to actual guilt, but discounted 20%, affectively. So, in effect, you ought to be as outraged now by DSK as you would be if you were 100% certain he had done something 80% as bad?
What’s the right way to feel, under uncertainty?
Lots of folks are bemused by Joly’s apparently critical statement that New York justice “doesn’t distinguish between the director of the I.M.F. and any other suspect.” Obviously there is a natural presumption in favor of equality. But the Times article also contains a video link to the full interview in which Joly’s own next words are something like, ‘this is the idea of equality before the law, but clearly for a director of the IMF …’ and then, clarity be damned, my ear is incapable of catching the bit that finishes the thought. What does she say?
UPDATE: Obviously feel free to discuss Joly’s ideas more generally. The argument against a perp walk, because it is inconsistent with presumption of innocence, is cogent. And obviously famous/powerful people like IMF directors are the people who risk losing their presumption of innocence in this way. So we have that rare case in which formal equality amounts to effective bias in favor of the weak and powerless. But it seems like a big mistake to say it is all just Big Apple barbarism – or, rather, Rome-style triumphalism, the defeated Gaul chief paraded in chains for the populace to see! The wealthy and powerful are not exactly without power and wealth, after all, so the prosecutor’s office, in a town full of rich, influential people, should ideally have effective general strategies they pursue, as a matter of course, to make sure they aren’t steamrollered by that. What do you think?
I almost admire Ron Paul for sticking to his propertarian guns, even when he knows it’s going to cost him. All the same, I wish the next person who gets to play the Chris Matthews role could manage to make it cost him a bit more, maybe like so:
“Jim Crow was a legal institution but also a social institution. Both functioned to deprive African-Americans of what all Americans today would consider basic liberties. Your libertarian philosophy commits you to dismantling the legal institution, but also commits you to prohibiting legal dismantlement of the social side of Jim Crow. This means one difference between you, as a libertarian, and the liberals who supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964, is that you are, in at least one important sense, less committed to guaranteeing individual liberty. You hope everyone will be free, but your libertarianism actually forbids you from fully guaranteeing basic liberties, in the no-Jim-Crow sense all Americans now take for granted. Is that right?”
That’s too many words, but I think it does a better job of pre-empting Paul’s responses: one, protesting he’s no racist; two, just expressing optimism that the market would somehow have caused the social problems to disappear, if there were no legal Jim Crow; three, saying it’s ancient history. Of course, boxing in Ron Paul is not the most vital task of the hour, probably. But it would be good if libertarians – tea party types generally – had more of an uphill slog, due to the fact that the liberty they want to guarantee is not quite the liberty Americans tend to assume should be guaranteed.
Despite having recently co-edited a book on Moretti’s work [free! free download, or buy the paper!], I haven’t yet commented on his Hamlet paper, which Kieran brought to our collective attention. Because I only just now got around to reading it, and sometimes it’s good practice to hold off until you do that, even though this is the internet and all.
First things first: if you can’t access the LRB version, there’s a free, longer version available from Moretti’s own lab.
Right, the whole thing reminds me of that memorable scene in the play in which Hamlet puts on a PPT presentation, representing social networks in The Marriage of Gonzago nudge nudge wink wink. (Apparently he’s been working on this stuff at school for years.) And Ophelia doesn’t really get it and Hamlet helpfully explains: “Marry, this is miching mallecho; it means mischief.”
But seriously, folks. I like the paper, and I don’t like it. On the one hand, I wholeheartedly endorse this bit. Or at least I would very much like to be able to. [click to continue…]
The new Fleet Foxes album, Helplessness Blues
Somehow there’s this review meme that Fleet Foxes is coolly uncool. Pitchfork: “Their bright folk-rock sound wasn’t exactly “cool,” but that was sort of the point– it’s familiar in the most pleasing way, lacking conceit or affectation. Their expression of their love for music (and making music) was refreshing three years ago, and that sort of thing never gets old.” Stereogum: “Helplessness Blues is a deeply uncool album. If you played it for your dad he’d either say, “Finally,” or he’d laugh and put on some Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Simon & Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, maybe even America if you stuck around. Robin Pecknold, Fleet Foxes’ singer and songwriter knows how unhip this music is.”
That doesn’t seem right to me at all. Fleet Foxes sounds to me like growing up on Radiohead transmogrified into a kind of flat, plainsong-y folk choral style. Radiohead is vocally flat/affectless and instrumentally droney and tick-tock yet also emotionally soaring; so is a lot of folk music. So you can map Radiohead-y forms and stylings onto folk-y or country-ish patterns and get something that sounds quite contemporary. If you don’t play it for laughs (seriously, click that link) you can play it for sheer beauty, which gets you Fleet Foxes, sounding quite contemporary. If you held a gun to Vampire Weekend’s head and told them to play folk music, they might sound like some of the brighter, warmer Fleet Foxes tracks. Like “Sim Sala Bim”. Which, come to think of it, sort of reminds me of the Beatles, “Two of Us”. And could be construed as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young-ish.
If you wanted to compare Fleet Foxes to something 70’s, I guess the smooth and flat but strong and soaring vocal style of Roberta Flack would seem less inapt, comparison-wise, than Simon and Garfunkel or America. But I don’t think Fleet Foxes sounds much like Roberta Flack. The Pitchfork review also compares them to the Zombies, which I could buy. I love the Zombies.
UPDATE: OK, I take it back. All that “Apples in the summer” stuff in “The Shrine/An Argument” sounds like Crosby, Still, Nash and Young.