Genius is

reaching the limit of a thought without indulging the desire to feel stupid.

Where to?

When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instanteneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—and what then?

Also sprach Martin Heidegger in 1935 (IM 40 [28-9]). "Regular television broadcasts [had begun] in Germany in 1929." "[Muhammad] Ali regained his title on October 30, 1974 by defeating champion George Foreman in their bout in Kinshasa, Zaire." "The first "modern" network technology on digital 2G (second generation) cellular technology was launched by Radiolinja (now part of Elisa Group) in 1991 in Finland on the GSM standard." Tonight, Fran Lebowitz answers the question concerning technology on HBO. Her answer is: "No." Where to then? "Here."*

_____________
*"I have none of these machines, which allows people to not be wherever they are. Since I don't have them and I'm forced to be where I am all the time, which is why I'm noticing what people are doing." It does not get much more Heidegerrian than that, does it, friends?

Method/Mandate

I was surprised that Google only turned up one instance of the sentence "Science is the methodical pursuit of knowledge". When I articulated it for myself, I certainly didn't think that I (or, as it turns out, "ChrisM") was saying something original. So if anyone knows of a classic version of that dictum, please let me know.

The straight pangrammatical homologue is: politics is the mandated pursuit of power. But all depth in philosophy, as Wittgenstein said, is the depth of a grammatical joke. Here the joke might go as follows:

If science is the methodical pursuit of knowledge, politics is the mandacious pursuit of power.

Only a pangrammarian would get it, of course. Only if the word "method" immediately calls up "mandate" will "mandacious" have any meaning at all.

The Conservation of War

Here's an astute and surprisingly still-relevant observation from Norman Mailer in his debate with William F. Buckley made in September, 1962, published in Playboy in 1963, and reprinted in the Presidential Papers (pages 170-1). Replace the Cold War with that peculiar vector of financial crisis and the "war on terror" that Obama inherited from Bush and the point, I think remains valid.

So long as there is a cold war, there cannot be a conservative administration in America. There cannot for the simplest reason. Conservatism depends upon a huge reduction in the power and the budget of the central Government. Indeed, so long as there is a cold war, there are no politics of consequence in America. It matters less each year which party holds the power. Before the enormity of defense expenditures, there is no alternative to an ever-increasing welfare state. It can be an interesting welfare state like the present one, or a dull welfare state like President Eisenhower’s. It can even be a totally repressive welfare state like President Goldwater’s well might be. But the conservatives might recognize that greater economic liberty is not possible so long as one is building a greater war machine. To pretend that both can be real is hypocritical beyond belief. The conservatives then are merely mouthing impractical ideas which they presume may bring them power. They are sufficiently experienced to know that only liberalism can lead America into total war without popular violence, or an active underground.

As far as I can tell, Rand Paul is not hypocritical in this sense. Like his father, he has always granted that the "huge reduction in the power and budget of the central Government" implies an enormous reduction in military spending, i.e., a reversal of imperial "total war" strategy. The larger argument, in the pages leading up to this paragraph, is worth examining. Mailer works through the budgetary wiggle room that a rollback of the welfare state implies and then introduces the problem raised by Goldwater's promise of not "economizing on the nation's safety".

Note to self: the longish post here, which saved me half the typing in that long quotation from PP, could make for an interesting engagement.

Songs of Praise and Libel

I just listened to John Coltrane's "Song of Praise" and Bob Wiseman's "Libelous" back to back. It's worth doing either. Also both.

Rand Paul, Jon Stewart and Rachel Maddow

I believe the world would change (or would have already changed) if Rachel Maddow gave Rand Paul an interview that looked (and especially felt) like the one she gave with Jon Stewart. The important thing here is what she let him say and how it did not destroy the mood. It suggests the following utopian vision:

Rand Paul is president. Jon Stewart is the host of the Late Show (that IS going to happen, right?)*. And Rachel Maddow anchors the evening news.

________
*Update: if you want to feel that this "IS" going to happen watch this clip.

Notes Toward Composure

The aim of poetry is to extricate the subject from the history of peoples, just as the aim of philosophy is to extricate the object from the world of things.

It is the task of the poet to present the subject by noting the emotions that position it in a particular history. It is the task of the philosopher to present the object by noting the concepts that relate it to a universal world. In a profoundly disturbing sense, the poet is to "the party" what the philosopher is to "the university".

Philosophers fail when they merely posit the object, just as poets fail when they merely pose the subject. The aim of philosophy is to bring the thing out and ground it objectively in the world as an object subsumed under a universal concept. Anything less is but an academic exercise. The aim of poetry, likewise, is to bring the person out and situate him or her subjectively in a history as a subject obligated to a particular emotion. Anything less is merely toeing the party line.

(I don't know if everyone appreciates these exercises. But they make me tingle. Just saying.)

Mayhewianism #3

"I came of age intellectually during the apogee of Derrida in the American academy, so I know this theory better than you. If you try this argument with me I will crush you."

(A "mayhewianism" is an expression that is characteristic of Jonathan Mayhew's exemplary scholarly persona. Ideally, it is something actually written by Prof. Mayhew.)

Rand Paul

I think Rand Paul did really well in this interview, and I don't think it's fair to say that he deals in "sweeping generalizations". I think he sounds as level-headed and intelligent as Obama did when he was running against Hilary Clinton.

His position is basically that the U.S. gov't can't keep behaving like "everything is an emergency". He wants to downsize it from a four trillion dollar operation to a two and a half trillion dollar operation. Like he says, that's still a very big government. If you want specifics, he refers you to a book by Christopher Edwards. Don't say that's skirting the issue. If you're going to downsize a government in that scale, you'd better have read a few books on the subject.

Most importantly, it seems to me that he'd take seriously the idea that pulling out of Afghanistan and legalizing pot are two very good ways of reducing needless government spending. So I'm looking at him with interest. He doesn't seem corrupted.

I know he's said some disconcerting and puzzling things in the past. But I mostly cringed with him, not at him.

Suit/case

Has anyone noticed that one can bring a "suit" against someone else and one's "case" can come up in court. You can also hire a lawyer (who will be wearing a suit) to write a brief. Lawyers don't keep their underwear in their briefcases, by the way. But when they travel they put their suits in their suitcases. They wear suits and carry briefcases, they keep their briefs (of their cases and suits) in those cases.

I don't know. Maybe it's important.

Kate's Own Eyes

This 30 minute film about Kate Greenstreet and her latest book, The Last 4 Things, is well worth watching. Kate's America, like Tony's, is a wondersome place. Thanks, Max.

I ♥ the New Yorker

'In the movies, we are taught that if something bad happens to someone, somebody better-looking will learn from it. In "Pearl Harbor", the sight of struggling sailors, drowning below-decks, serves as a useful reminder to Ben Affleck of how he ought to feel about Kate Beckinsale.' (Adam Gopnik, NYer, 25/10/10, p. 32)

Tony Tost as an Assuring Male Poet

I just came across an outrageous distortion of Tony Tost's Invisible Bride, perpetrated by Stephanie Cleveland (who I don't know who is, I'll admit). In "The Myth of Women’s Masochism", she writes as follows:

In “The Great Submarine Race,” Mathew Rohrer describes penises as metaphorical submarines (that is, warships) which slumber in the bloodstreams of all men. These “submarines” want desperately to “burble [i.e. shoot off] in shallow slips.” Erection and ejaculation are the primary focus; the woman’s vagina becomes passive, a port where the poet docs his sub:

A man in the square nudged his wife/and told her they were Mammary clouds. Everyone’s bloodstream burbled faintly./ The wife loved the lumpy clouds, the man’s submarine slipped its mooring/and nosed her coral arches. Simultaneously, all the world’s submarines exhaled and plunged deep into the shifting water, with their little engines racing (65)

Men fuck women as a collective entity, bonding through what Tony Tost has aptly poeticized as “the ancient male ritual of penetrating” (49). Some envision themselves as charming submarines who “enter her” magnanimously. For women, to reject this image of being plunged or parted by a man’s ship is to hurt men’s feelings, to risk making a male partner feel less substantial, less like a man, and potentially less willing to stick around. Every one else is fucking this way, every other woman in the world waits eagerly to be nudged by her partner’s penis; the male poet assures us this is so; every woman is happiest in her natural role of passive port directed were to look by an erection-wielding husband.

But anyone who reads the poem on page 49 will immediately see that Tony was not talking about a ritual of penetrating per se. Rather, he has “Agnes”, who recurs in the book as “the otherworldly force that silently and insistently explains [his] reason for being” and also “theorizes about the sanctity of airports" (8), say something completely different. I'll quote it here along with the set-up.

When I was ten I broke into my father's office to steal some money and there he was digitally stimulating my mother and talking on the phone. Agnes said I have spent my life's capital perpetually sneaking into my father's office, then telling myself I was a trespasser of the unknown.

"The ancient male ritual of penetrating the public sphere only to stumble upon a penetration of the private one," she said.

Cleveland, the "female poet", if you will, lops off the clauses that give a sense to "penetrating" and now assures us that this is a poem about how “men fuck women as a collective entity, bonding”. Very assuring, indeed.

Far Too Canadian

Many years ago when I was living in Canada there was a song called "Far Too Canadian" by a band called Spirit of the West. Today, I read the following about Canada's prime minister, Stephen Harper, in the Economist:

Last year he raised eyebrows by choosing to inaugurate a doughnut-innovation centre rather than attend the UN General Assembly. (16/10/10, p. 54)

It's one of those facts through which reality outdoes the parody.

Reverse Notation

Here' s a nice little poem by the Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt. It appears in a book called called The Hand's Tremor in November, here in my own translation:

You, whom I love, and who thinks that I love another. I love you so intensely these days because I have fallen for another.

An interesting idea, to be sure. Today, I had a series of experiences that made me feel something of what Pound noted down in his "In A Station of the Metro" (which, as I have noted before, is an anagram of "Of Another Tostian Item", but I digress...). What I felt can perhaps best be described with a poem that inverts, almost completely, Nordbrandt's notation:

You, who loves me, and I know can't love another. I fell for every girl I saw today because you love me so intensely.

Not a work, I will grant, of first intensity. But noted down, in any case, for future reference.

The Weather is Broken

Today it is so foggy outside that the weather appears to be malfunctioning. One wants to call the weather company and hear the customer service representative say that they're "working on it", that they hope to have it "up and running" later today.

Notes Toward the Meaning of Justice

In the "The Meaning of Truth", William James says,

Distance ... is made abstract by emptying out whatever is particular in the concrete intervals—it is reduced thus to a sole 'difference,' a difference of 'place', which is a logical ... distinction, a so-called 'pure relation.'

The same is true of the relation called 'knowing,' which may connect an idea with a reality. ... I say that we know an object by means of an idea ..."

Here's a pangrammatical transposition of this passage, converting it from a statement about knowledge to one about power (here, as we shall see, "mastery"):

Duration ... is made concrete by filling in whatever is universal in the abstract termini—it is ramified thus to a mass 'identity,' an identity of 'way', which is a passionate ... equivalence, a so-called 'brute position.'

The same may be said of the position called 'mastering,' which may divorce a reality from an idea. ... I say that we master a subject by means of a reality ..."

Not bad, eh?

Epigraphs

"In other words, the intermediaries which in their concrete particularity form a bridge, evaporate ideally into an empty interval to cross and then, the relation of the end-terms having became saltatory, the hocus-pocus of erkenntnisstheorie begins, and goes on unrestrained by further concrete considerations." (William James)

"Hoc est corpus meum." (Jesus Christ)

Desiderata

We want reality to be opaque. There should be nothing behind it.

We want ideas to be transparent. There should be nothing to them.

Major and Minor Forms

A distinguished novelist complained that no directions for major form were given in How to Read.
In apology: It is a waste of time to listen to people talking of things they have not understood sufficiently to perform. (Ezra Pound, ABC, p. 76)

Pound ultimately didn't even exhibit "major form" in the Cantos. As Kearns points out,

He never got around to theorizing about major form, nor did he impose one on the Cantos. As he added to the poem or he came across new materials that interested him, he allowed them to find a place in the expanding code, trusting principally that a dynamic magnetism would hold everything together by the quality of the poet's affections. (29)

This is exactly the opposite of what I want to allow, and what I can trust, in Composure. My notes will cohere, I want to say, even if It/I don't (cf. Canto CXVI). That's what the project is about.

I want a major form to emerge from the pieces (the pjecer that have been translated as Kierkegaard's "fragments"). 51 pieces, say, one of which is my body ("This is my body"). Where it at all coheres. The form will not be imposed; it will be built. Hand crafted.