About a Dostoevsky short story

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, "A Disgraceful Affair", we're introduced to a hoity-toity General having drinks with his buddies and running his mouth about how Russia will thrive in an age of what he calls "idealism". That, he imagines, is everyone respecting and caring for one another regardless of class. After one too many, he starts for home. Finding that his coachman isn't there waiting for him, he cusses a storm and forgoes a cab, content to hoof it all the way, mostly to spite his missing servant.

While straying through the ghetto he passes one of his lowly, wretched clerk's wedding receptions. The stewed General daydreams about classing up the party with his presence, in the process blowing everyone's mind with what a kindly superior human being he is. Sounds like a plan, so he stumbles in and, after the initial awkwardness, he settles himself, and even sees a few other underlings in attendance. But soon he is swilling vodka and champagne until he finally gets too drunk and passes out. But not until after making an ass of himself, rambling about idealism and spitting all the time.

At this point we learn the groom--the lowly clerk--shoulders all kinds of misery in his quest to make his way.

Anyway, the party breaks up, and the General thrashes and pukes a little until finally an old boarder woman assumes the job of cleaning him up. In the process, the General promptly sobers up enough to hightail it home where he stays in bed for eight days, laid out with a bad case of humiliation.

On the ninth day, no longer able to bear not knowing how much he's damaged his reputation, the General returns to the office where he finds, to his amazement, that nothing appears to have changed!

At the story's end, we find the General sitting pretty in his office, reflecting on the fact that, not only will he come through with reputation intact, but he's had a pretty awesome productive day to boot. Just then another clerk enters with the day's final paperwork and a transfer request from the new groom. Rather than grant the transfer immediately, the General actually says he'll forgive the young man. At this news, the clerk blushes and excuses himself. This inspires in the General the greatest wound, as

He felt more shame, more heaviness at heart, than he had experienced even during the most unbearable moments of his eight days of illness.

"I have failed to live up to my own ideals!" he said to himself, and sank into his chair--helpless.

I see this conclusion at least two ways: (1) I think there's a triple move there, a series of realizations: first, the General realizes his reputation is shot; second, he realizes that, by party crashing, he only added to the groom-clerk's misery, of which, until then, he had been completely unaware; and third, he realizes that, just now, at the moment when he could have spared the injured groom-clerk the insult of having to work for such a cruel boss, he instead chose to humor the prideful delusions of his own reputation. Or, (2) the General remains oblivious to the sufferings of the inferior folk, and is concerned with his own problems.


Notes:

• I told this guy at work about Dostoevsky's life and themes and he said it sounds like "Tales from the Hood" but earlier. An awesome comparison. But "Tales from the Hood" somehow seems like an older reference point than Dostoevsky does.

A poem

Toes in Wet Grass

  -by me

Wince

or sigh,

a pity.

Ozymandias

     -by Percy Blysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

about Jonah Lehrer, making meaning, not making sense

Recently, audiences were disappointed to learn that author-journalist Jonah Lehrer fabricated and misrepresented quotes and self-plagiarized. His crime spurred a couple soul-searching response pieces, most of which are summed in Salon's "Jonah Lehrer throws it all away". Here, Roxanne Gay hits a few angles and floats the hypothesis that a guy like Lehrer "fits the narrative we want about a boy genius" because he can "make us feel smarter for finally being able to understand the complexities of the human mind"; he is the product of, and answer to, "a cultural obsession with genius, a need to find beacons of greatness in an ordinary world".

Because there must be some deeper reason he did what he did. Symptomatic of some disease rooted in our culture and in our souls that caused this thing. This fucking thing.

Doesn't this kind of ponderous speculation, this pathologizing, just create, replicate, and self-serve our need for meaning and significance in this "ordinary world"? Or our need for a need for meaning? Couldn't it just be that Lehrer is dishonest? Or that maybe he got lazy? Or that he tried to produce too much too soon? Or maybe we don't know. And it doesn't matter.

Finding the work of guys like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell interesting is one thing, but to mistake these pop-sci/pop-soc writers for preeminent thinkers of relevance and genius undermines the fearlessness, moral courage, and intellectual vigor of the better writers (and artists) who act as critics, stewards, and producers of culture.

Note:

• I'm not convinced self-plagiarism is a thing or that, if it is, it should be so damnable an offense. But in Lehrer's case, if nothing else, it's sort of ironic considering his big theme was creativity.

Gore Vidal, 1925–2012

A few months ago I wrote of a trend in which people write critically of the newly dead. With Gore Vidal now gone, one such item appears in Salon with the clever title "Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal". But this writer gets it all wrong. He accuses Gore of aristocratic WASP-ish snobbery. Well, yeah, but that's not a damnable offense. The writer's main charge is antisemitism. Gore clearly took a political stance against Zionists; that is not antisemitism. Moreover, in the early eighties Gore urged American Jews to team up with gays and work together to get mainstream acceptance.

Anyway, knocking Gore for condemning a people is like accusing water of hydrating Nazis during World War II. Condemning is what he did. Criticism was one of Gore's biggest talents and he practiced it most of the time. Hell, he looked down on anyone he didn't hate.

This was not a good anti-eulogy.

Notes:

• "Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal" wins the gold for most crusty, crotchety title.

About "Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone" by Eric Klinenberg

Klinenberg wants us to know this is a big deal--"the most significant demographic shift since the Baby Boom—the sharp increase in the number of people who live alone". And the volume and proliferation of these people, annoyingly called "singletons" here, has never happened before. The book attributes the shift to four eco/techno/socio-cultural developments: (1) women's lib, (2) conveniences of technology, (3) longer lifespans, and, the biggest factor, (4) increased urbanization.

Klinenberg's revelation is that, rather than worry about this increased atomization making a nation of shut-in brats, we should see this as a neutral or even ultimately positive thing because these singletons are healthy, happy, and engaged. Indeed one of the book's big goals is to dispel myths and assumptions about people who choose to be alone. In support the book rallies scores of miniature profiles of singletons, quoting and amassing their differing and converging impressions and reasons. These mini bios also try and humanize the subject, to make flesh and blood out of a growing mass of loners.

The book's message is inherently anti-climactic: Hey, this is happening but it's OK (as long as we govern accordingly). I guess this is why I found the book so dull.

Good technical documents

The American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants' summary of their study on corporate ethics (May 2012) is very pleasing to peruse.

an email: Going Away Forever

From: Kumar
To: All
Subject: Jeremy - Going Away Forever Lunch
When: Thursday

Where: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Our beloved Jeremy is fortunately leaving us. As one of the Leads, he has been a great source of inspiration and guided most of us in all our difficulties.

We all have learned a lot of skills from him. The two most important things that anyone would have learnt is his sense of humor and using Lambda expressions in your code.  Though they seem to be highly efficient, yet they are so much annoying, for you have to rebuild the whole solution for any small changes to the code snippet containing those lambda expressions.

He has helped us immensely, inspite of the busy board he hangs on his chair. To put it in right words he had been a very good mentor like other Leads.

His leaving is a big loss for all of us as we would miss his knowledge, humor and expertise. It’s a big loss to the girls. Hopefully he will not take them with him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Let us group together and give him a great unforgettable favorite lunch, to extend our best wishes for his new career.

This would be the best time to bring sacks of Oranges.

Date : 07/26 ( Thursday) 11:30am to 12:30pm

Venue: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Racing around to come up behind you again

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

    ―Ecclesiastes 9:11

All fight for right

When reporters cover events as complicated as the current situation in Syria, they make it palatable and sensible by framing it in a story. This obvious but oft-forgotten point matters because such coverage shapes opinions, affecting policy and outcomes.

The story or narrative for Syria is something like Good Guys fight Repressive Bad Guys for freedom. The CNN article "Faces of the Free Syrian Army" gives us an example of the formalized making of this conflict's Good Guy via humanizing coverage that makes his struggle familiar and gives him voice:

"I go to war for my family, for my country," Amin said. "Because (Assad) has killed everyone. He killed my cousin. He destroyed my village. He destroyed my home."

Indeed, that sucks. Instant sympathy for him and his struggle.

This article is also notable for using the word "bivouacked", which means to take temporary refuge in a military encampment of tents and make-ready shelters vulnerable to enemy fire.

Note:

• I guess you can't see faces in this picture though. 

information

When I pass through, without fail I catch her engaged in conversations so dull you could trust a depressed, slight-wristed teenaged girl to leave them alone. Remote facts input via phones plugged into NPR or some trivia podcast, briefly unbothered in her database mind, at the first opportunity, and often before that, find a second life output as one of many banalities confidently shared for everyone's sake.

Apples, Oranges

The thought piece titled "The Joke's on You" argues that the popularity of John Stewart and Stephen Colbert among progressives "is not evidence of a world gone mad so much as an audience gone to lard morally, ignorant of the comic impulse’s more radical virtues." The author of the piece attempts to build his argument by citing many examples of the satirists cozying up to the establishment and passing on opportunities to challenge power.

The obvious rebuttal to this critique is that Stewart and Colbert simply aren't trying to be progressive, radical comedic performers like Bill Hicks. The author recognizes this objection:

Fans will find this assessment offensive. Stewart and Colbert, they will argue, are comedians, offering late-night entertainment in the vein of David Letterman or Jay Leno, but with a topical twist. To expect them to do anything more than make us laugh is unfair. Besides, Stewart and Colbert do play a vital civic role—they’re a dependable news source for their mostly young viewers, and de facto watchdogs against media hype and political hypocrisy.

But this rebuttal is never addressed. Instead, the author spends the next four pages offering examples of how Stewart and Colbert do nothing to effectively further progressivist causes.

Not addressing the rebuttal makes the whole argument moot. Such thought pieces, which are all the rage now, should be approached skeptically because often their premises, reasoning, and/or conclusions are weak.

Notes:

• The line "Fans will find this assessment offensive"--fandom has nothing to do with questioning the argument offered. But rhetorically the author makes a good move because it subtly casts those who disagree as lackey's for the famed satirists.

Communication breakdown

It is well known that a whole train of thought can pass through one's mind in a flash in the form of some kind of feeling, without being translated into human language, let alone into writing ... Because many of our feelings, put into ordinary words, would appear quite implausible, would they not? That is why they are never revealed, but remain locked up within us.

  -from "A Disgraceful Affair" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

About the film "Wings of Desire"

This Wim Wenders directed film follows a spirit who's tired of the spiritual and yearns for physical existence. The spirit is an angel named Damiel, and his journeys with his companion, Cassiel, expose the isolation inherent in the human condition. But, moreover, Damiel's particular existential crisis gently urges us to appreciate the little things and decide for ourselves that life matters.

The angels can hear people's thoughts, so thinking makes up most of the film's dialog. I enjoyed Cassiel's going to the library where he finds other angels listening to books being narrated in people's minds as they read. There he finds an old man whom he follows, is drawn to perhaps because the aged traveler is so enduring and purposeful, who self-identifies as a storyteller, an indispensable part of humanity.

Meanwhile, Damiel wanders into a low-budget children's circus whose star performer is a beautiful, unfulfilled trapeze artist named Marion. He falls for her, lusts for her, and is spellbound by her poetically lonely train of thought. They share a yearning.

Damiel brings Cassiel to that night's circus performance, which is to be the last of the year. But as Damiel absorbs the show, Cassiel sees how deeply his companion feels the need to live. Afterwards Damiel confesses as much. Marion, while celebrating at the circus staff's after-party, pauses and, in her thoughts, appreciates being alive. Hearing this, Damiel's heart breaks.

So he resolves to become real, and when an empty piece of body armor crashes onto his head, Damiel wakes in a vacant lot, apparently knocked unconscious after being dropped from Heaven--a helicopter hovering overhead. To be human is to be vulnerable, so he pawns his rickety old armor and finds Marion at a night club. There, they each taste of the wine from the bar and she asks him to join her in a life of consequence, to live as if they are setting new precedents for future generations.

The story inverts the usual paradigm: instead of man imagining and chronicling heaven as the grand but remote paradise, the angels imagine and chronicle man as the simple and immediate body, and they do so in ways that elevate man without pretending he’s a miracle. This inversion is sacrilegious, but it does no harm.

The viewing audience watches the angels watch the people. When a scene calls for your sympathy and you feel that sympathy, you feel the sympathy of the angels, you see Earth through the angels’ eyes. For example, in one scene we peek in on a small family and find a young man alone in his bedroom, sulking and brooding over how nobody knows he’s alive, but then we learn his dad is sitting alone in front of the TV and worrying about his son’s future while mom sits alone in the kitchen doing the same.

Notes

• Peter Falk of course is really charming in this, single-handedly keeping a good chunk of the film interesting. ("Columbo" is one of the best series ever.)
• Cassiel urges someone to his shoes correctly--using a double knot.

Rest in Paradise, Andy Griffith

I've probably seen every episode of "The Andy Griffith Show" and the best is "Opie's Hobo Friend" with guest star Buddy Ebsen, the next best is "Opie and the Bully".

About secularized religion

As the Church fell into crisis in the 17th century, an emerging secular governmentality assumed custodial rights over life and population issues previously managed by the Church. With this, the modern State evolved, giving rise to politics. Like medicine and science, politics grows and takes more and more things into its body of knowledge, even religion, which itself is now highly politicized (it has been before now, but in different ways). The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was developed in the context of this politics, and has been linked to it since the beginning as evident in the religion's history, a story of battling for political contention.

Taking this story on a tangent, on June 30 this year, a modest group of Mormons gathered to renounce their membership in the LDS Church using methods that conflate the political with the religious: their gathering was personal ceremony and political protest; they waved a "Declaration of Independence from Mormonism" and offered letters of resignation, seeking "freedom" as they gathered at Ensign Peak like Brigham Young did with his followers in 1847; they sacrificed church-bound relationships with their community, yearning to receive those same relationships in return, renewed as social and business ties; their reasons for quitting included Church teachings that are "made up", that conflict with science, that conflict with history, that veil racism and promote intolerance, and that are inconsistent.

Anyway, this story sort of stuck out like this.

The Higgs

The physics almost-news about the Higgs boson is simultaneously the most interesting and most boring thing going right now. Maybe this narrative conflict will resolve itself in a nice anti-climax.

About "A Very Easy Death" by Simone De Beauvoir

In A Very Easy Death, Simone de Beauvoir chronicles her dying, bedridden mother's last few weeks, and through writing reconciles the difficulties of the relationship they shared. This doesn't feel quite like grieving; it's more like making sense of something elusive and mysterious, sketching the likeness of a stranger who passes in the dark. Sadness is a gentle undercurrent, never threatening to pull us under. Likewise, de Beauvoir's distaste for the medicalized experience of death is rather clear, but this is no polemic.

For an intellectual known more for her political and philosophical works--topics given to lofty abstraction--I was interested to read this very human and immediate, emotional work.

Note:

• In her telling, de Beauvoir's mother was dying, suffering death, for weeks. At the moment of passing, there was a brief, choked struggle by the patient. After the official pronouncement of death, the nurse called it an easy death, wanting de Beauvoir to take comfort in its brevity.
  
  
  
  

Calling

He'd spent most of the past eight years in this confessional. The last to repent before him, some poor woman who carried the stench of congealed sausage fat smeared on brown paper, had trailed away from this cozy, curtained sanctuary months ago. The smell, an hour later. Actually, he was glad. For, you see, he could no longer answer the call of a God so great, he himself being so small. The first time he could not answer happened while staged on the alter. Standing, the flock kneeling before him, his hands just flaked away and his shoulders bolted across the room, fixed to the walls, lead beams bearing the full pull of the Earth, such that he surely could never handle the wine again, or the bread again, the blood and the body. Then his soul bled itself and scarred down the middle at exactly the moment when two other souls should have been joined in matrimony. Weeks later, his eyes froze, their last tears icing the mummy's silence on his lips, so that he could offer no comfort to the dying. And, now? He could no longer forgive, because all was forgiven. Now he could only, need only, give thanks!

Is there another kind of advertising?

Read this Washington Post article about the rainbow Oreo. Read it in a dry monotone voice.