History don’t fail me now
[Sharpen the silliness, and the contradictions will sharpen themselves: this is the point I failed to make this morning as I hurried out of the house…]
arma virumque
So I was toying with what I suppose has turned into a kind of riddle, along the following lines:
i: you embrace it — and build yr worldview round the fact of the embrace — bcz you believe it will deliver us from bother
ii: But then the bother arrives anyway, and is itself primarily fashioned around this fact of yr embrace
iii: And if you ever think to reach for it, to dispel this bother, you well know you simply affirm the logic of your foes and redouble their will to bother you…
iv: … which is the very model of an enraging positive-feedback pickle.
When I began, “it” was something like the “right to carry” or “gun culture”, and I was niggling idly away at the sheer baffling venom of the discussion in the US [edit: baffling as seen from anywhere else]. Except gradually it struck me that plenty of other “its” somewhat fit this bill: for example, “critical theory” engenders similarly over-reactive defensiveness when fingered as a symptom, as indeed does “rationalism”. But I don’t think the wars that bubble up out of such self-arming and the reactions against it are — at least straightforwardly — proxies for class politics as we ordinarily understand it (or indeed for religious or “philosophical” conflicts as we’d loosely sketch them).
Defending Adorno from his own devotees…
… or what happens when you cross the streams? My good friend Julio emailed me this: I’d come across Richard Taruskin before, many years ago, and been very taken with his work (via an essay on Stravinsky, neo-classicism, recording technology, the idea of authenticity and the Early Music movement, if I’m remembering correctly across nearly 30 years) — and more recently Seth had piqued my interest all over again, from a very different direction. Late on New Year’s Eve, in a pub in King’s Cross, Julio mentioned to me that this 2007 piece discussed Richard Meltzer, and was visibly entertained by how confused and over-excited I got.
Adding: I say the piece discusses Meltzer, but (I’m a bit disappointed to have to note) really all it does is mention him. He’s introduced as a symptom of the failure of the critical conversation round classical music and the compositional avant-garde to interest or excite the best minds of the 60s generation. But Taruskin doesn’t give much sense of what might be interesting about Meltzer as a writer or thinker, which is a pity — or (which is surely relevant) that he was clearly in the process of wriggling out from under Hegel and Quine (both mentioned at best fleetingly in book-version of The Aesthetics of Rock; Quine just once, in the same sentence as one of the Hegels). Over to Frank Kogan for an all-too-brief primer.
So why aren’t you already reading the yorkshire ranter?
This, on kickstarting London’s social housing stock using funds already available.
#bronydom
I guess I actually quite like it that Aaron Bady reps for Corey Robin when (a) Bady’s much better at the things Robin is supposed to be good at than Robin is, and
(b) Bady’s much MUCH better
at the things Robin is rubbish
at. Maybe he doesn’t know
(I know Robin doesn’t know).
model this
“Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, the same ‘logical multiplicity’. Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?'”
(Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 58–59)
Faintly recall from student days long ago that N.Malcolm was hard work and unrewarding as a philosopher (trans.: I was a confused and unsatisfactory philosophy student, esp.as far as Anglo-Am Analytical etc goes). But this is a good story, and — whether or not LW drew the correct conclusions at length — Sraffa’s intervention was strong, and Wittgenstein was right to be impressed and unsettled. I’m tempted to argue that music — all music, from Blobby to Boulez — is making much the same gesture to all other intellectual activity: here’s something you can’t do. That might be too strong — other things are always going on in music (including rapprochement, or attempts at same), and of course the various forces and layers never aggregate to a single decisive intent or content anyway — but it’s definitely an element I value in music, and don’t see well grasped in its discussion.
like tears in the rain (except they’re kept in a container in your freezer)
For a while now I’ve been wondering about the feasibility and the need for a project: which for want of a better term I’ve been calling the “co-operative archive”. When my friend Martin Skidmore died last year, his wish was that those who knew and loved him gathered at his flat and divided up whatever of his collections — of comics, records, books, art catalogues and more — that we variously wanted. It struck most of us that day, I think, that there was something more than just sad about splitting up what he’d put together so carefully, over many years: he was a highly intelligent man, a scholar, in fact, especially when it came to comics. Was there a way this archive could be maintained? Continue reading “like tears in the rain (except they’re kept in a container in your freezer)”
what they do is who they are
“It’s hard,” writes Thomas Harris somewhere of Starling and Lecter, “to accept that someone can understand you without wishing you well.” Life’s too slippery for books, Clarice; anger appears as lust, lupus presents as hives.
I wrote something in July about political grifters, left and right: an argument (over-compressed, over-allusive) that their adept way with words — their subtle deployment, and indeed understanding, of the elaborate shibboleths of the tribe — is by no means necessarily the conclusive tell for their motivation. The heart of a good con is that you’re hearing what you very much want to hear: the conman may or may not at some level also believe it himself (and please to note: they are by no means all men). The sentence “I love you” is not on its own proof that the speaker loves you (this powerful argument is Seth’s, by the way). Karl Rove and the Super-PAC American Crossroads; the people who built ORCA for Romney… what did these projects seem to say but “I love you” to those whose money they took, in such eye-wateringly large amounts?
This species of con is BY NO MEANS restricted to the moneyed right: though I think the equivalent on the left perhaps feeds more on moral-intellectual authority and celebrity and glamour than actual cash. (Though some of them do like cash.)
none dare call it skewed
Quick unedited notes the morning after (on just 4 hrs sleep)
1: the road-testing of the citizens united decision has not developed entirely to the 1%’s advantage
2: TRUMPBOT SMASH *trumpbot falls over on face in puddle of someone else’s vomit*
3: no one ever got rich betting against the continued stupidity of the US pundit class, but — and usually like emerson I am pro creative-transformative intuition and against the soulless bead-counting technocrat where’er he be — but Team Silver has surely helped ding the the current pundit-layer’s crappy jalopy, in a way that a mere unpredicted shock dem win would not have done
4: ratfuck report (relevant internal repug warfare): Continue reading “none dare call it skewed”
multiplicities of vision
“… our expectation that avant-garde art must puzzle, shock, and, above all, resist immediate understanding”: pianist-critic Charles Rosen on Elliott Carter (1908-2012) back in 1973