Highbrow

The Williamsburg Circle of International Arts and Letters

2012-02-01T19:50:00.000-05:00

Several weeks ago, I received an invitaion to join the Williamsburg Circle of International Arts and Letters, a group of artists, poets and scholars seeking to advance study in the humanities. The Circle is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York with the Williamsburg Art and Historical Center. Here I am happy to present the Circle's first press release:

THE WILLIAMSBURG CIRCLE OF INTERNATIONAL ARTS AND LETTERS

For Immediate Release

February 1, 2012

In January 2012 the WAH Center created a new program called the Williamsburg Circle of International Arts and Letters. It is composed of twelve outstanding scholars, publishers, collectors, artists and innovators (see complete member list).

We believe that a strong education in the classical humanities is a fundamental prerequisite for good citizenship in every country in the world today. What is Classical Humanities? It is nothing less than the spiritual, ethical and intellectual foundation for Western culture. Classics is a vibrant, interdisciplinary field that lies at the heart of the liberal arts. It is the lack of a common heritage and common values that gives rise to basic conflicts among peoples. A broad education in the classical humanities can bring about a common understanding and a common set of values.

As many of you know, the WAH Center's motto is "Peace, Harmony and Unity," as Yuko Nii, the Founder, has written in the Bridge Concept upon which she founded the institution.

Invitation: We also welcome you to the very first of Our Events on April 14th, 2012 where you can meet our chairman Dr. Robert J. Wickenheiser, 19th President of St. Bonaventure University, and learn more about our goals and projects.

If you would like to contribute to our worthy goals, we would very much appreciate your support at our inception. If you are a scholar or artist and contribute $50 yearly as a supporting member, we will list your name with your discipline and contact information (and web-site, if you have one) on a special supporting member page. Click here for benefits.

We would very much like to get your feedback on our project!

Terrance Lindall and Yuko Nii
Williamsburg Art and Historical Center, Brooklyn, New York

It is very encouraging to be involved in a project like this. The Circle shares many of the same goals as International Authors. In fact, Dario Rivarossa, Horace Jeffery Hodges and I are members of both the IA Board of Editorial Advisors and the Williamsburg Circle. Nor should I fail to announce here that Terrance Lindall has kindly agreed to join us on the International Authors Board. I look forward to seeing dynamic manifestations of collaboration between the two organizations, and all good things to come.

The Farmhouse Company

2012-01-30T15:25:00.009-05:00

When she's not busy writing poetry and fiction, or making the scene with the rockers in the Mumbai underground, Vitasta Raina is on the leading edge of sustainable urban development. Vitasta has recently turned her progressive architectural vision to India's rural areas. Her latest project is called The Farmhouse Company, a design studio offering three new developments for urban dwellers seeking a home in the country.

According to the Web site:

The Farmhouse Company offers you an alternate lifestyle; more than just weekend homes or holiday getaways, we offer you freedom from the cramped spaces and polluted skies of the city.

We understand your urge to escape the chaos of the city and be one with nature, to lie back on the grass and watch the clouds, to dip your feet in a brook and see only lush greenery all around you. Or, to come home in a chauffer-driven boat!!

The names of the three developments are Villa Arbol, Villas de Mer, and Villas de Rio. Learn more about the project by clicking here.

A chauffer-driven boat? Well, only if we can stop by the teak forest for a quick snack in the Sushi bar.

169 Clinton St.

2012-01-07T00:39:00.010-05:00

The Brooklyn, New York apartment building where H.P. Lovecraft lived in the mid-1920s. The figures in the photographs are painter Michael Brennan and his daughter Oona.

Aural Prolegomenon to the Revelation of Apophastic Method in Keltic Soteriological Experience

2012-01-03T15:37:00.003-05:00

A December Afternoon in Brooklyn

2011-12-10T20:53:00.005-05:00

I've just returned from Brooklyn where I visited with Yuko Nii and Terrance Lindall of the Williamsburg Art & Historical Center. After brief and warm introductions (shared, incidently, with a young couple from Spain entering the Center just ahead of me) Terrance thrust a cup of tea into my hands and led me on a tour. Not unexpectedly, I viewed lots of art, including the current exhibit and several of the paintings Terrance has done based on Paradise Lost. Also, he took me though his Cabinet of Wonders, an extensive collection of curios, artifacts and fine paintings, the proper description of which, based upon my cursory but nonetheless expert appraisal, would certainly require a brow loftier than even my own.

We talked about the Center, Emantions and International Authors. Terrance expressed interest in preparing illustrations for Emanations: Second Sight, and he has agreed to join the International Authors Board of Advisors. We discussed at length various theological and aesthetic matters concerning Milton and Paradise Lost, and then went on to cover a battery of arcane subjects in a lively bricolage of artistic banter, aphoristic legerdemain and philosophic enthusiasm; and we were especially keen as we agreed upon the importance of using art to preserve and advance the cause of great poetry. We compared notes on the possibility of an exhibit involving analytic philosophy and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, and we discussed the forthcoming International Authors edition of The Scarlet Letter.

It has been a very good afternoon.

The MSL Radiation Assessment Detector

2011-11-20T18:36:00.002-05:00

Don Hassler of the Soutwest Research Institute describes the MSL Radiation Assesment Detector that will be carreid aboard the Mars Science Laboratory, the next "rover mission" to the red planet.

Don is the son of Mack Hassler, who is a pioneer in the field of science fiction criticism, and who is a member of the International Authors Board of Editorial Advisors.

Emanations: Second Sight Call for Submissions

2011-11-13T12:01:00.000-05:00

International Authors and the editors of Emanations are happy to announce a Call for Submissions:

Emanations: Second Sight

Emanations is an anthology featuring fiction, poetry, essays, manifestos and reviews. The emphasis is on alternative narrative structures, new epistemologies, peculiar settings, esoteric themes, sharp breaks from reality, ecstatic revelations, and vivid and abundant hallucinations.

The editors are interested in recognizable genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, local color, romance, realism, surrealism, postmodernism--but the idea is to make something new, and along these lines the illusion of something new can be just as important. If a story or poem makes someone say, "Yes, but what is it?" then it's right for Emanations. Essays should be exuberant, daring, and free of pedantry. Length is a consideration in making publication decisions, but in keeping with the spirit of the project contributors should consider length to be “open.”

Our editorial vision is evolving. Contributors should see themselves as actively shaping the "vision" of Emanations.

Send files with brief cover note to the Editors:

IAsubmissions@hotmail.com

Deadline: April 2, 2012

Emanations is a not-for-profit literary project and contributors cannot be compensated at this time. All proceeds from the sale of Emanations will support the efforts of International Authors to publish new voices from around the world.

Please post questions, suggestions and ideas. The project is a collaborative effort, and as we share ideas the "vision" transforms, evolves, and grows. When we write stories and poems we hope to bring to bear the entire battery of modern and postmodern literary devices. More simply: we like good, strong writing. Our essays are incisive, precise, keen, challenging, and driven by the writer's desire to advance an intelligent audience's understanding of important subjects.

The Fine Print:

1) Submit files as follows: double space, Microsoft Word, Times New Roman 12 pt. The book will be formatted by the editors before publication.

2) No simultaneous submissions (contributors should get fairly quick feedback anyway, especially if their submission meets our needs). Material that is obviously pulled from a file and has nothing to do with the goals of the anthology won't get any feedback beyond the initial acknowledgement.

3) Word count/line count? See details above. We're flexible, but contributors should be sensible when considering what they send in. A novella? Well, maybe, and so on.... Rules of thumb: a) Stories: very short to 20-30 pages. b) Poems: send in 5-10 pages. c) Essays: 5-10-30 pages.

4) Published as hard copy only—Emanations will be available on Amazon. Participants who make a substantial contribution of material, editorial work, or art will get a copy. It can take some time to get copies to contributors outside of North America. In the case of our first anthology, for example, it took forty-five days to get a copy to a contributor in to Nepal.

5) In the past, International Authors has made it possible for contributors to purchases copies “at cost” using coupon codes, and so on. International Authors is a consortium, and as such every contributor is a “member” or our community, and contributors are encouraged to help promote the anthology by sending review copies to newspapers, journals and relevant Web sites.

6) Copyright "reverts" to contributors upon publication. That is, after a piece appears in Emanations, the contributor can seek to publish their piece elsewhere. Contributors should understand that Emanations will remain for sale on Amazon indefinitely.

Published by International Authors

Board of Editorial Advisors

Ruud Antonius, Netherlands/Spain

Steve Aylett, UK

Michael Beard, US

Michael Butterworth, UK

Jason W. Ellis, US

Cedric Cester, Spain

Mike Chivers, UK

Mack Hassler, US

Horace Jeffery Hodges, South Korea

Sushma Joshi, Nepal

Carter Kaplan, US

Devashish Makhija, India

Vitasta Raina, India

Elkie Riches, UK

Dario Rivarossa, Italy

Kai Robb, US

Stephen Sylvester, US

Novahead by Steve Aylett

2011-10-28T14:33:00.003-04:00

Steve Aylett presents us with an interesting sketch in the development of a young talent, and this youthfulness is indeed the essential quality characterizing much of his output, and he has been prolific. Aylett has published fifteen novels, all of them exhibiting an original flare for invention, iconoclasm (the sort that alienates both readers and publishers), and a careful attention to detail. He is not a fast writer; that is to say, he is an artist, and despite his dubious association with “packaged” avant-garde trademarks—slipstream, pop-surrealism, “bizarro”—of late his work has transcended the epicyclical dialectics that typify (and quite properly marginalize) communities of avant-garde ambition. Aylett’s work has in the past been constricted because of the theories and generically-controlled parameters that attend the very idea of the avant-garde. Such adhesion to generic formality is to be expected from a young author, moreover an author that remains enduringly young in spirit; and Aylett endures here in all the best ways. But Aylett’s talent has been growing, and his long-standing “tendency” to subvert the limitations of his own narratological experiments has borne fruit, especially in three recent novels, where at last Aylett has risen to the occasion of his own genius, and is forcefully advancing ideas and effects that are as hard-hitting as anything in the English language.

I found LINT, the first of these new novels, “interesting.” LINT is an inventive, convincing and entertaining hallucination, but towards the end of the novel, when Aylett moves from the mode of faux literary biography into fictive verisimilitude, the attenuated narrative does not match the exuberance of the first nine-tenths of the novel. In LINT, Aylett presents the literary biography of Aylett’s gamboling alter ego. Jeff Lint is a stock (and in many ways unremarkable) trickster figure built around the dubious persona of a 1960s science fiction writer possessing auto-destructive tendencies that surpass the sophomoric world view such tendencies usually suggest. Although the figure of Lint remains, and intentionally so, a failure, the biography of Lint does in fact represent an aesthetic we are familiar with, particularly in America, which of course has been deeply influenced by the pre-modern influences of Calvinism. In Aylett, the careful reader will detect a faint, but then very familiar—and very cold—echo of the radical Protestant heresies of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Think Milton in Book X of PARADISE LOST. Think Blake in THE MARRIAGE OF HEAVEN AND HELL. Think Mark Twain in his LETTERS TO THE EARTH. In many ways, this radical aesthetic not only anticipates the bleak landscapes of the Existentialists, but indeed outstrips them. Following the sudden washout that concludes LINT, I was very favorably impressed with the sequel, AND YOUR POINT IS? In LINT, Aylett is describing some interesting phenomena, but in AND YOUR POINT IS? Aylett is making interesting phenomena happen. AND YOUR POINT IS? represents the blooming, I believe, of Aylett’s mature talent. Indeed, in this novel Aylett shows himself to be a great talent.

And this brings us to NOVAHEAD, Aylett’s newest work, which combines tireless exuberance and invention contained inside the architecture of a tightly-controlled composition. Although larded with great promise, LINT and AND YOUR POINT IS? remain meta-narratives. They are parodies of literary biography and criticism, and they are not fictions. While such postmodern contraptions can be (and in Aylett’s case are) remarkable pieces of work, they do not give us representations of the world; that is, they are experiments rather working models. They are systems of artifice rather than creations of art. But now NOVAHEAD marks Aylett’s emigration from his pop-surrealist background to the illuminated space of enchanted literary expression. NOVAHEAD is a work of art to contend with. While there remains in this story sensationalized dystopian elements as familiar to us as the names of Zamyatin, Čapek, and Ballard, in NOVAHEAD Aylett’s vision is carefully (indeed scrupulously) centered upon a psycho-sociological exposition of the nature of language. Compare a clinical psychiatrist of the stature of Donald Cameron, at one moment attending to his heroic experiments at McGill University, then suddenly and miraculously transported to the tunnels of a supercollider, where a group of theoretical physicists are conferring over the nature of subatomic particles, and whose abstruse conversation naturally produces startling and remarkable effects upon Cameron’s accelerated psyche. Aylett’s precisely-constructed grammatical formulations neatly upset the routine epistemologies that dominate our beliefs, and so expose the mundane semantic customs and habits that prevent us from seeing things in the "larger" way that this novel—and the maturity of experience—makes possible. NOVAHEAD can be compared to Michael Moorcock’s A CURE FOR CANCER, which is certainly our finest pre-postmodern instance of this kind of writing, in which the “offhand” literary gesture and the aesthetics of cheap literature and even cheaper catharsis can be transformed into a vibrant satirical landscape. Indeed, NOVAHEAD represents an idiosyncratic species of writing that doesn’t merely drive such epistemological subversions, but which goes still further and creates an ecstatic point-of-departure. Thus, in NOVAHEAD, and notwithstanding its youth-cult DNA—like a discarded pupa husk lying nearby a pulsating Cicada uncurling its wet and shivering wings—there is such a carefully considered attention to the nuanced relationships amongst grammar, logic, perception, and the linguistic architectures of human identity and human society, that the work is not a mere postmodern squib, but instead represents the artistic expression of a profound analytic sensibility. George Carlin and William S. Burroughs certainly come to mind, but then so too does John Ashbery and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

View the Amazon page for Novahead.

Did you hear that?

2011-10-01T21:38:00.001-04:00

International Authors Goes On-Line

2011-08-24T13:12:00.003-04:00

Click here to view the new International Authors website.

Emanations is Available

2011-08-08T23:33:00.000-04:00

Our expectations descend through chasms of arcane wonder, where the Internet shapes marvelous new communities, even as the Academy breaks the chains of worn convention and formal discipline, sending forth a new class of scholars to explore the frontiers of unique realms. Amidst this progress, strangely enough and yet quite appropriately, consciousness rebels. In these pages are stories, poems, and essays that are exuberant, eloquent, and original—where expression and intelligence commingle in a flash of awakening. Whether this new consciousness is human or perhaps something greater remains to be seen, but by looking into our emanations we might find an answer.

The first anthology to be released by International Authors, Emanations showcases the work of sixteen writers from around the world. With illustrations by Kai Robb, Dario Rivarossa and Vitasta Raina.

Click here to order.

International Authors Meeting at the St Pancras Hotel

2011-08-05T11:20:00.007-04:00

On July 31 I met in London at the St Pancras Hotel with several of the UK members of International Authors. In attendance were Ruud Antonius, Steve Aylett, Hayden Westfield-Bell, Sara Butterworth, Michael Butterworth, Elkie Riches, and myself.

The meeting was enjoyable, and as we gathered together I felt a sense of shared ease and genuine warmth. Perhaps the most "official" proceeding was summarizing a message Michael Moorcock sent us. After greeting the attendees and expressing his wish to be there, Mr. Moorcock writes:

"Really would like to be there, particularly to meet those people I haven't yet met face to face. I am a bit of a softy around such ideas as a multicultural congress. I hadn't really thought about it before but Norman Spinrad brought up the thought that New Worlds had been a genuinely transatlantic venture with Americans coming to the UK specifically because NW was there. Part of the ideal was to have Anglophone writers, at very least, exchanging cultural influences. I'd still like to see a few more Indians, say, involved."

This is interesting to me as I belive Emanations (and International Authors) is both an endorsement of Mr. Moorcock’s suggestion and a response. Vitasta Raina's Writer's Block is a case in point: an endorsement, of sorts, and a response to multiculturalism. I think we are at a point where the “multiculturalism project” of the last century is unexpectedly (but properly, surely) transforming into a more complex transmodern experiment, and I think readers will agree when they see how the various pieces collected in Emanations reflect upon each other.

Back to the meeting: It was relaxed and convivial. We certainly “talked shop” but what I got out of it was more the feeling of being with kindred spirits. Topics we discussed: (mis)adventures in publishing, the technology of book production, recent accomplishments, International Authors, Emanations. I was happy that Dutch surrealist painter Ruud Antonius was there—people from different media mixing together and comparing notes can only be good. Cross fertilization, so to speak. And Ruud is at work on a novel, incidentally.

I showed Michael Butterworth a proof copy of Emanations, and he was quite surprised to see that in addition to his long story, many of his poems are in the anthology. For a moment I was concerned that I had misunderstood his sending them to me, but then he expressed his satisfaction (and happy surprise) that the poems had been included. Also, I was very glad to see how happy he was with the illustration that Vitasta Raina has prepared for his story.

We spent a long time together, but as people began leaving, I felt a bit frustrated. I could have sat there all night! As a matter of fact, Ruud (my host in London) and I were up talking that evening past 1:00 a.m.

Reviews of Writer's Block

2011-07-13T14:39:00.001-04:00

Vitasta Raina's Writer's Block has garnered a number of impressive reviews:

Flipkart

Mike Chivers' Necronomania

Amazon

Emanations Coming Soon

2011-07-13T14:33:00.003-04:00

Getting closer . . . now examining the proof copy . . . over 300 pages . . . it's a hefty book.

Captain Tomorrow and his Star Rangers vs. the Political Event Horizon

2011-06-14T19:13:00.004-04:00

Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange: Appropriate for College Viewing?

2011-05-19T17:12:00.036-04:00

In Ethics this term I am showing Stanley Kubrick's film A Clockwork Orange (1971). After viewing the first half of the film Tuesday, I received the following email from a student (quoted with permission):

Dr. Kaplan,

I am in disbelief that you made a choice to show that movie. Although it may not be offensive to some it may be to others. Some may not want to waste their time watching such garbage. You should consider how different each individual is. Some may be older and not accustomed to what society feels acceptable today. Others may be Christians and my be blown away by such immorality. Some may even be very young and even in high school considering that our college accepts high school students. Some may have never had a sexual experience and do not need to learn from this. I personally do not understand the purpose of this movie. I also believe that any content you felt was relevant to ethics could have been taught by the choice of another film. I sacrifice precious time with my children daily for my education. I do not think this was educational to me. I would never give up a moment with my children to watch such garbage. I had gained such respect for you because you had been so understanding but now my feelings have changed. I do not expect to be counted absent for leaving early nor do I expect to be counted absent on Thursday because I will not watch any more of that film. If you would like I will attend class once the movie is over. Please let me know.

Sincerely,

Student

I answered:

Dear Student:

I fully understand your concerns. As I said before we viewed the film, students could leave if they wished. If you examine the notes for this week and otherwise compare the content of the film and the course material, I think you should agree that the film brings together the central topics of the discussion we've been having since March. Also please keep in mind the college trains people to work in nursing, mental health, corrections, law enforcement, and social work. The film certainly addresses issues that are core to these fields. Don't let the nature of the film as a work of art distract you from a clinical consideration of the film. And as for that matter, the film is, if you examine it carefully, directly addressing the concerns you are vocalizing. That is, the problem of decadence in modern society and the effects of that decadence upon culture. Also, please consider that the director/producer of this film is one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, and A Clockwork Orange is often considered to be his best film. When the film first came out it was considered science fiction. Now it seems the film is rather about our current times. A student in the Monday evening class pointed out that many of the problems in the film are not only happening in America, but are in the Ohio Valley as well.

I should remark, too, that the material on broadcast television these days is as challenging as that presented in the film. Moreover, the film seeks to expose and criticize such decadence, while television instead seeks to exploit it. And I think that's a point we should do well to consider.

But as I said, you are of course excused if you do not wish to view it. We will finish with the film around 1:45 Thursday if you wish to join us for discussion. I do hope you will finish the film, however, as I would like you to consider it and contribute your views to the class during discussion having viewed the film in its entirety. Otherwise, please see the notes on the course Web site.

Best,

Carter

This afternoon we finished the film and in the remaining class time discussed the various themes that have bearing upon the course. Some of my class notes can be viewed by clicking here.

Here are some of the discussion points. We will continue to address these next week:

Dystopian Literature and Film
A Clockwork Orange: Dystopia or Satire?
A Clockwork Orange: 1971 and 2011
The Power of the State
Human Nature: Hobbes vs. Locke
The "Human Condition"
The Genealogy of the Totalitarian State/Police State: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany
Hooliganism: Chavs and Neds
Elite, Underclass, Working Class, Middle Class
Recruiting police from the "hooligan" class
Police Powers, the 4th Amendment
Romanticism and Revolution: Napoleon
Beethoven and Rossini
The 60s and 70s--what happened to the Summer of Love, the Flower Children and "Let it all hang out, baby?"
The dark emergence: Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, and Charles Manson.
Good vs. Evil
Choice
Torture
Social Control
Conditioning
DSM-IV: The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and the power of big pharma
The role of education in cultivating and preserving a free and open society

The student visited me after class and recapitulated some of the arguments from the email. Our conversation was amicable and productive. I asked the student to raise some of these questions in class next Tuesday as we continue our analysis of the film.

The Art of Dario Rivarossa

2011-04-14T19:08:00.006-04:00

The forthcoming Emanations anthology will feature illustrations by Tally-Ho, Cornelius! cover artist Kai Robb, as well as illustrations by a new member of International Authors, Dario Rivarossa.

Dario has started a new blog featuring his art, and I would like to invite Highbrow readers to visit and examine his work. Combining elements of surrealism, comic book art and pulp illustration, Dario is a master of creating visionary images combining heroic subjects with subtle and ingenious interpretation. Please click here to visit his blog.

Emanations is in the pre-press production stage, and I am cautiously optimistic that we could see the anthology out by June of this year. Stay tuned for updates.

Vitasta Raina's Writer's Block is Now Available

2011-03-29T17:48:00.011-04:00

On behalf of International Authors, I am happy to announce the publication of Vitasta Raina's novella Writer's Block.

Welcome to Chalet, the city of manicured luxury and western complexity, where India's rise to the promised land of elegant living and boundless consumerism is unchecked, except by the force of the millions living in the slums beyond the barrier walls. Their official fate is oblivion, and yet there is for them an existence of sorts--within the dreams and visions of those who dwell inside the Writer's Block.

Click her to visit the Amazon sales page.

Vitasta Raina is an architect and urban planner in Mumbai, India.

Stay Tuned

2011-03-09T19:07:00.003-05:00

Stay tuned for an announcement concerning a new International Authors publication, a novella by Vitasta Raina.

Diogenes is now available

2011-01-09T17:55:00.012-05:00

International Authors has published my Aristophanic comedy Diogenes.

Many thanks to my friends at International Authors, especially E. L. Riches for her Introduction, L. Sterns Newburg for his keen and acerbic reading ("Yes, it's wonderful, but what is it?"), Dana Sebree for her razor-sharp editing skills, and Vitasta Raina and Kai Robb for their work on the cover.

Click here to view the Amazon description.

Note: Satan and Prometheus

2010-12-27T23:51:00.005-05:00

Milton's Satan is a multi-dimensional and transformative figure, and in order to understand the significance of this Satan we must "connect" with Milton's anthropological concerns, and Milton's related analysis and exercise of mythopoetic language. But before we do that (rather my on-going project), let's have a look at what Shelley has to say about Satan as a "political" model.

The Romantics were interested in Milton's Satan because he resembled a liberal and a rebel, but he remained for them a diabolical figure. In his Preface to Prometheus Unbound Shelley neatly characterizes Milton's Satan, and argues that Prometheus is a more fit exponent for the treatment of the liberal political vision Shelley is seeking to express. I believe Milton would agree. Miton's Satan is an unsuccessful rebel, and Milton shows us why. And of course Milton's hero is the more morally intelligent and more politically capable Son.

From his preface to Prometheus Unbound, Shelley on Satan:

The only imaginary being, resembling in any degree Prometheus, is Satan; and Prometheus is, in my judgment, a more poetical character than Satan, because, in addition to courage, and majesty, and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement, which, in the hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character of Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs, and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling it engenders something worse. But Prometheus is, as it were, the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.

A little lower, Shelley has this to say on Milton:

We owe the great writers of the golden age of our literature to that fervid awakening of the public mind which shook to dust the oldest and most oppressive form of the Christian religion. We owe Milton to the progress and development of the same spirit: the sacred Milton was, let it ever be remembered, a republican and a bold inquirer into morals and religion. The great writers of our own age are, we have reason to suppose, the companions and forerunners of some unimagined change in our social condition or the opinions which cement it. The cloud of mind is discharging its collected lightning, and the equilibrium between institutions and opinions is now restoring or is about to be restored.

Source

Call for Submissions: Emanations

2010-10-24T16:47:00.015-04:00

Emanations
The editors of Emanations seek fiction, poetry, essays, manifestos and reviews. The emphasis is on alternative narrative structures, new epistemologies, peculiar settings, esoteric themes, sharp breaks from reality, ecstatic revelations, and vivid and abundant hallucinations.
The editors are interested in recognizable genres—science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, local color, romance, realism, surrealism, postmodernism--but the idea is to make something new, and along these lines the illusion of something new can be just as important. If a story or poem makes someone say, "Yes, but what is it?" then it's right for Emanations. Essays should be exuberant, daring, and free of pedantry. Length is a consideration in making publication decisions, but in keeping with the spirit of the project contributors should consider length to be “open.”
Our editorial vision is evolving. Contributors should see themselves as actively shaping the "vision" of Emanations.
Send files with brief cover note to Carter Kaplan:
IAsubmissions@hotmail.com

Board of Editorial Advisors
Ruud Antonius
Horace Jeffery Hodges
Dario Rivarossa
Norman Spinrad, blog
Vitasta Raina
Michael Beard
Elkie Riches
Mike Chivers
Carter Kaplan
Kai Robb, 2
Tessa Dick
Michael Moorcock
Joel K. Soiseth
Mack Hassler
Darren R. Partridge

Emanations is a not-for-profit literary project and contributors cannot be compensated at this time. All proceeds from the sale of Emanations will support the efforts of International Authors to publish new voices from around the world.
Published By International Authors

Please post questions, suggestions and ideas. The project is a collaborative effort, and as we share ideas the "vision" transforms, evolves, and grows. When we write stories and poems we hope to bring to bear the entire battery of modern and postmodern literary devices. More simply: we like good, strong writing. Our essays are incisive, precise, keen, challenging, and driven by the writer's desire to advance an intelligent audience's understanding of important subjects.
Intelligent people find themselves set between two fine-tuned extremes: the narcissistic communities made possible by the internet, and the micro-managed "fields" that are driven by an academic culture that forces people into narrowing corridors of specialization. Emanations is an artistic "way out" for intelligent people to create an exuberant, challenging and meaningful culture. We are pursuing a freedom of sorts, bringing liberty to intelligence. Whether this intelligence is human or perhaps something larger remains to be seen, but by looking into our emanations we might find an answer.

Additional Gloss on Book X and Milton's Project

2010-10-19T18:43:00.004-04:00

Apropos to my claims concerning Book X, suffice it to say PL is really good existentialist science fiction, and Milton knows this. The Biblical and the hermetic material in the poem are the carriage but not the tenor. This presupposes that a truly accurate reading--anyway an "Independent" late-Calvinist reading--of the Bible will yield the worldview Milton seeks to exercise and represent. Thus modernism is in essence a Christian philosophical project, sort of an analytic anthropology of shamanism, poetry, religious myth--altogether forming a somewhat acerbic-though-accurate survey of the human condition. As to the Independent English Calvinist foundation: little wonder then at the wrath of the tin pot gods of "postmodernism" and other forms of German mental disease. If we look backwards at Milton trough the lenses of Wittgenstein, Hawthorne, Jefferson and Locke, it seems clear enough. Anyway, that's a potted but essential statement of my critical position.

Book X and the Nature of Paradise Lost

2010-10-03T12:54:00.008-04:00

A recent reading of the tenth book of Paradise Lost has embellished my understanding of the nature of the poem.

Book X as an expression of a distinct mytho-analytic problem: Milton is dilating on lines 842-844:

O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears
And horrors hast thou driv'n me; out of which
I find no way, from deep to deeper plung'd!

His analysis of this theme is necessarily forced through the context of the plot and the terms of the characters and language he has to work with, but the entire book seems to be a response to 842-844.

A "reader" can pursue other avenues, but to do so is to mistake the particular character of the poem, and to go astray--and so generate various het readings, if I may deploy a little Hebrew here.

That is, PL is not an exercise in Biblical exegesis or a celebration of the coarse associations produced by commonplace poetical mechanics, but is rather a sophisticated modern poem bringing to bear the remarkably protean tool of "mythical-epic" language to express a manifold of analytic procedures. It represents modern analyses of modern problems. The Biblical stuff, the story, the characters, the music, the emotional content--all are points of departure, and to some extent the vehicles, but not the destination.

Another way to figure this: The appropriate cover for PL should not be a sharply-drawn realistic illustration by Dore or Durer, but more properly a well-theorized abstraction by Kandinsky or Tanguy printed on thin translucent paper, and which turns over to reveal a closely-controlled dreamscape by Dali--and vice-versa, if you will.

the hand that whirls the water in the pool

2010-09-13T20:54:00.007-04:00

Everglades Photo Journal by Margaret Evans

2010-09-07T16:36:00.004-04:00

Photographer's statement:

The Everglades: Unique, Magical, Mystical. Photographs taken by Margaret Evans October/November 2009. It may take a lifetime to fully appreciate all that the Everglades National Park in southern Florida has to offer. The territory covers 1.4 million acres of water-covered land and is home to more than 300 species of birds in addition to numerous reptiles, invertebrates, mammals and innumerable species of trees and plants. The Park has been designated a World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance. This mosaic of mangroves, cypress swamps, hardwood hammock, and sawgrass wetlands is the only subtropical preserve in North America.

Professor Margaret Evans is a faculty member in the Communication/Journalism Department at Shippensburg University. The photographs in this exhibit were taken during a fall 2009 sabbatical leave project in the Florida Everglades.

Click here for gallery.

Milton's Project

2010-08-31T14:21:00.005-04:00

Milton's project is to take the Independent Calvinist worldview and from it render a secular anthropological and political understanding. This worldview is "modern" in the sense that religion and the power of the church are mitigated (first) by knowledge and scientific skepticism and (second) by constitutional policy that denies magisterial power to churches. Magisterial power is reserved exclusively to the state--this is the substance of Locke's Letter on Toleration and Jefferson's Virginia Act of Religious Freedom. In this particular and others, Milton laid the groundwork for Locke and Jefferson, who carried Milton's project forward, refining the modern worldview by defining and designing institutions--education, balance of powers, property and labor rights, natural rights, the obligations of governments and the duties of citizens, a free press, the fair and equitable distribution of wealth, and so on--that would establish and maintain the processes of an open, free and liberal society.

Jefferson on the Presumption of Uninspired Men

2010-08-30T18:15:00.007-04:00

"The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world, and through all time."

—Thomas Jefferson, The Virginia Act of Religious Freedom

Political Science: 1933 & 34

2010-08-23T22:31:00.023-04:00

Hitler addresses the folk, 1933:

Hitler addresses the party, 1934:

It is important to note the following distinction:

1) The 1933 speech was for public consumption and rolls out the talking points and especial "codes" that lead the party to power.

2) The 1934 speech addresses NAZI Party concerns, which rather comes off as a mix of corporate religion and politics.

While the former speech is of interest to history, the latter is of interest to political science.

It's clear to see in the 1934 speech (and I have seen this described elsewhere) that Hitler set party members against each other to enhance the "strength" and "integrity" of the power structure, as well as to enhance his position at the top.

In regard to Hitler's language, figures of speech and logic in the 1934 party speech: The subtitles either represent a poor translation, or this is indeed the face of ruptured sense and meaningless language, the very mark of totalitarian madness.

Deep Space Triple-Star System Gravity Hole Drama

2010-07-26T11:49:00.006-04:00

Click here for story.

Check 9 o'clock for Fuji!

2010-06-06T22:44:00.002-04:00

From Mod to Chav in Three Generations: Historical Footnote on the Death of the British Working Class

2010-05-12T16:50:00.008-04:00

The traditional British Working Class came to be regarded by their masters as "redundant" for various economic and political reasons: the former role of imperial soldier was taken over by assets of the American Global Police Force, manufacturing was transferred off-shore, and the political obstacle to efficient social and economic management represented by the working class was widely recognized as an interrelated and compound problem. For these reasons (some would also emphasize "aesthetic considerations") an effort was mounted to mitigate and, eventually, remove this sector of the British population. Globalism afforded an opportunity to achieve these ends. A sector of the British working class, the hard-working lower-middle-class clerks (especially the highly-motivated class of self-styled “progressives”) would, as usual, play its functionary role; and popular media, itself enhanced by progress made early in the process by methods of cultural exploitation pioneered by the working class themselves, provided an useable instrument of control. Through Globalism, the means of production was moved to zones of enhanced profitability, and through the apparatus of the welfare system the workers were made dependent upon the state for their support and sustenance. Meanwhile, the entertainment industry provided workers with role models that valorized self-destructive behaviors. The project was successful, and within three generations the mass of the British working classes was weakened to a point where their political clout was thoroughly mitigated. Meanwhile, traditional Liberal forces--middle class traders and professionals—finding themselves discouraged by the behavior and the appearance of the working class, were alienated from it, and the traditional political, cultural and ideological ties which had previously strengthened both classes were cut. Systems of social support were now removed, and the working class, or rather the spectral shadow of the storied British Working Class, was purged.

The Future of the Library

2010-05-09T19:14:00.004-04:00

Interesting report here on a meeting held last week exploring the future of the library:

The Future of Libraries, Books, and Reading: A Twinsburg Library Centennial Presentation

Participants included Prof. Mack Hassler of Kent State University; Liz Murphy, proprietor of The Learned Owl Book Shop in Hudson, Ohio; and Ed Rossman, Adult Services Librarian at Shaker Heights Pubic Library. Mr. Rossman is also the author of Castles Against Ignorance: How to Make Libraries Great Educational Environments. Carrie Baker Dubiel, reference librarian at Twinsburg Library, moderated the event.

Michael Brennan

2010-05-05T22:47:00.003-04:00

New Work

Crawl Out of Your Pupa

2010-04-18T21:02:00.012-04:00

I don't think crying will help

There's nothing good on TV

Rock stars take up your time

Books are good can you read?

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create you own destiny

Love is something we live on

Like flowers rolling in weeds

So drop your play acting

Roaring wind shakes the trees

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create your own destiny

Spend your life in a pupa

A butterfly building its wings

Cicada sings in the oak tree

You were born to float on the breeze

Crawl out of your pupa

But don't come crawling to me

Crawl out of your pupa

Create your own destiny

XB-70 Aesthetics

2010-04-08T13:14:00.008-04:00

I do not know nor

May I ever know

Mach 3 at 70,000 feet

But I approve it

Just the same

As falling in Love

With a good-looking

Blonde who shines

Bright as a Valkyrie

Sent by the gods

To drag the dead away.

"Do you believe in Love

At first sight?"

"Yes," Ringo sang,

"I'm certain

That it happens

All the time."

Art of the Prose Poem: From the Secular Iconography of Inevitable Progress to the Valorization of a Dreadful Absurdity

2010-04-01T21:30:00.010-04:00

"Up, reach up! Higher! Higher! Rise and ascend!" we cried. "Roar forth against the brow of the boundless sky, O bird of silver steel and singing flame!" And, dog-gone-it, up she went!

In those days we were all rocket scientists, our ballistic fleets mere child's play, day after day seducing us, propelling us, thrusting us, exalting us toward an effortless sense of glue-together achievement transcending the mundanity of worldly morality and the neck-breaking burden of the geopolitical albatross!

Bathysphere 2010 - Courageous Men in the Deep Sea

2010-03-30T21:00:00.001-04:00

Bathysphere 2010 - mutige Männer in der Tiefsee from Norbert Brüggen on Vimeo.

Wood Childe of the Vernal Equinox

2010-03-28T12:24:00.004-04:00

The Author Function and the Author's Work

2010-03-25T10:51:00.020-04:00

Various lines from wikipedia outlining Barthes' thoughts on the Death of the Author and Foucault's concept of the Author Function:

In ["The Death of the Author"], Barthes criticizes the method of reading and criticism that relies on aspects of the author's identity — his or her political views, historical context, religion, ethnicity, psychology, or other biographical or personal attributes — to distill meaning from the author's work. In this type of criticism, the experiences and biases of the author serve as a definitive "explanation" of the text. For Barthes, this method of reading may be apparently tidy and convenient but is actually sloppy and flawed:
"To give a text an Author" and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it "is to impose a limit on that text."
In [his essay "The Author Function"], Foucault posits that the legal system was central in the rise of the author, as an author was needed (in order to be punished) for making transgressive statements. This is made evident through the rise of the printing press during the time of the Reformation, when religious texts that circulated challenged the authority of the Catholic Church.
The author function does not affect all texts in the same way. For example, the author of a science text books is not clear or definable as the author of a well known novel. It is not a spontaneous creation or entity, but a carefully constructed social position.

Critics interested in pursuing such matters will be pleased to learn that Tally-Ho, Cornelius! is a good point of departure for an inquiry into the nature of authoriety, the deconstruction of the "author function," and the nature and genealogy of transgressive statements. Indeed, these issues form deliberate themes (and meta-themes) in the novel. Jerry Cornelius, which Mr. Moorcock created as a sort of "share ware" trademark everyman (see the wiki article on JC, here) has been utilized by many authors over the years. This shared control over the character is part of his meaning, which plays upon a range of Continental ontological theories ranging from Rousseau to Foucault, meanwhile bringing to bear an incredulous (some might say "flip") British skepticism that, when it's all mixed together, produces fascinating literary/philosophical effects, as well as some unusual comedy.

What I found rather curious as I composed the novel is that the humor reminded me a lot of the aesthetic I find in Hawthorne and Milton, and I think often the reader can tell (perhaps it seems more obvious to me) that the writer--that is "I"--was evidently deeply impressed when he--"I"--read Paradise Lost and The Scarlet Letter. Significant to me as a reader is how Tally-Ho, Cornelius! brought me into a greater appreciation for Milton's and Hawthorne's humor. Moreover, I think Hawthorne and Milton are more hilarious fellows than most critics are willing to admit. Along these lines, I think this is true also of Gurdjieff--who is a capital joker, though you wouldn't necessarily get this from reading the people who write about Gurdjief, whoever they are.

Succulent Suite (The Astral Plane Song of Karak-kar-ka-krak-sha)

2010-03-21T23:50:00.012-04:00

Through sticky strands of flying tales
My friendships seem to pass,
Where wise old owls and little girls
Are laughing at the past.

Into the sun the flowers turn
Their petals brush the sky,
Honey bees fly into them
If you follow so will I.

A spider spins a web
And seems to go away,
But she remains to hatch her egg
Just watch the shadows sway.

If some song’s seven meanings
Leave much unexplained,
Open your eyes, don’t cheat yourself
What will be will save the day.

About elliptical clouds of ellipsoids
My refractions fly so fast,
Where crooked, aglow the dying woes
Are sailors before the mast.

Through corridors of spinning stars
A looking glass leads the way,

Against the frozen dust of a silent moon
The fires of the sun display.

Large corpuscles sublime appear,
They inflate amongst the mist.
Toward the goal they seem to soar
They lead the Just to bliss.

If you say your name backward
Does it sound the same?
Aleister Crowley has a job for you
On the Astral Plane.

Another Introduction to Analytic Philosophy

2010-03-16T15:58:00.013-04:00

The context is learning about the Talmud, and the humor is dry, perhaps boring for some, but the main thrust of the story says a lot about the essential meaning of Analytic Philosophy:

The Priest meets his friend, the Rabbi, and says to him "You have taught me many things but there is one thing in particular I want to learn very much but you do not wish to teach it to me. I want you to teach me the Talmud."

The Rabbi replied: "You are a Non-Jew and you have the brain of a Non-Jew. There is no chance that you will succeed in understanding the Talmud."

But the Priest continued in his attempt to persuade the Rabbi to teach him the Talmud. Finally, the Rabbi agreed. The Rabbi then said to the Priest: "I agree to teach you the Talmud on condition that you answer one question."

The Priest agreed and asked the Rabbi "What is the Question?"

The Rabbi then said to the Priest: "Two men fall down through the chimney. One comes out dirty and the other comes out clean. Who of those two goes to wash up."
"Very Simple," replied the Priest. "The one who is dirty goes to wash up but the one who is clean does not go to wash up."

The Rabbi then said to the Priest: "I told you that you will not succeed in understanding the Talmud. The exact opposite happened. The clean one looks at the dirty one and thinks that he is also dirty, goes to wash up. The dirty one, on the other hand, looks at the clean one and thinks that he is also clean and, therefore, does not go to wash up."

The Priest then says to the Rabbi: "This I did not think of. Ask me, please, another question."

The Rabbi then says to the Priest: "Two men fall down through the chimney. One comes out dirty and the other comes out clean. Who of these two goes to wash up?"

The Priest then says to the Rabbi: "Very simple. The clean one looks at the dirty one and thinks he is also dirty and goes to wash up. The dirty one, on the other hand, looks at the clean one and thinks that he is also clean and, therefore, does not go to wash up."

The Rabbi then says to the Priest: "You are wrong again. I told you that you will not understand. The clean one looks into the mirror, sees that he is clean and, therefore, does not go to wash up. The dirty one looks into the mirror, sees that he is dirty and goes to wash up."

The Priest complains to the Rabbi "But you did not tell me that there is a mirror there."

The Rabbi then tells the Priest: "I told you. You are a Non-Jew, with your brain you will not succeed in understanding the Talmud. According to the Talmud, you have to think of all the possibilities."

"Alright," groaning, said the Priest to the Rabbi. "Let us try once more. Ask me one more question."

For the last time, said the Rabbi to the Priest. "Two men fall through the chimney. One came out dirty and the other came out clean. Who of these two went to wash up"

"That is very simple!" replied the Priest. "If there is no mirror there the clean one will look at the dirty one and will! think that he is also dirty and will, therefore, go to wash up. The dirty one will look at the clean one and will think that he is also clean, and will, therefore, not go to wash up. If there is a mirror there, the clean one will look into the mirror and will, therefore, not go to wash up. The dirty one will look into the mirror and will see that he is dirty and will, therefore go to wash up."

The Rabbi then says to the Priest: "I told that you will not succeed in understanding. You are a Non-Jew, you have a Non-Jewish Brain. Tell me, how is it possible for two men to fall through a chimney and for one to come out dirty and for the other to come out clean?"

I should also suggest this sort of thing is key to unlocking the humor--and there is a lot of it--we find in the Gospels.

Click here for source.

Salamanda Palaganda

2010-03-13T22:19:00.003-05:00

Yes, but where does this "Donkey Ride" come from?

2010-02-28T20:16:00.018-05:00

The critical reception for my "Donkey Ride" has been positive, thus far. There has been some small confusion regarding the, ahem, "reactionary subtext" of the poem, but acting swiftly and with the aid of an amanuensis, I have put an end to the rumor (perhaps started by an emulator?) that the poem is in any way a squib tossed in the direction of Mr. Arthur Quiller-Couch, or, for that matter, any other fellow traveler. Still--alas, still--while critics are unanimous in their approval, no small controversy has emerged over the question of the fountainhead of my vision. What, they demand, could possibly be the source for this new (that is to say never-before-seen) extrinsic phantasm? "Surely," as one critic fleered, "Mr. Kaplan is not asking us to ponder Wittgenstein, again?" I should retort the origins of that statement are obvious, and I am not, I repeat not going for that bait, again. Ha, ha, ha. Really, my friends, while it is usually incumbent upon the literary artist to smile coquettishly and demure when prodded to reveal the source of his inspiration, I think I should (to confound my nemesis, if nothing else) break the rule this one time and hint, and not without some indication, that the muse which moves my pen in the case of my animal poetry, at least as it concerns six-legged subjects, is in fact Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi.

But wait, a donkey has only four?

Ah, but does it!

An Invitation to Ride a Donkey

2010-02-28T01:24:00.010-05:00

The Donkey Ride

Riding down the dusty trail
The desert smells like bones
The horny toads feed the owls
The black crows laugh and caw

Over the hills your donkey goes
His foot is true and sure
Jumbo jets etch the sky
Time has turned to stone

You think you lost your way
But your donkey is not slow
Bankers and pirates have no claim
‘cause a donkey needs no roads

Across a desert wide and cruel
Across to the other side
Any old donkey will take you there
If you have the guts to try

So ride a donkey if you dare
The good Lord holds it dear
He won't forget the pact you made
When you scratched that donkey's ear

Cyborg Insects and their Mechanical Kin

2010-02-22T21:20:00.003-05:00

Geheimnisse der Deutschen Philosophie Aufgedeckt

2010-02-20T21:25:00.006-05:00

Milton Presents the Fall

2010-02-13T12:58:00.013-05:00

When precisely in Paradise Lost does the "fall" take place? When Adam makes the mental decision to follow Eve's advice? As they actually share the apple? When their transgression is discovered by the angels? When they are expelled from Paradise?

As an overture, the question that first comes to mind is this: does Milton present any contrasting theological positions in Paradise Lost and De Doctrina? That is, is he writing for the same purpose, or does each work address similar subjects but for different purposes?

Similarly, might Milton's gloss on the supralapsarian and sublapsarianism doctrines (does Milton comment on the Synod of Dort?) inform our understanding of where/when the fall took place? Or, like Calvin, does he simply set forth the doctrine and then retreat from elaboration. Calvin is moving on for his own purposes, while Milton—or so it would seem—is using the question as a point of departure to display his learning, spin myth, and crack jokes to delight his fellow travelers?

The poem's initial descriptions of humanity's fall are not humorous, however. Consider Milton's descriptions of the universe going through various contortions.

When Eve plucks the apple from the tree:

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat

Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,

That all was lost. (PL 9.782)

As Adam eats the apple:

Earth trembl'd from her entrails, as again

In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan,

Skie lowr'd, and muttering Thunder, som sad drops

Wept at compleating of the mortal Sin

Original; (PL 9.1000)

It is important to consider that in Paradise Lost it is not the contemplation of transgression that precipitates the fall, but the actual act of transgression itself. As evidence, consider Eve’s dreaming of disobedience in Book V. As Adam advises her, sinful thoughts are not themselves sinful unless they are “approved;” that is, acted upon. Too contemplate sin is not to sin.

Evil into the mind of God or Man 

May come and go, so unapprov’d, and leave

No spot or blame behind: (PL 5.117)

So it would seem the specific act of eating the apple precipitates the fall.

Though the specific act of eating the apple precipitates the fall, the nature of that fall is rather curious. The conclusion of Book IX shows us that the "fall" is characterized by, first, enthusiastic love-making, and then, second, by an absurd domestic squabble, in which Adam and Eve blame each other for the transgression. Indeed, Milton's comedic hand is quite plainly evident at the end of Book IX: The "Fall" is an archetypical domestic argument between husband and wife. What is even more absurd is that in this case they are arguing over who is to blame for the Fall of Humanity. The passage is a delightful drawing-room farce, pure drollery.

Though, indeed, is there any state more "fallen" than a knock-down quarrel between a husband and wife?

How to Write a Proposal Letter

2010-02-07T12:17:00.017-05:00

Chip:

All this exciting talk of business conferences and leadership seminars has me thinking about the vast motivation conference industry. Why shouldn’t our own organization, Kaplan and Martindale, Inc. try its hand in this field?

What I propose is a series of conferences called “From Schlemiel to Schtoonk: Action Power Seminars.” We’ll put our clients on a track that will correspond to how many times they attend our meetings, for which we'll charge a nominal admission fee of $579 dollars. In order to enhance a sense of progress and success, our clients will receive certificates that recognize their progress as they move up from “ Schlemiel to Schtoonk.” Here are descriptions of the success levels:

Level One: Schlemiel.

The Schlemiel is the real bedrock of corporate organization. He or she is in a unique situation to grapple with entrepreneurial opportunities where the rubber really meets the road, where, in fact, the Schlemiel often gets run over. Certificate fee: $25 dollars.

Level Two: Schmuck.

What can I say? The Schmuck is probably the most recognized face in the business world today, and the occasion of clients receiving their Schmuck Certificate always creates great excitement at the seminars, where becoming a Schmuck is followed by heavy drinking. Certificate fee: $75 dollars

Level Three: Lucky Schmuck.

A real milestone. The Lucky Schmuck is recognized for his mastery of the art of getting paid for doing nothing. And who says doing nothing is without value? It beats working! And, anyway, not having something to do is of little concern to the Lucky Schmuck, because he doesn’t want to do anything meaningful in the first place. Certificate fee: $178 dollars.

Level Four: Lt. Schmendrick.

Our Lt. Schmendricks are real go-getters. You can recognize them by their chiseled features, beady eyes, and that radiant aura of keen entrepreneurial ability that says, “I’m ready to kick my fellow Schmendricks down stairs!” Certificate Fee: $237 dollars.

Level Five: Full Schmendrick.

Very few conference clients ever make it to full Schmendrick, and I’m going to tell you why. First, the requirements to become a Full Schmendrick are very difficult to achieve. Characteristics such as good grooming and meticulous personal hygiene, finely chiseled facial features, and the ability to speak to large numbers of people and successfully deceive them are rarely found altogether in a single individual. Indeed, it’s rare to find these qualities in twenty Lt. Schmendricks combined. Also, the Full Schmendrick must possess the ability to make things happen around him without people’s knowledge. This is not to say that our Full Schmendrick is a Machiavel, but it is perhaps indicative that our Full Schmendrick is most often found working in black budget government intelligence departments, or in the motivational speaking industry. Also, the certificate for this level is quite expensive, and anybody willing to pay for it has got to be a Schlemiel! Certificate Fee: $925 dollars.

Level Six: Schtoonk.

Our highest distinction. Everybody hates the Schtoonk, talks behind his back, envies him, but at the same time obeys him without question, flatters him to his face, and secretly wishes he could become a Schtoonk himself. Really, to be a Schtoonk is the Walter Mitty dream of all our clients. Schtoonks are very wealthy, and they are welcome to attend our seminars free of charge. Actually, people who pay for our meetings are forever disqualified from obtaining the level of Schtoonk, but only you and I are privy to this information.

It's a great opportunity, Chip, and I suggest we move on it pronto!

Talk to you soon,

Carter

Surreal Arrangements

2010-01-21T10:54:00.008-05:00

From André Breton’s novel Nadja:

As far as I am concerned, a mind's arrangement with regard to certain objects is even more important than its regard for certain arrangements of objects, these two kinds of arrangement controlling all forms of sensibility.

Much can be made of considering the mind and the objects of perception as various forms of "arrangement" existing in a frozen space sub specie aeternitatis, and for aesthetic and political reasons this sensibility is preferable to the historically-framed mechanism embraced, say, by the people who follow Hegel.

It is perhaps these people that Breton addresses in The Crisis of the Object as he writes, "The pursuit of experience is important above all: reason will always follow, its phosphorescent blindfold over its eyes." With these words Breton isn't dismissing the place of reason in the skeptical-empirical method that drives our modern science, but instead is drawing our attention to the deceptive tripartite devil’s tool of coarse imagination, habitual language and political custom that ignites everything that contacts its glinting prongs.

"Autobahn" by Kraftwerk

2010-01-17T18:57:00.009-05:00

2001: Forty Years Later

2010-01-14T22:41:00.005-05:00

Joe Bisden has written an astonishing study of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

2001: A False Flag Odyssey

Area 51: Secrets Revealed

2009-12-27T13:37:00.004-05:00

Click here for detailed declassified information concerning this unique chapter from the annals of arcane Americana.

Remembering Monster Magnet

2009-12-24T12:48:00.015-05:00

Was I six, or was I seven?

On the screen in black and white

Though I foresaw it were red

The Wham-O Monster Magnet

Furious, magnetic power-infused

Through red rippling arms

Very like a genii with a hoop in his ear

But mad mad mad mad

Mad monster mad!

I could hang from the ceiling

If it was steel

Lift tremendous loads

My distended mouth locked in mid-scream

Forever and forever and forever

Even pick up an atom bomb

And launch it across the Midwest

As Golden Achilles in form

Headsman-grim and lion-set

Watches the course of his spear

Arc over the beach and dwindle

Against the darkling skies of Troy

Then turns to face foaming Poseidon

Amidst crabs crouching the shingle

The heavy horseshoe of the magnet

Heavy held at the hero's side

In subtle warning to the sea

Full faces the god, softly, proud

The wind throws back his mane

He dares in pleasant conversation

To speak of the Superball!

" . . . ready-made souls in plastic bags, negligible generalities . . ."

2009-12-22T12:09:00.003-05:00

Vladimir Nabokov in conversation with Lionel Trilling.

From the National Archives

2009-12-15T23:04:00.011-05:00

What makes the United States of America original in the history of statecraft is that rather than notions of nationality, ethnicity, religious identification, geography, or even history, it is a country founded upon philosophical principles derived from observations of the natural world. Whether one agrees or disagrees with the substance of the original American political charters, the effort to base a nation-state on close, reasoned argumentation represents a uniquely interesting subject of study.

Click here to review the Founding Documets.

McNamara's Stepchildren: the New Hessians?

2009-12-10T13:58:00.013-05:00

It is an intriguing thing to consider: does the highbrow community have anything to contribute to the understanding of warcraft, and could our contribution actually help to mitigate the tendency of Homo sapiens to engage in war?

As a point of departure, consider the following from Ralph Peters:

Wishful Thinking and Indecisive Wars

It is important to consider that American military has always fought "by the rules." When individual officers have decided to do things on their own things have usually gotten out of hand. Take, for example, Patton and MacArthur who were advocates of strict adherence to established policy. They recognized their role was to carry out national policy as established by the civilian leadership. With an appropriate sense of self-righteousness they believed they were fighting in the cause of liberal democracy, and that in their professional role they were the direct heirs to--indeed, the defenders of--the political legacy handed down by the American founders.

At the same time, Patton was on several occasions embarrassed for stepping out of line. And MacArthur was fired for exceeding his authority. Notwithstanding whether MacArthur was "right" in terms of policy, he was wrong in terms of his professional obligations, and Truman very properly relived him of command.

Nevertheless, we flatter ourselves that there is a cultural distinction between, on one side, Patton and MacArthur, and, on the other, their German and Japanese counterparts. As the story goes, our flexibility in theatre allowed us to out-maneuver the Japanese and Germans, who were hampered by their "by-the-book" mentality.

Consider the reflections of the following Japanese and German officers. First, a Japanese destroyer commander in the Pacific:

It was clear that Hatta’s confusion was shared by many of his shipmates, so I replied, “That is a very good question. I will try to answer it. If our ship is stricken you are to abandon her immediately, without any qualms. This may seem contrary to what you have been taught in the past, but I will explain.

“We have reached a point of great adversity in this war. The material strength of the enemy is tremendous. But more crucial is our lack of skilled personnel, because of our many losses in battle. It takes five years to train an officer, so they cannot be replaced quickly. This ship may sink but there will be many more. Many fine Japanese sailors have died because they were too willing to give up their lives. If we are to win this war we must be tenacious.

“In feudal times, lives were wasted cheaply, but we are in the 20th century. The code of Bushido (the way of the samurai) says that a warrior lives in such a way that he is always prepared to die.

"Nothing has been so abused and misinterpreted as this adage. It does not mean that a warrior must commit suicide for some slight reason. It means that we live so that we shall have no regrets when we must die. Death may come to a man at any moment, no matter how he lives. We must not forfeit our lives meaninglessly.

“Bushido does call for atonement by suicide in case of gross negligence, and we can commit suicide at any time. But we are going on this mission not to commit suicide but to win, and turn the tide of war. We are to win this war and not think of dying. Does that answer your question, Hatta?”

“Yes, sir, it does,” he shouted. “And I share your views entirely. Thank you very much.” And he saluted.

Tameichi Hara, Japanese Destroyer Captain, Ballantine, pg 285

A German pilot on the Russian front:

He tells me that today all formations have clearly mapped low level approach routes. In the East we have long since ceased to develop practice from theory; we do just the opposite. One can do no more than give the formation leader his assignment; how he performs it is his affair, for it is he who has to carry it out. At the present time the war in the air has become so variable that one can no longer rely on theories; only formation leaders have the necessary experience at the critical moment and are likely to make the proper decisions. It was a good thing that we realised this in the East in time, otherwise it is a sure thing that none of us would be flying any more. Besides, have they not grasped the fact that we are helpless against the enemies mass of men and material?

Hans Ulrich Rudel, Stuka Pilot, Ballantine, 1958, pg. 186

In Going Downtown fighter-bomber commander Colonel Jack Broughton compares 1946 and 1966, and complains of a negative shift in military command culture, specifically the latitude afforded to commanding officers in theatre, which was sharply circumscribed by the Johnson/McNamara micromanagement system. Notwithstanding the question of Broughton's actions in the Turkestan Incident, don't we have to take this shift into consideration, and, if Broughton is correct in his criticisms, take into consideration the effect of this shift upon policy?

As in the armed forces, so in medicine and education: under the postmodern corporate-micromanagement system, the authority of the old time family doctor is a thing of the past. Similarly, it is true today in higher education that the professional liberty and latitude (and status) once enjoyed by professors has been "trimmed" by a comparatively lock-step ethos. In today's corporate education system, today's professors are, so to speak, "the new Hessians." Make of that what you will.

Finally, note how the lock-step attitude contributed to the recent tragedy at Fort Hood, Texas. Consider all the red flags, consider nobody did anything definitive to stop that problem--how did this happen? In this instance the officers ignored the evidence of their own eyes and bowed down to PC policy like Medieval Japanese, and without question did what they were told to do. Soldiers needlessly died as the result. I doubt this would--I doubt this could--have happened in my dad's Army.

Further insight might be had looking into the Shame-Culture/Guilt-Culture dichotomy.

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T18:46:00.007-05:00

"Pilgrim Overboard" by Mike Haywood

Francis Bacon: Abstract Necessities and the Four Idols

2009-10-25T11:17:00.007-04:00

Francis Bacon observed that human beings have a tendency to draw the separate facts, particulars, and events of experience into abstract necessities, general laws, and "natural" mechanisms. According to Bacon in Aphorism 45 from Book I of the New Organum:
The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected.Hence too the element of fire with its orb is brought in, to make up the square with the other three which the sense perceives.Hence also the ratio of density of the so-called elements is arbitrarily fixed at ten to one.And so on of other dreams.And these fancies affect not dogmas only, but simple notions also. (50)
In Aphorisms 39 through 44 of The New Organon, Bacon defines four classes of "idols" which he says "beset men's minds."These four distinctions Bacon calls, first, Idols of the Tribe; second, Idols of the Cave; third, Idols of the Marketplace; fourth, Idols of the Theater.
The Idols of the Tribe, says Bacon, "have their foundation in human nature itself . . . [H]uman understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it." Our understanding is distorted by our own animal nature.
The Idols of the Cave "are the idols of the individual man . . . [M]en look for sciences in their own lesser worlds [--according to their personal nature, the books they read, their education, the friendship and authority of those whom they esteem and admire--] and not in the greater or common world." Our understanding is distorted by our upbringing, through the association of our families and close friends.
The Idols of the Market are "formed by the intercourse and association of men with each other."Because of this association, language is often distorted "according to the apprehension of the vulgar.And therefore the ill and unfit choice of words wonderfully obstructs the understanding."Learned men are often in error in their definitions and explanations because "words plainly force and overrule the understanding, and throw all into confusion, and lead men away into numberless empty controversies and idle fancies." Our understanding is distorted by where we work and who we work with.
The Idols of the Theatre are "various dogmas of philosophies, and also the wrong laws of demonstration."These various dogmas are "entire systems . . . principles and axioms in science, which by tradition, credulity, and negligence have come to be received."The demonstrations and proofs for these systems are like "so many stage plays, representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion."  Our understanding is distorted by the language and orientations of various schools, academies, the sciences and the professions.
Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. New York: Liberal Arts Press. 1960. (47-50).

The Uses of Influence

2009-10-17T12:29:00.016-04:00

Is "influence" of a direct kind from the work of an admired writer a good or bad thing? Something to embrace or avoid?

With all the usual qualifications, it is a good thing, to be sure. Michael Moorcock has suggested that as an exercise writers should compose an entire novel based on the style of another author; I think Moorcock had Joseph Conrad in mind when he made this suggestion. While I wouldn't go so far as to copy a style in this way--I am happy enough playing with my own voice--the suggestion can lead to some interesting places.

Tally-Ho, Cornelius! might fit in this category of exercise, although the major "influence" I am working with in this novel isn't actually Moorcock, whose Jerry Cornelius and Second Ether provided much inspiration, as well as patterns that I could "invert" (itself a technique to be found in the JC material).

Considering the feel, the sensibility and the politics of Tally-Ho, Cornelius!, I trace the most significant influence to Nathaniel Hawthorne, who I would assert is our greatest American author, for the depth and breadth of his perspective, the sureness of his scholarship, and also for the way, amongst all of my country's authors, he brings together aspirations, theology and a political understanding that can be uniquely styled "American." He is the American Homer, Aeschylus and Aristophanes rolled into one.

Harold Bloom has written a book on the subject of influence. Although I often disagree with Bloom in the details, on the large scale his ideas are always interesting and serve as good points of departure for rewarding speculation.

Here's the Wiki article on his thesis:

The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (ISBN 0-19-511221-0) is a book by Harold Bloom, published in 1973. It was the first in a series of books that advanced a new "revisionary" or antithetical^[1] approach to literary criticism.
Bloom's central thesis is that poets are hindered in their creative process by the ambiguous relationship they necessarily maintained with precursor poets. While admitting the influence of extraliterary experience on every poet, he argues that "the poet in a poet" is inspired to write by reading another poet's poetry and will tend to produce work that is derivative of existing poetry, and, therefore, weak. Because a poet must forge an original poetic vision in order to guarantee his survival into posterity (i.e., to guarantee that future readers will not allow him to be forgotten), the influence of precursor poets inspires a sense of anxiety in living poets.
Thus Bloom attempts to work out the process by which the small minority of 'strong' poets manage to create original work in spite of the pressure of influence. Such an agon, he asserts, depends on six revisionary ratios^[2], which reflect Freudian defense mechanisms and the tropes of classical rhetoric. Later books, especially Kabbalah and Criticism and A Map of Misreading connect each ratio to the Kabbalah.
Prior to writing this book, Bloom spent a decade studying the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. This is reflected in the emphasis given to those poets and their struggle with the influence of John Milton. Other poets analyzed range from Lucretius and Dante to Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and John Ashbery.
In The Anxiety of Influence and other early books, Bloom claimed that influence was particularly important for post-enlightenment poets. Conversely, he suggested that influence was not as much of a problem for such poets as Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. He since has changed his mind, and the most recent editions of The Anxiety of Influence include a preface claiming that Shakespeare was troubled early in his career by the influence of Christopher Marlowe.
The book itself is divided into six major categories, called "six revisionary ratios" by Bloom. They are: clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonization, askesis, and apophrades.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anxiety_of_Influence

Click here to purchase Tally-Ho, Cornelius!

The Ice Diaries by William R. Anderson

2009-09-26T17:54:00.004-04:00

I just finished The Ice Diaries by William R. Anderson. This book goes into much greater detail than his earlier Nautilus 90 North in describing the adventures of submarine Nautilus diving under the ice to traverse the Arctic Ocean at the height of the Cold War, a voyage that required three attempts and proved to the world the U.S. Navy could pass at will between the Pacific and Atlantic along the exposed northern frontier of the Soviet Union, thus re-establishing American technical superiority in the wake of Sputnik. The politics of the Navy and the submarine service are reflected in the nature of undersea operations. For the submarine officer, a career is like a chess game, or like the discreet nature of undersea work itself. Transcending the sophisticated technical problems they are continually solving, submariners are involved in on-going and diverse analyses based upon the thinest of evidence and facts, for which they demonstrate a remarkable proficiency; a true form of art in its way.

Something/Anything?

2009-08-30T16:21:00.008-04:00

Here are a few approaches to consider while composing narratives:

- Compression/compressed narrative: Summarize a novel's worth of events in 2000 words. A 250 word story....

- Inversion: Make good guys into bad guys, invert moral or social codes, etc. If you are a Democrat, write a story about a jolly hunting trip with Sarah Palin. If you are a Republican, write a story that passionately advocates socialized medicine.... Satirical or not, it will be amusing.... Alternative history or current events....

- Substitution: Substitute fire trucks for tidally-winks, circuit chips for Bibles, what have you.

- Lists: Longs lists of funny words to produce satirical effects, or to wind the reader through landscapes of sense data stimulus. Could a grocery list serve as a plot outline? Why not?

- Telephone directories: See lists

- Catalogs: Write stories about pictures, consumer themes; if those pictures could talk, what would they say?

- Criticism: Novel as critical commentary, a la Pale Fire. Using the voice of a critic to tell a story....

- Pedantic voice, pedantic forms: see above.

- Instruction manual or handbook: Could a pilot's checklist be adapted as a plot line?

- Advertisements: TV, newspapers, radio....

- Pulp action/adventure/sci-fi: "elevate" a traditional generic form to "literary" status through over-burdened cleverness, big words, and satirical intentions. Not necessarily parody, but parody is OK too of course.

- Hypochondria/obsessive-compulsion: a sort of craven fixation upon plot elements, imagery, or the representation of emotional states: example, a lurid description of a soldier cleaning his rifle, or an oral surgeon hammering away at impacted wisdom teeth....

- Hysteria: hyperbolic description, emotions run amok, purple prose, etc.

- Mock Epic: See Alexander Pope "Rape of the Lock."

- Cut-Up and Fold-In Technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique

The Tao of the Tractatus

2009-08-22T00:44:00.007-04:00

From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it).

He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.

From The Tao of Jeet Kune Do by Bruce Lee:

Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one's back.

A Few Notes on Analytic Philosophy

2009-08-18T12:52:00.013-04:00

British Philosophy

It is often maintained by historians of philosophy that England has had only one school of philosophy, or rather, that it has had none at all, for its philosophy is a perpetual protest against Scholasticism. A faith in experimental science, based upon empirical evidence of the senses, and a complementary distrust of scholastic and rationalistic a priori speculation, may be said to form the cornerstone of the English philosophical tradition. Although Swift developed no systematic philosophy--this absence, too, seems to be characteristic of the tentative and experimental English mind--a peculiarly English and to some degree Lockeian nexus of assumptions underlies one major area of his satiric technique.

Rejection of Mechanism in Nature

[Jonathan Swift strikes] at the affectation of those who, by formula and artifice, impose some rigid subjective perception upon the world and then pay honor to this graven image as truth and to themselves as its discoverers. The folly of man's refusal to see things as they really are is thus consistently translated by Swift into symbolic representations of man as a mechanism. Inflexible, blinded to external truth by his own conceit, contentious in his assumption of the infallibility of his subjective responses, man becomes a puppet in life's Punch-and-Judy show of artifice, system and self-delusion.

Source: Bullitt, John M. Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1953. (124).

Emphasis on the Particular

William Blake argued for the perception of reality as a disparate aggregate, for a reality consisting of "minute particulars" which expressed the distinction and individuality of all things. Blake rejected the neoclassical attempt or practice to get at the essence or first principles of things by homogenizing or otherwise discarding the details. According to Blake, it was these details which comprise the windows into perception. "General Forms have their vitality in Particulars" (Jerusalem 91:30). "Sacrifice the Parts, What becomes of the Whole?" (462). "Minute Discrimination is Not Accidental. All Sublimity is founded on Minute Discrimination" (453). "What is General Nature? Is there such a Thing: Strictly speaking, All knowledge is Particular" (459).

Source: Blake, William. The Complete Writings of William Blake. Keynes, Geoffrey, ed. New York: Random House, 1957.

Rejection of Inevitable Necessity

The idea that man is an unconscious victim of external forces, or internal necessities, is one of the greatest intellectual orthodoxies of our time. Ever since the waning of traditional religions, men have been convincing themselves of one inevitable necessity after another, until the point has been reached where some of them have actually started to become operative in detail. Whether or not this desire to discover some omnipotent external force signifies an intellectual rage for order and understanding or rather a deep psychological drive to identify with a superhuman force and avoid responsibility is open to question: but its existence is beyond dispute. It can be seen in the Marxist appeal to inevitable laws of history, in the Freudian appeal to basic drives of the libido and most recently in the appeal to underlying forces of technology by Galbraith and McLuhan.

Jencks, Charles. Architecture 2000: Predictions and Methods. New York: Praeger. 1971. (20).

Analysis of Intellectual Mythology

In the days of the Enlightenment, science was rightly seen as being in the forefront of the struggle against religious mystification, superstition and dogma. Today science has replaced religion as the source and authority of truth. Every source of truth must, in the nature of things, also be a source of falsehoods, against which it must itself struggle. But it may also be a source of intellectual mythology, against which it is typically powerless. One great and barely recognized source of such mythology in our age is science itself. The unmasking of scientific mythology (which is to be distinguished from scientific error) is one of the tasks of philosophy. For philosophy is not the under-labourer of the sciences, but rather their tribunal; it adjudicates not the truth of scientific theorizing, but the sense of scientific propositions. Its aim is neither to engage in nor abjure science, but to restrain it within the bounds of sense, to curb the metaphysical impulse that is released by misinterpretations of the significance of scientific discoveries, to restrain scientists and philosophers (who have been beguiled by their myth-making) from metaphysical nonsense.

P. M. S. Hacker. Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. 1996. (123).

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN (1889-1951)

Wittgenstein's Early Thought: The Tractatus

Although the Tractatus conceived of logic as nonsense, or the metaphysical ends of logic as being beyond sense, it shared logic's desire to employ depth analysis to reveal the hidden essence of things. The Tractatus was "possessed by a vision of the crystalline purity of the logical forms of thought, language and the world," and strove for a sublime, unifying form of philosophical insight and procedure.

According to Wittgenstein's early thought, metaphysical contraptions do exist, but language cannot describe them. Metaphysics lies beyond the limits of language. Metaphysics cannot be described, but we know that something is "out there." Thus, according to the most quoted slogan from the Tractatus: "7. What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."

Wittgenstein's Later Thought: Philosophical Investigations

The Investigations presents a diametrically contrasting philosophical view.

The Investigations strove for a "'quiet weighing of linguistic facts' (Zettel §447) in order to distangle the knots in our understanding . . . [through a] heightened awareness of the motley of spatial and temporal phenomena of language (PI §108), [and] the deceptive forms which lead us into conceptual confusion."[1] In the Investigations Wittgenstein strove for "no more than the description and arrangement of what is simple and familiar, 'hidden' only because it was always before one's eye and goes unnoticed" (PI §129). In these respects, Wittgenstein is remarkably suggestive of the philosophical stance Poe assumes in his mystery stories.

A key difference between Wittgenstein's early and later thought concerns the expressibility of metaphysical propositions. According to the most quoted slogan from the Tractatus: "7. What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence." In contrast to this, Wittgenstein's later thought rejects the notion of the inexpressible entirely. If it cannot be expressed, then it does not exist. Indeed, there is nothing that language cannot express. "For there is nothing that cannot be said, and there is nothing beyond the bounds of sense save nonsense."[2] Metaphysics is nonsense.

In the Investigations Wittgenstein broke free from the vision of a single, unifying form of philosophical insight and procedure, and replaced it with a method in thinking that moved upon many levels and was aware of the "prodigious multiplicity, diversity and inexhaustible richness of things, and . . . describe[d] the nature of a vast variety of phenomena for what they are in themselves, without seeking to fit them into one, all embracing unitary vision." [3] Although expressing a rejection of metaphysics and idealism, the Tractatus pursued the same illusion of a unified theory (or underlying metaphysics) of logic. In the Investigations, however, Wittgenstein came to reject deep logic because it is an act of superstition to pursue "a final analysis of our forms of language, and so a single completely resolved form of expression. That is, as if our usual forms of expression were, essentially, unanalysed; as if there were something hidden in them that had to be brought to light" (PI §91).

In Wittgenstein's later thought, philosophy is not, as the logical positivists believed, a science. Philosophy "neither explains or deduces anything" (PI §128), but "leaves everything as it is" (PI§124). Philosophy does not contribute "to human knowledge, but to human understanding."[4] As for philosophical problems, they are simply misunderstandings caused by conceptual confusion. Once these misconceptions are understood, philosophical problems are revealed to be nonsense, but not "beyond sense" or metaphysical--as Wittgenstein had conceived them to be in the Tractatus. Philosophical theories are latent, concealed nonsense; the task of philosophy is to transform them into patent nonsense (PI §524). In the Investigations Wittgenstein introduced a new analysis based on descriptions of the way we use expressions. This descriptive analysis is synoptic in the way context operates as a determining factor in our understanding of the meaning of an expression.[5]

Appropriate Response to Phenomena: Empirical Explanation vs. Understanding

Wittgenstein was unsatisfied with Frazer's reading and conclusions regarding Frazer's own anthropological findings. Wittgenstein asserted that the human rituals Frazer cataloged went beyond the simple expedient of an empirical explanation, and that, indeed, understanding Frazer's discoveries does not require an empirical explanation. Frank Cioffi describes this in Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer: "Whatever relevance empirical method may have to the question of the nature and origin of ritual practices . . . is not the central question which Frazer raises and is not, in any case, the question which arises for us when we contemplate human sacrifice and the ritual life of mankind."[6] Wittgenstein voices the same objection to psychoanalytic explanation. Again, according to Cioffi, "Freud advances explanations when the matters he deals with demand clarification, that is, they call for an elucidation of the relation in which we stand to the phenomena rather than an explanation of them."[7] Again, as to aesthetics, "causal hypotheses are conceptually inappropriate responses to requests for the explanation of aesthetic experiences and . . . they are not what we really want."[8]

Melville also makes this distinction in Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick, Melville is rejecting scientific, philosophical and religious explanations in favor of what he really wants, which is a kind of self-understanding, or an understanding of how he stands relation to scientific, religious and philosophical phenomena.[9]

Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy

"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (PI §109).

"Our motto might be: 'Let us not be bewitched'" (Z §690).

"What is your aim in philosophy--to shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle."

"The treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness" (PI §255).

It was one of Wittgenstein's aims to make philosophical inquiry into a therapy and, through an examination of language, purge philosophy of those questions which were based upon illusory concepts, i.e. concepts which were parented by a misapprehension of grammar rather than the facts of nature. Wittgenstein was put on this track by Hertz and his grappling with the terms "force" and "electricity." Hertz writes:

Our confused wish finds expression in the confused question as to the nature of force and electricity. But the answer which we want is not really an answer to this question. It is not by finding out more and fresh relations and connections that it can be answered; but by removing the contradictions existing between those already known, and thus perhaps by reducing their number. When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.[11]

Philosophical theories are latent, concealed nonsense; the task of philosophy is to transform them into patent nonsense (PI §524).[12]

Therapy for Philosophers

Wittgenstein's technique of philosophical clarification is therapeutic in that it involves a rearrangement of familiar and unfamiliar contexts for the use of expressions that will make the grammar of the relevant expressions surveyable (PI §92, §225)[13]

Decide which of the following propositions provides the most accurate description of reality:

a) My mind is hungry for a big lunch.

b) My brain is hungry for a big lunch.

c) My body--my stomach--is hungry for a big lunch.

d) I am hungry for a big lunch.

The correct answer is d. The other statements are nonsense. Minds do not exist; brains are only to be found in medical textbooks, or on the tables of surgeons and gourmands; and bodies are only to be found at the morgue, at the beach, in the pages of muscle magazines, or in Newton's descriptions of objects possessing mass.[14]

It is not an easy thing to give up one's mind. If this concept is still difficult, you need more therapy. Consider the following propositions:

a) My mind is thinking about Plato.

b) My brain is thinking about Plato.

c) I am thinking about Plato.

d) You would do well to keep Plato in mind for the exam.

e) An Idea just crossed my mind.

f) The idea went in my right ear and out my left, crossing my mind along the way.

g) Some bees dance.

h) Some bees exist.

i) The dinosaurs no longer exist.

j) On my day off I am going to sit in the park and exist.

Propositions c, d, e, g and i are valid. The rest are nonsense. They exhibit conceptual confusion rooted in the misapprehension of language.[15]

The Synoptic Surview

"The pedigree of psychological concepts: I strive not after exactness, but after a synoptic view." (Z §464).

A technique for arriving at a perspicuous, synoptic surview of our critical problems:

The term "critical synoptics" can be used to refer to a number of analytical activities. For critics, critical synoptics refers to the examination of the influences of context, scenario and lexical/syntactical precision upon the meanings of propositions and concepts. The idea is to construct a synoptic overview of a concept or proposition. Any variety of techniques might be applied toward this end. In memorable terms, the basic idea of synoptic analysis is to tell stories about the ways propositions and concepts are used and understood. Such an overview provides a test for determining whether or not the proposition is valid. Once an appreciation for the synoptic overview is part and parcel of the critic's technique, any variety of concepts might be analyzed. The point of the following questions is to realize a synoptic overview:

I. How is the concept used? The use of the word, phrase, or proposition determines its meaning.

II. How is the concept used and understood in other scenarios? What is the accustomed practice of its use? The meaning of a word, phrase, or proposition is determined by what is explained by an explanation of its meaning, or an explanation of the rules for its use. (How does the concept reflect the discourse community that gives it rise?).

III. How is the concept understood? The way the word, phrase, or proposition is understood is its meaning.[16]

IV. What does the concept mean in simplified terms? How would the use of the word, phrase, or proposition be taught to a child?

V. What are the implications of the concept? What kind of world must be necessary in order for the use of the word, phrase, or proposition to be correct or legitimate?

VI. Are abstract nouns used in the formulation of the concept? Abstract nouns often have no validity outside of (and thus also within) the proposition in which they are used.

VII. Does the concept represent an empirical explanation of a phenomenon, or does it advance understanding of a phenomenon? Does the concept represent what we really want to know about a phenomenon?

Consider the following as synoptic overviews of various philosophical problems:

"Perhaps the most important thing in connection aesthetics is what might be called aesthetic reactions, e.g. discontent, disgust, discomfort. The expression of discontent is not the same as the expression of discomfort. The expression of discomfort says: 'Make it higher . . . too low! . . . Do something to this.'"

"What makes bright colors bright? Does it reside in the concept or in cause and effect? There is no luminous gray. Is this inherent in the concept of gray or is it part of the psychology, that is, of the natural history of gray, and isn't it strange that I don't know this?"

"What is called an alteration in concepts is of course not merely an alteration in what one says, but in what one does."

"Duration of sensation. Compare the duration of a sense-experience of sound with the duration of he sensation of touch which informs you that you have a ball in your hand; and with the "feeling" that informs you that your knees are bent" (Z §478).

""It is quite possible that he glands of a sad person secrete differently from those of someone who is glad; and also that their secretion is the cause of sadness. But does it follow that the sadness is a sensation produced by the secretion?" (Z §509).

"We should hardly ask if a crocodile means something when it comes at a man with open jaws. And we should declare that since the crocodile cannot think there is really no question of meaning here" (Z §522).

"What is the difference between these two things: Following a line involuntarily--Following a line intentionally?

"What is the difference between these two things: Tracing a line with care and great attention--Attentively observing how my hand follows a line?" (Z §583).

"The limitlessness of the visual field is clearest when we are seeing nothing in complete darkness" (Z §616).

"I should like to ask, not so much 'What must we do to avoid contradiction?' as 'What ought we to do if we have arrived at a contradiction?'" (Z §688).

"To understand sums in the elementary school the children would have to be important philosophers; failing that, they need practice" (Z §703).

a) First phase: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ("The Tractatus")

b) Middle/transitional Phase: The Blue and Brown Books

c) Foundations of mathematics

d) Notes on Frazier, Freud, and Aesthetics (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief).

e) Second phase: Philosophical Investigations, On Certainty.

[1] P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place in Twentieth-century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)., 98. The abbreviations "Z" and "PI" refer, respectively, to Wittgenstein's Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967) and Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).

[2] Ibid., 111.

[3] Ibid., 98-99.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics: Menippean Satire and the Analysis of Intellectual Mythology (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000) 27-29.

[6] Frank Cioffi, Wittgenstein on Freud and Frazer, (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), 2.

[7] Ibid., 3.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics, 117.

[10] P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place...110, quoted in Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics 28.

[11] Quoted in P. M. S. Hacker, Insight and Illusion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 21.

[12] Carter Kaplan, Critical Synoptics (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson) 28.

[13] Ibid., 28-29.

[14] Ibid., 14.

[15] Ibid., 203.

[16] P. M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein's Place, 125. Press, 2000)

Supplemental Reading:

Duncan Richter: Introduction to Wittgenstein from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/w/wittgens.htm

Wittgenstein Links: http://www.helsinki.fi/~tuschano/lw/links/

Prototype X: Call for Submissions

2009-08-09T20:53:00.016-04:00

Prototype X in Theory and Practice

The notion of the prototype as industrial artifact figures significantly in our concept of genre. The "prototype" represents a unique data point on the learning curve of an industrial trajectory. Positioned uniquely between thought and tool, the prototype is the initial manifestation of a concept; and this prototype, while not as supple or refined as following production marks, possesses unique qualities that, as literature, can reveal a host of insights into human creativity, psychology, consciousness, will, ambition, aspiration, necessity, and what have you. The revelation of these prototypical insights--both as process and subject--has important political implications as well. Looking into the process of generative thought and invention helps us to understand and accurately characterize the political events that manifest as the prototype evolves and moves up the graph of its historical trajectory....

While we are interested in recognizable genres--science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, dystopias--we are inclined to publish only "very good" examples of genre writing. Otherwise, we are interested in literature and poetry that somehow--through some sort of theorized generative concept or through simple mucking about--attempts, creates the illusion of, or actually represents something that is "new." This is of course tough to do, and that is why we are also perfectly content with the illusion.

In addition to experimental literature, we are very interested in criticism, essays, editorials, and historical sketches. Any subject is acceptable. Considering our interest in the prototype (as both theoretic mantra and object of male wonderment) we have in the past been particularly keen on aviation subjects. In future this interest will expand to include submarines, small arms, psy-ops, corporate propaganda broadcasts, armored fighting vehicles, the command and control of pandemics, new frontiers in food additives, special weapons and tactics, and the latest trends in ladies' swimwear.

Prototype X publishes work in languages other than English.

Contributers please send files to Darren Partridge:

spuyten@hotmail.co.uk

Prototype X is a non-profit literary magazine. Contributers cannot be compensated at this time.

A copy of the second issue can be purcahsed at lulu.com. The long-lost files containing the first issue have been recovered and a new edition will be available in the fullness of time. The editor is now accepting submissions for the third issue.

The Booker Prize and British Culture

2009-07-29T15:02:00.015-04:00

J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock get mentions in Nick Hastead's 1996 editorial on the Booker Prize:

BOOKS OF THE POP AGE - THEY WON"T HEAR OF IT

Nick Hasted
Independent
29 October 1996

It doesn't matter who wins. This year's Booker nominees offer uniform pleasures. The prose is controlled. The content is wistful. The stories tell of the past, childhood, innocence lost. In these pages, you can read of the Coronation and the "hit parade" of 1953. You can experience a childhood in the 1940s. You can watch politely as Edwardian England slides into the abyss. The popular currents of the present are hardly felt.

The Booker isn't exactly like this every year. The 1993 award to Roddy Doyle was a moment when the award and the public nodded briefly to each other in the street. And the 1994 award to the "bruised demotic Glaswegian" of James Kelman (in one critic's words) did attempt to be modern. But in the end, every year really is the same.

Each set of judges exists in a rarefied universe in which all "literature" is understood to be "high": where words are to be used with refinement, and content is a game to be played. They are judges in a defeated world, where tinkering with the past (AS Byatt's Victoriana, Beryl Bainbridge's Edwardian simulacra) are applauded as the height of modernity, and straining stylistic novelty (Martin Amis, Julian Barnes) is a sign of life. It is prize-giving day in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm dismissed as the "elite ghetto", the day when the dwindling band of traditional literati can hug each other warm, gifted an illusion of popularity on a food company's whim. The Booker sees itself as a celebration of British literature. But it is more like a wake. No wonder one of this year's contenders is about the sinking of the Titanic. (And the favourite, Graham Swift, writes as if Britain is gently sinking, too.)

If this were truly the state of British literature, one could hardly blame the Booker. But what makes the award so maddening, even damaging, is that contrary to the complacency of its judges and the nostalgia of its nominees, British fiction did not die in 1960. Rather, in its most energetic practitioners, it has embraced the vitality of British culture since then - from the noisy smash-and-grab of pop to the stylistic wonders of cinema, from dismissed pulp fiction to underground art. To the Booker grandees, this other British literature may look like the circling of barbarians at the gates. But to readers starved of life by the award's dead hold on what literature is seen to be, they are the cavalry.

This British literature began when the Booker version died: with The Beatles. It was their celebration of a Britain of superficiality, fashion and pop that told "high" literature its time was up. But as they sent one tradition into decline, they stimulated another into being.

Michael Moorcock was one of the first to give this Britain a voice. Moorcock was driven "half crazy" with joy by the sounds of the Sixties. His Jerry Cornelius novels, begun in 1965, were his response. They mythologised this new Britain, in which Beatles songs were played as sacred mantras and London was imbued with decadent glamour. Taking from Burroughs and the lowest science fiction, Moorcock's style was new and natural, cutting up British reality into parts of jagged sensuality. His fiction was related not to the day's literary relics - Evelyn Waugh or Kingsley Amis - but to the visionary cinema of Nic Roeg and Donald Cammell.

He was not alone. 1963 saw the debut of JG Ballard. While Moorcock wandered London, Ballard roamed the spaces beyond it. He did not despair of the barrenness (as any Booker winner would). He filled it. Less interested in pop, Ballard took from other new forms - the iconography of dead movie stars, the geography of motorways, the obscenity of the nightly news - and re-imagined them as prose of crystalline, impacted beauty.

In 1965, he was joined by Angela Carter, who added music-hall coarseness, fairy-tales and a prose of saturated sensuality. There were others, pushing this new "tradition" far past the Sixties: Iain Sinclair, who tramped through London doing tedious jobs till he had categorised the city's mutating myths in prose which drew from Moorcock and Ballard and the Beats, the secret cinematic visions of Stan Brakhage, murder autopsies and his own poetry; King's Cross's epic poet Aidan Dunn; Iain Banks, Hanif Kureishi, Irvine Welsh, even the bursting prose of Salman Rushdie, who established the Booker as an event and was surely awarded it by mistake.

It has been an explosion. Seeing only its peaks, it is hard to believe that British fiction has ever been more awake to the world, more alive and inclusive. But the Booker is not about explosions. It is a centre so still you would not think there was a storm. It enjoys Victorian parlour games, not atrocity exhibits. It does not turn the radio on for pop. There are sorts of writing which it simply cannot recognise. It shortlisted Empire of the Sun, the nearest Ballard has come to a "literary" novel. But his more typical work has been ignored. Moorcock's entree to respectability, Mother London, had to settle for a Whitbread shortlist. Angela Carter's last novel was notoriously snubbed, as she lay on her deathbed. Dismissive of "Booker shortlist victims", she would not have cared; but there has been a parting of the ways. There is literature. And there is the Booker.

It is a separation which has been felt at every level of British writing. As the Booker and the culture it represents insist, year after year, that literature is only the sum of each year's insipid winners, many good writers no longer want anything to do with literature as the Booker defines it. Some prefer the mulch of genre, where writing's crudest, quickest energies can be tapped. In this overlooked field, Ramsey Campbell's schizoid horror, Clive Barker's Blakeian visions and the grubby thrillers of Derek Raymond lie. Here, too, Iain Banks, who began with a horror novel, sardonically adds an M to his name when he writes science fiction, knowing few critics will admit he is the same man.

Others have left literature altogether. Alan Moore, one of the most serious and respected writers Britain produced in the Eighties, wrote comics; he thought the medium more appropriate for what was becoming a "post-literate" age. Even writers who have bothered to write novels no longer limit themselves to that medium. Hanif Kureishi's books may be important to him, but so are his films. They let the public hear the pop music in his head.

Irvine Welsh is typical of the state things have reached. He has become the only novelist of the Nineties to reach pop-literate readers on their own terms. He did not do so by following the precedents that the Booker depends on. He did not do so by writing nice sentences. He did so because he went to raves. As the Booker judges ignore such voices, year after year, they may think they are preserving British fiction. But really, they are choking the life from it.

I couldn't be bothered over the Booker prize. It's interesting, however, to reflect upon the cultural shifts (breakthroughs?) Hastead believes should be incorporated into the judges' consideration. The point could be made these shifts represent not credible emerging artifacts in British culture, but rather artifacts of American cultural hegemony, or the hegemony of what to literati are the anti-British classes, i.e. free market capitalists of the liberal American model, though the promise of liberal markets is as British as it is American.

But while at least the activity remains native to the island, perhaps the judges believe the content is alien. But what could be alien to the home of the English language, which has at last settled the globe? Maybe at some subtle level they perceive a mode or inflection that lies beyond the pale of true Britishness, or, even worse, something not even linguistically English. Nevertheless, Hasted's editorial has evoked my response, thus:

Lines Written Notwithstanding the Booker Prize, Indifferent to Hasted

Like Chinese junk, like Ballard
Ballard's toys were imported
A sort of mal du pays, expressed
In some pigeon of Midwest Ray Bradbury,
Adolescent cocksurity and BBC Received Pronunciation,
For the empty affluence of the American Space Age
Chrome thick enough to choke a horse
A mini juke box in every diner booth
Remarkably expert Hollywood television orchestras
Doris Day's pointed tits, maiden-form

Forever incapsulated a la Gemini
We are both injured passengers at once
In both vehicles, head-on, all is possible
Mushroom clouds are fleurs du mal
And formica countertops for all:
We came for the visions,
Stayed for the humor.

And next Moorcock wheels forth
In the wake of WWII a common
Disneyland pirate sea simulation
Uniting American and British
Workers in a dazzling consumer revolution
Sporting Dutchboy coiffures
The Beatles took the finger from the dyke
America flooded in . . . soon
The last church spire was descried
Slipping beneath a froth strewn with Thames
Mud, coloured stains unnamed,
Imperial semiotics and splinters
Moorcock cobbled together an Ark
From the floating debris

Like a day-glo viking in a neon junk
And sailed off to America
Returning occasionally on his annual
In triumph.

Celebrating the Wisdom of Salvador Dali

2009-07-01T18:48:00.005-04:00

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

There is only one difference between a madman and me. The madman thinks he is sane. I know I am mad.

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.

John Locke's Temper and Genius

2009-05-09T12:45:00.010-04:00

Significant to our understanding of Locke's philosophy are the matters of his temper and discretion. The following passage from Macaulay's History of England has nothing to say about epistemology or political theory, and the one work that is mentioned, Locke's Letter on Toleration, is not examined. Nonetheless, this brief sketch, the longest passage Macauley devotes to Locke in his History, tells us a great deal about how Locke thinks. In addition to the model of prudence and wisdom presented in Locke's character, the passage underscores the importance of the sort of thinking Locke is engaged in, and should bring us to a deeper and more precise understanding of what it is Locke aims for when he is discussing scientific method, epistemology, or government.

The exiles were able to raise, partly from their own resources and partly from the contributions of well-wishers in Holland, a sum sufficient for the two expeditions. Very little was obtained from London. Six thousand pounds had been expected thence. But instead of the money came excuses from Widman, which ought to have opened the eyes of all who were not willfully blind. The duke made up the deficiency by pawning his own jewels and those of lady Wentworth. Arms, ammunition, and provisions were brought, and several ships which lay at Amsterdam were freighted.

It is remarkable that the most illustrious and the most grossly injured man among the British exiles stood far aloof from these rash councils. John Locke hated tyranny and persecution as a philosopher; but his intellect and his temper preserved him from the violence of a partisan. He had lived on confidential terms with Shaftsbury, and had thus incurred the displeasure of the court. Locke’s prudence had, however, been such that it would have been to little purpose to bring him even before the corrupt and partial tribunals of that age. In one point, however, he was vulnerable. He was a student of Christ Church in the University of Oxford. It was determined to drive from that celebrated college the greatest man of who it could ever boast. But this was not easy. Locke had, at Oxford, abstained from expressing any opinion on the politics of the day. Spies had been set about him. Doctors of divinity and masters of arts had not been ashamed to perform the vilest of offices, that of watching the lips of a companion in order to report his words to his ruin. The conversation in the hall had been purposely turned to irritating topics, to the Exclusion Bill, and to the character of the Earl of Shaftsbury, but to vain. Locke never broke out, never dissembled, but maintained such steady silence and composure as forced the tools of power to own with vexation that never man was so complete a master of his tongue and of his passions. When it was found that treachery could do nothing, arbitrary power was used. After vainly trying to inveigle Locke into a fault, the government resolved to punish him without one. Orders came from Whitehall that he should be ejected; and those orders the dean and canons made haste to obey.

Locke was traveling in the Continent for his health, when he learned that he had been deprived of his home and of his bread without a trial or even a notice. The injustice with which he had been treated would have excused him if he had resorted to violent methods of redress. But he was not to be blinded by personal resentment; he augured no good from the schemes of those who had assembled at Amsterdam: and he quietly repaired to Utrecht, where, while his partners in misfortune were planning their own destruction, he employed himself in writing his celebrated letter on Toleration.

--Macaulay's History of England, 1877

As a coda, I am mindful of this quote from Frank Zappa's father, who said of his son: "Frank is a genius: he knows who he is." Locke's thought as well as his actions are centered, I believe, in this crucial fundamental of understanding.

The Politics of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Grey Champion"

2009-04-10T12:44:00.010-04:00

Having rejected basic conceptions of social subordination along with the lawfulness of established church institutions, the English religious sectaries of the 1640s were free to entertain political and religious ideas that were variously fanciful, enthusiastic, utopian, and, significantly enough, modern. In their analysis of the origins of political power, the limits of power, and the rights of human beings, the Independents and sectaries gave birth to the basic principles of the modern liberal state. At the same time, of course, the sectaries embraced the very un-modern belief of seeing themselves as part of a divine mission. As Christ’s elect, they sought to remove social and institutional hindrances to Christ’s rule on earth. They believed God intended man to live a better life and, to this end, they believed that men could understand this purpose and cooperate with God to bring about His will. In 1651 Milton writes in A Defense of the People of England, “God changes circumstances, assigns kingdoms, and takes them away . . . through the agency of men.” Victories in Parliament and upon the battlefield were to the radicals confirmation that God was supporting their actions. By this logic, however, failure might also reflect God’s disfavor. When confronted with the breakdown of the Protectorate and the Restoration of Charles II to the throne of England, the radical’s idealism and Millennial hopes turned to disillusion, and there was by the 1660s a retreat into quiet nonconformity and skepticism. Christian utopians looked for their Promised Land in the next life. The Quakers became pacifists. Realizing the Good Old Cause must be left to future generations, Milton resorted to writing a vigorous and lawless modern poetry in the guise of religious epic. With the aid of politicians like Shaftsbury, however, the torch was passed successfully. Locke’s First Treatise on Government not only contains polemics against the patriarchal absolutism of Sir Robert Filmer and the authoritarian materialism of Hobbes, but also looks to Milton as a source for observations and rebuttals.

When considering the English Bill of Rights and the ascension of William and Mary (which, incidentally, seems in large part to have been orchestrated by Locke), the historical connections drawn together in Hawthorne’s short story “The Gray Champion” come to mind. Hawthorne tells the story without irony or subtlety, and his politics are clearly evident. The story is set in 1688 at the end of the reign of the Popish King James II. An old veteran of Cromwell’s wars (perhaps he is a ghost) is a recurring presence in the American colonies where, in the episode presented by Hawthorne, he witnesses the arrogance of the Episcopalians in church and government. Hawthorne opens the story with a description of the procession of James’s colonial government filing down the main market street in Boston. Magistrates, soldiers and Popish ministers—wearing crucifixes, no less—march arrogantly down the street. The tension is palpable as the American colonists view the governor and his soldiers. Suddenly an old veteran, the gray champion, appears on the scene. Hawthorne describes his martial bearing, and “the solemn yet warlike peal . . . [of the man’s] . . . voice, fit either to rule a host in the battlefield or be raised to God in Prayer.” He is dressed in “an ancient garb [that] could only belong to some old champion of the righteous cause.” He challenges the governor and the procession stops. From horseback, a member of the procession scoffs, pronouncing the old man “some old round-headed dignitary, who hath lain asleep these thirty years, and knows nothing of the change of times[.] Doubtless, he thinks to put us down with a proclamation in Old Noll’s name.” During the English Civil War, Royalists applied the epithet “Old Noll” to Oliver Cromwell. The allusion to the haircut is also plain. The old man is an exponent of the Good Old Cause of the Independents in the English Civil War.

The Gray champion denounces the Governor and his party, indicates that James II is no longer King in England, and promises that the Governor and his men are to be thrown into prison the next day. “Back!” he exclaims, “lest I foretell the scaffold!”

The story resolves accordingly. James II flees England, William of Orange replaces him on the throne, and meanwhile the governor of the colony, his administration, and his clergymen are thrown into prison. The story of the Gray Champion celebrates the Glorious Revolution and the ascension of William and Mary as the rebirth of the Good Old Cause. In this story Hawthorne is neither subtle nor ironic, and the closing lines of the tale are unequivocal:

His hour is one of darkness, and adversity, and peril. But should domestic tyranny oppress us, or the invader’s step pollute our soil, still may the Grey Champion come, for he is the type of New England’s hereditary spirit; and his shadowy march, on the eve of danger, must ever be the pledge that New England’s sons will vindicate their ancestry.

Of Racing Cars and Finance: Steve McQueen's Le Mans

2009-04-05T12:31:00.023-04:00

Le Mans has been properly called the greatest racing film ever made. I recently viewed Le Mans because I am interested in the racing cars of the 1960s and early-70s. But of course this film is about more than just cars.

Racing was undergoing a significant transition in the late 60s and early 70s, and some of the key points of that transition are starkly evident in the film. The drivers, the cars and the sport had a spirit of individuality that is missing from today's racing. Although suicide machines by today's safety standards, in the history of racing the endurance cars of that period come closest to what we might call works of art. The Porsche 917K and the Ferrari 512S long tail are, in my opinion, the most exciting racing cars ever produced. With these two models Porsche and Ferrari had "maxed out" on the frontiers of brute power and good looks. In the wake of these machines, however, the science and the organization of motor racing was overtaken by safety, technology and bureaucracy. Auto racing lost much of the human element. Not only individual drivers, but racing teams themselves became obscured behind a patchwork of corporate logos, stickers and emblems. The spectacle of national colors in auto racing--green for British, red (Rosso Corsa) for Italian, blue for French, white and red for Japanese, white for German, etc.--would be replaced by the colors of multinational corporations; for example, Porsche in the orange and blue of Gulf Oil, as seen in the film. I think it's rather sad to see the greatest car in racing history painted in the colors of a gas station sign, although people have argued (and perhaps correctly) that the Porsche 917 looks very handsome in these colors. British driver Graham Hill was a significant pioneer of this transformation in auto racing finance, and those interested in pursuing this theme should begin with a review of his career, specifically his replacing the British racing green of his Lotus 49 with the red, gold and white of the Cut Leaf Tobacco company. In an act which surely eclipses his remarkable list of victories, Hill has the distinction of being the first driver to paint up his car like a pack of cigarettes. As the seventies wore on the cars would become billboards and the "bottom line" commercial attitude would prevail, eventually transforming auto racing into the vulgar corporate circus represented by NASCAR and F-1 today.

The film subtly documents some of the elements of the emerging corporate mindset: Steve McQueen sacrificing a win so that the "Gulf-Porsche" team takes first and second place, rather than taking first himself, which would have resulted in a second place for Ferrari. But of course we don't watch this film to study corporate history, but rather to enjoy great cars.

Illuminations from the Second Ether

2009-03-12T22:26:00.019-04:00

Here are some of the "illuminations" artist Kai Robb is preparing for a full-color edition of Tally-Ho, Cornelius! My collaboration with Kai has been most helpful, and his enthusiasm for the project has inspired thoughts of a sequel.

Manhattan as a Tree:

Cappy:

Mary Make-Believe:

The Bifurcating Monofilament:

The Bifurcating Monofilament in Flames:

The Smollettsphere:

Trailer Park Shane the Bling-Bearing Gangsta Wannabe:

Lt. Baudrillard Picturing Himself in the Guise of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Cornelius, with Soft Toy Cephalopod:

Climb High Oh Corsairs!

Arch Maintypes:

More of Kai Robb's splendid illuminations can be viewed here:

http://tekelili.deviantart.com/gallery/

A Hittitologist

2009-03-06T23:21:00.008-05:00

From Bill Caraher, a note on my uncle, Professor Charles Carter:

One of the fringe benefits of running this blog is that you occasionally hear from an alumnus/a who studied the ancient world under one my predecessors here at the University of North Dakota. While it was always interesting to hear from a member of the larger university community, I must admit that prior to working on the history of my department, these names were usually fairly meaningless to me. Some of this is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that that our department as a group have only a fairly modest collective memory, owing largely to the fairly brisk turnover in faculty over the last 20 years.
As the study of the ancient world in North Dakota allows for some unusual relationships, correspondences, and juxtapositions, it seems worth including a brief biography of one of my predecessor here (drawn in large part from the department'sCentennial Newsletter of 1983):
Charles Carter, a native of Kentucky, (greater Cincinnati) earned his Bachelor of Divinity from Emory University (Atlanta), a B.A. from the University of Kentucky and the Ph.D., ancient Near East languages, from the University of Chicago. He taught at Central Methodist College at Fayette, Missouri 1965-1966. At the University since 1966, he taught ancient and early European courses. His Ph.D thesis was entitled Hittite Cult Inventories, and his subsequent publications include "Some Notes on Political and Religious Institutions in Two Ancient Cultures," Social Science XLIV (1969) as well asVokabulare, mythen und kultinventare (1978, with H.G. Gutterbock) and numerous more specialized journal articles dealing with the Hittite language as well as reviews. In 2000, after some delays, a volume in his honor was edited by Yoël L.Arbeitman and titled The Asia Minor Connexion: Studies in Pre-Greek Languages in Honor of Charles Carter (Peeters, Leuven 2000).
He was the first individual to come to the history department to teach exclusively (more or less) the ancient world and he brought with him to North Dakota, of all people, the Hittites . He was active in national organizations like the American Oriental Society as well as more local organizations like The Linguistic Circle of Manitoba and North Dakota. He began and led the Grand Forks chapter of theArchaeological Institute of America which has subsequently disappeared.
Perhaps noting Carter's contribution in as ephemeral a medium as the a weblog is not doing him any great service, but, then again, some of the most compelling journeys come from following footprints in the sand.
--Bill Caraher, 8-14-07
Source: http://mediterraneanworld.typepad.com/the_archaeology_of_the_me/2007/08/hittites-in-nor.html