Fragments on Modern American Uncertainty

“Why are so many men and women in their 20s and 30s wandering around America living alone and looking confused?” - attr. to Chen Guangcheng, possibly apocryphal 

On August 11th, 1841, Soren Kierkegaard, a  29 year-old Danish theology student of very melancholy temperament tending towards the anxious, broke off his engagement to the, by all accounts, beautiful 18-year old Regine Olsen. He thought there was something he had to do. What this ‘something’ was, was - to both contemporaries and posterity - somewhat unclear. He spent the rest of his life living alone in various apartments in Copenhagen and producing some of the most original and beautiful works in the history of philosophy, a discipline admittedly not known for its originality  or its beauty. He garnered some renown in his own lifetime, but more hostility and resentment. He was a guy that stood up a beautiful young girl and then chose not to marry at all, but to spend the rest of his life alone. The townsfolk were nonplussed. He and Regine ‘bumped into’ each other exactly once afterwards (at church, of course), but no words were spoken. Regine nodded silently to him. In fact, despite all that passed between them, they never spoke to each other again.

What did Kierkegaard think he had to do? Now, of course, we know that he would become a famous philosopher, the anxious fountainhead of ‘existentalism’, and a world-historical thorn in Hegel’s world-historical side. While some of that may have been conscious to Soren at the time, I think he knew that articulating it in public - or private - would seem well, unpolitical. Certainly unChristian, and in 19th Century Denmark, those things were one and the same. We can know say that Kierkegaard suffered from what I am going to call Religious Anxiety. He was training to be a priest and he did not believe the old stories. He had serious private doubts about the metaphysical truth of Christianity. He knew he and his young wife were not going to live together in eternity, they were just going to live together.  And more importantly, he knew he could not share this with his significant other.  This failure at direct communication in life produced some of the most profound indirect communication in literature (which was itself further divided into even more direct and indirect communication).  

I have always found Lukac's essay The Foundering of Form Against Life; Soren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen to be one of the better attempts at explicating Soren. But for a long time, I could not unpack the intent of the title. I certainly know what form is, and how concerned with it that SK was. But not until I substituted the word 'Media' did it click for this 20th Century guy. You can also swap in 'Art'; for SK and his time the best word would be 'Literature.'

When we search for another in life, that special person, it is generally assumed that both parties are seeking not just a partner for sex, but also that ‘other half’ that Plato so dramatically dramatized. We seek something we think might be missing in us. The promise of romantic love is not sex per se. Certainly initial attraction is pregnant with the promise of sex, but the promise of love is the promise of a different kind of fulfillment. It is a psychological promise not a physical one.  It promises a sort of fulfillment in itself.  You will be made whole. The outsize promises of romantic love share an affinity with the outsize promises of religion, with the subtle exception that romantic love will only keep you whole in this life. As it became obvious to more and more people that this was the only life you were going to get, poets and thinkers began to substitute the search for Love for the search for God. After the Enlightenment, these people were called, appropriately enough, Romantics.


Do you think you have been 'called' to do something, or that you were 'meant' or 'destined' to play some role? Why? Does it involve you becoming famous or well-known or respected and revered by posterity? 


There are dominant two spheres in life wherein I think humans consistently dissimulate or play 'politics'; sex and religion. It does not matter to me that the latter is no longer a valid form of life in its metaphysical expression. The play of the promises of religion over our psyches, the promise of eternal life, eternal damnation for the wicked, etc. make navigating the social world - especially for young people - anxious and problematic, especially when imaginatively extended into the future with such questions as 'I wonder what type of parent this sex partner would make...?'  


I would say have sex not just before marriage - but before your first date. Don't even talk. Get all the animal stuff out of the way first. Find out if you kids work together in that way. Kids. If you think you want to continue at that point, then go on your first date. Begin the 'small' talk. Find out if the narratives inside your head converge. Spill the real god dirt. 

3 Minutes to Live

No one likes the male singer-songwriter more than me. The poet, and his descendant the singer-songwriter, are the sensitive man's hero. He is Jesus with tattoos and a sex life, turning the watery prose of earthly life into the whiny wine of song. [["In this context, the concept of 'charisma' is being used in a completely 'value free' way." - M. Weber, The Nature of Charismatic Domination]] And yet, not to knock the words, or the whole sensitive poet thing - but how often do you listen to music without words. Think how important music is in your life, but how too often it is chained to the word. What if the words are holding you back -, psychologically speaking. Pure music swells meaningful experience like nothing else. What is it like to sit and listen to - experience - an entire symphony by Beethoven? We will probably never know, even if we take the time to listen today, because we lack that patience. Our time is not the same to take. There are moments when you identify with the lyrics, of course. I identify with sad white guys who sing of broken hearts with a tinge of classical misogyny. But this is not uncommon to the poem, which is closest in form to the 3-minute pop song.  Why should just music cause such sweeping internal movement? [[In 'what-used-to-be-called-the-soul'.]] Why do we not listen to long compositions - be they 'classical' or not? Why, when we know how good great music makes us feel? In what situation is it possible that you might only get the chance to listen to 3-6 (or if it is Ryan Adam's Nobody Girl, 9) minutes of music? "No time for Bach or Mozart now! I do not even have time for the entire White Album! I only have 3-6 minutes here at this brief break from my reality." Do you not sit and listen to music for hours sometimes? Or, perhaps even more importantly, while you work?
I sure hope some cognitive brain scientists can tell us what happens when we listen to music, and then some social scientists can tell us maybe even how the form got so compressed to only 3 minutes or so. Because sometimes in those 3-minutes I feel like I am going to live forever.

The Jewish Sphinx

A long time ago, there lived a Jew who changed the way men and women think. His ideas were radical but incisive, world-shatteringly honest, some of them seemingly even too simple. Yet he was persecuted by philistines and pharisees. He began, even in his lifetime to build a following of disciples, some of whom sought him out, one of whom eventually would betray him. His followers would attempt to carry his word, spreading the gospel to the non-believers. Eventually, after he was gone, his genius would ossify into dry, stony fundamentalism. Even his own daughter could not carry his word as well.

The Dissident in Apt. 5

When I got home from work the blind Chinese dissident was in my apartment watching my LED television and reading Plato’s Gorgias.

“How do I get the HuffPo?” 

“In addition to being a cultural phenomenon of questionable use and value, the Huffington Post is a website, not a television program. What are you doing here? How did you get in?”

“But aren’t the distinctions between your TV programs and Websites rapidly collapsing? Doesn’t this TV have internet access?” He fumbled with the remote. “Your government was unsure where to stash me, but they said you live alone and do not have a wife or even a girlfriend. They said more and more Americans are living alone these days. They said that news even made the old newspapers. ‘More Americans Are Living Alone Than Ever Before’ or some such headline.  They also said something about some student loans...? And, well, in addition to being a dissident and a lawyer, I am also a locksmith. When was the last time you went to the grocery store? Are you out of beer”

“Trying to cut back, actually.  And while the TV does have internet access, I have been trying to cut back on that too. Can I get you some fresh-brewed iced tea I bought at the store in a bottle in the dairy section?”

“Already drank it all. Sorry. Good stuff. I can imagine the nightmare that must be involved in trying to brew it yourself. Did you know that in China, our internet access is, how shall we say, spotty?”

“I have heard. How long are you staying? I only have the one bed.”

“What, are you homophobic or something? Frankly, I did not want to say, but based on some things - well, the amount of facial gels and moisturizers in the privy and your collection of shirts - I even thought you might be gay! Don’t worry I will sleep out here on the couch in front of the electronic hearth. I have quite a bit of culture to catch up on. How do I get ‘Facebook’ and ‘The B**** in Apt. 2B’?”

“It is actually ‘23’ not ‘2B’.”

“What is the point of changing ‘Bitch’ to ‘B****’ anyway? Who are you fooling? The kids? What if your kid comes home from 3rd grade and she says, ‘Miss Melissa was a real bee-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk-asterisk today!’, are you supposed to reprimand her - but reprimand her less than if she said ‘bitch’? Is that American Moral Progress?”

“I am not sure, really. Out on U.S. Interstate-75, north of the Cincinnati loop at the Monroe, Ohio exit there used to be only a Hustler Hollywood superstore and some gas stations. (I never went there, of course.) But now there is an entire outlet mall and a shiny, new Chipotle across the street. Is that American Moral Progress? In which direction?”

“I will ask the imaginary rhetorical questions with no answers here, smart ass. What is the story with all the academic books in here anyway? Are you a professor of something at the Modern American University?”

“Afraid not. I think I was just looking for meaning. Did you know that all that is left of God in our Western world is the concept of ‘meaning’ or ‘consciousness’? Sometimes they will put them in italics to emphasize their supposed strangeness.  That is all that our Scientists cannot put their fingers on. So to speak. The only ‘mystery’ left, they say.”

“I have heard that. I even read a few of your Modern Philosophy of Mind books before you got home. Pretty dull, grey stuff. A lot of ‘he said/he said.’  This Gorgias seems far more historically aware, and it was written when? What did you get at the outlet mall?”

“They say circa 385 B.C. And a pair of jeans.”

“Not to be a moral gadfly on your American ass, but it sure looks like you have enough pairs already.”

“When do I raise the empirical objection that you are blind?”

“Whenever you want. This is your little story. ‘B.C.?’ is that before Confucius?”

“I thought you were a lawyer, intell-? Oh I get it - you are playing dumb with me, the American courtroom game, to get at an answer that will make me look silly in front of my peers. Or guilty.”

“Sideways smiley face,” the blind Chinese dissident lawyer said, “You got me there. Guilty as charged. Where do you work?”

“Next question.”

“Did you know that it is fairly impossible to be a white male and be a compelling national political figure, unless you want to look like a complete cretin that is about, well, pretty much exactly 2,500 years behind the times? Joe Biden told me that when I landed. He seemed - how do you say, grumbly...?”

“That thought had not uncrossed my mind recently. Maybe that is American Moral Progress? What do you think?”

“Is there a way that you can copy, cut and paste your electronic music files from your computer directly to your car’s audio system? You know, so you are not always lugging around an mp3 player or, worse, compact discs? That is so annoying and time-consuming”

“Did you guys get all the big moral questions figured out over there in China? As I recall, you chose to flee.”

“Touche. What do you call American dissidents?”

“Democrats. Or, expatriates. I was really looking forward to a glass of that iced tea, actually.”

“Why are so many people in their 20s and 30s wandering around America, living alone and looking confused?”

“Don’t change the subject."
"Is it time to get stoned and do the housework?"
"Not quite yet. If I give you the keys to the car will you go to the store and get some more iced tea.”

“Sweetened or unsweetened?”

“Unsweetened. And hurry back. New Girl is on tonight.”

“Oh, I may be blind and Chinese, but I love me some American Zooey D. She is a like a kind of maternal-sex symbol! A girl you want to be your mom and your lover! And the girls like her because she is not so anorexic skinny!” 

“And kooky. Do you have any money?”

“Don’t be silly”

“Here is my debit card - but press cancel for credit. Put the car windows up when you park at the store. It looks like rain.”

“Ha, of course. What kind of fool would leave his car windows open?”

“I could tell you stories.”

Fragments on 'How the Mind Works'

In the foreword to the second edition of his How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker expresses an earnest ignorance concerning the response of the now seemingly ubiquitous American Religious Right to the first edition of his book. Ever since the Greeks, feigned ignorance about a subject to coax a response from your interlocutor to debate, argue, discuss and arrive at some sort of resolution that one participant can claim as a victory, has been common to both Philosophers and Social Scientists, as well as children

Like the book itself, the foreword is a very anxious, self-consciously (though perhaps not to Pinker) political piece of polemical pop-science writing. Whether Pinker would admit as much in public (or perhaps even private) I would find to be a much better litmus test as to whether he is really an astute disseminator of ideas. Claiming that you had no idea that your book, which spends a good deal of its space attempting to reoccupy moral positions mainly associated with a millennial religion from 2,000 years ago, with ones now backed by the full faith and credit of the SSSM or discoveries in evolutionary biology would not cause a ripple among the religious right, does not speak well for your standing as a psychologist.  

Just because I think Pinker's book is a shoddy piece of work does not mean I am harboring secret religious beliefs, although this is the implicit, though sometimes explicit, charge leveled at any critic of American Philosophy of Mind. I can agree with Pinker's underlying assumptions - that man is an evolved social animal that has no immortal soul - and still think his thought is naive, reductive and banal. And a bad book, to boot. 

You cannot share your thinking; but you can share your thoughts. 

If you are interested in Philosophy of Mind, or Cognitive Science, or almost any part of the burgeoning Anglo-American big business of Consciousness Studies, if you actively seek out and read and digest those endless books and articles - whether you ‘agree’ with them or not - you are, without any question, what Pinker would probably call an ‘atheist’ or the somewhat less opprobrious and slightly more modern term, ‘naturalist.’ You just may not be aware of it. The ‘problem’ of consciousness is only meaningful in a philosophical way as a historical reoccupation of the Greek and Christian ideas of the soul.  

Can you really explain how the mind works with words? Does that sentence contain too much ambiguity with the final clause? If I realize that and write a clearer sentence, is that a tiny little victory for science? Can a paragraph be classed as 'Fiction' or 'Non-fiction'? What is this one? Does it depend on your 'religious beliefs'? Where in language is there not some hidden meaning? The mind does do some of its work in words. But not most of it. I imagine. 

The only reason there is a second edition of How the Mind Works, but not, say, Consciousness Explained, is that Pinker, in good Hegelian spirit (but again, surely not consciously) packed his polemic with far many more speculations and prescriptions about ethic, culture and politcs at the end of the book - after the chapters on perception and knowledge; those are the ‘foundation’ - which made it more accessible to the common reader (but far more likely to end up on the cultural radar of the ARR who are not known for their robust intellects; they do get Yeats’ ‘passionate intensity’, they are certainly full of that.They just have never read Yeats, or quite a few others for that matter).

Did Wittgenstein ever explicitly state that he had no religious beliefs? And what if he was lying? If he was lying to protect our children and grown-up children from the haunting spectre of nihilism (the term in contemporary usage is 'relativism') is that 'ethical'? Why does one get the impression that Pinker never read his Wittgenstein? 

David Chalmers’ book The Conscious Mind has a decent claim to being considered one of the most important books published about consciousness in the 1990s. But its importance stems not that he proposed that consciousness could only be fully explained by a ‘naturalistic dualism’ - but from the strange fact that he takes a political-rhetorical time-out at the beginning of the book to announce that he has no religious beliefs. To anyone with even a cursory or passing interest in philosophy or the history of ideas,  let alone active participants in the language game called philosophy of mind, the term ‘naturalistic dualism’ should have done the trick. It is not far off from a phrase as absurd as ‘religious atheism.’ ‘Dualism’ in philosophy jargon = ‘Religious.’

If somehow Pinker, or maybe that crazy joker Alan Sokal, snuck into a presidental press conference under the aegis of asking a question about the economy or gay marriage and then, when their turn came, asked Obama point blank “Mr. President, how do you think the immortal soul interacts with the human nervous system?” it would indeed be a somewhat historical event. They could get that footnote. But it would just be a footnote to another dualist President. 

Plotinus the neo-Platonist philosopher wondered how it was that he came to have a body; this was a puzzle to him. Our contemporary philosophers and cognitive scientists in more than a few universities wonder how it is that they came to have thoughts,  beliefs and desires.

This is their puzzle. The problem of consciousness. They have been working on it for some time now, close to a hundred years They make money at it. It pays their health insurance. "How was work today, Sweetie?" "I am still baffled by consciousness! But myself and the other philosophers and cognitive scientists are still working on it. We expect a fundamental theory any day now. What's for dinner? I am hungry." Did you imagine that the philosopher of mind in the preceding was white and male? Why? 

People like Pinker, I almost have to believe, have Platonic dreams of an imaginary civic courtroom wherein they could summon their interlocutors and critics before the great tribune of public reason and expose their errors to an equally imaginary jury of their intellectual peers and, probably more importantly for their own personal consciousness, posterity.  The concern with your place in history is common to both the national politician and the Harvard professor. Why do we assume one always lies, but the other is earnest?

I am thinking about calling this piece "Psychology, Politics and Prose" When it is complete, I mean.

"..a strong wish to change the subject..."

“We are sitting with friends at a diner or standing in line to buy tickets for a movie, chatting idly, when suddenly one of us, unable to contain himself in the face of our trivialities, bursts out with some existential question which we might later on paraphrase in polite terms as “What is it to live a human life well or badly?” or one which we might paraphrase as “What law, if any, has authority over us?” or [significantly] one which we might paraphrase as “What is the significance of death in our lives?” The  questions that actually burst out on such occasions will be expressed in cruder and rawer terms, as much a scream as an utterance, whose obscenities can be heard as expressions of anger and pain. And the response by those who hear both the questions and the emotions expressed through them is likely to be deep embarrassment, a strong wish to change the subject, a will to behave as if the questions had not been asked. We think: what can have got into him to talk like that? Is he perhaps having a break-down?”

- Alasdair Macintyre, ‘The Ends of Life, the Ends of Phiilosophical Writing” (in The Tasks of Philosophy, 2006, Cambridge University Press.

Haywire (2012, Steven Soderbergh): Daddy's Girl is Not Happy...

Far less allusive or puzzle-complex as their collaboration on 1999's new-wavy The Limey, Steven Soderbergh's and Lem Dobbs' Haywire is a frenetic concept piece, dirty pulp layered over with the patina of cinema art house, another descendant of John Boorman's 1967 Point Blank. The Limey was a searcher revenge tale, with a rough Cockney Terence Stamp as a father looking to avenge his daughter's death. Kicking her way through various set-pieces in Barcelona, Dublin, 'Upstate New York' and New Mexico, Gina Carano is Mallory Kane, a daddy's girl who doesn't need her dad's help. 'It would be a mistake to think of her as a woman' one of the film's evil men tells another of the film's evil men towards the end of this cinema-cyclone. But underestimate her, they all do. Carano isn't Meryl Streep, nor meant to be (I am pretty sure she does her own stunts and motorcycle riding) but you knew that going in, right? Her physicality is something to see, in a diner in New York or a hotel in Dublin; When she slips out of her spiky heels in the hallway before entering a suite with Michael Fassbinder, you know, intuitively, it is time for room service.  And Haywire is much better intuited than thought out. Just enjoy the deer through the windshield; don't spend too much time dissecting the deus ex machina. Along with Fassbinder,  you can see Ewan MacGregor, Antonio Banderas, Bill Paxton, Channing Tatum, and Michael Douglas as the boys helping her out, or, more likely, in her way.

Freud's Love Letters

To his twenty-two year-old fiancee, Martha Bernays, in 1882:

"If you insist on strict correctness in the use of words, then I most confess that you are not beautiful. But I was not flattering you in what I said...What I meant to convey was how much the magic of your being expresses itself in your countenance and your body...I myself have always been insensitive to formal beauty. But if there is any vanity left in your little head I will not conceal from you that some people declare you to be beautiful, even strikingly so. I have no opinion in the matter."

To Martha in June 1884, after he had begun experimenting with cocaine:

"I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are forward you shall see who is stronger, a little girl who doesn't eat enough or a big strong man with cocaine in his body. In my last serious depression I took cocaine again and a small dose lifted me to the heights in wonderful fashion. I am just now collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance."

"Then we came to the end..."

"Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year. Lights were strung across the front of every shop. Men selling chestnuts wheeled their smoky carts. In the evenings the crowds were immense and traffic built to a tidal roar. The santas  of Fifth Avenue rang their little bells with an odd sad delicacy, as if sprinkling salt on some brutally spoiled piece of meat. Music came from all stores in gingles, chants and hosannas, and from the Salvation Army bands came the martial trumpet lament of ancient Christian legions. It was strange to hear in that time and place, the smack of cymbals and high collared drums, a suggestion that children were being scolded for a bottomless sin, and it seemed to annoy people. But the girls were lovely and undismayed, shopping in every mad store, striding through those magnetic twilights like drum majorettes, tall and pink, bright packages cradled to their tender breasts. The blind man’s German shepherd slept through it all."

-Don DeLillo, Americana

"And don't we...

               “And don’t we – as children and perhaps even later – romanticize cheap movie stereotypes, endowing them with the attributes of those figures in the arts who touch us imaginatively? Don’t all our experiences in the arts and popular arts that have more intensity than our ordinary lives tend to merge in another imaginative world? And movies, because they are such an encompassing, eclectic art are an ideal medium for combining our experiences and fantasies from life, from all the arts, and from our jumbled memories of both." - Pauline Kael, reviewing Band of Outsiders

An Author At His Own Expense

"To be an author - unless one is a poet, and in addition a dramatist, or one writes textbooks or in some other way is an author in connection with public office - is about the poorest paid, the least secure, and just about the most thankless job there is. If there is some individual who has the capability of being an author and if he is also fortunate enough to have private means, then he becomes an author at his own expense. This however, is quite appropriate; there is nothing more to be said about it. In that way the individual in his work will love his idea, the nation to which he belongs, the cause he serves, the language he as an author has the honor to write. Indeed, this is how it will be where there is harmony between the individual and the nation, which in turn in the given situation, will be, somewhat appreciative of this individual.

Whether the opposite of this has in any way been my experience..."

               - Kierkegaard, On My Work As An Author, 1849

A Letter from the Govt. of Zanesvillle Oh. to Terry Thompson

Dear Mr. Thompson:

Thank you so much for applying for a permit to keep exotic dangerous animals on your 'preserve' in our humble duchy! (We trust this missive will find you well in the maximum security lock-up in Columbus.)

Admittedly we were concerned given your history of brushes with the law (not limited to - of all things! - animal cruelty!) However we do understand how important it is for a rural Ohioan to keep a Siberian Tiger and Grizzly Bear, among others, in cages on your 'preserve'. We are somewhat concerned how you will care for these noble beasts from your jail cell, however the $125 fee per annum will certainly help fill the Zanesville coffers! The pottery economy needs to putter along.
Godspeed to you sir!
(Should you decide to take your own life and let the animals free, please contact us in advance. Lol! )
With best regards,
The Sovereign Government of Zanesville, Oh.
(P.S. you were due in court to stand for charges of drunken disorderly conduct some months ago. Let us know if you are not able to make it.)

Joe Henry - Life Beyond Trembling, with Sticks & Stones

"It's a funny thing to live with both hunger and satisfaction - fear and consolation - bouncing within your bones in equal measure, like the opposite ends of a tightrope walker's long pole: you can sight along one end to the other and sense in its curved but strong line the truth of both impulses, bobbing and working to keep you upright along the trembling wire. 

I have wanted to believe such trembling behind me; that I could leave it like quarters and dimes on a starched white tablecloth, a meager tip but nonetheless an acceptable observance of time spent alive and nursing at the thin bones of the scrawny rabbit that my desire had conjured and conquered.

But no there is no life beyond trembling, no true consolation for desire, because desire does not wish to be consoled, only sustained and held in that terrible and holy state of longing. Like an empty can rigged with nails and wires and hooked up to a battery, its buzzing is the possibility that a rabbit is indeed on its way, and may even bring a carrot with him. 

So I sit on the beach and wait; smoke, laugh and remember. It is bright and warm but won't be for much longer; and such anticipation is the only thing I have ever had any use for in broad daylight" 

-Joe Henry, liner notes ("Life Beyond Trembling") on "Reverie"

In the office in which I work

“In the office in which I work there are five people of whom I am afraid. Each of these five people is afraid of four people (excluding overlaps), for a total of twenty, and each of these twenty is afraid of six people, making a total of one hundred and twenty people who are feared by a least one person. Each of these one hundred and twenty people is afraid of the other one hundred and nineteen, and all of these one hundred and forty-five people are afraid of the twelve men at the top who helped found and build the company and now own and direct it. All of these twelve men are elderly now and drained by time and success and energy and ambition. Two of them know what I do and recognize me, because I have helped them in the past, and they have been kind enough to remember me, although not, I’m sure, by name. They inevitably smile when they see me and say: “How are you?” (I inevitably nod and respond “Fine.”) Since I have little contact with these twelve men at the top and see them seldom, I am not really afraid of them. But most of the people I am afraid of in the company are.”

                                                                -Joseph Heller,

Something Happened

The Thing That's Not the Movies

"It felt real, the place was paradoxically real, bodies moving musically, barely moving, twelve-tone, things barely happening, cause and effect so drastically drawn apart that it seemed real to him, the way all the things in the physical world that we don't understand are said to be real.

The door slid open and there was a stir of mild traffic at the far end of the floor, people getting on the escalator, a clerk swiping credit cards, a clerk tossing items into large sleek museum bags. Light and sound, wordless monotone, an intimation of life-beyond, world-beyond, the strange bright fact that breathes and eats out there, the thing that's not the movies."

- Don DeLillo, Point Omega

The Mad Men Without Qualities

Eric Hobsbawm has written: "For 80 percent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still , they were felt to end in the 1960s."* Probably accurate, but if you were to look for where the remaining 20 percent was most concentrated in opposition, you would most likely find no more perfect geographical expression than an island off of the coast of the United States called Manhattan. By the 1960s, if not before, the cultural and economic (they tend to go hand-in-hand) dominance that had belonged to London or Paris now belonged to New York City. The English-speaking (but not 'British') WASP was setting the pace, even if they were leading at a historical game that they really did not understand. 

I just watched the first episode of season 4 of Mad Men and was reminded how much I liked to whole show, the whole idea of the show, the whole way it dissects this particular era, the White Male ascendant, head of his own household and telling you the way you need to think about yourself in yours. This is probably one of my favorite pieces of television production, or, as they are known to us without cable: "TVonDVD."  Watching them in compressed order (if not actually just over the course of one weekend) as the format encourages, strengthens one's opinion that the increased quality of recent television shows are giving the Old American Novel a run for its metaphorical money; the range of characterization and individual psychological development or multiple characters that are allowed on high-quality shows like Mad Men and The Wire or Freaks and Geeks (which I am currently midway through) are usually absent from 'The Cinema' because it is hamstrung by its form: 2 hours, 2 1/2 hours if the director pushes it. Everyone is familiar with the phenomenon of reading a 300 page novel, then seeing the 2-hour movie and feeling that something is 'missing' from the film or the characters. That something is almost always the rang of charac-well, exactly what I said above - that is afforded the reader of a novel that a film (most at least, it should be noted I am hardly an enemy of the movies) cannot find in its arsenal keeping to the 2 hour time-frame. 

I don't think there is any doubt that there has been a higher level of quality television in the last ten years or so, than the ten previous. Of the shows I have watched, two in particular have stood out: David Simon's The Wire and Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. As good as The Wire is, I am much more a fan of Weiner's Mad Men. Simon is still the polemical journalist, and sometimes I think he sacrifices art for politics. I find Mad Men to be both a better aesthetic project, and a more in-depth look at the mores of the time, the 'battle of the sexes', when affulent white guys ruled the street, Madison or otherwise, during Hobsbawm's 'Golden' 1960s. I find the cipher of Don Draper at the morally ambiguous center of the show, a white male who, with his own twisted code, twists and claws and lies and smiles his way into a whole other identity, one of the super affulent - both economically, but more importantly to me, culturally, to be one of the more important characters of recent times. Others may disagree. (But hopefully not with Hamm's performance in the role.)

I have been wanting to write about the show for quite a long time, both because I have been trying to circle my own feelings about it and also I am almost preternaturally lazy. It has definitely been one of the aesthetic touchstones of the past couple years of my life. Like most things I like, I over-think it, so I think I am just going to stab at it in pieces. Or episodically, if you will. Season 3's 'The Gyspy and the Hobo' is one of my favorites, so I will probably start there. But be forewarned now: I am going to tell you what happens towards the end of season 3. Spoiler alert.

But next post. I need a nap.






*The Age of Extremes (1994)

Sleepwalking through History

      "After ten weeks of additional strenuous negotiations with the Iranians, Jimmy Carter, now sleepless for two nights and worn to the marrow, received word just after six-thirty a.m. that a final agreement had been arranged for the release of the hostages in Tehran. At seven o' clock, he placed a call to the official presidential guest residence to tell his successor the joyous news, but the call was taken by an aide of Reagan's who said that the governor had had a long night, was sleeping, and could not be disturbed. 

      "You're kidding," Carter said.

      "No, sir, I'm not," the aide replied. 

       As dawn began to break, the ashen-faced president jotted down what had happened in his meticulous minute-by-minute log. Outside the White House, all over Washington, limousine chauffeurs, gown-fitters, sous-chefs, and gofers awoke to begin making final preparations for the most sumptuous presidential inauguration in American history." 

                                                  - Sean Wilentz, The Age of Reagan

The End of Bookstores? (8) Joseph-Beth Survives! (and eBook wars continue...)

We at markhoobler.blogspot  (meaning me, Mark Hoobler) are very happy to announce that the Cincinnati Joseph-Beth bookstore found a successful bidder in its private auction on Wednesday; the store will remain open and continue to serve the community. In recent weeks I have been in the store more often than I have been in the past year or so, and had somewhat forgotten the pure pleasure of browsing that can only be found in a real 'bricks and mortar' bookstore. This bookstore holds a special place in my personal history and I am glad it will continue to do so.

In related news, the eBook market-share wars continue. Today, Amazon did a full about-face by announcing that Kindle users would be able to borrow 'library' eBooks on their device. The move is widely seen as Amazon's attempt to try to keep pace with Apple's iPad and Barnes & Noble's Nook; these are more robust 'readers', most notably in the fact that they are in color, while Amazon's Kindle remains black & white. Users had been able to borrow library eBooks on the iPad and Nook, but not the Kindle. Previously Amazon had said they would not allow users to borrow library books on their device. 

But, as noted in the NYT article, publishers continue to hold back somewhat with eBooks in libraries. Of the 'Big Six' publishers, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan still do not allow libraries to 'lend' their eBooks at all, and last month Harper Collins announced libraries would only be able to be 'checked out' 26 times before the library had to buy the eBook again. 

Noli me tangere

"Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."
-Thomas Wyatt

The Corrections

Correction: March 25, 2007

A review on Feb. 25 about “Remainder,” by Tom McCarthy, rendered incorrectly the name of the test that distinguishes androids from humans in “Blade Runner,” the 1982 science-fiction film based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, whose work was compared with McCarthy’s. In printed references to the film, it is Voight-Kampff, not “void comp.” (In Dick’s novel “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” it is spelled Voigt-Kampff, without the “h.”)

- The New York Times Book Review

(Otherwise Liesl is correct: I second the second paragraph of her review: "What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them. If you allow yourself to admire the walls, the bewildering dead ends, the doubling back and the twists, then the sensation of entrapment can fascinate. You find yourself exhilarated by your confusion, wanting to be caught — if only to learn, as the fangs sink in, what the chase was actually for.")