Canadians Lost in Canada

Which Political Divide Will Claim bin Laden's Death Was Fake First?

2011-05-02T19:32:00.003-04:00

I’ve been stewing ideas for blog posts over the last while about the election, my philosophical research, and assembling my final thoughts on Finnegans Wake since I finished it last month. But the past few weeks have been busy with work and plans to attend conferences. Then just as I happened to get a few minutes, Osama bin Laden was assassinated. And since I never manage to update this frequenly enough to generate a serious readership beyond immediate friends and any intelligence agencies scanning the internet presence of young intellectuals, I thought I’d just muse about this until I felt like stopping.

I can’t say much that foreign policy experts and the more frequently-updated on the internet haven’t already said. But when I heard the circumstances of bin Laden’s burial, I knew what was coming next: Donald Trump spinning a ridiculous series of accusations that Obama faked the entire raid just to embarrass him. After all, the raid came the day after Obama and Seth Meyers humiliated Trump at the White House Correspondents Association dinner, and that’s too much of a coincidence to be a coincidence.

This is the way conspiracy thinking works, after all: nothing is a coincidence if it can be understood to be integrally connected to different events. Actually, a long term philosophical project of mine is to analyze conspiracy thinking as the ultimate irrefutable argument: even clear statements of fact against the claims of the conspiracy prove its truth, because any argument or fact showing the conspiracy theorist to be wrong can be understood as planted by the evil conspirators themselves. In the context of philosophy, it challenges irrefutability as the most important feature of a true account. But in a political context, it’s working very differently.

Obama’s best joke against Trump at the Correspondents dinner was a line connecting his boosting of the Birther conspiracy with ridiculously outlandish ideas. Now that the long-form birth certificate has been released, said Obama, “we can move on to the truly important matters that face our nation: Did we fake the moon landing? What really happened at Roswell? Where are Biggie and Tupac?” These are scenarios so zany, they can be dismissed by most people.

But contemporary conspiracies – 9/11 Truth, Birtherism – are deeply politically partisan. I have a rather apolitical friend who actually both theories, or at least considers them plausible. But he’s an outlier, because the American conspiracies of the 21st century are firmly divided along political lines. 9/11 Truth, or Trutherism, is a conspiracy of the left, those who were so driven into partisan rage against the Bush/Cheney Administration that they took gaps in evidence, the sheer monstrosity of the event, and gave it enough anger for fuel that they grew convinced that the American government caused the September 11 attacks, whether by launching missiles into the buildings, destroying them from inside, or remotely controlling the planes themselves.

Then during Obama’s campaign for the presidency, rumours began swirling that he was not born in the United States, and so ineligible for the role of president according to their constitution. This is a conspiracy of the right, prevalent among the Tea Party, tacitly tolerated by congressional leaders like John Boehner, and openly endorsed by congressional rebels like Michelle Bachmann. And most recently, Birtherism has been the key rant of the Trump pre-campaign. Critics of Birtherism have connected it to accusations of implicit racism, the unspoken feeling, probably largely unacknowledged by many of its believers, that a black person should not be president of the United States. At least that’s the joke: if he were white, we wouldn’t be questioning Obama’s qualifications.

The sad part is that the Birther conspiracy was started by desperate partisans in the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2008, before it was picked up by the American right. However, I’m at least slightly bemused that conspiracy theorists of left and right in America can find some common ground in the overlap among their main paranoiacally concocted secret plans. If you watch Zeitgeist, one of the better-known underground documentaries advocating 9/11 Truth, it actually connects Truther principles about a government conspiracy to control the Middle East with the Jewish conspiracy to control the international financial system and erode democracy from within its institutions by implanting surveillance microchips in the human body. That’s right: the flagship conspiracy of the West’s paranoid secular left is a grandson of the anti-Semitic Protocols of Zion.

See, that’s how you can tell conspiracy theory lineage: look for which secret societies they have in common. The secret societies don’t really exist, of course, but the conspiracies acknowledge that they must exist in order for these real events to happen. If there’s one thing a conspiracist can’t tolerate, it’s that the world is just messed up and terrible things just happen without the need for a secret intelligence directing it all.

I was expecting conspiracy theories about faking bin Laden’s death to arrive soon, probably from the Trump camp. The best way to discredit Obama, after all, is to tar him with the brush of conspirator. And discrediting Obama results in Republican victories. But it seems that this could be a conspiracy of the left in America, as well as of the right. I’m sure Trump will advocate the falsity of the Abbottabad raid as soon as he and his Celebrity Apprentice writers assemble enough epithets. But the first advocate out of the gate saying the government faked bin Laden’s death is one we haven’t heard from in a few years: Cindy Sheehan. She’s the activist who led many protests against the invasion of Iraq, and she was the first one to capitalize on the lack of photographic evidence and the quick disposal of the body. So maybe the far left's disappointment with Obama will result in a merger of the Fake Bin Laden Death conspiracy with the 9/11 Truth conspiracy, and lump the Democrats in with the Republicans as evil manipulators of a free public.

I never thought I'd sound radical advocating for listening to the government and believing in simple answers to questions.

To Change a Mind Is Immensely Difficult

2011-04-18T11:26:00.002-04:00

Last week, a website that was brilliant in its simplicity made the rounds of a ton of my facebook friends, Shit Harper Did. Next to a coal sketch of Stephen Harper smiling creepily while cradling a freaked out kitten, is a generator of summaries of news articles describing the destructive, polarizing, alienating, and anti-democratic activities of the Harper Government™. Among the terrible things that appear is Harper sabotaging international talks on carbon emission reductions and climate change, cutting funding for scientific research while muzzling the ability of government-employed scientists to speak to the media about their work independently of party-controlled public relations officials. He has also doubled annual spending on prisons in a country with falling crime rates. His handling of the G8 and G20 meetings in summer 2010 was needlessly provocative, grossly expensive in direct spending and lost revenue, and ridiculously handled.

I was glad that after I posted this site, the number of reposts among my friends skyrocketed. To see the popularity of anti-Harper propaganda like this at first made me hopeful that he would be out of power within a few weeks. Then I thought about who my friends were.

That phrase is usually trotted out to disparage a group of people, but I mean it in a more literal sense. My friends were already against Stephen Harper. They never voted Conservative in the first place, and they certainly weren’t about to now. Apart from a few exceptions, my social circles tend to involve people who are already left-leaning. We’re academics in the humanities, artists, journalists, activists for unions and marijuana legalization, young people in the technology industries. We’re people who live in the centre of cities, many of us don’t own cars unless we have to for work purposes, and few of my friends have work that requires cars. Even most of the lawyers I know are most interested in labour, criminal, entertainment, and contract, or else they went to law school and decided never to be a lawyer. We are not the demographic that votes Stephen Harper.

This idea first started making sense to me when Rob Ford was elected mayor of Toronto. All my friends were amazed that Ford won with the massive share of the vote that he did. But when I looked at the district-by-district breakdown, it was plain what had happened: the centre of the city, split among several diverse and dynamic candidates, went in their various directions indicated by their diverse and dynamic personalities. All the suburbs went Ford. None of my friends knew anyone in the suburbs. Neither do I, apart from some of my students, who commute to school from their suburban homes. We ask ourselves questions like "How could anyone vote for Stephen Harper?" and expect to hear only confused rage and disgust, because we only ask it around our friends who never consider voting for Stephen Harper. The most productive way to ask this question is with genuine curiosity and respect towards someone who enthusiastically votes for Stephen Harper.

There’s no way our venting anger on the alleys of facebook or in Toronto’s gay district is ever going to change a single Conservative vote. And that’s a shame, because voicing rage against the stupid and bigoted activities of the Harper Government™ and receiving adulation and praise in return feels so wonderful. What will be utterly painful and wretched is to go out to ridings that are in close contests and campaign against the Conservative party in places like Ajax, Orleans in Ottawa, or Mississauga. You’ll have doors slammed in your face, Conservative party activists hurl abuse at you, and go home feeling demoralized and dejected every day. But if you want to change minds and actually achieve political goals, a requirement is talking articulately with people who don’t already agree with you.

I, meanwhile, will just write this blog post that I’ll link on facebook and entertain my friends who hate Stephen Harper and like to complain about him.

Conference Diary: My Free Dinners with Marxists*

2011-04-14T16:21:00.002-04:00

For the first time last week, I visited York University, an enormous modernist compound in the middle of industrial parks north of Toronto, adjacent to a distant, isolated slum. It was for a conference their department of Social and Political Thought organizes every year, and because my friend who attends Osgoode law school lives on campus there (thanks again for use of the couch, Kyle!), I decided I would go. I presented a paper that took some of my ideas about the contingency of existence and a Nietzschean political philosophy into the context of postcolonialism. Normally, my writing wouldn’t be quite so reaching, but going to a department that’s outside philosophy proper, I gave myself some liberty with composition.

I did see some very interesting presentations, including some people who knew a whole hell of a lot about Theodor Adorno, and a lot of Marxists. It’s rare that someone from a philosophy department comes across such a concentration of academics who genuinely seem to believe in political revolution of the global working class. It was refreshing, and I think more traditional philosophy departments could learn something from interacting more regularly with these differently oriented departments and groups.

McMaster University has a lot of guest speakers come to its department to give talks; we have a weekly Friday series during the Fall and Winter semesters just for that reason. For the most part, the guests are people from other universities around southern Ontario – some just commute in for the afternoon – but some come from far flung locations like southern Illinois and North Carolina. In the past year, we’ve hosted a conference on the anniversary of Russell & Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica that drew logic and history of philosophy scholars from all over the world. Our upcoming philosophy of law conference will have delegates with a similar diversity of origin. But going to a place like the Social and Political Thought conference made me realize that despite the diversity of people who visit McMaster, they’re all also kind of the same.

It’s not that every one who visits McMaster has the same answers to philosophical questions. I’ve seen some epic arguments on a variety of topics. But there’s a remarkable amount of common ground on what questions to argue about. In a way, I think this is just about the habits of people anyway. An area of philosophical inquiry is a region of thought that a person – professor, graduate student, general thinker – is comofortable moving in. But beyond simply the comfort of familiarity, a philosophical inquiry is a set of open questions that require continued exploration, literally a lifelong and life-defining project. If you’re interested in developing such a project, you’ll be drawn to people talking about the same types of problems, compatriots with whom you can work to develop the ideas that have come to define your professional existence.

There are no Marxists, critical theorists, Frankfurt School specialists, anti-capitalist revolutionaries, or postcolonialists at our department. So those problems aren’t going to be on their professional radar, and the types of questions they ask won’t come up. In the same way, a lot of the intriguing questions that are asked at McMaster Philosophy will never come up in York Social and Political Thought. I stuck out like a spotlight over there talking about Richard Rorty. If you’re the type of thinker who does good work through focus along developing a specific path, then it won’t matter to you whether other groups of people are interested in other problems. But I find myself thinking that an inquiry can be revitalized, or at least given a healthy shock, by exposure to ways of thinking that diverge from the habits you might be used to. It’s what draws me to interdisciplinary conferences, or gatherings of different sorts of people. Some folks would find that diversity confusing, while I find it challenging. At the same time, I find the inquiry style of a specializer to be boring, and in danger of insularity, while other folks do their best work in that context.

People are built differently, and are better and worse at different tasks.

* Ever since the “My Dinner with André” episode of Community a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been incorporating references to that movie into different conversations I’ve had. I like to think this isn’t sad.

Wake Diary: Tangents of Philosophical Wisdom

2011-04-09T20:02:00.000-04:00

When I would tell my friends and concerned loved ones that I was reading Finnegans Wake, they worried for my general sanity. After they realized that I had gone long enough without general sanity that I never really needed it in the first place, they were still concerned that I would waste months of my life reading a book that made no sense. This post isn’t about following the plot or symbolism of Finnegans Wake: there’s too little of one, and too much of the other for that. This is about a phrase I found a couple of weeks ago, but am only getting around to writing about now, that actually sums up rather well what I think about problems of individual knowledge in philosophy.

"What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what an eye ere grieved for."

You might think that strange. And it is. But this actually made quite a lot of sense to me as an expression of my attitude towards how knowledge problems are manufactured and solved. Go through the phrase bit by bit.

“What can’t be coded”
We fail to have knowledge of something in two general ways. We may have no way to access it because it might be too far away, too large, or too small, and we haven’t figured out the right technology to observe it yet. We had no knowledge of Jupiter’s moons until we developed telescopes to see them. They were always there, but couldn’t be seen. But this phrase responds to the second, more problematic kind of unknown: that which might be part of our everyday world, but which we don’t know how to understand. It’s the problem of the unknown unknown, an object or a situation which we don’t even know we’re oblivious to, because we can’t even conceive of it existing. We can’t search for it, because we wouldn’t even know how to search for such a thing.

“can be decorded”
I like the wordplay, combining the senses of the terms ‘decoded’ and ‘untangled,’ as if we were trapped in a mesh of ropes that we had to figure out how to disentangle ourselves. And the ropes in which we’re stuck are metaphors for our perceptual habits, the ways of thinking that we’ve become used to and don’t bother to question. But all ways of thinking are limited, leaving parts of the world unknown to us, and that we don’t even understand how to search for or conceive of. But we can discover unknown unknowns by decoding the patterns in language that we don’t understand, taking that pattern apart and reverse-engineering it.

How do we do that?

“if an ear aye sieze what an eye ere grieved for.”
I wish I could remember where I heard this joke, but someone once told a joke about being stuck on an airplane where a blind man was laughing at a video of Mr Bean. The joke is funny because someone with no visual perceptual ability can understand comedy that’s entirely visual performance. His ears should “grieve for” visual humour because they’re incapable of perceiving it. Our ability to think abstractly lets us experiment with concepts so we can develop new powers of thinking, which allow us to figure out the patterns by which some unknown unknown exists in the world, and we can learn to search for it. Once you learn how to search for something, you’re able to find it, and systematize your discovery about the world into the framework by which you understand the world. Conceptually speaking, we can grow an ear where before we may only have had eyes. That’s how you solve the most interesting problems of knowledge, by figuring out how to perceive the world differently than you ever had before.

Wars and Dictators and Elections and Eyebrows

2011-04-01T20:22:00.001-04:00

A Political Note on Libya

A few posts ago, I was exasperated with Barack Obama’s waffling on support for the Libyan revolutionaries to the point where I was giving up on him. Having seen a vigorous no-fly zone manned by efficient Americans and angry Frenchmen, I am no longer giving up on him (the poster still hangs on the wall by my kitchen). Like he said in his books, he believes in the democratic institutions of his country and the world, even when they move with an aching slowness.

Actually, what’s been exasperating lately, though to a lesser degree, is the perspectives of my leftist comrades. Robert Fisk is a brilliant journalist and author, and in an otherwise balanced (and also exasperated) column, he writes, “Yet again, it’s going to be regime change.” My friends and political columnists who lean left and America-skeptical have begun leaning against Libyan intervention, that the no-fly zone is another grab for oil, or Middle Eastern influence, or something. If it’s not always mentioned, I find it an undercurrent to some of the discourse critical of the intervention.

But Libya is not Iraq. The anti-Gaddafi rebellion didn’t need Western help to begin. These are the revolutions of the Arab world. While it’s probably going to be a mixed bag of success, continued repression, and half-measured compromise, it’s still a vibrant revolution of Arab people. Westerners didn’t manufacture this revolution, but we can still aid it as best we can. A dictator like Gaddafi isn’t talked out of power. I’m no longer willing to say that there can always be a peaceful solution to political repression.

I’m willing to accept the paradox that sometimes you have to start a war for peace. Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Ben-Ali are just three more names on the list of overthrown dictators of people who wouldn’t live under their rule anymore. They join Slobodan Milosevic, Nicolae Ceaucescu, Chun Doo-Hwan, Rafael Trujillo, Porfirio Díaz, Benito Mussolini, Napoleon Boneparte, Louis XVI, and George III.

No matter how much we may complain about the Tea Party’s racism and insanity, and no matter how justified we may be in our fight against the destruction of organized labour in the United States, it was anti-Iraq-Invasion protesters who first put a Hitler moustache on a sitting President.
•••
A Political Note on Canada

I’m looking forward to this election, because I think Stephen Harper will finally lose some seats again. I don’t think the Conservative Party will ultimately lose the plurality in parliament, but if their numbers are reduced to the mid-130s or (if we’re lucky) mid-120s, it might be enough to cause an insurrection in the Conservative Party against Stephen Harper.

I’m registered to vote in Hamilton Centre, one of the safest NDP districts in the country. But when I hear that Harper is losing support in Quebec, and that a lot of seats in Saskatchewan are in play, I couldn’t be happier. Harper has demonstrated contempt for Canadian political institutions and for Canada’s parliament, as well as open hatred for every other political party. Holding Harper in contempt of parliament wasn’t just a political ploy: the reason he’s the only prime minister ever to be held in contempt is because of the seriousness of the charge. It carries with it a nominal restriction from running to be an MP for five years, which Harper has ignored. He treats the Canadian government as if he owned it, and there were no checks on the power of his office. He treats his own back-benchers and party activists like cogs in the Stephen Harper machine.

I posted on my facebook wall a link to an article that compared Stephen Harper’s methods of governance to that of Richard Nixon, and found them brothers in arms. Then a friend sent me another article demonstrating that Nixon’s policies on the environment, engagement with China, infrastructure and scientific investment, and even civil rights were more progressive, humanitarian, and superior to Stephen Harper’s.

I’ll be so happy to see him go.
•••
A Political Note on Senses of Humour

A sign that I think the Liberal party might have a chance of making some serious gains in this election is that they’re giving away a particular free gift with small donations: Stick-on Ignatieff Eyebrows. I’m glad their campaign is finally loosening up and is able to make fun of Michael Ignatieff’s stick-in-the-mud pretentious image. I’m waiting for the media clip where he tries them on himself.
•••
A Political Note on Exasperation

I know one of the excuses that have been heard for just giving the Conservatives a majority is that the increased frequency of elections in the past decade is hurting Canadian democracy. If anything, the greater means of maintaining accountability of politicians in parliament without a single majority party should keep leaders in a more moderate, compromising position which takes more concerns of Canadians into account. Harper hasn’t learned those lessons, and is just becoming more authoritarian in his party and the bureaucracy. If this is his authoritarian streak in a minority, I’d hate to see what he would do to the country with an unchecked four year mandate.

We’re All Different, But We Can All Be Understood

2011-03-21T22:50:00.001-04:00

Errol Morris had an intriguing series of essays published this week at the New York Times. They are entitled “Incommensurability,” and are an exploration into a philosophical idea about the social nature of science and knowledge. It turns out that Morris took a graduate seminar in philosophy from Thomas Kuhn, a writer from whom I’ve stolen some very good ideas. The climax of this relationship, from Morris’ perspective, was when Kuhn threw an ashtray at his head. The reason for this assault was Morris needling Kuhn about a problem regarding incommensurability.

Kuhn was a scientist and a historian of science more than a philosopher, but the ideas he had to formulate to make sense of his interpretations of science’s history were deeply philosophical. Key to Kuhn’s own understanding of the history of science, and the focus of Morris’ essay, was the concept of incommensurability. Science was not a progress toward better and better knowledge of the world, as traditional ways of writing its history would have it. The history of science actually consisted of a variety of models, ways of understanding the world and articulating problems that are largely unrelated to each other.

Revolutionary periods in science were the time when new models were created and become prominent enough to challenge the old models. This usually happened when some problem that the old model couldn’t make sense of become too noticeable to ignore. Those practicing one model understood the world in a totally different way than those practicing another model. The terms of one model only make sense within that model; to translate terms from one model to another would remove all the distinctive characteristics from the translated model. This is what it means to be incommensurable.

Morris explains that he confronted Kuhn with a problem of incommensurability: If two broadly defined ways of seeing the world were truly incommensurable, which Kuhn assured him they were, then a historian of science in the mid 20th century could never truly understand the scientific worldview of the medieval Europeans or ancient Greeks. The history of science itself should be impossible. And the ashtray flew.

Morris goes through several intriguing examples from history and philosophy and the history of philosophy to illustrate his points about the problem of the incommensurability concept. They are quite fascinating, but they all add up to the same point: If different models of understanding the world are genuinely incommensurable, then holders of different models shouldn’t be able to understand each other at all. Yet the conflicts among models of understanding the world seem to be motivated precisely because their opponents understand the new model. Read the articles and think about it.

Are you finished? Good.

I first heard of Errol Morris when I saw his documentary about the career of Robert McNamara, The Fog of War. I thought it was a brilliant exploration of how a sharp, intelligent, and empathetic person found himself becoming the architect of one of the most terrifying mistakes the American government ever made: its invasion of Vietnam. As I started hearing more about Morris’ history, I was less impressed.

When his filmmaking career began, Morris was friends with Werner Herzog, and would always talk to Herzog about this idea he had for a documentary about pet cemetaries and the people who use their services. But he would always come up with excuses as to why the film could never get off the ground. Finally Herzog said that if Morris ever actually got his film made, Herzog would eat the very boots that he was wearing at the time of the challenge. Morris made Gates of Heaven, and at its festival premiere, Herzog ate the boiled shoes from the challenge. The result was another short documentary: the hilarious Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. But it took a shoe eating challenge from Germany’s greatest living director to get it off the ground. I discovered on the commentary for Herzog’s Stroszek that this film was generated when Herzog went to rural Wisconsin to help make a documentary about Morris’ early life. But Morris never showed up, so Herzog wandered around small-town Wisconsin himself, coming up with ideas for the film that eventually became Stroszek. A wonderful result, but borne of Morris’ scatterbrained laziness.

Perhaps despite of these habits of his personality, Morris has written a fine series of articles that work a general audience through complex philosophical problems. The project suffers, I think, from the prominence that having an ashtray whipped at his head plays in his memories of Kuhn. That confrontation colours his entire view of Kuhn: With every interaction they had about what incommensurability meant, Morris thought Kuhn's anger was a sign that Morris was getting to the older man, forcing him to deal with something he didn't want to admit. Having won the staring contest, Morris presumes his suspicions were right, and doesn't think about the miscommunication he and Kuhn could have had from the beginning. I don't blame him for being affected by nearly being knocked out with an ashtray, but there is more nuance to Kuhn's (or at least Kuhn-inspired) thinking than Morris suggests.

It doesn’t require a purely objective perspective, a god’s eye view, or a view from nowhere to understand a way of making sense of the world that is alien to your own. All you need are skills of observation and disciplined, careful imagination. I think Morris makes a mistake in calling incommensurability the absolute separateness of some way of understanding from another, that someone who thinks according to paradigm A couldn't possibly understand anything of paradigm B. If this were true, there was no way for anyone to do any history of science at all: every view that differed from our own would be dismissed as nonsense. But one can think about one's own premises of thinking, and do so for any paradigm of thinking you care to investigate. In understanding how a paradigm of thought arises and evolves, one understands that paradigm.

Incommensurability is a matter of practical work, not pure understanding. A phlogiston chemist can't test for oxygen, because the structure of phlogiston chemistry doesn't include oxygen, or much of the periodic table. That phlogiston chemist could learn the basic concepts of a periodic table chemist, just as the periodic table chemist could learn how phlogiston theories work. But you couldn't do chemistry experiments using both theories at the same time. They can be understood, from a perspective of self-reflexivity, reflexive criticism. But when it comes to the work, you have to choose one or the other.

Barack Obama Is a Pathetic Wretch

2011-03-16T17:21:00.002-04:00

I’ve been willing to forgive Barack Obama for a lot in the past two years. But his abandonment of Libyan rebels is something I can’t let go.

There are definitely positive aspects to his administration. He has signed law improving income equity among genders, allowed homosexuals to join the army and die for their country in useless wars, and made their money back from the auto industry bailouts, giving the anemic manufacturing sector of his country another chance to recover. That they will likely fail is the fault of manufacturing business leaders who seek better profits from more exploitive working conditions in Asia. The health care reform that he fought for, while compromised, is a genuine improvement on the almost entirely private and piratical system the United States had until 2010. His candidacy, with its rhetoric and imagery of a generational shift in the tenor of American politics, inspired so many people around the world with its romanticized vision of America that he won the Nobel Prize. For the strength of that inspiration alone, he deserved it.

But aside from his rhetoric, he has been utterly tepid. The health care reform plan will likely be revoked by conservative court action, and validated by conservative legislatures. The anger that the ideologues of the Tea Party rode to the House of Representatives began with public outrage over health care reform. If Obama had advocated strongly for his health care program with the same inspirational power and ethical idealism that he summoned in the campaign, he could have stopped this movement in its tracks. All he needed was an information program that made sure Medicare reform (which first provoked the backlash’s first rage among the elderly) was a streamlining, and not a cut. Instead, he held back, and let the conservative movement take control of the national agenda.

When the Green Revolution failed in Tehran, I considered it a tragedy, but there was nothing Obama could really do to help them. Military action in Iran would have required a force as powerful as that which invaded Iraq, an invasion which left the American military limping out. Libya is a different case. All the rebels needed was weapons and a no-fly zone to prevent Libyan planes from taking off from their airbases. And that no-fly zone could have been enforced with sea power! One or two destroyers from the American navy, patrolling off the Libyan coast, could shell every Gaddafi-controlled air force base into dust. A steady stream of weapons could have been smuggled to the rebels with the help of the Egyptian army (who had just helped overthrow their own dictator, and would be glad to see the Gaddafi family out of their backyard). Even the Canadian military could probably carry out an operation like this – actually, why don’t we? Instead, the rebels are bombed into submission, and outgunned by government ground forces. The Libyan army will kill tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, in its inevitable destruction of Benghazi.

Obama has sat on his hands, afraid of offending the sensibilities of anyone (if they even exist) who would be opposed to American action to overthrow a dictator. Perhaps he is afraid of sounding like George W Bush, endorsing American military action in Arab lands in the name of freedom. It’s the same reason that Bill Clinton refused to sanction military force against Bagosora in Rwanda in 1994: having been burned in peacekeeping in Somalia, Clinton was unwilling to commit another military action in an obscure African country. Having been steadily burned in Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama will not commit to yet another military action in a Muslim country. This true believer in democracy will let thousands die at the hands of a dictator, when they are crying out for help to overthrow that tyrant.

I hope that he’s re-elected president for a second term, if only because his most likely Republican competitors would sell off every publicly held asset in the country for the benefit of big business interests. Conservative ideology in the United States today is based on the rollback of the last hundred years to the era of robber baron capitalism, reducing the country to utter poverty. He needs to stay in power at least to provide a bulwark against the free market über alles ideology that will transform the United States into an oligarchy.

As an alleged democrat, Barack Obama is worthy only of my contempt. The ‘Hope’ poster is finally coming down.

Wake Diary: Poems Made of Tone and Images

2011-03-08T21:26:00.002-05:00

The problem with novels is that the vast majority of readers expect them to have plots. That is, they want a clearly identified protagonist or protagonists facing a concretely described problem that they slowly investigate, act to solve, and then manage the aftermath. This is the standard rising-climax-falling structure of a plot that people are taught in high school literature studies. I prefer novels that are more narrative than plot, because plots have clear beginning and endpoints. The characters exist in the service of the plot, rather than serving as points of interest themselves. I read and I write stories that don’t have plots, as much as they have explorations, narratives, collisions of people.

Then I came to face Finnegans Wake, which doesn’t even really have characters. Looking for a narrative in this book is an academic cottage industry, as is looking for a clearly defined cast of characters. But I think there’s another way of reading this book, which actually fits its style better than an attempt to find (or interpret into it) clear characters and narratives. It’s a poem, constructed from emotionally evocative language, its rhythms, allusions, and allegories. There are recurring motifs, some of which receive clear definition in one part of the book so they can be better recognized in the rest of the work. HCE, Anna Livia, and Shem the Penman are some of these motifs. But the writing is meant to affect a reader the way a tone poem, or a piece of music does.

If anything, I suppose the entire thrust of James Joyce’s writing was a series of experiments that slowly jettisoned reliance on plot, then narrative, then even character. The stories of Dubliners were intricately constructed plots, situations whose narrative arcs created detailed situations that climaxed in a character defining epiphany. Portrait of the Artist eschewed the careful construction of plot for a series of five moments that exemplified the transformation of a character as he grew from a dependent child to an independent adult. Ulysses left narrative behind for a series of events contingently connected through the characters that wandered among them. Wake abandons even the constancy of characters. I’m not sure what to call whatever remains.

But I’ve had some profoundly strange ideas about how the Wake’s techniques influenced other artworks.

I found a very intersting interpretation of the Star Wars prequels a couple of months ago that reads them in the same way. It actually fits with some of what I know about their production, and how George Lucas envisioned particular scenes. If you watch Red Letter Media’s detailed reviews of the prequels, one of the critiques of Lucas’ narratives is that he includes specific images that mirror or parallel images from the original trilogy, but that these images lack their emotional impact when they appear without the investment of the individual characters.

When Leia sees Boba Fett’s ship taking off from the dock at Cloud City, she’s emotionally devastated, because the man she loves may have disappeared forever. When Padme watches Count Dooku’s ship take off from the dock of his mountain base, she doesn’t have the same emotional investment in the moment. Lucas created parallel images, but didn’t realize that the emotional connection of audience to story comes from the narrative itself, not the image alone.

That article above suggests that Lucas had always envisioned the story of the prequels told through images alone, not through narrative, and that he had to create his overcomplicated, emotionally cold narrative to get the proper images into the films. In other words, Lucas was stuck, because of the economics of his own film company, making a sci-fi blockbuster, when he really wanted to make a new La Jetée, on an enormous scale.

La Jetée was a silent French film whose narrative would form the skeleton of Twelve Monkeys. But its technique was to tell a story entirely through images that created emotional tones, crafted using motifs that allowed viewers to track the triggers of these emotions, and the relationships between those triggers. It was a film told with the same techniques of Finnegans Wake.

St John’s Diary: Sad to See the Old Girl Go

2011-03-07T21:43:00.001-05:00

My friend Kyle wrote a piece for the Osgoode Law School newspaper Obiter Dicta last week, talking about the benefits of returning to practice law in St John’s. It was an entertaining piece, and while I didn’t (nor have I ever) respected the bad jokes Kyle threw in his article, I do respect his position. He always states it well, and there’s a particular realism to his patriotism that I think is at the centre of why I can tolerate it.

I find Newfoundland patriotism slightly distasteful and a little deluded. Visiting a couple of weeks ago, my mother joked about a popular documentary that examined what an economic powerhouse Newfoundland could have been if we had maintained national independence in the 1930s. The contrast case was an everlasting boom that would never run into a money problem ever again: Iceland. This is the kind of delusion that annoys me about contemporary Newfoundland patriotism.

But Kyle’s piece centred on aspects of life in St John’s that don’t have the outsized ambition that some of the more naive patriots in the old country have displayed. The lifestyle is relaxed; the people are friendly; the rent is cheap; in the particular case of lawyers, law firms compete to attract students, instead of more frequently the other way around. A lawyer working in St John’s can be more of a community practitioner, instead of a faceless corporate shill. I know most people in law school actually want to be corporate shills. But Kyle is that most rare of law students: he’s actually a very nice person.

This is actually a more personal post on what I found when I returned to St John’s this time. For the first time, it was not because of a special event. It wasn’t Xmas, which I spent in Hamilton for the first time this year. When I went to St John’s this summer, it was for my friends’ wedding, which dominated my time there. This was just midterm break and a relatively cheap direct flight from Toronto. I would have to make my own fun.

I actually found a city that was starting to become distasteful. Ugly box stores were dominating the architecture of the old-growth suburb where I grew up. A very sketchily arranged Burger King was slated to be built within twenty feet of my mother’s condominium complex, ruining the atmosphere with its terrible smell and constant traffic. Hava Java, the legendary coffeeshop that was the centrepiece of the city’s hipster, art, and music communities, was leaving its classic location, forced out by a new building owner who wanted to install office space in the building. He had already forced St John’s’ only gay bar to close the previous Xmas. Some of my friends were doing well, and some of them were stuck in ruts. I hated to see it all.

So I returned to Hamilton, a cheap Ontario steeltown with a bad reputation and an endemic recession, feeling optimistic about where I lived, and much more hopeful for my future outside St John’s than I am for the city itself. My friend Elsa made this movie about it a little while ago, and it reminds me of a city that I’m not sure ever existed.

Maybe a New(ish) Way to Do History of Philosophy?

2011-02-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

University of Western Ontario is starting a History of Philosophy roundtable, discussing, as the name implies, various topics in the history of philosophy. I’m of two minds about studying the history of philosophy – my attitude towards the practice is a mixture of enthusiasm, dread, dismissal. The reasons why are a little complex, but that’s what blogging is for.

In my time as a graduate student, I've come across two approaches to the history of philosophy that seem pretty mainstream. One is history of philosophy as antiquarian studies: philology on writer X that seeks to get X right. One is understanding historical developments in current terms: asking if Aristotle was a functionalist on philosophy of mind – that question makes no sense to me. It applies the concepts of a long-ago philosopher to current debates with little heed to the radically different context of two writings.

I did my first few years of training in philosophy in a very historically-minded department, and I think I came out better for it. When I engage the work of a complex, difficult philosopher, I put a lot of effort into understanding their terminology, concepts, historical context, and the reasons why they thought the problems at the focus of their work were worth the trouble. I emerged with the ability to read a complex work in a very deep and careful manner rather quickly. You might think this leaned toward the antiquarian definition, and to a degree this was true.

But the individuals who played the biggest role in my education treated their historical subjects as their specialties, but they had no particular loyalties to them. At Memorial, I never worked on history of philosophy with any professors who said their specialty writers were the apex of philosophy, or that those writers were the only ones to get the universe really right. I’ve come across that attitude among some students who work on history of philosophy, and I hope that disappears from them.

My friend Jeremy once came up with the perfect definition of such a slavish historical philosopher: For a devoted X-ian, the only time X was ever wrong was when X himself said some element of X’s own corpus was wrong.

However, I’ve discovered over the past few years that I don’t want to work on history of philosophy, or secondary material generally, as my main specialties. I didn’t want to use my intellectual capacities in the service of illuminating the work of another writer. I didn’t want to spend the bulk of my time arguing over interpretations of another writer, with other writers whose careers were also spent commenting on the same writer as me. I’m just not humble enough to be that subordinate, even to someone who had proven themselves as remarkable as Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Heidegger, or Russell. I find secondary material to be writing about philosophy. But I want to write philosophy.

For me, the history of philosophy is a tool for creating concepts and working through contemporary social and ethical problems in philosophy. For example, I’m interested in Spinoza, but not just exegesis of Spinoza’s writings. He’s one of the few philosophers in the Western tradition for whom ontological matters – questions about being and what is – are closely integrated with ethical questions. This kind of reasoning is very important for my own work, but it’s difficult for mainstream philosophers to see this kind of convergence as legitimate. Being able to say that a big name like Spinoza did it too grants my ideas at least a small grasp on that legitimacy.

More than that, I engage with philosophy’s history to find the hidden subtlties of thought and strange concepts in dark corners that we usually don’t mention to undergraduates in the field. I’m looking for peculiarity that can inspire, or strange elements that could have sparked a completely different revolution in philosophy but never caught on because of some social or institutional factor beyond the writer’s control (this is my view of why Johann Fichte didn’t invent phenomenology in 1801).

I’m interested in taking part in this roundtable at Western, provided I can get transportation to London three or four times during the next term. I revere no one, although I respect them very much. And my applications of past to present are very indrect and convoluted. But I hope to find welcome, or at least sympathy. I’m not exactly someone who fits in.

Wake Diary: Unafraid to Sound Like a Lunatic

2011-02-16T20:41:00.000-05:00

An egomaniac is coming up against the limits of his own fantastic mind right now. I cannot make any damn sense out of Finnegans Wake, but I won’t give up on this thing. I’m only two chapters in so far, after starting to read it a week ago. I expected this would take a while, and I’m probably moving faster than most people who take a shot at it. Hell, I’m 50 pages in and haven’t thrown it out the window yet.

The inventions of words don’t stand in my way. The stereotype of Finnegans Wake is that every sentence invents so many new words that it’s impossible to understand the semantics of the book. But the book is written as if it really were a bizarre auditory monologue. Words are spelled differently, but mean the same thing, because they’re pronounced the same way. Most of the ordinary neologisms in the book play with the peculiarity of English spelling, seeing how many different ways you can spell a word but pronounce it the same.

Pronounciation is, for me, the most important part of reading this book. Whenever I come up against a particularly difficult passage, I start reading aloud, and return to my silent reading at the end of the paragraph, or whenever my voice gets tired. The only qualification is that I read it in a wretchedly thick Irish accent. And it actually makes more sense. In a way, it fits with the way James Joyce himself may have composed his work in the last twenty years of his life. He was functionally blind, most of his visual field an array of blurred colours. With difficulty composing a text, he would have had to speak out loud most of his drafts as he wrote each sentence. So their composition would have focussed on their vocal cadences and rhythms, musical and melodic qualities rather than ordinary grammar.

Given the context of the book being a kind of dream, this actually is an improvement. Read aloud, the Wake is more of a recording of a series of extended vocal improvisations than it is a novel as we traditionally think of them. Shifts in mood and digressions of content are more important than clearly defined characters and narrative. The closest analogue is like watching a jazz performance fed into a DJ mixing board where pre-recorded music is blended with live instruments, and the jazz players are reacting to their own playing, but also the DJ’s samples and regurgitations of their own music. And this is all done by one blind author. Over 17 years.

This is a tenuous analogy. I wasn’t kidding when I said I was coming up at the limits of my powers of description.

Dream of a Music Video Director

2011-02-05T23:47:00.000-05:00

I enjoy the music of just about everyone in the New Pornographers collective, Neko Case and Dan Bejar especially. Destroyer’s Rubies was one of my favourite albums of 2006, and I still love listening to it. Now, Bejar’s music and personality was always a little ridiculous. His New Pornographers songs were always the strangest on every album, but they were usually also the most interesting (although “Myriad Harbour” from Challengers is an earworm that lodges itself in you until you want to drill a hole through your head).

However, after hearing some songs from the new Destroyer album, Kaputt, I don’t really know what to think. Pitchfork gave the album an 8.8 and included it on their list of Best New Music. I usually respect Pitchfork praise, which is not exactly given lightly. They described Kaputt as evoking the pop aesthetic of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Describing its sound, they offered analogues in Sade, Steely Dan, Roxy Music, and Chuck Mangione. When I first listened to the lead single, “Chinatown,” I enjoyed it, finding it retro and catchy. But after a few more listens, the kitsch and the cheese is just biting into me and making me bleed in uncomfortable places. Listen to “Chinatown,” below, and see if you can’t get through that saxophone line with a straight face.

This is the kind of music a lounge singer from 1984 would sing at a private gig in the catskills for a bunch of bankers’ wives.

This morning as I was walking to lunch, I imagined a music video for this utterly ridiculous song. The setting is, of course, an expensive restaurant with an expansive dance floor. A beautiful Asian woman in a red dress leaves her companion, an uptight older white man, to get a drink from the bar. As the music begins to play, she sees a handsome brown-skinned man her own age. They lock eyes, a thin silk fabric goes over the camera lens, already coated in more vaseline than a wrestling pig at a Wyoming county fair. They walk past Dan Bejar, singing the song, on their way to the dance floor. A subtly erotic tango begins as the saxophone kicks in.

Her older lover stares at the couple on the dance floor, his face seething with the inward rage of hidden anger. Bejar’s head turns into the frame at suitable moments throughout the song, facilitating breaks in the dance in alteration with the Asian woman’s now-former lover. As the last verse finishes, the woman in red leaves the restaurant with her new lover, walking past the older man, who is still quietly enraged. She ignores his presence completely.

Outside, the young man opens the passenger door of his car (a DeLorean, naturally), offering it to her. But the woman in red looks away and walks down the street, proudly alone and self-reliant. Bejar sings as she strides into the city on her own, repeating, “walk away.” “Walk away.”

Maybe that should be one of my alternate careers in case academics doesn’t work out. Music video director.

Canada Could Use a New Species of Conservative

2011-01-31T22:17:00.001-05:00

The only politician whose twitter feed I follow is Canadian Industry Minister Tony Clement. The vast majority of politicians’ twitter feeds are written by PR interns, and consist almost entirely of announcements of speeches and press conferences, or links to press releases that state generic party policies, except with greater vapidity.

But someone retweeted Tony Clement joking about some absurd piece of popular culture. Intrigued, I read through his profile and discovered a fan not just of sports, but of science fiction. I discovered a man who seems to be a genuine nerd for technological innovations. We have quite a few common follows as well. Clement follows a lot of my more noteworthy journalist friends, which is probably expected for a politician to follow reporters who may soon work on him. But he also follows some of the same weird celebrities I do, like David Lynch, Leonard Nimoy, Conan O’Brien, and Kanye West.

After I spoke with my friends who read far more tech news than I do this weekend, I became incensed at the CRTC ruling having the effect that independent internet service providers, although nominally allowed to compete with large companies whose physical networks they used, would not be permitted to offer more bandwidth than the ISP plans of those larger companies. This would severely restrict internet access in Canada, making it practically unaffordable to many businesses and individuals. Coffeeshops, for example, could no longer offer free wifi, and probably lose their shirts along with the lagging customers buying endless coffees, pastries, and sandwiches while they sit in a warm coffeeshop on a freezing winter afternoon.

So I sent a twitter letter to Tony Clement. In eleven tweets, I explained my major complaints and my idea that a truly pro-business government would encourage investment in the bandwidth infrastructure for small ISP businesses to thrive, possibly even without having to rely on the networks of large telecom corporations. That was the main positive contribution to my critique.

I was chuffed when I got home today to check my e-mail, and found a direct message in my twitter inbox from Clement. It was a quick notice to watch his website for a more detailed statement on the ISP ruling, but nonetheless, it was a direct message to me from a minister of the party whose platform I am largely the most distant from in the entire parliament of my country.

Mind you, the actual statement was pretty underwhelming in terms of spelling out any actual position the government was taking on the issue. But they did acknowledge that the ruling conformed to the lobbying efforts of a major network owner, without naming that company, which was Bell. I will likely never be a fan of Stephen Harper, but if Clement listens to the knowledge of well-informed Canadians who understand how harmful the bandwidth restrictions unfolding from this ruling will be to the country, there will be at least one Conservative in the party who I think is pretty okay.

For most politicians, pretty okay is like getting a high A. Not an A with distinction (that’s an alright), but it’s about as high as a politician can get until I become the industry or education minster in about twenty or so years.

Universally Rejected

2011-01-28T10:12:00.003-05:00

One element of what I love about the internet is that random pieces of hilarity like this show up, The Journal of Universal Rejection. It perfectly illustrates one of the silliest paradoxes of academic culture, while working on multiple levels, especially given the weird philosophy I’ve been working on.

So the first interpretation I’ll explore is the simple satire. Academic journals have a way of measuring their relative prestige that I find remarkably strange. A journal gains prestige based on how many submissions they reject. Now, there are other criteria of prestige, like the age of the journal, the number of articles it has published that became pivotal in the evolution of its field, the reputations of its editors or regular contributors. But the shorthand prestige marker is the sheer statistical likelihood (or lack thereof) of actually having your submitted essay accepted for publication. If a PhD candidate like me gets an essay published in a journal with a 75% rejection rate, an established (if snobbish) professor or colleague may dismiss it as a relatively unimportant venue. “Oh, you had a one in four chance. Anyone could have made that!” But if you make it into a journal with a 95% rejection rate, that garners much more prestige.

Of course, anyone who actually knows how statistics works knows that this reduction of a peer evaluation, editing, and selection process to a fraction (1/4, 1/20) is a hideous oversimplification of an extremely complex process. But in most conversation, even among the supposedly most educated members of the human population, this little number is all that matters.

Academics themselves often take the criteria of a high rejection rate for granted, I think just because they’ve been acculturated to the idea for so long. Like the best satire, the Journal of Universal Rejection takes this simple principle and carries it to its logical extreme, so we can see how stupid it really is for measuring the worthiness of a journal. If a higher rejection rate equals greater prestige, then the most prestigious possible journal will have the highest possible rejection rate: 100%. Literally no essay is good enough for its high standards.

We find this ridiculous, but the principle we’ve used to arrive at the ridiculous is taken for granted and makes perfect sense. If we’re as intelligent as we say we are, we re-evaluate just how useful for living is this principle that we’ve never bothered to question before. This is how satire can sometimes push us into ambitious and interesting philosophy.

As I thought about it this morning, The Journal of Universal Rejection also has some meaning for my own ideas about ethics based on singularity. One of the problems I face when trying to articulate this ethical point of view is that it seems to paralyze activity. It starts from a principle that’s arrived through an ontological investigation, an examination of how the world is. That principle is that every situation and every individual is a singularity, a unique body that differs at least in some degree from every other. The result is that any universal principle or proposition will be a generalization that misses some of the singular features of the bodies to which it applies. A proposition that applies to many bodies in common won’t take into account various differences among those bodies. If it did, then it wouldn’t be able to apply to all of them.

This means that any universal proposition can’t be necessarily valid: some difference among its members that the proposition doesn’t account for can create effects that render the proposition useless. To put it more poetically: Reality rebels against any attempt at unity. Or to put it more happily: Existence can surprise us at any time.

In order for a set of universal principles and propositions to hold, those rebellious features of reality have to be set aside. If the people who hold those universal principles and propositions want to maintain the widespread belief in the truth of their system, they have to convince people that these rebellious singularities do not in fact exist. The universal principle rejects the reality that surprises it. If enough of reality becomes surprising to the universal system that the rejections can no longer be ignored, then the system becomes ridiculous, like a government or corporation that denies reality.

Think of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad telling the United Nations that there are no homosexuals in Iran, or a British Petroleum executive telling Louisiana residents that there isn’t anything serious about Deepwater Horizon. These statements become ridiculous because reality has escaped their systems of universal propositions which tell us that the singularities we can plainly see cannot possibly exist.

From ontology to ethics to politics in four paragraphs. Would anyone try to say philosophy is useless now?

Nobility in Barbarous Times

2011-01-23T12:26:00.004-05:00

After a slightly circuituous journey, my dvd of Werner Herzog’s Invincible has finally arrived this week. The company delivered the wrong dvd at first, a film of the same name released the same year, starring Billy Zane as an immortal swordsman turning against his people to fight for humanity. The film that I actually wanted to watch was Herzog’s adaptation of the life story of Zische Breitbart, an early twentieth century Jewish strongman into a parable about justice, hope, and kindness in 1932 Berlin starring Jouko Ahola and Tim Roth.

Invincible is the story of a naive Jewish blacksmith in eastern Poland who becomes a famous strongman performer in Berlin, and a lightning rod for tensions between the rising Nazi party and the local Jewish community. The story begins when Breitbart gets into a fight in a restaurant with some local anti-Semites, and competes against a travelling strongman for a prize to pay back the damages. He’s seen by an agent, who books him to perform in a variety/occult club in Berlin, working for Tim Roth, a hypnotist and clairvoyant who is cruel and demeaning to his lover Anna Gourari, and is courting for a position of power in the Nazi party. Ahola is first dressed up as Siegfried in a blonde wig and viking armor, but eventually decides to be true to his own identity and declare himself the new Samson. The real Breitbart died in 1925, but Herzog uses the man as inspiration for this story.

The more of his films I watch, the more satisfied I am at my choice of Herzog to be the centre of this philosophical project. Having familiarized myself with his classic period, 1970-82, I can easily spot the common themes and ideas in his more contemporary work that originated there. The faux-metaphysical proto-new-age nonsense that Roth spouts onstage during his hypnotism act reflects Herzog’s irritation at the attitudes of most professional hypnotists that he developed while working on Heart of Glass. It also brought a smile to my face when I recognized Herzog's son Rudolph, himself a magician, in a cameo as the club's magician, and Herzog's voice denouncing Ahola from off camera. Invincible is the most direct engagement Herzog ever made in his work with what he calls the barbarism of the Nazi period. Even here, he never addresses the war directly: he doesn’t need to, because in 2001, when the movie was made, we all know what will happen.

One thing that struck me when I was researching the film was the criticism of its acting. Among the three leads, only Tim Roth is an actor by trade. Jouko Ahola is a strongman athlete, and Anna Gourari is a classical pianist (her performance of Beethoven’s third sonata is the centrepiece of the film’s story and the fulfillment of the character arcs of herself and Ahola). Roth gives a highly nuanced performance, embodying stealth, viciousness, ambition, while slowly engendering sympathy as his plans are ruined. Ahola, in comparison, is almost naive in the transparency of his performance; Gourari is stilted and uncomfortable at almost all moments when she isn’t playing piano.

But watching the film, particularly the development of its story, the style of performance was itself integral to the narrative. Invincible doesn’t really have a plot, if by plot you understand events that push the characters to a climax. It has a storyline: these three characters are brought together and transform each other’s lives, physically and ethically. Roth’s hypnotist is a con man who has lived his entire life as a series of cruel deceptions, and when he meets Ahola, he presumes that this Jewish performer in Berlin will also embrace a new identity. But Ahola’s strongman is honest about himself, his feelings, and his motivations. He tears away his disguise because the only way for him to live is to be who he is.

Ahola’s strength is obvious, physical, part of his very identity. Roth’s strength comes from his mind, his ability to deceive and manipulate: physically weak, he finds ways to turn the strength of others to his advantage. He succeeds with Ahola at first, but the strongman eventually learns how to direct his strength of body and character in a more noble direction as a symbol for the confidence of his people. The simplicity of his performance fits the simplicity of his character’s spirit, given purpose in collision with a duplicitous man. Herzog created in his Breitbart a flickering beacon of nobility of spirit in a descent into barbarous times.

Here's the trailer that Peter Zeitlinger, the cinematographer, uploaded to youtube himself.

Overcoming the Sentimentality of My Country

2011-01-17T00:03:00.002-05:00

The last two weeks have been quite heavily packed with activity, most of it having to do with work. I’ve been so busy with teaching, writing philosophy essays and thesis chapters, and taking part in the hiring process for our department’s new position that I haven’t had time to blog, and hardly had time to drink. I even missed the New Years Day edition of the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show, and when I miss Craig Charles, you know I’m working seriously hard.

But I came across an article that has gotten me rightfully upset, or at least a tad cross. The Sentimentalists is the novel that won the Giller Prize last year, and its publication history seemed at first to be an uplifting tale of the surprising success of a nearly defeated underdog. Johanna Skibsrud wrote a novel, and couldn’t get it published by any of the big houses, so she eventually went with the small Gaspereau Press, who printed a limited run. The book was sent to a few influential critics who liked it enough to include on the Giller longlist, and it found itself on the shortlist, then took the top prize. There’s a softcover run on a major publishing label, and triumph was had.

This article sums up all the underhanded dealing that has resulted in this remarkably corrupt Giller win. I think I have something to add to this debate, however, which has less to do with the corruption of the Giller judges and the idiocy of Skibsrud’s publishers, and more to do with my ideas about Canadian literature generally. I didn’t know much about The Sentimentalists when it initially won the Giller, but having this accolade made me at least slightly interested in reading it. The books that I picked up on the gift card Mother sent me for Xmas (Bolaño’s Antwerp is done, Berlin Alexanderplatz is in progress, and Finnegans Wake looms before me, and I might blog my thoughts on it, like I did with Proust last year) are still not read yet. But once I read that article, The Sentimentalists stopped being interesting for me. Here’s why.

It’s rural, it’s cold, and its central character is a Canadian stereotype, the cruel buffoon. In other words, The Sentimentalists embodies everything that I’ve come to hate about Canadian literature, and that everyone else in the world who knows anything about Canadian literature hates about it too. I think this image of Canadian literature as being about rural, isolated existence is popular, but I think it’s exactly what keeps people from being more attracted to Canadian literature. The article I linked is right when it says that the rural Canadian novel doesn’t even represent the country anymore, now that Canada is more urban and suburban. Canada is also far less white, less Christian, and far more technologically savvy than the traditionally defined ‘Canadian novel’ makes it out to be.

The most interesting point of view for me is trying to work out how a fiction with a Canadian identity can reflect that urbanity without sounding like an American big city novel; or how we can reflect our multiethnic population without becoming a typical immigrant novel. I don’t really have a program, and I don’t want one, because I no longer believe that programs and manifestos really inspire creativity. They’re just easy to follow in a superficial history course.

Creative experimentation is probably the best route, but I do have ideas about basic ground rules of what not to do, and an inkling of what the most productive paths of development might be. Very clearly, what not to do is rely on the old stereotypes of the Canadian novel, the kind of survival themes that Margaret Atwood talked about in her thematically eponymous book, or the rural settings that aren’t as important to the lives of Canadians anymore. And it’s best not to fall too much in line with the major American fiction archetypes like the urban decay novel or the Western. Books about the underbelly of downtown Vancouver or the exploration of the Rockies or the North could definitely be interesting, but maybe not the most progressive.

Science fiction elements might end up being interesting, because sci-fi life is the kind of direction human civilization is moving in right now. We may not have underwater bubble cities, but we do have Wikileaks and hacker culture.

There’s a political attitude in Canada that I think is best called necessary humility. We’ve always been politically independent, but we live in the shadow of the United States. So while we’re part of the former dominating class of Earth’s powers, Canada has never really dominated anyone. I think that gives us a perspective on the shifting alignment of the world that’s more of a detatched observer than an angsty falling empire, like the USA. A Canadian can take a more ironic perspective on the shift of global power to China, India, and Brazil than any of the former world powers like America, Europe, or Russia could. They’re all losing something, but we’re not.

And there’s enough people of Asian and African descent in Canada for several generations that immigrant narratives don’t apply to them, but they’ve diversified Canada to the point where they can’t be known as the traditional culture of the majority. A third-generation Indian or African living in Toronto, Montréal, or Vancouver is part of a very different kind of settler community than the white folks were. So I don’t really know what’s going to turn up out of Canada in the future. But as long as it’s not more rural pablum like The Sentimentalists, I’ll probably be happy.
•••

I heard Imelda May’s music on the Craig Charles Funk and Soul Show for the first time this weekend, and I was suitably impressed by a fiery smart beautiful Irish woman who sings ridiculously frenetic rockabilly. She also does a cover of “Tainted Love” that blows Marilyn Manson AND Soft Cell away, along with the versions by Inspiral Carpets, and definitely better (and better looking) than the Pussycat Dolls version.

Keep Your Daughters Out of Ballet

2010-12-30T12:13:00.002-05:00

Darren Aronofsky and I have a troubled relationship. I think his films are brilliantly constructed, but so viscerally disturbing that I can never watch them more than once. At the same time, there’s a ridiculousness to them that I find funny in those few moments of relief from bodily terror. The Wall Street and Kabbalistic conspirators who hunt the protagonist in Pi are so amateurish that they become fools. If Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream wasn’t so pathetic, her hallucinations of a jumping and belching fridge would set me cackling. If the endings of these films weren’t so unsettling, they’d be black comedies. Maybe that’s the best way to characterize the general tenor of Aronofsky’s work (The Fountain aside): black comedies for sociopaths.

Dennis Lim at Slate examines the weird sense of humour in Black Swan, which I saw last week and thought was pretty amusing in that ridiculous way. I wasn’t really sure what to make of Natalie Portman’s performance, though. I have a good friend who has gone through the gauntlet of professional ballet, and from what she’s told me, Portman’s psychological breakdown is horrifyingly accurate to the mental state of the average professional ballet dancer.

These are people treated more as machines than humans, driven into anorexia and hideous personal collapse. Nina in Black Swan is a perfect illustration of the double bind of ballet dancers. She’s pressured to stay grotesquely thin, while her work requires tense athleticism. She’s molded into a concept of femininity as innocent childish asexuality, then sexually manipulated by her director and the demands of a role that she has no concept of how to portray.

Her hallucinations as she loses her grip on reality are multifaceted and fascinating, and constitute the character just as much as the actual performance and dialogue. The self-mutilation is a typical Aronofsky stomach-churner, and the autonomous mirror images are typical Aronofsky techniques to unsettle you mentally. Some of her swan transformations are actively hilarious, and the final black swan dance sequence is genuinely beautiful, a triumph of the character, which because this is an Aronofsky film, doesn’t last.

What Lim describes as the biggest aesthetic puzzle to the film is where it lands in the matrix of camp. Everyone in this film is an over the top caricature except Natalie Portman. Mila Kunis plays the less-talented oversexed party girl. Barbara Hershey is the overbearing self-obsessed hyper-possessive mother. Vincent Cassel is a walking cliché of a genius greaseball director. It helps that he’s French. Winona Ryder’s bitter, forcibly retired diva is the most obvious throwback to Showgirls, which I am increasingly convinced is slowly becoming one of the most influential films of the end of the twentieth century.

Now look at Natalie Portman in the middle of all this. Her character has no sense of humour at all: every situation she’s in is heightened to an incredible emotional intensity. Everyone in the film understands, to some degree, the ridiculousness of the world of professional ballet. It’s the most campy, over the top, laughably zany of all the traditionally high arts. Everyone can see, to some degree, the partial silliness of this world. Except Nina.

She takes all this with an immense seriousness, giving weighty significance to everything that happens to her. Her mother, sitting in her studio of mediocre self-portraits, has some sense of what a cartoon she is: that’s what she paints. Her director talks the pretentious talk when he’s wooing investors, but he knows it’s all a matter of kissing ass. Her rival just loves looking good on stage and getting laid. But for Nina, Swan Lake is the culmination of her existence. The tragic dimension of the movie is seeing that such a serious, perfectionist attitude ultimately gains you nothing. If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that if you're considering enrolling your four year old daughter in ballet, watch this movie first, and make sure she understands what kind of thinking will turn her into Nina.

The next day, I ended up seeing Tron, which was awesome, and 3D, and had Jeff Bridges in it.

Crippled By Moral Sensitivity

2010-12-16T11:17:00.000-05:00

A very funny moment happened during my first public reading of my short fiction. A friend was outside stumping for me, trying to get passersby along the Hamilton Art Crawl where I was performing to come inside and listen to me. One person asked my friend who I was, and she said that I was a PhD student in philosophy. This person then walked away faster.

I can understand that reaction. Academics and literature rarely go well together. It’s a very strange development to watch university MFA programs become the thriving new home for American short fiction. But those programs are actual creative writing programs, there to teach people how to write literature itself. They’re more like trade schools than academic institutions. And the MFA creative writing programs I’ve visited myself are free of a lot of the pretention and elitist attitudes of high-level academic institutions. Academics are often taught to keep their language dry, free from controversy, easily understandable, unchallenging, to stay away from ambition or broad scopes of meaning. I’ve never gotten along well with these academics, and I’ve worked best with philosophers who are just as hostile and apathetic toward the boring aspects of academic writing as I am.

But now that I have enough stories for a full set list myself, I’ve actually looked at my completed works so far and noticed an interesting trend. Half (or more, depending on whether you include writing about students and not just academic professionals) of my completed stories so far are about philosophers. Perhaps I’ve internalized the stereotypical adage of ‘Write what you know,’ because I’ve definitely gotten to know university and academic culture pretty well over the last few years. However, I think there’s a larger point that has snuck into my thoughts, which has to do with what kind of stories and what kind of characters I find interesting.

I’m most intrigued, as a writer, with hypocrisy. I’m not against hypocrisy per se; I never explicitly denounce hypocrisy in any of my fiction works – neither the stories or my novel. I’m a hypocrite myself. But I find that hypocrisy and inconsistency of character makes for the most intriguing literature. I’ve never been all that interested in literature about characters who have no internal conflicts and just deal with problems that arise around them. I’m not into plots. I don’t like narratives structured around things happening. I’m far more fascinated by narratives that reveal strange, multifaceted characters. Inconsistency in the beliefs and desires that are most important to your character makes for an amazing literary exploration.

I think this is the more profound reason why my ideas for stories keep coming back to philosophers. We’re the so-called lovers of wisdom. It’s in the etymology of the name of the fucking profession. A wise person is supposed to be a person without serious internal conflict, a person without hypocrisy. We call people wise who can guide people out of personal conflict and into more harmonious lives. Philosophers study ethics itself, so our own ethical beliefs we often hold to a higher standard than those of people outside the profession.

The ethical and personal obligations of a philosopher for consistency in living and freedom from internal conflict are at their highest intensity. A philosopher who becomes aware of his or her own hypocrisy or inconsistency of character is going to have the most intense conflict, because of all professions, philosophers have more skills to analyze these concepts and so understand their own internal conflicts more deeply than others who may not have been trained to be as articulate with ethical concepts. “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” which I just submitted to University of Toronto’s Echolocation fiction journal this afternoon, explores the disconnects from reality that can happen when you firmly believe that knowledge makes one moral. “My Perfect Lover” explores the hypocrisy of a man whose desires and emotions lead him to use his skills of reasoning and argument to defend a regime of slavery that he knows to be wrong. I have an untitled story in draft form about a professor whose drive to discover through philosophical argument the nature of a perfectly benevolent God turns him into a bitter old man incapable of love.

I thought of another idea today about a philosopher, the idea that made me realize that my profession was such a frequent subject for my fiction. This philosopher is so deeply committed to his utilitarian ethical beliefs and arguments, that the rich should give almost all they can to alleviate poverty, that the North is morally obligated to bankrupt themselves to feed the South. But as he comes to this ethical stance, he realizes that the institution of the university is incorrigably inegalitarian: according to his deeply held ethical beliefs, he shouldn’t hold a position that trains upper class elites of affluent North Americans and be paid from the profits gained from forcing thousands of young people each year into crushing student loan debt. But by the time he figures this out, he has his own family to support: children to feed and put through school. By his own philosophical beliefs, he should sacrifice the well-being of his three children to alleviate the pain of suffering millions. But when he goes home to see his own kids, he can’t. So he goes back to a job he hates every day.

Perhaps one day, I’ll publish a collection of stories about philosophers and their conflicts and hypocrisies. I might call it Thinkers. Perhaps it will be valuable.

Arrogance Is Philosophy’s Most Widespread Paradox

2010-12-12T22:01:00.000-05:00

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been building myself a tidy little transdisciplinary specialty that I like to call Critical Theory of Knowledge. The essays I’ve presented and published through the Book Conferences in 2010 in Switzerland and 2009 in Edinburgh are my major public efforts in this so far. But a kindly old professor once told me that it’s always good for a philosopher’s career if you can put something to do with knowledge and/or epistemology somewhere prominent on your CV. This suits me pretty well.

My main thrust is, at heart, to take knowledge and rationality off its high horse, without falling into the traps of post-modernism that would keep me from being read by people who still venerate rationality. Preaching to the choir might be an easy way to sell books, but I never took the easy way out. In my two published essays, I examine how peer review works in academic journals, and how attitudes of arrogance on the part of professors, editors, and article reviewers can stifle creative, unorthodox ideas, and render a field of study moribund and stagnant. My critique goes something like this: If someone has worked hard enough, and become widely recognized as an expert in their field, then they tend to take their own ideas as gospel. They’re the expert, after all, so their perspective on their field is the same as the truth. When someone disputes that perspective, the first response of a typical expert, working under this premise, is that the disputer is wrong. I wrote about this last week, so you can just scroll down to 3 December for a more detailed treatment of the argument.

Attitude is far more important to disseminating and taking seriously novel creative approaches to a field than most people generally realize. With this focus on attitude in mind, I remembered a curious commonality in my academic life. Keep in mind that this is entirely anecdotal, but what’s most important to take away from this story is not a certain truth, but an intriguing idea, a particular point of view, a conceptual nudge to the ribs.

Some of the most arrogant, curmudgeonly professors that I’ve ever met, the quickest and most vicious attackers of ideas that didn’t fit with their own established conclusions, were all devotees of Benedict de Spinoza.

A confession: I haven’t read an entire book by Spinoza in its entirety until this past week. Actually, I was emphatically turned off Spinoza’s philosophy by the egotistical and pretentious way it was presented to me in a class I took when I was 19. Spinoza wasn’t even on the class curriculum, but the professor would go on and on about “the divine beauty of Spinoza” in a way that communicated none of the important ideas, and just delayed us from covering the actual course material. With my current doctoral project using many ideas from the ontology of Gilles Deleuze, important background reading has turned out to be Spinoza. Deleuze’s big book on Spinoza, Expressionism, was the first presentation of his philosophy that made me feel good about it. This week, I’ve barrelled through Spinoza’s Ethics. And I’ve found something very intriguing.

Spinoza’s book Ethics is a philosophical guide to living. It’s written as a series of geometry-style proofs about the nature of God, existence, thought, emotion, and reason whose ultimate goal is to indicate how one can live through the guidance of reason, and so live a life of joy and exultation in existence itself. Pretentious? Maybe more than a little. Uplifting? Inspiring? Definitely! How could such a book, written with such sincerity by such a generous, magnanimous, and admirable personality inspire such arrogance among some of its devotees? The picture assembled itself slowly, but I’m convinced that I’ve worked out how it happens.

Spinoza has little time for people who live according to their emotions alone. They’re passive before the fluctuating situations of life, living as slaves to forces beyond their control. Part four of five, on how emotions can wreck someone’s thinking and personality, is actually titled “Of Human Bondage.” And he’s a master of the subtle burn. Reading the Ethics, I find myself laughing at a book laid out like a mathematical proof, because of the cunning ways he inserts light-hearted jabs about people who let their emotions carry them away, or who generally don’t think and live “guided by reason.”

And then it hit me. It was a sudden realization, which one should generally mistrust, but as I thought about it, the idea just made so much sense. Part four (Of Human Bondage), proposition 73, in the elaboration paragraphs labelled Scholium, Spinoza describes how the strong person is a person who lives guided by reason, a person who “hates nobody, is angry with nobody, envies nobody, is indignant with nobody, despises nobody, and is in no way prone to pride.” Yet when my Spinozist professors spoke to any students, colleagues, or even higher-ranked professors who expressed an idea hesitantly, or lacking detail, or fuzzily, or even just experimentally, the self-declard Spinozist would respond with anger, indignation, and spite. Anyone who articulated an idea with any less than the perfect precision with which Spinoza himself wrote and argued, was dismissed and insulted with great condescension and arrogance.

But sometimes, an idea needs to be given a chance to percolate in one’s thoughts, to drift around conversations, displaying roughness, but also promise. A lack of clarity may obscure a bounty of potential. These self-declared Spinozists of my anecdotes attack and dismiss an idea for lacking that perfect clarity of expression that it may not yet have had time to achieve. Spinoza’s burns and jokes are written with no cruelty, but a pleasant wit. His barbs come with the extended hand of friendship, never the spitefully dismissive spirit that I have heard from the self-declared Spinozists who ruthlessly attack all ideas in progress, unfinished, incomplete. But the same words Spinoza wrote, when delivered with a tone of anger, are words of hatred, rage, and dismissal.

In Switzerland, I spoke about humility as the most difficult, but most important task of a thinker. Humility is the ability to wonder sometimes, whether you are on the right track: The expert must sometimes question his own expertise to avoid destroying the vibrancy of the field to which he’s committed his life. Sometimes, if you dedicate yourself to Spinoza, patron saint of a life lived guided by reason, you can say to yourself, “I’m a follower of Spinoza, so I must be guided by reason. If I’m guided by reason, I must be right, and it’s my duty to stop those who are still in bondage to their lesser instincts, who are not yet guided by reason as I am!”

I hope you see the parallel structure of that thought, and my thought at the start of this post. The first sign that you’re no longer guided by reason is that you no longer think it’s required that you check to see if you’re guided by reason. Spinoza wrote that he who is guided by reason lives free from error, strife, or mistake. But the first and easiest mistake to make is to believe yourself incapable of mistake. That mistake is called pride.

70, 30, 40; 44, 6, 38

2010-12-08T18:01:00.006-05:00

John, et al, "Instant Karma," 1972.

I thought of two ways to understand stars today. One is to look at how little of the sun's energy is actually absorbed by the Earth, and how much is wasted, radiating into space, never used by any intelligent creatures. It can feel like an astronomical waste, an entire star burning away to nothingness for no reason. Or you can think about an enormous body that creates a fire of which we only became capable of imagining a few decades ago, a gigantic ball of gas that lives, pulsating energy for billions of years. It's the difference between burning and shining.

Dimebag, et al, "Revolution Is My Name," 2000.

It's easy to be overshadowed, even though Dimebag was shot by what was as conscious a Mark Chapman ripoff as you could become. History creates some strange patterns, the shapes of which are amazingly difficult to figure out. No one could work out satisfying reasons for these killings even if they had infinite time to live.

Publication Diaries: The Problem with Subtlties

2010-12-03T16:55:00.003-05:00

So I just sent in the publishing contract for my second essay to come out in the International Journal of the Book, “The Danger of Institutional Conservatism in the Humanities.” It will be available in the 2011 edition of the journal, and I’m quite proud of it. I’m not sure if I’d say it’s the best work I’ve done so far, but it’s definitely my most experimental so far that’s being published in an academic journal.

As I learn more about the peer review process, especially its problems and difficulties (for details, see my article in the Book Journal last year), I think interdisciplinary journals are best suited for a lot of my work writing philosophy articles. I’ve come to this conclusion for reasons that will sound very self-serving, if you want to interpret me maliciously. But I think my reasons are actually very insightful, if you interpret me charitably. I personally think it’s a very self-serving insight, but quite insightful nonetheless. I've noticed in academic culture, that the more specialized one’s knowledge is, the more zealously one tends to guard one’s perspectives from critique. In learning more and more about an increasingly specific subject matter, one tends to acknowledge one’s own expertise: At a particular point, different for everyone, one tends to presume that one’s own perspective on the subject matter is the right perspective. “I am the expert,” says the expert, “so my own knowledge is the standard of my field. If it wasn’t the standard, then I wouldn’t be an expert.” These people are very often submission reviewers for the academic journals in their specialty.

This attitude creates a potentially terrible problem for creative thinkers, especially people who are younger and/or less experienced, still trying to establish themselves in their field. Such a young person, a new entrant, may have ideas that differ from the established experts. Being newer to the field, they don’t yet have the experience or prestige that a long career in a specialized field offers. But they may also have innovative new ideas and approaches to their field, which may not be compatible with the approaches of the experts. And if the established expert has come to identify their own way of thinking as the only way of thinking, then that new writer will be rejected. The expert will hold them to be wrong, when the new writer may just be in disagreement or holding a different approach than the expert. The expert will reject their work, preventing an innovative approach from being disseminated.

At this point, I think it should be clear that the person I’ve been calling a specialized expert is better titled an academic curmudgeon.

I think this attitude becomes more prevalent, or at least more likely to encounter, in highly specialized academic environments. This, right now, is just a matter of anecdotal evidence, but the anecdotal evidence is beginning to stack up. What this has to do with my mutually beneficial relationship with interdisciplinary journals is that one is less likely to encounter this attitude in a less specialized academic environment. So my own strange ideas and approaches are more likely to be given a chance than they would be in a highly specialized journal with a greater probability of curmudgeonliness.

My forthcoming essay is a more experimental in form than any essay I’ve attempted to put in the public view. Read by one of my former professors, he described it as uncategorizable into any typical genre or division of philosophy. I took this to be a compliment. He also called it cranky decades beyond my years, which I considered a backhanded compliment. When I presented it at the Book Conference in Switzerland last month, it was received with gaping mouths, and it took a while for the ideas to sink in to the audience. It’s a very dense essay for 4,000 words, and has some subtlties in its tone and language that may not be noticed.

The essay is a continuation of my critique of how academic knowledge is generated, and contains potential solutions to the ways in which a field of knowledge can become moribund, uncreative, and boring. Key to the solution, which I note – there and here – is much easier to talk about than actually to achieve, is an attitude of humility. One of my reviewers had no critiques of the content of my essay, but often told me to remove what s/he called ‘self-referencing,’ sentences starting with ‘I.’ I will admit that I didn’t follow this direction in every case, because I didn’t want to give the essay a tone of pure objectivity and distance that is one of the signs of the arrogance of the expert. When I describe the attitude of humility, the reviewer annotated that I should re-write my introductory sentences to display more of this attitude. It was cheeky, and I laughed, but s/he also didn’t understand the subtle point I was trying to make with my cranky tone.

The most difficult part about inculcating an attitude of humility into academic professionals is that our personalities, and academic society generally, are shaped to make it immensely difficult to have actual humble attitudes. We’re rewarded for being distinctively smarter than our colleagues, and especially the general public. There’s a casual disdain for undergraduates and ordinary students in academic culture that I never really noticed in universities until I was no longer one of those ordinary students. And I’m still uncomfortable with bragging in a non-professional context. It’s difficult for me to accept compliments about my work in philosophy and literature, because of the conflicts it gives me: I want to be a humble, easily-relatable person, but I also want to produce remarkable, superior, inspiring writing.

I tell my friends in the philosophy department how many different and intriguing ideas I have in the course of a week, and I feel awkward when they tell me they don’t have nearly so active a brain. If there’s one thing I don’t want to become, it’s an insufferable genius, even though I can see myself eventually heading for near complete Rain Man territory as I get older. Academics are not humble people, and our increasingly exclusive social circles of other graduate students and eventually other academics and highly educated professionals only encourage that attitude of superiority to everyday people.

So I wrote my essay about encouraging humility in a very superior, bordering on arrogant, tone. It’s an illustration in the tone of the writing itself of how genuinely difficult the task of humility is. It’s written by an arrogant man who knows, despite his own instincts, that his goal of encouraging innovation and works of brilliance (of which he considers much of his own work), will only be achieved by inculcating widespread attitudes of humility. The paradox unfolds along many different levels of articulation.

Brilliant, isn’t it?
•••
In other news, the new Kanye album is absolutely fantastic, and I don’t use the word absolute in a positive sense very often. It’s a very appropriate clip to end a post that talks about the importance of humility.

Switzerland Diary 4: Computers Exist, So Get Over It

2010-11-25T15:09:00.002-05:00

About a month ago, I was talking to my friend Alanda for the first time in over a year. She was visiting her old friends still at McMaster philosophy after having moved to Barrie, gotten a teaching job at a college, and gotten married. One part of our conversation was about a new set of theories floating around educational circles about how to teach Millennials. This was a generation that had an entirely different perceptual understanding of computers, the internet, the temporal structure of the day. Millennials understood privacy, social interaction, how to behave in a classroom, how to learn, entirely differently than the generations before, because of their different relations to computer technology. She described them as a very alien society. It was then that, to her horror, I informed her that, having been born in 1983, I was a Millennial.

Normally, I don’t think this Millennial generational difference is that big a deal. But I saw some stuff at the Book Conference that made me think differently. The Book Conference had a different title when it began eight years ago, The Conference on the Future of the Book. The conference as I’ve come to know it in the last two years has covered many aspects of the phenomenon: literacy, education, book history, publishing business, the analysis of literature itself, intellectual and academic culture, and combinations and convergences of all these disciplines. But among them is a holdover from those early conferences: people who shook in their boots about the destruction of the book.

Their concerns were not Taliban-like anti-literacy movements, which exist and should be taken seriously and combatted. No, they were people scared of ebooks. Any new medium, like the electronic book, is going to have benefits and limitations. One advantage of ebooks is that they can be carried easily in large numbers. A library will be able to fit on an iPad. A limitation is the difficulty of controlling commerce in ebooks. They’ll be easy to download without financial recompense to the writer, so the economy of writers and books will have to change.

But I saw presentations and read essays about the popularization of ebooks that were conservative bordering on hysteria. I saw presentations that sought relevance for the physical book as a figure of fetishized pleasure, the turning of pages and the smell of ink deeply eroticized for the sake of preservation against the onslaught. I reviewed an essay for the journal that used Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts to villify the ebook as destructive of the individual human subject itself.

Every one of these people who were so afraid of ebooks was over thirty years old. They were all pre-Millennial, members of the generation less used to dealing with electronic media, generally less comfortable on the internet, those who find reading from a screen more difficult, an alienating process. It’s such a stupidly hysterical point of view that I can’t really take it seriously. It reminds me of those people who thought the advent of television would destroy cinema. But I’m not going to argue by analogy, because an analogy can be easily argued against: that’s A and B, but this is X and Y, with very different characters.

I still think this point of view, the defense of the paper book against the onslaught of electronic media, is utterly counter-productive to the best thinking on the topics of books and writing. The ebook is a different kind of medium for writing, one that is more mobile, easily distributed, copied, and stored. It will no more destroy literature and publishing than digital video has killed filmmaking. I think, like digital video, the ebook will offer a cheaper distribution method that will allow even more independent writers and presses to flourish, and encourage experimentation with literary techniques and tools. People who don’t understand this, because they’re too old and set in their ways to be comfortable with a new medium of artistic expression, should be quiet and let presentation slots at prestigious conferences go to creative people instead.

Switzerland Diary 3: A Weekend of Stealing Ideas

2010-11-24T12:42:00.001-05:00

What I like best about the International Conference on the Book, apart from the fact that they give me awards and take place in interesting places, some of which I can stay in for free (Ray’s apartment in Edinburgh, one of my many expat friends in Toronto next year), is that it’s an interdisciplinary conference that perfectly matches my career. It’s a venue where I can present and discuss my ideas that fall into the category of meta-philosophy, and there are enough people there talking about the publishing industry that I can brainstorm techniques for Crackjaw. Step one of being a web-based publisher: have a functioning website. I’ll get right on that, business seminar leader.

My own presentation impressed everyone who was there to see it, and because I was the award winner for my essay from the Edinburgh conference last year, I had a packed room in the first speaking session that morning. No one could really think of any questions for me at the end, though. I was told it was pretty dense. But later that day, after they had time to think about it, people from my audience came up to me and had some really interesting discussions about how fields of study can become insular and moribund through the processes like peer review and argument that we often think revitalizes us.

I felt a little bad that I was scheduled opposite my new friend Liz, who I’ve referred to in previous entries as the couch surfer. But there just wasn’t enough audience to go around on a Sunday morning. An art historian presenting on genital lack in statuary should at least be solid academic entertainment and a genuinely intriguing essay. However, I will admit that I'm not a fan of Freudian models of desire as lack. But I couldn't actually make her presentation. Christina, a film theory grad student from University of Iowa, presented an intriguing study of Hmong-American literature. It was interesting to see the reactive generation writing about their experiences breaking away from the conservative culture of their immigrant parents. But for me, the really interesting stuff will come from the generation in the Hmong community after this one: right now, their authors are too polarized between being purely American or purely Hmong. It’ll be another couple of decades before there are young authors capable of genuine play.

Corrine, my friend that I met at last year’s Book Conference, presented an ancient (for us, anyway; it was three years old) paper about Charlotte Brontë’s use of writing in her work as a sign of freedom from gender constraint. For me, secret megalomaniac that I am, the best part about her presentation was a single line, which I think she improvised and that I can’t even remember, that spurred me to an idea for a chapter in my planned book about philosophical ethics written through dialogue with Herzog movies. I figured out how to structure a chapter that explained how Herzog crafted his duty to New German Cinema, and through that his duty to rebuild Germany itself as a civilized country, and explained the ethical power of the duties that he demanded of himself and the world. It included his relation to the Silent Expressionists, Lotte Eisner the film critic, his strangely totemic walk from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter, and thematic analyses of Fata Morgana, Heart of Glass, and Nosferatu 1978. So thank you, Corrine, for the inspiration, even if it was utterly unintentional on both our parts.

Mathilde is a very short scholar of ancient Greek philosophy doing a PhD at UQAM, who presented a fascinating essay about the mythologization of Aristotle’s library in ancient Greece, examining different ways to relate to books as physical and mythical objects because of the different ways that books are produced and passed on in that civilization. If I can steal another Herzog phrase, it was about the ecstatic truth of Aristotle’s library rather than the actual facts of the case, which didn’t really matter to her point. The idea is to see what kind of philosophical insights we can take from the historical narrative – the facts of that historical narrative are only incidental, and should serve the philosophy without restraining it from undue fidelity to facts.

Liz, Corrine, Christina, and Mathilde were the other graduate students at the conference who I spent the most time with, and I'm very glad I did. That's all.

Switzerland Diary 2: Sausage, Chocolate, and Beer

2010-11-23T10:15:00.002-05:00

The title says it all: I finally have my priorities straight in this blog. Now that the negative aspects of the trip are out of the way, there’s the positive, which was considerable.

The only problem I had with the food was that it was too damn expensive. And the only problem I had with the places that served the food was that the entire country of Switzerland apparently closes on Sundays, so there was nowhere I could actually eat for an entire day. I have decided that during this winter, I’m going to learn how to make rosti, a kind of shredded crispy potato, and hope only that it doesn’t require too much labour to prepare myself. This is why I’ll probably never make my own sushi. But the healthy portions of rosti with a large gravy-drenched sausage and a tube of hot mustard sauce from Saturday night was probably the best meal I had while I was there. The waiter was a jerk, and I think I inadvertently insulted him. So I think we were both equally jerks.

The downtown chocolate shop that we were first shown during the terrifyingly punctual walking tour was very good to me, supplying me with glasses of the best hot chocolate I think I’ve ever had, and my souveniers of surprisingly affordable milk chocolate squares. I did purposely seek the cheap stuff that would fit most easily in my suitcase.

The hotel had the best hotel food I think I’ve ever experienced, and it will be difficult for most hotels I can afford to top this display. Hotel Sonne-Rotmonten had freshly baked bread and croissants every morning, with substantial packets of blueberry jam and marmalade to go along with them. There was also a tray of assorted meats, all of which were flavourful and spicy, next to a fruitbowl and a mini-fridge containing carafes of juice and milk for the people. I think conference delegates were the only guests in the hotel that weekend, as we had the entire north dining room to ourselves.

I did not go to the official conference dinner because it cost $US90. But I stopped by at the end to let my friend Corrine know that everything else in Switzerland was closed, so we wouldn’t be going anywhere to drink after dinner. We did, however, finish as much of the wine that was left as possible. There was a very pleasant fellow from the RAND Corporation at the conference who had indulged far more than I had the chance to. We left the restaurant at 10.45, which was just enough time for Corrine to catch the last bus back to her hostel. Yes, it was the last bus coming at only 11.00, because Switzerland closes on Sundays.

My last Swiss dinner was at a fondue restaurant that my couch surfing friend’s host took us to. However, I did not have fondue as that many carbs would combine with that much cheese to constitute a terrible, terrible crime against my hotel room’s toilet that night. So while everyone around me dipped bread in boiling cheese, I ate an enormous breaded pork steak. I also had a pint of Hefeweizen that I genuinely enjoyed for the first time in my life. I think central European water is just better suited to making Hefewiezen.

The default mode of coffee was espresso. It was served at my hotel in the morning, and at multiple times of the day during the conference. I found it making me tired during the withdrawal periods again, the negative impact of regular coffee intake beginning to re-assert itself. At least the hotel’s espresso was actually good. I surmised that the conference services at the university gave us the same espresso that they sold to the students.

Switzerland Diary 1: Unreality Stuck in Time

2010-11-22T11:50:00.000-05:00

So even though it’s been two weeks since I returned from Europe, I’ve only gotten the chance to write my experience of Switzerland now. I’m not exactly bound by the constant pressure for timeliness that the internet supposedly demands. My recollections will be slightly fragmentary, because there was no real narrative to my long weekend there. Honestly, it all seems a little surreal, in ways that I hope will become clear. I consider the fragments of my trip to be a reaction to the absurd punctuality of that country. I have never been on a walking tour of a city that ended precisely on time before I went to St Gallen, and I hope I never will again.

The punctuality of the place was quite unnerving to me, and the general perfection of the place was as well. I appreciate the beauty of the city and the country surrounding it, but it all seemed a little too perfect to be real. From my hotel window, I could see the entire city, as my building rested about halfway up a small mountain on the southern side of St Gallen. The entire city stretched out underneath me from my north-facing window. It honestly looked fake. I found it hard to believe that people actually lived there until I was actually in the thick of the city walking around downtown. It was as if the entire city was constructed as a film set, according to directions from a hack producer that consisted entirely of Swiss stereotypes.

The country was genuinely beautiful, however, and the people seemed very pleasant. One of the other graduate students presenting there was couch surfing with one of the locals. The couch’s owner had actually been to Canada, hiking in the Rockies. He was actually quite impressed by our mountain range, and one could consider it superior to the Alps in one important way. Hiking in the Alps, you’re always within sight of some cottage at the very least. The Canadian Rockies had mountain vistas and trails aesthetically equal to the Swiss Alps, but with the advantage that you were genuinely in the wilderness. Humanity in central Europe is inescapable.

There was one aspect of Swiss culture that did deeply disturb me, more than I thought it would, since I knew it existed going in. It’s one thing to think abstractly about culturally pervasive racism, but it’s another thing to see the posters and the physical behaviour of the people. In Zürich’s main train station, there were posters advocating the Yes side of another referendum to remove rights of legal immigrants who commit crimes in Switzerland. And the posters were of a sad-faced black sheep being angrily kicked over a border by a white sheep. My friend André, who comes from French-speaking Switzerland, described the people as not being “tender.” The word seems quite apt, implying a rigid, static, immovable quality to their hostility to foreigners, a congenital lack of empathy for the different.

The station itself was an amazing piece of architecture, an enormous stone framework for archways stretching at least three stories high from the indoor space alone. It was so open to outside breezes that it was no trouble to smoke in the station. The archways were the trains, and the pedestrians came in were so enormous that the station was more like a stone canopy, barely enclosed at all. Even inside, you were outside.

Similarity Is Not a Sign of Intention

2010-11-14T11:38:00.002-05:00

After performing a reasonably successful public reading of my short fiction, some misconceptions about my work have arisen in a manner typical of the Ontarian chattering classes. To set the record straight, I’ve spoken with literature and film critic Albert Nikos of Fictional Magazine.

Nikos: I’ll cut right to the chase, Riggio. Your story, “Mobilization of the Oppressed,” contained a central character who was very obviously satirizing your professors.

Riggio: That was most certainly not the case.

Nikos: Come on! The professor in that story runs his class like a dictator, utterly convinced of the power of his own ego. He’s totally condescending to all of his students, especially the women. He’s completely ignorant of any critique of a philosophical idea that isn’t strictly about the argument and its logical structure. He’s a pure ivory tower academic of the worst kind. Now who is he!?

Riggio: Professor Winchester is Professor Winchester. It’s as simple as that. I didn’t even think of a first name for him. He didn’t need one for the story, so I didn’t give him one.

Nikos: Well, where did the name Winchester come from? Surely it’s a reference to the British background of some of your professors at the McMaster philosophy department?

Riggio: He’s named after Dr Charles Emerson Winchester III, who David Ogden Stiers played on MASH. Actually, some of the folks in the audience thought I was making fun of the philosophy of law chair in the department, because the character talked about legal theory, and I read his lines with a deep voice. But I wasn’t making fun of any individual person. I was making fun of an attitude, showing the limitations of a particular way of thinking.

Nikos: And who among your professors demonstrates this way of thinking?

Riggio: You’re not going to catch me so easily, Albert. Everyone does, at some point in their thoughts. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a professor, graduate student, undergrad, secretary, janitor, or whatever. Anyone, when there’s any career path in which they can say that they were more knowledgeable than others, can think that they’re better than others. If we don’t check ourselves, or the outside world doesn’t check ourselves for us, we can all become as arrogant and dismissive as Dr Winchester. It’s the mind set of anyone who’s come to believe their own hype, someone who believes that they’re always right, and obviously right. So anyone who disagrees with them is either just plain wrong, or else they’re talking from a perspective that doesn’t count.

Nikos: What do you mean by that? A perspective that doesn’t count.

Riggio: Well, look at the character of Roshan in “Mobilization of the Oppressed.” She’s actually the central character, by the way, not Winchester.

Nikos: But Winchester has the most lines.

Riggio: But Roshan is the catalyst of the action, the knife that punctures his balloon of hot air.

Nikos: Or in this case, puts a bullet in it.

Riggio: Let’s not spoil the entire story.

Nikos: Sometimes, I can’t resist. It was just so delightfully weird.

Riggio: See, that’s the heart of the conflict right there. Roshan is delightfully weird, an event that shatters the illusions of perfect rationality and security. “Mobilization of the Oppressed” is just as much a critique of philosophy as it is a skewering of that kind of arrogant personality. Roshan is a contrarian, someone who isn’t comfortable kowtowing to authority because she’s seen legitimate authority at its most oppressive and violent. She’s left the oppression of Tehran, which was responsible for the death of her father, as I insinuate in that line where I describe him as having been disappeared.

Nikos: That was a clever touch.

Riggio: Thank you. But philosophy is a tradition that worships reason. That’s why Winchester always refers back to Plato, because we still think of ourselves, still too often in my opinion, as footnotes to Plato. We’re good democrats and liberals today, even the conservatives. So we always disagree with Plato’s Republic when he writes about a totalitarian dictatorship of the wise, Philosopher-Kings as society’s great planners. That’s because we’re uncomfortable with authoritarian political systems. That’s one way in which Roshan’s experience is put into tension. But philosophy as a tradition still believes in reason as being the paramount virtue. We always ask people to be reasonable, we believe that smart people should be in charge, that having the best knowledge results in the best political action when those people with the best knowledge are in charge. What Roshan does is problematize knowledge, call its value into question when she talks about political corruption and abuse of the vulnerable in society. You must have great knowledge of a political and legal system in order to manipulate it to your advantage. It’s that dark side of knowledge that Winchester doesn’t see, even as he’s an agent of it.

Nikos: You’re talking about the way he always talks down to Roshan, how that’s a kind of abuse of his power as a professor to control debate. He cuts her off, puts words in her mouth, even calls her questions nonsense.

Riggio: And it’s not just Winchester! She’s the only girl in that seminar, and I included lines insinuating that the male students in the class are always staring at her, and never sticking up for her or helping defend her against Winchester’s abuse. That’s the more insidious kind of oppression that we have in the West. In Tehran, if you’re undesirable, they come to your house and shoot you. It’s very honest. In Chicago, where the story takes place, or New York, or Toronto, or Dallas, or anywhere, undesirables are slowly worn down. People who are different think they have space to live as they want, think they’re respected and accepted by their neighbours, who are all fellow democrats. But they're wrong, because when they need help, their pleasant and smiling neighbours will often let them drown. Our democratic habits let us convince ourselves that we care about people who are different from us, they force us to hide our disgust at different ethnicities, different genders, different languages, different social classes. We even hide it from ourselves. But no one sticks their neck out for the town freaks. The really singular individuals will always be isolated, on their own. Roshan is different in so many ways. She rebels against her own culture’s traditions for how a woman should dress and behave, and she rebels against her professor’s condescension, and she rebels against the indifference or the objectivizing stares of her classmates. And her rebellion isn’t pure reactivity, pure resentment. She doesn’t rebel against Iranian standards of female dress by slutting it up. She dresses in dark colours, tight jeans, sweaters that show off her shape, but none of her skin. She’s creating her own definitions of modesty and confidence, without fully surrendering to the icons that are her reference points: the modest woman, the American feminist.

Nikos: Did you think of all this as you were planning the story, or did it occur to you after you wrote it? Because most fiction that’s written with those kinds of ideas in mind usually stinks.

Riggio: It does usually stink, because you end up with ciphers for philosophical concepts rather than singular characters. And you end up with a book that’s more like a disguised version of Hegel’s Logic, with characters interacting in ways perfectly determined by their concepts.

Nikos: Now you’re talking like a philosophy doctoral student. I’m going to have to ask you to stop.

Riggio: Yeah, a person walked right on by my reading when my friend told him that I was a PhD student in philosophy. I told her not to mention that again, if she stumps for me. She should say something pretentious about Borges instead.

Nikos: This will be my last question, but where did the story begin? What was the thought?

Riggio: My thought was my indignation about Raz’s idea in philosophy of law, that we defer to legal authorities the same way we defer to experts. Winchester articulates what I think is the natural evolution of that point of view to its extreme. Again, the tradition of philosophy worships reason, makes it into a moral virtue. Socrates said that knowledge makes someone morally good, and that’s just laughable. So I had this idea, that the account of legal authority as expert authority is secretly very fascist, very oppressive. But I also had a suspicion that I couldn’t argue against it as a philosophical essay. I wasn’t expert enough on actual theories of legal authority. And that kind of felt like I was playing into my opponent’s hand. So I decided to demonstrate the blind spots of pure reason, rather than arguing reasonably for them. Roshan was that demonstration.

Nikos: Will we see her again?

Riggio: Maybe one day. I hope so. I think there’s a lot more to her than comes across in this one story. There’s a novella I had an idea for a while ago, where I think she could be very useful. But I have no problem bringing someone back. I brought you back, didn’t I?

Nikos: No fourth wall tonight, sir. Thank you very much for sitting down.

Riggio: Thank you for having me.

Have We No Right to Our Sort of Protest Songs?

2010-10-25T10:31:00.004-04:00

It took me three weeks instead of one, but I’ve assembled my ideas about the problems of the affluent white person’s gesture of protest. It’s going to sound very cynical, but I actually consider my perspective on this quite optimistic, in a strange sort of way. All will, I hope, become clear by the end of the analysis.

So my loyal readers (or anyone who scrolls down to October 5) will know that I first began this stream of blogging with a saddening critique of an internet-based breast cancer awareness meme. People could put a joke in their statuses, mildly amusing at best, that would raise awareness of breast cancer among those who have already had this very opaque gesture explained to them. Here is the first, and in my view, the most superficial problem with the protest gestures of affluent white people. Quite a few of the things we get angry about – global poverty, disasters, disease, religious extremism, wars – are easily understood. And when people hang out in a public square holding signs that describe how much they hate war and cluster bombs, that’s easily understood. I look at a person with a sign that reads, “Stop the War in Iraq!” and I assume correctly that they very much want to stop that war in Iraq I’ve heard so much about. This is an effective protest because people, while they may not agree with you, will know what you’re talking about.

But some gestures of protest are very symbolic, and difficult to understand at first glance. In my breast cancer example from earlier this month, I found it very hard to understand. Cancer is a terrible disease, and we should raise money to research to cure cancers cheaply and effectively, and encourage people to self-examine and be mindful of their bodies, in case they develop tumours. A great way to spread awareness of this among your facebook friends is to post a status update like, “It’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month!” and embed a link to a reputable research charity or a web guide to self-exams. You could sponsor someone in a fundraising marathon, or some other kind of pledge drive. This would be an easily understood way of voicing your opinion and productively aiding the cause through the infrastructures that exist.

A terrible way to achieve a goal like this is to make your status an ambiguous joke about sex, writing “Athena Peterson likes it on the kitchen counter!” Really, you’re talking about ‘where you lay your purse when you come home,’ and in a long, elaborately detailed private message from the friend who’s been spreading this 21st century chain letter, explaining the symbolism that connects women’s sexual exploration, the attention that a kinky-sounding status garners, and the eroticization of the female breast to genuine concern about breast cancer. None of this deep and complicated meaning was at all present in the initial joke, which is the only part of this gesture that 95% of your friends will see! To them, your cause is lost in confusion and opaque symbolism.

I think this kind of protest is dreamt up by well-meaning people who simply have too much time on their hands, so they can ponder oblique connections between gestures, jokes, and political issues, then assemble a convincing pitch for their protest idea. Patton Oswalt has some wonderful jokes about this, his old routines about why hippies annoy him so much. But this kind of protest that defeats itself through its own opacity is the symptom of a much deeper problem with being a socially progressive affluent white person. Most of us in protest movements are affluent enough that we don’t have to work for a living. We do this because we’re bored.

Now, I don’t want to disparage the good intentions of many people, and I certainly don’t want to describe all progressive activists in my country as ivory tower academic types and trust fund kids who haven’t even seen poor people before. Most of the people I’ve known in activist communities have been on student loans, have staggering debt, and worked one or two wretched part-time jobs (fast food, gas stations, tour guides), to put themselves through school. But they could go to school, and university. They’re functionally literate. They have opportunities. They lived in decent neighbourhoods where you couldn’t just walk to the corner one block down to buy coke, meth, oxy, and heroin. They weren’t physically abused or molested. Their families usually had enough money to feed everyone and make the mortgage payments.

The people who actually understand from experience what it means to be poor, are poor, and they stay poor. Not by choice, but because poor people have to stay poor if capitalism is going to work. And communism only works for four or five decades before collapsing from the absurd weight of a bureaucracy big enough to plan (with minimal effectiveness, if that) an economy for an entire nation. We middle class liberals have the time to protest because we don’t have to worry much where our next meal is coming from. But because we aren’t poor, we can easily lose touch with the people we’re trying to help.

This is why moronically opaque, over-intellectual protest events happen: we have enough leisure time to come up with them, but actual poor people are too busy trying to survive to care. An affluent white person lives at a disconnect that the power of conscience alone can’t always bridge. That disconnect makes such a person a cartoon, and it makes the objects of their charity regard them with contempt and resentment. A poor person can legitimately say to the affluent white person who wants to help them, “You are an ignorant fool who understands nothing of my life. My life is hard and I work hard. I don’t need your fucking pity.”

Now for the most profound part of my analysis of the affluent white conscience: expand this scenario to the entire globe. Now colonialism is part of the picture, a massive system of economic exploitation that spread over the entire Earth and lasted centuries. We affluent white people exist because of the enormous effort our ancestors put into creating the massively unequal share of wealth among humanity today. If you think the resentment of a Canadian poor person toward a rich person who doesn’t understand their life can be powerful, imagine how someone who lives on the equivalent of a few Canadian coins each day would feel.

Even if affluent Western governments actually donated all the money in their foreign aid budgets to actual foreign aid, it is still an utter pittance. We live as we do today because for hundreds of years, our ancestors destroyed the economies of entire continents for their own gain. Today, we feel guilty about it. So we pity the poor of the world, and send some pocket change to them so they can buy an extra chicken and we can feel better. But it’s nothing more than our pity, which demeans and dehumanizes the people who are pitied. If an affluent Western person thinks they can restore the world to peace, harmony, and brotherhood with a few gestures of contrition about our society having reduced their societies to mud, she’s in for a rough surprise.

The global economy is an enormous crime against humanity. And I’m not even talking about the ecological destruction. That’s another post, and my PhD thesis.

There’s a beautiful and terrifying film that expresses the emptiness of the affluent’s contrition very succinctly. It’s called Cobra Verde, and it’s about the last gasp of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the 1880s. There’s a scene, included in the trailer, where Klaus Kinski, playing Cobra Verde, the head of the slave trading port, takes a visitor to choose a slave woman to screw that evening. The women live in cramped quarters, in an underground hole. The chosen woman climbs out of a ladder. The visitor asks who these woman are, and Cobra Verde responds, with clear understanding of everything he’s done, “Our future murderers.”

Kinski plays a slave trader who understands exactly the horrifying criminal nature of the slave trade. He does it anyway because he is a criminal. He doesn’t pity his slaves either. He knows that one day the slave trade will end, and those who are oppressed now will take a place of dominance. He doesn’t call the slave woman an avenger, someone who will bring justice. He calls her a murderer. In this way, he understands that the only way to escape a system built on terror and injustice is not charity or contrition, but destruction.

But that’s not how the movie ends. The movie ends with a song by an African choir of young girls, singing in Akan, dancing in their own style, wearing their own clothes, and smiling. It’s an act of creation and celebration of life. The resentment engendered by pity, the confusion of a desperate conscience, the never-ending guilt of restitution, the ridiculous charity of affluent boredom; these are all forgotten. The scales of justice are thrown away, and we are left with dancing and laughter.

Gastronomical Exploration: I Search for Bacon and Cheese Congeals

2010-10-18T19:34:00.001-04:00

Tonight, my good friend Jeremy and I ate KFC Double Downs. We will never do so again. But we do know that if we ever have grandchildren, and live long enough to interact with them (having sworn off KFC Double Downs, this is much more likely), we will be able to tell them that we grappled with the most legendary product the fast food industry produced in the early years of this century.

With the amount of hype – no, mythology – already surrounding the Double Down, it was impossible for one aggregate of meat to live up to it. A healthy aura of comedy does surround this edible matter, however. Indeed, aside from the fact that there is protein in chicken, the Double Down is not healthy in any way at all. It is a creation of pure grease, metaphorically speaking. So why am I typing this blog post and not in an ambulance getting my stomach pumped?

Actually, it really isn’t that bad. The entire product was quite hot when it was first delivered. I let it sit in its box for a moment while I ate a few fries. Of course, the grease sticking to the paper wrapper made me very glad to have as many moist towlettes as I did. The chicken itself had a mild spice reminiscent of peppercorn. The bacon, while crisp, was barely noticeable, overpowered by the surrounding chicken. The bacon was too thin, while the chicken was too thick. The something-like-mayonnaise left much to be desired, reacting with the swiftly melting cheese to create an orange-yellow gloop that congealed quickly, and much to my distaste, as the sandwich cooled in my hands. I think the Double Down could be greatly improved if this something-like-mayonnaise sauce was switched for a simple chipotle, or perhaps ranch dressing, if you want it to be even more blatantly unhealthy.

I left one small fragment of the Double Down uneaten. It was a large, rectangular crumb consisting of equal parts, chicken, chicken batter, and congealed cheese. Probably the only unappetizing part of the Double Down was the cheese after it had congealed with the something-like-mayonnaise. If they used a better quality cheese, a different sauce, or had an option for not having cheese at all, the Double Down could be a much better dining experience.

I don’t want my readers to think that the KFC Double Down is an entirely negative experience. It definitely has its flaws, but the chicken itself tastes good, and the cheese is quite pleasurable while it’s in that perfect middle period of melting, when it has melted just enough to liquify onto the surface of the chicken, but before it cools into a congealed gel.

The only genuinely negative aspect of the KFC Double Down arrives long after one eats it. I am not a man with a weak stomach, but as I type, I am taking breaks to pop a couple of antacids, make some tea, and otherwise keep my stomach in proper working order. I am extremely glad that my class schedule this year allows me to take Tuesdays off, because I will likely need to spend the day making sure the Double Down works its way out of my digestive tract without increased discomfort. And I do predict some measure of increased discomfort. If you already have stomach problems, this is assuredly not for you.

I will readily admit that the best part of the KFC Double Down is its inherent ridiculousness. As Jeremy and I were waiting for our food at the neighbourhood KFC, the kitchen employee was preparing three of them in a row on the stove. As she laid them in their cardboard boxes, she clearly spat out the words, “This is fucking ridiculous.” I was eating a bacon, cheese, and something-like-mayonnaise sandwich, with fried chicken instead of bread. And I paid money for this. I paid an extra dollar to an anti-poverty charity. None of this makes any sense.

One of Patton Oswalt’s most legendary comedy routines revolves around the KFC Famous Bowl: chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, fries, and a breadstick piled artlessly into a bowl that you can shovel indiscriminately into your mouth. The creative minds at KFC don’t just inspire utterly unhealthy food that will shorten the collective lifespan of the American people by at least a decade. They also unintentionally inspire some of the greatest comedy of the new century. I’m looking forward to a polished and perfected routine of Patton’s take on this infamous and hilarious sandwich.*

*I should clarify that the KFC Double Down is very much more like a cordon bleu than a sandwich proper.

Cover Without a Mother

2010-10-17T11:22:00.001-04:00

I had a very curious idea about songwriting that I might eventually turn into some kind of academic article, though at this point, I have no idea how to do that. I may eventually ask my cousin, who is now a tenure-track professor of jazz performance at University of Victoria’s music school. The story of how I came to this idea is just as interesting, or at least funnier, than the idea itself.

Last weekend, I went with several close friends to Oktoberfest in Kitchener, the largest Oktoberfest outside Germany. I was told to expect utter ridiculousness, and I was not disappointed. After an hour of far too rapid pre-drinking, we took a short taxi ride to the auditorium where our Oktoberfest tickets were. Yes, it was an auditorium, with the hockey ice removed and a series of long red tables cris-crossing the cement floor. The auditorium was ringed with drink ticket booths, bars selling mediocre mass-produced beer (Molson Canadian was the lesser of the two evils), and pretzel and sausage stands. I knew my stomach was unable to handle giant sausages at that point in the night, but I spent $3.50 on the best pretzel I have ever eaten in my life.

At the centre of all this ridiculous insanity was a stage where, about an hour after we arrived, a band started to play. The band was composed of middle aged men, some of whom wore the hairstyles of 1980s hair metal bands whose hairspray was confiscated at customs as deadly weapons. The first song they played was Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and as they worked their way through a variety of songs that night, I realized that they were all radio rock from the 1980s, and with few exceptions they were all Bon Jovi songs. I was at an Oktoberfest in Ontario where the best beer was Molson Canadian and the headlining act was a Bon Jovi cover band. I think I spent about a total of almost two hours laughing hysterically.

I’ll forgo the morning after and the car ride back, during which my travelling companions rediscovered their inner Robert Downey Jr circa 1997. The philosophical insight came to me a few days later, as I walked home on a productive evening of thinking. A mediocre song, like most of the songs in the Bon Jovi catalogue, almost always sounds even worse when a cover band plays it. But most Beatles songs still sound excellent when a cover band plays them. As long as they’re competent with their instruments and can sing reasonably well, a genuinely great song will always be covered well. A song that always sounds so good has a greater likelihood of being played by other people, because the quality doesn’t typically degrade, as in Bon Jovi or KISS covers.

Before the invention and mass production of recording technology, almost every song anyone ever heard was a cover song: someone playing a song that somebody else wrote, sometimes decades or even centuries ago. Today, when someone plays a cover song, we think of it as the player’s version of the writer’s song. And we can refer back to a definitive version of that song to compare the writer’s and the player’s: the album track.

But there isn’t really anything essentially different from the album track and a live reproduction and a cover version. The instrumentation may change, the quality of play may be different, but every iteration of that song is the same song. We’ve come to fetishize the recording to the point that the recorded version is often understood as the essence of the song. The album version is the theme, and all live performances and covers are variations. But by the 17th century, someone playing a song from the 16th century has no idea how it might have originally sounded. Without some definitive recorded version, that musician only has the basic structure of the song and his own skill to play it. There’s no battle between some new version of the song and its pure original.

It made me consider the idea that this understanding of the record as the essential version of the song is a kind of mistake. The musicians can be much more meticulous about the creation of a song in the studio, add effects or instrumentations that are only possible in the studio, and then rearrange everything in order to play the song live. Sometimes, the live version will be completely different from the recorded version.

Coroner ran into this problem a lot, because they created songs with gigantic numbers of guitar tracks all integrated with incredible complexity. But they only ever played live as a three-piece: the guitarist could never, with his single instrument, capture the same power and complexity as a studio version with twenty or more tracks. Their live performances lacked the necessary power that the studio could give them. Meanwhile, KISS only really broke through with their live album: the studio was too clinical an environment to produce the spontaneous, party-like energy of their live performances. KISS thrived on that energy of the concert, and they could never bring that energy to the meticulous construction of the studio.

The studio is just one set of ways of producing the song. It’s a very different set of tools than live performance, so there are very different things you can do. But the studio version is just one more iteration of the song itself, one more variation without a theme. It’s just that the studio version, being the one on record, is most easily referred back to. It’s the version of the song that most people will hear. They can play it at their leisure. They’ll hear it first, they’ll hear it most often, and they’ll probably hear it exclusively. So they think of this version that they hear most often, the most likely become ubiquitous in one’s experience of the song, as the essence of that song, and all other versions judged in reference to it. But the studio is one way among many of organizing musicians and instruments.

The song itself is the organizing principle of all its performances, whether that performance happens in a studio with the instruments recorded weeks apart and assembled on a mixing board, in the middle of an arena stage, or on an acoustic guitar half-drunk at a party.

I Like It When People Feel Good About Themselves By Hitting Keyboards

2010-10-06T10:49:00.001-04:00

In the past week or so, I’ve seen facebook statuses of some of my female friends that have confused me. “I like it in the closet.” “I like it on the back of my chair.” And so on. I knew there was some new meme creeping around, and when I did eventually discover what it was, I was even more disappointed than I had expected to be. I found out through this article, which I also discovered through a friend’s facebook link.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which means there are going to be commercials and memes telling me that breast cancer exists, and that it is a problem. I, and the vast majority of people, have known this for some time. But in the “I like it” meme, women are asked to change their status to say where they like to ‘leave their purse’ when they come home. The use of pronouns lets them feel naughty, as if they were talking about sexual intercourse (but not really, because that would be weird, wouldn’t it?). They send a message to a few of their friends explaining it, and the meme spreads, making lots of people aware of breast cancer.

Just when I think Christine O’Donnell or Bill Maher are the most disappointing features of Western humanity, this happens. As Stephanie Fusco explains in the linked article above, the only person who knows that the “I like it” status is actually about breast cancer is the writer of the status update. They have fallen for an increasingly common delusion of affluent Westerners with high-speed internet: thinking they can bring genuine social and political change with a status update or a tweet. They are deluded about their own significance in the world.

Before I go off on my major rant, Fusco mentions another terrible aspect of this meme: reinforcing moronic sexual mores. She, and her friend Amanda quoted in the article, say it better than I can.

“The whole idea that putting something so ‘provocative’ in your Facebook status will gain attention relies on the notion that women speaking openly about sex is both slutty and shocking. This may come across as feminist drivel, and I may be accused of having too many feelings, but it’s true. As my super-star feminist friend Amanda Judd explained, ‘This whole thing was really an exercise in using the associated shame of sluttiness to supposedly draw attention to a good cause. It wouldn’t have been provocative if slut shaming weren’t so big. So it was slutty, it was totally meant to be. Women were supposed to sacrifice their reputation for a moment to grab the attention of others.’”

Congratulations ladies, for your trip back to 1953.

And now for my own major point. I have long had a suspicion, which has since become a conclusion, that the most contemptible kind of activist today is the affluent white person who thinks they can make a difference to those worse off than they are. Isn’t this the basic principle of charity? Yes. Yes it is. But I’m talking about a very specific version of the principle of charity, which I think is perfectly exemplified by this “I like it” meme. An affluent person with no real problems in her life wants to make a difference to people who actually do have problems. She feels affinity with breast cancer as a cause because she’s a woman, and breast cancer is the most stereotypically feminized cancer in the world. Its ribbon is even a stereotypically feminized colour, pink. She is told about this meme with a message explaining it to her, feels slightly giddy because it’s also a sex joke, and posts the status.

Now she feels like she’s done something to help those less fortunate. Of course, she hasn’t. She’s just put a cryptic sex joke in her facebook status. But she knows exactly what the status update means. So, as her reasoning goes, ‘If I understand it, then its meaning was obvious.’ Of course, the meaning is only obvious to her because she was told explicitly what it means. To anyone, like myself, who hasn’t heard this explanation, this is just another confusing meme travelling around the internet. But the people updating their status this way get to feel good about themselves. They’ve done a good thing! Now pat yourself on the back, affluent little white person, while actual cancer research and treatment continues unhelped and unhindered by your complete lack of a contribution.

So much time and effort is wasted in the affluent West on protest campaigns like this that achieve nothing. The only thing that’s accomplished is that someone who normally does nothing to improve the world feels slightly better about themselves. Some of the people I know who joined the “I like it” meme are genuinely politically involved people, and actually work to correct injustices in the world. But I’ve seen many protests like this that exist solely to assuage the guilt of the affluent.

Another post will follow in the next week or so where I discuss what I think are the larger political and social trends revolving around the guilty feelings of the affluent and the decline of Europe and North America relative to China, India, and Brazil.

Screw the Tea Party, Join the New Peronistas

2010-09-26T16:20:00.000-04:00

I was listening to some old Rage Against the Machine songs, and thinking back to my more naive younger days when I dismissed them as moronic radicals without noticing how awesome their songs were. I went through a rebellious conservative phase as a teenager.

But I’ve actually been thinking about conservative revolutions, because I’ve been paying attention to politics in the United States lately. I’ve also been studying the political and social ideas of Martin Heidegger and the conservative intellectual scene in Germany in the 1920s. And I saw an Argentine movie a while ago called El Secrete de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), which took place under the Isabel Peron presidency, and dealt with the devastating effects the Peronista death squads had on that society. And I saw a movie at the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s film festival called Politist (Police, Adjective) with a very chilling subtext about a policeman’s duty to follow the law without reference to his conscience or moral sensibilities. And I’ve been thinking about the popular support throughout Iran of the Ahmedinejad regime.

I think Canadians, and Westerners in general, have associated radical thinking and emotionally driven politics with the left, as if conservative politicians were about preserving status quo, too rational, out of touch with their own moral sensibilities. But a conservative revolution can inspire the same powerful feelings as a leftist one. When I started listening to Zack de la Rocha’s lyrics again, I realized how little political content was actually there. You know their sensibilities because they’re famous, but most of their lyrics are poetic exhortations. So I thought that a good exercise in political philosophy was to make a Rage song pro-fascist, changing as few lines as possible.

Ughh!
Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack...ughh!
Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack...yeah!
It goes a-1, 2, 3...

Hey yo, it's just another bombtrack
And suckas be thinkin' that they can fade this
But I'm gonna drop it at a higher level
'Cause I'm inclined to stoop down
Hand out some beat-downs
Cold runna train on punk ho's that
Think they run the game

But I learned to burn that bridge and delete
Those who compete...at a level that's obsolete
Instead I warm my hands upon the flames of their flag (was “the flag”)
As I recall their downfall (was “our downfall”)
And the business that burned us all
See through the news and the views that twist reality

Enough
I call the bluff
Fuck moral humility! (was “Fuck Manifest Destiny”)

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

With the thoughts from a militant mind
Hardline, hardline after hardline

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn (ad infinitum)

It goes a-1, 2, 3
Another funky radical bombtrack
Started as a sketch in my notebook
And now dope hooks make punks take another look
My thoughts ya hear and ya begin to fear
That ya card will get pulled if ya interfere

With the thoughts from a militant mind
Hardline, hardline after hardline

Drug lords and media whores (was “Landlords and power whores”)
On my people they took turns
Dispute the suits I ignite
And then watch 'em burn

Burn, burn, yes ya gonna burn (ad infinitum)

And it would still be just as good a song. So now, students, you understand the moral indifference of art and emotion.

Freedom Is Doing What You Never Even Knew You Could Have Done

2010-09-20T19:23:00.002-04:00

I had one of those minor philosophical epiphanies that I probably won’t do anything with professionally, at least not directly. In order to produce publishable (in academic journals) material around this epiphany, I’d have to read at least the last twenty years of evolutionary philosophy and psychology, and the freedom vs determinism debate going back at least twice as far, and then well into the seventeenth century. I really don’t have time for an extra project that long, so I’m going to blog about it. There’s a few steps in this, so it’ll take a few paragraphs to spell out.

Why are the opponents of evolution so frightened by the prospect? It has to do with what exactly that prospect is. The more theatrical anti-evolutionists have made rhetoric of jokes about an orangutan being their uncles or aunts. But the weirdness of existing on a continuum with other species is only evoked to disgust people. Conceptually, a deeper meaning underlies it.

The way humans have understood themselves morally is as free agents. Human morality and the complex societies that produce these moral systems are typically seen as exceptions to the natural order. We humans are artificial. That which is natural is governed by deterministic linear causality, the most advanced form of which is instinct. But humans are not purely instinctual: we are moral. Morality is an exception to instinct, animal behaviour not subject to linear causality.

But evolution is a natural process. If humans are the product of a natural process, then our moral systems do not constitute an exception to the deterministic natural order. This produces a contradiction in which morality loses, in those people who think of the deterministic natural order in a particular (but very popular) way. Actions which are not freely chosen cannot require the moral responsibility of their actors. If morality is a natural process, then it is a complex evolution of instinct, an entire determined process. So we have moral concepts by which we attribute responsibility, but no actual responsibility because we are not an exception to the deterministic natural order.

The greatest fear underlying opposition to evolution is the fear that there is no genuine moral responsibility.

I laid out this chain of reasoning, but I don’t believe in it, because I think several of the premises according to which this makes sense are not actually the case about the universe. It hinges on a metaphysical point. I used the term deterministic linear causality above, and I did that on purpose. Causality in general is an underdetermined process: an event can have a huge number of conditions and causes, and very complex relations among them. The image of one snooker ball hitting another snooker ball is an example that oversimplifies an amazingly complex universe. Determinism is similarly underdetermined: an event can have a huge number of different effects, can change a system in a wide variety of highly complex ways, and each of these effects interfere with each other apart from the event that was their genesis.

Here’s where the word ‘linear’ comes in. Precisely because of these underdeterminations in how events actually interact and cause each other, very few relations of causality are actually linear, like the snooker balls. The world we live in is enormously complex, and even though the mathematics that describe these complex systems that are our world are deterministic, there are enormous possibilities within the deterministic development of a system. One event does not cause a single set of effect events. One event sets off an enormous chain of interrelated events with millions of possibilities that its constituent bodies can choose from. That choice among possibilities is especially open to creatures with highly complex perceptual and reasoning skills who can analyze situations with an eye towards all that can be, not simply what there is.

Instinct is a reactive response to stimulus, a pattern that an organism follows according to what is there. The ability to conceive of possibility, either through colloquial reasoning, or highly complex phase space chaos mathematics, is a step far beyond instinct. This way of thinking about the metaphysics of the universe and causality takes us out of the trap by which moral responsibility disappears. Freedom, the capacity to understand and act on what can be rather than simply on what there is, is an evolved trait.

The natural order itself constitutes creatures that are more free than any creature before, so free that they can imagine themselves to be unnatural, and believe their dreams.

The Future of Television - Lost. In Space

2010-09-05T21:40:00.000-04:00

I thought of an excellent idea for a new science fiction television show that would follow a similar pattern of Battlestar Galactica, at least as far as revamping seriously a laughably camp old sci-fi hit from the 1970s. I’m thinking about Lost in Space. Consider the basic premise of the show: An exploration ship is sabotaged and crash-lands on an unknown world, the crew being forced to work with the very saboteur who caused the mess in the first place. Of course, apart from the first and last episodes, the original series executed this premise as if it was Gilligan’s Island in space (with a comparable budget). But with a few tropes lifted from recent critically acclaimed hit sci-fi programs, and a few ideas of my own, I think I have a pretty good pitch. It could be worth developing further, at least.

The Ship and Its Crew.

The setup of the original show was too simple: The Robinson family of scientists and their best friend are the crew of the ship, and the only foreign entity in the crew is the villain-turned-walking-joke Dr Smith. What we’ve learned from shows like Lost and Stargate: Universe is that a larger, more diverse cast can constitute more complex storylines simply by their being stuck together. A large ensemble cast of singular characters with diverse histories and many different reasons for being on the ship provides a comparatively large potential for different character arcs as individual stories are developed, and different people come into different kinds of conflict as they try to survive on an alien world.

How to Travel in Space.

I only thought of the idea this afternoon walking back from the market, so I haven’t yet considered all the details of how this technology would work. I’m imagining some kind of wormhole creation and manipulation technology. This is partly why they’re stranded so hopelessly for quite some time into the series. Only ships carrying a wormhole generator can travel faster than light; signals can’t. So they can’t send a decent distress signal at all, because they’re too far away from human worlds, and can only signal them at light speed.

Key to the narrative is that humanity didn’t invent the wormhole technology - they discovered and reverse-engineered it on a sublight expedition several centuries ago. So a major narrative arc of the series would be that the cast slowly discovers evidence that they are wrecked on the homeworld of the beings who invented the wormhole technology.

The Villain.

I’m a pretty big Doctor Who fan, as regular readers will have discovered by now. And one of the Doctor’s favourite aliases, especially when he was stuck on Earth working for a planetary defence task force, was Dr John Smith. So I thought of making the central villain, the saboteur, a remixed version of our favourite Time Lord. The Dr Smith of the regenerated Lost in Space would be a manipulator of the rest of the characters, with his own nefarious ends regarding the planet's mysteries.

No one, not even the audience, would know he sabotaged the ship, and engineered it to crash on the Mystery Planet. Dr Smith would be a brilliant, eccentric, manipulative asshole. He would, effectively, be the charming rogue scientist at the centre of the show, using his considerably wide-ranging expertise to take at least partial charge of the cast.

There would probably be some other characters who would take charge of the day-to-day problems of survival for the cast on an alien world. And those characters would drive ongoing power struggles with Smith because they’re more obviously helping the cast survive on the planet. The cast also grows more suspicious of Smith over time, as they become conscious of his manipulating them, and his investigations into the planet’s mysterious nature.

One idea I had for the character is that he would be an older man, with some echoes of the Hartnell and Pertwee versions of The Doctor. And a story arc for the first couple of years would involve him discovering technology on the island to build an android body that would eventually resemble a young man, and eventually copy his own personality into it, cloning himself into a practically immortal body. This brings me to my favourite idea for the new Lost in Space.

The Android (or, Danger Will Robinson My Ass!)

At the 24 Hour Art Marathon in St John’s this summer, I wrote a short story about a future society that has invented a race of android servants and companions, whose brains were powerful computers and scanners based on chaos mathematics. Their long lifespans and incredibly fast learning curves make them intellectually and perceptually superior to humans. Because the intellectually successful androids were built as companions, they were basically T800 style robots with flesh that repaired itself by absorbing ultraviolet light, and couldn’t eat or drink, because the light would recharge their power plants as well. Pretty much every power source built to work in terrestrial environments, of course, would be solar or wind based by this point in human civilization, androids included.

By the time of Lost in Space 2.0, the androids will have long ago won their rights to self-determination, integrated into society, and to some degree have been forgotten. The android character from my story, Alice Chesterton, would be on the ship. A major narrative arc for her would be the crew’s eventually discovering that she is an android. Her immensely powerful brain would cast her as a rival to Dr Smith, and his envy and conflict with her would be partially what drives him to create his android replica.

Probably the most important element of Alice that the writers would have to keep in mind throughout the show is that Alice’s intelligence and learning speed is beyond the greatest of human geniuses. All androids are this way. Probably a very fascinating part of the Lost in Space 2.0 mythology is discovering the history of how the prominence of androids in society would have disappeared over the previous centuries. They are intellectually and physically superior to humans in every way. So one of the great mysteries about human history in this universe would be how and why the androids disguised themselves, or hid themselves away. Perhaps there's a secret society of androids somewhere in the human worlds, something like the Freemason conspiracies.

After Dr Smith created his android replica, he would have to be written with the same caveats as Alice. After that point, both Alice and Dr Smith can perceive all the possibilities of every object they see, giving them a fantastically fast learning curve. But Alice, unlike Dr Smith, is already centuries old, and was built by a corporation that became massively successful building high quality android companions. Android Smith, however, would not be built by such experts, and would be hampered by mechanical problems.

One of these would be impotence, because Alice was originally designed as a sexual companion for a professor on Earth, and so the physical processes for sexual activity would be an integral part of her brain. Her sexual relationships with other members of the cast would be excellent narrative fodder as well. Dr Smith's android would be something of a patch job. This would just add to the conflict between them, even as Android Smith begins to sympathize with Alice more than the human crew as he learns to exercise the immense potential of his brain. Alice has always been an android, so comes from a much more enlightened ethical perspective. Smith built his android self for egocentric human reasons, like envy of Alice and yearning for immortality. The breakdowns of his mechanical body would be quite ironic, given his advanced age as a human in the first two seasons of the show.

The Planet.

This is where the direct analogue to Lost comes into my idea. A mandatory feature in the hypothetical show’s bible would be that nothing like the God-ish aspects of Abrams and Lindelof’s island would ever come into play in Lost in Space 2.0. It’s a standard trope that most stories about stranded people take place in some jungle environment, but I’d prefer to set the crash site on a steppe near a mountain range, the kind of environment that would make shooting in British Columbia or California fairly easy.

All the long-range arcs of the story, again riffing from Lost, would have to do with the mysteries of the planet where they’re wrecked. Over the course of the first series, the cast, particularly those more loyal to Alice, would discover that human expeditions have visited the planet before, and evidence of these prior investigations (and perhaps some of their sticky, violent ends).

The steppe-mountain setting departs from the tradition of stranded stories, and would give the writers extra flexibility in setting. Some episodes would take place on the steppe, some at a nearby lake, and some exploring the mountains. Another narrative arc of the show would be a quest by some characters to discover the sea on the other side of the mountains, and that would probably integrate with the reveal of the indigenous species, described a bit later.

Most important about the planet’s mythology is that there is an alien race that lives there, the descendents of the inventors of the wormhole technology. And I would have them be as absolutely unlike humanity in every way possible. Perhaps they’d be a species something like amphibious cephalopods. The most important scientific consultant on the show would be the biologists who would brainstorm ways that intelligent amphibious cephalopods could evolve and become the dominant technological species on a planet.

The cephalopod culture would have to be immensely detailed as well, because the major narrative of the show would be the cast discovering their technology, culture, and mysteries, eventually learning to communicate with them. This would probably be the most difficult part of designing Lost in Space 2.0, even more than having one (and later two) major characters who are advanced android geniuses. At least androids and humans share a common history. The cephalopod culture would have nothing at all in common with Earth, but with a history just as detailed, and ethically complex, as humanity's.

There could also be conflicts because some of the humans (probably Smith and his cronies) would catch small cephalopods to eat at the beginning of the series. But because androids can perceive all the possible states of an object as well as its current actual state, Alice would stop the cast from eating them, and provoking the adult intelligent cephalopods. The human-cephalopod misunderstandings and conflicts would be another central story arc of the show.

I think this show sounds like a really cool idea. Let me know if you have any character ideas for anyone other than Alice and Dr Smith, because they’re the only people I’ve thought of so far. I don’t really want to see anyone who is too much like a character from Lost or BSG. If this whole academic career doesn’t work out, or it turns out that I can make more money as a tv producer, I know I at least have a good idea I can attach my name to.

How to Read Philosophy, and Be a Philosopher

2010-09-04T14:34:00.000-04:00

In the course of preparing a presentation I’ve been invited to give at a conference at University of St Gallen in Switzerland later this Fall, an intriguing idea came to me about the history of philosophy. It’s too complex to fit into the space I have for the presentation, but it’s promising enough that I think I can work with it for a while. It’s also connected to a conversation I had Friday evening about how philosophy is taught at the introductory and undergraduate level.

My friend has begun to find it ridiculous that we are teaching undergraduates philosophy by having them argue against or otherwise try to attack the works and ideas of the giants of our fields. If a philosophical work or corpus has survived with a prominent role in the history of ideas for hundreds or thousands of years, it seems absurd that we would teach people by demanding that they refute Aristotle at age 19. It trivializes a work of monumental scope and power. It demeans the concepts that have revolutionized thinking over the millennia. I didn’t recall being taught that way.

My first philosophy instructor was (and still is) an old Cambridge man, who waxed to me this summer about the old way of teaching philosophy, where you truly know your history, can genuinely understand the thoughts and social milieux that shaped the thinkers you’re studying. You can’t start refuting all over the house until you know why every word is just the way it is. This is philosophy as serious scholarship, the meticulous investigation into a way of life that in most cases no longer exists, so that one can understand most deeply how a great piece of work was produced, and how it was meant to affect its own time, its own readers.

However, there is a different way to read philosophy which I consider equally legitimate as serious scholarship, but is easier in some respects, but far more difficult in others. Werner Herzog talks about how the meaning of his films, particularly Aguirre The Wrath of God, changes depending on who is watching them. The work is no less great, even though the people who receive it transform its meaning significantly and radically. In fact, it’s greater because it can have all these different meanings in different contexts of culture and history. Philosophy has such a long tradition that its great works have undergone similar transformations. It is easier than scholarship because it doesn’t require so much historical and contextual work. But inspirational readings are more difficult because the work stands out as even more alien when it is transplanted into a new context.

It’s difficult to read philosophy well, or indeed any great work, when you are part of the community. Every filmmaker, the Hollywood hacks, commercial directors, no-budget indie directors with a stolen digital camera, is in the same community as Kubrick, Murnau, and Herzog. Writers are in the same community as Eliot, Joyce, and Cervantes. Philosophers are in the same community as Plato, Russell, Deleuze, and Kant. The danger of the trivializing attitude of refutation being your only engagement with a work is that you make a mockery of the giants of your field. The scholarly attitude becomes dangerous when it becomes worship, and you sterilize your own creativity in a terrible inferiority complex.

The inspirational attitude is to pick up a work and a philosopher as if you are talking to an old, strange friend. This friend will shock and terrify you, and also mystify you completely. But if you can engage your alien friend in a respectful conversation, a productive dialogue, then you can become a great figure yourself.

The ‘Sin’ of Omission, History, and Philosophy

2010-08-17T17:38:00.000-04:00

I picked up this afternoon, as a summer present to myself, a giant collection of fiction by Jorge Borges, who in the past year has become one of my favourite authors, especially in how I approach my shorter pieces of fiction. Thousands of ideas traversing all disciplines of knowledge animate his work, and his work inspires just as many ideas in his readers. Meditating on his work today has distilled in me the reasons for one of the only concrete, unequivocal stands I take in philosophy and art.

I have occasionally come across a philosopher who believes that the discipline’s goal is to discover ultimate universal truths through argument, and that these truths will be simple, clear, and comprehensive. I’ll omit names of those I’ve met personally, and mention one illustrative example that I’ve only read, Scott Shapiro. It’s an admirable goal, the admission and expectation that one day, philosophy will have completed its task, and in so doing, will be the greatest of all possible sciences. It will have explained all of existence in a short series of simple phrases.

It’s a beautiful dream, but an arrogant, hubristic, and ignorant dream. Consider the nature of expression, not in terms of what is meant or what is said or what is understood, but in terms of what is not said. I say a single word, for example, ‘symbol.’ Most of the time, we concentrate on that spoken word itself, and what it could mean, how we can understand it.

But when I say one word, I choose that one over all the thousands of words that I know in the languages I understand. So much of what is possible is omitted when I act. All the words that I could have said are thrown away and forgotten when I choose that one word. This enormous omission of what could have been, of possibility, of capacity, happens with each utterance of every person.

When I am silent, that is actually when I am closest to articulating those dreamy phrases that encompass all the universe, because I omit the least. In not acting, I certainly don’t omit, but I don’t say anything either. Perhaps that’s what Wittgenstein meant when he ended the Tractatus with “That of which we cannot speak, we must be silent.” There are some possibilities, some capacities, that we should not ignore and discard because of the occasional practical need to say stuff. This, I think Wittgenstein tried to say.

I don’t have Wittgenstein’s mystical leanings, but I think this is important for philosophers to consider when trying to articulate their mission statement. Every word said, every idea developed, requires the omission of all the ideas and words within our capacities apart from that one chosen. Articulating what is requires the omission of what could have been. If philosophy is to take capacity seriously, which I believe it must, then we must consider the radical finitude of all sensible statements. What is said cuts away all that could have been said. Can we really consider all that is said to be a complete picture of reality when so much is invariably omitted?

It Was So Much Easier with George W Bush

2010-08-09T13:43:00.000-04:00

Earlier this summer, I was having coffee with an old friend of mine, and the conversation turned to American Presidents. I remember specifically when he asked me to compare George W. Bush and Richard Nixon. A few years ago, at the height of the second Iraq invasion (the ‘successful’ one), I would have put them on about the same level. But now, I’m not so sure.

Through the twisting webs of facebook, I discovered a blog post on Psychology Today written just after the Republican National Convention meeting officially ratifying John McCain and Sarah Palin as their Presidential nominees. Despite a hopelessly provocative title, the post described a high quality study of what psychological traits were most common among conservative thinkers. The study discovered paranoia, fear of death, fear of change, intolerance of ambiguous situations or answers.

It actually made a lot of sense to me. I no longer see a firm disconnect between one’s personality and one’s political beliefs. One’s political attitudes are shaped by personal thoughts about what people are, and how different groups of people interact. So the conservative thought patterns of hostility to foreigners, anti-pluralism, conformity, the retention of the status quo despite inequality, poverty, or counter-productive economics are the political articulations of these personalities.

I’ve been thinking about W lately because American conservatives today are so very different from him. When I compared W to Nixon in that conversation, I realized that W actually wasn’t so bad. He surrounded himself with advisors who brought out the worst in some of his policy positions, like the invasion of Iraq for the sake of ‘democracy.’ But W actually believed in democracy. He believed Islam was a religion of peace, having met people in his alcoholism programs who healed themselves through faith in Allah, while he chose Jesus.

And W understood that the repressive governments of the Middle East provoked the very radicalism they fought so violently. Of course, he completely screwed up any possible success he might have had, because the Iraq invasion was a ham-handed piece of political idiocy operated at almost every level by morons. But he was doing it for democracy, or at least that’s what he always believed.

What Cheney believed was another story altogehter.

W was never anti-immigrant in the racist way a lot of major conservatives are today. In a recent article on The Daily Beast, they quote W from his days as Texas governor speaking about Mexican illegal immigrants in a humanizing way. W understood that Mexican immigrants were sneaking across the border because Mexican workers are egregiously underpaid, and that jobs in the USA would bring much more income back to their families. It’s a far cry from Jan Brewer’s paranoid shrieking about invasions of Mexican coke mules onto every suburban street corner in Phoenix.

What fascinates me about W are the contradictions and paradoxes that inform his personality. He was a political idealist at the centre of a corrupt administration. He saw the good in many people, even though his campaign machine was based around polarizing Americans and provoking conflict among them. His universals were black and white, good and evil. But when you sat down to talk with him as a singular person, he listened and tried to understand.

The real tragedy is that the hateful American conservatisms on the rise are so much more poisonous and poisoned than the poster boy for twenty-first century conservatism. Enjoy your retirement, George.

There Is a Cut Under My Left Eye

2010-08-02T01:02:00.001-04:00

Here is a story of how I got the small, but cosmetically noticeable cut under my left eye Friday night.

I was wandering home from The Brain on James North, having gotten a cab with my friend who lives in Dundas out of solidarity, even though I’m pretty sure I probably cost her extra because of Hamilton’s twisty one-way streets. I pay my share of the fare and get out at the convenience store plaza, wandering into the pizzerria because that always feels like a good idea after that much alcohol.

I’m approached by a guy in a beige leather jacket and sunglasses at night, a sign to anyone not this pathetically drunk that he was unstable, or Corey Hart, or an unstable Corey Hart. He barks at me in a mixture of Spanish and broken English. Apparently he thinks I’m someone named José, and that I’ll never get away with leaving his men in the jungle in Peru. He also says something about the Shining Path, which is enough that even I’m pretty sure I’m in trouble.

Next thing I know, we’re out in the parking lot with our left hands tied together and knives in our right hand. It’s like something out of the video for “Bad” by Michael Jackson. In fact, it’s so much like this that I’m feeling sorry for these Maoist terrorists who are still stealing all their tricks from mid-80s Michael Jackson. Some Lady Gaga would really chill these guys out, or at least give them a better fashion sense.

I know I’m no match in a knife fight for a Shining Path terrorist driven by a thirst for revenge against the traitor he thinks I am. So I did the only fair thing I could: cheated. As he lunged at my face with the knife, I jerked him forward while dropping back on my ass. I managed to throw him headfirst into the side of the dumpster, which was enough to knock him out cold. He managed to knick me under the left eye as he was sailing over my head, a shallow cut from above me.

Technically, I had still won the fight, which was enough to quiet his entourage of three other guerillas in cheesy leather jackets long enough for me to untie my hand and get my pizza. I still took the long way around the block back to my apartment. Apparently everybody, guerillas included, were still so drunk that I could get rid of any tail they might have put on me that way. I bought some polysporin Sunday afternoon to make sure it healed well, because the area was still pretty tender over Saturday.

Here’s how I really got that cut under my eye.

I was drunk and immovable sitting in the pizzerria at 2.15 in the morning, waiting for my evening-ending pizza when a fight broke out between three drunk idiots from Hess Village. One of them fell on my head, and the narrow-edged frame of my glasses was pushed down onto my face, giving me a centimetre-long incision. I still picked up that polysporin Sunday morning, though.

A Hilariously Simple Idea About Gilles Deleuze

2010-07-28T21:52:00.002-04:00

I was reading some philosophy this evening, as is my wont and my job, when I had one of those moments when several disparate threads of philosphical reading and reflection came together into what I considered a pretty wild revelation. The past two winters, my PhD supervisor has been teaching a graduate level seminar on the thought of Gilles Deleuze, a notoriously difficult French writer of philosophy. One of the concepts that has been most puzzling in that seminar, and in Deleuze’s writing generally, is the virtual.

I’m not going to go into what we speculated about the nature of the virtual, because I don’t have time this evening to write out all that speculation. We talked about Henri Bergson’s metaphysics, the mathematics of differential equations represented in phase space, the nature of possibility. We tried to figure out how something could be real but not actual. I could go on, but I won’t. I have lunch plans in fourteen hours, and I may run out of time. Also, I want to qualify this post with the fact that I’m not yet familiar enough with the French language secondary material on Deleuze to know whether this idea has been articulated there already. But I think I have figured out exactly what this concept is.

The virtual existence of any body is a complete set of all that a body can do. Here’s how I figured it out:

1) A body’s mathematical representation as a phase space is a representation on an n-dimensional map of every possible state of that body. We talked in the seminar about the virtual being ‘something like, but not quite’ phase space.

2) A possible state of a body is something that body can do. I can run, eat, sing (poorly), impersonate the voice of internationally acclaimed film director Werner Herzog. But I am not doing any of that right now. None of these actions are actually being done as I write this, but I can do them.

3) Understand the possible states of a body as contained within the structure of that body itself. This could sound weird, but all you’re doing is considering the capacities of a body to be part of that body. A capacity is a real part of a body, even while that body is not acting with that capacity at the moment.

4) A capacity not enacted right now is a real part of a body, but not actual because it isn’t enacted. A body can do this capacity, but doesn’t all the time, or maybe even ever. I can develop my voice into a deeply rich baritone and embark on an eccentric music career. But I won’t. That’s a real capacity I have, so is really part of the structure of my body. But it will never be actualized.

All that a body can do (keep your eyes open, Spinoza fans, Deleuze was one of you too) is the virtual aspects of that body. That’s Deleuze’s language for discussing a body’s capacities, what a structure is capable of, even if that body never develops that capacity. The capacity is always part of that body, even if it is never actualized. Deleuze calls that virtual.

In Search of the Irrefutable

2010-07-23T21:17:00.001-04:00

I’ve come across several philosophers in my experience who consider our discipline as a kind of science of arguments. Philosophers are seeking, according to these folks (none of whom are made of very much straw), the truth through argument. So when a philosopher formulates an argument that cannot be refuted, he (and they have all been he’s) will have discovered a truth upon which philosophy may rest content. But a curious idea occurred to me a few days ago that I realized would make an excellent philosophy article, and stick solidly in the craws of all those truth seekers who would deign to take me seriously.

It started when I read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, about men who synthesize every occult conspiracy theory for the past eight hundred years into a single, perfectly consistent history of the secret and hidden. The aficionados of ancient conspiracies (Masons, Templars, Rosicrucians, et al) then hunt down our heroes, killing them for their evidence, even though their synthetic history was entirely fictional.

Periodically, I’ll have a conversation about the 9/11 Truth conspiracies, the beliefs that some blend of the United States government, conservative establishment, intelligence agencies, and business elite carried out the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, and that al Qaeda had nothing to do with it. Not all the conspiracy theorists are quite this extreme, but all the 9/11 Truth theories have some of these elements mixed and matched together. Even if you can point to an established fact of the case that disproves some aspect of their conspiracy theory, the theorist will not respond to modifying his beliefs. He will instead denounce this fact as an elaborate fakery of the conspirators.

Nothing in the arguments of the 9/11 Truth conspiracy theorist, or indeed any committed conspiracy theorist, can ever be refuted. The very nature of conspiracy thinking maintains the integrity of the theory above all else - even facts. Some conspiracy theories are more consistent than others, and an intelligent theorist will modify their theory when shown some internal inconsistency. But this amounts to a strengthening of the conspiracy theory, not its refutation. Refutation would involve the dismissal of the argument itself, admitting that the USA government did not, in fact, cause 9/11.

This puts the definition of philosophy as seeking truth through articulating an irrefutable argument in quite some bother. The arguments most durable to attack, most invulnerable to critique, most flexible in maintaining their validity, are the most outlandish conspiracy theories. Of course, I’m not troubled, because I don’t think philosophy is about seeking truth at all. But if you’re sympathetic to this idea, I think I have something that could trouble you.

The Patience of Cellular Owners and the Strangeness of Time

2010-07-16T11:59:00.000-04:00

I had a curious realization the other day, as my phone rang about twelve times before I managed to answer it. Before cellular phones were as widespread as they are today, most people gave up on a call after five or six rings at the most. Now that people tend to call from and to cellular phones, we actually tend to be a lot more patient than we used to about waiting for an answer on the phone.

It probably has to do with the phone no longer being in a fixed location. On a land line, when the phone rings, you know exactly where to go to answer it. A cellular phone can be anywhere, or underneath, anything within earshot of its ringer. So a caller now anticipates having to wait around for the phone to be found in some absurd location like the pocket of an old pair of pants, underneath a pile of unpaid phone bills, or in the fridge. I find it amusing because the cliché of technology is that it makes us harried and impatient, yet we’re willing to wait for twelve or fifteen rings before concluding that no one is answering the phone.
•••
I’ve also been planning a future philosophy project about time. Basically, English language philosophy of time remains dominated by the McTaggart argument that time is unreal. In 1908, John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart wrote a paper that showed the logical inconsistency, and therefore impossibility, of the concepts of past, present, and future. An event X has to be the same event before it occurs as when it’s occurring and when it has occurred. So all its properties have to be the same, including its properties of pastness, presentness, or futurity.

But these properties all change as the event moves from future to present to past, so it can’t be the same event. But we can still talk about event X no matter when it’s occurring relative to us. So the properties of any event must not include its being past, present or future. Since these properties constitute time, no event can have time properties, therefore time is unreal.

This differs radically from the approach to time of Antonio Negri, an Italian philosopher whose ideas have come to dominate European philosophy of time. In his books and articles throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Negri considers time as it is experienced in life, and all of the social, political, and economic factors that shape our experience and understanding of time. For every mode of production and labouring, there is a kind of experience of time, each conditioning a different way of life and way of understanding existence.

So which is most important? McTaggart’s abstract understanding of time as a set of ordered events? Negri’s understanding of living time shaped by a societal apparatus of production? Those who know me well might assume I’m leaning towards an answer of both. However, I do think Negri’s approach to time is more philosophically productive, because it includes a concept of becoming: production. McTaggart’s doesn’t.

Actually, McTaggart’s argument forcibly prevents a concept of becoming from interacting with the concept of event. All events always exist in a particular order, along which our subjective consciousness moves. But a concept of production requires that events be made by some ongoing activity. So this looks like the one philosophical project where I actually choose sides, argue for one camp against another. Mark this in your calendars; it may never happen again.

He's Still My Hero, Man

2010-07-05T16:48:00.002-04:00

Because not every post can be on the epic scale of a major political demonstration shutting down Canada’s largest city, I’ve decided to talk about Doctor Who. It’s been a long time since I’ve done so. Tom Baker once said that fan love is superior to human love. Because Tom's friends and family will tell him that he's gained weight, that it's silly to dye your hair white, and to stop being so strange. But Tom's fans will introduce themselves saying, "You're my hero, man!" Well, Matt Smith can definitely count me as a fan.

First, I want to make clear that I love what new producer Steven Moffatt has done with the show. I’m glad that Russell T Davies revived the show in the first place, and he often made some fine adventures, and wrote some good scripts. “Midnight” is still a brilliant suspence vehicle, and wonderful character piece for the Tenth Doctor. But I always found Russell’s aesthetic a little too pop for me, along with the Tenth Doctor generally.

If there’s any feeling that I get from Moffatt’s production and Matt Smith’s performance as the Eleventh Doctor, it’s nerdiness. The Eleventh Doctor himself is a fantastically strange man. You’re entertained watching him because of the fundamental, unpredictable weirdness of his personality. He’s a man who is always a bit odd everywhere he goes, but far from being alienating, this oddness is charming, ingratiating. He doesn’t fit in, but he fits around others. Russell’s Doctors were very much lost men looking for a home, an anxiety that shaped their personalities. I got the feeling at times that the Tenth Doctor wouldn’t have minded settling down in a stable, if unconventional, home. But Moffatt’s Doctor is at home wherever he goes, because he’s so comfortable with himself. The Eleventh Doctor is a true traveller.

A Moffatt story isn’t afraid to become complicated, never assumes that the audience won’t be able to follow a clear, if complex, story. His season finale, “The Big Bang,” involved a lot of time travel shenanigans that were played for laughs in the moment, but intricately constructed the plot. And ultimately, it became a very personal story about the relation between the Doctor and his main companion Amy.

A couple of the reviews I’ve read of Matt Smith’s first season as a whole, I’ve found miss the point of having a new production team and new Doctor, which is a new articulation of what Doctor Who is. I’ve read that this year’s finale missed the epic dimensions of previous season enders. Even though the universe itself was at risk of being wiped from existence, there were no grand battles or sci-fi vistas, but puzzle in an empty museum for the Doctor to solve. The drama was contained within the four cast members of that story, the Doctor, Amy Pond, Rory Williams, and River Song.

Yet the biggest complaints about Russell’s season finales were that his epic battles became cartoonish, solved with technobabble and deus ex machinas with little attachment to the drama of the characters. But the resolution of this season, the return of the Doctor from oblivion through an anchor in Amy’s time-cracking memories of him, was hinted at throughout the season. Growing up next to a crack in time had altered Amy’s memory, so that she could remember timelines that never existed.

The metaphysics of how the Doctor could return to reality through a memory, and rebuild one timeline with a sample of it in another, was actually seeded in Russell and the Tenth Doctor’s swan song, “The End of Time.” All that’s needed to bring Gallifrey and the whole universe of the Time War back from oblivion was a single Gallifreyan diamond. Likewise, all that’s needed to restore the original universe is a sample within the Pandorica box, and all that’s needed to restore the Doctor to the universe is a sample of his existence in Amy’s brain, her memories of the never-was.

I also don’t understand why consensus seems to be that Rory is dead weight. It’s been a long time since televised Doctor Who had more than two main cast members for an entire season: classic season 21 in 1984. The 2011 season crew of the Doctor, Amy, and Rory will be the first crew. Maybe we’re just not used to stories with enough activity for three people that don’t devolve into the clutters of Russell’s mass reunion episodes.

I think people still consider Rory a white Mickey, the boyfriend overshadowed by Rose’s relationship with the Doctor. But Amy and Rory do onscreen what Rose and Mickey never actually did: make out. Rory fits into the same ‘main companion’s boyfriend’ slot, but the relationships among the three leads (and they are three leads) are completely different in 2010 than in 2005-6.

Mickey started out scared and incompetent, not knowing what to do in an alien invasion in “Rose.” In “The Eleventh Hour,” Rory’s actions and suspicions about his supposedly walking coma patients give the Doctor the information he needs to track down the villain. And he’s just as fast as Amy at evacuating the hospital. By the time he was travelling regularly in the TARDIS, he was on a level with the Doctor setting traps for Silurian warriors. At the end of the season, he was defending Amy from Dalek and Cyberman attacks. Rory was on his feet the fastest of any second-billing companion who wasn’t already a Time Agent.

And I’ll have no disrespect to the mopey nice guy who scored the hot bossy redhead.

The G20 Riots Are a Calculated Political Theatre Piece

2010-06-27T22:12:00.004-04:00

Blogging takes a backseat to thesis writing, research, and manuscript editing, so I haven’t followed through on my promise to tell a bunch of funny and insightful stories about my conference trip to Montreal. Taco Tuesdays at NL Girl House, Rue Sherbrooke will have to be immortalized somewhere else for now. There are more pressing issues at hand.

This time last week, I was considering going to Toronto today to join the G20 protests. I’ve talked a fair game about my more radical political views before, and now I had a chance to put some of my philosophy into action, at least in terms of political theatre. Watching events unfold in that city, I’m glad I stayed home, from the perspective of my physical safety. From the perspective of my political beliefs, I’m a little regretful.

Admirable, if smug, leftist activist leaders deride militant protesters as accomplishing nothing but property destruction, violence against people, and the counter-productive public relations that depicts all leftists as thugs, morons, and arsonists. Anti-capitalist groups worthy of praise deem the Ontario and Canadian governments as needlessly provocative, the extent and secrecy of their emergency police powers showing that establishment forces were spoiling for a fight, and are glad to have struck a genuine blow against those struggling for a more fair society in which all people can prosper and live freely.

I can’t disagree with ideas like that, especially when I see video like this.

I examine this situation and perceive a clear narrative. Everyone knew that this G20 meeting would be focussed on global austerity plans for many of the world’s richest nations. These rich nations, Canada included, have long been manipulated by a piratical investment banking establishment into running their governments at massive deficits, funding enormous national debts from which global financial institutions make the most profit. There are even ways in which an investment bank can profit from the complete collapse of a well-off country’s economy: buying insurance against the collapse of a country’s economy. And those economic collapses happened because of over-reliance on financial strategies invented by investment industry chicanery anyway.

Austerity economies in the world’s richest countries would only lead to increased suffering for poor human populations inside and outside those countries. The investment industry also profits from the deregulation of capital investment that comes with austerity economies. So naturally, advoactes for the poor would protest these plans at the most visible moments to communicate their message that there must be other ways of organizing an economy. Such a moment is a G20 summit where these international arrangements are taking shape. However, there is always a militant fringe to the leftist advocacy movement (just as there is for any political movement: observe, for example, the rural militias of the United States). This militant fringe usually causes property destruction, but has lately been overwhelmed in public relations by the sane organizations. I think one of the main reasons few militant anarchists have appeared at recent summits is that these summits have been held at isolated locations, and travelling there is very expensive. Most people who don’t believe money should exist have very little money for travel, so the militant left fringe can only arrive in small numbers.

However, the downtown core of Canada’s largest city is extremely accessible, and it’s cheap to get there. Everyone in Ontario comes to Toronto. Even a hitchhiker would find it easy to get a ride to a city as central to a country’s life as Toronto. Ask a driver if she’s going to Kananaskis and she’ll ask you for directions, and whether that’s the real name of a town. Knowing that huge numbers of people will be able to assemble for protests, the government then creates an enormous security apparatus, effectively shutting down an entire city for a long weekend. Every government spokesperson justifies the expense and enormity through talking points about the ineviably violent nature of leftist protestors.

A climate of mutual provocation is created. A brutalizing government can justify its large-scale security apparatus in an absurdly conspicuous location, while using the spectacle to discredit leftists and their sympathizers as violent criminals. Meanwhile, brutalized leftist protesters can decry the inevitable government crackdown and win sympathizers for their own causes who deplore government and police overkill. Watch the video again, and you can see both narratives unfolding. The police act in a manner that’s inherently threatening, standing in a street with full riot gear. And the protesters are singing the Canadian national anthem, an act of patriotism aimed at the police, who they hope to depict as having betrayed the democratic ideals of Canada. They sing the words to ‘O Canada,’ but what they communicate is, ‘Charge! I dare you!’ And the police gladly oblige. Both government and police, peaceful and militant leftists, have set a trap for each other, and each oblige the other by walking into their enemy’s traps.

My old friend Sheena is a journalist in Toronto who’s been reporting formally and informally on the protests / riots / crackdowns. She tweeted something earlier today that I found quite insightful. She was incredulous at protesters marching down the streets of Toronto chanting ‘These are our streets!’ when most of them had travelled in from other cities around the country. Again, it’s easy to travel to Toronto.

You could hear a statement of solidarity with the people of what they consider a besieged city, as when people around the world declared themselves New Yorkers after September 11, or how sympathizers with the revolutionaries of May 1968 would delcare themselves Parisians. Or one could hear the insincerity of a group of protesters callously manipulating their audience into sympathy by means of a charismatic image.

Yes, Toronto has become a war zone, with hundreds of people imprisoned by a police force with authoritarian levels of special powers. But a leftist today is savvy, knowing that police brutalization will play directly into their larger goals of discrediting a police force and a conservative government. In order to win, sincerity must be embraced and denied. A protester who travelled from other provinces, other countries, must genuinely believe that Toronto is their city, the site of this confrontation that is a defining moment of a political movement. And that protester must provoke the security apparatus that has been built to brutalize them, must manipulate their audience into believing in their cause, that their opposition to capitalism and the police institution is genuine. That’s why a protester sings the national anthem at a line of riot police: they know the cameras are there, and they know what an amazing image that is.

The advocates for global capitalism and heavy industry have long known how to manipulate the undecided masses into believing that advocates for social justice and environmental responsibility are enemies, terrorists, evil. Nixon created the blueprint for that when his administration destroyed the liberatory movements of the United States in the 1960s. They manipulated ordinary people’s fear of change, fear of the end of the old, comfortable order (comfortable because it’s old).

But advocates of social justice and environmental responsibility have learned these techniques of manipulation as well. We manipulate ordinary people’s fear of repression by state power, fear of democracy being hijacked by corporate interests, fear of surveillance, fear of death. I say this not to discredit social justice and environmentalism. The word manipulation carries nasty connotations, but it’s the very tool of politics and society itself. Read this again and substitute persuasion for manipulation.

Tools for achieving a political end are ethically neutral: they can be employed by any advocate of any cause. The ethical worthiness of a movement should be judged on its goals, not its methods. The cause of the protestors of global capitalism is the betterment of life on Earth.

I’ve Got Reservations About These Philosophers of Mind

2010-06-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

So it’s only now that I’m getting the chance to blog about the Congress meetings in Montreal, which went extremely well for everyone involved named Adam Riggio, as well as my companions from McMaster. Instead of attempting to yoke everything into one overarching narrative, I’ll just concentrate on some intriguing reflections and hope some linking thread establishes itself. Rather like a Robert Altman movie, I suppose.
•••
If my professional association with my friend Dustin continues throughout our careers, we may become known as some kind of feuding odd couple. He insults the French philosophers who are central to my work, burns me constantly in public with some of the fastest put-downs I’ve experienced since eighth grade. I came late to his presentation at the conference, because I was in the afternoon session of an all-day symposium on Friedrich Nietzsche. They’re discussing pluralism about knowledge, and I make a brief comment to the effect that maybe that isn’t actualy a bad thing. His response is to say that if I might want to make a useful contribution, I could listen to the whole presentation. Dustin inadvertently made the entire room think that he hated me.

Of course, during the course of the conference, we were drinking together almost every night. Near closing time on the back patio of the Saint Elizabeth pub, I even convinced him to read Gilles Deleuze’s book on Leibniz, because it was the best summary of the aesthetics of monadology ever written. I don’t expect anyone to understand that sentence. Even I don’t, very much. And the pizza on the way back to the hotel was delicious, completely worth the $2.50/slice.
•••
However, there is a not-so-positive element of my engagement with analytic philosophy that came up at the conference. I was enlisted to give a ten minute commentary on a paper about the colour constancy problem in perception. The paper was written quite well, with a technique that I personally find rather bothersome, but that comes up with increasing frequency in analytic philosophy of mind and knowledge: the intuition pump. The writer describes a scenario, then based on one’s intuitions about how the scenario actually functions, the writer derives various philosophical consequences. One usualy counters such a claim by modifying the scenario, or describing a new scenario, which leads to different intuitions with contrary or incompatible philosophical consequences than the first scenario.

Anyway, the paper was constructing several intuition pumps about what kind of philosophical consequences we should draw about the nature of perception and the content of experience from a particular problem in perception: that when we look at an object, we think of it as having a proper colour, even if the lighting conditions make, for example, a white object appear red. I don’t think I was quite the right person to respond to this, because I don’t actually think this is a real problem. Or at least, it’s not the kind of problem that encourages productive philosophy.

You see, that was the thrust of my commentary. The colour constancy problem is only a problem if you presuppose that every object has some property that is its proper colour, and that lighting conditions either distort to some degree or present this proper colour faithfully. And I said that if we think about colour as a relational property, a property of a field of interactions between an object, the light bouncing off the object, and a perceptual apparatus, then the whole idea of an object having one proper colour regardless of how one’s vision centres or eyes work, regardless of the nature of the ambient light – that notion just doesn’t come into play. And any philosophical problems about perception that depend on this notion just aren’t articulated, because it doesn’t make sense to do so. My commentary made the problem go away by questioning the truth of the premises that made the problem come to be in the first place.

And he had no idea what to do. I felt pretty awkward, to be honest. I had seen one of his presentations at last year’s national conference in Ottawa, and he seemed to be on top of his game when it came to philosophy of mind. He was certainly far superior to me in his knowledge of the literature and the debates. I’ve let the specifics slide as I’ve moved to work in environmental ethics.

But I thought that this sort of thing was still done in philosophy of mind. After all, it’s not a big leap to assume that they’ve read Wittgenstein. He invented most of the problems that philosophy of mind still talks about (and in my opinion, he got rid of those problems just as quickly, and the rest are still catching up). Wittgenstein invented the method of solving a problem by attacking the premises that made the problem exist in the first place. I didn’t think it would be a big deal for me to hit at the premises of the paper’s problem. But apparently, the lessons of the greats are already being forgotten.

Perhaps it’s just easier to pile one intuition pump on top of another. That way, you can get a back-and-forth argument going in the journals, and you don’t have to work that hard to produce an original idea. You can just come up with a slightly different way to interpret a scenario, or draw different intuitions from the same scenario, and you have a publishable article. It’s so much more work to declare a problem to be not worth working on, and try to make your own from scratch.

I don’t want to be that cynical, but it seems to be the most hopeful way for me to read that situation among philosophers. Because the worse idea for me is that all the self-identified analytic philosophers really believe that building intuition pumps for increasingly narrow and esoteric scenarios and problems constitutes real progress in philosophy. For me, real progress in philosophy would be doing the genuinely difficult work of questioning the presuppositions of the current dogma, coming up with new ways to understand the world instead of just following the same old patterns of your predecessors.

What I like about conferences is that I get to meet people from around the country and the continent who are kindred spirits about philosophy, people who think of philosophy as a creative act, and take this more radical activity of questioning presuppositions and turning over old dogmas as philosophy at its best. I met a couple of people in Montreal this year who were like that. But none of them were at this presentation, except me. And I felt it.

I Have Too Much Work to Be Anxious About All This Mess

2010-05-28T12:04:00.003-04:00

A close friend has recently come into some conflict with his very religious parents, and it’s made me think about some of the reasons why people are religious. Dylan Moran in his last comedy tour, much of which is floating around youtube, put it very precisely: Religion is a ritualized anxiety about death.

The subject came up in conversation with a younger colleague of mine who studies Heidegger for a living. She asked if I wasn’t concerned about what will happen to me after I die. I said I had enough things to concern me while I’m alive, and I can at least narrow that list down by using surrounding evidence to think of what’s most probably going to happen to me. I look in my bank account to see how much I’ll have after the rent check comes through. I prepare my doctoral thesis outlines and notes to work on writing that. I go through manuscripts that come into my publishing company to see if they’re worth disseminating. There is clear evidence in the world for all these tasks with which I am directly concerned. There is no evidence at all of what will happen to me after death, so I see no reason to waste my time in idle speculation when there are blogs, stories, and philosophy to write.

I’m an atheist when it came to most personal aspects of God. For me, death is a kind of recycling. Life is the most interesting way I’ve come across so far of keeping meat fresh. I’m quite happy with eventually becoming a meal for a forest glade and a flock of worms. Do worms come in flocks?

I’m digressing a bit here with the worm comments. People who believe fervently in religion often end up in quite violent arguments over who can be right. Religious conflict is driven by a particular conception of truth that many people seem to think is universal, the only kind of truth there is. Imagine a scenario something like this. A bunch of people are in an apartment having an intense argument about how many chairs there are in the room. Moe says there’s only one chair. Kamiko says there aren’t any chairs at all. Julia says there are three chairs, but that they’re all part of one big chair anyway. Fred says there are two chairs, that you can only sit on one at a time, and is terrified by anyone who sits on one chair and rests his feet up on the other. Padma says there are so many chairs in the room that she can barely move, they’re all in the way.

They can’t all be right, because it’s clear that when you look around whatever room you’re in, you can plainly see how many chairs there are. Anyone who tries to disagree with this obvious truth is stupid, because you discover it through simple attention. Now, replace the word ‘chair’ with the word ‘god,’ and you’ll see how the confusion arises. Naively religious people, like my friend’s parents, think gods are like chairs, and that it’s an obvious truth what kind of gods there are. What I hope my funny example, and draft of a standup comedy routine, shows is that there are many different kinds of truth depending what it is you’re talking about. A truth about God/gods is not the same kind of truth as a truth about furniture. And you end up in very silly positions if you think it is the same kind.

Is God a chair? Or perhaps a comfortable futon? A dining room table? Or the floorboards themselves? Find out eventually. Or not.

The Perfect Way to End a Story, But It Will Never Happen

2010-05-17T12:31:00.000-04:00

I discovered a while ago that Steve Carell is likely to leave The Office when his contract is up at the end of the 2010-11 season. I think it’s clear that the show itself would have to end at this point. Michael Scott is the show’s central protagonist and the point around which all the major action of the show revolves.

The Office is past its prime, generally speaking, but is still one of the most entertaining and well-characterized shows on American television. Seven years is a terrific run for any show, and all the actors can look back on it as a point of high quality in their careers. This would be true for the successful post-Office careers of people like Carell, Craig Robinson, Ed Helms, and Ellie Kemper. It would also be true for the people who will be utterly forgotten or typecast beyond all hope of return like John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, Mindy Kaling, and Rainn Wilson. I’m not sure what will happen to B. J. Novak. Perhaps he’ll become a time traveller.

The most interesting part of an Office finale for me is how it’s going to end. Taking a cue from the original British version would be no help. Having run for just two years before Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant began their other projects, Extras and the Ricky Gervais Podcast, the UK Office ended with Tim (US=Jim) and Dawn (US=Pam) getting together, an event the US version long moved past.

I had a wonderful idea how the show should end, but I think you’ll agree when you read it that it would horrify almost all the fans of the show. Then again, it could also be executed very happily and optimistically, though not without a good chunk of unhappiness. And combining laughs with gnawing depression is what The Office is best at.

I took my jumping off point to be the current plotline involving Sabre printers being defective and catching fire when carrying out large jobs. It’s plausible that, with the story of Michael’s illicit relationship now having been wrapped up, the last episode of the season would concentrate on the rest of the staff discovering the Sabre hardware scandal. The next, and presumably last, season would then see the fallout of the scandal on the Sabre corporation. This could set off a chain of corporate blunders and coverups that would eventually lead to the collapse of Sabre, the parent company of Dunder-Mifflin. The seventh season would end as Dunder-Mifflin goes down with the corporate ship and everyone loses their jobs.

An extended epilogue of the last episode would show what happened to the different characters. Jim and Pam move to Philadelphia, where Jim gets a sales job with some other office supply or furniture sales company and Pam stays at home with the kids for a while. I also see Pam getting pregnant again. Dwight would retire to his beet farm, Angela following doggedly with Dwight’s child, not named Morpheus. Darryl would get a job in another warehouse, bitter after his brief brush with the corporate lifestyle. Andy would find himself rewarded for his initial activism on the printer scandal with a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, an office which would prove to be even more insane than Dunder-Mifflin. Kelly would callously manipulate her way into a job at the Securities and Exchange Commission during the investigation of Sabre. Ryan would mopishly become her househusband.

Oscar and Stanley would find other, equally mundane, jobs in the Scranton area, and Stanley and his former mistress Cynthia would get married. Kevin, Phyllis, and Meredith would remain unemployed for the foreseeable future, although Kevin and Phyllis may begin a relationship. Creed would disappear into the Canadian wilderness. Toby would commit suicide.

For some reason, I’m imagining that after initial awkwardness is overcome in social situations, Michael and Erin getting together. They had a very nice moment after her breakup with Andy, and I want to see how that develops. And they would try to get the Michael Scott Paper Company off the ground again, perhaps diversifying into office supplies of all kinds.

The Love of Richard Nixon

2010-05-15T16:14:00.000-04:00

A conversation I had last week reminded me of how much I really hated Richard Nixon. My friend Jeremy and I ended up discussing politics, particularly the policies of various US Presidents. I expressed my somewhat ambivalent opinion of George W. Bush: If it had not been for September 11, he would never have been able to invade Iraq, would have passed immigration reform, and go down in history as a moderately successful one-term President. I have more respect for the person Bush had the potential to become, rather than the person that the situations of his time made Bush.

There was also a pretty funny joke about how William Henry Harrison probably should be left off any qualitative ranking of US Presidents, as he was dumb enough to die of pneumonia within a month. And I learned quite a few interesting and unsavoury things about Andrew Jackson and what could have been the Five Nations Autonomous Indigenous Region in the state of Georgia.

Then Jeremy asked me about Nixon. An initial comparison to Bush was possible, but I quickly dismissed it. Bush jr may have done some awful things in office, and made some terrible decisions. But I still believe that he was doing what he thought was best, and that he is actually a genuinely morally decent individual, at least regarding intentions.

Richard Nixon never made a decision that was not driven by resentment, spite, and hatred. He ran the Presidency as a personal fiefdom, purposely setting out to ruin and destroy anyone who opposed him. He took every political conflict personally. He was the major political motivator in crushing the liberatory ideals of the 1960s, if not in direct causation, then in inspiring and organizing the conservative, reactionary vanguard against them. If he had been elected in 1960 instead of Kennedy, he would have done what Curtis LeMay told him and started a nuclear war with Russia that would have destroyed at least half the Earth.

There has never been a democratic leader in the West more harmful to his people and more disgraceful to the status of his office than Richard Milhouse Nixon. I said to Jeremy that I don’t believe in God, but if there is a God, I hope that he invented a special hell worse than any that had already been established, to send Nixon to. He would probably have been strapped to a chair and forced to hear Allen Ginsberg poetry, recitations of atheist humanist essays, and Doors records for the next billion years before behind annihilated, dispersed into the sweet release of entropic oblivion.

Welcome to Jam

2010-05-13T13:49:00.001-04:00

Chris Morris, Britain’s most brutal and uncompromising provocateur satirist, created a six episode sketch show several years ago, called Jam. The sketches are not what most people call funny, and are mostly terrifyingly disturbing. The tone of sketches are unsettling, with most of the rhythms of comedy removed, and the cinematography sometimes starkly from another world. Here’s a sketch typical of its unsettling insanity, where a man comes to fix a television that has had lizards pouring out of it for the past day.

And this one, which is just plain strange.

I encourage you all to see all the Jam that youtube has to offer. But it’s not for the easily (or possibly) offended, or those whose personality isn’t already disturbed enough to find this funny. I laughed like a beast, especially the man who launches himself into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment by being shredded to sludge in a woodchipper.

Television that Keeps Me Watching TV

2010-05-12T14:51:00.000-04:00

I’ve been very impressed by the new season of Doctor Who, especially Matt Smith, who embodies the role of the Doctor in a way that implies gravitas, joy, and strangeness, sometimes all at once. I find him much less self-consciously pop than David Tennant, which endears him to me, though perhaps not to all the casual fans of the show. Steven Moffatt’s ability to craft such an involved and complex story arc is quite a selling point as well. For all I admire what Russell T Davies was able to do resurrecting the show in the first place, his season arcs were usually a little too simple, amounting to little more than teasers for the finale. This year, the Doctor is discovering clue after clue about the nature of the mysterious cracks and silences in the universe that seem centred around new companion Amy Pond and the oddly insular town of Leadworth.

Treme has been remarkably engaging television for me too. I particularly like the show’s favourite asshole, Steve Zahn’s Davis. Davis is a pompous musician and radio DJ whose uncompromising exuberance and total inability to tell how people will react to his actions before he does them combine, little by little, to ruin his life. In the second episode, he got fired from his radio job after letting a local musician sacrifice a chicken live in studio. By the end of that episode, he got his second job as a desk jockey at a hotel on Bourbon street, but lost it after directing a group of twentysomethings in New Orleans with a church group cleanup crew to a bar outside the hotel’s designated comfort zone. It didn’t help Davis that they didn’t make it back to the hotel for two days.

As a Spaced fan, one of the happiest things we experienced was that the US remake of the beloved show was never picked up. However, I realized this week that there is an American Spaced, and it’s called Community. It’s not just because of the inter-generational unlikely friendships in an eccentric environment, though the nuanced and self-aware characterizations of the protagonists and Greendale College residents is key to its charm. Edgar Wright is a rare director, in that he knows how a camera movement can tell a joke. And the creators of Community understand this as well. One recent episode saw the campus collapse into a paintball war zone, and the climactic last battle of Jeff and Britta with their deranged Spanish teacher Señor Chang would have just looked kind of silly and lame if it had been filmed with an ordinary series of camera shots. But the slow motion of Chang’s entrace, the low angles at which the diminutive teacher was shot, and the kinetic flow of Britta’s attacks and Jeff’s escape heightened the surreality of the moment. It’s still a very revolutionary, and very difficult technique for a camera to be made so pivotal to the humour of a scene. But Spaced and Community have successfully achieved that.

A Selection of Thoughts and Random Happenstance

2010-05-11T10:38:00.000-04:00

Every so often, I think to myself that I should sit down and write a blog entry. But between my thesis work, fiction writing, publishing ventures that show increasing promise, I haven’t actually sat down and written anything. So this week, I’ve written several short entries at once, and scheduled them to appear on the blog as a series of short cuts: weird things that have received cursory treatment in my facebook statuses and tweets, but that haven’t quite merited the sustained attention of a full blog entry. Maybe some unity can be made from the madness. That unity would be my life.
•••
Terrifying Bestial Gyrations Apparently Sell Hockey Tickets. Monday morning, I went to the market to buy food, which is a pretty normal thing to do. However, at the intersection where my supermarket is, there was a nine foot tall bipedal bulldog epileptically rocking back and forth with a sign advertizing that there was a Hamilton Bulldogs minor league hockey game that night. The weird thing was that the bulldog was just rocking back and forth, and his enormous head was tottering like a bobblehead. It looked to me as if he was ejaculating in his pants over and over again.

Finding Philosophy With a Mad German

2010-05-04T00:38:00.000-04:00

So a couple of months ago, I had an insane idea. I’m working on my doctoral thesis right now, a philosophy of ecology. It’s a way of thinking about nature that focusses on the contingency of human existence, and the continuity of humanity with nature, understanding humanity and its technology as a natural creation. All this involves re-thinking concepts of nature, subjectivity, life, and existence. Even though I won’t start actually writing this for another four or five months, and don’t expect to finish for a year and a half, I’m already thinking of the sequel.

The doctoral thesis, which I hope to publish as a book of philosophy, will work as a framework for an ecological ethics. And I want to approach ethical problems differently than the tradition of philosophy tells me I should. The traditional approach to ethics is to look for universal and wide-ranging normative principles that can be applied to particular situations. The problem is that I expect that my concept of existence won’t be amenable to such a dualist ethical thinking.

Instead, I’m thinking that an ethics based on characters would work better. In an ethics based on normative principles, one meets a situation and asks what universal imperatives apply here. In an ethics based on character, one asks what kind of person would you become by acting in different ways. Now think about working in a framework of ecology, thinking about problems of ecological destruction. The kind of person you would become in dealing adequately with these problems would be a human whose existence and personality included all the creatures and ecosystems around you. You would think about yourself less as an isolated human body, and more as a field of interconnected activities. The question now remains: How does one learn to think in this way?

My suspicion that most people would consider insane is that I can find the answer by engaging with art. In particular, I intend to work with the art of Werner Herzog. I’ve always been aware of his giving animals, architecture, landscapes, and forests prominent roles in his films. Sometimes, the actions of these elements are key expressions of the aesthetic structures of the entire films. Herzog’s films themselves are bodies that include non-human actors among their most important constituents. They are bodies where multiples species and ways of being intersect in clear and creative ways.

His protagonists often become other than human over the course of the story. Sometimes they journey among forms before returning to a similar shape to that as which they began. Sometimes, they try to impose their rigid human shapes on worlds alien to them, like the jungle, or the Antarctic, with mixed results. There is nothing necessary about the success or failure of conformity to non-human forms, or trying to force a non-human form to conform to one’s own. There is no universal principle to be found: success or failure of a plan of differentiating or imposition depends on the situation. Sometimes, it’s a matter of contingent features beyond the actor’s control, dumb luck. Sometimes, it’s the protagonist successfully anticipating contingencies.

These ethics do not deal with rules and applications. They deal with characters and situations. I’m not sure how successful my own philosophical project here will be, but I am hopeful that I’m onto a very productive path.

My Kind of Waking Life

2010-04-25T01:14:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a very interesting movie called After.Life. It’s an intriguing premise that apparently resulted in a wretched film. Christina Ricci is a woman (a spoiled, horrid, difficult, self-absorbed, idiotic woman) who is in a car accident and wakes up on Liam Neeson the undertaker’s slab. Apparently, Ricci is a spirit who hasn’t been able to understand that she’s dead, and Neeson has the power to convince her to accept her fate. As their conversations continue, she gains an increasingly deathly pallor, her body catching up to her actual situation of being dead.

This fancy little idea is not the actual point of the movie, however. I don’t mind spoiling it for you, because the movie is supposed to be pretty terrible, and the movie itself isn’t why I’m writing. It turns out that Neeson’s character is just a creepy serial killer who’s using the ‘confused souls’ story as a cover: He’s slowly injecting Ricci with chemicals to make her appear as if she’s dying, cutting off more and more pieces of her clothing for no good reason, and will end by burying her ‘alive.’

After reading the reviewer’s dismissal of the film as “veering into Saw territory,” I was pretty disappointed too. I thought the idea of an undertaker who had to deal with his self-reanimating corpses was pretty brilliant in itself. There’s no need to turn it into a samey serial killer story. In fact, this could make a brilliant black comedy. Consider this: What kind of person would die and refuse to believe that they’re dead. The character Ricci plays in the movie is actually quite like what one of those people would be: Someone so self-absorbed, so convinced that the world revolves around them, that they would find it incredible that the world would go on without them, or that they would die in an absurd accident, that their deaths would be anything other than epic or noteworthy. Can you imagine having to talk someone like that into humility?

That’s where the comedy comes in. This poor undertaker, who I would imagine as a bit more nebbishy, or at least a little less fit, than Liam Neeson, just wants to get on with his business of dressing the dead for their funerals. It’s fine when it comes to the nice old ladies and well-adjusted people dying of sudden heart attacks or terminal illnesses. But so much of his time is filled with exasperating conversations with utterly wretched people. Plus, he has a funeral deadline to convince them to make.

I think I’ll put this on my list of short stories to write. It will finally give me a chance to use Erin May, this reporter character I developed a couple of years ago for a novel treatment that went nowhere (too pretentious). She can investigate his funeral home after the Ricci character starts walking and talking during her own funeral, cajoling people about how little they appreciate her. I've been wanting to write something articulating her plucky jadedness for a while now, and this story might suit it perfectly. It would be a good practice for writing irrealism too.

A Better Expression of My Views on Sports Than I Could Write

2010-04-18T16:10:00.001-04:00

It’s difficult sometimes for me to explain my hatred for the New York Yankees. It’s one of those principles that seems utter nonsense unless you already understand it. So it’s impossible to make anyone understand it. However, Joe Queenan of the New York Times does a very good job.

It all revolves around the smugness of the franchise: everyone hopes to win, but the Yankees (like the Dallas Cowboys, Duke University basketball, the LA Lakers, and Manchester United) expect to win. A team can go on a years-long winning streak, like the Green Bay Packers, or Chicago Bulls, and not necessarily have this smugness, the presumption of victory. Everyone has to work for victory, but these teams are still conscious of having to work for it, and that consciousness in a Bulls fan, Packers fan, or Blue Jays fan prevents smugness from developing.

Developing legions of insincere fans from all over the world also helps build that smugness. The Montreal Canadiens won almost every hockey game they ever played for decades (and even a few games that they weren’t even playing at all). But the paradigmatic Canadiens fan was still a Quebecois. But there is nothing more insufferable than a dedicated Yankees fan from Arizona or Paris.

Being a Canadian who likes baseball, we all converge morally on Toronto, because the Blue Jays are all we’ve got. Even when the Montreal Expos still existed, Toronto was really all we had. Being ten years old during the second world series victory in a row helped imprint the Blue Jays on my personality as something to which warm, fuzzy thoughts and feelings apply.

The most difficult thing about being a Blue Jays fan is that they’re in the toughest division in the entire sport. Every Blue Jays victory has to come with a Yankees, Red Sox, or Tampa Bay Rays loss. You shouldn’t count the Baltimore Orioles as a team, however, because a 1-11 record this season disqualifies them from that status. So not only have the Blue Jays become my only untainted expression of patriotism, but they are also my weapon against the itching smugness of the Yankees. They’re down to third in the division right now, but a 7-6 record is still good in the first two weeks of the season. The Jays keep above .500 win percentage, and maybe this could be the year we knock the Yankees out.

Lessons from History, Or When Not to Read Too Closely

2010-04-12T11:04:00.001-04:00

I was reflecting on last Tuesday’s John Ralston Saul talk at McMaster this weekend, and another idea occurred to me. The actual subject of his talk was understanding Canada as a Métis nation, a life grown of pluralism that was founded in the historical situation in the country for many years, where the indigenous peoples and the English and French settlers were on a level playing field. This shifted, he said, in the nineteenth century, as European philosophies of racial nationhood took hold. But he said that Canada had a very special essence in this founding atmosphere of pluralism and multiple identities.

I found Saul’s talk very intriguing and useful. But my social scientist, cultural theorist, and historian friends thought differently. They raised questions and commented to me that Saul’s theory was naive. They raised the valid point that his romanticizing the early indigenous-settler relationships as a creative multiplicity of identity and lifestyle (and it was quite romanticized) papered over the genuine terrifying harm that settler-descended people had done to the indigenous. They argued that history was much messier than Saul’s simple story, and I agreed with them.

But I hold firm that Saul’s talk was intriguing and useful - as philosophy. As history, it missed major complications that made a mockery of his account of the Canadian story. Of course, the complications of history as it actually occurred always make a mockery of any simple story. The point of a simple story is not to be an accurate retelling of events, and anyone who thinks that is the point doesn’t understand the messy muddiness of how history works.

A story like Saul’s is told not to recount the past, but to create the future. A plural Canada whose people embrace contradiction and multiplicity in their national and personal identity is a Canada where I would love to live. Saul told a just-so story to explain his philosophy of identity (because that’s what it was, not a genuine historical account). Such a philosophy is connected with Canadian history to give its audience an anchor in their own lives, a tool to apply the concept to their own lives, taking it out of the abstract and into actual application.

The problem with just-so stories that are delivered as interpretations of historical events is that they gloss over the events that don’t jive with the story. So those in the audience with a better mind for history than philosophy will dismiss the concept as poor history and leave it at that. It’s a long-standing problem for creative philosophers to find ways to articulate their concepts in a manner that people can latch onto them and incorporate them into their own lives. It can be tough to get our ideas out of the abstract.

Philosophy as Critic and Creator

2010-04-06T15:49:00.004-04:00

Again, Brian Leiter’s blog has informed me of an intriguing essay and a sticky problem that contemporary philosophers face: the perception among many in wider society that the problems of philosophy are irrelevant. This essay by Jason Stanley describes a typical philosopher’s problem of trying to make the issues around which his discipline revolves matter. Stanley describes philosophy as the target of a prevailing attitude in the humanities today that understanding the particularities of cultures are most important for human civilization. Philosophy concentrates on the ancient problems such as whether there is free will, the nature of rational agency, what constitutes evidence, what is the truth of existence? These are the eternal questions, the questions that would appear to make mere gossip of what Stanley calls “the anthropology of the other.”

Yet philosophy, as it is traditionally understood, is devalued by its fellow humanities disciplines precisely because it does not engage in this anthropology. Stanley describes philosophers who seek ways of writing that escape the traditional eternal questions (Friedrich Nietzsche, Slavoj Zizek, in my opinion John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein also) as anti-philosophers. Stanley sees a role for philosophy in this new environment as one in its ancient Western tradition: the critic.

Often, people find themselves slipping into the dogmas of their cultural upbringings, their colloquial traditions, that which seems so obvious that it would never be questioned. Where this happens, the critical voice of philosopher turns, showing people by reasoned argument that they are straying from the truth through their mere anthropology. The job of the philosopher is to stand up for what is right and true, defending universal justice in the face of those who would say, “Ah, that’s not how we do things here,” sneaking abuse and violence under the banner of tolerant relativism. This relativism ends all discourse over right and wrong, which the philosopher, with his eye on the truth, can restore.

But I want to take this further. Stanley is mistaken to build an antagonism, an opposition, between the philosophy of the traditional eternal questions and the traditional critics of philosophy that tend to align with cultural studies and anthropology. The ideas they represent are only anti-philosophy insofar as ‘philosophy’ is understood as investigating the eternal, projects above merely cultural traditions, matters of absolute truth, unpolluted by facts of simple practicality.

To understand philosophy as a cultural tradition is not anti-philosophical, it is anti-necessitarian. I agree with Stanley about the importance of philosophical thinking as a critical, subversive activity. The biggest problem philosophy faces, I think, is its tendency to believe itself to have this priviledged role as the only path to reasoned certainty; its tendency to believe that the truth is unified, absolute, more pure than the cultural collisions described in mere anthropology.

John Ralston Saul gave a talk at McMaster University today on understanding Canada as having an important cultural tradition of embracing hybrids, multiple mutually inconsistent identities, continuing negotiation among neighbouring communities, and adaptation to changing conditions of life. He contrasted this attitude (which he associated with the traditions of the indigenous peoples of Canada and its first immigrants who implicitly picked up their ideas) with the European attitude that unity of identity, science, politics, ethnicity, territory, and truth is the only good way to run society.

From the very beginning of one’s education in philosophy, one is taught to unify one’s thinking, that inconsistency is a major problem in one’s thinking and identity, that you cannot be two things at once. Such inconsistencies and multiplicities are against the very nature of reason and truth itself. This is the kind of thinking that is dangerous, that brings adaptiveness and flexibility to an end. Convinced that what is true now is true at all times, one will run into severe problems when the nature of the world changes.

One rhetorical point Saul made was to bring up the condescending point about the technology of the indigenous peoples of the Canadian shield. “If these people were so intelligent, said the intelligensia of Europe, then why didn’t they develop such a simple technology as the wheel? Have you ever tried to use a wheeled vehicle of the nineteenth century to get through the wilderness of the Shield? You’d end up with a lot of broken wood very quickly.”

The point is that what is right and true for one land, region, culture, people, civilization, may not be right and true for another. This is not relativism, but adaptation. One can defend those abused by the powers of a foreign land, but not because you have access to an eternal ethical truth that holds sway over the contingent culture. The abused themselves know that they are abused, and if they ask for help, it must be given. A violent man may say that this is what we do here, but not for long once those to which violence is done rise up.

The philosophy that most intrigues me is the creation of new concepts and new ways of life for changing times, and the changing problems that come along with time. Philosophy is the branch of the humanities that deals with thought at its most abstract, but this is not superior because of the purity of the abstract. There is no absolute purity, only purity of some quality, abstractness being only one such quality. Thought at its most abstract is least restrained by our habits of daily thought, what we have become used to thinking is possible and impossible.

Maximizing freedom of thought in philosophical creativity lets us build ideas that can take us to weird, alien places. The world may change in an utterly unpredictable way one day. The more concepts we have at our disposal, the better we can approximate in our thinking and planning the strange new world where we now find ourselves. Philosophy can be our first foothold in a contingent, dangerous world.

The Dangerous World of an Elite Philosophy

2010-03-26T13:12:00.000-04:00

The follow up arguments to these posts have been on Brian Leiter’s blog for over a week now, but I only just got around to watching it. Last week, Jerry Fodor and Elliott Sober had an hour-long argument on bloggingheads.tv about the subject matter of Fodor’s new book, co-written with Massimo Piattelli-Palmerini, What Darwin Got Wrong. In the book and the conversation, Fodor argues that natural selection is not actually a scientific theory, despite the popular conviction that it is the theory of natural selection. The argument is provocative, but in my view considerably dangerous politically, but I think understanding this argument can show how dangerous and reckless philosophy can be when it’s done without reference to the role it can play, whether faithful to the purposes of its writers or not, in the formation and battles of ideologies.

People familiar with Fodor’s writings will find it rather strange that I’d call him reckless. Fodor is a writer who spends literally decades perfecting his arguments. Last year, I read his previous book, Language of Thought II, the main thrust of which was his argument for the modularity of mind and nativism of concepts. This argument he first formulated in the original Language of Thought, which was published in 1975. Since then, the argument has changed in its particular derivations, and how it connects one concept with another, but the basic structure and goal has remained the same. Essentially, Fodor’s writings on philosophy of mind have continually revised a single argument for thirty-five years.

How could a writer this meticulous about the creation of his argument be called reckless? Keep this question in mind as I walk through the argument between Fodor and Sober. I’ve embedded the full video a couple of paragraphs ago, but here’s Fodor’s basic point. A scientific theory, says Fodor, is a set of universally generalizable statements about what can and cannot happen, about how a system can behave. Such statements are the sole content of any scientific theory. By Fodor’s standards, if natural selection was genuinely a scientific theory, then it would be able to make universally generalizable statements about whether some trait is adaptive: for all occurrences of trait x, trait x is adaptive.

The natural selection principle cannot do this, because it can only tell you about what traits are adaptive in some particular situation. The predictions of natural selection as a theory can only be made in some particular context: Some of the particular contexts Fodor and Sober discuss are predator-prey relationships, sex distribution ratio in some particular ecology. Evolutionary biologists reproduce these contexts in mathematical models to make predictions about the development of these ecologies. According to Fodor, these concepts are mere particulars, which he dismisses as gossip, stories granny tells about lions and zebras, turtles, fungi, etc. No specific predictions can be made about what THE adaptive traits are.

But here is what Fodor doesn’t understand about evolutionary biology: no trait is adaptive in all situations. That fact is why species evolve in the first place: a trait is adaptive to an ecological context. The statement “Trait x is adaptive,” said without specifying an ecological context, is neither true nor false. Without an ecological context, such a statement is meaningless. Trait x is always an adaptation-to, and natural selection is always a selection-for. A statement in evolutionary biology is contingent, dependent on the particular ecology in which the organisms and traits in question exist. It cannot make universally generalizable statements about what traits are adaptive, because adaptation is not a universally general process: it is contingent and singular in its articulation and its situation.

If you share Fodor’s definition of ‘scientific theory,’ then you will agree with him that natural selection is no scientific theory. And perhaps as a corollary, you will believe that evolutionary biology is no science. This is Fodor on top of his game: he builds ironclad arguments based on premises that sound entirely plausible in the abstract. But as soon as those abstract premises and arguments are applied to real-world situations, then we end up assenting to what we never would have otherwise. Has Fodor convinced us of a truth of which we were previously ignorant? Or has something more dangerous happened?

Here is where we see the recklessness of Fodor’s method. Just put his argument into the contingent context in which he makes it. You could flippantly (or Frippantly; see Fripp, Robert) say we’re now working in an evolutionary ecology of ideas. Fodor and Sober spend their hour long conversation arguing over what is properly a definition of a scientific theory, about what kinds of propositions should properly be called theoretical and what should properly be called empirical field research (or gossip, in Fodor’s terms).

As a side note, I have never liked Fodor’s dismissive attitude towards philosophies he holds to be wrong. His contemptuous and insulting words I find rude and spiteful, no matter the calm and apologetic tones in which he may say them in conversation.

Now imagine how a fundamentalist religious campaigner may take Fodor’s words and twist them to his agenda. A respectable, scientific philosopher appreciated throughout his field for the rigor and care with which he crafts his arguments, is saying that natural selection, the key principle of evolution, is no theory. It doesn’t matter that Fodor is arguing over the definition of the word ‘theory’ and whether natural selection fits his definition.

Fodor is just trying to isolate his argument over definitions from the context of education and science programs and support in the rest of the world. Such political debates would, according to such a philosopher interested only in truths discovered through dispassionate (yet so very rude) argument, be mere gossip, grannies bickering at each other. Yet these debates craft the structure of our culture itself. One cannot understand the thought of Charles Darwin without reference to how he developed it. And one cannot understand this development without reference to the religious, social, and political climate in which Darwin worked and wrote. His ideas had a social power that may not be inherent in the propositions themselves, but constituted a profound revolution when placed in an ecology of Victorian Europe and North America.

Ideas themselves are developed in a contingent context, and while some may consist of universally generalizable propositions, the propositions alone cannot tell us how an idea will be put to work in the world. A philosopher who sees his discipline as above this riff-raff of mere politics, partisan gossip, and bickering grannies, may craft ideas that those grannies can take from him and pervert into a form the philosopher might find ethically repugnant. A genuinely mindful philosopher will keep her eye on the world in which her ideas are taken up, and think so as to help create the world where she wants to live. From riff-raff we are born, in riff-raff we live, and to riff-raff we will return. The highest philosophy is not the most abstract and distant from the distasteful, but the most powerful in transforming taste.

Was This What Romans Felt Like, But With More Funny Cat Videos?

2010-03-18T22:56:00.001-04:00

I read two articles today that gave me a very good sense of the national depression in the United States today. I don’t mean just the economic crisis, which is still just in recession territory. I mean the psychological and moral depression in the United States.

One explained a particularly strange investment: an insurance that will pay off if a country defaults on its national debt. Particularly, the article explained how counter-productive such an investment is when it’s held against the national debt of the United States. Because that country is so intimately integrated with the economies of so many other countries (particularly in terms of those countries which themselves have purchased large amounts of US debt), this actually would cause the entire global financial system to collapse.

Of course, under these conditions, no one could collect on this insurance, because there wouldn’t be any money left. And these insurance packages constitute a very small percentage of the total investment market. But the fact that they exist at all speaks to the amazing pessimism of contemporary Americans. What kind of people would even consider the possibilities of betting against their own country? Perhaps people who have become resigned to collapse.

The other article talked about a curious phenomenon in popular culture: the prominence of the Omega Male. We all know what an alpha male is: the muscular, dominating, soldier, jock, thunder lizard. And we can get an idea of what a beta male is: a nice guy who gets by, maybe a little on the bland side, the baxter, Jim Halpert. The omega male is the self-sabotager who whines about having been sabotaged, the loser, the stoner, the jerk. Referring specifically to Ben Stiller’s new movie Greenberg, he seems a holy fool, a pathetic figure played for laughs, but for whom a strange sympathy develops.

The omega male comes in many forms. The “Liberal Arts Layabout” is a failed artist or professional, becoming either bitter at the consciousness of their failure of retreating into a fantasy world. The “Mimbo” (thank you for this word, Elaine Benes) is a prettyboy without the intelligence even to direct his confidence towards some goal, or even to formulate some goal. The “Beer Guy” is a moron who has let himself relax into a pool of filth and Bud Lite. The “Game Boy” is the nerd who lacks the brains to make good use of his antisocial habits, the perpetual adolescent.

They are the figures of a society who has dropped out, archetypes of dominance who no longer have the capacity to control. Americans still have some measure of hope for the future, but this is a culture who has long equated success with domination, and that just isn’t possible anymore. Obama is probably a public figure who breaks most of these stereotypes of Greek-lettered men: intelligence, power, and charisma coupled with humility and respect.

But I still find something romantically strange about some of these failure figures. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been readind Don Quixote. Jason Schwartzman’s character in Bored to Death is described as a Liberal Arts Layabout Omega Male: a failed writer who enters a fantasy world to become a bumbling private detective after reading too many mystery novels. The parallel with Quixote is clear: our Don was a landed gentry of no note whatsoever until he read too many chivalric romance novels and took up a career as a knight errant, resurrecting through his own examples a golden age of justice that never before existed. I’m not saying Bored to Death is in the same league as one of the seminal works of Western literature. But there could be worse things to imitate, and far worse sources of material to steal.

The funny thing is that Don Quixote meets with a kind of success: he’s condescended towards throughout the first part of the two-part novel (I’m just under halfway through). But he demonstrates a kind of ethical striving that inspires a lot of the characters he encounters to improve their lives. He passes among quite a few people whose lives he plays a part in making better. He has an equal number of screw-ups, but the perfection he seeks is impossible. Perhaps this is the path of some of these noble loser figures, and dreams of better days gone by can resurrect that which never was.

What Happened? Have You Done Anything?

2010-03-14T16:20:00.006-04:00

Of the movies I’ve seen in the past year, none have stayed with me more than A Serious Man, and not just because “Somebody to Love” by Jefferson Airplane is such a great song. There’s a wonderful article on Slate that gets to the heart of its story quite concisely. Larry Gopnik, the protagonist, is a man whose misfortune appears out of the blue because he didn’t see it coming. It wasn’t that there was very much concealing going on - he just never looked.

It’s a meditation on a perennial human failing: we never ask until it’s too late, we never fix the bridge until someone falls. Trying to rationalize our own inattentiveness to the important events results in a lot of empty calls to a God whose job isn’t to answer. Larry never tries to figure out the answers to what has gone wrong in his life for himself. “I haven’t done anything!” he says repeatedly throughout the film. This is really the problem in his life. The only times he acts positive at all are in his dream sequences. At all other times, he’s barely reacting, watching his life fall apart. It’s true that it isn’t his fault, but he never tries to put it back together. He hasn’t done anything, and still doesn’t.

This movie made me think about what we use reason for, to explain our world and try to improve it. That’s one of its higher goals at least, but most of our time is spent using our reason to make excuses for why the world is as it is. Larry goes to talk to the three rabbis of his community for some advice about his life, and all he’s told is that what happens is God’s will. “Look to the parking lot,” goes the empty platitude of one. Another tells a pointless story of a dentist who found the Hebrew letters “Help me!” written on the back of a gentile customer’s teeth. What does the dentist do? He couldn’t figure out the mystery, so he returned to his practise as he always had before. How does that help me? asks Larry. How can we understand God’s will? answers the rabbi.

The last rabbi won’t even leave his office to say hello.

Weakness is more common to us than we like to think. So many of us like to believe that we’re in control of our lives, but it’s remarkably easy to mistake stability for control. If there are no disruptions to test whether I control my life, then there’s nothing to prevent me from believing that I control my life. Therefore I control my life. Spelled out as directly as this, the thought process seems utterly ludicrous, but I think it’s more common to a lot of us than we like to think. A person can be very uncomfortable facing how weak they actually might be. It takes fortitude to test yourself.

When Rabbi Marshack, the oldest, most venerable rabbi in the community, finally speaks, he speaks not to Larry, but to his son Danny, who is too high to listen. “When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, what then?” Sometimes control is a fantasy, and hope is all we have. A Serious Man suggests that a happy life might be one that’s just lucky enough to avoid disruption.

Imagine the Possibilities of a New Sound, Or a Sound So Old It’s Forgotten

2010-03-03T22:30:00.001-05:00

The other day, I came across an article about a collection of centuries-old pianos in a small town in Massachusetts. The bulk of the article examined the differences between the sounds of particular famous pieces of classical music on different brands of piano. The samples of music blew me away, so radically strange they were to my ears.

The pianos that are used universally in classical concerts and records today are contemporary Steinways. This is the instrument on which I’ve always heard Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” for example. But hearing it played on a 200-year-old Katholnig, a brand of piano that Ludwig van himself would have composed upon was mind-blowing. The sustain on the notes was just short enough not to overpower the subsequent notes, but created a much more dreamlike sound. The articles included examples of Brahms played on a Streicher and Debussy on an Erard, and the differences between these rare, out of production pianos and the mainstream Steinways was incredible. It makes one wonder why such variety of piano production, and therefore such variety of sound production, has disappeared from classical music today.

It made the article’s author Jan Swafford wonder, and she told a very nice little just-so story about why. In her interview with Michael Frederick, the owner of the piano collection in Massachusetts, he continually mentioned the standardization of piano production in the contemporary classical music world. All pianos were made to sound the same, and there was no longer any variation of piano products. Swafford speculated that the reason for this was because of the social role of recording technologies. Now that recordings exist, she said, people go to concerts to hear the music played exactly as it would be heard on the recordings. In order to get a perfect reproduction, one would have to make sure that every concert piano would sounds the same.

But as soon as I thought about how well this story applied to any other genre of music – jazz, rock, hip hop – I realized that recording alone could not be at fault for the deadening of variety in classical music. We music fans get the recordings, listening to them attentively, sometimes obsessively. But when we go to live shows, we’re bored when the songs are played exactly as on the records. We want to hear variations, improvizations, guest rappers, a random solo where we least expect it. And the proliferation of brands of guitar, each with their own eccentricities, is another sign of the embrace of this variety, of the possibility of new sound. Just compare the same stretch of music played on a Rickenbacker, a Telecaster, a Les Paul, and a B. C. Rich.

Classical music has come to be dominated by a feature of musical appreciation that modern forms largely, and thankfully, lack: obsessively insular reverence to the point of stagnation. Try to throw some improvization into a performance of “Appassionata,” a Beethoven piano piece with an ending cacaphony so wild that it foreshadows the guitar solos of Kerry King or Hendrix. You’ll never get away with it in front of a crowd of classical music fans. Classical music fans are centred on the worship of their godly figures who are long dead.

A performance of classical music isn’t meant to have the performer physically in front of you play a piece according to her own creative impulses. She’s meant to be a channeller of the idols. There are similar impulses in folk music too, but there’s still room for creativity in that genre. That’s why classical music has been standardized and had the life sucked out of it. And it’s been such a successful procedure that we don’t even know what we’re missing anymore until the owner of an antique piano museum in Massachusetts brings someone in to play us some Beethoven.

Wisdom Only Comes With the Falling of Dusk

2010-02-26T01:16:00.000-05:00

I can now consider Lisa Moore to have officially made it, because she’s been reviewed in the New York Times. I first met her when I interviewed her for The Muse, either just before or just after she became writer-in-residence at Memorial University. I can’t quite remember the exact chronology. She filled the job incredibly well, becoming a popular fixture on campus and deeply integrated with the literature student community. I had given up on writing of my own when she was writer-in-residence, so I wasn’t really an active member of that scene. If I could go back now that I self-identify very differently, I don’t really know what would change. But this post isn’t about other possible worlds.

Her second book is called February, the story of a woman who has taken decades to deal with the traumatic death of her husband at sea. The Times article, by Sylvia Brownrigg, is a very positive review, and it looks like an intriguing book. But there’s an element of the story that the Times doesn’t notice, which is very important for understanding the particular resonance of the book. The book takes place in St John’s, and Brownrigg notes that the protagonist’s husband had died in the collapse of an ocean oil platform in a severe storm in the early 1980s, where none of the crew survived. To a typical New York Times reader, this is all you need to know, and you can appreciate the story for its craft and emotional power at the individual level just fine with this context. But if you’re from Newfoundland, once you know this, the story takes on a deeper, much more traumatic meaning. Because a Newfoundlander reading the description of the husband’s death knows immediately that it was The Ocean Ranger.

The impact of this incident can’t be underestimated. The closest analogue I can see for a more widely known event is difficult to find. The best example I could think of is that The Ocean Ranger is to Newfoundland what The World Trade Centre is to New York City. It’s the greatest single shock of national trauma which that society experienced, and national trauma is the best way to understand its social, cultural, and psychological impact. It was the climax of centuries of deadly terror inflicted on working people by the sea. I don’t want to explain it any more, because my words in a blog post won’t match the place this event has in Newfoundland’s national psyche.

Mindful of this, here is what I think Moore was trying to do. She’s trying to make a national catharsis, a work of art to process the inconceivable. It seems an indirect method, which is probably best, because of the magnitude of the event itself. I don’t know how well she pulls this off, because I haven’t yet read the book. But I admire the project, even while I remain ambivalent.

The particular role of national art in depicting and processing national trauma is important and fascinating, and remains incredibly difficult. An artist has to be very careful not to trivialize the event through the required particularity of a narrative. There also has to be enough distance in time that the event can be properly understood without the immediate pain intefering with thought. Her story takes it as a remove as well, since it’s more specifically about the mourning process for the Ocean Ranger, rather than the event itself. This can be effective, but also very dangerous. If her protagonist, Helen O’Mara, comes to stand too literally for the ‘People of Newfoundland,’ then Moore risks sliding into hokum. But it would only be hokum to someone already familiar with the trauma itself, only a Newfoundlander. This particular kind of hokum would be pretty much invisible to someone not from the island, such as a New York Times book reviewer. I think Moore has the talent to prevent this, but I’m going to have to read the book myself to see. When does it come out in softcover?

(Is this a sign that a national trauma has been overcome? When a citizen can ask when the first major attempt at artistic catharsis is coming out in softcover?)

Meditations on Values and Priorities

2010-02-23T21:52:00.001-05:00

At the moment, I’m working on a paper that constitutes my last course requirement for my doctorate, an application of John Dewey’s thought to environmental ethics. Then again, perhaps I should better call it a demonstration that Dewey’s thought can be applied to environmental ethics. The concept of the intrinsic value of nature and an enmity to anthropocentrism seems pretty alien to a pragmatist viewpoint, and most environmental ethicists agree that pragmatism can’t help them.

Of course, my essay takes a completely left-field attack on this point of view. My reasoning isn’t so much that environmental ethics actually can work by understanding value as inevitably reflecting human priorities. That’s an obvious frontal attack on environmentalist hostility to pragmatism that just won’t work. Instead, I’m looking at Dewey’s metaphysical principles - ideas about the world as being contingent; understanding that a species only survives when it is able to adapt mindfully of its surroundings, making environmental mindfulness a key factor in any evolutionary success. Immediate practical values of staying alive are integrated with understanding how you’re interdependent with a huge multiplicity of things that are not you.

Of course, this brief summary doesn’t do the idea any justice in its details, and is only meant to be an overview of what I’m currently working on. And any commentary should reflect the provisional and summary nature of what I’ve said in the last two paragraphs, not flippantly attempt a total refutation based on a few ambiguities in the account (I’m talking about you, Benny Wald). This is a method that’s been fairly common for me, and quite successful: ignoring the obvious set of philosophical debates (in this case, all Dewey’s ethical projects) and seeing how the central concepts can be informed by other elements of philosophy.

Another Democrat Supports an Unrepentant Terrorist

2010-02-15T16:27:00.001-05:00

I discovered something today that I think will nag at me for quite a while in the future, because I don’t have an inkling of an idea of what to do about it. Scanning through my news of the day, I discovered a piece by Christopher Hitchens about a recent scandal regarding Amnesty International.

I have an ambivalent relationship with Hitchens. He was an advocate of the Iraq war in 2003, and a strong advocate of torture. He has since dropped his support of the war and more extreme torture techniques in the USA repetoire such as waterboarding, the latter after recording a very graphic video of Hitchens himself being waterboarded. And as I read his regular columns for Slate magazine, I find that his harsh evaluations of global politics to be remarkably sensible. I don’t always feel good about it, but I can’t help but agree with most everything he has written over the last twelve or so months, at least on some level.

Now he’s publicizing an affair that is incredibly disturbing to me. Amnesty International is one of the few charities I support financially, just above the minimum monthly donation, but it’s taken an important place in my thinking. They became involved over the Guantanamo era with a group called Cageprisoners, run by former Guantanamo prisoner and UK citizen Moazzem Begg. Amnesty advocated for Begg’s release, because they considered prisoners of the USA in Guantanamo to be political prisoners, and it was certainly clear that the prisoners were being treated inhumanely and violently.

But Begg himself and Cageprisoners are advocates for the return of the Taliban to the leadership of Afghanistan. In their support for Guantanamo prisoners, Amnesty has allied itself with figures who would deny millions of people the rights for which that Amnesty itself is an advocate. Amnesty opposed the USA’s treatment of its prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, an act in accordance with their ethical stance. But many of the prisoners themselves were stringent opponents of democracy, free thought and expression, and women’s rights. These men were unjustly treated in prison, because a democracy for one should be a democracy for all, even giving its enemies humane treatment. This is the core principle of democracy that Cheney’s policies ignored. To deny democracy in even one case is to deny your own democratic values.

Amnesty seems to have fallen into the trap of dualistic thinking. They opposed the USA’s human rights abuses, but in the fire of their opposition forgot that the targets of American violence were themselves enemies of human rights. Opposition to USA policy on prisoners meant alliance with Amnesty. But the most shameful aspect of this is that when an Amnesty executive, Gita Sahgal, spoke out against thier association with radical Islamists, she was suspended. Sahgal and her allies have established a website to advocate for her. These advocates of freedom of thought are trying to cover up their mistake by acting like authoritarians, like thought police.

But I find myself in a tight spot. Do I withdraw my funding and support of Amnesty because of this incident? Or do I hope that a resolution can be found, and its leaders come to their senses. I’ve seen many admirable figures and friends on the left become embarrassing hypocrites and apologists for violence because of the dualistic thinking that brought Amnesty and Moazzem Begg together. An opponent of the Iraq invasion becomes an opponent of NATO; support for ending the occupation of Palestine becomes support for Hamas; opposing George W and Western imperialism becomes apologising for al Qaeda. And I continue to feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.

Proliferating Television and Visions of Airships Over the Jungle

2010-02-09T21:31:00.001-05:00

A by-product of my trip to Ecuador was another idea for a novel, which I think is the most promising I’ve had, with at least equal or higher potential than Write My Name In Hangul, my story about English teachers in South Korea. Travelling around Ecuador from city to city seems rather difficult, because it’s such a mountainous country with wide swaths of protected jungle area. So land transportation consists of tricky mountainous roads, which often take an entire day to travel the distance which would be only a few hours’ journey on Canadian highways. The most efficient way of getting from one city to another is by plane. Ecuadorians are very ecologically minded people, so this high carbon footprint of travelling around their country is a little paradoxical.

I realized the best kind of inter-city transit industry for this country would be airships, blimps, zeppelins. Helium gasbags with large passenger and crew cabins, spacious enough for a small ferry with the capacity of a standard inter-city plane, but much more comfortable. It would move at maybe half the pace, but could still get you from Quito to Cuenca to Loja in three hours. And it would be much more comfortable than a cramped airplane.

I don’t really have the entrepreneurial acumen to start this business myself, but I definitely have the creative mind to write a book about it. I already have most of my main characters, a couple of which I’ve used already in other projects, and the bare outlines of a story. Really, in terms of story, I just have the framework of everyone’s lives bumbling along while they fly from city to city on the flagship, L’Altavida. And there’s one incident that I want to include.

There’ll be a drunken documentary filmmaker, Norberto Krieger from either Argentina or Chile, who basically makes a home out of the airship, specifically the airship bar. About two-thirds of the way through the book, he’ll be comically thrown out of the airship over the jungle, but about a week later, he’ll walk back onto the airship when it stops in Cuenca. When asked how he survived the fall, he’d say “You have to tuck and roll.” When asked why he came back, he’d say, “I left my laptop in my crew cabin.”

And I have a title: The High Life.
•••
One of the things that I find pretty cool about television today is the degree and obviousness with which a franchise migrates from country to country. Now, this has happened pretty much ever since television existed in multiple countries, with executives licencing remakes of shows that have been successful in other countries, and the success rate of the new shows being reasonable at best. The Office is probably the most obvious example, with eight versions now existing (the original UK, the United States, Quebec, France, Germany, Chile, Russia, Brazil). I find it interesting how differences between the shows can reflect the differences in culture between the different countries, but that’s not the piece of news I’ve discovered now.

No, what I found out is that a much more mediocre American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, has been ripped off almost exactly by Belarus. The characters even have the same name, the scripts are practically translations, and the actors are disturbingly old compared to their US counterparts. It’s completely unlicenced and absolutely impossible for anyone to get them to cease production. All television in Belarus is owned by the authoritarian state, which exists outside all international legal systems.

The Infamous Case of John Yoo, the Perfect Lawyer

2010-02-02T10:44:00.000-05:00

Over the years, I’ve become intrigued by the lawyer. Among all my friends who have gone to law school, I’d say seventy per cent of them either didn’t finish, or did and chose not to become lawyers. For some, it was a matter of the workload, and the very long hours poring over legalese for hire. For others, they would be restricted from doing what they wanted to do with their lives, forced into taking positions that they might not want to take. This is what fascinates me most about lawyers.

Last month, I watched Jon Stewart interview John Yoo on The Daily Show, expecting to see him catch Yoo in some moment of hypocrisy, to display him in the infamy he deserved. This would have been a Jim Cramer moment for a genuinely influential figure in the Bush Administration. Yet Yoo never became ideological - he didn’t seem to have an ideology for Stewart’s questions to describe. Thinking on this and reading some of the analyses periodically over the following weeks, I realized that it was because John Yoo actually had no ideology. He had no beliefs.

What was he doing working in the Bush Administration? He was hired for the job. Why would he author a memo of legal advice that gave the Bush Administration the space to make a mockery of the Geneva Conventions, commit acts that American people generally consider morally reprehensible? Because it was part of his job to do so. Yoo’s bosses asked him if he could write a legal document giving them grounds to carry out particular acts. He acted according to the wishes of his client, finding the grey areas in the relevant legal documents to make their explanations.

This is what fascinates me about lawyers. The ideal lawyer is one who always acts in the best interest of their client, who becomes a tool of the client. The ideal lawyer empties their own personality and belief system, moral and political, and takes on that of their client. The wishes of the client become their wishes. This is why I think a lot of my more politically active friends left the legal profession, because they would have found themselves in this bind. In an economic climate where a young lawyer needs to take the jobs they can get, there is no guarantee that someone at the start of their career will work at a firm or represent clients who share at least some significant part of their belief system. If you’re not comfortable with that, then you won’t be comfortable being a working lawyer.

These kinds of empty personalities are what I find fascinating, the people who completely subsume themselves, who make themselves a figure for the action of others, an implement. I had an idea for a novel a while ago about a lawyer. I might have written about it here, but I don’t feel like going through my archives to check. The central character would be a lawyer who was completely indifferent to the actual guilt or innocence of his client, who cared only that his case was successful. I first thought of him as being a totally amoral egomaniac, someone for whom victory in a case is the paramount good, a validation of himself as a person.

But that’s not actually how these personalities work. The lawyer who cares only for the concerns of the client is more a mechanism than an ego. If he had an ego, it would only get in the way of his client’s own ideologies. This lawyer would have to be completely neutral, in every sense of the term. It’s a character I find scarier than the egomaniac centred on victory at all costs. The egomaniac’s victories would always be for him, achievements against sometimes impossible odds. He would be a supervillain with an amazing zest and vitality. The neutral would be a pure mechanism, the absolute servant. I wonder what kind of story could be centred around a person with no desires of his own, who exists only as a cipher.

Maybe I need to read some Phillip K Dick before I write this one.

What Kind of 91 Years Is Spent in So Much Anger?

2010-01-28T21:43:00.004-05:00

So here’s my thing with J. D. Salinger. For me, it all started with how irritating Holden Caulfield was. His character development didn’t really matter, though understanding the character as an ironic commentary on the quest for sincerity alleviated this somewhat. Despite my detatched view of Holden, I can never avoid holding him in contempt myself. He has a vision of a perfect world, and then holds the world in absolute contempt because it won’t conform to his vision. And I can’t get past the stupendous immaturity of that worldview.

And also, there’s Mark David Chapman.

The reclusiveness of his life was a major irritant for me as well. Now, I’ve also become a big Thomas Pynchon fan, so you may ask about any hypocrisy between my love of Pynchon and my irritation by Salinger over the reclusiveness. There’s a difference between the two in their hiding. Pynchon isn’t belligerent about his reclusiveness. He lives in New York state like a normal person. He just isn’t photographed. I mean, Pynchon was on The Simpsons making fun of his own reclusiveness. His animated self was wearing a paper bag over his head standing next to a huge sign that directed you to his house, while he flagged people down on the highway to “Get your picture taken with a reclusive author!” Pynchon could joke about his hideaway along with you.

Salinger didn’t just hide in his house; he hid with a snarl of contempt for anyone who would even approach him. He refused to publish anything, despite it eventually becoming general knowledge that he was still working even while he lived off the substantial royalties still collected from Catcher. If it was perfectionism, it infested him to the point where it became almost pointless. Despite writing huge amounts, no one ever saw it, and there were doubts that anyone ever would.

Oh yeah, and Mark David Chapman.

This is the other, more sympathetic reason Salinger never published. From the very moment when Catcher was published, people sympathized with Holden Caulfield, to the point where they sincerely took on his contempt for the phony, for hypocrites, into their own lives. But they didn’t realize that the whole point of Holden’s character was to show the futility of a life that refuses to compromise with even the minor hypocrisies and inconsistencies that are necessary for life in the world. Now here were people taking Holden Caulfield of all people as a role model?

The worst of these worshipers of Holden, if we’re talking about consequences unintended by the author, was Mark David Chapman. This was a mentally disturbed man who needed help and guidance, and found it in a directly literal understanding of Holden Caulfield’s acidic contempt for phonies, for people who say they have one belief, but live according to another. The paradigm phony for Chapman was John Lennon, who professed values of peace and love while living the high life in a New York penthouse and going through long periods of Hollywood lifestyles and drug abuse. Chapman considered himself a hero worthy of Holden, and Salinger, when he rid the world of that ultimate phony.

Mark David fucking Chapman.

If I’ve learned anything about literature, it’s that great literature has no ideology. Whatever instruction manual you find in a genuinely great work of art is whatever you bring there yourself. You can read Oliver Twist entirely accurately as a condemnation of exploitation in the name of profit, and a celebration of the self-made capitalist working his way up from the bottom. And you’d be right both times, no matter what Dickens himself might have thought. A writer can only be responsible for the words s/he writes, but never how those words are understood, taken up, and carried forward. Maybe Salinger really did intend to indict Holden for his myopically selfish idiocy, but there were a lot of people who came to Catcher struggling for a way of living that could approach authenticity, consistency, coherence, and truth without hypocrisy. Holden may have been an egotistical fool to me, but he was a mirror to millions more. Really, Holden Caulfield and a self-absorbed teenager just reflect each other.

That, I think, was Salinger’s goal in writing. He saw a kind of innocence in youth that was washed away by the compromises of adulthood, and all his books tried to capture that adolescent innocence. But the innocence of youth, the innocence of a life that doesn’t yet have to make deals in a tough and messy world, is an innocence of extremism. It’s a refusal to compromise, a demand that the world be just as I want it to be because it is right that it be right and I am right to make it right! To deal with that world, to move among it and negotiate it, is just that: a negotiation. Life in the world entails compromises, and in the second half of his life that Salinger spent away from the world, he compromised nothing.

Really, Salinger will always be associated with Holden for just this reason. It wasn’t just that Holden is his most iconic character in popular consciousness. Holden was a character whose very existence, A Catcher in the Rye, was defined by his incredible sincerity, consumed by his yearning for a perfect and totally fair world. That’s an incredible dream to have. But learning to let go of that dream and understand the universe as being great precisely because it can never be perfect, because it is a place of disorder and craziness and compromise, that’s the sign of a mature personality, of someone who can be joyful in the deepest, strongest, most true sense.

Patches of Scenery in the Past and Future at Once

2010-01-24T01:08:00.001-05:00

In the weeks since I’ve gotten back to quite a busy semester, I haven’t really blogged anything. I decided to drop the gossipy post I wrote about my time in St John’s. Suffice to say that my friends who are doing well are doing rather well, and the rest should really move to the opposite side of the country. Or at least Montreal. Cabs in St John’s are now impossible to flag down now that they’re the regular targets of rich coke-addled morons visiting back from Fort MacMurray. The downtown is marvellously beautiful as always, only slightly marred by the charred gap in the joined buildings on Water street from the last fire.

However, the best part of my month so far has been my week in Cuenca. I don’t count having to stay the night in Quito airport or the non-existent internet connection at my hotel among my highlights. But the conference itself offered some wonderful ideas to steal, we had a formal reception with the mayor of the city, and I made some pleasant and intelligent new friends, one of whom has even given me a lead on a job when I finish my degree in 2012.

The heat of the tropics was not particularly hot, hovering around a comfortable low to middle twenties every day. The architecture was beautiful, a blend of buildings constructed over three centuries in Spanish, French/Spanish, French, and occasionally industrial American, styles. The streets were narrow, and mostly one-way, at least in old Cuenca, where I spent all my time. There were churches everywhere, magnificent stone buildings where there were daily masses held, all of which had impressively high audiences. On the way to the formal conference dinner, a couple of other attendees from my hotel wanted to take pictures inside. It was during a service, and I walked behind them for a moment, but had to step outside. The aura of their submission and devotion was too powerful for me, and I began to have trouble breathing.

Being out of breath was especially common in a city eight thousand feet in the Andes. Walking from my hotel to the University of Cuenca, where the conference was being held, I had to cross a small river over a stone bridge that consisted of three stories of stone steps. Walking down the stairway, even though it was crumbling on the edges of some steps, gave a fantastic view of the university and surrounding houses spread out through the valley between enormous green mountains. The university itself was peppered with pictures of Ché, sometimes two stories tall, along official buildings. I felt a strange pride at being in a place where leftist revolution was actually taken seriously, not just a stereotype on the walls of politically ignorant guitarists.

We Interrupt South American Stories for a Party Political Broadcast

2010-01-14T22:44:00.002-05:00

This is pretty much the only political issue I can get excited about, since my own country's leaders are arrogant imbeciles. Stewart, Colbert, and Conan are the only people I can believe in anymore. I think I'm not alone here.

Written From a Cheap Hotel With a Spotty Wireless Connection in the Middle of Cuenca: Part Two, Doctor Who

2010-01-13T00:20:00.003-05:00

When I was staying in Toronto overnight with my friend / former professor Dr Garrett, I caught on his quite efficient broadband internet David Tennant’s last episode of Doctor Who. I had seen part one of “The End of Time” the day after Xmas over the internet at my mother’s house, and have taken in events such that I can give a solid review of my thoughts.

I’ve only seen four regenerations ‘live’ in the chronology of the show. Of course, I wasn’t alive for most of them. I saw Colin Baker become Sylvester McCoy, but this was actually the first episode of Doctor Who I ever saw, at age five, so I had no attachment to Colin’s Doctor. I didn’t even really respect Colin’s Doctor until I returned to the show in the mid-2000s, exploring his character in novels and audios, which let me see his much-maligned television stories in a better light.

In 1996, I watched Sylvester turn into Paul McGann, but knew too little of the backstory in the Seventh Doctor novels for it to have appropriate impact, and the script was too mediocre for me to care. Like Colin, Paul’s Doctor was one who grew on me after rediscovery. The foreshadowing of Sylvester’s regeneration in the novels was actually quite similar to how David’s last year was developed, as Sylvester’s grand plans wound down to a surprising death in a random act of violence.

Then in 2005, I saw Christopher Eccleston become David Tennant. We had known this was coming because of a news leak from the production after broadcast of the first new series episode. So there was a touch of dissonance, as I knew Christopher would die, but no one on the show did. And Christopher’s regeneration was a kind of consummation of the character. Christopher’s Doctor was traumatized by his role in the Time War and the destruction of his people. This trauma defined his Doctor, hardened him and at times gave him a kind of death wish. Rose’s willingness to sacrifice herself to save him inspired his own sacrifice to save her. Christopher’s Doctor was at peace when he regenerated, able to accept his new body as a new beginning for his life.

David’s regeneration this New Year’s Day was of an utterly different sort, because the Doctor himself could see premonitions of his death long before it happened. Early in season four, Ood Sigma told him that his “song is ending soon.” And he heard the same thing from the psychic on the bus in “Planet of the Dead,” adding that “he will knock four times.” The story arc of the 2009 specials was David’s Doctor travelling alone confronting and running from the inevitability of this event. “The End of Time” saw him face this inevitability.

David’s Doctor stood out most in his enthusiasm for life, sometimes acting like a giddy child when he can defeat a destructive force or save a life that otherwise would have ended. These moments were insufferable at times, but they best embodied the simple joy at being alive that David’s Doctor was all about. I remember in the forum discussions of “Love and Monsters,” one of the most contentious elements of that story was how he saved Ursula’s life, by embedding her face and neural architecture in a paving slab. Many fans said it would have been better to die, but that was an essential moment of David’s character: any life is better than death. That’s why he saved River Song and her crew in the virtual world of The Library’s computer in “Forest of the Dead:” they were no longer bodily alive, but lived for thousands of years as mental patterns in the computer’s Matrix.

So when David is faced with his own death, he avoids it at all costs. When the Ood reveal the return of The Master on Earth, he is sure that confronting him will lead to his death, the four-times knocking being the drumbeat The Master heard in his head since he was a child. All his conversations with Wilf, his companion for this story, are the reflections of two old men facing the end of each other; Wilf with his old age and The Doctor with his premonition.

Part One is basically exposition of the situation, examples of the typical tropes of the series setting up the pieces by which the story’s real conflict will become clear and be resolved. The increasingly insane Master cruelly and literally devours others to keep his degrading resurrected body alive. A small-minded businessman plays with technology he doesn’t understand for selfish purposes, while two mysterious aliens, Vinvocci, lurk in the background. All the publicity leading up to the broadcast focussed on these elements so that we thought this was what the story was really about. Then the episode ends, revealing the Timothy Dalton led Time Lords about to return.

Part Two opens with a meeting of the Time Lord High Council on the eve of the Time War’s end, when The Doctor is about to use ‘The Moment,’ the weapon that will burn away the Dalek fleets and Gallifrey alike. But Dalton’s Rassilon angrily and violently refuses to die, a malevolent reflection of David’s Doctor’s refusal to give in to the inevitable. And he formulates the real scheme, seeding The Master, as a boy, with the sound that will drive him mad, and sending a Gallifreyan diamond to Earth just after The Doctor and Wilf flee to the Vinvocci ship in orbit to plan their counter-attack against The Master. All the time, the two old men contemplate with terror and sadness what they are prepared to do to save the Earth, whether they are willing to kill The Master to save humanity.

The Master discovers the diamond, and in his investigation of it, uses it as an anchor to lead Gallifrey back to reality, sitting ominously next to Earth. When the Doctor discovers the existence of the Gallifreyan diamond, he takes Wilf’s service revolver, which he had refused to use against The Master, to use against his own President. Here we finally discover the truth behind The Doctor’s destruction of Gallifrey: as Davros and the Daleks planned at the end of season four, the Time Lords were about to destroy all reality, to exist as consciousness alone. Rassilon would end the Time War by destroying the entire universe, and leaving the Time Lords as beings of pure energy. Rassilon’s refusal to die transformed him into someone willing to kill everything else.

Of course, Rassilon is defeated with the help of The Master, indignant at being reduced to a pawn. Gallifrey and the Time Lords return to die in the Time War, and The Master disappears. The Doctor thinks he has beaten the inevitability of his own end, until he hears four faint knocks: Wilf, trapped in a chamber that will soon flood with deadly radiation, and the only way to release him is to climb in the chamber’s twin to be fatally irradiated himself. Wilf urges The Doctor to let him die, because he’s already an old man, and David is enraged at the unfairness of it all. He has survived a battle with his life-long enemy and the most powerful Time Lord ever to live, but now faces death to save one old man. After all that he has achieved, his reward is his own demise. But he strides into the chamber, telling Wilf to be quick after unlocking the door.

He steps out of the chamber, thinking he has survived, but noticing that his cuts have healed: the regeneration is slow, but it’s begun. And so he goes for his reward, an epilogue that the general fandom sees as too sentimental, but that I see as a perfect summation of David’s Doctor. He, probably in great pain, holds off his regeneration, travelling to visit briefly his former companions who have meant the most to him, and gives them a second chance at life.

He saves Martha and Mickey from being shot by a Sontaran sniper. He gives Wilf a wedding gift for Donna and her new husband, both working minimum wage jobs: a £10-million lottery ticket for the next day. He passes Jack, in despair over his actions in Children of Earth, a note introducing him to Alonso Frame, the Stovian Titanic midshipman from “Voyage of the Damned,” offering the isolated Jack a new connection in the world, a new start for the immortal man. He visits the granddaughter of Joan Redfern, the nurse he fell in love with in “Human Nature,” seeking to know if Joan was ever happy again, pleased to know that she was. He saves Sarah Jane’s son Luke from being hit by a passing car, and finally visits Rose. It’s the first hours of 2005, a few months before she met Christopher’s Doctor, and David stands in the shadows of an alleyway, wishing Rose to have a great year.

She leaves, and David, doubled over in pain, staggers back to the TARDIS. David’s Doctor was shaped by a reaction to the despair of Christopher’s, his character informed most deeply by a love of life and a desire to improve the lives of those he cared about. This was why he didn’t go straight back to the TARDIS, why he held off regenerating to say goodbye and give one more life to his deepest friends. After all that, he is on the verge of tears as his regeneration begins, but they are not of happiness: “I don’t want to go!” he whimpers, and sets the TARDIS on fire with the pent-up energy of his transformation.

Matt Smith’s first actions as The Doctor are a radical break from David’s character, simply because he seems completely indifferent to the story we’ve just seen. He is the clearest indication that the story of Russell T Davies’ Doctor Who is over, and that an entirely new path for the show as begun with Steven Moffat in charage, Matt Smith as The Doctor, and Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond. I think the closest analogue in the history of the show may be the weirdness of Tom Baker’s Doctor and the heightened creepiness of his early years under Phillip Hinchcliffe. Steven has a similar reputation for frightening stories, Matt can be seen in the trailer below to be utterly idiosyncratic in his eccentricity, and Amy seems to be quite a match for it. I can tell a lot from a pair of googly eyes.

To days to come, and all my love to long ago.

Ancient Scenes of Celebrities Past

2009-12-18T18:59:00.002-05:00

I wrote that title without intentionally intending it to be a Dickens* reference, but decided to leave it there once I noticed because I thought it sounded good. These videos that I found, with very little effort, are the results of my procrastination as I work on conference papers for the Canadian Philosophical Association meetings in Montreal this June.

I’ve liked Eric Bana ever since I saw Munich: his was the best performance in the whole film. I had seen him in Black Hawk Down, but he was just one soldier character among others in that movie. Munich was where he stood out as an actor of intense emotion. And I thought of him after that as a dramatic actor, yet to recapture the intensity of Munich, but one can’t make a film like that every year. And I thought his work in Star Trek as Nero was the best villain of the entire film franchise since Khan.

Then I found his wikipedia page and discovered several things I hadn’t known before. For one, he’s of Croatian heritage, with the full last name Banadinovic. I learned more about the Australian films he’s done, particularly his dramatic debut Chopper. And most surprisingly, I discovered that he began his career as one of the lead actor/writers on a sketch comedy show, Full Frontal, that ran for six years. I knew from Funny People that he could do comedy, but I never realized that it was where he spent such a significant portion of his career. And he’s hilarious. He does a pretty good impersonation of Arnold Swartzenegger, but I think this sketch, showcasing his most famous character on the show, Peter the most stereotypical Australian in the universe, is his best old material on youtube.

And today is the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Second City theatre in Chicago, the venue which can legitimately claim to have invented modern American comedy. The list of people who have gone through Second City is so long as to require a great deal of dedicated research which I don’t want to do. So I’ll just post this sketch from 2001 featuring Steve Carell as an unassuming man doing his laundry. Carell has really grown on me over the years, but it’s fun to see him before he had a professional stylist keeping his hair in control twenty-four hours a day.

*A minor confession to my readers: Despite my regular screeds against VicLit, I have never read any Dickens.

It's Really Only the Music that I Hate About This Holiday

2009-12-13T13:57:00.001-05:00

Patton Oswalt explains everything that drives me insane about the holiday season, mostly having to do with schlocky stories and terrible music. I was in the grocery store the other day, and the combination of Saturday afternoon grocery store cart traffic jams with the most horrifyingly awful Xmas songs drove me close to the point of mass murder. Donovan, my cashier, agreed.

The really terrifying part about this song is that there's a tv-movie adapted from its story, starring Rob Lowe. It was made in the middle of his run on The West Wing, so he can't fall back on the excuse that he needed the paycheck.

Philosophical Friendships, Wordplay, and The Monster of Foxy Conservatism

2009-12-13T11:00:00.000-05:00

After a few comments I made last week about my philosophical and fictional development, a series of duelling comments between my old friend Bernie Wills and my newer friend Ben Wald has started on my facebook page. Bernie teaches at Grenfell College, Memorial’s west coast campus, and Ben is in the last year of his MA at McMaster. I think if they were to meet in real life, they’d get along quite well.

Both are extremely argumentative when it comes to philosophy, but neither of them are abrasive about it at all. They can just congenially dispute a point for hours, constantly coming up with new angles and evasions and rhetoric. I usually run out of steam and do something else after a while, but I think if Bernie and Ben were in the same room talking philosophy, they wouldn’t leave again until they ran out of food. And the argument would continue over lunch.

Ben can always find an angle to refute or critique pretty much any philosophical statement in a conversation. It will be very productive for him, even though it’s sometimes frustrating for me. The way I do philosophy, I pursue an idea starting from a very strange place, which can sometimes begin in a state resembling Orson Welles lying face up at sunrise on a beach in southern California wearing nothing but a pair of mysteriously stained boxers and tripping out of his mind on salvia. And I end up with a coherent and intriguing conceptual investigation. On the good days.

Bernie I met when he was teaching at Memorial’s St John’s campus, at a philosophy department mixer. It was 2005, as I recall, and I walked over to say hello to Jim Bradley, the department head and a good friend, who rapidly introduced me to Bernie. Unfortunately, I was standing against the wall, and Bernie is much taller than me, so dominated my field of vision as he spoke about the invasion of Iraq for the next half hour until I, like Jim, could finally find an excuse and go somewhere else. We since became good colleagues and friends, exchanging ideas on a wide range of topics from Deleuzian ontology to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
•••
An amusing Hamilton non-sequitor. There is a bar downtown called Liquid Kitty, that is constituted from a large basement dancefloor underneath another bar, almost as wretched, called Tailgate Charlie’s. Tailgate Charlie’s is just kind of lame; Liquid Kitty is a terrifying meat market for the 30-55 set (to which I approach closer with every passing day, so I have to mock them while I still can). It is so awful that you can smell the syphilis as soon as you get past the mandatory (seriously, it’s mandatory!) coat check.

My friend André habitually calls it Liquid Pussy. I don’t know if this is a purposeful joke, or if he just misheard it on the first terrifying night we ended up there. But it’s hilarious.
•••
Another amusing piece of Hamilton information. Sarah Palin is coming here in April as part of a fundraiser for two hospitals in the city. If George W Bush was the Arnold Swartzenegger Terminator, then Sarah Palin is the T1000 come to hunt down the pre-teen John Connor called political sanity. And she is coming, by invitation, to a fundraiser in one of the most left-leaning cities in Canada, a country with a real left-wing party that holds solidly almost every Hamilton seat in both levels of government.

Sarah Palin coming here better stir up at least a few women’s rights and anti-Republican protesters. I might even go myself with a sign and some of my friends from social work and sociology.

A Not Too Long Journey in Search of a Method

2009-12-07T22:15:00.002-05:00

My pleasure reading over the last month or so included mostly Bolaño, as you could probably tell from the previous few posts. After reading 2666 again, I started Nazi Literature in the Americas, his fake encyclopedia of the mostly melancholy and marginal lives of the men and women who constituted a century-long literary movement built around fascist ideas. Of course, these people were all fictional. It was, as I’ve considered everything else I’ve read by Roberto Bolaño, brilliant.

But after finishing Nazi Literature, I started The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, and the transition between the two authors in my reading was jarring. It’s made me think about the development of my own writing style, which, even though I owe a lot to the modernists like Joyce and Woolf, now is more aligned with the easier language of Bolaño and Nabokov. The idea I had today was that the reason for this transition has to do with my philosophical development more than my tastes as an author.

What fascinated me about modernist literature when I first discovered James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was the technique of stream-of-consciousness writing, language that inserted the reader into the thoughts of the character as they drifted along an associative train through time and space, sometimes focussed on the colloquial, sometimes on flights of memory, sometimes intimate moments of self-reflection, and sometimes into fragmentary thoughts that completely dissociated one from reality and could lose track of what is typically thought of as the narrative altogether. Plot became secondary to character study with this technique.

And it had none of the irritating omniscience that so annoys me in so much nineteenth century literature. The narration of Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and Maryann Evans (George Eliot) knew everything about their characters and displayed them on the page for you to read. Every facet of their characters were laid out in the text like the terms of an anatomy lesson. It wasn’t so much character study to me as character explanation. The narrator displayed all the psychological properties, and they collided in the mechanical necessity the parts dictated. I could almost call it mechanical realism.

This stream-of-consciousness technique offered a teenager with pretentions for a career in writing a way of exploring a character-constituted narrative, but kept the mystery and paradoxes that I saw in actual people. The mechanical realist technique put every facet of their characters’ psychologies on display, each one fitting together into a consistent whole. A character revealed through stream-of-consciousness could embrace inconsistency, as the character itself could become just as lost in its own stream as the reader. Surprise was possible.

My philosophical development began just as I was turning 19, with my first course in the subject from Jim Bradley, to whom I owe lifelong thanks. When I first began, I was fascinated by the problem of how the subjective could be bridged with the world, how thought could become objective and no longer distort the world in order to understand it. But over the following years, I began to understand how flawed this entire philosophical setup was. If a human subject’s knowledge of the world was so radically distorted as this setup says it is, then no creature with such a flawed perceptual apparatus could survive. In all the ways I had studied of how people tackled the question of how we could overcome the distortion inherent to subjectivity, no one had seriously questioned whether subjectivity was inherently distorting of reality at all. And I abandoned most of the philosophy that refused to pose this question.

And this is why, as I’ve developed this stance of radically rejecting the subject-world problem and all the ways this pseudo-problem crops up in other philosophies (mind-body, thought-reality, certainty-doubt), I’ve come to abandon the stream-of-consciousness as a fruitful literary technique. Reading Faulkner has just made this even more clear to me. I’m only reading him for the first time this year, having picked up a box set of three novels cheaply at a used bookstore in Windsor this March. He’s a master of the technique, taking it to what looks to be an extremity of fragmentation. The story of The Sound and the Fury is nearly impossible to discern from the constant shifts in time, mood, event, perception, and thought. These shifts are structured along the narrative of the decline and fall of the noble family of Compson. But that narrative is far from apparant in the words themselves and their organization.

The stream-of-consciousness technique is a story told from deep within a single character’s subjectivity. And taken to its extreme in Faulkner, I can see now the presumption in the technique as to the nature of a subjectivity: a distortion of the plot playing out in the real, outside, world. There is no place for the world itself to be mysterious in its constitution of itself, no place for a conspiracy between a character and her world, no way to turn a narrative into a plot against the reader. The only way for confusion and mystery to arise in stream-of-consciousness writing is in the distortion consciousness creates in trying (and inevitably failing) to apprehend the world.

The realism of Nabokov, Bolaño, Vonnegut, DeLillo, and Pynchon (these are my favourite examples; I know I must read more women) can create grand structures of multiplicity through a simple structure: realist writing with a narrator who doesn’t know everything, and who sometimes might not know anything. A stream-of-consciousness can flow in only one direction: down the black hole of a distorting subjectivity. Myserious realism can build an entire world with a quick suggestion.

Who on Earth Are All These Romanians?

2009-11-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

One particularly unusual discovery I made on the internet this weekend was the wikipedia page for Romanian Philosophy. I stumbled on this during a typical bout of procrastination while I was editing one of my essays. Sometimes, I look up random countries on wikipedia and see what our semi-democratic encyclopedia has to say about them. I noticed that the page on Romania had a link to a separate item on Romanian philosophy. I decided to check it out, expecting a brief summary of university growth in the country, perhaps a paragraph on restrictions under the Ceausescu regime, and a list of a few people writing today.

When I got there, I discovered a page that described, in chronological order, every figure who made some original contribution to philosophy in Romania from the 17th century to the present. Each figure got at least one paragraph describing their basic concepts, publications, and place in the philosophical societies and divisions of Romania. The entire article was easily 10,000 words long. The grammar was sometimes mildly sketchy, as if every now and then an English sentence would be written with a Romanian word order at the beginning. But these were rare enough that I could tell this incredibly comprehensive page was written by a fluent English speaker. English was certainly a second language, but the writer was fluent.

The page was first created in summer 2007, by an editor named Bogdan Rusu. And I must say that I am impressed. Not only is this page clearly the summation of a great deal of research, but it strikes me as having a sense of futility about it. I was fascinated to read through such a detailed summary of the development of the philosophical institution about which I previously knew nothing. But as I read through the article, what struck me was how none of this sometimes very creative philosophical activity ever made it outside Romania to any degree.

There’s an engagement with Hegel and Kant that has travelled in entirely different directions than in the regions more mainstream to a philosopher in Canada, the English, French, and German languages. This has lasted just as long in Romania as in Germany, because many of Hegel’s students were Romanians who returned to work in philosophy departments of their home country. From what I can gather, Heidegger was appropriated into the Romanian scene in the way I’m used to seeing, but there are a couple of idiosyncratic engagements with his ideas. Analytic philosophy never made much headway, aside from a few smaller groups of logicians and knowledge theorists. I think this might be because it took a long time for Russell and Wittgenstein’s works to be translated into Romanian. And the continental traditions, with its roots in Hegel, would have found a fertile conceptual ground in Romania, which already had quite an affinity with Hegel anyway.

What I think about most, though, is the degree to which a thriving philosophical scene can be isolated by political and linguistic factors. Romania spent much of the twentieth century isolated from the philosophical revolutions happening in Germany, France, Britain, and America. So their philosophers weren’t able to enter a dialogue with the vanguard in those countries. The English language attacks on Hegel made no impact there. And now we’re left with a country that has had a fascinating philosophical development, but that has made no contribution to what we in North America think of as ‘mainstream’ philosophy. Accidents of development and politics have made an intriguing tradition practically irrelevant.

A Few More Thoughts on Unadulterated Terror

2009-11-24T22:22:00.002-05:00

So as I finish reading the fourth, most brutally violent part, of 2666, I discovered this piece of news about one of the latest killings in Juarez. In this example, a 28 year old man and his 7 year old son were both shot, execution style, in their car. The BBC writes about it here. Even after the descriptions of constant violence in that fictional, yet accurate, book, I think this even pushes the limit past what Bolaño was writing about.
•••
In other political news that provokes my utter disgust, the Canadian government has been slandering one of its leading career diplomats, Richard Colvin, because he's whistleblowing over our complicity in torture. After all, when the government's complicity in violence we would never condone in our own country is discovered, our leaders should act like real professionals and try to buy off the whistleblowers and cover it up. Instead, they act like spoiled bullies in an elementary school insulting a tattler.

I'm against torture and violence as political activities myself, but if you're going to break the ethics of your culture, society, and country, then the least you could do is understand that what you're doing is wrong. Attacking those who call you on your reprehensible acts adds ignorance to your list of offenses. Reacting as if the one who denounces torture is wrong implies that you think torture is right. If you think you should commit crimes for the sake of national security, you should at least be aware that you've made yourself a criminal.

Because, as You Know, Time Is Unreal

2009-11-15T11:20:00.000-05:00

This is something funny I say lately when people ask me to be philosophical, even if it’s after 8.00 in the evening or I’ve had my second pint or equivalent wine or liquor. That’s the subject of an essay I read a couple of weeks ago by John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, which was incredibly controversial at the time, because no one could deal with the idea that time wasn’t real. He wrote that we can never identify time itself, only the relative succession of events in order. Once I realized that was the point of his essay, I understood that it wasn’t controversial at all anymore, and that he only anticipated the conceptual leap of special relativity physics, just without the math. When I use that phrase at a party, I usually follow it up with, “But that doesn’t matter anyway.”

The reason I bring it up is that I started reading Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 again just after I got back from Edinburgh. The story had stuck with my memory, involuntarily popping up in my consciousness ever since I read it last winter, and no novel had done that to me before. I’ve been able to see a lot more of the interconnections and callbacks among the different parts now that I hadn’t noticed the first time, which has made it a much more rich reading experience. But just now, I was thinking about why the parts are arranged out of chronological order as they are in the book, and I came to an idea that makes an incredible amount of sense. Whether it was Bolaño’s or not doesn’t matter, but it’s a fascinating idea.

The Chronological Order of 2666
One: 1998-late 2003
Two: 1980-2000
Three: early 2003
Four: 1993-1997
Five: 1920-2003

I never really understood why a writer would arrange their work out of chronological order (unless it was actually a time-travel story, in which case the concept becomes kind of laughable, or at least it should) before I wrote A Small Man’s Town, which is told out of chronological order. You could say that I organized the events of my book not in chronological order, but in emotional order. My book is organized in a series of arcs in which my characters mature emotionally. Some of them move more chronologically than others because those characters don’t have as many setbacks in developing their maturity. I found that kind of structure to be more significant than a simple order of events from 2001-10, because none of the events in that book are really all that significant. So that’s why I never adhered strongly to chronology.

Just before I started writing this, I had this idea about why Bolaño didn’t adhere to chronology. 2666 is a novel about the abyss, a maelstrom of violence and death bubbling underneath the surface of the ordinary life we think is so secure, but that when we least expect it can swallow us whole (or chomp us up in pieces) and spit us back out days, months, years later reduced to a bloody pulp. This is not an uplifting Mitch Albom style story where everything is alright because we love each other. The problem with the abyss is that it’s a void, it’s so terrifying that it’s unspeakable. So all we can do is approach as close as we can without falling in.

And that’s what the order of the five parts of 2666 do. The protagonists of each part, as you progress from part one to part five, become better able to approach, perceive, and understand the abyss. The four literary critics of part one- Jean-Claude Pelletier, Manuel Espinoza, Liz Norton, and Piero Morini - are sheltered, cultured western Europeans of the 1990s and 2000s. They understand it only through art, particularly the literature of Benno von Archimboldi (whose work we never actually read or have described in any detail), and perceive it only through their incomprehensible dreams.

Oscar Amalfitano, the protagonist of part two, is a philosophy professor in Santa Teresa, the ficionalized Juarez where the killings of hundreds of women takes place. He perceives the abyss through his estranged wife’s madness and death from AIDS, and the voices he hears as he edges into madness himself. Oscar Fate, the American journalist visiting Santa Teresa by accident to cover a mediocre boxing match for his magazine, meets up with some low-level gangsters in the city, one of whom is dating Amalfitano’s daughter Rosa. He sees the violent criminal culture that renders the murder of hundreds of women so ordinary, and understands it well enough to know that he and Rosa are both in way over their heads.

The fourth part is about the killings themselves, or at least the first few hundred of them, and the investigations that the police, narcotrafficers, and gangs get involved in. This part puts us in the thick of the massacre itself, with only one young cop, Lalo Cura, standing out among a large ensemble cast this time, as the only one who believes that the police can solve the crimes, and actually working towards this himself.

And part five tells the life story of Benno von Archimboldi: how a young German boy who loves to swim gets enlisted in the Nazi army, fights on the Eastern Front, is shot in the neck, recuperates in the reclaimed cavern of a long dead Jewish sci-fi writer whose works inspire him to begin his own literary career, plucking his pen name from random thoughts at the time, falling in love with a slightly mad girl after whose death he wanders Europe as an itinerant even as his books becomes increasingly famous, while he himself embraces life for its impermanence, instability, and finitude, and all the small moments of joy that come throughout it if you’re ready to receive them, until one day he hears from his sister, an ordinary woman with a son who moved to America to start a business and found himself roped into this terrible matter of these murders in Santa Teresa. So Archimboldi flies to Mexico to help.

I think it’s intriguing that the character of Prof Amalfitano turns up in the most parts. I think, and this is entirely unfounded speculation, that if the rumours that a sixth part of 2666 exists or was planned or prepared, it would feature Amalfitano finally succumbing to complete insanity. It would perhaps involve Archimboldi as well, and perhaps an older Lalo Cura, though I cannot say if he would be jaded by then or just as determined to stop the killings even if he understands them as deeply as my reading suggests.

An Ancient, Subtle City

2009-11-09T22:31:00.000-05:00

Well, the strike lasted a little over a week, and the deal we ended up with was pretty mediocre. The membership voted 58%, according to the union leadership, in favour of the university administration’s latest offer, even though there’s a practical pay cut across the board. I suppose it’s pretty hard for people in a position as prestigious as graduate students to realize when their contracts are terrible. The role of an academic is still held in high esteem. To most people, academics included, the idea that we’re exploited is pretty laughable.

I met one workman waiting at the Cootes drive picket line this afternoon who asked what we were striking over, and when I explained our issue with the high benefit charges for teaching assistants with families, he told me he had no sympathy for us because he had never had a benefit plan at all for his entire working life. It puts us in the absurd position of trying to argue that we have a right to strike when we already have better privileges than many other unionized people, like merely having a benefits plan at all. We’re in training to become one of the elites of society, and it’s very difficult to explain that trainee academics are considerably underpaid, and that an increasing number of professional academics have low-paying insecure university and college positions. The social prestige in which university professors and graduate students are held, I think, prevents us from making our case that we are shafted with growing frequency.

I hope the irony of this situation is appreciated.
•••
It’s one thing to read that a city is several centuries old, and another experience entirely to walk through such a city, like Edinburgh. I have never been in a city built of stone, and it was immensely surprising to wander along a cobblestone street down roads flanked by some of the oldest skyscrapers in the world, huge grey apartment buildings the same colour as the streets themselves. For the three days of the conference, I walked there each morning, usually chilly, with the sun hanging low in the sky, often obscured by centuries-old masonwork stuffed to bursting with shops selling pastries, curry, fish and chips, secondhand books, and novelty hats, the last of which I meant to pick up for my Halloween costume, only to drop the ball again.

My friends Ray and Erin, who I stayed with, live in a comfortable if slightly drafty apartment on High street, the centre of the old town of Edinburgh, the district that was over five hundred years old. I spent the bulk of my time in the city in this neighbourhood, a decision I think was for the best. The whole neighbourhood is a dense maze of streets winding into each other in three dimensions. It was the easiest city to get lost in that I’ve ever experienced, and for the most obvious reason. Going in the same direction as you started the previous day could take you to an entirely different destination, which would be underneath where you wanted to go. Many streets are bridges leading over other, even older, streets, and I would not be able to tell you how to get back to the level on which you began.

One of the walking tours the conference booked for us took us to the large stone apartment complex that used to be the most prestigious place to live in all of Edinburgh. David Hume and Adam Smith once lived in that very building only a short distance away from where I was staying for that week. It is now University of Edinburgh’s most prestigious, and expensive, student residence. As our tour guide was telling us stories about Hume’s particularly crazy parties, a notably nerdy young Chinese man was taking his garbage out.

Stories about J. K. Rowling’s coffee shop, the ubiquity of kilts, and the best chicken vindaloo I’ve ever had in future entries.

Strikes and Music Leads to Thoughts on My Political Art

2009-11-02T22:12:00.001-05:00

The expectation after my post last week was that this would be about some of the rest of my University of Edinburgh trip, but I’ve found myself in the middle of a labour action by the McMaster teaching assistants this week. I’m doing my twenty hours per week on the picket lines, though despite the university administration’s stonewalling, I don’t think the strike will last very long. This is more of a tangent about my art and the ideas that motivate it than the strike itself, which is being covered to death.

When I talk to people in cars giving them news about the negotiations and what our demands are, one piece of information that I’ve found especially compels them is the amount of money that TAs with families of their own have to pay for their family-rate health insurance. It’s too high, and TAs’ pay scales are mediocre enough without having these expenses on top of it. I can afford it, but I have no dependents, cheap rent, and no real expenses other than basic life.

So even though I’m on the picket lines to help the TAs who need help more than I do, I can’t help but feel disingenuous precisely because I’m fine. Who am I to speak for people in genuine financial trouble? Who am I to speak for people who go to sleep every night wondering if they’ll be able to feed their kids the next day, or next week? It’s condescending for a comfortable person to speak for someone in that situation.

Tonight, I’ve been listening to a free mixtape K’Naan (in my view probably the best rapper in Canada) and J.Period made, The Messengers. It’s a series of remixes of songs by Fela Kuti, Bob Marley, and Bob Dylan, interspersed with K’Naan discussing the role these artists played in his life, and in the political, social, and personal movements they sparked at the height of their careers. I downloaded it a while before I left for Edinburgh, and its music has stuck with me for weeks. K’Naan has crafted these remixes into duets, linking the African democracy movements, global anti-poverty activism, and the civil rights movements of the twentieth century to the political conflicts of the current time.

Among of the most affecting and powerful songs are a duet on “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” where Dylan’s verses alternate with K’Naan’s raps about global poverty, African gangsterism, and endless cycles of violence; and his remix of Bob Marley’s “Jonny Was a Good Man,” where K’Naan creates new verses between Marley’s chorus, describing a traumatized Iraq veteran who refuses to follow his orders and return to yet another tour, including graphic scenes of children mutilated and killed by the bombing raids of the soldier’s own army.

K’Naan grew up in Somalia through the collapse of the government. He fell in with gangster life in Baltimore, and only survived after the American INS chased his family to Toronto, where he discovered his musical talent. He can tell these stories because these are stories of genuine violence and hardship that he overcame. As a novelist, I want to write about these stories: these are the stories that matter today. Just as Bolaño can write about the crimes of the Latin American dictators because he lived there, and fled from there; just as K’Naan can write about the violence of Somalia because he lived that violent life: these are the stories of our era.

Contrast this to me. I’m a white male from an upper middle class background. The only stories that I can legitimately write about are breakups and love stories, tales of other rich white people who don’t get what they want. This is the situation of a great many artists in the West who want to tell important stories about the violence and injustice of our world. But our affluent lives insulate us from this injustice: we don’t have the rights to tell stories that really matter. The only pain in our lives comes from breakups; we know nothing of violence. I would be condescending to try to tell these stories, and I would probably get it all wrong precisely because I haven’t lived it.

I understood my solution as I wrote my first novel, A Small Man’s Town, my book about Newfoundland. My characters, especially in their youth as leftist student activists, interacted with people from genuinely violent regions like Palestine and Colombia. And I worked out how a person like me, who has never known violence or had to overcome it, can write about that violence. The very quest to avoid condescension itself, striving to escape being part of the problem, straining against the indifference that comes with wealth, is the awakening political consciousness of the wealthy.

It’s a kind of political shame that we have lived for so long without knowledge of our luck, and our unwitting roles in the exploitation of others. The political task of the affluent in this world is to become mindful of the suffering of others, and accept that this cannot be our world. I don’t think I’m articulating this concept well, but I want at least to try, to make one first attempt to understand this political consciousness the longs for redemption for his mindlessness to suffering, yet accepts that it is impossible.

An Epic Journey Through the World's Most Insane Airport

2009-10-25T23:23:00.001-04:00

At long last, I’ve returned to blogging after my week in Edinburgh. And I hope over the next week or so to tell all my remaining readers about it. But really, the most epic part of my voyage was the first part. It’s a story so harrowing, so chilling, so fraught with suspense and danger that it could be fatal to the faint of heart. I am speaking, of course, of having to transfer flights in Heathrow airport.

I arrived just over three hours early for my flight from Toronto airport. I spent those three hours figuring out where the international check-in and terminal was, drinking Starbucks coffee for lunch, writing an outline for my doctoral thesis, and wandering around the duty free shop. After a ludicrously long lineup for boarding, we finally got in the air only twenty minutes late. Because we were travelling five hours into the future, my six and a half hour flight would last almost twelve hours.

One thing I certainly learned about myself going through those long airport terminal corridors was that I can’t get on a moving pedway without starting to sing Feist’s “My Moon My Man,” and sometimes even dance too if it isn’t too crowded.

I noticed that my flight included a large tour group on their way to Israel to visit various Christian shrines. Thankfully, they kept their religiosity to themselves, as I find it very irritating after being awake for long hours. The multimedia entertainment systems in the backs of our seats were quite impressive, though. As well as being able to listen to Bob Dylan’s new album (still nothing as good as Time Out of Mind), they had quite a selection of movies, even a few independent ones. Though I mostly concentrated on trying to sleep, and quieting my digestive tract after ordering the beef dinner, much to my regret.

The major problem with the film selection was what my immediate seat neighbour, an elderly woman who was part of the Christian tour group, had herself selected. The Sandra Bullock / Ryan Reynolds vehicle The Proposal. Even though she had her headphones in and I couldn’t hear any of the atrocious dialogue, I could still watch the moronic set pieces and humiliating performances. This piece of celluloid vomit was like a particularly awful car crash: I couldn’t look away, and the bodies were already beginning to rot, the smell being especially disgusting. By the smell, I mean Bullock and Betty White butchering an Alaskan First Nations tribal dance. Why this happened, I have no idea. Perhaps because their god hates me.

But the real adventure began when I got to Heathrow. I had just less than two hours before my connection took off on the original schedule. The twenty minute delay at Toronto was no help, plus the Captain informed us that “We have a situation on board and some people will be getting on the plane before you get off.” I was concerned and confused at this, until I saw five uniformed London Metropolitan police officers striding down the airplane corridors and disappearing into the back section of the plane. I could only hope that their suspect had an aisle seat so they could grab him quickly. They apparently vanished out a back entrance, because we were given permission to leave just a couple of minutes later. I had ninety minutes to reach my connection.

I followed the signs that said flight connection, and stood in line for an interminable time waiting to go through security, removing my jacket and belt, and taking my computer from my briefcase. After moving through security, I found myself back in an international check-in terminal. Upon asking someone at a rental car stand, I was told that I was still in Terminal Three, and had gone through security unnecessarily, thinking that I was going to Terminal One to connect to my British Midlands (bmi) flight to Edinburgh.

Cursing my confusion, I got permission to duck back through a gate in the Terminal Three security (because you always get permission in an airport if you want things to go smoothly), and was given directions to the bus to Terminal One. I arrived at the bottom of Terminal Three at the bus stop just in time to get on board. The bus itself played a catchy piece of mild British techno reminiscent of a theme from BBC News while it drove us to the domestic terminal. I got off with just under an hour to spare and rushed along to the customs desk.

After many long corridors, I at last reached a long accordion-folded line for UK entry. Thankfully, there weren’t too many people in line, and there were almost a dozen customs officers at the check-in kiosks. However, after standing in line for almost ten minutes, I saw a sign that the ‘UK entry’ sign had obscured as I had approached down the corridor: it was for the line to connecting UK domestic flights. I was standing in the line for people getting off in London.

Ducking back through the polymer ropes, I stood in a much shorter line for foreigners connecting to flights going elsewhere in the UK. However, there were only three kiosks serving this line, so we were moving even more slowly than the larger UK entry line. When I eventually reached the front, I had only a few minutes until my flight to Edinburgh began boarding. I took the kiosk number, 37, as a good omen because of the Clerks reference, but I was to be denied. The flight attendants on my plane from Toronto had neglected to give me a UK customs card, so I had to fill one out on a bench next to the kiosks, nervous from the ticking clock and sleep deprivation.

Thankfully, it allowed me to forget my stomach still rumbling from that awful airplane beef dinner. Unfortunately, it also allowed me to forget the address of my friends Ray and Erin, who I was staying with, and which the customs card demanded I write in all caps. I don’t know why customs agents want us to scream at them on their cards, but I imagine that by the time my generation takes over this bureaucracy, we’ll get rid of that silly rule, as all caps are becoming increasingly rude.

Anyway, I handed my customs card in at kiosk 36, and was then asked a series of questions about what the hell I was doing in this country. After giving a very confused summary of my conference paper on the stifling affect orthodoxy has on creativity in academic peer review systems, my passport was stamped and I was told to proceed to biometrics. I stood in another line, waiting to be scanned by a set of small round black cameras, which I thought was some kind of molecular scan like on Torchwood. But after waiting for a further five minutes, I simply had my photo taken by a webcam. The image would then be sent to the security gate for Terminal One, which would be used to verify that I was still me. I was quite underwhelmed, as I was expecting some kind of eight dimensional quantum scanning device. Perhaps in the future.

After standing in another line and removing my belt, jacket, and computer again, I was informed that I may proceed to my gate. I asked one of the security officers how to get to Gate Eight from here, and she told me that I just had to turn left leaving security, and it was just down the hall. I think working at Heathrow eventually skews one’s sense of distance, because what she called ‘just down the hall’ was five hundred metres through a full shopping centre which included two duty free shops, three Starbucks, a clothing store, and three giveaway contest for giant gas guzzling cars that won’t even sell in America anymore.

With barely fifteen minutes to takeoff, I finally reached Gate Eight, but saw that it was subdivided in to gates 8a-e. Fortunately, I saw a small line of people boarding a flight, asked one of them if they were bmi flight 052 to Edinburgh, and when she said yes, I asked if I could cut in line. She acquiesced gladly, and I was on the plane within minutes, ordering £1.60 worth of ginger ale to calm my stomach, which was on the verge of rupture after that terrifying beef dinner on the overseas flight.

Overall, it had taken me 75 minutes to get through Heathrow airport. If I ever have grandchildren, I’m going to tell them this story, and they won’t believe me. When I touched down in Edinburgh airport, I stopped at the duty free shop to ask about what the rules were for scotch purchases, and the first music I heard was one of my favourite Stone Roses songs being played as background music in the shop. I felt like I was in paradise.

Actual Edinburgh stories later this week.

A Strange Erotic Journey from Milan to Minsk to LA

2009-10-10T22:04:00.001-04:00

Walking around my neighbourhood is one of my most productive times to think. A wandering mind on an absent-minded walk is a very fertile field. This is not to be confused with my walks around a supermarket, which raise my blood pressure to the degree that I’ve become convinced that if I ever have a fatal heart attack, it will be while navigating the condiments aisle.

But I actually wanted to describe an idea I had while walking to the bank and the supermarket this afternoon. You may remember a running gag in Seinfeld, continued in Curb Your Enthusiasm: a mediocre art film called Rochelle Rochelle, the story of a young girl’s strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk (later adapted into a Broadway play starring Bette Midler). It ocurred to me this afternoon that the story of Rochelle Rochelle would be perfect for a respectable pornographic film. The fictional art film apparently has just as much nudity.

Feature-length pornographic films are ideal for these kinds of stories, literal road movies. What little plot there is in most pornographic films exists to link a variety of graphic sex scenes. A feature length porno is a picaresque erotic comedy, a series of emotionally gripping and touchingly funny scenes as a young girl experiences her sexual and social awakening on a strange and occasionally surreal journey from Milan to Minsk. The Rochelle Rochelle plot also offers an oddly ironic layer as well: a repressed innocent in sexy, liberated Italy transforms herself into a supremely confident vixen as she approaches grey, oppressive Belarus.

Here is where my thoughts this afternoon took a turn for the meta. I realized that in order to produce such a film, I’d need to secure the rights to the story, which are controlled and owned by Larry David. So I would need to go to Los Angeles and ask his permission to make Rochelle Rochelle into a feature length pornographic film. I would have to convince him that I and my fellow producers were serious artists aiming to make a modern Last Tango in Paris. It all sounds rather like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

So I thought, why not make it one? Fly to LA to convince Larry David to give permission to make the feature length pornographic Rochelle Rochelle, then promote the film by building an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm around it. I would play a parodic version of myself, convincing the fictional Larry David to give permission to make the Rochelle Rochelle porno. Throughout the season, David would be periodically roped into the production, feeling uncomfortable yet titillated all the time. The arc would end with the film a huge success, and Larry David and I sharing an AVN Award for the film.

I think this has great artistic, comedic, and financial potential. Mr David? Are you reading this? Contact me if you’re interested.