1. Nearly everything on their minds is about relationships. This isn’t just because of the world MTV has created, where shows like “I Just Want My Pants Back” are probably being watched religiously by 9 year olds. It’s partly because of what entertainment explicitly for kids is: “Why does a 6-year old need to know so much about dating and breaking up?” Also: those who are more religious are not immune from this. Not even close. I’ve actually never seen so much pressure to “find someone” as I have in fundamentalist circles.
2. Nostalgia. I don’t even. It makes no sense to me we’ve got a bunch of oversexed young people who think they know exactly how relationships work. In many cases, they have more experience in a number of human interactions than people twice or three times their age. To the degree they’re right about such matters, it’s frightening. It makes even less sense that these same young people don’t even try reading Kant or Proust. They want “My Little Pony” and “Adventure Time” (the latter is, to be sure, an excellent show). Actually, now that I state the problem, it does make sense. If you feel you know something well beyond your years, you feel justified about your tastes and choices in a number of other areas. The reversion to childishness is because of growing up too quickly. There’s little or no sense of what is appropriate when.
3. “You don’t know me.” You can imagine how annoying it is to hear this when dealing with texts whose primary theme is self-knowledge, which no one bothers with nowadays. Our big assumption: experience is irreducibly private; we’re all unique; no one can be in the position another was. So, um, how come there are still bandwagon tendencies that can be exploited? How come marketing of any sort is effective? Why are there code words – i.e. “free speech” – which instinctively trigger emotions in nearly anyone? You’d think the thesis that true independence is something achieved would appeal to young people. Instead we have a whole world which thinks “freedom” is equivocal to “leave me alone.” Then we wonder why no one respects another’s right, let alone strives for justice.

Add it all up and you can see the source of a lot of craziness. Kids think growing up is nothing but sex and drugs. They have standards for physical beauty that allow them to dismiss others far too easily. Anyone serious about education has to make it clear inside and outside the classroom that school, reading on one’s own, making something of oneself are a real alternative to this shallowness. It has to be shown the shallowness goes nowhere, too: many people do trade their physical beauty for gaining experience. They want to achieve and know more than bask in their own resplendence. Many want to sacrifice on behalf of others.

I guess what I’m seeing is that “merit” can’t really replace “honor” or “nobility” in their fullest sense. Weirdly enough, sex and drug abuse can be seen as providing an alternate set of goods to those had by “having a job” and “being educated.” As long as we emphasize acquisition alone as the end of education, we’re going to run into this idiocy.

2. Adult Swim’s “stoner” shows seem to have grown-up. A lot. And they’re good. Delocated captures the spirit of Arrested Development well and has an edge to it that is most welcome: not often I see two characters killed in one episode. Children’s Hospital has its sight set on hospital drama generally, but gets its relevance from the utter preposterousness that is House. And NTSF: SD: SUV is a gem – the procedural format is thoroughly eviscerated while itself exploited. The show moves fast even for 15 minutes.

3. The conference went well. I’ve got a bunch of stories, but some of them are still playing out. The whole issue is who keeps up and what we do for each other. New Orleans was a refreshing city and I do want to go back.

1. Peg O’Connor pushes us to think metaphorically in her posting “In the Cave: Philosophy and Addiction.” Her summary of the Cave allegory in Plato’s Republic:

There is a cave in which prisoners are chained facing a wall. They cannot move their heads and therefore cannot look sideways or behind; they only can look forward. Behind them are a burning fire and a half wall where puppeteers hold up puppets that cast shadows. To the chained men, the shadows are real; they have no conception of the objects that cause the shadows. Appearance is mistaken for reality, and thus there is no real knowledge.

Now imagine that the prisoners are released from their chains. They look behind them and see the objects that caused the shadows. Most likely they will be confused and horrified and unwilling to accept that these objects caused the shadows. Imagine now that the prisoners start to leave the cave. They will be painfully blinded as soon as they encounter light. Once their eyes begin to adjust, they will be confronted by a harsh bright world with a whole host of horrifying objects. Some of the men will flee back to the safety of the darkness and shadows, valuing the familiar more highly than the unfamiliar. Anyone who returns and tells his friends who are still enchained what he has seen will be regarded as a nut lacking any credibility.

O’Connor is particularly concerned with people reacting badly to the light or even the possibility of light. This is all too reminiscent of an addict’s “reasoning:”

In various scenarios of addiction, the addicted person’s fixation on a shadow reality — one that does not conform to the world outside his or her use — is apparent to others. When the personal cost of drinking or drug use becomes noticeable, it can still be written off or excused as merely atypical. Addicts tend to orient their activities around their addictive behavior; they may forego friends and activities where drinking or drug use is not featured. Some may isolate themselves; others may change their circle of friends in order to be with people who drink or use in the same way they do. They engage in faulty yet persuasive alcoholic reasoning, willing to take anything as evidence that they do not have a problem; no amount of reasoning will persuade them otherwise. Each time the addict makes a promise to cut down or stop but does not, the chains get more constricting.

2. A large amount of Xenophon is devoted to illustrating that wisdom is moderation and its attendant ironies. Socrates is continually around handsome young men. There are times he may want one or another to get away from one he favors (Memorabilia I.3). We never see Socrates openly hitting on any of them. There is more going on here than such a depicted occurrence being distasteful. I suspect the attempted moderation of Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium and Alcibiades is taken for granted by Xenophon. Socratic eros does have higher aspirations.

If wisdom is moderation, doesn’t that mean ignorance is immoderation? Can addiction itself be ignorance? I’m not allowing for ignorance to be a species of addiction or vice versa just yet: can the metaphor point beyond itself and resolve into some truth about our experience?

O’Connor’s article really should be read in full. Toward the end, she starts putting together a case for allegory/myth as descriptive of a number of experiences empirical science may only inform. The key to such experiences are that they have to be communicated. We’re too fragile to work with them otherwise, especially if we can be characterized as addicts. We’ll relapse and lose our grip on all of reality. Our experiences do not translate into wisdom simply:

People relapse for all sorts of reasons, and often these have to do with old patterned ways of thinking and behaving that make a roaring comeback.

3. I think it is pretty obvious that “addiction = ignorance” is false. Ignorance encompasses many more phenomena than addiction. Oftentimes we run into people who don’t struggle with addiction of any sort because they don’t know anything. Their lives may not be led well at all. I know a number of men who will sit around and do absolutely nothing with their lives if given a chance. Is laziness or avoiding anything that looks like conflict an addiction?

Moreover, it is not clear why exactly anyone in the cave turns to the light. To be oppressed and to feel oppressed are two very different things. The philosopher is truly free, but that is partly because he belongs to another realm entirely. Does natural light extend into the cave at all? The fire mimics the sun.

At the same time, it is worthwhile to try to note where ignorance takes on the form of addiction. O’Connor is exactly right in pointing out that there is a denial of plausible narratives at work. We’re telling ourselves the only true story when we assert the rightness of our life against all others. There is no knowledge of ignorance, just simple ignorance. We might be able to describe our contentment with clearly failed conventional modes as an addiction of sorts. That gets tricky, though: sometimes conventionality fails because people have lost all respect for each other. In which case, insisting on things like “nobility” or “morality” or “compassion” may not be an addiction but rather an insistence that being human starts somewhere.

O’Connor’s got the right instincts. What truth is – especially when it comes to things like “self-knowledge” or “knowing another truly” – well, that’s really tricky. If we’ve got a narrative set up to fail and insist on using it, we might be addicts. I can safely say I’m not too happy with those who insist on a mechanistic explanation for everything. Recently I was involved in a discussion about why one would want to choose a certain location as opposed to another for a work of art. Everyone else involved in the discussion started listing costs and regulatory hurdles. The point I wanted to make, about the value the artist had for his own art and what he conceived it doing, was not worth bringing forth.

That we consume lots of trash is not a problem. I’ve seen the first season of Jersey Shore and do not hold watching the series against anyone. It would be ludicrous to ask people to come home from work and start reading Wittgenstein. Heck, we probably need something to distract us from the fact that “hard work” combined with “solid planning” and “an opportunity” isn’t quite equality of opportunity (the last sentence of that link is by far the most important).

But that last consideration brings back the problem of Vinny. To what extent does the attention lavished on him – the money he gets for being himself – make the world suck for the rest of us? On the one hand, reality TV “stars” are few and far between. Then again, when you get press comparable to an imprisoned critic of China’s brutality who designed their Olympic stadium, that’s pretty frightening.

In a free society, what the people want is what the people get. If you want cheap and stupid entertainment all the time, you’re going to get precisely that. And it is going to make the economy what it is. Go to a bookstore and take careful note how much crap is being sold to you versus any book of substance. Go to a university and watch as the administrators use it as a tax shelter and a professional sports franchise wrapped into one. This is all we can conceive.

I think this. Journalists have tough jobs. One has to maintain an air of objectivity while representing some utterly ludicrous points of view. There’s a ton of serious, interesting writing out there by journalists who I can’t imagine are making all that much on a plethora of subjects. If I want to go through a Sunday New York Times properly, it’ll take a week.

But it’s time to pull a Jon Stewart and start accusing. “Vinny” isn’t coming up big just because of Google’s expanded definition of news sources. He’s coming up big because some abstract idea of “magnitude” makes someone newsworthy and another not. A good story is found by actually looking where others aren’t. The former poet laureate was teaching remedial English for 20 years while producing some amazing work. Right now, it’s easy to find the stories about people making a “splash:” for example, the aspiring literati of The New Inquiry. What needs to be found are that many more who aren’t making a “splash” – quite possibly because they’re talking to different audiences or about subjects not on our radar.

As diverse and quality as media is (I know, it should be “are,” I don’t care), it needs that much more diversity and quality. It needs to start reflecting the arts of which it is actually a part. Good journalism is a craft. If it keeps taking cues from what sells, it will have all the appearance of an imposing, beautiful structure and the structural soundness of the house built on sand.

[Dave Boyle:] It culminated one night, after I’d done this Freedom of Information Act request, asking for the licenses of the 6 a.m. bars. Twelve hours later, my garage blew up.

- even before that section there exists a palpable sense of loss. Some thoughts on reality tv begin the whole issue:

My first reality-TV death — the first that stung — was Frankie, from “The Real World.” Some of you may remember the sister. Punk-goth from Wisconsin. Twenty-two, but seemed much younger: defensive and chirpy, suddenly happy or sleepy. Hair a deep chemical russet. She was a cutter, too; she cut herself with a kitchen knife. Her mother later identified this as her legacy, that she brought attention to cutting. Also, she was pathologically fearful of ships. If one came into sight (it was San Diego; they lived on water), her cast mates knew to throw a jacket over her head, to stop her seizing up. But Frankie’s true identifying oddity on the show was that she had bad cystic fibrosis in her lungs. And would talk about how it was going to kill her soon, while chain-smoking clove cigarettes. She was a girl whose rage to live could vent itself only through the death wish. She was captivating in a way you somehow resented. When she died, I felt nothing but then thought about her for a long time.

I’m keeping my copy of the magazine. I’m still thinking about a lot of it when not in awe. Consider this, about Vann Nath:

Meanwhile, out in the jungle, the Khmer Rouge leaders lived with impunity for decades until, in 2009, Duch was brought before an international tribunal in Phnom Penh and charged with the atrocities committed at S-21. Duch and Vann Nath, now in their 60s, faced each other one last time before Duch was sentenced to 35 years in prison. On the witness stand, weakened by illness but still emanating monkish calm, Vann Nath broke down. “What I want is intangible,” he said, still unable to look Duch in the eye. “I want justice for the dead.”

1. Once upon a time there were dragons whose power may have stemmed from words. They established a rule of sorts over men. Then the goddess came along and gave man the Voice – the power to use those words. Man defeated the dragons, at least for a time.

If we say that primordial chaos is not “nothingness,” that it could be words floating around, then this tale is some kind of combination of Genesis 1 and the myth of Prometheus. Maybe man is the creature that in putting words together has articulate speech. If so, what are the limits of his power? Much of Skyrim is devoted to a literal dispute over who is a god and who isn’t.

2. Like all political philosophy, the divide between political things and cosmology is problematic to say the least. The political things point to ever higher orders: underneath all the dogma is genuine wonder about what man himself is, where he belongs. But that doesn’t mean there’s any logical link between political things and cosmology.

In Skyrim, there are at least two before your character who used the Voice very differently. One was Talos, who had the Voice, got an army with it, conquered everyone, “ascended into heaven” (see Livy’s account of Romulus’ “ascension” to see what my level 23 Imperial-leaning mage thinks of that story). Then there’s Jurgen Windcaller, who realized that the ability to kill people simply by speaking might be connected to something higher. The Greybeards – monks who offer you guidance no matter what your race, who don’t care whether you’re their religion or not – look to Windcaller for the realization that “the Voice should be used for the worship and glory of the gods, not for the glory of man.”

So let’s say Ulfric is the second coming of Talos, complete with plans for Nord supremacy. And let’s say my heavily biased account above is right and the racism of the Stormcloaks against the Dark Elves is just one aspect of abusing the Voice. Does that mean we’ve derived a morality, a way of acting toward one another, directly from an account of the origins of the world?

Not in the least. For all we know, Talos might be a god. We’ve actually opened up a huge can of worms about our own perceptions. Self-determination is not necessarily a liberal principle. It can entail intolerance and closed-mindedness; early on in the Politics, Aristotle makes some observations that seem to mark any given tribe as tending toward empire. Ulfric’s general, Stone-Fist, is very open about wanting to conquer the elves after throwing the Empire out of Skyrim.

Yet self-determination seems to be an indispensable condition for freedom. The freedom the Empire gives is closer to what we have nowadays as freedom and we find a million ways of complaining about: security and order are paramount. The law is not in our blood but allows a diversity to tolerate each other and form a cosmopolis.

3. And all of you are aware what is above is oversimplified. It’s easy to use Skyrim’s mythology to generate questions. For example: How do Daedra fit into this? They are worshiped, but don’t seem to establish rituals or conventions like the gods of the pantheon do. My provisional guess – I need to play a lot more Skyrim to figure this out – is that they are desire itself for the most part (yes, this includes Daedra who govern things like darkness or twilight). Take the example Daedric prince of hunting, Hircine. Hunting doesn’t quite involve the skill set pottery does. One can characterize it, especially given its signification in ancient cultures, as a display of mastery. One out-beasts the beasts, so to speak. Hircine is insane as a result: he can’t tell who to aid, hunter or hunted, except in terms of creating the greatest hunt possible. The extremes desires lead us to exist outside of us and create situations desire itself cannot work with. Hence, it is another Daedra who created a weapon that can banish his kin. Azura might be the desire of change for the better. That kind of desire rarely likes to hear it is wrong.

Right now there’s a charming book in my inventory called “The Importance of Where” which would more than suffice for a children’s book. “Where” is not simply location or a target: it is the matter of demonstration or proof. The Dark Elves and the Dwemer might be competing over the same story. The know-how of the Dwemer resulted in magnificent creations that outlasted the race. The Dark Elves are surviving through their know-how even as they could be thrown out of Skyrim. I haven’t come across any Dunmer ruins yet.

Géricault’s aesthetic heir, Delacroix, is arguably the star of the show. Whatever his medium, the confines of the rectangle seem barely able to contain his energetic marks and strokes. Delacroix’s admiration for the freedom and intensity of Rembrandt’s drawings is palpable, equally visible in a highly developed study of Christ on the Mount of Olives, in calligraphic sketches, or in a drawing from life, of an Arab, made during a formative early trip to North Africa….

In his journals, Delacroix agonized over why he preferred his sketches to his finished paintings, concluding that sketches allowed the viewer to complete the work imaginatively.

- Karen Wilkin, “Drawn to Revolution” in the WSJ

The ground beneath and “supporting” Christ is so turbulent I feel He is about to be thrown out of the painting at us. That ground and the rock curve like waves attacking a shore; above and beside Christ’s figure motion roughly follows the circle of His halo, His light. Is it more peaceful? We are at least presented a narrative. Shapes like sleeping apostles on the left, very thick patches of dark green, a not-quite-distinct mob gathering on the right looking like they are burning, like they are a tongue of fire. Christ Himself is very much awake. Shouldn’t Providence – His knowledge – be experienced more positively?

The painting uses a very earthy palette. Christ’s light is radiant, but may not be the key color. One of the indistinct human shapes at the left wears blue. The upper right has a patch of blue. We can’t really recognize anyone as human in the painting save Christ. Perhaps Providence is not for God, but us. The godly thought may be that some have the freedom to choose better, even as earthly and cosmic events conspire to swallow us whole.

[Picasso] doesn’t seem so much to reinvent tradition, in the words of the show’s title, as to simply explode it, without ever losing track of the constituent pieces, which he combines and recombines in stunning ways. He does odd things with his mediums, for example, applying watercolor and gouache with a dry brush in thin, scratchy lines, as in the early Cubist “Still Life With Chocolate Pot,” creating an odd tactility that infuses his forms with light.

- Roberta Smith, “Lines That Kept Moving And Knew No Boundaries”

It resembles a landscape seen from above on which light falls down. The white extending from the cup and saucer to the bowl may be a river, beach or tides. Folds of cloth or bright patches of reflected light hold blues and darks. The browns, grays and maroon of the chocolate pot and table establish something more structured. Is it a ground of sorts? The shape of the pot is vaguely feminine; straighter lines on the right side of the painting make one think of adjoining walls. Most striking: the bowl of fruit completely cut off by the sundial-like head of the pot. It is as if that is an axle twisting the angles of perspective. Perhaps light alone creates landscapes. Our artifice, even simply cups or pots, prevents us from seeing that easily. A further distortion may be necessary. An empty cup holds much of the light.

Jacobus’ work is at http://madhatterphotography.com – he was a joy to talk to when I met him at the Art N Form gallery in Fort Worth. Many thanks to Trevor and Marina for their patience with me while we were there.

The “underwear gnomes” are famed for their business plan:

1. Collect [steal] Underpants
2.  ?
3. Profit

The business plan is told to the boys after they make a presentation in defense of a local coffee shop worried about a national chain coming to town. The local coffee shop makes terrible stuff: the boys’ presentation touts the virtues of small business in general. It’s a hit and the town gets ready to ban the chain from moving in. The underwear gnomes encounter the boys when they are working on a revised presentation. The gnomes claim to be experts in business and seem to have a large operation. The boys make their next presentation in defense of big business. The wife of the small businessman touts the virtues of the chain’s coffee, and everyone agrees it is good. The national chain opens in South Park and hires the local businessman to run their shop.

So what have we learned about business? From Wikipedia:

Paul Cantor, a literary critic and economic theorist, who has taught college courses revolving around the “Gnomes” episode, has described it as “the most fully developed defense of capitalism” ever produced by the show.^[3] Cantor said the episode challenges the stereotype that small businesses are public servants who truly care about their customers by portraying local business owner Mr. Tweek as greedier and having less scruples than that of the corporation he is challenging; Tweek knowingly takes advantage of American distrust for big businesses and nostalgia for simpler times in his fight to maintain his bottom line.^[4][5] At the end of the episode, Kyle and Stan conclude big corporations are good due to the services they provide people, and uphold the notion that the businesses providing the best product deserve to succeed in the marketplace and grow to become larger.^[2] However, in portraying the Harbucks business plan as seducing the youth of the town with high-caffeine and high-sugar “kid-dycinno” drinks, Harbucks is also portrayed as lacking scruples in its corporate expansionist agenda.^[4]

The episode portrays the mainstream media as biased against capitalism during a news report in which the reporter openly speaks in favor of Harbucks’ opponents; Cantor said the use of children in the anti-Harbucks commercials demonstrate a liberal tendency to use young people to advance their positions. Economic protectionism, portrayed in the episode as Mr. Tweek seeking a law to ban Harbucks from South Park, is portrayed as a tool used by businessmen to restrict free entry into the marketplace to protect their own profits.^[6] Cantor said the language used in school reports Mr. Tweek writes for the students, like “As the voluminous corporate automaton bulldozes its way…”, is a parody of rhetoric against large corporations.^[7]

The gnome characters and their underpants collection represent the ordinary business activity of capitalism that takes place on a regular basis in front of everyone, but is seldom noticed, understood or appreciated by society. Cantor suggests the fact that the gnomes are accused of theft is symbolic of the way businesses are unfairly accused of sinister activities by those who do not understand them. He also said the fact that the gnomes themselves do not understand their own business plan or why they steal the underwear could represent the notion that businessmen themselves often lack the economic knowledge needed to explain their activity and profits to the public.

I do think Cantor is spending a lot of time belaboring the obvious, which is fine given how little people pay attention to others’ views. But I think he’s missing that the gnomes are mythical creatures, and that both big business and small business are mythical in the American imagination. We don’t know for sure whether the chain’s coffee is actually good in the episode. We only know Tweek’s coffee sucks. The chain hires Mr. Tweek: what does that tell us about their future product?

That the gnomes don’t understand their own plan makes perfect sense. The missing step has to be “create something of value from the underpants and sell” or “market what you’ve got and sell.” Given what I’ve pointed out above, I don’t think “create something of value” is part of the plan. And the episode makes me wonder if “big business” and “small business” are terms that by their very nature cater to types of marketing. The real plan is to be a business and automatically get praise for it one way or another. Business is good. It is busy-ness. The opening of the episode is a teacher getting hassled because he’s wasting time in class. The rest of the episode seems to ask: Did having the students produce the reports which totally contradicted each other and contributed nothing to anyone’s understanding use time productively?

I’m not saying the episode is anti-capitalist. Cantor’s arguments are about right. The central issue is whether we can evaluate things properly. If we can, we might get something out of school, not pass bad laws, maybe even make good coffee. But we’re going to have to ditch the myths that create knee-jerk reactions. Tweek’s wife recognizes her husband’s weakness (and maybe even his strengths) and acts accordingly.