Technician milestone

Last week I finished my first scratch-build of a guitar amplifier. It's an almost-clone of a famous circuit from the 1960s and 70s, the Hiwatt DR504. If you want to read about the actual amp, you can look at the Electronic States posts about it. I didn't build the wood cabinet, and someone else made the nameplate for it, and the chassis was pre-made and drilled. Most of my labor was spent on wiring (which involves a lot of decision-making and luck, believe it or not). I do feel that I "built it" in the sense that I made the major decisions about how it would look and sound and work, and then realized the plan through a manually-intensive fabrication process. I thought I understood the circuit on the schematic, but there is another logic in the thing itself, and the messy imperfection of its physical components, that forced me to really understand it. The process merged both the factual and kinetic knowledge of it... I realize now that it's rare and exciting to have both kinds of knowledge about a thing.

It feels a bit like a coming-of-age, however late, to work this thing through from an idea to a pile of parts on a table to a functional and elegant machine. I've spent a lot of the last few years restoring broken things to working order -- amps of all sorts, hi-fi gear, guitars, basses, drums, bicycles, a steam heating system, plumbing... But in none of those cases can I say that I was the primary conceiver or the architect. I don't want to compare it to having a child; that's reductive and silly (machines aren't people, and besides, it's easier to create a child -- though not to raise one -- than build an amp).

But I also can't help feeling a certain pride at how this work self-interprets. It feels good. I've touched on this idea before while gushing over Matthew Crawford's work. He describes the unique "psychic satisfactions" of manual labor as rooted in the freedom from interpreting one's work for other people. Meaning, building an amp is not like writing a paper. When you write a paper, someone gives it back to you with a grade on it, but who knows if that grade is really reflective of the actual quality of the content, or if it's just your spot on the bell curve? After finishing any project of "knowledge work," you must engage in yet another labor of interpreting that work for others -- why it is worth their attention, why it is good or necessary, arguing for the work's place among competing peers. The argument is as much directed at the self, anxious that work might be mere noise, as at others. But when you build a machine, it either works well or it doesn't. If it doesn't, it's your fault. If it does, you need not be anxious that your work was somehow vain. The thing is there and it functions. It speaks of itself about your competence.

I have been out of college for almost 5 years, and I still have nightmares about having to take exams for which I haven't studied at all. I sometimes struggle to find the point in much of the abstract labor I did then. I don't have nightmares about mechanical and electrical failures.

Since most of my work is still abstract, relational, and conceptual (I'm not just talking about jobs, I would include artistic production and being married, for example), the contrast between anxiety around abstract labor and security around manual labor is more acute as time goes on. It's hard to understand whether there's something inherent in "knowledge work" that produces anxiety, or whether I've just been socialized into insecurity by a confluence of cultural and educational factors and the imperative to be "savvy" and "competitive" as a worker. There's also often a nagging sense that being that kind of high-achieving worker has more to do with gaming the system, through silver-tongued self-interpretation of impossible abstraction, than with actual competence. It's possible that manual labor offers existential security because machines don't lie. The technician does not have the luxury of spin.

Shopclass as Internet Meme

It didn't take long for the coherent and nuanced thesis of Shopclass as Soulcraft to become a single-jpeg internet meme. While I object that here some (all) of Crawford's conceptual care is thrown out in favor of sloganeering and snappy "revolution" youth marketing, I do basically agree with everything being said (and I think Crawford might, too). There are a number of things listed in the above image that Crawford specifically talks about --- agency vs. autonomy, no real technical support from manufacturers, obscuring the insides of machines. I do admit to having pleasant daydreams of a Wikipedia of service manuals that would eliminate the schematic-hunting part of my job.

Yet the reality is that fixing things is not for everyone. So couching it in "sustainability" terminology, making it a moral imperative, basically excludes you if you're not of a mechanical mindset... and also wrongly pretends that the typically pragmatic mindset of the mechanic is always harmonious with planet-saving. If anything, I struggle with the tradeoff between the narrow view of a specific problem I have to solve, and the bigger picture of how my expedient micro-solution may do macro-level harm. Holding both perspectives at once involves a high level of tension.

I suppose the nice thing is that the fix-it types tend to be male, introverted, and action-oriented instead of verbally fluent. They're the people who also typically get dumped on during recessions and mass-layoffs, while the fat cats go on uninterrupted. So I'm glad that we can start to invest some more dignity into handwork centered in the life of useful things.

More crankiness about boring art

I took some criticism for my complaint about newer postmodern American novels -- specifically that they're ultra-boring -- both private and public (public being the one comment from Andrew on that post). It was all good criticism. I haven't read Freedom, and I probably won't. I saw it as emblematic of a larger issue that I have with newer fiction specifically and contemporary arts & letters in general, and The Atlantic's review crystallized some of that sentiment. I have read The Corrections and while I 'liked it', it mostly made me feel tired and pretty nihilistic.

So, I was happy to find an article that more precisely frames the wider issue. I'll shout this at you: READ THE WHOLE THING. CAREFULLY. RIGHT NOW!

"Smart art: in America, the land of anti-intellectualism, it's perhaps inevitable that our art should devolve into a screech against the national celebration of the dumb.... Urban Intellectual Fodder is the prozac of the American intelligentsia."

Contrast that with:

"The art I'm talking about, the art that blows your mind, is something you feel with more than your mind. It makes your hair stand on end. It takes your head off. It has a physical effect, like some kind of vicious blow that makes you jitter with excitement, or some kind of fierce cloud that enfolds you in a hard, clammy grip."

This is the kind of aesthetic/spiritual experience I often describe as a "game-changer". Certainly it's some kind of confrontation with the sublime, a confrontation that in my experience often helps me to joyfully acknowledge uncomfortable truth (however obliquely or non-verbally). In the third section, "On Being a Snotnose", the author describes some of his personal game-changers. Here are just a few of mine:

-Blood Meridian

-The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

-Ecclesiastes

-Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven

-2001: A Space Odyssey

One of the shared traits here is that many of these epiphanies take quite a while to sink in. It's not love at first sight.

The musical selections above will be perceived as middle-brow, but I'll argue fiercely that they're not, and that in fact they are more than equal to the books and film. They most closely fit the criterion for 'real' art: they demolished my inhibitions. There's some nostalgia in the article for being savvy back when the greats (Bergman, the Beatles) were making their work -- I feel that same sense of privilege that I'm aware of the work of Stars of the Lid.

Take note: he really likes Cormac McCarthy. Win! I will admit that a core problem with my credulity here is that it arises from my approval of the author's taste. I understand that's a problem. I'm more just excited at what's being said because it's helping me articulate something I've felt or known non-verbally:

"In novels, well, I'm at a bit of a loss here. There's that Brooklyn McSweeney McSmugley lot. Very smart, for sure. Kind of like unripe Woody Allen.... Jonathan Franzen? WTF? He doesn't write novels; he writes prose. Holding up a middle-brow mirror to middle-brow America: that's not going to be interesting two decades from now."

"I won't even talk about Slum Dog Millionaire -- that's just a Rocky for Occidentals who like their condescension towards Orientals to come back at them with a happy ending."

Brutal! We're so hell-bent on subverting the canon that 'exotic' is conflated with 'classic.'

Does that clear up what I was trying to say before? McCarthy makes me feel something way down inside that Franzen is never going to make me feel. The fact that McCarthy can do this while writing about cowboys while Franzen is writing about the people closest to me? That's exceptional.

More love for Cormac McCarthy

I keep returning to Cormac McCarthy's novels; he may be my favorite fiction writer. He often gets lumped in with "postmodern fiction writers" like Don DeLillo, who is usually 'blamed' for spawning more recent literary figures like Jonathan Franzen, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Safran Foer, and David Foster Wallace. I don't think that's fair to McCarthy. He's more cast in the mold of Conrad, Melville, and Faulkner.

I had just finished reading No Country for Old Men when I stumbled across the first and only negative review I've seen of the new Jonathan Franzen book, Freedom, in the Atlantic. Reading it made me appreciate McCarthy even more, since his novels aren't about 'banality' or 'the mundane' or 'the people next door' --- they're somehow premodern apocalyptic texts in a vaguely postmodern format. Unlike most "postmodern" novels, they don't deny transcendence and revel in vanity, they just find that the one transcendently True element in human(-ist?) existence is the violent will to power (remember the Judge: "War endures"). In a way, it's really quite a Christian view of evil, except for the characters' despair that God seems to have abandoned them and left things to run amok. Evil (of the specifically American variety, kind of like Junot Diaz's "fuku Americanus") portrayed thus has more in common with the work of Flannery O'Connor than with any American 'social fiction' now.

The Atlantic's review complains about Franzen:

Even when he finally loses his temper, the book shows him no respect: the chapter in question is called “The Nice Man’s Anger.” Would he have turned out less of a clown had Freedom been written after the BP spill? I doubt it; Franzen must riff and smirk for our age, the Age of Unseriousness. No sooner does Walter declare his love for his assistant than we are forced to follow him to the bathroom, where, unable to pee, he wastes water in “an unnecessary flush.” How tiresome all of this is; literary fiction has drawn man smaller than life for much, much longer than it ever did the opposite.

McCarthy is just the opposite, he's telling the Truth as he paints characters larger than life. Melville does it with Captain Ahab, Conrad does it with Kurtz. In No Country for Old Men, Sheriff Bell wonders:

The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more than you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that's what it is. It's the thing you're talkin about. I've heard it compared to the rock --- maybe in the bible --- and I wouldnt disagree with that. But it'll be here even when the rock is gone. I'm sure they's people would disagree with that. Quite a few, in fact. But I never could find out what any of them did believe.

I wonder if that's the whole point of McCarthy's writing. The Truth is both transcendent and terrifying, contrary to the chroniclers of banality like Franzen. Reviewers constantly compare authors like Franzen to DeLillo, to whom McCarthy is considered a peer... but what DeLillo got right -- that his imitators don't -- is just this: the truth is terrifying. He doesn't express it nearly as explicitly as McCarthy, so the mood is paranoia instead of meditative, fatalistic despair. But it's the same underlying principle; when you look reality squarely in the eye, you will come apart. McCarthy illustrates the coming apart itself with unflinching directness, DeLillo critiques the social and technological defenses we put up to prevent it. Later writers like Franzen seem to have lost the sense that banality conceals dread; they treat the banality as the sum of reality itself, not a distraction from it. They just want to write dialog as snappy as DeLillo's, and without weight behind the surface, it quickly gets boring.

Romance about trades

Camille Paglia has finally jumped on the manual-is-intellectual bandwagon. I do kind of want to hate on her for being so late to the party, but her essay for The Chronicle Review is another concise and clear statement of what I was arguing before when I got mad at Stanley Fish. I'd like to see more academics rejecting the romanticization of their "trade" (since that is what it is).

(Of course, credit always needs to be given to relative outsider Matthew Crawford for injecting this whole conversation into the public/popular arena. The more prestigious academics are slow to join because THEY are the ones at whom the critique is most often directed.)

Romance about education

Stanley Fish writes in the NYT about classical education, a qualitative paradigm to counterbalance our outcome- and test-based models (via Ohbadiah).

As someone who was actually educated in precisely the way Fish is suggesting (home-schooled all the way through in classics, Enlightenment, and Modern/Postmodern thought; comprehensive ancient, medieval, and modern world history and politics; plus historically- tied math/sciences), I agree in principle with his valuation of that education. Unfortunately, it only prepares you to be exactly what Fish is: an overeducated, undersocialized, snobbish, elitist academic. And more unfortunately, there are vanishingly fewer openings with that job description every day. There are no jobs anymore for the Renaissance Man. The ones we see and celebrate are leftovers from a previous era, mostly held by gray-haired white men, born of privilege.

So I find myself with a world-class education from both a serious home schooling background and serious theory training at an Ivy League university. And basically, I can't make a buck doing anything related to anything I have ever studied. Some of my current job and financial situation is of my own choosing, based on values I hold (ironically, given to me in large part through my educational background), but a lot of it has to do with having no skills that are in fact meaningfully marketable without some meaningless additional credential. I could probably have polished myself up and gotten a "consulting job" before the crash, but I'd know deep down I was a fraud in an industry of frauds. Now even that option is gone.

Fish says of current standards-based educational paradigms:

A faith in markets produced gamesmanship, entrepreneurial maneuvering and outright cheating, very little reflection on “what children should know” and very little thought about the nature of the curriculum.

Unfortunately again, this is how the adult world works, particularly at the elite levels that everyone is presumably being educated toward. This is how kids are best prepared for what their work will largely consist of in America. People trained in this way can get work and can get ahead and make more than a few bucks. Learn to beat the system at a young age, and you can probably keep beating it for the rest of your life.

So much of the emphasis on outcomes and testing is based on America's envy of its better-educated neighbors. But how do we know they're "better-educated?" Test results. So it's kind of a no-brainer why that's our current yardstick. Quantitative is always easier than qualitative, especially at scale. The real question for classics education in this time is: Is it worth living in anxious wage-slavery for your whole life, just so you can know you're "more enlightened" or "more cultured" than someone with a more rote education? Seems like an overly-romantic and hyper-nostalgic notion from someone who's been in academia for too long. If there's a true benefit to classics ed, it's the inculcation of values that go beyond cost/benefit. And that's probably achievable through some other means.

Of course, there's David Brooks to respond to these objections.

In praise of metal: gender

Metal, as I experience it, seems to contain part silly histrionics and part genuine heroism. The proportion of those parts depends on the context. I'm beginning to frame this experience in terms of gender --- as I've tried to understand why metal as a genre and subculture is so male-dominated, I've concluded that it's not because of a "club" mentality or intentional exclusion of women. (There are plenty of examples, such as Arch Enemy's Angela Gossow, of women who equal and outdo their male counterparts in both skill and presence. These women are accorded enormous respect in the community --- probably more than men, from an acknowledgment that their climb is steeper.) I'm beginning to think that the overwhelming male composition has to do with the activity/identity function that metal provides: the opportunity for a non-destructive expression of traditionally "masculine" activities and values.

In other words, the demands of the music --- technical virtuosity, group coordination, extreme stamina, harsh environment, and risk --- form a fairly complete surrogate for soldiery. Participants are afforded the opportunity to "train" both individually and in groups, then engage in a public "test" (performance) that involves some degree of courage and/or risk, where they must prove themselves to a critical audience which judges skill, innovation, and authenticity simultaneously. If they can do this well and repeatedly, they get to be "heroes" --- achievers in the most concrete sense, physically doing things which seem at least marginally super-human.

This is probably why almost all metal fans have at one time or another been in a metal band. You can't really say this about fans of other genres. This culture of participation and production-imperative is actually quite at odds with the prevailing norms of spectatorship and entertainment consumption. It's one more dimension of the outsider nature of metal and its devotees (that's a separate discussion, though).

Neo-luddites would probably call this kind of subculture a "surrogate activity" which is a result of our daily work's total abstraction from the struggle for biological survival. I don't wholly buy that explanation, but the concept works here in a gender sense. Whatever your opinion of the nature or value of gender, the opportunity for heroism that metal provides is irresistable to many males whose gendered valuation of strength, stoicism, manual skill, and stamina has been declared obsolete or pathological by a post-modern, post-feminist society.

I absolutely do not blame feminism itself for this. I blame the industrialization of killing and the broader mistakes of the 20th century for creating a backlash. In that backlash we have erroneously conflated the masculine ideal with aggression. Even the most grossly patriarchal societies have codes of honor designed to elevate masculinity and contain aggression. What I am saying is that "masculine" ideals which formerly found their expression in conflict and battle must now have other outlets, both because of the inevitable and appropriate obsolescence of honor-governed warfare and because of new ways of living. The problem is that we threw the baby out with the bathwater and disenfranchised a large segment of society -- men who usually have no problem at all with women as their full equals and superiors, but whose very personalities have been inadvertently declared toxic waste by the cultural establishment, because they happen to value traditionally masculine traits and roles in themselves.

This environment will necessarily create the context for outsider subcultures. In our society, the males who feel disenfranchised by gender erasure and least able to adapt to it are also usually the ones least able to mount an intellectual critique against it. This is not because they're stupid, it's because the academy usually finds this type of person unsuitable for intellectual training. These males turn to other outlets, which fall at various places on a continuum from destructive (violence) to valueless (frat-boy antics) to potentially constructive (endurance/survival sports, exploration, etc.). The fact that apathy and destruction are often associated with this venting is probably only a confirmation that there is an underlying feeling of wholesale rejection, or at least a sense that society will never ascribe true importance to these people or their characteristics.

All of this is to say that I think metal often gets placed in the "destructive" or "valueless" categories, because it is seen as either morally detrimental and anarchic or simply immature and crass. While that can be true, I would argue that it is equally often a highly constructive pursuit, particularly for disenfranchised men.

Its constructive nature lies in the heroism I mentioned above. Of course there are myriad examples of the merely-entertaining and the outright lowbrow in metal, just as there are in society at large. These include the silly histrionics mentioned above --- guitar solos for the sake of showing off, shocking stage shows just for stimulus' sake --- that make the genre seem artistically irrelevant. But when a confluence of artistic, intellectual, and especially technical skills and energies are poured holistically into it, metal --- arguably more than other forms of musical expression --- becomes a vehicle for the explosive and the sublime, a collective experience of enormous power. It requires a "heroic" effort and skill to make such an experience possible.

That experience goes beyond entertainment into identification and ritual, which may be the real reason that "mainstreamers" often find metal threatening, though they can't articulate a specific offense. The relationship between performer and listener is reciprocal and vital, which might also explain the imperative of authenticity, and aversion to "poseurs" and hangers-on. If the experience is exclusive, it is only exclusive of those whose personal motives are suspect --- in other words, simply those who do not have the "community's" best interests in mind, because their involvement doesn't have to do with music participation, but rather with image or money. It is almost never exclusive on the basis of identity.

Returning to the point: this experience is not for males only, nor is it about masculinity. I think the form simply attracts a disproportionate number of males because it provides a uniquely suitable outlet for otherwise unvalued "masculine" traits.

These thoughts were forcefully brought home to me while I watched Buried Inside play on Saturday and Sunday night. Their music is technically, lyrically, and emotionally complex, and their performance instantiated and affirmed those qualities. Nick's and Andrew's shouted choruses over the pounding drums and guitars had a tragic melancholy that still contained defiance. It was masculine, but not macho --- a measured sadness about important things expressed with subtlety, yet at earshattering volume. To be so vulnerable, yet so imposing and so skilled, weaving a heart-and-mind narrative in rumble, pounding, and screaming, is truly heroic. It took a very long time for this level of seriousness and complexity to emerge in the form, but here it is. Metal might simply have been growing up all this time, with all the attendant growing pains.

There may come a day when it is no longer so male-dominated, but that would require a mainstreaming of the values and priorities of a "new masculinity" --- probably still very far off, if it is possible at all. Then, either the functions and uses of the form would shift to other areas or it would simply disappear. It's hard to say.

(And to end with a conceited, discriminatory, and completely unfounded assertion: the extraverts gave birth to metal in its histrionic infancy, but the introverts have inherited it in its more heroic maturity. Thus the shedding of the sex-drugs-rocknroll archetype for the crusty, brooding dirge-writer. Natural progression from cocky Achilles to strong-silent George Washington? Ha!)

Writing

Generally speaking, I do better with list-making than with actual writing. I would much rather make a list of "top 10 things I would change about myself" or "top five strengths" or "action items" (shoot me, please) than actually write a coherent account or argument to communicate the same information.

I'm not sure whether this makes any definitive statement about the nature of my self-reflection, or maybe it's that in my mind the "task" of writing can't be separated from the academic imperative to create a defensible argument. (This may be of a piece with my wife's blog syndrome.) The main problem is that my written communication can't develop through practice, because false imperatives strangle the possibilities of new modes and new fronts. Part of me wishes I had taken creative writing in college, but another part knows it would have been awkward, mostly due to the inevitably forced display of personal inadequacy. We rarely go into situations where we're required to show off what we're not good at.

I wonder too if the nonlinear process I use (to write papers: I "build" them) might itself be partially responsible for my Germanic and analytical tendencies. Sentences are intrinsically one-dimensional; I think three-dimensionally. I compromise by writing two-dimensionally. With enough revision, there's no penalty on fluency, but certainly some magic narrative element is lost. I don't have the gift of surprise anymore.

I don't experience my own texts because I see them the way an architect (or more properly, a contractor) sees a building. Words then primarily form systems, not stories. Thus the criterion or standard is an absence of flaws, not the presence of some human response or impulse. Again, it comes back to a desire to be unassailable, rather than human -- which might be the opposite, anyway.

(As an experiment, I wrote this on a piece of paper in a single sitting in a restaurant, without revision.)

Clothes

The first fashion article I ever personally related to:

With the recent decline in our security, industry and standing, that nostalgia for a prelapsarian America (and the durable domestic goods that defined it) seems to have settled over the stylish set here at home. "Ironically, it's largely because of overseas interest that Americans can now wear real American stuff," says Michael Williams, a fashion publicist who covers Americana on his blog, A Continuous Lean. "They're recognizing that heritage and quality are precious in our disposable Wal-Mart world." It's as if globalization has come full circle, creating both an appetite for cultural anchoring and a fashion to feed it.
-Authentic Americana, Newsweek, Jan. 31 2009

This seems to be quite a bit different from the "Ted Kaczynski chic" of four or five years ago and the ironic trucker hat and Carhartt jacket fad in Williamsburg. At least, it seems to espouse some kind of sincere admiration and nostalgia for the "strong silent," Cormac McCarthy-ish masculine archetypes, which haven't been in the eye of haute couture since Jackson Pollock. (I would say McCarthy himself, as an artist, is one of these heroic American males --- though in a far more quiet and introspective way than Pollock). After Pollock's self-destruction, the "dandies" took over as taste-makers, ultimately begetting metrosexuals 40 years later. The difference between this newest fashion statement -- born of economic anxiety -- and the hipster "white trash" fashion trend is earnestness.

By choosing clothes that exist for a reason, young urbanites are defying the metrosexual mores of recent years and trying to participate in a testosterone-rich tradition instead. It's still fashion, of course. But it's fashion that fulfills a masculine ideal rather than a feminine one: function over frill. Superficial or not, that shift has come as a relief for men who already spend more time working with their MacBooks than their hands—a sign that they aspire to be as strong and silent as their rougher-hewn predecessors.

That may be superficial, but it's more confidence-inspiring than this. Granted, I won't pay those prices just to 'look like' something that I already am: I don't want just to look like I do skilled manual labor (a simulation), I want to do skilled manual labor. But at least the underlying logic is similar to my own set of criteria -- I select clothing with use in mind. The return to function dictating form is reassuring to me, but I'm also fascinated that this emphasis on functionality seems to be regarded as both distinctly masculine and distinctly American.

Edit 2/11/09: That is, fascinated in a semi-annoyed kind of way. I appreciate and endorse elevating function above form, and the higher valuation of build quality and durability -- but the association of those values with "American masculinity" perplexes me. The Teen Vogue link illustrates the infuriating counterpart -- the association of absurd frivolity with femininity.

The result of the scientific metanarrative

The judge concludes:

It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

...

The judge smiled. Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all.

Suppose two men at cards with nothing to wager save their lives. Who has not heard such a tale? A turn of the card. The whole universe for such a player has labored clanking to this moment which will tell if he is to die at that man's hand or that man at his. What more certain validation of a man's worth could there be? This enhancement of the game to its ultimate state admits no argument concerning the notion of fate. The selection of one man over another is a preference absolute and irrevocable and it is a dull man indeed who could reckon so profound a decision without agency or significance either one. In such games as have for their stake the annihilation of the defeated the decisions are quite clear. This man holding this particular arrangement of cards in his hand is thereby removed from existence. This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one's will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence. War is god.

...

Might does not make right, said Irving. The man that wins in some combat is not vindicated morally.

[The judge replied,] Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn.

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

The scientific metanarrative

A concise statement of the goals of the Enlightenment -- remarkably similar to the attitude of C.S. Lewis's antagonists in That Hideous Strength, and to Lewis's own critique of the Modern scientist-turned-shaman:

Whatever exists, [the judge] said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.

He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he'd collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men's knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only when the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.

What's a suzerain?

A keeper. A keeper or overlord.

Why not say keeper then?

Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgements.

Toadvine spat.

The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on this earth, he said.

The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

Morning again in America

"It's not that I would have felt less love of country if voters had chosen John McCain. And this reaction I'm trying to describe isn't really about Obama's policies. I'll disagree with some of his decisions, I'll consider some of his public statements mere double talk and I'll criticize his questionable appointments. My job will be to hold him accountable, just like any president, and I intend to do my job.

"For me, the emotion of this moment has less to do with Obama than with the nation. Now I know how some people must have felt when they heard Ronald Reagan say 'it's morning again in America.' The new sunshine feels warm on my face."

-Eugene Robinson, Washington Post 11/6/08


A lot of people are talking about whether Barack Obama's election heralds an ideological shift from "center-right" leftward. I think that's missing the point. I'm deeply troubled by the angry and disappointed conservatives who are claiming that America is "finished" or is going to become "socialist", or that Democrats will "overreach" and get tossed. Maybe they feel left out, like they can't join the celebration of the "winners" because they're the "losers".

But I don't think that this joyful shock we are experiencing has anything to do with partisanship. I don't think people were crying and and lifting their hands to the sky two nights ago because the Democrats got the White House back. It's not even really about sticking it to George Bush, as much as he is now reviled in most circles, and I have detected no sense of snide self-satisfaction in most of the celebrating. It's something new. Our people are beginning to realize that anything really is possible, and that America is very symbolically putting its money where its mouth has been for 232 years. The meaning of "freedom" in this nation became broader and deeper and more real on Tuesday night.

Some of my more conservative friends have the idea that Obama is loved outside the U.S. because other nations want to make us weak and compliant, and believe that an Obama presidency would serve that end. These friends feel affronted and demoralized seeing spontaneous celebrations of Obama's election in other countries. Again, I think that's misunderstanding the motive. Just as much as I believe the overflowing joy here in the U.S. has nothing to do with partisanship, I believe that the celebrations abroad reflect not a perception of Barack Obama, but a perception of us. The world is excited because they now see that we, the people of the United States, are not so "rigid" and "bigoted" as they thought -- that maybe the sullen, arrogant, bullying superpower they knew had more to do with transient leadership than with the real soul and identity of our nation. Every man, woman, and child in this country, regardless of who they voted for, can own this new position of respect and global leadership. You and I and every citizen of our nation are now looked upon in awe, because we have again, at long last, demonstrated the promise of our heritage and led the world by example rather than by might. The victory belongs not to a person, a party, or a government, but to all the people of the United States, who once again have a reason to be proud.

The characteristic of rambliness

"The characteristic of meaning is that not everything has it."
-Jean Baudrillard, The Lucidity Pact

I've been thinking about this for about a year and a half, and I'm still not sure whether it's true. There are three possibilities: everything is meaningful, nothing is meaningful, or some things are meaningful. Baudrillard dismisses the first two. My worldview dismisses the second (disciples of Richard Dawkins can stop reading here). It's not a question of whether meaning is intrinsic or constructed (or both). The question is, when interpreting the basic events of our daily lives, which is more burdensome: a knowledge that Everything is meaningful, or the task of determining what is and isn't?

Take, for example, our obsession with self-knowledge:

This is the Wordle visualization of the content of this site for the last year. Is there meaning in the fact that the largest word is "people," seemingly incongruous because of my extreme introversion? If I knew that it was meaningful, but could have no grasp of that meaning, would that be worse? And that's only considering one word in the hierarchy...

This is where you call me a loser for thinking about this.

Ideal living is often summed up in trite phrases, like "live every day like it was your last," or, "look for the diamond in the rough," but these don't work in practice because they amount to veiled propositions about meaning. The propositions themselves usually remained obscured and unexamined, so we can never really accept or definitively reject the aphorisms. Of course, now that I've criticized the conventional wisdom, I'm supposed to offer a different spin on the same "truth." But I don't have one.

The reality is that everyone has a set of presuppositions about whether events and things are meaningful, and 90% of the time these presuppositions are not examined --- because to do so nearly guarantees unresolvable internal dissonance and paranoia.

I think this emergent self-examination is what happens to many academics somewhere between their 2nd and 4th years of graduate school. Like groundhogs, most of them see their shadow and run back into the hole (the hole is called "the tenure track"). It usually arises because of a question about whether their epic thesis on a clay pot from a 2nd century Welsh town is truly significant labor.

Yet we can't dismiss significance and meaning out of hand, because we all crave transcendence on some level. Everyone has reached momentary heights of blissful interconnectedness and holistic epiphany --- maybe while listening to a moving piece of music, or experiencing genuine intimacy with another person for the first time --- which tell us that either there is or ought to be Meaning beyond survival. Whatever it is, we want it.

I'm getting old

I never used to complain about weird hours, no sleep, or long drives. I don't know if it's because I got married or because my inner crusty old guy is starting to become my normal outer self.

I also find myself becoming tired of travel in general, mostly because the more I think about it the more selfish it seems. This is less true of touring (where you're supposedly "giving" people something wherever you go, creating value, etc.) than normal post-college travel, but still applies. As I begin to accept my limitations and realize that I will not go everywhere in the world before I die, I also begin to see more clearly the consumptive nature of travel. Of what value is all this "experience capital" anyway, especially to anyone other than myself? Am I really going to bring home some wonderful knowledge from far away that will improve my local community? That's a pretty Platonic idea and one which is all but obsolete in contemporary globalism.

It's more likely that by traveling I'm only spreading the gospel of consumptive late capitalism. It forces a weighing of the potential benefits (to me) of worldly experience, versus the potential benefits (to my community) of staying and investing in a real home. Some might claim that their enlightened transience allows them to be "citizens of the world" and have a community that spans the globe, but I contend that most of those people simply have no real community at all, and are stretched too thin to be much more than cultural leeches to the localities they come in contact with. Their "doctrine of placelessness" is also often accompanied by virulent delusions of their own importance.

I suspect many of these people are trying to escape what they perceive to be a kind of determinism in placefulness --- whereby your homeplace becomes inextricable from your identity, and therefore limits how much of your self you can intentionally construct. Having a local connection is a block to the long-held elite-white-people value of culturelessness (unless the "local" connection is New York or London, which are just nodes in the Space of Flows). I think that's actually a good thing. If that makes me "provincial" or a "yokel," I don't really care.

The hookah

This issue has come up in conversation on multiple occasions in the last couple of weeks, as well as occasions in the last two years, and I feel a need to address it with the relevant research attached.

I am repeatedly surprised by the number of intelligent, educated people --- who know smoking is harmful and would never touch a cigarette --- who smoke hookah and think nothing of it. If you're a regular smoker, I'm not talking to you. This is directed at people who "know better" than to use tobacco in its more pedestrian forms, and yet show a wealth of ignorance and misinformation when it comes to more "exotic" forms. But smoke is smoke, and tobacco is tobacco.

Let's address the misconceptions each in turn:

1. Shisha tobacco doesn't have any nicotine or tar, or those nasty additives in cigarettes.

Wrong: tobacco contains nicotine in any form, including chewing tobacco. Nicotine, however it is delivered, is extremely addictive. As for tar, any smoke contains tar because it is tar. Tar is the particulate matter (as opposed to gas) that you can actually see, which makes up the smoke --- it's just called tar when it's been deposited in your lungs. Tar contains thousands of chemical compounds, hundreds of which are toxic and/or carcinogenic (you know this already), and tar is what makes you sick and kills you. Many have used herbal substitutes for tobacco (such as Soex), most often to get around indoor smoking bans, claiming that they have none of the negative effects of tobacco. While it's true that herbal substitutes contain no nicotine, they deliver every bit as much tar as tobacco does, simply because all smoke is particulate matter --- chemically altered and discharged by burning/heating, and suspended in air. Herbal smoke will give you cancer just as easily as tobacco smoke.

What's more, a WHO study and several independent university studies have shown that in one hookah session, a smoker inhales the same volume of smoke that they would get from 100-200 cigarettes. This is because the smoke is less irritating (due to being cooled by the water) and therefore the smoker inhales far more deeply than they would from a cigarette --- as well spending much longer smoking, and inhaling much more second-hand smoke. Hookah has the reputation of being "easy on virgin lungs", but this is a heat issue only. Commensurate with the volume of smoke, a hookah session will deposit the equivalent tar of 100-200 cigarettes in the lungs, regardless of what is being smoked.

2. But hookah smoke is filtered by the water.

Wrong: studies show that the water has no effect on the smoke other than to cool it down, enabling deeper drags. This makes sense because as the bubbles pass through the water, there is only contact on their outer perimeter, so the smoke inside the bubbles is untouched. Furthermore, the non-particulate, toxic gases in hookah smoke (most notably, carbon monoxide and cyanide gas) are also unaffected and delivered at full strength.

3. But the shisha isn't burned, it's cooked by the charcoal, so it's not as bad.

Wrong: if something is heated hot enough that it gives off smoke, chemical changes are occurring --- the same changes as if it was burned directly. Heat causes these reactions, not "fire." The smoke from the cooked shisha has all the same compounds in it as cigarette smoke, and many more. Furthermore, the burning charcoal that heats the shisha gives off carcinogens and toxic gases of its own, which only compound the damage done by the actual shisha smoke. This is probably why the measured carbon monoxide in hookah smokers is much higher than even pack-a-day cigarette smokers.

4. But the smoke is just different, it's sweet, and doesn't feel harsh to me. It's relaxing.

Wrong: shisha is plain tobacco, soaked in molasses and fruit pulp. So not only are you inhaling the tar of at least 100 cigarettes, plus nicotine and charcoal burn-off, you're inhaling burning sugar and fruit matter, and artificial flavorings. These additions to the tobacco only serve to mask its acrid smell and taste, creating an illusion of safety. The total effect is that there is a lot more muck in the smoke than even in cigarette smoke, and you're getting a lot more of it.

As to the claim that hookah is "chill" or "relaxing": nicotine is a stimulant. It makes people feel "relaxed" because it raises the level of arousal of their autonomic nervous system (ANS), giving them a feeling of being empowered and in control. Just because it doesn't give a "buzz" is not reason to believe that it isn't active on the nervous system. This claimed sense of "relaxation" is most likely related to the drug effects of nicotine.

----

All of the above information is pulled from research which is listed at the bottom of this post. I encourage you to read through it if you have the interest. From numerous studies, we know that even the smallest tobacco exposure is irreversibly damaging --- I don't need to rehash that here. There is no such thing as responsibly moderate consumption. I cannot stress this enough. Every time you do this, you permanently damage yourself. The damage may be small, but it is irreversible.

Hookah is a silly trend that will probably pass in a couple of years. Still, that doesn't negate the damage that it is doing right now to ignorant young people, who are all too willing to be duped by marketing hype and misinformation. Concentrating and inhaling known toxins and carcinogens just doesn't make rational sense. Yet hookah gratifies that singular trait of people our age --- the feeling of invincibility and the willful ignorance of our mortality. It lets people get lost in a fog of the senses, abandon themselves to something that seems at once sensually close and exotically foreign. But it's the same poison repackaged to gratify our culture-consuming eyes. Exalting the body does not mean drowning it in short-lived and harmful pleasures --- in so doing, we treat it as a thing disposable and cast it aside. Exalting sensual pleasure does not exalt the body. When we care for the body and preserve it, train it and strengthen it, and give it up for a higher purpose --- this is exalting to the body.

I'll lay my cards on the table here: I watched three grandparents die horrible, painful deaths because of tobacco use. I have very little patience with a trend that is just another disguise for the same old life-destroying product. Admittedly, I would like nothing more than to see the entire tobacco industry in utter ruin. But this doesn't come from some kind of political affiliation, or abstract know-it-all attitude, or a desire to police people's decisions. It comes from seeing, repeatedly, the slow suffering and unbelievable pain that terminal lung cancer victims endure. Earlier generations made this costly mistake because they were ignorant of the danger, but we are not. And if we gloss over the facts to gratify our fleeting pleasures or a desire to be cool or adventurous, we show enormous disrespect to the dead and their suffering.

----

A few references, in chronological order with most recent first:
ABC News: Hookahs No Safe Alternative
UNT Daily: Hookah trendy, not as safe as some may think
ABC7 News.com: U.C. Berkeley Study shows the dangers of hookahs
Letter from Berkeley Pub. Health prof, JAMA -- Exhaled Carbon Monoxide With Waterpipe Use in US Students, January 2, 2008, El-Nachef and Hammond 299 (1): 36
US News and World Report: The Rising Allure—and Danger—of Hookah
HealthDay: Hookah Smoking as Tough on Lungs as Cigarettes
Medical News Today: Shisha Smoking Is More Harmful Than Cigarettes
AFP: Shisha smoking is more harmful than cigarettes: report
NewsDaily: Water pipe use as addictive as smoking
Medical News Today: Evidence Suggests That Waterpipe Smoking Is Not A Safe Alternative
New York Times: The Claim - Hookahs Are Safer Than Cigarettes?
Times of India: Is hookah smoking safer than cigarettes?
Brunei: Shisha More Harmful
United Press International: Beware the hookah
NY Daily News: Water pipes have the same dangers as cigarettes, experts warn
The Boston Globe: Smoke alarm
CBS2 Chicago: Trendy Hookah Lounges Have Hidden Risks
Daily News Egypt: Hubble bubble points to toil and trouble
Clickwalla.com: Shisha 200 times worse than a cigarette, say Middle East experts
American Lung Association: Trend Alert -- Waterpipes.pdf
PR Newswire: Hookah Use Carries Many of the Same Health Risks as Cigarette Smoking
Science Daily: Hold The Hookah --- Researcher Warns Against Trendy Tobacco Use
Science Daily: Avoid The Hookah And Save Your Teeth

Also:
Another blog post along these lines | And another
Tobacco.org
WHO Report (linked above)

Corporate Cosmopolitans and the End of Place

A recent read: "The Social Theory of Space and the Theory of the Space of Flows" by Manual Castells.

Castells' characterization of "managerial elites" in information society is an interesting (though certainly unintentional) scholarly corroborator to David Brooks' "organization kids" as the heirs of the corporate world. Castells, as I understand him, seems to implicitly rule out any dissenting participation in a corporate cosmopolitan lifestyle, suggesting that complicity in its comfort and homogeneity is mandatory for entrance. Consequently, there's no such thing as "changing the system from the inside" --- you are the system you choose to inhabit. Choose wisely.

Apparently of equal importance for entrance to the elite corporate class is an acceptance of placelessness. This most certainly is not the same rootlessness that has been romanticized and canonized in Beat poetry, and lately co-opted by advertising --- although corporate recruiters would like you to think that it is. This placelessness is a sense that all places are indeed simply different turns on a single, homogenized space. It is therefore a "safe" placelessness. The idealized itinerant wanderer experiences many places as dissimilar entities with distinct historical backgrounds and contexts, and must pay a personal, cultural, or ideological cost to participate in the life of those places. Conversely, corporate cosmopolitans experience many places as simply physical sub-spaces of a single homogenized ideal space, and their experience is insular and without cost. "Cosmopolitan" in this case is a misnomer. "Monopolitan" might be more appropriate, since while these travelers are indeed placeless; they are simply participants in one global, virtual city of the elite, with outposts all over the physical world. Castells calls this the "space of flows" and depending on your point of view, it renders a historically rooted sense of place either quaint and provincial, or completely obsolete.

In his words:

"Articulation of the [technocratic-financial-managerial] elites, segmentation and disorganization of the masses seem to be the twin mechanisms of social domination in our societies. Space plays a fundamental role in this mechanism. In short: elites are cosmopolitan, people are local. The space of power and wealth is projected throughout the world, while people's life and experience is rooted in places, in their culture, in their history. Thus, the more a social organization is based upon ahistorical flows, superseding the logic of any specific place, the more the logic of global power escapes the socio-political control of historically specific local/national societies." (pp. 415-416)

...

"A second major trend of cultural distinctiveness of the elites in the informational society is to create a lifestyle and to design spatial forms aimed at unifying the symbolic environment of the elite around the world, thus superseding the historical specificity of each locale. Thus, there is the construction of a (relatively) secluded space across the world along the connecting lines of the space of flows: international hotels whose decoration, from the design of the room to the color of the towels, is similar all over the world to create a sense of familiarity with the inner world, while inducing abstraction from the surrounding world; airports' VIP lounges, designed to maintain the distance vis-a-vis society in the highways of the space of flows; mobile, personal, on-line access to telecommunications networks, so that the traveler is never lost; and a system of travel arrangements, secretarial services, and reciprocal hosting that maintains a close circle of the corporate elite together through the worshipping of similar rites in all countries.

"Furthermore, there is an increasingly homogeneous lifestyle among the information elite that transcends the cultural borders of all societies: the regular use of SPA installations (even when traveling), and the practice of jogging; the mandatory diet of grilled salmon and green salad, with udon and sashimi providing a Japanese functional equivalent; the "pale chamois" wall color intended to create the cozy atmosphere of the inner space; the ubiquitous laptop computer; the combination of business suits and sportswear; the unisex dressing style, and so on. All these are symbols of an international culture whose identity is not linked to any specific society but to membership in the managerial circles of the informational economy across a global cultural spectrum." (p. 417)


For those of us who have a developed sense of place and a deep love of our particular cities, this is a frustratingly divisive mentality. It is emotionally charged, and can be alienating. It suggests that the only thing to value in a real place is what it can offer you --- in terms of material, ambiance, and convenience. Localized communal narrative is of no value in this scheme. Corporate globalism, if it is to maximize its profits and economies of scale, must necessarily enforce a cultural and historical amnesia that eliminates local distinctiveness. If we carry this to its logical conclusion, we might as well bulldoze every city in America except New York and Los Angeles. Whatever they got here they got there, right?

...

But why is this so polarizing? I think that those of us who desire and work to have a sense of place --- who love our built environments first and foremost because they're ours (not for what they offer us) --- often feel that something is wrong with us when we are repulsed by a set of values that seems to enjoy wide acceptance among educated people. Those of us who reject or critique cosmopolitan corporate life are regularly regarded by other educated people (often organization kids) as either unsophisticated or simply contrarian.

I was angry as I was reading the Castells piece because it was validating and giving credence to many of these discomforts, by speaking into them with a broader voice that could articulate things for which I previously couldn't find a vocabulary. I don't mean I was angry at Castells, I mean I was angry because the text facilitated a transition from "I don't like this [a matter of preference or taste]" to "this is wrong [a matter of broader moral consequence]". That's a crucial turn to take. The potential disappearance of our historically distinct places into a nebulous global space is not just an abstract semantic change, not just a paradigm shift; it is a loss with a moral component. It is a tragedy.

How can this tragedy be articulated? We're generally very uncomfortable when people make broad categorical statements in a moral space. But I think the problem with those statements is not that they are broad or categorical or moral, but that they haven't gone through the process of wider validation, reflection, or scrutiny --- they're just made out of the initial emotion with no filter. What we're actually uncomfortable with is the implicit assumption that the problem is never with me but always with the world/system/whatever. But the opposite "always/never" statement isn't true either. The problem is not always with me (that is to say: not everything is a matter of taste or comfort or culture). So the question is not whether it is right or wrong to make categorical statements in moral domains (a moral question about moral questions?), but rather how do I negotiate the intersections and divergences of the brokenness in myself with the brokenness in the world? How can I tell when I'm uncomfortable because I'm broken, versus uncomfortable because the world is broken? Our hearts have valid things to say to us (this is something I have to relearn over and over) that are rooted in truths beyond just our preferences. There is a critical and beautiful process of realizing "this isn't due to my brokenness [though I am broken], I am perceiving aright, the world is broken and I can see it."

I think Castells is helping me contextualize more broadly those elements of my past experiences. It's easy to answer the question "what don't I like about this situation?" but it's not easy to say why I don't like it. In this case he pulls that deeper question into view, naming those things which are lost, and by extension, validating the sorrow in the losing. Social science is often afraid of those things which it cannot quantify (morality is a prime example), but what I appreciate most about Castells' analysis is that he communicates in a detached and factual manner, yet without being reductive. I find that exciting and encouraging --- we can talk about these issues in a way that is ultimately productive, decisive, and generally applicable, rather than just a self-indulgent and aimless expression of tastes or opinions, with no consequence to anyone but the expressing individuals.

Consider

33 people were murdered at Virginia Tech. This is big news; in fact, it's more than news, it's a circus. Maybe it's even entertaining.

128 people have been murdered in Philadelphia so far this year. I drove past the covered body of the 128th two nights ago on my way to see my sister. This, apparently, is not news.

[Trans/ad/e]mission

I have recently come into a greater personal consciousness of that particular strain of anti-western [read: anti-American] antagonism that is purportedly responsible for terrorism. A lot of talking heads will set this up as a Muslim/Christian conflict: an increasingly Muslim east against a [post-] Judeo-Christian west. That's a stereotype and it doesn't hold water. It's less a feud of the monotheists and more of a violent indictment of the religion of Self that has risen in the postindustrial world. I agree with the newly vocal minority of critics who suggest that what fundamentalist Muslims really hate is the godlessness, unqualified secularism, and rampant decadence of the consumerist west.

The thing is, I hate it too. The new imperialism is more insidious than the old. American pols talk the talk of "spreading democracy" but that quickly turns out to be a euphemism for the real (or hyperreal) gospel of the corporation. I don't need to rehash here the social sins of American institutions abroad. Those are only symptoms of a deeper disease that is not simply cultural or legal or structural. Forget Secular Humanism. We're way past that, post-humanist maybe. The new American gospel is Secular Consumerism. It tears away all mystery, atomizes individuals, and hurtles inexorably towards the Total Realization of Everything (cf. Baudrillard's Lucidity Pact) --- that self-destructive paradoxical finality where there is nothing left to imagine, so everything becomes unreal and illusory.

[We're virtual now. How can the suffering of Those people over There be real? My own life isn't real. I don't care what anybody does as long as my sustained virtuality is not interrupted. Put a needle in my arm and start pumping RSS and mini-feeds.]

Militant Islam has a reasonable goal (if not a reasonable method): to retain the right to have a society based on symbolic exchange, which maintains a place for mystery and imagination, and which has communal respect for the intrinsic boundaries of human beings. Our urge to "spread democracy" amounts to little more than a desperate attempt to legitimize, for ourselves first and others second, our new consumer religion. Everyone should live as we do. We feel threatened when they don't.

It gives me pause when I realize that if 9/11 had happened 5 years later than it did, some part of me would have seen a certain justice in the event. Our quintessentially American arena of pop discourse --- the on-screen spectacle --- was expertly used against us. Our monumental, phallic shrine to pure money --- dollars representing nothing tangible, capital divorced from the object realm and Platonized to an abstract fetish --- was destroyed in a jarringly physical way. Though I would never, ever condone one human being taking the life of another, I am certain that I hate everything those towers represented just as much as the zealots who destroyed them. I see the same injustice, oppression, imperialism, complacency, decadence, and deception that they saw. I mourn for those lives lost (not innocent lives, simply ignorant lives), but I refuse to mourn for the wounds of the institution. The only difference between our "enemy" and me is that I cannot, will not, set myself up as judge and executioner --- because I and those I love have been complicit in oppression, and we are guilty as well. For that I am filled with remorse.

Tangentially: the God that I believe in does not allow us to take vengeance into our own hands. He does not, as so many others, make himself known by his capacity to destroy or to punish or inflict. Instead, He says, "Look what I have made." He is known by the ability to create that which is good and to repair that which is broken. Yet vengeance still belongs to Him, because only a God whose essence wholly contains and defines Beauty and Creation and Wholeness and Love could be trusted to take vengeance justly. Furthermore, a God who does not take vengeance could not be said to love or to care, or to be anything other than transcendently apathetic. And I believe that at the last, He will take just revenge --- not on human beings whom He loves, but assuredly on all the towering structures of human greed and oppression. Though for the moment, we are beating Him to it by destroying ourselves. The God I believe in is not spiteful, but is grieved by us.

Another thought: It is entirely possible that my sentiments here will land me under scrutiny by some kind of governmental body, or on some sort of "watch list." So be it. That is simply more damning evidence that our insipid secular consumerism is just as dogmatic and theocratic as any fundamentalist regime in the Middle East. We're the real fascists now.

[A nod to this post for provoking some of this]

HDR

This photograph was constructed using a relatively new technology called High Dynamic Range imaging (HDR). A computer program compiles bracketed exposures of a single scene into one image with a contrast ratio of about 100 times what a normal computer screen can reproduce. The resulting file can be "tone-mapped" to a normal dynamic range (somewhat analogous to multi-band audio compression/limiting) such that much more detail is visible, and contrast can be boosted locally instead of globally. The resulting images are often quite beautiful, if a little unreal.

I suppose it's only a matter of time before this particular micro-aesthetic becomes an annoying visual cliché, like dozens of Photoshop effects already have. Can it then still be "beautiful"?

For that matter, does technological development of this kind actually spring from need --- or is it more simply novelty for novelty's sake? That is, to what extent does technological development respond to actual needs, versus creating by its onward march a felt lack that would not have been perceived otherwise? Perhaps need and development feedback positively. I am of course talking about consumer technology here, those developments which are targeted at a buying public. I suppose it could be argued that we don't need 99% of what gets developed for these markets. If technology does address needs, it almost always exceeds them too, creating a gap in which we realize that what we have must not be enough ("Ooo, I want that"). The amplification of this gap is accomplished through advertising --- forcing us to acknowledge the obsolescence of what we have, to usher in the novelty of what we do not.

Considering this particular case, I had thought about this issue as a "problem" before. But I might have accepted it as a limitation of the medium, since display media have greater limitations than the associated recording media. Now technology enables me to work around those limitations --- but what I produce in so doing is not more lifelike, it is in fact less so. As such, the new process seems less addressed toward solving an existing problem than it is toward generating a "gee-whiz" reaction. When the novelty wears off, does the technology remain worthwhile?

Which came first, the disease or the drug?

Manual vs. abstract labor

This article is phenomenal --- I now understand my anxiety about somehow having graduated college with no real skills, placed in the larger question of "what is meaningful work?" I need to mull this over for a while.