Okay, so here is a draft of an original song: “Bright Sunny Days”

As usual, you can assume all my hand-waiving about levels and production since I still haven’t had the time to go to one of these cool Nashville audio production schools. I have a couple more in the works, but surprisingly to me as an English major, the lyrics are really difficult to get out.  BSD’s lyrics are to be considered in flux: the general idea is is a sour relationship song from a lazy bastard. I’m actually quite infatuated with the 5 part chorus.   Anyhoo:

The MP3 is available here: http://blakej.com/bsd1.mp3

Philip Hopkins has a review of Tom McCarthy’s C over at bookslut.com that I thought presented an interesting conundrum in its conclusion.  I’ll quote extensively here until the copyright Gestapo shows up at my door:

This brings us to the stranger possibility cited before, that C is a brilliant hoax. For a devotee of technology, progress, and the future, McCarthy has always been looking back. . .  Yes, there is no longer supposed to be any distinction between high art and other kinds. But I think McCarthy’s aping a total reverence for such ideas [as mid-century avant-gardeism and French theory], testing them with devotion.

He has staged conceptual and performance art globally. He published _Remainder_ with a French visual art press. So maybe McCarthy’s aesthetic program is semi-fictitious too, an elaborate performance culminating in the publication of C. This artist plays the role of overzealous postmodern novelist with insouciant accuracy. Why turn a once-revolutionary movement into an orthodoxy, other than to kill it? I offer one particular scene from C, which spends multiple pages on Serge’s constipation treatments, as McCarthy’s self-conscious diagnosis of the contemporary novel.

“You,” the doctor continues, “have got blockage. Jam, block, stuck. Instead of transformation, only repetition. Need to free what’s blocking, break whole rhythm of intoxication — then good transformation can resume and things will pass through you and make you open up.”

The naivete of Hopkins’s question, “Why turn a once-revolutionary movement into an orthodoxy, other than to kill it?” is astounding.  Every revolution is an aspiring orthodoxy.  The trick of the pomo-theoretical axis is “always already” to cannibalize itself: carving itself up for dinner has nourished it ab initio.  It also appropriated the feedback loop between criticism and fiction generally, so all this repetition and recursivity keeps it in an endless cycle of self-orthodoxification masquerading as perpetual revolution.  This self-sustaining dynamic is nearly inescapable except by sheer avoidance.

Which is why I thought this part of the review was a funny way to look at the state of letters these days.  The reviewer/novelist dynamic is as circular as the jammed up fiction-critical feedback loop that has maybe been skewered by McCarthy, to wit:  The review, which evinces some weariness of well-worn postmodern formulae like McCarthy’s, takes a standard postmodern lit-critical pose toward a novel (i.e. that the novel’s themes are about novels themselves) which itself may be challenging such reflexive lit-critical postures by running them into the ground with overuse (eg., by figuratively whaking us over the head with them) in order to explain how the novel may (or may not) affirm the reviewer’s aforementioned weariness.

I’m afraid that the Hopkins’s surmise — that McCarthy’s reverence for the style and theory of the last six decades is an attempt to burn them out with fidelity — falls short.  The unfortunate reason is diagnosed better and more amusingly by David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest.

If I may borrow Hopkins’s fiction-as-diagnosis-of-the-state-of-fiction approach, it’s easy to see IJ’s Organization of North American Nations’ (i.e. ONAN, the masturbatory federation of states) energy system as ridiculing the state of American letters.  “Annular fusion” is, to paraphrase, a process whose waste is the fuel for a process whose waste is the fuel for the first process.  If there’s a more apposite indictment of the relationship between postmodern fiction and academic criticism and theory, it certainly deserves a write-up on bookslut.

Given Wallace’s formulation of the problem, it’s hard to see McCarthy as really taking a step outside the annular cycle, even if he formulates his own less-felicitous scatological critique of his profession’s predicament.  For better or worse, orouboric repetition, citation, and reflexive criticism/adulation are the sine quibus non of the postmodern academic-literary tradition.  So, try as they might to out-clever McCarthy by imagining ever more baroque levels of reflexive critique spiraling ever inward/outward into/from McCarthy’s text, it’s a cinch that flattered academics will, despite suspicions along bookslut’s reviewer’s lines, (excuse my French) eat this shit up.

You can imagine my surprise at the unprecedented hipness and withitude of Tennessee State Senator Diane Black, who is campaigning for re-election this year.  I mean, it’s one thing to have a country musician at your rallies, but advertising on a Ludacris video?!   That’s a serious attempt to connect with the hip young urban voters who don’t realize that republicans are totally down with, well . . . have a look for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCQbV1S4nAs&feature=player_embedded

Now, I expect that these ads are probably pulled by now… I haven’t been able to get them to come up since Friday,
But I managed to grab these screen caps as evidence.  Clearly someone mismanaged their Google ads buy.  Priceless!!!

For this unjustifiable mashup of genres, musicians, and works that shouldn’t be mentioned in the same sentence (nevermind smooshed into the same techno remix), Blake’s Flakes presents Johnny Cash and Thomas Ravenscroft. Come on, you know they sound like a classic pomo miscegenation. Listen carefully for my wife on backup vocals!

I’m still working on this one, but I think I finally have the levels at a listenable setting. It may need more mid-range instruments, I haven’t decided. As it is, the bass is actually quite impressive — listen on your home theater if possible.

The MP3 is available here: http://blakej.com/hiho8.mp3

The 1000 character limit can make substantive discussion a little tricky on facebook, but I find ways to work with it:

I swear, I really do enjoy reading the NYT better than any other news-paper-site-thing.  So much so that I hereby commit to paying them when they suicidally begin charging for online access next year.  I’m going down with the ship!  Speaking of which, an opinion blog in the NYT coincided interestingly this week with another dire assessment of the state of the humanities disciplines in this week’s Chronicle of higher education.  So I posted this as a comment on the NYT blog, and reproduce, expand, and fiddle with it here for your edification.  Check out the Times Articles, my original comment, and the Chronicle magazine for reference.

——–

I was once interested in pursuing an advanced degree in English. I was also taken with the idea of investigating the kinds of relationships between the sciences and the humanities that the scholars mentioned in the related article are working on.  (Folks like Jonathan Gottschall and Lisa Zunshine do interdisciplinary research in the humanities with a scientific or empirical outlook.) So I ended up doing an MA before realizing that I was deeply and viscerally uninterested in classroom teaching. So much for that.

You can help save this woman from drowning! Read on!

Now I work with computers and databases, which is not intellectually stimulating in the same way as investigating whether strategic cooperation of the form studied by evolutionary theorists applies to combat in Arthurian literature (which I once did–Mr. Gottschall and Ms. Zunshine, there’s a topic for you, free of charge!), but has the virtue of being steady work for people who are grateful for the help.

While I believe that the work these scholars are pursuing represents a long-overdue emergence from the depths of theoretical irrelevance into which the  humanities seemed to have plunged themselves permanently by the late 90s, there doesn’t seem to be much of a life-boat waiting for them (the scholars and the disciplines) at the surface. The problems these disciplines face are myriad, structural, and budgetary. And this frightening triumvirate of qualifiers will not be overcome by a belated “empirical turn” in English departments.

For example, this week’s (imagine the serendipity) Chronicle of Higher Education magazine’s cover screams: “BROKEN: The Crisis in Graduate Education in the Humanities!” Yes, even those eager new PhDs who love teaching and have loads of publications can’t find jobs. The self-analysis and hand wringing and recrimination and prognostication that passes for strategic planning in the humanities has come to seem almost ritualistic: “Let us now hang our heads in consternation while we admit difficult truths and ponder an uncertain future” etc. I can almost hear a Gregorian chant….or maybe…. a sea shanty (read on for the connection).

It’s sort of telling about these disciplines’ inability to get their act together that one of the comments above cites Fred Crews’s dismissal of humanities/science scholarship, while Mr. Crews has actually written the foreword to Mr. Gottschall’s recent book. Crews was writing against the extremes of postmodern literary theory, which many of these scientifically-oriented humanities scholars also do.

So, to overextend the metaphor ever-so-slightly from paragraph three, when these folks stick their heads above the deluge of problems (budget cutbacks, declining enrollments, no jobs, methodological chaos, etc.) facing the humanities, not only will there be no life-raft, but William Pannapacker will zip by in a speedboat without turning his head. Or, who knows, maybe Alan Sokal will be waiting to whack them over the head with an oar — after all, this still isn’t science.

Somebody DO something!

What’s worse, there’s still a good deal of hostility toward empirical approaches to lit-crit in the disciplines themselves. It’s likely that there’s always already a postmodernist or two lurking around with harpoons.

But seriously folks, anyone interested in saving a discipline should look at this week’s Chronicle. There are literally a half-dozen photoshopped graphics of a lovely woman in a cap and gown at various levels of submergence in a variety of extremely threatening-looking bodies of water. One of these photos even just depicts the cap — floating by itself! (What, you thought someone without a PhD came up with that whole sinking/swimming theme by himself?) Please don’t let this very pretty scholar go to a watery grave! Support relevance in a humanities discipline that you cherish, even if it means emphasizing teaching over research, empirical approaches to cultural study, and supporting PhDs on career paths other than tenured professor. Our children’s literacy and the life of an exceptionally attractive drowning PhD candidate depend on it!

So my wife’s first comment was “are these in order of most influential?”  Jinkees! No!  So I am removing the numbers, which are probably just confusing things.  Discussion still to follow, and to reiterate: these are in NO particular order!
Update: Look!  The promised discussion!  It’s actually appearing!

Piers Anthony: Vale of the Vole — Whoo, boy!  That’s a blast from the past.  As I was mulling over which books had been important to me, I remembered a very early fling with Piers Anthony and his “Xanth” and “Apprentice Adept” series.  A few words to quickly quash discussion along the lines of: “Aren’t those formulaic trash for kids?” Yes, dear reader they are certainly churned out by the truckload from Mr. Anthony’s prolific pen, but they are exactly the sort of entertainment disguised as “reading” (or vice versa, whichever makes more sense) that can get people hooked on books.  And I can remember teachers and adults foisting the most insufferably dense, irrelevant, often incomprehensible stuff on kids like me (who were supposedly smart, etc.), leading me and I’m sure many of my classmates straight to the sciences and computers.  Never mind that a lot of that dense, irrelevant, insufferable crap is exactly the sort of thing I seek out rabidly now that I’m an adult who managed to dial it back a few notches early on and discover the pleasure of reading before trying the heavy lifting.  These days Harry Potter and Stephanie Meyer are filling that niche for young people.  Crap? Yes.  But it is important to get ‘em addicted while they’re young.

Charles Dickens: Hard Times — For those who think of Victorian novels in general and Dickens in particular and think of interminable door-stops like David Copperfield and Bleak House (well, most of this list is hardly for you), Hard Times offers a brief and brisk tour through caricatures of the mid-nineteenth-century educational system and class conflict in labor relations.  What’s great about this book is it dispels any notion that Dickens had the foggiest clue of what to do about all the things he hated: schools, teachers, labor, unions, wealthy businessmen, marriage, etc.  It’s all just a bunch of miserable people dealing with other miserable people and generally multiplying their misery.  Because it leaves so much completely unresolved (or at least uselessly resolved), and veers wildly from severe conservatism to something bordering on socialism, this problematic social problem novel deserves attention.

(Should be read together, but still cheating, I know) George Orwell: 1984 / Aldous Huxley: Brave New World — Since you‘ve been diligently digesting every brimmin’ bowlful of Blake’s Flakes for lo these many moons, you will have appreciated the finer points of my disparagement of greco-alphabetic marketing schemes juxtaposed against a satire of the contrasts in worldview of the Bush and Obama administrations viewed as exemplars of the political systems in these two fine novels.  No?  Well, when you do get the chance, you’ll be glad that you’ve read these two foundational modern dystopias.  Of course they are very different, not least in that BNW is a critique of futurist optimism, while 1984 is a bleak indictment of totalitarianism.  But I like to think that after you’ve read these in college and discussed them over a few tokes and you think that you’ve basically got the idea, like alright already, we know that totalitarianism is bad, and we know that can’t trust the drug companies and technology people to do what’s best for us, these works nevertheless remain indispensable companions to the literally mind-numbing stupidity of our governments and corporations and our own susceptibility to those enervating influences.  For example, remember Mustapha Mond’s dictum, “Extremes meet”, and then, unlike this sage from BNW, see if you can put that wisdom to work.

Daniel Dennett: Darwin’s Dangerous Idea – Dennett is an interesting guy with a fascinating philosophical program.  His philosophy of mind is grounded in an approach to consciousness based on what the sciences can tell us about the phenomenon.  He’s concerned primarily with eliminating Cartesian dualism from discussions of consciousness (the idea that there’s a little homunculus in your brain somewhere who really perceives your perceptions) and establishing a framework for understanding behavior called the intentional stance.  This approach to understanding others’ conscious states relies on treating any apparent agent as though it were a conscious, reasoning being, and arriving at a prediction of its behavior by evaluating its circumstances and the likely responses of similarly situated agents known to be conscious, “rational” beings.  Evolutionary theory is central to Dennett’s program because it charts a path through the many strata of complexity that can be observed in objects and organisms in the world right up to our own fully-conscious, “rational” selves, without appeal to miraculous interventions from processes outside those driven entirely by nature, ie. physics, chemistry, biology, entropy, and probability.

Dennett’s exhaustive treatment of evolutionary theories can be unsettling because it leaves little doubt of their explanatory power and of the relative inadequacy of alternatives.  I had always regarded scientific approaches as more-or-less the best way to look at “big questions” like evolution and consciousness, but before reading DDI I had never thought systematically about what that perspective meant or about what other notions and beliefs I might have to relinquish if I were going to to try to be consistent in my own outlook.  DDI (and Consciousness Explained, also phenomenal [pun intended] reading) helped me see the importance of letting go of comforting but ultimately problematic superstitions and folk psychology, while providing a point of entry into an incredibly rewarding and satisfying philosophy.

Douglas Hofstadter: Godel Escher Bach – To say that this extended meditation on how the relationships among music, mathematics, and art illuminate the problem of conscious intelligence is utterly and stupefyingly brilliant seems almost to insult its wild and as-yet-not-even-remotely-approached genius.  Okay, that might be a little hyperbolic, but I didn’t want to miss an opportunity to share just how profound and world-view-altering this now thirty-year-old magnum opus really is.  Hofstadter explores how complexity on the order of consciousness can emerge from processes of recursion and self-reference by way of analogies to familiar and delightful examples from a really impressive array of cultural and scientific figures and works.  I can’t really decide which I’d recommend that you read first, but I’m kind of leaning toward reading Godel, Escher, Bach first before reading Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, because GEB is a little gentler on your preconceptions.  Let Hofstadter soften you up a bit before Dennett delivers the knock-out blow.  You’ll be a better person.  Nah, not really, just significantly better informed.

James Joyce: Ulysses – Okay, yeah, it’s a little pretentious to have Joyce on the list, but at least I didn’t say Proust. *Blecch*!!!  In case you didn’t parse that punctuated neologism, it was a q-and-d stab at the phonemes that seem to be produced when I have a dry-heave caused by choking on my own spittle.  In short, I don’t like Proust.  And you can uncurl your lip even further when you consider that I didn’t just out-and-out lie like all those ridiculous bores who claim to love Finnegan’s Wake.

Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Specifically “Titus Andronicus”, “Hamlet”, “MacBeth” and “King Lear”)

Elaine Pagels: The Origin of Satan — The reason I remember this work is that it was the first book-length treatment of controversial issues in religious history that I ever read.  This isn’t a cultural history of how we dreamed up the iconic devil with cloven hooves and a trident who tortures sinners in New Yorker cartoons.  It’s a distillation of Pagels’s academic research into the relationship of scripture to conflicts between cultures and religions around the time the Bible and Gnostic Gospels were written down. It’s certainly not a far-fetched thesis: you demonize the populations around you with whom you’re in conflict.  But the evidence is fascinating and a great introduction to Pagels’s primary interest in the Gnostic Gospels.  Warning: if you are a dogmatic believer, this is not the book for you.  Or maybe it is: time for a thorough brain scrubbing.

David Foster Wallace: Infinite Jest – With all the lavish and sometimes ironic praise I heap upon these works that have deeply impressed me, it should be clear that a special place is reserved for this novel, which I consider to be the best single work of fiction in the English language that has appeared in at least the last century.  I hedge here on the historical greatness question only because other works have been important and transformational for their times, and I don’t have the kind of perspective on earlier periods to say for certain.  Let it suffice to say that Infinite Jest is so minutely accurate, so breathtakingly funny, so fascinatingly intricate, so completely engrossing, so startlingly intelligent, and such a refreshing break from the postmodern tradition that it kills, autopsies, embalms, eulogizes, and buries, that I am left (almost) at a loss for words.

The death of IJ’s author a couple of years ago is a tragedy for fiction and for his devoted readers.  I remember when I was about a hundred pages into this behemoth, and I thought to myself something I had never thought before in a lifetime of reading: “This guy’s only about 15 years older than me.  I have decades to look forward to his work.”   When I think about how much I enjoy this book, I’m even more impressed by how normal and normally flawed (if bizarrely gifted and tragically ill) a person DFW appeared to be.  As absurd and ghoulish as it may seem, I’m still greedily awaiting the publication of his last unfinished work next year, and I just devoured a lengthy transcription of previously unpublished interviews taped in the mid nineties by a Rolling Stone reporter.  I excuse the vulturish anticipation with which I await the publication of anything related to his work by thinking of his scathing review of a Borges biographer who spent too much time concentrating on the influence of the life on the work.  DFW seemed to have fully absorbed and substantially subscribed to the view that biographical crit was a dead end (pun intended).  So, while I mourn the passing of a man who by all accounts was a delightful person, as someone who would likely never darken his door, I mourn more deeply for the loss to the worlds of letters and of readers who might have been blessed by his gifts.  For us, it was and will always be about the work, the deprivation of which is a severe loss.

Alice Rischert: Oracle SQL by Example — Third Edition – For the past several years I have won my daily bread by understanding databases and translating that understanding into productivity for my employers.  This handy reference clearly illustrates and demonstrates the concepts needed to efficiently query and report from Oracle databases and has been an indispensable guide to both the basics and advanced topics like windowing.  It has made my life and work easier and helped me to explore a wide variety of interesting approaches to solving problems with data.  What?  A book doesn’t have to be philosophy or literary fiction to be great and influential.  Jeez.

Since I never actually watch Univision for more than a few minutes at a time, I really can’t say whether this latest addition to the annals of  Open Source Advertising is any more or less amusing than anything they’ve come up with.  I do think that there’s probably vast untapped potential in satirical Spanglish.  Maybe I just need to get out more.  Anyhow, without further ado…

INT typical business office.  MANAGER seated at her desk.  She looks queasy, ill at ease.  In walks JORGE, an employee.

Manager turns to fridge and begins to rummage through the contents while Jorge becomes distraught, sobs loudly and flings himself out of the office.

Manager discovers sought after portable milk product, opens product and drinks with gusto.

As manager gulps audibly, Jorge can be seen flinging himself through rows of cubicles outside manager’s office, crying out in despair.

PAN back to manager holding up container and smiling, sporting substantial milk mustache.

CUT to suburban living room.  BOYFRIEND sits uncomfortably on the sofa.  Doorbell rings.  He rises, opens door.  GIRLFRIEND enters, embraces and kisses him.

Girlfriend is crushed, her expression moves quickly from surprise to sadness to despair.  Boyfriend rushes through living room to kitchen, throws open fridge, and grabs product.  Drinks heartily and with pleasure/relief.

CUT to MOUNTAIN CLIMBERS perched precariously on a ledge.  MC1 is helping MC2 who is struggling to reach safety:

MC2 breathes a sigh of relief as he gets his head and shoulders above the rim of the cliff.

MC2 is visibly relieved.

CUT to terrified expression on MC2, then back to MC1, drinking lustily as terrified receding cries for help from MC2 fade behind . . .

As light from the sun or from artificial sources encounters objects in its path, some of its constituent photons are absorbed by the atoms comprising the objects, while others are reflected or re-emitted and subsequently encounter the photoreceptor cells of a human retina. Molecules of pigment in these cells are excited by the photons and transform their energy into nerve impulses that travel to the visual cortex of the brain, from whence they are subsequently integrated into conscious experience of external phenomena in the world.  These experiences are processed in the brain with a panoply of innate, evolved cognitive apparati as well as combined with the brain’s store of sense data, forming an intricate intentional system commonly referred to as the ‘mind’.  The mind’s interaction via sense data with objects in the world such as trees, animals and other humans and their minds generates a rich set of logically interrelated propositions or ‘ideas’, and an experiential history we commonly term our ‘lives’.  Contrived systems of symbolic representation such as syllabaries or pictographies, often termed ‘writing’, may be employed to convey the content of ideas and events in lives between and among minds with varying degrees of fidelity and accuracy.  The content of particular lives and of groups of living people such as families, communities, and nations may serve as useful templates for the fabrication in writing of ideas and series of events that share many of the characteristics of genuine occurrences but which are nevertheless artificial, having never actually occurred. These fabrications, or ‘fictions’, edify minds by diverting them temporarily from the objects, events, and other minds to which they must typically attend to ensure their continued survival and by providing them with examples of creative abstraction from lived experience that may supply them with an improved ability to reason about the nature of things, to understand the intentional states of other minds with different experiential histories, and to cope with the neverending ’shitstorm’ of the ‘daily fucking grind’.  The likelihood that such inventions bear strong resemblance to actual events is inevitable, given the substantial commonality of most human lives and the vast extent of history, and may be dismissed as bearing such resemblance by virtue of the high probability of a serendipitous correspondence or ‘coincidence’.

Our Final Issue: In Memoriam

NTSB issues recall for all motor vehicles

Hot on the heels of industry-rattling product recalls from Toyota and Honda, the NTSB this week issued an official recall of all motor vehicles.

Citing unacceptable track records for safety and fatality, NTSB spokesperson Tiffany Planckbotham indicated that all motor vehicles regardless of make or model would have to be returned to dealerships immediately.

“Motor Vehicles have an unacceptable rate of injury and fatality,” Ms. Planckbotham explained to an incredulous press.  “With nearly 40,000 deaths per year, motor vehicles kill more people annually than influenza, homicide, and aviation combined.”

Asked whether the recall of every motor vehicle in the country placed an undue burden on an already shaky economy, Planckbotham suggested that alternative modes of transportation and the growth in those industries might offset the disruption caused by the cessation of all automotive activity.  “Bicycles, planes, trains, rickshaws: many alternative modes of transport will have a role in our new post-vehicular world,” Planckbotham noted.

Following the NTSB announcement, the Obama administration quickly issued an addendum to its economic stimulus package providing twenty-three trillion dollars in deficit spending for a comprehensive system of interstate high-speed rail and local trolleys.  In a statement the Whitehouse concluded: “Hey, we’re pretty much screwed anyhow.  Might as well go all in.”