Suicides

Poetry

When my own brother died, I thought—well, no,
I didn’t think, or do. I just did not.
We know that when a young man dies we ought
to make a dirge of it, to rise and go
singing that bleak and elegiac rot
that manners make the requisite of woe.
Only, having known it, now I know
there is no song. Those still alive, our lot
is not a lot. Divide by zero. Take
the square root of a negative, assume
the dead are asymptotes, each tangent to
our lives, if infinite. We rise and make
breakfast, time, the best of it, make room,
make money, love, make jokes, make plans, make do.

Je suis moi-même plus probable d’être ivre

Culture, Media

One of the questions we might ask before concluding that David Brooks little ethical Area 51, dba “Humility”, at Yale is some sort of uniquely middlebrow, learning-annex hack job is just how unique it is, because this is an Ivy League, after all, and I suspect the course catalog is pretty well-larded with these sorts of PoliSci Rocks-for-Jocks offerings by notable alums. Brooks just has the bad fortune of being uniquely self-unaware enough to title an otherwise bland exercise in celebrity “intellectual” egotism Humility. If he’d called the class, “AmHist Colloquium: 201: The Decline of the Eastern Protestant Establishment from World War II to the Reagan Revolution,” no one would’ve said boo, and exactly the same gang of future legislative aides would’ve taken it. If you find yourself making fun of David Brooks or Yale, you probably don’t understand what either institution represents, or what their respective purposes are in the American life of the mind. Where do you think the sort of people who put David Brooks on the Times op-ed page and NPR Fridays and so on come from, Pomona? Bard? Who do think nods sagely at all those Tom Friedman columns you find so gloriously incoherent?

Tutelary Gods

Culture, Justice, Media

Two commenters on my last post make the reasonable claim that in eulogizing Aaron Swartz yesterday I was guilty of reifying genius. That may be so. I do believe in genius. I listen to a lot of Bach, so it’s hard not to. And maybe you want to argue the point, or say that since genius also leads to The Bomb it’s an inherently suspect category, morally speaking. Maybe you think that just using the word implies an undue hierarchy of human worth, which is fair enough; there’s certainly historical evidence to suggest that it’s true, although I tend to believe that, on balance, more of humanity’s great creative minds and beings have been trampled down in their lifetimes and, if elevated, only posthumously, and only in service of something very much other than their selves and essences and all that. But when I said that Aaron Swartz’s prosecution and death were an example of “a society intent on destroying its genius,” I self-advisedly did not say “destroying its geniuses.” Because that’s not what I meant.

I meant, rather, that our culture is uniquely cruel and unforgiving of creativity and difference. (I happen to believe that the former flows from the latter). I would just as soon make the same argument about the young girl who was punished for writing poetry that sympathized with the young man who killed all of those people in Newtown. The capacity to think intuitively or to feel empathically is held deeply suspect, particularly by the powerful forces of government and finance which, for all their talk of “creating” wealth and value, in fact view wealth and value as purely extractive. For all the supposed sophistication of our vast, computer-controlled, post-capitalist financial system, in effect we live in a period in which all worth is commodity value, which is to say, based fundamentally on supposedly natural scarcity. Aaron Swartz was not being prosecuted and made an example of because he “stole” some journal articles. No one gives a fuck about journal articles, and the few billions of dollars in the academic rights management industry are less than rounding errors in the global economy. What he represented, rather—and what many other internet “pirates” and such represent, from great programmers to college kids with bittorrent—is the extraordinary and dangerous idea that information is not a commodity, and that its scarcity is just a construct. How, after all, do you monetize something of which there is an effectively infinite supply?

But back to genius. I’m not going to claim that I was intentionally using the word entirely in its 14^th-century definition, but I do believe in its sense of each person’s wit and talent and esprit and generative power. All people have genius, and when I say that our society is antithetical to genius, I don’t want you to imagine a skein of Van Goghs dying penurious with their work only getting noticed after death. Instead, I want you to remember middle school and the last time you felt depressed.

The Days When We Had Rest, O Soul, for They Were Long

Culture, Justice, Media, War and Politics

While I’ve always thought that there was something particularly crass about our habits of erecting edifices of grief to strangers whom we perceive as similar to us even as we note and let pass without comment the deaths of so many more distant, more different people in our country’s wars and misadventures, and while I likewise find our habit of reacting with dismay to items like the prosecution-unto-death of Aaron Swartz even as we’re dimly aware that poorer, less connected, less important people are hounded to their lives’ ends by the dirty machinery of our penal system, which is powered by punishment wholly out of scale to any wrong, punishment which is itself quite often the only wrong ever committed, the sheer, tawdry, grotesquely ill-proportioned persecution of the young man for acts whose criminal taxonomy is something out of a Lewis Carroll poem is the sort of spectacle that really does make you wonder how long, actually, a society intent on destroying its genius in order to preserve the inbred rights of its rentier class to extract filthy lucre from the margins of genuine intellect can endure.

Wolfenstein

Culture, Media, War and Politics

“But Mom,” I said. “It’s killing Nazis!” Which didn’t win her over, exactly, but I did get to keep the game, and I managed to waste some moderate portion of my youth Playing Violent Video Games without ever killing anybody.

We live in society that will devote many fatuous hours discussing and deliberating the ill effects of video games and movies and rap songs and what have you. They are contributing to a “culture of violence” or some such. Meanwhile, the president actually has a kill list, and we accept the following as so banal that they escape the necessity of daily reporting:

You gonna blame Quentin Tarantino and Halo for that?

Assholes Are Like Opinions, Everyone’s Got One, and Everyone’s Is Just His Opinion

Culture, War and Politics

Following a call by a French minister to censor certain so-called hateful speech, a Guardian writer wrote what I’d call a predictably contrarian piece praising limited forms of censorship, and Glenn Greenwald wrote a predictably outraged piece arguing that

Nothing has been more destructive or dangerous throughout history – nothing – than the power of the state to suppress and criminalize opinions it dislikes.

Let’s say I’m not entirely convinced by this formulation, or by its corollary slippery slope: that the first infringement on free expression is the first step toward the camps. I mean, if we reject the notion that government-sanctioned gay marriage leads inexorably to interspecies romance or traditional Mormonism or whatever, then we’re also obliged to reject the notion that outlawing fag-baiting and Holocaust denial will march us straight into 1984.

Now I’m not in favor of government censorship, and The Higher Power According to Your Understanding of Him only knows that letting a bunch of self-satisfied énarques troll through hashtags, fishing for hatefulness and incivility and historical revisionism is a distressing—if also comic—proposition. But I do subscribe to this formulation:

First of all, I still lean to free speech absolutism. My position right now is to simply not give a shit about defending jerks.

That is to say, I think the left confuses the imperative to defend the least among us with the need to zealously defend the biggest fucking dickshits among us. The ACLU is great and all, but we completely over-valorize getting the Nazis a permit to march in Skokie. There’s a terrific irony underlying this notion that on the other side of prohibiting the swastika is inviting the yellow star. I do think the Nazis should be able to march past the synagogue and the Klan through downtown Birmingham, but we’ve too carefully cultivated the reflex to leap out of our seats when it seems that such ability might be curtailed.

Or, taking the French example, the conditions of extreme poverty and repression that obtain in the banlieues are much greater “threats”—are much more “destructive and dangerous”—than a bill to ban #SiMonFilsEtGay. That’s not to say that we need to fixate on one to the total exclusion of the other, but if we’re more concerned with assholes tweeting rank opinions (many of them not even the real, truly held opinions of their shock-seeking pseudonymous authors) than we are with the lack of a commuter line to Clichy-sous-Bois, then our allegiance is really to a hollow formalism rather than to the rights of human beings to live free, happy, comfortable, unmolested, and uncircumscribed lives.

In fairness, I believe that Glenn Greenwald would echo a lot of these sentiments, and it’s never fair to presume that a writer’s chosen emphasis implies the exclusion of other concerns. Still, there’s tendency to swashbuckle into these absolutist arguments about free speech every time some C-list bureaucrat or columnist suggests cutting off this or that asshole’s microphone, which is rarely matched in intensity or duration when the police go storming in to nettoyer la cité au Kärcher. (Plenty of free-speech advocates are also prisoner’s rights advocates; are also drug law opponents; but as a matter of column inches, well . . .)

We saw a similar phenomenon when one of the Democratic Party hacks at the blog Lawyers, Guns, and Money made some shall-we-say intemperate comments about Wayne LaPierre in the moments immediately following the school shootings in Connecticut. Of course, a gang of right-wingers put on their shit-eatingest Schadenfreude grins and accused him of “eliminationist rhetoric”—a coinage popular on liberal blogs—for calling for Uncle Wayne’s “head on a spike.” Meanwhile, the blogger went on to call for the state to declare LaPierre a terrorist and toss his ass in jail. His university employer publicly regretted his comments, and a gang of luminous slightly-to-the-lefties circled the wagons and demanded that his freedom—his Academic Freedom, ye gods—be respected, with the implicit understanding that telling a guy to quit acting like a dick is the equivalent of Threatening His Job and Livelihood.

But people in much shittier and more precarious jobs all over America and all over the world actually get canned every day for mouthing off or using Facebook wrong or failing to ask the customer if they found everything they were looking for today, and that is the sort of injustice that demands our attention, not the plight of some entitled shitbag who felt that recent bloody events made for an opportune moment to advocate for criminalizing gun advocacy—that is to say, for supporting activities that, if lamentable, are legal in our society.

Insofar as there is a public debate about free speech, it’s largely confined to a neverending argument about the rights of privileged dickheads to be dickheads, and usually to each other. But most of humanity isn’t limited in the expressive sphere by censorship or hate speech laws or MPAA or whatever. It’s limited by poverty, imprisonment, the tyranny of intellectual property, the limitless powers of the boss, the cartel ownership of the means of communication. The terms of service are a bigger constraint on free expression than the Minister of Women’s Rights. The unequal distribution of wealth has more profound implications for speech than any statute.

The Franchise: The Title: The Subtitle: The Catchphrase: The Roman Numeral

Culture, Media, Movies

There’s a brief comic moment in the second Lord of the Rings film—I don’t think it occurs in the original book—where Gimli the dwarf tells the noble niece of the King of Rohan, a sort of half-Norse, half-Hunnish horse kingdom riding out of the North of Tolkein’s fictive world, that men mistakenly believe that there are no dwarf women, whereas in fact dwarf women simply look so much like dwarf men that outsiders can’t tell them apart. Then Viggo Mortenson, future King of Gondor, which is a sort of half-Roman, half-Most Serene Republic, half-Carolingian kingdom in the south, says to her, sotto voce: “It’s the beards.” It’s an odd, modern locution given Jackson’s general fidelity to LOTR’s ponderous inversions of contemporary English’s Subject-Verb-Object order: epic was the dialogue; but for comic relief ordinary English rarely spoke they. Anyway, this is the common complaint about Tolkein’s universe in general, isn’t it?–the women are just beards for a locker-room full of fellas who prefer the company of other fellas. Poor Cate Blanchett as the mighty elven woman Galadriel really sums it up back in the first installment. Offered the One Ring of Power, she transforms briefly into a weird obsidian-eyed vagina creature and intones ALL SHALL LOVE ME AND DESPAIR, enacting in summary the generally worry of the Tolkeinian universe.

The Hobbit dispenses with women altogether—or, the book does, but it seems less overtly . . . strange, if only because it’s really a boy’s own adventure tale. Cate makes an appearance in Jackson’s film, which, like a middle third trimester pregnancy is both immensely swollen and still unformed. I just reread The Hobbit, and it’s really a shame Jackson had to go and make it epic. It’s such a pleasant little adventure yarn, with a surprising surfeit of bitchy authorial asides. In fact, The Hobbit’s prose is remarkably un-ponderous. Stripped of Anglo-Saxonism, Tolkein can be bumptious and quite funny. The voice in the reader’s head is a slightly drunken English uncle amusing the children after dinner. It’s a shame Jackson stole the movie back from del Toro, who might’ve done the book more justice, having a better eye for both childhood and the grotesque, although for my money, the best choice would’ve been Terry Gilliam, whose Time Bandits (an outright homage to The Hobbit already) was far closer to the tone and tenor of Tolkein’s brisk little tale than this 3-hour prologue. The company of dwarves is permitted its slapstick, but when axe comes to neck, everyone transforms into a superhero, while Ian McKellan’s more mischievous Gandalf seems somewhat flummoxed as to how his later filmic self emerged from this character. The problem here is not so much that the movie is overlong, but that it’s overladen. I don’t mind a long movie where nothing much happens, but this ain’t Barry Lyndon. After a busy opening and then a long fallow section in Bilbo the Hobbit’s house, action arrives with predictable regularity—the problem isn’t the pacing, but the design, or the overdesign. The movie creaks under the burden of its overattention to detail. I did not watch the high frame rate version, but even in regular ol’ projection, it looked like a movie going into post-production rather than emerging from it. The lighting was often either too bright or too dim, and I kept waiting for a boom to drop into the frame or a dolly track appear in the leaves.

It would be unfair to single out Jackson for larding the movie with the many edifices of Tolkein’s, ahem, legendarium just to stretch it out and thus squeeze more fucking money out of it. After all, for every pretention otherwise, the very published existence of Tolkein’s tales and epics and lost tales and lost epics and lays and poems and songs and so on and so forth owes to his estate’s and his publisher’s desire to do precisely that: having exhausted his finished works, they ransacked his papers in order to make more money. Rather, the problem is that movies and heroes may no longer have a limited scope. The adventures of small people in a world that is obviously vast and mostly unknowable to them is actually quite interesting as a conceit, most especially when it’s basically a children’s story, but by constantly panning back and helicoptering skyward to reveal the size of the countryside and the goings-on the next country over, what’s meant to be wondrous become merely banal. In the book, all of this is hinted at just enough by the weird wizard’s occasional disappearance and reappearance, his errands simply implying that greater histories are being woven elsewhere; in the film, we have to follow him around. Far from making the world more wondrous, it makes it less so, over-explained and over-determined, not a story in its own right, but a mere prequel—worse, an origin story, the curse of modern fantasy and science fiction. What is Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit? It is the longest, most expensive DVD extra ever made.

Lightning Is Striking Again

Books and Literature, Conspiracy and the Occult, Things that Actually Happen

Point1948

So as some of you know and some of you don’t, I’ve written a book, about which I will engage in some shameless promotion later on. But in this book, there is a guy named Winston Pringle, who believes that the Point in Pittsburgh is a nexus of intense magical energy, an axis mundi, where the three phenomenal rivers and the fourth esoteric underground river join in mystical convergence. Anyway, my good friend John Allen and his friend Dave were in town, and in honor of the end of the Mayan long count calendar, we walked through a wild snow squall to the Point, whereupon we encountered that very–I thought, since I made him up–fictional conspiracy theorist. Actually, he claimed that he was Philip R. Ford, director of the semi-legendary Vegas in Space.

Well, he was just down there to soak up the energy and collect a little river water. We had a great talk. He also claimed to be the brother-in-law of Lou Christie, one of Pittsburgh’s great early pop stars, whom you probably know by his one big hit, “Lighting Strikes”, here performed by Klaus Nomi, because that’s what Phil would’ve wanted:

“I asked the park ranger back there if there were any events or celebrations planned today,” he said. He was resting on a park bench. He used a cane. He was wearing a sort of cowboy-cum-Homburg, a pin with the outline of a scorpion and a ring embossed with a black ankh. “But he said there was nothing.” We nodded. “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ve got the energy all to ourselves, just the four of us.” Then he told us the roasting pans in his grocery bag were for a Christmas goose.

“I know times are dark,” he said, “But I happen to think we’re coming into a better age. Our collective consciousness is making the change. It’s going to be a more matriarchal period. I’m pretty sure about that.”

You could barely see the stadium on the other side of the river because of the snow. A construction worker down by the fountain kept trying to light a cigarette in the wind.

The loveliest sentiments are what the rest of us call mad.

First-Person Shooter

Media, War and Politics

We live in an entertainment culture soaked in graphic, often sadistic, violence. Older folks find themselves stunned by what a desensitized youth finds routine, often amusing. It’s not just movies. Young men sit for hours pulling video-game triggers, mowing down human beings en masse without pain or consequence.

–Charles Warhammer

The Confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers in December, 2012

Poetry

We thought the world would end, and so we made
a quiche, potato salad, lemonade,
and went down to the Point to watch the earth
open like a Titan giving birth
to a god, the rivers torn toward empty space
as if the edge of a medieval map, grace-
enshrouded, monster-guarded, void and deep
as an old mind entering death from sleep.
Well, shortly after noon it clouded up.
There was a little snow. A single boat
moved slowly toward the West End Bridge. I drank
some decent wine out of a plastic cup.
A distant siren sang a quavering note.
Someone tossed a stone, which skipped, then sank.