An article in the Times today about an old roommate.

Flipping the dial and drinking a beer, I caught 5 seconds of the Kennedy Center event on CBS, long enough to watch the camera cut to GWB pumping his head back and forth -in and out- at the sight of Beyoncé Knowles strutting onto the stage.
What a pathetic little fuck our boy king is.
I also caught the end of "Boston Legal," which was hilarious.

The morality of otherwise amoral structural integrity vs. the false morality, and true hypocrisy, of moralism.

Captain Kirk and Junior sitting on a balcony smoking cigars, having just freed a sexy client -Heather Locklear in ironic mode- who has been vilified in the press as a golddigger and a 'black widow', accused of killing her husband.

Kirk: Did we get justice today?
Jr: [puff] I don't know.
...
Kirk: I like the pathological. Let's get another one like her.
Jr: [puff] My eyes, are peeled.

Edmund Wilson vs The Academy.

Pankaj Mishra

In 1955, Wilson would read The Last Puritan (1935) and remark on the resemblance between his friends at Princeton and Santayana’s hero, who struggles to reconcile his genteel idealism with the aggressively commercial culture of post–Civil War America. Wilson, who partly blamed this culture for the mental instability of his father, a distinguished lawyer, knew that Santayana in Europe was an exile from the new America, which he had left after an unsatisfactory academic career at Harvard, where he claimed President Eliot had turned education into preparation for “service in the world of business.”

But now the new America was, unexpectedly, the supreme power in the world; and meeting in a Europe ravaged by war, Wilson and Santayana inevitably discussed the changes within the United States. Sitting on a chaise longue in his bare, dark room, with a blanket over his legs, Santayana spoke of the “great role” in world affairs that America was called upon to play—a role he would regard with skepticism in his last book, Dominations and Powers (1952), the manuscript of which Wilson saw sitting on a table in Santayana’s room.

...Devoted to the life of the mind, Wilson couldn’t see it flourishing in the isolation of Axel’s Castle, the academic ivory tower, or the research laboratory. Instead he saw intellectual life as shaping and being shaped by the political and moral health of society at large. This belief and the related search for what Kazin called “a new spiritual order”—“a reaching not frantic or explicitly political, but based upon a deeply ingrown alienation from the culture and prizes of capitalism”—made Wilson more than a literary critic, although he wrote most often about literature.

...It was his engagement with the world beyond texts that gave Wilson’s criticism such clarity and narrative power—and this is what especially struck me when I first read his books in India in the late 1980s. For someone like myself, who knew little of the world apart from his own lowly position within it, and for whom books were primarily a mode of escape, Wilson’s insistence on relating literature to the urgent questions of life—how it has been lived, how it can or should be lived—came as a revelation and a surprise.

Leiter

Gary Gutting (Philosophy, Notre Dame) has written a generous and informative review of my Future for Philosophy collection in which, towards the end, he considers the difference between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy, which we had occasion to discuss a few weeks back (here and here) during the visit of the Stanley brothers.  Gutting writes:

I agree [with Leiter] that there is no fruitful analytic-Continental division in terms of substantive doctrines distinctively characteristic of the two sides. But it seems to me that we can still draw a significant distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy in terms of their conceptions of experience and reason as standards of evaluation. Typically, analytic philosophy reads experience in terms of common-sense intuitions (often along with their developments and transformations in science) and understands reason in terms of formal logic. Continental philosophy, by contrast, typically sees experience as penetrating beyond the veneer of common-sense and science, and regards reason as more a matter of intellectual imagination than deductive rigor. In these terms, Continental philosophy still exists as a significant challenge to the increasing hegemony of analytic thought and, as such, deserved a hearing in this volume.

A few paragraphs I was asked to add to an exhibition catalogue for an old friend. In the end it wasn't used.


Abstraction has always been anomalous in art, and pure abstraction even more so. It makes sense if you're an idealist to imagine ideal forms, but such philosophies are as rare as the cultures that encourage them. And even pure abstraction only represents purity; we only know the ideal through the illusion of its presence.

When I first saw Dan’s paintings they reminded me in a way of the early work of Michael Hurson. Hurson’s modernism is T.S. Eliot's: a formalism of secret meanings in which the forms and ideals, if perhaps morally necessary, are also merely theatrical facades. The beauty is in the desire for beauty artfully described, with the vulgar and the common, the impure source material, kept secreted away or exhibited and simultaneously denied. Eliot's references to popular culture seem intended almost to inoculate his poetry against it. The result is an idealism that isn’t: a paradoxical hybrid which Hurson treats with a wink and a nod, but which Eliot plays straight.

Dan's paintings were closer to Eliot than Hurson: you always felt that the metaphors were not supposed to be there, as if Dan were using a ruler that kept changing shape. You saw the paintings winking at you, but you knew looking at them that the maker didn't want them to. The work manifested a crisis, caught between action and intent.

In 7 Grays Dan found a way to escape this crisis, to make use of modernism, to give himself over to it even while denying it; and he did so in a way I didn’t expect and that I’d never seen before, though I’ve seen it a lot since. Dan didn’t mock or parody or empty modernism of "authority” as thousands of press releases have described works of art over the past 20 years. And he didn’t follow Olivier Mosset’s lead and theatricalize his paintings as the work of a Lone Rider, coming to town on a motorcycle or a jet, making a gesture towards pure visual poetry -empty but somehow acknowledging everything else, even politics, in its absence- and riding off again. Mosset is the only master of this; it’s a hard act to follow. What Dan did in 7 Grays was to write the biography of Modernism, to respond to the weight of history by turning a philosophy (and one that was after all, deeply anti-historical) into a history of that philosophy. Dan made a carnival, and a souk, full of all the stories of all the versions and ideologies of the last century. You could say it was a brilliant strategy but it wasn’t. If you love your parents you can’t simply strategize their defeat, even if it's the result of your actions. Besides, if you did, it wouldn’t be art.

Dan created in 7 Grays a poetic recapitulation of what had now finally become the past, celebrating it and closing the door on it at the same time. Like the story of the great Condottiere and the leaders of the town he had just helped to liberate, and to whom he was now as dangerous as he had been to their enemies. “What do we do?” they asked. To which one wag is thought to have replied: “ Let's kill him and make him our Patron Saint.”

File under miscellaneous:

There's a difference between the way the ad was produced and the way you are perceiving it. For the people who made it, who were involved in it after the idea was thought up, the ad is simply a thing they made, a work of technical- and literary/theatrical- craft. We've come to the point in advertising where pure invention has become the equal of intent (and Giotto made billboards for the Catholic Church.) This is the result in how capitalism is perceived by those who live in it: it is no longer a question of Capitalism as ideal but simply as fact.

Advertising has always been seen as an intellectual act, as certain forms of popular literature are seen by their fans primarily as intellectual or illustrative. 'Speculative' fiction and the like usually are nothing more than advertisements for ideas. As a philosophy of art they're basically Stalinist, though that's become the template for all theoretical activity. The academy has become Intellectual technocracy; it doesn't matter if you're talking about analytic philosophy or deconstruction: ideas take precedence over acts.

In describing this ad you're describing the opposite.
Congratulations, you've just discovered art.

Duncan Black:

There's a really weird class resentment going on. White collar workers "know" they deserve more money than blue collar workers. Some blue collar workers, ones in unions and skilled workers, can make decent money. Since a lot of white collar workers actually don't get paid very well, they resent the hell out of the fact that some uneducated lout gets to buy a nicer house than they do. And, thus, we get the out of touch media coverage of the NYC transit strike.

The italics are mine. I never expect to hear things like this from college-boy liberals. Atrios is a combination intellectual know-nothing, knee-jerk, middle-brow mainstream progressive: he used to refer to Clinton as Big Dog. But then he lobs off something casually radically good hearted and decent -and New Yorkers are backing the strikers more than they are the MTA (numbers including those college-boys and girls).

update: old habits die hard:

"The 90s were a delightfully wonky era when serious center-left political types spent lots of time debating lots of things."

City by city

Fares as a Percent of Operating Expenditures

MTA Metro-North Commuter Railroad 54.8%
MTA New York City Transit 53.1%
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Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) 9.5%
Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) 8.9%


State and Local General or Dedicated Funds as Percent of Operating Expenditures

Dallas Area Rapid Transit (DART) 89.8%
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MTA New York City Transit 44.9%
MTA Metro-North Commuter Railroad 41.6%

Working Life

Steve Vladeck @ PrawfsBlawg and Orin Kerr @ Volokh on Padilla. Judge Luttig, writing for the Fourth Circuit:

[A]s the government surely must understand, although the various facts it has asserted are not necessarily inconsistent or without basis, its actions have left not only the impression that Padilla may have been held for these years, even if justifiably, by mistake –- an impression we would have thought the government could ill afford to leave extant. They have left the impression that the government may even have come to the belief that the principle in reliance upon which it has detained Padilla for this time, that the President possesses the authority to detain enemy combatants who enter into this country for the purpose of attacking America and its citizens from within, can, in the end, yield to expediency with little or no cost to its conduct of the war against terror –- an impression we would have thought the government likewise could ill afford to leave extant. And these impressions have been left, we fear, at what may ultimately prove to be substantial cost to the government’s credibility before the courts, to whom it will one day need to argue again in support of a principle of assertedly like importance and necessity to the one that it seems to abandon today. While there could be an objective that could command such a price as all of this, it is difficult to imagine what that objective would be.

Marty Lederman and Kieran Healy on Posner, the man with no imagination. I guess he thinks that as a simple pragmatist he doesn't need one: he was willing to moralize about Clinton's behavior only because it wasn't important; and now he refuses to "moralize" about this because it is.

Posner's mind is terabytes of RAM and a 5 gig hard drive.

In response to a comment in the last post:
I had something up yesterday, just a sentence, or two but I took it down. Too many short posts in a row.

Never, never, accept a two tiered system: different wages and benefits for new employees.
But that was taken off the table and replaced by this.

How is the MTA funded? Compare it to the way such systems are funded in other cities.
Kalikow is scum; Bloomberg is being an ass; and you could never pay me enough to work in a subway tunnel.
Oh yes, and fuck the NY Daily News. This:



is bullshit.

For more, go here or here

The definition of a pedant is a scientist discussing politics.

Brad DeLong's contempt for his readers: He makes bracketed [ ] but unsigned comments within the text of their replies, as if he were grading student work.

The arrogance of an economist: intelligence that knows no self-awareness.
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Jon Carroll on Doug Bandow:
"Lapse? One column is a lapse, maybe; 24 columns is a lifestyle choice."

"semi-communistic ideology". I read it in the Times but I'd rather link to JB's commentary.

And here's another one for the archives of stupidity.
update: Laura Rozen has put up a link after recieving a note from one of those involved:

...Bob P. ...is teaching a senior seminar this semester on, off all things, totalitarianism and fascism. He encouraged his students to try to get primary resources and one of them, a 21 year old senior, used Inter Library Loan to get the official version of Mao's Little Red Book not the abridged one found in our library and on-line (he requested it from Providence RI, Brown Univ. I believe). Of course to get the book you fill out a form which provides your SSN address, phone no. etc.

A couple of weeks later two Homeland Security officers showed up on a Sunday morning (in late November) at his parents house to interrogate him. They informed him that the fact he had lived abroad in South America (he is the son of missionary) and had requested a book that was on a watch list led to their visit. They asked him to explain just what he wanted the book for, where he had lived abroad and for how long, asked him to prove he was a student with several forms of documentation, and when it was over refused to provide him with the book and left things up in the air. He was scared to death needless to say. The student reported the incident to Bob who shared it with me.

As I have had the student myself in class and consider him to be one of our brightest I met with him myself to get the whole story. I have no doubts whatsoever to its veracity by the way. He insisted on remaining anonymous, did not want his name published, and was told by his parents to keep a low profile. His uncle who happens to be an FBI agent subsequently took him to Boston to the local HQ to explore the whole issue and eventually got the case against him dropped. From what I understand he waited in a room for several hours with people such as himself who had been similarly investigated.

I passed on the story to a reporter from the New Bedford Standard Times who called me at home to talk about President Bush's surveillance activities and I directed him to Bob P. Since then it has been picked up by US websites and even some in Europe and ABC, CBS etc. have asked for interviews. I have been inundated with emails from around the world telling me not to give in to pressure and to go ahead and teach my course on terrorism. I
am touched by some of them and would hardly have expected so many people to be interested in this issue (one list also noticed that Mao's Little Red Book shot up in sales on amazon.com yesterday). ...

The fact that fundamentalism in any form, religious, legal or technocratic exists as a popular movement in a republic, goes to the failure of that republic to educate its citizens in the responsibilities of that form of government. Intellectual snobs have as much contempt for democracy as religious thugs, and they share as much of the blame, if not more.

But at least the monarchists are out of the closet.

Read Max.

More vulgarisms from CT.

I'd be inclined to say I'm on the losing side of these fights -since I get so pissed off so often- but I'm not. 'My' side will win - is winning. History repeats itself in more ways than it does not, and more people are aware of that fact now than 50 or even 20 years ago. It makes no sense to pretend to be outside of history looking in, as a scientist is outside or above an amoeba on a plate.
This is obvious to most of us.

The ACLU

The first sign of corruption is the belief that you can't become corrupted.

These fuckers were always corrupt.

I don't want anyone thinking I'm not a cynic about these things, but the White House has quite obviously crossed a line, and Keller et al. aided and abetted it.
Angry leftists will say the lines are technical: that the moral lines were crossed years ago, but moral lines without techinical ones don't matter. Cultures are boundaries.
But boundaries change.