"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I was interviewed about my new book on the Seattle municipal channel on local cable TV. For what it’s worth, you can find a Real Video feed of the interview here.
I was interviewed about my new book on the Seattle municipal channel on local cable TV. For what it’s worth, you can find a Real Video feed of the interview here.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Steven Johnson is always a lucid, thoughtful, and insightful science writer, and his new book Mind Wide Open, if not quite as rich as his previous book Emergence, is nonetheless quite thought-provoking.
Johnson gives us a brief tour through recent discoveries and technologies in neuroscience, with special emphasis on their pragmatic implications. There are chapters on neurofeedback and MRI scans, on the brain circuits involved in the fear response, on hormones and neurotransmitters (and the drugs that closely mimic them), and on the psychophysiology of laughter and of attention. In each case, Johnson asks what these technologies or discoveries can tell us about ourselves: more specifically and autobiographically, he spells out what they helped him to learn about himself.
Though Johnson gives too much credit, I think, to the fantasies of evolutionary psychology and cognitive science, the two great pseudoscientific superstitions of our age, his emphasis is mostly on those aspects of recent psychology that actually do have a solid experimental and scientific basis: studies of the chemistry and the neural architecture of the brain.
Two aspects of the book particularly interest me. The first is where Johnson writes about “recreational” neurofeedback and neurochemistry. Most of the technologies he discusses are being developed for medical use: to help people with Attention Deficit Disorder or with Parkinson’s, for instance. But understanding how brain wave patterns and neurotransmitter levels affect mood, judgement, comprehension, and even creativity, and learning ways to alter one’s own patterns and levels at will, is potentially valuable for people in everyday situations as well. There are times when an adrenaline rush is useful, and other times when it just gets in the way; times when acute concentration might lead to a creative breakthrough, and times when distraction might be more helpful. Drugs are relatively crude tools, in comparison to being able to more precisely modulate one’s own neurochemical balances.
The second part of Mind Wide Open that especially interested me was Johnson’s conclusion, where he writes about how Freud stands up to recent neurobiological discoveries. Rather than indulge in fashionable Freud-bashing, he paints a rather nuanced picture. Contemporary brain science shows that Freud was right that much mental activity is unconscious, and that the seeming unity of the self is largely an illusion, since mental activity is made up of multiple, and often mutually contradictory, processes or “modules.” On the other hand, the part of Freud that Johnson rejects (or says that recent discoveries ought to lead us to reject) is the whole theory of repression. Instead of Freud’s “dynamic” model of the psyche, where energies get bottled up and need release, Johnson suggests that the new neuroscience leads us to “another metaphor: the brain as Darwinian ecosystem, instead of steam engine” (198). Understanding the mind is a matter of “pattern recognition instead of code breaking” (207): there is no deep, repressed meaning, no hidden censored core, behind the pattern of symptoms, and into which that pattern needs to be translated.
In one way, I find this an attractive demystification. But in another way, I wonder if it isn’t a cop-out, or an overly comforting idealization. For one thing, the metaphor of a “Darwinian ecosystem” is itself problematic. “Darwinian” implies struggle and competition, the brutal “survival of the fittest”, ultimately “nature red in tooth and claw” (which arch-Darwinist Richard Dawkins regards as a fair and accurate description of natural selection). An “ecosystem,” on the other hand, suggests balance, mutuality, a federation of parts each of which is necessary to a whole that is thereby greater than the sum of its parts. The two words reflect two different biological visions, between which theoretical biologists are indeed antagonistically split today. They both probably represent partial truths, but reconciling them as Johnson implicitly does is something of a sleight-of-hand.
The deeper problem is that, in dispensing with Freudian repression, we are left with too much of a functionalist account of the brain or mind. Even the mind’s conflicts and dissonances serve a useful purpose; “in the Darwinian model, failures are a sign of success” (200). From the point of view of the all-embracing ecosystem (if not of the species that go extinct in the struggle) all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There’s not enough room in this picture for the nearly infinite perversity, whimsicality, self-defeating stubbornness, willful blindness, and obsession of which human minds are capable. While I don’t necessarily believe that Freud’s theories (castration, Oedipus, the death drive) are the best account, or even a good account, of why and how these things happen, I think that any theory that would relegate them to minor exceptions, or to failures of “normal” development — which is what a functionalist theory inevitably does — is unacceptable. Function needs to be explained in the larger context of dysfunction, rather than dysfunction being seen as only a deviation from, or failure of, otherwise ubiquitous function.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Amy Ziering Kofman’s and Kirby Dick’s Derrida documentary is actually not bad, by which I mean that it is at least somewhat illuminating, and that the things about it that annoyed me are the same things that annoy me about Derrida himself.
Rather than trying to explain Derrida’s philosophy, or to tell his story (to the extent that he has one), the filmmakers are content to humanize him, and that is fine. So we see Derrida in everyday life, eating his breakfast and putting on his jacket and getting his hair cut, and we also hear him explain that this is not a “true” representation of his everyday life, because that life is itself changed by the presence of the camera.
The film shows rather well, I think, that Derrida has never been about making destructive arguments, or chopping logic for its own sake, but that his thought has always been about contingency and mortality; about the fragility and yet inescapability of the self; about how the basic experience of life involves being confronted with an Other — that is to say, with that which is not oneself and cannot be assimilated to oneself; about responsibility and forgiveness; about how the present relates to the past and to the future. Many of the great philosophical subjects, in short. And there is a certain wisdom in the careful and heavily qualified things Derrida says about all these subjects, in his simultaneous desire for clarity and meaning, and unwillingness to simplify and generalize.
The film also shows, and shares, Derrida’s extreme narrowness about these subjects. His main limitation as a philosopher, I think, is that he forever remains too narrowly just a philosopher, too much a part of the great Western tradition to ever venture outside it. He is never willing to open the windows and let in some fresh air.
When asked, for instance, whether he finds elements of deconstruction in Seinfeld, his response is categorical and uncomprehending: “deconstruction is not a sitcom,” he says. He is not horrified by the comparison, the way an older sort of high-culture snob would have been; but he is absolutely unable to grasp how it is possible that anyone would choose to watch an episode of Seinfeld in preference to reading a page of Heidegger.
Again, when the interviewer asks Derrida what he wishes he could ask one of the great philosophers of the past, Derrida rather charmingly replies that he’ d like to be able to ask Heidegger or Hegel about his sex life. He then spars coyly with the interviewer over the issue of whether or not he’d reveal anything about his own sex life (he encourages her to ask him, but says that he wouldn’t answer). But Derrida somewhat spoils the effect of all this when he says that, of course, he’s not thinking of “a porno of Hegel or Heidegger,” but rather something more dignified: that they admit that they cannot totally separate their thought from their private lives.
Me, I’d much rather witness the grotesque spectacle of Heidegger and Hannah Arendt fucking than read another essay by either of them.
Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.
Shunji Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly (1996) is a film about foreigners (mostly Chinese, but also European and American) in Japan. Most of these foreigners communicate with one another in English, which they know better than they do Japanese. The main character, Ageha (Butterfly) is a teenage girl, daughter of a dead Chinese prostitute, but who was born in Japan and only speaks Japanese and English. In the course of the film, we also meet Japanese-born children of Americans, white and black, but whose main language is Japanese, and who don’t speak English very well, if at all.
So the film is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic (though there don’t seem to be any Koreans, Japan’s largest minority group), giving the lie to the myth of Japanese homogeneity.
Swallowtail Butterfly is about these immigrants’ hopes of making it — their successes and failures — in the Japanese bubble economy of the late 80s/early 90s (I think). At times it has an almost documentary feel, at other times it is highly stylized and anti-realistic, as it flirts with the gangster thriller and with expressionist modes, as well as referencing music video (Iwai’s background, before he moved into film). Handheld camera is used throughout, supplemented by various filters and other visual effects. The film seems edited more for rhythm than for narrative, though its various narrative strands do converge towards the end.
What’s remarkable about Swallowtail Butterfly – as well as about Iwai’s later film All About Lily Chou-Chou (which I wrote about here) – is the way it drifts in and out of various moods or affects, as well as various genres. There are horrific moments (as when racist Japanese cops beat up and kill a Chinese man), and over-the-top film fantasy moments (as when the immigrants blow up several truck-loads of gangsters with a bazooka), and moments when time seems to stop (as when Ageha overdoses on heroin), and moments when time seems to expand into eternity (as when Glico, the Chinese prostitute turned singer, delivers a stunning rock ‘n’ roll version of “My Way” – played straight, and not in the mode of the Sid Vicious critique), and moments of sheer lyrical abstraction, pain and joy passed through the sieve of Iwai’s restless camera and savvy pop soundtrack. The film begins and (almost) ends with Chinese funerals, in which money – the Japanese yen for which the immigrants have come to Japan – is burned in a potlatch that consumes both the hypocrisies and racism of Japanese society, and the grief, rage, and desperation of which the immigrants’ lives are composed.
Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.
Running Out of Time (1999) is another brilliant film by Johnny To (whom I’ve written about before). A man with just a few weeks left to live (Andy Lau) plans and executes an elaborate robbery/scam, motivated ultimately by honor and revenge, the need to settle scores with the gang leader who betrayed his father. In the course of events he develops a kind of emotional bond with the cop who is trying to catch him (Ching Wan Lau).
The themes might seem familiar from John Woo, but this is a very different sort of film. To’s fractured action editing and oblique lighting, together with the way he has of inserting odd digressions into the plot without slackening the pace, create a kind of jittery poetry, both frenetic and cool, never quite settling down into any sort of fixed and recognizable sentiment (I think this is yet another example of what Jenny calls “emotionless affect”).
This sort of not-quite-feeling is a quality of To’s elaborate visual style; but it’s also perfectly embodied in Andy Lau’s charismatic outlaw, charming us even at the point of death. Knowing that he will be gone soon, periodically spitting up blood, he seems detached from his own ferocious desires, machinating his plot with an insouciance worthy of Cary Grant. Indeed, the way an insistent consciousness of mortality somehow comes across as insouciance is a big part of what makes the film work for me: such a connection or transformation seems utterly outrageous, yet at the same time it seems so perfectly right. The prospect of death is a source of dread and mystery, perhaps, only because death itself is so shallow; there’s nothing behind the curtain.
I don’t mean to say that Running Out of Time is a philosophical film: it’s too committed to the thrills of the action genre to have any such pretensions. (It also has some of the attributes of a video game). But To’s images, and Lau’s performance, nonetheless do embody a kind of thought. And a new thought at that. A thought that could only be thought in our age of globalization, of multiplying images, and of the ubiquitous electronic extrusion of our brains. Not profound thought, but lateral thought, networked thought, thought that is visceral yet superficial, skidding across the surfaces of our eyes and ears and minds.
Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, like his earlier Under The Sand, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
At the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea).
At first, Swimming Pool is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
The film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
Swimming Pool is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.
Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool, like his earlier Under The Sand, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
At the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea).
At first, Swimming Pool is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
The film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
Swimming Pool is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.
A brilliant epigram by Warren Ellis (from his Bad Signal email list):
“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain — do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”
A brilliant epigram by Warren Ellis (from his Bad Signal email list):
“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain — do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?”
I still think, even more, that we are doomed if Kerry is the Democratic nominee. In his victory speech tonight, Kerry looked and acted like he had a stick up his ass (a common metaphor, but in this case it seemed almost literally apt). Not only did he obviously not believe any of the things he was saying, he didn’t even seem capable of pretending to believe them. He’s too lame even to be phony.
Dean, on the other hand, was emotionally involved, with his people, and also with the larger TV audience. Not that this will do him much good. I agree with Jacalyn that Dean is in trouble in large part because the media read things like his now infamous whoop as that he is “acting too ‘lower-class’/ too black/too much like white trash.”
It’s not that I am saying that any show of emotion is automatically good. After all, who was more emotional (and thereby more crassly manipulative) in his political speeches than Hitler? I am saying, rather, that it’s more on an affective level than an ideological one that elections are won and lost. And too few political commentators notice this, or are willing to admit that they are aware of it.
It may be that nobody the Democrats have can compete with what Jenny, who writes very well about the politics of affect, describes as Bush’s display of ” feeling that doesn’t slip over into ‘a’ feeling….Bush is the conservative/political cousin to the iPod commercials, insofar as they both tap into emotionless affect in order to ‘work.’ ”
Now, I think that Bush is able to appear this way, precisely because he is a sociopath, as Mark Crispin Miller cogently argues. But that doesn’t make the task of beating him any easier; and though I still think that the career military man, General Clark, is the one most likely to be able to do it, I remain uncertain as to whether he can pull it off. But I know that Kerry doesn’t stand a chance.
Most idiotic comment of the evening, by somebody on CNN: “Women like Kerry because they feel protected by him.”
Most outrageous claim by a candidate: Lieberman, claiming his 5th place showing as a victory, because he was almost in a tie for third place (Kerry and Dean, he said, don’t really count, because they come from states directly adjoining New Hampshire. It’s a good thing nobody reminded Lieberman that, even if Connecticut doesn’t border New Hampshire, it, too, is part of New England).
Sharpton brilliantly one-upped Lieberman when he said he was thrilled to get a few hundred votes in New Hampshire, when he didn’t even campaign there.
I still think, even more, that we are doomed if Kerry is the Democratic nominee. In his victory speech tonight, Kerry looked and acted like he had a stick up his ass (a common metaphor, but in this case it seemed almost literally apt). Not only did he obviously not believe any of the things he was saying, he didn’t even seem capable of pretending to believe them. He’s too lame even to be phony.
Dean, on the other hand, was emotionally involved, with his people, and also with the larger TV audience. Not that this will do him much good. I agree with Jacalyn that Dean is in trouble in large part because the media read things like his now infamous whoop as that he is “acting too ‘lower-class’/ too black/too much like white trash.”
It’s not that I am saying that any show of emotion is automatically good. After all, who was more emotional (and thereby more crassly manipulative) in his political speeches than Hitler? I am saying, rather, that it’s more on an affective level than an ideological one that elections are won and lost. And too few political commentators notice this, or are willing to admit that they are aware of it.
It may be that nobody the Democrats have can compete with what Jenny, who writes very well about the politics of affect, describes as Bush’s display of ” feeling that doesn’t slip over into ‘a’ feeling….Bush is the conservative/political cousin to the iPod commercials, insofar as they both tap into emotionless affect in order to ‘work.’ ”
Now, I think that Bush is able to appear this way, precisely because he is a sociopath, as Mark Crispin Miller cogently argues. But that doesn’t make the task of beating him any easier; and though I still think that the career military man, General Clark, is the one most likely to be able to do it, I remain uncertain as to whether he can pull it off. But I know that Kerry doesn’t stand a chance.
Most idiotic comment of the evening, by somebody on CNN: “Women like Kerry because they feel protected by him.”
Most outrageous claim by a candidate: Lieberman, claiming his 5th place showing as a victory, because he was almost in a tie for third place (Kerry and Dean, he said, don’t really count, because they come from states directly adjoining New Hampshire. It’s a good thing nobody reminded Lieberman that, even if Connecticut doesn’t border New Hampshire, it, too, is part of New England).
Sharpton brilliantly one-upped Lieberman when he said he was thrilled to get a few hundred votes in New Hampshire, when he didn’t even campaign there.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
Can Xue is one of my favorite living writers, in any language, although (as well as because) I do not think I really understand her. Three of her books have been translated into English: the short story collection Dialogues in Paradise, Old Floating Cloud, which consists of two novellas, and the one I just reread, The Embroidered Shoes, which contains ten short stories and a novella. (As far as I know, Can Xue has published a lot more in Chinese, but these are the only texts of hers that have been translated into a language I understand).
It would seem obvious to say that Can Xue’s fiction is “dreamlike” and “surreal,” but words like these don’t get us very far. The stories contain lots of description, and are vividly poetic, and preternaturally clear, in their details. Yet these details are often highly irrational, or impossible; and they refuse to coalesce into anything like a linear narrative. There are obsessively repeated (but continually varying) images of disease and decay, of insects and other vermin, of flowers blooming and withering, of twisted family dynamics and unpleasant altercations with neighbors.
There’s something unique, too, about the tone of the stories: their everydayness. None of the narrators or characters find their “surreal” circumstances to be in the least unusual or strange. They describe a man who has suction cups on his hands, allowing him to hang from the ceiling, or a boy who raises poisonous snakes, or a woman who spends all her time in a glass cupboard, as if these were the sorts of people you met every day. They evoke metamorphoses of the landscape, so that familiar landmarks disappear, or abysses open up at their feet, as if they were merely talking about changes in the weather.
Most of these images are harsh and troubling. The stories are also filled with that dreamlike sense of never being quite able to reach a goal that nonetheless always seems to be imminent, just beyond one’s grasp. But I wouldn’t describe Can Xue’s stories as nightmarish or despairing. For they are filled with a certain wonder of metamorphosis: a sense of ongoing change that is more important than any of the goals that are never reached (for to reach them would bring the metamorphoses to an end). These stories are about loss, suffering, and mortality, but in them such events have a kind of quite beauty to them, since they are more about living on or going on, than they are about finitude and finality. There’s no finality here, and hence no narrative closure; but a kind of impersonal, insomniac vigilance that ever renews itself.
And in the end, I am not sure that anything I have just written about Can Xue’s fiction makes any sense. But what I love about this fiction is the way it continually, delicately evades whatever constructions one would want to place upon it.
I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress). Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).
I don’t have that much to say about Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers. The sappy plot – melodrama, but not over-the-top enough for my kind of melodramatic bliss – means it’s not anywhere near as interesting as Kon’s first film, the weird and science-fictional Perfect Blue. (I still haven’t seen his second film, Millennium Actress). Still, the animation was really good: the characters have that iconic simplicity that (as Scott McCloud has argued) is the special power of comics and cartoons; while the Tokyo cityscape is vivid and dynamic. Tokyo Godfathers is certainly an improvement on 3 Godfathers, the John Ford/John Wayne flick on which it is loosely based. (Believe me, 3 Godfathers is not one of Ford’s greatest moments. And Kon’s couple of lachrymose bum and stereotypical drag queen is far preferable to Ford’s couple of the Duke and Pedro Armendariz, with the former snarling to the latter at every opportunity, “Don’t speak Mexican in front of the kid’).