Monthly Archives: December 2005

Monk says  " Guilt made for poor cologne.  I hated three things on people.  I hated the heavy humor of public men.  I hated overt and indulgent self-deprecation.  And I hated conspicuous guilt.  I prided myself in the fact that I had only ever been guilty of the latter two. 

                      Everett, Erasure  237

The other day 2 blowhards.com raised the question of used books—here’s how it started:

Used-Book Phobia
Donald Pittenger writes:
Dear Blowhards –
I don’t like to buy used books unless I have no alternative.
There.  I said it.  I feel better already because confession purifies.  Or something.
Maybe I don’t like used books because they give me the feeling that
they’re not really mine. Or maybe there’s another explanation. I’m not
sure.
Truth is, I have all sorts of bookish quirks that are inexplicable — well, I can’t explain them, and they’re my quirks after all.

there is much more plus 26 comments on bookish quirks—I posted the 27th–

When I take long trips, 3 or more months, I pick up used paperbacks
wherever I can buy them and then as I read them I tear off the page
I’ve just read and throw it away. This satisfies some irrational sense
of "traveling light" and follows the logic of newspapers. Since we are
flooded with paperback books, why not dispose of them just as we do
newspapers. It also feels like it re-enacts the traveling itself. Two
or three weeks in one place,a few books read, torn up and gone. On to
another place, other books. Occasionally back home I will read a book
the same way, tearing the page off as soon as I’ve read it, but this is
harder to do at home.

our reporter in Washington says–

Here’s the latest statistic from D C.   Everyone hears that men who get
out of prison face an enormous challenge in getting a job.   They’re
desperate but no one  wants to hire ex-cons.   Well, one of the largest
construction companies in DC – Clarke Construction – decided to do
something about that.  They offered jobs to 200 men in DC who were
recently released from prison.   However, in construction, you have to
start work at 7 am, so exactly two of the 200 stayed with the job.  So
much for how desperate these ex-prisoners are  to get jobs, etc.  There
is just so much bullshit in this city!!!!   

Casey corrects me –

About the Google Economy: you’ve got it wrong. It’s not about having good keywords (well, that’s a part of it), it’s about being well linked. You can have all the right keywords in the world, but unless you get linked from somebody, you’ve got nothing. I’m not a "trapper."

Then Urizen arose upon the wind back many a mile

Retiring into his dire Web scattering fleecy snows

As he ascended howling loud the Web vibrated strong

From heaven to heaven from globe to globe.  In vast excentric paths

Compulsive rolld the Comets at his dread command the dreary way

Falling with wheel impetuous down among Urthonas vales

And round red Orc returning back to Urizen gorged with blood

Slow roll the massy Globes at his command & slow oerwheel

The dismal squadrons of Urthona.  weaving the dire Web

In their progressions & preparing Urizens path before him

                            ( "Vala, or the Four Zoas" Complete Poems of William Blake Ostriker, ed.  Penguin 370)

Michael Blowhard describes certain attitudes of young people really well–

The film director Bernardo Bertolucci has
spoken about the way young people today live in an "eternal present."
All questions of talent aside, young people today seldom go into
movies, for example, out of having fallen in love with the medium.
Movie history and the evolved language of the movies are nothing to
them; as far as the younger movie-set is concerned, "Pulp Fiction"
represents prehistoric ages. They go into the field because … well,
something about it kinda appeals to them. It’s glam. It’s hot. Or maybe
they just can’t help themselves.

Another example: I doubt that the kids who show up in the media and
arts worlds these days are any less well-educated than my cohort was.
But there’s a difference nonetheless, and it’s in the attitude towards
the ignorance. People from my generation usually woke up to how
ill-informed they were and then made some efforts to fill in a few
blanks. When kids today register how ill-informed they are, they show
no shame or embarrassment. Instead, they’re sort of amused that anyone
might be so stodgy as to think that a little background might count for
something. It wouldn’t occur to them to make the effort to fill in any
blanks. After all, why should anything be allowed to come between Me
and The Goodies I Covet? They’re the cut-to-the-chase generation.

Side note: As young people grow ever more ignorant of traditional
culture, they seem to grow ever more avant-garde. Yet it’s a new kind
of avant-garde — a primitive kind of avant-garde. Everyone’s out there
being brilliant, rediscovering the wheel. We sometimes forget that the
avant-gardism of the various early modernisms was
historically-informed. Early modernist painters were almost all
well-trained in the stuffiest academic sense. Jean-Luc Godard, the avant-garde filmmaking icon, is one of the world’s most well-educated movie-history buffs.

Upside of the new-media approach: an apparently complete lack of
inhibition about being yourself and getting it out there. Life’s a
multidimensional adventure game — what an irresistable blast. Why not
strap on the iPod,
follow your bliss, and let a million cyber-flowers bloom? If we’ve lost
touch with the past, that’s the deal we make in order to enjoy an
immensely various eternal present. If traditional culture has been
abandoned, that’s OK because electronics and popular culture have
become so expansive that they’re a universe unto themselves — and a
convenient and poppy one too!

Downside of the new-media world: an absence of impulse control and
depth. Not only does nothing seem to count, the whole making-it-count
thang has been forgotten.

FWIW, my small-t theory is that the making-it-count thang hasn’t
just been forgotten, it has been demonized. Young people sometimes seem
offended, even outraged, by the suggestion that experiencing life in
anything but a semi-camp/slightly-bemused way is possible. They seem
incapable of taking anything in, let alone feeling anything deeply.
They’re prone to go ballistic when life — let alone a work of culture
(or even a blogposting) — hits them where they live. Since, to them,
the only alternative to "feeling good" is "feeling bad," the person who
suggests that "feeling good" isn’t all there is to life deserves to be
castigated.

Hey, here’s a crazy idea: Perhaps, art, culture, and life aren’t
just about expressing yourself, being cool, feeling good, discharging
energy, and going for the button-slamming gusto. Perhaps something is
lost when the history of culture is regarded — when it’s thought about
at all — as nothing but a giant trash heap to be ripped-off for your
own projects. Perhaps life and art lose something when they’re
conceived of as nothing but a sequence of effects. Perhaps other people
count. Dread thought: perhaps even the hallowed venting/self-pleasure
cycle can lose its charm. Where then to turn?

His whole discussion of tradition and innovation is worth looking at.  www.2blowhards.com  I especially like his two key examples — the houses of Parliament in London and the courthouse in Santa Barbara, a wonderful building that reworks the elements of Spanish colonial architecture in magnificent and beautiful ways. 

I like the way Pico Iyer links W G Sebald’s work with Melville. 

A closer parallel is with that other maker of obsessive journeys, Melville, afflicted as he was with a sense of being caught in a tangle of the Fates, and yet committed to exploring deeps that were inseparable from the dark. .  . . And yet the intensity, even the delirium, of Melville comes from our sense that his craziness is carrying him away, as strong waves might the sturdiest boat.  What terrifies in Sebald is, if anything, the opposite:  his almost posthumous calm, as of a frozen ship upon a frozen ocean.   Sun After Dark  75.                                              

Michael Blowhard writes: 

Dear Blowhards —

The Blowhards — at least a few of us — are part of a very
exclusive club: "Only 0.3 percent of the Internet’s estimated 53.4
million bloggers are age 50 or older." (Source: AARP Bulletin — where else? — citing a Perseus survey.)

Adding slightly to those unimpressive numbers, The Spectator now has a blog.

www.2blowhards.com/