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Sunday, February 29, 2004

(6:35 PM) | Anonymous:

On being an ass.

I decided to call out Dr. Leth and Dr. Bowling and for posterity sake Dr. Thompson (though I respect him) because of rumors that I perceived as truths from those on and off the Dialog council. Unfortunately this kind of head on, balls out confrontational style has backfired once again and I, like so many times in my life, am playing the ass.

I have always been frustrated that students at Olivet who disagree with the administration simply "bend over and take it," which is part of the reason I left and part of the reason I constantly make an ass out of myself to those who still find themselves in the bent over position. I find it sad that we all want to avoid doing pointless acts of rebellion to the point that we will never know how to partake in meaningful rebellion against any structure. It’s not just a problem in the Religion department at Olivet Nazarene University; it is a problem throughout the whole Church universal! The entire Church sprang up from the fertile soil of rebellion but you wouldn't know that the Church used to matter from its current fruit.

It's through the pointless little acts, like the move to e-mail a listserv and make radical claims without having any facts, that we learn the embarrassment it is to be rebellious in any way. In this modern culture where our rationality is dictated and creativity is regulated to the altar of the star there is a certain embarrassment when attempt to criticize those who have all the cards in their hands, very much hidden from your view. Adam says that the death of something like Dialog is survivable and he is right, to those that Dialog mattered there will be little noticeable difference in their lives as they will still be the ability to eat and sleep and work. Though this non-event and its survivability says much about the administration of Olivet it says more about the students of theology who have stood idly by as boring old men have dictated their educations to them. We should have stood up in the beginning and demanded honesty from an administration that refuses to be honest, we should have stood up in classrooms and called out professors who were teaching dead words to a dead crop of pastors, we should have staged a useless protest in Dr. Bowling's office when the graduate program in Religion was taken away from Dr. Thompson. Even if none of it would have made a difference, even if these would be pointless acts that is what religious people are supposed to do!

But, like good ‘church’ people we did nothing.

So I am an ass, which is of course regrettable but very survivable, but I wish I had been more of an ass.

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(2:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Warmer Weather

It's strange, but warmer weather makes me want to be "more Catholic." During the winter, I'm much more open to dissenting from the church's position, but during warmer weather, particularly the summer, I'm more likely to fall back into a mild apologetic tone (for instance, last night I gave a standard defense of the pope's decision to remain in office despite his manifest physical debility that has to be keeping him from doing as good a job as he could). I also find myself wanting to be pious. Part of this is probably due to my personal history and the way we all tend to associate certain things with certain times of the year. I began to read heavily in Catholic apologetics in the spring, and I memorized my first Catholic prayers in the spring. My first ever lenten observance was walking home from school every day, so that the fresh air of the waning winter is closely associated in my mind with piety and prayer. I spent my semester at Oxford during the spring, when I was going to mass almost every single day and when I had a lot of walking time in which to pray. The summer months are especially Catholicizing for me because for many years I would spend the summer attending St. John the Evangelist in Davison, which seems to me to be one of the better parishes I've seen (in my limited experience) and was certainly the parish that drew me into Catholicism -- its members, its liturgy, even its building. The fact that so much of my conversion was tied up with a romantic relationship, which for me always increases in intensity in warmer weather, only helps this effect.

Today was also the first part of the big lead-up for RCIA members. I'm not particularly nostalgic about the RCIA process, since for me it wasn't so much a process of discernment as a somewhat annoying formality, but it was still nice to see most of them be so embarrassed and excited to be up front and have their name sung -- because really, how often does one hear one's name sung in public? I wonder how differently my life might have gone if I had done RCIA at St. John's my senior year in high school and if I had simply decided to apply at state schools or Catholic schools. I can't even begin to imagine how different things would be, at least at the moment, although perhaps the basic shape of my life will end up being the same. In any case, perhaps it's good, only in the long run, that I wasn't able simply to dismiss and turn my back on my upbringing. Perhaps it's good that I didn't alienate my family so completely. Even if I didn't need more time, even if nothing would have kept me where they wanted me, maybe they benefited from having more time to process it and from not having to go through the disgrace of my leaving the church during the highly stressful period of my senior year. Perhaps it's good, too, that I managed to get some distance from the aforementioned romantic relationship, so that I, and everyone else, could be more sure that I was making the change for myself, rather than for her. Providence does not submit to analysis, but maybe it's alright. Maybe I don't have to dream so often of starting over from ten years ago so that I can get it right.

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(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Hospitality

I've written about this before, and to write about it again might be inhospitable to those who are not directly involved in the situation -- but the dialog listserv at Olivet Nazarene University is being shut down. This is, as Anthony put it in his "parting shot," a "non-event." It is completely expected, indeed inevitable. Beyond that, I personally do not have a great nostalgic attachment to the dialog listserv; I studied in the religion department there for only a short, though formative, time; and I was never deeply involved with the theology club or its activities. This is surely something that must be passed over without comment.

And it will be. There will be no fanfare. There will be no gleeful, triumphant declarations from "on high." There will be no patronizing retrospective in the campus newspaper. There will probably not even be many questions from students, since very few new participants have entered the fold. The conversation will move to other places, perhaps either this page or the CRI Discussion Forum. All of "us" will be able to move on. I wonder, though, what will continue to happen to those new students who continue to arrive at a continually inhospitable campus. I wonder how it will be for those who may never get a chance to question what they came to school already believing. Is education even possible in a situation in which you are expected to maintain the same opinions that you formed in Sunday School, and aside from that to learn marketable skills? Is education even possible in an institution that feels that it is fundamentally threatened by questioning, that has to push questioners onto the margins, exploiting their labor and dedication at the same time as they attempt to "gently" push them out of the institution altogether? Is education possible when the fundamental question of what it means to be human in the light of God's revelation in Christ is taken to be the most straightforward and obvious thing in the world, and where serious intellectual inquiry that seeks understanding--not to overthrow the church or its teachings, not to tear apart the community, but understanding--is discouraged, where even the virtual space where it might, haltingly, continue to take place, is closed?

People don't always choose to go to Olivet. I freely chose it, certainly, but people don't always freely choose. Free choice takes place a lot less often than we like to think. Some people come to Olivet with eating disorders; they hear in chapel that eating disorders are a sin, and maybe that's the last straw, maybe they were just going to go into the counselling center to get some help--but, as sin? Some people come to Olivet with a strong, perhaps unacknowledged, attraction to people of the same sex; they hear in chapel that their disease is a choice and that their disease can be cured. Many of those people came to Olivet eager to serve Christ and the Nazarene Church--many of those people are the most active in promoting Olivet through music and admissions recruitment--but to hear that this principle around which they want to organize their intimate life, the principle according to which they want to determine to whom they will give themselves emotionally and sexually is a disease? There are people who come to school with unresolved heterosexual issues, who are ashamed to have to walk around in a damned body all the time, who wonder if they are even capable of loving another person--and they hear, over and over, that if they so much as watch a movie with nudity in it, they had better take a damn hard look at their motivations and at where they are with Christ.

Certainly none of that is necessarily earth-shattering stuff -- it's survivable. It's nothing worse than what you might find in certain churches, just par for the course. But then there are other things happening, too, spaces that open up where people can become something different, where they can understand themselves and the world differently, in ways that don't make them ashamed and depressed and despairing, but in ways that make them want to love themselves and give themselves to others, to serve, to live fully. Perhaps those things are what we might hope that a Christian college, at its best, would provide -- and many Christian colleges do, to some degree. Olivet still does, to some degree -- you just have to look a little harder, and you just have to unplug yourself from the official self-preservation mechanisms of the institution. Such spaces will continue to exist as long as God hasn't completely abandoned us -- but by shutting down dialog, the administration is saying, finally, that those spaces must fight for their existence, that their existence will be tentatively tolerated in spite of the official stance of the institution.

Maybe that's good of them to finally say that. Maybe it's good of them to be honest and finally say that they're in the self-preservation business and that everyone basically has to fend for herself. Maybe this will create a situation in which real, fundamental change can occur. It doesn't look promising, frankly -- but I hope so, for the sake of the people being put through the wringer of shame and self-hatred every single day.

UPDATE: I have apparently been had by the Olivet Rumor Mill. The sad thing is that this rumor was so instantly believable. In any case, see Jared Sinclair's comment to this thread.

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Saturday, February 28, 2004

(1:05 PM) | Anonymous:

Synth Rock Anthem

Dear All.

I have created what I consider to be a Synth Rock Masterpiece. And if that statement needs any consideration, I might remove the second word, as it doesn't Rock so much as Kick All Holy Ass. And not even necessarily Holy Ass. It Kicks Ass Indescriminately. It don't matter if you're rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, yo. My Synth Rawk is most triumphant.

The original material that I funked out with, for those of you who don't recognize the source, was the music from the Weapon Selection screen in Gradius III. A side-scrolling space-shooter for the SNES, it truly Rocked the Body that Rocked the Party, and I just wanted to see what I could do with it. For best effect, Pump up the Jam and the Bass Boost, or perhaps use Really nice headphones. The Bass Line is precious and dear to me, and I wrote it especially for you.

Hope you dig.

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(10:22 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

That One Movie about Jesus

Andrew Sullivan has some interesting remarks about The Passion of the Christ (via Matthew Yglesias):

The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels. It shows a man being flayed alive - slowly, methodically and with increasing savagery. We first of all witness the use of sticks, then whips, then multiple whips with barbed glass or metal. We see flesh being torn out of a man's body. Just so that we can appreciate the pain, we see the whip first tear chunks out of a wooden table. Then we see pieces of human skin flying through the air. We see Jesus come back for more. We see blood spattering on the torturers' faces. We see muscled thugs exhausted from shredding every inch of this man's body. And then they turn him over and do it all again. It goes on for ever. And then we see his mother wiping up masses and masses of blood. It is an absolutely unforgivable, vile, disgusting scene. No human being could sruvive it. Yet for Gibson, it is the h'ors d'oeuvre for his porn movie. The whole movie is some kind of sick combination of the theology of Opus Dei and the film-making of Quentin Tarantino.


The fetishism of the cross is quite simply a medieval attitude, one which Opus Dei, with its ridiculous focus on mortification of the flesh, carries forward into the present day. Although this movie is supposed to be a highly accurate, "by the book" portrayal of events, in point of fact it's nothing more than an extremely graphic passion play, with all the traditional elements and exaggerations that brings with it -- it's as though every day were Good Friday. Moving along:

There is nothing in the Gospels that indicates this level of extreme, endless savagery and there is no theological reason for it. It doesn't even evoke emotion in the audience. It is designed to prompt the crudest human pity and emotional blackmail - which it obviously does. But then it seems to me designed to evoke a sick kind of fascination. Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before. And you have to ask yourself: why? The suffering of Christ is bad and gruesome enough without exaggerating it to this insane degree. Theologically, the point is not that Jesus suffered more than any human being ever has on a physical level. It is that his suffering was profound and voluntary and the culmination of a life and a teaching that Gibson essentially omits. One more example. Toward the end, unsatisfied with showing a man flayed alive, nailed gruesomely to a cross, one eye shut from being smashed in, blood covering his entire body, Gibson has a large crow perch on the neighboring cross and peck another man's eyes out. Why? Because the porn needed yet another money shot.


The fixation on suffering explains precisely why this movie has become such an idol for so many Christians (if you don't believe me, just say something critical about it to a known conservative Christian -- they'll act as though you opened your Bible to the gospels and started pissing in it). Modern, mainstream Christians have nothing but emotional blackmail to keep people in the church. The continued survival of the church depends on people being more and more guilt-tripped by the cross and "what Jesus did for me," since the modern church can very seldom offer a positive program for what an abundant life means in practice, aside from a certain kind of neurotic emotionalism.

Authentic community? No, we don't do that. Calling the powers to task? No, we don't do that. Providing a space where people can ask questions about topics that don't involve making or spending money? No, we don't do that. But look at what Jesus did for you! Look at how much he suffered -- for you! Don't you owe it to him to live for him? Don't you owe it to him to join this club that was founded on his precious blood? It doesn't make any fucking sense. In the substitutionary theory of the atonement, the cross has nothing to do with anything -- it has nothing to do with the life of Christ, because of course Jesus was fully supportive of the government and only sought minor reforms in religious structures. It has nothing to do with the teaching of Christ, which is turned into some kind of "common sense" morality whose radical edge is blunted at every turn (the "eye of the needle" is a relatively narrow gate, so that it's just a little bit tougher for a rich man to get in). It's nothing but a quid pro quo set up by a sadistic God to satisfy his rage and bloodlust.

And people criticize the modern church for using fear to sell its message: well, how else are you supposed to sell a message like this? I'd say that we should give the church credit for at least being honest enough to use fear to sell its message.

UPDATE: By "the church," of course, I mean parts of the church I don't like -- mainly the conservative parts. Perhaps by assuming that conservative Christians represent "the mainstream," I am simply contributing to the problem. There are a lot of ways in which the church as a whole is attempting to respond to the concrete needs of the day, but The Passion and the surrounding hype do not, in my opinion, seem to be among those attempts.

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Thursday, February 26, 2004

(9:21 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Minor Changes

I did the HaloScan donation, so soon we will have three times as many characters to work with in commenting. I know that my commenting juices haven't been able to flow as they might have, due to the limits, so this will be an improvement. I also decided to add the HaloScan trackback -- I had that other system earlier, but didn't get much action from it. Now that HaloScan has added a trackback feature, perhaps more people will start using it. In any case, since Mr. Gauche is using trackback, I felt I had to keep up.

To do the donation, I had to do some major surgery to my PayPal account (which I've only used once, to send $1.00, literally). I discovered, much to my delight, that it is possible to use PayPal to pay bills for companies that don't normally allow online bill payment. I've written more checks in the two months that Richard's been gone than I've written in the rest of my life combined, so I'm very happy to be able to pay more things online. Also, as part of the verification process, I've apparently been entered in a lottery to win $1000. The message here: go over and set up a PayPal account. Or actually, please don't, so my odds will be better.

I've been thinking about doing a church-oriented post lately, but the thought is still half-formed. Much of my writing lately has ended up on the CRI General Forum. I used to be one of the most frequent contributors to that board, but I let it go for a couple months -- now, I'm back with a vengeance. It would be interesting if some of my loving readers got involved in the discussion.

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(4:51 AM) | Anonymous:

The Princess and the Pea

Earlier tonight I made the comment that my cat looked like "the princess and the pea" to my sister. This was because the cat was laying with a frumpled look even though she was on a stack of about 8 pillows in a chair. My sister didn't know the story, and besides the basics, neither did I. So, I had to refamilliarize myself with this beloved HC Anderson favorite, and may I now say - WTF?! (Which stands for "What The Flip Wilson?")

To recap for you all..There's this prince sitting under this lily tree, and life is great. Then he decides since he is the perfect prince in the perfect land, all he needs is a real princess. Everything is going great..this sounds fine. But I believe the full effect of the alcohol hit Hans here, as out of nowhere comes the most screwed up paragraph ever:

"No matter where he traveled on the back of his beetle he would bump into a princess. His beetle, Jeffrey, would chirp whenever they saw a princess, but none of them seemed just right. Indeed, his land was full of princesses. They would come and live under the many lily trees that were known to be the most beautiful in the world."

For the record, the beetle, Jeffrey, never comes into play for the rest of the story. Sorry to go all Vonnegut there and end the suspense, but Hans Christian apparently just felt like the story was simply going a little bit too much in the way of "not totally on crack" so he decided to go off for a while. Why a beetle? Why not a freaking horse or even like..a small dog or something? And also..what princess have you ever known who would travel miles to camp out under a tree? We've all seen the camping episode of Just Married, or whatever that Jessica Simpson/Nick whoever show is called, right? The opening is standard fare, and then HC goes dropping this bombast of information out of nowhere, causing me to sit back and cry.

OH BUT WE'RE NOT DONE..

We go on..the prince returns back to his palace. His palace in the most perfect land in the world. What's the palace made of? No, not gold, silver, frankincense or myrrh..but TINS OF SPICE. I am instantly reminded of how at Fuddrucker's all the seperations are made out of cases of beer and stuff. What if you want the paprika to zest up your chicken? Do you have to sit back and make the moral choice of bland chicken or no left-wing to the house? This seems less than perfect. But apparently the tins are amazingly sturdy, as an ice storm comes tearing across the land a few days later. Not any ice storm..the worst ice storm ever to hit THE LAND. A MAGIC ICE STORM.

The prince here's knocking in the middle of the storm. He assumes it is the branches or the wind..knocking CONSTANTLY for an hour straight. Eventually he figures out that it isn't the freaking wind, it's Princess Kayla, knocking at his door. Which is why it sounded a bit like knocking. Again..an hour straight..to give away the end again, this girl is so bothered by a few peas under 20 matresses that she can't sleep, yet sitting in the middle of THE WORST ICE STORM EVER TO HIT THE LAND has no effect, except that she is "almost frozen in the cold"..note that she isn't "ENTIRELY RIPPED TO SHREDS BY THE SHARDS OF ICE!". This is because she's not just your every ordinary day princess who you bump into with your huge beetle while walking under the precious lily trees. No friends, this is KAYLA...a real princess. Not to be confused with Princess II, the horrible marketing error that alienated all of Real Princess' customers with it's wild new taste and look. Princess II, by the way, is now available as Diet Princess.

Anyway, the princess comes in and asks not for like..a hot bath..or a warm blanket or clean clothes..but hot milk with nutmeg sprinkled on the top. This is the sign of a real princess, friends.

The prince's mom instructs the prince to have the princess stay the night, thinking she could test if the girl to see if she truly was a real princess. This part is pretty normal, but you need to click on that link and listen to it for the guys "Fairy Queen" voice..simply genius. He makes a big deal out of the fact that the queen never told anyone she had three magic peas. But, really, when does that sort of thing come up in conversation? I mean..really..all they do is feel like rocks to princesses, so you really have a limited audience interested in such a thing. It's not like they can sprout wings and fly..and even if they do, everyone in the kingdom rides beetles, who can also sprout wings and fly. Simply NOT A BIG DEAL. But the king and prince at least should have really taken an interest in the pea thing, because then they might have found out that she's not just the queen, she's A FAIRY QUEEN with magical powers. Wow...the more you know indeed NBC.

At this point, Hans really goes off again. I mean..ever since springing Jeffrey on us, he's been okay as far as fairy tales go, but now again he jumps off the deep end in describing the fairy queen. To get anything done, the queen claps 6 TIMES. In a row. Try doing this straight. There's no magic in that. It's too long..there's no way to get a "magic-sounding" rhythm out of 6 times. And really, maybe this is why her husband never knew she was a fairy queen, having to clap so many times to do anything would get heck-a tedious. But, in order to get this amazingly grand scheme of STICKING SOME PEAS UNDER A MATTRESS, the queen utilizes her full white magic powers. She claps 6 times to open a portal that lead to downstairs in order to get her magic box. The box is magic because it contains MAGIC PEAS.

Really..I'm not sure why the peas are even magical. I mean..I thought the emphasis was on the fact that a real princess would be so used to a life of luxury that even 3 peas under 20 mattresses would upset her sleep. If it's simply a matter of the peas being magic and being some sort of divining rod to find out if the girl is telling the truth, I lose a lot of respect for the princess. But, I mean..these are MAGIC peas kept in a MAGIC box that is protected by a MAGIC spell..and I'm not sure why 3 out of a can wouldn't have worked just as well. Maybe there was a shortage, I don't know.

She has her servants take the matress off the bed so she can place the peas on the box springs, and then she has 20 mattresses of the finest quality placed on top of it. I'm not sure why 1 mattress makes a difference, especially with these being MAGIC peas..shouldn't they reveal the truth no matter what? I mean..if you stick some peas under my 1 mattress I couldn't tell. Heck, you could stick the peas directly under me and I'd have no idea. But..then..I did sleep on a bottlecap a few months back, which left this ring-worm looking deep scar on my leg up until a couple of weeks ago. Obviously I am not a real princess. A pretty pretty princess, yes. A real princess, no.

Oh..this is what I was talking about before I got sidetracked. HC kicks the drugs up and starts going off for paragraphs on end about the queen getting so rushed that she begins to glow and sprout wings and spread magic dust. But..really..she's not doing anything..she's telling servants to do it all. Even if she's telling them in the same speed as that Micro-Machines guy, you know the one who also part-timed as a teacher at Bayside High in Saved By The Bell..the wings and glowing and magic dust would all just be superfluous..they wouldn't help her diction or anything.

They try to put white sheets over the bed, but the queen CLAPS SIX TIMES, and they MAGICALLY know that this is a special guest, too good for white, so they went and got some rainbow sheets. When they returned they were ASTONISHED that the final preperations had already been made. Apparently when the queen sprouted wings, started glowing and leaving a trail of dust behind her, that was no big deal..but the fact she was able to put some sheets on the bed herself was absolutely amazing. Apparently, the queen must have been amazingly short, and that she could reach to the top of the mattresses was the great feat..or something. Anyways, the servants go get Kayla, and the queen has to "rush" out to avoid being seen. The queen locks her door and folds her wings and goes to sleep. Foldable wings. Nice.

Of course, you can all tell the story along with me from here. The queen and Princess Kayla come to breakfast the next morning. The Queen asks Kayla if she slept well..Kayla "thought three times before speaking"..which I have no clue what in the heck that even means...and then burst into tears. She admits she didn't sleep because it felt like there were three jagged rocks. The queen busts up laughing and CLAPS 6 TIMES before revealing it all - she is the Fairy Queen, She hid three MAGIC PEAS, and now she knows this princess is perfect and honest. What's more, The prince was hiding behind some curtains. Apparently he just had to hear what the princess' answer would be, but if he was present she wouldn't have the gall to answer. But..he had no clue his mom was a fairy, so how'd he know about the pea plot? And if this princess is so perfect and honest, why wouldn't she tell the truth if the prince was there? I think every good fantasy needs someone hiding behind a curtain, because it is the most obvious and hard to conceal hiding place ever, but certainly it must have a reason for being! I cannot accept it otherwise!

But, yeah..the two fall in love, live perfectly, and the ice storm goes away. However, all is not right even yet. In the epilogue, Hans Christ. Anderson tells us that if we ever happen to be in the neighborhood of the palace made of spice tins, we should go in and ask to see the room where the prince and princess fell in love. I should note now, in case I did not before, that when the prince first opens the door to the princess, it mentions that he is blown to the floor by his love for her. Again, when the prince comes out from behind the curtain it tells us he first fell in love with her when he opened the door. Yet, the epilogue says "you will find, on top of a silken pillow, the three magic peas." This would seem to indicate: A) There was some sort of midnight trist in the princess bedroom, which makes it the "very room where they fell in love", which is hard to believe since the princess would basically be making love on top of 3 jagged rocks..which would tear her back up and probably would ruin the spice tin floor..or B) In the entryway they have this silken pillow with the three MAGIC peas..right next to the door are these peas which once caused the queen to hid them in a MAGIC box, locked with a MAGIC spell, located in a MAGIC tavern only accesible through the queen's MAGIC portal. You'd think for the price those could fetch on ebay, they'd be snatched quicker than you could CLAP SIX TIMES.

That's the end of the story..the queen fairy becomes the Queen Fairy Mother, while Kayla becomes the new Queen Fairy, contrary to all the high school bullies who said I occupied that post.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2004

(10:03 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Meditations on a Dilbert Cartoon

There is an old Dilbert cartoon (ca. 1992) in which it goes through portraits of various kinds of people: "their cars are always spotlessly clean," "their checkbook is always balanced," etc. They are "people with too much time on their hands." My car is not always spotlessly clean, and online banking has made me terribly lax with regard to formally balancing my checkbook, but the most damning manifestation of "too much time on their hands" was one that I deliberately left off the list: "they read the same book more than once."

I have read the following books more than once:


  • The Adventures of Robin Hood. This was an annual summer event for me for at least five years. I distinctly remember two separate versions: the one my grandfather gave me (in a way, it was the best gift I ever received), and the one at the Davison Public Library (whose holdings I had virtually committed to memory by the time I went to high school). The library's version was longer, with a lengthy excursus on the adventures of Little John, which I remember as being the best part of the book -- probably because of my tendency to prefer secondary characters in general (I was an avid reader of the occasional miniseries of comics starring Robin, of "Batman and"). I would read the book in trees, sitting on the top of the slide -- anything to be up off the ground, but a safe distance off the ground, which is curious, because I don't think Robin Hood necessarily lived in a tree.
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I first read this book in fourth grade, while I was grounded from TV for a couple months due to calling the playground lady a "butthead" after throwing a Frisbee at the head of Brian Granger (hitting him in the ear; during a brief time when I was required to sit right next to him in class, I once punched him in the ear, one of the few times I ever punched anyone -- I don't recall getting in trouble for, you know, punching a classmate in the ear, in a school where a playground fight was a major event, probably because the teacher simply didn't believe I was capable of such a thing). My heart was strangely warmed by the thought of wandering around in a cave with a pretty girl, though it seemed that having a maniacal Indian chasing me around would be annoying. I read it a second time simply because I owned a copy of the book and wanted to read a book, and I knew it was a good one. I also wanted to review for...
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (I swear, I did occasionally read books that didn't start with "The Adventures of"). From fourth grade through about sixth grade, before I discovered "sword and sorcery" novels, I was a Mark Twain completist. I read Tom Sawyer Abroad, a rather bizarre tale of Tom and Huck's trip across the country in a hot-air balloon, during which Huck exclaimed that maps were "liars" because the color of the ground in certain states didn't correspond to the color on the map (a motif later taken up by a series of Calvin and Hobbes comics -- to save space, I'll declare right now that I have read every Calvin and Hobbes strip ever produced, at least ten times, at least); Puddin' Head Wilson, which seems to have consisted of two half-digested stories in one; and a variety of other writings that were easily accessible in the library. I distinctly remember thinking that Huckleberry Finn was his least accomplished work. I had to read it again for sophomore English, and I did a hasty job of it. One could rightly say that I have not-read Huckleberry Finn multiple times.
  • The Bible. I had a startling, though half-unconscious, insight while growing up: the most annoying thing I could do would be to Actually Read the Bible. I read the whole thing through, in undisciplined segments, multiple times, focusing in on the most gruesome or puzzling incidents (my favorite is the story of Ehud in Judges 3). Nothing sets church people on edge quite as much as someone who knows the Bible, especially someone who has been trained to read the Bible through the careful study of books whose titles begin with "The Adventures of...." More than one biblical scholar has noted that fantasy novels are the best modern analogue to the scriptures. I never read them more than once (although arguably I read the same David Eddings series twice, though he switched around the names the second time -- still, David Eddings is the man; I think we can agree on that). I had a tendency to prefer the Old Testament over the new, which the sheer tedium of Bible quizzing only confirmed and strengthened. One might say that I have not-read Matthew, Luke, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, James, Hebrews, and 1 and 2 Peter many, many times.
  • Fear and Trembling. I read this my freshman year of college, having had virtually no instruction in philosophy, and I found it utterly incomprehensible. I then read it a couple years later after having read a lot of Plato (Protagoras is my favorite dialogue -- put it on the list), and still found it incomprehensible. I read it for an informal "reading group," precursor to the university without condition, and started to find it comprehensible. I read it a fourth time, for class, and I understood most of it. I'm sure that on the fifth time through, I'll finally comprehend the part about the merman. I also read Repetition about three times and Philosophical Fragments twice -- they weren't nearly as hard for me.
  • The Waste Land, Four Quartets, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock -- while we're on the topic of poetry, let us also mention the first book of The Faerie Queene, Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and Othello.
  • A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This was an important book for my development as a person. My senior year in high school, I was determined to read that book no matter what the odds. The title alone was what grabbed me -- I didn't even know about Joyce's canonical status at that point. Since I was going through a conversion to Catholicism at the time, it was especially bizarre to me. We might also add the first hundred pages of Ulysses to my multiple reads list -- I've started that one so many times that I can probably recite certain passages from memory, but once Leopold Bloom enters the scene, I've lost interest.
  • Slaughterhouse-Five and Cat's Cradle. I make fun of Vonnegut-o-philes, because I am one.
  • The Crying of Lot 49. I remain convinced that Thomas Pynchon is the most important theologian of the 20th century.
  • Invisible Man. In my naivete, the first time through I wanted to run to my professor and say, "Things like that boxing match -- they didn't actually happen, right? He just made it up -- it couldn't have been that bad, could it?" Say, not ask.
  • Oedipus Rex and Antigone -- but since they were high school reads, I can't remember the details. I hate how bad a reader I was then.
  • The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute -- Yes, you read that correctly -- I am on my way to being a scholar of Slavoj Zizek, the trend-sucking dilettante himself.
  • Seminar XX: Encore -- Lacan is much better the second time through. I didn't read the knot-tying section on my second pass, so maybe this doesn't count.
    (This list is turning out to be longer than I expected.)
  • Catch-22, White Noise, Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
  • Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, In Memoriam. Have I ever mentioned the paper I wrote on The Crying of Lot 49 and In Memoriam, in light of my half-digested understanding of Zizek's Lacanian ethics? It was one of those times when I chose a paper topic by using the "Oh, fuck it" test.
  • The Trial. Kafka almost ranks up there with Twain in terms of obsession -- he was truly the love of my high school life. Has he influenced my thinking at all? Perhaps unconsciously. Or perhaps I now shun him because "Kafka's for high schoolers."
  • Notes from Underground. This has been like the return of the repressed for me -- every few years it resurfaces. I'm about due for another helping of Dostoevsky. Crime and Punishment might also count on this list, though the first time was an over-ambitious junior high attempt, wherein I didn't "understand" -- but as Lacan says, and I paraphrase, "Read first, then understand."


I'm sure there are others. I initially thought the list was going to end shortly after Huckleberry Finn, but it turns out that I've been leading a fairly monastic life since age ten. I keep thinking that maybe I theoretically need to take a year off after getting my masters at CTS, but then I think, "No, if at all possible, what I need to do is read books and occasionally talk to people about them." Outside of that, all other choices and options blend together in a sea of indifference -- marriage or singleness, lay or clergy, business or charity, Coke or Pepsi. I worry vaguely about incurring debts and becoming "tied down," but that's precisely because such things could become obstacles to reading books and occasionally talking to people about them.

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Tuesday, February 24, 2004

(9:20 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

John Calvin: Atheist?

Right now I should be reading Derrida's classic examination of religion, The Gift of Death. Today I have already read two essays by Jan Patocka on which Derrida comments, and of Patocka I must say, "Good shit." Of Derrida's analysis of Patocka, I must say, "Isn't really holding my interest." I am becoming more interested in political issues and less interested in religious issues; one may indeed rightly ask if there is any way for me to be more interested in politics or less interested in religion than I already am.

Nevertheless, I am compelled to write tonight about the atheism of John Calvin. I do not intend this to be a post "bashing" or "snarking" John Calvin, although my Wesleyan heritage might incline me to do so. My contention is that John Calvin gestures toward what Bonhoeffer calls "religionless Christianity" (a concept around which I have nearly wrapped my mind since reading Alain Badiou's St. Paul and now Ted Jennings' Insurrection of the Crucified). The key to this? The doctrine of double predestination. I know, it sounds weird. But here's my contention: Calvin created an entirely arbitrary approach to heaven and hell because he does not care about heaven and hell. He does a shitty job of it precisely because it is an issue that he only felt compelled to address because there are some parts of the Bible that address the issue. He pushes it off into an eternal, utterly irrelevant choice at the beginning of time in an effort to make sure that the idea of heaven and hell have nothing to do with the heart of Christian practice and teaching.

A system of heaven and hell, in which God parcels out "rewards" for more or less arbitrary behaviors in the present life -- that's religion to me. That's religion as obscurantism. Perhaps such obscurantism could serve positive ends, but historically, it never has. No one has ever said, "Feed the hungry and clothe the naked, or you're going straight to hell" (a quote from one of my fellow students). No one has ever said, "If you don't stop gossipping and backbiting, you're going to hell." It's always arbitrary stuff that has nothing to do with anything, like using the proper language or putting your dick in the right spot -- all the while remaining completely indifferent to reality, to the extent that you actually have to convince people that Jesus has anything to say about the poor. That's obscurantism, right there. That's religion. That, to me, is "believing in God."

John Calvin, it seems to me, from my limited understanding, is calling us to live as though there were no God. That's what the Reformation as a whole is all about -- getting us to stop believing in God and start following the gospel. It was an attempt that failed. We're addicted to religion. We can't get enough of it. Obscurantism, especially obscurantism that hurts people, is our favorite thing to do as human beings, aside from starting little treehouse clubs based on who believes in God the hardest.

Under normal circumstances, I would write this more ornately, with longer sentences. I'm not in the mood now. I need to go eat, then slog through Derrida. Given Time was a far superior book. Go read Patocka while you wait for the next post.

Congratulations to Robb for his herculean effort earlier this morning.

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(6:50 AM) | Anonymous:

I'm Just A Boring Example of Everybody Else

This is going to be an music post. Not just A music post, but AN music post. An being the operative word, because while speaking of music, that word in this instance will encompass many vowel started words, so I just can't bring myself to throw an "a" in front of it. Really, this is all just an excuse because I accidentally typed "an" and my backspace button hasn't worked since Rosemary Cloony was skinny and Rick James wasn't on crack.

However, I think I'd like to fulfill the request of Adam Robinson to share what I'm listening to. It should be explained that my main musical experience takes place in the car. I drive some 2 hours a day on a normal day (30 minutes to school, 30 minutes to work, 30 minutes to home..at least 30 minutes of delivery at work, or "about towning"), which, by clicking Start, then Programs, then Accesories, then Calculator, I am able to find out is a minimum of 10 hours in the car during the week. Then on weekends I try to get out and do stuff so that's infinitely more time dependent upon if "stuff" is in OKC (60 minutes round trip) or Norman (100 minutes round trip) or is a trip home to Bartlesville to see the parents (600 minutes). More often than not however, stuff is a trip over to Braum's for some a gallon of milk, some ice cream, and dinner (5 minutes, one way..I normally camp out there through the weekend). Add in church and various other trips to the store, and we're looking at anywhere from 12 hours driving per week to 20. I have a 6-cd changer in my car, so in my terms, we're looking at 2 1/2 times through each cd to 4 times a week..so obviously this is the bulk of my listening.

I don't know why anyone would care about such things, but I feel the need to justify that the cds that happen to wind up in my car get more "play time" than others I play when just sitting around. I prefer silence for when I'm doing homework, and I have 23 hours of class this semester, so most of the time it's silence (except when I get done with a few hours to spare like this morning, and can sit back and POST). Yet, even when I was little it took me forever to get into music because I don't normally feel like just sitting in my room listening to stuff, and I'm not usually a massive fan of background music - I either need a situation to totally focus on the music, or I'm not that interested, which makes the nothing-else-to-do aspect of the car great for bonding with my cds.

However, before I could drive I didn't have much reason for music, and thus didn't really listen to much. This caused trouble when I was in junior high. I remember reading the bands off people's t-shirts to learn what was popular. When this girl I liked once asked me what my favorite band was, I quickly thought back to the last shirt I'd seen and answered "Oh, you know..I'm totally hardcore into the Cranberries right now.." It was not until years later I understood the girl's total lack of interest from that point on.

Another time on the bus, there was a conversation about music, and this girl Latoya asked me what music I liked..always a dreaded question. Well, my dad had been playing the crap out of Christian a capella group Take 6, so I told her about them. She asked me what style they were, and I told her "well..they're pretty alternative...." in my musical innocence I thought "alternative" meant "Christian music..the TRUE alternative." This, of course, led to great scorn when I brought her the tape to listen to the next day.

So, to review - I've pretty much gone from one extreme to the other in a short 7 years, freshman year of high school I started listening to music..got heavily into Christian music..then junior year, I started listening to blessed 105.1 THE EDGE out of Detroit (I think that was the right frequency..I can't remember), which pretty much caught me up on all things "good music" in the 90's combined with good stuff coming out at the time that mainstream radio didn't play. Then they up and turned into a Soul station, which I continued to listen to through high school..but I was forced to just go out and buy cds, which launched me past the "mainstream". Through college I experienced the normal discovery of other bands and what not, but probably took it to another level to where now I am back to where I started - unable to speak to anyone in real life about music, ever.

Now that we have my musical history and current state out of the way, let me speak some specifics. Normally there are a few select CDs that I listen to all the time at home when I get a chance..if I can't be completely focused, I like familiarity. So, for what I still listen to here, you can revisit my "best of 2003" list (I'd link..but the permalink is no more) , add some Sufjan..and The Decemberists, Broken Social Scene, Cat Power, and Songs:Ohia and you pretty much have everything I listen to here at home. Not much change there. However, the car is a place of constant rotation. I change cds out on tuesday, and have a pretty ridiculous formula for exactly which CDs are added to the car. I'd describe it, but I think any concoction you can come up with will make me less of a dork than the truth.

So, for the time being, perhaps the best way to tell what I'm listening to is to give a brief description or the 6 cds in my car. This is a good time for discussing such things, since I change the 6 out every tuesday night, and thus am pretty familliar with them on monday nights. (CD Change day was monday, which made more sense being the start of a new week and all, but my cd player went out for a day a while back, and I had to move it to make sure each cd got its fair play).

It should be noted that 1.) I've recently been in a full tilt classical swirl. This is great, because the music itself is awesome..but bad for the wallet. The classical is..um..a lot less easily "obtainable" than other stuff, and I keep having to buck up 30-50 greenbacks for the box sets. 2.) I have decided in recent weeks to make efforts toward re-visiting my entire cd collection. This was made mostly to combat my mom's constant prodding of "You never even listen to half those cds!" but also partially because I feel a certain sense of obligation. This means a lot of Christian cds. I mean, A LOT. I have 3 Avalon cds, and was music manager at a Family Christian Store, if that gives any indication of the level I'm speaking of.

So, with that..here's a brief discussion of the 6 cds currently in my cd player:

1. Glennwood - "Where Do We Go From Here?".
I'm not too certain how I wound up with this one. Well, yeah I am, I got it because Amazon has it reccomended for those who like Death Cab, The Wrens, The Postal Service, The Strokes and The Shins...we should have been a match made in heaven. But..it's really just marginal emo. It really might even be pretty good emo (which equals "doesn't totally suck) if the singer wasn't all...trying to sound classically trained or something. I'm not sure what, but something funky is going on with his voice. The CD is not exceptionally bad or anything, I'm just not sure how in the heck it got a national release...if I were to go see some local band, $3 show and heard this, it'd be pretty decent. But, with such high hopes propped up by Amazon, I am desperately disappointed. It should have read "Customers who bought titles by Glennwood also bought titles by these artists: Your friend's band that's just starting but is so "totally sweet" and "totally gonna get signed soon." I also lost all hope for America upon seeing that this cd was the 7th most popular on Amazon under rock.

2. Steve Burns - "Songs For Dust Mites"
I first discussed this album some decades ago. I'm not sure Steve Burns is THE God..but he is a God. When I saw him in concert, I was awe-struck by the fact that he was the guy from Blues Clues. The guy in the green striped shirt talking to salt shakers made of felt was suddenly up on stage rocking my soul. What's more..he had an EXTENSIVE multi-media presentation in the background featuring freaking DOMO-KUN of god killing kittens for masturbation fame. Then I bought the album, and found it equally great. There is a good heaping of Flaming Lips on here, by virtue of the fact that their drummer plays on the album, and the guy who produced Soft Bulletin also produced this album, and Wayne Coyne seems to be Steve's best friend. Wayne Coyne was at the Steve Burns concert too, in case you've forgotten or I didn't mention it. The crowd's jaw collectively dropped as he came in the side door and stood there, being so impeccably cool. I'm pretty sure I saw several scenesters rearrange the way they were standing and listening to the music to try to make their posture more like Wayne's posture. Seriously, Oklahoma City may not love many things, but the Flaming Lips we undeniably do. Love. One thing we undeniably do love.

Anyway, like I was saying, in a lot of ways, this could have been packaged as a second cd with Yoshimi. However, it is undeniably amazing in its own right as well. I really feel for the Steve Burns. Do any of us know what it's like to be a star of one of the most popular children's television shows of all time, to have those goofy teens who wear Spongebob Squarepants shirts as your most cognizant fans? To have MOMS wanting your body all day and all night, and emailing you as such, while knowing that the only way you came to their attention is because their LITTLE KID really likes you? AND THEN to go out and make a rock record so incredibly better than the rest, and have to have every review (including this one) spend at least a paragraph explaining that you used to be on Blue's Clues, rather than discussing the rock?

We all owe it to Steve to purchase Songs For Dustmites. To be this good under such situations is incredible, and I am definitely looking forward to his next cd.

3. Radiohead - Lost Treasures (Disc II) -
I'll make up some time lost on my Steve Burns rant here. Radiohead is freaking brilliant, you know this, I know this, little boy blue knows this. This album is the B-Sides from 93-97. It is great, and particularly wonderful is when they make fun of Oasis while playing "Wonder Wall." Radiohead is really about as far as I go in the experimental category..I'm sure there's something a little further along I might like, but it's strange to me that I love the last 3 Radiohead albums while I hate Sonic Youth's more experimental stuff, and pretty much anything else I've heard from bands that do stuff like the "no fun festival" of experimental rock. But, again, my greatest failing in life may still be my inability to like Pavement's Slanted & Enchanted, coupled with my great love for Terror Twilight. I don't know what to say, I love my hooks. All that to say..Radiohead is strange, because, based on these presumptions I should like this early stuff a lot better than the new stuff, but I like the last 3 albums better on the whole..though I think OK Computer is still my all time favorite. I don't know what this says about me..maybe it just reveals what a poser I am since it is cool to like the experimental Radiohead. So, yeah, this cd is really good.

4. USSR Ministry Of Culture - Shostakovich: Two Pieces From Scarlatti, Symphony #4.
This CD would be a heck of a lot better if everyone in the concert hall would stop coughing. But, to that extent it's a bit of history - how many recordings of a bunch of pinko coughs are there in the world? Seriously, throughout the whole thing, it was like the concert was played in the Gulag as a wake for the dying rather than whatever lavish concert hall it was played in. That said, I'm going to show my poser-dom again here. I don't like Shostakovich nearly as much as your Beethoven, Haydn, Bach, Mozart crew. I'm sorry, I can't get into the ear-piercing dischord and what not. I'm sure life under whatever russian torment it was that Dmitry suffered under (I'm way too lazy to go back and re-read the insert) was really hard, and I'm sure this expresses that well..but I still don't like the general feeling of "God..someone really IS going to kill me" that this music creates..especially not while driving. It's a bit like a long horror movie soundtrack, though obviously better..but not up to the hype that the intellectual crowd seems to throw its way. I'm no scholar in classical music, and I'm sure I sound like a twit here, so I'll stop..

5. Explosions In The Sky - Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Die, Those Who Tell The Truth Shall Live Forever.
Another band I've written about here before. EITS is still, in my opinion, the greatest band to come out of the post rock movement. This may have its source in the fact that they are the only one I've seen live..we'll find out when I go see Don Caballero in a few weeks..but for now, I demand that everyone who dares read this blog go buy an album by these guys, or at least contact a friend who has the album and ask them to send it to you. They certainly hit the "rock" part of post rock a little more than Godspeed or Mum or Silver Mt. Zion..there's not really any strings. That's what makes it so amazing to me. Instead of bringing in instruments less familliar to rock and meshing them, they take your standard tools..bass, guitar, drums..and somehow go off and make this thing that is seemingly totally new. That while using just these common place instruments they can make 15 minute epics which never come close to losing your attention, yet don't rely on any of the normal tricks like lyrics or traditional hooks is absolutely amazing. When they came here, they came with this folk-type guy who went under the name Lazarus. As the crowd was definitely a rock crowd, he took quite a beating from the local heckling flavor. Turns out he was on tour with them because he is one of their best friends..so they came up on stage, told the hecklers to "get their money back at the door and f-ing" leave" and watched to make sure that they did just that..then proceeded to just straight out go amazing for an hour or more. They didn't pause between songs or anything else..they just laid it on and floored everyone. Incredible..God bless them.

6. Rose Blossom Punch - Ephemere.

So, I was going to, and still might, make this list of what is good about Christian music. Or what my favorite Christian artists are..or something to make known the fact that I'm not embarassed of all this Christian music past (well..except the spanish-language Carman tape "Quien Es Aqui? HAY SOOS!"). I think it's a good topic, and I'll probably utilize it some day, but for now it is enough to know that Aaron Sprinkle and all his projects would and should be at the top of any list ever made about quality Christian-labeled music. From Poor Old Lu to his solo work, to this band, Rose Blossom Punch, he's never made a misstep (okay..discounting the pre-Sin Poor Old Lu stuff..). The fact that I happened to pick up this album is worth the hundreds of crappy cds I bought by bands with names like "According 2 John" and "Synkronized Brothaz of the Faith" and music like snot. I would try to think up a better comparative phrase than snot, but that music simply isn't worth the time it would take me. However, Aaron Sprinkle and Rose Blossom Punch are worth any time you choose to alot to them. It is a shame that Mercy Me sells 8 million albums while all the Aaron Sprinkle albums combined have probably sold 50,000. I'm very grateful that the Leave No CD Behind Initiative brought me back to this somewhat forgotten Christian classic.

So, there you have it, that's what I've been listening to this week. Oh, and for the completist, this post was written while listening to The Dandy Warhols - "The Dandy Warhols Come Down". And I also ate a ham and cheese sandwich made with Oscar Meyer brown sugar-cured ham and Mrs. Braid's Homemade Potato bread, and some miracle whip, and some Kraft American single slice cheese.

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Monday, February 23, 2004

(1:48 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Syllabus

An unexpected social engagement on Friday night has completely thrown off my academic rhythm, to the extent that I was unable to read the assignment for the university without condition this weekend. I propose we move the discussion date to next Monday, to give everyone plenty of time to read, study, and cherish Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" before we begin discussion. By that time, I might shell out $12 to upgrade my HaloScan account.

The new format is working well -- I'm glad to see that there is such consistent activity in the quick links and in the commonplace book.

In personal news, the tickets I've been receiving for violating tolls in parts of the state I've never been have in fact been dismissed -- I don't even have to bother with a hearing. I was very glad to hear that.

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Sunday, February 22, 2004

(5:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Further Critical Observations on Contemporary Culture

  • The monastic movement can only survive in the modern world by becoming a tourist attraction, where people come away with wonderful souvenirs of inner peace and joy. This would naturally lead to a reform within the movement itself that would make it more realistic and sustainable in the long term: the replacement of full-time monks and nuns who have committed for life with part-time, casual monks and nuns who come and go from monastery to monastery. In the Catholic Church, the priesthood has already adopted this model out of necessity (i.e., priests travelling from parish to parish in order to meet immediate needs on an ad hoc basis). Monasteries would do well to read the signs of the times and move forward on their own terms, rather than having change forced upon them, as it will be in any case.

  • One might hope that Republicanism will be discredited, if not by the time of the 2004 elections, then certainly after another term of George W. Bush's somewhat reckless approach to governance. Although gerrymandering may well ensure a consistent Republican advantage in the House of Representatives, it is still possible that the Bush presidency would convince some to leave the party and render gerrymandering irrelevant. The true danger may well be a Democratic Party that, far from having lost its soul, never had a soul to begin with, and presents itself as a common-sensical alternative to Republican excess. In the political situation as presently constituted, I cannot see any room for genuine imagination. We have only two choices:

    1. A Return to the Cold War: The focus is on catastrophic, long-shot threats, and the enemy is demonized to the point that substantive criticism of the present order is effectively ruled out from the start. Moral clarity is equated with a certain ideological blindness, and the word "national defense" is used to paper over the fact that the primary function of the military is in fact to subdue other nations, which pose no credible, sustained threat to the American mainland.
    2. A Return to Clintonism: Let us not forget that Bill Clinton was even more warlike than George W. Bush is feared to be, and also let us not forget that the Democratic Party fully endorsed the use of force against yet another small nation whose "threat" to America was laughable at best, WMDs or not. Is Clintonism finally anything other than the old Cold War logic, delivered with more finesse due to Bill Clinton's clear intellectual and oratorical superiority to George W. Bush? Is Ronald Reagan not the true horizon of American political discourse, whether right-wing or "left-wing"? (Though "both options are worse," I doubt that very many can adequately formulate a program that would go beyond mere Clintonism, viewing the Democratic Party as the savior of our comfortable lifestyle, which is ultimately what Bush's incompetent policies threaten.)


  • The war against cigarettes is a red herring -- logic would dictate that rather than focus on long-shot risks of cancer from second-hand smoke (well over 90% of those who contract lung cancer are themselves smokers), an initiative that truly sought greater health for society as a whole would seek to reduce the number of automobiles in use, which daily cause substantially more deaths than smoking could ever dream of causing. The closest we get is the (necessary and proper) campaign against drunk driving, which itself represents a red herring to a certain extent. The focus on long-shot catastrophic losses, above identified as "Cold War logic," is the foundation for our entire political discourse, in which we are supposed to believe that our primary concern should be cutting taxes on the extremely wealthy, in order to prevent the possibility that the government will take from me millions of dollars (when I, too become extremely wealthy). The American flag should, by all rights, be an image of a lottery ticket.

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Saturday, February 21, 2004

(10:12 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Sky Turns Green

Previously, I analyzed the Radiohead song "Exit Music (For a Film) vis-à-vis John Keats' "Eve of Saint Agnes." (Sidenote: in searching for that previous article, I noticed that all comments for posts not on the current page have been erased. I don't know what happened.) Today I'd like to use this break in my monastic existence in order to say a few words about "Where I End and You Begin", track six on their new album, Hail to the Thief. It is my opinion that the apparently obscurantist lyrics of this song are in fact capable of being deciphered and full of meaning and relevance.

I reproduce them here from the Green Plastic Radiohead site:

there's a gap in between
there's a gap where we meet
where i end and you begin

and i'm sorry for us
the dinosaurs roam the earth
the sky turns green
where i end and you begin

i am up in the clouds
i am up in the clouds
and i can't and i can't come down

i can watch but not take part
where i end and where you start
where you, you left me alone
you left me alone.

X' will mark the place
like parting the waves
like a house falling in the sea.

i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive

there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies


Before an analysis of the lyrics proper, it is necessary to situate them in their musical context. After a haunting, ethereal opening, the song enters into a bassline and drum beat that will remain essentially unchanged throughout. The first two stanzas represent a musical grouping, with relatively subdued delivery; the second pair of stanzas are musically an intensification of the first two. The fifth comes after a brief instrumental interlude and represents the most Thom Yorke-ish singing in the song, and the final two repetitive stanzas are basically a part of the instrumentation that brings the song to a close. With that basic framework in mind, we can proceed to lyrical analysis.

there's a gap in between
there's a gap where we meet
where i end and you begin

and i'm sorry for us
the dinosaurs roam the earth
the sky turns green
where i end and you begin


The first stanza twice repeats that "there's a gap," occurring "where I end and you begin." One naturally wonders whether this gap is a normal and healthy "space" that is reputedly necessary for every relationship or whether it represents something more sinister, and the second stanza answers that question. He is "sorry for us," because that gap is where "the dinosaurs roam the earth," ancient history that is only identifiable by its ruins. The gap is where "the sky turns green," where some kind of solid foundation is expected but only thin air can be found. Nothing can be built where I end and you begin. No moorings can be found there.

i am up in the clouds
i am up in the clouds
and i can't and i can't come down

i can watch but not take part
where i end and where you start
where you, you left me alone
you left me alone.


These next two stanzas call into radical question the very possibility of a relationship. He is "up in the clouds" and cannot come down, because, as we have already seen, there is only more sky where the ground should be. The gap in between may very well be an extension of himself, an obstacle that is internal and at the same time seemingly beyond his control. He "can watch and not take part," and he blames that on the withdrawal of the other, who "left [him] alone" (repeated). Their encounter has already been described as unspeakably ancient (taking place during the age of dinosaurs, before the dawning of human history) and as productive of sorrow, but at the same time as elusive and destabilizing -- indeed, one wonders where he ever got the idea that there was a "you" who began at all, where he got the idea that the green-colored air was ever anything but more of himself.

X' will mark the place
like parting the waves
like a house falling in the sea.


"X will mark the place" -- but that would require ground, which is not in evidence -- "like the parting of the waves" -- evoking a biblical miracle of liberation from slavery -- "like a house falling in the sea" -- the loss of all security and self-identity in a sea of chaos. The water plays a role of both salvation and destruction, but strangely, the destruction comes after the liberation. Does he have any idea what it would be like to stand in that space with the other or to encounter the other? Since this is a pop song, the relationship would normally be interpreted as a heterosexual romantic one, but it would appear that there's no such thing as a sexual relationship. (Has Thom been reading Lacan?)

i will eat you alive (4x)
there'll be no more lies (4x)


The last two stanzas, a repeated subtext sung along with the bassline, represent despair. "I will eat you alive" -- I will absorb you, I will not allow you to continue to exist as "you," but only as another part of me. "There'll be no more lies" -- but also no possibility of communication. The speaker will know everything, but be completely alone, and until the other intrudes upon him through a miracle that would simultaneously be the loss of everything he understands as himself, despair is the only possibility. Finally, he has provided words to the bassline that has run unceasingly through the song, the subtext to all the other lyrics.

there's a gap in between
there's a gap where we meet
where i end and you begin

and i'm sorry for us
the dinosaurs roam the earth
the sky turns green
where i end and you begin

i am up in the clouds
i am up in the clouds
and i can't and i can't come down

i can watch but not take part
where i end and where you start
where you, you left me alone
you left me alone.

X' will mark the place
like parting the waves
like a house falling in the sea.

i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive
i will eat you all alive

there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies
there'll be no more lies


To be understood properly, the song must be heard again, the second time with the knowledge of the ending, and thus of the underlying theme, in hand. The ethereal opening makes sense as the space of the encounter, the space where we meet, the period when dinosaurs roam the earth. The consistent self, represented by the bassline with its despairing "lyrics," represents the foreclosure of the possibility of encounter. I look for the place where I end and you begin -- but wherever I go, there I am! I can't return to the ground of an encounter and must instead remain floating in the realm of foundationless, cloudlike ideas, consoled only by memories and resentments of dubious origins. Echoes of the opening occur, though, even at the very end, promising the impossible possibility of another encounter, another meeting without the gap, a meeting where the threshold of the house of self has been demolished, cast into the sea, and self and other are in unmediated communion.

What can we learn here? Is this an "adult" position, or more romanticism (as in "Exit Music")? Has Thom Yorke ever truly left behind the adolescent obviousness of Pablo Honey? Can the gap in between, which is apparently just "more of me," be perceived instead as a threshold, open in a gesture of perpetual hospitality? Is it possible to mediate between the miracle of the coming of the other and the maintenance of a stable self?

If Radiohead, so emblamatic of a sophisticated, nearly post-rock sound, with apparently nonsensical lyrics, can be shown to be operating still at the level of adolescent hearbreak and rebellion, what are we to think of the rest of the field of musical endeavor? Has the concept of adulthood or coming of age been abandoned entirely in the postmodern era, in favor of a perpetual adolescence that cannot envision a way of relating to the other that does not represent complete self-destruction? Or is Radiohead remaining faithful to the adolescent origins of rock music while gesturing toward something more truly subversive? If not, why not? If so, then is that something good?

For the time being, these must remain open questions in every sense of the word -- they open onto the whole field of rock music and indeed of contemporary culture in all its parts.

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Friday, February 20, 2004

(10:13 AM) | Anonymous:

Posts deferred.

I’ve been having strange experiences lately. Nothing actually dramatic, nothing worthy to be filmed except the stranger falling in that dinner, that was dramatic. All the same (God, I don’t even know what that means) life has felt strange and I want to call it sublime but my fear of heresy stops me. I don’t know if I can describe these experiences (perceptions, apperceptions, cognitions, thoughts) and my writing always comes out less than I would hope (I’ll confess, I wish I was a great writer, I wish I had the ability to control or lose control; whichever makes good writing) but I’ll try merely for the sake of not being forgotten by those who read.

I’ve read 3 books in a week. I feel like a schizo. All these ideas in my head, Zizek, Derrida, Kant (WTF?), God. Who the fuck am (the computer wants me to change this to “is”) I? Sometimes at night, when I talk to people (at least I hope they are people) online I wonder how much of many of my thoughts are mine, if the process is mine, if there is any goodness in those thoughts belonging to me. This thought always comes to me when I’m on the train, what am I doing this for? This thought always comes when I’m trying to get through Kant or Derrida or Heidegger or God, when I am always fighting the nausea that the motion of the train causes (I think anyway, it could be what I’m reading, or the fact that I never sleep enough). This thought always comes when my face is pressed up against the window, my scarf a makeshift pillow and my coat a blanket always too hot I often wonder if I look like an old, overweight man trying desperately to make love to some beautiful young girl. My spine always feels like its about to pop when I sleep on the train, not pop like fingers pop but pop out of my body, sometimes it pops down sometimes out but always this pain. It makes it hard to sleep in bed too.

The other day on the “L” a man was drunk and preaching about the Church. He said that whenever two men come together (always men?) that God is there and therefore it is the Church. Like the PTA, at least that is what he told the man sitting next to him who was polite enough or cruel enough to engage the man in conversation. He then began to chant “No sex for you. No sex for you. No sex for you!” very loudly and violently. Everyone, including myself, looked away or pretended that this was all the same. Maybe it was. Damn me for not talking to him, to be cruel or kind. I wonder if I read Derrida as badly as I read the drunk preacher.

I have a fundamental distrust of people who don’t like sex. Actually, to be quite honest, I have a fundamental distrust of people who don’t have some kind of obsession with sex. I wonder what that means. Actually I hope it doesn’t mean what I think it does.

That drunk preacher, I named him Dionysus (you may know his revels, how he called me to the impossible that could be if I would let it), is stuck in my head. I don’t know if I am thinking about him or if it is Kant, or Zizek, or Derrida, or my mother (Mother, can’t you see that I am burning? With what? Lust? Where is dad?).

I can’t write well. I don’t have the wisdom for it but I swear I try, I swear. Is plagiarism really illegal? If so, I don't think many are innocent.

UPDATE

This wasn't a cry for help, a plea for understanding, an invitation to critique my life or anything besides something I wrote. I hope you enjoyed it, instead of worried about it. Now go have sex or something, it is Friday for God's sake.

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Thursday, February 19, 2004

(8:38 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Notes on the new format

I'm impressed that it only took two hours to get the new format up and running. Two points of disappointment:


  1. My economy web hosting package does not support the protocols necessary to include the two sub-blogs without the ugly scroll bars.
  2. It turns out that the three-column method would be virtually unusable except on a monitor considerably larger than mine. The full Glas effect must remain deferred.


In any case, all current contributors to the Weblog, as well as the keepers of our esteemed sister sites, have been invited to the two sub-blogs. For those who are worried about an unwieldy system, have no fear, for the Blogger interface is well-suited to maintaining multiple blogs quickly and easily.

My current desire is to leave the "Common-Place Book" anonymous in terms of who posted, although of course the author should be identified, and also without a date. The quick links will have a timestamp, but will also be anonymous. If anyone objects to this system, I will add the names of those who post. The two sub-blogs have the added advantage of appearing on all the archive pages, in order to increase the randomness of the affair.

I hope everyone enjoys the new format and that everyone will feel free to participate immoderately in the two new sub-blogs.

UPDATE: The Benjamin text has been made available here by à Gauche.

If anyone has a copy of Jan Patochka's Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy that would be accessible to me within the next couple days, please let me know.

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(6:24 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The University without Condition Begins Now

Sorry to use two Derrida phrases as titles in a row.

In any case, the university without condition, sponsored by à Gauche and the Kotsko Institute for Advanced Intertextual Studies, begins now. We will be reading Walter Benjamin's essay "Critique of Violence," available in Reflections. Those who do not have access to the book may e-mail either me or à Gauche to receive a convenient, printable PDF copy of the essay. It is approximately twenty pages long. So far, the participatngs include me, à Gauche, Mike Hancock, and Cap'n Pete.

I'm not sure if we're going to try to put any time parameters on this -- perhaps that would be a good discussion for the comment box, for those who would like to participate. Once we reach the end of the time period we designate for reading the material, those of us with blogging capabilities can begin posting, or perhaps we could designate one person to be the comment central for the university without condition.

In any case, thanks to à Gauche for being impatient and making a concrete effort to get this project off the ground.

I would also like to note that, barring complication, the new format I proposed last week will be operational by Friday morning.

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(8:37 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

On Cosmopolitanism

In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida draws on the experience of "cities of refuge" for persecuted writers to begin formulating the ways in which cities might be able to offer alternative centers of power to the nation-state. Since the nation-state excludes so many people from its protection, as shown by the situation of refugees and others who have no state that will claim them, it is necessary to find spaces in the current order where some kind of abstract membership won't be as much of a problem -- where we can still follow the medieval rule that "whoever is in the territory is of the territory" (usually written in Latin, but I can't remember that version).

In the medieval tradition, cities are by definition cities of refuge, since whoever made it into the city was freed from serfdom, and some of that independence still occurs today. Chicago, for instance, has decided that its police force will never be an agent for the INS. Various cities around America have declared that the Patriot Act will not be enforced within their city limits or have written up resolutions opposing the war in Iraq. Perhaps most notoriously, San Francisco, long known as the most gay-friendly city in the country, has begun sanctioning gay weddings. Virtual Stoa has a nice post on the subject, which is particularly personal for him since he and his wife were married in San Francisco city hall.

Through observing American history, I have long thought that states rights were just a code word for racism, but a variety of factors, such as the various states that have tried or have actually implemented something like universal health care or the states that have been favorable to gay marriage, have illustrated that generally left-wing goals can be accomplished in the spaces that our strange and complicated system of government opens up. Even more promising that state innovations, to my mind, are acts of civil disobedience by cities. Due to their fuzzier relationship to the entire chain of command, cities that have decided to disobey the higher authorities are much less likely to simply back down once the next-highest level declares that they must do so. If the federal government wants to stop gay marriages in San Francisco, for example, it seems likely that they will have to send in troops, which would only end up helping the gay marriage cause due to the vast disproportion.

Not having a large conservative and nationalistic rural population to keep happy probably also helps cities be more progressive.

ADDITIONAL THOUGHT: Is it any coincidence that Full House, a show about three single (for most of the series) guys living together raising children, took place in San Francisco? Couldn't this point the way toward even more radical models of marriage? And if you think about it, shouldn't Joey be able to visit Danny in the hospital? Shouldn't the other two maintain the right to inherit Danny's house and continue raising his children in the event of Danny's untimely death? The more I think about that show, the more radical possibilities present themselves.

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Wednesday, February 18, 2004

(4:52 PM) | Anonymous:

Christ Killer

I wonder why it even matters who killed Jesus. First, it requires a couple matters of faith to care about.

For example - was there a Jesus of Nazareth? Was he the Christ? If so, why would he let himself be killed so shortly after beginning his teachings?

Let's assume Jesus lived, was the Christ, and walked into the most obvious and asinine of political traps, assuring the Romans continued security in an area they held with little more than a whim and an installed magistrate.

Ok. So, Jesus is going to be killed. The Jews in power, and yet not the Jews and Gentiles that are following Jesus, are going to be blamed for his death. Well, we could blame the soldiers. Or the specific people in power that paid for Judas' betrayal (certainly not all the Jews), or we could blame the inanimate hammer and nails that hung him on the cross. Frankly, the spear in Christ's side that caused the fatal wound (and a spillage of water and blood, fulfilling one more prophecy, the one about the water flowing out of the right side of the temple and whatnot) should probably be viewed as mercy, and not the final insult. Crucifixion is not murder, but exposure to the elements. It's like leaving a man tied up in the desert, except you don't have to get a sunburn this way.

The fact that Mel Gibson wanted to retell the "Greatest Story Ever Told" isn't too unlike, in my mind, Peter Jackson saying, "Man, that Ralph Bakshi version of the Lord of the Rings sucked. Let's try this again." It's going to do some things that the fanboys won't forgive, but the majority of people will see the quality of film-making involved, and if it turns one more person on to the source material, well, whoopy hoo ha.

In other news, I've been preparing for a scholarly post. I've been re-reading John Steinbeck's East of Eden for the umpteenth time, trying to write a 'book report' of sorts. It's going to be too intense to be called a review, really. I just wanted to share the reason for my quietude.

In yet other news, today I am 23. And I'm listening to Jets to Brazil.

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Tuesday, February 17, 2004

(10:07 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Who Killed Jesus?

Due to that stupid Mel Gibson movie, everyone's asking this question. My answer is simple. It wasn't the Jews. It certainly isn't "everyone in the world who ever sins." The people who killed Jesus are the Roman soldiers who nailed him to the cross, propped it up, and left him hanging there. My argument in favor of this answer is that they did things that directly and inevitably led to his death. A major advantage of my argument is that the one element of Jesus' biography that is almost unanimously regarded as a historical fact is his crucifixion, and so we don't have to worry about parsing out the historically unreliable gospels.

Can we call a "case closed" on this one now?

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(12:37 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Uses and Abuses of Morality for Intellectual Life

The debate on conservatives in academia rages on, at John and Belle's and elsewhere. Belle's story of C., which recounts the woe-filled tale of a more traditional-minded PhD candidate in the classics department who was made to feel very unwelcome by all those who disagreed with his opinions, helped me to understand a little better the objections that reasonable conservatives have to the leftist academy:


  1. They're assholes to people who have opinions that vary from their own.
  2. Their supposed opinions don't really have much to do with real life, and so discriminating against people based on their opinions, whether consciously or unconsciously, is in principle just as bad as discriminating against them based on other arbitrary factors unrelated to the work at hand.
  3. Furthermore, the expected political orthodoxy in some departments allows some people to get through by parroting the party line when in fact they suck as scholars.


Let me repeat: all our "political opinions" don't have much effect in real life. The average citizen only has a miniscule influence on public policy through voting, a right which most citizens do not even exercise. With that in mind, deciding whether or not to "support" the war in Iraq is deciding what particular things one will say in conversation. It would be wonderful if people could openly discuss issues in our nation, but the two-party system, which roughly corresponds to a two-ideology system (liberal/conservative, mostly overlapping with the two parties), turns political opinions into a certain kind of piety useful for identifying in-groups. Thus, even though it shouldn't make sense, it does make a certain kind of sense in our country for conservatives to be discriminated against in the same way that, say, Presbyterians might be discriminated against.

What concrete actions should be taken? I don't know. Is discrimination against conservatives in academia that big a deal? Do leftists automatically do innovative work, finding new connections, and right-wingers automatically do the grunt work of careful research and scholarship? Would an influx of Republicans into the academic marketplace bring us the new commentaries on Livy that we've all been itching for? In short, would significantly, qualitatively different work take place if more conservatives were in academia?

In any case, such discrimination, whether conscious or unconscious, is certainly not fair, but I think I agree with John Holbo that it's not a problem worth fixing -- or at least not worth fixing thoroughly. Maybe what it comes down to is encouraging grad students and professors not to be assholes to people with different opinions -- certainly to engage them critically, to interrogate their position, etc. -- but to be nice to them on a personal level. Maybe go out for a drink with the Republican after the faculty meeting in which she filibustered the department's resolution opposing the Iraq war. Maybe understand that, except in extreme cases, everyone's acting in good faith and doesn't want to destroy our nation and the world, and so we should probably just treat everyone as people, at the end of the day. Maybe just grow up a little and learn how to study gender performance in ancient Greece without forming little tree-house clubs based on which petitions you've signed.

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Monday, February 16, 2004

(1:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Things that take a long time

A colleague and I were discussing the theology of Karl Barth, whose major work, the Church Dogmatics, is over 9000 pages long. He claimed that if you read fifty pages a day, you could read the whole thing in a year. I found a more exact figure for the page number, then did the math -- you can actually do it if you read a little over twenty-five pages a day (slightly under twenty-five if it's a leap year). I think that most any educated person should be able to read twenty-five pages a day in around an hour, and most people do have an hour to give if they look hard enough. So for all those who are thinking of reading the entire Church Dogmatics and don't think you have time -- you do have time, if you spread it out enough. (My colleague must have factored in breaks for weekends and federal holidays.)

Other really long works would probably be the same effect. For instance, In Search of Lost Time is probably less than half the length of Church Dogmatics, so you could read it in six months or so, at a completely reasonable and "doable" rate. (Does anyone have the exact figure? This is important.) You could read the complete Kant, the complete Shakespeare -- really, any massive body of work that "every educated person should know" -- in a reasonable amount of time if you paced yourself. Instead of watching the back-to-back "Full House" re-runs every night, break out Proust. It's that simple.

Only if you want to read Proust, though. If you want to watch the complete "Full House," then watching the back-to-back re-runs every night is probably the best way to go.

Now, of course, you're going to wonder how I'm applying this "slow and steady" logic in my own life. In my case, it's a team effort. Justin and I have determined that if we spent thirty minutes to an hour each day, working together, we can finish Contra III: The Alien Wars, at least on the easy level.

UPDATE: Justin and I did finish that game; now, on to the normal level.

Karl Barth is curing me of my aversion to reading theology -- although what I might be enjoying as I read (and tediously write an abstract) of portions of his Epistle to the Romans is not so much theology as Karl Barth himself. He was a truly brilliant man, with a powerful writing style and a penetrating intellect. I've been reading a lot about politically motivated dilletantism over at John and Belle's (okay, fine -- I can admit that it happens sometimes; I'll leave it to Chun to defend the MLA to the death), and one thing you can say for Barth was that he was never a dilletante. Deleuze once said that the best thing the student revolutionaries could do for the cause was to finish their dissertations, and that's exactly the approach Barth took. He took his intellectual enterprise seriously precisely because he took his politics so seriously.

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Sunday, February 15, 2004

(4:16 PM) | Anonymous:

Soul Intro/The Chicken

In the future this would be in the "quotes" side bar, but for now it will have to be simply a quick distraction for y'all till I can get done with enough of my research papers to feel right about posting. It's all about timing. All the same, here's probably the worst GW quote I've ever heard, brought to my attention by a friend's away message:

"For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific."
- George W. Bush, in Tokyo, Feb. 18, 2002.

Public reaction to this statement was mixed. A certain proportion of people felt it to be consistent with the common recollection.Some pointed to the fact that the alliance was initiated by Commodore Perry's 1853 arrival at Edo Bay with a small armada. Others complained that more diligent research might have yielded some mention of the Second World War, when relations were at a lower state.

Consider this an interactive post - until Anthony or I can post later tonight, have some fun putting your favorite GW quotes with applicable smart-alec asides in the comments section.

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Friday, February 13, 2004

(4:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Stewardship of My Time

The technology to implement a rudimentary version of the SuperBlog we were discussing a couple weeks ago does exist. Basically, I could make multiple columns, one for each type of content -- one for "real" posts, one for quick links, etc. It seems like a worthy experiment, but here's the issue: I have to read a small library this weekend. Perhaps if I get everything done by Sunday night, I can reward myself Monday night with an evening completely submerged in code.

In any case, here's my proposal: three columns, with a sidebar equivalent across the top. First column is for quick links. Second column is for substantive posts. Third column is for quotations of varying lengths. This would require three separate blogs from Blogger, to which all my loving co-bloggers would be invited. Comments would be reserved for the center column. Sound good?

UPDATE: No new posts from me until Monday afternoon at the earliest. If any of the other editors-at-large would like to keep the flow going, that would be welcome.

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(1:57 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The State of Sucky Rock

One of the rock stations in Chicago, 94.7, has been using the following promotion:

[Clip from song I like]: This sucks. [Clip from shitty song I hate]: This rocks! (repeat)

Usually the song I hate falls into the "drone rock" category -- a fourth-degree knockoff of a bad Pearl Jam song. Manufactured anger; slick, well-packaged rebellion.

I was a radio whore back in the 90s. I used to think that music was better back then, and it was, but it still wasn't quite "good." I was a huge Stone Temple Pilots fan when I was 16, and listening to them a couple weeks ago, I realized that they were mediocre at best. Nirvana and Pearl Jam (less so) stand the test of time a little better, but that might just be nostalgia talking.

One 90s figure I never want to hear from again is Chris Cornell. I don't know why he deemed it necessary to start a band with the guys from Rage Against the Machine and put out fifteen boring power ballads as singles, but ever since he did, I have hated him. Audioslave sucks. Chris Cornell sucks. Soundgarden retroactively sucks. A pox on his house.

The whole of the radio's "modern rock" is right-wing -- it's completely continuous with right-wing radio. It's all manufactured outrage and anger about shit that doesn't matter, distracting people and allowing those in power to do whatever they need to do -- rebellion in small, managable doses, a chance for white guys to feel alienated from the culture they control (in principle, even if most white guys really are powerless). Conservatism as radicalism, ignorance as strength, artificial suffering flavor.

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Thursday, February 12, 2004

(8:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Weblog Triumphalism

Robb's post below indicates one of the many reasons that the Weblog is head and shoulders above the rest of the blogosphere: variety. On what other blog could you find not just one, but two original raps, teary eyed confessionals, cutting edge philosophical discourse, biting cultural criticism, startling theological insights, but also the sexiest writing team alive? Well, actually, if you're looking for the latter, you might want to check out The H is O, but still.

Yet there are other blogs out there! And those blogs need our support. And love. Whether they're blogrolled or not. That's why I have decided, upon careful consideration, to do a "Blogosphere's Greatest Hits" post today, also known as a "link-fest."

First, I must note that Chun is making his bid for world domination today with an unprecedented series of posts, many of which seem to make immediate sense. For instance, commenting on a proposal to dismantle the US nuclear arsenal, he says:

I imagine responses to this would be of two types: 1) If we dismantled our nukes, other countries would only pretend to, and then nuke us, or at least plausibly threaten to. 2) Dismantling our sacred arsenal would reduce our ability to dominate ("democratize") the rest of the world and would thus be detrimental to U.S. business interests.


I wonder if this is a permanent change, or if the aggressively allusive Chun we all know and love will be back soon. Meanwhile, over at The Virtual Stoa, there is a series of posts (beginning here) commemorating the bicentennial of Kant's death by anthologizing favorite footnotes from his works -- also, a discussion of the somewhat inscrutable decision of the French government to ban religious symbols.

Crooked Timber features discussions of conservatives in academia, elsewhere addressed by Michael Bérubé, together with a charming comment thread on books every educated person should read (to which I feebly contributed). Lars quotes some remarks on the Thinking in Action series, some volumes of which admittedly leave much to be desired.

Cap'n Pete considers art, while our sister site discusses homosexual penguins. Invisible Adjunct provides a brief discussion of the intellectual diversity "issue", propagated, of course, by the postmodern relativists associated with the Republican Party. The Chronicle of Higher Education has decided to share the wealth by allowing us peons access to Stanley Fish's article on the "Trojan Horse" campaign. Here's a snippet:

While it may be, as some have said, that the line between the political and the academic is at times difficult to discern -- political issues are legitimately the subject of academic analysis; the trick is to keep analysis from sliding into advocacy -- it is nevertheless a line that can and must be drawn, and I would go so far as to agree with Horowitz when he criticizes professors who put posters of partisan identification on their office doors and thus announce to the students who come for advice and consultation that they have entered a political space.

But it is precisely because the pursuit of truth is the cardinal value of the academy that the value (if it is one) of intellectual diversity should be rejected.


Matthew Yglesias admits he was wrong. Adam Robinson continues his multi-partite discussion of the state of rock, and the rock of the state. Kevin Drumm's blog continues to exist.

That is the news of the blogosphere. This should hopefully constitute enough links to keep everyone busy at work tomorrow. (Sorry, Richard, for not posting during lunch. I was busy making a delicious meal.)

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