(12:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred 2

1. I hate how grumpy I get when I haven't eaten properly. (This general topic is addressed fairly thoroughly in this Unfogged thread.)
   
   
2. It is almost literally impossible to keep up with an Unfogged thread. I tried for a while, but it's really frustrating when you get up and do something else for twenty minutes, then come back to find that the number of comments has grown from 19 to 85. I like to have a lot of comments, but that is seriously unmanageable. (This is completely contrary to the spirit of this Tuesday series, but I'm actually quite pleased with the pace of comments on this site -- it's just right.)
   
   
3. I'm young and naive and don't know how things work. Like today I was totally taken by surprise when my temp agency called and woke me up at 8:30 and apparently thought there would be a good chance I could get to the Loop by 9:00. I had no idea that degree of readiness would be expected of me. I called them back later, and they said that they only get one or two jobs a week that are such short notice, so I'm not going to plan my life around it, but this whole temp thing is so tenuous, and I really don't want to alienate an agency through my ignorance and end up having to spend another morning signing up for yet another temp agency.
   
   
4. I wish I took better advantage of my unexpected days off. I helped a friend move Sunday and was completely dehydrated by the end of the day, then I had bad allergies today, so I can excuse myself for basically just sitting around the house today, but most days, my health poses no obstacle, and I still get to like 3:00 in the afternoon without having done much of anything other than the dishes. I actually have a lot that I wanted to do this summer, even beyond the German and the church fathers, and I'm not making much headway.
   
   
5. Since I "graduated" from CTS, my privileges for the Regenstein library at U of C expired Friday. The CTS librarian told me that she doesn't want to "push it" with the U of C people, since they're doing a pilot program where CTS people can have circulation privileges at the Regenstein for free, whereas before we had to pay for access. I hoped to do some research for the Nancy review (the book arrived today in the mail -- characteristically beautiful in the understated manner of French books), perhaps translate the Sartre text on Passolini that Scott McLemee suggested to me, and generally make use of the resources of one of the greatest libraries in this part of the country for the summer. I can get everything I need through inter-library loan, but it's just not the same! Maybe I'll figure something out -- I haven't even been down there since my privileges expired.
   
   
6. I take traffic statistics too seriously. For instance, this week, The Weblog's traffic dropped off pretty dramatically, by 50 visits a day. It's still above 300, which is not bad at all, but still, I'm searching for answers. What did I do? Am I not writing good stuff? Did I write something that alienated people? The real answer is that it's probably just the fact that Bitch PhD is on vacation (so the people who would check here to see if she had posted are not checking here), combined with the fact that I haven't managed to finangle a link from a big site in a couple weeks. Nothing a little comment-whoring can't fix.
   
   I was feeling really good when it was over 400 right before the election, but that was, you know, right before the election, when people were following all kinds of media sources much more closely -- I wonder if the liberal/left-wing end of the blogosphere suffered a hit after Bush was reelected? For a while it seemed like the big-name liberal bloggers were dominating all the rankings, with only Instapundit consistently representing the right wing, but that bubble really burst once people realized that reading blogs that favor one's preferred candidate does not necessarily make one's preferred candidate win. I never really read Daily Kos anyway -- except right before the election! This is all coming together.
   
   
7. I always take a book with me when I head to bed, and I never read more than a paragraph. Often I put it on my nightstand and don't open it at all. I don't know why I do this. Ever since I worked a few summers mowing lawns, I haven't been able to stay up late reading. I enjoyed the work, but obviously it took a lot out of me if I haven't recovered three years after the fact.
   
   
8. [UPDATE: Ben Wolfson sent me this link, scornfully saying that I would be interested. I tried to resist, but it was impossible -- I now know how to fold a fitted sheet. It's easier than you'd think!]

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(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Awful German Language

[UPDATE: A somewhat related question -- does anyone know how to pronounce the name Sloterdijk?]

This weekend, I got out of my routine of German-learning, and it is proving difficult to get back on the wagon, especially with the new issue of Harper's sitting on the coffee table. Perhaps, at some deep level, I don't want to learn German. This is, after all, a second attempt, and I have gotten only a little further than on the first. French is an elegant language, which has given birth to much of the writing that is dearest to my heart -- Derrida, of course, and so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.... Greek, as well -- that is a language. A whole other alphabet, bizarre conventions for accents, and perhaps the greatest writing in the history of the world (by definition, insofar as "history" is Western History) -- we have Plato and Paul, together with thousands of lesser figures.

But German. I don't know. I was talking to a Polish woman on the train once, about the new pope, and she said she didn't like him, partly because she didn't like German people. I asked her why, fascinated to learn of this intra-European fetishization of small differences; she said, "The Second World War." Oh. And the authors -- so many greats, of course, obviously, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Barth. But what have they produced lately? Not quite the key for the contemporary cutting edge (French, at least for a couple more decades), not quite the repository for timeless truths (Greek) -- not a good position for a language to be in. The German tongue should be forever grateful to the earnest German professors who steamrolled their way through every body of knowledge, although it should also be forever resentful of the lack of wit and verve with which so many did it.

German, it would seem, is always the language that one learns because one has to. It is a language that is assigned, perhaps a nerdy language. Overearnest, overserious. I reflected last night, playing the piano with a French text sitting at my bedside, having been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years: I am cultured now. I have arrived. I have met all the requirements for being considered a cultured person. But replace French with German, and the whole thing falls apart -- not as badly as if I'd learned Spanish, but still rather far down in the hierarchy of cultural prestige. The weirdness of a Kafka or a Benjamin simply can't compete, in terms of culturedness, with the coolness of a Camus or a Derrida. And not even Nietzsche -- sarcasm tending toward insanity is, it seems, the best we can hope for from the German tongue, the apex of its achievement.

I am reminded of a passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, which I will gladly quote for you now:

My struggle with the German tongue began in mid-October and lasted nearly the full academic year. As the most prominent figure in Hitler studies in North America, I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.

The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel. One eventually had to confront it. Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.

I'd made several attempts to learn German, serious probes into origins, structures, roots. I sensed the deathly power of the language. I wanted to speak it well, use it as a charm, a protective device. The more I shrank from learning actual words, rules and pronunciation, the more important it seemed that I go forward. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. But the basic sounds defeated me, the harsh spurting northernness of the words and syllables, the command delivery. Something happened between the back of my tongue and the roof of my mouth that made a mockery of my attempts to sound German words.

I was determined to try again

And so am I, my friends. I am not seeking after glamor or fame here. There is nothing glamorous about learning such a language, such an awful language. I'm not even going to do the obvious thing here and close with a German phrase. You deserve better than that.

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(9:48 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Kafka, "The Penal Colony"

[Note: This was originally posted last summer on the now-defunct University Without Condition site.]

I.

“Is a life’s work such as this”—he indicated the machine—“to be destroyed because of the commandant and the influence his women have over him? Should this be allowed to happen? Even by a stranger who has only come to our island for a few days?” (140)

In the Penal Colony is, among many other things, a meditation on the foreigner—the place, or non-place, of the foreigner. What does it mean to be a solitary observer in a foreign land? From the very first paragraph, it is uncertain: he “appeared to have accepted purely out of politeness the commandant’s invitation,” he was “not particularly enthralled,” “he paced back and forth behind the condemned man with almost visible indifference” (125-26, emphasis added). The whole thrust of the proceedings is unclear, a matter of conjecture—the officer works on the apparatus “perhaps because he was a devoted admirer... or because, for whatever other reasons...” (126).

The officer himself is radically out of place, wearing a full-dress military uniform, and we might ask what exactly we are to think of this colony, in what precise sense it is “penal.” Where do the mobs of children come from? How could the “old commandant” become famous (if he ever was famous beyond the officer’s dream world)? And what of the women? The officer has nothing but scorn for the new commandant’s women, but the old commandant had women of his own—women are an easy target for the advocate of a ritual that is clearly sexually charged, involving plenty of male nudity and horseplay, with even the stripping ritualized (“naked of course” [128]).

The colony was a penal colony in the sense of being a society completely devoted to punishment—the liturgy of punishment. Its closest parallel may well be the Aztecs, as described by Bataille: “Consumption loomed just as large in their thinking as production does in ours. They were just as concerned about sacrificing as we are about working.” In a story where the burning sun beats down from overhead, rendering the officer’s full-dress uniform a burden, an irrelevant throw-back, Bataille’s comments on the sun are particularly appropriate: “The sun himself was in their eyes the expression of sacrifice. He was a god resembling man. He had become the sun by hurling himself into the flames of a brazier” (46). I can’t prove philologically that Kafka knew of Aztec culture, but it’s not necessary—the association of the sun with sacrifice seems to be in our bones, as illustrated by the repetition of a driving sun with a meaningless, decadent sacrifice in Camus’s Stranger, an empty gesture, also performed in a tropical colony, hearkening back to when life meant something. For Camus’s protagonist, at least the punishment, voluntarily taken upon oneself, is still meaningful—for the officer, it is completely empty:

II.

“usually it’s some harbor works, it’s always some harbor works!” (146)

So much to do, so many things—how to justify devoting so much energy to public executions? How could one ever choose to maintain an insular community, focussed on the Old Man, when there are harbors to build, commerce to engage in, foreign observers—scholars, even!—to invite? “No longer can I ponder possible developments for the system, I spend all my energy preserving what’s left” (140). The gears are not the only thing that’s squeaking. We are assured that in days of old, the condemned man always learned of his sentence during the second six hours; but now, with the machine in such a dilapidated state, when no one comes to hear the “wheels of justice,” can we be sure that the same will happen? Much less to this doglike, frivolous prisoner? The “exceptional machine” (125) of sovereignty does not work in isolation, and one wonders why the officer never laments the lack of audience in quite the right way, why he never sees that the vast crowds are all incorporated into the apparatus.

But is everyone really as disincorporated as they seem? There are silent supporters all through the island, and in over three months, over a hundred prisoners are executed—close to a prisoner a day. Here, in miniature, we have a clear example of Hardt and Negri’s insight into the “postmodern condition”:

We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to the extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial. How is this possible, however, when today, as nearly everyone says, the institutions in question are everywhere in crisis and continually breaking down? ... The omni-crisis of the institutions looks very different in different cases. For example, continually decreasing proportions of the U.S. population are involved in the nuclear family, while steadily increasing proportions are confined to prisons. Both institutions, however, the nuclear family and the prison, are equally in crisis, in the sense that the place of their effectivity is increasingly indeterminate.... In the general breakdown, then, the functioning of the institutions is both more intensive and more extensive. The institutions work even though they are breaking down—and perhaps they work all the better the more they break down. (196-197)

If I can take the officer at his word, then it would seem that even more prisoners are being executed now than under the ancien regime (after all, there was a pause of at least a day between executions, enough time to gather a crowd)—perhaps that is what has contributed to its advanced state of dilapidation. The new commandant, a man familiar with commerce, with liberal “European” ideas, gets to distance himself from an unjust system—all the while getting his executions on the cheap!

Good liturgy is expensive, by definition. It takes time. The low-church style of the New Penal Colony gets everything done much more quickly and efficiently, all while maintaining an enlightened appearance, calling in a foreign scholar to denounce the system he has staked his power on. The very definition of decadence—he has become womanly in the Lacanian sense, knowing that there is no hard core of meaning beneath the surface. But you have to become a woman to be cured.

III.

“The traveler wanted to do something, bring the whole machine to a stop if possible, because this was not the exquisite torture the officer had wished for; this was out-and-out murder.” (155)

Do we notice that the traveler never really does anything? The bulk of the story is of course taken up by the officer’s elaborate fantasy of how the traveler will save his precious system, and the officer’s death is brought on by the traveler’s assertion that he will say something that he never in fact says, in a meeting he never in fact attends. Here the virtual has real effects—life and death effects—and all the power is in the hands of the foreigner, the scholar, one with no special expertise in legal matters. In the world of the Old Man, no words were necessary in order for people to know the wheels of justice were turning, but in the new decadent world, where everything is allowed to decay disgustingly, words mean something. Perhaps words only mean something when justice is not self-evident—perhaps the truly just world is the world that is not ruled by the all-powerful father, but by the whispers of the women and the convictions of the foreigners.

We may ask whether the execution was ever anything but out-and-out murder and whether Kafka’s story presages a world in which the obscenity of punishment becomes ever more clear; we may well tremble at the thought that the Old Man will rise from the dead, even as those around us chuckle at the thought; we may ask, further, what the role of the foreigner and the woman is in a time of the decay of sovereignty—and just how much prodding it might take to make the institutions implode.


WORKS CITED:

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share. Vol. 1. New York: Zone, 1991.

Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.

Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories. Trans. Donna Freed. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1996.

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(9:40 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

A New Group Blog

There is a new group blog out, entitled Long Sunday. The contributors are as follows (Name, Previous Blog):

Herself, Alphonse van Worden
Mark Kaplan, Charlotte Street
John Pistelli, Commonplace Book
RIPope, CPROBES
CR, Cultural Revolution
Carl, Fort Kant
Jodi Dean, I Cite
IT, Infinite Thøught
Alain Wittman, Long Sunday
A Disgruntled Postal Worker, Long Sunday
Christoph Wimmer-Kleikamp, Observing the Observer
Matt Christie, Pas au-Delà
YH, Young Hegelian

I figure that we will probably be driven out of business here at The Weblog within the next couple of weeks.

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Sunday, May 22, 2005

(8:20 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

My Big News

I have told many of you in private already, but out of fear that some technicality would keep it from becoming a reality, I have avoided announcing it "publicly," on the blog. The technicality could theoretically still happen, but here it is anyway: University of Chicago Press will be publishing my translation of Jacques Derrida's "Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation" in an expanded edition of The Gift of Death. I just found out this week, so I don't know when it would appear, etc., though I will of course keep the entire world notified.

I may now also rework the "commentary" section of my thesis to create a nice little article. Another minor bonus: CTS will possibly accept this in place of a formal language exam, as proof that I am conversant in French.

In related news, the "blog book" is proceeding apace. If the pieces are consistently as good as Discard the Name's, which I read last night -- and I'm sure they will be -- then this will surely be the greatest philosophico-religio-political essay collection ever compiled by bloggers.

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Saturday, May 21, 2005

(4:59 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Cleanliness

This past week, the house has been more cluttered than usual, and I think that made me more irritable than usual. I have never had any roommates who were not prone to clutter, so I hope that no one will take that as a passive-aggressive attack on Anthony and Hayley. I am excessively anti-prone to clutter. When I get into a car that is full of stuff, where things have to be swept onto the floor to make room for passengers, I literally do not understand what could have caused that situation. My car has nothing in it at all, aside from a CD wallet and some change, and a couple "emergency" type items behind the seat -- a flashlight, a road atlas, a blanket.

It would never even occur to me to leave things in the car to pick up "later," because in my experience, "later" (for those who habitually defer simple tasks that take two seconds to perform) is synonymous with "when things are so messy that I can't stand it and have to take a couple hours making a big production out of cleaning." This definition of "later" virtually guarantees that one will not "learn one's lesson" and develop habits oriented toward general tidiness -- understandably, one associates any kind of cleaning- or tidying-related task with what a huge pain in the ass it was to clean out your car for hours. One naturally wants to avoid such a huge pain in the ass, so -- "later."

I read about a self-help plan in The New Yorker called "Getting Things Done." It included a simple principle, similar to what I'm advancing here -- don't put off small tasks until they become a huge mountain. Yes, it's relatively unimportant whether one's dining room table has a couple things sitting on it that you just forgot to put away, but if you get into the habit of parking stuff there and only putting it away "later," your table is going to be constantly cluttered and will not be a welcoming space for when you actually want to do something on the table (such as press your tits on it). So get in the habit of putting stuff away. And stop just throwing stuff on the floor. And when you put the groceries away, don't leave the bags sitting on the table and the floor. And don't leave your mail distributed throughout the entire house. And don't just leave empty envelopes on the coffee table. And I could go on.

One does reach a point of diminished returns. I did that today. Anthony and Hayley were gone, so I did what I have always done, during my entire adult life, when I have lived with a lot of different roommates, none of whom were as tidy as me -- I cleaned up. Not thoroughly, not "anally." The shower was not cleaned today, for instance. I did not "dust." I flipped over the futon cushion so as to hide the huge mounds of cat hair, rather than remove the cat hair (by the time I decide to flip it again, the cat hair will have fallen off the bottom side -- a good system, until the time comes to sweep under the futon, which I saved for "later"). The windows remain unwashed.

This whole process just took a couple hours -- sweep and mop the floors, brush out the toilet, do the dishes, no big deal. I also washed the towels and the floormats and made the sink sparkling white. I have kept up to the second on my e-mail and on everything that comes in on my RSS feeds. I keep expecting that once all these little tasks have been achieved -- once the dishes are all done and put away, once the dining room table is cleared off, etc. -- this space for doing the "real stuff" will open up. It hasn't, though. All I'm doing is small stuff, or more accurately, all I'm doing is walking back and forth through the house, looking for small stuff to do. I've now taken it upon myself to drink "enough" water, by health-nut standards, which makes me have to pee a lot -- something to do!

I was led to believe that the tidy habits that were incessantly grilled into me as a child -- for instance, my mom demanded that my dad and I sit down when we went to the bathroom, to reduce splashing, and she really would have preferred it if we would wipe out the sink after each time that we used it, and my grandma was even worse, though now that I live far away and never see them and are never seen by them, both of them have lightened up considerably in the face of reality -- made me morally superior to other people. I thought, therefore, that some kind of reward would follow from the appropriately tidy behavior -- like maybe my house would start to feel like this really great place to get some work done. It doesn't, though. A really super clean house feels like a place where you do nothing, because no one lives there. The point is to keep everything put away, touching it only to remove the dust that inevitably gathers.

This is why I should never live alone. I need an inherent obstacle. I need to live with some "slobs" (and who, compared to me, is not a slob? The only people who could possibly view me as a slob are my mom and grandma, who are now slobs according to the standards that they imposed on me), so that the project of totalitarian cleanliness never appears to be feasible. So Anthony and Hayley -- and Pippin, Maizie, Sid, Soren, Zarathustra, and Meep -- and Jared, Jesse, Justin, Richard, Kari, Brett, Tara, Kevin, Robb, Mark, Adam, Kyle -- I hope you don't take it personally that sometimes I have bitched about the messes you leave lying around. I always make sure to reproach myself for it afterward. This is all part of the process -- I think this is something I can get over, with some help.

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(2:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

A couple recommendations

John Emerson has solved the problem of reality. You will be surprised by his results. You will be even more surprised, and delighted, to learn that he has signed a contract to blog here as a part-time consultant. He estimates that his first post will appear here some time within the next week or so.

Le monde has published an article entitled «L'univers des blogs, ses habitants, ses rites, son langage». I know that the majority of you can't read it, but the point here is that the article exists: Le monde is publishing stories about the blogging phenomenon. Last week, they were also covering the continued progress of the video game console wars. I remember a New Yorker article about how Le monde is really going downhill -- and I think that I speak for all twenty-somethings when I say that I'm really tired of witnessing the slow decline of nearly every once-treasured cultural institution (Saturday Night Live, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, the United States Constitution, etc., etc.). What do we get in their place? Oh yeah: McSweeney's. Thanks. And even that is in decline now!

And I guess there's someone hanging around here who thinks The Weblog is in decline, too! Well, screw that. We didn't used to be better. We were always exactly this bad.

Okay, so the important aspect of the story in Le monde is that the French term for Internet user is internaute, which looks to both me and Ben Wolfson as though it is formed by analogy with "astronaut."

m2 of The H was O[1] has a characteristically insightful and incite-ful post on the recent death of Paul Ricoeur. Why does it seem like towering French intellectuals always die on the weekend? Why?! Anyway, my call is that the response of the press to Ricoeur's death will be much more sympathetic than its shamefully ridiculous coverage of Derrida. I predict absolutely no vitriol. I mean, we're talking about the guy who came up with the ideas of "hermeneutic of suspicion" and "second naïveté" -- he's become part of the language!

[1] I would ask, now that all the lovable H is O characters have been either destroyed or banished to The H was O -- is the inevitable decline of The Weblog over? Was that the problem? Did F. Winston Codpiece III have to be sacrificed[2] on the altar of everyone's "expectations" of what The Weblog "should" be?

[2] I quietly note that the comment thread in which I got into a fight with F. Winston Codpiece III was perhaps the greatest bit of bloggery that has ever happened, ever. See, here's the joke -- I am/was F. Winston Codpiece III! Get it? (I never was any character who had "Kamala" in his name, nor was I the short-lived F. Winston Codpiece IV.) I was having an argument with myself, in which I deeply insulted myself under an assumed name! Wow. Good stuff. But that's when the bitching began in earnest. My question: If Fafblog can write nonsense and everyone loves it, why can't The Weblog?[3]

[3] I think I know the answer: everyone has come to expect that The Weblog will be characterized by posts on religio-philosophical topics, together with personal stories from me, of varying degrees of seriousness. I'll admit it -- it's a good formula. It has served us well. We're back to it now. If you liked that "The H is O"-style stuff, there's a page where they do nothing but. But for whiny cerebrality, this is your best destination.

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(9:10 AM) | Anonymous:

Paul Ricoeur est mort.

La Monde reports that Paul Ricoeur died yesterday. It doesn't seem like any U.S. papers have picked this up yet, which may be a good thing considering the shameful job they did with Derrida's death. For those of you who can read French there are quite a few other articles on the La Monde website under the heading "Lire".

[I see that Nathanael D. Robinson of Cliopatria caught this before we did.]

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Friday, May 20, 2005

(11:59 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Weiner: At Last

Despite my having no preconceived notions whatsoever about what Matt Weiner would be like, he blew all my expectations out of the water. Bitch PhD was everything I dreamed she would be and more. Ben Wolfson was the exact same as he's been every time I've hung out with him. I say this because I have just returned from an historic meeting with those three people. It was fun. I also got to check off on my mental score card that I went out this Friday night, so everybody wins.

Plus, before I met with them, I went to Europa Books, where they were having a clearance sale on French books. I picked up S/Z by Roland Barthes and Leçon sur la leçon by Peirre Bourdieu, for $4.00 total. They also have three copies of Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme, which is huge, and another Bourdieu book that is also huge. I would have purchased them as well, bringing the grand total to $8.00, but my bag was already full to overflowing as it was. That's one advantage of the suburban lifestyle, being able to put stuff in your car and thus not having to worry about carrying around your purchaces for the next six hours.

If I go to Europa tomorrow with an empty satchel and see that you bastards have snatched up all the cheap Irigaray, I'm going to be extremely angry and may quit blogging entirely.

On another note, they also had copies of the exact same books that I purchased or considered purchasing on the normal-priced shelf, ranging from $12.50 to $45.00 -- apparently they were hoping that people would look at either the normal shelf or the clearance shelf, but not both. Is that technically legal?

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(8:36 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Friday Morning Confessional

This is the only Friday Morning Confessional. Next week, we will go back to the Afternoon format. For this week, though, I am facing up to the fact that I have posted this in the morning almost every single time and that when I have failed to post it early enough, I have always received e-mail asking what the problem is.

Times are changing, of course. We now have the Tuesday Hatred, a new incarnation of The Hate List for the 21st century. Will confessions of the form "I confess that I find X really annoying" be a thing of the past now? Will people save complaints for Tuesday and misdeeds for Friday, or after at least a year of continually stretching the bounds of what counts as a confession, have we reached the point where it is impossible to place any kind of limit on what can be "confessed"? I confess that I don't know.

I confess to reading this site in its entirety, in one sitting. The premise is that people make postcards telling their biggest secrets, and the site author scans them and posts a new set every week. Ogged was right -- it's hard to stop reading. It reminds me of how much I enjoyed the Griffin and Sabine books.

I confess that at this point, I wouldn't mind if I had a different job every week this summer. It's not just that I'm so desperate for money that I will take whatever comes my way. Right now, though, it feels good to go in, do some defined job, and collect my money, without having to deal with all the dumb stuff of working in an office -- cliquishness, petty politics, etc. This is especially the case given that I am unlikely to find a job that requires me to be anything more than an interchangeable cog in the office machinery. Let's say that I'm really good at using office applications on the computer, or I type exceptionally quickly, or I file things away more efficiently than anyone who's ever worked in the office -- big deal. And there's no way I'm going to be paid enough in a job like that to make me feel like I'm a valued and integral part of the work. Thus, I feel like there's no reason that I should be eager to put myself in a position where I could potentially be bitched at by the same person for more than a week.

At the same time, I confess that if I found decent-paying steady work that would allow me close to full time for the summer and the option to work part time for flexible hours during the schoolyear, I would absolutely take it.

Maybe the point of this contrast is that I don't want to be working at someplace long-term through a temp agency. When you work a job for long enough, it starts to creep into your head even when you're off the clock -- and why should I put up with that, and will all the dumb relationship stuff in an office environment, when the company I'm working for doesn't want to assume the risk of paying me directly? I see no reason to let some business become a big part of my life when the ability to fire me at the drop of a hat is so precious to them that they are willing to pay a substantial amount over and above my wages -- although there's little to no chance that they would ever pay me directly what they're paying the temp agency to make use of me. It's helping me to get by for now, though, so one should probably not attach too much weight to these complaints.

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Thursday, May 19, 2005

(6:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Douglas Feith is an idiot

The New Yorker recently ran an article on Feith, which was actually pretty even-handed. The title, however, apparently irked Feith, as evidenced by his letter to the magazine, which appeared in the May 23, 2004, issue. To wit:

The title of Jeffrey Goldberg's article about me alludes, I suppose, to the famous line "A little learning is a dangerous thing" ("A Little Learning," May 9th). This tickled me. As it happens, I spent a delightful portion of a recent vacation reading the Alexander Pope poem from which that line comes.

The poem, entitled "An Essay on Criticism," has advice both for those who do and for those who criticize. Pope tells the former to curb their pride ("So vast is art, so narrow human wit"), respect ancient wisdom, and eschew "false eloquence" [juxtaposition in original -- Ed.]. As for critics, he warns:

But you who seek to give and merit fame,
And justly bear a critic's noble name,
Be sure yourself and your own reach to know,
How far your genius, taste, and learning go;
Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet,
And mark that point where sense and dullness meet.

I have pondered your editors' choice of title. Were they sneering, or making a self-deprecatory joke? Are they familiar with the Pope poem, or only with the disembodied line? Did they shoot at me and catch the arrow in their own backside? A little learning can be a dangerous thing.

Douglas J. Feith
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy
Washington, D.C.

This from the first and only Under Secretary of Defense to have been called, on the record, by a general, "The fucking stupidest guy in the world." I don't even know where to begin. He was reading Alexander Pope while on vacation? Who brings the Norton Anthology of British Literature to the beach? I am startled by the sheer mediocrity of a man who would spend his vacation musing over Alexander Pope. I am trying to think of a poet the choice of whom would indicate more slavish devotion to the "great books" mentality, but I simply cannot: Pope is just boring. Rhymed couplets suck. Dragging out the "Essay on Criticism" to come up with some too-clever-by-half letter to the New Yorker, to dispute an article that was actually astoundingly generous to him considering the source -- that really sucks. He was probably on the clock when he wrote it, too. My tax money would have contributed to the writing of that letter, in a scenario in which I had ever made so much money that I actually would have had to pay federal taxes.

(I quietly note that my first published work was a letter to the editor of the New York Times, criticizing Douglas Feith for opining that the lesson of 9/11 was that terrorists wanted to obtain weapons of mass destruction. I contended that that was the exact opposite of any lesson that could be rationally drawn from the events of that tragic day.)

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(3:14 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Histories of Christian Thought

I have a receptionist job right now, where I am allowed to use the Internet and read between phone calls. As a result, my project of reading through the early church fathers is proceeding much more quickly than it otherwise would. As I read, I thought back to the presentations of the two historians of Christian thought whose works I have read: Justo Gonzalez and Jaroslav Pelikan.

In the section relevant to my reading today, Gonzalez seems to be making excuses for the extreme boredom that the reading of Irenaeus invetiably produces, which fits in well with his overall scheme of offering us a "history of major figures in Christian thought." Such a scheme is, in my opinion, confusing and potentially even misleading. Pelikan, on the other hand, deals with major topics in given eras and brings in thinkers based on what and how much they contributed to each debate. The result was a more coherent storyline and, I think, a much better understanding of the arguments at stake. Ironically, though, Pelikan refers much more frequently to primary texts, often at great detail, while Gonzalez litters his work with footnotes on secondary works (including works not available in English), mixing together a history of the scholarship on the particular Hero of Christian Doctrine and a history of what he actually did -- this is inappropriate for a survey text, particularly given that most of those who read multi-volume surveys of the history of Christian thought don't have a deep acquaintance with the topic or any particular stake in the scholarly infighting surrounding Justin Martyr. I read Gonzalez for a class after already having read Pelikan, so I had a decent background and was able to follow it, but I could imagine nothing but befuddlement for my less experienced classmates.

In short, I recommend that if you are looking to read a multi-volume survey of the history of Christian thought, go for Pelikan, not Gonzalez. I say this only after having sold two out of three of my Gonzalez books on Amazon. I have just now decided that I'm going to earmark some of those massive profits for the purpose of assembling a full collection of Pelikan, of whose work I sadly own only one volume (and that only because that particular volume was on reserve in the library during the semester when I was reading the others, and I didn't want to sit and read it in the library only).

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Wednesday, May 18, 2005

(8:31 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Post-Opticon

The model of the panopticon, proposed by Bentham and popularized by Foucault, is no longer operative. It is broken. It undoubtedly still has effects -- wide-ranging effects, as does every broken thing -- but they are neither intended nor predictable.

Only in retrospect is it clear how essential the presense of a real person was in the panopticon. Simply knowing that some person was watching was the most important factor, starting the process of internalizing some presumed ethic. A person, by definition, wants something -- even if the prisoner or student misperceived what the guard or the teacher wanted, some kind of desire was operative.

Not so with the camera, perhaps. A camera wants nothing from me. It only wants to see, and it is able to fulfill that in itself. It is utterly indifferent to what fills its field of vision. Even assuming that there is a security guard somewhere watching the camera is not the same as having an actual living being see you with his own eyes. Indeed, the security guard is one of the most universally derided figures in our societ, a fat, balding, lazy failure, knodding off at the crucial moment in almost every movie in which security cameras play a role. He wants to be a cop, but then, cops are also proverbially fat and lazy, craving their donuts -- miserable people held up by their symbolic authority and nothing more. The admirable cop is the cop on the verge of retirement, taking on that one last case that could mean never attaining to that bliss of rest and relaxation, as though a screenwriter has to place a vast expanse of rest in front of the cop as a reward to distract the audience from the vast expanse of rest usually presumed to be behind the cop, punctuated by the occasional power trip of pulling over one out of the twenty people scoffing at the speed limit at any given point.

There is no one watching, just the watching itself -- and if there is someone watching, at some further remove, it is a pathetic person. Yet what if, still today, we are internalizing the demands of the one supposed to be watching us -- that is, the camera? What happens when a society is disciplined by the camera, disciplined into becoming the good citizens of the camera kingdom? It's as though we're cutting out the middle man here -- instead of emulating some presumed subject, we are emulating the real itself, the sheer unbiased observation of the real. And the real is, we all know, cruel. It is harsh. It is violent. We all know this. "Truth hurts," for example.

I'm sorry that I'm so tired that I can't connect this better, but: Everyone wonders why those American soldiers would tape themselves doing such horrible things in Abu Grahib. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves whether they were only enabled to do such things by the taping itself. What if the camera is what produces not cruelty itself -- it has always existed -- but the cruelty peculiar to our time?

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(1:06 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Internet Book-Buying

John Emerson has a post on Internet book-buying, giving his own tips on buying foreign-language books in particular and soliciting other tips. Here's a point of particular note:

I’m especially interested [...] in finding out why shipping from Europe seems to be both slower and more expensive than shipping from other equally-distant parts of the world, such as India and Australia. (Or is it just my imagination?)

I have found the same. Amazon's Canadian site is a good option for French books, but they seem to be a few months behind. I ordered Nancy's book on Christianity from Fnac, which seems to be the primary online French bookseller, but the shipping is destroying my soul, and then it is sometimes taking a break and allowing the exchange rates to destroy my soul.

So once you're done leaving tips for John, someone please chime in and answer me this: if I were looking to get a good solid overview of Nancy in two or three books, where should I start? I have to write a review of his newest book, and I feel like knowing something about him would help in that process. (Don't tell my editor that I asked this.)

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Tuesday, May 17, 2005

(11:33 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred

The Hate List is no longer the main gimmick of my web site -- now we do this daily blog update thing instead in a misguided attempt to draw in readers. I do think that the concept of The Hate List is sound, however, and it is a shame to let it go to waste. That's why I am introducing a new recurring series here at The Weblog: Tuesday Hatred. I calculated that doing it on Tuesday would allow people to participate more fully, having gotten past the usual Monday mountain of work (for those who work), but still holding those Monday annoyances fresh in their mind.

I am finding that unemployment sharpens the senses, in terms of noticing annoying details. So here goes:

1. I always send my car insurance in the day after I get the bill, because I am paranoid. Last month, the check apparently got lost in the mail, and I overnighted them a premium check (because I'm paranoid) to make sure that everything would be "cool." This month, my check cleared within just a couple days of sending the payment. The annoyance: there is still no explanation for what happened to last month's check.
   
   
2. I used to get a lot of tickets for arrogantly parking my truck on the street. I appealled every last one of them, and I also appealled a ticket I got for not having a City Sticker while I was in the grace period. This was three months ago, and I still have not heard back from them about a hearing. I am hoping that it just got lost in the bureaucracy, but there's really no way of knowing for sure.
   
   
3. Similarly, when I moved, the cable company switched out my previous cable modem for a newer model, but I forgot to keep the receipt for when they took the old one, so I got a bill for $150 for failing to return their modem, when in fact I did return it to them. I complained and asked them to try a little harder to track it down, and they said they'd get back to me once the situation was resolved. Since I haven't heard back from them in three months, I guess the situation is resolved, but it'd be nice if they would have called me and said, "Oh, we found it -- sorry to try to defraud you of $150."
   
   
4. The ferrets usually have these little platforms in their cage to make it a multi-level environment and give them room to move, but I guess Hayley has taken them down for cleaning or something -- anyway, just now they were wrestling in the litter box, because they really don't have many other options for where to wrestle. Not only is it disgusting, but it's also noisy, because they're rustling up all the ferret litter. Overall: the ferrets are going to need a bath.
   
   
5. Oh, now they're worn out, so they're actually taking a little nap in the litter box. I guess it's not that big a deal, since ferrets apparently only like to shit in the corner anyway -- there's always a huge pile right in the corner and this vast expanse of unused ferret litter. That alone should count as its own bullet point.
   
   
6. I hate those bus stops where there are six different possible buses that could stop there, because you see a bus off in the distance, and there's a chance that even then, your hopes could be dashed. I also hate how the Armitage bus stops running at 7:30 -- it doesn't really affect me directly, but it just seems petty.
   
   
7. I hate that my cell phone often doesn't ring when I'm walking around outside. I used to think it only happened when it was extremely cold out, but it recently happened when it was a perfect spring day, right in the middle of the Loop -- if there were decent cell phone coverage anywhere in the world, surely it would be there.
   
   
8. I basically hate talking on the phone in front of people, at all.
   
   
9. I hate being asked questions, about anything, ever. Even if it's a simple matter of just making conversation, asking what I'm up to, where I'm headed, I get this weird anxiety like I'm being interrogated.
   
   Once, when he was training me to analyze the x-rays, one of the chiropractors at the office where I used to work was looking over my shoulder to make sure that I was doing it right -- totally reasonable -- and I was just paralyzed, unable to start doing it. He said, "Oh, I see, you're nervous because I'm watching you." I said, "I just don't like to be seen doing anything." He said, "Yeah, I've noticed." I found that strange. I would probably be happiest in a job where I was locked up in a room and no one interrupted me -- then when I got off work, I'd be feeling sociable and talkative.
   
   
10. I hate that I feel like I'm walking on clouds when I get a three-day temp assignment. It's playing directly into the "new economy," of course -- I'm pleased with whatever pittance my corporate overlords send my way. It's like that old Onion article where the fast food worker is in charge of mopping the floor, and he gets a new mop, which is actually really nice and lets him get the floor cleaner with less work, but then he feels pathetic for being happy to get a new mop.

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