(9:34 PM) | Anonymous:

Winning the Brother for Christ (ii)

...[T]he problem is that we are actually so naive about choices, forgetting that this world of maximal choice is heavily managed and manipulated. The rebellious teenager has a ready-made identity to step into, professionally serviced by all those manufacturers who have decided what a rebellious teenager should look like: advertising standardizes our dreams. Our choices are constantly channelled into conformist patterns, and when we try to escape, there are often standard routes provided by the same market...

To solve the stress by not fleeing, by resorting to "human company", is to blur the sharp edges of responsibility and to imagine that you can arrange your situation to your comfort. Change the furniture, change the scenery, and you can change your inner landscape; talk to others and manipulate their reaction to you, and you can soften or share out the guilt you feel and fear. Someone has offended or hurt me, accused me of something, pointed out something I'd rather not recognize; the attractive way through is to talk to someone else and get them to reassure me that I'm wonderful and (ideally) that my critic is not worth listening to. But this is as useful in the long term as drinking salt wayer; I shall have to work very hard indeed at silencing the critical voice, and it can become an obsessive search for absolution.

To have a "will", for the Orthodox theologians of that era, was to have a set of dispositions that went with your nature: if this is the kind of being that you are, this is the kind of thing you're likely to want. Choosing among the kinds of things you're liable to want is on this account a "natural" activity. So, for Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the human will is active, and the human will, like all human wills, wants to survive and rebels against the thread of not surviving...But the human will is not the human person, and all this is quite abstract when considered apart from the person who activates the willing...Persons do the deciding; and when you have a person who is wholly self-consistent, whose identity is completely bound up in the calling to live in unreserved intimacy with God as Father, there is, as we say, no choice.

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(11:33 AM) | Adam R:

Ch 3

[So it's been forever, too long. I know. I'm remiss. You can read chapter one here and chapter two here. Or read below for the three-second summary. And I'd like to promise it won't be as long until chapter four unravels. And I'd like to warn you(finally) that this chapter is mostly expository, so after last chapter's nailbiter, you may have been waiting all this time for nothing.]


The story until now:
Adam Robinson is intent on writing a movie, or a play, he's not sure which. But he figures the best way to get started is with a plot structure, which he has been trying to sketch out in a narrative about Adam Robison, a young man who lives in a shady Baltimore neighborhood and works for a mutual fund corporation in the city's glittery Inner Harbor. Adam Robison dreams of being a culture critic. In Chapter Two we are introduced to a mysterious character named Robby, who arrives in Baltimore on a ship. He is in an amnesiac state when he meets a sardonic bum named Bill.


Adam Robison, saddened by his lack of writing ability or stick-to-itiveness, sat in his cubicle on the 25th floor and wondered what he was supposed to do. In the last few days he had sent emails to the editors of a handful of Internet magazines where he thought some of his writing on pop culture would fit in well, but he hadn’t heard back from any of them. That was okay, he figured, because he didn’t have any writing on pop culture. He was certainly interested in becoming the white Cornel West, and wanted desperately to amass a formidable amount of work on subjects as diverse as a pop diva’s wardrobe and the affects of big-box bookstores on literary publishing - but he did not want to write these essays for nothing; he wrote much better when he had been commissioned for a piece (as he was in limited measure on topics such as Christian rock).

So, floundering, Adam dug into his bag for the book by Theodor Adorno that he had recently purchased (at full price) and thumbed through it when no one was looking. This was an ineffective way to read anything, especially such dense theory that he wouldn’t have been able to understand had he been in an oak-paneled library, or if he'd been listening to a whatsit, an etude. Still, he was inspired by the material. He had shelves full of books that he only understood peripherally - Paul Bowles, Hegel, Jackson Mac Lowe - and he kept them more for their tactile reminder to work hard than for reference. Tiffany just received copies of her new poetry chapbook in the mail. She inscribed a copy for him and he shelved it in a place that would inspire and impel him. Her prodigious output flung him for ceaseless loops. And yet - a Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary sat on the corner of the floor nearest his computer uncracked. And he had wanted an OED for over a decade, shopped for them everywhere, until he found one a few months earlier at a church tag sale. It cost him a buck. He used it once to define the words “impel” and “prodigious.”

Marxism, fetishism, popular music. Gotcha. When he sat down to write, Adam cracked his knuckles in six languages. Struggling in his career, he signed up to take some graduate courses, and one of his assignments was to spend thirty minutes a day walking around. The idea was to quiet his spirit, he guessed, which seemed a daunting task. In fact, when the assignment was delivered, Adam said to himself, “Well, I can see myself not doing that,” and decided he would simply ignore the syllabus. But he recognized the lameness in something like that, and so every day during his lunch break Adam moseyed around the shining harbor, trying busily to slow himself down.

What finally stopped him on the first day was a group of window-washing ninjas repelling from the roof of a skyscraper with buckets and squeegees. Immediately he reconsidered his career path. The men would push themselves thirty feet from the building and drop to the floor below. They timed their trajectory so that when they swung into the window they could deftly affix a plunger to the glass and halt their movement. Then, in seconds, they would have the glass scrubbed and dried and were flying again. It was marvelous to watch, but looking up made Adam’s neck sore, and he kept thinking he would fall over. He propped himself up on a parking meter and scooted into a man he had not seen.

“Excuse me,” Adam offered.

“No sweat, brother. Can you spare some change?” He was a tall bum with tired skin and gray-streaked hair. What’s more, he was a bum with a dog, an eager but extremely calm, crusty Collie. Adam remembered when he was in China. There was a toothless peasant there with a monkey. He was not a nice man but the monkey was a laugh-riot, and after playing with the animal briefly it was no problem giving the peasant a few yuan. So Adam patted the dog’s head and forked out a dollar. It is absolutely true that Adam Robison is a dog lover.

But occasions for meeting pets downtown are rare, so after a few weeks Adam gave up his walks. Instead, he stood in front of his office window for several minutes and looked out over the city while his soup heated in the microwave. He listed the things he saw. Initially, he pointed the harbor out to himself, and the buildings surrounding it. After a couple days of this he noted the water in the harbor, and that there were trees set among the buildings, and people walking around, and cars and bicycles, too. He saw an expansive bridge that let cars onto route 95, which would take them to Washington DC and points south. Then he realized there were ripples on the water in the harbor, and boats out there. He didn't invent stories for the details, didn't imagine lovers in the paddleboats. He simply looked closely and listed what he saw, and found that the lists themselves were fascinating.

The next day Adam saw that the water was primarily three different colors, and the wake behind the boats was white. He studied the whiteness and realized it was actually steel gray. Looking more closely, he could tell that the buildings were comprised of windows and steel and rocks and air conditioning units. Pedestrians were reflected off the shiny glass of a hotel. The pedestrians wore dark clothes. He paid attention to the bridges one day, and from his great distance could tell that they were made up of concrete slabs set upon girders, held up by massive concrete posts. Baltimore's business district was an intricate place.

Adam tried to subject the neighborhood around 1818 to the same scrutiny, but everywhere he looked he could only see trash. He stood by his front door and looked down the street to see rows of rowhouses and potato chip bags whirling in the air. Even their brand name sounded grimy: Utz. He noted that the houses were charmingly distinctive in their appearance, painted varying shades of red or crumbling with a false brick veneer. He liked that. But as hard as he looked he could only see knotty trees, trash, and rat offal. Perhaps I could appreciate this better from higher up, he thought, and then he remembered that he could climb on his roof. He had, in fact, spent long hours on his roof in the past several weeks, trying to keep water from leaking through it. So he retrieved his ladder and set it up against the building.

Tiffany had placed a strict ban on going up the ladder without anyone to hold it, as there was a four foot gap between the ladder's tip and the the bottom edge of the roof. But Adam knew he was skillful at climbing. He was an adept climber. When he was six he fell from a jungle gym and broke his arm. At eight he fell out of a tree and broke his other arm so completely that the bone pierced the skin and fell out into the grass. While biking in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in his middle twenties he announced to his friends that he had a plan. "I'm going to climb that pine tree," he said, "hold on to the tip, and ride the tree as it bends to the ground."

"Like an elevator?" Homer asked.

"I hope so," Adam said from the top of the tree. It bent slightly, but it was an old pine, thirty feet tall and regrettably brittle. It bent only slightly, then cracked. Disappointed, Adam fell through the branches to the ground below, landing with his head only inches from a gnarled stump. "Oof," he asserted. Then the top of the tree landed on him.

"Oof," Homer said this time. It could be that Adam said it once more as well, before slipping out of consciousness.

While he was under, Adam dreamt he was in a crowded, noisy bar, trying to capture the bartender's attention. He wasn't trying to get the bartender's attention for a drink, he was literally trying to capture her attention. He wanted to use it to babysit his dog, Lightning, while he went away for a few days. He thought this would be possible by staring and inhaling slowly, but someone tapped him on the shoulder. In Adam's half-wakefulness, he knew it was the Holy Ghost, and that one of them was drunk. He said, "I dreamed I saw the Holy Ghost, standing drunk at the bar," as Homer laughingly shook him back into the present reality, which was not that bad.

So Tiffany's ban was more of a suggestion, he thought, and started up the rungs. When he lived with his grandparents he was given the task of straightening the antenna on the roof. "Have grandpa hold the ladder for you," his Aunt said, "but under no circumstances should you let him climb it." And no sooner did they have the ladder leaning in place than was the old man scampering across the roof like Anne of Green Gables. And then Adam was on his own roof in Baltimore, scanning the neighborhood for his story.

Eugie came by while he was up there. "Hey," he called up, "sport me a dollar." Adam pretended to ignore him, but it was easier to pay attention to another human then the streets of his neighborhood, so when Eugie called up again, he said okay and started to the ladder. Climbing down was always the hardest part. He had to close the gap between the roof and the tip of the ladder with boldness and blind strength of character. "So Schopenhauer," he said as threw his leg off the roof, his belly resting against the tar. "Will and idea." His foot found the top rung too hard, though, and the ladder slid across the side of his house and slowly, slowly fell to the ground.

Now Adam was holding to the roof's edge with just his arms, his face red with exertion and (it's not too much to admit) fear. He hoped Eugie would be sensitive to his predicament, but Eugie was already around the corner, talking to James. Their language was objectionable, and Adam thought the conversation was not entirely worthwhile. He focused his attention on his own situation, instead. Now was not the time to solve inner-city education problems. But when was the time? If the city continued to deprioritize preventative solutions, how could they expect real, lasting change? Adam accepted his own point, there was no reason to delay working toward a good cause. As he hung from the roof of his house, thirty feet high, he thought about praying.

"Dear Jesus," he said aloud, "please lay your guiding hand on the inner city of Baltimore, so that my neighbors can go to college and not get shot in the leg. And, Lord, if --" his arm slipped a bit off the roof. "If you can use your other hand to sort of scoop me back onto solid ground, that'd be great too. Lead me into the perfect center of your will, Adam." He chuckled. It had been a long time since he last prayed. "I mean, Amen."

It was a nice day. Birds were chirping in the litter. One bird, Adam noticed, had its wing stuck open, and he could only walk around in circles. That is, he could only pivot around his wing; he wasn't actually making circles. This was especially evident when the bird meandered over to a round drain cover that Adam hadn't seen before. "That's interesting," he thought. And suddenly the ladder was touching his feet again. It pushed up against his legs, forcing his knees up to his chest. Adam pushed back with his weight and was happy, really truly happy, that the ladder supported him. He let go of the roof and started his descent.

"Schopenhauer," he said at each rung. And when he was on the ground he saw the face of God, and God was Eugie, and Eugie had moved from the ladder to the wounded bird, and was chasing it in circles. | Main Page

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(7:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred: Curse You, Wolfson!

I hate not being able to fall asleep until 3 am.

I hate getting a grocery cart with a messed-up wheel.

I hate the smug self-satisfaction of a doctrinaire atheist.

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Monday, December 04, 2006

(6:29 PM) | Amish Lovelock:

A Picture of British Intellectual Life Today

Take a look at this all you one-paragraph-wonders (=bloggers).

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(1:41 PM) | Anonymous:

Translation Assistance.

So, I'm trying my hand at translating again. This time just a short article by Isabelle Stengers called "Faire avec Gaïa: pour une culture de la non-symétrie". Though it's been pretty easy going so far I've hit a sentence that I just have no idea how to translate. Perhaps stupidly I just can't figure it out.

"Julien nous dit qu’elle est née à la fois contre des récits fabuleux (le « n dit que » qui relatent ce que l’on trouve très loin mais aussi contre la magie, c’est-à-dire la possibilité d’agir par des moyes magiques sur le monde."

I assume Julien, who she has made reference to a few times in the course of the paper, is someone else at this particular conference who presented on the lack of a correlation between Western languages and Chinese with regard to the concept of nature. This is my attempt at a literal translation, but it's a mangled mess that makes no sense:

"Julien told us that it [nature] was born both against fabulous descriptions (the "it is said that") which reports what we find very far but also against magic, what is called the possibility of acting by magical means on the world."

Now I could also try it this way:

"Julien told us that it [nature] was born both against fabulous descriptions (the "it is said that") which suggests that it is against magic or very far from what is called the possibility of acting by magical means on the world."

Does that make sense? Is it a proper translation?

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(8:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Snow does not exist

I have a friend who came to CTS this year after living in Florida for nearly her whole life, so this winter has held a lot of firsts for her -- the first time seeing leaves fall from the trees (this seemed weird to me), first time driving home in a snowstorm of world-historical proportions, first time waking up to see the world covered in a blanket of snow, etc.

Talking with her about this has highlighted the fact that snow, ice, and bitterly cold weather generally is a total non-issue for me. For many years, in fact, I didn't have a proper winter coat -- I got by with just a leather jacket, a scarf, and a hat, and I would often wear a t-shirt underneath. I was cold, certainly, but it seemed to me to be totally unremarkable.

For this rare gift of cold-weather endurance, I have two factors to thank: the cruelty of my parents and the strange atmosphere of Olivet's dorm culture. Under the first column, we have the fact that from first through eighth grade, I walked to and from school basically every single day. Given that I was living in Michigan at the time, this obviously entailed a lot of snow; and given that I was living in a deteriorating neighborhood, this also entailed walking over a lot of sidewalks that were complete sheets of ice. A fearful and distrustful child , I had a lot of motivation to learn to walk quickly on the ice -- and so even today, I probably walk faster in icy conditions.

That was not enough to allow me to survive sub-arctic conditions in a spring jacket, however. For that, I needed to spend four years at Olivet. The first year in particular was pivotal -- the freshman guys' dorm is very close to the building where most classes were held, meaning that it felt like a "bother" to actually wear a coat while walking to class. (Women did not develop this "toughness" their freshman year since they had to walk approximately twice as far from the freshman girls' dorm to the same building -- though nursing students may be an exception to this, now that I think of it.) Even as we moved progressively further from the center of campus through the course of our Olivet careers, many of us maintained the attitude of regarding a bulky coat, gloves, scarves, etc., as a "hassle."

Finally, I have Olivet to thank for my near-suicidal willingness to drive long distances during snow storms. The "lake effect" is real! I know because I drove through "lake effect" snow (sometimes twice or three times a year), probably four or five consecutive winters -- often driving either a decade-old Geo Metro or a pickup truck in the back of which I had glibly forgotten to put any weight, or a shovel, or (in at least one case) a proper ice scraper.

One particularly awesome trip home involved a severe snow storm, a resulting traffic jam, and being told by a passenger in a neighboring car that my car "was smoking" -- because I had forgotten to put the cap back on after putting oil into the thing, leading to a humorous series of events that culminating in us (of course I had a passenger) periodically stopping to buy more oil until we could find a store that sold the appropriate replacement cap, something that's a little hard to come by in the far southwest regions of Michigan. Also, I didn't have a cell phone at this time, so to call my dad and ask what the hell to do, I had to use the phone card built into one of my credit cards, which charged something like 50 cents a minute.

I've gotten somewhat off-topic here. In fact, now I'm wondering if there was really any snow involved in that last incident at all. Anyway: stay tuned six months from now for the post about how I wait for it to get near-fatally hot before I will turn on the air conditioner and I never wear shorts.

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Sunday, December 03, 2006

(11:20 PM) | Amish Lovelock:

Indigenous Rights Revisited

So, on 28th November the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly refused to adopt the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples due to a vote on resolutions put forward by Namibia and the African Group to allow for more time for individual states to consider the Declaration - something they claimed they had not had time to do when the Declaration was adopted by the Human Rights Council this June. Of course, Australian, New Zealand and Canadian "big state" lobbying lay behind the African resolutions. The resolutions were adopted and another year of "open, inclusive and transparent discussions" has begun.

Of course, it is the state monopoly of violence and the ability to decide the exception has always been the reason behind refusal of the Declaration. The Declaration will "weaken states" was the argument pounded out repeatedly by the African representatives. This is why Paul Patton argues that "the recognition of native title involves a becoming-indigenous of the common law to the extent that it now protects a property right derived from indigenous law; and a becoming-common law of indigenous law to the extent that it now acquires the authority along with jurisprudential limits of the common law doctrine of native title." In other words, that it is a process of Deleuzian becoming.

What gets me though is that self-determination within states does sound a lot like an opportunity for deterritorialization and "imperialism without colonies." How long will it be before States realize that "Iraq" might work in the indigenous world too? How will these two forces play out?

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(8:58 PM) | F. Winston Codpiece III:

Possible Show Idea for Fox

Since The War at Home is obviously well on its way to cancellation, Fox is going to need a new Sunday-night show. After hours of hard work, I have come up with precisely the concept that they need to inject a dose of variety and innovation into their weekly line-up: a cartoon show featuring a father who is a complete sociopath.

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(10:51 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Go Terrorists!

Matt Ygelsias got 96%, but I got an even 100!

Your 'Do You Want the Terrorists to Win' Score: 100%

You are a terrorist-loving, Bush-bashing, "blame America first"-crowd traitor. You are in league with evil-doers who hate our freedoms. By all counts you are a liberal, and as such cleary desire the terrorists to succeed and impose their harsh theocratic restrictions on us all. You are fit to be hung for treason! Luckily George Bush is tapping your internet connection and is now aware of your thought-crime. Have a nice day.... in Guantanamo!

Do You Want the Terrorists to Win?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

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Saturday, December 02, 2006

(12:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Don't Read The Weblog

Read this stuff:

• A White Bear, Tuesday's guest hater, has several good posts up. I especially like the one about the ethics of blogging in relation to one's personal life -- should you tell friends from the biosphere about your blog? How should you deal with the knowledge that a person reads your blog? It's awkward, and IT's situation reminds me that my current solution of just assuming that no one reads my blog unless they explicitly state otherwise (and even then not assuming they read any particular thing on it) may not work.
  
• My favorite new blog is currently Voyou Desoeuvre, which I think I may have been reading since even before the first post. So join me in reading it.
  
• Dominic's new blog Necrotic Toxicity is hilarious. The current top post also indirectly introduced me to the joys of Cockney rhyming slang, of which the post's keyword "berk" is a prime example.
  
• And finally -- against all expectation, Melville seems to be everywhere lately.

I should clarify: Herman Melville.

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Friday, December 01, 2006

(9:06 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: World-Historical Proportions

I confess that I'm a little relieved that we've finally had our customary "snow storm of world-historical proportions" for this year, because I was starting to get a little bit freaked out by the extremely warm weather. I confess that I was thinking about heading down to CTS to put in a few hours of work, but it would probably take me 14 hours to get down there at this point.

I confess that last night I watched the second and third Matrix movies, because we are supposed to discuss them in "Philosophical Thought" this week. I confess that I did not watch the first one because I think it's kind of dumb -- though I am in the minority, I will say that insofar as the Matrix trilogy is worth watching, it's only because of the second and third ones. The best being, of course, the second. I confess that this light-hearted activity is likely meant to give us time to study for our final, for which we just received our practice questions -- mine being, "Write a Deleuzian commentary on Plato's Timaeus, with particular focus on the chapter in What is Philosophy? entitled 'The Plane of Immanence.'" That sounds like a hard question to me.

I confess that I need to stop getting in pointless arguments.

I confess that this confessional is late.

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