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Cotillion

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

CotillionCotillion by Georgette Heyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

What started out as complex as it seemed: a marriage proposal among family ended as quickly as it ought to have seemed. That is to say, the problems of the main characters resolve themselves through feeling — not through any sense of scheming — because this book seems to be nothing more than scheming.

Part of the scheming has to do with what the characters are. They aren’t simply their personal appearance their personality — although they do seem to be as well — but rather their form is their class, their social standing and how they embody that class. So scheming here, with the many subplots of who likes who and who is to be with who, makes it so that these characters, embedded in the complex social tapestry of Victorian England, must continually navigate and negotiate boundaries as to who is who and what is what and how one is to fit in and do what one does.

In the end, all of these schemes take place, within the overarching scheme of marriage, many other lesser marriages, and trying to resolve the plot of the subcharacters to get them to marry. In the process of negotiating successfully other subplots, the main characters find themselves apt and able to dashingly profess their love and acceptance upon the adequacy of the couple as a team, as how they fit in together. One imagines if things went awry and their exciting plots didn’t work out, the feeling may be deferred again, so as to not express itself as the positive love they would otherwise see fit to be the case.

So what seemed to me to be the bulk of these subplots is really the excuse needed to for the other characters to see the good will they have towards others, the genuine personableness. And while that may be confusing from an aesthetic standpoint, it wouldn’t do for the characters to be selfish, for them to only think of themselves.

I’ve not read other Heyer books but this one, seemed highly refined in how it carries out its ambitions… the characters are lively, entertaining, well drawn out, even if they don’t learn anything themselves (only to “learn” about each other) and that’s about it. In this way, though the women act the passion and the men are what they can do for the women. Freddy proves apt and able to anticipate and understand Kitty. He gets her out of fixes, saves her from her harebrained but good-willed schemes… whereas Jack is the dashing figure full of appearance — in that way, much more in the position of a woman, being passion and display but low on fixing things for others. Centered as it is, the novel appears feminist because the chosen man is prosopopeic to Kitty, he speaks her out by completing the inaction in as much as she speaks for him the content of what he misses in his own life — desire and passion — as he is such a dandy and all about appearance rather than doing. In their fitting together, they are then, of course, shown to us demonstrably to each other, through the subplots to be a desirable couple.

I don’t know much about this genre at all, but the appearance of knowing one another well, and the quickness to which these plots carried out in their action rather than in their dialogue makes me feel as if this book went though the motion rather than in exposing for us the revelation. After all, Kitty did much of what she did on her own; and only told Freddy of it later, which he accepted all too quickly. I suppose after this I should read some Austen — take her work as a model — to see that the range of what they mean to each other needs also valleys and disagreements, fights as well as, so they should miss one another. Because part of what makes a love novel so exhilarating is also how the characters learn they cannot do without as much as they can with.

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The Daughter of Time

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Daughter of TimeThe Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

From the point of view of the present (or the book’s present) we have a contingent view (was Richard III a murderer of his own nephews)… and this view is one we use to go back and determine the past. That is, this view is used to anchor the discourse of how to organize the past… all other events become secondary to this present view, one that apparently was not upheld in the past, or at least, not in the same way.

Confusing at first, I didn’t realize that this was part of a series of books in which we the reader are to already know Inspector Grant. All the same, a light read, one in which the “actuality” of the character’s emotions tell us how we should read the revealed history of Richard III as it appears to us in fragments. As Tey shows us, it is this process of revealing and this process of indeterminate motives that history and mystery both collapse together along the same narrative chain. Her grasp of this chain is what makes this an excellent exercise in craft.

Not particularly trilling in an intellectual sense, but easy to read because of her excellence.

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A Thousand Acres

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

A Thousand AcresA Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Apart from the conceit that this is a re-writing of King Lear, (because that begs us to consider this book as not being its own work), I found that Jane Smiley is an excellent author.

What seemed slow in the beginning, was really only such because we had to understand what was at stake.

Each instance of re-entering the story, of which the breaks in the narrative gave us (in terms of chapters or books) gave Smiley a chance to exploit the break in narrative to re-enter the plot in a different way. By establishing these different directions from which to view the narration (as of yet), she explored various strands in the family, in the landscape, in the town history. With each break, we sink deeper into Ginny (our narrator) to come to a different, and sometimes seemingly contradictory, angle from which to consider what was to be one continual complex totality.

Smiley is a brilliant author, although there are a few readers, if you read other comments, who did not get her work. Who wanted her to hinge on something bigger. Perhaps Iowa farmers are too cliche; oh of course they are simple townfolk, so what? Of course they are corrupt, (incestual, selfish, greedy), so what? Of course they are tied to the land; we don’t see the point of these endless descriptions.

The ending though is a good particular clue. What Smiley does, and what most stories that “speak to us” do, is that they get to the “universal humanity” by outlining traits expressed by at times, very contingent contingencies. By grounding the distinctiveness of the scene with the landscape, Smiley pulls us in, as Balzac might, with a wide angle that narrows onto very specific very particular figures against what seems like an endless parade of earth. We see their growth from the beginning to end, their attitudes and their inexplicable character differences as being both substantive and singular. Their contradiction is that they are the same, but they are also different… we can’t understand why they are different when they grew from the same stock. We can’t understand why the Father did what he did, or why one sister did this or another sister did that. We can only grasp that they did it, and look at the various artifacts Smiley narrates to us as evidence or a fingerprint that they did.

As Smiley examines each of the characters of that young adult generation of farmers, we see their individuality shine, fade and mutate into different character traits, expressed through Ginny. What lesser writers are unable to do is to explicate how their narrators can be so particular (limited in their worldview) and yet expose for us readers a richness that they seem unaware of, and Smiley at times, does suffer a little from this. Nonetheless, each character becomes only as deep as Ginny is able to connect with them, and their fading away, such as Jess or Ty, really only bespeaks of their (un)stable presence for her. In everyday life, we understand people via how we connect with them. Those aspects with which we do not connect are centers we have no access to. Literally.

So, as the book goes on, the characters and complexity of the plot rises until the action must come to a crash. Like trains on a track must go as they are defined to go, as trains are made to go forward and the track goes straight until it must turn… the complexity of the characters provides an unfolding of the plot which then unfolds the characters themselves. When faced with their reality of what they want for each other, the characters come to an apex, and must scatter. Because nothing can stay the same forever, their realizations tear their family apart as what they want for themselves is overcoded by what they want for each other.

In the very end, Smiley implodes the characters as a series of Ginny’s own admirations, aspects of different attributes. She knows herself through the people around her, just like she doesn’t know herself by the diners (and therefore she doesn’t know herself when she is in the diner). Smiley exploits this connection at the end, highlighting through the disconnect of each character, aspects of Ginny as she dismantles Ginny by dismantling the family. Self knowledge for our brave narrator is knowledge of how she is connected, and what she is as she destroys each aspect of those connections, removes, them, examines them, and sees in herself how she is very much like the Father she opposes, that she cannot run from, what she and her sister can only have, despite losing everything else; that the last part of themselves is beyond the understanding of others, that last singularity of will that even in the darkness of eradicating everything she is, she comes to grasp as the inexpressible hypostasis of being best only expressed by the horrific inexplicable action that goes against the grain of everything nice and acceptable about a respectable, dignified man, a pillar of the community in a small town of farmers. By wrapping the last inexplicable point of abjection, Smiley lets us come back around to totalize the entire episode.

This is a rare high point in any novel. Arguably, Smiley does it in her own way (of course that is her own genius), but she does it nonetheless, as a highlight of what is the same even after everything else is lost, ripped apart, and disintegrated. This is a novel of being.

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Simulacra and Simulation

September 9, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Simulacra and SimulationSimulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is not an easy book to read, in part because Baudrillard starts off with his ideas in full development and then talks around them, to explain them. He will start off with an example, develop the idea within the example, and then end by wrapping the example around itself, rather than ending on continual applications of the idea. In any case, he doesn’t do the historicity thing by telling you the past, where the idea may have come from, and then develop the series of thoughts that outline the form of the idea. Instead, Baudrillard plops you in the middle and makes you flounder. And unlike other thinkers, he doesn’t quote too many philosophers; in fact, nearly none at all. Instead of giving you guide posts along the way, he’d rather you sink or swim. Get it or not.

Baudrillard’s basic idea is that we don’t live in reality—that is, in the common sense use of the word, there is no thing-in-itself. He doesn’t even talk that way, as though the thing-in-itself is unnecessary. Following Quentin Meillasoux, Baudrillard is an absolute correlationist: the relationship we have with language is what also determinates any outside of language. Thus, for Baudrillard, we live in a world of simulacra. That’s easy so far. But there’s a catch. For Baudrillard, reality has already been exceeded because the processes that we buy into. These processes are unthinking, mechanical means that produce the simulacra which we then take for the actual thing. The easy examples of postmodern malls in America come to mind, or Disneyland.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation (12 – 13).

But such simulations only act to hide the fact that we can’t get back to reality because we’ve lost it. So this explains why Baudrillard drops us into the mix. He can’t explain why this happened. Once we’ve gotten sucked into hyperreality we’re here. It’s a traumatic event. The sheer force of hyperreality obscures any possibility of a central signifier. There is no metaphysics of presence; in fact he doesn’t even mention such a concept because it’s not important. Instead, he talks of what remains when the model has exhausted itself. “When a system has absorbed everything, when one has added everything up, when nothings remains, the entire sum turns to the remainder and becomes the remainder (144, original italics).” One of the key sections, philosophy-wise, in this book has to do with the remainder, which is another way of talking about emptiness as a thing. The remainder is the excessive real, “in a strict sense, it cannot be defined except as the remainder of the remainder (143)”—that is, left over after processes have stopped. You might say hey, wait, isn’t everything real? And yes, that’s how language is, but the model for what is real and what is hyperreal have become the same. For instance, in talking of diplomas, their ubiquity and the ease at which they can be acquired— for whoever goes through the process gets one—signifies nothing but their meaninglessness. What makes diplomas meaningless is that it’s not about knowledge; it’s about process. Diplomas connect in a system of simulacra that only point to other simulacra. Similar to Derrida, with Baudrillard, we end with a passed reference that is always missed. What’s left over is the reality we deal with, the remainder that we must recycle back into a process for it to be what we think it is, which is a problem we have today with things that are “meta,” that the meaning of a thing today is often exactly what it is, a simulation, a context that determines our locus, not what it should be for us. For example, if we go to say, Paris, that trip will be like “a family trip,” with all the clichés and potholes of a family trip, which might as well be a sitcom simulating a family trip. The process of going through replaces the reality of a family trip, so that really, you’re just “doing” the “family trip.” You can’t otherwise because we are trapped in hyperreality. This is like how fake internet money in a game treated like real money in an economy becomes real money. The caveat is that real money then is just as fake as fake money because it’s just another simulation due to a formal process. Baudrillard notes that, like the Borges story, the territory itself decays when the map of the territory replaces the territory by being the territory itself. The simulacra of simulation, the pattern itself, the hyperreality has taken over reality by replacing reality. In hyperreality, the map meant to represent reality becomes a simulacra of reality itself so that we don’t get real, we get the map qua real qua map.

The fact that he is able to note the lack of a lack, as Zizek would say: the anti-philosophy at the heart of philosophy, so to speak, places Baudrillard with all the other philosophical greats of our time. He notices the void that persists throughout simulation: that which organizes simulacra and leaves only sense making in its wake.

Meaning, truth, the real cannot appear except locally, in a restricted horizon, they are partial objects, partial effects of the mirror and of equivalence. All doubling, all generalization, all passage to the limit, all holographic extension (the fancy of exhaustively taking account of this universe) makes them surface in their mockery (108 – 109).

Thus, the curve of meaning making is in fact what is created through the distortion of the absent remainder, leaving us only sensible sense, the trace that makes sense. In other words, when speaking of truth, or ideology, Baudrillard is able to show us how adding the unnameable nothing (the social totality, the remainder) back into the mix gets us the totality that we cannot exceed. The simulation always over-codes totality by naming its void, leaving us always within the wake of its own logic. Baudrillard writes: “As the social in its progression eliminates all residue, it itself becomes residue. In designating residual categories as ‘Society,’ the social designates itself as a remainder. (144, original italics).” This is another way of saying that in trying to split a totality like the social, we name parts of it also things, so as to make a thing out of its parts. But the social as a totality, as a bare named signifier, persists because the social always remains as a residue to mark the situation we are in. With the naming of any void, the absent remainder, we can never get away from conditions like being in society, whatever ideology or other kinds of hyperreality. Hyperreality is the kind of situation presupposes the very topography that we are trying to define, to get away from! If anything, what is confusing about Baudrillard is that he does not allow us any access, imaginary or real, to what we are talking about. What he calls simulation is also the very naming of a given set of the conditions that allow us to talk about anything at all, simply because such terms act as null reference points to its own generic logic.

I am split on liking the reviews (through Goodreads and Amazon) where people obviously didn’t get it, and thus didn’t like it, and disliking such reviews by hurt readers who rebelled at feeling stupid, or having their time wasted (and it’s hard to tell the difference when you’re not sure what you are reading about). To be honest, I’ve read this book three times over the past 10 years, and each time I’ve come away with a fuller picture. This is one of the hardest books I’ve ever read, and that includes any of Zizek or Deleuze’s works.

Overall, I appreciate this difficulty because in making you work for it, the concept will stick with you. You’ll make the concept your own, and you’ll remember it better. It can inspire you, help you along. If the entire concept everything was handed to you, you’d lose the influence. In this sense, by stretching in a new way, you end up in the ‘pataphysical, where the meaning stands on its own. Is this a site of resistance to the ubiquitous hyperreality? With ‘pataphysics, you get something that can stand in for itself on its own by itself, in this case, each particular re-reading. Although, it is arguable that while there is the process of reading, if you read the good stuff, each time it will be different. This difference however, is really a pre-fabricated genre soaked simularca because it is different. We assume, in Baudrillardian terms, that what we are reading relies on a kind of perhaps, “naïve faith in a pact of the similitude of things to themselves.” We assume that what we are talking about is the same as what we are talking about, and this is where our conception, or model or map, gets in the very way of what we are so desirous to speak of.

The real, the real object is supposed to be equal to itself, it is supposed to resemble itself like a face in a mirror—and this virtual similitude is in effect the only definition of real—and any attempt, including the holographic one, that rests on it, will inevitably miss its object, because it does not take its shadow into account (precisely the reason why it does not resemble itself)—this hidden face where the object crumbles, its secret. The holographic attempt literally jumps over its shadow, and plunges into transparency, to lose itself there (109, original italics).

And in this way, you can say that each time you process Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation you’ve actually miss-encountered it. Whatever process of reading you have, you inevitably create a conception of it, and in that conception, blur the totality of everything else around it, to make room for this conception. So in a twist of Baudrillardian logic, perhaps we read Simulacra and Simulation in order to claim everything is a simulation. In finding simulacra everywhere around us—we dig extra deep in order to hide the fact that we already don’t really live in reality, that our very response in naming and determining differences around us for orientation—to get at reality creates the very condition we want to escape from.

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Anti-Nietzsche

September 9, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Anti-NietzscheAnti-Nietzsche by Malcolm Bull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Part of the problem with going against Nietzsche is that he says too much; and is hard to pin down. His books are all over the place, and he leaves you with aphorisms that are as philosophical as they are suggestively poetic.

In this vein, Bull does a pretty good job, even if it is a bit disorganized, at teasing out bits of Nietzsche. Bull’s approach is unique. He goes against Nietzsche to see if there’s something practical in Nietzsche. And I think that this untraditional approach works well, even if you have to read between a lines a little to see it.

Bull says very clearly that Nietzsche’s insight is that values are due to social difference. That hierarchy and social organization give rise to values; the two are the same, but at different levels. The main contention here, is that radical egalitarianism would destroy values. The loss of values leads to nihilism. While egalitarianism and nihilism are not the same thing, “nihilism exceeds egalitarianism” and after equality has been done so that there can no longer be any difference to equalize, we would only be left with nihilism… where everyone could only “listen to Muzak and eat potatoes”. The question Bull leaves us rhetorically, is “what value could there be of a society where no one could distinguish themselves” likewise, how could we improve ourselves if there we don’t have values to know what better is?

The main thesis, and it’s buried in there, is that Nietzsche foresees nihilism approaching… and seeks to stop it with the quest for a Superman. Nietzsche wishes to save us from a life of a diluted, weak society in which we are all forced to be equal to its weakest members. To highlight the importance of this idea, Bull goes to the opposite lengths, to “read like a loser” and become animal: “subhuman”. If we want to see the value of Nietzsche’s project we have to experience the absence of such a project… we have to fall into the depths of nothingness itself, to be weak ourselves and beg others for compassion and sympathy. We have to induce society to think only of us and baby us for our well being… We have to be as animals, to not have a clearing in the world, only further darkening.

What perhaps, makes Bull difficult, perhaps for some readers, is that he pulls many readers of nihilism and thinkers of the state to task, using their thoughts to give structure to Nietzsche’s aphorisms. Bull impressively quotes Nietzsche often, supporting them with the philosophical vocabulary of others to make his argument. He runs circles around some concepts to show their limits, show how others apply them and to show ultimately how Nietzsche is right to approach nihilism the way he does. And in this exciting quest, Bull convinces me of what he sees in Nietzsche.

I find it curious that other reviewers thought Bull confusing and yet praised him as his book as being well-written… I find that there in such reviews, there is a familiarity with many authors but no coherency to be found… an argument against a book as being “well-written”.

Nonetheless, I do agree in part, that Bull throws too many people at us, sort of at surprise… and then scrambles to reformulate his argument. The chapters are also split into too many sections. The issue I have with sections is that authors do this sometimes, because it’s easier to write in smaller blocks… without having to resort to well formed transitions between them. Perhaps Bull writes all his books this way, but I think it’s the fault of the editor for not having encouraged Bull to devote himself to a sustained argument. The first chapter however, is marvelous. The last chapter did end without really clearly articulating the book as conclusions are wont to.

Still, I give him 4 stars for an exciting book that is well worth the reading, even if towards the end he starts to lose focus… but never comes to the conclusion about what kind of society we are to be left with, leaving us at the mercy of the Great Beast, with mediocrity.

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Disneywar

September 9, 2014 / posted in Business, reviews / No Comments

DisneywarDisneywar by James B. Stewart
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The scope of this book seems pretty modest: it covers the reign of one Michael Eisner, who from his introduction as CEO took Disney as a static company and revitalized it as a meta-conglomerate it is today. Whats interesting about this nearly 600 page book is that how it chronicles the 20 years he worked as CEO… mostly as a series of conversations he had with others. The main interest in this book has to do with the internal politics and policies that the high level managers of Disney implemented… mainly that while Eisner was highly successful in his earlier years, in his later years he kind of lost touch with creative innovation and took to securing his own stardom and success at the expense of the talent he sought to bring into Disney.

If you know the history of some of the worst tyrants, who started off good, you can see this trend, when power blinds one to their short-comings. The last 1/3 of the book is intensely interesting as Eisner seeks to maintain control of the board of directors, the very people who he needs to answer to, rather than letting them keep him in check.

If you want a short analysis here it is: the main flaw in Shakesphearean tragedy is hubris; extensive pride. Any civilization or individual letting their ego run wild will have excessive pride. How this is flaw is easy: one coasts on past success and lets that speak for their present action. One over extends or hyper-focuses on specific problems at the expense of maintaining a balanced ecology. This is what happened. In Eisner’s profit chasing and empire making, he made many profoundly bad choices, which where really only bad in hindsight. Towards the end of his tenure as CEO he focused on securing his position against all others who might contend with him… creating an environment of spying, hostility and backstabbing.

I won’t go over much of the book’s narrative line in detail, but this book, while I thought it might be boring, turned out to be the exact opposite. I can’t really think too much of what more I’d like to have seen, in its construction. I think Stewart did an excellent job… the book seems pretty thorough, considering much of the “plot” is dialogue and conversation which may or may not have been recorded. It’s actually a very fascinating human drama.

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Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

September 9, 2014 / posted in images of being-human, reviews / No Comments

Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and MeaningPagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning by Edward Carpenter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At first glance, Carpenter seems to be heavily de-valuing Christianity as he examines how Christian rituals have precedence within pagan rituals. But in reading this book you learn this is not what he is trying to do.

He is actually seeking to find the root of religion. Carpenter grounds religious understanding in the development of human consciousness… so in that sense, pagan or Christian makes no difference — we are attempting to find our place in the world. How we do so through religion, is by grounding validation of our social reality through various external markers. In other words, we use sacrifice and ritual to maintain a consistency with the outside world.

The actual thesis comes fairly late in the book. About half way through, he notes that this humanity seeking place develops in turn from the increased consciousness that comes with the loss of drive…with knowledge. The 2nd stage is self awareness, when knowledge of the world is mobilized as functionality of the world oriented to the self. The last stage is a return to unity of humankind within the ground of Self.

Where Christianity steps in, is within the increased development of self-consciousness… for instance, Carpenter notes that with the rise of self-consciousness came self-will. This will according to self came as a threat to the coherency of the group. Christianity solves this by requiring that newcomers be born into the group, or I should say, born again. This doesn’t stop the selfishness though:

with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regeime became as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: “Am I saved? Am I doing the right thing? Am I winning the flavor of God and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did I make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?” The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole human system.

Carpenter isn’t quite done yet with Christianity. He also writes that “Sin is actually (and that is its only real meaning) the separation from others, and the non-acknowledgement of unity.” After all, any sin is really the run-away of human will, for the exclusion of all else, an imbalance within human consciousness.

Carpenter’s final point, the rise of the ground of Self marks for him a return to past truths, half sensed within human consciousness but not fully articulated. This ground of Self is really a return to philosophy, something Carpetner shys away from, but being from the earlier part of the 20th century, this was how existence was conceptualized, along a kind of immanent ground, be it consciousness or Self.

And that is my only compliant. His argument is from a structuralist framework, and it works well when dealing with other religions. Where it becomes sketchy is in that he slides from speaking of consciousness to speaking about Self… as if the two are the same. They aren’t. Nonetheless he ends on a positive note. He quotes one Dr Frazer from “The Golden Bough”

The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories (of thought); and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena–of registering the shadows on the screen–of which we in this generation can form no idea.”

Carpenter does hope that we can find out of self-conscious obsessed world, wherein we think only of ourselves, to find unity. What he doesn’t mention is that science too, is a knowledge based oriented along the self, for humankind and so on…. at least in the 20th century it was viewed as such. More understanding of how we are interconnected with nature has been revealing a different picture, one in which we cannot take a self interested view only, for to only be interested in things for us, is to lose the rest of the world… and no one can live without that.

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Sisters of Salome

September 9, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Sisters of SalomeSisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In this well written book, Toni Bentley traces how 5 women (among others) explore the image of Salome to express their freedom.

These women existed in the early part of the 20th century, when the industrial revolution had gotten off the ground, and our material reality was suddenly released from its constraints. We were now able to re-create our identity anyway we sought… and these women did so through the story of Salome… a story about a will-full jewish princess who uses her sexuality to decapitate a religious saint.

This tale not only encapsulates the mystery of the femme fatal, but it also becomes an expression of female freedom, in a public sphere dominated traditionally only by men… Through embracing this image, many women found freedom, not just personal artistic expression, but also to some extent, financial freedom… although the story varies from individual to individual.

Bentley only seeks to explore this topic through the lense of biography and personal history. It’s somewhat out of her scope to examine how economical and political liberalism at full swing sought to defamiliarize social labels. How this happens is perhaps unimportant but Bentley does note that it’s no joke that by skirting the boundaries of social acceptability (dancing in various states of undress) many of these women faced real retribution from the political powers that be, as scapegoats. In each case, though these women were able to successfuly co-opt that image of Salome, to make it their own and use that social prohibition to their personal advantage… their ability to do so relied very heavily on society’s (at that time) ability to create a class of luxury, separated from the means of production by a market place… in a sense, a group of people who could participate in the group fantasy of entertainment, with the means and material access at their collective hands to create elaborate sets to express any such radical ideas.

It’s also no mistake that each of these women entered the field of opera and dance without formal training… ambitious women who were willing to cross boundaries to do so, to take center stage, but not relying on the traditional routes for stardom (for those are controlled by conservative hands).

Delightful book to read… although I would have liked some conclusion perhaps… though ending with Colette, the brightest story of them all, was a good move on Bentley’s part… perhaps saying all she wanted to say with that ending.

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The Philosopher in the Kitchen

June 24, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Philosopher in the Kitchen (Cookery Library)The Philosopher in the Kitchen by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

At first glance this book seems like it would be hard to review. What you have is an intellectual’s pontification of food. Being from the time period of middle capitalism, when industry was in full swing, but of the upper classes, most of the knowledge he brings to us is conjecture… that is, his biology, anatomy and chemical analysis only go so far as to talk of macro-structures. Much else is opinion, metaphysics pulled onto observations connected at the macro-level. So in that sense, hardly interesting to us today, given our wider acquaintance of the sciences. But then again, his thoughts serve as a mirror to the values of his day… that is to say, reality only echoed back to him (and us, the reader) his “apparent truth” that he read in the things he wrote. What we get then, is less an encyclopedia of food related relations — but rather we get a slice of the French world view from the position of a gourmand.

There are in this work, the tell tale signs of modernism, of the epic tale. He waxes on food, praises it, sings highly to the gods. In each tale he tells, of class relations, of political opponents, of military men, of husband and wife… their relations take on the “flavor” of how they relate to food. In this sense, Brillat-Savarin says more than he means to say, even as he tries to maximally complete this high tale of digestion and gastronomy… touch every aspect of life… he ends instead of telling us what is important in this lifeworld.

For most of human existence, we have hungered. Our economic and social arrangements all center around our bellies (first and foremost, although of course there are other things that influence these hierarchies). So for the first time, in the middle of the industrial revolution you get the bounty of the Earth, delivered at your door. For the first time, with foodstuffs from Asia, the New World, Africa, the middle East and even in Europe, you get whole mobs of well to do professionals, often with disposable incomes, hungering for sweets and delicacies. This sounds scrumptious until you realize that much of the political instability today is due to vast social and ecology abuse from this time period. Latin America for example, still bears the scars of heavy cane sugar farming. Much of the land in Cuba is left unproductive. This also includes the human misery caused by slavery in service of European tastebuds. As a result of this need for profit and this need for luxury, within this book we get evidence of a bourgeois class not only able to sake their thirst but also create new meals, unheard of delights! Much of capitalism isn’t just greed — its also competition in the social hierarchy of who throws the best meals, who has the best parties, who can afford the most rarest of desserts.

This kind of excess still goes on today, of course, as endangered species are eaten by the wealthy, who can afford profiteers who are willing to break the law for a tidy sum… but back then, regulation was much laxer. So in this book, you get a paralleled description of the excess. On nearly every page, Brillat-Savarin describes the bounty of courses, the mouthwatering meals, the smells, and the skilled preparation of food. Food! FOOD. In the course of waxing about how great food is, he talks about how it relates to nearly everything about the French bourgeois, from dating, to attitudes about what to eat, who is a pig, who is laughable… bad manners in foreigners (mostly British but some American and German, whose nations incidentally are also France’s major economic competitors at this time period)… in essence, Brillat-Savarin classifies people by their attitudes towards food.

In this book, food is the nexus that determines social standing. While Brillat-Savarin seeks to talk about food, about the meaning of it, he ends up telling us instead (although in an excessively ego-centric way) about the people who seek to eat it. Who deserves it? How can you be saved by it? His most hilarious stories are always at the expense of people who lack the class and finesse either to appreciate the meal, or understanding its richness.

In this sense, this book is quite a tale. But you kind of have to read between the lines (a little) to recognize this. In another sense, this book was a boring as hell… probably because I don’t care about his society, his world or his antiquated thoughts! If anything, Brillat-Savarin was most likely a fascinating, friendly and energetic man of his time. But he reads to me as being boorish, childish in his temperament towards others… and not at all understanding of the deeper sensibilities that contextualize his social reality. But we shouldn’t fault this of him… after all, each of us does reflect our origins, or at least where we are right now, in how we think of things, how we write of them and how we choose to identify what aspects of what particular has what meaning to us. This doesn’t mean though, that I should like him.

He does of course, reflect his time period. And in his time, the Earth was limitless abundance, and all the pleasures of capitalism could be lead straight to one’s stomach. People were first learning that greed in the marketplace meant stuffing yourself silly (as it was your right to spend your money as you liked)… all the while impressing your neighbors while you were at it. Obviously today, our world has grown too small to support our appetites…so it disgusts me to read about how people often over ate just to impress others with the ruggedness of their lifeforce… And in that sense, perhaps I envy his innocence, even just a little.

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Postmodern Cities and Spaces

June 24, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Postmodern Cities and SpacesPostmodern Cities and Spaces by Sophie Watson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the onset, this collection of essays takes the point of postmodernism for granted, in order to avoid evaluation of the term and jump right into the meat of the matter.

Considering that people often have a difficult time discerning what postmodernism is, it comes as both no surprise that these essays approach the matter from multiple points of view, in as much as it comes as a delightful surprise.

The tactful conclusion this collection reaches is that postmodernism destroys boundaries in as much as it secures them. Sound like a contradiction? The “classical” modernist view, that things are objectively what they are no matter how you look at them, remains a ghost in postmodern studies such that we always refer to what is different in postmodernism… to find the orderless and impose order. Nonetheless, a grand narrative of sorts exist as social boundaries align along a multitude of dimensions, overcoding and re-writing each other.

In the new conceptualization of identity politics the old binary oppositions of class and gender and race are disrupted and dispersed, and new formations and alliances come together in different forms to erupt in new places and new forms. Instead of assuming single subject positions and identities which shift and change all the time.

Ultimately postmodern cities exist because people are postmodern, existing differently depending on who is looking, or what criteria is using used. Of course, this leads us directly into Badiou’s anti-philosophy or Baudrillard’s “lost referential” created by the disclosure of simulacra. In postmodern discourse, we attempt to find the metaphysics of presence, that elusive center that grounds a discourse in reality, so we can safely say, this is official: this is what something means… from this truth we can start to build an objective truth.

Of course, this central position is impossible… metaphysics of presence disappears when we examine one area, as it seems to be slightly off elsewhere… so we chase that bird and end up running in circles. Only in postmodern discourse, going in one direction doesn’t mean you can return to where you came from if you simply reverse vector, as objects of knowledge can only exist through the structured filter of the place you are currently at… other places will be structured differently; under different constraints.

I rather enjoyed the analysis of different cities, different spaces and different gazes… each of which was grounded by the authors historically, only to be partially dissolved when present day is reached. In each “microhistory” we see the effects of politics, economics and culture (among other things, like race, sex, religion and so on) overcoding various areas to question other discourses. The flux of determinable meaning becomes embedded in the everyday reality of a postmodern gaze/space/city. While the overall classical hierarchy appears to vaguely exist (rich people live here, poor people live here, industry is here or there) the overlapping sectors seem to be what determine postmodernism… the fluidity of capital (or the lack of it) within a city seems to be one of the key ways in which a city comes to unknow itself, as it constantly struggles to synthesize standard relations between its different parts. In particular, the essay on Bombay, the essays on heteropologies, discourse, the essay on walls, and the essay on flaneur and gazes seemed to tie the topics coherently for me. This isn’t to say the other essays aren’t interesting either.

All in all, this is an interesting if fragmentary look on postmodern cities. A good place to start. Of course there are plenty of other books on the subject. But if you pick a different author, from a different school, with a different view of social reality, then you will be bound to come to another specific conclusion… and it is this motley of conclusions which is rightly bundled as postmodern.

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