FROTTAGE & EVEN AS WE SPEAK

May 30, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

FROTTAGE & EVEN AS WE SPEAKFROTTAGE & EVEN AS WE SPEAK by Mona Houghton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Two novellas in this short book. But what novellas they are.

They both deal intimately with family — with our orientation and loss of orientation in the universe, the world we make.

The first reaches us in the form of a series of disjointed letters — a woman writing to her psychologist, at first, detailing their encounters, and his lack of response… and in these letters, she is able to tell of the very seminal bonds she had with her two brothers, the trauma that came with the loss of their inner world (the three of them had) and then the healing that starts up again.

The second deals with a collage of a series of characters whose lives by happenstance collide and come together. Family again. But through a series of equally traumatic encounters the different characters down own up to their existence (in different ways) finding their way again.

Both these stories at first, seemed to wander. Where were they going? What were they doing? But then, when you get past half the story, and the worldview of each separate piece seems established in its normality, or at least within its own internal logic of its ‘scene’ you get a rush in which the accumulated disturbances, the small pieces that seemed in place come together out of joint. The displacement takes you further along, faster than you had before to arrive at the breaking point, when the ending seemed too clear, and yet less clear.

And this is where the two novellas parted ways for me. The first didn’t seem completed, as an ending that was befitting (although that was read over six months ago… reading it again now, it seems very much so). The second novella wrapped itself up neatly, almost too neatly for how can characters after encountering so much pain (their own pain, the pain of those around them) — come to a satisfying ending? And yet Houghton does pull it off, by emphasizing the story is closed.

What Susie secretly suspects (she images the scientists will someday come to this) is that there is a giant universe of universes (no exit, no entrance), and that inside it, smaller universes slip and slide against each other, constantly on the move, positions random and haphazard, always keeping the big moves mysterious, yeah, you might exit this universe and come right back in on the other side, but, just maybe (timing is everything) you might exit and slip into a whole other universe just because it happens to be sliding by the one you are escaping, the one you’ve played all the games in that can be played, the one you’ve earned the right to exit for good

By wrapping the larger theme in a metaphysical theme, she echos the structure of narrative structure, in fact, her structure, as you see each partition in the story fragments come together as motifs in a larger tapestry, playing out all the permutations and exhausting the inner voices of her story. Finally, the story then releases us, having imparted its word and completed itself, like a classical piece of music, developed its theme out fully and yet wrapped us back to end on a note that is the essence of itself, sustained by its ending to linger a little longer than after we turn the last page.

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The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China

May 30, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Seven Military Classics of Ancient ChinaThe Seven Military Classics of Ancient China by Ralph D. Sawyer
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

For most of recorded history, China has housed the largest human population. Combined with the very fertile land of the area, and its relative connectedness (Europe in comparison, had many mountains and small areas connecting it, causing populations to form in related but relative autonomy), Chinese civilization gave rise to hugely bureaucratic institutions that helped perpetuate its monolithic political system. As such, the military might of empire building has given rise to a variety of teachings about military matters from its victors.

In classic form, these texts are often inscribed in a series of question and answers, the point of which aren’t organized in the same brute force organization as the German treatsie or the Anglo-Saxon essay. Nonetheless, despite the length of time encompassed in this text many of the texts sound fairly similar. Much of the principles behind these texts can be found in Sun Tzu’s art of war.

Taoist teachings have penetrated much of Chinese thought and society, giving rise not only to military tactical and strategic thoughts but also thoughts on propaganda, ruling, medicine, astrology, chemistry and martial arts. Most of the principles are pretty much the same though. Be orthodox when they enemy expects unorthodox. Be unorthodox when the enemy expects orthodox. Things like that. Be where they don’t expect you, be integrated in how you approach things, withhold information, let your enemy fight amongst themselves when possible. Win wars without fighting.

In a sense, the best military strategies are the ones that avoid war, that ensure political and economy success without military expense.

I won’t pretend that this was a mystical read, full of great oriental wisdom… by today’s standards, there is much detail missing… and the repetition did get mind numbing. Nonetheless, it is good to see how many ideas haven’t changed over time and how people can continue, despite technology, to discover the same ideas as being relevant.

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When Things Fall Apart

May 30, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

When Things Fall Apart (Shambhala Classics) Publisher: ShambhalaWhen Things Fall Apart (Shambhala Classics) Publisher: Shambhala by Pema Chodron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Chodron draws a portrait of Buddhism that is both intensely personal and highly unfamiliar. From the desperation of her unhappy marriage she tells the tale of her discovering Tibetan Buddhism, embracing it and then coming to terms with it.

New Age approaches to Buddhism tell of Eastern gurus with deep wisdom, sages that can see right through us, and of course, the ever-lasting mystical bliss, as being a deeper reality available to us if we only reach for it.

This may be how many of us are drawn to Buddhism, but the Buddhism Chodron paints is one of intense suffering. Sitting for hours on end, meditating, performing routine chores, putting yourself in socially awkward positions… it seems a monk’s life is only there to expose you to your own folly. Left to your own devices, all you can do is let your ego run rampant through the monastery (either by promoting it, or fighting it) or let it pass through you.

But be aware, she isn’t just talking about her own life, she is making a connection to you through her own trials. Chodron is very clear. Suffering in this life is only through our own actions. Even if we locate the problem outside of ourselves, our suffering through it results in the attitudes we have about ourselves, and the expectations we have about who we are what the world owes to us… the kind of life we deserve. Seeking to fulfill the requirements of one who deserves the best won’t make things better… it makes it worse. Because if you succeed, you’re tied to the idea that somehow you earned it (many people have tried to win at life, and why they fail often has to do with chance more than anything else). So the only way out of this slavery to our own unconscious whims? Failure. Suffering. Learning who you are by discovering how little you can do without. Ultimately, what you learn to do without is also your own self: the very thing you set out to save.

And be warned, this book is dense.

I read it very carefully, taking over a month to engage in the various parts in the book. There are so many passages I could quote from but I’ll end it with her own quote from Jean-Paul Sartre:

“There are two ways to walk into a gas chamber–free or not free”

Life is short. We can’t wait. We often live our lives with the view that we can do things tomorrow. We expect the future to be always around the corner, but at the same time, never quite here… so we often don’t live in the present. We live for tomorrow, we live for the next day, and we never quite make it to living. Really though, the choice is ours… and our own poison is how we run our lives with the expectation that we are going to make it to a place of bliss, in the future… a place that won’t ever exist unless we make it happen right now.

Talk about Buddhist nihilism. It’s also the elimination of ideas like nihilism. You can’t ever get to keep your own philosophy, or system.

In short, her emphasis isn’t merely that Buddhism is there to help you “when things fall apart” but rather Buddhism is there to help you make “things fall apart”… the when, is NOW.

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Marriage In Free Society by Edward Carpenter

May 30, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Marriage In Free Society by Edward CarpenterMarriage In Free Society by Edward Carpenter by Edward Carpenter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At first, this small book seems like it might be a backwards glance at what marriage is. But in fact it’s not. In many ways, surprisingly contemporary in how it outlines problems in marriage, Carpenter anticipates many of our social issues today.

What is significant about this work is that he poses “free society” in terms of the freedom of ownership. He foretold of a future when women should be free as well… free to earn her own living wages, same as any man.

While this small gem is scattered throughout the book, Carpenter foresees a future when marriage has to be between two free agents, rather than as a mode of domination of a man towards a woman. He tells a tragic tale of women stuck in servitude, raised separately from men, promised a life of everlasting romance but bound through economic needs to a husband. I was surprised at how fresh I found his outlook.

There are of course, some instances when Carpenter betrays his dated sensibilities, such as when speaking of sex (that women don’t want it nearly as much, and men are just crazy over it) But his general treatment is idealistic. He paints a portrait of marriage as equals, outlining how society needs to change how it raises its young in anticipation of a hard wrought equality of two partners whose love can only grow through true commitment. It seems our ideas of marriage can benefit from some of his temperament, rather than embracing marriage as either one long endless honeymoon or one long endless ball of drama.

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The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It

May 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can't Do Without ItThe Music Instinct: How Music Works and Why We Can’t Do Without It by Philip Ball
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a fabulous book. There is one main question it tries to answer: What does music mean?

This question is not an easy to answer question. The short answer is that we don’t know. Because we don’t know, it’s also somewhat difficult to know where to start. Ball manages though, to get the ball rolling. Still, it’s a wild ride, as what music means (to us) is also, what is it? How is it? What are the mechanics? How do various groups react to it? And how do we find, in all these loose structures, tons of opinions and endless variations, any kind of universal over-arching box for which we can place music in a sock drawer and be done with it?

Even given such a huge domain, one which touches us so intimately as music touches us, Ball manages to designate borders around this cloud of what “music” is. His main push lies in the classical music tradition… which has very much to do with an interplay of themes and melodies, harmonies of sonic form — that

in the Baroque period, when composers aimed to portray the states of the soul, such as rage, excitement, grandeur or wonder. They were not trying to tell us how they felt, but were offering something like symbols of ideas and feelings in a systematic language that their audiences understood. They employed stock figures and devices, often drawn from the principles of classical rhetoric, such as the inventio (finding a musical subject) and its elaboratio or exposition. No one believed that the music had some intrinsic, mystic power to evoke these things; they simply expected the audience to know the language. During the Classical era and the Age of Enlightenment, in contrast, the objective was to make music that was ‘natural’, that moved and entertained with its grace and lyricism — as music historian Charles Burney wrote, this made music ‘the art of pleasing by succession and combination of agreeable sounds.’

It was in the nineteenth century, when composers started to believe music had an intrinsic potential to express raw emotion without the mediation of agreed conventions, that they and their audiences lost sight of the strictly conventional assignation of meaning and started to think that music produced immediate imaginative suggestion. [In this same time period] composers were less likely to produce works commissioned for particular patrons, audiences or events, but instead felt they were writing for eternity. […] The composer, like the painter, was no longer a craftsperson but a priest, prophet and genius.

In a way, music was most natural when people were “expected to just know” even though music at that time was made of Baroque rhetorical devices. But when the medium of music became a thing in-itself, music detached from this naturalness of rhetoric and became lovely sounds. Eventually that became Romanticism, as the theme emerged from chaos, wrought from pain and angst in the medium, and so composers themselves were also hardpressed. The genius himself is the creation of genius… the genius is so beyond, that the conventions that are used, the rhetorical devices are blasted apart, but somehow loosely held enough together in our contemporary era.

Ball also writes that the best music shows us how to hear, but it has no linguistic equivalent as if language is the true language of reality. Instead, Ball says music is simply itself, it has no deeper meaning in language (although we may think it does) in that others can hardly verify that meaning in its specificity. This is another way of saying that Ball means that meaning can only be verified as being “out there” if “enough” people can independently find that meaning in its object. Because music cannot be verified this way, music becomes “a little bit of the Real” that we can directly apprehend.

This is his meaning too when he points out that music cannot have developed for our evolutionary advantage because processing music is not assigned to a specific part of the brain like other functions (such as speech or movement or counting). Instead, music lights up the entire part of the brain, including areas as “basic” as our motor skills in processing rhythm… or rather, does rhythm excite our motor skills? Either way, inasmuch as anyone wants to see meaning in music, a meaning which they most likely could just as easily find anywhere else in the universe because of how they specifically are, we also see ourselves in music… struggling, finding brief happiness, being gloomy, running naked in a field, flying through the air, laughing with friends, having sexy time… music can tell us of how we each individually are just as it can remind us to be appropriately happy or sad as we have learned to listen to it as being those emotions.

Just as over time, music has changed its meaning, or its ability to speak to us, so our expectations of ourselves have changed too. When music becomes the work of geniuses, we need to find geniuses out there who can write such music. When music was natural, obvious and everything good, so was our idea of society, our progress as a species, our ideas of God and universe. Music has served historically, as a mirror to us. Many non-Western cultures use music differently, but in each, they are moved by it, place it appropriately in their social setting, and enjoy it as a group activity. Music is the glue that binds us in as much as it reminds us of who we need to be, who we are already and who we think we should be.

Ball’s book is not that thick. But it is a moving, touching piece, that reaches the range of what we think are our ways of knowing reality (logic, science, history, math, art) and applies each in turn to music, to find out how it is music is able to show us what we are, to be our partner in time and reality. But despite all these approaches, Ball succeeds not only in exciting us but also showing us how each area is somehow adequate and inadequate… for each aspect of music is always simply what it is, each study may serve to show patterns, assignations, but these qualities quickly dissolve into the body of music again. If doing anything, but only reminding us of the different ways we can enjoy and participate in music.

In other words, by trying to tell us what music is, Ball manages to tell us what it is not. Rather than dampening our spirit, this rejection of the limits of music only heightens our wonder at the wide variation of music, the huge range of effect it has on us, personally and collectively. In a self reflexive way, not knowing what music is allows us to not only enjoy it (which is great), but also see ourselves reflected in it. Music falls through the cracks in languaged meaning to be only what it is, outside of language. In this way, literally, through music we can reach ourselves just as we reach the world totality.

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The Haunted Vagina

May 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Haunted VaginaThe Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

At the heart of this compelling tale (with its title and its cover image) is a fetish of the other—in this case, an Asian woman. Her promise is that she’s fun, simple, provocative and oh so cute. But there’s a twist. Her vagina is haunted. So the when the narrator, Steve, whose lack of variation allows us to assume he must be white, crawls inside her, he discovers a sad twisted world. To explain the situation to himself, he runs through a multitude of possible explanations (many of which are standard Sci-Fi scripts) before finally arriving at the correct one, the orientalist explanation:

Perhaps, a long time ago, in Asia, where Stacy [whose vagina we are in] was born, there was a village that had too many people but not enough food. Perhaps this situation went on for so long that evolution had to step in and do something about it. Perhaps a few mutant females were born, each containing fertile worlds in them. Worlds that many villagers can move into. Worlds that could sustain several villages. And all that would be needed is to feed and protect the female hosts of the worlds.

The weight of this passage is significant. In an otherwise playful book how does this serious sounding passage fit? If anything, the change in tone, with its undecided “perhaps,” leaves us with a stain that cannot be erased, one that is not definite enough to argue against. But in the absence of any other further explanation, we then proceed as though this explanation were enough.

Much of the book to this mid-point is mostly cute mundane normalcy, except for the text surrounding her vagina. But in the vagina, things turn upside down. Whereas only Stacy’s vagina was inexplicable, here Steve is the normal one and his beloved Stacy becomes an anchor, a theoretical point (as he never sees her again) when he clings to his thoughts of her in order to orient himself in this alien landscape.

But wait, like a Russian doll, not only is there another woman inside Stacy, this alien woman kidnaps Steve to keep him from leaving. This nameless woman changes him, seducing him through crazy pheromones he can’t handle. He transforms into one of her species, so much so that he eventually decides to stay and be with this other woman instead of Stacy whom he loves!

So let us unpack this situation. We find that inside this white-washed Asian woman with a honkey name is a super-exotic, super-erotic other woman (named Fig, an inhuman name), who pulls the white man into her world and indoctrinates him. Together they live inside the vagina having awesome, uncontrollable sex, frolicking naked, alone, in what otherwise is a devastated village devoid of people. Is that a happy ending? But we can tease out more here. So in the interest of completeness, what killed almost everyone else in this village?

Cancer (as Fig claims). Of course, a modern intrusion. But is that so fantastic about this intrusion being modern? Stacy was in fact an orphan, so when her family and village was otherwise destroyed (not just the one inside her, but also the one she was from), she was adopted by Americans…African Americans.

So you can be sure she is still pure, uncorruptedly herself, untainted by white parents. She still gets to be other without being other. Her real world reality is a mystery, as Mellick writes, “Stacy was forever cut off from the truth.” So we too, are cut off from the truth, left to our own devices (or at least Steve’s devices) to decipher the truth of Stacy’s vaginal world.

An easy reading is to categorize this as a story of “yellow fever” as expressed by cynics who would claim that white men only want Asian women so as to dominate their culture. Expressed in Hollywood, many movies about the Asian world have a white man being more Asian than anyone else, winning the Asian woman, preserving the culture despite the modern capitalist machine destroying the native culture. Last Samurai comes especially to mind, as Tom Cruise comes to Japan as a westerner diseased by war, made whole by Japanese culture even as Japan tears itself apart with modern weaponry. Incidentally, this story has the same structure as The Haunted Vagina.

In a way, this story actually serves as a critique of yellow fever, turning stereotyping into tragedy. While Stacy ultimately decides this uniqueness is unimportant, Steve comes to an opposite conclusion. The setup is as follows: The specter of this vague Thai-ness, the ghost that haunts this ethnically pure Asian woman who is otherwise as American as any white American woman, is this horrendous other who competes with Stacy and wins. While Stacy has had other lovers before Steve, that ghostly voice attains its own identity to become a spectacle, an exotic treat that Stacy eventually dismisses as meaningless in order to get on with her life.

[Stacy] stayed in college until she was thirty, becoming somewhat a legend on campus. Near the end of her college years, she started going to goth parties and charging money to all the little goth boys and girls to listen to her vagina for a few minutes. There would be lines out the door to see her. Eventually, a rumor went around that it was all fake. She just had some kind of wireless speaker inside her playing tape-recorded noises. Nobody believed her after that. She was no longer dating any of the college kids, since they were all so young, so there was no one who had gotten intimate enough with her to back up her story. And she didn’t care to prove it to them. A few guys still paid to listen to her vagina, but once she realized they were just doing it to rub the sides of their heads between her legs, she stopped doing it completely.

It’s significant that she tries to monetize on this voice first, before she is rejected as being a liar and then treated as a sex object. But the fact that this voice comes from her vagina, and that she tries to profit from it, says more about what we should think about exotic natures than it does about her. After all, the book is fictional. She is constructed as the active party, so we project onto her and not onto the population of the campus, which serves as a neutral background. Even if Stacy stopped selling herself after realizing that she was prostituting herself, as an experience, she matches a meaningless detail about herself (something that just “happened to her,” she was born with) as meaningful only as a profit motive. This recalls how signifiers that have no signified, as we do not know the meaning of Fig inside of Stacy, that Fig may be a figment, reflects back to us the universal positions we impose on meaningless contingency. In other words, our first reaction to something unknown says more about us than it does about a given situation. It’s no joke, for example, this vagina madness started for Stacy in college (the place of miss-romance that serves as a back drop to the American spirit of extended childhood romantic-comedies):

[S]he ended up getting drunk and sleeping with some wannabe Beat poet English major. She warned him about having a haunted vagina, but that only turned him on. After they screwed, he said that it was the most amazing thing he’d done. They dated for a while, and he worshiped her vagina. He told all of his friends about her and even had them listen to the voices through her pants. All of them thought she was brilliant. She brought magic into their worlds. She was proof that their drunken philosophical discussions of rebellion against reality were somewhat correct. And when she got bored of her boyfriend, she moved on to one of his friends. And when she got bored with him, she would move on to another. All of them treated her like a goddess.

In this way we see that Stacy, who possesses an unexplainable phenomenon in the world, is a catalyst for freedom in meaning making. Stories are constructed from events that are chained. The relationship of these chains describes the limit of what can be acceptable qua real. These limits of acceptability are evidence of the transcendental limit of what is synthesizable, of what is always present, of what is universal. This forced experience of the limits of meaning come about because new experiences force us to organize the appearance of the new with the very structures we can’t see, because we “see” those structures all the time, in how they affect us and shape what is allowed. This is what Alain Badiou means when he calls being a “void,” that the acknowledgment of the void (that is otherwise omnipresent in its absence) allows these story worshipers their “drunken philosophical discussions of rebellion against reality” to create any story. The any story comes about because the vaginal voice is a null signifier, an unincorporable contingency, acting as a bare connector for any kind of connection to be made of it. Any derived story that links the vagina voice in a chain must always be “somewhat correct” because the novelty of that contingency is always undecidable . The vaginal voice, belonging to another world must always be incoherent in-itself, as that voice offers no legitimacy within this world for us to decide upon its place in this world. In other words, Stacy inadvertently gave these college kids the “philosopher’s stone,” in the sense that they can create reality with it. So it’s logical that they started to worship her as a goddess.

As an interesting segue as the desire to reform material reality through pure muster of semiotic thought, these philosophers do two things:

1) They show us what they think is important, either material access or cultural signification

and

2) Making the most useless thing into the most useful thing at will demonstrates absolute

control, that if you can make this leap in value you can make anyone do anything else.

This had the (un)surprising effect of proving that cultural signification is not as absolute as one might think. The rise of the age of Reason, which coincided with many philosophers seeking a material philosopher’s stone, sought to eliminate bad cultural signification. Ironically, the age of Reason first leads us to worship gold as pure value, before it is replaced by money and then fiat money. Money takes the place of the philosopher’s stone’s legendary ability to choose what reality we should live in, as capitalism becomes the vehicle to determine the kind of environment we collectively transform the earth. And in this sense, Mellick III is absolutely correct: having a mysterious contingency like a haunted vagina, if inexplicable enough, allows them an experience of the unnameable, one that is more valuable than cash, which is what Stacy did in college, until a lie spread up around her, normalizing that experience. Those English majors with their freedom of storytelling were basically getting high off of the indiscernible in Stacy’s vagina. This is starting to make Stacy sound like an actual prostitute, in the sense that she valued money the most, which fits us back into “yellow fever” stereotype because it blames an

Asian women for being experienced as extra-sexual by the white man qua null subject. Null subjectivity is much like a “void” (in a quasi-Zizek way, devoid of being anything, even a subject) that allows us to access to the transcendental. When faced with a contingency that we have not encountered, we only experience that contingency through the structures of the transcendental. In other words, we realize a character through the unknown only via whatever features we happen to gleam, even if those features are arbitrary because our experience of the unknown is partial, incomplete and indiscernible. This is the nature of stereotyping – that we package others through generic characterization that relies heavily on whatever features we select.

So what is the modification of this stereotype of Stacy that allows us to jump from bizarre comedy to tragedy?

We might expect to dislike Stacy, but then we are pushed into feeling bad for her. What was maybe horror, or comedy: the ridiculous skeletons, the non-sequitur actions (that Stacy vores Steve because she wants to see where that skeleton that emerged out of her came from), and the unexplainable events and encounters, we suddenly have to feel for Stacy. When Steve tells Stacy he will stay, Stacy cuts off the phone, hurt and distraught (and jealous) that Steve would chose to stay, to love and be responsible for this Fig(ment), that by refusing to join her in the real world and just live comfortably in her vagina, Steve shows that he really only loved Stacy for her Asian identity.

In other words, Steve’s literal diving into Stacy’s vagina (also called vaginal vore in 4chan slang), and then being exposed to an inexplicable situation forces Steve to reveal the structures that already structure his own view of Stacy. In the absence of any explanation, Steve fills us in about her history. Note that this history is only formed through the connection to her vagina, her mysterious being, has this Asian-ness that is so deformedly not even Asian anymore as to be alien, haunting her “subjectivity.” Like the English majors who got high off her mystery, Steve forms a convenient truth about Stacy, one that corners her without any input from her. Despite Steve’s constant lamentations that he loves Stacy, he still abandons her. Steve literally loves what he sees in her, the fantasy world he gets to have sustained by her vagina. Steve comes to love what Stacy is, which is another way of saying that he loves what Stacy is not. This negative love is expressed when he demonstrates that he doesn’t care about her. This final judgment ends the story, when he inevitably hurts Stacy as he gets away with hurting her as she has no recourse (effectively reducing Stacy into a crying voice over a dying cell phone, like the incoherent voice in her vagina that opened this story). The story then must end, in the sense that nothing will ever change from this point on. Steve realizes that not only can he can live in Stacy, in endless enjoyment in her vagina, but he can also continue ad infinitum in her daughter’s vagina and her daughter’s daughter’s vagina. In other words, Steve decides he can’t leave (with the excuse that he’s trapped in her daughter’s vagina) only when he simultaneously realizes that he can reap endless vaginal enjoyment. In this way, we come full circle. Via the meaningless mystery of Stacy’s vagina, Steve uses his fantasy to extract surplus enjoyment of Stacy’s vagina. While Fig is the little nothing that Stacy comes to dismiss as meaningless, we also come to witness the final placement: Steve is the other haunting Stacy’s vagina.

And perhaps that is the real horror: That we can have inanely structured experiences that are highly arbitrary, but no one will disbelieve them as long as things go as we like.

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The Crying of Lot 49

May 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

The Crying of Lot 49The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although short, this book is also dense, like a many layered cake.

One way to distill it is to pull all the tropes together into one stream. Let’s start with Maxwell’s Demon. Maxwell’s Demon is a thought experiment in which a closed system remains, on the macrolevel, static, but in terms of its inner space, becomes organized through random motion, using entropy to violate the first law of thermodynamics: entropy. Maxwell’s Demon grabs particulates and then keeps all the high energy particles on one side and shuffles all the low energy particles on the other side.

So literally, Ophelia Maas attempts to be Maxwell’s Demon by taking all the random bits of narrative particulate streaming around, and organize them into one coherent gradient. One can see the gradient as a reality when a piston moves. As in the narrative, she fails. Towards the end of chapter 6, Ophelia is depressed, confused and increasingly unable to figure out what to do or how to be. Thus, she is not Maxwell’s Demon.

But if you think the story is on the side of Ophelia, that as a protagonist, she must in fact be the subject, somehow special like Maxwell’s Demon, you’ll discover you’re wrong.

But instead of being Maxwell’s Demon, Ophelia is in fact the piston that proves that Maxwell’s Demon is making a gradient. Hence, Maxwell’s Demon is somewhere else, moving the narrative particles about: the muted trumpet, W.A.S.T.E., her x-lover’s will, Trystero, Thurn and Taxis, the Courier’s Tragedy and of course John Nefastis and his actual Maxwell Demon perpetual machine… all of these are spun madly about, showing up in the Vatican, showing up as a pornographic version, showing up on the Western frontier, showing up in the Netherlands, in theater, in the mouths of Grad students… Pynchon creates a closed box of narrative particles spinning about. All the while Ophelia pistons around Los Angeles, going up to San Francisco and back down again, trying to find the correct subject, to locate the novel’s antagonism… to find the displacement that is the gradient’s negative.

But the novel ends abruptly, and rightly so, because in this mystery, just when things look like that we (Ophelia) has run out of options, so we hang all the antagonisms in the novel, place all the narrative displacement onto one plot element: that lot 49 that will auctioned and Ophelia will find a missing person…

Even though it seems that there’s no guarantee that the missing person will in fact have any answers what so ever!

So what Pynchon’s done is build his novel as a Maxwell’s Demon. But doesn’t this only just point out that novels as a structure have a rising gradient, with all the tropes being “pushed to one side”, suspended impossibly, so all resolutions can only come together, at once toppling down and revealing their secret panties? That Maxwell’s Demons are antagonists, and protagonists are pistols that are somehow able to stop the antagonisms…

But wait! There’s another side to Maxwell’s Demon as well:

The two fields [of thermodynamics and information theory] were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell’s Demon. As the Demon sat and stored his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were there

.

This isn’t totally right, because in information theory, entropy is the lossiness in information transfer. The state of a totally neutral field of molecules, one has perfect information because we know its completely even… any one area will look like any one another area. Once we get a difference in the field, we now have the possibility of entropy (that is, information entropy) reoccurring in the transfer to the subject.

So in this sense, as Ophelia sorts information (or Thurn and Taxis sorts information in the form of postage for others), or as anyone sorts out information for the Courier’s Tragedy or any kind of history, and you start to get a loss of information. Entropy insures. In fact, it’s arguable that the system Pynchon set up loses entropy (as molecules are sorted into gradient) in order to potentially increase entropy (as information about the molecules are lost).

So to wrap this up: The gradient in the narrative may follow the narrative curve and become climactic right at the end, but that’s equaled by the confusion about the narrative as we become continually displaced by as the characters reveal more and more information to Ophelia. In order words, right before the climax, the narrative gradient (loss of entropy) is equal to the narrative entropy (confusion about what we are looking for…). Imbalance on both information and gradient which is offset when both are balanced: information about nothing is equal to a field of indistinguishable nothing.

All of these layers wrap themselves together to form one even shell. From beginning to end, Pynchon magically carves a space out of words on the page for us to fall deeper and deeper into, grounding an experience in us, of an end so conclusive that we can’t ever reach it.

He impresses us with inevitability.

(Really. Go read it for yourself. You’ll see exactly what I mean.)

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The Fountainhead

May 10, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The FountainheadThe Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I was first introduced to Ayn Rand about ten years ago. I found her works distasteful and naive… but I was largely also responding to what many of her fans were saying about her works, to support capitalism and conservativism. So imagine my surprise when I read this book, and found out that it was amazing.

Like Rand’s aesthetic, this book follows one over arching arc to explore as many facets of her philosophy as possible. To this end, her narrative is thick in order to create a world… though it is presented as a tour de force, an unstoppable motion.

The basic idea is that most people only acquire a sense of self through the creation of an ego, which is really the image that one maintains in order to position oneself among others. For Rand, this ego in most people, only exists through the validation of others. That is, most people are selfless in the sense that they can only find values mirroring and parroting one another. This externally based validation of the ego is similar to a cognitive psychology theory about the development of the ego. This theory is called spiral dynamics.

Rand’s exposition of ego and spiral dynamics share many things in common, although they aren’t the same. For example, Rand doesn’t explain how ego develops, or how it grows from nothing since infancy. (Spiral dynamics splits into two sets of stages, conventional and post-conventional.) While Rand does cover both sets of stages, this book feels stunted philosophically, in not covering how the ego develops. Still, Rand’s purpose is more illustrative and this book is great at exploring how people of different stages interact. Although Rand takes this idea literally, that some people are nothing more than their open attempt to pull validation from people by appeasing people, this book is still nonetheless interesting.

Validation from others comes from fitting in an image, being admired, being kind, being pleasant, being the complete image of status, success and sophistication. Often in real life, you do find people who lack some sense of self, and thus need to prove themselves. People who set out to prove themselves in all the conventional ways sometimes become successful, and it is those people who often become the leaders of our communities. This is why leadership is often conservative, because it needs the crowd it leads in order to define itself as leader. This is where Rand and political conservatives start to part, as for Rand, the internal image of a leader, as he sees himself, defines who he is, not the people he leads.

So whereas the main character and protagonist Howard Roake, finds himself a companion, Gail Wynand who is a “Creator” like him, Wynand occupies the position in what spiral dynamics calls the 4th stage, the last stand of conventionalism. Here, Wynand dominates the entire social landscape, although he never realizes it, his quest for power still creates an ego in him. His sense of self worth is based off of the money and power he’s attained, and in the end this explodes in his face when he tries to make use of it. Wynand ultimately realizes his true position, exactly that of the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic (although Rand doesn’t use these terms), when he realizes that his leadership is based off of the crowd’s values, not his own. He is a mirror of other people’s values just like everyone else. The 4th stage is the stage when success itself is understood as still finding validation outside the self… Wynand at that moment transcends that stage and enters the post-conventional stages…in which the ego starts to break free of the undergrid of meaning which cages egos. Wynand faces the dissolution of the ego, which is inherent in the post-conventional stages.

What’s particularly interesting about reading the Fountainhead is how the characters navigate the social hierarchy within titles and dialogue. This is much like real life, in which people show their mettle through witty conversation. Being a novel though, the characters do understand one another directly in the language Rand has developed, and when they position themselves, there is much dialectical twisting, in the form of Hegelian dialectics, because the values in question are significant inasmuch as they are sometimes also absent. Rand realizes this same structure later on as in Atlas Shrugged when she names the sections of her book “non-contradiction”, “either/or” and “a=a” although, of course, the structure is loose (most likely as it comes from a text of fiction and not a purely philosophical text).

But I digress. The characters in the Fountainhead don’t change much. Most of what they do in change is self reflexive, much like real life. They realize what they are (like Peter Keating) and stay stagnant. Other than Wynand, the only other character to go through change is Dominique Falcon.

Falcon is a problematic character. She’s obviously supposed to be the female counterpart to Roake, but lacks herself any sense of being. In fact, for much of the novel she isn’t his equal, simply because she has an ego… one form or another, in most of the novel, she tries to kill it off. She does this by attempting to fit in the various roles she’s landed (through marriage mostly). And that’s basically her thing. Roake at least seems to have a thing that he is (architecture) but Falcon has nothing but her body and her image as a woman. In fact, as woman, she confines herself to being prosopopeia to her man, by erasing the self… which is to say, wholly to support her man’s ego. Perhaps this is why, in part, Rand decided to give her character Dagney Taggart from Atlas Shrugged a thing of her own.

This brings us to Howard Roake, who is the protagonist. He has no ego, cares not for what other people think of him, or what they think of at all. His embodiment is his work, and that’s all he is. He is 100% self. And this is where spiral dynamics and Rand part, at the last stage of post-conventionalism. If the self is wholly informed as to who it is, via the image of an ego, and the ego can only be the social position of a self in language, then says the theory, Roake cannot be as selfish as he is. Roake’s sense of person should dissolve in a major way, and be integrated into the experience of the universe… which is also missing from Rand… that ego and worldview are intimately tied. The less developed the ego, the more black and white the world. By assuming that the self is in fact completely separate from the world, and the world is obvious in its materiality, Rand has failed to take her understanding of selfhood far enough. In other words, even though Rand can see how language and social reality are intertwined with the ego and how the ego forms itself from the fabric of social reality, Rand fails to understand that all objects are in part languaged-objects and the external world is rightly, exists as it is only in service of humankind’s ability to create meaning, and define things in the world in terms of who we are… So when the ego changes who it is, the meaning of the self and world, and the world as the self sees it changes too.

In fact, his person taken literally, Roake should be nearly outside of language, incomprehensible in totality to all others… although in the novel he often says exactly what he is. Two alternate models of a self outside of language come to mind: Herman Meville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street”, or an enlightened guru who has retreated to the tops of mountains to contemplate the eternal Tao (or something like that).

Of course, neither would make for a compelling story about ego relations in Depression era New York, so Rand decided to make Roake a solid self, a self that was completely architect, so that the reader can see him. And seeing him is important, so that in order to stablize the relations of ego, Rand has a language and a world that is full of consistent objects, not dissolved objects or selves with blurry post-conventional “ontologies”. In other words, the language of the Fountainhead is consistent because Rand needs to show us clearly how her characters interrelate in terms of ego and self, to hierarchialize her characters… which of course, maintaining social hierarchy is all about what stable unchanging controlled language is about, but alas, again I digress.

Also, don’t forget, that after all, architecture is the most resource intensive thing humans do, it’s also intersects political, economic and aesthetic interests… and has at its handle, all the range necessary for Rand to show off her ideas, which impact creation, industry, media, art, fashion, beauty, friendship and love.

So even while Rand doesn’t also show how the world changes with the self… her book still reads very well. Its driven, its clear and its engaging. After all, wasn’t it her goal in the first place to show how egos can change? Her goal is to show how most of humanity stumbles around on trying to please and placate itself while getting in the way of those few who seek progress. Having developed enough of a theory of ego, Rand does assume an external reality, one in which language is firmly what it is even if the ego isn’t, which is probably why all her characters and protagonists can exist as unchanging models on a never ending background. After all, if language changed depending on the strength of the ego, how would we understand who is winning? How would we understand what progress is, or what things mean? In this sense, Rand’s solid world, is a world that is the same no matter who is walking in it. Things will mean the same thing, because Rand means for us to see something in her novel greater than any of the characters independently.

It is by this measure of objectivity that a self unleashed by the bonds of society can be shown to be equal to the creative force of progress for the betterment of humanity… a triumph of human spirit… For if the background changes with the social tides it would be very easy to show that an individualist is simply the formation of a bad guy, which is the stance most socially free individuals tend to become… unless of course, society itself is ill… which in this case, society is in fact very very ill, making Howard Roake the hero and protagonist in extreme.

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Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash

May 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

Waste and Want: A Social History of TrashWaste and Want: A Social History of Trash by Susan Strasser
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Strasser’s modest book is an examination into the short history of trash… which is also a history of how the image of household status became, through post-industrial capitalism, attainable for the average American family… and how that image in its purity, shed its excess into garbage bins, trash cans, landfills, and the ocean.

Strasser examines how we go to where we are with our attitudes of what is disposable, what is usable, and what is wholly taken for granted, mostly examining from the mid 1800s our attitudes towards what we consider today to be trash.

What may be surprising to many, such as I was, that as of the start of the 20th century the cycle of trash was completely different (mainly there being a cycle). One richer family’s disposal was in fact “up for grabs” by an entire industry which relied on wasting as little as possible. While her detailed descriptions and references as to how people recycled, reused parts, and the importance of odds and ends (such as strings, rags, metals, and foodstuffs) is interesting I found it most compelling to see how the development of late industrial capitalism here in the United States also meant the splitting of consumer and producer ends of the cycle.

In other words, as finished material became more abundantly available, so recycling, and the industry of recycling began to disappear. This industry was previously supported by the poor and the very poor, picking through richer people’s junk, selling these choice parts to junk men, who then introduced the materials back into industry by sorting and shipping back to factories. This grid of consumers feeling material back into producers did not stop even up until World War 2, as it was so prevalent.

You see the ramping up of production starting around the boom of the 1920s, when new things became more desirable as status symbols. Previously to that, things were made by engineers and mechanics, with very little attention to design and color. When the ’20s hit and department stores needed to sell sell sell to survive, they pressured design into products. With this, planned obsolescence became the trend as obsolescence of style or function became inherent within the system of production. In fact, much of what was produced after the Great Depression was to replace what was already functional!

While much of whether planned obsolescence was desirable or not was debated for some time. From the side of business, waste wasn’t seen as throwing away functional things… waste was seen as not buying the newest thing and allowing industry to progress!

How progress can be done through style obsolescence, isn’t something that is discussed in this book, Strasser is more interested in presenting us the history, without judgement.

Today we do get a recognition that the abundance and conveyance of a throwaway society isn’t necessarily a good thing. There is a funny (and sad) exchange between the mayor of New York trying to justify discarding NYC’s waste in the state of Virginia and the governor of Virginia. The seeds of our recycling program come from observations of one alarmed citizen writing books in the 50s… and while recycling today is more of a moral duty than one in which we expect to get paid (as the past individuals who did recycle then), today we pay the price for our laziness and our pursuit of the image of what a perfect household should look like… the history of waste is somewhat less a history of capitalism’s development as it is a history of how the image of status created the anti-septic, spotless kitchen (home) with its perfectly clean and refined interiors all made from the latest, most stylistic fashions.

I can’t recommend this book as a great page turner, or a mystery novel (as we do know where we are today) but this book is definitely an interesting page turner, one which will open your eyes to seeing the very things that surround us daily — our stuff, our junk — and allow us a foundation to understand that life doesn’t have to revolve around disposable anythings.

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How to Think More About Sex

May 10, 2014 / posted in reviews / No Comments

How to Think More About SexHow to Think More About Sex by Alain de Botton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, it may seem that we think too much about sex already. But no, De Botton’s very short book is meant to help us think more (in a different way) about sex. That is, not just the fantasy of having it, and the meanings that come with our fantasy of who we aspire to be, or feel that we are inside, but more about how our attitudes about sex (love and marriage) come to define us, and set us up in ways that are wholly contradictory.

As many wisemen have pointed out (although I can’t think of any at the moment), “people make their own problems” (or at least problems for one another), which may as well be the direct inverse of existentialism’s “people make their own meaning”.

Sex as a topic, as pointed out by many thinkers, like Lacan, is difficult to explicate, as sex occupies a “hole” in the continuity of our shared social experience… this hole is the unthinkable, unsayable dimension of personal fantasy… sex means something different to everyone. If you accept Lacan 100%, there can be no sexual relationship because our personal fantasies cover the void where sex is concerned.

With this in mind, De Botton sets about illuminating where we go wrong with how we make our own problems, about sex, in as much as where he shows we go right.

The methodology is simple. Think outside the box, not just how a particular action sets us up for folly, but how in its extension, it can also be right, or wrong. There are many great passages in this book. He ranges the topic from sex itself, to love, to marriage, running the gambit of fetishes, adultery and pornography… all features of how, today, we deal (or not deal), with sex.

The root of the problem, De Botton shows us, is how we exist wholly for ourselves. If you were to rely on a genealogy of where our attitudes come from — they come from the very bourgeois beginnings of capitalism. In an era when status was attained by having neat things, or living the dream (rather than titles conferred upon one by a king), the bourgeois set about creating for themselves marriages of happiness and abundance. Marriage was made about enjoyment and happiness. Fast forward to today, and we live in an era when relationships are supposed to be wholly monogamous all the while intensely pleasurable. The pressures of keeping up with the Joneses, managing finance, housework, children, careers AND being in Love and having great sex all the time — the list is nearly impossible to maintain.

Very literally, the images we have of relationships — why we want to get into them — how we assess how we are doing while in these relationships — are the very reasons why we make ourselves miserable. This sounds a little surprising, but also entirely familiar. I won’t steal De Botton’s thunder here, but he does make some compelling every day examples of how a hypothetical relationship can easily go awry, when two imperfect human beings expect the other to be perfect for themself.

But this sounds so general, we do need some examples to put ourselves in. And that’s where De Botton excels. He places us into these examples, general enough to be anyone, specific enough to be familiar, and shows us where things can go if we were to think about it one way, vs another.

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