{a lived contradiction: studies in stark contrasts and conscious hypocrisies}

2012-01-19T20:13:00.000-08:00

and then there is one...

2011-09-02T21:22:00.000-07:00

This is something that always happens to me, and for some reason I'm always surprised when it happens, as if I forgot the hundred other times it happened.

Let us speak in epitomes:

All I love in film can be boiled down to one director: Orson Welles

All I love in fiction can be boiled down to one author: Dashiell Hammett

All I love in poetry can be boiled down to one poet: T. S. Eliot

All I love in prose can be boiled down to one writer: C. S. Lewis

All I love in philosophy can be boiled down to one thinker: Etienne Gilson

All I love in rock-n-roll can be boiled down to one guitarist: Slash

All I love in jazz can be boiled down to one artist: John Coltrane

All I love in art history can be boiled down to one aspect: architecture

All researches must come to an end, all arguments, to a conclusion. Everything must come to a point. And at that point, the only thing that remains is disinterested contemplation. And why would I want to waste my time with an infinite variety when in each thing I can contemplate the best possible?

Unreal City

2011-08-28T00:23:00.000-07:00

2011-08-14T20:51:00.000-07:00

My memory keeps taking me back to that winter evening at Longhorn on Roswell Road when M. and I were talking on the phone about L., how I should try talking to her. And I warned her I was afraid, based on past experiences, knowing the type person I assumed her to be -- and the kind of person I am -- that somehow, someday, I would rub her the wrong way and I'd end up holding the bag. But M. says if you "don't put yourself out there" something or other will or won't happen. So I said fine.

In time, I spilled my guts to L. And this present state of affairs leaves me with the impression that she doesn't give a flying fuck. Yet she wonders why I've insulted her and doubted her and tried provoking her into an argument at the very least.

But I never told her that I had anything akin to romantic feelings for her. I didn't think I needed to. She lived far away and worked 12 hours a day. Talking was enough for me. I never thought I would have to deal with some dipwad who would get in the way of that. Especially since M. assured me, L. was single and loved it.

And just right at the very moment I thought she and I would really be able to start talking more -- on the phone anyway -- this thing happened. I mean, frankly, all I ever needed or wanted or asked for was a friend. And she was without a doubt the most magnanimous, intriguing, talented person I ever knew. It was because of her I learned I had strengths I forgot I ever had.

For however short a time, she was my life.

But then, this thing, call it what you will, happened. And I ceased to matter. And her reaction? "Don't be offended; I'm just busy."

So what could I honestly do but lash out at every opportunity? nourish suspicions? provoke? grind away? How can you open a locked door other than beating the fucking thing down?

But she's Ms. Empathy, right? So how could I have been in the right?

Maybe I'm just allergic to estrogen...

the pacino list

2011-08-14T14:27:00.000-07:00

Sure, there are over a dozen more he's appeared in, but these are my favorites (and, if I'm not mistaken, some of his own favorites too) by The Actor, a.k.a., Al Pacino--

The Panic in Needle Park (1971)

The Godfather (1972, -74, -90)

Dog Day Afternoon (1975)

...And Justice for All (1979)

Scarface (1983)

The Local Stigmatic (1989)

Looking for Richard (1996) *

Donnie Brasco (1997)

Chinese Coffee (2000) *

Insomnia (2002)

*also director
_________________________________

And here is the shorter list, the list of my most personal favorites, the "desert island" Pacinos:

The Godfather

Dog Day Afternoon

Scarface

Looking for Richard

Insomnia

what if...

2011-08-11T19:32:00.000-07:00

Instead of the screenplay, the actors, the story, coming first...

What if the soundtrack were written first? What if the music for the movie were played for the actors, for each scene, and they generate the scene from the sense and emotions they get from the music?

THE crime story

2011-08-10T08:35:00.000-07:00

Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest is, without question, the greatest crime novel ever written. I say this because it is the only crime novel (that I've found anyway) that is about crime and nothing else. It's not about criminals with hearts of gold or some secret code of honor. It's not subliminally about "family" as one finds in, say, The Godfather. It's not about some bigger humanistic or Shakespearean theme. It's just a town of crooks, all of whom are trying to pull the wool over everyone else's eyes, a society of grifters, killers, and corrupt politicians.

The one man who might have some kind of moral ambiguity or Shakespearean quality is the protagonist detective, the Continental Op. But his efforts are partly mercenary, partly vengeful. Every faction believes he is somehow On Their Side, but he rats out every faction to every other faction -- in his own words, he stirs things up. The objective: to instigate a war of all against all, with every yegg cutting every other yegg's throat. A harvest of blood.

That's all there really is to it, and that's one of the reasons I adore it so. So piss on Gatsby and Holden Caulfield and little Huck Finn. I breathe the smoke and tar of smelter-stack Poisonville.

the rub

2011-07-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the root of all these interpersonal confusions, struggles and conflicts is that all I really care about is intellectual matters. I don't ask how people are or what they're doing because I just want, and want the other person, to get on with the discussion of ideas and to engage in rational argumentation. Then when everybody else is caught up in the phenomenon they like to call "Life" -- the most uninteresting of concepts -- they're actually surprised (or are they?) when I blow a gasket. I mock them for their contentment -- although, yes, I do sometimes envy it -- to shake them out of it, but it often backfires, resulting in the prevailing view that I'm just some sort of emotional sadist.

If I chose you -- and, trust me, if we're friends at all, it's because I decided we should be -- it's because I thought you were somebody I could actually talk to. But in about 90% of cases I have been wrong. And so, on the surface -- the hard, boring surface -- we remain...

confusion

2011-06-13T13:17:00.000-07:00

The story goes that I used to never read, much less study, books. I played guitar and that was about it. Then when I discovered philosophy all of that changed (around 17), and for the next several years my life was almost exclusively about reading. Playing music became a very rare activity.

Now, in the past few months, I've taken up music again, yet I find myself finding reading to be just an option, whereas it used to be a compulsion (when I was a teenager it was music that was the compulsion). And now music has sort of become the compulsion again.

So my mind is a house divided. It disturbs me. I want to do both and I want to do both compulsively. As it stands I almost alternate days. On Guitar Days I read a little but not much; on Reading Days I play a little but not much.

One good thing to come out of it is I'm having a kind of a renaissance with one of "My Authors," and that is Hammett. My interest in him has been scarce the past year or so but now he seems like the only person I really want to read. So that's the silver lining.

2011-06-12T14:12:00.001-07:00

Jack Agonistes: The Tribulations of Jack Bauer

blasting

2011-05-23T20:27:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I prefer an overdriven amp for jazz improvization is to have a level playing field with the horn players. In a traditional jazz combo, everybody gets quiet for the guitar solo; then when the trumpet player comes in, everybody has to step it up. I want the versatility that the horn players have. That's the long and short of it.

Also: I got a new pickup for the bridge position on my Telecaster: Seymour Duncan Hot Rails. This isn't a stack: it's an actual humbucker -- it employs side-by-side blades to keep the size of a single coil. What I like about this arrangement is (1) I still have a classic Fender sound in the neck (which is the only part of the Fender sound I ever liked to begin with); (2) as for the new humbucker, some will say, "for that sound you have to have a Gibson, no two ways about it," and I say, "To hell with your conventions!" The fact is that I prefer the way a Fender feels when I play it; I've always played a Fender; I'm used to it and I like it. So, now, with a classic single in the neck, and a scorching humbucker in the bridge, I have the ideal jazz-to-blues-to-rocknfuckinroll Master Guit-fiddle.

Hoo-hah.

montage

2011-03-27T13:31:00.001-07:00

Okay I don't know what the fuck happened to this damned blogger place, but fuck it, I'm going to tell you what I need to tell you here, and then post the videos above. What a waste of e-paper... Some time ago I started hoisting images, for various reasons, off the Internet and inserting them into photo-manipulation software and displaying (or "posting") them in various places for various reasons. I did this alot when Everybody was using MySpace; and that's one of the reasons I hate facebook [still don't know what that word is supposed to mean]: a bunch of people who can't spell anyway being given free rein to say anything about everything. But of late -- especially generated by my so-far year-long infatuation with Orson Welles -- I've been wanting to make movies. Once I read the interviews and saw F for Fake and the documentary Orson Welles: One-Man Band, I saw this as not only a possibility, but infinitely desirable for me personally. I have a long way to go on that score -- like owning a camera, going to need to do that one of these days -- but in the mean time, I've started making these videos with Windows Live Movie Maker. At the very least, I am, in practice, learning the principles of editing; and as Magister Welles saith: Editing is not an aspect of filmmaking -- it is the aspect. Hence I don't consider these "movies," but rather "montages." Consquently, you will find above the three montages I did this past week. With each one I learned something new, and the first two, you'll note, are very experimental. But really, it's all experimental. I don't know that there is a such thing as "non-experimental" art; if there is a formula involved, there is no seminal idea which gives life to the form being made. I have to keep rambling on because, apparently, paragraphs are no longer allowed here [?]. The first introduces a concept I hope to go places with in the future using, very possibly, a dramatic adaptation of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." The second is an obvious attempt at a romp in badassistry; I'm now convinced one would need actual "motion" pictures for this sort of thing to work right. The third is most important to me, I think. Formally I employed some neat tricks, including optimal video/audio timing and some iconographical dissolves; in content, I just love poor old Jack Bauer. Will there be a Part Two? I don't know yet.

--Update, 22 April 2011: As you'll note, I've added several more videos to the "three" I mentioned here. I think the above will be my permanent video posting "thread." Just f.y.i. and all.

the parable of flitcraft

2011-03-24T07:11:00.000-07:00

-- from The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

[Sam] Spade sat down in the armchair beside the table and without any preliminary, without an introductory remark of any sort, began to tell [Brigid O'Shaughnessy] about a thing that had happened some years before in the Northwest. He talked in a steady matter-of-fact voice that was devoid of emphasis or pauses, though now and then he repeated a sentence slightly rearranged, as if it were important that each detail be related exactly as it had happened....

A man named Flitcraft had left his real-estate-office, in Tacoma, to go to luncheon one day and had never returned. He did not keep an engagement to play golf after four that afternoon, though he had taken the initiative in making the engagement less than half an hour before he went out to luncheon. His wife and children never saw him again. His wife and he were supposed to be on the best of terms. He had two children, boys, one five and the other three. He owned his house in a Tacoma suburb, a new Packard, and the rest of the appurtenances of successful American living

Flitcraft had inherited seventy thousand dollars from his father, and, with his success in real estate, was worth something in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand dollars at the time he vanished. His affairs were in order, though there were enough loose ends to indicate that he had not been setting them in order preparatory to vanishing. A deal that would have brough him an attractive profit, for instance, was to have been concluded the day after the one on which he disappeared. There was nothing to suggest that he had more than fifty or sixty dollars in his immediate possession at the time of his going. His habits for months past could be accounted for too thoroughly to justify any suspicion of secret vices, or even of another woman in his life, though either was barely possible.

"He went like that," Spade said, "like a fist when you open your hand....

..."Well, that was in 1922. In 1927 I was with one of the big detective agencies in Seattle. Mrs. Flitcraft came in and told us somebody had seen a man in Spokane who looked a lot like her husband. I went over there. It was Flitcraft, all right. He had been living in Spokane for a couple of years as Charles -- that was his first name -- Pierce. He had an automobile-business that was netting him twenty or twenty-five thousand a year, a wife, a baby son, owned his home in a Spokane suburb, and usually got away to play golf after four in the afternoon during the season."

Spade had not been told very definitely what to do when he found Flitcraft. They talked in Spade's room at the Davenport. Flitcraft had no feeling of guilt. He had left his first family well provided for, and what he had done seemed to him perfectly reasonable. The only thing that bothered him was a doubt that he could make that reasonableness clear to Spade. He had never told anybody his story before, and thus had not had to attempt to make its reasonableness explicit. He tried now.

"I got it all right," Spade told Brigid O'Shaughnessy, "but Mrs. Flitcraft never did. She thought it was silly. Maybe it was. Anyway, it came out all right. She didn't want any scandal, and, after the trick he had played on her -- the way she looked at it -- she didn't want him. So they were divorced on the quiet and everything was swell all around.

"Here's what had happened to him. Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up -- just the skeleton. A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn't touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. It only took a piece of skin off, but he still had the scar when I saw him. He rubbed it with his finger -- well, affectionately -- when he told me about it. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened. He felt like somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works."

Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings. He had been raised that way. The people he knew were like that. The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair. Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them.

It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life. He said he knew before he had gone twenty feet from the fallen beam that he would never know peace again until he had adjusted himself to this new glimpse of life. By the time he had eaten his luncheon he had found his means of adjustment. Life could be ended for him at random by simply going away. He loved his family, he said, as much as he supposed was usual, but he knew he was leaving them adequately provided for, and his love for them was not of the sort that would make absence painful.

"He went to Seattle that afternoon," Spade said, "and from there by boat to San Francisco. For a couple of years he wandered around and then drifted back to the Northwest, and settled in Spokane and got married. His second wife didn't look like the first, but they were more alike than they were different. You know, the kind of women that play fair games of golf and bridge and like new salad-recipes. He wasn't sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don't think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that's the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling."

what the light used to do

2011-01-24T22:14:00.000-08:00

I'm finally watching the Feist movie Look at What the Light Did Now. When it first came out and was touring all over the place -- everywhere except Atlanta -- I was worried I wouldn't get to see it. But, of course, agents and managers and producers don't let something like that go without a DVD-&-CD release. The first thing to say is that it reminds me alot of the kind of, as it were, "art documentary" first invented by Orson Welles in F for Fake (Welles called it an "essay" film). But I think the reason I find Leslie Feist so hypnotic (aside from the fact that I like her voice and style, and that she's quite a piece of ass) is she reminds me of what it was always like spending hours upon hours with my guitars and pens and papers, how tedious yet invigorating the creative musical process is. I get it; I know what she's doing; I've been where she's been (at least mentally: her love for, and cooperation with, other artists is something I was never good at).

"mainstream" noir

2011-01-16T02:28:00.000-08:00

It has become increasingly apparent to me that all the best noir films were made by directors who, for the majority of their career, could be called "mainstream." The list should speak for itself:

Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd. by Billy Wilder
Kiss Me Deadly by Robert Aldrich
Touch of Evil by Orson Welles
Possessed by Curtis Bernhardt
Act of Violence by Fred Zinnemann
The Asphalt Jungle by John Huston
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers by Lewis Milestone

I think it worth noting that Van Heflin stars in three of these (Possessed, Act of Violence, and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers). Interesting....

There are more, of course, but these make a good representative sample. I think it worked out this way simply because these were not per se "B-picture" directors; they were A-picture directors who, for whatever reason(s), employed -- even if only for one film -- an idiom, icononography, and style more common among B-pictures. It still all kind of goes back to my own view that Citizen Kane is really the first film noir ever made.

"hey, how 'bout that local sports team!"

2010-11-27T05:00:00.000-08:00

A family member, just a few moments ago, "ripped" me for the fact that I did not linger after eating on Thanksgiving with the other family members. What do I have to talk to these people about, some of whom I don't even like, let alone have nothing in common with? I "alienate" myself, it is said. An uncle from California was brought up as an example of someone who I would bullshit with in the past. Well, I said, he's a different story; he's not boring. And families--under the pretence of concern (though no doubt some are genuine)--they pry.

I have, the past year or so, nourished an idea that I might do exactly what they want: I'll talk my balls off. And how will it turn out? I can tell you: having spoken my mind--without malicious intent--I shall be put right where I would have put myself in the first place. My father is in a similar predicament as I am, except that he maintains the standards of decorum to a certain extent (but even he, by a few others, is maligned behind his back). But I really don't give a damn what they think of me, while he might.

I'm not saying that I'm right. But I am saying that, in this particular case, I do not care if I am wrong.

that 20-years-ago thing

2010-10-25T14:52:00.000-07:00

I was just thinking about certain experiences and teachers from gradeschool for some reason. If I had a different family, and if I were in second grade now rather than twenty years ago, I would have been one of those unfortunate kids to have been thrust into taking Ritalin (and then, in my case, because of my then-undetected congenital heart valve disease, I suspect I would have pretty shortly been dead). Ms. Summers used to always bust my balls about "staring off in to space"; I guess I just wasn't interested. And more than one teacher complained that, while they wish they had a classroom full of me's, I just talked too much; i.e., I rarely did anything that required being disciplined, except for talking during class. I was serious ADD-meds material.

I also remember well the difficulty I had in the notion of "rounding up from 5"; I thought she was trying to say, in a sequence of numbers, written on a sheet of paper, one would need to begin writing the numbers vertically (i.e., "up"), rather than horizontally, if one happened to land on a 5.

Two years later, nonetheless, at another school, another lifetime, I had the highest math average in my class, and went downhill arithmetically from there. The one exception was my senior year. (In college, of course, I did much better, but here we're dealing with before that.) I had a pretty good teacher for a semester, but then she left. Then we had an African guy who was almost incomprehensible. Then we had Mrs. Spatorno who was -- as I told her husband when I met him, totally by chance, years later -- simply the best math teacher I've ever had in my life. Naturally many students called her a bitch; she was, as Mr. Spatorno accurately said of his wife, very "matter of fact." To me she was simply brilliant. Neither was she unattractive in any sense of the word; her looks were as sharp as her mind. And indeed her pedagogical wit was as refined as any good college professor's. I especially remember one junior reciting that oft-repeated mantra, "But when am I ever going to use this in life?" to which Madame replied, "Well, you have an exam to use it on next week."

I don't really have a point other than that you can't learn something that you don't find interesting (I've used math because, historically, it's been one of the most uninteresting things to me). If you find something truly interesting, you'll never even need a real "live" teacher for it; most of my principal teachers have been dead for decades, a few for centuries. But a good teacher can do the impossible: a good teacher can make interesting the uninteresting. Or rather, a good teacher brings to light that this particular lesson is simply part of, as Chesterton would say, the only subject there is in the whole universe.

newyorkness

2010-10-16T15:03:00.000-07:00

One of the things I really love about Hammett's The Thin Man (which, if you were thinking of the movies, I am not referring to at all -- the novel is completely different) is that it is almost an entire novel's worth of the kind of mise-en-scene and general atmosphere one gets in the chapter "The Hat Trick" in The Glass Key -- when Ned Beaumont goes to New York -- or even (in a different way) in Salinger's Franny and Zooey. It's funny, because I used to not even like The Thin Man; then again, I used to not like The Glass Key either. I'm always surprised by Hammett, no matter how much I read him; it always seems like the things I think I have to look outside of his works to find are already in his works, or rather in the works I haven't read as many times.

another recent thought...

2010-10-15T10:57:00.000-07:00

I am often horrified by the fact that people change, and, consequently, think people who love change so much ought not to be as terrified about death as they are. For most people change so much in a decade that the person they were the previous decade is already dead. What is the difference between a corpse and an unrecognizable soul?

chaorders

2010-10-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

Some do not perceive the order underlying the chaos. Their belief that the world, the universe, is chaotic is founded on the mere surface of things. "But," you will say, "quantum mechanics..." -- and I shall preempt you: "In quantum theory, we still are only dealing with the surface."

finding the unreal city

2010-10-01T15:33:00.000-07:00

What is the Waste Land? Where and what is the Unreal City?

I think I may have an answer within my own experience. Perhaps my greatest alienations occur when, against all odds, I discover some truth which rocks the foundations of my preconceptions on its corresponding object or event. Something which has always been, seems new to me; and it now appears so obvious, so native to the intellect, that one remains awestruck that he had never seen it before.

But then come the Men of Experience. The Men of Experience explain how this does not fit in with The Model, what they've always known, always been told, and always told everyone else. Don't think I'm discussing anything political here (though this does happen in political philosophy as well, abundandly so); I am merely talking about truths related to activities of everyday life.

To emerge from the shadows and return to the world of light -- or, more likely, vice versa -- is to find the Unreal City. Everyone is doing it all wrong. There are a few kindred souls like us, "We Few," but by and large one finds oneself in a land which engorges itself on pleasures wholly illusory. One realizes, "I, too, was once one of Them." In a zeal for the propagation of this transcendental nugget, one tells everyone one can think of. But ultimately no one really listens. Nevermind that your new insight is based on rather unescapable laws of chemistry or biology, ontology or calology. No, you're just... in your own little world.

To you Few to whom I'm making sense, I bid thee well, and welcome. For you, too, live here, in Unreal City. We natives, though, in our affectionate way, we call it the Waste Land.

the trial

2010-08-24T06:19:00.000-07:00

It just occurred to me that in The Trial (Kafka/Welles) there is a double entendre in "trial." On the one hand, yes, there's this bizarre "legal proceeding" which we call a trial. But also, the whole gamut of legal troubles hoisted upon Joseph K. are a "trial" sent by God. In the end of the Welles adaptation, a priest says something or other with the old appendage, "my son," to which K. replies, "I'm not your son," and walks out the facade of the church. This, as Welles calls it, "defiance to the end" apparently is contrary to the novel, in which K. is more or less like Job. Welles, incidentally, said that he changed this because he just could not imagine a post-Holocaust Jew just laying down and taking it, and that, had Kafka lived after WWII, he would have been under some kind of logical compulsion to write it differently.

2010-06-25T20:23:00.000-07:00

Of late, I really like hotel stories for some reason. Probably actually several reasons.

pieces of orson

2010-05-22T18:59:00.000-07:00

This is what contemporary philosophy is like:

Say the great Orson Welles just died and a lot of odd necrophilic actors and directors have access to his corpse. One group cuts off a finger; one gets his head; others, respectively, get his organs, feet, etc.

Then they all argue and compete about who Has Orson. "But we have his head that he thought with!", "But I have his finger that he directed with!", "But us, over here, we have his liver for crying out loud!!" You get the idea.

But isn't it true that none of them Has Orson? Orson is dead. His life is gone. Only his corpse remains, and these lunatics are all running around with pieces of that corpse, saying that their piece is the right piece. And all the while, the pieces rot.

Substitute philosophy for Orson Welles, and contemporary "philosophers" for the necrophilic thespians (I can't decide whether this or "theatrical necrophiles" sounds better), and you have the state of contemporary philosophy.

Every one of them thinks (or believes? or knows?) they have the philosophers' stone, but they're all dealing in cement dust.

Oh much-lamented O.

2010-05-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

The things about O. that I liked most were so simple. I don't think I was truly ever "in love" with her (whatever that means), and our relationship was as far as can be from romantic. It was almost more like a friendship between two males. But she stimulated me a great deal because her ways were so charming. And I don't know whether I am in denial, or whether I truly don't know what it is that I did to make her cut me off so successfully, so circumspectly.

These simple things often present themselves to me in the form of memories. She was a central figure of two of the most important years of my life thusfar, and these were nearly a decade ago now. I remember one night she, her sister, and I were riding around Conyers. A storm was brewing, and O. said (what we never did) we ought to "get some Sprites and sit in the car watching the thunderstorm." Not everyone would appreciate the genius of this. I mean, Sprite. Not just any soft drink, not any illicit substance -- Sprite.

And she introduced me to so much new music. It wasn't so much new artists, but a different kind of listenability, as it were, that she showed me via a few artists.

And there was the time we rode to my first college's theater to see that wretched play. She drove so fast. I don't think I've ever known anyone drive so fast, not even among notoriously fast drivers. She was dyslexic, so she couldn't take directions like left and right worth a damn, which was hilarious to me.

And one night, on the "Main" street of an historic district of a nearby city, she and I, and L. and D. had a fabulous dinner for O.'s birthday. It is one of the most significant moments of my life, one of the few times I have ever truly lived in the moment. There was nothing about this event which should have made it more significant than a thousand other moments, but memory presents it as significant. Not formatively significant: significant the way a work of art is significant the first time you really understand it.

And yet, this person who I would have traded ten run-of-the-mill friends for, at some point found me miserably disagreeable to be around. And maybe she was right. Indeed, the time when our contact began to wane was one of the most miserable periods of my life, and a time when she seemed to be changing rapidly. Who knows? Perhaps who I am now and who she is now would not harmonize at all; maybe (I'd never considered it till the beginning of this paragraph) she is a totally different person, alien to the person I knew Back When. Nonetheless our brief friendship represents a classic specimen of one of those dreaded "Things I Would Do Differently Now If I Could Go Back..."

And as I sit here reflecting, I remember other occasions. I remember once when I went out with her and R. and he made me so fucking angry about something or other and she was laughing hysterically about it, and then how that occasion made me think about, and horribly miss -- more than I ever had before or have since -- Someone Else, who at that time I loved more than anyone. As for O., my point here is simply that it baffles me that someone I knew for so short a time and who I never really knew terribly well -- and who evidently now regards me as some sort of human vermin -- could have had such an impact. The memories are few, but they have the odd advantage -- suspiciously unlike a thousand other occasions with dozens of other people -- of being memorable.

ars gratia artis

2010-05-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

While in the past I had no great interest in aesthetics or the philosophy of art (that's right! they are two different subjects!), of late it has been of great interest. In the past, when my main haunt was ontology, my appreciation of beauty could really go only as far as calology, which studies the beautiful, not qua beauty, but as a transcendental of being (the transcendentals of being, i.e., are the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful); in this case, beauty is simply one of many revelations of ipsum esse. The closest, back then, that I came to an appreciation of ars gratia artis was reading Oscar Wilde. This led to a pursuit, in fiction, that led ultimately to my beloved Dashiell Hammett, whose artistry pleases me infinitely.

But some newer experiences have opened me up to a whole new range of appreciation and philosophy of art, and below is a list of these influences. Right now I simply list them; perhaps at a later date I'll make some annotations. I make here no distinction between literature and film.

An Experiment in Criticism by C. S. Lewis

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot

The Arts of the Beautiful by Etienne Gilson

Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino

Citizen Kane by Orson Welles

I should also say that the entire corpus of film noir is pivotal as well. I first began watching noir films because of their underlying Weltanschauung, but they soon led me to a way of viewing art qua art -- and, of course, film especially -- which I hadn't anticipated. Color looks different, the whole world looks different, once you've resurfaced from an immersion in the realm of noir.

on fr. john a. hardon, s.j.

2010-04-24T10:47:00.001-07:00

For the longest time I found immense consolation--intellectual and emotional--from the Modern Catholic Dictionary by Fr. Hardon. I'd always assumed it was just the facts and not the mind arranging them that was so gracious. Upon beginning the same Fr. Hardon's Catholic Catechism--and being able to distinguish it from other catechisms in my mind--I can say now that Hardon's mind is largely the conduit for this spiritual satisfaction. True, he presents the most orthodox of doctrines and the most erudite of opinions, but his particular way of writing, reasoning, and being I find very stimulating and compatible to my own temperament, much as I find with my few favorite authors.

But this is all derived from Fr. Hardon's true humility and sanctity, his respect and devotion to Truth. As old Jacksie said, try to be "Original" and you will never be original; but tell the truth without giving a damn about originality, and, nine out of ten times, everyone will perceive you as "original" or "daring" anyway. The ever-ancient is the ever-new.

A Canon for Right Thinking

2010-04-20T07:28:00.000-07:00

The Science of Correct Thinking: Logic by Celestine Bittle

The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Etienne Gilson

Mere Christianity;
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis

The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas;
Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

willssonhearsts

2010-04-10T07:50:00.000-07:00

It just occurred to me, upon beginning my umpteenth re-reading of Red Harvest, that the fictional Willssons may be loosely based on the real-life Hearsts. The father who dominates a mining town who has a son who comes home to run the newspapers, bent on reform campaigns. Wow.

ambition

2010-04-09T01:43:00.000-07:00

I wonder why I'm considered depraved because I have no ambition. Isn't ambition a sin? I blamed for having a vice that is in fact, not a virtue, but the absence of a vice. I've been ambitious, but for me ambition is like math. The harder I try the worse it gets. The only way I could live ambitiously is in a lawless society; e.g., I could have been ambitious in an old mining town because I could have simply resorted to cutting throats to get what I want.

I would be a criminal or a monk before being an employer or an employee. And I would be homeless before being a bureaucrat.

4 signs

2010-03-20T23:48:00.000-07:00

According to an addiction psychiatrist, one Arnold Washton, there are four cardinal signs of addiction, that the alleged-addict should use to self-diagnose (i.e., addiction can only be self-diagnosed, because it is not until the addict sees his own addiction that the cure will start -- e.g., you will only go to the doctor when you know you are sick).

1. Obsession
2. Negative Consequences
3. Lack of Control
4. Denial: (a) that the activity is a problem they can't control and (b) that the negative consequences have any connection whatsoever to the activity

(1) As for my own situation (which those who know will know what I'm talking about), I acknowledge obsession. If obsession alone were the sole criteria, I'd be "addicted" to a lot of things. Nearly everything I have any interest in whatsoever is an obsession to a certain degree. If I'm not obsessed with something, I can barely regard anything as not boring.

(2) As for negative consequences: I see these. They are financial, psychological, social, and a few health-related (but no more serious than constipation and weight-gain -- but some of the consequences in respect to health are positive, e.g., lower blood pressure).

(3) Lack of control is a by-product of obsession; lack of control is the "compulsive" part of the term "obsessive-compulsive." I've proven I can control it when I really want to; I have some cards up my sleeves. But more often I just don't care; I let go and let artificial pleasures take over for several days.

(4) Denial: here is the real rub. As the preceding has made perfectly clear, I am not in denial at all. I by no means believe "Oh what shall I ever do without it!" I believe it is a conscious choice in the end, and that I don't need it to "survive"--on the contrary, I believe that using it is impeding my much beloved instincts for survival! And I fully acknowledge that those "negative effects" are the result of the activity.

So here is the situation we have. In the four cardinal signs of addiction, I fully admit that I suffer from three of them, but not the fourth. Indeed, if I suffered the fourth, I couldn't possibly admit that I suffer the first three! But the question remains whether I fit the diagnostic criteria of addiction. I don't know the answer. But I am certainly not in denial about it. My problem is procrastination in quitting. I've gone periods without it; and I'm not more of a "scoundrel" when I'm on it (in fact, I'm actually much more friendly). But it does isolate me 90% of the time. Yet not total isolation: I am isolated with great philosophers and great films and great ideas and great ars gratia artis.

The preceding would lead one to think (especially me) that it's not so bad after all. And, objectively speaking -- i.e., compared to addicts of heroin, cocaine, alcohol, sedatives (been there), marijuana, hydrocodone (almost went there) -- my condition really is not that bad. But is this not one more step at which I am being deceived by some devil or by myself? What of those moments of despair, of fighting to stay awake, of binging, constipation, the weight gain, the increasing doses with decreasing satisfaction, the isolation, the substantial amount of money that I quite simply do not have?

But what really troubles me is this. If I admit I am an addict and am not in fact an addict, then my "admission" is meaningless. What would be the point? Would it make sense for someone who is by no means an alcoholic to "admit" he's an alcoholic just so he won't drink alcohol for other reasons that have nothing to do with "addiction"? They seem to give you two options: you can either be an addict -- i.e., do the addictive activity -- and not admit it; or, you can admit you're an addict and not do the addictive activity. But I find neither of those choices acceptable: I want to not be an "addict," and neither do nor want to do the addictive activity. Isn't "addict" (and all such terms) after all merely a way for the few to exert their control over the many? E.g., in psychoanalysis, the analyst can always resort to the tactic, when the patient disagrees, that goes something like, "Ah, yes, perhaps you don't realize that's what you are doing [or thinking, or manifesting, or believing], but, regardless, you are" -- thanks to that good old "Unconscious."

The truth is that in spite of all the negative consequences, I suppose I ultimately don't care about them. It's as if my momentary relief from boredom were by far the most important thing, and that all those long-term bothers aren't even realities, because the only reality is "now," and right "now" I don't want to be bored or obsessed. But no sooner than I say what I just said in the last two sentences, I change my mind: for at this moment I just don't want to be a sucker, don't want terms dictated to me by a subrational creature, don't want a leaf to dictate terms to me any more than insect. That's what I see as the ultimate problem, the real struggle: I don't want to be anything's, or anyone's, bitch. But once I finish writing this sentence, won't the craving return?

In any case, though I think terms like "addict" and "addiction" only make matters worse (as they seem to me to be what in cognitive-behavioral therapy they call "labelling" -- i.e., "If I'm an addict, then I'm bound to do the junk no matter how hard I try, so I may as well give in!"), The Phenomenon is certainly approachable by the path suggested in the Imitation of Christ: each time you resist temptation, the less temptation will continue to bother you.

(...which, incidentally, I just demonstratively proved as little as a few minutes ago... granted, I failed to prove it a few hours ago....)

c.s. v. t.s.

2010-03-12T14:54:00.000-08:00

The more I read about T. S. Eliot -- his thought, not his poetry -- the more sense he makes, and the more I can see why, for a long time, he made no appeal to me at all, then a vehement dislike, then a fleeting love followed by disappointment, then the view that he was just a preening culture-monger without any real respect for logic. And I think the reasons I didn't like him so much before was because I just didn't have a comprehensive enough view of him. It never occurred to me, for instance, that his literary criticism is also social criticism; i.e., that literature, being a by-product of culture, must be discussed in tandem with the cultural tradition from which any given literature has emerged.

But what is really interesting is the debate going on in my mind between C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot. As Lewis said, they are so much in agreement on the really important things that their disagreements on lesser things hardly seem to matter. But there is a definite tension. Where they disagree I naturally tend to agree with Lewis; not just because I am more familiar with him and that I owe him so much, but also because Lewis seems to me far more logical than Eliot (in fact, Eliot does not seem to care much for logical consistency). Many of Lewis's conclusions are Eliot's assumptions; thus Eliot is certainly bold in his adventures, but the price is that he is more often blazing trails than finally settling an issue. Lewis is more of a settler of issues. Where Eliot is a man of social conscience, Lewis is a man of personal conscience; Eliot talks much of "culture" -- Lewis thinks the invocation of "Culture" tends to precede confusion.

In a word, Lewis and Eliot are agnostic about opposite things: things Eliot seems to have an answer for, Lewis not only does not believe there is an answer for, but thinks it's pointless to even seek an answer. Similarly, there are areas common to Lewis's thought that I think Eliot would not dare to tread, probably out of humility. But here is the really interesting point: each in doing what he is doing is superbly orthodox. Eliot and Lewis both hail from the same tradition, but they are sort of working on different elements within that tradition; kind of like, say, St. Thomas and St. Bonaventure.

In any case, I'm coming to learn that Eliot is just a hard nut to crack; which is why he is widely acclaimed by people who, if they knew the "other things he said," would immediately repudiate him. It explains why it's taken me so long to get this close to him, to begin to trust him. I just needed to get some sea-legs first.

moral chaos

2010-02-22T17:35:00.000-08:00

It just occurred to me that we do indeed live in a morally chaotic universe. Only my understanding of "moral chaos" differs from the typical secular critic, e.g., the popular critics of Hammett, and perhaps Hammett himself. They would say that we live in a morally chaotic universe because there is no natural law, because we can be wiped out by random forces at any moment.

But I say that moral chaos is only intelligible against the presupposition of moral order. The natural law is real. And events are caused by minds, whether by God, angels, or humans. But sometimes angels, and all the time humans, are fallen creatures: they adopt a standard that diverges from the natural law, and there is no way of knowing where their ultimate loyalties lie. In that respect, and in that respect only, can one accurately speak of moral chaos. The fact that there are different moralities does not prove that there is no objective morality. The fact that there are different moralities proves that we have fallen short of the demands Reality makes on us. We are rebels that must lay down their arms.

So, yes, we do live in a morally chaotic universe; but that chaos is parasitic on an originary morality of pure righteousness. We live in a morally chaotic universe precisely because we can never finally count on anyone to abide by the natural law.

infinite comprehensibility

2010-02-21T19:32:00.001-08:00

I wrote the following somewhere else originally as a reply to an argument that, since God, if He existed, created everything, including human consciousness, we should know intuitively -- i.e., without anyone telling us -- that God existed. But since we have no such intuition -- since everyone is "born an atheist" (that's what this person said) -- it's obvious that God doesn't exist.

On the contrary, Chesterton said: "If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

Christians never claimed that the human race wasn't flawed; hence the doctrine about Fallen Nature and Original Sin. If humanity were perfect, each human would indeed know of God's existence by direct intuition. If God exists, and if humanity is not what it ought to be, mightn't most of humanity (except for your rare Socrates) completely reject God from the outset, in favor of self? For God, so our parents "indoctrinate" us to believe, wants us to participate in the natural law. Why assume that it is on account of the non-existence of God, rather than the imperfection of Man, that Man does not achieve this perfect intuition of the Divine?

Christians believe that, given the fact of fallenness, God resorted to a more direct means, by revealing Himself in history first to the Jews, and then by the Incarnation of His Word, Christ Himself. To demand that the ways and means of God revealing Himself be limited to something strictly "spiritual" or "immaterial" is to assume alot about The Way God Ought To Be. Whence does anyone derive this assumption? It seems to presuppose that God is merely a human invention, and results in unsound argument; viz., "If God existed, then X would happen," but one must first establish that the existence of God would necessitate the occurrence of X.

In any case, how can one expect that God can be completely known and determined by the finitude of human thought when even such this-worldly sciences as quantum mechanics are considered beyond the pale for most? Something that comes crashing in from outside has to be at least as unlike anything we expected than the most rigorous of the natural sciences. Rather than alot of spiritualist mumbo-jumbo, the records that we have in fact show that it is more than a mere matter of dialectic: it is a matter of history and biography as well. Consequently, once again because of human fallenness, even many Christians (e.g., Evangelical Protestants) do not accept the glories of the material world such as you find in the originary and ancient faiths of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, which believe that God manifests Himself everyday by material means in the Sacraments, and in the very activity of the life of the Church. If God invented matter as a means for humans to communicate with one another, why shouldn't He use matter to communicate with humans?

But such is the Platonico-Cartesio-Kantianism of our epoch...

self-deprecation

2010-02-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

I'm watching, or rather studying, Citizen Kane and the best documentary made about it, The Battle Over Citizen Kane. I'll have more to say about it later, but I just love Orson Welles, the man. He reminds me of myself, though a very extroverted version and unapologetically arrogant version. He's what I would be if I truly Didn't Give A Fuck.

This is especially true in how he uses a system to totally mock and deprecate the same system. In this case, the film industry. It is remarkably similar to Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, which outraged Louis B. Mayer. Both films can boast being the greatest films of their time -- Kane can boast being the greatest film of all time -- and in so doing they reveal the very motion picture system in which they work to be full of shit. It reminds me of how I function in the university. It's rather like being an intellectual spy, or, as in Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, a philosophical detective.

Hammett and the Hammettesque

2010-02-19T12:12:00.000-08:00

I don't how many times I've said this, or something just like this, or how many times I'll have to say it again. I wish I could say something new or original, but I can't. There is some deep, grotesque, spiritual doppleganger effect between me and Dashiell Hammett. Show me anything in post-1920's popular culture and I can point to origins in Hammett. I can't explain it. It's just the way I'm wired. Somehow, some way, every aesthetic value I have is in his fiction, and in many ways my personal, moral values. I feel I am exaggerating; but I feel it every time I praise Hammett. And if it's not in Hammett, it's in T. S. Eliot. And yet Hammett read and admired Eliot -- and the vicious circle continues.

What sprung this particular wonder? I'm in the middle of Citizen Kane, and I'm seeing all kinds of traces of Hammett's fictions. The newspaper reforms exhibit, and immediately send my mind to, traces Red Harvest and The Glass Key.

But maybe I'm exaggerating? But if it be so, the exaggeration is involuntary. I'm not trying to convince anyone to love or to like Hammett, certainly not as I do. I'm just trying to give credit where credit is due, praise where praise is due. I'm only trying to make clear -- largely to my own mind alone -- this phenomenon.

Also: H. P. Lovecraft is reading well. His Sense of Tale is to horror and gothic and the macabre what Hammett's is to our criminal and political fictions. And Lovecraft's fine, 18th-century prose-style is rubbing off. I certainly wouldn't read him if his writing did not bear such elegance.

And, once again: Etienne Gilson is the shit.

re-up

2010-02-19T05:32:00.000-08:00

I am officially re-"in love" with the great Etienne Gilson, the only French philosopher of the 20th century who isn't full of shit.

"But economists!!"

2010-02-14T12:15:00.000-08:00

From the start, Obama has flouted the notion that he has "Economists" backing him up and all of you people just have your political ideologies.There are two things wrong with this:

(1) Just because someone is an economist doesn't mean he isn't an ideologue! There are plenty of economists who want socialism, not because it will make the best economy, but because of their "ideological" motives. But in spite of that...

(2) Anyone who knows the most basic axioms of economics knows that, in principle, there simply cannot be "many economists" who agree with his policies.

He may well be basing his ideas on "what economists say": but who these economists are matters a great deal. You can't say, "Oh, but an economist said so!" and be let off the hook.

films noir

2010-02-02T21:24:00.000-08:00

Over the past couple weeks I have watched twenty-something noir films for the first time. Since for the moment I've pressed "Pause," I'm making a list of every one that I can remember. I've marked ones that I take to be quintessential noir with "^"; the ones marked "*" are new favorites, i.e., favorites not just of film noir, but of all movies.

The Asphalt Jungle^*
The Postman Always Rings Twice^*
The Stranger
Double Indemnity^*
Act of Violence^
Mystery Street
Illegal
They Live by Night
Side Street^
The Big Heat^
Criss Cross^
Where Danger Lives
Tension
Crime Wave
Decoy
The Killing
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
The Big Combo^
The Blue Gardenia
The House on Telegraph Hill
D.O.A.^
Strangers on a Train
Suddenly!
Possessed^
Sunset Boulevard^*
This Gun for Hire^

It seems like there were more than that, but I think that's actually all of them.

Films I want to see in the very near future are:

Blast of Silence
Kiss Me Deadly
Night and the City
The Big Clock
Detective Story

Ultimately I want to see the entire cycle. And ultimately I am going to have many, many things to say about the most intelligent form of film ever.

ode to modern woman

2010-02-01T08:32:00.001-08:00

Where have the ladies gone?
This familiar form which purrs before me,
A ghost's fedility, a tomcat's story,
Has all the features of what once passed for virtue.

But strap-on in one hand, fancy pills in the other,
She approaches, to smother you and laugh with decadence.

So I'm inventing a sport about this vicious new animal,
This predator of late-night watering holes;
It can't be tamed and it can't be domesticated and
(Unless you're a cannibal, alas)
It can be made into a useful evening meal.

All that's left for any to do is mount thy loyal steed,
Strapped to the teeth with blades and gunpowdered lovelies.
All that's left, that's not fit to burn,
We leave as a feast for ravenous birds of prey--
They, at least, can't help themselves.

only the incarnations

2010-01-31T22:38:00.000-08:00

I do not like "philosophy": but I love C. S. Lewis.

I do not like "fiction": but I love Dashiell Hammett.

I do not like "poetry": but I love T. S. Eliot.

I do not like "classic film": but I love Film Noir.

I've said this several times before, but it is never wrong to say it again. What makes a writer or a book, an artist or a work of art, worthwhile is not merely it's value as entertainment of transitory usefulness. What makes it worthwhile is its underlying Weltanschauung. More than that; what lies behind every work is the mind of a man. If I cannot tolerate a man's book, it is very likely I cannot tolerate the man either. I don't care about acquiring a general view of human nature. I care immensely about acquiring an intensive understanding of a few core truths. Diamonds aren't made by being out in the open air: they are made by being smothered.

lament of pseudoliterati

2010-01-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

I can lament, now, the loss of my old friend pseudoliterati (p.l.). P.l. has successfully cut me out of all aspects of her life; not that there were many aspects I was part of in the first place. Now that I am at least 50% sure she will not be reading this -- and about 90% sure that no one who knows the true identity of p.l. will read this -- I feel I can more or less freely discuss what I perceive went wrong with us, though I confess the larger part of that wrong still remains a mystery to me.

When I first met her I found her to be very special. She was probably the smartest girl I'd ever met; in some ways, she is still the smartest girl I have ever met, in terms of book-smarts. There was always something hypnotic about her presence. Innocent at first, but after a while she seemed darkly -- and, say, sexually -- mysterious. She had no interest in politics back then. She didn't care who was in Congress or who was in the White House, and she was so pleasant on that point.

The first real brick wall we hit was my own argumentativeness. She taught me a lot about the value of, as she called it, "discussion," as opposed to argumentation. She was also one of the first to really help me understand what a self-absorbed bastard I really am; and yet, she did not judge. There are alot more things I could say, but they would only embarrass me.

As time went by and we talked less and less, we also had less and less to talk about, on those rare moments we did talk. And presumably when she Became Political, her politics were not only different from mine, but were the absolute polar opposite from mine. One's politics being only a manifestation of one's metaphysics, our differences went further and further down, to the point where even t.v. shows and movies could be a topic of intense disagreement.

I don't deny that I may have said some asinine things, things her friends would be able to see and freely critique (but I suspect they instead sent her private e-mails campaigning her to drop me -- why, after all, should you bother with someone you disagree with! Preposterous!). And I think she thinks I just said disagreeable things for disagreeableness' sake. And there, precisely there, she would be wrong. All my disagreements are genuine. But ask me my reasons, and I shall give them; I am more than willing to give them, even to the point of giving them away.

The last paragraph is as far as I detect the reason for my cutoff from p.l. You might be thinking, "Oh but she's a woman isn't she!" By gender, yes, she is. But I doubt I've ever met any female my own age who had a more masculine mind. She, of course, might reject these gender categories entirely. Androgyny does seem to be a flirtation of hers (though at that point, do gender pronouns not lapse into meaninglessness?). In any case, I doubt that there is a typical fussy womanish reason for her clever-swinging. It's something else. I have two guesses, and only two guesses: (1) she found my opinions so unbearable that she just couldn't talk to me anymore; or (2) she believes that I am insincere, that I cannot possibly mean what I say, that I say things merely to get some sort of "rise" out of her. As to (2), even in the cases where it may be true that I am trying to get a rise out of someone: it does not necessarily follow that I do not mean what I say -- which brings us back to the issue of (1), she just thinks I have a horrid mind.

If there is anything beyond that, I haven't the slightest clue what it is, and would openly welcome her explanation, though I'm pretty sure she won't. Not knowing: that's the real bitch of it. If she had just said, "Okay, lookit, asshole, I'm not talking to you anymore, and here's why...." That would have been fine! I might have even agreed with her. But what I find unendurable is the whole disappearance act. When you cut someone off -- hell, if you kill somebody -- you should state your reasons, because then at least the cuttee has the luxury of deciding for himself who is the truly guilty party in the endeavor. For if you conceal from me your reasons, I have no choice but to believe they are stupid reasons, because you will not expose them to the light of day -- and the consequence is you'll find me, in moments of boredom and curosity, sticking my nose back in. But if you tell me your reasons, have a rational dialogue about them, and they are irrefutable to me, why then, then you're doing what makes sense, and presumably it would make sense for me to follow suit and leave you alone as well.

But we do indeed live in a chickenshitted generation, where no one speaks ill of another unless it's behind their backs....

2010-01-24T14:09:00.000-08:00

the slut & the assassin

2010-01-15T22:26:00.001-08:00

For some reason I can almost understand, I can almost rationalize, in my own mind, a life of crime in tandem with devout church-going, but not a life of promiscuity. If a woman sold narcotics for a living, it's like I'd see no problem with her; but if she's a slut or a call-girl, I feel she shouldn't receive communion.

Now in reality (though it is better to be neither), the second cannot be as bad as the first (I think), but my own mind rebels at such an arrangement.

Do Not Likes

2010-01-12T23:42:00.000-08:00

Before I begin this list, I want to make as clear as possible that, in doing so:

1) I am not "dumping" on anyone. If what I say offends you or is in some God only knows what way felt to be an insult to you in particular, I can only guess that you find the fact that anyone would hold such a notion "insulting."

2) I am not saying that my dislikes are objectively right or wrong across the board. Many of them are, in fact, wrong -- but just as many are right. E.g., it may be "right" that I like fruits but "wrong" that I do not like vegetables. I am not thereby saying that vegetables are objectively bad: I am merely saying that I have no taste for them.

3) I am not saying that anyone who holds my dislikes to be likes are contemptible or wrong or even necessarily mistaken; as per #1 I am only saying that I do not like them.

4) By saying I do not like something I am in no way suggesting that I am better because of it, nor do my dislikes indicate that I think someone with opposite taste is "inferior" to me in any way. As per the example in #2, the not-liking of vegetables may be simply a defect in my make-up.

5) The fact that I even made up such a list is no indication of "misery." I am simply bored, and it is simply easier to make a list of what one does not like than to make a list of things I do like. And in my case, the things I do like are so specific that many wouldn't understand my liking of them until I provided very scrupulous and very detailed accounts of them -- whereas my dislikes can be painted with much broader strokes.
___________________________________________________

Do not like...

- Weddings or anything to do with them

- Between the ages of 13 and 35

- Parties

- The Olympics

- Reunions, high-school, family, or otherwise

- The premise, the very idea, of the movie Garden State

- Pharmacists

- Weather above forty degrees

- The sun

- Cops

- Postmodern theater

- Academia

- Liberalism, in any of its incarnations, in any of its forms, or eras

- Holidays

- "Goals"

- Family functions

- Marijuana

- Nightclubs

- People who cannot understand, "Declare, or shut the fuck up!"

- Telling people my real name

- People who think "reproductive rights" actually means something

- People who talk about their jobs

- Birthdays and "New Years" (a few numbers change and people go bonkers)

- People who think it's okay to be a liar, provided you're "nice"; I've always said, e.g., I would rather someone speak their beef right to my face and settle it right away than spare "my feelings" by lying to me, and/or talking about their beef with me with other people who have absolutely nothing to do with it!

....more to come.

updated

2010-01-07T17:24:00.000-08:00

I discussed some "Rituals" a while back (see: http://vitaephilosophiadux.blogspot.com/2009/10/rituals-and-leisures.html) and, as Stark's The Score has turned out to be not at all as durable as I'd hoped, I thought I'd make a revised list of Rituals:

Surprised by Joy;
Mere Christianity;
The Abolition of Man;
The Problem of Pain; and
Miracles: A Preliminary Study by C. S. Lewis
The Continental Op;
The Big Knockover;
Red Harvest;
The Maltese Falcon; and
The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock";
"Portrait of a Lady";
"Preludes";
"Rhapsody on a Windy Night";
"Morning at the Window";
"Gerontion"; and
"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot

But generally speaking, any works by either C. S. Lewis or Dashiell Hammett can be read, at different times, as either Rituals or Leisures. The same goes with Eliot's early poetry; viz. "The Waste Land", "Gerontion", and the first five poems of Prufrock and Other Observations. As a general rule one might consider Eliot's later work (and some of his prose) as Leisures, but that in the strictest sense, as Eliot's post-1922 work just doesn't do it for me. Furthermore, the other poems within Prufrock and Poems (1920), i.e., poems unlisted above but published with them, may be counted as Leisures, not Rituals.

2009-12-28T13:47:00.001-08:00

2009-12-17T05:20:00.000-08:00

trials

2009-12-07T00:51:00.001-08:00

I suppose this is what they call a "trial of faith." Could it be a mark of improvement? I don't know. But it breaks down like this:

I believe that Jesus of Nazareth is the Son of God, the Second Person of the Trinity, the Resurrection, and so forth. I believe that the Catholic Church is the embassy of the Holy Spirit on Earth, in this life. I find it unlikely that the Apostles simply "made it all up," as a group of Galilean peasants "mistaking" their rabbi for Jahweh Himself is a patent absurdity; He either had to be God, or they had to all be deceived or deceivers -- it's a statistical and a moral impossibility. Furthermore, if the Apostles are the ones "really responsible" for the Church, then they must have been a lot smarter than their Master, because the facts they present are clearly beyond reason. Either their claim that their Master is God is true, or the most berated, undermined, spit upon, targeted, idiosyncratic people that ever lived "invented" a religion that would have baffled even Plato.

And yet -- why am I invaded by a pernicious sense of doubt? What happens goes like this: some absurd question arises in me about the authenticity of the gospels, or the honesty of the Apostles (though it never occurs to me to implicate St. Paul, who everyone now likes to make the whipping boy -- somehow I always assume St. Paul is right, and that may be a rock to hold on to), or some such thing, and then I consider the actual objections in the form of questions, and, go figure, the questions always have an answer; I can show how the objection isn't even viable, how it betrays a misunderstanding, or what have you, and I win one more for the team. And yet, and yet.... That's what it's like: "And yet, and yet...." In other words, there is no rational or evidentiary basis for these "and-yets", yet they still bother me. They are not based on reason or upon data; they are based on imaginary hypotheses, "what-ifs," obsessions, or emotions.

This is why the church regards Faith as a virtue. It is not believing something even in the face of contrary evidence: it is simply holding on to what one's reason has previously judged true. That is, one has faith that, given the derivation of two from the square root of four, it will always remain so in every possible world: faith is based on reason.

If after many good reasons you're still bothered by doubt, the problem is with you, not with the data.

oxymoron?

2009-12-04T23:00:00.001-08:00

There seem to be some very learned, very orthodox, Catholics pushing a kind of postmodern orthodoxy; they see, apparently, some congruency between the relativistic postmodern movement and the unchanging Faith. What's the rumpus? I don't think I get it. The likes of these include Catherine Pickstock, Romano Guardini, Michael Oakeshott, Eric Voegelin (I think), and, to a certain degree, James Schall. I find it bizarre. Can there really be congruency between that which holds that truth is--or at least the most important truths are--unflinchingly objective and that which holds that there are absolutely no objective truths (except, of course, the proposition, "there are no objective truths")? It's bizarre.

Did I mention: it's bizarre?

insights

2009-12-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

Regarding the subject matter discussed below, I've uncovered--by various means--a few insights which I hope will solve the matter. These are the sort of capstone notions I've been looking for all through which would make the issue a non-issue, something to sort of tie it all together.

- Unlike religions which make claims to solitary revelations which must be followed to the letter (e.g., Islam, Mormon), Christ, by writing nothing, opened, rather than closed, Himself to authentication. It's a paradox, so think about it for a minute, even if it hurts your head.

- Admitting, on the one hand, that the New Testament is authentic and then asking, on the other hand, whether something significant has been left out or suppressed is inconsistent. The assertion admits one statement to be true while the question presupposes the falsehood of the same statement.

- Finally, since the first Christians didn't even have any scriptures they could call "their own", the question of "suppression" cannot even be entertained when it comes to that generation. The Apostles had no concern with books; their only concern was preaching, teaching, and the Sacrifice of the Mass. So, any suppression or exclusion would have to have occurred later, e.g., between the Council of Nicea and A.D. 405 when Pope Innocent I approved the canon as it exists today. By that time, the specifically Christian scriptures had been written, and had been commented on heavily, preached and taught heavily, and were accepted throughout the orthodox church as authentic; and those books were: the New Testament as we have it. In other words: the books authenticated themselves by their usefulness, truthfulness, through centuries of use by the Fathers and by the saints, after which the Church collected them into a definitive anthology and gave them her officiating "stamp." Essentially, the Apostolic Age would have been The Time to do any suppressing if any suppressing was to be done, but everything we know about the apostles themselves discourages the view that they were the type to suppress anything. In other words, right where it matters most is right where it is most likely not to have happened.

authenticity

2009-11-28T16:55:00.000-08:00

I think a spirit has been provoking me. Either God or the Devil. Either way I think I'm coming out of it now, with some reinforced knowledge.

The issue has been the authenticity--or inauthenticity--of the New Testament. I've ruled out the solitary Ingenious Deceiver hypothesis on the Chestertonian observation that, given the actual content and variety of the anthology of writing that makes up the New Testament, no one could have come up with it. As Pascal pointed out, no one would even ever think to make up something like the Resurrection. As a purely human notion it is either insane or absurd. The only way it makes sense is if the action is Divine.

The originating concern, however, has been how we know whether or not--even granting the historical viability of the gospel narratives--there mightn't be documents that were suppressed by the Apostles; e.g., a document written by Jesus's own hand. But the only reason to suppress a document is that it makes claims contrary to the document(s) you're pushing; in this case, the "contrary" claims would be that Jesus is not, in fact, God, and that the Apostles were not His representatives. The latter is exactly the kind of thing we would expect from a man-made religion, whereas the idea that an orthodox Jew of the first century could casually commit blasphemy is untenable. But besides all that, there is the fact that the Church precedes the gospel writings. "The Gospel" is simply the witness of the Resurrection, not this or that particular book about the Riser. The Gospel was taught for years before "the gospels" were ever written. So I finally realized I've been working with a backwards axiom. It is not scripture that authorizes the Church: it is the Church that authorizes scripture. The fact is, even if the New Testament had never been "authorized," the Catholic Church would still be today exactly what it is. The Church is the Body of Christ and a Living Tradition.

But the real problem has been the vicious circle I've been going through, pondering and repondering, checking and rechecking. The question of the reliability of the Apostles has really been a bugger. But it seems unlikely that some small group of Galilean tradesmen would be capable of a vast KGB-esque conspiracy. And the claims of St. Paul to have received a direct post-Resurrection revelation of Christ, and the subsequent lack of disagreement of the original Apostles with his teaching, sure is curious. A zealot like Saul of Tarsus would never have given up his Jewish heritage--with full knowledge of the condemnation he would receive as a Christian--without damning evidence of its incompleteness.

And one more point: I read last night a great apologetic for the authenticity of the four Catholic gospels, as against the counterfeit apocrypha: To say that the unreliability of the apocrypha demonstrates the potential unreliability of the canonical gospels is like saying that the fact that there are counterfeit coins proves that all coins are counterfeit. Rather the very existence of fakes demonstrates the necessity of the originals. In any case, as above, the way any given writing was determined as worthy to be included in the canon was the degree to which it reflected or bore witness to the already-existing Church.

Christianity is not an "of-the-book" religion.

(Not that Protestants would have you believe that.)

libre

2009-11-23T21:14:00.000-08:00

This is one of those posts--or is it a note? briefing? memorandum?--where I just go on and on and on. Or, rather, it is one of my On-and-on-and-on's which is executed by the act of writing. Correct: the written word is secondary, the concept is primary. So "Take that!" you spineless deconstructionist chumps. You could say this is my coffee hour, though it is not my coffee hour, because "coffee hour" suggests--like "tea time"--that this is the time of day I ordinarily have coffee. Not so, in this case (indeed, it is not so lately in general, as it once was in yonder dayes, when my coffeehouse was my sanctuary). In this particular case, "coffee hour" refers to the time I make a Real Coffee around midnight ("when the moment is not right") and muse upon the possibilities of a more thrilling life. Thrilling, not the way a Jack Bauer's life is thrilling, but more as, say, the narrator of "The Waste Land"'s life is thrilling. What happened to those days when I wandered and wandered not knowing what to do, not knowing what to be, or who to be, or is it whom? In those moments of utmost despair I found more meaning than the humdrum of my daily being nowadays. Boredom. That is my great devil. I have a good mind to chop boredom into little pieces, break early into a sushi bar, and switchout the pieces with some fine raw seafaring meats. O! To sabotage some chink bastards with the deadly dish of raw boredom! Or, what is even better, to poison unsuspecting whites or blacks who, attending frequent sushi bars, merely think themselves fine multicultural bastards with my vanquished and spliced and diced foe, boredom. The pufferfish was never so deadly as this. So, getting back to the point, I used to always wonder, "Oh what do I do? what shall I ever do?" and I hated it. Plans were cleverly devised and deduced and revised and destroyed and begun all over again. It was a truly hellish state of mind. Indeed I gave it up. I said to myself, I shall make no more "plans"; "goals" are for suckers. My only goal is the fly by the seat of my pants, as it were. My only plan was to make sure I never sit down to the dreadful task of actually drawing out a plan. But what fortune is there now? Now that I have abandoned my plans, I have indeed got a few things that needed to get done finished; e.g., my bachelor's degree. If I had kept making and revising plans academically, I would still be saying that I don't know what I'm going to major in, English or Philosophy. But all of that is finished now. But besides that. The point is this: that maybe I'm not obsessive enough anymore. Maybe life was more interesting when I was obsessive, even though I never got anything done. Because as it stands now, I am neither obsessive nor am I getting anything done. In other words, I'm doing nothing. If I start obsessing again, at least then I'll be doing something, even if only obsessing. On the other hand, when you really break it down, I don't want to do anything. I really have no ambition. If I work, I work for the sake of leisure and only have the itch for money. I don't care about cars, computers, selling goods or services, helping people, writing books, doing math, travelling, building models, or taking photographs. Give me my premium coffee, my premium books, premium cigars, a premium atmosophere, and, on occasion, some premium narcotics, and I have all I want. Entrepreneurs say you should make a job out of doing what you like to do best. I'm afraid that could never work in my case, because what I like to do best cannot be sold to anyone but me.

So run and hide, ladies, run and hide, sweet ladies,
For from me ye never finde securitye,
And ye dreams of all that husbands be
Shatter, when me blank stare be employed.

all there is

2009-11-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

Let's see, you have Lewis, Eliot, and Hammett; you got The Godfather and Inglourious Basterds; and you have the Catholic Church.

And that's pretty much everything there is.

cut down to nothing

2009-11-14T17:11:00.000-08:00

I find it somewhat disconcerting that every "philosophical insight," once you boil it down to its essentials, is merely one more boring instance of the phenomenological reduction in action. Every "original" idea ends up being a juxtaposition between two apparent contraries, a paradox, which ultimately is so because of the nature of the relationship between the intended and the intendor, i.e., between the world and one's consciousness of it. One can either accept the mystery and move on, and in time become wise. Or, one can endeavor to explain it--or, what more often happens, to explain it away--and in time become a mere philosopher. In most cases you must pick either one or the other. I haven't noticed many "wise philosophers"; they don't usually come in that pattern.

multiply variety

2009-11-12T21:48:00.001-08:00

I just noticed an interesting connection. While reading Eliot's poem "Gerontion" I noticed how nearly identical the overall mood is to Chandler's The Big Sleep; not the content, the mood. But perhaps General Sternwood, in the latter, is modelled on Gerontion? Furthermore, Sternwood's greenhouse houses many orchids, and Sternwood refers to himself--in his near-death condition--as living on heat like a spider. The latter reminds me specifically of the spider in the poem. But even more interesting is the orchid connection, by accident. The original chief of counterintelligence for the CIA was James Angleton, who was friends with Eliot, was very fond of orchids, and saw their entire existence as a metaphor for deception, viz., in his profession of espionage, which Angleton, quoting Eliot, called a "wilderness of mirrors." Passages from "Gerontion" were read at Angleton's funeral. So we have this web of interrelations between Eliot, Chandler, Angleton, Orchids. Eliot doesn't mention orchids, but Chandler and Angleton do. And Chandler and Angleton seem to lean on Eliot for inspiration, and both see orchids as a key metaphor. So we've found this curious link, via Chandler and Angleton, between Eliot and Orchids. More than anything, however, all of these persons and objects point to an indescribable mood. And perhaps the Orchid is the symbol for that particular mood.

Codes

2009-10-21T16:13:00.001-07:00

Had I been a more active person growing up and no certain obvious health disqualifications, I might have made a decent Marine. I say this because most of the things I end up being very interested in turn out to be governed by some kind of creed or "code." This is especially true in what I read. Perhaps it is Catholicism which has bred this in me. A friend of mine, a couple of years ago, noted that, in reading Hammett, I was sort of developing this "secular creed"; not to say an ungodly way, but just a way of conducting oneself in the world or in adult affairs. It made sense, and it clarifies a lot about my own mind. That's probably why I look not just for good books, but for good authors; I look for philosophers, not fabulists. But, in this sense, it is philosophy in the Stoic or the monastic sense; it is more about a "way" than about a series of true statements, more about an approach or "attitude" than about a theory. This is one of the common threads that runs, for instance, between C. S. Lewis and Dashiell Hammett; it is what makes Chandler's The Big Sleep superior to his other novels (and effectively rendering all of his other novels, for lack of that, as totally useless); it is also what makes my brand new discovery of Richard Stark's The Score superior to the other Parker novels, for it most clearly explicates Parker's, as it were, "criminal philosophy." Indeed, I think that if one wanted to be a professional thief one could easily regard the novel as a field manual. This is also one of the things that singles out Sun Tzu's The Art of War; this "bible of deception," as it has been called, I regard as a metaphor for how to conduct all of one's affairs.

Not that I regard it as in any way a virtuous path -- the Gospel is, of course, superior to all of these things, but I am not very good these days at accepting the grace to imitate that true Way. Nonetheless, I think that, just as all ancient religions in their own way have something true about them which inevitably reflect the Church, similarly all creeds reflect something, in their own dim and obscure ways, analogous to the True Creed -- that is why I don't regard my pursuits as completely depraved.

Rituals and Leisures

2009-10-18T20:10:00.001-07:00

For my theory of "categorical reading" see:

http://vitaephilosophiadux.blogspot.com/2009/03/categorical-reading.html

Now for some actual examples:

Rituals

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis
Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Score by Richard Stark

(Within this group is prevalent a quality, or, as it may be, an operation, which I refer to as "Contrast." Without getting into details, Hammett is a contrast to Lewis; Chandler's novel is a contrast to Hammett; and Stark's novel is a contrast to them all, each in their own ways. Indeed The Score is, so far, the only novel I've found that exhibits everything I ever originally thought I'd find in the whole of Stark (viz., criminals and criminal philosophy, with a very hardboiled prose style); and it is a fine contrast to all the above insofar as it focuses on vice rather than virtue (unlike Lewis), on criminals rather than detectives (unlike Hammett and Chandler), yet while still retaining a very precise and unadorned writing style, which, though such is usually Hammett's department, is even more unadorned than Hammett. As for the fiction alone: next to Chandler, Hammett appears truly hardboiled, and the other way around, Chandler appears truly noir; and next to Stark, Hammett appears most truly hardboiled-noir and Chandler appears as most tragically [i.e., Sartre-and-Camus-can-eat-their-hearts-out] noir.)

Leisure-"repeaters"

A Short History of England by G. K. Chesterton
The Science of Correct Thinking: Logic by Celestine Bittle
Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas (Anderson, ed.)
The Waste Land and other poems by T. S. Eliot
The Love of Learning and the Desire for God by Jean Leclercq, O.S.B.
The Essential Russell Kirk (Panichas, ed.)
Deception: The Invisible War Between KGB & CIA by E. J. Epstein
The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas (Pieper, ed.)
The Art of War by Sun-tzu

One useful function of symbols...

2009-09-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Symbolism helps to discover analogies by isolating the form an analogy has to take and then plugging in the corresponding variables...

E.g.,

Jane Doe says to John Doe: "You hide behind rationality"

First you must isolate the action, "hiding" (H), and the essential attribute, "rationality" (R). Jane says to John: H & R, implying that ~(H & R) is what should be the case.

But to John's mind, the truth is that ~H & R = humanity itself.

So, to discover an analogy, the formula "~x & y = z" must be used, where z is the thing itself, y is one of the thing's core attributes, and x is some possible action of z with respect to y, viz., something which, if it were affirmed, would be contrary to y.

So, John Doe wants to use sun as an example: z = "the sun" (S). So now he needs a key attribute of the sun: y = "burning gas" (G). And what is something that could absolutely not be happening to the sun if it is burning gas?: x = "cools down" (C)

Ergo: ~C & G = S

To make this analogous to Jane Doe's earlier remark, we have: H & R = C & G, which, once we define the terms we know to be absurd.

So then John Doe counters Jane Doe with: "Saying that one hides behind their rationality is like saying the sun cools itself by burning gas" -- essentially, to suggest a human being is hiding behind rationality is the same as saying a human being is hiding behind human nature.Thus I find it to be with subjectivists. I have more than once been accused of being "out of touch with reality" because I hold, for instance, that truth is objective; I'm putting my head in the sand because I believe that reality is real.

Logos

2009-08-24T21:29:00.001-07:00

In all my years of studying philosophy, now, just when I thought I was finished with it for good, I've discovered what you're supposed to learn first: logic. I find it a relief, mainly because I thought there was nothing left for me in this science (that's right, assholes: philosophy is a science), but also because of the intellectual confidence which it fosters. I truly consider metaphysics to be "first philosophy," not only because it founds, grounds, and causes every other science, but also because it really ought to be studied first. I honestly don't see how my study of logic would be anything but a nightmare if I didn't already hold a rather rigid and traditional system of metaphysics. Before rational argument can even begin terms (which refer to things) must be defined and judgments (which refer to complexes of things) must be formed; and for the past sevenish years I have been focussed on these first two acts of the mind. The third act of the mind, reasoning, is what I've been missing, and it consists in logic proper. The "square of opposition" is about the most intellectually interesting thing I've encountered since I first encountered potency and act, essence and existence. I definitely see now how no intellectual advancement is possible without logic; without logic one remains stuck at the level of propositions which--even when true--don't go anywhere.

The difficulty, of course, has been in finding suitable books to learn from. One might say, "But there are tons of logic texts to choose from," but 99% of them are not for me. That 1% of logic texts--like that 1% of texts on metaphysics--is the Old Logic, of Aristotle and Aquinas, of Cicero and Augustine, which predates and, in my opinion, wholly outperforms the new, nominalistic symbolic logic. In all fairness to the symbolists, however, I can already see how it will be useful to one day study it, and then, perhaps, after that, mathematics. But it would be a gross error to do what the contemporary philosophy department in the mainstream university today does: teach symbolic logic with scarcely any reference to the ancient and infinitely more useful logic of Aristotle. In any case, through an antiquarian bookseller (loomebooks.com), I discovered a gem by one Celestine Bittle--last printed in 1947--which gets down to brass tacks and teaches logic without regard or respect for contemporaneous "debates" or so-called "advancements" in the "field." And, thank God, it contains a bibliography with more books like it, all written, gloriously, before the 1950's. So that's a relief.

Eights

2009-08-11T10:35:00.000-07:00

It baffles me that for eight years the media and the Democratic Party constantly assaulted the character and decisions of George W. Bush and never once thought that they were doing anything outside their rights, but now, eight months in to the Obama administration, criticism of the president--by the same media and same Democratic Party--is considered un-American, or as they love to say, "mean-spirited." A year ago when a picture of Bush painted like Joker was in a magazine, they called it "brilliant" and "art." And now the picture of Obama as Joker is condemned by the same audience as "dangerous."

One thing is clear: these people care nothing about freedom of speech as such. All they care about is freedom to express their ideology. If anyone disagrees with their ideology--and most do--it's considered some kind of calamitous moral ambiguity (oddly, from a group of people who profess moral and cultural relativism).

The comparisons of Bush with the Nazis were completely unfounded because nothing Bush did was comparable to anything the Nazis did. The comparisons of Obama with Naziism are becoming more and more evident each day for the opposite reason. "Nazi," in fact, means National Socialism. I mean, when Bush and Cheney encountered criticism, they took it as mature statesmen should. When Obama and his people are criticized, Americans sympathetic to their cause are called upon to spy on their fellow citizens and send information about possible "dissenters" to an e-mail address at the White House! And the fact that Bush thought it prudent to spy on terrorists plotting against this country from within this country was criminal?

Reversal of Terms

2009-08-09T08:33:00.000-07:00

I've come, over the past few years, to develop an instantaneous process of challenging a proposition when it is presented to me. The tactic, primarily, is to reverse the terms within the proposition. If someone says 'x, therefore y', my immediate reaction is to reflect on the possibilities of 'y, therefore x'; if it works--i.e., if it does make more sense--from this I can usually immediately deduce and pronounce the reasons for preferring this y-x proposition over the x-y proposition. Often, though it settles the matter for me, an abyss of misunderstanding comes between me and my interlocuter, who often will not accept a contradiction to their uncritically accepted maxim, and if their x-y proposition was going to lead to some other, more pressing point, I have unwittingly rendered that point meaningless by showing that I believe their presupposition to be false.

This reversal of terms usually works logically simply because the modern world has every major metaphysical premise completely backwards; we live in the land of absolutized relatives and relativized absolutes. The consequence is that those who have not examined this metaphysical foundation pop up with all kinds of erroneous conclusions, which are, of course, consistent with the foundation they're working off of, but inconsistent with reality as it truly is. If the metaphysical foundation--the source of logical premises--is false, it cannot yield correct conclusions, except by accident. This "accident" is very problematical. For while I believe that proposition p is based on metaphysical foundation M1, my interlocutor might also claim that p, even though, by accident, he has arrived there by metaphysical foundation M2. Thus, while we both believe that p, if each does not question how the other arrived there, we might for a long time believe that we both hold the same metaphysical foundation when in fact we do not. And the day will come when one will say to the other something q--on the assumption that it would be arrived at intuitively based on a shared metaphysical foundation--and discover, with shock and surprise, that the other says "No! No! Not-q!!" Then argument begins, testing of other propsitions come into play, and at the end both find that they have been living in two different worlds entirely.

Equity Clinics

2009-08-08T23:02:00.001-07:00

Let's be fair. If we must have abortion clinics, we really ought to have aborter clinics. That is, whereas the "abortion clinic" is where mothers take their children to be killed, aborter clinics are where those would-have-been mothers go to be killed. I'm thinking of opening one myself, free of charge. Low overhead. Just line them up out back by the dumpsters, aim, and fire. Doctors and politicians who felt like coming to give up their share would be more than welcome too. Of course, since they are responsible for so many more dead children, they really ought to pay a fee as well.

I mean, it only seems fair to the kids. It's not like they could defend themselves, much less avenge.

(It's people like me that make all the rest of you look bad.)

The Wisdom of Warhol

2009-08-05T06:31:00.000-07:00

Strategic extractions from:

"'The thing is to think of nothing.... Look, nothing is exciting, nothing is sexy, nothing is not embarassing. The only time I ever want to be something is outside a party so I can get in.'"

"At the times in my life when I was feeling the most gregarious and looking for bosom friendships, I couldn't find any takers, so that exactly when I was alone was when I felt the most like not being alone. The moment I decided I'd rather be alone and not have anyone telling me their problems, everybody I'd never even seen before in my life started running after me to tell me things I'd just decided I didn't think it was a good idea to hear about. As soon as I became a loner in my own mind, that's when I got what you might call a 'following.' As soon as you stop wanting something you get it. I've found that to be absolutely axiomatic."

"We should really stay babies for much longer than we do, now that we're living so much longer. It's the long life-spans that are throwing all the old values and their applications out of whack. When people used to learn about sex at fifteen and die at thirty-five, they obviously were going to have fewer problems than people today who learn about sex at eight or so, I guess, and live to be eighty. That's a long time to play around with the same concept. The same boring concept. Parents who really love their kids and want them to be bored and discontented for as small a percentage of their lifetimes as possible maybe should go back to not letting them date until as late as possible so they have something to look forward to for a longer time."

"The biggest price you pay for love is that you have to have somebody around...."

"You can be just as faithful to a place or a thing as you can to a person. A place can really make your heart skip a beat, especially if you have to take a plane to get there."

"I believe in low lights and trick mirrors. A person is entitled to the lighting that they need."

"When you want to be like something, it means you really love it. When you want to be like a rock, you really love that rock. I love plastic idols."

"People's fantasies are what give them problems. If you didn't have fantasies you wouldn't have problems because you'd just take whatever was there. But then you wouldn't have romance, because romance is finding your fantasy in people who don't have it. A friend of mine always says, 'Women love me for the man I'm not.'"

"Diana Vreeland, the editor of Vogue for ten years, is one of the most beautiful women in the world because she's not afraid of other people, she does what she wants. Truman Capote brought up something else about her--she's very, very clean, and that makes her more beautiful. Maybe it's even the basis of her beauty. Being clean is so important. Well-groomed people are the real beauties. It doesn't matter what they're wearing or who they're with or how much their jewelry costs or how much their clothes cost or how perfect their makeup is: if they're not clean, they're not beautiful. The most plain or unfashionable person in the world can still be beautiful if they're very well-groomed."

"Someone once asked me to state once and for all the most beautiful person I'd ever met. Well, the only people I can ever pick out as unequivocal beauties are from the movies, and then when you meet them, they're not really beauties either, so your standards don't even really exist."

More to come...

Sacred and Profane

2009-08-02T08:24:00.000-07:00

The enduring dichotomies for me, that under which nearly every work of art, visual and non-visual (or written and non-written), seeks to unite itself in my mind under the specter of a single vision or idea may receive some revelation by consideration of these ideas:

- The Monk and The Gangster

- The Monastery and The Mean Streets

- The Late-12th Century and The Early-20th Century

These are not complete, but they are momentary abstractions which serve as adaptations or manifestations of what I Always Mean. They represent my fundamental tension, my curiosity and my cynicism, my sendintariness and my violence, my ideas of vita contemplativa and vita activa.

The late-1100's of course were more rational than the early-1900's. For in the 1100's you had monks who were also Crusaders, i.e., knights. In the Middle Ages it was not "decided once and for all" that type-A is type-A and type-B is type-B. That is to say, in the Middle Ages, the human race had a better knowledge of itself, because it had a better knowledge of Original Sin, a better knowledge of the Pauline observation that the Spirit is willing but the Flesh is weak, that, in spite of our more holy aspirations, we are still fallen creatures; that it would be better for us to take up the habit and pray, but, if we must, let us fight, and fight for Truth.

I think this is one of the reasons I always come back to the notion of the Detective, who seems to reconcile these contraries in his person. Or rather, he is the only modern archetype who recognizes the reality of Original Sin, the only man who will acknowledge that he is a house divided against itself.

"Facebook": I don't get it, and I never will.

2009-08-02T00:29:00.001-07:00

I've never liked "facebook." I don't like it now. And I have real reasons for not liking it. Ever since everyone switched over to it, it has basically screwed my social life over totally. What this means is: people that I actually liked keeping in touch with, have essentially cut me off, because I don't keep to the bullshit standards of decorum that no one ever uses in real life, but that, evidently, as soon as you're on "facebook," you simply must conform to. Another way of saying this is: what, a year ago, I could have said that would have been to the total amusement and entertainment of the other party, now is considered some kind of obnoxious crudeness with which association is expendable entirely. Fortunately a few of the people I actually do care about--viz., largely outside the e-world--I already deleted from there, especially since I have other means of contact with them (not that I am not forced to talk to them less since I don't share that common e-realm with them, which apparently filled some long-sought hole in their lives all the years before it was invented).

And what in hell is "facebook" supposed to even mean anyway?

Self and Other

2009-07-20T17:56:00.001-07:00

Okay, here is why I object so vehemently to phenomenology and all other such egocentric epistemologies.

The whole premise of the Hellish Creature is that he makes all things a part or (as Lewis says) an "appendage" of himself, of his own ego. Phenomenologists and Idealists, whilst on This Side of Time, do just that. It's almost as if they were perverting the Socratic notion of "preparation for death" into, indeed a preparation for death, but a death which ends in Hell.

This is why I am convinced that not all forms of thinking are equally valid or, for that matter, equally safe. A philosophy which excludes the brutality of fact, which ignores the opacity of the sheerly other seems not only suspect, but perhaps, even, in a sense, demonic.

2009-06-02T18:58:00.000-07:00

2009-05-27T19:19:00.000-07:00

2009-05-22T12:19:00.000-07:00

The rational voice that the Left is trying to silence:

Read: WSJ.com - 'Feigned Outrage Based on a False Narrative'

The Next Step

2009-05-14T12:14:00.000-07:00

I think many believe that C. S. Lewis suffered some sort of impairment in the late 1940's (largely blamed on what is, in reality, a rather insignificant argument with Elizabeth Anscombe), after he wrote Miracles, a belief I used to somewhat buy in to, but am now no longer convinced of. They assume that, because Lewis was once largely preoccupied with more philosophical writing, when he turned to Narnia in the 1950's he somehow "stepped down." But given the whole arc of Lewis's work, I am inclined to believe he simply moved in a new direction. Writing was kind of a compulsion for Lewis, and his most popular books were written in his spare time (the only books that he really considered "work" were his scholarly publications).

Not only this, but if one really looks at the progression of Miracles (1947), a largely imaginative literature seems to logically "come next." For the aforementioned book begins with much logical rigor, and ends in a sort of epic tone. One might say the book represents, in brief, his lifelong intellectual progression. By the end of the book, Reason and Imagination have suffered a kind of fusion, Fact and Myth have become One. This is one of the very fundamental truths of the Christian faith: the Incarnation--God become Man--which is, to our human perception, the grand instance of Myth become Fact. As Chesterton put it, throughout history, philosophy and religion were like parallel rivers, but when Christianity came, those two rivers merged and became one river: from then on, Reason and Imagination would unite under the spectre of Faith, and serve one ultimate purpose rather than two distinct purposes.

But it would be a drastic mistake to think that Lewis only wrote (as they call them) "children's stories" from 1950 until his death. This was the era of some of his most enjoyable writing, including his autobiography (which in itself has a lot of philosophy), other works of fiction, and some of his best scholarly writing (e.g., Studies in Words, The Discarded Image). As for the latter, one could most certainly consider his death "untimely" when considering these later books on literature; i.e., had he lived another ten years--another five years--we might have half a dozen more great books on old books which, like the ones he did write, put contemporary literary scholarship to shame.

Private Eye

2009-05-13T19:31:00.000-07:00

"The detective is one who looks, who listens, who moves through this morass of objects and events in search of the thought, the idea that will pull all these things together and make sense of them. In effect, the writer and the detective are interchangeable. The reader sees the world through the detective's eyes, experiencing the proliferation of its details as if for the first time. He has become awake to the things around him, as if they might speak to him, as if, because of the attentiveness he now brings to them, they might begin to carry a meaning other than the simple fact of their existence. Private eye. The term held a triple meaning for Quinn. Not only was it the letter 'i', standing for 'investigator', it was 'I' in the upper case, the tiny life-bud buried in the body of the breathing self. At the same time, it was also the physical eye of the writer, the eye of the man who looks out from himself into the world and demands that the world reveal itself to him."

+ Paul Auster, City of Glass

Torture

2009-05-10T15:47:00.000-07:00

Every week, nay everyday, you will hear it from some pundit, some celebrity, some politician: "Torture is wrong. It goes against the very ideals of this country."

But where and when did that become the case? Are they referring to the 8th Amendment, which reads:

"Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted."

But our Constitution was not written as some sort of pamphlet to be distributed throughout the nations as some vague abstract "ideal" that the whole world ought to follow: it was written to restrict the capabilities of the government to persecute its citizens.

The 8th Amendment, in principle, cannot apply to enemy combatants. The 8th Amendment only applies in local and federal law enforcement. It has nothing to do with national threats or national security. That, at least, is how it seems to me.

But then we have the third Geneva Convention to deal with, which I will deal with in my next segment. I think that when they who say "it's against all we believe in" come out with that mantra, they do not really have the Constitution in mind: they have in mind the global humanitarian ordinances set out by the Geneva Conventions. That is all find and good: but we must remember that the Geneva Conventions are not our Constitution. In this segment I merely wanted to make clear that there is nothing per se un-Constitutional about the use of cruel and unusual punishment toward enemy combatants, traitors, and spies (though, of course, there may be in the case of Geneva statutes). That is to say, there is no violation of "our ideals", as they call them, when it comes to hostile extraction of intelligence from a sworn enemy of state.

And another thing: torture has been going on for years without presidential knowledge or consent, and no matter what anyone says, it will keep going on. Ultimately such musings as these are pointless because those in the deepest levels of the intelligence services, the Pentagon, and who knows what else, stick to tried and true methods, and at the very least aren't so goddam naive.

The Cold War

2009-05-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

Progression and the need to become completely dominant is built right into the very fibre of Communism. That is why I do not think the Cold War is over, at least not in a general sense. The Soviets may not be the primary enemy anymore (though some think that the KGB is still behind it, which fits, given their long track record of successful deceptions), but Communism is still the enemy of every free society.

The fact that many do not see the abhorrent Left leaning bias in the media is proof of the power of the infiltration and wide distribution of Communist ideas into the general population. The fact that so many people do not see the president as dangerous is another proof. Communists work by patient, subtle, strategic moves, like a chessmaster. They know the deceptive uses of distraction. Today, for instance, everyone is so worried about the anti-pandemic "swine flu" the fact that the government is initiating their new control over the banking industry seems like an irrelevancy to most. Karl Marx laughs in his grave.

The problem with, and the glory of, Communism is its fundamental belief that good and evil don't exist, and, even if they did exist, wouldn't matter. Eternal Fatalists, they believe that they could not stop the progression to Communism even if they wanted to. Free will is excluded from the outset for a dialectical materialist. This belief enables them to justify nearly any action in the name of the "Greater Good," an unrealized, and unrealistic, future ideal.

I just hope that something radically changes in politics before we start in with the gulag camps.

Never waste a Good Crisis

2009-05-04T11:47:00.000-07:00

That was what the president's chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel, said to the media right around the beginning of this year. He was, at that time, referring to the economy. His logic was that, no matter how the economy got messed up, may as well use the opportunity to enact whatever policies we deem necessary for Our Idea of Government in the name of Saving the Nation from Economitastrophe. And hence we have the government intruding on private business at a largely unprecedented level. I'm taking bets on how long until it all goes totally Communist and the KGB throws a parade....

The "swine flu" is no exception. Did "the government" cause or "let happen" this merely new strain of influenza? Of course not. But this administration is going to use it to the advantage of pushing their Leftist agenda. In reality the H1N1 virus is just one more garden variety variation of the many forms of influenza already going about everywhere all the time. The difference is that for this particular strain they do not have a vaccine yet because it is "new." But it is not the "Killer" the media is making it out to be. See, for instance:

http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/05/02/siegel_swine_flu_h1n1/

As a matter of fact, tens of thousands of people died from influenza in 2006:

http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=47469

But who remembers that? And why don't they?

In any case, mass hysteria weakens the immune system. So don't give in.

Transcendent Truths, or Brain Chemicals?

2009-04-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

I begin to remember things. I remember when I began not to trust people, and how much effort it took. And then I remember: that how I got where I am now was by slacking off, by trusting again, by trusting too much. And I remember why I stopped trusting them in the first place. I stopped for the same reasons my father did: they betrayed every inch of trust that I gave. There are some of us who for the rest of the world our existence is some sort of cosmic joke; the world thinks there should be a law against our existence. And so when we do exactly what they told us to do all along, they dust off their double-standard and use it against us.

For us there are only two options: be a block of ice, or be regarded as a total fool. Guess which one I pick.

Contemporary Deceptions

2009-04-23T10:02:00.001-07:00

If you do not talk, you are strange.

If you do talk, you are condemned.

If you have the wrong attitude, you are ostracized.

If you have the right attitude, you are a clone.

If you describe a state of affairs, you are paranoid.

If you go with the flow, you are a flake.

If you are young, you are inexperienced.

If you are old, you are behind the times.

If you are practical, you are not imaginative enough.

If you are brilliant, you are narrow-minded.

If you are an idiot, people will elect you president.

On assbook

2009-04-11T19:10:00.001-07:00

I don't know precisely what it is, but I think there is something intrinsically Wrong about facebook (or as I lovingly call it, assbook). I resisted blogging, but then I finally gave in, and I don't mind it. I resisted MySpace, but then I finally gave in, and found I quite enjoyed it. I resisted assbook, but then I finally gave in, and I most definitely think there's something wrong with it. Perhaps it reveals to me how little control I have over other peoples' lives.

In any case, I would laugh like a loon if someone somehow set some sort of e-fire and collapsed the whole e-community. I would do it myself, but alas I don't know much about technology, not to mention the fact that I loathe it, and hate myself for what little of it I use. Yes, that would definitely make me feel all fuzzy inside, seeing everyone panic over losing their precious forum for e-coddling.

Solid Ground

2009-03-21T23:49:00.000-07:00

While watching a film with one of my favorite actors--certainly not the kind of film I would have watched were it not for this actor (though my purpose here has nothing to do with the actor or the film)--I began to wonder, of his character, "Why does he care? This hocus-pocus that he's chasing, why doesn't he just let it alone? Why does he have to know?" Then I remembered something: the character was once a detective. And that pretty much solves the riddle. For asking why a detective has to "get the straight" is like asking why a philosopher--the old, the true philosopher who follows, not Kant and Hegel, not Russell and Carnap, but Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--it is like asking a philosopher why he seeks the truth. The answer is in his very nature. If you were to ask Socrates, "Why, O bald-headed, pug-nosed Athenian, why do you seek Truth?" "Why," Socrates would answer, "because it is true!" Similarly, he who has "detectiveness" in his nature will seek the story, the explanation for whatever event he finds himself in, simply because that's what a detective does. Not only does he try to unravel mystery, he is in fact a mystery to himself: he does not know why he does what he does--it is satisfying enough just to know that it's what he's supposed to do. The philosopher must not ask "why truth?"--he must seek it. The detective must not ask "why the facts?"--he must find them. Either must stand on the solid ground of his existence, must presuppose it, so that he may realize and acquire what remains to be found.

It becomes necessary, in all reasoning, to stand on solid ground at some point. One cannot go on explaining forever, because eventually explanation itself will be called in to question; inquiry will try to step outside of itself and ask what inquiry is, but, because it made that detachment, has lost the very ability to inquire. First causes, absolute truths--they exist. They must necessarily exist. They are the ground of all reason, of all discourse. On a journey, if I have no point of origin, I do not know how far I have come; I could not really call it a journey either. If where I am is not predicated on where I was, where I am means nothing. If words are detached from their origins in reality, they lost all meaning.

I'll probably talk about this more later on. Suffice it to say, relativism, in all it's forms, is the epitome of bullshittery.

More idiocies

2009-03-20T14:26:00.001-07:00

I saw a poster at the school yesterday being toted by some moronic looking undergraduate labelling Obama as our "New War Criminal in Chief." And then today I read that the leader of some pacifist veterans thinks Obama a bigger "war criminal" than Bush.

Do these people think we have no enemies? I know one thing: no matter who you are, if you do anything involving the military, you're a war criminal. To the pacifists, "war criminal" is a redundancy.

While I disagree with nearly every action Obama has taken, the one thing I do think he has the right idea about is in trying to find new strategies to defeat Islamist terrorism. But I don't think that this is something Bush wasn't doing.

Oh, but hell. I'm so "biased" anyway. I'm the type that believes the sole function, the only conceivably justifiable function, of government is to protect its citizens from foreign aggression.

Idiocies of democracy

2009-03-19T16:12:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a segment on the radio where they approached random people, live, asking them questions over the phone.

Basically, the questions were:

1) Do you know who the president is now? --Of course everyone knew the answer to this question.

2) Do you know who the vice president is now? --Most people couldn't remember who he was or even have his last name on the tip of their tongues.

3) The president is trying to enact as policy a strategy where each American will work according to their ability, and each American will receive from the government according to their needs. Do you agree with this? --Most did.

4) Have you ever heard of Karl Marx? --Most had no clue. One did say, as if by automatic reaction, "socialism"--as though the items from Question 3 had no relationship to that ideology (it was just a word to him apparently).

5) Did you vote for Obama? --"Oh yeah! Of course!"

Okay, this is my point about voting. If all these idiots--who don't know one goddam thing about politics--are allowed to vote, it does not matter whether I vote or not. I could not possibly win. Despite the fact that my vote would at least be informed--and, mind you, not even that well informed--my vote would be rendered meaningless by these morons who vote based on popular appeal.

It's true what Plato and Aristotle thought of democracy (which the Founders of this country also knew, but the people in government now do not seem to know): democracy is nothing more than mob rule. If the overwhelming majority of people believe that X, it does not "therefore" follow that X is true, is the best course of action, or is anything more than unreasoned response to the stimulus of propaganda.

The Genius

2009-03-16T15:26:00.000-07:00

Yeah Obama's a genius. Overturning methods which have prevented several terrorist attacks in the past six years or more. Freeing terrorists and conspirators from offshore prisons that aren't even citizens. A real genius. I just hope that blame is placed where blame is due when the next attack is successful. God knows there were plenty of successful attacks against American interests in the forty years before Bush was president. FDR-like is right. Because already, by undoing well-worn preventative measures, he has allowed to happen whatever attacks may happen. What a prodigy.

Categorical Reading

2009-03-15T21:21:00.000-07:00

So this is how I read books. I've always sort of read books this way (I'm always reading more than one at a time), but I've now been able to make my categories explicit and I think this will make things a lot more coherent.

There are "Ritual" books, and there are "Leisure" books.

- Rituals are always "repeaters," though Leisures may be either repeaters or "non-repeaters."

- In order to become a repeater, a non-repeater must pass the test of Leisure reading; if it does, it may be at the very least a Leisure-repeater.

- If after a few Leisure-repeats the book becomes Integral, it then may "graduate" to Ritual and have "tenure," as it were.

- All Rituals are repeaters, but not all repeaters are Rituals.

- Rituals may serve as Leisures when/if necessary, though they are still in essence Rituals. "Natural Rituals", in other words, may be Rituals and/or "Artificial" Leisures as needed; while "Natural Leisures" can only be Leisures. Some repeaters may never become Rituals, though they may always make great Leisures. In any case, Leisures are "safety valves."

Thus we have always at least two books to read, one Ritual, and another Leisure. Numbers may vary, but there should be no less than two at a time, so that Ritual is always grounding Leisure--and Life--and Leisure is always providing a contrast for Ritual--and stimulating new curiosities.

Not a waste

2009-03-15T16:23:00.000-07:00

To my earlier specifications of Prufrock and Other Observations, I will also allow The Waste Land. The latter, at least, still has a profound connection with the City Streets, and provides the landscape of modern degradation, which is the essential background, in my estimation, of Hammett's work (once again, there is documented evidence that Hammett was a Eliotophile early on). Eliot's poetized City Streets became Hammett's fictionized Mean Streets. W.L. is great too because so many people don't understand it. Or rather, they think it is meant to be understood, in a logical sense, but really it is not. It is more of an impressionistic account of emotions and scenes that too often escape us.

W.L. was kind of a crossroads. There was a very surface-level element in his earliest poems; and in the later poems, there was a sort of unapologetic profundity (which is fine, just not what I'm looking for in a poet). In W.L., however, the two met and mingled. Like an existentialist's view of the world, the angst is present in objects themselves, not merely in one's mind or perception of them.

1910-ish. (-esque?)

2009-03-13T16:38:00.000-07:00

So after doing some investigation in Inventions of the March Hare, which I introduced below, I've discovered this about the "pre-1920 Eliot": what I've liked, and, again, found to be Ideal, in Eliot was indeed all written before 1912. The poems written (not published) between November of 1909 and November of 1911 have "It" (alas, even from these, it is only the city poems that have the slightest interest to me). From the notes of the editor and the prose selections from Eliot himself, it appears that the principal--though by no means the sole--inspiration was, in fact, Jules Laforgue. And Laforgue, as it turns out, was no mere adherent to French symbolism: he was an innovator and an original. In essence, the poetry of the early-20th century experience--or as I have called it, the Poetry of the City Streets--originated in elements of Laforgue, in France, and was subsequently invented by Eliot, not in England, but in America--i.e., before he moved to England. It wasn't Paris, or even London, that provided Eliot with his "vision of the street that the street hardly understands": it was St. Louis and Cambridge.

I always find these moments of originary artistic discovery to be a relief, precisely because they extinguish hope. Perhaps "extinguish hope" sounds too drastic. It is just that I am a firm believer in answers. I believe questions have answers, by logical and metaphysical necessity. Searches and researches must not continue on forever. The idea that a journey--which implies a destination--has, in fact, no destination--that, somehow, one is supposed to be happy with the journey as an end in itself, the question for the sake of questioning--is intrinsic bullshit.

It is when we find answers, first causes, that we find things valuable in and of themselves. One ends the obsessing, the ratiocinating, the incessant wondering, and gets on with the contemplating, the enjoying, the living. It is therefore a relief when I find "narrowness." The narrow road is the right road; the wide road is easy. Questions are easy. It is answers that are hard: they demand something of you. Hence the calamities of modern "open-mindedness."

Inventions of the March Hare

2009-03-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

T. S. Eliot wrote a lot of poems between 1909 and 1917, the year when he gained fame with the publication of Prufrock and Other Observations. I have always preferred the poems from 1917 over the poems from 1920 onward. The only parts of, for instance, "The Waste Land" or the "Four Quartets" that I even really enjoyed were those reminiscent of pre-1920 Eliot.

And so there is this Notebook of over fifty poems which is now available, things which he never wanted to see the light of day, and I feel now I have the Eliot I was always looking for but could never find. The Eliot which in Prufrock spoke to me and then in "Gerontion" disappointed so grievously has now been re-discovered. I only need One Book from a great thinker or writer; but it has to be a Great Book, ideally, it must be a Thick Book. The thinness of Eliot's books, so to speak, made me hate him. He gave you a whiff of the good stuff and then took it away. This, of course, was not his fault. The fact is that his natural impulses jib with my own. But he wanted more than that. He wanted something else, and he changed and developed. Now I care absolutely nothing for change or development. The best things to me are those which are spontaneously derived. I usually only answer a question right when I answer it off the top of my head.

In any case, the early Notebook, sardonically titled (and then scratched out) by the poet himself, Inventions of the March Hare, contains not only the principal poetry from Prufrock, but also additional episodes of Prufrock himself, and a host of other poetry in the same spirit. It's what I thought "poetry" should be before I ever read any. What a relief.

Gays are Gay

2009-03-07T23:42:00.000-08:00

People who want to go and make all the great authors homosexual, in many cases (not all) have simply forgotten the traditional understanding of love. C. S. Lewis reminded us (one of the many things he reminded us) of the "four loves" of affection, friendship, eros, and agape. It is shameless the way literary critics look for "homoerotic" elements in some great poets where the only real evidence is for friendship, affection, and agape. Our epoch has reduced "love" to erotic love. Do they relegate the male embrace of Achilles and Odysseus, Beowulf and Wiglaf, Lancelot and Arthur, to "homoeroticism"? Freud and his slaves have really bitched everything up. Even to the point where certain actions that in past ages were considered overtly masculine now represent some kind of goddam repressed femininity on one of any given two men. It really is ridiculous. Of course, the agenda is political, unfortunately. It is all political. The reasoning that no one wants to let you in on is that if great authors and great works of literature are "O.K." with homosexuality, and we regard said works as "great," then, why by God! it is certainly great and humane to be a fairy after all!

What a load of... -- oh hell, I forgot the French word for bullshit.

Pseudonihilism

2009-03-07T16:30:00.000-08:00

A lot of the time I know I come off as believing in nothing. But if a nihilist is someone who does not believe that objective values exist, I am quite at the opposite extreme from nihilism. I believe in objectivity--in values, in truth, in knowledge, in being. But the majority of the things purported by "Intellectuals" result from subjectivity and relativism. It is to those (surprisingly dogmatically held) beliefs that I say: that is meaningless.

So basically, I believe in transcendent, objective truth. But I do not believe in anything else. Why would one base one's life on fictions (e.g., the Life-Force, the collective unconscious, evolution), when one can base one's life on facts (e.g., God, reason, order)?

Anyways.

Failing

2009-03-06T13:08:00.001-08:00

All this hype about Rush Limbaugh "wanting" the president to "fail" is really aggravating. For one thing, I'm not sure that that is what Limbaugh and his type "want": rather, it's what they believe is going to happen because Obama's domestic policies are based on really bad ideas.

Secondly, even if Limbaugh were guilty, how would it be any different than the liberals' attitude to Bush over the past five or so years?

The past forty or so years has done alot to put the American president into a position he was never meant to occupy. The president was never supposed to be King.

All this celebration and festivity is wholly un-American.

Retrogressive

2009-02-12T17:53:00.000-08:00

Not only am I not a Progressive, I am not a conservative, properly speaking, either. Progressives want to turn the clock forward, or else bash the clock and learn some new way of telling time that is incompatible with the nature of human perception or, for that matter, of time.

Conservatives want to do literally that: preserve the status quo. They prefer the devil they do know to the devil they don't. They prefer maintaining the present problems rather than creating new ones. Conservatives want to keep the clock right on time.

Me? I am a Retrogressive. I prefer things past simply because they are past. I like old things because they are ancient, I hate new things because they are new. I don't want to maintain the status quo, but to go back to an earlier status: I want the clock turned back. I prefer the evils of the past to the evils of the present, the thinking of our ancestors rather than thinking of my grandfathers. I would have architects build cathedrals, and not skyscrapers; I would have artists paint something or someone, rather than smudging shit on a canvas; I would have people go to Mass rather than to their stupid book clubs or freemason lodge or asinine fucking political meetings.

"Revolution" does not mean moving forward, it means to go back.

On hating hobbits

2009-02-03T21:09:00.000-08:00

As I've noted before, I tend to like a lot of things that other people like, but for completely different reasons. I find this to be true with J. R. R. Tolkien. I honestly could care less about The Lord of the Rings. I think this is largely because of the novel-esque form of the story. But also because of the characters, namely the small ones. I don't mind dwarves. And I love men and elves. But, my God, I cannot fucking stand hobbits. And surely these little bastards are considered the core of Tolkien's world in most people's minds.

Thus I hate to mention that I even like Tolkien--i.e., his nonfiction, The Silmarillion, and so forth--for fear I'll be grouped with the people who like him for all the popular reasons.

C. S. Lewis at least is a little bit more elusive. Most people know he wrote more than just the Chronicles of Narnia.

And as I go through things in my head that I like, I keep thinking of all kinds of other examples.

Race is Irrelevant

2009-02-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

It is really aggravating how the media is sheilding the President from any criticism and then, when criticism does get through (as in the case of Mr. Rush Limbaugh), the critics are called "racist." "Race" has nothing to do with someone's being an idiot. Limbaugh's problem, for one, is that we should not have to bend over backwards (or forwards) to support Obama's politics or policies for fear that if we disagree we'll be called (or will consider ourselves to be) bigots. And I think he's right on target, and I think that is precisely what people are doing.

Two men who are far "blacker" than Obama are Armstrong Williams and Thomas Sowell. Either one of them I--and no doubt Mr. Limbaugh--would support as president. They both have two things that Obama has not: they are both sharp as fucking tacks, and they're not ignoramus Left-wingers. Ask any conservative why they do not like Obama and why they do like, say, Thomas Sowell, and the answers you get may vary. But obviously the reasons for preferring Sowell will abound, and they won't be because of race. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, Sowell is more "black" than Obama, i.e., has two black parents while Obama only has one. So again it will have nothing to do with "race."

This whole issue of "race" is a liberal media tactic to attack with a genetic logical fallacy those who disagree with Obama's socialist agenda without having to provide any rational bases for those positions. That is to say, it is liberals, not conservatives, who are preoccupied with "race." Conservatives do not care about the body, but about the mind.

Gun Control

2009-02-01T14:17:00.000-08:00

If the President has his way, I may end up a criminal myself in the next few years.

The following information comes from Dr. Dolhenty of the Center for Applied Philosophy a.k.a. The Radical Academy:

- In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control. From 1929 to 1953, about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

- In 1911, Turkey established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

- Germany established gun control in 1938. From 1939 to 1945, a total of 13 million Jews and others who were unable to defend themselves were rounded up and exterminated.

- China established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

-Guatemala established gun control in 1964. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

- Uganda established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

- Cambodia established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, one million 'educated' people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

- Defenseless people rounded up and exterminated in the 20th Century because of gun control: 56 million.

- It has now been 12 months since gun owners in Australia were forced by new law to surrender 640,381 personal firearms to be destroyed by their own government, a program costing Australia taxpayers more than $500 million dollars. The first year results are now in:

-- Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent

-- Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent

-- Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent)!

-- In the state of Victoria alone, homicides with firearms are now up 300 percent.

-- Note that while the law-abiding citizens turned them in, the criminals did not, and criminals still possess their guns!

-- It will never happen here? Probably the Aussies said that too!

-- While figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms in Australia, this has changed drastically upward in the past 12 months, since criminals now are guaranteed that their prey is unarmed.

-- There has also been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.

-- Australian politicians are at a loss to explain how public safety has decreased, after such monumental effort and expense was expended in successfully ridding Australian society of guns.

-- The Australian experience and the other historical facts above prove it.

- You won't see this data on the U.S. evening news, or hear politicians disseminating this information.

- Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and property and, yes, gun-control laws adversely affect only the law-abiding citizens.

- During W.W. II the Japanese decided not to invade America because they knew most Americans were armed!

- Note: Admiral Yamamoto who crafted the attack on Pearl Harbor had attended Harvard University from 1919 to 1921 and was Naval Attaché to the U. S. from 1925 to 1928.

- Most of our Navy was destroyed at Pearl Harbor and our Army had been deprived of funding and was ill prepared to defend the country.

- It was reported that when asked why Japan did not follow up the Pearl Harbor attack with an invasion of the U. S. mainland, Admiral Yamamoto's reply was that he had lived in the U. S. and knew that almost all households had guns.

Experience

2009-01-25T11:43:00.001-08:00

It just occurred to me that one of the reasons I find C. S. Lewis so satisfying and so re-readable is that all his writings--by his own admission--convey solutions to problems which he himself had experienced. On things that he had never had a problem with or never perceived as a problem, he had little or nothing to say.

I think this gives some evidence to my own nature. For I find the same in St. Benedict, even though I don't live in a monastery. There is something, for me, in people who say nothing of what they have not derived from long and painstaking trial and error.

It is interesting, parenthetically, that one of Lewis's favorite pupils, a lad called Griffiths, became Dom Bede Griffiths, O.S.B.

At every turn, I disagree.

2009-01-19T17:46:00.001-08:00

I cannot say the extent to which I am alienated from contemporary humanity. Or even, for that matter, ancient humanity. At times I wonder if I am not just one more ideologue, one more idiot, one more liberal (in the originary sense).

I say this because while one might object to liberal (current sense) "law" or conservative "order", I nearly object to both. I should say this: I object to law in nearly every form as we now understand it. I do not object to order, in principle, but I do object to state-sanctioned, state-governed, order, which nearly amounts to law anyway.

Give me a Catholic cardinal, give me a mob boss: but do not give me a government bureaucrat--I might hurt him.

I think it is almost useless to even argue such points anymore, or to listen to such points being argued. I noticed something highly insightful in the Rule of St. Benedict today, which he actually got from the Book of Proverbs: The fool cannot be corrected with words. That, precisely, is why I think no one need make any apology for any abuses perpetrated by either the Medieval Crusaders or the Renaissance Inquisitors. You cannot allow a bunch of idiots run around and ruin everyone's good sense with lies. You can warn them once or twice. But if, inevitably, they will not listen to reason, you must apply the rod. (So I suppose in some cases I can be amenable to order.)

scraped down to nothing

2009-01-14T18:47:00.000-08:00

I really want simplicity. I really want only what is most hard-boiled and elementary. I try to let my mind broaden, but then find I prefer the forest to the plains, the caves to the mountains. Empathy is not in my nature.

This is all fine and good. But here is the problem: what do I do with all the time I have left over?

Alas, I may have to delve into the world of action and events. Let no one forget that the foregoing has only to do with my interior life.

Criminals and Hypocrites

2009-01-09T09:51:00.000-08:00

I can tolerate a straightforward lawless or criminal person. A thief, a contract killer, an extortionist, and what have you, I am okay with. What I cannot tolerate--and indeed wish I could hire said contract killer to assassinate--is a con artist, someone who does evil under the pretence of good, someone who does good for the sake of evil. For a criminal merely does evil for the sake of some good.

But there are more con artists in spirit than there are textbook con artists. I insist, there are con artists at every level of government. There are con artists in real estate and banking. Nearly every person who thinks himself a good person is a con artist. "Whoever says of himself he is not a sinner is a liar."

I can always find the good in an allegedly evil person. I can rarely find the good in an allegedly good person. I say, if you want to cut a man's throat, declare his offense in the public square and in the public square, by all means, cut his throat. But he really needs his own throat cut who would condemn, in the public square, throat-cutting but then behind closed doors or in some obscure shade goes ahead and cuts his enemy's throat anyway. And that, precisely, is what the politician, the tycoon, the attorney do.

We are all hypocrites. The question is what kind of hypocrite we will be. We can be a hypocrite for good or a hypocrite for evil. Hypocrites for evil abound; they are what we commonly call a hypocrite. What we need more of are hypocrites for good. Those dastardly villians who will cut your throat on the public square but then pay your funeral home costs; who sells you heroin but will then cut you off when you start to become a danger to yourself, because he just kind of likes you for some reason; who, to your face, tells you to go fuck yourself, but behind closed doors tells his associates that you're "all right."

But he who really needs a good throat-cutting is the insufferable Society Man who tells you how much he respects you, and then behind closed doors plans and plots for your demise and death.

2009-01-06T07:14:00.001-08:00

"Okay, my people brothers.... Let me give you the Four One One.... That means information!"

Nutshell

2009-01-04T13:11:00.000-08:00

Here is the modern-liberal mind in a nutshell: we want all the effects that traditional values have had on mankind, but without tradition.

- We want justice, but without truth.

- We want truth, but without religion.

- We want religion, but without Christianity.

- We want Christ, but without His Divinity.

- We want divinity, but without God.

- We want a God, but one without a personality.

"We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

And they wonder why I'm so pissed off....

Absurdities -- oops, I mean ideologies....

2009-01-04T01:15:00.000-08:00

People who think that conservatism lacks the logical coherence of ideologies such as socialism or liberalism are absolutely right, but, as people usually are, for the wrong reasons.

I will discuss this more as time goes on, but right now I make this declaration for the record:

They are correct in saying that conservatism lacks an ideological framework. And that is precisely because conservatism is not an ideology. It is the absence of ideology. It in fact condemns ideology because ideologies unrealistically seek to make people conform to an absurd ideal--an abstraction, a metaphysical utopia--which has no connection with the vast story of human experience.

Conservatism is not ideology: it is indeed the only conceivable antidote to ideology.