DFW on worship and truth

Not actually from "Infinite Jest," but quite marvellous nonetheless.

The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see [life, the universe and everything]. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship…

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Taken from that now-famous commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005. Read it here before it disappears behind a pay-wall.

Shabbat shalom, my dears.

Thought for the day

Brian Eno talking to Daniel Lanois about a film on the source of Beauty that Lanois wants to make.

One thing that would be really interesting for your film is for people to see how beautiful things grow out of shit, because nobody ever believes that. Everybody thinks that Beethoven had his String Quartets completely in his head, they somehow appeared there formed in his head, and all he had to do was write them down so that they would be manifest to the world. But I think what's so interesting and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn, is that things come out of nothing, things evolve out of nothing. The tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest, and then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think that this would be important for people to understand, that this gives people confidence in their own lives to know that this is how things work.

If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted that they have these wonderful things in their heads — but you're not one of them, you are just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that — then you live a different kind of life. But you could have another kind of life if you say "Well, I know that things come from nothing very much, start from unpromising beginnings, and I am an unpromising beginning, and I could start something too."

Still alive

Just a brief post to allay the dire suspicions of those who harbour such things.

Two snippets related to my last post. Reading in the "New Yorker" from December 26, 2005 (it's a long story) I find this quote from Philip Pullman, author of the trilogy "His dark materials:"

Although I call myself an atheist, I am a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist, because that's the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences.

In a reply to one of this week's Posted Secrets, an e-mail commenter said

Whenever I go into a church building, I apologize to God for not believing in Him.

Exactly.

In other news Darren Broadfoot lists 44 fascinating and little-known facts about William Shakespeare.

In other, other news here's an amusing little art-history quiz: Famous or not?. Give it a try. I shall post my score in a day or two, to avoid intimidating you all. (Apologies to whomever I am borrowing this from, I can't remember else I would have credited you. Honestly.)

In otherest news Last but not least, here's a new favourite blog that I haven't mentioned before: the story of Charlie, an orphaned coyote pup being raised by "me and a tomcat in a one-room log cabin in Wyoming."

Miscellany, Friday edition

Mellow and slow day today, mostly spent walking about and talking to friends. Hamburg was nice, but it's also nice to be back in the big small-town of Stuttgart. I noticed something today that I hadn't spotted when I was in Hamburg: there are far fewer garbage cans on the streetcorners here, yet the streets are much cleaner. I wonder why?

In the absence of anything earth-shaking to report, permit me to direct your attention to Mir, who has moved from New England to Georgia and learned a thing or two about the American school system:

There was FIFTEEN MINUTES of an hour-long presentation devoted to why it’s important to have our kids read every day. One quarter of the allotted time. And they did a nice job with the presentation, but I cannot adequately explain how saddened I was, first, that there would be a need to go into such detail and passionated exhortations about this, because we are all readers here and in my happy little bubble of nerddom I can barely comprehend people NOT wanting to read, and second, as I realized that the parents who really needed that pep talk probably weren’t even present.

In this town, in this school, the “rich” sit in class next to kids from the projects, and the school motto this year is “If you miss school you miss out” because attendance rates are abysmal for the kids living in poverty. My bleeding liberal heart hurts when I consider that; the kids who are impoverished can get two free meals a day at school (even if nothing else), and yet they are often absent because—why? Because their parents don’t care? Because their parents are working too many jobs to be home and get them on the bus? Because they’re taking care of siblings? Chances are if they’re missing school they’re not eating, either. My mind boggles. I have taken so much for granted.

Indeed. Go read.

A recent post of Dale's reminded me of a favourite quote from George Orwell:

In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that "non-attachment" is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is "higher". The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives," from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

Indeed. Go read.

Today's Friday Favourite will be one of the last, because a proposed change in German law would make my distributing such things a criminal offence (whereas it was previously "only" a civil-law matter) and I'm not prepared to risk jail to broaden your minds. (Not that your mind needs broadening, I was referring to the others.) Here's a mellow song for a calm and reflective Friday evening, from 1975.

Shabbat shalom, my dears. Enjoy the weekend.

Home

There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune; miss it and you're left up to your knees in sticky mud, watching the sail disappear below the horizon as gulls gyre and squawk above you.

My mood returning home today is very different from the happiness of my last southbound trainblog post. I am going to miss Ingrid and Hamburg, and I fear that the comforts of my own bed and kitchen will be pale substitutes.

Damn.

Who needs horror movies?

From Hendrik Herzberger's article The Darksider in the "New Yorker" of 9/16 July:

[M]any of the details and incidents that Gellman and Becker document [in a four-part series in June in the "Washington Post"] are as new as they are appalling. More important, the pattern that emerges from the accumulated weight of the reporting is, as the lawyers say, dispositive... for the past six years, Dick Cheney, the occupant of what John Adams described as "the most insignificant office that the invention of man contrived," has been the most influential public official in the country, not necessarily excluding President Bush, and his influence has been entirely malign. He is pathologically (but purposefully) secretive; treacherous toward colleagues; coldly manipulative of the callow, lazy and ignorant President he serves; contemptuous of public opinion; and dismissive not only of international law (a fairly standard attitude for conservatives of his stripe) but also of the very idea that the Constitution and laws of the United States, including laws signed by his nominal superior, can be construed to limit the power of the executive to take any action that can plausibly be classified as part of an endless, endlessly expandable "war on terror."

More than anyone else, including his mentor and departed co-conspirator, Donald Rumsfeld, Cheney has been the intellectual author and bureaucratic facilitator of the crimes and misdemeanors that have inflicted unprecedented disgrace on our country’s moral and political standing: the casual trashing of habeas corpus and the Geneva Conventions; the claim of authority to seize suspects, including American citizens, and imprison them indefinitely and incommunicado, with no right to due process of law; the outright encouragement of "cruel," "inhuman," and "degrading" treatment of prisoners; the use of undoubted torture, including waterboarding (Cheney: "a no-brainer for me"), which for a century the United States had prosecuted as a war crime; and, of course, the bloody, nightmarish Iraq war itself, launched under false pretenses, conducted with stupefying incompetence, and escalated long after public support for it had evaporated, at the cost of scores of thousands of lives, nearly half a trillion dollars, and the crippling of America’s armed forces, which no longer overawe and will take years to rebuild.

The stakes are lower in domestic affairs—if only because fewer lives are directly threatened—but here, too, Cheney’s influence has been invariably baleful. With an avalanche of examples, Gellman and Becker show how Cheney successfully pushed tax cuts for the very rich that went beyond what even the President, wanly clinging to the shards of "compassionate conservatism," and his economic advisers wanted. They show how Cheney’s stealthy domination of regulatory and environmental policy, driven by “unwavering ideological positions” and always exerted “for the benefit of business,” has resulted in the deterioration of air and water quality, the degradation and commercial exploitation of national parks and forests, the collapse of wild-salmon fisheries, and the curt abandonment of Bush’s 2000 campaign pledge to do something about greenhouse gases. [...]

Cheney, Gellman and Becker report, drew up and vetted a list of five appellate judges from which Bush drew his Supreme Court appointments. [...] The result is a Court majority that, last Thursday, ruled that conscious racial integration is the moral equivalent of conscious racial segregation. [...]

[L]ast week, Cheney provoked widespread hilarity by pleading executive privilege (in order to deny one set of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee) while simultaneously maintaining that his office is not part of the executive branch (in order to deny another set to the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives). On Cheney’s version of the government organization chart, it seems, the location of the Office of the Vice-President is undisclosed. So are the powers that, in a kind of rolling, slow-motion coup d'état, he has gathered unto himself. The laughter will fade quickly; the current Administration, regrettably, will not. However more politically moribund it may become, its writ still has a year and a half to go. A few weeks ago, on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the Vice-President issued threats of war with Iran. A "senior American diplomat" told the Times that Cheney’s speech had not been circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, adding, "He kind of runs by his own rules." But, too often, his rules rule. The awful climax of "Cheney/Bush" may be yet to come.

Impeach the bastards now, while you still have the right to do so.

Hot

The next day was broiling, almost the last, certainly the warmest, of the summer. As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon...

"Hot!" said the conductor to familiar faces. "Some weather! ... Hot! ... Hot! ... Hot! ... Is it hot enough for you? Is it hot? Is it? ..."

My commutation ticket came back to me with a dark stain from his hand. That anyone should care in this heat whose flushed lips he kissed, whose head made damp the pyjama pocket over his heart!

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

It took me an unusually long time to find that quote, in the end I had to look at every page of the book until I spotted it. The difficulty lay in my pictorial memory for words: I remembered that the episode was in the first inch of so of a left-hand page about three-fifths of the way through, and so I searched in my usual manner by fixing my eyes on that position and flipping the pages with my thumb. I didn't find the quote, because I had mis-remembered how it sat on the page. The start of the quote, the paragraph that begins "The next day..." is actually in the lower middle of the previous, right-hand, page; the position I'd remembered is of the line "That anyone should care..." which is why I couldn't find it. After flipping back and forth twice I happened to recognize the end of the quote where I'd been searching for its beginning, and so found it.

As you may have inferred from that preamble, it is hot. The temperature is currently over thirty degrees in the valley; the sun is beating mercilessly down on the dusty streets, and the humidity is high. Nasty weather. I treated myself to an iced coffee on the shady terrace of the Kunstmuseum while walking downtown (officially doing some shopping; in truth wasting time in idleness and frivolity).

In other news the Lioness wrote

you know what Judaism is abt at its core?, it's abt truth, it's abt being able to take a good look at ourselves, it's abt making decisions and OWNING THEM, fucking owning all of them, the good ones and especially the bad ones, everything else is cowardice, no amount of davening or Torah will help us if we're not willing to face the crud in our bellybuttons and the rottenness in our wake

Well said; but it's actually a defining practice of maturity not just of Judaism. Substitute your own practices for "davening" and your own belief-carriers for "Torah" and it applies to any religion worthy of the name. "My mess, my fault" one might well say.

In other, other news I am about to shower for the second time today, before meeting Princess for dinner al fresco. I hate this weather.

Procrastination in action

Or "inaction," as the case may be. There are of course many things which are much more important than blogging, at this point in time exactly forty-eight hours before I leave for the airport; so of course I am blogging rather than doing any of them. My (call it) reluctance is in some way an expression of fear of what I will find buried and half-forgotten in the mess. If I stopper up my ears so as to hear no clucking, can the chickens be said to be home and roosting?

In other news I present for your delectation an editorial from the Portland Mercury:

It's time for the Democrats to face reality: They are the party of urban America. If the cities elected our president, if urban voters determined the outcome, John F. Kerry would have won by a landslide. Urban voters are the Democratic base.

It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion--New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on. And we live on islands in red states too--a fact obscured by that state-by-state map. Denver and Boulder are our islands in Colorado; Austin is our island in Texas; Las Vegas is our island in Nevada; Miami and Fort Lauderdale are our islands in Florida. Citizens of the Urban Archipelago reject heartland "values" like xenophobia, sexism, racism, and homophobia, as well as the more intolerant strains of Christianity that have taken root in this country. [...]

If Democrats and urban residents want to combat the rising tide of red that threatens to swamp and ruin this country, we need a new identity politics, an urban identity politics, one that argues for the cities, uses a rhetoric of urban values, and creates a tribal identity for liberals that's as powerful and attractive as the tribal identity Republicans have created for their constituents. John Kerry won among the highly educated, Jews, young people, gays and lesbians, and non-whites. What do all these groups have in common? They choose to live in cities. An overwhelming majority of the American popuation chooses to live in cities. And John Kerry won every city with a population above 500,000. He took half the cities with populations between 50,000 and 500,000. The future success of liberalism is tied to winning the cities. An urbanist agenda may not be a recipe for winning the next presidential election--but it may win the Democrats the presidential election in 2012 and create a new Democratic majority.

Quite right. The article is less academic and more amusing (to an urban blue-state mentality) than these excerpts suggest, well worth reading.

In other, other news here is a series of wonderful Flash animations of scenes from office life using only typography. Brilliant.

On violence and civil society, part two

Three reactions. Beth thinks hard about what went wrong:

Of course gun control is part of it, but easy access to guns in America is not new. Unless we look at what makes America a society so in love with violence - as reaction, as solution, and as entertainment - there's no hope for change. Furthermore, who were the other people killed yesterday, or the day before, their deaths financed by my tax dollars? Is any one of those deaths a lesser tragedy? And who were the young American men or women who witnessed or caused those deaths, sent into war at 18 or 20, emotionally and psychologically unprepared, ignorant about the people and country to which they were going, yet heavily armed, and placed in a position of fear and, sometimes, chaos? What is the damage being done, in my name, to countless people who, if they survive their tour without physical damage, then return to a society which has, meanwhile, been websurfing for Prada knock-off handbags and worrying about whether Jennifer Lopez is getting a divorce?

and Rana picks up on the entertainment value of violence (in reply to Beth):

I do find personally compelling the argument that part of this is due to a culture of violence in this society, a culture that is taken as normal and unremarkable. I still remember, when I was an undergraduate nearly two decades ago, this one incident that sums it up well for me. At the time I was living in the Russian-speaking dorm, along with several other students and a native speaker visiting from Moscow. They were showing "The Shining" one evening, and I invited this woman to attend with me. She was horrified and terrified by the violence in the film - and the implied violence - and was even more astonished and disturbed by the fact that many of the people in the audience were laughing at Jack Nicholson's behavior.

while the Rockstar Mommy rages against the sensationalizing, rude, crude, intrusive media coverage:

Showing these things over and over and over again is doing absolutely nothing but finally giving this kid —this psychopathic mass-murdering cowardly crybaby little fuckhead— the attention and fame that he wanted. Did they learn nothing from Columbine? Did they not hear him reference Columbine in his video? Do they not realize that all this over-saturation will only put more ideas in more kids' heads? ...

I'm sick to death of this kid getting this kind of attention. He was a coward. He was a pussy. He was a self-centered, schizophrenic freak. No wonder he didn't have any friends. A good kid with issues doesn't turn into a psychopath, it's born into them. There is no glory in what he did. What he did does not make a statement. We are not in "The Matrix." This is not "Natural Born Killers." Killing people because you're sad does not make you cool. And killing yourself so that you don't have to deal with the consequences makes you the lowest scum of the earth, just below the news media.

Quite right.

On violence and civil society

Teju Cole writes well this morning (he always writes well, actually, but today's post spurred me to action):

Yesterday was Patriots' Day. If you didn't hear about it, it's because it isn't a well-known holiday... Another thing you perhaps did not hear about was yesterday's carnage: thirteen Iraqi servicemen shot to death in an ambush, another three accidentally killed by American soldiers, a university professor assassinated in his house in Mosul, and three people tortured and shot just north of Baghdad.

These items are, in my mind, related to yesterday's mass murder in Virginia. For me, the question has almost nothing to do with gun control. The Swiss are far more heavily armed than we are. It has to do with the story America tells itself about itself...

There are American qualities that are worth being patriotic about. I can't help but think that, were our leaders, and the people they represent, to pay closer attention to those qualities, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in today. We need to hear more from those among us who can help us stop entertaining ourselves into a stupor. We need to stop torturing people, so that we can rightly decry it when it happens in other countries. We need to stop making humiliation a national sport. We have a good thing going here, a deeply flawed but good thing, a heavy historical burden that, with mindfulness and patience, we might work our way out of. But now we're on the cusp of fucking it up. Our present is absurd: a country full of wise and thoughtful people run by idiots.

Indeed. Go read.

The example of the peaceful, heavily-armed Swiss is apposite; Canada has just as many guns per capita but a twentieth of the murder rate. I think gun control is a very good idea and should be implemented: there is no reason at all why a sane person should have an assault rifle at home, and every reason why insane people should be forbidden to; but gun control on its own will not solve the root problem.

The issue at root is why so many Americans are apparently filled with an uncontrollable, undirected violent rage.

Ade, Kurt

Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.

And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on. Read the rest of the article.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., 1922-2007. RIP.

Friday miscellany

I've been downtown for a cappuccino and to buy a new CD, music that I heard at Famous Photographer's birthday party, and photographed a few early Spring flowers on the way there, and am now (in theory) settling down to some serious work on the database. In fact, as you can see, I'm messing around on the Internets. Here's a sample of what caught my eye today:

Rob Bray, brother of the more famous Tim, said

Life is, for the tool-using resource-hogging primates that we are, a matter of collecting stuff, and we always end up with more of it than is good for us. But the problem comes in when you start to love the stuff even more than its acquisition (which is bad enough), and then it exacts such a terrible price. I have such a fear of stuff, a fear that I might end up loving it instead of human beings. Stuff is incapable of loving you back of course, which is why it can be so very attractive.

Paul Graham, the world's leading LISP programmer-evangelist, said

The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people tend to be smart in distinctive ways. [...] The path to wisdom is through discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected self-indulgence. Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic. And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects. Perhaps we can box it up and put it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow together with everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly large pool. At the very least, we can avoid being discontented about being discontented.

Bruce Schneier, security and cryptography expert and commonsense-ist, said

A lot of [confusion about risk and security] can be chalked up to simple ignorance. If you think the murder rate in your town is 1/10th of what it really is, for example, then you're going to make bad security trade-offs. But I'm more interested in divergences between perception and reality that can't be explained that easily. Why is it that, even if someone knows that automobiles kill 40,000 people each year in the U.S. alone and airplanes kill only hundreds world-wide, they are more afraid of airplanes than automobiles? Why is it that, when food poisoning kills 5,000 people per year and 9/11 terrorists killed 2,973 people in only one year, are we spending tens of billions per year on terrorism defense and almost never think about food poisoning?

In other news today's Wondermark is particularly subtle.

In other, other news the now-traditional Friday favourite song is from this album. Enjoy. And have a nice weekend, too.