Everything2 Writeups
2000 to 2002
E2 writings
http://everything2.com/user/mpbubb/writeups
mpbubb has 23 writeups:
Hoboken, New Jersey (place) Dec 28 2000 at 05:04
3C!s lynching (idea) Dec 28 2000 at 17:28
Kimchee Pizza (thing) Jan 03 2001 at 21:13
1C! Bulgogi (thing) Jan 03 2001 at 21:28
1C! The Administered State (idea) Jan 05 2001 at 00:31
Theodor Adorno (thing) Jan 05 2001 at 02:49
Fading out (idea) Jan 08 2001 at 08:16
1C! Kojeve on Hegel (idea) Jan 08 2001 at 08:47
1C! NamDaeMun (place) Jan 11 2001 at 05:32
1C! Stone in Korea (thing) Jan 11 2001 at 05:44
1C! Interracial marriage (idea) Jan 26 2001 at 06:25
BuDae ChiGae (thing) Feb 12 2001 at 23:03
digital emunction (idea) Feb 12 2001 at 23:50
Mary and Martha (idea) Feb 13 2001 at 01:08
1C! transcendental homelessness (idea) Mar 17 2001 at 04:58
bebimbap (thing) Jul 31 2001 at 04:43
Wim Van Est (person) Jul 31 2001 at 05:30
3C!s Bad Dylan is better than good Diamond (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 01:19
Burroughs in Tangiers (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 01:44
1C! Montaigne and Lyme - Near Death Experience #689 (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 02:29
1C! American Tourists (thing) Aug 13 2001 at 00:30
2C!s cat euthanasia (idea) Aug 17 2001 at 17:37
1C! Ernst Bloch (person) Jan 25 2002 at 00:05
Hoboken, New Jersey (place) Dec 28 2000 at 05:04
(place) by mpbubb Thu Dec 28 2000 at 5:04:02 Hoboken is where On the Waterfront was filmed and the basement of Sts. Peter and Paul church look pretty much the same as in the film. The docks are gone, transformed into luxury apartments and parks. I’m just old enough to remember the smell of roasting coffee from Maxwell’s (the coffee factory not the bar) that would hang over the city on humid summer days.
3C!s lynching (idea) Dec 28 2000 at 17:28
(idea) by mpbubb Thu Dec 28 2000 at 17:28:41 The New York Historical Society had (has? I havent been there lately) an exhibit of lynching photos called Without Sanctuary. It showed photographs - many of them postcards with writing on the back - 98% black victims (I think a few were Sicilian, one or two Asian, Jewish and white women). Sea of jeering white faces, bodies hanging, stripped of clothes often charred.
The accumulated horror of seeing these little trophies sold as souvenirs and the gleeful tone of the writing on the backs of the cards which emphasized the normality of these artifacts was overwhelming.
I hate the sense of sanctimonius, self-congratulatory rightgeousness this node may project. Beneath the layers of training and conditioning I’m sure I’m as racist, sexist, etc. as the next…
But the experience of looking at these things was the most haunted feeling I’ve had. It made me think of Adorno (half read and half-digested in graduate school). The notion of a terminal event which is behind that assertion which is something like ‘After Auschwitz, poetry is not possible’.
It was not just the lynching, which horrible as it is happens all over the world. It is the normalcy of it, the celebration of it in the photos - like Rousseau’s notion of a spectacle, a communal event which is an affirmation of what the community lives and feels… something that people participated in and then went home to sleep, peacefully. No troubled conscience, no connection made between the act they were supporting and the crucifixion they hold sacred and celebrate every Sunday.
These pictures were from a few generations ago, the bulk of them from 1900-1930 but some earlier and some later. The only thing that roubled me about the exhibition was that it focused on lynching as a Southern practice. The choice of dates and places are determined by the availability of the postcards and photos which make up the exhibit but a true assessment of the practice of lynching would have to expand and include events like the New York City Draft Riot of the 1860’s. The New York Historical Society made no reference to lynchings in New York; it is alot easier to see it as a Southern practice.
Leaving the exhibit and walking down to the D train on 72nd Street was a process of reabsorption. Back into the city built on ward politics and ethnically-controlled unions and its racially complex history. A process of forgetting and hardening against imagined and real dangers and threats.
And later walking down Broadway where bodies hung from lamp posts. And I was thinking of that Rilke line at the end of Archaic Torso of Apollo, “There is no place that does not see you/ You must change your life”. There is something inescapable about this. It doesnt matter that my relatives came from Europe about 100 years ago and never owned slaves. It is more to do with a certain blindness that it is to be American, the self-congratulation of being on the right side of WWII and the right side of the Cold War a blindness and lack of insight, a lack of self-reflexivity. A total absence of a critique of who we are and how we got here and what we are doing right now. I dont mean as individuals, individual white guilt (mine or anyone else’s) is irrelevant. Critique does not mean to hate oneself or one’s country. Critique means to analyse something in terms of its own ethical claims. MLK is the greatest American because he forced us to do this ever so briefly. But we can’t bear the scrutiny for very long. To critique something means to love its finest aspects and want them to develop.
Without Sanctuary is an imperfect glimpse at a buried reality which has not been properly expiated. It would take the imagination of Blake or the energy of Whitman to do it justice. Something we as Americans probably didnt even think of before Martin Luther King, Jr. we are haunted by this but our understanding of it is faulty. And secretly we wonder if we would have the strength to act otherwise as we look at these photos of people struggling to get in the frame of the photo to say ‘I was here!’, ‘I did this!’…
It is easy to see fascism and other forms of evil as ‘not-us’ but it it is hard to recognise actual evil and articulate what is wrong.
Kimchee Pizza (thing) Jan 03 2001 at 21:13
I love this idea - I thought of it in Korea to the bemusement of Korean friends. They had BulGoGi pizza at the various chains around Seoul but I never saw Kimchee pizza.
Kimchee is delicious when roasted or broiled and makes meat tender. I have wrapped steak in it and broiled it and it comes out great. But it seems I’m the only one who thinks so.
Not that I would do it in public as it is probably somewhat sacreligious and there is true beauty in the way that food is laid out on a Korean table
But alone, or with understanding friends, I can slather and marinate a good piece of beef in the smelly cabbage and enjoy…
Thanks to whomever put this node up, you made my day…
1C! Bulgogi (thing) Jan 03 2001 at 21:28
Often called Korean Barbecue but the marinade is quite different than what westerners think of as BBQ. I think the basic recipie involves scallions, soy sauce, sesame seeds, sesame oil, honey, massive quantities of garlic, peppercorns and sometimes bell pepper and I think a sirloin cut of beef.
It’s cooked at the table with rice and side dishes called banchan. Best known banchan is Kimchee but there must be hundreds of kinds of banchan.
Korean food in general is wonderful (IMHO). I love the communal aspect with all the shared dishes, the low close table. From growing up eating what I would characterize as Irish-American cuisine (well-cooked meats, even more well-cooked vegetables, starch) the bubbling, fiery and multiple dishes on the Korean table was an education
1C! The Administered State (idea) Jan 05 2001 at 00:31
I was in Times Square for New Year’s Eve for the first time in my life (though I’ve lived in or less than 30 miles from NYC all my life) and I saw a Broadway musical for the first time as well. Beauty and the Beast. A truly Disney experience through and through Being in that large a crowd and going through countless police checks was a bit of a dystopian experience making me think vaguely of far-distant cousins in Northern Ireland or any other of a number of situations around the world where people have to pass through police barricades.
Not that there was a threat of danger in Times Square on New Year’s Eve…Comparing it to Northern Ireland, Eastern Europe, the Middle East would be simply ignorant. I mean that I thought of those other places where one would have to go through barricades of armed police or military.
And then the musical, which was about as perfect an example of a product of the Culture Industry as one could hope to never see… Nietzsche begins the Use and Abuse of History with a quote from Goethe “… I hate everything which merely instructs me without increasing or immediately enlivening my activity.” And I think of this in moments like this where I’ve gone through something full of hype and pyrotechnics and it has been as eventful as a morning ride on the subway. Of course I walk into something like a B’way musical looking for things to hate but I walked out feeling very little at all.
And then walked uptown with family and friends staying in hotels. Marveling about how much safer Times Square (and Manhattan as a whole) is these days which is a leitmotif. Which is statistically true but I always feel uneasy in these discussions as no sense of what might be lost as a price of such security emerges.
Adorno saw something in America in the 50’s and 60’s and wrote about the dominant social and cultural tendencies of America and the developed West which would soon become a global cultural dominant . The administered society is one where technological advances do not make life qualitatively better but refine and reinforce the control the state has over individuality. I hate to butcher Adorno so I’ll just alude to this idea in passing. But the feelings of vague unease came from the way in which this night of enforced and controlled gaiety was for me this multi-layered Disnified experience. And even those close to me could only speak in terms of basically negative experiences. And the great need for some kind of security and community which drove (mostly tourists) people to participate in this kind of celebration in this way.
The need is a false sense of security and community which is underpinned by enormous contradictions. In Michael Harrington’s book The Next America he talks about talks about Disney as on the one hand having technologically advanced utopian possibilities and on the other being a sinister force for consolidating and Haussmann-izing American public spaces. An oft quoted passage characterizes Disney’s efforts at urban planning as a:
“… town fraudulently concocted by a huge corporation; a celebration of free enterprise within the confines of a perfect monopoly; a homely, reverential, authoritarian and corporate-dominated place; a society managed by a sophisticated business elite but pretending to be a laissez-faire utopia.”
With these and other thoughts, It was turning into a morose evening to say the least…
But something happened when my wife and I said goodbye to the others and made off through Central Park (made safe by Guiliani and Mickey M). The snow, still white and powdery; the fireworks; the openness and utopian layout of the great park, not yet Disneyfied. Maybe it was the fireworks - the spectacle Adorno called the “prototype of art” an emblem of subjectivity that flowers momentarily and unexpectedly leaving only the anticipation of the next such moment…
Theodor Adorno (thing) Jan 05 2001 at 02:49
Teodoro Adorno is the name of the cat in Julio Cortazar’s books like Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, a lovely book like a perverse scrapbook full of short stories, random associations, quirky photos and little moments of prickly and subterranean estrangement that the author was so good at.
##### Fading out (idea) Jan 08 2001 at 08:16 Lyme disease it turned out to be and I had never really been sick before so I didnt recognize the fact that I was sick. Vertigo that’s what I thought it was. A exhausting summer, trying to squirrel away money for grad school. In love with and over my head with a beautiful ballerina who would have to return to Asia after her summer in NYC…
And I collapsed.
Left work early on the G train back to Greenpoint, fading out like a Burrough’s junkie seemingly going on the nod for no reason. The whole world going black starting at the edges of my vision and sqeezing in like a camera fading to black. The strangest feeling.
I didn’t know my heart was stopping, that spirochetes had caused an infection in my heart and the muscle’s electrical activity was interrupted but would kick back in after 20 second or so intervals. Hence the fade outs.
The doctor at the neighborhood clinic looked at the ekg looked at me and said “I could call 911 and they could take you to Brooklyn General, but you probably wouldnt make it.” Then he made a call and took me in his car to St Vincent’s in the Village.
I was admitted into the emergency room at St Vincent’s and in the weird Dante-esque swirl of the place with a raving drunk tied to the bed directly across from me someone gave me forms to sign and informed me that they would have to put me on a pacemaker then and there and they couldnt use any kind of anesthesia because they had no idea of what the problem was.
I got quite scared as I thought they had to open my chest to do such a thing but it turned out they could scope down through my neck and attach the unit externally. It actually didnt hurt but I did feel the scope going down and in and could hear the doctors and nurses talking.
And for the next few weeks the monotony of the hospital bed, massive doses of antibiotics to kill the Lyme critters and then to leave with a hefty bill (thanks to the lousy insurance for grad students at my University).
I guess the lasting impression was of the fact that I didnt really know that I was sick. If my heart had stopped completely I wouldnt have come out of one of those fade outs and I would just cease. Animals sense they will die but I had no such viceral reaction. No light at the end of the tunnel either. I guess like the phrase ‘passing away in one’s sleep’. I was disapointed and a bit disturbed that I wasnt at all aware that the systems were shutting down.
Neurotic grad student that I was, I had a book with me. Montaigne’s Essays. An unfinished paper from the semester before. Still unfinished. I tried reading through the whole ordeal. I was focusing on the esays that had to do with monstrocity and it really had no connection to what I was going through. Even after the doctors told me my heart was stopping and they didnt know why, etc. I didnt stop and pray or prepare a will. I was cross checking allusions and tracing ideas… The whole experience was about denial.
The coolest part for me was when the doctors pulled out the pacemaker wire. Before they did they started turning down the voltage and at some point I felt my heart kick in again and override the pacemaker. Not to sound New Agey I truly hate that shit but I became aware of the border between my will and the physical reflexes of my body.
I remembered this tonight, it all happened a few years ago. But when I get sad or stressed I feel a physical heaviness in my heart and it is a brief memento homo qui pulvis est.
The Bardo, or Tibetan Book of the Dead talks about the preparation of the soul as it passes on a journey from this reality to another. I realized after how mentally or psychologically ill-equipt I was to deal with this basic process. And still am. I havent really changed. Hopefully when the time comes I will be more ready
1C! Kojeve on Hegel (idea) Jan 08 2001 at 08:47
A passage I return to again and again…
A. Kojève describesHegel’s frame of mind as he sets out to write the Phenomenology of Mind:
“To begin with, he is a man of flesh and blood, who knows that he is such. Next, this man does not float in empty space. He is seated on a chair, at a table, writing with a pen on paper. And he knows that all these objects did not fall from the sky; he knows they are products of something called human work. He also knows that this work is carried out in a human World, in the bosom of a Nature in which he himself participates. And this World is present in his mind at the very moment when he writes to answer his “What am I?” Thus, for example, he hears sounds from afar. But he does not hear mere sounds. He knows in addition that these sounds are cannon shots, and he knows that the cannons too are products of some Work, manufactured in this case for a Fight to death between men. But there is still more. He knows he is hearing shots from Napoleon’s cannons at the Battle of Jena. Hence he knows that he lives in a World in which Napoleon is acting…” (Introduction to Hegel, p 34)
This passage evokes consciousness and self-consciousness in an almost cinematic way. It starts with a person (who doesn’t yet realize his own importance so he is a normal person) at a desk writing. His awareness of where he is and the forces that control his life and the human activity that constitutes his life radiate outward and spiral inward at the same time. Thus showing the connected (or in Hegelian terms the dialectical nature of) what is deeply personal and idiosyncratic on the one hand to a person sitting at a desk and at the same time the globally resonant events of October 1806.
1C! NamDaeMun (place) Jan 11 2001 at 05:32
The name NamDaeMun means “South Gate” but due to the expansion of Seoul what once was the southern border of the city is now the approximate center. Near this gate a sprawling market. The SamSung Corporate Building is directly across the street; the city hall is directly down the street and a geographic line connects it to the old palace now obscured by more recent buildings. The market has been in the same spot for roughly 800 years.
During the day it is a retail market in which food, clothing, household supplies, cameras, eyeglasses, watches and a number of other items are sold. At night the market transforms. Trucks from other cities assemble at the entrances to the market and jockey for position. The market becomes a wholesale market - primarily for clothing. Because the streets are narrow, motorcycles ferry the clothing out to the waiting trucks. Even at 2:30 in the morning the narrow lanes are full of people rushing along. Bouncy, aerobics-inducing hip-hop blares out of stalls across the street to merge with all of the other sounds - motorcycles, barkers and the various noises of the crowd. The sum total noise is a frenetic piston-like roar, which is a soundtrack to monotonous, rushed activity. The whole market place throbs like a souped-up Celica shaking to the sound system inside.
NamDaeMun in the evening has all of the intensity of the stock market. Walking between the endless row of clothing stalls, the yelling, the hand gestures, the collective wave of activity all sweeps you up and propels you along. Like a seminal epicenter of capitalism with holdovers from another time. An ancient site. Ancient practices of bartering, exchange, loading, stocking, displaying all sped up to a macrobeat. Nobody seems to notice or mind the music although it forces them yell prices and counteroffers with hands cupped to the mouth.
Diurnal contraction and relaxation of a great capitalist cardiac muscle. You can imagine all such activity rippling out from this source. While the office workers sleep the fires are stoked and the engine churns furiously on towards the next day. The attraction and then scattering of the trucks full of clothing keeping the system nourished with their circulation.
You can forget yourself in this crowd but it is a forgetting totally devoid of individuality. Moving with the motorcycles and pushcarts it’s almost impossible to stop; though at times you are pulled or beckoned to a shop. But the throb propels you further the noise keeps you energized and if not happy at least distracted by the carnival of it all
1C! Stone in Korea (thing) Jan 11 2001 at 05:44
OnDol - the Korean floor was traditionally stone (now metal pipes embedded in concrete and covered by a thick layer of a linoleum-type flooring). The houses were heated by a charcoal stove with pipes that passed under the house. The stove radiated heat through the stone. When Koreans travel they miss their food - kimchee, hot pepper paste, roasted seaweed - but also the soothing surface of warmth that they sleep, eat and sit upon. As one local historian observed, “In making the transition between pit dwellings and houses, my people never lost their strong attachment to living at ground level. The family still spent most of its indoor life on the floor, which provided living space for eating, talking, sleeping, everything.”
DolSot - Korean chefs include a vise-grip or an ordinary pair of pliers along with their knives, oversized chopsticks, spatulas and kitchen shears, as necessary kitchen utensils. A number of rice dishes as well as soups are cooked and served in the DolSot, a stone bowl which the chef takes directly off the fire and places on an underplate with the pliers while the server waits to take it out to the table. The DolSot should come to the table with the soup bubbling furiously or the rice crackling and roasting against the stone - the dish finishes cooking as you wait for it to cool enough to eat. The rice at the bottom of the bowl hardens and caramelizes slightly giving the dish a wonderful aroma. The hard rice is considered a treat and is sold alone as a snack - NoRunGi.
OnDol and DolSot are two elemental aspects of Korean life - they possess a simplicity, durability and roughness which makes of harshness a beauty. This aesthetic penetrates many aspects of Korean life. Even though Koreans have been experts at making fine celadon (green and white porcelain) for centuries -the most remarkable ceramic production is the brown rough-hewn stone wear. Each cup in a set is a slightly different size and shape. The mouth is not perfectly round. The surface is mottled and slightly rough in your hand. You can easily see the mark where it was taken off the potter’s wheel and the indentations of the potter’s hand - as artfully careless looking as calligraphy and just as expressive.
There are a number of dolmen (the root ‘dol’’ here is of Celtic not Korean origin) in Korea including a few still standing within Seoul city limits. The Korean sculptor Yi Gi Chul takes natural boulders from the mountain near his studio and hollows them by hand with a chisel. He works in a rhythmic and painstaking way, creating the negative space in such a way that the natural line and shape of the boulder is unaffected. Approaching the rock from one side you see nothing until coming around the corner you have the surprise of the gutted boulder and the innumerable tiny chisel marks. Another sculptor, Jeong Kil Taek, makes very striking pieces in which huge, smooth, flat black stones have indented patterns in the top, which contain pools of water giving them the appearance of stones indented by water dripping over long time. The flat gray of the dry stone and the dark black of the wet pool provide an evocative monochromatic contract of depth and texture.
All of this reminds me of my favorite thing from Korea: the ink stones used by calligraphers. They are a two piece black rock, the lid of which is ornately carved with a dragon, fish or an abstract design. The bottom piece - a sloping indentation. The ink, in the form of blackened charcoal stick (the residue of OnDol), must be scraped against the stone well with some water to create the deep black ink necessary for a clear brushstroke on rice or silk paper. The calligrapher to clear his/her mind before starting to rub the charcoal in a repetitive meditative gesture for thirty minutes or more, releasing the compressed blackness into the water.
1C! Interracial marriage (idea) Jan 26 2001 at 06:25
miscegeny - the word is not negative in meaning (despite the closeness in sound to misogyny). Misc - is a root for mixture. Geny - genes. A mixture of genes: anathema to some; a future-oriented hope for some and for most not even a thought. My friend, Monique had a word for it - “au-gratin”. She was from New Orleans and of mixed heritages and she used this word to describe mixtures - like in the Tom Waits song “…half puertorican-chinese” as “au-gratin”. She never explained what she meant but in her mouth it was a label of pride. I guess something about browning cheese filled potatoes… better than the tired phrase ‘melting pot’
The word does not imply a lack of racism and the ‘future -oriented hope’ is hopefully not just blindness and it’s not a promise of salvation or a return to the garden. And in my own experience it is certainly clouded with forms of racism, orientalism and agorophobia…
but i think the desire at it’s root is perhaps in orientation with the motto Marx quotes from Latin: Nihil humanum mi alienarum puto. I know I have it wrong here - I will find it and correct it. But the gist is “Nothing human is strange to me” or “No human is alien to me”. Clearly a motto I break at least five times by the time I’ve finished my coffee on the PATH train into midtown Manhattan. It’s not always happy mixtures and a morning subway ride is a good analogy to such annoyances. But there is something socially theraputic in being forced together like this. When we meet again on the elevator or street, I’ll be less likely to shrink away and grab my purse in white knuckled fear (metaphorically speaking)… What does this word describe and what is about it that makes the Ashcrofts’, the Falwells’ and the Helms’ jaws tighten so visibly? (A recent Harper’s index stated that 2/5ths of the voters in a southern state had voted to make interracial marriages invalid.) Why is it a threat? I go for stretches of time without thinking of such questions. But inevitably they come back when my wife and I are looked at askance or I read a related news article…
But this is not just about interracial marriage or race relations in general. We have the experts, PhDs and politicians to speak of such things. More of an ineluctable question is intended. Maybe (hopefully) akin to Marx’s quote and George Clinton’s series of answers to the refrain “What is Soul?” on the Funkadelic album: “Soul is a hamhock in your cornflakes…etc”
miscegeny - I just like the sound of the word. as far as I know it is not a real word - miscegenation is the proper form. But miscegeny sounds more like a state of being or a password for a society in a state of us-them warfare like in that Margaret Atwood novel of an anglo-christian dystopia. Yes, perhaps a password…
BuDae ChiGae (thing) Feb 12 2001 at 23:03
Korean ‘stew’ (chigae can be roughly translated as a stew). BuDae means army base. The main ingredients are a combination of Korean staples - kimchee,tofu, ramen and a green leafy vegetable that resembles a cross between parsely and wild celery. It might be sukwhich is also used to color ricecakes a distinct jade-brown color but I’m not sure. The other ingredients are the Korean War-era K-rations of the US Army. The versions I’ve had include baked beans, hotdogs, Spam and American cheese. Eaten at a little neighborhood restaurant in Seoul over a bunsen burner with OB Lager to cool it down. A little sliver of Korean history bubbling away in an aluminum pan. Certainly one of the finest uses of Spam - that bizarre concoction that (according to dubious urban legendI heard) so resembles human flesh that it became the favorite meat of a cannibal group in Indonesia). And a cultural artifact that is very Korean IMHO and in my somewhat impressionistic and lazy opinion. Korean in that it takes something so bland and depressing as rations and with the addition of kimchee makes it firey and fragrant. Reminds me of Stone Soupor Nail Soup that German fairy tale about a hungry soldier who cleverly elicits ingredients for a soup after claiming that he could make it with just a nail… Korean in that it takes the materials at hand and turns it into something distinctive and unmistakably Korean.
digital emunction (idea) Feb 12 2001 at 23:50
From Beckett’s triliogy: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable - an absurdly Latinate term for nosepicking. Beckett and Joyce before him had wonderful parodies of the way in which the English language tends towards abstraction on two levels: One turning an action from a verbal form into a noun; Two using an impressive Greco-Roman root when the Anglo-Saxon would do just fine… “…the ineluctible modality of the visible…” from Ulysses
Mary and Martha (idea) Feb 13 2001 at 01:08
A remarkable story in the Gospel of Luke. I read it first years ago, bored out of my mind in church. So bored that I read the lectionary. It is a short story only a few lines actually. They are related to Lazarus. Jesus arrives for a meal. Mary (perhaps Mary Magdalene?) sits with him and talks. Martha gets busy preparing things for the meal and at some point complains to Jesus that Mary isn’t doing anything. And Jesus says something like ‘Martha you are busy and anxious and concerned about the things of the world - Mary has chosen the better part and that won’t be taken from her’. There is something clear and precise about the story. Like a Zen koan or one of the passages from the Tao Te Ching. I had chills but not in a religious-conversion-type way. Very down to earth, practical advice. ‘Don’t complain. You make your choices and can’t really hold on to the resentment against others for their choices…’ Yup, call me Martha…
1C! transcendental homelessness (idea) Mar 17 2001 at 04:58
“Philosophy is transcendental homelessness; it is the urge to be at home everywhere” A beautiful quote by George Lukacs from the Theory of the Novel about modernist philosophy or - better yet - Enlightenment philosophy.
One of those Hegelian dialectical assertions that you have to let sit on your tongue and savor a bit before swallowing.
Even as the world becomes more and more comprehensible and encoded the desire to wander and experience something becomes internalized and insatiable.
bebimbap (thing) Jul 31 2001 at 04:43
mmm - Korean sticky rice, assorted julliened vegetables (and possibly some ground beef), the lava-like substance called GoChuJang (pepper and bean paste). Sometimes a fried egg to crown it all off. And - if you are lucky - in the hot-from-the-oven stone bowl called dolsot. With soup on the side, an amazingly satisfying meal. In Korea a number of mountains have Buddhist monasteries on or near the top. A wonderful goal to have at the end of the brisk hike up the rocky but well-traveled mountain paths.
Within Seoul there are a number of climable mountains, which save the city from being a hell of concrete, glass and paving stones… Like Prospect Park, Brighton Beach and The Cloisters redeem NYC somewhat.
KwanAkSan is a mountain just to the south of Seoul. With two friends we made a weekend climb up and as we passed through the monastery - the smell of the miso-like soup (DwuengJangGuk)that goes with bebimbap tortured us… Turned out that that monastary offered the simple meal to visitors for a suggested donation.
Mountain air, a beautiful little monastery and some bebimbap - not much else to ask for in life…
Wim Van Est (person) Jul 31 2001 at 05:30
The Tour de France is full of stories of amazing endurance and absurd suffering. The US press focuses on the US riders, when we have a good one and lots of the other stories are lost. (Try to find a good story on Zabel vs. O’Grady and the green jersey on the last day…) Always there are crashes and they are one of the main reasons that the 20 or so 9-man teams get whittled down to 150 or so riders by the end. Not even the favorites are exempt - Ullrich took a frightening fall this tour, while Lance was a gentleman and waited for his rival…
In the 1951 Tour, Van Est wearing the yellow jersey takes a descent too fast and takes a 30-foot fall - his second fall of the day. A picture shows him openly weeping on a rock - filthy from the tumble and his face contorted in a grimace that looks like the exagerated facepaint of a sad clown.
For me it’s one of those photos that is in its own way like other famous photos of the extremity of the human condition. The torture of a thousand knives photo which Bataille and Cortazar made reference to. The ‘Thrill of Victory - Agony of Defeat’ footage of that skier which graced the opening of ABC’s Wide World of Sport circa 1976.
After his three story fall and the difficult climb with the bike back up, Van Est wanted to continue, though he was clearly in bad shape. He fought those who tried to put him in the ambulance but the Tour was done for him.
Hundreds of other stories - Hinault, the Badger with broken nose and cracked ribs (and subsequent bronchitis)going on to not only finish but to win the Tour…
An amazing event - all about self-willed suffering on a grand scale… and Van Est one of its many patron saints.
(photo is on cyclingnews.com)
3C!s Bad Dylan is better than good Diamond (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 01:19
No person is more of a Puritan than an adolescent who discovers a musician or musical style that really speaks to him or her. It becomes a prism or monad that clarifies all around into a deceptive whole. And divides the world into those who somehow get it and those who are hopelessly lost. For me it was Dylan. And I felt truly sorry for the Rush or Queen fans. Smugly superior to the Beatles or Stones throwbacks. And furiously indignant when a graduating senior attributed All Along the Watchtower to Jimi Hendrix (though Hendrix could be said to have inheritied it with his amazing version…)
For reasons that are beyond me, a moment of almost perfect clarity came when I was 15 or so and in the back seat of a two-toned brown station wagon. It was 1979 – I know that because Bob Dylan’s Slow Train Coming came out and at that time in my life a new Dylan album was an event of some magnitude. When I discovered the old copy of Another Side of Bob Dylan among the ‘Mantovanni Strings’ albums, the Perry Como’s and the Dinah Washington’s of my parents’ collection, it was something to pore over song-by-song, line-by-line. And luckily there were about ten albums to catch up on and do the same to so I was occupied for some time in this way. But a new Dylan album was something special.
I don’t think at that moment I had even bought it yet. I probably had a taped version from the late night program on WDHA “The Rock of North Jersey”. But, in any event, my Dad had it on the tape deck and I was absorbing Mark Knopfler’s guitar and Dylan’s voice singing his portentous, somewhat-paranoid and apocalyptic lyrics about relationships and current events (even some lyrics about the late seventies’ gas crisis) and redemption. And I had a feeling of extension and concentration combined with a sense of what I would do and become.
A boy in the back seat of a tank-like American car - a mid-seventies General Motors behemoth sucking up way too much gas - in a dreamy, content frame of mind, listening to the best music that he knew in the world and realizing that it wouldn’t always be that way, that things now opaque would approach come into focus and pass behind. Perhaps it was the suggestion of the lyrics of the song (“A slow train coming, up around the bend…”) or some slight hormonal shift in his body, the Van Der Waals force which focused him out of the present and on a future that seemed about as inevitable as the small town of Morristown passing by in that tumescent way a town passes by though the dusty windows of a terribly ugly but solid and reassuring station wagon driven by a dad who had not lost his seeming invincibility yet…
Burroughs in Tangiers (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 01:44
Burroughs is in Tangiers, I don’t think he’s coming back – It’s sinister…– A. Ginsberg, “America” Is Burroughs great or overrated?
Sometimes I think of Burroughs as akin to TS Eliot – 2 crotchety, arid,brilliant, mid-western Harvard types. But have come to see Burroughs as more limited. Really was amazed by his Yage Letters, Last Words of Dutch Schultz, Queer and some of the shorter passages from works like Wild Boys. The opening of Naked Lunch, with the junkie jumping the turnstyle at west 4th street and dispersing through the city like some viral agent, is a favorite as well. And Dr Benway coked out of his mind performing an unnecessary appendectomy with a ‘rusty sardine can’ while an ‘espontaneo’ enters the surgical theatre and threatens to take away the patient.. And some of the characters – the Green Nun, Dr Benway, Kiki the house boy, FDR, the Exterminator (“Exterminator, Lady. You need the service?”) are pretty memorable .
And Burroughs has some of the funniest and perverse one-liners:
“In Panama City even the whores are cut with sponge rubber…”
“I’d take my mother’s last paregoric… and her laid up with the piles… Wouldn’t you?”
And when he adopts that ‘anthropologist-gone-native’ perspective he comes up with some great stuff. – The story about the US industrial mogul who goes down to Mexico to try and hire the Mayan corn god to take care of some of his labor problems – is really good. It ends with a memorable line “Stupid, vulgar son-of-a-bitch. Thought he could hire Death as a company cop…”
Seems like he had a few good notions – his idea of a diffuse and narcotic will-to-power that was as powerful and perverse as any opiate. Burroughs had the psyche of a J. Edgar Hoover or a Roy Cohn down pat. All the paranoia, the repression and the irrationality that came from closeted conservatives.
Burroughs’ limitations are there. I don’t think he gets beyond a point. The one event that dominates the writing is the death of his wife. Down in Mexico City, he played ‘William Tell’ with her and shot her in the head. He tries in a number of ways to explain it away – demonic possession, fate, etc… But comes up short. His situation is almost a reverse validation of Catholic penance. That horrible event is one which he can never come to peace with.
Movement and Benzedrine-inspired riffing of Kerouac and Ginsberg are different than Burroughs. Burroughs is in flight- like the Blakean notion of “abstract horror”. At time he has the abitlity of Eliot to combine high and low culture or of Beckett to find genuine humor in horror – but I don’t know that he has contributed more than brilliant fragments.
He’s more American than Ginzy or Keruoac. His grandfather (or some relative) invented the adding machine (which the Burroughs family name is attached to and which became the title of a book of essays by the man) so they were a somewhat prestigious St Louis family. Ginsberg has that immigrant son perspective and Jack was a French Canadian but Burroughs was a Brahmin and a bit older so more set in that post war and early fifties mindset. Which makes his particular kind of revolt a bit different…
And I just can’t stop reading him. Like there is something there, just around a corner…
1C! Montaigne and Lyme - Near Death Experience #689 (idea) Aug 09 2001 at 02:29
I felt dizzy and a bit out of it. Summer in Greenpoint, a somber, sometimes downright depressing Polish and Latino enclave in Brooklyn. Working as a teacher and trying to finish a paper on Montaigne for a graduate course at NYU Comp Lit from the semester before. And living in a beautiful old brickfront house that stifled in the summer heat. And my girlfriend was gone for the next 9 months, touring with her ballet troupe… So there were objective reasons to be a bit blue and rundown. I started feeling like I was passing out and decided to go home. On the G train I started seriously blacking out and got nervous enough to think about going to the doctors. At home I changed into shorts and flipflops, grabbed the collected Montaigne. NYU grad school health insurance didn’t work through the summer so I went to a Greenpoint clinic that catered to the neighborhood.
After waiting for an hour or so in a waiting room reminiscent - in overall dinginess and Eastern European flavor - of the clinic that Tomas ends up in after displeasing the government in The Unbearable Lightness of Being… And the doctor was surprisingly good. He did the perfunctory listening to the heart and taking the blood pressure type things. And got noticably concerned. He put me on a truly ancient EKG and ripped off the chart and waked into the other room.
When he came back he told me that my heart was slowing down and indeed stopping for seconds at a time. And said he had no idea why. He then said I had to get to an emergency room immediately. He then stopped and reflected on the fact that if he called 911 I’d be taken to a Brooklyn hospital and might die waiting for care. He told me to come with him and he walked straight out of the clinic with its packed waiting room and into his car. Through the Queens midtown tunnel and to St Vincent’s hospital in the West Village. Me nodding off the whole time.
In St Vincent’s emergency room they had my papers ready, i signed then and went on another gurney and another ekg machine that set off an alarm everytime my heart stopped. After 10 minutes or so of this one doctor came over and told me in a matter of fact way that they would have to put a pacemaker in my heart and that because of my condition they couldn’t use any general anesthesia. The nurse was right next to him with the requisite forms. For the first time I felt real fear – not at my condition but imagining some kind of open heart surgery. I felt horribly alone and ridiculous in my plastic sandals and bathing suit shorts holding on to the copy of Montaigne’s essays.
Turned out to be nowhere as dreadful as I imagined. And with moments of emergency room humor. “We call this a Bronx tan” he said while the nurse scrubbed my neck with betadine. The pacemaker was external and the wire passed down though my jugular (or my carotid I’m not sure) into my heart. The most unsettling thing was a kind of dull pressure down my neck and the doctor’s running commentary as he affixed the electrode to my heart.
Then passed two weeks of hospital bed rest, the blood tests that revealed Lyme disease and the Montaigne paper to finish. I was writing on sickness and monstrocity in the essays. And relating it somehow to Caliban in Shakespeare’s “Tempest” as this is what one does in Comp Lit. I found myself unable to write this simple paper. I’d read everything I needed to, had plenty of notes and thus didn’t have to do more than transform the notes into a paper format. And have never done it. Dropped out of grad school soon after. Not through anger – just loss of desire for it. Perversely being stuck with Montaigne and a few other books but mostly Montaigne. Reading about his kidney stones, his cannibals, his cripples and monstrous children… it wasn’t morose or depressing. Just being stuck in a hospital bed was probably enough to realize that I was just hiding out in the Program for Comp Lit and I’d never have enough desire to do what was necessary to get the PhD and then get a job.
Never a moment with a bright light at the end of the tunnel. I was evidently fairly close to death but never really felt danger. Didn’t feel a great sense of importance or urgency. Didn’t particularly want to see anyone at my bedside (not even the ballerina) felt a sense of balance. Guess it was the effect of what I was reading. A kind of Tibetan Book of the Dead. Not to say that I’d reached some kind of satori or anything. My existence wasn’t painful at that point and I certainly didn’t want to die. More of a feeling of passivity or equanimity. Like ‘this is the best of all possible worlds’ as the character in Candide asserts but at the same time it is no ‘Mega Ti’ – not a thing of great importance. And the universe would continue quite well without me.
Similar experience – though more instantaneous – reading the Tao Te Ching while on a business flight to Atlanta and lightening struck the plane - but that’s another near death experience…
1C! American Tourists (thing) Aug 13 2001 at 00:30
The Ugly American. A great stereotype in that it is so easy to find examples when you travel - or more specifically when you live in a place long enough as an expat and you cringe everytime you hear those voices a few decibels too loud and the complaints about bathrooms, food and the surliness of those natives. The level of survice that just would not fly in Peoria, etc. In Barcelona, Paris, Urbino, Seoul, Ho Chi Min City - I’ve skulked down sidestreets or ducked into stores to not be associated with one of my tribe…
I’ve even seen myself transmogrify into that fat, hawaiian-shirt wearing ogre at moments. In the countryside a few hours northwest of Ulaan Baatar ride back was over 8 hours late. I was furious and hungry and found myself yelling at the driver - a young Mongolian guy.
Another time in a cave near Cat Ba Island in Vietnam. My flashlight - which I bought in Korea before travelling on to Vietnam - was more powerful than the guide’s. When he realized this he asked to use mine, actually didn’t ask but just kind of gestured towards it. I gave it to him for a while but then got frustrated bumbling in the relative dark. So I asked for it back. And left him in the dark and the group without a leader.
Both incidents are relatively minor but for me became little memories that I wince at. Both reactions (or overreactions) were moments in which my American (I use this term provisionally) expectations for how things should work, how things should run, overwhelmed my desire to be in a different place and observe how things are. Egotism (or more precisely egocentrism), possesiveness, an obsession with time and schedule and the desire to be served… all these traits were at work in these two little episodes. Exactly what you are trying to escape by traveling far away and yet what you come to find in your core, the lesser angels of your being.
But to characterize this as American? That’s silly nationalism. I livesd and worked with Canadians, Australians, Brits, French people and Koreans. It has so much more to do with class and a certain blindness. A Canadian colleague trying to barter down on a watch on a Korean market when the starting price was about half of what it would be at home. A Korean aquaintance who thought nothing of answering a cell phone during a concert.
The Ugly American, the American Tourist has more than become globalised. Really it is the international class that has enough money to travel and who has certain expectations of how thay will be treated while having little concern about others. The kind of person who wants to be entertained and informed; the one who expects that money is the key into any meaningful exchange and buys the better things in life. This character used to be American but today is no more ‘American’ than MTV - it’s now truly a transnationalist class. I see them just as easily as I try to fight the gawking crowds to get home at the 32nd and Broadway subway stop as I would on the Champs-Elysees with their cornfed, red-nosed faces and upside-down maps…
2C!s cat euthanasia (idea) Aug 17 2001 at 17:37
Writing this made me realize a specific need e2 provides - one which is different from any other interaction in my life. One which I am terribly grateful for. We got Gogo and Didi from a bonafide cat lady in the eastern stretches of Williamsburg Brooklyn. She had dozens of cats in the loft space and looked like she spent a good portion of her income on their upkeep.
She interviewed up sharply - “outdoor cats?” “No” …etc. and when she was satisfied took us to see the kittens. It struck me as a group litter as the kittens seemed very different from one another and feral house cats will accept orphaned kittens into their own litters. KaySu picked up a tiny male with Siamese seal point markings and I picked up a very active lightly-striped female. They were pathetic and dirty and when we got then back to the apartment we lightly cleaned them and set up a little nest or them. KaySu decided the male was as pathetic as a GoGoMa seller (the men who sell roast corn and sweet potatoes at Korean subway stations). With Gogo came Didi for Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot. I don’t mention this to show how incredibly brilliant, witty and pomo multicultural we are. But from a feeling that naming Gogo as we did brought him a bit of bad luck or karma..
After a bout with a nasty repiratory thing they grew up as fairly normal kittens - bothering my wife as she tried to do her leathercrafting and patternmaking work at home and developed into lovely cats.
When it was time to get “fixed” - one of the weirdest euphemisms, I actually prefer “tutored” from a memorable Far Side comic of about 10 years ago - Didi the female was relatively fine after her hysterectomy. But Gogo with the relatively simple and non-invasive snip-snip had all kinds of complications. Turns out he was monorchid meaning one tesicle was floating around his abdomen somewhere and had to be found. Also he had a congenital heart murmur. And an eye infection relating to the overlap of his upper eyelid. When we got him back he had stiches in his eyelid and a relatively large scar from the exploratory surgery.
He looks ‘Siamese’ enough (though actually I think his father was a large dark Burmese which we saw in the neighborhood)that the vet strongly recommended we tell the breeder we got the cats from about all these congenital issues.
We decided to monitor the heart murmur by an ultrasound the next visit which we decided to schedule early because Gogo was unusually lethargic. Ultrasound turned up lymphoma thoughout his little thin body. Deadly cancer throughout the body. And then a few more tests to rule out leukemia, FIP. And then a decision about what to do…
Untreated the vet gave him days to live. Treated months. So we decided to start him on a simple chemotherapy designed to make him comfortable and when the cancer takes over - euthanasia (a punchline to a horrible joke with the pun on “youth-in-asia” - black and stupid humor seems inevitable at such moments).
I’m surprised by the amount of turmoil I feel about this. I feel guilty in ways. At the moment this cat is getting better treatment, better nutrition and better quality of drugs than a large percentage of the world’s population. i will probably miss a good friend’s wedding. Most people’s reaction ranges from the ‘put him down now’ to ‘tie him in a pillowcase and throw him in the Hudson’.
Am I giving Gogo the chemo for him? Of course not - he is not a conscious being. On the other hand he is not in any outward pain, is still eating and even played a bit with the toy mouse suspended from a stick. It seems a waste to kill him because he is going to die anyway. And there is a tiny chance he’ll make it through. In which case I’ll rename him Lance.
This is all about an emotional attachment to an animal. A fetishism of sorts. I watched the movie Why the BhodiDarma has left for the East and dreamt that night of trying to cremate Gogo out on the apartment balcony. Woke a grown man weeping… I know what’s going on - on a rational level - and yet these feelings are so deep I can’t do otherwise.
E2 is not a therapist’s couch and isn’t a bbs… so I’ll stop there. I feel like what I’m doing at the moment is akin to what Tony Leiung’s character does in In the Mood for Love he goes to Ankor Wat, finds a hole in the side of the temple wall and whispers his heart’s prayer into it. Afterwards he stops it up with moss and goes away feeling his secret is both safe and expressed…
e2 is like that for me. T.S. Eliot in a lecture on The Waste Land claimed that the poem was not so much “…an important piece of social criticism” but was instead “…the relief of a personal and wholly insignifigant grouse against life; … just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”.
This writeup would never be mistaken as “…an important piece of social criticism” or even an unimportant one. It is an “insignifigant grouse against life”.
And through all the grumbling, Gogo just sleeps with the white tip of his tail stuck in his left ear.
1C! Ernst Bloch (person) Jan 25 2002 at 00:05
1885–1977 German Marxist (Hegelian Marxist) philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School for Social Research (Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Eric Fromm, Walter Benjamin, Sigfried Kracauer, etc.)
He had a position at the University of Leipzig (1918–33). He ended up in the US after fleeing the Nazis but returned to Leipzig in 1948. He was forced to defect to West Germany in the early 60’s and settled in Tübingen and taught at the university there.
I first came across Bloch in an Aesthetic Theory class taught by a favorite professor back at Rutgers in undergraduate days. That little book about the expressionist debate with the aforementioned Frankfurt School thinkers and Georg Lukacs and Bertolt Brecht. A beautiful little book called Aesthetics and Politics. Bloch’s essay starts the whole thing off and in contrary to the somewhat dry prose of the rest of the book; his essay is a rush of imagery and allusions - almost an expressionist work in itself.
I looked for more stuff in the library on him or by him and by luck found a three volume work called Principle of Hope. It traces strains of utopian thought through history - in cultural expressions; religious thought and political action. But it is not simply an encyclopedic or historical treatment of the subject (i.e. de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World. No, the remarkable aspect of this work is a basic ontological claim - and by extension the historical method which accompanies this claim.
Ah - but I make it sound so dry and really it is not. If you are reading this and your eyes glaze over at words like ‘ontology’ (not because it is hard but because when we discuss it it becomes dry and abstract - reified to borrow the Frankfurt School terminology. Pick up Bloch and let the language carry you until the thoughts begin to make sense. It is not hard like the translations of Derrida or Heidegger nor the English of Frederic Jamison or Homi Bhabha or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, etc… It’s hard because he is speaking directly at you (perhaps like Nietzsche did for his generation) and is using a terminology that is at once complex and simple.
The ‘upright glance’ is an example that comes to mind. The ability of a human to look clearly and directly at other humans. To be neither slave nor master (in the Hegelian meaning of those words. So what I meant in the previous paragraph about him speaking directly to you - is that he presupposes an upright glance in the reader…
The ontological claim he makes can be classified as an open ended, negative, plural ontology. Negative here doesn’t have pejorative connotations. Hegelian negation indicates a gap between potentiality and existence. Thus hunger and desire as expressed in art, music or literature - the hunger for transcendence - indicates a negation. Plural indicates a social aspect to identity. Homo oeconomicus. We don’t start out alone and we don’t see the world as atomized individuals.
An ontological claim is a basic statement of our being and identity - i.e. Aquinas (esse est percipe) or DesCartes (cogito ergo sum). Bloch’s could be expressed as “We are becoming”. A simple unremarkable statement on the face of it without the epoch-making grandeur of “I think, therefore I am”. Bloch’s ontological claim puts the category ‘hope’ at the very center of human identity. And by doing so injects a Copernican twist to the Cartesian claim. Human existence is fundamentally stateless. Categories of Reason provide some structure but cannot begin to satisfy true human needs. Utopian thought orients this stateless existence towards a goal. ‘We are becoming’ human.
“Man cannot live on bread alone, unless he doesn’t have any” Art, music, technology - many of our productions contain a germ of utopian content. Dream images of a life without work, food for all, enduring peace. These dreams permeate our culture and fragments of a desired whole are found in high and low places. The fairy tale of a child and the symphony.
But it is not to say that this is a simple positivistic progression towards perfection - a la Disney or the 1939 World’s Fair. The reality is that history is a multidimensional fluid dialectic. It is not pointing in one direction. The content of the present is full of the unexpressed dreams of the past and glimpses of a possible future.
A category that shows up in Heritage of out Times - the nonsynchronous contemporainity - explains this. The work as a whole is remarkable in that it was an early analysis of fascism from the point of view that the fascists were co-opting the dream images of the current society and using them to promote a backward looking vision. The fascist allusions to ‘Blood and Soil’, the Fatherland and racial identity are all examples of this.
I think Bloch’s analysis in Heritage can be made of current US corporate and political life - mutatis mutandis. And his philosophy has had an impact in a number of movements (liberation theology, Green movement, etc.).
This little writup is in no way even scratching the surface of this man and his work. I was reminded of the excitement of first reading Bloch back in Prof. Bronner’s Aesthetics class because I noticed that Bloch’s first work Spirit of Utopia was published in English last September. And not to belabor the point but I have not begun to get over that month yet. Nor begin to comprehend it. I watched it all from my balcony overlooking the Hudson River. For me Bloch is perhaps a start.
Incomplete list of Works in English (ie the ones I have):
Principle of Hope
Spirit of Utopia
Heritage of Our Times
Atheism in Christianity
Man on His Own
On Karl Marx
Philosophy of the Future
numerous essays on Art, Literature, Aesthetics and Politics