The Left - In our Heads

They argue too much. With each other. Too much arguing, not enough lefting. I kid, sort of...but bear with me.

After a while, arguing feels an awful lot like doing stuff, but it's not, except when arguing is doing something. I mean, it sure feels like doing something - you get all hot and bothered, you have trouble sleeping because someone wrote a mean blog response to your blog post, and it goes on and on.

Blogging is an activity, isn't it? Changing people's minds, one hit at a time, right? Arguing is even engaging, right?

I love critiques. If someone could write a critique like Kant did, back in the day, when people just sort of up and stopped doing entire swaths of philosophy, because Kant came up and closed the door on it, and then padlocked it, these problems wouldn't happen, would they?

But we know that's not going to happen again because Kant, the conditions that made his critique possible and the ways in which we know things have changed so much that one can safely say that the door is no longer there to be closed. Got a problem with someone, no matter how outrageous? You've got a platform.

And so I, like many before and after me, hung out our shingles and tried to talk politics, and I really feel I tried. I joined the conversation.

But those blog commenters! What stamina! Who has the time to engage them? To incessantly be at them, to play bugbear to their troll?

How long did I last? Seven months? And now, the tepidity of my political entries, the thin gruel of my iconoclasm, are a point of shame for me.

So where is this strange rambling post going? It's going to the old saw of doing vs. thinking, of writing vs. building stuff. One sees, in the light of the economic colapse, the twilight of the left around the world. What gives? Was it really only a year ago that many of us thought that the moment would be siezed and we would be looking at a very different world?

But, and this is the kicker, was the problem really that everyone was too busy blogging about the collapse of capitalism to actually try to build something new? Remember people, comment patrolling is work! Blogging is work!

Back to the question though - I feel the answer is no. Most of us, in our own ways, are both in the online world and, perhaps unsurprisingly, eat and sleep and go to art museums and church and defecate like real people too, you know, like in Ulysses.

And I suspect a lot of those people, and a lot of bloggers, participate in the world. And we participate in the world by allowing governments and corporations to be who they are, because it's too much work to do things any other way. I think sometimes why I walk away from the online world is that there continues to be something strangely shameful about it, in that it reveals me for someone bourgeois enough to talk about my life and things I think about it in public, but never about the things I do in my life that affect actual people.

Maybe the issue then, and the issue in the post I linked to way up above is that somehow all this talk among the left, all these critiques, all these posts and forums, is that they all feel like statistics, as in statistical reports. We are all sitting around reading statistics everyday. And helping out in a soup kitchen doesn't help, because after a while the people you help also start to become statistics.

To sum up, blogs lack the taste of the real.

Blowing our Minds

When one reads this article, it's hard not to smack your head and think "of course, why didn't anyone really think about this before?"

Could this be the final copernican turn, that we are not the end of the evolutionary path? I hope so.

A Question to the Classical Blogosphere

Why is it that a disproportionate number of classical music bloggers have elected to truncate their posts for RSS feeds? Is it some kind of desperate desire to know how many people are reading them? Maybe the siren call of google ads tempts them too much to allow people access to their free content?

Really, I'm just curious.

Shrugging

There is a great essay right now in the New Republic on Ayn Rand. There is some wonderful writing in it, and the final paragraph is fantastic.

I think it's safe to say to my readers that I'm not fan of Ayn Rand, so the essay offered little to me in the way of contrary opinions. However, I have one concern with the essay.

It argues that Objectivism is the obverse of Marxism. However, Marx wrote a critique of capitalism. Communism is the outcomes of this massive analysis, and whether one likes it or not, has a lot of intellectual merit.

Rand, on the other hand, appears to have been simply, a deeply narcissistic person, and wrote a few books that allowed other narcissists to feel they had a moral basis for their own narcissism. I don't detect analysis in her work so much as a deep desire for the world to be as it was in her own mind.

Analysis of the world vs. Desire for world to be just like me doesn't strike me as terribly obversive.

An Observation

The linguistic philosophy of Jacques Derrida is quite similar to that of Wilfid Sellars. The fact that one is derided as a charlatan and the other as an important, if perhaps obscure, philosopher reminds that that, even in philosophy, it seems that sociology is the true Queen of the Sciences.

A Quick Question

Why is this news?

Before I opened the link I was pretty sure that the Globe would post a photo Julie Couillard in that dress. And the Globe delivered.

A, uh, nice snapshot of the mainstream media at this time.

(no title)

I step onto the streetcar last night, black clouds again threatening downtown. I sit, and watch a man sit in the seat ahead and across from mine.

He was immaculately dressed. He wore a grey flannel pinstripe suit, brown oxfords and grey socks, with a white shirt and pale blue tie with orange diagonal stripes. He was deeply tanned, and looked as though he had just had his hair cut, and I suspected that he looked this way every day.

He carried a small brown briefcase made of calfskin, and from it he pulled paper from it talking about opening an account.

Then the real fun began - what did he do? Was he a banker? Seemed a little north for that...a bureaucrat? Maybe, sometimes political staffers dress this way, but there was something just not quite right about that, an ease with which he carried himself that made me suspect that he didn't spend his days being barked at by the former real estate agent from wherever who is now the Minister of Whatever.

It occured to me that he might work selling clothes, at Holt Renfrew or Harry Rosen, but there is often an undertone to people who work there, the scent of people who spend all their time catering to the rich, and indeed are outfitted like the rich, and yet none of it is theirs. He lacked this quality.

So imagine my surprise when I find myself at the Royal Ontario Museum, having lunch with my mom and my son, and this very man walks past me, in the same suit, and walks back into "employees only" part of the cafeteria at the ROM, which they call the Food Studio, as I suppose it allows them to charge more for juice boxes.

He works at a museum, in food services...the mind strains, maybe he's a curator I wonder, even though any ROM curators I've met so far would have trouble tying a clip-on, let alone master the sartorial depths of this gentleman.

No, let's just let this one play out. He works in a big, beautiful museum, running the food services department (food services - could there be a less gustatory term for providing people with nourishment?).

Never in a million years would I have imagined that.

Back to Paper

Last week, after again reading some news article online and then rubbernecking at some of the moronic comments left at its footer, I decided that I would avoid reading newspapers online, save for the New York Times, which doesn't allow comments beneath its articles.

Why? Regular readers know I don't like a lot of online commenting (maybe that's why no one ever comments here....hmmmm....uh oh), and I've decided that maybe I should do something about it.

So far, going back to reading things in print has been a pretty pleasant experience. One's tastes tend to be more catholic - I find myself reading a lot of articles that I wouldn't bother with online, and, frankly, as an aesthetic experience, reading a paper is vastly more satisfying than reading on a desktop.

I still believe there's too much heft to most papers, especially on weekends. I do believe that there's a market in Toronto for a small "daily briefing" kind of paper, something cosmopolitan, that situates local news in a broader context alongside thoughtful, mixed commentary. In other words, something along the line of the Financial Times (still bar none my favourite paper), but closer to the size of the local free papers.

I believe that people starving for this kind of thing would pay well for it, just to avoid the ads. All that remains is for someone to start this paper!

By the way, if all this sounds familiar, it's because I've written on the same thing before. Think of it as online recycling.

No More Promises

I just finished reading Genesis. A few thoughts:

1) Joseph is the most pious character in Genesis, and therefore the least likable, when taking Genesis as a literary whole.

2) Much of Genesis concerns God favouring someone, and that someone screwing up, usually pretty badly, leaving God with egg on his his face, because, being God, he doesn't feel as though he can renege. But he always keeps trying, until he just kind of absents himself from the second half of the book, with lots of "God of your father" stuff, and not a lot of God actually being around. Compare and contrast this with Jesus' feelings about his apostles, which often borders on exasperation.

3) My favourite character in Genesis is Esau, in part because his name shows up in a disproportionate number of crossword puzzles.

4) If there is anything to be learned from Genesis, it's to never trust your siblings.

The Internet and Shame

One man posts a video of his child driving a car, and suddenly this is some great no-no, an act of unbridled stupidity?

Isn't going out onto a backcountry road and getting a taste of adulthood one of the great joys of childhood? I would like to know how people haven't had this experience as children. Would a video of a child toasting and sipping some wine at Christmas meet with the same approbation? After all, drinking under age is illegal, isn't it?

It seems here that what's really wrong is posting the video. In this way the Internet seems far, far less like a democratic forum, where people vote and deliberate, and more like a courtroom, where people judge and sentence others. This distinction seems be and large to have been lost on people.

So as one fixes their lives online, those lives get fixed to the law, and out the window are all the informal and subtle rules and pleasures of a culture.

I promise soon to post more optimistic things! I am just getting the hang of things after a long absence.