How is it that the greatest challenge facing many of us today is which cell phone to buy? It's an issue fraught with peril - does one get a "smart" phone and reach into the future of complete social connection coupled with physical alienation, or does one stick with the cell phone?
Am I the only one who finds this a task of surprising difficulty? Of course, here at The Transcontinental, the question is never really these ones, but why is it such a challenge? I'm at a loss. Any suggestions?
Friday, April 09, 2010
Thursday, April 08, 2010
On Getting Derrida (and Adorno) Right
A beautiful essay by Marco Roth from N+1 on Jacques Derrida, which includes a wonderful defense of Adorno through Derrida:
My bolded italics. It is so easy to caricature, and so very difficult to characterize. It also makes me wonder why it is so important in intellectual circles, and especially in philosophy, to have enemies...
Derrida's seminar was on hospitality. It was his usual touch for the relevant without engaging in the actual politics of the moment. Every session he fended off questions from students anxious to know how reading Lévinas or the orientalist and anthropologist Louis Massignon linked to the issues of hospitality facing France. He told them that he'd signed the petition supporting the sans-papiers and had marched, but his intellectual method seemed designed to evoke a present social situation and frustrate his students' desire for arguments to use on the barricades. It's important to know what's happening, but that means we should read Hegel or Lévinas or even the Catholic pornographer Pierre Klossowski with more care and slowness than before. You could imagine frustrated radical students pelting Derrida with flowers and baring their breasts.
My bolded italics. It is so easy to caricature, and so very difficult to characterize. It also makes me wonder why it is so important in intellectual circles, and especially in philosophy, to have enemies...
Wednesday, April 07, 2010
The Philosopher's Stone
I must admit, it's pretty rare these days for me to find enough self-interest to blog, much less recommend the another's blog. Although I have settled into a neat little rut when it comes to the blogosphere, but I must recommend, via Brian Leiter, Robert Paul Wolff's The Philosopher's Stone.
Delightful stories and thoughtful analysis, well worth your time. It doesn't hurt that I am highly amenable to his politics. However, I leave what that actually means as an exercise for the reader.
Delightful stories and thoughtful analysis, well worth your time. It doesn't hurt that I am highly amenable to his politics. However, I leave what that actually means as an exercise for the reader.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
China to become more Socialist
Or something like that - doesn't this headline sound really strange given where it's coming from?
Thursday, March 04, 2010
My goodness, the dust!
I suppose one could find a correlation between my disappearances and the winter solstice (they wouldn't be wrong to do so) , but among the various things I do, this blog rises and falls in importance.
So what have I been up to? Mainly rediscovering my childhood through my son. You see, he is a big Star Wars fan:
When I was little, I was a pretty big Star Wars fan. Coincidence? Not really, I've certainly stoked his interest, but his interest seems genuine nonetheless. That being said, I hope he doesn't do what I do and grow up resenting liking Star Wars for years because I associated it with "being little".
Although this insulated me from a lot of the Star Wars "extras" (what do you call the entire culture out there that lives this stuff?), it also insulated me from looking back fondly on my own childhood, which was, as far as I can recall, pretty good.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I think a lot of the criticism around the prequels is very much related to the fact that there are a lot of people out there who grew up feeling a similar way to me about the original films, and discovered that being grown up doesn't offer the same experience of the "new" that being a five year old does.
That is also why I think the recent, and very popular film review of Phantom Menace, while funny (and disturbing - not for kids!) is still very much in the vein of "why couldn't George Lucas make me a kid again" style of Star Wars criticism that has characterized (or plagued) the past decade since the prequels were released.
I think the review makes a lot of salient points, but I also think it's couched in the same kind of anger that is fuelling the
If we can agree with Adorno that popular cultural products are a mirror of the culture in which we live, then I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of people out there who view George Lucas as the father who raised you really well and then once you'd grew up, dumped your mom, bought a Ferrari and took off with the waitress from another bar.
Am I (over)psychologizing Star Wars criticism? Perhaps, but then, LOOK AT THE CRITICISM. Doesn't a lot of it scream out "Father Issues"? And isn't this rather ironic, given the Saga of Anakin Skywalker is all about father issues?
He lacks a father, spends the prequels looking for one, finds one, and only begins to seriously question his life path once he discovers he himself is now a father? Should it surprise us that so much of the critical relationship models the movies' themes?
Perhaps the documentary attempts to address this - the trailers suggest that it doesn't, favouring instead a sequence of futile catharses, but given I haven't seen the film I can't say! However, I do think that a lot of this clouds our ability to look at the films aesthetically, or as cultural artifacts of some lasting significance.
But then, who am I to talk, as a father whose son has drawn him back into thinking about these father-son films? Perhaps I am in more need of psychologizing...
So what have I been up to? Mainly rediscovering my childhood through my son. You see, he is a big Star Wars fan:
When I was little, I was a pretty big Star Wars fan. Coincidence? Not really, I've certainly stoked his interest, but his interest seems genuine nonetheless. That being said, I hope he doesn't do what I do and grow up resenting liking Star Wars for years because I associated it with "being little".
Although this insulated me from a lot of the Star Wars "extras" (what do you call the entire culture out there that lives this stuff?), it also insulated me from looking back fondly on my own childhood, which was, as far as I can recall, pretty good.
Anyway, this is all a roundabout way of saying that I think a lot of the criticism around the prequels is very much related to the fact that there are a lot of people out there who grew up feeling a similar way to me about the original films, and discovered that being grown up doesn't offer the same experience of the "new" that being a five year old does.
That is also why I think the recent, and very popular film review of Phantom Menace, while funny (and disturbing - not for kids!) is still very much in the vein of "why couldn't George Lucas make me a kid again" style of Star Wars criticism that has characterized (or plagued) the past decade since the prequels were released.
I think the review makes a lot of salient points, but I also think it's couched in the same kind of anger that is fuelling the
People vs. George Lucas, an upcoming documentary on people's complex psychological relationships with Lucas.
If we can agree with Adorno that popular cultural products are a mirror of the culture in which we live, then I think it's safe to say that there are a lot of people out there who view George Lucas as the father who raised you really well and then once you'd grew up, dumped your mom, bought a Ferrari and took off with the waitress from another bar.
Am I (over)psychologizing Star Wars criticism? Perhaps, but then, LOOK AT THE CRITICISM. Doesn't a lot of it scream out "Father Issues"? And isn't this rather ironic, given the Saga of Anakin Skywalker is all about father issues?
He lacks a father, spends the prequels looking for one, finds one, and only begins to seriously question his life path once he discovers he himself is now a father? Should it surprise us that so much of the critical relationship models the movies' themes?
Perhaps the documentary attempts to address this - the trailers suggest that it doesn't, favouring instead a sequence of futile catharses, but given I haven't seen the film I can't say! However, I do think that a lot of this clouds our ability to look at the films aesthetically, or as cultural artifacts of some lasting significance.
But then, who am I to talk, as a father whose son has drawn him back into thinking about these father-son films? Perhaps I am in more need of psychologizing...
Thursday, January 21, 2010
A Glimpse Into What My Colleagues Must Endure
Colleague: Hey, does your son use Play-Doh?
Me: No, he's really more of an Aristotelian.
Me: No, he's really more of an Aristotelian.
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
More Fraktur For Me, Suckers!
It seems that one of my local university libraries is disgorging itself of Fraktur-fonted texts. For a mere $1.50 I now own the complete works of Ludwigs Tieck and Uhland. Except in Fraktur.
It's odd, but I think that people still somehow associate Fraktur with National Socialism, even though from what I know, the Nazis didn't like Fraktur. Nonetheless, the stain of its germaness remains and so there appears to be a push to "modernize" by eliminating Fraktur texts from today's libraries (google books excepted!)
The editions are part of the Meyer Klassiker-Ausgaben, a 19th Century "Great Books" Series that reprinted the critical editions of major German authors. As Library copies, they bear the markings of administration, if not of use. Most of my colleagues in the German department tend to shy away from texts in this font, however, I've come to realise that where there's disinterest, there's cheap books to be had!
I wonder how difficult it would be to collect an entire set of this series? Perhaps even more interesting, thanks to the power of the Internet, if turns out that Arnold Schoenberg had the Meyer editions! So by buying these old books, I'm allowed to remain on the cutting edge of musical innovation, unless you read Greg Sandow, which I'm sure none of my audience does, right? Yes, his blog bothers me mightily, and I do intend to write more Adorno-inspired thoughts on what he and his ilk are doing to "classical music". Suffice to say that I'm on Schoenberg's side.
Let the collecting begin!
It's odd, but I think that people still somehow associate Fraktur with National Socialism, even though from what I know, the Nazis didn't like Fraktur. Nonetheless, the stain of its germaness remains and so there appears to be a push to "modernize" by eliminating Fraktur texts from today's libraries (google books excepted!)
The editions are part of the Meyer Klassiker-Ausgaben, a 19th Century "Great Books" Series that reprinted the critical editions of major German authors. As Library copies, they bear the markings of administration, if not of use. Most of my colleagues in the German department tend to shy away from texts in this font, however, I've come to realise that where there's disinterest, there's cheap books to be had!
I wonder how difficult it would be to collect an entire set of this series? Perhaps even more interesting, thanks to the power of the Internet, if turns out that Arnold Schoenberg had the Meyer editions! So by buying these old books, I'm allowed to remain on the cutting edge of musical innovation, unless you read Greg Sandow, which I'm sure none of my audience does, right? Yes, his blog bothers me mightily, and I do intend to write more Adorno-inspired thoughts on what he and his ilk are doing to "classical music". Suffice to say that I'm on Schoenberg's side.
Let the collecting begin!
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
K. 310
Waking up this morning, and feeling dislocated from reality (OK, more dislocated than usual), I went through my usual routine - a homemade latte, some toast, and their quiet, if brief, consumption.
When I returned from walking my dog, I realised just how little I was feeling anything today. So I took out the only piece of music that affects me, that wakes my out of my waking slumber - Mozart's Piano Sonata no. 8 in A minor.
As I'm sure many of you know, Mozart wrote this piece in an around the death of his mother, and so we, desperate to read life into abstract music, have surmised that the minor key and the pathos of the work are connected to his loss.
Without delving too deeply and finding myself committing myself to the intentional fallacy, I will say that, for me, feeling something is central to this work, and I would very much like to think that Mozart intended this, not necessarily for the listener, but for the player.
I would like to imagine that he, or anyone else, can open this up, and play through the dark march of the exposition, only to find themselves in the development in a nice, bright C major. One almost feels relieved at this point, that the gleeful Mozart that we're all raised on, you know, the one that makes babies smarter, will carry us through and make this a minor a jovial, ironic work.
We all know how this winds up.
He doesn't just use dissonance, he hammers us. He does this for a while, very elegantly and sequentially, simultaneously unnerving, jarring. When Mozart lets us loose, releasing us from these semitones, instead of giving us a moment to breathe, and I believe that this is the key to the whole first movement, he unleashes what I can only imagine is fury. Sixteenth notes in the right hand, painting the harmony while the left hand plays these remarkable leaps and defiantly trill their way to resolution (this is not the best the much-maligned left hand gets in this work).
And then he winds us up chromatically into the recap in A minor. But we are not home free, on our way to a nice, if dark, martial recap of the 2nd theme in A minor. No, in a move that moves this work from the pathetic (old sense) to the sublime is when he drops the opening theme into the left hand, this dissonant right hand accompaniment reminding us of the development we just thought we'd safely resolved.
There is no resolution in this first movement, or if there is, it's a Phyrric one, reluctantly playing out the formal constraints of the day before Beethoven would come along and really throw them all aside.
There is no other piece of music I play that wakes me up to the world the way this one does. If it didn't, I certainly wouldn't have written about it today.
I wouldn't have written about anything today.
When I returned from walking my dog, I realised just how little I was feeling anything today. So I took out the only piece of music that affects me, that wakes my out of my waking slumber - Mozart's Piano Sonata no. 8 in A minor.
As I'm sure many of you know, Mozart wrote this piece in an around the death of his mother, and so we, desperate to read life into abstract music, have surmised that the minor key and the pathos of the work are connected to his loss.
Without delving too deeply and finding myself committing myself to the intentional fallacy, I will say that, for me, feeling something is central to this work, and I would very much like to think that Mozart intended this, not necessarily for the listener, but for the player.
I would like to imagine that he, or anyone else, can open this up, and play through the dark march of the exposition, only to find themselves in the development in a nice, bright C major. One almost feels relieved at this point, that the gleeful Mozart that we're all raised on, you know, the one that makes babies smarter, will carry us through and make this a minor a jovial, ironic work.
We all know how this winds up.
He doesn't just use dissonance, he hammers us. He does this for a while, very elegantly and sequentially, simultaneously unnerving, jarring. When Mozart lets us loose, releasing us from these semitones, instead of giving us a moment to breathe, and I believe that this is the key to the whole first movement, he unleashes what I can only imagine is fury. Sixteenth notes in the right hand, painting the harmony while the left hand plays these remarkable leaps and defiantly trill their way to resolution (this is not the best the much-maligned left hand gets in this work).
And then he winds us up chromatically into the recap in A minor. But we are not home free, on our way to a nice, if dark, martial recap of the 2nd theme in A minor. No, in a move that moves this work from the pathetic (old sense) to the sublime is when he drops the opening theme into the left hand, this dissonant right hand accompaniment reminding us of the development we just thought we'd safely resolved.
There is no resolution in this first movement, or if there is, it's a Phyrric one, reluctantly playing out the formal constraints of the day before Beethoven would come along and really throw them all aside.
There is no other piece of music I play that wakes me up to the world the way this one does. If it didn't, I certainly wouldn't have written about it today.
I wouldn't have written about anything today.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Frankfurt School on BBC
In an effort to continue my love-in with Adorno et al. I'm pointing you to the latest broadcast of BBC's excellent In Our Time with host Melvyn Bragg. This week they're discussing the Frankfurt School, so if you're interested in hearing more about Adorno beyond the fact that he hated jazz, this is a good starting point!
You can listen to it here, and if it's gone, it's sure to be in the archives.
Also, will I return to regular blogging on matters that matter (or not, depending on your point of view)? We'll see!
You can listen to it here, and if it's gone, it's sure to be in the archives.
Also, will I return to regular blogging on matters that matter (or not, depending on your point of view)? We'll see!
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