This weekend, Capria and I will be in Idaho Falls for her sister's wedding. It should be fine times held by all.
I just started a new quarter. It's going to be fun. I'm up to my ears in Kant's 3rd Critique. There comes a point in reading Kant where it actually becomes quite pleasurable, as strange as that sounds.
I should have posted this link a long time ago, but I recently learned of this great online theology and culture journal called The Other Journal. The editor is a friend of mine, and they publish some really great stuff, like this fantastic article by Daniel M. Bell on Christianity and Capitalism.
Next weekend (April 7-9), the Other Journal is hosting Film, Faith, and Justice, the forum dedicated to the theology of social justice. If you're in Seattle, you must come.
As you may recall, I offered my ode to St. Patrick's Day last year. I won't repeat that here.
I stumbled across this passage today and thought some of you would like it, since I know we've discussed the issue in the past. It also has some interesting relevance for this Slate article on the international Irish Pub industry.
Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a base of kitsch.
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
So tonight, if you find yourself in perhaps a "Gaelic" or "Country College" Irish Pub simulacra, shedding two tears into your Guinness, brought to you by years of brewing traditions and globalization, don't feel bad. You're simply doing your part to usher in the international fraternity.
Kind of makes you feel like a fascist, doesn't it?
Over the weekend I finished Alan Moore's V for Vendetta in preparation for the upcoming film. I read Moore's other classic series Watchmen over the course of the quarter, so I wasn't simply jumping on a media bandwagon.
They are two very different works, although both have the complexity and critical rigor that characterizes Moore's anti-heroes. Both are set in the "present that could be," although Vendetta, written during the mid-eighties, is a bit more projective (most of the action takes place over 1997-1998) then Watchmen's Cold War America.
What I am particularly curious about is how much the Wachowski's want to do with the plot and its potential for a more overtly situated (Bush America, 2006) political commentary. Part of Moore's genius, (and part of why, I suspect, he calls the current adaptation "rubbish") is that the character of Thatcher's Britain is rechanneled and recreated in the text, not simply critiqued. The effect: we see ourselves in Vendetta as much as we see the big, bad political machine--we can't just put the blame on the fascist "they" but are forced to come to terms with our own political and philosophical position.
It gets quite sticky. After all, V, the man behind the Guy Fawkes mask, is declared by the government to be a terrorist and I, for one, have to grudgingly agree with their claims. Moreover, his bombings and murders are the outworking of an articulate self-proclaimed commitment to anarchy--think Tyler Durden with a little less nihilism. V wants to make the world better for everyone, but his definition of better is far too radical for most of us to assent to.
And yet, I can't help but find his argument somewhat compelling. Not the compelling of soft lights and soothing music and sharp outfits we typically see in pop culture glosses that make bad guys seem good, but a real resonance with his project, an evocation of the question, barely whispered: "why can't the world be like that?"
Of course, the arguments of anarchists are adequately answered with a little more thought and reflection. But, like Marxism, that isn't to say that the values a character like V articulates aren't worth praising. There is something, after all, behind that mask, and the story makes us wonder what would happen if we took it off.
Apparantly race doesn't matter any more, at least not in terms of who gets money for college, even though at least one study shows that, in fact, systemic racism continues to plague our educational system.
If a certain group is being disporportionately under-represented in a particular signpost of upward mobility (like college education), then that is a good indication that we have not achieved a just society. Consequently, we have to do more to make those opportunities available, not less.
And it is disporportionate. Not radically so, to be sure, but unfortunately so. Let's take the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in 2003. 70% went to white people, while 8.7 percent were awarded to black students and 6.3 to hispanic. In terms of national population, the white population was about on track: 75.1 percent of the population is white. However, 12.3 percent of our population is black and 12.5 percent is hispanic.
Comparing these porportions, there is an approximately 7% differential between national population and bachelor's degree representation for white students. For blacks, the differential is about 30%, and for hispanics it is nearly 50%. Clearly, something isn't working, and eliminating scholarships designed to enable students from these underrepresented populations to attend college isn't helping matters.
Slavoj Zizek does it again.
Perhaps a few of you read my post from a while back which was struggling to articulate a number of problems and issues surrounding religion in the political world, particularly in regards to the furor over the cartoon representations of the Prophet.
Zizek, is his idiosyncratic way, offers this editorial in the NY Times which both says what I wanted to say, far more elegently, as well as couching the discussion in extremely equivocal language. S.Z. and his cohorts have this uncanny rhetorical move they pull where they argue that the truest expression of a thing, like Christianity, is found in its opposite. Ah, Hegelians.
As always, it's provocative. And it's nice to see smart guys making the Times top-five email list.
Here are two passages I came accross in my reading this week. The second seems relevant to the first; perhaps not. I've also added a third passage from the records.
Science--
beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,
every time I make love for love's sake alone,
I betray you.
(Katherine Larson, "Love at Thirty-two Degrees")
And so I insist on promoting the dea that, whether grounded or not in biological observation, instinct--among the modes of knowledge [connaissance] required by nature of living beings so that they satisfy its needs--is defined as a kind of [experiential] knowledge [connaissance] we admire because it cannot become [articulated] knowledge [un savoir]. But in Freud's work something quite different is at stake, which is a savoir certainly, but one that doesn't involve the slightest connaissance, in that it is inscribed in a discourse of which the subject--who, like the messenger-slave of Antiquity, carries under his hair the codicil that condemns him to death--knows neither the meaning nor the text, nor in what language [langue] it is written, nor even that it was tattooed on his shaven scalp while he was sleeping.
(Jacques Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire.")
"This is what it is to go aright, or be led by another, into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty, starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs: from one body to two and from two to all beautiful bodies, then from beautiful bodies to beautiful customs, and from customs to learning beautiful things, and from these lessons he arrives in the end at this lesson, which is learning of this very Beauty, so that in the end he comes to know just what it is to be beautiful.
"And there in life, Socrates, my friend," said the woman from Mantinea, "there if anywhere should a person live his life, beholding that Beauty."
(Plato, Symposium)
Camille Paglia has a great guest editorial in yesterday's NY Times on the post-Summers Harvard fallout and the possibilities for the humanities in the future. It's really nice to see someone criticizing academic dogma while still calling for the protection of intellectual freedom without trying to push some ridiculous hit list.
Last night was the Totten twin's 21st birthday celebration (or at least one of its stages). It was nice to see Chris, who's in town until Sunday. They also did a show, which sounded good tho I had a hard time with the venue staff. Maybe I'll start a venue for art rock here, with some cool poetry readings and stuff from time to time as well. And orange walls.
Speaking of music, here is something to do away with all of those fights people get into regarding the quality of a particular musician and cut out the "beauty is in the eye of the beholder/Clay Aiken is just as good as Miles Davis" malarky all at the same time. I haven't figured out all of the values yet, but this system is probably particularly attractive to those of my friends and readers who have a polemical bent. You know who you are.