A is for Always….With a Love That’s True

by Christopher Bacas

ImageWe weren't out too long before a brief break and another personnel change. After a pre-dawn departure, I arrived at a Midwestern airport and staggered toward baggage claim. A man paced back and forth between carousels; long black hair hanging over the collar of a wide-open trench coat. Head down, he puffed aggressively on a cigarette. It was Doc, a saxophone player from college days. I hadn't seen him in 7 years. He was now the other tenor and my roomie. The manager thought, as schoolmates, we'd be a good match.

Well trained in the requisite skills, Doc had no problem with his book. In the room, he slept long and hard; really hard. I asked if he could smoke outside and he agreed. I tried not to wake him with my 5am yoga and bubbling saucepans. The hot plate got constant use with the winter squash, kombu (seaweed), carrots and burdock stored in my overhead. Lentils came out particularly tasty.

In the bathroom, early morning, soaking, waiting for my oatmeal, I heard the phone ring. Fully expecting Doc to pick it up, ten, twenty, then thirty rings passed. Annoyed, I rushed out with a towel on and snatched up the receiver. The preset wake up call was silent. I hung up. Standing over roomie, his face a mask, I got a hot flash of fear. No one sleeps with a ringing phone six inches away. He was dead. I started to prod him, gingerly, awkwardly holding my towel, still dripping water. Soon, I was shoving the rubbery body. His face never moved. Then, a mythical princess, he slowly opened his eyes. I felt tears spill over my eyelids.

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Richard Rorty on the Future of Philosophy

From the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Metcalf-RichardRortyPhilosophicalArgumentforNationalPrideRichard Rorty is considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. He is credited with reviving the philosophical school of American pragmatism and challenging the accepted pieties of analytic philosophy. He championed “quietism,” which he says attempts “to dissolve, rather than solve” sets of problems that should now be considered obsolete. This November 23, 2005, interview is among his last; he died in 2007.

Rorty came to Stanford as a fellow at the Humanities Center in 1996 and then joined the faculty of the Comparative Literature Department in 1998. Beginning in the 1970s, he challenged the notion of philosophy as a discipline that could discern timeless truths about the world. Such attempts were motivated by western philosophy’s misguided reliance on Platonic metaphysics, the notion that there are underlying structures, realities or truths that stand firm against the vagaries of history and social mores. Rorty insisted that we have only a linguistic and causal relationship with the world, so any attempt to find some kind of transcendent, unmediated knowledge about it is futile. He famously urged that intellectuals shift their focus from “the problems of philosophy” to “the problems of men.”

His Entitled Opinions conversation with Harrison moves to the limits of philosophy in describing the nature of reality, and then whether philosophy should tackle human aspirations for greatness or stick to maximizing human happiness. In an occasionally testy exchange with Harrison, Rorty makes a controversial defense of bourgeois liberal democracy, arguing that the rest of the world should be more like America, and America should be more like Norway. The potential cost for cultural diversity? “That’s the price we pay for history,” he says. He takes a number of provocative positions in the conversation. Does he stand alone? As he notes, loneliness is the lot of mankind: “If you don’t have any sense of loneliness you probably won’t be interested in religion or philosophy; if you do, you will.”

Listen to the full interview here.

The ctenophore’s brain suggests that, if evolution began again, intelligence would re-emerge because nature repeats itself

Douglas Fox in Aeon:

ScreenHunter_2841 Oct. 02 11.30Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be aliens, with surprisingly different biology and brains, right here on Earth. Those aliens have hidden in plain sight for millennia. They have plenty to teach us about the nature of evolution, and what to expect when we finally discover life on other worlds.

Moroz, a neuroscientist, saw the first hint of his discovery back in the summer of 1995, not long after arriving in the United States from his native Russia. He spent that summer at the Friday Harbor marine laboratory in Washington. The lab sat amid an archipelago of forested islands in Puget Sound – a crossroads of opposing tides and currents that carried hundreds of animal species past the rocky shore: swarms of jellyfish, amphipod crustaceans, undulating sea lilies, nudibranch slugs, flatworms, and the larvae of fish, sea stars and countless other animals. These creatures represented not just the far reaches of Puget Sound, but also the farthest branches of the animal tree of life. Moroz spent hours out on the pier behind the lab, collecting animals so he could study their nerves. He had devoted years to studying nervous systems across the animal kingdom, in hopes of understanding the evolutionary origin of brains and intelligence. But he came to Friday Harbor to find one animal in particular.

He trained his eyes to recognise its bulbous, transparent body in the sunlit water: an iridescent glint and fleeting shards of rainbow light, scattered by the rhythmic beating of thousands of hair-like cilia, propelling it through the water. This type of animal, called a ctenophore (pronounced ‘ten-o-for’ or ‘teen-o-for’), was long considered just another kind of jellyfish. But that summer at Friday Harbor, Moroz made a startling discovery: beneath this animal’s humdrum exterior was a monumental case of mistaken identity. From his very first experiments, he could see that these animals were unrelated to jellyfish. In fact, they were profoundly different from any other animal on Earth.

More here.

I called Hugh Hefner a pimp, he threatened to sue. But that’s what he was

Suzanne Moore in The Guardian:

1500Now that he’s dead, the disgusting old sleaze in the smoking jacket is being spoken of as some kind of liberator of women. Kim Kardashian is honoured to have been involved. Righty ho.

I don’t really know which women were liberated by Hefner’s fantasies. I guess if you aspired to be a living Barbie it was as fabulous as it is to be in Donald Trump’s entourage. Had we gone to court, I would like to have heard some of the former playmates and bunnies speak up in court – because over the years they have.

The accounts of the “privileged few” who made it into the inner sanctum of the 29-room Playboy mansion as wives/girlfriends/bunny rabbits are quite something. In Hefner’s petting zoo/harem/brothel, these interchangeable blondes were put on a curfew. They were not allowed to have friends to visit. And certainly not boyfriends. They were given an “allowance”. The big metal gates on the mansion that everyone claimed were to keep people out of this “nirvana” were described by one-time Hefner “girlfriend no 1” Holly Madison in her autobiography thus: “I grew to feel it was meant to lock me in.”

The fantasy that Hefner sold was not a fantasy of freedom for women, but for men.

More here.

The Mind of John McPhee: A deeply private writer reveals his obsessive process

Sam Anderson in the New York Times:

ScreenHunter_2840 Oct. 02 10.50When you call John McPhee on the phone, he is instantly John McPhee. McPhee is now 86 years old, and each of those years seems to be filed away inside of him, loaded with information, ready to access. I was calling to arrange a visit to Princeton, N.J., where McPhee lives and teaches writing. He was going to give me driving directions. He asked where I was coming from. I told him the name of my town, about 100 miles away.

“I’ve been there,” McPhee said, with the mild surprise of someone who has just found a $5 bill in a coat pocket. He proceeded to tell me a story of the time he had a picnic at the top of our local mountain, with a small party that included the wife of Alger Hiss, the former United States official who, at the height of McCarthyism, was disgraced by allegations of spying for the Russians. The picnic party rode to the top, McPhee said, on the incline railway, an old-timey conveyance that has been out of operation for nearly 40 years, and which now marks the landscape only as a ruin: abandoned tracks running up a scar on the mountain’s face, giant gears rusting in the old powerhouse at the top. Hikers stop and gawk and wonder what the thing was like.

“It was amazing,” McPhee said. “A railroad created by the Otis Elevator Company. An incline of 60-something percent.”

Then he started giving me directions — 87, 287, Route 1 — until eventually I admitted that I was probably just going to follow the directions on my phone. McPhee kept going for a few seconds, suggesting another road or two, but finally he gave up.

More here.

If Nietzsche were alive today…

Fraser Myers in Sp!ked:

Nietzsche_fraserFriedrich Nietzsche is an ambiguous figure today. Fragments of this infamous philosopher are all around us. He invented the word ‘superman’; his pronouncements on the nature of good and evil, on self-empowerment and overcoming through struggle, are echoed throughout popular culture, from Harry Potter to Kanye West; and an entire self-help industry, enthusing about the ‘gift of failure’ and churning out books with titles like Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway, is heavily indebted to Nietzsche. Yet when named directly, Nietzsche remains controversial. He is accused by some of being a proto-Nazi, and he is considered by others to be responsible for two world wars. While those claims are overblown, there is little doubt that Nietzsche’s fierce criticism of an emerging mass, dremocratic society put him firmly on the side of anti-democracy. So surely Nietzsche, for all his influence on our intellectual and cultural development, is a thinker best understood in his context, rather than someone whose ideas we would wish to revive today? Perhaps not. In his new book, Get Over Yourself: Nietzsche For Our Times, Patrick West, a columnist for spiked, rejects the idea of contextualising Nietzsche in order to explain away the less palatable aspects of his thought. In fact, West is not really interested in judging Nietzsche. Quite the opposite; he asks Nietzsche to judge us. And it is an incredibly rewarding move, because while Nietzsche’s thought offers few concrete solutions, it does offer a tonic against all manner of contemporary social ills.

Take identity politics and all its attendant narcissism and navel-gazing. Nietzsche attacked this kind of thinking at its root, firmly rejecting any suggestion that national, cultural, racial, religious, gender or sexual identities should be recognised, let alone respected. For Nietzsche, West argues, labels imprison us. ‘Life is concerned with forever becoming, for striving to go beyond oneself’, writes Nietzsche. Indeed, his philosophy of the superman, outlined in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, concerns the individual who goes beyond himself: ‘Man is something that should be overcome’, says the titular Zarathustra. ‘What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.’

More here.

Elie Wiesel’s Secret

Ron Rosenbaum in Tablet:

ImagesSometimes I’d see him at Jewish events; the most recent was a few years ago, at a panel at the YIVO Institute at which Philip Roth unexpectedly announced his retirement from writing. An event that raised Primo Levi questions, in part because it was Roth who brought Levi to the attention of Jewish intellectuals, and it was Roth who had sustained a provocative relationship with the argument over the Holocaust. Over which Jewish reaction was appropriate. How much more bitter, how much longer was it appropriate to remain enraged. The kind of inner debate Wiesel rarely aroused anymore. That night, I thought back to the shock of recognition I felt in Jerusalem in the Hebrew University office of Yehuda Bauer, the great Israeli historian of the Holocaust. Bauer said something so heretical it slapped aside the line of theodicy peddled by mediocre rabbinical sermonizers in America whose philosophy—if you could even call it that—was best represented by Harold Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The line most used was one Kushner seemed to have cribbed from Irving Greenberg’s influential essay “Cloud of Smoke, Pillar of Fire,” which argued for a “God in Struggle,” a God not all-powerful, but one who needed us, needed our help in his wrestling with evil in the universe and thus silently sat by during the slaughter. (This was, Norman Mailer told me once, “the one big idea” behind his fiction and nonfiction as well. He puts it in the mouth of every one of his protagonists from the fictional Sergius O’Shaughnessy to the real-life Gary Gilmore: God is weak and needs our help to hold off the devil. It is the groundwork of the entire literary movement now called “black humor.”)

In any case, Yehuda Bauer would have none of that temporizing. What do all the prayers say? God will reach out his mighty hand to save the Jews, not God will reach out his trembling, sclerotic limbs and wave goodbye to the six million dead.

You either had a God who was all-powerful and all-knowing or loving, Bauer told me. If he was all-powerful, the traditional God of the Seder prayers who always stepped in to save the Jews, and all-knowing, if he knew what was being done to “his” people and did nothing to stop the murder of a million—or was it a million and a half?—Jewish children—then he was not loving. “He was Satan,” Bauer said. If, on the other hand, he was loving but impotent, not powerful enough to save his people, Bauer said, he was “just a nebbish.” “I don’t need such a god,” he said, contempt dripping from his voice.

“Just a nebbish”! There was no mistaking the dismissive Jewish rage subsumed in that remark.

But now, decades later, it almost seems as though the lease has run out on the justifiability of such anger—and in no small part because of Wiesel. He made it possible to think we could make peace with such a God, to still say the prayers, to not think too deeply about what that meant; he symbolically saved us the trouble, erased the angst, allowed us to pretend we had forgotten the quarrel, to go back to worshipping the nebbish.

More here.

Sunday Poem

Out of the horror there rises a musical ache
that is beautiful . . . —James Wright

Monkey
—an excerpt

5

There is a hill.
Men run top hill.
Men take hill.
Give hill to man.

Me and my monkey
and me and my monkey
my Vietnamese monkey
my little brown monkey
came with me
to Guam and Hawaii
in Ohio he saw
my people he
jumped on my daddy
he slipped into mother
he baptized my sister
he's my little brown monkey
he came here from heaven
to give me his spirit imagine
my monkey my beautiful
monkey he saved me lifted
me above the punji
sticks above the mines
above the ground burning
above the dead above
the living above the
wounded dying the wounded
dying.

Men take hill away from smaller men.
Men take hill and give to fatter man.
Men take hill. Hill has number.
Men run up hill. Run down.
.

by Bruce Weigl
from Unaccustomed Mercy —Soldier Poets of the Vietnam War
Texas Tech University Press, 1989
.