Category: Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Caveat: Love is not that special

Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Life in Korea / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I finished watching the episodes of 1%의 어떤 것 toward the end of last week, and immediately began a new series, called 쾌걸 춘향 (translated as Delightful Girl Choon-hyang).  I'm trying to figure out why I've been enjoying these romantic/comedic dramas as much as I have – above and beyond the insights to Korean culture.  And I made a realization because of the rather weighty tradition behind this new one I've started.

Delightful Girl is based on a traditional Korean story called 춘향가 (chunhyangga), which is part of what's called the pansori storytelling tradition – in essence, a kind of epic/lyric oral literature.  The plot of the story, just like the 1% story I was watching last week, revolves around frustrated love and romance in the broader context of Asian/confucian social systems and values.  And I suddenly realized, I've been enjoying these stories for years – they are extraordinarily similar to the almost hundreds of "framed stories" found in the Cervantine corpus:  girl meets boy of different social class, or under some unusual circumstance; love gets frustrated by conflicts involving parents, in-laws, or social mores and taboos; weird coincidences happen that alternately encourage or frustrate the relationship; everything ends happily-ever-after.   And Cervantes was just echoing the likes of Petrarch and Boccacio and the vast content of the Spanish Golden Age drama.

My hypothesis:  culturally, Korea is experiencing the equivalent of Europe's renaissance and baroque, alongside modernity and postmodernity, all at the same time!  That may be too bold, but I taste the germ of a fascinating comparative cultures / comparative lit paper exploring the parallels between renaissance drama and literature and the contemporary Asian television drama.

And my profound quote of the day:  in the 2nd episode, the character Han Dan-hee says to her boyfriend Pang Ji-hyuk, over french fries, "They only need a moment.  Love is not that special.  Crush on an eye, on ears, and then you get the feeling.  That's love."

Caveat: Comunistas y Anarquistas

Banalities & Journaling / Español Aleatorio (Random Spanish) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

Vicente Huidobro, el poeta chileno que, seguramente, he mencionado más de una vez, escribió, "Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente la sociedad actual no sea comunista. Es incomprensible que un individuo que haya estudiado profundamente el comunismo, no sea anarquista."  El hecho de que la cita ya lleva unos cuantos 70 u 80 años de edad no parece alterar su esencia verdadera fundamental. 

Pero… ¿y en quién se convierte él que haya estudiado el anarquismo?  Pienso en la situación de los llamados "estados fracasados," por ejemplo la de Somalia.  Porque eso sí es el anarquismo verdadero, ¿no?  Quisiera decir que él que estudiara el anarquismo se convertiría en libertario, pero no creo que sea la verdad, al menos en la mayoría de los casos.  Parece más probable que el anarquista frustrado se vuelva al lado autoritario, sea fascista o leninista.  Nos da un resultado deprimente, entonces.  Y circular.

Caveat: An Aimless Drive

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

"Life is an aimless drive that ya take alone.  Might as well enjoy the ride, take the long way home." This is the chorus from the Bloodhound Gang's song, "Take the Long Way Home."  I'm not sure that I have anything specific to say about this. But it's a good quote. And right now, I'm listening to the Beastie Boys.

On NPR, earlier, I heard a man named Tom Segev being interviewed.  He's a columnist for the newspaper Ha'aretz (Israel), and was talking about the whole question of to what degree the Israeli government interacts with groups such Hezbollah or Hamas.   He said (and, because this is overheard on the radio, I don't know that it's a perfect quote), "We claim never to be negotiating with terrorists.  In fact, we are always negotiating – every government in the world is always negotiating – with terrorists."

This struck me as profoundly and fundamentally true, and puts lie to the constantly enunciated position of most governments that "negotiating with terrorists" is neither appropriate nor ever pursued as a matter of policy – "so as not to encourage them" so to speak.

I would only like to add further to his observation, by wondering:  if this [i.e. "negotiation"] did not occur, with great regularity, mightn't terrorists eventually abandon their activities as fruitless?  Terrorists are successful with their generally ideological missions mostly to the extent to which the terror they sow can induce governments to react and change policies, cede resources, or capitulate.  This has always been true, and all war is, ultimately, terrorist in nature, and just an extension of politics by other means, as the aphorism has it.

And now I'm listening to Radiohead's "Backdrifts."

Caveat: Carbon Amortization

Less Banal Than Usual / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

I was reading an article about Priuses in the New York Times (online) that caused me to think, once again, about something I find very troubling about all the discussion of reducing the carbon footprints of the automobiles we drive, about legislating improved mileage and/or offering incentives to buyers of lower-carbon-footprint cars.  And it is this:  what about the carbon footprint of the manufacturing process?  What about other environmental impacts of new cars?  Bear with me, while I try to think this through.
Suppose I have a Hummer.  It’s a nice, ecologically disastrous beast, with a very high carbon footprint, that I bought in a solipsistic moment some years back.  I don’t know enough to actually assign a meaningful number to its day-to-day carbon footprint, but lets say its daily value is “10.”  So, one morning, after a long talk with some friends, I wake up feeling guilty, and decide to buy a Prius.  So I buy the Prius – and lets say, for the sake of argument, that its daily carbon footprint is “2” – i.e. it puts out 20% of the ongoing emissions as the Hummer.
But what was the carbon footprint of manufacturing the Prius?  Is it unreasonable to imagine it might be some rather large number compared to the daily value?  I mean, just the delivery from manufacturer to dealer is going to be some largish multiple of the daily footprint, e.g. 20 or 50, right?  There’s steel, engine, tire manufacturing.  And farther back, there’s high-paid executives and designing engineers at Toyota and their contractors, sitting in air-conditioned offices over years, making the Prius a reality.  ALL of that is part of the vehicle’s carbon footprint.  Is it unreasonable to imagine that the carbon footprint of the creation of that new Prius might not be, say, in the 1000’s?  10,000’s?  What if I go out on a limb, and guess, say, 8000 “units”?
The consequence is as follows:  I’m reducing my personal carbon footprint, by switching from Hummer to Prius, by 8 units per day.  But the Prius’ manufacture entailed a footprint of 8000.  So, that means I will have to own the Prius for 1000 days before I “break even” in terms of carbon footprint.  That’s almost 3 years!  Wouldn’t it be better for the environment to urge people to KEEP their current cars longer, rather than switch out to lower-footprint vehicles?  This would be true regardless of the type of vehicle they currently own.
And I understand very well, I just pulled these numbers out of a hat, and the analysis could be extremely mistaken.  But what I wonder about, is why don’t you ever see anyone doing this kind of analysis, in the media?  And there are other issues – the Prius has a contingent of non-carbon-related environmental issues, around its high-tech manufacturing processes, and its massive array of batteries – these are not in any way resolved.   What about battery disposal?  What about the toxics involved in battery and plastics manufacture?
I cannot argue that in terms of real, long-term life-of-product carbon footprint, my father’s 1928 Ford Model A is lower than almost anything else on the road (or, er, in storage, at the moment), because of its under 20 mpg and “dirty” exhaust.  But it nevertheless represents maximizing the utility of the manufactured object vis-a-vis its intended purpose.  The carbon footprint of the car’s manufacture has amortized for 80 years now!  Meanwhile, that self-righteous bastard driving the 2008 Prius, which replaced his 2005 Corolla, which replaced his 2000 VW, which replaced his 1992 Chevy, etc., etc., has left a landscape strewn with massive-manufacturing-footprint disposed-of vehicles.  If he had kept each of his earlier vehicles for three or four years longer than he did, and avoided the Prius completely, he’d probably do more to reduce his carbon footprint than a lifetime’s worth of Prius driving.
I’m going to call this problem the problem of “carbon amortization.”
Below, is a picture of my mom, my sister, and me, with the family car, somewhere in Oregon, 1970.
picture
My father still has this car.  He hasn’t had it running in a few years, due to financial constraints, but I know he intends to drive it many more miles – as do I.
picture

Caveat: Perhaps Dubya is the real Kira?

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I have become substantially absorbed in the ongoing episodes of the manga series called Deathnote.  I bought volumes 9, 10, and 11 on Sunday and have ploughed through two of them in the last two days. 

These texts definitely have a lot going on in them, and I've decided it's quite a bit more than just a serialized graphic novel in the suspense/thriller genre.  The main characters are quite complex, and moral ambiguity is pandemic – no one is faultless, and you can't even decide who the good guys are – as opposed to the bad guys – although the authors do tend show some of them in a more sympathetic light than others.

The central protagonist is Light (Raito) Yagami, an academically gifted Japanese teenager who's father is a career policeman.  He gains the power to kill people by merely knowing their names and faces, and sets out to "make the world a better place."  I won't go into the details of the plot and character development here – If you're interested, you can start at wikipedia or any number of other places on the internet to find out more.

From what I've read in my own explorations online, the authors did not specifically intend for the series to be philosophically deep, nor did they set out to create a semiotic masterpiece.  The main writer (Ohba) explicitly states that he tried to avoid being "ideological" – whatever that means.

Nevertheless, the text is brimming with all kinds of tasty ideological morsels (and morasses) – to such an extent that I think it would be extremely fruitful and interesting to undertake an in-depth semiotic study of the text, perhaps something in line with Frederic Jameson's method, as he outlines in his seminal work, The Political Unconscious.

I can't help but be constantly aware of the geopolitical backdrop for the writing of the series – these times we inhabit, the first years of the 21st century.  It's set in a Japan still basically attached to the U.S. strategically, but increasingly unrooted culturally and economically.  The early books constantly had me flashing to the awkwardness of Japan's postwar identity, and also to the looming moral cypher that is represented by the United States' nuclear umbrella.

But in the most recent episodes I've been reading, I keep thinking about righteous hegemonies… about U.S. unilateralism, vis-a-vis the character of Kira (the machiavellian boy Light, who's become a demonic-powered avenger, Kira, but is also masquerading as one of his hunters, the character named "L").  In chapter 75 (book 9), Light says "If we catch Kira, then Kira is evil.  If Kira rules the world, then Kira is good."  To which Aizawa responds, "So the victor is righteous…"  Which is to say, righteousness has less to do with morality than with might and victory.  "Might is right."

And isn't that what's going on in Iraq, now?  Isn't that what happened in Japan 60 years ago, for that matter?  Yet there's a muddled moral imperative, however contrived, that drove both that old war and the one we are witnessing now.  Personally, I continue to be compelled to reject those revisionists who insist there's some qualitative moral difference between any given war and any other.  I have decided that Kira represents the exercise of inordinate power, whenever blinded by its own moralizing rationalizations.  Yet one finds oneself sympathizing, at least sometimes, with those rationalizations.  Because they're "rational," of course.  And because Light-Kira is the protagonist.

I like the way that the authors exploit the graphic format, also.  In book 11 there's this long, complex dialogic thing going on, involving a conversation between Light and Takada, who are speaking for the benefit of known eavesdroppers, but secretly supported and manipulated by notes being passed between them, and at the same time commented and subverted by the listeners, all in a chaotic progression of comic-book frames that becomes dizzingly non-linear.

Caveat: Californio

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A speech by Pío de Jesús Pico, a mestizo businessman of Los Angeles who was the last governor of California when it was still part of Mexico: 

What are we to do then? Shall we remain supine, while these daring strangers are overrunning our fertile plains, and gradually outnumbering and displacing us? Shall these incursions go on unchecked, until we shall become strangers in our own land?

So he was what has been called a Californio – a pre-U.S.-annexation Californian of Spanish or mixed Native American and Spanish descent.  Pico actually had an African great grandmother, too, from what I understand.  I've always found the history of the Californios fascinating – it's a kind of forgotten group.

He took refuge in Baja California during the war, but afterward he returned to Los Angeles and made peace with the gringafication of the region, even running for city council at one point, and building a famous hotel.  But he died a pauper because of his extravagant lifestyle and gambling habits.

Caveat: Apophenism

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

Wikipedia says: "Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data."  I think this is one of the most salient features of human psychology, and a defining characteristic of postmodernity as well.  Or perhaps I'm just seeing patterns in random data?

One of the most amazing novels, Pornographia, by Witold Gombrowicz (a Polish-Argentine writer), deals with this phenomenon.  The somewhat embarrassing-to-cite title is in fact misleading – and part of the apophenic game that goes on throughout the whole novel, as it leads the reader into making all kinds of efforts to see meaning where none is to be found.  The title's relation to the novel is in fact the first apophenic movement of the novel, which continues in the same mode throughout.

Actually, the thing that made me think of apophenia  might seem surprising.  I was thinking about macroeconomics, the relationship between command economies and truly market-based ones, and all those gray areas in between.  This was prompted by a recent short article in The Economist (May 31st, 2008) that was explaining the recent government-mandated "restructuring" of the massive and fast-growing Chinese telecoms industry.  To quote the line from the article that got me thinking:  "Each time the government has arranged things to mirror the outcome produced by market forces in the West."

First, I thought, "how clever."  They get the best of both worlds (from their point of view):  command economy as well as the presumed efficiencies of market capitalism.  It's like if the proposed God of the ID (intelligent design) people had a little (or not-so-little) Darwinist laboratory running somewhere "on the side" where He (yes, He – we're talking IDers, right?) that can give Him ideas, and then He imitates it and makes it even "better." 

But then I started thinking.  First – just how random and/or market-driven is what happens to e.g. telecoms markets in the West?  And second, is it really proven that the patterns that emerge in terms of how markets are structured represent some kind of best-rises-to-the-top principle?  We presume that market economics is Darwinist and necessarily leads to efficiencies, but why would it?  Maybe the patterns we see in truly unconstrained markets (to the extent they are, in fact, unconstrained) are just manifestations of apophenia?

I think I want to add the title of "Apophenist" to some of my others.  It's a neologism, although google makes clear it won't be mine, as it's already out there.

Caveat: Densities

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I just read an article that included the information that Los Angeles is now the most densely populated metropolitan area in the U.S.  This is so contrary to perception and conventional wisdom – to imagine that it is more densely populated than especially crowded-seeming east-coast cities like New York or Boston.  And I wonder especially at the criteria – there is a lot of "in between" space in Los Angeles – the Santa Monica mountains, or the little ranges of mountains between the airport and downtown, or the Arroyo up toward Pasadena.  How do these open spaces count in the calculation of densities?  Alternately, how do the open water spaces of a water-oriented city like New York get counted?  And what about "freeway space" – which abounds in LA and virtually doesn't exist in NYC – is it excluded in the calculations, too?  I just can't see that, on a comparison of built-up areas to built-up areas, that LA is higher density, given how high-rises so dominate places like Manhattan or the projects of the Bronx.

Then again, Mexico City manages to be one of the densest metropolises in the world with very few (relatively speaking) high rises.  I'm just not sure about all this.  Regardless, we also need to understand that higher population density doesn't necessarily imply lesser transportation dependence.  NYC may "seem" denser because of the very high level of public transportation usage in the city, compared to a place like LA. 

Caveat: Dodging Popperazzi

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I finished Lee Smolin's book, The Trouble With Physics.  I've been looking at some critical reviews, online, too.  Several people mention Susskind's use of a term "popperazzi" to refer to people who make a big deal of Karl Popper's ideas about the importance of "falsifiability" in developing scientific theories, and I think that it is probably accurate to say that Smolin's book is, at least in part, a popperian review of contemporary physics, especially string theory.

I'm not a physicist, nor a mathematician.  And I don't really have an opinion about string theory, either way, although I never found it as intuitively appealing as, say, general relativity or even quantum mechanics, to the extent that I understand them at all.  In that vein, I'll confess I find Smolin's earlier-enunciated, and currently somewhat academically marginalized, loop quantum gravity theory more intuitively appealing.

But I also would agree with Smolin's critics that his popperian view of string theory is overly combative and ends up coming across as academic sour grapes.  It's too polemical to be useful.  And I do think that Popper, to the extent I understand him, may not have been the last word on how science works.

Caveat: Dialectic

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

What is dialectical analysis?  I often pretend to understand, but sometimes I don't think I understand at all.  I'm reading a new(-ish) book by Ian Buchanan entitled Fredric Jameson:  Live Theory.  Jameson is one of the most important cultural theorists (i.e. literary critic, cultural critic, etc.) of recent times.  I've always found his ideas to be extremely clear and insightful – the sorts of insights that make you look up from what you're reading and go "wow, yeah, that makes sense!"

But this writing is very dense, and presupposes an immense amount on the part of the reader.  I guess I'm little rusty on all this lit-crit and philosophy stuff.  I'm only 5 or so pages in, and already managing Deleuze and Althusser (and, in my misguided opinion, Lacan, although he's not been explicitly mentioned).  And, of course, Marx.  Jameson, like Eagleton, is what's known as a marxist critic.  I like to use the small "m" because it's important, in my opinion, to make clear that a marxist analysis as a critical or philosophical pursuit isn't the same thing as a political compromise (not that I'm trying to imply anything, either way, with respect to the degree of political compromise Eagleton or Jameson specifically hold).

Indeed, given the current world-situation, I would almost hazard a guess that a clear marxist analysis of the world economic and political picture might lead one to conclude that Marxist political compromise needs to be ruled out.  Certainly the Communist Party of China seems to have reached that basic conclusion – I read an interesting description of the Chinese political color as being infrared (as opposed to red).  The term captures a great deal about the nature of that weirdly fascistic (and fetishistic?) brand of communism, eh?

Caveat: Where to Go When You Visit Alioth

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Science & SciFi

Alioth is a star in the big dipper, also called Epsilon Ursae Majoris, and one of the 50 brightest star in the night sky.  Apparently, someone has managed to create a rough "map" of this star – meaning of its surface, I guess – despite the fact that it is more than 80 light years distant from Earth.  This is possible because of the peculiar fact that the star's strong magnetic field's poles are at 90 degrees to its axis of rotation, meaning that the magnetic pole and the distortions it causes in the spectral make up of the star's surface swing past the Earth's vantage point with the interval of the star's spin.  This allows astronomers to create a map of the different elements that compose the star's surface (which is irregular partly due to the strong magnetic field), as they swing past their viewpoint. 

I like the idea that we can make a map of something so far away, just based on deductions from viewing the spectral lines.  And once we have a map of something, we can write a tour guide, and tourists can't be far behind, right?  Let's all go to Alioth for the summer!

Caveat: Speaking in Caves

Banalities & Journaling / Less Banal Than Usual / Life is a Dream / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

It was an unhealthful-feeling weekend. I had an upset stomach or something in that vein. So I didn’t do much.

I had a repeating dream, both Saturday night and again last night. It was one of those very peculiar, semi-abstract dreams, kind of like dreaming a short excerpt from a philosophical novel. The kind of dream I deserve, given the sorts of things I sometimes read or think about, I suppose. But it wasn’t terribly coherent. Prominent in the dream were references to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. I won’t try to explain it here – you can browse wikipedia for an explanation.

I am not a Platonist. But revisiting the Allegory of the Cave is not something unexpected in the life of my mind – I first met Plato’s Allegory on the pages of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which I first read when I was 15, and re-read my first year of college. The book had a profound influence on me – arguably, it has been one of the most influential books I have read.

Platonism and I have had other encounters, and many of my acquaintances and friends have been put off by my almost militant stance against it – especially given the fact that I’m careful to make clear I don’t even fully understand it. But it’s all part-and-parcel with my anti-transcendent take on epistemological topics more generally. Most notable, perhaps, is the unforgettable, inconclusive argument I had with Michelle over the “nature of reality,” which began fairly early in our relationship.

It was in the spring or summer of 94 – before I went off to Chile for 6 months that fall. We were driving back from Winnipeg, through a thunderstorm somewhere in North Dakota. We had been visiting Michelle’s friend Gerry, who was one of the few of Michelle’s friends for whom I felt a certain affinity – he had been a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and Michelle had gotten to know him when he’d been a T.A. for a general education philosophy-type course she took. So, having been visiting with Gerry out on the Manitoba prairie over the weekend, philosophical topics were in the air.

Already, I knew Michelle was a hardcore Platonist. Though she wouldn’t have been comfortable using that term. Aside from not liking “labels” of that sort, anyway, she wasn’t really very comfortable with philosophical language, despite her strong inclinations to thinking about such things, and her capacious abstract intelligence.

So we argued. Plato versus Aristotle – roughly. It was, in some ways, one of the most painful, unrelenting arguments she and I ever had. It lasted the entire drive back to Minneapolis, and it never really ended after that – we were still having that same basic argument – different in vocabulary and tone, but substantially the same content – on the phone a week before she departed in 2000. It was quite central to her exit: that there was a place, beyond, where she better belonged. So much so, that in some weird sense, her suicide was an eerie sort of exclamation point – an irrefutable concluding remark – to the argument.

And Platonism inevitably comes up in a discussion of Spanish Golden Age literature. The Church was necessarily Platonist – one could argue that one of the great works in post-Plato Platonic philosophy is the New Testament, after all, and medieval and renaissance philosophers were committed to the relationship. But part of the Erasmian humanist philosophical current emerging in Europe in the proto-enlightenment that was nurturing in repressive, 17th century Spain, included a significant redicsovery of Aristotle. And for writers such as Cervantes, the struggle between the two currents is never far below the surface.

And dreams and cave allegories merge in a work such a Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño. In that vein, I’ve always been rather preoccupied by the coincidence of the names of the protagonists of Cervantes’ Persiles and Calderón’s drama: Sigismundo/Segismundo. Their namesake, a 6th century Burgundian king, seems to have been sainted by the Church mainly to acknowledge the dubious accomplishment of his having felt so guilty about murdering his son that he decided to retire to a monastery. Which makes him, in my thinking, perhaps the patron saint of feeling guilty?

So what was the dream? It didn’t really have a plot, although Michelle and Sigismundo both put in appearances (representing the excessively, woundingly real and excessively, woundingly fictional, respectively?). And I was in a cave. And some people were worshiping shadows, and speaking in tongues. Glossolalia. Or maybe, more likely, a xenoglossic manifestation, because I seemed to understand them, although they didn’t understand themselves or each other. Hmm, is this about my work situation, again? If so, it’s an ironic inversion of some kind.

I asked myself… does speaking in tongues, in a cave, constitute a special case of “speaking in caves”? Let’s call it grottolalia. This question, and answer, were actually a component internal to the dream, and both mornings I awoke with that neologism rolling awkwardly around in my head: grottolalia. A good Freudian could have a field day with this. But I’m strictly Deleuzional – post-Freudian, right?

The dream doesn’t seem terribly significant, does it? Not much plot, just a sort of ambient sense of philosophic unease. But the fact of its repetition is discomfitting.

My anti-transcendentalism remains central to my philosophy – of a piece with my unremittingly materialist view of the universe. But it’s perhaps more fragile now than it has been.

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Caveat: 애국심은 악한의 마지막 도피처이다

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs / Quotable / 한국말을 배움 (Failing to Learn Korean)

"애국심은 악한의 마지막 도피처이다" (aeguksim-eun akhan-ui majimak dopicheo-ida) => patriotism-[topic-marker] scoundrel-[possessive-marker] lastly hideout-[copula].  Does anyone recognize the immortal words of Samuel Johnson?  "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

The idea also appears in a Bob Dylan song, and for a long time, I mistakenly believed he was the origin of the quote.  Anyway, it's been on my mind lately, in light of the annoying progression of events in Tibet and China, and the constant posturing of ALL (yes, ALL) of our presidential candidates in the U.S.  I'm sick of it!

The world will be a better, happier place when the last self-declared patriot (of any stripe) finally recants or passes away.  "Patriotism" is almost always just a kindly euphemism for some brand of xenophobia or another:  hating other countries and peoples, or at the least distrusting them and devaluing their common humanity.  I know this is controversial, and it might get me in trouble to declare it so publicly, but on some things you must take a moral stand, right?

I made some curried pasta for dinner.  Kind of a makeshift using various things I had left in my kitchen – curry powder, garlic, onion, tomato, some italian pasta, and yoghurt.  It came out very delicious, and then I sat and watched the original Star Wars movie on KBS2 (dubbed into Korean) and ate my dinner, while running an upgrade to ubuntu 7.10 on my linux OS.   It was a good evening.

Caveat: Crossing the Plane of Immanence

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I'm re-reading snippets of A Thousand Plateaus (by Deleuze and Guattari).  It's always been one of the most difficult yet absolutely central pieces of philosophy in my library.  It's crucial to my efforts at re-evaluating (and re-valuing) Cervantes' Persiles.

One of my guiding philosophical quotes is from Deleuze (on Spinoza):  "Ethical joy is the correlate of speculative affirmation."  This sounds difficult, but it's not, really.  What it is saying is nothing more than:  if you think positive thoughts, these develop and coexist with "ethical" (guilt-free) happiness.  Or, as I might paraphrase it:  guiltlessness implies optimism, and vice versa.

And speaking of ethics.  An anonymous author of the English-language wikipedia writes:  "An ethics of immanence will disavow its reference to judgments of good and evil, right and wrong, as according to a transcendent model, rule or law. Rather the diversity of living things and particularity of events will demand the abstract methods of immanent evaluation (ethics) and immanent experimentation (creativity). These twin concepts will become the basis of a lived Deleuzian ethic."

Hmm… "a lived Deleuzian ethic."  Guidelines for Deleuzional behavior?  Let's try it.

Caveat: Citizen Dog

Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

I mentioned a Thai movie called Citizen Dog a while back.  The other day I found it online and downloaded it (it took a while, of course – downloading movies is slow business, even with a DSL connection), and this evening, amid my general gloominess, I watched it.  It was a delightful exercise in almost pure garciamarqezesque magic realism.  And isn't that a cool word I just made up: garciamarquezesque?

One of my favorite moments is when the narrator says:  "Now Kong is dead.  But he is still here because he really likes riding his motorcycle."  Kong is the character who is killed by the rain of motorcycle helmets.

Caveat: Price-placebo effect

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Recent publications by psychologists and/or economists have been discussing amazing neurological evidence to support what's called the price-placebo effect: that we actually derive more REAL efficacy from things we pay more for.  More pleasure from higher-priced wine, more boost from higher-priced energy drinks, etc. And it's been raised recently in the sordid context of the Spitzer scandal.

But I started thinking:  in light of this, I wonder whether it's really in our national interest to work hard to lower the cost of prescription drugs and medical care? Perhaps the high price of drugs and medical care in America is directly linked to their efficacy?

Caveat: Trolleyology

Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A brand new word, with two widely variant meanings.

On the one hand, Word Spy (a website for "new" words) describes trolleyology as the practice of a sort of amateur anthropology in which people judge other people based on the contents of their shopping trolleys (shopping carts), especially to provide a means of evaluating potential love interests.

On the other hand, I have seen a reference in The Economist magazine (Feb 23rd, 2008), as well as googled sites such as ZhurnalyWiki or the mckimmy ethics blog where trolleyology is defined as the study of a collection of hypothetical ethics problems au courant in philosophy writing, in which people have to make decisions about switching the routes of runaway trolleys (streetcars) based on variant numbers of lives being at risk.  I have run across this practice in my readings in philosophy before, but had never seen it called trolleyology.

It's a good word:  so young, yet already deliciously ambiguous!  I can already visualize a comedic skit involving people making ethics decisions involving runnaway shopping carts and potential love interests at risk, where the contents of the carts informs the decisions made.  Lends a whole new potential meaning to the idea of a "streetcar named desire."

And for some reason I have this vivid image of a trolebus (Spanish for trolley car) in a poem by the neosurrealist poet Miguel Labordeta, but I can't recall the name of the poem or find it using google.  But it was a poem definitely linked to mortality and love.  So in the spirit of this, I'll quote another poem by Labordeta, "La voz del poeta": 

  Acariciándolo todo, destruyéndolo todo,
  hundiendo su cabeza de espada en el pasmo del Ser
  sabiendo de antemano que nada es la respuesta.
  En lo alto del Faro.
  La voz del poeta.
  Incansable holocausto.

Caveat: Debucklified

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

William F. Buckley died the other day.  I used to idolize that guy.  Not sure quite why… he was an arrogant ass, for the most part, although he had a pretty good command of language.

I have a vivid memory of watching a videotape of him and Reagan debating the idea of the return of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government for my debate class in high school, and thinking they were about as intellectually mismatched as two men could be.  Yet they shared a great deal, in terms of political philosophy. 

Caveat: Dust and Silence

Banalities & Journaling / Life in Korea / Life is a Dream / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Poetry & Fiction / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

"The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular.  The silence."  This is the ending of a paragraph near the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I just finished.  In some ways, a very typical bit of postapocalyptic fare.  In other ways, more spare and unprogrammed, maybe.  A gloomy, depressing book, though.

Oddly congruent with the current fall of yellow Mongolian dust – a seasonal visitation not uncommon in Korea, but rendered more worrisome now that it comes laden with the unquantifiable atmospheric  toxicities of Northeast China's vast industrial effluence.  All the cars were covered with a fine spattering of rain-patterned pale dirt, as the yellow dust had come accompanied by rain.  All the piles of snow have melted.  The cold, damp air tasted like sand.  It was easy to imagine McCarthy's world, as I read while riding the subway into Seoul to buy my Sunday installment of English-language magazines.

The last time I was so profoundly affected by a post-apocalyptic story was perhaps James White's Second Ending novella, which sometimes still haunts my dreams even though it's been thirty years since I read it (and I had to spend 30 minutes with google to figure out the title of it).  But overall I have always felt James White to be a vastly underrated sci-fi author. 

And speaking of underrated, I found myself thinking of Alasdair Gray's Axletree for some reason, recently too – the tale of  those men who build a babel-like tower to heaven, only to damage the surface of the sky and bring the deluge down upon Earth when it shatters. 

Then there's John Lucian Jones' story of the Protagonist – a robot-sentience from a machine civilization called in to solve the mystery of an extinct primitive civilization that seems to have stopped in its tracks just as these robot-people from a distant star were about to make contact.  We gradually learn that the extinct civilization in question is none other than Earth, as the Protagonist obsesses Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius-style over the ruins and artifacts. The stunning truth is that the robots themselves have inadvertently destroyed everything on the planet due to sheer ignorance of the possibility of carbon-based life.

Caveat: Egg. Chicken.

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / The Wonders of Work

Some of my students had the assignment to "interview me" but I hadn't given them any kind of guidance as to what sort of questions they should ask.  I got a lot of interesting and different sorts of questions, but the funnest one was from a girl named Jung, who asked me "Which came first, the chicken or the egg, in your opinion?"  I hardly needed to hesitate:  the egg, of course – it's a matter of genetics, right?   I'm not sure she really understood my explanation. 

Caveat: No Love

Banalities & Journaling / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable

"Love is not for the faint-hearted, or for the self-possessed" – I think Rumi (Persian poet) said this.  Since I am both faint-hearted and not terribly self-possessed, I suppose this means that love is not for me.

Actually, it can be surprising the number times I get the question, "why aren't you married?" or its variants (such as why I'm not in a relationship, etc.).  And a number of people, both Koreans and non-Koreans, seem to jump to the conclusion that I must be "looking" for a relationship, and that my coming to Korea may even have something to do with this – given the commonplace that Westerners will have "better luck" finding a significant other in Asian countries (which I definitely don't actually think is necessarily true, either).

But the facts are more complex, and the net is – I'm really NOT looking for a relationship.  In fact, part of what lead me to make the decision to go off into an alien culture and go looking for new experiences was because I had reached a firm decision, last year, that I am meant to remain single.  With the idea of a relationship basically ruled out, it made it easier to let go of things like "career" and "place" and just go off drifting again. 

And so.  "But don't you get lonely?"  Of course I do.  Still… I'm happier with loneliness than I have ever been in a relationship – at least over the longer term.  So, it's for the best.

Caveat: Ook!

Banalities & Journaling / Databases, Smartphones & Computers / Found Online / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

"Ook!" is what is known as an "esoteric programming language."  I've developed a certain passing fascination for these constructs, which I've pursued in my wikipediasurfing.  There are various kinds, but what they share is a certain in-jokey relationship to the practices of theoretical computer science.

Another esoteric language I particularly like is "whitespace" – a programming language that allows you to write code using nothing but ASCII whitespace characters, such as tab, space, and linefeed.  It then treats all other characters as its own  whitespace, thus allowing you to, in theory, embed a secret whitespace program into the code of some other (slightly) more conventional programming language – perhaps "Ook!" 

Meanwhile, I've also been pursuing research into xenotheology – the study of alien belief systems, I guess.  Obviously, since we don't know anything about aliens (yet), this is a strictly hypothetical-based pursuit.  But fascinating.  What do aliens believe?  Or rather, what would they believe, if they existed?  How will what aliens believe interact with what humans believe, in a potential first-contact situation?  Will we be evangelized?  Will they be?  Would human religions as currently structured survive a first contact with an equally (but differently) religious but alien civilization?  I suspect some religions would cope better with aliens than others – especially those currently "fringe" religions that have a belief in aliens (or other worlds/planets), etc., already embedded in their dogmas:  e.g. scientology or, most notably, mormonism.   All of which is to say, which president would you rather have handling a sticky alien first-contact situation:  President Romney or President Huckabee?

Caveat: Delusions of Skepticism

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I spent time surfing around online yesterday, and have also been reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.  Dawkins is a vaguely militant atheist, but upon reading his book and thinking about what he has to say, I would say his skepticism trumps his atheism, and I think it's important, as he does, to make a clear distinction.

If I understand Dawkins' argument clearly, scientifically well-founded skepticism disallows a 100% atheism, but inevitably leads to a 99.99% atheism.  But a skeptic will always say:  "show me the evidence, and I will change my mind."  A 100% atheist will affirm that no evidence will ever be found:  that's what I like to call "faith-based atheism." 

My wanderings online led me to wikipedia (inevitably) where I found an article on mereological nihilism.  As I have understood it, it's a sort of extreme anti-platonism – a denial of the objective reality of all composite objects (which is to say, only philosophically "simple" objects are actually "real" – e.g. quarks and photons and such indivisibles). 

Is this a true anti-platonism?  Unless I very much misunderstand, it seems an almost perfect inversion of the parable of the cave…  In the cave, the "real" reality lies in the transcendent perfect prototypes (i.e. pre-existent images of the compositional objects), and the illusion is in the grainy shadow-projections on the wall.  But all these prototypes (categories, or sets, e.g. sets of  "simples arranged tablewise" standing for "table") are just illusion under mereological nihilism.  I think I may be a mereological nihilist, on top of being a godless atheist and metaskeptic (i.e. I'm skeptical of skepticism).  In any event, it sounds cool.

Caveat: Experimental Philosophy

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

What would experimental philosophy be?  I mean, beyond the practice of science in general, to the extent that science is, still, what used to be called natural philosophy?  I mean, could you practice experimental ontology, for example?  How would that work?  Could I work this into my ongoing career as an itinerant epistemologist?
I ran across the idea in a novel I finished reading over the weekend.  Kiln People, by David Brin.  Sci-fi, entertaining, humorous, essentially founded on a single improbable conceit: what if technology that allowed people to make innumerable temporary but fully functional copies of themselves were widely available and cheap?  Well, anyway, one idea Brin skims across in the novel is that of religion and/or philosophy as experimental sciences.  I was intrigued.
I also started reading another novel over the weekend – Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove.  Rather in a different vein than hacky sci-fi, but also entertaining, in its way.  I used to be in that category of people who would roll his eyes and groan at the thought of tackling a James novel, but something in the Turn of the Screw, which I read for a semiotics class in 94, converted me.  With Melville, he’s the cream of 19th century American Literature.  Hard to explain.  I’ll see if I can add more as I work further into the novel.
So you might gather, I spent the weekend reading.  I was feeling profoundly antisocial and unmotivated, and my computer was ill with a linux mess I created for myself which left me without my standard resort of dinking around online.  The computer’s healthy again, and work focal.
I stopped and bought some 삼각김밥 (samgaggimbab, which I roughly translate as “three-cornered-rice-wrap-thingy”), which are rice and some kind of savory additions molded into a triangular shape and wrapped in a sheet of seaweed stuff, a la Japanese California rolls and such-like.   They’ve grown on me recently, very convenient  Korean fast food, I guess.  Here’s a picture I found of the stuff online by googling the term:
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Caveat: Original of Laura

Banalities & Journaling / Found Online / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / My Photos / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Vladimir Nabokov, one of the great writers of the recently ended century, left an unfinished manuscript when he died, which is called “The Original of Laura.” He had explicitly requested that it be destroyed, and now, years later, his son (Dmitri Nabokov) can’t decide whether to go through with it or not.
Nabokov, of course, is famous for the novel Lolita. Personally, I like both Pale Fire and Ada much better – especially Ada, with its alternate-universe North America which seems partly inhabited by vaguely frenchified tsarist Russians. I would be fascinated to read a “lost” work of the author’s, but something about respecting a person’s last wishes comes into play too. Dmitri is stuck with a terrible dilemma.
Meanwhile… here is building I saw a while back, a few blocks from here on the other side of the Jeongbalsan (Jeongbal hill).
picture
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Caveat: Chocolate Rain Obsession

Background Noise / Banalities & Journaling / Internet & Blogging / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

Today was a very long day at work.  I really liked my students today, though.  Especially the incurably silly Gavin, Cathy, and friends in the new ER2(T) class, with their “happy singing zombie students” act.
Not to mention the “8th grade princess mafia,” aka the new TP1(T), which by some quirk of exam-scores and fate has become a girls-only class.  They’re smart-alecky and unshakably in love with their cellphones, and only motivated under very generous definitions of the term… yet, they manage to be unmotivated almost exclusively in English, and thus I can’t bring myself to complain.  I was feeling sad for the super-smart Lainy and Julia, the only 7th graders in the group having recently been promoted into it, given the other girls’ very cliquey behavior, but they’re so smart they hold their own and put the others to shame with stunning performances.
So.  I stopped in the H-mart on the way home at dusk, and bought some food for my barren cupboards, including not just cabbage and tomatoes but a decadent bag of doritos and some chocolate milk.  Then I proceeded to spend the evening surfing wikipedia and other bits of the internet.  And became obsessed with a little internet meme that peaked over the summer, known as “Chocolate Rain.”
I’ll let you pursue it, if you’re interested – the tale of Tay Zonday, a University of Minnesota PhD candidate who, using a quirky youtube video, bootstrapped himself from obscurity into talk show appearances, big-bucks product jingles and endorsements, and major-talent collaborations.
And yet he continues to be a grad student, and the original ditty is actually an intriguing piece in its monotonous way:  a little allegorical study of racism, with references to, among other things, the riots in the Paris suburbs.  And, to quote:  “Chocolate Rain / Made me cross the street the other day / Chocolate Rain / Made you turn your head the other way.”  And continues, “Chocolate Rain / The bell curve blames the baby’s DNA / Chocolate Rain / But test scores are how much the parents make.”  People who complain that the song is pointless, haven’t read the lyrics.  And those who accuse him of selling out are missing the point completely, I think – publicity is a two-way street, and a thinking artist with a social-change agenda may in fact have a weird sort of  obligation to leverage offers of publicity and money from commercial interests in order to further that agenda however he or she can.
A Brazilian vlogger observes (and maybe I’m just quoting him to showcase my own multilingual erudition, but I liked the way he phrases it):

É impressionante como a internet consegue transforma em celebridades os mais inusitados dos seres e as suas mais toscas exibições de talento. Veja o exemplo de Tay Zonday, um garoto que gravou uma canção chamada “Chocolate Rain” fazendo uso de uma voz grave, quase que robótica.

I’ve certainly got the tune and words stuck in my head, now.  And so I listen to dozens of remixes and parodies of “Chocolate Rain,” while eating doritos and drinking chocolate milk, while I sit in my little apartment in happy Ilsan, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea.
To quote Mr Zonday: “This internet thing is wild!”

[Update: youtube embedded video added retroactively, 2011-08-03, a part of background noise.]
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Caveat: Saved by hip-hop?

Banalities & Journaling / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I was watching part of an episode of a program called American Dad on the AFKN channel on my television.  Something involving a criminal with a german accent, whose brain has been transplanted into first a fish, then into the body of a seventies-era-looking black man.  Meanwhile a hippie dude who says he is a "tree in a man's body" is running some kind of eco-terrorist thing.

And there's a werewolf subplot.  And the pet space alien, Roger (a regular, apparently, described at wikipedia as "sarcastic, alcoholic, surly, lonely, aloof, and flamboyantly effeminate"), loses a pair of sea monkeys he dearly loves, after feeding them some champaign.  Near the end, Stan says, "for the second time of my life, I was saved by hip-hop."  Bizarre cultural references abound.  Was this a good use of my time?  I don't know, but I laughed very hard, several times.

I sure get tired of those military public service announcements, though.  It's like watching them collectively, as an institution, try to convince themselves that they have a clue.

I am drinking something called citron tea, which is made from something that is inexplicably almost identical to orange marmalade jam – you scoop out a spoonful of it into a cup, add hot water, and drink:  presweetened vaguely tea-ey hot citrus drink.  I bought a huge jar of it for 3000원 (about 3 bucks) last time I was at the supermarket.  I like it.

Caveat: Consumption Gap

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

An editorial / review in a recent Economist magazine ("Economics Focus:  The new (improved) Gilded Age") discusses something that I've been pondering for many years, but haven't been very good at articulating.  Despite the sharp – even alarming – rates of increase in "income inequality" throughout the world in recent decades, something else is going on that isn't being captured in standard economic statistics:  this is the somewhat weird but, I believe, oddly compelling observation that although incomes are diverging, lifestyles are converging.

I don't know if this is really true, but the anecdotal evidence offered in the article is interesting, such as the observation that a $300 refrigerator and a $10,000 one aren't that different in terms of the what they can do for you.  Likewise, the cheapo Hyundai sedan vs the Jaguar.  They both are typically driven by owners on the same crowded highways, despite a 1000 percent difference in price.

This ties in with an idea I like to think of as rooted in marxist analysis (though I'm not confident that that's its provenance):  as capitalism continues to evolve, it drives constantly toward manufacturing new "necessities" which, as a matter of course, are not true human necessities but strictly market-created artificial ones.  And the rich, with all that extra income that the income gap is giving them, go chasing after these artificial necessities, while the lot of the poor continues to improve, albeit slowly, with respect to the profoundly less artificial  necessities which they seek to satisfy.

So incomes are out of wack, and constantly more so.  And consumption, as measured by dollars outlaid, is also diverging.  But if you measure consumption by a more intangible concept such as "range of experience," you will find the experience of rich and poor converging in strange ways.  Fishermen in India, bankers in southwest Connecticut, and grandmonthers and schoolchildren in Korea all use cell phones in markedly similar ways to improve the quality of their very different lives, at almost universal levels of adoption.  And, in other extremes, obesity (a disease of affluence) strikes the poor more than the rich.

OK.  I don't know where I'm going with this.  I'm not trying to say it excuses governments' complicity in the capitalist plunder of the world's people and resources.  Capitalists, being capitalists, require ethical supervision, I suspect.  But I do think the apocalypto-alarmist rhetoric from the anti-globalization camps and the anarcho-left may be rooted in an inaccurate analysis of the current state of the world's economy, vis-a-vis real human needs (i.e. as opposed to manufactured needs).

Caveat: A lot of monkeys…

Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Quotable / Science & SciFi

… does not a masterpiece create.   At least not using typewriters.  As physicist Seth Lloyd explains:  "No matter how far into Hamlet a monkey may get, its next keystroke is likely to be a mistake."   But then he goes on to explain that if you assume the monkeys are typing on programmable computers, they very well might come up with Hamlet.  This is a counterintuitive distinction, but it gets at the heart of his thesis, which is that the universe's complexity is a consequence of its underlying programmaticity (I made that word up, not him).

Caveat: The longest war

Background Noise / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism / Politics, Economics & Current Affairs

I overheard on the radio part of a book review of Susan Faludi's new book, Terror Dream.  Without having read the book, I'm probably as skeptical as the reviewer with respect to Faludi's apparent core thesis:  that Bush/Cheney's war-on-terror is resulting in significant rollbacks of feminist gains of previous decades.

Nevertheless, one sub-thesis that the reviewer mentioned, that I found compelling and powerful, was the idea that, far from being a strange and unwonted new type of war, the new "war-on-terror" is, in fact, America's oldest and most formative experience of war:  after all, wasn't the idea of a besieged city-on-a-hill at the heart of the White Man / Native American conflict, from the time of the first British settlements in North America?  A community of "innocents" victimized by fanatical, unknowable others who, "unprovoked," would come into the community and attack civilians.  As a nation, after a long period of aberrant integrative practice, we've finally reconnected with our long lost old demons, now conveniently externalized into the broader world.

In this sense, we've been fighting the war-on-terror since the mid 1600's.  By comparison, all other wars are irrelevant internecine squabbles.  Regardless of the validity of the parallel, the drawing of it is quite thought-provoking.  Are these Islamic fundamentalists, our fellow humans, the new Injuns?  Wow.

Listening to:  Magnetic Fields' "Strange Powers;" "The Trouble I've Been Looking For."

[Youtube embed later as part of Background Noise.]

Caveat: Professoriality

Banalities & Journaling / Life is a Dream / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

A while back my best friend Bob sent me an email in which he responded to a comment I made a few weeks back about always ending as the "professor" at the teaching jobs I've taken on.  I was working on writing back to him finally, just now, but realized this could be a more general comment on the "state of Jared's life."  So here goes…

Bob wrote the following: 

    I wonder whether your multi-lingual, bi-continental, bi-millennial career of being nicknamed “professor” means that you should actually become one? I know you have trepidations about how much backlogging you’d have to do to start a degree in a new field, but shit, if you got a doctorate in anything, you could probably market yourself to teach anything else, perhaps in some cool, alternative-type institution and/or exotic locale. I don’t know how many such places actually exist, but I do seem to detect a trend within academia away from specialization towards more interdisciplinary courses, majors, and so on. Not sure I really know what I’m talking about—perhaps I’m just unwittingly fantasizing about my own dream job.

He's right, of course.  I should become a professor – I've always thought that's where I should be headed.  But getting a PhD is not trivial – especially when one is as unfocused and vaguely dilettantish as I seem to be.  Last fall, as part of my relocation back to Minnesota, I made an extended self-examination around the idea of returning to graduate school.

I audited a doctoral-level seminar with an old professor I really liked on the topic of good old Cervantes, who occupied the position of honor in my abandoned doctoral dissertation proposal when I was in the Spanish Lit program at the Univ of Pennsylvania.   This audit experience merely confirmed the fact that, as much as I love Cervantes and the whole lit-crit game, it's not what I would want to do a PhD on at this point in time.

I had some interviews and conversations with another old professor at the U of MN, who had been my undergraduate advisor and is now attached to the Philosophy Department, wondering if I would do a program in that subject area.  But as much as it attracts me, it's difficult for me to nail down what, exactly, I would do in the field of philosophy.  I'm not really a philosopher as much as a philologist… but we just discarded the philology line in the previous paragraph.

How about linguistics?  I could see doing this, sometimes.  And certainly, that's the subject area that dovetails best with my current pursuits – teaching and learning language(s).  In an aside, I had a fun moment in a class today, as I demonstrated for my terminally bored teenagers a few moments of my experience on their side of the hagwon divide (i.e. my Saturday Korean class):  I did one of those back-and-forth dialogues, where I played both student (myself) and the teacher (my Korean language seonsaengnim), and demonstrated conclusively that I, too, could be profoundly clueless in the face incomprehensible linguistic input.

OK.  No answers.  Just thinking "out loud" here.

I'm having some ramyeon and boricha and listening to Minnesota Public Radio's morning show at eleven at night.  More later.

Caveat: Psychogeographie et l’art de la dérive

Banalities & Journaling / Language & Linguistics / Media (Texts/Music/Movies etc) / Philosophy & Cultural Criticism

I was listening to Warren Olney's (sp?) "Which Way L.A." radio program last night, and he had as a guest a man named Will Self who is a practitioner of Guy Debord's psychogeography – a 50's situationist pseudo-artistic movement that endeavored to move around cities in unexpected ways, thus  "reading" urban landscapes  in some way via the subconscious.  Or something like that.  But I realized that I may actually be a long-term  psychogeographer, given my love of wandering about urban spaces without plan, map or program. 

Will Self had just spent the day before walking in a straight line from LAX to Watts – about 11 miles, and something very much like what I would do – indeed, more than once while living in LA I would take long undirected and notably untouristic walks, once walking from Long Beach to San Pedro, for example.  And just recently I've taken some rather random jaunts around Seoul, as well as last Saturday's long hike from Imjingang to Munsan-eup.

It's a rather high-falutin'-sounding term, though.  I like better Debord's concept of 'dérive' – "drift."  This suits me just fine.  I think I'll pursue it.

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