Leon Wieseltier is trying to formulate and delineate his approach, this is great, but in the process he draws a caricature. There is the uninterrupted tradition that goes all the way to Spinoza, Marx, Nietzsche, not some small potatoes. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein certainly attempts to tackle the problem philosophically. But here is the rant. ►►►read more
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philosophy
Look, it’s pretty simple. Can you trust or believe anyone around you? Certainly not! This pretty much eliminates anything we are supposed to take for granted from the previous generations. To believe in the validity of the broken telephone passed along to us from the past without the evidence is retarded. The question about the Divine revelation in the past is irrelevant and the only useful reduction is the divine revelation in our own lives. Did you witness God in your very life, did you see the divine inspiration in a fellow human being? Absent of a direct experience the historic record discussion is a heap of crap. Without a community that acts illuminated by the word of a living God, any religious community is a fraud. End of story.
This is the visually impressive clip from the 1981 Warren Beatty film about John Reed The Reds starring Diane Keaton. Note how hammer and sickle morphs into the Muslim crescent. And the jihad inducing Zinoviev is a sort of Jewish caricature. The culturally inaccurate mosque background, Spanish Moorish carvings instead of the Persian mosaics of the Soviet Asia and even the miscast Corinthian column behind on of the translators. Those machine gun horse carriages magically rolling out of the train cars are more appropriate for the streets of Paris than for the Konarmia cavalry aka Budennovtzy. (annoying sound crack at 1:45 mark) ►►►read more
James Barry, Satan at the Abode of Chaos and Old Night, c. 1792-95
I don’t get the philosophical rhetoric for or against God. Dostoevsky’s moral argument still works. If one is to assume that God is in charge than one would have to conclude that based on the empirical evidence God is a sadist. To outsource the blame to a Satan is about as original as the “dog ate my homework” excuse.
This explains why most religious groups have displayed exceptional cruelty in each and every single manifestation of the belief. Naturally people recognize that God must be a sadist so in the spirit of imitatio dei a believer is compelled to unconsciously emulate the sadism of the supreme being to the best of his or her abilities.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
This is a thirty minutes conversational lecture by the couple at the RCA in London. They talk about about Rebecca’s new book and the protagonist Cass Seltzer. ►►►read more
The enlargeable Jerusalem photo beamed to us by Todd Bolen via bibleplaces.com. We are probably looking at the Christian or the Arab quarters of the old city. Comfortably reclining under the sun are the square and symmetrical wattage of the solar panels, the high-strung, cross-like “traditional” TV antennas, the voluptuous water barrels painted black to appear thinner and to trap heat, the breathlessly perspiring condensation boxes and of course the attentively detached, confidently dominant satellite TV dishes. That house in the middle got more disks than apartments, perhaps a radio signal outpost? What the dude on the broadcast minaret is thinking when he dishes the takbir, is the reception as good? The Crescent Moon above the minaret’s green dome wired somewhere down below, it moonlights as a lightning rod for the neighborhood.
Behold an allegorical layer superimposed on the ancient urban fabric. The “dish veil” looks like a foreign fashion. But if you walk the narrow streets facing the facades you will hardly see it. The “dish veil” is easily and quickly removable. To clean the dirty dishes off the table slate grab the four corners of a magical tablecloth…abracadabra there is no trace of the feast for the senses, the buildings appear au naturel circa 18th century – naked, pure and innocent like Adam and Eve. Yet there is the claustrophobic, choking, uneasy apprehension that all the gadgets are permanently anchored, dialed directly into the brains of the inhabitants, the tubes of the information life support IV dripping into the blood stream of imagination. You can picture the wires snaking down the soft, apple rotten crevasses of the pale, pinkish limestone, plugged and soldered into the human conscience circuit. A reversal along the metaphorical vertical access, the flip of the modernity flop played out on the most stubborn of stages. Traditionally the submerged dark mystery is below ground in the proverbial basement, the hidden foundation, while the persona emerges above ground lit by the sun. Here the captured sun energy descents from the soaked with revelation firmament to energize and illuminate the concealed subterranean layer of dreams and desires. The Jerusalem roof is the new spiritual catacomb. The Jerusalem of Gold glistening with shadows of the parabolic reflections.
John Frederick Lewis, Two horses pulling a plough, viewed from the back, c. 1820
We can’t define an intellectual by the volume of his database. Not even by his or her ability to reason. Alain de Botton writes that “a wealthy family in England in 1250 might have had three books in its possession: a Bible, a collection of prayers and a life of the saints”. They are not less intelligent than a college graduate in humanities after reading a thousand books. So intelligence is not a familiarity with the contemporary European philosophy, comparative fluency or ability to memorize. Intelligence is curiosity. This curiosity in turn fuels the exploration of a subject or an object.
I meet many people who have an enormous mental database covering a vast filed of knowledge. Yet they became jaded and lost their curiosity. It’s hard to describe these people as “intelligent”.
There are the current laments about the lack of intellectuals among the modern orthodox here and here (and not even an expectation about the other streams). This is unfair to people brought up or converted to the dogmatic culture. You can’t hold people responsible for the lack of curiosity if they are indoctrinated into a system that presumes and postulates more answers than questions. Centuries of breeding out the curious and curiosity as an undesirable trait are finally paying off.
Images licensed courtesy of Picture Library of the Royal Academy of Arts
Raimund Abraham, Constellation 5, 2003
I don’t know about the life expectancy but one of the signs of the middle age is that suddenly people you personally know who are in their forties or fifties (plus minus ten years) start dying from natural causes (an occasionally unnatural causes). This is always a marker and extremely unsettling. It brings to the fore the thoughts about mortality, your start thinking about the “life’s score”. You start remembering your interactions with these people, the moments when they were in distress or more often when they were in a state of mental or professional exertion. Was it worth it?
Today someone emailed me about a man I worked with who died in January. “I am sure you know” read the email, but I didn’t. Half an hour later I saw in my RSS feed an announcement that my college professor was killed in a car accident in LA yesterday.
Now that I write about this suddenly it occurred to me that they both had one odd thing in common. Geoff Wodding spent his formative architectural years in Austria and Professor Raimund Abraham the designer of the Austrian Cultural Forum in NY is himself from Austria. Last week in Manhattan I saw a new building and as I looked at it I was thinking that the unusual roof line is exactly how I have done it in the Raimund’s class.
The Fountain at the Met
Aaron Haspel is a master of aphorism. And the Twitter is not going to change this fact. Is there a Madrasa where one can memorize his verses? But I really wish Aaron would resume blogging.
- “Real work ennobles the soul: fake jobs destroy it.
- Ask if you do your job well, but first ask if it ought to be done at all.
- Every party looks more attractive out of power.
- Few human decisions are as well-considered as suicide.
- Marital bliss and marital discord are equally inappropriate in public.
- When you have an idea that runs against your ideology, don’t suppress the idea, suppress the ideology.
- The businessman denounces government bureaucracy from the confines of a corporate bureaucracy that would shame an apparatchik.
- The ideal work environment for a writer is jail.
- Rather than spend time at work, spend the time you do spend at work working.
- Real experts know exactly how good they are.
- The most influential people in history have all spent entirely too much time by themselves.
- Old people look absurd playing rock. We know what this says about the old people, but what does it say about rock?
- A single arbitrary law can topple an entire code.
- Why people do things is a less subtle and profound question than why they don’t.
- Whatever you do for the sake of the children is probably wrong.
- J.D. Salinger has died, and the overgrown children who still read him will follow shortly.
- Men are more ashamed of correcting themselves than of erring in the first place.
- The laziest, loosest, and most popular organizing principle for prose is the list.
- Occasionally the operation succeeds but the patient dies; far more often it fails but the patient survives.
- Life may not be a game, but what works for one works for the other more often than you’d think.
- If Blake were understood he would no longer be read.
- If a rule is required, then its outcomes will be imperfect.
- If you’re not in a band at 20 you have no heart; if you’re still in one at 30 you have no head.
- The theory that genius and madness are ineluctably bound up has been responsible for most mad geniuses.
- People defective in reason fancy themselves compensated in imagination — which is imaginative.
- Professional courtesy merely props up the guild. It is professional rudeness that is in short supply.
- From fear can come adequacy, but never greatness.
- Attention begets all virtue, distraction all vice.
- God would satisfy no one without His viciousness and caprice.
- Most of what you think you have to do you don’t.
- Some men, like Balzac’s Goriot, are made of money. When it ends so do they.
- Because life has no meaning, a particular life can mean a great deal.
- Scientists have usurped the prestige that properly belongs to science.
- Movie-makers ought to restrict their budgets for the same reason poets used to write sonnets: constraint spurs creativity.
- Freud wields more influence in America than Marx ever did in Russia, though many of his most slavish disciples barely know his name.
- Living makes enormous demands on one’s time.
- God is not merely dead but stillborn.
- They laughed at Edison, they laughed at Fulton, and they laughed at every hopeless crackpot.”
Shakespeare in the Park
A friend called me last week to challenge me on my assertion in The Derivative Trifecta – Internet, Jews, Wall St. that Judaism is a derivative religion. He conceded that the culture, the popular ideology is derivative but then there were the mad creative eruptions, the heroic innovations. We went through a glorious list and I had to agree. I was thinking on a bus to NY and realized that I really wrote about this before. But let me try to remodel the expression, being that the Evanston Jew quote is still ringing in my ears:
“Some hide, (Jewish Studies Judaism) some party (Carlebach and Jewish Renewal). Many many turn away from the burden of a historical memory (intermarrieds, secular, Reform), leaving only the pintele yid, a pointillism of sorts, some call it a post impressionism, that sees Orthodoxy as belonging to the world of OCD and psychopathology.”
Evanston Jew calls Jews shearis hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors) and I would add shearis hapleitah b’arey hapleitah (the remnants of the survivors in the biblical cities of refuge). Let me explain. There is a temptation to describe a culture by its highest expression. A repressive ideology forces the crime of a genius to a city of refuge. There a creative sprit can find a reprieve from the blood thirsty mob. There a spirit can hide behind some exquisite grammar studies, poetry, law, etc. But then comes the forgetfulness, the criminals lose track of the geography and claim that they, the citizens of the cities of refuge define the culture outside of the walls. On rare occasions the claims catch on and a sect is born but in general this is exactly what the sign on the gates says – an escapist illusion. This is like saying that the way communism is practiced under the comrade Stalin is not a true communism but few of us here in the Manhattan chapter of the Communist Party really know what the true communism is all about. So please leave the non derivative thinking where is belongs, in the escapism of the cities of refuge, not in Judaism.
I don’t do Twitter or Facebook anymore but I keep an eye on selected tweets. Here are some from Alain de Botton:
- “The dream of the modern individualist: to be famous. The dream of the pre-modern collectivist: to help sustain an institution.
- Society continuously introduces us to new works of art and in the process prevents any one of them from assuming due weight in our minds.
- A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.
- Office life would not be possible without the hard take-offs and landings effected by coffee and alcohol.
- There should be a special circle in hell reserved for ‘friends’ who from a love of ‘honesty’ report the mean words of others back to us.
- Despite the best efforts of critics and the hopes of authors, our tastes in books are probably as inherent & unbudgeable as those in food.
- Most of ‘wisdom’ boils down to the art of not letting things get to you.
- Few architectural works would benefit most cities more than contemporary versions of the Wailing Wall – the name alone is a relief.
- The book will be killed not directly by new technology but by the monkey mind it breeds. The issue is concentration, not royalties.
- Authors write things down so as to have to think of them less.
- Writing opens up the otherwise unusual prospect of being violently disliked by strangers & training oneself not to mind.
- Writers have to go on working despite the increasing likelihood that they have already written their most important book.
- Definition of a present: something you can’t get for yourself. As a child, that meant toys. In adulthood: reassurance, sympathy, forgiveness.
- We cannot help but exaggerate our parents: their goodness, evil, significance…
- To be flattered or insulted? ‘I enjoy your tweets much more than your books…”
And now few tweets from Nassim Nicholas Taleb:
- “You know you have influence when people start noticing your absence more than the presence of others.
- Ethical man accords his profession to his beliefs, instead of according his beliefs to his profession. Rarer and rarer since middle ages.
- If we are good, it is usually more from lack of opportunity for transgression than from intrinsic virtue.
- The things people apologize to us about are almost never those that have upset us.
- The attraction of the melancholic: sadness has created the room we’re going to take up in their lives.
- Most people write so they can remember things; I write so I can forget them.
- I wonder whether a bitter enemy would be jealous if he discovered that I hated someone else.
- What they call philosophy, I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; and what they call journalism I call gossip.
- Academics are only useful when they try to be useless, and dangerous when they try to be useful.
- Success is to be in middle adulthood what you dreamed to be in late childhood. The rest comes from loss of control.
- A good foe is far more loyal, far more predictable, and, to the clever, far more useful than any admirer.
- Most modern technologies are deferred punishment.
- Medieval man was a cog in a wheel he did not understand; modern man is a cog in a more complicated system he thinks he understands.
- They will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status – but rarely for your wisdom.
- Modernity: We created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.
- In science you need to understand the world; in business you need others to misunderstand it.”
Those are all pretty good, I though so. But note the two quotes I highlighted, amazingly alike. There is something liberating about “the need to write”, it releases you from the ownership of an idea. A written thought becomes the foundation for the building above while it recedes underground (some call it unconscious). Contrast this with people who take copious notes. I think note taking is a tick, the condition comes from the fear that you don’t have the ownership of an idea and you must write it down to remember, to cage the fleeting bird. A writer moves in the opposite directions, his words are born to reveal the internalized expression, to un-cage the rhyme, and like a child it must find its own unattached path.
If the Ten Commandments were written by my cousin Shmerl or a God is a minor detail. But more importantly in all the denominations a “Rabbi” could be a 50th generation einikle or your friendly dyke, they all have the same job description, to be a DJ. In other words they all spin some dusty vinyls, they don’t create any music. Some DJs are purist and they still spin the real plastic, others are spinning the virtual digital copies, but they all mix old music to a popular beat, they don’t sing in their own voice. You can spin that vinyl to the right or to the left but you must understand the differences between a DJ going through some old tunes and a young Amadeus Mozart. The interpretive strands of the derivative culture are secondary, insignificant variations. You can write an app for the same proprietary OS, but then you can write a new OS. You can aggregate, link and embed, heck, even with comments, and then you can give birth to a poetic expression that changes the way we think, sing and dance.
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photo via flickr/ViniMan
