Bare(ass) Life in the Swirl

As you age, you reach point where you feel that your life is in the toilet. You reach this point regardless of how happy you are with your life (you may love and desire your wife, love your kids, if you have any, love your job abd colleagues, love where your live, and so on). But let's consider that toilet metaphor. The metaphor brings with it a narrative that breaks down into three crucial moments, before the flush, after the flush, and the brief but most crucial swirl that begins the flush. In the face of impending disasters (loss of job due to budget cuts, global warming, etc) I reassure myself by thinking about the swirl. Even if someone hits flush, there's always the swirl. You can surf it even if your life now stinks and is totally going down the toilet.

It's Not you, It Is you

The experience of reading or hearing about how other people respond to Blu-ray discs on flat screen TVs has led to say that expereience" is ovr-rated. What you think is your experience is actually eceryone's. You say to the BestBuy salesman, "It has a kind of 3-D effect," as if you were making an acute observation like you might on a painting. But the salesman replies, "Oh yeah, everyone says that," thinking he is affirming what you have said. Only you don't feel affirmed. You are recognized as not you, not even as one of many, but as everyone, and this recognition obliterates the specificity of what you thought was your experience and your articulation of it. Both are mass-prodcued as much as the Blu-ray and its marketing are.

Is (fill in the blank with the name of a dead person everyone knows is dead) dead?

OK, I heard in the audiocommentary or maybe it was an interview supplement on the new DVD edition of Wes Craven's Last House on the Left that the film was given this title because no went to see the film when it was shown with its original title.  Something about the word "last" seems to hook audiences.  Also appears to be the case as well as with the "death of" whatever, at the moment.  But consider Mark Twain's title "Is Shakespeare Dead?"  It's kind of funny, both comic and weird.  How can it be a question? What does it mean?  Is Twain serious?  Twain doesn't address the title in his book, which is about the authorship question.  And then we have the death of various isms, like Marxism in Derrida's Spectres of Marx (is Marxism dead?).  Derrida ends his postscript-mortem essay on Foucault "To Do Justice to Freud" (which turns out to be a line Foucault wrote) by twice using the metaphor for keeping the questions Foucault raised "alive."   My favorite example is in  Son of Frankenstein when Igor (Bela Lugosi) says joyously that he is "alive dead," but the people who tried and final to execute him by hanging  are "dead dead" (because he had the monster kill them in retaliation).  

The Strangeness of Cinephilia

I was watching Marathon Man again for the umpteenth time yesterday and it dawned on me after all these years that the music was composed by the same guy who did the soundtracks for Klute and All the President's Men.  And then I remembered that I had seen Marathon Man many times when it first came out because I was living in Buffalo then (I spent a semester in grad school there before returning to Berkeley); the movie theaters there were few in number and showed the same film for what seemed like incredibly extended periods of time.  Because I loved going to the cinema so much, I saw The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Tenant, Marathon Man, and Carrie repeatedly.  I realize now that I developed as a consequence my ability to do a close reading of a film as I watch it.  I remember surprising a friend who gone with me to Carrie by giving her my reading of the film as we got up from our seats after the film ended. I don't know if that was the first time I saw Carrie or not. Still, it was a repetition of the same that is no longer doable now that one repeats a viewing of a film on DVD or Blu-ray. 

Image Quality versus Image Delivery

DVDs and Blu-rays are most frequently evaluated in terms of image quality, that is, the resolution and density of the digital image. the higher the resolution, the better the image.  The importance of the delivery system is less often commented on, but deserves attention since screen sizes, projectors, and kinds of screens all make a huge difference.  To give one example, I have been watching DVDs on a 52" LCD with a Sony Blu-ray player that I had seen before on a 32" cathode ray TV set.  I generally feel like I am watching a new film.  I can see all kinds of things I missed the previous viewings.  One thing I appreciate about the reviews at www.dvdbeaver.com is that the reviewers list the specs of the equipment they use to watch the DVDs and Blu-rays they review.  I hope that info becomes standard practice for reviewers.

Did I really meet I.F. Stone?

When I was 18, I did my European vacation alone by thumb and eurorail pass.  When I was in Venice, I took a boat one night from one island area to another and this old guy introduced himself to me and said he was I.F. Stone.  We talked during the boat trip, but I didn't really believe him.  I didn't ask him for ID, but I thought to myself that he was some old guy trying to pick me up thinking he could do better by impersonating I.F. Stone.  But maybe I was just being paranoid and he really was I.F. Stone.  But maybe he really was I.F. Stone trying to pick me up!  I would have gone on my merry way alone in any case.  I got to wondering today because Harper's has a post about its I.F. Stone memorial award.  

What Happens When Your Name Becomes an Adjective?

Is there a price to be paid for being so incredibly bright that you become really famous and people start using your last name as an adjective, as in Freudian, Derridean or Foucauldian?  Does a certain notion of what your writing practice is, in functioning as a descriptive, modify and limit the reception of your works to what readers expect to find?   Foucault said the more famous he became the less widely he was read.   Derrida frequently said of his critics that they hadn't read him.  One can read Freud with Freud or Freud against Freud, but can one read for unFreudian moments in Freud?  Cane one read / not read the writer / not writer?   I have found moments in Derrida's works that strike me as being very unDerridean, either because they contradict his practice or turn it into a patois (this usually happens in interviews).  For example, he regular questions a Heideggerian distinction between the human and technological, between physis and techne.  But when questioned about his paradoxical critical practice bears on his political commitments, he responds: "If every project were a reassuring project, the logical or theoretical consequence of a knowledge that  was guaranteed--euphoric, without paradox, without aporias, without contradiction, with no undecidability to be resolved--it would be a machine functioning without us, without responsibility, without decision, ultimately without ethics, law, or politics. There is no decision or responsibility without the trial of aporia and undecidability."  Bad reading is mechanical, good reading is not.  Are moments like these to be dismissed?  Or may they be used to produce productively resistant (un)readings?  In the case I cited above,  there seems to be a potential danger in characterizing one's reading practice in stark binary terms, the danger of being unnecessarily dogmatic, of limiting resistance to one's work by charaterizing it in entirely negative terms; that is,  the oppositions Derrida draws self-deconstruct:  what Derrida describes as not being a machine could easily be described as a machine or program without resistance.  Hence,  you find your aporias, paradoxes, contradictions, and so on.  Are unreading and nonreading the same thing?  Is unreadability a quality one wants one's writings to have?