Thanks to Andrew for the video.
1.31.2009
1.22.2009
Cross posts
I will be cross-posting on dailykos under the username destructiveanachronism (creative, eh?) for one diary a day (per kos rules). Once Friday (the last day at the job from hell) is over, expect posting to pick up significantly (traffic, too, I hope).
I know I didn't post any sort of long missive on Obama's inauguration, but have no doubt that I was glued, teary-eyed, to the TV and then the webcast, pretending to work while I rejoiced at the distance this nation has traveled in the last forty years. For the first time in eight years, we have a competent, transparent, and effective executive branch.
I know I didn't post any sort of long missive on Obama's inauguration, but have no doubt that I was glued, teary-eyed, to the TV and then the webcast, pretending to work while I rejoiced at the distance this nation has traveled in the last forty years. For the first time in eight years, we have a competent, transparent, and effective executive branch.
1.19.2009
Let Freedom Ring
It's been my policy -- on the many incarnations of my blog(s) to link to Dr. King's speech on Martin Luther King Day. Watch it in full, especially since its message reaches its final apotheosis tomorrow. It brings me to tears every time.
Stanley Fish on the End of the Humanities
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/18/the-last-professor/
My reply on the Times website:
My reply on the Times website:
Well, just lucky, or just acquiescent, I suppose.
The instrumentalization of the university isn’t a necessary or inexorable fate. It’s part and parcel of a culture that deems profit the highest good, and inquiry the pastime of effete “elites” who spend their days in meaningless debate on exegesis of “non-essential” texts.
What the financial and economic crisis now unfolding shows us, I hope, is that practicality as an end in itself isn’t really that practical, that at the end of the day, reasoned and thorough debate on issues that affect each of us profoundly is as important as the business cycle or technological advancement. Take philosophy, for instance. Once the queen of the sciences, it has, as you suggest, assumed a position at the margins, deemed thoroughly impractical by those who move the levers of commerce and fundraising. But is the work of Kant, whose ethics caution against willing an end that is not universal, or Adorno, who (rightfully) fulminated against the idiocies of mass culture, or Habermas, who provided valuable if flawed insights into the nature of the transformative and toxic mixture of media/business/government, really useless in contemporary society?
I would argue no, and I would hope that any defenders of free inquiry would agree with me. At the end of the day, the humanities play a critical role in directing and regulating contemporary discourse. To dismiss them as old hat or as useless in a “globalized economy” is to admit that the modus vivendi of profit/success maximization is indeed the greatest good. The universities ignore this at their own peril. I have no doubt that a greater number of universities will abandon their obligations to direct inquiry toward the pursuit of the good life, which, as Aristotle reminds us, is the ultimate pursuit of philosophy. But anyone with an intellect can see through the ruse of the free market ideology, and can dare to ask what the world should be like, even if the answer is “impractical.”
Practicality in itself is meaningless if not directed toward some higher pursuit. The goal of the humanities is to do just that, and if the universities fail, alternate avenues of discourse will open up. Your column is disappointing in this respect, Professor Fish — that you don’t wager a defense of the humanities, but complacently bemoan that times were good while you were around, while those of us who are young (I’m 23) should have no hope for the future of critical inquiry. It may be a burlesqued trope that the humanities “broaden minds,” but I would argue that the value of the humanities lies in their willingness to challenge the illusion of political and economic consensus, to point the way to pursuits that have nothing to do with productivity or profit.
Critical inquiry is one of few goods-in-itself, and it will be a sad day when the institutions which exist to safeguard the opportunity to pursue such inquiry relinquish their responsibilities.1.12.2009
Moving Forward
Well, I'm putting in my two weeks' notice at my current job tomorrow/today (Monday -- it doesn't count as today until one wakes up, as far as I'm concerned) and taking a part-time job at an independent bookstore outside of Boston. The pay is much less, but I'm so looking forward to waking up everyday and looking forward to going to work and having the time to write and read. I'm scared, too, particularly given the current economic climate, but living creatively isn't ever easy, and always takes some sort of leap of faith to get started. So here we go.
For the next two weeks -- while I'm employed at my current job -- I won't be posting that often, but once I'm done there, I will be working on this site daily or almost daily. I don't have any pretensions to being Andrew Sullivan and am looking to post longer ruminations and essay-type pieces, but I will try to get something new posted each day. I'm also looking to cross-post at dailyKos, and will have more information about that once I get things set up. My username there is destructiveanachronism, but since I just signed up a few days ago (apparently you can't change your username -- I had been posting as dtreader) I can't open a diary for a few more days.
For the next two weeks -- while I'm employed at my current job -- I won't be posting that often, but once I'm done there, I will be working on this site daily or almost daily. I don't have any pretensions to being Andrew Sullivan and am looking to post longer ruminations and essay-type pieces, but I will try to get something new posted each day. I'm also looking to cross-post at dailyKos, and will have more information about that once I get things set up. My username there is destructiveanachronism, but since I just signed up a few days ago (apparently you can't change your username -- I had been posting as dtreader) I can't open a diary for a few more days.
1.04.2009
Starting Over
I began work on the novel that I've half-heartedly been "working on" for the better part of two years now today. It is a fictionalized account of a series of events that happened to me and in which I took part as a junior in college, taking place over a few days and involving a surreal road trip from Dartmouth to New York City. The main participants were myself and two fraternity brothers of mine -- but that's about where the college-y, fratty, ROAD TRIP! markers end. The journey stood out to me of the all the lunatic times I had there for the rather strange mixture of personalities as well as the fucked-up things we got ourselves into, involving among others the seduction of an evangelical Christian girl, a multicolored hot tub, smoking weed in the subway, a trip to New Haven at 2 in the morning with broken windows in 30 degree March, and a short series of mushroom trips.
I've long struggled with what to do with such lovely subject material, how to organize it, conjure up a plot to project onto a series of reckless and defiant behavior, to be set against the uneasy backdrop of coming of age in post-9/11 America. The broad theme that I want to work on entails navagating a course between the regimentation and technologicization of everyday day and the self-destructive nihilism of irreponsible narcissists (such as we were) on a serious drug binge against that very backdrop. Oh there are all sorts of fun questions I want to ask and maybe answer about systems of social control, sexuality, what remains of individuality and what prospects it has for the future. I'm still struggling with unifying these various interests under the aegis of a coherent and compelling narrative. The creative process is still somewhat foreign to me -- I have plenty of experience with the burst of inspiration, the frenetic passion of the "moment." I tend to lose myself in the construction, description, and production of the nimbus that remains when the fireworks are done. That's the part I'm trying to overcome now.
I've spent the last two years or so in a numbing and increasingly self-destructive depression. Depression is something I've been prone to/have dealt with my entire adult life, beginning as a high school freshman struggling to cope with his parents' divorce and sudden breakdown of family life. I don't have an answer for it yet. My typical response the last couple years has been pure and unalloyed escapism, courtesy of weed, then wine and World of Warcraft, which is an exceptional purgative of reality. My struggle with the creative process is, of course, deeply linked to the act of running away. Depression breeds or creeps forth from a lack of self-worth, an inability to see in one's self a spark of potential, a wavelength that could bring forth something new and beautiful. I don't talk about these things. They are my hidden burden that I feed after my fiancee goes to sleep, when none of my friends (those whom I've not yet entirely alienated) are around, when family is at a safe distance of several hundred miles. I am a master at deception, at lying, at hiding from anything that could puncture my shell -- or worse, confirm it to me.
Recent events and realizations have managed to do just that -- break through the self-deception and the inverted narcissism that has convinced me for so long that my existence is worth less than the morning dew, to be burned off or brushed away at convenience. And so the defiant optimism of my first post was, to an extent, disingenuous. I stand by it, but with the caveat that much work and much recovery is to be done, before I can with any legitimacy pronounce against the hypocrisy and deception of so many contemporary social phenomena. The first step, so they say, is honesty, so this is honesty. My fiancee found me slumped over in a chair with my computer in front of me, dead drunk on vintage Scotch whiskey that we had been saving for a special occasion. This after three days of similar behavior. That's the truth, and it's a testament to her faith in me that I still have a fiancee.
So to come back to the original theme: I am writing this novel for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the desire to explore thematically the nihilism, narcissism, and substance abuse which I have allowed to fog my brain and retard my self-development these past few years, in an attempt to purge myself of that part of my life. The greater goal, of course, is to create a work of which I can be proud, and on which I can base the prospects for future success as a writer, for I don't think I'm made to be anything else. My abject failure at incorporation into corporation life has taught me that.
As I work on the hard part -- setting the structure, unifying the theme, developing the dramatis personae -- I will post updates, and as I write, excerpts.
I don't have confidence in my ability to write, which has been a major part of the problem, but the realization that whatever ability I may have is meaningless if I drink it away and wallow in self-immolation has finally acquired an urgency to it that's spurring me to action.
I've long struggled with what to do with such lovely subject material, how to organize it, conjure up a plot to project onto a series of reckless and defiant behavior, to be set against the uneasy backdrop of coming of age in post-9/11 America. The broad theme that I want to work on entails navagating a course between the regimentation and technologicization of everyday day and the self-destructive nihilism of irreponsible narcissists (such as we were) on a serious drug binge against that very backdrop. Oh there are all sorts of fun questions I want to ask and maybe answer about systems of social control, sexuality, what remains of individuality and what prospects it has for the future. I'm still struggling with unifying these various interests under the aegis of a coherent and compelling narrative. The creative process is still somewhat foreign to me -- I have plenty of experience with the burst of inspiration, the frenetic passion of the "moment." I tend to lose myself in the construction, description, and production of the nimbus that remains when the fireworks are done. That's the part I'm trying to overcome now.
I've spent the last two years or so in a numbing and increasingly self-destructive depression. Depression is something I've been prone to/have dealt with my entire adult life, beginning as a high school freshman struggling to cope with his parents' divorce and sudden breakdown of family life. I don't have an answer for it yet. My typical response the last couple years has been pure and unalloyed escapism, courtesy of weed, then wine and World of Warcraft, which is an exceptional purgative of reality. My struggle with the creative process is, of course, deeply linked to the act of running away. Depression breeds or creeps forth from a lack of self-worth, an inability to see in one's self a spark of potential, a wavelength that could bring forth something new and beautiful. I don't talk about these things. They are my hidden burden that I feed after my fiancee goes to sleep, when none of my friends (those whom I've not yet entirely alienated) are around, when family is at a safe distance of several hundred miles. I am a master at deception, at lying, at hiding from anything that could puncture my shell -- or worse, confirm it to me.
Recent events and realizations have managed to do just that -- break through the self-deception and the inverted narcissism that has convinced me for so long that my existence is worth less than the morning dew, to be burned off or brushed away at convenience. And so the defiant optimism of my first post was, to an extent, disingenuous. I stand by it, but with the caveat that much work and much recovery is to be done, before I can with any legitimacy pronounce against the hypocrisy and deception of so many contemporary social phenomena. The first step, so they say, is honesty, so this is honesty. My fiancee found me slumped over in a chair with my computer in front of me, dead drunk on vintage Scotch whiskey that we had been saving for a special occasion. This after three days of similar behavior. That's the truth, and it's a testament to her faith in me that I still have a fiancee.
So to come back to the original theme: I am writing this novel for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the desire to explore thematically the nihilism, narcissism, and substance abuse which I have allowed to fog my brain and retard my self-development these past few years, in an attempt to purge myself of that part of my life. The greater goal, of course, is to create a work of which I can be proud, and on which I can base the prospects for future success as a writer, for I don't think I'm made to be anything else. My abject failure at incorporation into corporation life has taught me that.
As I work on the hard part -- setting the structure, unifying the theme, developing the dramatis personae -- I will post updates, and as I write, excerpts.
I don't have confidence in my ability to write, which has been a major part of the problem, but the realization that whatever ability I may have is meaningless if I drink it away and wallow in self-immolation has finally acquired an urgency to it that's spurring me to action.
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