my next interview

I’m interviewed HERE in Mute magazine by Diarmuid Hester.

Dutch government to ban tourists from drug shops

HERE.

Things have been taking a more conservative turn there lately. I have no especial interest in marijuana, but I think it’s healthy for every culture to have a place where the usual rules are suspended– a sort of pressure valve.

Las Vegas and to some extent New Orleans play that role for the USA, Bangkok for Asia, Bahrain (to a lesser extent) for the Gulf Arab countries, and Amsterdam for Europe. I think Amsterdam should stay that way. It will just make the Netherlands seem stuffy and bland if they keep following this path.

elements 114 and 116 added to periodic table

HERE. They are not yet named, but like all the new elements they last for only a fraction of a second.

Elements 113 and 115 are not yet accepted, so this brings the accepted total to 114.

gmail’s overactive spam filter

Man. I ought to check it more often. There was some really important stuff caught in the spam filter!

Greenberg vs. Kandinsky

Though I really ought to be doing nothing but regroup from the trip, I’m never too busy to share samples of powerful writing. And the more Clement Greenberg I read, the more I tend to agree with our friend Robert Jackson that he’s one of the most powerful writers of the 20th century.

To repeat an earlier point, I think that was largely because he adapted so well to the genre that was forced upon him. Greenberg had to write extremely short pieces of art criticism in most cases, and so he developed the ability to pack sentences and paragraphs as densely as bombs.

For example, here he is on Kandinsky, about whom he is rather critical. I don’t even think I agree with much of this, but it’s so good that it doesn’t matter in the least. Try to count how many potentially important cultural insights there are in these samples:

“There are two sorts of provincialism in art. The exponent of one is the artist, academic or otherwise, who works in an outmoded style or in a vein disregarded by the metropolitan center– Paris, Rome, or Athens. The other sort of provincialism is that of the artist –generally from an outlying country– who in all earnestness and admiration devotes himself to the style being currently developed in the metropolitan center, yet fails in one way or another really to understand what it is about… [One] provincial of this latter sort is… the Russian, Wassily Kandinsky, who died two weeks ago in Paris at the age of seventy-eight.”

“[Kandinsky and Marsden Hartley] were quite different as painters but both were alike in being provincial. Hartley failed to understand the School of Paris because he really lacked culture. Kandinsky was learned and at ease in his learning, and was one of the first, if not the first, to get an intellectual purchase on post-cubist painting, yet he failed in the end to understand it in practice. (Kandinsky and Hartley were further alike in that they both came to post-impressionist painting through German expressionism, which seemed to make post-impressionism more accessible to non-Latin outsiders.)”

“Like many a newcomer to a situation, seeing it from the outside and thus more completely, Kandinsky was very quick to perceive one of the most basic implications of the revolution cubism had effected in Western painting. Pictorial art was at last able to free itself from the object… But Kandinsky erred in assuming that this newly won freedom exhausted the meaning of the cubist revolution and that it permitted the artist to make a clean break with the past and start all over again from scratch– something which no art can do without losing all sense of style.”

“Kandinsky, in principle, seems to have paid ample homage to the new awareness that easel-painting takes place on a flat, continuous, finitely bounded surface, but he lacked an intuitive grasp of the consequences of these facts in actual practice. As if in reaction against his earlier liquescent style, he came to conceive of the picture überhaupt as an aggregate of discrete shapes; the color, size, and spacing of these he related so insensitively to the space surrounding them… that this remained inactive and meaningless; the sense of a continuous surface was lost, and the picture plane became pocked with ‘holes.'”

“At the same time, having begun by accepting the absolute flatness of the picture surface, Kandinsky would go on to allude to illusionistic depth by a use of color, line, and perspective that were plastically irrelevant. Last but not least, the consistency of his paint surface and the geometric exactness of his line seem more appropriate to stone or metal than to the porous fabric of canvas– this stricture also applies to Mondrian.”

“…academic reminiscences crept into [Kandinsky’s paintings] at almost every point other than that of what they ‘represented.’ And only a sense of style acquired from closer contact with the School of Paris would have insured him against such reminiscences, or at least agaisnt their discordant quality.”

“As a result of his failure to acquire a modern sense of style, Kandinsky remained an insecure painter… The stylistic and thematic ingredients of Kandinsky’s later work are as diverse as the colors of Joseph’s coat: peasant, ancient, and Oriental art, much Klee, some Picasso, surrealist protoplasma, maps, blueprints, musical notation, etc., etc…. A real high style would have imposed harmony upon materials even more diverse, but Kandinsky could have developed such a style, as I have said, only by going to the the School of Paris for inspiration. It remains the necessary source of the only high styles of painting our age is capable of, even as Italy remained the only such source during the sixteenth century.”

Again I complain that people don’t really know how to size up philosophers this well (regardless of what you happen to think of Kandinsky, whose paintings I rather enjoy looking at, in fact). We rush to considerations of what they are right and wrong about, as if all other questions were nothing but arbitrary personal reverie.

Occasionally Nietzsche and Schopenhauer hit this sort of Greenbergian note in advance, but not often. This sort of criticism remains largely untested in philosophy.

Just think how good a history of philosophy essay could be that began: “There are two sorts of provincialism in philosophy…”

Good wine criticism is just as impressive, and so too with the first-rate critics in cinema, restaurants, theater, music, etc. These people often know how to write extremely well simply because their subject matter presses them towards new kinds of subtlety. Good writing is not an ornament plastered onto pre-existent propositions: good writing is itself the best way of probing for fresh thoughts.

some quick marginal thoughts on Laruelle

Laruelle doesn’t write like the other recent French thinkers. He writes more like a 35-year-old German who’s really into recent French philosophy. There’s a technical precision and density there that we’re more accustomed to finding in German authors, and his literary gifts are more in the area of wise aphoristic sentences surrounded by much professorial bookkeeping (think Hegel or Husserl) than in the extended stylistic ballets that one is used to finding in French philosophers, for better and for worse.

Laruelle is also a clever reader of people like Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida, picking up things that others miss, and I think he is often brilliantly on target.

That said, while the central idea is pretty clear, I don’t find it especially powerful. (Some of the people who want to know what the “payoff” is for OOO are Laruelle fans, but if there’s any recent author whose “payoff” is unclear, it’s Laruelle himself– who makes a point of trumping everything in sight, but often without much of a pot on the table when he throws down the trump card.) But maybe I’m still missing something. I’ll think it over a good deal before actually writing the review, because you never want to misfire on an emerging thinker of significance.

I don’t know Rocco Gangle at all, but he seems smart and to the point. His preface isn’t a boring waste of time as some prefaces are; you actually learn from it, and it’s readable.

But I’d better save the details and my broader conclusions for the bigger audience.

Egypt

I love it that there’s that definite moment when you know the plane has entered Egypt. I’m always coming from either the north or the east, and in both cases there is sea, and then suddenly is land, and you know you’re back in Egypt.

good news: it’s peak watermelon season here, and the melons are excellent

tonight: see a friend

tomorrow: office

now reading: Virginia Woolf

But I also want to go back and finish Hillary Spurling’s Matisse biography. It was a Christmas gift to me in 2005, I immediately read a good chunk of it, but then was sidetracked and will now have to start from scratch. A couple of people were discussing it in Venice, and that reminded me I need to get back into it.

now writing: the extra Circus Philosophicus myth, which will immediately be translated into German and may not appear in English for a long time.

interesting sense experiences at Istanbul Airport restaurant

First, the guy on one side of me has a softly barking puppy in a cage, ready to go on a flight. In one sense I feel sorry for the puppy, but it isn’t that distressed, and it’s very cute.

Second, the Turkish woman to my right is wearing extremely strong perfume. Usually this is mocked as vulgar and showy, but I always like it, given that my sense of smell isn’t that good.

I heard the same about either Ben or Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s. One of them doesn’t smell very well, and that’s why they put gigantic pieces of things in the ice cream.

Another poor guy who has no sense of smell at all is Stevie Wonder, I kid you not. He was already blind, but then had a severe car accident that destroyed his sense of smell when he was hit in the head with steel beams, or something of that sort. Some people get all the bad luck.

wifi access at Istanbul Airport

I’m putting this up less for the benefit of my blog readers than for any travelers who happen to Google the topic contained in the title of this post.

Wifi access at Istanbul Airport… there’s one free network, but it’s one of those things where they want to send you the password by SMS. They always did that in India too, and it drove me crazy because I happen not to like traveling with a phone (just because Vodafone Egypt has royally screwed me with roaming charges on trips a couple of times, just as they royally screwed the Egyptian public as a whole by co-operating with the Mubarak regime’s telecom blackout, without a peep of protest).

If you travel without a cell phone, as I prefer to do, your best option is the restaurant called The Greenport, inside the passport control area. You have to order something to eat or drink, but if you do so the waitstaff is then perfectly nice about giving you a card with their network name and password, for free access.