“integral arrogance”

Funniest thing I’ve read all day. Clement Greenberg writing on Arshile Gorky in 1946:

“Gorky’s art does not yet constitute an eruption into the mainstream of contemporary painting, as I think Jackson Pollock’s does. On occasion he still lapses into dependence on Miró… Yet the chances are, now that he has discovered what he is and is willing to admit it, that Gorky will soon acquire the integral arrogance that his talent entitles him to. When he does acquire that kind of arrogance, it is possible that he will begin to paint pictures so original that they will look ugly at first.”

Unfortunately, we never saw what might have been Gorky’s best work, since he only had 2 years left to live. The end of his Wikipedia bio is poignant enough:

“This peak period of Gorky’s work was cut short. His final years were filled with immense pain and heartbreak. His studio barn burned down, he underwent a colostomy for cancer, his neck was broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident, and his wife of seven years left him, taking their children with her. Gorky hanged himself in Sherman, Connecticut, in 1948, at the age of 44. He is buried in North Cemetery in Sherman, Connecticut.”

Bad luck dogged him even after death:

“A plane crash in 1962 took 95 lives and 15 of his paintings and drawings.”

a new and relevant blog

Over at INTRA-BEING, the ethnographer Andre Ling has been writing quite a bit about OOO. There’s a post over there about my “Vicarious Causation” article, and other things of that sort.

LeBron’s preseason “Nike” apology

This takes on added poignancy after yet another failed season. You really want the guy to succeed, just not in 2011.

brutal dig!

A minor league baseball team, the Peoria Chiefs (a class A Chicago Cubs affiliate) will be hosting a viciously titled “LeBron James NBA Championship Replica Giveaway night.”

As the story puts it:

“‘Replica rings’ — also known as air — will be handed out by stadium workers as fans enter the park, according to Chiefs spokesman Nathan Baliva.”

Poor LeBron. Despite being generally one of the nicest major sports stars we’ve ever seen, he’s dug himself such a national hole of mockery (thanks mostly to his own decisions) that he is ridiculed even by fans of a different sport in a state, Illinois, that has nothing whatsoever to do with him.

How will this affect LeBron over time? Will he retreat into his shell with increasingly hurt feelings, shying the limelight? Will he ignore it and keep playing the same way? Or will he start to turn a bit prickly and aggressive?

I do feel sorry for him. However, you’d have to say he’s earned it, at least for a few more years. People are now completely justified in mocking the Miami Heat “welcome party” from last summer.

What a difference is made by a week or so. When Miami went up 2-1 in the Finals, we were all getting ready to bow down and say we were wrong. Instead, LeBron and Wade look like a couple of arrogant and immature failures after the cockiness of last summer and the silly “cough” joke about Nowitzki, who cleaned their clocks.

The difference is that Wade already does have a championship ring, won against these same Dallas Mavericks five years ago. LeBron has nothing but an imaginary ring, and even the fans in Peoria will be making fun of it this Thursday night.

Ouch, that has to hurt.

I’m actually starting not to like the way people are piling on LeBron. I think I’ve decided to be his fan again next season (as long as he isn’t playing against Chicago).

challenging cat day

Tamanya’s really giving me a hard time today. Never seen her this bratty before. She’s making everything difficult on purpose.

underpriced Intrade stock

Anthony Weiner to resign by September 30 is still only at 61.9%.

I can’t believe it’s that low.

There’s a 17-year-old girl involved in the story now. Obama already dropped the heaviest of hints yesterday, saying: “if it were me, I would resign.”

There’s no way Weiner is going to weather this through September 30.

If not that I don’t actually want to make bets on news events, there would be an excellent 40% windfall earnings opportunity here. If Weiner is in Congress on October 1, it will be a shock.

There are plenty of people who have made fortunes on the stock market. I wonder if anyone has ever become an Intrade millionaire, parlaying their political instincts into an Intrade fortune. My friend Graeme Wood will soon be in Dublin to do a story on them; I’ll ask him afterward who the biggest Intrade tycoon in history is.

hawkish Republican consensus beginning to end

Here is an INTERESTING PIECE in the NY Times about the Republican positions on military use that are emerging so far in this campaign.

It’s the beginning of the end of the homogeneously hawkish stance of most Republicans other than Ron Paul since 2001.

In part this is fatigue with Afghanistan and Iraq, and in part it’s simply that Obama, as the incumbent, has become the owner of the hawkishness.

The interesting thing about the bin Laden raid, politically, is that if there was one issue on which the Obama team was always more hawkish than the Republicans in 2008, it was Pakistan. Obama, Biden, and James Jones had all made public statements about going into Pakistan unilaterally to catch bin Laden, which even McCain was shying away from back then.

Dennett and phenomenology

Over at the NewApps blog, there’s an exchange going on following THIS POST by Jethro Masis on how Dennett gets phenomenology wrong.

My position is different from any of the others I’m seeing there. While I agree with Masis that Dennett and Metzinger do not grasp phenomenology very well, I’m afraid I cannot agree with this part of the post:

“I really don’t want to get into technicalities. Suffice it to say that there’s nothing easier than weeding out Dennett’s interpretation of phenomenology as introspection because —as Dan Zahavi has consistently pointed out— ‘all the major figures in the phenomenological tradition have openly and unequivocally denied that they are engaged in some kind of introspective psychology and that the method they employ is a method of introspection’ (for example, Husserl, Heidegger, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty in several passages). Moreover, introspection is actually antiphenomenological from the outset for the very point of departure of phenomenology in Husserl’s breakthrough work, Logische Untersuchungen (1900-1901), was precisely a call to abandon the dichotomy (Scheidung) between inner and outer perceptions, which Husserl associated with a naïve commonsensical metaphysics left behind with the concept of intentionality. And of course, introspection is parasitic of this Scheidung which endorses the idea that consciousness is somewhat inside the head and the world outside.”

I see this as a dangerous argument that endorses the weaknesses of phenomenology while overlooking its strengths.

As I read it, Masis’ point here is roughly that “you can’t accuse phenomenology of idealism, because it’s already beyond the realism/idealism divide.”

No, it isn’t. Husserlian intentionality does not overcome the distinction between inner and outer perception. It is totally and completely idealist in character. And until this is admitted and rectified, there will always be an opening for the Dennetts and the Metzingers to take shots at phenomenology.

Husserl’s originality lies not in some mythical overcoming of the realism/idealism divide (which he simply never achieves) but in his being the first person I can think of to theorize an object/quality dualism within the phenomenal sphere. As far as I can tell, it was simply assumed by everyone that the realm of experience contains nothing but qualities, bundled or attached in some other fashion. Any true unity to the thing must lie outside experience, in the outer world.

Husserl, by contrast, identifies an object/quality strife in the phenomenal realm itself. The phenomenal tree remains the same tree despite a swirling patina of shifting adumbrations through which it is encountered. We don’t even see this insight in Brentano or Twardowski, who as far as I can tell remain too much under the distant influence of British Empiricism when describing the phenomenal sphere: it’s all about “content” for them, whereas for Husserl phenomenal experience is about something deeper than content, since contents shift constantly without intentional objects necessarily changing.

And I don’t think Husserl would have been under any pressure to see this if not for his idealism. By confining himself to phenomenal experience as if to a prison, he had strong motivations to find interesting and previously unnoticed features of that prison.

Which is not the same thing as saying that he “overcame” the prison, which he didn’t. He was trapped within it more and more as time went by.

We should appreciate Husserl far more than he’s appreciated by mainstream continental hipsterism at the moment, but we shouldn’t credit him with transcending a dispute in which he is thoroughly inscribed in one of the two opposing positions, far from being beyond it.

like a figure from the deeply distant past

No one in the media even seemed to notice… June 11 was the 10th anniversary of the execution of Oklahoma City bomber TIMOTHY MCVEIGH.

If 9/11 hadn’t happened, that probably would have been big news, since Oklahoma City was an unprecedented shock at the time. But just three months after McVeigh was executed in a federal prison in Indiana, his actions were permanently eclipsed.

This may sound like a weird question, but it would be interesting to know if 9/11 actually diminished the trauma in Oklahoma City somewhat. It’s a familiar experience that we can be having a bad day, hear about someone’s much worse day (such as being diagnosed with cancer), and suddenly decide our problem is pretty small by comparison. I suppose that can happen on the level of collective psychology as well, and other those who actually lost friends and family members, I wonder if Oklahoma Cityans somehow had their 1995 trauma reframed by the bigger national trauma a few years later.

speaking of Jordan’s last shot

It wasn’t literally his last shot, since he had the brief and mostly boring comeback with the Washington Wizards a few years later. But it was his last shot for Chicago, his last shot in the 20th century, and his last shot as Jordan rather than as “Throwback Old Man Gimmick Jordan.”

Jordan with the steal on the other end, then a shot over Russell that, as Simmons said, you absolutely knew he was going to hit. If he had missed it, the series would have gone to Game 7 and the Bulls might have lost the series.

The problem with LeBron: he would have passed to Wade, afraid to take the shot himself. Jordan was a killer, afraid of nothing.