a fading implement?

In “The Whisperer in Darkness,” Wilmarth uses a magnifying glass to look at the photos.

Is it just me, or does it seem like the magnifying glass is passing more and more out of the standard human toolbox?

My grandparents always had one, but my parents never did as far as I know. And I seem to remember my grandparents treating it as a fairly standard piece of household equipment. For my part, I have never owned one nor even considered buying one. Nor would I immediately know where to buy one if I wished to do so.

I suppose you might have a magnifying glass in the case of certain hobbies: stamp collecting, for instance. But I don’t know anybody in my age group who has ever owned one.

Alternatively, I suppose it could be something that everyone drifts into using with advanced age and failing eyesight. In that case it would be somewhat like an umbrella. When I was in my early 20’s I never owned an umbrella, and wrongly thought that no one used them anymore, simply because my friends and I at that age didn’t see the point of avoiding getting a little bit wet with a dash down the street.

a revealing passage from Lovecraft: vague, but damnably suggestive

This passage from “The Whisperer in Darkness,” which refers to the photographs of footprints of the flying crab-creatures sent by Akeley to Wilmarth, could also function as a description of Lovecraft’s own work:

“…in spite of the vagueness of most of [the photos], they had a damnably suggestive power…”

Much like Poe, his stylistic ancestor even more than his forerunner in the “scary” genre, Lovecraft systematically produces that which is “vague, yet damnably suggestive.”

If there is one theme that is typically Lovecraftian, it is not the tininess of humans in the cosmos, nor even the more literal theme of extremely horrifying extraterrestrial monsters hiding in New England and elsewhere; the latter is merely the vehicle he uses.

Instead, the central Lovecraftian theme is the gap between realities and their manifestations: whether it be the gap between horrifying events and the traces of them discovered later (the camp scene in “At the Mountains of Madness”), the inadequacy of language to describe the fabulous anatomies of the various creatures (Wilbur’s decaying corpse in the Miskatonic library), even the inadequacy of the known structure of space-time and Euclidean geometry to serve as physical sites for his monsters.

With most writers, when they begin to talk about the impossibility of describing this or that entity in words, they draw attention to themselves; it becomes an exercise in self-reflexivity. In Lovecraft’s case, there’s nothing self-reflexive about this process at all: the thing itself is shown to be incommensurable with any possible description of it, yet he makes an attempt anyway, in such a manner that we do gain some vague sense of what the thing looks like (though not enough to draw or paint it, and this is why I’m an iconoclast in Lovecraft’s case: no Lovecraft paintings, sculptures, or films should be allowed). No other writers I can think of are more effective at undermining their own language in a way that makes the things they describe even more vivid.

McLuhan on the 1976 Ford/Carter debate

McLuhan on the Today show with Tom Brokaw and Edwin Newman, with very harsh remarks about the debate format and about the performance of both candidates.

Julian Young

Laureano Ralon’s latest interview is with Julian Young. HERE.

Facebook exodus

You can read HERE about signs of Facebook fatigue, including the loss of 7 million users in North America.

My peak of anger against Facebook (over their violations of privacy) came in spring 2010. At the time I deleted my page completely, though I had little choice but to rejoin in January/February 2011 in order not to miss out on all the Egyptian Revolution information, which was mushrooming on the Facebook site at the time. Now I use Facebook mostly as a “read-only” site, posting almost nothing of my own anymore but using it to access information posted by others.

All the reasons people cite against Facebook in this article seem like valid objections. But I think that, in McLuhanian terms, they can be boiled down to phenomena related to “overheated media.” There is a glut of everything there– invitations, friends, games, wall posts to be read. It’s all too exhausting, and eventually the payoff proves to be limited.

But my own primary objections to Facebook remain the same as they were 18 months ago:

*privacy problems

*inability to keep different parts of one’s life separate (I had several people commit moderate gaffes in saying things on my wall that not all 200 of my Facebook friends needed to know at that stage, and this experience has probably been shared by all of you)

*social pressure to add people to your friends list who you really don’t want on there in the first place

*friends no longer emailing because they say they were “already keeping up with my news on Facebook”

*the annoying tendency of many people to use Facebook messages rather than email, making it harder to keep track of past correspondence

Facebook was extremely fun when I first started using it in 2007. Then, like email itself, it stopped being fun and became an obsessive chore.

There’s only one person in the CNN article whom I find to be a bit of an ass. This guy:

“Joshua DeRosa, a Salt Lake City graphic artist and former Facebook user, agrees. ‘I don’t need to see pics or hear updates about people’s babies,’ he says. ‘I know what babies look like, and while you might think what Junior did was the cutest thing ever, I couldn’t care less.'”

I’m not sure what Mr. DeRosa expects people to put on their Facebook pages to amuse his precious time, but if people are proud of their new babies, I think we should cut them a bit of slack. That’s a universally respected topic of interpersonal conversation; the delight taken by most people in infants is one of the pillars of human society, and ought to be safe ground on a site such as Facebook.

No, the truly annoying thing is people saying tactless things that they should never be saying in a crowded room. And that’s what ultimately makes Facebook such a horrible idea in principle: why would you want all 400 people you know gathered in the same room making comments about you? Clearly it’s only a matter of time before something embarrassing happens.

first-ever high school reunion coming up

As for many people in intellectual fields, high school wasn’t the high point of my life. At the time I really hated it, in fact. But it doesn’t leave any bitter traces in memory by now, perhaps because I’m geographically so far from the experience that it approaches irrelevance. By contrast, some people I know who stayed physically nearby remain somewhat scarred by that era of life.

I’m from a very small town (3,000 people then, a mere 4,000 even now), and of the 75 or so kids in my graduating class, I’d say 45 or 50 were with me from Kindergarten all the way through senior year of high school. I really grew up with these people, in other words, and in some cases their parents grew up with my father.

Initially I was indifferent to the 25th reunion (though I almost went to the 20th), and was only talked into attending by one good friend who really basked in the high school experience– star football player and so forth. But as the time approaches I’m finding it a potentially more and more fascinating event. How often do you get to see a whole group of people simultaneously who you know extremely well, but have not seen at all in 25 years? There should be all kinds of surprises, and also a number of people with whom it will simply be a pleasure to catch up.

They time this to coincide with the town festival, Heritage Days, which I last attended seriously at about age 11. And when all is said and done, it’s probably one of the more charming small towns in the entire Midwest; much of it is on the national historic registry. Lots of brick streets and nice old houses, and generally more the feel of New England than of Iowa.

My parents are no longer there, however. Back in the mid-1990’s they relocated into a culturally very different area less than a half hour away.

The house I grew up in was purchased by the town and deliberately burned for fire department practice in extinguishing the fire. They then tore down the remains, bulldozed everything away, and built a new municipal baseball field on top of it. Only a few distinctive trees remain from what was once a quasi-rural childhood landscape, and even with those trees it is hard to calculate exactly where the house once stood. The burning took place in 1997 or 1998, and my first visit to the property afterward was quite a shock.

It’s a place that’s burned pretty deeply into memory, as you might well imagine given that I lived there from the ages of about 3-18. If I were ever to use those ancient oratorical tricks where you memorize a long speech by putting each paragraph in one area of well known spatial location and then walking through that space, then I would certainly use this town as my mnemonic pillar. It’s quite easy to walk up and down every street in my imagination, cover the whole town, and presumably not miss much of anything.

You have to remember as well that there was no obvious reason why I thought I would ever go too far from there. Five generations preceding me had chosen not to go far, at least on one side of the family. Both of my brothers left as well, and I doubt there’s much that would be capable of luring us back at this stage of history.

the young painters of the late 1940’s

Having spent 1945 and 1946 ripping the mediocrity of the younger American painters, Greenberg sees a 1947 show of younger French painters at the Whitney, and decides that they are even worse:

“Neo-cubists, neo-realists, neo-surrealists, neo-expressionists– they are alike in their brittle color and their excited and equally brittle design. Where their American equivalents tend to mud or garishness, French painters tend, apparently, to confetti and neon lights. If the Americans seem stodgy and dull, the liveliness and the knowingness of the French are empty. Nor, contrary to expectations, are the French more facile or tasteful. They are just as coarse, just as inept for the most part– and hysterical in the bargain.”

report from Tamanya’s babysitter

Tamanya has arrived in Ma’adi. The two reports I received were:

1. She’s just as cute as she was the first time she was there. (This is true, though she has quadrupled in weight and probably tripled in length since then.)

2. She’s no longer used to the three adult cats who are there. Most likely she doesn’t remember them at all. But she got along with them brilliantly last time, and I expect more of the same this time.

a possibly better 20th century writer

Concerning the other really elite writers of the 20th century, who is Greenberg’s competition? To simplify the exercise, let’s limit ourselves to non-fiction.

If the proverbial gun were held to my head and I were forced to name the greatest writer of the 20th century, it would probably be Freud. People complain about Joyce, Proust, and Kafka never winning the Nobel for Literature, but I think Freud’s omission is at least as great a crime.

Often people don’t even bother to read Freud. He is so culturally ubiquitous, so widely known as the source of a handful of useful tricks in interpersonal dealings (“if someone leaves something at your house, they want to come back”) and a few other boiled-down conclusions that can be offensive to women, homosexuals, and some other groups.

So, you feel like you know him in advance. “Everything is sex,” or some other vulgarization along those lines. And that’s why I never read a word of Freud until my senior year in college. But the experience was so powerful that I spent the summer after graduation doing nothing but reading almost everything he’d ever written.

The lucidity and power of Freud’s thought processes are all the more impressive when you consider that for much of that time he was wandering in a forest with only a handful of supporters. Almost any time you pick up an essay by Freud, you can bet that it will be magnificently constructed, easy to follow, and contain several major surprises that will stick with you for hours if not days.

But it’s likely that I didn’t even fully appreciate Freud until teaching him in Egypt. Here, his ideas are not part of the stock cultural fund of interpersonal psychology. They’re somewhat unfamiliar, in fact, and one of my most satisfying experiences as a teacher was doing a whole semester on Freud at AUC and seeing how many doors he opens, and how quickly, for people who essentially have no prior notion of his theories at all.

Anyway, Freud is a tough competitor for Greenberg as a prose writer. Freud probably has the edge due to his greater mastery of larger structures of writing. Greenberg is at his best with one-liners and two-liners and three-liners.

Greenberg

I’m entertaining more and more seriously Robert Jackson’s claim that Clement Greenberg could be the best 20th century writer. There are a number of candidates for that honor, but the power that Greenberg packs into one or two sentences is really hard to beat. Every morning in recent weeks, what literally makes me happiest is the thought that I’ll be able to read 4 or 5 more of his mini-essays on the bus ride to campus.

I was going to call his writings “a feast,” but that’s obviously the wrong metaphor. A feast implies abundance, whereas Greenberg serves up small but exquisitely prepared portions of prose. An even better metaphor, which I’ve used before, is wine-tasting. Reading Greenberg is like doing a vineyard tour with someone who really knows what they’re talking about.

These volumes of collected criticism have been around for quite awhile, since the 1980’s I believe. And I saw them in a bookstore in Iowa City as early as 1995, but didn’t think to buy and read them. That’s too bad, because I was probably ready to appreciate them even then.

There are certain authors we aren’t ready for until a certain point. For example, Heidegger would have meant little to me at age 13, and I tried and failed to read Being and Time at 17 and 18. But at 19 I was ready for it and plowed straight through. It took me until deep into my thirties to appreciate Plato fully, since I used to be annoyed by what seemed like the back-and-forth chatter over pious-sounding topics such as virtue and justice (Nietzsche: “Plato is boring”); others like him much sooner.

Then there are other authors where you just know you would have been ready for them much sooner, and really wish you had gotten down to business much sooner. I could have been reading Latour 6 or 7 years earlier, for example.

It’s like that with people, too. There are people who would have left little impression on you if met any earlier or in a different context, and then there are others you really should have known decades earlier and it’s tragic that you didn’t.