speaking of Morton: July 1 at the Royal Academy

A few other familiar names are on the roster with Tim as well:

HERE.

More generally, July will be one of the more important months in the brief history of OOO, with Morton’s lecture, plus at least 4 books on the topic coming out.

the expressway near Hoofddorp

If any of my Amsterdam friends are reading this, sorry, I’m only here for a 6-hour nap before getting on another plane at the crack of dawn. That’s why I didn’t call anyone. I’m on the expressway in Hoofddorp, pretty far from the center of A’dam.

I was just email chatting with Tim Morton, who said he was in one of these “interstitial nowheresville” hotels himself not long ago, near Denver. The one I’m in is surprisingly nice, but the location is so horrible that you’d never stay here unless KLM put you up here after missing a connecting flight. KLM probably owns the hotel, I would guess. And they do a nice job of making it reasonably comfortable. But you wouldn’t ever book a room here for any other reason than a KLM schedule glitch.

what makes or breaks a flight

Really quite simple: how crowded is the flight?

When largely empty, you can stretch out and sleep, the attendants are more attentive, bathrooms are always available when needed with no wait, and you get on and off quickly. These are always great experiences, and you arrive at the destination feeling greatly refreshed.

Unfortunately, this particular flight looks packed, judging from conditions in the gate area.

The one thing I don’t much care for on flights to and from Egypt… Egyptian parents have a fairly “hands off” style when it comes to child wildness. There’s something to be said for this as a parenting technique (and American kids love it when they live in Egypt), but it means that kids go crazy on these flights sometimes, running up and down the aisles and screaming, things like that.

Latour Litanies in Lovecraft

Just about to board the flight, so I can’t go into too much detail, nor do I have time to do an exhaustive check.

But as for the use of so-called “Latour Litanies” by H.P Lovecraft (Ian Bogost’s term for lists of assorted objects), I notice the following pattern, at least in the major tales.

Initially, the only Latour Litanies in Lovecraft seem to be the long lists of “horrific forbidden texts” that he likes to throw into his stories as a spice: the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred (which is bad Arabic by Lovecraft, by the way: the -“ul” at the end of Abdul shouldn’t be duplicated by the “al-” at the beginning of Alhazred, since both are the same definite article repeated twice; should be either Abdul Hazred or Abd al-Hazred); Unaussprechliche Kulten by von Juntzt; and other real and imaginary texts.

But in “At the Mountains of Madness,” Lovecraft really seems to fall in love with Latour Litanies, and uses them extensively. It begins with his description of Pabodie’s ingenious ice-drill, when Lovecraft summarizes its numerous clever components. It continues with lists of various Antarctic creatures and geographical formations.

Robert Jackon on my Greenberg posts

Robert’s thoughts are HERE.

Just as Robert says:

“The problem of course, is that whilst [Greenberg] is undoubtedly influential today and will continue to remain influential for a good while yet, his work is almost-always subject to the opposing side of influential hostility. Most critics of a young age, continue to single out Greenberg/Fried/Krauss as relics of a by-gone era of oppressive authority, elitist high standards, smugness and a ‘stuffy’ purity of form. Most do not remember Greenberg’s actual project, but the stuffy-ness of being enlightened through modernist critique.”

Right. But Robert hits the nail on the head in his very next sentence:

“If you believe his conclusions and not his words, then no wonder.”

More and more, I think this is the problem with most bad reading that misses the point, in whatever field. People are so fixated on whether or not they agree or disagree with an author’s conclusions. But pretty much the most important intellectual skill that exists is the ability to detect quality quite independently of whether or not you like that quality.

Likewise, you’ll quickly know you’re in a fruitless conversation if everyone is busy telling you that they agree or disagree with what you’re saying.

But just as I am suspicious of readers who cannot occasionally admire that which they dislike, I am equally suspicious of authors who appeal only or primarily to those who agree with their conclusions.

Heidegger was a Nazi, but he has plenty of admirers among communists, liberal democrats, and just about any other political group. Why? Because the intellectual quality of his work is so high that there’s no circumventing him.

Nietzsche was an elitist aristocrat and a misogynist, yet he inspires plenty of socialists and women. Why? Because the quality of his mind is at a very high level, whether you like the content of what he’s saying or not.

By the same token, Greenberg’s intellectual quality is such that it ought not to matter whether you “disagree” with his attempt to isolate artworks from surrounding social forces and so forth, or whether you find him to be an elitist. But perhaps it’s just a question of time. He may simply be too intertwined with controversial contemporary issues to get a fair hearing, just as it may be premature to figure out the true stature of Marx, just because so many positive and negative agendas are entangled with his name. (As for Greenberg, I was once at a lecture where an audience member described him as an “idiot,” which is quite simply false. Read him. He was brilliant well beyond common measure, and his achievements are especially remarkable considering that he was heavily self-taught.)

I am always rather skeptical of authors who are admired primarily by those who like and agree with their conclusions. That’s the same reason we like air conditioners: they are very useful on hot summer days.

Finally, it’s ironic that the charge of elitism should be made against Greenberg, who was basically a communist. The only sense in which he was an “elitist” was in the good sense: namely, he distinguished between high-quality and low-quality work. The fact that there will always be some disagreement about such assessments does not mean that the difference doesn’t exist.

We all make such “elitist” decisions constantly. You don’t eat just anything placed before you without deciding whether or not it’s wholesome and/or tasty. You don’t choose friends or mates at random. You don’t choose a career at random. Instead, you try to choose the best in every situation. The fact that my friends and I disagree on what is Chicago’s best restaurant does not mean that all restaurants are equal and that it’s “elitist” not to appreciate them all equally.

same as ever

Boarding shortly. This will be a great six-week trip as always, and a badly needed break from the usual routine.

However, with each passing year I loathe ever more greatly the act of travelling– as opposed to enjoying the destination in every case.

Namely, when I was younger I used to love going to airports, boarding flights, sitting on flights, etc. Now I hate all of that so much that 9 times out of 10 I’d prefer just to stay home if I could. The enjoyment now comes exclusively from being in whatever new environment I reach on each trip.

This trip in particular will be an interesting mix of familiar places (Iowa, Kansas City, Portland) and one unfamiliar place (Providence) to which I nonetheless have strong personal ties despite never having set foot there.

one-hour discrepancy

Between when KLM says my flight is and when the Cairo Airport website says it is. Could be just a Daylight Savings Time glitch? I don’t know, but obviously I’ll have to assume it’s the earlier time, just to play it safe.

“what happens when Greece defaults”

HERE.

I don’t know much about the author of the article, but since he’s named as a senior editor at CNBC, I would assume he represents fairly mainstream thinking on what will happen in Europe in the near future.

[ADDENDUM: I skimmed the first couple of paragraphs too quickly. The article’s original source is Andrew Lilico at the Telegraph, and that article seems to be HERE. I haven’t followed the story enough to know whether this sounds like scare-mongering or whether it’s a reasonably accurate prediction.]

books and New York

One of the interesting features of Amazon AuthorCentral is that it tells you how many copies of each of your books sold in each region of the U.S.A. each week.

And though it may not sound surprising, I’m struck by how consistently New York leads in sales every week without exception.

Obviously, it’s the biggest city in the country, and well-known as a magnet for mentally active people of all sorts and in all fields. But it’s intriguing to see just how much we rely on New York to be the consumer and processer (not to mention producer) of ideas.

2nd place varies from week to week, but the California Bay Area is usually in the running.

random Prince of Networks object generator

Darius created this page which, on each click, chooses at random one of the objects mentioned in Prince of Networks.

On the first click I got this one: “the German sentries guarding the heavy water plant”

Many of them are much simpler, though.

[ADDENDUM: With bleary morning eyes, I completely forgot to link to the page in question. It is HERE. My apologies.]