A Fellow Blogger Told Me...

...to write about what I feel like writing about.

So what I feel like writing about - is a certain overlap I've sensed between the writings of V.S. Naipaul and Joseph Conrad.

And apparently I'm not the first to have noticed. (As a quick word search of this site, a collection of mostly academic publications will reveal.)

I'm reading Conrad for the first time, if you can believe it; well after having read Naipaul some number of years ago (A Bend in the River). So I don't really see this as a study in how Conrad may influenced Naipaul, but more how my having first read Naipaul influences my reading of Conrad.

Also interesting is the need academics seem to feel to group topics in threes: Conrad, Greene, Naipaul. Conrad, Lowry, Naipaul. It seems to be an implicit requirement that, if you drew a correlation between two writers, you damn well better go out and find a third one to add to the mix.

So yes, this really is the sort of stuff I prefer to write about and think about.

Happy Memorial Day...

...and a special Happy Quit Facebook Day to those who pulled the plug.

I did, and if I have had any regrets, Kevin Rose's defense of Mark Zuckerberg helped ease my mind. These Web 2.0 types really know how to alienate people when they are trying to make converts.

Rose talks a mile a minute and covers a lot of topics. And I could rip into him for playing to the whole a-certain-demographic-just-doesn't-get-the-internet jibe, but he doesn't dwell there, so I'll let it pass.

Where he does get more substantive in his defense is when he starts with the disclaimer that he doesn't really know what Zuckerberg is doing, but then launches into a lengthy monologue (mostly) about how Facebook is trying to dethrone Google as the preeminent search engine of the web.

Facebook launched these "like" buttons... You linked something because you liked it... these are humans, that are liking certain individual pages in real time... That's like real time data fed directly back into Facebook... They can take that content, they can crawl it, they can classify it, they can build out a real-time search engine a lot better and quicker than Google can.

That's sounds fine, but the trick is getting users on board. With his interlocutor car-loving Alex Alberg (Sp? Not sure who he is...) playing the skeptic, Rose starts pumping the Kool Aid.

Let's say you like an ad, say you're watching a bad ass youtube add of the M3... you like it. And then get this; all of your followers... as they are browsing on the web, one of them happened to be a BMW fan as well, all of sudden they see an ad for the M3... and Alex Alberg likes this underneath it, oh shit, Alex liked it? I'll check that ad out. All of a sudden, a higher click through rate. See what I'm saying?

Yes, I see what you are saying in your 17 minute infomercial, Kev. And here's a .1 second response: No.

Okay, I'll elaborate, and I'll take a risk that I'm dipping a toe into the advertising grid, and what I intend to communicate, and how it is used, can diverge. I'm a foodie. I like Trader Joe's, I like shopping for herbs and spices at The Spice House in Chicago, I like shopping for obscure-ish Indian food items at Patel's on Devon Avenue. I love talking to people about these things with certain people, in the right setting.

I do not - DO NOT - intend to advertise these things, or make the content of my thought on these matters more public with some token little "likes" that an audience - whether I have some modicum of control on who that audience is, doesn't matter. The discussion I might have wanted to initiate with my chosen group of friends on Facebook when I posted my favorite Gazpacho enhancements is a different animal from Kevin's and Mark's profit-driven rush to supplant King Google, and I'll unplug and stay unplug before I play along.

Too Many Humanities PhDs

Back in April, Peter Conn, a professor of English at University of Pennsylvania, wrote an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education stating that Humanities graduate programs were churning out more PhD grads than the market could bear - a situation I feel has marked my career path, despite my not completing my PhD, and having done all kinds of non-academic work since. It's an interesting article, and one I hope the universities take to heart.

While the whole article is bearish on the place for people with impressive degrees in future markets, it concludes with a nice defense of the humanities having some essential purpose in the world.

Collectively, those of us who profess the humanities must make a sustained effort to explain to our various constituencies... that these disciplines, and the traditions they represent, are not merely ornamental and dispensable. They lie near the heart of mankind's restless efforts to make sense of the world. Debates over war and peace, justice and equity: From the uses of scientific knowledge to the formulation of social policy, the humanities provide a necessary dimension of insight and meaning.

Now if "providing necessary dimension of insight and meaning" would just show up in more job descriptions...

European Identity and Anthropology

From Kolakowski, a social science that is born from uncertainty of self in the face of cultural plurality and existential threat:

This capacity to doubt herself, to abandon--albeit in the face of strong resistance--her self-assurance and self-satisfaction, lies at the heart of Europe's development as a spiritual force. She made the effort to break out of the closed confines of ethnocentricity, and her ability to do so gave definition to the unique value of her culture. Ultimately we may say that Europe's cultural identity is reinforced by her refusal to accept any kind of closed, finite definition, and thus she can only affirm her identity in uncertainty and anxiety. Ant although it is true that all sciences, social and natural, either were born or reached their maturity (maturity in a relative sense, of course, from the perspective of what they are today) within European culture, there s one among them which, because of its very content, is the European science par excellence: anthropology.

The anthropologist... must suspend his own norms, his judgments, his mental, moral, and aesthetic habits in order to penetrate as far as possible into the viewpoint of another and assimilate his way of perceiving the world. And even though no one, perhaps, would claim to have achieved total success in that effort, even though total success would presuppose an epistemological impossibility--to enter entirely into the mind of the object of inquiry while maintaining the distance and objectivity of a scientist--the effort is not in vain. We cannot completely achieve the position of an observer seeing himself from the outside, but we may do so partially. It seems obvious to us that an anthropologist cannot understand a savage completely unless he himself becomes a savage and thus ceases to be an anthropologist. He may suspend judgment, but the very act of suspending judgment is culturally rooted: it is an act of renunciation, possible only from within a culture which, through learning to question itself, has shown itself capable of the effort of understanding another.

From "Looking for the Barbarians" in Modernity on Endless Trial.

Once I had a blog

Take me, for instance. I've been writing letters helter-skelter in all directions. More words. I go after reality with language. Perhaps I'd like to change it all into language, to force Madeleine and Gersbach to have a Conscience. There's a word for you. I must be trying to keep tight the tensions without which human beings can no longer be called human. If they don't suffer, they've gotten away from me. And I've filled the world with letters to prevent their escape. I want them in human form, and so I conjure up a whole environment and catch them in the middle. I put my whole heart into these constructions. But they are constructions.

Saul Bellow, Herzog

I had a blog once, it outlived it's purpose though, so I got rid of it. Friends enjoy what I write, and I would like to please them, but blogging was supposed to be for me. You blog because you think others should read your thoughts. At some point when I was blogging, I was writing things for the sake of updating my blog. When I went back to read my posts, they didn't seem valuable or worth sharing. I didn't see anything there that was really worth reading.

I was still full of this optimism for the internet. I believed in the whole "Global Village" thing, I felt like there were ideas to share. I felt that, if enough people wanted a Renaissance we could have a Renaissance, and it wouldn't matter where we lived or whether we worked in stores or offices, or what our names were, we could do it. Global Village. Peer to peer.

At the time I was reading Vaclav Havel's letters to his wife, compiled in Letters to Olga. I used to have this weird interest in prison memoirs... Gramsci, Bonhoeffer, Havel - great ideas have been developed by people in confinement. Havel's letters are remarkable in that they reveal a man in a state of physical weakness (stress, pain from hemorrhoids, emotional neediness directed at his wife, etc.), and yet he prevails over a totalitarian system that tries to silence him.

I came across a good book: Herzog, by Saul Bellow. I'm about half-way through with it and among other things, it's about the crisis of intellectuality in conditions of complete intellectual freedom. The main character--a professional thinker about the world, i.e., a philosopher--has read everything (obviously without having to work hard or run any risks in tracking things down), can say whatever he wants and write about anything at all--without anything ever happening (either in general terms or to him). But his thoughts are constantly in a whirl until at last it drives him batty. (It is more complex and multifaceted than this; I'm just looking at one aspect of it.) A professional with "words" goes mad in a situation where words have no weight. He clearly lacks what we [in Communist Czechoslovakia] do not, which is to say a situation in which words have so much weight that you must pay quite dearly for them... In my last letter, I wrote of the conflict between words and deeds. Words that are not backed up by life lose their weight, which means that words can be silenced in two ways: either you ascribe such weight to them that no one dares utter them aloud, or you take away any weight they might have, and they turn into air. The final effect in either case is silence: the silence of the half-mad man who is constantly writing appeals to world authorities while everyone ignores him; and the silence of the Orwellian citizen.

Vaclav Havel, Letters to Olga

I might have misunderstood the internet at the time I was blogging: I do love it, but its ubiquity may, I worry, be causing us to be less energetic readers than we would be. When there is so much written information available to us, and so little time to really look critically at who produces it and toward what end, it begins to just "wash over us." Critical reading is something to practice, and I observe in myself a tendency to take in assumptions without taking the time to look behind them. And that is what I was probably hoping to combat: I wanted a blog that didn't eliminate uncertainty, but pointed to it and hope that it made people more thoughtful about it.

I don't think that is what I am trying to do this time. Now, I think, I just want to have an outlet to express myself and combat the personal silence that Havel observed in Herzog. And if I end up just writing unheeded missives in an attempt to instill a conscience in a world that isn't receptive--and appear strange in the process, just as Herzog did--oh well then. At least I tried.