delay indicted!

evolution article in wash post

Good article. Addresses some aspects of why the random mutation/natural selection mechanism seems like "not enough" to explain the diversity and complexity of life.

so far so good

Spoke with my mom a couple of hours ago -- everything seems to be ok. She even has electricity. Still raining and windy, but nothing severe. The only thing to still worry about is flooding -- if Rita stalls and dumps a ton of rain. Many thanks to everyone who expressed concern and warm wishes!

Apparently some people are still stranded on the highways, and there's no gas to be found anywhere. I'm so thankful she didn't try to leave.

Why on earth they (whoever they are) didn't open all freeway lanes to outbound traffic from the get go is beyond me -- and will hopefully be the subject of some kind of investigation. Though I doubt, of course, that anyone will really be held accountable for anything.

hurricane

Rita's headed right for Houston. My mom lives in Houston. It's too late for her to get out -- the highways are too congested and there's no gas left. Fortunately, she's not in one of mandatory evacuation areas, and most of her neighbors are staying. Still, no one knows what to expect. Weather service is saying downtown Houston could experience up to 120 mph winds. I read somewhere that the building codes only require that buildings be able to withstand winds of around 100 mph. Please direct any surplus positive vibes toward the Texas coast . . .

responding

I sometimes wish I could respond with an equal amount of empathy to every injustice. Truth be told, sometimes I just think "how horrible" then forget about it.

Other times, I recognize that the victim and I have something in common -- which makes the reported injustice "hurt" in a very personal way that other reports don't. Were I perfect, I suppose that every injustice would "hurt" in this deeply personal way. To go about our daily lives, though, it seems we have to be selective about what affects us. Sometimes, however, I fear that this selectivity "cheapens" our daily lives considerably -- if not in always immediately tangible ways.

What got me thinking along these lines was this article and its accompanying photograph of a 22-year old man who'd just received 100 lashes for being gay. I know a little bit -- a very tiny bit, relatively speaking -- about what it feels like to be reviled for one's sexuality. It's enough, at least, to have overcome the sense of the "otherness" of the victim in this case -- so that when I saw that photo a part of me felt like it had happened to a relative or to a friend of mine.

To be honest, it really puts my anti-imperialist stance to the test. I'm not sure I'm for the right of national self-determination if it means executing (according to one estimate cited in the article) 4,000 gay men (and women? the article doesn't say, though I'm sure many, many more women have been executed for a host of other reasons) over the past 30 years. At the same time, though, I also figure that the fundie wingnuts who are currently bringing chaos and misery to the middle east would -- in secret, of course -- applaud Iran's treatment of gays (and women) and, in the darkest recesses of their lightless hearts, deliriously envision a future in which similar measures are implemented here.

badiou quote

Just got a book of Badiou’s writings (“Badiou: Infinite Thought” from Continuum books), opened it to a random page (42, to be exact) and found this:

I am convinced . . . that the world needs philosophy more than philosophy thinks.  Philosophy is ill, it might be dying, but I am sure that the world (the world, neither a God nor a prophet, but the world) is saying to philosophy: “Get up and walk!”

a quite unsober take on emily dickinson

Taking an American Poetry & Poetics class this semester. We started with Poe, worked our way through Whitman, then Emily Dickinson. Now we're at Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, and H.D. The class is everything I'd hoped -- insightful and passionate instruction, insightful and passionate discussion. Much contention. Contention is good. It's such a joy to watch people getting angry with one another over their presentations of poetry & poetics. Why? I suppose because it affirms that I'm not the only freak who feels passionate about this stuff.

Prior to this class, I'd never had such a close encounter with Emily Dickinson. We read a ton of her poems. I found myself moved, touched, flabbergasted, perplexed, startled, amazed, confounded by all of them. I'm on the verge of declaring Emily Dickinson my favorite poet of all time. Not sure that will stick, but I must say that the modernism of Marianne Moore and company strikes me as tedious, pretentious, and cynical relative to the poetry of Emily Dickinson. I'm sure I'll learn to find something worthwhile in the modernists -- but for now, I'm still under Dickinson's spell.

What follows is a quite unsober account of how I read Dickinson's deeply unsual punctuation in light of Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson.

***

I wanted to roughly sketch something that struck me while reading Howe's My Emily Dickinson. I’m not sure it’s at all supportable via Howe’s text -- and I'm making quite a few connections that probably aren't justified -- but what struck me has nevertheless affected my reading of Dickinson’s uses of the dash.

On p. 21-22 of Howe’s text, she states the following:

Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philosophy from alien territory, a “sheltered” woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation. HESITATE from the Latin, meaning to sick. Stammer. To hold back in doubt, have difficulty speaking. “He may pause but he must not hesitate” – Riskin. Hesitation circled back and surrounded everyone in that confident age of aggressive industrial expansion and brutal Empire building . . . He might pause, She hesitated. Sexual, racial, and geographical separation are at the heart of Definition . . .

At the center of Indifference I feel my own freedom . . . the Liberty in wavering. Compression of possibility tensing to spring.

Perhaps because I was wondering about the dashes just before I read this section, it seemed to me that when Howe talked about HESITATION she was (or could be) talking about the dashes. Suddenly I could see each dash as a site of this compression of possibility tensing to spring.” Each time a dash interrupts a line or a phrase, Emily Dickinson opens the poem (and opens us as readers) to a field of radical, even absolute, possibility. The philosophers Gilles Delueze and Felix Guattari, in their book What is Philosophy?, discusses an image in which each of carries around an umbrella to shield us from the radical openness – or, in their view, chaos or absolute difference – of the sky overhead. This umbrella is the coherent, stable (fiction of a) world that we navigate day to day. Artists, they claim, make a little tear in the fabric of that umbrella -- not to eliminate the umbrella all together (which would result in madness) but to let through a little bit of the vastness that lies on the other side.

I was reminded of this “other side of the umbrella” by the following in Howe’s text:

This is the process of viewing Emptiness without design or plan, neighborless in winter blank, or blaze of summer. This is waste wilderness. Nature no soothing mother, Nature is annihilation brooding over. (p. 21).

At each dash, then, we might say that the poem stutters, hesitates before this Emptiness – and it seems, at times – especially when the dash appears in the middle of a line -- that nearly anything might follow. It’s as if the infinity of this Emptiness, this Indifference, inevitably overflows our expectations and pours itself into the sheer possibility of “what comes after the dash” – such that we could read each dash as inscription of the Emptiness itself, as an inscription of the very “Compression of possibility” from which the next word or words will “spring”.

Thinking on this, I’m intrigued by Dickinson’s relationship to the “Emptiness without design”. At times, she seems perfectly at home, almost a peer, of this vast otherness. “My Business is Circumference”, she tells Higgins. She alone rides “Beyond the Dip of Bell” in poem 142 (376):

I saw no Way – The Heavens were stitched –
I felt the Columns close –
The Earth reversed her Hemispheres –
I touched the Universe –

And back it slid – and I alone –
A Speck upon a Ball –
Went out upon Circumference –
Beyond the Dip of Bell –

And the respect she receives from the Sea (?) in poem 209 (520):

Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –

Yet the Sea, in the same poem, nearly drowns her, eternity consistently overwhelms her, she speaks in poem 500 (1405) of “a Universe’s facture”, in poem 206 (512) of the Soul’s “Bandaged Moments”:

The Souls has Bandaged moments –
When too appalled to stir –
She feels some ghastly Fright come up
And stop to look at her –

and in poem 177 (449) even Beauty and Truth (or at least their names – without which, one could argue, they would remain inaccessible to thought) are erased by the creeping moss in their adjoining tombs:

And so, as Kinsmen, met a Night –
We talked between the Rooms –
Until the Moss had reached our lips –
And covered up – our names –

She not only rides “Beyond the Dip of Bell”, then, but eternity, infinite Emptiness, also overwhelms, invades, fractures. Each dash, each hesitation, then, we might read as the site of such a facture. In her poems, the infinite invades language, breaks it, fractures it – only to have her re-set those fractures in order to compose something wholly original.

existence, nonsense

Is it nonsensical to talk about existence as such? If so, then how is it possible to experience "existential anxiety"? The anxiety is certainly real, but perhaps "exisential" part really isn't "about existence" -- perhaps it's always, by definition, "about" something else. Or perhaps it's that anxiety which has no object whatsoever.

"How strange that there are beings! How strange that anything exists at all!"

Strange -- with regard to what? Non-being? Nothingness? What are those, and how can they even be conceived except as concepts parasitic upon concepts like being and existence?

Or maybe I'm worried about MY existence. But that may not be possible either -- if I can't represent existence as such to myself, then I'm probably not able to represent my own existence as such to myself . . .

rule-folllowing

I came across the following argument today in a draft of a paper I read on how Plato might have responded to Kripke's version of Wittgenstein on rule-following (and this paper isn't, I believe, the first time I've come across this argument).

Proposition1: Any action a can be construed to be in accordance with rule r.
Conclusion: Words don't mean anything at all.

Perhaps this would make more sense if we added the following propositions:

P2: The meaning of words = their use in our language or form of life.
P3: The use of words is rule-governed.
(P3.5: If any action a can be construed to be in accordance with rule r, then any use of a word is as good as any other -- we can always construe that usage as having been used in accordance with the rule which allegedly governed it.)

First, the problem arises only with regard to the interpretation of rules. There must exist, Wittgenstein tells us, a way of following rules which doesn't involve interpreting them. I confess that I read Kripke's book years ago, and I don't recall whether or not Kripke addresses this -- but it seems the argument above overlooks it.

Second, I'm curious about P2, the proposition that the use of words is rule-governed. It strikes me that there are two kinds of rules.

1: Rules you formulate ahead of time, then ask someone to follow. "Start with a number, add 2 to it, then keep on adding 2 to whatever number you end up with," for instance. These are rules in a "strong" sense.

2: Rules that you formulate after-the-fact, which characterize or describe or quantify a certain already-existing phenomenal patterns. "Any object will fall to the ground when there's nothing below it, holding it up," for example.

I'd put the rules of language in the second category. Our use of words tends to cohere into certain patterns, but those patterns are always evolving. Any one of us can disrupt those patterns at any time, and that disruption -- if it's catchy enough -- could eventually become the "correct" pattern.

I could easibly be wrong about this, but I think that Kripke-Wittgenstein's "paradox" exists only with regard to the first kind of rule. Wittgenstien raises the issue when trying to determine when it is possible, to say with certainty, that someone is following a rule. Only with regard to the first kind of rule does this concern arise -- for only then does the question of "following the rule" even have relevance.

aluminum pillow

i think you’re just a little too much weight for my back

and i’m not talking about those sleep-induced erections pressing upward against the toes or one of those cardboard nametags we used to separate the vanishing points from our drawings of the hallway

she didn’t say anything, i didn’t even know what “talk” meant, i received the same stream of syllables which spilled from the mouths of their slain believers

there was nothing i could distance between myself and the far end of the moonlight

on the couch she’d ask me, the vast crimson couch, Jesus, the pastor zigzagged back and forth, reaching up to visit me every few weekends through to the skin, a kind of door, a bottle with my next breath like steam

construction paper taping them firmly against the surface of my bare pages maybe the adults would believe i’d drawn it up on my forehead, then the wrists and the feet because feet were all safely inside

“i’ll wait out here” i knelt in front of the tip of the hill, scurried around the torso of a well-built man in yellow bikini briefs, could feel my pulse in the hospital but he paid more attention to others than he did to me, and i believed everything shaped like a big aluminum pillow

she saw wherever she looked an enormous silver belt buckle at the edges some of the white perms had been double-stacked, their spines even still the books sketching in the lines

then that’s interesting she chuckled, hospitalizations made you the way you are and whatever god does is fair because god had told you a question about something on the bedroom walls, now and throughout history, no cheating

we sat in small circles, you knew that the suicides were suppose to be you, part of this is faith, resentment had briefly touched down

i’d never seen a balloon stay aloft for so long

'Get Off The Fucking Freeway ': The Sinking State Loots its Own Survivors

To tell the truth, I haven't kept up on news reports from New Orleans for precisely the reasons this powerful article cites. God, what an awful, terrifying disaster -- and what an awful, terrifying response to a disaster from all of those in power who had the power to make it less awful but instead refused to act or, in some cases, knowingly made it worse.

pyramid lake

Me, at Pyramid Lake, coming back from Burning Man, full of dust (literally -- you breathe the dust, it gets in your ears, on your food, and so on) and exhausted. I think that's some sunscreen on my upper lip. We took a dip in the lake to wash off the dust and the sun. Ahh, water.

alkjsihfkldheoighfjkdhcnreio

That relatively randomly-typed sequence of letters rather aptly demonstrates my mental state upon returning from Burning Man. It was a wonderful, beautiful, and profoundly disorienting experience. Many photos to share, which I hope to post this week.

One of the playa's archetypes would have to be that of the Trickser. It gives and takes in unpredictable ways -- but always in ways which "count" and which, in some sense, could be called "profound". This time, it took all of my prescription medicines . I remember packing them, but they're gone now. This "counts" because I worried incessantly about losing my bag of medications. I compulsively ensured they remained immediately accessible throughout the entire event. It's unfathomable to me that I could have left them behind.

Anyhow, it's about 3:30 AM and I've probably slept for a total of ten hours over the past five days. Time for bed. Real bed. No howling wind. No dust storms. Mattress. Sheets. Warmth. Ahh . . .

reading in santa cruz

Good lord, I'd forgotten how exhausting getting ready for Burning Man is. It's about 3am, we've still got to pack the car. Hopefully will get there about noon on Thursday.

Wanted to mention, before I run, that I'll be joining Delia Tramontina and Curt Anderson at a poetry reading in Santa Cruz on Friday, September 9th.

The reading is officially scheduled for 7:30 p.m. at the Louden Nelson Community Center in Santa Cruz. The center appears to be a converted elementary school so all the rooms are essentially classrooms. People should be able to find the room no problem. Here's info on the center with a link to a map. As for directions, since most people will be taking 17 over the mountain: Highway 17 terminates at the edge of downtown Santa Cruz and becomes Ocean St.; take Ocean to Broadway and make a right; Broadway crosses over the San Lorenzo River and becomes Laurel; Louden Nelson is on the corner of Laurel and Center Street.

Come on down, spend the afternoon at the boardwalk, ride the roller coaster, go hear some poetry, hang out with hippies at the beach, maybe even visit the famous "mystery spot" while you're at it . . .