Heteronormativity and Performativity (HetPer)

Adele, Appoggiatura, and Commonality of Heartbreak

2012-02-17T10:38:00.000-05:00

Adele is all over the place now. She received six Grammy's. In addition, she's receiving a lot of play time on most radio stations worldwide. You can hear her at Starbucks, at the doctor's office, even at Costco. Adele's ubiquitous which is one of the better things to come out of pop culture.

She's even featured on the Wall Street Journal as an illustration of appoggiatura. The article entitled, "Anatomy of a Tear-Jerker" zeroes in on Adele's track "Someone Like You" and why it resonates with most people.

Personally, I don't care much for the track. I find the chord progression too simple and the lyrics vexingly clichéd. But, I like the video. No, correction, I am in deep like with the video. It reminds of my most favorite French film of all time, the spectacular Last Year at Marienbad by Alain Resnais. Incidentally, if you do need to take a couple of hours to yourself and work something out in your mind, give this film a try. It will lead you to a kind of introspection few other things can. But that's another post. A trailer from the 1961 film is featured below:

The WSJ article stipulates that the reason why a track like "Someone Like You" has such wide appeal is because of appoggiatura which is an ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good.

A bit from the article says: "Measuring listeners' responses, Dr. Zatorre's team found that the number of goose bumps observed correlated with the amount of dopamine released, even when the music was extremely sad. The results suggest that the more emotions a song provokes—whether depressing or uplifting—the more we crave the song."

You can read the rest of the article here.

Let Them Eat Hershey's

2012-02-14T11:05:00.000-05:00

I kept thinking of this old Italian film I used to watch as a child. It took place in a classroom and Rossi, the best student, was beaten one day by anther student who scored better on a test. One test. When all the ridiculous underachievers found out that Rossi was not the 'best' anymore, they started chanting in a chorus of mediocrity:

"Tu non sei piu primo, tu non sei piu primo!"
[You're not the first (best) anymore, you're not the first....]

I always felt for Rossi. His whole life, well, from the age of 6-10 at least, poor Rossi had done everything to learn all he could and he was mostly resented for being successful. And the one time he slipped by one point, he gets faced with the horrible voices of those who never cared to self-improve and learn but rather emerged in a sea of triviality and boredom.

So, this Valentine's day, if you're going home to someone who likes you well, who makes you feel good, and who is at times responsible for taking you out of the sea of 'tu non sei piu primo' chanters, be equally good to them the way you were a day prior. If you're going home to an absence of that, embrace the idea that it can be had by anyone. It's not inorganic chemistry. Far from it. It's easy because it's instinctual. Find what makes you content for the moment and keep it moving. You won't gain any unnecessary weight or cellulite which, let's face it, will dramatically improve your chances of pairing up with someone who's not into group chanting and who's a better natural fit for you anyway.

And, for all of us, chocolate eaters and non-eaters alike, let's enjoy a bit of fun reading from the great W. Somerset Maugham and his novel, The Painted Veil.
When the doctor in the novel realizes that his marriage is coming to an end and he sees his wife, due to no fault of her own or her nature, for how she actually is: limited, he writes:

“I had no illusions about you. I knew you were silly and frivolous and empty headed. But I loved you. I knew that your aims and ideals were vulgar and commonplace. But I loved you.... I did everything I could to make you think me as big a fool as the rest of the men you knew.”

Werner Herzog on Chickens

2012-02-12T12:58:00.002-05:00

This, well, this you have to see and, most importantly, hear.

I've always been a bigger Herzog fan than I let on. I always privileged Wim Wenders, maybe a revisitation of his work is needed:

Werner Herzog on Chickens from Tom Streithorst on Vimeo.

On Eudaimonia and Coffee

2012-02-09T11:52:00.001-05:00

On the drive back from half a day of snowboarding up North, I stopped to pick up a friend in the city. He informed me the night before that there is a new coffee place worth checking out in the city. Coffee places are like mushrooms after the rain in this city.

So, we go get coffee at this place where the baristas wear these sort of..., eh, why bother. As I keep explaining to my people, this city is where hipsters and scenesters come to retire. Sort of like Portland, but, you know, generally prettier. Sorry, Portlanders. Those of you who've been here sort of already concur.

I still had my slope hat on and my right leg was killing me thanks to a prior fall. Coffee tasted good, though. Apparently, after taking the first sip I had this look on my face that said, I'm so not here right now. I'm so somewhere else.
The other party asked me, "where did you go just now?"
He continues, "you have a look on your face right now that says, 'I'm so not here right now. I'm so somewhere else.'"
I get that look when I'm fully happy for the moment. I wonder why, in moments like that, I look disinterested in the present place and company, but I know that it happens. There's this utter detachment from the present moment. I suppose 'happy' looks different to different people.

I snap back into the present moment. I look around and I see a sea of iPhones and Apple gizmos, Ugg boots, and blah, blah, blah. "Eeek, I had to snap back to this," I think to myself. My friend opened up his messenger bag and he pulled out a book that looked beat up by time.

"Why do some translate 'eudaimonia' as 'happiness'", he asks.
I shrug my shoulders. Not because I don't have an answer. Alas, I sort of did. But because I was getting a bit of a sensorial overload from the new coffee place where the baristas have this 'cool' way of making..... ah, who cares.

"Can't really talk about eudaimonia right this very minute." In a nutshell, the eudaimonists concerned themselves with the maximizing of one's own practical goal to achieving happiness. They might call it happiness, I'm more inclined to calling it evasion of futility. Whichever is more important to one, I suppose. Just an hour ago my telos was staying on the board and not letting the right eye that kept itching bother me too much. "Let's get out of here. I'm worried about getting a ticket. It's been what...?"
"About 10 minutes," he says.
We leave. While driving on a street with too many lights I complain about traffic and then think to resume his initial topic of eudaimonism.
"So, what about them?"
He knew what I was referring to and promptly said,
"I wonder if some translate it as 'happiness' because it puts a stop to artistic pursuit. To go after art means, or should mean, to suffer."
I take a sip of my surprisingly unpretensious coffee and only manage to get two words out before I'm interrupted by a laughter. I say one function word and one content word and then a "HA" ensues.
"The telos...."
Ha, telos, I'm sorry, he says, you have that silly hat on with the two hanging straps and your board is in the backseat and The Killers are playing in your iPod and we're talking about eudaimonia.
I didn't think that the content word 'telos' was that humorous a choice but I suppose in the context we were in, it sort of, kind of was.
We left eudaimonia at that.
This morning as I was straightening my hair, I was thinking of the little exchange and got to thinking about it a bit more. I wondered why I never cared much for it. And then I wondered why I never cared much about Aristotle either. Just because I 'get' them, doesn't mean I ought to care, or even like, them. Philosophy, much like anything else, should serve a practical function, one that is of use to the person to be/get better. Aristotle was so adamant about the importance of philosophy and how it is good for the mind to be consumed by it. It turns out, it's not always so. It's better for the mind to be consumed with the practicality of the pursuit of happiness, however. Sometimes, most times actually, it's better for the mind to wander freely. And that's as close to being happy as some people can hope to get. I suppose this would make me a bit of a eudomonia-enamored person at this present moment. The purpose of life is to practically go after one's own happiness. Or something.

Assorted Links

2012-01-29T03:41:00.003-05:00

1) I managed to catch Last Night this weekend. Someone told me it was akin to Patrick Marber's screenplay of Closer. The real reason why I PVR-ed it however was Guillaume Canet whom I'd never seen in an English-speaking role before and, as a result, was curious to see as I generally enjoy his work. The narrative is predictable but there are interesting achievements of form in this film. Cinematically, it does well, too. While the characters and plot, for the most part, are predictably forgettable, the form and soundtrack beg for some attention.

2) Portlandia stars interview each other.
My favorite episode of the first season had to be the pilot.

3) There is a new study on the familial linkage between neuropsychiatric conditions and intellectual interests. You can read the article in full here. A bit says:

"Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10−6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10−8)."

4) Where was the web invented? Well, Al Gore might give one answer. Other sources have other answers. Tip of the hat to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.

A bit says:

"I’ll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders."

Doubt Is the Origin of Wisdom

2012-01-28T13:57:00.004-05:00

Or as Descartes put it in his Meditations on First Philosophy, "Dubium sapientiae initium." The gift of doubt is something evolution rarely gets much public laud for. And doubt makes the most sense when seen in conjunction with others. Consider it in isolation, and little progress will be made.

Companionship is not always a matter of desire. It's, for most, and fundamentally, a matter of need. Of survival, really. We don't refer to it as such in public discourse because it becomes too heavy and who would want to tackle things of seriousness in broad daylight?!

Any discussion of the economics of companionship in the public forum is, at best, pushed to the side and given commercial-length attention. People have no choice when it comes to allying themselves with others. From an evolutionary perspective, there's power in numbers. Survival is found in numbers. Two or more people have a better chance when it comes to outsmarting and or vanquishing a hungry bear than one isolated person. In nuce, the bigger the pack, the better the chances of making it.

Enculturation brought with it more than just better stratagem so that better game could be caught, bigger cavernous spaces in which to prepare said game, draw such activities on the amorphous walls to record the culture of survival, and secure protection from the elements of the physical world. Enculturation brought to life the results of systematic sociality: spawn, a lot of spawn - in case bears and physical elements got to most of them - and a desire to create a narrative of living, one that is historical, that builds on previous accounts and doesn't stop at a dénouement. One that, phoenix-like, gives birth to yet another version of itself ad perpetua.

Survival, or efforts to survive, lead one to a better existence. Efforts to survive give one better tools of coping. I've long maintained this. Some humans are better at living because they're naturally good at surviving. Genetic makeup dictates many of the living choices we all irrespective of one another make. But so does sociality. While the former is devoid of choice, the latter is fully predicated on it.

From a Darwinian perspective, what makes one fitter to survive than others is their ability to decode their surroundings and make decisions that are congruent with nature. Which path to take to encounter the least amount of bears, what time of the year to go hunting, who has the kind of childbearing hips that can sustain the highest frequency of births, who to strike alliances with for the purpose of attaining the most game and the most fruitful childbearing hips, et al.

Descartes noted in his Principia philosophiae, Part I the following: "Ex nihilo nihil fit. Meaning: nothing comes out of nothing. Understanding that plurality counts, counts. A multitude of human resources will never be inconsequential to existence, good existence. It will be indispensable to good living. In sum, we don't choose to align ourselves with others out of fickleness. Most humans do so out of clean calculation. Nothing comes out of nothing. Much comes out of calculated sociality and sustained companionship.

So, next time when dinner is prepared in the kitchen, dry-cleaning is picked up, and one is accompanied to the doctor's office, think of sociality is its purely pragmatic, evolution-informed form: that it is commoditized and not the romanticized entity we're daily told it is. There's always a cui bono - i.e.: 'what's in it for me?' - attached to it. Even a simple peanut butter & jelly sandwich brings expectations with it.

Cogito ergo sum, Descartes? Also, I think, eat, engage physically, and pick up my dry-cleaning at times, therefore I am.

The picture below was taken at the airport on one of my summer trips while waiting to board the plane. The parental time spent made sense: when bored, do yoga publicly.

Egocentrism over Email

2012-01-27T11:51:00.001-05:00

I just finished reading a study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology about the benefit of factoring in paralinguistic cues such as gesture, emphasis, and intonation and how without them it can be difficult to convey emotion and tone over email.

Email communication is ubiquitous. Businesses rely almost solely on it. Interpersonal relationships can't seem to be without it. However, communication is multi-faceted and without paralinguistic feedback it can be quite lacking.

I had an experience with a work email the other day. As a trained close reader, tone matters to me. I pictured what the writer of the email meant by it if the same content were shared by way of the voice while being physically present. I still didn't quite feel I got to the core of the text.

I was in too tired a state of mind to place a phone call. Instead, I choose to give it a few hours, wrap up some last-minute things, tidy the desk, put things away, and then I compile the text. It was an exercise in economy of speech. And as most such exercises go, they take time.

Afterwards, a number of phone calls ensued for the purpose of getting to a full understanding of the content and what now feels like a waste of 60 minutes of my time. In the end, the original writer of the email concluded, incidentally by way of email, "so glad this is all sorted out. sorry :)" I wanted to email back the following, "it wouldn't have even been born had one of us verbally phrased the same thing." But I didn't. Because I was in no mood to waste yet another hour of my already packed existence.

A bit from the study says:

"Five experiments suggest that this limitation is often underappreciated, such that people tend to believe that they can communicate over e-mail more effectively than they actually can. Studies 4 and 5 further suggest that this overconfidence is born of egocentrism, the inherent difficulty of detaching oneself from one’s own perspective when evaluating the perspective of someone else. Because e-mail communicators “hear” a statement differently depending on whether they intend to be, say, sarcastic or funny, it can be difficult to appreciate that their electronic audience may not.

Social judgment is inherently egocentric. When people try to imagine the perspective, thoughts, or feelings of someone else, a growing body of evidence suggests that they use themselves as an
anchor or reference point. Although precisely why this occurs — whether the result of an overlearned and generally valid heuristic, the residual byproduct of an earlier stage of childhood egocentrism, or the inevitable consequence of an effortful cognitive process such as anchoring and adjustment—is a matter of some debate, the fact remains that the assessment of another’s perspectives is influenced, at least in part, by one’s own."

You can read the rest of the study here.

Claims re: the Alpha Male Myth et al.

2012-01-24T23:41:00.000-05:00

I just read the following. The first one is a repudiation of the notion of alpha masculinity and how pop culture notions are utterly in the wrong when faced with fundamental evolutionary biology. An interesting read. A bit of the study says:

"If evolved human dominance behaviors have been decreasing over time, we would expect to see something else evolve to replace it. Because of the evolution of hominin brain size and cognition across the paleolithic, we might expect that whatever trait evolved via sexual selection related to these developments. Indeed, humor and intelligence appear to be more attractive to women than testosterone-related masculinity when it matters most — during female ovulation (Kaufman, et al. 2007)." More here.

Francesco Schettino is a worldwide known name now. The captain who abandoned ship to save himself has become the laughing stock of the reading world. The Guardian's Ian Jack, however, explores what his premature leaving of the ship might entail and how it relates to our collective attitudes about honor. A bit says:

"...[h]is transgression is enormous. The rule that a captain must be the last man (or woman) to leave a ship in difficulties is never written down, but everywhere understood. In the words of a former P&O captain: "At sea, you have a great sense of responsibility for the people who are beneath you – it's moral as well as legal. You need to stay as long as anyone else remains."

In this altruistic sense, the mystique of captaincy has survived into its third century. Sentiment, if not always practicality, will ensure it continues. For who can resist the gallantry of David Hart Dyke staying aboard the tilting hull of HMS Coventry, or Noel Coward and what remains of his crew clinging to their life-raft in In Which We Serve, and Coward commanding, as his destroyer finally goes down: "Three cheers for the ship!" More here.

Having Preferences Means Having Weaknesses.

2012-01-24T11:11:00.002-05:00

Preferences allow us to carve a space for actualization. We cannot self-actualize without a set of personal preferences for they lead to pursuits. Pursuits, of any kind, are fueled by interests and interests or drive as some would say, are indispensable when it comes to accruing any sort of success. However, preferences reside in a space of exclusion. Having them means shutting doors to other things for preferring one particular thing presupposes a presence of preclusion.

I've been thinking a good deal about the role preferences play when pursuing anything. I've thought about the role choice plays in preference pursuing. Deny the self of a preference, and most pursuits become lukewarm. And achievement is rarely to be found in the lukewarm.

Just as I was thinking about the philosophical nuances of preferences, I had a desire to play a good game of chess. Funny that. I hadn't played in a few months. I call the one person in the city who usually gives me a good game of chess. He was surprised at my call as last time we got together for chess I told him that I wasn't all that interested in carrying on with our chess encounters for a while.

I'm the kind that needs time to warm up to something. I usually warm up to an idea, a person, or a general pursuit by thinking and reading about it. So, I start doing something exciting like reading up on chess news. It's exciting to me. Sort of like writing about 12-century egocentric heroes. We all have a kind of cake we like better than others. Choice has little say in preferences. If it did, impulse would play no role whatsoever in human pursuits. Think of the last thing you pursued with systematic interest and explore how big a role impulse played. I'd wager, a good deal. But I digress.

So I get on ChessBase.com to see what's up in the world of chess. While there I come upon an interview with the renowned chess player, Magnus Carlsen. Reading the interview got my juices flowing. I let out a few 'ha'-s and 'good one'-s as I was doing do. A bit from the interview says:

So you can’t call yourself a tactician or a strategist?
-I’d call myself an optimist! In actual fact I don’t have any clear preferences in chess. I do what I think circumstances require of me – I attack, defend or go into the endgame. Having preferences means having weaknesses.

Could you compare your impressions after a win in a subtle endgame or a whirlwind attack? Do they really not differ at all for you?!
-I really don’t know what I like more in chess! Among other things a game can stand out for the feeling you get when it’s over, when you realise you’ve created something truly worthwhile… But something like that happens very, very rarely. In any case, over the whole course of my life – only a few times.

Well, and if you’re just a spectator, which kind of game do you like more?
-I don’t know. I like the struggle in itself.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

I found it quite interesting that Carlsen would comment on what role preferences played in his activity of choice. In my opinion, however, whether it's chess or cheese-making, preferences matter. It's whether one's got a good poker face going in that truly counts when it comes to the end result. We all have preferences. It's how much/little we show them that matters.
And I'm all warmed up now.
I've removed all the specks of dust from my chess set and in about 5 minutes, my bell will ring. And so it does. My friend has a preference for punctuality. And he makes no fuss about obfuscating it. If he's this open when we play, I'm bound to win, aren't I?
We'll see.

Stuff New Yorkers Say

2012-01-20T07:33:00.002-05:00

Steve McQueen's Shame: A Review

2012-01-10T02:03:00.004-05:00

I saw Shame today. I like Michael Fassbender in most the films he's done with one exception: Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.

I generally tend to not judge accents as I'm a veritable soup of idiolects myself. However, Fassbender's accent in Inglourious Basterds is the stuff of headaches. But back to the Steve McQueen's Shame.

I like Fassbender's work a good deal. There's a certain gravitas he projects that few actors have the ability to carry. Born in Germany and raised in Ireland, he's a picture of cultural and linguistic diversity which is perhaps the reason why he appears to effortlessly play anything from a New Yorker to an aristocrat a-la-Jane-Eyre, or an X-Men-er.

The premise of Shame is the 'text' of shame and how it is engendered within a Judeo-Christian framework regardless of how far from prescribed religiosity it finds itself. I found the form of the film beautifully mimetic of a religious ritual. One good decision McQueen made is to go for Fassbender. It takes courage to take on certain roles and I most definitely don't see a Brad Pitt or a Clooney doing the same thing. Ok, maybe Colin Farrell or Jared Leto who by the way came to a mind a lot when viewing this film. Think, Requiem for a Dream, perhaps.

Most critics regard the film to be an examination of modern/urban sociality and how much the contemporary person wants to be tethered to others even though a good deal of current life seems to be about heightened individuality and insularity. McQueen's cinematic strength is not content, however. As a matter of fact, it rarely is. One thing he seems to do well, however, is explore the substance of form. The shots are clean, fast but not furious. McQueen's choices made me think of Doug Liman's portraiture styles. The camera rests on the characters just long enough till it gets moving again to the next point in the plot. Incidentally, this is how the film manages to deviate dullness. Aesthetically, this film is rich. Some of the city shots were also reminiscent of Nicolas Winding Refn's film Drive.

The past few years, at least since the actual boom of web 2.0, there seems to be little, if any, change in aesthetics. Incidentally, Vanity Fair's Kurt Andersen has a new article out on the question whether we as a culture are stagnating aesthetically. I thought of it while watching the film, actually. You can read it here.

I suppose it makes sense that form remains the one last frontier that's resisting change as all else around it has been changing mercilessly. Think technology. Hanging on to one thing seems to be the one crutch one needs to cope with the novelty and unpredictability of everything. Or is it? This seems to be the question that Brandon, the main character, tries to answer and eventually reject. Much in life seems to come easily to him. Much but not everything. He seems to bridle all else but basic urges about things he deems utterly trivial in broad daylight and when in the company of full lucidity.

Brandon seems to have it all on the surface. He's well employed, is generally well liked, at least on the surface, and seems to be governed by self-discipline. Only, he doesn't seem to do so as well as he appears.

He appears to want to connect to the world but the world seems to move simply too fast for him. His attachments are flimsy and most of the people he meets are forgettable. There seems to be a crisis of supply and demand when it comes to meaningful human connectivity. Brandon wants the opposite of what he has but the urban survival camp doesn't seem to be capable of providing it. He desperately wants the opposite of what he can get and every time he tries to leave his patterns of living, he falls right back into the known regardless of how much it is mired in dysfunction. Every night he goes after a new pursuit so that the next morning he can go back to all he knows.

Carey Mulligan plays his sister. I have only liked her in one film, An Education. All the other films that have ensued are nothing more than an imitation of her debut film. But then again, it would be hard to compliment a character who needs little support. Fassbender is no Pitt. He needs little support from other characters. A better script would have helped, no doubt.

Jessica Chastain is good in this. Very good. She's another example of an underrated performer often stuck in incoherent filmic choices, think the widely overrated The Help.

In sum, I enjoyed seeing Fassbender and I enjoyed the cinematography of Shame. What I didn't enjoy is McQueen's verbose effort to school the audience on addiction. His effort was, at best, sophomoric. His director of photography, however gets an A. Fassbender gets a solid A- but only because there's only that much he can do given the script.

In Shame, he is close to aces.

This film won't make you want to go back and brush up on your Descartes. Or perhaps Kant. It might just make you want to watch a bit of Kubrick and perhaps get a bit melancholy that he's been gone for a bit over a decade now.

Happiness and Excoriating

2011-12-27T05:58:00.002-05:00

"I've got to tell you something and I know you'll excoriate me," says he as I drive through the rainy streets of the city thinking of ways to improve two things I'm currently struggling with. Driving, like working out, is a good way to clear my head. Another way is going down by the beach, sitting on my favorite bench that's usually unoccupied around 9pm and between 7am-8:30am.

"What makes you think I'll excoriate you?" I say to him as I make a right turn.

"Because I know you. Plus, I know I'm in need of being excoriated." he adds. Usually, I would have interjected one of my usual one-liners known only to those who know my discursive routines. Instead, I say nothing. I'm in too involved a mood. My mind's busy. I say nothing and almost enjoy the silence for a bit.

"I might have something you'll excoriate me about, too", I finally say, "but let me hear yours first."

He proceeds to tell me the details and I ask him if he needs to hear from me the same thing I've told him a number of times in the past. He says he does. He feels like a review. "I feel like a good review," he says. Thus, we review.

I've thought a lot about happiness recently and how it relates to micro and macro sociality. Blame it on the rain, I suppose. It does have a tendency to lead to written fecundity. Writing pours out of me when it rains. Incidentally, I just finished a draft I'm submitting in two weeks. But back to the happiness thing.

Happiness cannot happen without self-examination. This is not some adage I had to think long and hard about. This is what the Western canon has taught me since early childhood. Start way South with Sophocles, move on a bit North to Plautus, pick up a bit of Dante in the neck of Florence, head North and West to Shakespeare, head back South and pick up some Goethe and, while you're at it, swing by France and have a sip of existentialism and what you'll end up gleaning is the following: Happiness cannot happen without self-examination. We cannot know the other, without knowing the self. Nobody can tell us what feels good to us, unless we experience it ourselves. I love the smell of pines. Absolutely, love it. It drives me insane with happiness. I discovered it when I was fourteen, right after learning how to dance with a tall boy with whose family we were vacationing and who was a horribly bad badminton partner. Happiness needs context in order to get registered. It needs a vehicle of narration. Without storytelling ability, it cannot be.

And it most certainly cannot happen without a clear grasp of history, one's own history. There's a better chance to face what's around the corner when you know and understand the corners you've left behind. And living because one can is no answer to existence. While existence might be nothing more than a string of coincidences, what our canon teaches us is that collectively we feel better about our individual and collective experience in life when we view it in connection to something larger than ourselves, like a bigger group of people, or a larger cluster of interests.

One of the first Shakespeare bits I memorized as a teen was a Hamlet soliloqui. I mostly saw Hamlet as a spoiled brat, not that different from other spoiled brats I knew growing up. And yet, I was in love with his eloquence. He was a brat who had a way with language. I've never been able to resist this kind, the kind that has a way with language. And my history will back this up.

"What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust?"

I always found it curious that while most people responded to the first verses, I was always keener on the "quintessence of dust" part. For some reason, I mostly use this phrase when break into German. I really don't know why. Translating Shakespeare into German is almost as sacreligeous as translating Goethe into English. My German counterparts often say, "Was ist denn mit der Quintessenz?!" Essence is fine enough a word, no? I wanted to say Quintessenz on Saturday. I didn't. I remember the context well. I was simply too tired to use it as using it would invite even more questions as to why my speech is often peppered with uncommon words.

The reason why I always respond to the "quintessence of dust" bit of the soliloqui is because it encapsulates the notion of life and human existence most fundamentally. And yet, it's poetic. It's association with nothingness is poetic. While our entire literary canon suggests than meaning resides in tropes, sometimes it feels better to embrace the simplicity of experience for what it is, a speck in time, a cluster of little somethings, some of which are good and others the stuff of anxiety, which inevitably make up one big trace.

The thing is, happiness is about shared experience. We need canon to live well. We can easily survive without a historical blueprint of existence. Animals do it. But to live and to want to live well, a script is needed, a well written one. One that says that happiness is our duty and that to go after it is somehow lofty a pursuit, noble even. We spend our lives going after goals, hard ones, to reach a level of happiness much of which seems to be rooted in status and accomplishment.

Without connectivity, we have no context, no history and few things taste better to one than being known, resisted, and eventually agreed with. Happiness is having someone who truly knows you and whom you truly know say to you that they've said or done something you'd excoriate them about. Bottom line, they know how you'll react and they know they'll feel better after sharing with you their short narrative. And while you've read their script over and over again you somehow feel good that they feel you know how to read them and, like a forgiving teacher, you'll excoriate them briefly but then you'll write little notes on the margins of their essay and they'll know how to get better and do right by you.

Familiarity gives me comfort because familiarity gives us all comfort. Humans like routine. It's
due to our enculturation. We have no say in the matter. It's like saying we like how water tastes after being deprived of it. Another synonym for familiarity is intimacy and intimacy is harder for some for it resides in the territory of vulnerability where impulse and unhoned instinct doesn't do very well and where damage can easily be dished out. Giving intimacy means getting known and there is no ouvre bigger and more significant than that. C.S. Lewis wrote that we "read to know we are not alone."

Those who say they can do without familiarity have never had the courage to acquire it, they're strangers to it. And one could never rely on someone who refuses familiarity because to refuse it means to refuse a shared history, connectivity. And while contentedness can happen free of context, happiness needs more, at the very least, it needs a semblance of importance. The feeling of sucking on frozen grapes makes some, including me, feel content. Wearing silk panty hose with a form-fitting black dress hand-made in Berlin in the early 90's while wearing high-heeled boots as I meet someone for dinner makes me feel good. I do it when I feel like my inner self needs excoriating so that it can get to feeling better.

The Futility of Suffering and Nietzsche

2011-12-12T11:52:00.001-05:00

Right after I woke up this morning I started reading the new articles on Vanity Fair. I started reading a new piece on aesthetic stagnation first and after getting upbeat at its premise it only seems apropos that I move on to Hitchens.

While reading Hitchens' article entitled Trial of the Will, I got to thinking about things I'd either experienced in life before or read in previous publications. I illustrate. First I got to thinking about David whom I met in grad school. He turned on to Dosteyevsky and Nietzsche around the same time we met so naturally we clicked. I'd run into David at the oddest times. One night, when my grad school significant other and I were driving home from dinner, I saw David walking by himself on the sidewalk. "Slow down. I think that's David" I say. We do just that. I roll down the window and say, "David! It's late. And cold. I mean, not that it matters." I felt my person giving me an eye-rolling but, naturally, I didn't care. What David and Bri time meant was hours upon hours of Lit Crit talk. We would both dive into a literary discussion almost maniacally. We'd start with Bulgakov's Master and Margarita, move on to Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche and in true, 'light' fashion finish with a good chat about existentialism.

Ha. I think to myself, this morning, as my hair is wrapped up in a towel and I find some pleasure out of smelling the body lotion I've been keen on for years. I get on my email and do a keyword on David. I have to say 'hey,' I think to myself. I enter his name and a sea of David words come at me. I open one particular email. The first sentence that jumps out was when he was traveling one summer around Europe and he was telling me about me his peregrinage. He writes, "I suffer regularly which is good for a person, I reckon." Ah, David!

Suffering and learning. Suffering does little for learning. It makes sense that we'd create a whole narrative of learning around it. I mean, it's bound to serve some purpose, right? Actually, the more I think about this, and I've bee thinking about this since early adolescence, the more I'm convinced that it's nothing more than a shallow myth. This is why back in 2004 I readily agreed with Woody Alen and why I easily get on Hitchens' side on the topic today. Granted, I also have much literary and historical context to back this up. Think Nietzsche. People tend to romanticize him and more often than not forget that his twilight years were yet another example of how impervious to learning one is when in deep suffering. Nietzsche's last years were a scene straight out of the third circle of hell.

There's little catharsis in suffering. The only good feeling that it generates is when it reaches its very end. The thought of not having to experience it again produces relief. And relief feels good when tasted after hardship.

I'm amazed at how our brains work. During the time I was in the shower this morning, it managed to give me a nice little essay, equipped with a full bibliography, of my readings and experiences on one topic. I started with David, moved on to Nietzsche, and closed with Woody Allen's Spiegel magazine interview back in 2005. I read it closely then. I also taught it in my German Literature course that Spring. A bit from the article says, and I translate:

"There is nothing really redeeming about tragedy. Tragedy is tragic, and it's so painful that people try to twist it and say "it's terribly hard, but look we've achieved something, we've learned something." This is a weak attempt to find some kind of meaning in tragedy. But there is no meaning. There is no up-side. And suffering does not redeem anything; there is no positive message to learn from it."

What was Nietzsche's phrase again, Was mich nicht umbringt macht mich stärker i.e., "What doesn't kill me, makes me stronger"? And how strong exactly was Nietzsche during the last decade of his life? By all accounts he was an etalon of feebleness thanks to his intense physical and mental suffering.

So, what's die Moral der Geschichte? The moral of the story would be, when attempting to grapple with hardship, stay away from Nietzsche and any viable association you might want to make between learning and suffering. Sometimes, stuff needs to be experienced and left alone, wrapped up and hidden in some drawer.

I close with Hitchens' own words on pain. His own experience of sickness and suffering is what fueled his new article on Vanity Fair. He concludes: "I am attracted to the German etymology of the word “stark,” and its relative used by Nietzsche, stärker, which means “stronger.” In Yiddish, to call someone a shtarker is to credit him with being a militant, a tough guy, a hard worker. So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing."

What I learned from reading Greek tragedies as a child was that the best thing to do with suffering is to evade. Pretty good reaction, if you ask the adult version of me. Pretty, pretty good.

When in Doubt, Think Dante

2011-12-06T19:12:00.002-05:00

I think about Dante all the time.
All the time.
I especially think of Dante when in times of hardship.
Of course, it helps that since the age of nine I got in the habit of maniacally memorizing verse after verse and, oddly, have yet to forget a single stanza in the terza rima. Dante helps me organize my thoughts. His work helps me get centered and put things in perspective.

As a doctoral student in Germanics, I took a PhD course in Dante's Inferno. I was the only non-Italian PhD candidate in the course. The professor, one of the better known Dantisti in the States, asked me one day, "Brikena, come mai Dante?" i.e.: "Brikena, how come Dante?"

Stutteringly, I said: "Perche, eeee, insomma, perche mi parla...." i.e.: "Because uhm, well, because he talks to me."

Since early childhood, I've most likely spent thousands of hours reading Dante. Easily. Dante never feels like reading. It doesn't feel like work. It's like listening to music. It speaks to me. And unlike much else, it never disappoints. It always gives me something. It doesn't just take. It gives. Therein lies its unfading novelty and attraction. Novelty and attraction can only work well in the confines of giving. Deprive them of it and they'll vanish.

Dante understood that the human experience is marked by universality. He knew that while we might term certain emotions and feelings differently, our experience of the great basics, i.e., love, pain, anger, anxiety, difficulty are fundamentally the same whether one is professor Brunetto Latini who's condemned to inferno for eternity (see Canto XV) or Virgil, the guiding poet, who was unluckily born a few decades 'ahead of his time.'

Feeling good is 'dolce' and feeling badly is not. The dichotomy is clear to all. Dante refers to himself as two separate entities. On the one hand, there's the generally cerebral Dante, il poeta laureato, and on the other hand, there's Dante, l'uomo, the highly emotional man. The man, who faints at the sight of the great emotional pain of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V.

Dante embraces his emotional and cerebral sides fully. In my view, this is what makes me be as Dante-centric as I am. Dante fills a need. A need to self-soothe and inevitably self-ameliorate.

Why Dante, others, other than Prof. Di Tommaso have asked me. Why not Sophocles or Shakespeare? Or Goethe, even. For crying out loud, especially Goethe!

The answer is easy. I've long held that we don't get to choose art. Art chooses us. I believe this. As a matter of fact, I'll venture so much as to say that few things are solely choice-based. Very few. We think we choose but in most situations we are swayed to go one way over another.

Daily, I'm amazed at the multitude of applications that La Commedia lends itself to. And daily I'm tempted to apply it.

Dante spoke to me first on a cerebral level as someone with a doctorate of philosophy. He spoke to me equally strongly on a personal level. My whole life I've had difficulty with displays of emotions. I've always privileged my cerebral side. And unfairly so at times. But the older I get and the more I experience raw life, the more I allow myself to taste the opposite of ease, levity, and happiness, the more I'm drawn to Dante. It's hard, no, impossible, to ignore something that reaches you both on a cerebral and emotional level contemporaneously. Try it. You'll most likely fail.

What's been claiming most of my thoughts recently is the notion of the pursuit of happiness and it tenability. I've long wondered what it is that Dante must have experienced to write in Canto V that there's:
Nessun maggior dolore
Che ricordarsi del tempo felice
Nella miseria (lines 121-123)
There is no greater sorrow
Than to be mindful of the happy time
In misery.

Cerebrally, I've always known this. I've lectured on it plenty. Emotionally, I'm convinced that the only way to get happiness, to truly capture it albeit fleetingly, is to see it in conjunction with pain and memory. Happiness cannot exist in the confines of complacency. It couldn't. It needs the oxygen of immediacy. It can't be without. Happiness can only be when ridden with the anxiety of potential loss.

Being, at times, happy is the hardest task to accomplish. Some are aided by their respective genetic makeup to have a somewhat easier/harder time with happiness. Generally, however, happiness takes much conscious work. If left to chance, the end result will undoubtedly be difficult. The gift of introspection, some call it. This ability that some have to look inward to find answers to the human condition. Introspection is not a gift. Introspection is work, a lot of arduous work. Introspection cannot be given one. It needs to be acquired. One individual at a time.

Steve Jobs' Biography by Walter Isaacson: A Review

2011-10-30T22:26:00.001-04:00

Isaacson's authorized biography of Steve Jobs is a good read. No doubt. How could one go wrong with a subject such as Jobs? All the years I've been reading about Steve Jobs, I used to get a kick out of people complaining about his controlling ways, his voracious appetite for work, and his unrelenting quest for excellence. Well, I wouldn't expect new devices like the iPod and the iPad to come to life by a slow, lassez-faire type with no sense of urgency.

Isaacson's biography is not peppered with too many 'genius' references. I'm glad it's not. It's another strong aspect of the book. Isaacson portrays a person who is aware of societal hierarchies and knows that to get any kinds of access, one needs to be in the right place at the right time. The anecdote of young Jobs forcing his parents to sell their house so that they could move to a place they couldn't quite afford just so that he could attend a better school was most compelling. Those who observe that Jobs did things his way and had disregard for established hierarchy seem to be wrong here. Young Jobs understood that everyone needs a good beginning, even one who has the ability to bring us the iPod.

Another griping snippet in the book was Jobs' refusal to have any sort of relationship with his biological father. Birth anxieties seem to have accompanied him his whole life. Isaacson seems to infer that much of drive was informed by the fact that he was given up for adoption. Jobs' personal relationships were well captured in the book. Two other people stand out in this section as well, his sister and his illegitimate daughter. Through it all, Jobs looks like any average person out there. He was accompanied by ontological insecurities and found work a good place to be and maybe hide in.

Those who refer to Jobs as a genius seem to do so decontextually. What is a genius anyway? What standards are we employing here? Are we talking 'Leonardo' genius or 'Einstein' genius? Apropos, since I mention the latter here, what made Einstein interesting from a popular culture point of view is the fact that he was, for some intents and purposes, quite average. He didn't excel scholastically, didn't have big professional ambitions when in the work force, ah, and, most importantly, had a troubled relationship with mathematics. It took many a person to help and inform him.

And just like Isaacson's biography shows, it took a lot to help and inform Steve Jobs. But while Jobs was extremely hard on those who crossed him, he would be harder on those he liked and, as a result, held to a standard they couldn't always keep. What people like Jobs have is tenacity. Skill comes in many forms. There might just be as many ways of being good at something as there are moments in time. What allows one to produce a great product, in the case of Jobs, is his ability to understand that function could never truly shine outside the realm of form. Aesthetics is never inconsequential. This is a sentence I find myself uttering often. Form is not the stuff of levity. Form has heaviness, the heaviness of importance. It's one nugget I am certain of and one I also saw elaborated in this text.

I recommend that you read it. It won't necessarily inspire but then again, should it? Fundamentally, we are all the same whether we're creating things that millions will want to have or not.

Poetry and the iPhone 4s

2011-10-27T00:09:00.000-04:00

I have a knack for poetry.
And poets.
Especially, poets.
I have much respect for people who have an innate ability to produce poetry. Maybe that's why I privilege my poet friends to the degree that I do. I am aware of their skill and I pay homage to it. I was never good at writing it. However, I vouched to get decent at interpreting it.

Today I met a poet.

We met while talking about the iPhone 4s and how it compares to other super phones in the market. The conversation started most business-like. I've been in the technology business for a year now and there has been a shift in my quotidian jargon. I've replaced words like la terza rima, literary tropes, synecdoche, and gender theory with words like multicore, downloading speeds, data, and Android. The latter choice is faster, very 'now', technical and, at times, not very poetry-informed. It's denuded of tropes. It's clean, clinical, and free of literary entanglements.

At times though, my literary scholar self comes out most unexpectedly and, voila, a poet is befriended.

The following conversation took place today between me and the poet:

The poet: "So, what do you make of the Samsung Galaxy S II dominating Europe right now?"
I: "It's good. It speaks well for the Samsung brand but Apple is still king. It's tough to ignore the 'cool' factor of the brand. Especially now. The iPhone 4S is going strong."
He:"The Galaxy S II is a superphone, though."
I: "No doubt. The S II is a superphone, it has a double core, 14.4+ downloading speed, 4.2; screen, 8MP camera. At the same time the iPhone is a super phone to all those who have it and have experience with it."

I continue and this is where the connection takes place.

"You know, the new 4s is poetry."
He:"What do you mean by that?"
I:"It's a beautiful balance of form and content. It has capabilities that I doubt most users will ever come close to making use of and, not insignificantly, it's aesthetically pleasing. It's like a good poem."
He: "Hmm. Funny you say that. I do that. I perform my poetry."
Instead of resuming the conversation like any other 'normal' person, I channel my literary scholar self and say, "structured or free verse?"
He: "Allen Ginsberg. All the way, Ginsberg."
I: "He seemed to need so much affection, a shame not to make him happy."
He: "Death & Fame." Hmm. Really?"

He looks happy to have outed someone. Someone like him. Someone of his ilk.

...
At this point we know we're not about to go back and talk about Wired articles on super phones or Steve Jobs' passing, the Apple brand, or superphones.

He: "So, who's yours? Favorite, I mean."
I: "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita...."
He: "Dante."

Needless to say, we will speak again. Meeting poets with a knack for technology doesn't happen often. Most of my poet friends are not technofiles. Or infected by neophilia, for that matter.

My new friend says he reads his own poetry at a cafe nearby.

In a businesslike fashion, I open up my iPhone, tap on the calendar app, ask for the name of the cafe, click on the GPS and calculate the distance from work. Beautiful. It's only 2.4 miles South.

18304

2011-10-03T00:32:00.000-04:00

This is the number of messages I have in my Gmail account. Of course, I delete. I do. Daily. But I've always led a highly verbal life. As a result, I get to get an email form Google Help Desk letting me know that my "web mail quota has exceeded the set quota which is 3GB. [I am] currently running on 3.9 GB."Forgive me Google for I have exceeded the quota. I've dared go past the permitted parameters. What now? Will I be marginalized to the outskirts of the emailing world? Is there such a thing as an email Inferno or something? Which circle will I end up in?The email did get me to thinking about my writing habits and my usually verbal life, however. For years I've been giving/receiving a whole lot of words. And words add up. 3.9 GB is a lot of words. I take a few minutes to look at some folders. Some are too passe. Especially at 2:15 AM they feel passe. I delete a few folders. And still, not a dent. I need to get a good course of action. I need to put my words on a high-protein, low-carb diet.I wake up on account of a bad dream. I open up my email to get my mind off of the disturbing images of the dream. Why was that scary behemoth of a dog chasing me like that?! I mean, I even fed it and everything. I gave it my Starbucks muffin. What gives, dog? But, I better stop talking about the dream and get back to the google chastisement. I have to face the bottomless well that is my highly verbal life and start editing much like I edit my closets. It's easy for me to edit clothing. I only own a very few items of clothing that are older than one year. The reasons are simple. I'm hard on what I wear. In no time I'll manage to ruin the sturdiest and best-made sartorial contributions any closet would love to have. Why is it to hard with words, though? In my academic career, most of my lectures and writing were about concise speech and how difficult it is to master it. As a matter of fact, for all the courses and syllabi I've developed so far, I have an assignment I called: "capture." Often, especially in literary theory courses, I'd accompany it with another one I called "James Joyce auf Deutsch." i.e., "James Joyce in German," i.e., writing a-la-James-Joyce. So, for the latter, the students would be encouraged to just keep on writing and let the words flow as naturally and freely as they could, one association at a time. And in a matter of days, the next assignment would be a one-page 'capture' intended to make them think carefully about every content word chosen. Many of the comments I would put on most papers would say, "How could you say more with less? - Economy of speech: employ it more often."It's time I heed my own advice.I've always been in love with economy of speech. Some people tend to love difficult things. And I've always loved a good speech economy. The kind that's managed right. Once in a blue moon I encounter it and, when I do, I delight in it like a diabetic at a gelateria who's been allowed to go nuts on ice cream for one blessed day.And, here I am. Looking at the number 18304. Wondering how I could have accumulated a Tower of Babel in such a short time, with much deleting and all. I start to delete a few. But then my eyes get heavy. Surely, this can be done later. I put the computer aside, turn to the left side, close my eyes, and hope I don't get tormented by the awful nightmare that woke me up in the first place and sent me to my email.

The Cars' New Brilliant Album: A Review

2011-08-11T00:28:00.002-04:00

I've been on a bit of a break from music.
...

Shocking, I know.

However, one truth of mine is that I can easily let go of stuff that doesn't keep me interested. I tend to look at this trait as a big positive. Others might disagree. If something is not qualitative, I'll give it some attention out of fundamental politeness and general respect for the genre. However, my academic quarter is just that: a brief interval of artistic etiquette.
But maybe other things have been at play in my recent nonchalant attitude vis-a-vis music. Be that as it may, after five weeks of no active music listening, (sacre bleu, I know!), I'm back.

After feeling no inspiration while scrolling down the thousands and thousands of track titles in my library, I thought I'd gain some distance between my muse, music, and my quotidianity. Instead, in my long drives and writing intervals, I'd listen to Marc Maron's brilliant podcast, WTF with Marc Maron. And, since I have long been a lover of stand-up comedy since seeing live acts back East, listening to Marc Maron interview comics has been most gripping and informative.

But, I'm not one to be without music for long. While my love of novelty might be too strong to resist, my long-term commitment to music is indisputable. And in the end, it always wins. I always pick it.

Enter The Cars.

Their new album, Move Like This, is the stuff of true skill. It's brilliant, very now, oozing experience-forged skill, and just very sexy. Hot. Very hot! In a time in music where prefab tracks and auto-tune seem to call the shots and true talent is obfuscated by way of cheaply manufactured aesthetics, coming across actual quality feels so refreshing. I had been parched and tonight I feel sated. Tracks like "Hits Me," "It's Only" and "Keep On Knocking" have a kind of masterful pace that make one wonder how such melodic perfection could be produced. So good. Great guitar, incomparable synthesizer, unparalleled vocals and just general 'cool' are what The Cars' new album is all about.

Every track is infused with a sense of history and contemporaneity which I've always thought hard to pull off. You listen to a track like "Take Another Look" and you know that feeling both melancholy and levity is a genuine possibility in the realm of good music. When a band tries to tip the hat to times past, it runs the risk of sounding dated. When it tries to be as 'now' as it can, it runs the risk of being slapped with accusations of affectation. However, The Cars do it just right. The listener is transported to times past while being firmly aware of what it means to be contemporary.

You don't make good art by accident. You make good art by study and constant practice. It took the Cards a couple of decades to put forth a new album but, holy crap, they've produced a hell of an album. So, sorry Marc Maron, I'll have to retire your podcast for a bit. Well, I've listened to every episode by now anyway and I'll re-visit your stuff in a little while. I'll be courting The Cars now. And I invite you all to do the same. You will love this.

Sitting between Two Redheaded People

2011-08-09T00:35:00.003-04:00

I received some major news a few weeks ago. You know how it feels when everything around you unexpectedly goes in slow motion and you're almost capable of doing a play-by-play analysis of what's getting shown to you? Yeah, kind of, sort of like that.

Afterwards, I go to my car, sit, and put my hands around the steering wheel as if I’m driving somewhere. Only, the key is not in ignition and I have no music or a podcast episode from WTF with Marc Maron coming out of the iPod. Fifteen minutes into it - even though I'm told it's fifteen minutes. It felt more like 15 seconds to me - I hear, “uhm, so, are we going somewhere or should we see if we can get pizza delivered in the parking lot?”

Funny. I know.

For some odd reason, my mind took me to my first semester as a freshman in college. I haven't really thought about that time since going through it. As a general rule, I tend to experience, file, and move on to the next thing. Anyway. I had a brutal schedule then. One that I had hand-picked myself. Naturally. The thing is, I have a knack for picking difficult scenarios and subsequently sticking with them and bringing them to fruition. It's a chronic condition, I guess. Some people spend their lives averting challenges, others welcome them with an unexplained and unrequired bravado. Color me the latter. Whoopty doo!

So, when most students would take between 12 to 15 credits, I would alternate between 18 to 22 credits. Most unnecessarily, by the way. I just wanted to see if I could push myself to a new limit and if I could still hold on to my full-ride scholarship while castigating myself with an impossible schedule. I know. Let it go. It’s my thing.

To illustrate my point, here’s my schedule as a first semester freshman.
English Writing: 8:00AM-8:50AM (apropos, I am categorically not a morning person.)
Basketball: 9:00AM-9:50AM
Religion: 10:00AM-10:50AM
Biology: 11:00AM-11:50AM
And, after a six-hour break:
Math: 6PM.

Chances are, if I would go at it again, I’d most likely pick some hard scenario like this again. And since I didn't do all that shabbily the first time around, I'd dare make it even more challenging. I wish I were joking. At times, I wished I was one of those people who were happy being a 12-credit type of person. I could never pull that off, however. A certain gene pool and predisposition coupled with certain acquired behaviors proves to be incurable more often than not. Bottom line, some people take the easy or easier way out while others like detours or harder trails. It doesn’t mean that one camp is better and/or smarter than the other. It’s just diversity. I used to think, foolishly proudly, that the harder way was somehow more respectable. Turns out that's not true at all. Being happy with ease and a general lack of ambition is something I wish I could do. I bet life would be a total breeze. I doubt I'd lose track of time, holding on to my steering wheel while the ignition key is still on my lap if I were into 'easy.' Alas, I'm not.

But back to the schedule. I know I'll make the point eventually. The hardest thing about it (i.e., the schedule) was going from Basketball to Religion. I played basketball like I was a 6.2’ dude. And I’m a foot shorter than that. I played so hard all I wanted to do afterwards was take a long shower and do the unthinkable: take a nap. Instead, I’d gather my stuff and try to clean up as I ran even harder from the gym to the Humanities building where the Religion course took place. I was always panic-stricken when going to Religion. Ok, the real reason had to do with the seating chart, yes there was a seating chart for that class. The professor thought he could remember our faces better if we sat in the same place every day. Oh, there were close to 100 students in that auditorium, by the way. Insane man, I know.

In Religion, I was sitting in the middle of one of the back rows. That's the seat you get for being one of the last ones to walk in as you pull a Carl Lewis from gym class. I was smack dab in the middle. I tend to remember few details from people and events if I’m not too struck by either aesthetics and/or intelligence. Nothing much struck me in that class other than the fact that there were two redheads in there, a boy and a girl, and for some reason they were sitting respectively to my left and right. Yup, I was sitting between two bona fide redheads, a boy and a girl. I couldn’t get over the fact how enthralling I found their hair and their galaxy of freckles. They could have been related. They weren’t.

What occupied my mind then was the fear that I would continue to perspire as the professor taught about the historical context behind Leviticus. I couldn’t wait to go home and shower. Hard. Few things make me freak out. Not showering twice a day is one of them. I know. It’s my thing. Let it go. In Religion, I somehow felt some version of piety as I “suffered” in my tight but cushy seat while pursuing my education in the private university where people were more polite than those in Pleasantville and perfect strangers would say “hello” and “how are you?” to you. Ad nauseam.

For some odd reason, after my news, I felt exactly how I felt when sitting in Religion as I freaked out at the prospect of more sweat coming out of me as I had played with a kind of vigor I generally reserve for the airport as I'm always running to my gates trying to make my connections. I recognized the feeling immediately. I scratched my head metaphorically and literally. I wondered why I had to scratch my head and made a quick mental note re: changing shampoos. Then, metaphorically, I scratched my head again and wondered why, of all the thoughts my brain would have strung together, it decided to pick one that took me back to my freshman year.

In sum, I often wonder why I have such loyal tolerance for quotidianity and all its menial routines and overall uninterestingness. And every time I wonder about its strong presence, I am reminded of the function it plays. It's a bringer of stability and overall sanity. I like control. Control, for odd reasons, gets a bad rap. However, control is nothing to sneer at. It comes too naturally to some and very challengingly to others. While I have a naturally hyper nature which at times makes concentration difficult, thanks to learned control and discipline, much can get accomplished.

It's hard to get stuff done well when you are pulled in so many directions all of which beg for your attention. So, amid the frustration of nature, desire for focus needs to kick in. And it does. It says, I want to do a task at a time and I want to do them well. So, controlling one's nature is indispensable when it comes to accomplishment and productivity.
It turns out, it's also indispensable when it comes to dealing with a kind of novelty that puts well-tested quotidianity on its head and tells it to go spin.

And there you are, metaphorically sitting between two redheaded people, hoping your sweat won't get noticed.

How Does One Know One?

2011-07-19T00:03:00.001-04:00

Last night, I luxuriated by way of time and language. I rarely find myself in a ménage of this sort. It's usually one or the other but not both. Well, what can I say. I'm in a splurging mood lately and there's nothing I can do about it.

I had the opportunity to take some quiet/unscheduled time lately. After that, however, big questions were born and what better way to discuss them then by talking with those who share your modus vivendi? So, last night one of my closest friends asked me the following, "Na, du, wie kennt man Einen?" Translated: "So, you, how does one get to know one?"

I don't have the answer to it. "I don't have the answer to it," I said. Come to think of it, i don't even wish to have the answer to it. The beauty of getting to know one lies in the process. That is the stuff of poetry. One of the lines that has stuck with me from all the literature I have ever read, - and that is a whole lot -, comes from Botho Strauss' play in two acts Die Fremdenfuehrerin i.e., The Tour Guide. In it, the main character says: "Ein zweiter Mensch erweckt neue Erwartungen" i.e., "A second person awakens new expectations."

Without expectations there can be no drive to renew one's self, to morph into something better, hopefully more developed. Without expectations there can be no passion, no drama, no, well, life. Expectations set things in motions and humans are meant to be in motion. Agito ergo sum, after all. We do/move, therefore, we are.

Back to my friend's question. I told him I didn't have any special insight. I think I added something like, "man kennt einen, wenn man sich selbst kennt. Oder nicht. Was weiss ich denn..." "One knows one when one knows one's self. Or not. What do I know..." After saying it I felt some measure of melancholy. Knowing one's self is tough. It is, in my view, one of the hardest pursuits. Those who think they know themselves well usually fail miserable at recognizing basic truths about them. Self-knowledge is nigh impossible. Which means, a knowledge of the other, actual knowledge of the other, is nigh impossible as well. It's not the knowing of one's self and the selves of the others that is important but rather the inclination to engage in a process of self-knowledge and knowledge of the other.

Knowing others is fundamentally predicated upon knowing one's self and one's 'self' i.e., our 'selves' are not like books standing on the shelf where they can be picked up at any time divorced from time and particular circumstance. Identity is not petrified, like the written word. It shifts, morphs into new things, progresses and regresses. It moves. To get it, to get to the core of one's 'self' one needs to consider any and all variables. And this, well, this is nigh impossible to do. However, it is in this very impossibility where beauty can be found. Not the kind of beauty that fades but rather the beauty about which one is compelled to give a damn. True substance.

Knowledge of the self and the self of the other changes as a result of circumstance as well.

I illustrate:

I used to hate pizza. As in "ewe, blah, double ewe, can't eat that crap"-type of thing. I have my ideas as to what informed my general disgust for this particular food. I reckon it has something to do with a period in my life when I didn't particularly care for Italian cuisine generally and pizza/pasta particularly. I like pizza now, though. Matter of fact, I just had it for dinner tonight. Coupled with hot chocolate. And cherries. Yeah. Yum! Put that in your pipe, Wolfgang Puck, and smoke it. I know why I'm cool with pizza now. I know why I'm cool with pizza in the company of hot chocolate and cherries. Given the same presentation a while back, I would have sneered, mocked, and resisted the urge to part ways with whatever dwelled in my stomach. But that's then and this is now.

Hard things beg for attention. Not-so-hard things are largely forgettable and I happen to think not worth one's consideration most of the time. There's bound to be a hierarchy of difficulty. After all, we're not all meant to be into John Donne. Some are into that kind of hermetic brilliance. Others, on the other hand, do just find with Harry Potter. There's something for everyone.

I have a knack for hard things. It's one of the few things I have come to truly get about my nature. What can I do about it? Nothing. I can embrace it and go with it. Sooner is always better than later. Resisting it would be like the day my friends and I were swimming in the river and I had the brilliant idea to try going against the current because, of course, the Napoleon inside me, thought s/he could just do it. Long story short, I ended up on the other shore, lost my left Havaiana and ruined my favorite swimsuit when wrestling with an unfortunate looking tree branch. I have yet to find a better suit. But I digress. The point is, we are who/how we are. At the core, we are who we are. We do not change. This sounds too much like a cliché. I can't be the first to have phrased it this way. Wait, it's making me think of someone. Duh, Charles Dickens and his Great Expectations. Still, though, it has value even though I get zero points for originality. I happen to concur with the point and that adds value to it. How's this for healthy self-esteem?!

So, after talking about sociality, my friend and I segued into an analysis of sociality. I made the point that an understanding of sociality can only be had when one truly invests in solitude. And investing in solitude is tough. Especially if one's inclination has little natural space for it.

I've gotten to be a bit more decent at alone time. I'd give myself a solid 6/10 as an adult. The reason why is quite simple. It's called learned behavior and focused practice. Gregariousness has always come easily to me. Others would most likely give me a 9/10. I would give myself a solid 8. But, just like it is the case with other traits that one comes equipped with genetically, I tend to often privilege things and traits that are not as easy. I don't know why this is. It's a trait I've long resigned myself to. If all roads lead to Rome, I tend to usually take the longer, more difficult one. I illustrate as a tip of the hat to my Italy-residing people. It's kind of like getting to Rome from Milan by driving your car - at least a stress-fueled 8-hour-period of your life marked by noise, odd lane-changing habits, and traffic that comes out of Dante's third circle of Hell - as opposed to flying from Fiumicino to Malpensa (a mere hour). In case I need to explain, I'd, most likely and almost unequivocally, prefer the former. Why? I don't know. We are who we are. We don't change.

So, how does one get to know one as per my friend's question? One stops being a coward and starts to get to know one's self as one truly is at dawn and not as one thinks one is at dusk. Dusk, albeit a favorite time for many, is a tricky little rascal. Dusk is like wine. It veils things. It doesn't let one see things in an unfettered and untarnished fashion. Nothing can reveal all freckles, blemishes, and corporeal changes the way dawn can. And in that space of time is where the others might be known too. At least to some degree and in some measure. Nothing and no one can be known fully. And in this very lack of omniscience lies the beauty of being human and foible.

I Couldn't Like Emerson More

2011-07-16T21:19:00.001-04:00

I've never had much respect for books I can read in one day. I don't know why that is. Wait, I do know why that it is. My high-frequency books are Dante's Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Botho Strauss' Die Fremdenfuehrerin. They're all complicated works that need careful attention and much consideration. If you can figure something out too quickly, then maybe you shouldn't have bothered with it all in the first place.

Right.

Having stated this, check out this jewel of a thought from Emerson regarding Jane Austen's work. Man, I love this guy! Boom, this is how you write about Jane Austen.

"I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair”, say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable."

Emerson Goodness

2011-06-15T23:37:00.000-04:00

Was just reminded why I'm keen on Emerson. The following comes from his Notebooks (1841).
Tip of the hat to Tyler for the pointer.

"We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over & actually read a volume of 4 or 500 pages. Even the great books. “Come,” say they, “we will give you the key to the world” — Each poet each philosopher says this, & we expect to go like a thunderbolt to the centre, but the thunder is a superficial phenomenon, makes a skin-deep cut, and so does the Sage — whether Confucius, Menu, Zoroaster, Socrates; striking at right angles to the globe his force is instantly diffused laterally & enters not. The wedge turns out to be a rocket. I have found this to be the case with every book I have read & yet I take up a new writer with a sort of pulse beat of expectation.

Identity Shmidentity

2011-06-15T02:11:00.003-04:00

Every time I hear Polonius’s statement from Hamlet: Act 1 Scene 3 quoted, i.e.: “To thine own self be true” I unequivocally frown as a way of saying 'say what?!', without actually saying it. I do so because Polonius is usually quoted decontextually. Polonius, let’s be real, was pretty much an officious, sort-of hysterical, well, ok, imbecile. In nuce, he was a follower, at best, who lacked the ability to think for himself. Polonius was, metaphorically speaking, a little man, one who never saw his daughter, the much deeper Ophelia - who must have certainly taken after her mother - for what and who she was: cerebral, observing, and analytical.

But back to the often decontextually quoted “to thine own self be true” which, apropos, came up in a conversation I was a part of this evening with a couple of people. I did produce a "say what?!" by way of the face but that might have been because I didn't have dinner till later. Anyway.

Back to the topic at hand, i.e., identity. We can’t be the same in every situation and with everyone. Judith Butler generally maintains that we tend to ‘perform’ the many versions of ourselves situationally. The sum of our performances of identy(ies) make up our very social make-up. Granted, her identity notions as found in her seminal work Gender Trouble (1990) mostly applies to Gender Theory but the concept could still be applied more broadly.

I tend to think that a number of core traits are with us all the time. However, other things are added and subtracted. Certain traits get exacerbated and others get nigh muted depending on the context, time frame, and the influences we are exposed to. And, everyone is around influences. Nobody is immune to them. What was the adage again? Ah, yes, no man is an island. Right. No person is an island.

I had a thought tonight about another conversation I had with my best friend the other day. Every time we talk he inserts one of his usual, ‘Seriously, that would have been your idea of hell,’ or ‘that’s when you would have adios-ed the conversation.’ By way of context and making a point here, my best friend and I met as freshmen in college when taking a Linguistics course. We were both bored out of our minds in it. One day, the professor asked me an Italian-related question, I answered it and then after class he came to me speaking in flawless Italian. His mother is Swiss Italian, hence the proficiency.

In Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates states that philosophy is: meletē thanatou. The phrase simply means — a diligent/educated practice of death. However what Plato means here, among other things, is that one of the ‘performances’ of philosophy is to helps humans better deal with their basic humanity. By extension, I would submit that philosophy/education or knowledge/information exist primarly to help us come to terms with the many versions of our fundamental humanity and why/how they actualize themselves they way they do.

My parents always say the following when we see one another during family events and vacations: “you’re the same you used to be.” And unequivocally I retort: “Who else would I be?!” Change, however, happens. It is bound to happen. And what counts is not what garrulous Polonius said i.e., “to thine own self be true,” but rather how the self can handle the many variables it encounters daily. The goal eventually is to stay afloat and not drown. The goal, as Plato’s Socrates points out in Phaedrus is to cope with mortality as well as one can. What else is there of more import, really? And if a version of self is not doing the job well enough, it can and should get laid off. There needs to be more where that, it, came from after all.

I’ve never been able to understand why anyone would take advice about life from Polonius of all people. It’s sort of like a priest going to Bill Maher with a Gospel of John question.

Thinking Bits

2011-06-13T01:09:00.001-04:00

There's a folder in one of the iPhoto libraries that reads 'Bri Thinking Photos.' I opened to look at it today and I saw one that matched the diurnal mood. This one.

I usually use music and my writing as a way of keeping track of experiences and quotidianity be it memorable or forgettable. Luckily, there are the photos too.

There’s no better way to get a good snapshot of one’s existence that when faced with an expected unknown. What I find interesting about existence is just how clearly one can see certain things in situations that are primarily defined by certain events/experiences. It’s like having bionic vision for a spell and getting to the core truth of things quickly albeit for a little while.

I thought again today how much easier it would be if my medium of choice could be in the realm of movement. I live for movement and yet my mode of expression is writing. I need to be sedentary to do it and yet the best ideas I get come to me when I’m out and about, generally moving quickly, getting lost in some thought while getting to the next thing on the list.

“Where is she?”
“Out & about. Off to think or sth.”

I saw this on the iChat window the other morning. It made me chuckle. Mostly because it’s true.

My people get that. My concept of inferno, personal inferno, is utter lack of movement. Well, that and having to be in it in the company of disingenuity. Force me to be in a state of inactivity and I’ll start bargaining right away to get out of it. I’ll agree with Mephistopheles before he has a chance to reveal the terms of the pact. I’d be willing to recite whatever to get out of it. I guess that’s why I tolerate yoga. Even though I’m confined to the space of a mat, I’m to move while on it.

I had my wayfarer’s on today as I was returning home from a day away. To my right, I could see the quiet Pacific and the sun that was reflecting on it. My hair looked much blonder than it usually does indoors when not touched by the sun. I liked it. The iPod was playing some random track from either Lilly Allen or Kate Bush or, some such singer, they sound all the same to me. It didn’t matter what the iPod was playing which is testament to the actual value of the unique feeling the little moment in time contained.

It was the sort of feeling that tends to get generated when forced to be in the present fully. The feeling that corroborated your already researched and tested sense of self-reliance and why it matters. It always matters. Having faith in one’s self is key. All we have is that, really. Granted, relying on the ones who love you daily helps. But, let’s call things what they are. The reason, the main reason, why those who are big investors in self-reliance are loved well and consistently is because of their investments in self-reliance.

Words were uttered but they mostly served as instrumental soundtrack like an Ennio Mrricone album. They were placid but I have no idea what they were about. I suppose if it's important, I'll hear it again. Thing is, at times nothing should interfere with the poetic beauty of silence. Even music would be like adding salt & pepper to an Eric Ripert dish at La Bernardine.

Oh, Larry!

2011-06-06T23:56:00.001-04:00

Larry does New York. Man, I cannot wait for this.