Some of the “radical” responses to this most recent shooting grate our more human sensibilities. “Guns” are touted as having become a “fetish object”; there are calls that we need to promote “justice,” not the control of guns—specific, state-delineated efforts to define and control the “gun problem” are said to be “liberal.” We don’t need to decrease the supply of guns, we need to deal with the demand for them!
Categories: Notes.
“We’ve never gone into surveillance for sake of surveillance unless there is criminal activity afoot,” McDaniel told The Daily. “Just to see what you’re doing in your backyard pool - we don’t care.”
From an article on the increasing use of drones in the US, which paid special attention to the problem of putting weapons on them. They’d not be using guns (at first), but they’d be fitted out with tear gas and rubber bullets, for use above the border.
Categories: Notes.
Fernando Báez has a fixation with books. This comes through in the introduction to A Universal History of the Destruction of Books, his account of the ways books have been destroyed throughout the globe, when he relates an anecdote from his childhood about a flood that destroyed the library in his town, the “object of his curiousity.” “Sometimes, on the nights that followed, I dreamt Stevenson’s Treasure Island sank, while one of Shakespeare’s plays floated,” he writes, continuing, “I never got over that terrible experience.”
Categories: Notes.
Last month, or the one before that, John Lanchester did a podcast on Marx for the London Review of Books. Presumably this is an effort to generate a bit of buzz for Lanchester’s new novel, Capital. From the title of the new novel alone, we can assume that there’s not a little that Lanchester owes old, dead Karl. LRB ran the piece, and it really is execrable: self-contradicting and riddled with glaring errors. I’m not sure how this happened: there are a lot of commentators on Marx who could say something intelligent about his work and legacy, maybe even go so far as to speculate on what method he would take today. This is not that. It is just bad.
Categories: Notes.
Stumbled across an interested series of posts (first one here) on the history of English food written by Rachel Laudan. Laudan is writing in response to an old blogpost by Paul Krugman, written in 1998, that used English food’s putative crappiness to demonstrate the bad equilibrium thesis. Essentially, the thinking is that a free market can get caught in a “bad equilibrium” where only bad goods are supplied because decent ones have never been available, and hence generate no demand. This applies to English food, Krugman assumes, because England’s early industrialization and urbanization caused the English to be exposed only to the poor-quality, mass-produced foods that industry can muster to satiate an urban populace. Hence, because the English had never tasted good food, they never demanded good food, and in the absence of a compelling demand, suppliers produced only bad food, and so the English only bought bad food. Vicious circle.
Categories: Notes.
How to describe the aimless dissipation of my creative energies? Lumpenprolific. It strikes me as odd that there’re no hits on google for that word. But well. There will be now.
Categories: Asides.
Midwinter spring is a strange season. The city is not so cold, but the air is still very dry. It parches the lining of my nostrils, causing me quaking headaches. At night, the radiator hisses wake me and I listen for the scanty distant sounds of tires on the roadtops. There are desperate thoughts in some of these times, and they drive a bit of writing in scraping, broken, inky passages over the pages of journals I’m in the habit of keeping for longer than I recognize the person who wrote them. Surprisingly, for me, anyway, the city is no longer looming so large in my future. That aching sense of it, and the way it and its demands cripple possibilities, has receded. Older, dirtier wants begin to erode images of perpetually jostling life here. The sound of the sea plays soundtrack to this, gradually overcoming carsounds. The canopy of a forest, evergreens, deciduous, gradually asserts its silhouette over that of a borough street. This fickleness is calming, in a way, and makes me aware of my desires’ mutual, shared nature.
Categories: Anecdotes.
The French gastronome Brillat-Savarin began “The Physiology of Taste” (1825) by declaring, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.” You are also what you read — or, perhaps, what you own.
So Leah Price writes in an article in the Times. You are what you own: ah yes, books — notice your book-reading identity relies not so much on consuming books by reading them as it does on by doing so with your money — and what they show about your personality. Checking out someone’s bookshelf for a peak into their fealties, political beliefs, taste, and, of course, spending habits, seems so self-evident that it is a strange realization that it wasn’t always something that people did.
Categories: Notes.
For our day, we went to see the Cattelan show at the Guggenheim. When we arrived, the museum seemed to be very crowded: a line of people had queued up, waiting to get in, and I thought, “Well, I bet it was even more crowded during the free day.” But we waited, patientlike, with tourists and old people. “Is this the line?” “Unless you’re a member.” The crowds were denser inside. We concurred that it was a “madhouse.”
Categories: Notes.
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