Henry Miller, on travel

(or, a perfect description of the process of culture shock)

from "Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch"

"[Arriving in a new place] is all so inviting, so spectacular, so complete in itself, that at first you are emotionally stymied. The preliminary bout of intoxication which inevitably follows is one the alcoholic never knows. Comes a settling down period, generally accompanied by a slight touch of boredom--the ransom one pays for flirting with perfection. Then follows the trouble period, when inner doubts pave the way for domestic squabbles, and the whole horizon grows dark with conflict. When at last you hit bottom, you say--everyone has said it at least once--"Big Sur? Why it's just like every other place!" Speaking thus, you voice a profound truth, since a place in only what you make it, what you bring to it, just as with a friend, a lover, a wife, a pet, or a pursuit.

"Yes, Big Sur can be a dream come true--or a complete washout. If there's something wrong with the picture, have a look at yourself in the mirror... The result is that you either come to grips with yourself or else turn tail and seek some other spot in which to nourish your illusions. Which leaves a whole universe to roam--and who is to care should you never come face to face with yourself?"

Does "White Culture" exist?

'In a marvellously splenetic essay, “On Being White . . . And Other Lies,” James Baldwin argued that America had, really, “no white community”—only a motley alliance of European immigrants and their descendants, who made a “moral choice” (even if they didn’t realize it) to join a synthetic racial élite... In 1994, the white labor historian David R. Roediger published an incendiary volume, “Towards the Abolition of Whiteness.” Paying special attention to unions and strikes, he traced the unsteady growth of American whiteness, a category that eventually included many previous identities that had once been considered marginal: Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish. “It is not merely that whiteness is oppressive and false; it is that whiteness is nothing but oppressive and false,” he wrote. “Whiteness describes, from Little Big Horn to Simi Valley, not a culture but precisely the absence of culture. It is the empty and therefore terrifying attempt to build an identity based on what one isn’t and on whom one can hold back.”'

The New Yorker, 12 April 2010, "Beyond the Pale"

This is what happens when you get married...

Age and wisdom

I don't like Judd Apatow's oeuvre, however he made a very salient comment on Fresh Air regarding wisdom, knowledge, and aging:

I feel like everybody on Earth is very immature. As I get older -- I'm 41 now -- I'm realizing that adults are not smarter than young people; some might say they're dumber. I don't meet many 70 year old people that I think, "What a wise person who can give me so much wisdom." I think most people are a mess and they're either covering the mess, or they're openly a mess. And we're all struggling, and a 60 year old man can be as immature as a 15 year old boy. I'm sure there are exceptions: I doubt Walter Cronkite was that way. But most of us are that way. ... I also think it's funny to expose it, and talk about it. Now that my friends are all in their 40s, I really do think, "Man! We're just a dumb as ever!" I actually think it's funnier when people think they are wise, or they do have their act together. Ya know, the funniest thing is the world is someone who's self-assured. Ya know, who's more hilarious than Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney? People who think they have all the answers: they're the people to be the most frightened of.

Fresh Air, 22 July 2009

Nietzsche says

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

「措置入院に安く散歩は信が何もを成らない事を見せる。」

"The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad."

"Although the most acute judges of the witches and even the witches themselves, were convinced of the guilt of witchery, the guilt nevertheless was non-existent. It is thus with all guilt."

-via The Nietzsche Family Circus

A tentative list of actors who have played some sort of incarnation of Woody Allen

-Kenneth Brannagh
-Jason Schwartzman
-Robin Williams
-Tobey Maguire
-Stanley Tucci
-Richard Benjamin

from The Death of Ivan Ilyich (Tolstoy) + 今日の日本語言葉

This is why I escaped the suburban miasma of my upbringing:

"Ivan Ilyich’s life had been most simple and commonplace—and most horrifying."

「イバンイリイチの生活は卑近で普通ですけど、参列。」

ーーーーー

生地獄　 (　いきじごく　) - n: living hell

From Anthony Lane of The New Yorker

Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in the Hollywood of recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish. I lost patience with “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” once we learned of Willy Wonka’s primal trauma (his father was a dentist, and forbade him candies, so guess how he reversed that deprivation?), and, likewise, with “Batman Begins,” from the moment that mini-Bruce tumbled into a well full of bats. What’s wrong with “Batman Is” ? In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained. Shakespeare could have kicked off with a flashback in which the infant Hamlet is seen wailing with indecision as to which of Gertrude’s breasts he should latch onto, but would it really have helped us to grasp the dithering prince?

-Issue of May 18, 2009

I consider traveling the purest form of living.

僕には旅が一番無雑な生活ですと思う。

Margaret Sanger: Eminent Eugenicist

An excerpt from her brief proposal, "A Plan For Peace" (1932). At first I thought she is being sardonic (something like "An Modest Proposal"), but actually it was quite fashionable back then to argue for the sterilization, etc, of "morons" and other undesirables.

"...The main objects of the Population Congress would be:

• a) to raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population.
• b) to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand.
• c) to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924.
• d) to apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
• e) to insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents, by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization.
• f) to give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization.
• g) to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives.

The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics.

The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strenghtening and development of moral conduct. Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense---defending the unborn against their own disabilities

The third step would be to give special attention to the mothers' health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives---thus reducing maternal mortality.

The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace.With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care, we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace. There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system.In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace."

Quoth Zadie Smith:

"The funniest thing about dying is how much we, the living, ask of the dying; how much we beg them to make it easy on us."

"We had been tight as thieves as children, but I'd barely seen him since [my father] died, and I sensed us settling into the attenuated relations of adult siblings, a new formal distance, always slightly abashed, for there seems no clear way, in adult life, to do justice to the intimacy of childhood. I remember being scandalized, as a child, at how rarely our parents spoke to their siblings. How was it possible? How did it happen? Then it happens to you."

"Comedy nausea is the extreme incarnation of what my father felt: not only is joke-telling a cheap art; the whole business of standup is, in some sense, a shameful cheat. For a comedian of this kind, I imagine it feels like a love affair gone wrong. You start out wanting people to laugh in exactly the places you mean them to laugh, then they always laugh where you want them to laugh -- then you start to hate them for it."

-The New Yorker, Dec. 22, 2008

re: Bush's progress, democracy; "freedom"

Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, the student journalist sentenced to death for blasphemy in Afghanistan, has been told he will spend the next 20 years in jail after the country's highest court ruled against him – without even hearing his defence.

The 23-year-old, brought to worldwide attention after an Independent campaign, was praying that Afghanistan's top judges would quash his conviction for lack of evidence, or because he was tried in secret and convicted without a defence lawyer. Instead, almost 18 months after he was arrested for allegedly circulating an article about women's rights, any hope of justice and due process evaporated amid gross irregularities, allegations of corruption and coercion at the Supreme Court. Justices issued their decision in secret, without letting Mr Kambaksh's lawyer submit so much as a word in his defence...

...Mr Kambaksh was found guilty of blasphemy and sentenced to death last year for circulating an essay on women's rights which questioned verses in the Koran.

read it here

Hypocrisy, etc

"The biggest consumer [among US states], Utah, averaged 5.47 adult content subscriptions per 1000 home broadband users; Montana bought the least with 1.92 per 1000...

Eight of the top 10 pornography consuming states gave their electoral votes to John McCain in last year's presidential election – Florida and Hawaii were the exceptions. While six out of the lowest 10 favoured Barack Obama."

Latter-Day Saints: moral exemplars all

article here

Hamlet, revised

My students produced this modern interpretation of Hamlet...

from the Dept. of Revelations

2. Know that you're not alone. Many people have ornithophobia, including George W. Bush. It's nothing to be ashamed of, as millions of people suffer this in the world, and they feel just like you. Don't feel "defected", or "weird" because you have a fear of birds.

-excerpted from the list, "How to Overcome Fear of Birds"