jasonswadley.com

Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’

An excellent essay by David Mamet (gasp!) in the Village Voice (gasp!gasp!) on how he slowly realized he wasn’t a liberal.

Stalin has left the game

I’m not sure who made this, but anyone who has ever played an online multiplayer game knows how accurate it is. Crass and true.

Moses was an addict?

"As far Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics," Shanon told Israeli public radio on Tuesday.

Of course it’s probable when you exclude the other possibilities. The world may be round, which I don’t believe, or flat, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, could be on the back of a giant tortoise with turtles all the way down.

Was that whole "manna from heaven" thing just the excuse Moses used when he got the munchies?

Come on. We already know how the 10 commandments were really given.

A life history in six words

You might have heard about the six word memoir meme going around - NPR did it, and Salon is seeking reader contributions. I felt inspired to write a handful this morning.

He wanted to lead, challenge, serve
Good at many things, never best
Hated running; loved the human race
From pastor’s family, a listening layman
Tried this exercise, needed seventh word

Take a stab at a few of your own in the comments. They’re surprisingly fun.

Jonah Goldberg on Contradictions

Why is it only conservative "cranks" who think it’s relevant that Obama’s campaign headquarters in Houston had a Che Guevara-emblazoned Cuban flag hanging on the wall? Indeed, why is love of Che still radically chic at all? A murderer who believed that "the U.S. is the great enemy of mankind" shouldn’t be anyone’s hero, never mind a logo for a line of baby clothes. Why are Fidel Castro’s apologists progressive and enlightened but apologists for Augusto Pinochet frightening and authoritarian? Why was Sen. Trent Lott’s kindness to former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond a scandal but Obama’s acquaintance with [William Ayers, former Weather Underground leader] an unrepentant terrorist a triviality?

I couldn’t have cared less about Lott trying to make an old man happy at his birthday party. Nor do I care about Obama visiting this guy - Hyde Park politics are sufficiently tight-knit so that not doing so would be an odd move. (It should also be noted that the Clinton campaign was the one pushing this story) The flag is admittedly too much, but underlings don’t always speak for the candidate.

Still, Goldberg is right to point out the drastically different heroes we (or, more accurately, the media) tolerate and persecute.

Youthful Effervescence - Ralph Waldo Emerson

From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds power, fills us with exalted dreams, which we call hope, love, ambition, science: especially, it creates a craving for larger draughts of itself. But they who take the larger draughts are drunk with it, lose their stature, strength, beauty, and senses, and end in folly and delirium. We postpone our literary work until we have more ripeness and skill to write, and we one day discover that our literary talent was a youthful effervescence which we have now lost.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1862

What are you saying? - February Edition

My continuing mission: To chronicle the laughably atrocious abuse of the English language by those who think they sound smart.

Neoliberal and corporatist logics are increasingly reconfiguring bodies in and around universities. The work of "diversifying" the academy imposes a disproportionate burden of labor on faculty, students, and staff marked by multiple forms of difference; the pressures of professionalization anticipate and authorize narrow standards of bodily capacity; and precarious modes of transnational expansion involving institutions of higher learning fortify and retrace imperial circuits of acquisition in land, bodies, and knowledge. This calls for a critical account of how neoliberal processes dismantle and rearticulate various sites of the university as well as the contours of bodies allowed to function within it. Our conference will thus engage debates surrounding embodiment within the university as it pertains to the overlapping structures of access, difference, and power.

- A conference invitation to NYU

Who’s reading this blog?

FeedBurner says I have around 100 subscribers to this blog, which is a flattering number, given the small amount of time I have to post these days. Others I know visit the site on occasion instead of subscribing. I am humbled and thankful that you think I have something interesting to pass along.

But since you know so much about me, I’d like an introduction. What’s your name? What do you do? How did you find out about the blog? What are your favorite things about it? Is there something you’d like to see more of? Less of?

So go ahead - drop a few comments on this post and tell me about yourself.

The Seven Last Words of the Seven Liberal Arts

A not insignificant portion of the challenges now faced by liberal arts colleges are of their own making, resulting from competition between them. Costs have been increased by the addition of programs and resources for the specific purpose of attracting students away from competing colleges. Competition has caused dollars to be diverted from important uses, e.g. for faculty salaries and support, to flashy facilities and programs. Grade inflation and the elimination of requirements are examples of competition between liberal arts colleges that degrades the offerings of all of them.

A few liberal arts colleges are wealthy, but most struggle financially. They all, however, are threatened by declining demand for liberal education. If they have any long-run chance of resisting the vocationalizing of their curricula, they need to make common cause, to work together, not at odds with each other.

Marriage Kills Genius      

Creative genius
and crime express themselves early in men but both are turned off
almost like a tap if a man gets married and has children, a study says.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at the University of
Canterbury in New Zealand, compiled a database of the biographies of
280 great scientists, noting their age at the time when they made their
greatest work. [...]

"Two-thirds (of all scientists) will have made their most significant contributions before their mid-30s."

But,
regardless of age, the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye
to making any further glorious additions to their CV.

I’m not sure what’s more interesting about this piece - the age relationship, the marriage relationship, or the fact that crime and creative genius follow such similar patterns. I dug up the full text article from 2003, if anyone is interested in the PDF. Perhaps Dryden was not too far off:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied
And thin partitions do their bounds divide

Kurt Vonnegut on Addiction

If Western Civilization were a person, we would be directing it to the
nearest meeting of War-Preparers Anonymous. We would be telling it to
stand up before the meeting and say, "My name is Western Civilization. I
am a compulsive war- preparer. I have lost everything I ever cared
about. I should have come here long ago. I first hit bottom in World War
I." Western Civilization cannot be represented by a single person, of
course, but a single explanation for the catastrophic course it has
followed during this bloody century is possible. We the people, because
of our ignorance of the disease, have again and again entrusted power to
people we did not know were sickies.

The Myth of Prodigy

One [way to answer the question of prodigy] is simply to track the achievements of precocious kids. Gladwell cited a mid-1980s study (Genius Revisited) of adults who had attended New York City’s prestigious Hunter College Elementary School, which only admits children with an IQ of 155 or above. Hunter College was founded in the 1920s to be a training ground for the country’s future intellectual elite.

Yet the fate of its child-geniuses was, well, “simply okay.” Thirty years down the road, the Hunter alums in the study were all doing pretty well, were reasonably well adjusted and happy, and most had good jobs and many had graduate degrees. But Gladwell was struck by what he called the “disappointed tone of the book”: None of the Hunter alums were superstars or Nobel- or Pulitzer-prize winners; there were no people who were nationally known in their fields. “These were genius kids but they were not genius adults.”

On Melancholy

I for one am afraid that American culture’s overemphasis on happiness
at the expense of sadness might be dangerous, a wanton forgetting of an
essential part of a full life. I further am concerned that to desire
only happiness in a world undoubtedly tragic is to become inauthentic,
to settle for unrealistic abstractions that ignore concrete situations.
I am finally fearful of our society’s efforts to expunge melancholia.
Without the agitations of the soul, would all of our magnificently
yearning towers topple? Would our heart-torn symphonies cease?