Captain, ye don't have the power!

This probably isn't too rare for apartment buildings, but my building has certain emergency lights that aren't usually on and can't be switched on by the residents, but they're hooked up to a special emergency generator. So paradoxically, if you see that they are on, you know there's been a power failure. I came home today and saw that these lightbulbs had tripped on. Those and the lights behind the EXIT signs, which are apparently indispensable either way.

Needless to say I wasn't too happy to find out that we were without electricity on what will probably be one of the hotter days of the year. But there was nothing to do for it but wait for the guys from National Grid--who were already working on the street--to fix it. I read outside while waiting. At one point I looked up at a neighbor's window fan and saw the blades spinning, but it turned out that the wind was blowing them, then it would stop. But after some time I poked my head in and saw that it was dark. Again paradoxically, this was a good sign.

For our own good

The US-Canadian professor Justin E. H. Smith is a new name to me. In fact when I first started reading this essay I thought it was by a woman named "Justine H. Smith." No matter. Don't think of it as long, consider it substantial.

I will say that I do not support anything so simplistic as “distinguishing between the artist and the work”, since it is fairly plain to me that often the moral rottenness of the artist is constitutive of the work. This extends even to philosophy, where any honest person will concede that Martin Heidegger was not “a great philosopher” who was “also a Nazi”, and that the whole challenge of dealing with Heidegger and his legacy is to figure out how Western philosophy developed in such a way that when Nazism emerged it made sense for at least one of its greatest expositors to offer his services as a handmaiden to this ideology. It is precisely for this reason that reading and understanding Heidegger is so urgent. There is nothing “honorific” about doing this; philosophy is not a fan club, and if you are treating it as one, this is because you do not really understand what philosophy is.

There are a couple of trends that Smith touches on that seem very strange to me. One is that the enforcers of the most stringent identitarian morality so often come from the world of YA fiction--if not as authors then at least as proponents. But once upon a time I was studying to become a schoolteacher. And included in this training was a class in Young Adult literature. At the time YA Lit was essentially a coverall term for children's books with accomplished prose. Occasionally they might contain mature scenes--sexual or otherwise--that you'd hesitate to show an 8-year-old, but not really a 15-year-old. And the object of exposing students to any of this was as part of a broader education, to help the youth become balanced and curious people. That's a worthy agenda, but apparently not a sexy one.

Smith also talks about an online meme of books that you might see on the shelf of a guy she goes home with, books that should warn her off. Seems to be a standard list of Hemingway, Foster Wallace, Nabokov. There's probably a lot that could be said for or against each author, but that's a conversation starter, not an ender. It's hard to see why a woman would need to be protected from a man's literary tastes, or pretensions to same. Unless he's not just a fan of the novel Lolita, but an actual ephebephile.

Act the same

Kat Rosenfield, whose work I've linked to at least once before, has a good new article on the pretense that the corporate world--and especially the tech industry--values individuality, even eccentricity. This is something that was very big around the turn of the millennium. Free thinkers and mad innovators were supposedly the new royalty because they just might change the world.

It was always and empty sham, of course. These companies were only interested in a very narrowly defined kind of visionary, the kind that could foresee and nudge developments in their own field. And even this may have been devalued in the ensuing years, as the CEOs figure they already know everything worth knowing. Better to save up and buy a few politicians.

Anyway, one of the big relics Rosenfield talks about is Apple's Think Different™ campaign, a representative poster from which is shown below.

Notice anything that all or at least most of these people have in common? Yeah, kind of a brilliant touch, actually. They had the cachet of having shuffled off this mortal coil, and Apple didn't have to worry about them doing anything new that might be off-script or which, in today's parlance, might get them canceled. 

Less than meets the eye

One of the books I'm reading now is Jesse Singal's The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can't Fix Our Social Ills. It's a survey of ideas from the social sciences that have gone viral on the common assumption that they're more accurate and useful than they actually wind up being. Having been a psych major in college before switching to English, and having read a good deal of the literature both good and bad, I can see the temptation to find magic bullets in psychology.

Singal has chapters on the self-esteem movement--which was kicked into high gear by a very weird California legislator--and the late 20th century panic over delinquent underclass youth being "superpredators."

There's also the Implicit Association Test, a test intended to help the user pinpoint their level of (usually racial) bias. The idea that unadmitted racial prejudice has a negative effect isn't crazy and is in fact fairly logical. The test itself, though, has huge problems.

Implicit bias has enjoyed blockbuster success because there is a simple test that anyone can take to measure one's own level of this affliction: the implicit association test, or IAT. If you've been in a diversity training anytime in the last few years, it's likely you've come across this tool, which is promoted by Harvard University and a veritable army of well-credentialed social psychologists who study bias and discrimination. You can go to Harvard's Project Implicit website at implicit.harvard.edu to take an IAT yourself, and if you do you'll see that the setup is fairly simple. First, you're instructed to hit i when you see a "good" term like "pleasant", or to hit e when you see a "bad" one like "tragedy." Then hit i when you see a black face, and hit e when you see a white one. Easy enough, but soon things get more complex. Hit i when you see a good word or an image of a black person, and e when you see a bad word of an image of a white person. Then the categories flip to black/bad and white/good. As you peck away at the keyboard, the computer measures your reaction times, which it plugs into an algorithm. That algorithm, in turn, generates your score.

When I first read this description I mistakenly thought that it primed the test-taker to associate black faces with negative words. It apparently doesn't, or at least not exclusively. But there are enough moving parts to the test to make it hard to read. In practice it's not obvious that it measures anything at all. 

Which is often the case.

Meta note

Okay, so I found out a while ago that this blog shared a name with a piece by the French composer Maurice Jarre. Which, a few years ago, started to pop up in the Google results for "flying totems."

But now it's exclusive. This blog doesn't show up at all unless I add "blogspot." Dang. I was using the phrase before he was. I've never been so insulted in all my life.* #minorannoyances

*Not really true, but I can play it up.

Seeing things differently

 

On the front page of Rachael Hulme's website she calls herself  "an artist, art educator, and learning experience designer." Despite the welcome presence of the Oxford comma, this may come off as wordy obfuscation and have you expecting something drab and awful.

Pleasant surprise, then, that her work actually turns out to be a lot of fun, especially in her Constructivism project. I don't know the exact age of the pupils she's taught art to, but she's able to bring a childlike perspective to her work. And perhaps hand-in-hand with that is a recognition of untapped possibilities within familiar objects. The potential of a beginner's mind.

The obsolete man

In the process of writing a story and it's occurring to me that to a lot of people it's not going to seem like it's happening in the present day. Basically just because it's me writing it.

For one thing the main character comes home and calls his semi-estranged girlfriend. Could have done that from anywhere, right? And everyone says now that you don't call someone out of the blue, text them first. But from a drama and scene-setting vantage point, texting lacks something for me.

For the same reason I'm more likely to write someone channel surfing than just selecting what they want on Netflix or what have you. The latter seems to me to close off more storytelling possibilities than it opens.

In part I guess this is a function of age, but not just that. Kit Reed, who wrote in science fiction and a number of related areas, was born in 1932. She passed on in 2017, but up until that time she was very savvy about young people and their relationship to technology. Different people have different gifts.

...to know which way the wind blows

 Windows downloaded another update a couple of days ago. Now the taskbar permanently displays weather and temperature. 

I'm of two minds. Could be handy, but if you're online this is information it's easy to look up anyway. And if you hover the cursor over this icon a selection of the latest headlines will pop up. I really don't need this, and don't trust anyone's news priorities except my own.

Harbor town

A short film, animated, from and about Rotterdam in the Netherlands. There is some additional explanatory text at the Vimeo link, but it's really not necessary. The easy motion and the little splashes of color speak loudly enough. There's also a cat and a bird, both of whom are lovely.

Faintly

 Bear with me, I seem to have reset the password on this blog. Complications from having multiple Google accounts.

Anyway, just a little bit ago I put on a record. Jazz instrumentals, Gerry Mulligan was involved. It was a bit late and I didn't want to disturb the neighbors, so I set the volume low. It turned out to be even lower than I expected. Audible, but very faint.

An interesting effect actually. While I was hearing the music, it felt more like I was remembering it. Although this would have been an eerily detailed and accurate memory.

Kudzu

 

Go walking for long enough in any place that has yards and you'll see these yard signs. At least where I live. 

You have to parse them carefully. Take the tautology that "Love is love," It doesn't say that love is particularly important, does it? Surely not, which is why you're free to undermine every form of familial love and agape ever known. Linguists are still trying to determine the definition of this word "kindness" but the word self-evidently isn't being used in the previously accepted manner.

Really, though, you can ignore everything after "house." The underlying message is, "We belong to the property-owning class." You don't see them in apartment windows.

The big heat

That time of year is upon us. High heat and high humidity. Dogs will be hanging their tongues out and looking for shady places to nap, if they aren't already. 

Speaking of napping, it helps to have some efficient cooling at least in your bedroom. Some people think you need air conditioning, but I don't really feel this is necessary, and certainly not for the home. I have a fairly powerful fan about the size of a toddler, so I should be all right. Anything that keeps you mostly dry overnight is fine.

A vignette of the Belle Epoque

 

Chantal: So you were saying...

Vivienne: I was just telling you that it's weird to be around Edmond when Anatole is around.

C: Weird? What kind of weird?

V: Well like, Anatole can spend an hour or more staring at Edmond, this creepy pout under his beard. And I'm all, are you sporting wood for my boyfriend, buddy?

C: Ha-ha, that's awesome. How does Edmond react?

V: He just kind of stares into space all broody-like. It's hard to know if he's into it or he's just clueless and self-absorbed. You know how it is.

C: Well I mean, yeah, I told you when you first started dating. When they're that pretty there's usually something missing.

V: Uh-huh. Well, I'll make you a bet.

C: Actual money bet?

V: Nothing too rich. Say twenty francs.

C: Huh. What's the bet, then?

V: Okay, so the three of us are having a picnic tomorrow. Has to be the three of us because Anatole tags along everywhere.

C: Yeah, okay.

V: And the bet is that I can take off all my clothes, just get ass naked right there in the park, and neither one of them will even notice.

C: No way! That's a claim all right. I'm gonna need proof.

V: Yeah, I know, pics or it didn't happen. I'll get you a snapshot.

C: See, that won't work. It's the nineteenth century and a photograph takes six fuckin' hours. No, I have to be there.

V: Sure, whatever. We'll be by the river. You can go there and bathe or something.

C: Fine, but I have to keep my slip on. I'm breaking out in zits all over.

V: TMI, but I'd insist on it anyway. I never said anything about them being able to ignore two naked women.

C: ?!?

V: Well, not Edmond anyway.

The night they shamed Old Dixie down

The strange case of Ellie Kemper's debutante ball shows cancel culture at the intersection of silly and sinister.

First, some background on Kemper. She's a comedic actress who first leapt to prominence in the latter half of  The Office's run (US edition) as kindhearted ditz Erin Hannon. When that was done she played the title role on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a sitcom about a former cult member and implied sex slave. While I've only seen clips, few things could be funnier than the fact that NBC picked it up for its opening season, then passed it onto Netflix  in a blind panic before it ever aired when they realized what they'd signed on for.

The controversy or "controversy" of the past couple of days goes back to her Clinton-era teens, when she was crowned at some high society function that--if you traced it all the way back to its roots--used to be segregated. Wait until you hear about a little something called the United States of America.

The good news is that as cancellations go, this one thus far looks to be a bust. None of the high-profile actors/producers/etc. that Kemper has worked with have stepped forward to denounce her or apologize for associating with her. She hasn't tearfully checked herself into whiteness rehab to reflect on her privilege. If she's not on Twitter it's conceivable she's blissfully ignorant the whole thing happened.

As an X-ray into the psychology of wokeness, however, it's educational. The AV Club reading this as Kemper having a "racist past" and Kemper being called a "KKK princess" stem about entirely from her hometown being St. Louis, Missouri. Missouri was a slave state, albeit one that fought on the Union side in the Civil War. And it's hard to deny that we in the North look at the South/border states with an unearned sense of superiority. Which is to say that in both regions football is huge, water is wet, and debutante balls are kitschy, but it's much easier for us to project evil qualities on all these things if they're taking place below the Mason-Dixon line (as commonly accepted.) 

Partisan attitudes following the migration of posh Rockefeller Republicans into the Democratic coalition may have exacerbated this tendency. And of course there is a huge overlap between Southern Americans and black Americans, which suggests how much alleged antiracism consists of condescension toward the latter.

As implied, I live in a Northeastern state, and there are a lot of things I like about it, such as brilliant fall foliage and a shorter mosquito season. This kind of snooty provincialism, though, I could do without.

Good grief

 

Just a little behind-the-scenes with Sparky Schulz. (I keep wanting to add a "t" to that last name, and I'm kind of amazed that everyone pronounces the name as if it were there. Ah, German.) Interesting that while the Peanuts characters could express themselves with the erudition of a college graduate--something Schulz pioneered in the comics--they were still very much drawn as children in terms of shape and dimension.

I don't know if he had a barber father like Charlie Brown did but he looks it.