I just figured out how to make a playlist for the weird videos I've been making using public domain content and music from me and Emily's rock band. The playlist is HERE (the one's that work best video-wise are probably Santa Sangre, Zombies, and the Zoo). The general webpage for the band with lots more MP3s of songs is HERE. I"m decent at playing guitar and writing melodies, barely adequate at singing, bad as a lyricist, and even worse at getting a decent mix and timbre when recording these things on my computer.
When playing live I can keep an audience's attention if I am wearing a wrestling mask. Once it comes off they start drunkenly talking to one another and ignoring me. There's probably some Levinasian reason for this.
Music has mostly been on a hiatus with very young children. During the sabbatical year I could be a decent father to a baby, play music, and write philosophy. When we came back to Baton Rouge and I had to teach again while trying to be a decent father to a toddler it took me a year just to figure out how to write philosophy again (as much as possible do it two hours every morning very, very early- then the rest of the day is grading, teaching, prepping lectures, administrative stuff, helping students, and being a dad). I think it's going to be another year at least before I can work realiably rocking out back into the mix. Other musician friends of mine with full time jobs tell me that when your youngest hits three things open up in a way that gives you one or two hours a day rocking out time without being a bad father.
I also find that I have much less to say when I'm reading something that I really agree with, especially if it's non-trivial. This semester I'm teaching three of Noel Carroll's books and I find myself writing things like "Yes!" and "Cool!" in the margins with distressing frequency.
You can also be silenced in a far more paralyzing manner by something that seems so wrong to you that there's no place to start.
I guess the sweet spot is where you find something that you think worthy of improvement. . . Maybe this is why philosophy professors can be such unpleasant people. If you think your vocation is to constantly improve other people's beliefs then your sense of self-worth can end up completely out of whack with reality.
I forgot to wish Hurricane Gustav a happy birthday yesterday. It's hard to describe the particular kind of awfulness of a week without electricity in a swelteringly hot, humid, pedestrian unfriendly city with high crime and poverty. It's hard to describe the alien landscape of fallen trees and debris and mutilated buildings. And your one year old has bad heat rash and you are terrified about him overheating, and stores where you might purchase pedialite or baby powder (he's never had heat rash before) are all shut and without power.
It really sucked, and the national media totally dropped the story after it was clear it was not going to be another Katrina (which even in Baton Rouge also really sucked). The reporters for ABC News stood in the French Quarter of New Orleans, and after the levees failed to breach pronounced Gustav "a fizzle;" Reuters said that it "lacked punch."
Thanks to youtube though we have access to films that non-media types made. The first (from Thibodaux) shows the destructive power of wind strong enough to peel off brick facade.
And here's a nice photo essay of what Baton Rouge looked like for months after the storm. Before viewing this, it is essential to note that. (1) These are not just the worst of the worst. Any place you were in Baton Rouge you saw multiple vistas of scenes like those in these photos. (2) A large portion of these photos were taken weeks or months after the storm. You can tell because the roads are not blocked by huge trees.
The thing that's truly appalling to me is that after the storm there was a little bit of talk about actually burying the power lines the way they are in many American cities that don't even suffer the double whammy of periodic hurricanes and lots of trees. But that completely disappeared. The private companies that run all of the electricity now have dictated that yearly extended power outages for millions of homes due to storms (usually winter storms in the north east and mid west) are just going to be part of the equation in the United States. And the rest of us accept that as inevitable.
When did we become the country where everything is impossible? Somehow, countries with much less per capita GDP than us have vastly nicer power grids, telecommunication infrastructure, airports, health care, prisons (and at least Christians are explicitly supposed to be concerned about this), roads, hurricane and flooding protection, and public transportation. At the current rate of degradation it will be less than twenty years before we lose out in our comparative advantage in space development and our university system. It's really bizarre. No country with near the per capita wealth of the United States is anywhere near as murderously dysfunctional as we are on any of these metrics. But any time someone tries to substantially improve anything in the United States for the past twenty five years the collective wisdom solidifies around the theme that it's impossible.
When did that become our national ethos? Why did it become our ethos? In the vast majority of the above things we until very recently (through the early 1980s) were the envy of the world. Now Americans accept (and virulently defend!) mediocrity and worse as our birthright.
Ever since Hurricane Katrina I increasingly feel like I don't recognize this place. I still love it (every time I've travalled abroad I choke up when the border agent says "welcome home" when I finally get back). I mean, you don't stop loving a person when they become diseased. There's no reason it should be any different with countries.
One of the things about growing up with actual long playing albums and 45 rpm singles (as opposed to CDs and then now ipods) is how the fragility of the medium itself affected our attitudes about music. It was very easy to break or scratch an actual record, and a big privilege when your older brother entrusted you with putting the record on and lining up the needle. There were all sorts of rituals that had to be mastered, for example involving cleaning the dust off the record while it was spinning around.
I don't know why this is, but fragility is one of the things that helps to inspire reverence in human beings, not just with records but with everything else too.
Of course if you wallow too much in how easy it is for everything to break, you become paralyzed, but I don't think you can properly revere that which deserves reverence without some appreciation of breakability, without learning well the rituals necessitated because of this (if the Tibetian Buddhists are anywhere near right, then a great deal of life is about learning to die properly and helping others do the same).
Again, I'm not sure why fragility and reverence are so intertwined, but it seems obvious that they are.
I just discovered my colleague James Rocha's fantastic interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody (possibly the best rock song, and hence possibly the best song, ever) that he posted last year on his blog. It's HERE. And here's the original video for the song.
My older brother Chris turned me on to Queen and the Beatles when we were kids in the early seventies. He had the red and blue Apple greatest hits Beatles albums and a whole mess of Queen 45s. He, my sister, and me used to have long discussions about whether Strawberry Fields Forever or Penny Lane was a better song (Strawberry Fields was ultimately proclaimed better by a unanimous vote; and I'm pretty sure we'd all vote the same today). Bohemian Rhapsody sort of hovered over everything though.
Most of my friends' older brothers ended up in the Kiss Army. We stuck with Queen and the Beatles, and expanded into Elton John and Cat Stevens (both the influence of our Dad). And though I'm jealous of my friend Neal Hebert's good standing in said Army, I still think we ultimately got the better deal. Here's another 45 we wore out with repeated playing.
I remember being incredibly impressed by the fact that Freddy Mercury had the cajones to admit to not liking Jaws or Star Wars. It was scandalous, but also my first intimation of real freedom.
When I do things like begin sentences with "As an academic" it always makes me feel like a certain kind of professional wrestling bad guy (technically known as "heel"), the kind who embodies irritating, condescending self-importance.
As a wrestling fan, I get a huge kick out of this: Dr. Death Jon Cogburn, with a Ph.D pickup truck full of dialectical whoop ass in tow. I am charged with informing the unwashed that they don't understand the art of wrestling like my educated friends who actually know how to pronounce words. I constantly reference fancy parties where people drink wine and discuss literary history.
So yeah, I get a kick out of this. . . but honesty impells me to admit that it is probably not very good for our Republic that anybody who reads books, attends to relevant empirical information, and tries to reason things through becomes, in virtue of that, a canonical variety of wrestling heel.
I mean, if Thomas Merton were alive today he'd be cast in that role and mocked by all the Rush Limbaughs and Bill O Reillys out there. He really would be. What kind of evil world is that?
I do think this is part of the reason that the political persuasion of research scientists has changed so radically. Under Eisenhower 80% of them were Republican. After Nixon's pseudo-populast Southern strategy, this started to erode until by the time of the first Bush presidency it was down to 50%. Midway through the second Bush presidency, with its glorification of satanic macho idiocy, lying, and unreason, things were the exact reverse of Eisenhower. By that point 80% of research scientists were Democrats.
Note that these statistics are for people who do hard science, not for humanities professors.
What we need now is for there to be an Egghead type heel to do the Stone Cold Steve Austin miracle, which is where someone is playing as a heel but so awesome that without changing anything they become the most popular face (technical term for good guy) in sports entertainment. I think in some ways all of us arty farty intellectuals hoped that Obama would be our Stone Cold Steve Austin. The jury is still out. It's been a hard couple of months for the forces of truth and beauty.
I think that the conventional wisdom that the internets have killed the business model of popular music is completely mistaken.
What has happened instead is that the omnipresence of media in American public spaces (soundtracks and chattering televisions everywhere) has for a metastasized portion of the population destroyed the part of the soul that permits traditional musical fandom. When you put on a record in the 1970's it was still an event, even though at that time music was already becoming more and more just aural wallpaper. But a non-trivial proportion of the American population then still had long stretches of silence and regular moments of genuine solitude which provided the appropriate neurological background so that individual composers could be cherished.
Since that point, everything in American culture has worked to destroy silence and any kind of meaningful solitude, and the new null state is of having droning media and music as a constant accompaniment to life. In this context everything changes. The music no longer needs to be very good when it's primary purpose is to intrusively prevent people from thinking or being meditative in what were once peaceful public places like airports or doctors offices (and of course people internalize this and allow their own homes and bodies (cellphones) to be increasingly colonized). For most people the music part of their brain is too burned out on all of this to really get high on artists that deserve their love.
The first step was mechanical reproduction itself. People's ability to listen to music without anybody actually having to play it has steadily eroded musical literacy. The second step is what I'm describing here,our post-human Borgiocracy which begins with mechanically reproduced noise colonizing all aspects of life.
This, and this alone, is why I think there will be no more Beatles, no more Cat Stevens, no more David Bowie, etc. As Westerners are forced to evolve to be able to handle the constant visual and auditory intrusions we also lose the ability to listen.
Wikipedia defines "the Peter Principle" as the view that "In a Hierarchy Every Employee Tends to Rise to His Level of Incompetence." If you are good at something, and the organization is rational, you will get promoted and you will keep getting promoted until you are faced with tasks that you are not good at.
I think something similar holds for philosophy. Not the institutional hierarchy of philosophical positions, but rather philosophy itself. If you are really doing it right, you get just to the point where you can sort of understand certain aspects of questions that you have no hope of answering, or even in the end formulating correctly. This is your "level of incompetence."
Colin McGinn's philosophy of mind is the view that the Peter Principle holds collectively for the Enlightenment project. For McGinn even trying to pose the "mind/body problem" makes us like fish who have some idea that something weird is going on outside of the tank, but no hope whatsoever of figuring it out.
[Note: I realize that a lot of much, much better philosophers than me take there to be something worthwhile in Nietzsche that you can't already get out of Schopenhauer. (1) I accept that I am almost certainly wrong about that. (2) I also realize that Nietzsche has to be studied just because he was so influential. In any case, what follows just concerns Nietzsche's literary style, not his worth as a philosopher. ]
When I was an undergraduate I read everything by, and about, Nietzsche that I could get my hands on. For a period in graduate school I'd go back and reread him periodically.
Despite (or maybe because of) this, I find him pretty much unbearable now. Some common tropes that drive me nuts: (1) the pseudo-Aristocratic pretense, as if he's gazing down from Olympus with his dear reader at the all-too-human foibles you and he are condescending to notice, (2) the use of scare quotes to mark distance from (and of course superiority to) the vulgar concepts of the herd, (3) the affected world-weariness that is in fact the stylistic equivalent of a fake thousand yard stare (because the void stares back at you!), (4) overstatement expressed in a violent manner so as to titillate the very bourgeois sensibilities he pretends to be overthrowing, (5) the stance that anyone who disagrees with him is not only obviously mistaken but also psychologically unhealthy. . .
I don't know if the content of Nietzsche's thought is coherent enough to deserve the sobriquet 'evil' (c.f. the cottage industry of Kaufmanesque apologies). But the style of that content's expression is so consistently dehumanizing that one could argue that the style itself is evil.
If Nietzsche wrote a book about how flowers were pretty he'd still manage to communicate through stylistic presupposition that everybody besides him and those strong enough to agree with him (that flowers are pretty) are worthless. And a significant portion of people who liked the flowers book (e.g. Ayn Rand, Glenn Beck) would ape the style precisely so as to be able to commmunicate exactly the same thing.
Posting for the next few days will be light. I'm working my butt off to get a serviceable paper on the change in the alignment system from Edition 3.5 Dungeons & Dragons to 4th Edition before the reading group starts.
I love it when philosophy has non-trivial consequences for stuff like this. If I'm right then the unassailable force of reason is going to lead to another revision in the system. Actually, the fact that this is every gamer's fantasy means it almost certainly won't, any more than my philosophically proven ideas for storylines are of any interest to the good people at World Wrestling Entertainmnet. That's fine, I'm just interested in getting closer to Truth anyhow.
I do, however, have a subset of good friends who ask me why I waste my time on such things. Now that I have tenure they bug me less about it I guess on the assumption that the point of tenure is to waste your time (and I write just as much philosophy that is not about popular culture in any case).
But it's not a waste of time! Norman Malcolm wrote that one of the most embarrassing moments in his life is when he and Wittgenstein saw a newspaper with a story about British attempts to kill Hitler. Malcolm said something to the effect of, "That can't be true. It's not in the British spirit to do something like that." Wittgenstein responded that he was filled with despair that someone who knew as much philosophy as Malcolm could say something like that (and it is to Malcolm's immense credit that he left the story for posterity).
Philosophy is supposed to creep out of the narrow confines of whatever dialectic in which you find yourself. It's supposed to creep up from whatever you are passionate about. And that does not just mean using it to have witty conversations. That doesn't just mean being less likely to say incredibly stupid things. It means getting it on paper, getting it reviewed, and rewriting it.
I hereby get off my soapbox. So know that refuting this will not knock me over.
Professor Bousquet's blog How The University Works is an invaluable resource. The following is from a recent letter of his that is going around the American Association of University Professors listservs.
At the present rate of decline, the next two decades will see the percentage of tenured and tenure-track professors plunge into the single digits. As of fall 2007, the tenurable comprised just one-quarter of the faculty population, according to the American Federation of Teachers, down from one-third a decade earlier.
Sadly, the AFT analysis is probably conservative, relying chiefly on federaI IPEDS data containing reporting loopholes for instructional staff that the institution designates as“without faculty status,”* employees with another position on the campus, and some graduate employees.
Nor do these sobering statistics capture the full sense of the transformation. Tasks formerly performed by the professoriate haven't just been turned over to lecturers-- much of that work is now done by an army of nonfaculty staff, administrators, and even undergraduate students
In short, we already know what the future academic workplace will look like. It'll closely resemble many of today's for-profits and the community colleges with which they compete--operating without tenure or with tenure reserved for a small group of faculty administrators in charge of hiring, supervising, and setting curriculum for a part-time staff, typically without doctorates and earning only a few thousand dollars.
At institutions where some faculty currently engage in research, tenure is likely to survive among those populations bringing in external grants. But departments that traditionally rely on internal funding are likely to do steadily less research and more instruction. . .
Many of these departments may consolidate on the model of the community college--more and more “modern-language departments” and “humanities departments” featuring consolidations of philosophy, art, art history, classics, and the languages—not to mention departments of “social and behavioral sciences,” “intercultural studies,” and the like.
In many cases, the income-producing research activity will follow the trend of moving into non-departmental locations –institutes, centers, and programs—that can be closed with less fuss if the income dries up. This suggests an alternate to consolidating departments at institutions where faculty do research: by redefining the department chiefly as an instructional center and not the home of exciting interdisciplinary research, the researchers will visit departments only to irritably develop syllabi to be implemented by subordinated cadres of cheap teachers, and to reproduce themselves in steadily more pro forma votes, as the real decisions about hiring and retention are made in the revenue centers.
. . .for the majority of us, this ugly future has already happened. The only reason “we” don't realize it is because those of us with the loudest professional voices haven't allowed ourselves to understand.
What the one-quarter of us bemoaning the “future” demise of tenure are most unwilling to understand is this: those of us with tenure are not just a minority--we're experiencing a radical shift in our function with respect to everyone else.
With the nontenurable majority engaged primarily in teaching, and many of the tenured released to revenue production, the remaining fraction of a fraction performs most of the service for everyone else.
More and more committee work. Longer terms in administration. More advising of more complex requirements, and more assessment of more kinds of learning. More mentoring of graduate students. More oversight of student workers, including undergraduates, both paid and donating their services. (I swear I just received a request to serve as my unpaid “research assistant” this summer--from a high-school junior!) And a steady stream of more and more nakedly managerial responsibilities with respect to the nontenurable majority—hiring, evaluation, curricular development, professional development, and so on.
If you are tenured and feel this intensified service burden already, imagine what it will be like twenty years from now when the proportion of tenured and tenure track is 8%, not 25%.
Fortunately, there are countertrends. Most notably, the movement toward unionization of the nontenurable faculty is producing substantial new forms of job security and raising wages.
Some points-
(1) Bousquet's decline is not going to happen at the tiny minority of prestige universities (paradigmatically the top 25 rated Carnegie institutions and the best 10 or so Liberal Arts colleges), which will continue to have large departments with decently funded Ph.D programs across the panoply of the humanities.
(2) Since unionization is the only thing to stop any of this, so called right-to-work states are going to further lag behind the rest of the country.
[For people living in more civilized states and countries reading this, "right to work" means that unions are prohibited from signing exclusive employment contracts with employers, and so employers can always fire union members and hire non-union members. This is unconstitutional, as it abrogates employees' rights to organize into their own corporations that can make service contracts. These laws were touted by anti-union forces in the 60's and 70's as ways for mostly Southern states to radically improve their economies. But all they did (and this is not controversial) was vastly decrease the middle class, lowering median income, further returning such states to the share-cropper economic status that aspects of their cultures support. [Consider Louisiana, which is the 14th richest state in the country in terms of per capita wealth, but is reliably from 45th to 50th in terms of median income.] In addition, the laws economically hammer the states by contributing to the massive outmigration of skilled labor to other states where union protections guarantee a livable wage.
And please don't bring up the canard about automotive unions causing the Big Three to go under. First, watch this excellent performance.
Then note that American car companies would still be the envy of the world if auto executives had used a tiny fraction of their political power to push for socialized medicine and meaningful federal support for energy efficient vehicles. Instead they betrayed their shareholders, employees, and customers out of class loyalty, a truly misguided alliance with oil companies, and relying on SUVs that any rational person could have said would not be profitable as soon as the next oil crunch came along. American companies are obsolete because they have to compete with car companies in countries where the government provides health care and meaningful pensions. And everybody knows this.]
(3) States without prestige universities are increasingly being governed by a political elite that attended prestige universities in other states. As with unconstitutional "right to work" laws, this will further the trends of which Bousquet speaks.
All of the life experiences of these leaders support the thought that anyone smart enough to deserve a truly liberal education would go to an out of state prestige university. But then, for the majority of Americans not wealthy or preternaturally gifted enough to travel out of state to a prestige institution, education further devolves into narrow vocational training. That this is catastrophically short sighted in a world where the most important skill is being able to learn new skills is beside the point, just as the economic and human carnage of "right to work" laws is beside the point.
(4) I think it's important to realize that when one experiences the trends Bousquet chronicles that they are not the result of moral failings of the specific administrators at your university. It's really not very much fun to be an administrator. That's why they have to pay them so much.
More importantly, the administrators at your school didn't set up the system of economic incentives that are killing research in the traditional arts and humanities and also leading to a now decades long decline in real median wages in the United States. They just work here.
(5) Likewise, I think it's important to realize that these trends are happening at most American universities (again, with the exception of the prestige schools). The age of massive investment in infrastructure to improve the things for everyone, an age typified by setting up land grant colleges and songs like this
was unceremoniously deposed in the 1980s in the United States.
If the realization that these trends are catastrophically misguided as far as the direction of our Republic is depressing, there is still some consolation in realizing that they have nothing in particular to do with your school.
(6) Complete pessimism about the trends Bousquet measures is warranted in the short and medium term. Cultivate your own garden. Give up on the illusion of "faculty governance." The powerlessness of faculty senates in the face of these changes show them to almost always be glorified student councils. Actually not even that. In American High Schools student councils get to plan the prom, which is some power at least.
To the extent that they have any role in governance anyhow, these trends turn faculty senates into Lord of the Flies type scenarios. People from the "revenue generating" departments, and the one or two humanities or arts departments who for historic reasons still have decent PhD programs at the institutions in question, have zero interest in the service departments flourishing. And the "blame the victim" mentality that is sadly intrinsic to human nature leads those of the tenurable left in one of the service departments to get treated like a peasant or child. Be seen and not heard. The big people's table is not for you.
(6) It used to be considered part of academic freedom that there was a defeasible presupposition that tenured professors were doing a decent job and that people in the departments were the experts on what and how to teach (so long as this was consistent with university requirements). I've seen this presupposition waver to the point of collapse in my ten brief years as a professor (and time as a grad student before that). More and more, we are subject to the hegemony of time-consuming, soul destroying, jumping-through-hoops, assessment measures, where you have to write report after report to committees of people not in your field just for permission to continue doing what you've always done. Never is anything actually improved by these processes!
Any private business that wasted so much time on assessing rather than doing would go out of business. But in higher ed. more and more of the business just is this kind of infinitely recursive assessment, self assessment, assessment of assessment, etc.
It's like under Mao where you had to wear dunce caps and have kids hit you as you told everybody what a crap job you were doing for the revolution. No good ever came of that either.
The hegemony of "assessment" is a complete scam that exists solely to "prove" to accreditation agencies that schools with less and less credentialed teachers are still deserving of accreditation. It really is maddening the number of insultingly useless reports you have to write to overseers whose bureaucratic Stockholm Syndrome leads them to take these things seriously, even though nothing has ever been improved as a result of any of these assessments.
A few examples: a book-like "strategic plan" for your department, every five years another book for "external review," reports every year on writing skills of senior majors in every senior level class, reports on how learning outcomes are being accomplished in every General Education Requirement class, yearly reports from every department about how the number of majors is being increased (even though the school has a static number of students), reports on how grade inflation is being addressed, a slew of reports to two committees any time any aspect of departmental curriculum is changed, etc. etc. etc.
This has gotten so bad for smaller departments (in big departments the labor can be distributed better) that one chair that I have immense respect for broke down weeping in the secretary's office a few years ago. He had been spending over 40 hours a week writing Kafkaesque reports. He quit.
But in my heart I know everything will all work out. The awesome power of this song has been rearranging the spheres even as I've been writing this.
For the most part, suburban cultural homogenization has completely undermined claims to extreme regional differences. I might be in the minority of academics who think that this is on the whole a good thing. But I remember growing up in Montgomery, Alabama prior to Starbucks and Barnes and Noble, etc. It's much better now!
Of course every town does have its own unique qualities for better, worse, and weird. Perhaps unfairly, Emily and I have coined the term "Baton Rouge moments" when we experience the weird (some good, some bad, some neutral) here. For example, not a mile from our house there is a snow cone stand named "Deligth Snow Cones," which is painted on the stand itself and a largish sign. Or take our new Whole Foods. How many other Whole Foods stores in the country have gigantic "No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service" decals on all of the entrances and also signs with dire warnings about thirty dollar fees for bad checks? The one in Baton Rouge has both. And in between downtown and campus there is a new store called "The G Spot." It's not an adult novelty store, but rather sells baggy clothing, jewelry, rap music, and school uniforms. And nobody who works there has even heard of German gynecologist Ernst Grafenberg, or his eponymous spot. And consider the NPR gardening show on Saturday morning. The lead in music is the Star Spangled Banner. What does that have to do with gardening? And Baton Rouge is chuck full of cutesy little boutique stores (clothing, stationary, chemically smelly things, jewelry, knickknacks and doodads) for rich women and those whose cultural allegiances align them with rich women. And Baton Rouge hugely supports the LSU Tigers but not so much the college itself; the disconnect is bizarre. When I first got here I thought people in LSU shirts/hats/beer bongs etc. would be happy to know I worked at LSU, but if anything they are more surly and suspicious than random people. And an idea of a fun family outing in Baton Rouge is going to Tony's Seafood and watching the employees electrocute and then skin catfishes (I must confess I enjoy doing this myself).
I don't know the extent to which any of these kinds of things (or at least those that reflect class divisions, poor service, and ignorance) have to do with indigenous culture, or just the fact that Louisiana is one of the poorest states in the country.
I don't think the truly dysfunctional things (the educational system, terribly designed street non-grid, medical system worse than Cuba, etc.) in the United States South are really the function of poverty so much as they are a function of social norms where the non-poor's sense of self is in large part derived by contrast with the poor. Many people here would be perfectly content to live in crap as long as they can look down on those further down the heap. This is a hangover from slavery and apartheid. Most of the whites were always vastly poorer than the ruling minority of rich whites, but the poor whites got to feel like their boot was on the neck of the blacks. This being said, I honestly think that this is weakening. At least 2/3ds of the "New South" thing is the reaction of new money against these dysfunctions. This is why the Baton Rouge Business Report is actually very liberal about a number of issues, more so than the daily paper (which to be fair, isn't crankily conservative).
I'll do a post on things I like about Baton Rouge very soon! I get horrifically irritated by snooty pants academics who move to a poorer area of the United States and make fun of everything.
From the age of 17 to 27 I smoked around a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. Strangely, I never smoked around my parents or when I was visiting. So every Christmas and once or twice a summer (during this time I spent around seven summers living with them too) I would have to go through nicotine withdrawal, and then stay off of cigarettes from one to three months.
Though that was difficult, it gave me a better understanding of the process of withdrawal, making it much easier to ultimately quit for good ten years ago and to transition recently to a lifestyle more consistent both with fatherhood and being a serious student of yoga (not just as an excercise routine, but also a philosophy). And my personal experience strongly supports the claim that twelve step programs are radically incomplete in some ways. So here's some advice for anybody trying to kick anything that plays a destructive role in their lives.
(1) When you kick anything that has a destructive role in your life, you are in for four days of feeling physically crappy. This is true for tobacco, caffeine, boy/girlfriends, alcohol, refined sugar, too many carbohydrates, etc.as well as illegal drugs. So it really helps to treat the four days like a physical illness. Lay around in bed and read books in which you can easily lose yourself. Take lots of baths. Get people to cook for you.
(2) On the fourth night you will have the best night of sleep you've had in God knows how long and from the fifth day onward you will feel on average physically better than you did with the monkey on your back. However, now you will have intense psychological cravings that are triggered by certain events. Do not avoid these events! Instead confront them and figure out ways to replace the bad stimulus with something else. If you've kicked coffee, drink herbal tea when you used to drink coffee. If you really miss a glass of wine with a gourmet meal, treat your mineral water with some of the same ritual you treated the wine. If you are quitting pot then do something else during the times you used to smoke up.
(3) For every person there are joys you have to pay back with interest and joys that keep on giving. The secret to being healthy is replacing the former with the latter. For example, if you are an alcoholic, all that means is that alcohol is the former for you rather than the latter. The signature failure of 12 step inspired programs is that they don't get this, and as a result even many members of the groups continue to be deformed in the same ways that led them to become addicts. The thirteenth and fourteenth steps are this. (13) Find things that you enjoy learning, and dedicate a portion of your day to reading about them. Take classes at the community college if you can. It doesn't matter what these things are, there is a universe out there waiting to be known about (examples- history of ancient Rome, Buddhism, baseball, computer aided design, foreign languages, math, anthropology). Go to the public library and walk through the non-fiction section until you find a book that looks cool. Read it and if you enjoy then read several more books on the same topic, What matters is that you get joy out of learning more and more about them. (14) Get hobbies that involve creative work in which lose yourself and pursue with passion. This used to be the norm! Before the division of labor, the division between hobbies and work did not exist and people built stuff as a matter of fact. Before passive entertainment people filled their time making things and making art. So play music, paint paintings, design software, cultivate a garden, learn to sew. Again, it doesn't matter what it is.
The point of both 13 and 14 is to replace joys that charge interest with joys that pay dividends. The fundamental problems that addicts face are a lack of meaning and a lack of joyful affect. The only way to kick an addiction without becoming a walking cripple or dry drunk is to replace the medicine with things that actually bring real meaning and joy.
(4) The learning and creativity of the above must be done every single day, especially at times in which the bad habits were engaged. For example, I've had to cult my caloric intake pretty dramatically due to GI problems. Before each meal I do yoga, after lunch I go for a brief walk and write a paragraph or two of bad fiction, after dinner I play music with my wife.
(5) Part of what make addictions so difficult is that they are related to stuff that humans have to do. Humans need to recapture the warmth they felt when being held by their mother as babies. Humans must eat. Humans need to be excited and expectant. Most harmful addictions exploit these basic needs. The only way to break out of this subtle form of exploitation is by practicing what the Buddhists call "mindfulness." When I first turned over control of food portions to my wife, I found myself getting irritated because I'd finish the food before she did. But then I realized that if I made sure to put half as much on my fork or spoon as I used to, and payed close attention to each bite of food, I didn't finish before her. I also found that I didn't want more. Since then I've discovered that there is a movement for "mindful eating." Check out the recent stories in the wall street journal and on parents.com as well as the web page devoted to the topic.
In this regard, I've found yoga to be invaluable as well.
(6) You couldn't handle the thing you are trying to quit. This is your weakness, not a sign of moral superiority. I can no longer put Tabasco sauce on my food. That doesn't make Tabasco sauce bad or the people who are strong enough to handle it bad people. For nearly any drug or kind of food there are societies where most people that use that drug or kind of food do so responsibly. Individuals should not be judgmental jerks about people with different lifestyles than themselves, and social policy should: (1) at most limit itself to promoting responsible and balanced use of drugs and potentially unhealthy foodstuffs (as opposed to prohibition), and (2) respect people's ability to formulate conceptions of the good life for themselves (e.g it is not automatically irrational to the point of non-autonomy if someone decides to drink, smoke cigarettes, or eat more food than the government people dictate; life is a series of trade-offs and people have to decide for themselves how to negotiate them).
"Progressive" is a manifestly hateful word in all of its various meanings.
(1) The original "progressive movement" at the beginning of this century brought us prohibition. Shame on them and their left and rightwing American Taliban descendents. Move to Saudi Arabia if you like state sanctioned Puritanism so much.
(2) Anything that purports to be rock but doesn't bear at least a minimal Wittgensteinian family resemblance to the music on the Stooges "Fun House" isn't really rock. More to the point it isn't really good. Ergo, "progressive rock" is horrible. Q.E.D.
(3) Political "progressives" invariably would rather make a point than make a buck. If they can feel morally superior to everybody else that's O.K., even if the price is the ever increasing Brazilification of the United States because these bozos are what passes for the left now. Fine, don't shop at Walmart. Be vegan. So what. Just don't pretend that that has very much to do with being a good person or that it will make any difference to the amount of suffering in the world.
As far as I can tell, all forms of "progressivism" carry with them self-defeating and absolutely misplaced condescension. Feh!
I've been working my ass off non-stop for five months, and I'm starting to get worried that pretty soon I will have no more ass.
I know what you're thinking, and you're right, people shake their heads in disbelief, especially when I saunter down the street weaving to and fro, overbalancing for my rapidly diminishing ass. Who would of thunk that the ass was so important for just walking around?
And I take no comfort in the fact that scientists in Sweden are in the process of designing new chairs and couches for people like me. And University of California research scientists are burning through hundreds of millions in start-up grants in a pathetic attempt to design the most perfect prosthetic ass.
Trust me, we still won't be happy.
The Dead Milkmen penned a song about this evening, and you can watch it performed here. I wish the Circle Jerks had written it.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- In the future, the title of every art work will include the phrase,
"F*** You." It will be really transgressive. It will problematize the
distinction between artist and audience. It will collapse the
distinction between art world and "real world." Oh boy!
------------------------------------------------------------------------ Every human being has one useless superpower and one totally inextricable, albeit ultimately harmless, vice.
Real human psychology is a sad parody of Jung's duality of man. The
super hero and super villain reside in all of us, yet in such
attenuated forms that there is nothing to get too excited about. In
fact, let's go back to discussing sitcoms. You were telling me for the
umpteenth time with great relish how Ozzy Osbourne is really Homer
Simpson. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Decent writing requires ruthlessness with oneself.
Rather, decent writing requires repeated rewriting, and decent
rewriting demands ruthlessness with oneself. You have to look at part
of your own mind (the rought draft) as if it were foreign, and then you
have to subject that part to the harshest criticisms, and then have the
strength to improve in light of those criticisms. Then you have to do
this again and again and again.
I suspect that this is part of the explanation of why intellectuals
in the twentieth century were such marks for ruthless people like
Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and (in Chomsky's case) Pol Pot. Of course, most
of the explanation is basic bad faith of the sort Nietzsche and Freud
thematized. And Chomsky is an a-hole.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ If
I could make only one prayer, it would be that Thomas is kind, curious,
creative, hard-working, and joyous, that great passions and interests
arise from these virtues, and that he grows up in a world that values
such things.
From the age of 17 to 27 I smoked around a pack and a half of cigarettes a day. Strangely, I never smoked around my parents or when I was visiting. So every Christmas and once or twice a summer (during this time I spent around seven summers living with them too) I would have to go through nicotine withdrawal, and then stay off of cigarettes from one to three months.
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