Franz Kafka has his tale about hunger artists, people who starve themselves as spectacle. In Kafka’s story, people with money could buy tickets to watch the hunger artists. Starvation as entertainment. You see a version of Kafka’s tale on CNN and the BBC now, as ratings depend, at least for a while, on what will happen to the earthquake victims in Haiti. Haiti as show and spectacle.
Today, the Guardian ran a story about some well-to-do people enjoying themselves on a vacation in Haiti.
Sixty miles from Haiti’s devastated earthquake zone, luxury liners dock at private beaches where passengers enjoy jet ski rides, parasailing and rum cocktails delivered to their hammocks.
The standard response is to be repulsed by those who are enjoying themselves so close to a massive disaster for human beings. Yet, how is what is happening on the cruise ship all that different from what has gone on with Haiti for years and years? Before the recent earthquake, the haves rested in their hammocks, visited tanning booths, went to the movies, purchased tickets for spring break, and parasailed, all while the people of Haiti lived in poverty. The haves just did not happen to be in such proximity as the people on the cruise ship. The haves were partying and entertaining themselves in Miami or Long Island or Los Angeles.
Why do we have the ritual of rounding up the homeless in American cities whenever one of the cities hosts a political convention? Is the point to remove the homeless from people’s consciousness, because their proximity would, as the kids says, put a harsh on the (political) party? No one believes that homelessness has been solved because no homeless people are visible during the political convention. The attendees accept that capitalism will produce haves and have-nots, though that can make some people uncomfortable when the haves and have-nots occupy the same space — when that space is unregulated. Much more comfortable to have gated communities, or lovely shops like Starbucks where one can be with one’s own kind, and purchase something overpriced, knowing that a portion of the cost will be distributed without our knowledge or vision to the have-nots, to those who are being excluded from our gated communities. Why get upset when the party comes to the economic scene of horror in the form of a cruise ship? Is it the distance that is unseemly?
If we are to believe the reports during the first day or two after the earthquake, some foreign rescue crews in Port-au-Prince concentrated their efforts on recovering people from the Hotel Montana, the hotel where former President Clinton said he had visited, and where some of the heads of various missionary agencies dined. How many Haitians do you think were staying or dining at the Hotel Montana when it collapsed?
John Lanchester, author of, among other books, The Debt to Pleasure (he was on to debt early), says in his newest book:
I’ve been following the economic crisis for more than two years now. I began working on the subject as part of the background to a novel, and soon realized that I had stumbled across the most intersting story I’ve ever found…. It is an absolutely amazing story, full of human interest and drama, one whose byways of mathematics, economics, and psychology are both central to the story of the last decades and mysteriously unknown to the general public.
Lanchester has writerly talents that allow him to tell this amazing story in an illuminating way, with at least one conclusion that runs counter to those (e.g., Jamie Dimon) who see the financial crisis as merely a brief example of capitalism having fallen off the wagon of profit. Lanchester asserts that the lessen of the fall of 2008 ought to be a realization that more individualism and the singular pursuit of economic happiness via shopping and endless purchasing will not be the answer. The answer lies not in individual getting and spending and indulgence but in collective rationality. The short version is: we are all in this together.
For reasons that I am unable to discern, the American title of Lanchester’s book is I.O.U., while the U.K. version is called Whoops. While many people in the U.S. will know Lanchester from his literary works, I.O.U. has been sent on to the business section of your bookstore. This categorizing for shelving purposes might not help sales, so be sure to direct any Lanchester fans you know to the business aisle of the local bookstore.
Some holiday gifts from various kindhearted people mean that I have some interesting reading ahead, including Javier Marias’ three-part Your Face Tomorrow. The reading will likely call for more than one season beyond winter.
It was the 18th-century thinker Lichtenberg who said, “A good metaphor is something even the police should keep an eye on.” Metaphors can move us, and it was only a few years ago that the philosopher Jacques Derrida reminded us that modern Greek still uses metaphorikos as the word for transportation. Researchers have now learned that metaphors can help scientists to reconsider their assumptions (translation: transport them to a new locus of thinking) when they are compelled to think out loud in front of other scientists who do not share their preconceptions. Jonah Lehrer explains the importance of scientists working outside the comfort of a lab consisting of the like-minded:
The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were [sic] protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”
When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves [my emphasis]. These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions.
This would seem to suggest, among other things, that scientists could benefit from learning about literature, though few institutions of higher education offer programs designed to take advantage of bringing the two disciplines together.
The New Statesman offers up some quotations from a review by Slavoj Zizek of Peter Hallward’s Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment. One seems pertinent juxtaposed to the statements by Pat Robertson in the video.
Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary fight against slavery, which ended in independence in January 1804. “Only in Haiti,” Hallward notes, “was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day”… Denounced by Talleyrand as “a horrible spectacle for all white nations”, the “mere existence of an independent Haiti” was itself an intolerable threat to the slave-owning status quo. Haiti thus had to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path.
Strange rhetorical twist at The New Republic. Isaac Chotiner forces himself to admit that new technologies have impacted the arts, particularly coverage of the arts in newspapers, which, like the book publishing industry, have found themselves mostly unable to discern how to adjust their capitalistic ways to continue to bring in sustaining profits. Apparently longing for the days when people read Proust in front of the fireplace after Jeeves handed them the last glass of port for the night, Chotiner announces a new entity — oops, an old entity — “The Book.” The Book is a new addition to The New Republic, but one totally uncomfortable on the web, although one would suspect The Book’s ongoing health might rely in some part on web readers. Why, then, insult them in your manifesto-disguised-as-a-welcome piece? Below is a sample of Chotiner’s rhetoric.
The first thing to know about The Book is that it is a supplement to our print content–an attempt to apply the new technology to the old and untarnished purposes. While our online book review will certainly be lively, it will not be significantly more relaxed than our magazine itself. We are not slumming here, or surrendering to the carnival of the web. Quite the contrary. We are hoping to offer an example of resistance to it. Many of the writers you will read in The Book are the same writers you will read in the magazine. Their subjects, too, will be the same. Here you will find criticism, not blogging; pieces, not posts. Four or five times a week we will publish a new review of a new book. The length of these reviews will vary, and we will count on our readers sometimes to sustain an attention-span that is not generally required for reading online.
Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons
The reactionary and defensive prose of Chotiner then shifts a bit as readers learn that The Book will include “LitTube,” a blatant bow to the carnival that is YouTube. If you are experiencing cognitive dissonance, a sense that Chotiner exhibits a love/hate relationship with the web, you are likley not alone.
Some of us out here in the “carnival” also view books and culture generally as having a linkage to politics and to political health. At least at the moment, you will not find Chotiner and his co-editors acknowledging that linkage. Sample the selection of intial reviews to confirm The Book’s old-fashioned aesthetic, its mainly apolitical approach to culture. At almost every turn in Chotiner’s so-called welcome message, the rhetoric is nostalgic. It’s a Frankensteinian project, trying to bring what is dead back to life. The Book’s editors will launch “TNR Classics,” where, for instance, TNR will reprint old essays, such as “Virginia Woolf on Walter Scott from 1924.” Chotiner’s description of “LitTube” admits that the life of one part of the project will be brief: “[LitTube] will consist of videos of writers, historians, philosophers, and other important intellectuals from the past, so that they may briefly come alive [my emphasis]. Finally, the “Lost & Found” department will feature literary remains that have been forgotten, left for dead.
The Book will be worth watching, for it is likely that Chotiner & Company will fail to devitalize literature and the arts to the degree they have planned. Some animated and subversive bits will slip into the cadaverous parade that they intend as the substitute for the carnival that is the web.
Locals in California Question Yoo's Actions on Behalf of the Bush Administration
When it is available, I will post Jon Stewart’s interview with constitutional lawyer John Yoo. It took place earlier today, but does not yet seem available on the web site of “The Daily Show.” Stewart said the interview was unsatisfying, and the event confirmed the quotation by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Lawyers spend a great deal of time shoveling smoke.” Stewart strained to have Yoo come to grips with Yoo’s own justifications for helping the previous administration in the White House to make certain kinds of torture legal.
Yoo finds himself at odds with numerous people and organizations in the Bay area. One source is reporting that the location of his spring class at the University of California at Berkeley is being kept secret. One might wonder whether that is for his own protection. After the interview on “The Daily Show,” Professor Yoo has reason to lie low.
The holidays must not have been cheery around the Brooker household. A stranger might have toddled in and sprinkled something nasty in the eggnog. Charlie Brooker has returned to The Guardian with a new column for 2010, a reading of the Labour Party’s future in his homeland. It’s divination of a dark sort. Some vintage Brooker appears about half way through the piece when he admits to having seen a most peculiar U.S. television program, one that he sees could have practical implications for rescuing the Labour Party in the upcoming election.
I recently watched several episodes of a high-quality US comedy-drama serial called ‘Breaking Bad.’ The storyline revolves around an underachieving, debt-ridden 50-year-old chemistry teacher who discovers he’s got terminal cancer. But wait, it gets funnier. Realising he has absolutely nothing to lose, he decides to become a crystal meth dealer in an insane last-ditch attempt to provide financial support for his family when he’s gone. Cue plenty of pitch-black hi-jinks. It’s a good show. It’s also a road map for Labour. The party’s condition is similarly terminal, so it might as well go for broke by announcing a series of demented and ill-advised election pledges in an openly desperate bid to retain power.
