Rex is Rex

Rex Grossman has been feeling a bit under the weather lately (see pic - note: er ist noch am leben - I know it looks a bit  like a chalk outline or some sort of ritual flooring).

He's doing well and we are once again indebted to Dr. Singh (side note to anyone in the Milwaukee Metro with a pet on the brink, Bayshore Vet in Shorewood is the best).  

** Update as of 7/10/13: Rex is back to 100% and acting normally.  We went to see Dr. Singh again today for a final check and his infection seems to have abated.  After a couple of routine vaccines, Rex was good to go, though, the promised 'sleepiness and lethargy' as a result of his shots did not come to pass...

Who's a good dog?

ooh! ooh!, did you read Joel's new tweet?!

Talking about a tweet you read (or in this case wrote) on a blog is kind of like discussing what you heard on the radio later in the day...

That being the case, I am, and have never been, cool.  I have re-watched the movie, Bulworth, and found it as redeeming as I did when it was first released.

It is my firm belief and desire that you do the same... on both counts.

Let me know.

What is the opposite of Freedom?

If we take this question at face value we probably come up with some obvious preliminary answers like slavery or oppression. A more etymological answer might try to contend with the idea of free- first, where unfree- would mean something like ‘being subject to someone (or something) else’ and then deal with –dom. “un-dom” might mean being outside the state of (or realm of) free-ness (or in this case un-free-ness). Then the opposite of freedom becomes something like ‘a state of existence outside of subjugation’, which I think we might also define as ‘freedom’.

a picture of freedom generally involves standing with spread arms

I might add to these initial (good) answers the troubling notion that debt might be a very good contemporary answer to our question. Or even commerce or exchange in general. A more radical answer might even be love or friendship or community.

I think what I am most concerned with here is the notion of a presumed value or good.  Freedom seems like something we all agree is good.  We like it.

I'm rereading House of Leaves with my Theories of Revolutions class and on this go-round (it's more of a maze for me now than the labyrinth it once was) it seems to me that the central metaphor of the novel holds that life is a journey... through a labyrinth.  However, there also appears to be a certain amount of cheats built into it, either you can cheat it (break through a wall or imagine new solutions) or it can cheat you by shifting its architecture and 'changing the rules'.

In the novel it becomes clear that the metaphor is just a shell game, but my title question occurred to me as I was reading this earlier today:

"Dialectical thought thus becomes negative in itself. Its function is to break down the self-assurance and self-contentment of common sense"
— joel seeger (@stogie10) May 3, 2013

Marcuse goes on to say, ", to undermine the sinister confidence in the power and language of facts, to demonstrate that unfreedom, is so much at the core of things that the development of their internal contradictions leads necessarily to qualitative change: the explosion and catastrophe of the established state of affairs" (Preface to Reason and Revolution, italics are mine).*

Another resource to help us think this through a bit might be the actual definition of freedom and what the entries seem to think freedom might not be.

Without confine or constraint, what do we have to do but stand, arms spread wide, trying to take up as much space as possible.  It seems to me that we need the limitations if for no other reason than to have common space on which to start a conversation (or relationship).  I think Marcuse/Hegel's point is that we need to be able to think outside of those limitations, but inevitably cannot actually act outside of them.


*As a side note, I think this quote also does a fairly good job of articulating why people tend to not enjoy talking to me at parties or late at night...

Waiting by the Vent

I'm standing in the hall as my students complete what will very likely be my last UW-M evaluation and it occurs to me that this phase of my life is rapidly coming to a close.

Of course I have my dissertation to complete (pesky detail) and I fully (though perhaps mythically) believe I will land back in the throes of academia soon, and finally (and finely), but my time of first and foremost defining myself as 'grad student' is done.

Oops, they're calling me back in.

#erstwhility

Terror and Horror

While re-reading I Am Legend, the great precursor novel to most modern zombie films and fiction by Richard Matheson, the following passage gave me pause:

"'It's horrible,' she said. 

He looked at her in surprise.  Horrible?  Wasn't that odd?  He hadn't thought that for years.  For him the word 'horror' had become obsolete.  A surfeiting of terror soon made terror a cliche.  To Robert Neville the situation merely existed as natural fact.  It had no adjectives."

It was not

*   *   * 

August 2018


This


*  *  *

May 2019

I was going to revisit this last year it seems - it's a concept that I am fond of.  The Matheson quote seems to conflate the two terms, and I think that was why I was interested in it.

I'm interested in what the difference between terror and horror in literature and film and art:

Terror - The literary fear.  A sublime experience of the darker sides of humanity.  An experience of something that scares us, but one which we value - that we take something away from and grow from.

Horror -  The gross out fear.  A scariness that (historically) is assigned no redeeming value.  A 'cheap thrill' of a scary text.  An exploitation of human drives, appealing to the lowest common denominator.

We might think of the distinction of these two as the difference between Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.  M. Night Shylaman's oeuvre versus George Romero's zombie movies.

In my former academic life, I was much interested in that lower form of existence and what we might learn about ourselves by looking carefully at it.  I took a course called "Art History and the Value of Being Disturbed" and found myself an outsider who some of the others in the class.  They wanted to look at artists like Maplethorpe, Serrano and Ofili and claim disturbance from something that aligned strongly with their political views.  I was looking at Eduardo Kac and Brakhage's Pittsburgh Trilogy and Bodyworlds and trying to look straight at things that I'd rather not.

On this date in history I think I thought I knew what I was talking about, though now I think I did not. Now I know what I'm talking about, but don't know that I do (so I might not, really).

Also, I think it wasn't so recently as 2009 when I seemed so sure of my nonsense - this is likely a piece I wrote during the fall of 2005.

Nowadays, I tend to think that Althusser is kind of full of shit, but Fanon, he's it.

Matt Damon

The LA Times has posted a video history of the spectacular feud between Jimmy Kimmel and Matt Damon in celebration of Matt Damon's takeover of Jimmy Kimmel Live.

It's a quick relive of a pop culture phenomenon that offers a smart critique of Hollywood pomposity.  Enjoy!