The Cynic's Kringle

I didn't join the office Kringle because it seemed like a great recipe for spending $20 and receiving something of no great relevance. Instead, I recruited a friend into a Cynics Kringle - we each identified a gift we wanted, gave very precise instructions on acquiring it, and then boughtfor each other.

I now own a paper copy of Hegel's Phenomenology, and translations of Heideggers Lectures on it. (When you want a complicated idea made clear, Heidegger is probably not your first choice. But I think Heidegger took Hegel very seriously - we shall see.)

Cynicism ftw.

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Nanopad

Well, my Korg Nanopad can eventually be made to work - the secret is to ignore Korg's drivers. Windows recognises it and it runs well, although with some latency. Also works well on the macbook, with no appreciable latency.

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From 'Sickness Unto Death'

Penguin classics,  Translated by Alastair Hannay.

p74 - Kierkegaard's opinion of Hegel, after drawing so heavily on Christian theology, concluding that he drained it dry and disbelieving.

No, being in error is, quite un-Socratically, what people are least afraid of.  One sees amazing examples of this which illustrate it on a stupendous scale.  A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc. - and if one turns one's attention to his personal life one discovers to one's astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next-door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor's quarters.  If one took it upon oneself to draw attention with but a single word to this contradiction, he would be insulted.  For so long as he can complete the system - with the help of his error - being in error is not what he is afraid of.

 p104 - Kierkegaard's describes yours truly with clarity and brutality:

We began [] with the lowest form of despair, which in despair did not want to be itself. The demonic despair is the most heightened form of the despair which in despair wants to be itself.  This latter despair does not even want to be itself in Stoic self-infatuation and self-exaltation, not even in that no doubt mendacious way, but one that in a certain sense conformed to its own ideal of perfection; no,  it wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its misery; it does not even want defiantly to be itself, but to be itself in sheer spite; it does not even want to sever itself defiantly from the power which established it; it wants in sheer spite to press itself on that power, importune it, hang on to it out of malice. And that is understandable - a malicious objection must, of all things, take care to hang on to that to which it is an objection.  Rebelling against all existence, it thinks it has acquired evidence against existence, against its goodness.  The despairer thinks he himself is this evidence.  And it is this that he wants to be; this is the reason he wants to be himself, to be himself in his agony, so as to protest with this agony against all existence.

This is what I am constantly to repent of. To be is good.  Even if you are a silly person who can't forsake too many projects and has very little talent at any of them.

Arson

Simone at AnotherSomething's school was burned in an arson attack. I am something of a pessimist, and while I totally sympathise with the loss and the insult, I couldn't see it as hard to understand - in fact I would think this sort of thing is almost over-determined.

The first candidate is the arsonist, looking for a mostly wooden building that will certainly be empty in the middle of the night, and which people care enough about to notice the attacks.

The second candidate is the person for whom school functioned as a giant, long-running hell of having 'not good enough' stamped on them by the adult world of the state and by their peers. If they have hated us, we need to remember that they think we hated them first.

The third candidate is perhaps the dux or the prop of the first fifteen at an elite private school, celebrating the end of their academic year with a hearty 'sod the proles'.

Each of these may be present in a single person - they seem to me to draw energy from resentment, from a self defined by weakness and lacks.

Nations

Newt Gingrich's 'invented nation' gibe is yet more evidence (if any were needed) that he is a big fat idiot. Nations in the nation-state paradigm are invented or instituted. Many African 'nations' were invented in the colonial era, and have been invented again to get to the post-colonial organisation.  And of course, America.  No nation is more invented than America.

Real common language, common descent, common culture nationhood is something everyone wants, because it gives the self something to hang its hat on, some essence that is in other people and validates how we are. But, as Benedict Anderson points out, we have to make do with imaginary compatriots, because
a. We can't possibly know even a representative sample of our huge modern nations; and
b. If we did know them, we'd know they are not what we hoped for and that we have much less in common than we thought.

Nation-building is not a job for other nations - its a job for people and messages.

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The Internet and the end of Capitalism

This week I gave money to a few worthy institutions - wikipedia, paul sheeky from triptree, and others. They give good things without asking a price, and my gifts were scaled to be more than I would actually pay if they did. I think if we were ever to come out the far side of capitalism as Marx anticipated, it will be through this distributionist approach. The end of inequality is achieved when each of us treats others needs as our own, until my needs are being met from the generosity of others, not because I demand a price to be alienated from my labour.

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Who He? or The Rat Race

Alfred Bester, science-fiction novelist of note, wrote a non-science fiction novel called "Who He?" to very little acclaim.  It's a story set in the production of a New York-based variety TV show called (yes, eponymously, my tyrannical inner lexicographer) "Who He?" It was first published in 1953, and is set in that era.
 
Jordan Lennox is one of the creators of the show, and also the head writer.  Like the whole milieu he moves in, Jordan (aka Jake) is a poison-eater - psychologically dysfunctional in just the right way to take all the rubs, slights and cruelties of the business to heart and then turn it into good work.  But he has a number of problems - he's drinking heavily and having extended blackouts, and his show is under attack from a sinister letter writer called "Knott".  He has to deal with anxious stars, alcoholic actresses and all-powerful producers.  And then he runs into Gabby Valentine, and finds himself in love with her. Unfortunately, Gabby is a communist and married to Lennox's nemesis - and she's not a poison-eater: she is sanity itself.

The story is a psychological detective thriller, reminiscent of the Demolished Man.  Bester can't write uninterestingly, and he creates a coherent and oppressive world in this novel.  I think the things that stand between it and success are to do with the over-reaching psychoanalytical take on personality. The point of the novel is to confront poison-eating and put forward the alternative; but there is something a little cartoonish about people drawn in full, with their repetitions and tics and blind spots more present to us than they are to themselves and people they interact with.  This is probably uncomfortable because it is true - I shudder to think how transparent my need to be right and use the right words, my laziness and my ludicrously inflated sense of my own understanding is.

Bester's wife Rolly was a modestly successful actress and later an advertising executive and he was a New Yorker most of his life.  They had no children.  She predeceased Bester and he left his estate to his barman.