An insect bite can make you very sick. But the insect remains an insect.

Hum II Sp 08

AS2000 A&C Humanities II
Sp 2008

Our topic will be: Dehumanizing Humanity – Technophobia and Technophilia in Modern Culture. We’ll look at this topic in the light of several themes: The foundation of concepts of the human in concepts of nature, work, and technology; Modern media’s power to represent and reshape humanity and social life; Technology’s enabling of the dehumanization of others; Androids, robots, and other artificial human creatures in the modern popular imagination.

Books:
Bill McKibben - The End of Nature (2006 ed.) (Random House, 2006)
Stanley Perkowitz - Digital People: From Bionic Humans to Androids (Joseph Henry Press, 2004)
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (Signet, 2000 – the 1818 edition. Do not get the 1831 edition.)
Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain of Others (Picador, 2004)

Most of these are available used from Amazon or abebooks.com. But be sure to get the right edition.

The following required readings are available free online:
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto
Henry David Thoreau – Walking
Franz Kafka – In the Penal Colony
Michel Foucault - Panopticism
Guy Debord - The Society of the Spectacle

The following films will be studied in class:
Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1926)
La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)
Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964)
RoboCop (Paul Verhoeven, 1987)

Further suggested reading:
George Orwell – 1984
Walter Benjamin – The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Bill Joy – Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us
Kevin Kelley – Out of Control
Nick Bostrom - Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios
The Unabomber’s Manifesto
Francis Fukuyama, - Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. Picador, 2002

Love Songs

For "heart" read "sexual organs."

Just a minute left in Joseph Conrad's 150th birthday. We started Heart of Darkness in the evening Humanities section tonight. Nothing seemed to impress them so much as the coincidence of its being Conrad's birthday. The symmetry in this semester is planned: We started out with Civilization and Its Discontents and are ending with analysis of HoD, considering whether it's the same argument in the form of narrative. (More successful and more "earned"--you can see why Conrad didn't care for Freud.)

It's funny how like Mann Conrad is. I remember suddenly realizing sometime back that The Goat was Albee's Death in Venice; of course HoD is DiV, too, only that much darker. These are metamorphosis stories--along with Kafka's actual Metamorphosis--where the central character encounters some sublime force that makes it impossible to live as he once did. It seems like they ought to be all over the place; that every bildungsroman should be a transformation, but they're not; they're relatively rare, compared to takes in which the change is just a melodramatic readjustment to the norm. The real ones are sort of grim, earnest, and religious in implications, like Diary of a Country Priest and Le diable, probablement, The Counterfeiters, Young Torless, Demian.

From www.bathybius.com

Beaudouin-Mason-Welt
Dec 02, 2007 @ 11:51 am

I had an amazing time at the reading last night in Baltimore. David Beaudouin, Chris Mason, Bernard Welt read in that order. part ways thru Bernard’s reading the word ecstatic came to mind. by ecstatic I mean that each of the three readers seemed to have left themselves behind as a condition for their having written the things they did. the work all seemed especially unburdened by… I want to say identity, or specific expectations or preconceptions about what being a writer is all about.

I learned from Michael after the reading that Chris had put the three together for this reading. Chris was the only one of the three I knew at all prior to the reading, but I hadn’t seen Chris read, outside of his part in a collab thing I did with him, Bender, Rupert and Adam Good. Chris’ reading surprised me. His presence was not what I would have predicted, tho I’m not sure I can get more specific about that. he was commanding in a very untyrannical way. (not that I was expecting tyranny.) among the things he read were some sound poems called “click poems”. I asked him if he had recordings of the poems and apparently he does, so I will want to get those on the dc poetry site and link to them. I think Chris stands the same way I do when I read. and/or moves or doesn’t move, the same way. same kind of peculiarly intentional verticality. but he moves less, I think.

David, who read first, read a few very different kinds of things. there were some denser longer (but not very long) things that especially worked for me. not dense like leaden. free & surprising, utterly. not like the other kids. Says the i.e. series blog, “He was the founder of Tropos Press, Inc. (1976-2001), one of the region’s most respected alternative literary presses, as well as THE PEARL (1980-2001), a Baltimore journal of the literary and ’spontaneous’ arts.”

I’m not usually comfortable with big words like “astonishing,” but Bernard’s reading could be described that way without fear of excess. he read some things he described as “prose.” among them was a piece (series of pieces?) about George W. Bush. the piece is a series of dream sequences in which George W. Bush — who is always referred to that way in the piece, with the “W” — appears exactly when we least and most expect it. the piece is funny but also devastatingly sad. something about the affect is just so perfect for this particular moment, late in W’s presidency, where we’re all exhausted by what he has wrought, to the point of something like punchiness, at times. something happened to me during the reading wherein I was suddenly struck by my capacity as a human to be affected by what is happening to THE ENTIRE WORLD. at some point in recent years I think I decided it might be possible to only be affected by what is happening within a 10-mile radius (putting aside the fact that my 10-mile radius contains the federal gov’t, etc) and not care about the rest of the world. I’ve even had times where I stopped believing that human beings can care about the out-of-sight. you know, cuz you can’t really hold a whole world in your head. but Bernard’s piece recovered a lot of that for me, my real relation to something as big as the world. (as soon as I publish this blog post I will start working on recovering my indifference.)

Bernard also read a piece called “I stopped writing poetry.” It’s one of these pieces that is just jammed full of things that are funny and true, not only about being a poet but being a human. You keep thinking to yourself as you hear it read, I’m not going to be able to remember all of this so I just need to remember this one sentence because this must be the one that can’t be eclipsed by anything that remains in the piece. but then that happens fifteen more times. It appears in The Best American Poetry 2001, I now know, from a search. So if you happen to have that volume. Hopefully it’s the same version as what was read last night. It is about the numerous times when Bernard has stopped writing poetry and the various reasons for those stoppages. From various searches I now see that the piece got quite a lot of attention way back in the year 2000.

After the reading I asked Bernard if he had any books and he mentioned a book of essays, but he didn’t mention an out-of-print book of poetry — Serenade (Z Press). I see also that he has some things here. The book of essays is Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art. I was able to order Serenade from Amazon, but I’m a little skeptical because it was $5 there and listed in “new” condition, whereas it is upwards of $30 from other sellers. a little worried I’ll get a “just kidding” email from Amazon.

Title:
I Fucked a Communist for the FBI

It practically writes itself.

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.

-Salvador Dali

The only difference between me and a retard is that I'm not retarded.

-Bernard Welt

Today in class: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. I just watched most of A proposito de Bunuel, one of the best documentaries on an artist I can think of. To write like a child with the knowledge and vocabulary of an adult--that must be great.

Just discovered I can do a killingly funny imitation of Bela Lugosi as Dracula singing "Tried to Make Me Go to Rehab." That will certainly come in handy.

Tom the Dancing Bug

Augustine of Hippo

Do not ask what truth is. For mists of corporeal images and clouds of phantasms will rise forthwith and confuse the clarity that flared up in you in a first impulse when I said: 'truth.' When the word 'truth' is spoken, remain if you can in the first impulse which struck you as a flash of lightning. But you cannot. You fall back into this world of familiar, earthly things.

-De Trinitate

If Rumsfeld Were Gay

I read with heart-bursting joy tempered by deep skepticism that there's just a slight chance Donald Rumsfeld could be arrested for ordering torture while he's in France this weekend.
As Rummy would say:
Do I wish I were getting fucked up the ass right now? Sure. Would I like to be blasting a hot load down some muscle-stud's throat? Of course. Would I rather be eating out that same muscle-stud's hole while he fucks some daddy's-boy twink senseless? It goes without saying. But it's not a perfect world, and sometimes instead of getting the filthy, kinky, gayer-than-gay sex you really want, you find that your only choice is to initiate hapless, incredibly ill-conceived and breath-takingly reckless military adventures that ruin the lives of millions, destroy both the credibility and the future prospects for security of the United States, and benefit no one but your overfed, grotesquely self-satisfied cronies. If the American people want to call that poor judgment, we'll just have to agree to disagree.

"It turns out that Bayard’s book benefits significantly from not being read."

Right after I make my notes about why I have written so few of my collected works, Sam Anderson reviews Pierre Bayard's How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.

Epiphany

Y'know, Nacho Doritos really are delicious.

Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books

I am incredibly jealous of Marcel Benabou's title, but the book itself I found flat and kind of empty. And maybe that's postmodernism, contemporary writing, poststructuralist takes on literature, and/or Frenchness all in a nutshell.
I am constantly subject to this conflict--more than conflict, internal antagonism, rivenness--between my two modes. Benabou really writes about intellectual activities in critical terms, and after a lot of interesting, self-reflecting turns of thought, writes exclusively about reason, critical analyses. But to me it seems like this is intellectualization, rationalization, avoidance of issues that are psychological and in fact founded in unreason rather than reason. It is something of a cliche to point out that artists and critics can spin out a lovely surface and even claim that there is nothing but surface, theorize endlessly about the death of the metaphor of depth, precisely in order to avoid the fact that depth is invoked merely as a metaphor for something that is empirically real (if anyway we actually try to account for human behavior) and that it is that something really real that one theorizes in order to avoid. (If I could show that Freud's notion of an "unconscious" is ultimately flawed and unsatisfying, that is not to say that reflecting upon childhood, family dynamics, and personal symbolism becomes useless.)
Because I can write well--not in a note on a blog, to be sure, but elsewhere, when I refine phrases and get interested in patterns of metaphor--I've always felt stuck between the pursuit of artifice as a means to "get at something"--to find that playing with the language makes something pretty or sublime that reveals ideas I didn't know I had (on the one hand) and (on the other) blurting out an almost-spontaneous rant that turns out to articulate just where I'm standing, or what I'm feeling, about something that's really important to me. (I'm thinking of "I stopped writing poetry" and "No Title" especially; there's a lot of irony and adopting of characters in them but they're basically improvs that allowed a lot of stuff to come out, as opposed to "poems" I made by starting with and fooling with language.)
I don't feel like I have to come down on one side of this, cause I've sort of embraced my schizoid position generally, but my heart seems to be with the rants, and perhaps more importantly, they seem to energize me and get me working, and after all, I might be saying that when my mind and my heart seem to be in conflict, yes, it's very nice to integrate the two, but if I have to choose I'd go with the heart, and after all, even my reason tells me to be mistrustful of reason if my heart does not.

So:
Stories I have notes for and haven't written-
The Juniper Tree
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
Further Researches of Dr. Praetorius
Old Man (Little Acorn)
Brian's Dream
I Will Hold You
Come As You Are

Also: Jonah
That's a lot to be backed up on.

Young Frankenstein is the funniest piece of comic musical theater I've ever seen. In adapting it to the stage, they've made some very canny choices: First, as the film was in black and white, the stage production adopts the conventions of the comic revue circa 1934, when the story is set. So there's a kind of Marx Brothers tone to everything (in fact, Frederick Frankenstein's entrance is sort of like Groucho Marx's in Horsefeathers). Second, they sort of deal with much of the audience knowing the best lines by setting them cleverly within the context of musical numbers. You wouldn't think that Frau Blucher's "He Vas My Boyfriend!" could be spun into a great comic aria, but it works amazingly well. Third, the same is done with stage design and other conventions: the show plunders the whole vocabulary of classic designs for musicals the way the film did with Hollywood mise-en -scene--anyone who's looked at Young Frankenstein closely sees immediately why Mel Brooks championed David Lynch and The Elephant Man--and essentially every musical number is a variation upon a showstopper in another, classic show--including the Gilbert & Sullivan comic operetta Ruddigore. And maybe you don't like Will and Grace, but Megan Mullally is fucking brilliant--and you'll be hearing this in reviews in a week or so, so let me be the first to mention: she's channeling Charles Busch in Die, Mommy, Die, the latest in a long line of distinguished performances by biologically female entertainers as drag queens.
So yes, it's very, very good, and I'll be surprised if it doesn't run for eleventy-hundred years. If there isn't a strike this week, that is.
So not everybody here is into musical comedy, but it's kind of my equivalent of serial killer/tribal rock band/Japanese porn. (As Jake Shears once said, "Judy Garland is my heavy metal.") We had every Broadway cast album in my house when I was a kid, and I knew all the lyrics. And I obsessively reread the New-Yorker, Algonquin-table humorists, and loved borscht-belt comics. When I got "serious"--starting with Thoreau, Buddhism, Marxism, then, God help us, symbolist French poetry--in my teens, I left it all behind. Sometime in my thirties, I realized that my inner voice was closer to Ethel Merman and Buddy Hackett than to Verlaine and Rimbaud. That's just the kind of hairpin I am.
Although come to think of it, I do think that's why the South Park movie is so brilliant, and why Johnny Knoxville feels so close to Rip Taylor and John Waters--and why the brilliant finale of Jackass Two is a musical number Mel Brooks must have pissed his pants over (though he'd probably say that at his age, he pisses his pants over very movie he sees).

Note: That Asperger's represents some kind of mutation that's actually evolutionarily healthy. The survival value of a failure of empathy, so humans can finally make rational decisions unclouded by emotion.
(I haven't gotten around to reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time because Bob Smith's novel came out. But it's next on the list.)
This week starting on the chapter on interdisciplinary courses on dreaming, which means collecting every note on the topic I've ever written.
In Humanities, The Bacchae, Leviticus, then on to The Tempest. In Dream Screen, from Freud to Jung by way of Mark Blechner and Ernest Hartmann, Forbidden Planet and Living in Oblivion.

Animal Collective

The show I saw last night at the 9:30 Club is available at NPR.org. I can't get the link to work, but it's still online, audio and slideshow.

"I don't think that people accept the fact that life doesn't make sense. I think it makes people terribly uncomfortable."
-David Lynch

10 Animal Collective Videos

at Dennis Cooper's blog today.