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I have once again suspended transcribing my mini-lessons (although I think some of them do present points worth making) in a moment of fresh despair at ever making myself understood.
Most of what I present is what people already know, or others have said much better than I. I realized a couple of nights ago again that there is more wisdom and intelligence to be found in the collected essays of John Crowley in In Other Words (although the publisher’s proofreading is execrable) than in this entire journal. Which is what you would expect from the nonfiction writings of a globally celebrated novelist, and you can carry the book to the beach or the bathtub if you don’t mind risking damage to a signed limited edition, plus it incorporates its insights in a more entertaining prose format.
That would mean the only reason to read joculum is for the book citations, which oftentimes come straight out of the new New York Review of Books or are so idiosyncratic as to be useless to most readers, or are simply misguided. (The arrival of Parag Khanna’s The Second World reveals that the book’s exposition of the shifting tectonic plates of global power seems much less intelligently argued than the magazine article based on it, although it does begin to map the territory—with the oversimplifications of mapmaking—which is more than I can say for books on the topic.)
And although my argument is that the various contributions of the academic disciplines are often misunderstood within the discipline itself because they don’t take into account the information already available elsewhere, I cannot master enough of the disciplines to do more than amateur speculation that is, sometimes, little more than a more or less sophisticated version of the average tavern argument of intellectuals.
What I do try to do, and often I forget even to do that, is to present what everyone already knows in a format in which we don’t already know it.
We are dying of sleepwalking; that was the point of my friends-only disquisition about the money managers waking up consumed with emotion and thus exacerbating the wrong decisions based on mistaken premises, all the while operating with the supreme self-confidence that comes with being the masters of the universe.
There are lots of speculative novels about the need for putting the pieces together differently and less pridefully, but mostly all they do is allow us to goose ourselves with the comforting thought that if we could get it all together, we really would be masters of the universe.
To which I present a few expletives based on a whole bunch of past philosophical insights that have fossilized into comforting excuses on their own, even as I continue to suggest that there may indeed be counterfeits only because there is such a thing as real gold. (Just as there are unicorns in art because there is such a thing as an anomalous hybrid that disturbs our illusory sense of what natural order ought to be.)
But we can begin to wake up if we are whopped one upside the head often enough with events and experiences that keep upsetting our sense of natural order. And then we can figure out what while there are no unicorns, there are indeed more wonders in earth and heaven than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
That is why the most profound entry in this whole blog (which I like to dignify with the term digitalized journal) is the screenbot-laden piece a few entries back in which the reader is forced to read a rambling introductory paragraph letter by letter, only to find that it ends just before the point is made, with the rest of the entry made beneath the LJ-cut.
I didn’t plan it that way; it was a happy accident.
But the impatient reader, I suspect almost every one of you, simply skipped the entry altogether or jumped to the text beneath the cut to see what the hell this tomfoolery was driving at.
So I may have been the only one for whom the exercise worked.
But in the end, all we can do is set up our own disequilibriation exercises. Mostly I do it by reading book reviews against the grain, and then reading my readings against the grain. (A quotation comes to mind that would be misleading because the author of it has a philosophy that is only loosely related to where I want this to go. And aren’t you sorry I brought up the whole subject?)
With that (which that?) in mind, it is particularly interesting to read (in the latest NYRB) the multiple subtexts of Peter Brown’s review of the exhibition of Early Christian art currently in Fort Worth, a onetime rootin’-tooin’ cattle town that today is home to megachurches (I assume) and to high culture, as currently embodied in this unprecedented series of loans from the Vatican Museum and other repositories of the cultural remains of Late Antiquity (though not enough of the latter sources, as Brown points out, which would reveal the very different Early Christian world farther east).
That would be a separate topic for a post, were the post ever to be written, but I would at minimum point out the delight of Brown’s reading of the actual situation and social class of early Christians who commissioned art for their homes and their persons, among them the well-paid entertainer Vitalis, who puzzled the medieval monks who had to make sense of the archaeological evidence.
Most of what I present is what people already know, or others have said much better than I. I realized a couple of nights ago again that there is more wisdom and intelligence to be found in the collected essays of John Crowley in In Other Words (although the publisher’s proofreading is execrable) than in this entire journal. Which is what you would expect from the nonfiction writings of a globally celebrated novelist, and you can carry the book to the beach or the bathtub if you don’t mind risking damage to a signed limited edition, plus it incorporates its insights in a more entertaining prose format.
That would mean the only reason to read joculum is for the book citations, which oftentimes come straight out of the new New York Review of Books or are so idiosyncratic as to be useless to most readers, or are simply misguided. (The arrival of Parag Khanna’s The Second World reveals that the book’s exposition of the shifting tectonic plates of global power seems much less intelligently argued than the magazine article based on it, although it does begin to map the territory—with the oversimplifications of mapmaking—which is more than I can say for books on the topic.)
And although my argument is that the various contributions of the academic disciplines are often misunderstood within the discipline itself because they don’t take into account the information already available elsewhere, I cannot master enough of the disciplines to do more than amateur speculation that is, sometimes, little more than a more or less sophisticated version of the average tavern argument of intellectuals.
What I do try to do, and often I forget even to do that, is to present what everyone already knows in a format in which we don’t already know it.
We are dying of sleepwalking; that was the point of my friends-only disquisition about the money managers waking up consumed with emotion and thus exacerbating the wrong decisions based on mistaken premises, all the while operating with the supreme self-confidence that comes with being the masters of the universe.
There are lots of speculative novels about the need for putting the pieces together differently and less pridefully, but mostly all they do is allow us to goose ourselves with the comforting thought that if we could get it all together, we really would be masters of the universe.
To which I present a few expletives based on a whole bunch of past philosophical insights that have fossilized into comforting excuses on their own, even as I continue to suggest that there may indeed be counterfeits only because there is such a thing as real gold. (Just as there are unicorns in art because there is such a thing as an anomalous hybrid that disturbs our illusory sense of what natural order ought to be.)
But we can begin to wake up if we are whopped one upside the head often enough with events and experiences that keep upsetting our sense of natural order. And then we can figure out what while there are no unicorns, there are indeed more wonders in earth and heaven than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
That is why the most profound entry in this whole blog (which I like to dignify with the term digitalized journal) is the screenbot-laden piece a few entries back in which the reader is forced to read a rambling introductory paragraph letter by letter, only to find that it ends just before the point is made, with the rest of the entry made beneath the LJ-cut.
I didn’t plan it that way; it was a happy accident.
But the impatient reader, I suspect almost every one of you, simply skipped the entry altogether or jumped to the text beneath the cut to see what the hell this tomfoolery was driving at.
So I may have been the only one for whom the exercise worked.
But in the end, all we can do is set up our own disequilibriation exercises. Mostly I do it by reading book reviews against the grain, and then reading my readings against the grain. (A quotation comes to mind that would be misleading because the author of it has a philosophy that is only loosely related to where I want this to go. And aren’t you sorry I brought up the whole subject?)
With that (which that?) in mind, it is particularly interesting to read (in the latest NYRB) the multiple subtexts of Peter Brown’s review of the exhibition of Early Christian art currently in Fort Worth, a onetime rootin’-tooin’ cattle town that today is home to megachurches (I assume) and to high culture, as currently embodied in this unprecedented series of loans from the Vatican Museum and other repositories of the cultural remains of Late Antiquity (though not enough of the latter sources, as Brown points out, which would reveal the very different Early Christian world farther east).
That would be a separate topic for a post, were the post ever to be written, but I would at minimum point out the delight of Brown’s reading of the actual situation and social class of early Christians who commissioned art for their homes and their persons, among them the well-paid entertainer Vitalis, who puzzled the medieval monks who had to make sense of the archaeological evidence.
