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Text of the page (random words):
here s one version i m using google so forgive the narrowness of my sources mostly americans mostly people that everyone reads if you are destined to become a writer you can t help it if you can help it you aren t destined to become a writer the frustrations and disappointments not even to mention the unspeakable loneliness are too unbearable for anyone who doesn t have a deep sense of being unable to avoid writing donald harington needless to say i can help it i can not write for long periods of time i scrawl a bit but it s not for sharing at least not here i can busy myself with alcohol and movie watching making and time wasting and flirting it s not that hard i promise not talking would be another story let the ascetics go to hell since they re already there anyway so we have two positions here and that third one represented by dr johnson that i threw in on the sly one says that a writer is someone who writes all the time the other says that a writer is someone who writes all the time let s do away with the holy business of writing though the first question that should be asked in an inquiry into the nature of a vocation in any case is what the practitioners of that vocation do and let s not begin with the tautology either they write because that s not what they do if we re looking at their writing as social practice if we re looking at it as a form of social labor so let s figure out what they do let s read jonathan franzen s new novel freedom like his previous one the corrections is a masterpiece of american fiction the two books have much in common once again franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life franzen knows that college freshmen are today called first years like tender shoots in an overplanted garden that a high minded mom however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors ethical lapses will condemn them with no epithet harsher than weird that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity what s going on here well sam tanenhaus a writer is describing a long piece of writing by jonathan franzen also a writer and praising that piece of writing for its ability to observe describe elaborate he s making an offering at the temple after a bit of reflection a couple of themes are recognizable in this little chunk of writing writing as profession tanenhaus is the senior editor at the new york times book review on top of editing he makes his living reviewing pieces of literature franzen makes his living writing those pieces of literature and giving interviews and writing articles and giving lectures and so forth we have then two professionals engaged in a game of sorts tanenhaus praises franzen tanenhaus probably really likes franzen franzen is famous tanenhaus secures proxy recognition franzen s fame increases circulation occurs writing as revelation we are being told that franzen sees things that we do not see for example college freshmen are called first years and young men express aggression through complex means such as cutting people off on the highway in this category we should also mention the ideas of writer as doctor writer as priest writer as god writer as celebrity the entire piece revolves around the idea that we can get something from franzen not just knowledge but a kind of aura or élan and that we ll thereby become happier or better people cf writer as doctor priest social hierarchy franzen tanenhaus you this is more complex than it might seem presumptions that we live in a meritocracy are patently false this is nowhere more apparent than in the complex social rituals that exist in hierarchical systems contrary to seeing blatant examples of these hierarchies as more exploitative than normal relations i see them as doing us the favor of revealing what we already implicitly know so what we see then is not one kind of role for a writer priest analyst but a number of roles which include professional priest doctor celebrity and better person nb i m deliberately ignoring foucault s important essay what is an author i think some of the claims are overblown the coming into being of the notion of author constitutes the privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas but i neither want to interrogate nor defend them i recommend the essay to anyone who is interested but let s examine another role one that will no doubt be familiar to those versed in the early works of jacques derrida writers make inscriptions in a legible medium capable of storing content of grammatology makes much of the proliferation of words ending in graphy calligraphy choreography geography that is to say the act of writing is an act of making a mark like taking a shit in the woods and the act of making a mark is an act of writing like taking a shit in the woods with intention this is to say that something like communication is entailed in writing but also that other things that have nothing to do with communication like money and power are entailed in writing no shit sherlock as i used to say when i was twelve it s also to say that the act of writing is not the necessary act of self divulgation or freeflowing unloading that representatives of the write to live school make it out to be one writes not because one must unload the workings of the mind what chutzpa writing is an act of inscription and as such it is an act among other acts all this is to say nothing new the inscription debates of the 1970s known as structuralism post structuralism grammatics etc more or less exhausted the subject of what writing is romanticism persists but it rings hollow one particular kind of romanticism about writing though the moral injunction tends to have more cache than others maybe the greatest sin is neither of these two ancient ones the lust for power and hubris the greatest sin may be the new twentieth century sin of indifference peter drucker it is the duty of every citizen according to his best capacities to give validity to his convictions in political affairs einstein the world is a dangerous place not because of those who do evil but because of those who look on and do nothing einstein washing one s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful not to be neutral paolo freire we are called to speak for the weak for the voiceless for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers a time comes when silence is betrayal dr king our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter dr king first they came for the communists and i didn t speak up because i wasn t a communist then they came for the jews and i didn t speak up because i wasn t a jew then they came for the catholics and i didn t speak up because i was a protestant then they came for me and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me pastor martin neimoller the simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie one word of truth outweighs the world solzhenitsyn i swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation we must always take sides neutrality helps the oppressor never the victim silence encourages the tormentor never the tormented elie wiesel civil disobedience is not our problem our problem is civil obedience our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war and millions have been killed because of this obedience our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves and all the while the grand thieves are running the country that s our problem howard zinn these are compelling quotes i won t pretend they aren t i won t pretend they re coming out of naiveté either because they re not nor will i take the typical critical position of holding myself at some distance and saying i understand what these people don t because i critique ideology it wouldn t be true for starters but to know perfectly well that injustice is taking place and to remain silent not only to remain silent but to believe not naively but with conviction that one has nothing to say this is the position i see myself coming from this is a strange position to take false modesty possibly or genuine self doubt but it s also a refusal adorno continues to invoke anger for his statement that writing lyric poetry i believe he had in mind poetry that praises uplifts the soul after auschwitz was barbaric he later gave a quasi retraction of this statement in which he said that it s wrong to censure a victim of torture for crying out a gesture that i think fits in very well with the nature of the statement itself on the one hand the statement is absolutely right it is barbaric or naive to continue to hope in the face of oblivion on the other hand it is absolutely wrong humans continue to exist and until that is no longer the case then they must be able to express their solitude writing both is and isn t barbaric but in the name of honesty i should say what it is that i haven t been writing about arab spring the occupy movement police repression the continuing economic crisis love and hate global warming all issues that i feel myself deeply invested in and deeply committed to yet also unable to talk about with a sense that i am doing them any justice and there s the rub once when i saw myself as a critic i could write critique is easy but when i began to regard myself as deeply and acutely enmeshed in everything that i previously wrote about the idea of continuing to write began to feel to use a provocative word barbaric but let s not romanticize it too much there was also apathy on my part in spades an apathy that hit hard during the budget debates of summer 2011 it was then that i saw in very stark terms that political theater could take place unhampered by any number of dissenting voices any number of banging drums or loud exclamations of injustice that these men and women on the right and the left were lying during these debates was patently obvious and there were many of those who called them on it castigated them cried out against the theft that was being perpetrated yet the outcome was predictable from the beginning and everything went according to a neoliberal script the republicans demanded austerity from those who could least afford it the president outdid them in their fiscal conservativism the republicans demanded more boehner promised to renew this theater at the next round of budget discussions and then apathy it seemed like the only possible reaction at the time how could i take justice seriously in the face of such overwhelming cynicism what could i possibly add to the discussion better to get drunk i thought this is not a recovery of my voice story and it doesn t end with what a friend of mine has called the shrug toward utopia this is simply an essay on not writing an attempt at saying something different from what i have said we write because we write and i haven t written because i find my words perhaps not barbaric but absurd leave a comment filed under uncategorized november 5 2010 4 33 pm notes on ecology and philosophy 1 no easy coherence between already existing philosophies and the ecological question marxism and ecology ontology and ecology psychoanalysis and ecology vitalism and ecology epistemology and ecology theology and ecology the general trend is to squeeze the latter into the former show how it s always been so etc 2 liberationist philosophy whether christian theology marxism or neoliberalism has tended to emphasize what have been called acts of commission as opposed to acts of omission that is oppression warfare sin the spectre of ecological crisis is one in which regardless of human goodness or evil regardless of whether greed is good or bad things have been pushed too far and they will snap 3 relativism is not an ontology e g it s turtles all the way down quantum physics is not social theory 4 there is stupidity there are wrong answers are there right answers there are less wrong answers 5 knowledge production is necessary for finding solutions knowledge production has very large material needs these two facts will always be in conflict 6 scarcity needs to be thought but we don t have to reinvent the wheel this is dangerous ground though and rationalization ideology abounds 7 there is something important expressed in kant s third formulation of the categorical imperative every rational being must so act as if he were through his maxim always a legislating member in the universal kingdom of ends don t reify it though 8 no matter how bad a problem gets one can always make things worse this expression however can be formalized and all iterations are true no matter how much p there can always be q not p not q p not q not p q 9 a theory of hegemony takes precedence over a theory of the state 10 there are three sins fraud cynicism and hypocrisy fraud is by far the worst 11 the weight of sheer numbers leave a comment filed under uncategorized october 21 2010 3 55 pm mad men s4 ep 12 13 review if an office in a tv show has mass layoffs the actors and many of the support staff for those actors have also just lost their jobs 2 comments filed under uncategorized september 24 2010 8 55 pm equation althusser gramsci foucault historical research nuance leave a comment filed under uncategorized september 20 2010 7 09 pm the cultural turn haven t we had cultural turns before the renaissance romanticism high modernism the progressive era the 60 s any period in which culture comes to play a direct role in politics and vice versa amounts to a cultural turn intellectuals begin imagining a new world replete with new social forms and new ways of thinking gaps are bridged between disciplines confusion about what constitutes what at the end there are lamentations about the breaking down of the social order reformation disraelism victorianism fascism mccarthyism the reagan revolution leave a comment filed under uncategorized tagged as cultural turn culture historicism september 13 2010 7 16 pm food for thought i may think about this and respond comment at some point but for now i simply want to put it out there man as individual and man as mass the latin proverb senatores boni viri senatus mala bestia has become a platitude what is the meaning of this proverb and what meaning has it acquired that a crowd of people governed by immediate interests or gripped by a passion stirred by the impressions of the moment acritically transmitted from one person to the next unites around the worst collective decision reflecting the lowest animal inst...