also: i've decided that the purpose of my writing will be to capture extremely subtle emotions

or more like emotional tics, actually. it's weird because every so often - and usually on the bus, not sure why that is - i get these feelings that are sort of half-feelings, like the water is moving up the graduated cylinder with the aid of capillary action (as my friend RMD said recently in the most triumphant (and deservedly so) way, "meniscus!") but sort of lingering between one notch and another. and i have no words to describe these interstitial feelings - they're like the place between sleep and waking, when consciousness fades away and simultaneously looms large like a squishy, rapidly-deflating balloon - and i really want to describe them. and not just feelings in themselves, but interactions between people that are charged with little stings and bolts and something that i can only call "zolts" - like small, neutral charges, or those sparks that come out when people weld things. they're harmless and temporary but sort of striking, even more so for their fleetingness. anyhow, moments of truth? yahweh trying to tell us something? or just little things that rise and then slip down, not too important, benign cysts of information floating in our jawlines? either way, we're clearly not listening. so i want to capture some of those things using the infra-photography of writing, which will allow us to say "ah!" and suddenly gain a sharper focus. which may as well be the point here, anyway...okay, writing in a somnambulist state is not getting me anywhere. le chambre!

uh-oh

eyes closing. but fingers itching to write! but no time, no time. soon enough! chaotic rituals of never having been born.

Trust Hormone

I think that's an excellent band name. Our first album can be titled "Chaotic Rituals of Never Having Been Born." Song titles can be 1) Heavy Metal Panicum, and 2) Common Box. That's about it.

The Eighteenth Century: some thoughts

so, i said that i'd deliver on why the 18C is so erotically charged, and here we go. i think that i'm going to try to give some structure to this blog-post by talking first about my experiential encounters with libidinous remnants of the 18th century, and then i'll go into some of the material itself.

first off, almost everyone i know who studies the 18th century is a total lech or a perv. this is nearly true across the board - think about it, people. when you see those professors of the 18th century, don't they look sort of sweaty and dazed, like they just finished masturbating under their desks? isn't their hair a little messy, aren't their eyes a bit weepy, and what of those flushed cheeks and hastily-reassembled ties and ascots? the thing about the 18th century that you must first understand is that it combines the stuffiness of the past, and the reverence that we're taught to have for it, with the ribald nature of the here-and-now of libertinage -the sensorium, in other words. because phenomenologically and sexually, the 18C was full of literotica, erotic art, sensual architecture, smells, bells, and other sublime grime. not to rhyme for the sake of rhyming - it was the transition of dirt into musty sublimity. or so i think from reading all of this (i would imagine) semen-encrusted poetry. anyhow, so the first thing that you need to realize is that, yes, scholars of the 18th century are hornier than those of the 14th, 15th, 16th, 17th, 19th, and even, perhaps (perHAPS - not sure about this) 20th. and clearly of the 21st, when sexual pleasure seems to have dissolved into jaded cynicism and the physical malaise that follows the heady cocktail of anorexia and debauchery that we've been imbibing for the last several decades. blurgh. sex today is not what it was in the 18th century, and that's too bad, really. sex today is like a false modesty covering extreme lasciviousness covering extreme boredom - a sort of rolling around on a nuptial bed made of trashy magazines and situated in the suburbs, where we've been taught to go. there's nothing dirty about sex anymore, except the really desperate kind that still goes on among the poor, contracted, in public, on trains, et cetera. that's the other side of the coin - desperation and a desire to evade the banality of sex as a sort of croquet - but it also seems oddly devoid of pleasure, of humor. i know that i'm sort of invoking foucault here, and i'm not necessarily saying that this has anything to do with polymorphous sexualities or gender play or anything like that. i'm not saying that queerer is better and that people can never understand their desires, because i think that they can. i'm only saying that i think the pleasure has been stripped out of modern-day sex but was palpably present in the 18C, and a fraction of this pleasure can be gleaned from interpreting the textual production of that period. and it's just damn amazing stuff, so vulgar and yet so well-preserved in our modern-day an(n)als. to say that we are keeping this shit because we think it a vital part of our intellectual heritage is totally amazing! it's the equivalent of saving all of the disgusting pornographic trash that flows into the internet's fiber-optic cables on a daily basis. but most people, if you asked them, probably wouldn't even realize what this stuff is really about. just thinking about the gap between seeming and being here is making me shiver a little bit (in a good way, of course).

so: the first time that i really started to connect the 18C with extremes of eroticism, i was reading an article written by an eminent scholar, one of the top of our field. he's an old man, irrepressibly lusty, and has often intoned things about propriety while his roving eyes grazed his interlocutor's cleavage. i saw this myself, and at first i thought it strange, the juxtaposition of these two ways of being. but then i realized that propriety was precisely the source of the sexual glee.

the article was all about samuel pepys, of course - the prime lech, who masturbated in church, without touching himself, fantasizing about having sex with the queen. so awesome. he also referred to his penis in spanish, because spanish was for him the language of secret desire. also awesome. he hits on all the daughters of his friends, totally inappropriate targets, and is aware of the inappropriateness of this and the fact that he'll get nowhere with it and probably offend people in the offing. his spanish is comically terrible, but the sexual glee that erupts from every diary entry is visceral in a way that hardly ever comes across these days. (note: there are two exceptions to this that immediately come to mind: my photographer friend and susie bright. others just seem to sermonize about the politics of sex or relish their conformity to some sort of boring sexual ideal, like the blonde-headed palomino pony. and then there's porn, about which i could talk for hours, but i'm going to leave off of that dead horse for the time being.) so samuel pepys seems to be the template par excellence, the priapic statesman, the sophisticated animal whose freedom is not in his flexibility but rather in his control - he knows what he wants and often how to get it (or how to get off). in other words, sexual desire does not have to be 'deviant' to be sexy. it just has to be strong, insistent, and recurring. that is part of what the 18th century teaches us.

after i read this article, i became totally caught up in the pleasure of it - and then it faded away somewhat until i started screening films and reading up on the 18th century for a lecture that i was delivering. all at once i was reminded of this hot and heady period of novelty and experimentation, once again plunged into the whole enjoyable (but time-wasting) gauntlet. the coded language, the hyperformality, slumming, excess, deviance, looseness, nascence - the beginning of the institutionalization of sex. what a great transitional point, when categories were not yet solidified (and this is riffing directly from foucault) and the hot glass was steadily congealing, as we knew it would, but we could still mold it into certain shapes, albeit temporary and ephemeral ones. now, as we move among things that seem transparent and solid, it's hard to believe that they were once liquid and inchoate. that's the sense that foucault evokes, and i really do think that it emerges in a great deal of the literature and art of the 18th century.

then there's the ribald poetry of the earl of rochester, precursor to the marquis de sade, who wrote about giant orgies in 'rustic' language, and whose part is played by johnny depp in the movie 'the libertine.' suffice it to say that when i first saw this film, it made me collapse (or 'swoon,' as they said in the 18th century) in a hotly freudian way, and i realized that i could never show it to my students, because they'd freak out. so i ended up picking this other film that was a lot more innocent but still caused the same reaction, owing to its ribald preoccupation with the penis of this queer and sexy male actor who played women on the restoration stage. whew! even though it was a terrible movie (Claire Danes reminded me of a sniffly poodle in it, her sculpted curls whiffing about her head as she wept her way through the acknowledgment that her lover, the cheekboned Billy Crudup, was sort of gay), its weak pawings at eroticism resonated somewhat with the 'era.' oh man, the humorous decadence! comedic sex, interlaced with farcical fart-jokes and spices imported from persia. so awesome.

this isn't necessarily to say that i'd like to transport myself there - in general, i hate it when historians treat the past that way. no, i think i'd like to live now, in this somewhat sterile environment, wherein capitalism micromanages our desire and cools the overall sexual climate inversely to global warming...i do attribute some of the boringness of modern-day sex to capitalism, and here you can feel free to argue with me, since it's really just a gut instinct. but i'm sure that there are other reasons why we are less sexily sexual today. maybe people are less attractive (though also less syphilitic, i'm given to understand), and maybe it has something to do with the general absence of naked brutality from our daily vicissitudes. i think there is something about sex that is brutal, violent, scary, threatening, and in general destabilizing - and if it's not that, then it becomes a sort of spineless nuzzling, or two lumps dissolving into one. now i know that that former kind of sex might be 'bad for business' - like the business of reproducing towheaded farmchildren - but still, that's part of where the 18c gets its force.

okay, i'm sort of enervated (haha - this has truly been a balzacian exercise in masturbatory writing), but i hope i've given you at least a few hints about the sexual nature of the 18C. something more could be said about the blurring of privacy, propriety, prostitution, and OPP. also, sentiment, epistolary novels, cross-class relationships like that of Charles II and Nell Gwynne, orange-girl of the theatres. also, constant references to orgasm and libido using punnish words like 'will.' i highly recommend that you read some sexually-charged 18th-century literature today and then see the world revitalized.

The Eighteenth Century:

Most erotic/ribald century ever. Proof of this to follow!

anecdote

last night i went out, and on the way home i got into a surreal conversation with a very friendly cabdriver. when i got into the cab, he said, "guess what? i've only been driving for two days! tell me what you think is the best route home." so i did, and then eventually he told me that he had been joking, that he'd driven for decades in chicago. we talked about beer, bars, liquor, edgewater, politics, blagojevich (which google's spell-checker thinks should be spelled "archipelago"), restaurants, ethiopian food, obama, potholes, four-wheel drive, and the general perils of driving in a snowy chicago. he recommended this italian beer called something like Buroni, which he said was "heavy," but in a good way. We aso talked about the unsatisfying nature of "light" beers.

while we conversed about alcohol, he told me: "in africa, we have a saying: don't drink dark liquors, only clear." He told me that dark liquors have toxic oils, whereas if you put your finger to the surface of a clear liquor, it'll only come away bearing water. he told me that in African bars, typically you don't get a shot of liquor, you buy a whole bottle. one of his friends, he said, drank so much 'red liquor' that he vomited up his liver in front of everyone. at that point i thought that we were getting into the terrain of magical realism, and i had to jump out anyway. i noticed when i did that there were several empty bottles of beer clanking around in the back of his cab, but i had asked him if he was drunk (because he lit a cigarette and said, "i only smoke when i drink!") and he swore that he wasn't, only joking. he was a funny guy.

moved to write something about israel, jews, and gaza

so, lately this gaza thing has, of course, been irking me. after all, i'm a US jew, and my family and jewish friends often feel caught in the middle of a terrible juncture of nationalism, zionism, anti-zionism, religion, culture, identity politics, and anti-semitism, ad nauseum, every time israel launches a brutal and violent offensive, fully supported by the US, i once again engage in these stress-producing moral dilemmas and feel generally that my hands are tied. so i wanted to fulminate for a second here.

1) anti-Semitism: to all outward appearances, global anti-Semitism appears to be on the rise. I would say that this is largely a factor of Israel's policies, because Israel is so hated around the world, and jews are often associated with israel, as if the two were one. which they often are - for example, the powerful jewish lobby in the US includes a lot of neocons who influence US policy toward israel, while rich donors give money to Israeli causes. It's hard to be pro-israel while skirting completely the issue of israel's approach toward terror groups in palestine and lebanon. also, it's painful to see the overwhelmingly unequal use of force against these groups, and i consider those actions a human rights violation, plain and simple. So it's complicated. what if, say, you support israel for sentimental reasons, as, i would argue, my grandparents do, and you're simultaneously donating money to israel's nationalist causes and very outspoken in your opposition to the ways that israel treats palestinians? can this happen? i would say yes, because all sorts of nuances regarding one's feelings for israel and palestine are possible, but by and large these very intricate political stances - which are actually often jumbles of emotion, ideology, and even a sort of fantasmatic forced ignorance brought on by nostalgia - get smoothed over by the media and by governments, which have to unequivocally endorse or reject things.

2) it gets more complicated: the US backs israel, but jews are not the only ones motivating this. first off, there's the evangelical right, which feels other religiously-inspired and politically motivated ties to israel and has wielded substantial power in US government for the past 8 years, in case you didn't notice. then there's the idea that israel and the US have a lot of espionage and weapons ties in the middle east - as my friend noted, it's an open secret that israel does the US's 'dirty work' in iran and has spied for us quite a bit elsewhere. so that motivates these ties. then there's the jewish lobby. but i'd like someone to do a study on how most US jews feel about israel, because i would bet that the majority are rather heartsick over the killing of innocent people, because of the whole 'human' thing, even while they wish that israel could succeed. israel and jews are, to some extent, vehicles for the machinations of larger forces- US policy in the middle east in the case of the former, and global anti-semitism for the latter. i mean, jews are a tiny percentage of the population, but we've historically been hated forever, and we continue to be hated all over the place. while traveling this year in latin america, i encountered anti-semitism that bordered on the eugenic - weird stuff about jews, brains, and money (and big noses) - and europe is equally bad, i hate to say. but i just want to know how the opinions of average jews toward israel synch up, or don't, with those of the influential neocon jewish power brokers who lobby the government on behalf of israel.

sorry, those weren't divided into talking points at all. but here's three nonetheless:

3) public forums on jewish attitudes toward israel: we know that there are a lot of critical voices about israel IN israel - that is, dissenting opinions that are expressed in national forums. but what about here and in other parts? the problem is that when in latin america, i encountered both rabid anti-semitism and factors that would seem to inspire such feeling - like jewish communities that were conservative, wealthy, clannish/exclusionary, and in general sort of deserving of the title of 'greedy jew.' same with madoff! he played into the hands of anti-semites, of course, but now what? how to we extricate ourselves from that tautological double-bind? likewise, israel invaded gaza, some say, because it was being perceived as 'weak' and vulnerable by not doing anything. now it's seen as an aggressive martyr-maker whose people deserve, think many, to be wiped off the face of the earth. so now what? these tautologies seem impossible to escape, and i think that they're once again the result of the jews being taken up as vehicles for others' agendas (anti-semites, the US government). blah! oh but

4) public forums on jewish attitudes toward israel: forgot to get to that. now, very rarely do i see jews stand up and say that they're both jewish and anti-zionist. and why not? it's seemingly not such a bad thing, but it's almost considered self-hating by many. when i go home for the high holy days, the rabbi fulminates on all sorts of conservative, pro-israel platforms, and yet he is socially liberal - in favor of civil rights and obama - and also even fiscally liberal - in favor of a large and consolidated welfare state - as are many in the jewish voting bloc. weirdly enough, these two viewpoints - hawkish about israel, soft on all else - can somehow coexist. and i see it a lot in the jewish community - for example, in my parents and grandparents and in a lot of my friends, who i would never consider ignorant or simplistic people. so what's motivating this blind faith vis-a-vis israel in someone who is supposed to be as beneficent as a rabbi?

i think it's massive community pressure, as evidenced in that spertus museum incident last year. sometimes the jewish community can be like the most taskmaster jewish parents, forcing you to do things through guilt, manipulation, and outright hysteria/neuroses. we've all felt this pressure-cooker, and jews are often really good at internalizing all the guilt and admonishment, which explains why we succeed in school, heh heh...anyhow, in the spertus fracas, the museum had to cancel this really excellent and balanced installation of art dealing with the israel-palestine conflict, because the jewish community (which did not name itself, but which clearly consisted in the richest donors) was offended by perceived anti-semitism. i understand that the 'community' has to watch its collective back, but i also think that cries of anti-semitism are often totally unhelpful and, moreover, harmful for the diminishment of actual anti-semitism. but there's too much legend and lore supporting the 'underdog' thesis that jews love to talk up. to which i say: blah. why don't we get ourselves into the modern age, here. i would much rather see global peace accords and turned other-cheeks than i would a strong and defiant and feisty little jewish community standing against everyone who hates our guts unduly. because that's getting to be everyone, it seems.

5) i didn't talk about the other side, and i know that. look, i don't think that launching rockets into israel is a benign act. i think that hamas was egging us on. but i also think that after so many disastrous wars against seemingly uncrushable insurgencies, the thing to do is to think about what war really does in the short- and long-run and perhaps just ignore the attacks as we would a middle-school bully. because that's essentially what these weak and flaccid terror groups are - they're petty and trying to make us mad, so we'll go to the international political equivalent of the principal's office. okay, i know that that's simplistic and, moreover, infantilizing, but i still think that serious thought needs to go into issues like public relations and war policy on israel's side, instead of these huge counterattacks that do far more harm - in terms of lives lost and public opinion - than good.

words, music, images, and time

today i happened upon a music video on youtube, some sort of poppy beat that i had really enjoyed circa summer and fall 2008. not so long ago, you would think - but for whatever reason, when i listened to it, i immediately realized that the tune no longer had the sort of emotional purchase for me that it had before, although even at the height of its kz-popularity, i knew full well that the song was totally awful, faddish and passing strange, a pop confection with an expiration date. and i guess it's putrefied by now, so that i can see those things about it and internalize them too; in other words, there's no emotional counterpart to my experience with it.

but the interesting thing was that while listening to it today (just to test myself, really), i remembered in a very detached way all of the almost euphoric feelings that would course through me when i heard it over summer-fall 08. i remembered walking jerkily up capitol hill to the library of congress, humming or even singing the tune while policemen gave me rolled-eye grins, and there were certain things about the words, particularly the way that they were spoken (with the added factor that they were spanish, causing me to focus more intently on the phonetics than i might have if they were in english), that i recalled enjoying when i'd first heard the song. but there was a change, a nod to my former appreciation but an inability to summon even a fraction of that former appreciation.

i don't know why this happens, and i wonder if it's a common thing. it's not just novelty - rather, it seems to me that certain objects, songs, books, and other media have their places or answer a certain need but may not be able to hold up over time. it strikes me that this applies to some relationships too, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, though it's often portrayed that way. anyhow, i definitely feel that it's something that hasn't been examined sufficiently in media studies - this question of why a cultural product's popularity or relevance/aesthetic quality/etc might wax and wane or gain and lose a certain receptive power with certain population sectors. it can't just be novelty, there must be some cognitive component, a result of repetition or perhaps some kind of mnemonic device whereby memories are attached to bits of media, imbuing the latter with their significance. ahh. i'm sleepy. but that's a thought that i wanted to squeeze out before oblivion.