Catching Up: An Enormous Blog Post

I took a lot of little notes during my trip to Europe and now it's time to put them where they would have gone if I'd had a laptop with me (or an iPhone I guess! Does iPhone have blogs?).

Pretty late one night Ben and I were sitting in our hotel room in Amsterdam, maybe around 2 a.m., the whole place pretty quiet except for the water running in the sink where Ben is brushing his teeth. Suddenly the whole world erupts in sound... people yelling, talking, laughing, etc. Ben: "It's rowdy out there!" We look out the window and there is an enormous crowd, marching/walking in the road. We realize very quickly that a minute ago they were not there--a minute ago no one was there. We watch them for a while and after a couple minutes they disappear. The last pair, a couple of slowpokes, walks by and just like that the whole crowd is gone like they were never there. This baffled us the entire time we were in Amsterdam. When I came back through there on my way back to Chicago I happened to be outside when the same thing started happening all around me. Maybe a hundred young people, walking and drinking and shouting as I'd seen them do the first time. I asked one of them whether everyone in the crowd knew each other. He said mostly. I asked why there were so many of them and he said it was a pub crawl. A fucking pub crawl! What kind of punch line is that?

Something re: JL's favorite distinction (biographical/historical): at one point that evening my iPod ran out of batteries. I was sad, because it meant I could not listen to music as I fell asleep. Ben: "Would you like me to sing you a lullaby?" Beckoning towards a past... but whose!?!?

One thing I want to write at some point is about the secondary source/primary source distinction that is hammered into our heads at school and the rather naked power dynamics that are inherent in those categories. Good example of this comes courtesy of the Sokal Hoax, when the physicist Alan Sokal wrote a fake piece of "the world is not real"-style critical theory and got it published in a prestigious journal called Social Text. Sokal published an article unveiling his joke in Lingua Franca as evidence that cultural studies had lost the plot, and the Social Text editors published a response in the next issue (I think). Their defense? "We thought it was an interesting document and we wanted to show our readers what it's like when a scientist starts coming to terms with postmodernism." I'm paraphrasing but that was the basic idea... labeling him a specimen worthy of attention as an illustrative piece of data, not a legitimate work of scholarship. Thus a critical text passes into the realm of "primary sources," and is effectively delegitimized and disarmed. This happens a lot, I think.

General observation re: Amsterdam. People there don't think they are late to the party like everyone does in New York and in the United States in general. No one seems to fear that the city is past its prime, that all the good stuff already happened before we were even born. There is no "golden age" that people look back on with nostalgia and this makes for good living. Related: Amsterdam looks to me like a city that built itself. As in, no one built it, the city map following no top-down master plan as it went through the natural throes of growth. The houses sprouted on their own; the merchants built out, expanding and expanding as required by the growth of industry.

Funny thing: UWM professor Jane Gallop, the feminist scholar whose travails with sexual harassment were chronicled in Lingua Franca ("A Most Dangerous Method") had (has?) a boyfriend named Dick Blau. Might he also have considered a name change, like certain other people who have shared his unfortunate fate?

I'm no pragmatist but I kinda liked this explanation of what it stands for, from "The Quest for Uncertainty" in Lingua Franca: "[There's] no point in saying that truth has anything to do with the way the world really is... notions of 'truth' and 'accurate representation' are nothing but compliments we pay to sentences that we find useful in dealing with the world."

In Brugges: broke character and lit a candle at the Notre Dame cathedral for H. Antonius, B.V.O. and his pig. I was the first one to do it-- none of the other candles were lit and I used a lighter to light mine. Paid a whole euro to do it. Motivations unclear (I liked the pig) but I felt a definite sense of accomplishment when I came back later and saw that a bunch of other people had followed suit, presumably using the flame from my candle to light theirs.

Ciara's "Bang It Up" features a line in the chorus that's something like, "Don't talk about it, be about it!" which reminds me a lot of the "interview" from Riff Central where The Game tells NBS that having "heard" about rainbow parties, he now wants to "see about them and maybe do about them." Also that Clipse skit from Lord Willin' where the guy is crying because Pusha and Malice think he's a freeloader. "You know I got you!" he says, tears in his throat. "I know you got me," comes the solemn reply. "But don't got me, get me." These things are related.

There should be something written about the use of water during violent protests. There are huge similarities between the bizarre incident that took place recently at a Harvard theater, during which a crowd of Christian people stormed the stage during someone's one-man show because they found it obscene and poured water all over his notes, and the 1978 attack on the evolutionary psychologist (right?) sociobiologist E. O. Wilson at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, during which anti-eugenics socialists poured water all of his head while he was presenting a lecture and chanted "Wilson, you're all wet!" as he sat there stunned. Should be noted also that Wilson was sitting due to an injury (Via Lingua Franca/Quick Studies, "Oh My Darwin").

Factoid: elephants stand during non-REM sleep and lie down during REM sleep.

DeLillo on factoids, courtesy of the New Yorker: "The Factoids: Nobody knows whether they in fact exist... By the end of the novel, it is suggested that everyone is a Factoid, a rumored version of himself... The existence of the Factoids explains everything from the Kennedy assassination onward--Vietnam, Watergate, etc. Did Factoids kill JFK? Or was JFK a Factoid--found out and murdered. Truman Capote's Black-and-White ball (a factoid confection)."

Question for JH: what do we think about the fact that in 1866, the Linguistics Society of Paris forbade all papers on the origins of language? What happened the following year? More interestingly, possibly: what happened the year before??

Would it be possible to run an analysis on a bunch of languages and figure out 1) which one makes use of the most sounds that none of the other ones use, and 2) which one has the highest number of words that use those sounds? If it were possible, we could figure out the Most Unique Language!

It is really a shame that I did not read Cosmopolis until just recently. We could have really used this quote (re: Doctor Nevis, who checks up on the main character once every day) when we were launching our Gawker thing:

"So he comes to your house, nice, on weekends."
"We die, Jane, on the weekends. People. It happens."
"You're right. I didn't think of that."
"We die because it's the weekend."

Related: as I told Shane in an e-mail (which I guess goes for a lot of this stuff, sorry bro), I understand Wood's complaint about DeLillo but surely there's a place for what he does alongside all those novel-novels by Jane Austen and Philip Roth. Because: what DeLillo does is put theory to music, and that is good.

Some notes on the Dachau concentration camp. Strange that as late as 1933 crimes being committed by the Nazi party still provoked a more or less reasonable reaction from certain people in Germany. Namely: over the course of three months (March-May) of that year, the S.S. executed 12 relatively high profile political prisoners being held at Dachau. The judiciary (I'm not entirely clear on what that is) demanded an investigation, and some of the murders were even reported in the newspapers in Munich. Himmler responded to all of this by firing the head of the detention camp and replacing him with a tougher dog named Theodor Eicke. That was in June; together the two of them slowed the process until it fizzled and the case was dropped. All that dancing for 12 lives--bizarre in light of the thousands who died in that camp over the course of the next decade. Bizarre also to see the newspaper articles written about those murders and the subsequent investigation, pinned up on the wall in the Dachau museum as the last shadows of normal procedure, steps that would seem laughable mere months later. This makes me think of raindrops falling quaintly in advance of a hurricane. Someone gets an umbrella and promptly drowns. I thought of this also in Berlin, where the main city street, the one leading into the Brandenburg Gate, is called Unter Der Linden because historically it has been lined with hundreds of beautiful Linden trees. According to Rick Steves, who wrote the travel guide I used in Germany, Hitler cut these Linden trees down when he came to power and replaced them with Nazi flags. Due to "popular discontent" on the part of the people, however, he put them back as they were (they remain to this day). What form did this popular discontent take, I wonder? Also why did those people focus so much on the trees?

Still in Dachau: a plainclothes American priest is touring the museum alongside an American lady, telling her all about what happened and guiding her through the exhibits. Unclear what their affiliation is (maybe it was a church trip, I dunno); point is they pause next to exhibit 4.3, "Persecution of the Jews until 1939," which is approximately at the museum's half-way point if you start at the beginning. The priest explains: "You see, the Nazi party took Christian morals and contorted them so that they would appear to justify their actions." A sufficiently banal point made somewhat interesting by virtue of the fact that dude's a priest, OK. The woman's response, however, is completely baffling: "Yes," she says. "It's hard to believe that something like this could happen in this day and age." The priest agrees: "Yes, exactly."

True enough, I guess, but still. Exhibit 4.3!

Moving on: in the barracks across from the museum, where you can see the beds people slept on and the toilets they used while in captivity. In one room, two large wash basins. People have thrown coins into them. What?

From Adam Shatz's "Black Like Me" in Lingua Franca, artist/scholar Adrian Piper: "Aestheticism...is simply the last refuge of the liberal racist." She is described later as someone who has a "flair for high pranks." This is what I aspire to have a flair for, I think.

Last thought: "Oh, it's self-serve. You just put on what you want," is a factoid one might expect Ben to know, generally speaking.