One Fine Day in South Philly

In lieu of a lot of words, here's a few words and a few pictures [comic].

Click to read!

I draw comics when I get frustrated with writing. Before long I get frustrated with drawing and return to writing with renewed enthusiasm.

Pet causes: Herman Melville on corporal punishment

William H. Myers

Lately I've been reading White-Jacket, Herman Melville's fourth novel, whose publication in 1850 antedates that of his masterpiece Moby-Dick by one year. I'm really digging it so far—Melville's jaunty prose and his focus here are on par with what he brings to Moby-Dick, as is his knack for parabolic and metaphorical flourishes. Readers who enjoyed Moby-Dick's descriptions of the tools, practices, and procedures aboard a nineteenth-century whaling ship—bathed profusely in wry wit, corny jokes, social commentary, and philosophical rumination—you're in luck: that's all of White-Jacket (except here the topic is a US Navy frigate, not a whaling ship).

Obviously this makes White-Jacket a relative featherweight: you've got almost none of the man/nature dialectic, no towering symbol of the unknowable and unconquerable, and no luciferous sea captain's quests for supernatural revenge, which together form Moby-Dick's supermassive barycenter. But you can see White-Jacket as a shuddering chrysalis, ready to tear. (You can also see it as a much brisker read than Moby-Dick.)

One of White-Jacket's claims to fame is its place on record as one of the last arguments in the public debate over corporal punishment in the US Navy. (The novel was published in March of 1850; Congress passed legislation abolishing flogging in the Navy in September of the same year.) Melville had spent more than a year overseas in the Navy around 1843; obviously he was outraged to witness more than once the punitive whipping of a fellow crew-member.

Today I think it would be fun to take a look at White-Jacket's chapters regarding flogging. (The text here is cadged from Project Gutenberg.) There's a lot of interesting stuff on the periphery here. Look for Melville making uncharacteristically overt political pronouncements; notice the passing allusions to the American South and slavery with nary a peep of criticism for that institution (possibly so as to conciliate southerners who might otherwise be on his side in the matter of corporal punishment in the military); observe the points of contact with the setting and context of Billy Budd, Melville's final story; witness how in the climate of 1850, a man as sensitive as the young Melville, who saw nuance like a mantis shrimp sees color, is compelled to strike up his own note in the chorus of Manifest Destiny.

Enjoy!

CHAPTER XXXIII
A FLOGGING

If you begin the day with a laugh, you may, nevertheless, end it with a sob and a sigh.

Infinite Jest and the path of least resistance.

By ElDangerrible. Very cool.

I began reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest sometime in September. Last Wednesday I finally, finally, finally finished it, and just in time for the flurry of INFINITE JEST TWENTY YEARS LATER news feed items commemorating the anniversary of its publication in February 1996.

Before you run away screaming, this is not a review of Infinite Jest. That fucking book. No, it's too titanic, too involute, too revelatory for a few paragraphs of a blurb of a blog post. It's the kind of book that other books are (and should be) written about. But I do aver that yes, it does live up to the hype, even though some of the obloquy directed at it isn't without reason; you won't see me exerting myself to refute epithets like "self-indulgent," "in desperate need of an editor," "mashup of instructional manuals for cheap electronics and obtuse postmodern academic criticism," etc., etc. But for all the frustrations and difficulties that accompany a trip through Infinite Jest, it is indisputably a raiser of the bar, a pusher of the envelope, and an argument for the enduring relevance and extant potential of the novel. (I would even make the totally unqualified claim that it's the best American novel since Moby-Dick, which was also a big hot glorious wet self-indulgent heap of a book.)

The sixty seconds that elapsed immediately after I read Infinite Jest's final sentence ("...and the tide was way out.") were eerily reminiscent of how I remember reacting to the end of Chrono Cross when I was seventeen, i.e., WHAT? WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? WHAT IN HELL JUST HAPPENED? WHAT? WHAT. WHAT?

If nobody has made the joke that Infinite Jest is like the American novel meets Dark Souls, please allow me to be the first. This is a book that does not make it easy on the reader. To call the narrative "nonlinear" is like saying a Kandinsky painting is "colorful." Most chapters are datestamped, but since the book takes place in a North America where calendar years are "subsidized" by consumer brands, you'll spend a good 200 pages trying to figure out whether "Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment" comes before or after "Year of the Whopper." There are enough characters swinging around in an n-body orbital knot to make War and Peace seem rather sparsely populated. The book ends on a flashback, and, on an initial appraisal, with none, none of the major plot threads terminally resolved. There are 1079 pages of text in all, strewn from the very beginning with clues to the story's mysteries, and to the first-time reader they are very well camouflaged.

Here's the thing: the story does not come together. Not on its own. Not unless the reader makes the effort to put it together for him or herself.

(Minor spoilers ahead. You ready?)

The truth will set you free (but are you better off?)

Continuing from where we left off:

During my tenure at the Quaker center, I occasionally measured my own life, my own happiness as an atheist against the pilgrims and seekers sojourning at the place. In retrospect, unless the people under examination had serious mental health problems (which wasn't common, but not exactly rare) I found that the majority of religious visitors, while not without their problems, were buoyant, scrupulous, friendly people of conviction and élan. I recall a man from Kenya named Shem who practically glowed in broad daylight. Kenyan Quakers tend to be of a Christocentric, veritably evangelical strain, and Shem's beliefs had a distinctly pentecostal complexion. The termini of his emotional gradient were "cheerful" and "ecstatic." As he roved the campus cum arboretum, his faith-steeped gaze found, as Shakespeare wrote, "tongues in trees, books in the running brooks / Sermons in stones, and good in everything." The world was a parable for Shem; nothing he encountered was not somehow representative of the Trinity, of grace and divine reason, or of man's progress from the womb to the world to the loving embrace of the Creator.

I could not (and cannot) believe in the things that Shem believed, and I did not (and do not) wish to. But I can only speculate as to what it must be like to exist in a world where everything from the commonplace to the celestial stands inextricably braided with the transcendent, and these relations are not only patently obvious but explicable. Listening to Shem speak I imagined he must experience his whole waking life the way the most of us most of us momentarily feel while reading a really good Rumi poem (if we're lucky).

I have to make the assumption that Shem's joie de vivre was the flowering of his faith, and I do acknowledge and emphasize that this is an assumption. Even though a wealth of studies (some of which we'll look at shortly) have suggested a correlation between religion and happiness, they are to be taken with a grain of salt. Secular-minded critics of these reports point out, often correctly, that many of the people and institutions conducting these investigations follow agendas that stand to benefit from promoting a link between happiness and religious belief. (But many of the atheists who impugn the credibility of all such studies are no less guilty of arguing in bad faith, as it were).

Tolstoy on Free Will & Necessity

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

Germane to our last confab.

I abandoned my belief in the feasibility of the "free will" proposition some years before I picked up B.F. Skinner and found in radical behaviorism a developed and articulate theory delineating the general situation. Skinner helped to clarify and codify the conviction, but the metanoia that begat the conviction was an earlier occurrence.

When precisely did I stop believing in free will?

I guess it's one of those things that curious or reasonable people wonder about for a period, but either commit to noncommittal wishiwashiness on the issue or eventually affirm their belief in free will. Our culture actively encourages such an outcome: the rhetoric of Western society extols "freedom" as a crowning virtue; our historical/mythical/entertainment narratives are frequently constructed so as to be deconstructed as "freedom versus tyranny" allegories. Most conceptions of "freedom" become meaningless unless free will is axiomatic. Free will can't be called into question without shifting the sands on which the foundations of most of our cultural "truths" have been erected. It's much more comfortable to leave it alone.

The Back to the Future films (which I so loved as a child) conclude with Doc Brown's epiphanic declaration that the future is whatever we make it (implying a human agency uninfluenced by incident and circumstance). That did stick with me for a while. As a brooding teenager I found a compellingly delivered counterpoint in the Soul Reaver games (which, let's face it, were Back to the Future with vampires), whose in-world metaphysics were saliently deterministic. I must have gave the matter some further thought while trying to sort out the antinomies of Paradise Lost, but those efforts were more an examination of whether the poem actually succeeds in pinning a QED ribbon to Milton's thesis. (I guess I had neither the curiosity nor the savvy to look to philosophy or science for answers back then.)

After many years of neither fully believing in nor abjuring the existence of free will, what finally and irrevocably titled the scales was Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869), particularly the culminating synthesis of the epilogue. I think it's very cool that Leo would write a 1300-page story pullulating with characters and subplots through its fifteen-year arc—and then cap it off with a little epilogue wherein he closes the narrative curtain, comes onstage alone, and says a few words about what's been on his mind lately, explains what he's been trying to get at with this thing he's made. (I wonder if the new BBC miniseries will address the epilogue in some way; concomitantly I have to ask if transferring War and Peace to any other medium is really worth it.)

The second part of War and Peace's epilogue (of course there are two epilogues) is an essay on history; it is as much a repudiation of the "great man" theory of history (we can adduce the veneration of modern hero-figures like Steve Jobs to demonstrate its historiographical persistence) as a disproof of free will. (In the context of the novel and of Tolstoy's argument, these angles are complementary.)

I'd like to share with you some words from the final pages of War and Peace, taken from the 2005 translation by Anthony Briggs (who neglects the Oxford comma and is very wrong to do so). By transcribing it here I hope to better internalize its points; I always wish I could summon this stuff verbatim when I find myself speaking to an incensed believer in unconditional human agency. (We usually end up talking in circles until he or she is too angry to continue.)

City as Sculptor: Some Thoughts on Environmental Psychology

Victo Ngai, Clockwork City

A few years ago I had an idea for a short story and began scribbling it out on a whim. When the initial draft was completed maybe four months later, the thing was well beyond the novella milemarker, so at that point it seemed to make the most sense to drive it the rest of the way into novel territory. It was self-published last March to as much fanfare as one could reasonably expect. (I still think it's pretty darn good, though.)

The domino-field dimensions of the plot required that a character have a preoccupation with human psychology, so I perused Freud and Lacan to better figure out that character's conceptions of people and how they think and operate. It was obviously a wrong turn; such an extraordinarily left-brained person would be much less interested in mentalistic hermeneutics than in rigorous empirical analysis, so I shelved the psychoanalysts and picked up B.F. Skinner's About Behaviorism and Science and Human Behavior.

To my own surprise, Skinner converted me to radical behaviorism. (In fact we've visited Dr. Skinner and flirted with his ideas before.) It is not a popular school of thought: most people reflexively object to the "no free will" premise and feel that such a perspective robs humanity of its dignity and of the significance of its actions (an aspersion famously cast by Dr. Chomsky). But after Freud and Lacan, who read more like literary criticism than scientific analysis, the material practicality of Skinner's model won me over with its straightforward plausibility (however many of the obscure particulars he glosses over, trusting they are either unimportant or certain to be solved/verified by the anatomists of the future).

A Caribbean Lesson in Courtesy

Agostino Brunias, Free West Indian Dominicans

So. I have a job now. I'd prefer to leave its description and duties unspecified here. It's enough to say it's in customer service (which I am resigned to never escaping), and it isn't particularly glamorous or lucrative. But it is allowing me to make rent, so for the time being I'll be keeping to myself any grievances I may have.

The setting and gist of the gig is a space where visitors browse about, and if they would like to procure any of the merchandise on display, they speak to me (or my cohorts). A procedural remnant from my days at the Caribbean coffeehouse and the hip grocery store chain (heck, and probably from my teenage years jollily upselling at the mallcore superstore) is my tendency to greet people when they come within a certain distance of my person. Usually I dispense with the "hello how can I help you" crap. Rather: Hey. Hi. How's it going. What's up. Wassup. Sup. Wass. Namaste. Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya. & cetera. Actually, what I most often say is "good morning" or "good afternoon," but we'll get into that in a moment.

Sometimes my greetings' recipients will say hello back. And every once in a while we'll indulge in some light chitchat that doesn't leave a bad taste in my mouth.

But I think the most frequent answer I get when I say "hello" is "just looking." Or: "No thanks."

I'm used to hearing this. I've heard it ever since I was accosting bewildered-looking parents surveying the Nightmare Before Christmas swag display at the mallcore superstore in search of holiday gifts for their teenaged progeny. But until recently I haven't found it as disrespectful and offensive as I do now.