Harold Pinter (1930 - 2008)

The sad news today was that Harold Pinter has died. His Nobel prize lecture from 2006 was a tour de force, and if you haven't seen it, you should really have a look at it. There are Spanish subtitles on this one, but it has the best image and sound quality.



Elsewhere: Guardian obit, NY Times obit. Interesting interview in The Guardian.

Oh, no

Writer David Foster Wallace hanged himself Friday night.

That's just incredibly sad. He was one of the greatest American writers of his generation, and one of the ones that I loved the most.

With acute, embarassing self-awareness of the risk of seeming pathetic¹, the kind of state Wallace described better than anyone, Shakespeare springs to mind (Wallace's magnum opus was a book called Infinite Jest):

"I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!"

I was just reading a long interview with him yesterday, done just before the publication of Brief Interviews With Hideous Men. I feel like the guy I was talking to yesterday died during the night.

Update: here is an old post of mine which contains links to some of Wallace's wonderfully intricate, deeply insightful and break-a-rib-funny essays. And here is Scott Eric Kaufman's reaction to the news over at Edge of the American West. I thought of "Good Old Neon" when I heard the news, too.

1. Thereby robbing the gesture of much of its intended effect. But fuck it: I really, really mean this.

Esbjörn Svensson has died

I just got the terrible news that the Swedish jazz pianist Esbjörn Svensson of EST (the Esbjörn Svensson Trio) has died in a diving accident, only 44 years old.

I interviewed Svensson at least once. He struck me as a wonderfully friendly, articulate guy with a lot of humility about his work.

I'm not sure I always liked the direction they were taking the trio in the last couple of years (flirting with varying degrees of success with electonics, moving in a more pop/rock/easy listning direction – even though I'm not really much of a jazz purist, I never thought it worked when they got too "easy"). But I won't soon forget the concert they gave at USF in Bergen in 2002. I was having a bad month of epic, biblical proportions. (The kind of month where the bills pile up, you do badly on exams, a flock of locusts threaten your crops, barbarians pillage your tribe and hear the lamentation of your women, fire and brimstone fall from the sky, etc.) I came late, and walked in in the middle of "And God Created the Coffee Break":



And I felt my foot tapping, and then they segued into an extraordinary version of "Behind the Yashmak":



And after that it just got better and better. And seriously, I think that concert was the only time I felt really happy for like three months.

Hp: 0

There's a really good obituary of Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, at the NY Times. The author, an editor at Wired, connects Gygax' role-playing inventions with the electronic avatars of web 2.0. According to his argument, Facebook and MySpace are cast in the templates of tabletop character sheets. I have to say it's a surprisingly convincing argument. There always did seem to be an unusually strong link between early and powerful internet adopters and sci-fi and roleplaying fandom. Maybe that's the reason. I never really thought of that before.

The article is also noteworthy for the flowchart illustration (click "enlarge this image" to see it). To someone like me, who spent too much time playing AD&D and reading William Gibson in his teens, that flowchart is funny and eerily accurate.

Ex-blogger (oh, and professor or something) Michael Bérubé has written a 9-page essay on the event of Richard Rorty's death which I'm looking forward to reading. It's called "Richard Rorty and the Politics of Modesty" (pdf).

Re: the first paragraph:
Have you ever noticed that when people are writing about the recently deceased, they always begin by using the full name even though the person in question didn't Richard Rorty becomes Richard McKay Rorty, and Ronald Reagan (no similarity implied) becomes Ronald Wilson Reagan. There's something ritualistic in the public declaration of death. The use of the fuhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifll name accentuates the individuality of the deceased as well as the formality of the event. I wonder if that isn't one of the oldest functions of the public sphere: the public declaration of birth and death, habeas corpus, non habeas corpus, bring out yer dead.

Oh, and Bérubé is also going for Obama. Yup. Me, Bérubé, Stevie Wonder, Josh Lyman and Oprah.

Stalemate

1. c4 e6
2. Nf3 d5
3. d4 Nf6
4. Nc3 Be7
5. Bg5 O-O
6. e3 h6
7. Bh4 b6
8. cxd5 Nxd5
9. Bxe7 Qxe7
10. Nxd5 exd5
11. Rc1 Be6
12. Qa4 c5
13. Qa3 Rc8
14. Bb5 a6
15. dxc5 bxc5
16. O-O Ra7
17. Be2 Nd7
18. Nd4 Qf8
19. Nxe6 fxe6
20. e4 d4
21. f4 Qe7
22. e5 Rb8
23. Bc4 Kh8
24. Qh3 Nf8
25. b3 a5
26. f5 exf5
27. Rxf5 Nh7
28. Rcf1 Qd8
29. Qg3 Re7
30. h4 Rbb7
31. e6 Rbc7
32. Qe5 Qe8
33. a4 Qd8
34. R1f2 Qe8
35. R2f3 Qd8
36. Bd3 Qe8
37. Qe4 Nf6
38. Rxf6 gxf6
39. Rxf6 Kg8
40. Bc4 Kh8
41. Qf4 1-0

(visual here, and also this pyrotechnical combinations game, from when he was 13)

Too Much Heidegger

I received the news in an email almost exactly a year ago. As so often in recent years, Rorty voiced his resignation at the "war president" Bush, whose policies deeply aggrieved him, the patriot who had always sought to "achieve" his country. After three or four paragraphs of sarcastic analysis came the unexpected sentence: " Alas, I have come down with the same disease that killed Derrida." As if to attenuate the reader's shock, he added in jest that his daughter felt this kind of cancer must come from "reading too much Heidegger."
-- Jürgen Habermas in an obituary of Rorty

Well, amen to that. I know I'd die of something if I sat down to read Heidegger. It's a very nice obit. Habermas and Rorty were friends and each others best critics for most of their lives.

More things one can read and listen to by Rorty:

Here's a series of lectures and radio shows with Rorty. And here's a conversation between him, Hilary Putnam and James Conant. In both of these, just search the page for Rorty to find the right link.

Here's an essay by him called "Trotsky and Wild Orchids", a very funny personal essay which tracks his own development as a thinker through his Freudian obsession with orchids as a child.

Richard Rorty (1931-2007)

Richard Rorty died yesterday from pancreatic cancer.

I don't really know what to say. Rorty is probably the thinker who has influenced me the most. I first read him in Ralph Jewell's amazing seminars on the poetics of science when I took a grunnfag in philosophy. When I was re-reading him for my MA thesis, I became acutely aware of how much his thinking had seeped into the foundations of my world-view.

For more about Rorty, you can actually just check out the last couple of paragraphs of the previous post.

Update:

Some places to start with Rorty.

First, try reading this introduction to Consequences of Pragmatism from 1981. Here, Rorty gives a brief outline of how pragmatists think, and what the consequences of that position is. It's a good place to begin, and it's a way of determining if you like Rorty's whole approach to philosophy. I think one should not completely assimilate Rorty, and take all things which he say to heart. He is fuzzy on a lot of practical issues, and simplifies a lot of problems (possibly for rhetorical reasons - he is an eminently rhetorical philosopher). The most important thing one should take from him is the basic approach, I think. The way he makes things contingent and takes the consequences of a godless world to their last stop, and tries to create a practical philosophy in that position. He refuses throughout his bibliography to say that he is right, that he speaks the truth, and that this does not mean that he cannot make ethical judgements:

Pragmatists think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define the word "true" or "good," supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area. It might, of course, have turned out otherwise. People have, oddly enough, found something interesting to say about the essence of Force and the definition of "number." They might have found something interesting to say about the essence of Truth. But in fact they haven't. The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive with the history of that literary genre we call "philosophy"-a genre founded by Plato. So pragmatists see the Platonic tradition as having outlived its usefulness. This does not mean that they have a new, non-Platonic set of answers to Platonic questions to offer, but rather that they do not think we should ask those questions any more. When they suggest that we not ask questions about the nature of Truth and Goodness, they do not invoke a theory about the nature of reality or knowledge or man which says that "there is no such thing" as Truth or Goodness. Nor do they have a "relativistic" or "subjectivist" theory of Truth or Goodness. They would simply like to change the subject. They are in a position analogous to that of secularists who urge that research concerning the Nature, or the Will, of God does not get us anywhere. Such secularists are not saying that God does not exist, exactly; they feel unclear about what it would mean to affirm His existence, and thus about the point of denying it. Nor do they have some special, funny, heretical view about God. They just doubt that the vocabulary of theology is one we ought to be using. Similarly, pragmatists keep trying to find ways of making anti-philosophical points in non-philosophical language. For they face a dilemma if their language is too unphilosophical, too "literary," they will be accused of changing the subject; if it is too philosophical it will embody Platonic assumptions which will make it impossible for the pragmatist to state the conclusion he wants to reach.

And also the following, oft-quoted passage:

Suppose that Socrates was wrong, that we have not once seen the Truth, and so will not, intuitively, recognise it when we see it again. This means that when the secret police come, when the torturers violate the innocent, there is nothing to be said to them of the form "There is something within you which you are betraying. Though you embody the practices of a totalitarian society which will endure forever, there is something beyond those practices which condemns you." This thought is hard to live with, as is Sartre's remark:

Tomorrow, after my death, certain people may decide to establish fascism, and the others may be cowardly or miserable enough to let them get away with it. At that moment, fascism will be the truth of man, and so much the worse for us. In reality, things will be as much as man has decided they are.

This hard saying brings out what ties Dewey and Foucault, James and Nietzsche, together- the sense that there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves, no criterion that we have not created in the course of creating a practice, no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion, no rigorous argumentation that is not obedience to our own conventions.

If you want to read a book-length work, Contingency Irony and Solidarity is probably the best introduction to his thinking. It's a very easily read, deceptively simple book. The argument of the book is basically an attack on foundationalist conceptions of language, self and community (a negative project); followed by an attempt to construct political and personal possibilities after taking those conceptions apart (a positive project).

First, he attempts to think of the language we use not as a device becoming better and better suited to the world around us, but as a tool for interaction with other human beings. Second, the idea of the self becomes an attempt at redescription of culture in a historical setting. Third, the idea of community becomes a rhetorical element. A set of arguments and descriptions of how certain institutions and ideas of community arose.

In chapter 4, he lays out the political possibilities for the ironist mindset which arises from these contingencies. The ironist is the personality Rorty has the most respect for. A humanist who is never quite able to take himself entirely serious, and is therefore never sure of his own rightness. These people are easily convinced of the right of other people to express their own ways of life, and hard to convince that certain rules should be made to be unbreakable and non-negotiable.

Next follows some readings of cranky old continental philosophers and Derrida, and readings of authors Proust, Nabokov and Orwell of which particularly the Orwell chapter is interesting. There, he basically argues that one of the lessons to take from Orwell is that characters like O'Brien in 1984 are possible. That we might at one point step off the wheel of history at the wrong place, and that one should never give up the diurnal struggle. All it takes is one bad generation before the torturers come knocking. And this is the vision which Rorty attempt to create an apparatus to prevent, O'Brien's vision of history. As an intellectual of the party, he can say the words with a straight face, as something to be desired: "If you want a
picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--for ever."

And as Winston pleads with him to convince him that such a society is impossible, he appeals to the Spirit of Man, and O'Brien tells him that if Winston is a man, he is the last one. That he is about to become extinct.

"By the late 1970's, Vonnegut was rich and irrelevant".
-- Fox News obituary.

Ting-a-ling, you son of a bitch

Kurt Vonnegut died last night. So it goes.

Being a humanist means that you try to behave as decently, as honourably, as you can without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. When we had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, I spoke at it and said at one point, 'Isaac is up in heaven now'. It was the funniest thing I could think of to say to an audience of humanists. Believe me, it worked - I rolled them in the aisles. If I should ever die, god forbid, I hope people will say, 'Kurt is up in heaven now'. That's my favourite joke.
Kurt Vonnegut: Timequake

Jean Baudrillard took place

Jean Baudrillard died yesterday in Paris, aged 77.

Though it seems a bit callous to say so after his death, I didn't like Baudrillard. I can't remember reading a single thing by him that I thought wasn't arrogant, pessimistic, obtuse and uninteresting. The few texts I have read (4 or 5 shorter articles, so take with pinch of salt) gave me the distinct impression that Baudrillard really was the thing that Alan Sokal was attacking: a thinker uninterested in community and communication, rigorous thinking and the sharing of ideas, using language not as a device of trust and constructive communication (of whatever sort) but as a smokescreen for banality. I think he gave postmodernism a bad name, and it's a shame he's been grouped together with great thinkers like Jacques Derrida and the like.

His ideas about simulacra leads to ideas of originality and reality which I think is a throwback to Plato, and very unfortunate for the development of criticism of media, culture and capitalism. But most of all, really, I don't like Baudrillard for his pessimism. He was a cultural defeatist, mourning the passing of the real, of the center which never existed. Any philosophy which doesn't point to something constructive, something we can do, is meaningless in my eyes. Why even write, when there's only sadness and defeat? And why write so densely and confusingly? For one self?

So far, the only good thing I have seen that came out of Baudrillard was the misunderstanding of him that lead to the Matrix. Though only the first one, mind, the two next ones were just simulacra of good films. No, never mind that: they were real, but crappy films.