07w45:1 Charles Taylor on the Secular Posted November 6th, 2007 by timothy. 0 Comments Goodreads | 2007 week 45 number 1 (Charles Taylor on the Secular) Charles Taylor recently published another magnum opus, A Secular Age. It is currently being discussed at a blog which launched last month, The Immanent Frame. Taylor himself responds to some of the critiques of the book in the posting linked below. Problems around the secular | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/shorty/ssrc/taylor/ “One great problem is that the term “secular” is a western term, and corresponds to a very old distinction within Christendom. Then it goes through a series of changes in order to surface in such neologisms as ‘secularization,’ and ‘secularism.’ But even so, some of the original meanings carry over. These terms are then applied unreflectingly to what are seen as analogous processes and ideas elsewhere, and the result can be great confusion. (Example: discussion of Indian ‘secularism’, whether or not the BJP is ‘secular’, etc.) My way of dealing with this has been a prudent (or cowardly) approach of trying to examine the processes we call secularization primarily in the Western context. This however is not a clean and simple solution either, because a) the religious life of other cultures has impacted on the developments in the West (as Peter van der Veer has pointed out), and also one of the facets of contemporary religious life in the West is the borrowing of forms of devotion, meditation and worship from other parts of the world; and b) there has also been borrowing in the other direction, that is by non-Western societies from the West (hence the fact that certain arrangements of the Indian constitution are captured under the cover name “secularism”).”
07w26:1 A Variety of Links Lunk and Thoughts Thunk Posted June 26th, 2007 by timothy. 2 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2007 week 26 number 1 (a variety of links lunk and thoughts thunk) An overview: Since the last Goodreads arrived in your inbox, Rob Labossiere was kind enough to review the first of my Timereading Series, Outdoor Air Conditioning on Sally McKay’s blog (but I had nothing to do with the gun-cock-cop) I felt the need to comment on the recent Luminato festival over at my blog. Commentator LM asked last week (at Jennifer MacMakon’s Simpleposie) why I wasn’t included in the recently opened MOCCA show featuring disagreeable artists, since I (along with Eldon Garnet and Thrush Holmes) piss off and irritate lots of people. I also found time to contribute to the discussion on Sally McKay’s thoughts on the Toronto art-scene here (but I wish she could have deleted my accidental dupe). In blog news, after surviving cancer, Cedric Caspesyan has apparantly realized life is too short for the art-world’s mean people, Chris Hand’s Zeke’s Gallery blog has been apparently sued out of existance (and yet, the ads remains) and Franklin Einspruch doesn’t plan to update his blog until the Fall. I did manage to develop a Goodreads podcast link, to provide an alternate and direct way to access whatever mp3 links I find (and have found): http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/rss/podcast.php Supporting the Troops Meanwhile, three Canadian soldiers died last week prompting the City of Toronto to reverse the decision to remove the stupid ‘support our troops’ decals on firetrucks and ambulances in favor of leaving them on indefinitely since pacifists are still considered more loathsome in our society than the people who actually volunteer to kill. And if you think I’m exaggerating, consider that Afghani President Hamid Karzai was shown on the CBC news last Saturday night complaining about NATO’s heavy-handed tactics of ‘shelling a village from thirty-some kilometres away’ and killing civilians in the process (ref video clip here; CBC related here and here). The report went on to say that as of Saturday, (23 June) 90 Afghan civilians had been killed in the previous ten days. Notice that this report was buried on the Saturday 11 o’clock news, and that when things like this are reported, suddenly it’s the problem of the ‘NATO coalition’ and Canada’s pride at the fact that the Cdn forces are the ones doing most of the heavy-lifting in the region is obfuscated. But we have to support the troops, or keep our mouths shut otherwise, and ignore the ratio that 3 Canadian lives are worth more to our conscience than the 90 or so people who were alive at the beginning of the month, whose names and faces we will never know, and who ‘we’ are not supposed to be there to accidentally kill but rather to accidentally help, through what could be called ‘aggressive peacekeeping’ in the bullshit lingo of the military. I also write this in light of seeing last April the Frontline World report (video available on July 9th) on the Canadians in Afghansistan, which prompted commentator Alex March from Edmonton to say: ‘I am afraid the Canadians are treating the Afghanistan people with a combination of traditional Department of Indian Affairs false promises and CISIS paranoia. Sad it will cost many lives unnecessarily,’ with a rebuttal by one of the soldiers Mr. Annoymous, who tells us the reporters did what they typically do, which is to obfuscate and simplify, which of course prompted a response by the filmmakers … and… on and on, the cycles of animosity never do end to they? Andrew Cash wrote about the decals in Now Magazine during the first week of May, notable to me for including this facile sentence indicative of the whole problem of the ‘support the troops’ sloganeering (people choosing stock phrases rather than a conscious awareness of what they’re saying): ‘Who among us isn’t deeply saddened by the news of ever increasing numbers of uniformed Canadians killed or seriously injured in the war.’ I stand up to say I am not deeply saddened because I don’t pretend to be an idiot out of social convention. Out of a population of heroin users I understand some will turn up as corpses with needles hanging from their tourniquet arms. Similarly, I understand that some soldiers going to war zones will come home in body bags. Why should I feel upset about either when it’s continually presented to me as a fact of the world that no one seems to have any intention of changing? If we do want to change it, how about we start by stopping the rhetoric and unquestioning support of militarism? Therefore, I don’t support the troops. The Human Union I found this when I was researching the Human Network links below, although I have to ask, why do progressive websites often display such poor design? From ‘The Human Union Declaration’ found on the site: To force me to act in compliance with a political system that goes to war against my fellow humans is a denial of my humanity and I will resist such efforts to the best of my abilities. To force me to act in compliance with a political system which discriminates politically against my fellow humans is a denial of my humanity and I will resist such efforts to the best of my abilities. Human Union http://humanunion.info/ The Human Network The recent anniversary of the Tienanmen Square Massacre prompted PBS’ Frontline to rebroadcast their April 2006 documentary The Tank Man, which is available online at the Frontline website, in four parts. In the fourth and last part, Yahoo!’s complicity in facilitating Chinese censorship led into a report that Cisco Systems has sold the latest technology to China to enable such control of information. I laughed when I heard this, given how Cisco’s latest advert campaign, launched last autumn, announces itself as facilitators of ‘the human network’. Interestingly, their commercial features Toronto, leading to one of those WTF? moments – is it because we have the world’s largest communications tower? Is it because relational aesthetics is hot here? Nevertheless, the scene illustrating ‘welcome to a world where people subscribe to people and not magazines’ in which girls meet up in front of City Hall through coordinating on their phones inspired me somewhat. I like the idea of living in a city where people subscribe to people and not magazines. But I also have this sense that Goodreads has managed to blur the two – a subscription to a webzine/Mr. Timothy person. If only more people bought me diner…. The Tank Man | PBS Frontline http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tankman/view/ Welcome to the Human Network on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x60pWzJvb9Q http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEfPxnbWr8U Welcome to the Human Network| Cisco Systems http://www.cisco.com/web/thehumannetwork/index.html Facebook Welcome to the world where people are subscribing to people via Facebook. I joined Facebook at the end of April. Let’s face it, Facebook is here to stay | Michael Geist http://www.thestar.com/Business/article/211078 Facebook banned for Ontario staffers | Robert Benzie http://www.thestar.com/News/article/210014 // it’s great how this story is illustrated with a picture of an old man Art The Art World by its nature is nepotistic. Jerry Saltz had a problem with that a few months ago: Not Buying It | Jerry Saltz http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/saltz/saltz4-30-07.asp Some Links I found myself forwarding to friends On Shakespeare Shakespeare: the Biography (Paperback) | Peter Ackroyd http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/shakespearebio/ // I’m currently reading this biography of Shakespeare and it’s so so good. Yes, that’s two so’s for emphasis, not a typo. In Search of Shakespeare | Michael Wood http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/shakespeardvd/ // I saw this when it was first broadcast on PBS in 2004. It was so good I actually found it haunting. Especially the bit with the photographs. When I found the accompanying book later that year in a remaindered store, I of course bought it. On Teenagers Trashing Teens | Hara Estroff Marano http://goodreads.ca/shorty/psychologytoday/teenagers/ Chomsky on Pomo On Postmodernism | Noam Chomsky http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html “Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest — write things that I also don’t understand, but (1) and (2) don’t hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven’t a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of “theory” that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) … I won’t spell it out.” // Haven’t I sent this out before? If I haven’t, I always meant to. The Norman Finkelstein Case Dear Canadian Universities: you should hire this guy and prove that you’ve got more going on than the so-called superior American schools. The Commonplace Cowardice of Responsible Professors; What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia | Robert Jensen http://www.counterpunch.com/jensen05252007.html Noam Chomsky Accuses Alan Dershowitz of Launching a “Jihad” to Block Norman Finkelstein From Getting Tenure at Depaul University | Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/17/1327203 “It Takes an Enormous Amount of Courage to Speak the Truth When No One Else is Out There” — World-Renowned Holocaust, Israel Scholars Defend DePaul Professor Norman Finkelstein as He Fights for Tenure http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/09/1514221 Norman Finkelstein | Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Finkelstein NormanFinkelstein.com http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/ Good riddence Blair British Author Tariq Ali on the Resignation of Tony Blair: ‘The Fact That He’s Leaving is Because He’s So Hated’ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/1531215 2007-05-11 Selections from Democracy Now! Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson Slams His Friend Mitt Romney for Flip-Flopping on Abortion, Stem Cell Research, Torture in Attempt to Win GOP Presidential Nomination http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/25/1421228 2007-06-25 John Perkins on “The Secret History of the American Empire: Economic Hit Men, Jackals, and the Truth about Global Corruption http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/05/149254 2007-06-05 The Task Force Report Should Be Annulled – Member of 2005 APA Task Force on Psychologist Participation in Military Interrogations Speaks Out http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/1457247 2007-06-01 100th Anniversary of Rachel Carson: Remembering the Woman Who Helped Launch the Environmental Movement http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1412219 2007-05-31 In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Burst http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/04/1343218 2007-04-04 In Rare Joint Interview, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn on Iraq, Vietnam, Activism and History http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/16/1338223 2007-04-16 From SDS to Life After Capitalism: Z Mag Founder Michael Albert on Activism, “Parecon” and a Model for a Participatory Society http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/17/1327211 2007-04-17 Howard Zinn Urges U.S. Soldiers to Heed Thoreau’s Advice and ‘Resist Authority’ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/17/1851213 2007-04-17 Legendary Broadcaster Bill Moyers Returns to Airwaves With Critical Look at How U.S. News Media Helped Bush Admin Sell the Case for War http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/25/1414222 2007-04-25 Fighting Fascism: The Americans – Women and Men – Who Fought In the Spanish Civil War http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/30/1321243 2007-04-30 Abraham Lincoln Brigade ‘Represents an Important Part of the American Soul’ – Harry Belafonte Pays Tribute to U.S. Vets Who Fought Fascism in Spain http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/30/1321250 2007-04-30 Banned by Army: Folk Singer Joan Baez Can’t Sing to Wounded Soldiers at Walter Reed http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/04/1419207 2007-05-04 // Of course I feel the need to point out here that maybe the reason Joan Baez was uninvited to sing for wounded soldiers was not because of politics but because young hurt boys would probably prefer a Britany Spears tits-and-ass show than an ethereally voiced sixty-something ex-hippy. Mother’s Day for Peace: A Dramatic Reading of Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day Proclamation http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/1531255 2007-05-11 Studs Terkel At 95: ‘Ordinary People Are Capable of Doing Extraordinary Things, and That’s What It’s All About. They Must Count!’ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/16/140218 2007-05-16 George Monbiot: If We Don’t Deal with Climate Change We Condemn Hundreds of Millions of People to Death http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/18/1429219 2007-05-18 Author Paul Hawken on ‘Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming’ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/23/1430208 2007-05-23 War Made Easy: How Presidents & Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/29/1322235 2007-05-29 Charles Taylor Roundup A roundup of the Charles Taylor content I’m aware of, and which flourished after he won the Templeton Prize. The Enright Files – A Celebration of Charles Taylor | CBC Ideas http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-05.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror] Michael Enright, host of The Sunday Edition, in conversation with the Canadian philosopher, thinker and winner of the 2007 Templeton Prize, Charles Taylor. Modern Social Imaginaries | Charles Taylor & David Cayley http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2005-12.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror] What makes modernity different from all previous ways of life? Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor talks to IDEAS producer David Cayley about what makes us modern. Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries and Cultural Transmission Theory | Mark E. Madsen http://www.mmadsen.org/2006/01/kens_comment_to.html Charles Taylor and the Hegelian Eden Tree: Canadian Philosophy and Compradorism | Ron Dart http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20070430235045487 Canadian philosopher strikes paydirt | Michael McGann http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/canadian_philosopher_strikes_paydirt/ Charles Taylor ‘Religion and Violence’ | Charles Taylor http://www.tvo.org/podcasts/bi/audio/BICharlesTaylor042207.mp3 // I was at that lecture (standing-room only!) and posted my lecture notes for Goodreads 05w08.3 Religion and Violence | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/lectures/taylor/rel_violence04.html Religion and Violence explores the complex relationship among modernity, religion, and categorical violence – namely, violence directed against people on the basis of their belonging to a certain category or group. Professor Charles Taylor will discuss the rising tide of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism, and ask what connection this phenomenon has to modernity. Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence | The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/media/taylor_se041128.ram Real Audio file on the above lecture, recorded a week later (48.53min) Philosophy, spirituality and the self – Part 1 | The Philosopher’s Zone ABC Radio http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-04_p1.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror] Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world’s most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week on The Philosopher’s Zone, he talks to ABC Radio National’s Tom Morton, about how we are intellectually and how we got to where we are. Philosophy, spirituality and the self – Part 2 | | The Philosopher’s Zone ABC Radio http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2007-04_p2.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror] Charles Taylor, the distinguished Canadian philosopher, has just been awarded the Templeton Prize, the world’s most highly endowed award for intellectual achievement. This week, we hear the second part of his conversation with ABC Radio National’s Tom Morton, about how a moral view of the human self might be possible in an age of scepticism and neo-Darwinism. And Danny Postel, senior editor of opendemocracy.net returns to the program with news of Iranian dissident journalist, Akbar Ganji, who is touring the West talking to eminent philosophers and political thinkers. Manuel Delanda Roundup Since Darren sent me the link which I included in the last Goodreads (reproduced below) I found more Delanda stuff, which I quite enjoyed listening to at work, and which lead me to get his books, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History and A New Philosophy of Soceity. Manuel DeLanda on Deleuze | Manuel DeLanda http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/manueldelanda wrote Darren: “here’s an interesting video of manuel delanda taking a trip through deleuze and it’s not all that confusing” From Manuel DeLanda Annotated Bibliography: Manuel DeLanda, ‘Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Art’ presented at the Art & Technology Lectures, Columbia University, New York, 08.04.04 http://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/itc/visualarts/dmc/ramfiles/delanda_04_08_04.ram // (Real Video, 84 mins) Manuel DeLanda, Democracy, Economics and the MilitaryÕ presented at Democracy Unrealized, Vienna, 20.04.01 rtsp://81.3.51.68/platform1_vienna/de_landa.rm (Real Video, 62 mins) Deleuze Day 3 | Tate http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/deleuze/deleuze_day2_3.ram (Real Video, 50 mins) Manuel DeLanda, ‘Nature Space Society’ presented as the first Nature Space Society lecture at the Tate Modern, London, 05.03.04 http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/naturespacesociety/delanda.ram DeLanda argues for a Deleuzian philosophy of nature. In the first half he rejects a sharp distinction between culture and nature. He demonstrates instead the direct interaction between the biological and social, citing examples from William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples, and Alfred Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism. We must dismiss social-constructivism’s obsession with language and cultural representation. In the second half, DeLanda argues that, in order to avoid this provincial anthropocentrism, we must be realists, but not essentialists. We must historicize nature, and replace ideas about ‘laws of nature’ with Deleuze’s singularities (special, topological points) and affects (the capacity to affect and be affected).(Real Video, 3 hours) —————————————- Long links made short by using Shorty (http://get-shorty.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com
07w04:1 The Confusion of Memory with Thought Posted January 21st, 2007 by timothy. 2 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2007 week 04 number 1 (The Confusion of Memory with Thought) This Goodreads is based around the current confusion between memory and thinking, which I began to notice after reading a footnote in Voltaire’s Bastards a year ago. Describing the character of Simon Reisman, who was once a Liberal Party honcho and who negotiated Canada’s free-trade deal with the United States in the late 1980s, Saul quote from the phone conversation in which he interviewed Reisman: “Our conversation began civilly. Gradually Reisman’s voice rose and his tone became more vociferous. Eventually he was shouting about the Europeans…[etc]…and eventually, about the person he was talking to, ‘You’re looking for sensationalism! You describe yourself as an historian! [emphasis mine] More likely you’re muckraker!”1 [1: JRS, VB, p.638, itself footnote 20 to Chapter 4] I found this to be a very revealing quote, because what it says is that at the time Saul was writing his magnum opus, he was describing himself as an historian, and presumably, thought he was writing a history book. Yet, three years after the publication of Bastards, and on its strengths, Saul was asked to deliver the 1995 Massey Lectures. In the process, Saul’s went from being a self-described historian to being a media-described philosopher. Simply, this is because there has been a confusion between the capacity for memory with the capacity for insightful thought. In the January 16th edition of The Globe & Mail an image of a snow filled street was captioned this way:’…Ottawa enjoyed weeks of unseasonably warm weather before the snowfall,’ of the day before. Even if I was living in Vancouver I’d have known about this already, and I wonder why the editor chose remind us as if we’d suddenly forgotten our ‘unseasonably warm’ winter. Perhaps, as a suggestion, it is because in this culture we are trained to forget, or at least, to be forgetful. It helps to sell us the DVD release of stuff we’ve already seen, for example. Further, we aren’t supposed to know the contexts that shape our lives and the politics of our societies. Diary keepers and bloggers can be dismissed as narcissists and who wants to be a narcissist? Isn’t there a party to go to? Isn’t there some hot indie band at the club singing what we’ve heard sung before? Can’t we drink ourselves into another night of ringing-eared forgetfulness? And so, given the pressure to ignore context and to be forgetful, it’s no wonder than anyone who can string together the connections between last week’s event and today’s seems a little smart. Intelligence is thick on the ground; as John Taylor Gatto once wrote, ‘genius is as common as dirt’. And especially in today’s culture, when any bum probably knows more than Galileo ever knew about Jupiter, the problems of inadequacy have little to do with raw intelligence or access to information. Rather, it may have something to do with our relationship to memory. Modern Social Imaginaries | Charles Taylor & David Cayley http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/audio/taylor2005-12.mp3 [Goodreads Mirror] http://podcast.cbc.ca/mp3/ideas_20070115_1553.mp3 “What makes modernity different from all previous ways of life? Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor talks to IDEAS producer David Cayley about what makes us modern.” I was happy to see this show up on the CBC Ideas podcast, saving me the trouble from excerpting the recording I already had. Charles Taylor speaks of our society’s relationship to memory through our need for a ‘special time’, a ‘time outside of regular time’. He brings up the popularity of Proust in this regard, and what he calls an unprecedented interest in biography. This begins around the 45.00 minute mark. To be specific, Taylor is referring to our ‘tremendous preoccupation with memory’ and raises Proust as an example of the modernist and pomo-version’s need to fetish-size history. Which raises another article I sent out on Goodreads before, and deserves to be included here again: The Reasons for the Current Upsurge in Memory | Pierre Nora http://goodreads.ca/shorty/iwm/memory/ Nora’s essay really gets going in the third part, in which he speaks of ‘the age of commemoration’ (my example: the ceremonies in 2005 to mark the 60th year since the end of World War II, as if the one’s from 1995 weren’t good enough, and I suppose we can look forward to the next generation of political leadership at their 75th anniversary photo ops in 2020) and our current attitude toward stockpiling the present: Broadly speaking, the future could be interpreted in one of three ways, which themselves determined the image people had of the past. It could be envisaged as a form of restoration of the past, a form of progress or a form of revolution. Today, we have discarded these three ways of interpreting the past, which made it possible to organize a “history”. We are utterly uncertain as to what form the future will take. And because of this uncertainty, the present-which, for this very reason no doubt, now has a battery of technical means at its disposal for preserving the past- puts us under an obligation to remember. We do not know what our descendants will need to know about ourselves in order to understand their own lives. And this inability to anticipate the future puts us under an obligation to stockpile, as it were, in a pious and somewhat indiscriminate fashion, any visible trace or material sign that might eventually testify to what we are or what we will have become. In other words, it is the end of any kind of teleology of history-the end of a history whose end is known-that places on the present this urgent “duty to remember” (devoir de mémoire) that is so much talked about. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t have, or were at least seated at, a computer, which is a remarkable machine for memory. It’s search function has made finding those half-forgotten tidbits effortless, and it’s capacity to store the raw information we collect in our lives means that as a personal library it easily beats the old analogue cut-n-paste scrapbooks. What then does the future hold? Gordon Bell is trying to find out. Working for Microsoft, he’s been pushing the limits of digital memory by trying to input everything so that Microsoft can develop the ‘organize your life-memories!’ software they’ll later try to sell to you. My Life Bits | Gordon Bell et al http://research.microsoft.com/~jgemmell/pubs/MyLifeBitsMM02.pdf (PDF 445k) The Persistence of Memory | Gordon Bell on On The Media http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/2007/01/05/07 ——————————— Mr. Mee by Andrew Crumey (2000) Proust has already come up twice – first in Taylor’s discussion, but also it the title of the Gordon Bell presentation. What better way to introduce Mr. Mee? The truth is I wanted to publish a review of Mr. Mee in the summer of 2005, and it is a novel I read in the summer of 2004, but obviously didn’t get around to it until now. Mr. Mee is a novel of three story-lines, with two of the major players being Rousseau and Proust; Rousseau as a character, and Proust as an idea. It is set a decade ago, in 1997, during the early years of the internet – which is an important element to the fiction. The eponymous character of Mr. Mee is a retired, naive academic who buys a computer in order to use the nascent World Wide Web to try and track down an obscure book. In a Borgesian allusion, Rosier’s Encyclopaedia has been referenced in the bibliography of a book he brought home from a leisurely afternoon at the used bookstore. Andrew Crumey shifts the scene to tell us more about the Encyclopaedia by bringing us back to 18th Century Paris, and introducing us to two characters, Ferrand and Minard, two down-on-their-luck copyists who are commissioned to copy a bunch of nutty writings by a Mr. Rosier. F & M are named after two people who Rousseau wrote about in his autobiography, and Crumey’s speculation on their backstory, and its consequences were outstanding. This novel is simply intellectually delightful in that regard. Perhaps they had something to do with Rouseau’s famed paranoia? Maybe they thought Rousseau a murderer? And perhaps their paranoia was fueled by their work fair-copying this work of an 18th Century genius who’d thought up 20th Century quantum physics and binary computers in 18th Century terms? (One of my favorite parts of the book describes Minard’s construction of a digita-binary computer out of string and bits of paper, and he is heard to complain about needing more memory. It seems that even in the 1760s, it was desirable to have more RAM). In the 1990s, a professor lies in a hospital bed, contemplating his life over the past several months, and the possibility of his death. He had been a professor of Proust, and had come to teach this work of autobiographical literature after an adolescent infatuation with the work of Rousseau. And so, as he writes his memoir, he reflects both on Rousseau and on Proust. This is the tour-de-force of the novel. I found this the most satisfying, and appreciated it’s intricate subtleties. The professor comes across as just another dime-a-dozen mediocre academic who live their quotidian lives a students and commentators of past human achievement. The Proust-bug has not yet bitten me, and it was here I learned of how Proust described his magnum opus as being ‘about an I who isn’t I’. The introduction of this thought in the professor’s memoir raises the question of how much of his text is about an I that isn’t he. The overall impression is that, faced with impending death, Dr. Petrie has at last given it a try, written his work of autobiography about and I who isn’t I, inspired by his mastery of knowledge of these two masters of the art. Dr. Petrie ignores whatever sense of failure that has brought him to this point – the broken heart, his cancer, the sense that it was his attempt to initiate an affair with a student which brought on the illness. Instead of being cowed by a sense of mediocrity in comparison to his literary heroes, he gives it a go and in so doing constructs a literature of the self. The added poignancy comes from the embarrassed recounting of the infatuation which he blames for the illness out of a sort of hubris, and it is perhaps through this honest memory that his work becomes literary and becomes the final accomplishment of his life. And perhaps here it is worth remembering that a year ago, James Frey was in the news for his book of autobiography, and it should be an embarrassment to anyone who claims to run a book club to not understand the need to embellish, to lie, to cheat the details as (what used to be called in a more literate age) poetic license. Crumey’s skill is seen in his ability to weave together the tale of naive Mr. Mee, the octogenarian centre of the story, with the dying professor and the story of Rouseau’s Minard and Ferrand, and in the process, imagine 20th Century theoretical physics in 18th Century terms, remind us of what the internet was like a decade ago, muse on human foibles and the nature of autobiographical literature. Perhaps an even more central thesis to the story is that consciousness comes from writing, or at least, from the type of contextualization of memory that can come from writing. If we are not telling the story, than it didn’t really have to happen. Ultimately it ties into the nature of memory in our lives and the nature of identity as a narrated self. Mr. Mee on Amazon.ca http://goodreads.ca/shorty/amazon/mr_mee/ As I Was Saying to Rousseau … | Hilary Mantel http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/reviews/010401.01mantelt.html?_r=1&oref=slogin April 2001 Review of Mr. Mee in the New York Times The segments from Rousseau’s Confessions on which the Ferrand-Minard chapters of Mr. Mee are based http://www.hum.aau.dk/~i12bent/Rousseau-MrMee.html And finally, you might remember last week I noted I was working on a website that I wasn’t yet ready to promote. I now am. After several years of hosting my artistic/narcissistic portfolio first as a subsite of Instant Coffee, and than as a subsite of Goodreads, I now have a dedicated eponymous url: timothycomeau.com.I expect the visitor-stats to be low and the blog comments to continue to be nil, yet perhaps it is a way – or simply my way – to construct something about an I who isn’t I in the 21st Century. —————————————- Long links made short by using Shorty (http://get-shorty.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Sunday 21 January 2007 @ 3:45 PM
Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence Posted February 22nd, 2005 by timothy. 1 Comment Good Reads Mailing List | 2005 week 8 number 3 (Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence) ——————————————————————— Religion and Violence | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/lectures/taylor/rel_violence04.html “Religion and Violence explores the complex relationship among modernity, religion, and categorical violence – namely, violence directed against people on the basis of their belonging to a certain category or group. Professor Charles Taylor will discuss the rising tide of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism, and ask what connection this phenomenon has to modernity.” Note: I went to this lecture in November, and these are the notes Charles Taylor on Religion and Violence | The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright http://www.cbc.ca/thesundayedition/media/taylor_se041128.ram Real Audio file on the above lecture, recorded a week later (48.53min) —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 22 February 2005 @ 4:09 PM
04w49:3 The Cartesian Hegemony Posted December 1st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 49 number 3 (The Cartesian Hegemony) ——————————————————————— Natural-Born Dualists, A Talk with Paul Bloom | Edge.org http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bloom04/bloom04_index.html “Our dualistic conception isn’t an airy intellectual thing; it is common sense, and rooted in a phenomenological experience. We do not feel that we are material things, physical bodies. The notion that we are machines made of meat, as Marvin Minsky once put it, is unintuitive and unnatural. Instead, we feel as if we occupy our bodies. We possess them. We own them. Because of this, we talk about my brain, or my body, using the same language of possession that we use when we talk about my car, or my child. These are things that we possess, that we are intimately related to?but not what we are.” An End to Mediational Epistemology | Charles Taylor http://goodreads.ca/lectures/taylor/larkin-stuart04.html “In two consecutive lectures, Prof. Charles Taylor will speak on the modern epistemological tradition, its effect on our thought and culture, and how that relationship is changing today. The first lecture will sketch the features and characteristics of the modern epistemological tradition, and describe its influence. The second lecture will explore how philosophy may offer alternatives to this tradition. ” I went to the lectures and put up my notes with commentary – Timothy —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 01 December 2004 @ 8:10 PM
