The Global Village is Too Large

The following is an excerpt of an 10 November 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

Art:

McLuhan considered cultures with non-alphabetic languages, like the Chinese, to still be tribal. Alphabetic characters are, by the their very nature, devoid of meaning. Emojis show a return to non-alphabetic literacies. Memes are a similar development. The ascendancy of the Chinese and other cultures less removed from their tribal roots is another sign of the times. We shouldn't misinterpret the seeming uptick in oppression of these groups as a counterargument. It's a sign of a weakening, a waning. 

But I think it's more helpful to imagine this as the formation of one conflict-ridden tribe rather than the proliferation of many warring ones. That latter phenomenon I chalk up to the last gasps of the print paradigm. 

Then again, Ghengis Khan and Mao killed about 14 million a piece.

Will:

It makes sense that Steffi would see the possibility of the Internet making the whole world one tribe/cult. I think the reason the one tribe idea limps, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm taking this from McLuhan, is that the global village is too large for people to feel the intimacy of the global village. We can't have a multibillion-person village that works like a 300-person village. I can find my network of 300 like-minded people, though. 

You are right that he saw the electronic age as easternizing the west and westernizing the east. A thing that makes McLuhan misleading is that he tried to remove his feelings about technological advancement from his inventories. He wanted to say how things worked, not whether they were good or bad. In general, though, he preferred print culture to electronic culture. That didn't keep him from examining the dangers and benefits of both. In general, he said he was against all change, and that he wasn't an optimist or a pessimist but an apocalist—his hope was in the end of the world.

The Notion of Roles

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.

Installing folding tops at Ford's Highland Park Plant, 1915

I think we're both touching different parts of the same elephant!

McLuhan blamed industrialization for homogenizing us, and industrialization is a byproduct of the age of print. Print creates centralized government and bureaucracy, but it fragments psychically in that we read alone and in silence, which creates the primacy of the individual instead of group-oriented tribal thought. Industrialization gives us jobs where the tribal mindset gives us roles, and roles allow for greater expression than fragmented jobs. But tribes also live in a state of nearly constant warfare and tend to reject pluralistic viewpoints. Literate man is more open-minded. Literate man overheated is industrial man, who tends to conform. Electronic man tends to position himself in the tribe of his choice, then go to war.

Henry Ford wouldn't partake in the digital retribalizing impulse, but there is definitely a lot of engagement with social Darwinism and the segregation of people into distinct tribes with a goal of pitting them against each other for self-serving ends. There is an element of masterminding group conflict for personal gain that seems lodestoneish to me.

To get back of the idea of roles, these are how the tribe, in McLuhan's terms, express diversity. Belief in tribes is supposed to be orthodox and relational. Beowulf identifies himself as Beowulf, thane of King Hygelac of the Danes, son of Ecgtheow. Odysseus tells Polyphemus his name is Odysseus, King of Ithaca, son of Laertes. If you ask a tribal person why he doesn't steal, he says my people are not thieves. A literate person says I am not a thief. A digital person says I don't feel like it. If I am an eccentric member of the tribe, the tribe finds a role for me, probably as priest, artist, or fool. If I am violent, I'm a warrior. If I'm scholarly, I'm a wise man or advisor. In this regard, everybody can support the same values despite individual charisms, and everyone can value difference. The tribal values are the same; the ways of serving them vary, and everyone depends on the differences in roles. That is a different approach than the industrial vision in which the jobs are the jobs and you conform to them, quit, get fired, or find a new job. It's a sign of change, though, that business keeps on talking about getting everybody on the right seat of the bus; that's a sign that business is embracing the notion of roles.

I agree that social media should probably start leaning more toward the ear. That would explain the ascendancy of video and the archaic feel of email. I think the print aspect of words and images is part relic, partially something closer to the hieroglyph. That would explain the transition from the emoticon to the emoji. I also think the short sentences we get from Twitter thought are like grunts—the little brother equivalent of newspeak. The content tends to polarize, and for McLuhan, the tendency toward polarization would be the form itself—the medium is the message. I see a parallel between the 140-character message, the advertising slogan, and the battle cry.

In some form, if McLuhan is correct, as print becomes obsolete, it should find new life as art. Of course, I'm reminded of Liza's word art.

The Fractious Facebook Feed

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

As far as the fractious Facebook feed, I personally feel this is the last gasps of print literacy and individualism trying to assert itself before it is dragged down into the tribal world of the ear, of the chorus, of the chthonic, of chaos, of chanting, of moira, of ritual, of dithyrambic dance.

When you really look, those exchanges and the resultant fragmentation are still due to the paradigm of print. The fact that this fragmentation is accelerating is due to the extreme anxiety produced by retribalization and the end of 400 years of print literacy. When I ask my students about Snapchat, they have a hard time explaining their enthusiasm for it. But they are largely uninterested in Facebook and increasingly uninterested in Twitter.

If McLuhan was right, we should see new types of social media with an even greater emphasis on the ear. Snapchat has deemphasized print literacy, but it's still visual. The movie Her seems to imagines that social media will go in this direction.

Then again, maybe the fragmentation and fighting is our reacclimating to the levels of conflict present in the tribe.

But Henry Ford would not partake in this tribalizing impulse. This is the full flower of mechanization, specialization, isolation, fragmentation. Tribalizing is the opposite impulse: stay in the same community or village and experience the conflict!

The Homogenized Urban Society

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to Will on 10 November 2015.

Henry Ford with 1921 Model T

My information on McLuhan's view is from an interview: "Print centralizes socially and fragments psychically, whereas the electric media bring man together in a tribal village that is a rich and creative mix, where there is actually more room for creative diversity than within the homogenized mass urban society of Western man."

Maybe this is what you're talking about regarding greater conflict:

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony—the customary life mode of any tribal people.

In other words, he likens the inevitable conflict to that which occurs in a family. Fragmentation and militarism—another kind of conflict—is the kind driven by alphabetic literacy. Arguably, the latter kind of conflict has been the more brutal of the two. Henry Ford's (Don Gilber's?) ambitions seem to fit the "urban conglomerate housing thousands of family" description better.

Here's another awesome one:

Literate mechanical society separated the individual from the group in space, engendering privacy; in thought, engendering point of view; and in work, engendering specialism—thus forging all the values associated with individualism. But at the same time, print technology has homogenized man, creating mass militarism, mass mind and mass uniformity; print gave man private habits of individualism and a public role of absolute conformity. That is why the young today welcome their retribalization, however dimly they perceive it, as a release from the uniformity, alienation and dehumanization of literate society. [italics are mine]

Anyone Can Fire Our Neurons

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art and the group on 10 November 2015.



Have you read McLuhan's War and Peace in the Global Village?

He's pretty insistent in that and in several interviews that renewed tribalism brings more war, not less. He says the cost of electronic culture is civilization. It would be lovely if stretching our consciousnesses all over the world resulted in one village, but it doesn't. Stretching our nerves everywhere means anyone can fire our neurons. Our tribes are just not as geographically organized as they were before, that's all.

Two seconds scrolling through a Facebook feed shows that we aren't all in one tribe, and that the enmity between tribes is accelerating. Also, the way people reduce tribal conflict on Facebook is to defriend anyone who create conflict, which paradoxically reinforces tribalism, since one limits one's interactions to those with people of the same tribe. 

It makes sense to address the issue of tribalism, as the 70's begin with the end of the 60's dream of one tribe, we get the age of cults, then we end with the digital age trying to absorb the power of The Lodestone. 

I see Arthur as tribal, too. He's torn by the family tribe and the universal tribe of man, as well as a personal relationship with God.

Molten or Molded?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 10 November 2015.




I read this article, which makes me wonder if our method of "caressing" the content of this project could be Snapchat.

If you have a chance to read this, it kind of clarifies why Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even the blog are not appropriate. Implicit in "Return" is "Disappearance." In other words, whenever Arthur's world returns, it means that it has previously disappeared. If we believe Hegel that "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit," then we need to understand why youngsters seem to prefer things that disappear like they do on Snapchat.

Why do youngsters increasingly NOT care to make themselves look good and eternal when they arguably have all the necessary tools to do so? Instead, they are increasingly okay with being authentic and transient (and authentically transient?). Liza's recent set of "unfinished" illuminated texts partake of a similar impulse.

Why is summer the only time that I can muster the time and effort necessary to caress, shape, and pattern my existence sufficiently for Instagram and Facebook? Why should it take time to share reality with one another?

With Snapchat, we are more in touch with the "do it for the Fat Lady" ethos. But at that point, are we even "a thing"?

Perhaps this discussion is too abstract, too remote from the reality of being a band. Everyone needs to compete, to assert themselves in that arena, right? But the effort required strikes me as very linear, rationalizing, Gutenbergian, insincere. It's so wearisome this effort to become universal, definitive, infinite, immortal—seeking tîmê and kleos like we still live in an age of heroes.

As Herodotus pointed out, Zeus put an end to all that with Helen. That thematic decline of heroes continues through Odysseus and Oedipus until it is finally transformed in Christ. We are no better than the chorus. We are the chorus.

Actually, inasmuch as we don't have Christ's hypostasis, the thematic decline of heroes is transformed in Mary. Her Magnificat is now the model and pattern for all other utterances of transcendence.

So there's the negative: that kind of heroism is no longer possible. On the positive side, think of the French onomatopoeic, Gutenbergian word, cliché, "the sound of a mold striking molten metal." Do we want to be molded or remain molten? I have a hunch that the two are mutually exclusive.

But perhaps this line of thinking is unnecessarily absolute.

Certain things persist. As we've mentioned before, people still buy CDs and records and books. But Arthur at least seems further along this path. He has remained molten in spite of Will's attempts to mold him.

Will, I know that this doesn't really respond to your recent email, but I feel like we have a different definition of tribal. I feel like Arthur is tribal. Like McLuhan, I consider the return to tribalism to be a positive development, one that will result in our being more in tune with the rest of humanity, as in his "global village" concept. In your email, you seem to see it as a negative development, presided over by the lodestone. I point to Gutenberg and the Reformation as evidence that widespread alphabetic literacy has resulted in widespread militarism, specialization, individualism, malaise, alienation, schizophrenia.

This is the opposite of the tribe, and yet, it is what has caused the fragmentation.

This World of Leisurely Terror

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 10 November 2015.

The Minotaur

I'm hoping to get back to this world of leisurely terror, but I'm currently bogged down in my ill-advised choice of profession, reading a bunch of timed writings on a poem I should have never assigned ("A Bird Came Down the Walk" by Emily Dickinson).

My notebook is filling up with ideas/topics of discussion worth pursuing, but I haven't had a single minute to share any of these, nor to participate in any of this most recent uptick. Such is life in the tunnels, I suppose.

Nor have I had a chance to read this article, which you probably just received in the mail too, Will. But the pictures look cool. My 12-year-old son does Lego animated films all the time. I have so many figurines, including dinosaurs, although I gave away a lot of them at the last show. Could "we" (feminine singular: Liza) do video or photostory dramatizations of episodes using miniature scenery and figurines?

If not it's fine. Ever since I lost my way in the labyrinth I've resolved just to keep yelling. If some kind of monstrous Minotaur finds me first, so be it.

I'll eventually start leafing through these shredded maps, hotel napkins...just need a little light to work with.

The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.

De Profundis

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 31 October 2015.

Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré

More on the saline abortion avenger.

The two best stories in the world, Exodus and the Gospel, begin with a massacre of babies.

Evil is characterized most by its banality, which means it sets itself up against creativity, procreativity, prolificity, etc. Inarticulate babies sum up that impulse perfectly; that's why Satan has always laid siege to that stronghold.

I'm not sure where our story is heading, but I think it makes sense that this would be a starting point of sorts, albeit of a later episode.

Is the fact that it's twins the reason why Farthington seeks an abortion? Or was that his idea all along? In other words, all of his followers need to be emptied; some of the stronger ones need to be broken. It's clear that Farthington is pissed and that something didn't go as planned, either with Will, Arthur, or Steffi, or any combination of these three. Steffi almost certainly would have needed to be drugged at this point; Farthington doesn't have that kind of control over her. Will may have been on his way down to save her.

The fact that some horror occurred down in the tunnels is probably enough. That's the nature of the dark substratum: irrational, inarticulate, incoherent, unfathomable, yawning, awesome. But that something is born, unleashed upon the world is also important. God knows all about Leviathan: no dual Universe. He chose to use the primeval chaos as the sign of his first sacrament, for Moses, for Jesus, and for us.

So mind blowing and beautiful this strange faith of ours!

Part of what I want to do in creative pursuits is to "reconstitute" (wrong word) chaos. Then let God do what he's always done: bring order out of it. But I can't play the role of junior god; I can only describe the abyss:

De profundis clamavi ad te Domine!

Those Who Sow in Tears

The following is an excerpt of a 31 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

St. Paul in Prison by Rembrandt

Will:

The podcast my friends Russ and Fred run has a structure that could work for us.  Basically, Russ tells the story of the inspiration behind one of his songs and then plays the song.  We could run a similar structure: Legends of Arthur White, in which we tell a story about Arthur that May or may not be true and end with a song from the era we address.  The whole, "correct" story could be told in another medium, and a podcast could go in multiple contradictory directions without any issues.

Art:

I noticed that; that's a really good idea.  

I feel too hampered, hobbled, hindered to accomplish that (or anything beyond emails and practicing songs with Francis). I'm not enjoying my small sharing in the swaddled/crucified existence right now. Half wishing the Benefactor could make all of this go away. But I'm sure Paul and John the Baptist and so many other heroes of the faith felt the same when they were imprisoned, their lives and voice snuffed out. But as Paul writes us from his prison cell: "Nothing can separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus." 

I'm having a hard time believing this, both with teaching and with this project (Psalm 126:5-6): 

Those who sow in tears
shall reap with cries of joy 

Those who go forth weeping,
carrying sacks of seed,
Will return with cries of joy,
carrying their bundled sheaves.
will reap with cries of joy.  

I feel like I'm sowing in tears; I just don't believe the second part. Help my unbelief! 

I'm not sure what you were imagining with the podcast, but if you were able to create and host the show (along with the theme music, bumpers, etc.), you could actually just run the whole thing. 

What about having guests on who would learn the songs, possibly bringing their own interpretive flair, and play them up in T.C.? Then, you could call me on the phone (there are ways to set this up for podcasts) and see what I thought. When appropriate, you and I could provide some background about the song and it's meaning. I could just be myself or I could get into the Arthur White role. I could also play the song from my home, either instead of or in addition to the other person performing it. 

Alternatively, we could discuss some of the story lines. But I still like the idea of me being only a relatively small part of the show.

Channeling a Horror Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 28 October 2015.

A Tale from The Decameron by John William Waterhouse

I agree with everything you've said.

I'm just channeling a horror story right now. Is Arthur White like the The Decameron or Canterbury Tales or One Thousand and One Nights, just a flimsy frame story within which to tell cool stories? Is this Alyosha saying, "Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!"

I know the context is different, and I don't think we'll be talking about all of our favorite horror movie ideas in Heaven (it is a troublesome line nonetheless!). And I don't think our story has a lot in common with a frame story. But we have come up with a basic idea as to why all these unrelated stories can be subsumed and integrated, namely, the effect the lodestone and the turbulent reversals seems to have on characters and plot lines.

We also have the idea of legends, stories that flourish around a character, especially ones of dubious historicity. Only at a much later date do individual writers try to impose coherence.

Also, the nefarious process of disintegration that sets itself up against God as All-in-All.

But is does that last one also show God's action in that He is able to integrate even disintegration? Something like "captive led captivity."

It's therapeutic to revisit these stories and hopes and dreams from the past through the magic lens of this story. It's like I'm reclaiming all the mundane moments and locations of my life. I'm not even sure this is an attempt at literature; more like an attempt to retake all the ground conquered by the forces of evil, which, as some have pointed out, is characterized most by its banality.

Lately, I've been tromping around my college and post-college days in Ann Arbor, accompanying those Tokyo International College of Business exchange students to Sleeping Bear Dunes, heading out of Las Vegas into the desert darkness west of Nellis Air Force Range. No need to explain how all this is finding its way into the story.

Because I'm making these journeys not through a spirit of nostalgia, but through an all-out effort to shatter the ice that has encased and obscured them, half expecting—like Philip K. Dick—to find first-century Palestine beneath their stale surfaces.

And is the story obscure because we are being deliberately obscurantist?

Or is it because we are trying to "make dark things plain"?

Will Will

The following is an excerpt of an October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

In all our messing with nomenclature and in all my years living with my own name, we've never thought of "Will" as a future helping verb.

Art:

How about when Farthington can't control Will he creates a clone of him called Will Will (helping and main verb). Maybe this is what is in Steffi's womb, although I'd always imagined that one being female (perhaps male/female monozygotic twins?). Maybe this is another reason a raging Will follows Farthington into the tunnels. Modernity enthrones the enfeebled will at the center of its moral law. 

Will should only be a helping verb; modernity tries to make it both helping and main verb. 

One of the twins dies. Does the other become the inarticulate monster?

Will:

So, I am conflicted on the saline avenger. 

My pro is that terrible topics are important to cover, especially in a project that seems to be a mock grand unifying theory of postmodernisty. 

My con is that for some reason, I have never lost my faith in the idea that at some point, this story will actually take some conventional narrative form and be told, and at that point, the saline avenger, if we aren't completely past the tipping point of holding an audience already, completely dumps us over. I know I've always said I want to work within the influence of a morality play, but I still like shaded, complex, mimetic characters. I worry that we keep flattening out everybody. 

Who knows. But there's no reason why Will Will can't just be a girl, who I suppose leaves the cryptic message "WILL WILL" in blood on walls.

Art:

Pulled in two opposite directions then... 

You want our narrative to take a more conventional form (a flattening, rationalizing, dehumanizing impulse). Your original, Everyman-inspired allegorical impulses might be classed with this as well. Deus ex machina too. 

But you also want nuanced, mimetic, irreducible characters (a deepening, irrationalizing, humanizing impulse). 

We've defined postmodernism the synthesis of these two. One way we've conceptualized it is clear, straightforward narratives told by unreliable narrators! 

Is that scaffolding robust enough? 

Carrie, the Stephen King movie, is great for this. All the nuance of modernity is finally judged by a pre-modern God, who is PISSED OFF. It's one of the most dialectically satisfying moments in film. Similar to the tension in Antigone between the younger Olympian gods of Creon and the older chthonic gods of Antigone. Hilarity ensues when the older gods wake up from their slumber and get pissed off by all the silly modern antics for which they have no context, understanding, or compassion! 

Although it's a piss-poor movie, the scene in Prometheus where the Weyland wakes up the engineer gives a similar pleasure: old gods waking up and KILLING EVERYONE!!!

A Terrible Beauty

The following is an excerpt of a 28 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at the April in Paris Ball 1957

Will:

I guess another way of putting my concern is that I want the story to be beautiful and uplifting.

Art:

I understand that, but this probably goes along with my Aristotelian/Millerian preference for tragedy. I find works with a clear moral valence—or, worse, an "inspirational" intent—NOT beautiful. Isn't the human being endeavoring against the black backdrop, against impossible odds, beautiful enough? Isn't it the case that the black backdrop provides the occasion for his beauty to shine forth? Isn't this the most inspiring of all pictures, the one that calls us forth out from complacency, blinking in the cold wind of the world? 

I see you as the protagonist, trying to assert your story, to build your foundationless castle. It's like what King Arthur tried to do. But we've found that it only exists as "once" and "future." It only exists in the telling or, better yet, the singing of it. I'm the one who provides that black backdrop most of the time, the chorus roaring moira. You're the hero who needs to keep building, believing, setting things aright, even as you sink down into the morass.

Will:

In your version of Miller, I think Biff has cancer from smoking without his shirt on, got raped in jail, and had his leg ripped off by a vengeful cow and is ashamed of his homemade robotic prosthesis.

Art:

That's so much better than Death of a Salesman. Hold the presses!

Will:

Another way of putting it—Yeats called tragedy a terrible beauty, not terror. The struggle against the black backdrop unites the hero to truth, hopefully...not terror. Good comes from the hero's fall, a messenger survives to tell the tale, and order is restored to the kingdom. If people just get stabbed in the neck no matter what they do, the message is that the universe is blind terror, and Aristotle denounces the art. The movie O comes to mind, in which the writer and director messed with Othello a little too much, undermined the tragic conventions, and created nihilism instead of tragedy.

Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.

Harbaugh

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 24 October 2015.

Jim Harbaugh

Google and Facebook will cause the civil war, robots basically, by the way they serve up content. Based on my recent interests in news stories, my Google app is serving me up all Breitbart and Fox News. I imagine those on the other side are being served up the exact opposite. So when we have killed each other and the humans are weakened from years of civil war, the robots will take over.

And I think the robot's style of government will, in the early going at least, be Skinnerian. Check out his Beyond Freedom and Dignity if you want a glimpse of what that will look like!

I take that back: it already is Skinnerian!

I take that back: it's also serving me up stories about Harbaugh.

Is this what the lodestone does?

The Monster That Now Pursues You

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 21 October 2015.



I don't think this will go in the blog either because I'm not going to be able to express what I feel about this coherently. You may be able to understand what I mean.

I think the so-called uneducated people of America are just pissed as hell having been essentially ridiculed for the last 8 years by everyone from the POTUS to Bill Nye the Science Guy. I feel some of that anger, even though I am not a Creationist or automatic weapon owner or even someone who has smelled sawdust or animal entrails in the last month. But I feel like this is a reckoning. The vengeful, silenced masses are now sending us their inarticulate messenger. The basic message is:

You have banished us from the table, from the public square, from civic discourse. You have been unwilling to engage with us in dialogue, preferring instead to use your monopoly of major media outlets and the bully pulpit of the presidency to shout us down, to proclaim us unclean, to paint our demands and desires as ridiculous, unconscionable, or worse. We, for our part, have attempted several times to present our arguments coherently according to the terms of engagement. But you have killed our most articulate messengers, replacing them with straw men whom you burn in effigy all the day. You have successfully demonized us, silenced us, and caricatured us. And so we now send you the only messenger you can recognize: the caricature, the demon, the vengeful, inarticulate angel. Its exaggerated, grotesque, almost comic features are a function of the toxic underworld from which this monster emerges. Had you extended the warm embrace of civility and dialogue, you might recognize in it a brother or sister or friend. But it is too late for that now. No, you didn't create this entity, but you are the one who turned it into the monster that now pursues you, wordlessly and inexorably.

In my prophetic imagination, this isn't Trump. This being would actually overtake and kill Trump at some point, Trump being far more articulate than the underlying impulse the entity represents. At best, Trump would be a perverse John the Baptist figure:

I am baptizing you with water...but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. (Matt 3:11)

I am not saying anything about the relative validity of issues such as flying the Confederate Flag, espousing traditional views of marriage, believing in the Genesis account of Creation, etc. I'm just saying that it's been relatively quiet lately. Voices have been summarily and successfully silenced. Hillary Clinton is the odds-on favorite for the presidency, Bill Nye has parlayed his Bachelor of Science degree into a second career, and Barack Obama is taking victory laps.

Drop the mic, right?

But you are a fool if you think those voices that raged so violently are just gone. They fester in the fetid darkness, their individual voices echoing, melding into a cacophony of incoherent rage. To be clear, if this were a horror movie, I would be killed along with everyone else. I'd be that traditional character who thinks he understands the being, who thinks he can reason with it, who is fascinated with it, who tries to explain to others how it became what it became.

Muzak/Karaoke Tracks

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Max on 19 October 2015.

Bonnie "Prince" Billy

Art:

Hope you're doing well! Long time, no see! 

I'm swamped as I often am during the school year, but I had a good idea, especially if you're not swamped. 

I was thinking of doing some fundraisers where we just invite select people to my home or other people's homes and have a "freewill offering." Instead of practicing a ton and making major mistakes anyway, I had the following awesome idea (inspired in part by the concept behind Maria Bamford's The Special Special Special): 

You create muzak/karaoke tracks for a good set list of Arthur White songs. Ideally, use a heavily produced, saccharine, polished sound. You can add your own "spin." Late 90's keyboard sound, nothing vintage or cool. With my voice and content, this will assuredly be disturbing without resorting to any Nine Inch Nails high jinks. I'm talking like this synth break that comes in Palace's "West Palm Beach," but even more immersive, that is, no implied irony/critical distance. It's like an attempt to be optimistic and uplifting in a socially appropriate way that ends up being so inappropriate--all the more inappropriate for trying to pretend like it was appropriate in the first place! If you could get some awesome canned backing tracks, you could also play guitar over the top and I would just get wheeled into the room and sing the songs. I've talked about this idea before in the blog post about Pino Marelli. A couple up-tempo disco numbers would be good as well! 

I actually had a chance to see Will Oldham (now Bonnie "Prince" Billy) do a set a lot like this in Chicago, where he just pressed play on a tape deck and it played horribly "uplifting" synth/muzak versions of his songs while he attempted to play along with his out-of-tune guitar and flawed voice. It was so disturbing and satisfying at the same time! I did a similar thing back in the 90's, recording my songs direct to my Wurlitzer Funmaker tape deck. You might be able to find a cheap MIDI option where you can just plug in the chords and mess around with the voices.

Max:

It's great to hear from you! I've missed our Tuesday sessions, but I've been really busy with drawing and film studies and yadayadayada. Also, I enrolled in a drawing class on Tuesdays and Thursdays at LCC, but that is ending a week from now. But hopefully I won't be any less busy because ideally I'll just fill that empty space with more drawing, as I am trying to get really really good. That being said, I am really interested in this "house show" as us youngsters like to call them. With my class done, I'd like to open up more time in my schedule for music. I got some really good software with some really great sample instruments which, though they may be too cool for what you are talking about, could be of use in this next endeavor. I'll attach a video of a short little track I made with it so u can get an idea of what it can do. The program would also be of really great use in rehearsals if we ever get those started again! But anyways, just to be clear I am down for this show! It's sounds awesome.

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 5 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

E. On Peter Maurin

And, of course, all of this reminds me a great deal of Peter Maurin's Easy Essays. To move toward a solution by mobilizing the foundational problem is to personify the notion of radicalism. This is what it means to go down to the roots. This is what it means to create "a new society within the shell of the old with the philosophy of the old, which is not a new philosophy but a very old philosophy, a philosophy so old it looks new. "We don't need a new doctrine, we need a new technique."

F. On What this Means

So, yes. This is my long-winded way of simply saying yes. I agree with you. We must get behind it.

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 4 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

D. On Finding Aesthetics Within Anaesthetics

The concluding sentence on the previous page is most certainly most overused quote; especially while teaching. While the decline of the 'aura' of both works of art & human experiences is troubling on the one hand, the other hand is encouraging. Are you with me up until this point? I hope so (though I'm barely with myself, you see). Through this panoramic viewpoint, it's clear to me that our most effective mode of transportation back to the garden is by boarding the motorized machine. We must utilize the simulation as our best weapon against simulation. I'm reminded in the previous sentence of a sentence from my previous letter: →"To look upon this horror and utilize our repulsion to propel us closer to God is the most brutal form of attack against this demonic presence." Also of an e-mail I sent to Art back in May: "I think one can simultaneously scorn the regurgitory culture and utilize it for its instrumental value in understanding American mythos. To me, total immersion into the circling pools of excremental matter is the best way to stay afloat. By reconfiguring our submission, we can then make guppy-like journeys away from these subjective surfaces in search of the depths of objective truth. Understand it we may not ever, but we mustn't let our befuddlement blockade our probing! "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. This is why we "can't sit back and let something grow of its own momentum. [We] must probe it from the outset."

We Must Probe It From the Outset (Part 3 of 5)

The following is a series of attached photos sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these illuminated texts along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

B. On Books

Also, fun fact → CENSORED → All attorneys are equal but some are more equal than others.

But really, Allison, please let me know when you're in the market for your next load of overpriced textbooks. You are welcome to any & all of Connor's collection for reference or study materials. I'd be more than happy to send them your way.

C. On Will's Correspondence with Nick

This is simple yet profound! So profound!

Exchange is a damn fine representation of "the satellite's" positive potential to be the most powerful agent of social change that man has—and will—ever encountered. I write "agent" instead of a "channel" because though composed of billions of particles like the human agents behind the screens, the compendium of texts, images, & sounds that populate the world of the web coexist forever & never again as single quantum particles. What I mean by this is that a medium such as the Internet possesses the unique capability of taking on its own agency when we, ourselves, collapse our terrestrial artifacts & intangible ideas into a single public location. By giving this project, for instance, a fixed position for the collective gaze to absorb & synthesize, we (though mostly the lot of you, I mostly gaze) are simultaneously giving it instantaneous & unlimited mobility. So, by collapsing these projections into the virtual location of the blog, it doesn't quite matter that its home is in a simulated world, in a pixelated reality. It doesn't matter, that is, when observed not as a segment but as the whole. The whole, of course, is the reality we yearn for; the reality that favors confrontation with.