DrHGuy Cyber-Bookmarks: 09 December 2006

December 9th, 2006 at 6:42 am · DrHGuy · No Comments

A sporadically promulgated annotated listing of arguably worthwhile, recently published online reading, new or revised websites of potential utility or ostensible interest, and other internet-accessible experiences that, were it not for the casually collected, cavalierly collated, & capriciously collocated components comprising these posts, could easily be overlooked - which would be, in some cases, a shame

Readings

Think Again - What Did Descartes Really Know? Anthony Gottlieb. New Yorker 20 Nov 2006
This is one of those essays that the New Yorker occasionally publishes under the guise of a book review. The two books ostensibly being reviewed, Desmond Clarke’s “Descartes: A Biography” and A.C. Graylilng’s “Descartes: The Life And Times Of A Genius,” are not named before Gottlieb has completed a full, three-column page of exposition and, with a bit of reformatting of the article, could accurately be characterized as references rather than the alleged focus of the piece.¹ Not that I’m complaining.

In any case, the description of Descartes’s personality and life is intriguing. For example,

His [Descartes's] personality remains an enigma. Vituperative, devious, insincere, proud, and unpredictable in his correspondence, he published works that ooze sweet reason and cool logic. Why did this Frenchman choose to spend most of his adult life away from his native country? Why did he repeatedly tell friends that he craved calm and quiet, then constantly pull up stakes and rush elsewhere? (A team of movers would have come in useful.) He did not, in adulthood, enjoy reading the books of others. So what, exactly, was going on in his head during his long mornings of inactivity?

The explication of his philosophy, however, is even more striking and is provocative enough that I was chagrined about my own cavalierly superficial assumptions about the mind-body dualism I attributed to him.

It isn’t easy to see Descartes’s work the way he saw it—the relationship between science and philosophy has changed too much for that. Despite his current reputation, the man himself seems to have been less interested in metaphysics than in applying algebra to geometry and delving into the innards of cows. He turned to philosophy relatively late in life, and out of fear that the Catholic Church would condemn his science. He would have been surprised at how he is remembered. Most of all, he would have been aghast at the way in which “I think, therefore I am” has been ripped from its context, inflated into a one-sentence summary of his ideas, and turned into something absurd.

As for the “I think, therefore I am” bumper-sticker summarization of Descartes’s philosophy, it seems to have been little more than a throwaway line, published in his “Discourse,” which itself was “merely as a preface to a collection of treatises on optics, meteorology, and geometry.”

In his “Discourse on Method,” which is presented as an intellectual autobiography, Descartes recounts how he aimed to rebuild human knowledge on the firmest foundation. As a first step, to purge himself of error, he tried to cast doubt on as much as possible of what he thought he knew. So he pretended for the sake of argument, as he later put it in his “Meditations on First Philosophy” (1641), that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me.” Since he could not, at this stage of his inquiries, rule out the existence of such a demon, Descartes reasoned that it was possible to doubt all the evidence of his senses. What he thought he saw, heard, and felt might be a dream somehow procured by the evil deceiver. But then, he says, he realized that there was at least one thing that he could not be wrong about; namely, the proposition that he himself existed. The very act of doubting, of wondering where he might have gone astray, showed that he did exist.

This is an entertaining, instructive read.

“Borat”: The Memo George Saunders New Yorker 4 Dec 2006
“The Memo” is a send-up of notes offered in regard to additional content for a mythical Borat DVD. I found this piece especially funny, in part, because it spotlights some of the trickery and condescension in “Borat” that I personally found uncomfortable. Exposing the hypocrisy of a pompous public official, for example, can be a public service and provide entertainment; flummoxing a naive, trusting victim desperately trying to accommodate a stranger, especially when the merry tricksters have exclusive access to the editing equipment, hardly seems a challenge and provides little beyond a cheap, undeserved laugh at the manufactured foolishness of those folks identified in Variety headlines as “local yokels.” Of course, that’s just one guy’s opinion. These excerpts are typical:

RODEO NATIONAL ANTHEM SECTION: Would be great if we had a series of shots where we see hundreds of people in the rodeo audience driving home, in their “pickups” or whatever, troubled at the thought that hundreds of other people in the audience continued to cheer even after the “Bush drinking blood” line. We could focus on one particular couple who have had complicated feelings about the war in Iraq from the beginning, even though they (1) live in the South and (2) enjoy rodeo. (Although too unbelievable?) A nice touch might be: This family sees Borat hitchhiking, picks him up, he sits in back seat of car with kids, takes shit in back seat, then pretends to be humping the family dog, and we see, from their reaction, that they really are rednecks after all.

“GANGSTA” SECTION: The scene where Borat says something intentionally offensive to the inner-city black guys—where is that scene? I have been unable to find it. Here I definitely suggest a reshoot. In the attachment, I have provided a list of common racial slurs that Sacha could try out on “the brothers,” just to see what they do to him. My thought is, that seems to be the ethos of the rest of the film—i.e., Sacha saying/doing the most offensive things possible, in order to elicit a reaction—so I sense a little inconsistency here. Thoughts?

I acknowledge that my take on the movie is a minority viewpoint, but the piece is clever and witty enough to appeal to the 90% of the population who thought the flick was hilarious and politically on target.

Blogs & Newsletters

The Lefsetz Letter
“The Lefsetz Letter” is intense, straightforward and fearless. It’s also funny. Most of all, it’s an insightful look at how the entertainment industry, and especially the music part of that industry, works. Or doesn’t work. Bob Lefsetz’s background is substantial (entertainment industry business attorney, consultant to major labels, head of Sanctuary Music’s American division), but his rants stand on their own merits.

From the blog posts and e-mail newsletter issues I’ve read, I could pull excerpts at random that would, I think, prove impressive. The first excerpt is a portion of the first Lefsetz Letter that was sent my way:

Posted: November 30, 2006
If Stevie Wonder’s album had come out on J, would it have been a hit?

Last night I heard an obscure Stevie Wonder song on XM’s 70s on 7. Actually, not knowing which of the hundreds of XM channels I’d left my tuner on before I’d walked into KLSX, I thought it was a NEW track. And I was reminded how Stevie Wonder’s comeback album last year sank like a stone. Was this because he was washed up, or because the audience had moved on and nobody made them pay ATTENTION!

Tomorrow Jay-Z is going to release HIS comeback album. To make sure no one has forgotten HIM, which might be next to impossible, since he never really left, the man has tied in with Budweiser, Hewlett-Packard, TNT and NASCAR! It’s saturation marketing that only a rapper can get away with. We call it selling out if you’re white, if you’re black, it’s ripping off the man.

Yes, that’s what I learned discussing Jay-Z’s record on KLSX. As long as you don’t compromise who YOU are, don’t change YOURSELF for the man, you can take ALL the money, tie in with EVERYBODY, we, the audience, are ROOTING FOR YOU!

Kind of funny that the audience is rooting for this mega-millionaire. To me it seems desperate. It seems more about the brand than the music. And how important, how cutting edge can the record be, if America’s biggest corporations have endorsed it? You wouldn’t have gotten Miller to feature N.W.A. in an ad when they were urging listeners to fuck tha police. No, to me it appears that mainstream rap has lost its edge, turned into a cartoon, and most people know it, which is why sales have declined so dramatically this year. You’re supposed to buy the music, not the marketing. It’s ASS-BACKWARDS!

But Jay-Z has a profile. What if YOU’VE GOT NO PROFILE!

If you’re over fifty, you remember Stevie Wonder’s heyday. A three album, maybe five album, run that has only been rivaled by the Beatles. Now maybe Mr. Wonder has burned out. Maybe he can’t do it anymore. But Stevie seemed to really want this.

He just went about it the wrong way.

The following is an excerpt from the Lefsetz posting that is current as I write this post:

Did you know the record business is in trouble? Yes, I know it might be hard to believe, but those major labels, presently jockeying for position on the Grammy show, are in desperate straits. You see the public is rejecting their wares. They think mass-produced crap is…JUST THAT! In cahoots with an ever-narrowing radio landscape, the major labels have delivered cartoon-like acts with a sheen so bright it blinds the audience, making them turn away. As far as a major label is concerned, it’s about Top Forty and Top Forty only, in a world where Top Forty is an island in a sea of change, where what’s OUTSIDE Top Forty is so much more important than the mainstream pop and urban fare the hit outlets purvey.

Yes, junior. Music is so tame, so lame, that even MTV NO LONGER AIRS IT! When the supposed arbiter of hip abandons a whole art form, you’ve got to scratch your head, you’ve got to pay attention, you’ve got to say WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON HERE?

Actually, MTV is the culprit. MTV eviscerated the credibility from music. It was like heroin to record execs. Instead of signing and promoting GOOD stuff, INTERESTING stuff, they focused on what MTV would play. Because if MTV played it, they were going on a rocket ship to the MOON! They were gonna sell more records than they ever dreamed of, they were gonna make SHITLOADS of money! Actually, it’s not so different from Detroit focusing on SUVs. To then be eclipsed by the Japanese, who figured out how to sell the luxury-liners AS WELL as econoboxes that made money. Toyota has eclipsed Ford as the number two carmaker. It’s probably gonna surpass GM. Detroit was asleep at the wheel. Its PRODUCTS stunk. And the same thing is gonna happen to the major labels. Oh, their catalogs will sell, but with the Net an open playing field, with the younger generation not even tuning into radio, some young ‘un is gonna come along and steal music just like Bill Gates stole computing from IBM.

Any questions?

Credit Due Department:
Ms Thomas introduced me to the Lefsetz Letter

Footnotes

This use of a book review as an excuse for publishing the pseudo-reviewer’s own views, by the way, is hardly unique to the New Yorker. Heck, The New York Review of Books (which admits to being, in its self-depiction, “The premier literary-intellectual magazine in English language”) fully consists of such articles, the content of each comprises the writer’s own discourses on some subject connected, often by a perilously tenuous and tangential association, with the book being reviewed (90%) and diatribes commending the book’s author as a genius (i.e., being in agreement with the writer of the review) or condemning the book’s author as a fool or a charlatan (i.e., being in disagreement with the writer of the review) (10%) ↩

Show Social Bookmarks