Month: November 2010

Kyle Minor unearths an 1856 letter from Thoreau to Unitarian minister H.G.O. Blake. He expresses dueling opinions on Walt Whitman's 2nd edition of Leaves Of Grass:

There are 2 or 3 pieces in the book which are disagreeable to say the least, simply sensual. He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. I think that men have not been ashamed of themselves without reason. No doubt, there have always been dens where such deeds were unblushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete with their inhabitants.

But even on this side, he has spoken more truth than any American or modern I know. I have found his poem exhilaratingly encouraging. As for its sensuality,–& it may turn out to be less sensual than it appeared–I do not so much wish that those parts were not written, as that men & women were so pure that they could read them without harm, that is, without understanding them. …Of course Walt Whitman can communicate to us no experience, and if we are shocked, whose experience is it that we are reminded of?

Morgan Meis scoffs at and then appreciates Robert Anderson's official Bush portrait:

That can't be serious, I thought to myself when I turned a corner at the Gallery and saw the portrait. The mundane kitsch of the thing was shocking. There are standards. By God there are standards. Aren't there? A vase of flowers sits on the table of a dining room set behind him. The set is more middlebrow than anything you could find even at a mainstream outfit like IKEA. It is a set you'd find, I suppose, at Jennifer Convertibles. The whole scene is resolutely suburban. Aggressively suburban. The portrait is, essentially, a Sears portrait. Hanging at The National Portrait Gallery, not too far from where Elaine de Kooning's Modernist rendering of JFK can be found, is a Sears portrait of the 43rd President of the United States of America.

The more I looked at it, the more my admiration grew. Say what you like about George W. Bush, but that dummy is no dummy. Any other painting, any other style, any other approach would have been ridiculous. But how do you ridicule a Sears portrait that really and truly presents itself as nothing other than a Sears portrait?

(Image: by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Ed Vulliamy reports the convoluted details of the drug war in Tijuana: 

It emerged when Alejandro talked to his family, says [his mother] Cristina, that the confessions were coerced, and that the general had played a vile game with his quarry: “The soldiers,” she recalls, “used electric shocks on his eyes and feet, and burned him with cigarettes and lighters to get him to talk."

Earlier reporting on this topic here.

Mark Vernon writes on the divine and the physics of time. Augustine saw God as definitionally changeless through time. That idea is now under attack:

Polkinghorne borrows another notion, from process thought. In process thought, change is not regarded with the suspicion that it is in the Platonic thought of Augustine. Change might be for the better — as evolution seems to imply, with its tendency to greater complexity and the emergence of consciousness, and then the moral sensibilities of self-consciousness. Surely, such change is a good thing. What this implies, for Polkinghorne, is that God can’t know the future because the future is not fully determined by the present. There is genuine novelty in the universe.

But where does that leave God?

Subject to time too. God’s perfect knowledge of the universe is not absolute omniscience but current omniscience: God knows about what exists, not about what doesn’t yet exist.

The two theologians argue that this apparent limitation on God is a distinctively Christian notion. It’s called kenosis, and is revealed in the incarnation of Jesus when, as Paul’s letter to the Philippians has it, Christ emptied himself of his divine (eternal) nature and became human (temporal). God does so out of love, in order to be alongside his creation.

A reader writes:

On the question of Marco Rubio: I'm half-Cuban and have family spread out across the East Coast – New Jersey and Florida mostly, one branch in Illinois – and though most of them are officially Catholic, some of them definitely either attend Baptist churches or donate to Baptist organizations, foundations, etc. They seem to mostly hew to Catholic doctrine and what you might call Catholic culture, but are far more like the Baptists in terms of how they express their religious faith or how they see the image of God. I've had quite a few debates over Thanksgiving to resolve exactly this kind of stuff.

Goldblog responds to Nicolette Hahn Niman and explains why he doesn't want us to eat either:

What [Niman] fails to mention anywhere in her argument is another fundamental difference between pigs and dogs: Pigs are smart, whereas dogs are dumb, which is why it was so easy for humans to domesticate them in the first place. Science has proven that pigs are among the smartest animals on the planet (up there with dolphins and non-human primates) and one consequence of having a brain is that pigs, as Jonathan Safran Foer has shown, can sense that they are destined to die well before they are actually slaughtered. …

Dogs should not be eaten because of their unique qualities and their unique relationship with humans, but pigs should not be eaten because they are noble and intelligent creatures.

Obligatory scene above.

Joyce Gemperlein reports on the disturbing trend of faking a terminal illness to get support over the internet:

Examples of this type of hoax are plentiful and include the well-known case of “April Rose,” in which a Michigan woman drew the support of conservative Christians when, in 2009, she wrote extensively — and “beautifully,” according to Feldman — of carrying a fetus with a terminal disease rather than undergo an abortion.

After attention, apparel and money was sent her way, she posted a picture of herself holding what she said was the dead child. The hoax came to an end after a doll maker in New York recognized the “baby” as a lifelike toy that she herself owned.

"The Old Dwelling" by Charles Henry Crandall appeared in The Atlantic in June of 1891:

See how the dwelling trembles to its fall, —
    The wondrous house of life, now leased to death
    How softly in and out moves the light breath,
And gently in the tender-memoried hall
Speaks the loved owner, soon beyond recall!
    In the fast-closing windows glimmereth
    A dying glory, as when sunset saith
Good-night, sweet dreams, and faith and hope to all.

Thus, full of enterprise and joyous trust,
    Perched on a sill, serene and plumed for flight,
        A dove will pause, while ruin round it lies.
So, too, dear soul, although the house be dust,
    Yet thou thyself, now free as morning light,
        Canst find another home, ‘neath other skies.

(Image via 3QD by JR, Action in Phnom Penh, House in the Water – close up, Old Station Habitations, Cambodia. 2009)

Says Nick Carr:

By encouraging us to think of sharing as "collaborative consumption" and of our intellectual capacities as "cognitive surplus," the technologies of the web now look like they will have, as their ultimate legacy, the spread of market forces into the most intimate spheres of human activity.

Or perhaps more prosaically put: six years is long enough to do something for nothing. Alan Jacobs is particularly worried about the "commodification of intimacy":

On some level we all know this is happening: no thoughtful person can possibly believe that Mark Zuckerberg’s crusade for “radical transparency” is a genuine Utopian ethic; we know that he’s articulating a position that, if widely accepted, yields maximum revenue for Facebook. But we are just beginning to think about how radically transparent we are becoming, and if Nick Carr is right, we very much need some “web revolutionaries” who really are revolutionary in their repudiation of these trends.

In other words, the problem isn't the businessmen who want to dig around in our brains — of course the business world wants to dig around in our brains: haven't you seen “Mad Men”? — the problem is the failure of influential wired intellectuals to provide the necessary corrective pushback.

I'm not as cynical as Alan is on Zuckerberg. I think he finds online personal transparency liberating – and it can be for many. I'm also puzzled at what wired intellectuals can do to provide pushback. The web is a strange paradox: terribly personal and intimate and yet also infinitely large. You relate to what you read here quite personally – you are often reading it at work or alone, and at this moment, it's between you and me. We could do this for free, of course, and for a long time did. But the commodification of this process allows it to be professionalized. I'm not sure why any intellectual wanting to pay the rent would want to push back on this.