As part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, The New York Review of Books has been digging into their archives, and recently showcased Hannah Arendt’s classic 1969 essay, “Reflections on Violence.” This passage seems especially relevant:
Violence, being instrumental by nature, is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end which must justify it. And since when we act we never know with any amount of certainty the eventual consequences of what we are doing, violence can remain rational only if it pursues short-term goals…
[T]he danger of the practice of violence, even if it moves consciously within a non-extremist framework of short-term goals, will always be that the means overwhelm the end. If goals are not achieved rapidly, the result will not merely be defeat but the introduction of the practice of violence into the whole body politic. Action is irreversible, and a return to the status quo in case of defeat is always unlikely. The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
Recent Dish coverage of the new film about Arendt here and here.
Colin Marshall digs up Wes Anderson’s first short film, the 13-minute Bottle Rocket:
In the late nineties, Anderson and his collaborators found themselves in a position to make their beloved breakthrough Rushmore on the strength of its predecessor Bottle Rocket, their 1996 feature debut. But even that film, a now-appreciated but then little-seen story of three deeply amateur criminals on the run through the green open spaces of Texas starring now-famous acting brothers Owen and Luke Wilson, followed another. Four years earlier, Anderson and Owen Wilson, who’d met in a playwriting class at the University of Texas, Austin, put together the thirteen-minute short you see here. It tries out the concept of thieves in training, albeit in a very different style from the one we’ve come to regard, over twenty years later, as Andersonian.
Marshall adds:
Wes, if you read this, know that I’d like to see you do something in black-and-white again. With a jazz score.
Danielle King profiles “Frank,” a successful pot dealer in Florida, and wonders what will happen to him and his ilk as acceptance of cannabis spreads:
The statewide legalization now playing out in Colorado and Washington will present us with a fascinating case study, though it’s hard to tell how quickly or effectively this will scale to the rest of the country. Even if they’re not much on voters’ minds, it’s worth asking what decriminalization would do to reliable suppliers. What will become of the Franks of the world when they have to compete with folks who have business licenses and pay income taxes?
Though Frank has legions of loyal buyers, there’s a lot of vulnerability in his model. One day in the future, federal lawmakers and their state-level counterparts will vote to make smoking weed legal. Soon after comes the legalization (and aggressive regulation) of the sale of cannabis. …
What if government pot smokes the way that “government cheese” tastes?
Might we be required to present our driver’s licenses to purchase tightly restrained amounts of shake weed at higher prices to cover the sales tax? Given our track record with cigarettes and alcohol, and the way control over those markets is exerted by the Big Three tobacco companies or the Anheuser-Busch conglomerate, there’s a clear potential for monopolization. The enterprising, shirtless, teenaged stoner dealer only a text away could disappear entirely. And what then will happen to the culture of weed smoking, as it evolves from something wholly outside the law into something available at your local gas station?
But whether it’s bravado, experience, or the combination of the two, Frank isn’t worried: “Well, I guess it would kill a lot of the fun in getting a buzz if you could just buy it at a store. There’s something cool about your first pickup, meeting a guy in a parking lot and having him jump in your backseat. I don’t think I’m too worried, though. Good business won’t get run out by new business. You’re only in trouble if the new guy is better than you. And there’s not really a lot of business, at least here, that’s better than me. That’s not arrogance, it’s just the truth.”
Debate rages over what type of older women pair up with younger men:
In an April paper in the Review of Economics and Statistics, University of Colorado economists Hani Mansour and Terra McKinnish analyzed census, health, and cognitive data on thousands of married couples to test common stereotypes about cougars and their more traditional counterparts, sugar daddies (older, wealthy men who marry young, attractive women). They found that couples in which one partner is significantly older than the other scored lower on measures of attractiveness, income, education, and intelligence, than couples in which both partners were similar in age. …
But economist Melvyn Coles isn’t convinced. He and University of Essex colleague Marco Francesconi wrote in a 2011 paper that the cougar phenomenon, while still rare, has been growing since 1970 and is more likely to occur when the woman has higher levels of education and professional success. Looking at data from the United Kingdom and the United States, they reported that unions in which the woman is five or more years older than the man increased from about about three percent in 1970 to more than eight percent in 2000. Digging deeper into this subset, and including women who had divorced as well as those in their first marriage, they found that women with higher education and professional levels are 45 percent more likely than the average woman to be in what they call a “toyboy” relationship.
Richard J. Williams suspects that architects have underestimated a key component of human nature:
It’s odd how little architects have had to say on the subject of sex. If they’re routinely designing the buildings in which sex happens, then you might expect them to spend more time thinking about it. Buildings frame and house our sexual lives. They tell us where and when we can, and cannot, have sex, and with whom. To escape buildings for sex — to use a park, a beach, or the back seat of a car — is a transgression of one kind or another. Most of us keep sex indoors and out of sight. …
According to [sex therapist Esther] Perel, sex wastes time, needs space, and (most intriguingly) is inhibited by too much intimacy. All these things have implications for architecture, which in the West has been coloured by the language of efficiency for at least a century.
His proposal?
For me, the ideal would be some form of co-housing, the best-known example being Sættedammen in Denmark, established in 1972 (with the founding creed: ‘Children should have 100 parents’). It occupies the right space between the wilder forms of intentional community, and market-dominated individualism. It doesn’t explicitly challenge sexual norms. However, by providing shared facilities (childcare, gyms, swimming pools, saunas, rooms for parties), it provides time and space to play, and addresses the deficits that Esther Perel identified as inhibiting our sexual lives (sex loves to waste time, remember).
But I’d add some sort of therapeutic role, too. If we were to live more communally, we would need help to resolve inevitable interpersonal conflicts. The odd thing is that we already strongly value co-housing, albeit in an occasional and time-limited form. University students live like this, and we do the same thing on holiday; both forms seem to provide a better emotional environment in which to explore and develop primary relationships — including sexual ones. If we can accept such communal living for some of our lives, why not the rest of the time? Then we might have an architecture that actually supports, rather than impedes, our sexual lives.
Fifty years after her suicide, Terry Castle reflects on the enduring controversies surrounding the life, death, and work of Sylvia Plath:
What to make of it all after half a century? From one angle Plath had only herself to blame for the rhetorical excess she provoked—and still does provoke—in readers. She was crazy, after all. Even fifty years on, the gruesome mental suffering that she wrote about continues to pierce and frighten and exasperate.
In her defense: Plath used the pain as best she could. Though attempts over the decades to see her as a protofeminist oracle fail to convince, it has to be said that Plath’s writing captured the central and most disturbing psychic component in the lives of conventional middle-class American heterosexual women of the 1950s and early 1960s: a toxic, typically unconscious longing—sadomasochistic in structure—to be both adored and degraded, cherished and abjected, by a powerful man resembling one’s father. The fantasy contaminates (and sickens) any number of now-canonical Plath poems:
“Electra on the Azalea Path,” “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” “Medusa,” “Cut,” “Daddy,” “The Jailer,” “Lady Lazarus”—all those kitsch near-masterpieces that make the poet a sensation still (sometimes) among bulimic female undergraduates. Plath exposed, as no one had before, the quintessential “nice girl” sex-anguish of her time: a mode of female desiring as incoherent, narcissistic, passive-aggressive, and self-canceling as it was misogynistic, daddy-obsessed, and morbidly heterosexual.
But one shrinks at the ugliness and hysteria of the vision. Most off-putting, to my mind, is the way Plath made a repugnant and meticulously curated longing for death feel sexy and sublime. At least, that is, for a minute or two. Like Sylvia and Ted [Hughes] colliding at St. Botolph’s, Eros and Thanatos not only lock eyes in Plath’s poems, they’re already so far gone—so mad and humpy with crazy love—that we know they’ll end up killing each other. One doesn’t wish to remain too long in close proximity.
Daniel Lende searches for a middle ground on neuroscience amidst a mounting backlash against the field. He tries to streamline current controversies by citing Professor Nikolas Rose, seen above:
One tension highlighted by Rose is whether the “psy complex” (the fields from the 20th century focused on psychology and mind) will be overtaken by a “neuro complex” in the 21st century. In one sense, that’s what the big fight going on right now is about. Will the autonomous self, with self-control and rationality and an accompanying unconscious, be replaced by a reductive brain? How will one century’s core understanding give way to a new type of materialism, united around ideas of circuits, whether those are neural or technological?
We like to think that our thoughts are inside. We reveal them to others by making them external in the form of action, words, writings, messages and the like. That’s all well and good for describing ordinary life. We can keep secrets. We can publicize our deepest yearnings. But actually, there is no inside. Or rather, use any device you like — from the scalpel to the brain scan — and you won’t find meaning, significance, value, in the head, just as you won’t find value in the coin’s material body. The very inside/outside distinction breaks down.
Lende asks, “Does this mean that, as Marshall McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message? That the circuit is the mind?”:
In my research, that conflict can boil down to whether addiction is primarily a brain problem or a societal problem. And yet all my years of work have convinced me time and again that addiction is both. And that’s the rub. If we take Noe seriously, and we break down the inside/outside distinction, then how do we still make sense of addiction? … One idea is to break the fundamental linkage of mind as defining person, this legacy of the 20th century. Addiction is not defined by the person, and thus the mind (and from there, now, thus the brain). Rather, addiction is a pattern of activity where brain and society meet, and relies on both at once. …
[F]or neuroscience, the funny thing is how much they’ve bought into the “psy complex.” Use the brain to explain the mind, and you’ve found the holy grail. But that’s last century’s holy grail. The middle ground isn’t the mind, whether explained by brain or by society. The middle ground is simply where we live our lives.
Previous Dish on the subject here, here, and here.
This year, we developed an ambitious aesthetic based upon the idea of double exposure, inspired by Alabaster’s amazing track and the conference’s program design. We worked around the theme of binary, juxtaposing the urban sprawl and nature, black and white, flight and fall, and unification and disintegration. It was a labour of love and we couldn’t be prouder with the end result.
The Guardian talked to seven well-known writers about their missteps in life and literature. Julian Barnes has refined his understanding of failure:
When I was growing up, failure presented itself as something clear and public: you failed an exam, you failed to clear the high-jump bar. And in the grown-up world, it was the same: marriages failed, your football team failed to gain promotion from what was then the Third Division (South). Later, I realised that failure could also be private and hidden: there was emotional, moral, sexual failure; the failure to understand another person, to make friends, to say what you meant. But even in these new areas, the binary system applied: win or lose, pass or fail. It took me a long time to understand the nuances of success and failure, to see how they are often intertwined, how success to one person is failure to another.
Lionel Shriver looks on the bright side:
I’m fascinated by failure, a far more difficult experience to ride out with grace than victory, which tends to bring out the best in all but gloating arseholes: magnanimity, generosity, ease, confidence, joy, relaxation, energy, festivity, and a positive outlook. In contrast, failure naturally elicits bitterness, resentment, dolour, enervation, listlessness, pessimism and low self‑esteem – a pretty ugly package. Yet, against the odds, it’s possible to fail well – to rise above the unpleasant basket of emotions that come with the territory and to not allow disappointment to sour one’s very soul. I am bowled over by the massive number of remarkable people who face down the fact that no, they are not going to be film directors, famous artists or billionaire entrepreneurs and still come out the other side as cheerful, decent, gracious human beings. As emotional achievements go, that is much more impressive than making a go of something and avoiding becoming a complete jerk.
A baby orangutan is seen during a birthday celebration at the Singapore Zoo. Home to more than 2,800 animal specimens from over 300 species, 26% of which are threatened, the zoo has attained a strong reputation internationally for its conservation initiatives and breeding programmes. The zoo celebrated its 40th anniversary on Thursday. By Suhaimi Abdullah/Getty Images.
The Dish 