Just read on a new urinal in a university bathroom: “Saves 88% more water than a one-gallon urinal.” Since most urinals (the functioning ones, I mean) USE water (well, some don’t use water at all), a more accurate statement would be: “Uses 88% less water than a one-gallon urinal.” But this would imply that one still uses water, whereas the first statement hopes the pee-er accepts the far-fetched notion that the company is a redeemer redux who is helping you save the planet when nature calls. Welcome to the moral flush. How much water and energy it took to design and produce these automatic valves, repair them when they malfunction, get rid of the old ones cannot and should not enter calculations, I suppose. It is a bit worrisome to see well-intentioned and important sustainability plans become part of modes of forced consumption parading behind facile ethics.
All posts by Gildas Hamel
UC notion of a townhall
A message from the UC Oakland cloud just came announcing that there will be a Web Town Hall on UC Benefits on Friday, Sept. 24, 2010, from 10:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
UC leaders will host this online town hall meeting to talk with faculty, staff and retirees about post-employment benefits, health care costs, UC’s budget and other university issues. It is presented as an opportunity for faculty, staff and retirees to ask questions about UC benefits and share concerns.
That word “sharing” is beginning to sound like an insult and the medium of the message indicates it is too much of an opportunity. It will be a “live, interactive webcast” farmed out to a company called “ustream”. You log on, sign name, address, etc, so you are on yet another facebook-like crap-machine and can ask questions and submit comments.
What happened to the real live meetings where representatives of unions and associations are deputied to ask real UC members’ questions, ranked and organized, rather than have this sharing soup?
Epic and tragedy in the Bible
To my old question regarding the absence of the tragic form in the Hebrew Bible—I’m thinking of the mise à plat of the injustices and cruelties perpetrated in the Davidic royal house—, one answer is that the epic genre was abandoned by the Judean writers of the sixth and fifth centuries because its purpose was to sing heroes and kings (preferably winning ones). By the time the writer(s) of the books of Samuel and Kings were putting those books together as we have them, perhaps in competition with the authors of the books of Chronicles, where were the heroes and kings to be sung? Long gone. Add to this internal reason the fact and cruel reminder that the Assyrian, Babylonian, or Persian religious and political structures were most recognizable by their use of the epic genre, it was so necessary to them, as it had been to the little Israelite, Judaean and neighboring Aramaean kingdoms as long as they lived the life of kingdoms, that one of these, badly beaten (and repeatedly so), when it set about to recast its own stories about the world, couldn’t sing them, not without kings, without victories, without much of a pantheon.
The re-imagining and re-writing of Hebrew mythology implied a critical evaluation of divine forces and led to a giving up or relinquishing of the incantatory mode, at least in the recounting of human deeds. [Contra: as for the only king left in the new scheme of things, namely the dethroned divinity, think of Psalms, including the psalms of ascent especially, or Psalm 51 on David. In what way are they different?] This abandonment of the epic form in the telling of the origins of the world, did it not lead to—or: wasn’t it part of—a broader impossibility, namely the embellishment of the kind of human actions and stories found in classical tragedy? In contradistinction, see Aristotle’s commendation, regarding the need and appropriatedness of making things more beautiful, heroic, and more appealing than they could be or have been:
Since tragedy is a representation of men better than ourselves we must copy the good portrait-painters who, while rendering the distinctive form and making a likeness, yet paint people better than they are. It is the same with the poet. (Poetics 1448b.25 and especially 1454b.8–14, translation by Hamilton Fyfe, LCL)
Nobility, courage, cowardice, treason, pusillanimity, etc… were not the only driving forces for the author(s) of the book of Genesis or Kings, however, because they could not be.
Portland cello project
I just listened to three cello pieces done by the Portland Cello Project and loved them. Titles: Turkish Wine, Mouth for War, Halo 3 Theme.
Le pain des rêves
Quote from Louis Guilloux’s La confrontation (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 60–61:
Mon dieu que faut-il de plus à un homme qu’un toit pour le garantir de la grêle? Le feu, sans lequel le toit n’est rien. Çà et là je voyais fumer des cheminées. Mais le feu et le toit ne sont rien sans le pain. Il y avait partout des champs prêts pour les semailles. Oui, mais … et les rêves? Qui manque de pain ne rêve plus d’autre chose et quelle est la première des choses? Le pain ou le rêve? Et qu’est-ce que tout cela sans la laine? Surtout sans la main qui travaille et qui donne, qui caresse et qui protège…
Rise of monotheism
On Jan Assmann’s Of God and gods: Egypt, Israel, and the rise of monotheism (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 2008). Assmann keeps talking about Moses as a symbolic, not historical character, which is fine, but I find more exact to speak of the story about Moses, of the authors of that story… About violence: Assmann tackles the passage about Phinehas in Numbers 25, and wants to show that one alluring aspect of polytheistic culture was the participation in feasting, i.e. sacrifices, to the gods of Moab (p. 116). But more than that was involved in the story of violence attributed to Phinehas. The background to the telling of the story is that the sharing of other gods in the ancient world was by the same token the sharing of women, the contracting with other families who had their own privileged access to gods and goddesses (clear for instance from their proximity to temples), and therefore the “sharing” of access to land and labor. Exilic Israel authors of the sixth and fifth c. BC, in this kind of stories, made virtue out of necessity, i.e., turned the impossibility of the conquest of lands and therefore the uselessness of adopting other gods, into a virtue or blessing, and finally a mark, as well defended as the normal conquest (by war, alliance, translation or translatability of gods). But this type of thinking, and reinforcement stories, could only follow other starker needs: to explain how and why their ethnic god still protected them and had a role to play.
Orchard
Vieux verger? Talus, et de l’autre côté? clairière dans ces herbes folles. Vieux troncs pourrissants, sureaux à sarbacanes, et ruisseau possible dans le lointain, c’est-à-dire argent et “surpassing” fluidité au fond d’un village plein. Champ au-delà: lin comme dans “derniers champs de lin”. Et ces quelques violettes inattendues. Qu’est-ce qui est inattendu? La rondeur des feuilles, le vert ni trop sombre ni trop clair qui équilibre mon idée du vert, la façon dont ces feuilles forment parapluie, et les fleurs elles-mêmes à découvrir dans le bouquet. Loin / dans un endroit innommable, une marge. Et le parfum? Le vent? C’est ce qu’il faudrait dire.
Country road, take me home!
Far away in Santa Cruz, we talk, walk, joke about old bones, share a hamburger, potato salad and pie, feel hearts beat and expand and dance.
Real presence
Catholic and Protestant views of real presence are still opposed and played with by the most surprising of authors, who surely would rebel against the idea of being cast in theologians’ roles. But here is for instance Segal, a specialist of ancient theater:
The major interpretative division that affects (and afflicts) classicists … is that between a historicist and a linguisti-semiotic model. In the former the text contains a message (however complex) about a world outside itself that the critic can discover. In the latter the text is a construct of conventions and operations which relate to other families of texts (other such constructs) rather than to a final historical truth. Meaning, in the semiotic model, is not something immanent in the text itself; it is a construct dependent on the context(s) into which the interpreter decodes the text’s networks of relations (psychological, political, sociological, etc.).[1]
It is a language of theologians! The fire and smoke—more of the second than the first—of structuralism, post-structuralism and post-modernism have dissipated. The fundamental problem remains: does the rose have a smell, that I recognize and yet find potent and mysterious in the act of smelling it (and calling others to share), or is it all a figure of un-reachable realities (still, Lutheran or Kantian realities)? Real presence or pure figuration?
[1]Article in the collection by Hexter and Selden, Innovations of antiquity (New York: Routledge, 1992), 444–45.
The brilliance of quoting
Montaigne’s passage below still applies, surprisingly, to modern and post-modern critics:
The injudicious writers of our century who scatter about their valueless works whole passages from old authors, in order to increase their own reputations, do just the reverse. For the infinitely greater brilliance of the ancients makes their own stuff look so pale, dull, and ugly that they lose much more than they gain.