"Two Well-Dressed Men"

 In October 1986, television news anchor Dan Rather suffered a bizarre tragedy that has become the stuff of urban legend. Walking through New York City, he was set upon by two strangers, whom he described at the time as "well-dressed men." The two men started badgering him, repeating the mysterious phrase: "What is the frequency, Kenneth?" Or: "Kenneth, what is the frequency?" Rather explained that they must have him confused with someone else. They refused to listen to him, instead repeating the same question and chasing him down the street. Eventually, they started hitting him. Rather was only saved, after a brutal beating, by the intervention of a building superintendent in the place he had sought shelter. 

The story is a sad and frightening one, but in at least one sense hardly unusual. Since the era of de-institutionalization—when the enlightened public in its wisdom decided that instead of forcibly incarcerating the mentally ill, it would lurch wildly along a different vector of inhumanity and simply turn people out on the street to fend for themselves—since then, I say, the fate of being accosted on the street by strangers muttering incoherencies is unfortunately not uncommon, in any of our great American cities. 

Retrogression

 For my 33rd birthday—the start of my rosy crucifixion year—my dad compiled a slideshow of all the photos of me he could find on his computer, arranged in roughly chronological order. I was deeply touched by the gesture, but somewhat destabilized by the result. Not that I objected to each and every photo of myself. But seeing still images from your life arranged in sequence, you can't help but interpret them as a kind of story. And the story this sequence seemed to be telling was one of potential unrealized and promise unfulfilled. 

More specifically: there was a long sequence of photos at the beginning showing me as an adorable child. What a normal-looking and perfectly acceptable person, I thought. What promise! His whole life ahead of him. Then, it's like you can almost pinpoint the moment where it all starts to go wrong. And this coincides, of course, with the onset of puberty. 

A Science for Our Times

 The meta-fictional experiments of the latter half of the twentieth century emerged from a widely-felt sense that realistic literature had reached an impasse. John Barth spoke of a "literature of exhaustion," declaring that old-fashioned narrative prose concerning characters and events had hit a dead end, exhausted its potential, and otherwise—as he put it—"just about shot its bolt[.]" 

One gets the sense that this conviction had something to do with the emergence of new technologies of ever-increasing complexity. What was to be the status, writers feared, of the "work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction"?—to use the resonant title of Walter Benjamin's essay. Italo Calvino, an exemplar of the new metafictional techniques, pictures in one scene (of his If on a winter's night a traveler...) a reader strapped to a series of electrodes monitoring her neurological reactions to each word and passage of the book she is consuming. Why? So that a computer can generate the perfectly-pitched novel designed to achieve maximum responsiveness from the human mind. 

Errata and Marginalia 021: Morris

Wright Morris, The Field of Vision (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press: 1974); originally published 1956.

In his utterly unique and strange novel The Plains, Gerald Murnane imagines a mysterious place somewhere in the inland of Australia (a stand-in for the Outback, perhaps, but unlike the real Outback in several key respects). Though arid and largely static as a society, this great empty wasteland nonetheless regards itself as the cultural center of the nation: so much so, that it has even divided itself into militant factions in strife with one another over the exact reason and justifications for the region's title to civilizational preeminence. 

The piece is, among other things, a satire upon the chauvinism and parochialism of every cultural bloc. Even an empty barren country in the middle of nowhere, Murnane seems to be saying, regards itself as the center of the universe. 

Adulting

 This week I finally got around to transferring my vehicle registration to my new state of residence; what amazed me about myself in the process is that I actually got it done-- all in less than a complete afternoon. I had already picked up the title to my vehicle from the storage unit in another state where it was housed, so I basically just had to show up at the county treasurer's office and submit my paperwork. They hit me when I did so with a $75 fee: an expense I had not factored into my mental budgeting for the month. But instead of procrastinating the payment, walking away, or weeping over the injustice of it all, I paid it.

Then the next hurdle appeared. I had my new license plates in hand. But I had no readily-provided way to attach them to my car. The old plates were still bolted into the frame with flat-headed screws inaccessible to any ordinary screwdriver. I went at them with a pair of simple pliers but I couldn't get them to budge. My tool kit at home had nothing that could affect them. Once again, I considered railing against the injustice of fate. I contemplated weeping. I thought: maybe I'll just give up and drive around with my MA plates for a few more weeks and deal with all this later. 

Plato's Republic, Shortened

  So there's this guy named Thrasymachus. He's disgusting, odious, always stuffing his face and belching, because that's what sophists do. He's like, "Socrates, you think you're so clever. But you know what I think? I think morality is just a social construct determined by whoever holds power in a given society." And Socrates is like, "Oh, you do, do you? Well, I'm just a humble teacher, what do I know about anything? But first, how do you define morality? How are you defining virtue? How are you defining vice? And by following through the logical consequences of those terms, haven't you just said that vice is a virtue and virtue a vice and thereby lost yourself in a welter of contradictions?" "Alright, you win this round, Socrates," says Thrasymachus. He exits stage left, in tears. 

Glaucon and a bunch of other people are like, "Ha ha, good one, Socrates. You sure showed him. But seriously. Trolling the sophists is always good fun. Owning Thrasymachus is always good sport. But can you tell us: what's the actual answer? How do we know morality isn't just a social construct again? Do you have an argument that isn't just based on semantics, tautologies, and definitions?" Then Socrates is like: "Well, I'm just a humble teacher. What do I know about anything? But, we can definitely say this much: the human soul must be a lot like a city." 

The Second Night

 Last year, my mother, sister, and I took a trip to Las Vegas to see the Korean pop band BTS in concert. It turned out to be auspiciously timed--we didn't know it when we signed up, but it proved actually to be one of the last opportunities to see the boys in concert before they parted ways to focus on solo projects and complete their mandatory military service. 

As part of our preparations for the trip, we had to decide how many of the band's concerts we wanted to see during our weekend in town. My sister was for attending both shows two nights in a row-- we were traveling all that way primarily to see them, was her thinking, so why not make the most of it? I, however, felt I could not tolerate that heavy of a dose. I would be bored to tears by seeing the same show and listening to the same songs two nights running. "You both go to the second show if you want to," I said. "I'll just do my own thing the second night."

"Quicksilver in a nest of cracks"

A character in Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1918 novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, makes a stunningly true observation at one point, in speaking of his overbearing nephew—the protagonist of the tale, George Amberson Minafer: "the most arrogant people that I've known have been the most sensitive. The people who have done the most in contempt of other people's opinion, and who consider themselves the highest above it, have been the most furious if it went against them. Arrogant and domineering people can't stand the least, lightest, faintest breath of criticism."

It strikes me that this seeming paradox was the same I once tried to explain in an earlier blog post, apropos of our then-president Trump and his legions of followers. What most puzzled me about them was how disproportionate their rage seemed in light of the actual hand they had been dealt by life. Trump, after all, is a child of privilege; whatever American society offers of fame, glitz, and power, he has gobbled up with far too few obstacles in his path. And his followers, though often mythologized as somehow disenfranchised, always show up in demographic surveys as among the relatively advantaged. 

How could anyone join them for "Love"?

 A friend sent me a link to a piece in the New Yorker headlined: "The Case for Wearing Masks Forever." I automatically applauded, having read no further. I'm one of the few people in my social circle—and the only one in my 1L class—who still wears a mask every day in public settings, and I have long argued that routine masking should become a new social norm in the pandemic era. The article's headline was therefore one I could whole-heartedly endorse.

When I actually opened and read the piece, however, it turned out not to be an opinion column arguing for the proposition in its title. Rather, it is a profile of an ad hoc group of activists calling themselves "the People's CDC," and the author ultimately manages to make them seem rather silly. I can't tell how much of this is simply the journalists' power to shape a narrative. The piece, though it is not by Isaac Chotiner, nonetheless pursues a very Chotiner-esque strategy of allowing one's subject to speak up to the point at which they make themselves ridiculous.