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For those who are not aware, today is—besides International Weed Smoking Day and Hitler's Birthday—the 10th anniversary of the "incident" at Columbine High School. It's an odd trifecta of coinciding anniversaries and, added to the gloomy weather here, unhelpful in distilling any sort of positive vibes from the day. This particular Columbine anniversary also means that it's been ten years since I graduated high school, as I was also a senior when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attempted to "out-mayhem" Tim McVeigh's demolition of Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building.
What? Did you just ask me to define "out-mayhem"? Why didn't I just call it a "school shooting" like so many people have done for the past ten years? Well, I'll leave the nuts and bolts of this to journalist Dave Cullen, whose new, exhaustively researched book, Columbine explains nearly everything you could possibly want to know about this seminal closing event of 20th century America. I say "nearly everything" because there are some things nobody will ever know about this, but Mr. Cullen seems to know all the rest.
Having come of age during a period of media-induced fear and hype over school shootings I'm sure I'm not alone in being a bit morbidly fascinated with them. Combine that with my sociology background and picking up this book was a no-brainer. I had done some minor researching into Columbine a year or so ago and it was Cullen's original stories for Slate that initially caught my attention (though I didn't make the connection when I first picked up the book) and had me thinking differently about the whole ordeal. Columbine wasn't a school shooting perpetrated by some disaffected loners; this was a botched massacre whose plan was hatched by one popular, intelligent—though psychopathic—kid with an intense hatred of mankind and his suicidally unstable friend.
The evidence for this is now overwhelming, but it wasn't easy unearthing it. Though Cullen was there from the beginning, he outlines how the county sheriff mangled the investigation and did a similarly poor job trying to cover up that fact. Many myths surrounding the shootings that are still taken as gospel are exposed to extreme scrutiny and none of them survive. The mass media—a few local papers excepted—did an incredibly poor job of separating facts from a good storyline and it was those early mistakes faulty judgment that spiraled chaotically into the school shooting narrative familiar today.
Cullen's book is valuable not only as a history of the actual event and a record of all the threads that became knotted this day ten years ago, but also as social reading of mass media and information dissemination. The narrative took on a life of its own that defied clearly contrary evidence and fed back into the ongoing tale of sterile, fearful suburbia. Utilizing the personal effects of the two killers, Cullen revealed the true nature of Eric and Dylan, the psychopath and the seeker who practically dared the folks around them to discover their heinous plot. The two who, because of the faulty profiling of the "school-shooter type", were able to plan their attack because, frankly, most people never suspected them as the loners ready to snap (one mother, whose warnings were ignored, excepted).
Columbine is one of the best non-fiction works I've read in a while and there's little doubt that Cullen poured all his energy into making it a work of art. His portraits of all the involved parties, from the parents to administrators to teachers to fellow students to law enforcement, are sympathetic and caustic in all the right proportion. And while there are clearly parties that are more at fault than others, Cullen never sinks to any immature blame games. The descriptions of psychopathy are engrossingly chilling and the pain of all the affected families and individuals bites the reader no matter how much you try and disengage. A commendable achievement in journalism and a noteworthy work of social history.
The other day I was shelving books at work and came across Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. It was the subtitle, "The Experience of Modernity," that actually caught my eye, as I tend to gravitate toward any work that demonstrates a willingness to explore our epoch's deepest paradoxes. During my short stint at The New School For Social Research, we had to take a core curriculum class called, "What Is Modernity?" Since then I've been endlessly fascinated with definitions of modernism, postmodernism and the debates between adherents and critics of both. (Personally, I'm of the belief that "postmodernism," or the postmodern condition," is merely a minor stage of the "modern" era, but I don't have the room to explicate all this here.)
I wasn't sure what to expect from Berman's book, since it's shelved in the Literary Criticism section, but flipping through I immediately had to sit down and start reading (a luxury I actually have at work). Part One focuses on Goethe's Faust as the premier work that spans the fissures out of which the modern era has grown. Unfortunately, I've never read Faust, though as soon as I have time I'm doing so. Most people are familiar with the terms "faustian" or "a faustian" bargain, but Berman points out that all too often those terms are used poorly and in situations that don't quite fit the allegorical mold. Anyway, that's not what I'm writing about at the moment (though with some more time to think, maybe I will in the future).
While I was intrigued by Part One and stormed through it, I was really looking forward to reading Part Two, which revolves around The Communist Manifesto. I can't tell you how many times I've read this work, and my own copy (in The Marx-Engels Reader) is highlighted and marked up beyond recognition. Berman's take on it is fascinating, and now I'm going to have to read it all again. He describes it as the first true work of art of the modernist period despite the fact that it is all but ignored when works of Marx's contemporaries—like Baudelaire, Flaubert, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky—are discussed.
Berman notes that Marx was stunningly prescient in envisioning the course of the bourgeois project. In fact, Marx, more than any of capitalism's cheerleaders, makes the case for the world-altering power of capital and its never-before-seen ability to liberate people from the binds of previous social and religious systems. Capitalism was (and is) notoriously unstable, though while Marx saw this as virtue, it was a facet that the major proponents of the emerging system kept shushed in the corner, out of the spotlight.
To this day you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone writing about the transformative glories of capitalism with the same poetic gusto with which Marx wrote. However, Marx believed that this transformative power, this era in which "all that is solid melts into air," would lead to continuous revolutions and the rise of a new kind of man. As capital must always expand, it must always destroy to clear room for newer, more efficient methods and products and ideas. This was the major paradox of Dr. Faust's activity in the world as well as something the Futurists would embrace just prior to WWI ("We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world"). Capitalists have always been the world's truest nihilists in this regard.
Still only in section 2 of Part Two, Berman touches on Marx's "theory of crises." Here, suddenly, the theoretical, the allegorical, the metaphorical all peeled away to today. Berman's words from 1982 display Marx's words from 1848 which mirror 2008. (Call it synchronicity, coincidence, whatever, but when I got home and opened my Marx-Engels Reader, my bookmark was on p. 445, the second page of Marx's "Crisis Theory". This book has been in a box for months.) This is what he writes, on page 103:
Here we are in the midst of a growing worldwide economic depression. And you know what? Millions of people are frightened, but I'm not. People are scared because they've tried to build comfortable lives in an uncomfortable world. There is no rest, no respite. Capital will not let you rest, because if you do, it will destroy you like every other obsolete barrier it faces. Your future will become like that Philemon and Baucis, consumed in cleansing fire to make space for the new tower.
I hardly consider myself an apologist for capitalism, but it has its virtues. I admire the Futurist project for its liberating lack of sentimentality and its nihilistic dedication to destroying the obsolete. Of course, this always means that once all those old traces have melted away, one must find a new solid to burn for fuel. But there is plenty of shit that capital has produced that many of us would love to burn, clear away, to make room for something better. (And if you're averse to the concept of burning, think of it as dismantling and recycling the usable elements.)
So here's to a new year of destruction and creation, of Shiva Nataraja triumphantly dancing upon the defeated dwarf of ignorance.
On the day that we celebrate the beginnings of the systematic elimination of the indigenous peoples of North America for the sake of the white man, I offer these quasi-relevant tidbits:
1) Wayne & Co. over at Hooks So Big recently posted a new Slayer track. It's one of the best things I've heard from them in a while. This track is so hot you can just put all your food next to your speakers and it'll be cooked in about 2:31.
2) My parents are on their way to my place now to start cooking. Is it hilarious that I'm almost 28 and yet too poor to get a bunch of food to truly "host"? I don't know the answer to this.
3) The other day my new special lady friend sent me a link to this article from The Onion and then asked me, "what do you love about thanksgiving if you can't eat turkey? i mean, do you get some tofurkey? or are you really into cranberry sauce and green beans?"
Well, here's my answer to that:
I like thanksgiving because there's gluttony involved and that's one of my favorite cardinal sins. Lust is a pretty good one, too, but you probably figured that out already. And sloth, i like that one sometimes. Favorite thanksgiving foods (in no particular order):1) Tofurkey. Some veggies HATE this stuff. I am not one of them, though I do make better gravy.2) Pie. apple, pumpkin, blueberry. Others are acceptable, but those three are tops.3) Mashed potatoes. god, i love mashed potatoes 4) My gramma's (miss you, Gram!) mushrooms & onions. This is basically onions and mushrooms cooked in butter and salt for a long time. I never liked it as a kid, but goddamn now i love it5) I'm probably missing something else like stuffing or squash. (ed.-Wow, now I'm starving. This is gonna be awesome.)
Oddly enough i hate cranberry sauce. Yes, I hail from the world's second-largest producer of these little, bitter fruits (Wisconsin, I have a feeling your whole family's going down), however, cranberry juice (lightly diluted with water, trust me) gives me a pants tent. It's weird, i know. Oh, and regarding that onion article...that's why i don't spend much (any) time in my hometown anymore. Some folks are all, "lemme know when you'll be home for thanksgiving or christmas!" and I always say, "yeah, i'll be home for a few days." And then I'm at home for 2 days, eat a ton of food, drink all my dad's beer and then come back to the city well-rested. Much better that way.
Happy Thanksgiving and to all the Massachusett, Pequot, Narragansett and whoever else my Euro forebears killed off, my sincerest apologies. You were right all along...
Back in early June, I had made note of some thoughts I had (yeah, it happens) about the search for a "Theory of Everything". I try to keep abreast of current work in cosmology and high-energy physics, particularly if new work appears that's crafted for the education of the layman, "because that's who I am, and that's who I care about." Anyhow, I made the notes regarding the nature of what a theory of everything actually is. Fundamentally, it's a religious pursuit undertaken by ostensibly secular physicists and mathematicians. Why do I call it a religious pursuit? Mainly because in order to reduce the workings of the universe to a comprehensible, elegant mathematical function one must know far more than I think we're capable of understanding (i.e.; initial conditions for the grand event that birthed our universe).
Now there are reasons why I don't think we can know these, and that's where Cambridge mathematician/cosmologist John D. Barrow comes in. New Theories of Everything is an update of a book he wrote in 1991 and provides incredibly clear explanations for a vast array of mathematical and cosmological concepts. (As in frightening, geniusesque clarity.) It's exactly the high-end pop-science book I've needed to read for a while, because while Barrow's grasp of physical phenomena is tight, his deep knowledge allows him to be critical of certain directions many of his peers are taking.
The main premise of the book revolves around the idea that there is no reason to think that the physical properties of our universe can be distilled into one mathematical function. While our universe may have a mathematical skeleton, there are many aspects of its existence that are chaotic and non-linear and other aspects (think closer to home à la the arts) that don't seem to have mathematical explanations at all. Without knowledge of the exact states of initial conditions of these chaotic phenomena we have no way of predicting how future states will turn out (thus negating the ability to confirm the accuracy of an equation or experiment). Symmetry breaking also gives theorists headaches for similar reasons, but I just mangled that last explanation so I'll leave this one for the expert (read the book) to flesh out.
Lastly, I must mention—and I'm cutting this review off because I'm obviously not a physicist and I've also been enjoying some scotch—this book left me a bit baffled. Not by the content per se, as it was expertly explained and I highly recommend reading it, but by the author himself. You see John D. Barrow is a religious man, of a specific christian denomination. Now it may be obnoxious of me to go down this path, but after reading such an obviously brilliant explanation of some of the most conceptually difficult material for humans to comprehend, I cannot help but wonder how its author holds such traditional christian beliefs (i.e.; that jesus our savior, the viability of the trinity, etc.) and is able to reconcile them with all he knows of our universe—not to mention the possibility of an infinite multiverse of which our universe is only one small bubble. I find this realization more troubling and difficult to comprehend than the ideas of infinity or nothingness. But maybe I'm the weird guy.
Anyway, regardless of my ever-dyspeptic responses to the continuing presence of nonsensical religious beliefs in today's world, read this book if you have any interest whatsoever in quantum phenomena, chaotic systems, universal origins, multiverse theory, string theory and any aspects of mathematics. The latter almost always forms a stumbling block for laypersons and Barrow's ability to explain various mathematical concepts made me want to strangle all the terrible math teachers I had growing up who never explained a single fucking thing.
fin.
I'll just go ahead and say it: Rushdie's latest is one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. It just might be the greatest I've ever read (though I'm not keeping score). Equal parts historical fiction and illusionary dreamscape, I found myself as enchanted by this read as those inside were by the Qara Köz (Lady Black Eyes).
The Enchantress of Florence weaves together fictionalized accounts of the lives of the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great, Niccolò Macchiavelli, Antonin Argalia (Argalia the Turk) and Amerigo Vespucci's cousin, Agostino. Extensive research was conducted to delicately place each of these men in space and time—Renaissance Tuscany and Mughal India—so that their historicity provides the backdrop upon which the existence of a mysterious lost Turkic princess unfolds. While it undoubtedly takes talent to develop complex characters who exist only in the imagination, to breathe life into long-passed historical figures is an even more noteworthy accomplishment.
Recent readings in eastern philosophy (by way of modern physics, no less) illuminated more of this text than I think I would have otherwise discovered. The ancient vedic concept of maya plays a major role in the story of the Mughal Emperor, Akbar. The Western translation of this word as "illusion" tends to lose the nuance of the concept; as opposed to, say, a figment of the imagination, maya should more accurately be viewed as an outlook that deceives reality. Sure, Akbar's most beloved queen is certainly imaginary, but she is as much a part of his conception of the world as any actual physical entity. Our eyes play tricks on us and we interpret the world through our senses. Senses can be deceived and what constitutes "reality" may be far more than what our senses perceive.
Concepts like maya have not been a part of Western philosophy at all, and so when our reality deceives us we have often blamed them on the work of some outside actor instead of seeing them as a natural part of our universe, our human existence. Pre-Enlightenment Europe was continually privvy to witch-hunts and inquisitions that sought to find the living causes of our own misfortune and fate. The mind/body divide is present in Florence, but not in the seat of the Mughal Empire, Sikri.
What Rushdie is able to do in this novel is demonstrate the same-ness of these two approaches to understanding our existence. Though others may purposefully deceive us, just as often we are to blame for deceiving ourselves in our feeble attempts to explain what evades. However helpful human religious outlooks may be in navigating daily existence or providing meaning for events, the answers are always illusory and deceptive. The rogue traveller and storyteller Niccolò Vespucci—the Mogor dell'Amore, the "Mughal of Love—endears himself to the emperor, Akbar, with his near limitless ability to understand his environments and intellectual uncanny. Ultimately, he is undone by his own tale, for he has an important fact wrong and Akbar knows the truth. Of course, even this truth hides another story.
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Literary themes aside for a moment, I just read the review in the NYTimes and thought the critic totally missed the point. Then again I'm a complete fiction novice and thought the magic and imagination quite charming. (full paradox disclosure: I play D&D and I loathe Tolkien) Anyway, for a rationalist non-fiction reader to be so enchanted by such a book must mean something, right? Well, even Mr. Gates concedes that it helps to be in the right mood to enjoy this, so presumably he was in a foul mood. Naturally, as a student of history I was caught up in the settings and historical figures and didn't let any "claptrap" bother me. What can I say, sometimes I'm in a good mood and this book helped keep me there.
