Disneylandia

Disneyland is, fundamentally, a vitrine.

yule log

Even within the tribe, the dances are kitschy, as Christmas is to the Christian.

the way we never were

Reading a biography of Disney, it is remarkable how the golden ages - of turn-of-century America, or of his studio - never occur except in the imagination, but there occur strongly.

The actual struggle of America or of Disney to rise directly transitions to the disillusionment of power and structure.  There is no intervening golden plateau in time.  But there is a golden plateau in imagination - the hopes of youth and the security of experience drawn together onto a mental plane, a central clearing, that becomes a permanent, though unreal, stage for the enactment of what never was.

When I was an undergraduate, my writing style came from a deliberate effort to complement - even match - the material being written about.  (This was made easier by the fact that I was writing mainly about written material.)  And the style also grew from an attempt to present things in an order of natural development: each section would be presented when it was done brewing, no sooner or later.  My idea was to create nothing - only to give new and fertile ground to the material and let what grew - grow.

Disney had something of that approach to America: it was a cultural rather than artistic relationship.  And that is the sense in which Disney is authentic.  To watch a "Silly Symphony" is to watch a tribe of 1930s Americans watching their nimblest members perform a new ritual dance (sound animation) in a new clearing (the cinema) to whole tribe's satisfaction.  To visit Disneyland is to visit a tribal festival, enacted by a 1950s American tribe, for itself.  (Unlike a World's Fair, which is nominally for others: the "public".)

The Disney festival is, for example, supremely commercial because the 1950s American tribe is so.  It has a fantasy-driven relation to the outside world because that is what the tribe has.  It idealizes Main Street because that is what the tribe does.  The satisfactions and embarrassments derive largely from that cultural correspondence:

Disney gave the American tribe many of its ritual dances and costumes.  They evoke a time that wasn't, but an imagination that is peculiarly true to the tribe and thus quite unlike the fantasy worlds of loftier and more literary artists.

a simple one

You have enough.  You already had enough.  You are going to have enough.

each of us

I have no special love for Koyaanisqatsi or Naqoyqatsi, but Powaqqatsi is a glory.  Out of the masses, the eyes betray personality.  Individuality is not a social construct.

sleepless

Thinking of Hegel: Your actions are your soul. Your thoughts and motives - your feelings and memories - are real and relevant, but only in the same manner as your body. You are deepest not within yourself but at your very edge - in contact with and in motion within the world.

fur

Honesty is naked, but that will never do.

aloft

I look down on the tops of sunlit, densely white clouds.  The wind carves patterns into the tops of these clouds precisely like Gobi desert sand dunes.  What we are looking at, when we see these clouds, dunes - or deep ocean waves - is not moisture, sand or water, but wind.

kit house

As Sears and Montgomery Ward helped us move West, Amazon helps us move online.

pipe tobacco

Smells are the glue of memory.

massive

There is a silent majority, in the sense that the majority is silent, and must ever be so.  The ordinary virtue is the virtue of refraining.

Westgate Mall

My mind reels in disgust at violent evil, and knows that, in reeling, it forms part of evil's invitation.

because it makes them less alone

One who turns the pages of old philosophers shouldn't wonder that dogs stop at every corner to smell for the piss of those who came before.

King Walt

Will to power through sweetness.  Just imagine creating something you will name "Main Street, U.S.A."

The Long Goodbye

A beach is a kind of temple, as courthouses and hospitals are temples, at we come in contact with power.

glories

Beryl Reid's portrayals of Connie Sachs in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.  Nobody has so threaded the needle of laughter with a string of tears, or so given us the bathos of intelligence unharnessed and put to pasture, the bow unstrung.

36°30′

A test of an American's historical literacy: can that person connect our Civil War to our relations with Latin America?

Pelosi, McConnell

Power is derived from the governed, but the governed are not themselves powerful.  The people project their need for the powerful onto whom they choose (though they often do not admit they chose).  Then some, only some, of those chosen, show the capacity to reflect and shape that power back onto the people.  Those are the powerful, and their power takes many shapes.  Some are powerful without being obvious, like McConnell or Pelosi, others are old-school, dick-swinging mensch like LBJ or Robert Moses.  On the contemporary political stage, Merkel is the prime example of this old-school, untrammeled version of power - good, bad and indifferent.

big city

It's a big city. We have a store Specializing in Stretch Fabric.

prompted by appellate brief writing

Triangles work uniquely well as metaphors and to structure arguments because it is easy for the reader to grasp that there are exactly three straight paths from the triangle's three points.  Tell readers that there are three things - animal, vegetable and mineral, say - and they readily grasp that there are three relationships: animal to vegetable, animal to mineral and vegetable to mineral.  This clicks with the reader.  It occupies the sweet spot between simplicity and complexity that gives a satisfying intellectual click.  Tell the reader there are four or more points, and the relationships fall apart in the mind.  No click.  Tell the reader there are only two points, and there is no intellectual satisfaction: it all seems too easy, simplistic.  Again, no click.  This does not mean points may come only in threes.  But it does mean that there has to be an underlying order when there are more than three points:  Four to seven points along a straight line - each leading to the next, each building upon the last - can be satisfying.  And it is always possible to collect miscellaneous points summarily and separately, leaving the main points organized in some satisfying configuration, untroubled by the small fry.

reader

Every departure is a book of small leavings.  The climactic exit comes only towards the end.  But eventually the cover shuts as certainly as it had opened, with that startling realization that the game is afoot.

Auda ibu Tayi

You tell me what is honorable, and I'll tell you where you belong.

an interpretation

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

Taken in context, this is a scripture about taking things a step at a time and not troubling ourselves today with what will be trouble tomorrow - a compound exhortation to savvy sequencing and childlike blitheness. Neither is very deep nor at all original, and each is a crude aid to the simple. Valuable for what they are, though, and appropriate to the audience hearing the sermon.

But the single observation is also intelligible in isolation, and deeper. Taken apart, I understand this scripture thus:

• As admonition: Brethren, add no evil.
• As observation: Our labors are hard enough even when we work timely and well.  So do not add yesterday's troubles to this day's by procrastination.
• As theory: The presence of evil is a natural result of material entropy and human disagreement.
• As encouragement: Evil is but one aspect of our time - it neither overtakes nor is the whole - it will press but not break us.

hum

Short sleep, caffeine soup, the thud
of papers served "Official Business"
And what to do with them.
Mile markers of pages typed,
Hot blue sky of baked thought.

Back home a nettled comfort,
Domestic kiss,
The dust of mutual imperfections settles
Thinly but there -
The need for constant cleaning
Of what moral entropy flakes
From two scalps.

This is good, this somewhat garden,
This oxidizing happiness;
At 35 I am not flattened,
But I am not shiny now.

Our love is a 2004 Honda Accord.
A nice love, a reliable love, a well-equipped love.
It gets us around, it doesn't let us down,
It is better than our friends' cars.
They ask us about car maintenance,
And we are good shade tree mechanics,
Generous with advice and hand tools.
We keep our mats vacuumed
And the oil changed.
Our cloth seats are fine:
Don't leather seats burn in the summer?

Fancy things make us nervous anyhow,
We'd feel obliged to slip-cover our hearts.
The honest wear, the pucker in the driver's seat back,
says this is yours.

And, we have good friends.
I have a lot of ands,
But not enough sleep.

When I get 8 hours in,
I slumber past the thrum of ands.
But when I don't,
I am terribly awake
And the particles,
The small words,
The twitchings of minor muscles,
Swarm over me and - there!
Conspire to be apparition.
With frosty whisper of
a long, middle passage.

Episode 13

Of Night Vale. The one where they figure themselves out. 

Jonathan Edwards

Congregationalism.  Constitution.  West.  Emancipation.  WWII.  Hubble.  I believe in America.

long love

Love grows long and then anything can remind you.  A pasta sauce seems a little like him in attitude, a tree smells a little like him, you detect little shards of him anywhere.  The mystics must have been like this in their later years of adoration.

bad puns

Apparantly there's a Congressman named David Camp.  I hope he becomes president.

comme les autres

Politically or socially, the shutdown is analogous to a national strike.  A small - but not that small - bloc of the public puts its foot down and says no.  The Tea Party, French farmers, Welsh coal miners.  Their values differ, they may all be doomed to fade, eventually, they all do collateral damage - similarities and differences.  But, fundamentally, an American variation on a national strike of the sort that roils other democratic societies.

a six-course life

Il faut laisser du temps au temps: You have to give time time. - François Mitterrand

inward travel

Perhaps mental objects relate to thought and memory precisely as physical objects relate to acceleration and space.

Or, if you prefer:
[With respect to mental objects]
memory : space :: thought : acceleration

we age

I look at my old writing, a decade old.  How I deteriorate.

Astoria now

A warm night that smelled like an easy, suburban Christmas of pot roast and Duraflame.

Liebnitz

A zero fell to pieces and made the world.

very regular

Zero, One, Two, Infinity.

pot culture

There was a half-smoked joint on the floor of my office elevator just now.  I kicked it into the gap between the elevator floor and the 42nd floor landing.  Maybe a rat will eat it.

yeah, yeah

The French have their si.  The contradicting yes.  (Of course it is also used for emphasis, but all emphasis is implicit contradiction.)  For lack of a si, we English speakers are forced into the use of no or any of its negative kin as a kind of whole-word prefix to an affirmation: No, I'm going.  Or else we made the affirmation bigger: Oh, yes!  Or we do without.

one line plays

Didn't you call last night?  Well, somebody didn't.