Monday, October 30, 2006

Philosophywatch, Oct. 23-30

There was a classic philosopher-name-drop (P-N-D) in the Oct. 23 issue of Crain's Chicago Business. Profiling derivatives trader-turned resterauteur Nick Kokonas, Mark Scheffler wrote:

Novelty. Innovation. Existence. It's all on the metaphysical menu tonight, fitting for a one-time philosophy major and fan of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work wrestled with the logic of language.

Huh? Also on Oct. 23, writing in The New Republic, TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier weighed in on the flap surrounding the cancellation of a talk by NYU historian Tony Judt on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" at the Polish Consulate in New York. (NB: Judt was a contributing editor at TNR till he came out in favor of a one-state solution in Palestine, in the NYRB, in 2003.) Judt has reportedly written to "a variety of email chains" claiming that the cancellation was part of a smear campaign orchestrated by powerful figures in the New York media world who do not favor a one-state solution.

Judt is quoted as writing, in one of these emails:

It helps to have read Kafka to know what it feels like to go to bed a liberal, secular historian of Jewish background and wake up the next morning an anti-semitic Israel-denier.

To which Wieseltier replies, "Only somebody who ... did not read Kafka could have written that sentence, or someone romantically involved with himself." I'm not taking sides, here, but that's a good line!

On to less serious stuff: On Tuesday, writing in the Evening Standard (London) about British comic Sacha Baron Cohen's "Borat" movie, David Sexton made this claim:

In refusing to give any interviews about the film out of character, Baron Cohen joins the ranks of those heroes, like Samuel Beckett and Thomas Harris, Salinger and Pynchon, who insist that their art alone will speak for them.

It's not that Baron Cohen's guerrilla comedy/PR stunt isn't interesting, but there are better ways to make point without dragging Beckett and Pynchon into it -- and that long author-name-drop (A-N-D) is an offense to the sensibilities. I know Sexton is being absurdist, just having a laugh. But he's also showing off. Thumbs down!

In an interview with the Sydney MX (Australia) on Tuesday, poet Nathan Shepherdson was asked, "Which four people would you like to invite to dinner and what would you cook them and why?" He responded as follows:

1. Samuel Beckett: I'd serve him a large, white bowl with nothing in it. He'd think of it as dessert. 2. Shakespeare: What else but black pudding. When he wrote "out damn spot," he wasn't yelling at his dog. 3. Franz Kafka: A beautifully moulded jelly, with a dark chocolate question mark set in the middle. He'd be too scared to breathe, overly concerned that the jelly might wobble. 4. Francis Bacon: Very expensive champagne, served with cobalt blue tapenade on melba toasts. Being alive is an indulgence.

What to make of this? Shepherdson's jokes are lame, at best, and his choices of dinner guests are cliched. But is this a pretentious or clueless A-N-D? No, one doesn't get that impression. So we'll let him off with a warning, this time.

On Saturday, the LA Times ran a fascinating e-mail exchange between Elvis Costello and Green Gartside, of the intellectual post-punk act Scritti Politti. Asked, by Costello, if there was an anything he'd read in school that particularly influenced his work, Gartside said:

I started at art school with Wittgenstein. I was interested principally in the indiscrete problem of meaning. The Beatles introduced me to the most powerful thing: ambiguity.

That's beautiful stuff, not Philosophywatch material at all.

On Sunday, a concerned reader points out, a review by Peter Darbyshire published in the Vancouver Province (British Columbia) described the 2005 graphic novel "Pyongyang," by French artist Guy Delisle, as "a quirky view of an absurd culture -- a sort of Tintin meets Kafka." "Isn't 'X meets Kafka' always a suspect formulation?" the reader asks. Yes, it is, and it should be avoided. But I've read "Pyongyang," and Darbyshire is not incorrect to describe it the way he does. Take a look:

Earlier today, a friend mentioned that in today's (Oct. 30) issue of The New York Observer, "Edgy Enthusiast" columnist Ron Rosenbaum praises the new Philip Kerr detective novel, "The One From the Other," by concluding that Kerr's book makes readers fall ill with

what Kierkegaard called "the sickness unto death," a sense of the infectious affliction of human nature and human history. A sickness of the soul that no immune system can protect you from.

Though I'd love to nail Rosenbaum, a look at the review made doing so impossible. The entire essay, it turns out, is an excuse for him to get off that Kierkegaard line -- it's replete with mentions of physical and emotional illness, from the flu to Weltschmerz. I may think Rosenbaum is pretentious, but he didn't shoehorn Kierkegaard in; he did just the opposite.

OK, come back next Monday for more.

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Posted by Joshua Glenn at 04:36 PM

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