Looking forward to this. Here’s an interview with the author Michael Twitty.
The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans
Review of Lawrence Powell’s masterful history of New Orleans in Cosmos + Taxis.
The palpable sense of cultural vibrancy and of place, so essential to New Orleans’ identity, makes absolute nonsense of the currently fashionable phrase “cultural appropriation”, a conceptually illiterate term of abuse, a newfangled fundamentalism, espoused by the authoritarian “regressive” left.
What a 1930s horse racing guide by a conservative philosopher could teach sports scientists today
Ed Smith in the New Statesman.
Facebook usage on smartphones and gray matter volume of the nucleus accumbens
People who frequently check Facebook (or as I’ve called it “Facecrack”) on their smartphone tend to have less gray matter in a reward-related area of the brain — Behavioural Brain Research.
It appeared, that in particular higher daily frequency of checking Facebook on the smartphone was robustly linked with smaller gray matter volumes of the nucleus accumbens.
Popol Vuh
Still on music, a pretty damn good price ($33) for 5 disks, a package with very good production values. Apparently it’s out of stock and will hopefully become available again soon and at a similarly good price. If you appreciate the work of Eno and Bowie, you’ll get Popul Voh, arguably the grandees of so-called “Krautrock”. For more on Popul Vuh see here (a four parter), here and here.
Music Noir Americana
I’m so glad that Robert Fontenot in OffBeat has again unequivocally given the Deltas the thumbs up. I’ve been thinking about how to characterize this band and independently came up with the idea that Deltaphonic are the musical analog to film noir. This time of year I usually visit Baton Rouge but I’ll have to settle for listening to track 7 (Radio) off the album: get your copy here.
Their new backwoods mystik only augments their trademark smirking despair . . .
. . . dark Americana with history’s dust shaken off
David Stove
Died on this day in 1994. A sure-fire way to wind up your colleagues on “plantation regressive” is to leave this book in plain sight or, for that matter, any Stove book would do the trick. If you like a cracking no-holds-barred philosophical polemic then Stove is the man for you (Stove might well have been the most prominent modern philosophical troll). The last and posthumous Stove piece that was published was edited by my chum Andrew Irvine. Here are some review pieces, one by the mischievous Willam Briggs; others include Mark Anthony Signorelli, John Derbyshire, Michael Beran, Kelly Jane Torrance, Patrick Keeney, and Barry Maley. For more on Stove see Roger Kimball’s “Who was David Stove?“; the best online resource is maintained by Jim Franklin and Gerry Nolan. (Interestingly, on the original website this message was posted: “An authorized officer of the University of New South Wales has requested that one of David Stove’s articles not be hosted on a UNSW web server. So the David Stove website has moved”.)
Stefan Zweig, Farewell to Europe
This film seems consistently to be garnering very warm reviews — NYT, The Observer, Variety, IndieWire and the LARB.
Walker Percy Wednesday 138
As a consequence of the unprecedented appearance of the triad in the Cosmos, there appeared for the first time in fifteen billion years (as far as we know) a creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in myriad disguises.
One semioticist defined the subject of his study as the only organism which tells lies.
The exile from Eden is, semiotically, the banishment of the self-conscious self from its own world of signs.
The banquet is still there, but it is Banquo in attendance.
The self perceives itself as naked. Every self is ashamed of itself.
The semiotic history of this creature thereafter could be written in terms of the successive attempts, both heroic and absurd, of the signifying creature to escape its nakedness and to find a permanent semiotic habiliment for itself—often by identifying itself with other creatures in its world.
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As soon as the self becomes self-conscious—that is, aware of its own unique unformulability in its world of signs—from that moment forward, it cannot escape the predicament of its placement in the world.
An organism exists in its environment in only one mode, that of an open system responding to those segments of its environment to which it is genetically programmed to respond or to which it has learned to respond.
But a self must be placed in a world. It cannot not be placed. If it chooses by default not to be placed, then its placement is that of not choosing to be placed.
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In a post-religious technological society, these traditional resources of the self are no longer available, leaving in general only the two options: self conceived as immanent, consumer of the techniques, goods, and services of society; or as transcendent, a member of the transcending community of science and art.
(a) Self as Immanent. The self sees itself as an immanent being in the world, existing in a mode of being often conceived on the model of organism-in-an-environment as a consequence of the powerful credentials of science and technology.
Such immanence is a continuum. At one end: the compliant role-player and consumer and holder of a meaningless job, the anonymous “one”—German man—in a mass society, whether a backfence gossip* or an Archie Bunker beer-drinking TV-watcher.
At the other end: the “autonomous self,” who is savvy to all the techniques of society and appropriates them according to his or her discriminating tastes, whether it be learning “parenting skills,” consciousness-raising, consumer advocacy, political activism liberal or conservative, saving whales, TM, TA, ACLU, New Right, square-dancing, creative cooking, moving out to country, moving back to central city, etc.
The self is still problematical to itself, but it solves its predicament of placement vis-à-vis the world either by a passive consumership or by a discriminating transaction with the world and with informed interactions with other selves.
Reissue of Hayek’s The Sensory Order
The University of Chicago Press has alerted me that TSO is almost as good as here — so order now through the usual channels so as to not waste anytime in getting your hands on a copy.
