Coming soon — check out the trailer and documentary’s website for details. Also Cosmos + Taxis has a special themed issue dedicated to Jane Jacobs’ work soon to be published, edited by Sanford Ikeda and featuring some of the leading theorists in the field.
Walker Percy Wednesday 127
THERE IS NO FASHION so absurd, even grotesque, that it cannot be adopted, given two things: the authority of the fashion-setter (Dior, Jackie Onassis) and the vacuity or noughtness of the consumer. E.g., bustles in the West, bound feet in the East.
00000
The efficacy of fashion turns on the self’s perception of itself either as a nought or at least as lacking something, and its perception or misperception of the splendid wholeness of public figures as evidenced by even the most carelessly worn badges of their substantiality—when in truth the selves of Jackie Onassis and Wallis Simpson and John Wayne are probably more insubstantial than most.
Question: What does the saleslady mean when she fits a customer with an article of clothing and says: “It’s you”?
(a) She means the same thing the customer means if you should ask her: It is becoming to me. It looks nice. I don’t have a thing to wear.* It does something for me.
(b) She means that it—the hat, blouse, hairstyle, dress—actually accentuates your best features—eyes, hair—while minimizing your worst: no neck, etc.
(c) It will please your husband or lover.
(d) It will impress other women.
(e) Most other women are already wearing it and you look dowdy without it.
(f) The saleslady means what she says. It really is you. That is, you are not much without it, you perceive yourself as mousy, and you are a something—your self in fact, your new true self—with it.
(CHECK ONE)
But if the saleslady means what she says—and since you have gone through any number of such styles in the past— then it must follow that the other articles in the past were also you and are no longer. How can that be? It could only be because some sort of consumption takes place. The nought which is you has devoured the style and been sustained for a while as a non-you until the style is emptied out by the noughting self.
Consider the stages of the consumption:
First stage: You see an article or a style worn by a person with a certain authority. At first glance it seems outlandish, even absurd. Or ugly, like the long skirt of the New Look of the 1950s.
Second stage: You see more people wearing it. It is still outlandish, but it is an outlandish something and you are fading.
Third stage: You try it on. The saleslady says it is you. You laugh, shrug, shake your head, but secretly the possibility is born that it can be you.
Fourth stage: You buy it and wear it. For a while, it is you and you are it. That is, you perceive it as informing you and you as informed, either as a new you or the old “real you which has never come to light before.
Fifth stage: Gradually the new style becomes everyday, quotidian, rendered neutral. No matter how exotic it is, like a morsel to which an amoeba is attracted and which it surrounds and takes into itself, it is devoured and becomes part of the transparent flowing substance of the amoeba.
Sixth stage: After a sufficient lapse of time, the husk or residue of the new style is excreted and becomes an oddity, a slightly shameful thing but still attached, like the waste in the excretory vacuole of the amoeba.
If you don’t believe this, take a look at an old snapshot of yourself wearing a Jackie-O pillbox hat twenty years ago—or a ducktail Elvis haircut. You will laugh or frown and put it away. It looks queer. It is not only not you. It is a not-you.
Thought Insertion as a Self-Disturbance: An Integration of Predictive Coding and Phenomenological Approaches
My correspondent, the very excellent Aaron Mishara, has just alerted me to his latest freely available coauthored paper in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. For those familiar with Andy Clark’s “Whatever next? predictive brains, situated agents and the future of cognitive science” and Shaun Gallagher’s “Neurocognitive models of schizophrenia: a neurophenomenological critique” — this article should be of interest.
Laphroaig Lore
I own enough square footage (albeit not contiguously) of Laphroaig to build a decent sized detached house on. Last night I tried Lore for the first time and my default scepticism was immediately and absolutely blown away. This was possibly the greatest all round Islay I’ve ever had. If I were to offer an analogy it would be (improbable as this may sound) the Honda VFR750 of Islays. But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the very excellent Horst Luening giving the rundown on Lore:
Working Class Hero
The very underrated Matt Monro (Terry Parsons, Fred Flange) always gives respite from the unrelenting dissonance of the day. I know this is controversial but I’ve always thought that he was far more interesting than Sinatra, Como, Williams and the like (and to their credit they pretty much acknowledged this). For my money Nat King Cole was the bossman of the crooner genre. Matt had great producers (George Martin) and great writers (Quincy Jones, Don Black, John Barry, Lionel Bart amongst others). Below is a favourite song of mine, the second video tells Matt’s story.
He drank like a fish and smoked like a chimney
— George Martin
EPISTEME 14(1) now available
Jack Vettriano: What Do Artists Do All Day?
The painter whom the establishment loves to hate and no doubt so do a whole raft of pearl clutching regressives.
Cosmos + Taxis 4:1
Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation
This popular book is garnering some very warm reviews — The Economist — NYT — NPR chat with author Alan Burdick
Walker Percy Wednesday 126
Question: Is amnesia a favorite device in fiction and especially soap operas because
(a) The character in the soap opera is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.
(b) The writer is sick and tired of his character and wants a change.
(c) The writer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change.
(d) The reader or moviegoer or TV-viewer is sick and tired of himself and his life and wants a change—and the housewife is the sickest and tiredest of all.
(e) The times are such that everyday life for everybody is more or less intolerable and one is better off wiping out the past and starting anew.
(CHECK ONE)
00000
Thought Experiment: Test your response to vicarious loss of self by imagining amnesia raised to the highest power. Imagine a soap opera in which a character awakens every morning with amnesia, in a strange house with a strange attractive man (or woman), welcomed by the stranger, looking out a strange window with a strange view, having forgotten the past each morning and starting life afresh, seeing the window, the view, himself, herself, in the mirror afresh and for the first time. Does this prospect intrigue you? If it does, what does this say about your non-amnesic self?*
00000
Question: Why was not a single table designed as such rather than being a non-table doing duty as a table?
(a) Because people have gotten tired of ordinary tables.
(b) Because the fifty non-tables converted to use as tables make good conversation pieces.
(c) Because it is a chance to make use of valuable odds and ends which otherwise would gather dust in the attic.
(d) Because the self in the twentieth century is a voracious nought which expands like the feeding vacuole of an amoeba seeking to nourish and inform its own nothingness by ingesting new objects in the world but, like a vacuole, only succeeds in emptying them out.
(CHECK ONE)
00000
Thought Experiment: Try to imagine the circumstances under which the fifty non-tables converted to use as coffee tables would become less and less desirable until one would actually prefer an ordinary table constructed of four legs and a top. E.g., imagine you are an archeologist of the twenty-first century, exploring the abandoned beach cottages of Martha’s Vineyard and finding all manner of strange artifacts used as tables—pieces of driftwood, capstans, shark jaws— and that you need a good worktable and, not recognizing these objects as tables, you construct a simple and sturdy table from a plank of wood and four lengths of two-by-fours.
Thought Experiment (II): Consider to what extent an “antique” is prized because it is excellently made and beautiful and to what extent it is prized because it is an antique and as such is saturated with another time and another place and is therefore resistant to absorption by the self—just as a pine piling saturated in creosote resists corrosion by the sea—and thus possesses a higher coefficient of informing power for the nought of self.
If you say that a writing table made by Thomas Sheraton is of value because it is excellently made and beautiful, how would you go about making a writing table now that would be similarly prized as an antique two hundred years from now?
The real question of course is whether the twentieth-century self is different from the eighteenth-century self, both in its reliance on “antiques” to inform itself and in its ability to make a writing table which is graceful and useful and for no other reason. Was a well-to-do eighteenth-century Englishman content to buy a Sheraton writing table, or would he have preferred a fifteenth-century “antique”?
