RIP Betty White

 

NZ Journalist Becomes First Person With Māori Face Tattoo to Present Primetime News

Oriini Kaipara has created history by becoming the first washine with a Maori face tattoo to present the primetime news bulletin

Read the full article on News18

 

E.O. Wilson, famed entomologist and pioneer in the field of sociobiology, dies at 92

Pioneering biologist, environmental activist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward O. Wilson has died. He was 92.

The influential and sometimes controversial Harvard professor first made his name studying ants — he was often known as "the ant man." But he later broadened his scope to the intersection between human behavior and genetics, creating the field of sociobiology in the process. He died on Sunday in Burlington, Mass., the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation said in an announcement on its website.

Read the full article on NPR

 

Desmond Tutu: South Africa anti-apartheid hero dies aged 90

Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Nobel Peace prize laureate who helped end apartheid in South Africa, has died aged 90.

Read the full article on BBC
 

Report from Millbrook

short film about Dr. Timothy Leary

directed by Jonas Mekas (965)

 

Joan Didion obituary

Detached observer of American society and political life through her collections of journalism, novels and screenwriting

Read the full article on The Guardian

 

Book Review

Selected Works 

by Cicero

     In ancient Rome, Somnus (otherwise known as Hypnos in Greece) was a personification of sleep. He lived in a cave that contained the river Lethe(forgetfulness). Somnus is only tangentially connected to Cicero via and time and place but he is being mentioned here because he visited me several times while I was reading Cicero’s Selected Works. Without diminishing its historical importance, I will say that this book was a crashing bore that persistently made me drowsy and Somnus successfully lured me into his cave several times throughout the course of this short 200 page essay collection.

Cicero was a Roman statesman, neither patrician nor plebeian and also an outsider because of his obsessive-compulsive insistence on moral purity and honesty at any cost. He came from the Stoic school of philosophers. It could be tempting to say that Cicero’s political life was more exciting than his ideas, he had five men executed in the Catilinian Conspiracy to prevent the senate from being overthrown and he supported the assassination of Julius Caeser, but he is most famous for his oratorical skills and writings in Latin concerning the ethical branch of philosophy.

Since Cicero’s forte was public speaking, this collection opens with a transcribed speech in which he denounces Verres, the corrupt governor of Sicily. He denounces Verres for nepotism, bribery, and debauchery while declaring the superiority of running government as a system of laws as opposed to the tyranny of men. As far as speeches go, this is a good one with precise phrasing, effective punctuation, rhythmic cadences, a mixture of abstract and concrete ideas , and a sufficient buildup of thematic tensions to keep the audience engaged. Compare this to the transcribed speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. or Barack Obama and you can see how a good speech works just as well in writing as it does in speaking. Hearing it spoken in the echoing chamber of the Roman senate must have been impressive. But a clear picture of Cicero, with his Apollonian self-righteousness, begins to emerge early on. While I am inclined to agree with Cicero that honesty in government is necessary, if I wanted to have a good time, I would rather seek out the company of Verres.

The essay “The Second Phillippic Against Antony” is another work of character assassination that targets another individual. Again, despite the moral indignation, Cicero makes Antony look like an interesting character in contrast to Ciecro’s high ground which certainly is higher but certainly not exciting. Antony, after all, was the guy who got to fuck Cleopatra. In these polemics, Cicero presents us with such a stark contrast of the rigid orderliness of Apollonian ethics and the disorienting, life affirming celebrations of Dionysus, the polar tensions that have defined the human experience up until the present day.

The second section of Selected Works is a collection of excerpts from letters Cicero wrote to his friends and colleagues, many of which were penned during his time of exile from Rome. He comments on politics and some battles. There isn’t anything of interest here unless you are deeply immersed in the study of Roman history. These read like footnotes and supplements to a more significant work on the history of the empire and as a casual reader, I didn’t get much out of them.

Moving on, there is a dull essay called “on Duties” pertaining to ethics and honesty, mostly in regards to commerce and the marketplace. No doubt, this Stoic philosopher probably had his own personal grievance in this matter since when he returned from exile, he found that his property had been confiscated and sold without his permission, although I am not sure if that happened before or after this essay was written. I actually don’t care enough to bother checking the dates. Cicero uses the criteria of moral righteousness and advantage to evaluate the ethics of non-disclosure in financial transactions. (Yes, I know you are yawning already) Morality means adhering to what is natural and since lying is unnatural it is immoral. Therefore, using deception to gain an advantage in a sale is unnatural and fundamentally against morality. Even though, as an honest type of a person, I am inclined to agree with this concept, it still seems like a flawed argument and a reductio ad absurdum as well. Cicero spends very little time examining nuance in his argument nor does he address the ambiguous concepts of “natural” or “advantageous” in sufficient detail.

The equation of nature with morality is a problematic construct since morality is inherently subjective and humanistically determined, hence not natural. Deceptiveness is also not unnatural since an insect may have evolved to look like a plant in order to camouflage itself from predators. This would be entirely natural and since being deceptive in this way would further ensure the survival of that individual insect and benefit its species if it successfully reproduces then this deception is not immoral from a human standpoint either. So Cicero’s argument collapses almost immediately and without much effort from the reader. Forging German passports and visas to help Jewish people escape concentration camps would just as well be a form of deception that is morally justifiable. I could imagine Richard Dawkins beating the crap out of Cicero but to be fair I do see the rudiments of game theory in this essay since Cicero argues that more people in society benefit when business is conducted honestly and with minimal conflict than otherwise. Cicero just doesn’t take his argument far enough. His concepts of “moral”, “honest”, “deception”, and “advantage” are not sufficiently defined here, unfortunately, to make the argument work.

The final essay, “On Old Age” addresses the topic you would expect it to. The Stoic Cicero comes out in favor of the elderly, essentially arguing that old age is superior to youth. Since physical strength declines as we age, we get more time to spend enhancing the life of the mind. As a philosopher and ethicist, Cicero is far more concerned with philosophical and educational matters than he is with strength which is good for little more than menial labor and warfare. In his view, the thinkers get to rule society while everybody else gets stuck doing their shitwork. These ideas are neither surprising nor lofty but they are refreshing in today’s world where being young and stupid is valued over being old and wise. It is even worse now with the younger generations that rail against racism, sexism, and homophobia while expressing a vile and nasty hatred towards anybody over the age of forty. Ageism is just as much a form of discrimination as those other ills and expressing ageist ideas can very well be considered hate speech in some circumstances. But in the internet matrix world, young people know everything and old people know nothing so that is just how it is nowadays, be it sensible or not.

Overall, Cicero comes off to me as a morally upright prig, the kind of po-faced killjoy who screams at people for farting in his presence. If there is one thing that John Milton proves it is that we need villains in order to make life interesting. It was the upright and uptight American Puritans who banned Christmas celebrations and alcohol during Prohibition. It is the Islamic Wahhabis and Salafis that try to purify the world by draining all the joy and color out of everything. It is the homicidal monk in Umberto Eco’s The Name Of the Rose who kills someone for laughing, claiming that laughter is immoral because Jesus never laughed. Bone-dry morality is just as boring as a pile of cardboard. Even conman Christian preachers have figured out that nothing puts a congregation to sleep faster than a sermon on righteousness. That’s why the grifter evangelicals have injected so much showmanship into their prosperity gospel with razzle-dazzle stories about going to war against Satan. Why do you think that Qanon inspires fanaticism when Methodism and Lutheranism don’t? While most intelligent people who aren’t sociopaths would be inclined to agree with what Cicero had to say about ethics, that doesn’t mean his beliefs were exciting to read. The people he attacks are far more exciting. He certainly was an important historical figure and I have no interest or intention of taking that away from him, but these Selected Works are little more than a cure for insomnia to me.

Cicero. Selected Works, translated by Michael Grant. Penguin Books, New York: 1971, 

 

R.I.P. Mensi

singer for Angelic Upstarts

 

Book Review

Diane Arbus: A Biography

by Patricia Bosworth

     You could make the case that the transgressive photographer Diane Arbus sufficiently represented the zeitgeist of the times she lived in. Patricia Bosworth’s Diane Arbus: A Biography, although being unauthorized, has become the standard book for documenting her productive but troubled life. Bosworth does not explicitly claim that Arbus was an avatar representing the values of her times but it is easy to see how this could be true and understanding the values of the 1950’s and 1960s will go a long way in helping you understand the significance of her photos.

According to Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus was a precocious child, seemingly almost tailor-made to be an artist. She was an avid reader, felt emotions strongly, and was strangely sensitive to physical sensations, feeling life in every material item she touched. She experienced the world around her at at a much deeper level than everyone around her which, darkly, sometimes led to periods of melancholia and depression. She came from a family of secular Jews with ancestral roots in Ukraine. Her father owned a chain of expensive fur coat stores with their flagship location being on 5^th Avenue in Manhattan. Diane Arbus grew up in a sheltered environment with her family protecting her from the negativity of the Great Depression and World War II in their New York City apartment.

In the 1950s, Diane married Allan Arbus, the first boy she fell in love with during high school. Despite their almost inseparable attachment, she simultaneously had romantic notions for Allan’s close friend Alex Eliot, who she eventually had an affair with. The husband and wife team rose to prominence in the art world as fashion photographers, working freelance for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Life. They churned out magazine spreads at a dizzying pace like a highly productive factory while maintaining high standards of quality. Their work was monotonous but stable and dependable; still an unease and creeping feeling of dissatisfaction was underlying their lives. If Diane Arbus could be said to exemplify the cultural attitude of the 1950s it would be in this dullness and restraint of emotions. Everything in her life was fine and that was entirely the problem.

Up to this point, Bosworth’s biography suffers from one major flaw. There is very little said about Diane Arbus herself. The author goes into a lot of detail about the people in Arbus’s life but doesn’t say enough about her. There is a lot of information about her family and friends while Arbus just fades into the background. Her absence weighs heavy on the narrative while Bosworth goes into yet another sidetrack discussion about her brother, her friends, or other members of the professional photography community of that time. The author might have been trying to camouflage Diane Arbus in the people surrounding her to make a point of how inconspicuous she could be, but if that was done intentionally, it was taken too far, so far that it interferes with the flow and meaning of the text.

During the ‘60s, Arbus’s life began to change and this is where this biography becomes more interesting. As a fashion photographer, she got used to seeing different sides of her models. Many of them were poor, suffering from depression, or having problems with drugs and alcohol. Some of them were homeless or victims of domestic violence. But when the Arbuses photographed them, they took on a whole other appearance. These displays they put on for for the camera were superficial and fake. She took interest in who these models were in reality. She decided to use her photographer’s talents to explore this other side of life. Diane Arbus began taking pictures of carnival sideshow freaks, homosexuals, eccentrics, the mentally ill, nudists and all other manner of people who existed at the margins of society. She became fascinated with the seedy street-life of 42^nd Street. She photographically documented the world of outsiders in America. She didn’t just take their pictures, though. In most cases she spent hours talking to them, getting to know them, sometimes visiting them in their homes, sometimes having sex with them. By getting to know them first, she felt like she could break through to the real people they were. When most people are confronted with a camera, they act as if they want to project to the world how they want to be seen but Diane Arbus wanted to show the world how they really were. By photographing these outsiders, Arbus tried to see something of herself in them, to identify with them and to force the viewer to do the same by confronting us with their images. Her style of portraiture was aggressive, rough, sometimes even intimidating.

For Diane Arbus, this photography was a means of transgressing her own boundaries. She was breaking taboos with her art and likewise in her own life the initial feeling of liberation led more and more to extremes. She became continuously more promiscuous, attending orgies, and going as far as having casual sex with complete strangers in public places. As the 1960s progressed, becoming more and more liberated and free spirited, her life became more disorganized, her marriage ended, and her photography become more popular. But as gallery managers and art dealers hailed her as a visionary and genius, she sunk deeper into poverty and mental illness. Just as the hippie generation ended with the Manson Family murders and the deadly chaos at Altamont, Diane Arbus sank into a hopeless state of depression and committed suicide. It was as if she personally embodied, step by step, year by year, the whole process of lifestyle experimentation, social change, and the undoing of repressions that characterized the counter cultral movement of that pivotal decade. Going so far off the rails and into wildly uncharted territory, unfortunately, led to the simultaneous downfall of both Diane Arbus and the hippies’ strive for utopia at exactly the same time.

In terms of the narrative, Bosworth does a much better job of telling the story in the chapters dealing with the 1960s. Maybe that is because that decade was the most productive and most interesting period of Diane Arbus’s life, but also the author does a better job of keeping unnecessarily extraneous information from intruding. There is still some sidetracking, she provides a lot of biographical information about Weegee even though Arbus did not actually know him, but this sidetracking is less prevalent and the narrative moves along more smoothly as a result.

Diane Arbus: A Biography certainly has its flaws. The writing is sometimes choppy and Patricia Bosworth provides quotes from a wide array of people who don’t seem to be particularly important or insightful for the purposes of this book. These shortcomings are not big enough to ruin it. Patricia Bosworth did a sufficient amount of research to make it work in the end and she succeeds in putting Arbus’s life and oeuvre into context in terms of art history, photography, theory, criticism, and the socio-cultural climate. A definite picture of Diane Arbus stands firm at the end. She was a woman who moved faster than everybody else, so fast that her contemporaries could not keep up with where she was going until it was too late. She reflected and influenced the times she lived in and it is only with hindsight that people are able to see what that means.

Bosworth, Patricia. Diane Arbus: A Biography. W.W. Norton & Company, New York/London: 2005. 

 

Book Review

The Satyricon

by Petronius

     Deciding how to evaluate and interpret The Satyricon by Peronius can be a challenge. The main reason is that the text we have is fragmentary, most of it being lost, damaged, or destroyed. Scholars are not even sure if Petronius, a member of Emperor Nero’s court, was truly the author or not. Maybe that does not even matter because almost nothing is actually known about him. Experts in antiquarian literature regard it as satire, but if that is so, what does it actually say about Roman society? With such an incomplete text, the best we can do is draw some meager conclusions based on what little we have.

Although written in Rome, most of The Satyricon takes place on the Greek peninsula of Peloponnesus. The narrative follows the wanderings of a criminal named Eumolpus and his younger boyfriend Giton. At first they are accompanied by another man Ascyltus, but Eumolpus fights with him constantly for the attentions of Giton and they eventually leave him behind. Soon after they meet up with an older poet named Encolpius who latches on to them because he has eyes for Giton too. His poetry is not well received by anybody and his public recitations result in jeering and stone throwing from the audiences.

Like a picaresque novel, The Satyricon is really about the characters and the situations they find themselves in as opposed to an overarching plot. There is no purpose other than to show different facets of Greek and Roman society. The situations begin with the three characters getting abducted by a priestess of Priapus for an orgy that promises to cover the type of literary territory explored by the Marquis de Sade in a later century; as an audience we are criminally deprived of all the raunchy details because those parts of the text are lost. You might wonder if some puritanical Christian in Rome destroyed them on purpose. Eumolpus and friends attend a lavish banquet at the villa of a rich man named Trimalchio where the decadent setting is used as a backdrop for a discussion over whether Rome is suffering from a moral decline or not. That theme is later taken up again when Eumolpus and Giton meet up with Encolpius for the first time. Later, they travel to Italy and stop in the morally corrupted village of Croton. Somehow, Eumoplus gets sidetracked and seduced by a beautiful and nubile woman of a higher class but he is unable to perform; he launches into the longest, and most hilarious, lament about a man facing a male’s biggest fear ever committed to literature.

One great, and complete, story in this book is about a widow who is mourning in her husband’s mausoleum. A soldier is stationed nearby, guarding three criminals being punished by crucifixion. After spending three days making love to the widow, he emerges to find one of the men is missing from his cross. His solution to this dilemma is one of the funniest conclusions in the narrative. It is hard to tell if this was written to be a mockery of the Christian myth regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. It might be coincidental that the details align so well to give an alternate take on that tale but The Satyricon was written in approximately 100 AD and the author was certainly irreverent enough to pull such a satire off. We shouldn’t put it past him to do so.

Overall, there is not enough of the text here to really come up with any grand interpretations of what Petronius intended this work to say. The theme of moral decline is brought up more than once but the earthy humor overrides any moral statement that might have been intended. The story of Eumolpus’s inability to raise wood gets more attention than any prolonged examinations of ethics. In terms of literary history, its style and tone predates classics like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, Voltaire’s Candide, and the aforementioned picaresque genre of the novel. The best way to read and interpret The Satyricon is to take it all at face value and leave it at that. Like the Venus de Milo, the ancient Greek statue Nike, or the ruins at Ephesus, despite the missing pieces, you can admire and appreciate whatever is still there. 

Petronius. The Satyricon, translated by William Arrowsmith. Mentor Classics/The New American Library, New York: 1960. 

 

Masters of Photography

documentary film about Diane Arbus

directed by John Musilli

(1972)

 

Book Review

Parting the Waters:

America In the King Years 1954-63

by Taylor Branch

     Good quality books on the history of the Civil Rights Movement in America are surprisingly hard to come by, especially considering how pivotal this political movement truly was. Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1953-64 is as good as it gets.

Branch’s first volume in this massive three book series has the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as the central figure of the narrative. It all begins with King as a mediocre high school student from a middle-class African-American background who wishes to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the clergy. Extensive details are given about his college education, time spent at divinity school, and the growth of his personal philosophy. While you can see King’s intellectualism start to soar above and beyond that of his peers, these early chapters really do dwell on the subject more than they should have. If you think theological seminaries are not too exciting to read about, this part of the narrative might drag quite a bit.

But the pace revs up and takes off when Martin Luther King begins preaching in Birmingham, Alabama, becomes more acquainted with Gandhi’s practice on nonviolent protest, and embraces racial integration as the purpose of his life. We can see how the bus boycotts, lunch counter sit-ins, picket lines, voluntary jail sentences, and public criticism of the Deep South’s Jim Crow laws propelled him to become the premier leader of this most important socio-political uprising. We also get to see how ugly and evil the southern segregationists really were as they beat, bomb, lynch, and murder any African-American they can find who tries to improve the lives of Black Americans. Taylor Branch does an excellent job of showing just how rotten the people in the South were at that time and just how tyrannical the state governments and police were as they colluded with the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan to commit acts of terrorism against the citizens of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi who merely wanted little more than a fair chance at life. Some passages of this book are infuriating to read but honest American citizens need to know all the details of this shameful part of our past so we can prevent our nation from ever sinking this low again.

Along with the activism of Dr. King, we also learn about other organizations like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, CORE , and the more radical SNCC who later went on to work more closely with the New Left political movements of the later 1960s. These organizations contributed a lot to the Civil Rights Movement by organizing voter registration drives and the Freedom Rides throughout the Deep South after the government banned segregation at the federal level. Branch shows, however, that not all African-American advocacy groups were sympathetic to King and his cause. Surprisingly, the NAACP saw him as a dangerous rival and gave minimal support to his ideas. The African-American Southern Baptist Conference also put up strong resistance to King and his own organization, the SCLC.

Branch’s account of these times are so successful because he provides a street-level picture of how nonviolent demonstrations worked and why it was such a game-changer in the history of American politics. On one hand, the demonstrators were well-dressed African-American groups, sometimes mixed with courageous white supporters, who often made their point by sitting, laying down, praying, and singing church hymns. On the other hand were violent rednecks and police, attacking them with clubs, dogs, and fire hoses, sometimes resorting to using guns and bombs to murder people or blow up their homes and churches. Ultimately, the optics of this all did more violence to the barbaric segregationists than it did to the peaceful demonstrators who looked, more and more, like innocent victims. Rather idiotically, the Southern white people kept claiming that African-Americans were a threat to society and racial integration was inherently dangerous but it was these same white troglodytes who were committing all the acts of terrorism and violent repression. When the media broadcast images of segregationist brutality across the nation, public opinion quickly pivoted to the side of the Civil Rights activists. Branch does a sufficient job of showing the reader what this all looked like. He really puts you in the center of all the action.

At another level of society, President John F. Kennedy and his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, took notice of what was happening in the South which was a Democratic stronghold in their day. Both of the Kennedy brothers felt personal sympathy for the Civil Rights cause but politically it was a dilemma. They didn’t want to turn their backs on their Deep South constituencies but they also wanted to maintain law and order. Martin Luther King had direct contact with Robert Kennedy, but the acting AG dithered while trying to encourage Southern politicians to reach solutions on their own. There were times when the Kennedy brothers were preparing to send federal troops into the South to prevent the police from killing Black people. They had to do this several times in order to enforce the desegregation of public schools. Branch’s portrayal of the Kennedys may leave the reader with mixed feelings about them. They checked their personal feelings to uphold the law even though the law disgusted them. This had the effect of trivializing the Civil Rights cause in the eyes of its adherents. It was all a tricky situation for John F. Kennedy because he won the presidential election with support from both the segregationists and the desegregationists. It is easy for us to criticize the decisions a president makes but considering that most of us never have been, and never will be, in that position of power we might not be the best ones to make those kinds of judgments.

Another political layer to this history is that of J. Edgar Hoover the sinister activities of the FBI. Hoover was an outright racist who hated African-American people. He especially had a personal hatred for both Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy so he set the FBI on a task to destroy them and the organizations involved with the Civil Rights Movement. He was convinced that Dr. King’s SCLC was infiltrated by communist agents with direct ties to the KGB. The FBI did extensive wiretapping and espionage operations on King and his associates. When they failed to turn up evidence, Hoover fabricated it, claiming that Dr. King’s lawyer and closest white friend Stanley Levison was being paid by the Soviet Union to destabilize America. Branch shows us how sick-minded J. Edgar Hoover really was. In light of the spying they did, and probably still do, on American citizens, you might question whether America is really all that different from any other totalitarian nation or not. Just remember that the US government was against racial integration until it became a viable issue for strategically winning elections.

Other fascinating topics covered in this book are the Ole Miss Riots that happened when James Meredith tried to register as the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, the assassination of the NAACP leader Medgar Evers, Dr. King’s writing of the landmark essay “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in which he castigated the hypocrisy of white segregationist clergymen, and the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.

The biggest problem with this book is its size. At over 900 pages, there are a few parts that could have been edited out. While the majority of Dr. King’s work was not direct political action, it was actually organizing, planning, and fundraising, the details of every meeting he ever attended are not necessarily important. The same can be said for White House cabinet meetings. Some of the information also gets redundant, especially Branch’s mentioning of John F. Kennedy’s extramarital affairs. For example, the tryst that Kennedy had with a possible East German spy may be relevant to the discussion about his contentious relationship with J. Edgar Hoover and why he insisted that King throw Stanley Levison under the bus to placate the FBI director, but Branch goes over the details too much so that it just seems like a waste of paper after a couple paragraphs. Then there are other important parts that do not get sufficient detail. Little is said about the Constitutional Amendment and federal legislation passed under the Eisenhower administration and the emergence of the Nation of Islam along with Malcolm X are mentioned only briefly.

Taylor Branch’s Parting Of the Waters, despite its length, is an easy book to get engaged with. The subject matter is important and it can really change the way you look at American society and race relations. Even when the author preachers to those of us who already members of the choir, it is still an eye-opening narrative. The next time somebody asks about the ten books you need to read before you die, this should certainly be one of them. 

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America In the King Years 1954-63. Touchstone Books/Simon and Schuster Inc., New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/Tokyo: 1989.