In the wake of the shootings in Aurora, Colorado, discussion of firmer gun control measures has been whisper quiet, if not completely nonexistent. Evan Selinger contemplates the philosophical defensibility of the neutral weapon fallacy, Hegel mourns the ruthless efficiency of the guillotine, and Marshall McLuhan calls out a Reserve Brigadier General, who also happened to be a telecommunications mogul, on voicing the “Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”

1.

“Like many other technologies, Ihde argues, guns mediate the human relation to the world through a dialectic in which aspects of experience are both 'amplified' and 'reduced.' In this case, there is a reduction in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as dangerous, and a concomitant amplification in the amount and intensity of environmental features that are perceived as calling for the subject to respond with violence.”

—Evan Selinger, “The Philosophy of the Technology of the Gun,” 23 July, 2012.

2.

“The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off the head of a cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”

—G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, 1807.

3.

“… General David Sarnoff made this statement: ‘We are too prone to make technological instruments the scapegoats for the sins of those who wield them. The products of modern science are not in themselves good or bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.’ That is the voice of the current somnambulism. Suppose we were to say… ‘Firearms are in themselves neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.’ That is, if the slugs reach the right people firearms are good…There is simply nothing in the Sarnoff statement that will bear scrutiny, for it ignores the nature of the medium, of any and all media, in the true Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.”

—Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: mankindunplugged.com

Scientists in Toronto have begun to understand a sleep disorder in which the muscles of the body fail to paralyze themselves during REM sleep, causing the sleeper to act out her dreams in various degrees of embodiment. During her fieldwork in the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston contemplates the body called back to life, and Junot Diaz ferries us back to Haiti for the apocalypse. 

1.

“What we call ‘sleep’ involves transitions between three different states….REM sleep is also characterized by temporary muscle paralysis. In some sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and parasomnias, like REM behavior disorder, the distinctions between these different states breaks down; characteristics of one state carry over or ‘invade’ the others. Sleep researchers believe that neurological "barriers" that separate the states don't function properly, though the cause of such occurrences is not entirely understood….[M]ost people, even when they are having vivid dreams in which they imagine they are active, their bodies are still. But, persons with RBD lack this muscle paralysis, which permits them to act out dramatic and/or violent dreams during the REM stage of sleep.”

—The National Sleep Foundation on the condition known as REM Behavior Disorder, undated.  

2.

“Here in the shadow of the Empire State building, death and the graveyard are final. It is such a positive end that we use it as a measure of nothingness and eternity. We have the quick and the dead. But in Haiti there is the quick, the dead, and then there are Zombies. This is the way Zombies are spoken of: They are bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that, they were called back to life again.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, 1938.

3.

“For six, seven months it was just a horrible Haitian disease—who fucking cared, right? A couple of hundred new infections each month in the camps around Port-au-Prince, pocket change, really, nowhere near what KRIMEA was doing to the Russian hinterlands. For a while it was nothing, nothing at all…and then some real eerie plep started happening. Doctors began reporting a curious change in the behavior of the infected patients: they wanted to be together, in close proximity, all the time.”

—Junot Diaz, “Monstro,” The New Yorker, June 4 & 11, 2012. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Felicia Felix-Mentor, photographed by Zora Neale Hurston

Last week, just days before his first solo album was released, writer, singer, and Odd Future member Frank Ocean posted an arresting statement on his tumblr, describing his first love: a young man who couldn’t love him back. Some called it a coming out…others called it an amazing piece of writing. For his first televised performance, on Jimmy Fallon, he performed the song “Bad Religion,” a meditation on longing in the tradition of An Excellent Song, Which Was Solomon’s, and Mirza Ghalib’s Urdu poetry. 

1.

    Taxi Driver

    be my shrink for the hour

    Leave the meter

    runnin

    It's rush hour

    so take the streets if you

    wanna

    Just outrun the demons

    could you.

    And he said Allah ho Akbar

    I told him don't curse me

    Well boy you need prayer

    I guess it couldn't hurt me

    If it brings me to my knees

    It's a bad religion…

—Frank Ocean “Bad Religion,” 2012

2.

1 In my bed by night I sought him that my soule loved: I soght him, but I founde him not.  2 I wil rise, therefore now, and go about in the citie, by the streets & by the open places & wil seke him that my soule loveth: i soght him but I founde him not. 3 The watchemen that went about the citie, founde me: to whom i said, Have you sene him who my soul loveth?

—Geneva Bible, Song of Solomon, 1560.

3.

    ...What appears as confirmation of the Ocean's actuality

    It is merely a sum total of wave, drop, phosphorescence

   Reticence is a form of pride, even with oneself

   No matter how unveiled you are within your many veils

   The embellishment of the ravishing is never to be done

   Inside the seclusion of the veil, the mirror lives constantly

   The deep decorum of the hidden is misread as revelation

   The clairvoyant lost in dream, dreams he is awake…

—Mirza Ghalib, “Why parsimony today in the promise of tomorrow’s imbibing,” 1841, trans. Sara Suleri & Azra Raza

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Still from Frank Ocean, "Swim Good"

Last week, science writer Jonah Lehrer was all over the news after reporters found a number of substantial repetitions between his previously published writings and his new work for the Frontal Cortex blog he brought with him from Wired to the New Yorker. (And now there's this.) A year-old piece from the Observer quoted Lehrer describing some aspects of his high-paid lecture circuit as “existentially sad,” particularly his surplus of electronic hotel keys. Daisy Buchanan and Søren Kierkegaard know what he means.  

1.

“You end up getting existentially sad, where you look through your wallet and you realize you’ve got like seven hotel keys…It happened last week in San Francisco, where I was convinced this key wasn’t working. I went down to the front desk, and they pointed out that I was using the wrong key. It was from a month ago.”

—Jonah Lehrer, quoted in the Observer, 2011.

2.

“And yet it could be that the little I have to say contained some particular remark which, if it met with favour and indulgence, might be found to contain some truth even if it concealed itself under a shabby coat.”

—Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 1843.

3.

“He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many-colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, and monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily. 'They're such beautiful shirts,' she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. 'It makes me sad because I've never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.'”

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: keanureeves.blogspot.com

The Adidas Originals Facebook page (and the internet at large) blew up after a photograph of a shoe with ankle chains, the JS Roundhouse Mid, designed by Jeremy Scott, was posted this past Monday. Scott said the shoe was inspired by the 1980s toy My Pet Monster. The Reverend Jesse Jackson got involved. Meanwhile, the National Parks Service has plans for an event called “Walk a Mile, a Minute in the Footsteps of the Enslaved” on July 8. Adidas, for their part, have decided to pull the shoe. As Olaudah Equiano reminds us, "apparel" manufacturers were always slow to join the cause of abolition. 

1.

“The design of the JS Roundhouse Mid is nothing more than the designer Jeremy Scott’s outrageous and unique take on fashion and has nothing to do with slavery…Jeremy Scott is renowned as a designer whose style is quirky and lighthearted and his previous shoe designs for Adidas Originals have, for example, included panda heads and Mickey Mouse. Any suggestion that this is linked to slavery is untruthful.”

—Adidas statement regarding the JS Roundhouse Mid shoe, 18 June, 2012.

2.

“I hope that the slave trade will be abolished. I pray it may be an event at hand. The great body of manufacturers, uniting in the cause, will considerably facilitate and expedite it; and, as I have already stated, it is most substantially their interest and advantage, and as such the nation’s at large, (except those persons concerned in the manufacturing neck-yokes, collars, chains, hand-cuffs, leg-bolts, drags, thumb-screws, iron muzzles, and coffins; cats, scourges, and other instruments of torture used in the slave trade).

—Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, 1789. 

3.

“Park Ranger Angela Roberts-Burton will be in period clothing telling tales of the enslaved who labored here. Experience agricultural labor that enslaved people may have performed at Hampton. Work in the fields with actual hoes and scythes. Carry buckets of water with a yoke on your shoulders.”

—Publicity materials for the National Park Service’s Hampton Farm Site in Maryland, which is planning an event called “Walk a Mile, a Minute in the Footsteps of the Enslaved on the Hampton Plantation” on 8 July, 2012. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Black Media Scoop

It is believed that Boston crime boss James "Whitey" Bulger may have had something to do with the infamous Gardner Heist, in which Rembrandt's "Storm on the Sea of Galilee," among other works, was stolen. Yesterday, Catherine Greig, the long-time companion of Bulger, was sentenced to eight years in prison for harboring her boyfriend while he remained atop the FBI’s most wanted list. In a sentencing memo Grieg’s lawyer invites us, by way of Shakespeare, to consider why people love criminals.

1. “Why people fall in love has been debated since before Shakespeare’s sonnets…The truth of the matter is that she was and remained in love with Mr. Bulger…It is not justice to use the law as a cudgel to exact the proverbial ‘pound of flesh’ from a kind, gentle 60-year-old woman who is at the mercy of this court for a fair sentencing commensurate with her conduct which arose out of the love she had for Mr. James Bulger.’’

—Kevin Reddington, sentencing memorandum, filed 11 June, 2012

2. If my dear love were but the child of state,

    It might for Fortune’s bastard be unfather'd,

    As subject to Time’s love or to Time’s hate,

    Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd.

    No, it was builded far from accident;

    It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls

    Under the blow of thralled discontent,

    Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:

    It fears not policy, that heretic,

    Which works on leases of short-number'd hours,

    But all alone stands hugely politic,

    That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.

            To this I witness call the fools of time,

            Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

—William Shakespeare, Sonnet 124, 1609

3. “It helped…that his brother, William Bulger, was the president of the Massachusetts state senate. The base of Bulger’s personal kingdom was Southie, where he served as the judge and jury, the hometown hero who never left, and teenagers would sometimes scrawl on their notebooks:WHITEY RULES.”

—Ulrich Boser, The Gardner Heist, 2009. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee via Wikimedia Commons

An article in yesterday's New York Times explored the Obama administration’s “top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture.” The president remarked that the youth of the nominated has moved us into a “whole different phase.” In 2007, Judge Peter Beaumont called 17 year-old Samina Malik, also known as the “Lyrical Terrorist,” a “complete enigma.” And in a 1987 review of Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival, Salman Rushdie suggests that the answer to the riddle is the one thing that must never appear in the riddle itself.

1.

“The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years… ‘How old are these people?’ [President Obama] asked, according to two officials present. ‘If they are starting to use children,’ he said of Al Qaeda, ‘we are moving into a whole different phase.’”

—Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” The New York Times, 29 May, 2012.

2.

“We are told of a dream of an exploding head, of ill health, of family tragedy. There may be more to it. I think it was Borges who said that in a riddle to which the answer is knife, the only word that cannot be employed is knife. There is one word I can find nowhere in the text of The Enigma of Arrival. That word is 'love,' and a life without love, or one in which love has been buried so deep that it can't come out, is very much what this book is about and what makes it so very, very sad.”

—Salman Rushdie, “A Sad Pastoral,” in The Guardian, reviewing V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival, 1987.

3.

Following the verdict, Judge Peter Beaumont QC, the Recorder of London, told Malik: ‘You have been in many respects a complete enigma to me.’ She had posted her poems on websites under the screen name the Lyrical Terrorist, prosecutors said…The court also heard she had written on the back of a WH Smith till receipt: ‘The desire within me increases every day to go for martyrdom.’ Malik said she had only called herself the Lyrical Terrorist ‘because it sounded cool.’”

—BBC News, “Lyrical Terrorist Found Guilty,” 8 November, 2007. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

image: Giorgio de Chirico, The Enigma of Arrival and the Afternoon, 1912, via wiki-paintings.org

A Tyrannosaurus Rex [Tyrannosaurs baatar] skeleton ostensibly excavated in Mongolia, and allegedly illegally transported therefrom, was sold at auction on Sunday for just over a million dollars by Heritage Auctions of Dallas, Texas to an unnamed phone bidder. On June 19th and 20th, London will host the International Colloquy on the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles, also known as the Elgin Marbles, even as Greece teeters on the brink of withdrawing from the Euro-zone. Lord Byron graffitied his thoughts on national patrimony and plunder on a plaster wall at the Parthenon. 

1.

“Before bidding on the skeleton began, the auctioneer announced that the sale would be ‘contingent upon a court proceeding dealing with this matter.’ Almost immediately, Robert Painter, a lawyer representing Elbegdorj Tsakhia, the president of Mongolia, stood up with a cell phone held to his ear and yelled, ‘I’m sorry, I need to interrupt this auction. I have a judge on the phone’ … Despite the ruckus, the auction continued, and the considerable artifact sold for $1,052,500, to an unidentified phone bidder. The small audience, slightly confused, applauded.”

—Laura L. Griffin, “T-Rex Wreck: Mongolian Representative Disrupts Skeleton Auction,” The New York Observer, 21 May, 2012.

2.

“The neo-fascists are hunting down immigrants in the middle of downtown Athens, in the streets north of the central Omonia Square. They call it cleansing. They hunt people like Massoud, a 25-year-old Afghan from Kabul. He has been living in Athens for five years without a residency permit, even though he speaks fluent Greek…The gangs also hunt the dark-skinned man pushing a shopping cart filled with garbage and scrap metal through the streets. Or the woman with Asian features, who now grabs her child and the paper cup with which she has just been begging in the streets…The Greeks may have come to terms with the fact that the luster of antiquity is long gone. But the notion that Athens, a once-proud city, has now become synonymous with political failure and mismanagement is difficult to take.”

—Julia Amalia Heyer “Amid Debt Crisis, Athens Falls Apart,” Der Spiegel, 28 March, 2012.

3.

“Quod non fecerunt Goti Hoc fecerunt Scoti. [What the Goths left undone has been done by the Scots].”

—Graffiti on the west side of the plundered Athenian Parthenon, source of the so-called “Elgin Marbles,” attributed to George Gordon, Lord Byron, circa 1810. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."

Image: Wikipedia Commons

Carlos Fuentes, author of two of my favorite novels, The Eagle’s Throne andThe Crystal Frontier, died yesterday. He also wrote a book called Gringo viejo (Old Gringo), which imagines the undocumented end of Ambrose Bierce’s life during the Mexican Revolution. Bierce’s satirical lexicon, The Devil’s Dictionary, was known in its first edition of 1906 as The Cynic’s Word Book. Bierce’s pursuit of truth and political engagement in the Mexican Revolution was decidedly uncynical, however, and his disappearance approaches Quixote-esque proportions of melancholic folly. Fuentes considered Don Quixote the best novel ever written. 

1.

“[T]ime will not only tell: Time will sell. One might think that Cervantes was in tune with his times whereas Stendhal consciously wrote for "the happy few" and sold poorly in his own life…Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a willful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality. Plato puts immortality in perspective when he states that eternity, when it moves, becomes time, eternity being a kind of frozen time. And William Blake certainly brings things down to earth: Eternity is in love with the works of time.”

—Carlos Fuentes, “In Praise of the Novel,” 2005.

2.

“DEBT, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave-driver.

                 As, pent in an aquarium, the troutlet

                 Swims round and round his tank to find and outlet,

                 Pressing his nose against the glass that holds him,

                 Nor ever sees the prison that enfolds him;

                 So the poor debtor, seeing naught around him,

                 Yet feels the narrow limits that impound him,

                 Grieves at his debt and studies to evade it,

                 And finds at last he might as well have paid it.”

—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary, 1911.

3.

“ ‘Oh!’ responded Sancho, weeping. ‘Don’t die Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy. Look, don’t be lazy, but get up from that bed and let’s go to the countryside dressed as shepherds, just like we arranged…If you’re dying over sorrow of being defeated, blame me for that, and say you were toppled because I didn’t tighten Rocinante’s cinches…”

— Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote Part II, 1615. 

Let Me Recite What History Teaches (LMRWHT) is a weekly column that flashes the gaslight, candlelight, torch, or starlight of the past on something that is happening now. The citational constellations work to recover what might be best about the “wide-eyed presentation of mere facts.” They are offered with astonishment and largely without comment. The title is taken from the last line of Stein’s poem “If I Told Him (A Completed Portrait of Picasso)."