My old friend Randy has mentioned, in a post called Aaden. Adan, Aden etc. that he recently got some unwanted, unfriendly comments on a blog entry he posted over two years ago, Bad Baby Names. Randy was caught commenting on people who bestow unique and precious names on their unborn offspring.
Category: Zombies
Talking Back to the Hand
Denis Dutton, the editor of Arts & Letters Daily likes Roger Sandall, who publishes essays online at a site or sites called The Culture Cult and Spiked.
His most recent essay is called “See Here, Ms Truss, The Civility of Archaic Man”. (The dateline at the end says January 2005, which is wrong – the essay mentions Peter Jackson’s King Kong). He mentions the latest book by Lynne Truss, Talk to the Hand: the Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life and by Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It.
His subject is culture – the cultural restraints on individuals in primitive culture, the failures of decadent primitive cultures, the modern Western myth that primitive cultures were personally and sexually liberated, and their members fulfilled and happy. Nice writing, interesting arguments from cultural anthropology.
Underclass
Theodore Dalrymple has produced a steady flow of articles and essays, published in The Spectator, The New Criterion, and City Journal. Denis Dutton has featured many of his essays at Arts & Letters Daily. In 2001, Dalrymple published a collection of his essays in City Journal, over the period from when he first wrote for City Journal in 1994 to 2000, as a book, Life at the Bottom, The Worldview that Makes the Underclass. I can’t handle online material for sustained reading, but the essays are available on line at City Journal. I will mention some of the essays, which can be found in the list generated by searching his name as author.
Meth Scare Stories
Steve sent me a link to the George Mason University’s STATS site which “monitors the media to expose the abuse of science and statistics before people are misled and public policy is distorted”. They issue an annual list of stories that used misleading or false information, the Dubious Data Awards. Their top story for 2005 was Meth Mania.
Coming Up for Air
After The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell’s next book was Homage to Catalonia, which was about the Spanish Civil War. In 1939, he published the novel Coming Up for Air, a first person narrative covering a few days in the life, and many years in the memories of George Bowling. Bowling is a 45 year old insurance representative, living in a London suburb. He lives on commission, he travels, he tries to enjoy life. The story is about Bowling’s decision to play hooky – from work and from his family – for about a week to visit the once-rural, once-small village where he grew up before the first World War. The story is the story of his life.
Another Meth Story
The Free Press has published a couple more stories about crystal meth addiction and the governments’ strategies to restrict supply of meth.
Last Tuesday, January 4, 2006, there was a Bruce Owen, “Mom blames crystal meth for daughter’s death”, published electronically at McIntyre’s site. On Friday, January 6, 200, there was a story that pharmacists had agreed to move products that contain ephedrine and pseudo-ephedrine behind the counter, and to limit the amount sold.
Cultivating Culture
An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture (ISBN 1-890318-47-7) makes an argument for high culture and aesthetics as a civilizing force. The author, Roger Scruton, is a philosopher, a conservative writer, and a critic of postmodern ideas in philosophy, the humanities and the social sciences. His stated purpose, in the preface to the American edition was to explain what culture is and why it matters. That overstates his point, which is that the critical appreciation of the humanities is being displaced by a less critical, postmodern cultural studies of popular culture. The displacement has occurred in colleges and Universities, and in the arts and entertainment industries. It is manifested by the destruction of critical standards, the chaos of postmodern art and literature, and the fragmentation of culture. The core of the argument is that literature and the arts, like religion, express social emotions and play a vital part in maintaining an ethical culture.
The Discovery of Meth
The Winnipeg Free Press discovered crystal meth this year. There were a few stories, usually tied to the meetings of the Western Canadian provincial premiers, over the last year or 18 months. A few weeks ago, the Free Press discovered the real source of the problem and the government instantly solved it. I am of course being sarcastic, and not completely fair to the Free Press. Some of the information in the recent stories was more useful than the usual daily wad of infomercials and propaganda between the Superstore section, the Canadian Tire section, the Wal-mart section and the Future Shop section.
Elites
Chrisopher Lasch said, in the acknowedgements in his book, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995, ISBN 0-393-03699-5) that it was written under trying circumstances. He had cancer and died before it was published. It was based on essays published in several intellectual magazines and journals. In The Gift of Christopher Lasch, James Seaton, writing in First Things, a conservative, religious, intellectual magazine, saw his work turning from fashionable radicalism to “the moral and spiritual depth that becomes possible when an intellectual disdains the consolations offered by the intellectuals’ view of themselves as morally and mentally superior to the rest of humanity.” The conservative critic Roger Kimball was less gracious, even condescending in “Christopher Lasch vs. the elites”, (1995, Vol. 13, New Criterion, p. 9). (Lasch praised Kimball’s book Tenured Radicals in one of his essays, and said little that Kimball would disagree with, except on capitalism and high culture).
Staying alive
In the The Minimal Self, Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (1984, ISBN 0-393-01922-5), Christopher Lasch supplemented The Culture of Narcissism, and refined his analysis of cultural narcissism. The earlier book covered economic, political, educational, and social structures, and the psychological experience of living in a consumerist world of superficial exchanges. In that situation people don’t know how to value anything and cannot identify values worth having. The Minimal Self deals more with cultural and psychological issues, with some attention to the political and social movements that came out of the Counterculture of the 1960’s. (He addressed a few points about the Counterculture, the New Left and the New Age in the Afterword of the 1991 Norton paperback edition of The Culture of Narcissism). His method, again, is a review of the social and psychological effects of living in a late capitalist, postmodern society.