“You have written a dull and unreadable book which could have been written by any staff writer on The New Yorker (an undercover reactionary periodical dedicated to the interests of vested American wealth.) You have placed your services at the disposal of interests who are turning American into a police state by the simple device of deliberately fostering the conditions that give rise to criminality and then demanding increased police powers and the retention of capital punishment to deal with the situation they have created. You have betrayed and sold out the talent that was granted you by this department. That talent is now officially withdrawn. Enjoy your dirty money. You will never have anything else. As a writer you are finished. Over and out. Are you tracking me? Know who I am? You know me, Truman. You have known me for a long time. This is my last visit.”
—
July 23, 1970. Quoted in Harper’s. It’s not known whether the letter was sent.
In the mid 19th century the lives and deaths of animals would pass mostly unobserved by the majority of the European population, and the new meatpacking industry would embrace a lesson that classical art had long imparted to its audience: represent your victims as if they were taking pleasure, or at least accepting the rationality of their own annihilation. Laughing cows and dancing pigs have ever since decorated signs outside butcher shops and BBQ joints. Meat packages similarly depict the joy of carnage.
Quoted in The Abu Ghraib Effect, Stephen Eisenman
Stop Smiling Magazine: What do you feel about the possibilities for music as a healing power in the universe?
Ron Carter: I’m not sure music can do that. I’m not sure that Beethoven’s Fifth or Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue played in Congress is gonna make them stop the fuckin’ war, man. Or make the Shiites and the Sunnis not shoot each other. We hear musicians and people who look for ways to solve problems say music is the answer. But music has so many different possible interpretations that I don’t see how it’s possible for a tune or a note to discourage a guy from robbing this grocery. I hope my examples don’t seem simpleminded, but I don’t think music has that kind of life-changing force to make the world what I would call a better place to be. I can’t imagine a person — a hedge fund manager — would go to the Village Vanguard and hear different bands for a week and be so moved by this music that they’d give the Village Vanguard their million dollars so they could operate for a year without taking any money off the door. I wish I could play a chorus and make the robbers stop robbing. I wish I could play a chorus and make all the gangs come to my gig at a nightclub and say, “Man, we gotta stop doing this.” It’s going to take something else to make that happen. And I don’t think music is the means to make that take place. There was a jazz fundraiser at the White House this year [2007] and President Bush said he enjoyed the music, but the war’s still going on, man. Kids are still getting killed. The music didn’t stop his thought process at all.
In the mid 19th century the lives and deaths of animals would pass mostly unobserved by the majority of the European population, and the new meatpacking industry would embrace a lesson that classical art had long imparted to its audience: represent your victims as if they were taking pleasure, or at least accepting the rationality of their own annihilation. Laughing cows and dancing pigs have ever since decorated signs outside butcher shops and BBQ joints. Meat packages similarly depict the joy of carnage.
Quoted in The Abu Ghraib Effect, Stephen Eisenman
"Following, of course, the general outlines of the Christian life. I myself tend to think of catching trains more than Christianity."
— John Cage, from Silence
“The content should do nothing, the form everything; for the wholeness of Man is affected by form alone, and only individual powers by content. However sublime and comprehensive it may be, the content always has the restrictive action upon the spirit, and only from the form is true aesthetic freedom to be expected. Therefore, the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form.”
Schiller, quoted in Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom. (See letter XXII here, a different translation: “In a really beautiful work of art….”
For Shakespeare there was no such thing as the characterless self. His doubts were rooted in his practice; that is, they were inseparable from his power as a playwright. A conception of the moral self as characterless was not for Shakespeare a philosophical blunder so much as an undoing or denial of his life’s work.
from Stephen Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The third stage, postmodern capitalism (for lack of a better label), is with us still. We witness both the cultivation and the manufacture of desire—and the wild proliferation of it. The market engine is still producing consumption, but now it is consumption of the self in the form of the consumer. We’re no longer interested in stuff, or even in the satisfaction that stuff promises; now we chase a certain idea of ourselves, as cool or fashionable or self-actualized. Thus the arrival of what we ought to call erotic capital, the most spectral form. I, with all my carefully constructed preferences for Pink shirts or Lululemon sweats, become the most desirable consumer product in the economy of taste. To paraphrase Slavoj Zižek, the superego is no longer a form of restraining conscience—Don’t do that!—but instead expresses the imperative of smarmy waiters everywhere: Enjoy! Consumption is both intimate and relentless: brand-conscious consumers cannibalize themselves, feeding on their jumble of layered identities.
Exemplary fiction: David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
Mark Kingwell
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The second stage, late capitalism, is what caught the Frankfurt School’s gimlet eye in the middle of the last century. Now the engine of the system is the production not of goods and services but of consumption itself. That is, rather than merely cultivating longstanding desires in new aspirants, the mechanisms of economic growth must manufacture ever-novel desires using the feedback loops of the emergent advertising industry. Capital is reproduced, not merely accumulated: the shadowy shills of the culture industry want us to spend our way to wealth and happiness. Down on the ground, the individual experiences fractured selves, or multiple consumption identities, even while yearning for wholeness.
Exemplary fiction: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
Mark Kingwell
Suppose for a moment that there are three clear stages of capitalism, defined minimally as the dominance of markets by money.
The first, classical capitalism, defines the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, more or less the moment that Veblen analyzed. The engine at this stage of development is the straightforward production of goods and services. In order to clear the markets of these goods and services, the system works to cultivate desire. Accumulated capital—in its most basic form, primitive hoarding—is spent on conspicuous demonstrations of waste in the form of leisure. From the individual point of view, the central goal is a self defined by the demonstration of good taste.
Exemplary fiction of the age: Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country.
Mark Kingwell
![Ramsey Lewis Trio on Michigan Avenue, Chicago. [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu1iglURxb1qzpjrfo1_500.jpg)
