Who really discovered America?

What we think of today as the American dream -- where you can be all you can be, where people are good looking and good -- come from the golden age of movies. And those movies were made by Jews. Outside Hollywood, Jews were threatened with anti-semitism and international nazism. Inside Hollywood, they created an idea country -- the country we call America.  In a sense, Jews discovered America.

As David Denby writes (New Yorker 16 September 2013) summarizing an argument from Neal Gabler's "An Empire of Their Own":

"The future moguls came from the backwaters of Eastern Europe and arrived in the United States with nothing . . . they worked at whatever trade lay at hand: peddling scrap metal, furs, gloves. Then, soon after the emergence of storefront nickelodeons, in 1905, they threw in their lot with a new, primitive art form that many regarded as a passing fad . . . [and] built their enterprises with a speed that even now, in the age of venture capital and mobile-app entrepreneurs, seems remarkable. And yet, outside their domain, . . . they acted as if all their power and their personal wealth could be taken away if they made a mistake.

"Their fears were not entirely irrational, since anti-Semitism was widespread in America in the twenties and thirties. It could be found in the radio broadcasts of demagogues like Father Coughlin, in the street rallies of Nazi and pro-German groups in New York and other cities. The Jews were blamed in some quarters for the worldwide economic crisis. . . .

"In response, the studio bosses wrapped themselves in Americanism, generating in their movies . . . an ideal country: 'It would be an America where fathers were strong, families stable, people attractive, resilient, resourceful, and decent.'"

Why bother sleeping?

William Dement, one of the leading researchers of the last century and co-discoverer of Rapid Eye Movement sleep, concluded from his fifty years in the forefront of the field that "the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy."

Notes Towards a Philosophy of Sleep | Philosophy Now
http://philosophynow.org/issues/91/Notes_Towards_a_Philosophy_of_Sleep

Reading with a knife?

500 years before the first online wiki, when books first came out, you read them with a knife and they gave you plenty of room for notes.  Not so different from today's "share" or "comment."

Adam Smyth writes (LRB 5 July 2012): "The gusto with which readers intervened in texts, adding annotations (ticks and crosses; sketches of flowers; heckling commentaries) or even physically remaking them (knives and scissors were reading props alongside spectacles and candles) suggests that the book was thought of less as a finished, coherent object and more as an ongoing process: often sold unbound, and frequently including blank pages, the material book had the capacity for endless revision."

Renaissance printing prefigured digital age wikis.

We can also find antecedents to the "death of books" diatribes today.  And what we find is that the new technology renews interest in the old:  "Popular printed texts such as almanacs actively encouraged handwritten interventions: one from 1566 offers itself as a space for anyone 'that will make & keepe notes of any actes, deedes, or thinges that passeth from time to time, worthy of memory, to be registered.'  Far from killing off scribal activity, printing functioned, in Stallybrass's words, as 'a revolutionary incitement to writing by hand.'"

Similarly, digital book technology increases reading:  ebook readers go through 60% more books a year than traditionalists (Pew).

Usually today, we pride ourselves on how different our new things are.  Ads emphasize the different.  Reviewers comment on the novelty.  But just like our Renaissance forbears, our new book technology strives to be like the old:

• Amazon prides itself on a computer that looks just like a printed page:  "Kindle's E Ink screen reads like real paper, with no glare. Read as easily in bright sunlight as in your living room.
• "Early printed books – including the first of them, Gutenberg’s Latin Bible of 1455 – tried very hard to look like handwritten texts."

Some of the most fun books of the past decades obsess with text standards.  Think Pale Fire or If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.  Turns out these concerns come from the early publishers too, just like the "the deletion sign derived from the Greek δ":   "a broader stress on uniformity, accuracy, standardisation and ‘a new sense of responsibility towards the transmitted text.’  We see this in the overheated title-page boasts that use a rhetoric of accuracy to out-jostle rivals: the third edition of Lancelot Andrewes’s A Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine (1675) was ‘corrected and perfected … and thereby purged from many thousands of errours, defects, and corruptions, which were in a rude imperfect draught formerly published.’"

So much of the online culture comes from Renaissance publishing.  I wonder when I'll see the laptoppers at Starbucks web surfing with a knife?

Why is politics a dirty word?

"Whereas morals are for ever, politics is just one damn thing after another, says Glen Newey (LRB 9 Jul 09).  I used to think politics was a dirty word.

Growing up, we could say "shit," we could say "ass."  We could say anything we wanted.  We couldn't say "politics."   Politics was what was wrong with everything -- with our country, with where my dad worked, with our building, our playground, the beach, even.

Newey explains my family dynamic:  "The idea seems to be that morality is grander than politics, because it is more amenable to reason, for example, or has a longer use-by date."

Growing up, I've come to think of politics as fun.  It started with the Greeks, for whom politics is the way of the city.  In Greek, city is "polis" and the way of the city is "politikay."  Reading Greek showed me that my love of the city is politics in its original sense.

Despite being born into the New York City of Deathwish, I've always thought cities are the greatest human invention.

Working in the city and for the city, I started to see that how interesting the political questions are.  In Newey's review of Raymond Geuss, the second political question is fascinating:  "What is the thing to do here and now?"

When you read philosophy and you read history, you learn a lot of interesting ways of looking at things.  When you practice politics, you get to apply them.  Applying the theories makes them fun:  given everything you know to be right, how do you make it work?

While it's nice to read about them, the other questions don't strike me as interesting:  "Geuss isolates three kinds of question that are distinctive of thinking about politics. Lenin’s celebrated query – kto kovo?, or ‘Who whom?’ – is, in Geuss’s view, the primordial political question. Second, ‘What is the thing to do here and now?’, which is very different from asking what it would be best to do from an imaginary eternal or universal standpoint. Third, there is a question about legitimacy, derived from Max Weber, but which has also bulked large in Skinner’s analyses of historical texts. What forms of legitimation are available to political actors?"

The first question seems like more of a national politics question.  In a city, it should be -- and often is -- "us us."  But some people feel perpetually left out.  I suppose for them the "who whom" question is more meaningful.  I always find these questions of "voice" frustrating.  Given my history and Aristotle's maxim, this will likely be my main focus in a few months.

"There are no moral skyhooks from which politics can be hung. It is quite hard to understand, except perhaps as a relic of state-of-nature theory, why anyone should think that morality is given, while politics remains to be constructed."
I don't know.  The eternal truths still seem more valuable.  As to do the artistic achievements.   Monumentum aera perennius.

"In the old days theologians had the task of explaining how God could permit evil to happen, to which the least bad answer was that He had to lump it, as the price of human freedom. No human agency, including the state, can do a remotely plausible impersonation of the Almighty. By keeping that in mind, we might even come to see politics, and its forlorn theodicy, not with despair, but muted celebration."

Hip hip hooray?

Who am I when I'm all alone?

"Neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be" writes Lidija Haas (LRB 23 Feb 12).  I go through withdrawal when my cellphone is far away.  When it's near, I can't concentrate for long.  If I'm reading the Iliad, even this edited version by Mitchell, I wonder when the next email or text is coming, or if I should look up more about Deiphobus or Idomeneus.

Haas explains, "The network we now carry around with us saves time yet uses up much more of it. It makes us so available to each other that sometimes we need to withdraw, but the result is that neither intimacy nor solitude is quite what it used to be."

Her essay recalls for me the times I could spend hours with lego or crayons learning who I am:
"With a doll, even the most imaginative child knows that he or she is playing alone.  The prototype for My Real Baby was designed to cry out in pain when handled roughly, but when Hasbro put it into mass production they decided that it should instead shut down in such situations, so as not to 'enable' sadistic behaviour.  Nobody would want 'to see their children tormenting a screaming baby,' but what might they learn from one that doesn’t react to torture?"

Our toys, our phones, our gadgets, they're all so "thoughtful" on their own, what are really our own thoughts.  Just as Google knows what you're thinking as you're typing a search, and as a result, you don't know what you really wanted, just so the doll that cries, or the coloring book that has a drawing premade, or phone that interrupts your thoughts every few minutes -- who knows who I am when I'm all alone?

What did Raymond learn in prison?

When he was 18, Raymond Harris was sent to prison for robbing a woman at gunpoint.  When he was 23, three weeks after getting out of prison, he was arrested for rape and setting his victim's home on fire.

Now, six months after a 13-year prison term, Raymond beat an old woman to death, stole her wedding bands, and proposed to his girlfriend with them.  (Sun-Times 11 Nov 11)

What sort of school or home or friends did he have that, as a teenager,  Raymond was mugging people with guns?

What did he learn in prison that, right after getting out, he raped and stabbed a woman?

How was prison life, that the parole board released him?  That Raymond thought it was OK to kill a woman, take the rings off her fingers, go to a party, and, romantically, give the rings in a wedding proposal?

How could we rear such a child, and grow such a man, and unleash him on so many victims?

When did you start wearing pants?

Gibbon writes (1.XI note 87) about the European pretender-emperor Tetricus, conquered by Aurelian in 274, that he was paraded through Rome in trousers:

"The use of braccae, breeches, or trowsers [sic], was still considered in Italy as a Gallic and Barbarian fashion. The Romans, however, had made great advances towards it.

"To encircle the legs and thighs with fasciae, or bands, was understood in the time of Pompey and Horace to be a proof of ill-health or effeminacy.

"In the age of Trajan, the custom was confined to the rich and luxurious. It gradually was adopted by the meanest of the people. See a very curious note of Casaubon, ad Sueton. in August. c. 82."