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Friday, May 09, 2008

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Hijacked Version

I confess that I am posting this with no authority. I claim authorship as my moral right, but it was not given me to post today's confessional. I sincerely hope that whatever plans have long been in place for this spot will succeed my post, even abolish it if deemed appropriate. I'll live.

I mean, fo' reals, I got shit I'm not going to confess here. Real, meaningful shit that is blowing me up with shit. I confess I'm a wretch. That'll have to do for the probing honesty you're going to get from me. Because I'm too sad to tell you.

Really, though, what I wanted to say is that I saw this at Ryan Call's new blog:

I think I might derive too much from this.

(Adam R. has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

(4:22 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

ABABD

I just finished my last exam. In addition, yesterday I sent my advisor the draft of my dissertation proposal that will be the basis for my oral exam next Thursday. Assuming I passed all the exams, I can think of no other way to describe my present status than ABABD.

Even with the extra AB, it feels pretty damn good.

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:00 AM) | Dominic:

Wednesday Sex: Alpha and Omega

Is there a parallax effect in sexual attitudes, caused by a fundamental inequality between two distinct classes of person?

Consider the fables of sexual happiness set up by Houellebecq, in which a lifelong sexual loser finds love with a desirable, vivacious, obscurely unhappy sex maniac who will do absolutely anything to please him. A law of nature is posited in order to be broken: someone whose previous sexual experience is entirely composed of rejection, humiliation and sordid failed attempts at gratification with other unhappy persons is suddenly ennobled, granted the keys to the garden of earthly delights. It is like passing from one side to another of the screen separating the viewer from the pornographic movie: the world's great "no" to the loser is transformed into a ceaselessly renewed "yes, at once!".

The transformation is a "local truth", confined to the immediate vicinity of the beloved: the wider world remains hostile, contemptuous, structured through and through by the invisible line that separates the desirable from the undesirable. Happiness for Houellebecq is an "island", a zone of exception where the normal rules of social hierarchy are suspended and one's desires can be fulfilled without having to demonstrate one's status, or display one's credentials. His lovers visit sex clubs together, or frolic in the sand dunes, expanding the freedom they have found with each other to include others. There is something saintly about them.

Houllebecq's vision of happiness requires of women specifically that they cease to discriminate between desirable and undesirable sexual partners, whilst continuing to make every effort to be desirable, and not undesirable, to men. It is not as if there are not plenty of disgusted, contemptuous descriptions of old, saggy, emotionally mean or mentally inferior females in Houllebecq's tales: women who fail, or refuse, to give pleasure to men, to stimulate or accommodate them. Houllebecq dwells with morose delectation on every particular of the sexist schema within which his characters are imprisoned; but his imaginary solution to the impasse at the heart of that schema is for one party simply to roll over and let the other have whatever it wants.

What is this sexist schema, and where does the impasse arise? Houllebecq's novels assume, and propound, the premise that nature prescribes sexual competition between males for the attention of females. Male social hierarchy is organised around sexual access to females: the "alpha" male both monopolises resources (food, money, markers of status) and maximises his reproductive opportunity. Females co-operate with this system by awarding reproductive opportunities to those males who look like a good bet in terms of nourishing and defending future offspring. What makes females desirable to males however is not status but fecundity: the female sexual attributes that Houellebecq's male characters continually salivate over are all markers of reproductive health. (Nubility in this system is nothing other than fuckability, the state of being of "prime" child-bearing age). A male is undesirable if he is not materially successful, or if his place in the male social hierarchy is low; a female is undesirable if she is old, unhealthy or sexually unaccommodating.

It's clear that this system hasn't much to offer to non-alpha males, or non-conformist females; but the trouble is that the non-alpha males persist in finding well-formed females desirable, and ill-formed females persist in fantasizing about alpha males; indeed, they have to in order for the system to work. In reality? Who knows: this is ideology we're talking about here. And as ideology always does, it says two incompatible things: i) there is a natural order which matches sexual partners one to another according to a system of rank ("there's someone for everyone"), and ii) the system of rank operates by making everybody desire precisely those who are out of their league ("you shall go to the ball!" - and Houellebecq does indeed rewrite Cinderella with a male protagonist). Attempts to game this system, in the manner of Neil Strauss, only affirm its ludicrous premises.

To return to my initial question: do the kinds of inequality that Houellebecq first naturalises and then miraculously suspends (in a manner that actually completely validates the underlying logic of the system) actually exist in the real world in such a way that they result in a parallax view of sex? I've often felt that people talking about how constrained they feel by monogamy, for example, must belong to some entirely other sexual universe than the one I live in: a universe in which you're actually missing out on something by only having sex with one person. (One whole person!) For me, the familiar claim that no one person can completely satisfy one's diverse sexual needs just screams MASSIVE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT. But this is wholly unfair of me: I like having more than one friend (while I'm not gregarious, I do like to hang out every once in a while...), and would probably feel a bit hard-done-by if even my best friend in the whole world were the only friend I had; and some people feel that way about fucking, too, and it's an entirely contingent and uninteresting fact about me that I mostly don't. Someone who found it difficult to form and sustain lasting friendships would probably find my alleged need for a wide and varied circle of friends similarly vexing, and suspiciously self-centred.

But still, there's that whole-other-world effect. I was once very briefly in a situation when I might if I chose have split up with one woman and taken up with another - or, if I'd been really crafty about it, managed to keep them both on the go at once (can't think of anything worse, actually, but some people would I suppose have relished the challenge). I think that was the only time in my life when I was ever in the position of having that sort of decision to make (in the event I vacillated, which is never good). It's incredibly difficult for me to imagine what it might be like to be continually faced with such dilemmas, but I've known people who were, and whose working assumptions about sex and relationships were simply incomprehensible to me. The thing is: they weren't necessarily the most attractive, or rich, or socially impressive people I knew. Some of the most mind-rendingly complex psycho-sexual configurations I've ever heard described were - apparently - swarming around the persons of some of the plainest and most unprepossessing people I've ever met. So it's not - pace Houellebecq - alpha-maledom or super-breeder status that makes for this kind of differend. In that case...what the heck is it?

(Dominic has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

(4:43 PM) | Adam R.:

I WILL SMASH YOU

Michael Kimball, the novelist, and Luca Dipierro, the artist, are collaborating on a documentary that features dozens of people smashing things that mean a lot to them. I participated. I smashed my favorite hymn. It came out about how I expected.

They used my part as the trailer.

(Adam R. has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(1:35 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Calling All Computer People!

I found a macro that converts sentence capitalization to title capitalization -- a crucial step toward maintaining my sanity as I assemble the bibliography for my dissertation proposal, as the Regenstein library lists all titles in sentence capitalization. It even skips over words not usually capitalized and does the first letter of the selected phrase regardless.

For optimal convenience, though, it should do two things: detect a subtitle (i.e., capitalize the word following a colon regardless) and strip the space that the Regenstein puts before all colons. How do I make it do that?

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Tuesday Hatred: Then There Was One

I hate that I still have one more exam to look forward to. I hate being afraid to start my dissertation because I'm afraid to be finished. I hate that I've been letting go of language maintenance for the sake of exams and how frustrating it's going to be initially when I start back up.

I hate Unfogged commenter James B. Shearer, and I hate the misguided liberal tolerance that allows him to keep posting there.

I hate not hearing back at the promised time about a potential job.

I hate that I'm unlikely to find work for the summer and don't really want a job anyway, so I should take out another student loan. I hate that if I do take out a student loan, there will be no real reason for me not to take some kind of language class to learn how to actually speak something other than language -- I have enough trouble socially interacting in English.

I hate my general boredom and anhedonia. I hate not knowing what I want from people, and I also hate not knowing what they want but assuming I must be letting them down in some way. I hate running into people I didn't realize I never wanted to see again, and I hate situations that trigger negative associations -- especially when the negative association itself leads to a vicious circle of self-beratement.

I hate lapsing back into the despairing attitude that went out of style on The Weblog some time in 2005. I hate feeling that my best days of blogging are far behind me -- to be precise, I hate that I care that I don't care about that. That last clause is a testament to what it's like to have about 14 levels of self-reflexivity floating around at all times.

UPDATE: All you need is Tuesday Love.

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Monday, May 05, 2008

(4:07 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

OMG OMG OMG!!!

Blogger now lets you schedule posts! Just change the timestamp to the future, push publish, and it lists it as "scheduled" and explicitly promises to post it automatically!

Since I learned this by accidentally hitting "post" for the Tuesday Hatred, I should say: I hate being excited about a feature they should've implemented years ago.

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Sunday, May 04, 2008

(5:42 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

A Nearly Empty To-Do List

I have reached the point where I can no longer bear to do further preparation for the third of my four exams tomorrow. Naturally I am now daydreaming about what I will do with myself when this process is completed, and it seems to me that, barring any rash commitments in the next few days, my academic to-do list will contain only three items:

A brief review of an introductory text on philosophy of religion
A conference paper on Jean-Luc Nancy
My dissertation

Only three things to do! No big deal.

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Saturday, May 03, 2008

(11:44 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

A Thought

What would be better at a high school basketball game than the pep band breaking out into "Head Like a Hole"?

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)

Friday, May 02, 2008

(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:

Friday Afternoon Confessional: Little Boxes on the Hillside

In a recent confessional someone accused me of eating "children's cereal" and I took umbrage. I confess that one morning this week I opened up my box of Frosted Mini-Wheats to find a glowing Indiana Jones-themed spoon.

I confess that taking a qualifying exam while crippled by allergies is sub-optimal.

I confess that the conclusion of the second season of Weeds -- which I confess I watched in one sitting, as a "reward" for the aforementioned day of taking an exam while crippled by allergies -- dispelled my doubts. I confess that I went straight to my room and began downloading season 3, upon seeing the massive cliffhanger with which season 2 ends.

I confess that I had nothing to do with the advent of Wednesday Sex, but I approve.

(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)