This one came in late last night. Same as the others. Much shorter this time. Seems like whoever this is is aiming for pithy.

We consider the conservation of the past to be important as a tool for learning but that is absent.

We consider the forward motion of the moment to be what it could otherwise might have been.

This is known. This is Known.

There is in conservatism a desire to move backwards. The impossibility of time travel gives the lie of the jeremiad.

The jeremiad lives only in the present.

It is a refusal to accept reality on its own terms and to project onto the past with its attendant veneration and respect of elders that emanates almost naturally from the human condition.

It is a political tactic to manipulate the tendency for ancestor worship that grows naturally out of the love and attachment to mother.

Mother is from the past. Mother is perfect. Therefore the place mother came from must be better than now, which is not perfect.

This childlike reasoning is the symptom of the mental retardation that is conservatism.

The conservative misses the safety of mother's teat, and so turns to a false pragmatism and a self-righteousness of the now that views the now as degraded.

Pity the conservative. Pity him for his pathetic needs and unrealized motivations.

But do not LISTEN to him, for christ's sake.

Just received my courtesy copy of a book I'm in. It's called the Modern Library Book of New York Diaries and it has diary excerpts from New Yorkers going back to 1609. They included an excerpt from my much reblogged post about 9/11, written on 9/12.

It's a lovely volume and you can buy it via the widget to the right.

I got another one of these emails. I'm just going to keep posting them I guess unless they get too bizarre, because, frankly, I want to see where this guy (girl?) is going with all of this. If he's going anywhere.

The Quiet American Sleeps Sound

The sound might carry. This might institute a carrier wave. There may in waves be found the waving of a flag, a glove, a skirt, a handkerchief.

Handkerchief used to be two words. The Quiet American has always been three.

The Quiet American is also one.

There are moments in which the behavior of an individual is a fractal representation of the behavior of a society.

Consider the individual following slowly the actions of the group, moving steadily into synch but accelerating.

This is following and it is a form of invisibility.

Consider the individual as he begins to catch up and move simultaneous with the whole. In so doing he becomes indistinguishable from the whole.

This is one form of invisibility.

Consider the individual so adept at imitation that he begins to anticipate the moves. He moves before the society moves. The society is now following him.

Despite appearances, this is an illusion. This is also a form of invisibility.

The individual is only visible when his movement is contrapuntal and harmonic with but separate from the movement of the whole.

This is the essence of what follows.

An essence exists but not prior to existence. This is what Jean-Paul thought he proved. But Jean Paul was not the Quiet American. He was not even American. Jean-Paul was French.

This was emailed to me with the subject "for wetasphalt." The return address was info at wetasphalt.com and the whole thing was in plain ascii text with no signature or any other identifying marks I could discern. Additionally, when I tracked back the IP addresses it seemed to have been sent from a remailer running on a BSD machine somewhere in Indiana connected to the internet via an inflight wi-fi service used by a number of commercial airlines. That is where the trail ends. I don't know quite what to make of it, but I found the whole thing pretty interesting so I figured what the fuck, I'll publish it. I have corrected some punctuation here and there, and fixed numerous spelling errors (so many that a big part of me suspects that Eric is the one that sent it to me, although the obsessive interest in aesthetic moments would seem to indicate this is the product of EL Borgnine, although I'm pretty sure it's not him. If it is, well, it's nuttier than it seems). It is otherwise unaltered from the text as it was sent to me:

The Quiet American Grows Quieter.

Consider that the avant garde is over. Whether you believe this or not is immaterial. Hold it in your mind like a crystal of hypothetical possibility that may or may not explain the prismatic severing of the world you live in. Consider that it is over.

If it is over, then it is in fact not a sociological or cultural occurrence. It is rather a historical occurrence.

If it is historical, it is fixed in spacetime at some point and with some people in some shared past that we are remembering and talking about but not ourselves experiencing. All of this follows from the nature of history.

I've made my third appearance on the comiXology podcast, talking about some wonderfully hallucinogenic comics like Orc Stain and Hats, as well as Wonder Woman, Hotwire, X-Statix and more. Have a listen if you're interested in comic books at all.

Forgive me if the site is slow for a little while (barring whatever JF Quackenbush or EL Borgnine might have cooking up in their demented brains). I'm finishing a novel.

But there will be another installment of the History of Popular Fiction on the pulp era in the near future! Oh, yes.

Recently ran into Dr. Tyson at a holiday party and recorded this interview with him with my cell phone. All apologies about the quality.

Dr. Tyson graciously answers some questions about scientific topics.

Some context:
The Willamette meteor at the museum is considered holy by the Clackamas tribe of native Americans, who were upset when the museum cut off a part of the meteor for research.

Potentially Earth-like planets were recently discovered by the Kepler team: http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2011/1222/Earth-like-planets-How-will-we-know-if-they-can-sustain-life-VIDEO

Scientists at the CERN supercollider discovered a new particle in their search for the Higgs-Boson: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/science-and-technology/2011/12/22/large-hadron-collider-scientists-discover-new-particle-as-search-for-god-particle-goes-on-86908-23654100/

I normally wouldn't comment but it remains amazing to me that Eric's attack on NaNoWriMo from 6 years ago still gets a bunch of angry upset comments. This sort of reaction really only happens when people are irrationally invested in something. You get it from Lyndon LaRouche groupies and Scientologists when you confront them with how insane their sacred ideas are.

And because all cults are by definition cults of pedophiles, clearly NaNoWriMo is some sort of cryptopedophiliac underground designed to seduce young people into an apparently safe environment where they can be preyed on by the pederasts behind the cult conspiracy. It's really obvious when you think about it.

So stop supporting NaNoWriMo, because if you do you're obviously sexually attracted to prepubescent children.

I have liberal friends who don't get it. Mostly young liberals, people committed to the Democratic party and progressive causes; they don't understand it.

I'm sympathetic. I'm also empathetic. I have both of these feelings for the purveyors of standpoint theory and the project they claim to be working on. I'm less empathetic to the project they appear to be working on, but more sympathetic than they might actually be willing to admit. But I have no patience for standpoint theory, and there are two reasons for that that have nothing to do with their various philosophical problems. The first is strategic. The second is textual.

The strategic objection is as follows: 1.) Standpoint theory holds that knowledge from a specific standpoint in a socially situated universe of all knowledge is necessarily delineated by the social privileges that a person enjoys by their relative position "in" or "out" of the dominant power positions in that society. 2.) As such, it contains with it a claim that empathy and sympathy are impossible generally, and in particular are not possessed in sufficient quantities by members of dominant social groups BECAUSE OF THE FACT of their membership in dominant social groups. 3.) This amounts to a claim that all members of dominant social groups are deficient in the nature of their being in a very important way. 4.) When members of marginalized groups advance this theory it feels to members of the dominant group like an insult and an attack, because it is one. 5.) Tactially speaking, it's unlikely to win many converts when every conversation begins with a cutting insult directed directly at the potential converts very soul.