A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE

Here's an interesting podcast with a strange story that somehow claims a bizarre sort of feminist currency.

OK, I gave it a chance ...

IT NEVER HURTS TO LISTEN

An acquaintance of mine recently turned me on to this underground podcast that on the surface seems so bizarre, so random, so senseless and insignificant that if you're not paying close attention you'd think it's just another exercise in social media self-indulgence.

Well, here, now, you can judge for yourself. It's put together by a conceptual art collective called Plausible Deniability Projects and I believe they  come out of Detroit.

Timmy Black may or may not be a real person but David Schoffman certainly is;

Let me know what you think:

MORTALITY

I just returned from the fourteenth annual Coolidge Pierce College conference on "Big Data."  For some damned reason, the New York steampunk art zine Wavy Thread thought it would be a good idea to send me there. They even lent me the money for my train fare to Yonkers.

For two days I attended panels, cocktail mixers, professional development seminars, hackathons, robotic puppet shows, gaming marathons, cybersecurity debriefings, virtual reality mixed martial arts matches, drone races and even a wacky version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse using face recognition software. 

If I hear the word disruption one more time I believe my head will explode.

When geeks get together to slap each other on the back the atmosphere becomes redolent with the smell of freshly slaughtered goat. The goat in question this year was that quaint relic we used to refer to as "privacy."  

It seems that these techno-nerds are so in love with themselves that the idea that they have wrought a world of ubiquitous surveillance barely raises a giggle. "It's not our fault that Facebook users are so stupid," one particularly smug programmer from Baltimore told me while sipping a craft beer at the Snowden Lounge.

And in fact, among all these millennial encryptors I never once saw anyone pose for a selfie. These dudes (& they're almost always dudes) never drink their own poison.

I left the conference feeling both despondent and relieved. I was sad because the future seems like one flat intellectual strip mall but I was soothed by the melancholy reality that I won't live forever.

I hope ...

A GUIDE TO LANGUAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

When I was a graduate student in critical theory we were mockingly advised that if we had a problem expressing our ideas with obfuscating prose we should switch to writing poetry.

I confess that I never fully understood the sarcasm behind that directive but I laughed along with everyone else, confident that we were in the serious business of parsing deep meaning.

I thought about this recently when a friend of mine from school, the poet Tsivait Mzloz, sent me a copy of his latest book, On The Glamour of Being Vague.  Mzloz (pronounced Mees-losh) was the guy in class who consistently questioned the primacy of theory and nagged our professors into defending their aversion to beauty. He knew his way around the Frankfort School and was alone in our class in his ability to read the French Deconstructionists in the original. When he took the advice to become a poet, I remember feeling sorry for him. 

Tsiviat's book is difficult and brilliant, combining insights with speculation all wrapped in a lush fabric of improbable metaphor. I won't bother paraphrasing his complex thesis, it would be, as Cervantes put it, like looking at a Flemish tapestry from the back. But I would recommend reading the lengthy glossary in the end of the book from which, I believe, one could get the gist of his ideas.

Mzloz is a keen observer of language and he has carefully traced the effects of technology, entertainment, the mental health industry and corporate culture on demotic English. Whereas at one time allusive speech and precision were the twin virtues of articulateness, today's talk is a veritable thesaurus of unfocused ambiguity.

Here are a few of his favorite examples:

Empowerment - an inauthentic form of chutzpah (see Authenticity)

Authenticity - a feeble feigning of conviction

Disruption - the profit motive disguised as an ethic

Network (as a verb) - exchanging business cards with an authentic smile (see Authenticity) 

Validate - the enablement of weakness disguised as praise

Vision - the packaging of the past into a recognizable brand (see Brand)

Brand(ing) -the neutering of individuality into an elevator pitch

Resource - a human being

Leadership - the loudest voice in the room while paraphrasing an aphorism from a book on management (see Management)

Management - the effective evasion of personal responsibility

Share - to talk about personal matters with an indifferent stranger
Panel - a group of people sitting on director's chairs who have never heard of Billy Wilder 

THE SUPREME AUTHORITY OF THE PRESENT

The cruel accidents of birth and chronology.

What good is immortality compared to 346 consecutive weeks on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list?

Blaise Pascal

If he could have somehow delayed his birth by about 350 years, Blaise Pascal would be burning small bushels of sage while hanging beaded curtains in a sun-drenched beachside villa amassing millions of followers on Instagram while administrating a massive self-help multi-level marketing empire in Santa Monica, California. 

He would appear on Oprah, dance with Ellen and preside over weekend motivational/actualization retreats in Ojai and Sedona. 

He would sunbathe with celebrities, deliver inspiring Ted Talks to the titans of industry and be the subject of hagiographic documentaries on Netflix and the Sundance Channel.

He would give up his dusty perch on the philosophy shelf at the Strand and take his proper place in Barnes and Noble's Christmas vitrine with works with updated titles like "Living and Doing," "Secrets and Tips for the Successful Executive Life," and Clearing Possibilities Toward Powerful Awesomeness." 

He would do all these things and more just on the strength of the following famous excerpt from the Pensées:

“Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light is throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

But alas, Blaise Pascal was born in 1623, long before one could count on a critical mass of disaffected middle-aged professionals whose considerable disposable income and active repertory of insignificant grievances could catapult a crackpot into a mass-market media prophet.

Poor Blaise who said it all four centuries ago, watching from the heavens as snake oil mediocrities like Prem Morran turn his subtle French phrases into Facebook aphorisms, t-shirts and tweets.

"C'est une maladie naturelle à l'homme de croire qu'il possède la vérité"