Gone Phishing

Up way too early, having (due to acid reflux) slept scarcely at all; and worried (though I knew not why, really) about my Bank of America checking account:  Something compelled me, at 3:30 a.m., to call the BankofAmerica hotline and tell the nice, intelligent young woman about how dutifully I had filled out all the information they asked for in their late (1/9/08) "Security Alert Questionnaire"--It turns out it wasn't their questionnaire, but that of some monstrous fraud, "phishing" (?!) my account, using BankofAmerica logos and letterheads, in order to pillage it.  Just fucking lucky that I made that call before my SSI check is deposited (10:00 this evening, Hawaiian time) or I'd've lost it.  New bank card, PIN, etc., should arrive in the mail within the next ten days.   How sordid, squalid the little mind....But interesting how, though I remained totally ignorant,--I still haven't found a definition of "phishing," (so new a neologism it seems to be), although I suppose I understand it well enough now--my Guardian Spirit can plainly be seen Working Miracles (just in the nick of time) of Mysterious Prescience:  O toi qui me prolonges les jours...I would fall down and worship it, except that, somehow, it's not outside myself, and is, in fact, part (if not the very essence) of that Magnum Mysterium of us Men of the West, my Real Inner, Individual Self.  And one would look precious silly, after all, worshipping oneself.  

Up betimes with the Morning Star.  6:00 a.m. is still dark here in Paradise.  But there won't always be a Morning Star--Venus or Mercury, whichever it is; for such is the Inconstancy of Heaven--then, with no Harbinger in the East to fix on when I wake for my final night's pee, how will I know to rise half an hour before prima lux to take my Adderall and make my morning coffee?  I worry.   

And, O Beloved Transcendental Self (how near are we ever to things that threaten Thee with dissolution!), I confess, I found yesterday online, and listened to, the first few bars of the redoubted Berg violin concerto--and (what I'm confessing is) it wasn't too bad; not too atonal, is what I guess I mean.  But actually to sit down now and listen to the whole thing--and be persuaded to bear and hear patiently Wozzeck, Lulu, and the final vile, bitter dregs of other Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern?--When Hell freezes over!  No way!  Ever!  Thus far have I been seduced towards the Modernist Heterodoxy by the treachery of a false friend (Ethan Mordden, in his Guide to Orchestral Music), but at the Edge of the Abyss (having tossed a pebble into it, just to see if there were any Monsters down there) I have recoiled, and now stand firm against all further transgression.   Come scoglio, my mind is, henceforth and forever, adamantly, closed.  Which, I admit, it has never successfully been before (being ever the dupe of Beauty, Good Humour, and Fairness)--But how likely is it that I will ever again come upon a balanced, favorable exposition of musical serialism, theory and practice, like what Ethan Mordden came upon me unawares with, and be tempted again just to check it out?  Not likely, I should think. The woods are not exactly crawling with apologists of dodecaphony.   Or perhaps that depends on which neck of the woods you hang out in.  In my woods actually, they're thick as vipers underfoot--along with trendy French Deconstructionist Mythologs, post-Freudians, and snob-idolaters of Peggy Guggenheim.   You have to watch where you step.

Fraud, or, if you will, Humbug--

I weary, I worry my grave, responsible transcendant inner self by puzzling at its ubiquity--being quite of a mind with Thomas Love Peacock that most of what the world is serious about is utter, non-starting horse shit. Let us go back to epicycles, so dear to the pre-Copernican astronomer as the likeliest explanation of planetary retrogression, and, by implication, of the wheels-within-wheels, clockwork complexity of the Universe itself. No wonder the pious Medieval "Astronomer" clung to them, and willingly burnt people at the stake for disbelieving in them. Let us then advance to the Science of Phrenology--how much it explained! And, when phrenology somehow, suddenly started embarrassing everybody and was summarily discarded--how avidly the world leapt upon the morbid and nasty fantasies of late 19th century Viennese Jewish medical doctors, and of a certain early 20th century Swiss Nazi, as the virtual "open sesame" of "depth psychology." Is it really any wonder that tone-row serialism was "discovered," or that James Joyce's prolix, whumsical Irish coprophilia, and Jackson Pollock's trivial drippings were hailed as sheer, perfect genius? Or, now that planetissimals have been reasonably hypothesized as part of the early developmental stages of the concretion of suns and planets, the inference of things' having gone bang! smack into one another is now thought (perhaps I should say believed) to account for things as various as the retrograde rotation of venus, the Moon-like once-a-year rotation of Mercury, and the creation (I think we might call it) of the Earth's moon? Really, we haven't got all that far from epicycles.

I read the news today,  oh boy:  Murky, mucky stolen election in Kenya, refusal to relinquish ill-gotten power, murders perpetrated against whole ethnicities (Kikuyu), and retaliations (murderous) against whole other ethnicities.  Mau Mau politics?  The politics (if not of AIDS--Cannibalism?--and Sucking Severed Goats Penises) of "protecting" species like Giant Spitting Cobras, and making sure that anyone who gets bit by them never gets more than half of the anti-venin they need?  Interesting, but scarcely edifying. 

 So, turning to Italian politics, the exquisitely civilized-seeming (my impression) "Professore" Prodi is about to lose a vote of confidence in the upper house (What the hell do they need an upper house of Parliament for?  Did the Gladio group force that on them too?) of the Italian parliament, the Evil Magnate Berlusconi appears to be staging another CIA-backed comeback. 

What did I just say?

Smelling something, I googled a curious line of inquiry, starting, just for contentiousness' sake, with "CIA, instability of Italian government," and, Boys and Girls, can you guess where it led me?  Well, I have some very edifying bookmarks on my computer, starting with, "A timeline of CIA atrocities;" which led to the aforementioned "Gladio group:"  which led to "P2 Berlusconi;" which led to "Propaganda Due--Wikipedia;" which led to "Misteri d'Italia;" which led to--Are you with me, Boys and Girls?--"Berlusconisilvio.com: Il piano di rinascita di Licio Gelli."

 

Cruising on my lovely new computer this morning.  I started googling "transcendentalism vs. pragmatism," the latter of which I knew was going to disgust me--but I hadn't heard before about Royce, a disciple, I think, of Dewey, and a long-time-ago a professor here at the University of Hawaii.  It turns out that Royce's schema of the Conscious Self (which Baumeister seems to have lifted from him wholesale) with the Secondary Function (#2) of the Conscious Self, forming social bonds--after the Primary (#1), Cognitive Function, knowing the world and oneself, and before the Tertiary (#3) Executive Function, willing and organizing--(the Secondary Function, I say, joining the world) is epitomized by joining the Christian Religion; "overcoming one's isolation from Christianity."  Jesus fucking Christ.

Then I went on to the "Linguistic Wars," between George and Robin Lakoff, on the one hand (Metaphors! Metaphors! the more unconscious the better!), and Stephen Pinker and Noam Chomsky on the other hand.  The thing about being stupid (the former hand) is, it fills you with unappeasable rancour and makes you totally, ridiculously, intransigeant.  On yet the other hand, as my favourite poet (A. Pope) says, "No Creature smarts so little as a Fool." I don't see George and Robin giving up any time soon--I suppose they have one another.

Being/Having an American Transcendental Self

Much googling and reading of Baumeister & Cie. on the peculiarly North American Self.  As Pascal said God says, "Tu ne me chercherais pas, si tu ne m'avais pas déja trouvé."  As usual, I don't find everything that Baumeister says of the same worthwhileness, but his re-discovery of "Will-Power", and his generally adequate notion of what the Self (at least among North Americans) is, and what it does, are, I daresay, of timeless significance--worthy of place alongside such lights as Plato/Socrates, Montaigne, La Rochefoucauld, Emerson, Nietzsche/Thoreau, Proust, Henry James.  I just throw Henry James in there, because it seems to me that he does (much more than his brother--an understanding forced upon him, as I believe, by his ineluctable gayness) have an appreciation of the inner workings and apperceptions of the Self, that only, maybe, Mark Twain (specifically, in his author's soliloquies on the deliberations of Tom Sawyer's and Huckleberry Finn's consciences) ever equaled in American letters--funny, and instructive, how mutually antipathetic James and Twain found one another, considering their very similar notions of (essentially male) psychology:  'Twas, I expect, the age-old, half-in-the-shadow, Shakespearean/Marlovian dichotomy between basically straight and basically gay mentalities.  

After all the last-minute hassling, all the panicked hustling--looks like I can't get into school this semester--or, maybe, any semester:  Such is the hash I've made of getting financial aid.  Monday, I will, for an hour, shelve my austere, I-can-do-anything-by-myself-without-asking Standards, and talk to a Graduate Academic Advisor.  

So.  I've had my new computer, a Mac Pro with all the fixings, installed, ready to go for a couple of days now.  I can blog any time of the day or night.  I am registered at UH, will attend my first class, (FR 409, stylistics) this afternoon.  I'm back in the groove.  Phil just called; we talked for half an hour or so, of many things...I'm still able after all these years to shock the boy:  Why didn't Hitler care, during the last nine months of the War, that he was losing?--He had his hours and hours (days, in fact) of homosexual snuff porn (his generals being strangled with piano wire), which he watched over and over and over, and, his lust being satisfied, he cared about nothing else.  Phil said that took him places he didn't want to go.

Dalla Biblioteca Hamilton. Just finished registering online here at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for Spring 2008 graduate studies: Fr 409 and Fr 661, advanced French grammar and stylistics, respectively. How fast it's going. Read a whole book on Transcendentalism last night: Hate to say it, but I have nothing to add: That's me, top to bottom, from "moral sense," and the hash we make of Kant's "pure" and "practical" reason, to the Emersonian aversion to all of Hawthorne, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables ("too melancholy!") and Edgar Alan Poe ("jingle-jangle man"). I knew I liked (loved, actually) Emerson and Thoreau--I just didn't know how much. Funny, the only difference is I'm not as persuaded as they were of Walt Whitman's great genius, and I am inclined, like say the Lowells and the Longfellows, to find Great Barbarically Yawping Walt insuperably nasty. Oh well.

You Can Take a Boy Out of the Country

I haven't lived on a wheat 'ranch' among the vast rolling hills of the Palouse Country for fifty years, but the spirit of the place will live in me till I die--and maybe afterwards, who knows? So what is this immortal 'Spirit of the Palouse'? It is in the first place a feeling of being centered and alone in the midst of benign and nurturing immensity. The size of the average family's ranch in the Palouse is two or three thousand acres; not tens of thousands of acres as in Texas, but. when you consider that there are 640 acres in a square mile, that means that 'neighbours' in the Palouse are usually two or three miles apart. Ordinarily when you go into the fields to do the business of dry-land wheat farming--pulling harrows or plows with your caterpillar tractor, or driving combines or wheat-trucks--you don't meet with another soul, and you don't see a single other human being. It's just you and the land, the thousand-foot tall hills of wind-blown loess, unchanged for thirty million years.

At the Hawaii State Library returning all three of the Baumeister books, having extracted the juice and reduced them to a dry remainder of insipid, derivative bagasse (Never use an unselfconscious metaphor). Baumeister's lucubrations on "identity crisis" are worthless pap: First he acknowledges that maybe there is no such thing; then proceeds in quite the fraudulent Jungian/Freudian manner to expostulate on and develop his non-existent non-idea with fabulist abandon. Whenever he touches on something real, like artistic creativity, he is ridiculously, pompously absurd. Disgusting.

Still waiting, waiting for my insurance settlement. Thinking about my whoopdedoo "academic career," how really I don't know what else to do; but, fortunately, I do know how to do it.

Hanging out at the Hamilton Library today--since the insurance money hadn't arrived, I decided to bag the whole thing and come here to blog and satisfy my idle curiosity with unlimited internet access. Then towards two-thirty, one of my meanest blogs accomplished and my curious thirst (first impulse of an active "controlling" self, according to Baumeister) pretty much slaked for the time being, I thought what-the-hell I'll see if Mme. Jose'-Fassiotto (head of the French department) might be in, and could tell me what I'm supposed to be doing next Monday when classes start. Damned efficient woman (funny and nice, about my age)--within five minutes I was signed up for two classes in grammar and stylistics, and was in a Teaching Assistant program, set to be teaching (I think) three mornings a week, for an additional $13,000.00 a year. Jesus.

What a Difference the Mob Makes

How it all ties together. Re-reading Ethan Mordden's Some Men Are Lookers, which I just finished again this morning, I noticed, in all its significance, the erotic/masochistic spanking by Carlos of the ever-reforming Little Kiwi/Virgil/J. Which entirely escaped me when I read it first a month or so ago--I thought it was a hot scene and sexy, but truly I did not understand it, did not understand that it had significance--because as recently as a month ago I had not read Sam D'Allessandro's taunting little essays, and I had not read Roy Baumeister's Masochism and the Self, or Escaping the Self. I had no idea. Which brings me round again to my self and to the Self: What's funny/odd about this Western Individual Self is what a paradoxical worry and an onus it seems to be to be free and responsible only for one's self. Not that it necessarily is so for me--but I would be unlike anybody else in the world, apparently, if it were not so, at least sometimes, maybe in ways unknown to myself. And I am really not prepared to view myself, with all my self-defining differences, as a wholly new species. Or maybe I am. After all, I don't view myself as gay--or American--in any sense having anything whatsoever to do with the Stonewall riots. How dare I not? Well--try and understand--the Stonewall Inn was a Mafia-run bar. The corrupt-by-definition Jew York police who raided it were used, by long habit of corruption, to harrassing homosexuals, and specifically to harrassing homosexuals in Mafia-run establishments which didn't pay adequate "protection" money to them. I'm glad, of course, that those heroic drag queens finally showed the world what horrible brutality they were suffering at the hands of the Police--but no one even noticed that the whole system had been exposed as corrupt: It didn't matter then (the New York Times certainly never mentioned it) to anybody, and it doesn't seem to matter now. What "Americans" East of the Rockies don't understand, don't seem to grasp, is that being inured to, putting up with--having put up with all these years--the Mob and a corrupt-by-definition police force, makes them utterly unlike us who live where (the prosperous, rural Pacific Northwest) there is not and never has been a Mob or a corrupt-by-definition local politics and police force: unlike and inferior to. Sorry. The sad truth is: Suffering does not ennoble. Living mired in moral squalor, so long that you don't notice it, just makes you squalid.

Dancing with Girls

When I was twelve years old my mother got it into her head that I needed to know how to dance, and, over my vehement protests, insisted that I join a square-dancing club, as well as take private ballroom dancing lessons from the daughter of one of her friends, a girl a head taller and a year older than myself. Both endeavours were horrific, soul-searing disasters, ending in mutual outbursts of exasperation between me and my partners. Wisely, my mother abandoned the project of heterosexualizing me at that point, and didn't foolishly resume it until I was fifteen, when my total lack of interest in girls began to worry her, and she nagged me into going on the first, last, and only date-with-a-girl that ever I went on--another scarifying experience, but of no relevance to this story, except that it did include a little post-football game sock-hopping, from which I emerged virtually sick with tension and disgust. Heaven spared me then for many years from the horrors and terrors of ballroom dancing, until I was in my early thirties, and was invited to a Thanksgiving dinner and party afterward with a family of hospitable and genteel negros. Nicely, the daughter of the house grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the center of the livingroom where several other couples were apparently enjoying themselves doing what seemed to be fairly free-form ballroom dancing. Gamely, I allowed myself to be dragged into the loose embrace of what might have been a two-step, and tried to divine my partner's intentions and imitate them. Which resulted in a tangled train-wreck. Laughing, the young black woman held me at arm's length and said, "Don't you know how to lead?" In an instant, forgetting how determined I was to take part in things and be Good Company, I responded indignantly, "'Lead'? What do you mean 'lead'? Aren't we equals?"

Having read this morning Christopher Bram's terrific Hold Tight, I've cleared the shelves here at the dear old Hawaii State Library of all the other books by our latest favourite gay author. Additionally I'm going to check out Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, just in case I missed something, and, for the same reason, Carl Dahlhaus's Schoenberg and the New Music. Honey and vitriol. Ambrosia and gall. For a balanced weekend's reading. I've already found, from a serious enough reading of the first few pages of Civilization, etc., that there is sometimes profit in reading something you know is horseshit--just keeping it focused on its being utterly pointless drivel, apart from the author's perfectly obvious self-serving fraud and deceit. Really, it helps to understand Freud to read him in this light. And I'm supposing that the same sort of truths will surface in taking an utterly disbelieving run through Dahlhaus's solemn absurdities.

Sat in today reading William Jack Sibley's Any Kind of Luck: Funny, yes, and heart-rending--so well written as to deserve a category of its own. And while I sat, Hawaii Telcom installed my high-speed (11.5 megabytes per second) internet connection, and UPS delivered a modem with all the fixin's. Now all I need is my Mac Pro and my HDTV--as soon as that insurance settlement check is "cut" (as the say); which could be as soon as tomorrow, certainly not later than next week (so the nice lawyer said when I signed the Release of All Claims and handed it in New Year's Eve).

Listening lately to the Boccherini guitar quintets; along with, of course, the Albinoni concerti a cinque. Why is five, peculiarly, the number of perfection in music? Not that you can't do with more (six parts is Josquin's and Brahms' perfect summum), or fewer (as, of course, Haydn's quartets exemplify); but it is to note that, in modern music, there is only one perfect string trio: Mozart's, K. 563 (as I recall). And it is generally admitted that the string quartet has an essentially ambiguous tension between homophony and polyphony, which Haydn, of course, does resolve magisterially--but not always, and it took him awhile to arrive at a perfect balance: The fugal last movements of most of the early Haydn quartets is generally admitted (at least I admit it) to be an unsatisfactory tilt in the direction of polyphony at the expense of the intrinsically homophonic character of the quartet. The balance is not really resolved until you add a fifth part, another viola in the Mozart quintets, another cello in the Boccherini and Schubert quintets. This is why I myself, when I turn composer, usually write music in five parts. I can't exactly say what it is about the perfection of "fiveness," but I hear-tell that there were musical theorists of the Italian Renaissance who wrote on the subject--and I am determined to hunt them down.