Welcome to the new site. I'll say: notice the larger text, the simple, black-and-white color scheme, and the data streams on the sidebar. This is what's called Progress. To understand this, you'd probably have to have been following The Conviction since my sophomore year of High School -- we've been a long time since then. The site has changed a lot, and now, once again, it's time to tighten the slack and rethink the sort of stuff that this site tries to do. So if you'll indulge me, the following post is basically some thoughts on that question of making this space matter again, and some other stuff too.
In one sense certainty, it's an academic project. My aim with this site is to develop a system for the thoughtful management of information, a system to deal with the mass of data I encounter day-to-day. The rss streams on the sidebar are a part of this. The posts, once they come, are going to be part of this as well. My idea is to somehow post "abstracted/raw data" from the articles I'm reading and from the ideas I'm playing with. I want to focus on the act of writing (of producing) as an act of editing. Writing as parsing and winnowing. Writing as a quantum of information, but also as a vector (as DFW once wrote).
That's my goal -- and, frankly, I think that few projects are more important. Information abundance is characteristic of our time, of my own life, and one of the thing that we've learned for sure is that information alone does not mean truth or knowledge. In fact, it's vividly clear that the opposite can be true. Abundance can breed its own forms of unknowledge, its own forms of exclusion and control, its own new, special forms of helplessness. We can drawn out totally. And if we're not drawing, we're defecting: defering control of our information flow upwards, or cowering into dogmas, or otherwise resigning to being hopelessly ignorant, totally abject. These are the pathologies of information abundance. They are the pathologies that result from the condition of having too much and too many, of abundance unmatched by an ability to reckon with it. I think I can go further and say that so long as we continue to deal immaturely with information, then we'll continue to be fucked in the special ways of the recent past. Look at the financial crisis and the role information asymmetry played in creating moral hazard; or look at the Iraq War.
For those of us who want to make some decently accurate choices about what to believe, whom to trust, what to do, then the process begins with making serious choices about what information we consume and how we do it. I'm not there -- not even close. But I'm trying, and this blog is small part of that.
So that's the first point: information control. But I'll admit that there's more. If you stop reading here, it's fine, because the rest of this post, I'm afraid, might start to unravel. (This I suspect is going to be a characteristic overplaying of my intellectual hand. Usually I regret it.) This project, like a lot of blogs out there, is not just about providing content for the reader, but about providing content for the writer. I'm asking my readers to participate in my own self-help.
The gist is this: if I want to grow then I've got to be willing to fail. That's my main point. If I want to write and think better, then I've got to write and think more; if I want to succeed, then I've got to go through the very unsexy process of attempting, of confronting my assumptions and bringing them to bear and then ripping them down; of writing again and again until one piece -- finally -- succeeds, after a hundred -- ultimately -- have failed.
It's paradoxical, sure, but I'd argue that there's dignity to failure. To fail is to try, and to try -- in an age that has surrogated "physical fear" (fear for one's actual life) for "social fear" (fear for one's social life) -- is to be fearless. Failure is a willingness to fuck up and embarrass oneself for the purposes of making art or doing good. And that's meaningful. In an age that has redefined fear, failure is one of the closest things we've got for proof-positive evidence of personal bravery.
Maybe there's more. Maybe it's not just that we fear for our "social lives" but also that we fear the sort of truth that failure gives us. When people say that "you learn from your mistakes" they don't say anything about exactly how you learn. It's truth that hits hard. Anyone who's ever failed -- I mean, really failed -- knows what it means to get truth like a blow to the face. It's truth that burns in your eyes; to fail is to sit on your bed in midday and look at your placid hands and to look at the shadows on the wall and to feel that moment of violence come down on you; it's to forget yourself, your ambivalent, postmodern self. And at the same time it's to remember yourself, to remember that at least you have a self, that you've lived through darkness, that you'll be here tomorrow. Maybe people are afraid of failure because they're afraid of truth, or at least that very special, very place-putting kind of truth-as-blow-to-the-head that failure gives us. A life without failure means a life where this sort of special bravery and special truth -- I think the term is "wisdom" -- would be very far off indeed.
So these are roughly my intentions. To try, to write a lot, to fail a lot, and thus to grow. I take Becket's line in Westward, Ho! as my guide here: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's what I want this site to be about.
I'll say, in closing, that the process I've attempted to describe is not just a personal-self-help thing. The whole failure-based model, unillusioned as it is about the messiness of progress or the priority of empirical experience over theory, yet still committed as it is to beating forward, to progress despite the fear, to engaging in the project of being better no matter how ultimately unperfectable man is -- this is the model of an American cautiousness, of an ad hoc hopefulness, and it probably has a lot to do with what "the liberal conviction" can means to us in this day and age, in the first place. So, once again, I'll say, "welcome to the site."
N.B. I haven't figured out how I want to archive my old posts. So until then, I'll just throw up a few indicative pieces, from an earlier age...
Cameron's Culture (Dec. 2006)
Two Years Old Today (Feb. 2007)
I feel silly now, that in my trepidation, I overlooked the fact that no one ever said free speech was supposed to be clean and grammatical. It should be boisterous, unruly and unapologetic, and the Internet is just that. In one fitful stroke it empowers both brilliance and bigotry, pitting one post's flaws against another's, dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, hoping that truth rises to the top of the labyrinthine pile of incoherency and inaccuracy. Sure, the Internet is not authoritative, but, in all of its blemishes, obscenities, inanity, and openness, it is the ultimate free marketplace of ideas. Blogs don't claim to be correct, only curious.
"Censorship at John Jay's Open Mic Night" (March 2007)
From what I gathered, the intent of the students' reading – an excerpt from the award-winning play "The Vagina Monologues," a play I saw just one week ago – was to celebrate femininity, what for so long has been seen as frail and inferior, or lascivious and sinful. The students uttered the word not as an admission but as a declaration: no longer should a word so natural and important be shrouded in a mist of ignorance and irrationality.
It is the height of irony that by censoring this word, and by punishing those who said it, the administration has compounded the mist of ignorance and irrationality that the word set out to dispel in the first place.
Start the Dialogue (March 2007)
The real issue is that as a school, John Jay has the educational imperative for diversity. Importantly, adamantly, is this: just because someone feels uncomfortable by the sexual politics of the Monologue, it does not mean that he is entitled to censor it. Because that would mean the end of education. How would I know what I believe, if I were not exposed to that which I did not believe? How would I know the bounds of my own civility, if I were never made to feel uncomfortable.
Caramoor (May 2007)
The guests told Walter that they felt as if they had traveled to another country when they visited his home. Perhaps what they really felt, is that they had traveled with Pizarro himself to Cajamarca, and that they had witnessed a massacre. Only in Caramoor, it was not the Incas who were slaughtered; it was time and distance and culture and everything that could die did die. So nothing that survived in the halls of the mansion could ever die anymore, for pretty things like paintings and old swords and reliefs could live for a very long time, without context or soul. One man's suffering and another's genius were owned by Walter Rosen and hung up among the ruins in the rooms and corridors, like a fantastic museum of cauterized splendor.
Farewell Speech to Campus Congress (June 2007)
I am saying this, quite simply, because representation is not always easy. When we act there are going to be costs. But I believe, and I believe this from my heart, that if there are costs when we take action, then the costs for inaction are far greater. To ask a question our school district asked itself this year: What harm can come of words? Perhaps words can cause harm. Perhaps that is true. But ask yourself: What is the harm of no words at all? How can we understand who we are, the bounds of our own civility and our own ignorance, if we cannot hear aloud what others think? Of all the values a society, or a school system like this, can have, the willingness for open discussion is our most important. If we cannot meet and talk freely about our own stupidity and our own potential, then we might as well be going to class to learn fairytales each day.
Graduation Speech: The Man Without a Hamlet (June 2007)
The roads that he travels – that we on the stage have traveled to get here – are different, of course (in the textbook, on the turf, at Cameron's Deli) but all roads towards anything are, in a sense, very much the same. They wind far onto the horizon, so that the Man Without a Hamlet can only see what is directly in front of his eyes.
A Very Short Love Letter to America (Oct. 2007)
This small collection of pictures spans a time period from the beginning of the summer -- to me known as the Summer of Love -- to the end of my travels in the West. Though this period is rather short, I will remember it as endlessly long. How long is the moment that a ball tossed in the air stops and sits before it travels down again? There is a moment that the ball does not move. This is the moment of transition, of reflection; the ball is at once traveling up and traveling down; this is the moment that glances at infinity, that is outside of time, has no beginning, no end and is infinitely short. Therefore the moment is forever. For me, that is the feeling of this period in my life.
Herzog Review (Feb. 2008)
Thus, we begin with a vision of what it means to be human: freed from type. Freed from the predictable. Too diverse for ideology, too beautiful to be any one thing.
Watching Ayacucho (April 2008)
Max! he scolded, get to the point. But what is the point? The point is knowledge and love and human suffering. That is the point. The trains that Kerouac jumped existed because of collective man and radical hopes and the slouching and trembling brotherhood I call progress. What a fool to revolt against the very society that permits your existence. Kerouacs glowing on the margins – we cannot have that, in this struggle to survive. The real kind: people are dying.
Crossing Borders (May 2008)
Eventually they just looked at each other. She asked him what he was thinking. He said he was thinking about flowers and clouds and then he leaned in towards her lips. She turned her head. She looked at the wall for a moment. Max tried again, leaning against her body. He tried again to kiss her lips, and then she turned once more, this time, moving close to his ear. She was all seriousness now. She said, too loudly for a whisper: Not all Colombian girls are what you think.
He smiled and kissed her on the cheek and got up from the bed. It was late. Yes, he said, and not all American boys are what you think.
Persistence of Difference in Marilyn Diptych (Feb. 2009)
The message is clear: accepting the reality of time opens up both a host of possibilities and a host of problems, accounting at once for Marilyn Monroe’s fame and her death. Accepting the right panel, that of change, is accepting the trappings of freedom. The very existence of the right side questions the power of the left: the persistence of time despite our attempts to evade it. Warhol forces us to grapple with the two universes, side-by-side.
Review of Unequal Democracy (May 2009)
His book, a collection of previously published papers, traces the socially mediated processes that transform economic disparities into political inequality. He creates a model for understanding democracy that (given recent political and economic events) is utterly relevant, even urgent so.
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