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Thursday, August 14, 2008
THE DARK PAGES OF SEPTEMBER LEAD TO THE NEW LEAVES OF SPRING
Paul Weller
22 Dreams
Yep Roc : 2008
[Buy It]
MY PHILOSOPHY
Boogie Down Productions
By All Means Necessary
Jive : 1988
[Buy It]
OKWUKWE NA NCHEKWUBE
Celestine Ukwu and his Philosophers National
1974
Available on : Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds and Nigerian Blues
Soundway : 2007
[Buy It]
PHILOSOPHY
Them
1965
Available on : The Story of Them Featuring Van Morrison
Polydor : 1998
[Buy It]
SHIT FROM AN OLD NOTEBOOK
Minutemen
Double Nickels on the Dime
SST : 1984
[Buy It]
As ususally happens in late summer, I'm in a phase where my reading is split almost exactly between crime fiction and philosophy. Not crime philosophy. Let me rearrange that so that the adjective doesn't look distributive. I'm in a phrase where my reading is split almost exactly between philosophy and crime fiction. Not philosophy fiction! Damn it! I mean actual philosophy: Kierkegaard, Hegel, Wittgenstein, Plato. The crime fiction is easy to explain. It's summer. There's time on the beach. Procedurals and thrillers are printed in mass-market sizes. They fit easily in pockets. Plus, you can read them fast.
The philosophy is trickier. I still have my old books, some from college, some from grad school. But when I read philosophy I rarely crack them open. That's because there's a deeper, shallower reason for needing philosophy at this time of year. I spend most of my time dealing with books: books as products, books as organs, books as bribes and tail feathers and millstones. I write books myself and publish them, as do a(n) (alarmingly) large percentage of my friends. Philosophy can take place in a book, but just as often it takes place in a text, by which I mean that I can locate the innards of the book (online or elsewhere: this is a good place to start), extract them, and carry them around with me. Free philosophy printouts, these brilliant non-books, have summer portability, but that's the least of their powers. They open up a magical door through which I can escape this world, the book world, for a moment, while still getting from it what I need. I can't tell you the number of times that I have been standing in bookstores, looking at this shelf or that table, and that I have started to feel queasy, unable to abide the thought of the latest novel by Writer I Know or the latest memoir by Writer Someone Else I Know Knows. Another book by another person in the neighborhood or someone in an identical neighborhood elsewhere: ecch. This is an uncharitable thought, or at least an uncomfortable one. It doesn't settle easily. But it's true, and that's what blogs, not to mention philosophy texts, are for, right? I (try to) read philosophy because I need to step in many directions at once: to step back into what I perceive as an unreachable past, to step upward into what I perceive as a zone of broader truth, and most of all to step sideways out of the line of fire.
Normally, this would be the point where I would outline some of what I have learned from philosophy and some of what I hope to learn. I might mention Lyotard or Aristotle or the Symparanekromenoi, as unpretentiously as possible, which isn't really unpretentious at all. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not a philosopher, by training or by temperament. I have friends who are. They are programmatic for long stretches. They work through the texts at hand. While they are mastering them methodically, they are storing up energy. Then, all at once, they make an intuitive or a moral or an analytical leap. That's how new philosophy is made and how the case is advanced. I don't work that way, which is to say that I don't work at all, not as a philosopher. I skip around. I master single sentences or paragraphs but leave the rest to chance. It's hard not to think of that line from "A Fish Called Wanda," when Kevin Kline, as the crazy Otto, responds to being called an ape by saying "apes don't read philosophy" and receives the all-time greatest rejoinder. "Yes they do," Jamie Lee Curtis says. "They just don't understand it." Since I am, ape-like, crippled by poor training and poor temperament, I'm just going to say that reading philosophy comforts me via worthy removal from the moment. I'm not reading these philosophy texts to understand books better, but because I understand them as something different (better) than books. It's only one way of dealing with the material, but it's my way. As KRS-One says:This is just one style, out of many
Like a piggy bank, this is one penny One of the problems, I think, is that it's too easy to come to see books as products, partly because they are products. Authors love/hate to talk about sales because they love/hate what sales represent: acceptance of their ideas, of their core. But the truth is that sales mean nothing in a historical sense. Some of the books we read now as classics of the canon were busts during their authors' lifetimes. Some of the books that were huge hits have vanished from sight. You can make (and I have made) the argument that there is in fact an inverse relationship between time-local sales and time-global relevance, that anything that seems to matter so much at the moment is not built to last, and while this is reassuring, it is also sophistic (see: I have been reading philosophy). But the other thing is undeniably true. You just don't know which books will matter later, and how much they'll matter. This is why making books is an exciting and sickening process. Your vogue could peak during your lifetime. It could be sparked again by a critic making a discovery in 2011, or 2019, or never. Still, it is important to remember that there is no real correlation between numbers and value: never has been, never will be. Books may be products with covers and endcaps and tie-ins, but what is inside of them is not. For me, philosophy books are an especially true case of this: while philosophers, when alive, are certainly just as subject to these endcap and tie-in anxieties as any author, their books seem to lend themselves better to de-booking. Innards can be brought out and allowed to speak for themselves. Product can give way to productivity. This is a borderline preachy point, which is why I'll let the Minutemen make it for me:Let the products sell themselves
Fuck advertising and commercial psychology
Psychological methods to sell should be destroyed
Because of their own blind involvement
In their own conditioned minds
The unit bonded together
Morals
Ideals
Awareness
Progress
Let yourself be heard Now it's time to go read some printed-out philosophy.Labels: ben, rock and roll
posted by Ben
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