(no subject)

nuncstans interviews me:
1) We have both been accused of having a "mafia mentality". What does this mean to you? How has it made you a better person?

to use your own succinct definition of “mafia mentality” that you wrote to me in an email, I believe, last summer, the main point is that “loyalty is more important than objectivity.” That is something that is easy for me in practice, in a way, but problematic for me in theory sometimes, considering my reification of the monolithic Truth, also previously discussed at Stingy Lulu’s. So in terms of what it means to me, it means that when it comes to loyalty vs. objectivity as a framework for guiding action or behavior, I will pick loyalty 99% of the time, even if it makes me feel schitzophrenic if the two happen to be at odds with each other. So I guess on some level what it means, for me, is that loyalty is a good model for interpersonal relationships, whereas objectivity is something that I must always retain privately, b/c of my obsession with Truth, and then I can look at both, choose to act upon one or the other, without collapsing one into the other. I.e., loyalty does not equal objectivity, if I am loyal to someone or something that does not automatically make their case/discourse/whatever tantamount to true/objective in my mind, but loyalty is more important in practice. I don’t know if it has made me a better person. I suppose it makes me a good friend, by my own definition, where loyalty is the most important thing in any close relationship; I suppose it has also set me up for the hypocricy seat in certain situations, where my discourse of objectivity does not overlap with my practice of loyalty. But since I also thing that one can be a “good” or “better” person only in relation to others (since, as our old argument goes, I judge people by actions, not intent)), I guess that works.

2) Zombie vs. Vampire. Discuss.

Both are extremely useful as metaphores. Zombies cover: simulacra (of sexuality, of elan, of anything genuine, that gets performed without being animated with an ethos), a certain kind of pathological, destructive assault upon critical thought, (eating brains), the Dubya administration, etc. Vampires are different; they are both undead, but vampires have a thirst for warm blood, which sustains them, which to me means that their way of “living” is more of a dialectic between death and life, rather than the zombie m.o. which is more of an empty mimesis of diminishing returns. Vampires can sire others like them, and that seems to be the process of tranformation, whereas a zombie making someone else a zombie is a process of pure negation. Vampires are more sexy--there is penetration of the skin, sucking, exchange of body fluids; basically they seem to exist on the razor’s edge between Eros and Thanatos. Vampires seem to have agency, where zombies have a blind compulsion (and a slow-moving one at that, even their only desire is performed in arrested slo-mo). Vampires have an aesthetic; zombies have an unAesthetic, if they have one at all. Basically, vampires seem to have desire, in the Lacanian sense, in looking for blood they are looking for the lost joussance, whereas zombies just want to eat brains, in a straightforward, literal, non-metaphroric way (which makes them useful for a metaphor, but only on a meta level). Vampires are individualistic and zombies are not. Vampires could be dangerous/destructive in a Nietzschean way, whereas zombies are all about mindless collectivization whose sole project is to replicate itself like a retrovirus. Vampires can be heroes (or anti-heroes, but at least compelling ones) in narratives, from Dracula to Spike and Angel on Buffy, zombies don’t even have names in narratives, and no one would ever want to sleep with them.


3) "Anything too stupid to be said is sung." Discuss.

You mentioned in one of your posts a while ago how you and I process music in different ways, and my way is very lyrics-oriented. I agree with the Voltaire quote, but I don’t always think it’s necessarily a cynical disparagement. For the most part, lyrics of any song I like would make pretty crappy poetry by my own standards. Then, again, I like abstract, ludic, language-oriented, sometimes cold poetry more than effusive emotive kind; that makes me viscerally embarassed. That visceral embarassement is mediated by music; I don’t know why, maybe because the music creates a framework of catharsis, but I usually make use of that quote in the sense that any sentiment that I would think would sound embarassing/too stupid in speech, or even in a poem, I appreciate in music because then I can relate to it. Don’t get me wrong, I still prefer quality lyrics--a rare thing to find in the age of Jewel, but basically I interpret “stupid” in that quote as something potentially embarassing because it is so visceral and non-ironic and revealing emotionally, and I like it when I hear a song where words are sung out loud that end up being meaningful to me at the moment, but that no one would ever say outside the context of the song because that would sound retarded and overdramatic.

4) If you had been in that story about the golden bird with the swords coming out of its feet, how would you have saved the day?

shit, that’s a horrifying story. (Background: it’s this story in this fairy tales collection I had when I was little, very very weird fairy tales, the story went like this: basically there was a childless couple, a fisherman and his wife, and they couldn’t have their own kids, and then one day the fisherman found a baby boy in a fishing net on the beach. He brought him home and they adopted him, but they could not get the net off of him; the net grew with him, and he became knows as boy-in-the-net. Anyway, when he was, like, 18 or something he went on his Joseph Campbell-ian quest, and ended up in this beautiful city where everyone was sad and crying and there were funeral pyres. When he asked what was going on, he was told that some time ago, the king had received a huge statue of a golden bird as a present in honor of some truce; it was made of pure gold with rubies for eyes. The city had a feast in honor of the bird and placed it on a pedestal. Every night after that, at midnight the bird would come alive, walk off the pedestal and walk through the city. As soon as it started walking, there were lightnings everywhere, making it as light as day, and the people were filled with absolute horrifying terror. They ran to embrace each other and seek comfort in each other, but the other side effect of the bird was that during its walks, everyone’s hands, from fingers to elbows would turn into sharp swords, so as soon as the people tried to embrace each other, they ended up running each other through with the swords. There was a whole bunch of other stuff, but basically the guy ended up being immune from the bird’s effect, volunteered to rid the city of the bird, took it on a ship, sailed to the middle of the ocean and drowned the ship with the bird on it.) I don’t know what I would have done. His solution seems to have worked pretty well. Honestly, I probably would have fled in terror. But that just may be my reaction to the story, because that was, honestly, the scariest story i read/heard as a child, so I sort of can’t think of any rational way of dealing with the bird. I mean, it’s like saying how would you deal with Freddy Krueger or the evil terminator in T-2. I don’t know, that’ why I don’t like those kinds of narrative elements. For god’s sake, i still sleep with my light on!

5) You asked someone who was his favorite Faust. Which Mephistopheles would kick all the other Mephistopheles' asses in a fight?

Hmmm, that’s a hard one. I think Goethe’s Mephistophelis is sort of the uber-Mephistophelis among the conventional Faust narratives (although he does lost Faust’s soul to the angels at the end of it, but that’s just because Goethe was channelling some proto-Heideggerian German love of land/place as the ultimate force of meaning and redemption). I think that Woland is inherently strong, because it is implied in “Master and Margarita” (both through the epigraph from Goethe and the summit with Yeshua to decide the Master’s fate at the then of the book) in some way he is the same force that God is, in a way that is more transcendental than just dialectical; of course, that is his greatest weakness as well. But I think if I have to pick, I will say that if Falter, from Nabokov’s “Ultima Thule” was ever a Mephistophelis, he would make all other Mephistopeles’ heads explode.