Self-Portrait of The Philosophe at 40 Years of Age



In the 17th Century, a fashionable pastime in high society was writing portraits of oneself and others. French writer François VI, Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) begins his self-portrait with a physical description:

"[I] am of medium height, well set-up and proportioned, by complexion dark but fairly uniform . . ."¹

As for myself, I am of short height, slight of build, my complexion light, having exchanged the freckles of my youth for large, noticeable pores. Despite gaining flab around my middle, my cheeks remain drawn. My hair is not as red as it once was, and my blue eyes are bloodshot from too much time staring at a computer screen. I am no great looker, but a strong jawline, prominent nose and broad shoulders have served me well enough with the fairer sex, even if I have never been a ladies' man.

"My expression has something melancholy and aloof about it which makes most people think I am supercilious . . ."²

My expression is often blank and reticent, which combined with my unobtrusive manner makes people think me uncaring or dismissive even when I am not--although often I really don’t care about certain acquaintances. I imagine my face is also often melancholy and plaintive, but who knows how I look to others? Behind my eyes, I am simply baffled or dismayed by just about everything.

"[I] am not given to muddled thinking, yet I am so preoccupied with my gloomy thoughts that I often express my ideas very badly . . ."³

“Gloomy thoughts” are my constant companions. Like the Furies beleaguering Orestes, they drive me through each day, but this is alleviated somewhat of late. Perhaps my intellectual adventurousness has laid some burdensome questions to rest, or perhaps life has simply prepared a more comfortable situation for me midway along the natural lifespan. At the moment, my family and I enjoy a home that is more happy than not, and I hope this will continue for some time.

"I am fond of all kinds of reading, but especially that in which there is something to train the mind and toughen the soul . . ."⁴

Despite having traveled much of the world and tried many exotic pastimes, I currently lead an exceedingly sedentary, isolated and bookish lifestyle. I work long hours at home, and late at night when the work is done, I am back in my study, at my desk writing or reading. This has resulted in regular blog posts the past year, but I long for more activity. Should the right situation present itself, I will throw myself into it gamely.

I have no outstanding success or worldly riches of which to boast, but I take my work seriously and I have been rewarded with a small name for myself in my precise field. At this point, the career I have is likely to be the one I keep, with the lofty dreams of my earlier years further and further out of reach, but by the time you reach this age, you begin to accept that while life still holds plenty of possibilities, they are fast giving ground to established realities.

To conclude, I return to La Rochefoucauld once more:

"That, in plain terms, is what I believe I am like . . . and I think it will be found that my own opinion of myself in this respect is not far from the truth."⁵

 

 

 

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1. La Rochefoucauld. Trans. Leonard Tancock. Maxims (London, England: Penguin Books, 1959), 25.

2. Ibid., 25.

3. Ibid., 26-27.

4. Ibid., 27.

5. Ibid., 25.

 

Why It's Difficult to Talk About the Killing of Police Officers

When Ismaayil Brinsley shot to death two New York City police officers, the public conversation immediately merged with the debate about police killings because Brinsley had been upset over Eric Garner’s death at the hands of the NYPD. The debate has dominated my thoughts, but I’ve found it difficult to say anything.

The most obvious thing one might express is sorrow over the deaths of Officers Wenjian Liu and Raphael Ramos and sympathy for their families, but there are two problems with this. The first is that it may sound hollow, like those who always said about Trayvon Martin, “It’s too bad when any life is lost, but drugs, riots, low pants, blah, blah, blah.” These people reduce the dead human being to a preface to what they really care about, which is blaming the victim, denigrating his defenders and defending the murderer. I wouldn’t want to do the same to Liu and Ramos because their lives are no mere preface to whatever narratives I have adopted as a supporter of the protesters.

The other problem is that any statement of sympathy for the NYPD, however obvious or morally just, inevitably plays into the hands of those who have been waiting for their chance to shut down the protest movement. They have had no qualms about using Liu’s and Ramos’s deaths to further attack the Black Lives Matter movement by blaming the protestors for encouraging Brinsley’s actions and by calling for a suspension of the protests. They know very well that once a protest movement dissolves, it rarely comes back anytime soon.

And, of course, one might fight back by saying that Brinsley didn’t represent the protestors: He was a violent man with a criminal record who was disturbed enough to also shoot his ex-girlfriend and leave her to die immediately prior to his ambush on the police. Even claims that recent protests somehow pushed him over the edge are so tenuous that video of protesters chanting “Kill a cop!” had to be faked. But when the debate has been framed as protesters-vs.-police, anything less than police worship can sound like sympathy for the murderer.

Which is exactly what the protests are against.

Even broad statements to the effect that All Lives Matter are no good because they strengthen the appearance that the two putative sides--the police and aggrieved communities--are equal, when they are anything but. Brinsley’s actions were illegal, the police acted to stop him, and police departments have policies for helping the families of fallen officers. By contrast, the system turned its back on Eric Garner’s family and let the killers walk. Teenager Mike Brown’s killer walked. Twelve-year-old Tamir Rice’s killers are on administrative leave. The police dismissed the shooting of Akai Gurley as an accident. John Crawford’s killers walked. News came out this week that Jordan Baker’s killer will walk. And this will continue until--if you care--you despair of it.

But how volubly am I willing to press these points when right now the families of two police officers are grieving their own loss amid a media swirl?

Thus, I’ve found it difficult to say anything about the Brinsley killings. The situation is a perfect example of how speech is imperfect and performative. You intend to say one thing but come across or are received differently. You say one thing, but your words have a different effect, even a contradictory one. Aware of that, the best I can do is offer this post analyzing the complications and hope such a contribution isn’t entirely without value.

 

 

The Best of 2014: Comics

This is a category that usually gets scant treatment in my Best Of posts, but 2014 was a good year in comics. Largely, this is due to a friend turning me on to digital comics. I quickly got caught up with Batwoman (previous post), and began looking around for the best titles today--among them Neil Gaiman’s return to The Sandman, Gerard Way’s contribution to the Spider-Verse, and the best-selling reboot of Ms. Marvel.

But what grabbed me most this year was a manga series called Cherry from a lesser-known author named Eisaku Kubonouchi. Volumes of Cherry have decidedly girly covers, so I was embarrassed when purchasing my first volume, but the story dragged me in, so I had to go back for more.

 

Cherry is a romantic comedy about recent high school graduate Kaoru, who works at a convenient store in a rural community. Sick of his dull life and unsure about the future, he elopes to Tokyo with his childhood sweetheart Fuko, but no sooner do they arrive than they realize they have no money, no jobs and no place to stay. Sure, the plot setup is half-baked, but so are Kaoru and Fuko. As they learn to fend for themselves in the city, they learn about love, friendship and growing up.

I was first attracted to Kubonouchi’s work when I ran across his sketches on Twitter. His illustrations of young women are dazzling and capture the essence of the Japanese word kirei (綺麗). Kirei means “pretty,” but it carries a number of other connotations. Foremost among them is cleanliness, but kirei also suggests delicacy and elegance more strongly than its English counterpart. Kirei is everything Japanese culture has traditionally told girls they should be. We might complain about the negative effects of such norms, but girly girls are people too and Kubonouchi draws them stunningly.

The above front covers are decent examples of Kubonouchi’s sense of kirei, but I recommend checking out his Twitter feed. He regularly posts illustrations at various stages of development from rough sketch to full color, and many showcase his humorous and cartoonish side as well.

 

Toward the end of the series, the complications of adult life--money, jobs, time constraints, social ties--threaten to pull Kaoru and Fuko apart, but they realize all the hard work and stress isn’t worth anything if you lose the one you love. This is cliché, but isn’t it something we all struggle with? How often do we feel like all the stuff that is dominating our lives isn’t what’s really important?

For all that, Cherry is also comedy. Kaoru and Fuko elope riding a pig, make friends with quirky characters, tangle with yakuza stooges, and get into the most ridiculous situations. Kubonouchi keeps the laughs coming, and the humor combined with striking art and a touching love story made this manga the most enjoyable comic series I read this year.

 

 

The Best of 2014: Music

 

It was a good year for music. My listening ranged freely among genres from classic soul like Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man to Swedish melodic death metal like Amon Amarth, but despite all the groovy or brutal music with hipster cred I could name as the best music I encountered in 2014, I have to go with “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen (2013).

 

As I understand it (I haven’t seen the full movie), Princess Elsa has the ability to create and control ice. This is a cause of embarrassment and conflict in the royal family, causing Elsa to flee the palace in an emotional fit and unleash her powers to cast an eternal winter over the land. She hides herself in the mountains and erects an ice fortress where she can live as a Snow Queen openly wielding her powers.

On the surface, the lyrics suggest a moment of self-empowerment. Elsa is declaring that she will no longer restrain herself for the comfort of others. And yet it is out of weakness--her inability to stay in her home kingdom--that she has fled to her mountain refuge, dragging all her emotional baggage with her. She is overcompensating, boasting even as she breaks inside.

Altogether then, “Let It Go” is a powerful statement of the simultaneous experience of strength and fragility that is being human. I read somewhere that when the scriptwriters of Frozen heard “Let It Go,” they thought it was so wonderful that it was unsuitable for a typical villain, so they reworked Elsa’s character to be more sympathetic. The result is a charming musical number that children the world over are singing in the original English or their own languages.

 

My 3-year-old is no different. He makes ice castles with Legos, copies Elsa’s gestures, and belts out the song all . . . day . . . long. The lyrics “Let it gooooo!” are simple enough, but it’s comical to hear him sing such grown-up phrases as “The past is in the past” and “Distance makes everything seem small.” Some are a bit of a mouthful for him, like “spiraling in frozen fractals all around,” but he soldiers through. Then, when he finally stops, it isn’t over because I can hear kids a few doors down singing it!

A worldwide hit, a poignant statement of human nature, and an inspiration to children and adults alike: not much makes it to that level, so despite all the artsy, retro, indie or badass music I could pick as my personal best of 2014, I choose a showtune from an animated Disney film.

 

 

Deux hommes et une femme et leurs livres (Best of 2014: Books, Part 2)

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn stands as the best book I read this year, because it was every bit the thrill ride it was cracked up to be (previous post), but I had the good fortune of running across a lot of other interesting books this year. By some coincidence, the best of them came in pairs by French authors: Michel Houellebecq, Francoise Sagan and Milan Kundera.


Michel Houellebecq:

Early in the year, I discovered Michel Houellebecq, whose books in the UK editions have covers with a shameless sex-sells aesthetic. Nonetheless, they’re eye-catching, and a good book cover is worth nearly as much as a good book:

 

Atomised (The Elementary Particles in US editions) follows the lives of two brothers. Michel is a molecular biologist with almost no interest in love, while his brother Bruno is a loser obsessed with sex. They are both, as the title expresses, isolated from their fellow human beings by the conditions of modern life, among them market forces dominating everything from economics to sex. Largely set in today’s world, the story reaches beyond into science fiction. Michel discovers a method for cloning humans, thereby separating reproduction from love and sex.

It’s a book of ideas with a lot of explicit sex, which is all well and good, but what hooked me was the author’s blatant misanthropy and pessimism. Let’s face it, more often than not the world is a crock of shit, and Houellebecq isn’t afraid to say so. I’m not as much of a pessimist as I once was, but I can’t deny that in Atomised I encountered passages echoing many of my own dark thoughts. The author’s voice was a familiar one, and as one that doesn’t sugarcoat, I found it a great relief.

Platform is also about a man named Michel, and he too is sex-obsessed. An unrepentant sex tourist, he and his girlfriend embark on a sex tourism business venture, but it doesn’t end well. While Houellebecq’s portrayal of the lonely men who ache for sex with young women is at times compassionate and eloquent, the novel often comes off as propaganda in favor of sex tourism without an honest look at its downsides, such as how awful the lives of many prostitutes must be. Platform, while interesting, was less inspiring than Atomised. Often, I put it down feeling dirty.

 

 

Francoise Sagan:

 

The works of Francoise Sagan are also sordid--but less hard-core. Bonjour Tristesse is about Raymond and his daughter Cecile who spend their summers drinking, partying, lazing about and sleeping around on the French Riviera. Their dissolute lifestyle is scandalous for the times and alienates them from respectable society. When her father makes a bid to marry a proper woman, Cecile will have none of it and hatches a plot that ends in tragedy.

Bonjour Tristesse is fluff, and A Certain Smile--about a young girl’s love affair with an older, married man--is fluffier still. But I enjoyed these books. Their literary heft and insight into the human spirit is debatable, but the voices of the young protagonists are charmingly affectless and carry you along for short, sweet rides. Perhaps it’s just me, but I believe the languorous and free-spirited nature of Sagan’s characters are visible in the eyes of the author herself:

 

 

 

Milan Kundera:

While Milan Kundera’s Immortality and The Unbearable Lightness of Being were both written in Czech, the author is usually described as French-Czech, so he makes it into this post on a technicality. Immortality is a book that reaches in many directions, and while I’ve already posted on it twice, I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface. Check out my earlier posts (4/10/2014, 4/20/2014) or just check out this cover illustration for Immortality because it’s excellent:

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Being begins with an original take on Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence and goes on to relate the changing fortunes of a doctor named Tomas, his wife Tereza, and his lover Sabina against the backdrop of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Czechoslovakia. As the years pass, they make decisions that burden or lighten their emotional state, and along the way they have many amorous and erotic encounters.

While Lacanian psychoanalytic theory can be applied to anything, I was surprised to find Kundera intentionally applying it as the framework underpinning his characters, right down to chapters headed “A Short Dictionary of Misunderstood Words.” Since words like “music” or “fidelity” mean different things to each person, we often fail to understand each other. One of Jacques Lacan’s famous pronouncements is “Communication is a successful misunderstanding.” And so it goes for Tomas, Tereza and Sabina. They inevitably fail to grasp each other, but sometimes they get along well nonetheless.

Not only does Lacan’s theory of signification factor heavily in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but there were also clear references to the Mirror Stage, objet petit a, foreclosure, and other Lacanian concepts without ever mentioning Lacan or using his curious terminology. No doubt others have noticed this in the 30 years since the book was published, but I hope to go into it more in a later post.

None of that was part of the reading I had scheduled for myself this year (I did finish the Dune arc laid out by Frank Herbert and take down a handful of Michael Moorcock’s Elric books as planned), but it was unscheduled reading in French literature that turned up some of the best reading in 2014.

 

 

When Is an Unarmed Teen Not Unarmed?

From the start, it was almost a forgone conclusion, because of systemic biases, that the law would not hold police officer Darren Wilson accountable for shooting and killing unarmed teenager Michael Brown (explainer). Since the announcement of the grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson, a lot of analysis from legal and law enforcement experts has pressed the point that irregularities in the handling of the case by the police and Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch made certain Wilson wouldn’t face charges. I’m not the one to analyze that data, but I do want to look at some astounding narrative sleight-of-hand that aided the authorities in their crime.

 

The above cover for satirical news publisher The Onion appeared on August 15 soon after Michael Brown’s death. It’s a funny cover, taking a jab at those who see every person of color, every young man with swagger, every boy in a hoodie, as a threat, and it uses a clear logical contradiction to do so: Assuming you have the average human being’s rational apparatus, you would have to switch it off to think that an unarmed teen is armed.

That is the exact narrative, however, that Wilson sympathizers have been pushing and that the anti-protester crowd embraces today. The first trolls to engage me on Twitter always started with some version of “But hey, Michael Brown was a big guy.” The idea is that Michael Brown was so big, so ferocious, that with his bare hands he was an immediate threat to the life of a grown man his own size, armed and trained. Wilson made the same claims in his testimony--in which he described Michael Brown as a “demon.”

All of this is to say, in effect, that unarmed teenager Michael Brown was actually armed. He was deadly. The very lunatic logic behind the humor of The Onion’s cover has become the narrative of everyone--including many in high places--who thinks Darren Wilson did his job, Michael Brown got what was coming to him, and the protesters should just shut up. This narrative is tried-and-true and has gotten many a killer off the hook, while the victim's parents and friends cope with the loss of a loved one in the face of a system that will do exactly nothing for them.

I have held off posting this as I tried to decide how much I want to continue to address the issue--like the death of Trayvon Martin, I find this injustice upsetting--and as I have waited, the story has continued to develop. Wilson has resigned without severance pay, President Obama has met with community leaders to look for solutions, and protestors of all variety continue to raise a stink. In the end, I suppose I have to post this to raise my own small voice of solidarity with those who have little power but a voice to raise.

When is an unarmed teenager not unarmed? When he’s armed, of course. We might also ask where is an unarmed teenager not unarmed? Why, in America, of course. Because in America, you can kill unarmed kids in broad daylight in front of witnesses and not even go to trial.

Justice in Ferguson has been served up like a sad, sick joke.

 

 

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Previous posts on Ferguson:

Ferguson: How Did We Get Here?

Identifying with Ferguson as Symptom

Don't Look Away from Mike Brown