totalitarianism today

Bad memories: When the fiction feels like a documentary.

"Memory believes before knowing remembers." [William Faulkner, Light In August]

The difference between a good memory and a bad memory has no bearing on its reality. We do not choose what to remember. History, as an academic discipline, makes an attempt to choose this for us. Ultimately, however, the salience of memory takes place in the twilight. What we remember may (or may not) be something like what actually took place.

In his Mailer-esque novel-nonfiction about the Vietnam War, Tim O'Brien explains the "surreal seemingness" of war memories:

In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of visions are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss alot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.

So maybe seeing is believing the story you told yourself. And maybe seeing and remembering share the connection of a mind to its mirage. 

When my grandfather describes life under Ceausescu’s communist regime in Romania, he talks about the cheap, hard bread procured after hours spent waiting in bread lines. He does not dissect the past for an explanation as to why flour could not be purchased, why a black market for bread did not exist, why no one questioned the scarcities that turned their lives into miserable shopping lists. Instead, he talks about coming home after work to change into his boots before going to wait in the lines. My grandfather did not want to destroy his nice work shoes.  There is something sacred about the way in which we hide our feet.

The impeccable status of witness, possibly related to the American respect for anything which smacks of faithful "testimony", has been known to cause problems in the modern pursuit of criminal justice. Molika Ashford brings up the example of Timothy Cole's recent exoneration: 

This February, 10 years after his death in prison, Timothy Cole was posthumously exonerated for a rape he did not commit. Before his trial, a victim picked him out of a series of photographs, but her memory may have been skewed by the fact that his image was the only one in color. Cole’s case is not an isolated one. The Innocence Project, a legal advocacy group that worked on his behalf, has cleared the names of more than 175 people who were wrongly convicted due to the unreliability of human memory. 

Psychological research continues to undermine the trust given to eyewitnesses’ ability to accurately remember the details of a crime, and we’re becoming increasingly aware of how often their memories are unconsciously manipulated. Paired with a growing interest in the field of neurolaw, which examines the intersection of neuroscience and legal systems, the desire for tools that can objectively assess the accuracy of memories is palpable.

Why must these memories, these morsels for the memoirs, be so certain to us? Why not leave them as the beautiful unbelievables which do best when they suggest? Canadian WWII veteran Pat Hennessey's memories were found in an attic, swaddled in dust. The latest versions of Russian history have been duly massaged into a more presentable, cocktail-worthy version. Ollie North's memories of Reagan make a life in the present rather difficult; the nostalgia breaks out like sweat beads on his upper lip. An exhibition of communist propaganda is greeted with a fond, unforgiving tenderness by Bulgarians. Who really remembers Italian-style divorces? 

I want to...

Understand cowbirds in love....Print a copy of the Table of Condiments That Periodically Go Bad and stick it to what's left of my refrigerator. Become a dorodango collector.... Stroll through the aisles of David Eggers' Superhero Supply Store in search of the perfect grappling hooks...Read something short and spiffy by Angela Carter.... Resist the urge to lose a few hours in My Modern Metropolis or Drawer Geeks....Bump into Florin Cristescu somewhere near this street corner and decide whether to name the feeling "nostalgia" or "deja-vu". Because naming conventions matter. And so do conversation-corner conventions. And Daniel Goldhagen knows how much conventions about what we do with memories matter... Watch every single little Hitchcock film still at this website.... Have an answer to the question of whether the WSJ pictures of the day taste quite so intense when not viewed on a Macbook.... Form a secret society of sorts on Hashima Island... Discover a book I haven't read by Hannah Arendt right after waking up to find a gargantuan book holding every single article ever published in the sorely-missed Partisan Review right next to my pillow...

Tom Waits and The Omnipresent: An interview over time.

Since there are so many mediocre interviews with Tom Waits in which one must pore over pages to come across a gem, The Omnipresent is here to cull the best of journalistic sources for the best of Tom Waits. The words of all characters in this conversation are entirely their own (see sources at the end). Unfortunately, there is no source for The Omnipresent apart from this post, but all The Omnipresent's statements are original to him/her/it.

The Omnipresent: Today I found myself reveling in The Heart of Saturday Night, as I am wont to do weekly, which made me wonder about Tom Waits. Being omnipresent means I get to see everything all at once, but I rarely get to focus on one thing in particular. So I like to spend rainy days focusing. And today my focus is Tom Waits. Who is Tom Waits?
David McGee: Tom Waits is a twenty-six year old composer and performer who looks like an urban scarecrow. He wears a ratty black cap pulled down over his left eye, a coat that is simultaneously too big and too small, paper-thin pointy black shoes, and a couple of days' worth of beard. He appears to have slept in a barrel.
The Ominpresent: So he was. But who is he now?
Todd Everett: Tom Waits is a poet.
The Omnipresent: Obvious and mundane. Tell me something I don't know about Tom Waits.
James Stevenson: In 1977, Tom Waits' band was called the Noctural Emissions. They played softly.
Tom Waits: Poetry is a very dangerous word.
The Omnipresent: Tom Waits himself has joined the conversation. What's so dangerous about poetry that you felt you had to join the conversation?
Tom Waits: I don't like the stigma that comes with being called a poet-- so I call what I'm doing an improvisational adventure or an inebriational travelogue, and all of a sudden it takes on a whole new form and meaning. If I'm tied down and have to call myself something, I prefer "storyteller".
The Omnipresent: Alright storyteller, tell me a story.
Tom Waits: I was born in LA at a very young age. I was born in the back seat of a yellow cab in Murphy Hospital parking lot. I had to pay a buck eighty-five on the meter to move. I didn't have my trousers on yet and I left my money in my other pants.
The Omnipresent: Why did you become a musician?
Tom Waits: Well, it was a choice between entertainment or a career in air-conditioning and refrigeration.
The Omnipresent: Air-conditioning is perhaps the greater good. But, then again, you are a star.
Tom Waits: I'm not a big star. I'm not even a twinkle...I'm just a rumor.
The Omnipresent: What you are, Mr. Waits, is a man indulging in false modesty. I never called you a "big star". I only called you a "star". And stars can be bought pretty cheaply nowadays. On that note, how would you describe your music?
Tom Waits: Well, you know...most of my songs are kinda travelogues. It's difficult to say exactly where they come from. You gotta sleep with one eye open.
The Omnipresent: Why just one?
Tom Waits: Everything here eventually turns into something else. It's not good if you're insecure.
The Omnipresent: And keeping both eyes open is a sign of insecurity? I've always thought giving interviews is a sign of insecurity. Maybe we are both a little insecure. Without invoking Leo Strauss, I'd venture to suggest that perhaps modernity breeds insecurity. What do you think?
Tom Waits: There's a common loneliness that just sprawls from coast to coast...It's like a common disjointed identity crisis. It's the dark, warm, narcotic American night.
The Omnipresent: Yes, I like narcotics. They stand the test of time. What do you like, Mr. Waits?
Tom Waits: I like smog, traffic, kinky people, car trouble, noisy neighbors, crowded bars, and spend most of my time in my car going to the movies.
The Omnipresent: And Burroughs. You like William Burroughs, don't you?
Tom Waits: Yeah, I love Burroughs. He's like a metal desk. He's like a still, and everything that comes out of him is already whiskey.
The Omnipresent: So you tend to like life and home-made whiskey. That's interesting. But not as interesting as what you hate. So what, if your soul permits, do you hate?
Tom Waits: I guess the only thing I hate is bluegrass played poorly.
The Omnipresent: Do you worry about a lot about success or achievement?
Tom Waits: I worry about a lot of things, but I don't worry about achievement... I worry primarily about whether there are nightclubs in heaven.
The Omnipresent: You have children, which means that at one point you had a baby daughter, since you now have an older daughter. What is she like?
Tom Waits: Well, we haven't picked a name yet. I told her that when she's eighteen she can pick any name she wants. In the meantime, we'll call her something different every day.... Max today. She's been everything. We just can't seem to make up our minds. When she meets somebody and likes them she takes their name. She speaks seventeen languages. She's now in military school in Connecticut. I only get to see her on weekends. At night when I get home all the kids line up in their uniforms and Joe Bob's got my martini and Max has my slippers and Roosevelt has my pipe. They all say, "Hello, Daddy!"
The Omnipresent: How droll. So you like to keep mum about your family? A real family man...
Tom Waits: I'm also colorblind, which is kind of interesting. I juggle with brown and green and blue and red, and green looks brown, brown looks green, purple looks blue, blue looks purple. I don't see the world in black and white...
Alina: That's the worst pick-up line I've ever heard. Got any more?
Tom Waits: The laws that govern your private madness when applied to the daily routine of living your life can coagulate into a collision.
Alina: Almost as lame as an Ivy League alma mater ring. I had no idea you were so trendy...
Tom Waits: Jazz developed nylon socks...
Alina: Blah.
The Omnipresent: I keep hearing voices from the proletariat interrupting our conversation and bringing down the intellectual bar that we have set so highly, Mr. Waits. How do we deal with the din?
Tom Waits: It's hard, because we're so product-oriented that our only real spiritual leadership comes from that angle, chasing the dollar. It's like it's okay if you get enough money for it. Selling out is alright as long as you get enough.
The Omnipresent: "Selling-out" was never an issue in the Middle Ages. Times have changed, haven't they?
Tom Waits: I was on 9th and Hennepin years ago in the middle of a pimp war, and 9th and Hennepin always stuck in my mind. "There's trouble at 9th and Hennepin." To this day I'm sure there continues to be trouble at 9th and Hennepin. At this donut shop.
The Omnipresent: So things stay the same at 9th and Hennepin, but that is hardly an argument for anything. Times still change. What are you trying to say?
Tom Waits: Make hay while the sun shines.
The Omnipresent: But night has no sun.
Tom Waits: Satudaynightistis..it's what happens to your arm when you hang it around a chair all night at the movies or in some bar, trying to make points with a pretty girl.
The Omnipresent: I've never done that. Pretty girls rarely change the world. It's the Madeline Albrights, Janet Renos, and Hillary Clintons, not what any seeing-eye dog would call pretty, that matter. But I do love chicken. Where can I get good chicken?
Tom Waits: I suggest the Red Wing Hatchery near Tweedy Lane in South Central L.A. We're talking both fryers and ritual chickens. Hang one over the door to keep out evil spirits; the other goes on your plate with paprika.
The Omnipresent: So you're an L.A. man, then? Is that where you are living now?
Tom Waits: I don't know where I'm living. Citizen of the world. I live for adventure and to hear the lamentations of the women... I've uprooted a lot. It's like being a traveling salesman...There's a certain gypsy quality, and I'm used to it. I find it easy to write under difficult circumstances and I can capture what's going on. I'm moving towards needing a compound though. An estate. But in the meantime I'm operating out of a storefront here in the Los Angeles area.
Robert Lloyd: You ever go down to San Francisco?
Tom Waits: I go down sometimes-- in for a weekend of excitement. Watch women's wrestling, or mud wrestling. Midget female mud wrestling. It's big there-- it's huge. It's bigger than the opera-- in fact, they call it "The Little Opera".
The Omnipresent: This is my conversation. I'd like to speak to Mr. Waits without all you journalist hangers-on. You guys get to chase him all the time. This is my moment.... Mr. Waits, I just want a little one-on-one with you. Being Omnipresent is a spectacle of the lowest common denominator. Rarely do I get to see midget female mud wrestling.... What do you want? What thoughts give you goosebumps?
Tom Waits: An all-midget orchestra. They could all stay in the same room and on stage they could all share the same light.
The Omnipresent: You have a soft spot for midgets...
Tom Waits: I had a midget prostitute climb up on a bar stool and sit in my lap when I was about eighteen in Tijuana. I drank with her for about an hour. It was something. Changed me. Tender, very tender. It was like I didn't go off to the room with her. She just sat in my lap.
Craig MacInnis: He did not explain the reason for the Band-Aid over his right eye or the bandages wrapped around his hand and wrist.
The Omnipresent: Right you are, Craig. But it seems like such an obvious question that I refuse to ask it. I think he just wants to get attention. And I asked the journalists to please back off from my conversation.
Alina: Attention is the petri-dish of interviews and conversation.
The Omnipresent: Please, no gadflies or Socratic ambitions. You can't enter this conversation without a byline. Or even with a byline. This conversation is mine, mine.....Now Mr. Waits, let's talk about your albums, your music, your favorite dentist, all that noise you make with pots and pans. The Heart of Saturday Night is the reason I got stuck at a point in time seeking you. Which Saturday night comes to mind?
Tom Waits: I've tasted Saturday nights in Detroit, St. Louis, Tuscaloosa, New Orleans, Atlanta, NYC, Boston, Memphis.
The Omnipresent: But why an album to these nights? What is the album about?
Tom Waits: If you're ever pursued by a crocodile, run in zigzag fashion. They have little or no ability to make sudden changes in direction. But they're fast, they're very fast. In fact, there are probably more people killed by crocodiles than there are by.... anything.
Brian Brannon: A lot of your songs have a certain melancholy, what's that from?
The Omnipresent: Brian....
Tom Waits: Too much wine. Half of me, I feel like a jackhammer, I love to holler and stomp my feet and throw rocks. But there's another side of me that's like an old man in the corner that's had too much wine. I'm probably too sentimental for my own good sometimes.
The Omnipresent: Okay, before Brian butts in again, let's discuss Rain Dogs, not your best work but loved by many chumps. Explain.
Tom Waits: Maybe I should say something about the title of the album... You know dogs in the rain lose their way back home. They even seem to look up at you and ask if you can help them get back home. 'Cause after it rains every place they peed on has been washed out. It's like Mission Impossible. They go to sleep thinking the world is one way and they wake up and somebody moved the furniture.
The Omnipresent: I'd never thought about that. Life can be very difficult for dogs in your time. They seem to be peripherally involved in the status-seeking wars between humans. I imagine I'd be so miserable and even dejected if my owner didn't value me enough to purchase a camouflage rhinestone collar for my dog-neck. How do you deal with this sort of issue?
Tom Waits: Your world is only as large as you make it. What you decide to include and to affect you is very much up to you. What you ultimately do with it is something else.
The Omnipresent: I feel like you are trying to tell me that your dogs don't have rhinestone collars. But you can't just be direct and say so.
Tom Waits: I usually have a hard time talking about things directly, you know? I don't like direct questions, I like to talk.
The Omnipresent: So talk...
Tom Waits: When I was twenty-one, I was just happy to be on the road, away from home, riding through the American night y'know, out of my mind. Wild-eyed about everything. Now, I think more about it, like what can we do that's cheaper, simpler, and better? I think maybe we should just have a stage no bigger than a hatbox. I'll probably go on the road, with devil horns and angel wings and dry ice and a toy guitar. The band will all be cutouts.
The Omnipresent: Why not aliens? Aliens would be more compelling than cutouts. Do you believe in aliens?
Tom Waits: I believe there is intelligent life, but we are the ones who define what intelligence is, so I'm sure it would fall outside of our intelligence or ability to perceive it, which leads me to believe that they may be here among us and we are unable to see them, or understand that they're here.
The Omnipresent: Your metaphysics is rather broad, Mr. Waits.
Tom Waits: Dogwood is what the cross was made out of. And they say after Jesus went up to heaven that the blossoms on the dogwood developed a red cross in the bloom, and you can see it in the dogwood blossom. And that wasn't until after he had risen.
The Omnipresent: I didn't know you were religious... How do you bring religion to your music?
Tom Waits: "All Stripped Down" is kind of a religious song, 'cause you can't get into heaven until you're all stripped down.
The Omnipresent: Mule Variations, give me something to think about.
Tom Waits: Kathleen and I...
The Omnipresent: Wait a second, Kathleen is your wife. Right? Okay, go on..
Tom Waits: Kathleen and I came up with this idea of doing music that's "surrural"-- it's surreal and it's rural, it's surrural. (Sings) Everybody's doin' it doin' it doin' it. Surrural. She'll start kind of talking in tongues, and I take it all down. She goes places... I can't get to those places. Too, I don't know...pragmatic. She's the egret of the family. I'm the mule.
The Omnipresent: What are you trying to say?
Tom Waits: Hold on. We're all holding on to something. None of us want to come out of the ground. Weeds are holding on. I thought that was a real positive thing to say. It was an optimistic song. Take my hand, stand right here, hold on. We wrote that together, Kathleen and I, and that felt good. Two people who are in love writing a song like that about being in love. That was good.
The Omnipresent: I feel like you're digressing. I want to talk about music and you keep bringing up your wife. Let me be specific-- I heard that Les Claypool played on Bone Machine. Care to verify?
Tom Waits: He came up and played on "The Earth Died Screaming." He was in between fishing trips at the time. He's great, he's got such an elastic approach to the instrument: a fretless, spastic, elastic, rubberized, plasticine approach. He's like a fun house mirror. He can take and elongate his face. He's a real pawnshop weasel, endlessly in pawn shops. I think that's why he tours.
The Omnipresent: If you humans had any brains, you'd call your pawn shops "museums" and turn your museums to pawn shops.
Tom Waits: Happiness is never perfect.
The Omnipresent: Guess not... Your music says as much. On the cover of your 1976 album, Small Change", you don't look very happy even though there is a willing stripper a few feet away. On the cover of Blue Valentine, you've got Ricki Lee Jones but still no smile worthy of remark. Maybe happiness is not only imperfect-- maybe it is a flat-out lie. Have you read anything by Karl Marx or Dale Carnegie?
Tom Waits: This is getting really metaphysical... I do believe in the mysteries of things, about myself and the things I see. I enjoy being puzzled and arriving at my own incorrect conclusions.
The Omnipresent: Ah-ha! Finally, an epiphany! You are a materialist, Mr. Waits-- a man who believes in "things" and appreciates incorrect conclusions. My time spent trying to talk to you is redeemed by this discovery. Communism is, in fact, everywhere, including the sub-ruralurbs of L.A. The Cold War has become a gang war....  Any final words of wisdom before I return to the eternal recurrence?
Tom Waits: Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late.
The Omnipresent: Maybe in another life I'll finally get my own pavement princess. One can dream...

In this interview, Tom Waits' words can be directly traced to the following sources. Tracing the game of hopscotch I played to cut and paste these quotes into this interview, however, is impossible.

David McGee, "Smellin' Like a Brewery, Lookin' Like a Tramp", Rolling Stone, January 1977
Tom Waits, The Heart of Saturday Night press release, 1974
Betsy Carter with Peter S. Greenberg, "Sweet and Sour", Newsweek, 14 June 1976
Peter O'Brien, "Watch Out for Sixteen-Year-Old Girls Wearing Bell Bottoms Who Are Running Away From Home and Have a Lot of Blue Oyster Cult Record Under Their Arm", ZigZag, July 1976
"Proust Questionnaire", Vanity Fair, November 2004
f James Stevenson, "Blues", The New Yorker, 27 December 1976
The Don Lane Show, Channel Nine, April 1979
Todd Everett, "Not So Much A Poet: More a Purveyor of Improvisational Travelogue", New Musical Express, 29 November 1975
Johnny Black, "Waits and Double Measures", London Trax, 18 March 1981
Robert Sabbag, "Tom Waits Makes Good", Los Angeles Times Magazine, 22 February 1987
Glenn O'Brien, "Tom Waits for No Man", SPIN, November 1985
Craig MacInnis, "Waits Never Lets Guard Down", The Toronto Star, 7 October 1987
Mark Rowland, "Tom Waits is Flying Upside Down (On Purpose)", Musician, October 1987
Adam Sweeting, "The Mellower Prince of Melancholy", The Guardian, 15 September, 1992
Jim Jarmusch, "Tom Waits Meets Jim Jarmusch", Straight No Chaser, October 1992
Steve Oney, "20 Questions", Playboy, March 1988
Robert Lloyd, "Gone North: Tom Waits, Upcountry", LA Weekly, 23 April 1999
Karen Schoemer, "Holding On: A Conversation with Tom Waits", Newsweek, 23 April 1999
Elvis Costello, "Summit Talk: Eavesdropping on Elvis Costello and Tom Waits," Option, July 1989

One way in which I agree with Rush Limbaugh.

Rush Limbaugh called Jonah Goldberg a heretic. I prefer the term "opportunist" myself. In that case, Jonah and Rush are two birds of a feather. I'd pay lots of money for a poster of those two snuggling and giving each other a big bear hug... Inspirational.

15 famous minds on 15 different topics.

1. Nietzsche on curiosity.
2. Tariq Ali on the dark side of dissident royalty.
3. Stephen Hawking on the limits of knowledge.
4. HL Mencken on the law and the Bible.
5. Ted Solotaroff on his Commentary days.
6. Hannah Arendt on Isak Denisen / Karen Blixen.
7. Rebecca West on violence in the Balkans.
8. Nelson Algren on heroin.
9. Erica Jong on mothers, daughters, and the shoah.
10. Michel Foucault on non-affirmative painting.
11. Henry George on the law of human progress.
12. Mircea Eliade on the sacred and the profane.
13. Henry Miller on insomnia.
14. Frank Chodorov on misguided patriotism (see chapter 13).
15. Robert Conquest on war.

Saturday afternoon thoughts on meaning.

"Expressions are constitutive and shaping, not as abstract texts but in the activity that actualizes the text... As expressions or performed texts, structured units of experience, such as stories or dramas, are socially constructed units of meaning."

The role you play is determined by the script you choose to read.

If you are autistic or bipolar, you reject the script-- it does not fit into your world of meaning. In fact, you might be said to inhabit a different world of meaning. Of course, the only reason why this provides you with a diagnosis is because the dominant world of meaning is deeply institutionalized and resistant to pressure for change. No world of meaning is more "true" than another. But one would be insane to disagree.

The way you act out the story says something small about you and something large about your culture. Films like Ghost World are amusing precisely because the actors half-heartedly "play their roles". Sarcasm and ennui characterize their deliveries. Trying to access the meaning of roles steeped in sarcasm is ultimately disappointing for the meaning of every sarcasm amounts to a question-- Why does this really matter? There is nothing thought-provoking or interesting about this question ad infinetum.

We have reached the point where the manner of delivery rubs against meaning, yet the friction produces no sparks. Ghost World was a terrible film-- insipid and desperate as a singles ad placed in a church bulletin.

"Although life is a flow, we can never experience that flow directly because every observed moment is a remembered moment."

Every conversation is an opportunity to be seduced by nostalgia-- to leave this moment for another one; to graft past meaning onto our experience of the present. History repeats itself through our surrender to the context and meanings of the past.

[The quotes are from Edward M. Bruner's paper, "Experience and Its Expressions" & the photo was taken by Cosmin Bumbut. ]

A thought on fatalism in Eastern Europe.

Has Eastern Europe lost its sex appeal, or are we just confusing post-pubescence for maturity? Surely there is still something sexy in the fatalism that still hangs like wisteria, heavy with perfume yet rapacious and weed-like. Surely that something is sexier than the Protestant urge to gallop backwards, to discover significance in the corpses of horses with continous hopeful references to "the big picture". What will follow the widescreen?

[The photo, No Future in the Past, was taken by Andreea Chiru.]

7 forays through death, delight, and demons from the continent.

1. Bernard Henry-Levi probes a venture on anti-Nazi dialectics. En route to Oswald Spengler, he makes a pit stop at Tom Cruise. 
2. Russian artist Anna Alchuk was discovered drowned in a river, and now her husband, philosopher Michail Ryklin, scans her diaries for answers. What he finds is further testament to the banal horrors of life under authoritarian governments.
3. When Matei Calinescu's 25-year-old son died, he waited forty days (the requisite Eastern Orthodox time period for the soul to ascend) before writing his beautiful, Portrait of M. An excerpt is now available from Words Without Borders.
4. Cathy Caruth applies Hannah Arendt's critique of the inordinate amount of lying which occurs in the political sphere to the Bush administration's war on Iraq. The results are not so savory.
5. Andrei Plesu comments on the vicious circle to which ideologies are prey. (Use Google Translator in right column for translation.)
6. Kenneth Cox reviews Romanian surrealist poet Gherasim Luca's recently-translated book, The Passive Vampire, with much aplomb.
7. Michail Ryklin talks about the Western defenders of communism, "The Red Pilgrims", and what drove their geographic and intellectual pilgramages.

Against specialization.

Herman Hesse is never so forcefully pagan as in The Glass Bead Game, where he reveals the sorrows of the intellectually specialized elite. Considered by many to be Hesse's best work, The Glass Bead Game describes a quasi-Platonic world in which a few intellectuals are chosen to work on the big questions of humankind. However, these chosen ones remain so far divorced from everyday reality and the "big picture" due to their fine-tuned academic specialization that the only answers they concoct will be doomed to irrelevance. The protagonist faces the almost cliche conflict between cultivating his knowledge or working towards wisdom.

On a different plane, reading Magical Child by Joseph Chilton Pearce, reinforces this warning against associating specialization with intelligence, only this time, the topic is child development. Though Pearce's occasional kookiness grates the nerves, his insights about the nature of intelligence are reinforced by recent discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Pearce glorifies the "open intelligence" as the most adaptible, hence evolutionarily useful, type-- "an open intelligence is one that can structure knowledge of an increasing amount of experience and compute the widening range of information gained by that experience". Open intelligence combines with a flexible logic to increase our understanding of the world and our ability to adapt or accomodate to it-- "the more phenomena and events with which we interact, the greater our ability for complex interactions".

On its face, this might seem like an argument for exposing children to different languages and social environments in the early years. However, Pearce could also be understood to suggest that over-emphasis on one particular framework for processing information severely limits our ability to turn that information into usable knowledge. For example, assuming rational choice theory to understand what happens in transition economies neglects the incredible influence of social and cultural factors in particular transitions. Likewise, reading literature through the dulling lens of feminist and Marxist theory ensures a limited (and often useless) interpretation of literary events.

Ultimately, the more we specialize, the less we are able to percieve the limits of our lens. This is because we have decreased incentives to percieve this limit (i.e. we've devoted so much time, money, and intellectual resources to assuming the verity of this lens). Rather than countenance cognitive dissonance, we prefer to tweak the picture on the margins rather than reevaluate the entire enterprise. Just think of the nice gentlemen who still vociferously defend communism as a workable political system-- "Communism isn't flawed; it's only that the right conditions for the experiment haven't existed yet"-- to give flesh to this problem. Let's hope that the coming decades reveals the rise of the Renaissance man who is mentally equipped to handle the increasing complexity of our mental milieu.

• The Glass Bead Game in online game form.
• Charles Cameron explains the Glass Bead Game.
• Michael Heim explains why the Glass Bead Game matters in The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality.
• The Magical Child Foundation.
• Chilton speaks to homeschoolers about the connection between heart and mind.

Words on the streets of Tribeca.

After spending a few days trotting around New York for the Tribeca Film Festival, I ran across a few good films and a litter of runts for thought...

• Air Guitar Nation amuses.
• Cocaine Cowboys perturbs.
• East of Paradise fascinates.
• Freedom's Fury puts Hungary back on the map.
• Hammer and Tickle: The Communist Joke Book reminds.
• Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis stuns.

Rest your eyes on the PDF version of the festival guide for a listing of films, descriptions, and details.