drift and panic, under new management and recently deceased translators

Note for a post: somehow, the whole issue of hyperbolic discounting passed by yours truly. But as I've been doing some desultory research, resting here on my laurels, I've run smack into it. Hyperbolic discounting describes an ordering of future preferences which reflects a non-linear and sudden shift in behavior, rather than an incremental and rationally spaced out one. Thus, for instance, the smoker may resolve, today, to quit smoking in the future, knowing that the effect of smoking is killing him, yet not, in fact, quit smoking in the near future, nor show signs of making plans to quit. Hyperbolic discounting is a nice phrase for drift and panic. Which seems to be the m.o. in the U.S., lately, about a lot of bad habits.

I just thought I'd mark the phrase for some future post.

PS – Correspondents have suggested I mention the deaths of two translators. Michael Hamburger, who translated Celan, Hölderlin, and other extremely dense German poets. Friend of Sebald, poet himself, and, according to his obituary, a big fan of East Anglica, Hamburger’s name is one that will be subconsciously familiar to any American who is interested in international lit, since it figured so often on the title page – “translated by” – but not so often (for our imaginary reader) in glorious solitude (“by”), since it is not by his essays and poetry that he is known.

Edward Seidensticker had a larger profile. The relationship between post-war Japan and the U.S. in the fifties and sixties is still somewhat shadowed by Cold War secrecy. Wiener’s recent book on the CIA pointed out that the party that has pretty much ruled Japan as the PRI once ruled Mexico, the Liberal Democrats, were systematically bribed by the Americans up until the seventies. They were bribed partly to violate the constitution that the Americans originally imposed on Japan – such are the vagaries of imperial whim. Running through the fifties was an undercurrent of guilt regarding the way the war was waged against Japan, most notably the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oddly enough, the most massive bombing of civilian targets in history, the US fireboming of Japanese cities, which resulted in at least 600,000 deaths in less than one year, never has been given the queasy fisheye by the American conscience. Perhaps Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the proxies. Into this mix of need and guilt stepped various influential go betweens who translated Japanese literature and explained Japanese culture, like Edward Reischauer and Donald Ritchie. Many had studied Japanese, during the war, at the Navy’s Boulder Institute – this is where Donald Keene gained his Japanese, and where Seidensticker gained his. The “Boulder boys” – so named by correspondent Edith Terry – dominated the discourse, post-war, in things Japanese. It is fascinating to see how Cold War culture assimilated and mixed themes that were appropriated and bricoleured against that culture – for instance, Zen, which entered into the American mainstream in the fifties as a sort of Cold War gift, and was quickly adopted by the beats and taken to be a route out of America, a form of inner emigration – before of course it became self-help and a part of Cold War therapy culture.

Seidensticker’s great translating feat is, of course, The Tale of Genji, which puts him in that rare group of translators of the essential books – comparable to Constance Garnett, Antoine Galland, Wilhelm von Schlegel. These are the translators’ translators.

a plea for a natural history of traffic jams

WE had now reached the summit of the loftiest crag. For some minutes the old man seemed too much exhausted to speak.

"Not long ago," said he at length, "and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened before to mortal man --or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of --and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man --but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.” –
Edgar A. Poe, Descent into the Maelstrom

Every five years or so, I like to drive a car into a traffic jam. Surely being in a traffic jam has become the American way to touch the mythic hero inside, a la Joseph Campbell. In simpler times, it was the big fish story. Gilgamesh wrestled Humbaba, Ahab took aim at the fabled White Whale, and your Gwinnett County householder descends into I-20 from several convenient ramps and takes on only two lanes of traffic open on that three lane Westbound. The third lane is closed for obscure reasons. Apparently, the highway department has decided to pile up big mounds of red clay at selected spots along five miles of the thing. Men in hard hats mill around these mounds, some of them in highly expensive earth movers. They look confused. Perhaps there are cultic motives behind the mounding.

Traffic jams are things of beauty to complexity scientists and a certain breed of architect who moves through the world of forms like a blind flatfish in search of a moderately priced oculist. Kas Oosterhuis, in Architecture Gone Wild, writes reverentially: … the traffic slow slows down, it becomes more dense. The movements go on the blink, the shape of the flow clusters into bloglike forms: this condition announces the impeding traffic jam, the flow in its liquid state. At a given point in the hardening process, the liquid stops flowing, traffic reaches its state of zero moment, it crystallizes (newspapers unfold, mobile phones come into action, the operating system (you) switches to stand-by mode, check Fellini’s film Roma). What shape does the jam have? There is no single shape, it is a dynamic balance possessing a multitude of states, from gaseous to crystalline.”

Well, I can report that the I-20 traffic jam was a cross-phaser – it went from gaseous to dyspeptic to boglike to the shape assumed by a man contemplating the purchase of viagra.

That human beings arrange these formations for their own amusement tells us, I suppose, something about what amuses human beings. Although there is a glory here. Here is something ultra-human, yet 6000 feet above all humanity. Something to compete with waterfalls and hurricanes. In great traffic jam cities like Atlanta, there is a quiet pride in the length and duration of the traffic jam. So, as I slowed the immense black truck that, by a concantenation of absurd circumstances, I was supposed to deliver to my sister at the Kingfisher school (which she owns and directs), into the auto bog, I had a sense that I, too, was an Atlantan. Well, not so fast. First I had a yikes moment, as I looked up from fiddling with the confusing array of buttons and switches that successfully fended off amateur attempts to turn on the radio and noticed that the Toyota I’d been following at 65 per had slowed to 10. As was good and proper, I brought an initial terrified glance into my encounter with the beast. Luckily, I am well trained in braking – ask any unfortunate who has passengered with me! I must admit to some feeling of betrayal. I thought we of the second lane were a team, a 65 m.p.h. team, and we were being let down.

Once inside the jam – I note these things for our post-peak posterity, riding on their mules and keeping the internet intermittently alive by generating electricity from turning giant gerbil wheels – a curious dissolution of the team spirit occurs. Though we are packed together as never before, now, now is the time to instantiate those outlying game strategies that contravene the rules of God, Man, and the equilibrium theories of neo-classical economics. Thus, the notice that the first lane was ending in half a mile operated as a curious invitation to many to get into the first lane. Yes, these clever minxes saw that the first lane was relatively open – due to the sign – and that while the cowed untermenschen in the second and third lanes were dallying, the Nietzschians were going to hurry up to the ending point and barge into the second lane. Of course, us second laners could have blocked that move, but we had already proved ourselves pussies by not plunging into the first lane from the beginning. This does raise a philosophical question about the third laners, however. Surely they were the ubermenschen. Surely they were the speeders, the risk takers. But here, in the midst of the jam (which at this phase had turned the shape of foie gras spread on wet toast), they were two lanes over from the gamers lane. In their tragic plight, the philosophically minded driver could see the whole history of the slave uprising in morals and the fall of the Roman empire.

Now, t.j. heads know that maximizing your jam requires not just plunging into one – any idiot can do that. No, you have to be low on gas, and you have to have a pressing appointment. Some of the fun of the later has been spoiled by the pernicious spread of cell phones. Luckily, LI has never and will never have a cell phone. Extra points come from having one of those cars that starts billowing steam from the hood. But the big black truck had been decently cared for in the radiator department, so I merely had to keep my weather eye on the fuel gauge, where the arrow was fingering the red zone. My plan, of course, was to stick my sister with the cost of filling up this monster. I definitely did not want to spend on it myself. Besides the gas tease, however, I had plenty of time to figure out the radio/stereo system, read a chapter of War and Peace, and gaze about, looking for the babes among my neighbors. Actually, most of my neighbors looked rather like pole struck oxen. The expressions ran from the stultified to the dissatisfied. Although of course I couldn’t survey the lot – surely some were heroically gleaming, aware of the historic occasion into which they had blundered. I would wager that all of them, however, would at some later point in the day mention that they had been in a traffic jam.

We edged past the Panola exit as in a dream. I know what dream, too. It is the one where somehow, you are trying to walk down the road or over the floor and you can’t seem to get anywhere.

Perhaps Leibniz was dimly foreseeing the traffic jam when he came up with that monad idea. Each of us did have a mirror in our vehicles, but otherwise we lived in our traffic jam with a maximum of self enclosure, on up to the microclimate produced by the a/c. And this is why I am rather surprised at the road rage fashion – none of which was really on display in this jam. In a sense, this was a break in the day. Each could meditate on the four last things, if desired. Or compose a recipe or grocery list. Traffic jams are ideal for poets and hermits. If the desert fathers had known about them, they surely would have deserted the caves for the friendlier, but still solitary, medium sized automobile.

At some point, as suddenly as it had congealed, the traffic jam took on the shape of a dead man pitching a spitball. In other words, it broke apart. There was, suddenly, empty highway – emptiness being, here, a metric for the possibility of going 75 miles per and not crashing into the bumper of the guy ahead of you. In fact, the guy ahead of you is going 80. And thus my big black truck freed itself from the posse of 18 wheelers and the inchworm action of the Jetta in the second lane who was breaking the eleventh commandment: thou shalt not hold up traffic. Yes, my jam time was over. And what had I learned?

Well, it is hard to say. The true descent into the traffic jam (contra Godard’s Weekend) has still not been made. We need a Dr. J.M. Rossbach. In 1870, Dr. Rossbach realized that battlefields were not just battlefields – just as a rose is not just a rose – but occasions to study rigor mortis. Thus, he went traipsing over the battlefield at Sedan and Beaumont, measuring and observing the dead soldiers, and reported his observations in an article entitled Over initial rigor mortis in cases of immediate life-ending events (Ueber eine unmittelbar mit dem Lebensende beginnende Todtstarre). He noticed the “preservation of the expressive effects of the last moments of life in the face” of many soldiers, noting, however, a few anomalies – “in a group of six French soldiers, killed by a grenade blast, on an elevation at Beumont, [there was one] with a smiling, happy face, which only lacked the top half of its skull, torn away by the grenade blast.” My problem is that, unlike Dr. Rossbach, I did not have carte blanche to get out of the big black truck and walk about amongst my fellow jamites, to see how they were taking it. Someday, some sociologist should pack students up in a truck or van and plunge into a jam and, in the slow heart of the heart of it, let the students rush among the vehicles, taking pictures and giving out survey forms. Otherwise, this odd feature of modern life may pass away, in silence, when this civilization is good and extinct.

more chatter

LI, on vacation, doesn’t do that thing called thinking. Vacations are inherently anti-Cartesian. Into the vacuum enters, embarrassingly enough, poetry. And though I am rapidly making my way to the grave, I still haven’t given up such childish joys as masturbation and making one line follow another, and even searching for rhymes. But don’t worry, I am not about to throw a pile of poetry into the face of the public. This is just an observation of the automat within me.

If I were thinking, I’d look at the papers, I’d look at the current state of play on Iraq, the pre-September follies, the incredible demonstration that distance is the equivalent of the worst vileness – civilization and the moral imperative probably have a precise ending point, say at 2020.9 miles from one’s home - and I’d slit my wrists, metaphorically speaking, or try to shed this human skin and become inanimate. But those, too, are childish fantasies – if you live in the monster, you are the monster. That’s that.

Instead of which, I will translate this paragraph from De L’amour, chapter 33:

“Always a small doubt to tranquilize, this is what makes for that thirst persisting every instant, this is what makes the life of love happy. As fear never abandons it, its pleasures can never bore. The characteristic of this happiness is extreme seriousness.”

LI gets a deep satisfaction – the satisfaction one gets from all vertiginous art, or the art, simply, of the baroque – from the variations of tone and sensibility Stendhal gets out of one little word, here: ‘happiness’.

camp

When LI goes out hiking with our brothers, the scene partly resembles the chapter in which Leopold Bloom and Stephen Daedelus slope towards home. Questions are raised - notably, the question of how it could possibly be the case that the intervals between the hour when the shadow points due east, the hour when it points due north, and the hour it points due west could be uneven. This involved much diagramming with sticks, calculations about preserving the percentage of the average day between sunrise and sunset as a circle with a greater or lesser diameter, representing the variation of the day over the year, and a few counterfactuals, one involving a world made entirely of glass, which sorta went over my head. Then there is the traditional argument about the pre-Columbian population of North and South America, which is always, for some reason, heated. The scene also resembles tradition redneck fiestas - for instance, back at camp, we all sing along to Freebird when its turn comes on the itunes playlist. Then there is the traditional beer, whiskey, rum and ... stuff. There is the straining to see a bird that just flew off from a bush, the shadow of a fish in a pool, and the hope of seeing a bear someday, at a suitable distance. There are the dirty jokes, which segue into politics, which veer into descriptions of crime scenes one has been a part of. There's the princess and the pea, or rather the princess and the fucking rocky gravel, effect to deal with in the confines of a tent upon which absolute forest dark has closed down; there's the amazingly delicious morning coffee, no longer cowboy style; there's the swimming in the pools under the waterfall.

To prove my distaste for shorts (excepting the right occasion): here's LI on a bridge in the mountains, wearing waterproof, non-commodifiable, thoroughly theory vetted trousers:



My brother, D., decided that LI was being silly. He opted for Lacanian lounging in a thoroughly American pair of shorts.



My other brother, D2, was also determined to trample the trails exposing his knees. To. Poison. Ivy. Having avoided the annual scourge so far this year, I was not about to dare that pernicious native american creeper:



Finally, we styled in the wilderness with this ultraneat camo budweiser tent for pooches. Featured is a model pooch, Cody:

various

Atlanta. LI successfully made it past the e-ticket, the woman who tells you to get into the big line that wends around just like it used to pre e-ticket, the man telling his wife that he thinks they should go home and call up American airlines and get their money back, the harried smiles from the multiple service monster snorting up information and baggage, the doffed shoes, the metal detector and involved search of the old Mexican guy in the wheelchair including his stretched out socks, the niceness of tvs not hanging everywhere unlike Dallas, the airport where tvs are as thick as passenger pigeons used to be in the autumn skies of Ohio, the tracking of hurricane Dean through holiday resorts, the Delta plane with barely any passengers within which one could settle back and enjoy the two count em two packets of peanuts to make this trip an enjoyable one since the pilot and the Delta organization he represents know (regretfully) that we have a choice when buying tickets showing that old institutional memories of 1910 when we didn’t have a choice die hard, and then my brother, with a bit more gray to him and me and both of us casting those surreptitious measuring glances of siblings who haven’t seen each other in a while and getting our footing and we are off…

So there is going to be less from LI. I planned to do a little more concentrated research while here for my happiness essay. Gonna mostly try to hike. Eat. Drink. Be merry.

In the meantime … do look at the whole festschrift of inanity pouring out of Gideon Rose’s defense of the foreign policy clerisy. Glenn Greenwald is on quite a roll, dismantling the various pretences. Oddly, over at Lawyers Guns and Money one of the bloggers is defending the idea that invading Iraq was at least a defensible idea back in the day. LI begs to differ. There were two parameters that the promoters of the war had to deal with: cost and manpower. Cost was figured by Glenn Hubbard at 100-200 billion dollars. Manpower was figured by Shinseki at 400,000 men or over. Both figures referred to the whole process, for the invasion and the occupation were one process. I discount any argument that compartmentalized those things. I only count those arguments for the war which absorbed the fact that it would take the resources projected by Shinseki and Hubbard. And any supporter who did that – I can’t think of one – would have, honestly, not been able to support the invasion. The testimony of Wolfowitz and of the Rumsfeld Defense department in the months leading up to the war undercut any serious case for the war. In the same way that advocating building a dam across a river conscientiously means advocating using the resources it takes to build a dam across a river. A bad engineer will build an insufficiently supported bridge and cause a catastrophe. A bad foreign policy analyst will build a case detached from the project realities of resourcing it and create a guerilla war, a falling state, four million refugees and some not small change in deaths – we’ve reached five hundred thousand or so last year in Iraq. In both cases, the irresponsibility is shameful. And that’s that.

wasting time

Damn. LI is going to Atlanta today. So we don't have time to post a long translation from Stendhal's 1826 preface to On Love. As we've been saying and saying, the 19th century experienced a change in emotional customs, following behind a change in the positional structure that derived from the emergence - or imposition - of the market society. What makes Stendhal such a great witness is that his early life was dedicated to the proposition that happiness in Europe was born out of the the French Revolution. This was what Napoleon's soldiers brought with them. If you remember the great opening chapters of The Charterhouse of Parma, he describes there the irresistibly joyous result of the contact of modernity - Napoleon's soldiers - with the petrified order of the ancien regime in Italy. Although the irresistibility was, in fact, resisted and rolled back in the 1820s. This was the decade in which Standhal saw political oppression in Italy first hand, in the career of the woman he was in love with, Mathilde Dembowski, a Milanese woman who was spied on by the Austrians for her work with the Italian revolutionaries. It was in the wake of Stendhal's affair with Metilde that he wrote On Love.

A.O. Hirschman, in "The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph", has given an account of the way the relation between passion and interest was reconfigured in the post-Smith era. Hirschman begins with a tres Stendhalian question: how did glory get subordinated to wealth in the West?

“No matter how much approval was bestowed on commerce and other forms of money-making, they certainly stood lower in the scale of medieval values than a number of other activities, in particular the striving for glory. It is indeed through a brief sketch of the idea of glory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that I shall now attempt to renew the sense of wonder about the genesis of the “spirit of capitalism.”

Indeed, all his life Stendhal strove to reconcile an intellectual preference for the strictly logical and cold - philosophy expressed in the style of the Civic Code, as he put it - with his notion of the 'happy few'. The meaning Stendhal gave to happiness is inseparable from glory. The glory that ran through the Napoleonic period had, for Stendhal, departed from Europe, atomizing into private ventures - such as Julien Sorel's. Stendhal's biting comments about businessmen and the wealthy comne out of this sense that they are essentially inglorious. The striving for self interest actually blinds the reader of On Love to its meaning: it is literally incomprehensible to them:

"In spite of taking pains to be clear and lucid, I can’t perform miracles; I can neither give ears to the deaf nor eyes to the blind. Thus money men, men whose pleasures are unselective [a grosse joie] who have earned a hundred thousand france in the year preceding the moment they open this book ought to quickly shut it, in particular if they are bankers, manufacturers, respectable industrialists, that is to say people with eminently positive ideas. This book may be less unintelligible to those who have gained a lot of money in the market or the lottery. Such profit can coexist with the habit of passing hours entirely devoted to revery, and to enjoying the emotions that come out of a painging of Prud’hon or a musical phrase of Mozart’s, or, finally, of a certain singular look darted by the woman one is preoccupied with. This is, of course, nothing but wasting one’s time for men who pay two thousand workers at the end of each week. Their minds are always pointed towards the useful and the positive."

Well, I will return to this when I can.

would the underground man approve of psychological experiments?

C'est la raison qui engendre l'amour-propre, et c'est la réflexion qui le fortifie; c'est elle qui replie l'homme sur lui-même; c'est elle qui le sépare de tout ce qui le gêne et l'afflige: c'est la philosophie qui l'isole; c'est par elle qu'il dit en secret, à l'aspect d'un homme souffrant: péris si tu veux, je suis en sûreté. Il n'y a plus que les dangers de la société entière qui troublent le sommeil tranquille du philosophe, et qui l'arrachent de son lit. On peut impunément égorger son semblable sous sa fenêtre; il n'a qu'à mettre ses mains sur ses oreilles et s'argumenter un peu pour empêcher la nature qui se révolte en lui de l'identifier avec celui qu'on assassine. – Rousseau, Second Discourse

“It is reason which engenders amour-propre, and it is reflection that strengthens it; reason shoves man back upon himself, and it is reason which separates him from everthing that discomforts and afflicts him; it is philosophy which isolates him; it is on that account that he secretly says, in the face of some suffering person: perish if you want, I’m safe. Only the dangers run by society as a whole troubles the tranquil sleep of the philosopher, pulling him out of his bed. One can boldly cut the throat of his brother or sister under his window, and he’d do no more than put his hands over his ears and argue with himself a bit in order to keep down nature, nature which revolts inside him to identify him with the one being murdered.”

There’s another nice psychological experiment described by Lauren Slater. It was inspired by the Kitty Genovese case. In that case, Kitty was assaulted, stabbed several times and raped on a residential street in New York City, at 2 in the morning. The residents of the apartments around saw it. Not one even called the police. The assailant actually made three attacks, each time returning stab Genovese again, and the last time returning to cum over the fatal wounds he’d inflicted on her.

This caused a scandal at the time. Was New York City entirely inhabited by Rousseau’s philosophers? John Darley and Bibb Latané devised a nice experiment to understand the dynamics of what Rousseau claimed was the ‘natural pity” of the human being. Like many of the other great experiments, it is, in form, an experiment within an experiment – in a sense, Hamlet is the father of all experimental psychologists when he devised his play to monitor his step father’s reactions to the portrayal of a crime he believed happened in real life. And so, too, a play’s the thing to catch the experimental subject. In this one, the subject enters a chamber believing that he is engaged in a psych experiment about student life. The rules are that the subject is to hear the others talk about their common student problems, which they would do in turn. The student is to wait until it is his turn. Then he could turn on his mike and speak. It was a form of “tag team therapy” in Slater’s words.

In actuality, all the subject received were recorded voices. One of them, though, claimed to be epileptic, and during the course of the session has what seems to be a seizure. He asks for help. The subject believes that this information is received not just by him, but by all the members of the collective in their rooms. The epileptic pseudo subject actually keeps his mike on for six minutes, during which the sound of his fit is being received by the subject. He asks simply for someone to go to the monitor and alert him.

“The students [subjects] had a chance to think, and then to act. Here are the results: very few acted – thirty one percent…”

However, interestingly, when the group size was varied, and the subject thought he was in a dyad – just him and the student having the seizure – eighty five percent sought help.

Darley and Latane made an amusing variant of this experiment. In this one, the subject is to go to a room and fill out a questionaire about student life. There are other students there doing the same thing. At a certain point, smoke starts coming out of the air vent into the room. Then a lot of smoke. The other students continue to work, unbothered, even as the smoke becomes so thick it is hard to see. “In the entire experiment, only one subject reported the smoke to the experimenter down the hall within four minutes, only three within the entire experimental period, and the rest not at all.” So attunded did the subjects seem to be to the social cues of the other students that they didn’t dare break a sort of taboo, even though they were obviously threatened with something, and even though the only possible pain they could suffer would be to seem embarrassingly alarmed to some strangers.

As Slater writes; “This perhaps more than any other experiment show the pure foly tht lives at the heart of human beings; it runs so contrary to human sense that we would rather risk our lives than break rank, that we value social etiquette over survival. It puts Emily Post in a whole new place. Manners are not frivolous; they are more forceful than lust, than fear, more primal – that deep preening. When Daley and Latane varied the experiment so the naïve subject was alone in the room, he or she almost always constucted the story of smoke as an emergency and reported it immediately.”

All of which is an intro to the Stendhal’s reflection on interest and what at that time (1829) was not called altruism – that word was coined by Comte some 20 years later. Which will be an upcoming post.