I love bizarre groups of old things. So does, I take it, Joanna Ebenstein, who’s just launched a site for The Secret Museum, her “exhibition of photographs exploring the poetics of hidden, untouched, and curious collections from around the world.”

Ebenstein (Morbid Anatomy, Astropop Productions) has an eye for the macabre-elegant and the hideous-awesome. Her blog and the events she puts together have several times blown my mind, and the Secret Museum is no exception. I especially give her props for aiming to capture the mystery and wonder of “liminal spaces.” (What is science, what art? What spectacle, what education? What grotesque, what natural, &c.)

The Secret Museum is on view free of charge, IRL, at Observatory Room in south Brooklyn through Sunday, June 6.

History never effaces what it buries; it always keeps within itself the secret of whatever it encrypts, the secret of its secret. This is a secret history of kept secrets.

—Derrida.

A friend at work sent me the Sam Harris talk, and I sent it to a friend I used to live with by the name of Luke Rodgers. Luke is a philosopher, and if you enjoy his thoughts on Harris, I encourage you to explore his blog, everything flows.

I sent Harris’s talk to Luke in part because I wanted to confirm my own biases: I agree with some of Harris’s thoughts, yet others annoy me. Luke’s reply is as thought-provoking as Harris’s lecture. Check out this off-the-cuff philosophizing:

First, the fact/value distinction is old, but also has been under attack at least since 1805 (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit). There are many good reasons for believing that this distinction is not rigid, but there are also good reasons for, in some cases, not abolishing it altogether, I think.

Harris claimed that the moral core of every religion is ultimately about conscious experience. I think this may be deeply wrong, and that the opposite is probably true. Certainly Kant’s philosophy specifically eschews this approach, and it seems to me that Judeo-Christian morality, conceived of as a law issuing from without, is also exactly contrary to Harris’ conception.

The question of suffering may be a good one, and some philosophers in the 20th century sought to locate this question at or near the centre of ethics (Derrida does something like this in some places). There does seem to be a “fact of the matter” here, so I think Harris is at least partially right that science can contribute to this debate.

Even though he went out of his way to try to avoid coming across as racist/imperialist, the contention that “conferences like this” are only conceivable in certain parts of the world, as though that is evidence of some moral or developmental superiority, is utterly hypocritical and arrogant, insofar as conferences like TED are, at least within the parameters of the current global economic system, only conceivable on the basis of incredible inequality and suffering in other worlds. That is to say, it can only exist in the USA because it cannot exist in so many other countries.

The overall reductionism, this century to the brain, last century to psychology/genetics, the previous century to phrenology, is a stupidity that many Western philosophers and scientists have been trading in since the early modern period. I doubt we will stop making it any time soon, though anyone who is acquainted with the history of modern philosophy (as Harris obviously is not) would be less likely to make this blunder. Harris reveals the ultimate contradiction himself when, in the Q&A period he admits that brain states cannot be reliably interpreted without reference to the larger context. That is to say, things are not reducible to the brain, that is to say his basic thesis is inherently misguided.

The question of “how humans flourish” is totally abstract, and cannot be determined outside of particular contexts. It is incapable of a universal answer. Harris’ talk about “valleys and peaks” on the moral landscape, while not absurd, here functions merely as a screen for his actual thesis of convergence which, along with the utopian idea that borders between nation-states are already disappearing (plausible) and will eventually vanish (incredible), is an old liberal myth.

The notion that “certain opinions [on morality] must be excluded” and that an objective domain of expertise on how to achieve human flourishing will emerge strikes me not only as vastly improbable, but also extremely dystopian and proto-totalitarian.

So, in sum, “yes” to weakening the fact/value dichotomy and being open the possibility that science will *inform* moral debates, but a resounding “no” to the notion that moral debates will constitute a domain of experimental science, and also “no” to the naive brain reductionism.

§

With regard to the veiling and honour-killing &c., yes, I agree. In that sense, I am ethnocentric in the sense argued by Richard Rorty (one of my favourite pragmatist philosophers), which I see as the least contradictory and most sophisticated way of avoiding the pitfalls of relativism and absolutism. I believe (though perhaps in a less jingoistic way than Rorty did) in the superiority of democracy and (certain aspects of) the individualist/liberal and secular traditions, though I also believe that I have no ultimately foundational, or non-question-begging ways of supporting those beliefs (i.e. I don’t think it’s grounded in objective reason, or anything like that).

As to brain science, yes it is indeed gaining serious weight, and it’s hard to see what will replace it and supersede it, though something probably will in the next 100 years, at least in terms of what we consider to be the science best suited for understanding human nature. On the other hand, it is still seriously deficient in many ways (deficiencies which, I think, scientists are sometimes better able to recognize than the breathless philosopher sycophants), e.g., it’s explanatory language is still at a very early stage and relatively crude, it has basically no idea how many anti-depressants work, etc.

If you can find the essay by Alisdair MacIntyre called “Hegel on Faces and Skulls” it’s a good read on this topic

Also, with regard to genetics, I expect there are still some huge surprises in store for us which are potentially game-changing. For example, until recently we thought that a large amount of DNA was “junk,” i.e., didn’t code for any proteins, and I think we’re just now beginning to figure out what that junk DNA is for.

There is some research going on right now that shows how Lamarck was right in certain ways, that is to say that sometimes a genotype can actually be modified on the fly in response to certain environmental conditions in a way that makes the change heritable.

But yes, genetics may be approaching a level of maturity comparable to physics; i.e., we may find that in 100, 200 years, certain beliefs we have now about genetics are still held true—a situation I would say is fairly plausible, barring societal collapse.

An interesting book on this topic is The Social Construction of What? by Ian Hacking, in which he develops a sophisticated way of looking at the extent to which different things may be considered “socially constructed.”

Atlas Obscura is one of my favorite things, period, and I’m proud to edit it, when I can. Congratulations to everyone who’s written, edited, viewed, or even heard of AO. You’ve all earned the award (a “Southie,” perhaps?).

FYI, apparently, South By Southwest is the new Burning Man. (Both have godawful oogly websites.)

[Of course, both of these media circuses pale in comparison to a good ole fashioned Wicker Man.]

Many moons back, my friend Seth, who writes under the nom de plume “Sparrow Hall,” asked me to work with my friend Sam, the rock paragon behind the bands Arpline and Courtier, to create a tripped-out hip hop song for the soundtrack to Sparrow’s new… novella?

He wants a soundtrack to a story? I thought, remembering McSweeney’s #6, for which They Might Be Giants and a few other decidedly un-crunk musicians created a soundtrack, one designed to exactly complement the stories in the journal from front cover to back.

But Seth’s idea is more grand in scale: He wants to publish stories and books that involve rich multimedia packages, including songs, videos, dances, &c., each of which reflects rhizomatically the progenitive central piece (in this case, a novella about love and memory loss called Two Blue Wolves).

I had a blast making “Stranger In The Strangest Land,” the ant-mentioning ekphrastic song-about-the-novella with Sam. I also ended up editing the novella.

And now it’s all finally available, on SparrowHall.com. Check it.

The soundtrack features music by a dude from Elefant and many other fascinating artistic souls, including several good friends.

Also, 15% of sales benefit the Alzheimer’s Foundation.

So once more, Gentle Reader, I murmur “check it” into the windy crevasse of the internet. Stories have finally entered the post-postmodern age.

Traditionalists may see the death of old media and the fracturing of style as threats to time-tested systems. Old writers likely want people to read books, dangit, and books written within clear limits of genre, even if those limits have only existed for a few decades. Each medium wins its hawks, and so each medium has mourners to bemoan its inevitable death.  But how much gladder am I to laud the comings of a form, the birth of a new literature, a new system of meaning, one made of transparencies and Japanese music videos…

These musings are really just to say: My friends P. D. and M. R. of What We Know So Far have been presenting for the last year or so a series of simultaneously low-fi/hyper-current lecture-operas about, among other rhizomatic topics, the internet—what it means, where it’s going, and how quickly information in general is mutating in the Twitter era.

The other night at 3rd Ward they presented a series of short… lectures (?) and videos, some of which I’d seen in earlier, less-polished (but always entertaining) rounds of composition. To sum it up quickly and perhaps badly, WWKSF’s work blends the words of Baudrillard and the images of ICanHasCheezburger seamlessly, so that it’s afterward surprising that the great French de-thinkers of the twentieth century weren’t inspired by the internet, but somehow prefigured it, perhaps by doing lots of awesome drugs, or by being really smart, or a mix of columns A and B.

For What We Know So Far’s bold and hilarious efforts to probe just what we know and how we know it, in toto, they receive this week’s Honourable Badge of Merit.

In related news, (i.e., the news of cat memes on the internet), I found a new favorite sentence of the summer, from the New York Times:

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent.

This sentence claims to describe a movie, District 9, which I hadn’t really wanted to see until reading about the Nigerian cat-food gangsters. I wonder now, rereading the sentence from beyond the stars, if the c.-f. gangsters ever heard of Athanasius Kircher’s anti-mellifluous cat piano, and if cats like aliens, or if aliens fall into the same category as other cats, vacuums, mops, twine, roaches, bees, human toes, and floss.

My brother G, an iPhone enthusiast, sent me an email the other day regarding a service call he’d made to AT&T Wireless. The email went, my emphasis:

word of the day… i learned from AT&T CUSTOMER SERVICE REP

frustrational, synonymous (i think) with frustrating… as in “i know that is frustrational…”

wow…

I enjoy pointless faux-Latin suffixes, and I enjoy words/signs that perform the very acts they mean to capture abstractly. The word frustrational is, albeit only mildly, actually frustrating.

I was not sure, after reading G’s email, that I’d ever feel frustrationalized, even if I knew I’d often feel frustrated. But I still laughed and copied the word into my mental florilegium, somewhere between frotteur and fulvous.

I then spent some hours editing the Atlas Obscura, an online encyclopedia of naturally or historically wondrous places and collections of curiosities.

If you’re headed out of town and want to see something besides yet another Denny’s water closet, search the Atlas. Waterfall of primordial blood? Check. Garden of poisonous plants? Sure. Living bridges made of massive entwined roots? Why not.

The Atlas is relaxing to edit and inspiring to read. Its entries are almost entirely inoffensive. They widen the world without challenging it. They are written to inform. Nothing about the project is harsh by design; the Atlas, like other moderated wikis, appeals to a broad audience.

So I was naturally surprised and even frustrationalized when the New Yorker, a once-notable journal of centrist politics, mediocre fiction, and blurry inscrutable cartoons about cat-psychiatrists and men trapped on desert islands with various supernumerary household appliances, published on its website this bizarre and seemingly off-topic review of a new patch of internet esoterica that I not only enjoy reading but actually edit.

The review is neither scathing nor adoring. The reviewer says she/he is “not immune” to the Atlas’ charms. But then the reviewer refuses to engage with the site on its own terms. The reviewer claims the Atlas is branded as a “club or society,” which isn’t true: The Atlas describes itself only as a “compendium” and “collaborative project.”

Inaccurate reporting aside, the tone of the review is off. Why does the reviewer mention Wes Anderson, for example? To my knowledge, Mr. Anderson makes twee, fantastical movies about immature man-boys of the type often played by the Wilson brothers. I like his movies, sure, and he does mention exotic, faraway places like Texas, but he’s hardly cornered the market on “exotic” or historical art.  (And the Atlas isn’t fiction. It’s nerd love pur sang. It’s an encyclo-freakin-pedia!)

The use of the name “Wes Anderson” in a review of a project undertaken by young scholars feels to me not like a valid jab at privileged knowitalls, but like a flailing attempt on the part of the New Yorker to participate in the discourse of hip. Their review of the decidedly non-twee Atlas reminds me of some technophobic friends’ scathing opinions of Twitter, a site these friends have never actually visited.

It’s not surprising that the fear of the unknown should follow us from the newsprint era into the era of the all-connective Web. Too, it’s not weird that the New Yorker should worry about its relevance. Frankly, it may not be especially relevant. It has clout; it frequently publishes good writing. But lots of magazines and sites publish good writing. Increasingly, clout is going to run downhill, from the dinosaurs to the more adaptable mammals of the publishing world.

I’m just surprised that the New Yorker would try to engage the world of cool, hip, twee, [insert adjective you think the New Yorker thinks is synonymous with "cool"] via a tactic so blatant. Like the chubby boy in fourth grade who can only let the pretty girl know he “like” likes her by spitting on her Bedazzled jeans-jacket, the New Yorker finds a cooler, younger site and wants to do… something… to/with/for it. But it ultimately proves a mite lost, unsure how to use its cultural clout and toward what end.

The Atlas has, in its first few weeks of life, garnered hundreds of followers from around the world, not to mention good reviews from Time and Metro. No doubt the New Yorker will continue to flail and look lost. I don’t need to extrude my syllogistic inklings very far to feel good about my own generation’s efforts to write well, explore the world, and perhaps - just perhaps - make it a little less of an old-white-dude-with-a-monocle kind of a place.

The bluenesses of different eras recall different dreams of what sadness, thought, and hue finally are. The moods of the past may not be read perfectly, but they may be seen as motion, deep beneath an ice-clear lake, or the body behind a frosted sliding shower door. The blues of one painter are the pale turquoise of regret, or orgies ended; another’s blues are modernist, stark, mysterious, eye-entangling, and unyielding, like the gods of Lovecraft or the gazes of those who spurn us.

Ranking blues chronologically by their authoring spoils the fun by breaking trust with the great writers.

Ranking my favorite blues chronologically by their supposed authoring, as I have done just now, to see how they stack up in my head as I return to them, allows us to envision different cerulean heavens, many varieties of squid-bruise sea, and all manner of sad personages, casting mournful or perhaps hilarious sturgeon-faced gazes out onto unresponsive expanses of pampas and heath.

To the chrono-palette:

When Hoja remarked that my powers of imagination were all too limited, I remembered the mustachioed French turtles in our lily-pond, the blue parrots that talked with Sicilian accents, and the squirrels who would sit facing one another preening their coats before mating. We devoted much time and care to a chapter on the behaviour of ants, a subject which fascinated the sultan but which he could not learn enough about because the first courtyard of the palace was continually being swept.

—Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle, set circa the seventeenth century.

Pamuk’s blue is the childhood color of imagination; the house is colored green; the grass is red; the yellow sky eggily holds up a black sun; etc. Like many great authors, Pamuk supercharges his novels with even more interesting but impossible to write fake books. Here, our blue is the sadness at never being able to read Hoja’s elaborate bulldada animalian encyclopaediae.

Rain, sun, two whole days of impenetrable fog, night winds whistling, winds far and near, nights of blue crystal, crystals of ozone. The graph of temperature against the hours of the day was sinuous, but not unpredictable. Nor, in fact, were their visions. The mountains filed so slowly past that the mind amused itself devising constructivist games to replace them.

—César Aira, An Incident In The Life Of A Landscape Painter, set circa the nineteenth century.

The games of Kandinksy, whom Gass quotes: Blue absorbs where yellow diffuses happily into oblivion; the one, a cat; the other, a tiring dog. This montane landscape is gray-brown to us now, sparsely green, but to the men who walked it before Twitter, the stones revealed depths of frozen flesh and layers of color, whole canvases used again and again by matrices of indecisive, chameleon crystals and minerals reflecting each color in turn, patient as their immobility could ever warrant.

Scolding and demonstrating (how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s) all had folded itself quietly about her, when the girl spoke, as, after a flight through the sunshine the wings of a bird fold themselves quietly and the blue of its plumage changes from bright steel to soft purple.

—Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, set circa the World Wars.

Dame Woolf here writes, in part, of the blue of quiet transformations. When my (blue) cat realizes I am leaving for the day, his gunmetal fur ripples as his body twists to leave the sill, abandoning cat-yoga to rush for the door and out into the fatal void-world where I live. (Just as I might try to leave earth in a spacesuit of duct-tape.)

The blue of the sky. Trees leant against. Bird stutter and the whisper of grasses. The Dead Father playing his guitar. Thomas performing leadership functions. Construction of the plan. Maps pored over and the sacred beans bounced in the pot. The yarrow sticks cast. The dice cup given a shake. Shoulder blade of a sheep roasted and the cakes in the bone read. Peas agitated in a sieve. The hatchet struck into a great stake and its quivers recorded. First-sprouting onion caught and its peels palpated. Portents totted up and divided by seven. Thomas falls to the ground in a swoon.

—Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father, set circa a dreamy, olden-timey now.

The blue of prophecy darkens the sun-colored supposedly free world in which we live. (Our world is darkened otherwise by the industrial blue of leadership functions, networking, thing-fetishizing, and so on.)

What pretty names, he thought. Indigo, sugar, ginger, cotton. The reddish flowers of the indigo bush. The dark blue paste, with copper glints. A woman painted indigo, washing herself in the shower.

—Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, set circa now.

The shower again. A prismatic turn toward indigo. The thickness of paste. The painting of the self to reflect, what? The blue everywhere else, or the blues inside?

Or finally the thick landscape of blues, tangible, practically taste-able, that William Gass writes of—the realm of blues-set-beside-non-blues, to bring out their quintessential bluenesses—sadness, awareness, the rain, sex, and time?

So blue, the word and the condition, the color and the act, contrive to contain one another, as if the bottle of the genii were its belly, the lamp’s breath the smoke of the wraith.

—William Gass, On Being Blue, timely, timeless.

I’ve been reading a lot of the Atlas Obscura of late, thinking about the job of cataloging the irretrievable, unmanageable past. This morning, my daily email from the New York Times included the headline “A Historian Is On A Quest To Locate Lost Events,” which piqued my inner amateur historian quite a bit.

Unfortunately, the questing soul featured in the article, Andrew Carroll, runs only a spartan website on which there’s little actual lost-event locating to be found. He mentions a blog but doesn’t link to it. Weird.

Weirder, perhaps, is Carroll’s URL, “hereiswhere.org/Here_Is_Where/Here_Is_Where.” Why the deuce, the rhizomatist wonders, would you not forge ahead simply with “hereiswhere.org,” an elegant, koan-like URL? Or even “hereiswhere.org/home,” a nod to convention? Or might I suggest “hereiswhere.org/whereishere/hereiam,” or some other act of play?

Officially, all word-hijinks aside, I salute Carroll and his ilk for wandering down that hallway of the past. My only admonition, I borrow from novelist Andrei Bitov, who writes in Pushkin House:

He expresses the evasively simple idea that it is equally false, if not more so, to infer a historical picture of a given age solely from data that are few and extremely meager. The contemporary of an age and his historian move toward each other in darkness, but this is a bizarre simultaneity, for the contemporary exists no more, and the historian not yet. The few things that the historian sees when he looks back are too clear to him; to the contemporary, they are engulfed by life. Why, one might ask, if a scholar succeeds in establishing something with precision, does it seem to have become more obvious and better known in the past? The scholar, more often than the dramatist, succumbs to the delusion that every gun fires.

I’ve missed out on opportunities to announce readings and publications via this site; amends will be made shortly.

For now, suffice to announce: “The Death of Our Hair,” illustrated by Mr. Ethan Gould, impeccable artist and mind-warper, has been published in the lovely 26th issue of the Brooklyn Review, whose site is still being turned forward into 2009.

“T.D.o.O.H.” is a low comedy about hair, the Crusades, the hair of the Crusades, history, how we write about history, indecision, cities, and other subjects of interest to a wide variety of readers. Mr. Ethan Gould’s drawings of curious rock-like/twine-bound stone figures add vim and spice to an otherwise desert-solemn typographical experience.

Also available is issue no. 5 of Pomp & Circumstance, the Brooklyn arts & culture glossy I help edit. I am now the “Technology & Faith” section editor, meaning I solicit nonfiction about wires and beliefs and their intersections. Issue no. 6 concerns survival and survivalism and promises to be an extra-hoot, assuming my writers deliver on their goods. Otherwise, I’ll be a nutless squirrel in winter…

Ahem. Shop for P&C at local Barnes & Nobles, newsstands in the greater New York City supra-urb, and my house, where cat-ravaged copies of the previous four issues are slowly leaking onto the floor as I prepare to move to Ditmas Park.

Thirdly, Electric Literature no.1 is now available for popular consumption via print-on-demand (from Ingram, no less), epub, Kindle, Sony Reader, and probably smoke-signal, steam-punk vacu-helmet mind-transfer, &c.

Electric is a bi-monthly journal/e-journal of new fiction by (often famous, generally amazing) authors including Michael Cunningham, Jim Shepard, and T. Cooper. Rick Moody endorses it. I might be involved with it in some capacity; stay tuned.

Also available for gawking-at is the Atlas Obscura of Mr. D. T., Mz. M. E., and Mr. J. F., all noble and competent author-explorers. I am not involved with the Atlas but plan to be soon, via their moderated wiki-curiosities-posting system. If you read Curious Expeditions or once read the Kircher Society’s blog, check out A.O.

Also hell of dope is this guy’s site, which I just found randomly.

Today, friends, is a glorious day, because despite all the petty and noble terrors of the earth, there is the internet, and it yields forth so many fructifants, some mango-like (lusty, wet), some pomegranate (jeweled, secret), some fig (sweet, gritty, leathern), others jerky (turkeyfied) or ape-brain (clay-y, monosodium glutamate-ish).

Here I have tallied only a small portion of the multiple lode:

• Vin Diesel loves Dungeons & Dragons. (Thanks to Julianne Smolinski, writer and professional genius, for the heads-up.)
• Billy Bob Thronton hates both Canada and acting. And isn’t all that into music, either. Which is strange when you think about the guy’s life, spent acting, playing music, and (at times) touring Canada. (Why do we do the things we loathe? Baudelaire couldn’t help us there; I’m not even going to try, je regrette.)
• My sometimes hero/sometimes nemesis Nicholas Kristof is bored by words, which I long suspected.
• Finally, I now know the joys of RSS (”really simple syndication”/”rich site summary”/”read sexy snippets”), thanks to (who else) Google. I feel like all the previous RSS readers were working too hard to promote themselves and not hard enough to show me the multiple Infinities of web content.

Of course, speaking of infinity, it’s gotta be nice to be Google: Like Dan Flavin, John Cage, Sam Beckett, you’ve got your discourse’s version of Minimalism on lock. You never have to do more work than [white page, Logo], as long as you back up said Minimal steez with un-fuckable-with functionality.

And with the help of said functionality, what day is not full of wondrous charm, here in the internet?

I write “in the internet” but can just as well write “through, via, by way of, thanks to, courtesy, all over, throughout the internet,” or any prepositional phrase that does not imply “through the internet,” since there is no mystic Other Side, no transcendent meaning, no final answer, no wizard behind the curtain (unless Vin Diesel is hanging out behind a curtain; that dude loves spellcasting).

The internet, without center, without king or tyrannical convention of democrats, may be the first true rhizome, the first deterritorializing machine, that which consumes and strips of transcendent meaning, applying all meanings to all surfaces to produce (more) all meanings (again, different). (And I am far from the first to suggest as much.)

Video/design expert and friend Patrick Davison designed Hello Cthulhu; lunchboxes and mousepads soon to come. H.P. Lovecraft was a top-notch bastard; this image would have probably driven him to an early (and soon unearthed) grave:

Writer and friend C.J. Hauser draws single-panel cartoons, every single day.

In terms of “famous” cartoonists and other drawers, I must note Partially Clips and Achewood (again), which have severely influenced my own stances toward talking animals and fourth-wall destruction.