While I'm still sleep-deprived and therefore less inhibited I thought I might as well announce my foray into the ranks of Twitter. Two weeks ago I hadn't the slightest intention of following in the footsteps of Twitter users who, according to the scathing stereotypes, inform their beleaguered friends and the world of such thrilling events as "Just had a sandwich!!1!" whilst littering these effusions with typos and horrendous contractions like "lol."
But Facebook is royally peeving. The reason I went on there was mainly so that people could keep up contact with me if they wanted to, and because I needed closure on high school. On the other hand it disturbs me that the information I give the website is so voluminous and personal in nature, and that access to it can be left wide open to the general public whenever a brilliant redesign of the privacy settings occurs; it disturbs me to know how much I could find out about other people, and so far I've religiously only looked at photos, etc., where I was wholly sure that the person wouldn't mind; and I don't like the compulsion to chase popularity just like in the high school I was trying to get closure on, nor the fact that a "Facebook friend" is a very different thing from a real friend. As therapy to overcome feeling despised and isolated in school, Facebook has been great, just because I have to confront it and because if someone picks up contact it seems like they can't entirely hate me, but I find it difficult to write updates or notes about links as naturally as I would if my Facebook friends were, let's say, my brothers. Besides it's depressing to be aware that the things that really interest and inspire me may be received as deadly dull and irritating clutter in the newsfeed of someone else.
On Twitter, by contrast, I am a total stranger and I (not being a celebrity or being connected to a network of friends there) don't have to prove anything to anybody. If the mood strikes to "tweet" something myself, I can practice condensing thoughts into short and entertaining sentences, which is especially good practice for someone who writes longwindedly and likes to qualify her statements. If people like what I write I earn their attention and (virtual) conversation fairly. Aside from that, and as importantly, I can keep up to date on magazine and newspaper articles, press releases and other information from charities, and publicly available videos and event announcements from cultural organizations, governments, etc. Besides I can remain in touch with the projects and thoughts of actors and other famous people whom I admire, and be certain that the information they are sharing is not unduly personal and is freely given to the world at large, and that I don't have to be a pain in the neck or support the tabloids and other intrusive press to find it.
So far among the people whom I follow on Twitter the most consistently amusing is Armando Iannucci; most gently didactic Martha Stewart, who is currently travelling in southeast Asia and whose reports and photos are National Geographic in miniature; most informative of events like a press conference with David Cameron and Angela Merkel is Downing Street 10 [Number10gov]; most filled with righteous indignation the Reverend Al Sharpton; and the most absorbed in peace and love and projects for furtherance of the same is undoubtedly Yoko Ono.
There are plenty of other interesting people, like Karl Lagerfeld who in resemblance to Carine Roitfeld and Anna Wintour writes brief declarations of his life and fashion philosophies with a humourlessness which in his case is imbued with what I consider as Eeyorish gloom; actors like Susan Sarandon or authors like Zadie Smith who have sadly tired of their Twitter accounts already; and pop culture entities who figure prominently in Gawker and Jezebel and whom I happily avoid like the plague in any other context, e.g. Perez Hilton (Paris doesn't annoy me, since I think she has a real sense of humour) and the Kardashians and Lindsay Lohan (whom I like in any capacity other than her tormented tabloid persona).
Much as I have loved to watch America's Next Top Model, despite the shame of it, I have not seen the last two seasons beyond one to four episodes, and even the lure of André Leon Talley (who is also on Twitter) did not cure my thorough disenchantment, and I am following neither OfficialALT nor Tyra Banks. But I am following Toccara Jones, a third-season contestant who had an understated manner subtly concealing a vast aplomb, and who had a spread in Italian Vogue's (*sigh* ) "black" issue.
Apart from that, the humanitarian organizations and NGOs which I follow include UNHCR and UNICEF and NAACP, and it feels jolting but very good (though of course I haven't lifted a finger to help anybody yet) to be aware of what is happening in the world at large again. Then, as a cultural calendar, I follow museums, musicians, symphonies and magazines.
I'm relaxing my death grip on Anglosaxonia and specifically American culture a little, but frankly Twitter seems far more developed on that continent and the scepter'd isle than in Germany and Europe on the whole. So while I can heartily recommend Twitter feeds for continental museums like the Prado and Rijksmuseum, I have limited my German followings to Tip magazine.
Anyway, I've enjoyed myself hugely so far, though trawling through the lists of people whom famous interesting people are following in order to find more famous interesting people to follow one's self can be not only an odd (and seemingly hoity-toity) thing to do but also a major pain. Fortunately I already know what hashtags, etc., are and how they work, and have no trouble on that count.
P.S.: One must be aware, of course, of imperfections like spam Twitter accounts and stolen identities. At least the stolen identities can be highly amusing and essentially benign, like "Mrs. Stephen Fry," whose bewigg'd daguerreotype already hints that something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
A State of Rudeness
Whether it's interesting or not is (almost) impossible for me to say, but I feel like a ramble about the research I've been doing for the French Revolution story. I still don't anticipate writing the story itself for years. In my view literature, and art itself, are most worthwhile when they are the thoughts and experiences and knowledge of years, encoded (in a way) by the author or painter or musician, and then left to the reader or spectator or listener to decode over years with the help of his own thoughts, experiences, and knowledge. So, also because I like a finely wrought piece of work for the superficial immediate enjoyment of it, and out of undistilled curiosity, I am taking pains to build up a very thorough understanding of the state of France before and during the Revolution and possibly up to the exile of Napoleon to the island of Elba.
A priority is to understand where the revolutionaries were coming from. The more I learn [largely, I admit, from Wikipedia] the clearer it is that they fell into very diverse factions — the apparently bloodthirsty hébertistes, Montagnards, Jacobins; sympathetic clergy and aristocrats; ambitious and resentful minor aristocrats and lawyers and so on —and that certain ideas of the revolutionaries regarding the rights of man and the injustice of the tax system and so on were actually quite in vogue in higher circles. Honestly I think that it was the ambition and class resentment from those who were or felt snubbed by the upper class which had far more to do with setting the events of the Revolution in motion than the oppressed peasantry. In Brittany this seems to be even more the case, where the king was respected as a very distant entity, the Catholic church was strongly engrained in the fabric of society, and taxes like the gabelle (salt tax) were not as harsh thanks to the late accession of the province to France and I think to the favourable terms wrung out by Anne de Bretagne.
Personally I am skeptical as to the degree to which the droit du seigneur was exercised — it appears to be a propagandistic gimmick, like the much-touted "bra burning" of the 1960s and 70s which never happened once — and I think I read that the corvée, or mandatory labour exacted of peasants for the building of roads and other infrastructure, was essentially gone (at least in Brittany?) by 1789. But it is clear that the tax system was ridiculous and injust. First of all, that it was weighted so that the great majority of the burden fell on the poor. Secondly, that it was gathered by private contractors who apparently had free rein in exacting higher sums than the royal treasury would ever demand or receive. Thirdly that the taxes were so complicated; besides the gabelle there was the capitation (head tax), the vingtième (property tax), the octroi (I think the English term is market tax; it was levied of peasants entering cities to sell their produce), and the taille (church tithe), to name four examples. When this joke was rendered utterly humourless by bad weather, crop failure, and the shortage of bread and other staples, of course the fat was in the fire.
The monarchy itself was bankrupt thanks to decades (or centuries, depending on how one sees it) of warfare whether direct or indirect as in the case of America's War of Independence, Louis XV had squandered the prestige of the throne through his reckless spending and menagerie of mistresses and presumably his disenchanting descent into bawdy old age, and Louis XVI was an ineffectual figure whose questionable advisors quite overshadowed him on policy questions. In the course of the Enlightenment the superstition which may have propped up the construct of divinely appointed kings was eroded, new ideas arose on points of law and governance and the social hierarchy, and the staunchly successful Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and even the very fledgling American republic which the French king had supported pointed the way to a different course. Besides the system of buying positions in government invited nepotism, laziness, and a continuing or even expanding gap between the powerless have-nots and the powerful haves.
Anyway I imagine that drafting a virgin government in one's mind as the government one grew up and possibly suffered under edged closer and closer to obsolescence must have inspired feelings of considerable giddiness. (Kind of like when Obama succeeded Bush.) I am trying to follow the mental processes of those who did it back in the 1780s and later. So, aside from toiling through Rousseau, I want to read Montesquieu (I just found out about De l'esprit des lois and have downloaded it onto the computer to read at leisure) and other more contemporary or at least French philosophers, and go back to the Roman and Greek models of government as described in Plutarch's Lives and elsewhere.
Either way I have actually read documents on Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in their entirety, and it's nice to have a goldmine of primary sources at my fingertips. Jacques Necker's history of the Revolution (which I have admittedly not read in its entirety by a longshot; but what I wrote about the causes of the Revolution above is largely informed by the book's opening chapters) is most approachable. Even though it's tied up with a tragic massacre in Avignon which prefigured the Terror in Paris, I enjoyed, too, a speech by the Abbé Mulot in rebuttal to a Sieur Rovère (a revolutionary who had apparently falsely masqueraded as a marquis), of which I copied out my favourite insults. He calls Rovère "one of those low intriguers who know the tortuous paths which lead to crime but not to the scaffold" ("bas intriguans qui connoissent les routes tortueuses qui conduisent au crime sans arriver à l'échafaud"), which strikes me as a truly lovely turn of phrase. Later, and less imaginatively, he exhorts Rovère to "Blush, then, once, sieur Rovère, for the impudence of your lies" ("Rougissez donc une fois, sieur Rovère, de l'impudence de vos mensonges."). Evidently what the church gained in Mulot, the eloquently hyperemoting tradition of lofty French tragedy lost.
[Disclaimer: the above translations from the French are obviously my own and likely inaccurate. And I hope the final remark does not sound unkind.]
Rousseau persists in being a pain in the neck. The quirky view which philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had of man in a state of nature rather amuses me — though if I had ever taken the pains to slog through the Leviathan instead of knowing of it through pleasant, civil, and short references this may not be the case — because it lines up so funnily with modern conceptions of prehistoric man. And because it's nonsense and at the same time a weird instinctive understanding of a scientific phenomenon, like the idea of the atom which certain ancient Greeks had formed millennia before Niels Bohr, or John Dalton, for that matter. [N.B.: We learned about Dalton in school, which is to say briefly and long ago, and if he did help determine our modern understanding of atoms it's purely a fluke that I vaguely remembered.]
But! I object to being called upon to glamourize the existence of Neanderthal man and to pretending that living In The Bosom of Nature is a beautiful experience. The tableau of Man in a State of Nature blissfully grazing on a fruitful and readily accessible supply of acorns is possibly the biggest tosh I've ever read. There have been much more entertaining and convincing accounts of the Pays de Cocagne or Schlaraffenland. Besides, now that anthropology is an established field of study Rousseau's ideas on the subject are just so blatantly invalid. Besides Rousseau's ideas, though I wouldn't call them fascist because the underlying airy-fairy touchyfeelyness is so disparate, are morally repugnant and essentially eugenicist. The possession of a paper copy of the Discours sur l'origine, etc., would I think be worthwhile just so that I can fire it at the wall as soon as I read, for instance, the part where he thinks that the Spartan practice of leaving "malformed" babies out in the cold to die is peachy. In the meantime I just play out violent fantasies of him being chased by a mammoth over the hummocky neolithic tundra or something.
Then his ideal of man in a state of nature is so hypocritically snobby, generalizing, callous, and totally brutish and depressing:
&$%*@#! Anyway, I know that his thoughts were influential and that the Discours does capture archetypes and trains of reflection which remain and always have been relevant, but I just hate being confronted with declarative statements that are misguiding and untruthful, i.e. being lied to, especially when couched in repugnant pseudohumane sentiment.
A priority is to understand where the revolutionaries were coming from. The more I learn [largely, I admit, from Wikipedia] the clearer it is that they fell into very diverse factions — the apparently bloodthirsty hébertistes, Montagnards, Jacobins; sympathetic clergy and aristocrats; ambitious and resentful minor aristocrats and lawyers and so on —and that certain ideas of the revolutionaries regarding the rights of man and the injustice of the tax system and so on were actually quite in vogue in higher circles. Honestly I think that it was the ambition and class resentment from those who were or felt snubbed by the upper class which had far more to do with setting the events of the Revolution in motion than the oppressed peasantry. In Brittany this seems to be even more the case, where the king was respected as a very distant entity, the Catholic church was strongly engrained in the fabric of society, and taxes like the gabelle (salt tax) were not as harsh thanks to the late accession of the province to France and I think to the favourable terms wrung out by Anne de Bretagne.
Personally I am skeptical as to the degree to which the droit du seigneur was exercised — it appears to be a propagandistic gimmick, like the much-touted "bra burning" of the 1960s and 70s which never happened once — and I think I read that the corvée, or mandatory labour exacted of peasants for the building of roads and other infrastructure, was essentially gone (at least in Brittany?) by 1789. But it is clear that the tax system was ridiculous and injust. First of all, that it was weighted so that the great majority of the burden fell on the poor. Secondly, that it was gathered by private contractors who apparently had free rein in exacting higher sums than the royal treasury would ever demand or receive. Thirdly that the taxes were so complicated; besides the gabelle there was the capitation (head tax), the vingtième (property tax), the octroi (I think the English term is market tax; it was levied of peasants entering cities to sell their produce), and the taille (church tithe), to name four examples. When this joke was rendered utterly humourless by bad weather, crop failure, and the shortage of bread and other staples, of course the fat was in the fire.
The monarchy itself was bankrupt thanks to decades (or centuries, depending on how one sees it) of warfare whether direct or indirect as in the case of America's War of Independence, Louis XV had squandered the prestige of the throne through his reckless spending and menagerie of mistresses and presumably his disenchanting descent into bawdy old age, and Louis XVI was an ineffectual figure whose questionable advisors quite overshadowed him on policy questions. In the course of the Enlightenment the superstition which may have propped up the construct of divinely appointed kings was eroded, new ideas arose on points of law and governance and the social hierarchy, and the staunchly successful Glorious Revolution (1688) in England and even the very fledgling American republic which the French king had supported pointed the way to a different course. Besides the system of buying positions in government invited nepotism, laziness, and a continuing or even expanding gap between the powerless have-nots and the powerful haves.
Anyway I imagine that drafting a virgin government in one's mind as the government one grew up and possibly suffered under edged closer and closer to obsolescence must have inspired feelings of considerable giddiness. (Kind of like when Obama succeeded Bush.) I am trying to follow the mental processes of those who did it back in the 1780s and later. So, aside from toiling through Rousseau, I want to read Montesquieu (I just found out about De l'esprit des lois and have downloaded it onto the computer to read at leisure) and other more contemporary or at least French philosophers, and go back to the Roman and Greek models of government as described in Plutarch's Lives and elsewhere.
Either way I have actually read documents on Gallica, the website of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in their entirety, and it's nice to have a goldmine of primary sources at my fingertips. Jacques Necker's history of the Revolution (which I have admittedly not read in its entirety by a longshot; but what I wrote about the causes of the Revolution above is largely informed by the book's opening chapters) is most approachable. Even though it's tied up with a tragic massacre in Avignon which prefigured the Terror in Paris, I enjoyed, too, a speech by the Abbé Mulot in rebuttal to a Sieur Rovère (a revolutionary who had apparently falsely masqueraded as a marquis), of which I copied out my favourite insults. He calls Rovère "one of those low intriguers who know the tortuous paths which lead to crime but not to the scaffold" ("bas intriguans qui connoissent les routes tortueuses qui conduisent au crime sans arriver à l'échafaud"), which strikes me as a truly lovely turn of phrase. Later, and less imaginatively, he exhorts Rovère to "Blush, then, once, sieur Rovère, for the impudence of your lies" ("Rougissez donc une fois, sieur Rovère, de l'impudence de vos mensonges."). Evidently what the church gained in Mulot, the eloquently hyperemoting tradition of lofty French tragedy lost.
[Disclaimer: the above translations from the French are obviously my own and likely inaccurate. And I hope the final remark does not sound unkind.]
Rousseau persists in being a pain in the neck. The quirky view which philosophers like Thomas Hobbes and John Locke had of man in a state of nature rather amuses me — though if I had ever taken the pains to slog through the Leviathan instead of knowing of it through pleasant, civil, and short references this may not be the case — because it lines up so funnily with modern conceptions of prehistoric man. And because it's nonsense and at the same time a weird instinctive understanding of a scientific phenomenon, like the idea of the atom which certain ancient Greeks had formed millennia before Niels Bohr, or John Dalton, for that matter. [N.B.: We learned about Dalton in school, which is to say briefly and long ago, and if he did help determine our modern understanding of atoms it's purely a fluke that I vaguely remembered.]
But! I object to being called upon to glamourize the existence of Neanderthal man and to pretending that living In The Bosom of Nature is a beautiful experience. The tableau of Man in a State of Nature blissfully grazing on a fruitful and readily accessible supply of acorns is possibly the biggest tosh I've ever read. There have been much more entertaining and convincing accounts of the Pays de Cocagne or Schlaraffenland. Besides, now that anthropology is an established field of study Rousseau's ideas on the subject are just so blatantly invalid. Besides Rousseau's ideas, though I wouldn't call them fascist because the underlying airy-fairy touchyfeelyness is so disparate, are morally repugnant and essentially eugenicist. The possession of a paper copy of the Discours sur l'origine, etc., would I think be worthwhile just so that I can fire it at the wall as soon as I read, for instance, the part where he thinks that the Spartan practice of leaving "malformed" babies out in the cold to die is peachy. In the meantime I just play out violent fantasies of him being chased by a mammoth over the hummocky neolithic tundra or something.
Then his ideal of man in a state of nature is so hypocritically snobby, generalizing, callous, and totally brutish and depressing:
Source: A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind [Gutenberg]Alone, idle, and always surrounded with danger, savage man must be fond of sleep, and sleep lightly like other animals, who think but little, and may, in a manner, be said to sleep all the time they do not think: self-preservation being almost his only concern, he must exercise those faculties most, which are most serviceable in attacking and in defending, whether to subdue his prey, or to prevent his becoming that of other animals: those organs, on the contrary, which softness and sensuality can alone improve, must remain in a state of rudeness, utterly incompatible with all manner of delicacy; and as his senses are divided on this point, his touch and his taste must be extremely coarse and blunt; his sight, his hearing, and his smelling equally subtle: such is the animal state in general, and accordingly if we may believe travellers, it is that of most savage nations. We must not therefore be surprised, that the Hottentots of the Cape of Good Hope, distinguish with their naked eyes ships on the ocean, at as great a distance as the Dutch can discern them with their glasses; nor that the savages of America should have tracked the Spaniards with their noses, to as great a degree of exactness, as the best dogs could have done; nor that all these barbarous nations support nakedness without pain, use such large quantities of Piemento to give their food a relish, and drink like water the strongest liquors of Europe.
&$%*@#! Anyway, I know that his thoughts were influential and that the Discours does capture archetypes and trains of reflection which remain and always have been relevant, but I just hate being confronted with declarative statements that are misguiding and untruthful, i.e. being lied to, especially when couched in repugnant pseudohumane sentiment.
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