Reading the “Dark Night of The Soul” by Saint John of the Cross. it’s quite interesting. And there’s a marvelous amount of familiar psychology that should make the moderns grin ruefully in recognition. I also think that this would make for an interesting trope or narrative structure for some kind of gangster film starring a washed up assassin. YOu know how it goes.

Subjectivity and mathematics education

This is from a paper I found on the web, on subjectivity and mathematics education, perhaps prompted by my recent return to teaching calculus, however briefly, which has reawakened my interest in the subject. Especially now, when I realize that i am not really, passionately interested in most of what happens in the world, in the things that people take interest in. The stuff we talk about: music, movies, sports, politics, tech, food–you see all of that in our conversations everyday, and yet what i think about is what is NOT included on the list. I mean most of what we talk about has its root in mass culture, as opposed to elite artistic or intellectual culture. There’s nothing wrong with that, but sometimes i step back at this and think “you know what, i just dont want to be a part of this anymore. And then, inevitably, i think of being atop a hill, with a glimpse, from between the hills, of the Mediterranean. and i think about a simple life, and i think about a life free from working for the Man, that is, i think of what life could be like if i didn’t have to sell my soul to corporate capitalism or pay attention to its creations and cultural artifacts. Because capitalism’s greatest achievement is not the particular objects but how it’s won hearts and minds, molded us in the shape of the consumers that they dream of seeing, turning us into the market that will make them rich. In any case, this creeping sense of alienation has made me think more and more about what it is that constitutes the self, the sense of who you are, the feeling of belongingness or estrangement from one’s cultural world. and so i read this passage and thought it was interesting:

Self has often been understood as the biological entity held together by a cognitive
unity, but as Lemke (1995, p. 82) argues, from a “post-modern view this was a massive
sleight of hand. Even within the natural sciences there is no guarantee that physical, chemical and biological definitions of an organism coincide for all purposes”. Subjectivity is constituted discursively, defined by participations in a multitude of discursive practices. As such subjects identify with something outside of their selves. They identify with and partake in social discourses and through these identifications craft their subjectivity. Although possessiveness of one’s subjectivity is also in question since subjects are acting out aspects of previously formed languages, trying them out for size, but never quite fitting (Althusser, 1971). As such subjects are “alienated” from their discourse.

Pirouettes on the edge of madness: Bertrand Russell, me, and other fucked up peeps

With my own sanity and mental health at greater peril than ever before, i start reading, for some inexplicable reason, about Bertrand Russell’s personal life. I have read some of his books before, on happiness, marriage, etc. and of course the classic “On the History of Western Philosophy”–but I find that while i am obviously not of the same level, there are various personal similarities which i can’t help but noticing. If you go to the Amazon page for Ray Monk’s biography of Russell’s early middle-age years you find the following blurb from Publishers Weekly:

At age 30, philosopher and philanderer Russell (1872-1970) wrote, “Abstract work must be allowed to destroy one’s humanity.” His life into his 50th year is the subject of Monk’s first volume of a two-part biography. As previous biographers have found, his competition is Russell’s own mesmerizing yet unreliable memoirs. Monk (Wittgenstein) quotes extensively from Russell’s correspondence and autobiographical writings, but always with a gloss on the facts. Russell’s compulsive womanizing kept at bay loneliness, and worse. His mother and father died when he was a boy, and he saw insanity in his aristocratic lineage. Mathematics, his first love, lay on the edge of philosophy, and he feared that inquiring too deeply into the wellsprings of the self would lead to madness. The loss, also, of Victorian certainties intensified his sense of solitude, and his compensatory quests into logic, politics and sex left him questioning (as Monk puts it) “whether it was better to be sane with lies or mad with truth.” When the biography breaks off, he has married for a second time, been to jail, been expelled from his Cambridge professorship and written landmark books on mathematics, politics and philosophy. By then D.H. Lawrence has wounded Russell by accusing him of a paradox: that while Russell loves women sexually and loves logic professionally, “It is not the hatred of falsity which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood.

This revisits a theme that i;’ve thought about continuously for much of my adult life: which is what you want out of people in your personal life and what you hope for for humanity at large–and if there is any sort of psychological connection between the two. People–biographers, or just people who have had substantial contact with the man, have said that his love of humanity was abstract–that he was afraid of flesh and blood, that he had problems dealing with real people. And then there is talk of the compensatory nature of logic, and i find that *compensatory* to be quite illuminating. Why? Because logic and the disinterested pursuit of truth in science and mathematics allows one to dwell in rarefied world, away from the messiness and inconstancy of human life. There is a real sense in which someone with an IQ as high as Russell’s is also just not going to be able to “get” other people. sure he will need other people–I was reading about Conrad’s wife and Joyce Carol Oates described her as offering “maternal solicitude”–and I’ll be damned if there aren’t a bunch of male intellectuals who go for women like that…in any case, these uber-intellectuals and writers need regular people sometimes–they project their own fantasies and needs on them. I bet that the reason that Russell was a pacifist was because he believed that the nuclear arms race was a form of irrational madness based on lies that the government tells the people to get them into acquiesce–and this offended his deepest intellectual instincts. Human beings are mad, they are stupid. And yet you must love them so you try to steer them in what you consider the right way.

And what about Russell’s personal life, his compulsive womanizing? Again, echoes of my own life, except that I am not that compulsive and not that much of a womanizer–but again, the vector points in the same direction, just with lesser magnitude. The need to stave off madness and loneliness–i know that all too well.
I would go as far as to say that a man’s deepest redemption from loneliness–the loneliness brought about, in part, by his intellectual and existential instincts. Therefore, there is always this balancing act going, because the intellectual and artistic pursuits drive you in one direction, drive you in a direction that could conceivably lead to madness, or at least, shall we say suboptimal mental health. And that is why you need a woman, to assuage and ameliorate the pain that is brought on by that very pursuit.

somewhere else i read about Russell’s “unyielding” type of personality–another word which sent the flashbulbs off in my mind, because I believe that is why I have such problems following careers such as journalism and filmmaking, things that I ostensibly am in love with and respect–because I have something in me that predisposes me towards logic and mathematics, same as Russell (though obviously not on the same level). But the same proclivities are there, and the same political leanings–which means that whatever “advice” I could glean from his writings or writings about him could really be quite useful and therapeutic for me. And that’s perhaps, why, in times of extreme, duress, articles such as this and the thoughts they contain “find” me.

Books I’m Reading: 写给大家的中国美术史

Something’s been running around my mind since I started reading this book: the idea of the scholar-painter. Each of the early Chinese dynasties had court painters, but its during the first centuries AD, after the fall of the Han and during the successive Wei, Jin, Tang, Song, Five Dynasties that you have individual “artists” emerging, and then you have the idea that they are not just painters, but men of letters, scholars — you see it in the development, during the Song and Yuan and afterwards, of paintings that have poems written on them. The written word and the image are, thereafter, wed both in art and artist. It seems that they loved to sing and play various instruments as well.

Jiang Xun mentions that now familiar trope in Chinese high culture: the men of letters that go into seclusion, the wandering (and often drunk) poets, they of considerable talent who, for whatever reason, refuse their services to the new regime, preferring the consolations of nature and poetry.

What follows next might alienate some people (if, that is, anyone is actually reading this): I sometimes think of myself in this light. I might not be completely fit for that lifestyle, but given my druthers I would spend more time wandering, and more time writing than I do now … the parallel interests in writing, poetry, painting and music also seem to describe me. Of course, related to this apposition of various arts is the spiritual crisis or drama of alienation: of course these poets from a millennium ago could not really have experienced the anomie and alienation of we moderns: but there is, of course, much we have in common with them as well, perhaps a certain intellectual aloofness and even disdain from both masses and elites. They are not one with them. They are not for these types of games. They want an exit strategy from the mess, an escape route that can instantly take them far from the madding crowd.

In times of great turmoil or rapid social change, their ontological security is in our intellectual/artistic lineage, our belief that we are part of a loose collection of individuals and groups over human history that have shared this particular orientation. Outsiders, to use Colin Wilson’s concept anachronistically. They offer succor and sustenance to each other, through the centuries.

Grandiose, perhaps. Pompous, arrogant, poncey, overwrought, etc. It’s nothing I use to puff my ego up, to big myself. It’s just a small thought that somehow, for whatever reason I mean, gets me through the day a little easier and gives much-needed rest to the frazzled neurons that are, like those myriad background processes in any computer operating system, constantly eating up my mental and spiritual resources, insidiously and invisibly making the task of making it through the day just that much harder.

2008art, aesthetics, books, literature, chinese, china, culture, history, tang, song, writers, durkheim, jiang xun

Amazon.cn: not exactly the paragon of literacy

Amazon china misspelled title

Excuse me for being a dick, but I just had to point out this email that I found … someone said that it might be phishing type email, but I think it might be real … I have shopped at Amazon.cn and maybe I inadvertently signed up for their email notifications and newsletters.

A few snippets from a David Foster Wallace appreciation on Newsweek

This from “David Foster Wallace: An Appreciation by David Gates (Newsweek Books).

I suspect that Wallace was a genius who happened to be a writer, rather than a writer who happened to be a genius-Hemingway, for instance. You can’t imagine Hemingway writing, as Wallace did, a treatise called “Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity” (2004), or winning an undergraduate prize at Amherst College for a thesis on “modal logic,” whatever that may be, or going on to Harvard for graduate study in philosophy after his well-reviewed first novel, “The Broom of the System” (1987) was published-this after getting an MFA in fiction at the University of Arizona. Like Wallace, Hemingway worked as a journalist (in his case, primarily as a war correspondent), but he was an observer while Wallace was an explorer.

This idea of being a genius who happened to be a writer reminds me of a certain person I know, who is/was a math and computer genius but “rebelled” against this side of him and decided, at one point in his early 20s, to pursue an MFA in poetry, which he did, and published some books, did some translation, etc. I don’t know if he is still a writer, or whether or not he has become an architect or something…but anyhow, David Green expounds a bit more on the idea later:

The writer who happens to be a genius—the archetype is Shakespeare—is in love with his words, his story and his people. Wallace-the reverse archetype-surely knew as much about words, stories and people as any writer would ever need to know, but he gave his deepest love to his ideas about them. If the endlessly self-analytical Hamlet had been a writer (aside from that “speech of some twelve or fifteen lines” he composes to insert in “The Murder of Gonzago,” the play within the play), he would have written far more like Wallace than like Shakespeare. Hamlet says that “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams”; it’s a line that the author of “Infinite Jest” must have taken deeply to heart. Wallace’s encyclopedic self-reflexiveness made his work, at its best, a wonder of the literary world, and at its worst, nearly unreadable.

david foster wallace, writer, novelist, suicide, america, books

Books I’m Reading: The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

paradoxofchoice book cover by Barry Schwartz

I’ve been meaning to get this book for ages and I finally managed it. It’s an interesting book, almost too much so in my case, since it really gets to the heart of many of the issues I face in my life.

The main thesis in the book is that we have too many choices in our modern, affluent societies. So right off the bat we are talking about the middle-classes of the developed countries, not all of humanity. Schwartz contends that we have too many choices, and that this overabundance of choice, contrary to all those free market nostrums about the freedom to choose, the more choices the more competition the better for the consumer, that there is a downside – a serious price, both individually and collectively — to the kind of society that we have created.

Schwartz develops a theory about two different types of behavior: maximizing and satisficing. The former is the person that is obsessed about making the right choice. They spend loads of time researching the various pros and cons, opportunity costs involved in every decision. Their more neurotic tendencies mean that before the decision is made, they will anticipate regret and afterwards, will, even if their choice wasn’t too bad and worked out for them, will still harbor some regrets – for they know too well all the things that they missed out on.

In contrast, the satisficer constrains the amount of informational input that goes into every decision: they are not going to compare prices from 100 stores and read 20 consumer reports or reviews…they have decided what the minimum standards are for what they need, and most anything that falls into that range is good enough. After making their decision, they do the psychological work of justifying their decisions, meaning that they convince themselves that this was a good decision.

Schwartz’s contention is that everyone falls somewhere in the spectrum between the maximizer and the satisficer, or more precisely, are one or the other depending on the type of decision and the area of our lives.

I have found that when it comes to things like cheap laptops, I am a satisficer: I tell myself my budget limit, and as long as I can get a cheap but functional PC that fits that bill, it doesn’t matter what features it has, or what brand it is. I don’t agonize forever about the specs, and whether or not it will be the best choice for the various tasks that I will use the computer for. I don’t care if it looks good.

However, there are many things in which I am a maximizer, and, if Schwartz is correct, maximizing carries within it an inherent danger. The way he puts it, there is no way to distinguish cause and effect between maximizing the behavior and the psychological/emotional substrate in which exists. That is, I don’t know if I was already neurotic to begin with and maximizing made it worse or whether or not the society in which we exist — where the glut of choices and the endless array of maximizing enablers (I’m talking about you, Pricegrabber.com and Ebay.com)— creates this mentality. Schwartz doesn’t have the answer to this, and he suspects that it’s a two-way street, and I concur, adding only that it differs so much for each individual. The etiology, if you can call it that, is very individual and does not admit of easy generalization.

There are three areas of life in which I was or still am a hopeless maximizer, and I can safely say that for the most part, this has been, as Schwartz says, a prescription for misery.

1. Deciding a major in University
I switched from philosophy to sociology, then to applied math, and then almost to film, and then to pure mathematics. I was always looking for the right fit. I had considered a bunch of different majors, including physics and Russian literature. I loved philosophy but started hating the other students, who I didn’t think were on my level, intellectually. They seemed like poseurs, people who thought they were deep just by hanging out in philosophy classes. None of them seemed to have any real intellectual firepower; they were fairly ignorant when it came to the other realms of knowledge. I remember one philosophy student whose knowledge of physics was little more than that planetary, Bohr model of the atom. Of course, the real philosophers, the professionals – know much more, many of those who are philosophers of physics know as much physics as your average PhD in physics. But I hated the students. Same with sociology. It was too easy, the other students were a bore.

I wish I had done physics, and I would have if I weren’t so lousy at experiments and doing those nitty gritty problems. I suppose I was always more of a math person anyway, but in any case I finally chose math because you didn’t really have to talk much, and no one else liked to talk either. It was all nerds, and so no one spouted anything stupid. You just couldn’t, I mean if some mathematical assertion you make is off base, people will know sooner or later. There was nothing being debated that couldn’t be settled, objectively and definitively, with a few lines of calculation or reference to some book.

It took me a long time, and it was a tortuous route. I had to have the perfect mix — something intellectually challenging, not full of bullshit, not full of stupid classmates, and perhaps even employable after college.

2. Careers.

Torn between doing something that pays and something artistic. In the realm of the arts: should I be a writer, a journalist, a filmmaker, a photographer, or a musician? Which one would pay the best, and be the most stable? Which one has a better chance of making it in Shanghai? What about New York? Or should I just go back to doing a PhD in something mildly scientific and mathematical, like public health or bioinformatics? Schwartz mentions the issue of non-reversibility, which is to say, the more you treat something as reversible, the less committed you are, psychologically, to making it work, to making it something you enjoy. There is a refund policy on everything, there is an exit strategy and escape clause in the back of your mind, which means that you give yourself the license to think about all those other options – precisely because they still ARE options.

Hence, I keep thinking about going back to math-related fields, even though my age and lack of training have really made the proposition a fairly impractical thing.

There’s another point Schwartz makes that is worth mentioning here: expectations and control. If the learned helplessness theory of depression has any merit, than depression is caused by a lack of control, and obviously I don’t mean just once, but when it happens enough that people, for whatever reason, begin to think that this is an inherent feature in their lives. They give cosmic explanations for their failures, meaning they blame society or the Fates or the short-sightedness of other people (these people can’t understand or help or appreciate me) for whatever happens to them. And they tend to also locate the faults in themselves, in some kind of unchanging, immutable flaw that they can never change. Optimistic people tend to just see these things as one-time unfortunate circumstances (that HR person was in a bad mood, which is why I didn’t get hired).

I think that I had too high expectations of myself. My parents, my teachers and my peers always thought I was smart, that I had something going for me. I was placed in the gifted and talented classes. I excelled at a range of subjects. I was (am) well-read, knowledgeable. I can write better than most people. I can compose songs on guitar. I can do calculus in my head (well not anymore). I know what Hilbert spaces are, and I know what Augustine’s life in Carthage was like. I They said I was a Renaissance man, some say I’m a polymath. It doesn’t matter. I felt like I was groomed for success, and right now, I don’t feel successful. I feel underused, and under-appreciated. I most definitely feel underpaid. I feel like I am wasting my talent. Talent for what, I don’t know. I feel like I spend most of my time trying to find some skill I can sell for a pittance, whether its editing or copywriting. Most of the time I have to hide who I am and what I am. I cannot be too intellectual. I cannot use too many big, polysyllabic and obscure words. I cannot fully celebrate the pleasures that the life of the mind affords — at least not with others. I never thought that I would be the President of the US, but I did think that I would amount to more than this. I thought I would have a PhD and some kind of respectable job and status in life. And I thought I could control it, because I always had. I studied hard and worked hard and got A’s. I impressed teachers. I was in the driver’s seat.

I don’t think that way anymore. Nowadays, I seem to have less initiative. I don’t really believe that anything will come out of my life. I think that if I worked harder and tried harder and marketed myself or whored myself out a bit more things would go more smoothly. But I don’t think that I will be graced with great success, artistically or financially. I think I am doomed to be something or someone middling. One day, perhaps in a few years or decades, I will exclaim, like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront: I coulda been a contender! Don’t get me wrong, I think I will be ok in the long run. I won’t starve. But I won’t be the wildly successful person I thought I would be. Of course I still think that time is on my side. I’m 31, there is hope yet. But I have to find the right thing, and I have to put it all into that one thing. And there I go, back into that labyrinth, back into that endless arbitraging of skills and intellectual assets, trying to find the loophole that will allow me to come out ahead, in anything, anything at all. To be good at something and therefore remembered is all that matters.

Now I am too worn out, mentally, to write about romantic relationships, another area where I do a neurotically unhealthy amount of maximizing. But I will save that for some other time. My McDonald’s breakfast just arrived, and with it (or anything with cheese on it), a slight respite.

Can you buy Opening Ceremony DVDs at the Shanghai Book City?

视频：奥运会开幕式DVD上海热卖_视频新闻_新闻_腾讯网 via kwout

According to this report, you can or will be able to soon.

Hu Yang comes out with new photo series on young people in Shanghai

Hu Yang (胡杨) is the Shanghai based documentary photographer that takes shots of people living in Shanghai, in their native environments–their homes. He did a series that got a lot of publicity in the last year or so, it was called 《上海人家》 and showed Shanghainese people (or at least people who live here) from all walks of life in their homes, which was quite interesting not only sociologically but because many of the rooms had a personality of their own and showed us personal idiosyncracies that were far more interesting than any broader, social truth that might have (but ultimately was not) gleaned from the picutres. Well, I was leafing thorugh the pages of Shanghai Photography Magazine and saw that he’d done some new pictures, portraits of young people born anytime between 1970 and 1989. The photographs are nothing to write home about, but I guess there is still that minimal portrait of a generation value to it. In the actual exhibit and article in the magazine you read what each subject answered to a questionnaire given to them by the photographer, stuff on what their personal interests and hobbies were, etc. Anodyne but interesting, I suppose.

Photography books capture Wenchuan earthquake and aftermath

I saw this book when i was in the Xingguang Photographic Equipment Center on Luban Lu, in one of the bookstores on the third floor. The book is called 震动中国(百名摄影记者震区全记录 and cost 80 rmb, but I felt cheap at the moment, so didn’t end up buying it. I think it’s a good book, but it’s not the quality of the product that matters to me, or even the quality of the photography contained inside, but rather just the fact that it’s a pictorial record of what happened, and that’s just something that I feel I ought to have with me. Order it from Amazon China. Look at more images from the book on this blog. There are some other photography books on the earthquake, one of them was a big coffee table one that I saw in the same bookstore but I didn’t find it online. But it may be called 震殇5·12(崔益军汶川大地震摄影纪实) and be purchasable from Amazon as well.

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