Pink Air

Fleurons. Beowulf. Borges.

ne of interestingness' most attractive features is its non-judgmental character. Anything can be interesting, as long as someone thinks that it is. Interestingness does not discriminate against any subject or format. Billboards and novels get an equal hearing.

But behind its impassive mask of laissez-faire tolerance, interestingness does harbour some tastes of its own. It secretly connotates. When it turns its disinterested, denotating gaze upon itself, it generates an implicit personality and set of values more or less like those of Montaigne. His ghost is raised by reflection.

The Montaignesque spirit of interestingness is fundamentally conservative, based in a self-conscious awareness that any single perspective (most significantly, one's own) is drastically limited, which leads to the search for other perspectives. (Montaigne was a voraciously observant traveler.) How do other beings in other places with other minds see things? What attitude should we take towards a world that we are largely ignorant of? To care about those questions has implications for everything from politics to typography. 

For example, interestingness likes fleurons: the squidgy little designs separating blocks of text in your fancier publications. A thoughtful deployment of fleurons is a good sign that the text will be interesting to those interested in interestingness. Fleurons are often used in the Ironic Victorian¹ style, familiar from the work of San Francisco² agencies from Goodby back to Riney and through the Gossage Timeflux to its pre-ironic, striving Victorian antecedents, pushing themselves forward in a cacophonony of type, charlatan illustration and folksy patter full of convincing, irrelevant detail.

But the noble fleuron can trace its lineage back even further, to the illuminated manuscripts of pre-Norman Britain, with their curiously florid yet laconic depictions of Biblical miracles and everyday peasant life, from Jerusulem to Norwich, all the elements of the known universe shrunk to fit precisely through the gaps and margins of the text.

That same dense weaving of words and imagery is mirrored in the distinctive, sonorous repetition-with-variation of Anglo-Saxon writing:

In the composition of Beowulf, scenes and episodes are similarly woven into a pattern of contrast and recapitulation so that the effect is of formal intricacy and immediacy rather than any linear development...   The interlace structure has thus been defined as expressing the meaning of coincidence, the recurrence of human behaviour, and the circularity of time as the thread of words crosses and recrosses itself in endless weaves and knots...If it is indeed a vision of the world, it is one which has no beginning and no end...only the endless recapitulation of patterns and the constant interplay of opposing forces.

Peter Ackroyd then goes on to trace England's fondness for meandering patterns from runic symbols to Northumbrian foliated capitals through Sir Thomas Browne's preoccupation with "the making of mosaic patterns with fragments of knowledge," Robert Burton's "false learning and concocted quotations designed to confuse or tease the reader" and Blake's "tense abstraction".  All follow the winding, sinuous serpentine that William Hogarth identified in 1753 as The Line of Beauty, a figure graved into the British landscape by countless ancient pathways and whose principles (fitness, variety, regularity, simplicity, intricacy, greatness) overlap and interweave with those of interestingness.

Interestingness, like Old English verse, is "constantly calling attention to the remarkably wrought quality of the things of this world." Both gain strength through "compound force and internal alliteration."³ Medieval Anglo-Saxons saw the densely detailed and interwoven patterns of the world as proof that it was all made by God. But the direction of that logic can be reversed, to work up rather than point down, and to find in the appreciation of intricate pattern an escape from the blinkered perspective of a solitary self in a single cell and a temporary elevation to the clear and infinite view from which God once saw the universal pattern whole.

Praised be the infinite
Mesh of effects and causes
Which, before it shews me the mirror
In which I shall see no-one or I shall see another,
Grants me now this contemplation pure
Of a language of the dawn.

1. Other aspects of the Ironic Victorian style include woodcut illustration or typography, a dry sense of humor, a shared wink over the inherent insincerity of commercial communication, focus on the links between minutia and consequent tendency to meander like a bemused grampa and lots of footnotes. These features are also characteristic of Borges, Aspergers, The New Yorker, and the hysterical realist school of writing.

2. Also home of the architectural Ironic Victorian.

3. Inventing English, Seth Lerer. "Wrought," "Tense Abstraction" and "Hysterical Realist" could all serve as titles for an Aspergian manifesto, an art film biography of Borges, a coffee table book survey of 'zine culture, a media studies thesis devoted to the semiotics of Ian Curtis' suicide, or a Wire tribute album.

Condolences

Dear C.,

I am very sorry to hear of your loss. Not the loss of office, but the loss of stability that you are currently suffering. You should know that you are not alone. It may seem as though we are all just moving on as if nothing had happened. In fact, it probably seems as though many of us are rejoicing in the destruction, profiting from it, and maybe even causing it.

But we miss stability too. Really. I know I do. It used to be much simpler. It wasn't easy, but you knew where to apply your effort and had faith that with enough effort applied to eternal truths, fair and reliable results would be achieved.

Today it seems that effort has nothing to do with results, doesn't it? It looks as though people have forgotten about the value of effort altogether, as if no one wants to take responsibility, no one sticks to it, no one has loyalty. It looks as though a bunch of lazy, irresponsible looters have burst into the factory, destroyed all the machinery, had a party in the wreckage, and now wonder why the factory doesn't work any more.

But here's the thing. Looters didn't destroy the factory. The owners did. Not because they're especially greedy or shortsighted, but because they're just about as greedy and shortsighted as you and me. The factory was built to self-destruct when a certain set of variables reached a certain level. No one knew exactly what the levels were or when they were reached, but in retrospect, it seems they led to a rapidly accelerated rate of change which, as we know from chemistry, is just another way of saying BOOM.

Now, some people look at an explosion and say, "Shit. Look at all that stuff we had that just got blown up." Other people say, "Awesome. Think of what we can do with all that empty space."  And a very few others think, "Excellent. I had the insurance policy on that." Then they all turn to each other and say, "Fuck you." But what we need, as with any great loss, is to grieve, retrieve and move on.

And here's the other thing. Your leaders have failed you. They are keeping you from taking the first step of grieving the loss of stability because they hold the insurance policy. And as long as you stay focused on denying your loss and pain and grief, that policy will pay and pay and pay. I'm not saying they're to blame. I'm just saying, they are interested in keeping you in an angry, blaming, crazy state. I say this as a friend: Snap out of it. We desperately need your help and you're not helping. This is not about blame, but the first move is all you. Look at the insanely contradictory, illogical things you're being asked to believe. You know that can't be right. But you won't be able to see it until you are willing to feel sad.

Believe it or not, I'm here for you. We don't share everything, but we do share a lot. Most importantly, we share this sense of loss and the place where it has happened, is happening, will continue to happen. It isn't going to stop. I know that your natural tendency is to conserve, but the thing you're trying to conserve is inherently unstable. You can't conserve small business and small government in a global, densely connected world. At least not the way things are currently set up. And you can't conserve economic freedom and religious uniformity. Their logic and consequences lead to deadlock because of those eternal, nice and not-so-nice truths about human beings that your older relatives were constantly going on about. They weren't wrong.

But your current leaders are not going to tell you that. And they're certainly not going to help you grieve so that you can shake your angry melancholia and see it for yourself.

C., this one is on you.

Yours in heartfelt sympathy,

L.

Avatar IMAX 3D

Most Awesome Bad Movie Ever.

I have to agree with the Pope on this one. Though his concern over nature worship seems a bit overblown coming from an organization currently paying out billions after covering up and continuing to minimize truly shameful, hypocritical, exploitative behavior for centuries. Maybe if the mote in his eye were 3D, he would notice it.

American

You've probably heard by now that Up In The Air is a very good*, thoughtful movie starring George Clooney as a man who fires people for a living and who mostly enjoys the muffled and disconnected life afforded by a life of constant travel and frequent flyer benefits. You may have also heard that American Airlines and Hilton Hotels are all over the movie, but provided only production services rather than a product placement fee. In general, the public response to the tie-up is that both American and Hilton got a great deal. I'm not so sure.

The heart of the story (originally written long before the current downturn) is about individual isolation versus connection. And I appreciated that the benefits of isolation were not simply dismissed as neurotic, sad and destructive. (At least not initially. This is Hollywood, after all, not Sweden.)

But the wintery setting of mass layoffs conducted with bland, technological efficiency by companies constantly chirping "We Value Your Loyalty!" is obviously not irrelevant. And it's here that I wonder what the PR people were thinking. Each of Clooney's business trips is tattooed by quick portraits of laid-off workers responding to the news of their firing. Some are angry. Some are tearful. Most are simply stunned. (And these are for the most part not actors, but real people who were recently laid-off, recounting their exit interviews. Their performances are astonishing.)

And between each of these moments of despair, the thread along which they are strung, is the word AMERICAN in big red letters: on the planes, on the nametags of desk clerks programmed to greet Mr. Clooney with "personalized" Platinum Club attention and on the flight lounge posters that also say (of course) "We Value Your Loyalty!" when loyalty is the Holy Ghost of the movie, present by its overwhelming absence. These moments were made possible by American Airlines.

There are a number of other digs in the movie (as when Clooney, moonlighting as a motivational speaker says, "Whether you own just a studio apartment or a two-bedroom home..." Ouch. Even the AMERICAN dream has been downsized.) But again, it's nothing new to see movies taking a shot at big business. What's interesting is that American didn't see that they're part of the target in this one. Reebok sued when Jerry Maguire made them look soulless. But maybe that's the best airlines can hope for at this point.

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*Though not everyone agrees. Here is an hilariously obtuse review from the conservative American Spectator.

Scary fairy

I cannot imagine a better title than There Once Lived A Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby. Really, how could that not be interesting? The book leaped the synapse from shelf to hand with immediate, chemical certainty. And the stories inside live up to the title's promise.

Like Borges, Grimm and Chekov combined, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya compresses almost everything I like about art into morbid, hopeful, magical, bleak, gentle, ambiguous little fairy tales that catch the light of human character embedded in the grim slag of Soviet Russia. And while the stories are infused with Russian tone, history and specifics, the rock weight of suffering and alienation squeezing out scary sparks can be found everywhere.

I was looking for ways to fit in more gushing adjectives: exquisite, condensed, onyx, They-Might-Be-Giants-esque. But you get the idea.

Movement

In retrospect, I can see that it was too much to expect a Republican Joy Division. The Republican party is too far gone. It has become...get ready...a rabid, senile, sclerotic rat, backed into a corner by its own paranoid visions, simultaneously choking on and excited by the bloody froth in its mouth leftover from chewing off its own limbs.

But outside the Grand Old Guignol itself, a few reflective conservatives are gathering their thoughts. Distancing themselves from the abuse of power, corruption and lies of the party itself and to varying degrees willing to acknowledge the failures of, well, just about everything over the past eight years, this brotherhood (it is too small, too soon and too male to call it a movement) is groping its way back to first principles and in the process, rediscovering the idea that human frailty is not something to be ashamed of. It is the basis of reasonable politics.

David Brooks stumbles across this idea every twelve months or so, in last year's defense of institutions and this year's reminder that we can't be protected against everything. (Though he promptly forgets again, as in this week's description of the Tea Party movement as passionately "disgusted" by things they appear to be merely uninformed about and afraid of.)

But Andrew Sullivan gets right to the point in The Conservative Soul:

All conservatism begins with loss. If we never knew loss, we would never feel the need to conserve, which is the essence of any conservatism...these experiences teach us the fragility of the moment, and that fragility is what, in part, defines us.

He excoriates the Bush administration as incompetent fundamentalists who lost sight of classical conservatism's acceptance of loss, frailty and consequent politics of doubt. In doing so, he seems pretty darned close to Tony Wilson's description of Joy Division as the band who turned punk's "Fuck you" on itself in order to say "I'm fucked."

It may be that Sullivan's existential sense of fuckedness is reinforced by the fact that he is not just conservative, but Catholic, gay and HIV-positive as well. When the cultures you call home officially condemn you as a low-life, you might develop a complex. And though it could be a simple failure of rhetorical technique, there does seem to be a touch of Stockholm syndrome in his bizarre attributions of support for Saddam Hussein and anti-gay posturing to Democrats. (This is particularly puzzling coming from a former editor of The New Republic.)

I am a big fan of failure, so a Republican platform based on human frailty and the inevitability of loss could be engaging, interesting and even somewhat seductive. But while I'm waiting for the sirens' call of a more reasonable right, I'm not holding my breath.