I had not read anything new at all last Wednesday and so did not post, but now I have read two books, one good and one bad.
The bad one, Other Peoples’ Skin, a collection of four novellas by four people, is morally uplifting but as writing, it is about at the level of airplane reading. I read it because my youngest brother likes it and because I sometimes like to read airplane literature when I am tired.
The more interesting of the novellas are the middle two. The first and the last read like romance novels — full of food and clothes porn — and are very wooden to boot. This is not good writing.
The most ridiculous novella is the last. It takes place at a university in Detroit where the coffee is hazelnut, the pillows are red satin, and the students’ thighs are “buttery” in terms of color and skin softness.
Then I read On the Genealogy of Morals. This book has been on my list since Jennifer recommended it last spring as an explanation of and antidote to Reeducation. It is that, most startlingly and accurately so. It also seems to have been closely read by Vallejo, who lifted quite a few phrases from it and put them into poems.
All in all, On the Genealogy of Morals is a most revealing book, much moreso than I have attempted to indicate here. I recommend it highly and will comment in greater detail anon.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I’m moving very rapidly in new directions and sense you are too.
I’m interested in Jennifer’s comment on her blog about staying flexible as a way to resist change. She uses the metaphor of the tennis player who, through fancy footwork always manages to stay in front of the ball.
I see signs of inner disintegration in my peers and this worries me, and I wonder if this is not something that could happen to me as well: a sign of aging.
Complex thoughts. I may say more on my blog.
That’s a fascinating comment by Jennifer; I hadn’t seen it.
I also see signs of inner disintegration among my peers and I am concerned about it / concerned it could be happening to me too.
But then I have been seeing this since we hit about 30, in different ways. It’s just that now it seems different because the causes seem to be organic.
There is a kind of flexibility that is really subversive, but only in the sense of being like a ‘smart drug’ — targeting an aspect of people identities, and not the whole. The thing is not to feel enmity, but to nonetheless retain a sense of one’s complete autonomy from others. And one does so by not feeling enmity. The trick is basically not to embrace an Oedipal ego-orientation towards the world, because that is precisely what splits the world into “them” and “me”. One can have a pre-Oedipal orientation (that is, in the sense of the more mature, “Depressive” stage, rather than the Paranoid-Schizoid stage. I have read books that say that they “Depressive” stage precisely concerns the development of that competitive disposition between “them and me”, but I think one can register these things without acting on them, if one retains enough internal fluidity.) Or one can have a post-Oedipal orientation (concerned with the capacity to make choiced). But one simply must not get into the mode of spitting the world between those who are good (because we conform to a certain internal standard) and those who are not good (generally meaning “not us”). That way one can avoid feeling emnity.
Now if one avoids feeling this, one loses ones receptors and so neutralises those oppositional impulses in others.
This is good for one’s own mental health but in terms of getting other peoples’ behavior to improve I haven’t actually found it to be true. I’ve found it actually inflames them, because not getting the response they want makes them even angrier. So one doesn’t have to respond, but one needs to really note that this person sees one as an enemy.
Yes, but I am talking about effectively removing the bridge between you and the enemy. Not just posturing that you are shutting off from them, but actually removing the affective, psychological bridge. In order to do this, you need to ge nourishment from other sources, though, otherwise you will crave approval from others, and end up opening that bridge again.
Yes, these things are very true and important to remember!
I started taking a ceramics class at the local senior center and felt quite a shock at the way some of the women in the class would go there with an idea of making something and be totally unable to work. It was very sad. And these are not what you would think of as very old or senile people. It’s as if something is broken in them.
That is unfortunate indeed. The place to take ceramics, though, isn’t a senior center – it’s at a school or at the studio of an artist who gives lessons. A lot of the people who go to my studio are in fact retired women in their 60s and 70s and they’re quite able to work.
Oh, I downloaded Geneology of Morals on my Kindle, where it comes up as a tiny but readable PDF.
Dunno.
I guess this is the attack on Rousseau and Mill and other democratic thinkers. And the intro makes clear its writer’s belief that societies are dragged down by the weak.
No. I don’t agree with that at all. It’s putting the cart before the horse, as they say, reversing cause and effect. It is not valid, in my opinion, to apologize away very obvious and blatant statements of this sort or imply that the writer didn’t really mean it or that it a metaphor for the psyche or something like that.
I won’t say more, but I will at least skim this. Kind of related:
I was just reading a blog by a Canadian women and reflecting that she has a good life in spite of not being young, rich or powerful, and her sense of ownership of her life and fortunes is very strong. Her life sounds to me admirably lacking in the kinds of tension that are the everyday lot of Americans who might be her counterparts, since we have little of that security that people in social democracies take for granted.
Nietzsche himself acknowledges the cultural relativism of his position, when he says that in a time when strong characters were the norm ( I believe he makes reference to the 14th Century), the soft, meditative mind was the kind of complimentarity that this era needed. In 19th Century Europe, he sought to express the opposite values in himself to those he saw were prevalent in the middle class sphere –ie. European piety and genteel superficiality, along with the overemphasis on suffering as a virtue.
I fully understand why so much “Nietzscheanism” seems undesirable or going in the wrong direction, from a US cultural perspective. And there is no reason why it shouldn’t seem so, or actually be so.
But I tend to take a shamanistic viewpoint — which is one concerning inner life. I say what Nietzsche was really trying to achieve is more of life consciously lived by the individual, and less vitality given up in misplaced deference to others. For vitality is both given up and misplaced whenever people turn suffering into a virtue for its own sake.
Jennifer – that’s how I read the book, under your influence of course but then I really think that’s the truer reading. And Nietzche’s aristocracy doesn’t really mean the old nobility, the bourgeoisie, the “fittest,” or any of those kinds of elites.
Hattie – re the blog – yes, social democracies are good. On Nietzche – I think that’s a standard reading of this book, but I think it misses the point. And – democracy isn’t putting the lowest common denominator in charge.
Yes, I could certainly be accused of missing the point where N. is concerned. My defense is that I have lived in Germany and Switzerland and know German. It was N’s style that is so striking in German. I don’t know many Germans who take him seriously as a thinker. They consider him an artist, mostly.
Of course, thinking and art are not necessarily at opposite poles! It’s just that Germans think in dichotomies so much.
Shamanistic *wholeness* has to do with overriding those dichotomies. Nietzsche may have written in a German style, but he was not German in this sense that you describe.
One chapter more to review, and the conclusion chapter to redo. Then I am referencing, for many, many weeks.
Good luck, Jennifer.
PZ: My teacher is excellent, and so are some of the students. I dragged along two of my friends who are experienced potters, and they are more than happy in this class. I actually don’t need for or care for much guidance. It’s like my photography. Use the simplest possible medium (my cheap Nikon 100)and see what you come up with.
I’m not willing to spend big money on a pastime like this, anyway. It’s ten dollars a semester plus extra for clays and firing. That is just fine with me.
As a matter of fact, the teacher is the best potter on the Island. But being Japanese and in her late 50’s she enjoys hanging around with old folks like us. She’s glad I brought my friends in to lively up the class.
This ain’t the Mainland anyway. The desire to compete and to achieve is not there and is, as a matter of fact, frowned upon. It’s a different culture, as high pressured white folks discover pretty fast.
BTW: is that paper you got published the one you had out on the ‘net for a while?
Last question, yes.
Hawaii sounds like Louisiana. Glad you got the class livened up!!! 🙂
Excellent re chapters! Re Nietzche and Germany, too large a topic for a blog comment thread [at least that I participate in]. Y’all go on ahead, now…
Yes, at least this island is like Louisiana, and maybe Kauai as well. The plantation mentality lingers. We are really really out of the way.
At the same time, this IS America.