Blogging brings out the hit-and-run element in communication. Bloggers tend to be punchy. They often hit below the belt; and when they land a blow, they dash off to another target. Pow! The idea is to provoke, to score points, to vent opinions, and frequently to gossip.

The most gossipy blogs take aim at public figures, combining two basic ingredients, scurrility and celebrity, and they deal in short jabs, usually nothing longer than a paragraph. They often appeal to particular constituencies such as Hollywood buffs (Perez Hilton), political junkies (Wonkette), college kids (Ivy Gate), and lawyers (Underneath Their Robes). Politically they may lean to the right (Michelle Malkin) or to the left (Daily Kos). But all of them conform to a formula derived from old-fashioned tabloid journalism: names make news.

How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes the most of technical innovations—the possibility of constant contact with virtual communities by means of web sites and the premium placed on brevity by platforms such as Twitter with its limit of 140 characters per message. Yet blog-like messaging can be found in many times and places long before the Internet.

Read the full article here

[Again, WTF? I would gripe in detail about this as I have the previous sentences, but Marder's prose has sucked my soul dry until I am a now an exhausted shadow of my former self. Help. Me. I. Am. Barely. Able. To. Type. This.

But, luckily, the whole paragraph concludes by reiterating what has come before.]

I have written before, or rather, I have blogged before about my own frustration with the style of, say, late Leonard Lawlor and others, that is to say, Derridean style. I have to say I read Jon’s post with much giggling enthusiasm, and yet I am uneasy about general dismissal of turgid prose as such. I think that I am ambiguous about the matter for several personal reasons, but mainly because I think we tend to blame some types of writing not because they are unnecessarily obscure or nearly non-sensical (see Jon’s examples), but because the effort put into deciphering this sort of a text sometimes does not pay off, or rather, is not perceived as deserving of our efforts due to unlikely return on the investment. Let me explain. Two quick points:

1) Kant or Hegel or Heidegger or any of the important so-called analytical philosophers are not easy or accessible, they are simply considered worth our time, that is, we are told they are worth the effort and therefore we put in the effort. But when it comes to new authors, especially if they (intentionally or not) imitate the masters, the issue is not whether one can get through a difficult book or not – hopefully any educated person can read through any book they choose to – but whether it is worth our time to do so. In other words, if accessibility was the ultimate criterion of worthiness, too many books would be left unread.  I have read many books of many different styles (and so have you), some were enjoyable in their turgidity, some were annoying in their imitating and ultimately empty verbiage, but none were judged to be good or bad based solely on their style, I think.

2) Behind accusations of intentional obscurity and put-on complexity (not from Jon, but generally speaking), there are often accusations of elitism, charlatanism, and disrespect/arrogance. These particular accusations go beyond style of the book. Take Derrida. He was quite clear in some essays, and quite annoyingly gut-bustingly and knee-crushingly dull and unclear in other essays. And yet in many talks, presentations, discussions and interviews he was able to communicate his ideas quite clearly and simply, while still being persecuted (metaphorically, of course) for his obscurity and supposedly intentional “let’s-fuck-with-their-head”-ness. To put it differently, I wonder what is the real reason why we hate people’s style and whether it has anything to do with that style? When I hate some Derridean mumbo-jumbo, I’m not hating their style as such or my own potential waste of time, I hate the posturing, the pretense, the thin layer of bullshit that covers such exercises of coded insider-talk, and yet I cannot claim that I get all of this from the text itself, there must be more to it.

Needlessly complicated prose is frustrating, yet the idea of accessibility as a virtue is a rather slippery one and anyone who ever tried to explain a “simple” philosophical notion to students knows that there is simple and there is simple. Yes, sometimes complexity is a way of hiding one’s ignorance or some lack of original thought (which is very useful in any academic setting), but that is not always the case – complex subject matters sometime require complex expositions, otherwise we end up with idiotic nonsense such as this:

First, from our cultural distance, it is evident that Kant’s arguments against masturbation, for the return of wives to abusive husbands, etc., are gobbledy-gook. This should make us suspicious that there might be other parts of Kant, too, that are gobbledy-gook, for example, the stuff that transparently reads like gobbledy-gook, such as the transcendental deduction, and such as his claims that his various obviously non-equivalent formulations of the fundamental principle of morality are in fact “so many formulations of precisely the same law” (Groundwork, 4:436, Zweig trans.). I read Kant as a master at promising philosophers what they want and then thowing up a haze of words with glimmers enough of hope that readers can convince themselves that there is something profound underneath.

Second, we cannot expect ordinary people to be better philosophical moral reasoners than Kant. Kant’s philosophical moral reasoning appears mainly to have confirmed his prejudices and the ideas inherited from his culture. Therefore, we should be nervous about expecting more from the philosophical moral reasoning of people less philosophically capable than Kant.

Go figure!

…any academic discipline which wants a place at the trough, but is unable to offer the predictions and the technology provided by the natural sciences, must either pretend to imitate science or find some way of obtaining “cognitive” status without the necessity of discovering facts (35).

Now, I have no idea if this actually represents Rorty’s own stance on the use of science in its relations to other non-scientific fields, but it gestures to a rather interesting phenomenon.  That is, if one wants to achieve at best some prestige, or at worst, acceptance of those in the academy,then one has to become “scientific.”  This seems especially evident in those who would like to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution in the science classroom.  In this case, religion or religious discourse is “dressed up” and parades around as science.  I’m sure there are other examples.

Thoughts?

This got me thinking about some of Tom Sorell’s criticisms directed towards various attempts to cook up a scientific philosophy under the guise of  “naturalism”  in his book Scientism.  That book isn’t fresh enough in my head to make any substantive connections here, but I think I recall his solution was some sort of version of Kant.

I used to be entertained by these sorts of exchanges – seeing people talk past each other made me laugh – but now I’m just sad. But at this very moment someone is surely wrong about something on the internet, so I must go and bother them immediately!

LOVELAND, Colo. — A long-running argument over a favorite McDonald’s parking spot has resulted in an assault conviction. A Colorado jury on Friday convicted 52-year-old Vernon Brandt of Loveland of felony third-degree assault for a 2008 fight with 85-year-old Richard Albers.

On the day of the assault, Albers walked up to Brandt’s truck because Brandt was blocking the spot Albers has been using almost every morning for 16 years. Albers tapped on Brandt’s door, and Brandt then swung open his truck door, knocking Albers to the ground. Brandt then allegedly got out of his car, grabbed Albers and threatened to fight him. Prosecutors said the men had argued over the spot before.

Sentencing has not been set.

Where are the promised “death panels” when you need them?

Murail is an interesting figure, a student of Messiaen, he’s teaching composition at Columbia, I think. Here’s his more recent piece called L’esprit des dunes:

And here’s Boulez’s Rituel with explanation by Sir Simon Rattle:

Abram Terz has a nice short story about graphomaniacs, I’m sure it’s available in English – the moral of that story has often been bugging me: writing is easy, anyone can write, good writing is what is rare.

I wonder if our “publish or perish” academic culture does not only force everyone to become a writer, but also forces everyone else to read all that mediocre crap that everyone is forced to publish? I mean it’s seemingly no one’s fault and yet something’s quote wrong with it, isn’t it?