I have the very same twist to my face

Father plagiarizes mother plagiarizes

Sister plagiarizes brother plagiarizes

Uncle plagiarizes auntie plagiarizes

Everyone at the party plagiarizes

Style Wars redux – II

Toning down the sarcasm and meta-sarcasm from Part I (here)…

Reading through Wall and Piece, Banksy comes out as significantly more “evol” than SF. And here “evol” is used both phonetically and synechdoche-istically. His work has changed and evolved to the point where he contradicts himself, more accurately, his previous self (by going to canvas). Contradiction is fine, a là Whitman. But contradiction in this particular case is also part of the punk-ish ethos behind street writing.

At the risk of being called and absolute relativist, principles are, in my view, a living, breathing, evolving, thing (there are some absolutes, but not all principles should be absolute). And principles come across in Banksy and SF’s work. SF comes across as a bit of an absolutist (which also gives him a self-righteous aura), and this then drives an unintended contradiction: SF wants us to obey his principles (and politics). Banksy seems more of a relativist, both in his work and in the interviews. And this flexibility has allowed for the evolution and sophistication (as a conjugated verb, rather than a noun) of his art.

Where this takes us is to SF being a sf about his stuff. Simplistically, he has one fixed idea which he seeks to impress upon us with his work. He is then, a designer (used here to mean a craftsman, not an artist). He is a marketeer… Banksy is more an enfant terrible. Banksy is the current enfant terrible of the establishment. And he perpetrates his art. Which allows him to keep the concept of writing going despite being much beyond “just” writing.

The Warlord of Punk, Mr Joe Strummer, was malcontent with The Clash’s career by the time they played at Shea Stadium. It did not feel right for him to be a star at a NY stadium singing about Victor Jara in Santiago’s. It did not feel right for him to be a celebrity. For Banksy this is a problem. One could argue (and some do) that all his work is somehow effaced by his success. I, here, take the relativist approach again. On the one hand, he has somewhat dealt with the travails of celebrity via the travails of anonymity. On the other, the fact that Angenlina Jolie bought and at such a price and unleashed the Bansky bubble is art itself. It’s Banksy’s irony itself (Damien Hirst-style) it is the incarnation of SF’s manifesto wrapped in sarcasm. It does not deface him, as it does SF. And it makes Banksy’s manifesto of individuality and humanity, though shrouded in anonymity, clash against the cookie-cutter counter-culture of SF.

(I long to go to the UK to see Banksy versus the Bristol Museum, but in all likelihood I will miss it. Still, I would have much rather seen that show than SF’s at the ICA.)

The Davids versus THE Goliath

My brother disputes my reading of Wittgenstein (W) in the comments to the previous post (here). And he’s probably right as I know little or nothing of philosophy… Still…

Three-hundred-fifty cities in the world
Just 30 teeth inside of our heads
These are the limits to my experience
It’s scary, but it’s alright
‘Cause everything is finite

So it would seem that, in “Finite = Alright” off of Feelings, David Byrne (DB, or David #2) follows Wittgenstein the earlier (W-1). But by the end of the song, “Things have an end, but feeling is infinite.” And that’s where am going to try and take 6.43, even if it is via tricky semiotic gymastics. (And I will not miss the opportunity to highlight that The Broom of the System does not end when it ends.) Is DFW (David #1) playing a mischievious 6.43 juggling act?)

“1 The world is all that is the case.” Right, I need start from there. But W-1 selbst suggests that the uniqueness of the world is in question. Further, the question is if the world (or worlds) is everything that is the case or everything that could plausibly be the case? I take the latter approach. What can plausibly be the case? What are the absolute constants? Well, the spin, color charge, etc… of a quark, or so the theory goes. So, everything that is plausibly the case is every plausible combination of constants for every quark (which am using for a placeholder for any sub-atomic particle and/or fundamental building block of the physical world).

Now, by construction, not everything can be the case (i.e. not every quark can have every characteristic) at the same time. So how can all plausible combos be? How can they “be” concurrently? Enter David Deutsch (David #3), who in The Fabric of Reality suggests that even simple interference experiments on photons show that we are not in the universe (as classically defined to be the whole), but in one universe. A universe is construed to really be just one of a multitude of universes, part of the multi-verse. Each time a “decision” is made, a universe splits into two branches. The macro example is that right now I exist in many universes within the multi-verse. In at least on of those, I am writing this post. Within it, I can “decide” to publish the post or not. When I make the choice, that universe will split into one where I publish it and one where I do not. Now, there are a multitude of universes where I reach that cross-roads, so the split is of multiple universes. This is the process via which parallel universes are created—each of which contains a Tomás (or doesn’t) that took a path through a chain of plausible choices. (One thing that has always amazed me, is that this esoteric physical thesis towards a Grand Unified Theory is used as the basis of The One, starring Jet Li… In some universes he is a bad guy and in some a good guy, and one bad Jet Li one day starts traveling through universes—which is theoretically possible, and actually allows some form of time travel, as long as it is onto a different branch—and killing his twins.)

(The micro example is that every time, say, a photon hits another particle, it does so in only in a portion of universes of the multi-verse. In the other portion, it is a shadow photon that does it. Basically, before the photon/shadow photon hit something there are x [which I know is infinite and uncountable] universes in the multi-verse. Now when they hit, there is a branching out into x+y universes, where x represents universe where the photon hit and y those where it is the shadow photon that does it. Or, another is that when a charm quark decays into an up or down quark, the multi-verse unfolds again. I am lame at physics, but am trying to say that decisions that split the multi-verse are “quantum decisions”.)

If this Tomás is constrained to what he is writing, then it does follow that the limits of language (or at least of the particular language he is employing) are the limits of the world. But in some universes, he is not constrained. In some universes there is a meta-Tomás that is writing about the Tomás writing. That provides a jump from one of W-1′s world to another. David Markson (David #4) actually manages to convince us that the Kate in Wittgenstein’s Mistress is the only one that is, and that her world is all that is the case. That is, until we realize that there is a meta-Kate. What appeared to constrain Kate in her own writing, i.e. her language, was not her language but the facts expressable by her constrained language which knows not of meta-Kate. Kate’s novel is constrained to the facts of meta-Kate’s writing. So Kate is and is not just a character in a novel, an the same goes for meta-Kate.

Which brings me back to David #1 (DFW) in The Broom of the System (TBotS)… DFW forces Lenore (within the novel) to ask herself whether she is just a character in a story. Whether the limit to her life is what can be said about it (with language). And Rick Vigorous implicitly asserts, in the end, that he is just defined by his ‘word’. But the point is that the limit to BotS is not language, it ends by not ending and language, or words, are not all there is as it is the lack of language, or words, that resolves Rick Vigorous’s implied view that he is constrained by them. And Lenore breaks out of her storied-life too. It is Lenore Senior then, that provides the quantum jump for Lenore to go from one world (where she is constrained by language and is just a character in a story) to another (where she exists, in Ohio, etc…). The search for Lenore Sr is the search for that which allows Lenore, or us, to jump into another world.

The search for Lenore Sr is the “good or bad exercise of the will” in 6.43. The point that I am trying to make is that within THE Tractatus, W-1 was already hinting at W-2 (Wittgenstein the later), if implicitly. The jump is the change in context, the change in the context that will define language (rather than language defining itself). And that change in context is the quantum decision that splits the multi-verse. Each quantum decision makes the world “wax and wane as a whole”. For David #2, it is “feeling” that is infinite despite our experience being finite. It is context that turns experience into feelings, into Water. For David #3, the limit to the world is the limit to quantum decisions. For David #4, language is the limit only in solipsism. For David #1, there is no limit to context.

Thus, 6.43 can serve to modify 1 into saying that “The world[s] [are] all that is [plausibly] the case.” Because it is the exercise of the will (any plausible quantum decision) that allows the world to wax and wane as a whole (to split the multi-verse). It is context that allows the scope of language, and thus the world, to change. It allows the unhappy man to turn his world into that of the happy one (because feeling is infinite, in spite of experience).

Sunday confessional

(This is the prelude to a wider Water-topic that is upcoming.)

I am watching Stick It!, again. I am falling in love with Missy Peregrym (Hailey), again. And just the fact that the soundtrack includes a chunk of “One Big Holiday” by My Morning Jacket makes me like the movie more. I like the subversive undertone, and the rebel-rebel attitude. Much more interesting than play-it-safe, lay-up, be-nice, geek-goes-jock, Ice Princess (albeit I liked it too). Part of why that one works is because Michelle Trachtenberg has to be a good-girl. Her trying to play the bad-girl is probably what annoys me so much of her in Gossip Girl)… The her-his conflict in The Cutting Edge: Going for the Gold, adds a bit of romantic tension, but that one remains relatively bland (if enjoyable). In any case, the point is that when Hailey shed a tear on the balance beam, so did I.

Consider the writer (13 September 2008)

As promised, here is something on DFW’s passing. I sent this email (I note that I sent it from a Blackberry, just in case it seemed lacking in self-consistence) on the morning of 13 September 2008 from Oaxaca. The picture from where all the clouds in the blog are taken from is from that day in Yagul… It was the knee-jerk, gut reaction, so…………..

From: Tomas.Lajous
To: undisclosed-recipients
Subject: Consider the writer
Date: Sat, 13 Sep 2008 10:57:55 -0500

I received a couple e-mails with news of the death of David Foster Wallace (thanks). I’m amazed that people wake up sooo early on Saturday morning and read the paper… Hold that thought. I”m amazed that people stay up so late on Friday night AND read the paper (guys – get a date!)… I am very sad. I never thought the death of someone I’ve never met (though I did fantasize about becoming his pen-pal) would have such an effect. Would I have cried on end when Lennon was shot? Maybe. But this one, for some reason, resonates. (It is already curious that my friends sent me the e-mails.)

So I sit here, listening to the most befitting record for DFW’s death: Digital Ash in a Digital Urn. Absolutely hi fi. Jimmy Tamborello has come up with the musical equivalent to footnotes—added to Conor Oberst’s magnificent songs. Assonance. Dissonance. Tempo changes. Self-referential production (the faders DO move when Oberst croons “and the faders move”). And the death-obsessed lyrics (“we hurry to our death”, as did DFW). All about the mid-west. I guess Omaha is not that different from central Illinois.

My brother is probably reading The Broom of the System. I gave it to him recently. Yesterday, packing for the weekend I grabbed a copy—we could talk about it over dinner in a few weeks (like we talked about the infamous McCain essay last week). But I put the book back on the shelf (leaving DFW and Belle & Sebastian’s lo fi behind) and brought business books and The Corrections, instead…

Where I’m at does not have a good DFW repository. And I have no computer. So I can’t wiki DFW as I wish I could. But I can try and remember. (On Friday I was looking through Vik Muniz’s memory paintings—oh, the beauty of the distortion. A question that I had is whether Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello figured that they were singing to a beauty that wasn’t there.)

Out with the truth. I’ve never read Infinite Jest. Well, I’ve read it many times. So, truth: I’ve never finished Infinite Jest. Like Sisyphus (or whatever he’s called, the guy with the big stone). I now for sure will, even if out of sheer will. But it’s one of my favorite books. A futuristic tennis academy has got to be grounds for great literature anyway you look at it. Or for brilliant footnotes (so that haven’t gotten through more than 300-400 pages means more like 500 when including these). Never fully read, it still rings so true. DFW clearly had an impact: I once wrote a love letter with footnotes. McCain became a-palatable-republican from a-republican, in my head. I’m a happy mook when it comes to understanding porn. I saw why my brother can’t own a TV (Sartori, eat your heart out). The blissful isolation and blank thought allowed me to become a bit of a runner. I now see much more clearly what a girlfriend meant when talking about David Lynch’s beauty. And no, am never going on a cruise.

In death I say that DFW was probably the best American writer of our generation (definitely NOT Dave Eggers). I am happy to have said it aplenty in life. Critics say he never committed to anything (the “I am both pro-choice and pro-life” essay….). He hid behind his incredibly ambitious and extraordinarily intelligent writing to never actually say anything. I disagree. He implied everything. He had a view on everything. And he either transmitted it or made one really think about it (and it is very clear that he hates much of what the middle-America he defines lives for). It did it for me.

I am going to do three things:
1. Go to the mid-west and think about middle-America.
2. Read Infinite Jest and re-read the rest of DFW.
3. Consider the writer, which we almost never do.

But am still sad.

Tomás