I was just now looking at Nietzsche's "Late Notebooks," also familiar under the title "Will to Power." The difference between the older and more widely distributed "Will to Power" version (trans. Kaufmann) and the one I'm reading (ed. Bittner; trans. Sturge; CUP) is that the latter is organized by notebook and date, while the Kaufmann version assembles scattered aphorisms under thematic headings. Thus it could be argued the Bittner and Sturge version is a more straightforward presentation of Nietzsche's thoughts.
Anyway, I'm reading along in Notebook 5, summer 1886 - autumn 1887. I get to aphorism 59, p. 113.
Absolutely amazing moment the other day on tv. I had heard that Cormac McCarthy was going to be on Oprah to discuss The Road - which seemed like an unlikely and interesting thing to see so I taped the show. But as it turned out, the McCarthy section was by far less interesting than the first segment, which featured Michael Moore discussing his new movie about the American health care situation, Sicko.
The moment when it felt like the ground was giving way beneath my feet comes about 1:30 into this video (which is bound not to last on-line, so get it while the getting's good)...
Here's a transcript of the exchange in question:
O:
OK this is what I was going to say about the film - that I got it in a way that I hadn't gotten it before. Now don't you love when that happens. When you just go "Ooo! I got it!" Because you know the word "socialism" really stirs up...
MM:
[Scarily] Socialized Medicine...
O:
Socialized Medicine
MM:
[Scarily] Ooo...
O: And then when you showed the example of [how] we have socialized activities in this country. The fire department - we don't pay for a fire department. We don't pay for the police department. We don't pay for public schools.
MM:
And it's universal.
O:
We don't pay for the library. And it's universal - universal is for everybody.
MM:
Right.
O:
And so the very idea of extending that to the care of people is really something that I have to honestly say that I hadn't thought about it because I'm one of those people, "I got mine," so I wasn't thinking about who didn't have theirs. Really. Right.
MM:
And we don't expect the fire department to turn a profit. It would be an appalling thought, and the reason we don't is because it's a life and death issue. Well, health care is a life and death issue.
O:
Yeah.
MM:
And that's why turning a profit has to be removed from the system.
Good Christ, that's amazing. The slow but distinct re-discovery of what that word, "socialism," might mean by a figure obviously not associated with words like that. The discovery that we already very much have elements of it all around us, elements that we would never willingly part with. The emergence that a better synonym for "socialism" would be "universality," rather than "Stalinism" or "gulag" or "bread-lines" that it's usually equated with, when it's mentioned at all, in the US. The revelation of the fact that "socialism" in fact provides very simple, but persuasive answers to issues that only at first seem incredibly complex, impossible to repair, and as if natural, inevitable features of our sociopolitical landscape.
In short, I think this little episode renders abundantly clear why exactly socialized medicine is such an important - perhaps the important - issue today in the US. Just as the right has own Overton Window games that they've long played with school prayer and vouchers and the like, a nation with a public medical system funded by even a large fractional amount that the US currently spends on health care today would be a nation on its way, I believe, toward a whole branching set of public sector reinvestments.
And it further, Moore's appearance on Oprah puts to shame ten thousand cute and clever forms of aestheticized intervention - simple, spirited explanation may have set us on a path toward improvement that no act of detournement or deconstruction, no dialectical ruse, nor metatextual abyssalism could accomplish.
This is a sobering, yet inspiring thing to realize, if you're someone who does what I do for a living.
I've really liked Michael Moore for a long time, but he is now officially one of the patron saints of my blog. As is, in her own way, Oprah for playing this out in this way...
The journal espouses no particular theoretical line, ideology or programme. However, responding to a perception that the projects going under the names of ‘new’ and ‘critical’ musicology have been succeeded by a certain disciplinary retrenchment or even counter-reaction, we aim to encourage work which explicitly or implicitly interrogates existing paradigms, and which acknowledges that musicological work will always have a political dimension. The politics we favour might be summarised as a desire to democratise the field of the permissible.
Richard Rorty, the leading American philosopher and heir to the pragmatist tradition, passed away on Friday, June 8.
He was Professor of Comparative Literature emeritus at Stanford
University. In April the American Philosophical Society awarded him the
Thomas Jefferson Medal. The prize citation reads: "In recognition of
his influential and distinctively American contribution to philosophy
and, more widely, to humanistic studies. His work redefined knowledge
'as a matter of conversation and of social practice, rather than as an
attempt to mirror nature' and thus redefined philosophy itself as an
unending, democratically disciplined, social and cultural activity of
inquiry, reflection, and exchange, rather than an activity governed and
validated by the concept of objective, extramental truth."
At the awards ceremony, presenter Lionel Gossman celebrated Dr.
Rorty as an advocate of "a deeply liberal, democratic, and truly
American way of thinking about knowledge." Dr. Rorty's published works
include Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1988), Objectivity, Relativism and Truth: Philosophical Papers I (1991), Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers II (1991), Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998), Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers III (1998), and Philosophy and Social Hope (2000).
Excerpted from the symposium on "American Writing Today:"
Whom should more poets follow, or at least contemplate? Again, in poetry: George Herbert, Christopher Smart, pre-1937 W.H. Auden, Basil Bunting, Donald Davie, James K. Baxter, post-1964 Robert Lowell. Among living writers, maybe Thylias Mass, Juan Felipe Herrera, Laura Kasischke, Liz Waldner. In poetry criticism: William Empson, Donald Davie.
What current modes clog the pipeline and tire me out? (1) Quasi-automatic writing and a kind of comic quasi-surrealism, especially when the author wants to be winning, funny, "entertaining," and shocking at the same time. (2) Slack free-verse autobiography; chatty anecdote without interesting form. (3) Endless zeroxes of '50s formalist poems, copies of Anthony Hecht and Howard Nemerov. (4) "Spirituality," which, pursued as a primary goal, tends to make poems sound like bad translations.
Most poets today are writing either for a coterie of readers they know personally, who want to participate in the social circulation of new work (rather than in the rereading of old work), or else (in part) for an academic market in which the more you publish (as long as it's in semiprestigious venues), the more your chances for tenure and promotion.
Both paradigns encourage overproduction. Younger poets, in particular, seem to rush things, to make public ten pounds of cookie dough when, had they waited, they might have had five pounds of tasty cookies. I don't know what any of us can do about that, and for certain poets whose work is supposed to sound "raw" (such as Kasischke and Waldner) that may not even amount to a disadvantage.
Anything you can do 100 times in 100 poems without learning a new trick isn't worth doing more than twice. Sense is harder than nonesense; order is harder than disorder. But, as Stevens said, "A great disorder is an order"; as Dickenson said, "Much madness is divinest sense / To a discerning eye."
Something by Caleb Crain, somewhat less memorable, followed.
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