CXVII
Who let the nudes out?
And still, the sound of fig leaves falling. Since you are once again teaching at NYU, the Sexton Plan, aka NYU2031 – an astonishingly bald real estate power play and extraordinary, debt-driven expansion of an already vast footprint – is literally in your face. Nor can one look for a moment at the plan without recognizing that behind president John Sexton’s schemes, stands the pivotal figure of Kenneth Langone.
A working class son of Nassau County, Langone attended NYU’s Stern School of Business at night, then went on to co-found Home Depot. As billionaires go, he’s a virtual dwarf, but his strategically-placed charitable donations have given him an outsized visibility. The program he attended at NYU now bears his name, and a gift of $200 million prompted NYU Medical Center to add “Langone” after its acronym.
Aside from serving on NYU’s board of trustees he was, in 2004, chair of the compensation committee of the New York Stock Exchange, then a nonprofit corporation. In that capacity, he approved a payout of $140 million for his friend Richard Grasso, outgoing NYSE chair and CEO. Certain board members, however, felt this payout was excessive and sued to block it. Interviewed by Fortune, Langone made his position plain: “They got the wrong fucking guy. I’m nuts, I’m rich and boy do I love a fight. I’m going to make them shit in their pants. When I get through with these fucking captains of industry, they’re going to wish they were in a Cuisinart – at high speed. If Grasso gives back a fucking nickel, I’ll never talk to him again.”
Nor did Grasso have to, since in 2008, an appeals court gave its blessing to this most golden of parachutes.
Little Off-and-Onnie: with those big whide, pupil-less eyes…
Gin a selfie meet a selfie
Comin thro’ the rye…
Washington’s Square Park
With a circle more or less in the center
Heaven round, earth square
And under heaven, which is no out there, but simply the unfolding of world’s course, the seven billion human question at last arises, makes itself visible:
What if instead of “discovering” America, Europe had landed in the middle of Ming Dynasty China? What if the civilizations had encountered one another during Europe’s late medieval phase, rather in the 19th Century?
What might China – in that earlier and far less “yin” state – and Europe, at a moment between faith and science, not yet fully committed, nor evolved in its mode of universalizing conquest – have had to say to one another then?
Wheels, doubtless, would continue on being round. But what of the social energy of the forces that drive them?
Might we not, in short, be differently oriented?
Times headline on September 16, 2015:
“Closing the Back Door to Europe.”
When everybody’s tryin’ to sleep
I’m somewhere making my midnight creep
Yes, in the morning when the rooster crow
Something tell me I got to go
I am a back door man
I am a back door man
Well the men don’t know,
but the little girls understand
Sang Howlin Wolf oncet
What a quandary we’re in searching for the perfect Other.
The Proche-Orient is entirely too proche. Under the veil of orientalism, it reminds us of ourselves – our scary selves, really militant about the faith, but unconstrained by the bondage of universal love. And as for the Jews, they disturb things by refusing to go away, by remaining archaic holdovers from a more primitive phase the West likes to think it’s grown out of. And, at bottom, neither Jews or Moslems are interested in being universalized much less globalized. They are all about diverging and remaining distinct.
India almost fits the bill, but we share among other things, linguistic roots. So if one truly wants to meet the Other, you have to turn to China, or what China was when it was China.
For of course, China isn’t “China” any more. The dominance of the West, its ubiquitous grafting onto or injection into of Western ideas into every corner of the globe has created a host of Frankenstein cultures – some quite astonishingly powerful – retaining inexorably altered, but nonetheless distinct functionalities, and immune, by nature, to any universalizing force.
“Migrants Plot Other Routes as Hungary Cracks Down”
—NYT, 9/16/15
Our bodies, our selfies
“Closing the Servant’s Entrance to Europe”
“Covering the Ass of Europe”
“Migrants Plot…”
She came in through the bathroom window…
A storybook wedding: Curious George marries Madeline in an intimate ceremony officiated by Babar. Le Petit Prince gives away the bride, Pooh serves as best man. The guests, among them Pippi Longstocking, The Borrowers, and the Boxcar Children wipe away tears of joy. Outside the chapel, amidst a shower of rice and good wishes, the happy couple mounts the Pushmepullyou, and rides off to a secret honeymoon, which some suspect is in Wonderland.
And if the West is now attempting, albeit in a halting and muddled way, to reformulate, renounce or even repudiate the political and philosophical ideas it has inscribed into world history, this can hardly nullify the inscription, or waft away its operable effects. Those remain to be dealt with functionally, they cannot be denied, or good-willed away.
I divide the works of world literature into those written with and without permission.
Said Osip Mandelstam, oncet
But what is the nature of permission? To what degree is permission granted by the process of the work itself, and the internal workings on the language as it is “translated” from thought or feeling to word, by the writer onto the page and back again?
Planting refugees in the herb garden at Dachau.
Root shock, mon amour
She wanders relaxedly through the Met’s Greek and Roman antiquities. Mid-20’s to early 30’s. Neither slender nor plump. Pleasant of face. “MARRY ME,” says her tote bag, “FOR MY CHINESE CITIZENSHIP.”
Golly, and just think, we managed to get through this whole thing without Superman!
—James Olsen, circa 1956
Great Caesar’s ghost!
Default, dear Brutus, is not in our stars…
Leonidas at Thermopylae,
Spoke right up and said “Hey hey hey,
Give me vo-doh-de-oh,
Vo-vo-vo-de-oh-doh!”
And the strange agony of the Times continues:
BREAKING NEWS [as of early a.m. September 24, 2015]
Stampede Near Mecca Leaves at Least 310 Dead
The accident, which left nearly 450 injured, occurred on the first day of Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest holidays in the Muslim year.
Can a stampede be classified as an accident within the (previously) accepted terms of the English language? Certainly an accident can trigger a stampede, but whether a stampede constitutes an accident is a question.
And then, just for a lagniappe, is the notion of a holy holiday…
Holy Stampeding Muslims, Batman!
Or rather, Caped Crusader
Is it possible, in English, to use “crusadist” as an alternate for “crusader” and still a) fall within acceptable usage, and b) retain a workable definition?
Who was that mosqued man?
Is a voltaire an unit of energy?
The Cancan, Heil Hitler, Universal Truth and, oh yes, Human Rights
Inasmuch as you have done it unto the most of these…
Clam up and carry on
Calm up
Universal human whites. Uh, I dunno.
It’s hard to be white when you’re Wong.
Selfie stick: the new pilgrim’s staff
Clones and drones of angel hair…
Chôrismos, mon amour…
…the apotheosis of digital technology having radicalized the process initiated by (or perhaps before) the Greeks with their [Platonic] separation of form and appearance.
Resituation of our struggle with the idea of materiality itself. How to deal with being so vastly outnumbered by images? How to be among an exponentially multiplying, and potential infinitude of appearances?
To be? Yes, but only as an eidolon among eidolons.
Which may or may not be why people sometimes try to walk through you on the street. Or why you are sometimes tempted to ride your bike through that bus full of tourists blocking your path.
You certainly aren’t a “form” to them, merely an annoying phantom, as often, they appear to you. And walking through you is one way to establish, ever so slightly, their own materiality – by asserting its preponderance over yours. Or at least allay their doubts about it. In which case they may find out to their even greater annoyance that you are as solid an object as they are.
But still, you too perhaps suspect that in the clash of phalanxes – you versus the tourist bus – the latter will be revealed as even less material than you.
To be or not to be. A question freighted with anxiety. And, frankly, confusion about establishing the distinction. Evermoreso when appearances have, seemingly, so utterly overwhelmed forms. Why stop for that red light when chances are what you perceive as an oncoming car is “just” an appearance?
Or, put short: how many car wrecks have we seen represented – the proof being that we didn’t have to sweep broken glass off our laps – versus the number we’ve actually been in? Hasn’t the point come and gone where we start to slip a bit in our understanding of what is and isn’t real?
And then, too, one begins manufacturing cars that are, compared to once upon a time, pretty flimsy, mostly plastic and “displays” – in hopes, perhaps, that at some point they will dematerialize altogether?
Unless, that is, appearance and form aren’t “really” separable at all.
