via images.google.com

Beautiful archival photos of Walt Disney at Life Magazine. Just as one example of the treasures you'll find there.

Are you following @shitmydadsays  ?  It is hilarious and apparently he's got a tv and a book deal based entirely on his Twitter feed.  

via www.nytimes.com

I'm following this recent Heidegger thing fairly closely--mostly because Hannah Arendt was implicated in it as I posted about here.  I've gotta tell you--I've long been "not a fan" where Heidegger is concerned.  I essentially blame him for the complete absence of metaphysics in contemporary philosophy--he declared metaphysics dead at the turn of the 19th century into the 20th.  Though his work was based in metaphysical ideas, like Hegel and a lot of other philosophy dudes, Heidegger thinks of himself as an evolutionary stopping point.  For Heidegger, he is The Last Metaphysician.  He tells us "Yo, metaphysics is dead.  So I'm going to have a lot of fun doing the last little bit of it, but after me, there shall be no more philosophical mirth y'all.  Have fun becoming British Analytics and materialists and whatev.  Werd."  This ticked me off to no end.  I went into philosophy because I'm a metaphysician by birth and I went headlong into it, only to discover this funny looking little self-fashioned ubermensch murdered it before I was even born.  That he was a Nazi only aided me in hating him.  

But the above passage is the irony here--I was also able to blame Heidegger for the turn of progressive politics away from classical Liberalism (I blame him a lot don't I, I also blame him for the Snuggie, Crocs, and the mysterious force that removes one sock from every dryer load.) and the bereft and barren wasteland of post-modernism.  That he is now being attacked as a motivating energy behind right wing politics is beyond bizarre.  I weep little for Heidegger--but I also think that there is not a comprehensive idea of how Heidegger functions in the history of philosophy, despite his ironic Nazism.  I DO weep for Arendt who is about as far from Heidegger at foundation as you can get.  (The lady did her dissertation on St. Augustine, I mean come on.  Metaphysics?  She dug it and dared to think she could do it after Heidegger. Uppity chick.)  She adopts many of Heidegger's ideas but criticizes the inadequacy of his world view vigorously.  

That's the thing, my friends.  Continuity with the past.  Find what is truthful in the past and build on it and leave the rest in a smoking heap of detritus.  Philosophy is not an all or nothing deal.  Even I find certain useful ideas in Heidegger, particularly "being-in-the-world" and zeitgeist.  (And by now it should be clear he leaves a taste in my mouth much like brushing your teeth after drinking orange juice.)  I have to look at this book though I doubt I'll find the time soon.  But I want to know WHAT PARTICULAR ideas she finds in Heidegger that are responsible for his Nazism and that supposedly animate right wing extremism currently.  Because for the past two decades that I've been in higher education (Oh sweet cheese and crackers am I THAT OLD?) I've never heard Conservative philosophers brandish him.  Only Left Wing Progressives.  

Which proves what I have always said, the Extreme Left and the Extreme Right are very proximal to each other.  It ain't a spectrum on a line.  It's a circle.  

via hilobrow.com

The catchphrase for this blog is "Hilobrow" Middlebrow is not the answer.  I'm trying to distill a philosophy of what being anti-middlebrow is to the author of this excellent blog---I'm starting a category here called "Brow Wars" since it seems to be cropping up everywhere.  I can't seem to find an "about" page on this blog so I've tried to contact the author of the blog to get an answer to some of the questions I have about his aesthetic philosophy.  I'll post here if I get some answers.  In the meantime, drill down.  It's worth it.  Since I write here about Chesterton frequently, I thought I'd highlight this post about terrorists in literature in which he discusses The Man Who Was Thursday--which I actually think is the primary influence for Reservoir Dogs.  

I didn't do my makeup post on Monday as promised but I made up for the makeup today.  In GKC 15 minutes at a time, I look at "A Defence of China Shepherdesses" and think about GKC and Laura Ingalls Wilder a little bit.  

There's a lot of "s"s in that word.  Shepherdesses.  Good thing my lisp is only slight.  

"Will we ever be able to think of Hannah Arendt in the same way again? Two new and damning critiques, one of Arendt and one of her longtime Nazi-sycophant lover, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, were published within 10 days of each other last month. The pieces cast further doubt on the overinflated, underexamined reputations of both figures and shed new light on their intellectually toxic relationship."

via www.slate.com

I have to say, I like Ron Rosenbaum.  A lot.  His angry-not-so-young-anymore man stance on a number of issues always feel refreshing to me, despite me becoming a little impatient with the multiple chips he carries on his shoulders.  Explaining Hitler is an excellent book, I could not remove the book from my hands until it was finished and I was on an extended trip to Ireland at the time so that is saying a lot since it was quite easy to fill those hands with pints.  

But I just don't get this.  Rosenbaum hates Arendt with a passion I really can't understand.  He's jacked up over a new book about the way in which Arendt "internalized" the anti-semitic literature of her country and was, in essence a Nazi herself.  He is furious with the term "banality of evil" which he sees as some sort of sympathy or excuse for Eichmann though she ends her book on Eichmann this way: 

Just as you [Eichmann] supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

The article leads in with "damning" new evidence, which is not evidence at all but a re-reading of some of the quotes that she used in creating a history of Jews in Germany, and on this they call this "evidence" damning.  Despite real evidence that she was Jewish herself, suffered at the hands of the Nazis, was professionally impeded by them, and physically worked to aid Jewish refugees in Europe. He cannot seem to forgive her for having an affair with her Nazi professor Heidegger, one that began when she was 18 years old.  I can get  on board with him on Heidegger, and the evil involved with remaining silent on the atrocities his party committed, after all the evidence was in.  That Arendt maintained contact with Heidegger seems unforgivable to Rosenbaum.  

I also understand the problems he has with the term "the banality of evil"--because he feels it absolves monsters of personal culpability for the evil acts they commit.  But even Rosenbaum admits he's not sure that Arendt intended it to be used in that way.  I never took "the banality of evil" that way.  I always absorbed her term "the banality of evil" concerning Eichmann, not as an absolution, but as a horrifying description of the sense of ennui that can accompany evil. Rather than Dr. Evil sucking on a pinking, plotting, hungering for power, some evil occurs just because it's in a day's work.   It's a description of the way people remain willingly unconscious to the evil they commit just because it's easier to go with the flow rather than against it.  The idea of Eichmann shuffling papers across his desk, while, perhaps, stifling a yawn while those papers led to the genocidal torture and slaughter of millions is one of the most chilling images I have taken from reading about the Holocaust and social theories about how and why it happened. 

But if Arendt's crime is internalizing anti-semitism and espousing a philosophy that excuses Eichmann then why does she end her book blessing his execution? 

I think I know the answer--his remarkable work on the book Explaining Hitler has done something to the man,  there is a pain there that rails and rails.  An unending thirst for justice that can never be fully satisfied.  I felt it in his book--it is what makes the book extraordinary.  But this piece makes me question if he can maintain a rational course of thought when his cry for justice extends to attacking another Jew who suffered more directly from Nazism than he ever did.  

As for Arendt, I think her biggest crime is that she did not allow the evil of the Holocaust to lead to a philosophy of vengeance.  She also did not fear criticizing those who were motivated by vengeance.  She dared to criticize Israel and the manner in which the Eichmann trial was conducted on that count while still acknowledging the horrific crimes against humanity that needed to come to reckoning.  She was not perfect by any stretch, but there is a fine point of thinking involved in that, one that leaves her open to criticism, even as it reflects the ability to making critical distinctions.  That is what she means by the "only" reason he was to hang.   It was the only REASON to demand blood in exchange for blood. 

Overturning a previous study that suggested that technology has created a more isolated American, the Pew Charitable trust now says that texting, mobile phones, and, the big one, FACEBOOK is creating wider social networks and deepening conversations and discussions.  

YAY FOR US COMPUTER NERDS.  

(This is a little, polite, bird flip to those who thought I was a freak when I started using the Internet back in 1993.)  

via www.wired.com

A great compendium of sci-fi favorites in film.  I'm going to make this a check list at some point.  You know after the DISSERTATION MONKEY is off my aching back...

Harvard University Press's major new tome, A New Literary History of America, is getting significant publicity—both praise and controversy. Edited by the Harvard scholars Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, with its own Web site and a kickoff party in Cambridge featuring symposia on aspects of the book, it's a 1,122-page collection of essays that unpack cultural topics broadly defined—not just literature, high and low, but the Salem witch trials, W.E.B. Du Bois and his relation to Booker T. Washington, J.F.K.'s inaugural, Linda Lovelace's Ordeal, the screenplay as genre, Alcoholics Anonymous. It is history, literature, art criticism, and more, all rolled into one. The Chronicle Review asked Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Wald to discuss the project via e-mail. Sollors then comments on the dialogue.

via chronicle.com

This volume provides an interesting entry on what we call "literary" and disrupts the usual distinctions of high-middle-low brow culture.  I can't really comment on the controversy until I take a look at it, but I've added it to my Christmas list.  American culture as a whole provides commentary on what survives and thrives in popular imagination.