Posted on: July 16, 2008
We have a new essay below by our good friend David Haan, entitled Irony. Ironically, that’s not what it’s really about, except in a sort of indirect way. A very articulate bird told me that he got the idea for the piece from this review of Richard Sennett’s new book, The Craftsman.
Was the writer (Mr. Haan) pondering the art of being a bricoleur? Quite possibly. Was he thinking about improvising with and extending his bag of tricks, his toolbox of sorts? Probably. He may have zoomed in on this particular part of Scott McLemee’s interesting review:
“The notion of the bricoleur exerted a certain charm among the strenuously professionalizing, for it offered the gratifying prospect of imagining a tactile and worldly dimension to one’s intellectual activity. The bits and pieces of various theories or systems could be regarded as parts of a rough-and-ready “tool kit.” If they were incomplete or out-of-date — well, so much the better: To “make do” was a challenge to prove one’s knack.
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Posted on: July 16, 2008
Rumormongers have hypocritically insinuated that I make use of cheap irony. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I employ only the finest quality of irony, procured at great expense, its like not to be had discounted. In fact, I do not entrust supply to outside provisioners, but participâté at every stage of manufacture, from the selection of raw material (unalloyed, never scrap) through its refinement — forged under sublime pressure, even tempered, under controlled heat, by a process of my own invention. Despite all due precaution, irony can become corrupted, so the results of all this effort may well never see the light of day. Only the most resilient irony, without discernable imperfection, is suitable to any proper craft.
Nor do I use it sparingly. To be effective, irony must be thickly applied, preferably in many layers, and meticulously worked in to its foundation so as to become integral to the final product.…
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Posted on: July 15, 2008
Barnegat Lighthouse, New Jersey. Photo by Thisisbossi
The Garden State. It’s like Rodney Dangerfield. It gets no respect. Which is one of the reasons why Bruce Springsteen’s rendition of “Jersey Girl” always gets to me. Because he takes all of that disrespect and throws it out the window of a fast moving car on the way to the shore. He sings that to his Jersey audience. He gives them pride of place and evokes memories his audience can easily relate to. He takes Tom Waits’ song and makes it his own and theirs. He makes it a Jersey song, which is something Waits could never do, as great a songwriter as he is. Waits was born and bred in California. Not his fault. He couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to grow up in Jersey, in the shadow of the Big Apple.
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Posted on: July 14, 2008
Battle of Quatre Bras, by James B. Wollen
My musings on dualisms come with many qualifications and the usual hemming and hawing. But, I’m going to skip past most of that and push on, despite the obvious flaws in any kind of capsulism.
Was thinking about the difference between layers in society and culture. That there has been, over time, a difference between the top and the bottom – and later the middle – across time, across cultures is too obvious to require elaboration at the moment. But there are differences as well between East and West, when it comes to those differences, which is far less obvious.
Conflict and Harmony. Of course, you had plenty of conflict in the East through the centuries. You had kingdoms, wars, empires, invasions, occupations, forced expulsions and so on, just as in the West. To form a kingdom or an empire means you had massive bloodshed along the way.…
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