Alan Jacobs

thingsmagazine:

Found in this hefty steampunk portfolio, a compilation of (mostly imagined) cityscapes

I was scheduled to fly to Bahrain on Saturday, Dec. 1st, 2012. We received our official itinerary from the State Dept. at 5:58am, on Monday, November 26th, 2012. Less than six hours later, we received an urgent telephone call informing us that the entire trip had been canceled, due to some higher level controversy. We couldn’t get any more information or answers as to why this was suddenly canceled at the last minute. When I was originally invited by our contact, it seemed everyone was aware of what I stand for with my positive attitude. They were aware of how I look and my high-energy rock music. They were excited to bring my message of living life to the fullest to the people in the Middle East. I was thrilled at the opportunity to represent my country and the spirit of inclusive and open-minded freedom that makes our nation so special and inspiring. So, for a Department of State representative to say Andrew W.K. ‘doesn’t meet their standards’ after they invited me and planned my trip for a year… well, that doesn’t meet my standards either. You can’t judge a book by its cover. I would’ve done a great job and represented our nation with dignity and pride. Despite all these challenges, I still would love to go and I vow to continue partying, and working everyday to to unite our human race through the power of positive partying.

For the beautiful in Mozart seems to stand apart, untouched by human hands. Which is to say that Mozart’s music often seems effortless, an aes-thetic judgment often ratified by what we know of the circumstances of its composition. Human strain, or even overt human manipulation, the tooling of a product, would seem to have left little mark here. The music seems somehow pre-made, and it glows with a self-sufficiency that has less to do with “unity” and more with apartness: untouched, untouchable. It is often heard as a kind of alabaster that flows without perturbation—this effect has nothing to do with a lack of dramatic events in the music but rather with the bearing of the music, for even the most electrifyingly dissonant passages never cloy; the psychic envelope of the music never threatens to tear; nothing is going to burst. Yet even so, the effect is not that of some distant Olympian but is often as moving as Schubert. What musical features account for this particular kind of beauty? Why do we tend to hear Mozart’s music as both untouchable and touching?

So we have a right-wing and a left-wing party. But we do not have a conservative party – nor could we. Parties are organized around coalitions of interests, and interests don’t have a temperament. Both the right- and left-wing party can exhibit and have exhibited a temperament that is conservative, liberal, or even radical, depending on circumstances and on the issue in question.

In my view, a conservative political and intellectual journal should be pushing in a particular temperamental direction, for both the left-wing and right-wing party.

The reason for pushing this way is not to ensure that this or that coalition of interests triumphs at the polls, because that triumph will, ultimately, be a function of the relative power of said interests, which in turn will be a function of deeper historical forces that are too chaotic to be discerned. Signing up as the intellectual handmaid of a particular set of interests may feel like it is essential work to ensuring the triumph of truth and right (which are implicitly identified with one particular set of interests), but this is mostly an illusion, and an even less-plausible illusion than that of Napoleon, convinced that he is shaping history through the application of his genius through the instrument of his will. And by signing up to be such a handmaid, you are signing up to perpetuate that illusion among your readership. Which runs precisely counter to cultivating the conservative virtues that I listed above.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.”

On September 13 of this year, a private company named Ocean Renewable Power Company in collaboration with the Maine Public Utilities Commission, finally flipped the switch on four TideGen submersible turbines in Cobscook Bay, just west of Eastport. It took the company just a few months to install the turbines, but they spent years working through permits, bureaucracy, and red tape…. They are currently only generating 180 kilowatts of electricity at peak—enough to power up to 30 homes. If these turbines perform as expected, ORPC will expand the Eastport turbine generator field to a capacity of 540 kilowatts — powering up to 100 homes in eastern Maine.

Coastal towns and cities around the globe are watching this experiment with great interest. If it proves successful, tidal-power generation — due to its relatively low barriers to entry — could quickly become a major player in the world’s energy mix. Tidal power is attractive. It’s renewable and clean. It’s dead reliable as — come hell or high water — the tides will never stop. And finally, the turbines are underwater, which both shields them from the increasingly powerful storms of climate change and also makes them invisible from land—clearing the Not-In-My-Backyard hurdle that has plagued the wind power industry for decades.

XXI Dynasty

My body holds its shape. The genius is intact.
Will I return to Thebes? In that lost country
The eucalyptus trees have turned to stone.
Once, branches nudged me, dropping swollen blossoms,
And passionflowers lit my father’s garden.
Is it still there, that place of mottled shadow,
The scarlet flowers breathing in the darkness?

I remember how I died. It was so simple!
One morning the garden faded. My face blacked out.
On my left side they made the first incision.
They washed my heart and liver in palm wine—
My lungs were two dark fruit they stuffed with spices.
They smeared my innards with a sticky unguent
And sealed them in a crock of alabaster.

My brain was next. A pointed instrument
Hooked it through my nostrils, strand by strand.
A voice swayed over me. I paid no notice.
For weeks my body swam in sweet perfume.
I came out scoured. I was skin and bone.
They lifted me into the sun again
And packed my empty skull with cinnamon.

They slit my toes; a razor gashed my fingertips.
Stitched shut at last, my limbs were chaste and valuable,
Stuffed with paste of cloves and wild honey.
My eyes were empty, so they filled them up,
Inserting little nuggets of obsidian.
A basalt scarab wedged between my breasts
Replaced the tinny music of my heart.

Hands touched my sutures. I was so important!
They oiled my pores, rubbing a fragrance in.
An amber gum oozed down to soothe my temples.
I wanted to sit up. My skin was luminous,
Frail as the shadow of an emerald.
Before I learned to love myself too much,
My body wound itself in spools of linen.

Shut in my painted box, I am a precious object.
I wear a wooden mask. These are my eyelids,
Two flakes of bronze, and here is my new mouth,
Chiseled with care, guarding its ruby facets.
I will last forever. I am not impatient—
My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.
I’ll lie here till the world swims back again.

When I come home the garden will be budding,
White petals breaking open, clusters of night flowers,
The far-off music of a tambourine.
A boy will pace among the passionflowers,
His eyes no longer two bruised surfaces.
I’ll know the mouth of my young groom, I’ll touch
His hands. Why do people lie to one another?

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Next June Princeton University Press has a very special present for y’all. Don’t forget!

thingsmagazine:

The Acme Catalogue

Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer’s twelve-speed bike.

The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell’s chords are played away.

So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante’s heaven, and melt into the air.

If it doesn’t, of course, I’ve fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove

Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.

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