Thursday, December 21, 2017

The Saboteurs: Rude Writers

Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power
~Jozef Oscar Wild Imrich with BC on triple S's

After all, Derrida had managed a spectacular, American-style self-reinvention. The Algerian-born thinker had failed to make a mark in his first adopted home. “He was humiliated—belittled and passed over in France,” Apostolidès said, “probably because he was arrogant.” Apostolidès continued calmly, emphatically: “Derrida’s obsession was success. He tried to place his spoon everywhere in America. . . . He had no success in France. He was a little humiliated Jew and he wanted revenge. He took America as his field for revenge.”
You can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste . . . And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” (French Invasion)

Crowdfunding markets in everything: a Romanian jazz album with plants used as the musical instruments.  Dandelion sample here.  It grows on you.
   Mongolian Neo-Nazis? The lesson here is simply, but neglected nonetheless.  And grammar Nazis.



ANALYSIS: TRUE. Political Journalists Have Themselves to Blame for Sinking Credibility: Sloppy work creates self-inflicted wounds

The German Artist Who Uses Her Power To Change Things


Hito Steyerl, this year's number one in the Art Review Power 100 list, is a filmmaker who also delivers hypnotic lectures and whose ideas influence many other artists and culture creators. "Her previous texts don’t become dated; her ideas keep circulating. ...People take her work and build upon it. And she’s not afraid of the truth of her time. That’s important for generations that come after her." … [Read More]


Read the acknowledgments. Amid the dreary enumeration — librarians, fact-checkers, mothers, therapists, divorce lawyers — truths seep out... Cold River 



"I write because I hate,” said William Gass, who died last week. Anger at his bigoted father and alcoholic mother shaped a singular philosophical vision Gassing like Smoking McKay

Making design work in the public sector.
Reduced risk and an increased chance of success … sounds good right? So what actually happens when public sector organisations adopt design approaches? TACSI share the lessons they learned through their work with governments across the country.


How to manage self-motivated, intelligent workers.
Managing knowledge workers requires motivating them by appealing to their own values and giving them space to do their job. Intelligent adults resent being treated like naughty children.



David Bentley Hart is a scholar of old ideas, like those published in the New Testament. But he is a modern writer. The evidence: He is very rude... Heart Attack Material  - Anthony Moore  



Writers are told to fan out across genres, to expose themselves to everything. Bad advice.Don't read widely. Most work is middling and should be Ignored  



Big Man Walking London Review of Books

As we rush to impose moral clarity on human desire, remember: Sex is not a solvable problem. Let's minimize the number of its victims Moravian born Freud  


Jerry Fodor was a skeptic, including in his own ideas about how cognition works. He was treated as a crank — a beloved crank Cranking About  

ROCK AND ROLL EDITOR: Andrew Ferguson reviews Sticky Fingers, Joe Hagan’s new biography of Jann Wenner, and the recent HBO documentary on Wenner.



From the first, Hagan makes clear, Wenner was as much a fanboy as a journalist, hoping to use his position as editor of a rising publication to bathe in the nimbus of his favorite rock-and-roll celebrities. The ambition often paid off editorially. Wenner’s obsession with John Lennon led to other early scoops and made Rolling Stone seem indispensable to anyone following the counterculture. In 1968 word came that Lennon and Yoko Ono had posed naked, front and back, for the cover of a new album called Two Virgins. After Wenner’s relentless transatlantic hectoring, Lennon agreed to license the photos to Rolling Stone, if only because no one else would take them. (Asked about the significance of the Two Virgins cover, Lennon’s bandmate George Harrison said everything that needed saying. “It’s just two not-very-nice-looking bodies,” said the Quiet Beatle. “Two flabby bodies naked.”) Wenner put the flabby backsides on the magazine’s cover and tucked the other, full-frontal photo inside. It made a worldwide sensation. Multiple printings of the issue sold out. “Print a famous foreskin,” Wenner said, “and the world will beat a path to your door.”






The top 10 picks you made in 2017.
This was almost the year of the viral recruitment video, satire, and flexible working. And it might have been, but for all the hatches, matches and dispatches.