My Lamma Forums

[spinoza1112]

[Mr. Lamma the Gung, I have made this a separate thread with its own label so as to avoid my usual farting in church, wherein I interrupt people trading brief and sometimes even witty *bon mots* with an extended treatise, the effect of which is a puzzled silence, followed by a low growl from the darkest corners of this cybernetic public house. I have given it an accurate, but intimidating, title, so that those who enter here have abandoned hope.]

I confirmed that the Now broadband offer does not include BBC or Cartoon channel, only lameass CNN, Stars, HBO, an expense of spirit in a waste of shame unredeemed by The Sopranos and a few other decent shows which I can buy later on DVD. It also includes two Chinese channels, one of which is apparently nothing but Jackie Chan boom boom kung fu fighting and the other probably for the old folks, with Guan Yin weeping under the sea. That's cool, but not enough.

"You know, I don't think there's any such thing as TV" - Laurie Anderson

"'See if there's anything good on...'. 'Why bother?'" - Robert Crumb, "Plunge into the Depths of Despair!", circa 1970

Seriously...I have been ruminating of late of the temporal and spatial phenomenology of television but not being able, yet, to make it through Husserl's Logical Investigations (hi Robert!) I may yet do naught more than reinvent a wheel.

The spatial phenomenology of TV was noted by me when TV entered my world as a lad. Yes, there are people amongst us who remember a time before TV. Sure, Britain had TV as early as 1939, but "the Telly" came as a sociocultural institution to Britain after it came to my land in 1954, and my South African chums tell me that they had no TV as late as 1975, the *apartheid* government not wanting the homeys to Get Ideas from American TV shows such as The Jeffersons, where egregious Yank blackfellows might talk back to whites.

In TV, we learn to bracket out an ovoid and reduce it to a rectangle. No cleverdevil Yankee has successfully created a TV with an eye-shaped ovoid such that this could fill our eye and become the reality, meaning that our dismissal of our lifeworld (*lebenswelt* and a tip of the hat to my German friends) is something we rehearse continuously.

If as I think Husserl saw, emotional and cognitive cannot be disambiguated, then in watching TV we are continually practicing the act of tuning out and dismissal of part of lived reality.

(Do I reinvent the wheel? Did American anti-TV pundit Jerry Mander say this in the 1970s?)

Certainly, Modern Life is replete with what may be isomorphs of the act of tuning out. "Son, I would like to talk to you about the Playboy magazine I found in your room, and to give you advice about the peoplehood of the women therein, and also borrow it too". "Aw gee Dad I'm watching telebision".

"Honey, me Bunny, I need to talk about Us." "Why certainly, Darling Dora, my Mouse...wait a minute...wait a minute...pass it, pass it to Beckham you bloody handless git...aw haw hey we're the wee boys!"

"Ah'm not interested in the Blix team's investigation. Just tell me if we can put this turkey over and go to war against Iraq. Cut to da chase."

These are isomorphs of the spatial act. The temporal tuning occurs when we learn (cf Foucault so I don't have to) to structure our time into work and leisure.

We find the leisure segment further subdivided insofar as we retain an interest in High culture, whether by High culture you mean *alles schon undt gudt* eg. that which is Improving, or getting High.

Thus, culture "vultures" of my acquaintance find that after watching BBC Shakespeare they want madder music and stronger wine, and switch over to the latest Reality show, even as a Russian count of the 19th century might start his evening at the ballet, fall to studying thighs and glimpses of Bolshoi buttocks, and end his evening for this reason amongst Cossacks and Gypsies who steal his money.

Count Tolstoy may have seen how "the evolution of productive relations" in Tsarist Russia, in increasing the smorgas-bord of Choices available to the aristocratic man about town or *haute* bourgeois, had unstructured the leisure of his class so as to create a spiritual crisis.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned: we're "distracted from distraction by distraction". 32, 64, 128, 256, 512 and 1,024 cable channels and we're basically in the same boat as the American couple of 1970, who could find "nothing good on" in Chicago of that year, even though they had American Choice of ABC, NBC, CBS, WGN (the local station with the Cubs) and Channel Eleven educational programming, the precursor of Public Television...yet to be debased by fund raising and only partially redeemed by The Teletubbies from Britain.

"'gain, 'gain, want watch 'gain" - The Teletubbies

This is warmed over, but I think nourishing, McLuhan. The REAL Marshall McLuhan was a critic of media and not its fan, and in The Mechanical Bride, he saw that the media (primarily film) of his day objectified people starting with the gals. But unlike most Anglo, American, Canadian philosophers, Marshall acknowledged the power and necessity of media: if we simply get rid of it we are not saved, but become instead Unabombers.

And our tranquil moment of disembarkation right here on this Isle of Cythera is marred, I say. It is marred by desparate "students", Taliban who are made to wear yellow and black golf shirts in the heat and bully-ragged into wasting my time promising me BBC and Cartoon Network to make their numbers, a promise they could not keep.

Of course, my Pater also railed in this way.

"I think I see my father." "Where, my lord?" "In my mind's eye, Horatio".

And my Grandfather also railed (and railed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also railed). Grandfather railed against our constant watching, our grim and unsmiling childish suveillance, of The Three Stooges, because Grandfather had hired men like Moe, Larry and Curley, desparate men of the Depression when it wasn't funny to not have money to pay for a baby, poor little perisher aye that he be.

The PCCW infestation was a beachhead. Normally the scene at the ferry is curiously absent of the heraldry of corporations, the green and white of Starbucks and the red and white of Circle K, in their own way as frightening, as hegemonic, as double headed eagles in the forests of Bosnia. The black and yellow of the week just past was bad news.

I am most relieved that it will not take much will power to resist Now cable since it doesn't have BBC or Cartoon Network.

[Lamma-Gung]

Wow, that's an impressively quirky article, Spinoza!

This article really reminds me of some philosophy classes at university. I didn't understand all of it, but it sounded so deep, learned and impressively clever...

Almost ready-made for the Lamma-zine, including the title that made me laugh out loud, a real classic! Thank you!

We welcome ALL styles of article and writing in the Lamma-zine, from text messages to poems, fiction to philosophical phenomenologies.

[spinoza1112]

Thanks. A note, then, of explanation, of the rather intimidating word "phenomenology".

"Phenomenology" is like stopping smoking if you've ever smoked. All of a sudden you have to experience life on life's terms, and things come AT you without explaining themselves. You have to deal with them anew. You "bracket out" preconceptions, but in "bracketing out", in silencing, you find that the silence is filled anew.

Thus for example, I focused at the end of the article on what I saw and immediately felt when I saw the PCCW stand.

But as an artist (in painting) I know that you don't stop thinking when you look unless you're drunk which I have also been.

Therefore I can image "globalization" and what may be yet the commodification and destruction of Lamma as an image, in hopes of casting a spell to prevent it.

Phenomenology can perhaps teach us to look at corporate symbols as hostile acts.

[spinoza1112]

[OK, I need to annotate the article, Mr. Lamma Gung. So, like Tom Eliot in The Waste Land, here goes.]

(1) Shakespeare, Sonnet 129: “An expense of spirit in a waste of shame/Is lust in action...”

(2) As far as I can tell, “lebenswelt” is used in Phenomenology to refer to life as lived, not as partitioned for academic convenience by the professors and schoolmen, nor as commodified by the men of the market.

(3) Just kidding about Foucault. He is most readable and tres amusing.He teaches us that we have been schooled (nice work if you can get it, remedial education) to use our leisure to improve ourselves in ways that are socially useful, but that we cannot easily “stop the world”. That is, I LIKE to run, AND it socializes me so that I can go to work and not leap overboard from that grim Ferry which carries across the waters of Lethe, to work.

(4) “Alles schon undt gute” was used by German philosopher and public intellectual Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno to refer to what we are taught in school: about Higher things: that then must be remedied, whether by Sergeant Major or at Work, so that we don't expect more than our share.

(5) I was thinking of War and Peace, in which Pierre, disordered by his bastardy and the openness to him of aristocratic Russian society, finds his social life devolved and debased. This was Tolstoy's biography and it is continuous with life today.

(6) Most readers will know that “the ceremony of innocence is drowned” is good old Yeats in the Second Coming: “mere anarchy is unleashed upon the world.”

(7) Slightly rarer, T. S. Eliot's 1930s Londoners are, in his Four Quartets, “driven from distraction to distraction by distraction” in a “twittering world” which he describes, using onamopoetia, using the names of London suburbs: “Hampden, Clerkenwell and Putney”: he foreshadows Malvina Reynolds, the American folksinger who in 1960 beheld Daly City as “little boxes, on the hill”. Time has been kind to neither for the homes in my own Rolling Meadows were well-maintained and are excellent value today. Nonetheless, the idea of borrowing money to be suburban still fills me with horror.

( The Isle of Cythera was a French theme of the 18th century, as painted by Watteau, a pastoral in which the high-born lovers could return to Arcadia and, I'd hazard, get lucky. We are in a sense pastoral on Lamma, trying by means of the ferry to keep the world at bay: but as in Poussin, “et ego in Arcadia”: for as the shepherds of Arcadia discover Death in the painting, we get cable.

(9) "I think I see my father." "Where, my lord?" "In my mind's eye, Horatio". Hamlet, of course.

(10) “And wailed down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also wailed”. Allen Ginsberg was dead by September 11 yet in Howl he saw as in a prophetic vision “trees, clocks, radios, tons!” when “they [my relatives in New Jersey! Dead now! Lung cancer! Stress!] broke their backs lifting Moloch to heaven!”

[toddy]

Wow man ... if you were a dog, you'd be a German Shepherd. Their brains never stop. Very nice piece. Anyway, what about the old bugger Heidegger, about how we're "enframed" by technology and such? He might fit in quite well somewhere. By the way, methinks you're too smart to like the BBC TV news. (And I'm not talking about Masterpiece Theatre, etc. That doesn't count.) By now you'll be in need of ideological detox. (Don't say you were never warned.)
Next you must write us a piece applying your phenomenological analysis to the lamma.com forums.

[Lamma-Gung]

A phenomenologocal analys of these forums? Om my god! That would be pretty interesting but might devolve into a psychoanalysis of quite a few members, the miscreants, the multiple personalities, the trolls, the egomaniacs, the antisocial misogynists, the list is almost endless... Much of it great fun, tough!

[spinoza1112]

Heidegger? Overrated, and too "authentic", too much the person who rebukes complexity of speech but himself is a windbag. I like hot air, and pure gas, but only if it has an iron core, like Saturn.

I hope everybunny got Out in the Sunshine of what was a truly beautiful day, with a clarity of light that one rarely sees.

Heidegger does ask good questions, such as what the hell is this life, anyway? Are we after all immortal? Where is David Kerr? Ou sont les neiges d'antan? And where are you tonight, sweet Marie?

[toddy]

<<the person who rebukes complexity of speech but himself is a windbag>>

You mean like Fortune Chan?

(LG: that's not a personal attack. It's a good-natured ribbing. We've got to make these fine distinctions; i.e., please sir, please don't exile my post to the fight club. it's nasty in there)

[toddy]

PS. Heidegger isn't any more overrated than the rest of the windbags you brought up. How can he be overrated? He helped pave the way for one of the greatest genocides of the 20th century. And look, if you're going to be disseminating high falutin' philosophy to us plebian-minded commoners, you need to cut us some slack with your allusions ok? What the hell are the bonhommes de neiges de downtown? And by sweet Marie, are you talking about the chocolate bar they used to sell?

bonhomme de neige de downtown: a Canadian teletubby?

[spinoza1112]

[toddy]

[spinoza1112]

Thanks, Toddy, I shall interpret your icons as a compliment, but I wrote "The Carpenter Tree" yesterday under the unconscious influence of the following wonderful poem by John Crowe Ransom


Captain Carpenter

Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.

It was a pretty lady and all her train
That played with him so sweetly but before
An hour she'd taken a sword with all her main
And twined him of his nose for evermore.

Captain Carpenter mounted up one day
And rode straightway into a stranger rogue
That looked unchristian but be that as may
The Captain did not wait upon prologue.

But drew upon him out of his great heart
The other swung against him with a club
And cracked his two legs at the shinny part
And let him roll and stick like any tub.

Captain Carpenter rode many a time
From male and female took he sundry harms
He met the wife of Satan crying "I'm
The she-wolf bids you shall bear no more arms."

Their strokes and counters whistled in the wind
I wish he had delivered half his blows
But where she should have made off like a hind
The bitch bit off his arms at the elbows.

And Captain Carpenter parted with his ears
To a black devil that used him in this wise
O Jesus ere his threescore and ten years
Another had plucked out his sweet blue eyes.

Captain Carpenter got up on his roan
And sallied from the gate in hell's despite
I heard him asking in the grimmest tone
If any enemy yet there was to fight?

"To any adversary it is fame
If he risk to be wounded by my tongue
Or burnt in two beneath my red heart's flame
Such are the perils he is cast among."

"But if he can he has a pretty choice
From an anatomy with little to lose
Whether he cut my tongue and take my voice
Or whether it be my round red heart he choose. "

It was the neatest knave that ever was seen
Stepping in perfume from his lady's bower
Who at this word put in his merry mien
And fell on Captain Carpenter like a tower.

I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.

The rogue in scarlet and grey soon knew his mind.
He wished to get his trophy and depart
With gentle apology and touch refined
He pierced him and produced the Captain's heart.

God's mercy rest on Captain Carpenter now
I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman
Citizen husband soldier and scholar enow
Let jangling kites eat of him if they can.

But God's deep curses follow after those
That shore him of his goodly nose and ears
His legs and strong arms at the two elbows
And eyes that had not watered seventy years.

The curse of hell upon the sleek upstart
That got the Captain finally on his back
And took the red red vitals of his heart
And made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.



DAMN, that;s a good poem.

I recommend a collection of "Good Poems" by American radio humorist Garrison Keillor for more fine, manly British and American stuff suitable for recitation that will nonetheless not fright the ladies lest we all be hanged.

But, the Children should be in bed when the above is broken out.

...and made the kites to whet their beaks clack clack.