jude folly

Nay sayers dismiss Wikipedia because it’s free and because anyone can contribute to it. So the conventional reasoning goes: what reliable information could emerge from such a den of  nihilism?

I like to think of Wikipedia as an epistemological pun: by its massive dimensions (it has 3,022,714 entries as of 2 Sept. 2009), it sounds encyclopedic, yet it mostly lacks the scholarly bona fides of an academic publication.

Mostly, except that early in its history, the web site appropriated entries from the 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which, as Nicholas Baker points out in his review of Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, is no longer protected by copyright law. He describes in detail the inner workings of the massively popular resource and how the manual’s author, John Broughton, gives readers clear, direct advice on wading into the wild, roiling fountain of information that is Wiki.

Accounting for the key factor in all big internet successes (email, AOL chat, YouTube and Facebook, to name a few), Baker explains, ‘they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.’

Like any culture that seeks to establish and maintain order, Wikipedia features an assortment of guardians, judges and mayhem makers. As an example, Baker cites the Pop-Tart page; an entry that endured a variety of revisions over the span of months.

Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Several days ago it said: ‘Pop-Tart is german for Little Iced Pastry O’ Germany.’ Other things I learned from earlier versions: more than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are ‘frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon and semen.’ Pop-Tarts are a ‘flat Cookie.’ No: ‘Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch.’ No: ‘A Pop-Tart is a flat condom.’ Once last fall the whole page was replaced with ‘NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!’

While he acknowledges the tempestuous quality of Wikipedia revisions, Baker writes that the malicious changes are swiftly fixed by the team work of volunteer editor andd antivandalism software. And without its vandals, he adds, ‘Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been. . . .’

Dipping in a bit deeper into the Wiki realm as a volunteer editor, Baker learns of an elevated social order wherein a struggle between inclusionists (Wikipedians who strive to save articles marked for deletion) and deletionists (Wikidpedians who assert a narrower definition of notability). If a particular entry can be propped by references to external sources, then it stands a chance of surviving.

Though this struggle may display cruder tactics than in the battles taking place at the university over the scope and limits of knowledge, Wikipedia merits admiration for openly displaying that learning and knowing is an ever evolving process.

Now that this scandal has been beat to pulp, we should move the conversation beyond any further details of the South Carolina governor’s infidelity and skip the talk about his mental well being.

The particulars of the story bear a striking resemblance to a novel called Damage (by Irish writer Josephine Hart), a tale narrated by an unnamed protagonist – an English physician and up-and-coming Member of Parliament – who, by all appearances, had possession of a wonderful life. Like Mark Sanford, his rise to prominance as a capable and admired elected leader inspired talk of his potential as a head of the nation.

The novel’s opening passage presents themes about the human condition – what I would liken to pangs of an undernourished soul - that play out with dreadfully regrettable effect.

There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives. . . .

For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe. . . .

And in my own life, I have traveled far, acquiring loved and unfamiliar companions: a wife, a son, and a daughter. I have lived with them, a loving alien. . . . and tried to be what those I loved expected me to be – a good husband, a good father, a good son.

Had I died at fifty I would have been a doctor, and an established politician . . . . One who had made a contribution, and was much loved. . . .

But I did not die in my fiftieth year. There are few who know me now, who do not regard that as a tragedy.

The promising politician finds his ‘imprint’ in a dark, mysterious young woman (French, of course, for full fatalistic effect) who happens to be his grown son’s romantic companion. As if powerless against the collision of greater forces, they commence an affair whose calamitous arc ends with the death of his son.

While the Mark Sanford saga doesn’t feature a taboo element like incest, judging from the weepy press conference he held to admit that he had cheated, and from the emails he exchanged with his lover, the affair was no frivolous fling. At the risk of implying that Gov. Sanford’s behavior should be excused, I think it worth considering that, like the novel’s central character, the magnitude of his misdeeds reflects a great spiritual longing or hunger of the soul; requiring a moral catastrophe proportional to the unfettered becoming (or metaphysical fulfillment) that contemporary culture has few resources to accommodate.

Well, then he should not have sought public office, would be the common sensical response. True; and I would observe that in order to serve our republic, we require candidates to submit to somewhat extreme contortions of image and soul in order to appeal to a rule of the majority.

Yet how easy it is to disparage elected officials for the chameleon qualities they adopt and not recognize our complicity in the compulsive ‘costume’ changes (a.k.a. flip flopping) politicians must make to remain politically relevant. Yes, voters play a significant role in all this madness – though in Mark Sanford we witness the implosion of one political career that could not conceal the impassioned, vulnerable and utterly human qualities that far too many in the United States would prefer to deny about themselves.

Adulterers or not, absconders of duty or not, we are Mark Sanford.

Lewis Lapham, former editor at Harper’s, serves as editor of a history-focused literary magazine called Lapham’s Quarterly. It publishes a collection of excerpted writings by the greats of literature, philosophy, art, politics and any other arena of renown. Each issue features texts gathered around a specific theme (e.g., States of War, About Money and Eros). Fall 2008′s theme, Ways of Learning, addresses education.

In a stunning preamble to that issue, Lapham presents an incisive, often devastating, critique of education in the United States. How fitting that he titles the piece ‘Playing with Fire,’ evidently inspired by a maxim tacked at the top of the essay, a quote credited to Plutarch:  ’The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled.’

No less incendiary than that sentiment, Lapham delivers a far-reaching but nuanced analysis of the forces at work in the perpetual shortcomings of education. Taking a cue from the 1983 National Commission on Excellence in Education, which cautioned that the the nation’s schools were flooded with ‘a rising tide of mediocrity,’ the author illustrates a broader cultural context to account for the said deluge of underachievement.

Two mistaken but often unquestioned assumptions at work in the demise of education are 1) the belief that education is a commodity and 2) that the humanitites are inconsequential. As Lapham discusses each assumption, I cannot help but marvel how each notion enables and provides cover for the other; working together they render a consensus thinking that the writer savages in the following statement: ‘If the kids know how to run the computers, work up the punch lines for Disney or Goldman Sachs, figure the exchange rates between the euro and the yen, what does it matter if they don’t know who won either the Revolutionary or the Civil War?’

If Thomas Jefferson were to have his say about what is taught in schools, he might reiterate his hope for a citizen prepared for the demands of self-government and encouraged ‘to judge for himself what would secure or endanger his freedom.’

Echoing Jefferson’s thinking toward the end of the essay, Lapham writes, ‘What makes men and women free is learning to trust their own thought, possess their own history, speak in their own voices.’ If conveying this kind of knowledge could not be co-opted, packaged and mass marketed for maximized profit, would there be any takers?

In anticipation of the release of Indignation, the 29th book by Newark’s notorious son, Esquire has offered to its readers a ‘crash course’ guide to prepare readers for what I’ve seen with my own eyes is a standard, even whispy plot predictably taken from Roth’s biography.

Such Manhattanite pandering is only surpassed when Woody Allen releases a new film.

Special thanks goes to Charles Bukowski for inspiring this gem of wisdom. He once presented a signed a book of poems to Larry Mullen Jr (U2′s percussionist), wherein the poet inscribed the followng maxim: “Humanity at its greatest is a failure.”

While living in San Francisco in the late ’90s I first browsed Lloyd Dangle’s Troubletown in one of the free Bay Area weeklies. His cartoons strike the viewer’s eye with their amateur-quality (even for political cartoon standards) illustrations, sinister facial expressions and squalor-tinged settings. 

Depicting whichever political scandal or celebrity idiocy of the day, Troubletown simply followed a public figure’s rhetoric to its most demented and self-serving conclusion. There’s something appealing about the crudely drawn figures that lends a deviant quality to the makers of media mayhem. You’ll often find them sketched with a diabolical brow and knowing sneer; dark rings under the eyes of those tirelessly at work on sordid schemes.

Take a look at his response to the enormous financial debt the United States owes to China. It’s a stark yet clever reminder of the lender-saturated advertising one most likely will endure while watching television or listening to the radio.  

The 50th anniversary edition of William Burroughs’ Junky includes, among other treats, a glossary defining some of the terminology used by the addicts, pushers and various other unsavory characters trafficking the underworld of post-war New York, New Orleans and Mexico City. Very appropriately the glossary introduction acknowledges the influence of ‘jive talk’–a language that defined the community of marijuana users (and I would guess jazz musicians who overlapped with potheads)–and ultimately merging with those considered ’hip’ (see glossary below).

To quote the introduction more directly, “Jive talk always refers to more than one level of fact”–to which I would add that this dialect of American English inscribed a code for the essential business of scoring the next fix, as well as illustrating much of the associated activities and consequences of getting high.

are you anywhere? (Do you have any junk or weed on you?) That this question should ring philosophical, even existential, cuts to the heart of the user’s raison d’être. I would imagine an outsider’s possible response to such a question–”Are you high?”–proportionally ironic.

burn down (To overdue or run into the ground.)  The glossary cites a scenario when junkies gathering too frequently at a particular eating establishment to score, that law enforcement eventually gets wise to it. The restaurant in question is then considered “burned down.”

croaker (A doctor.) As described in Junky‘s text, one willing to prescribe a junky his fix. Burroughs elaborates on the type of physician a user will seek out.

Generally speaking, old doctors are more apt to write than young ones. Refugee doctors were a good field for a while, but the addicts burned them down. Often a doctor will blow his top at the mere mention of narcotics and threaten to call the law.

Doctors are so exclusively nurtured on exaggerated ideas of their position, that generally speaking, a factual approach is the worst possible. Even though they do not believe your story, nonetheless they want to hear one. It is like some Oriental face-saving ritual (pp. 17-18).

hep or hip (Someone who knows the score. Someone who understands ‘jive talk’; someone who is ‘with it.’) I believe any thoughtful observer of popular culture will acknowledge how this term has become orphaned from its origins and yet signifies the past fondly.

lush-worker(A thief who specializes in robbing drunks on the subway.) An economist accounting for the cash flow operating in the drug trafficking system in Manhattan (circa 1950) would have to account for the capital generated by preying on the intoxicated upwardly mobile.

poke (A wallet.) The pot o’ gold at the end of the rainbow for your vigilant and industrious lush-worker. An example among several others when a specific action–poking around someone’s pockets–becomes a noun.

pop corn (Someone with a legitimate job, as opposed to a hustler or a lush-worker.) I suspect there’s a glint of insult in this term for someone with one foot in the “square” world and the other among the “hip.”

smash (Change, money, coins.) Another example of an action–in this case the destruction of coin-operated machines, to raise money for a fix–transformed by usage into a noun.

Often the terminology of a marginal community I have found equally amusing and intriguing. The amusement is self evident. The intrigue I owe to the mystery of appropriating accepted usage for a purpose quite far removed; to effect the function of concealing and revealing at the exact same moment; always referring “to more than one level of fact.”

Recently I read this nonfiction piece by Frank Tempone called “Born Again”, featured in the literary magazine Upstreet. (Spoiler to the evangelical crowd: it’s got nothing to do with any come-to-Jesus moment.) I recommend this piece for depicting the harrowing pity a son might experience when first acknowledging his father’s vulnerability, especially that of an authoritarian patriarch; overall, an enjoyable and pathos-inducing story.