Seven Red

After long delay, some reports from San Francisco, where I attended the dreaded CCCC conference this year. I will say this: I did not see a single bad talk. I will be taking Thank You gifts from the field for my previous taxonomical snark, which apparently whipped everybody into shape. You’re welcome, 4C’s. But on to the real topic of this post, Bourbon & Branch. This little speakeasy-style cocktail bar is, as the title says, made of win. So I’ll offer a little review.

You can get into Bourbon & Branch one of two ways. You can make reservations for a two-hour slot ahead of time, in which case you’ll likely get a table (or really, a booth), or you can seek a kind of general admission, in which case you’ll be placed in the “library,” which you access through a secret panel in the wall of the main room. Am I corny as hell, or is that cool already. Hell with you: I was impressed. But Drinking Buddy (DB) and I went the reservation route, so we had a booth from 6-8. We rang the bell, whereupon a hostess asked us for the password, previously communicated when we confirmed the reservation. It’s all very hush hush.

Since it was still light out, B&B seemed remarkably dark, but really well done. You walk in to the main bar room, where piles of fresh lemons, limes, and oranges are arranged on the bar. Appearance: velvet red floral wall paper (see the web site for the design) under a shiny pressed tin roof, small yellow-lit lamps at each high-seated wooden booth, a snazzy pinstripe design on the booth padding, along with severe tapered mirrors on the walls that match the tapered wooden tables: they’re doing the 20′s posh thing, and doing it well. Sound: subdued jazz playing at just the right volume, and ranging from some 20′s songbirds and early Tommy Dorsey to as late as Astrud Gilberto doing some popular Bossanova numbers, with the heavier accent on the older, pre-war stuff. When you get to the booth, a waitress hands over one hefty cocktail menu that also includes the house rules: no photography, no cell phones, smoke out the backdoor (unlock it and relock it when you come in), and don’t even think of ordering a “cosmo.” They actually have it in quotations like that, as if the thing can hardly be said to exist. The waitress also brought over two glasses of water and a small drink for us while we looked over the menu; I think it was champagne with bitters.

The menu is itself impressive, with the whole back-end focusing on scotch and whiskey and such. I just don’t do the scotch thing (hell, I hardly do cocktails), so I focused on the first part, which was subdivided into house specialties and classics, with, again, the accent on a particular respect for cocktail history, pre-war. Each cocktail listing comes with both ingredients and an explanation, so cocktail know-nothings like me can feel comfortable. The waitress also advised us of a non-menu cocktail for the evening. I started with the non-menu cocktail, a “Kentucky Buck,” consisting of strawberry-infused Four Roses Bourbon, bitters, lemon, and ginger beer. It was yummy. DB started with an Old Fashion, also delicious. For my second drink, I went classic, with a White Lady. It was Tanqueray 10, Cointreau, lemon juice, and egg white. I have to tell you that I was a bit nervous about the egg white, since I’ve seen the foaming action go so often wrong, but this was really perfect. In fact, if pressed, I’d say that the White Lady I had at Bourbon & B ranch was the best cocktail I’d ever had, period. DB, who drinks more cocktails than I do, concurred, raving about it. For his part, he ordered a Blood and Sand, which was good, but maybe a little light on the orange juice. I was essentially done at two, because we still had beer drinking to do later at Toronado (on Haight). But DB went for one more, a Black Manhattan, which was the house version of a Manhattan with coffee bitters. I had a sip: yum yums.

And then we were done, but that was perfect for somebody like me. The atmosphere and the time limit make the usual shenanigans you see when people are drinking cocktails more or less structurally impossible, so you actually enjoy a few good cocktails like a good meal. It was a very pleasant experience. More on SF in the coming days. One thing that did strike me in Bourbon & Branch is that she would just love the place, and meanwhile, she’s home eight-months pregnant while I’m cavorting around drinking cocktails. I have to get her down to a Chicago version of this thing when she gets through all this baby-birthin’ business. She’s gonna be ready for a drink.

I used to want to plant bombs at the Last Night of the Proms
But now you’ll find me with the baby, in the bathroom,
With that big shell, listening for the sound of the sea
- Billy Bragg, Brickbat

In my business, many of the people you know end up working in relatively isolated locations, Giant State Universities and Smaller Schools all across the country. And when they bump into me, they often say “You’re so lucky to live in Chicago,” to which I usually respond, “Why, they don’t have Blockbuster Video and pizza where you live?” Because the truth is, we very rarely get to go out, partly because babysitting is a ridiculously complicated sort of affair, and partly because, well, we’re like old and stuff. This was at no time more clear than on our odyssey last night.

We dropped babygirl off with some friends who also have a 3-year old; we swap babysitting nights with them to reduce costs. Our destination? Quimby’s bookstore in Wicker Park, where our friend from Giant University Town had organized a reading from his literary magazine, PANK, to coincide with the big Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which is here in Chicago this year. Quimby’s is a cool little independent bookstore that she and I took to calling the Porn Comix store on account of all the porn comics, but that’s just because we’re like old and stuff, and nowhere near hip enough for the place, or for porn comics. So I parked myself next to the anarchist and Chomsky books and directly in front of the sadomasochism erotica rack, while she sat on the floor, ready to meditate. We met Work Colleague there: I think he was expecting drinks! I’ll have to admit that, though I’ve been to a lot of such readings, I never know quite what to make of them. I think fairly visually when it comes to text; I will generally know where on a page a particular point appeared, even in long books, so there’s something about written text that just resonates with me. It is, of course, a common conceit that poetry and literary prose are better when read aloud, spoken, uttered, but I’m not convinced that there isn’t a bit of the old Platonic disdain of writing itself involved in such judgments, as though some degraded second order signifier had usurped the close relationship between speaking and thought, and we’re trying to recapture it through spoken readings. I’m enough of a Derridean to at least be suspicious about such pronouncements. So I think when I hear writing spoken, it throws me off, and I spend too much time trying to envision it on the page, trying to catch the poetics by reconstructing the visual text. But the bottom line is that my judgments are never clear (or probably reliable) on these things, because I have difficulty encountering language in these ways. I don’t want a writer to have a “voice.” I want a voice to have a text.

In any case, there were some memorable parts of the readings that I managed to process despite my general incapacity to get into the rhythm of such things. Jennifer Pieroni read an unpublished poem called “Unlucky Babies,” the point of which seemed to be that all the qualities considered admirable by literary bohemians (poor hand-eye coordination, the capacity to see the strange and beautiful in the ugly, and the like) are generally considered “unlucky” in culture. It’s a poem about eugenia, in other words, the “well born” and “beautiful,” but quibbling on the point of a poem always strikes me as missing the point, so to speak. Pieroni created an interesting list poem, and the rhythm sticks with me. Rachel Yoder then read an epistolary essay titled, I think, “Letters to My First Love,” in which the narrator (R.) sends a series of unanswered notes (I almost said “missives,” but resisted the urge) to her first love (M.) at the instigation of her professor – a curious set up that I would have liked to hear more about. As the essay stands, it is like a self-conscious contemplation of self-indulgence, complete with references to Jacques Lacan and the general problematic of the adequation of words and things. The clear tension that then emerges between the self-conscious and the self-indulgent was its most memorable quality. At one point, for example, the narrator notes that she used to think people who claimed to like Jim Jarmusch films were pretentious assholes, but now she likes them, and maybe thinks that she is herself a pretentious asshole, etc. About that speed throughout. Personally, I found the repetitions of M. and R. (the address and signature) for each letter to be somewhat disorienting, but maybe that’s what she was going for. Perhaps dates would have separated the letters without introducing this odd repetition (we know M. never replies!). My favorite of the night was James Grinwis’ poetry, largely because I don’t remember its content at all, but remember it to be really jarring and cutting. This is an exception to my usual incapacity to be struck by spoken language; I’m not sure what he did poetically, but it was aggressive and dark and sumptuous – I really dug it. He was also the most understatedly funny speaker of the night in my view: he described how his sister-in-law had bought him a writing journal which required daily entries (and the fullness of that story was just wonderfully suggestive: one imagines the sister-in-law bemoaning the bohemian existence of her executive husband’s younger ne’er-do-well brother, whom she refers to sardonically as “The Poet,” until her thoughtful friend – a sorority sister from her college days, perhaps – suggests that she encourage him in his writing career, advice she takes to heart by buying him a writing journal in an expensive luggage store, and presenting it with a self-satisfied if pitying grin on Christmas morning, in front of the whole family…). So he had filled out many dates early on, jumping well ahead of the actual date, but was now well behind. This struck me as glorious revenge on the sister-in-law, and her real scheme, which would be to enforce some discipline on his writing practices, if he was going to be a writer after all. Grinwis conveyed all this in a kind of dazed, drunken deadpan. Hilarious.

Daniel Nester then read an essay about his guitar playing skills, or relative lack thereof, and the many technical devices he had purchased to make up for them, culminating in the dreaded talk box. Nester’s essay was charming and funny, switching between contemporary rock history and self-deprecating autobiography, but I found it interesting, I think, because it really delves into the problem of failing at that which one loves, of capacities. It’s much easier for us to accept the notion of musical capacities than capacities in other areas of activity, and particularly writing. I think this is what the literary people have over the composition studies people: they recognize that writing requires a set of capacities just like anything else, and that some people just cap out at a certain point. Such a conception is anathema to a writing studies that likes to think of itself as democratic: it first elevates writing to the general mode of existing in common and participating in public, and then must derive a universal capacity for good writing that merely requires good teaching. What Nester’s essay emphasizes, I think, is that even a deep love for an activity and years of practice don’t guarantee even moderately passable performance. The capping out of performance capacity would then, a fortiori, come even sooner when someone evinces hardly any interest in a thing. Say, the average student in a first-year composition classroom. If, however, writing is the key to power and voice in a democracy, one simply cannot admit such a thing, because it would imply second-class citizenship. The problem of capacities, in this way, becomes the unspoken (though certainly not ungraded) monster (unlucky baby!) haunting the composition classroom, and more so the more a teacher is trained in the democratic ideology of composition. But Nester’s essay will have none of this. He keeps bumping up against the problem of capacities: his nubby fingers only stretch four frets, he lacks hand-eye coordination (unlucky baby!), and similar insuperable problems prevent him from becoming the guitar player he wants to be. At a pudgy forty, he is rejected by younger, hipper bands, with their floppy-haired lead singers even slamming the door in his face. He wants to “play out,” which is to say, in public, but does so only ten times thus far in his life (a few times with a band called “Fear Itself” – I told you it was funny). And he purchases all manner of device to cover his incapacities, even the talk box, the hideous talk box. There’s much to contemplate in this description. Certainly, one cannot immediately lend guitar-playing the same equivalency with democracy that writing attains, even as an empirical matter: writing, literacy, has a snugger fit with its supposed political twin. But it would be an interesting thought experiment. At one point, Nester notes that if he was as bad a writer as he was a guitar player, the reader (and we were listeners, again) would be reading “jabberwocky” (I like Carroll, so this struck me as off). But why not? Why not consider the writer who loves it, but can’t do it? Why not consider those capacities that stand in the way? Why restrict such incapacities to the musical instrument, the paintbrush, the dance?

Finally, Sheila Squillante read a poem and a short essay. Squillante was the only speaker whose writing I am somewhat familiar with, and, quite frankly, I consider her a brilliant stylist. Again, I’ve seen her writing: I think of it as text on a page, so this may affect my impressions. In any case, by this time, she (who is, let’s remember, 7 months pregnant) was getting a little uncomfortable, so I was a bit distracted from Squillante’s reading. But she won back my attention on the second part of her essay, during which she describes the encounter with a tribe of wild chickens in the Pacific Northwest. The very notion of undomesticated chickens is, of course, resonant in itself: the ultimate in domesticated and bred animal returning to a natural state. That said, I’ll usually key in on some words or image. In this case, Squillante said something like “Those chickens owned that piece of land,” with the real emphasis on owned, just an odd but powerful word in this context. She described their wild tails, completely beyond the range of what we’d consider a chicken, and likened her reaction to seeing her doctor out at the grocery store, or in an airport gift shop: they were at first unrecognizable as chickens. For some reason this just grabbed me, as Squillante’s prose has done before. There’s something lyrical to her prose and images that I just appreciate.

So, you’re pretty but you’re boring. Obviously, I’m not referring to the readings in the subject line, but to us, Seven Red. And, really, you might split the difference, assign one quality to each of us, and be done with it. Getting back to the theme, in any case, of being like old and stuff. After the readings, we gabbed a bit with our friends, but decided against going out for drinks with the whole AWP crew, largely because we were very hungry, and this was sort of their thing, and we had no confidence that they would be moving in under ten minutes. And this is where the odyssey of being old and stuff begins. We walk out of the bookstore, looking for a place where she and I can eat, but Work Colleague can drink (he is desperate for beer by now, having expected to have been drinking for an hour already – and this is a tough expectation to have squelched). Here’s the result of that search:

1. Aberdeen – We start off at the bar directly next store to Quimby’s. We walk into a wall of sonic loud that would knock you down, some real shit techno, awful. It was so loud that I was literally scared for the babybelly. It was so loud in there that even saying ‘It’s too loud in here” was a massive struggle. We walked out immediately, probably looking like those squares who storm out of the theater in the middle of Pink Flamingos.
2. Wicker Park Tavern – We find another bar-restaurant, and get an actual table: a miracle. The waitress then tells us that the kitchen, which they share with the restaurant Absinthe, is too busy to make anything but appetizers for us. Well, what are the appetizers? Nachos and fucking wings. Unacceptable. We leave soon after.
3. Crossing Damen three times: we then cross Damen three times looking at various places. They are all full, closed, or just dodge. It suddenly occurs to me that everybody around us is under 28 and dressed to the hilts, except the grifters.
4. Some Pasta Place – In desperation, we walk into a contemporary Italian style restaurant, which looks pretty full from the outside. Ah, what the hell. We’re optimists. The hostess tells us “Oh, it’ll be about 40 minutes,” as if our car won’t turn back into a pumpkin at the babysitting expiration time we set for 10pm. Yes, ten. We storm out without even saying “No thank you.” What next? First, we have to get the hell out of Wicker Park. she decides that we’ll drive back to our own neighborhood, where at least 40% of the people out in the bars at night are safely in their thirties, and she’ll drop me and Work Colleague off. Off we go.
5. Garcia’s – she has given up on the night. She’ll just go get babygirl while we get drinks, and grab something to eat at home. She drops us off by the Western station on the Brown Line, saying “Don’t stay out too late.” And we head for the Huettenbar in Lincoln Square (one of my favorites). Halfway there, I decide we have to eat something, so let’s go to Garcia’s for a burrito and some beer before we go to Huettenbar. Garcia’s is packed: every table is filled, the bar is filled, and twenty people are waiting for tables. Where’s this bad economy? I curse under my breath, determined to drink on a now well empty stomach. Off to Huettenbar!
6. Huettenbar – I walk in, show my ID to the grungy looking bouncer kid. But Work Colleague doesn’t have ID! No ID! “I don’t drive,” he says, and tries to show the kid his Unnamed Employer Institution ID card, which states that we are faculty. The kid says no dice. Mind you, I’m in my mid-thirties, and Work Colleague is several years older than me. It would be a strange universe indeed in which we could pass for under 21. But there we are, getting turned away at the door of a bar. “I don’t drive,” Work Colleague says again, apologetically, “I don’t have ID.” How the fuck do you get on an airplane? I mutter. He responds, sensibly, “With my passport.” Hmm.
7. Skewers – We truck down Lincoln in the now falling snow, heading to a place called Skewers. We get there: out of fucking business. Welll, shit now. This is starting to look like fate. But right next door…
8. Jack Rabbit – We finally get a table in Jack Rabbit, a little nouvelle Mexican bistro operation on Lincoln. I’m exhausted and starving. I eat a fajita (damn good) and drink one – yes, ONE – Negro Modelo, then we pretty much agree that it’s time to head home. I’m in the house before 10:15. Unlucky baby.

So that’s the story of Seven Red’s big night out in Chicago. Luckily, Blockbuster gets new videos every Tuesday.

In that last post, I freely copped to being totally wrong about US electoral politics most of the time. In other words, I can’t make heads or tails of how people vote in this country. It simply makes no sense to me, likely because of my snooty Eastern elitist upbringing and continued devotion to an urban elitist arugula-laden lifestyle. Case in point, of course, would be Governor Palin, who strikes me as a finger-wagging knucklehead at best. she and I were laughing this morning at her scoldiferous outtakes on NPR; I didn’t watch her speech, but the whole thing seems just preposterous. Needless to say, she greatly impressed everyone, including the pundit braintrust in the supposedly “liberal media” who fell all over themselves to mention how fantastical she was after the McCain campaign spent the better part of two days kicking them in  their collective balls. Maybe it’s my Eastern elitist roots cultivated in the snooty confines of outer borough New York City public schools, but where I come from, if somebody calls you a worthless asshole, the appropriate response is generally not made up of compliment and praise. Like I said, I don’t understand how the thing works.

So the unemployment numbers come out today, and it’s pretty brutal: 6.1% unemployment, and eight straight months of job losses, now over 600,000. In another stunning stat, 9.2% of all homeowners are either behind or in foreclosure on their mortgages. The overall numbers are just as bloody: 3.7 million manufacturing jobs up and vanished under the Republican presidency; real wages, as Obama likes to remind listeners, are down $2200 since Bush took office. All of this has much less direct effect on places where the effete urban elite live, of course. The effete urban elite are generally trained in precisely the sort of symbolic analytic work that prepares them well for a variety of positions in the global economy: lawyers, doctors, marketers, teachers, software project managers, derivative traders, and so on (to name the positions of just a few of my friends from college, some of whom are even rabid Bushites). Of these friends, nearly all live either in New York City itself, or in the immediate suburbs, or in major metropolitan areas in New York state . What’s more, none of these people would last two weeks in Wasilla, Alaska – and especially not the Bush fans. I am the only one of them with even an inkling of having lived in something less than a city/suburb for more than a weeklong summer vacation, and that was in Giant State University College Town, not exactly Wasilla, culturally speaking.

But no worries, Ohio! That Sarah Palin’s spunky, and she’s gonna show those city folk how to field dress a ten point buck! Hooo-aahh! I don’t usually go in for the Thomas Frank argument, that these “merely” cultural issues cause people to vote against their economic self-interest. First, I think people usually vote a certain way for good reasons: good reasons for them. Unlike my cohort in the Eastern elitist squad, I don’t buy that people are duped or even stupid. Everyone locks into some affective attachments; it just happens that the liberal affective attachments come with this scientistic mythology about “economic self-interest” being somehow different and superior to all the other  “interests” in life. This is a strange sort of prediliction indeed, since the same people will usually argue against mere social or economic efficiency criteria for, say, the arts. Aren’t the arts “wasteful” in the same way voting merely on abortion issues is “wasteful” for the poor family in Kansas? One would do well to read Bataille on restricted and general economy, and the various functions of wasteful expenditure. Instead, the solution has been to reduce everything to restricted economies, and to thereby import social and economic efficiency into the analysis. The arts are – so this story goes – really efficient after all, first, because they are crucial industries themselves (the culture industry), and second, because they produce positive externalities, etc.

All true, I guess, but ultimately lame. The struggling musician who could do much better writing stupid little commercial jingles “votes” against her economic self-interest everytime she refuses to “sell out,” just as surely as does the struggling mechanic obsessed with semi-automatic rifles. But you don’t see a lot of people writing books about how these people are “duped,” or, if you do (No Logo), it is only because their very “resistance” to efficiency has itself been cycled into production. To take it from a completely opposite direction, nearly everyone who votes at all really votes against economic self-interest if you posit the exploitation of labor as a given. As my three readers know, I do. This leads to the ironic condition whereby voting for your “self-interest” continually ratifies the exploitation of your labor. Of course, self-interest must be laid out on a continuum of possibility. It would always seem better to vote for the pro-union candidate than it is to vote for the anti-union candidate, the pro-choice candidate rather than the anti-choice candidate. But let’s not pretend that economic self-interest is a transparent category. So these arguments don’t really work for me, either way you slice it.

The question would not be “Is this congruent with self-interest?” Rather, we’d have to ask what affective attachments operate in either case. It also doesn’t seem as simple as prattling about “resentment,” as Krugman does in the NY Times today, unless you want to take a stronger Nietzschean version of ressentiment right to the heart of the Subject. Why the left isn’t better at asking these questions remains a mystery to me, since it is much better at managing collective affects in nearly every domain outside of electoral politics. They seem to think that if only people could see through the “cultural” screen to the real effects of economy, the scales would drop, and ta da! That the right has gotten so good at parsing out these attachments is similarly mysterious, since their devotion to the most stupid and reductionary neo-liberal economism generally dominates their analysis of all social life, full stop. But that might be how it works. Once you give up on the silly base-superstructure version of economism, you start to get a better sense of how these affects circulate. The right has completely given up on the distinction: everything is economics for them; it’s the night in which all self-interest is gray, so to speak. Hockey-mommery is as important as job creation: this is what you get when base-superstructure falls by the wayside. Obama, on the other hand, keeps up with this “They’re not talking about economy. They’re not talking about issues” stuff. Will it work with 6.1 % unemployment and a collapsing economic “base.” Maybe, maybe not. What irritates me about Palin, in any case, is not the premise, but the specific affects she promotes and hooks into. Again, I’m usually wrong.

The Atlanta-Athens-Atlanta-Seattle trip went off without a hitch. I have yet to be really annoyed by the airlines. I’m more amazed at the logistics of it all, quite frankly. On Friday my co-panelist and I woke up in Athens, Georgia, drove over to a parking garage at UGA, went to the student center, did our spiel, got back in the car, drove to Hartsfield-Jackson, had a few beers, got on a plane, and in six hours we were in a bar in Seattle. I guess other people are more used to this sort of thing, but I find it amazing.

In any case, I was going to post the Top 20 RSA Presentation Mistakes, until I realized that I don’t really see many bad presentations at RSA, and I really don’t remember one. Even the ones I disagree with are at least well presented; it’s usually a case of “That project would be so much more interesting if I was doing it,” as one of my buddies and I said a lot, but that means it’s interesting and smart enough to consider doing. I was pretty happy with the show, all told.

Probably the best one I saw was my co-panelist from C&W’s presentation at RSA. His stuff is always sharp, clever, funny, and smart, and I always learn a lot about my own work by speaking with him, especially because we fundamentally disagree on pretty important perspectives (production/consumption, etc.). Luckily, I had a chance to see two of his presentations this weekend, and we also had a good talk over beers at some college bar in Athens. I also had a chance to hang out with all the old cronies in Seattle, which was fun, as always.

Our watchwords for the weekend were as follows: fastpitch softball (mmm), eggroll (don’t ask, won’t tell); cheese-grinder (youch); beshat (which is to say, Biblically); DNA (as in, “The prosecutor will tell you, ladies and gentleman of the jury, that you can put blood in a magical machine that will tell you who committed a murder!”). You may find this confusing, but I can assure you that each of these terms was repeated on the order of 500 times, to much hilarity. Good times.

Anyway, while doing the flaneur thing in Teargas City, I came across these, probably a legal wall on 2nd and probably Lenora. These are just detail shots. I’ll probably post more on Friday. Enjoy.

Gas Mask Character, HEWS, Seattle (2nd and Lenora?)

Character, SNEKE, Seattle (2nd and Lenora)

Just saw the news that Albert Hofmann died. It’s amazing that Hofmann was 32 when he first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide while working for the Swiss pharmaceutical giant, Sandoz, and 37 when he became the first human being to ingest LSD-25. Hofmann had been working with various ergot derivatives when he accidentally synthesized a substance that would change the course of history in the 20th century. If you haven’t read LSD: My Problem Child, you should. It is a document of primary importance for the understanding of 20th century scientific development – the flip side and hidden twin of the Manhattan Project in more ways than one.

Just as a side note, Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc. and really the father of modern conservatism much more than Buckley, took LSD-25 often with his wife, playwright and congressional representative Claire Booth Luce. He even pushed (so to speak) stories on the “miracle drug” on his editors at Time and Life. He also took psilocybin mushrooms with R. Gordon Wasson, who first brought them to the United States after trips (so to speak) to Huautla region of Mexico in the early 1950′s. Wasson was an amateur mycologist and an investment banker at JP Morgan; like Luce, he was a staunch anti-communist.

For Monday morning hilarity, I suggest a reading of Stanley Fish’s crotchetiest column yet, in which he complains about not being invited to the VIP opening for the painfully 80′s pomo New Museum, then proceeds to thrash the exhibits (and their purported underlying aesthetic) soundly. From Fish’s description, you’d think the New Museum was stocked with works by that long forgotten artist, Mallory’s boyfriend Nick from Family Ties. I heard this joke already, in other words, and it involved Alex P. Keaton. But when a critic writes “you can’t make this stuff up” about your exhibit description, you know you’ve had your clock cleaned but good.

Fish’s more curious argument is that he prefers those depth pieces that are seemingly divorced from the politics of the day, as opposed to all this surface (glitz) that presumes itself to be actively tied to an outside, which is to say, contemporary politics, the agora rather than the interior spaces of the oikus. I suppose that’s fine, but I don’t see any necessary connection between depth and home, anymore than I see a connection between the surface and the agora. Indeed, I thought the last 40+ years of cultural criticism was doing a pretty good job of upending precisely these distinctions. And I’m pretty sure Stanley Fish knows that. Better to let the readers of the New York Times nod along, serious and amused, I guess. One aesthetic then, not two, but one aesthetic folded quite deviously, folds upon folds. And maybe we’re closest to the political when we’re farthest from the agora?