Leningrad Gothic

Feedback makes me think of "feedback and distortion", the stuff that contemporary guitar rock is made of. Anyway, today's essay comes with a soundtrack: http://metameso.org/~joe/cowboys-vs-einstein.mp3

I was trying to do zazen today and there was this guy outside with a leaf blower. I wanted to kill him.

(NB. I started blasting the above MP3, and my flattie appeared from upstairs - I didn't know she was home. She said I didn't wake her up though.)

What is a peer? We arrogate ourselves into the company of Socrates, Darwin, DFW, and maybe Deleuze and Guattari in this writing project. Maybe it's an exaggerated sense of self-importance that does it? Like in Lou Reed's chorus: "You're going to reap just what you sow."

At the same time, "paragogy" seems to denote more of a horizontal movement than a forward movement. Paragogy is practiced by the kids talking in the back of the class. We're the film critics who either make or break someone else's work. Like in the MP3 we're quite comfortable playing Philip Glass against the Leningrad Cowboys covering Lou Reed to see what comes out of it -- not that we're so much "peers" of these guys, and after all it's not as if layering two audio tracks requires too much intelligence.

The track was on my mind though, because of this quote I read on Slashdot:


 * What made "great" scientists recognized, in the previous century, was not mere genius or relentless work or even showmanship. The only ones that were noticed were the ones who realized the great collection of authorities in the field were dead wrong, and then had the guts and genius to prove they were wrong. They were cowboys like Einstein and Tesla. The days of the cowboys are gone. (And forget about working in a patent office part-time, while working on your breakthrough discovery. Then again, the pay and financial security of academicians/researchers are so bad, the next vanguard of scientists just may require a day job.) The last scientist I can think of who went maverick and made her mark was Barbara McClintock. She had to stand by her research for decades while it was dismissed by her peers, until they couldn't continue to look stupid and wrong. And who the hell here even knew who she was when I mentioned her? [...] There are probably many scientific discoveries unknown to us, merely because the first guy to prove it just didn't have the right juice, or some bureaucratic body had a financial interest in dismissing the findings. -- slashdot_commentator, http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/11/08/232223/the-stroke-of-genius-strikes-later-in-life-than-it-used-to

So there's a mythology here: the myth of the cowboy (or gunslinger), the man (though of course it is not always a man) who works alone (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IWorkAlone). In literature: William S. Burroughs (though in fact he often called on colleauges). In journalism: Hunter S. Thompson. There's a thrill in the encounter, though; and I think the "gunslinger" myth does a good job of capturing the "first person perspective" and getting "you" into the story (cf. Scott McCloud, "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art").

In the same way, there's a thrill to working with others. It's generally a pleasurable sensation to get feedback from other people on what you do. Why? Certainly we're not talking about the "feedback" of noise pollution here, the noise that comes from modernity itself and that leaves us with no space to ourselves. Or what? What is it that makes a given connection fun and friendly, and another one tedious and obnoxious? And of course the same goes for one's connection with oneself.


 * "Future you is just past you with new molecules. We shoot the old ones out follicles and hair is dead cells so our faults get shed well, meaning our parts that are hard to adore get mopped up on the barber shop floor." -- George Watsky, http://lybio.net/george-watsky-letter-to-my-16-year-old-self/poem/

Words are what work for communicating with other people or with yourself. "Burroughs sees the significance of a written word as a distinguishing feature of human beings which enables them to transform and convey information to future generations." (Or downstream users more generally. "He proposes the theory of 'the unrecognised virus' present in the language, suggesting that, 'the word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host.'"

The word for us is a bit like the pheromone trails used by ants. Practically next door to working alone is not existing at all, or just being an "ant" -- working as a mindless drone on the larger "organism" that is the ant colony.

PS. The title of the essay comes from my blog: http://hyperreal-enterprises.posterous.com/leningrad-gothic