19th
Something I wanted to talk about in my last post but then forgot was the idea of “inside/outside,” which I know Derrida supposedly destroyed decades ago, but one thing I’ve been thinking about recently is how binaries are still useful even when they aren’t necessarily tenable. I think this is basically Frank Kogan’s take on deconstruction, which I’ve been trying to understand for years (mainly as a way to avoid having to read Derrida). And I think Kogan got it from Richard Rorty, as did Louis Menand, who lead me to read this essay last year but I don’t remember anything I got from it. And I think Rorty derives from Wittgenstein, whom I tried to read this summer but gave up. I’m sorry if this is all just basic pragmatism, but they haven’t offered any courses on it at school so I don’t know much about it. I took my dad’s copy of The Metaphysical Club down from the shelf the other day but I don’t think I’ll get around to reading it for another couple years. Maybe I’ll talk about meeting Louis Menand later in this post.
Kogan likes to use the example that “a cold star is 2,000 degrees above zero and a high-temperature superconductor is a couple hundred degrees below zero, the comparison being to other stars and other superconductors,” acknowledging that “hot/cold” is still a useful binary even though their definitions are kinda fluid; we just have to trust our common sense to recognize when something is “hot” or “cold.” Actually thinking about this now, that philosophy seems like the type of irrationality that could lead to fascism or something. I’ve had this file on my desktop for about a year or so but I’m not sure it relates.
And so when I was visiting Kenneth he told me he was pissed that Tom Stoppard denounced other people’s interpretations of his work at a lecture, and I told Kenneth how Dr. Keller was pissed that Daniel Mendelsohn denounced Stoppard’s interpretation of his own work in the Letters page of the New York Review of Books. I told Kenneth that maybe sometimes authors don’t control the meanings of their work and maybe sometimes (as in the case of Tom Stoppard, who seems to know what he’s doing) they do. This is maybe what Kogan means when he derides “[t]he mugwump who misreads [Richard] Meltzer’s ‘pertinence can be just anywhere at all’ as meaning ‘pertinence is just anywhere at all,” a distinction I consciously ignored when I was writing my high school senior thesis.
[Kogan also has this to say of Meltzer: “Basically, after reading Meltzer I can’t write for a day without picking up his style, it’s so strong.” The same thing is probably true of me and David. I’m gonna try to dial down the “like basically”s and “anyway”s and “and so”s, and I figure if I keep this up long enough I’ll develop a more distinct blogging voice or whatever, but be patient.]
[This has been the first time I’ve really missed my copy of Real Punks Don’t Wear Black, which I’m pretty sure Nick returned after I loaned it to him in 2008. I thought I had most of it memorized by now, but I’ve been relying on Google Books for the quotes. I already recommended the book to David and now I’m recommending it to you: if you haven’t read it already, click on that link and order it. It’s way better than this Tumblr.]
Anyway I’ve also been thinking about the “inside/outside” thing because the people in the Spy book are really into touting the magazine’s “insider/outsider dynamic” (p. 55) and right now I’m gonna loop back and contradict myself and say that living in New York makes you both an insider and an outsider. My first school was in Chinatown, where there were maybe two other white kids, and my second was on the Upper West Side, where there were maybe two other kids who lived below 34th Street. The whole time I was going there I refused to identify with the school’s preppy stereotype, but I didn’t really have any life outside of it (by which I mean any hipster friends). But then Vampire Weekend and Gossip Girl came out and I decided it was cool to be preppy but I couldn’t get into Harvard or Yale so I ended up at the Ivy League school for “trustafarians and children of celebrities who major in drum circles and semiotics” (I’m not any of those things either). And then I wrote a punk song where I rhymed “Chuck Bass” with “Cambridge, Mass.”
It’s kinda like how in the Spy book they say, “[T]he misapprehension that we were rich New York preppies always rankled us: The two founding editors and Susan Morrison were all products of provincial middle-class families and public-school educations;” or like how Ezra Koenig’s parents are middle-class Jews. I wrote this post a week ago and forgot what else I was gonna say so I’m gonna publish it now.
