Electronic Monument

The Monument has been established and locked in!

www.Wix.com/StephenJLind/Peanuts-Gallery

Peanuts Widget

COMICS.com has now released their Peanuts strip Widget:

http://comics.com/widgets/peanuts/


(FYI - it seems a little buggy to me right now, as you may notice from the Sidebar version below)

Neon, Neon, Neon... am I getting tired of Neon?

(Dec. 6, 1962)

We suffer from compassion fatigue:  Granted.  Tourism requires spectacle:  Granted.  Beyond that... I'm not so sure.

Reading this last chapter from Ulmer's Electronic Monuments, I can't help but return to a theme I struggled with a few weeks ago - that of Reason vs. Neon.  If we suffer from a certain numbness and tend to allow the abject to stay abject, is the solution more potent spectacle?  Perhaps more strategic spectacle?  Spectacle directed at that which is not yet spectacle?  I'm not sure I'm comfortable with this approach.  There seems to be a certain danger to it...

Again I find Ulmer's work thought provoking, but at times a little alarming - alarming in a way that I'm not entirely okay with.  It seems that there is a certain exploitative use of Neon over Reason happening more than once.  That is not to say that the Reason is absent, but rather that the combination of gas and electricity may be problematically volatile.  For instance, in the recollection of the Times' "Portraits of Grief," it was noted that "an editor named Wendell Jamieson circulated a memo admonishing contributors to avoid certain tropes.  By then, evidently, the Times had filled its quota of bond traders who loved their wives and kids and were fanatical about golf" (244).  Perhaps I am simply missing it, but there seems to be no condemnation of such approach.  The victim is not the right type of spectacle, so figure out a new way to showcase him is the line of thought.  If devoted golfer-husband-father is how that bond trader self-identified and how the family remembered him, why is the egent given license to recast him as more spectacular and "free of the burdens of compassion fatigue?"

Ulmer routinely uses dramatic, graphic material to illuminate his ideas.  It would be naive not to recognize the value of such in the marketability of a book.  That's not to say that Ulmer is merely falling in-step with academic capitalism, but I wonder how much is spectacle in order to draw attention to the book.  That then compounds the problem of our ethical limitlessness - how much Neon per part Reason?  While he remarks off-hand that there is "more to capitalism than fraud" (251), he still proposes for consideration "an eternal stove labeled Invest in the Future into which visitors [to Ground Zero] are invited to toss their cash" (247).  Are we okay with such a proposal, even if just a "proposal?"  Are we okay with the constant invokations of Bradley McGee?  I'm not sure that I am.

Perhaps this is spectacle for the sake of overriding our own academic compassion fatigue - bending the bar too far so that when it relaxes it is in the proper place.  But at what cost?  Ulmer tells us, "When you see the gain, look also for the loss" (247).  What are we losing in this drive for MEmorialization, for Electracy?  For what lies "beyond" (258)?  The Sufi that Ulmer mentions (252) had a battle years ago with Spectacle in Turkey.  The Karagoz shadow puppetry (BELOW) became a hit with the masses - largely in part to its spectacular screen-ishness.  Islamic law prohibited such as they were representations of animate objects, but ultimately came up with the line that the perforations in the puppetry made them non-representative, and thus they were permitted.  The Sufi were backed into a corner - either fight the will of the masses or lose part of their religious consistency.

Does electracy/MEmorialization back us into a corner?  What might WE be losing?  Perhaps LOSING BE US...