I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.

This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.

–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.

Here is an awesome video that I found via the aforementioned blog:

The other thing that has been standing out about it is how contemporary the apocalyptic tone feels. I mean, every era arrives at the conclusion that the world is going to end on its watch, but the particulars tend to vary. The sort of traditional return of the messiah has a certain feel, and the nuclear holocaust of my youth had a rich texture of its own.

Eliot’s interwar poetry sees the impending end of the world as a collapse into filth. Society recedes until all we have left is squalid savagery. In our political climate in which not taking any responsibility for anything is the ne plus ultra, this all starts to feel very familiar. It’s pretty shocking how quickly a handful of maniacs can reverse so much progress.

The big thing, though, is a sort of shift in my sort of mental state regarding my, I don’t know, let’s say “condition” for lack of a better word. I think that in a lot of ways living with C and S has created a sort of suspension or deferral where I’m sort of waiting for things to happen in regard to them, and now that’s gone so I have to do things now, which is going to be strange. I’m not sure I’m up for that any more. I’m not even really very clear on what things are. I guess I’m just going to have to keep my eyes open.

As you are probably aware, Malcolm Gladwell is a man who makes his living repackaging conventional wisdom with glib, offbeat twists. He allows the dullest of the hegemonically enfranchised to feel clever and iconoclastic, so he’s quite a success.

You may also know that Neil Gaiman is a fantastic comic writer, and a perhaps somewhat rougher novelist. He is also married to Amanda (Fucking) Palmer, but that’s neither here nor there. Slightly more salient is that his hair is beautiful enough to corrupt to American legal system.

Bear these facts in mind as you read the following dialog.

Me.: What are you doing?

C.: Reading the New York Times.

Me.: Yeah, how are rich people saving the world?

C.: (baleful glare)

Me.: What does Malcolm Gladwell say about it?

C.: I don’t know.

Me.: Can’t hear him through his hair?

So then C says she doesn’t know what Malcolm Gladwell looks like, so we head to Google Image Search. She just searches by name, my search string is “does malcolm gladwell look retarded or what?” The whole point of this post is that one of the images that this search returned was this one:

So there you have it, in a sufficiently strong wind, Neil Gaiman’s justice-destroying hair makes him look like Malcolm Gladwell. It’s a crazy world.