Other Self: An Interview with Angie Hobbs

Jeffrey Kastner, Sina Najafi and Angie Hobbs

“Most men agree that a true friend is a precious treasure,” Socrates’ student and amanuensis Xenophon records the philosopher observing, “and nevertheless there is nothing about which we give ourselves so little trouble as to make men our friends.” Such tensions—between the utter centrality of friendship to the development of both the individual and society at large and the casual, almost thoughtless way in which so many friendships are made and lost—have animated philosophical discourse since the very beginnings of the western intellectual tradition. The elusive, nuanced nature of philia and its relationship to community (both earthly and otherwise) remained an essential theme for theologians such as Augustine and Aquinas and secular thinkers like Montaigne and Mill, and such questions continue to tantalize contemporary thinkers and politicians today. Angie Hobbs—Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, England—has written widely on the philosophical history of friendship. She spoke with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi by phone in December 2009.


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A Dry Black Veil

Brian Dillon

­­­­­­­­By the last decades of the nineteenth century, an obscuring perplex of ideas regarding dust hung above the inhabitants of the European city like overlapping clouds, variously threatening or inspiring with the weight of knowledge, quantity of filth, or degree of infection they contained. London, especially—having only lately escaped a mid-century cholera season that had devastated parts of the inner city—seemed to exist in a miasmic haze of dirt, disease, and curiously aestheticized industrial pollution. As early as 1661, in th­e pages of his Fumifugium: Or, The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, the diarist and polymath John Evelyn had complained that citizens breathed “nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour,” which concoction scoured their lungs and disordered the entire body, so that coughs, catarrhs, and consumption raged more in London alone than in the whole of the rest of the world. The poison fug was partly attributable to domestic fires, but Evelyn blames brewers, dyers, lime-burners, and salt- and soap-boilers for the most noxious emanations:

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Games of Chance

D. Graham Burnett

In the earliest laboratory notebooks, the wall-mounted m­echanism shown in this image was simply called “the pinball machine.” In the published output of the research program of which it was a part, it wen­t by the more dignified­ appellation Random Mechanical Cascade, yielding a catchy acronym: RMC. Around the lab, however, the ­device was known affectionately as ­Murphy, since if anything could go wrong, it would.­ ­ ­ ­

­In a way, of course, this was exactly the point: the whole system—the nine thousand polystyrene balls droppin­­g through a pegboard of 330 precisely cantilevered nylon pins, the real-time photoelectric counters tallying (by LED readout) the segmented heaps forming belo­w, the perennially balky bucket-conveyor for resetting an experimental run—had all been painstakingly constructed and ca­librated in order first to exemplify, and then to defy, what the Victorian statistician ­Francis Galton dubbed the “Law of Frequency of Error."­

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Head Trips

Jordan Bear and Albert Narath

­­­For more than a century, any promenade do­wn a seaside boardwalk has required a stop at an apparently nam­eless apparatus: a painted wooden façade featuring a colorful character in an outlandish situation with a hole where its head should be. A tourist playfully inserting his or her head into the cartoonish scene is then recorded for posterity by a professional photographer. The genre has its favored iterations, from the weightlifting hulk to the bathing beauty, the swimmer perilously clenched in the mouth of a shark to the novice aviator nervously clutching the controls of an airplane. As one of the omnipresent features of visual mass culture in American life since the end of the nineteenth century, these façades offer the possibility of radical transformation in the guise of carefree recreation, a chance for the working-class beachgoer to become, safely and fleetingly, someone very different. As with any element of quotidian experience that see­ms always to have existed, the photo-caricature or comic foreground (two names given to the innovation by its inventor) does in fact have a genealogy—a complex one that winds its way through the rise of modern culture.­­

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Colors / Black

Paul La Farge

A little while back, when I was working on one of my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave, either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my face, 
waving. 


That darkness is what I think about when I think of black. I was going to write, the color black, but as every child knows black isn’t a color. Black is a lack, a void of light. When you think about it, it’s surprising that we can see black at all: our eyes are engineered to receive light; in its absence, you’d think we simply wouldn’t see, any more than we taste when our mouths are empty. Black velvet, charcoal black, Ad Reinhart’s black paintings, black-clad Goth kids with black fingernails: how do we see them?


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Reading to the Endgame

D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter

­THE PROBLEM

In his brief essay “Gli scacchisti irritabili” (“The 
Irritable Chess Players”) of 1985, Primo Levi elaborates a set of symmetries between the act of literary creation and the playing of a game of chess. Both a work of literature and the royal game, he suggests, unfold in time within strictures that inexorably invoke “life and the struggle for life.” There is, as he puts it, a “symbolic shadow” that lengthens over a chess board, since 
the way to the end is the way to a death, “a death for which you yourself are guilty.” The novel, of course, 
is the literary form that has evolved precisely to afford 
language the means of erecting and choreographing such a metaphorical life space. And thus it is no surprise that the novel, too, is haunted by a long shadow: all plots, as Don DeLillo memorably put it, end in death. Moreover, en route to their respective endgames, both chess and the novel offer powerful arenas in which to investigate the question of questions: the ever-vexatious issue of the relationship between fate and agency, between necessity and freedom. Every move is our own, except when it’s not. Either way, the board thins, the sheaf of paper in the right hand dwindles, sifting 
left as if blown by an inexorable wind—though of course, we turn every page. Chess, in this sense, is the opposite of dice, just as the novel is the opposite of Scripture (the exact difference between chance and providence has never been clear, but they share an antithesis in deliberative subjectivity, and this may be 
a clue).

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Roll Playing

Jeff Dolven

Sixty-four pages into his 1930 manifesto of rhythmic experimentation, New Musical Resources, the composer and music theorist Henry Cowell made a passing suggestion about how his more extravagant ideas might be realized: “Some of the rhythms developed through the present acoustical investigation could not be played by any living performer; but these highly engrossing rhythmical complexes could easily be cut on a player piano roll.”¹ As far as­ we know, onl­y one man took him up on the proposal, an expat American card-carrying communist jazz trumpeter and polyrhythmic prodigy named Conlon Nancarrow. But this man made it his life’s work.­

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The Fall and Rise of Ernest Lalor Malley

Christine Wertheim

­­“You seem very clever at explaining words, Sir,” said Alice. “Would you kindly tell me the meaning of the poem…?”


“Let’s hear it,” said Humpty Dumpty. “I can 
explain all the poems that ever were invented—and 
a good many that haven’t been invented just yet.”
­—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass


In 1945, John Ashbery discovered ­th­e work of an obscure Au­stralian poet named Ern Malley. “I liked the poems very much,” Ashbery recalls. “They reminded me a little of my own early tortured experiments in surrealism, but they wer­e much better.”¹ Later, in 1961, he included two of Malley’s poems, “Boult to Marina” and “Sybilline,” in an issue of Locus Solus edited with Kenneth Koch, Harry Mathews, and James Schuyler. Though neither Koch nor Ashbery believed Malley had any influence on his own work, both thought of him as a “secret, exotic, precious, outlandish figure” whom they would teach in their poetry classes at Columbia and Brooklyn College, introducing his work to the next generation of American writers, and, through them, back to their Australian peers John Forbes and John Tranter.^2­­­­

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