Frank Kogan's forthcoming "Real Punks Don't Wear Black"

unless it's like 10 below then everyone would be fuckin' freezing.

Yeah, I think that's the point I'm trying to make, that "subjective" and "objective" leave most of the map untouched. My feeling is that you and I aren't seriously at odds here, but my other guess is that if you dropped the word "subjective" from your vocabulary, your thinking wouldn't be inhibited thereby. E.g., if in some instances by "subjective" we mean "we can get away with disagreeing without being called insane," that's what we should say: not that we're being subjective, but that can get away with disagreeing. This is because the word "subjective" implies a deeper principle than "what we can get away with saying," and furthermore implies that there are only two choices: you're either speaking for yourself alone or your speaking for everybody.

In your example, everyone in the room could agree, "It's too cold for some of us but not for all of us." But as soon as someone says, "No, it's too cold, period," the situation has changed. Either the guy is dismissed out of hand - is in essence dismissed from the conversation - or at least some of the other participants have to acknowledge that one person's judgement of coldness may be better than another's (in which case it's no longer just up to the individual). OK, that'd be a strange argument, to argue over whether someone feels cold or not. But to bring up an example that I use in my book, what about the person who claims that Jay-Z is too pop to be real hip-hop? Or what about the person who claims that there are witches? Or the person who believes in Intelligent Design? You can call all of these judgments and their corresponding counterjudgments (Jay-Z is real hip-hop, there are no witches, Intelligent Design is vacuous bullshit) "subjective," but how does that help you? What does it tell us about these judgments that we wouldn't otherwise know, if there were no such term as "subjective"? Once something jumps social roles from "matter of taste" to "matter of judgment" (which often then links up with "matter of definition"), then not everyone is agreeing to disagree, since some people's ideas can be better or worse than the others', some people can be right and others wrong, and we have no process that everyone will adhere to that determines who is right or wrong.

If you want to, you can call matters of taste and matters of judgment "subjective," but I don't see what you've gained by lumping the two together. "I don't like spinach" and "witches are real" seem at a pretty far remove.

But all this is also at a pretty far remove from why people call me solipsistic. In Real Punks, where I tell my story I'm not doing so just for its own sake but because there are resemblances between my story and some other people's, so by analyzing and probing my own predicament I'm analyzing and probing a lot more, too. I make this clear right on the first page of the preface, where I say that my sentences don't just come from my pen, they're a social product; and I ask, therefore, not just what do I gain by producing such sentences, but what does a society gain by producing people like me who write such sentences. So I'm saying that my story is relevant even for people whose experience doesn't match up with mine, since I'm still playing a role in the society of which they're a part. Of course, one can dispute this claim, but whether I'm being "subjective" or not doesn't touch the claim one way or another. Rather, what's at issue is whether or not my experience resembles other people's; and whether the principles I'm illustrating in telling my story can be applied to other people; and whether my social roles relate to the social roles of poeple whose story doesn't resemble mine.

You think you know me?

And if that surprises you, then either you don't know me as well as you think, or you don't know her.

You think you know me?

You think you know me
Word on the street is that you do
You want my history
What others tell you won't be true

I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep
Nobody's really seen my million subtleties

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I hear you talking
Well, it's my turn now
I'm talking back
Look in my eyes
So you can see just where I'm at

I walked a thousand miles to find one river of peace
I walked a million more to find out what this shit means

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

I'm a bad ass girl in this messed up world
I'm the sexy girl in this crazy world
I'm a simple girl in a complex world
A nasty girl, you wanna get with me?
You wanna mess with me?

Got stains on my t-shirt and I'm the biggest flirt
Right now I'm solo, but that will be changing eventually, oh
I laugh more than I cry
You piss me off, good-bye
Got bruises on my heart and sometimes I get dark
If you want my auto, want my autobiography
Baby, just ask me

well, i think this relates back to my issues above with readers claiming to not understand writer's metaphors, and feeling like instead of not understanding them they are just rejecting them b/c they cannot see how anyone's peculiar experience is of use, b/c it has to be individual to them and therefore must be different from everyone elses. there's no understanding how getting into someone else's understanding might help with making your own map. anyway...

Except the lyrics on the page don't convey how sexy it is when she says. It's a come on. The song is like the world's most brilliant personal ad.

And I never in my life wrote a line as great as "I walked a thousand miles while everyone was asleep." I don't know if Jay-Z or Eminem ever did either. Or Dylan. It's like she's saying, "Here I am, stealth genius, and you didn't know." Of course, she's making promises in that song that she probably won't be able to keep, just as Dylan and Jagger and Iggy and Lennon and Johnny and Johansen never lived up to their promise.

When I go out I'm a go out shooting
I don't mean when I die
I mean when I go out to the club, stupid

That's actually a pretty good definition of "subjective". And since the difference between "subjective" and "objective" is a continuum and not a black-and-white divide, then I think perhaps you're right that the word obscures more than it reveals. It's basically a lazy way of saying, "I don't think you're right and I don't think you can convince me." And in any case, I don't think the word is absolutely necessary to an understanding of criticism. Because criticism (or at least good criticism) is a social process, good critics quickly move beyond the "AC/DC rules! Losers drool!" school of thought and they start to ask "Why do they rule?" and "What other bands rule in similar ways?" and so on, and pretty soon they find that there are things they can hold a conversation about, even with people who might not agree that AC/DC rules.

It's actually "And I'll walk a million more to find out what this shit means."

See what I mean about her making promises? I admire her for making them.

Or it could be a way of saying "I think you are right but there's no sure-fire way that we can convince even the people we respect." But my major problem with the words "subjective" and "objective" is that they divide up the universe between what's in the psyche and what's in objects; that way of mapping the universe pretty much leaves out most of the universe. Leaves out society, and culture, and people's lives, and the fact that people use objects in their lives.

(Not that people who use the words "objective" and "subjective" actually map out the universe in this way. Another thing I imply but don't really get into in the book is that the problem isn't that people's views are distorted by their belief in a mind-matter split - normally people don't think about that split at all, and it really doesn't play a big role in social discourse - but that they run to such splits when they don't want to deal with social conflict.)

Frank I really really like this point - I think I've verged on thinking it dozens of times without ever actually finally articulating it. e.g. I used to be broadly in favour of Ned's "Radical Subjectivity" position but now I'm somewhat uncomfortable with it, not because I believe in objectivity but because it feels like a conflict-avoidance-mechanism.

hahahahaha. you have brass balls, and i love you for saying this. youve just sold another copy of your book, which might have been your intention.

When I first listened to Bob Dylan's mid-'60s stuff I thought it was especially honest. It was honest to me because the vocals weren't pretty and didn't sound like singers were supposed to sound, and mistakes were left in. The lyrics to "Visions of Johanna," "Memphis Blues Again," etc. were honest because they were self-destructive. The earlier protest stuff, attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, fit into a genre of "folk" music; the electric stuff seemed more individual and true. Dylan got to be "honest" not by attacking power, prestige, and everyday commonplaces, but by attacking Dylan.

I thought if you were going to get to see Ashlee's come-on, you should see mine as well, so that's the first paragraph. Ashlee's has a better lilt. I should work on my flirting technique.

I wrote the piece 22 years ago, and it's not about any actual Dylan autobio. "The true autobiography of Bob Dylan isn't an account of his life, or how he got to be that way; but of how it got to be that way, how we got to be that way." In other words, I'm saying we get to complete Dylan's "autobiography" in our own lives and our own stories.

Harold Bloom to thread.

Yes, this thread's all about selling copies of my book.

and i wish harold bloom would contribute, but isn't he very sick? (im reading genuis at the moment. pretty good.)

I like these lines, but I don't think I'd like them as much if I didn't know about her family background (ie., ex-pastor father).

But my major problem with the words "subjective" and "objective" is that they divide up the universe between what's in the psyche and what's in objects; that way of mapping the universe pretty much leaves out most of the universe.

This is also a good point. When I say "It's cold in this room", I'm talking about things both outside myself (ie., molecules vibrating in the room, how much clothing I'm wearing) and inside myself (ie., my nerve endings, body temperature, etc.). When I say "AC/DC rules", I'm also talking about things both outside myself (Angus Young's abilities as a guitarist) and inside myself (personal listening history and tastes). To say that either statement is "subjective" may be a useful corrective to someone who denies the "inside myself" part of the equation, but it's not the whole truth.

Well, admittedly these people in my example are kind of straw men, but so is the person that denies the "inside myself" part of the equation. The whole thing is only constructed as an example to clarify some distinctions that in most real situations would be mired in grey, hence the straw men.

But I think that people who criticize critics for being "subjective" or "solipsistic" misunderstand the nature of criticism. In some ways the process is more interesting than the conclusion - the journey is the destination. This is the same reason that the considerations that led a critic to vote a certain way on a year-end poll are more interesting to read than the ballot itself. You might maintain that a conclusion is "subjective" but that doesn't mean it's not about something real, and that you can't learn something by reading how it was arrived at.

I can't quite go as far as you do to maintain that the "in here/out there" framework serves no purpose. I'll admit that it's a framework that we often take for granted, but I'm not sure there's much we can achieve by discarding it. I'm not even sure how we could go about discarding it. To discard it would seem to deny that each of us has a separate internal existence.

I should probably clarify this. Obviously there are many reasons why someone might say something that I would disagree with (not the least being that I might be wrong), but in some cases it could be that we are seeing different things because we are looking at the same thing from different places. If I'm wearing blue sunglasses and I say "The sun is blue" and you're wearing red sunglasses and you say, "No, it's red", if we don't stop and consider our sunglasses then we may never resolve our disagreement.

First, to put some perspective on Ashlee, in one of her songs on I Am Me she says that the fact that her boyfriend is so sensitive ("You finish all my sentences before they begin") is that he must have been hers in a previous life; this is a really boring and unimaginative metaphor, far duller than anything you'll find in the early work of Eminem or Dylan or Johansen et al. Stuff like this is why I won't be altogether shocked if she doesn't follow through on the potential of "Autobiography."

Second, I've revived the Death of Pop thread; not only is it one of the all-time great ILM threads, it's the one that pulled me onto the board in the first place.

should be "means that he must have been hers." Actually, what I need to do is to take a nap.

I'm not sure what you mean by "social fact" here. But I think you mean something like this: the concept of a "room" is something that we learn from society and something whose meaning is preserved by mutual agreement. In other words, even the constructs that we see as residing in our minds are part of a fabric that unites us with other people. It's only because I have been raised in a culture with the concept of "roomness" that I even think in terms of rooms. So culture becomes the all-pervading matrix of our existence, and the inside/outside distinction loses its meaning. That's one way of looking at it.

Another way of looking at it is that there is no stable, unitary statement, "It is cold in this room". This statement can only be made in a certain social situation, and its meaning is entirely dependent on that context, and cannot be preserved outside of such a context.

So it would seem that my insistence that the "room" is an external reality that is independent of the social context is incorrect.

However, it was never my intention to establish that the "room" is external of social context in that way. Rather, I am saying that the "inside/outside" distinction is provided by the social context, and it is a useful distinction to use in communication, so I don't wish to discard it.

You remember those toys you had when you were a very small kid, plastic shapes - circles, squares, stars - and a ball or a table or something with corresponding holes to fit the shapes into? This is my picture of music appreciation - you like the Stones if you have a Stones shaped hole in your head, you don't like jazz if you don't have a jazz-shaped hole in your head. And I've always characterised this as something along the lines of radical subjectivity, because it's all about what's in your head - no-one can tell you that jazz is objectively Good Music because if you don't have that hole in your head you just ain't gonna see it. But it isn't really all that subjective because a) the shape of the block - an objective fact - is obviously just as important a part of the equation as the hole in your head - the subjective opinion. And ii) as Frank says, it's a social thing. No-one can say to you "Jazz is good, you are an idiot for hating it", but you can talk about why you don't like jazz - what is it in the shape of the block or the shape of the holes in your head that mean they don't fit together - and you can, either on your own or by talking about these things with other people, change the holes in your head, so that maybe one day you will come to like Jazz. And that to me is something that creates a whole other set of questions - how exactly does one change the holes in one's head? How far could you take it - could your brain eventually become a sponge, able to accept and appreciate any kind of music? Is that even a goal worth aiming for - what would happen to critical appreciation then?

But you know what? My heart's with the first album. That's the one where more feels at stake, in words and in sound. Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic.com complains about the second album (he liked the first much more): "The problem is this album is presented with utter seriousness, as if her garden-variety changes in emotions and fashion were great revelations instead of being just what happens in adolescence." That's obviously not how I hear it. Is it possible to listen to "L.O.V.E." and "Burning Up," for example, and not get into the goofing around? I guess it is for Erlewine, who's always worth reading anyway. He's right that her changes in emotions and fashion are garden-variety. That doesn't mean they can't be revelations. The situations and emotions in Dylan's "Outlaw Blues" and "Visions of Johanna" and "Sooner Or Later" are just as garden variety. What is amazing is what he makes of them. Any 23 year old can say that even though he sometimes looks and acts like a weasel, he still feels like there's a hero somewhere in him (you hope that a 23 year old hasn't yet lost a sense of his heroic potential). But most won't then come up with anything like "Well, I might look like Robert Ford, but I feel just like Jesse James" to call forth the legends of weasels and heroes past, not to mention calling forth the fear that he'll get shot in the back for it (and the subtext that says, "Look, I can make my little blues song go anywhere, try and stop me"). The risk with Ashlee is that she'll put everything into perspective - that she already has - that she'll decide that a weasel is just a weasel and a breakup is just a breakup and they have no resonance with any larger perfidy or heroism. Maybe "Autobiography" and "Shadow" and "I Am Me" and "La La" are just the pop machine making a couple of lucky shots, and maybe this garden-variety celeb (Dylan: "I know there're some people terrified of the bomb. But there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a Modern Screen magazine") won't make much more that's extraordinary out of her ordinariness. If a Sophie or Alanis or Lucinda had come up with a clumsy line like "Does the weight of consequence drag you down until it pulls you under" (in the title song of I Am Me), I'd mutter, "Go take a walk in the park, or a nap, or something," but in Ashlee it gives me hope. If she's still got pretentions, maybe she'll push herself to make her mind worthy of those pretentions. You know, like she's got a million miles to go before she sleeps. Or not. In the meantime, at least she gets to speak to my inner 19 year old. Important not to lose that guy.

(This mistake wasn't because I mistyped, but because I neglected to look up the spelling.)

thats your problem.

Oh, and do not do not do not order the hardcover version, which is ridiculously expensive and besides won't even have a dust jacket or a cover photo. The hardcover is really only meant for those libraries that want books in hardcover.

And remember, the book has raunchy rap lyrics and free-floating expletives.