Mental 📸: Lina Ferreira, Hofstadter, Dark, Karaoke Paradise

Hi! A picture inside my head on this Memorial Day:

📚 “CID-LAX-BOG” by Lina Ferreira

In picking through Phillip Lopate’s The Contemporary American Essay (2021), Lina Ferreira’s “CID-LAX-BOG” caught my eye because of the Colombian connection. It’s very powerful. Lines like the following about a trip to donate blood hit like a blackjack to the nape of the neck:

 And as a thin thread of blood drips down my forearm, I picture my veins like great cylindrical halls lined with all the willing and unwilling participants of my mixed heritage. The rabies virus pumped in as if through the vents, weaving in and out, drifting over and under all the bodies inside my body, all the mixed blood in my blood.

📚Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
I’d previously read The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and seeing Hofstadter’s article version of that text in Lopate’s The Golden Age of the American Essay (2021) brought this one to mind. I’m about 20% of the way through, and at this stage, he’s exploring the relationship between pietism and rationalism in 19th/20th-century American history. Hofstadter was a masterful stylist and illuminating thinker. I thought his distinction between intellect and the intellectual was useful. I like this quote he includes from one of my heroes, John Dewey:

Let us admit the case of the conservative…If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place (45).

Beyond Dewey, quotes like this from the evangelist Billy Sunday are too much:

Jesus Christ could go like a six-cylinder engine, and if you think Jesus couldn’t, you’re dead wrong…Jesus was no dough-faced, lick-spittle proposition. Jesus was the greatest scrapper that ever lived (116).

🍿Karaoke Paradise (2022)

I saw this one at the European Cinema Festival at the Cinemateca in Bogota. It’s a Finnish documentary that follows a woman who travels to bars, nursing homes, and the like in rural areas to host karaoke events. It’s powerful in capturing the power of karaoke to combat loneliness and leave the performer feeling validated and affirmed. I’ve been revisiting some of the old punk rock/hardcore music of my youth, and group chants of the lyrics are a huge part of the live show in that subculture. The idea might be a little different, but it’s interesting to see a similar phenomenon take shape here in terms of the way that participating in rather than just observing live musical performance can satisfy deep emotional and social needs.

🍿 Dark (2022)
I’m on Season Three now. I admit things are starting to go a little off the rails for me. I adore the metaphor of time travel as a vehicle for exploring life’s untaken paths and previous mistakes. The moody atmosphere nicely carries through the entirety of the series, and some of the doubling of scenes at the start of the third season cleverly underscores the shift to a parallel universe. I like the show’s metaphysical reflections on the nature of time, but I might have dwelled for too long in the sectors of formal philosophy that take on those questions for its work in that area to hit as hard for me as perhaps it would otherwise.