for 25 November 1997. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Filler

Subject: Pennyroyal Tea?

I've noticed over the past
couple of weeks that in the
Filler pages there are
frequent uses of lyrics from
Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea."
In one of the tables made
between Angst and Nostalgia
there was "Cherry Flavored
Antacids" and "Mentos." And
in an earlier issue I recall
the Evil Canadian Rabbit on
Crack reading a book on
Anemic Royalty. Do you find
something special about this
song or is it just some
coincidence?

Daved Balto

Good catch, David. Don't
really like the song much,
actually, it's just really
depressing, and, well, some
of us have been feeling
slightly depressed and blah
lately, so that song comes to
mind. Just another of the
countless downsides to
feeling slightly depressed
and blah.

The real question is, are we
just spoiled or do we have
iron-poor blood?

Critical Mask

Subject: Ideology and
Cynicism

I wonder if Nietzsche didn't
actually solve (or at least,
fully state) the entire
problem all those years ago.
Certainly, the dialectic
between recognizing the
illusory nature of ideology
and accepting its necessity
was one of his central
concerns. One way of reading
him would be to say that this
provokes three possible
responses: denial in those
who will nothingness,
cynicism in the Last Man,
and, in the Superman, the
strength of will to make
ideology into reality.

Jotham

P. S. Phyrro/Sextus Empiricus
faced the same problem, of
course, their response being
that one should suspend
judgment on all things while
accepting the illusions of
the society in which one
finds oneself as an
irreplaceable guide for
action. I doubt that this is
really possible in practice,
but in the case of Montaigne,
for example, it could serve
as the opening move in a
terrifyingly honest and
morally rigorous critique of
the self and society.

While the great Marxist
thinker Louis Althusser
wasn't fit to carry
Nietzsche's restraints at the
asylum where they both did
time, he goes way beyond the
Mustachioed One here: We all
have the "strength" to make
ideology into reality because
business and school give us
the practices that do it
automatically (though
Althusser, Foucault, and
their continuators who talk
about practice depend on a
notion of "the magic power of
ritual," which itself
deserves an examination that
I'm damn sure not doing
here). I actually think that
that "terrifyingly honest and
morally rigorous critique" is
what Althusser and Zizek are
pointing us toward.

Some years ago, the
bestseller-that-
nobody-actually-read was
Goedel, Escher, Bach: A
Golden Braid. It was, in
fact, a pretty hard book,
since it included as a
subthread a complete proof of
Goedel's Incompleteness
Theorem (and no, I haven't
the slightest idea if that's
how he spells his name);
however, if you were
interested in things like
that it was worth the effort.
It was about
self-referentiality and it
posited, among other things,
that exactly the type of
self-aware, cynical-about-
being-cynical attitude you
discuss is in fact the very
nature of consciousness. It's
actually rather optimistic, I
think; it suggests that the
post-postmodernism you decry
is in a way the very
definition of what being
human means....

Alan Kornheiser

You are of course right.
Self-awareness is the primary
tool of the intelligence and
a foundation of our humanity.
That's not the oppressive
feeling of knowingness I was
talking about. Note that the
word "cynicism" does not
appear once in the index to
Hofstadter's book. And hey -
I like post-postmodernism.

Ad It Up

And then of course, one that
may have gone unnoticed south
of the border. Canadians were
bombarded last year with the
Bank of Montreal's online
service ad campaign, which
used crowds of children
à la "I'd like to
Teach the World to Sing" all
happily mouthing, "The Times,
They Are A-changin'" along
with Bob Dylan.

But for all the expressed
outrage at the bank's
shameless use of a
counter-culture anthem - the
boomers craving an apology
while gleefully setting their
modems to receive 24-hour
mutual-fund updates - nobody
asked Dylan why he had done
it.

I think perhaps that people
are afraid of the answer....

Chris Corrigan

Fuckin' 'nucksters. Dylan
never would have met with the
pope if the Bank of Montreal
hadn't started him down the
slippery sell-out slope.

Ersatz

And I thought I was the only
one that got a kick out of
closed captioning. The best
places are the live shows,
especially news. When I watch
some live, unrehearsed event
on CNN, the only thing that
keeps me from switching is
watching the closed-
captioning guy struggle to
keep up, horribly mutilating
the words and then finally
giving up and inserting a
[unintelligible]. Makes you
feel sorry for the deaf
people out there. Maybe we
can start a support group.

By the way, I love your work
there at Suck. Feel free to
make fun of me in the Fish.
I'm sure you will anyway, but
I don't care.

Scott Martin
<scott@centex.net>

It's [unintelligible] people
like you, Scott, who
[unintelligible] our day and
make us want to
[unintelligible]
[unintelligible].

Ersatz

Filler

Dear Suck,

My routine viewing of COPS
after wolfing a roast-beef-
and-cheddar was recently
interrupted by a three-hour
Suddenly Susan special in
which Brooke Shields brings a
cigar and a Beanie Baby to
Bob Hope on his deathbed. I
could hardly blink. In my
transfixion, I failed to
notice that my chair, made
entirely from best-selling
Stephen King novels, had
become clammy with diet soda
spilled when I was switching
over from Seinfeld to Car
Talk earlier in the morning.
Normally, I like to listen to
comedy that's actually funny
while reading books written
by smart, interesting people,
but ever since my melted
cheese melted on my vinyl
copy of Spiderland, I haven't
been the same. Mostly I take
long naps between shifts at
Chick-Fil-A. Sometimes I
dream the Car Talk guys are
Beck and Matt Groening. When
I wake up I like to pretend
my pubic hairs are curly
fries.

Of course, when my son is
around, I have to deport
myself more respectably,
listening to Radiohead while
Sponge waits on the stoop for
the delivery from that good
Indian place next door.

Yours,

Ed Skoog

You can be in our club any
time, Ed.