A Leg Up

This blog is a lot of things, but I never expected that it would become what it has. This post is about just that: the unexpected creation of reality.

A few months ago, I posted about Tetris, one of my favorite games. Now, I'm not one for re-runs, but that post got me thinking about the viability of writing about Tetris in an academic setting. Due to the connections I drew to Confucian ideology of ritual and instinct, I pitched it to my philosophy professor and in the end wrote about this very issue for my final research paper in Confucianism and Virtue Ethics this past semester.

This is as much about the willingness of my professor to allow such a discussion take place, but because of the time I had spent composing my thoughts into writing on this blog, it made it easy to pitch this as a meaningful analogy and literal example of Confucian ritual. Because it was about something I care about deeply, the paper was engrossing to write and I think it turned out pretty well. There has actually been some scientific studies on the effects of Tetris linking it to brain development, specifically thickening the cerebral cortex. It's even been intimated as a "cognitive vaccine" for post-traumatic stress disorder. I would never have discovered this had I not been able to dip my toes in the waters of this blog.

Now, there's a lot of writing going on here at LegLeg, much of it is incredibly relevant to what's going on in popular culture, and it could very well serve as a jumping off point for further more "legitimate" forms of written work. This is the proof. What began one night as a kind of jest has become a consistent launching pad and work space for thoughts rendered from the impenetrable granite that is the internet. It makes me think about what a blog is for, really. College students spend so much time thinking about what other people think, getting trained to think quicker, more broadly, more specifically, and with confidence. Is a blog in this context about escaping from the framework of imposed subjects in order to apply our new cerebral methodologies to what we want to think about?

Or maybe we're learning more from this forum than we think, and it's fueling thoughts that might not have coalesced had we not taken this opportunity to say whats up. In any case, I'm just expressing my gratitude to the series of tubes that we call home, it's given me a leg up.

 

Going up

The past summer has been full of books for me, and few have sated my thirst after reading the Pevear translation of Anna Karenina. I've searched all of my standbys and classic writers, Fitzgerald, Forster (and others not beginning with "F"), but none have kept my attention after Tolstoy. That is, until I opened up Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist.

It's about elevator inspectors, and it's exhilarating.

Two warring factions in the Department of Elevator Inspectors vie for dominance: The Empiricists, who go by the book and rigorously check every structural and mechanical detail, and the Intuitionist, whose observational methods involve meditation and instinct. Set in a dirty, working class, mob-run American metropolis sometime after the civil rights movement, the book focuses on Lila Mae Watson, the first black female inspector in the country.

The book quickly unwinds form this initial novelty (elevator inspectors? really? how quaint) into a dark and hyper-realistic city with heavy suggestions of Film Noir, while going off on philosophical excursions into Lila Mae's educational life, and delving into her struggle with racism and politics. Blade Runner comes to mind, and much of the descriptors of the book I can think of come from film, rather than literature. But the writing is incredibly artful, not only the prose but the structure as well.

And while the book is going in what seems like one hundred directions at once, it's all headed upwards. The elevator provides not only the organizing content, but melds all of these ideas and themes into one focus. Never before have I considered the theoretical, psychological and even social implications of these metal boxes, but this work of art has given me new eyes onto the dark chutes we so depend on.

The book is a thriller, a philosophical investigation of culture and fear, an excursion of dark humor and is an entirely rich, full invented world in it's own right. From a vivid flashback to Lila Mae's final inspector's examination to the random mentions of Lift magazine, the world unfurls without pretense, each one accomplished with a whip-crack.

From the book:

"'If we have decided that elevator studies - nuts and bolts Empiricism - imagined elevators from a human, and therefore inherently alien point of view, wouldn't the next logical step, after we've adopted the Intuitionist perspective, be the build an elevator the right way? With what we've learned?'

'Construct and elevator from the elevator's point of view?'

'Wouldn't that be the perfect elevator?'"

The Intuitionist is just such a thing: a piece of steel constructed from air, a book separate from book-ness. Frankly, it's an ascension.