orc and urizen
The other day Caterina linked Louis Wain's descent into schizophrenia as indicated by cat paintings, and I have not been able to get them out of my head. It's as if this guy repeated the horrific transition from the nineteenth century to the twentieth inside his own skull. By now conversation circles seem to have exhausted the links between creativity and illnesses like manic depression (a correlation, yes) or schizophrenia (probably no link)—and yet the "psychotic" paintings are far more interesting, and in their way more beautiful, than the "normal" paintings. I'm particularly drawn to Psychotic Cats Nos. 2 and 3, though they frighten me as well. You can see the obsession and fear latent in the intricate, jagged symmetry: to arrange these minute shapes was his charm against dissolution of the mind.
See, the problem with the globalization debate is that its most visible participants are the evil plutocrats on one side and the stupid extremist millenarian leftists on the other. (The book in question appears to be a typically turgid mélange of Marx and Foucault that ultimately calls for "an affirmative violence" to usher in the post-capitalist era.) If we could just get these people to accept that the process of globalization cannot be denied, maybe we could start an intelligent conversation about better ways to do it. (International free trade also constitutes—you guessed it—another way for meat to be unsafe.)
