ApatheticLiberalDepressingPostModernEvangelicalRedNeckTechnoApocalypse

So I think I've fixed my bike tire again, but I'll have to wait a couple of hours to see if it's still leaking. I had replaced it Sunday and it held air until Monday afternoon, when I needed to ride home from work. Then this morning it lasted barely 30 minutes while I rode to and from the local library, so I figured I'd be able to find the hole now that it had enlarged.

Last night we were playing cards when my boss called my cell phone to chew me out. One of our customers, who I am apparently responsible for since nobody else is, was having problems with his tv upstairs, and his drop-down screen theater downstairs. So I told him what I knew, which was that I hadn't done anything that should have caused problems... And then the customer called me five minutes later, fresh off a cussing spell, and I, tech-support genius that I am, got everything working again over the phone in no time flat. Now I have fewer minutes left.

two cultures

From The Art of Mathematics, by (Professor) Jerry King:

One of the committee members was a distinguished bioscientist whose own world was reduced to what he could see through a microscope when he looked at the insides of catfish. He knew more than anyone living about the causes and the development of malignant tumors in marine creatures and his publication record was longer than any fish that ever got away. But what he knew about literature would fit inside your watch. His name was Cell and he went everywhere wearing his white laboratory coat and carrying a bulging folder marked "research." Cell considered me to be an advocate for the notion of liberal education which included a strong dose of literature and reading. Consequently, he considered me a challenge. To Cell, I was someone who neede reforming....

"Those guys," he asserted, "have nothing to do." By "those guys" Cell meant every humanist, everywhere.

"They work in their offices during the day," I told him. "At night, they work at home or in the library. They don't have to be in a laboratory."

One day Cell ventured outside his laboratory. Wearing his white jacket and carrying his research folder, he wandered down a corridor in the humanities building. He walked past the open door of Professor Prose, the university's distinguished authority on the modern American novel. What Cell saw so excited him that he rushed over to my office to tell me about it.

"I've been working in my laboratory all morning," he said as he thrust his open research folder toward me with both hands. I got a glimpse of a black-and-white photograph taken through a microscope. It looked like a piece of honeycomb that had been licked by a bear. "I've been doing research," he told me.

He put the folder down on the corner of my desk. "What do you pay that guy Prose over in English?" he asked.

"No professor works for me," I said. "And you know I cannot discuss particular university salaries."

reading in the summer

As far as I'm concerned, spring's over. Even though it will get hotter, and even though I've shrugged off worse heat, it's now that time of year where I really ought to wear each shirt once. The salty spots on my work shirts are there because I'm out of quarters. Filthy miser.

I'm really looking forward to my summer routine: work as little as possible, drink drinks with ice in them, and read in all the little spots of inactivity. I can put in a few chapters between scraping the gritty milk out of the cereal bowl and putting on my steel-toed boots in the morning. Come evening, I skip supper (the heat really takes away my appetite) and flip pages while moving from chair to chair to keep the pools of sweat evenly distributed. Over the next month I'll make room for World Cup games, of course, although most of those will be played while I'm supposed to be at work. I guess I'll be checking to make sure those sat and cable boxes still work.

post-hike update

The hike was 30 miles, 3 days, from Clingman's Dome to Fontana. (Consult your closest map of the Appalachian Trail through the Smokies.) Because it rained the first two days, I kept the same pair of socks throughout to match my wet boots. Tried wringing socks out every few miles the first day but eventually gave up; the grass along the trail just held too much water. Plus boot juice is rather pungent. (Strangely enough, the action of wet foot on wet sock in wet book produced zero blisters.) On future non-winter hikes, I'm strongly considering hiking in sandals. May my ankles forgive me.

Oh, yeah, I almost blew my left knee out trying to run downhill the last day (which was, finally, sunny). It feels like I've worn through much of the cushioning in the joint. Turned that romp into a hobble. I think the pain will be completely gone by the weekend, which means (a) no visit to the doctor (b) I'll get back on my bike next week, and (c) next hike, I'll probably do the same thing. Hurray for stupidity!

traveling

I'm taking off Thursday for some hiking, assuming I make it through tomorrow. Long hours and heat don't make me very relaxed.

John Updike's latest book Terrorist promises to have some intriguing tension ["I was happy — because there was so much shaky ground in the writing of this novel — when Jack began to hit on Terry Mulloy," Mr. Updike said. "I felt I was in a scene I could handle."] which means I might finally read an Updike novel.

plums to be eaten

It's been a slow news week, so I decided just to make a list of books that I'd like to get around to reading somewhere between work and biking to work and hiking and lying around wishing it wasn't getting hotter this summer.

The first three, which I should be able to pick up at the library, are Alexander McCall Smith's Blue Shoes and Happiness (#7 in the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series), Andre Dubus's House of Sand and Fog (now a film and an Oprah pick, but possibly a good book nonetheless), and something or other by R.K. Narayan because he's an Indian writer with multiple books and I've only read one (The Guide).

All these next are books the library doesn't have, but still I hope to read them without spending any money (interlibrary loan works quite well with a university in town). First up is some academic stimulation from Frederick Crews: Follies of the Wise, with two essays on Freud as applied to literary interpretation ("The Unknown Freud" & "The Revenge of the Repressed"). [Crews is also author of the Postmodern Pooh, a collection of essays aimed at fostering an increasingly critical reexamination of A.A. Milne's subversive masterwork of bourgeois sensibilities.] [[Wow, I can still spit sentences like that out. Must not be cured yet.]] There's also a new book out--Edgar Allen Poe & the Juke Box--containing unpublished poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Poe's alright, but for some real chills up the spine, I'd like to read Biohazard by Ken Alibek, a former director of the USSR's biological weapons research programs who now lives in the US. And then I'll read Thomas McMahon's Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry, a novel about the A-bomb.

Finally, a collection of picture books & graphic novels. Two geography-related: Georg Gerster's The Past From Above, and an OUP volume titled The History of Cartography. One German children's book set in Venice: Kai Meyer's The Water Mirror. And then some graphic novels by Alan Moore (of V for Vendetta) and Neil Gaiman. Ought to be enough to keep me busy.

this is just to say

April is the cruelest month; a snake came to my water trough as I walked out one evening. She sang beyond the genius of the sea,

Love's the boy stood on the burning deck
When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd.
This world is not conclusion;
Some must employ the scythes.
Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young
Swear by what the sages spoke.
All I know is a door into the dark
On either side the river lie.

That Whitsun I was late getting away. Because I could not stop for death, my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun. Take that, damn you; and that! Margaret, are you grieving? The art of losing isn't hard to master, only a man harrowing clods. Everything has its limit, including sorrow; summer is a-coming in.

shameless frenzy of joy

Thanks to Nate I've found the Detholz and now life has meaning. I'm hoping they make it really big so I can sell my Kodon cd containing an early recording of "Kiss Me In Space" for a ton of money. Check out their cover of Phil Collin's "Sussudio". It makes listening to PC a very masculine experience. Sort of.

neb in her own words

Betty Friedan & Gloria Steinem & all of them were right about this: You just can't drop out for a year to have a baby and be a stay-at-home mom and then come back. It just doesn't work like that. At Bible study tonight I said "The bigger you get, the bigger he gets" and they were all like, ooh, that's all profound, and I was like, no, that's what C.S. Lewis said.

[She assures me that there was a nuanced and extended transition between the two halves of that sentence--in her head, but I record it as it was heard.]

tunes

It's been a long time coming, but I finally realized last night that the Blind Boys of Alabama's version of Amazing Grace is sung to "House of the Rising Sun." In a way, this is not a let-down.

mathematical impersonations

From Stephen Barr's Modern Physics and Ancient Faith:

Bertrand Russell was asked by an interviewer whether, given the fact that anything could be proven in inconsistent systems, he could use the statement "2=1" to prove that he (Russell) was the pope. Russell instantly proceeded to do just that. Consider (he said) a room containing 2 people, namely Bertrand Russell and the pope. Now, since 2=1, it is also true to say that there is only 1 person in the room. Since Russell is in the room, and the pope is in the room, and there is just 1 person in the room, then Russell and the pope must be the same person.

wide asleep, sound awake

Tonight has been the second-best lightning storm of my life. Well worth staying up for.

After an exhaustingly long week of work, the threat of a sixth day pulling wire was lifted. [There's a story with multiple levels of Dilbertian stupidity there, but I'm too tired to explain it clearly.] So now I'm waking up earlier than I would have woken up for work to go hiking. (Technically, it is already Saturday, but allow me to float a time-zone west as we will be hiking in CTZ.)

Those who have read A Suitable Boy will appreciate this joke: "One Bengali is a poet; two Bengalis are a film society; three are a political party; and four are two political parties--both leftist." [Kinda like Garrison Keillor's "Wherever two or three Lutherans are gathered together, there will be a hotdish", or that Southern staple, "Wherever four Baptists are gathered together, there will be a fifth." I'm fairly sure there's a knee-slapping Jewish version that ends up schizophrenic, but I can't for the life of me remember it.]

for people spelling the names of south asian leaders

geriatric

On the one hand, there is the Imogen Heap album which I will be playing nonstop on my iPod for the last few weeks [OMG!!! She's coming to Sundown in the City this year!!!] and an insatiable desire to watch Miyazaki movies back to back to back, suggesting that I am a teenage girl. Possibly Japanese.

The banal truth is that I can't sleep in past 9am anymore. The combination of duty, guilt, or a fear of back pain makes me get up. Sometimes I sit awake for several hours thinking of reasons not to drink coffee, as if sleep might then choose to return. It doesn't want to. What's scarier is that I feel quite tired if I stay up past 11pm. I'm becoming a relic. It's obviously time to start smoking and heavy drinking.

michelin man

'What do they call the Michelin Man in France?' Fortunately, Wikipedia has the answer: Bibendum.

Another question of great import in the 'bumper-sticker' category: Does anyone make a 'W' sticker that says 'Wikipedia'? (I've noticed 'G: God' stickers cropping up around town recently.)

gospel of judas

The newly-discovered ancient Coptic text, which is perhaps the Gospel of Judas, is making big news, for all the wrong reasons. In the US press, at least (the two links above are to Canadian and UK ), the GoJ is being heralded as the earthshattering event that will overturn those stodgy traditional gospels. [While, at the same time, a Canadian fossil fish is being heralded as the "missing link" which will convert barking mad creationists to staunch evolutionists.] Calm down, folks; there have been plenty of Gnostic scriptures discovered before this.

Between frosted mini-wheats this morning, I watched as the experts debated the significance of this new find while the tv showed footage of people with tweezers moving pieces of papyrus. And then Katie Couric breathlessly came on camera asking about the impact of this revelatory Judas expose in light of the sensational religious discoveries portrayed in The DaVinci Code. I had to pick up my jaw from the floor.

Last time I checked, The DaVinci Code was fiction. So agreed the British courts. And if you want to take the time to do the research, you, too, can discover that the dossiers secrets, the centerpiece "evidence" of Dan Brown's novel, are almost certainly forgeries, a con in a series of cons. So Couric citing Brown was much like pointing to the Loch Ness Monster to support your contention that the Sasquatch exists. In other news, journalism is still dead.

What's getting overlooked in all the hullaballo is Gnosticism itself. I can't claim any special knowlege (har har har), but I have read some Augustine, The Golden Ass, and Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels. Essentially, Gnosticism was a banner label for many quasi-religious movements practicing their own 'creative reimaginings' of Christianity blended with other new religions of the ancient world such as the "Cult of Isis". The basic modus operandi of such cult groups was to claim "special knowledge", or gnosis, about what Jesus really meant (and really was). The beliefs of the group, progressively revealed to initiates, involved elaborate cosmological systems, drawing from some reading-between-the-lines in Plato and other authorities, in which the hierarchies of Good (soul) and Evil (body) battled for ascendancy. You could escape the inevitable destruction of the world by developing your spiritual self and shedding that limiting shell of a body, provided you were in the know. Often asceticism, to purify (or demoralize) the flesh, was the order of the day. Some groups, though, took the "eat, drink, and be merry" tack since, they assured their members, you couldn't further damage a body already condemned for destruction.

What's being missed, then, is that Gnosticism was not a movement within orthodox Christianity, but a series of cults with quite distinct ideas. If you were to take each article of the Apostles' Creed in turn and twist the words so it says just the opposite, you would have a succint summary of what some Gnostic group or the other believed. And it's amazing how catchy and relevant Gnosticism still is. You can hear Gnostic echoes throughout of the "Jesus was a nice guy, and he left special instructions just for you" sermons on how to tap into your true self. You can "get in touch with your inner ___." You can tune into Gnostic channels in most metropolitan areas (most Christian tv--and Oprah!) to discover "how you can live to your full potential." Dieting, for crying out loud, is a thoroughly Gnostic inheritance. Scientology, Hollywood's cult cult, is Gnosticism with a vengeance. Old heresies never die.

three random links

First off, the Heroes of Might and Magic minigame in case you need to waste time. Second, perform Lasik surgery on yourself and save money you would otherwise have given to a doctor. [Is the apparatus reusable? A career in illegal medical procedures could await you!] Third, Mexico City has a giant pyramid buried beneath it [one of many such archaeological sites, as modern-day MC is built over the lake city of Tenochtitlan]. What is especially interesting about this article, however, is that it pays attention to the site's religious significance, past and present, and so provides a great illustration of Andrew Walls' thesis about the spread of Christianity and the apropriation of older religious forms. [Coincidentally, the chief archaeolgist is named Jesus. And if you were wondering why Mel Gibson is making a movie set in Mayan times after making Passion...."Stab, stab, rip, sprinkle, sprinkle" as someone in a history class once said.]

elizabeth bishop

has a new book out, death not withstanding. I've read through her Collected Poems a time or two and created a bio for her loosely adhereing to that text, but the definitive review of her unpublished poems and drafts (which uses the word 'fractious'!) corrected all that, and filled in a lot of biographical gaps whilst pronouncing her the most important American artist of, oh, the second half of the 20th century. I concur, with a raincheck on Flannery O'Connor, leaving the battle for 1900-1950 to be fought over by Eliot, Faulkner & Hemingway, and while I would not begrudge anyone their poetry, that the author is a lawyer makes this outstanding review all the more surprising.

loof lirpa

Earlier today Slashdot got a rather pretty makeover. 'OMG! Ponies!!!' indeed.

Google announced the launch of Google Romance, a search-based, ad-sponsored dating service to find a truly-compatible soulmate. Of course, it's still in beta.

what I wrote

the lazy summer cometh