ApatheticLiberalDepressingPostModernEvangelicalRedNeckTechnoApocalypse

Marilynne Robinson is a very good writer, and I know this because she makes me want to disagree with her — and then proves to my satisfaction that I'm wrong. Her incisive essay style reminds me of George Orwell in its combination of plainspokenness and astounding insight. Well, it seems plainspoken for a few pages, until she hits me over the head with a portmanteau formulation of "what I'm really getting at" that takes twenty minutes with the dictionary to unpack — and worth every minute.

I keep wanting to do extensive posts on one essay, and then the next; but they would solely consist of extended quotations. Entire essays illegally reprinted. I want to write her book, in the manner Borges made "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Anyhow, if you need a book for a book group or something to see if your mind's in shape, try picking this one up. My uncle says it's coming out in paperback in time for Christmas, too.

And here's two articles, Mrs Robinson, from the NYT's Book Review. (Yes, Jesus loves her more than you could know.)

afternoon whiskey

The same qualities that 'make America great' also make her stupid. If, someday, one were to teach dogs how to play football, an entire entertainment industry—coaches, trainers, agents, product endorsement—would grow up overnight around the Canine Football League. Lassie would be cloned to play quarterback, and negotiate a million-dollar Nike contract. People would feed steroids to puppies and replace cries of "Here, boy!" with motivational speeches. Paris Hilton would have to buy her chihuahua a helmet.

And, in true American fashion, this would only be the beginning - we would have to make this profit seem humane. There would be CFL-sponsored charity events to benefit the less fortunate dogs of society. The grand gesture of goodwill would be the establishment of a separate league for maimed and disabled dogs: those blind, three-pawed wonders could suit up and run out onto the gridiron, too: because everydog deserves a chance to play! And there would be a giant machine resembling a zamboni to glide across the field of battle at halftime, removing turds.

concerning whales

Having pondered in my heart Nate's post of last week contra the whimsied, skittish ignorance of bookish folk towards matters scientific, I determined to make a rejoinder or at least an acutely-angled commentary; but having no other instrument of inspiration in my hand save a gilded, faux-leather-bound volume of Moby Dick, I foolishly turned to its hundred and third sura ("The Fossil Whale") and read:

[Let me reply, to the insufferable charges that I always write about big books which people shouldn't be forced to read, that Melville's language is as Shakespearian a voice as you will find in Am-Lit: to wit, this is that Whale of the Humanities, and you may strike at him as you choose; bring him down, and blind poets, Porlock, opiate-spined detectives, fatwa'd Indian exiles, and the balding Bard himself will all follow, like child of Ophelia and Falstaff, into the sea. There and then, being drowned, I will not grudge you.]

... and, having made note to plagiarize the author's hyper-ebullient style, read:

Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behoves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan - to an ant or flea - such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me....

When I stand among these mighty Leviathan skeletons, skulls, tusks, jaws, ribs, and vertebrae, all characterised by partial resemblances to the existing breeds of sea-monsters; but at the same time bearing on the other hand similar affinities to the annihilated antechronical Leviathans, their incalculable seniors; I am, by a flood, borne back to that wondrous period, ere time itself can be said to have begun; for time began with man. Here Saturn's grey chaos rolls over me, and I obtain dim, shuddering glimpses into those polar eternities, when wedged bastions of ice pressed hard upon what are now the Tropics; and in all the 25,000 miles of this world's circumference, not an inhabitable hand's breadth of land was visible. Then the whole world was the whale's; and, king of creation, he left his wake along the present lines of the Andes and the Himalayas. Who can show a pedigree like Leviathan? Ahab's harpoon had shed older blood than the Pharoahs. Methusaleh seems a schoolboy. I look round to shake hands with Shem. I am horrorstruck at this antemosaic, unsourced existence of the unspeakable terrors of the whale, which, having been before all time, must needs exist after all human ages are over.

Is this good science writing? I am a poor judge who cannot tell. The few science papers I have perused were either linked from The Economist or sat on Dan's coffee-table beneath pizza coupons, Simpson Pez dispensers, menus for all of Hyde Park's Chinese restaurants, and the empty bottle of cheap wine which drove someone such as myself to peruse a scientific paper in lieu of a more digestible breakfast. I have not the stomach to drink truth from the source; I glean my scientific scraps from Pop Science books: Stephen Hawking, Simon Singh, Adders' Fork and Blindworm's Sting, Lewis Thomas, James Gleick, Fillet of a Fenny Snake, Darwin, Mary Shelley, Feynman, For Th'Ingredience of Our Cauldron.

In a word, I judge the potency of the scientific conconction by its effects upon my senses; by what splendors it conjures from the bone-fields of the mind; and not by what rickety ladder it raises — towards truth? — at least, away from error.

Ah! the Reduction of Error! how unglamorous! To be fixing, correcting, and otherwise revisiting other peoples' work. How, in a word, scientific. But to my, and to the public mind, the operative Sagan-Dawkins conception of the scientist as 'prophet of the new era' continues its sway: the scientist as Discoverer of Great and Awesome Technologies of Nature.

Lets be honest: the 'slow, painstaking toil in quest of accuracy' model of science doesn't get many headlines. Marie Curie gets a biography or two; but Oppenheimer gets an opera. And the good Sagan-Dawkins scientist will use controversy, 'revolutions', and lots of other mind-blowing (mindless) arguments to present scientists as the vanguard of truth, valiantly casting down outmoded (ie religious) prejudices from atop the precipices of biology's temple, whatever that is. Nothing sells hotter than a publicized hypothesis [note the juxtaposition between the reviews, and the sales rank]. Yes, I have just compared Sagan and Dawkins to a quack‚Äîand justly, I believe‚Äîfor, whether hypothesis of a quack or quack hypothesis, their bliztkreig science prospers by blowing all other theories out of the water. And then it writes a sequel in 'shock and awe' in case any opponents survived. Even if they despise the literate public, they are in thrall to them. It's a publishing racket, I swear.

Be skeptical, then, of loud noises and sudden movements; Thomas Kuhn's structures don't turn on a dime; if the revolution is to be televised, you'll still have time to catch it on the eleven o'clock news. In conclusion, I say unto thee: read Moby Dick, and catch smaller fish, about the size of the ones you caught with your dad on those afternoons when he took you down by smelly rivers and made you learn how to cast fishhooks into trees. And work your way up to the present whales slowly.

corridor diplomacy

Hotels provide such useful metaphors for modern politics. Are lobbyist called lobbyists because they frequent hotel lobbies? And particularly amiable special interest groups and politicians are said to be "in bed" with one another? What do "room service" and "check-out times" and "exercise facilities available" really mean? In politics, it seems, you can't work out of your home.

Continuing news from a topic dear to my heart, Pakistani President Musharraf and Israeli PM Sharon had a planned chance meeting at the UN this week. The date was Wednesday, September 14th.

"A senior diplomatic source said on Tuesday that both the ambassador and the spokesman were right. There will be no planned meeting. Both the leaders will happen to be at the same place at the same time and will shake hands."

How quantumly deterministic of them.

phlegm, phlegm, glorious phlegm

It creeps down my throat and comes back again. So I'm staying at home, the better to blow my nose, and wondering that this summary of the Supreme Court nomination hearings has uncanny resemblances to my current state of health.

'dead, unlit city'

An NPR driveway moment so sad & beautiful, it left me close to crying. I know I've heard Andrei Codrescu's voice on the radio before; his words went unremarked then, save his Eastern European notes. Today he spoke a lament for his lost city, stunned and angry, nostalgic and guilty. 'We are all', he says, 'working in this pit of sorrow to unfreeze time.'

cedia, part dead and part ugly

By the time I got to the donuts this morning there were just chocolate-covered, icing-filled ones left, so I had sugar kick for breakfast. The day basically went downhill from there. We walked all over the trade show floor again, robbing all the swag we could get from vendors who, realizing they didn't want to take 500 pounds of t-shirts/ pens/ mints back to California, had finally put it out where it could be taken without a sales pitch.

Ah, the sales pitch! Whoever invented that thing deserves the ninth circle of hell. With some sales devils telling them about the upcoming features "which our engineers are very close to implementing."

"And we should have this little over-heating* problem taken care of in the next week or so. And the pitchforks are a little inconvenient, I know, but we'll have a documented, easy work-around available. Thick padded suits, or plate mail, or something. So as I'm sure you can see, our user experience will be totally comparable to Heaven, but at a much lower price point. Plus all our product line comes in black. Now, could I interest you in a scalding lava bath or some flaming whips? Cause you can't get this stuff anywhere else. Not that you can go anywhere else now we've gotten hold of you!"

*(Yes, Dante fans, I realize that his inferno is actually quite cold. And yes, my subconscious is channeling Dilbert today.)

We just drove the three blocks through downtown Knoxville. So freaky after the miles of huge blocks that are Indy. I forget this town is so small sometimes.

cedia, part when will this be over?!

Today was test day for me. I got to do what I do best: fill in the little ovals on standardized test forms with #2 pencil.

I rode the pink-line shuttle bus in as there was no chance of anyone else being up that early - 7am - as I. It was a bad night's sleep. I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 4am and never got back to sleep. And then I missed the first shuttle bus I tried to catch by maybe 5 seconds. But that gave me time to go back in and get some "continental breakfast" of burnt coffee and decent "blueberry" donut. (The non-dairy creamer was, in fact, non-dairy.)

The test was preceded, for me, by the 6-hour review session. covered things like building codes, electricity, types of wire. There was even math. As our SoCal grown-up Dennis-the-Menace instructor said (and he'd know, because he had an opinion about everything else), "Trigonometry is extremely useful in this job."

We lucky students for the day then had a 45 min break, which I used to get Starbucks, and cram for the ensuing certification exam. Bad idea to have coffee before a test. Bad idea. At least I've learned to mark quickly with that #2 pencil.

Now, in 6 to 8 weeks, I'll find out how I did, and then get a raise if I passed. I was given an hour of bliss with a pair of sharp pencils and machine-readable form, and I squandered it all because of coffee. And then there was no beer on the floor today, either!

cedia, part the second

Got up late and drove downtown, going to the Marriot for Elan class from 10am to 1pm. Fortunately there was a break early and I got into the Starbucks line for some wake-up juice. From Elan we went back over to the Indy Convention Center to meet with some guy who looked like Dick Cheney. Identical twin, I swear. The VP gave us a product overview of Energy speakers, which are handcrafted from birch trunks by lumberjacks in Canada. And we went to USTec and saw their new "everything over cat5" tecLAN product, which takes TV, phone, internet, and audio in at one end, converts everything down to data packets, throws it over a network, and then reassembles it all on the other end.

Then we wandered around the showroom floor; I was just trying to pick up swag (ie free junk). I got a free 3' glow rod, which is a flexible, glow-in-the-dark fiberglass rod which is useful for pushing up hard-to reach places. (Like insulated walls.) Oh, and about 4pm someone rolled out the beer carts onto the show floor!

We had another party to go to that evening; this time we had to wear these gay little blue-bead necklaces with a blinking logo as our proof of invite. I have mine left if anyone wants it. The party was thrown by Sonance, who make in-wall speakers. It was in a theater downtown, but just in the lobby area, so it was rather packed. There were little bars in all the corners, hors-d'oeuvres along the walls, and not enough air conditioning to go around upstairs.

But, oh the fountain of chocolate which cascaded
Down the centerpiece, a muddy waterfall
And little pointy sticks and strawberries,
And then, to really knock you out, a plate
Of white and dark bon-bons! (I ate just six.)
And 'mid this tumult I went to the bar
And ordered me a wicked Irish car bomb.
I chugged it till it curdled and I stumbled through the haze
Towards the wicked outdoor smokers and their wicked smoky ways.
Found out about the party on next door --
The Monster Jam was up on the sixth floor!

The short story is that we got in, had a few drinks, and then another dude and I drove back to the hotel because I had a class in the morning. Apparently those who stayed were thrown out of Denny's later that morning, but I haven't gotten the whole story yet. Would someone be interested in studying why groups of acquaintances get utterly wasted in front of complete strangers in strange cities, and what this has to do with the various theories of capitalism?

One final vignette from the Budget Inn (motto: So run-down we're roach-free!). As I entered the office to get my keycard re-magnetized yet again, there was a rather agitated dude there trying to get a fridge; he had baby food that he needed to refrigerate overnight. He was getting quite animated trying to explain the direness of his situation to the desk clerk, who wanted to know, for some reason, how much food this would be. (I guess he thought it could have been a very big baby.) While we were all standing around, a lady came in the side door wearing slippers that must have been made from two dead, orange poodles. Our man with the gluttonous baby was suddenly changed. "You busy later?" he mumbled to her. She gave him a "You've got the wrong lady" look. "Oh, my bad," he said.

On the bright side, no one has been shot in the parking lot since I've been staying here. And I've gotten used to walking along the second-floor balcony, which dips and curls like a ship at sea.

cedia, part the first

I'm in Indianapolis for the CEDIA convention, which is where home electronics manufacturers and installers go to schmooze with one another. It's basically a geek convention, as you can tell from the lines outside the mens' restrooms, or the crop-circle of bald heads that form around anything in a skirt.

We (my two bosses and I) left K'ville last night and stopped off at a "No-Tell Motel" outside of Lousiville, KY. That motel, and this Budget Inn East here in Indy, are nice reminders that there are parts of the US which resemble third world countries. I actually smelled the "sewage merging with rainwater" smell - it brought back memories of home! Plus it's in that part of town where the liquor store is next to McDonalds.

Convention-wise, today was brief but fairly cool. We checked in to the convention by entering our confirmation codes into computer workstations, and then our badges for the week automatically printed out with magnetic access codes on the back for all the events we've registered for. So far all I've had to swipe for has been a copy of my itinerary (which had all of three items on it). So I'm going to be winging it most of the way, which is okay by me. I started in fine fashion by mooching a cherry danish breakfast from a table in some hotel outside a conference session that I wasn't attending. But hey, it beat standing in the 20-minute line for Starbucks downstairs.

The first thing we went to was a product-line overview for Marantz audio equipment. They make receivers and CD/DVD players, as well as some projectors, and most of the audio jobs that I've worked on have used one or more of their pieces of equipment. Then lunch at some chili-specialty restaurant where there was a horse skin on the wall, including "before" pictures of the horse, for some reason. (The chili was all beef, by the way, and very savoury.)

This afternoon I went to a Logitech sales pitch for the pretty cool Harmony Remote, which is an Internet-based universal remote control. Meaning that you fill out a few forms on a web page and then you can press one button and - poof - the lights dim, the screen drops from the ceiling, and the movie starts playing. Normally, this would cost a bundle of money and would require hours of painstaking remote programming time, but now, with the Harmony, it just requires a bundle of money. The presenter was from Canada, but I restrained myself and was able to not make fun of him at all for his silly Canadian accent.

Did I mention that there are a lot of people with dumb questions attending these presentations? And that they expect these gadgets to address and/or solve any technical problem that they can raise - especially if said problem has Nothing Whatsoever to do with the presentation at hand? Oh, I did - see the paragraph about the gender ratio above. It's like Philosophy class all over again.

Well, to top off the day, I didn't have an invitation to the invitation-only party that my bosses were going to at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, so I got the car !!! a 2005 Dodge Charger !!! which I'm not on the rental car form to drive !!! and drove up I-465 towards Chicago to try and find an Afghan restaurant which was listed in the phone book. Well, the Afghan restaurant "Kabul" had morphed into "Garam Masala," an Indian restaurant, but I still had a good meal.

Driving back downtown, I got a phone call from my boss, saying that they were opening up the museum's IMAX theater for private showings, and that it looked like I should be able to sneak into the invite-only function without much problem. So I did. The movie was 3D, called "Cyberworld"; sort of like "Riven" meets "Fantasia 2000" meets Codex Seraphinianus, and yes, I almost got sick at one point. Then, after two strong drinks at the open bar and a piece of chocolate cheesecake (I love mooching!), I got to drive back to the hotel. Because I was the least drunk, of course.

strange things

First off, Salman Rushdie has a new book out, Shalimar the Clown. The title character is a Kashmiri entertainer who turns terrorist after his Hindu wife leaves him for the American ambassador to India. Say what you will for plausibility (we lit types know that, in books, an implausible thing is, in fact "a metaphor"), it can't be worse than his last few books, which seem to have been pieced together from various tabloid gossip columns.

However, the main news of the moment is that Pakistan is moving towards recognizing the country of Israel, officially and diplomatically. Pakistan would join Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, and a handful of former SSRs as the only Muslim countries to do so. There are real strategic gains from such a move: namely, getting access to Israeli trade and technology which India already has; and scoring brownie points with the US, of course.

What's going to be interesting is that for many in Pakistan, especially the usual bunch of hard-line turbaned guys, the very idea of Israel is anathema. According to BBC, a Karachi newspaper was attacked last year for having printed an interview with Israeli Shimon Peres. And that anti-Israel stance has smaller, comical reactions, too. Former PM Benazir Bhutto once vowed that she would only drink Pepsi as Coke was sold in Israel. And of course no book published in Pakistan shows Israel on map. And then there are the "chance" meetings of high-level Pak/Israeli officials in hallways at various world bodies, which get written up in The Jerusalem Post as semi-official meetings, complete with lounge chairs, catered delicacies, and cigars, while the Pak government denies the existence of any and all hallways and swears that its ministers do not and would never frequent such places.

So far, the fallout from this momentous meeting has been international: Iran's nuclear minister canceled a trip to Pakistan. (That's probably for the better.) But I'm sure that there will be protest marches, opposition calls for strikes, and the like once people figure out who to blame for this.

no looting here

The GetReligion blog has a right-headed collection of articles addressing the morality of looting, if you're into that sort of thing. I'm not too surprised at what's been happening when you consider that New Orleans attempts to destroy itself every Mardi Gras and is only prevented from succeeding admirably by strong police control.

NO seems to have indulged in political as well as other forms of self-destruction. One of PBS's many roundtables last night was discussing the forgone conclusion that the federal government was entirely to blame, because, "as everybody knew" and "all the experts said", this city could not withstand a disaster of such magnitude as occurs "every 100-300 years". The problem with such superficial finger-pointing is (a) "everybody" didn't seem to care much about a disaster which might or might not occur in their lifetime; (b) none of these experts managed to get the attention of anybody who could do anything; and (c) those who had the money were elected for 4-6 year terms and therefore had no interest whatsoever in long-term expenditure.

It seems excessive to put all responsibility on the federal government if there was little local effort to hold local public officials responsible for setting and executing a prudent public policy. No doubt we will "learn", in the days ahead, that the mayor of NO and the governor of LA have spent the last 30 years of their lives in a unceasing, fruitless crusade to pry billions of dollars from the coldhearted federal government to build defenses that would have prevented all of the hurricane damage and flooding. But I wouldn't believe a word of it.

Oh, if anyone's interested, I'm for re-engineering the Mississippi to restore silt deposits to the delta, thereby saving the LA coastline. Hopefully before the next hurricane.

intelligent design special

For some reason the ups and downs of Intelligent Design -- theory? hypothesis? philosophical position -- have made it to the babbling, flighty, flippant, jacuzzi-lounging part of my brain. [I'm suspicious of the Capital Letters, which suggest a religious subtext: "evolutionary theory" is not usually capitalized, though "Darwinism" being proper-nounly (properly-noun?) derived, is. The phrase "intelligent design" comes across as less hostile.]

First, The Onion ran a story on "Intelligent Falling" (Yes, it's all true!). Then NY Times ran this story about Pastafarianism, whose adherents wish to mandate the teaching of spaghetti in Kansas public schools. Spaghetti is, of course, a proximate cause of reproduction, as we know from careful observation of Lady and the Tramp. Another point in the "Pastafarians" favor is that they have a soft spot for pirates. AND an FSM bumperfish!

my kinda justice

The NYTimes says it all. This man now has my endorsement. [I know, like it matters. And this will probably bring the teachers' unions out against him for assuming that the misuse of language should be castigated.]

Here's a rather different story from the BBC about former Russian soldiers living in Afghanistan. I once got my hands on a book of photographs about the Afghan War from the Russian perspective: very intense, disturbing imagery.

And while on the subject of Russia, I finally plowed through Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago last year: a synthesis of tragedies. Recently Washington Post editorial columnist Anne Applebaum has come out with a history of the gulag. And this sounds like a film I ought to find the time to see.

let's all worry about aliens

Seems to be the motto of the fall tv season. Every major network has some form of X-Files / Stephen King-inspired alien invasion show in the works (not to mention the movie War of the Worlds which came out this summer). So what's driving the networks to ratchet up the extra-terrestrial fear factor, besides the usual bunch of American morons who believe that little green men with slit eyes enjoy flying their interplanetary space-crafts across earth (near airports, at night, by strange coincidence), pausing only to abduct lone individuals for comprehensive medical testing? Well, it could be repressed longings for a foreign-staffed national health-care system; but it's probably the insatiable American appetite for navel-gazing (that is, staring at belly-button lint, not at ships or oranges).

Navel-gazing, because 'aliens' are a rather crude stand-in for 'terrorists'. Because a show about terrorists (as opposed to actual hard news coverage) would involve some amount of coherent thought on the part of the writers, and some difficult reflection on the part of the viewers. Much easier to stick with non-human aliens, who we all can fear and hate and eventually defeat. Of course, there will be the obligatory "but they are like us after all" moment somewhere in the story arc, but not before firmly inculcating the "fear everyone who's different" mentality.

The fact is that it's very un-American to admit that monsters are human at all. One of the most prominent features of the collective cultural reaction to serial killers and child molesters is disbelief. Disbelief that anyone would do something like that, disbelief that that person could do something like that, disbelief that something like that could happen here. I'm not out to suggest that 'monstrous' crimes are normal, just pointing to this rote denial of the human participation in monstrosity. In contemporary American popular culture, there are only two types of monsters, both conveniently non-existent: hostile species of aliens; and bastard creations of science. Earlier generations may have considered Native Americans in a monstrous light, but (a) they turned out to be human and (b) we killed most of them and confined the rest.

The really super-convenient thing about believing only in Klingons and Frankensteins is that you only have to worry about how to destroy them. And when you want complete decimation without moral difficulty, you turn to Technology. Press the button, drop the bomb, and everyone can run out into the streets and watch the fireworks, ensuring the survival of the human race. So what's the problem with those people in the Middle East, anyways? Do they not realize that the Hollywood duo of Confident White Man and Sassy Black Man have saved their butts from imminent destruction -- and looked cool doing it?

hate poetry

'By God,' quod he, 'for pleynly, at a word / Thy drasty rhyming is nat wort a toord'

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love poetry

While "white flannel trousers" and "I do not think that they will sing to me" may satisfy those who like their loves unnamed and all-around ignored for the duration of their love songs, may I throw in a vote for the poet being anonymous instead? [TSE's just so much fun to slap around!] Sorry about the Old English (that is, sorry that we had to go and replace it with Modern English and tone out all those rough Germanic interruptions and prettified French intrusions and shamelessly plagiarized Latin interpolations which really gave you four languages for the price of one -- alas, those were the days!), but Alysoun is clearly the best love poem in English, especially as it's number three in my copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse (thanks, Nathan, for buying it however many Christmases ago). Who are mere mortals to quibble with Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's editorial taste? (The first four lines, btw, are the refrain, which comes after each stanza.)

Pity that no one spells the name "Alysoun" any more; every time I read that poem I'm in love with her, no matter how dead she may be, which she isn't, because she inhabits the poem, right? That's an example of how lit majors think; and you can deconstruct it for yourself by deciding that as she's dead, and the language is dead (or difficult, which is the same thing), the poem's dead, and poetry is pointless and we have computers that can do this sort of thing more cheaply anyways. So, in conclusion, it's good to live in the past.

Wouldn't you know it, the OB of EV is online, so here's Alysoun, again.

it was the greatest library in Christendom

"Now the Antichrist is truly at hand, because no learning will hinder him any more."

Thus endeth the book of books, The Name of the Rose. So if you or a loved one is a incurable reader but also interested in saving the world, build bookshelves, and don't let blind monks with lamps get too close to your palimpsests.

novel plagiarism

Belated I realized that Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy has 'remarkable similarities' to another long, post-colonial novel chronicling a family's course in, and against, a modernizing, religious society: Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy [Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street]. Seth's ghazal-singing courtesan Saeeda Bai (and her heart-breaking younger sister Tasneem), shadows Mahfouz's belly-dancer Zubaydah (and her her heart-breaking daughter Zanuba). Seth has Islamic scholar-cum-socialist Rasheed Ali; Mahfouz's original was student demonstrator Fahmy. Etc, etc, down to the street vendors, and the beggars in the alleys. And beyond similar characters lie the flat-roofed houses of Cairo and Brahmpur, the common legacy of British rule, and the daily-shifting politics of emerging nations.

Charges of plagiarism are too strong, perhaps. Many of the similarities are no doubt due to that shared culture which stretches from Cairo to Brahmpur. And who can blame Seth for (re?)writing such an engrossing novel? [Well, I didn't like the aftertaste, but it was delectable going down.] After all, Shakespeare plagiarized most of his plots. What's oddest, perhaps, is that the original and the copy are both well done.

but what's scientific about it?

I'm currently reading Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which, being a medieval mystery of murders stemming from monastic disagreement over the mixture of mirth in the divine man, makes a nice backdrop to this little column. [In the interests of full metaphoric disclosure, said book is a hand-crafted tapestried backdrop of immense depth and pleasure, while our little column would be pushing its luck to hold up the sagging porch on a double-wide.] All in all, it's the usual quirky off-beat Economist article. [And you thought I was being humble and self-deprecatory and talking about my writing, didn't you? Not a chance!] But here is skating on thin ice:

[H]umour is one way of dealing with the fact that humans are ‚Äúexcrement-producing poets and imperfect lovers‚Äù, says Appletree Rodden of the University of Tuebingen. He sees religion and humour as different, and perhaps competing, ways for people to accept death and the general unsatisfactoriness of the world. Perhaps that is why, as Dr Morreall calculates in a forthcoming article in the journal Humor, 95% of the writings that he sampled from important Christian scholars through the centuries disapproved of humour, linking it to insincerity and idleness.

Oh, really? Maybe. Or maybe not.

It would be a stretch to say that the Church Fathers were a bunch of stand-up comedians. Nonetheless, I shall be awaiting the journal article in question to see how scientific Dr. Morreall's research is. For example, what was his sample size? Was it random? (Probably not.) Did he have a control group? (Of philosophers, say. Or chemists. Or doctors? I don't recall any passages in Freud where he mentions that found a joke 'funny'.) Were comparison studies done with the writings of Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu, and Jewish scholars? How much more unscientific can a scientist get when intruding on the humanities?

I'm not doubting that a cursory survey of important Christian thinkers should turn up a healthy skepticism towards humor, but I hope that the good doctor did more than a Google-style word-search in the course of his experiment. Hopefully he bothered to read their books -- and their bio/hagiographies, which can be quite entertaining. Anyone who tamed wild lions while naked in the desert fleeing loose women and talking to the Devil can't have been serious, in the bad way.

graffiti

Nice introduction to contemporary art here.

if harry's bad, william's worse

Potter and Shakespeare, that is, not the princes. As I see it, the ~~fathers~~ ~~spouses~~ ~~domestic partners~~ separated persons with joint custody and alternate weekends of the English Literary Tradition are the KJV and Shakespeare and I was wondering what course of action should be taken to Ban the Bard after the following advertisement appeared in last Sunday's paper (the "Local" section, appropriately enough):

Harry Potter is Defeated and Judged
There is a book about war, love, sex, murder and victory with a flaming sword, walking sticks that turn into snakes, a chariot of fire, giants, the sea that opened up and swallowed a whole army, food that mysteriously appeared to feed hundreds of thousands of people for years, grapes so big it takes two men to carry them and if you read it all you might receive something better than money or gold - it is a revelation. This is a book to die for - the King James Bible.
A Holy Jesus Loves You.
(Paid for by Benny Clark).

I'd like to state for the record that I agree with Benny Clark here, whoever s/he may be (and his/her questionable verb wrangling skills aside). Verily, verily, I've never heard anyone offer to die for the NIV; though perhaps in a suburb far, far away.... But what exactly does the literary, moral, miraculous, and spiritual excellence of the KJV have to do with Harry "666" Potter, who for six books now has grown fictionally in wisdom and stature and favour of men, but not (apparently) with God? Was there some passage denouncing J.K. Rowling in the minor prophets (whom I admit never got around to reading)?

There's always been some antagonism between The Word of God and Secular Fiction. Augustine wrote scathingly of his passion's wounded reaction to Dido's in the Aeneid; but he was thankful for the close-reading, rigorous method of interpretation which he learned in the study of that work and was later able to apply to Scripture. Better to have fiction with characters who make hard choices in the face of complex situations (Harry Potter) than a gaggle of flat puppets woodenly performing superficial set scenes combining world politics and late 20th century Ameri-centric theology (Left Behind). [Which reminds me of a work in progress...]

If you want to be angry at Harry Potter, don't be angry at him for being convincing fiction, a suspenseful, humorous, well-told tale: in short, a good book. As Benny Clark reminds me, the Bible tells a pretty good story, too. Maybe all good writing is bad - but that's a postmodern attitude, and we know that's evil! So I'm going to stick with what I feel and know, and side with Augustine, and blame not the writing, but the reader: in books, you receive what you are willing to give. If the young Augustine had been unwilling to give his heart to Dido, why should he have trusted it in a book of God?

Tonight was free Shakespeare on the Square again, and this time the TSC played Twelfth Night, with Feste the clown playing beautiful air guitar in rocking performances of the in-play songs, while the drunken duo of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek fell over each other repeatedly. Shakespeare is high culture in every sense. There was also talk of lechery and much vulgar thrusting of hips and hip-connected portions of male anatomy, but in the end everyone was coupled up, save Malvolio, if you'll permit me to join pirate Antonio with his shoulder-mounted parrot in unnatural matrimony. Aaaargh! Anyways, my point is that despite all the quaffing of gin (rum? brandy? what was the liquor of choice in Elizabethan England?) and all the vile cross-dressing and all the wicked duels and bloody off-stage quarrels, most everybody went out happy. And if that doesn't agree with your view of the world, then it leaves you something to think on. I can't see how either prospect should be condemned.

P.S. I do have to point out that Orsino (who was Macduff thereafter) was played by a man named Orion Protonentis. His programme bio states that he is "a refugee from the Pacific Northwest and this generation's answer to Yul Brynner." From what I gather of the Pacific Northwest (i.e. hippies with weed farms), I take it that this is indeed his legal name. And he is bald. No word on whether he "was from his mother's womb untimely ripped". Perhaps "Orion Protonentis" is a common birthing curse among the women of Seattle?

washcloth of India

It's not the - alas! - now-defunct academic Bad Writing Contest - this one is entered by bad writers who intend to win - but the results are, as you'd expect from a bad sentence competition, awful. May I point out for special attention the Runner-Up in the Children's Literature category, with its acute social criticism?

buy a hovel

Why not live in a hovel? Although it does seem a bit pricy.

I was going to go to se Twelfth Night, but the afternoon thunder has already begun. Maybe I'll go and get wet anyways.

what's in a middle name?

I just stumbled across one of those too-obvious-to-notice cultural clues: liberal politicians like to assert - or get subtly ratted out by - their middle names. Conservative names: Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, William Rehnquist. Liberal names: Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Conner. What about Hillary Rodham Clinton? John Forbes Kerry? I suspect right-wing nomenclature fiends have infiltrated the media.

But then what to make of George W. Bush? Is he simply indecisive, or does he just want to have it both ways? And will Mr. John G. Roberts [so speaks the NY Times] diminutive 'G' reach full length, or will the initial usage be corrected at a later date, once his political sympathies become public?

geopolitics and me

The 10 mile commute home took 40 minutes today for reasons that I cannot fully understand. I decided to blame it on summer traffic, rain, and general stupidity. Right now I'm sitting here waiting for the Prez to announce his Supreme pick, but I'm wondering why bother. As far as I can remember, US government decisions have made no positive difference to my daily life whatsoever. Nor do I expect things to change, despite the current administration's covert employment of novelists. That 'promising novelist' Lewis Libby may have more time on his hands depending on the investigation of the Plame affair. Perhaps he'll be able to resume his literary efforts courtesy of the federal prison system. For political novels, I prefer Christopher Buckley, whose last book was Florence of Arabia. Mmmm -- the taste of satire!

I'm going to nominate this week as the official "Dog Days of Summer" - 90 degrees, humid, with afternoon thunderstorms scheduled to begin at 3:30pm every day.

the coolest post ever

Except that I was 'writing' it yesterday while hiking in the Great Smoggy Mountains so I can't remember what was so urgently cool. There was a fat, two-foot rattlesnake on the path, and lots of mud, and slippery rocks, and the constant noise of a very full stream, but I can't recall any pressing and inspiring thought.

With a long bike ride Saturday and the hike Sunday, it turned out to be an extreme weekend (as in "Dude! That was so Extreme!"). Of course, if I compare it to the Tour de France which has been my secret obsession this month, I look like a wuss (as in "Dude! You are such a wuss!). To quote someone who was explaining what you have to be capable of to ride in the TDF, "Few amateur cyclists can ride a century, 100 miles in 5 hours." That's serious understatement -- and then most stages of Le Tour are actually 125 miles. Though some stages are shorter, with a mere 1000 to 1500m of elevation gain and loss on their multiple mountain climbs. Oh, and you have to ride that way for 21 days. Saturday I rode about 40 in 4, as flat as possible, with my muscles screaming at me most of the way. Maybe I need a lighter, more expensive bike, and a lucrative endorsement contract to make the century.

For those suffering infestations of flies, I swallowed a couple while I was moving around outdoors. Hope that helps.

five reasons young earth creationism makes little sense

1. The Earth is very, very old. We know this by examining rocks which are very, very old. We know the rocks are very, very old because the processes which form rocks involve radioactive elements which have a constant rate of decay over time. So the rocks are essentially 'time-stamped' with their date of formation. Now, if you were to assume that the natural processes we observe today have no relation or similarity with natural processes in the past, you could argue that this is a bad reason. As far as I know, however, I existed yesterday.

2. There is no global conspiracy of atheistic scientists. I'm not going to cite any source for that statement, If you have evidence that rabid, vengeful scientists are secretly controlling the world, nothing I can say will change your mind. The scientists (in-training) whom I know are playing around with stuff (ie chemicals, critters, or cells) to see what happens, or else just slacking. They are not attending Communist pep rallies, or ripping Bibles into shreds, or hunting down and destroying the dinosaurs that lurk in our cities lest God-fearing members of the public should see a living stegosaurus walking down Main Street and have instant proof of all the evolutionary lies. (If you want to find the atheists in Western institutions of higher education, you'll have much better success in the literature departments. Again, you'll have to take my word on that.) I find it easier to believe that the overwhelming observable evidence, gathered over the course of centuries by a lot of different people, pointing to evolution, is mostly right. It doesn't require a leap of faith - unless you don't trust other people and their human senses. In that case, conspiracy theory is for you!

3. In conjunction with point (2), scientists do not wake up every morning and say, "Gosh, I really need to go look for evidence that I can use to prove that evolution is true!". The scientific method tests the theory by subjecting the predictions of that theory to rigorous experiment. That is to say: for the theory to be generally accepted, it has to accommodate all the facts. All. The. Facts. Now, I have no doubt that there are some good, well-attested facts out there which do not contradict young-earth creation. The problem is that there are a lot more facts which are utterly inconsistent, in a 'this-fact-demolishes-your-argument-entirely' sort of way, with a young earth, and no unrelated pieces of evidence can really overcome that.

4. Young-earth creationism is a very recent phenomenon. By 'very recent' I mean circa 1950. Not that there is anything inherently wrong with 'very recent' things, such as myself. But I have a hard time accepting very recent theories that require massive skepticism and total dismissal of all science that came before them. For one thing, it's bad manners. For another, I have difficulty believing, as I might have to as a good young-earth creationist, that God created the world very recently, and then engaged on a massive cover-up operation (burying dinosaur bones, altering the earth's magnetic field, and playing fast and loose with radioactive decay) to hide his tracks. The idea is very imaginative. It's also very presumptuous.

5. Young-earth creationists have offered lots of reasons, many involving arcane interpretations of Hebrew letters from the first chapters of Genesis, of why young-earth creationism is the only possible explanation for the origin of the earth. Unfortunately, many of the arguments given by young earth creationists are a little lacking in the fact department, as they themselves admit (thanks for the link, Nate) - although the authors of the Christian science textbook I used in middle school were apparently unaware that many of these arguments against evolution had problems of their own.

6. Bonus Point! Cosmic Background Radiation! Proof that there was a Big Bang 14 billion years ago is passing through your body at this minute. Go read a book about it.

never too much gilt

On a whim we decided Saturday evening to go see The Adventures of Robin Hood (Errol Flynn) downtown at the Tennessee Theatre. The theatre has been restored to its original Gilded Age splendour a year or so ago, and this is the first time I've been there that I remember. Talk about color shock! Someone let loose packs of feral interior designers who could not refrain from employing gold leaf everywhere! (Of course, I am used to the typical Protestant-church decor where garish means "off-white.")

There were some rather odd pictures hung in the lobby, their ornate frames blending in with the wallpaper. One portrayed this scene: A young dandy, who resembled Leonardo DiCaprio deprived of a razor, was stiffly bent at the waist holding the hand of a blushing, cow-faced girl and inspecting her fingernails - for dirt, or lice, or signs of frenetic biting. I suppose he intended to kiss the hand if he found it hygenic enough; and if he did not, he carried a big walking stick which looked well-suited to beat cleanliness into her. Ah, the Gilded Age, when men were men!

I thought the ticket price ($7.50) was a bit steep for an old, probably-public-domain film -- but we received a definitive old-time movie experience. First came the organ rising out of the depths, and then a Three Stooges short, and finally the main feature. There was much curtain raising and applause. And the theatre looked pretty darn cool with the lights dimmed: intensely deep shades of blue, orange, and magenta filled the crevices. And there was gold leaf on every surface, and it looked pretty cool, too.

On the technical side, the film itself was in wonderfully preserved Technicolor, though whoever was running the projector could not focus the picture properly. Finally, when they switched to the second reel the film got much crisper. The film was in 4x3 format, mono sound.

On to the swashbuckling action! The best swordfighting was of course the climactic one between Robin Hood and Sir Guy of Gisbourne (boo! hiss!) during which they slash their way down the stairs, dance around a candleholder, knock over the table; and then, just after Sir Guy fails to plant his treacherous dagger in Robin's eye, a little two-inch stab in his belly gets him stiff and going backwards off the balcony like a sack of concrete. And then Robin had to run and force - with an comically bent blade - the gaoler to release Maid Marian from the dungeon. I'm still voting for The Princess Bride as the best sword-fighting film ever, but I'll give this second, or even first by virtue of precedence. [My top three "best swordfighting films ever" are basically related: 'sweet Wesley' (Cary Elwes) of The Princess Bride also plays Robin Hood in Robin Hood: Men in Tights, which film, when it's not making fun of Kevin Costner, is busy ripping off scenes from Errol Flynn's Robin Hood; while Bob Anderson, who trained and directed the sword fighting in The Princess Bride, also supervised fight training for the Lord of the Rings movies. What that means it that Wesley, Inigo Montoya, Robin Hood, and Aragorn could make one bad-ass movie fighting alongside one another, because they're cousins. Maybe someone will make a digital remix.]

nooooo! you stupid woman!

After spending all last week in love with A Suitable Boy, Lata went and married The Wrong Man! That's just so irresponsible of the author, and flies in the face of decent, humane values -- all of them at once! Everything bad you've ever heard about novels is true! They're immoral, whimsical drivel! From now on I'm sticking to science writing. It may be possible to get emotional about rocks, but surely it's harder for them to break your heart.

satan pays retail -- but jesus saves!

Today I'm thinking about combining TV sermons with the Home Shopping Network. Something like your typical "Christian" "book"store on TV, but without any pretense of being holy. If Jesus Saves, So Can You!

For all you waddling / expectant / wannabe mothers out there, a poem courtesy of A Suitable Boy (yet another of those thick foreign books I read to show off):

'A Lady Baby came to-day --' What words are quite so nice to say? They make one smile, they make one pray for Lady Baby's happiness. 'Today a Lady Baby came.' We have not heard her winsome name, we can address her all the same, as Lady Baby-Come-to-Bless.

When Lady Baby came to earth, her home was filled with joy and mirth. There's not a jewel of half the worth of Lady Baby-to-Caress. We're glad that Lady Baby's here, for at this sunless time of year, there's nought that brings such warmth and cheer as Lady Baby's daintiness.

Hush! Lady Baby's fast asleep, the friendly fire-flames dance and leap and angel's wings above her sweep as on her eyes a kiss they press. 'A Lady Baby!' Lovely phrase, it means she'll have such gentle ways, and grow to goodness all her days -- may God this Lady Baby bless!

And of course it would be wrong to omit, terrible, horrifying, and most certainly not-funny as they are,

Hush! Lady Baby's fast asleep, the friendly fire-flames dance and leap and burning her to ash they sweep across the Lady Baby's dress. 'A Lady Baby burned today' -- Her dainty soul has flown away -- God's called her back to frisk and play -- and that's one Lady Baby less.

what I wrote

july - september 2005 archives

the death of adam

afternoon whiskey

concerning whales

corridor diplomacy

phlegm, phlegm, glorious phlegm

'dead, unlit city'

cedia, part dead and part ugly

cedia, part when will this be over?!

cedia, part the second

cedia, part the first

strange things

no looting here

intelligent design special

my kinda justice

let's all worry about aliens

hate poetry

Medieval Realty!!

Medieval Realty!!

love poetry

it was the greatest library in Christendom

novel plagiarism

but what's scientific about it?

graffiti

if harry's bad, william's worse

washcloth of India

buy a hovel

what's in a middle name?

geopolitics and me

the coolest post ever

five reasons young earth creationism makes little sense

never too much gilt

nooooo! you stupid woman!

satan pays retail -- but jesus saves!