ApatheticLiberalDepressingPostModernEvangelicalRedNeckTechnoApocalypse

I found a Monty Python and the Holy Grail t-shirt at Target earlier this evening, but I didn't get it. Which may be a good sign.

Since it's been raining all day and has no plans to quit until Monday, I found this intriguingly simple game online. It's perfect for lateral thinking, and you can share your answers with other players. I'll leave my current 'saved game' state in the comments if you'll reciprocate. [For those with homework: this exercise is entirely optional. It will not be graded. It will not be on the test. You will not receive bonus credits. ]

14.x, nudge, nudge

Ah, Denver! Looking eastwards you wouldn't know you're not in Kansas anymore, but when you turn around there are those scrubby, unwashed mountains subtle as a line of elephants. A view like that gets my heart-rate up. I guess I have a thing for altitude.

Of course, I wasn't there for hiking, or even for gazing at the mountains, because I was busy repeating last year's orgy (in several installments, all hilarious, if I do say so myself) of electronics, caffeine, and alcohol. One minor disappointment on the third item is that I didn't get around to having an Irish Car Bomb, but overall I'd rate the long weekend of work (and "work") as very successful. The flight back was three hours late, which, after three years working for an airline, is exactly what I expected for Sunday afternoon. I sat in a Zen-like state of bliss watching everyone else squirm and panick. And then we all made our connections anyways because every flight in the Chicago area was as delayed as we were.

It rained in little pieces the last evening, and into early morning was cloudy, but when the sun broke into the afternoon the sky shone a polished, pearly blue and cresting the hills as we drove could see what had been hazy and hidden all the long, hot day of summer: those terraced ridges of hills grown higher and darker, and beyond them the darkest and highest outline of the real mountains, terribly new, as though they had gone away like nomads and returned by night to sit on thrones.

awake and caffeinated

I have chocolate-covered coffee beans!!! And can get more!!!

is there anything better

than a fresh cup of coffee, pressed from newly-ground beans? It is the form of coffee-ness. Or it isn't, because there is only one form, while my press holds, sometimes, a second cup. Why, in all those philosophy lectures, did we never let our stomachs think about the enjoyment of food? [There was moment of tobaccolust when a certain professor of Medieval and Enlightenment philosophy, whose portly form I will always recall when I think of G.K. Chesterton, told us that he had given the Christmas gift of a fine cigar to the college president. Apparently, not all men are born epicures.]

Anyhow, I reckon that taking quotes from the tag-team of Chesterton ["Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable"] and Ben Franklin ["Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy"] and Dorothy Parker ["I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy"], any semi-educated lout can justify the enjoyment of basically everything worth enjoying. But what's Plato got to do with it?

quotes from books

Julius Caesar, de bello civili, liber I:

“Against all precedent, the consuls left Rome, and in defiance of ancient custom… [l]evies were raised, and Italy became an armed camp. Monetary contributions were exacted from the municipal boroughs, the temple treasuries were drawn upon, and there was no distinction between the rights of God and man.”

Did Jesus, then, questioned on taxes, quote [allude to] Caesar?

G.B. Shaw’s thoughts on the World Fellowship of Faiths:

“While admitting that he had ‘found in the east a quality of religion which is lacking in these islands’, he doubted the practicality of uniting ‘men of burning faith’. In his view, all potential members should be asked a number of questions, including: ‘1. On what public grounds would you shoot your next door neighbor, excluding those already recognized by our criminal court?’

A little consolation:

“I feel annoyed that in [God’s] wisdom, He chose to reel me in with middle-brow Christian fiction. It could be worse, I suppose. I could have come to faith while reading Left Behind.”

That clears all that up, then:

“So poor Louise, who loved her father very dearly, could only turn to Harry for help. But Harry listened to her in frank disbelief. Girls had a habit, he knew, of distressing themselves over things which did not exist. It was something to do with their wombs, so a fellow-officer had once told him. No doubt Louise was suffering from this womb-anxiety, then.”

See also: the novels of Milan Kundera

“A taste for kitsch among the well-to-do is a sign of spiritual impoverishment; but among the poor, it represents a striving for beauty, an aspiration without the likelihood of fulfillment.”

Reading Isak Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, I came across this priceless, bawdy, sexy sacrilege of an anecdote—no, even briefer than that—a sacrilegious witticism:

Miss Malin, outshone as a world traveler by the valet, quickly took refuge in the wide world of her imagination. “Ah,” she said, “in Egypt, in the great triangular shadow of the great pyramid, while the ass was grazing, St. Joseph said to the Virgin: ‘Oh, my sweet young dear, could you not just for a moment shut your eyes and make believe that I am the Holy Ghost?’ “

Doesn’t it seem like a Jewish tale, a story told originally in Yiddish? ‘And wouldn’t the New Testament be funny if Jews had written it?’ (And it is funny, isn’t it? But where, and why?)

Physicist Karl Giberson, writing on Newton, quotes John Maynard Keynes, who, having purchased a box of Newton’s papers at auction, wrote on what he found there:

In the eighteenth century and since, Newton came to be thought of as the first and greatest of the modern age of scientists, a rationalist, one who taught us to think on the lines of cold and untinctured reason. I do not see him in this light. I do not think that any one who has pored over the contents of that box which he packed up when he finally left Cambridge in 1696 and which, though partly dispersed, have come down to us, can see him like that. Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind which looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago. Isaac Newton, a posthumous child born with no father on Christmas Day, 1642, was the last wonder-child to whom the Magi could do sincere and appropriate homage.

Is that not an immortal paragraph?

supplement to the devil's dictionary

I was scrolling through the MS Wordy-goodness of my pre-blog and decided that plagiarizing my old material was easier than coming up with something new. Besides, I've forgotten how to type and so every second key is backspace. (That's exaggerations, otherwise this post would be blank.)

Some definitions after Ambrose Bierce:

spirit – another name for the body, intended to foster feelings of repulsion towards it and simultaneously generate the wishful idea that something can be done about it; what optimists think humans aspire to be, and realists recognize they abhor.

sermon – a religious discourse designed to inure one to the torments of hell.

bible – a large book in plain words, of moral and ethical and spiritual instruction, whose guidance men will do anything to avoid understanding; thus can it be said to be the chief source of the Christian religion.

hermeneutics – the work of wrapping a cat in brown paper.

episcopalian – a Christian without faith in Christianity, willing to stand for principles not yet existent, who would sever communion with Christ her/himself should s/he offend by holding a stable opinion.

fundamentalist – one so enamored of the Bible he would quote Scripture to God in similar manner as the Devil tempted Christ in the wilderness.

evangelical – one to whom the certainty that the world is irrevocably damned and the conviction that it must be immediately saved do not register as conflicting beliefs; a donkey driven by a carrot to chase a stick.

how not to title your autobiography

if your name is Dick Schaap.

The same issue of Metro Pulse has an extraordinarily good article on Ezra Pound (yes, that Ezra Pound) and the Clinton, TN riots (a tense summer of civil unrest) that occurred fifty years ago during the onset of desegregation.

the cup of hamlock

This week saw the death of Bangladeshi poet Shamsur Rahman. Despite a few gaffes in translation, his poems read pretty well.

In completely unrelated news, some guy just ruined it for everyone else.

hello nsa

Last weekend I got Fahrenheit 911 from the library's collection of DVDs, not because I'm some freak conspiracy theorist or anything, but because Michael Moore is a funny guy. And he has some moments of great incisiveness along with his wackiness, as evidenced by such films as Bowling For Columbine, and that one where Alan Alda of M.A.S.H. plays the US President, they invade Canada, and a Mountie stops the invading truck plastered with anti-Canadian slogans to enforce the language laws and makes them respray every phrase with the French equivalent. (A gag stolen from Monty Python's Life of Brian, but still funny.)

I thought that before I get picked up by the FBI I would mention that, were I only Muslim & Pakistani by birth, I'd fit every terrorist profile out there (excepting the profiles for women, I guess). Single, reclusive loner, college-educated, feeling out-of-touch with western culture, and prone to fits of depression. (In the 1930s I'd have been a Communist. And of course that worked out really well, if your first name happened to be "Joe", "Fidel", or "Kim".) Why do I nurture that apocalyptic sense of urgency and fatality? It can't just be habit.

hidden beneath a candy-colored exterior

A couple of weeks ago, I went ebaying. And bought me one of these for my computer. Now I can run some cool software like this and this, and this, and especially this. Oh, and this raspberry-like thingy.

The lit-geek side of me would like to point out that I have also attended performances (live! free!) of Henry V and The Taming of the Shrew in the last week. Henry and Katherine were played by the same forceful redhead. Needless to say, she has a voice could scold you from ten miles away. And the kids who got killed in last year's Macbeth repeated as the boys of the English baggage train.

long lonely summer

As the summer drags on the heat makes everyone more melancholy; and that, surprisingly, makes everyone just a bit more friendly. I think. It might just be that fatigue makes me more oblivious to what others are thinking. Nevertheless, I consider it noteworthy that I've run into, been written to by, or talked on the phone with multiple old friends this week. It's like a personal reunion.

excavation

Or something involving a backhoe and bulldozer has laid waste to the House Mountain parking lot. I reckon it has something to do with Congress (that would be the federal government) appropriating a couple thousand dollars for "improvements." To get around the fact that it's a state park, the land was redesignated as a "federal state recreation area." That means, I suppose, that the great state of Tennessee won't have to spend any money but still gets all the credit. At the end of the day, though it's still just a parking lot for a hiking trail, now surrounded by "Keep Out" signs. The view from the top isn't bad, though, on a clear day.

percy is palahniuk

The Moviegoer is the same book as Fight Club. In spots they have almost the same language; the same detached way of viewing the world through theory. I am not entirely sure what this means.

the real mccoy

And I thought that the book about monks working their way into the global economy was meant as a parody. Monks have been in the copying business since the Middle Ages, so why not modernize a bit and branch out into printer cartridges, as the LaserMonks have?

death in novels

Nothing very intelligent in this summary of authors killing off favorite characters (where are the despicable characters whom the author still couldn't bear to completely destroy? like Becky Sharp from Vanity Fair) but many good books are mentioned all together, which is how I like my book reviews.

greeneland

I've been trying for some time to figure out why I like reading Graham Greene. He's a guilty pleasure, I know, and that's enough to start me bothering. The second charge is that the man has no style. Of course, in our style-inflicted age, Greene's shunning of an obviously literary style is in itself striking and novel. Whoop-de-do. [Consider: did Jane Austen's contemporaries consider her to have a style?] Part of the problem here is that the thriller/spy novel, to which Greene contributed heavily, has turned into a genre, hence an industry, with the usual dire consequences for those with literary expectations. You end up reading scripts for action movies instead of accounts of applied moral psychology that happen to occur within a fast-paced plot. To my mind, the best recent spy movie has been The Bourne Identity series, which is of course based on those old-fashioned spy novels where the protagonist is allowed to carry a conscience.

Anyhow, the nice thing about Greene's lack of style--his gift for natural language, let us call it-- is that he never makes you wonder what exactly it is that he's saying. His sentences are always on target.

And, in true procrastinatory fashion, I must admit that everything above is now falsified, because I have read a Greene novel absolutely reeking with style. I've shied away from reading The Quiet American because there was a movie recently made from it, but that was a pretty bad excuse for missing a book as good as this. I attribute the style-reekishness of it to it being narrated first-person by an English reporter. (The previous sentence is awkward, but that is not the point.) What Greene does unbelievably well is get inside one character's head and stay there like some horrible parasite until everything happens.

I have been most callous by entirely omitting Greene's nonfiction travel writing from consideration. This is because I have not read it. But, if my little theory about his mastery of the first-person is correct, then I should like it.

seventy-some miles later

My Family and Other Animals: Like Roald Dahl, except of course that it isn't, which makes it even more delightful to discover.

We hiked from Newfound Gap up to Clingman's Dome Saturday, and I finally got to see the view from on top. It was also nice to be able to check off those hazy blue peaks in the distance and say "Yep, I've been there." Now that I've done every mile of the AT inside the Smokies, I guess it's time for a new challenge. Only I don't know what it is yet.

what I wrote

funny farm