Bob Dylan said that.
Adam Mars-Jones has something a little different to say in Granta. It's a plea for peace and quiet in the movies. Sort of.
The New Republic discusses prediction markets, the Condorcet Jury Theorem, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, fat oxen, and much besides.
I'm just hoping Graeme will want to explain the Canadian election to us.
The shots heard around the world.
(No connection to the rather good latterday Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand).
Yet another alarmingly authoritarian piece of legislation coming America's way, with which, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Apple could be sued for making the iPod. The iPod, it seems, is a device which makes Apple's customers more likely to download music they haven't paid for. Manufacturers of CD Burners are also considered plausible targets.
I'd like to see Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) show a little consistency and support suits against gun manufacturers for selling items that are routinely used to kill people, and are an essential accessory in all sorts of more pecuniary crimes.
Perhaps if we could set the gun lobby against the RIAA this country would have a chance of developing sensible copyright policy.
One of the things I used to most enjoy over at the Scottish Newsgroup were the interminable (often learned, sometimes silly, but nearly always fun) squabbles over Orwell's ideas. I see no reason to drop the tradition, and I also see that Martha has provided a useful entry into such a discussion with her post about GO over at Harry's Place:
For one thing, he didn't like or understand the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience invented by Gandhi. He repeatedly classed Gandhi with totalitarian demagogues in a way that seems strange now, and the "Reflections on Gandhi" essay itself is mainly critical. I honestly don't know what he would have written about MLKing and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I'd almost rather not know.
Now, Martha and I have had this out before, but I still think she's missing the point about Orwell and nonviolent civil disobedience (hereafter NCD). The first thing to recognize is that Orwell's views on this subject were not static. Certainly, he didn't take Gandhi very seriously during the 1930s, and as late as 1944 he was still following the line that "[Gandhi's] methods have never seriously embarrassed the British". It is not until the 1949 post-independence Reflections that he seems to have finally, and somewhat grudgingly, acknowledged the significance of NCD tactics in India. (Whether Orwell ever grew to like Gandhi personally or not is, of course, a very different question).
By the way, an overlooked historical footnote: the resistance to British rule in India was frequently violent, and weighting the long-term significance of civil to uncivil disobedience is tricky. Gandhi's cause was often more of a frustrated vision than a practical reality.
But the crucial point about NCD so far as Orwell was concerned was its applicability within totalitarian regimes, a constant theme of 1940s pacifism. And it was this claim - that NCD could act as a replacement to violent resistance, external or internal, to Hitler, et al. - that he questioned.
"There is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle with the British government. The important point here is not so much that the British treated him forebearingly as that he was always able to command publicity ... he believed in 'arousing the world', which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at the moment? And if there is, what is he accomplishing? The Russian masses could only practice civil disobedience if the same idea happened to occur to all of them simultaneously, and even then, to judge by the history of the Ukraine famine, it would make no difference."
Martha asks what Orwell would have thought of Martin Luther King, with the implication that she wouldn't like the answer much. I don't believe in the WWGD? game, but I doubt that Orwell would have found anything in the history of the US Civil Rights movement to contradict what he had said about NCD a decade earlier. America in the 1950s and 1960s was, in many respects, a country of violent injustice - not unlike the Raj of the 1930s. But, also like British India, it was a country in which there were basic civic rights (at least for a privileged segment of the population) that could not be permanently ignored without repercussion, and it was these rights which activists used to take their case to the country and the world. If the Jim Crow South had operated like Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany, then Martin Luther King Jr. would have remained an apolitical pastor all his life, would have taken up violent resistance, or (if he had persisted in NCD tactics) would have quickly and quietly disappeared from history. But I cannot see any realistic scenario in which he would have been able to pursue the kind of successful Gandhiesque campaign that he did.
In what way did Orwell not "get" NCD?
CBC readers address a burning question: would Michael Moore make a good Canadian?
By far the most interesting selection in the Walt Disney Treasures DVD series has just been released - On the Front Lines, a compilation of the studio's wartime output, which includes cartoons starring Donald Duck & co., government information films, training shorts, and other animated ephemera produced by the Disney company from 1941-1945. It seems that Walt Disney took a keen personal interest in his company's wartime contributions, regardless of profit; indeed, the Disney firm almost went bankrupt producing unnecessarily elaborate and often quite beautiful films that would never make back a fraction of their cost. There are two particularly striking cartoons, Der Fueher's Face (a fantasy tale in which Donald imagines himself a serf in a Nazi-dominated country; the visuals are straight out of Modern Times and Spike Jones provides the amusing titular score) and Education for Death (a scary animated 'documentary' about a doe-eyed innocent becoming a fanatical stormtrooper under Nazi tutelage; think Bambi with the SS thrown in).
Some general observations:
As you might expect, the portrayal of the Japanese (and, to a lesser extent, the Germans and Italians) would not past muster with the racially sensitive these days, although the enemy are more often depicted as comic buffoons than as bestial apes or some of the other unpleasant excesses of wartime propaganda.
The anti-Semitism of the Nazis is alluded to, though always indirectly - there's much made of 'Aryan supremacy', while 'forbidden names' like Sarah and Rebecca are mentioned, as is the burning of a Mendelssohn suite - but I don't think the word 'Jew' is ever used in any of these scenes. Perhaps Disney believed (accurately, I suspect) that 1940s audiences would be less sympathetic to a specifically Jewish plight than they would to a more generalized theme of racial victimization.
The centerpiece of the collection is Victory Through Air Power (1943), an hour-long mixture of live action and animation which is an adaptation of a book by Major Alexander de Seversky. This, along with the still-embargoed Song of the South, was the only full-length Disney cartoon that had never been available for purchase, though unlike the controversial Brer Rabbit movie it was probably just the period obscurity of Victory that delayed its release. It's a detailed and often dazzling production, with splendid animation and high production values, although the themes it propagates (America must build 3,000-mile range bombers to attack Japan from Alaska, among other things) were pretty eccentric even at the time. It's a shame that Disney didn't go the whole hog and add a commentary track by an aviation historian; that would have turned an interesting historical curio into a really significant work of scholarship.
Well, happy Orwell's birthday. Yes, I feel a little like Schroeder in "Peanuts" with his lonely sign: "Only 20 Shopping Days Left To Beethoven's Birthday..." Commemoration seems pretty light this year per Google News. But in this household at least we raised a Jura whisky toast in honor of poor old Eric. Cheers to others who may be doing similar.
...according to a recent survey conducted by the Merriam-Webster website.
Apparently the Czechs have a proud history of defenestration.
More reasons to hate happy people:
1) Happy people are meaner and tend to be more prejudiced than sad people, as any sad person knows perfectly well without a bunch of researchers publishing it.
2) Swedes are the happiest people in the world, which is weird.
3) Happiness is mainly genetic, which is patently unfair.
4) Men become happier with age, while women become less happy. Blatant gender bias.
5) Happy people are more politically involved than unhappy people, that is, we have happy people to thank for most of our current problems.
6a) Happy people are full of themselves and inevitably blab a lot about their boring jobs and meaningless titles at parties.
6b) Happy people win prizes (i.e., are "prize-winning").
On the other hand, happy children supposedly have shorter life spans.
This obviously brilliant psychologist has argued that happiness is a mental illness.
Your long wait is finally over. Don't just read prize-winning fiction, experience it in a whole new way.
Which has got me thinking again about creative writing programs, the whole concept in general, its, as you might say, theory and practice. Are they only good for redistributing a little wealth from middle class kids into the pockets of well-deserving (usually prize-winning) writers? If not, why not? Thomas Pynchon took creative writing classes, according to an introduction he wrote to a collection of early short stories.
Finally, am I the only one who cannot use the term "prize-winning" with a straight face?
Well, we seem to be found, sort of, after a slightly scary mixup.
To get the ball rolling again, it turns out the actual book Lost Horizon was the first ever published in paperback. But does anyone know if the book, or the film made from it, is any good?
And who do you suppose is the better musician, John Ashcroft or Silvio Berlusconi?
Via the Dr. Who fandom conversation that's developed in an earlier thread -- Proust has this thing to say about enthusiasm substituting for introspection. (Proust being his dear windy self, I'll continue this in extensions of remarks.)
Even in our artistic enjoyment, although sought after for the impressions it gives, we are very quickly content to leave those impressions aside as something that cannot be expressed and confine our attention to those phases which allow us to experience the pleasure without analysing the sensations thoroughly, while thinking that we are communicating them to others with similar tastes, with whom we shall be able to converse because we shall be talking to them of something which is the same for them as for us, the personal root of our own impression having been eliminated. At the very times when we are the most dispassionate observers of nature, of society, love, even art itself, since every impression has two parts, one of them incorporated in the object and the other prolonged within ourselves and therefore knowable only to us, we are quick to neglect the latter, that is to say, the one part to which we ought to devote our attention, and consider only the other half, which, being outside ourselves, cannot be studied deeply and consequently never will cause us any fatiguing exertion; the slight groove that a musical phrase or the sight of a church made in our consciousness we find it too difficult to try to comprehend. But we play the symphony again and again or keep returning to look at the church, until, in this running away from our own life which we have not the courage to face -- they call this 'erudition' -- we come to know them as well, and in the same manner, as the most learned lover of music or archaeology. How many there are, consequently, who stop at that point and extract nothing from their impression, but go to their graves useless and unsatisfied, like celibates of art. They are tormented by the same regrets as virgins and idlers, regrets that fecund labour would dispel. They are more wrought up over works of art than the real artists, because they do not labour arduously to get to the bottom of their emotional state and therefore it is diffused in outward expression, puts heat into their remarks and blood into their faces; they think they are doing something really great when, after the execution of a work they like, they shout vociferously "Bravo! Bravo!" But these manifestations do not force them to seek light on the nature of their love; they do not know what it really is...Casts some light on fan clubs, maybe?
J & I have been thinking up reality shows.
"Celebrity Fog Factor" is mine, based on the notion that written documents have a "fog index." On successive shows, contestants from sheltered lives attempt to apply for driver's licenses, unemployment benefits, welfare benefits, building permits, disability bus passes, and so on. Points are deducted for tempers lost, colds contracted in stuffy offices, security called due to asking for a supervisor, etc.
J., being more lighthearted in general, suggests "Celebrity FUD Factor," FUD meaning mainly the "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" allegedly instilled by some large companies in the minds of customers regarding smaller competitors' products. (It also recalls the "Far Side" cartoon in which the family dog has scrawled "Cat Fud --->" on the door of the spin dryer & is praying for the family cat to step inside. But I, as usual, digress.) "Celebrity FUD" could test the players' bullhockey detectors: which one of six outlandish science tales isn't fake? Would you buy stock in some company called "International Business Machines"? How scared should you be of dihydrogen monoxide?... and so on.
So, OK, you guys got a better idea?
Laura Miller critiques a new mind-probing study of the President by GWU Psychiatry Professor Justin Frank - who, so far as I can tell, has never even met Bush, let alone evaluated him in a clinical environment. I'm no fan of '43, but this book seems to reveal more about the dubious state of Freudian psychoanalysis today than it does about the current occupant of the White House.
"If political commentators often resort to overly simplistic notions of character, psychoanalysts tend to overly personalize politics. Frank regards every act of the Bush administration as a direct emanation from the psyche of George W. himself. He seems unaware that a presidency is a collaboration, or that sincerity is not always a viable political option ...
Psychoanalysts also have an annoying propensity to interpret every behavior that they don't approve of as a manifestation of pathology, teeming with hidden meanings. As a result, Frank, your basic liberal, never honestly engages with the conservative ideology that Bush espouses and all the counterarguments it makes to liberal ideals of good government. The underlying premise of "Bush on the Couch" is that because Bush is a conservative, he must be suffering from "an array of multiple, serious and untreated symptoms." Bush may indeed be gravely troubled emotionally, but that conclusion doesn't automatically follow from his conservatism and it's neither respectful nor adult to act as if it does."
Ladies of New Jersey - your discounted bar-hopping is guaranteed by law again.
Joyce wrote in Switzerland; Wayne Rooney walked all over it.
"...I was a Flower of the Mersey yes when I put the ball in the air like the Brazilian boys used or shall I wear the white and red yes and how I kissed it over the Swiss wall and I thought well as well me as Owen and then I asked him with my feet to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my Everton flower and first I put the ball around him yes and drew it down to Stiel so he never felt the ball all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes it's there my son Yes. "
Professor Yagoda takes mild umbrage, but at least he can walk away - this idiomatic confusion is my whole life.
Anyone for a stroll through Dublin in 1904?
A&L and the Guardian have roundups.
An interesting take on the Supreme Court's Pledge of Allegiance decision.
I'd like to join the chorus and say we wuz robbed, but a soberer analysis would suggest that justice was done at (literally) the last minute.
c/o Arts & Letters Daily, a link to the Churchill Centre's quarterly journal partly debunks the oft-cited claim that in 1919 WSC was "strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes". The precise moral qualities of lachrymatory gas (to which Churchill was apparently referring) I leave to others. But this is another cautionary example of how dangerous it is to rely on conventional Net wisdom, particularly when it comes to "famous quotes". I had a pratfall myself a little while back when I spouted a maxim of Chesterton's that 'everyone knows', only to find out that it was bogus. Examples from Orwell and Burke followed. Dodgy quotes are not necessarily spurious - as in the Churchill case, they may be literally accurate but so ripped out of context as to be misleading. In any case - as George Washington never said - a careless cite can be "a troublesome servant and a fearful master".
(Oh, and you can forget rum, sodomy and the lash too).
Thus says Dennis R. Schrader, director of homeland security for Maryland, when asked what he thinks of "privacy concerns" over the installation of a vast network of cameras in the Baltimore region to be monitored by an army of retired police officers and, uh, college students.
Just another great college funding scheme? If this has anything to do with terrorists, what will the ever-vigiliant students of Baltimore look for? People wandering the streets in ski masks?
The following is from Graeme Burk of Gem, Geek or Rare Bug?
There's an election here in Canada, in case anyone was wondering, with the extreme right just slightly ahead of the right, with the left party possibly acting as a spoiler for the first time in 30 years.A couple of articles have come out of this that may have applications elsewhere. There's a fascinating article about the very lame attempt at blogging by the official political parties. And there's an interesting, if colourful, article on how the right-wing party's attempt to steal votes from the left to forestall the hard right party from getting in is part of a broader malaise within politics.
Anyone know this "Word Spy" site? Looks like it could be worth exploring. Here's the side page I found first, with a nice quote from Tsvetaeva.
Here's an unexpected find in the normally dry output of the U.S. General Accounting Office: a report that explains some continuing property disputes in New Mexico through a legal/scholarly history of land claims in what's now the Southwestern U.S., from the conquistadors to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to the present. The period photos and documents alone are worth a glance, and then there's the frisson of watching frontier-era dramas still playing themselves out in the America of the mini-mall and the SUV. (If the above link is balky, try clicking through from this one, where you can also download the text in Spanish if you like.)
There's often more to these kind of stories than the initial news reports reveal, and I'm leery of allowing public institutions too much 'creativity' in their punishments in any case. But I do wonder: would this 10-year-old really have been better served by the default week-long suspension (or the alternative cop-out, no punishment at all?)
I try to avoid overtly political postings at Horizon, but this deconstruction of 5 Reagan myths has something to annoy everyone, I think.
Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity, which got mixed reviews to begin with, is now out in a better-reviewed stage version.
I can only assume from promos of The Simple Life II that Rupert Murdoch has become a revolutionary Marxist and is using his media empire to spread Bolshevik propaganda about the parasitic capitalist class, exemplified by the singularly worthless Hilton/Ritchie duo. Either that, or decadence has reached a new point of irony-free shamelessness. What's next in Fox's celebration of unabashed waste: Burning Large Piles of Cash, hosted by Carrot Top? Pro-celebrity gold plate tossing into the Tiber?
I don't know about you, but the possibilities of electoral fraud in this new scheme seem so vast to me that I can't take the bland assurances of the 'Department for Constitutional Affairs' (now where did that come from?) very confidently.
UK official takes flak for urging council officials to allow poor people to smoke.
There's Nothing New Under the Sun Part LCMXVII: Fox TV's "innovative" new reality show The Jury is, as 1970s viewers of lunchtime Granada TV will immediately recognize, just a warmed-up crib (more or less) of Crown Court.
I've read a lot of hyperbolic stuff about journalists - usually opinionated columnists sitting in comfortable air-conditioned offices - taking "brave" or "heroic" stands over the last year or two, so here's a sobering reminder of the genuine dangers that some members of the press face in their everyday line of work. Here's hoping that Frank Gardner makes a swift and complete recovery.
One of the things I realized when I scanned the various obit notices for the late President Reagan was that I have never, ever, seen one of his movies; not Knute Rockne: All American; not Cattle Queen of Montana; not even the now iconic Bedtime for Bonzo. So partisanship and/or rote respect for the recently dead aside, is anyone out there willing to chip in on the central question of his film career: was he actually any good at all? After Reagan's rise to political prominence in the late 1970s it became cliched to describe him as a bad B-movie actor, but surely he wouldn't have made that many leading performances if he was as lousy as they say, would he? I seem to recall Gene Zitver making a guarded defense of the Gipper's thespian skills at one time: any other bids?
Daniel Mendelsohn delivers an extremely literate pan of the "Troy" movie in the NYRB, ending with a phrase that will be familiar to some Aspidistra fans.
OK, I'm gonna be pretentious for a minute:
We had this conversation about obviousness last summer that in typical Orwell-fan fashion wended from boils to Bile Beans to skin treatments to political cartoonists but along the way also discussed the problem (if it is a problem) of some folks often not even wanting to be original.
In half-hopes of reopening that conversation, here's my question: is there a problem writers have that's similar to the "anxiety of influence" stuff Harold Bloom talks about, & could you call it "anxiety of obviousness"? I.e. are there writers who suffer from trying so hard to be original that they leave out essential structural elements and/or make stuff happen in their stories that's just too weird to seem even loosely extrapolated from real life? On the other hand, are successful screenwriters, or writers of popular page-turners like J.K. Rowling, successful in part because they're willing to punch a certain minimum number of their audiences' buttons?
And does the argument in "The Orchid Thief" between artistic Charlie Kaufman and his (fictional) lowbrow film-school-student brother Donald shed any light (or bile, or beans) on these questions?
As long as we're borrowing from A&L Daily today, there's this Atlantic Monthly feature on the horrors of the Victorian household:
...And the houses themselves were deathtraps: the larders held food colored with poison, including lead, which was also in the primer on the walls, which were covered in paper that contained arsenic. The aspidistra became a symbol of the middle-class because it was one of the few houseplants that could withstand the noxious fumes in the gas-lit parlors....Besides which, we're told, the culture was so deeply obsessed with death that ladies' clothing for a latter stage of mourning was sold in the "Mitigated Affliction Department."
Hilarious article on academic titles and general administrative buffoonery from the Chronicle of Higher Education via A&L Daily.
I've met some rock-dumb administrators before but whoever came up with the title "Assistant Director of the Underclass" has got to win some sort of prize if there's any justice in this world.
Two reasons to mark Sunday. June 6, 2004: the sixtieth anniversary of D-Day - probably the last time that significant numbers of veterans will be able to take part in memorial services; and this young man's birthday.
The Euro 2004 championship will be starting in just over a week, but the Portuguese hosts are ambivalent about its impact on their small, relatively poor country.
Via A&L Daily -- a site with such similar taste to this group's -- a verbless review of a novel without verbs. Such language possible a hundred years ago, you suppose? Possible now because of telegraphic headline and Internet language habits?
Funny stuff, this extended text without an essential element of grammar. Reminiscent in its own way of Ursula LeGuin's fictional example of a tabloid newspaper article in The Dispossessed: "...'By last night rebels hold all west of Meskti and pushing army hard...' It was the verbal mode of the Nioti, past and future rammed into one highly charged, unstable present tense..." There, of course, a journalese with verbs, but likewise an example of grammar without an ordinarily essential element.
Whose phrase, "Death to the adjective!" --? Hemingway's? But maybe survival for the adjective longer than for the verb?
Those prepostrous email legal disclaimers deconstructed.
A little while back I mentioned some moments of kitsch-meeting-real-life during the Eurovison Song Contest's history. Now the Czech Republic's Pop Idol contest (American Idol to you parochial Yanks) has been stung with accusations of anti-Romany prejudice.
We all missed George Formby's hundredth birthday on May 26. I don't claim to be a Formby expert but I've learned enough about him from UK friends not to want his centenary to pass without comment. If nothing else, there's his association with the Wigan Pier joke. Here's the George Formby Society site for more information
And there's a nice surprise from the BBC via the Crooked Timber item above: it turns out the author of the cringe-making "Mr. Wu" lyrics actually did a fair amount of standing up to prejudice in other ways. I haven't listened to the BBC report yet (am looking forward to doing so), but the Crooked Timber folks say it describes Mr. and Mrs. Formby as both refusing to play along with apartheid while touring South Africa.
Here's hoping he got to keep his ukelele in heaven. Harps galore would be deadly dull.
The seemingly inexorable march of the Tylers continues apace. (BTW, anyone who bought a dalmation in the wake of the Disney movies must be regretting the decision by now; has there ever been a more disagreeable dog?)