Because some folks here will groove on it, I'm providing this link as a public service. Found via good egg archy.
Incidentally, on the subject of offending people, I find this in the latest Harper's Weekly:
In Hempstead, New York, two legal-reform activists were detained for telling old lawyer jokes outside a courthouse, including: “Why do they bury lawyers 100 feet into the ground? Because down deep, they're good people.” An offended lawyer had the men arrested.
I didn't realize one could be arrested for telling jokes. Martha, any comments on the civil rights implications? (Or is that civil liberties? What exactly is the difference, anyway?) The original article has more details:
"They put the handcuffs on us, brought us into a room, frisked us, sat us down and checked our driver's licenses to see if there were any warrants out for our arrest," Lanzisera said yesterday. "They were very nasty, extremely nasty."
I once got arrested by the BART police and thrown in a cage for supposedly stealing a dollar, so I know how they feel.
I'm not planning any recognition or appreciation of Ayn Rand's upcoming 100th birthday, but the fact of its approach got me thinking of all the people I've met over the years who've claimed Atlas Shrugged as the book that changed their lives. Well, I'm always wary of life-changing books, so I waited until my mid-40's to discover what the fuss was about. Actually, a Satanist talked me into reading it. Wow, what a bad book.
But to the topic of life-altering, heavens-opening, mountain-sundering books. I have been impressed, influenced, even swept away by certain books; but not one - that I can think of - has changed my life. Do such books exist?
Interesting ariticle on Helen Vendler from A&L. Also an interview with her from earlier this year.
Then for something completely strange, here's a poem by that great American poet Ernest Hemingway...
I LIKE CANADIANS (1923)
I like Canadians.
They are so unlike Americans.
They go home at night.
Their cigarets don't smell bad.
Their hats fit.
They really believe that they won the war.
They don't believe in Literature.
They think Art has been exaggerated.
But they are wonderful on ice skates.
A few of them are very rich.
But when they are rich they buy more horses
Than motor cars.
Chicago calls Toronto a puritan town.
But both boxing and horse-racing are illegal
In Chicago.
Nobody works on Sunday.
Nobody.
That doesn't make me mad.
There is only one Woodbine.
But were you ever at Blue Bonnets?
If you kill somebody with a motor car in Ontario
You are liable to go to jail.
So it isn't done.
There have been over 500 people killed by motor cars
In Chicago
So far this year.
It is hard to get rich in Canada.
But it is easy to make money.
There are too many tea rooms.
But, then, there are no cabarets.
If you tip a waiter a quarter
He says "Thank you."
Instead of calling the bouncer.
They let women stand up in the street cars.
Even if they are good-looking.
They are all in a hurry to get home to supper
And their radio sets.
They are a fine people.
I like them.
Nicked from the A&L Daily silly section, here's a suggestion that Finland has made a more harmonious society by teaching its children to play musical instruments. You believe that?
...being condescended to by the Times of London about a Southern California court judgment that I don't like one little bit myself. What are we now to the rest of the world -- South Africa?
In Vermont, it gets cold but not half as cold as Minnesota; our politicians can run for national office but it's best if they don't win; our definition of a natural disaster is a tree crushing a picnic table; and when we have a scandal it often concerns a teddy bear.
Been reading Eminent Victorians a little this week. It's an interesting/unique tone -- arch, quietly funny, elegantly rude ("...The Oxford Movement was now ended. The University breathed such a sigh of relief as usually follows the difficult explusion of a hard piece of matter from a living organism..."), and so given to scarifying everyone's absurdities that it takes a long time to figure out whose side he's actually on.
There's some of his dry tart humor in Orwell actually, whose Jan. 21 death anniversary btw I see we've missed.
Some of him in Douglas Adams too. E.g. on an ecclesiastical follower of Cardinal Newman:
...Given the premises, he would follow out their implications with the mercilessness of a mediaeval monk, and when he had reached the last limits of argument be ready to maintain whatever propositions he might find there with his dying breath... [H]e swallowed whole the supernatural conception of the universe which Newman had evolved, accepted it as a fundamental premise, and began at once to deduce from it whatsoever there might be to be deduced. His very first deductions included...
...well, not precisely rice pudding and income tax, but you see what I mean.
Anyone got thoughts on what to make of Mr. Strachey?
A refreshing breath of common sense by William Saletan on the Isn't-Larry-Summers-A-Monster saga, which unusually focuses on what the Harvard President actually said about gender differences in science rather than what he is presumed to have said.
There's no poet on the program for today's inauguration. Salon discussed this same absence in 2001. Not sure I buy into the reasons. Why should a poet tend to be a Democrat? And assuming that any poem written for the event would necessarily use the theme of American Exceptionalism (thanks, Ben) as a positive force, why couldn't a Republican poet get the job done?
Do Democrats have a better ear for poetry than Republicans? Nonsense.
Edgar Allan Poe born today, 1809.
Some time back there was a discussion here about books taught in high schools then and now, specifically Catcher in the Rye, and I remember being pleased that a novel written in the early 50's still speaks to young people. Now I'm recalling my Kate as a freshman, coming home one day excited about The Cask of Amontillado.
There came forth in return only a jingling of the bells. My heart grew sick; it was the dampness of the catacombs that made it so.
I recently watched the first two episodes of the Dukes of Hazzard and that was a strange experience. I had only fragmentary childhood memories of an orange car, people jumping in through the window, and a fat guy saying "Duke boys!" over and over again. It's funny when just one little phrase is all you have, it becomes emblematic of so many hours of pre-adolescent lethargy, and every time you try to remember it you just see a fat man saying "Duke boys!" repeatedly like a jingle stuck in your head. "Duke boys! Duke boys!" It's disturbing after a while.
So, now I've seen some of it again, I am not surprised to find that the show was, dramatic pause, horrible. Even nostalgia couldn't make watching more than a half hour of it worthwhile.
There were a few surprises, though. For one thing, it was shot back in the days when people shot TV on real film stock, and maybe that stock wasn't well preserved, or maybe it's my monitor, but it looks very under exposed. This makes for a stange experience: particularly in one scene, it sort of looks like the Godfather with a sputtering Boss Hogg stepping in for Brando. It's a completely differenty visual style from later TV.
It had also never occured to me before how drastically TV fashions can change. Watching these episodes reminded me that there was a time in American TV in which almost every show had to have at least one car jump in slow motion. I would go so far as to guess that the Dukes of Hazzard ushered in this leitmotif, which went on to be almost the entire reason for the existence of shows such as Knight Rider and the A Team. It used to seem so natural that it should be that way, but now it just seems bizarre. And I can't remember the last time I saw a car in mid air on television.
The increase in the volume of vacuity is proportional to the acceleration of channel selection mass times the rate of DVR usage? I nearly flunked physics, so there's no need to challenge that formula.
It's the TiVo Nation versus the League of Extraordinary Curmudgeons. There's a new proletariat fleshing out the bottom rungs: Old Navy mobs, terrified of missing an episode of Desperate Housewives. For some of us, that means a shot at joining the new ruling class, membership at the highest levels in the Party. All you'll need is to read five books a year, maintain a backyard herb garden, and keep warm a fantasy about a regularly kept blog.
How will you know if you're a candidate for election to the elite? A simple calculation: do you now watch 50% less television than you did as a twelve-year-old? How do you rate?
Like most posters here, an encounter with that famous Orwell quote about pacifists is an occasion for me to roll my eyes -- a wince and a mental "Yes, but..." as I hesitate a bit to read further. Imagine my pleasure when reading Eugene Volokh's draft article on deterring speech, I ran into Orwell's self-rebuttal, four pages later!
At first, I was fooled into thinking the David Gelernter bit in Commentary might be an instructive piece on the religious foundations of the American nation. To a degree it is, but on the whole it's just more pulpit pounding.
The idea that Americanism is not just a religion but an actual branch of Judeo-Christianity is intriguing. Too bad Gelernter can't act as disinterested observer. How much more convincing he'd be if he didn't so identify with that religion.
'By Americanism I mean the set of beliefs that are thought to constitute America’s essence and to set it apart; the beliefs that make Americans positive that their nation is superior to all others—morally superior, closer to God.'
We should all accept our sense of moral superiority. But embracing it like a lover requires the glossing over of a great deal of our history and a very short memory. And if you can't fathom why other nations and cultures - and some fellow Americans - might feel threatened by that, then we all may be lost. But then, Anti-Americanists, as I gather from Gelernter, are merely religion-mockers, a group made up of journalists, professors, school teachers, Europeans, Muslims, and Al Gore.
Each of us believes we are morally superior to our neighbor. The real test of that ascendancy is our willingness to kill for it.
If you're thinking about setting up camp on the moon, you better check with the owners first.
'If you intend to use my area within the bounds of your intention, to build a moon base or something else on, over, or under the surface of this moon area, you have to contact me personally.'
Turns out Michael McClure doesn't want to be Poet Laureate of California anyway.
Per the Chron's Leah Garchik:
"It's kind of a political gig,'' he said, "and I'm antipolitical."Merle Haggard fans may now rejoice.
In Slate’s elegy for the humorist, Dave Barry, I found this quote:
"I read it and realized it was the first time in my life I had laughed out loud while reading the printed word," says Weingarten…
We are a nation of silent laughers. Laughing is best kept to oneself.
I once received this email compliment from my boss’s boss after one of my lighter memos: “I have to confess, you made me laugh out loud.”
Things were never the same between us. To this day, I’m looking over my shoulder at work. I had gone beyond amusing him. I made him do something to which he had to confess.
I’ve read similar confessions on the back of books:
XXX made me laugh out loud.
Every page had me laughing out loud.
I’ll admit it, when I read XXX’s book, I was laughing out loud.
You may read that as praise. I see people trying to come clean. It’s a dangerous business. It’s not hard to see how Clinton haters might have successfully driven him from office if he had slipped up with a little honesty: “I did not have sex with that woman. But she did make me laugh out loud.”
Laughing, apparently, is an activity we’d rather conduct internally. I don’t know if this is a human or specifically American trait, but it goes a long way toward explaining the contorted, pain-filled faces we make during those fleeting moments of the most extreme intimacy. We wouldn’t want anyone to think we were having a good time.
Born this day, 1876, Jack London. The story Love of Life made a deep impression on me when I was maybe seventeen.
In my Google travels on the London topic, I came across the Jack London Literary Prize, which 'is intended to promote the timeless values of Western civilization.' The prize committee seems to be comprised of people who prefer to be called European-American separatists rather than white supremacists. I don't know enough about London but I associate him with socialism, not white supremacy. Can anyone enlighten me?
Nice post-appreciation appreciation of Sontag courtesy of A&L. We can’t control what people say about us after death, but there's hope Dan Rather can escape being remembered for the Kenneth incident.
The blogging world has been abuzz the past few days at the story of Joe Gordon, an employee at the Waterstone's in Edinburgh who was fired from his job for comments made about his job on his personal blog. The Guardian has a pretty good article on this, and here's Joe's own statement on his blog about the matter. Looking at the blog, Joe seems to be saying nothing more than a guy having a bad day at the offiice might say, though with a higher degree of irony and acerbic wit.
Given that Waterstone's has no policy on employee blogging many have observed it's ... uncomfortable that a bookseller is firing someone on the grounds of how they have expressed themselves in writing on their own time . I visited that Waterstone's in Edinburgh about eight years ago and remember I was really impressed with the SF section which was Joe's responsibility and bought a few graphic novels and Doctor Who books there. I think the next time I go to Britain, Dillon's will be getting my bookstore custom.
Oh, note to everyone: The Burmese Days Literary Club will be back up and running in the next day or so. I've been nursing an awful cold
They all had a nip of something. The butler, shy yet beaming, stood on one leg beside the table, with the tray in his hand. 'Earthquake, sir, BIG earthquake!' he repeated enthusiastically. He was bursting with eagerness to talk; so, for that matter, was everyone else. An extraordinary joie de vivre had come over them all as soon as the shaky feeling departed from their legs. An earthquake is such fun when it is over. It is so exhilarating to reflect that you are not, as you well might be, lying dead under a heap of ruins. With oneaccord they all burst out talking: 'My dear, I've never HAD such a shock--I fell absolutely FLAT on my back--I thought it was a dam' pariah dog scratching itself under the floor--I thought it must be an explosion somewhere--' and so on and so forth; the usual earthquake-chatter. Even the butler was included in the conversation...
...The Europeans stayed in the Club till midnight, and the butler popped into the room as many as half a dozen times, to relate a new anecdote. So far from snubbing him, the Europeans even encouraged him to talk. There is nothing like an earthquake for drawing people together. One more tremor, or perhaps two, and they would have asked the butler to sit down at table with them.
Speaking of poetry, the latest sensation in German pop music is a song about a baby alligator written and performed by a four year old.
She is apparently a savvy marketer as well.
Charles of Charles' Orwell Links has just given me the OK to mention our new Spain photos page on his site. I've already posted most of Joel's photos here but Charles gave them a really nice presentation and I've annotated them with quotes and comments.
Charles has redone his whole site with much effort this fall and winter. It has a lot of new elements now, including a chronology and some interesting-looking new essays and articles (see especially the "biographical" section), along with familiar things like Alan A's Chestnut Tree Cafe and Tom Mason's luminous images from Jura, and there are links to further Orwell gems, including Robbie's Wallington photo essay and his "George" song, and Andy MacDonald's London photo gallery.
Anyway, lots of good reading there for a long rainy night like this one.
Just got fed up with reading a convoluted government website and went looking for a fog index algorithm to feed it to. Found a nice one here. The financial regulation that is still boggling me got off with an index of 16.50, which is surprisingly low, and a "Flesch Reading Ease" of 34.47 on a 100-point scale, which seems about right.
My question, though, is whether mechanically computing fog indices performs any useful service. Can a machine decide if a phrase is confusing or not? What about, for example, very simple phrases that cause confusion by oversimplifying, as in the school textbook that mystified Richard Feynman with the meaningless phrase, "Energy makes it go"? What about IRS or Social Security publications written in such "plain language" that they spackle over important technicalities?
How complicated is just complicated enough?
Uniting our two recent themes of weird airline economics and real money investment in virtual economies, it's the frequent flyer miles glut. Weird stuff. Read it and get what my mother-in-law calls "economic vertigo." Don't miss the tale about "the pudding guy" -- though I wish they'd tell us what on earth he did with the pudding.
God has been in the news the last couple weeks. Maybe that’s the point of natural disasters: He wants us to keep Him on the front burner. As someone who has lived on both sides of the spiritual fence, it seems like so much silliness.
Why must we reconcile the ways of God to man? (Who said that anyway?)
Even before I lost my faith I wouldn’t have felt the need to square my conception of God with the fact of a nation-crushing tsunami. Why expect God to behave as I would if I had His job?
As usual, one of Ben's questions has got me thinking. He asked if we read modern poetry for fun.
Most modern poetry is artificial, existing on life support. Not to say that it has no role at all, but it certainly doesn't play the social role that it used to.
The fiction/non-fiction distinction wasn't really a part of medieval literary culture; as opposed to a distinction between factual and imaginary, medieval readers generally drew a distinction between true and false, which is completely different. Nevertheless, in the Middle Ages, just about everything we would now think of as fiction was written in verse.
Over time, for some reason, prose has overtaken most of literature. Poetry has become a rarified, separate genre with its own heavily traditional rules and carefully guarded boundaries, existing alone and for its own sake. The idea of "prose poetry", whatever you think of the terminology, just shows how much prose has encroached upon poetry's literary territory. It is no longer conventionally necessary to express certain things in verse, as it used to be.
It's interesting to wonder why that happened.
It must have something to do with the literary drifting away from oral performance, which has a lot to do with the printing press, making what used to be an ephemeral event into a physical object, a script which could be consulted or replayed whenever one wanted. The more literature becomes textualized, the less the practical benefits of poetry (rhyme and other forms of repetition as a mnemonic device, for instance) matter.
Recording technology must have a lot to do with it as well. While poetry has been squeezed out of literature by prose, its viability as performance has been expanded by this technology, which preserves for it the aspect of performance and also confers upon it the reproducibility of a written text. Poetry, good and bad, has not gone away, it has retreated into popular music, where it's always been.
Popular music has benefited from this contraction. There is far more serious popular music now than I think there has been for a very long time, because there really isn't anywhere else for serious poetry to go.
Lyrical poetry is not the same as textual poetry. Different things work in different media. Reading lyrics, no matter how good they are, is usually a sure way to deflate them. But that's always been true. Read some of Thomas Wyatt's poems (many of them meant to be performed with a lute) and see whether some of it sounds (or rather, looks) familiar.
Leonard Cohen is an interesting example because his songs are written poetry set to an often cursory musical accompaniment. But no matter how accidental the music might be, far more people seek it out in recording than in his books or the Norton anthology which includes some of his songs. Poetry has now moved back into music, and that's where most people look for it.
Since the Taser was discussed here a little while ago, maybe some folks will be interested in further news on its alleged hazards.
I don't pretend to understand economics beyond the most basic basics, and I hate doing the homework. That aside, I'm wringing my hands over the airline industry and what I'm taking to be Delta's adoption of the Walmart business model (see Martha's blog for links, etc. on Walmart, the next superpower).
To be fair, I hate air travel. To me, an airplane really is a big, silver bird, and to board one is to mock the gods. And I'll never get how flying to a destination can be cheaper than walking there (economies of scale, you say - and I say that's exactly the danger).
I'm aware of only two ways of increasing profits: raise prices or reduce costs. In a competitive market, increasing prices cannot work (otherwise, it seems to me, there has to be collusion - which is the opposite of competition). So really, only cost reduction works: not only does it expand a specific margin but also can increase sales. So the Walmart model isn't revolutionary but more a perversion that cannot stand in the long run (over time, how can you sustain consumerism by pressing the consumer into poverty?).
Now it's one thing to underpay and overwork retail workers - the morality notwithstanding - but (and we all know this grim joke) it's another to make airline employees feel worthless.
We've got a rumble shaping up over two candidates for California Poet Laureate: Michael McClure and Merle Haggard. (Scroll down to third item.) McClure is the well-known beat poet, originally from Kansas. Haggard is the well-known country-western curmudgeon, originally from... well, you know.
Powerline has further word on the Haggard nomination campaign. For the sake of balance I tried to find a website for the guy backing McClure, but the best I could do was McClure's own home page.
Should present company wish to endorse these or other candidates, see the noiminating instructions on the official California Poet Laureate Program web page. No idea if you have to live in California to nominate. Fortunately or otherwise, the position is not elective.
Featured in s'morning's San Francisco Chronicle: a publication entitled, Modern Drunkard.
J. asks, "So is it a joke?" I'm not sure what to tell him. Whadda you think?
They wonder which airline will next see bankruptcy and yet they know their problem: they are selling seats at a loss. They are trapped in a bad marriage from which there is no escape. That the modern American believes getting from Vermont to Kalamazoo in two hours for $200 is reasonable speaks more of depravity than decadence.
I’m sure I’m taking Philip Larkin out of context here, but when he said, 'I wouldn’t mind seeing China if I could come back the same day,' I like to believe he wasn’t advocating faster transport but lamenting the lost art of deriving pleasure from backyard travels.
When I’m in need of a good journey, I walk up Cemetery Road, past the ruins of the Methodist church, and visit the graveyard. There I always find Tryphena and Asper and Sophona and Lydia, nineteenth century people with short, spare biographies, whose now illegible stones say all you need to know about lives worn down by work and worry. There is Harrison Smith, dying at age sixteen, for his country’s cause in the Great Rebellion of 1861. Towards the back, is a rugged tongue of ledge poking from the earth, professionally engraved with Ronald Ricker 1948 – 2003, and beside that a wooden cross upon which Ron is carved by hand. Near that is Jeffrey Babcock’s plot. He died this year and his family gave him a big, glossy stone with a sort of painting in varying grays of the local landscape. This would be a mere curiosity if you didn’t notice that propped against its base is a small, flat rock, with Dad hand-chiseled on its face.
And since no journey is complete without poetry, there is my favorite marker:
Myrtie Faye
Died June 20, 1883
20 years
20 days
God hath early called thee home