Horizon

"Fall out" -- ?

Usage question here: wonder if anyone has run across the use of "fall out" as a verb meaning either of these things:

1) To fall suddenly and deeply asleep: "I had been up all night so when I got home I fell out."

2) To become suddenly ill: "Don't worry about a little itching. If you're having a real allergic reaction you'll fall out."

A military borrowing maybe?

What Do They Know?

This isn't an great example of a critic going too far, but on a small scale it annoys me. Meghan O'Rourke, reviewing Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel, makes this one comment:

and that proves to be a source, for me, of many of the book's more contrived moments (e.g, when the grandmother despairingly asks herself over and over "Why does anyone ever make love?")

I don't want to discuss the merits of human sexuality. What concerns me is a critic allowing her personal views to override her duty as a objective reviewer.

I don't find the above contrived at all; but then, that's my personal view.

Historic Reith Lectures

The BBC website has six classic Reith Lectures available for online listening.

Disparaging the Inhabitants

You can go home again, but you might find all the bookstores have left town. My little hometown has never been large enough to support a bookstore, but the greater Glens Falls/Queensbury region used to have a few. Not great bookstores, but they existed. I was told to drive to Saratoga for a bookstore. The problem there is that Saratoga is over the river and down the road a piece, and we are talking about a part of the world where people take great pride in never leaving the county.

After some serious investigative work, my sister and I found the Book Warehouse on Lake George’s Million Dollar Mile, a stretch of land we used to associate with the struggle between 18th century European powers; sensible folks know it’s where you go to buy shoes. The Book Warehouse is neither a warehouse, nor a bookstore in the usual sense, but a small shop with wallshelves and gondolas of remainders. I found J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Joan Didion’s Where I Was From at very good prices.

But it turns out that the citizens of my native land aren’t just dispensing with bookstores, they are also throwing away the books they own. A friend runs a clothing recycling business there and in the clothes dumpsters he manages he also finds books. Thousands of them (along with CDs, cameras, fishing equipment, and musical instruments). He gave me Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a Sudden Fiction collection, and a biography of Paul Bowles.

In 1944 Look magazine named Glens Falls, New York, Hometown U.S.A. Swedish National Television in 1964 selected it as America’s “most typical” small city.

Whine

Tonight, for the first time, I paid more than two dollars a gallon for gasoline.

I don't expect much sympathy here, but thought I'd whine anyway.

A Savory Rant

It appears I'm not the only person who shouts at the radio. Language Hat has a good pointer to Geoff Pullum's rant about an NPR interview with James Cochran:

But for the most part it is a mystery why linguistic subject matter is treated so differently from other material in which science has been interested; it baffles all of us here at Language Log Plaza. Imagine if an amateur wrote a book on ecology (How Now Brown Cow: A Little Book of Threatened Animals) and said that mice have "practically become extinct" in America. Would the interviewer listen credulously and politely as the nutball pothered on, not even alluding to any evidence for the absurd claim?

Aesthetics and Subjectivity

In the Kafka thread, Bobby said:

I'd be interested in having you expand on this. I don't see how anything but a personal experience of literature is possible.

Since the response is long, and it's a new topic, I have made it a new post.

I would say that a lot of what we experience when we experience art is not personal in the sense that we share much of that experience with everyone else.

It's basically the same as the question of whether we have any access to reality, or whether a "real world" can be said to exist. The simple answer, it seems to me, is that if there was no external reality which we perceive in an imperfect and highly mediated way (to put it lightly), then it would be impossible for people to interact with each other at all. Disagreements about that reality are largely due to imperfect perception, to perspective, and, to some degree, cultural factors.

The only sensible way you can argue that humans have no access to external reality is to take a very strong version of solipsism, in which you assert that reality as you perceive it is all in your head, including all the other people you meet. That's the only way you can account for the apparent agreement between you and other people on what is real.

Suggesting that the experience of art in general is a purely subjective (which I meant by personal) affair gets you into similar trouble and makes it plain that aesthetic experience is far more general than usually recognized.

So things get interesting when you start to ask what parts of aesthetic experience are general and why? How do you distinguish between a generally "valid" aesthetic reaction and a personal one? I think no one should call themselves a critic without having thought this through at least a little bit.

I think there are two levels of aesthetic experience; you could call them formal and interpretational. The formal level is nearly universal because it relies on how our brains process data. (There is probably more to it than that, but this is certainly the foundation.) This accounts for much more of an aesthetic experience than is usually recognized. The interpretational level, where we step back and try to decide what a story means, is where most of the divergence comes in.

That scheme is complicated by the fact that personal factors can interfere with the basic formal level of perception. I can't remember who, I think it was I. A. Richards, who started talking about the idea of an "ideal reader" back in the middle of the last century. I think that's a useful idea. It is impossible to be an ideal reader, but it is possible to be more ideal than others.

The best thing to read for this is the Shakespearean scholar Stephen Booth's latest book. There is a nice excerpt of it there. There is also an essay I published almost a year ago which I'm a little hesitant to recommend because I was working on a deadline and it needed more revision, but it might give you an idea of what I have in mind. And since it's there for all to see I might as well advertise it, I guess.

At My Age, Too

It's when I see headlines like

Faithful Feel Absence of Ailing Pope

That I know that Tom the Dancing Bug's Science Facts for the Immature was written specially for me.

Did Someone Say Kafka?

The only psychological insight which I think has a good possibility of being true about Kafka, and which is borne out in his work (which is frankly all I really care about), is that he suffered from a generalized, objectless (or you might say portable) sense of guilt. I have seen this happen with people who grew up with parents who had a tendency to blame the child for things it wasn't old enough to understand. The guilt sticks around for the rest of one's life, and since it was never anchored to anything much in the first place it remains unbound and liable to latch on to anything at all. Because it is unspecific and because its real cause is basically unknowable, it is impossible to assuage. You could call it "original guilt" (strange religious preoccupations, anyone?).

It's not hard to see how The Trial, The Judgement, or The Metamorphosis in particular, among many others, capture this perfectly.

It's the indeterminant, or maybe unfocused is a better word, quality of this guilt (so it seems to me) which led Kafka to write willfully vague stories which nevertheless go out of their way to encourage us to attempt a solution which does not exist. Just so there was no solution and no meaning to his guilt, and just so the pain and confusion it engendered ensured that Kafka would spend his life searching for an answer which he quickly came to realize wasn't there.

It's not surprising that the biographers would find repressed homosexuality as the most likely factor to account for this. That explanation is very near to hand; for that very reason it is worthy of increased skepticism.

Not that any of this really matters, but it is interesting.

Incidentally, Kafka wasn't that crazy and did not lead a life of unrelieved despair. If anyone wants to get a sense for what he was like free from his own late night self-torments or the prying accountancy of biographers, I suggest looking at Conversations with Kafka by Gustav Janouch, who befriended Kafka when he was a young man.

Meow

Just because I needed a laugh:

...as tabloid reporters scoured the streets in safari gear brandishing butterfly nets, the Guardian picked up the scent of something big across the railway line by Catling Close.

Billy Rich, 44, was looking out of his window at 5.30am when he saw a black creature leap across the road and bound south towards Mayow Park.

"I see a ... thing," he said.

"What's he supposed to have seen?" asked his ex-wife.

"The beast of Sydenham," your correspondent explained.

"The only beast of Sydenham is him," she replied, prodding a finger at Mr Rich....

Alan(s), can we have a topic category for "Stuff"? I had to put this item under "Culture" just now and I'm not entirely sure it fits.

the interest in professional fasting has markedly diminished

The national "distraction" this week ought to be seen as a useful conversation, but it feels nothing intelligent or informed can be said about it. How pleasant, instead, to stumble on this brief, mildly interesting review of a biography of Kafka. Alan H. will likely tear it apart, which would provide welcome respite.

Does Gregor Samsa really wake up as a repulsive insect only because he symbolizes isolated genius, as the good-hearted Nabokov read the tale? If we remember the obsessive variations on the motif of the serpent and the apple in Kafka’s private notes, we could instead brood on the possibility that he left the cause of Gregor’s alteration symbolically under our eyes. Gregor dies from an apple, thrown by his father, which sinks “right into his back”, where it then rots. Gregor “felt as if nailed fast and stretched himself out in utter derangement of all his senses”. Subtexts? Who knows? There are hundreds of passages that can be read in this way, or that – either as the cipher of something to be precisely identified, or as the dark flower of a mystery. But as soon as one opens Kafka and falls under the spell of his prose, unequalled in its limpidity and pithiness, another suspicion arises. Perhaps this man was neither enigma nor mystery, but a miracle.

Visa for Avalon

Continuing the discussion of apocalyptic/Utopian novels, here's Margaret Atwood in the NYRB on a rediscovered novel that sounds as though it presents a utopia and an anti-utopia through indirect kinds of description. She shrugs off the Orwell and Huxley approaches as a satirical way of telling stories about the future that is far from being the only one or the obvious one. Interesting and maybe worth thinking about.

Solzhenitsyn and I

The Russian text of Solzhenitsyn's Harvard address has one peculiarity apparent to this novice reader. He consistently spells the word мир ("world") as мір. That middle letter ee wasn't in the Russian alphabet I learned. Apparently it's the Ukrainian I, but why is a Russian using it, and why only for one word? Any guess on what this is supposed to imply stylistically?

How many fingers?

"... 'I have my rights' has become the verbal equivalent to putting two fingers up at authority," says the UK's Michael Howard. (Judging from context, this is a notion that bothers him.)

Now, one finger I'd understand. We have that here. But wotzis about two? An adaptation of the Churchill thing?

Solzhenitsyn and Putin

I picked up a copy of Solzhenitsyn's 1978 Harvard commencement address for $1.28 yesterday, and was struck by a few passages that seem to have distinct echoes in contemporary Russia. Turns out the whole thing's online, but read on if you're interested in the snippets that struck me.

On the press:
How many hasty, immature, superficial and misleading judgments are expressed every day, confusing readers, without any verification. The press can both simulate public opinion and miseducate it. Thus we may see terrorists heroized, or secret matters, pertaining to one's nation's defense, publicly revealed, or we may witness shameless intrusion on the privacy of well-known people under the slogan: "everyone is entitled to know everything." But this is a false slogan, characteristic of a false era: people also have the right not to know, and it is a much more valuable one. The right not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life does not need this excessive burdening flow of information.

On leadership:
In today's Western society, . . . [a] statesman who wants to achieve something important and highly constructive for his country has to move cautiously and even timidly; there are thousands of hasty and irresponsible critics around him, parliament and the press keep rebuffing him. As he moves ahead, he has to prove that every single step of his is well-founded and absolutely flawless. Actually an outstanding and particularly gifted person who has unusual and unexpected initiatives in mind hardly gets a chance to assert himself; from the very beginning, dozens of traps will be set out for him. Thus mediocrity triumphs with the excuse of restrictions imposed by democracy.

On civil rights:
Legal frames (especially in the United States) are broad enough to encourage not only individual freedom but also certain individual crimes. The culprit can go unpunished or obtain undeserved leniency with the support of thousands of public defenders. When a government starts an earnest fight against terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists' civil rights. There are many such cases.

Devil's Pact

An interesting exchange of views about the danger - or safety - of nuclear proliferation.

Sydney Ducks in SF

Being newly sensitized by reading Fatal Shore, I'm learning that convicts originally transported to Australia sometimes went on to take part in the California Gold Rush. Here's the Google for "Sydney Duck." It brings up some lively results.

The Number's Up

Comments appear to have dried up at Harry's Place, so I'll just make a brief aside here about the general theme of this weekend. I imagine that my own views are considerably out of kilter with the bulk of the STWC, and so I think I can genuinely deny an accusation of special pleading. But I find it a little distateful on basic grounds of principle that the HP commentators place so much emphasis on, erm, size. Surely one engages ideas, not quantity. That an idea held by a small number of people is contemptible because of the fact that it's held by a small number of people seems an odd position for a 'progressive' site to take. Would a handful of folks protesting about union rights or free speech be subject to such derision-by-bean-counting?

Been There, Done That

A worthwhile comment by Clio's Jonathan Dresner about a comparison which I thought was pretty fatuous at the time (and now wish I hadn't been too lazy to post about), and which particularly annoyed me because the underlying criticism was one that I broadly agreed with. Misused historical analogy is one of the most intellectually corrupting schticks in the blogosphere (I'm reminded of those 'slave states vote GOP' maps last November), and deserves much more scrutiny: Tim Burke's posting about their misuse is recommended background reading. A couple of Dresner quotes:

What does it tell us? It tells us that this is a political movement concerned with changing an aspect of public life through the use of communication, public comment and, at times, humor, ridicule and rhetorical excess. Sounds like a lot of good rallies I've been to.

I believe that the details of these cases matter because we are so often wrong in drawing conclusions about social phenomena. We overreact to our own experience and to the personal experiences of others; we over-rely on logical formulations (or intuition, or "gut reactions") to cover gaps in evidence; we resist restructuring narratives with which we are comfortable. We need to address individuals and episodes before we get to patterns; we need to engage arguments rather than "taking names." If we can keep the conversation civil and focused, we might even change some minds, though that's terribly rare for some reason. If we can agree that there's a problem (and I think there is at least one problem), and on the nature of the problems (we're a long way apart on that score), then we can talk about solutions. I'm going to keep trying.

Change is Bad

Oh, it’s a revelation when a guy who thinks he’s too smart to care about college sports – or any sports for that matter – wakes up in the morning, checks the news, and gets a charge when he learns the local squad has won its first game ever in the NCAA tournament. Odd business to find yourself taking some pride in the success of a program you’d prefer didn’t succeed. I keep forgetting that winning is fun.

I like thinking of the University of Vermont as that small gem at the top of the hill in Burlington, the school of John Dewey and the occasional Nobel Prize winner. Its academic credentials aren’t exactly Olympian, and it does have a record of modest athletic competitiveness (actually, I think they’re pretty good at hockey); but last year, when we took the youngest to the campus tour event, they asked the 200 or so prospective applicants if they were considering UVM for its sports and not a hand went up.

There’s a game this afternoon (I don’t know who they’re playing; and notice how I don’t write “who we’re playing”?), and, if by some miracle they win, I’ll be thrilled. But that wonderful campus will be changed forever. For me, it will still be the home of Ira Allen Chapel, Royall Tyler Theatre, and the Bailey/Howe Library (a lot of happy hours there when my girlfriend was a student); for a good many others, it’ll be a basketball school. I wonder if they know what they’ve gotten into.

Not Proven

From the following (December 1946) week's New Statesman: I quote this not as the set-up for some hang-'em-and-flog-'em rant, but out of genuine curiosity. Without touching upon the principle of presumption of innocence (which has powerful merits in its own right), is the following observation nonetheless empirically true? [Note: without getting into an argument about what 'practically impossible' means, exactly, I would point out that anecdotal counter-examples would not, in themselves, invalidate the general claim.]

"Most people with long experience of the criminal courts believe that it is practically impossible for an innocent person to be actually sent before a jury. Before it gets so far, a case encounters too many hurdles for that. Somewhere in the chain of preliminaries, the fact that the man is innocent must become unmistakably clear. A Magistrate can discharge a man accused of murder (though this is no bar to his being charged again on fresh evidence); and so can the officer in charge of a police station. A Judge can stop a trial at any time after the case for the prosecution is completed and direct the jury to say 'not guilty'. But manifest innocence is so different from inadequately demonstrated guilt. Cases of wrongful conviction, which usually achieve notoriety, are generally cases of conviction on inadequate evidence, not of people condemned for something they have not done."

New SAT Essay Prep

Headline from the New Statesman, December 21, 1946.

"Are the French Impossible"?

Note: Candidates may attempt the question from a political, sociological, metaphysical, logical, or surreal point-of-view.

Misunderstoodimated

The Chronicle of HE has a new article asking academics to describe what they regard as the most misunderstood concepts in their fields (thanks to Cliopatria). My own entry would be the difference between bias and opinion, two quite different concepts which are now hopelessly and destructively confused in popular discourse. Other suggestions welcome.

Show Me the Precedent

On the radio driving home tonight I heard Tom DeLay say Terri Schiavo has a constitutional right to live. If that's the case, then how can we ever send anybody off to war?

Probably

From Picture Post, October 12, 1946: "Is a Footballer Worth £12 a week?"

For Valour

First VC awarded since the Falklands (hat-tip to Harry's Place).

I wonder if they really still make them from captured Russian guns from the Crimean War, as I was (perhaps unreliably) told in my youth?

Bad Analogies

Folks here might be interested in the discusson over at Erin O'Connor's about the removal of the analogy section from the SAT.

Good reading

Robbie's found a nice Portuguese website with an archive of essays and reviews on George Orwell and the Orwell industry. Many of them familiar but some not.

This Is How The World Ends

Good article by Clifford Geertz on our world's impending doom, as foretold by Jared Diamond and Richard Posner.

All very convincing. Diamond apparently says that some people reading his book today will live to see the beginning of the end. That sort of talk really gets the blood going. Personally, it makes me think about timing. Why couldn't I have been born a little earlier? On the other hand, it could be sort of exciting to live just long enough to see the end of the world but to still come in under the wire and die a natural death at the last minute.

But if I had been born earlier, say at a time before anyone had much idea about tipping points and the associations with the word "greenhouse" involved only tomatoes and other growing things (incidentally, absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is why the term became popular), would that have saved me from fretting about the end of the world?

The end of the world is like the golden age. It's always some distance away and is maddeningly portable. Ovid thought the world had gone to hell by the time he was around to notice, as has almost everyone else with a taste for social criticism. It's a rhetorical strategy gotten out of hand, like a dead metaphor in reverse; so useful it becomes transparent and begins to seem uncontroversial, self-evident.

Same goes for the end of the world, though its popularity seems to oscillate more than the golden age. Generally, the end comes near in times of crisis and recedes when things get better.

The big question this leads me to, which I suspect is unanswerable (I love that sort of question), is this: How can I be sure that all this talk of tipping points and asteroids isn't just another of those fluctuations? Of course every time it comes back around it seems convincing to everyone, it has to, doesn't it? Am I being a fool? On the other hand, there is Easter Island. It's obviously happened before.

Fatal Shore, Cont'd

Ben posted something in the previous reading group comments that I'd like to bump up for discussion:

I remember a conversation I had with one of my sister-in-law's college friends in Perth. She commented on how the defining focus of Australian movies was the underdog. Forgetting my manners, I blurted "Odd, I thought that was the main theme of American movies." Much later I realized that what she was talking about was movies where the underdog doesn't win in the end.

Radio Utopia

Folks here may be interested in the BBC Radio4 series In Our Time. This week's program is titled "Modernist Utopias", and discusses some topics we've talked about here before it gets to the midcentury dystopias.

Best of all, they've started offering the single most recent episode as an MP3 download. This makes for great listening while cooking supper, polishing the silver, or — as in my case — upgrade testing. The only downside is that they're only offering one episode at a time and URL hacking won't work, so get 'em while they last.

Orwell and Huxley get treated about 24 minutes in.

When Men Were Men & Women Were Darn Glad of It

Reaching into my handy hatful of newspaper clippings and out pops…Now Back on Screen: The Big Bang Bangs, a piece on a film series running through March – it doesn’t say where – on the American Western. Sorry, no link because you’d need a subscription to the NYTs. But here’s one paragraph:

The classical western is, like the Wild West itself, pretty much history, and it’s a part of our movie history that no longer seems quite so glorious as it once did, when it supplied for us and for the world the primary elements of our national myth: the story we told ourselves about American strength, self-reliance, freedom and righteousness. The films in this series, which were in their time familiar landmarks in a well-traveled cultural territory, may now look strange, almost exotic: the terrain, the people, the values and, especially, the firm creative conviction with which the makers of these films represented them, are practically unrecognizable to 21st century eyes. Whether or not the movies’ west is the “real” west – much less the “real” America – is a wide open question. What’s beyond dispute is that the western in its heyday created a weirdly powerful reality of its own.

Synch

Our public library's permanent surplus-book shop had a copy of Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998, Vol. I. (That's as in Andrei Codrescu's Exquisite Corpse online journal. Just so you don't think I'm morbid, as the lady who sold me the book clearly did until I explained it was just a plain old lit anthology, not some kinda weird hymn to necrophilia.)

So anyhow I opened the book at random and found this:

...I've just been reading Time's biographical file on Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim) and the new British intellectuals. Somerset Maugham has a beautiful comment which I'm not at all surprised to have missed in many another article on the "angry young men." He says, and I quote: "it (Lucky Jim) describes a new class, the white-collar proletariat... which does not go to the university to acquire culture, but to get a job, and when they get one, scamp it. (scamp?) Their idea of a celebration is to go into a public house and drink six beers. They are mean, malicious, envious ... they are scum."

Good old Maugham: it's good to see the sledge-hammer coming down from the top for a change, instead of striking up at the belly of society from the bottom.

Of course you're so far out of it up there that you probably don't realize that the "beat generation" is taking over American literature, while the "angry young men" are the driving force in Britain. And although I'm neither beat nor necessarily angry, I'm glad to see somebody taking a stand for a change. It's the first real "movement" in literature in many a year: a point of reference, if nothing else. The writing world seems at least to have settled into two very definitely opposing camps: the pedants and the hobos. Most of the best writers fit in neither camp, of course, but then very few of them ever have. A good writer stands above movements, neither a leader nor a follower, but a bright white gold ball in a fairway of wind-blown daisies...

...and, yes, it's Hunter Thompson, in 1958, as excerpted from The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967, ed. Douglas Brinkley.

The Way We Were

A week later, I am just getting around to clipping articles of interest from last Sunday's NYTs. A man, his scissors, and a newspaper. Web links get lost, forgotten, and frankly, so do press clippings, so I'm not sure what the point is. Something textural, charmingly old school, I guess.

So I found this photograph of the last public execution in America. Rainey Bethea, 1936. Not commenting on the death penalty, just found the picture stunning. I mean, look at all those spectators.

Tool-Time

I have a feeling that this one is aimed at me, and since there's no way to reply to it on the original site I'll make a brief mention here.

First off, I'm not going to comment directly on the incidents cited because I've been around blogs long enough now to suspect any news anecdote that's too good to be true. Allport's Rule of Blog Shock-Horror (as applicable to the Left as to the Right) is that in cases like this there is always some detail left out that only transpires after much digging around, which I certainly don't have time to do now. Thus, for the sake of argument, I'll assume that each scenario is just as bad as it seems, even though my gut feeling is dubious.

So where does that leave us? Since "those folks who still think the Taser is used only as a safety measure against uncontrollable dangerous maniacs" are, for the purposes of this argument, imaginary Straw Men (perhaps they exist; but I've never met one, and I'm certainly not one myself), it's not immediately clear what conclusion is being posed. That cops are born sadists? That they're badly trained and regulated? That Chuck-E-Cheez is no place to be assaulted? All possible debating points. I'm just not clear what the taser, in and of itself, has to do with any of them. Even if it had never been invented all these problems would still exist, one has to assume. It's just that different tools would be available. Two comments unwittingly (I suspect) provide an answer - that is, if people ask the right question in the first place:

"I suppose it could have been worse, he might just have shot him, and been done with it."

"This guy is threating to arrest both of us over a $1.50, have our car towed and he's waving around his night stick like he's ready to bust some heads."

Out of the mouth of babes ...

It seems to me that blaming a taser because it's abused is a bit like blaming a guitar because it's out-of-tune.

The "B" Ark

I have a sneaky and growing suspicion that Douglas Adams might have read Fatal Shore. It started with learning that the First Fleet was led by one Captain Arthur Phillip. And it crystallized on getting to the rogue's gallery of officials sent out from England to work for Lieutenant Govenor George Arthur (yes, a different "Arthur") of Van Diemen's Land, who himself seems to have been a totalitarian and nepotistic Gradgrind.

"Arthur made no bones about the scope of his patronage or his bias toward military men. Given the quality of some of the civil officials the Crown sent, one can hardly blame him.

Dudley Fereday (1789-1849), a bankrupt coal magnate's son whom an English lord's patronage had made sheriff of Van Diemen's Land in 1824, turned out to be a relentless usurer, lending money at 35 percent interest. Arthur soon got rid of him, and of his uncompliant attorney-general, Arthur Gellibrand, and of anyone else who seemed either disobliging or short on moral fiber. He went after the customs collector, Rolla O'Farrell, who had arrived penniless in Hobart but amassed a fortune of more than £15,000 by creative venality. This man, Arthur told London, was a debauchee [sic] with the morals of a stoat, who lived with one of the prostitutes off the Princess Royal and had been fined for harboring and seducing female convicts. In 1831 England sent Arthur a judge, Alexander "Dandy" Baxter (1798-1836), whose ignorance and paranoiac sadism (while serving as Darling's attorney-general in New South Wales, he had battered his wife with a poker after she gave birth to twins) were such that Arthur would not have him in his colony. "I found him," he declared, "in a high state of neurotic excitement and such an habitual sot that it would have been a violation of all public decency to have suffered him to take his seat on the Bench." In 1826 Arthur received John Burnett (1781-1860) as his first colonial secretary -- a mewing, forgetful creature, who confessed to Arthur soon after getting to Hobart that "so extremely sensitive is my nervous system that everything which agitates my mind immediately affects my bodily health and brings on illness."...."

"Ah, yes, that was it."

But What Would You Call It?

My view may be skewed by my coming home every night and flicking on the local and national news, but am I the only one who thinks the words “tragic” and “tragedy” are suffering from overuse? I don’t want to take anything away from the grieving parents of the child who fell through the ice by denying the magnitude of its awfulness, but is it really tragic? Why is every calamity and catastrophe a tragedy? By employing them to describe every bad thing that happens, are we lifting these events to a higher level or just carrying on the happy tradition of perpetuating sloppy language?

Punkery

For the most part living in the Bay Area is not as interesting as outsiders think it is. I was dragged to Lake Tahoe last weekend for a shotgun wedding and apart from the very large mountains and very, very large lake, there were only three differences: everyone drove a truck in Tahoe, everyone dressed the same and had similar haircuts in Tahoe (what, to the eyes of one thoroughly inured in Bay Area-ness, looked to me like Frat/Sorority fashion), and whenever someone mentioned San Francisco or Berkeley they'd say the word "protest" and all present would laugh knowingly in Tahoe. Apart from that and the altitude headaches it wasn't so different.

So I'm on the bus and I notice one of our three odious free weeklies on the seat next to me. Ordinarily I'd leave it there, but it has a sensational cover story about the very, very, extremely big earthquake that will destroy this region relatively soon. Always ready to have my earthquake paranoia stoked, and also always on the lookout for ammunition for the inevitable parties when drunk people think I'm crazy because I have planned out the best way of escaping from my building when said earthquake hits, but most of all thinking it might scare some sense into my girlfriend, who is firmly in the skeptical party camp so far, I grabbed it and took it home and left it casually yet prominently on my coffee table. (If it looked contrived, she wouldn't read it.)

And there it lay for about a week. And last night I'm trying to concentrate on a letter from Pliny the Younger to Trajan and I glance up and there it is, announced on the cover of the weekly: an article on

Punk Cuisine

Just let that sink in, it might take a minute.

Handlebar Moustaches

I'm pleased to report that the handlebar moustache is alive and well in Fort Worth.

Among the gentlemen I spotted sporting a neatly-trimmed handlebar this weekend were

1. The policeman who handled some drunk who tried to steal the hood off my truck.
2. The guy that replaced the window the drunk broke while trying to steal my hood.
3. The cutter at the barbecue joint we ate at while the window was replaced.

Mr. A’s Universe and the Certain Reign of the Ambiquities

Alan alluded to Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen in the previous post, warning those seeking an explanation to go read the play. Was he too tired, too busy, too distracted by things going on outside his office window, or had he forgotten what the play was about and even forgotten why he mentioned it? Maybe he had a school play to go to last night and at the same time realized he had just taken his last plug of Copenhagen chewing tobacco, and so imagined there was a play called Copenhagen written by someone who may or may not be Michael Frayn. Depends on your perspective. And Alan’s. And yours and Alan’s and mine, not to mention the fellow who vacuums the hallways after the lights go out and everyone goes home and has a glass of pinot noir. Or was it merlot?

I found this lecture on Copenhagen and think it provides the explanation of Alan’s thinking that he was unwilling to provide yesterday. It is not the Cliff Notes to Copenhagen. Or maybe it is. Just because it’s called a lecture doesn’t make it a lecture, nor does it mean it’s not Axl Rose’s uncompleted last album, or both.

It might have made sense to make this link available through the previous thread, but it is worth a read (maybe, depends) and I did think it worthy of a post of it’s own. Then again, maybe I just want to have a post of my own, couldn’t come up with any ideas of my own and stole one of Alan’s. Then again, I might just be killing time. Difficult to say.

It snowed eight inches today. Probably only six, but eight sounds better and that’s how I’m going to remember it.

Making History

I just stumbled by accident on the transcript of a 2002 lecture by Jerry Kuehl, who was associate producer on the groundbreaking WWII documentary series The World at War. It's recommended reading even if you're not particularly interested in the subject-matter, because it's an unusually frank look at the problems and limitations of putting factual material on the screen (cue an embarrassed silence from you-know-who).

Any examples of documentaries (not necessarily historical) which try to grapple with their own methodology as well as just throwing up pictures on a screen?

And while I'm at it, does anyone else think that Ken Burns is vastly overrated?

Same guy?

Says here "the critic Robert Hughes" has compared R. Crumb to Breughel. Same Robert Hughes as the Fatal Shore guy? If so, he sure gets around.

Bored of the Rings II

Gotta read Graeme's hilarious account of watching the entire (Lord Of The) Ring Cycle in one DVD marathon. "Hockey Hair Guys," "Tree Muppets," and more.

To Graeme: if it's any comfort, a lot of the things you thought were dumbest in the film version are things that seemed least faithful to the book in the opinion of this die-hard fan. Especially the decision to cast that little squirt as Frodo. Frodo is supposed to start his adventures as a fifty-year-old country squire with a slight paunch and a fair stock of ordinary life experience though not much knowledge of the outside world. He's not a whey-faced teenage mini-elf. And that ridiculous Army of the Dead? Don't get me started...

Annals of Doublespeak

From the BBC:

The government of Niger has cancelled at the last minute a special ceremony during which at least 7,000 slaves were to be granted their freedom.

A spokesman for the government's human rights commission, which had helped to organise the event, said this was because slavery did not exist.

How's Your Health?

Speaking of Amazons, couldn't the proportionally misrepresented LA Times op-ed wannabees championed recently by Professor Susan Estrich have found a less distasteful patron, given as she apparently is to accusing her opponents of brain damage?

One Last Preachy, Maudlin Stand

This is my final climb onto the Social Security pulpit (relieved, appreciative applause). We don’t really do politics here – which I think is wise – so I am grateful for the indulgence. My parting thoughts are informed by Ben, who provided this interesting Foreign Affairs article a while back, and also pointed me to Orwell’s The English People as he straightened me out on GO’s views on abortion.

The President and his men will be crossing the country over the next couple months, beating the war drum for Social Security reform. What they will fail to mention – and what all of us are loathe to recognize – is that any fix is merely treating a symptom.

Orwell diagnosed the malady in The Future of the English People section of The English People:

There was a small rise in the birthrate during the war years, but that is probably of no significance, and the general curve is downwards. The position is not quite so desperate as it is sometimes said to be, but it can only be put right if the curve not only rises sharply, but does so within ten or at most twenty years. Otherwise the population will not only fall, but, what is worse, will consist predominately of middle-aged people. If that point is reached, the decline may be never be retrievable.

We just don’t make babies anymore.

The Foreign Affairs piece describes not an American or Western dilemma, but an approaching worldwide crisis. We don’t have a Social Security problem, we have a survival of the species problem. Forget about retirement: the achievements and glories of humankind will be lost if we don’t reproduce. We need to at least replace ourselves. A small challenge you would think, but one that my generation wasn’t up to and that the succeeding generation is failing to meet.

Why? Again, Orwell:

At bottom, the causes of the dwindled birthrate are economic. It is nonsense to say that it has happened because English people do not care for children…In a sense it is true that modern English people have small families because they are too fond of children. They feel that it is wrong to bring a child into the world unless you are completely certain of being able to provide for him, and at a level not lower than your own…No doubt the dearth of babies is partly due to the competing attraction of cars and radios, but its main cause is a typically English mixture of snobbishness and altruism.

If he were speaking of Americans, I’d say he was being too kind by leaving out the “selfishness” factor. And I think it is the truth of that selfishness that keeps even a conservative President from advocating we kick up the birth rate. We are all of us to some degree selfish, and so we prefer our national leader leave that fact off the table. Making babies is great fun, keeping them is damn hard work. Avoiding that work is the business of excuse-making:

Bringing a child into such a messed up world is irresponsible. The world can’t get too much worse, and we don’t stand a chance of improving it by refusing to have new inhabitants.

We’re waiting to have children until we can afford them. Then you'll never have any.

I’d make a terrible parent. It’s true: you will make a terrible parent. Nobody is good at it, but most of us give it our best shot and usually we don’t raise mass murderers.

I realize the idea that we should have more babies may pose a challenge to the women’s movement. Challenge is the key word. I don’t see women having complete reproductive rights and achieving equal status with men as roadblocks to a sustainable birthrate. In fact, I’d say that until we live in a society where men and women live together as equal partners, truly responsible population growth is impossible.

It has to be conceded that if someone had shared this “wisdom” with me twenty years ago, it would have likely little changed my behavior. I write now from the luxury of having my baby producing years behind me. I did have two daughters, but they are the product of three failed marriages, so I didn’t do my bit (on more than one count). If you are looking for a poster child to stand for the selfishness of the Baby Boomers, I’m your man.

Working until we’re seventy, receiving reduced benefits, suffering a tax increase – these are the prices my generation will pay for its actions.

Politically, a “value” is never anything more than a charm or incantation. As long as it remains a talking point, it will be safe to touch. An actual value requires some work to keep it alive; it calls for personal sacrifice. So we won’t mention it. Because in this country we don’t do sacrifice. Even during wartime I go to a movie, grab a bite to eat, travel, buy a new car, price a larger house, and let someone else go off and make the sacrifice. This may be the end road of individualism and materialism, where the “me” triumphs over the “us.”

That triumph is the legacy my generation leaves yours. A family is not a “me” thing. You’ll have to give up something in order to have one. My mother said she wished she could have more grandchildren. I wouldn’t listen.

And In Other News ...

I have a feeling that this story is modern America in capsule form - heck, it's the modern existential condition in capsule form - but I'm not even going to begin to decode it. Just read it before someone writes the novel.

And What About All That Marvellous Cookery They Do?

It's Women's History Month! And as Senator Harry Reid (D-Nevada) puts it: "We honor the women who have changed the course of American history. Whether by raising their families, defending our nation or opening businesses, women all across America play a unique role in strengthening our country and our values." So, ladies, there's your options: Madonna, Amazon, or (rehabilitated) Martha Stewart.

(This public information post has been included simply for the gratuitious Friday afternoon ticking-off of Martha. The other Martha, I mean).

In the Bathtub

"[Dalton] Trumbo did most of his writing in the bath, on a tray suspended over the tub. According to his wife, he'd spend days in the tub, writing and soaking -- and smoking...."

Go ahead and read the rest of the article here if you're into Hollywood blacklist history.

Mainly, though, I'm wondering what other great works have been incubated by bathtubs. OK, there's Archimedes and Douglas Adams -- but anyone else?

100 Favourite Fictional Characters

... as chosen by 100 literary luminaries.

The Digital Bloody Fool

Seems necessary to say farewell to Burmese Days. Being the first book-length electronic text I’ve read, I wonder how it would have gone had I not been familiar with the work. It did take an effort and an extraordinary amount of time to finish, and I think that’s because it wasn’t waiting atop the bedside stack every night. I had to remember to read it.

I’d call this my most attentive reading of it. That may be because I know I’m by nature a careless reader of electronic copy, so I gave the effort a little extra. It turns out it is a book worthy of a little extra.

Elizabeth has grown mature surprisingly quickly, and a certain hardness of manner that always belonged to her has become accentuated. Her servants live in terror of her, though she speaks no Burmese. She has an exhaustive knowledge of the Civil List, gives charming little dinner-parties and knows how to put the wives of subordinate officials in their places--in short, she fills with complete success the position for which Nature had designed her from the first, that of a burra memsahib.

I’m not sure I always know the difference between irony and tragedy.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad (etc.)

The Bad History Carnival includes a worthy, if older, link to a piece of historical nonsense I was thinking of writing about myself, so I'm glad John McKay had already put in the effort.

As an addendum, I've just spent several weeks reading through every copy of the Daily Mail from January 1945 to December 1946 (thank God for paper rationing; they were only 4 pages each), and aside from high politics the only stories regularly emerging from the British Occupation Zone of Germany were: how much are the Germans getting to eat, and to what extent are the troops allowed to fraternize with civilians (mixed opinions on both). Now and again there were reports about soldiers having been killed or injured which left open the possibility of sabotage or assassination, but the implication was clear that even if true this was the work of isolated fanatics acting spontaneously - nothing along the lines of what's currently taking place in Iraq.

Fatal Shore, etc.

Turns out the Hughes book is as hair-raising as Red Cavalry sounds. Good golly. But is anyone else here reading the thing or am I a Reading Group Of One?