Attempts

All Men Live Enveloped In Whale Lines

2012-02-03T09:56:00.003-05:00

Thus the whale-line folds the whole boat in its complicated coils, twisting and writhing around it in almost every direction. All the oarsmen are involved in its perilous contortions; so that to the timid eye of the landsman, they seem as Indian jugglers, with the deadliest snakes sportively festooning their limbs. Nor can any son of mortal woman, for the first time, seat himself amid those hempen intricacies, and while straining his utmost at the oar, bethink him that at any unknown instant the harpoon may be darted, and all these horrible contortions be put in play like ringed lightnings; he cannot be thus circumstanced without a shudder that makes the very marrow in his bones to quiver in him like a shaken jelly. Yet habit -- strange thing! what cannot habit accomplish? -- Gayer sallies, more merry mirth, better jokes, and brighter repartees, you never heard over your mahogany, than you will hear over the half-inch white cedar of the whale-boat, when thus hung in hangman's nooses; and, like the six burghers of Calais before King Edward, the six men composing the crew pull into the jaws of death, with a halter around every neck, as you may say.

Perhaps a very little thought will now enable you to account for those repeated whaling disasters -- some few of which are casually chronicled -- of this man or that man being taken out of the boat by the line, and lost. For, when the line is darting out, to be seated then in the boat, is like being seated in the midst of the manifold whizzings of a steam-engine in full play, when every flying beam, and shaft, and wheel, is grazing you. It is worse; for you cannot sit motionless in the heart of these perils, because the boat is rocking like a cradle, and you are pitched one way and the other, without the slightest warning; and only by a certain self-adjusting buoyancy and simultaneousness of volition and action, can you escape being made a Mazeppa of, and run away with where the all-seeing sun himself could never pierce you out.

Again: as the profound calm which only apparently precedes and prophesies of the storm, is perhaps more awful than the storm itself; for, indeed, the calm is but the wrapper and envelope of the storm; and contains it in itself, as the seemingly harmless rifle holds the fatal powder, and the ball, and the explosion; so the graceful repose of the line, as it silently serpentines about the oarsmen before being brought into actual play -- this is a thing which carries more of true terror than any other aspect of this dangerous affair. But why say more? All men live enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters round their necks; but it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life. And if you be a philosopher, though seated in the whale-boat, you would not at heart feel one whit more of terror, than though seated before your evening fire with a poker, and not a harpoon, by your side.

-- Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 60, "The Line"

I vividly remember quoting that to my therapist on September 7, 2001 -- and then within a week the world proved Ishmael correct. And then this passage came up in conversation again today. I trust that, that lesson of this passage's truth well and truly learned, the world will not feel a need to repeat it this time. (In truth, I myself had learned it long before.) I am tempted by the superstition that perhaps I should not quote it again: but then, as someone (Raymond Smullyan ?) has said, "superstition is bad luck."

Kay Ryan Rides on Neurath's Raft (Kay Ryan Week™, Day 3)

2012-02-03T07:20:00.005-05:00

Remember, today is Special Class Cross-Over Day as Attempts' Epically Earth-shattering Kay Ryan Week™ continues...

As I mentioned a few days ago, I am once again teaching The History of American Thought Since 1865 this semester. And starting last Wednesday, we began covering Pragmatism; I'll continue lecturing on it today (and we'll discuss William James Monday).

Pragmatism is a complex philosophy -- check out this post for several different definitions of it -- and not easily nutshellable, but one of its key characteristics is an anti-foundationalist epistemology. Anti-foundationalism is, again, complicated, but it's been well captured in a number of different metaphors -- the most famous of which is actually from a philosopher who was not, himself, a Pragmatist at all. Philosopher Otto Neurath (1882 - 1945) famously compared inquiry to a boat being rebuilt while underway:

Imagine sailors, who, far out at sea, transform the shape of their clumsy vessel from a more circular to a more fishlike one. They make use of some drifting timber, besides the timber of the old structure, to modify the skeleton and the hull of their vessel. But they cannot put the ship in dock in order to start from scratch. During their work they stay on the old structure and deal with heavy gales and thundering waves. In transforming their ship they take care that dangerous leakages do not occur. A new ship grows out of the old one, step by step—and while they are still building, the sailors may already be thinking of a new structure, and they will not always agree with one another. The whole business will go on in a way that we cannot even anticipate today. That is our fate.

Now, as I said, Neurath himself was no pragmatist -- he was in fact associated with the logical positivists -- but his analogy was adopted by W. V. Quine, who is often described as a pragmatist. (He's not one of the classical pragmatists, but he definitely has pragmatist tendencies in a way that the description is not unreasonable, in my opinion.) In fact, it was Quine, in his most famous book, Word and Object (1960), who popularized Neurath's notion, saying that "Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must rebuild plank by plank while staying afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat." (p. 3) And certainly the idea captures well a concern that the Pragmatists too shared.

Note that Neurath himself used the words "vessel" and "ship"; Quine called it a "boat" -- but if Google is to be trusted (and Caveat Surftor is definitely the word of the day there), Neurath's raft is a more common a search than either "Neurath's boat" or "Neurath's ship". And that is the version that Kay Ryan (Remember Kay Ryan? This post's about Kay Ryan.) used when she took Neurath's vessel out for a little cruse of her own:

We're Building the Ship as We Sail It

The first fear
being drowning, the
ship's first shape
was a raft, which
was hard to unflatten
after that didn't
happen. It's awkward
to have to do one's
planning in extremis
in the early years --
so hard to hide later:
sleeking the hull,
making things
more gracious.

-- Kay Ryan

It's a cute use of the metaphor, although I'll admit that I don't think I agree with the philosophical point it's making. (In fact, I think I rather strenuously disagree with it (at least with what I take it to be.)) I also don't like it quite as much as I do either of the poems from the first two days of Kay Ryan Week -- and I'm frankly unsure if that's because of the philosophical disagreement, or is simply an aesthetic judgment, or some mixture of the two. But I do like it -- and I really, really like that she wrote it. Neurath's boat is a fine craft, and I love to see it get more attention.

Stay tuned tomorrow for another exciting day of Attempts' already-hyped-almost-to-metaphorical-bankruptcy Kay Ryan Week™!

Poem of the Day: "The Best of It" (Kay Ryan Week™, Day 2)

2012-02-02T07:34:00.001-05:00

For day two of Attempts' world-famous Kay Ryan Week™, we have the title poem from Ryan's Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of "new and selected" poems, published in 2010.

The Best of It

However carved up
or pared down we get,
we keep on making
the best of it as though
it doesn’t matter that
our acre’s down to
a square foot. As
though our garden
could be one bean
and we’d rejoice if
it flourishes, as
though one bean
could nourish us.

-- Kay Ryan

Come back tomorrow for day three of Kay Ryan Week™ -- a special cross-over edition with the class I'm currently teaching!

Poem of the Day: "The Edges of Time" (Kay Ryan Week™, Day 1)

2012-02-01T07:07:00.007-05:00

As our first entry in Attempts' Kay Ryan Week™, by way of easing into things a bit, I'm presenting (what seems to be) one of Ryan's most famous poems -- and the one that she herself chose as part of a "poet's choice" feature in the Washington Post. (Click through to read her own comments on writing the poem... but my advice is to read it first, preferably multiple times, and only then read what she has to say about it. I don't think her comments enrich the poem (a common thing with artists talking about their own work), and it's worth reading on its own first.)

The Edges of Time

It is at the edges
that time
thins.
Time which had been
dense and viscous
as amber suspending
intentions like bees
unseizes them. A
humming begins,
apparently
coming
from stacks of
put–off things or
just in back. A
racket
of claims now,
as time flattens. A
glittering fan of things
competing to happen,
brilliant and urgent
as fish when seas
retreat.

-- Kay Ryan

Come back tomorrow, as Attempts' already-legendary Kay Ryan Week™ continues!

The Headline All of Human History, Up To This Point, Has Been Leading To

2012-01-31T11:21:00.002-05:00

"Gordon Ramsay's dwarf porn double Percy Foster found dead in a badger den in Wales."

- Source

(via Abi Sutherland at Making Light, who (correctly) notes, in the title-text, that "Like most strange and funny things, it's actually made up of deep sadness.")

Announcing Attempts' Kay Ryan Week™ (starts tomorrow!)

2012-01-31T07:46:00.008-05:00

Via this post, I recently read this essay entitled "Two Philosophical Poets: On T. S. Eliot and Kay Ryan". Well, I teach Eliot, and certainly know his work well. But the second name made me go Who?

Yeah, it turns out I shoulda known. Ryan was the poet laureate of the U.S. from 2008 - 2010; she won the Pulitzer Prize last year for her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems; and she got a MacArthur genius grant last year. (Obviously, my Noble Readers -- all far better read than I -- will know all this already; I mention it just to remind my own future self, lest I carelessly forget.)

So I went and read some of her poems online and... wow, she's fabulous.* I was thinking of posting one of her poems as a "poem of the day", and couldn't decide which one, so I thought, heck with it: I'm doing a whole Kay Ryan week.

So tomorrow, February 1, is the first day of Kay Ryan Week™ here at Attempts: each day I'll post one of her poems. These won't be Considered Selections Of The Best of Her Work: as the above indicates, I don't know her work that well yet. Rather, these will be seven poems that have made me want to read more.

So come back tomorrow for a first dose of Ryan-week-y goodness! I'll also link to all the poems I post in this post, for future reference.

------------------------
* No, I don't think that follows from the list of honors in the previous paragraph. But in this case it happens to be true.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-30T10:39:00.005-05:00

It is easy for us to lose ourselves in details in endeavoring to grasp and comprehend the real condition of a mass of human beings. We often forget that each unit in the mass is a throbbing human soul. Ignorant it may be, and poverty stricken, black and curious in limb and ways and thought; and yet it loves and hates, it toils and tires, it laughs and weeps its bitter tears, and looks in vague and awful longing at the grim horizon of its life, -- all this, even as you and I.

-- W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece"

(I'm teaching this class again; it's week two, and this is the book we're discussing today.)

But What Was the Name of the Cat?

2012-01-26T13:02:00.002-05:00

"We even adopted a cat—a sweet indoor kitty with an autoimmune virus we named Wimbledon."

-- Paul M. Davis

I Dream Things That Never Were, and Ask, "Why Not?"

2012-01-23T21:51:00.002-05:00

"They don't pay people $25,000 a month to be a historian."

-- Mitt Romney

(title cite)

"Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Henry Clay, Charles De Gaulle, William Wallace, Pericles...

2012-01-23T10:13:00.007-05:00

...The Duke Of Wellington, Thomas Edison, Vince Lombardi, The Wright Brothers, Moses, and 'a viking.'"

-- A list of the people to whom Newt Gingrich has compared himself (as reported here, in turn as distributed by the Romney campaign (whose word is worth the paper it was emailed on, so caveat lector on this one)).

For sheer entertainment value over the next ten months (which seems to be a non-trivial part of the value our increasingly farcical elections have these days), there's no question who you should root for as the Republican nominee.

Quote of the Day

2012-01-14T10:15:00.004-05:00

Everything is so fragile.

There's so much conflict, so much pain. You keep waiting for the dust to settle and then you realize this is it; the dust is your life going on.

If happy comes along -- that weird, unbearable delight that's actual happy -- I think you have to grab it while you can.

You take what you can get. 'Cause it's here, and then...

...gone.

-- Kitty Pryde in Astonishing X-Men #22, by Joss Whedon

This Post Intentionally Left Blank

2012-01-11T23:39:00.000-05:00

Man, I'm messing up everything today.

Working Title of the Memoir of the Last Human Being Alive

2012-01-10T13:37:00.003-05:00

No One But Myself To Blame.

(It will never get out of draft, of course: oh, it's good enough -- everyone who's read it liked it -- but all the remaining publishers think there won't be any sort of audience for it.)

Quote of the Day on the Most Important Political Issue of Our Time: a New Year's Eve Post

2011-12-31T11:07:00.004-05:00

Climate change is the most important issue of our time -- both due to its urgency (the time frame for getting a solution into place is distressingly narrow) and the direness that will result if nothing is done. If you're not convinced of this, read these two posts by David Roberts (follow-up here) -- and worry. Even if you only posit a, say, 5% change that he's right (ludicrously low), panic seems a very appropriate response. Every other issue before us will affect only a few generations, or only Americans, or some other subset of humanity -- this issue will affect the fate of humanity, full stop. It's urgent and it's dire and it's terrifying.

Let's just pause on the consequences for a moment longer. To quote "Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain":

For humanity it’s a matter of life or death ... we will not make all human beings extinct, as a few people with the right sort of resources may put themselves in the right parts of the world and survive. But I think it’s extremely unlikely that we wouldn’t have mass death at 4 degrees.

‘‘If you have got a population of 9 billion by 2050 and you hit 4 degrees, 5 degrees or 6 degrees, you might have half a billion people surviving."

Read that again. We're talking about the death of 94% of the human race. (The above-linked articles talk about the fact that we are, in fact, heading rapidly for a 4 or more degree (celsius) temperature rise.)

So how is Obama, our "liberal" president, doing on this most pressing of matters? Well, they're working as hard as they can... to sabotage a small European-led effort to work on the problem. From Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (via):

It’s bad enough—more than bad enough, really—that the U.S. has failed to lead the fight against climate change. This is very nearly as true under President Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. As former Senator Tim Wirth, now the president of the U.N. Foundation, put it recently, “I don’t know who and where the climate leadership in the Administration is. It doesn’t exist.”

Now, by trying to block others’ attempts to tackle the problem, the U.S. is behaving in a manner that seems best described as unforgivable. Last week, in a letter to Secretaries Clinton and LaHood, the heads of several of the nation’s leading environmental groups noted that the Administration is “actively thwarting other countries’ efforts to effectively and efficiently reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” a position that is incompatible with the Administration’s own stated commitment to avoiding “a dangerous rise in global average temperatures.” The groups urged the Administration to abide by the European court’s decision, “just as the Administration would wish other nations to respect the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

It’s pretty much impossible to imagine how the world can reduce the risks of climate change without imposing some sort of emissions limits, and airline emissions seems like as good a place to start as any. If the Administration disagrees with the European plan, then it would seem to be under a heavy obligation to propose its own. All it's doing now is shilling for the airlines. Is this any way to run a planet?

For those of you who like to blame the Republicans in Congress for all of the Obama administration's mistakes, please note that they are not involved here: this is Mr. Hope & Change, and his trusty deputies, all on their own.

To say that Obama is working hard to be the James Buchanan of climate change is far, far too optimistic. First, however horrific a crime slavery was, it did not threaten the extension of 94% of the human race. And, of course, Buchanan was followed by Abraham Lincoln -- whereas Obama-as-Buchanan is likely to be followed (whether in 2013 or 2017) by the climate-change equivalent of John C. Breckinridge.

Most people would probably think that I was being histrionic in saying Obama could and should be impeached for this. But the truth of the matter is that it would be ludicrously slight. Obama will be -- to quote a President whose name Obama is not fit to utter -- "damned in time and eternity" for his inaction -- or, rather, for his positive actions on the side of mass death and destruction.

Obama has been a utter disappointment in so many important areas -- civil liberties, executive secrecy, American military adventuring, coddling of 1% lawbreakers, a failure to aggressively address unemployment, a failure to confront inequality, a pathetic tendency to pre-capitulate to the forces of reaction, and an utter failure to use his famously powerful voice to articulate an alternate language to the Ayn Randian culture we have created (something which was begun -- just begun, but begun -- this year by Occupy Wall Street). But I think I could forgive all of that if he had genuinely confronted the environmental crisis. After all, if politics is about utilitarian compromise, then you could certainly argue that the climate crisis outweighs all of the rest put together.

But far from addressing it, Obama is fighting on the wrong side (just as he is in at least the first four of the items in the first paragraph, and arguably the first six (the last two he is clearly just failing miserably, or giving up without trying, rather than actively aiding the forces of Malevolence.)) What, in fact, does he have to show for all his meekness and compromise? A Republican health-care plan, and a number of small symbolic victories -- boy scout medals which he can hang on the wall moments before it is washed away by the flood which will drown the world.

So this is where we are: a crisis of unprecedented proportions, dire urgency, and the mainstream of political life caught between a conservative, business-agenda hack, and whichever loon the Republicans put up to run against him.

I don't, as a principled matter, believe in despair in the realm of the political. "Rage, rage against the dying of the light": yes. But at the moment I don't even see how to forward the hopeless struggle. If we are to fight the long defeat, we at least need to know how to do that. But now, where do we line up to fight in the hopeless battle? If that is the only question left, then I'd at least like an answer to that.

And that's where I see us located, now, on the last day of 2011. Happy new year to you all.

Happy Birthday Joseph!

2011-12-21T07:04:00.003-05:00

Joseph Saperstein Frug is 3 today. Happy Birthday!

Pictures from his third birthday party, held at the Science Center on Sunday. (Not unlike George Washington, Joseph's birthday is celebrated on a different day than its actual calendrical date.) The Science Center throws a great birthday party; fun was had by all.

Coates on Greenwald on Hitchens: The Cohabitation of Virtues and Sins

2011-12-19T11:09:00.001-05:00

After this long linkfest, I had not intended to return to the topic of the late Christopher Hitchens. But I am drawn to do so by ~~the fact I still have grading to procrastinate on~~ Ta-Nehisi Coates, who continues his irritating habit of being a better and wiser writer than anyone has a right to be, and showing the rest of us up. In response to Glenn Greenwald's thoughtful (negative) posting about Hitchens and the reaction to his death, Coates first noted (via) that "over the last decade, Hitchens sins actually injured his prose" -- an incredibly important point all by itself. But then he goes on to say this:

Nevertheless, I think Glenn's frame is wrong. Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them. Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder. Perhaps worse he was a slaveholder who comprehended, more than any other, the moral failing of slavery, and it's potential to bring the country to war, and yet at the end of his life he argued for slavery's expansion, and on his death many of his slaves were sent to the auction block.

At his end, Jefferson sided with those who would eventually bring about the deaths of 600,000 Americans. He argued that the antebellum South would have either "justice" versus "self-preservation." To paraphrase Churchill, it chose the latter and consequently got neither. But Jefferson was a beautiful writer, and a great intellect, whose thinking and prose I consistently find stunning. This admiration does not negate his moral cowardice. Both are true at the same time. (The same point could be made in regards to our conversation over Elizabeth Cady Stanton.)

Given Hitchens own ties to this magazine, of which I'm very fond, I'd like to say that--at least in this space--there's no demand for exclusion, or any sense that Hitchens worthy of unalloyed admiration. No one should ever receive, or wisely desire, such a thing. I can't really speak for other people, but I don't believe in an essential, irreducible moral nature. I don't see Hitchens, or anyone else, as a case of either/or.

Word. Yes. "Both are true at the same time": "Virtues don't excuse sins; they cohabit with them". That captures it -- not just for Hitchens, but for the human experience.

Coates says more in comments:

I don't know that his "virtues outweigh his vices." That presumes a kind of grand authority that I neither want, nor feel qualified, to exercise. It's just not a case I would ever make. Nor am I really interested in making the case, it's sort of irrelevant to me. It seems to originate from the need to either declare someone a "good person" or a "bad person." I think it's clear from my writing on slavery and race that I don't really see the world that way.

...If I disqualified people for the horrendous ideas they held or advanced, my personal canon would be sliced in half. I don't think those horrendous ideas should be shooed away. But they aren't a counter to whatever better ideas the person espoused. You can be a horrendous bigot, and a great father. You can be a raving misogynist and a great novelist. Neither cancels the other out--though I understand people often write as though it should.

(Still more here.) "Neither cancels the other": the simple, basic truth about human beings, human merits and vices, human reality that seems so hard for people to grasp. (Including some of Coates's commentators, a fair number of whom seem, uncharacteristically for his comments section, to miss the point.)

It seems that one fair criticism you could make of Hitchens is that he himself did not recognize this truth at all: that he tended to support or condemn people whole, without the least nuance, without any understanding that virtue and sin can and do cohabit. In that sense (as well as in others) I think that Coates is a wiser writer than the man he credits with inspiring him so.

Poem of the Day: Rudyard Kipling Waxes Metaphorical About Fifteenth Century England

2011-12-18T07:13:00.001-05:00

The Dawn Wind

The Fifteenth Century

At two o'clock in the morning, if you open your window and listen,
You will hear the feet of the Wind that is going to call the sun.
And the trees in the shadow rustle and the trees in the moonlight glisten,
And though it is deep, dark night, you feel that the night is done.

So do the cows in the field. They graze for an hour and lie down,
Dozing and chewing the cud; or a bird in the ivy wakes,
Chirrups one note and is still, and the restless Wind strays on,
Fidgeting far down the road, till, softly, the darkness breaks.

Back comes the Wind full strength with a blow like an angel's wing,
Gentle but waking the world, as he shouts: "The Sun! The Sun!"
And the light floods over the fields and the birds begin to sing,
And the Wind dies down in the grass. It is day and his work is done.

So when the world is asleep, and there seems no hope of her waking
Out of some long, bad dream that makes her mutter and moan,
Suddenly, all men arise to the noise of fetters breaking,
And every one smiles at his neighbour and tells him his soul is his own!
-- Rudyard Kipling

I'd always known the opening quatrain only in the context of its use as the epigraph for The Citadel of the Autarch (the fourth book of Gene Wolfe's masterpiece The Book of the New Sun). Recently it occurred to me to wonder what poem it came from; the above is the answer. It's one of a cycle of poems first published in A School History of England (1911) by C.R.L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling. Peter Keating notes that "It was used to close chapter VI, ‘The End of the Middle Ages: Richard II to Richard III, 1377-1485.’ An entry in the right hand margin beside the poem reads: ‘The hour before the dawn’ which might – given that the poem is centrally about process rather than achievement - make a more precise title for the poem than the one it carries."

Christopher Hitchens, 1949 - 2011

2011-12-16T12:14:00.016-05:00

Christopher Hitchens -- a man who wrote some genuinely fine sentences -- died yesterday. I have mixed feelings about the man's work (which I won't elaborate on now), but none about his death, which is utterly shitty, as all death is. Particularly death too young, when the person had work left to do.

Here are some things that some other people have said.

PZ Myers:

Hitch is dead. We are a diminished people for the loss. There can be and should be no consolation, no soft words that encourage an illusion of heavenly rescue, no balm of lies. We should feel as we do with every death, that a part of us has been ripped from our hearts, and suffer pain and grief — and we are reminded that this is the fate we all face, that someday we too will die, and that we are all “living dyingly”, as Hitch put it so well.

As atheists, I think none of us can find solace in the cliches or numbness in the delusion of an afterlife. Instead, embrace the fierce strong emotions of anger and sorrow, feel the pain, rage against the darkness, fight back against our mortal enemy Death, and live exuberantly while we can. Confront mortality clear-eyed and pugnacious, uncompromising and aggressive.

It’s what Hitch would have wanted of us.

It’s how Hitch lived.

The NYT Obituary:

He also professed to have no regrets for a lifetime of heavy smoking and drinking. “Writing is what’s important to me, and anything that helps me do that — or enhances and prolongs and deepens and sometimes intensifies argument and conversation — is worth it to me,” he told Charlie Rose in a television interview in 2010, adding that it was “impossible for me to imagine having my life without going to those parties, without having those late nights, without that second bottle.”

David Frum:

A friend of theirs once took Christopher Hitchens and his wife Carol Blue to dinner at Palm Beach’s Everglades Club, notorious for its exclusion of Jews.

“You will behave, won’t you?” Carol anxiously asked Christopher on the way into the club. No dice. When the headwaiter approached, Christopher demanded: “Do you have a kosher menu?”

Dave Zirin:

Christopher Hitchens was a man of prodigious gifts, but in the end, he used those gifts to promote wars that produced a killing field in the Middle East. That, tragically, is his lasting legacy to the world, and no amount of flowery obituaries can change this stubborn fact.

(The Nation's more cordial official obituary is here.)

Andrew Sullivan has a very moving video here. Unsurprisingly, Sullivan's blog has been Hitch central today (many of these links are from there): his first reaction to the news is here; he links to Auden's poetic porn "The Platonic Blow" in Hitchens's memory; two quotes from Hitchens's writings here. With doubtless more to come. (Update: Sullivan has a link round-up of his own Hitchens-related posts here, including a fair sampling of Hitchens quotations too.)

Here's a nicely-done collection of quotes from Hitchens about various subjects. And here are his answers to the so-called 'Proust questionnaire'. Selections from Hitchens's writing in their magazines have been posted at The Nation and The Atlantic.

Hitchens's brother, Peter.

No particular quotes, but here are memorial notices or other quotes, clips, etc from other people:

I may add more later if I see them. (Update: yep. ~~Paragraph~~ List below, too.)

Some more negative responses, which I'll separate in case anyone wants to obey the "hear no evil of the dead" rule:

Interesting to note that as time's gone on (and yes, I keep adding to this -- I don't mean to, but I keep seeing things here and there) the latter list has grown and grown after the former one has stopped expanding. I guess the backlash is well and truly on.

***

I said above that I wouldn't go into what I disliked about Hitchens's work; I didn't say so, but it was out of respect for the man the day after his death. But maybe I was wrong to do so: Hitchens himself set another standard, as this video clip of his appearance on Fox news right after Jerry Falwell's death shows. Perhaps it would be true to the man to light into his errors, even today?

But no. It wouldn't. For above all, Hitchens was true to himself, and refused to mold himself to fit the opinion of the world. He possessed, in this way, what Emerson called "self reliance" -- a refusal to bow to conformity (or consistency, for that matter.) And if it is Hitchens's way to speak ill of the dead, I do not wish it to be mine.

For the same reason, I will not refrain (as PZ Myers and Greta Christina have urged) from saying "rest in peace" -- not because I have any more belief in an afterlife than they or he, but because I don't actually think it means that: it's just a ritual, something to say when you hear about a death and feel that "every man's death diminishes me, because I am part of mankind".

So I won't say what I dislike about his work; I will wish him (not really, just verbally) a peaceful rest. Because Hitchens exemplified being true to one's beliefs, right or wrong, in the face of the world's lashing you in the face with its displeasure.

And that, Noble Readers, is a legacy. And a loss.

Rest in peace.

Still later update: I keep seeing Hitchens pieces -- I guess because ~~this damn grading is taking forever~~ they're being published everywhere. Most of it has been said well enough in the above (or here), so I shan't update any more. (Probably.) But I can't resist linking to this genuinely brilliant satire of the entire affair by Neal Pollack, "I Knew Christopher Hitchens Better Than You." (Via 3quarksdaily, which notes that within a mere "72 hours we've gone from obsequy to backlash to satire".) If you've read even a fraction of the above-linked items, you should read that -- it's quite hilarious.

Quote of the Day

2011-12-15T20:59:00.004-05:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates is Too. Damn. Good. a writer. Really. Today's proof:

It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, if we were slave masters our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter, that were we poor and black our sense of Protestant industry would be a mighty power sending gang leaders, gang members, hunger, depression and sickle cell into flight. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct.

Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, but on the whole, mediocre....

This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this--You are not extraordinary. It's all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't and then ask "Why?"

This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking "Why?" The fact that we -- and I mean all of us, black and white -- are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling.

I think that "a muscular empathy" is not only an astonishing phrase, but it is the key to why Coates is such an astonishingly good historian. (However much I think he's wrong about some things.) Indeed, I wonder if perhaps "a muscular empathy" isn't an utterly vital component for writing good history of any sort.

Or writing good literature. Or making good public policy. Or just being a decent human being in a world in which that is never an easy or trivial task.

Read the rest. (He has a follow-up post here.)

The Ogre's Feathers

2011-12-14T15:32:00.003-05:00

I just watched a brilliant short film called "The Ogre's Feathers", written and directed by Michael Almereyda. I was interested primarily because ~~I'm procrastinating on grading my exams~~ it includes SF writer, critic and all around Man of Marvelous Letters Samuel R. Delany in a small supporting role as the ill king (the first person on the screen is he) who needs an ogre feather to recover. (That's the reason my friend Ron Drummond, whose done editorial work for Delany, linked to it, which is how I saw it.)

The film is based on the story from Italo Calvino's book Italian Folktales called "The Feathered Ogre". (It's only three pages long; you should be able to read it at the link.)

The film is described by its creators as a "silent" film, but that's not quite right: there are sound effects and music. (Actually, both of those are quite well done and are part of the pleasures of the film.) I'm tempted to say "wordless", but that's not quite right either: there are words, put on title cards (white letters on a black screen), as used to be done in silent films. But there are no spoken words in the film.

(Which raises a question for me: why didn't silent films use subtitles? Was it simply that no one ever thought of it, or was there some technical reason (or aesthetic reason) why they wouldn't work? It seems like a far better (subtler, more efficient, less disruptive) way of communicating words on film using text than title cards. Yet I can't recall ever seeing a silent film use them. Does anyone know?)

I will admit that I'm not quite sure the not-really-silent-silent-film aspect really works. It's a bit odd given the sound -- the really quite gorgeously done sound, including, at one point, inaudible voices of children in the background. (Silent movies had music, but this has sound effects -- doors closing, etc -- which make the lack of voices odder.) And it slows down the movie, and makes it artificial... although that last point may be a plus, given that the entirety is a fairytale, but that it is filmed & set in contemporary New York: the oddity may be necessary to make it work. But it's an interesting (and clearly quite deliberate) artistic choice, and doesn't stop me recommending the film.

What I liked best, though, was the cinematography -- the movie is just gorgeously photographed, in incredibly rich black and white, with marvelous settings, frame compositions, and so forth. It really is plain old fabulous to look at. (It's very well acted too; I particularly liked Rachel Chandler as the ogre's wife.)

-- although here, too, I must admit one quibble: the entire film is gorgeous and beautiful... except for two brief scenes which take place on a ferry. Apparently they couldn't get permission to film on the real ferry, so they used rear screen projection for those scenes -- which looks oddly fake and off-putting compared to every other frame of the film.* (And it's odd, because they make it look like an old movie -- one of the movies in which that technique was regularly used -- whereas it otherwise doesn't, for all that it's a (not-really-silent) silent, black-and-white film.) Given that they updated the rest of the visual setting (i.e. talking and acting as if were a fairy tale but filming in NYC), I would have suggested trying the subway, or a bus, and referring to it as a ferry.

But quibbles aside, I really enjoyed it.

So here's the film. It's about 20 minutes long; the youtube is listed as "unlisted", meaning it doesn't show up in search results but is still available for embedding and linking (unlike "private" videos). So hopefully this (or this link) should work:

Finally, now that you've watched the film (come on, those exams can wait...), one small plot quibble which is a SPOILER for the movie (and the short story too):

In the story, the hero is asked by three additional people (apart from the ill king) to bring feathers, but is asked by four additional people for information. Each time the ogre's wife takes a feather she asks a question, so that the monks, the fourth set of information seekers (who requested no feather) go along with the feather for the king (who needed no information). Four feathers, four questions. In the film, however, the monks are cut out, which means that the wife asks only three questions and takes (or we see her take) only three feathers. Which means that I was counting feathers as they redistributed them to those who had asked, sure that the hero would run short. But he didn't: he gave out four feathers. Which is to say, cutting the monks left a plot loophole that I for one wish they had somehow filled (maybe one of the other three questioners could have refrained from asking for a feather?).

_________________
* Even the scenes on the ferry are beautiful if you ignore the background and just look at the actors. The background looks lousy, though.

Links, Recent and Otherwise, By Categories

2011-12-13T07:10:00.018-05:00

A link round-up. I've been bookmarking these for a while, and forget where I saw most of them, but the majority are probably from Gerry Canavan, and most of the rest from Making Light, 3 Quarks Daily or Andrew Sullivan.

Geeky

• Daniel Abraham, "A Private Letter from Genre to Literature". (This wins my personal "if you only read one of these links" vote, although obviously that will differ for everyone depending on your interests and tastes.)
• Terry Pratchett's short story "A Collegiate Casting-Out of Devilish Devices".
• Muppets, Avengers and Life in the Age of Fanfiction (AKA Everything is Fan Fiction Now.)
• Only the first Muppet movie was real; the others were the movies made by the troop assembled in the first one.
• Really awesome interview with Joss Whedon about his film of Much Ado About Nothing... done by some insanely talented (& insanely lucky) high school student.
• Alan Moore on the use of his V for Vendetta mask by the Occupy protesters.
• The rules of magic in diverse fantasy works.

Philosophical

• T. M. Scanlin (a philosopher whom I knew while I was in college, although I don't think I ever took a course with him) on libertarianism and liberty, with replies by Brad DeLong and Will Wilkinson.
• The errors of baseball umpires from various philosophical perspectives.
• "Octopuses," writes philosopher Godfrey-Smith, "are a separate experiment in the evolution of the mind." And that, he feels, is what makes the study of the octopus mind so philosophically interesting. Inside the Mind of the Octopus.
• Start at any Wikipedia page, then click the first link (ignoring any that are italicised or nestled in brackets), then repeat. For more than 93% of articles, you will end up at philosophy. Guardian article about this fact. Analysis which is the source of the 93% figure. Web application which will trace the path from any given Wikipedia page (or a random one) to Philosophy. Wikipedia's own article about this phenomenon.

Funny

• Presidential pick-up lines. (Only for those who like dirty jokes. And pictures of presidents.)
• Also from Tumblr: Shit Siri Says.
• How to speak Republican.

Political

• David Frum (former speechwriter for George W. Bush) asks When Did the GOP Lose Touch With Reality?
• Genuinely horrifying and shocking story: American government censors a blog, denies due process for over a year.
• Daniel Larison (one of the more interesting conservative writers around) talks to Corey Robin about Robin's new book The Reactionary Mind.
• Ethnically-based nation states are a really dumb idea.
• Segregated buses in America -- in 2011.

Visual Art

• Cool digital colleges by Matt Wisniewski. My favorite:

• Mysterious sculptor leaves gorgeous artworks in the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. (More)
• Irina Werning gets people to pose for recreations of old photographs (staring themselves as children, or at least much younger versions of themselves). They're quite astonishing. More here. (One or two in each set mildly NSFW).

Music

• Paul Simon's Graceland at 25.
• Andrew Rilestone on Bob Dylan in concert.
• Elliot Carter at a concert in celebration of his 103rd birthday. Carter had "written five works this year [!!] that were included in the program... Never in the history of music has a major composer still been producing significant pieces at such an age."

Profiles and Lives

• Jackson Lears on Reinhold Niebuhr
• Louis Menand on George Kennan
• Stalin's daughter died recently; she had a bizarre and fascinating life, well worth reading about.
• This has been around for a long time, but I don't think I've ever linked before to this fun little biography of Samuel R. Delany by K. Leslie Steiner (who is, incidentally, Delany himself).

Relating to Universities

• Why are they so fucked up? (Latest in a very, very, very long series of speculations & analyses by diverse people)
• Marc Bousquet on working as an academic (and how little it pays)
• The militarization of campus police.

Things That From a Long Way Off Look Like Flies

• A lengthy & fascinating thread on Metafilter in which non-Americans are asked to identify what's weird or quirky about America/Americans.

Gilbert Adair, 1944 - 2011

2011-12-10T14:12:00.005-05:00

Gilbert Adair died two days ago.

Adair is, I think, best thought of as a writer in that slightly old-fashioned category, "man of letters". Some obituarial writings stress his relati onship to film -- he was a film critic, and had some of his novels filmed. But Adair was largely about words and the culture of words so far as I can see.

I've only read two-and-a-bit books by Adair, although I've enormously enjoyed all of it, and read some more than once.

First, I've read Adair's utterly fabulous and delightful novel The Death of the Author -- a postmodern murder mystery (which, incidentally, is a whole subgenre), based around (not Barthes, as one might think from the title, but rather) Paul De Man, and the various revelations around his history of writing literary criticism for a fascist-friendly newspaper during world war two, including at least one directly antisemitic piece. It's really quite terrific, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in that sort of thing (a murder mystery set in academia, a send-up of De Man, a postmodern mystery, or anything else).

Second, I've read Adair's astonishing translation of Geroges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition, published under the title A Void. A lipogram, of course, is a piece of prose written deliberately eschewing one (or more) letters of the alphabet; Perec's La disparition contains no instances of the letter e (in French, as in English, the most common letter of the alphabet). Adair's translation, rather remarkably in my view, respects this constraint, and manages to translate Perec's e-less French novel into an e-less English one. (Perec's novel, incidentally, is also a postmodern mystery, in which the lack of an e symbolizes greater, unspeakable losses which haunt an unknowing world.)

For obvious reasons, translating a lipogram into a lipogram is a much harder, and thus in some ways more impressive, linguistic challenge than simply writing one: Perec could shape his novel according to his constraint, discussing things that happened to have no e in French, whereas Adair had to follow Perec's subject matter. There have been critiques of how well he did this (scroll down (or search for Adair) at this link to read Ian Monk's critique of Adair's translation). But personally I am quite grateful that he did it, and did it as well as he did.

(I've dealt with this topic before; for more on the translations of La disparition, see this post; for more on lipograms in general, see this one.)

Finally, I've read a few of the essays in Adair's (unspeakably marvelously titled) collection The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice. I think that title alone justified Adair's existence on this earth, and ought to preserve his memory.

Adair wrote all sorts of other things -- a biography of the real boy who inspired Thomas Mann's Death in Vencie, The Real Tadzio; a sequel to Lewis Carroll's two Alice books, Alice Through the Needle's Eye; and a number of other novels, including his most famous, Love and Death on Long Island, and also a number of other mysteries (about which I know little).

As a man of letters in an age of which tends to max out after 140 or so, I fear Adair is not very widely known, and may well not be long remembered. But it's a pity. Letters really get good when they pile up in long sequences: and Adair did this very well. If you've not heard of him before, and you enjoy sequences of letters longer than 140, see if you can track down The Death of the Author. It's quite fabulous. And I myself may well see if I can track down Love and Death on Long Island, which sounds good too.

Gilbert Adair, RIP.

Slandering My Good Name

2011-12-03T14:52:00.001-05:00

My name, of course, being "Frug". It's a name of Russian-Jewish extraction -- my paternal grandfather used to say that we were related to the Yiddish poet Simon Frug (1860 - 1916)*, although my father doubts this, and I have no hard evidence either way. As far as I know, every Frug in the western hemisphere (a small number) is related to me, some quite distantly of course.

Now, the other famous meaning of "frug" is in reference to the 60s dance craze of The Frug. For all practical purposes, the dance hasn't been done by anyone in half a century, but it comes up from time to time in popular culture -- the most prominent case, I suppose, being the Rilo Kiley song "The Frug". But other references -- often in the gerund form, "frugging" -- pop up from time to time. Wikipedia's entry on the dance has a lengthy list of them (at least as of now, until some pompous, killjoy editor decides the list lacks importance). I've previously mentioned that the late writer Thomas M. Disch told me he wrote a pseudonymous story called "If You Don't Frug Baby Then What Do You Do?" which he described as the worst thing he'd ever written.

So: a forgotten (and seemingly bad*) poet, and a forgotten (and seemingly silly) dance craze. And my family. I can live with that.

But then, earlier this week, I read the following (via):

According to complaints on consumer-focused Web sites, some American Solutions calls begin with slanted polling questions before proceeding to a request for money. The tactic, known as "fundraising under the guise of research," or frugging, is discouraged as unethical by trade groups such as the Marketing Research Association. (emphasis mine)

"Frugging" a slimy fundraising tactic! Aghast! I've been slandered!!

Ah, but it gets worse. Trying to dig a bit into this usage, I stumbled upon the entry for "Frug" in Urban Dictionary. There are references to the dance, of course, and references to the words as short for "frugal" (I've heard that one before too -- I believe the Frugal Gourmet is called "The Frug"), but then there's also this:

2. fat, retarded, ugly.
3a. A person who is extremely tight-fisted with money. Considered cheap, miserly, penny-pinching, selfish. Always has a negative connotation - thrifty would not be a synonym.
4. An exclamation used exclusively when you've accidentally just agreed to go on a date with someone that you consider to be repugnant.***

...and a few more which are even more obscure or odd and which frankly I doubt have ever been used in human speech.

Trying to come up with an appropriate response to these vile slanders, I am reminded of a quote from an old episode of the TV show Babylon 5 (of which I was, at one time, a great fan):

I don't know who's been saying these things but I want you to know when we get back I am gonna sue somebody! I don't know how -- and I don't know who -- but by God I am gonna sue somebody!

-- Lyta Alexander, in "Between the Darkness and the Light", by J. Michael Straczynski

Word.

__________________________
* I've read a handful of his poems in translation, and they're all pretty bad. It's hard to know in translation of course -- it's possible the originals were better -- but the one person I've ever run into to read Frug in the original** confirmed to me that no, he was, in fact, simply a bad poet.

** A rabbi at my school (he was, much later, to read the Ketubah at my wedding) who, upon being first introduced to me, exclaimed "Frug! Famous name! Famous Yiddish poet!" and then walked around introducing me to people as "Stephen FRUG" the way one might say "Stephen WHITMAN" or something, which puzzled everyone else in the room since, as with the great mass of humanity (even the great mass of Jews) none of them had ever heard of the poet.

*** I have to admit that this notion -- accidentally agreeing to go on a date -- is so bizarre and amusing that I'm almost willing to forgive someone for ascribing a bad version of it to my name. (Almost.) It's a hard scenario to imagine; here's the sample dialogue from the Urban Dictionary entry:

Other person: "Hey, so, uh, what are you doing this Saturday night?"
You: "Oh, nothing much. Going to Coffee Shop X to study, probably."
Other person: "See you there!"
You: "Frug!"

Poem of the Day: Did I Miss Anything?

2011-11-28T00:19:00.006-05:00

Did I Miss Anything?

              Question frequently asked by
              students after missing a class

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

 Everything. I gave an exam worth
 40 per cent of the grade for this term
 and assigned some reading due today
 on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
 worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

 Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
 a shaft of light descended and an angel
 or other heavenly being appeared
 and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
 to attain divine wisdom in this life and
 the hereafter
 This is the last time the class will meet
 before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
         on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

 Everything. Contained in this classroom
 is a microcosm of human existence
 assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
 This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
         gathered

 but it was one place

 And you weren't here

-- Tom Wayman, 1994

The author, Tom Wayman, has a FAQ about the poem here.

My Annual Thanksgiving Post - Now With Exciting A/V Content Added!

2011-11-24T08:39:00.001-05:00

Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.... Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

-- Psalm 100:2, 4

ANYA: I love a ritual sacrifice.
BUFFY: It's not really a one of those.
ANYA: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.

-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Pangs" by Jane Espenson

Thanksgiving is a holiday, and holidays are rituals. And one of my holiday rituals is to give thanks to you, Noble Reader, for reading. Not all sentences said ritualistically are heartfelt -- it goes with the territory -- but this one always is.* I am thankful that you have dropped by; I hope you will come back again. That I am copying and pasting this paragraph from last year's post -- save for this self-referential sentence -- does not in any way alter or diminish this fact (he said speech act-ily.)

In, however, a desperate attempt to enliven this ritual with some exciting! new! content, here is a video clip of the exchange from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode quoted above:

Oddly, there is no youtube clip of David Ha-Melech saying the appropriate clip from the Psalms. All they have is a few odds and ends -- the famous bits, Psalm 23, and all that. Anyone have it and want to upload it? I promise to post it next year...

I wish everyone a joyful Thanksgiving, however (and whether) you celebrate it, and to whomever (and however) you give thanks.

_________________________
* Yes, that sentence noting that the ritualistic sentence is said not just ritualistically but sincerely is now, itself, a part of my Thank sgiving ritual. I will note that it, too, is said sincerely and not just realistically, and shudder at the inevitable extrapolation of this trend. (As, for instance, the slightly odd shudder I get at copying & pasting the previous sentence from last year's post...)

Poem of the Day: a Poem (!!) by Terry Pratchett

2011-11-21T21:30:00.003-05:00

Just came across this, here, for the first time:

Ode to Multiple Universes

I do have worlds enough and time
to spare an hour to find a rhyme
to take a week to pen an article
a day to find a rhyme for 'particle'.
In many worlds my time is free
to spend ten minutes over tea
And steal the time from some far moon
so words can take all afternoon,
Away beyond the speed of light
I'll write a novel in one night.
Aeons beckon, if I want 'em...
...but I can't have em', 'cos of Quantum.

-- Terry Pratchett

Two Poets Walk Into a Pub

2011-11-20T13:55:00.001-05:00

...Except they never met, really, and it wasn't a pub, it was a bar.

Maybe I should back up.

A commentator with the delightful* handle Steve with a book, over at Making Light, mentioned (in passing) what he called "Auden's questions: In what pubs are they welcome? What girls marry them?".

Well, I loves me some Auden, and those lines weren't from any Auden poem I knew, so I went and tracked them down.

The first thing to say is that, as I said at the beginning, it's not a pub, but a bar. The pub misquotation (to judge from the google results) originating in Clive James's book Cultural Amnesia, in a section that was reprinted in slate under the title Assessing Terry Gilliam, which presumably accounts for its prevelance in the googlesphere. Apart from that Anglicization of the post-English Auden, though, James's quotation seems perfectly apposite: he's discussing the torturer Peron, and Auden's original use is simply to stick the questions into parentheses after mentioning "torturers": "In what bars are they welcome?/What girls marry them?" A misquotation, to be sure, but not at all a misuse. Surely we can spot James a round at a pub in return for bringing to our attention those two lovely lines.

But what about the larger context, i.e. the whole poem? That, Noble Reader, is where things begin to get interesting.

The lines are from a poem (or ought one say group of poems?) that Auden published later in his career called "Eleven Occasional Poems". In particular, the lines are from the fifth subsection of that poem (or ought one to say to a poem in that group?), which is titled "Josef Weinheber" and subtitled with his dates (1892 - 1945). The subsections are separately dated**; "Josef Weinheber" is dated February, 1965.

And who, one wonders, was Josef Weinheber?

Well, it's not the kindest way to begin introducing the man, but given that we've come across him in the context of lines questioning the social acceptance of torturers, it seems appropriate to begin by noting that Josef Weinheber was a Nazi. I don't mean that rhetorically, but literally: he was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party in the Third Reich. (He was Austrian, and became a citizen of the Reich with the anchlauss, which Weinheber apparently welcomed.)

Now, lest any of my readers not be all that familiar with Auden, let me hasten to add that the man was no Nazi sympathizer. (If he committed any political sins in the 1930's, they were on the left, not the right.) In fact, a fair amount of his poetry has a specifically and not-too-subtly anti-Nazi message. In "Spain" (1937) he wrote admiringly of the struggle against the fascists in Spain; in "Refugee Blues" (1939) he dramatized the plight of German Jewish refugees with nowhere to go in a way that is still being used in Holocaust course material. Auden himself married Erika Mann (daughter of Thomas, and Jewish on her mother's side) in order to obtain a British passport for her in 1935. (Auden was openly gay, and the marriage was forthrightly just for convenience. "***)

Okay. So Auden was no Nazi sympathizer. What was he doing eulogizing a former Nazi?

Well, for one thing, Weinheber apparently had -- eventually -- a falling-out with Naziism, and came to regret his support for them. Weinheber was also a poet that Auden admired, and was the only other resident of note in a town in southern Austria, Kirchstetten, where Auden summered in the last several years of his life (and where he died, and where he is buried.) Here's how Auden himself put the matter, at a 1968 poetry reading, as recoutned by James Fenton in the Guardian a few years ago:

[Auden] reads a poem in memory of Joseph Weinheber and, on introducing it, tells the audience that Weinheber was an important Austrian poet who was at first an enthusiastic Nazi supporter, but who gradually during the course of the second world war became disillusioned and depressed until, in 1945, he committed suicide. There is a dialect phrase in the poem, which Auden has to explain. Weinheber had been taken up by the Nazis, and Goebbels had asked him what the party could do for Austrian culture. "In Ruah lossen," Weinheber's reply, means that they should leave it alone, leave it in peace - precisely what the Nazis were unprepared to do. What Auden is addressing here is the ghost of a man who had made a very big mistake (supporting Nazism) and died regretting it.

Anyone interested in more details should seek out an article by Peter Edgarly Firchow, called "Auden and Weinheber: Poets of Kirchstetten", which explores the various intersections of the poets' lives in some detail. (It appeared first in the journal Salmagundi (No. 96 (Fall 1992), pp. 187-211) -- the link is to JSTOR, where it can be found by those who have access -- and later as the fifth and last chapter of Firchow's 2008 book Strange Meetings: Anglo-German Literary Encounters from 1910 to 1960.) Definitely the major piece in this admittedly small corner of literary studies.

Or you could just read Auden's poem, which I've posted below.

Josef Weinheber
(1892 - 1945)

Reaching my gate, a narrow
lane from the village
passes on into a wood:
when I walk that way
it seems befitting to stop
and look through the fence
of your garden where (under
the circs they had to)
they buried you like a loved
old family dog.

Categorised enemies
twenty years ago,
now next-door neighbors, we might
have become good friends,
sharing a common ambit
and love of the Word,
over a golden Kremser
had many a long
language on syntax, commas,
versification.

Yes, yes, it has to be said:
men of great damage
and malengine took you up.
Did they for long, though,
take you in, who to Goebbels'
offer of culture
countered -- in Ruah lossen?
But Rag, Tag, Bobtail
prefer a stink, and the young
condemn you unread.

What, had you ever heard of
Franz Jägerstätter,
the St. Radegund peasant,
who said his lonely
Nein to the Aryan State
and was beheaded,
would your heart, as Austrian,
poet, have told you?
Good care, of course, was taken
you should hear nothing,

be unprepared for a day
that was bound to come,
a season of dread and tears
and dishevelment
when, transfixed by a nightmare,
you destroyed yourself.
Retribution was ever
a bungler at it:
dies alles ist furchtbar, hier
nur Schweigen gemass.

Unmarked by me, unmourned for,
the hour of your death,
unhailed by you the moment
when, providence-led,
I first beheld Kirchstetten
on a pouring wet
October day in a year
that changed our cosmos,
the annus mirabilis
when Parity fell.

Already the realms that lost
were properly warm
and over-eating, their crimes
the pedestrian
private sort, those nuisances,
corpses and rubble,
long carted away: for their raped
the shock was fading,
their kidnapped physicists felt
no longer homesick.

Today we smile at weddings
where bride and bridgegroom
were both born since the Shadow
lifted, or rather
moved elsewhere: never as yet
has Earth been without
her bad patch, some unplace with
jobs for torturers
(In what bars are they welcome?
What girls marry them?),

or her nutritive surface
at peace all over.
No one, so far as we know,
has ever felt safe:
and so, in secret regions,
good family men
keep eye, devoted as monks,
on apparatus
inside which harmless matter
turns homicidal.

Here, though, I feel as at home
as you did: the same
short-lived creatures re-utter
the same care-free songs,
orchards cling to the regime
they know, from April's
rapid augment of color
til boisterous Fall,
when at each stammering gust
apples thump the ground.

Looking across our valley
where, hidden from view,
Sichelbach tottles westward
to join the Perschling,
humanely modest in scale
and mild in contour,
conscious of grander neighbors
to bow to, mountains
soaring behind me, ahead
a noble river,

I would respect you also,
Neighbor and Colleague,
for even my English ear
gets in your German
the workmanship and the note
of one who was graced
to hear the viols playing
on the impaled green,
committed thereafter den
Abgrund zu nennen.

-- W. H. Auden
February, 1965

Hey! Wanna see my impression of an editor for the Norton Anthology of Whatever?

• 8: "circs": circumstances. Fenton comments: "The abbreviation of circumstances to "circs" in the first stanza is typical of the linguistic mannerisms that used to annoy his critical readers, but Auden is expecting us to notice that the very informal language is gently referring to a terrifying moment in history."

• 27: "in Ruah lossen" Weinheber's (apparently real) response to Goebbels's question about what he could do for Austrian culture -- which Firchow translates as "leave 'em alone".

• 31: "Franz Jägerstätter". The story Auden tells here is a true one. Details here.

• 45-46: "when, transfixed by a nightmare/you destroyed yourself." Weinheber committed suicide on April 8, 1945,

• 49-50: "dies alles ist furchtbar, hier/nur Schweigen gemass" - lines quoted from a poem of Weinheber's called "Auf das Unabwendbare" ("On the Unavoidable"), which Firchow translates as "all of this is terrible;/here silence is the only proper response." Firchow goes on to say that "The words actually do not actually appear in quite the way that Auden cites them, but represent a fusion of the stanzaic refrain (Dies alles ist furchtbar) with the final line of the poem (Hier ist nur Schweigen gemäss)."

• 55: "Kirchstetten" - we already covered this, O Careless Reader! That's the town in southern Austria where Weinheber lived & where Auden had a summer home.

• 59, "annus mirabilis" - Latin for "year of miracles". Originally used in reference to 1666 (see here for more), now a common phrase. Firchow glosses this as (for Auden) 1939.

• 103-104: "Sichelbach tottles westward/to join the Perschling". The Perschling is a tributary to the Danube in Austria; I'm presuming that the Sichelbach is too, but, really, who the fuck knows. An actual Norton editor gets paid for this shit, right?

• 119 - 120: "den/Abgrund zu nennen". Of these lines, Firchow writes that they are

taken, again in slightly altered form, almost as if Auden were revising one of his own poems, from the poem "Kammermusik" (1939), in the collection of the same name. The poem, subtitled "A Variation," consists of four stanzas, with each stanza being spoken by one of the instruments in the quartet. The two violins start off expressing, as in their nature, sunny or only slightly shaded views of life. The viola, however, provides a dark glimpse of the abyss, which, drawn as it is to suffering rather than to naive optimism, the viola feels obligated to name (den Abgrund euch zu nennen). The cello closes the poem on a note of reconciliation, of seeing the whole, of accepting what fate brings: "I don't warn, I weep with you. I console." Significantly, however, Auden picks out the suffering Christian voice of the viola, rather than the balanced Greek voice of the cello, when he wishes to give us his final verdict on Weinheber.

• "February, 1965": Has the poem been translated into German? Why yes, it has.

________________________
* Well, a good name and a good object, what else could you want?

** Which inclines one towards calling them poems, with Auden's collective grouping simply being a way of slightly deemphasizing poems which fall into his category of "pieces he has nothing against except their lack of importance" (which, Auden continues, "must invariably form the bulk of any collection since, were he to limit to to... those poems for which he is honestly grateful, his volume would be too depressingly slim.") But the typographical signals in the layout of the Collected Poems definitely marks them out as a poem, rather than as eleven of them.

*** There are a number of charming stories about the marriage arrangements, most of them, I believe, appocraphal. I recall two. One is that when Auden was approached to see if he would marry Mann in order to get her out of Nazi Germany, he replied, affirmingly, "What's a bugger for?" The other is that before Mann arrived to marry Auden, they'd never met, so he didn't know what she looked like. There was a mix-up about the times, so she was not on the train; but Auden, seeing a lone woman get out, assumed it was her, walked up to her, and said, "Madam, I understand that we are to be married tomorrow."

Speaking as an Historian...

2011-11-16T10:37:00.002-05:00

I just want to announce to the world at large, and to Freddie Mac in particular, that my consulting services are available for considerably less than $1,600,000. If the historian you are currently paying for advice is charging you that much, you ought to consider me as a cost-effective alternative for all your historical consulting needs.

Truth Crushed to Earth Will Rise Again

2011-11-15T09:19:00.006-05:00

So the bastards did it: they closed down the original occupy wall street encampment, in Zuccotti park. I hope to God this backfires on them.

Personally, I think the only adequate response would be a general strike -- probably Thursday, since that when a day of action was and is being called for anyway. But that's what should happen. They shut down the park, we shut down the city.

I only wish to God I was in NYC now so I could propose this, listen to reactions, and help.

Right now I'm thinking of breaking down and finally joining twitter, because it seems like the only way to keep up with what's going on. In the meantime, some tweets I've seen:

NYC authorities clearly feel #OWS eviction is just and reasonable. That's why they are doing it at 2am and barring all press.

-- George Zornick

Peacefully shut #NYC down #OWS! Strike! Shut it down!

-- Cooper's Hawk

NYPD Occupying Liberty Square; Demands Unclear

-- Mike Castleman

More when I can. [Update: tweet added.] In the meantime, the image below is from the official OWS twitter. Pass it on.

Update: Glenn Greenwald quotes a OWS spokesman (hey, I thought they didn't have any of those?):

A military style raid on peaceful protesters camped out in the shadow of Wall Street, ordered by a cold ruthless billionaire who bought his way into the mayor’s office.

That about covers it. Greenwald also has important points to make about the militarization of the police breaking up OWS (and similar encampments elsewhere (did you hear that they used police helicopters to ensure that no media helicopters would be able to see what they did as they broke up the protest (in conjunction with an on-the-ground press blackout, of course.)), as well as about the fact that, by ignoring the court order for him not to break up the encampment, "Bloomberg this morning has broken more laws than the hundreds of protesters who were arrested". Not that anyone will care, of course -- by which I mean, any of the 1%, who are the only people whose opinions count in this country. ("Now you're not naive enough to think we're living in a democracy, are you buddy?" - Gordon Gekko, Wall Street, 1987. Back before it was as bad as it is now.)

Poem of the Day: Langston Hughes's "Justice"

2011-11-07T21:50:00.002-05:00

Justice

That Justice is a blind goddess
Is a thing to which we black are wise:
Her bandage hides two festering sores
That once perhaps were eyes.

-- Langston Hughes

(via)

Something To Look Forward To...

2011-10-24T10:20:00.006-04:00

The buzz on the internet this morning:

....there was some speculation that it could be a hoax (the title certainly would fit), but Nathan Fillion, who broke the news, has confirmed that it's real. (Apparently he's playing Dogberry.) And then so Maurissa Tancharoen did too. And of course Whedon has spoken often in interviews of the Shakespeare reading groups he does with his friends (including people he casts in his TV projects). So I'm guessing it's legit.

So, uh, yay!!

More here.

Update (10/25): So this news is everywhere now -- like, even in the newspaper of record. (Are they still that?) Unsurprisingly, Whedonesque is the place to go for all your MAAN news. The juciest single news source I've seen on it is this interview with Whedon, Sean "Dr. Tam" Maher and Amy "Fred/Illyria" Acker. Apparently the film is in black and white -- which is cool (I wonder if that was a purely aesthetic decision, or if it was also financial?). And it was shot entirely at Joss's own house -- which, who knew, was designed by his wife Kai, who's an architect.

The full cast list is in the official press release, but I'm going to quote this blog post which lists the actors and parts along with Whedon-fan-friendly identifications:

Amy Acker (Angel) will play Beatrice and Alexis Denisof (Angel) will play Benedict. Fran Kranz (Dollhouse) will play Claudio and newcomer Jillian Morgese (The Avengers) will play Hero. Nathan Fillion (Firefly) is Dogberry, Clark Gregg (The Avengers) is Leonato, Reed Diamond (Dollhouse) is Don Pedro.

Additionally, Sean Maher (Firefly) is Don Juan (the villain of the piece), and Tom Lenk (Andrew from Buffy/Angel) plays Verges. And that's it for Whedon alums that I can see on the list.

I don't know Gregg, 'cause The Avengers hasn't come out yet, or Morgese, 'cause she's a "newcomer" (how'd she get so luck?), but the others are all fun to imagine in their respective roles.

War is a Force Which Gives us Meaning

2011-10-14T09:53:00.005-04:00

The title is Chris Hedge's, of course. I just came across this example of it (rereading an article in preparation for a class today where I've assigned it):

This is a war with a difference -- a weird and beautiful difference. Personally, I feel challenged by it. I'll tell you one thing -- it's a heck of a lot more challenging than running a string of gas stations or supermarkets back in the States.

-- Colonel John K. Walker, Jr.
Quoted in Jonathan Schell, "The Village of Ben Suc"
The New Yorker, July 15, 1967, p. 77

Which leads us to:

Certainly, many people do join the army because they are deprived of opportunities. But the real question to be asking is: opportunities to do what?

Let me offer an anthropological perspective on the question. It first came home to me a year or two ago when I was attending a lecture by Catherine Lutz, a fellow anthropologist from Brown University who has been studying U.S. military bases overseas. Many of these bases organize outreach programs, in which soldiers venture out to repair schoolrooms or to perform free dental checkups for the locals. These programs were created to improve local relations, but they were apparently at least as effective in their psychological impact on the soldiers, many of whom would wax euphoric when describing them: e.g., “This is why I joined the army,” “This is what military service is really all about–not just defending your country, but helping people.” The military’s own statistics point in the same direction: although the surveys do not list “helping people” among the motives for enlistment, the most high-minded option available–”to do something to be proud of”–is the favorite.

Is it possible that America is actually a nation of frustrated altruists?

-- David Graeber, "An Army of Altruists"
Harper's, January, 2007

Not the same thing -- challenging is not the same thing as helping people -- but variations on a theme.

Also relevant in this context: the fact that one reason (misguided, perhaps, but a real motive) that people go to law school is a desire to do good in the world.

Is it possible that America is actually a nation of frustrated altruists? Could it be that one thing lawyers and soldiers have in common is that they both choose a poor means (if possibly the only means available to them, or that they thought was available) to try to do good in the world?

This has been a post about Occupy Wall Street. It's true that, contrary to the bombast of the 1%-owned media, the message of Occupy Wall Street is clear: it's about economic injustice. (link via). But perhaps it's about more than that, too.

There's an old lefty slogan that "a better world is possible". Maybe one of the things we're starved for are ways to help make it so.

Words, Words, Words... Also Images, Videos and Sundry Other Media

2011-10-11T07:26:00.000-04:00

Recent links, non-political edition:

• Twitter jokes about the faster-than-light neutrinos. ('cause you've all seen the definitive joke, from XKCD, right?)

• Cool painting which I just saw (a reproduction of) for the first time: Victor Olivia's The Absinthe Drinker. (via)

• Very cool story by Robert Charles Wilson, Divided by Infinity.

• Caveman Science Fiction. (via)

• Very cool video of a famous optical illusion brought to life. (via)

• China Mieville's rejected pitch for an Iron Man comic. (via) I would so totally read this.

• Julian Sanchez on Why do rich superheroes inherit their money while rich CEOs tend to be supervillans? Follow-up thoughts from Aylssa Rosenberg here.

• Brian Leiter's five books to start reading/reading about Nietzsche.

• "Ten percent of all the photos we have [i.e. the human race has now in any form] were taken in the past 12 months."

• John Crowley on predicting the future.

• Two fun videos of people doing impressions: Jim Meskimen Does Shakespeare in Celebrity Voices, and 50 Impressions in 50 Seconds (both via).

• You know that famous quote from Zhou Enlai where he said, in 1972, that it was too early to tell what the impact of the French Revolution would be? Well, he meant the street protests of May 1968 -- not the famous Revolution of 1789. Much more reasonable, albeit less notable.

• A profile of Barry Duncan, the world's first self-proclaimed master palindromist. (Although so far as I can tell he's actually not yet bested Georges Perec, save in quantity.) More on Duncan from Metafilter. (I'm pretty sure these were via Gerry Canavan, but I can't find the link, so maybe not.)

• Bee proverbs.

• Most of Tom Tomorrow's fabulous cartoons are political in humor, and thus not linked to in this list, but this particular cartoon is not only very funny, but isn't really political at all (save in the broadest, most meaningless, "everything is political" sense).

• John Varley's short story "The Manhattan Phone Book, Abridged". Via Jo Walton, who says it's like Geoff Ryman's internet novel 253.

• Speaking of which, Paul Lafarge lists Ryman's 253 as one of the two hypertext novels which actually stand the test of time (so far) in his essay about why hypertext fiction seems to have fizzled (via). The other he lists is Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl which, alas, is not online for free, unlike Ryman's 253. Lafarge himself is in the middle of publishing a hypertext novel, Luminous Airplanes, as the companion/sequel to the just-published print novel of the same name.

• Adrian Fiske traveled both China and India, giving people a piece of paper, asking them to write whatever they wanted on it, and taking a photograph of the result. More at his web site, although there's no direct link to that set, sadly -- get through his annoying intro page, then, under the "new stories" menu, they're labeled "ispeak India" and "ispeak China". (Why do photographers have such annoying web pages?)

What They Said, a.k.a. Which Side Are You On?

2011-10-09T12:29:00.005-04:00

I've been meaning to post about #occupywallstreet since I first heard of it. But I haven't found anything particularly original to say. So, for the moment, I've given up that search, and will simply say What They Said:

Declaration of the Occupation of New York City
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world can know that we are your allies.

As one people, united, we acknowledge the reality: that the future of the human race requires the cooperation of its members; that our system must protect our rights, and upon corruption of that system, it is up to the individuals to protect their own rights, and those of their neighbors; that a democratic government derives its just power from the people, but corporations do not seek consent to extract wealth from the people and the Earth; and that no true democracy is attainable when the process is determined by economic power. We come to you at a time when corporations, which place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and oppression over equality, run our governments. We have peaceably assembled here, as is our right, to let these facts be known.

They have taken our houses through an illegal foreclosure process, despite not having the original mortgage.
They have taken bailouts from taxpayers with impunity, and continue to give Executives exorbitant bonuses.
They have perpetuated inequality and discrimination in the workplace based on age, the color of one’s skin, sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.
They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization.
They have profited off of the torture, confinement, and cruel treatment of countless animals, and actively hide these practices.
They have continuously sought to strip employees of the right to negotiate for better pay and safer working conditions.
They have held students hostage with tens of thousands of dollars of debt on education, which is itself a human right.
They have consistently outsourced labor and used that outsourcing as leverage to cut workers’ healthcare and pay.
They have influenced the courts to achieve the same rights as people, with none of the culpability or responsibility.
They have spent millions of dollars on legal teams that look for ways to get them out of contracts in regards to health insurance.
They have sold our privacy as a commodity.
They have used the military and police force to prevent freedom of the press. They have deliberately declined to recall faulty products endangering lives in pursuit of profit.
They determine economic policy, despite the catastrophic failures their policies have produced and continue to produce.
They have donated large sums of money to politicians, who are responsible for regulating them.
They continue to block alternate forms of energy to keep us dependent on oil.
They continue to block generic forms of medicine that could save people’s lives or provide relief in order to protect investments that have already turned a substantial profit.
They have purposely covered up oil spills, accidents, faulty bookkeeping, and inactive ingredients in pursuit of profit.
They purposefully keep people misinformed and fearful through their control of the media.
They have accepted private contracts to murder prisoners even when presented with serious doubts about their guilt.
They have perpetuated colonialism at home and abroad. They have participated in the torture and murder of innocent civilians overseas.
They continue to create weapons of mass destruction in order to receive government contracts. *

To the people of the world,

We, the New York City General Assembly occupying Wall Street in Liberty Square, urge you to assert your power.

Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; occupy public space; create a process to address the problems we face, and generate solutions accessible to everyone.

To all communities that take action and form groups in the spirit of direct democracy, we offer support, documentation, and all of the resources at our disposal.

Join us and make your voices heard!

*These grievances are not all-inclusive.

What they said. Keith Olbermann read the document in its entirety on the air if you're more for audio/visual.

No, it's not what I would have said how I would have said it. (The footnote about how "these grievances are not all-inclusive" is about 15% cute and 85% ridiculous; I think the whole animal rights/factory farming bit was a mistake to include; and so forth.) But it doesn't matter. What matters is the movement, the overall thrust of the matter. As Kevin Drum (as anodyne and mainstream a liberal as you can find in the left-handed blogosphere) put it: Keep Asking Yourself One Question: Whose Side Am I On?

Or, as Pete Seeger sang years ago: Which side are you on?

I assume you've all seen the links, so I won't bother to include too many. I will, however, point out that Greg Mitchell's blog at The Nation is the best source for updates I've seen (via Gerry Canavan). And here is Zunguzungu's most recent link list on OWS (most of which I haven't read, but Zunuzungu's rep as one of the best linkbloggers around is well-earned). But I did particularly like this 50 best signs collection. (If any of those signs bother you, go (re)read the Kevin Drum essay.)

Alasdair Grey famously quoted (from Dennis Leigh) that one should "work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation". Until occupy wall street, I was finding it impossible to do that.* And I think I'm not alone. If they were to accomplish nothing else (and they already have: they have changed the national conversation in ways unimaginable a mere month ago), I am deeply grateful to them for that.

__________________________
* Two days after the occupation began -- although before I'd heard of it -- I wrote:

I myself see no possible hope on the horizon. Oh, we can fantasize about some massive citizen campaign changing things. While we're dreaming, though, I'd like a few million dollars, and a pony. Seems just about as likely. I think that 2009 may well have been this country's last chance to change course.

Maybe OWS won't be that "massive citizen campaign": but maybe it will, in which case that moment of despair came even after it had already begun. (Hey, can I have my few million dollars now? You can keep the pony...) Perhaps -- just perhaps -- our eucatas trophe has begun. If not, it is at least a bit easier to imagine hope now.

And Yet Another Is Removed From the Rack of This Tough World

2011-10-06T10:09:00.005-04:00

Last night, I glanced at the New York Times and saw the news of the deaths of Steve Jobs and Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth -- the latter of which I posted about here (or just scroll down). Then this morning I looked at the paper again -- and saw that yet another man who had done great works died yesterday: Derrick Bell, one-time professor of law at Harvard Law School.

Unlike Rev. Shuttlesworth or Steve Jobs, I actually met Derrick Bell a number of times. He was a colleague of my dad's, and so I met him in all of the various ways I met the left side of the faculty at HLS when I was growing up. I didn't know him particularly well or anything -- he wasn't one of those our family was particularly close to -- but I knew him, a little bit, a long time ago. So in some ways this death strikes me even more than the other two. Of Derrick Bell, I actually have personal memories.

Two occur to me now, hearing of his death.

The first is a simple occasion, from when I was a teenager -- before college, anyway. Bell had barricaded himself in his HLS office in protest -- of something: to be honest, I don't remember what. Maybe the lack of African American Women Professors on the faculty, which is what he ultimately resigned from HLS over; or maybe it was something else. (Looking over his NYT obituary, I bet it's one of the occasions they describe when "in 1986, he staged a five-day sit-in in his office to protest the school’s failure to grant tenure to two professors whose work involved critical race theory.") But having barricaded himself in, he couldn't just slip out to eat; so people took turns bringing him food. And one night my family went and had dinner with him in his office, bringing the food along. Nothing particularly dramatic happened; I just recall the dinner, is all.

The second is an even more distant thing. I read Bell's classic SF story "The Space Traders" (that's a link to an online version; there's a pdf here) when it first came in Bell's essay collection Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism, a copy of which was in my house. (I don't think I picked it up because it was SF, although maybe my Dad told me it was -- but I certainly was the sort of kid -- young adult by then, I guess -- who would have idly picked it up and leafed through it.) I liked the story, of course, but I wondered how much SF Bell had read -- it seemed like a story written by a law professor rather than an SF fan as such. So through my Dad I sent word to Bell that he should read the story "Way in the Middle of the Air" in Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, which was, in an odd sense, the reverse of Bell's own story; and I got word back thanking me for pointing him at the story, which he hadn't previously seen.

And that's most of what I know about him, to be honest. Aside from his SF story (which I hadn't realized had been made into a TV episode until I saw it mentioned in an obituary this morning), I haven't read much of his work -- the only thing I remember in particular is his contribution to Jack Balkin's essay collection What Brown V. Board of Education Should Have Said, an essay which displays the same despair over the possibility of ever ending racism that he expressed in "The Space Traders", and Faces at the Bottom of the Well more generally -- a despair that I felt was unwarranted, although I was and am also very conscious that that's easy for me to say as a white man living in a racist country, and that Bell's judgment was formed out of both experience and scholarship of which I have no parallel. So I don't trust my judgment on this matter -- although, somehow, it is still the judgment I have, despite that.

Mostly, though, he was a friend of my parents: I met him a few times, I read some of his work, and now he's gone. And the world has one more hole in it, on a day when two too many others had been ripped open already.

I hate it when it feels like I could fill my entire blog with obituary notices. Everyone dies: but, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." I would say that this is setting oneself up for ongoing disappointment in life -- save that life really has that taken care of anyway, doesn't it?

Rest in peace.

Mourning a Corageous American Visionary

2011-10-05T22:42:00.004-04:00

No, I don't mean the man who designed the computer I'm typing this on, who also died today -- sure, he was a visionary too (he envisioned up this computer, didn't he?), but he's getting front page treatment right at the moment. But just as the deaths of C. S. Lewis and Aldous Huxley were buried by the more newsworthy man who also happened to die on November 22, 1963, Jobs's death is pushing down the front page the death of a genuine American hero. And he's the one whose death really struck me.

I speak of Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the founding members (along with Martin Luther King and others) of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, one of the major Civil Rights organizations during the Movement.

Rev. Shuttlesworth (left) alongside Reverends Abernathy and King

In 1956 Rev. Shuttlesworth organized a movement to try to desegregate the buses in Birmingham; in response his house and church were bombed. (People forget that the most important element maintaining Jim Crow wasn't the laws and wasn't social custom, but ongoing terrorist violence and the omnipresent threat of terrorist violence.) In an interview in the (truly remarkable) PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize (episode 1.4, "No Easy Walk"), Rev. Shuttlesworth described what happened next:

They blew the floor out from under my bed, spaces I guess 15 feet. The springs I was lying on, we never found. I walked out from this and instead of running away from the blast, running away from the Klansmen, I said to the Klansmen police that came, he said, "Reverend, if I were you, I'd get out of town as fast as I could." I said, "Officer, you're not me. You go back and tell your Klan brethren that if God could keep me through this, then I'm here for the duration." I think that's what gave people the feeling that I wouldn't run, I didn't run, and that God had to be there.

That, Noble Readers, is courage. The kind of courage that defeated a culture of terrorism such as existed in the Jim Crow South.

Rev. Shuttlesworth died today in his home town of Binghamton, Alabama, at the age of 89. Every American alive today owes him a debt of gratitude.

Rev. Shuttlesworth alongside the statue
of him at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute

"Owes him a debt...": I use language which, before having my head spun around by this extraordinary interview with David Graeber, I would have used unthinkingly -- but which, having read not only that but as much of Graeber's work as I could, I now find myself extraordinarily reluctant to use. But at the moment I haven't any other.

How do you pay a debt of gratitude -- a debt to a hero who won his battles, and has now departed from the rack of this tough world?

You pay it forward.

I can't help but think, in connection with Rev. Shuttlesworth's death, of the brave Americans of Occupy Wall Street, who were beaten and maced tonight by the police in New York City. (I can't shake the cynical thought that the cops thought it would be safe to attack tonight since the world would be so distracted by the death of Jobs that they wouldn't notice the attacks on those protesting the death of jobs.) They are paying it forward: by confronting, with Shuttlesworthy courage, a system which, although more amorphous, and more inclined to do its violence at a distance, is as large and intractable and cruel as that which Rev. Shuttlesworth faced down fifty years ago.

May his memory give us hope, and may his example give us courage.

Rest in peace.

Quote of the Day: Bayard Rustin from 1965

2011-09-29T15:55:00.003-04:00

From a classic essay, which my students were assigned for the seminar I'm teaching this fall:

I would advise those who think that self-help is the answer to familiarize themselves with the long history of such efforts in the Negro community, and to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. It goes without saying that any effort to combat demoralization and apathy is desirable, but we must understand that demoralization in the Negro community is largely a common-sense response to an objective reality. Negro youths have no need of statistics to perceive, fairly accurately, what their odds are in American society. Indeed, from the point of view of motivation, some of the healthiest Negro youngsters I know are juvenile delinquents: vigorously pursuing the American Dream of material acquisition and status, yet finding the conventional means of attaining it blocked off, they do not yield to defeatism but resort to illegal (and often ingenious) methods. They are not alien to American culture. They are, in Gunnar Myrdal's phrase, “exaggerated Americans.” To want a Cadillac is not un-American; to push a cart in the garment center is. If Negroes are to be persuaded that the conventional path (school, work, etc.) is superior, we had better provide evidence which is now sorely lacking. It is a double cruelty to harangue Negro youth about education and training when we do not know what jobs will be available for them. When a Negro youth can reasonably foresee a future free of slums, when the prospect of gainful employment is realistic, we will see motivation and self-help in abundant enough quantities.

-- Bayard Rustin, "From Protest to Politics" (Commentary, February 1965)

Postscript: And while I'm at it, how about this prophetic little sentence from later in the same essay:

It may be premature to predict a Southern Democratic party of Negroes and white moderates and a Republican Party of refugee racists and economic conservatives, but there certainly is a strong tendency toward such a realignment...

Quotes of the Day: Andy Borowitz Edition

2011-09-28T13:36:00.003-04:00

In one article, Andy Borowitz captures the essence of both political parties today. In the headline -- actually, in the sub-headline -- he nails Obama precisely:

In Compromise, Republicans Allow Obama to Create One Part-Time Job
Step in Right Direction, President Says

Bull's-eye.

And then he nails the Republicans -- the only reason this is not perfect is that he happened to pick on the person whose front-runner status has just been canceled, so he's nailing the wrong guy, but since he was the right guy (or the right's guy) as of a week ago, it's still pretty apt:

"If we don't cut Social Security now, we won't have enough money to execute our children's children," Gov. Perry said.

Bull's-eye again.

The rest is pretty funny too, although I think those were the best parts.

Even the Conservative New Republic...

2011-09-19T21:25:00.004-04:00

...gets what Obama's chief mistake was:

Charismatic leaders can reshape and even defy their nation’s political culture. Franklin Roosevelt did so during his first term. But Roosevelt inherited a situation so desperate that the public was willing to tolerate any kind of experimentation. Obama entered office with some of the preconditions for radical reform. Crisis was in the air. Wall Street was in disfavor. Voters blamed the downturn on his Republican predecessor, George W. Bush. And he had the rudiments of a political movement. But the country was not in as desperate shape as it was in 1933, and the opposition was still functioning. To have put in place a program that might have spurred at least the beginnings of a recovery, Obama would have had to be both extraordinarily bold and fiercely combative. And he was neither.

In dealing with the downturn and financial crisis, the president was cautious—as evidenced by his choice of Geithner, who had presided over the Federal Reserve Bank of New York during the crash. Like MacDonald, Obama harbored a dream of bringing the parties and interest groups together behind his program. As The Financial Times’s Martin Wolf put it, “Mr. Obama wishes to be President of a country that does not exist. In his fantasy US, politicians bury differences in bipartisan harmony.” After the bruising battle over the debt ceiling, Obama may have finally put his dream of a post-partisan politics to rest and adopted a more aggressive political style. But the narrow opening for dramatic change that existed in early 2009 has probably closed.

(The context is John Judis's article about how the world is recapitulating the mistakes made early in the Great Depression. He says that "Obama—at least judging by his recent jobs speech to Congress—seems to understand that this approach is leading to economic disaster; but he may have waited too long to begin making this case to the American people". Judis's entire article can be read starting here. (Via Digby.))

That gets what to me is the essential point, as I said a while ago: Obama came into office in a once-in-a-generation moment, in which the normal rules of American politics might have been overturned and the country could have been set on a genuinely new direction -- the economic catastrophe averted, the global warming apocalypse reversed, the crimes of the Bush era ended and prosecuted (rather than covered-up and continued). And he flubbed it. Whether he did so because he was inept or evil doesn't actually matter at this point: the point is the chance is gone. Similarly, whether Obama's recent combative rhetoric and almost-on-the-liberal-side-of-the-conservative/liberal-divide proposals is just a cynical election-year ploy (as Greenwald argues) or is a genuine, belated recognition that their approach was a total failure (as should have been obvious from before it was tried, frankly).

Various centrist commentators, (e.g. Steve Benin) are claiming that Obama is now doing what his left-wing detractors have been advocating for a long time. I can't speak for anyone else, of course, but for my part, this isn't true: I think it's too late. Obama had one shot at this -- in the first few months of his presidency. Maybe he could have reversed course after a few months -- say, when he finally got 60 votes in the Senate -- with a "we gave it our best shot" moment. But by, say, December 2009, he'd blown it for sure. And of course by the time that the Republicans won in 2010, it was way, way, way too late.

Obama had a chance to save the country. He didn't. Now it's too late. And now I myself see no possible hope on the horizon. Oh, we can fantasize about some massive citizen campaign changing things. While we're dreaming, though, I'd like a few million dollars, and a pony. Seems just about as likely.

I think that 2009 may well have been this country's last chance to change course. And Obama was the man who could do it. At the very least, he could have tried. But he didn't -- didn't even try, let alone succeed. And for that I think Obama will be, in the words of a politician who did not flinch when his test came, "damned in time and eternity."

Update: In the interests of full disclosure, I should note I've used the joke that is this post's title before. And (although I thought of it independently,* for what little that's worth) I wasn't the first either. In comments to his own post, PNH explains the joke for those who miss it.

* Twice, actually, since I didn't remember making it before.

Long Live Zhōu Yǒuguāng!

2011-09-15T21:20:00.005-04:00

Googling something up, I clicked (at a whim) on the link for the Wikipedia page about one Zhōu Yǒuguāng (周有光), called the "father of pinyin"*... and saw that while it listed his birth date (January 13 1906), it didn't list the date of his death.

Frankly, I thought that this might be an oversight on the part of the Wikipedia hive-mind... but no, it seems that he's still alive and well and living in Beijing. He recently celebrated his 106th birthday. According to Wikipedia, he has an eight-year-old great grandson.

Here's a profile of him from two years ago (from which I took the above image). Here's a video profile from a year before that (via). The editor of the English-language site Pinyin.info met him a few years back. The same site has the table of contents of Zhōu's book, The Historical Evolution of Chinese Languages and Scripts, plus a few sample pages, such as this page on what pinyin is not (the "three nots" of pinyin), this page on homophones and (from an appendix) the rules of pinyin orthography.

He's lead quite a life. He was an economist, who returned from the U.S. to China in 1949 (the year of the founding of the PRC), convinced by his acquaintanceship with Zhou Enlai (no relation), one of the top people in the party, that it would be a democracy (he was not himself a communist). He was put in charge of the pinyin project thanks to that same acquaintanceship, despite protests that he was just an amateur linguist. And he, like so many intellectuals, was exiled to the countryside (away from his family & work) during the madness of the Cultural Revolution. But he survived, returned after three years, and kept working: and he's still doing fine. Writer and actor Stephen Fry interviewed him for a documentary last year ("Joy... never stopped laughing" Fry tweeted); here's a photo of the two of them.

A nice, happy discovery that a man who did great work is still alive & doing well at a pleasantly advanced age.

What can I say but Wànsuì Zhōu Yǒuguāng! (Although I guess he's pretty much got that covered, doesn't he.)

_______________
* Pinyin, of course, is the standard romanization for Chinese, adopted by the People's Republic of China in the 1950's, and by now adopted pretty much universally (e.g. even in Taiwan), which is why the city you used to see referred to as Peking is now universally known as Beijing: it's just a different way of romanizing the same Chinese name, 北京.

This Post Which Will Be 30 In the Year 2041

2011-09-14T20:38:00.006-04:00

Teresa Nielsen Hayden links to olduse.net: a real-time historical exhibit *, which presents "usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago".

Shouldn't it expand as the net did, and eventually become the entire internet, updated in real time, thirty years after the fact? Which means, thirty years from now, it will contain within itself a rerecreated form of the usenet, updated in real time as it was thirty years ago as it was thirty years ago. Which in turn will morph over time...

And so on, in an endless, iterative cycle, a 'net-flavored version of the Eternal Return.

And around the same time, of course, this post will be in there too: and perhaps someone inside olduse's recreation of the internet will google it up, wondering if anyone would have guessed it; and they'll see me (you, there, are seeing me now) waving across time, thirty years into the future.

Hello up there....**

___________________
0 Title footnote.

* And how marvelous is that concept: a "real-time historical exhibit"? (I guess the various reenactors would say they'd gotten there a long time ago, although I don't know if any given reenactment is really long enough to qualify.)

** Although this is all I've got to say, really.

Quotes of the Day: Two Thoughts on Action

2011-09-12T22:48:00.004-04:00

Action is transitory - a step, a blow,
The motion of a muscle - this way or that -
'Tis done; and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betrayed:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And has the nature of infinity.

-- William Wordsworth, The Borderers
(also online here and here)

I saw this in Chris Hedges's remembrance of 9/11 (via) which -- like this essay which I linked to yesterday -- notes the disappearance of the jumpers from the media narrative, speculating that

The "jumpers" did not fit into the myth the nation demanded. The fate of the "jumpers" said something so profound, so disturbing, about our own fate, smallness in the universe and fragility that it had to be banned. The "jumpers" illustrated that there are thresholds of suffering that elicit a willing embrace of death. The "jumpers" reminded us that there will come, to all of us, final moments when the only choice will be, at best, how we will choose to die, not how we are going to live. And we can die before we physically expire. The shock of 9/11, however, demanded images and stories of resilience, redemption, heroism, courage, self-sacrifice and generosity, not collective suicide in the face of overwhelming hopelessness and despair.

Ten Years After: Link Roundup

2011-09-11T23:05:00.008-04:00

A lot of people are writing about the anniversary today. Although a fair number of other people are simply staying silent (example, and another) -- more than I'd have thought, really. For myself, I don't really have anything to say save to offer the traditional Jewish words about the honored dead, may their memory be for a blessing.

Or, as Bruce Springsteen put it (from the album The Rising, which is my personal candidate for the greatest work of art to come out of 9/11 (a topic I've seen debated all over the place recently)), referring specifically to those rescue workers who rushed "up the stairs -- into the fire":

May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love

About the dead I would, typically, say "rest in peace". But somehow, given what has been done in their name in the decade since, the words turn to ashes in my mouth. So I can't even really say that.

May their memory be for a blessing.

-- But here are links to some people who had more to say -- things that have struck me over the past few days leading up to this date. Most of these are via somewhere, but for most of them I forget where; I apologize for the breach of netiquette.)

• Rick Perlstein, "Solidarity Squandered". An early leading candidate for the best thing written about the tenth anniversary.

• Paul Krugman, "The Years of Shame". Another leading candidate. A very brief piece, but one which cuts to the heart of the matter: "The memory of 9/11 has been irrevocably poisoned; it has become an occasion for shame. And in its heart, the nation knows it."

• Krugman's is the best, I think, but here are similar views from Tom Engelhardt, Lawrence Weschler and Cliff Schecter.

• Lauren Walsh on the suppressed images of 9/11 (via)

• "Nation Would Rather Think About 9/11 Than Anything From Subsequent 10 Years" -- The Onion, living up to its tagline ("America's finest news source"), as it has so often over the past decade plus (including in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 (via)).

• Speaking of things written in the immediate aftermath (also via), I missed this the first time around: "Why the Bombings Mean That We Must Support My Politics". Snippet:

Of course the World Trade Center attacks are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. But we must also not lose sight of the fact that I am right on every significant moral and political issue, and everybody ought to agree with me.

• Speaking of older pieces, from 2007, David Foster Wallace on 9/11: "Just asking". (via)

• Abbi Sutherland:

[P]undits and politicians are trying to do to our memories of that day what those films did to my private Gandalf... the media wants to overwrite our own recollection, our own reactions and considerations, with their carefully packaged interpretations... We are being farmed for our anger, fertilized with the same images over and over again, that we may come ripe on election days and when the pollsters call.

The rest.

• Jim Henley lays on a refreshing dose of cynicism.

• Will Bunch on the 10 unanswered questions of 9/11... although the answer to #10 is clearly just "no".

Updates, 9/12:

• Krugman's post, linked above, was apparently the target of a right-wing hissy fit. Krugman himself follows up here, but even more worth reading is Greg Sargent, and even more worth reading is -- as usual! -- Digby (from whom I took the "hissy fit" label).

• Amp, in comments, suggests this Noah Millman as an addition to the above.

Poem of the Day: Labor Day Edition

2011-09-05T07:50:00.000-04:00

A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?
The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed.
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome
Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? Over whom
Did the Caesars triumph? Byzantium lives in song.
Were all her dwellings palaces? And even in Atlantis of the legend
The night the seas rushed in,
The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls.
Was there not even a cook in his army?
Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet
was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears?
Frederick the Greek triumphed in the Seven Years War.
Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory
At whose expense the victory ball?
Every ten years a great man,
Who paid the piper?

So many particulars.
So many questions.

-- Bertolt Brecht

Quote of the Day: the Bureaucrat's Redemption

2011-09-03T20:04:00.003-04:00

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden's lengthy and fascinating account of her excommunication from the Mormon church (officially, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints):

And there's one other thing, the official action that really and truly made me excommunicate: When the central organization of the church received word that I was out, someone formally went to the filing cabinet where my membership file was kept. And that someone, specifically and officially using red ink, took my folder and stamped across the face of it EXCOMMUNICATED. And do you know what? If I repent and am once more received into the church and my sins are washed away again, I will triumphantly be issued a new file folder. I thought this was wonderful, a sort of bureaucrat's revenge and redemption.

Read the rest if you want more odd details, like how the excommunicating church officers say goodbye by shaking her hand and saying "it was nice to meet you", which is pretty funny in and of itself.

Drawing a Computer in Chinese Characters

2011-08-30T12:54:00.003-04:00

The other day my son wanted to draw so, in part for fun, in part to help him focus, in part to help him feel like I was playing with him and not just watching him, I got out a piece of paper and began to draw too. Jospeh (being two) started scribbling everywhere, and said he was drawing a cave. (Why a cave, I don't know.) So I began doodling and -- given my recent fooling around with Chinese -- what I doodled were a couple of Chinese characters:

黑星

Joseph looked over. "Why are you drawing a computer," he asked, "and not a cave?"

So I stopped drawing characters and began drawing a cave.

But I really liked the idea that those two represented a computer. Not a bad interpretation, really.

Goodnight Irene

2011-08-27T08:44:00.004-04:00

Good advice for tonight, at least for those of you on the East Coast of the US:

Stop your rambling, stop your gambling
Stop staying out late at night
Go home to your wife and family
Stay there by the fireside bright

Stay safe, everyone. It's a hard rain's a gonna fall.

(Source)

Quote of the Day: A List of Things to Do

2011-08-24T09:58:00.003-04:00

"Help!" cried Toad. "My list is blowing away. What will I do without my list?"
"Hurry!" said Frog. "We will run and catch it."
"No!" shouted Toad. "I cannot do that."
"Why not?" asked Frog.
"Because," wailed Toad, "running after my list is not one of the things that I wrote on my list of things to do!"

-- Arnold Lobel, Frog and Toad Together (1972)

(...but how does he know that without it?)

The Civil War as Tragedy

2011-08-18T10:49:00.015-04:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates has been writing a series of blog posts (first, second, third, fourth) on the question of whether the Civil War was a tragedy. He argues that it isn't. Now, Coates is, as I've noted before, one of the most perceptive and interesting writers writing about American history today, so I don't disagree with him lightly, but I think he's wrong about this.

I don't think, however, that he's wrong because he's wrong about what the Civil War was; I think he's wrong because he's wrong because he's wrong about what tragedy is.

Let me see if I can explain.

The first thing to say is that, until fairly recently, to say that the Civil War was a tragedy was not false so much as a category error. "Tragedy" was a literary genre (and still is -- but it's no longer, as used, only that). You could write a play (or, by extension, a novel or a history) of the event as a tragedy -- or you could write it as a comedy, or a chronicle, or a farce, or a horror. This is particularly true since the Civil War as a big, complex event, and had tragic, comedic, farcical, horrific, and many other elements besides. But the event itself was just an event.

I grant that the word "tragedy" has moved on, and so should we; but it's worth remembering its literary roots, because they're still important. In particular, their persistence entangles the common word "tragedy" in two almost-contradictory meanings. Coates is using one; I am going to argue that the word should be reserved for the other. So he's right, by his definition; but I think his definition is a poorer one, so that (in another sense) he's wrong.

Coates is using the word tragedy in a way that has two overarching implications: first, that the event in question was avoidable -- it was a tragedy, and if only we'd done something different and better, then it wouldn't have happened. Secondly, that the event in question was negative -- if not entirely negative for every person on Earth, then overwhelmingly so. Ultimately, a tragedy is something you wish hadn't happened -- meaning that it might not have happened, and that it was bad that it did happen.

It is in this sense of the word that Coates argues that the Civil War was not a tragedy. And, of course, he's perfectly correct. He points out the overwhelming good -- emancipation -- that arose from the war (this first point is, at least in his bit of the internet, fairly uncontroversial). And then the bulk of the argument tends to be about whether this good could have come about otherwise -- could we have had a peaceful end to slavery, as happened (for instance) in Brazil or with Serfdom in Russia, or was a war the only way that it could have ended? So that people who disagree with Coates -- such as Matt Yglesias here -- tend to imagine that another, less violent way to end slavery might have been found. In reply, Coates argues -- correctly, to my mind -- that the nature of the South as a slave society* made no other ending possible. So the Civil War was neither evitable nor (on balance) negative in its consequences; hence, it was not a tragedy. As Coates writes, "Shorter me: I'm glad the Civil War happened". Because if it hadn't happened, slavery would have continued; and slavery was an evil that had to be ended, and there was no other way. QED.

In this use of the word, any sort of bad thing, or at least any avoidable bad thing, is a tragedy. On the news airplane crashes and the like are referred to as "tragedies" -- they were evitable, and they were bad. And, I grant, this use of the word is very common, probably increasingly so. Perhaps the change of the word's meaning has gone too far to be reversed (not unlike, say, "beg the question" -- or "novel", which every year my students seem to think refers to any book, nonfiction or otherwise). But I hope not, because I think "tragedy" has a different meaning than that (even aside, that is, from its earlier one defining a literary genre) -- one for which there are not other synonyms.

You see, I don't think that evitable things with bad consequences -- say, airplane crashes -- are tragedies. I think they're horrors, calamities, catastrophes. One might write them up as tragedies, but they aren't, in and of themselves, just by happening, tragedies.

Because, traditionally, tragedies were not evitable; traditionally, tragedies were the working out of inevitable fate. In the classical Greek tragedies, this tends to be a fate decreed by the Gods, inhuman in their purposes and methods.** In Shakespearean tragedies, this element of inevitability is turned inward: no longer brought upon by the capriciousness of the Gods, it's brought about by the tragic figure's own character.*** This is a version of tragedy that I (and a great many other people) ultimately feel is richer than the Greek version -- his shift of the locus of tragedy from outer fate to inner character is one of the reasons that Shakespeare is, well, Shakespeare.

In this sense, tragedies are the working out of the inevitable consequences of character flaws of great (in the sense that they tend to be kings rather than peasants) figures. They're not, perhaps, inevitable in the sense that if they person in question had been other than they are the events needn't have happened. But the person's character is too deeply embedded in them to make this a live possibility. Othello without his jealousy, Macbeth without his ambition, Hamlet without his hesitation, Lear without his arrogance, simply would have been other people. Once those people were placed in those situations the tragedy was inevitable.****

In this sense, the Civil War was a tragedy: it was the horrific working out of a deep character flaw. America's racism (and, really, it was America's, not just the South's, although the role the South played was of course unique) led to the bodies all over the floor at the end of Act Five.

Nor is the other element that Coates focuses on -- the unquestionable good that arose from the Civil War -- incidental to this understanding; rather, it's essential.

In the traditional literary sense, tragedy is not simply the working out of horrors due to inevitable character flaws (or fate); it is an elevated version of that. In a literary context, the elevation is largely due to the language and the literary presentation: Hamlet is a tragedy because it's Shakespeare writing it as Hamlet, and not me nattering on about some Danish prince who saw a ghost, spazzed out and killed a bunch of people.

In a historical context, however, the element of literary presentation drops away. What replaces it -- what elevates mere horror into tragedy -- is that some good comes out of the horror. The case is even tighter if the good could have come about no other way, and if the good is proportionate in scale to the horror needed to bring it about. In the context of the Civil War, more than six hundred thousand dead are elevated by the fact that it lead to the end of slavery for millions. Coates recently asked whether seeing the Civil War as a tragedy involved "saying something like, 'It's really tragic the South was, uhm, the South?'"; and that, I claim, is precisely right: the sin of slavery was embedded in the South (really, I think, in America's) nature, just as ambition was in Macbeth's or jealousy was in Othello's. The Civil War was the working out of the character flaw; what elevated it to tragedy is that it was the only way a good end -- emancipation -- could have happened, given the character of the nation involved.

(Note that in a literary context the good outcome is optional because the nobility is supplied by the literary form. It's not necessarily absent -- there's no good at the end of Hamlet or Lear, but Macbeth ends pretty well for the people of Scotland, with the rightful King restored and villainy punished. But it's not a necessary component. With the switch of the term from literary genre to classification of an event, the good outcome not otherwise achievable becomes necessary as the ennobling element.)

This is not, I should note, a sense of "tragedy" that I am introducing; it is an established usage -- a stage between the purely literary usage and the common habit of making "tragedy" synonymous with "catastrophe". For example, mid-Twentieth Century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr uses the word in a similar way in his 1952 book The Irony of American History:

The tragic element in a human situation is constituted of conscious choices of evil for the sake of good. If men or nations do evil in a good cause; if they cover themselves with guilt in order to fulfill some high responsibility; or if they sacrifice some high value for the sake of a higher or equal one they make a tragic choice. Thus the necessity of using the threat of atomic destruction as an instrument for the preservation of peace is a tragic element in our contemporary situation. Tragedy elicits admiration as well as pity because it combines nobility with guilt.

This is not, to be sure, precisely the use I'm suggesting here -- Niebuhr focuses on a conscious choice, what W. H. Auden famously called "the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder"*****, which doesn't fit the case of the Civil War since emancipation was very much an unintended consequence of the decision to go war -- but it's pretty close. As for why this usage is preferable to the modern usage, I think it's because, first, it is more closely connected to the traditional meanings which we still closely identify with the word -- we still see Lear and Hamlet and Othello as tragedies -- and, second, because there is no other word which means this, whereas the airplane-crash sense of tragedy (the sense in which Coates correctly argues the Civil War was not a tragedy) has lots of available synonyms, such as "catastrophe" or "calamity".

To clarify further, let's contrast the Civil War with another war which, while a horror and a catastrophe, was not a tragedy: World War One. World War One was not a tragedy partly because it seems like it ought to have been avoidable -- perhaps not, it's arguable -- but above all because nothing good came out of it, certainly nothing comparable to emancipation. World War One is simply a calamity, out of which arose a great many other calamities of a calamitous century. There is nothing ennobling about it at all -- nothing equal to the scale of the horror, nothing that couldn't have come about in a better way. We can, simply, wish that World War One hadn't happened. That's why it's not a tragedy.

Whereas we can't wish the Civil War hadn't happened -- not given who we, as a country, were. We can wish that we were otherwise -- that the South was not the South, that America was not racist. Which is like wishing that Hamlet wasn't Hamlet -- better, perhaps, but it's not him any more.

The Civil War involved terrible, mass death, but it was the only way to end American slavery, which had to end; that defines rather than denies its tragic character.

Perhaps the first person to see the Civil War in this way -- as a horror, but a necessary horror, a horror that came about due to character flaws too deep to be dealt with in any other way -- was none other than Abraham Lincoln, in the famous passage from his second inaugural:

The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!" If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether".

Lincoln here mixes the Greek sense of tragedy (brought about by the will of the gods or, in his case, God) with the Shakespearean (the consequences of a character flaw, namely, slavery). But the basic elements are the same: he sees the horror ("this mighty scourge of war") but also sees that, perhaps, it is necessary to right the wrong that lay at America's heart.

So yes, given what America was -- a nation built on racism and slavery -- one has to be, in some sense, glad that the Civil War happened -- sad, perhaps, that it was necessary: sad that we were who we were, that we couldn't have ended slavery another way as other countries did, or, better yet, never committed that sin to begin with. But we were who we were, we did what we did, and thus it had to end as it did: in a horrific war with a morally necessary outcome that could not have been otherwise achieved.

In other words, a tragedy.

Update: Some hours after I wrote this, I saw this post by Freddie deBoer (via) making some similar arguments to what I'm making here, in particular this passage:

...the classic definition of tragedy [is] that the tragic is the downfall that springs from character, that tragedy occurs because there is some failing within the tragic character (here the United States) which makes that tragedy inevitable. In this sense I would say that the Civil War is precisely tragic: given the character of the early United States, it was both inevitable and necessary. That equality was codified in so many of our foundational texts while simultaneously denied to many millions of the country's people isn't merely an ugly contradiction but one which made violent correction inevitable.

deBoer is rather less impressed with Coates than I am overall, and he says a lot in his post that I disagree with; indeed, the post might be fairly characterized as something of an anti-Coates rant. But he's clearly thinking along the same lines as I as far as how to understand "tragedy" goes. (deBoer has a follow-up post here, presenting a somewhat more nuanced take on Coates's work (although still a critical one); but don't follow it for more on my topic here, because by that point deBoer's mostly talking about something else.)

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* Historians use "slave society" as a technical term, contrasting it with a "society with slavery": the latter includes slavery as one of its features, but not as a foundational one. In a slave society, the entire economy, society and culture are inextricably entwined with slavery's role within it. The American South was a slave society; in the Eighteenth Century (and stretching into the early Nineteenth in some places) the American North was a society with slavery.

** It is in this sense that David Simon has defined The Wire as a Greek tragedy, with our (post-modern, post-industrial) institutions standing in as the capricious and cruel Gods.

*** Following the Greek philosopher Heraclitus's famous aphorism that "Character is fate".

**** There's a nice commonplace -- I think it might be due to A. C. Bradley, but I'm not sure -- that if you switch the heroes of Shakespeare's tragedies, there's no play. Othello in Hamlet's situation would have simply dispatched his uncle; Hamlet in Othello's would have seen right through Iago. A tragedy is the working out of the flaws of a particular person as embedded in a particular situation; change either and it is no longer a tragedy.

***** Which George Orwell equally famously castigated as a phrase which "could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word," adding, "[p]ersonally I would not speak so lightly of murder." -- an attack which was, apparently, one reason that Auden disavowed the poem and excluded it from his Collected Poems.

Wonderful Coal Consumption

2011-08-14T07:05:00.000-04:00

In my recent foolin' around with Chinese*, I was looking at this bilingual web comic -- which, in this instance, was simply a translation of the opening phrases (no, not even the entire opening sentence**) of Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. (Note that I have no idea whether or not it's a good translation.) Looking at the way the comics artists translated "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" I was drawn to the characters that looked different in the two sentences (meaning, presumptively, "best" and "worst"):

那是最美好的时代，
那是最糟糕的时代；

The characters for "best" are 美好.

Now, one of the things I've found is that different dictionaries will translate the same Chinese word*** in different ways. So that if you look up 美好 in this dictionary it is translated as "happy, fine, ok"; but this dictionary gives "beautiful, fine" -- not quite the same. And then this dictionary gives "wonderful". All three, that is, give quite different meanings to the same word. (And none of them, incidentally, make it sound like a good translation for the English word "best". Now, I'm not saying the translators were wrong -- it's quite possible that in the context 美好 is a perfectly good translation for "best" -- but either they were wrong, or the dictionaries aren't giving very complete answers, or the context dependence is doing a lot of work here.)

But as it happened, I didn't actually look up 美好 directly. It happened that I knew the pinyin for those two characters (isn't true for a lot of characters, but it was of those), so it seemed easier just to type "meihao" into a dictionary (as it happened, this one) instead. As pinyin goes, that's incomplete, since I didn't mark the tones, either through accents or through the (far less aesthetic but easier to type) numbers. But it seemed like it would work.

And it did. It gave two options for meihao, spoken with different tones. It could either mean 美好, wonderful, or 煤耗, coal consumption.

Now, note the difference between the pronunciation of these two words is just the tone of the second syllable. (Ordinarily 美 is pronounced third tone, but before another third tone it switches to second, and comes to match 煤.) In other words, a tone slip in a single syllable could have you say, accidentally, "It was the coal consumption of times".

This is why I'm not studying Mandarin. I'm just fooling around with Mandarin. Because it's too damn hard to actually learn for real.

__________________________
* A reminder of what this means, from the earlier post: "The difference between fooling around with Chinese and studying Chinese is that I'm not expecting it to go anywhere, that I'm not claiming (even, or perhaps especially, to myself) to have learned anything, that I'm not being systematic about it, and that it's just for the pleasure of discovery rather than for anything that may result from it (since probably nothing will). It's less about Growth, Self-Improvement and Opportunity than it is about idle procrastination and lazy curiosity."

** "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way -- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." -- The comic gives about two-thirds of the sentence -- up to "other way".

*** Yes, I said word: most modern Chinese words are made up of more than one character.

The Tale of Elizabeth and Hazel -- Updated and Longer

2011-08-12T07:17:00.002-04:00

Four years ago I wrote a post plugging a magazine article about these two women:

The young African American girl is named Elizabeth Eckford, and she was one of the Little Rock Nine -- nine heroic high-school students who endured incredible things to integrate Little Rock Central High School (with the help of armed federalized troops) in 1957-1958. This incredibly famous picture of her is from what was supposed to be her first day at Little Rock Central High, when she got separated from her eight fellows and walked alone into a mob of segregationists. The young woman behind her, who was immortalized in this posture of hatred, is named Hazel Bryan Massery. It's one of the classic photos from the Civil Rights Movement, about one of the central events of that world-changing struggle.

In point of fact, it's two of the classic photos, because (although the fact is little-known), the incident in question was captured twice -- perhaps both by Will Counts, perhaps by two different news photographers. (Counts definitely took one of the two, which was named by the AP as one of the top 100 photos of the century, although I'm not certain which, because I've seen both of the images labeled as Counts's photo!) At any rate, here's the other version:

So far as I can tell, they were taken at almost the precise same moment -- note that the woman who turned to look behind her, clearly visible in the upper photograph to the left of the screaming Hazel, is also looking behind her in the lower photograph (half-hidden behind Elizabeth from the second angle). This seems to belie the claim I've seen made that Counts took both of them. On the other hand, maybe the woman behind Elizabeth, next to Hazel was simply carrying on a conversation with someone behind her, and turned around twice. And since it wasn't a planned event, the notion that one photographer happened to be there seems more plausible than that there were two. But I'm not sure. Anyone have any information on the provenance of these two images?

It's interesting to compare the two -- the subtle differences conveyed by different angles is fascinating. (Hazel's face in particular changes -- she's screaming and full of hate in both, but she looks wilder and closer to the edge of violence in the latter.) I think the top one is better purely as an image, but the latter one better captures Elizabeth's isolation and danger and bravery. I guess it's good to have both.

But life is odd, and it turns out that Hazel eventually apologized, became friends with Elizabeth -- and then had a falling out with her. The incredible, complex story was told in this incredible article in Vanity Fair by reporter David Margolick, which I recommend no less strongly today than I did four years ago when I first read it. It's a fabulous recounting of a key, powerful piece of the American story.

But I bring this up not just because the article is a perennial (although it is), nor because I'm about to start teaching my seminar on the 1960's in a month or so (although I am), but because its author, David Margolick, saw my post and was kind enough to write and tell me that he's expanded the article into a full-length book, which will be published by Yale University Press one month from today, under the title Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock. If the book is anything like as good as the article, it'll be a terrific read, one which will speak to the history both of the Civil Rights Movement and to the complex racial landscape of post-CRM America. I don't know too much about how the book was updated, although apparently Margolick was able to interview Hazel more than the first time around.

Anyway, check out the article. (Vanity Fair's site seems a bit twitchy, so if that link doesn't work, try here.) Then, if you're so inclined, you can pre-order the book from Amazon here, or Powells here. Margolick's official web site is here. It's a powerful tale in the shorter form, and I have high expectations that it will be even better in the long.

Links to Funny Things, Mostly Over a Year Old

2011-08-11T07:24:00.000-04:00

As with this earlier post, these links are old, but still working (as of a few days ago), and still funny.

• The classic list of Star Wars Lines Improved by Replacing a Word with "Pants" is one of the funniest things ever on the internet -- and, sadly, its original location seems to have vanished. Fortunately, this site has saved the top twenty five of them (which, frankly, were by far the best). Here are the first five:

I find your lack of pants disturbing.
You are unwise to lower your pants.
The Force is strong in my pants.
Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.

• 11 Funniest Classified Ads ever.

• 11 Ridiculous Signs.

• Lincoln's Facebook Page.

• Truthful titles for fantasy novels.

• My first dictionary. Biting and bitter, but brilliant.

• Every year the New Yorker has a contest for redesigns of its classic Eustace Tilley cover. These were the ones from 2009.

• Accidental maps.

• Neil Gaiman on winning the Newbery Medal.

• Everyone remembers Matt Taibi's classic evisceration of Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The World is Flat, right? Well, for some reason, his 2009 evisceration of Thomas Friedman's Hot, Flat and Crowded has never gotten the same level of internet love, despite being just as funny.

• Hang this up in your time machine.

Oh Yeah, Play Them Duì Bù Qǐ Blues - I Like That

2011-08-09T10:52:00.009-04:00

As part of my recent fooling around with Chinese, I stumbled upon (via) this video of a song from the perspective of a struggling learner of Chinese. It's in Chinese, but the chorus (save in the final iteration, where it changes) translates as follows:

Sorry, my Chinese is not so good!
Really sorry
I don't understand what you're saying!
Sorry, my Chinese is not so good!
Really sorry
I just want to be friends!

(That's as given in the subtitles of the video). The pinyin lyrics (although without tones, so sort of crippled pinyin) can be found here, and the Chinese lyrics here. (Warning: both of those links open with automatic sound playing -- and not the song in question, either.)

I'm not quite sure what people who haven't taken Chinese as a foreign language, or been fooling around with Chinese on their own, will make of it -- it might not be at all funny or fun to Chinese-free English speakers (on the one hand) or native Chinese speakers (on the other). But for anyone who's spent time in the vast region in between those two places, it's highly recommended.

Getting information about the song and the band is a bit tricky, because the name of the band (Transition) is a very non-googleable word -- and if you manage to target it more precisely (perhaps by googling the name of the band as they always give it, first in English then in Chinese -- "Transition 前進樂團"), then you get a lot of pages in Chinese. So for the benefit of those who's 中文不好 (zhōng wén bù hǎo -- Chinese is not so good), I thought I'd give a bit of information & links that I managed to find.

First, the song. In the Roman Alphabet (which is as close as the title gets to English) it seems to be called Duì Bù Qǐ (which means "sorry"), but in Chinese characters the song seems to be called by its entire first line -- 對不起我的中文不好 (duì bù qǐ wǒ de zhōng wén bù hǎo -- Sorry, my Chinese is not so good). Presumably this is because calling the song just "對不起" would make it identical to a thousand other songs, whereas (in the Roman script verse) there aren't that many songs called "duì bù qǐ". Anyway, once again, the video is here. (I'm not going to embed it, because in general I find that doesn't work that well on this site -- so click through if you're interested). The band's official page has a page offering a free mp3 download of the song, but the user interface on the page is pretty bad; you have to go to what looks like the play bar of a video, but is actually a song under a jpg image, and use the button on the far right to either save as source (which is an mp4, I think, although it's not labeled as such) or as a quicktime movie (which isn't actually a movie, just a sound file). Basically, it's less a free mp3 than a really irritating scavenger hunt. TANSTAAFL, I guess.

(Incidentally, the video begins with a little dialogue which is not on the mp3. A person working at a store calls to one of the band members (in Chinese), "Hey, American, Hello!" And the band member replies, "I'm English". The rest I couldn't catch, but I think it was about a misunderstanding anyway.)

Second, the band. It's called, as noted above, Transition 前進樂團*. It's an English band, but seems to be based mainly (entirely? I'm not sure) in Taiwan, and it's fanbase seems to be more Chinese than British. That link goes to their official site, but the site is, as noted above, not great. They don't, for instance, have links to their albums, either to buy or sample, or any information on what they've recorded -- let alone useful extras like lyrics or an actual, honest-to-God introduction to the band (they have one, but it's poor). They also have an official facebook page, but honestly it's not all that much better -- fairly little information, and what there is is in Chinese. Their Wikipedia page is brief and out of date. Frankly, it's a pretty good lesson on how not to present your public face in the digital age (2011 version). The best source of info I've found on them is this (translated) article from a Taiwanese newspaper. The band is made up of two pairs of brothers (although, judging from their web site & videos, one of the four has now left), has done three albums, and now lives in Taipei.

The other song of theirs I've found so far that I like is a bilingual song called "Turn Me Around", which is done in collaboration with some musician named "Wing 羅文裕"**, about whom I've been able to find out nothing (even less information via English-language google*** -- but since he seems to be just a Chinese audience, it makes more sense than the equivalent situation with a British band). Anyway, click here if you want to hear it -- as far as I can tell, the band is not on iTunes nor Amazon, so I think youtube is the only way to hear them.

But mostly I recommend duì bù qǐ 對不起我的中文不好, at least to those who have ever expressed the sentiment.

_____________________
* Google translate turns their Chinese name into "Forward orchestra", which this dictionary breaks down into "advance" (前进, qiánjìn) and "orchestra" (乐团, yuètuán) -- take with the usual boatloads of salt for trying to unearth meaning from such sources, and add salt.

** My best guess about "羅文裕" is that it's just a Chinese name, and has nothing to do with "Wing" -- "羅" is the traditional form of 罗 (luó), which is the twentieth most common Chinese surname. But again: salt, salt, salt.

*** The thin gruel I found: a few photos of him posted by the photographer; a brief reference in a post about another singer; a livejournal post that might have an album of his for (illegal?) download. That's it in English.

Comics-Related Links, Mostly Over a Year Old

2011-08-08T11:50:00.000-04:00

These have been sitting in my "I should link to these" folder for a long time. They're all still fun.

• Snoopy writes a Batman story. Really.

• Scott Eric Kaufman on teaching Warren Ellis's Planetary.

• Comics (and cartoon) characters' names in Chinese.

• Scott McDaneil analyzes the layout of a page of Promethea. Anyone who likes my 100 Great Comics Pages series (which I do intend to resume, some day) will like this one.

• Tom Neeley boils down an old X-Men comic to a single page. The comic in question is X-Men #143 (discussion).

• The Peanuts as Marvel characters.

• More Peanuts-related humor.

• Watchmen characters as manga-style young girls.

• Todd Klein on making the "Library of Dream" poster.

• Ng Suat Tong writes about superhero comics, collaboration and writers.

• Sean T. Collins disagrees with ibid.

• Superuseless Superpowers.

• Stuart McMillen's Amusing Ourselves to Death: the Comics Adaptation.

• Ten most iconic Marvel comics panels of all time, from a poll. With links to #70 - 11, in case the top ten isn't enough for you.

• Government comic books.

• Sandman as a quintessential novel about/from the 1990's.

• And, a cri de coeur from two and a half years ago: Tom Spurgeon on why there's hope for comics in the recession (from December, 2008). Since, thanks to the action of our politicians, we're going to be dealing with economic misery for the foreseeable future, still timely.

"Inept or Evil?" is the new "Stupid or Lying?"

2011-08-05T07:01:00.006-04:00

Round about 2005, someone on the internets -- I think it was Tom Tomorrow, but maybe he got it from somewhere -- summarized the issue with the (then) contemporary Republican party in a single question: stupid or lying? It was a brilliant question, one that captured so much about the Republican party. (They didn't believe in climate change? They didn't believe in evolution? Saddam Hussein had WMDs? Michael D. Brown was doing "a heckava job"? etc, etc, ad nauseum.)

Well, in the wake of the recent national-game-of-chicken that the Democrats played with the Republicans, a new question seems to be being asked a lot -- this time of the Democrats: are they inept or evil? That is, are the Democrats, in particular Obama, getting the results they want -- letting the Tea Party "force" them to enact right-wing policies that they (or their paymasters) want to enact, but not to be seen to enact? Or is Obama simply such a bad negotiator, so willfully stupid in his insistence on trying to negotiate with hostage takers who will never, ever negotiate in good faith, that he ends up doing a lousy job despite his best intentions? Inept or Evil?

First a nice, brief quotation summing up the charges to which inept or evil? will be the plea:

The fact that John Boehner walked away shouldn’t obscure the facts: A Democratic president offered to pay for the Bush tax cuts by handing over the health care, education, safety, and savings of the American people.

That's just on the most recent political own-goal, of course; there have been so many, many others, it's hard to count.

Oh, and before you say: yes, there were some things Obama could have done -- if he wasn't so...

Well, which is it?

Most of the mainstream left is going with "inept", with only occasional questions about whether there's a certain amount of evil involved; see Paul Krugman, Robert Reich, James Fallows (also here), Matt Yglesias. But here are some arguments which weigh in on the side on "evil": Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Chris Floyd, Johnathan Schwartz. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of splitting the difference -- Robert Kuttner, for example, or pretty much everything Digby's written over the past few weeks. For a variety of views in one conversation, check out this interesting debate here between a variety of left-wing intellectuals, basically going back and forth between various points on the inept or evil? spectrum.

So what do you think?

To be sure, Obama still has a few defenders -- Kevin Drum, Steven Bennen, Mark Rosenfelder -- who argue he's neither Inept nor evil, but in fact he's doing pretty well. Some of these assume that the Democrats will actually show a little spine in the future, however, which strikes me as unlikely in the extreme. (The only thing I'm not sure about is why (inept? evil?)) The rest just strike me as aiming so low you shoot your own foot.

In all fairness, I don't really think the inept or evil? question really captures the complexity of what's going on (any more than stupid or lying? did); it's a useful summary of the poles, of which the truth is somewhere in the middle. Which is to say, I think Obama is essentially partly evil and partly just inept.

Odd as it sounds, I don't find that particularly comforting.

(Post Scriptum: For one link that I couldn't fit into the above, but which is nevertheless interesting, here is David Frum, an actual grown-up Republican, bewailing the Republicans' role in all this... in a way that places him to the left of where Obama currently is. Depressing, when you think about it.)

Clicke, lege

2011-08-04T11:28:00.003-04:00

As part of the desacralization of the world, we have moved from tolle, lege followed by a spiritual experience, to clicke, lege*, followed by amusement. Whether this is a diminishment or not is one of the points where the so-called New Atheists disagree with Nietzsche.

In the meantime: clicke, lege. You won't find God, but the following are all worth reading anyway:

• I began reading Curzio Malaparte's astonishing story "The Traitor" (translated by Walter Murch) under the misapprehension that it was a true story. At some point along the way I figured out it couldn't be. But I have to admit that I enjoyed it more thanks to the false belief that led me into it. Still, it is an utterly fabulous story -- a hilarious story in a black-humor vein. Highly recommended. If you only click one link in this post, make it this one.

• Michael Moorcock on how to write a novel in three days. (via)

• John Holbo talks about books about the history of reading. The part that stuck with me over the past month is this paragraph from Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator by Elspeth Jajdelska:

A change from reading aloud to skilled silent reading is important because it radically changes the underlying model of what writing and reading are. Reading aloud creates an identification between the writer and the reader. The reader is a speaker, the writer’s mouthpiece, with the writer’s words in his or her mouth. Silent reading creates a different relationship between writer and reader. Instead of identifying with the writer as a speaker of his or her words, the reader becomes an (internal) hearer of the writer’s words. So the move from reading aloud to reading silently involves a move from reading as speaking to reading as hearing, and from reading as declamation to reading as silent participation in an imaginary conversation between writer and reader. This is a radical change in the orientation of both writer and reader to the text.

Click through to read what Holbo has to say about that, and another book on a similar topic, too. The earlier post referenced therein is also worth reading.

• Cool word: deepity, "term coined by Daniel Dennett in his 2009 speech to the American Atheists Institution conference. It refers to a statement that has (at least) two meanings; one that is true but trivial, and another that sounds profound, but is essentially false, or meaningless with respect to this deeper meaning, but would be "earth-shattering" if true."

• This is pretty much the whole thing, this paragraph:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

...but this is the post that made it go viral, and it has lots of follow-up links trying (and mostly failing) to identify the source.

• For those who liked this post: how long do the events of Goodnight, Moon take? An astrophysicist investigates.

• The shortest Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ever written.

• Geoffry Pullum versus Strunk and White. Blood everywhere.

• The Nobel Prize in Literature from an alternative universe. Y'know, the one where Tolstoy, Ibsen, Mark Twain, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Borges and Philip K. Dick won it.

• Atlas of True Names: maps with the etymological roots of names instead of the names themselves. Highly cool.

• Uncomfortable plot summaries. Four samples:

FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF: Amoral narcissist makes world dance for his amusement.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
RISKY BUSINESS: Privileged rich kid gets everything he wants with no consequences.
STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.

If you liked those, click through for loads more.

• Not to read, but to look at: really awesome art made of Chinese characters. Sample:

The characters at the bottom are, of course, the components of the art (if you don't see it, look at the woman's forehead and compare to the first character). Google translate it as "beautiful Jí mother" -- whether that's "beautiful Mother Jí" or "Jí's beautiful mother", I don't know. (This dictionary confirms that 姞 (Jí) is a family name, but otherwise gives no particular guidance.) At any rate, the rest are wonderful too, so clicke, vulticuláte**.

• Incidentally, the full iPhone/iPad app version of that dictionary is on sale this week. They also have a stunted version which is free (which is all I've tried).

• A second one to look at it: a very cool optical illusion.

• And one more just for looking: life in four bottles. Utterly brilliant.

Update: I added a few links after this was first posted.

Update 2: Mammothly stupid mistake about the Chinese corrected.

_____________________
* Note bene: "clicke" is pulled out of thin air, not actual Latin, since I don't really know what verb the ancient Romans used to speak about following a link on the internet.

** My deep apologies to Mr. ------,*** my 9th & 10th grade Latin teacher, for this entire post. He was a much better teacher than I was a student, so the butchery of Latin in this post should not be laid at his feet.

*** Name omitted to avoid besmirching the innocent.

Obama 2012 Campaign Poster

2011-08-01T21:27:00.003-04:00

We've come a long way from "hope", eh?

If I Was On Twitter, I'd Retweet These

2011-07-31T15:31:00.001-04:00

Re-Elect Obama: He'll agree to Republican demands, but only after prolonged negotiations!

GOP held up spending cuts as core value. Obama held up compromise. So we compromise on spending cuts.

- Both from Matt Yglesias

As the deal is being done...

2011-07-31T13:16:00.005-04:00

More or less what Gerry said:

What worries me is that many progressives seem to have mistaken Boehner’s bad press in recent days for a reversal of results. Make no mistake: Republicans are still running the table, having somehow managed to transform what was once a purely pro forma vote into massive unilateral concessions. The final deal is much closer to Boehner’s than Reid’s, where Reid’s plan was a more right-wing version of McConnell’s, which itself was far to the right of where negotiations began, which itself is far to the right of just raising the debt ceiling without conditions, which is what was done the last hundred times this came up.... [I]t’s a testament to just how badly Democrats have been outplayed on the debt ceiling that some progressives seem to think our side is winning. In fact the Republicans won this game by a mile: they got the drastic, draconian spending cuts they wanted and total control over an automatic trigger for even worse cuts—all without any new revenue whatsoever. Democrats got the good sportsmanship award.

And, as Yglesias points out, this entire affair has most likely normalized taking the economy hostage as a future tactic -- at least for Republicans (obviously, if the Democrats did it, it'd be treason or something).

The only reason I say "more or less what Gerry said" rather than simply "what Gerry said" is because I think this underplays the degree to which the result is along the same lines as what Obama -- and quite possibly a lot of other Democrats too -- has been aiming for. There's every reason to think that Obama has wanted a center-right deal all along, one far to the right of what the majority of his voters want (and most of those that *do* want it did so because of the relentless disinformation and misinformation about what will and what will not actually help them and theirs find jobs). So some of what Gerry makes out to be the Democrats getting punked is actually Obama joining with the right to punk those who voted for him. Not 100% -- this is almost certainly will be a farther-right deal than Obama (or Reid, or Pelosi...) wanted; but Obama has clearly wanted to be forced to move right, and if the Republicans have made him move some degree farther than he wanted, well, that's just business. We all have to sacrifice, right?

And ultimately precisely what degree this is Obama being punked and what degree this is Obama joining with the Republicans to punk us doesn't matter: the long and the short of it is that we're going to get screwed -- not quite as badly as if default happens, I guess, but it's always harder when it's someone you thought was to-some-degree on your side doing the knifing

Oh, and in addition to the link above, another what Digby said bit here.

I suppose that the rumors could be wrong, and that no deal might happen... in which case, instead of Obama joining the Republicans to punk the country, they will have mutually driven off a cliff dragging us behind them. The results will be worse; but saying that shouldn't distract us from how very, very, very bad this deal was -- and how much responsibility Obama has for it. To what degree what was atrocious negotiating and to what degree it was deliberate betrayal can be figured out once the historians pick the documentary bones.

Update: Oh, and via Gerry: what Glenn said.

Foolin' Around With Chinese: Translations of Children's Classics

2011-07-30T15:13:00.003-04:00

So I've been fooling around with Chinese. The difference between this and studying Chinese is that I'm not expecting it to go anywhere, that I'm not claiming (even, or perhaps especially, to myself) to have learned anything, that I'm not being systematic about it, and that it's just for the pleasure of discovery rather than for anything that may result from it (since probably nothing will). It's less about Growth, Self-Improvement and Opportunity than it is about idle procrastination and lazy curiosity.

But it's fun, at least for me, and so I thought that I'd share a bit of the fun with my readers.

For this initial post, I thought I'd share three popular English-language children's books which have been posted online in Chinese.

In ascending order of age-appropriateness, the first is Eric Carle's classic The Very Hunger Caterpillar, a book designed for the tiniest of babies -- and, thus, appropriate for those who have only achieved the level of, say, a fairly impressive beginner in Chinese. (It has to be fairly impressive because, of course, we don't expect the babies to read it to themselves!)

Anyway, it's online here, in a translation pieced together by the bloggers from various existing commercial ones, picking what they liked of each. (They don't include the pictures or anything like that, but some of us -- say, parents of young children -- will have read it so many times that it doesn't matter.) It's just in Chinese, but if you mouse over any of the text the pinyin (for pronunciation) and the meaning of the word are given. It's a lot of fun, and good for learning things like the days of the week and the names of various fruits.

Second in our ascending order of age-appropriateness we have this version of Beatrix Potter's Tale of Peter Rabbit. It is really a quite superb web presentation. They have many of the original illustrations (I think they have the core set; nowadays you can buy editions which include ones left out of the early printings, and that's the one I read to my son (thus the one I'm familiar with), but the ones they include are more than sufficient to tell the story). Each page has the same bit of text -- one to four sentences -- in both English and Chinese; you click one of the buttons at the bottom of the page to switch back and forth. Another button will play that snippet in whichever language is displayed (the English taken from the librivox recording). Hovering the mouse over the Chinese text displays the pinyin (just the pinyin, and the whole sentence in one lump, so that one feature's not quite as useful as the The Very Hunger Caterpillar presentation). All-in-all, a splendid version -- you could just keep it in English and let a child play with it, learning to play the text and go forward and back at will; or you can use it yourself to, well, fool around with Chinese. (Not, please, to learn: that requires textbooks and flashcards and furrowed brows; it produces Results.)

Finally -- and this is a book on a level that I am far beyond getting anything out of (just as my (two-and-a-half-year-old) son couldn't enjoy it, unlike the other two), but I mention it because I found it so why not -- is a translation of Alice in Wonderland into Chinese. This is at the same site as The Tale of Peter Rabbit, although the presentation is much less fancy. (The same site also hosts one of the best free online English-Chinese dictionaries.) I don't know anything about the translation -- for instance, I know there's a classic translation of Alice into Chinese that's supposed to be very well done, but I don't know if this is it or not. At any rate it is, as I said, way over my head -- well, all three are way over my head, but the first two are over my head in a it's-still-fun-to-jump-and-see-how-close-I-can-get-to-touching-them sort of way; the Alice is -- well, c'est du chinois. 'nuff said.

So there it is. If anyone else wants to try to fool around with Chinese -- or if you know enough to just read 'em -- or (in the case of the Beatrix Potter) you just want a good presentation of a marvelous children's book -- enjoy! And I may have more foolin' around with Chinese posts in the future -- keep an 眼睛 on this blog if you're interested.

File Under 'Unintentionally Humorous Juxtapositions'

2011-07-29T09:18:00.003-04:00

The final sentence from Paul Krugman's (characteristically spot-on) column today, along with the editorial note that is appended to it:

The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse.

David Brooks is off today.

Yes. Right.

(Why it's funny, for those not following the story.)

Update: ...but I shouldn't stop with the funny. Scott Lemieux described a different section of Krugman's column as "the heart of the matter", and he's right that it's a key aspect:

The cult of balance has played an important role in bringing us to the edge of disaster. For when reporting on political disputes always implies that both sides are to blame, there is no penalty for extremism. Voters won’t punish you for outrageous behavior if all they ever hear is that both sides are at fault.

We have been terribly failed by our political institutions, and terribly failed by the sociopathic madmen of the Republican party and the hapless cowards of the Democratic party, but we've been terribly failed by the media too. It's part of what is going on in our current national game of chicken.

Xu Bing's Book from the Ground

2011-07-20T11:52:00.003-04:00

I'll get around to the explanation in a minute, but the main thing I wanted to do in this post is to quote the first paragraph of an avant-garde novel-in-progress, The Book From the Ground, by the contemporary artist Xu Bing. (The first name is pronounced -- very, very roughly -- like "shoe".*) So before I explain anything, let me quote the opening paragraph:

Go on. Read it. Yes, you can. Really. Just try. ... ... See? That wasn't that hard, was it?

-- that last of which is (if I understand it) precisely the point.

Xu Bing -- who was born in China, moved to the U.S. in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, but who seems to have recently repatriated to China -- is a conceptual artist. My experience of his work, however, differs from my experience of most conceptual artists in that I find that he's actually working with interesting concepts. The work which (as I understand it) really made his name was A Book From the Sky, which is described on the artist's site as follows:

An all-enveloping textual environment, "A Book from the Sky" is composed of massive sheets of Chinese characters, some left loose and some bound into books, which are suspended form the ceiling, pasted on the wall, and laid on the floor. Everything about "A book from the Sky" has the look of authenticity. Form its arrangement of headings and marginalia on the page to its string bindings and indigo covers, the work mimics in every detail the characteristics of traditional Chinese printing and book -making. While donning such a guise, however, "A book form the sky " is supremely inauthentic. Its characters are purely of the artist's invention and utterly without meaning. What is most [unsettling] perhaps is the way in which Xu Bing's characters approximate the real thing , for the artist has composed them from the variant parts that make up Chinese characters.**

The coolness factor here is a bit hard to grasp unless you understand the way in which Chinese characters are made from parts of other Chinese Characters, but if you do get this, it seems pretty cool indeed. (Or shocking -- apparently his work was very controversial when first displayed.)

The Book From the Ground -- a project begun eight years ago and still ongoing -- is conceived as a sort of thematic sequel (sidequel? something) to the previous work. Here's how Xu Bing describes the origins of the project on its associated web site:

Book from the Ground is a novel written in a "language of icons" that I have been collecting and organizing over the last few years. Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life... This project first began with my collecting safety manuals from a number of airlines... Then, in 2003, I noticed three small images on a pack of gum (they translate into please use your wrapper to dispose of the gum in a trashcan), and came to realize that in so far as icons alone can explain something simple, they can also be used to narrate a longer story. From that point on, through various channels, I began to collect and organize logos, icons, and insignia from across the globe, and I also began to research the symbols of expression employed by the specialized fields of mathematics, chemistry, physics, drafting, musical composition, choreography, and corporate branding, among others...

Xu Bing then connects this to earlier (in and of themselves false) descriptions of Chinese as a universal language:

In 1627, the French thinker Jean Douet, in an essay titled "Proposal to the King for a Universal Script, with Admirable Results, Very Useful to Everyone on Earth," first suggested that Chinese was a potential model for an international language. The word "model" is important here because Douet does not limit this "universal script" to the form of Chinese characters per se. He instead focuses on the universal potential of the system of recognition upon which the Chinese language is based. Today, nearly four hundred years later, human communication has indeed evolved in the direction predicted by Douet. We have come to sense that traditional spoken forms are no longer the most appropriate method for communication. And, in response, great human effort has been concentrated on developing ways to replace traditional written languages with icons and images. For this reason, among others, humankind has entered the age of reading images.

And lastly connects the project with his own previous work:

I have created many works that relate to language. This subject first took shape twenty years ago with a piece called Book from the Sky. It was called Book from the Sky because it contained a text legible to no one on this earth (including myself). Today I have used this new "language of signs" to write a book that a speaker of any language can understand; I call it Book from the Ground. But, in truth, these two texts share something in common: regardless of your mother tongue or level of education, they strive to treat you equally. Book from the Sky was an expression of my doubts regarding extant written languages. Book from the Earth is the expression of my quest for the ideal of a single script. Perhaps the idea behind this project is too ambitious, but its significance rests in making the attempt.

(Despite the length of those excerpts, the full essay is, in fact, much longer -- click through if you want to read more.)

Whether he's successful or not you can yourself judge. Certainly the above passage is comprehensible to me -- and, I suspect, will be comprehensible to many people who speak no English, so it's not that language that's clarifying it for me. (I have doubts about its universality -- it seems to me to be a sort of "language" of its own -- but I agree with Xu Bing that the attempt itself is worthy.)

I should forewarn anyone who wants to read more, however, that the web site's navigation is a bit counter intuitive -- I suppose Xu Bing didn't spend as much time clarifying that as he did trying to clarify his symbolic language. If you go to the web site and click on the "read" icon, you are directed to this page, which is called (in the web browser) "basic", which contains a six paragraph text (can I call it a text?) of which the above-quoted paragraph is the opening. This text is titled, appropriately enough, "". But there's no indication of any further text -- at first I thought that that brief passage was the entirety of the work. If you then click again on the "reading" icon, however, it takes you to this table of contents, which lists fourteen chapters (by number only), with a final page promising "to be continued". There isn't any indication (that I've seen) about the relationship between the initial text and the fourteen numbered chapters. I've only carefully read the former, so I may well be missing something, but a brief scan of the latter makes it seem like the original text is a sort of proof-of-concept sketch, which is then elaborated in (rather than continued in) the first chapter of the actual book.

Still, if you're looking to read more, you'll want to go beyond just the first page.

Since the table of contents lists only numbers, but the actual pages themselves have chapter titles (all in Xu Bing's symbolic language, naturally), I thought it might be of some small service if I were to provide a hyperlinked table of contents to the work as it exists so far:

Preface (?):
Chapter 1:
Chapter 2:
Chapter 3:
Chapter 4:
Chapter 5:
Chapter 6:
Chapter 7:
Chapter 8:
Chapter 9:
Chapter 10:
Chapter 11:
Chapter 12:
Chapter 13:
Chapter 14:

There it is, if you wish to read it. As with many tables of contents, I think you get at least a hint of the story's shape just from the titles. I can't recommend it -- again, all I myself have read is what I'm calling the "preface" -- which is interesting as language, but not so interesting as story. But it looks like the longer version may well improve on that latter score. Someday soon I hope to find out.

A post script: two categorical queries

Is The Book From the Ground a Oulipian work, i.e. a work of constrained literature?

I would say it is not. It is an experimental work, certainly, but not I think "constrained" in the sense that that term is used by the Oulipo and its adherents. I can imagine some disagreement on this point -- the Oulipo has done some work on altered languages, such as Jaques Jouet's "The Great-Ape Love-Song" (published in English translation in Oulipo Laboratory). Nevertheless, it seems to me that a newly-invented language -- particularly one not related to any existing language, but pictorial in origin -- while involving, as every task does, certain constraints, is clearly not constrained literature in any plausible sense.

Is The Book From the Ground comics under the McCloudian definition ("juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer"***)?

Again, I would say no. It's not that I am unwilling to apply McCloud's -- to my mind, extremely fruitful -- definition broadly. (In fact, I have been criticized for doing so in the past (see comments.)) But it seems to me that Xi Bing's work is clearly not comics in any plausible sense of the spirit of the term (again, in McCloud's usage).

Again, I can imagine some disagreement here: one might say that Xu Bing's work consists entirely of "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer", so if it is not comics, then does it not represent a plain counter-example to McCloud's definition? I would say it does not, because what Xu Bing is doing ultimately is repurposing what were pictures and other images into a symbolic language, i.e. by the time he's "written" his "texts" what he's working with are no longer images in the sense that McCloud intends.

That said, I think that you could make a plausible argument to the contrary, and either understand what Xi Bing is doing as comics (it is derived, as noted above, from airline instruction manuals and the like, which McCloud does specifically include in his understanding of comics), or tweak McCloud's definition to exclude it (which risks accusations of monster-baring, but may be the best way to go). Alternatively, you could understand Xi Bing as taking comics and changing it into a textual language -- see it not as comics, but as a derivation of one particular form of them. This might be the most accurate approach.

Did you include this entire postscript just as an excuse to tag this post with "ou-x-po" and "comics", since you thought Xi Bing's work would be of interest to those interested in those categories, despite the fact that it isn't, basically, either Oulipian or comics?

We said just two questions.

________________
* I haven't seen any site which prints that in proper pinyin, i.e. with tones marked, or I'd reproduce that. Without tones, the pinyin doesn't give sufficient information to pronounce his name. (If anyone happens to know, please leave the information in comments! If it helps, his name in Chinese (according to Wikipedia) is 徐冰.)

** Be grateful I cut off the quote before he started talking about "deconstructive bricolage".

*** Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics, p. 9.

"And the whole world was of one language and of one speech"

2011-07-18T10:39:00.006-04:00

A fun site I found last night (via) has the bible in multiple languages, formatted in parallel columns. This is not itself so rare, but this particular site has the bible in both Chinese and Pinyin (the standard romanization system for Chinese), which I don't recall seeing before. And you can line those up with English, or French, or a number of other languages. Fun for those of us who don't know Chinese, but who enjoy lusting after it from a great distance.

Now, the English is that of the King James Bible -- which is to say, it's pretty but also pretty inaccurate as far as translations go. And I have no idea, really, what the provenance of the other translations are -- whether, for instance, they were translated from the original languages, or from other translations, nor how accurate they are.

Still, y'know, fun.

And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
Toute la terre avait une seule langue et les mêmes mots.
那时，天下人的口音，言语，都是一样.
Nàshí , tiān xià rén de kǒuyīn , yányǔ , dōu shì yíyàng.

That's Chinese in simplified characters; they also have traditional. Furthermore, they also have an audio recording of the Chinese -- pretty cool, frankly.

The one thing they don't seem to have -- an odd omission -- is the Bible in the original, i.e. Hebrew for the Tanakh, Koine Greek for the new Testament. On the other hand, you can find that a lot of places (e.g.). The site above seems really to be designed for the Chinese.

Oh, and this quote, of course, is Genesis 11:1 -- the beginning of the creation myth that this most excellent of myth collections offers for the multitude of human languages.

"America is not in decline, it has declined."

2011-07-08T21:39:00.004-04:00

Timothy Burke had the terrible experience of getting Lyme Disease, and, in the process of telling us about it, presents some reflections that enlighten more than just his particular disease, or even the particular problem he applies it to:

...as a matter of policy, the hospital was coping with a large number of local patients using its ER for ordinary medical care by passive-aggressive neglect. Unless you walked in with an immediately and obviously life-threatening condition, time would be your triage, not a medical professional. If you could endure waiting eight to nine hours, that was proof that your condition was sufficiently serious that you might need urgent care....

The basic problem faced by this hospital and many others is structurally serious and requires a strong nationally consistent solution. Given that one political party struggled to formulate a fussy, detail-strangled series of half-measures to address the problem and the other party apparently thinks there isn’t any issue in the first place, I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life.

This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined. A nine-hour wait at a well-built, well-staffed, well-resourced medical center for treatment of a serious condition is decline. As a traveller seeking urgent care, I’ve been seen more quickly in similar facilities in both Africa and Europe.

I've given a bit of the context so you can understand what he's saying a bit better, but let me highlight this part again:

I’m resigned to this situation happening again to me, my loved ones, my friends, my fellow citizens, for the rest of my life. This is where we are at now. Decline is not something we need to fear or forestall, it has already happened. America is not in decline, it has declined.

Yes: resigned. Because what can we really do? Politics seems hopeless -- and yes, I know, rage rage, the political Pascalian dilemma, and all that, but even if the rational thing to do -- even if the rationally irrational thing to do -- is to keep struggling, it just feels hopeless, a hopelessness that washes up and batters you like the sea.

Sometimes it's hard to feel like they've already knifed the country (if not the world) in the heart, and all that's left is the flopping around, the ugliness of blood, and a doctor's calling the time to make it official.

Thank You New York State

2011-06-25T09:08:00.003-04:00

...for passing laws such that my wife and I are no longer participating in a discriminatory institution by being married. Seriously, I feel much better about marriage as an institution now. (Of course we were married in Massachusetts, which was the first to make marriage non-discriminatory some years ago now... but we live in New York, and it's good to live in a free and equal state.)

It's nice to have good news -- such unequivocal good news, an inarguable step forward for humankind -- to wake up to in the morning.

A few random notes/links:
• I love that Andrew Cuomo showed up to the Senate ~~to sign the bill on the spot~~. (It goes into effect in thirty days.) Update: Nope, I got that wrong: he did show up, and he also signed the bill last night, but he signed it in his office.
• Josh Marshall was at Stonewall Inn last night, taking pictures.
• Andrew Sullivan on Why New York Matters. (His real-time reactions are here.)
• Joe Sudbay reprints a great passage from the print edition of the NY Times, missing in the online article:

On Friday night, as the Senate voted, a crowd jammed into the Stonewall Inn, where televisions were tuned to the Senate hours before the vote began. Danny Garvin, 62, said he had been at the bar on the night of the riot, and came back to watch the Senate debate on Friday. On the streets where police beat gay men in 1969, on Friday crowds cheered, as police quietly stood watch.

Extremely Cool Online Toy of the Day (Flagged for Photographers)

2011-06-24T09:39:00.005-04:00

Via Andrew Sullivan, here is the coolest online toy I've seen in a while: pictures that you can focus after taking them -- changing the focus in various ways. Here, try one out:

Try clicking the flower in the far foreground (lower right); then click the flower in the medium foreground (the one sticking out in the upper left of the flower field); then click the background proper, the trees or the beach. Three different pictures.

Sadly, this isn't just a plug-in you can get for photoshop on a standard camera; it's a design for a camera, and one that's still in beta-testing, and not yet generally available. Still, something to look out for! (I wish I had one for my current project...)

Here's a NY Times story on it with more information (basically an extended press release, but hey, sometimes those are interesting (which is why I'm putting up an abbreviated one on my blog...). And if you click through to their web site, you can play with a couple dozen pictures like the one above. According to their faq, the camera isn't for sale yet (and they're not saying when or how much), but it sounds like they're working on it. Maybe later this year? Maybe someone wants to buy me a very expensive Christmas/Hanukkah present :)

It's Going to Continue Quiet 'Round Here a While

2011-05-26T13:34:00.004-04:00

After having two of my heaviest blogging-ever months in February and March, and a perfectly respectable April, May has been quiet around here. So I thought I'd pop up to let y'all know that this is likely to continue, at least for a few more weeks. Nothing wrong, just busy. (As I've always tried to stress, things here at Attempts have always been, and will always be, on-and-off-again, depending on time and whim.)

In the meantime, via my favorite blogger for links, here's a collection of 70 covers of Dylan songs in honor of Dylan's 70th birthday this week. It was downloading very slowly on the birthday itself, but it's doing well know, and the collection is a lot of fun. The first one to make me stop my tour through the set to listen to it again was Hazel Dickens's cover of "It's Only a Hobo".

Be seeing you.

Duelling Proverbs on the Death of Bin Laden

2011-05-02T13:47:00.003-04:00

Jeffrey Goldberg offers: "When justice is done, it brings joy to the righteous but terror to evildoers." -- Proverbs 21:15

Russell Arben Fox (and the Magnes Zionist, and Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld) offer “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles.” -- Proverbs 24:17

(In fairness, if you read their full statements, both RAF and Rabbi Herzfeld are more equivocal than that quote would indicate.)

What can one say except "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose"? (Merchant of Venice 1:2). But how do you tell which is which?

He's Dead. Now Let's Declare VIctory and Go Home.

2011-05-02T11:32:00.003-04:00

The well-deserved death of Osama Bin Laden gives President Obama a fantastic opportunity, if he should choose to take it: declare victory in the war on terror. Use this as the occasion to end the war in Afghanistan, the undeclared war in Pakistan, the war in Iraq, and so on. Decide that threats should be dealt with based on their likelihood and impact, not on an irrational elevation of this one source of danger over all others. Revert to intelligence & police work as the prime protections against criminal terror networks. End the war on terror: declare victory, and go home.

This is not an original idea with me -- nor is it, as one person said to me, restricted to the lunatic fringe. Mainstream liberals, like Matt Yglesias and James Fallows and Peter Beinart (via), are saying the same thing. Unsurprisingly, the right is taking the opposite tack, asserting that this does not mean the war on terror is or should be over.

So we should - we must - push back. Try to get Obama to do what's right.

I agree that the practical significance of Bin Laden's death (as far as American security goes) is likely to be low. But the symbolic significance is high. Which makes it a great time to do what we should do anyway: reorient our foreign policy to a more balanced (and less militarized) one; reorient our domestic priorities back to civil liberties and away from security theater; etc, etc. This is a great moment: Obama should seize it.

We should seize it.

Some people (e.g. Glenn Greenwald) are saying, cynically, that this won't do any of these things. And as far as prediction goes, they're most likely right. But prediction is totally the wrong way to think about this. This isn't something that will or won't happen regardless of what we, collectively, do; it is something that will or won't happen depending on what we, collectively, do.

So let me revise my statement that this is a great opportunity for Obama: it is a great time for us, collectively. We can use this to change course. We should. Those of us who think this should try to convince those who don't. It's too good an opportunity to waste.

It's not unrealistic any more than it's realistic: it's up to us. We can do it if we want. "If we will it, it is no dream." So we should do it.

Bin Laden's dead. Good riddance.

Now let's end the war on terror. Declare victory, and go home.

May His Name And Memory Be Erased

2011-05-02T00:14:00.004-04:00

Osama Bin Laden is Dead. Throw another log on the fire, boys...

Can we end the wars on Afghanistan & Pakistan now?

Two Good Thoughts on Translation

2011-04-30T12:35:00.003-04:00

Two thoughts, both by the blogger Waggish. One that I'd never had before, that strikes me as at least partially right (and therefore important), on why translated literature receives so little attention (measured against English-language literature) -- in book reviews and the like:

...it is the university that institutionalizes a real bias against translated literature. In the most prestigious universities, you study “English,” or else “comparative literature” in the original languages. There are very few opportunities to read translated literature; they are usually in cultural history classes, or else pet projects of professors that wouldn’t attract enough students otherwise. I don’t know if this attitude is present in most other countries, though I know it is England.

An attitude that makes no sense translated from class curricula to the reading habits of everyday readers -- but I think Waggish is right that that is a source of the attitude. (Partly because of the declining place of the reading of books in our culture, where it is increasingly experienced as something one just does (or at any rate primarily does) in college). At the same time, an attitude that does make some real sense for college-level classes, for reasons that Waggish brings up later in that same post -- an idea that is more familiar than the first-quoted one, but seems to me particularly well conveyed here:

But to echo Borges, what is lost is often miniscule compared to what is preserved. What you lose, however, is the authority to know exactly what was said, and what’s left is the uncertainty that one turn of phrase may or may not have a hidden resonance, that a language-specific idiom could not possibly communicate the same thing as whatever is in the original. The Quartet Encounters translations made this obvious, which in one sense was helpful. I had to treat them on the level of the abstract ideas, characters, and plots communicated imprecisely, not the specifics of the language. With few exceptions, I was not able to do this at university, and I appreciated the bald awkwardness of many of the translations, which pushed me away from the particulars of the words.

-- And since the particular of the words are so important in literary study, translations are ignored.

Important, yes: but surely not all important? Why not read more translated books in college-level classes -- not only in particular offerings of various foreign-language departments (classes on Dante or Russian literature and the like), but works from multiple languages, actually integrated with English-language novels?

(There is an exaggeration in the idea that one doesn't read translated literature at the college level -- but there's some truth in it, too, I think.)

Joanna Russ, 1937 - 2011

2011-04-29T19:39:00.004-04:00

Very sad news: Joanna Russ, one of the great SF writers, died today.

Her masterpiece, I think, is pretty clearly The Female Man. (It's been a long time since I read it. I should read it again. I think I missed a lot of it first time around.)

"The Female Man" is one of those titles (like The Crying of Lot 49 or Stuck Rubber Baby) which make no sense when you first hear it but, once you understand it, is impossible to unhear: it seems so bloody obvious what it means. (As opposed, say, to those titles that take on new meanings after you read the book, but are perfectly comprehensible before.) Unlike those other two examples, however, its meaning is not a spoiler, so I thought I'd share it. From The Female Man:

"Man" is a rhetorical convenience for "human." "Man" includes "woman." Thus:
1. The Eternal Feminine leads us ever upward and on. (Guess who "us" is)
2. The last man on earth will spend the last hour before the holocaust searching for his wife and child. (Review of The Second Sex by the first sex)
3. We all have the impulse, at times, to get rid of our wives. (Irving Howe, introduction to Hanly, talking about my wife)
4. Great scientists choose their problems as they choose their wives. (A. H. Maslow, who should know better)
5. Man is a hunter who wishes to compete for the best kill and the best female. (everybody)

...and then you get it: "Female Man". Right. Of course. -- And, if you're like me, you feel ashamed you didn't get it earlier.

(Not that this captures the whole meaning -- the term has more meanings than that -- but this gets at its essence, I think.)

It's probably wrong of me, but I take a small piece of consolation in the fact that the parenthesis for number 4 -- where Joanna Russ talks about "my wife" -- now sounds far more natural than it did when the book came out 36 years ago; and that I suspect (or at least hope) that twenty-year-olds who read it 36 years from now won't get why it was supposed to sound odd at all.

She's a great writer. As always in such cases, the small sliver of consolation is that her works remain. But it's always hard not to wish that won't be more of them.

RIP.

Update: Links to some of Russ's work online:

• Russ's Nebula-award winning short story, "When it Changed", set in (one of the) worlds that shows up in The Female Man (or, at least, in a version of it), published three years before the novel (so not a spoiler). (via)

• Russ's 1975 essay "Towards an Aesthetics of Science Fiction" (via Mumpsimus, as is the following one)

• The 2006 phone interview with Samuel R. Delany at Wiscon (referenced by Patrick Nielsen Hayden in the above-linked thread).

• The opening of her book How to Suppress Women's Writing.

Rule of Thumb

2011-04-26T16:41:00.005-04:00

If a google search for a book title and author's name (from a fairly full one like Stephen Jay Gould The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox * to a simple one like Adapting Minds Buller) does not bring up the Google Books page for the volume in question within the top ten results, then there is no preview (or only a basically-useless snippet view) of the book. If there is a preview of the book, however, then the google books page will be in the top ten google results.

Known exceptions: if the book is very new, reviews, sales and publisher's pages will sometimes crowd the top ten and crowd out the preview; and if the author's name and title is sufficiently general, then non-relevant hits might crowd out the preview.

___________________
* And no, Google, I did not mean Ghould instead of Gould. Oi.

Poem of the Day: Philip Larkin

2011-04-26T14:34:00.001-04:00

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

-- Philip Larkin

(h/t)

Great Moments in Misquotation

2011-04-20T07:22:00.001-04:00

I was reading John Ashbery's famous ekphrasisical poem "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" and came across this puzzling passage early on (sic as copied from the aforelinked site):

...Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself from that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.

Even knowing Ashbery's reputation as a postmodernist poet, those last few lines gave me pause. "...his reflection, of which the portrait is the reflection, of which the portrait is the reflection once removed"? Whence that double portrait and treble reflection? That the portrait is the reflection of the reflection makes obvious sense, but what does it then mean to say of that that the portrait is it's reflection once removed? Is it a restatement of the previous lines (i.e. first the poet thinks it's a reflection, then decides that no, it's a reflection once removed), or is it a comment somehow on the nature of reflection, that there is always (in the mind, perhaps?) a double reflection, so that the portrait is a reflection, and that that itself is (self-reflected?) in the portrait at one remove?

Fortunately, pursuing this matter, I found this site which has the mp3 of Ashbery reading his own poem (and a great many other aside), and found out that no: it's actually a copyist's error. A quick use of Amazon's search inside feature confirmed it; that little postmodernist puzzle was not in what Ashbery originally wrote. Here's the text, as corrected. (I've corrected the other (more obvious) error in the above quotation as well.)

...Vasari says, "Francesco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers . . .
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,"
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.

-- And that, again, makes straightforward sense.

So why do I feel a slight nostalgia, a slight sadness, for those great lines of poetry -- never, apparently, written deliberately -- saying of Parmigianino's Self-Portrait that it portrays "Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait/Is the reflection, of which the portrait/Is the reflection once removed."?

To close off this blog entry, insert your own self-reflective joke about the convex (distorted) nature of the reflection of quotation and description here.

Can We Have An Update on the Acutal Work of Art, Please?

2011-04-19T12:52:00.010-04:00

Apparently Andres Serrano's long-controversial photograph Immersion (Piss Christ) has been destroyed (some news reports have "damaged") by fundamentalist Catholic protesters in France. All the various news stories and blog posts I've seen on this (e.g.) have focused on the culture-war angle -- the photograph has always been controversial, the rise of Christian fundamentalism and so forth; P Z Myers (reasonably) compares this to the Taliban's destruction of Buddhist statuses. Etc.

But I'm primarily worried about the artwork. Can it be repaired? More importantly: Immersion (Piss Christ) was a photograph, which are often (but not always) made in series -- so that there are a handful of "originals" rather than just a single original, as in the case of a painting. Is this true with Serrano's work? Nothing I've seen so far has addressed this, but I'm actually very eager to find out.

Because here's the thing: apart from the politics and the controversy... Immersion (Piss Christ) is a very beautiful work of art. Take a look at it, and try to forget what you know about its origin, and just look at it as an image:

Gorgeous. And also, as many people have noted, a very religious image. Serrano himself has said that "I have always felt that my work is religious, not sacrilegious... I am drawn to the symbols of the Church.... I like to believe that rather than destroy icons, I make new ones." A writer for the Guardian makes a similar point here. Even PZ Myers, not known for his sympathy to religious expression, notes that the "luminous golden glow" is "reverential".

I hasten to add that this shouldn't make a difference: anti-religious art can be as beautiful as religious art, and I hope it goes without saying that the destruction of artwork is immoral whatever viewpoint it promotes or the intention of its artist to shock or not. Saying Serrano's work is religious is a description, not a defense, since I don't think that the claims (blasphemy, offense, intentional sacrilege) against which it would be a defense are ones that in fact require a defense. If those charges are true, it doesn't matter. But, as it happens, I think they're not. Immersion (Piss Christ) is a work of religious art -- one focusing on (among other things) the physicality of the incarnation, with all that that entails.*

But mostly it's beautiful. I've only seen reproductions, which never do a work of art justice, and I'd love to see the original someday. Can I? That is, are there other, still-undamaged originals made by Serrano from the same negative? Or was there only one, and it is truly gone? I'd really like to know. Anyone feel like doing (or linking to) any reporting on this angle?

Update: Telling this story to a photography buff, he assured me that more than one copy of "Piss Christ" was made (photos are often made in series, usually in the 3-12 range I think). So it does still exist, somewhere. Just don't tell the wackos.

______________
* I'm reminded of the line which the late David Foster Wallace quoted from a novel by William H. Gass (which I've not read and know nothing else about), Omensetter's Luck: "The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not."

When You're Too Lazy And/Or Busy To Make A New Passover Post...

2011-04-18T17:08:00.003-04:00

...just recycle one from earlier years:

(Compilation made with this site; click image for a larger version.)

Happy Passover to all those who celebrate it!

Today in Internet Awesomeness

2011-04-18T13:39:00.003-04:00

This, by Landon Schurtz, via Yglesias:

Quote of the Day: James Baldwin

2011-04-12T07:24:00.000-04:00

...our humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only do what is infinitely more difficult -- that is, accept it. The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is in his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended.

-- James Baldwin, "Everybody's Protest Novel"

The Current Theory-to-Beat on Obama's Leadership Failures

2011-04-11T13:56:00.006-04:00

When I read about how Obama took a terrible deal and made it far worse by the political equivalent of scoring a goal against his own side (see also, and also) the first thing I thought of was this old post about how Obama's worst failure is that he's bad at loosing. But I didn't even remember where I'd read it.

Thankfully, Gerry Canavan linked to the writer of the "bad at loosing" post's recent post about how this particular episode exemplifies the fact that Obama's so very, very bad at loosing.

So if you feel like reading something about politics (frankly, these days I keep shutting my eyes and holding my fingers over them to make sure I don't peak, the news is so horrible), I recommend those two posts:

• Biggest Surprise of Last Two Years: Bad at Losing, from December 30, 2010;
• Obama is Bad at Losing, Budget Edition, from today.

For myself, I can't look at the train wreck no more, 'cause the brightness of the light from the burning bodies is starting to hurt my eyes.

Poem of the Day: Amiri Baraka

2011-04-11T07:53:00.000-04:00

Hey, just because I'm not going all out and putting up a poem every day like I did in late March, I can still find a poem & post it, right?

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus...

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

-- Amiri Baraka

Quote of the Day

2011-04-10T14:01:00.001-04:00

Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta.

-- John Wisdom (quoted by Henry Louis Gates)

This Is Not Intended To Be a Factual Statement

2011-04-09T09:38:00.003-04:00

Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) thinks women should be enslaved and turned into dedicated breeding machines.

An Economical Example of Thomas Kuhn's Inconsistency About His Own Ideas

2011-04-07T23:20:00.003-04:00

...[T]he proponents of competing paradigms practice their trades in different worlds. [...] Practicing in different worlds, the two groups of scientists see different things when they look from the same point in the same direction. Again, that is not to say that they can see anything they please. Both are looking at the world, and what they look at has not changed. But in some areas they see different things, and they see them in different relations one to the other.

-- Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 150

From "practicing in different worlds" to "both are looking at the world" in the space of two sentences! It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "the destroyer of worlds". Jean Grey, eat your heart out!

Mary Joe Frug, 1941 - 1991

2011-04-04T07:22:00.004-04:00

Twenty years ago today my mother, Mary Joe Frug, was murdered about a block from our house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was early evening; she was out for a walk. No one was ever caught or charged; we have no idea, to this day, who killed her. It was less than a month after my twentieth birthday.

At some point in the week and a half after she died, my sister and I were sitting in my parents' bedroom, talking, and it suddenly struck me that some day I would be forty, and it would have been half my life. I vividly remember telling my sister this, literally days after our mother's death. (I don't think she remembers.) I've remembered it a long time. And now, today, I am forty, and it's been twenty years. Half my life.

For the actual burial, we had a private funeral service for my mother Monday morning, April 8 -- mostly just family, with one or two friends brought along for support. Then, that afternoon there was a memorial service in Harvard's Memorial Church. (When she died my mother, on leave from her regular job at New England School of Law in Boston, was a scholar at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute; my father taught (and teaches) at Harvard, and I was then a sophomore in college there.) It's a big church; and it was filled. I think there were more than a thousand people there.

Rabbi Sally Finestone officiated. (Officially, we couldn't have the service there unless one of the university-associated chaplains officiated; as the only member of my family with any sort of connection to any of the chaplains (I was active at Harvard's Hillel), I asked Rabbi Finestone to do it. She said an opening and closing prayer.) There was some music, which my father and sister picked out. The song that got everyone weeping was Cat Stevens's "Wild World". (Technically, recorded music isn't allowed at Memorial Church, but the official head of the church, the late Rev. Gomes, was out of town at the time, and we got away with it.)

And there were eight speakers. Five were friends of our family's, including of course my mom: Cynthia Wardell, Mopsy Strange Kennedy, Judi Greenberg, Le Clanché du Rand, David Kennedy. There was the Dean of my mom's law school, New England, John O'Brien; there was a colleague of my mom's (whom I'd never met before or, to my recollection, since) Marie Ashe. (That's all in order, except that John O'Brien spoke second, between Cynthia and Mopsy.) And then, lastly, there was me.

The year after her death, the New England Law Review published a special two-volume issue dedicated to my mom's memory. It had to be two volumes because so many of her friends (mostly other law professors) wanted to submit an article. As a sort of preface, they printed the entire memorial service -- Rabbi Finestone's opening and closing benedictions, and all eight speeches. If you want to read it, the citation for it is 26 New England Law Review iii, pp. 636-658. (Yes, I had to look that up). I think that, all things considered, it gives a pretty good sense of what she was like.

Here's what I said. I wrote it the night before, a few days after my mom's murder. I was twenty. It's got a few things in it that embarrass me now -- infelicities of diverse sorts. But I haven't changed it.

I’m here to speak about my mom.

I’m the only person I know who heard the phrase, “carpe diem”, before they saw the movie that made it so common. I knew it from my mom. She used to tell me that, often. “Seize the Day” she would say. This would be her advice when I was down, depressed about something I had done or something I could not do. And she would follow her own advice, seizing every day that I knew her.

I’d like to tell you some things she did. They’re not really important things, they’re everyday things, things she sized. One of the things about my mom is that she did everything with gusto. Here are some things that she did.

She would play any tape that she liked over and over and over again, until she got sick of it and couldn’t listen to it for a month. She would wait until beyond the last possible moment to do anything, and then do it when everyone thought that she couldn’t. She would wait up for me or Emily to get home, and talk to us when we got back. She ate the icing off of cake and left the cake. She said that the reason she did this was that her father once stole her icing when she wasn’t looking. I think she just didn’t like cake.

She would manage to get to know perfect strangers before I could learn their name. People at grocery stores, friends of mine or my sisters, random strangers at a cocktail party: she would be busy “chatting them up” as she used to call it, finding out more about their soul then I would have thought possible. She was better with people then anyone else I know.

She would put on makeup before driving me somewhere at two in the morning when no one could see her. She would read every night before she went to bed. She read everything and anything. I can’t think of anyone who had as broad a taste as she did. There was always something called, “My Novel” which would change every few days. She was the first in Latin in the state of Ohio when she was in high school. I guess that’s where she learned the words “Carpe Diem”. I don’t know why, but she mentioned that fact a lot.

My mother could be very funny. A few weeks before she died, I talked to her about her trip to the Caribbean with my sister. “Well, you feel like a load of laundry: there’s a rinse cycle then a dry cycle and then you start again”, she said.

She would do embarrassing things in restaurants. She would bend over to people eating next to us and ask what they had for dinner, and if they liked it. My family, we would all cringe and blush. She was never embarrassed at all.

And she would take walks. Long walks, short walks, bicycle rides, walks during the day, walks at night. And that is how she died.

* * *

I want to say one thing about today. On behalf of my family, I want to thank you all for coming. A lot of you, if not all of you, feel that you have some special relationship to Mary Joe. All of you are right. The way she was is such that she had a special relationship with more people than I can count. And she cared about every one. Every one.

* * *

I remember a quote from a story by James Joyce, whom my mom liked so much that she named me after one of his characters. It’s a story my mom knew and loved, a quote from a story called "The Dead", and it goes like this:
One by one they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.
As you’ve heard already, and as all of you know, my mother passed into that other world in the full grip of many passions.

* * *

When I was trying to think about what to say, and what to do, I was trying to think what she would want us to do. I thought back to what she said when her father died, years ago. She was sad, she felt his loss. She felt that she wished she had talked to him more, that she had done this and that-- as you all no doubt feel now. And then she kept going. She kept being strong, she kept being joyful, she kept being full of cheer. She kept being Mary Joe Frug.

There were imperfections in my mother’s life, like in all of ours. But she never spent much time regretting them.

Rest in peace, Mom. I miss you.

The Other Life of Russell Kirk

2011-04-02T14:11:00.002-04:00

Russell Kirk is best known as one of the intellectual founders of modern American conservatism; his best known work is The Conservative Mind, and it was one of the thirteen books I chose to assign in my survey of U. S. Intellectual History Since 1865 (we just had our discussion of it yesterday). It was far from his only contribution to this tradition, however: he also wrote a column in the National Review in its early years, edited his own conservative journal called Modern Age, and wrote a lot of other books on conservative thought, and so forth. Like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater, Kirk is one of the intellectual founders of contemporary American politics, of enormous influence.

But Russell Kirk was also a fantasy writer, specializing in ghost stories; reviewer Michael Dirda, who knows whereof he speaks, called Kirk "the greatest American author of ghostly tales in the classic style". And, as I found out when preparing my lectures for this week, his story "There's a Long, Long Trail A-Winding" actually won the World Fantasy Award in 1977 for best short story (the same year Ray Bradbury got a lifetime achievement award). It's included in a collection of Kirk's short fiction called Ancestral Shadows, and also in David Hartwell's anthology The Dark Descent (which I've owned for years, and have read a lot, but not all, of -- and not this story, nor did the identity of its author ever penetrate my consciousness; this shouldn't have been a surprise to me -- but it was).

I'm fairly certain he's the only author we're reading this semester who won a major F/SF award. I wouldn't be surprised if he's the only person I'm so much as mentioning in the class who ever won a major F/SF award.

Strange world.

An Even Bloggier March (Accidental Poetry Month: Index)

2011-04-01T09:21:00.007-04:00

So after noting that this past February was my second-highest posting month ever, it turns out that i put up even more posts this March (it was, in fact, my single heaviest posting-month ever). It's not quite the same as last month, though, since most were just me reprinting poems -- upon finding that I had (quite coincidentally -- some of them were even pre-scheduled some time before March) put up seven poems, I declared it Accidental Poetry Month™ and (deliberately) put up more than a dozen more.

It's been fun.

I thought I'd post links to all of them in one place, in case anyone's curious; but first let me draw attention to two very personal posts I put up this month:

If you were going to read just two of my posts from this month, those are the ones I'd suggest (even, push).

Apart from that, however, here are the poems I put up on this blog. An asterisk indicates that the post in question has a significant amount of material (a judgment call, obviously) in addition to the text of the poem -- not always about the poem itself, and in at least one cast only tangentially related at best. In the other cases, the post is basically just the poem, with at most a paragraph or two clarifying some reference or the like. So you can go especially to, or avoid, either kind as you prefer.

Barnstone, Willis, "The Secret Reader"
Baudelaire, Charles, "L'Albatros" *
Cope, Wendy, "Waste Land Limericks"
Donne, John, "Hero and Leander" *
Eliot, George, "God Needs Antonio"
Frost, Robert, "Carpe Diem"
---, "Fire and Ice" *
---, "Mowing"
Frug, Stephen Saperstein, "Midas"
Gwynn, R. S., "Approaching a Significant Birthday..." *
Heaney, Seamus, "Requiem for the Croppies"
Hollander, John, "Kitty"
---, "Kitty and Bug"
--- "Powers of Thirteen: 29"
Jarrell, Randall, "90 North"
---, "At dawn, the sun..." (from The Bat Poet) *
---, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"
---, "A Lullaby"
---, "The Old and the New Masters" *
Li Bai, "Thoughts on a Quiet Night" *
Pound, Ezra, "In a Station of the Metro" *
Qabbani, Nizar, "Less Beautiful"
Sidgwick, Frank, "The Aeronaut to His Lady"
Wilbur, Richard, "Advice to a Prophet"

A rather eclectic little anthology, to be sure. But all poems worth reading, which is enough.

And as I said before: don't be surprised if things quiet down around here: these things go in cycles, and I've been running hot awhile. On the other hand, I said that last month too, so I suppose you shouldn't be surprised if the opposite happens, either.

A Poem of My Own Composition (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 22)

2011-03-31T07:44:00.001-04:00

I write a lot of things -- SF, comics scripts, history papers, blog posts -- and have plans, schemes and hopes to write a lot of other things as well; -- but not, for the most part, poetry. I like to think I write prose well; I can't bring myself to think I write poetry well. Generally speaking.

But I did go through a period (nearly two decades ago now) of writing poems, in which I wrote perhaps a dozen that I thought ranged from the pretty good to the good (tout court). (There were also another dozen or so that showed promise, although they never got beyond the needing revision/incomplete work phase.) I even tried to publish a few, with no luck (although I wasn't very persistent nor very realistic about where I might be published the first time out). But since it's not an area I am currently planning to pursue (although who knows) I thought I'd share one with my Noble Readers as a climax (or anti-climax) to my Originally-Accidental-But-Long-Since-Quite-Deliberate Poetry Month™ that I've been indulging in.

If you like it, or even find it interesting, leave an encouraging comment, and maybe I'll post another.

Midas

So will I end:
Stand overlooking the vast reed plain
Bent in periodic waves by the wind;
Eternally poised,
With a solid sort of dignity--
The wisdom of a king
Etched upon a not quite human face;
Lifelike-- once-life-- the finest
Details of scarf and nail
Preserved in glimmering gold:
Eyes on the mountain,
Hand carelessly on a thigh;
Statue, not carved,
But an ellipsis in time:
Iridescent flesh
Made solid by my own caress.

-- Stephen Saperstein Frug (1994)

John Hollander's Shaped Poems (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 21)

2011-03-30T09:52:00.007-04:00

In addition to Randa ll Ja rrell, my other discovery* of this Increasingly-Inaccurately-Named Accidental Poetry Month™ has been John Hollander. I've mentioned browsed two of his anthologies (Committed to Memory, which is online (follow the links), and The Gazer's Spirit, which led me to this month's first Jarrell poem), and then -- reading in his anthologies having led me to read his poetry -- posted one of his poems from his Oulipian work Powers of Thirteen.

My next step was to the library -- which, in this case, was useless. So my next step was to order two of his books, which just arrived. One was his Selected Poetry (1993) -- which in addition to having samples from many of his books, has his Oulipian book Powers of Thirteen included in its entirety. But that I haven't yet had time to even dip into.

The other book of his which I ordered was one of the books which was not excerpted in Selected Poetry, but which I nevertheless was distinctly interested in reading: a book of concrete poetry he wrote called Types of Shape (the "new, expanded edition" of 1991).

Concrete poetry is poetry whose visual shape on the page is a crucial part of the poem.** The most famous shaped poem in the language (as Hollander notes in his introduction) is The Mouse's Tale from Alice in Wonderland. I hadn't read much of it before, but I was interested to see what Hollander did with it.

Well, as I said, I just got the book, and normally I'd wait a little while longer before posting any of it; but since Accidental Poetry Month™ is rushing to a close, I decided that I'd go ahead and post my two preliminary favorites -- chosen, note, before I've even read the entire book through (despite its including only 35 poems!). Maybe I'll like others more. But I definitely do like these -- more than enough to post them.

For the obvious reason, I'm putting these up as jpgs rather than as text. The title of the first one is "Kitty" (subtitled -- or described as -- "Black domestic shorthair"):

What I like about this -- indeed, about both of these -- is that they really work as poetry: the language is rich and interesting, and what is said is interesting too. Which is to say, it's not just about the form: it's also just plain good verse.

Here's the other, a companion piece (it seems), titled "Kitty and Bug" and subtitled (or described as) "Grey domestic shorthair and black beetle":

Do click through to see larger versions, by the way: the shapes are cute, but the words are actually worth reading -- and they're much more legible at the larger size.

I'll try to get around to reviewing the book properly once I've gotten around to reading it properly. But these instant discoveries seemed to me -- wonderful as they are -- things I was happy to post at once.

Coming tomorrow: the climactic (or decidedly anti-climactic) final entry in Accidental Poetry Month™! Stay tuned!

____________________
* In a I've-heard-of-him-and-even-read-a-book-of-his-without-remembering-his-name sort of way; the book I'd read (or read in) in Hollander's case being Rhyme's Reason.

** The difficulty in laying it out, and the amount of sheer page space they require, are presumably two of the reasons why Types of Shape was not excerpted in the 1993 Selected Poetry -- along, perhaps, with the fact that a new edition had just recently come out.

Poems of the Day: Still More by Randall Jarrell (Accidental Poetry Month, Part 20)

2011-03-29T12:03:00.009-04:00

And now here's a third helping of Randall Jarrell, who I've already posted three poems by this month.

I said in one of my earlier posts that I was seriously reading Randall Jarrell for the first time this month, but that is, in fact, not quite right: there is one book of his I'd read many times over: one of his children's books, The Bat Poet. I hadn't remembered, prior to my recent explorations, that Jarrell was its author (I knew it was a famous-but-not-all-that-famous poet, but no more); but the book itself I remember extremely well from multiple readings during my childhood. I will definitely read to my son when he's old enough.

(And I certainly didn't remember that The Bat Poet was illustrated by Maurice Sendak, most famous as the writer & illustrator of the all-time children's book classic Where the Wild Things Are.)

The Bat Poet is about a bat who tries to be a poet, but is misunderstood by all the other bats -- and by lots of other creatures, too. It's a charming and wonderful story. Here's a part from early in the story where the Bat Poet tries for the first time to recite one of his poems to the other bats:

At dawn, the sun shines like a million moons
And all the shadows are as bright as moonlight.
The birds begin to sing with all their might.
The world awakens and forgets the night.

The black-and-gray turns green-and-gold-and-blue.
The squirrels begin to--
But when he'd got this far the other bats just couldn't keep quiet any longer.

"The sun hurts," said one. "It hurts like getting something in your eyes.

That's right," said another. "And shadows are black -- how can a shadow be bright?"

Another one said: "What's green-and-gold-and-blue? When you say things like that we don't know what you mean."

"And it's just not real," the first one said. "When the sun rises the world goes to sleep."

"But go on," said one of the others. "We didn't mean to interrupt you."

-- Randall Jarrell, The Bat Poet, pp. 5-6

The entire work is fabulous, and I recommend it unreservedly.

This week, however, I've been exploring the adult poetry of Jarrell; so here's yet another one -- another war poem (a genre he wrote much in). It's a less famous war poem than the one I posted last time. I think the general preface for the other might be justified -- that it might be a better poem overall -- but this poem has a few lines (the last few) which strike me as far more perfect, and far better, than anything in the other poem. But judge for yourself:

A Lullaby

For wars his life and half a world away
The soldier sells his family and days.
He learns to fight for freedom and the State;
He sleeps with seven men within six feet.

He picks up matches and he cleans out plates;
Is lied to like a child, cursed like a beast.
They crop his head, his dog tags ring like sheep
As his stiff limbs shift wearily to sleep.

Recalled in dreams or letters, else forgot,
His life is smothered like a grave, with dirt;
And his dull torment mottles like a fly's
The lying amber of the histories.

-- Randall Jarrell

That final line is just stunning, summing up something deep and important and true in a few perfect words.

Stray Thought

2011-03-29T09:30:00.004-04:00

Poor Isaiah Berlin is remembered for just one sentence -- "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing". And he didn't even say it!

(But he did, however, offer an interpretation of it that is so persuasive that other possible interpretations are impossible to see through its mist. And I suppose he's better off than Archilochus, who's remembered for nothing -- not even the sentence that he wrote but Berlin is remembered for!)