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

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!

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

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

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

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:

• Spencer Ackerman
• Christopher Buckley
  
• Paul Campos quotes Hitchens about meeting Borges
• Greta Christina
• Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Jill of Feministe
• Scott Eric Kaufmann
• Dennis Perrin
  
• Abbas Raza
  
• Benjamin Schwartz

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:

• John Cook
• Echidine of the Snakes
  
• Glenn Greenwald
• Scott Lemieux
• Michael Lind
• Katha Pollitt
• Melissa McEwan
• Alex Pareene
• Corey Robins (moved from above list)
• Richard Seymour (aka Lenin)

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

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

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, who's 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

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

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 relationship 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). (Much later update: it turns out the book has been brought back into print by Melville House Publishing, so you can read it, if you like (and those of you who think you might like most definitely will like.))

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

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?

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!

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 Thanksgiving 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

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

...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...

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

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"

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...

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 lucky?), but the others are all fun to imagine in their respective roles.

War is a Force Which Gives us Meaning

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

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?

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 eucatastrophe has begun. If not, it is at least a bit easier to imagine hope now.